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Tom Krell teams with collaborators like Jack Antonoff and dancehall producer Dre Skull on his most polished album yet. But it turns out the professional sheen doesn't suit him. | Tom Krell teams with collaborators like Jack Antonoff and dancehall producer Dre Skull on his most polished album yet. But it turns out the professional sheen doesn't suit him. | How to Dress Well: Care | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22416-care/ | Care | Over the course of his last few albums, Tom Krell, the singer behind How to Dress Well, charted a heady course, elevating pop accessibility, R&B crooning, and a dash of electronic experimentation into high art. With his intellectual bona fides established by his never-quite-finished philosophy dissertation and his canny tendency of praising contemporary rappers and 18th century theorists in conversation, Krell was able to brand his viscerally pleasurable music as both “smart” and “cool.” By the time the smoldering, show-stopping “What Is This Heart?” came out in 2014, he had become a poster boy for alternative R&B at a time when critics were not quite as united against the term as they are (I hope) now.
Krell’s seeming intelligence, combined with his curiosity and talent, inspired a generosity in his listeners, a willingness to read great meaning into ostensibly simple lyrics. It’s an attitude that you can see play out in the Genius annotations of the single “Repeat Pleasure” from “What Is This Heart?” The song’s first verse ends with the lyric, “Without your neck to kiss, I was thrown to the night.” Here’s the Talmudic interpretation: “Krell plays with the conventional pop love song’s themes of undying love and eternal happiness in love by recognizing the night of love; loneliness.”
That statement is not wrong, and its generosity is not misplaced. On the contrary, it demonstrates an attitude that should be extended to more musicians, regardless of how much philosophy they’ve studied. There is a lot going on in the Michael Jackson-aping “Repeat Pleasure,” a single that combines thoughtfulness and danceability in a way that presages many of the better songs on Care, Krell’s new album and his fourth full-length as How to Dress Well. The new record contains plenty of lyrics that seem basic to the point of banality, but which our trust in Krell often allows us to recognize as filled with well-considered ideas about the risks and challenges of love, of one’s self and of others.
Take “Can’t You Tell,” the stunner that opens the album. On first listen, it’s nothing more than an enthusiastic sex jam, beginning with the lyrics: “Wanna lay you down and take you right there, take you right there, can’t you tell?” If this were a song by another artist, you might not think twice about the words. But with How to Dress Well we linger, and the lyrics reveal depth: “Take you right there” can be read in two ways, the first passionate and threatening, the other tender and devotional, the two ideas either linked or opposed. And that strange, lingering lyric “can’t you tell?,” signals a kind of plea for connection and consent, emphasized soon afterward when Krell seems to halfway retreat: “Yea I want it,” he enthuses, before insisting, “But I want it when you want it, baby.”
As layered as they can be, these ideas about sex (which are ideas about power, attraction, and respect) wouldn't be as rich were it not for the music bolstering them. As on “What Is This Heart?,” Krell’s voice remains front and center throughout most of Care, which he executive produced with help from guitar-pop maestro Jack Antonoff and the dancehall mastermind Dre Skull, as well as the experimental Canadian musicians Kara-Lis Coverdale and Michael Silver (CFCF). Working with a team of diverse collaborators seems to have allowed Krell to indulge his tendency for rich sonic experimentation while making the most direct music of his career.
This combination of adventurousness and immediacy yields one particularly extraordinary song. “Salt Song,” the track that directly follows “Can’t You Tell,” is a masterpiece, one of the best songs that Krell has made. Produced by Skull, it’s an immaculately structured, near seven-minute pop odyssey about self-care, happiness, and risk that includes a panoply of musical elements that you’d think would repel each other: mournful cello, a ludicrously self-satisfied whistle encasing the vocal melody and a stormy mosh pit of a coda that will be soundtracking the ecstatic ends of Saturday night parties for months if not years to come. The song accomplishes what the best pop does, disguising its own complexity even as the excitement of its many thrills keeps it interesting after half a hundred listens.
Opening as it does with those two songs, as well as the good-but-not-great second single “What’s Up,” Care seems to be carving out territory as a record on par with “What Is This Heart?”, less obviously ambitious but way more fun. And then, Care’s first single, “Lost Youth / Lost You” lands with a dull thud, casting a pall over the rest of the album. The track, produced in part by Antonoff, is almost a full minute shorter than “Salt Song” but it feels infinitely longer with its plodding, faux-insightful chorus about the heart’s confusion and its head-scratching musical decisions; an unearned guitar solo mid-track is made even more miserable when Krell decides to sing over it. It takes a truly empty song to turn a generous listener into a miser, and on Care, “Lost Youth/ Lost You” is that song.
The track is intended to signify a narrative shift from excitement and lust to heartbreak, but it overplays that transition and derails the album, partly because Care’s back half is significantly spottier than its opening numbers, with several of the elements that hurt “Lost Youth / Lost You” showing up repeatedly. Sly, jokey lyrics suddenly come across as blustering, or obnoxiously self-absorbed, while slow-burners including “Burning Up,” “Made a Lifetime,” and “They’ll Take Everything You Have” feel perfunctory. Either their lyrics genuinely lack the intellectual sheen of earlier tracks or we’ve lost our willingness to read meaning into their simplicity.
The odd semi-collapse of Care serves as a reminder of just how fragile an album can be, how vulnerable even the most talented artists are to stumbling over elements like song sequencing, which many might dismiss as a secondary concern. When we listen closely, our perceptions of an artist can change on a dime. And because pop music can be so direct, it’s subject to harsh evaluations: It can be easy to tell when a pop song has missed its mark.
Krell has succeeded in making the simplest, most direct album of his career. But that places him in direct competition with pop music proper, and because Care arrives at a point when many mainstream artists are making such remarkable music, it’s no longer quite as easy to accept on its face the distinction Krell made two years ago, between being pop and being populist. There’s no reason to evaluate him separately from the rest of the pack. Though several of the songs on Care are extraordinary, others are superficial, failing to deliver on the depth that has been such an essential part of How to Dress Well’s appeal. Pop can’t soar if its carrying dead weight, and there’s simply too much of that here for Care to succeed. | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino / Weird World | September 26, 2016 | 6.8 | 46040c05-ed97-4735-bccb-7cc84bfc6cb8 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
This is supposedly the final chapter for Phonte and Pooh's often divisive group, self-proclaimed keepers of the true hip-hop flame. | This is supposedly the final chapter for Phonte and Pooh's often divisive group, self-proclaimed keepers of the true hip-hop flame. | Little Brother: LeftBack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14142-leftback/ | LeftBack | I never thought this would be the case, but I kinda feel bad for Little Brother. Their caricatures of hip-hop boogeymen were never going to change anyone's mind about, say, DipSet, but the rush to caricature them as the backpacker fun police instead of talented rappers almost certainly resulted in people slagging off worthy projects like Foreign Exchange, the Chittlin' Circuit, and, oddly enough, their mixtape with DJ Drama.
To their credit, Little Brother have gone to lengths to make things right themselves. The key lyric on LeftBack, Little Brother's presumably final studio album is, "Not mad at the radio/ 'Cause I don't know what's on it." There is a subtle yet important shift in tone here: On albums past, this message might've been meant as a boast. On LeftBack, Little Brother acknowledge that rather than being defined by their perceived opposition, they're but one of many options.
Little Brother were always pretty entertaining when they weren't burdening themselves with hip-hop's salvation, but ultimately your enjoyment of LeftBack can boil down to whether you care about Phonte and Pooh debating if they can leave the game alone when it doesn't need them. Even on the triumphant career retrospective "Curtain Call", the two can't help but live with regret, blaming The Minstrel Show's commercial failure on listeners not appreciating "the real on the reel."
More than ever, Little Brother appear to be a two sides to one group; duality informs nearly the entirety of LeftBack. There's almost an even split between "for the love" rap ciphers with peers like Truck North and Khrysis, and "for your love" relationship songs. Big Pooh comes off like the guy who's most intent on pursuing a new solo career, but he continues to be casually outshined by Phonte, whose nonchalance deflates even his corniest rhymes ("not being Cam'ron-ish, I mean diplomatic"). And while Phonte is trying to establish himself as viable outside of his collaborations, he constantly questions his commitment-- he appreciates what "the kids" are doing, but admits, "one day I was playin' my old shit like 'who the fuck is this, I kinda miss this dude.'"
But even those of us who don't have an issue with their subject matter have been subjected to increasingly monochromatic listening experiences. Used to be you could blame that on 9th Wonder, but even with other producers, Phonte and Pooh seem incapable of rapping over something other than mostly interchangeable soul backdrops with papery drums that split the difference between handclaps and snares. Phonte raps, "fuck if I'm goin' to be doin' this shit when I'm 60," but Little Brother were always well-suited to the mindset of rap as easy-listening.
In the end, the finality of LeftBack sticks with you more than anything, because unlike many rappers promising the same thing, Little Brother seem like they really mean it-- not to mention that a three-way Twitter beef with 9th Wonder over a disputed beat really felt like the final coffin nail, appropriate for a group whose narrative took place almost entirely on the Internet. But if LeftBack really is the end for Little Brother, it's a fitting epitaph for a likeable act who just could never seem to get out of their own way. | 2010-04-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-04-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Hall of Justus | April 19, 2010 | 5.9 | 4604b5af-ba40-49ec-b3fe-4bbdb8cdb133 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Over the last four years, Matt Cutler has steadily established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting producers. The follow up to 2012's excellent Galaxy Garden finds him both expanding his sound and returning to his roots. | Over the last four years, Matt Cutler has steadily established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting producers. The follow up to 2012's excellent Galaxy Garden finds him both expanding his sound and returning to his roots. | Lone: Reality Testing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19458-lone-reality-testing/ | Reality Testing | Over the last four years, Matt Cutler has steadily established himself as one of dance music’s most exciting producers. The Nottingham-based artist is a master of indulgence, jamming his tracks with jagged, aggressive rhythms and glistening melodies. Cutler draws heavily from rave music’s more explicitly colorful side, embracing the all-out intensity of breakbeat techno and hardcore’s effervescent steamroll; like many of his contemporaries, he was barely old enough to ride a bike when those strains of dance music emerged the first time around, so his work as Lone is essentially a reconstruction, an alternate version of the past put together by someone who wasn’t around to experience the sound's genesis.
Cutler sidesteps claims of misplaced nostalgia through sheer inventiveness. After working in earnest near the end of the 2000s, he first caught a larger audience’s ear with 2010’s kaleidoscopic Emerald Fantasy Tracks, released on his own Magic Wire imprint. An eight-track collection that felt less like a unified whole and more like a collection of singles, Emerald Fantasy Tracks gave a brighter tint to to the dazzling grit of techno luminaries like Underground Resistance. Resurrected European techno label R&S took notice and signed Cutler, and two years later he released what stands as his magnum opus, Galaxy Garden. It was a massive achievement and also startling in its originality. Upon its release, Cutler told The Stool Pigeon that the record was “influenced by nothing," and although rave music loomed larger than ever in his sound, the comment made some sense. Galaxy Garden is one of those records that truly feels boundless, a head trip that practically overflowed with beatific melodies and inviting textures. (It’s unsurprising that, in the same year, Glasgow's Rustie tapped Cutler to contribute a new track to his era-defining contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series; maximalism is a central tenet to the Lone sound.)
One of the decade’s singular electronic records, Galaxy Garden was a thrilling document that made you wonder where Cutler would take his sound next. Reality Testing turns out to be both a left turn and a back-to-basics move. Largely abandoning rave’s warp-speed tempos and sensual overload, Reality Testing finds Cutler shifting his focus to the dusty hip-hop grooves of auteurs like J Dilla and Madlib, two artists regularly name-checked by European dance producers as formative influences. Cutler’s no exception: his early work drew from those artists’ loping knock as much as it did from the hazy electronic music of Boards of Canada, with 2009’s Ecstasy & Friends (released on Actress’ continually ahead-of-the-curve Werk Discs imprint) being the last time he explored those sounds so thoroughly.
Depending on the your relationship Cutler’s earlier music, the shift in focus on Reality Testing can prove initially disappointing—there’s no shortage of producers currently attempting to hardwire hip-hop motifs to Boards of Canada’s iridescent glow, and he's covered some of this ground before. It might take a few listens to get on Cutler’s current wavelength, but approaching Reality Testing with an open mind yields great rewards. It’s one of his most assured and confident efforts and it provides a perfect gateway into the Lone sound.
I've heard comparisons between Reality Testing’s more explicitly hip-hop-influenced cuts and the work of Wolverhampton producer Stephen Wilkinson’s Bibio project. The two artists operate in different lanes—Wilkinson’s more predisposed to song-based structures, whereas Cutler derives his energy from dance’s lack of set definitions—but the similarities are there. “Restless City” is all tumbling claps and record-skipping sounds, with a few needle-drop effects to add a sense of halting texture; “2 Is 8” sounds deliciously retro, with vocal samples occasionally intruding on the track’s knocking drums and steam-pipe melody that resembles an alternate take on the “Sesame Street” theme. “Meeker Warm Energy” oozes West Coast lackadaisical vibes, with honeyed static slathering a Dilla-aping beat; early single “Airglow Fires” takes the hat-tipping a step further by calling back to the vocal sample from Dilla’s Donuts neck-whipper “The Twister (Huh, What)”, speeding up the easygoing tempo and covering the thing in chunky chords reminiscent of Detroit techno.
The sounds of early-gen Detroit dance music is Reality Testing’s other main influence; the hollow chords that anchor “Aurora Northern Quarter” bring to mind Derrick May, and “Vengeance Video” is the album’s most straightforward house cut, a patiently skipping tune that benefits from a loopy synth entering at the halfway point. Another of Cutler’s frequent touchstones, the clean sparkle of new age, is all over Reality Testing. Although the embrace of new age in dance music has become a common trend among young producers, few apply those textures as effectively as Cutler does. Wind chimes enter and exit—opener “First Born Seconds” is literally two minutes of swarming, spa-ready drone—while closer “Cutched Under” calls back to the downtempo glory of the Anneka-featuring Galaxy Garden capper “Spirals”, melding warm tones to the type of marching percussion that overtook Bristol’s bass sound circa 2010.
Cutler’s ear melody takes center stage on Reality Testing. His touch is distinctive and generous—the Lone remix of Radiohead’s The King of Limbs cut “Feral” wrung benevolence out of that album’s most abstract, slight track—and here his jams run free, from the delectable yo-yo synth line that crashes through the head-nod of “Meeker Warm Energy” to the sparkling pan pipes that whirl around the speedy house motifs of “Begin to Begin”. Similar to kindred spirit and Cologne producer Motor City Drum Ensemble, Cutler proves most effective at applying personal dabs of melody to his own vision of the past.
Reality Testing is Cutler’s easiest listen—you can imagine this music playing over coffee shop speakers as much as you could put a rapper on top of it—and as such it may seem less innovative when placed up against his previous two full-lengths. It’s more spare than the dense Galaxy Garden, but it’s also a few minutes longer than that album, and by comparison its relatively placid back half blurs together a little more than the acid-infused pyrotechnics of its predecessors's losing cuts. Regardless, Reality Testing stands as one of the year's best, most luxuriant, and accomplished electronic albums, more proof that when it comes to forging a new future out of what’s already taken place, Cutler remains at the top of his game. | 2014-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | June 19, 2014 | 8 | 460528fd-e29f-4f28-ab74-dce1db406d40 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Vietnamese experimental trio’s debut album offers a breakneck onslaught of disparate styles and moods. The sounds can be thrillingly haphazard, but the vision is unmistakably focused. | The Vietnamese experimental trio’s debut album offers a breakneck onslaught of disparate styles and moods. The sounds can be thrillingly haphazard, but the vision is unmistakably focused. | Rắn Cạp Đuôi: Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rn-cp-uoi-ng-ngay-ngay-ngay-tn-th/ | Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế | In 2018, the members of the Rắn Cạp Đuôi collective invited musicians to come and improvise with them for 48 hours nonstop. Since they’re virtually the only experimental act in Ho Chi Minh City, the event served as a way to connect with others and create new music. This durational exercise was akin to how the group, which currently consists of Phạm Thế Vũ, Đỗ Tấn Sĩ, and Zach Sch, makes music: In a tiny shack located in the mountains, the players record countless hours of material that Sch later edits and stitches together.
Historically, Vietnam hasn’t ever had a sizable number of active avant-garde musicians, and those in the 21st century—from Đại Lâm Linh to Sound Awakener to the late Vu Nhat Tan—were never as internet-minded as the self-proclaimed “meme club” that is Rắn Cạp Đuôi, who favor titles like “linus tech tips (>ω^).” Their influences include artists with largely “online” fanbases, from hyperpop to James Ferraro, but they’ve also cited the importance of Chino Amobi, a producer whose industrial post-club fantasias mirror the kaleidoscopic collages on Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s official debut album, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế.
In its best moments, the album delivers a breakneck onslaught of wonders. “Eri Eri Eri Eri Eri Rema Rema Rema Rema Rema” repeatedly stops and starts, its cavalcade of warped vocal samples and head-spinning sound effects echoing the plunderphonic madness of Giant Claw. That it traverses so many moods—spectral terror, fluttering power ambient, funhouse beat flagellations—without losing steam points to the group’s astute sense of pacing. “Distant People” has a similarly large number of tonal shifts, but it can be hard to register everything that happens, given its sensory evolution. The song starts with lo-fi aquatics before displacing its calm into a flurry of electronic twinkles. As a faint SOPHIE-like synth conjures a brooding atmosphere, the whole thing collapses into a looping beat adorned with frenetic synths. The through line is the track’s introspective nature, which is akin to feeling serenity amid whirlwinding chaos. This juxtaposition is at the heart of Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, whose title proves especially apt: It translates to “sleeping through the apocalypse.”
Until this point, such thrillingly haphazard music was never the defining feature of Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s work. Throughout the past half-decade, they’ve released a multitude of albums and one-off tracks, both together and solo, all highly varied in sound. There’ve been no-wave freak-outs and post-Mark McGuire guitar epics, vocal-based ambience and electroacoustic curios. The concrete and amalgamated vision that defines Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, realized in part with Berlin producer Ziúr, marks a new beginning for the group, and that this record is billed as the trio’s debut is an understandable maneuver. Such a proclivity for reinvention feels like a central tenet of the collective, and is even represented in their name: Rắn Cạp Đuôi translates literally to “snake bites tail,” a visual depiction of the ouroboros, a symbol of renewal.
Like other contemporary experimental acts from Asia, including Senyawa, Gabber Modus Operandi, and Otay:onii, Rắn Cạp Đuôi incorporate aspects of traditional culture into their music. On “Mực nang,” triumphant percussion and chanting lead into an all-consuming drone. The sound of a ghastly voice hovers above it, though, as if telegraphing that the spirit of such music permeates the band’s contemporary practices. When I hear that, and the manipulated Viet-pop on crystalline standout “Aztec Glue,” and then the Vietnamese voices on radiant industrial closer “Đme giựt mồng,” I’m filled with a nourishing sense of possibility for what “Asian music” can mean. Westerners have often described certain acts to me as “Asian” only when they strictly adhere to traditional forms of music, implying that anything that “sounds contemporary” or “sounds Western” is merely an approximation of a style not belonging to them. At only 27 minutes, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế is a dense and disorienting spectacle, but also an inspiring declaration: It suggests that “Asian music” can be anything and everything, all at once.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Subtext | July 30, 2021 | 7.8 | 46065227-1c0d-4822-9230-a6ce30cab411 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Ontario producer turns to a deep bench of guests—Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, Pylon’s Vanessa Briscoe Hay—for a debut album steeped in krautrock’s murky throb. | The Ontario producer turns to a deep bench of guests—Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, Pylon’s Vanessa Briscoe Hay—for a debut album steeped in krautrock’s murky throb. | MISZCZYK: Thyrsis of Etna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miszczyk-thyrsis-of-etna/ | Thyrsis of Etna | Thyrsis of Etna is Nyles Miszczyk’s debut album, but the Ontario producer has been working behind the scenes for more than a decade, producing leftfield hip-hop and retro new wave and working as the in-house engineer at Toronto’s Royal Mountain Records, where Alvvays got their start. Miszczyk brings a producer’s mentality to his album: All 16 tracks feature a different singer. These guests range from indie heroes Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab and Vanessa Briscoe Hay of Pylon to fellow Toronto artists and labelmates and even a Nigerian rapper, Nai. But he ties it all together with a cohesive sound informed by krautrock’s motorik thump and sparkling melodies.
The majority of these tracks are short—only one of them breaches the three-minute mark—which, compounded with Miszczyk’s insistent rhythms, gives the album plenty of thrust and flow. Between Laetitia Sadier’s dulcet voice and the song’s propulsive bassline, opener “In the Dark” feels like a lost cut from Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, while the dirge-like “Runaway, I Age” offers a meditative respite before the nervous arpeggios and relentless groove of “The Garden.” Miszczyk covers plenty of territory, from the synth-punk thriller “Immediate Needs,” with its echo of Suicide, to the jangly indie pop of “Lunar Days,” yet they slot together like puzzle pieces.
But the uniformity of the album’s palette—track after track swims in buzzing organs and analog delay—turns stale in album’s the second half. The warbly voice of Colin Lloyd Tucker, who once sang with the Go-Betweens and Kate Bush, disappears into the murk of “New for Old.” And while “On Zuma Beach” hints at the intimacy of a Radiohead demo—singer Corey Hernden even sounds like Thom Yorke—the song’s muted bass feels curiously noncommittal, as if it couldn’t be coaxed out of the shadows.
Given the album’s revolving door of singers, Thyrsis of Etna plays a little like a hip-hop producer’s beat tape. And while his guest vocalists don’t always make the most illuminating guides to Miszczyk’s maze-like terrain—a jumble of non-sequiturs and disconnected images, the lyrics on many songs feel like placeholders for more engaging songwriting—their voices lend texture to his gravelly analog synths, tape-warped effects, and hazy psychedelia, rounding out his retro-futurist universal with a crucial sense of human presence. | 2022-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | We Are Time | July 18, 2022 | 6.5 | 4609898b-4c4a-4b21-b3aa-380a82aed381 | Marshall Gu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marshall-gu/ | |
The irreverent Detroit rapper’s latest album reaches toward seriousness with traditional song structures and slower, more menacing production. | The irreverent Detroit rapper’s latest album reaches toward seriousness with traditional song structures and slower, more menacing production. | BabyTron: 6 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babytron-6/ | 6 | BabyTron likes to goof around. On his early scam raps, he bragged about wheeling and dealing with Russian gangsters on Telegram and punching holes in walls like Dragon Ball Super villain Lord Beerus. He spit over an instrumental with 21 beat changes and, after getting arrested this year, released an EP with his mugshot as the cover, poorly photoshopped to make him look like Super Mario. His casual silliness is one of his most distinct qualities; not many rappers could work quick-witted bars about drug money over the Donkey Kong Country theme, coming off like a Gen-Z answer to Papoose.
After joining last year’s XXL Freshman class, Tron is now making songs for blockbusters. So following the lead of January’s Bin Reaper 3: New Testament, which boasted big-name features from Lil Yachty, Cordae and Rico Nasty, his latest project 6 plunges further into Serious Album territory. Here, the beats are slower and less colorful; in place of kooky pop culture samples from Harry Potter and The Bernie Mac Show is more menacing and grayscale production. There are still plenty of irreverent punchlines (“No veggies on my hibachi, already smoked lots of broccoli”), but the album feels more deliberate.
Take opener “100 Bars,” a word-game endurance test in the vein of Blackalicious’ “Alphabet Aerobics” or The Game’s “300 Bars & Runnin’.” The angle? Tron ascends from 1 to 100 with quips about everything from fighting with grown adults (“Why you tryna beef with me, like ain't you thirty-nine?”) to his dazzling jewelry (“Chain know like eighty-three dance moves, this bitch Sada [Baby]”). But this time, he’s not barreling through the beat, instead taking his time to stunt. He’ll pause the count to whisper an aside or simply let out a “skrrt!” There’s a sense of relish across 6 that’s missing from other Tron projects.
Several cuts feature hooks, a first for Tron. On “Russian Roulette,” he channels the rush of the gun game into a droning chant—“Russian roulette, spin the barrel, point it at yo head/It’s either ‘click’ and you straight or [gunshot], you dead”—that gives the song structure. But his refrains can also drag the momentum, sounding like half-baked placeholders for a better verse. The chorus on “Slo-Mo” is drably delivered and written, redeemed only slightly by a clever comparison between the jewels on his wrist and a Sno-Cone. The hook for “Mush Smush” comes off stilted and repetitive.
Half the fun of a Tron song is following all of the ridiculous images he conjures. On “Eobard Thwane,” he dunks on a hater for having a truck that looks like Mater from Cars before flexing his $6,000 Marni sweater. But this time, his writing has a darker undercurrent. Closing track “Letters” is a series of short confessionals: “It fucked me up that you ain't 'round to catch a jack/It fucked me up that you ain't 'round to catch a flight,” he raps to a dead friend, a twinge of melancholy in his voice. It isn’t exactly Nas’ “One Love,” but this is the most vulnerable Tron has ever been on record. His attempts to dig deeper into himself are a welcome change; he still has a ways to go before he hits the next level. | 2023-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The Hip Hop Lab / Empire | June 15, 2023 | 6.8 | 4609f56f-df9c-4890-b37a-408fbe35cb5e | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Mount Kimbie harness their command of detail—plus star turns from King Krule and James Blake—on a rhythm-driven album that feels less like electronic music and more like the work of a full band. | Mount Kimbie harness their command of detail—plus star turns from King Krule and James Blake—on a rhythm-driven album that feels less like electronic music and more like the work of a full band. | Mount Kimbie: Love What Survives | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-kimbie-love-what-survives/ | Love What Survives | From the jump, Mount Kimbie have been contrarian. The duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos may have chosen a handle that suggests a towering geological formation, but they quip that it merely signifies “a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time.” They began their career on the heels of dubstep, but instead of the drop, they favored drips, blips, and hiccups. Such smallness becomes Mount Kimbie, so much so that Maker’s recent production credit on JAY-Z’s 4:44 is for a song in which the sound of breathing sometimes overshadows the rapper himself. Mount Kimbie’s most ubiquitous two seconds, thus far in their career, might be the thrumming snippet of guitar strings that buzzes behind Chance the Rapper and Justin Bieber’s “Juke Jam,” sampled from their own Crooks & Lovers song “Adriatic.” Four years after their Warp debut, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, Maker now lives in Los Angeles while Campos is still in London. But despite swapping files across thousands of miles, they feel like a real live band bashing out their third album, Love What Survives.
While previous Mount Kimbie albums could bring to mind the meticulous and effervescent electronic music of Boards of Canada, Four Tet, and the like, Love What Survives churns and buzzes like post-punk or krautrock. Mixing circuitry and sweat, their drum machines stumble about like a hyperactive if unlearned drummer. Feeding back like overdriven guitars, the Korg MS-20 and Korg Delta synths that Maker and Campos used exclusively on the album elicit metallic tones reminiscent of plucked kalimbas, conjuring any number of Rough Trade bands from the early 1980s that moved from guitar-centered punk toward more exotic timbres. This jammy, hands-on approach gives instrumental tracks like “Audition” and “Delta” a rough-hewn urgency; they sound like they were hammered out by the band at their squat rather than fussed over on a computer screen.
Adding to that full-band feel is the stable of vocalists Mount Kimbie prominently feature here, including King Krule, Micachu, and their longtime colleague, James Blake. After the striking electronic amalgams they made with King Krule on Cold Spring—the standout tracks “You Took Your Time” and “Meter, Pale, Tone”—Mount Kimbie seethe and roar behind him on the roiling “Blue Train Lines.” Peals of feedback, wobbling bass, and relentless hi-hats sizzle around Archy Marshall’s strangulated growl as he reels off seedy images of razorblades, popping veins, and dead bodies. The song’s watery, inchoate elements don’t quite coalesce until the midpoint, when a furious drumbeat snaps the din into sharp focus and it all goes speeding toward a seething climax. Marshall’s performance is so visceral and intense that it’s hard not to imagine him thrashing on the floor of a mosh pit by the song’s end.
A garbled guitar riff commingles with a throbbing bass figure worthy of the Fall’s early sides on “You Look Certain (I’m Not So Sure),” another highlight. The churning motorik beat is deftly offset by Andrea Balency, the band’s live vocalist, whose multi-tracked voice conjures the curious delivery—monotone yet strangely compelling—that Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen affected during their band’s prime.
Mount Kimbie reunite with James Blake for two of the album’s most off-kilter tracks. “We Go Home Together” is a drunken mix of looped laughter and church organ that turns melodramatic and before abruptly dissolving, some two minutes in; Blake’s tone is more caterwaul than nuanced complement. More successful is the closing “How We Got By,” which also flits between chest-heaving release and slow-decay minimalism. “When I get it wrong/I really get it wrong,” murmurs Blake, exploring a lower register than we’re used to hearing from him; as the song nears its close, the duo drapes his harmonized voice over hesitant piano and understated bass pulse, sounding both opulent and restrained.
But the album’s most stunning vocal turn comes from Micachu on “Marilyn,” which might prove to be the most disarming song in either artist’s oeuvre. Built on an arpeggiated thumb-piano figure and a tapped ride cymbal that swings loosely over the rhythmic grid, it sounds like a lost Arthur Russell song that the Raincoats never got to record for Odyshape. Mica Levi’s deceptively flat intonation bears just enough vibrato that when the horns and melodica enter, the song turns ruminative and redemptive at once. It’s that kind of subtle detail that makes Love What Survives feel all the more substantial. The duo’s music was always full of the small details, but they now conspire toward something bigger. | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | September 11, 2017 | 8.4 | 460c105a-a40a-4994-bd1f-a7cccd23719a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Planet Mu's new releases from 20-year-old rising talent DJ Nate and comparative veteran DJ Roc put a spotlight on the emerging sounds of juke. | Planet Mu's new releases from 20-year-old rising talent DJ Nate and comparative veteran DJ Roc put a spotlight on the emerging sounds of juke. | DJ Nate / DJ Roc: Da Trak Genious / The Crack Capone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14868-da-trak-genious-the-crack-capone/ | Da Trak Genious / The Crack Capone | Juke has been bubbling up in the Chicago area for the better part of the past decade, but its roots are deeper in the past. The combination of repetitious pop and hip-hop samples, jackhammering polyrhythmic beats, and faster-than-fast BPMs owes something to Miami bass and ghetto house, which emerged in Chicago and Detroit in the early 1990s. The accompanying dance is derived from jit, which itself owes debts to both traditional African dancing and the jitterbug. The legacy is obscure, but it's there.
Juke is starting to establish roots in the present, too. Salem frequently feature thudding footwork figures in their tracks, as does London's label-of-the-moment Night Slugs, who just released Girl Unit's footwork-indebted single "Wut". UK dubstep artist Addison Groove offered a sparser, cleaner take on the sound with his "Footcrab" single-- and, hell, even the relentless slam of Kanye West's "All of the Lights" carries a trace of footwork's genetics.
The growing fascination with footwork's compositional tics has also brought an equal interest in its raw materials, which is where UK electronic label Planet Mu comes in. In the past few months, they've put out a scene-spanning footwork compilation, Bangs and Works, as well as full-lengths from 20-year-old rising talent DJ Nate and comparative veteran DJ Roc, Da Trak Genious and The Crack Capone, respectively. Despite their difference in age, Nate and Roc's full-lengths share a few similarities: Both excel when working in juke's sonic braggadocio (Nate's "Footwurk Homicide", Roc's "They Can't Fuck Wit Me") and downtempo mood-setters (Roc's mesmerizing rework of Robin Thicke's "Lost Without U"). Both records are of a slightly patience-testing length (Da Trak Genious is a psychosis-inducing 70 minutes long). And, in a quality that applies to the scene as a whole, the tracks succeed in proportion to the quality of their samples.
Roc's The Crack Capone is the more enjoyable full-length. Roc favors cohesive musicality above all else, [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| an attribute that ties into his background in the more colorful Chicago juke sound. The "Crack" in the album title refers not to the drug but to Roc's production style, which favors tightly edited rhythms and snapping track structures. That sense of tightness makes The Crack Capone a frequently invigorating, accessible listen, whether taking on percolating forms of UK bass (album closer "Break it Down") or vibrant blasts of melody (the one-two punch of the Willie Hutch-sampling "Get Buck Jones" and "Gun Smoke").
If Roc is fixated primarily on melody, then Nate's focus is more texture-based. Da Trak Genious is a tough front-to-back listen, and not just because it's so damn long; many of the tracks turn their pop-fixated samples into abstractions, repeating figures endlessly until they become hypnotically broken mantras. The result can be almost psychedelic at times; when he lets the source material breathe a little, as on the Dreamgirls-biting "You're Gonna Luv Me" or the Lil Wayne-sampling "Let Da Beat Build", the results are more immediate but ultimately less interesting. Still, it's heartening that Nate, Roc, and other artists working in the genre don't seem overly invested in any one template, and it'll be interesting to see where the scene's talents take their sound next. | 2010-11-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-11-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | November 19, 2010 | 7.2 | 4610d6c9-61cd-4213-b301-7b1ceb3f0061 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
TK | TK | Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/olivia-rodrigo-guts/ | GUTS | Twenty seconds into the music video for her hit single “good 4 u,” Olivia Rodrigo sits in front of two casting directors, partially obscured behind white text that reminds the viewer what we’re about to see is not real life, but a production: “Starring Olivia Rodrigo.” The song is a deliriously petty pop-punk retort to an ex who moved on a little too fast, and though this offense makes him basically “a damn sociopath” in her book, she’s the one gleefully acting like a psycho. Scowling on camera, she is the imperious head cheerleader slamming twerps into lockers, throwing hissy fits while applying mascara and setting her bedroom aflame. The inspiration behind the song—an indifferent ex—is pretty ordinary. But Rodrigo, pop star and veteran performer, knows how to turn the ritual humiliations of girlhood into dazzling, over-the-top spectacles. The world’s a stage, and she’s gonna put on a fucking show.
Guts, her uproarious second album, is a collection of bratty rocker-chick anthems and soul-searching ballads that could slot into the soundtrack of any classic high school flick, from 10 Things I Hate About You to this year’s ludicrous queer sex comedy Bottoms. While it might seem tailored to zoomers, several generations will hear the music of their youth: from Blondie and Toni Basil, to Hole and Letters to Cleo, to Avril Lavigne and the Veronicas, to the more recent Lorde. Rodrigo faces a familiar cast of antagonists: shitty boys, social anxiety, bad self-image, and competitive obsessions with other beautiful women. On the pop-punk freakout “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” she spirals over her various party faux pas—smashing glasses, blabbing too much—and wonders, once again, why a girl can’t catch a break. She might as well have called the album Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen: “Everything I do is tragic/Every guy I like is gay,” she sighs exasperatedly, a theater girl to her core.
Rodrigo might be a self-proclaimed “goody two-shoes,” but she’s not interested in playing the perfect little angel. On “all-american bitch”—an epithet borrowed from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem—she reckons with the impossible expectations young girls face: to be sexy and virginal, selfless and ambitious, and no matter what, to be always grateful. She sarcastically inhabits the archetype of the ideal woman, highlighting its ridiculousness: “I am light as a feather and stiff as a board,” she sings over twinkly guitar, the halo hovering over the perfectly-coiffed hair she curled with Coke bottles. But soon her plastic smile starts to melt into a grimace, and on the chorus, she wilds out, putting on her best dirtbag All-American Rejects sneer.
Instead of having “class and integrity like a goddamn Kennedy,” she’s fucking up tremendously, waking up in her ex’s bed with a hangover and a million missed texts demanding to know why she’s disappeared from Find My Friends. On Sour Rodrigo called out a former flame for his cruelty; here she winces at the degree to which she is to blame—a chronic self-sabotager who simply cannot get well. “Jesus what was I even doing?” she questions on the Kelly Clarkson-meets-Two Door Cinema Club romp “love is embarrassing,” aghast at how she reassured a lousy guy she was dating over his ex getting a new boyfriend. Rest assured: Even a Grammy Award-winning superstar with it-girl friends and a Vogue cover will still get trampled over by a “weird second-string loser not worth mentioning.”
But Rodrigo makes acting stupidly sound so fun you wonder what’s the point of being smart. The insouciant, rip-roaring highlight “bad idea right?” might as well be an advertisement for reckless behavior, following Rodrigo as she sneaks to an ill-advised hook-up, probably with the same loser. She hears the voice of reason—“I should probably, probably not!”—but drowns it out with a chorus of blah blah blahs, narrating the escapade with Kesha-level irreverence. “Can’t two people reconnect?” she chirps, feigning innocence to her friends. “I tripped and fell into his bed!” It’s a testament to the thrills of delusion, how, with a little alcohol and a bruised enough ego, your ex who’s a 6 on a good day can momentarily resemble the divine creation of Michelangelo. You might regret your shenanigans in the morning, but whatever. “Fuck it, it’s fine,” she dismisses.
Guts is so spunky and bitingly charismatic that its few lows feel like a shame. Counterbalancing the album’s ruthless zingers are the platitudes of treacly ballads like “logical,” on which Rodrigo tries to show her romantic irrationality with a grade-school mathematics demonstration. The album’s more somber offerings are not always bad on their own, but amid songs that showcase such ripened self-awareness, they can feel stuck in the past, content to repeat the same wounded, wide-eyed disbelief of “drivers license.” “the grudge” even has the same pulsing piano and sky-scraping vocals. And the gap between party songs and melancholic confessionals is more stark than on an ostensible forebear like Melodrama, creating a greater sense of disjuncture. But not all attempts at earnestness land poorly: “pretty isn’t pretty” is an iridescent mid-tempo pop-rocker with beautiful, twisting vocals. It has the crystalline satisfactions of an Alvvays song.
Listening to the lesser ballads creates a deeper appreciation for the innovations of “vampire,” Guts’ withering lead single about a parasitic older man who descended upon Rodrigo for her youth and status. At first the singer is just a static figure at the piano, tormented by his betrayal and her own naïveté. But instead of staying in this funereal mode, she and producer Dan Nigro slowly accelerate the tempo, creating a climatic rock opera that whirls through new settings as if to recreate the disorientation of a toxic love affair. The song’s vampire-themed concept is a little trite—a Twilight fan simply can’t help herself—but she roughens it up with her word choices, among them the brilliant little insult “fame-fucker.” Rodrigo kicked off the last album with the declaration “I want it to be, like, messy”—and throughout Guts, she and Nigro demonstrate an admirable willingness to ruffle the order, always down for an instrument switch-up, loopy spoken ad-lib, or surprise guitar solo.
But back to this fame-fucker: He’s the subject of the album’s bona fide smash, a topsy-turvy rap-rock heater called “get him back!” With a bored, over-it attitude, Rodrigo recalls the saga of their relationship, how he’d make passes at her friends but then whisk her away to Paris to cover for his indiscretions. She’s probably done with him, right? Well, not exactly. “I am my father’s daughter, I said maybe I can fix him,” she chants, slyly nodding to her therapist dad. The title cleverly reflects all the emotions rattling in her head, how in one moment she wants to demolish his car and in the next she just wants to make out. “I want sweet revenge/I want him again,” she sings in a rousing chorus that demands to be shouted everywhere: in the gymnasium, at the tailgate, while you’re in a ski mask egging a house. She may not be the ideal role model, but the best main characters never are. | 2023-09-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | September 11, 2023 | 8 | 461412ec-3fc6-465b-b6e0-08a53ae33c9c | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics' nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped ... | Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics' nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped ... | Autechre: Confield | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/365-confield/ | Confield | Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics' nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped bombs like Barry Lyndon, a film that bored audiences at its debut and never gained relevance with time. All directors can claim their share of failures, but Kubrick's affinity for intellectual understatement often masked the initial appeal of his work, making it difficult for audiences to separate the wheat from the chaff when his movies first came out.
Only the passage of time distinguished the strokes of cinematic brilliance from their clumsy, hollow counterparts; but reviewers, bound to deadlines, never got to enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Instead, they resorted to blind guesses, issued sharply divided reviews, and crossed their fingers in hopes that, when the smoke eventually cleared, the future would prove them right.
So imagine my anxiety when I discovered I had only a week to come to terms with Autechre's new long-player, Confield. The group's oeuvre includes equal measures of visionary genius and uninspired tripe. While LP5 and Tri Repetae++ remind us that Rob Brown and Sean Booth have access to a talent matched by only a handful of contemporary electronic producers, Amber and Chiastic Slide suggest that this access is inconsistent, fleeting and out of their control.
To further complicate things, Confield catches the pair in the most abstract, difficult period of their nine-year recording career. I've had the album for just over a week now, and must confess I'm still not certain I have a firm grasp on it. But I've given the songs enough effort and attention (headphones and speakers, stoned and sober, and several times without pause from beginning to end) to draw a few early conclusions. And it pleases me to announce that they're resoundingly favorable.
Confield picks up where its predecessor, the four-track Peel Session 2 EP, left off-- splicing the ambient, non-musical styles of artists like Kit Clayton and Phthalocyanine into Autechre's more structured syntheses. Booth and Brown exercise a meticulous economy of melody on this disc, so much so that many of the tracks cease to resemble proper songs.
They have instead assembled an album of ordered soundscapes-- nine methodically arranged pieces that rely largely on repetition of textural, dissonant and atonal sounds to construct a variety of aural climates. Think EP7 without the hooks. Think early Tetsu Inoue, with twice the depth and a penchant for foundry sounds. Now welcome to Confield, where the local time is the tomorrow.
My first listen to this album required a great deal of toil and patience-- desperately listening for rhythms, trends, bits of melodic resolution and a general sense of cohesion. I made the mistake of launching straight into "Bine," the sixth track, which discouraged me because it had none of those things. In retrospect, I should have started where Autechre wanted me to: with "VI Scose Poise," the album's opener.
Though one of Confield's least satisfying pieces, the first track offers a roadmap for the material that follows. Booth and Brown employ techniques in this song that recur more subtly in later tracks, and the opener becomes a means by which to understand some of the disc's more challenging material. The song is, in a sense, a metaphor for the record at large: patterns emerge from the discord; cacophonous droning wells up in tense knots, then dissipates with the appearance of three-note melodic bursts; the sonic hellstorm relents in scattered moments of clarity, but never recesses for long. Just as the melodies begin to acquire complexity, the song comes to an abrupt close, dropping the listener once again onto foreign soil.
"Cfern," which follows, comes out swinging with a disjointed barrage of elastic snares. Languid synth pads churn out a stagnant stew of dissonant notes, in which the clicks become burps and the cuts become bubbles. "Pen Expers," next on the playlist, ups the tempo with a spastic drill-n-bass joint whose vacuum-navigated drums and reversed string hits evoke imagery of liposuction.
Confield carries on like this until the final note-- each song establishes a personality distinct from the rest, cautiously balancing musicality with chaos. The latter half of the disc actually surpasses the former. The subtle funk of "Parhelic Triangle," the record's apogee, reminisces of "Acroyear2" from LP5. A brooding, troglodytic bassline chugs through a spectral landscape of chimes, bells and railroad crossings, while the violent sounds of a threshing machine keep the pace. "Lentic Catachresis" closes the show with a blistering exercise in drum programming. Booth and Brown wind the beats progressively tighter, capping the album with a thick lid of percussive sound.
Many long-time Autechre enthusiasts will feel alienated by the pair's latest release. It's not Tri Repetae++, but it's unlikely that Booth and Brown will ever revisit the trademark sound that brought them fame. For those willing to take these times in stride, Confield promises elegant production, accessibility in moderation, and one of the most enveloping, thought-provoking listening experiences to come forth from leftfield this year. You just have to reach for it. | 2001-04-17T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2001-04-17T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 17, 2001 | 8.8 | 4616c8be-2294-4c66-af59-67162c7585b4 | Pitchfork | null |
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As the Cleveland band returns to Electrical Audio at full force, they retain their penchant for rueful concision and world-weary chronicles of pandemic existence. | As the Cleveland band returns to Electrical Audio at full force, they retain their penchant for rueful concision and world-weary chronicles of pandemic existence. | Cloud Nothings: The Shadow I Remember | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cloud-nothings-the-shadow-i-remember/ | The Shadow I Remember | On their seventh album, Cloud Nothings remind us that personal shit persists during a pandemic—that lockdowns give us longer periods to chew over what becomes harder to swallow. As tuneful as ever, The Shadow I Remember presents the Cleveland quartet not as fighters or complacent survivors but as chroniclers, telling fragmented stories about chronic malaise and nights as dark as northern winters.
Thanks to engineer Steve Albini and their faith in a narrowing gyre of noise, Cloud Nothings could’ve released three-quarters of The Shadow I Remember at the peak of their early-2010s ubiquity. But what began as questioning has hardened into doubt. Immune to self-pity or the cynicism that is a curdled form of sentimentality, singer-guitarist Dylan Baldi finds the world testing his patience—the mess is permanent, as a grim title on The Black Hole Understands notes. “Does anybody living out there really need me?” he howls in “Am I Something.” Opener “Oslo” wonders, “Am I at the end/Or will there be another change?” Baldi presents these verses as questions, not wisdom. His and guitarist Chris Brown’s six-string crosstalk keeps a dialogue open; drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist T.J. Duke’s rhythms rumble and thrash, impatient and surly.
Expect no left turns on The Shadow I Remember. Seven months after Baldi and Gerycz assembled The Black Hole Understands in isolation, Cloud Nothings have regained their full line-up but retained their penchant for rueful concision. Elaborations like Last Building Burning’s 10-minute “Dissolution” or even Attack on Memory’s eight-minute “Wasted Days” are gone. Rather, like the old pros they are, Cloud Nothings fold experiments into their post-punk formalism: the looped guitar arpeggio in “A Longer Moon” may evoke similar textures in a Mission of Burma track, but it slaps like Rush’s “Spirit of Radio.” The new filigrees offer pleasures previously denied in this most ascetic of bands: When Ohmme’s Macie Stewart sings the second half of the chorus of “Nothing Without You,” you can practically see Baldi’s shit-eating grin, a levity he and Brown swiftly dispel with a series of pulverizing riffs.
But every time I play The Shadow I Remember I return to “Sound of Alarm.” Propelled by a nagging, needling fuzz hook, it centers on the declaration, “I need to make time for me.” Gerycz’s thunderous interjection breaks the line into discrete Hemingway-esque halves; Baldi pauses as if to get out of the way. When work and leisure dissolve into empty space, it’s easy to imagine Cloud Nothings anticipating our anxiety with something like 2012’s on-the-nose “No Future/No Past.” But The Shadow I Remember understands the thrill, too.
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. | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | March 2, 2021 | 7.2 | 461d4f42-c4bd-4f6b-87f6-03b6e70a6659 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Newly reprinted on vinyl, this collab between Jneiro Jarel and the elusive MC features remixes from Thom Yorke, Beck, and more. It remains one of the best releases to feature DOOM’s name this decade. | Newly reprinted on vinyl, this collab between Jneiro Jarel and the elusive MC features remixes from Thom Yorke, Beck, and more. It remains one of the best releases to feature DOOM’s name this decade. | JJ DOOM: Bookhead EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23263-bookhead-ep/ | Bookhead EP | *Key to the Kuffs *has aged into excellence in the nearly five years since it first came out. It can still feel a little weird hearing MF DOOM with a couple MPH off his fastball, but that only puts more stink on his trick pitches—like his how’d-he-rhyme-that internals and a thematic villainy that’s never felt more at home on some off-the-grid corner of the Deep Web. And while Jneiro Jarel never went as far afield as Madlib or subverted classic hip-hop and R&B like DOOM’s own production did, his beats weren’t afraid to be at least a bit unnerving—just a notch below the potential to be an Organized Noize for the West Coast bass crowd.
It might’ve been the *Butter Edition *that made it a bit clearer: Released a year after the original August 2012 pressing of Key to the Kuffs, the limited edition expanded reissue tacked on a bonus disc with four outtake tracks and five remixes that brought in some serious indie-crossover star power. That disc got another limited run on its own as a 12” picture disc half a year after that, and while it wasn’t exactly impossible to find, it seems like it nearly slipped through the cracks. That release, the *Bookhead *EP, is getting another lease on life from Lex Records. It’s not really any different from the *Butter Edition *bonus/2013 12” that came out a few years back, but it deserves another go-round as one of the best releases to feature DOOM’s name this decade.
As a short but potent dose of hook-free haranguing, the title track has aged into a strong fan-favorite deep cut with one of the better JJ beats to come from that whole collection. DOOM rapping about escaping from the grind by losing himself in reading (”From the mean streets of the ‘Can I get a dollar, dude?’/Above measure, the singular pleasure of solitude”) would be a pretty good public library PSA if Jarel’s beat didn’t lurk like the synthesized soundtrack to leafing through the poetry books of Aleister Crowley. “Pause Tape” is a little less focused, featuring DOOM at his most thematically free-associative (“Quicker than a sleight of hand, like, damn/Telepathy and telekinesis, faster than Instagram”). It’s also one of two tracks (along with the quickie “The Signs”) where Jarel has enough time on the mic to turn his workmanlike voice around a few unlikely turns of phrase (”Never compromise, keep it real/Never peek at you/Rolling through the jungle/Glowing eyes like a kinkajou”). Then there’s “Viberian Son,” the counterpart to the “Part II” instrumental that showed up on Key to the Kuffs. DOOM’s verse is practically a cameo, but his lines about talking to your kids instead of hitting them register more memorable than Del the Funky Homosapien’s scattershot phrases.
”Bookhead” aside, and no slight to Jarel, the major draw here is the collection of remixes that fill out the EP’s later stretch. The indie/art-rock contributions ramp up DOOM’s griminess in oblique ways without losing sight of the fact that the tracks are supposed to knock. Dave Sitek collabed with Jarel on one of the better remixes on 2010’s *Gazzillion Ear *EP, and that formula pays off again with the Sitek remix of “Rhymin Slang.” More a customization than a transformation, it pares back the synth riff that made the original seethe and foregrounds the tape-hiss low end and adds some more expressive drum kicks and a brief Latin percussion breakdown that gives the UK-banished DOOM a postcard from New York. Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke turn the unlikely target “Retarded Fren” into a lurching chamber music nerve-rattler that toes the orchestral line between suspense-thriller score and “Looney Tunes” gag. And the plinky, clunky robot piano funk of Beck’s take on “Banished” is Exhibit Q of what he could do if he decided his *Midnite Vultures *mode was more worth resurrecting than Sea Change.
That said, the two most fascinating remixes are the ones that inspire what-ifs, coming from two acts known for putting distinctive fingerprints on their production work for rap artists. BADBADNOTGOOD have done more thrilling work in recent years than their remix for “Guv’nor,” but it still fits DOOM’s more diabolical side. And “Bookfiend,” the title cut reworked by Clams Casino, gives us a glimpse at the villain in Jack Kirby mechanized Day-Glo environs, cloud rap where the atmosphere’s laced with crackling cosmic rays. Either one of these acts could make for a revelatory full-length collab with DOOM, new frontiers for a vet who feels weathered by experience without necessarily feeling straight-up old. For now, we’ve got one-offs like the ones on this EP to keep us guessing—which is what DOOM does best, anyways. | 2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | May 30, 2017 | 8 | 461d7402-00bd-45b3-a369-4dc6548d2a00 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Discwoman co-founder’s keen understanding of space and dynamics makes just a few overlapping rhythms and melodies feel unexpectedly expansive. | The Discwoman co-founder’s keen understanding of space and dynamics makes just a few overlapping rhythms and melodies feel unexpectedly expansive. | UMFANG: RIVEN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/umfang-riven/ | RIVEN | Emma Burgess-Olson—the New York producer best known as UMFANG—has often emphasized the self-imposed limitations on her work. When she designs artwork for her albums and flyers, she often limits herself to the rudimentary tools pre-installed on her computer, rather than using something more powerful, like Photoshop. As she’s become one of New York’s most respected producers of both techno tracks and more obtuse experiments, she’s often forced herself to make music under similar constraints.
Most of UMFANG’s 2017 album Symbolic Use of Light, for example, was made with a single drum machine that she bought off a friend for $50. She pitched up basslines from the device to make piercing lead melodies, finding a surprising lushness in her stripped-down setup. Even when she isn’t explicitly making records with a single piece of gear, her work is marked by stylistic restraint. Though she shirks ornamentation and excess, there’s a sort of sleight of hand embedded in her process. If she didn’t tell you, you might not notice that she’s working with such a limited palette. Her keen understanding of space and dynamics makes just a few overlapping rhythms and melodies feel unexpectedly expansive.
Burgess-Olson hasn’t explained the specifics of the creation of RIVEN, the first release on her new label Thanks for Enlightening Me, but its eight tracks evince a similar philosophy. None are especially busy; it’s rare to hear more than a few layers of instrumentation going at once. Often, she’ll zero in on just a sound or two, letting them loop and mutate, and figuring out what feelings present themselves in the meditative repetition. “Rubber” is built around a single, spare synth phrase that echoes delicately as a percussive bass part thrums in the far distance. The song doesn’t change much after its oozy intro, but had she given in to the temptation to add more, its fragile beauty could have easily been shattered.
This discipline isn’t necessarily a surprising approach for a producer schooled on techno, a genre that’s often austere by design. What makes RIVEN special is how diverse it manages to be, even with its relatively sparse parts. The record opens with an ambient yawn called “Flare,” which quickly gives way to prismatic keygen funk (“Glass Escalator”), dubby refractions (“2 Body Beat”), overcast techno (“Riven”), slowly unfolding kosmische (“Rubber”), and even ghostly approximations of grime instrumentals (“Baby Blue”). The tracks can be long and elliptical, but they don’t settle into a mood for longer than a song or two, which gives the record an ecstatic energy despite its low-key arrangements.
UMFANG has shown this kind of range before, dipping into skeletal experimentation on records like Riffs and more straightforward floor-fillers on albums like OK, but she’s never tried out this many different sounds on one record. In that way, RIVEN feels like a testing ground for new ideas and forms that she wants to bring into the fold of the broader UMFANG project. Yet the relative minimalism of each piece lends the record a comforting uniformity. It’s like opening a sketchbook and seeing still lifes of all sorts of objects, each rendered in the same style: simple, stark, and elegant. | 2020-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thanks for Enlightening Me | March 24, 2020 | 7.3 | 461de166-710d-40e6-b1e1-3db3af8d14bc | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On her quietly confident debut, this soulful Chicago singer-songwriter offers portraits of intimacy and songs about the need for self-love. | On her quietly confident debut, this soulful Chicago singer-songwriter offers portraits of intimacy and songs about the need for self-love. | Tasha: Alone at Last | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tasha-alone-at-last/ | Alone at Last | Tasha makes wondrous, gentle soul that advocates for self-care. But the music of the Chicago singer-songwriter is radically different from Dove beauty campaigns or expensive Goop product guides, where ideas of empowerment are preached with no mention of the struggle it takes to get there or the fact that real self-care is more than a marketing ploy. Instead, on her incisive seven-song debut, Alone at Last, she reimagines the world as loving and safe while exploring the hurt and anguish inherent in navigating our society, especially as a queer black woman. She positions self-care as a remedy to oppression, not as a crass money-making tool.
Tasha is a poet, activist, and musician who has worked with organizations like Black Youth Project 100, a nationwide group built in part on “political education using a Black queer feminist lens.” Her 2016 EP, Divine Love, focused on self-love and political activism, inspired in part by her work with the Black Youth Project. For Alone at Last, she picks up near where she left off: “Sometimes I’m afraid that if I die/Everyone will be too tired to remember my name,” she says during the still, spoken-word opener “Take Care.” She contrasts images of unknotted curls, warm water, and bubbles on her nose with jarring lines about the inevitability of pain and loss. For her, self-care means preparing to meet injustices in order to honor and protect those injured by them. That starts with the individual. “When the next deaths come, because they will,” she speaks, “we will have vigor enough to remember their names.”
This acknowledgement of the dark realities of a racist, sexist, homophobic world—and Tasha’s celebration of joy in spite of it—is Alone at Last’s unifying idea. On “Kind of Love,” a song about the thrill of falling for someone, Tasha sees the act itself as political, a way to find “stillness in a world on fire and bodies without hurt.” She imagines radiant utopias where black people can exist free of harm during “New Place,” singing, “Hurry, before they see that we’re leaving/Don’t worry, haven’t you noticed you haven’t been breathing?” And on the stunning “Lullaby,” Tasha reassures black girls that she understands too well “how much it hurts/To always prove your worth.” She urges them to “keep your magic to yourself.”
During “New Place” and “Lullaby,” Tasha’s layered vocals create an angelic cushion for her words; her simple, pick-and-strum guitar lines foster a sense of intimacy. Tasha’s voice and her deliberate words are foregrounded above these choral orchestrations and meandering beats. Like amber, her voice is mellow and luminous, adding to the music’s feeling of comfort in the face of all this anxiety. The subtly psychedelic instrumentals and warped vocals during “Something About This Girl” alter the pace and tone, adding depth and texture. Still, there is more room for variation and experimentation here, other ways to animate these conflicting feelings. In this sense, Alone at Last feels like the debut it is. But with lines as beautiful on the page as they are on the track, like “What’s the word for falling into someone else’s sigh,” it is exciting enough to imagine the shapes Tasha’s songs may soon take.
These are “bed songs,” Tasha has said, sweet and tender tunes to which you could drift asleep. Beds—in particular, her bed—show up numerous times, representing dreaminess and safety, a holy place where Tasha is “alone at last with space to cry.” But this is not mere escapism, songs about forgetting the world outside. Tasha reminds the listener again and again why rest is necessary, how the fight for equality or even existence requires tremendous energy and care. | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Father/Daughter | November 3, 2018 | 7.1 | 4623aba7-d990-40ce-a98f-f8d0f72d4897 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Meek Mill's major label debut, featuring Drake, Rick Ross, Mary J. Blige, Nas, Trey Songz, Wale, and others, is an album that's distinct in voice and sound, one that plays to the Philadelphia rapper's strengths. | Meek Mill's major label debut, featuring Drake, Rick Ross, Mary J. Blige, Nas, Trey Songz, Wale, and others, is an album that's distinct in voice and sound, one that plays to the Philadelphia rapper's strengths. | Meek Mill: Dreams and Nightmares | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17315-dreams-and-nightmares/ | Dreams and Nightmares | Rappers who come up through the mixtape circuit have two choices when it comes time for their major label debuts. On the one hand, they can try to please their core fanbase by sticking to their established sound. The downside of this approach is that it may stunt their ability to grab a larger audience. (It also leaves them open to accusations of asking fans to pay for a record that is basically a well-mastered mixtape.) The other option is to go full pop and embrace the new collaborators and sounds that a big budget has to offer, a path associated with disrespected sellouts (B.o.B.), MCs mired in self-loathing (Lupe Fiasco), and rappers that tried to go pop and failed anyway (Wale's first act).
There are exceptions. Artists like Drake and J. Cole have made better, more accessible versions of the early songs that first got them buzz, and Nicki Minaj plays both sides of the field. Waka Flocka Flame was smart enough to capitalize on his timing simply by turning a proposed mixtape into a debut album, and, most recently, Kendrick Lamar used his unwavering artistic vision to essentially subvert this game entirely. But this is still a thin line for artists to walk, one so difficult that good-to-great major label rap debuts now feel like a minor miracle.
So maybe Dreams and Nightmares is something to celebrate, even though it's imperfect. After navigating that push-pull, Meek Mill has emerged with an album that is distinct in both voice and sound and also plays to his strengths. It is tense and dramatic, with variations of piano constituting the bedrock of the album and Meek rapping passionately even by his own standards.
His music channels pain, anger, empathy, and glee into a wave that hits immediately and forcefully, especially on the album's first two songs. On the opening title track, he raps unabated for nearly four minutes, tracing lines from his come-up in Philly to strip clubs in Miami and back, over a beat that morphs into menace halfway through. It's a track that best distills Meek's singularity; hurt oozes from his voice and words, illustrating rap's literal and spiritual roots.
Rap is often about contradiction, of wanting to stay humble and true while still stunting. Sneering talking heads and confused elitists use that struggle as a weapon against the music: How can this music, and these artists, be taken seriously when they brag about throwing money at strippers? The genius of Meek's music is that he embodies, fleshes out, and answers the rapper's dilemma.
Struggle and triumph, are palpable and plainly articulated in his music, and it makes the best of Dreams and Nightmares (including "In God We Trust" and "Believe It") feel eminently vital. He is as much a truth-teller as lyricist, and this singular viewpoint and delivery have both been carried over from his mixtapes. It extends to "Traumatized", a track where Meek addresses his father's killer while illustrating exactly how treacherous his upbringing was for him and those around him. Where some rappers coast, Meek's mere existence feels earned.
Unfortunately, the album loses steam with a quarter of the way to go. "Tony Story Pt. 2" is the follow-up to the stunning storytelling track from Dreamchasers, but this version lacks its precision and is bogged down by a chintzy Boi-1da beat. "Who You're Around", featuring Mary J. Blige, marks the point where the album becomes syrupy and maudlin. Some songs that appear earlier on the album ("Maybach Curtains", "Young Kings") borrow the orchestral bloat of Rick Ross, and could've been replaced by up-tempo bangers à la "House Party" or "Burn" on which Meek has made his name.
Still, Meek has made the move from mixtapes to the majors with a solid vision. Whether he can maintain or strengthen that in the future is an open question, but this is music that immediately hits emotionally and physically while lingering in your thoughts long after you turn it off. Dreams and Nightmares is the type of thing rap will always need, even when it's in flawed form*.* | 2012-10-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Maybach | October 31, 2012 | 7.4 | 462db5aa-6afb-4edb-9ccb-56eb4273b9e7 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
On their sixth album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! draw a hard line between “identity” and “ideology.” Produced by Grace and put out on her own label Total Treble, the band splits the difference from old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters. | On their sixth album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! draw a hard line between “identity” and “ideology.” Produced by Grace and put out on her own label Total Treble, the band splits the difference from old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters. | Against Me!: Transgender Dysphoria Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18902-against-me-transgender-dysphoria-blues/ | Transgender Dysphoria Blues | It’s been easy to disagree about the fluid and often conflicting ideology of Against Me! over the years. They were born to the Gainesville, Fla., scene as anarcho-punks, wearing black and fully DIY; NOFX's Fat Mike offered the band some money and off they went to his Fat Wreck label, a farm league for the majors where bands could slug Bro Hymns to the kids at Warped Tour. Then Sire offered them even more money so they went up to a major, effectively jettisoning any remaining Reinventing Axl Rose ideologues. And finally in 2010, lead singer Laura Jane Grace (who was then known as Tom Gabel) sang her mea culpa/kiss-off to all those who cried “sell outs,” to those who would go to Against Me! shows and stand there with a middle finger in the air in silent protest wearing studded vests and liberty spikes. She sang on “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” with her own middle finger to the crowd: “You want me to surrender my identity/ I was a teenage anarchist/ The revolution was a lie.”
But identity is a different thing entirely—it's what houses ideology, where ideology goes to gather agency and dig roots. In a rare act, Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! draw a hard line between these concepts with their sixth studio album Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It’s almost kismet for a band who’s been lambasted for not committing to their ideologies to make an album about a real identity crisis. Grace came out as transgender in 2012, and started writing these songs around that period. They were built out from raw acoustic folk punk into 10 songs of slapdash glam punk that carry great urgency, even those songs that don’t directly concern Grace’s journey. She makes all that cis punk sound limp in comparison.
Good news for early adopters of the band: all that Butch Vig lacquer from their last two albums has mostly been scraped off. The record even opens with a little cowpunk shuffle on the title track to firmly mark a departure from the arena stylings of New Wave and White Crosses. Produced by Grace and put out on her own label Total Treble, the band splits the difference between old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters. It’s comparatively gaunt for Against Me! as of late, but it yields the stage to Grace’s voice, which has never sounded better.
The aggression peaks right at the top, when years of suppression meet the rage in her voice with lines like, “You’ve got no cunt in your strut/ You’ve got no hips to shake” and “They just see a faggot.” It escalates soon after on “Drinking With the Jocks”, where Grace dissembles with and dismantles misogynistic bro culture in about two minutes flat. She sings, “There will always be a difference between me and you” with a little diva flip, the perfect inflection for the album’s key pull-quote.
For every “fuck you” there is an equal and opposite “fuck me,” where all the anger that’s on the surface of the album starts to crack and reveal deap-seated anxiety flowing underneath. Consider that Grace may, as she's discussed, undergo plastic surgery to be who she wants to be, in addition to taking treatments of estrogen, progesterone, and Spironolactone all while confronting stigmas and thwarting skeptics along the way. While never too overtly stated, displacement and shame color Grace’s growl, especially on the MySpace username as song title “FuckMyLife666”, which incidentally reconnects the band with Fat Mike, who plays bass on the track. It really cuts to hear Grace sing from the judgmental third person: “Chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress/ Is your mother proud of your eyelashes?” Later in the song, she submits another competitor for Tagline of the Album: “There's a brave new world that's raging inside of me.”
If only Grace could rest her big black margiela boots on these singular moments, these battle cries for trans culture. The songs themselves are never as daring as Grace herself throughout Transgender Dysphoria Blues. You can feel her breath on your face, taking on the jocks, death (on the acoustic “Two Coffins”), major label execs (“Black Me Out”), and even Osama Bin Laden. She sometimes spirals into the verbose and clunky lyricism that has followed her around her entire career, as on “Dead Friend”, whose words seem untimely ripped from someone still in the gangly throes of grief.
In detours from the title topic, Grace’s anger is scrawled too hard and too sloppy on the page—see “Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ”. Any of the song’s grander metaphors are lost behind the jingoistic chorus, “You’re gonna hang like Benito from the Esso rafters/ Hang like Clara with her skull caved in.” The eye-for-an-eye, boot-in-yer-ass simile is some distance from throwing shade at Robert McNamera on White Crosses. It’s easy to look past occasionally ineffectual production, staid song arrangements, and static guitar riffs when Grace—as she discovers herself on the album—is anything but ineffectual, staid, or static. But when she addresses politics or mortality, the record falls flat and lapses into gawky extremes.
If Transgender Dysphoria Blues was wholly focused on transgender dysphoria blues, it would push aside so much of what Against Me! has built through the years; even in their shortcomings, they remain who they are. But it's fitting that there are facets of the album that refuse to cohere, that don't quite fit right, that flail about in its too-eager execution. These welts are ultimately part of Grace's journey to the depths of self-discovery, and the journey to Against Me!'s true sound, all while playing to the theme of transformation. Punk has always been about disruption of order, and this new revolution that Laura Jane Grace leads doesn't surrender her identity, it reclaims it. This revolution is no lie at all. | 2014-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Total Treble | January 24, 2014 | 7.5 | 4630eaa7-7f8c-4efe-a791-8bae1df224e4 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
As Snoop cruises on into his Cool Uncle entrepreneur phase, the title of his very enjoyable 15th studio album, Neva Left, is, nevertheless, pretty accurate. | As Snoop cruises on into his Cool Uncle entrepreneur phase, the title of his very enjoyable 15th studio album, Neva Left, is, nevertheless, pretty accurate. | Snoop Dogg: Neva Left | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23320-neva-left/ | Neva Left | Like frat parties and Razor scooters, rapping is for the young. Braggadocio, especially when it’s based on how many girls you’re fucking, guns you’re holding, and pounds of coke you’re moving, doesn't look good on older men. And just like a dad trying to hold court in his old football locker room, it comes off as desperate to keep reliving your glory days or, even worse, rap like you’re still on the come-up when it’s well-reported you’ve been tucked away in a mansion for years. With varying degrees of success, rappers nearing middle age have tried to talk about wives and art collections and other facets of adulting, but few of their longtime fans want to be reminded that they’re not 22 anymore. If rap is your means of artistic expression and your way to make a living, what’s a rapper nearing middle age to do?
Snoop Dogg is one of the lucky ones. He’s savvy, maneuvering his career with shows like “Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood” and the endearing documentary series “Coach Snoop” so that his image now reflects a family man who has been married nearly 20 years and is a compassionate role model for the kids in his peewee football league. He adopted Wiz Khalifa early in the fellow weed aficionado’s career, re-upping his relevance and sealing his status as a legend with a new generation. With the launch of his cannabis-centered lifestyle site Merry Jane in fall 2015, he shifted from stoner to a champion of legalized marijuana. He’s so universally adored that Kylie Jenner hasn’t been excoriated for using “Kylizzlemynizzl,” a riff on his popular slang, as her Snapchat name.
Despite those endeavors, the title of his very enjoyable latest album, Neva Left, is accurate. Snoop Dogg really hasn’t ever taken a break from music. In fact, he’s been something of a machine, cranking out almost two dozen records in as many years since the 1993 debut of his bona fide classic Doggystyle.
Happily, on Neva Left, Snoop hasn’t become a grumpy old man, nor is he trying to keep up with the kids. Snoop’s gift is two-pronged: a penchant for always dropping into the pocket and his low, smoky growl of a voice, which curls and stretches words in such a distinctive way no one has ever mimicked it successfully. “Trash Bags”—produced by Atlanta-based Musik MajorX, featuring an Uncle Luke sample and K Camp’s pleasingly detached hook—is the closest Snoop comes to trying on a new style. “Lavender,” produced by BADBADNOTGOOD and Kaytranada, is a gorgeously trippy track, but it’s the foreign entity in a game of “one of these things is not like the other.” Mostly, though, Snoop keeps the features and production within his era—Battlecat, Rick Rock, Devin the Dude, Too $hort.
And why not? It might not always be on trend, but on his 15th studio album, Snoop sounds in great shape and like he’s having the time of his life. “Moment I Feared” features him slipping into double time as nimbly as any young whippersnapper, and just try not to get “Swivel” stuck in your head. Lots of nods to classic records—J-Massive’s “Bacc in da Dayz” samples “Check the Rhime,” “Promise You This” interpolates Too $hort’s (or One Way’s, depending on how you look at it) “Don’t Fight the Feeling”—let old fans reminisce and new ones discover.
Snoop’s other strategy is simply pointing out the obvious instead of trying to be the cool dad, acknowledging his age and offering advice like the OG he is. On “Go On,” an instant cruising classic that indulges his abiding love for slick ’80s R&B, he mentions riding bikes with his grandson in the park. The one dent in his armor is hitting on a girl literally young enough to be his daughter on the fun, degrading (some things haven’t changed) bop “Toss It”: “She say she went to school with my young son … told me that her daddy was a Eight Tray Crip, I did time with the nigga.”
Still, letting go of the good ol’ days is harder the older you get. On “Neva Left,” the album opener, the first words out of Snoop’s mouth are, “I gang bang to the fullest.” The last are shout outs to Crip sets across L.A. and Long Beach. Like Bruce Springsteen sings on “Glory Days,” “I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it—but I probably will.” | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / Doggy Style | June 1, 2017 | 7 | 4633e016-5217-4c96-830e-dd3c2ab82520 | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
Written almost entirely in French, the Parisian artist’s quietly imaginative new album pursues a sonic and lyrical interiority that doesn’t always translate to great pop. | Written almost entirely in French, the Parisian artist’s quietly imaginative new album pursues a sonic and lyrical interiority that doesn’t always translate to great pop. | Christine and the Queens: Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christine-and-the-queens-redcar-les-adorables-etoiles-prologue/ | Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) | The conceptual territory of Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), the latest Christine and the Queens album, starts with the Bible, with the story of the Archangel Michael and his quest for dragons and meaning. Then it goes mid-century. Here’s Gena Rowlands in the John Cassavetes film Opening Night, seeing ghosts, lighting up a smoke in a robe. Then it goes into the real and explicitly autobiographical, exploring the grief of losing a parent, the realization that you’re trans, and the refusal to conform to anyone’s expectations about what that looks like. The artist now goes by Redcar, a new name that comes from something like an omen: After his mother’s death, he kept seeing red cars over and over and over again.
That’s a lot of ground to cover in just under an hour of music. And for his entire career, Redcar has made pop that is both effervescent and conceptually rich. The electric, dazzling, Madonna-esque jams of 2018’s Chris made you want to dance on top of the FAO Schwarz piano in glittery loafers. La vita nuova, an EP from 2020, was chilled out, introspective, dreamy, drawing on a Dante Alighieri text of the same name as its conceptual underpinning. There’s a lot that’s captivating on paper about this latest high-concept pop album, one that’s thorny and invested in both sonic and lyrical interiority. It is a quiet record, written almost entirely in French, more interested in intimacy and honesty than in being accessible to English-language audiences. It’s also littered with images of angels, rebirth, and living your life anti-mimetically. All of that is really exciting. But things don’t fully mesh. Some of that interiority feels tedious, and that conceptual rigor comes across almost flat.
Redcar les adorables étoiles was mixed by producer Mike Dean, who has worked with Beyoncé and Frank Ocean on their best records. Dean is a fitting creative partner for Redcar, who has seemed on the verge of becoming a pop star for a few years now. His influence on the record is subtle, and Redcar is at his best when he’s at his loosest, musing and free-associating. Like on “Ma bien aimée bye-bye,” where crystalline production lends itself to walls of synths and a looped guitar line. Meanwhile, Redcar sings about a beloved, a wife, and being together until they die. He sounds like he’s sulking over a cigarette and a whiskey on the rocks. Or on “Mémoire des ailes,” where the synths grow brighter, dipping into the territory of Soft Cell B-sides and spoken interludes. “Come on, stay outside, let’s play a game I’ll teach you,” he sings like a mantra, a rare English interlude.
But much of the rest of the record feels indistinct, so cohesive it’s almost homogenous. And none of it really captures that purported conceptual richness. “Je te vois enfin,” the album’s lead single and hypothetically biggest track, feels generic. Against big synth hooks and strobing drum machines, Redcar snarls about questing for a woman by a stream (that’s not figurative: “Elle m’attendait près du ruisseau pour me parler,” he sings, which translates to something like “She was waiting by the stream to speak with me”). It should be electrifying. It has all the parts of a song that should make you want to dance, but it is weirdly monotonous. On “Tu sais ce qu’il me faut,” we hear him lapse into guttural shrieks over a smoky arpeggiated synth. It’s more cabaret than avant-garde pop, and while cabaret can be fun and fertile territory for experimentation, the song just sounds kind of unfinished.
Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) is a transitional album. It’s in the title: Redcar is a prologue to a bigger record, also made with Dean and set to arrive next year. Hardly surprising, then, that it is intended to be softer, more understated, a preliminary introduction of new material to be fully realized at a later date. But Redcar is an artist who treats all of his records as art objects that demand equal weight and respect. And in his earlier work, even the most subdued songs glow with possibility. Redcar, on the other hand, is a frustrating listen from a brilliantly talented artist. For all of its angels and prophecies and mid-century decadence, what we are left with is a very quiet collection of songs with all the weight of ephemera. | 2022-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | November 26, 2022 | 6.2 | 463b5d5f-8e37-402a-852e-87713fe2ac13 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Signed to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, and responsible for making Yeasayer's Anand Wilder excited about guitar again, the 25-year-old New Jersey musician Steve Marion offers plenty of vivid, lively playing on his latest album as Delicate Steve. | Signed to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, and responsible for making Yeasayer's Anand Wilder excited about guitar again, the 25-year-old New Jersey musician Steve Marion offers plenty of vivid, lively playing on his latest album as Delicate Steve. | Delicate Steve: Positive Force | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16919-positive-force/ | Positive Force | Cartoons and kids' films always promised that behind the walls, under the floorboards, beneath a city, exist perfect miniature worlds more wonderful than our own. To promote his new record, Delicate Steve-- aka 25-year old guitarist Steve Marion-- hid play-buttons around Brooklyn and Manhattan for people to plug their headphones into and hear Positive Force ahead of release; hook up to one at Valentino Pier to hear Steve's chandelier psychedelia, and you might believe you'd just jacked into the heart of a secret world powered by raw joy. Though Marion's real-life existence seems equally paradisiacal: He hails from New Jersey, where he's part of the Smallboypants collective, most of whom play in his live band. He's signed to David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, spends his time taking 100-mile bike rides, playing basketball, or hanging out with his sonic brothers in Fang Island-- who, it transpires, run "a cheese van" in New York, and named their truffle oil-infused grilled sandwich after him: Anyone for the $10 "Delicate Cheese"? Positive Force sounds a little like what might happen if you sent Fang Island's hyperactive music on an Eastern detox retreat-- though letting them hang onto the cheese's sentiment, if not its harder to digest aspects.
In a recent interview, Yeasayer's Anand Wilder said that Delicate Steve's music-- they're old touring buddies-- had made him excited about the guitar again, and it's a shame that he didn't incorporate more of Steve's vivid, lively playing into the limp Fragrant World. Marion is one of those rare guitarists whose instrument sings in the place of vocals: Positive Force is predominantly instrumental, but you'll hear him take a breath at the very beginning to introduce his second voice. The combination of mic-ing up his Telecaster's strings and an amp, then blending the two together, sounds crystalline and futuristic, gently boisterous and squirty. His guitar sings like George Harrison's guitar reanimated, Dustin Wong's post-Ponytail solo releases, the most melodic moments from Swing Lo Magellan, and the effects on Julia Holter's marvelous collaboration with Jib Kidder from earlier this year. It often wheezes like old fairground organs, and beams with an open-heartedness you'll recognize from the 80s sitcom theme tunes that instantly tell you happiness is on the way, like "Charles in Charge" and "It's Your Move".
The songs here resolve beautifully, but never predictably, with more attention paid to their structure than on Marion's first LP, Wondervisions. The cooing "Two Lovers" trickles like two tributaries, one shallow and one deep, flowing against each other before achieving confluence in a babbling whirlpool. The conversation between the blooming bass and sleek vocalizing on "Big Time Receiver" seems like the responsible voices of parents idly keeping an eye on the miniature, skittering ticks and itches dancing around them. Standout track "Wally Wilder" is the theme to Midnight Cowboy by way of Animal Collective, harking back to the early-1970s trend for harmonica melodies to replace vocals, the perfect example of which would be the wondrous "Groovin' With Mr. Bloe". The sound of birdsong and the feel of a balmy, sun-dappled garden glows throughout.
If there's anything wrong with Positive Force, it's that it's better suited as background music than bearing up to intense listening; while the guitar lines on most of the songs here are deliciously difficult to whistle, they're all essentially fairly similar. And only "Redeemer" and the title track manage to reiterate the terrifically strong opening salvo of "Ramona Reborn" and "Wally Wilder". But for a strong run at a rapidly forming philosophy of positive vibes and inspiringly innovative playing, it's hard to want to pick holes in a record that more than lives up to its title. | 2012-08-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-08-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luaka Bop | August 29, 2012 | 7.6 | 463f8920-2dd8-4568-9b82-7f943b1e96fb | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On their first album in seven years, the experimental guitarist and lutist craft surprisingly accessible and candid instrumentals from esoteric topics. | On their first album in seven years, the experimental guitarist and lutist craft surprisingly accessible and candid instrumentals from esoteric topics. | Jozef van Wissem / Jim Jarmusch: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jozef-van-wissem-jim-jarmusch-an-attempt-to-draw-aside-the-veil/ | An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil | You might struggle to conjure a more esoteric scenario for an album than the one that underpins An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil, the fourth record of largely instrumental duets from experimental lutist Jozef van Wissem and textural guitarist and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. On this hazy suite of seven pieces, the pair ruminates on the apocalyptic visions of religious poet and painter William Blake and the divisive ideas of foundational occultist Helena Blavatsky. Named for a particularly wondrous Blake passage, the finale, “When the Sun Rises Do You Not See a Round Disc of Fire,” fades toward silence as a robotic voice reads a paragraph from Godfrey Higgins’ 19th-century tome Anacalypsis. The sun (“in early times… believed to be the creator… the first object of adoration”) is the grand thread running through world religions, the clipped monologue offers, words pushed against one another as if racing to share this forgotten wisdom. This all plays out, mind you, alongside an electric guitar that treats riffs like mere suggestions and a Renaissance instrument manipulated here until it becomes a mirage.
Against most odds, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil, the duo’s first album in seven years, is a remarkably conversational work, playing out as an alternately heated and convivial exchange between two rapacious minds and thoughtful players. Until that concluding excerpt, the philosophical underpinnings of An Attempt linger in the background, less required reading than
atmospheric context. With the lute and acoustic guitar intertwined into impossibly knotted patterns, “The Unclouded Day” suggests a slow walk through a verdant garden on a cloudy day, two old friends sharing their respective beliefs and enthusiasms—their senses of right and wrong, maybe, or abiding aesthetic preferences. During “The Two Paths,” Jarmusch and van Wissem perform a musical tug of war, Jarmusch’s compressed growl of electric feedback pulling against van Wissem’s pensive lute line, and vice versa. By the end, you sense that they’ve had an impact on each other, with the lute prancing beyond the melody just as the guitar hum starts to refine its amoeboid creep. The distinct sides draw toward one another, the rare debate that prompts reconsideration.
Key to this surprising esprit is just how offhand these recordings sound, as if we’re listening in on their composition in real time. Both Jarmusch and van Wissem play multiple instruments here—bare-bones drums, ghostly electronics, haunting synthesizers—but these pieces feel like lightly edited first takes, as frank as the conversations they suggest. Opener “Concerning the White Horse” is a spectacularly impressionistic version of latter-day Earth. Jarmusch replaces the sharp edges of Dylan Carlson’s blues with the color fade of a Mark Rothko sunrise, while Van Wissem’s bass drum swaps Adrienne Davies’ peerless finesse for a primal insistence. The piece scans like an idea they captured as they teased it out. Even that literary finale moves like an untempered tide of phosphorescence, guitars and electronics funneled into one wide, radiant smear. With theatrical readings by Tilda Swinton and multiple tracks that floated beyond the 10-minute mark, their Sacred Bones debut, 2012’s The Mystery of Heaven, often felt fussy; they have smartly foregrounded the energy of their dialogue.
Separately, as a duo, or with other outfits, claims of novelty have perpetually dogged van Wissem and Jarmusch. One, after all, is a prolific lute player who composes in palindromes and upends classical mores, a veritable plucking punchline; the other is an insistently independent auteur who, at times, has seemed interested in a sort of subdued Southern Lord cosplay. But after their extended absence, the pair has found a more fitting framework, singular in feeling but fluid in execution. An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil allows us within that realm, an accessible wonder spun from obscure considerations. | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | February 19, 2019 | 7.7 | 4649847e-15f8-455b-acbd-7cd94b83a994 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Rap’s perennial kid brother makes his best album yet—adjusting for expectations. | Rap’s perennial kid brother makes his best album yet—adjusting for expectations. | Nav: Good Intentions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nav-good-intentions/ | Good Intentions | Nav didn’t like his first album, either. He claims he’s learned now, that he’s self-aware—in the trailer for his new album, he announced with a straight face that he’d made a “vision board.” There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. Adjusting for expectations, this is his best album yet, one in which he makes half-hearted stabs at “maturity” and occasionally tries to be in on the joke.
There’s still plenty of standard Nav fare. “Turks,” the lead single, is a stale, neon attempt at a Wheezy banger. “No Debate” is diet trap music anchored in plodding 808s. Throughout, it’s unclear whether Nav is trying to be funny or if his flexes are just too odd and specific to land. He clarifies that he rummages through his fridge for lean, not Sunny D. He invites a woman to quarantine with him, clad in all designer. “I’m part of the money-making committee,” he announces on “My Business,” a clunky boast that highlights his tendency to write garbled work-arounds of generic rap tropes. Nav repeats the same ideas over and over again—he likes drugs, he doesn’t trust women, look at all his money.
When he lurches towards something like maturity, it’s a reprieve from both our boredom and his. This mostly takes the form of limp apologies, confessions that wither by the time he reaches the chorus. “I act the way you see on purpose,” he admits on “She Hurtin,” a quasi-love song where Nav transparently uses a new girlfriend to make an ex jealous. He moans about having “too many options” for lovers on the forgettable “Did You Wrong.” He proves incapable of discussing women without talking about what he can buy them, or, horrifyingly, how he wants to procreate (“If I come inside, she got a king inside her belly,” he warbles, not 30 seconds into the album). The lens is equally narrow when he turns it on himself; in “Brown Boy,” a song weird enough to almost be interesting, he sings about himself from the perspective of a third-person observer, whining about the size of his rings and how his music “feels like drugs.” (He pulled the same trick on 2017’s “Did You See Nav,” and he released another song called “Brown Boy” in 2014.)
The apex of his flexing is that he’s friends with Young Thug, who pops up on the album twice and easily overshadows him. The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way. On “My Business,” he’s content to mumble occasionally in the background while Future gallops over the beat for a full minute. Lil Uzi Vert salvages “Status” with a vibrant verse that distracts from Nav rhyming “caught caught caught” with “rocks rocks rocks.” It’s genuinely shocking when the late Pop Smoke appears, his gravelly voice slower and softer than we’ve heard before; Nav wastes the opportunity by rhyming about wearing mink to go ice skating.
Travis Scott appears only briefly, and his AutoTune-slathered influence seems to have waned. Instead, Nav tries to imitate his executive producer and label owner The Weeknd, reducing Abel Tesfaye’s haunted gloom to generic darkness. “Saint Laurentt,” whose extra “t”s seems intended to avoid confusion with the better Wale song, is a corroded, moody heartbreak track, with pitched-down vocals to convey the emotion Nav’s voice can’t carry. He references addiction throughout the album, but uses the glut of pills and bottles more to create an aesthetic than to consider their implications. “When I get depressed, no one can help me,” he squeaks on “Overdose.” “Sometimes I hope I overdose.” It’s a disturbing admission, one that seems to crystalize the sulking despondency that fueled his earlier music, but Nav doesn’t go deeper.
The record ends on “Proud of Me?” a diatribe presumably aimed at people who comment on his social media posts. “I just want to fulfill my dreams,” he chirps, achingly earnest. For a 30-year-old rapper who only recently stopped complaining about his teachers, any semblance of self-actualization seems like growth. But intentions alone aren’t always enough. | 2020-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | XO / Republic | May 14, 2020 | 5.8 | 464b6448-b590-4930-b7c7-841cad03809d | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
On his second album of 2020, the underground New York rapper reaches a new level. The vibe is calm and bittersweet, as Navy Blue sinks deep into the recesses of his mind. | On his second album of 2020, the underground New York rapper reaches a new level. The vibe is calm and bittersweet, as Navy Blue sinks deep into the recesses of his mind. | Navy Blue: Song of Sage: Post Panic! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/navy-blue-song-of-sage-post-panic/ | Song of Sage: Post Panic! | Over the course of the last half-decade, the 23-year-old skateboarder, graphic designer, and streetwear model born Sage Elsesser has quietly crafted his own version of the brisk and insular rap currently powering the New York underground. Much of Navy Blue’s recent music—particularly his debut album, 2020’s Àdá Irin—charts paths through familial trauma and grief; his songs scan as holistic diary entries, the literary equivalent of burning sage to cleanse your surroundings. Song of Sage: Post Panic!, Navy’s second full-length album of 2020 released this past December, sinks deeper into the recesses of his mind, fighting greater battles while reaping bigger rewards.
Listening to Song of Sage, the pains and pleasures of Navy’s past feel three-dimensional. Mental cobwebs gather in corners; memories loom like kaiju towering over cities; family and loved ones glow like beacons. The writing is lived-in, spacious and intimate in equal measure: “So many photos on the wall at most the times I was caught/In a web that I had spun myself, the damage did a lot,” he remembers on “1491.”
Yet, across Song of Sage, the past and present blur. Navy often takes an active stance, placing his healing in the center of the frame: “Look myself in the mirror, start tearing up as I reflect/I rearrange my meaning/December days, I recollect, I reconnect through dreaming,” he offers on “Dreams of a Distant Journey.” Even on the celebratory closer “224,” after the blessings and gratitude have taken effect, Navy still acknowledges the need to mend his damaged soul in the present tense.
Lyrically, Navy dances between the specific and the opaque. His writing is descriptive without giving too much of his inner monologue away (“I write for those who know me,” he says on “Deep Water Blue”). On “Aunt Gerry’s Fried Chicken,” he briefly reflects on hearing his mother's screams after his brother has been shot before abandoning the thought. His voice audibly cracks and strains when he mentions crying in front of his partner while “blazing like a comet” on the standout “Self Harm.” Navy wades through oceans of sadness, yet never dwells for long. Hope and gratitude are his rudders, manifesting in his family and his spirituality. “It’s soothing to know the body is just a shell,” he exhales on “Tired,” content to live and learn.
These songs don’t only wring deeper emotional truths than before; they also enhance his craft. He’s experimenting with flows, too, matching billy woods’ zig-zagging bar structure on “Poderoso” and pulling off a double-time delivery on the hook for “Deep Water Blue.” His growth is apparent, expending less energy to hit more potent highs like the soccer players he consistently name-checks.
The bittersweet energy expressed through Navy’s lyrics also seeps into Song of Sage’s production. California rapper/producer Evidence pitches a wailing siren against vocal chants and steady drums on “1491,” creating an anxious sense of speed. New Jersey producer Roper Williams infuses “Dreams of a Distant Journey” and “Self Harm” with soul and sorrow. Rising Montreal producer Nicholas Craven’s four placements—particularly the shimmering “Back to Basics” and the smooth shuffle of “Pressure Points”—are among the best loops you’ll hear on any rap album in the coming year.
Every beat here is a winner, but the standout is Navy’s crunchy guitar loop on the title track “Post Panic!,” a place where words and music become amorphous. Though Navy is responsible for only five of the project’s 18 beats, they gel seamlessly, much like the beats he produced for As Above So Below, the collaborative album he produced in full for DC rapper ANKHLEJOHN. Song of Sage’s beats breathe and crumble with organic beauty, loops falling off the bone like tender meat.
In the face of mental anguish, Navy Blue has created the best music of his career. Song of Sage: Post Panic! is a raw and assured highlight of the continuously morphing New York underground, recontextualizing an old sound for a younger generation. It narrows the degrees of separation between two generations of NY talent—Navy shouts out Ka on “Breathe,” featuring a showstopping verse from fellow Brooklyn veteran Yasiin Bey—while crowning a new disciple in the process. Above all, though, Navy is committed to the clarity of metamorphosis, recreating himself a little stronger and a little more humble every time.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Freedom Sounds | January 11, 2021 | 8.2 | 46518c6b-68e0-4d13-a248-8f009a1821b4 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
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 1995 album that changed the sound of dancehall while pointing the genre in a newly reflective direction. | 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 1995 album that changed the sound of dancehall while pointing the genre in a newly reflective direction. | Buju Banton: ’Til Shiloh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buju-banton-til-shiloh/ | ’Til Shiloh | “Strangest feeling I’m feeling/But Jah love we will always believe in/Though you may think my fate is in vain/’Til Shiloh, we chant Rastafari’s name.”
These two lines, delivered in a fervent a cappella, comprise the entirety of the first track on Buju Banton’s 1995 album ’Til Shiloh. The legendary deejay’s raspy voice—until then typically heard booming from the towering 10,000-watt sound systems of open-air dancehall sessions—seemed instead to conjure the resonant wooden chancel of a church; the way it rose in tone, from hushed to beseeching, gave it the unmistakable contour of a prayer, an entreaty aimed at once inward and skyward. Taken on its own, it might easily be heard as a snatch of gospel music, yet the divine names Jah and Rastafari placed the song squarely outside the strictures of mainstream Christianity.
Banton was then Jamaica’s most prominent artist and reggae’s rawest voice—whether measured in the sheer volume of his thundering basso or the unfiltered sex and violence of his lyrics. But “Shiloh,” just 18 seconds long, signaled a shift. If this first track contained within its mesmerizing tranquility a half-formed question about what sort of album might follow, the second—“’Til I’m Laid to Rest”—offered a definitive answer. Opening with wordless vocalizations reminiscent of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s traditional Zulu harmonies, it was anchored solely by Nyabinghi hand drums.
Atop this self-consciously traditional accompaniment, Buju unveiled a vocal declamation that was shockingly inventive in form, adapting his signature deejay style—a gruff baritone polyrhythm more closely associated with dance-friendly catchphrases—to a classic protest song: “Oh, I’m in bondage, living is a mess/I’ve got to rise up, alleviate the stress/No longer will I expose my weakness/He who seeks knowledge begins with humbleness.”
The effect was electrifying, combining the gritty emotional pull of a blues lament and the mystic aura of the best roots reggae with the rhythmic dexterity and extemporization of a soundclash champion. Producer Bobby Digital would later issue this rhythmic bed as a juggling riddim, featuring other vocalists over a filled-out arrangement with rhythm guitar and a harder kick and snare pattern, called the “Kette Drum” riddim, but when Buju wrapped his constantly modulating double-time around this slow, stripped-down version, most listeners had never heard anything like it.
At the time of ’Til Shiloh’s release, dancehall had been recognized as its own art form, something more than just a subset of reggae, for less than a decade. Buju, at the ripe old age of 22, was its undisputed king. He began deejaying seriously in the late ’80s, hanging around Kingston sound systems like Rambo Mango and Culture Love, waiting for a chance to hold the mic, then haunting studio gates, hoping to record. Although “The Ruler,” for producer Robert Ffrench, was the first Buju 45 pressed to vinyl, his 1991 breakout hit “Stamina Daddy,” for Winston Riley’s Techniques label, established his star persona: a lanky beanpole of a youth assuming the macho swagger of a bigger man, complete with a deep, gravelly voice that emulated his namesake, the older sound system star Burro Banton.
In 1991 and 1992 he followed “Stamina Daddy” with a seemingly endless string of hits including “Quick,” “Bogle,” “Battyrider,” “Love Me Browning,” “Love Black Woman,” and “Bonafide Love,” featuring Wayne Wonder. Mr. Mention, his 1992 debut for producer Donavan Germain’s Penthouse label, broke sales records, and the same year he also broke the standing chart record for No. 1 singles in Jamaica, previously held by Bob Marley & the Wailers.
He did so, seemingly, by carrying Jamaican music in the exact opposite direction from Marley’s visionary songwriting, specializing instead in rapidfire delivery, a sexual braggadocio beyond his years, and courting all manner of controversy. The central conceit of “Browning,” for instance, made a play on the similarity between the Browning semi-automatic pistol and the slang term for a light-skinned woman. Read as either promoting gun culture or stigmatizing dark skin, the song caused such a backlash that Buju quickly followed it up with “Love Black Woman” on the same rhythm track to make it clear where his true affections lay. Thus managing to have it both ways, he capitalized on the scandal and then quelled it with his own answer record.
Just as this wave of success led to a major-label deal with Mercury, however, Buju’s seemingly magical ability to be outrageous without repercussions failed him with the unexpected release of “Boom Bye Bye.” An early lyric penned when he was 15, then re-recorded for Shabba Ranks’ manager Clifton “Specialist” Dillon, “Boom Bye Bye” was calculated for pure, sophomoric shock value, simultaneously playing up the taboo subject of gay sex and exhorting graphic violence against its practitioners. Jaw-droppingly offensive lyrics were par for the course in dancehall at the turn of the ’90s, a milieu of “slackness” in which Little Lenny compared STDs to a “Gun in a Baggy” (baggy = panties) and Admiral Bailey got himself banned from radio with “Two Year Old,” which seemingly sexualized toddlers.
If shock was the goal then “Boom Bye Bye”—released on Dillon’s Shang imprint just as Buju was reaching an international audience that would hear his words with very different ears—succeeded beyond his worst nightmares. The violent lyrics were reprinted in the New York Post and denounced by GLAAD. His international shows were met with protests, and Buju was summarily dropped from the bill of England’s WOMAD festival. Buju distanced himself from the song and issued a public apology—but then undercut it by suggesting in interviews that he was being censored and misunderstood by outsiders to dancehall and Jamaican culture.
Some critics and academics pushed back on the way Buju and other dancehall artists were portrayed in the international press. Professor Carolyn Cooper of the University of the West Indies has argued that a xenophobic double standard is applied to dancehall, writing: “Homophobia is one part of dancehall but… I don’t think it incites people to violence. I think people understand the power of metaphor.” Nonetheless, rights organizations like J-FLAG documented a frightening rise in all-too-real violence against LBGTQ Jamaicans during the same period that homophobic lyrics became a trend in dancehall.
Buju eventually signed on to the Reggae Compassionate Act, renouncing all violent and homophobic lyrics, and ultimately scrubbed “Boom Bye Bye” from his catalog altogether. In 1993, however, the unfolding firestorm of mutual mistrust undoubtedly hampered the reach of his major label debut, Voice of Jamaica, which attempted to marry a more mature melodic dancehall sound to rap and R&B (including a cameo from a newly solo Busta Rhymes). But if the easy violence of his youthful lyrics had come back to haunt him on the verge of international stardom, it seemed karma was not done with Buju yet. It was while touring behind the album in Japan that he learned of the murder of his friend and fellow deejay Pan Head, formerly a specialist in gunman tunes, under murky circumstances in the Maverley section of Kingston. He poured his anguish into the lyrics of the plaintive “Murderer,” which charged the wistful melody of reggae’s classic “Far East” riddim with new gravity: “Yes, you can hide from man but not your conscience/You eat the bread of sorrow, drink the wine of violence/Allow yourself to be conquered by the serpent/Why did you disobey the first commandment?”
“Murderer” captured the collective spirit of the times. It wasn’t just a massive hit in dancehall culture; it was a phenomenon, often credited with single-handedly changing the genre’s trajectory. Sherman Escoffery, a nephew of Winston Riley who had recognized Buju’s potential early (and along with his cousin Kirk Riley recorded and leaked “Stamina Daddy” before the elder Riley had a chance to say no) witnessed firsthand the effect Pan Head’s death had on Buju and his dancehall contemporaries Capleton and Beenie Man, each of whom recorded their own Pan Head tribute songs (“Cold Blooded Murderer” and “No Mama, No Cry,” respectively).
“When Pan Head died it was kinda like one of those moments of enlightenment,” Escoffery recalls in a new interview. “The violence is still there. Being a deejay, being a popular guy is not gonna protect you. But also they had gotten to a certain age where they weren’t children anymore. They were now grown men and they had to start taking responsibility for the things that they say, the things that they put out there. It was the same thing with ‘Boom Bye Bye.’ That was something that started off as a joke, but people are dying now, people are getting beaten up for being gay. Now your words have taken on flesh.”
In the same period, Buju publicly converted to Rastafari and started to grow his hair into dreadlocks. Released as a 45 single in ’93, “Murderer” was included as the third track on the CD version of ’Til Shiloh, followed by “Champion,” another established club anthem with a faster pace, more in line with conventional dancehall expectations. These two songs connected the album’s bold vision back to the voice that Buju fans already knew well and confirmed that he wasn’t going to let ’Til Shiloh’s neo-roots experimentation supplant the hits-packed model of Mr. Mention. In fact, of its 16 tracks, at least nine became certified dancehall classics that still play regularly on sound systems, including combinations with singers Garnett Silk (“Complaint”), who had also tragically passed away scarcely a year before the album’s release, and Wayne Wonder (“What Ya Gonna Do?”). Even the less anthemic cuts on ’Til Shiloh aren’t so much skips as sleepers. Repeated listens reveal how the lyrics of the quieter “Chuck It So,” for instance, build upon the album’s profound anti-violence theme.
The wealth of singles charts an evolution in Buju’s voice and sound, leaning toward more ecstatic themes and a jubilant, double-time steppers tempo best heard on “How Could You,” “Wanna Be Loved,” and “Hush Baby Hush.” In that sense it is a uniquely satisfying dancehall album, a document of what was actually happening on dancefloors and sound systems; an unprecedented rejection of violence, experienced and expressed collectively in real time through music.
Yet it is also more than that, as the songs already known to Buju’s fanbase are exponentially heightened by their placement within the frame of ’Til Shiloh’s original material. “Untold Stories” is another example of Buju’s newly unveiled vocal approach, this time setting that inimitable rising and falling flow to an unadorned acoustic guitar groove that recalls Marley’s “Redemption Song” or perhaps even a Tracy Chapman ballad. Here, Buju outdoes himself lyrically once again, delivering a searing testimonial on behalf of those trapped by the structural violence of Kingston’s garrison geography: “Who can afford to run will run but what about those who can’t? They will have to stay/Opportunity a scarce-scarce commodity in these times I say/When Mama spend her last and send you go class/Never you ever play.”
Applying the intricate rhythmic improvisations of the deejay’s art to such emotionally raw subject matter, Buju arrived at a vocal form with the immediacy of personal testimony, pouring forth in a stream of consciousness that could also, paradoxically, hypnotize with the chanting quality of a prayer. Though also released on 45, “Untold Stories” could hardly be called a typical dancehall single: It touched on something more intimate and sacred, if no less communal.
Along with “Til I’m Laid to Rest,” “Untold Stories” is the keystone statement of ’Til Shiloh, effectively bringing the artistic arc documented on the previously released singles to a crescendo. It demonstrated that the wiser, more compassionate side Buju revealed on “Murderer” was not simply an in-the-moment reaction to tragedy but a lasting change in his artistic voice, bringing to bear the same skill he had previously applied to gun talk or the latest dance step on themes of eternity, redemption, and purpose.
Neither the depth nor the artistic evolution were lost on critics and fans. In their 1998 book Reggae Routes, music historians Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen summed up the critical consensus this way: “Artists like… Buju Banton and Luciano give hope for the future. Indeed, many critics saw Buju’s 1995 album ’Til Shiloh as the genre’s first masterpiece….” “Masterpiece” was not too strong a word. A quarter of a century on, ’Til Shiloh stands as one of those rare albums wherein the intensely personal expression of an artist at the height of their powers aligned perfectly with a larger cultural shift. A wave of neo-roots followed in its wake: digital reimaginings of reggae’s golden era that paired drum machines with strumming acoustic guitar lines, crafted by producers like Buju collaborator Bobby Digital and Philip “Fatis” Burrell. Buju’s long-player also changed dancehall’s relationship with the album form, which prior to ’Til Shiloh was often just a compilation of an artist’s latest 45s. If Sizzla, Luciano, and Capleton each forged their own equally original versions of neo-roots, their debt to ’Til Shiloh is most evident in the expansive, longform visions they reached for on Black Woman & Child (1997), Sweep Over My Soul (1999), and More Fire (2000), respectively.
Just as tellingly, with the possible exception of Super Cat, none of the reigning badmen who had ruled dancehall before Buju’s rise (Shabba, Ninjaman, Cutty Ranks) scored a solid hit after ’Til Shiloh. Its impact can even be traced outside the realm of reggae. If ’Til Shiloh’s sonic palette had something of an antecedent in the Fugees’ 1993 debut Blunted on Reality (especially the original album version of “Vocab,” which set breakneck raps to a drumless acoustic guitar riff) it was almost certainly a precedent for Lauryn Hill as she mapped out her solo reinvention on 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, most audibly on “To Zion,” which unfolds like a swelling neo-roots hymn in all but accent.
Most of all, however, it was the moment that the artist who could credibly call himself the Voice of Jamaica fully grew into his own voice. In Escoffery’s view this growth represented not so much learning to avoid controversy or ignore criticism as it did a hard-earned perspective on which reactions mattered. “If you’re offending the politicians for the sake of the people, the people are always going to be on your side,” he observes. “You will get some backlash for calling out the powerful… but that’s good backlash. You’re offending the right people.” ’Til Shiloh still resonates not just for its musical innovations and virtuosic command of craft, but also as a portrait of an artist coming into full knowledge of their own creative power—to harm or to heal. | 2023-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | November 5, 2023 | 9.4 | 46537ce7-9f5a-4ec2-b73c-d14c625146b8 | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | |
Providence-to-Portland duo the Body's second of two collaborations with New Orleans’ Thou is a match made of mania and menace. During the last decade, both of these doom metal squads have issued records at startling clips, and You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. | Providence-to-Portland duo the Body's second of two collaborations with New Orleans’ Thou is a match made of mania and menace. During the last decade, both of these doom metal squads have issued records at startling clips, and You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. | The Body / Thou: You, Whom I Have Always Hated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19970-you-whom-i-have-always-hated/ | You, Whom I Have Always Hated | The Body and Thou must get bored easily. During the last decade, both of these delirious doom metal squads have issued records at startling clips, the pace sometimes so speedy it’s as if they’re desperate to outrun the doomsdays of which they so often yell. Apart from a brief pause two years ago, New Orleans’ Thou have offered a few titles a year, many of them splits or EPs that rerouted their sludge through small new capillaries. Despite several dozen releases, they’ve managed but four (intriguing, at worst, and inescapable, at best) full-lengths.
Much the same holds for Providence-to-Portland duo the Body. To date, they too have favored splits or collaborations with pals old and new, instead of records entirely dependent upon their spartan if seismic guitar-and-drums configuration. Since their 2010 breakthrough All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, itself a close hybrid with a hometown choir, they’ve released a few good splits, a terrific EP and only one album, the strangely self-satisfied Christs, Redeemers. Instead, some of their best work has arrived through a full-length collaboration with noise sculptor the Haxan Cloak and now their second of two collaborations with Thou*,* You, Whom I Have Always Hated. It is a match made of mania and menace.
The six-song set is available as a limited-edition record through Thrill Jockey, the Body’s most recent and stable home. The 10-track CD and digital editions, however, warrant the most attention, especially if you missed last year’s Released from Love. That four-song EP captured the two bands holed away in a Louisiana studio at the beginning of 2013. The results are included here not as a prequel but as a necessary companion to the recent arrivals. Those Southern sessions made it clear that this is a painful and powerful fit for complementary brutes. Perhaps because of their economical configuration, the Body often affixes parts that aren’t noise, drums, guitars, or screams to the ends and beginnings of songs. The more versatile Thou, however, allow for more engrained subtlety. During opener "The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills", Thou’s Bryan Funck delivers imprecations in his deep, full scream. Behind him, the Body’s Chip King squeals like a wounded animal, his high pitch offering a sliver of contrast to the mid-range, mid-tempo melee. A later cover of Vic Chesnutt’s "Coward" seems as terrifying for the singers as it does for the listener. In his raspy falsetto, King yells the opening lines like a death cry. The band builds behind Funck as he bellows the chorus—"I, I, I, I, I, I am a coward"—until they collapse in exhaustion around the sound of that last word. A counter-riff adds drama to the stentorian march of "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer", while mutated bridges afford misdirection to the aptly named "Manifest Alchemy". Thou and the Body could be wider and wilder together than separately.
The new material springboards from that same synthesis. Recorded in Providence during the middle of a shared July 2014 tour, the second batch hits hardest when these two bands land as one. There’s perhaps no better example than their reverent but explosive take on Nine Inch Nails’ "Terrible Lie". The crews reanimate the industrial architecture of the original, with guitars and bass turning the melody into a mess of forceful chords and corrosive feedback. And the beat gets massive, punched down as if both drummers were born wielding sledgehammers. The sound is as colossal as the Body’s but as sharp and severe as Thou’s—a combination that makes the 1989 template feel, by comparison, like little more than a stripped skeleton. Though "The Devils of Trust Steal the Souls of the Free" begins like the Body with more guitars or Thou with more drums, it captivates when King and Funck again split vocals. The song’s commandments, like "Reach out and find nothing," only get shocking when it seems as though the whole world were yelling them at once. The pair slips when the results are expected, as if you’re listening to two bands play the same song at once rather than finesse the parts as one unit. "Her Strongholds Unvanquishable" and "Lurking Free" both stumble toward that mire, if not in it altogether. Tricks that make the Body and Thou’s own records interesting can start to feel like unnecessary crutches when they overcrowd the same shared space.
But those are aberrations for this collusion. Taken as a full-length by two groups that treat the format with some suspicion, You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. Though it shows signs of both responsible parties, it also proves their inherent restlessness, as they’re both willing to bend toward one another to create something richer than they might have rendered themselves. It’s important that You, Whom I Have Always Hated marks the shortest effective span between successive LPs from either the Body or Thou. Perhaps together, they can continue to avoid boredom. | 2015-01-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-01-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | January 27, 2015 | 7.6 | 465c16ea-585a-4dfe-ab1a-25f6cacda320 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Duppy Gun’s latest, organized around the songs of I Jahbar, finds the Jamaican crew boldly charting their own course. | Duppy Gun’s latest, organized around the songs of I Jahbar, finds the Jamaican crew boldly charting their own course. | I Jahbar & Friends: Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/i-jahbar-and-friends-inna-duppy-skrs-soundclash/ | Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash | Ruellia tuberosa, known in Jamaica as Duppy Gun, is a flowering plant native to the tropical Americas but now distributed around the world. If you add water to (or just spit on) their mature seed pods, they explode within seconds, flinging stinging seeds outward as if possessed by a trigger-happy ghost. It’s a mysterious and powerful plant used as a health tonic and aphrodisiac, but it can also pop safely in a child’s hand. It’s a wonderful namesake for the Jamaican collective formed in collaboration with Los Angeles producers Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw) and M. Geddes Gengras, one which continues to cultivate a bracing take on modern dancehall as sensitive to the outside world as the titular flower.
On Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash, Duppy Gun showcases Jamaican riddims alongside contributions from the British Columbia-based Seekersinternational (aka SKRS). The album also functions as a debut of sorts for I Jahbar, nephew of “Ashanti” Roy Johnson of the Congos and a vocalist, local party host, and engineer at the Duppy Gun studio in Spanish Town. Building on—and drawing from—the far-flung collaborations on 2018’s Miro Tape (a few tracks from which appear here again), Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash collects nine songs, one remix, and two “mixtape megamix” sides, each devoted to one of the two production crews involved, soundclash-style.
Of the two, the SKRS productions feel more studied and conservative. “DemNoBad,” for example, pushes the needle into the red in a manner reminiscent of time-honored Jamaican recording techniques. But the Canadian crew depart from convention on “DuppyKilla,” a manic track continually interrupted by edits and effects, where the production sometimes wholly submerges Buddy Don’s voice.
The Duppy Gun productions by Velkro and Bigflite come across as more unhinged and original, if still rooted in reggae aesthetics. Slow burner “Turn Up” combines detuned chords and sustained, distorted tones that sound like a distorted guitar shacked up with an airhorn. Bizarre little licks and synth smears create a woozy texture, anchored by I Jahbar’s steady flow. The album is a showcase for Jahbar, who projects menace on the whisper-sung “Ipy Ipy” and turns “Weed Patrol” into a captivating saga of spiriting ganja across the island, dodging police road blocks and ducking from sirens, imploring friends across the island to help out. He even slips into a faux-British accent at the end of “Sniper Rifle” to lighten up the proceedings, reminding us that when Jamaican artists invoke murder, they’re often talking about music.
The album alternates between Duppy Gun and SKRS productions, while the megamixes allow each production house to be heard on its own. The mixes perhaps offer the most engaging tour through the global crew’s sprawling sound. They are doing something unique: Edgy dancehall has been produced outside of Jamaica for decades, but rarely do such productions involve artists still located in Jamaica and playing to home crowds. (Some of the songs on the album have apparently attained singalong status at Chopdawg Sundays, a regular party and stage show in Portmore.) This sort of collaboration between outside enthusiasts and local artists can be mutually beneficial, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and allowing unorthodox sounds to flourish. The sound of Portmore, aka Gaza, has been so strongly imprinted by Vybz Kartel and Popcaan in recent years that it’s refreshing to hear a different crew ignoring current trends to find common ground with a wider world. | 2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Duppy Gun | August 9, 2019 | 7.3 | 465d39fb-079c-4f4a-9e79-84bbf465a544 | Wayne Marshall | https://pitchfork.com/staff/wayne-marshall/ | |
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 eclectic Texan’s 1987 album, a terrific showcase of his subversive and idiosyncratic country style. | 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 eclectic Texan’s 1987 album, a terrific showcase of his subversive and idiosyncratic country style. | Lyle Lovett: Pontiac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lyle-lovett-pontiac/ | Pontiac | While reflecting on the sexual politics of small-town Texas life, the novelist Larry McMurtry once mused on the stunted emotionality of the cowboy: “The tradition of the shy cowboy who is more comfortable with his horse or with his comrades than with his women is certainly not bogus… The cowboy’s work is at once his escape and his fulfillment, and what he often seeks to escape from is the mysterious female principle, a force at once frightening and attractive.” For male flatlanders, whose development can be as arrested as the arid land they inhabit, the two things can sometimes get confused for one another: women seen as wild beasts to be broken into submission, horses as precious creatures deserving of respect and affection, both treated with a certain caution lest you break your heart and bust your ass.
Like so many Texan poets laureate before him, Lyle Lovett’s songwriting has long been fixated on those two primary neuroses: the emotional relationships of men to the women they love—what he once bluntly characterized as “the male-female thing”—and the emotional relationships of men to the livestock they tend to. In a 1988 Rolling Stone profile, Lovett quipped that he would have been a cowboy, had he not been deeply afraid of cows: “My uncle had a dairy farm. I used to help milk them and stuff. But you get kicked a couple times and it sort of makes you get gun-shy.” The interviewer couldn’t help but make the obvious prod about Lovett’s bovine anxiety: “Sort of like with women?”
“If I Had a Boat,” the opening track to Lovett’s second album, 1987’s Pontiac, expresses that perpetual Peter Pan syndrome as a wistful cinematic fantasy: “If I was Roy Rogers, I’d sure enough be single/I couldn’t bring myself to marryin’ old Dale/Well, it’d just be me and Trigger/We’d go ridin’ through them movies/We’d buy a boat and on the sea we’d sail.” If the folky melody felt like it came from a much older place, the kind of big-rock-candy-mountain daydream a hobo might have strummed a generation ago, that’s because in some way it was. The song originated almost a decade before it was recorded, during Lovett’s tenure as a journalism student at Texas A&M University, written while playing hooky from history class. “If I Had a Boat” immediately felt like a country standard, destined for the secular hymnal every picker carries around in their head, if only because Lovett had played it so many times before he ever recorded it—the words and images came effortlessly, but he still took years to make sure they were just right.
Though his 1986 self-titled debut had made for a successful enough introduction to Nashville, it was Pontiac that announced Lyle Lovett as not just a voice worth listening to, but a vivid writer who wormed his way into your imagination. There was an old-fashioned twang to the swinging rhythms and weepy steel guitar of Lyle Lovett, but its production was also very of the time, electrified and synthesized and ready for the stage at Farm Aid. Pontiac stripped it all down to the core, developing the warm, organic sound Lovett would continue to refine, a blend between the acoustic intimacy of coffee-shop folk and symphonic jazz. By embracing his many idiosyncrasies as both a performer and persona, Lovett only seemed to make himself more loveable, and the unsinkable eccentricity of Pontiac made it a surprise hit outside country. The record may have had hybrid appeal, but it was still unmistakably Texan; somehow, Lovett’s refusal to take his boots off no matter where he roamed made him all the more appealing, even exotic, to those who might normally look down on cowpokes.
As a long, tall Texan born of upstanding Lutheran stock, Lovett had a surprising capacity for subverting relationship tropes in country music. In Lovett’s songs, the trappings of cowboy life can function as fetish objects. From the opening fiddle licks of “Cowboy Man,” the Western-swing wet dream that introduces his debut album, he gleefully embraced innuendo, turning a cowhand’s trusty lariat into an instrument of sexual bondage. The narrator of 1996’s “Don’t Touch My Hat” clings to his Stetson like a waifu body pillow, willingly choosing a hat that fits right over romantic fulfillment; the premeditated murderer of “L.A. County” finds platonic companionship with a firearm who “did not say much” on the drive to their deadly final destination. In the universe of Lovett, like the woeful wooden “Kaw-Liga” that Hank once sang of, objects are personified and persons objectified: the bleary-eyed bar patrons “unplugged” like a neon sign on “Closing Time,” or a woman played with like a turntable on 1994’s “Record Lady.”
There’s a casually absurd, almost childlike surrealism to Lovett, a man who has written songs about his affection for penguins and his distaste for pants. That borderline cartoonishness extended to his visual presentation, namely his hair, which from the inauguration of his career would be discussed by critics almost as much as his music itself. Robert Draper’s iconic 1992 Texas Monthly profile of Lovett would devote lots of ink not just to the “thatch of nuclear-radiated alfalfa sprouts” atop his head, but his face, which “suggests the elegance of an elephant tusk.” A review of Pontiac for the Associated Press posited him as “more like a Pet Shop Boy than an Oak Ridge Boy,” while Hank Hill put it more bluntly on an episode of King of the Hill: “Get out of my way, rooster boy.” When k.d. lang first met Lovett backstage at the Country Music Awards, she allegedly asked him, “Did you get into Eraserhead for free?” No matter which descriptor you chose, Lovett’s hair stuck out like a water tower on the horizon, far too large to be contained by even a ten-gallon hat. In some way, he seemed to mock his home state’s preoccupation with its own perception of big-ness, his hair an obelisk to the stubborn and endlessly self-mythologizing Texan, climbing ever higher alongside the oil wells and windmills and rockets that reach into the sky.
Music Row might have been afraid of Lovett, but they couldn’t look away. Playing songs from his debut album on a 1987 episode of Hee-Haw, he made for a dark contrast to the program’s yum-yucking y’all-come humor, a shifty-eyed drifter with a crooked grin staring straight into your soul. Hollywood couldn’t shake his gaze either. Lovett wasn’t fit to be a debonair leading man like Kris Kristofferson, or even Dwight Yoakam, but his mug was made for character acting, and Robert Altman would use him—much like Michael Mann employed Willie Nelson in Thief, or Tom Waits in the films of Jim Jarmusch—as a bit of local color in later-period works like Short Cuts and The Player. Lovett would also provide the toe-tapping Western swing score to Altman’s slight romantic comedy Dr. T & the Women, about a Dallas gynecologist whose wife has a psychotic break—a protagonist right out of a Lyle Lovett song.
For all his nose-thumbing at convention, Lovett held fast to certain traditions, like a shadow you just can’t shake. In spite of the bright Hollywood lights and Nashville bigwigs that courted him, Lovett has continued to live all the while in his hometown of Klein, a once-rural and now-suburban community just north of Houston, founded in the 1840s by Lovett’s own German immigrant ancestors. By the time of Lovett’s childhood in Klein during the tail end of the baby boom, the land had been completely remade by oil and its interests. The Texas mud gave rise not only to thunderous swells of petroleum, but a metaphorical range war of simmering resentments, between the roughnecks who rushed after oil and the ranchers who wanted to hold onto the old ways. Lovett grew up somewhere in between, learning how to rope and ride on his uncle’s farm while his parents worked at Exxon. The rhinestone cowboys he sang of on “Farther Down the Line” and “Walk Through the Bottomland” may have been colorful characters, but theirs was a reality Lovett was never too far removed from, as a lifelong breeder of horses and competitive rider inducted to the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2012. Much like Larry McMurtry, Lyle Lovett may have at times traded the ranch for high society, but you could never quite take the ranch hand out of him.
Lovett approached his development as a singer-songwriter almost like a practical apprenticeship. As a reporter for The Battalion, Texas A&M’s student paper, Lovett profiled Texan songwriters like Willis Alan Ramsey, Michael Martin Murphy, and Steve Fromholz, booking many of those same acts at clubs on campus—usually with himself as the opener. Lovett used his assignments for the school paper not only to pick the brains of his idols about their craft, but sometimes even to learn songs directly from them. For all his eccentricities, Lovett approached songwriting like a journalist, detailing scandalous crimes and human interest stories alike with a mindful precision, always careful of the word count. The result landed somewhere between magical realism and creative nonfiction. Looking back at Pontiac in 2018, he explained that “Simple Song” was written like an assignment for English class: “It was the five-paragraph paper. Opening paragraph, three more paragraphs, and then one that closes. I wondered if I could write a song that way.”
His idols like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt may have had more name recognition outside of Texas, but many of Lovett’s most beloved songwriters were practically artistic hermits, decidedly disinterested in whatever the music business could sell you. The city limits of Austin might have become synonymous with live music, but each corner of the state bore forth its own unique musical traditions: the electrified rockabilly and sparse Flatland songwriting of West Texas, the slick cowtown countrypolitan of the North Texas Panhandle, the 12-bar blues and Cajun flavors of deep East Texas, and the raucous Tex-Mex brew of the South Texas borderland. Lovett was an active inhabitant of this statewide musical ecosystem, regularly performing at events like the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival.
Though it was his breakthrough to the pop charts, Pontiac felt like an elegy to something that would soon be gone, with Lovett’s face blurred into grayscale obscurity; that monochromatic design has marked his album covers ever since. The video for “If I Had a Boat” chaotically intersperses the song with Errol Morris-like interviews with the aging residents of Klein. “They’ll still be running cattle in Harris County in 25 years,” one of them opines. “It might be in the shade of a 20-story building, but there will still be some cows here.” The album’s title track sees the world through the tired eyes of one of these nameless old men, who luridly fantasizes of telling a young girl about all the Germans he killed in the war.
In both voice and instrumentation, Lovett sounded like his peers about as much as he resembled them. After a few too many critics described his style as “big band,” he began referring to the ever-growing orchestra that supported him as his “Large Band.” Their lush arrangements could have fit at the Cotton Club and the Armadillo World Headquarters alike, fiddle breakdowns rubbing shoulders with funky backbeats. The spirit of Bob Wills was regularly invoked by reviewers of Pontiac, but Lovett stood apart from the era’s neat-and-tidy neo-traditionalists, a proudly sore thumb next to the Sinatra-esque schmaltz of George Strait or the souped-up party music of Asleep at the Wheel. On a song like “M-O-N-E-Y,” Lovett swings at a slowly swaggering tempo, moving to a beat more suited to sweaty pelvic grinding than the nimble footwork of a line dance.
When not performing with the Large Band in their full form, Lovett is often backed by a minimalist ensemble, recalling a jazzier version of an old-time string band like the guitar and “hillbilly cello” combo of Norman and Nancy Blake. With a deliberate sparseness, the outfit works in hazy watercolors, underscoring “Pontiac” and “Simple Song” with a dewy glisten: velveteen acoustic guitar, Bruce Hornsby-esque clear piano lines, light brushstrokes of percussion, the resonant baritone of cello strings, and steel guitar that occasionally stretches out with the spaciness of post-rock. Whereas so many of his heroes sang with voices weathered and worn, Lovett’s felt more like cool creek water, clean enough to drink but not clear enough to see through.
Emotionally and musically, Lovett tends to work in extremes. For every comic romp or densely arranged composition, there was another more restrained and clear-eyed, heartbreakingly tender or haunting or somehow both. Maybe his tales of violence were all the more unsettling because of that gentle vulnerability, the shyness and self-effacing humor that made him seem like such a raised-right and well-mannered man. “L.A. County” is a tale of parallel road trips, as two pairs of “old friends” set off in search of something they’ve long dreamed of: the first, a woman and her silent male companion, who find love in each other's arms after arriving in California and make a plan to wed; the second, a man—maybe a jealous ex-lover, maybe the angel of death—and his “coal black” pistol. For both sets of pilgrims, the far-off “lights of L.A. County look like diamonds in the sky,” the twinkling promise of a long-held dream finally within sight. Like The Graduate gone wrong, the man arrives just in time to observe the blissful scene—“Her face was bright as the stars a-shining/Like I’d dreamed of all my life”—before piercing it with a bullet, the crumpled bodies “kneeling at the altar.”
Lovett’s brand of humor was hardly new to Nashville country, but something about the way he piled on the irony while staring straight into your soul, lip twisted and hair tormented, gave songs like “She’s No Lady” a Lynchian menace. Because of his willingness to embody flawed male characters, at times not just unsavory or unsympathetic but downright lecherous, early albums like Pontiac were met with occasional accusations of misogyny—there was the spiteful violence, sure, and his willingness to mock a potential dance partner’s appearance on a song like “She’s Hot to Go” certainly didn’t help either. But like the scathing satires of Randy Newman—an influence who he would collaborate with later—Lovett would hand over the song’s perspective to more unsavory characters than himself. The protagonists of “God Will” or “I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You” are unreliable narrators, imperfect men unable to overcome the cruel vanities of self-pity and pride to let love in. On Pontiac’s Tex-Mex-accented “I Loved You Yesterday,” Lovett pleads for his lover to take him back, yet places the blame for their relationship’s failure solely on her shoulders and takes no responsibility himself. That “fear of the mysterious female principle” Larry McMurtry once identified rears its head in songs like “Give Back My Heart,” in which a domineering redneck Jezebel towers over a shrimpy cowboy like an R. Crumb cartoon. (Per usual, Lovett acknowledged the perception of his gender politics only dryly: “Lately I’ve been thinking about taking some time off from the music thing and opening up a chain of misogyny parlors,” he joked in Rolling Stone.)
But the surface impression of misogyny doesn’t match up with the reality of Lovett’s music, which frequently emphasizes and even privileges the female perspective, not just in lyricism but in collaboration. The women who have lent Lovett their voices—like Emmylou Harris on “Walk Through the Bottomland” and “L.A. County”—are often high up in the mix, as true duet partners and not just backup singers. After Lovett’s long-time duet partner Francine Reed first sang on the Sunday morning service of 1986’s “An Acceptable Level of Ecstasy,” she was promoted to a featured player on Pontiac—she appears on “Give Back My Heart,” “M-O-N-E-Y,” and “She’s Hot to Go”—and subsequent albums would increasingly highlight her as an irreplaceable pillar of Lovett’s sound. Performing “Here I Am” alongside Reed on The Tonight Show, Lovett steps back and lets her take the lead like she’s the real star of the show, with nothing but adoration in his eyes. Johnny Carson was reportedly so captivated by the pair’s musical chemistry that he made the rare call to invite them back for a second performance only weeks after their first.
Beneath all the literary narratives and affected characters, it’s that unrestrained joy in group collaboration, the effortless electricity that crackles when performers are perfectly in sync, that Pontiac captured like lightning bugs in a jar. “If I Had a Boat” told of a man and his steed alone against the currents, but Lovett could have never existed in isolation—he needed other hands to pitch in and help raise the framework of his wooden universe. From those long hot afternoons in the late ’70s picking bluegrass tunes with his Texas A&M classmate and fellow songwriter Robert Earl Keen on up to the intricate spectacle of his well-oiled orchestra, Lovett’s music has always been a patchwork affair, passed around like an exquisite corpse as individual sensibilities combine anew. The years have a way of altering perspective, and Lovett now looks much more like the “weathered gray-haired seventy years of Texas” he sang of as a young man. But well-crafted songs are built from something sturdier than old front porches, and time has been gentle to the songs of Lyle Lovett. | 2023-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | MCA / Curb | August 20, 2023 | 9 | 46612381-4b74-4124-acd9-4e5fb616aa92 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Back in '97, El-P released Funcrusher Plus with his seminal group Company Flow. The album's tense, hypercreative backdrops laid ... | Back in '97, El-P released Funcrusher Plus with his seminal group Company Flow. The album's tense, hypercreative backdrops laid ... | El-P: Fantastic Damage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2712-fantastic-damage/ | Fantastic Damage | Back in '97, El-P released Funcrusher Plus with his seminal group Company Flow. The album's tense, hypercreative backdrops laid such a sturdy foundation for the underground hip-hop world that it still echoes five years later, and has since been widely recognized as one of the genre's greatest achievements. Unfortunately, after only a few additional singles and an instrumental album, Company Flow was officially sent off last year with a blistering farewell show in Boston. And while El-P's remained busy with production work (most notably Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein) and running a record label (the estimable Def Jux), heads have been hungry for the man to step back up to the mic.
Now, after a series of frustrating delays, El-P's finally kicked out his first solo LP and exceeded the expectations of everyone who anxiously awaited its arrival. Fantastic Damage is an unrelenting, end-to-end burner that not only heralds the resurrection of El-P, but also provides a milestone for post-millennial underground hip-hop. The music is carefully constructed and sonically intricate. Distorted guitars, cacophonous, high-pitched ringing, and spiraling screams comprise its musical motifs. Lyrically, El-P eschews hip-hop's straightforward style for fits of associative word clusters (a la Kool Keith, or even early Pavement) that sound like a freestyle battle between a Marxist pamphlet and a technical manual. "Motherfucker, does this sound abstract?" El-P howls on one early track. "I hope that it sounded more confusing than that."
Like Funcrusher Plus, the themes on this album are predominantly political. "I am not a mechanism borne for the state," he spits, "I had to be trained." In "Dead Disnee," he fantasizes about visiting a post-apocalyptic Disney World-- a bleak prospect considering recent threats from the al Qaeda network. El-P even takes a sharp-witted stab at the Star Wars phenomenon on Fantastic Damage's title track, charasmatically ranting, "Operate catapults and goosestep over the innocent/ Vagrant of Reganomics phase with books to burn at the pod race.../ This is that Bronx magic, without Lucas Arts graphics/ Crayon colored green monsters and horrible child actors."
But while anti-capitalist anthems have always been his specialty, El-P's greatest accomplishments on this album are his newfound lyrical abilities, at once emotionally resonant and conceptually creative and consistent. On "Stepfather Factory," he fuses his personal and political rage and delivers the record's most fully realized concept song. Affecting the voice of a CEO for a corporation manufacturing abusive guardians, El-P softens his caustic howl as he rhymes over a dark, looming beat that vividly conjures a corporately oppressive near-future.
If Sly Stone phoned up Stockhausen for a presidentially mandated collaboration with 10,000 hours of government-granted studio time at Abbey Road, they still couldn't have crafted a soundscraper this abrasive, complex, and primal. An infectious retro-futurism informs the parting beat of "The Nang, The Front, The Bush and The Shout"; the chorus of "Dead Disnee" is what Devo might sound like after spending a few days spun on PCP and meth; and "Lazerfaces' Warning" approximates industrial circus funk. Then there are the guest appearances: while Aesop Rock comes on with a surprisingly disappointing verse, Vast Aire drops another nugget of noir swagger on the "Dr. Hellno and the Praying Mantis."
As tight as Fantastic Damage is, subtlety is definitely not its strong suit, and its esoteric and indulgent moments might have been better executed with a little smoothing over. Still, with a sphere of oppression and violence hanging over this country, El-P's trenchant examination of our environment and inner space is like manna in a desert of irony. No doubt, El-P has delivered both what we'd hoped for and what we need right now. This is his statement for these times, and it's one of the finest hip-hop records I've heard all year. | 2002-06-18T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2002-06-18T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | June 18, 2002 | 8.9 | 4662fc0b-2380-45e7-94dc-1f55440f0684 | Pitchfork | null |
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Daft Punk's TRON: Legacy work gets remixed by an odd crossection of producers, including Moby, Paul Oakenfold, Photek, and the Crystal Method. | Daft Punk's TRON: Legacy work gets remixed by an odd crossection of producers, including Moby, Paul Oakenfold, Photek, and the Crystal Method. | Various Artists: TRON: Legacy Reconfigured | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15317-tron-legacy-reconfigured/ | TRON: Legacy Reconfigured | A sad fact of Daft Punk fandom: Once exemplars when it came to making dance albums that played like pop albums, for the past five or six years the duo's often been more enjoyable once they've been remixed, or when they venture into the visual. Their last proper album, 2005's Human After All, was poorly sequenced and way too long, full of tracks that were just blandly, grindingly repetitive. It was almost anti-pop but not in a truly out-there way. Good for DJs, in other words, and bad for those of us playing along at home.
Given their lack of interest in making pop records now, it's been unsurprising that much of Daft Punk's activity over the last half-decade has been about crafting raw material for remixing (including masterfully remixing themselves on 2007's live-album-meets-DJ-mix set Alive) and the cinema (including their foray into art-house territory in Electroma from 2006). Here then is an album that combines the two. When it was announced that DP would be recording the score for the TRON reboot, it seemed like the natural next step in the duo's 21st-century trajectory. A slick pop science fiction film, with a Disney-sized budget lavished on its special effects, would surely provide their lushest visual accompaniment yet. And while the symphonic elements of the TRON: Legacy soundtrack made it very different from Human After All, as a home-listening prospect it played out in much the same way. Not so much fun to listen to minus the film's visual razzle-dazzle, and primed for creative remixers to turn the results into something closer to pop.
TRON: Legacy Reconfigured succeeds as much as most remix projects do, which is to say about 50% of the time, and without Daft Punk's name attached to the project it's doubtful it would have attracted much attention. The list of remixers sure doesn't inspire much confidence, at least if you're not afflicted by a serious case of 1990s nostalgia. From Paul Oakenfold to Photek to Moby to the Crystal Method, it's full of names whose best work (using the phrase very loosely in some cases) is a decade or more behind them. If Daft Punk shaped a lot of the past 10 years, whether via indie kids glomming onto Discovery or brutalist dance-rock producers picking up from Human After All, much of Legacy Reconfigured seems sonically stuck in the late-90s era of super-clubs and "all-star" remixes on CD single.
The best tracks here are hugely unsubtle pop-dance tunes with big acid-meets-electro riffs-- in other words not too dissimilar from from what DP were peddling circa Homework. That's not a negative, of course. The Crystal Method's redo of "The Grid" is cheesily anthemic and unabashedly big in a way that's sadly rare these days, and Oakenfold's "C.L.U." has a sturm-und-drang epicness that the original soundtrack approached rarely. Much of Legacy Reconfigured is what many of us were actually hoping for from the actual Legacy score, and from Daft Punk in general: grandiose electronic pop full of bombastic hooks, without the genteel orchestral touches that felt like a lame cop to Hollywood tradition.
Unfortunately, Legacy Reconfigured can't keep that intensity up across a whole disc. Plenty of these remixes are just inert filler. Oddly, many of the weakest remixes are by younger producers, like Teddybears' "Adagio For Tron", which could be any squelchy and interchangeable French dance single of the past five years. Who knows, maybe the new jacks were cowed by working with material from a group they consider a formative influence rather than just peers. In any event, taken as a whole, what we're left with is a solidly middle-of-the-road project building off a solidly middle-of-the-road movie score. The best you can say is that Legacy Reconfigured is less disappointing than Legacy itself. No one expects much from Paul Oakenfold these days, so it's a pleasant surprise here. But it's hard not to expect more from Daft Punk, even with how often they've missed in the last decade. | 2011-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Walt Disney | April 19, 2011 | 5 | 46697abc-9db9-4ef3-b633-d7c35f38e4dd | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
It's hard to imagine that the least satisfying thing Johnny Marr could ever do would be launching a solo career, yet here we are with Playland, the second official solo album by the former Smiths guitarist. The oppressive truth lurking behind almost every tired lick and lazy lyric of Playland is that Marr can, and has, done so much better. | It's hard to imagine that the least satisfying thing Johnny Marr could ever do would be launching a solo career, yet here we are with Playland, the second official solo album by the former Smiths guitarist. The oppressive truth lurking behind almost every tired lick and lazy lyric of Playland is that Marr can, and has, done so much better. | Johnny Marr: Playland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19892-johnny-marr-playland/ | Playland | In the Smiths, Marr was the preeminent guitar stylist of his generation. Glam, folk-rock, post-punk, funk, rockabilly, and a certain ineffable Marrness— that ringing, swinging, intricate, atmospheric, hook-dripping soul— all dovetailed into a sound that still stuns. But while his erstwhile Smiths-mate Morrissey has taken his own primrose path down self-parodying mediocrity with this year’s World Peace Is None of Your Business, Marr is doing the same on a lesser scale with his solo career. Which makes sense: Marr never had as high a profile or ego as Morrissey, and that low-key humility has made him a fan favorite.
But who knew that the least satisfying thing Johnny Marr could ever do would be launching a solo career? Yet here we are with Playland, the second official solo album by the former Smiths guitarist (or third, if you count Boomslang, his 2003 album released under the name Johnny Marr & the Healers). There’s not a sizeable difference between Playland and last year’s The Messenger. Both feature listless songcraft, lackluster vocals, and a dull pulverization of every Britpop trope imaginable (not that imagination had anything to do with the making of this record). Worst of all, though, is the oppressive truth lurking behind almost every tired lick and lazy lyric of Playland: Marr can, and has, done so much better.
We root for him, though, and in return he gives us “Easy Money”, Playland’s lead single, a silly, clumsy fumble of a song that can’t click into shape. Is it supposed to remind us that money is a bad thing, or that it’s ironic how millionaire musicians still feel the need to sing about it? It doesn’t matter, because the song's only notable element is Marr’s perpetually dated musical taste, as the slashing, squelching rock of “Easy Money” feels about as fresh and inspired as Kaiser Chiefs.
Playland isn’t all bad: “Boys Get Straight” is as breakneck as the Smiths’ “London”, and that energy almost carries it over the finish line, despite a poverty of hooks. “Little King” isn’t any more original—its sinuous intro could be a page in the Echo & the Bunnymen songbook, an nearly funny gesture seeing as how the Bunnymen were one of the Smiths’ chief rivals in the '80s— but Marr spins that into a tuneful, propulsive bit of diversion anyway. The album’s title track is its only glimmer of Marr’s worship of vintage glam, but what might have started out as filthy, flashy rock in the practice space has been pasteurized to the point of blankness.
Marr’s tendency to sing like his former Electronic bandmate, New Order’s Bernard Sumner, might be flattering to Sumner but proves embarrassing otherwise; the pinched, boyish, breathy style serves Marr adequately on tracks like “Dynamo” and “The Trap”, but it doesn’t come across as conveying emotion and melody as much as it does him doing vocal exercises. If his curious status as a New Order/Joy Division fanboy is in question, he titles two consecutive tracks on Playland— either consciously or not — after Joy Division songs: “Candidate” and “25 Hours”. They do exhibit a trickle-down trace of that same dark, stark atmosphere, but rather than coming across as an homage, the resemblance seems fawning at best, insecure at worst.
A lack of effort isn’t the main problem with Playland; if anything, there’s been too much effort put into it. It’s been fussed over so much that any spark that may have spurred it has been smothered. As Marr continues to staple pages to his résumé—and the prospect of a Smiths reunion becomes even more remote—the disconnect between the iconic architect of '80s indie and the journeyman who’d rather follow than lead grows. In an interview with the NME, Marr cited “boredom” as a big inspiration on Playland, and all it takes is a listen to prove it. | 2014-10-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Music Group | October 7, 2014 | 4.6 | 46698826-0927-4ece-b17d-6a703390d754 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Devonwho is part of the Klipmode collective that includes Leaving records labelmates MNDSGN and Knxwledge. His take on blunted instrumental hip-hop favors the wobbly synths of the early ’80s. | Devonwho is part of the Klipmode collective that includes Leaving records labelmates MNDSGN and Knxwledge. His take on blunted instrumental hip-hop favors the wobbly synths of the early ’80s. | Devonwho: Luz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22621-luz/ | Luz | Matthew McQueen’s Leaving Records is quickly becoming one of the most diverse labels going. His own music swings from hip-hop to ambient, and McQueen has found common ground between those dueling interests, releasing a stream of disparate records ranging from the new age of Laraaji, SunPath, and his own Matthewdavid moniker to unclassifiable records by Guy Blakeslee, Seiho, and Deantoni Parks and a steady stream of off-kilter hip-hop in the mode of Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint. Luz, from L.A. producer Devonwho, is the latest Leaving release to continue the trend, drawing on R&B, funk, and hip-hop.
Devonwho (born Devon Fox) is part of the Klipmode collective that includes friends and Leaving labelmates Mndsgn, Knxwledge, and Suzi Analogue, and their vision for hip-hop shares both influences and an ideological point of view, celebrating the synth-driven nostalgia of the early ’80s. Luz is situated in a wobbly aesthetic of Zapp-style synths, with a blunted haze hanging on top of everything.
At its best, Luz presents Devonwho as a fresh new voice, with a handful of standout tracks that argue that even today there’s still gold to be found in the g-funk swamps. The moody “Trueandyou” has a pulsing, emotive synth and a stuttering hi-hat beat, and “Andthentherewas” comes off like a lazy brother of “Still D.R.E.,” featuring a similarly plinky melody. Both tracks recognize the value of melody over squelch, and Devonwho drapes a lovely overlay of synths to complete the picture. “Alphaloop,” “Trio,” and “Anti-ragequit” mine a similar vein, with the latter sounding like it could have been the anthem to a different, more Dazed and Confused version of Stranger Things.
On two of Luz’s weaker tracks, Devonwho brings in vocalists, perhaps as a way of advertising his production to beat-seeking rappers. As uninspiring as the vocal cuts are, they present a welcome change of pace on a record with a relatively limited palette and a handful of boring snoozes. At a relatively economical 39 minutes, and with 11 of its 13 tracks being instrumentals, Luz amply showcases Devonwho’s chops as a producer. But as a listening experience, it lags well behind this fall’s more consistent and inspired Body Wash from Klipmode compatriot Mndsgn. | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Leaving | November 18, 2016 | 6.5 | 467ab825-6174-4e4e-a5c8-9ec016e7d27b | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Tim Rutili's Chicago collective outdoes itself on this record, which sounds like ancient mountain and Delta traditions synthesized-- scratched up, muddied, and re-imagined for an America more reliant on machines than the grace of God. | Tim Rutili's Chicago collective outdoes itself on this record, which sounds like ancient mountain and Delta traditions synthesized-- scratched up, muddied, and re-imagined for an America more reliant on machines than the grace of God. | Califone: Roots and Crowns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9479-roots-and-crowns/ | Roots and Crowns | Anyone craving a quick schooling in vintage Americana can spin Harry Smith's The Anthology of American Folk Music or Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon, memorize Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, or waddle through In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain, the Bear Family's gorgeous, heart-skewering Carter Family box set. But if you're more interested in hearing ancient mountain and Delta traditions synthesized-- scratched up, muddied, and re-imagined for an America more reliant on machines than the grace of God-- curl up with Califone's Roots and Crowns, the Chicago collective's staggering homage to starts and finishes, computers and cornfields, dirty feet and throbbing foreheads.
Roots and Crowns is Califone's most sophisticated record to date, a natural-- if lighter-- extension of 2004's Heron King Blues, and a coherent aesthetic declaration (which is even more of a triumph considering it was recorded in chunks with new gear, after frontman Tim Rutili packed up for California and the band's instruments were raided during their last tour). This is Califone's climax: Roots and Crowns blurs all lines between the organic and the synthesized, and is as much a product of the gut as the mind, with each perfectly placed skronk-and-twitter hitting its intellectual and emotional targets.
Over the course of eight full-lengths, Califone have proven their prowess for improvisational out-jazz and melodic scrap-folk in equal measure-- Roots and Crowns sees both impulses at play, over some of the band's best-written songs. Longtime engineer (and former Red Red Meat member, and part-time Califone percussionist) Brian Deck orchestrates the loops and squeaks, piecing distinct, synthesized bits into cohesive pictures, and ensuring that the end result still sounds like something your dog dug up in the backyard and spit out, slobber-slicked and gummed, on your front doormat.
Lyrically, Rutili favors tiny, imagistic vignettes over narrative arcs, and these songs read more like prose poems than stories-- which, given the hyper-fragmented sound-collage of Califone's instrumentation, makes a certain kind of sense. In addictive opener "Pink and Sour", Rutilli talks-- twice-- about losing his language over rollicking tribal drums and slide guitar ("Along your skin/ Lost my language," "Cotton in the calm along your side/ Lost my language"), and his bandmates compensate in full, slipping in vivid percussive flourishes that speak remarkably well in his absence. On the whimsical "Spiders House", fellow Chicagoans Bitter Tears lend brassy toots, muted trumpet and trombone sighing, resigned and tired, while Rutili's rusty pipes spew abstract laments: "After the quiet bleeds peel and age familiar/ Peace in the pain." "The Orchids", lifted from former-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, is, according to Rutili, the record's inspiration, and is beautifully rendered here-- Rutili' s voice is cottony and vaguely-love-struck, while wisps of harmonica weave in and out of his coos.
Califone have always been stupidly underappreciated, and the further we stumble into the 21st century, the more this music starts to feel both familiar and necessary: Roots and Crowns is bluesy and soulful without reverting to revivalist schtick, and experimental without relying on blind cut-and-pasting. It is old and new, dirty and clean, alienating and accessible, sweet and ugly, organic and industrial, doting and vicious. It is one of the most quintessentially American records imaginable. | 2006-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | October 9, 2006 | 8.7 | 467dacf3-c2a1-48cf-9b56-5c6c397949fb | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The Spanish producer’s evocative debut album exists in an interzone where the natural world seems forever on the cusp of swallowing up the constructed one. | The Spanish producer’s evocative debut album exists in an interzone where the natural world seems forever on the cusp of swallowing up the constructed one. | Pépe: Reclaim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pepe-reclaim/ | Reclaim | The Spanish DJ Pépe started producing tracks when he was 16, a full two years before he was of legal clubbing age. Years later, his music still has the dreamy quality of an imagined dancefloor, an idealized space far more vivid than reality. While still a teenager, Pépe had his synapses rearranged by Marcel Dettmann during a pilgrimage to the hallowed Brighton club Patterns, where he would eventually become a resident: “I had come from Valencia, which at the time had nothing like that happening,” he marveled. His music glows with the wide-eyed energy of a convert.
Like Dettmann, Pépe smuggles subtle warmth into the echoing spaces his music populates. His synth pads are taffy-like and warmly pliable, while the drum hits, glistening mallets, and shimmering keys all seem to have a little moss creeping up their sides. His evocative and propulsive debut LP, Reclaim, glitters in a slipstream between worlds and genres. Synths like thrown scarves suggest house music. Breakbeats evoke harder, more forceful genres—dubstep, garage. No matter where you think you are in one of Pépe’s mercurial tracks, the weather is shifting beneath, and a blinding change is underway.
The album title refers, he says, to the way nature “strives to regain ground, once humans are removed from the streets.” Pépe has expressed interest in architecture that allows for flora, in cities covered in green—a redemptive embrace by the natural world of the constructed one. He seems drawn to the spot where bustle gives way to calm, where a packed landscape suddenly seems to empty out. On “Katta,” a smeared synth like a truck horn dissolves abruptly into chittering and peeping, as if the camera had panned abruptly beneath a superhighway to the insect kingdom below. Blaring sirens, a few cents sour, echo off of the implications of bare concrete on “Optical: Activate” before being submerged from below in a warm bath of long tones. It’s a phantasmagorical landscape, one where you can never be quite sure whether you’re squinting down a chipped-brick alley or breaking cloud cover in a sea plane.
It’s hard to maintain this level of rapt attention over 10 tracks, but Pépe’s ear for detail is so fine that each new sound arrives with the urgency of a clue. The pianos that pierce through the milky light in the last minute of “Act III: ‘Compact City Dream’” sound almost too beautiful to be real, while the oscillators on “Resonant Bodies” seem to take you upward with them. Some of his juxtapositions are so radical as to be blinding. On “Goma (Prime Mix),” a musty breakbeat, redolent of Burial and seasonal allergies, finds itself drowned by chlorine-blue synths and assailed by pink plastic mallet percussion. You are forever just about to discover your true location in Pépe’s music, only to be mistaken.
Implicit in Pépe’s beatific vision of a “post-human future,” of course, is widespread death and destruction. The longer you spend within Reclaim, the more the serenity begins to feel deceptive, even ominous, as if it were smoke emerging from the crater of a blast site. Near the end of “Resonant Bodies,” wraith-like synths rise up, with melodies shooting through them like headlights through mist. It recalls nothing so much as Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner, which hinted to us at the vast reserves of beauty awaiting us even in the most blasted and dim of corridors. | 2023-04-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lapsus | April 7, 2023 | 7.6 | 467efdc6-ba1a-45d0-8adf-89971e7e74ce | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
This compendium of odds and ends from the Canadian singer and sound artist may be his most incisive and convincing album yet, thanks to the way his voice finally becomes one with his machines. | This compendium of odds and ends from the Canadian singer and sound artist may be his most incisive and convincing album yet, thanks to the way his voice finally becomes one with his machines. | Ian William Craig: Thresholder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-william-craig-thresholder/ | Thresholder | At a glance, the music of Canadian singer and sound artist Ian William Craig may seem to hinge on a gimmick. During most of this decade, Craig’s crackling drones have spilled slowly beyond the contemporary avant-garde thanks to an ingeniously seductive technique: Craig sings ribboned melodies in an arcing falsetto, then routes the sound through, beneath, between, and around pathways of customized tape machines that in turn rend, mutilate, erase, or otherwise mangle his pristine tone. It is a novel but physical effect, a hands-on approach to distortion that mirrors the visceral grip of the din it makes and tends to elicit a consistent how-does-it-work wonder.
But Craig is also a classically trained singer, something evident from his mannered restraint, and an esteemed printmaker who finds deep aesthetic connections between his visual and musical work. He is also an emotive singer-songwriter in the Bon Iver mold and a piano player who favors the steady ascendance of chunky chords. Still, his wider artistic scope has typically been overshadowed by one appealing idea, his multitudes reduced to a single mode.
More than any of Craig’s past albums, though, Thresholder pulls together those overlooked threads with his seraphic tone inside of those tape decks. Thresholder should dispatch any lingering notions that Craig’s best-known premise is limited or inflexible, symptoms of a design that has become a crutch. Instead, on 11 tracks he recorded but never released between his dual breakthrough albums, 2014’s A Turn of Breath and 2016’s Centres, he wields his voice-and-tape technique as an adaptable compositional tool. Just as Philip Jeck uses turntables, GAS fills four-on-the-floor skeletons, and Julianna Barwick arranges her own voice into folds and spirals, Craig’s premise becomes a starting point, not a fixed end.
Where “Idea for Contradiction 1” uses subtle processing to suggest the Vienna Boys’ Choir performing in the hull of some docked cargo ship, “Idea for Contradiction 2” crowds and clouds those murmurs with rhythmic clicks and corrosive hiss from a looped spool of tape. It’s as if that mammoth vessel were collapsing upon its return to sea. His falsetto blends in perfect, damaged harmony with his machines on “Sfumato” but becomes a hapless victim of their industrial design on “Some Absolute Means.” Craig oscillates between the harsh and the heavenly here, the balance too true to life to favor either side.
Most of these pieces are not fragile but delicate, their layers woven together with obvious attention. But there are surprising moments of power here, pieces that afford everything else a sense of topography and scale. “Some Absolute Means” is an essential addition to Craig’s repertoire. Step by step, the keyboardist pits an outsized church organ battered by effects against his crisscrossing coos and a cycle of brittle dissonance that seems to cut crevices into the surface of both. It sounds like Tim Hecker producing the outré Jónsi Birgisson album many expected but never got as Sigur Rós’ star rose.
There has long been a trace of escapism to Craig’s work, the sense that the singer is not satisfied with the body or finesse of his own voice; the electronics are a magic hatch, a space meant for hiding. But listening to these 11 tracks, it seems that Craig is not avoiding reality so much as he is reckoning with the inherent distortion and disruption of our own machine-mediated times. He takes care to never omit his voice, the music’s human core, from any of these pieces; instead, its movement is the source of light, the thing you squint through the dark to decipher.
During the transfixing centerpiece, “And Therefore the Moonlight,” you can hear the faintest trace of a gorgeous vocal melody beneath a groaning drone, as if your headphone connection were popping in and out of its socket while some twilit chamber piece played. You strain to hear the signal, and, just then, it appears, Craig singing beautifully of what must be celestial love. You mourn for the parts you missed, recognizing anew his skills as a songwriter. Likewise, one of Thresholder’s most captivating moments comes near the end of “Discovered in Flat,” where a gentle roar parts to make room for his refracted mewl. He weaves in and out of his machines’ distortion, bits of his voice always stuck to the tape like old taffy clinging to a wax wrapper. At last, though, his ululations drift slowly into the noise, spinning away like flotsam vanishing into deep space. It is a beautiful absence of sound.
Craig’s music is not concerned merely with his gadgets or the way he wants his voice to be. Thresholder is, instead, a summary of the way his voice might be heard or ignored or interpreted in a universe where activity and entropy only increase without bound. If there is a gimmick there, it is one of our own doing and not his, one where we’ve made the signal and the noise inexorably and inflexibly bound. Thresholder is a curved mirror, reflecting that reality back in a feedback loop where technology and humanity continually meet. | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | FatCat | November 5, 2018 | 7.9 | 467f65fb-e944-45ee-b9ee-df687e27796b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The reissue of Matthew Herbert's landmark 2001 album Bodily Functions gathers period remixes and a few new versions in one package. But the real star is the album itself, which is arguably his finest. | The reissue of Matthew Herbert's landmark 2001 album Bodily Functions gathers period remixes and a few new versions in one package. But the real star is the album itself, which is arguably his finest. | Matthew Herbert: Bodily Functions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17491-bodily-functions/ | Bodily Functions | Matthew Herbert likes processes, rules, and parameters. He has a manifesto for how he records music-- no sampling other artists, no drum machines, no synths. It sounds mighty ascetic, but the prolific Brit has been responsible for some of the past decade-and-change's most natural-sounding dance music. 1998's Around the House saw him incorporating household sounds; 2001's Bodily Functions moved inward, building songs from samples of the human body. It was easily Herbert's most audacious idea at that point.
Bodily Functions is even more stretch-your-legs-out luxurious than House. The beats don't sound like flatulence, belches, or growling stomachs, but there is something very organic about the record. The drums feel squishy, the rhythms are padded, and everything moves with an elegance that most house could only dream of (no drum machines, remember). "Leave Me Now" and "You Saw It All" are relatively raucous stompers fashioned from gasping snares and wet rattling, while the very strange "Foreign Bodies" is like early Ricardo Villalobos mapped out in human flesh.
It's as much of a jazz album as a house album. Around the House already had plenty of jazz leanings, but this record makes them explicit-- horns that sigh like deep exhales, scrumptious, meaty bass. The album is punctuated by brief meanderings away from house, like the cocktail lounge opener "You're Unknown to Me" or the straight-up "I Know", which is four and a half minutes of pure jazz vamp with Herbert's own delectable piano work. These pieces serve to open the album up into its inviting, expansive whole.
Bodily Functions also continued Herbert's fruitful collaboration with Dani Siciliano, a smooth singer whose jazzy inflections go well with this album's tasteful house. She's as much the star of Bodily Functions as Herbert is, her pleasantly husky voice inhabiting the album's warm atmosphere. Her calm, gently emotive personality makes tunes like the masterful "It's Only" agonizingly ambiguous. She wrings layer upon layer of feeling from the wry kiss-off "Leave Me Now," commanding "never call again" but later asking "be the friend I never knew." The lyrics are equally clever, mixing the lexicon of life science ("Foreign Bodies") with subtle commentary on relationships and interpersonal interactions.
Bodily Functions' supple texturing, smooth demeanor, and pop songcraft have made it timeless, a gem so well-polished you couldn't ever imagine it accumulating scuff marks. So the reissue acts as more of a reminder than a rediscovery, packaged with a second disc that includes compilation track "Back to the Start" (which could have easily landed on the album), as well as a number of period remixes. Highlights include a stunning cover by Jamie Lidell and strong remixes from Matmos and Plaid.
For well-versed Herbert fans, the reissue offers few revelations, though it is nice to have the whole period collected into one package. There are a few new bits, however, including a Dave Aju remix of "Foreign Bodies" and two remixes from Pampa boss and consummate weirdo DJ Koze. His take on "You Saw It All" capitalizes on the album's odd movements and springy textures, but it's his version of "It's Only" that really hits home. Koze's work here is pretty transparent: he hollows out the beat and mixes up the vocal, and then puts a monster bassline underneath, sloping down at a sharp right angle just when you expect the chord progression to ascend.
With Bodily Functions, Herbert made a gorgeous jazz-pop album from recordings of human bodies and a few instruments-- but he also made one of last decade's most important dance albums. An enduring album that still sounds singular, Bodily Functions floats far above the trend-obsessed nature of dance music. | 2013-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Accidental | January 3, 2013 | 8.7 | 4687910a-2235-4eab-9f0e-36efc1b3daae | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Tackling a range of R&B radio hits from the 1980s and 1990s, Meshell Ndegeocello treats the practice of covering another’s songs as an act of intimacy and empathy. | Tackling a range of R&B radio hits from the 1980s and 1990s, Meshell Ndegeocello treats the practice of covering another’s songs as an act of intimacy and empathy. | Meshell Ndegeocello: Ventriloquism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meshell-ndegeocello-ventriloquism/ | Ventriloquism | Some songs are rooms within rooms, vast interconnected musical systems. Meshell Ndegeocello gets this; many of her own compositions end at a considerable distance from where they began, teleporting freely from chord to chord. But Ndegeocello understands that songs can also be rooms unto themselves. Sometimes they are even less than a room—they can be a closet, or a corner.
Over the last 25 years Ndegeocello has merged soul, rock, and hip-hop to make a kind of R&B that is at once cerebral and interstellar. She has devoted space on each of her last three studio albums to taking another artist’s song and bending it into new configurations, inverting its structure, seeing how much she might alter its appearance without disturbing its inner grooves. She doesn’t perform these songs as much as she renovates them from surface to center, peeling away wallpaper, pushing furniture around, crumpling and discarding any unnecessary dimensional space until she figures out what kind of room the song is.
Almost 10 years ago, during the sessions for her 2009 album Devil’s Halo, she revisited Ready for the World’s crystalline slow jam “Love You Down.” The original recording of the song is a lovely and faithful replica of a slow-motion Prince ballad; it delivers itself to the listener as a shelf of dry ice delivers fog into the air. For her own version, Ndegeocello shaved down all of the fog and extra space and filled it with silence. Then she shaved the vocal itself down, carving a soft, defeated sigh from Melvin Riley’s shivery tenor. She ruthlessly edited out every unnecessary gesture, removed every distraction and ornament until only the original feeling remained. A desperate plea disintegrated into a whisper; a room was reduced to a corner. As a result, the “Love You Down” that appears on Devil’s Halo occupies an extremely narrow and tender inch of emotional space.
Ndegeocello’s newest record, Ventriloquism, adds 11 new R&B and R&B-adjacent covers to her catalog; in its song selection, it examines a period of music from 1982 to 1994, during which the genre expanded and contracted itself into several different forms—disco shrank down into boogie, new jack swing slit electro-funk into narrow strips and stapled them back together out of order. The songs Ndegeocello studies on Ventriloquism aren’t deep cuts. They’re radio hits, some of which crossed over and most of which still radiate softly in throwback quiet-storm playlists. Ndegeocello refrains from adjusting the pronouns in her covers, so the songs written by men for male singers generally end up queerer than they started—the sensibility that inspired her to preserve the lyric “All that really mattered was you were my girrrlfriend” in “Love You Down” is also felt in her cover of Ralph Tresvant’s “Sensitivity”: “You need a man with sensitivity/A man like me.” (“Sensitivity” is one of three songs on the record, along with the Force MD’s “Tender Love” and Janet Jackson’s “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun),” that were written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who at one point in the 1980s were on the verge of fusing R&B and synth pop forever.)
The greater transformations on the record are structural, as on Al B. Sure!’s “Nite and Day,” a breezy, fluttery new jack swing song that Ndegeocello converts into an ocean. She softens the hits of percussion until they glow and tremble like distant beacons. Without the discrete drum-machine thwacks establishing the song’s boundaries, it flows shapelessly into the space beyond them. It’s as if Ndegeocello picked up on the song’s inner buoyancy, tore out its floor, and installed a pool.
Covers, when they surface over the course of an album or an artist’s career, may seem unnecessarily digressive—light filler, in other words—or even opportunistic; how better to add a sense of legitimacy to your project than by quoting someone who already passed through the same territory? But as soon as you begin to sing someone else’s song, there are innumerable unconscious and invisible adaptations that the song must immediately go through. How can you convey an established idea with a different voice, different instruments, different sensibilities, in a different time and space? How do the words of a song change when, instead of being sung, they are spoken, or whispered?
Some of the covers on Ventriloquism are as cubist in approach as Ndegeocello’s “Love You Down.” Her version of “Sensitivity” seems to have spliced in some DNA from the Beatles’ “Wild Honey Pie,” particularly in the insistent, arthritic banjo strum that underpins the chorus; her cover of Sade’s “Smooth Operator” sounds as if she knocked the song to the ground just to see what fractals would form when it shattered. Her cover of TLC’s “Waterfalls” most directly realizes the ambitions of the album’s title, of Ndegeocello trying to reanimate compositions and characters she didn’t originally design. The song’s primary bass riff is rerouted through an acoustic guitar; the rest of the arrangement gradually paints itself around Ndegeocello’s voice. What sort of room is “Waterfalls”? Well, it’s probably an island, maybe even a particularly isolated neighborhood—it could function as any shrunken microcosm of society. Ndegeocello swivels between the different perspectives embedded in the lyrics, sinking through each window of the neighborhood: a mother who can’t reach her son; a son who is murdered in the midst of a drug deal; a pair of lovers, one of whom has inadvertently transmitted AIDS to the other. “I’m so sorry I hurt you so much,” she sings as the boy. His words are immediately countered by his mother: “Can’t keep yourself out of trouble,” Ndegeocello repeats gnomically, as if sighing and shaking her head at the meaningless circularity of the scene, the way these individual human dramas continually replay themselves on radio and in reality.
The most striking variation on the record is one in which Ndegeocello’s adjustments are minor but mood-expanding. Her recording of “Sometimes It Snows in April” is relatively faithful to Prince’s original; it merely transposes the notes Prince played on the piano, each of which sounded gently stirred out of sleep, to the electric guitar, which makes the song not only blurrier but somehow lonelier. “April” is a different song now. It changed when it migrated from Prince’s mind to the piano, and it changed again when Prince died almost two years ago. When I listen to it now, it sounds like a monument to a suddenly blank space. Ndegeocello’s cover is first and foremost a recording of this change. “Always cry for love,” she sings, and then her voice drops, loosening from the rhythm of the verse and slowing into speech, as if the song were too painful to resume singing. “Never cry for pain,” she says, her voice crumbled into a trembling husk. Throughout the length of Ventriloquism, in Ndegeocello’s hands, no cover is ever mere lip service. A cover is an act of scholarship, an act of criticism, an act of intimacy. An act of love. | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Naïve | March 17, 2018 | 7.8 | 468a3fbe-0181-4373-9e53-955dded35e3c | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
On its second album, the Austin quartet balances complex, technical arrangements with playful moments of levity. | On its second album, the Austin quartet balances complex, technical arrangements with playful moments of levity. | Mamalarky: Pocket Fantasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mamalarky-pocket-fantasy/ | Pocket Fantasy | It’s easiest to connect with Mamalarky at odd angles. The songs on the indie quartet’s 2020 self-titled album married structured choruses with brash, jangly interludes. This approach made for a few inspired peaks (the cheeky psychedelia of “You Make Me Smile”) but also tended to fall back on tired formulas and melodies that didn’t quite stick. In these less distinctive moments, Mamalarky felt like a band still very much in the process of figuring itself out. Their new album, Pocket Fantasy, smartly doubles down on the proggy quirks and little incoherences that make them such a unique force while still maintaining the effortless charm of their previous music.
The band’s first full-length was released at the height of the pandemic, but Pocket Fantasy is the product of time spent all together, cooped up in a rented home in Atlanta. The exploratory nature of the songwriting reflects that closeness: You get the sense many of these tracks arose from jam sessions, without a particular destination in mind. “Dance Together,” a velvety highlight, begins in a shimmer of guitar. There’s a trancelike quality to bandleader Livvy Bennett’s voice as she sings about “glittering fractals moving across the roof.” But just as soon as the dreamstate arrives, it’s gone—a spiky, off-kilter chorus bleeds into high-pitched background squeals, and the keyboard and drums launch into what sounds like a frenetic take on elevator music. That’s not a knock on the sound of this record; Mamalarky are at their best when they’re messing around, riding melodies that spin and spiral into each other before they ever quite come to rest.
While nothing feels labored, the music is consistently complex. That Pocket Fantasy is a fun, breezy project doesn’t detract from the maturity of its arrangements or the technical qualities of the playing itself. (Bennett has made a point of emphasizing her chops, even outside of the music: Last year, she taught a series of instructional videos for Fender’s YouTube channel on subjects like fingerpicking and barre chords.) The irregular geometry of “Shining Armor” feels indebted to math rock, and “Little Robot” dabbles in wonky meter before resolving into one of the album’s prettiest codas—a moment of glittery respite in the wake of stabbing, anxious guitar.
Despite all the experimentation, Mamalarky are never fussy. These songs are sophisticated, but they aren’t overly serious or difficult. There’s no mistaking the playfulness of a band that features Uglydolls and friendship bracelets so prominently in their visuals. The lyrics, too, balance high-minded affectations (“Technology and nature tied/There is no reason we should hide,” goes one line on the opener, “Frog 2”) with earnest declarations—odes to friendship (“Mythical Bonds”) and nostalgic pleas for just a little more time with loved ones (“Now”). Even on tracks like “It Hurts,” where comfort feels far away, Bennett conveys her feelings plainly. “I know it’s bad timing but I need you very badly/And it seems that you can’t give that much,” she sings. The accessibility is part of what makes Mamalarky so immediately appealing; in their world, what’s complicated is never too intimidating. | 2022-10-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | October 7, 2022 | 7.3 | 468f20e6-bd90-4113-9778-d979d78503ac | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
Three years after the still-wonderful Echoes, the former DFA band team with Paul Epworth, Ewan Pearson, and Danger Mouse to helm a more meticulous, cleaner version of their once-gritty indie-dance sound. | Three years after the still-wonderful Echoes, the former DFA band team with Paul Epworth, Ewan Pearson, and Danger Mouse to helm a more meticulous, cleaner version of their once-gritty indie-dance sound. | The Rapture: Pieces of the People We Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9399-pieces-of-the-people-we-love/ | Pieces of the People We Love | Oh, what a heavy burden the Rapture must bear. When "House of Jealous Lovers" dropped out of the sky like a bomb filled with hi-hat and cowbell, it set in motion dual music-crit ripples: The rise of the internet's ultimate game-of-telephone hype, and the promise of a chiropractic procedure on the stiff spine of indie rock. The resulting frenzy over dancepunk or discopunk or indie-dance or many other compound words powered the band into a contract with Universal and buoyed the release of 2003's Echoes, still the definitive statement of 21st century indie rock rediscovering dance music.
Then, almost immediately, things began to fall apart. The internet, fickle mistress that it is, began dissipating the aura around the Rapture as quickly as it had conjured it up, with listeners speculating that they were mere puppets for the DFA, or plagiarists of the early 80s, or merely the Emperor's New Hipster Jeans. Meanwhile, dancepunk went on to disintegrate before our very eyes, flaming out even faster than most hastily-classified genres, with nobody digging past the most obvious influences (read: Gang of Four) to do more than echo Echoes. As the general opinion of the heady dancepunk days of 2003 faded into disdain, the Rapture-- as the sound's most-recognized face-- took the brunt of the negativity.
Into that unwelcome environment comes Pieces of the People We Love, the Rapture's third full-length and very patient followup to Echoes. Even with the three-year vacation, Pieces seems destined to face a tidal wave of righteous anger from those who felt scammed by dancepunk's brief promise, a piñata to absorb the beatings of the jilted. Fortunately for the band, Pieces turns out to be a strong (at times even spectacular) album, one that finds the band evolving from where they left off with Echoes while restoring some of the old hope that indie kids have, indeed, learned how to dance, and no longer have to be quite so obvious about it.
What the Rapture have returned with is a sound less concerned with retaining the raw, gritty punk half of the equation: From the fade-in harmonies and discrete four notes of bass-synth that announce the album, it's clear the group is going for a cleaner sound, surely helped by Paul Epworth and Ewan Pearson, who man the boards for eight of 10 tracks. While nothing on Pieces reaches the velveteen club-readiness of "I Need Your Love", the band's previous muddy immediacy is replaced by a more meticulous approach: the keyboards polished to a glossy sheen, the guitars eased back into a supporting role, percussion real and programmed blended seamlessly.
It's impressive then, that even with this newfound attention to detail, the Rapture still maintain a flailing energy and enthusiasm that most of the other dancepunk bands could only fake. The idea that one can, you know, actually dance to the Rapture is sometimes mocked, but tracks such as the sharp, sax-supplemented "Get Myself Into It" and the delirious Afro-funk guitar vs. merrily popping bass of "The Devil" approach that elusive concept known as "groove." As with Echoes, Luke Jenner helps the songs he sings drop their inhibitions with his loose-hinged voice, building to a fake-orgasm crescendo on "The Devil" that's absurd yet logical.
"The Devil" keeps getting mentioned, since it's one of the standout tracks on Pieces of the People We Love, all of which share a common feature, or more accurately, familial resemblance. The Talking Heads were, suspiciously, largely absent as an influence upon the dancepunk boom of 2002-03, but here the Rapture are avid pupils of their teachings, specifically mimicking the punk-to-funk transition period. I'll leave it to the caretakers of music propriety to hem and haw; the Rapture do the tribute thing well, most noticeably on "W.A.Y.U.H." where the band bottles the itchy guitars, ringtone keyboards, and pseudo-tribal chants of Remain in Light.
However, what ultimately makes Pieces a step or three down from Echoes is a drop off in consistency, reflecting a higher percentage of songs that fail to ignite. Two of these are the tracks produced by Danger Mouse (the Cee-Lo-guesting title track and "Calling Me"), which are content to coast along on fairly pedestrian beats. Even though the group sticks mostly to what they know (read: songs about dancing) and they've stopped drawing inspiration from "The Ladybug Picnic", the Rapture still sometimes trip on the untied shoelaces of their lyrics; for instance, the incessant groove of "First Gear" would eventually win listeners over if not for Matt Safer endlessly stuttering with irritating dyslexia "my-my-my Muh-Muh-Mustang Ford." Ambition also tends to get the better of them, like the "Setting Sun" vs. "Firestarter" electronica-hit pastiche of "The Sound", or the dopey psychedelia of "Live in Sunshine" (this album's counterpart to Echoes' equally out-of-place departure "Love Is All").
These missteps aren't deal-breakers, though, and for lovers of schaudenfreude expecting a Hindenburg of hype, Pieces of People We Love will be a disappointment. The time for a statement on behalf of dancepunk is probably long past; it surely died when LCD Soundsystem spat "Everyone keeps on talking about it/ Nobody's getting it done," or when it morphed into colorful dance-not-punk from the likes of the Go! Team or Cansei De Ser Sexy. But Pieces nevertheless makes a statement on behalf of the Rapture alone, that they're a group with the exuberance, the right producer rolodex, and the right ear for influences to string together multiple albums that will persist long after their newsworthiness fades. | 2006-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Interscope | September 12, 2006 | 7.8 | 46947e93-95d6-425d-99b7-4ec89040aaca | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Warp mainstays and techno pioneers pivot slightly with an album of dark ambience and intriguing textures. | Warp mainstays and techno pioneers pivot slightly with an album of dark ambience and intriguing textures. | Autechre: Oversteps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14051-oversteps/ | Oversteps | After more than two decades of recording together as Autechre, Sean Booth and Rob Brown can still create the aural equivalent of whiplash if they want to, or showcase a deep knowledge of dance music. The production duo's energetic 12-hour online radio broadcast from earlier this month-- joyfully tweeted about and linked to by fans-- was a massive, almost exhausting display of influences and favorites. Floating between Coil and Lord Quas, the mix inspired someone to crowdsource the track list on Google Docs.
Oversteps takes a much quieter approach, focusing on a smaller scale. Coming after 2008's Quaristice, a varied collection of shorter tracks that originated during live jam sessions, Oversteps leans toward some of the slower, more atmospheric aspects of albums like *Amber (*minus the metered pulse). After the album's initial 20 seconds of silence, the opener "r ess" slowly surfaces-- cold, distant synths arc overhead while broken, incomplete rhythms clatter and collide-- seemingly suggesting that steady beats aren't the main focus here.
Many tracks, such as "O=0" and "d-sho qub", do contain propulsive rhythms, and a slow funk and dull handclap seep through "Treale". But the textures are where things get interesting. Whether it's from tones floating in space or notes brushing up against each other in quiet but effective dischord, the ambience and atmospheres of Oversteps are haunting. "st epreo" expands and contorts with bass notes that seem bound to the rules of fluid dynamics. "Yuop" steadily builds and crests with ringing, grandiose synths. Sometimes, the lack of propulsion distracts, like on "pt2ph8". But the overlapping round of notes in "see on see" points to a clear design within the synthetic ether.
Autechre have evoked heavy moods while pushing the possibilities of production technology forward and broadening the vocabulary of electronic music. The famous video for their track "Gantz Graf" suggests as much, that they harnessed the grating sounds of a machine in the middle of a grand mal seizure. Oversteps finds them working in a comparatively less rigid fashion, almost organic compared to something like Confield. Focusing on creating tension and release within their compositions, they're still incorporating new designs, not merely repackaging the previous products. | 2010-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 22, 2010 | 7.2 | 46967ef1-7874-47d2-932d-2feeb50f6fba | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
A tighter, slicker, poppier sophomore album tries on every imaginable sound and style-- but none is as original or effective as the one they started with. | A tighter, slicker, poppier sophomore album tries on every imaginable sound and style-- but none is as original or effective as the one they started with. | Yeasayer: Odd Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13922-odd-blood/ | Odd Blood | When Yeasayer debuted in 2007 with All Hour Cymbals, they were a Brooklyn art-pop group intriguingly out of step with their peers. They carried an air of mystery and surprise, and at their best ("2080", "Sunrise") managed to make offbeat mysticism and off-kilter pop music seem attractive and exciting. They were basically a rootsy, classic rock-ish version of MGMT then. Their fate seemed doubly sealed by "Tightrope", their laser-focused and damn near best-in-show contribution to the all-star charity compilation Dark Was the Night.
Then they arguably topped that with "Ambling Alp", the pre-release single to sophomore album Odd Blood. "Alp" managed to retain the leftfield bona fides within an easy-to-love glassy pop sheen. That duality extended to the lyrics as well: The song is about infamous Italian boxer Primo Carnera, but in the chorus Chris Keating sang the kind of wholesome fatherly advice you might hear in a Shrek montage.
Like "Ambling Alp", Odd Blood itself should appeal to a lot of people: Yeasayer have made a potentially vanguard record using the full range of possibilities of software-based music to create what once would have been radio-friendly rock. The elastic "O.N.E." and the Tears for Fears-ish "I Remember" are successful mid-80s throwbacks, achieving the full potential hinted at on All Hour Cymbals and rivaling that album's best material. Opener "The Children" also works by tailoring their offbeat tendencies into a tightly packaged song. In much of the first half of the album, Yeasayer demonstrate a rare craftsmanship and consideration that's too often shoved under the rug in modern indie music. Their lyrics may not say much of anything, but their agile arrangements, sense of dynamics and pacing, and singer Chris Keating's expressive vocals communicate plenty.
The rest of the album suffers from a major identity crisis-- few of the various far-flung ideas it explores pan out, and most of them wind up overcooked. On the whole, the record alternates between a prog-rock version of 80s UK synth-pop (and those are the good songs) and dreadlocky alt-pop or yuppie-era world music imitations (aaaand... those are the bad ones). Songs like "Rome" or "Love Me Girl" aim for ambitious sprawl but just wind up muddy, while the ballads "Strange Reunions" and "Grizelda" seem plodding and congested. The more in need of editing the music gets, the weaker the lyrics become: "Mondegreen" is the worst offender, with Keating chanting "Everybody's talking about me and my baby makin' love 'til the morning light" ad nauseum over shamanistic electro-boogie. (But you knew that-- I mean, everybody's talking about it.)
Of course, Yeasayer aren't going anywhere: quality singles, inventive videos, and solid live performances go far. But it's hard to miss the pressure the band was under to deliver here-- it's nearly palpable in their overfed production and search for direction, and as a result, Odd Blood is a bit too much of not enough. I went back and listened to "Tightrope" again. It remains charming, human, and assured, winning your affection instead of trying to earn your respect. When Odd Blood succeeds, it does the same, but when it fails, it fails badly. | 2010-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Secretly Canadian | February 11, 2010 | 6.1 | 46a03940-c09b-4761-9ab7-a5c6429c2bc5 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Singer/songwriter Margaret Glaspy's Emotions and Math is a collection of compact grunge-rock and breezy torch songs that variously recall Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell. | Singer/songwriter Margaret Glaspy's Emotions and Math is a collection of compact grunge-rock and breezy torch songs that variously recall Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell. | Margaret Glaspy: Emotions and Math | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21999-emotions-and-math/ | Emotions and Math | Margaret Glaspy grew up playing fiddle and trombone and listening to early-’00’s Top 40 pop. She hung around in the Boston folk scene after briefly attending Berklee College of Music and eventually settled amongst New York’s singer-songwriter community. Along the way, Glaspy released a pair of EPs, beginning with Homeschool, a solo-acoustic offering that highlighted her compelling, nasally warble.
Several years later, Glaspy has arrived with her full-length debut Emotions and Math, a collection of compact grunge-rock and breezy torch songs that mark a decisive departure from the quiet, spare softness of her past recordings. After starting off singing meandering, exploratory folk (see the modernist recitation of “Know My Name/To Be Heard and Be Had”) on her debut Glaspy has developed a newfound knack for pop hooks and easy melodies.
If the songs on Emotions and Math, which follow conventional structures and hover in the two-three minute range, have polished over some of Glaspy’s intriguing eccentricities as a vocalist, they also show off her refined focus as a songwriter. On the ’90s-Liz Phair-indebted title track, Glaspy establishes herself as an uncanny chronicler of everyday neuroses, outsourcing her anxieties about a long distance relationship to the numbing tasks of calendar keeping and number crunching “the days ‘till you’re back.”
Two tracks later, she channels her anger inwards on the swaggering rocker “You and I,” blaming herself for letting a lackluster love linger too long: “Tonight I’m a little too turned on to talk about us,” she sings in front of a punchy guitar line. “Tomorrow I’ll be too turned off and won’t give a fuck.” Glaspy asserts her indifference with so much confidence that what might be a moment of despair instead scans as comforting, if not downright celebratory. It’s one of many instances on Emotions and Math in which Glaspy reserves her deepest empathy for her characters during their lowest moments, when their flaws are getting the best of them and their only sense of reassurance might be knowing that their peers are, more likely than not, fucking up just as mightily.
At their best, these songs share the self-scrutinizing intimacy of Elliott Smith and the imaginative melodic intonations of Joni Mitchell, two of Glaspy's most obvious influences. Whether she’s writing from the point of view of a parent giving advice to their lonely child (“Parental Guidance”) or acting out imaginary conversations about her deepest insecurities (“You Don’t Want Me”), Glaspy is a lyricist who can toggle between distanced storytelling and open-hearted self-examination with equal ease.
Compiled from years worth of accumulated material, Emotions and Math suspends time and chronology as the 27-year-old songwriter navigates the dead ends, cheap promises and false starts of young adulthood. One minute, she’s stomping on the fading embers of a failed fling; the next, she’s pining for those very memories she just so happily surrendered. Glaspy toys with these emotional contradictions, juxtaposing nostalgia and angst against one another from song to song. As she puts it: “Why remember all the times I took forever to forget?”
That line is from “Memory Street,” the album’s centerpiece which finds Glaspy tiptoeing her way through remembrances of a failed relationship she’s worked hard to get over set to a slow-burning Neil Young & Crazy Horse groove. “When I get hungry for the mess we made,” she sings, indulging the cruel thrill and fulfillment in revisiting painful memories and past traumas, “I start walking down memory lane.” Whereas many songwriters might revel in the youthful abandon of such recklessness, Emotions and Math instead treats bad decisions and destructive impulses with compassionate clarity and heartfelt empathy. When Margaret Glaspy sings that she’s “a woman actin’ like a kid,” she presents the line not as critique but as consolation: it happens to the best of us. | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | June 10, 2016 | 7.7 | 46a2cc93-c565-4717-91bf-f918d1ecf9ae | Jonathan Bernstein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-bernstein/ | null |
On her second album, singer and songwriter Johanne Swanson is wiser, steadier, and more willing to explore. Her music now feels like an expression of emotional epiphanies. | On her second album, singer and songwriter Johanne Swanson is wiser, steadier, and more willing to explore. Her music now feels like an expression of emotional epiphanies. | Yohuna: Mirroring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yohuna-mirroring/ | Mirroring | Johanne Swanson’s debut album as Yohuna, Patientness, narrated her nomadic tendencies and countered their turbulence with evocative, delicate synth-pop. Now settled in Brooklyn, Swanson has a newfound grasp on stability, and her second album, Mirroring, demonstrates the personal growth she’s undergone between LP releases. Reaping the benefits of “a lot of time in therapy,” her music now feels like an expression of emotional epiphanies. More heterogeneous than the steady tranquility of Patientness, Mirroring allows Swanson to float between new aesthetics: Grand, shoegazey guitars and classical strings are a striking left turn, especially to those who’ve followed Yohuna since her early industrial-tinged EP, Revery.
In Swanson's words, Mirroring is “a metaphor for psychological projection,” and the title track takes a straightforward approach to the concept: “What’s you?/What do you see/And choose not to?” she sings, a tough-love invitation to evaluate (and maybe scrutinize) yourself through her lens. On the optimistic “Stranger,” she flips the idea, admiring the “calm confidence” of an elusive subject: “Strange how I’m your mirror.” Mirroring goes both ways; Swanson’s journey of self-discovery has enabled her to examine others’ traits in relation to her own. The wisdom she’s gained is palpable.
That’s evident in the album’s astute breakup songs, where Swanson explores shattered relationships from multiple angles. The well-wishing “Fades to Blue” realizes lessons from past lovers in her own “thank u, next”-style prose: “Thanks for showing me my truth/Not all pathways lead to you.” She reminisces fondly as she lets go (“I wish I wasn’t blacked out during our first kiss/I made my bed so you would come over and sit on it”), even as she regrets not having been entirely present in the moment. “Waiting” aches in a partner’s absence, asking, “When is the perfect day that doesn’t start with you?” On “Dead to Me,” the usually cordial Swanson sounds near furious as she recalls an inexcusable betrayal by someone she once held close. “Can’t consent when you withheld the truth/Yeah, you’re dead to me, too,” she sings, the drawn-out “too” implying the sting of mutual animosity.
Swanson wrote and co-produced every song here, but the additional performers include some familiar names: frequent (Sandy) Alex G collaborator Emily Yacina, Told Slant’s Felix Walworth, Foxes in Fiction’s Warren Hildebrand (founder of Swanson’s label, Orchid Tapes), and LVL UP’s Mike Caridi and Greg Rutkin, among others. Though Patientness was similarly a group effort, Mirroring sounds less cohesive in the latter half. “Mirroring” and “Dead to Me” feature piercing guitar whammies. The gentle strums on “Waiting” recall the hazy acoustics of Hovvdy or Elvis Depressedly, and “Stranger” gives way to a cello solo. Reverbed vocals in “Find a Quiet Place” are swallowed by a run of harp arpeggios, which, while stunning, feel rather out of place in the middle of an otherwise modern-sounding album. Rather than blending these ideas into a unique sound, Mirroring’s songs remain compartmentalized, giving the album as a whole an air of disarray. It feels especially ironic on a project that aims to illustrate how Swanson has found center. Still, her weighty lyricism and intellectual acuity testify to artistic maturation. Yohuna’s identity is still mutable, but on Mirroring, Johanne Swanson seems much more assured. | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orchid Tapes | June 10, 2019 | 7.2 | 46a52511-f9c3-4a40-8dd7-ccd35c52b693 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
On the latest installment of his mixtape series, the rapper/singer invites a truckload of guests to flip ’00s R&B hits. | On the latest installment of his mixtape series, the rapper/singer invites a truckload of guests to flip ’00s R&B hits. | Tory Lanez: Chixtape 5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tory-lanez-chixtape-5/ | Chixtape 5 | The latest installment in Tory Lanez’s Chixtape series is another attempt to recreate the recent past. This time, the rapper/singer remakes early-’00s R&B hits alongside their original creators. As an anthropological exercise, it’s kind of fascinating. As music, it strains to hold your attention, pulling you back to old hits without doing much besides reminding you they existed.
Lanez tries to impose a narrative, using skits as exposition. The story offers a long-winded account of Lanez cheating on a woman who then pays a second woman to set Lanez up by seducing and then leaving him (why anyone would do this is unclear); the album somehow ends with Lanez claiming to be the victim, guilt-tripping the woman who was paid. None of this matters, except as an excuse to cram in more early-’00s references (“You know WASSUP!”, Lanez belches to his friend at one point, referencing the old Budweiser ad campaign.)
At over an hour long, the album suffers from sag and bloat. Each song loses momentum after the first minute, despite the endless parade of guest stars – Lil Wayne, Ludacris, Mario — popping by. Still, there are moments where the experiment almost works: “Jerry Sprunger,” a song constructed around T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” featuring T-Pain himself, is a silky AutoTuned banger. “Beauty in the Benz,” a remix of Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s “Beautiful,” unfolds around a mediocre Snoop verse, with enough twinkles in the production to make you bob your head reflexively.
The rare songs that don’t feature a prominent sample fit into the world Lanez has created: featureless, water-soluble R&B. Songs like “Broken Promises” are pretty enough on the surface to distract from the lyrics. “The Fargo Splash” snatches the “Oh!” refrain from Ludacris’s “Splash Waterfalls” and a few lines from the song, but it’s hampered by Lanez’s clumsy lyrics: “McDonald’s chicken fries, thick as thighs.” Ludacris one-ups him with the even-worse “Left the pussy on the deathbed/ Been killing the game since I was breastfed.”
This approach to women extends to the guests. Ashanti, who appears on the album cover, sounds stunning on the remake of “Foolish,” but Tory doesn’t give her the space to shine, cutting her off with his warbling. (It also bears noting that Chris Brown is on this album, chirping along to a new version of his song, “Take You Down.”) Ultimately, despite the concept behind the album, or how much effort Lanez clearly went into creating it, it's hard to enjoy the music when the results are this puerile. The only reason the Chixtape series exists is to create decent songs out of once-great ones, and all of the prominent samples in the world can’t change that.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Mad Love / Interscope | November 27, 2019 | 5.8 | 46a722d4-8389-4731-8741-758e28c59794 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
On their riveting new album, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter-producer shifts from future-shocked electronic pop to a super-sized emotional bloodletting steeped in ’90s alternative. | On their riveting new album, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter-producer shifts from future-shocked electronic pop to a super-sized emotional bloodletting steeped in ’90s alternative. | yeule: softscars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeule-softscars/ | softscars | When yeule uncorks their roar, it sounds like a full-body exorcism, like they’ve been waiting their entire life to let it out. Wrapped up in grungy angst, hurtling alongside rambunctious cymbal crashes, and shadowed by an exasperation with the empty promises of online life, these screams blare like klaxons on softscars opener “x w x,” signaling ruptures to come. This deck-clearing detonation of a song is prefaced by cascading piano lines tangled up in computerized static, a neat aural distillation of the art-school pop cyborg’s animating inquiry: Now that we’re all hopelessly tethered to technology in search of companionship, comfort, and control, what does it mean to be human? On softscars, their answer can be as annihilating as those shrieks, as playful as an #emovoice TikTok video, or as startling as a notification from a dead friend’s phone.
yeule first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, “This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.” Over the last few years, the non-binary digital native broke out with a couple of future-shocked electronic pop albums in the mold of Grimes, Charli XCX, and Björk, collecting a cult of Discord and Twitch fans along the way. All the while they mostly sang in a hushed deadpan, wary of letting the real world encroach on their virtual existence. “I like to think I’m doing just fine/I like to search my symptoms online,” goes one memorable lyric from 2022’s Glitch Princess.
But on softscars, yeule dives headlong into this thing called humanity, tussling with all of the chaos that comes with it. The album’s title defiantly references old self-harm scars that linger on yeule’s body, tangible reminders of past traumas and what it took to overcome them. And a cloak of reverb is finally lifted from their voice, revealing an expressive range: They can sound winningly whiny or wistful or utterly broken in vocals that are often echoed by pitch-bent doppelgangers, like a chorus of Gollums calling in from a choppy line. They’re also looking to a much different, more retro realm for musical inspiration: alternative rock. The album, largely created by yeule alongside the exciting young producer Kin Leonn, delivers a vintage K-Rock playlist of corroded and gauzy styles, with souped-up dream-pop, emo, electro-folk, pop-punk, and grunge rushing by like fond teenage memories. Meanwhile, the 25 year old at its center continues to explore the infinite spaces between flesh and firmware, fantasy and reality, ones and zeroes.
And guess what? It turns out yeule is a very good rock star, a student of the game. In their youth, stifled by Singapore’s conservative society, they escaped into Smashing Pumpkins cassettes and bashed out Pixies songs as part of a band. They filled their 2021 covers album Nuclear War Post X with homespun takes on the Breeders, Big Thief, and the Velvet Underground, among others. When David Bowie died, a teenage yeule didn’t leave their room for a full week. That admiration resonates in their aesthetic bravado and alien otherness: They have cited Nintendo DS consoles and bottom-feeding deep-sea creatures as mood-board fodder for their ever-changing looks, which have recently hit upon a perfectly tattered midpoint between steampunk and cyberpunk, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Matrix.
Bowie can also be heard in softscars’ walloping emotion and the way yeule gives voice to today’s outcasts—Ziggy Stardust’s Gen-Z grandkids, dismantling gender normativity in the face of heightened violence and prejudice. Mix all that with a dramatic self-loathing streak that Billy Corgan, Thom Yorke, or Gerard Way could appreciate, plus hints of Courtney Love’s confrontational spin on sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, and even some of Avril Lavigne’s middle-finger insolence (yeule has called the famed mall-punk’s 2002 debut, Let Go, particularly formative), and you have someone who’s balling up decades of misfit energy into art that speaks to our uniquely AI-addled times.
Again and again, the album pulls off a delicate tightrope walk, balancing big, widespread feelings of modern disillusionment with harrowing personal details. On “software update,” a strung-out, meta power ballad that deserves to be met with a galaxy of swaying phone lights, yeule offers a micro autobiography that could work as a social-media bio for a blinkered generation. “25, traumatized, painting white on my eyes,” they sing sweetly, as if reading from a children’s book. “Handcuffs and hospitals are some things I despise.” The song references disordered eating, a condition that yeule still struggles with, along with white lines and grams, bruises and loss. It revolves around the idea of digital immortality. “When I leave my flesh, you can download my mind/And pick out the pretty parts for you,” they offer, lines that carry an extra heft considering that, as a lonely teenager existing mostly online, the idea of living on as a series of automated posts actually crossed yeule’s mind. “software update” crests with yeule’s version of an algorithmic arena-rock hook—“I love you baby,” they belt atop distorted guitar chimes, perhaps addressing their fans, their friends, their partner, themself, or all four.
Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too, like the excellently titled electro-rock headbanger “cyber meat.” On the song, yeule adopts an unmistakably emo singing style—nasal and bratty—that reads as a loving tribute to the genre. “Bite me, vampy/I taste just like candy,” they tease, sounding as if they were auditioning for a Hot Topic commercial circa 2003. “cyber meat” features production and guitar from Chris Greatti, who’s in Yves Tumor’s band, and it underlines the current trend of queer artists, including yeule, Yves, and Jane Remover, who are brilliantly putting their own spin on alt-rock and emo as they subvert those genres’ historically masculine associations.
For yeule, and so many others, the sounds that glint and crunch across softscars are inherently nostalgic, harkening to a turn-of-the-century era of blissed-out innocence, when a scratched-up copy of Nirvana’s In Utero could be the most important thing in the world, and the simple stomp of a fuzz pedal could send your serotonin levels off the charts. It was also an era before the internet as we know it, before social media and its attendant ills, when the web presented hopes of breaking down old ideas and binaries instead of reinforcing them. For an artist who was raised online to choose this time to start closing their tabs and turning their metaphorical 404 errors into badges of pride feels especially meaningful. And yet softscars isn’t as simple as a rejuvenating weekend in the countryside, or a Marshall stack ringing over the hilltops. In its clash of handcrafted distortion and digital anxieties, the album faces our blurry moment at the precipice of head-spinning technological advances with a laugh and a cry. “Art, artificially,” yeule sings at one particularly fizzy point, over chugging guitars and starry synths, “I wish I was special.” Don’t we all. | 2023-09-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ninja Tune | September 22, 2023 | 8.5 | 46ad06e8-13a8-4df5-b298-e7070bf32336 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
The louche UK singer returns with an album that thrusts ahead quickly and painlessly but leaves you itching to shower off its overpowering cologne the second it’s over. | The louche UK singer returns with an album that thrusts ahead quickly and painlessly but leaves you itching to shower off its overpowering cologne the second it’s over. | Miles Kane: Coup de Grace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miles-kane-coup-de-grace/ | Coup de Grace | So you’ve managed to get into a decent party in Hollywood, the bar is open, the company is starry, life seems fantastic—then suddenly you see a familiar face in the corner. It’s that guy. The voice in your head panics. Oh god, what’s he doing here? This is the Miles Kane effect: Nobody ever asked for him, but he keeps showing up. Perhaps the Liverpool thing is exotic in L.A.? One man’s Scouse hanger-on is another’s future McCartney, apparently. Kane has bristled at the notion that he’s riding the coattails of his best mate, Arctic Monkeys henchman Alex Turner. But it still stands, even if it can be benched at this juncture because he’s found someone else to exploit.
Turner is off celebrating the success of his band’s sixth album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, which sounds closer than ever to his and Kane’s side project, the Last Shadow Puppets, and may imply the end of that frolic. Kane is cast asunder. He’s in crisis. What’s a lad in a world without the other lads? His third LP finds him mooching off the reputation of another post-MySpace British bard, Jamie T. Kane’s new collaborator has, bewilderingly, co-written Coup de Grace, an album that was five years in the offing but only two weeks in the making.
It sounds like it, too, thrusting ahead quickly and painlessly, yet leaving you itching to shower off its overpowering cologne the second it’s over. “Keep it simple and real and you can’t go wrong,” Kane tweeted recently. But Coup de Grace often sounds so rushed as to be crass. Listening to “Loaded” (which was written with Lana Del Rey after an encounter at a show—again, how?), I initially misheard a lyric as “Fuck you like a monkey with my makeup running.” The true line begins, “Funky like a monkey.” That was a mild relief at first, but then my heart sank further upon realizing that the former could as easily have made the cut. Kane recently revealed that Del Rey’s talent took him by surprise, which tells you everything you need to know about how he sizes up women.
Kane’s M.O. has been to wear his scoundrel reputation on his sleeve and thus get away with it. But for all his crimes on Coup de Grace, there’s one line so blindly idiotic it beggars belief: In “Silverscreen,” he imagines his lover being pursued by a Ryan Gosling type. This makes him cross. So he shouts, “Two-faced Johnny, hotel lobby/I won’t go up without you.” Now, cast your mind back to the last time Kane was promoting a record, the Last Shadow Puppets’ 2016 album Everything You’ve Come to Expect, when he propositioned a woman journalist. “So, what else are you guys doing today?” she asked, wrapping up. “Do you want to go upstairs?” Kane replied. He later apologized for his “ill-judged” comment. But since then, he’s backpedaled. “All I can say about it is it was a joke that didn’t get understood,” he insisted in a post-Weinstein interview. “It got me down.” Poor Miles, still dogged by a fruitless advance.
The crux of Kane’s problem seems to be that, somewhere along the way, someone told the 32-year-old he was hilarious. His attempt at a lovelorn lament, “Killing the Joke,” contains the line: “Since you’ve been gone, I’ve left the TV on, let the milk go sour, let the bills pile up/But I know I’m a funny guy.” Yet Kane invites ridicule more often than his wit elicits anything like laughter. “You always look away as they crucify me,” he sings on “Loaded,” criticizing an ex for failing to rescue him. “This is my Adele album,” he’s offered, unconvincingly. Inspired by the end of an year-and-a-half long relationship, he invokes some stylistic role models: Marc Bolan (“Crying on My Guitar”), the Damned (“Coup de Grace”), and—allegedly—the Fall. If only Mark E. Smith, who once vowed he’d get an injunction against Franz Ferdinand for citing the Fall as an influence, were alive to conjure an appropriate insult.
The problem with Kane’s emulation of past performers is that he remains a tourist lost in his time warp, lacking the originality and vocal grit to elevate fandom into innovation. He is (as I’ve said before) a karaoke Rod Stewart. His scream on the chorus of “Cry on My Guitar” is nasal and strained, like he's sucking words through a stubbed cigarette. The song’s lyrics are so lazy in their retromania, they might as well have been written by an algorithm. “I cry upon the strings of my guitar,” he rasps, “and everybody tells me that it’s sh-la-la-la-la oh yeah.” One hopes Coup de Grace really is Kane’s parting shot. | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | August 10, 2018 | 3.6 | 46b20b79-72d7-4397-a285-23769c999ad4 | Eve Barlow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eve-barlow/ | |
This mostly unknown early '80s record from Japan has been absent from conversation for the past 30 years. Now, it is reissued and ready to blow your mind. With mesh of Japanese and Armenian sounds, Mariah's unforgettable melodies walk the fine line they all but invented between its authors’ musical heritages. | This mostly unknown early '80s record from Japan has been absent from conversation for the past 30 years. Now, it is reissued and ready to blow your mind. With mesh of Japanese and Armenian sounds, Mariah's unforgettable melodies walk the fine line they all but invented between its authors’ musical heritages. | Mariah: Utakata no Hibi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21030-utakata-no-hibi/ | Utakata no Hibi | Throughout its long, slow journey west, Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi has been an album without context. After a dormant period at home among Japan’s vinyl geek underground, the 1983 record began to spread farther in 2008, when the tastemaking Scottish DJ duo Optimo shared a cut online. That song, "Shinzo no Tobira", which they first heard in a Tokyo record store, has since earned a cult following worldwide for the ethereal lines it traces between Asian and Middle Eastern tonalities, folklorish Armenian lyrics, and futuristic Japanese synthpop leads. Its soundscapes are like those once dreamt by Brians Eno and Wilson. But for all the love "Shinzo" and its parent album have found in tiny nightclubs and Internet testimonials, surprisingly little has been asked or answered about its origins. It's almost as though Utakata—now reissued by Palto Flats—has at last arrived on our shores not simply through a crate digger’s time warp, but from some other world altogether.
Or maybe a few of them: As befits an album that owes its broader discovery to a Shinjuku record store called Eurasia, Utakata’s plainspoken lyrics are sung in alternating Armenian and Japanese. In this regard—and most others—the record bears no resemblance to Mariah’s previous five, wherein a revolving door of popular Tokyo session men dabbled in everything from prog rock to jazz funk. By 1983, the project was being led by Yasuaki Shimizu, a relentlessly exploratory musician best known for the saxophone takes on Bach’s Cello Suites he would later record in both Japanese mines and Italian palazzos. His brilliant solo outing from the previous year, Kakashi, is Utakata’s only obvious relative. But that earlier work’s East-meets-West patchwork of genres, moods, and scales feels much more cut and dry than the seamless marvel Shimizu would soon create. Given how difficult it remains to find a fair comparison for any of Utakata’s seven songs, let alone synthesize the picture they form together, it’s an album that has well earned its reputation as an elusive classic.
The long tally of pleasant surprises begins with opener "Sokokara…" ("From Here…"), in which slash-and-burn no wave guitar and a frantically overloaded player piano somehow only add to the springtime optimism suggested by the song’s marching beat, blossoming synths, and Shimizu’s skyward warble. "Hana Ga Saitara" ("Were Flowers to Bloom") is a more eloquent draft of the dubbed out, sax-led post-punk that was then beginning to bubble up in England rock clubs, here powered by brass skronk and proto-techno synths. And "Fujiyu Na Nezumi" takes the British nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" and translates it into Japanese, Armenian, and a poetic syntax of spare bass, sustained synths, and simple percussion—indicating not so much the album’s sense of humor as the childlike wonder animating its every move. Mixer and engineer Seigen Ono would later work the boards for artists like John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, and King Crimson, but the way he focuses Shimizu’s playtime ruckus of international instrumentation and production techniques remains the accomplishment of his career.
Utakata’s most impressive feat of synthesis, however, lies in its coupling of East Asian and Middle Eastern sounds. The most explicit instance occurs in early highlight "Shisen" ("A Vision"), which weds gorgeous piano pentatonics and koto court music with Armenian vocalist Julie Fowell’s mesmerizing mantra, "Our eyes as one." When the lone, cavernous drum and piercing sine waves enter, the effect is devastating. The twinning effect is at its subtle best on the famously DJ-friendly "Shinzo no Tobira" ("My Life Is Big") that first got Optimo’s attention, where unforgettable melody walks the fine line it all but invents between its authors’ musical heritages.
In 2015, it remains a rare and enchanting thing to hear a piece of convergence culture this effortless—which, after all, may be one reason Utakata still sounds so otherworldly. Another could be the fact that the album owes its existence to a creative moment in Japanese pop that remains virtually unknown to the English-speaking world. Thanks to '80s electronic pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra’s continued chart success and the glory days of the Japanese economy, the mainstream entered a renaissance of open-mindedness and ludicrous recording budgets, producing an abundance of records that answer Shimizu’s sonic adventures with ones every bit as bold and compelling. Maybe Utakata belongs, then, not to some wondrous alternate history, but a real one we’re just beginning to uncover. | 2015-09-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Palto Flats | September 25, 2015 | 8.5 | 46b582fb-64bd-46c4-9598-0abe5d273437 | Jakob Dorof | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jakob-dorof/ | null |
Owen is the new miracle drug for the treatment of chronic insomnia. The FDA has begun testing it as anal ... | Owen is the new miracle drug for the treatment of chronic insomnia. The FDA has begun testing it as anal ... | Owen: Owen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6072-owen/ | Owen | Owen is the new miracle drug for the treatment of chronic insomnia. The FDA has begun testing it as anal ternative general anesthesia for certain surgical procedures. Law enforcement officials have suggested using it to subdue anti-globalization protesters at this summer's WTO rally. I'm saying Owen's debut album is going to put you to sleep here, people!
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. As I grow older, sleep is quickly becoming one of my favorite activities, and an album that assists me in the process can hold a very special place in my collection. Sedative qualities don't have to equal boring; it can also mean the music is just pleasant or comforting. At the end of a long, hard day, I like nothing more than putting a CD in my stereo and gently drifting off to sleep, something that's hard to do with the Ramones or Jay-Z on.
Owen, by the way, is not a guy named Owen, but the solo project of one Mike Kinsella, indie-rock journeyman formerly/currently of American Football, Joan of Arc, and Owls. Why Kinsella would name his one-man band Owen rather than, say, Mike, is a mystery, though I like to think that it's in tribute to mid-80s Red Sox shortstop Spike Owen. Not likely, but a nice scenario.
Kinsella pulls off his musical sandman act by primarily utilizing that most sleepy of instruments, the acoustic guitar. Eschewing chord strumming for delicate, dreamy finger-picking, Owen's songs generally sit on a central riff repeated for the three- or four-minute duration, lulling the listener into a hypnotic state. Kinsella's just-above-a-whisper vocals also soothe the ear, a million miles away from the throaty yelp of his brother Tim and generally avoiding typical verse-chorus structure or melody.
If this all sounds like an unplugged version of American Football, you're mostly right. But the setting is considerably more intimate on Owen, without Kinsella's earlier vehicle's spiraling guitar epics and octopus drumming. Also gone is the post-breakup open wound nature of American Football's lyrics, the raw honesty of which could provoke weeping fits or retching, depending on one's tolerance for emoting. Instead, Owen's themes are considerably less traumatic, if not exactly sunshine and lollipops (one song is called "Declaration of Incompetence"). And when drums-- organic or programmed-- are added into the mix, they're sedate and simple, keeping the tunes from floating off into space without disrupting the relaxed tone. The other instrumental flourishes Kinsella adds to the mix-- vibraphone, organ, strings-- similarly add depth and color to his compositions without becoming a distraction.
The combination works best on the album closer, "Think About It," which progresses patiently through three distinct movements over its seven-minute run time. Many of the tracks are seamlessly blended into one another, maintaining the warm, drowsy glow with brief instrumental passages. "Accidentally" serves as the strongest of these, as Kinsella slowly overdubs more and more guitars playing complimenting themes until the song builds into a soft, cushy pillow of... zzzzzzzz...
Whoa. Sorry about that.
Given the above description, it'd be easy to categorize Owen as mope-core, or slow-core, or curl-up-in-the-fetal-position-and-have-a-good-cry-core. Correct, too; Kinsella invites the comparison himself by not too subtly mimicking the Red House Painters on "Places to Go." But while Owen adds little to the genre's customary sound, one has to admit he does it well by not letting the tortoise-like pace get too monotonous.
Obviously then, if this kind of subdued, contemplative music makes you want to kick someone in the groin, Owen should not be placed on your to-buy list. But if you're more receptive to sad white guys making music in their bedroom, or if your prescription for Valium is running out, it might be for you. Just don't operate any heavy machinery during use. | 2002-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | February 10, 2002 | 7.2 | 46ba6b51-911b-4cb1-b7cd-0aebc080f4da | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The South Side producer infuses footwork’s intricate syncopations with the romance of R&B; in the process, he underscores the shared lineage with Chicago house. | The South Side producer infuses footwork’s intricate syncopations with the romance of R&B; in the process, he underscores the shared lineage with Chicago house. | DJ Manny: Signals in My Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-manny-signals-in-my-head/ | Signals in My Head | Footwork isn’t just dance music, it’s meant for competition. At roller rinks, raves, and other functions on Chicago’s South and West Sides, DJs cue up tracks with syncopated layers of percussion to mirror the rapid movements of battling dancers. (At this rate, expect to see footworking in the 2032 Olympic Games, if the Games still exist by then.) But on Signals in My Head, veteran footworker DJ Manny downplays the competitive aspect of the music in favor of a romantic tone inspired by R&B.
Manuel Gaines learned to footwork from his older brother in middle school, started producing tracks on FruityLoops as a high-school freshman, and co-founded footwork crew/label Teklife with pioneers DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad as a teenager after meeting them at a roller rink. Beyond his production, Manny was known as one of the best dancers of a generation, once noted for dominating a battle with a track of his own making, just a few hours after recording it. But that competitive streak isn’t exclusionary: He’s just as likely to bring a newcomer into the fold with a friendly introduction.
It’s a big summer for footwork. RP Boo’s upcoming Established! blends samples from Dr. Dre and Phil Collins into complex rhythms, while Jana Rush’s Painful Enlightenment pushes into more abstract, jazz-like territory, and dance crew the Era light up downtown every night with a gigantic public-art installation. Though Manny is younger than these originators, his latest album takes footwork back to its roots. Manny calls Signals in My Head an “R&B love type album”; that translates to an emphasis on the ecstasy that footwork shares with other genres of Black Midwestern dance music while maintaining the signature 160bpm tempo and rhythmic sophistication. This theme was possibly inspired by his new home in Brooklyn with his romantic partner and fellow musician SUCIA!—he did include one of her tracks in his recent BBC guest mix—but then, love (or lust) has often been part of his music. (When South Side Weekly asked what first attracted him to footwork, Manny joked, “It got me girls.”)
The best tracks on the album evoke the thrill of a new romance. On the title track, the kick and snare respond to each other, first as quarter notes then more rapid patterns, like a flirtation carried out on MPC pads. Album opener “Never Was Ah Hoe” draws out more than 45 seconds of synths and hand drums before any bass kicks in, building tension by withholding the longed-for sub-bass.
Sometimes the romance theme is literal, using the vocabulary of love songs. The sampled vocals on “All I Need” switch from whispers to soulful vamping to declare, “Your love is all I need” and “It’s what I want.” It’s a simple message, but it’s effective, and Manny’s production adds rhythmic nuance by alternating between uptempo and half-time cadences accentuated with 808 triplets. (This is an album with two separate songs titled “You All I Need” and “All I Need,” to really drive the point home.)
Manny’s vocal samples are often less about the words than the tone. It takes a few repetitions of the syrupy sweet vocals on “U Want It,” reminiscent of Manny’s fellow South Sider Jeremih, to notice he’s singing about money, not a lover. The purrs on “Never Was Ah Hoe” are sensual enough that the vocalist’s actual past is irrelevant.
Manny’s renewed focus on the romantic side of footwork links the music to its origins in Chicago house. The gospel vocals on “Wants My Body,” full of lust and self-confidence, would fit on a vintage Frankie Knuckles track, but the near-religious fervor is amplified by the syncopated drums. “You All I Need” and “That Thang” bounce along with swung, splashing hi-hats on the off beat, a house-music signature.
The album only drags when it abandons the love theme, loose as it is. The full four-on-the-floor pound of “Club GTA” is too aggressive, and the high synth whines orbiting the upper register create the claustrophobic feeling of an overcrowded dancefloor. “At First Site” closes the album with dramatic synth pads and a keening lead melody, evoking a spooky 16-bit video game. It’s a fine track, but a strange note to end on.
As with most footwork records, the strength of Manny’s album may ultimately lie in how well dancers can move to it. But the romantic glow that infuses Signals in My Head suggests your technical skills don’t matter, as long as you’re dancing with the right partner.
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. | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 23, 2021 | 7.2 | 46bcc75e-6b7c-4ed5-9bed-4fcad3f1c75c | Jack Riedy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jack-riedy/ | |
Though the Flint rapper’s latest falls slightly short of his previous mixtape, he’s still capable of delivering dumbly witty punchlines and sex-obsessed theatrics. | Though the Flint rapper’s latest falls slightly short of his previous mixtape, he’s still capable of delivering dumbly witty punchlines and sex-obsessed theatrics. | YN Jay: Ninja Warrior | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yn-jay-ninja-warrior/ | Ninja Warrior | Flint, Michigan wouldn't be one of the hottest scenes in rap without “Coochie,” “Coochie World,” “Coochie Scout,” a mixtape titled Coochie Land, and Coochie Man, the floor-humping alter ego of YN Jay. Through horny punchline-based vignettes, overpowering ad-libs, and sexually frustrated grunts that sound closer to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall than anything we’re used to hearing in a rap song, Jay has been putting his own spin on the sound of Flint rap since early last year. This seems like a stunt that should have gone briefly viral and faded away, and it probably would have if YN Jay’s theatrics weren’t secondary to the music itself.
YN Jay’s first mixtape of the year, Ninja Warrior generates countless questions. Why is there a Naruto theme but the tape begins with a snippet from The Warriors and ends with a clip from Kung Fu Panda? Why does he tirelessly brag about the sex position where he whips a leg in the air like a jockey lifting themselves onto a horse? Is there a reason why he keeps barking? YN Jay heavily pants, growls, and breathes during the opening seconds of “Oh My Gawd,” and the line that follows is, “I just seen a badass bitch lookin’ at me in the club!” If you haven’t realized yet, YN Jay is obsessed with sex, and even the slightest possibility of it makes him lose his mind like a dog with rabies.
The way he relentlessly fantasizes about asses like a middle schooler who just found their first porn site is part of his charm, but it’s a convenient smokescreen. His music is actually about how well he’s able to use the foundation of Flint rap to build this raunchy fever dream. On “Elevator Music,” Jay and fellow local star Louie Ray use the conversational back-and-forth style—which has produced some of their city’s best songs like “Movie” and “Arguing”—to boast about their sexcapades: Jay and this one girl were so wild that they broke a California king bed, and Louie reminisces about the smell of booty.
“Kakashi” has the fast-paced drums and breezy delivery that sounds like the older kid on the block telling you a tall tale—both of which have become synonymous with the Flint rap scene. But it’s how Jay manipulates the flow that makes it feel so fresh. It takes him multiple tries to get his anecdote right about creeping with another man's girlfriend, but there are no second takes—well, at least it doesn’t feel as if there are—because Jay flourishes in those unplanned split seconds.
It’s impossible not to compare Ninja Warrior to YN Jay’s 2020 explosion, and when you do, the mixtape slightly underwhelms. There is no moment as jaw-droppingly funny as the sound effect of an ass clapping on “Coochie;” the handful of Michigan-style Marc Boomin instrumentals are familiar and fine, but feel like B-versions of the frenetic Enrgy beats that have backdropped Jay’s regional hits of the past. And his punchlines are still dumbly witty, but not like the time when he exclaimed, “How the fuck you thick wit no ass?!” on “Austin Powers.” Still, there’s no shame in that—Jay set the bar high for himself. As long as he continues to embrace the brisk drum patterns and casual flows of his city, the music will remain more than a gimmick.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | YN | January 28, 2021 | 6.7 | 46c110db-ddf9-494b-ab71-29597ee090f9 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On his best album in decades, the most famous man in metal reaches again for big hooks and big statements, with help from new friends like Post Malone. | On his best album in decades, the most famous man in metal reaches again for big hooks and big statements, with help from new friends like Post Malone. | Ozzy Osbourne: Ordinary Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ozzy-osbourne-ordinary-man/ | Ordinary Man | Since the mid-’90s, Ozzy Osbourne has been so famous he only needed to show up. In 1996, by then years removed from his last great album, he launched the annual metal circus that borrowed his name. He soon became an early star of reality television, a lovably mumbling patriarch in a family of salacious misfits. He no longer needed to strive to make great music; he just had to be on time for an annual summer of sets and, like, get really bummed about jogging on his birthday.
Despite becoming a global brand, Osbourne’s solo records have always been surprisingly audacious, as if the man most synonymous with heavy metal itself still had something to prove. And so it goes with Ordinary Man, his first LP in a decade and his finest in two. Produced and co-written by Andrew Watt, the name behind recent pop hits by Cardi B and Justin Bieber, and featuring a murderers’ row of veteran hired guns like Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Ordinary Man is an enormous record. Full of gospel roars, symphonic swells, and massive hooks, the music cuts between doom, pop-punk, and even a little hair metal. Even as Osbourne, now 71 and recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, croons “When I speak my final words/What will it feel like,” he sounds as ambitious as he’s been for half a century.
Osbourne has often flirted with trends without actually chasing them. For 1995’s Ozzmosis, he mined the same sad soulfulness as one of his acolytes, Chris Cornell, whose own more tensile version of Osbourne’s yearning voice made him a superstar. And 2010’s Scream—his most recent studio album, as uneven as a season of The Osbournes—reimagined him for audiences that loved Disturbed or alternative rock. (Aiming for Foo Fighters, he only got close to Collective Soul.) For Ordinary Man, Osbourne and his coterie of co-writers pursue a more conceptual trend: the playlist. These 11 songs feel like a loose mixtape, flitting among a half-dozen moods and motifs in what feels like a methodical quest for streaming placement.
For most of Ordinary Man, that approach provides inspiration for the restless Osbourne. As unlikely as it seems, “Under the Graveyard” is one of the most memorable doom spirituals ever from the singer who practically invented them, the lamentations of a lost soul coiling into a triumphant chorus. Half a plea for the release of death and half a reckoning with the solitude he imagines it will entail, it is a paean to perpetual dissatisfaction—with sobriety or indulgence, life or death, heaven or hell.
Despite the shadow of age, disease, and mortality, there’s childlike glee here, too. “It’s a Raid,” a thrashing hardcore tirade about state surveillance featuring Post Malone, explodes in an ecstasy of rebellion. The irrepressible boast “Straight to Hell” is delightful, if only because of the way Osbourne rhymes “celebrate” with his vow to make you “defecate.” Resist all you’d like, but it’s hard not to smile when he mutters “I’m on the menu/Are you hungry?” like some impudent schoolboy during “Eat Me.” Mining the bluesy sway of Down and a dozen other Sabbath-loving Southerners, the band matches this bravado line by line.
But the lack of focus means that the misses—when Osbourne aims for “November Rain” grandeur or “Iron Man” menace, for instance—are flagrant. A duet with Elton John, the title track is a maudlin ballad about surviving the excesses of fame only to realize you’re going to die, anyway. “I don’t wanna say goodbye/When I do you’ll be all right,” Sir Elton solemnly swears. Pompous and overwrought, the song is so self-serious it mostly makes you glad you’re not a frail old rock star, too, anticipating your own eulogies. “Scary Little Green Men”—a paranoid tantrum about how the aliens are creeping into your mind, bro—awkwardly seesaws between Foreigner-style rhapsodizing and Motörhead-lite browbeating. Noncommittal and unconvincing, this is Ozzy, desperate for topical #content.
That quest for relevance highlights the deepest issue with Ordinary Man, the feeling that haunts you even as you enjoy it. Osbourne has struggled with intelligibility for decades, but he somehow sounds like he’s 25 here, flying and diving inside his historic range like the drinks and drugs never happened. You can’t help but remember the way Rick Rubin captured Johnny Cash or Joe Henry showcased Solomon Burke, showing the wrinkles inside their legendary voices during their final years. Ordinary Man instead feels like a preemptive holographic interpretation of Ozzy, a digital patchwork of his voice standing in for the real thing. He sings about decades of hard living and the nearness of death, but his voice bears no evidence of that wear and tear. Yes, Ozzy sounds great, but that sound leaves you wondering, once again, if he had to show up at all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Epic | March 3, 2020 | 6.5 | 46c24df9-302a-4766-9a30-d5ee62feb312 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The dizzying new album from Suicide’s Martin Rev is 34 tracks long, and highlights his playful streak—an underdeveloped mix of noise, new age, bossa nova, rock’n’roll, and more. | The dizzying new album from Suicide’s Martin Rev is 34 tracks long, and highlights his playful streak—an underdeveloped mix of noise, new age, bossa nova, rock’n’roll, and more. | Martin Rev: Demolition 9 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23154-demolition-9/ | Demolition 9 | Martin Rev’s first album in seven-plus years introduces itself with a blast of noise that’s bound to make even the most masochistic listeners leap for the volume button. Beyond abrasive, the sound throbs and quivers as layers of ear-piercing frequencies overlap for an excruciating 45 seconds. Let’s hope that military interrogators never get their hands on this piece of music, titled “Stickball,” because it’s by no means a stretch to say you could torture someone with it.
As co-founder of the venerated experimental duo Suicide, Rev is of course no stranger to challenging his audience. He is also clearly more than just a noisenik, having proven his ability to carve form out of chaos over and over since the early 1970s. There’s random noise and then there’s Rev’s brand of noise: “Stickball” is actually quite carefully arranged. The vague outline of a drum pattern begins to materialize within its wash of booming static, but it takes a special kind of perseverance to appreciate it.
Perhaps opening the album on an unlistenable note was Rev’s way of weeding people out, but it’s a curious decision. Demolition 9 contains some of Rev’s most straightforwardly musical work, and for most of its 34 tracks, Rev pulls back the curtain to reveal the composer that he is at heart. He did the same on his last album, 2009’s Stigmata (a heartfelt tribute to his late spouse), except there he stuck to an orchestral style. With Demolition 9, Rev runs free across a dizzying grab bag of genres.
Try to ingest this album in a single sitting and you might literally find yourself dizzy from its nonstop hairpin turns. “Stickball” leads into the gentle choral stylings of “Salve Dominus”—a piece that couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to what came before it, and the first of many examples where Rev makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he’s courting beautiful sounds. From there, he delves into new age, bossa nova, ambient soundscapes, traditional rock’n’roll, and more noise with a glee that approaches the zaniness of a cartoon score.
Rev’s playful streak is evident going all the way back to his eponymous 1980 solo debut. It was there in Suicide, too; it just wasn’t as easy to make out. If you watch recent live clips, he seems to relish his role as a kind of musical trickster figure. So it follows that some of the new album’s transitions are laugh-out-loud funny. And on tunes like “My Street,” Rev exposes how lighthearted his irreverence has become by playing a 1960s girl group-styled melody on a distorted guitar with a tone so cutting it sounds like a blowtorch. Imagine Phil Spector producing an early industrial/power electronics act.
There’s definitely a method to the madness here. And to be fair, at least half a dozen tracks showcase Rev’s unique gift for turning abrasion and spartan beats into art. But “Stickball” epitomizes this album’s central problem: the pattern in the noise never comes to fruition. Later, Rev reintroduces the same harsh tones on “Into the Blue,” basically a repeat of “Stickball” with a more defined live drumkit. But rather than letting the drums emerge gradually, Rev breaks the idea into two separate shards of glass, almost as if daring you to either step on them or steer clear.
Rev doesn’t give anything on this album time to develop; he simply introduces each motif and then drops it for the next idea. With most of the tracks clocking-in at under two minutes, Demolition 9 gets aimless and exhausting very quickly. It didn’t have to be that way. Had Rev taken some care to group the individual vignettes together by similarity of style, the music could have had an arc and played like a series of suites. Even the face-scraping “Stickball” could have felt rewarding with some proper setup.
Without any attention to flow, Demolition 9 sounds like a person rummaging through drawers, reading off unrelated pages from separate notebooks. The experience is not without its charms. Rev makes for a lovable eccentric, but at this point, he has nothing to prove by making his music more difficult than it needs to be. Hiding in the cracks of Demolition 9, there’s an album that speaks to Rev’s musical range. To find that album, though, listeners will have to come up with a coherent track sequence on their own. | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Atlas Réalisations | June 3, 2017 | 6 | 46c75f11-18d6-4f23-bc02-e83fb4d9c65a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The soundtrack institution of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross return to their well of ominousness and employ an array of techniques to convey anxiety, impending danger, and discomfort. | The soundtrack institution of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross return to their well of ominousness and employ an array of techniques to convey anxiety, impending danger, and discomfort. | Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Bird Box (Abridged) Original Score | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-bird-box-abridged-original-score/ | Bird Box (Abridged) Original Score | Starting with 2008’s sprawling collection of instrumental work Ghosts I-IV (released under the Nine Inch Nails aegis) and accelerating with 2010’s Oscar-winning score for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the instrumental side of Trent Reznor has effectively shared equal billing with the more traditional industrial rock that made him a superstar. Never one for half measures, Reznor clearly sees the film-soundtrack work done alongside his longtime composing partner Atticus Ross as a chance to flex. “We aim for these to play like albums that take you on a journey and can exist as companion pieces to the films and as their own separate works,” Reznor wrote recently. He’s not kidding: The duo’s score for Fincher’s 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, is 15 minutes longer than the movie itself.
In announcing the release of Bird Box, the score for Netflix’s treacly Sandra Bullock survival-horror film of the same name, Reznor described it as a way of presenting the audience with “a significant amount of music and conceptual sound” that didn’t make the film’s final cut. Even then, that “Abridged” parenthetical in the title points toward “a more expansive” version of the album due later this year. It’s just as well since what Reznor and Ross have created is better than the movie they created it for. It does exactly what good soundtracks are capable of doing, and what they expressly intend for it to do: Emerge as a rewarding experience in its own right.
Songs like the subtly intimidating “Hand Covers Bruise” and the melancholy “Soft Trees Break the Fall” from Reznor and Ross’s breakthrough Social Network score still set the template for much of what’s going on here, using gentle keyboard-based melodies to establish an emotional baseline, while adding varying degrees of electronic noise to ratchet up the ominousness or relief depending on the needs of the moment. Album opener “Outside,” for example, charts a 12-minute course from quiet piano exercise to carrion-insect buzzing, with a gap inserted at the halfway point as if to say, “OK, time for the scary shit to start.” Later tracks “A Hidden Moment” and “Last Thing Left” find the pair in full grownup lullaby mode, twirling and twinkling their way through Reznor’s unmistakable melodic signatures.
But despite its familiar sonic hallmarks, Bird Box is not the work of one-trick ponies. You’d never mistake this album for, say, the Reznor/Ross soundtrack to Jonah Hill’s coming-of-age film mid90s from 2018, which provides a neat apples-to-apples comparison. The companion EP for that movie is all major-key optimism; it sounds a lot like looking at the partly-sunny sky on the album cover feels. Bird Box, by contrast, employs an array of techniques to convey anxiety, impending danger, and the sense that safety and happiness are never guaranteed—subject matter that suits a Nine Inch Nails lyric sheet just as well as a Netflix fright flick.
Odd time signatures on “Outside,” “Sleep Deprivation,” and “And It Keeps On Coming” leave the listener waiting for a resolution that never arrives. The crescendoing repetition of “Undercurrents,” the record’s most unnerving track, positively screams mounting horror even if you don’t know it accompanies the literal end of the world in the actual movie. And there’s a hook shared by “Careful What You Wish For” and “Close Encounters” best described as the sound of a broken record player skipping somewhere else in a deserted building you’ve entered but can’t get out of. Throughout the album, there’s a sense of maddeningly slow forward momentum, of heading someplace but never arriving. It works if you’ve seen the movie or not.
Despite nearly identical running times, you’re unlikely to give Bird Box a casual afternoon spin the way you might with The Social Network. (Unless you’re the kind of person who owns approximately 33 hours of Trent Reznor music with half a dozen playlists arranging the work by mood. Ahem.) It’s not as easy a listen, and the songcraft is far less direct. Still, nearly a decade deep into a sideline in the soundtrack business that’s become a second full-time gig—and nearly three decades into Nine Inch Nails as a going concern—Reznor and Ross are finding new ways to draw their listeners in, then make them uncomfortable once they get there. | 2019-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | The Null Corporation | January 16, 2019 | 7.1 | 46cd9fd2-c37c-437c-b872-bbed897beb42 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
Strut offers a richly researched and smartly sequenced compilation of all of Sun Ra's singles, offering a compelling and unique look at the cosmic jazz innovator’s genius. | Strut offers a richly researched and smartly sequenced compilation of all of Sun Ra's singles, offering a compelling and unique look at the cosmic jazz innovator’s genius. | Sun Ra: Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22639-sun-ra-singles/ | Singles | How do you pin down Sun Ra? The cosmic jazzman laid down so much music it would take a warehouse of full-time historians working round-the-clock hours to figure it all out. Albums were often hastily assembled from his prolific sessions, packaged with DIY artwork and sold at gigs for quick cash. Thousands of hours of unheard recordings are rumored to exist. Maybe he stacked boxes of magnetic tape on far-away planets too, such was his connection to the stars.
If it’s even possible to traverse the vast Sun Ra universe on board a single starship, then Strut Records’ new compilation Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection offers a compellingly sturdy vessel. It’s a 65-track set of 7-inch fragments of the celestial god, sent to earth to help us map out details of his galaxy that the albums could not. There are no wasted motions here: Each flat, wax disc represented another bright star in the constellation Ra.
The name of his birth certificate read Herman Poole Blount. Born in Alabama in 1914, the mysterious musician showed up in Chicago in 1946 with little more to his name than a jail record picked up for refusing to fight in World War II for ethical reasons. The jazz scene was primed for revolution and Blount moved to a different beat, driven by a journey to Saturn he claimed he made years earlier while in deep spiritual concentration.
The star man would later take up the name Sun Ra, form his ever-changing band the Arkestra, and spend a lifetime teaching the world Afrofuturism, a complex ideology of Black nationalism, Egyptian myth, scientific discovery, science fiction movies and the other-worldly fashion choices he’d flaunt on-stage. Forget “Disco 2000”; Sun Ra was envisioning to the paranoid blips and beeps of “Disco 2021” some 30 years before Pulp showed up. He mastered the electro squiggles of “Planet Rock” prior to the birth of hip-hop, and forged his own form of analogue cyberpunk as Philip K. Dick sat as his typewriter laying out his own dark vision of the future. Singles preserves all that for future generations.
It’s said when you watch classic movies like Citizen Kane today, it’s important to bare in mind that these movies were writing the rules of filmmaking that we now take for granted. Sun Ra’s music somehow doesn’t require that kind of explanation. As soon as the needle drops, it sounds like scripture—a key testament that formed a building block of a half-century of music. Everyone from George Clinton to OutKast read from The Book of Ra.
And yet, on paper the project seems an odd prospect. Sun Ra was a lot of things—pianist, bluesman, bandleader, arranger, interstellar poet, multiverse traveller—but he’s never been accused of being a singles artist. Because of the format, Singles eschews his lengthier wigouts for shorter vignettes. You might not get the 20-minute avant-garde virtuosity of “Space Is the Place,” but you do get jaunty holiday jingle “It’s Christmas Time.” That might seem less crucial, but when grappling with Ra’s slippery legacy, nothing here feels disposable.
For the fanatics, *Singles *will offer little they’ve not heard before. While the original 45 versions of a lot of these songs, many of which were released on Ra’s own El Saturn Records, are rare (or, in some cases, completely lost), they’ve all cropped up in other places, including a similar-but-less-expansive compilation put out by Evidence Records in 1996. Still, there’s undoubted power in hearing Ra’s career laid out like this.
Arranged chronologically (or as close to it as possible—Ra wasn’t exactly pedantic when it came to labeling his sessions) and with about half the songs recorded during his 1950s Chicago period, Singles captures the genesis of his forward-thinking space-bop. Fittingly, the opening two tracks, “I Am an Instrument” and “I Am Strange,” both spoken-word numbers, predict his metaphysical interests. “I belong to one who is more than a musician/He is an artist,” he says on the former. His voice is tuned low and grave, as though foreshadowing a seismic event.
Whether he’s envisioning a playful, pamphlet-utopian version of the city on the Lieber-Stoller-esque “Chicago USA” or mixing experimental rhythms with dense and fractured chants on “Spaceship Lullaby” (both recorded with the Nu Sounds, an important precursor to the Arkestra), it’s thrilling to hear Ra connect Chicago’s timeless jazz scene to his increasingly wild tinkerings. Even the earliest material on* Singles *is the sound of a bandleader confidently wielding his arsenal for maximum purpose.
It’s not just Ra that gets shine. Singles captures The Arkestra at their finest. John Gilmore, a chief lieutenant in the group for almost 40 years, blusters with his tenor saxophone on the peppy “Soft Talk,” recorded in his first few years alongside Ra. The gentle horn riff of “Space Loneliness”—from 1960, Ra’s final year in Chicago—pulls you towards the void of the outer cosmos before blissful and delicate solos from Phil Cohran (cornet) and Marshall Allen (alto sax) chime in.
Given the nature of the format, Singles also showcases Ra’s pop instincts. Whether it’s the smooth doo-wop of “Daddy’s Gonna Tell You Know Lie” (of which there are two versions), the wild-man energy of singer Yochanan on blistering R&B number “Hot Skillet Momma,” or Hattie Randolph’s sweet rendition of jazz standard “Round Midnight,” it’s a thrill to hear Ra carve out lean jukebox jams. On “Bye Bye,” the sweet harmonies of the Cosmic Rays are drowned out by short, sharp skewering of double bass that tears through the final few seconds. Recorded a decade before George Martin was doing that sort of thing, it confirms that even in the pop realm, Ra was a daring futurist.
The later work sees Ra fully exploring the outer realms of his own talent. “Disco 2021” sounds like an android’s fever dream. A doomed but dinky organ holds hands with a Gilmore-led wind quartet on the ugly-beautiful “Outer Space Plateau.” Ra incorporates a Moog synth into “The Perfect Man”; probably recorded in mid-1973, he deploys a bluesy horn riff as the bedrock before running wild with the synthetic instrument. It’s a strange mismatch, but “The Perfect Man” feels like a rare link between dapper nightclub blues and the space-bound sounds of new wave, disco and early hip-hop. The song encapsulates Sun Ra’s freewheeling, alien brilliance.
The London-based Strut Records has long been prolific in unearthing and reissuing old music and has gotten pretty damn good at it. The three-disc CD and LP releases of Singles: The Definitive 45s Collection includes a lot of the trimmings you might expect: rare photos, artwork, sleeve notes and an interview with El Saturn Records founder Alton Abraham. There’s also detailed track-by-track and session notes by project compiler Paul Griffiths that you’ll open up a lot as you grapple with this set. Strut is experienced in dusting off old recordings, so the remasters sound crisp—particularly when played back-to-back with versions that cropped up on other compilations—but without suffocating that rich 45rpm flavor.
In addition to the CD and digital releases, Strut is putting out 20 cuts from the collection in two 45s box sets (Volume 1 released this month, Volume 2 released in March 2017) in a limited 500 copies run for the dedicated looking to fully immerse in the spirit of their original releases. For newcomers here for spiritual guidance, broaching Sun Ra’s seismic life work can be daunting. To penetrate the outer atmosphere and splash down into an unknown world; to crawl into a mind of a man with the power to transport his consciousness across our solar system. Singles offers a wide-ranging but accessible route to his unearthly sounds. | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Strut | December 3, 2016 | 8.7 | 46d4c3ee-a94b-43b1-a858-11e4d8fa1495 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | 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 globetrotting fantasia on the Nintendo 64 that remains the high-water mark for video game 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 a globetrotting fantasia on the Nintendo 64 that remains the high-water mark for video game music. | Koji Kondo: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koji-kondo-the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time/ | The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time | Ever since those four notes guided enemies down the screen in 1978’s Space Invaders, video game music has remained one of the most commonly heard sounds across the world. Yet there is a disconnect between its outsize popularity and its critical recognition. Game soundtracks rarely pad out year-end lists or are regularly reviewed in music magazines, let alone considered as credible listening options outright. The soundtrack for Ocarina of Time, the fifth edition of The Legend of Zelda—a flagship series for Nintendo that inspires such slavish devotion, both Robin Williams’ daughter and Seth Rogen’s spaniel share its name—was so full of creativity and color and wonder that it presented the most convincing possible case to argue game music belongs in the canon.
The score, composed by Nintendo’s in-house MVP Koji Kondo, was the first that truly thrived outside of its originating medium, a game centered around an ancient flute-like instrument. It quickly took on a second life as open-source material, where it was enjoyed, adapted, and shared. An entire generation grew up around the explosive popularity of the game in the late 1990s, which explains why mash-up producers feel compelled to slap Clipse over “Lost Woods,” or why countless symphonic orchestras tour their own reinterpretations, and why a genre named Zeldawave exists at all.
From the stirring opening screen to the weepy final credits, the music that flows through Ocarina of Time was a generational Rosetta Stone, encompassing Gregorian chants, Arabic scales, harp, flamenco, dark ambience, and at least one rip-off of Gustav Holst’s The Planets—an unforced and generous way to transmit those sounds into the homes of millions. In the 21 years since its release, Kondo’s score remains the one component of the game that has not dated, even as every facet of the industry has advanced by orders of magnitude. By eschewing what was or wasn’t in vogue, Kondo instead hit upon timelessness.
Koji Kondo understood the medium of video game music better than anyone. A young fan of regional jazz fusion acts Casiopea and Sadao Watanabe, as well as the grandiose prog of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, he rolled out the Osaka School of Arts in 1984 and straight into a job at his first and only company, Nintendo. He was part of their inaugural wave of sound technicians, hired at a time when the blocky tones pumping out of arcade machines served little purpose beyond luring quarters; a ubiquitous but characterless wavelength, ripe for someone to stamp their imprint.
Although the Nintendo Entertainment System was able to play only three notes simultaneously, his score for 1985’s Super Mario Brothers was a revelation: Pixelated fish fluttered along to the rhythm of watery waltzes; the Underworld was a melody-devoid inversion of the Overworld; and you always seemed to be falling down crevices or spoing!-ing off enemy heads pleasingly in time with the music. Variables in how the game functioned were limited, which allowed Kondo to work with Nintendo’s still-small team to compose a soundtrack that existed as an invisible master hand, guiding player movement along while remaining catchy enough to be something that will be hummed or strummed along to until oceans burn.
Kondo was gifted a chance to set the parameters of a compositional practice in its infancy. Attempting to make game music diaristic was a dead end. Even Ennio Morricone’s finest film scores existed for situations that you could come across in everyday life, more or less: Binaries of love and hate, comfort and danger, hope and despair, played out with human bodies and recognizable locations. There never could be a relatable analog for Zelda’s elfin hero, Link, strafing around the belly of a whale king or being hounded by flaming skulls, so why bother? Repetition was equally a double-edged sword to master. Get it wrong, and you’re subjecting the listener to a banal ditty over and over and over. Get it right, and you’re creating something familiar to millions yet indelibly personal to the player. By the mid-’90s, Kondo was so accomplished with working through the challenges of constrained composition that the Super Nintendo’s successor, a 64-bit machine with the capacity to replicate sound significantly closer to actual music, might have seemed like letting the rest of the industry start on easy mode.
If Nintendo 64, which hit the market in the summer of 1996, broke the stratosphere of what 3D gaming could achieve with its launch title, Super Mario 64, 1998’s Ocarina of Time was the first successful attempt to stick a moon landing. Released with just 39 days left on the calendar, it still became the biggest seller of the year, besting an impressive class of ’98 that contained Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, Banjo-Kazooie, and StarCraft. An instant hall-of-famer, Ocarina of Time improved on just about everything that came before it: immense scope, absorbing lore, dynamic storytelling, elaborate presentation—and music.
Kondo now faced an entirely new challenge to make his vision pay off. The N64’s audio fidelity and internal memory were terrible. To add embellishments to a track, you might need to bargain with coders to discreetly leave one part of the map with the uneven texture of cobblestones. Worse still, the industry was undergoing a kind of reverse automation in lockstep with upscaling technology, replacing machines and machine-capable composers for actual musicians. Compare Yasunori Mitsuda and Akira Yamaoka’s acclaimed soundtracks for 1995’s Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo and 2001’s Silent Hill 2 on the PlayStation 2, and the changes feel chasmic. The synthetic twinkle of the former is unmistakably tied to the 16-bit period, but the scratchy, layered textures of the latter break free from those associated tropes, and into an age of CD-quality sound design.
Initially, Kondo resisted morphing his beloved bleep-and-bloop game music into real life music. So he rebelled by keeping things unreal. He would spend days rifling through global curios in Kyoto’s record stores before merging his finds into combinations that broke with chronology, geography, and anthropology—combinations that couldn’t plausibly be found outside of a console. Vocal from as far back as 1990 about the changes sweeping through his profession, Kondo eventually embraced them, forging links to the past and casting forward imagined futures.
The sheer size of Ocarina of Time was unprecedented, which gave Kondo the freedom to let his imagination roam. As the game was being coded, he would build out his compositions from the trickle of development updates, tracing rhythms from Post-it Notes littered over his keyboard about woodland mazes and collapsing castles and Death Mountains. He waited for fitting motifs to drop into his brain, often while he was in the bath. Progress was generally fluid, nothing like the 18 months spent hacking away on 1990’s Super Mario World.
Sometimes, what was called for was pretty obvious. Glassy tones fit the “Ice Cavern,” gladiatorial horns and crashing timpani rolls gave dramatic flair to a “Boss Battle,” and a plaintive twang greets you at the “Lon Lon Ranch,” the kind of snoozy town-that-time-forgot vibe that comes off like Beck B-sides fed through a machine learning algorithm. Kondo also boldly ditched Zelda’s iconic main theme, broadly regarded as his standout work, for the very first time. This could have resulted in open revolt amongst diehards but for two majestic new pieces inserted in its place: The rousing “Hyrule Field,” which follows you throughout the game’s central area, stayed fresh by utilizing an adaptive mechanism that told the game’s internal engine to cleanly cycle between eight-bar segments with open chords, depending on whether you were in danger, resting, or in full flow on horseback. Then there’s the tender “Title Theme” greeting you as soon as the N64 loads up: drifting chords, spare keyboard rolls, one quivering ocarina, and clip-clopping hooves as Link’s horse, Epona, strides across the screen.
Other times, Kondo would need to conjure diegetic music that Link and other characters in the game respond to. Twelve of the game’s themes are based around just five notes—re, fa, la, ti and the higher-octave re—simple enough to map onto the instrument in Link’s hands, but resonant enough to occupy a permanent space in your amygdala. Concision was key; so long as your N64 was on, the loops could replay endlessly. Many of the tracks on the officially released score that accompanied Ocarina of Time landed between only 30 and 70 seconds. Striking a balance between complexity and simplicity, Kondo deepened the range of expression while keeping it elemental. “Song of Storms” is so maddeningly catchy it drives a windmill operator in the game to actual madness, ruining his life.
What was particularly arresting about Ocarina of Time was its very un-Nintendo embrace of darkness. Here was a game you brought neighborhood friends round to share, curtains drawn, watching and listening intently—not just because it was expansive and fun and un-put-downable, but because this thing was off its axis. Characters age and die, clay zombies rise up to choke you, and dungeons full of enslaved prisoners spiral like M.C. Escher paintings. All along, the music gets progressively more claustrophobic and forbidding. For once, negative space on audio tracks seemed like artistic license rather than technical limitation. When night falls, the music tapers off completely, leaving you exposed to the elements with nothing more than a bone chill for company.
Capturing this psychological turmoil in a way that connected to a broad audience pushed Kondo harder than before. The scorched earth of “Dodongo’s Cavern” is evoked through a miasmic mood piece that creeps like noxious fumes preceding a pyroclastic flow—but with Trent Reznor scoring the blockbuster first-person shooter Quake back in 1996, this sort of unsettling soundscape wasn’t exactly new. Kondo’s fascination with arcane instrumentation rarely heard in general, let alone in games, gave him the edge. An Armenian duduk snakes through the musty, grim “Spirit Temple,” marimbas pace around the climactic battle against Ganondorf—set against leaden drums in a 23/16 time signature that looks bizarre on paper, they represent the lithe movement you need to overcome a dominating but cumbersome final boss—while the rattling percussion and ephemeral hollering of “Forest Temple” respectively came from Indonesian angklung and a sample pack named Zero-G Ethnic Flavours.
Kondo’s curiosity did, however, lead to one of the larger controversies in Nintendo’s history. Rapt with excitement over an exotic chant he had likely picked up while browsing discount bins for audio travelogues, Kondo did not realize it was أَذَان (adhan), the Islamic call to prayer. He layered the sacred verses throughout the “Fire Temple” for atmosphere, and given the fractional Muslim population inside Japan’s cloistered society, no local testers picked it up. Corrected revisions of the game, with a more generic male choir in place, were rushed to stores as soon as the passage was caught, but stands as a lone blot on the company’s customarily sparkling copybook.
Ocarina of Time was to be Kondo’s last full soundtrack. He was responsible for most of 1999’s Majora’s Mask, drawing inspiration from Chinese opera in line with its mask-based aesthetic, but had a much-diminished role when it came to the Gaelic sea shanties of 2002’s The Wind Waker. He remains in charge of Nintendo’s music department, but as a composer, Ocarina of Time was his way of leaving it all out on a field that was in the process of being aggressively returned. Nintendo’s latter-day scores for Zelda and Mario skew more orchestral, but so do most big-budget titles now. They lack Kondo’s uncanny ability to bind feelings of happiness and sadness into an immediately nostalgic whole, so that your first listen feels like your thousandth.
A remake of Ocarina of Time in 2011 roused Kondo, like a great gatekeeper awoken by a sense of duty. He preached the necessity of continuity, giving employees strict instructions to stick as closely as possible to the original, watching out for fractional differences in tempo and timing that would ruin the malleability of the score. Tampering with the leitmotifs twinned with environments and characters was a cardinal sin: nothing could be worse than jeopardizing fond memories. Even basic SFX had to be recreated to transmit the feel of the N64 era on the handheld 3DS, despite the newer hardware being wired completely differently. Heads were scratched over a revamped “Title Theme” that Kondo kept rejecting, before his young team clocked that the N64’s characteristic reverb, used to mask the harsh compression, had been scrubbed. The opening ocarina no longer drifted into view from a far-off forest, but was front-loaded and far too clean in the mix. Once derided, the N64’s drawbacks were now cherished, imperfections to stimulate a flutter of butterflies in the gut.
One of Nintendo’s greatest strengths—or follies, depending on what stage of the deleterious decline/miraculous revival cycle the company finds itself in—is having the confidence to reach for intangible qualities of magic and the sublime in an earnest and uncynical fashion. They remain the lovable dad of the industry, corny and often eye-clawingly frustrating, but self-aware enough to make good on it. Kondo’s scores are the connective tissue in Nintendo’s enormous body of work, like Joe Hisaishi’s for Studio Ghibli films. His particular gift was to not just create music matched to gameplay, but to grasp the way sound folds itself into our surroundings, creating associations forged and never forgotten.
The central conceit of Ocarina of Time’s story is the ability to toggle between adult and kid versions of Link, warping between the bleak morass of adulthood and an era of innocence, with only flickers of the hellscape to come. This is not a luxury afforded to us in reality. Yet Nintendo do their best to bridge the divide all the same, striving to make kids feel like adults and make adults feel like kids again. No game soundtrack before or since has brought that to bear quite like Ocarina of Time, leaving an emotional response that lingers long after the system shuts down. | 2019-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Nintendo | July 7, 2019 | 9 | 46d4dac3-0ac2-479a-b763-82888fdc3848 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
As a mainstay of Warp Records, Clark returns with a more accessible, more human album that still reinforces his outré techno dreams and arpeggiated fantasies. | As a mainstay of Warp Records, Clark returns with a more accessible, more human album that still reinforces his outré techno dreams and arpeggiated fantasies. | Clark: Death Peak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23074-clark-death-peak/ | Death Peak | Clark is a torchbearer for his label, Warp, a former vanguard that outlasted its own revolution to become an immutable status quo. He and labelmate Bibio interviewed each other for The Quietus in 2009 for the label’s twentieth anniversary, and Clark offhandedly related a creation myth for his music: “There was so much rave stuff you’d listen to and you could imagine bobbing about to it, but [Black Dog] just had more depth and layers of feelings to it.” Presumably, he meant Bytes, from Warp’s genre-defining early-nineties compilation series, Artificial Intelligence. He spent the next fifteen years imprinting his MPC jams, analog synths, and samples of his drumming and acoustic guitar onto the sound.
Still, synthesizing a neat developmental arc for Clark is an exercise in meaningless distinction. His nine albums touch on many varieties of techno in no particular order. In fact, disorder is his medium. Instead of measuring their relative pH levels of jungle and garage, it’s best to assess each album this way: Is it More Clark or Less Clark than the last one? More Clark means manic and malfunctioning; Less Clark means accessible and coherent. His best records, like 2006’s Body Riddle and 2014’s Clark, are More Clark and Less Clark at once, balancing detailed, chaotic sonic events in impregnable forms (a.k.a. Just Enough Clark). His weakest records, clustered in a slump between those milestones, tend to be way More Clark than a person could handle. But isn’t too vivid a voice about the mildest flaw an artist can have?
Death Peak is Clark’s first record that’s almost completely Less Clark. While it doesn’t have quite the artistic heft of his self-titled album, the bright, punched-out shapes are more fun to listen to, with an emotional accessibility that makes me imagine a kind of post-rave Eluvium. Don’t worry, it’s still Clark enough: as usual, his tracks sound like jittery, rusted iron machines that somehow produce long rainbows of melody, and there are many moments when the tracks cling to the edge of control. “Hoova,” where burned curls of distortion eddy around colossal drums, is eventually seized by a mad, accelerating whir that, just when it seems about to explode, expertly disperses. “Slap Drones” is technically aggressive and emotionally dry, the kind of thing Clark has sometimes filled whole albums with, and “Un U.K.” gets lost in ten minutes of lovely channel surfing, but he had the courtesy to put it at the end. But more often, there’s nothing cerebral about these arpeggiated fantasies, lushly produced, full of tones that pulse in soft colors.
Clark, whose wilder cyborg music courts post-human themes, also integrates the human voice more thoroughly than ever before. He relies on a chorus of what kind of sounds like Oompa Loompas in Mordor—a little silly, a little evil, and quite grand. But there’s never a sense of a single human speaker; the voices simply clad the well-made grooves with warming polyphony and rhythmic accents. Still, their usage is very songful, especially on the radiant “Peak Magnetic,” which feels effortless in flight even when a turbine engine cranks up inside its sparkling trills.
Too bad Clark already used Body Riddle as the title of his supreme head record, because Death Peak is some of the most engaging body music he’s ever made. From the infinite boogie of “Butterfly Prowler,” where all the shifts and drops land right where they belong, to the show-stopping “Catastrophe Anthem,” which sounds like someone taught an A.I. Colin Stetson and blew it up to M83-size, it's a multicolored flood of effortless release and actual human feelings, an assuredly musical record that continues a modern streak of Peak Clark. | 2017-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 8, 2017 | 7.4 | 46daab6f-00d2-4de2-a295-6a6073710146 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Detroit rap stalwart makes hard-hitting music with no frills. His latest project basks in the idea that an album this regionally specific can still have nationwide appeal. | The Detroit rap stalwart makes hard-hitting music with no frills. His latest project basks in the idea that an album this regionally specific can still have nationwide appeal. | Icewear Vezzo: Rich Off Pints 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/icewear-vezzo-rich-off-pints-3/ | Rich Off Pints 3 | About a decade ago, Icewear Vezzo took a trip to New York to pass around his bubbling Michigan street hit “Dancin.” Featuring the star of the Detroit crew Team Eastside, Peezy, the single was rooted heavily in local tradition—slick punchlines and a funky piano-driven beat. When he played the song for record labels and radio stations around town, the collective response was confusion: It was “as if that shit was the worst shit they ever heard in their life,” he remembered. Years later, the sound of Icewear Vezzo and Detroit rap in general isn’t much different, but the way it’s received is. From Florida to Texas, from Philly to Louisville and even France, Michigan rap’s influence is everywhere.
Raised on Detroit’s East Side, Icewear Vezzo has been a constant in the scene ever since his music blew up in the city’s strip clubs in the early 2010s. His songs are straight-up with no frills: The hard-hitting beats and vivid lyrics attempt to give you a glimpse at the life of a Detroit high roller every time out. You wouldn’t be wrong to say he makes the same song over and over again, but that one song is pretty damn good.
Rich Off Pints 3, the finale to Vezzo’s recent trilogy about living like the bits of Paid in Full where it’s all good vibes, is predictable yet satisfying. He makes bread, throws it at the strip club, blows a bag on cars and jewelry, gets his family right, causes a little havoc, and makes some more. It sounds pretty sweet. Vezzo isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said before on “Ace of Spades,” rapping over an instrumental so low and ominous that it resembles the Jaws theme, but it works because of how confidently he says it: “Throw the money up until the club empty/Pill poppin’ nigga, keep my gun with me.” Opener “F Blocc” is another standout, full of sleek whooshing ad-libs and disappointment toward everyone not hustling as successfully as he is. Vezzo’s also got a flair for the dramatic. “Took some penitentiary chances for this new Richie,” he raps on “On My Own,” like he’s in a one-last-job heist movie.
The beats, though, are fairly routine. The brooding pianos and pummeling drums aren’t ever bad, but sometimes I’m convinced he types “Icewear Vezzo type beat” into YouTube and clicks download without even listening. The sound is a bit more old school Detroit than the faster, kinetic instrumentals popularized with the emergence of the Flint scene, and I do wish he would mix it up occasionally. But he’s such a good and efficient rapper that it hardly matters. I’ve heard variations of “The 6” beat a couple hundred times, but that doesn’t make the punchlines any less effective.
Variety isn’t exactly the point of Rich Off Pints 3. Vezzo is basking in the idea that he can make an album that sounds this regionally specific while still having nationwide appeal. When major rap stars like Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and G Herbo pop in for solid runs, Vezzo never shaves off the edges of his local style to make them more comfortable. It’s a sign of how far Michigan rap has come. On his next trip to New York, he’ll be welcomed with open arms. | 2022-07-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Iced Up | July 26, 2022 | 7.3 | 46dc0b59-8ec1-48e1-bd98-974977fb3ba5 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On her first full-length, Karima Walker fuses structured folk songs with abstracted sound art to create an uncanny Americana. | On her first full-length, Karima Walker fuses structured folk songs with abstracted sound art to create an uncanny Americana. | Karima Walker: Hands in Our Names | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23003-hands-in-our-names/ | Hands in Our Names | Karima Walker began releasing simple pastorals around a half decade ago, but quickly her songs morphed into something stranger. Inspired by her discovery of boundary-pushing composers like Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros, she’s taken to fusing her structured folk songs with abstract sound art. It’s something others have attempted before—think Will Oldham’s recent collaboration with the drone duo Bitchin Bajas or some of Charalambides’ warped spirituals—but this Arizona-based songwriter’s fusion feels particularly alien. Unearthly drones collide with slowly scrawled acoustics. Electronics overwhelm spectral hymns. Looped vocals and slivered field recordings lend an unsettled feeling to her work, which sounds born both of earth and stratosphere, here and hereafter.
Walker’s first full-length, Hands in Our Names, was conceived in the New Mexico desert. A few hours away from her Tucson home, she ventured to a remote house nestled in the midst of a grassy plain—the sort of Southwest residence that lets you see miles into the distance. (Crucially, she didn’t have cell service.) It was there that Walker worked on much of Hands in Our Names, which was released on tape in 2016, but has now been resequenced and remastered for vinyl. In so much as you can sense Walker’s need to get out of her usual world, Hands in Our Names illustrates what she does best as a composer: She looks at the familiar from different angles, and stares intently at everything until it feels new again.
Opener “Holy Blanket” starts with a whisper, a wind through trees or a rolling stream, rustling through lo-fi gear. It sounds like a voice memo, an environmental memory stowed away for better days, but it slowly gives way to a strummed electric guitar and her voice, singing impressionistically about watching cosmic phenomena somewhere over the mountains. The track lasts just over a minute and a half before receding back into sumptuous layers of static. It’s a trick she employs throughout the record—moving between naturalistic sampling, to familiar-feeling folk songs, then ending on something harsh and cold. Similarly, the record’s title track weaponizes her voice in a sort of digitalist round. The piece swells and crackles as more and more layers build into a spiderweb of parts, until it’s a wall of noise.
One of the record’s best moments is the narco-drone folk of “St. Ignacio.” Walker starts by approximating the snowbound gloom of the Kranky stable, but her dedication to emotional openness and wonderfully lightheaded vocal runs lends an unusual lushness to the proceedings. The track flowers as it goes on in unexpected ways—and the feeling’s something like stumbling upon a jungle in the arctic, or a beach on the moon. When Walker was recently asked in an interview to distill Hands in Our Names to a single word, she called it merely “terrestrial.” And sure, she made it in the desert. But with her uncanny Americana, it’s as if Walker’s experimental inclinations have allowed her to explore some previously unplumbed liminal space on the horizon, somewhere between sand and sky. | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Orindal | March 28, 2017 | 7.4 | 46e3d1b1-d022-4e25-a096-0e37ee16f949 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
With his latest record, the onetime teen prodigy reemerges as the face of a new sound and scene that blurs the line between avant-garde jazz and hip-hop. | With his latest record, the onetime teen prodigy reemerges as the face of a new sound and scene that blurs the line between avant-garde jazz and hip-hop. | Earl Sweatshirt: Some Rap Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some-rap-songs/ | Some Rap Songs | If the title of Earl Sweatshirt’s long-awaited third studio album feels like he’s underselling it, it’s because he is. He’s intentionally reducing the magnitude of an offering from one of the most lauded artists of the decade from a grand gesture to a gift with no wrapping. The rapper born Thebe Kgositsile’s worst enemy is—and has always been—our collective expectations and the entitlement that comes along with them.
It’s always been Earl versus the world. Fame found him at the age of 16, making him an internet sensation, then a meme, then an enigma, and finally, an icon. For an introverted kid who knew he could rap but was reluctant to accept the exposure and invasions of privacy that came with being a bona fide pop culture phenomenon, it’s been an uncomfortable evolution. Voracious fans threatened to consume not just his music but his personal life too. That same entitlement caused the “FREE EARL” campaign to mutate from eager appreciation to scary obsession and stoked fans’ demand for music during the three years since his last album—even as he was mourning his father’s death earlier this year. Rather than bask in the attention, he recoiled from it, setting himself apart from peers who maintain relevance through carefully strategized ubiquity. As he receded from the spotlight, his mystique grew—as did fans’ desire to hear him to do what he does best.
His followers tend to come in two flavors: those who gravitate to Earl, the spitter—the guy who dazzles with multisyllabic couplets and clever similes; and those come for Earl, the relatable mope—an avatar for their own emotional pain. But on Some Rap Songs listeners are challenged to take him not in parts but as a whole, in the form he is in now: a poet philosopher who is also the face of an emerging sound and scene.
Earl has always been a reflection of the collaborators around him. His first tape, Earl, and his official debut, Doris, rest squarely in the Odd Future canon. His second album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, established Earl’s identity as a man apart from the then dissolving crew and saw him working with East Coast rappers also dealing with dark emotions and budding rap careers in New Jersey’s Da$h and New York City’s Wiki. Now, on Some Rap Songs, the 24-year-old has become the OG to a vanguard of younger artists who are blurring the lines between avant-garde jazz and hip-hop.
The world created by Earl and his new cohorts—including up-and-coming NYC rappers Medhane and MIKE, producer-rapper Sixpress, aka Adé Hakim, of the Bronx collective Slums, and Gio Escobar, frontman for genre-bending ensemble Standing on the Corner—is based on abstraction, where form is secondary to mood. It’s where the concept of Blackness is radical and the practices of soul-searching are channelled through a lo-fi sound replete with off-kilter loops, samples that get chopped beyond recognition, and audio clips that feel both random and apropos.
Take first single “Nowhere2go,” produced by Darryl Johnson and Adé Hakim, which rides a jittery beat replete with stuttering loops, warped vocal samples, and loose percussion. The instrumental lands somewhere between disorienting and soothing, and it is the oddly perfect backdrop for a matter-of-fact Earl as he deadpans a heavy revelation about himself: “I think... I spent my whole life depressed/Only thing on my mind was death/Didn’t know if my time was next.”
The project is distinctly rough around the edges, to great effect; there’s the sound of dust popping off vinyl and cassette hiss throughout. With these imperfections, Earl and company tap into the same sort of illegible, yet undeniable, feeling jazz musicians capture in slurred notes. The cross-influence between Earl and his cohorts is evident in his vocals too. On the Navy Blue–produced “The Bends,” Earl flexes what feels like a MIKE-like monotone to get off his stream-of-consciousness raps. That is, until you realize that MIKE’s own delivery is influenced by Earl. This is symbiosis, not thievery.
If the fact that Earl is a product of his circle of friends is the explicit story being told here, the implicit one is that he is a product of his parents. Though most of the album was written before the death of his father, South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, in January of this year, his presence looms in a way it hasn’t on past Earl projects. Resentment and laments of abandonment are replaced with acceptance and embrace. “My momma used to say she see my father in me/I said I was not offended,” he raps on “Azucar,” showing signs of reconciliation but only after acknowledging how the women in his life held him down during the bad times. “My cushion was a bosom on bad days/It’s not a Black woman I can’t thank.”
On “Playing Possum,” we hear a cobbled together duet composed of recordings of his mother, Cheryl Harris, thanking Earl and describing him as a “cultural worker” in a keynote speech interwoven with his dad reciting an excerpt of a poem called “Anguish Longer Than Sorrow.” Taken altogether, the track is a letter from a loving son honoring his progenitors, a letter that his father did not get to hear before his death. Then, on penultimate song “Peanuts,” Earl grapples with his grief over a slow and out-of-tune piano sample and shouts out his uncle, African jazz legend Hugh Masekela, who passed away shortly after his father. The mourning gives way to catharsis on the Masekela-sampling finale. At the very end of the album, the second-hand guitars begin to wobble before glitching into silence. His uncle and father are gone, but Earl is still here, carrying on their artistic legacy—and, with the help of his collaborators, building his own. | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Tan Cressida / Columbia | November 30, 2018 | 8.8 | 46e497fc-f977-4f7b-a867-f949b4b68a57 | Timmhotep Aku | https://pitchfork.com/staff/timmhotep-aku/ | |
On their first new album in over a decade, Manchester’s funkiest post-punk band offer an imperfect distillation of their 40-year legacy, updating their classic sound with nods to contemporary beat-driven music and political strife. | On their first new album in over a decade, Manchester’s funkiest post-punk band offer an imperfect distillation of their 40-year legacy, updating their classic sound with nods to contemporary beat-driven music and political strife. | A Certain Ratio: ACR Loco | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-certain-ratio-acr-loco/ | ACR Loco | Since releasing their ninth studio album Mind Made Up in 2008, Manchester mainstays A Certain Ratio have been taking stock of their history and settling themselves comfortably in the present. Last year’s ACR: BOX tracked their evolution from the icy post-punk of their 1979 debut 7" to a rhythmically expansive sound informed by R&B, go-go, and acid house; meanwhile, a series of commissions from artists like Maps and ShadowParty had them reworking contemporary songs according to their own funky, minimalistic vision.
Apparently fired up by their archival and studio work, the band recorded ACR Loco, their first collection of new songs in 12 years. The album distills A Certain Ratio’s 40-year legacy, potently if imperfectly, while also bending modern beat-heavy music to their collective will. ACR Loco is built on the taut yet fluid rhythms of A Certain Ratio’s core trio—drummer Donald Johnson, bassist/vocalist Jez Kerr, and multi-instrumentalist Martin Moscrop—and spins off variously into motorik disco (“Berlin”), clattering samba-meets-electro (“Taxi Guy”), and gooey jazz-funk (“Get A Grip”). The otherwise tranquil opener “Friends Around Us” slides into a drum’n’bass breakdown for its final minutes, and the low vocal tones and disco bridge of “Supafreak” sound like the band has spent time with Hot Chip’s catalog.
ACR Loco’s embrace of both modern and present is exemplified on its guest list, which features old Mancunian friends like Smiths drummer Mike Joyce as well as current names like Gabe Gurnsey of Factory Floor. Each of them makes adjustments to assimilate into ACR’s essential chemistry. When Maria Uzor of the synth-pop duo Sink Ya Teeth appears on “Get a Grip,” she eschews the cool remove of her own work for a more combustible approach, in keeping with the music’s roiling energy.
Singer and ACR touring member Denise Johnson is the only contributor who exerts her own gravitational pull on the trio—as she has since her first appearance on 1990’s acr:mcr, bursting through the baggy funk of “Be What You Wanna Be” with a towering melody. Her earthy tones sell the rather lightweight message of unity on “Family” (“Brothers and sisters/We are family/One world united/Love, peace, harmony”) and provide human counterweight to a robotic vocoder on the silly “Bouncy Bouncy.” Sadly, ACR Loco was the band’s final collaboration with Johnson before her death at 56 in July. She appears on only four tracks on ACR Loco, and makes a deep impression each time.
Several songs seem to address the state of post-Brexit England, the album’s only modern preoccupation that feels awkward or strained. A Certain Ratio have never been the strongest lyricists, but ACR Loco’s calls for togetherness and resistance are especially flimsy. The punky bluntness of a line like “We all need to come together to fight/Fight greed/They’re inventing pain/For short term gain” loses its efficacy when paired with the limber go-go (and goofy title) of “Bouncy Bouncy.” Opener “Friends Around Us” centers on an unsteady proclamation: “We have no idea our meaning without friends around us.” ACR fare better when Kerr is singing to a loved one or, on “Get A Grip,” giving something like a dispatch from a psychedelic trip.
The occasional clumsiness of ACR Loco is easy to forgive in light of the album’s musical pleasures. After a deep dive into their back pages, A Certain Ratio found a powerful formula: paying heed to where they came from while keeping the door open for more all night parties in their future.
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. | 2020-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | September 28, 2020 | 6.9 | 46e75034-64b2-43d3-98c8-8cb86a121034 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
With a large group of collaborators, Alexis Georgopoulos has crafted a pulsing, eclectic, wonderfully breezy album of ethereal psychedelia. | With a large group of collaborators, Alexis Georgopoulos has crafted a pulsing, eclectic, wonderfully breezy album of ethereal psychedelia. | Arp: Zebra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arp-zebra/ | Zebra | Alexis Georgopoulos has never been terribly secretive about his influences. Over the past 11 years of his solo career as Arp, he has gleaned from, paid homage to, and straight-up aped any number of his forebears. He has channeled the burbling arpeggios of the Berlin school, the labyrinthine art rock of Brian Eno, the crystalline fingerpicking of Durutti Column, and even the smoldering guitar fuzz of Flying Saucer Attack. But on Zebra, the New York musician’s first major solo album since 2013’s More, there is a song that might cause even longtime Arp-watchers to steal a second glance at their media player, wondering if there weren’t some kind of metadata mix-up. Over a gently swaying drumbeat, a pair of synth chords initiates the first stirrings of déjà vu; then a contrapuntal melody practices a sneaky bit of sleight-of-hand before Georgopoulos unveils a lilting mallet melody—and the big reveal. It’s not a cover; more like a Petri dish of brightly colored Balearic pop cloned straight from the DNA of its source: Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
This is new territory for Georgopoulos, but it is also a logical extension of his tendencies. He is a magpie with an uncanny ear for detail, a quality that has only become more pronounced the further his stylistic pendulum has swung. When Arp started out, the project was inspired mainly by the arpeggiated synthesizer music of Tangerine Dream and their ilk; by More, Georgopoulos’ interest in Brian Eno’s early albums had him nailing not just those records’ general vibe but many of their particulars: the snaky guitar tone, pistoning piano, vocal tics, and even titles.
But “Fluorescences,” while one of ZEBRA’s joyful highlights, is also an outlier. Georgopoulos’ influences have never felt quite so well integrated, nor his ideas so original, as they do across the rest of the album. On 2014’s Pulsars e Quasars EP, it was as though the effort to escape his influences was driving him to extremes of course correction, sending him careening between guitar noise and jangle pop. ZEBRA covers even more ground, but it coheres much better. Every song is its own miniature world, yet they all hang together like the stars of a single galaxy.
The album’s primary mode is a kind of airy, bright art pop in which marimba melodies ripple across a turquoise expanse of Mellotron, and fretless electric bass and acoustic guitar drip like moisture down a just-finished glass of Campari. It’s possible to detect hints of Talk Talk’s ethereal psychedelia in the playful weave of woodwinds, electronics, and earthy hand percussion. The tracks in this vein are less songs than excuses to luxuriate in a warm bath of tone and bubbling texture. They range from the pulse minimalism and Moog solo of “Parallelism” to the patch of shade that is “Ozu,” a sketch for saxophone and Mellotron that is so unassuming, I didn’t notice it until after a dozen or more listens to the album.
Then there are the detours, like “Fluorescences,” the synth-pop curveball, and “Nzuku,” which applies the Moog-and-marimba palette to jazzier ends; both of these more ebullient songs suggest an attempt to time-travel back to the terrace of Ibiza’s Amnesia discotheque circa 1984, when ECM and krautrock fell into rotation alongside records by Grace Jones and Wally Badarou. A pair of comparatively restrained tracks, “Folding Water” and “Moving Target,” are deployed like pencil cross-hatching to fill in the space between the record’s extremes. “Folding Water” is the lone link back to Georgopoulos’ time in the funk-punk band Tussle: It sounds a little like an outtake from Talking Heads’ Remain in Light where most of the mixing desk’s channels have been muted, leaving only puttering drums and glinting dub accents.
All of it makes for a wonderfully summery sound with Mediterranean overtones, languid as a post-meal nap and salty as a harborside kiss. It builds to a gentle climax with “Reading a Wave,” the album’s penultimate track, in which David Lackner’s keening saxophone soars above contrasting pulses—rolling jazz drums, liquid piano chords, tumbling synth squiggle—like a kite above the surf. It can’t be overstated how musical it all is. To make the album, Georgopoulos availed himself of a larger crew of collaborators than ever before—there are three percussionists, a bassist, a keyboard player, woodwinds, guitar—and it’s tempting to wonder if that isn’t what it took to get Georgopoulos out of his record collection and out of his head. If previous Arp records sometimes felt like columns of boxes to be checked, lists of footnotes to be collated, on ZEBRA, analytical listening gives way to the pure pleasure of being in the moment; it’s a celebration of community, of togetherness, of the magic of collaboration. In reaching out to others, Georgopoulos is discovering his own voice for the first time. | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer | June 29, 2018 | 7.6 | 46f1a29e-7cf8-43d5-a5ba-08d9a492c881 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Foxygen seemed to pack a career’s worth of triumphs and travesties into the last two years. *...*And Star Power translates all the exhilaration and exhaustion the band has experienced into an unwieldy 24-song splatter that often sounds like a band at war with itself. | Foxygen seemed to pack a career’s worth of triumphs and travesties into the last two years. *...*And Star Power translates all the exhilaration and exhaustion the band has experienced into an unwieldy 24-song splatter that often sounds like a band at war with itself. | Foxygen: ...And Star Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19769-foxygen-and-star-power/ | ...And Star Power | Embedded within the detailed credits to Foxygen’s …And Star Power is this revelation from guitarist/band co-founder Jonathan Rado: “During our recording process, our only true heated argument was over this song.” The identity of the song in question is immaterial; the very fact Rado felt the need to downplay any perceived infighting with vocalist/foil Sam France speaks volumes about the reputation their band has acquired—one that’s unruly enough to seemingly require some liner-note damage control. Following the release of 2013’s critical success We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, Foxygen seemed to pack a career’s worth of triumphs and travesties into a single album cycle—and, as such, …And Star Power translates all the exhilaration and exhaustion the band has experienced over the past two years into an unwieldy, 24-song splatter that often sounds like a band at war with itself. It’s as if Foxygen is issuing a challenge to all the rubberneckers in the audience by saying, “You think we’re a trainwreck? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Coming from a band that has chalked up its many concert cancellations and onstage meltdowns to tour-induced fatigue, …And Star Power aptly approximates the dislocating sensation of strung-out, sleepless nights in posh hotel rooms that have had the Do Not Disturb sign dangling on the outer-door handle for several days, with moments of lucid (if bleary eyed) introspection regularly giving way to flashes of fever-dream psychosis. The raucous opening warm-up exercise is titled “Star Power Airlines”, a nostalgic nod to that bygone era when rock bands could become popular enough to acquire their own jet fleets, but also a telling indicator of the many random recording locations—from the Chateau Marmont in L.A. to The Magic Shop in New York—that lend this album a whirlwind tour itinerary of its own.
Despite its double-album girth, …And Star Power feels less like a ’70s-rock masterwork than a ’90s indie patchwork in the tradition of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, Sebadoh's III, the Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk at Cubist Castle, and Ween’s earliest brown-outs. This is an album you get lost inside—you don’t so much listen to its four-sided sprawl as free-fall into its increasingly deranged depths. Its kitchen-sink messthetic (parts of which were rendered in Rado’s actual kitchen) encompasses pristine power pop, stoner country-rock, a four-part title-track suite (overture included) that introduces the band’s punk-alter-ego-cum-pirate-radio-station Star Power, space-age bachelor-pad synth doodles, Lou Reed-copping junkie poetry, acid-folk rambles reminiscent of Syd Barrett, Feelies-esque jabber-jangle; and a song that sounds like Suicide crashing a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party. And that’s all before we’ve even reached Side Three (the one accurately subtitled “Scream: A Journey Through Hell”).
In its most fully realized moments, …And Star Power is the album Todd Rundgren could’ve released between Something/Anything? and A Wizard, a True Star, its best songs striking an uncanny balance between the exquisite balladry of the former and the progged-out fantasias of the latter. True, the Runt referentialism is beyond blatant: lead single “How Can You Really” is a perfect mirror reflection of “I Saw the Light”, while “Star Power IV: Ooh Ooh” distills the candlelit intimacy of “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference” into a quick post-coital cuddle. (The press release for …And Star Power actually summarizes the album’s ethos—“rock and roll for the skull"—by quoting Patti Smith’s original Creem magazine review of A Wizard, a True Star. Even this band’s self-aggrandizement comes second-hand.)
But for all their shameless appropriation, Foxygen have become increasingly assured and accomplished songwriters, outfitting standouts like “Coulda Been My Love” (the ironically serene source of the intra-band acrimony mentioned at the top of this review), “Cannibal Holocaust”, and “Everyone Needs Love” not just with silken soft-focus melodies and heavenly harmonies, but ever-evolving arrangements that steer the songs into surprising, splendorous new directions without losing the throughline. At their best, a Foxygen song is like that drunk who seems destined to topple over, only to turn their stumble into a perfect pirouette.
If We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic completed Foxygen’s long-gestating evolution from private recording project to proper band, …And Star Power expands their universe to even greater degree, placing them at the epicenter of a modern psych-rock constellation that includes the Flaming Lips, Of Montreal, White Fence, and L.A. fuzz-popsters Bleached, all of whom make guest appearances here. (And, as if to acknowledge their place on the storied madcap continuum, they give shout-outs to Skip Spence and Kim Fowley in the liners.) At certain points, Foxygen’s generosity of spirit goes beyond merely accommodating a cameo to outright handing over the reins of their album to third parties: the brass-knuckled “Star Power III: What Are We Good For” begins with a Kevin Barnes dispatch live from the corner of Lexington and 125, and Foxygen even admit in the liners they’re entirely not sure what he’s yapping about. The Lips’ Steven Drozd is credited with composing the analog-synth strut “Mattress Warehouse”, while the adrenalizing freakbeat rave-up “Brooklyn Police Station” features White Fence’s Tim Presley in so many different capacities (bass, guitar, harmonies), it’s no surprise the song ends up sounding like it was plucked outright from one of his albums.
Tellingly, the self-produced …And Star Power is Foxygen’s first Jagjaguwar release made without their mentor Richard Swift behind the boards, and while the album shows France and Rado can no doubt craft classic-rock-radio-caliber songs without his compositional expertise, their reactionary attempts at punky aggression and noise experimentation come off as half-baked. Particularly in the album’s back half, it starts to feel like Foxygen decided to make …And Star Power a double album before writing the necessary number of songs to justify one, stuffing the gaps with frivolous filler that wouldn’t be able stand on its own outside of the record’s crazy-quilt framework. And so the lo-fi doom-metal-drone-cum-garage-skronk of “Cold Winter/Freedom” (the wrought-iron gateway into the aforementioned “Scream” side) rambles on for six tuneless minutes, while counterpart track “Freedom II” and “Talk” drive their Nuggets-schooled grooves into the ground through incessant, nonsensical hollering and abrupt structural shifts that don’t so much yield a dramatic effect as betray their lack of direction. Such regressions may be intended to serve as the freaked-out flipside to …And Star Power’s more meditative material, but Foxygen’s “Journey Through Hell” ultimately sounds less like therapeutic catharsis than aimless dicking around for yuks in the practice space.
But for Foxygen, such violent pendulum swings prove to be the musical manifestation of an eccentric spirit they once conveyed lyrically. What ultimately elevated We Are the 21st Century beyond mere classic-rock karaoke was France’s playfully wry observations, which infused Foxygen’s retro affinities with a distinctly modern-day sensibility and irreverence. …And Star Power, however, works the other way: the anarchic sound world is grounded by more sobering songwriting, with France’s once-prominent voice left to float in the psychedelic soup—which means you won’t find any instantly quotable zingers here on par with “No Destruction”. But while France’s words may be more nondescript this time out, the band’s tumultuous recent history suggests platitudes like “You’ve got to hang on”, “How am I going to make it with you?”, and “Where must we go again to become friends?” are genuine, necessary pleas for sanity and serenity.
Accordingly, the impenetrable “Cold Winter/Freedom” is preceded by an endearing little snippet of an eight-year-old France’s earliest recording forays, wherein he acts as the on-air announcer for his own imaginary radio station. “Hold onto your butts and get ready!” little Sam declares, and, in essence, …And Star Power is Foxygen’s attempt to recapture that sort of innocence and wide-eyed enthusiasm after a prolonged, public struggle to keep their shit together. But the retroactive warning is nonetheless appreciated: …And Star Power is a long, bumpy ride back to where Foxygen once belonged, and, at times, your butt is bound to feel sore. | 2014-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | October 13, 2014 | 7 | 46fea59e-1b8a-43b7-8475-82e75b018cce | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On their third LP, Arcade Fire prove they can make grand statements without sounding like they're carrying the weight of the world. | On their third LP, Arcade Fire prove they can make grand statements without sounding like they're carrying the weight of the world. | Arcade Fire: The Suburbs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14516-the-suburbs/ | The Suburbs | Arcade Fire never aim for anything less than grand statements. That quality has played a huge role in making them very, very popular; it's also their greatest weakness. Funeral was wracked with agony and grief, but what made it one of the transcendent records of the 2000s was that it avoided easy answers. It proposed that the fight of our lives is just that, a fight, but a winnable one. But when they turned that same all-or-nothing intensity outward on Neon Bible, otherwise propulsive and elegant songs were sometimes bogged down by overblown arrangements or pedantic political statements. You'd figure an album bluntly called The Suburbs that focuses on The Way We Live might repeat some of Neon Bible's worst tendencies. Instead, it's a satisfying return to form-- proof that Arcade Fire can still make grand statements without sounding like they're carrying the weight of the world.
The metrics of The Suburbs are misleading: At 16 tracks, including interludes and multi-part songs, it might seem like Arcade Fire are shooting for their Sandinista!, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, or Sign O' The Times-- a band at the peak of their powers reacting against the walls closing in by blowing everything up and trying anything. But the album actually plays out more like Bruce Springsteen's The River, a generously paced collection of meditations on familial responsibility, private disappointments, and fleeting youth, much of which takes place in moving vehicles*.* It also reintroduces much-needed levity to an act that can be overbearingly self-serious. On the deceptively chipper chamber pop of "Rococo", Win Butler borders on patronizing, evoking Nirvana's "In Bloom" and using the title word as a sword to skewer an easy target: the hipster more concerned with following trends than locating a genuine understanding in the world around him. But the point is that Butler values directness and truth, and throughout The Suburbs, what he lacks in poetry, he makes up for with honesty.
There's a tension between the uneasily resolving chords and lightfooted piano shuffle on the title track, as Butler sings in a restrained falsetto: "Sometimes I can't believe it/ I'm moving past the feeling." As The Suburbs plays out, that "feeling" is one that lived on Funeral and is dying here. The initial fantasy of Funeral was escaping the neighborhood, dancing beneath the police lights, and living on misbehavior. The Suburbs can be seen as the update decades later, with those same kids having kids of their own, and moving back to and struggling in the same neighborhoods.
The heavy-handedness that marred some of Neon Bible mostly resulted from Butler's warning us of destruction caused by the lies of authority figures-- shady cultural impresarios, corrupt church leaders, politicians all too eager to push the button. But what makes The Suburbs a more humane and empathetic record is that Butler and Régine Chassagne have come to terms with how the pain of our day-to-day lives more often results from the lies we tell ourselves. At the outset of "We Used to Wait", staccato, minor-key piano chords evoke anxiety. The song is a simple lament about the exhaustion from a relentless pace of life that demands everything immediately. But as Jeremy Gara's steady drums lift the piece into cathedral drama, it's obvious that there's a deeper concern than the antiquation of letter-writing. By the time the narrator finds himself with "the lights cut out... left standing in the wilderness downtown," it's a sad reminder that giving up your dreams for a reliable job that pays your way and corrodes your soul isn't even a reliable option anymore. Soul-sucking work was at least once a dependably secure and profitable enterprise. Now what do we do?
The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth. As bleak as the lyrics are, though, they're buoyed by the band's leanest, loosest songwriting yet. These songs are busy, but never overly complicated, subtly nudging at their boundaries while allowing wide lanes for Butler's perfectly memorable melodic turns. The framework is familiar: Arcade Fire's trademark of decorating AOR with orchestral fringe ("Ready to Start", "Empty Room"), sun-baked Harvest gold ("Wasted Hours", "Suburban War"), and in the record's highlights, pulsating electro ("Half Light II [No Celebration]", "Sprawl II [Mountains Beyond Mountains]").
But The Suburbs is a record that seeks to build, and it reaches a monumental peak at its closure. Both parts of "Sprawl" act like a conversation between lovers and a treatise on what makes Arcade Fire tick: Butler's despondence on "Sprawl I (Flatland)" matches the desolate atmosphere that surrounds him-- returning to a mall-spackled hometown is an admission of defeat. But as with their first two albums, the penultimate song towers over what came before: "Sprawl II" is an Arcade Fire song through and through, balancing a sort of defiance in the midst of crushing circumstance ("These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose/ But late at night the feelings swim to the surface"). It's a rare and thrilling example of the group stepping out of their musical comfort zone, an airy disco bounce evoking "Heart of Glass" that serves as further evidence of just how crucial the often underappreciated Chassagne is in tempering Butler's grimmer outlook.
That said, the relative concision of Funeral and Neon Bible didn't allow for a whole lot of wiggle room. And while it's somewhat heartening to hear something allowed to be a "minor" Arcade Fire song, they're still, well, minor. "Month of May" strains too much for a ragged punk glory while the folky, Neil Young-ish strummer "Deep Blue" doesn't develop its Kasparov vs. IBM metaphor into more than an afterthought. And as The Suburbs reaches its second half, there's certainly some thematic redundancy-- surely, there's already a drinking game revolving around Butler's use of "the kids."
There's also the possibility that The Suburbs can be seen as a lesser Arcade Fire album if you mostly value rock music for its escapism. This is another 2010 example of a Boss-indebted band (see also: the National and Titus Andronicus) making epic outpourings of modern disillusionment and disappointment for people who can commiserate and return to fretting about their jobs and bank accounts once the house lights go up. But just because the concerns of The Suburbs are at times mundane, that makes them no less real. And that Arcade Fire can make such powerful art out of recognizing these moments makes our own existences feel worthy of documentation. By dropping Neon Bible's accusatory standpoint, The Suburbs delivers a life-affirming message similar to Funeral's: We're all in this together. | 2010-08-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-08-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 2, 2010 | 8.6 | 4702e710-10b9-4e19-92ff-aeb509ec3d89 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
null | Although weaned on prog-metal, educated in classical music at Harvard, and once viewed as a representative of the indie rock set, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo prefers to write simple music that can be easily enjoyed by a mass audience. It was one of many elements that defined him in the beginning, on his band's hugely popular 1994 self-titled debut (*The Blue Album*), if one of few remaining characteristics defining his music today.
Following poor initial sales of the record's follow-up, the more introspective cult hit *Pinkerton*, Cuomo famously retreated from the public eye. Over the next five years, the band would remain | Weezer: Weezer (Red Album) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11568-weezer-the-red-album/ | Weezer (Red Album) | Although weaned on prog-metal, educated in classical music at Harvard, and once viewed as a representative of the indie rock set, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo prefers to write simple music that can be easily enjoyed by a mass audience. It was one of many elements that defined him in the beginning, on his band's hugely popular 1994 self-titled debut (The Blue Album), if one of few remaining characteristics defining his music today.
Following poor initial sales of the record's follow-up, the more introspective cult hit Pinkerton, Cuomo famously retreated from the public eye. Over the next five years, the band would remain silent, cultivating goodwill and an ever-growing army of fans. But most of that goodwill has deteriorated since their re-emergence in 2001, in the wake of three mediocre-to-awful albums that were, in many ways, the opposite of what made Cuomo's band so adored in the first place.
Sadly, the once burned-out Weezer continue to fade away: Those first two records capture their decade in 75 minutes of near-perfect power-pop: straight-faced irony, eccentric sincerity, meta references, and bipolar guitar distortion from ordinary-looking outcasts who became stars and then complained about it. Punk that's too catchy to offend. Pop that's too smart to cop to itself. And, uh, emo. After Pinkerton, the deluge; rap-metal and post-grunge wound up so thoroughly conquering modern rock that now even staunch rockists are making excited noises about "American Idol" winner David Cook. Hey, somebody's supposed to save mainstream rock'n'roll, right?
Not these guys. Beginning with 2001's so-so Green Album and plumbing Jules Verne depths with 2005's terrible Make Believe, the band began to take on some of the most infuriating characteristics of the very bands that had replaced them during their absence: intelligence-insulting songwriting, cookie-cutter dynamics, questionable facial hair. At the very least, The Red Album (as Weezer have nicknamed their latest) is a first step toward rehabilitation-- a tacit admission that recent discs, with their empty universality and recycled riffs, had a problem. But it's not a return to glory unless you consider 2001 their glory days.
Judging by appetizing first single "Pork and Beans", The Red Album could've been almost as funny and catchy as Pinkerton's "El Scorcho", only from the perspective of a married man coming up on 40. It's as if last year's demos compilation, Alone, helped Cuomo remember how to do this stuff right. His sarcastic mention of super-producer Timbaland's chart magic is as hilarious as it is on-point-- especially after Madonna's dreadful, Tim-helmed #1 single, "4 Minutes". Jacknife Lee (who co-produced the album along with Make Believe overseer Rick Rubin) lets the chorus explode from the mix in a way that little on the radio does anymore. It demands to be sung by millions of uncomprehending bar-goers.
With an opening Rogaine reference, "Pork and Beans" also establishes The Red Album's main theme. Already a self-described "old man" on Pinkerton, Cuomo is focused these days on reliving his lost youth-- probably the same reason some of us still listen to Weezer albums. Lead track and third single "Troublemaker" starts back in school, a faint whiff of existential angst and a surging bridge helping to redeem a vapid chorus and monotonous, familiar-sounding guitars. The laughably bad "Heart Songs" is The Blue Album's nostalgic "In the Garage" schmaltzed up as a sort of name-dropping "Circle of Life"; if Nirvana had "the chords that broke the chains I had upon me," kudos to Cuomo for swiping them on the otherwise forgettable teenage prankfest "Everybody Get Dangerous" (to quote: "boo-yahhh").
At this point, Weezer is as much a brand as a band. When Cuomo relinquishes the mic, The Red Album could be by any group of modern-rock mediocrities. Longtime guitarist Brian Bell gets throaty and twangy like a poor man's Rob Thomas on repetitive non-apology "Thought I Knew", backed by bland acoustic guitar and a TR-808 drum machine. Bassist Scott Shriner speak-sings in creepy stalker mode on "Cold Dark World", with Cuomo swooping to the rescue on the choruses. "Automatic", led by original drummer Pat Wilson, returns to the faceless crunching of 2002's Maladroit.
Not that Cuomo needs other voices to reveal that The Red Album is hardly the work of idiosyncratic auteurship the first couple of singles could've suggested. He sings on peppy, tempo-switching "Dreamin'" and the grandiose finale, "The Angel and the One", but for all their background-friendly polish, both are typical, vacuous latter-day Weezer tracks.
The Red Album's most ambitious song adapts the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts". The melody, played first on piano recalling Pinkerton's "Across the Sea", is more obvious than the Erik Satie snippet Cuomo ganked for The Blue Album's "Surf Wax America", but now, as then, the theft isn't the point. "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" is the warped genius let loose, from half-rapped intro to Queen bombast to baroque a cappella. Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song-- and this album-- relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones. | 2008-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | DGC / Interscope | June 2, 2008 | 4.7 | 47040b9c-897a-48e9-b3eb-f7631ead48e2 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The soul legend presents her loosest and most daring album in years, an affectionate tribute to the underappreciated blues and folk songwriter Randall Bramblett. | The soul legend presents her loosest and most daring album in years, an affectionate tribute to the underappreciated blues and folk songwriter Randall Bramblett. | Bettye LaVette: LaVette! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bettye-lavette-lavette/ | LaVette! | Bettye LaVette sings “Lazy (and I Know It),” from her new album LaVette!, like she’s telling a joke and just realized it’s not funny. “One time I had a day job,” she declares over a bluesy, clock-watching crawl. She draws out those syllables into a languid lament, then switches to comical, matter-of-fact sing-speaking for the next line: “It didn’t thrill me.” It’s a funny yet grave moment, acknowledging the bizarreness of one of the finest song interpreters of the era being confined to a cubicle all day, while reminding you that there’s a real-life danger in dwindling away behind a desk. “Day job for three months, coast for nine,” she strategizes. “Catch me in a nightclub at closing time.”
The song was written by Randall Bramblett, a member of Chuck Leavell’s Georgia fusion group Sea Level as well as a celebrated sideman with Bonnie Raitt, Gregg Allman, and Widespread Panic. In the liner notes for LaVette!, her new album of Bramblett covers, she declares him to be “the best writer that I have heard in the last 30 years.” It’s obvious that she sees him as a kindred soul: a born artist who’s not cut out for day jobs, 401(k) plans, corporate ladders, or anything else that might get in the way of making music all day. These songs speak to the same kind of obsession that motivated LaVette after Atlantic Records dumped her in the 1970s and before she cemented a comeback in the 2000s. “I ain’t got no plan B,” she sings on the breezily funky “Plan B,” an anthem for anyone who doesn’t have a fallback. “Rhythm and blues in the back of my mind/Champagne and a joint would do me just fine.”
While LaVette has recorded several albums devoted to one scene or one artist, LaVette! is different. On 2010’s Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook and her insightful 2018 Bob Dylan collection Things Have Changed, there was a thrill in hearing her remake iconic songs and bend them to her will. Those albums allowed you to gauge and appreciate how completely she could rearrange familiar patterns, how she could raise new questions and introduce new implications, and how she could get away with rewriting Dylan’s lyrics.
Bramblett is no Dylan, no Who, and no Elton John, which means his songs won’t be as familiar to listeners as “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Love, Reign O’er Me” are. So on LaVette!, there’s no sense of her reinventing a popular song or challenging our perception of a popular artist. That’s no criticism: This is her loosest and most daring album in years, an affectionate tribute to an underappreciated figure that could easily be renamed Bramblett! In LaVette’s hands, he emerges as a deft stylist who mixes various strains of Southern music with slyly evocative turns of phrase, self-denigrating humor, and big questions about existence and spirituality.
She locates an absurdism running through his lyrics, darker notes of chagrin and suspicion. On the manically percolating “Hard to Be a Human,” LaVette wonders if the Big Man Upstairs might be responsible for our failures and foibles: “First He made the mountains, then He filled up the seas,” she sings, her delivery growing more sardonic with every word. “But He lost His concentration when He started working on you and me.”
As though arguing for Bramblett’s impact and importance, LaVette and drummer, producer, and musical director Steve Jordan assembled a band of big names for this album. Steve Winwood and Hi Rhythm Section veteran Rev. Charles Hodges both play the Hammond B3 organ, pianist Jon Batiste turns “Mess About It” inside out with a double-time piano solo, and jazz bassist Pino Palladino holds everything together with Jordan on drums. Together, this devises a palette that draws from country and blues, gospel and rock, funk and jazz, and folk and swamp, subtly mirroring the pan-Southern sound that Bramblett has been refining for decades now.
Larry Campbell’s pedal steel adds a country stateliness to the breakup song “I’m Not Gonna Waste My Love,” as though weeping on LaVette’s behalf, while John Mayer makes himself useful by channeling Stax guitarist Steve Cropper on “In the Meantime,” a ballad of regret and resilience that’s one of the album’s saddest songs. “I’m dreamin’ dreams of my used-to-be,” LaVette sings, as though reeling back in time to her years in the wilderness, “Tellin’ everybody I’ll be just fine.” While she has a reputation for making familiar songs sound utterly new, here she finds a way to make Bramblett’s songs tell her story, to let them speak for her. She rewrites his songs simply by singing them. | 2023-06-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Jazz / Pop/R&B | Jay-Vee | June 21, 2023 | 7.7 | 4712ff0f-dbc8-4215-8300-347bf0c75973 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
UK producer Simon Green, now based in New York, was at the forefront of the downtempo electronica scene that bubbled up in the late 90s and early 2000s. His fifth studio album as Bonobo features guest vocals from Erykah Badu and a haunting sense of déjà vu. | UK producer Simon Green, now based in New York, was at the forefront of the downtempo electronica scene that bubbled up in the late 90s and early 2000s. His fifth studio album as Bonobo features guest vocals from Erykah Badu and a haunting sense of déjà vu. | Bonobo: The North Borders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17907-bonobo-the-north-borders/ | The North Borders | A sense of déjà vu haunts The North Borders, UK producer Simon Green’s fifth studio album as Bonobo. It’s almost 15 years since he first appeared with the shy-footed but prescient “Terrapin”, which later appeared on his debut album Animal Magic and helped him find a name at the forefront of the downtempo electronica scene that bubbled up in the late 90s and early 2000s (a period when ambient pop albums like Air’s Moon Safari and Röyksopp’s Melody A.M. were scoring top 10 positions in the UK charts). Drawing on the noodling notions of jazz and trip hop, downtempo became the clubbing generation’s default after-hours music: the sound of a thousand compilation CDs made for slinging on after the club or soothing heads the morning after the night before.
Bonobo stood above the rest because his compositional touch was so instinctive: deftly coaxing complex emotions from machines while employing acoustic instrumentation sparingly to devastating effect. Throughout the 2000s he built on his reputation for sonic storytelling, culminating in his exquisite 2010 album Black Sands. Yet with The North Borders, Green appears to have hit a stumbling block. The balance is skewed and he all but drowns his knack for emotive instrumentation in the kind of introspective production that marked his formative period.
A number of tracks feature a stock approach to progression and release. They begin as densely layered, moody affairs, caught up in themselves and in the past. It’s only in the final minute or so that the underlying instruments are allowed to sing, and when they do the track finally feels alive in the present moment. On opening track “First Fires”, it’s the strings that finally rise above the cloudy production in the closing minute or so that provide the track with an anchor. There’s some truly lovely arrangement towards the end of “Sapphire”, when a chorus of reed instruments purr sagely to one another. Then again on “Ten Tigers” those heart-serrating strings tease in the background only to momentarily-- fantastically-- bloom as the track fades.
The problem is not so much that these instrumental flourishes are too little, too late, but that the tracks that hold them feel over-worked, the layers so dense as to stifle the ideas. “There's nobody there telling me when to stop, so often I end up adding a bunch more elements to the track after I originally thought it was done,” Green said recently. “I often have an idea and it starts splintering off into a whole lot of directions; I'm interested in exploring every single one of them.”
Green recorded the album in his new home of New York, following an extensive year and a half touring Black Sands, and you can hear his exhaustion in the album’s confusion. On one hand he appears to reach for dialogue with the chime-led melodies of Caribou and Four Tet on album standout “Cirrus”, a truly joyful, free moment on the album. But on the other hand, it finds him seeking refuge in a realm he knows inside out: lolloping, jazz-inflected soundscapes. While it sounds like he had fun collecting sounds on his travels-- from a truck’s air brakes to train doors closing on the subway-- they are lost in his layering. Even his track with Erykah Badu feels like a missed opportunity: it’s a sweet enough jam but she’s so deep in the mix on “Heaven For The Sinner” that she slips frustratingly out of focus. While for all intents and purposes The North Borders screams “easy listening,” it’s doesn’t half tie itself up in knots. At its worst-- the limp and dated bumble of “Jets”-- it feels like Bonobo-style music.
That said, his work with new singer Szjerdene has more energy: “Towers” breathes easier, while “Transits” has a narrative depth that largely evades the rest of the album. While it’s exciting that Green will be performing the album live with Szjerdene and a 10-piece orchestra, I can't help feeling he was playing safe by not fully embracing his orchestral exploration in the album’s recording. The North Borders is not a bad album-- for the most, it’s as inoffensive as those decade-old chill-out compilations-- yet a frustration persists because Bonobo is better than this. | 2013-04-12T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2013-04-12T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Ninja Tune | April 12, 2013 | 6 | 4719289e-97bc-408e-a586-730c26a72294 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | null |
The house producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, aka Octo Octa, both describes and comforts anxiety. On this new LP, her candied synths and incandescent songs spiral towards infinity. | The house producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, aka Octo Octa, both describes and comforts anxiety. On this new LP, her candied synths and incandescent songs spiral towards infinity. | Octo Octa: Where Are We Going? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23033-where-are-we-going/ | Where Are We Going? | Several years ago, the producer Octo Octa compiled a mix beginning with one of the earliest house singles, Marshall Jefferson as Hercules’ sinister “7 Ways.” “Visually touch the body in front of you,” Jefferson commands, “caress it with your eyes, drink it in slowly.” He savors the words like a cobra does movement. There are enough layers of dominance and submission to delight Throbbing Gristle. Octo Octa’s own work swims the gulf separating dance music’s utopian, transcendental side from the bodies grinding up against capitalist demands and social alienation—and perhaps each other, too, if a night’s shape allows. She describes and comforts anxiety.
You could call that an acquired skill. Before Maya Bouldry-Morrison was Octo Octa, her solo material drew more from the drums-frenzied school of techno. Her early records often borrowed R&B a capellas, like “I’m Trying,” which reduced Amerie’s “1 Thing” to abashed moans. Her use of compression could be subtly disorienting, giving different sounds tangible presence for only a moment, like ghosts.
With her new album Where Are We Going?, Bouldry-Morrison’s aesthetic has grown more resolved. Her candy-bright synths remain, but the songs have grown increasingly circuitous, elaborating on their own structures. “Adrift” sends a pulse descending through the depths of murky reverb; “Fleeting Moments of Freedom (Wooo)” keeps circling back and starting over again, as if spiraling towards infinity. (It would explain the deadpan title.) Unlike earlier Octo Octa records, vocals are rare, often abstracted—“No More Pain (Promises to a Younger Self)” distorts Mariah Carey over hip-house drums like a kite in a wind tunnel. This distracted introspection is the kind you only experience while dancing, as when the brooding “On Your Lips” makes a synth’s timbre blush incandescently.
Where Are We Going?—the question could be asked in rhetorical despair, or outside a club flirtatiously at 3 a.m. This is the first Octo Octa album since Bouldry-Morrison came out as trans, and on the second part of its title track she interrupts the glistening piano melodies with a refrain: “Do you feel better? Are you going to feel better?” As she turns this interrogation back towards the listener, it reminds me of the vocal samples on DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, which placed beautiful deep house and historical grievances in dialectical intimacy. Bouldry-Morrison never feels bound to offer an answer, but through the vivid ambivalence of her music, you can sense a warming to new possibility. It’s like someone catching sight of themselves at a mirrored corner of the dance floor, smiling faintly, and returning to the party. | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honey Soundsystem | March 25, 2017 | 7.6 | 471c52f7-b521-45e5-8353-08cb439c54f2 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | null |
After two heart-rending albums about the death of his wife, Phil Elverum documents a new kind of heartbreak in a set of duets with Julie Doiron. | After two heart-rending albums about the death of his wife, Phil Elverum documents a new kind of heartbreak in a set of duets with Julie Doiron. | Mount Eerie / Julie Doiron: Lost Wisdom pt. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-eerie-julie-doiron-lost-wisdom-pt-2/ | Lost Wisdom pt. 2 | We cling, briefly, to bits of good news, reminders that happiness still exists outside of corrupt power vacuums. The 2018 marriage of songwriter Phil Elverum and actress Michelle Williams felt like some flotsam floating in a sea of prevailing despair. It was an offering of hope for and from people who needed a second chance. A decade ago, Williams’ estranged partner and her daughter’s father, Heath Ledger, died from a drug overdose. And in 2016, Elverum’s wife and his daughter’s mother, Geneviève Castrée, died after a yearlong battle with cancer. The fallout of Castrée’s death—Elverum’s struggles with solo fatherhood, self-identity, and an aversion to artistry in the face of actual crisis—became the thread of two subsequent albums (2017’s A Crow Looked at Me and last year’s Now Only), harrowing explorations of what it means to be the survivor.
But on Lost Wisdom pt. 2, Elverum reckons with a different sort of lost love: an impending divorce. Less than a year after their small ceremony, news leaked that Elverum and Williams had separated. These eight songs are as close as either has come to a public explanation. In one sense, Lost Wisdom pt. 2 is the third volume in a lovelorn trilogy that began with A Crow, the album on which Elverum faced off with Castrée’s death as though it were a monster, sitting in the same crowded room. Here he is again, a single man squaring up to impossible sadness, telling us about how many text messages invaded his space when word of the split went public. But this is also the sequel to Lost Wisdom, a 2008 series of duets with patient songwriter Julie Doiron, the great singer of Eric’s Trip. On these songs, she is his foil and confidant, the friend keeping him company as he cycles again through stages of grief.
Elverum’s writing on Lost Wisdom is less direct than that of A Crow or Now Only—there are no wrenching tales about the backpack his wife ordered for their daughter before she died, no existential eruptions outside of Skrillex’s tour bus in the Sonoran Desert. It is mostly coded with suggestion and allusion, with Elverum calling Williams not by name but by situation—their vulnerable moment in a bookstore’s second-floor nook, their uncomfortable conversation about growing unease with the need for privacy amid the surveillance of paparazzi. Elverum confesses his wonder-at-first-sight moment with Williams, calling her “a god who walks among us…angelic, miraculous.” He saves the savage details for himself, like when he confesses to showing up at a widow support group unkempt, smelling like salmon, and on the verge of a breakdown.
But that kind of specificity is the exception for Lost Wisdom, where raw feelings are shrouded in symbol and simile. Perhaps because the circumstances of Elverum’s last two albums were so extra-ordinary, these sad songs feel, at times, pedestrian in their drama. However exquisitely rendered they may be, and however strange their circumstances may seem, these are breakup songs. When the guitar suddenly conjures Bon Iver’s “For Emma” a minute into “Love Without Possession,” it all seems a tad obvious and bathetic—a flinch from the sting of an ember cast by the bonfire of love, as Elverum’s steadfast metaphor would have it.
Doiron’s presence, though, is a welcome balm, warming these cold realizations and offering Elverum a steadying hand for some of the most difficult moments. She trails his voice into the final verse of “Belief,” when the impending breakup reframes his life: “Homelessness enthroned us and all the kids, wind-blown.” And she harmonizes with him for every word of the deathly still “Pink Light,” a beautiful bit of poetry where Elverum wonders if this world will keep spinning without him.
What’s more, Doiron’s voice reminds us that there are two parties to this heartbreak, two people contemplating what it means to move past a failed partnership. They deliver the final verse of “Real Lost Wisdom”—an answer to “Real Death” and to the question of what we can learn from colossal hardship—slightly out of sync, like actors split between screens, singing the same epiphanies to one another from different sides of the world. During “Enduring the Waves,” they sing crisscrossing lines, each offering a different take on the same pained realizations. The effect is as vertiginous as heartbreak itself. At one point, Doiron revisits a line from a Galway Kinnell poem that reportedly gave Williams hope after Ledger’s death. “‘The wages of dying is love,’ like the poem says,” she softly offers. “It almost was,” they answer in close harmony. It is a mutual admission that no one here is to blame, a moment of astounding grace for a world always in need of more.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | November 13, 2019 | 7.4 | 471e1b1e-dfb9-4f8d-b1ad-07d36e92dbb6 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
In a few short years, Sia has gone from subverting the mainstream to being the mainstream. In light of that transformation, you'd expect more than an almost play-by-play recreation of her most recent highlights. Her new album This Is Acting can't help but feel like the big-budget sequel to 1000 Forms of Fear's sleeper-hit success. | In a few short years, Sia has gone from subverting the mainstream to being the mainstream. In light of that transformation, you'd expect more than an almost play-by-play recreation of her most recent highlights. Her new album This Is Acting can't help but feel like the big-budget sequel to 1000 Forms of Fear's sleeper-hit success. | Sia: This Is Acting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21481-this-is-acting/ | This Is Acting | At the age of 40, Sia Furler has been through more career phases than her most of her contemporaries combined. By the time "Chandelier," one of the best Top 40 pop ballads of the decade, made her a global superstar, she had already been frontwoman of Australian '90s jazz-fusion band Crisp; vocalist for crossover lounge act Zero 7; and a modestly popular solo artist, whose 2006 song "Breathe Me" was featured in the finale of the HBO drama "Six Feet Under." That's a lot, so when "Chandelier" took off, there was an excitement to seeing this relative underdog succeed so wildly in a traditionally sexist and ageist industry, all without bowing to cookie-cutter concepts of what pop stars should be.
This Is Acting, the follow-up to this surprise attack on the Billboard charts, can't help but feel like the big-budget sequel to 1000 *Forms of Fear'*s sleeper hit. As the much-hyped backstory makes clear, almost every song on the album was written by Sia but rejected by another artist, from Adele to Rihanna to Beyoncé. Most songwriters would perhaps choose not to draw attention to the fact that they've had an album's worth of material passed over by some of pop's biggest names, but to Sia's immense credit, This Is Acting doesn't necessarily sound like a slapdash collection of demos or B-sides. It's a complete piece of work, and one that serves as a commentary on the intersectionality of art and fame by someone who has recently acquired a new level of notoriety. But the sacrifice here is the personal flair that gave her previous album a spark of creativity and set it apart from the songs she had already been writing for other pop stars. In a few short years, Sia has gone from subverting the mainstream to being the mainstream, and in light of that transformation, you'd expect more than a play-by-play recreation of her most recent highlights.
She remains a vocal powerhouse, capable of injecting vitality into even the most formulaic numbers. That aching, slip-sliding, cracked voice reinvogorates the military-drums-and-anthemic-chorus formula on lead single "Alive," and even amidst the record's slow moments, the character of her voice reels you back in: "Broken Glass" seems like a typical, by-the-numbers ballad, until not one, but two belted key changes rescue it from blandness. The Kanye-produced "Reaper" falls a little flat, missing the punch that its intended artist would have provided (Rihanna, in case you were wondering), but it's balanced by the pseudo-reggae lilt of the charming and pleasant "Cheap Thrills."
"Sweet Design," however, hints at the epic-banger party record Sia could put out if she so chose. It's an explosion of the playfulness Sia became popular for (sort of a spiritual cousin of "Buttons" from 2008's Some People Have Real Problems); when she sings "Word travels fast/ When you've got an ass like mine[...]/ Where the mens at?" it's strangely hilarious, irreverent, and above all, fresh-sounding, a song that definitely fares better in her hands than anyone else's. As her star continues to rise, hopefully Sia will concentrate on just that: saving the best for herself. | 2016-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | January 28, 2016 | 6.8 | 47232cbd-7b65-4d2b-8822-ffbdb3d36d20 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Pitchfork: You opened for Wilco recently. How was that?
Greg Saunier: When I was in the audience, watching their show ... | Pitchfork: You opened for Wilco recently. How was that?
Greg Saunier: When I was in the audience, watching their show ... | Deerhoof: The Runners Four | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2256-the-runners-four/ | The Runners Four | Pitchfork: You opened for Wilco recently. How was that?
Greg Saunier: When I was in the audience, watching their show, they would start a song, and people next to me would start hugging each other because they loved that song. And I thought that was something that I would really aspire to. To do something where music becomes-- and this sounds ridiculous or pretentious or something-- but where music becomes more than just good music.* * *
Any band taking cues from Wilco-- let alone the best band in the world-- that's hard to stomach. Says Dominique Leone, "You don't always have to sound poignant to make poignant music." But I appreciate Deerhoof's challenge here: to comb hair without cutting it, to wash face without popping all the pimples, to be the best band in the world, but beyond that, to be the most lovable, too.
So tomorrow, Deerhoof put on their Tuesday best and release their first straight-up guitar-rock album-- short, dense songs packed into familiar forms, full-bodied vocals for unabashed, often gut-punching melodies, less herk-jerk, less of that house-of-cards spirit that coursed through Reveille and Apple O. Some people will miss that.
Milk Man, Pt. 2? Not really. Deerhoof aren't holding back here so much as redistributing their energies; where before we found cute in the grotesque, now the opposite. My offer: I'll concede that Milk Man was poppy, watered down, desperate love shit if you'll actually listen close to The Runners Four and realize that it's onto something else entirely-- by turns jubilant, confused, afraid, angry, sad, relieved, all pretty poignant, yes. They've made us a hugging record. Nothing ridiculous or pretentious about hugging.
Almost twice the length of their other LPs, The Runners Four plays not as one big song, but as three swoops of six or seven. That first swoop (from "Chatterboxes" to "Odyssey") might dishearten the diehard, at least initially. Drummer Saunier, famed for his freakish battery, barely touches the set, but in his absence we get compositional tension, which is sometimes more intense than Saunier's top-down. Dueling guitar lines bristle close in the rub ("Chatterboxes"), and harmonics stab away at Chris Cohen's existential pirate ballad "Odyssey": "Pirates on an odyssey/ We ask the captain 'What will be?'" Now pirates count for some of the biggest douchebags this world has ever seen, but they get scared, too-- people forget that.
"Wrong Time Capsule" starts swoop #2 with Runners' most on-the-sleeves guitar riff, a cry to echo singer Satomi's dejected message in a bottle: "Don't forget me yesterday/ 'Cause today's no place to stay." The trill stays fever-high with unison chants on guitars and vox ("Scream Team"), folksy-bluesy confessions/comeuppance on "After Me the Deluge" ("Middle love I did do you harm whenever I want to"), up to "Siriustar", Deerhoof's sparse-to-gigantic guitar anthem, like nothing they've written before. I think it's about a werewolf.
The next third dips into more emotionally resonant stuff-- the furthest capitulation of Deerhoof's animalism so far, where lyrically they can guess the emotions of all things living (people being chased by spies) or non-living (lightning rods). We can wonder, as they do, if lemons are sad when we eat them, stuff like that, though Deerhoof make sure to push things inside-out, rescuing something human from the rumination. Runners' gut-puncher, the third swoop rounds out with "You're Our Two" as needly guitar lines sandwich Satomi's image-heavy paranoia: "Cast afloat on icy water/ Can I really leave?" then "Ark sailing/ Believe all fools or die."
A somber if slightly perplexing note to end on, it's the right one for this album. But Deerhoof don't leave us there. Instead they give us "RRRRRRight", a chirpy, stark, primitive cut á la "Come See the Duck". Of course, after an album so unafraid to ask for our love, Satomi's ga-gas and oompah-oompahs feel somewhat inconsequential. Then I saw Deerhoof play the song live and understood why they have it here: The song is ginger, a palette cleanser as much for us as for them. Love what happened, they ask, forget what happened, start all over again. | 2005-10-09T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-10-09T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kill Rock Stars | October 9, 2005 | 9 | 472ae8da-f312-420b-bfb3-a202cb3002fd | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
DJ Snake is best known for his endless sugar high “Turn Down For What.” His solo album has a few successfully ridiculous tracks but mostly makes you question the need for its existence. | DJ Snake is best known for his endless sugar high “Turn Down For What.” His solo album has a few successfully ridiculous tracks but mostly makes you question the need for its existence. | DJ Snake: Encore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22197-encore/ | Encore | DJ Snake is a young French DJ and producer best known for his endless sugar high of a song “Turn Down for What,” and, up until now, his big moments have felt worth the tooth rot. Other big time producers from, Afrojack to Zedd, make mostly humorless music. Their drops and major keys work for clubs of course, with huge dynamic shifts that play to the pit of your stomach the same way a roller coaster does. The genius of them is they also work for partying on a smaller scale, like for at-home pregaming. EDM’s lack of subtlety isn’t a fault—it’s the entire point. For the genre, you can often replace questions of “good” and bad” with “useful” or “useless.” EDM is a tool as much as it is a type of music. DJ Snake has taken EDM’s inherent grandeur and played around in its sandbox. “Turn Down for What,” especially, turned the dial past eleven. Its over the top aggression is written into its rhythms. The song has Lil Jon barking at you. It’s ludicrous, and excellently so. After billions of of plays, it’s still not old, as it well overshoots its modest ambitions. In other words, at his best, DJ Snake under-promises and over-delivers.
Unfortunately, we don’t get much of DJ Snake at his best on Encore. Clearly DJ Snake has the ability to make some serious earworms: “Sahara,” with Skrillex, adds an element of surprise, in the form of tablas and chanting. It’s got a predictable buildup and inevitable drop, before some very “Turn Down” esque synth jabs take over. It’s dumb fun. “Ocho Cinco,” the album’s most successfully ridiculous track, mostly eschews vocals (like “Sahara”) and utilizes what basically sounds like a nail gun for most of its drums. It sounds appropriate for driving your car into a wall. Same with “Propaganda,” which follows a similar formula of exuberant pummelling.
But instead of just riding out that vim and vigor, he looks to make a real album, more songs with choruses and verses. Why? There’s a fish with a bicycle comparison to be made here. The album is simply not the format for DJ Snake. The conventional song barely is. He makes tracks. Instead of being, at least, a collection of great, standalone singles, the album is riddled with ill-advised rap songs and bad ballads. At best, “Let Me Love You,” the collaboration with Justin Bieber (who knows his way around silly EDM beats) is forgettable. Jeremih, on “The Half” sounds half awake on the beat’s video game bloops. Closer “Here Comes the Night” with Mr. Hudson is actually pretty good in that slick Ryan-Gosling-movie-credits way. But how a clunker like “Future Pt 2” with limp vocals from Bipolar Sunshine ended up next to these songs is anyone’s guess. Can no one working on these records tell how bad they are?
Ultimately, the question that remains with Encore is really just: Why does this exist? The party tracks on here are exceptional at doing what they do. The guy can make a banger. Surely those songs would have the life they deserve on computer screens and in subwoofers however they’re released. The “Turn Down for What” video has half a billion YouTube views! It’s digestible. In what way does an uneven album help DJ Snake or his fans? Is his ambition to be a producer and songwriter? It probably shouldn’t be. No one needs these wet noodle ballads. They’re inoffensive, sure, but they’re completely unnecessary. Not sure what made him turn down. | 2016-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Interscope | August 11, 2016 | 5.3 | 472d47d6-543c-441b-ac11-5443e0d9a8ae | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | null |
The 25-year-old Norwegian musician is a chameleonic vocal force. Her debut cushions heartache in shadowy, serpentine melodies and shoegaze guitars. | The 25-year-old Norwegian musician is a chameleonic vocal force. Her debut cushions heartache in shadowy, serpentine melodies and shoegaze guitars. | Shikoswe: Back in the Tall Grass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shikoswe-back-in-the-tall-grass/ | Back in the Tall Grass | The coldest moment of Nora Shikoswe Hougsnæs’ debut album Back in the Tall Grass illuminates a breakup in pale blue light. When face-to-face closure doesn’t satisfy her, she sifts through her ex-partner’s online profile, scavenging for connection. A ghostly organ accompanies her on “Two Heads in a Room” as she succinctly captures the moment: “There’s a war between my tenderness for you and the fact that I don’t love you anymore.” She’s sad, not because of the breakup, but because she’s seeking comfort in virtual stalking. Her matter-of-factness drills in the brutality.
As Shikoswe, Hougsnæs brews frothy dream-pop that tucks epiphanies in striking vignettes. The 25-year-old Norwegian musician has been releasing whimsical, surreal music for three years now; 2016’s The Hour of the Body EP indulged morbid curiosity and drew inspiration from René Magritte. On Back in the Tall Grass, she trades her more eccentric interests for an equally uncomfortable exploration of heartbreak. Her prickly vocals are smoothed over and veiled in echo, without the breathtaking intimacy of “This Here,” or the playfulness of “Marie.” Instead, Back in the Tall Grass is haunting and sedate. At her best, Shikoswe elevates her pensiveness into a cosmic, existential query.
With just over a dozen tracks to her name, Shikoswe is already a chameleonic vocal force whose high, clear tone resembles Annie Clark or Kate Bush. Back in the Tall Grass strips away the raw piano and nature sounds of her earlier work, using shadowy, serpentine melodies and shoegaze guitars to cushion the blows of lost romance. Balmy synths and angelic vocals wash over these songs like swirling auras; the echoey reverb and seductive, Cocteau Twins-esque dream-pop produces a warm, psychedelic glow reminiscent of Tame Impala. Withdrawn in the mesh of hazy effects, her voice at times sounds apathetic or consumed by memory. On the title track, she drags herself alongside a weepy keyboard melody, singing, “I was so sure you were gonna let me go for a moment.” A melancholic vortex of synths enshrouds her as she hovers like a phantom, unwilling to accept that it’s over.
Shikoswe doesn’t reveal where her relationship went wrong, or what could have salvaged it. Instead, the album is a mirage of melancholy and grief. Sometimes her understanding of love feels aloof: On “From the Start,” she compares her relationship to flunking out of school. It’s a strange comparison—connecting with another person shouldn’t feel like passing a test. But maybe this is shame and self-indifference rising to the surface. Though she takes all the blame, at times she seems strikingly detached.
Sometimes the magnetic haze surrounding Shikoswe’s music overwhelms her writing and prevents the emotional strife from resonating. The hypnotic current of “Good Intentions” overshadows the significance of the lyrics, and the aching ruminations about death on “Some Days” feel awkward amid choir-like synths. Still, Back in the Tall Grass is a reminder that breakups breed both agony and personal understanding, and Shikoswe finds peace in the end. “Don’t weigh yourself down,” she sings on the closing “Swimming,” absolving herself of guilt by recognizing her own insignificance: “Take a minute and consider that/We are all so small.” At first it’s jarring, then it’s comforting. | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | August 28, 2019 | 7.2 | 4734c8c1-b863-4383-a4bb-d8adb60dd629 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On his solo percussion LP, Jamire Williams shows himself to be an inspired crafter of sound, capable of building entire worlds from just his drum hits. | On his solo percussion LP, Jamire Williams shows himself to be an inspired crafter of sound, capable of building entire worlds from just his drum hits. | Jamire Williams: ///// Effectual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22667-effectual/ | ///// Effectual | It’s not easy for drummers to get the spotlight, especially if they’re the non-singing kind—no matter how prodigiously talented they may be. For every Ahmir “Questlove” Johnson (the Roots) or Damon Che (Don Caballero), there are hundreds of anonymous men and women who pound the back beat while their bandmates take center stage. After years of playing back-up to others, including many in the Leaving and Brainfeeder label nexuses (and, curiously, accompanying Wordpress founder Matthew Mullenweg in his senior recital as a jazz major), drummer Jamire William’ establishes his voice on solo debut ///// Effectual, a surprisingly satisfying record composed almost entirely of his own drumming.
///// Effectual isn’t the first time Williams has put himself out front. Previously he lead the jazz/hiphop/rock band ERiMAJ, who released one more or less overlooked record in 2012; though he was a principal songwriter, he was also just a member and not the group’s singer. But on ///// Effectual, Williams strips away the instruments and melodies, leaving behind only his percussion, both live and looped, all the while posing a direct question about what exactly classifies as a “song.”
Williams adorns a handful of his tracks with melodic accoutrements but ten of ///// Effectual’s fifteen cuts are just in-your-face drum hits. ///// Effectual begins with a sharp, two-handed snare snap on “WHO WILL STAND?” that summons the aforementioned Questlove and his opening to the Root’s “The Seed (2.0).” The similarity is striking, but Williams’ version is a stoned, hazily recorded drummer-on-his-own practice session that gives way to open space instead of a tight rhythm and blues. It’s remarkable how such a short snippet of sound can leave such an imprint, but it sets the stage for ///// Effectual in an odd and effective way.
What most distinguishes Williams’ tracks is a strangely hypnotic and claustrophobic quality , made more striking by the fuzzy recording quality. The fluid compositions sometimes evoke classic solo performances like Max Roach’s “The Drum Also Waltzes” or Tony Williams’ “Echo” stretched out and explored. “Selectric,” with its thudding, dystopic programmed drums, sounds like 21st-century version of Billy Cobham’s “Anxiety,” while the uncharacteristically tight “[ Selah ]”—featuring extra percussion by producer Carlos Niño—gives “Funky Drummer” a run for its money.
An even better reference point for ///// Effectual might be Antonio Sanchez’s magnificent 2014 soundtrack to the film Birdman. There, drums were similarly arranged around musique concrete samples, conjuring an entrancing, insular world that can simultaneously propel or make crazy anyone who dares listen for too long. The skittering pitter-patter of the hi hat on “Illuminations” mirrors Sanchez’s “Almost Human,” and the slow snare brushes of “wash me over (Pollock’s Pulse)” could just have easily been swapped into Birdman with the subtitle “(Keaton’s pulse).”
Yet despite the success of Williams’ solo performances, the album’s numbers featuring additional instrumentation (from other musicians) are without doubt the album’s most listenable. GB (aka Gifted & Blessed) contributes to three of them, the most compelling of which is “TRUTH REMAINS CONSTANT,” which marries an anxious tom thump and cymbal crash rhythm with an airy Oberheim synthesizer. The result recalls pastoral bedroom IDM like Boards of Canada’s “Everything You Do is a Balloon” or cLOUDDEAD’s “(Cloud Dead Number Five) (1)”. Eventually Williams’ drums disappear and the synths are left to rise, giving the sensation that you’re in a hot air balloon about the disappear into the clouds.
Better still are the album’s deliciously paced two closing moments: “collaborate With God,” featuring French composer and Frank Ocean collaborator Chassol and its subsequent remix by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, provider of strings for Niño and others in the Brainfeeder/Leaving headspace. Of the two, the Chassol-only version is preferable, remaining a Jamire Williams track in feel. The latter, while excellent, is dominated by the Atwood-Ferguson strings and shifts the backdrop to something more like moody spy music.
On ///// Effectual, Williams shows himself to be both an inspired composer and tasteful crafter of sound. He can build whole worlds worth spending time in with nothing but drum hits. But, as the fuller tracks suggest, he might make something even deeper and richer if he allowed even one or two more primary colors into the frame. *///// Effectual *provides a powerful blueprint to build on. | 2016-12-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Leaving | December 30, 2016 | 7.2 | 473c56ad-0dec-437e-9bc2-9c6731d3da22 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has said his new album is steeped in positivity, with the implication that he’s having too much of a good time in his new life in England to dwell on the past. My Bloody Valentine's Deb Googe and former SY drummer Steve Shelley contribute. | Former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has said his new album is steeped in positivity, with the implication that he’s having too much of a good time in his new life in England to dwell on the past. My Bloody Valentine's Deb Googe and former SY drummer Steve Shelley contribute. | Thurston Moore: The Best Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19861-thurston-moore-the-best-day/ | The Best Day | The Best Day is not the first music Thurston Moore has released since becoming the most famous—and, in some circles, most reviled—divorcé in American indie-rock. It is, however, the first time he’s released a song-oriented album under his own name since his highly publicized split from long-time wife/bandmate Kim Gordon. And given that Moore’s traditionally used these solo albums to explore more intimate, emotionally resonant songcraft than Sonic Youth’s gnarled guitar jams normally accommodate, it’s not totally unreasonable to expect he’d use this opportunity to reflect upon the recent upheaval in his personal life in a more poetic way than contentious interview sound-bites allow.
But with Sonic Youth officially on indefinite—or is it infinite?—hiatus, The Best Day proves to be not so much a revelatory, introspective antidote to Moore’s best-known band as a serviceable, equally high-voltage substitute for it. The album may not approach the metal-meltdown extremes of last year’s one-off with Chelsea Light Moving, but it does leave the drumstick-scraped guitars and humming amplifiers plugged in, displacing the acoustic quietude of 2007’s Trees Outside the Academy and 2011’s Demolished Thoughts with a distinctly Sonic Youth-ian discord.
Now a London resident, Moore has built a backing band that’s a transatlantic mirror image of the Youth’s classic formation, complete with a certified queen-of-noise bassist in My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe and a Lee Ranaldo-esque guitarist foil (James Sedwards of long-running U.K. math-punk trio Nought) schooled in both classic-rock tradition and avant-garde experimentation. (Playing the role of drummer Steve Shelley is… Steve Shelley, who—given his unwavering Hoboken allegiances—is presumably being paid in frequent-flyer points.) As such, The Best Day proves to be more of a demonstration of this line-up’s intuitive dexterity than a snapshot of Moore’s inner psyche—it's not so much a break-up album as a celebration of breaking free.
Moore recently told Rolling Stone that, from the album title to the quaint 1940s-era cover shot of his mom hugging a dog, The Best Day is an album steeped in positivity, with the implication that he’s having too much of a good time in his new life in England to dwell on the past. But it’s a contentment that’s not so much communicated in the lyrics—which adhere to a familiarly cryptic combination of street-hassle spiel and Catholic-block symbolism—as in the freewheeling spirit that permeates these recordings. (Ironically, the few acoustic-based songs that seem to speak most loudly to Moore’s personal preoccupations—like the cassette fetishism of “Tape” and the grrl-power solidarity statement "Vocabularies”—actually feature lyrics penned by London-based poet Radieux Radio, with whom Moore previously collaborated on a 7''.)
Showing off his newly minted supergroup like a recently acquired sports car, Moore leads with his two most imposing, open-ended tracks: Clocking in at a respective eight and 11 minutes, “Speak to the Wild” and “Forevermore” bracingly announce Moore’s return to sprawling, Sonic Youth-scaled guitar odysseys, with an alluring, live-in-the-room ambience that makes it feel like you’re curling up on the pillow weighing down Shelley’s kick drum. But these colossal songs emphasize what separates this line-up from Sonic Youth as much as the similarities. Even when compared to the Youth’s more even-keeled post-2000s output, there’s an almost ominous steadiness to Shelley’s playing here, as he and Googe lay down a locomotive, locked-groove foundation for Moore and Sedwards' six-string entanglements that’s ultimately closer in spirit to CCR’s extended “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” overhaul.
The FM-radio flashbacks don’t end there: the only way to make the title track’s Keith Richards worship more obvious would be to call it “Stones” (had Moore not already used that name a decade ago), while even the stripped-down “Vocabularies” is centered around a chugging riff oddly reminiscent of “Smoke on the Water”. But while the loose, carefree nature of The Best Day supports Moore’s claim that he’s having “so much fun” playing with his new band, the top-heavy sequence gives the album a lopsided feel, with its two opening monster tracks establishing an immersive intensity that the shorter, scrappier songs in its wake never quite recapture. (Though “Grace Lake”, an instrumental that follows a similar chiming-to-churning course as way-underrated 1998 Sonic Youth epic “Wildflower Soul”, comes close.) Tellingly, in a recent interview, Moore admitted he positioned “Germs Burn”—a more oblique manifestation of his unyielding Darby Crash obsession—as The Best Day’s closer not because its contrast of gleaming guitar jangle and hardcore-inspired staccato phrasing makes for a particularly dramatic finale, but simply because he was unhappy with his vocal performance on it and wanted to bury it. All of which suggests that, with The Best Day, Moore is really laying the groundwork for a better tomorrow. | 2014-10-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 20, 2014 | 7.1 | 47437211-99a6-4399-90c5-2fa3fb075c2a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Natural is the best of Kool A.D.’s 10 (!) projects released in 2016, setting aside his deconstructive tendencies in favor of structured songs with intriguing, clever, and funny rhymes. | The Natural is the best of Kool A.D.’s 10 (!) projects released in 2016, setting aside his deconstructive tendencies in favor of structured songs with intriguing, clever, and funny rhymes. | Kool A.D.: The Natural | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22751-the-natural/ | The Natural | In 2016,Victor Vazquez (aka Kool A.D.) released 10 albums, a staggering output that that rivals 2010s Gucci Mane or mid-’00s Lil Wayne. Across 282 tracks, he sang his own praises more than ever, maybe hoping to will his oft-repeated (however ironically and/or seriously) “best rapper in the world” claim into reality. Unfortunately, Vazquez was sometimes derailed by the actual music. Many songs and plenty of freestyles were lazily thrown together, likely by design. For example, “Arts & Leisure” (from July’s 100-song Zig Zag Zig) is just a pitched-up version of a 2012 Action Bronson collaboration. Vazquez’s final album of the year, The Natural, is also the best of the 10, setting aside his deconstructive tendencies in favor of structured songs with intriguing, clever, and funny rhymes. The project lives up to its title, showcasing a nonchalantly brilliant rapper.
The Natural is cohesive, with all of the beats courtesy of frequent collaborator and fellow Bay Area resident Amaze 88. Sample-driven and blissed-out, the instrumentals keep the album moving when Vazquez threatens to drift off into the free-associative abyss. Leaning on his natural ability as the album’s concept, Vazquez sounds relaxed, effortlessly connecting thoughts. Nothing sounds forced, and he occasionally finds depth (“I feel the need to transmit my intellect along with the folly of my pride”) and humor (“the Scritti Politti scrivener”). He loves repeating himself, whether it is his own lyrics or those of others, and he may be realizing that if he wants to continue using his own bars over again in various songs, he needs to come up with some new signature phrases.
Vazquez often buries insight in his lyrics to equalize the ordinary with the profound: All thoughts are valued on a Kool A.D. album. The Natural continues the trend, as he juxtaposes a line like, “Live for the common good of people, not capital” (“The Natural”), with a later one on “Lay Up” where he intentionally mispronounces “library” and brags about oral sex. It flattens the scope of rap, insisting that words are inherently meaningful and meaningless, and lines are just combinations of sounds and musings. Or, as he raps on “Fatwa”: “I speak with no notion of convincing you of anything.” It’s an impulse that both pushes forward and undermines Vazquez’s work: He understands the art form conceptually possibly like no other, and his continued output demonstrates a near-addiction to rap, but too often it serves as an excuse to deliver inferior product that works only theoretically. | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 10, 2017 | 6.7 | 4743b772-4a3e-4ad4-8414-6536aa6e213a | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Channeling stripped-back pop songs into hushed folk arrangements, the Seattle singer-songwriter’s 15th album confronts life’s impermanence in terms tender yet unsentimental. | Channeling stripped-back pop songs into hushed folk arrangements, the Seattle singer-songwriter’s 15th album confronts life’s impermanence in terms tender yet unsentimental. | Damien Jurado: What’s New, Tomboy? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damien-jurado-whats-new-tomboy/ | What’s New Tomboy? | On his 15th album, Damien Jurado confronts impermanence with arresting frankness. Across What’s New, Tomboy?’s 10 songs, a close friend perishes onstage, a plane smashes into the side of a mountain, and a long sought-after romance promises a dark comfort: someone to die with. Jurado may examine the unpleasant, but his observations are aren’t needlessly morbid or cynical, nor tortured or overwrought. Instead, Jurado allows these reflections to drift by like a steady current, never lingering long enough to invite undue scrutiny. In this 30-minute collection of vivid impressions, Jurado positions his voice at the front of the mix, braced by subtle and warm folk arrangements. His words are still just above a whisper, but they’re impactful as ever.
What’s New, Tomboy? is, unsurprisingly, a quiet album, but it is noticeably less quiet than its predecessor, 2019’s In the Shape of a Storm, which also featured 10 brief entries. But while those songs were built entirely around acoustic guitar and Jurado’s tempered chest voice, What’s New, Tomboy? features an expanded palette courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Josh Gordon. Gordon was present on In the Shape of a Storm (playing high-strung guitar), but here he lays down bass, electric guitar, drums, Hammond organ, Rhodes, and more. Jurado extends himself as well, adding Mellotron and percussion to his usual repertoire. The effect is hushed but rich, and Gordon’s presence adds levity to Jurado’s melodies: His guitar licks on “Arthur Aware” and opener “Birds Tricked Into the Trees” twinkle as they refract off Jurado’s dusky voice.
Gordon might be the reason that What’s New, Tomboy? at times sounds like a stripped-back pop record. Jurado recently admitted to Aquarium Drunkard that in the past year he’s become a first-time Beatles fan (“at 47 years old!”), suggesting that this may have partly influenced the simple structure of these new songs; there’s also a McCartneyesque feel to Gordon’s basslines. But despite What’s New, Tomboy?’s enlivened arrangements, the most interesting element is his lyrics, packed with fragments of daily life and ruminations on death. Mid-album ballad “Fool Maria” relays a series of contradictory images, at first lovely and then tragic. He likens a woman’s eyelids to a closing curtain “that lets you know it’s over.” “We are fiction as it’s written/The bleeding ink on paper,” Jurado sings, accenting his words with fingerpicked guitar. “Quiet as an aeroplane/Before it hits the mountain.” It’s like Jurado has baked a fish into a birthday cake—you eat a forkful of something sweet only to bite into a pungent and unpleasant surprise.
Jurado doesn’t have a regimented writing schedule; his songs show up when he’s occupied with other things, whether that’s laundry, television, or even sleep. Avoiding the process is the process, and it’s likely the reason his lyrics sound so inspired and original. On the driving “Arthur Aware,” banshee-like backing vocals swirl around the dark fable, and a character named Mr. Will shares a cryptic secret: “I keep all of my prized reflections/In glass jars from the coroner,” he says. “And when I get bored of looking at myself/I trade the gray for the shade of someone else.” Singular passages like this are marbled throughout the album, and they don’t sound like belabored phrases that have been erased and rewritten a thousand times. Instead, they seem to have appeared to Jurado fully formed while he was walking through the grocery store—slippery thoughts that will dissolve if not documented immediately.
If Jurado’s ideas are fleeting and intangible, that might be because he thinks life is, too. On “Ochoa,” Jurado sings to his late friend and longtime collaborator Richard Swift, who died in 2018 of complications from alcohol addiction. “Absence tunes the choir/Symphonies of you,” Jurado sings, again disrupting a serene image with a death knell: “You turn to sing, you’re gone/The show must go on.” But Jurado is quick to comfort his lost friend with the knowledge that he won’t be long behind. This sentiment is reinforced on “The End of the Road,” perhaps the album’s best song. Here death is lassoed to devotion. Gordon’s walking, bulbous bassline guides Jurado and his partner down a winding one-way street. We all know what’s at the end of it, but Jurado makes time to take in the bewildering scenery along the way.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mama Bird | May 12, 2020 | 7.3 | 47479fe5-054c-4c1c-8745-0a61ae42d2cb | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5eb5cd3ed7b4ffbd265094c3/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/What%E2%80%99s%20New%20Tomboy?_Damien%20Jurado.jpg |
On their second album of the year, the ever-mutating Aussie psych-rock outfit embrace throwback thrash metal to soundtrack the end of life on Earth. | On their second album of the year, the ever-mutating Aussie psych-rock outfit embrace throwback thrash metal to soundtrack the end of life on Earth. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Infest the Rats’ Nest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-infest-the-rats-nest/ | Infest the Rats’ Nest | Heavy metal demands true devotion. It disdains the hipster tourist; it maintains purity through its own antifa(lse metal) movement; it requires that at least 85 percent of your wardrobe be given over to black band t-shirts. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, on the other hand, are non-commital by nature—the ever-mutating Aussie psych-rock outfit are synonymous with impulsive aesthetic shifts, resulting in a deep, frequently updated discography in which no two albums sound alike. But even by the Gizzard’s scatterbrained standards, 2019 has yielded two albums so diametrically opposed, you’d think one of them was mislabeled. Following the whimsical electro-glam boogie of April’s Fishing for Fishes, the Gizzard return with Infest the Rats’ Nest, an album that embraces the contentious stance that metal isn’t necessarily a way of life, but a passing mood we all feel from time to time.
Infest the Rats’ Nest’s throwback thrash isn’t just a matter of Gizzard king Stu Mackenzie upgrading his favorite Lemmy band from Hawkwind to Motörhead; it’s a raging response to a world where even the most despairing UN climate reports barely make a blip. King Gizzard are no strangers to getting heavy, but Infest the Rats’ Nest is their most succinct and single-minded statement to date, presenting a vision of modernity where fleeing Earth to begin civilization anew in outer space looks less like sci-fi and more like docudrama. And when devising a soundtrack to imminent eco-pocalypse, drug-resistant disease, and furious contempt for the planet-killing powers that be, only the most merciless metal will do.
With a handful of members tending to other musical and familial obligations, Infest the Rats’ Nest finds the Gizzard in a rare power-trio formation: Mackenzie is backed by fellow guitarist Joey Walker and drummer Michael Cavanagh. As a result, the album forsakes thrash’s technical precision and more grandiose, prog-inspired qualities for a gritty immediacy redolent of the genre’s early days. While jackhammer beats and gratuitous shredding abound, the album also shrewdly connects the dots between thrash and its ’70s-metal forebears: The murderous charge of “Planet B” (as in: “there is no”) peels down the asphalt laid by Deep Purple’s “Highway Star,” while “Mars for the Rich” mimics the bloozy, brontosaurus chug of Black Sabbath’s “Hole in the Sky.” But if King Gizzard’s take on thrash still bears their stoner-rock stamp—particularly on the sludgy “Superbug”—Mackenzie treats the occasion like heavy-metal Halloween, abandoning his natural singing voice for a Venomous bark that favors hook-free howls and minimalist rhymes (“Counterfeit! Hypocrite!”; “Auto-cremate! Self-immolate!”) to hammer home his doomsday prophecies. (Only lines like “shoot the dingo while the shit goes out the window!” remind you that you’re still listening to Australia’s most proudly absurd rock group.)
Coming from a band that was singing wistfully about birdies just a few months ago, Infest the Rats’ Nest is a convincing display of metal muscle. But as heavy as the album is, it feels slight in the context of the band’s catalog, lacking both the unpredictable detours of their biggest rock-outs and the insidious melodies of their more pop-focused work. At their best, King Gizzard absorb an array of seemingly incompatible influences into a sound uniquely their own, with a careening momentum that ensures you’re never really sure where they’re taking you. Infest the Rats’ Nest, on the other hand, is a rock’n’roll spin class—intense and relentless, to be sure, but ultimately fixed in the same spot. Even when the album’s second side introduces a conceptual narrative about a group of people who escape Earth to live on Venus (spoiler: things do not end well), it doesn’t venture anywhere—musically or thematically—it hasn’t already been. As the Gizzard’s two releases this year respectively prove, they’re not afraid to push their sound to its most playful and punishing extremes. But it’s always been more thrilling to hear them excavate the uncharted territory in between.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flightless / ATO | August 17, 2019 | 6.7 | 474ed870-8421-4f17-9025-85b07bba2e44 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
In 1980, Grace Jones decamped to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas where she worked with producers Alex Sadkin and Island Records’ president Chris Blackwell, as well as a crack team of session musicians rooted by the rhythmic reggae force of Sly & Robbie. Across three critical and commercial hit albums, with 1981’s Nightclubbing as her pinnacle, Jones reinvented herself while also altering the face of modern pop. | In 1980, Grace Jones decamped to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas where she worked with producers Alex Sadkin and Island Records’ president Chris Blackwell, as well as a crack team of session musicians rooted by the rhythmic reggae force of Sly & Robbie. Across three critical and commercial hit albums, with 1981’s Nightclubbing as her pinnacle, Jones reinvented herself while also altering the face of modern pop. | Grace Jones: Nightclubbing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19222-grace-jones-nightclubbing-deluxe-edition/ | Nightclubbing | Like Josephine Baker nearly 50 years before her, it was when Jamaican-born Grace Jones left New York City and went to Paris in 1970 that she went from being mere Wilhelmina Agency model to international cause célèbre. Towering at nearly six feet, with an obsidian skin tone and facial features like flint rather than flesh, Grace Jones and her androgynous looks made her a sensation in the fashion world. She stalked the runways for Yves St. Laurent and Kenzo Takada, roomed with Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall, served as muse for photographers like Helmut Newton and appeared on the covers of Elle and Vogue.
Fashion world conquered, Jones then returned to NYC, habituated Studio 54 (sometimes in nothing more than her birthday suit), and conquered disco, recording three albums with the man who invented the very notion of the form, Tom Moulton. Jones’ choice of covers on those albums ran the gamut from dreck like “Send in the Clowns” to a stunning rendition of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose,” her flat monotone speak-singing voice atop a flamboyant overly-dramatic backdrop that veered often into camp. When the disco backlash began in earnest, Jones set her sights on a new realm to conquer: new wave.
In 1980, Grace Jones decamped to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas where she worked with producers Alex Sadkin and Island Records’ president Chris Blackwell, as well as a crack team of session musicians rooted by the rhythmic reggae force of Sly & Robbie. (This group would eventually be dubbed Compass Point All Stars, supplying island grooves for everyone from Robert Palmer to Tom Tom Club to Black Uhuru.) Across three critical and commercial hit albums spanning from 1980’s Warm Leatherette through 1982’s Living My Life --with the expanded reissue of 1981’s Nightclubbing as her pinnacle-- Jones reinvented herself, while also altering the face of modern pop.
Fashion, art, and music all converged in the form of Mrs. Jones and looking out at the 21st century musical landscape, it’s easy to see her influence: Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Grimes, FKA twigs, and more. Beyond that, there’s an entire subset of alternative music that draws on the template set by Jones and her Nassau backing band: Massive Attack, Todd Terje, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, and LCD Soundsystem all emulate those rubbery yet taut grooves of Sly & Robbie and cohorts, a hybrid that amalgamated rock, funk, post-punk, pop and reggae. So curiously strong was Grace Jones’s influence on pop culture of the early '80s that not only did she pioneer the androgynous look in fashion (as styled by Jones’s then-beau Jean-Paul Goude), she was even able to turn her chiseled bodyguard boy toy into an action star. It's but one of many examples of Jones' singular existence in pop culture (who else nearing retirement age could command a stage with the likes of both Lil’ Kim and Luciano Pavarotti, or perform for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee while hula-hooping?).
On the album’s opener, a cover of Flash and the Pan’s “Walking in the Rain”, Jones growls in her contralto about “Feeling like a woman/ Looking like a man.” Noirish, foreboding, sounding rain-slicked, the beat crafted by Sly Dunbar with percussionist Uzziah (Sticky) Thompson is undeniable across its four minutes. But it’s on the second disc, where many of the album tracks' running times are extended towards the sublime, that the now seven-minute song soars even higher. It also doubles as a showcase for keyboard wizard and the Nassau band’s secret weapon, Wally Badarou, a classically-trained synth session man who’s C.V. includes M’s “Pop Music” and Level 42’s “Something About You.” Badarou's extended solo evokes a tone not unlike Miles Davis' muted trumpet: gorgeous, weightless, it's as brooding and wistful as a midnight walk in the rain can be. On Grace Jones’s take on the tango “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango),” Badarou mimics both Argentinean tango master Astor Piazzolla’s bandoneon and that eerie organ tone of “Runaway”.
But of course, Grace Jones is the star here. Five of the original album’s nine songs are covers, though rather than fealty to the source material, Jones sounds as if she’s shredding the songbook with her bare teeth. She treats each cover not as a singer tackling a song, but as an actor inhabiting the skin of a role. She sneers the Police’s “Demolition Man” as if she's a villainess leveling a hospital, inverting the gender and notions of sexual dominance in her lascivious take on Bill Withers’ “Use Me.” Dubbing out the zombiefied pacing of “Nightclubbing”, Jones intones Iggy Pop’s lines with the detachment of a dominatrix contemplating her cat o’nine tails, while a previously unreleased cover of Tubeway Army’s “Me! I Disconnect From You” sets it in a sleek reggae setting.
Another bonus track is labeled “Peanut Butter,” which some disco fans will recognize as the title of another Sly & Robbie & Wally track (as remixed by Larry Levan), made for Gwen Guthrie on her 1985 mini-album Padlock. But here, “Peanut Butter” is the beat that Grace Jones turned into her Top 10 single and Paradise Garage anthem, “Pull Up to the Bumper.” Originally deemed “too R&B” by Chris Blackwell, Jones finally got her hands on the pistoning riddim and turned it into one of the most profane singles in pop/dance music history. Long black limousines, commands to “pull up” and coos of “let me lubricate it” make it one of the finest parallel parking metaphors for butt-fucking. At a time wherein a song about a "gigantic" interracial lover can soundtrack a tech giant's new promotional ad campaign, one hopes that soon a car company will do the same for Grace Jones' most wanton pop moment on a record that further cemented her iconic status in pop culture. | 2014-05-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Island | May 1, 2014 | 9 | 4756d0ad-3bd3-48d0-ab37-59adb0ae5611 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Richmond metal quintet’s fourth album is its most intense and most rewarding: a virtual symphony of pummeling, dissonant riffs sculpted with unrelenting precision. | The Richmond metal quintet’s fourth album is its most intense and most rewarding: a virtual symphony of pummeling, dissonant riffs sculpted with unrelenting precision. | Inter Arma: Sulphur English | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inter-arma-sulphur-english/ | Sulphur English | Sulphur English is a tempest. The unrelenting intensity of Inter Arma’s fourth album is common in metal, but its monolithic power is striking for a band long defined by its dynamics. On its previous three full-lengths, the Richmond quintet has tested a theory that the apocalypse would sound more real if it invoked the totality of the landscape: lush gardens of British folk in one corner, the winding roads of Southern rock stretching out in the distance, the wide open skies of prog above. This ability to shapeshift has yielded a catalog that feels vast but interconnected: different topographies along the same map.
On Sulphur English, with little territory left to cover, Inter Arma set fire to it all. The riffs are pummeling and dissonant, as if melting and losing shape in real time. The songwriting operates on a principle of tension and repetition. Less melodic and more aggressive than anything they’ve recorded, it’s a test of endurance through which the band seems to grow more focused with each passing minute. Yet these songs do not simply suggest Inter Arma’s dark unburdening, their primal howl after a series of masterfully composed opuses. Instead, they spiral with the patience and precision of some dismal symphony. With Sulphur English, Inter Arma expose the nightmare world that’s lingered below the surface of all their previous work.
Vocalist Mike Paparo has discussed using these songs to address his struggles with depression, and the record itself is dedicated to two of the band’s colleagues who died in recent years: Bill Bumgardner of Lord Mantis and Indian, for whom the ominous opening track is named, and Adrian Guerra of Bell Witch, whose mournful doom metal echoes through the album’s quieter moments. Its darkness feels personal, lived-in. The bluesy and exquisite “Stillness” and the funeral march of “Blood on the Lupines” touch on the classic-rock-influenced ballads from 2016’s Paradise Gallows; but where those songs were defined by their sweeping momentum, these seem to burrow deeper into themselves, unwilling to transcend.
In the absence of the band’s boundless experimentation, the heavier songs adhere to a traceable lineage of atmospheric death metal. In “Citadel,” drummer T.J. Childers—who has long been Inter Arma’s most versatile member—alternates between plodding fills and ghastly blast beats. It sounds like a sudden free fall rendered in slow motion. The album’s best moments find similar inspiration in their descent. The closing title track repeatedly collapses into slow, claustrophobic breakdowns, like a traffic jam in hell, before imploding in chaos, courtesy of guitarists Steven Russell and Trey Dalton.
From the beginning, Inter Arma have been interested in grand statements: Their songs are complicated and their albums are long, and their ambition sometimes seems limited to the sprawling tone shifts in their material. So while Sulphur English is their least welcoming album, it is also their most rewarding. Standout tracks like “The Atavist’s Meridian” and the gothic, percussive “Howling Lands” indicate a band able to capture its passing moods—helplessness, rage, devotion—and shape them into something whole, merciless yet refined. With Sulphur English, they’ve delivered a cohesive vision of internal destruction, all the more explosive for everything they’ve left behind. | 2019-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | April 15, 2019 | 8.1 | 47585f03-799b-46f4-af83-4e9ea662601d | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The heavy-hearted G.O.O.D. Music debut from the young singer is a refreshingly new take on eclectic, lovesick soul music. | The heavy-hearted G.O.O.D. Music debut from the young singer is a refreshingly new take on eclectic, lovesick soul music. | 070 Shake: Modus Vivendi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/070-shake-modus-vivendi/ | Modus Vivendi | The best moment from Kanye West’s ye, his much-maligned album from 2018, was crafted by 070 Shake. The 22-year-old singer’s chest-thumping appearance on “Ghost Town” was a glimmer of promise amid a heap of sloppy, single-take recordings, one of the few times on the album actually seemed transcendent. Her debut, Modus Vivendi, proves our ears weren’t deceiving us. The album is intensely sincere, with the New Jersey native proudly serving her soul raw atop bullish, beautiful production. It is the most compelling and complete release under G.O.O.D. Music since Pusha T’s Daytona.
The heavy-hearted vibes begin immediately on the opener, “Don’t Break The Silence.” Shake’s ambered voice rises over a floating synth and describes a lover who isn’t quite ready to break things off. “If you were liquid, you’d be bitter like wine/Till then I’ma drink, stay here for the ride,” she hums out. The feelings of desire, being desired, and all the messiness in between are at the center of Modus Vivendi, a Latin term used to describe an arrangement between two conflicting parties in the hopes of coexisting peacefully. For Shake, that harmony is elusive, not only in her relationships with women but also in her own heart. On “Terminal B,” she grapples with whether the warm feelings of a relationship can be trusted, poking at it like it’s too good to be true. “Yeah baby, she’s on lockdown love,” she murmurs before immediately second-guessing herself: “Maybe she is not down.”
All this heaviness is packaged neatly within bright melodies built for lovesick kids to belt out at Coachella and Rolling Loud. This gives her songs a tone of triumph and catharsis rather than total defeat, like on the hook for “Morrow,” where she dejectedly lets a partner know, “I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow,” but stretches out the last word in snappy fragments, similar to Rihanna’s ad-libs on “Umbrella.” She goes for a higher register on “Come Around,” where she cries out for someone to join her in her loneliness, like she’s trapped at the bottom of a well, yelling at a sliver of sky.
The elasticity of her voice isn’t always utilized properly here, perhaps the result of too much experimentation in the studio. On a few tracks, she ventures too far into trap-rap territory, dumbing her voice down to a mumbled delivery, like on “Rocketship,” which could serve as a Travis Scott reference track in how similar it is to his auto-tuned sound. She dips heavily into voice modulation on the album as a whole, recently telling Pitchfork that this was done to make her sound “more real.” In actuality, it achieves the opposite effect, creating a degree of separation between her in and the listener by placing a governor on the amount of emotion she conveys. At times, you find yourself yearning for her voice to be left more naked and vulnerable.
These are largely the only missteps on an otherwise richly produced album. Modus is essentially the antithesis of the half-baked works that arose from Kanye’s Wyoming sessions in 2018. It is the result of a handful of talented collaborators who provide enough eclecticism to balance out the bombastic sound of G.O.O.D. in-house producer Mike Dean. For every “Come Around” built on the same roaring synths Dean supplied for Yeezus, there’s an infectious ’80s-inspired jam like “Guilty Conscience.” “The Pines,” meanwhile, is constructed on a distorted chant similar to the one played out on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy switch-up “Hell Of A Life,” but finishes with a thunderous string arrangement, giving Dean’s sound some refreshing variance.
The most inspired works, though, come from former Stills member Dave Hamelin, who gives Shake ethereal, dreamy soundscapes to navigate through, none more pretty than the closer “Flight319.” Over astral chords that conjure images of misty daybreak, Shake encapsulates her internal tug of war by alternating between lines of confidence and shame, optimism and fear. Eventually, the drums cut out and she hits a point of reflection: “Oh, I’ll never know, how long I’ll stay, how far I’ll go.” Everything is in agreement, even if it’s just for a moment. | 2020-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | January 21, 2020 | 7.3 | 475921d6-b7d7-4d04-ab9d-21b9a4b5dd1f | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
The Turkish sound artist balances technical precision, emotional potency, and trenchant cultural critique on an album whose individual sounds are as compelling as their widescreen narratives. | The Turkish sound artist balances technical precision, emotional potency, and trenchant cultural critique on an album whose individual sounds are as compelling as their widescreen narratives. | Ipek Gorgun: Ecce Homo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ipek-gorgun-ecce-homo/ | Ecce Homo | In the work of Ipek Gorgun, small moves and grand gestures are equally important. Before she molds her instrumental electronic music into massive shapes, the Turkish sound artist infuses it with precise detail. “I work with milliseconds in the beginning, then I switch to seconds, then to minutes,” she once explained. “At the end, I think about the whole arrangement of the structure... So I zoom in, zoom out, and try to find a way to fit everything in place.” As a result, her compositions connect on the micro level of individual sounds as well as on the macro level of widescreen narrative.
On first listen, Ecce Homo, her second solo album, seems more about the micro. It opens with the tactile chimes of “Neroli,” a track that gets progressively denser but never loses sight of the sonic molecules that comprise it. Gorgun has a talent for spinning fine-tuned sounds that stay resistant to blur no matter how thick her mix becomes. It’s easy to get lost in those textures, the shiny whirrs and low rumbles and drilling noise. But as the album moves forward, Gorgun’s ever-deepening forests prove to be just as compelling as the trees they encompass.
As technical as all of this may sound, Ecce Homo can be quite moving. On pieces like the creeping, piano-echoed “Reverance” and the expansive, atmospheric “To Cross Great Rivers,” Gorgun uses both natural sounds and utterances that feel alien to create habitable worlds. She can sustain these attention-commanding arcs over long stretches, too; on the consecutive tracks “Le Sacre I” and “Le Sacre II,” extended tones and pointillist stabs seem to echo the cycle of calm and nerves that so often characterizes the mood of a momentous occasion. The emotion in Gorgun’s music is sneaky, though. Her technique is so fascinating that you might not notice, at first, that the music is working on your mood as much as on your intellect.
What makes Ecce Homo even more compelling is that, though her music is generally pretty abstract, Gorgun doesn’t shy away from pointed statements. This is most apparent in her use of vocal samples, which ground her open-ended sounds. The most stunning example is “Bohemian Grove” (a reference to the California campground that hosts an annual retreat for an all-male cabal of political elites and the ultra-wealthy), which blends quotes from fearmonger Alex Jones into a hellscape of metallic horror sounds. It’s a risky move; trying to make meaningful art out of cartoonish grandstanding could easily result in a simplistic critique. But by applying the same techniques she uses throughout Ecce Homo, Gorgun creates a work complex enough that it can take multiple listens to fully appreciate.
Most of Ecce Homo is not that literal, however, as Gorgun proves adept at making music that feels universal while retaining her very specific signature. This talent helped make Perfect Lung, the collaborative album she released with Toronto producer Ceramic TL last year, sound unique without throwing out any compositional rulebooks. But it’s when she’s patiently stitching together whole sonic universes on her own that Gorgun’s musical identity is at its most potent. On Ecce Homo, each tiny step reveals the will to run a marathon. | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Touch | September 8, 2018 | 7.5 | 475a0b0b-5b58-4aed-b900-d2b19cd896dc | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Three years after his 2017 opus Drunk, Stephen Bruner returns with more fleet-fingered jams and abstracted musings, this time a little more unpolished. | Three years after his 2017 opus Drunk, Stephen Bruner returns with more fleet-fingered jams and abstracted musings, this time a little more unpolished. | Thundercat: It Is What It Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thundercat-it-is-what-it-is/ | It Is What It Is | Thundercat the bassist and Thundercat the lyricist arise from separate sides of Stephen Bruner’s brain. The former is a fleet-fingered virtuoso, plucking out lines as dazzling and complex as a star system. The words on top of those basslines, meanwhile, are far less methodical, fraught with hazy existential questions, references to getting so smashed he can’t find his shoes, and shout-outs to his cat. Together, they form songs that sound equally enchanting and unfinished, frivolous and deep. Drunk, his 2017 opus, effortlessly toed the line between Bruner as mighty bandleader and introverted doodler, with immense funk grooves slotted next to sonnets about feeling strange.
It Is What It Is could serve as a companion piece to Drunk, even though it arrives more than three years later. Bruner is still getting tipsy and pondering what waits for us in the beyond. There’s growth and acceptance in that wonder—the title suggests as much— but not necessarily in the songwriting. The album lacks the anchoring power of a full-bodied jam like “Them Changes,” “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” or even his 2011 George Duke cover “For Love I Come,” leaving us lost inside Bruner’s mind.
That isn’t always a bad place to be. “I Love Louis Cole” (featuring—who else?—Brainfeeder artist Louis Cole) could score the Willy Wonka Tunnel Of Terror with its ominous strings and increasingly wild-sounding drums. It ends abruptly, just as Wonka’s boat trip does, on an orchestral flourish. On the other end of the spectrum, “King Of The Hill” is the most pared-down we’ve heard Bruner in a while, as he hums over a refreshingly simple and spooky beat made with the help of Flying Lotus and BADBADNOTGOOD.
His bass playing remains captivating. “Unrequited Love” opens with a swirl of strums and intricate jazz fills before giving way to a reverberant instrumental accentuated by heavy snares. “Funny Thing” highlights his trademark low-pass Moog tone, which he’s honed to imitate the croak of the oldest and nastiest-looking toad you could imagine. And “How Sway” is a masterclass in lightspeed chord changes.
But “How Sway” also features two words total—“ayy” and “yo”—which indicates how unpolished some of these compositions feel. “How I Feel” starts off promising, with a subtle bass melody, lovely bell plinks, and a magnetic synth line, but it stays in place for the rest of its brief runtime. On “Overseas,” dippy lyrics about meeting up with a woman in Russia and joining the “mile-high club” on the plane ride stumble into a clip of comedian Zach Fox imitating an airline captain—funny, but not necessarily compelling.
Singer Michael McDonald, who collaborated with Bruner and Kenny Loggins on 2017’s gleaming “Show You The Way,” recently told the New York Times that Bruner reminds him of Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who were “Top 40 radio darlings” but also had songs that were “so strange, and so sophisticated.” Here, Bruner has the attitude and the aptitude, but he’s mostly missing the songs.
“Fair Chance” comes close, with its weightless keyboards, gentle drums, and heartbroken hook about loving someone even though they’re not around—a reference to the late rapper Mac Miller, with whom Bruner was extremely close. But despite its sincerity and strong guest spot from Ty Dolla $ign, the song slides off the rails when a well-intentioned (but struggling) Lil B warbles out a shaky final verse. “Black Qualls” cooks along with a groove featuring ’80s boogie figurehead Steve Arrington, but loses its momentum midway through.
Then there’s “Dragonball Durag,” the most effortless song here. Over a breezy beat featuring a billowing saxophone provided by longtime friend and collaborator Kamasi Washington, Bruner sings playfully to a girl about his silky headscarf. It’s undeniably silly (“I may be covered in cat hair, but I still smell good,” he purrs) but also feels complete, one of those moments where Bruner’s goofiness complements his musical prowess. There’s evidence to suggest he can do this when he wants; there’s also plenty to suggest the contrary. | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Brainfeeder | April 7, 2020 | 7.4 | 4762b4d2-bafa-4044-a5b5-11b65fd862bb | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
As he closes the books on PC Music, label founder A. G. Cook unspools a rangy triple album full of shiny synths, inside jokes, and gently sentimental vocal pop. | As he closes the books on PC Music, label founder A. G. Cook unspools a rangy triple album full of shiny synths, inside jokes, and gently sentimental vocal pop. | A. G. Cook: Britpop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-g-cook-britpop/ | Britpop | The logic of today’s pop culture is lore, and the keepers of the lore are the fandoms. As recently observed in the Swiftieverse, the stans cannot live on songs alone—they demand worldbuilding. They shall have Easter eggs. They will make video essays about whether or not Harry Styles wears a wig. These are ideal conditions for A. G. Cook, the producer and persona at the heart of the PC Music universe. His third solo full-length is a dizzying concept album that spills over into animated videos, bespoke websites, and several millennia’s worth of made-up lore. Appearing in the midst of the megawatt rollout for Brat, the Charli XCX album on which Cook returns as a lead producer, Britpop was never going to be the biggest pop album of the year as measured by social clout—but it just might be the biggest by volume.
As his first album since the end of PC Music, the era-defining experimental pop label that ceased releasing new music last year after a decade, Britpop follows 2020’s seven-disc solo sprawl 7G and its rapid sequel, the dense and ambitious Apple. This time around he’s kept a lid on things—it’s a comparatively tight triple album, eight tracks per disc, arranged along the themes of past, present, and future (a classic tarot spread, not coincidentally). It’s also a sprawling multimedia project complete with characters, timelines, online games, videos, and bonus downloads accessed via three familiar-looking websites: Wandcamp, Wheatport, and Witchfork. (All three were recently “acquired by an undisclosed multidimensional conglomerate,” according to a pop-up.)
In a way, the PC Music enterprise was always about making websites, as Cook—a computer nerd before he became a musician—explained to DIY back in 2014. While a complete hermeneutics of the Cookverse is beyond the scope of an album review (and would spoil the quest) the video for “Soulbreaker” might be the place to start: a time-traveling animation by Gustaf Holtenäs that’s stuffed with lore to be decoded by the faithful of the PC Music subreddit.
Britpop begins in the Past, with the first disc a kind of epitaph to PC Music’s now-classic sound, a shiny playground of boing-splat colors and neon noise. It sounds like Cook is tying up loose ends, perhaps emptying the archives. There are mallow-soft synths and stinging trance supersaws, hairsprayed ’80s syndrums and speedy riffs recalling the “impossible music” of early influence Conlon Nancarrow. Hyper-chopped helium vocals appear in various states of disarray, from Charli XCX trilling “Brit-brit-brit like Britpop” on the title track to the shattered verbiage of “Prismatic.” The third disc is on similar ground musically but with a few more solidly structured songs and, on “Butterfly Craft,” a very un-PC excursion into cable-tangled radiophonic noise.
The Past and Future discs will appeal directly to PC heads, with few big surprises. Even at peak intensity—the speedrun finish of “Prismatic,” the restless mechanics of “Luddite Factory Operator”—Cook’s surfaces are varnished, his structures both effortless and complex. There’s none of the naivety or pleasingly “wrong” tilt of those remarkable early productions, like GFOTY’s “Bobby” or Hannah Diamond’s “Pink and Blue.” This is the work of an accomplished, L.A.-facing pop producer. When Charli enters the room—as she also does on “Lucifer,” a catchy, moody-girl highlight also featuring Addison Rae—the scene comes alive, while the tracks that rest on ultra-processed, unintelligible vocals, like the Balearic “Crescent Sun,” take on the weightless quality of a hologram.
Which is why the Present disc, where Cook takes the mic, is the surprise standout of the three. Picking up where Apple left off, these eight songs also take their cue from Thy Slaughter’s Soft Rock—Cook’s witty collaboration with PC Music oldtimer easyFun—to drive deeper into digitally enhanced fuzz rock. Infused with the wistful melancholy that British comedian Bill Bailey once identified in his countryfolk (because “52 percent of our days are overcast”) the Present disc falls somewhere between cultish bedroom-punk (The Durutti Column, Felt) and scratchy ’90s indie (Teenage Fanclub, the Breeders, late ’90s Blur)—and delivers some sweet, sweet guitar tones to boot. Our troubadour gets close to the mic, using telephone effects and Auto-Tune to boost the grain of his far-from-powerful voice, while the guitars do quiet-quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics (“Green Man,” “Greatly”) and wailing mini-solos (“Nice to Meet You”). Most addictive is “Bewitched,” an egg punk anthem for the children of Weezer and Ash, iced with a perfect hook (“I heard her say, Abra-abracadabra”) that echoes an oldie by Ian Dury.
Buried inside the lyrics is a sense of distance and loss, from the awkwardly British (“I’ll miss you greatly”) to the open wound of “Without,” a tribute to his creative twin flame SOPHIE, who died in 2021: “An emptiness, a silhouette/I never guessed the loudest sounds are hollow.” Cook has spent the past few years living in America, including a lockdown in rural Montana, home to his girlfriend, the singer Alaska Reid. Feeling like a foreigner inevitably made him more aware of his Britishness, and seemingly more eager to play it up—hence the enduring Beatles mop-top. In place of the playful meta-ironies and commercial sheen of the PC Music world, Cook aligns himself with myth and magic (“Green Man,” “Crone,” “Bewitched”), stocking his lyrics with an apothecary’s worth of amulets, manuscripts, gargoyles, “skulls on the shelf” and “membranes stacked in the catacombs.”
It’s an anachronistic pivot, and with it, Cook joins a long tradition of British artists who have looked to the country’s distant past for a sense of identity unspoiled by rubbish modern life, from the Pre-Raphaelites’ obsession with King Arthur and William Blake’s vision of Albion to the reactionary nostalgia of the Kinks, Smiths, and Libertines. A longing for the notional good old days is hammered out again in Timothy Luke’s design for the album campaign, with A. G. Cook written in cod-heraldic lettering straight out of merrie olde England, while Britpop appears in the zippily optimistic curves of Mexico Olympic, the logotype designed for the ’68 Games and adapted by Pulp in the mid ’90s—notably, the last two moments when Britain was seen to be swinging.
Cook’s embrace of the mythic past mirrors a wider turn towards the wyrd in British culture, but also puts some distance between him and the PC Music experiment. By the time it wound down last year, the label had permeated the entire fabric of pop, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance (Cook has a credit on “All Up in Your Mind”) to Danny L Harle’s work for Carly Rae Jepsen and Dua Lipa, and even Camila Cabello’s recent hyperpop pivot, “I LUV IT.” Mission accomplished? Perhaps, but we can assume that Cook gets his kicks from subverting the pop hierarchy, not being absorbed into it. Not unlike Cowboy Carter hitching herself to the Wild West imaginary, Britpop opens a practical portal between Cook’s old universe—hard, bright, aggressively contemporary—and a seductively oppositional dimension of folklore, fantasy, fuzz rock, and magic. | 2024-05-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | New Alias | May 9, 2024 | 7.8 | 4764c848-7ed6-4d49-af85-99bd081e1200 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Produced using analog synths, drum machines, and four-track tape, these ambient sketches and beat experiments reveal the foundations of the Japanese producer’s later, more elaborate work. | Produced using analog synths, drum machines, and four-track tape, these ambient sketches and beat experiments reveal the foundations of the Japanese producer’s later, more elaborate work. | Kuniyuki Takahashi: Early Tape Works (1986-1993) Vol.1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kuniyuki-takahashi-early-tape-works-1986-1993-vol1/ | Early Tape Works (1986-1993) Vol.1 | Delving into the early efforts of a well-known musician can be like undertaking an archeological dig. Sometimes all that comes out of the ground are little fragments; other times, you get the whole foundation. The latter is what the Dutch label Music From Memory unearths with Early Tape Works (1986-1993) Vol. 1, the first of two volumes collecting the earliest known recordings from the Japanese electronic musician Kuniyuki Takahashi. Originally released on a series of short-run, self-released cassettes, the six marvellous tracks compiled here lay the groundwork for nearly all his subsequent recordings, from the harsh EBM he created as part of the duo DRP to the lush deep house he’s best known for.
The threads connecting these tracks with his later music are easy to follow. The looping synth lines and bulbous basslines that wrap like infinity scarves around a cooing bit of Kozue Fukuma’s spoken word on “You Should Believe” have been mirrored in tracks as recent as “Between Shadow and Lights,” a song recorded with Anne Clark for Takahashi’s 2013 album Feather World. And with just a small shift in BPM, a track like “Zero to One,” which throbs with the cool sensuality of Depeche Mode’s late-1980s work, could fit comfortably on DRP’s 1990 album Electro Brain 586. The final three tracks on this short collection are generally indebted to club sounds of the time. “Signifie” comes across as an homage to Front 242, complete with barking samples of film dialogue and what sounds like sheet pans being abused.
Side A of this vinyl edition particularly reveals how essential these primal synth-and-drum-machine experiments were to Takahashi’s future work. (The collection’s title, Early Tape Works, is a nod to the four-track cassette deck he recorded on.) The first three tracks feel like remixes of his deep-house singles that have stripped away the pulsing beats and bass, leaving behind only a colorful haze of drones and flowering melodies. “Night at the Seaside” lives up to its title in long, intertwining chords evoking a moonlit stroll on the sand. In “Day Dreams,” a plucked guitar replicates the sound of traditional Japanese instruments like the koto and shamisen, while a honking synth imitates the timbre of the horagai, or conch shell. The closest Takahashi gets to his deep-house future is “Drawing Seeds,” a winsome, Eno-esque tune with fluttering stabs of melody girding a clattering yet barely-there rhythm.
The most remarkable takeaway from Early Tape Works is how fully formed Takahashi’s ideas were from the jump. For someone who was working with relatively inexpensive equipment and learning on the go, he produced some assured, complex music. The only aspect of Takahashi’s recent music that isn’t present on Early Tape Music is the interest in jazz that guides 2007’s All These Things. Perhaps we’ll have that to look forward to when Volume 2 arrives later this year. | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Music From Memory | February 7, 2018 | 6.9 | 47681708-a79a-4d24-9e0c-754abf2dc9e8 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The J-pop icon and hyperpop predecessor returns with an album that looks forward even as it longs for an imagined past. | The J-pop icon and hyperpop predecessor returns with an album that looks forward even as it longs for an imagined past. | Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: Candy Racer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kyary-pamyu-pamyu-candy-racer/ | Candy Racer | Try, if you can, to describe Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s earliest singles—like 2011’s “PONPONPON” or 2012’s “Tsukematsukeru”—without using the word “hyperpop.” These songs predated PC Music yet presented a similar vision: pop songs so abrasively kinetic and uncannily saccharine that they begin to feel sinister. Kyary (aka Kiriko Takemura), one of Japan’s biggest pop stars, has rarely been placed in the largely Western hyperpop lineage. But her influence on the genre is hard to deny: When she first played London, Charli XCX was in attendance, and Kyary also worked with SOPHIE on a track that has yet to see the light of day. Having rewired J-pop's genre conventions and inspired many of hyperpop’s foundational artists, Kyary has reinvention on her mind as she enters the second decade of her career.
Candy Racer, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s first album in three years, proposes two very different paths forward for the star. She continues to work with her longtime writer and producer Yasutaka Nakata (CAPSULE, Perfume), though there’s a clear mandate to explore new sounds. In the album’s first half, Kyary dials up the tempo until her slippery pop sound feels optimized for the dancefloor. The title track pairs manic marimba runs with a sped-up disco beat, while “Dondonpa” is nothing short of a galloping house track. If you encountered the latter song in a club, you might mistake Kyary’s repeated chirps of “Dondonpa!” (an onomatopoeic portmanteau that evokes rapid-fire drums) for a sample—her vocals on the song are limited to that single line, plus some percussive scatting.
If the first half of Candy Racer decenters Kyary in her own songs, the second half recasts her image in a manner that feels even more radical. Tracks like “Perfect Oneisan'' are built from the glossy synth presets and plastic horns common in vintage Japanese “city pop,” and she does her best to approximate the yearning of a 1980s balladeer. Given the futuristic sheen that Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s music has always had, this might feel like a surprising pivot—though this is the same woman who named her beauty brand Nostalgia Syndrome. What’s more curious is that the resurgence of city pop (and vaporwave, which often samples city pop) is a largely Western phenomenon, and Kyary is a massive star only in her home country. Both city pop and vaporwave satisfy a Western nostalgia for a past that feels slightly askew, having been filtered through pre-millennial Japanese sensibilities. Kyary is now selling that same aesthetic back to a domestic audience, alongside bottles of her signature shampoo.
If this all feels a bit meta, it’s perfectly in keeping with the ethos of hyperpop, which walks a tightrope between skewering the language of commerce and outright embracing it. As with many things, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu seems to have gotten here first, by dint of working within Japan’s more nakedly consumerist music industry; like many J-pop artists, she’s no stranger to commercial tie-ins. But unlike most Japanese stars, she’s been able to find a significant audience in the West through ambitious music videos (you could argue that she helped usher in pop’s embrace of the grotesque) and her savvy use of platforms like YouTube. And so we get a song like “Natsuiro Flower,” which sounds like it was pulled from the 2011 internet curio Floral Shoppe but was in fact recorded in 2021 by one of Japan’s biggest stars, and which feels targeted at an audience of Western listeners hungry for Japanese retro-futurism. Not all of Candy Racer sounds like a break from the past: The album’s midsection is littered with archetypical Kyary Pamyu Pamyu songs like “Kamaitachi,” “Kimigaiinekuretara,” and “Gum Gum Girl,” which adorn bright melodies with unmistakably Japanese flourishes like shamisen. But even as it revels in new ideas, Candy Racer finds Kyary Pamyu Pamyu as we’ve always known her: just a bit more outre than her peers in the world of chart pop.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | KRK Lab | November 3, 2021 | 7.2 | 476b474c-cb18-4757-a3a5-462358d6efa4 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
With stark, introspective lyrics and fuller production, Meg Duffy’s latest is a bold foray into poppier sounds. It feels like a fresh start. | With stark, introspective lyrics and fuller production, Meg Duffy’s latest is a bold foray into poppier sounds. It feels like a fresh start. | Hand Habits: Fun House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hand-habits-fun-house/ | Fun House | The music video for “Clean Air,” a single from Hand Habits’ new album Fun House, unfolds like a magic trick. Meg Duffy, a guitarist and singer who made their name as an accompanist for Weyes Blood and the War on Drugs, ambles moodily on stage, clutching a microphone as if about to deliver a sermon. Then, as the strum of an acoustic guitar picks up, breezy and gentle, the audience explodes with energy. Sweat drips, bodies sway, a pit opens up; at one point, Duffy starts crowd surfing. The joke is obvious, though it clarifies something deeper about the disconnect between what’s felt and what’s spoken aloud.
This particular tension—understated indie rock with the emotional force of a scream—has informed all of Duffy’s music over the past few years. Their last full-length project as Hand Habits, 2019’s placeholder, felt knotty and interior; Duffy has described the record as being “impulsive”—the product of writing while on tour. The lyrics were anxious but also aimless, running up against impossible questions. “What’s the use if you’re not trying to forgive?” they asked, lingering on the feeling of frustration.
On Fun House, Duffy approaches a sense of resolution. “I could never hear her, no matter how loud/Screaming, ‘I’ll always be the anchor you drag around,’” Duffy sings on “No Difference.” While the song courses with doubt, the persistent emotional block stalling a relationship, it never curdles into bitterness or anger. Near the end of the song, Duffy is joined by background vocals from several collaborators, including Perfume Genius and Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, helping disperse some of that unease, relying on community for reassurance.
Many of these songs twist feelings of anxiety into comforting new shapes. Late-album highlight “The Answer” is a triptych survey of a relationship; what starts as a resigned, whispery swell is interrupted by a different time signature that works like a counter-argument. When the initial cadence returns after a moment of near-silence, it’s as if Duffy has finally come around to their own side. Even amid this psychic back-and-forth, they sound assured. “Drink the mist/My body, a question that hangs on her lips/I know the answer/The answer, it’s always mine,” they sing, backed by a silvery tableau of plucked guitar and tambourine. The meaning of each section pivots on that phrase: “I know the answer.” The answer isn’t always the same, and it isn’t always what you’re looking for, but it always is.
After the folky seriousness of placeholder, produced by indie rock stalwart Brad Cook, the relatively varied sounds of Fun House represent a fresh start for Duffy. With production from Sasami Ashworth, Duffy adds woodwinds and digital pulses to the guitar-forward sounds of their earlier work. “Aquamarine” is drunk and dizzy, a head-out-the-window, hair-in-the-wind jam, and a bold foray into poppier sounds. It’s also among the darkest moments on the album—a stark confrontation with the facts of their mother’s suicide. “I didn’t know she played guitar ’til I turned 27,” they sing, reflecting on details kept hidden from them as a child and how the truth ends up surfacing anyway.
There’s a similar ethos of unlikely celebration in the opener, “More Than Love,” which begins with a quote from a Bruce Springsteen classic and peaks in a halo of sun-streaked guitar. Duffy has nailed this sort of wild climax before, but mostly for other artists. Here, their guitar playing introduces a uniquely personal catharsis, a creative breakthrough you can feel in real time. Coming to terms with their own past, Duffy arrives at a cohesive survey of the formula they’ve been refining throughout their discography. Fun House embodies all Duffy’s gifts at once, bringing their virtuosic talent into their own wheelhouse, on their own terms.
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. | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | October 27, 2021 | 7.8 | 47731dd0-dbc5-4027-805c-68e56ebe0250 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
The Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel blows away the cobwebs from Sam Shackleton’s often shadowy psychedelia, adding a celebratory force to the English electronic musician’s hypnotic minimalism. | The Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel blows away the cobwebs from Sam Shackleton’s often shadowy psychedelia, adding a celebratory force to the English electronic musician’s hypnotic minimalism. | Shackleton / Zimpel: Primal Forms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shackleton-zimpel-primal-forms/ | Primal Forms | The maverick composer and instrument builder Harry Partch once described his creative lodestar as “the actions and activities of primitive man as I imagine him.” Whether this impulse to flee modernity takes form in Constantin Brâncuși’s sculptures, Hilma af Klimt’s paintings, or Partch’s instruments, there will always be artists who seek inspiration on the shores of ancient custom and spiritual communion. Primal Forms, the new album by Sam Shackleton and Wacław Zimpel, is awash in this sensibility. The album’s folkish minimalism often recalls the so-called Fourth World of Jon Hassell, whose music David Toop called “almost psychotropic in its capacity to activate alien worlds in the imagination.” Shackleton casts a similarly hallucinogenic spell. Though the English artist was once associated with dubstep through his and Appleblim’s old Skull Disco label, his “ultimate destination” as an artist, as he told The Wire in 2010, was actually toward Partch—in short, a musical language he could call his own. On Primal Forms, Shackleton and Zimpel walk the path as though they’ve always known the way.
Though Shackleton and Zimpel are serial collaborators, they both sound notably renewed on Primal Forms, their first recording together. Zimpel, a Polish jazz composer and clarinetist whose past work includes an EP with Border Community’s James Holden and two albums of Carnatic fusion, has brought a refreshing lightness to Shackleton’s music. Since 2016’s Devotional Songs, the pagan arcana of Shackleton’s music has often been given shape by singers and poets. But, whatever the quality of their contributions, the music’s atmosphere had grown thick with “gothic” imagery that felt, in Susan Sontag’s phrasing, constructed rather than secreted. Shackleton’s last album, 2017’s Anika-featuring Behind the Glass, could sometimes feel like what one Discogs commenter described as the soundtrack for a Victorian funeral, but here, Zimpel’s use of the Ukrainian lira, harmonium, violin, and other instruments suggestive of folk traditions add a celebratory force to the English artist's Escher-corridor minimalism.
This all leads to an improbable thought: Zimpel has made the often dour Shackleton sound lovely. Once you’re past the title track’s chilly intro—its crime-noir strum might remind you of Portishead’s “Sour Times”—Zimpel’s alto clarinet and digi-choral swells add a penetrating warmth, as though the shade that Shackleton’s music usually inhabits has vanished beneath a second sun. The clarinet’s presence elsewhere sets in motion a passage of disembodying awe. Within a simple monochord loop four minutes through “Primal Drones,” Zimpel’s reed undulates with a conversational sonority—as though, if only you could tune to the proper frequency, it might be possible to make out a centuries-old haiku.
Though Primal Forms has lots of trance-inducing intensity—see the Terry Riley-esque organ spirals towards the back of “Primal Forms”—the transitory moments are a pleasure, too. The midsection of the final track, “Ruined Future,” is a longish changeover from Zimpel’s thinning clarinet to rolling marimba triplets. In taking its time to get from A to B, Shackleton and Zimpel show the confidence to let nothing much happen for a while. Perhaps by this point the duo’s destination, a prelapsarian place of mystical sound and ritual beauty akin to the one Partch longed to discover, is already in sight. If so, the duo found it not by following a map but by awakening neglected instincts in each other.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Cosmo Rhythmatic | August 28, 2020 | 7.7 | 4773979b-38ab-44ae-89f5-dfd3d31d5199 | Ray Philp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ray-philp/ | |
Skrillex is a festival-circuit megastar who’s already put an indelible sonic imprint on the early stretch of this decade, but Recess is his first proper album. It's a mix of big-drop dubstep tunes and whatever-works eclecticism, including spots from Chance the Rapper, Diplo, and Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit. | Skrillex is a festival-circuit megastar who’s already put an indelible sonic imprint on the early stretch of this decade, but Recess is his first proper album. It's a mix of big-drop dubstep tunes and whatever-works eclecticism, including spots from Chance the Rapper, Diplo, and Michael Angelakos of Passion Pit. | Skrillex: Recess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19139-skrillex-recess/ | Recess | He’s a festival-circuit megastar who’s already put an indelible sonic imprint on the early stretch of this decade, but it still feels like Sonny Moore got a raw deal. Sure, the fact Skrillex became the face of dubstep did plenty to rile the “purists,” but the Tempa–12“-hoarder set wasn’t responsible for reducing an unsubtle but genuinely adventurous and accessibly weird artist to a living meme. Outlets that eyerolled at first-wave dubstep as too niche belatedly rushed to hail Skrillex as the person who could—hallelujah!—finally make electronic music that you could mosh to and glibly compare to punk-fuckin’-rawk. By the beginning of this year, it was starting to feel like the reduction of his music’s endorphin-explosion dynamics to a ”wait for the drop" punchline would drain all the giddiness out of Skrillex’s catalogue before he even got around to a full-length debut.
But at the end of the day, all the thinkpieces about corporate rave and pop crossover and subgenre snobbery weren’t enough to obscure just how open Skrillex has been to switching his game up. You could call it from the word go: 2010’s My Name Is Skrillex delivered sugar-high jolts of French Touch that integrated Todd Edwards-style chopped-vocal fusillades into Justice-style snarl-house. And while the trademark mechano-industrial shivers and alarms in his subsequent work sound like chaotic ADD noise on the surface, it’s also frenetically unpredictable and musically fun in a way not commonly heard since the crab-scratch heyday of super-advanced turntablism. (Listen to Mix Master Mike’s Napalm Rockets—released a few months before My Name Is Skrillex—for a great if probably unexpected precedent.) No matter that he learned about IDM when Korn gave Aphex Twin props on TRL; the point is that Skrillex decided he wouldn’t stop learning. And yet that’s why Recess is confounding: it hints at places Skrillex could take his sound, but doesn’t feel ready to commit to any of them.
What expectation-meeting wub-wub stuff there is on this album is diverting and enjoyable, even if it feels obligatory in the context of this album's attempt at breadth. I mean, the leadoff cut is called “All Is Fair in Love and Brostep”—the man clearly knows the joke and is savvy enough to turn it into a “yes, and” improv sketch. That he gives the opening-track spotlight to a guest spot by the Ragga Twins—the MCs whose early 1990s singles made them connoisseur go-tos and pivotal figures in the early UK rave and jungle scene—points to a lineage that his detractors rarely gave him credit for. And the track is fittingly rugged—nothing that’ll have dubstep aficionados forgetting the Bug anytime soon, but it’s easy to hear the fundamental strength of his basslines and the nuanced timing of percussion. Between “All Is Fair”, the more explicitly dancehall-informed Ragga Twins teamup “Ragga Bomb”, and the crowdpleasing “Try It Out” (built alongside Owsla signee Alvin Risk), Skrillex proves adept at going beyond the build-drop-build-drop Pavlov response to something a bit more dynamic and playful.
But the broader sound is also pretty familiar at this point, an issue that he’s aimed to confront with the album’s forays into whatever-works eclecticism. Sometimes the results are at least fascinatingly off-kilter. “Doompy Poomp” is the biggest wait-what? moment on the album, a galumphing kind of schaffel/wonky/IDM hydra that’s all candy-colored grotesque. “Fuck That” dials back the bass a bit to something more in line with the distant swells of circa-02 Horsepower Productions sides, wraps his sensibilities around a beat more befitting of contemporary bass music, and builds the big ramp-up moment towards a switched-up version of the rhythm that bristles with negative space. And “Fire Away” returns to the shallow-Burial shot at spacious UK garage that he tried out on "Leaving", a tolerable effort that’s upended by jarringly twee melodic accents and the grating wail of singer Kid Harpoon.
What’s worrying is the stuff that seems to sidestep his oddball ADD energy completely. Even if brostep is pop these days, it’s at least pop in a polarizingly abrasive sense; his maneuvers towards other more accessible sounds not only sound less bracing but feel pulled out of his hands. Teaming up with Diplo and getting K-pop superstars G-Dragon (Big Bang) and CL (2NE1) is an inspired move in theory, but “Dirty Vibe” sounds so dominated by familiar Southern bounce and trap tropes that it feels like Skrillex is taking a smoke break and letting Mad Decent take over for a bit. The title track is even more confused—Fatman Scoop and Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos together at… last?—with pseudo-Sleigh Bells pep rally bluster and bang-on-a-PVC-pipe moombahton that plays like decline-era big beat. And “Coast Is Clear” is jazzed-up d’n’b that keeps tripping over its own snares, with Chance the Rapper’s voice the closest there is to an element of wavering chaos; shame his appearance is little more than a repeated if extended hook. (At least the machine-gun “doyouwannafuck, doyouwannafuck, doyouwannafuck” refrain has staying power.)
The progression from early singles to first album isn’t nearly the same arc as it was just 10 years ago, but it’s still weird that the first full-length showcase for Skrillex as self-contained album artist feels more like a transitional record than a debut that plays to his strengths. It’s tempting to suggest he’s ahead of the curve when it comes to the eventuality of the sound he popularized getting stale, but he probably has his own reasons for tweaking, sanding down, subduing, or otherwise retooling the parameters for what could be considered his signature aesthetic. If it points his fanbase towards another set of sounds to appreciate, it could be at least somewhat worth it. But more of these half measures, and they might just wind up deciding to listening to someone else entirely. | 2014-03-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Atlantic / Big Beat / Owsla | March 21, 2014 | 5.7 | 477ae247-6e22-4290-839b-6f50ece36492 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Australia’s King Gizzard have become one of indie rock’s most unlikely and glorious crossover stories of late. Their second album of 2017 pushes towards new levels of raucousness and ridiculousness. | Australia’s King Gizzard have become one of indie rock’s most unlikely and glorious crossover stories of late. Their second album of 2017 pushes towards new levels of raucousness and ridiculousness. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Murder of the Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-murder-of-the-universe/ | Murder of the Universe | “Nonagon infinity, open the door!” When King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard ringleader Stu MacKenzie uttered those words to kick off the band’s eighth album, 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, it sounded like precisely the sort of fantastical, D&D-addled gibberish you’d expect to hear on a sci-fi psych concept album made by a band with a silly name and two drummers. But in hindsight, it now sounds like he was reciting a magic spell—because since that album’s release, a lot of doors have blown open for the Aussie armada. Where the prolific group previously hovered in the shadow of one-time label benefactors Thee Oh Sees, with Nonagon Infinity’s audacious album-long suite, they became international club headliners in their own right. And with this year’s more measured but still wiggy Flying Microtonal Banana, they rose to the ranks of talk-show appearances and sold-out theaters, cementing their status as one of indie rock’s most unlikely and glorious crossover stories.
Given that the band slugged it out for six years and seven albums before finding wider success, they’re taking the concept of “strike while the iron is hot” to absurd extremes. King Gizzard have promised five new albums in 2017, of which Murder of the Universe is the second. Right now, with just six months left in the year and three more records to go, it will take a Herculean effort to meet that goal. But as Murder of the Universe proves, you can never count them out—because not only have they come up with an album that matches Nonagon Infinity’s breakneck pace, intricate interconnectivity, and conceptual scope, they’ve managed to push themselves to new levels of raucousness and ridiculousness.
If you think of Nonagon Infinity as King Gizzard’s Tommy, and Flying Microtonal Banana as the pared-down Who’s Next-style reprieve, then Murder of the Universe is their Quadrophenia moment, the album that makes its immediate predecessors feel like mere warm-up exercises. Structurally, it bears surface similarities to Nonagon Infinity—including overt callbacks to that and other Gizzard records—though it breaks up the flow into three discrete sections. Like Nonagon, Murder of the Universe’s motorik-punk momentum whisks the band through interlocking sections as if they were levels in a video game. It veers into stylistic netherworlds (prog-jazz contortions, bluesy harmonica blowouts, synth-funk breakdowns) like secret bonus coin zones en route toward explosive, boss-match-style climaxes that serve as resets for the album’s recurring melodic motifs. And King Gizzard do it so often and seamlessly that even a colossal nine-section piece like “Chapter 1: The Tale of the Altered Beast” eventually acquires the instant familiarity of a three-minute pop song.
But thematically speaking, Murder of the Universe is a sequel of sorts to the doomsday prognostications of Flying Microtonal Banana. Where that record’s nature-focused lyrics ruminated on imminent environmental disaster, Murder of the Universe explores a different agent of the apocalypse—A.I. technology—through cheeky B-movie-worthy storylines involving Frankensteined monsters and vomit-spewing cyborgs. And this time, you don’t have to parse and paste together the narrative from MacKenzie’s staccato phrasing: here, the band take the guesswork out of the equation altogether and thread ominous, “Thriller”-style spoken-word exposition throughout the album’s three movements.
The voiceovers can verge on excessive—like a porno, you’re here more for the action than the plot. As MacKenzie and steely-voiced narrator Leah Senior jostle for mic time on the “Altered Beast” suite, it can sound like he’s having a shouting match with a Poe-spouting Siri. But on the closing six-part piece, “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe,” the band’s most heavy-metal movement to date is given extra heft by its elderly orator. Sounding not unlike Sir Alec Guinness doing the intro to “Iron Man,” he manages to make a first-person narrative about a barfing, self-destructing robot both oddly affecting and genuinely horrifying, his eventual physical meltdown soundtracked by the band’s musical one. In true madcap Gizzard fashion, the band’s proggiest album turns out to also be their most visceral and vital. Murder of the Universe may be built from the band’s now-familiar krautpunk battle plan, but their ability to execute outsized architectural complexity at manic, warp-speed velocity is no less astonishing. | 2017-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | June 29, 2017 | 8 | 477c7a34-b510-4944-b60d-a0c8edb8e609 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Kill Rock Stars debut from this promising songwriter and remarkably distinctive and technically skilled guitar player also features Hella's Zach Hill on drums. | Kill Rock Stars debut from this promising songwriter and remarkably distinctive and technically skilled guitar player also features Hella's Zach Hill on drums. | Marnie Stern: In Advance of the Broken Arm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9919-in-advance-of-the-broken-arm/ | In Advance of the Broken Arm | A couple of weeks ago, while discussing Marnie Stern's In Advance of the Broken Arm, a friend asked who played that breathless, finger-tapping, Energizer guitar. It was a telling moment, a weird backhanded compliment: For some reason, folks still don't expect a woman to shred. Well, dudes, Marnie Stern does-- and how.
She does just about everything here, handling guitars, vocals, synths, songwriting, and production. But no one's an island: Hella's Zach Hill plays drums, an addition that brings more muster to Stern's debut. Hill also chips in a pair of keys, bass, and production. Extra bass and even more organ/key duties go to John-Reed Thompson, who engineered and mixed much of In Advance. But despite the extra hands, it's Stern's fingerprints that matter.
Beyond pure technical skill-- almost more impressively, really-- Stern sounds like nobody else. She told The New Yorker that she ostensibly didn't listen to "good music" (as she calls it) until she was 23. At that time, Sleater-Kinney were her watershed; she eventually found Hella, Boredoms, Melt-Banana. Don Caballero reportedly inspired her finger-tap technique (as well, perhaps, as her lengthy song titles). You'll hear bits of those bands across the 13 tracks-- that S-K guitar interplay and lilt revved with caffeine and turned into a 60-string molotov. The biggest unspoken presence for my buck, though, is Mick Barr, who wields a similar I-am-a-rock feel in Orthrelm, Ocrilim, Octis, other "O"'s, and his Shred Earthship collaboration with Hill. Beyond the ubiquitous Hella drummer, Barr and Stern also share a propulsive buoyancy, affixing emotion to flat-out, jaw-dropping chops.
Unlike Barr, Stern's seeking pop concision. I caught him rattling out a long solo guitar piece at the Whitney at Altria a month or two ago-- if it'd been Stern, she would've subdivided the real-time loop 10 times and added a vocal chirp. That's another thing: Her voice is a major component to her practice, layered as many times as her guitar. She can sound a bit like Deerhoof's Satomi-- the way she rides atop the guitars, a stone skipping across water. But the chants are more next-room distant, gauzy. Structurally, she sets up her own call-and-response (musically and lyrically), her sing-talk style cutting across the strings like a rogue auctioneer or cheerleader.
But talk about front-loading: In Advance roars out of the gate with "Vibrational Match", "Grapefruit", and "Every Single Line Means Something", each showing Stern at her best. At those moments, her playing and dynamics are complimented wonderfully by Hill's horse-racing drums, as she strums over her own amplification and tripped "adjust your perceptions" lyrics (in one spot, someone crawls to a gutter with broken knees). In that sense, if "Every Single Line Means Something" is taken as a commentary on every vocal bit and modulating Van Halen guitar line, Stern's work becomes a true-blue head fuck.
Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark. Let's use another song title as an instruction: "Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!!" Yeah, perhaps the palette could be a tad more various; the addition of some breaks or other dynamics would help. As is, by the end of the record, the insouciance has faded a bit, the shredding lost some of its stream. For example, take a look at "This American Life"-- ingredients that sounded brilliant elsewhere, dodder a bit and yearn for variation. Oddly, as the song titles get more intriguing-- "Letters From Rimbaud", "Plato's Fucked-Up Cave"-- the songs themselves are less interesting.
An album needs pacing. For instance, Grindstone, the recent Shining outing scatters weirdness into various baskets, creating a super slow, imploded central shift and ultimately, well, a diamond. Here Stern keeps stabbing, and so the steam lessens. Strange then that Barr can do something like OV, looping endlessly, without it getting a snore. So, maybe she needs to extend some of the riffs? Perhaps there's too much going on-- the glass is empty, the glass is half full...
There's a stand-out section where Stern nails this sorta next-big-thing. Check the link/transition between "Logical Volume", a feedbacking chant that stands in place a bit before moving into an almost elegiac realm, and the up-tempo "Absorb Those Numbers". Hear how it soars? It's a delicate balance, and she pulls it off remarkably well. On the latter she intones, "As your breath catches up from where you began": The present catching up to its past and circling back to a shared beginning. Here, too, she showcases different textures of her voice, turning the guitar into an almost jazz sax behind her catchy, modulated hooks. At these moments, regardless of the late-period bomb, you know for fucking sure Stern has it-- a charisma and technique that already distinguishes her as pure Technicolor in a glutted, black-and-white scene. | 2007-02-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-02-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Kill Rock Stars | February 23, 2007 | 7.7 | 477da77e-c9f5-4a81-94c7-d2fd9a3d0b0e | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The Rio de Janeiro MC deftly uses a grime framework to explore a wide range of emotional textures that are part of living in Rio—its pleasures and its hardships. | The Rio de Janeiro MC deftly uses a grime framework to explore a wide range of emotional textures that are part of living in Rio—its pleasures and its hardships. | SD9: 40˚.40 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sd9-4040/ | 40˚.40 | SD9 is acutely aware of the fantasies projected on his hometown. For outsiders, the city conjures images of golden beaches and chilled caipirinhas, maybe the gentle hum of a João Gilberto tune echoing in the distance. To accompany the release of his debut album 40°.40, the Bonsucesso-raised artist wrote a poem about this romanticized vision of Rio, alongside a short visual. In the clip, he renders a fantasy of the city in rich detail, celebrating its gorgeous women and sunny boulevards. He quotes Gilberto Gil’s 1969 song “Aquele Abraço,” in which the Tropicália icon ensures that “Rio de Janeiro is still beautiful.”
And then, within 30 seconds, SD9 shatters the utopia. Scenes of young kids carrying submachine guns flash across the screen as he reveals a more fatalistic picture of Rio—one plagued with police surveillance and brutality, burning cars, and infinite cycles of drug addiction and violence. “Sorry Gilberto Gil, but for me, Rio de Janeiro was never beautiful,” SD9 says. Across the album, he explores a wide range of emotional textures that are part of living in Rio—its pleasures and its hardships. 40°.40 captures a side of the city most people refuse to see.
SD9 and his producers excel when they reimagine their Rio roots within the framework of UK grime. Standout “Poze do Rodo,” featuring fellow Brazilian grime upstarts D r o p e and LEALL, layers an aluminum tamborzão beat over a frosty eskibeat click, a brilliantly metallic synthesis that evokes classic Wiley instrumentals and baile funk parties in equal measure. SD9 and his co-conspirators trade bars about garnering status and respect in the slums while alluding to MC Poze, a funk carioca MC who is regularly targeted by law enforcement for his alleged connections to drug trafficking. Similarly, SD9 drops vocalized tamborzão patterns on songs like “Consequencias” and “B.O.,” using funk carioca’s playful “bum-cha-cha, cha cha” to punctuate his tales of crime and street life.
The centerpiece of these stories is SD9’s guttural timbre, which lends itself well to the curvatures of Portuguese. The macabre church choir stabs on “ODP & Sangue” are coarse enough to get under your skin, and SD9’s staccato, horror-movie flow cloaks the typewriter-like snare drums in a villainous shroud. On the title track, SD9 shares memories of friends gone too soon, lost to police or gang violence. For those who reside in the neighborhoods in the North Zone, past Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue, death is omnipresent. SD9 isn’t afraid to confront this haunting reality in his flow, to make you feel the specter of death in your chest.
His vocals hit the hardest when fortified by the beats of his producers, many of whom are faithful students of grime and its hybrid influences. On the wonderfully ballistic “Astra 1.8,” another meditation on death, beatmaker Chediak combines the overblown bass of 8-bar, the revving of an engine, and jittery jungle breaks; the result feels like two grade-school kids smashing action figures together. DIIGO’s instrumental on “Oi” threads together a breathy sex moan, the blaring horn of a WhatsApp push notification, and 2-step garage textures into a song about a girl at the club with a Ganesha tattoo and Nike VaporMaxes. Meanwhile, frigid piano flourishes appear on the title track and the aforementioned “Poze do Rodo.” These productions are as reverent of grime as they are prescient, illustrating the genre’s capacity for reinvention.
40°.40 traces a blueprint of how to evolve a genre steeped in the history of local communities. It transcends mere tribute and instead functions as an initiation into the underworld of Brazilian grime. It’s no wonder that SD9 and his fellow MCs in the local grime collective TBC Mob selected this genre as their weapon of choice; government officials have racially profiled and criminalized practitioners of funk carioca, Rio’s claim to global music fame, as much as the UK-bred artists from which SD9 draws inspiration. 40°.40 excels when the MC draws sonic and cultural parallels between these sounds. And at the same time that 40°.40 communicates a strong sense of place, it asks us to make sense of the way hyperlocal music movements evolve in the context of globalization. When a genre like grime goes mainstream, traveling across social media networks and streaming platforms, what happens to its context? More than reinscribing stale tropes about music’s capacity to transcend borders and languages, 40°.40 is a testament to the fact that music born out of struggle can transform itself, appealing to people living in similar situations elsewhere—especially those who need it for survival.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | On-Retainer | July 28, 2020 | 7.8 | 478815cb-1c47-486d-8d2a-d5c3c4e856dc | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Recorded in Oakland with a heavy presence of Bay Area producers and rappers, the Das Racist member's highly listenable second mixtape of 2012 is a testament to his heretofore untested malleability. | Recorded in Oakland with a heavy presence of Bay Area producers and rappers, the Das Racist member's highly listenable second mixtape of 2012 is a testament to his heretofore untested malleability. | Kool A.D.: 51 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16552-kool-ad-51/ | 51 | Kool A.D. grew up in San Francisco-- while this is a well-known fact, it's not one that's acknowledged particularly often. It's understandable considering Das Racist have become entrenched in N.Y.'s cultural milieu in so many different ways that their music has been embraced as something like a metaphor for a certain kind of lifestyle in the city. You can ascertain Victor Vazquez's Cali roots as a matter of relativity, being that Queens native Heems is more assertive as both a rapper and as a media presence. But otherwise, outside of calling himself the "second-best rapper with glasses after E-40," it's tough to pinpoint much influence even when you know it's there. All of which makes Kool A.D.'s second mixtape of 2012, 51, a surprise and a long time coming: Recorded entirely in Oakland with a heavy presence of Bay Area producers and rappers, it's a testament to his heretofore untested malleability, a new way to hear the old Kool A.D.-- something which the admirable, if loopy outré R&B of The Palm Wine Drinkard got only half right.
He takes every opportunity to enthusiastically serve as a tour guide ("Couple blocks from the sun dial/ Candlestick Park, south one mile/ Alameda, Walnut, St. Anthony"), drop slang, and rhyme over out-the-trunk 808s ("Ticky Ticky") and near-hyphy rhythms ("Manny Pacquiao") to let you know he's making himself at home again. Overall, though, 51 feels more like a comprehensive California thing, specifically mid-2000s Stones Throw in both sound and structure with the "for the love" generosity of recent E-40 tossed in. There's an intelligent stream-of-consciousness here, something along the lines of Madlib's work as Quasimoto or Guilty Simpson's overlooked OJ Simpson. To isolate a particular five-minute run, the typically dense "Donda" ("I'm so emotional like Thursday/ Cherchez anything/ So Diddy with it/ Looking for a check with like 50 digits") abruptly cuts to a Dylan sample ("Biz vs. Nudge") and then 15 seconds later, a screwed Young L production named after British art maven and media provocateur Damien Hirst where Kool A.D., Dope G, and MondreM.A.N. are outfitted with aluminum voiceboxes.
It all fits into the "goin' back to Cali strictly for the weather, women, and the weed" vibe, too genial and stoned to come off as chaotic as it reads, and even the tracks that initially feel like one-and-done listens-- Kool A.D.'s instrumentals in particularly tend to be longer on ideas than technique-- rarely end up triggering the fast-forward impulse. While a two-minute Huey Newton speech might sound like it clashes completely with the high spirits described thus far, it serves as a reminder of just how deeply felt the experience of recording back in Oakland was for Kool A.D., as well as a bridge between the Boots Riley feature "Leverage" and the paranoid "TV Eye".
To a certain extent, the presence of Main Attrakionz is surely something of a selling point-- if not the fact that Kool A.D. is actually rapping for the most part on this one rather than further pursuing the robo-tripping path of Palm Wine Drinkard. It's the outermost he's gone to interact with hip-hop as a whole, both stylistically and geographically, and it's not two worlds colliding so much as comfortably nestling. Neither changes their delivery in the slightest, and it doesn't do much to really put Kool A.D. within the current Bay Area conversation of "cloud rap" or #based. In those realms, the actual content takes on a secondary, if not subliminal, effect and even if Victor is mostly in pop-culture-acrostic mode here and occasionally repeats himself ("What the fuck is up, chico man?/ I'm Rico Suave, ya tu sabe/ Jewish Eddie Murphy in your barbershop/ Jewish Mel Gibson/ Black Tintin" is an example of his doing both), failing to listen closely is a disservice to yourself. Kool A.D. is rarely off-point during these 21 tracks, and I'll leave it to listeners to pick out their own personal gems-- the initial recognizing of the connections made is really where a lot of the thrill is with 51.
It's certainly good to hear Kool A.D. in his zone for an extended period of time again, but the revelation of 51 is producer Amaze 88, who's featured on eight tracks. He's definitely a revivalist and his grooves aren't particularly rare-- even beyond the easily ID'd Supremes samples, I imagine he spent a good deal of 2004 listening to The Pretty Toney Album and Madvillainy. But these are beats that Kool A.D. sounds fantastic over, and he's far more amenable to the warm and fleshy soul here than the metal-on-metal abrasiveness of Relax. No matter how dusty his fingers got searching for his material, Amaze lets everything sound alive and airy, with jumpy drum fills and falsetto cooing adding color to A.D.'s lackadaisical monotone. There's an impressive roster here-- Trackademics, Mike Finito, and Young L in particular-- but any time you hear something that stands out for its enthusiastic take on pre-Donuts undie-soul, you can accurately guess Amaze 88 was on the beat. While his five-minute instrumental intro initially comes off like an unnecessary hurdle to hearing Kool A.D. drop one quotable after another on "Electrum" and "La Pinata", after a full listen, you see why he earned it in the first place.
It's the most consistently listenable thing out of the Greedhead camp since Sit Down, Man probably because it's the most effortlessly fun since Shut Up, Dude. More and more, it seems easy to isolate the combative Relax as Das Racist using their highest-profile release to play against their strengths and prove some sort of point-- you notice immediately just how much laughter and camaraderie there is on this thing. Lest you think their divergent mixtapes are indicative of an interpersonal schism, they've sounded as good as ever on the same track as of late, and that holds true on "A Different World". Like Heems' grittier and grimmer Nehru Jackets tape from earlier this year, 51 gets deeper into its creator's hometown roots as something of a fact-finding mission-- Kool A.D. sums up his bicoastal credentials over the slow-coasting "Oooh", shrugging, "My bad I slept through the session yesterday/ But yo you gotta admit, tho-- that's hella Bay/ Moved to New York cause sometimes you gotta get away." Reverse the itinerary, and that about describes 51. | 2012-04-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Greedhead / Мишка / Veehead | April 27, 2012 | 7.9 | 478ae802-45e6-4d26-aa2a-cb3c10faaa39 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Houston rapper Maxo Kream borrows heavily from outsider visions of his own city, blending the local Houston and the more panoramic, now global idea of Houston and seeking a middle ground between the city’s perception and its reality. | Houston rapper Maxo Kream borrows heavily from outsider visions of his own city, blending the local Houston and the more panoramic, now global idea of Houston and seeking a middle ground between the city’s perception and its reality. | Maxo Kream: Maxo 187 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20356-maxo-187/ | Maxo 187 | Houston’s rap scene—or more specifically, its aesthetic—has been ravaged by outsiders. The biggest appropriators, like Harlem’s A$AP Mob and Miami’s Raider Klan, have repurposed the sounds of DJ Screw and the lingo of UGK into a sort of chopped-and-screwed noir. It’s a haunting take on trill culture that sucks out most of the funk, leaving only distorted vocals and waves of ambience. Houston up-and-comer Maxo Kream is taking heed of the poachers and embracing their renditions of Houston rap and culture. He isn’t interested in reclaiming the city from squatters; in fact, he’s more than willing to play by their rules, and on Maxo 187 he seeks a middle ground between the city’s perception and its reality.
The record is a sinister and visceral portrait of Houston street life that binges heavily on the A$AP brand of trill, even enlisting one of its producers (A$AP P on the Boards). The music is a binary of local Houston and the more panoramic, now global idea of Houston, which spawned the #BEENTRILL movement and the widespread abuse of lean. Kream's sound is far more derivative of the A$AP crew than Z-Ro, but his music is still deeply indebted to Houston gang culture. The music is most menacing when Kream drapes his gangland tales over creeping synth progressions and pulsating bass lines reminiscent of Spaceghostpurrp’s "Pheel tha Phonk 1990".
Kream has been completely indoctrinated by gang culture, and on songs like "Thirteen" and "KKK" his raps are imbued with the rhetoric. At times, it’s borderline propaganda: On "Paranoia", which is produced by A$AP P on the Boards, he raps remorselessly about killing civilians and decapitating grandmothers for some sort of greater good ("Fuck your opinion I’m just trying to make a living"). It's chilling, in part because he doesn't even sound like he's trying to convince anyone that what he’s doing is worth it. Maxo 187 doesn’t portray cripping as an escape from the hood but a liberation from ordinary life.
The lyrics are peppered with occasionally complex ideas exposing the corrosive nature of gangs, and Kream softens these ideas with accessible metaphors. When he finds the right balance between the two, his wordplay clicks. "My boys goin' pop I ain’t talkin' Backstreet/ My guns goin' pop and the bullets in sync," he raps on "1998", laying the groundwork for a personal flashback to the year in question. Most of his more engaging rapping takes place when he avoids talk of homicide altogether. The Father-assisted "Cell Boomin" and dual-sided "Trap Mami / Flippin", both produced by Houston beatsmith Wxlf Gxd, are drug peddler anthems with bouncing flows that explore static thump and a syrupy codeine haze.
A year ago, Maxo Kream told Noisey that he felt the candy-coated Houston sound was dated and that it was time to welcome the city’s new image. His message was clear: The city has changed, so its sound should change with it. However, Kream has tethered himself to the A$AP interpretation of Houston rap and the music he’s making now is heavily shaped by the outside perception of his city, the reappropriation of Screw into something even more ominous. Though Kream maintains his ties to Houston street life, he continues to find himself in the reflection of those that have been pantomiming H-Town rappers for years now instead of those within the city limits. | 2015-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | TSO | March 19, 2015 | 6.6 | 478c8cf6-1125-440e-809b-dd0ad4a45276 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The pop polymaths closed 2010 with this Christmas Eve gift: A mixtape in every sense of the word, with the group laying vocals over other people's music. | The pop polymaths closed 2010 with this Christmas Eve gift: A mixtape in every sense of the word, with the group laying vocals over other people's music. | JJ: Kills | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14971-kills/ | Kills | In the parade of 2010 holiday releases, jj's was among the most anticipated. In late November, the pop polymaths gave away single "Let Them" and promised to leave a free, new mixtape beneath the tree on Christmas Eve. And there it was, glistening on the Sincerely Yours website when the 24th came: A download link, well worth the wait. Kills is a true mixtape in both senses of the word. First, like the American rap tapes they seem to love (they've toyed with a lot of non-mixtape material as well as R&B covers in the past), much of this outing finds Elin Kastlander laying her vaporous vocals over other people's samples. It's all very tongue-in-cheek but at its core, Kills, which features a version of the "Let Them" single re-titled "Kill Them", also plays like the kind of tape one fan/nerd might give as a gift, but with a twist. These are songs and samples and scraps of melody they clearly loved enough to share.
jj boast a peerless melodic sensibility, and on this tape they're at once disorienting and exhilarating. You may even LOL every now and then. Because there's a lot of fun to be found in hearing, say, the hydraulicized pluck of Dr. Dre's "Still D.R.E." slice through Kastlander's goofy, weed-heavy, Weezy-saluting whispers on opener "Still". Or in "Die Tonight", a Frankenstein of a track that opens with Kastlander lifting lines from Robyn's "Hang With Me" before vaulting into a dance-pop floor banger sewn together with a sample from Taio Cruz's "Dynamite". Though underrated, stretches of n° 3 did sound as though they had been left incomplete or drained of all the color that made its predecessor so vibrant. Even when smoked out or slowed down, Kills still teems with energy and both Kastlander and Joakim Benon, chameleons that they are, blend into snippets of song just as well as they shift gears between genres.
A lot of that is due to how well they can identify the potential for a new song in someone else's. "Kill [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| You" for example, takes M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" and transforms it into a torch-wielding break-up hymn. Kastlander riffs on the chorus, Benon adds a cushion of synths that sound like they could part clouds, and wham, you hear a new interpretation of a song (and its raised gun sample) that could go over fine in the quiet of a church. On "New Work", the duo takes the piano melody from Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" and makes it the chassis for a song about being young and starry-eyed elsewhere. And then there's "Angels", which clips a Biggie Smalls vocal from a Diddy-Dirty Money track and bookends it with 2Pac's "Changes". Thankfully, this sort of conceptual relief saves the whole affair from being a slew of stonerizations and Auto-Tuned faux-swagger, which, by the way, still somehow ends up wreaking of swagger.
But in the end, as energizing as it tends to be, Kills feels more like a one-off stopgap between original jj full-lengths, an illuminating detour for creativity's sake. The album's climax, "Boom", stitches together three distinct pieces of Kanye's latest opus and then boldly tacks on blasts from Hans Zimmer's Inception score for even more gusto. When that "can we get much higher?" sampling from "Dark Fantasy", drifts in, it's not clear whether jj are referencing weed again or simply commenting on some music they love. But when Kastlander hums over the last few bars of "Runaway", the two seem one in the same. This is how they sing along. | 2011-01-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sincerely Yours | January 6, 2011 | 7.6 | 4793e489-5dc5-4b51-a461-477d7876beea | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Zomby's third album (and second for 4AD) is a two-disc set of short, nimble tracks loosely divided by attitude: "tough" on disc one, "contemplative" on disc two. With Love veers sharply from rhythmic duress to stoned calm, proving a reckless and inattentive immersive experience. | Zomby's third album (and second for 4AD) is a two-disc set of short, nimble tracks loosely divided by attitude: "tough" on disc one, "contemplative" on disc two. With Love veers sharply from rhythmic duress to stoned calm, proving a reckless and inattentive immersive experience. | Zomby: With Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18183-zomby-with-love/ | With Love | Zomby burst onto the scene in 2008 with a series of inventive singles and a mixtape/album that sampled Gucci Mane and Aaliyah into earworm rave. He seemed at the time capable of expanding the borders of bass music, a maverick in a scene where progress is still regarded as hugely important. Things haven't quite turned out that way. As peers like Burial, Rustie, and Pearson Sound have added their styles to an impressive history of U.K. electronic music (referred to as the "hardcore continuum" by journalist Simon Reynolds) Zomby has retreated into the canon, dragging up the bits-- grime's arcane melodic sense, U.K. Garage's shifty rhythms, dubstep's disorientation-- that best promote a perverse, personal history. Put more simply, Zomby likes to play progressive, but he's a synthesist at heart.
Never has this been more apparent than on Zomby's third album (and second for 4AD), With Love. A two-disc set of short, nimble tracks loosely divided by attitude ("tough" on disc one, "contemplative" on disc two), With Love is an abundance, an unabashed display of affection for that continuum. The execution is still very much Zomby: With Love veers sharply from rhythmic duress to stoned calm. For an immersion experience, it's reckless and inattentive.
Complicating matters, the album offers few signposts. Zomby still works with vocals, but they're less intrusive than on past albums. Even the requisite 90s R&B sample-- this from Brandy & Monica's 1998 hit, "The Boy Is Mine"-- is played with more subtlety than in the past. On "The Things You Do" and "If I Will", mangled vocal snippets are masterfully woven into the track's tapestry. There's no Panda Bear collaboration or Gucci Mane remix to peg, and the result is a long, even run of tracks that allows Zomby to hide beautiful, idiosyncratic moments in his thickets of rhythm. "Isis"' gentle, walking bassline and "I Saw Golden Light"'s brassy malevolence pass quickly and without pretense, offering their wares and then bowing to the next track.
Zomby continues to show no interest in fleshing out his ideas, but there's a pleasing efficiency to the way With Love's tracks move in and out of melodic phrases. His particular combination of dulcet synth tones and creeping leads tattoo these tracks, and his sense of rhythm stirs those ideas into hypnotic vignettes. With Love is less expansive than Zomby's early work; he's traded invention for the opportunity to explore every nook and cranny of his humid rhythm mazes. Like simple puzzles, the process and order of With Love transfix long after novelty has worn off.
Just as Where Were U in '92 played like a more vibrant and modern version of early 90s rave and hardcore, With Love offers a necessary sonic update on its inspirations. Drum & bass plays an increased role (Zomby also wonders where you were in 95), allowing Zomby to run stormy drum attacks like "It's Time" full-stop into creeping symphonic pieces. The album snaps on a good system, its depth charge bass anchoring hopscotch leads and tittering hi-hats. Considering that so much of what Zomby draws on was made on cheap computers with limited software, the comparative sonic richness of With Love's music is key. At times the album plays like an extended attempt to upgrade the haphazard majesty of white label grime tracks like DJ XTC's "Functions on the Low". Replacing a bleating, synthesized horn with a more harmonically complex tone separates Zomby from his source material, spiritually-- those shitty sounds were part of the appeal-- but also offers a crucial twist. With Love is reverent displacement: U.K. street music re-imagined as luxury.
With Love's short, baroque tracks balance its overall largesse, leaving a purpled, blunted ambience. Zomby's sense of melody and tone is distinct enough that, intentional or not, it feels like motifs and phrases are repeated and expanded upon throughout. Zomby accomplishes this despite his abrasive sequencing, cramming discordant pieces next to one another. With Love is like a pocket book of poetry, a series of short thoughts only tangentially related. Zomby is the elegant menace, capable of beauty and great affect but too stoned or disinterested to fully commit. The tension between Zomby's adoration for his heroes and his aberrant creativity fuels With Love, less a homage to the past than an intensification of it. | 2013-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 4AD | June 19, 2013 | 7.9 | 47950181-6c36-4636-8c39-ff6b0babfcef | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Pitched between heat-seeking acid house and ambient bliss, the techno auteur’s first album since 2013 is a beat-music odyssey that thrums with spiritual resonance. | Pitched between heat-seeking acid house and ambient bliss, the techno auteur’s first album since 2013 is a beat-music odyssey that thrums with spiritual resonance. | Jon Hopkins: Singularity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-hopkins-singularity/ | Singularity | Jon Hopkins is playing God. That much is clear as soon as “Singularity,” the lead and title song on his first album since 2013’s Mercury Prize-nominated Immunity, shivers into being. A ferrous wasteland of synthesizer overhung by evaporated strings and guitar merge into a remarkably complete sonic landscape — the land and sky of a new world, with its own alien physics, its own genesis and apocalypse. Hopkins keeps hanging these strange planets in wobbly orbits throughout Singularity, forming a universe that pulses with deep consciousness and a sense of endless discovery.
Hopkins was known as a hired hand for Coldplay, Brian Eno, and Imogen Heap, with a sideline in tasteful IDM records until Immunity promoted him to noted techno auteur. Like that breakthrough, Singularity is a beat-music odyssey pitched between acid house and introspective ambient bliss, constant change and eternal return, sublunary and sublime. It also combines many other opposites into thrillingly unstable wholes. The producer’s distinctive techno is coarse and granular, as if electricity were a solid you could grind in a mill, yet it flows in a graceful stream. It squelches like muck and shines like crystal. It beats like a body, but it moves like a mind.
Singularity begins with a three-song voyage through a realm that’s recognizable from Immunity epic “Open Eye Signal,” one where much of the rhythm occurs in negative space. For a techno producer, Hopkins has a counterintuitive way of treating sound as something huge and immobile, then scything crop circles into those heavy frequencies to create a sense of motion. His beats are blanks, and his tracks feel unbound from the metronome. “Emerald Rush” climbs a ladder of Laraaji-like arpeggios and mountainous chord changes to some hidden summit of consciousness. The track features additional drum programming by Clark, another tailor of the fabric of spacetime—something Hopkins turns inside out at the drop on “Neon Pattern Drum.”
This is the kind of album that could only be realized by an expert technician and holistic composer, but Hopkins’ taste for popular music is also apparent. Even his most arcane compositions, like the sideways wobble of “C O S M,” are generous with melody. He taps into something distinctly spiritual and medicinal on Singularity, an urge to transform and heal through a trancelike ritual fusing techno with pop. That quality goes deeper than some meditation-tape song titles (”Everything Connected,” “Feel First Life,” “Luminous Beings”) and a couple of new age piano pieces.
Hopkins recently told The New Yorker that Singularity capped a period of seeking in his life, a time when he devoted himself to “desert treks, controlled breathing, [and] freezing baths.” He bottled that intensity in grooves that heave themselves into being, discovering their forms moment by moment. The songs here are about 75 percent build and 25 percent release, which is gripping, faintly exhausting, and, if you’re ready to go there, transcendent. Hopkins seems to model his music on the infinite cycles of destruction and rebirth that power the universe—but we, too, are part of the scheme. Singularity is ultimately grounded in the personal, not the cosmic, which is what makes this head music so rich. | 2018-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | May 10, 2018 | 8.3 | 47963133-87b5-4b6c-9bab-9e3a76cd3ba4 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The Portland experimental metal outfit have made their simplest record yet, one that is less sprawling than their earlier releases and scarier for its concision. | The Portland experimental metal outfit have made their simplest record yet, one that is less sprawling than their earlier releases and scarier for its concision. | The Body: No One Deserves Happiness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21631-no-one-deserves-happiness/ | No One Deserves Happiness | With No One Deserves Happiness, Portland metal experimentalists The Body don’t add any new elements to their sound or introduce any new collaborators. Instead, they reconfigure their core elements — Chip King’s self-waged war between his shrieks and thick sheets of riff-noise, Lee Buford’s man-machine hammer, frequent collaborator Chrissy Wolpert’s vocals and chorus arrangements —and conscript them into their widening vision of the spot where metal intersects with other dark genres. The result is less sprawling than All The Waters of Earth Turn to Blood and scarier for its concision.
Wolpert’s contributions over the years makes her almost a third member, and on Happiness she fights against the usual notion of women metal vocalists as pretty voices in the background or magnets for male gaze by becoming the confrontational center. The Body have often lashed out at the world through envisioning its end, and Wolpert turns that anxiety inward, proving that, yes, they can get more uncomfortable. The songs in which she has the heaviest hand are Happiness’ most powerful. Her chants of "go it alone" throughout leadoff track "Wanderings" feel like a visceral reminder of unremitting horror, and her chamber-pop instincts take on an alien tinge next to King’s shrill wail. She can also play off herself, as she does by combining a more brooding croon with brief soaring highs in "The Fall and The Guilt," the album’s most devastating track.
"Adamah" sees guest vocalist Maralie Armstrong channelling Kate Bush over Buford’s clipping thuds, not too far off from Rabit’s bullets-as-percussion approach. Combined with King’s clipped rhythm, which recalls Blood’s "A Curse," it's the closest to pop that The Body have ever come. This isn’t a huge leap for them: They’ve covered Sinéad O’Connor’s "Black Boys in Mopeds," Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie," (with Thou) and Fleetwood Mac’s "The Chain" (also with Thou); never before has it seeped into their composition like this.
Pop and metal have more in common than diehards of both would prefer to admit, and one is both rely heavily on structure and tight performance. The Body aren’t improvisatory live, but they don’t play it straight like most metal bands do either, putting it all into an endurance test that’s made them both the heaviest live metal act and guaranteed death for punk houses’ electrical systems. King leans on noise on Happiness more than ever before, from subtle squeals in "Shelter is Illusory" and the undercurrent of "Hallow / Hollow" to the complete absence of chord structure in "For You" and "Guilt." When "The Myth Arc," the final song, kicks in, King blurs the line between doom metal and total noise abstraction. Buford is also a freer player than before, incorporating the punch of harsh techno beats but without an interest in keeping listeners in line with a steady, comfortable tempo. In a way, The Body has always been obsessed with feelings of consuming futility, and in kicking free of conventional structures and following Wolpert's lead, they've come closer than ever to their truest selves on record.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the vocalist on "Adamah" as Chrissy Wolpert. It is Maralie Armstrong. | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | March 15, 2016 | 7.7 | 4798e0bd-83d9-4450-93fe-4e8f3e49500d | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Queens-based songwriter offers nervy lo-fi synth pop that buzzes with everyday anxiety. | The Queens-based songwriter offers nervy lo-fi synth pop that buzzes with everyday anxiety. | Grace Ives: 2nd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grace-ives-2nd/ | 2nd | Most contemporary synthesizer music flows down one of two channels: There's dance music, which aims to set the body in motion, and then there's the now-ubiquitous scourge of “chill,” ambient music’s corporate descendant that guides the body to a state of rest and/or productive concentration. Queens-based songwriter Grace Ives maps her music to a third coordinate. Her new album 2nd is restless, seeking neither catharsis or sedation but instead exploring the gradations of thrumming anxiety.
This is a little like what James Murphy does with LCD Soundsystem, and a few of Ives’ new songs, like “Icing on the Cake,” recall his work. But where Murphy will stretch songs about self pity well past the seven-minute mark, Ives prefers to work in miniature. The tracks on 2nd are two minutes long, give or take; some run closer to one, and none goes longer than three. Her concision is a mark of her songwriting aptitude. She doesn't need to be verbose because she’s already said everything she needs to.
Ives’ vocal style—hushed, plaintive, and clear—evokes bedroom pop, but she is not interested in its purposefully scuffed-up sound. She produced 2nd herself, buffing the record to a gloss that flatters her simple but crystalline vocal melodies. Songs like “Butterfly” make do with just a handful of lead notes, sung first in an earthy low tone and then vaulted up an octave, Cocteau Twins-style, to a breathless head voice.
Ives wears plenty of different masks across 2nd. She's a giddy “sucker for love” on “Butterfly,” a skulking menace while speak-singing on “Something in the Water,” an eager pugilist “looking for a fight” on “Mansion.” Her synth work shifts to accompany each character, landing low percussive throbs like jabs or sending laser-gun pew-pews streaking across the high end. One mood she never entertains is boredom, a relief given how many of her peers overindulge their ennui. Ives is always curious, always hunting for the next spark. She’s not content to complain lightly over a four-on-the-floor trot.
The smallness of these songs lends them an accessibility, even when her lyrics approach existential dread. “I had a dream/That the earth was flooded,” she sings on “Nightmare.” “It must have been because of something I was watching on TV.” How can anyone go on living when the television says the end is nigh, and yet what choice does anyone have but to go on living? Ives grapples with the sheer mundanity of our era's atmospheric doom. She has no answers, but she's keeping a level head. She’s dealing. | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dots Per Inch | April 25, 2019 | 7.7 | 47a4e8d9-cf63-430c-ade7-6b664d75ef52 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
After a car accident derailed her life, the pop singer returns with her second album, compacting emotional and romantic upheaval into tactile electro-pop packed with splashy synths and soaring melodies. | After a car accident derailed her life, the pop singer returns with her second album, compacting emotional and romantic upheaval into tactile electro-pop packed with splashy synths and soaring melodies. | Kiesza: Crave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kiesza-crave/ | Crave | Kiesza’s house-pop hit “Hideaway” arrived alongside a rush of mid-2010s dance-pop crossovers, distinguishing the Calgary singer through an ecstatic blast of energy and a viral one-take video. Kiesza’s debut didn’t deviate far from that song’s formula, yet it also led to platinum sales in Europe, three Juno Awards, and a big-tent collaboration with Diplo and Skrillex’s Jack Ü. Then, while writing her follow-up in Toronto, a car accident derailed her life, leaving her with memory loss, fatigue, and balance issues on the left side of her body. Faced with the possibility of never performing again, Kiesza worked with a chiropractor and various alternative health approaches to will herself back into physical and mental shape within a remarkably fast two years.
The trauma led to more than just a bodily transformation. Kiesza parted ways with her major label to start her own; performed a brief, stripped-back acoustic tour; and released a pair of downtempo synth-pop songs that reflected a new sense of resolve. That reinvigorated spirit persists on Crave, Kiesza’s independently released second album, where she compacts emotional and romantic upheaval into tactile electro-pop packed with splashy synths and soaring melodies.
Crave is obsessed with overstimulation, both in its gale-force choruses and Kiesza’s plain-faced lyrics. Each touch is electric or addictive, as in the energetic “All of the Feelings” which, down to its title, unabashedly recalls Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION era. The festival-primed single rides a jaunty chorus (“I’m getting all the feelings back/You make me believe in love again!”), with verses punctuated with gasps of air and vocal runs that instantly evoke glee. “Run Renegade” pulls off the same feat, dolloping on the nostalgia with delightfully chintzy drum pads and lyrics that urge on the album’s themes of reclamation: “I’m not giving an excuse,” she sings, “because I’m not changing for you.”
Crave’s detours from euphoria feel sleekly designed in their own right. Kiesza slips into a more restrained vocal mode on the lithe “Love Me With Your Lie” and finger-snapped “When Boys Cry,” singing in a breathy mid-range that especially suits the former’s disco throb. Yet the maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer.
Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure. The title track is an ideal example of the album’s insistence on lifting you out of your bad mood, using Prince-inspired guitar licks and a rubbery synth line to express unfettered longing. Kiesza sounds free and untroubled over stacks of her own backup vocals, ready to give in to an emotional free-fall. It’s impossible not to feel the same exaggerated sense of bliss.
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. | 2020-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Zebra Spirit Tribe | August 15, 2020 | 7 | 47a598df-1344-4b66-a28a-6f9d074e4e59 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Clinic compile odds and ends from the steady flow of three-song singles that have accompanied each of their albums, covering the period from their breakout Internal Wrangler through last year's Visitations. | Clinic compile odds and ends from the steady flow of three-song singles that have accompanied each of their albums, covering the period from their breakout Internal Wrangler through last year's Visitations. | Clinic: Funf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10290-funf/ | Funf | It's hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for Clinic. When they hit the ground running in the late 1990s, they were greeted with such an intense blizzard of critical acclaim that they were damned never to live up to the expectations set for them. Their fingerprint, first established on a series of excellent early EPs and solidified on their unremittingly brilliant debut album Internal Wrangler, is unmistakable: Drawing from dub, surf-rock, doo-wop, psych, British jazz, girl groups, the Velvet Underground, and everything in between, it's a sound that stimulates countless record-collector pleasure centers. And yet, for whatever reason, their successive albums have all felt relatively lacking, failing to fully recapture the diversity of their debut.
Now comes Funf, a collection of odds and ends pulled from the steady flow of three-song singles that have accompanied each of Clinic's albums, covering the period from Internal Wrangler through last year's Visitations. Funny enough, the random, fractured flow of the disc is the closest the band has come to recreating the aesthetic their fans have pined for since Walking With Thee changed the script with its consistent, icy sound. Unfortunately, the quality of the material widely varies.
The disc opens with "The Majestic", from the "Return of Evil Bill" single, an instrumental track that might have served as an alternate Internal Wrangler opener if "Voodoo Wop" hadn't bettered it. Radiating the haunted surf vibe Clinic have often explored, it packs enough material for a whole suite into just two minutes. The alpha, however, is quickly followed by the omega: "The Magician" B-side "Nicht" is just horrible, an overdistorted punk rant that transforms familiar Clinic territory into a dense, impenetrable mess. Nothing else on Funf approaches this nadir, but much of it comes off as subpar variations on sounds they've delivered more capably elsewhere. The "Second Line" single's "Magic Boots" is like a less memorable, vocal version of "Hippie Death Suite", for instance, while "Christmas" (off "Come Into Our Room") falls somewhere between "Earth Angel" and "Goodnight Georgie". With its jazz-inflected, smoothly flowing guitar part and well-placed hook, "Christmas" is something of a rarity on Funf: a well-executed run that actually earns its inclusion.
There are a couple of others here that deserve another look. "The Castle" (from the flip of "The Return of Evil Bill") is one of the record's best tracks, employing the overdriven organ sound of "2nd Foot Stomp" and spotlighting a classic, clenched-teeth vocal from frontman Ade Blackburn. "Lee Shan", originally a B-side to "Harvest (Within You)", rides a repeated piano phrase through a cavern of Spector-esque reverb, but instead of a Carole Kaye bassline and a soaring vocal, we get Blackburn's paranoia and nail-biting surf guitar with a bit of spooky reed organ. It's a good example of Clinic doing their best to subvert the expectations set up by the obviousness of the influences at work in their music.
Apart from these, there are a couple of surf-style tracks that sound kind of cool but don't feature much in the way of melody, some other tracks that were obviously left aside in favor of better ones, and a handful of go-nowhere experiments like "Dissolution; The Dream of Bartholomew", which aimlessly meanders between passages of stinging fuzz guitar and twinkly noises. Clinic completists aren't likely to find much of note here, as they'll already own all of these tracks and more (the collection is far from definitive, leaving off several b-sides, including "Stardust", "The Sphinx", "Saxon Road", "Cutting Grass", and "Mechanical Madrigal"), but those open to traversing the band's more haphazard experiments may find a few fleeting moments of worth. | 2007-06-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-06-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | June 6, 2007 | 6.1 | 47a77f88-792e-44e1-ba2b-5b6cade2649b | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Harpist Mary Lattimore traveled across the country with her harp; At the Dam, the album she made on the journey, bursts with ambition and ideas. | Harpist Mary Lattimore traveled across the country with her harp; At the Dam, the album she made on the journey, bursts with ambition and ideas. | Mary Lattimore: At the Dam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21624-at-the-dam/ | At the Dam | The only car that can even begin to fit Mary Lattimore’s 47-string Lyon and Healy harp is a vintage Volvo Station Wagon, with the the back seats folded all the way down. It’s a snug fit, the harp hogging all of the car’s square footage, leaving space for only one other passenger. Before she was collaborating with a legendary laundry list of artists (Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, and Arcade Fire to name a few) she ferried the instrument to and from the odd gig, usually weddings, playing by herself, and leaving by herself. The experience of travelling, practicing, and performing with the harp is an undeniably solitary one. And intimate doesn't feel like it does a good enough job of describing this relationship. Lattimore’s harp is more than just the wellspring for her art and her livelihood, but a life companion.
In 2014 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship, so she and the harp decided to hitch up the station wagon and head out west. At the Dam is the travel journal of that meandering journey across the country, spread over 44 minutes and five songs. The album’s title was lifted from an essay in Joan Didion’s The White Album about the Hoover Dam. Lattimore tries her best to draw power from the staccato rhythms of Didion's sentences and the probing sensuality of her prose. While Lattimore never fully engenders that narcotic feeling of total surrender Didion felt on the 405, she comes close, rendering a landscape that is rich in memory and allusion.
The album was recorded mostly up and down the coast of Southern California from Santa Monica to Joshua Tree and also in Marfa, TX. All of the music was improvised, written in fragments, sculpted as the trip itself took shape. The opener, "Otis Walks Into the Woods" started in Marfa, after Lattimore learned that her family’s blind and elderly black labrador Otis wandered into the wilderness outside their home in North Carolina to pass away. His body was never recovered, and the song recreates the scene of Otis’s final walk through a daisy chain of slyly processed sounds.
"Otis" sets the table for the album’s first half, which is a meditation on mourning and lingering memories. With her harp as the sole interlocutor, it’s quite a feat that Lattimore draws out such specific and poignant themes. "Jimmy V," the track that follows "Otis" is dedicated to the late Jimmy Valvano, a charismatic basketball coach, famous for a life-affirming and courageous speech he gave at the 1993 ESPYs two months before his death. Somehow the tone of of these two songs is never wistful, the cloud of sizzles and pops that surround the harp are as familiar and therapeutic as an Alka-Seltzer pill being dropped into water. The grayness of mourning is colored in with the harp's dulcet sonic splatter.
At the Dam’s latter half is more concerned with explicit archiving—it’s obsessed with freezing transient or chance moments. "The Quiet at Night," "Jaxine Drive," and "Ferris Wheel, January" are environmental and diaristic, gentle accretions of sounds that bounce into each other, trail off into nooks and crannies, and bubble up towards unknown directions. Lattimore uses stray harp-string plucks to suggest the blips of a submarine’s radar throughout, a recurring touch that grounds the environment of these songs, giving shape to the world outside of the echo chamber Lattimore builds. Her sneaky ability to morph sounds and playfully off-kilter sensibility keeps the album from ever seeming fussy or needlessly ornate, always a risk with the harp.
The music plods at times, but that somehow doesn't feel like a problem. The slowness can feel like a blessing. As music critic Ben Ratliff has said, this kind of slowness "invites reciprocity: it makes the listener want to fill the spaces with his own content." The disjunctions and hiccups in the sound, a result of the dialogue between the harp and the digital effects, reminds me of converting old family VHS tapes to DVD, and how the degradation of analog technology coupled with the imperfection of digitization unexpectedly shifts how you remember those records. In some ways, Lattimore borrows from the same decaying spirit that defined William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops. On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with. | 2016-03-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Ghostly International | March 7, 2016 | 7.8 | 47ac4a40-fe7b-419b-94bc-47a047f7302a | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's fourth full-length was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band’s formative line-up, and includes contributions from the National's Matt Berninger and Kid Koala. The album has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time. | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's fourth full-length was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band’s formative line-up, and includes contributions from the National's Matt Berninger and Kid Koala. The album has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time. | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Only Run | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19405-clap-your-hands-say-yeah-only-run/ | Only Run | Depending on your disposition, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are either a band to pity or one to envy. Their much-adored 2005 self-titled debut continues to tower over their entire subsequent discography, but then ringleader Alec Ounsworth seems more comfortable lurking in the shadows than basking in the spotlight. A glance at the band’s current touring itinerary reveals venues half the size of the ones they were headlining nine years ago, but Ounsworth is the sort of artist who’d rather play your living room than an arena. It seems like Ounsworth is exactly where he wants to be, having earned enough clout to, say, assemble Philadelphia indie-rock dream teams for his solo albums or live out his Tom Waits fantasies in New Orleans with some veteran funk session players in tow, while putting enough aesthetic distance between himself and that first Clap Your Hands album to ease the burden of expectation and follow whatever whim strikes his fancy. At this point, the ever-resourceful Ounsworth is beholden to no entity, save for the Bandcamp terms and conditions page.
But as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s fourth full-length Only Run illustrates, there’s a difference between feeling boundless and sounding rudderless. The album’s conception was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band’s formative line-up, leaving just the core of Ounsworth and drummer Sean Greenhalgh. Accordingly, in sharp contrast to the streamlined sound of 2011’s Hysterical, Only Run has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time, with an increased reliance on synthesizers, manipulated voice effects, sampled dialogue, and song fragments pieced together like unevenly aligned Lego blocks. The one constant through the CYHSY canon, of course, is Ounsworth’s excitable tremble of a voice, and, on an album-by-album basis (both within the band and without), he’s been eager to recast it in as many different contexts as possible. But Only Run often compacts this catholic approach into the span of a single song, with frustrating results.
While the circular drum pattern, synth-smeared ambience, and New Order-esque guitar lines of the opening “As Always” lend the track an ascendent grandeur that sounds more like a proper Dave Fridmann production than anything on the last album CYHSY recorded with him, in the final minute, the arrangement drops out to leave Ounsworth singing the verse melody on his acoustic guitar. It’s a classic songwriter ploy—to prove a tune is sturdy enough to stand on its own in the absence of studio embellishment—and, in this case, an effective one. But when the same trick is repeated on “Blameless” and the title track, wherein Ounsworth’s voice left to float in a desolate haze for extended stretches, the sense of structural randomness starts to feel like a crutch in and of itself.
And like a child playing dress-up with their parents’ wardrobe, Only Run’s impulsive change-ups can result in some ill-fitting looks: “Your Advice” aims for a Kid A-style deconstruction of a standard rock song, but the separation between Ounsworth’s clear-eyed, straight-forward melody and the ambient swirls floating behind it is so pronounced, it comes off like an unfinished remix with mismatched console levels. But even that seems complete compared to “Coming Down”, a trainwreck of a song that smashes together an overdriven fuzz-bass riff, melody-averse muttering, and a door-crashing cameo from Matt Berninger that feels less like a triumphant class-of-2005 reunion than him getting his decade-in-the-waiting revenge against CYHSY for upstaging the National on the latter's 2005 tour behind Alligator.
Fortunately, Only Run finally hits its stride in its more focussed second half, with Ounsworth and Greenhalgh strategically building upon simple ideas rather than trying to cram them together and see what happens. “Beyond Illusion” is essentially Only Run’s “Idioteque”, a drum-machined strut that retains its twitchy tension even as the mid-song appearance of Greenhalgh’s booming drums offer some levity. And if the unlikely collaboration with Kid Koala on the slow-motion sci-fi lullaby “Cover Up” proves anti-climactic, the shimmering “Impossible Request” yields the fully realized fruits of Only Run’s grab-bag experimentation, transmitting the band’s inherent ramshackle charm through an expanded palette of space-age sonics. But, of course, this being Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, bliss and balance can only ever be temporary states, as Ounsworth closes out “Impossible Request” with a promise-cum-threat worthy of being chiseled on his tombstone: “Please don’t ask me where I’m going… I’ll tell you again, I never know.” Though, at this point in Clap Your Hands’ perpettually zig-zagging career course, he need not ask us not to ask. | 2014-06-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | June 3, 2014 | 5.8 | 47b066a6-9704-4b75-b5c4-4560329799db | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
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