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Crystal Castles songs could once be split into two camps, the "pretty" ones and the "aggressive" ones. (III) is by a large margin the most focused record by the band, and frontwman Alice Glass' lyrics take on a new importance. | Crystal Castles songs could once be split into two camps, the "pretty" ones and the "aggressive" ones. (III) is by a large margin the most focused record by the band, and frontwman Alice Glass' lyrics take on a new importance. | Crystal Castles: (III) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17272-iii/ | (III) | Crystal Castles seem to operate in a perpetual state of confrontation, conflict, and stress. That works in their favor as they face a new and strange set of challenges on their third album: Their brand of dark electro has proven so influential in recent years that it's put them in danger of sounding normal in 2012. Their first two records were explosive, unpredictable, and found them living on borrowed time, trying to outlast the blog-house fad that spawned their earliest singles and outstrip a run of bad publicity caused by early copyright disputes and cancelled gigs. "The world is a dystopia where victims don't get justice and corruption prevails," Alice Glass recently vented. "I'm one step away from being a vigilante to protect people and bring justice to the people I love." Indeed, her lyrics on the fiercely aggressive (III) take on a newfound importance, often reading like the broken promises of an overworked guardian angel.
Though the duo claims to have overhauled their recording process for (III), trading in all of their gear and disallowing the use of computers in the studio, the album couldn't be mistaken for the work of anyone else. It retains Ethan Kath's trademark staggered synths and Glass' acute wail still pierces through thick reverb. The music now conveys a sense of unease somewhere between waiting for the drugs to kick in and wanting to leave the club as soon as possible. As promised, it is unyieldingly "bleak." Even the catchy songs are filtered through a forbidding darkness. "Pale Flesh" exhumes witch house for just long enough to beat it at its own game, "Sad Eyes" is pure rave throwback, and the call-and-response hooks that materialize as scrambled vocal transmissions ("Kerosene") and longing synth countermelodies ("Affection") come off like power-pop played by catatonic automatons.
While not as immediately striking as either Crystal Castles (I or II), the streamlined sound allows more maneuverability and subtle variety in the actual songwriting. Crystal Castles songs could once be split into two camps, the "pretty" ones and the "aggressive" ones; (III) is the duo's most focused record, and the fact that it avoids assaults like "Doe Deer" or "Alice Practice" demonstrates an alluring confidence. Even the all-texture tracks ("Telepath", "Insulin") are more driven by rhythm than abrasion; they contribute to the overall flow rather than hijacking it.
Insularity is nothing new for Crystal Castles, as both of their self-titled records existed in a sort of personal airlock. Shortly after the release of Crystal Castles (II), they re-cast its cover of Platinum Blonde's "Not in Love" with Robert Smith on lead vocals, resulting in their most successful single to date, but it had the unintended effect of making the emotional illegibility of their own version more apparent. At the end of the tightly coiled "Kerosene", Glass reveals a desire to connect, breathing a promise of equal menace and love: "I'll protect you from all the things I've seen." Glass' lyrics are often addressed to children facing horrors they can't quite process or future atrocities they can't imagine-- references to blood, wounds, antiseptics, and soil are frequent, as well as a warning to "sell your bones for ivory."
So how is this popular, exactly? Fair question. Pop music is often considered to be synonymous with escapism, but it can also be cathartic, and many records this year have shared (III)'s apocalyptic bent. Albums by Swans and Godspeed You! Black Emperor view 2012 in the Mayan sense, predicting a form of divine retribution that will be cataclysmic but also possibly awesome. And while the typical goth jokes came easy when "Affection" dropped on Halloween, look at it in the context of being just another day: the New York Marathon planned to go on despite the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated featured a story surveying the "resilience" of the Penn State football team a year after the Jerry Sandusky scandal erupted, and we were in the homestretch of an American presidential election that actually fostered the discussion of what constitutes "legitimate rape." Whether you listen to Crystal Castles or not, this is a time of confrontation, conflict, and stress, and the success of (III) is how it brings you close enough to the evil that men do to be shocked, repulsed, and affected by it. | 2012-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fiction / Casablanca / Universal Republic | November 12, 2012 | 8 | 47b3a3df-d956-49fd-975d-9e9b40499fea | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Kelsie Hogue’s debut album is likely to be among the year’s most extra albums, but behind its excitable homage to Britney and “TRL” lies an even more intriguing spin on ’90s alternative. | Kelsie Hogue’s debut album is likely to be among the year’s most extra albums, but behind its excitable homage to Britney and “TRL” lies an even more intriguing spin on ’90s alternative. | Sir Babygirl: Crush on Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sir-babygirl-crush-on-me/ | Crush on Me | If you ever thought that pop music was getting too anhedonic, too bummed out or laid-back—basically, too chill—then Sir Babygirl’s “Haunted House” is a one-song counterbalance. It is chill like an active volcano is chill. “Haunted House” is relentless from the first synths, like the pizzicato strings from “Call Me Maybe” repurposed to sound like a heart palpitation, and never lets up the 4/4 jackhammering. Kelsie Hogue’s vocals are frantic and almost breathless, as if between each line she’d stopped to sprint at full speed. Melody chases melody, jerking into a scream and then springing down an octave, like some kind of “Looney Tunes” ACME Slinky.
It’s exceedingly high-energy and also high-stress, much like the party described in the song. And while every pop artist with the slightest drop of alternative, from Charli XCX to Alessia Cara to Lorde, records at least one track about hating shitty parties—knowing thy audience—rarely do they actually sound malevolent. This is, needless to say, not for everybody. It’s only February, but Sir Babygirl’s debut, Crush on Me, is near-certain to be among the year’s top ten most extra pop albums. And everything about it, from the name Sir Babygirl (“the absolute bullshit name,” Hogue told Paper) to the emotional tenor generally being somewhere around an all-caps AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, requires for you to be OK with that level of excess.
Before Sir Babygirl, Hogue used to sing in a hardcore band, and her current project sounds like her attempt to translate that energy into neon and spangles, or at least into 1999. Like seemingly all of her generation, Hogue was inspired by the “TRL” era she grew up on, where “everything—hip-hop, pop, everything—was really maximalist and cartoonish,” she said. But the “TRL” era was at heart controlled, from Max Martin’s template-rigid Cheiron Studios productions to Christina’s mechanical melisma and R&B ballads. The dances were highly choreographed, the hooks precisely scheduled, the weird Titanic skits tightly scripted. Even the screaming tweenage crowds outside were cordoned into place. You have to go pretty far into “TRL” deep cuts before you find anything as authentically teenage as “Flirting With Her,” a mash note disintegrating into a freakout over a tossed-off “hey.” Even in the deep cuts you’d have a hard time finding love songs not geared toward the straight male gaze—Hogue is non-binary and bisexual, and much of Crush on Me is unambiguously about crushing on women. And you almost definitely wouldn’t find something like the mid-song shriek on “Heels” (“I changed my hair!”). It’s less the Britney of Circus than a full-on psychedelic circus—and in that same interview, Hogue calls herself a clown eight times.
For a short set—nine tracks, two of which are reprises and one of which is a 1:43 outro—it’s remarkable how Crush on Me comes off as two albums in one. One album, containing “Heels” and “Haunted House,” is a less abrasive version of SOPHIE’s work with Mozart’s Sister, which ends up as a hyperventilating version of the alt-pop singles that litter playlists everywhere. They’re all executed well; they’re certainly done with the most gusto possible. But the familiarity gets a bit much. “Cheerleader” attends to its detail, with an actual cheer chant in the background, but “I’ll kill my reputation if you come with me to hell” is basically a lyric from Lorde’s “The Louvre,” influence turning to copy. The campfire-singalong nihilism of “Everyone Is a Bad Friend” (“Everyone I meet, I think is going to die”) is SoundCloud emo in a neon bodysuit. Then there’s the unfortunate timing of the title track, dropped just as “thank u, next” made crushing on yourself go meme supernova. At least the song, if not a smash, still oozes charm with its early-Madonna synth twinkles and Hogue’s near-delirious delivery.
The other, better album in Crush on Me is an alt-rock throwback of the kind Honeyblood or Charly Bliss have been making, the 1990s touchstones in this case being the Sundays, Tuscadero on The Pink Album, and especially Dressy Bessy on the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack. This is of course still derivative, but it’s where Hogue allows herself to stretch. The reprises to “Flirting With Her” and “Haunted House” offer welcome breaks from the glitter treadmill. The formers bolsters its acoustic guitar break with a stalking orchestral background, the latter lets the pent-up energy of “Haunted House” dissolve into a featherlight rondo, and both are buoyed by Hogue’s voice at its most Harriet Wheeler ethereal. These, too, were inspired by Lorde, but the inspiration is a starting point, not an end. And if this were actually 1999, “Pink Lite” would make Hogue an instant star, as it voltrons “Here’s Where the Story Ends” and “Semi-Charmed Life” into the kind of monster track that would have engulfed alt-rock radio whole. “I’ll have months where I’ll just take everything in,” she told Paper; what’s truly remarkable is how much of that’s pushed back out, fully formed and infinitely shiny. | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Father/Daughter | February 20, 2019 | 6.8 | 47b6b92b-ada9-40ad-a6cf-96bf7a2b00d8 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The prolific rapper Little Simz returns with a concept album that references Alice in Wonderland. | The prolific rapper Little Simz returns with a concept album that references Alice in Wonderland. | Little Simz: Stillness in Wonderland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22704-little-simz-stillness-in-wonderland/ | Stillness in Wonderland | Rapper Simbi Ajikawo, who records as Little Simz, is by all measures on an upward trajectory, with comparisons to iconoclasts like Lauryn Hill and praise from craft-minded virtuosos like Kendrick Lamar (the latter said Simz “might be the illest doing it now.”) By last year’s A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, she’d experienced enough fame to be ambivalent about it—“the type of music that ain’t never gonna sell,” she rapped on “Wings.” But sell it did, enough for Simz’s next album to feature notably well-curated guests (though not Lamar; that collaboration will probably be pretty great whenever it inevitably happens). All of which served to set her up nicely for her new album, which is…a concept album based on Alice in Wonderland.
The reference to the children’s story is a metaphor, naturally—“It’s about situations I’m still trying to get my head around, and places where I’m still trying to figure out who to trust, or who not to trust,” Little Simz told Vice in late 2016. (The exact situations are a bit amorphous—in other interviews she’s suggested the music industry, or escaping into art, or escapism in general.) But the conceit is the biggest problem—there’s a limit to how many takes can be drawn from a book of Victorian math jokes and accompanying film of Disneyfied drugginess. Alice is also more suited to satire or farce—Carroll’s original idea—than serious subjects or earnest introspection, the two modes of this album. “LMPD,” the first track, features a conscious Chronixx verse on Bob Marley, Black Lives Matter, and pineal glands, followed by a birdsong-flecked interlude featuring a spacey, pitch-shifted Cheshire Cat that evokes, depending on how charitable one is, reggae or a spa. A point is being made here, but perhaps not the intended one.
On Stillness in Wonderland, befitting the title, Simz eschews the vivid psychedelia of peers like Janelle Monáe in favor of a muted, atmospheric approach. There are a couple of overt references—a “white rabbit” clip recurs throughout, and “King of Hearts” takes advantage of Alice’s most confrontational character to let Simz take off heads with Chip (still atoning for his kiddie-grime past as Chipmunk) and Ghetts. But for the most part, the wonder is in the arrangements. Much of Stillness features gorgeous production; touchstones might be early Martina Topley-Bird or last year’s KING album.
But Stillness in Wonderland comes off more as a sparsely edited mixtape than a self-contained album: heavy on atmosphere, light on songs. Simz is remarkably prolific—this is her 11th release—and the album often feels fragmentary: tracks have five ideas in the space where one should be, promising experiments are shoehorned into a concept that perhaps might not have been there. On “Picture Perfect,” she plays Wonderland MC over jaunty brass; if only there was more to say besides “Wonderland is amazing, ain’t it?”
Unusually for such an introspective album, the guest spots are welcome respite.“Poison Ivy” is a standout, a duet with longterm collaborator Tilla about a toxic-yet-compelling relationship, personified in a distorted, prickly guitar line tried to build an alluring soul duet atop. On “Shotgun,” there’s a gossamer hook by the always-welcome Syd, and then there’s Bibi Bourelly’s Rihanna-polished swagger on “Bad to the Bone.” It’s probably not coincidental that these two tracks are both more polished, with a radio-pop sheen totally out of place with the proggier stuff, and contain relatively few Alice references; Simz’s grappling with fame may well be a holding pattern. “I don’t want to be an overnight sensation/I’m tryin’ to make a record you can’t stop playin’,” SiR says on “One in Rotation”; there’s some false dichotomy shit going on here, and then the track cuts off, abruptly, as if snapped out of a dream. | 2017-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Age 101 | January 5, 2017 | 7.1 | 47bba4d5-5483-4eb7-9c66-2e25249db525 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Taking Flight finds Ryan Hemsworth and largely unknown Seattle producer Lucas engaging in a generous give-and-take that plays to each of their strengths. This is warm and unhurried electronic music that's built for Sunday mornings. | Taking Flight finds Ryan Hemsworth and largely unknown Seattle producer Lucas engaging in a generous give-and-take that plays to each of their strengths. This is warm and unhurried electronic music that's built for Sunday mornings. | Ryan Hemsworth / Lucas: Taking Flight EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21082-taking-flight-ep/ | Taking Flight EP | No matter what source material he’s working with—be it a Gucci Mane verse, a Mitski song, or a Pokémon sample—Ryan Hemsworth wants you to know that he loves this stuff, sincerely and without reservation. He’s more than just an armchair curator, though; in the last few years, he's developed both a well-defined aesthetic and a deft hand. Where other DJs seek the thrill of juxtaposition alone, Hemsworth excels at making divergent tracks feel of a piece. Whether he’s flipping Tinashe or Blink-182, it always sounds like Ryan Hemsworth.
Lately, Hemsworth’s evangelism has found a new platform in Secret Songs, a quasi-label where he handpicks tracks from up-and-coming producers for an audience of the faithful. He’s built Secret Songs into a sort of anti-PC Music; in place of ironic distance, there’s a loving embrace—the label’s mantra states that this is a "friends only" affair. Naturally, the songs tend to hew to a type, which is to say that any of them could cleanly slot into Hemsworth’s DJ sets. One of these tracks, "Keep U Warm" by Seattle producer Lucas, was an early standout, a set of disparate sounds, ranging from wind chimes to cricket chirps, sequenced with the delicacy and precision of a music box. For his latest project, Hemsworth teams with Lucas for a collaborative EP that serves as Hemsworth’s first Secret Songs release. The end result finds the two producers engaging in a generous give-and-take that plays to each of their strengths.
The biggest surprise here is that the largely unknown Lucas often sets the tone. Whereas Hemsworth’s recent solo work favors crisp, clean lines, these tracks tend to crackle, buzz and fade. Melodies waft in as if through an open window and often drift off just as unceremoniously. Vocals are treated past the point of intelligibility, serving as textures that rub up against other elements in the mix. Given the gauzy sonic palette, emotions feel implied, rather than announced—not a bad look for Hemsworth, who can occasionally veer into preciousness on his own. There’s a sort of hazy sheen over Taking Flight that makes even the big crescendos feel slightly blurry, like vaseline smeared on a camera lens.
Thankfully, Hemsworth’s knack for pulling heartstrings remains intact, as does his skillful, trap-influenced drum programming, if it's used judiciously. While "From Grace" is the only track on here that feels like it’s built for the dance floor, there are points in all of these songs where, for a brief few seconds, things snap into focus rhythmically before retreating back into the haze. Lucas likes to work with snippets of found sounds and every rattle, flutter, and squeak here feels like it’s adding up to something, nudging the song toward a resolution. Drums are often employed only to stitch together all the sounds floating in the mix, suddenly making you aware of a beat that was there all along. This is warm and unhurried electronic music that's built for Sunday mornings.
At just over 20 minutes, Taking Flight is hardly ambitious, but it's a casual experiment that manages to feel vital throughout. It serves as one hell of a calling card for Lucas, whose previous output is limited to a handful of SoundCloud tracks. Meanwhile, a guy who’s made a career out of bending other people’s songs to fit his aesthetic gets to demonstrate that he’s just as adept at doing the exact opposite. And in allowing a less seasoned artist to eat away at the edges of his sound, Hemsworth has somehow managed to bring his gifts as a producer into even sharper focus. | 2015-10-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Secret Songs | October 6, 2015 | 7.3 | 47be49aa-e0e8-4edc-aebb-805ced509e18 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The electronic duo’s latest is a wonder, a record of ambient house grooves filled with hundreds of tiny, captivating details. It’s also a showcase for the unique allure of their German label Giegling. | The electronic duo’s latest is a wonder, a record of ambient house grooves filled with hundreds of tiny, captivating details. It’s also a showcase for the unique allure of their German label Giegling. | Kettenkarussell: Insecurity Guard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23341-insecurity-guard/ | Insecurity Guard | There was a club in Weimar, Germany where a group of friends let their imaginations run wild. It was really just a house in a park with two dancefloors nestled within its warren-like maze of rooms. Parties sometimes ran for days; house and techno ran parallel with slower, more abstracted sounds: ambient, dubstep, even jazz. The venue was so fundamental to the collective’s sensibilities that on some of the homemade record sleeves for Giegling—the label they eventually founded—they sprinkled dust swept up after their parties into the drying ink.
That idea of a space apart—an autonomous zone, a utopia—continues to fuel Giegling’s efforts. On a recent world tour, they decked out clubs and theaters with candles, bouquets of flowers, and balloons, freely mixing chillout-room vibes and art-school antics with hedonistic, long-haul parties driven by heavy kick drums. Of all the artists on the label—Edward, Ateq, Vril, Traumprinz and his aliases DJ Metatron and Prince of Denmark—Kettenkarussell might best encapsulate that spirit of duality.
Kettenkarussell—the duo of Leafar Legov and Herr Koreander—were the first act to release a record on Giegling in 2009: I Believe You and Me Make Love Forever, a EP of trippy, minimalist house. But it was their 2014 album *Easy Listening *that really delivered on the label’s unique sensibility with a mixture of twinkling ambient miniatures, moody floor-fillers, and a bookending intro and outro sampling Bruce Lee and Jim O’Rourke, respectively. The Giegling crew can sometimes come dangerously close to self-parody in the pursuit of their sound (DJ Dustin, one of the label’s co-founders, described their aesthetic as “the feeling of seeing a sunset”) but *Easy Listening *proved that they were not without a sense of humor. An obvious Boards of Canada pastiche, right down to the warbly synthesizers, was called “Chords of Banana”—not just a sly pun on the Scottish duo’s name, but also a tongue-in-cheek riff on their psychedelic, synesthetic titling conventions.
On Insecurity Guard, the label’s two sides fuse together like never before. Rather than being divided into alternating tracks, as they often were on Easy Listening, here they’ve been swirled into one all-encompassing mix of muggy atmospheres and sleek, gliding house grooves, with driving beats wreathed in woodwinds and bells. The opening “Gate” deploys train-track clatter and pensive vibraphones in a way that suggests hurtling forward while standing stock-still, and in the pulse-quickening “Just for a Second,” the kick drum lashes to and fro while harp glissandi rise and fall with liquid grace; big, burly, shadowboxing drums are balanced by chords that feel as reassuring as a hug.
It’s full of tiny, captivating details likely to snap you out of your day and make you look up in wonderment. Halfway through the smooth, frictionless “New York Blues,” staccato synthesizer riffs stray from the tonal center and turn suddenly dissonant and bright, like sharp rays of sun hitting a rain-splashed windshield; then just as quickly, the track settles back down into its rolling, minor-key groove and hypnosis takes over once again. The album’s six-track, 43-minute run feels like a journey in miniature, one that blurs the line between ambient house and peak-time fare, between going up and coming down, depending on the listener’s mood.
They’re still taking cues from Boards of Canada; the backward flutes and jewel-toned synths of the closing “Brueder” tip their hat to the most wistful moments of Music Has the Right to Children. It’s also possible to hear echoes of Nicolas Jaar’s richly textured music, particularly his fusion of acoustic and electronic timbres. *Insecurity Guard *boasts as sumptuous a sound as you’re likely to hear on a “dance” record. They favor soft, porous timbres, like clarinet and crackling vinyl; they use struck tones with a metallic gleam, like Rhodes piano and mallet instruments. Whether at its softest (the warm, consonant chords of “Everything,” with their shades of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock) or its heaviest (the fierce, pummeling beat of “Just for a Second”) it’s an overwhelmingly physical recording, one that envelops and caresses, taking advantage of an expansive range of frequencies.
It emphasizes, above all, the pleasure inherent in listening. There are no wasted motions, no unnecessary sounds; every tone unleashes a tiny burst of serotonin. *Insecurity Guard *is a kind of secret garden, a clearing in the woods, where the mundane falls away and reveals a world of heightened sensibilities. | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Giegling | June 2, 2017 | 8 | 47bf14e3-d4cd-45bd-9897-e3e17f4568c8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Montreal producer fondly glances back at his formative musical memories of the late 1990s: commercial electronica and alternative rock, in all their occasionally kitschy glory. | The Montreal producer fondly glances back at his formative musical memories of the late 1990s: commercial electronica and alternative rock, in all their occasionally kitschy glory. | CFCF: Memoryland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cfcf-memoryland/ | Memoryland | For those in the know, commercial “electronica” was always a sham: a marketing scheme masquerading as a genre that haphazardly threw together artists and scenes which often had little to do with one another. Originally used in the early 1990s to describe a wide swath of experimental techno, the term was quickly co-opted by the American music industry, which hoped to capitalize on the success of European artists like Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, the Prodigy, and the Chemical Brothers and break the sound into the U.S. pop charts. (The fact that these artists were all riffing on styles that had originated years earlier in Black and brown communities in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York makes the electronica push feel like a particularly egregious act of cultural erasure.) In retrospect, it might seem absurd, but for countless young listeners—many of whom likely first encountered this music via their local alternative-rock radio station—electronica was a gateway into a whole new world, or at least a new sound palette. One of those listeners was Mike Silver, a Montreal native who would eventually go on to make music of his own as CFCF.
Memoryland is framed as a “capital-E Electronica album” and a direct homage to the formative sounds he heard in the late ’90s. Few artists would dare to make a record inspired by both Basement Jaxx and Smashing Pumpkins, but Silver has never been afraid to embrace the unfashionable. Genres like Balearic, new age, and smooth jazz are accepted and even celebrated in today’s electronic circuit, but back when he was making records like 2015’s The Colours of Life and 2016’s On Vacation, those styles were practically radioactive. On 2019’s Liquid Colors, he dabbled in drum’n’bass, which is admittedly in the midst of a full-blown revival, but he purposely focused on the music’s least underground strains, excavating the soundtracks of long-shuttered chillout lounges and oxygen bars.
That collision of electronic music with the pop sphere is at the core of Memoryland, and although an element of kitsch runs through it, the album isn’t some sort of extended joke. Electronica clearly meant a lot to Silver, and the first single, “Life Is Perfecto,” feels like a not-so-subtle tribute to Paul Oakenfold and his Perfecto label. (The UK artist was arguably the biggest DJ in the world in the late ’90s; his 1998 release Tranceport sold more than 100,000 copies in the US, a staggering figure at the time for a mix CD.) With its gauzy textures and twinkling melodies, “Life Is Perfecto” isn’t as over the top as Oakenfold’s swashbuckling 2002 crossover hit “Ready Steady Go,” or even his crunchy 1998 rework of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Perfect,” but the song’s dreamy ambience and grunge-pop guitars affectionately echo the era and its largely ahistorical approach to electronic music.
Relatively little of Memoryland is aimed straight at the dancefloor, but the crooked disco-funk loops of “Self Service 1999” nod to Daft Punk and the larger French touch sound, while “Night/Day/Work/Home” is a giddy pop-trance cut that also folds in the same sort of pseudo-serious, vocoder-assisted emoting that made Moby’s “We Are All Made of Stars” an unlikely hit in 2002. Less successful is “After the After,” which impressively channels the breezy vibe and skittering rhythms of late-’90s 2-step garage—think Artful Dodger—but is ultimately held back by the limitations of Silver’s voice.
Silver is no Craig David, but he does a bit of singing on Memoryland, sounding best on “Punksong,” a bouncy, 93-second piece of fuzz-pop that’s reminiscent of alt-rock also-rans like Imperial Teen and Veruca Salt. It’s the most blatantly “rock” moment here, but distortion-licked guitars pop up repeatedly throughout the LP; neither “suburbilude” nor “dirty” crack the two-minute mark, but both could pass as a Sonic Youth outtake. Lush highlight “Model Castings,” a glitch-flecked collaboration with Montreal indie outfit No Joy, sounds like a cross between “Windowlicker”-era Aphex Twin and something a shoegaze band like Chapterhouse might have cooked up. Silver could have played it cool and filled Memoryland with references to Underground Resistance, classic UK jungle, and whatever other ’90s sounds are fashionable at the moment, but he refreshingly doesn’t attempt to front. Clearly he was an alt-rock kid, and his willingness to acknowledge that—along with the blatantly rockist orientation of the electronic music that shaped him—is a big part of why the album is so charming.
Electronica reeks of what some might call inauthenticity, but does that invalidate the connections that Silver—and millions of others like him—forged with the music more than two decades ago? Memoryland seems to indicate that it doesn’t, but the album is more a warm remembrance than a full-blown celebration. Perhaps that’s why the LP’s more introspective tracks are some of its most potent. “Gravure Idol” is a whimsical psychedelic number that’ll surely trigger fond memories for anyone who was blown away when the Orb’s iconic “Little Fluffy Clouds” appeared in that Volkswagen Beetle commercial back in 1998, and “End—Curve of Forgetting” ventures even further into dreamland as it vacillates between new-age soundscapes and beatless trance. Silver is undeniably looking back at electronica through rose-colored glasses—in fairness, his glasses are actually tinted yellow in his latest press photo, which feels far more appropriate for that late-’90s era—and though he can still find joy in the bright colors and Y2K excess of these sounds, he’s also clever enough to recognize just how ridiculous they were in the first place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | BGM Solutions | April 12, 2021 | 7 | 47c4275f-d199-4bf9-94d1-940312f40f04 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
With a cast of female vocalists guiding and redirecting the songs, the National’s eighth album is their largest, longest, and most daring. | With a cast of female vocalists guiding and redirecting the songs, the National’s eighth album is their largest, longest, and most daring. | The National: I Am Easy to Find | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-national-i-am-easy-to-find/ | I Am Easy to Find | There’s a lot to marvel at on any National album: the regality, the musicianship, the compositional flourishes, the ornate displays of sublimated rage. The ex-Brooklynites are among the smallest handful of ’00s bands to close out the ’10s with a higher stock than what they entered with; theirs is one of the richest dynamics in indie rock. But for all they’re good at, every album has been first and foremost a litmus test on singer Matt Berninger. To enjoy the National, you’ve got to enjoy him.
Anybody who’s followed the band for seven albums has likely done so because they’ve connected with Berninger’s dapper hangdog persona, a Cary Grant interpretation of Leonard Cohen. He’s the kind of singer who can express listeners’ ugliest insecurities yet somehow make them sound like a brag, forever the star of his own movie where not much happens but it’s all beautifully shot. It’s a real feat spinning a fantasy out of feelings so messy. Even for listeners growing tired of his grousing voiceovers, or those who never liked it much to begin with, the band’s form-breaking eighth album I Am Easy To Find offers another way in. For the first time, Berninger is just a piece of this universe, not the center.
On nearly every song Berninger is accompanied and sometimes silenced by a rotation of featured female vocalists who step in to offer perspective, commentary, and dissent. It’s perhaps yet another lesson internalized from Cohen, whose songs regularly called on a chorus of women as their voice of reason. And like Cohen, the National have recruited some of the best singers out, among them Lisa Hannigan, Mina Tindle, Kate Stables, Sharon Van Etten, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, whose spotlight “Dust Swirls in Strange Light” benches Berninger all together. Most revelatory of all is Gail Ann Dorsey, David Bowie’s longtime bassist and backing singer, who heralds the album’s new direction midway through opener “You Had Your Soul With You.” Her extraordinary voice of saffron arrives like a divine intervention, instantly parting a track that had previously been National-by-numbers.
The album’s guest roster shores up the National’s greatest critical vulnerability—the myopic white, male vantage—so conveniently that it’s tempting to read it as cynical. In interviews, the band has been more than a little defensive about the choice, insisting it wasn’t made out of some patronizing notion of allyship. It’s the execution, though, that casts aside doubts. These women aren’t window dressing, they’re focal points, and each subtly redirects the music to previously unexplored directions. They approach these songs from the most daring angles of attack, creating an air of unpredictability that even 2017’s electronics-laced Sleep Well Beast couldn’t sustain. Their presence also turns the lyrics, some written by Berninger’s wife Carin Besser, from a monologue into a conversation. The competing perspectives seem to humble the singer, challenging him and shaking him from his own head. “I know I can get attached and then unattached to my own versions of others,” he concedes on “The Pull of You.”
All those outside voices aren’t the only reason I Am Easy To Find can feel like a remix of a National album. Just as those strong collaborators seize the control away from the band, so has the record’s producer Mike Mills, a director by trade who incorporated some of this music into a tear-jerking short film of the same name. In the band’s telling, Mills wasn’t shy about editing their work, often stripping songs of the elements the band was most excited about (that may be why so few of Sleep Well Beasts’ U2-isms have carried through). So although the album is the band’s biggest yet, with a cast of dozens including 13 violinists alone, it rarely feels bulky. Only the too-Arcade-Fire-for-comfort “Where Is Her Head” succumbs to grandiosity, prioritizing spectacle over purpose.
At 64 minutes, I Am Easy To Find is also the National’s longest album, which is a mixed blessing. It provides room to luxuriate and admire all these guest voices as the art pieces they are while getting sucked into unhurried treasures like “Quiet Light” and “Oblivions,” both among the band’s most weightless and sublime. But the record can drag, sometimes badly. “Rylan” sounds like a rewrite of every other mid-tempo National number directed at a character with a moderately memorable name, while “Hairpin Turns” adds ammunition the most frequent dismissal of this band: They’re boring.
The complementary inverse of boring, of course, is consistent, an adjective that’s similarly dogged this band for the last decade (it’s meant as praise, but more often reads as shorthand for nothing new to see here). Between the consecutive departures of Sleep Well Beast and I Am Easy To Find, the band has finally started pushing back against their reputation for playing it safe. If some of their gambits sound less risky than they actually are, it’s mostly because they’ve pulled them off so well.
I Am Easy To Find’s lyrics, too, celebrate risk. On “Not In Kansas,” Berninger fears that he may not be the type of guy to punch a Nazi, though he’d love to be. And while the album’s title sentiment could be read as romantic in a certain light—a sweet reassurance—the title track instead casts it as a passionless pledge between a couple too tired to fight but too vested to split. The words reek of defeat; there’s nothing alluring about them. In contrast, on “Hey Rosey,” Gail Ann Dorsey outlines a far more dangerous love, one like a razor blade and a radiant flame, and Berninger can barely contain his excitement. “There’s never really any safety in it!” he swoons, as the music crests and trembles deliriously. In love, as in art, easy is boring. The unknown? Now that he can get worked up about. | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 16, 2019 | 7.6 | 47cca9a2-e554-48b8-bb49-47099bf7d0ee | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
British singer-songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton is back with a new name and a new sound. The ukulele, harp, and glockenspiel of her 2012 debut have been replaced with Stones R&B rhythms, doomed Sabbath licks, and blistering Cali-punk. | British singer-songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton is back with a new name and a new sound. The ukulele, harp, and glockenspiel of her 2012 debut have been replaced with Stones R&B rhythms, doomed Sabbath licks, and blistering Cali-punk. | Du Blonde: Welcome Back to Milk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20442-welcome-back-to-milk/ | Welcome Back to Milk | In the summer of 2012, after releasing her debut LP Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, singer-songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton suffered a nervous breakdown, scrapped an entire album, and devised a new plan of attack. She plotted a drastic reinvention and arranged sessions with producers who would nod along with glazed expressions before layering on Auto-Tune and ornamental synths in the studio. Exasperated, Houghton turned to nefarious Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos, impressed by his yen for psych bands like Lemon Pipers and Ultimate Spinach, and developed her classic-rock chops. Then, just before hitting the studio, Houghton eviscerated the work, wrote two new tracks, and rebuilt, once more, from the ground up.
The result of the triple-distillation process is Welcome Back to Milk, a radical musical and psychological inversion of its predecessor. Where Cellophane Nose sketched an alluring wonderland, the follow-up finds Houghton, now working as Du Blonde, fierce and firm, assertive enough to know when to keep us away, at a distance that suits her. In the sense that it strives less to be pretty than honest, the album is about growing out of preconceived social roles. Cellophane Nose was a resplendent work of odyssey and intricacy, a feature some critics couldn’t untangle from her femininity: In a short paragraph, the Guardian review describes its "airy, fairytale quality," observes one song "skipping delicately" and compares another to "fellow sprite Alison Goldfrapp." Perhaps Houghton took it to heart.
So Welcome Back to Milk skews primal. The debut’s ukulele, harp, glockenspiel, and Wurlitzer are all out, along with any "nu folk" threads; in their place are Stones R&B rhythms, doomed Sabbath licks, blistering Cali-punk, and a primitive kind of glam–the most flamboyant instrument Houghton employs is the voice of Future Islands' Samuel T. Herring, who makes a lovelorn, pantomime-villain cameo on "Mind Is on My Mind". But if a picture is forming of barren blasts and ruthless efficiency, that’s not quite it: "Four in the Morning" is a wrenching piano ballad, "Isn’t It Wild" waltzes dreamily to the stars, "Hunter" concedes tenderness for an ex-lover. Still, what’s important is that the record feels fierce, is designed to, and Houghton has pulled no punches in spreading the word.
The record’s opening brace alone leaves you dazed throughout the first half: "Black Flag" acts out both sides of a lovers’ spat over stormy guitars, while "Chips to Go" thunders along on a devilish, Sparks-like riff as Houghton yells and trills theatrically. Third track "Raw Honey" simmers, but despite being resolutely unpunk (a frilly guitar solo consumes one-third of its runtime) the fingerpicked hook is so inescapably reminiscent of Californication-era Red Hot Chili Peppers it’s tempting to hear a pass-agg kiss off to Houghton’s ex-beau Anthony Kiedis.
The men of Welcome Back to Milk fare about as well as you’d expect, which is not very. On Cellophane Nose’s "Atlas", Houghton sat with her boyfriend "dissecting the atlas for places we’ve been/ Your list is longer, but you’ve got more years on me." Here, that sort of homey affection would feel jarring: Domesticity has become a battleground where partners pick fights ("If You’re Legal"), polish their egos ("After the Show") and mansplain your "issues" ("Hard to Please"). On "Young Entertainment", a shimmering noir-punk number, she demands, "What is it like to fuck your mistress with her hands tied?"
Welcome Back to Milk scans as an overhaul of its protagonist’s romantic history, a poised reassessment of domestic situations that seemed okay at the time, but maybe weren’t the best, after all. Wherever her gaze turns, Houghton’s conviction is lethal. On "Mr. Hyde", she shreds a domineering narcissist to pieces; on "Four in the Morning", she shreds herself to pieces; on "Black Flag", she simply shreds. This all serves a winning mission statement: Radically reinterpret your past, and your present will look after itself. | 2015-05-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | May 21, 2015 | 7.4 | 47d9f29d-9f69-4b70-afb2-ec84bb6b9cce | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Brand New’s fifth album stands as a monument to their gradual evolution. It is a wise and vulnerable conclusion for a rock band who were crucial in shaping a scene, a sound, and many emotions. | Brand New’s fifth album stands as a monument to their gradual evolution. It is a wise and vulnerable conclusion for a rock band who were crucial in shaping a scene, a sound, and many emotions. | Brand New: Science Fiction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brand-new-science-fiction/ | Science Fiction | The eight years of psychotic speculation ahead of Brand New’s forever-delayed “LP5” did more for the band’s legacy than topping Deja Entendu or The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me ever could. This fan fervor lent the album a mythical status typically granted to someone who died or disappeared. Objectively, it’s been 14 years since “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” peaked at No. 37 on Billboard’s Alternative chart, eight since Daisy, their most recent and least loved studio album, and they’ve toured both clubs and festivals regularly in the time since. The excitement surrounding Science Fiction now that it has arrived is faintly tempered by the thudding finality of it all: “#thisIsTheLastOne” and the “Brand New 2000 - 2018” t-shirts are a statement of fact. But to put it in his own words, “LP5” was a millstone around Jesse Lacey’s neck. Science Fiction turns it into a monument.
As they’ve done throughout their two decades, Brand New defy expectations to a degree that can make even their most beloved past work feel short-sighted. If the streamlined pop-punk throwback singles “I Am a Nightmare” and “Mene” were eventually bundled into Science Fiction, it might’ve been the equivalent of that oft-fantasized Radiohead album where they returned to The Bends; a satisfying capitulation to fans who refused to evolve along with the band. Instead, from its opening invocation of burning witches, Science Fiction is most similar to A Moon Shaped Pool: We’ve never heard this band be this quiet or this gracious about aging. And it’s unnerving because an infamously inscrutable frontman drops his defenses and finally becomes vulnerable, like he knows this might very well be the last time he gets the chance.
Lacey’s long-lasting aversion to talking about himself and his music is completely at odds with the band’s most popular work—his logorrheic lyrics inspired thousands of LiveJournal status updates lost to the digital dustbin of history, only to be salvaged decades later at jam-packed Emo Nights across the country. Given that 2003’s Deja Entendu was essentially a concept record about Brand New’s conflict with modest fame, how much could we trust Science Fiction if Lacey hadn’t mentioned the rise in expectations during his transformation from Warped Tour pin-up to musical prophet? “Got my messiah impression, I think I got it nailed down,” Lacey sarcastically self-harmonizes during the one song that evokes Deja Entendu in both shout-along catharsis and Brand New meta-criticism. The real punchline, though, is the chorus: “I’ve got a positive message, sometimes I can’t get it out.” Sure, if we could all constantly radiate love for everyone and shrug off our demons, maybe Brand New wouldn’t need to exist. But Lacey was built to fight through all this to the bitter end.
Science Fiction doesn’t provide much joy beyond its mordant humor, but using the acidic feel of “old Brand New” as a counterpoint, it resonates longer, has more gravitas, and carries the weight of earned wisdom. The candlelit “Could Never Be Heaven” expresses Lacey’s desire to be a reliable family man in his 40s with as much intensity as he once summoned to smite exes and Taking Back Sunday. On The Dark Side of the Moon and Antarctica hybrid “In the Water,” he warns, “‘Hide your daughters,’ the old men say/You were young once before, you know how we get our way,” and as the guy who admitted to doing just that on Deja Entendu’s dark and regrettable song “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis”, he should know. Likewise, centerpiece “Same Logic/Teeth” takes a stern but empathetic look at cyclical self-destruction: “Your friends are all imaginary/Your shrink stopped answering the phone/So you decide to make incisions at your home while you’re alone.”
While Science Fiction keeps the energy up with diamond-cut harmonies, howled hooks, and pithy quotables, it also blooms outward with new qualities: patience, long stretches of stillness, denial of easy answers, defiance. It’s bookended by two of Brand New’s lengthiest songs and certainly their most disquieting. Lacey dreams of bursting into flames through all of the nocturnal, dubbed-out opener “Lit Me Up,” yet never reaches above a mutter; he closes the album with the chilling guitar figures of “Batter Up” turning into white ash, like “Jesus Christ” given a Disintegration Loops treatment. They’re produced with astonishing clarity and detail by longtime “fifth member” Mike Sapone like controlled burns. The stately balladry of “Waste” is slowly subsumed by guitarist Vinnie Accardi’s molten feedback, “451” and “Desert” recall the aggressive, parched blues of PJ Harvey or Feist’s Pleasure. By emphasizing closely-mic’d drums, live-room dynamics, and gristly, 3-D grain, Science Fiction creates an unusual intimacy despite its sweeping expanse, ensuring the listener never feels too far removed from Brand New even if they’re being projected on a festival screen.
For all of Brand New’s ambitions, it’s hard to recall a popular rock band making an album this crafty, this finely decorated without jettisoning the attributes of rock music. Accardi has been a key architect in the defining and redefining of Brand New’s sound, and Science Fiction features his most inventive textures and his proggiest soloing, mandolins and banjos, but also stiffly strummed power chords, intimate acoustic picking, and arena-ready anthems. This is populist rock music—outsized alternative rock—and the scope and scale is unique enough in 2017 to forgive the inevitable moments where Lacey could’ve used an editor, namely the indelicate Nagasaki and Wizard of Oz metaphors on “137” and “Could Never Be Heaven.”
If Brand New sonically recall the mid-90s, when emotionally fraught and morally conflicted guitar bands ruled the airwaves, no wonder they released Science Fiction into the unsuspecting world as 500 one-track CDs. From its arresting cover art to its careful sequencing, it’s an album that impresses with its carefully considered wholeness. It rigs even the potential “singles” with unexpected segues, trap doors, false endings, found sound, lo-fi vignettes, tape loops, and lyrical Easter eggs that either reference their past work or can easily be manipulated into doing so. “In the Water” ends with the same incantation that began “Daisy” and splices in a manipulated voice that blurts “seven years” seven times—an off-kilter reference to “Seventy Times 7”? Or the count-off from “Limousine”? Why is it seven years when Daisy came out eight years ago?
For years, Brand New obsessed over Science Fiction and it should be treated in kind. It secures their place in 21st-century rock music by re-establishing why a lot of their acolytes became musicians themselves. Whether it’s Manchester Orchestra’s blockbuster dirges, Lil Peep’s sweet and sour emo-rap, Julien Baker’s ecclesiastical confessionals, the cleansing emotional purge of Sorority Noise’s You’re Not As _____ As You Think, the caustic nu-grunge of Citizen, or even their choices in opening acts (Modern Baseball, Cloakroom, (Sandy) Alex G, Foxing), popular guitar music in 2017 has been undeniably shaped by Brand New, a band who has served not just as damaged role models but as a formative musical influence. And this was all before they provided an example of what all these bands could aspire to sound like in their 40s without disowning their younger, more dramatic selves. In death, they provide a last will and testament—if this truly is the end for Brand New, Science Fiction points a way forward for everyone else. | 2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Procrastinate! Music Traitors | August 23, 2017 | 8.3 | 47daa18e-4563-479a-a99c-f17eac390aca | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Since 2006's Year of the Dog, Fucked Up have released an EP once every 12 months or so featuring music inspired by different years of the Chinese calendar. The seventh in the series*, Year of the Hare*, shows them indulging their weirder sides, embracing outsider psych and sound experiments. | Since 2006's Year of the Dog, Fucked Up have released an EP once every 12 months or so featuring music inspired by different years of the Chinese calendar. The seventh in the series*, Year of the Hare*, shows them indulging their weirder sides, embracing outsider psych and sound experiments. | Fucked Up: Year of the Hare EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20607-year-of-the-hare-ep/ | Year of the Hare EP | The thing about Fucked Up is that on their proper albums, their music has never been all that fucked up. At this point, the Toronto band is basically a heavy guitar pop group fronted by the unmistakable hardcore bark of Damian "Pink Eyes" Abraham. They're hardcore in spirit and attitude and Wikipedia entry only: 2014's Glass Boys was more digital-age the Who than Minor Threat (and the same goes for 2011’s hour-plus rock opera David Comes to Life, really).
As far as living up to their name, it's in their ongoing Zodiac series where they let the freak flag fly. Since 2006's Year of the Dog, they've released an EP (sometimes only "EP" in name) once every 12 months or so featuring music inspired by different years of the Chinese calendar. These songs are often long and more experimental. The seventh in the series*, Year of the Hare*, includes a 21-minute title track that was written and recorded in 2013 and a eight-minute B-side recorded in 2014. The cover art was designed by Converge frontman Jake Bannon, who's released Year of the Hare on his Deathwish imprint, but this music isn't especially heavy.
Instead, it sounds like the kind of outsider psychedelia that may have popped up on a weirdo imprint like Siltbreeze at some point in the '90s alongside the Strapping Fieldhands, the Dead C, and Harry Pussy. The B-side, "California Cold", actually made me think of psyched-out noise-freaks Temple of Bon Matin and Comets on Fire for the first time in awhile. The vocals are hazy and occasionally buried, the guitars reminiscent of a blown-out "Free Bird". There are shakers, saxophone, and flute. It's a lusciously murky offering, one that works as an anthem before folding in on itself and breaking apart in interesting ways, and overall is the stronger of the songs here.
The title track finds them experimenting with the process of recording itself. "Year of the Hare" starts in silence for two minutes before an acoustic guitar strums and the song slowly picks up pace. But throughout these 21 minutes, tape is spliced and edits are intentionally obvious: you get the sound of a cable unplugging (and the connection being reestablished), an empty studio layered over and over, a plaintive piano starting and stopping and warping, music skidding out into a dead-end and then negotiating a new climax. "Year of the Hare" feels, at times, very much like their version of a modern-classical experiment: John Cage collaborating with Youth of Today. It's not until about the six-minute mark when they allow themselves to go full bore into the song, and here it becomes an enjoyable Fucked Up anthem. Though, after repeat listens, it remains unclear if you really needed to go through the rest to experience that rush.
Abraham and guest vocalist Isla Craig sing—at different times, it's more like Act I and Act II than a duet—about various rabbits, from the popular culture of Alice of Wonderland ("There's only one way to stop a mad watch") to the kind you find in your backyard. There are "hare/hair/heir" puns and references to endless fucking and endless proliferating. These lyrics were written by guitarist and producer Mike Haliechuk, who has said that the song "focuses on time, and becoming lost in it. The modern way of life, getting stuck in time-sucking gadgets and trends, stress and scheduling."
The song itself is circular, finishing how it began; it feels very much like an endless loop, Abraham howling somewhere in the middle: "Mad as a march hare, two days late/ They stole all my time and ate all my space/ A thousand rabbits with a million heirs/ It's always tea time in the year of the hare." The track was accompanied by an unsolvable interactive video that features an office worker being haunted by rabbits on the subway, in his office, and at home. I couldn't get the video to work properly, so just kept refreshing my browser, until I started to wonder if that's actually what they wanted me to do.
All of this is admirable enough, even if, at this point, the commentary is a bit obvious. But hey, Fucked Up have continued to stretch and find new ways to carry on, and for a hardcore group that formed in 2001, this is worthy of respect. Doubling down on all of this, the band is about to go out on a Zodiac-themed tour, performing Zodiac songs (some never before performed live) as a nine-piece featuring all the members of the group, Doomsquad.
You have to wonder, though, if it isn't time to scale back a little, and to find complexities in a more compact approach. You can add layers and length endlessly, but that often dilutes (Chinese Democracy vs. Appetite for Destruction, if you will). Sometimes a power trio is more than enough. Because while "Year of the Hare" offers nice sounds and concepts, it essentially works best as background music. All said, I'm not sure if background music's what I want from a band who, on more than one occasion, literally caused the hair on my neck to stand up. | 2015-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Deathwish | June 17, 2015 | 6 | 47db41d3-e3e1-4deb-899e-04ffff9e8078 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the wondrous alchemy of performance and technology found on Tortoise’s third record. | 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 wondrous alchemy of performance and technology found on Tortoise’s third record. | Tortoise: TNT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tortoise-tnt/ | TNT | Imagine a graphic showing all the bands the five members of Tortoise were in before they came together and then all the bands they went on to play with after. At the top of the funnel you have groups ranging from dreamy psych-rock to earthy post-punk crunch, including Eleventh Dream Day, Bastro, Slint, and the Poster Children; on the “post-Tortoise” end are groups focusing on electro-jazz and twangy instrumental rock like Isotope 217, Chicago Underground, and Brokeback. In this graphic, Tortoise is the choke point, the one project that has elements of all these sounds but is never defined by nor committed to any of them.
Instead, Tortoise floats free, a planchette moving over a Ouija board guided by 10 sets of fingers, where everyone watches the arrow float in one direction but no one is quite sure how it gets there or who is doing the pushing. No album in the band’s initial run embodied that like their third, 1998’s TNT. Weirdly beautiful and impossible to pin down, TNT was a fulcrum, a place where the musical values of the past (instrumental proficiency, deliberate composition) met the digital future.
But first we should start with that past, with a rhythm section, or rather, two of them. The first of these came together when drummer John Herndon and bassist Doug McCombs became friends and started playing together in Chicago in the early 1990s. Entering a studio with producer Brad Wood to record an early single, Herndon and McCombs overdubbed multiple parts to flesh out the sound but realized they needed more musicians for what they had in mind. They played the tapes for their acquaintances, drummer John McEntire and bassist Bundy K. Brown, who formed the rhythm section for the Louisville-based post-hardcore group Bastro, and soon after, the four players, along with percussionist Dan Bitney, became Tortoise.
If the early ’90s was the perfect time for a band like Tortoise to emerge, Chicago was the perfect place. The city’s burgeoning independent music scene was attracting national attention. After the post-Nirvana alternative rock explosion, the hunt for “the next Seattle” was on, and Chicago was one of the candidates. In 1993, Billboard published a piece touting Chicago as “Cutting Edge’s New Capital,” citing the buzz around artists like Liz Phair, Urge Overkill, and Smashing Pumpkins. But if the national press was more focused on the MTV-ready alt acts, that meant that the underground was free to do their thing far from the glare of the spotlight. For Chicago, the building blocks of such a scene were the city’s record labels, particularly Touch and Go, Drag City, and, beginning in 1995, when it moved from New York, an upstart imprint called Thrill Jockey launched by former Atlantic A&R rep Bettina Richards.
After bassist Brown had been replaced by ex-Slint guitarist and bassist Dave Pajo, Tortoise began moving fluidly between musical worlds. An experimental strain of music using rock instrumentation was emerging, and “post-rock” seemed to fit as a blanket description. Initially, the term applied to UK bands like Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis, but a framework for understanding this music from the U.S. was laid out by critic Simon Reynolds in a late 1995 piece for The Wire. As Reynolds pointed out, the American flavor of post-rock (the piece highlights Tortoise, Labradford, UI, Stars of the Lid, and more) could be thought of as anti-grunge, a music that suggested a headier and less earthbound alternative to the alternative. “Grunge literally means ‘grime,’ ‘muck,’ ‘dirt,’ Reynolds wrote. “It’s appropriate that so many of those in revolt against Grunge’s earthly passion have turned to science fiction and outer space in order to free up their imaginations.”
Guitars dominated the grunge-derived strand of music, but post-rock left room for electronics and other instruments. McEntire was Tortoise’s resident tech wizard, and the band’s M.O. moved from the thudding beats of the debut into something that could fit with what was happening with various strands of electronic music. On Virgin’s 1995 set of dark atmospheric electronica, Macro Dub Infection, Tortoise appeared alongside Spring Heel Jack, 4 Hero, Tricky, and the Mad Professor. And in 1996, they were included in Mo’ Wax’s blunted head-nodding 2-CD trip-hop set Headz 2A, sandwiched between songs by DJ Krush and Massive Attack. Tortoise didn’t exactly fit on either compilation—they were too disjointed, too ready to leave the groove behind if something else caught their fancy. But these compilation placements helped to reframe their music as a studio creation first, something assembled from parts.
Remixing was in vogue, and Tortoise embraced it. The astonishing 20-minute journey “Djed,” the opening track from their second album, 1996’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die, put the idea of after-performance manipulation at the center of the piece, as a deep-pocket groove is born, develops, and shatters halfway through in a moment of digital haywire that sounded like a mistake. That garbled transmission when the piece implodes provided a clue as to what the next record might be about.
TNT took the ideas of “Djed” further into the creative possibilities of nonlinear editing. It was recorded to hard disk via Pro Tools, a relatively new idea on the music scene when they started working on the album in late 1996 (Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, engineered by McEntire around the same time, was another early entry for the technology). TNT is a record where copy, cut, paste, and undo reign supreme. Individual parts were worked up in rehearsals, recorded in various combinations, and later reconfigured into new pieces of music by McEntire and the band.
One of the delicious tensions of TNT is its ex post facto assembly. It doesn’t really sound like music created by careful manipulation of each bit and put together from parts. You almost always have a sense that individual people, not machines, are playing each part and even though the players’ skill ranges from “highly accomplished” to “virtuoso,” the pieces also sound human. You can see hands on keys and people standing over drum kits. Beats are a bit off-kilter, the guitar seems in dialogue with the bass.
TNT’s opening title track is the most live-sounding cut on the record, but it, too, was carefully built one part at a time. As it begins, the cymbals and snare taps are like the tide rolling in, the skitters and crashes are as jazzy as Tortoise get, and out of this foamy pile emerges Jeff Parker’s immortal guitar line. Parker was new to the band, and was the first player to bring serious jazz chops, with his history with Chicago’s legendary collective AACM. He announced his arrival in Tortoise with a guitar phrase that might be the group’s most memorable single moment, a riff that sums up not only the album’s mood but the spirit of an entire era. Parker’s 12-note phrase seems to ask a question and then half answer it, and because it conveys the feeling of an incomplete thought, it leaves a space for the listener to fill. Driven by that guitar refrain, which loops throughout the track, “TNT” folds in horns, a sequencer, and chunky bass as Parker offers counterpoint phrases. You can feel both how “played” it is alongside the album’s modular nature, where each part is slid into place as it grows and then explodes. “TNT” conveys possibility—it’s a musical expression of what it feels like to wonder about the future on an album that feels like it’s living inside of it.
Nothing else on the record is quite so dynamic or organic. Instead, TNT settles into a liminal zone that straddles genres and threatens to slip into the background but never does. It’s a vague record, but that’s actually one of its strengths—the music frames uncertainty, leaves avenues unexplored, and sounds a little different each time you hear it. Many of the tracks flow one into the next, and motifs appear and then reappear later. A few songs become loosely joined pairs as one idea is introduced and then explored later from a different angle. It’s an album that seems to be in conversation with itself.
The hiss of the closing cymbals in “TNT” cross-fades into the bass-driven mood piece “Swung From the Gutters,” a quiet track that feels like a lost interlude on the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah. This focus on a simple melody connects it to “The Suspension Bridge at Iguazú Falls,” which shows up later on the album but unfolds at a much more deliberate pace. None of these nods to genre are played completely straight. “I Set My Face to the Hillside” opens with the voices of playing children before a nylon-stringed guitar enters, carrying a memory of flamenco that blooms out like the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. That sound was already an established template for Tortoise, but here they tweak it. On “Set My Face,” you can almost hear the clop of horseshoes in the drums, but then the main melody enters, played on melodica, and you imagine Augustus Pablo meeting the Ventures uptown.
Other references are more of-the-moment. On “Almost Always Is Nearly Enough,” Tortoise do a convincing imitation of the squelching, endearingly awkward electro-pop that Mouse on Mars was releasing on Thrill Jockey around this time, complete with fluttering programmed beats and a squawking robotic vocal. That vocal continues through “Jetty,” which gets close to dance music proper, with a jittery forward-leaning beat. “The Equator” is loping electro, a wobbly gurgle of a bassline percolating below a twinkly electronic drone and a slide guitar. The defining word for all these tracks is “almost”—they hint at the work of other artists and embody a range of styles, but they never go all the way. Tortoise were never interested in making actual dance music, the same way they never wanted to improvise in a conventional way. The music is about what happens in the cracks.
“The focus is definitely shifting to the treble over the last couple of records,” McEntire told Billboard in early 1998. He was talking about the use of mallet instruments, especially the marimba, which pops up frequently on TNT. “Ten-Day Interval” and its companion piece “Four-Day Interval” pick up the Steve Reich thread that wound through parts of Millions Now Living and make it more explicit. “Ten-Day” is comparatively dense and busy, while “Four-Day” feels like a ghost of its predecessor, ticking along at half the pace and unfolding with twice the space. Tortoise’s take on Reichian repetition has an appealing pop edge to it, foregoing long-form trance induction and instead laying out a basic premise: tweak the rhythm with bits of piano, bass, and percussion, and get out. All the pieces function together, and none, with the possible exception of the title track, draw undue attention to themselves.
For their first two albums, Tortoise received almost nothing but raves, but the reaction to TNT was initially mixed. It seemed to pull back slightly after the first two albums strained against limitations. Where the band once shattered conventions, now their music was quiet, pretty, and worked in the background of a dinner party. SPIN thought TNT was accomplished but ultimately bloodless and antiseptic, while The Wire called it “one of the least explosive records ever made, and one of the most gently perplexing.” Neither criticism is unfair, but both inadvertently point to what makes this record special—its essential in-between-ness. Jeff Parker told CMJ in 1998, “People expect everything to be so obvious. But life isn’t like that, so why should music be like that?” TNT is not about certainty. It’s a free-floating work that tends to find a different meaning everywhere it lands, an album that’s beautiful on the surface but gets harder to parse the deeper you go. To enjoy it is to embrace that uneasy sense of not-knowing, of luxuriating in a sound that doesn’t tell you what to feel. | 2019-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Thrill Jockey | February 17, 2019 | 9 | 47e303bd-0c53-4828-80ba-8283f2cea859 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The Florida rapper’s debut album is muted and mired with pain, trauma, and controversy. The reasons it is difficult to listen to can overshadow the need to listen to it. | The Florida rapper’s debut album is muted and mired with pain, trauma, and controversy. The reasons it is difficult to listen to can overshadow the need to listen to it. | XXXTentacion: 17 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xxxtentacion-17/ | 17 | One of the most disruptive effects of streaming culture, especially as it pertains to rap, is the way it brings the periphery to the center: When one hot SoundCloud single does more for a young artist’s career overnight than years of label development, there are no rules beyond what works and what doesn’t. And so the fact that 2017’s most vital rap movement—a loosely-connected group making bruised, blown-out DIY music that often doesn’t sound much like rap at all, mostly discussed under the umbrella term of “SoundCloud rap”—has almost no mainstream appeal is not a hurdle, but a selling point. “Look At Me!”, the breakthrough hit from XXXTentacion, this scene’s most contentious poster boy, is a succinct embodiment of SoundCloud rap’s ideals. Purposely mixed like shit so you know it’s real, with crass lyrics that tumble over a decayed, bass-boosted Mala sample, the song was an inhospitable introduction to the underbelly of South Florida rappers that have so far dominated the sub-genre. Currently, it has more than 92 million SoundCloud streams; the first comment on the track reads, “MY EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
But despite making a handful of the scene’s marquee hits, the 19-year old born Jahseh Onfroy stands apart from his SoundCloud rap peers. That distance was plainly illustrated in this year’s XXL Freshman cypher: while Playboi Carti, Ugly God, and Madeintyo bounce around, hyping one another with ad-libs and cooking dances, XXXTentacion lurks motionless in the background, head hung low. Then Sonny Digital cuts the beat, and X crouches to the floor, expressionless, rapping in a chilling monotone: “And if the world ever has an apocalypse, I will kill all of you fuckers.” There is a sense of unease when Digital brings the beat back; whatever just happened, no one is sure how to follow it.
It’s a thing, these days, for rappers to insist that their work transcends genre—and hey, more power to ’em, though by now it’s a bit clichéd. But a deeper dive into X’s three-year catalog turns up sufficient proof that it is more than just lip service when he lists his inspirations as Nirvana, Papa Roach, and the Fray. Scattered throughout his SoundCloud are surprisingly compelling experiments in grunge, nu-metal, and post-Weeknd R&B. In fact, “Look At Me!” might be one of X’s least essential offerings—a solid introduction to his persona, but an insufficient distillation of his artistry. If anything, the song’s most revealing element is its title’s imperative exclamation point: “Look At Me!” is not a request, but a demand.
It turns out people are looking, though perhaps not for the reasons X had hoped. As “Look At Me!” crept up the Hot 100 earlier this year, X sat in a Broward County jail, serving time for violating a house arrest agreement from 2015 charges of home invasion and battery with a firearm. But more recent, and far more harrowing, charges have made X notorious, raising the valid question of whether ethical consumption of his music is possible. Miami-Dade County court records reveal charges that include aggravated battery of a pregnant woman. That woman is alleged to be his ex-girlfriend; a photo of her swollen, bruised eyes has been circulated across social media. Google Trends data shows a grimly proportionate correlation between the alleged October 2016 incident and X’s sudden spike in visibility. Since then, there has been almost no middle ground in the response to the rapper’s popularity. X assumes a cult-leader authority over his die-hard battalion of stans, outlining in interviews a rubric for fandom that feels more like the Sea Org’s billion-year contract. Many of these fans seem eager to comply by trolling his critics (and, horrifyingly, his ex herself) with frenzied claims of “innocent until proven guilty” and familiar misinterpretations of the First Amendment. Meanwhile, just as many listeners have chosen to opt out entirely, and understandably so; it is soul-crushing enough to exist in 2017 without the obligation to engage with music made by even alleged abusers.
If you can stomach it, though, it is interesting in a purely critical sense to imagine receiving 17, X’s first official album, on unmarked CD or anonymous zip file. Nothing on the 22-minute album sounds anything like his breakout hit; and while I imagine that X relishes in this opportunity for a bit of a fake-out, it feels disingenuous to chalk up 17’s stark distinction from “Look At Me!” to pure provocation. In an Instagram post last month, X warned fans: “If you listen to me to get hype or to not think, don’t buy this album.”
In fact, it would be a stretch to call 17 a rap album at all; instead, it is a collection of shell-shocked bedroom R&B and hopeless, rock-bottom grunge that deals exclusively with depression, heartbreak, and suicide. “Jocelyn Flores,” a half-sung, half-rapped dedication to a friend who ended her life in a hotel room earlier this year, presents pain as one’s final connection to something that’s no longer there. “Dead Inside (Interlude)” is just a piano and X’s racing thoughts, reminding me quite a bit of the 2000 version of Cat Power’s “In This Hole.” “Voices in my head/Telling me I’m gonna end up dead,” he chants along with the funereal plod of “Save Me,” a blatant cry for help that sits somewhere between Staind and unplugged Chris Cornell. Of its 11 songs, only half make it past the two-minute mark. But if the songs on 17 often feel like unfinished thoughts, well, that’s what existing inside the black hole of depression and PTSD feels like. And for those who have suffered from mental health issues, it’s hard not to relate, on some primordial level, to the visceral despair here. There is no respite, no light at the end of the tunnel, just darkness.
As genre boundaries have dissolved and rappers have become known as the new rock stars in a post-Rebirth world, the recent resurgence of emo, rap-rock, and Hot Topic aesthetics makes sense beyond just millennial nostalgia. But part of the reason stuff like rap-rock was so maligned (aside from straight-up classism) was that it often seemed to sit awkwardly in the middle of the two genres it attempted to merge, unresolved. More than most of his fusion-inclined predecessors and all of his current peers, 17 presents X as impressively adept at reconciling his influences into a sound that is shockingly elegant, even at its most unpolished—an album whose disparate influences dissolve in an acid bath of raw feeling.
It is that visceral emotion that makes it easy—against all of my better judgment—to understand what makes X’s core audience so intensely, uncomfortably fanatical. If Xanax, within the vernacular of SoundCloud rap, has come to function as a trendy accessory—a signifier for a certain type of fuck-the-world cool for those on the fringes of society (or those who imagine it might be glamorous to be)—17’s desperate numbness is a reminder that opiates’ clinical purpose is to temporarily anesthetize a traumatized mind. The R&B songs here—especially the Trippie Redd-featuring “Fuck Love,” currently the most-played song on SoundCloud this week—feel adjacent in sound to popular R&B of the past few years. But where “alternative R&B” in the 2010s has largely suffered from an air of total detachment, “Fuck Love” bleeds emotion. You’ve probably experienced, in recent years, the strange cognitive dissonance of turning up to Future songs in which he appears to be on the brink of overdose, or bopping along to Lil Uzi Vert telling us his friends are dead. But 17 forces you to sit quietly in X’s headspace, to wholly embody that suffering; to be dancing to this stuff would be perverse.
And at the same time, this is precisely what makes 17 as a record, and moreover, the entire XXXTentacion phenomenon, so harrowing. “I put my all into this, in the hopes it will help cure or at least numb your depression,” he announces in the album’s intro, the “p” in “depression” popping into the microphone, painting a picture of X recording alone in his bedroom, just as you are listening to it. And though it’s preceded by a creepy demand for fealty (“I do not value your money; I value your acceptance and loyalty”), X seems sincere in his hope that his words might be a balm to others in pain. But it is impossible to navigate the line between cathartic solidarity with his listeners and valorization of rage, to the point of excusing the reprehensible behavior it can inspire in those who don’t see a way out. It seems almost too fitting that this is the hottest new rapper of 2017—in a cultural moment in which we are more woke than ever but unable to apply that awareness to actionable results; a digital landscape that so often feels catered towards the lonely, angry, and impressionable who seek a sense of belonging at any cost.
And while there is no shortage of catharsis in and around 17, I have a hard time getting past the nauseous feeling I get when songs like “Revenge” and “Carry On” allude explicitly to his ex-girlfriend, whose last name is the title to the album’s wallowy alt-rock outro. Certainly, it is within X’s artistic license to write about any of this, regardless of its veracity. At many points, he appears painfully aware of his mistakes, though he is conveniently unspecific as to exactly what those are. But when he sings on “Revenge,” in that queasy Isaac Brock yelp, about his vendettas against those who have betrayed him, directed obviously towards his ex, it feels like a monument to something fucked and evil, something that should be torn down.
I can’t help but wonder what it might sound like if XXXTentacion took these dark, gut-level thoughts a step further, from the knee-jerk documentation of rock bottom (as talented as he is at showing, not telling, how depression feels) to some kind of reckoning of his own part in all of this, and maybe even an attempt at contrition. And this, in turn, leads to the uncomfortable question as to whether that is what listeners really want from X anyway; does repentance ever make for art as vital as the kind born from seething, dizzying pain? Perhaps naively, I would like to think it is worth pursuing all the same. | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Vibes Forever / Empire | August 31, 2017 | 6.5 | 47e6c4aa-e356-4652-a570-8bff4f30f290 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Scott Morgan's fourth Loscil album, like his others, explores calm, textured, emotionally neutral space. | Scott Morgan's fourth Loscil album, like his others, explores calm, textured, emotionally neutral space. | Loscil: Plume | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9092-plume/ | Plume | From a career standpoint, artists making ambient music don't have it easy. They're usually faceless, like most electronic producers-- we have no idea who is making this stuff. Since subtle understatement is the genre's forte, they're not typically at the cutting edge of technology, either, so the gear geeks inevitably move on to something else. And then there's the problem of how the music changes once a template is established. It's a fantastic and rare thing to create your own voice in electronic music, but once it happens, you're confronted with where to go next. No matter how appealing or distinctive your sound, it's unlikely that most people will need four or five albums of it.
And that's where I'm finding Scott Morgan's Loscil project here on his fourth album. It's not that he keeps making the exact same record over again. There are changes. Sometimes he makes the heartbeat 4/4 kick a priority; other times he focuses more on glitches. Sometimes his music sounds bubblier, more aquatic, or more organic; traditional instruments have cameos. But despite the variance, the general character and prevailing mood of his four albums is virtually identical. Were a listener looking for a calm, textured, emotionally neutral space to stumble upon any one of them, including Plume, I'm sure they wouldn't be disappointed. If you know his first three records well, on the other hand, you might find this one redundant.
Let's talk about the differences. Morgan looks back a bit further on this record, giving Plume a clear "classic ambient" sound. By using spare bits of guitar and piano, he evokes the 1970s world of ambient pioneers like Eno, Cluster, and Tangerine Dream. "Chinook" and "Bellows" in particular sound like the Reich-channeling trance music Tangerine Dream brought to soundtracks in the late 1970s and early 80s-- most famously for Risky Business-- and it does so rather nicely. Throughout, Plume is much less diffuse with lighter processing. Morgan seems content to let the synths go it alone on droney tracks like "Zephyr" and "Motoc", inserting just the smallest bits of static-ridden glitch to send ripples across the placid surface. Plume sounds older and more spacious than any of the earlier Loscil material.
Which all adds up to...I'm not sure, exactly. Plume is certainly a nice-enough record, but it also seems like the kind of music Morgan could do well until the end of time. There's no sense of challenge or risk, no feeling that this project wants to step outside what it already knows. Not a terrible thing, but also not a quality that invites close attention as new material piles up. One of the tracks, appropriately enough, is titled "Rorschach". You'll hear what you want to hear in these blobs of sound, and the specific place you're coming from will make all the difference. | 2006-06-07T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-06-07T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | June 7, 2006 | 5.6 | 47fa7987-9cb4-4fd7-ba50-029bfd1d525d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Two years after its release, the Postal Service just keep milking the debut, Give Up: This new EP features the title track, one new song, and remixes by Matthew Dear and Styrofoam. | Two years after its release, the Postal Service just keep milking the debut, Give Up: This new EP features the title track, one new song, and remixes by Matthew Dear and Styrofoam. | The Postal Service: We Will Become Silhouettes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6433-we-will-become-silhouettes-ep/ | We Will Become Silhouettes EP | I think I can say without exaggeration that the Postal Service is the most important band in music history. Okay, in the past five years. Three years. In the genre of indie rock. In the sub-genre of indie rock with laptops. In the sub-genre of indie rock with laptops featuring Ben Gibbard. On Sub Pop.
Okay, maybe they're not so important in the grand scheme of things, but for a group of their size and funding, the Postal Service have been surprisingly ubiquitous. Thanks to that "Scrubs" guy, "Such Great Heights" has been added to Hollywood's palette of trailer music, perfectly expressing that "dramedy about quarter-life crisis" sensation. The friendly resolution to the band's mini-spat with the actual United States Postal Service earned them national coverage, and a choice gig at the influential Postmaster General National Executive Conference (which, as you may remember, launched the career of the Beatles). And the duo's brand of point-click indie-pop has begun to inspire their peers to follow suit: Rather than find his own tech support for his recent digital wanderings, Conor Oberst merely picked up his phone and growled (quaveringly) to his secretary, "Get me Tamborello!"
All of which is good reason for Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello to celebrate with a few cold-brewed Coors Lights-- but not a reasonable justification to shake the last few shards of pocket change out of two-year-old Give Up. "We Will Become Silhouettes" is one of the flatter tracks from that album's saggy middle, an unsettlingly chipper song about living through the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Christmas carol backing vocals, accordion samples, and the climactic New Order keyboards can't distract from lyrics about fallout shelters and uncontrollable mitosis-induced body explosions. It's difficult to think of a movie looking for that lap-pop Hiroshimal sound... maybe it could be the love theme from 56 Days Later.
The single's lone new track is "Be Still My Heart", which-- as its title might imply-- is typical Postal Service heart-meet-sleeve territory. Sadly, it seems only half-hearted: Built around dreary old guitars and live drums, it sounds more or less like a Death Cab demo with a few anxious clicking noises added to it.
Clicking noises are also the weapon of choice on the single's two remixes, Morr Music producer Styrofoam's take on "Nothing Better", and Matthew Dear's reworking of the A-side. The Human League-biting medical terminology duet of "Nothing Better" is much more deserving of promotion to single status than "Silhouettes", but sometime-Notwist (and Gibbard) collaborator Styrofoam doesn't add much to the original, oddly choosing to make it more rockier while adding a rhythm track that sort of sounds like a guy making the O-face and flicking his cheeks.
Ghostly International tech-house wunderkind Matthew Dear takes a few more liberties with "Silhouettes", giving it the old separate-the-elements treatment and spiking the track's drink with a handful of Ambien. The swirling ambient loops alter the music to fit the lyrical creepiness a little better, but it still doesn't quite nail the mood, perhaps due to Gibbard's incorruptibly saccharine delivery. Someone should've been a bit more willing to goth it up, or maybe just have given the song over to another band, a la the Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" single. Anybody death metal would do (though I guess it'd be hard to find one with a Sub Pop contract).
So in the end, We Will Become Silhouettes does little more than advertise for a revisitation of Give Up. One wonders if the protracted flogging of that album means that new product from the band is far off-- especially since Gibbard is busy riding Death Cab's prestige into the indie MOR growth market, and Tamborello is embracing his newfound role as the go-to guy for indie heartthrobs looking to modernize their sound. If so, that's a shame, as their snail-mail collaboration remains the most effective shuffling of the IDM and indie scenes in decades. Well, okay, in the past three years. | 2005-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | February 6, 2005 | 4.3 | 47fd1b89-88d9-4fa8-b9e2-16914d5893b2 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The title of L.I.E.S.' two-and-a-half-hour second label-summating compilation, Music for Shut-Ins, may or may not playfully allude to the forward thinking dance imprint's reputation for fringe-originating dance music. But the collection approaches a perverted accessibility. | The title of L.I.E.S.' two-and-a-half-hour second label-summating compilation, Music for Shut-Ins, may or may not playfully allude to the forward thinking dance imprint's reputation for fringe-originating dance music. But the collection approaches a perverted accessibility. | Various Artists: L.I.E.S. Presents: Music for Shut-Ins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18839-lies-presents-music-for-shut-ins/ | L.I.E.S. Presents: Music for Shut-Ins | Ron Morelli isn't here to make friends. After two years and change of simmering in obscurity, the sometimes-producer, mostly-curator's Long Island Electrical Systems imprint enjoyed a profile-raising 2012, emerging as one of the most thrilling American dance labels in a field that's typically dominated by European voices. The chatter surrounding L.I.E.S.' quiet climb served as a reminder that the New York City's still an embarrassment of riches when it comes to forward-thinking producers and DJs.
So when 2013 rolled around, Morelli did what any misanthrope enjoying a taste of low-level success would do: he left NYC, abandoning the city he once referred to as an "overrated cesspool," moving himself and the L.I.E.S. name to a new home in Paris. An interview with FACT around the release of last year's dark, misshapen solo debut Spit (released by fellow enfant terrible Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions) found Morelli in top grouchy form, the choicest quotes drenched with negativity: "People are terrible and always have been. That's the harsh truth since the dawn of man...We're all going to die alone."
Granted, Morelli's antisocial causticness shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's familiar with L.I.E.S.' loosely drawn aesthetic, which amounts to various strains of dance music filtered through layers of psychedelic grit and static sludge. The level of interest directed in the label's direction these days is partially owed to good timing, as noise musicians have increasingly turned their ears towards the dancefloor with results similar to L.I.E.S.' more inscrutable output.
More often than not, dance culture can't help but ascribe eye roll-worthy nomenclature to emerging sounds and scenes, which explains why you've probably heard L.I.E.S. releases referred to as "outsider house," a term not-totally-seriously coined by distant-relative noisenik and Hessle Audio boss Ben UFO. (As curious labelings of American DIY-dance phenomena go, the term is certainly less embarrassing than what we were stuck with two years ago.) The title of L.I.E.S.' second label-summating compilation, Music for Shut-Ins, may or may not playfully allude to its reputation for fringe-originating dance music. If so, it's another example of the label's overlooked sense of humor; the booklet art for 2012's American Noise comp took a yellowed image of a shish kebab, cast a phallic shadow on a mushroom, and drove the whole pointed stick straight through a gesticulating Skrillex's mouth.
L.I.E.S. release music at a constant clip that, unless you're the type of listener that lives this shit for real, is nearly impossible to keep pace with; the swarm of sounds is so persistently overwhelming that it can (and occasionally has) come across as, well, just a lot of noise. So the label's compilations have functioned less as a way to keep tabs on its general direction, instead providing a somewhat incomplete but necessarily concise method of appraising what its artists have been up to as of late. It is, from a label run by a human being who has gone on record expressing a hatred of humanity, a considerably generous gesture.
Compared to the label's other long-playing excursions in 2013—a platter of rudimentary synth experiments courtesy of Brooklyn producer Marcos Cabral, the murmured nightmares of eerie-techno duo Shadowlust's Trust in Pain—Music for Shut-Ins approaches a perverted accessibility insofar that the L.I.E.S. catalog's lack of sonic approachability can occasionally come across as overstated. There are moments of flat-out gorgeousness—the skipping placidity of "northeast" producer Samanthas Vacation's eponymous side-long single, Berlin resident Florian Kupfer's distant, emotive soul-house jam "Feelin'", D.C. duo Beautiful Swimmers' jungle-infused "The Zoo"—laid up against purely psychedelic workouts that carry their own iridescent beauty, like Beau Wanzer's trapped-in-the-mainframe "Crush of Lust" and L.I.E.S. regular Vereker's analog tunnel-chaser "Rosite".
Taken in small chunks, Music for Shut-Ins is as bewildering and exciting as its predecessor, a reminder of why L.I.E.S. have thus far escaped falling trap to faddish notions, remaining as engaging now as they did when no one was even talking about them. At two and a half hours, though, it's a slog as a front-to-back listen, particularly in the opening moments of the 2013-collecting first disc. This is fine, though, as the purpose of compilations like these aren't so much as to be listened to as proper albums as they are to literally compile, to properly round up singles that, especially considering L.I.E.S. low-profile method of releasing their white-label releases, would otherwise dissolve in the low-bitrate ether of YouTube rips.
American Noise and Music for Shut-Ins share an identical structure: one disc of appraising the L.I.E.S. oeuvre thus far, and another disc of new material. Whereas American Noise had two years and change of material to draw from, Music for Shut-Ins takes its previously released work from just over a year's worth of releases, which drives home L.I.E.S.' increasingly impressive track record of releasing forward-thinking dance music. The second disc of American Noise suggested that the label's sonic future would further embrace fragmentation, and as such, anyone coming to Music for Shut-Ins looking for hints on where L.I.E.S. is or will be should look elsewhere. Above all else, Morelli and company have demanded that we expect nothing but the unexpected, and the pleasurably gnashing dissonance of Music for Shut-Ins' past/present collision suggests that the L.I.E.S. label's what's-next surprises are far from growing stale just yet. | 2014-01-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-01-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Delsin | January 7, 2014 | 7.8 | 47ffaf45-35df-45d9-ae25-92666fd6593c | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
At 73, the outsider artist has made his most ambitious and approachable album: an extraordinary aural memoir that tells a cosmic story of survival. | At 73, the outsider artist has made his most ambitious and approachable album: an extraordinary aural memoir that tells a cosmic story of survival. | Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lonnie-holley-oh-me-oh-my/ | Oh Me Oh My | The Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was the kind of educational institution that traumatized its students more than it educated them. Founded in 1911, after the state of Alabama took over a large farming campus in the Mount Meigs community near Montgomery, the juvenile correctional facility became infamous for the horrific abuse and torture it inflicted on poor Black youth. In 1947, inspectors visiting the school found 300 boys “cooped up in cramped quarters with nothing to do or occupy their energies except to eat and live like hogs.” By the 1960s, a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, young inmates were forced to pick cotton from sunrise until sundown; beatings and sexual abuse were common. “This was functionally a slave plantation,” concluded the journalist Josie Duffy Rice, who spent a year and a half researching the school’s history for a podcast series.
Lonnie Holley, who was born into extreme poverty in Jim Crow-era Alabama and spent his childhood being passed from surrogate parent to surrogate parent, was among the souls who did time at the Mount Meigs campus, where he was eventually sent after being arrested at 11. “I was like the Jungle Book child,” Holley reflected in 2018. “I was cast away from society.” The trauma lingers. Even at 73, as an internationally renowned visual artist and musician whose work defies classification, Holley experiences night terrors, haunted by memories of Mount Meigs.
He exorcizes these ghosts on “Mount Meigs,” the harrowing centerpiece of his fourth and finest album, Oh Me Oh My. As a roiling, free-jazz storm of bleating horns and frantic drums erupts around him, Holley transports us 60 years earlier, summoning the fields where he worked and the name of the belt-wielding man who beat him into submission. “They beat the curiosity out of me/They beat it out of me/They whooped it/They knocked it!” he recounts with mounting intensity. Like much of Oh Me Oh My, the song is an extraordinary aural memoir, honoring Holley's story of survival in what can only be called a fucked-up America.
Holley is a self-taught visual artist who specializes in vast, sprawling sculptures and found-object assemblage—work that he fashions from discarded materials such as animal bones and abandoned shoes and pieces of steel and which has made its way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Throughout Oh Me Oh My, he applies a similar approach to music, creating unorthodox and moving songs out of the trauma and raw life materials that others would rather forget or discard. He surveys not only his own suffering at Mount Meigs, but the suffering of his mother, who gave birth to “baby after baby after baby after baby,” as Holley yowls on “Oh Me, Oh My,” a stunning track that pairs his narratives with Michael Stipe’s mournful croon.
Holley, a descendant of slavery, also taps into the intergenerational lineage of Black trauma, dramatizing an exchange between an enslaved person and her enslaver on “Better Get That Crop in Soon,” set to a funky undercurrent of kalimba and marimba grooves. (Slavery is a recurring theme both in Holley’s sculptures, which have depicted slave ships, and his music, which includes the 18-minute epic “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship.”) By sequencing the song next to the more explicitly autobiographical “Mount Meigs,” he draws a parallel between his own experience and that of his ancestors, all victims of state-sanctioned brutality.
Made in collaboration with producer Jacknife Lee, who shares a writing credit on every song, Oh Me Oh My manages to be Holley’s most approachable and most ambitious album all at once. The widescreen, full-bodied arrangements are a grand departure. Holley began a music career in earnest in his 60s; his early releases, 2012’s Just Before Music and 2013’s Keeping a Record of It, contained chintzy, off-the-cuff arrangements that mostly served as a malleable canvas for the artist’s free-association storytelling. On 2018’s sprawling MITH, the music assumed a more dreamlike, jazzy texture, with tracks that unfolded across seven minutes or more.
On Oh Me Oh My, the songs are more tightly structured, while the musical backdrops take on a cinematic life of their own: the sputtering, orchestral funk of “Earth Will Be There,” the ambient drift of “Kindness Will Follow Your Tears,” the frantic, vibrating polyrhythms of “Better Get That Crop in Soon.” We even get traces of West African pop on “If We Get Lost They Will Find Us,” which features the raspy wail of Malian vocalist Rokia Koné. The poet Moor Mother blurs personal and cosmic histories into one on “I Am a Part of the Wonder” and “Earth Will Be There,” which place Holley’s detail-rich reminiscences in communion with free jazz, electro-funk, and the long, rich tradition of Afrofuturism.
Oh Me Oh My is the rare album that can be described as both “star-studded” and virtually bereft of mainstream appeal. Lee, who’s produced records for the likes of R.E.M. and U2, marshals some big-name contributors, and some will look askance at the intrusion of marquee guests into Holley’s work. What’s striking is that these guests rarely steal the spotlight (Koné is the exception), content to serve as part of the patchwork of Holley’s outsider art. Stipe contributes a soulful mantra to the title track; Sharon Van Etten brings a world-weary yearning to “None of Us Have But a Little While,” which yields Holley’s most melodic singing to date. And Bon Iver’s chilly, multilayered falsetto is instantly recognizable on “Kindness Will Follow Your Tears.” It’s the first time conventional hooks have been present in Holley’s music.
Every Lonnie Holley song is a survival song because Holley survived extraordinary circumstances and unimaginable pain to get here. Yet improbable optimism is embedded in his spirit; it’s reflected in his catchphrase, “Thumbs up for Mother Universe!” Throughout Oh Me Oh My, he finds a kind of liberation in naming his pain, adding it to the cosmic record, placing it next to that of his ancestors, both spiritual and literal. On “I Can’t Hush,” the elegiac would-be closer (the actual closer, “Future Children,” an experiment in vocal manipulation, has the feel of a gratuitous hidden track), he reckons with the abuses inflicted on his mother and grandmother. They stayed silent and kept it all “locked within their brains,” something Holley cannot do. “I need the black ropes of hope,” he states in his grandfatherly drawl. “I need the togetherness/Where we put our Black hands together and act like a rope.” Out of this rope, Holley fashions these remarkable songs; junkyard scraps have always been his liberation. | 2023-03-15T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-15T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Jagjaguwar | March 15, 2023 | 8.5 | 4800db39-ee30-476a-b1c0-229c7e89512b | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Like their Danish neighbors Iceage, Lower's overheated punk has cooled down considerably as their scope has expanded. On their new EP, they shift from post-punk to goth—specifically the booming goth rock of the '80s, when acts like Sisters of Mercy and the Cure recorded in what sounded like cobwebbed dungeons that had been improbably outfitted with high-end studios. | Like their Danish neighbors Iceage, Lower's overheated punk has cooled down considerably as their scope has expanded. On their new EP, they shift from post-punk to goth—specifically the booming goth rock of the '80s, when acts like Sisters of Mercy and the Cure recorded in what sounded like cobwebbed dungeons that had been improbably outfitted with high-end studios. | Lower: I’m a Lazy Son...But I’m the Only Son EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21004-im-a-lazy-sonbut-im-the-only-son-ep/ | I’m a Lazy Son...But I’m the Only Son EP | If singer Adrian Toubro had something important to say on Lower's debut EP Walk on Heads, the rest of the band sure did their best to stop anybody from hearing it. The louder he shouted, the harder the band roared back, drowning his words under sheets of blistering squall. Like their Danish neighbors Iceage, however, Lower's overheated punk has cooled down considerably as their scope has expanded. By last year's full-length Seek Warmer Climes, which favored post-punk's slow crawl over hardcore's speed-trial tempos, the singer was no longer locked in bloody competition against the rest of the band. Lower's latest EP I'm a Lazy Son…But I'm the Only Son cements their new pecking order: Now Toubro's voice leads and everything else follows.
That voice has earned its place at the front of the mix. It's the band's strongest instrument, and it's never been more expressive than it is on these five songs. On opener "At the Endless Party", he croons "Come on sweetheart, take me as I am/ Drag me to your chamber and toss me around," pulling at the word "sweetheart" until it becomes an accusation. It's the delivery of a desperate man trying to preserve his dignity in the face of dire need. "We'll never connect; there's no way around it," he mourns. He's not the first guy to sing about using sex to numb the pain, but he may be the first to make the pain sound like the better alternative.
"Endless Party" introduces the latest evolution in the band's sound, which undergoes a logical shift from post-punk to goth—specifically the booming goth rock of the '80s, when acts like Sisters of Mercy and the Cure recorded in what sounded like cobwebbed dungeons that had been improbably outfitted with high-end studios. The stark, churning bassline of "Keep Me in Mind" lurches as if it's weighed down by frost. Lower's commitment to goth's pervasive dreariness is impressive, though as Only Son's unhurried closer "Nasty Business" crawls past the six-minute mark it's hard not to pine a little for the speed and brevity of their punk output. The band makes an effort to fill in the track's creaky expanses, coloring it with sober pianos and echoes of muted horns, but really, this is Toubro's show, and it's his poetry of sorrow that drives the EP. "I deserve something more," he broods, "So much given, nothing given in return." On song after song, Toubro defends his own honor, demanding to be heard. And he is. | 2015-09-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / Escho | September 9, 2015 | 6.4 | 4802cf65-2d2b-4a4d-ba1d-048c6833d18e | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The avant-garde tenor saxophone quartet returns with three adventurously dense movements, yet they maintain a focused sense of restraint and melody throughout. | The avant-garde tenor saxophone quartet returns with three adventurously dense movements, yet they maintain a focused sense of restraint and melody throughout. | Battle Trance: Blade of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22258-blade-of-love/ | Blade of Love | The fad of the saxophone quartet began in Europe during the early 20th-century classical scene. But it was in 1970s America that startling new concepts for all-saxophone groups started to appear with regularity. Often the players ignored the standard configuration of soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxes. In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago co-founder Roscoe Mitchell put together an all-alto sax quartet to perform his ferocious, atonal piece “Nonaah.” Around the same time, bands such as Rova and the World Saxophone Quartet were using the instrument’s swing legacy to craft styles that could slip between jazz and classical categories.
Battle Trance takes advantage of the possibilities opened up by those pioneers. In 2014, Travis Laplante’s tenor sax ensemble made its recording debut on the contemporary classical New Amsterdam label. Palace Of Wind showed that Laplante had the compositional chops to keep a three-movement, 40-minute piece lively. Just as crucially, he had partners who displayed crisp command of his ideas. Matthew Nelson, Jeremy Viner, and Patrick Breiner collaborated with Laplante on fast-repeating minimalist oscillations, sustained drones, as well as some charming melodic lines. Laplante cited classical music, avant-garde jazz and black metal as influences—and backed it up with timbres varied enough to make good on those claims.
On the follow-up, Laplante doesn’t try to set any world records for group-saxophone intensity. *Blade of Love, *comprised of three movements, often has a quieter feel than Palace—though it doesn’t stint on idiosyncrasy, either. A few minutes into the first movement, the group members sing notes through their instruments. As far as “extended techniques” in saxophone performance go, this isn’t a groundbreaking trope, but its use contrasts nicely with the thick, reedy blocks of sound that open the album.
Over time, each player stops singing and begins producing notes through the mouthpiece once again. After the first member makes the switch, you can tell what’s going to happen: The staggered return to “regular” playing is going to feel triumphant, once everyone is back on the riff. But despite its obviousness, this simple concept has a subtle beauty as it unfolds. Once all four saxophonists have made a return journey to more standard note-production, some of the players delight in expressive, bluesy lines that swing around the more manically pulsing parts. This joyful section of the piece eventually transitions to a section of searing drone, and then a mournful coda.
The second movement adds more unexpected sounds to the mix: Pops of the players’ lips, whistles and smacks of air are all pushed around through the saxophones’ metal bodies. Again, this is a setup for a path toward a more traditional sound, which eventually comes in the form of a bracing and soulful theme. The third movement is the shortest, and its initial, mellow rounds of chanted tones are probably the closest that any saxophone group has come to the sound of early devotional music. This time, the inevitable transition from vocalizations to near-unison saxophone shredding doesn’t carry quite the same charge. But on the whole, Blade Of Love shows that there’s plenty of sax-quartet innovation left for these artists to explore. | 2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam / NNA Tapes | August 25, 2016 | 7.5 | 4806941d-ea1e-4a5d-9ced-861c9ee63263 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Kills wrote and recorded their second LP in just over a month's time, and that expedited process lends No Wow a raw immediacy that fits the band's tempestuousness and sexual tension. | The Kills wrote and recorded their second LP in just over a month's time, and that expedited process lends No Wow a raw immediacy that fits the band's tempestuousness and sexual tension. | The Kills: No Wow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4427-no-wow/ | No Wow | You want to write the Kills off as either fashionistas freeloading off of more accomplished artists or opportunist White Stripes biters, except that everything you read, see, or hear about them-- the predestined bonding over Edie Sedgwick, the one-way ticket from Florida to London, the hunt for haunted mixers-- is a scene from an implausible art-rock buddy movie, and No Wow is the heart-thumping soundtrack.
The band is often described as sexually menacing, but the feeling here is more akin to a couple of best friends who toy with their sexual tension, fully realizing that doing anything about it would ruin everything. No Wow plots the wax and wane of relationships like this, as the duo drop the Velvet Underground curtain and spaz on each other in plain view. On the title track, they're talking shit and issuing challenges: Alison Mosshart scowls, "You're gonna have to step over my dead body/ Before you walk out that door" over Jamie Hince's steady rumbles and thrusts, the two taunting each other until the song explodes into a raunchy playfight chant. "Love Is a Deserter" threatens the firing squad if someone doesn't ante up, while "Dead Road 7" gets sick of the bullshit and shows you the exit sign.
The mothballed drum-machine used on No Wow feels less a Suicide nod than a means to eliminate outside interference. It provides the cool, mechanical pulse for Hince and Mosshart's theatrics without getting in the way like a live drummer would. There's no "hey, hey guys" interventions from the dum-dum box, and the little robo-bastard gets his freak on throughout "The Good Ones", a pulsating convection whose video has onlookers infected by pink lust at the mere sight and sound of the Kills.
"I Hate The Way You Love" and its "Part 2" comedown are Hince and Mosshart moving past the pseudo-drama, both attempting to prove each is more over it than the other. The former is a raucous "whatever" mock insult; the latter is a sappy, screeching acquittal mantra.
The Kills pay tribute to the Benton Harbor, Mich., Meijer's supermarket on "At the Back of the Shell", a handclap-driven exposé of smalltown romantic endeavors. Hince's obsession with a rare Flickinger mixing board that was once coated in Sly Stone's coke rails led the pair to the Lake Michigan town that's as well known for its racist cops as it is for washing machines and Sinbad. Once there, they squatted in a studio and wrote the entire album in just over two weeks. Three weeks later, the record was finished. The expedited process lends No Wow an immediacy and rawness that enhances the band's intention to pare down the sound of their full-length debut Keep On Your Mean Side.
The guns brandished earlier are holstered on "Rodeo Town" which is also the first song on the album to let Hince's guitar take a rest. It's country-fried jangle providing Mosshart the opportunity to stretch her vocal chords a bit. Hince's vocals are only separated once on the simmering "Murdermile" which also has Mosshart briefly revisiting her wailing days with Discount. Closer "Ticket Man" sends the band packing, exhausted and emotionally spent. Over a plodding piano, Mosshart pines, "Too many tickets is the problem, man/ Too many problems is the ticket in my hand". It's a fitting end to a fitful tantrum of a record.
The Kills might wear their obsessions on their sleeve, but they wear them with pride. They follow the tradition of the tempestuous male/female sparring of bands like X and Royal Trux with an utterly current sense of uneasy self-awareness. No Wow steps up to the promise of their EPs and debut LP, a boisterous reminder that kids can still hook up to songs that are little more than a guitar and attitude. If that makes the Kills poseurs, they'd probably be the first to admit it. | 2005-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade / RCA | March 9, 2005 | 8.3 | 480af26b-3f98-488a-b38e-60b234360cca | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
After a 17-year wait, Chinese Democracy needs to be a spectacle-- something that either validates its tortuous birthing process or a Hindenberg so horribly panned it somehow validates its mastermind as a misunderstood genius. | After a 17-year wait, Chinese Democracy needs to be a spectacle-- something that either validates its tortuous birthing process or a Hindenberg so horribly panned it somehow validates its mastermind as a misunderstood genius. | Guns N’ Roses: Chinese Democracy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12469-chinese-democracy/ | Chinese Democracy | To paraphrase another of rock's foremost procrastinators, Axl Rose just wasn't made for these times. Sure, armchair psychology and Axl Rose is a tired combination but it stands to reason that the only remaining original Guns N' Roses member expected Chinese Democracy to garner a 1990s-style brand-name reception: MTV would block off hours at a time to premiere its videos, fans desperate for real rock would line up at Sam Goodys nationwide for the midnight record release, and school would be forsaken to blast it on speakers the size of Greg Oden. Instead, "Shackler's Revenge" debuted on a video game, as if Gn'R were just some chump band on the come-up (or Aerosmith), and the album's world premiere found it meekly whispering through tinny computer speakers from a very un-rock MySpace page.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Chinese Democracy is that it's about the fifth-most shocking Guns N' Roses album. Sure, it's difficult to endure both Use Your Illusions in one sitting, but there's something fascinating about how the bombastically lonely "Estranged" could share disc space with the junior-high politicking of "Civil War", "Yesterdays"' concise, sepia-toned pop, and the critic-baiting tantrum "Get in the Ring". Had that record been a career-ender, it would've been a fitting finale. Instead, Axl took 17 years to, we hoped, explore new textures, manipulate songwriting conventions, seek out challenging collaborators, or delve into unfamiliar genres for inspiration. Yet on the way to being this decade's Sgt. Peppers, Chinese Democracy became its Be Here Now-- a record of relatively simple, similar songs overdubbed into a false sense of complexity in a horrorshow of modern production values.
Fans have long complained about Guns N' Roses still existing in the absence of Slash, Izzy, and even Duff, partially out of their talents, partially out of their iconography, and partially because there's no evidence Axl was an auteur figure who could work without his supporting cast. Judging from the personnel involved in the making of Chinese Democracy-- there were 18 musicians in all, not including orchestra players or the more than 30 who provided engineering and ProTools assistance-- it may be more appropriate now to think of Guns N' Roses as a free-floating creative project, even while the music itself suggests a more corporeal entity: The title track, after opening on a seemingly-interminable fade-in (it's been 17 years, another minute gonna kill ya?), pummels your ears with brickwalled, textureless power chords, the first of what seems like thousands of wah solos, and a xylophone. Initially, it's exciting to hear modern rock rendered in such operatic largesse, but the track ultimately proves insubstantial, a middle-aged symphony to nowhere.
This is generally how the rockers go on Chinese Democracy, clocking in at anywhere from nearly five minutes to just over five minutes, using those minor-third/flatted-fifth riffs co-opted by far shittier bands in Gn'R's absence. You also get a couple of piano-led ballads aiming at radio stations that don't exist anymore, while songs like "Catcher in the Rye" and "This I Love" conjure Journey and REO Speedwagon, except you can't really sing along to them. There is, however, a level of craftsmanship that salvages Chinese Democracy as a listening experience-- Axl's voice sounds surprisingly great, and even "Shackler's Revenge" has an ultrasheen gloss that particularly benefits its chorus. The problem lies with Axl’s creative direction: That same song is derailed by a grinding arrangement that suggests he's still looking to Korn records for inspiration.
It's that flaw which ultimately delivers the fatal blow. Even if Chinese Democracy had dropped a decade previous, it would still sound dated. 1996 appears to be the cut-off point for sonic inspiration, a time when the height of electronic and rock synergy in pop music involved having an acoustic guitar and a drum machine on the same track. Fans deserve better than hearing Axl trying to fight with post-NIN nobodies like Stabbing Westward and Gravity Kills for ideas. "Better" and the closing "Prostitute" feature memorable, fluid melodies, but are tied to rudimentary Roland tracks that Steven Adler could've replicated in his sleep, and while "I.R.S." sports an Illusion-sized chorus, it's dampened by empty conspiracy theorizing.
To that point, Chinese Democracy is inevitably and sadly limited in scope to the actual making of Chinese Democracy. Apart from a handful of appropriately vague love songs, Axl seems convinced that the only thing that's mattered to us over the past 17 years was anticipating whether "Riad and the Bedouins" might ever see its proper release. Anyone outside of Axl's inner circle appears lumped into some royal "you" and thrust into a meta exercise to be held up as evidence of a defiantly achieved victory: "All things are possible/ I am unstoppable," "No one ever told me when I was alone/ They just thought I'd know better," and most pointedly, "It was a long time for you/ It was a long time for me/ It'd be a long time for anyone/ But looks like it was meant to be."
Strangely, Chinese Democracy comes off like the inverse of the record it will likely finish behind on the week's Billboard chart, Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak-- one terribly protracted and isolated, the other dashed off and intensely personal. And yet, both feel humanizing in proving that even megacelebrities can deal with life-altering pain and expectations and still have little to say about it.
In an April Fools' review of Chinese Democracy written two years ago, Chuck Klosterman suggested that if it wasn't the greatest album ever released, it would be seen as a complete failure. Chinese Democracy needed to be a spectacle-- something that either validated its tortuous birthing process or a Hindenberg so horribly panned it would somehow validate Rose as a misunderstood genius. Instead, it's simply a prosaic letdown, constructed by a revolving cast of misfits ultimately led astray by a control freak with unlimited funding and no clear purpose, who even now remains more myth than artist. | 2008-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2008-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Black Frog | December 1, 2008 | 5.8 | 48103f94-6ff8-4338-b280-fd221e23c9b6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their fifth album, San Francisco progressive metal band Hammers of Misfortune ditch their penchant for overblown concepts, get a new vocalist, and focus on 50 minutes of old-school riffing that could appeal to fans of titans like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. | On their fifth album, San Francisco progressive metal band Hammers of Misfortune ditch their penchant for overblown concepts, get a new vocalist, and focus on 50 minutes of old-school riffing that could appeal to fans of titans like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. | Hammers of Misfortune: 17th Street | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15990-17th-street/ | 17th Street | Hammers of Misfortune's fifth album, 17th Street, is a song cycle about "loss and endings," though it sounds like a series of new beginnings. For starters, guitarist/lyricist/songwriter John Cobbett-- of recently disbanded SF black metal group Ludicra and onetime member of comrades-in-classic-metal/sister band Slough Feg-- has again retooled his rotating cast: Longtime drummer Chewy Marzolo returns, as do more recent additions Sigrid Sheie (organ) and Max Barnett (bass), but this is the first HoM album to feature guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf (Saros, Amber Asylum, Vastum) and power-piped vocalist Joe Hutton (the Worship of Silence).
The band, which debuted in 2001 with the three-part rock opera The Bastard, have never shied from ambition. When I spoke with Cobbett in 2008, he said HoM's 2003 sophomore collection The August Engine was his "first attempt" to make an album as big as The Wall. 2008's sprawling Fields/Church of Broken Glass, two individual concept albums packaged together, was his second. But the music Cobbett writes is detailed enough that he doesn't need to fill four sides of vinyl to make his point. He's finally figured that out on 17th Street.
At a time when fans can get caught-up on how fast someone solos, or how ominous a back story they have to offer, HoM shake aside gimmicks and play classic progressive metal in a way that makes room for thrash, doom, NWOBHM, and legit hooks alongside honest feeling and larger concepts. Cobbett didn't spell out the specifics in the record's accompanying press materials; his songwriting and lyrics are evocative enough that it isn't necessary. These are songs about gentrification (in his hometown and elsewhere), paeans to areas of San Francisco, and stories about individuals living out their lives in those spaces-- though it's easy to ignore all of that and just go along for the air-guitaring.
Cobbett's said working with Abdul-Rauf got him to return to writing songs for the electric guitar, a claim consistently backed up by this record's incredibly emotive, vintage riffs. On opener "317", guitars entangle with a swaggering, synchronized momentum until one spirals out like the album cover's splayed lights of San Francisco. Two and a half minutes of instrumental music pass before Hutton gets all Walt Whitman with it: "We are the soil becoming dust/ We are the chrome becoming rust," etc. But even without the voice, the song's plenty expressive. It's followed by the the speedier, punchier "17th Street" with its doubled female harmonies, slick (then crunchy) guitars, and spacious organ. Lyrically, it's a focused study of a "ruthless" street outside a window (in, what you expect, is any city, anywhere), reminiscent of William T. Vollmann's descriptions of the Tenderloin district. Musically, it gallops, but maintains a 1970s airiness.
The best track, "The Grain", is a seven-minute "love" song that has guitars mirroring the vocal lines amid a number of space-stretching pastoral breakdowns. It culminates, over and over, with an anthemic multi-person chorus that you'll try to sing along with even if you can't possibly hit the notes. As far as these sorts of moments go, there's also "The Day the City Died", an ode to those cities and the places their inhabitants are heading: "This one's called I'm getting addicted/ This one's called I'm getting evicted/ This one's called another one moving away." It has a punkier vibe, but filtered through flamboyant 80s metal and, of course, scorching guitar solos. There's also a seven-minute piano-powered ballad, "Summer Tears", that had me reaching for my Queensryche albums for the first time since high school.
That's important. 17th Street is one of those metal albums that could appeal to fans of Judas Priest, Rush, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, Dream Theater-- lifers not in the know about the current underground, who would stumble upon these 50 minutes of old-school riffing and (actual) singing and fall in love. And, even if you have been keeping track of what's bubbling beneath the mainstream, this is in a class of its own. Cobbett's a talent, one who makes well-considered, carefully crafted music, the kind of stuff that would work well in stadiums if metal of this sort could still fill them. | 2011-10-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-10-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Metal Blade | October 31, 2011 | 8 | 48124eac-6874-43b2-8c34-e0a8e5cb9437 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The full-length follow-up to Ys is no less ambitious, but this 3xLP set also has some of the most inviting and accessible songs of Newsom's career. | The full-length follow-up to Ys is no less ambitious, but this 3xLP set also has some of the most inviting and accessible songs of Newsom's career. | Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13960-have-one-on-me/ | Have One on Me | It was a little disturbing at first to hear that Joanna Newsom's full-length follow-up to the ambitious and polarizing Ys would be a triple album. Where 2004's The Milk-Eyed Mender was an unusual record with its share of quirks (her squeaky voice and fondness for arcane language, the harp), it also had its simple pleasures. Most of the tracks were short and the sound was spare; you pretty much liked it or you didn't based on how you felt about Newsom's sound and her ability to put a song together. Ys, on the other hand, was unapologetically dense. The five songs averaged more than 10 minutes each, and through them Newsom sang continuously; Van Dyke Parks' arrangements were similarly relentless, seeming to comment upon and embellish almost every line. It was a rewarding album-- filled with memorable turns of phrase and impressive storytelling. Many were enthralled, and almost everyone at least admired it. But in comparison to Milk-Eyed, Ys took some serious work to crack. So when I heard that Newsom would be following it with a 3xLP set called Have One on Me, I had troubling visions of 25-minute songs with lyrics that stretched to 5,000 words.
As it turns out, Have One on Me is a "triple album" in the vinyl sense, in the same way that the Flaming Lips' Embryonic is a "double album," even though it fits onto one CD. There are 18 songs here, and they total about two hours. To pick a couple of reference points from the CD era, that's the same length as Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and just a bit longer than Biggie's Life After Death. Two hours is a lot of music, but having it broken into three discs, each the length of a 1970s LP, helps. You can dip into Have One on Me at a given point, listen for a while, and move on to something else. But while the album invites sampling, I've found myself returning to a different section each time I sit down with it. The highlights are spread out evenly, and Newsom couldn't have sequenced the record any better.
While songs here evoke moments of Ys and Milk-Eyed and Newsom's harp is still the dominant musical focus, it's striking how much Have One on Me feels like its own thing. Not a progression, exactly, more of a deepening. You can feel roots going down and an edifice being built. Her voice has gained depth and she sings with more force and clarity, so that's part of it. And the arrangements are more judicious and draw less attention to themselves (some tracks are just harp, others add horns, strings, and percussion, but with a lighter touch). But the bigger difference seems to be the overall mood, which is expansive and welcoming. The best songs feel more like conversations rather than artworks to be hung on the wall and admired from several paces away. Newsom seems to sing from somewhere deep inside of them, and her earthy presence has a way of drawing you in, bringing you closer to her music than you've been before.
The name you'll most hear in discussion of this record is Joni Mitchell. Part of it is that Newsom can sound a fair bit like her with her more richly textured voice. Sometimes, almost eerily so, like on "In California" (the way she wraps the vocal melody around the evocative title word is just a few miles up the PCH from Blue's "California"). In addition to her voice and phrasing, the more approachable songs here, from the stirring harp-and-voice ballads "Jackrabbits" and "Esme" to the funny, weird, and hugely appealing road song "Good Intentions Paving Company", have bluesy chord progressions that stand in stark contrast to the rigid folk modes of Ys. These songs sway and heave with a warmth and approachability that are new for Newsom. They, and several others like them, offer a fresh way into Newsom's music for the curious.
"The phantom of love moves among us at will," goes a line in "Esme". Most of the songs here deal with love in some form, another quality that connects Have One on Me to the broader singer-songwriter tradition. Sometimes the love is romantic; other times its about friendship or family. Newsom sometimes approaches the subject from her elliptical perch, talking in pictures-- "Each phantom-limb lost has got an angel (so confused, like the wagging bobbed-tail of a bulldog)," is the line that follows the one above in "Esme". But though Newsom indulges her gift for imagery early and often, Have One on Me has moments of simplicity and directness, where the tangled phrases can be boiled down to, "Life can be difficult and lonely and we all need love, but holding on to it can be hard."
One significant difference between Newsom and Mitchell is that the latter, especially early in her career, was writing songs that would sound good on the radio. For better or worse, Newsom is not a pop singer-- that's just not what she does. So I don't want to overstate this record's accessibility. A few tracks here, especially longer ones like the title track and "Kingfisher", approach the winding density that marked Ys. On these, song structure is elusive-- at any given moment you're not sure if you're listening to a verse, chorus, or bridge. The lyric sheet helps a bit, but with two hours of music to digest, you won't feel too guilty about using the skip button here and there, or digesting the record in pieces. Helpfully, returning to the most immediate songs causes their charm and appeal to bleed into the tracks that surround them-- so the album seems to grow and change as you listen.
Have One on Me begins with "Easy", about a wish for the kind of life the title suggests, and closes with "Does Not Suffice", which finds the narrator packing up a house to leave after a breakup, putting away all that reminds her lover of how "easy [she] was not." The latter is subtitled "In California, Refrain", it uses a similar gospel-inflected progression as the earlier song, and it's flat-out gorgeous, heavy with sadness ("the tap of hangers swaying in the closet") but also exhibiting quiet dignity and strength. It's my favorite song here, and it comes last, which is a dependable sign that I'll be returning to an album often. When I hear Newsom sing the word "easy" in "Suffice" and my mind jumps back to the opener, it reinforces just how many threads she's weaved between those songs and how incredible it is to discover new things with every listen. | 2010-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | February 23, 2010 | 9.2 | 481a9f41-79a0-404a-ab8e-891b2d5efb0d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After bowing out at the peak of the trap wave they helped usher in, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice return for their first EP in seven years, sounding as irreverent and unruly as when they started. | After bowing out at the peak of the trap wave they helped usher in, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice return for their first EP in seven years, sounding as irreverent and unruly as when they started. | TNGHT: II EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tnght-ii-ep/ | II EP | In 2012, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s joint project TNGHT burst into the public consciousness with a singular goal: Write bangers. After months of building excitement off the back of a legendary live debut at SXSW, they released their beloved self-titled EP, bridging the gap between experimental club music and Southern hip-hop while inadvertently becoming standard-bearers for the burgeoning “festival trap” sound that had begun invading American EDM. With their eye-watering bass and surgical drum programming, TNGHT classics like “Goooo” and “Higher Ground” set a new watermark for such obnoxious, body-shaking tracks. Soon enough, big record labels began to swarm the duo like koi fish flocking to flakes.
Then, at the height of their influence, TNGHT hung up their hats until further notice, wary of becoming pigeonholed and unwilling to associate themselves with the “bro-ish” bombast of DJs imitating their sound. The break was inevitable; after all, TNGHT was always an outlet for HudMo and Lunice to embrace the base desires they rarely indulged in their solo work, a fun side gig where “first thought, best thought” was the undergirding principle. Now, at a time when electronic acts have grown increasingly obsessed with crafting imaginary worlds to contextualize their conceptualist music, TNGHT have returned with a new set of absurdist dancefloor weapons.
Irreverent fun is the primary ethos of II. Listening to the EP’s eight tracks, you can practically imagine HudMo and Lunice in the studio, cackling and egging each other on as they scroll through a software synthesizer’s tackiest presets: How ridiculous is that sound? Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we used that one? The stiff flutes and chintzy brass on the dembow cut “First Body” sound like they’re straight out of GarageBand, but in HudMo and Lunice’s capable hands, they’re warped into an addictive hook. Cheesy rave synths dominate the mid-album highlight “Club Finger,” which feels like a spiritual successor to their last pre-hiatus single (and arguably hardest-hitting tune to date), “Acrylics.” It’s obvious that TNGHT are no longer concerned with whether rappers (or anybody, for that matter) can follow along with these beats, which only grow increasingly erratic as II goes on.
Having opted out of the trap wave, the two producers now channel their experimental spirit into more varied tempos and genres. “Dollaz” is probably the closest thing to a pure return to form: A trunk-rattling sternum-shaker built around incessant vocal samples that lodge themselves into your brain. Elsewhere, they dabble in SOPHIE-esque distortion (“Gimme Summn”) and crushed trance breakdowns (“I’m in a Hole”). Much of the latter track, with its distorted subs and tight snares, is reminiscent of Kanye West’s menacing single “All Day,“ which HudMo helped get to the finish line during his time in the G.O.O.D. Music camp.
In the years following their break, TNGHT’s legacy was defined by their outsized influence on rap-influenced EDM, as well as another Kanye cut, “Blood on the Leaves,” the breathtaking Yeezus standout that sampled the duo’s unreleased song “R U Ready.” In comparison to II, the early releases now sound borderline ostentatious—not because they’ve aged poorly, but because hordes of copycats, from SoundCloud wannabes to soft-drink brands, have dulled the edges of a once novel idea. But that’s what happens when you’re an innovator; everyone tries to jack your style, even if they only scratch the surface of what makes you special, diluting the quality of the sound you pioneered. Released from all possible constraints—no obligations, no “scene,” no hype machine behind them—HudMo and Lunice are now free to pursue every imaginable whim. There might be no going back to 2012, but there will always be new ways to fuck up some nightclub speakers. | 2019-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp / LuckyMe | November 18, 2019 | 7.7 | 481b15a2-1a4a-49e2-bf83-25dcb3db0ae2 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups and her punk heroes, the New York singer-songwriter’s debut is a fiery exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age. | Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups and her punk heroes, the New York singer-songwriter’s debut is a fiery exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age. | Pom Pom Squad: Death of a Cheerleader | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-death-of-a-cheerleader/ | Death of a Cheerleader | In 1999, a satirical comedy film called But I’m a Cheerleader proposed an astonishing lead character: a cheerleader who isn’t quite like the other girls on her team. She gets whisked away to a hilariously straight-laced conversion-therapy camp on the suspicion that she might be—gasp—gay. “I’m a cheerleader!” she whines in hesitation, as if this makes it impossible to fall outside societal norms. The movie marked a memorable early instance of the divergent cheerleader, an increasingly popular trope that drives the creative mind of 23-year-old singer-songwriter Mia Berrin, who makes bratty grunge-punk as Pom Pom Squad. On her debut, Death of a Cheerleader, the New York musician stakes her claim to pleated miniskirt canon, joining the ranks of those who’ve weaponized cheer imagery to disrupt convention.
Cribbing its title from another movie about a popular high school girl with a secret, Death of a Cheerleader marks a period of self-acceptance for Berrin. The album came about partially as a reckoning with her own queerness, as well as with her multiracial identity, which she didn’t see represented in the indie rock world: “Rock was invented by a Black queer woman—Sister Rosetta Tharpe—but I grew up feeling like I was odd for loving guitar-based music,” she explains in press materials. Self-produced alongside Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, Death of a Cheerleader is an amalgam of Berrin’s influences, which span Billie Holiday, riot grrrl bands, and angsty cult films. Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups as well as her punk heroes, the album is a fiery and compelling—albeit slightly uneven—exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age.
Informed by her own memories of pairing Dr. Martens with her school uniform and perusing cool-girl bible Rookie Mag after class, Berrin alludes to adolescent rebellion throughout Death of a Cheerleader. She recalls kisses stolen under the bleachers on “Head Cheerleader”: “You should ask your mother what she means/She said stay away from girls like me,” she sings. On the brutally hot-blooded “Lux,” she envisions herself attending the homecoming dance as the eponymous protagonist of The Virgin Suicides, delivering several of the album’s best lines in one fell swoop: “How do you expect me to figure myself out when I cannot tell the difference between bad and good attention?” she roars, evoking Kathleen Hanna’s snarl in a swell of guitar noise.
Elsewhere on Death of a Cheerleader, Berrin falls into a softer, more romantic mode, though its effectiveness varies. In the middle of the album is a cover of Tommy Jones and the Shondells’ 1968 classic “Crimson and Clover” that does little to revamp the original; between punkier moments like “Lux” or “Shame Reactions,” Berrin’s version feels out of place. Other songs like “Forever” and “Be Good” also tap into a ’60s pop aesthetic, but come off feeling too temperate. Berrin’s cheerleader character serves as a culmination of the identities and influences that made her, though it seems she’s still refining what that means for her music. The “death” of the album’s title feels more like a disavowal of arbitrary expectations—both those about cheerleaders themselves and about how a queer woman of color ought to present herself in rock music. “It was empowering, in a way, to put on the bitch costume and be the bitch,” Berrin has said of her stage persona. Death of a Cheerleader strives to pass the torch to like-minded underdogs with aspirations to someday become that girl, 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. | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | City Slang | June 30, 2021 | 6.9 | 48285401-5ac9-4915-a86d-a70f5dfd2c0c | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
On her exhilarating Hyperdub debut, the London electronic musician slathers on processed vocals in thick, inky layers, breaking feverishly free of the rhythmic grid. | On her exhilarating Hyperdub debut, the London electronic musician slathers on processed vocals in thick, inky layers, breaking feverishly free of the rhythmic grid. | Klein: Tommy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klein-tommy-ep/ | Tommy EP | The rise of digital production techniques means that listeners tend to expect a certain clinical perfection in modern recorded music. Glitches are edited out and beats, confined to strict rhythmic grids, could run in perfect sync until the end of our days. Occasionally, though, an electronic artist will emerge who eschews the tight, rhythmic mapping of the sequencer in favor of cruder electronic tools. Burial once claimed to make music with the basic audio-editing program Sound Forge, and the wildly promising London producer Klein told FACT earlier this year that she uses Audacity, the freebie audio editor beloved of penniless media students everywhere, to arrange her music, recording hours of piano, guitar, and vocals that she later chops up and manipulates into strange new sounds.
In the same interview Klein says that she uses her voice as her primary instrument, pushing her vocal tones to see how high and how low they can go. Tommy, Klein’s first release for Hyperdub after the self-released Lagata and Only EPs of 2016, builds on this approach. But whereas her earlier records were relatively spacious, Tommy sees Klein slather on vocals—from herself, her collaborators, and in sampled snippets—in thick, inky layers, manipulating her source material until the voices sound tarnished, rotting, and irregular. The result is music that overwhelms with its sickly density: a flawed, chaotic structure that feels both solid and strangely vulnerable, like a huge, poorly constructed skyscraper.
“Prologue,” which opens the EP, is a brilliant example of Klein’s modus operandi. It starts with the abrupt, discombobulating rumble of processed piano chords, as if the listener has been dropped into the studio mid-session, followed by 20 seconds of random chatter. A lone voice starts singing a melody, which is then processed and pitched into a sound that is part human and part machine, the output of an Auto-Tune unit that has gotten bored and gone rogue. Slowly, more voices join and are themselves pulled in and out of focus, as the volume and intensity build and contract. “Prologue” is messy and feverish, the refracted, despairing sound of a chorus of ghosts calling from the bottom of the sea. It’s an intense, discomforting listen but never less than visceral in its impact.
What makes this destructive approach particularly fascinating is that Klein—a fan of both Brandy and Andrew Lloyd Webber—can clearly write pop hooks, which she dangles in front of the listener like a conniving angler. “Cry Theme” starts with a fragment of catchy vocal melody, which is pitch-shifted into chipmunk territory as a spectral chorus echoes underneath; “Tommy” seems to initially borrow from 1950s-style doo-wop harmonies, while “Everlong” pulls a similarly teasing trick with the kind of earworm acoustic guitar riff you could imagine introducing a minor R&B hit in the late 1990s. Hidden deep among the EP’s opaque sonic layers are beautiful vocal and instrumental parts, which Klein occasionally allows to emerge from the mix like body parts floating to the top of a muddy river, before dragging them back under in a brilliantly contrarian act.
If Klein’s sound is maximalist, though, her source material is anything but, cooked up largely from piano, guitar, and vocal snippets. Drums don’t make an appearance until five tracks in, on the brilliant “Runs Reprise,” where a helium R&B hook is rudely interrupted by a lurching, unsteady bass-drum thump and a furiously distorted breakbeat that rivals the bloodied intensity of Squarepusher’s best programming. It is a mark of the song’s almost unbearable density that when “Runs Reprise” finishes (barring a long, disorienting echo) just 37 seconds in, the listener feels overcome rather than underwhelmed. Elsewhere, an eerie synth drone and more frantic breakbeats give “B2k” the air of early ’90s jungle cut with ringing piano chords and snatches of a commercial R&B, rendered in an off-grid time signature that suggests a supreme disdain for musical convention.
That “B2k” is one of the more straightforward tracks on Tommy says a lot about the fearsome originality of Klein’s music. While she may borrow from R&B and pop, Klein’s output has more in common with the abstract impressionism of Jackson Pollock. Such intensity makes Tommy a difficult and even exhausting listen, despite a running time of just 25 minutes. But as Captain Beefheart and the Shaggs have shown in the past—and as Klein demonstrates now—stepping off the musical path that leads to standardized perfection can prove hugely rewarding. | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hyperdub | October 2, 2017 | 7.6 | 48291fac-11d3-4705-90f6-7a6564fbc925 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
null | null | Television / Adventure: Marquee Moon / Adventure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11853-marquee-moon-adventure/ | Marquee Moon / Adventure | These reissues arrive just a few months too late to catch the red-hot apex of 70s New York revivalism, but that doesn't mean they're any less welcome: with all the attention Television have received lately, it's been strange to see their masterpiece, Marquee Moon, stuck in a bin with all the other old classics at the record store, in a barebones edition with a blue "Super Saver" sticker on the wrapper.
Television, along with the other 70s legends that inspired the recent reintroduction of guitars, punk and garage-rock to the mainstream, are continually rediscovered by new breeds of NYC hipsters looking to start their own bands. The group's place in history has been resacramented again and again, so by now the backstory's old hat-- you know, the one about them kicking Richard Hell out of the band before they cut their first single, playing gigs and publishing verse with Patti Smith, and talking the owner of the then-unknown CBGB's to host shows of other genres than just "country, bluegrass, and blues" (which also makes them largely to blame for all those people that wear the club's t-shirts).
You can read first-hand accounts and second-hand analyses of all these events, and one thing you'll uncover is the debate over how "punk" Television was. Sure, they joined the movement from the beginning, playing out as early as 1973, and they harnessed the energy you associate with punk, even as they crossed it with art-rock and the poetic urges of frontman Tom Verlaine (nee Miller, renamed after the French poet-- but not in a fey way). But they were also a rock band that roared through long, tense jams: When I first heard "Marquee Moon", it somehow felt like I'd already been exposed to it on a classic rock station wedged between Steve Miller and Skynyrd.
With all that context, the most interesting thing about picking up Television's Marquee Moon-- today, for us folks who weren't old enough to buy the first edition vinyl-- is how ahistorical it sounds. If you listen to their original Brian Eno-produced demos, you hear a scragglier, faster band that's less confident and more... punk? If nothing else, the band at least sounded closer to the sometimes-sloppy Bowery clubrats Eno must have taken them for on those early tapes. Their sound on Marquee Moon, though, is clean, raw and simple. The band never breaks for a squall of energy, yet the whole record crackles with it, and they never rely on atmosphere to make their case. Billy Ficca's drums and Fred Smith's bass are extra lean and crisp, and the band's so tight that even the "Did you feel low?" call-and-response on "Venus de Milo" sounds amusingly rehearsed. The only rough edge is Tom Verlaine's striking warble, a somewhat choked-off tenor influenced either by Patti Smith or by someone kicking him in the throat.
But the things that make the record so classic, that pump your blood like a breath of clean air, are the guitars. This whole record's a mash note to them. The contrast between these two essential leads is stunning: Richard Lloyd chisels notes out hard while Verlaine works with a subtle twang and a trace of space-gazing delirium. They play lines that are stately and chiming, rutting and torrential, the riff, the solo, the rare power chord, and most of all, the power note: the second pang on the riff to "Venus de Milo" lands like a barbell; the opening bars of "See No Evil" show one axe rutting the firmament while the other spirals razorwire around it.
If Jose Feliciano had rearranged "Marquee Moon" the way he ruined "Light My Fire"-- by emphasizing the melody and lyrics and ditching the solos-- he'd have failed Television even worse than he did The Doors; every part of the song is a bridge to the monstrous Verlaine showpiece, and yet his guitar solo has no bombast: it climbs and soars in tangible increments, edging its way up scales and pounding like a contained explosion. The structural integrity makes this an Eiffel Tower in a world of Burning Men: in a decade full of guitarists spraying sweat on the arenas, Verlaine comes off like a man punching through ceilings.
Rhino's remastered release of 1977's Marquee Moon adds a few alternate takes; for example, you can hear "See No Evil" with guitar solos scrawled all over the verses. But you also get the first-ever CD release of "Little Johnny Jewel", a raw single that twangs and skitters around Verlaine's bug-eyed singing. So if you're new to Television but shy about picking up this bedrock masterpiece for the first time, just tell the cutie at the record store that you're buying it for that single, which alone would be worth the price.
With Marquee Moon entrenched in the canon, it's more interesting to revisit their 1978 follow-up, Adventure. This record has always suffered by comparison, mainly because it's so easy to relate it to the first record: the arrangements and the aesthetic are roughly the same, but the music is quieter and more reflective, and that means less horsepower. It's not weak or even very different from their debut, but you might be disappointed when the earth doesn't cave beneath your feet.
There isn't a weak song here, even if you count the abandoned title track, which is restored here as a bonus cut. "Carried Away", the best ballad on either album, floats away on an organ instead of a guitar; "The Fire" sounds as melodramatic as "Torn Curtain" but a lot less Stygian. And while "Foxhole" and "Ain't That Nothin'" wouldn't have broken the flow on Marquee Moon, there's a sense that they're going in a different direction but with the same tools. The reissue is great-- especially for the bonus "Ain't That Nothin'" instrumental runthrough-- but a new Television listener would probably be tempted to check out a whole different experience by picking up the live albums, The Blow-Up or Rhino Handmade's new Live at the Old Waldorf.
Television broke up after Adventure, and like typical mid-level rockers who fade away instead of dying, they went on to other projects, cut a reunion album in 1992, and still play occasional shows to this day. Writing this up now, it's hard not to feel out of place as someone too young to have caught their shows while the world is bursting with tributes and nostalgia from the people who loved them back when. But if my generation only inherited the band, then this release enshrines it again as something timeless, like that Greek sculpture the band once namechecked that shows motion and grace no matter what museum it's displayed in. Rhino and labels in the future will keep carbon-dating and explaining Marquee Moon, but sometime in the future, some Martian kid who can't get dates and hates sports will look past the plaque and sit in his room, blaring this music and wondering how life can possibly sound this great. | 2003-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 9, 2003 | 10 | 482a27f0-e002-4bc3-a32b-20a4d7329b5b | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Blind husband-and-wife duo from Mali team with world music star Manu Chao to create a varied, bright, and charming album. | Blind husband-and-wife duo from Mali team with world music star Manu Chao to create a varied, bright, and charming album. | Amadou & Mariam: Dimanche à Bamako | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/485-dimanche-a-bamako/ | Dimanche à Bamako | Hollywood doesn't make movies as good as the life story of Amadou & Mariam. Their musical careers stretch back decades-- Amadou Bagayoko played guitar for the legendary Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako beginning in the late 1960s. At Bamako's Institute for Young Blind People, Bagoyoko met Mariam Doumbia, and the pair forged two parallel partnerships, one in marriage and the other in music. Their parents approved of neither. They began their recording career in the 1980s the way so many other African artists have-- traveling hundreds of miles to Abidjan in Cote D'Ivoire, which until recently was one of the cultural and economic centers of Francophone West Africa, to make cassettes and perform. Within a decade, they were playing in Europe and cutting all kinds of new influences into their sound, from Cuban son and horn-spiked funk to reggae and Delta blues, and Western labels were giving them the compilation treatment. Now, with Dimanche à Bamako, the blind couple from Mali seems well-poised to make a huge splash, though it's likely that the mainstream attention they get in the rest of the world will far outpace what they get in the U.S.
For Dimanche, the duo and their backing band brought in Manu Chao, a world music superstar famous just about everywhere outside of the United States, and the dividend is a varied, bright, and charming album. While Chao's beat-conscious eclecticism makes this Amadou & Mariam's most accessible album (to Western ears, that is), it also comes at the expense of some of the organic directness of their past records. Still, that's more than made up for by the incredible style salad they've dreamed up, one which Chao's airy production and love of field recordings holds together quite well.
In fact, you might hear something like this album driving through the streets of Bamako with the windows open, the way snatches of street noise, sirens, and voices drift through. Both Amadou & Mariam sing (Chao's voice is everywhere as well), and they're both restrained, smooth vocalists, especially compared to some of Mali's biggest stars, Salif Keita and Mory Kante. As such, this probably makes them more suited to chunky r&b; and Western pop than their countrymen, and indeed, were it sung in English, Amadou's thrilling descending chorus on "Politic Amagni" sounds like something you might hear blasting from a car at an American stoplight.
As pleasing as his voice is, Amadou's real talent is reserved for the guitar, an instrument he plays with supple, liquid skill. He reels off roiling lines and droning desert blues with graceful dexterity, reflecting influences as wide-ranging as Bembeya Jazz's Sekou Diabate, Robert Johnson, and Saharan guitar and oud music. Opener "M'bife" proceeds in two parts, the first being the proper song, featuring Mariam's starkly unadorned voice over male harmonies, percussion and strummed guitar; the second is a buoyant, thumping instrumental that intertwines rhythmic guitar interplay with tumbling balafon, a West African marimba with a slightly sharper sound than the marimbas we're used to.
Single "Coulibaly" layers male/female harmonies and bluesy guitar licks over a dense foundation of swirling rhythm guitars and clattering percussion, while "La Realite" brims with siren samples and off-beat organ. "La Fete au Vilage" sounds ancient by comparison with its modal guitar and traded verses, though granted it's unlikely that tablas could have made it into the background of a Malian folk song prior to the last few decades. Mariam flirts briefly with rap on "Camions Sauvages", coming halfway between it and Indian rhythm exercises, and the track highlights how important raw kinetic energy is to the album with an insistent beat framed by Amadou's slow, surf-y strumming.
The album spends a full hour swinging from strength to strength, and by the time it's over, it's clear that it would be a crime if it didn't rocket Amadou & Mariam straight to stardom. It's a shame that in the U.S. it's likely to be smooshed into the world music ghetto, because it demonstrates as well as any recent release just how meaningless the world music tag is-- if anything, it proves that music is perfectly capable of wandering right past borders and across oceans and teaching us that for all of our perceived differences, our cultures and art are compatible. Amadou & Mariam clearly see no boundaries. | 2005-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Global | Nonesuch | September 29, 2005 | 8 | 483f349e-f4bc-45f3-bc32-e64b7386ca37 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Avant-rockers Deerhoof team with the elite contemporary classical outfit Ensemble Dal Niente for a weird and wonderful musical exchange. | Avant-rockers Deerhoof team with the elite contemporary classical outfit Ensemble Dal Niente for a weird and wonderful musical exchange. | Ensemble Dal Niente / Deerhoof: Balter / Saunier | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21806-balter-saunier/ | Balter / Saunier | Collaborations between classical players and composers associated with rock are no longer surprising. By now, most Radiohead fans know that Jonny Greenwood writes orchestra works. Fans of Annie Clark and Sufjan Stevens may have seen those singers’ chamber-music pieces show up on albums by groups such as yMusic. One thing that has remained rare, though, is the indie-meets-classical “merged ensemble.” While someone like Bryce Dessner may play guitar in a classical group, we haven’t seen him include his bandmates from the National in any original items written for the Kronos Quartet.
So it is genuinely notable to find the members of Deerhoof hanging with an elite contemporary classical group like Ensemble Dal Niente. Even more impressive is the fact that the Deerhoof players aren’t here to perform arrangements of their own music. Instead, this collaborative album opens with Dal Niente and Deerhoof tearing through a seven-movement suite by Brazilian-American composer Marcos Balter, titled "meltDown Upshot." This 23-minute opus takes full advantage of this mega-ensemble’s chamber chops and rock edge—just like you’d hope—but it doesn’t stop there. When he’s not indulging in minimalist-inspired patterns or proggy progressions, Balter also includes some gestures that sound copped from the world of avant-jazz.
That’s a lot of textures for any one composer to handle well. Though Balter pulls it off. His writing engages with the diverse talents of this group without ever feeling choppy. The contemplative first movement, “Credo,” places the delicate (but confident) vocals of Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki over writing for strings and piano that often glides over the minor second interval—a doleful semitone hop that receives tender-lullaby handling, here. The second movement introduces Greg Saunier’s drums and Ed Rodriguez’s electric guitar arpeggios, and it has a lightly propulsive feel.
A hint of manic writing announces the third movement, “Ready,” which is packed full of short, exciting riffs for the full ensemble, as well as saxophone squall and fast-moving vocal figures. Plucked strings, piano and Saunier’s drums animate the memorable “True/False.” Later on, “Cherubim” builds on the indie-power first introduced during “Ready.” This time, the drums and guitars hit harder—yet they don’t obscure the contributions of the Dal Niente players, either. And while this passage represents the height of freneticism during "meltDown Upshot," the climax of the piece is delivered by the more optimistic-sounding harmonies of “Rapture,” the closing movement. Overall, this feels like a major composition from Balter. And it’s also a triumph for the musicians of Dal Niente and Deerhoof. The performance comes from a group that sounds like a group, rather than two bands taking a flier on a cross-genre experiment.
On the record's other long track, Dal Niente play the music of Deerhoof, as newly arranged by Saunier himself. Though, in keeping with the band’s own fragmented aesthetic, these aren’t straight-up transcriptions. The stomping chords from the beginning of “Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain” (originally heard on the album Milk Man) have been pulled apart a bit in the version that appears almost four minutes into "Deerhoof Chamber Variations." Now the barnstorming line sounds more akin to the work of John Adams, circa that composer’s madcap Chamber Symphony.
Touches like these keep Saunier’s recasting of various Deerhoof themes from seeming under-thought. But even when the music is smart and attractive, the roving unpredictability of the band’s own performances is not always captured by these arrangements. Nor does the overall shape of this 20-minute work have the same force as Balter’s major piece. Still, Dal Niente’s playing is always vibrant, and it’s interesting to hear Saunier stretching in this way. Deerhoof and Dal Niente are both plenty busy with their more typical efforts, but their joint-venture debut sounds far too good to be a one-off. | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | April 27, 2016 | 7.6 | 48415f51-3bcd-43f4-bc7e-e45931c88bfb | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
A trio of reissues from Merge and Third Man capture the L.A. punk veterans at two very different points in their career, tracking their growth from scrappy dilettantes to swaggering glam rockers. | A trio of reissues from Merge and Third Man capture the L.A. punk veterans at two very different points in their career, tracking their growth from scrappy dilettantes to swaggering glam rockers. | Redd Kross: Red Cross EP / Phaseshifter / Show World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/redd-kross-red-cross-ep-phaseshifter-show-world/ | Red Cross EP / Phaseshifter / Show World | In a 1993 feature on his band Redd Kross, singer/bassist Steve McDonald bemoaned the fate of the group he started with his older brother Jeff in the late 1970s. “We’ve always been ahead of our time,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “We make records, and five years later another band has success with the sounds we’d already done.” At the time, that probably felt like the case, as some of the band’s most vocal fans, like Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland, were scoring multi-platinum sales by applying the same formula—’70s glam meets underground rock—that Redd Kross nailed on their second full-length, 1987’s Neurotica.
But listening to the work that Redd Kross did in the ’90s, the truth is much simpler. That’s particularly true of Phaseshifter and Show World, the two fine albums they cut for Mercury Records that were recently reissued on vinyl by Third Man Records. To paraphrase a song by Brian Wilson, another songwriter that hailed from the McDonalds’ hometown of Hawthorne, California, Redd Kross weren’t made for that time. They have always looked and sounded like a throwback to a bygone era of rock, no matter what the calendar said at the time.
That wasn’t always the case. When the McDonald brothers started making music together, they were caught up in the swell of punk rock, cadging rides from their folks to see X and the Dickies, and making a three-chord racket in their garage. They were enterprising enough to look up the phone numbers belonging to members of their favorite groups and bug them for a shot. Only one band took the bait, and before they knew it Red Cross, as they were known at the time, had their first gig opening up for Black Flag. Steve was all of 12 years old.
This is the period captured in another Redd Kross reissue: an expanded edition on Merge Records, their current label, of the group’s 1980 debut EP. The vinyl/CD re-release adds on a handful of demos and a live track recorded at the former Baptist church where Black Flag rehearsed. It’s capped off by some fantastic photos of the fresh-faced group—which at the time included Greg Hetson (Circle Jerks, Bad Religion) on guitar and early Flag vocalist Ron Reyes on drums—in all their precocious glory.
Heard some four decades on, the cookie-cutter punk of Red Cross sounds downright adorable. All six songs are wobbly and sloppy and fast—only two tracks are over a minute long—but played with undeniable enthusiasm. True to their tender age, the McDonalds sing silly screeds about spoiled rich kids, jocks, and cover bands.
The brothers’ punk inclinations on this EP masked their fondness for pop. Lyrical gripes about Kiss and the Knack in “Cover Band” belied the truth that the McDonalds were actually big fans of both, and the titles of “Annette’s Got the Hits” and “Fun With Connie,” the overblown live track that closes this reissue, are references to ’60s pop icons Annette Funicello and Connie Francis. Fast forward just a few years and the veil would be completely removed. The McDonalds and their bandmates played up their influences, dressing in loud thrift-store duds and recording covers of the Partridge Family, Bowie, and Charles Manson.
By the ’90s, Redd Kross were nowhere nearer the top of the charts, despite some valiant efforts and a lot of expense on behalf of their labels (Atlantic Records supposedly spent nearly $200,000 to promote 1990’s Third Eye). But a new deal with Mercury held some promise for the group, as did the cultural shift fomented by grunge. What came out of it, though, were two albums hampered by strange decisions and indifference from their label.
Although Phaseshifter was produced by the band—at this point a quintet including keyboardist Gere Fennelly, guitarist Eddie Kurdziel, and future soundtrack guru Brian Reitzell on drums—the thick, brawny sound of the record owes everything to John Agnello, who recorded and mixed the sessions. Perhaps an attempt to apply some hard-rock spunk to their power pop, in the vein of Andy Wallace’s work on Nevermind, the unfortunate results turn hip-swingers like “Jimmy’s Fantasy” and “Visionary” into headbangers and almost entirely bury Fennelly’s contributions. When Agnello releases his grip, the album is a blast, with “Lady in the Front Row” and “Ms. Lady Evans” evoking the luscious camp of the Sweet, and “Pay For Love,” a tune co-written by Jeff’s wife, Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s, revealing the thick, sugary zip of a milkshake beneath the power chords and Kurdziel’s yowling solo.
With the help of Mercury’s full-court promotional press (a spot on The Tonight Show, tours with Stone Temple Pilots and the Lemonheads), Phaseshifter was supposed to turn Redd Kross into a sensation, and when it failed to achieve liftoff, the label barely moved a finger for its follow up. The added shame of it is that 1997’s Show World is a little gem of an album. The group found a far more complementary collaborator with co-producer Chris Shaw, who, the year before, had helped Fountains of Wayne achieve power-pop grandeur.
Show World plays like a tour through Redd Kross’ record collection. Explosive acid rocker “Teen Competition” closes side A only to be followed by the ’60s Britpop homage “Follow the Leader” on the flip. The sweaty ballad “Secret Life” gets nestled between “Ugly Town,” which imagines the Righteous Brothers coated in distortion, and the glammy spark of “Vanity Mirror.” In contrast to its often muddy predecessor, the production here feels crisp and colorful, with plenty of open air for Kurdziel’s sharp-toothed and surprising solos to take flight.
Following some perfunctory efforts to promote the album, including a tour with the Presidents of the United States of America, Redd Kross went into a holding pattern for the better part of a decade. In 1999, Kurdziel died from what was reported to be an apparent drug overdose. The McDonalds stayed busy, producing other bands’ work, and Steve found gigs playing bass with Sparks and punk supergroup OFF! But as artists like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees started to find success mining a similar sound, Redd Kross were coaxed out of hibernation in 2006. Since then, they have steadily picked up momentum, playing numerous live shows and releasing 2012’s Researching the Blues and 2019’s Beyond the Door on Merge.
Between those new recordings and this recent spate of reissues—which includes 2018’s Record Store Day re-release of Third Eye and repressings of early efforts by the McDonalds on Merge—the world is finally catching up with Redd Kross. Hearing the cheeky ebullience of the first EP and the candied pop sheen of the group’s ’90s work confirms that, even as they sat alongside the biggest names in underground rock, the McDonalds never fit with the trends of the moment. But it’s not so much the case that they were ahead of their time, as Steve McDonald asserted in 1993; for decades, they’ve existed outside it entirely.
Buy: Red Cross EP / Phaseshifter / Show World at 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. | 2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 2, 2020 | 6.6 | 4842b52e-a4f5-4098-b200-30f33059a973 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The Chicago rapper-producer’s new album blankets hedonistic flexes in a layer of frost. | The Chicago rapper-producer’s new album blankets hedonistic flexes in a layer of frost. | ICYTWAT: Final Boss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/icytwat-final-boss/ | Final Boss | True to his name, ICYTWAT’s music sounds like it emerged from a frozen hell, cold and intense as an Arctic snowstorm. The Chicago rapper-producer distills the airiness of cloud rap, the blown-out noise of rage music, and the bounce of Memphis crunk (particularly When the Smoke Clears-era Three 6 Mafia) into an impish, head-splitting mix. Final Boss, the fifth project he’s released this year, mostly keeps pace with recent work like April’s Have Mercy on Us and July’s 4 Tha Troopz. It’s a collection of hedonistic bangers that shimmer like stalactites.
As a rapper, ICY tends to lean on boilerplate flexing—vague talk of bag chasing, label deals, and endless drugs and sex—but his dead-eyed croak brings texture to his blustery productions. Often he’s the quietest aspect of a given song, whispering while the beats swirl and crash around him. On tracks like “Neva Worried,” he slurs through syllables with a shrug; on “Cut Up” and “They Don’t Hear Me,” he channels the ethereal bounce of Freewave 2-era Lucki. His ad-libs frequently sound like he’s trying to make himself gag, giving songs like “No Settling” and “Topside Freestyle” a jolt of Carti-esque weirdness.
Sonically, the team of producers behind Final Boss largely stick to Icytwat’s script. Cincinnati producer Rocco Roy handles the lion’s share of the beats, including “Onnat,” “See It In Her Eyez,” and “Black Card,” which throb with menace. Memphis producer Scott Romosa’s “Feel Like Pat” is a bit of explicit Three 6 worship that mixes the group’s gothic tendencies with warbling, eardrum-shredding bass. But a handful of outliers slow things down. Detroit’s Topside gives “Topside Freestyle” a muted swing with bass licks and glittering keys that, compared to the rest of the album, feel almost gentle. And while the drums, police sirens, and barking dogs on closing track “Final Boss Music” would induce Resident Evil levels of anxiety on their own, here it’s a reprieve from the chaos, a place for ICY to stretch his limbs while he’s off to “make some muhfuckin’ money.”
ICYTWAT knows exactly what he’s here to deliver: trippy music where odes to designer shades and blowing your label advance slot between punishing, maximal beats. It’s not an especially ambitious approach—he’s not aiming for the bombastic showmanship of Travis Scott or trying to pry open your third eye like his former Divine Council colleague $ilkmoney. Final Boss, like so many ICY projects before it, just wants to keep things cool. | 2023-08-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Siddhi | August 14, 2023 | 7.3 | 4848eb91-d187-4e11-acc8-75b535a42221 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The New York duo MS MR resembles a pop-art design firm, a partnership that happens to offer pop music among other holdings. How Does It Feel is their second full-length album, and the larger sense that they're a smartly conceived rollout plan in search of indelible songs has never really stopped dogging them. | The New York duo MS MR resembles a pop-art design firm, a partnership that happens to offer pop music among other holdings. How Does It Feel is their second full-length album, and the larger sense that they're a smartly conceived rollout plan in search of indelible songs has never really stopped dogging them. | MS MR: How Does It Feel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20824-how-does-it-feel/ | How Does It Feel | The New York duo MS MR resembles a pop-art design firm, a partnership of sorts that happens to offer pop music among other holdings. Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow met as Vassar students, after Plapinger started the label Neon Gold as a thesis project. They rolled out the Candy Bar Creep Show EP on Tumblr in 2012, and their followup debut Secondhand Rapture came with "visual treatments" for all of its songs. Their song titles often feel like songwriting-workshop prompts ("Dark Doo Wop"). Like Marina and the Diamonds, MS MR offer pop that strives to hit its marks and offer something further: the viral hit and reactionary think piece about it, all in one.
How Does It Feel is their second full-length album, and the larger sense that they’re a smartly conceived rollout plan in search of indelible songs has never really stopped dogging them. They seemed interesting in 2012, and they seem interesting in 2015. But the songs don’t speak the same subversive and interesting language of their publicity. Plapinger is a powerful singer, someone who very much sounds like she belongs perched on footlights. But the aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful: There are no mind-warping sounds to match the visual boldness of their videos, and none of Plapinger’s lyrics have the crisp, memorable economy of her album and song titles. If pop art traffics first in unforgettable iconography, then MS MR fail the basic test: You could be listening to other people when you are listening to MS MR, and it’s often easy to imagine that you are.
If there are no calling-card songs here here, there are several solid ones: "Painted" turns Plapinger’s tense, brittle recitation of the words "What did he think would happen" into a rhythmic tattoo. The song seems to be accelerating slightly for its entire length, obsessive irritation gathering force. On "No Guilt in Pleasure" (another one of those mission-statement style song titles), tiny thumb pianos share space with tarmac-sized synths, while Plapinger dips into the throaty, throbbing lower end of her register. In general, MS MR have a much better feel for "small, tense, and interesting" than they do for "big and soaring"—the verses crackle with friction and ideas, while the choruses taste generic. When "No Guilt in Pleasure" and "Wrong Victory" scale up into their Big Hooks, the flavor drains out of the music as the volume builds.
Plapinger’s lyrics also often clunk where they should soar. The synth-pop "Tunnels" builds a cool and autumnal atmosphere, but Plapinger trips through it with wordy lines like "Silence and motion on this quiet tread/ Searching for lanes that don’t lead to the end." They are conversational in a way that fights the basic impulse of pop lyrics, which is to distill emotions to a fine point. You can usually hear the semicolons in Plapinger’s lyrics, which struggle to wedge layered impressions and fleeting thoughts into the stark, four-color backdrops of the music. This is often a problem when you approach a genre—in MS MR’s case, pop music—with the stated intention of subverting or commenting on it. Genre writing is a complex enough game all by itself. Unless you are blessed with some illuminating thunderclap of genius, your efforts to "subvert" those tropes usually just renders them inert. | 2015-07-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-07-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | July 24, 2015 | 6 | 4849b297-043c-4940-8687-6a066c4d2fca | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Ocean Roar is the second of a pair of albums Phil Elverum recorded on extended break from tour. May's Clear Moon was a dreamy fantasia about home. The midnight-black Ocean Roar, meanwhile, is an experiment in imagined homelessness: It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest. | Ocean Roar is the second of a pair of albums Phil Elverum recorded on extended break from tour. May's Clear Moon was a dreamy fantasia about home. The midnight-black Ocean Roar, meanwhile, is an experiment in imagined homelessness: It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest. | Mount Eerie: Ocean Roar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16988-ocean-roar/ | Ocean Roar | Ocean Roar is the second of a pair of albums Phil Elverum recorded recently on extended break from tour. Holed up in a de-sanctified church in the town of Anacortes, Wash., he began making music of heightened attention-- to surroundings, to his consciousness, to nature. The albums are full of the kind of observations you find time to make only when you haven't talked to anyone for a few weeks. May's Clear Moon was a dreamy fantasia about home, its comforts, and also the trickle of anxiety you feel when you are reminded of its fragility. The midnight-black Ocean Roar, meanwhile, is an experiment in imagined homelessness: It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest, as if Elverum steeled himself and left his house at midnight, barefoot, and just kept walking.
Clear Moon opened with the faint sigh of a single acoustic guitar-- a tree branch scraping your bedroom window, maybe-- but Ocean Roar's "Pale Lights" opens on a storm, an an ominous churn of organ and drums signaling the imminent arrival of bad feelings. As he always does, Elverum shapes sounds so that they arrive in tantalizing pulses: When he sings, "a small yelp on the wind/ And then, more roaring," over the murk of the music, which has suddenly died down, you are squinting through the album's black-night sound to discern moving shapes just as he is. This odd sensation, of straining to hear music piping through buds wedged directly into your ears, is a good sign that you're in Elverum's world; it gives his music a fragile air, like something that might not survive without your intervention.
Elverum's voice sounds more frail than ever here, flanked by bleak, oppressive towers of electric guitar. He's talked about the influence of black metal on his music before, and it has surfaced sonically on Wind's Poem and elsewhere, but Ocean Roar is the first place you can feel it: The spine-scraping, all-sixteenths tremolo'd guitars of the Popol Vuh cover "Engel Der Luft" channel the tinny evil of early black-metal recordings; "Waves" pounds mercilessly with drum rolls and a nastily distorted bass guitar for nearly its entire running time, with Elverum surfacing only for a moment to mumble the album's title and disappear beneath the noise. He casts himself as a small force lost in the wake of something huge, and seems mostly interested in black metal for its elemental dread.
In the middle of all this gnarled, frozen-gray bleakness, the gentler moments gleam like snow-globe hallucinations. "I Walked Home Beholding" is the charmed center of the record, the moment when the noise clears and Elverum surveys, with his signature quiet awe, the power of nature to bury his small town. It is the kind of redemptive, reassuring note that many might choose to close on; everything's all right, kids, here comes the moon. Or, in Elverum-speak: "Totally at peace with the meaninglessness of living." But the final track, immediately following "I Walked Home", is a seven-minute, tar-thick pulse of droning guitars (one of two slightly overlong instrumentals on this quite short record) that threaten to blot out everything else before them, before cutting off, sharp, hot, and sputtering, trailing abruptly into an unsettled silence. What Elverum wants to convey with this rude closing is unclear, but one thing is certain: The storm, metaphorical or otherwise, has closed back in behind him. | 2012-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | September 6, 2012 | 8.1 | 485057c3-bdaa-4842-af13-226871176b7d | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
null | The current decline of the music industry is of course not so much a catastrophic collapse as a simple market correction: a delayed downturn that should've actually begun in the early 1980s, before major labels cajoled consumers into replacing their vinyl collections with shiny CD replications-- thereby artificially padding their bottom lines well into the 90s. But now that record companies have lost control of the means of production, it's funny to see the indie-rock industry resorting to the same behaviour: Making people buy the same albums over and over again, lavishing the reissue treatment not just onto era-defining classics | Mogwai: Young Team [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11600-young-team-deluxe-edition/ | Young Team [Deluxe Edition] | The current decline of the music industry is of course not so much a catastrophic collapse as a simple market correction: a delayed downturn that should've actually begun in the early 1980s, before major labels cajoled consumers into replacing their vinyl collections with shiny CD replications-- thereby artificially padding their bottom lines well into the 90s. But now that record companies have lost control of the means of production, it's funny to see the indie-rock industry resorting to the same behaviour: Making people buy the same albums over and over again, lavishing the reissue treatment not just onto era-defining classics (e.g., Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Deluxe set), but also on albums that were simply very good. Just this spring alone we're being treated to 15th-anniversary editions of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, the Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray, and Sebadoh's Bubble and Scrape-- albums that were certainly much admired and analyzed in their 1993 inception, but which in 2008, don't really resonate far beyond nostalgic completists.
By that yardstick, Scottish post-rock perennials Mogwai are jumping the gun somewhat, reissuing their debut full-length album, Young Team, in an expanded double-disc edition barely a decade after it first appeared, and given that they've released a steady stream of mildly variable albums since then, it's not as if we've had much of a chance to miss them. But in this particular case, the reissue serves more of a practical than a canonical function-- the label that released Young Team in the U.S. in 1997, Jetset, went kaput several years ago, making what is still the band's most cohesive and consistently bracing album the hardest to find on these shores. But the timing is all the more appropriate given that Mogwai's most recent release, 2006's Mr. Beast, was their most perfunctory set of quiet/LOUD instru-metal to date, so it's an opportune time to revisit the album that made us care in the first place. And the fact that Young Team's influence can still be felt across the international indie-sphere-- not just in kindred art-rock spirits like Sigur Rós and Explosions in the Sky, but also avant-metal outfits like Boris and Pelican-- means the album exists today as something more vibrant than a museum piece.
For a mostly instrumental band, Mogwai have developed a reputation in the media for being big mouths who take no small delight in slagging other bands (hey guys, how about a 10th-anniversary reissue of those "blur: are shite" t-shirts?) and praising themselves. However, the spoken-word intro-- a friend reading out a gushing student-paper review of an early Mogwai performance-- that ushers in the slow-burn rapture of Young Team's "Yes! I Am Long Way From Home" feels less like a cheeky self-aggrandizing device than a rejection of the hollow Britpop hyperbole that was endemic to the era. But if Mogwai were determined to distance themselves from prevailing retro-rock fashions, Young Team evinced a nostalgic streak of its own, particularly for the pre-Britpop moment of 1988-91, when indie rock bands both American (Slint, Mercury Rev) and British (My Bloody Valentine, Bark Psychosis) were obliterating the parameters of rock music (and the VU meters that quantify them), before those groups either dissolved or turned more classic rock. So in a sense, Young Team was tending to unfinished business, bridging the continuum the connects shoegaze psychedelia to the anti-pop aesthetic and rhythmic thrust of the then-emergent post-rock.
But, of course, what distinguished Mogwai from the multitude of all-instrumental outfits jockeying for a Thrill Jockey deal was that their post-rock actually rocked. And to this day, nothing in their catalogue attests to this fact more than Young Team's startling second track, "Like Herod". Even when you heard it the first time, you knew the song's silently stalking momentum-- guided by Dominic Aitchison's deceptively melodic bassline-- would trigger an eruption of heavy-metal thunder that sounded like Slint soundtracking the shower scene in Psycho. But the tension lies not in question of whether the bomb is going to drop, but when, and this re-mastered reissue does a superb job of prolonging that feeling of impending doom-- during the song's second quiet stretch, you can hear Stuart Braithwaite and John Cummings' fretboard taps panning back and forth in the mix, like an unseen predator taunting you from some unseen location in the shadows before going in for a particularly savage kill. And after 11 years, I'm still never quite prepared for it.
At 11 minutes, "Like Herod" is actually only Young Team's second longest song; that honour belongs to 16-minute closer "Mogwai Fear Satan". Rather than resorting to sudden dynamic shifts, Young Team's colossal closer masterfully layers sheets of distortion, percussion and flute swirls over a repeated, ascending three-chord progression that-- despite the cacophony swarming around it-- projects a remarkable sense of calm. These two titanic tracks-- still staples of the band's live set-- have traditionally overshadowed the rest of Young Team's tracklist; listening to the album in its entirety today, what strikes you most is not so much Mogwai's brute force, but that these erstwhile piss-takers are capable of moments of great beauty and sensitivity: On the glockenspiel-gilded ballad "Tracy", random phone conversations are threaded into the mix, casting the mundane chit-chat in a overwhelmingly melancholic light, rendering the track as a requiem for someone who's no longer with us; on "R U Still In 2 It"-- Young Team's lone vocal track-- guest singer Aidan Moffatt of Arab Strap duets with Braithwaite on a devastating anti-love song that vividly captures a dead-end relationship being strung along by declarations of non-commital commitment.
Given how prolific Mogwai were in their formative years, much of what would normally be considered for anniversary-edition extras was already released 10 years ago, in the form of the Ten Rapid singles collection, the 4 Satin and No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EPs and the Kicking a Dead Pig remix collection. So all that this reissue's second "Appendix" disc can offer is one unreleased track (the suitably mournful "Young Face Gone Wrong"), a couple of compilation rarities, and a hearty serving of Young Team concert/radio-session recordings. The band's faithful version of Spacemen 3's "Honey" (taken from a 1998 tribute album) provides insight into Mogwai's more melodic influences, and seven-inch obscurity "I Can't Remember" finds the band toying around with a DJ Shadow-esque drum loop, but the live tracks mostly stick to the script-- the one revelation being that, in concert, Mogwai seem to be in more of a hurry to plow through "Like Herod" and "Mogwai Fear Satan", lopping several minutes off of each. Still, the version of "Satan" that closes this collection-- taken from Chemikal Underground's fifth anniversary party in 2000-- does add one sound effect that the original Young Team version merely implied: the sound of ecstatic applause confirming minds well blown. | 2008-06-16T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-06-16T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Chemikal Underground | June 16, 2008 | 9.2 | 4850eee1-a38a-4de8-8ceb-3cc856833ea5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Four years on from the landmark Person Pitch, Panda Bear returns with a record that embraces both summer fun and hushed spirituality. | Four years on from the landmark Person Pitch, Panda Bear returns with a record that embraces both summer fun and hushed spirituality. | Panda Bear: Tomboy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15299-tomboy/ | Tomboy | Noah Lennox's Panda Bear project has always been about making "difficult" music scan as almost radio-friendly, to translate experimental moves to a broad audience with little interest in such things. It's a strategy he learned, at least in part, from sonic forebears like Arthur Russell and Brian Wilson, along with the avant-techno types he reveres. Like those disparate influences, Lennox has used potentially off-putting compositional and textural ideas to craft some of the most inviting music of his era. In turn, he's inspired more of his own followers in the last four years than anyone might have guessed. Lennox has found himself the unwitting king of the chillwave nation, hero to a whole generation of underground kids drawn to his mix of heavy reverb, sun-woozy synths, droning kraut-surf-ambient-pop songs, high childlike voice, and psychedelic-cum-nostalgic sleeve art.
Tomboy, Lennox's fourth solo album as Panda Bear, was mixed with Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember of Spectrum/Spacemen 3. And again, in a way there's little here that's any further out-there than the blissful psychedelia and dream-pop Spacemen 3 and their peers were playing in the late 1980s, a lineage that stretches right back to stuff we now consider classic rock. With its angelic choirboy harmonies over an unchanging synth buzz, even "Drone", the album's roughest song, is a dead-ringer for the way Spacemen 3 songs like "Ecstasy Symphony" merged the pop high of Beach Boys with the woozy downer feel of the Velvet Underground.
But despite Tomboy's shorter songs and more conventional structures-- especially compared to the loose percussive jams of Lennox's 2007 solo breakthrough Person Pitch-- he's still committed to pushing his music to strange places. And few of his chilled-to-the-point-of-entropy acolytes can match Lennox for warped hooks. Forget comparing his gorgeous voice to their mumbling. Unlike many chillwave and dream-pop artists (and Spacemen 3), Lennox is blessed with the ability to actually sing, and he knows enough about crafting harmonies to do more than vaguely nod in the direction of 60s pop. So Tomboy is a pretty singular mix of the eerie and the inviting.
Despite the murk and terror and noise of Animal Collective's earliest music, there's never been anything particularly ugly about Lennox's mature solo work, starting with 2004's Young Prayer. But even then, he wasn't comfortable playing the laid-back hippie stereotype that's been laid on A.C. by detractors in recent years. Young Prayer might still be the most emotionally wrenching album in the Collective's catalog, an album written by a young man wrestling with some heavy shit. Lennox's father was dying of brain cancer while Young Prayer was being written. "[My father] got to read the lyrics, which was the most important thing to me," he told me in 2005; Young Prayer was a last attempt at confirming the good his father had done for him.
Musically, the album was the least bleak, least difficult thing an Animal Collective member had recorded to that point. But the unembellished recording-- you could almost hear the empty rooms in which it was recorded-- only heightened the fragility of the songs. "I didn't want to spend a lot of time producing it or thinking about how I wanted to get it to sound," Lennox said in that same interview. "I just wanted to get it out quickly." Tomboy is a much more considered record, with thickly layered psych-style production. There's also another heavy dose of dub, the most studio-bound and effects-driven music of the last 50 years, with the kind of extreme echo that plays like an overt tribute to the very different Jamaican psychedelia of King Tubby and Lee Perry.
But Tomboy's also something of a return to the simplicity, if not the emotionally blasted vibe, of Young Prayer after the ornate structures and epic lengths of Person Pitch. Instead of a Young Prayer we now have a "Surfer's Hymn". Instead of a naked guitar and a lot of blank space in the recording we get a wall-of-sound rush and percussion that's like Steve Reich by way of IDM. But the spare droning quality and devotional feeling of the music remains. There was plenty of church music in the Beach Boys and Arthur Russell, too, and Tomboy has a similar quality of embracing both summer fun and hushed spirituality.
The trouble with recording a ramshackle epic like Person Pitch is that you set up a portion of your audience to expect the next album to be at least as grand in both scope and design. There are certainly no obvious peaks on Tomboy like "Bros" or "Good Girl/Carrots", where the 12-minute lengths announced them as attention-demanding stand-outs. So Tomboy's smoothness will likely be mildly divisive among Lennox's fans. Many might have hoped that Lennox would have recorded something less accessible to separate him from the beach-obsessed glut of bedroom pop. But the scaling back on Tomboy in no way represents a scaling back of ambition on Lennox's part. In a way, what he's pulled off here is even more difficult. He's condensed the sprawl and stylistic shifts of Person Pitch into seemingly tidy songs. The fact that he's able to make music that's both otherworldly and familiar-on-first-listen is something that all of his followers would like to achieve, and very few have the chops or inventiveness to pull off. | 2011-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Paw Tracks | April 11, 2011 | 8.5 | 4853a5b5-1987-4233-a72f-eca40fefb5b8 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Featuring co-production from Kurt Vile, the classic trio’s latest reunion album is their breeziest and most melodically generous yet. | Featuring co-production from Kurt Vile, the classic trio’s latest reunion album is their breeziest and most melodically generous yet. | Dinosaur Jr.: Sweep It Into Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dinosaur-jr-sweep-it-into-space/ | Sweep It Into Space | If you bet a sizable sum back in 2005 that Dinosaur Jr.’s improbable reunion would last longer than the band’s previous two eras combined and generate four new albums ranging from good to great, you’d have cashed in by now. But who would have taken such a gamble? Against steep odds, the Western Massachusetts noisemakers’ classic lineup has made more records in the 21st century than they did in the ’80s, and unlike Pixies, they’ve achieved a kind of lineup equilibrium that eluded them the first go-round. (Maybe time really does heal deep wounds—or maybe J Mascis and Lou Barlow just learned how to communicate after becoming dads, as drummer Murph mused in this SPIN profile surmised.) Even during the pandemic that interrupted the recording of the band’s fifth and latest post-reunion album, Sweep It Into Space, Dinosaur Jr. seemed compelled to play together in person, performing one of the earliest socially distanced rock shows at a farm in Connecticut.
That sense of effortless—if hard-won—chemistry permeates the new album. Partially recorded in fall 2019 with co-producer Kurt Vile, then completed by Mascis during last year’s quarantine, Sweep It Into Space bears little evidence of its protracted creation. It’s the breeziest and most melodically generous of the trio’s reunion efforts, even flirting with power-pop on the compulsively hummable “And Me.” The album brightens the punkish snarl of 2016’s Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not but rarely strays far from Dinosaur Jr.’s familiar guitar-forward racket, another testament to this band’s reliability well into their fourth decade.
Sweep It revs up like a used car with “I Ain’t,” a major-chord stomper in which Mascis starts ripping melodic solo licks even before the first chorus hits. The song’s main refrain, “I ain’t good alone” (easily misheard as “I ain’t gettin’ old”), evokes the simple yearning for musical companionship that has defined this band’s reunion. Mascis’ skill seems to have only grown during quarantine, which he spent playing Hindu peace chants in solidarity with healthcare workers and jamming along with the Schitt’s Creek theme song. His fiery solos remain piercing as ever, whether he’s wailing over the buzzsaw chords of “I Met the Stones'' and “Hide Another Round” or injecting pyrotechnics into the brooding “To Be Waiting.”
The band departs from familiar territory when Vile asserts his presence behind the boards, like on the rolling country rock of “I Ran Away,” which features Vile’s 12-string accompaniment. The acoustic-electric mix of “And Me” is a nice change from the band’s usually implacable roar, but the jaunty “Take It Back” is the one most likely to raise eyebrows among longtime fans. The song is just a few trumpet overdubs away from ska, swapping out the usual Marshall stacks for a digital Mellotron and a Blue Beat-inspired rhythm, with a disjointed but still catchy chorus.
Otherwise, Sweep It Into Space is classic Dinosaur Jr., straight down to the division of labor: As on each of the band’s post-1997 albums, Barlow is allotted exactly two songs, a tradition so consistent you wonder if it’s baked into a contract. As usual, they’re wordier and more cerebral than Mascis’ contributions: a slightly mawkish song of devotion called “You Wonder,” a compelling English-folk pastiche called “Garden.”
The latter is a survival anthem, and takes its title from a sign Barlow spotted on a shed while driving through Massachusetts: Back to the Garden. “I was looking for a resolution,” Barlow explained. “Where do we go when faced with such dramatic confusion? Back to basics, back home, back to the garden.” It’s not just a song title; it’s also Dinosaur Jr.’s animating principle.
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. | 2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 23, 2021 | 7.3 | 48549b28-56f6-4131-b546-cde1f003730f | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Imposing and stark, the Soft Moon's Captured Tracks debut is impressively bathed in the tension and gloom of the industrial and goth 1980s. | Imposing and stark, the Soft Moon's Captured Tracks debut is impressively bathed in the tension and gloom of the industrial and goth 1980s. | The Soft Moon: The Soft Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14997-the-soft-moon/ | The Soft Moon | From the Bauhaus-influenced record cover, to the dead thuds that pound every corner of The Soft Moon, there is something imposing and stark about Luis Vasquez's debut record. It casts a bleak shadow, like a graying tower block. The record heavily recalls the industrial and goth 1980s, eras of music bathed in blackness, yet beneath the squall and the otherwise monolithic sound poke out some impressive moments of clarity.
The record announces itself on "Breathe the Fire" with a Joy Division-like beat and creeping synths, Vasquez's vocal-- as on much of the record-- never rising out of a whisper. When it finally does on the tense single "Circles", it's wordless and yelping, sounding more like a pagan chant. That tense song eventually builds to a visceral, satisfying release of noise; it's a trick repeated a few times on the album, but Vasquez's timing and restraint make it just as gratifying each time.
These fleeting moments of release lend some grounding to a record that-- with its slightly phasing bass lines and watery guitar-- is often hard to pin down, a perception only enhanced by the obscured vocals. The icy exterior of The Soft Moon might make it a little inaccessible, but it's never willfully obtuse, and the sequencing neatly frames one of the albums high points, "When It's Over"-- a moment of beauty peering through the darkness that surrounds it. It's a natural centerpiece for the record, and Vasquez here allows space to surround the drums for the first time, while a fragile guitar and bass underpin glacial shifts. There's also a rare moment of transparency for the vocals as Vasquez's post-apocalyptic narrative is articulated and given a heart.
That "When It's Over" is the sole escape from the claustrophobic drums and frosty static elsewhere makes it seem even bleaker. It's as though the only respite comes for Vasquez when the world is over. While goth was always melodramatic, something about the wordless, faceless dread invoked on The Soft Moon seems distinctly of its time and place, a world in which we're often reminded of our doomed course via out-of-reach financial barons and rogue, nation-less aggressors. That The Soft Moon carries the look so well here does the same trick as many of Goth's best moments-- it makes oblivion seem like an enticing prospect. | 2011-01-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-01-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | January 13, 2011 | 8.1 | 4857221d-293c-4538-8c6c-cd57837c384a | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
On their beautiful second LP, the Minneapolis duo conjure the grandeur of Scandinavian extreme metal with reverence. | On their beautiful second LP, the Minneapolis duo conjure the grandeur of Scandinavian extreme metal with reverence. | Inexorum: Moonlit Navigation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inexorum-moonlit-navigation/ | Moonlit Navigation | Time is a fickle mistress, and so are metal fans’ sympathies. Bands who end up stuck in era-specific transitional subgenres like melodic death metal, for example (or metalcore, or crossover thrash, or blackgaze) still have their fans and their place in history, but are often left behind as the genre forges ahead without them.
But, even though melodic death metal, its close associate, melodic black metal, and their hellish spawn, melodic blackened death metal, may not be all that cool anymore, it doesn’t mean that fans have stopped loving them. While their popularity and visibility have plummeted since the late ’90s and early ’00s, these subgenres are still going, with their own classics and new devotees. The Minneapolis duo Inexorum are a case in point: Their second LP, Moonlit Navigation, sounds like a guided tour through the best of the ‘90s Necropolis Records catalog. Helmed by Carl Skildum with the new addition of Matthew Kirkwold, the project’s unabashed worship of melodic Scandinavian extreme metal is a joy to hear, and they deliver it with reverence.
Describing Inexorum’s chosen micro-genre demands hair-splitting; to be brief, the sound marries the most melodic forms of black metal and death metal, adding occasional dashes of Viking-metal grandeur. Skildum has referenced his love for this particular era before, and Moonlit Navigation is dotted with sonic references to early Dawn, Sacramentum, and, fittingly, Amorphis, whose Tales From The Thousand Lakes may as well have been written about his own rural Minnesota upbringing. And in a testament to the living nature of the genre, those who came upon this scene a bit later may instead recognize shades of more recent acts like Amon Amarth, Thulcandra, or Insomnium. But Skildum and Kirkwold blend signifiers so seamlessly that their sound becomes its own living, breathing thing.
Both band members also play in death thrashers Antiverse and serve as part of medieval metal visionaries Obsequiae’s live lineup, so their genre agnosticism comes as no surprise. Picking apart songs like the grandiose title track or more downbeat “Chains of Loss” in order to deem this bit more death metal, or this bit more purely black, feels misguided; to properly appreciate an album like Moonlit Navigation, the listener must commit to occupying that messy space in between. The clear delineations that now separate death metal and black metal did not exist in their chosen sound’s heyday, and it’s a credit to Skildum that he allows everything to bleed together.
The cold, windswept atmosphere that hangs over the record is as important as the riffs or Skildrum’s weathered growl; there is a sense of place, grounded in the northern woods and jeweled lakes that surround the duo. The bombastic “Dream and Memory” allows the folk-influenced melodies and soaring grandiosity of Viking metal—its own complex beast—to imprint itself on Inexorum’s sound. On the triumphal, synth-powered “The Breaking Point,” which features guest vocalist Sarah Roddy, Inexorum wreathes its stirring melodies in uptempo thrash beats and blasts of frigidity. The acoustic interlude “Wild Magic” offers a momentary respite before “In Desperate Times” closes the coffin lid with a flourish of blastbeats and razor-sharp black metal riffing.
One of the beauties of Moonlit Navigation—for it is an overwhelmingly beautiful album—is Skildum’s ability to craft something new from older, near-forgotten pieces. When there are so many boundary pushing new bands drawing extreme metal forward—from black metal anarchists Dawn Ray’d and extreme metal shapeshifters Immortal Bird to Inexorum’s genre-smashing labelmates Thou and noise-rock vanguardists Couch Slut—it can be hard to understand why anyone would feel compelled to look backwards. But with their latest, Inexorum has provided a compelling argument for honoring the best of extreme metal’s past, even as we continue to carve out its faster, louder, weirder 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. | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Gilead Media | July 8, 2020 | 7.7 | 485b2ee9-4874-4409-a25b-2536739e25ae | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
The art-punk eccentrics’ first album in six years is a woozy celebration of Britain’s sleazy past, and it sounds like nobody other than Clinic. | The art-punk eccentrics’ first album in six years is a woozy celebration of Britain’s sleazy past, and it sounds like nobody other than Clinic. | Clinic: Wheeltappers and Shunters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clinic-wheeltappers-and-shunters/ | Wheeltappers and Shunters | For 12 years, Clinic’s intrinsic surrealness was counterbalanced by an output that was positively businesslike. Every even-numbered year, the Liverpool band delivered a capsule-sized blast of post-punk psychedelia, as reliably timed as a new Harry Potter film, and perhaps equally inscrutable to outsiders. (“Wingardium Leviosa!” is a Harry Potter spell and “Diggy diggy da mona mon!” is a Clinic lyric, but wouldn’t you believe the reverse was true?) The run began with 2000’s Internal Wrangler—a brash, near-perfect debut whose urgency is communicated via sinister surf licks and blasted-out organ tones—and seemed to wind down with 2012’s Free Reign, a slower, dub-inspired mutation of their sound. At their best, a new Clinic album sounded like absolutely nobody else; at worst, a new Clinic album still sounded like nobody else, but also sounded a little too much like the last Clinic album.
And then, after a 2013 remix album based on Daniel Lopatin’s original Free Reign mixes, Clinic’s prolific zeal mysteriously ceased. More than six years passed without an album. Although the band never announced a break-up or hiatus, it was easy to fear that it had become another cultural casualty of the early 2000s, like MP3 blogs or RAZR phones.
Wheeltappers and Shunters, the group’s first album of new material since 2012, puts such concerns to rest. It’s unmistakably Clinic: deeply eccentric, brief as hell (shorter than the Ramones’ debut!), British to the point of obsession, and steeped in the sort of classic drum machines and synthesizer textures that rarely come within 10 feet of a Discover Weekly playlist. Ade Blackburn’s vocals frequently veer into cryptic mutterings and even gibberish, but here he’s more intelligible than usual: You can clearly hear him enunciate lyrical gems like “Wednesday was a shit day!/Every day is a shit day!” on “D.I.S.C.I.P.L.E.,” a paranoid rave-up that would have been doused in distortion had it been recorded 15 years ago.
This seems to be in the spirit of the project: Wheeltappers is, in Blackburn’s words, “a satirical take on British culture, high and low.” Its songs evoke a seedy British era of traveling circuses, seaside resorts, and smoke-filled nightclubs, and its title references a long-forgotten 1970s variety show. Granted, every Clinic album could be perceived as fetishizing the distant past, given the band’s fondness for vintage instrumentation and retro eccentricity, not limited to 1950s rockabilly, doo wop, and post-punk groove. But this thematic weight gives the songs an overarching purpose and provides some context for Clinic’s typically bizarre interludes (see: “Tiger,” in which Blackburn repeats the phrase “joining the cir-cus” in an ominous incantation). “Be Yourself / Year Of The Sadist,” meanwhile, is a quintessential Clinic ballad, in the vein of Internal Wrangler’s “Distortions” or Funf gem “Christmas.” The song’s swaying melody is a vehicle for the group’s tender side, until the track mutates into an oddball sample of a British town crier hollering in 1971. It’s peculiar, on-theme, and characteristic of the band’s tendency to never let a pretty song get too normal.
Fans may wonder whether Wheeltappers picks up where Free Reign left off or marks a return to the punkish terrain of earlier Clinic. The answer is a bit of both. These songs are jaunty and quick—only one passes the three-minute mark—but full of woozy sonic flourishes and traces of Free Reign’s narcotic groove. (Check out “Ferryboat of the Mind,” which, in both title and sound, evokes a dubby journey down a cartoon river.) The album was mixed by Dilip Harris, who is known for work with predominantly electronic acts like Mount Kimbie and who likely warrants some credit for this record’s experimental undercurrent. Headphone listening is encouraged—especially with “Complex,” which throbs along on a drum-machine pulse immediately reminiscent of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” or “New Equations (at the Copacabana),” in which Blackburn’s heavily processed vocals form a foggy détente with what sound like the echoes of an autoharp (but may, in fact, be something more obscure, knowing this crew).
These are novel variations on the familiar Clinic sound. Some, like the queasy synth refrain in “Rubber Bullets,” work less well than others. And some of the melodies seem rather thin, considering the band had six years to generate them (looking at you, “Mirage” and “Rejoice!”). That’s an ancient weakness of the group, and Wheeltappers and Shunters is nothing if not steeped in the past. “The good old days, the good old ways,” Blackburn mutters on “Complex,” his voice coated in sarcasm. Britain’s past is full of sleaze, but at least it brought us Clinic. | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | May 13, 2019 | 6.9 | 485d143a-290a-482f-bc42-cf625d5785e0 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th. You know the\n\ stuff of which ... | This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th. You know the\n\ stuff of which ... | Dälek: From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2148-from-filthy-tongue-of-gods-and-griots/ | From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots | This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th. You know the stuff of which I speak; hip-hop built from samples harder to grasp than a wall of Jell-O, whose time signatures change faster than a 15 year-old girl's fashion sense, all strung around beats dirtier than the old man asleep at the bus stop. Innovators like cLOUDDEAD, El-P, and the Anticon Crew have been redefining what hip-hop is for years now, so it's nice that people are finally starting to take notice. If you've been paying any attention, you know what's bound to happen next: the market will glut, and innovation will make way for imitation. But first, Dälek returns to the scene, fresh off collaborations with Faust, Techno Animal and Kid606, with a sophomore album inventive enough to extend avant-garde hip-hop's stay in the limelight for, at the very least, a few more weeks.
So what is it that makes Dälek-- alongside producer Oktopus, and turntablist/producer Still-- stand out amongst a seeming onslaught of original, challenging hip-hop? Namely that their songs are set to moody musique concrète backdrops that sound like something out of a David Lynch nightmare. Yes, there are rhymes set to hand-drums and cowbells. Yes, the lyrical content would feel more at home in a lit hall than in some trash-ridden alley. Yes, there are times when Dälek opts to speak his vocals rather than rap them. And yes, he's more sensitive than your average bear. But what really separates Dälek from the rest isn't his rabid experimentation as much as the way he builds a bridge between the avant-garde and the traditional.
While his contemporaries experiment with slant-rhyme and abstract poetics, Dälek takes a comparatively standard lyrical approach (assuming you'd consider rhymes like, "Forgot our days in shackles?/ You concentrate on battles?/ I lecture graduates/ Discussing Kant till they leave baffled," standard), setting forcefully delivered rhymes to some of the strangest soundscapes that will ever be labeled 'hip-hop.' Pleas for understanding, cries of frustration, and even the occasional ray of hope weave in and out of music that owes more to 80s Western European industrial music a la Psychic TV and Nurse with Wound than it does to Grandmaster Flash or Public Enemy.
Steering clear of the purposefully vague poetic abstractions of his peers, Dälek prefers to revisit much of the thematic ground that hip-hop culture was built on. He's confused by issues of race (the album opens with a track called "Spiritual Healing," which poses the question: "Who you pray to, my God, the black God?/ Who you pray to, my God, the brown God?/ Who you pray to, my God, the white God?/ Your reaction's kind of odd for a kid who loves to nod"), frustrated by his confusion ("I vent my anger on all angles/ Would strangle angels if they'd let me"), yet certain all the while that the answers lie in the past, never ashamed to look to his predecessors for clues in his eternal quest for understanding ("Remember days of cardboard, fat lace, and Krylon?/ Microphones and twelves, tools we all relied on/ Niggas dropped a verse, the thought was one to die on/ I remember hip-hop, that's my Mt Zion").
If Dälek's skill lies largely in his ability to merge the traditional with the unusual, then perhaps it's somewhat ironic that From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots' finest moment is its most atypical. A twelve-minute epic called "Black Smoke Rises" serves as the album's centerpiece, a defining moment that sees Dälek all but abandoning any and all rules of hip-hop. "Black Smoke" is all atonal drones, hisses and shrieks that build and build, computer bleeps that pierce the atmosphere like an alarm clock pierces through sleep, ghostly vocals that linger ominously on the horizon, coaxing the nervous listener to come closer. Throbbing Gristle is the closest reference point I can manage, with Dälek playing the role of Genesis P. Orridge, calmly intoning a mantra ("Black smoke rises to a heaven I do not know/ Slowly gaze to take in our sorrow") that bobs peacefully in and out of the murky chaos. His words float through the listeners' consciousness, eventually overtaken by the building drones. The grinding noise escalates and Dälek plays the now-cliché part of the emotional emcee. But his introspective spoken words transcend the obvious. As he longs for a soul he once knew, the listener catches himself uncertain if Dälek's referring to a lover, a more innocent world, or himself.
Such ambiguity rears its head again on "Trampled Brethren," built around a vocal sample that warns, "So that we would be denied the knowledge of who we are, this was taken out of the history books several centuries ago. And, of course, it hasn't been put back yet." Standard hip-hop fare, sure. But by placing it against a backdrop of Eastern Indian instrumentation, Dälek denies the surface interpretation, reminding listeners that injustice and oppression is something happening everywhere, to everyone.
"Forever Close My Eyes" is universal in a different way. Depressed, though never whiny, Dälek embeds a refrain of, "My yesterdays don't matter now, they're gone/ Your careless expression left my wrists torn.../ Yesterdays don't matter now, you're gone/ Shattered glass of empty bottles cut my palms," in a glorious bed of e-bowed guitar feedback a la Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting.
As an emcee, Dälek shows off a rare versatility, equally capable of straight rhyming and formless spoken word. As a poet, Dälek has a grasp on subtlety that most will never approach. And as a collective, Dälek have achieved the seemingly impossible: successfully bridging the conventional and the experimental in a way that respects both at once. It's a risky endeavor-- one that threatens to alienate fans of both disciplines. But it's this very risk that makes Dälek's music so very affecting. | 2002-08-12T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-08-12T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Ipecac | August 12, 2002 | 8.7 | 4862c45c-1c6a-4cdf-aa10-1a933f416f4b | David M. Pecoraro | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-m. pecoraro/ | null |
Herbert pays homage to DJ culture on his latest record, composed from sounds recorded during one night at the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt. | Herbert pays homage to DJ culture on his latest record, composed from sounds recorded during one night at the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt. | Matthew Herbert: One Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14648-one-club/ | One Club | The first wave of DJs had to overcome an astounding number of barriers that were, in retrospect, both obvious and stupefying. The stumbling block that really sticks with me, however, was one of the first to arise: there was initially opposition-- certainly from musicians but also from patrons-- to recorded music being played in public places. The thought, presumably, was that if a crowd and venue were sufficient to support music, it should be live music. Matthew Herbert's One Club is composed from sounds recorded during one night at the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt; it is a self-professed attempt by Herbert to document the vibrancy and chaos of an ad-hoc community brought together by recorded sound. It is sort of a will-the-circle-be-unbroken?-artifact for DJ culture, if you enjoy thinking conceptually (Herbert does).
Nothing with Herbert is merely an artifact; everything is a statement. One Club aims to combat what Herbert sees as the growing corporatism in club culture. He will combat this corporatism with high art, natch, but One Club is actually one of Herbert's least overbearingly wacky ideas this decade. (It is also the second volume of this year's "One" trilogy. One Pig-- volume three, scheduled for later this year-- attempts to document the life cycle of a swine.)
Herbert functionally stopped making club music several years ago, so One Club represents something of a return to his roots, though it has little in common with the jazz-inflected microhouse he helped pioneer in the late 1990s. The points Herbert seems to be making-- that clubs are foggy, wonderful, frightening social habitats-- are elementary enough, but the way he makes them is natural. There is chatter, haze, long stretches of aggressive percussion. More than once a crowd starts chanting. I think of my bleeding-together club experiences: DJ call and response sessions ("Marcus Bujak"), bathroom breaks ("Alex Duwe"), stumbles to the bar ("Jalal Malekidoost"), and unmalicious elbows in my side while dancing ("Oliver Bauer"). In what is either a move of astoundingly precise conceptual execution or, well, compositional failure, One Club also embodies the ills of clubgoing: It is loud and too long and leaves you fatigued.
Whereas 1998's Around the House (composed of recordings of household objects) always just sounded like techno, it's actually possible that listeners could suss out One Club's source material without prior knowledge. "Loud, emotionally conflicted public event" really shines through; "football game" (the sponsorship and corporatism of which would likely cause Herbert's head to burst) wouldn't be a bad guess. One Club ran a risk of its source material and subject matter ending up in a weird feedback loop. But the best part about it is that it evokes a club experience without actually sounding like club music. Herbert's re-imagined club is capable of leaving you groggy and sore as well as excited and nostalgic, though that's probably exactly his point. | 2010-09-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Accidental | September 20, 2010 | 7.2 | 486557f8-6d58-46a4-b53a-25497227eed9 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Grounded in historical horrors and gesturing darkly at personal demons, the gospel-punk band’s third album is shot through with dread. | Grounded in historical horrors and gesturing darkly at personal demons, the gospel-punk band’s third album is shot through with dread. | Algiers: There Is No Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/algiers-there-is-no-year/ | There Is No Year | Atlanta author Blake Butler’s 2011 novel There Is No Year follows a family struck by a plague of paranormal activity. They move into a new house and reality bends around them. The hallways constrict and contract, nicking elbows and knees; the television signal is blurry for normal channels, but the premium porn station comes in crystal clear; caterpillars spawn in the mailbox. Relentlessly tactile, the book elliptically channels ennui and loneliness into weird, semi-humorous horrors that fester beneath the family’s otherwise normal life like mold.
For their third album, gospel-punk outfit Algiers, who describe Butler as a friend, have adopted the title and the mood of the book. Built around extracts from an epic poem written by frontman James Franklin Fisher, the record is saturated with dread that smolders under his scorched-earth polemics. Unlike their past records, which were awash in musical allusions and references to global struggles, There Is No Year is narrower and more internal, a shift that results in leaner, more intuitive songs. The horrors Algiers conjure—colonization, oppression, dispossession—remain diffuse, but as a unit they sound more in sync.
That focus is baked into the record. Whereas their debut was built from years of file-sharing among band members and The Underside of Power was recorded between touring and sessions across the UK and the US, There Is No Year was made in two weeks in one place. It also has only two producers, Ben Greenberg and Randall Dunn, who bring an arsenal of synths and a knack for layering sound. The result is songs that feel less leaden and overthought, like album highlight “Chaka,” which sways from a soulful disco bop to a flurry of atonal noise without the slightest bit of friction. Algiers songs have always been busy, but for once they sound loose, open-ended.
The problem with the record is that this expressive turn is half-hearted. Fisher remains addicted to vague allegory and generic revelation; his writing conjures fire and brimstone but lacks the heat of the flame, the stink of the sulfur. “We all dancing to the fire,” he warns on “Hour of the Furnaces.” “Streets are raining fire/We’ll be gone now any day,” he prophesies on “Wait for the Sound.” These moments are supposed to feel urgent, but he could be talking about climate change or Burning Man. There’s no texture to his writing, no scene-setting—just intensity. On single “Dispossession,” he sits atop a mountain, looking down on a flaming America and promising that “freedom is coming soon.” For whom? When? What does it look like? Fisher speaks like a prophet, but his visions remain frustratingly opaque.
There are times when he seems to be addressing personal demons. “Misophonia,” the poem from which the lyrics are sourced, was reportedly composed during a “protracted personal period of anxiety and lack”; the title means “hatred of sound.” A musician detesting sound could be a fascinating subject if it were developed more, but the writing is too closed off to make searching for an entry point feel worthwhile. While the rhythm section molds these lapses into more imagistic, evocative shapes (the synth fills on “Unoccupied” are killer), the tracks are still structured around Fisher’s impassioned vocals, so when he falters, the whole enterprise feels aimless.
Given the chaotic sprawl of their past work, it’s refreshing for Algiers to turn inward and attempt to ground their righteous fury in soul-searching rather than the entire history of global oppression. Unfortunately, even when invoking personal anguish they make conflict feel atmospheric instead of something rooted in bodies and experiences. There’s precedent for more cosmic and conceptual accounts of struggle. Bands like Sunn O))) (who Dunn has produced for), the Comet Is Coming, and Priests have distilled grand ideas into arresting narrative, in both word and sound. And Algiers’ audio zines, the last of which invoked the Algerian revolution to explore angst and uncertainty using thickets of drone, show that they are capable of more nuanced writing . But they haven’t yet learned to translate the political into the personal, to turn abstract ideas into matters of the gut.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 17, 2020 | 6 | 486ac459-415b-44b3-862a-8ad455f2af69 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
With features from Future, Quavo, Young Thug, and T.I., French Montana returns newly motivated with his sophomore album, which acts as a funnel for everyone’s strongest qualities but his own. | With features from Future, Quavo, Young Thug, and T.I., French Montana returns newly motivated with his sophomore album, which acts as a funnel for everyone’s strongest qualities but his own. | French Montana: Jungle Rules | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/french-montana-jungle-rules/ | Jungle Rules | French Montana has spent a decade and several record deals trying to close the gap between his flamboyant lifestyle and his boring raps. The chromatic and gaudy world he navigates IRL isn’t usually reflected inside his verses. French names exotic pets after Roman dictators and spends fortunes on luxury concept cars imported from his native Morocco to Calabasas. There are videos of Akon buying him a Maserati and a $120k basketball shootout with Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, and Meek Mill; the raps should write themselves. It’s one of contemporary rap’s biggest riddles: How can a character so fit for the Kardashian Extended Universe be the least interesting person on every high profile release he’s ever been a part of? The overstuffed and dull Excuse My French was just a microcosm of a larger problem: This guy has no vision and no imagination. He’s consistently a hanger-on—to Max B, to Diddy, to Ross, and then to Khloe—who flourishes as a premium space filler. Until recently, there hasn’t been much validating his seat at the table.
The stink of his big-budget major label debut stuck with him, but to French’s credit, he’s persisted, making himself visible when others might have vanished. In the four years between Bad Boy releases, he churned out a mixtape series that peaked with Wave Gods last February, and he was building momentum for a proper Excuse My French follow-up. MC4, a mixtape sequel turned album, was supposed to be his big comeback. But despite tracks with Drake, Kanye, and Nas, and the phenomenal Kodak Black-led “Lockjaw,” it was repeatedly delayed. French cited sample clearance issues when it was pushed back. (L.A. Reid later admitted that it was delayed simply because there wasn’t any buzz for it.) In a bizarre turn, Target shipped the album unprovoked on the original release date. MC4 soon ended up online, and was subsequently shelved before finally becoming a retail mixtape. After parting with MMG and going home to Morocco for the first time in years, French Montana returns newly motivated with his sophomore album, Jungle Rules, which acts as a funnel for everyone’s strongest qualities but his own.
Well-produced but protracted, Jungle Rules is a marvel of excess that often works in spite of French Montana, who seems content to let others do the heavy lifting. His voice is rarely the standout and is the least necessary. Many of French’s best songs find him rapping about death and overindulgence inside warped carousels fashioned out of vocals from Adele, Florence and the Machine, La Roux, Lana Del Rey, and Utada Hikaru. Jungle Rules returns to the well—on “Whiskey Eyes,” “Too Much,” and “White Dress”—but wildly mixes in trap, dancehall, and pop rap. After turning a corner on Wave Gods, his writing has regressed to hollow swaggering.
He really needs listeners to know he purchased Selena Gomez’s $3.3 million mansion in Calabasas (even though he never stays in it), which is cool even by rap standards, but all he manages to muster are Selena shoutouts and outright mentions of the buy. When the bars aren’t goofy (“And that’s why the bitches fuck with me/‘Cause a nigga flip-flop like he standin’ on the beach”) they’re sadly drab (“I pray we live/For a thousand years/And if I hurt you/Baby, drink Cîroc for your tears”). His idea of a romantic gesture is hoping aloud a woman doesn’t get famous, unable to hide his selfish ulterior motives with lazy writing. And its hypocritical coming from someone who has actively sought out famous women and whose entire identity hinges on being adjacent to celebrity.
Why aren’t there raps about his return to Morocco? Or about his bizarro album release mishap, which is unprecedented in the streaming era? Why is “Got jerked my first deal, and I told ‘em ‘Suck a dick’/Once I made my first mil’, I told them ‘Fuck a brick’” the closest he gets to unpacking his tumultuous major label journey on his comeback album? How can a 18-track album say so little? The most interesting material in his life gets misused or goes unmentioned.
That isn’t to say French is incapable of mustering up any insights about his fascinating life or giving more of himself. If Wave Gods and MC4 proved anything, it’s that he can be effective when concise, and on Jungle Rules there are flashes of that same acuity. On “Formula,” he raps, “My homie Chinx got murdered/Nobody seen, nobody heard/They left us on the corner, wanna kill us here/Now, Nino in the Carter with the Cartier/My homie Max got a hundred years/His mama body dry, can’t cry no tears.” “Too Much” condenses mass incarceration into four lines.
But there isn’t enough of that to fill the hour. French has relied heavily on guests throughout his career, and they dictate things here too, creating an uneven play-through. Swae Lee dominates “Unforgettable,” which is ironically named given French’s contributions. Sandwiching French between the Weeknd and Max B exposes how monotonous his melodies can be. He isn’t an equal for Future or Quavo or Thug or T.I., who all steal the spotlight with more memorable performances. “Formula” is a poached Alkaline song woefully repurposed. “She Workin” would be much better off as a Marc E. Bassy song. On “Bring Dem Things” he gets upstaged by both Pharrell the Rapper and a mismanaged sample of Organized Konfusion’s “Stress.”
Jungle Rules doesn’t answer any of the questions that have circled French Montana his entire career, chiefly: Can he be a leading man and can he be as interesting on wax as he is in the day to day? He has evolved quite a bit since Excuse My French, coming up with moments of sharpness, but he is still limited in what he can do. His music flattens the showy life he lives. If there’s a case to be made for his vibrance, it isn’t this. | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Boy / Epic | July 19, 2017 | 6.5 | 486e24a9-76fc-469c-8364-0a6641332b40 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Chicago rapper is something of an outcast in his hometown’s hip-hop scene, delivering slick punchlines over boom-bap beats. His third project in four months is his best, but he’s got room to grow. | The Chicago rapper is something of an outcast in his hometown’s hip-hop scene, delivering slick punchlines over boom-bap beats. His third project in four months is his best, but he’s got room to grow. | Chris Crack: Being Woke Ain’t Fun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-crack-being-woke-aint-fun/ | Being Woke Ain’t Fun | The prevailing narrative of Chicago rap does not allow for an eccentric like Chris Crack. His music neither bears the whiff of patchouli of the influential YouMedia and Young Chicago Authors open mics, nor does it share the permanent gun-violence scarification of the erstwhile drill scene. It is not the pastel proselytizing of Chance the Rapper; it is not the thundering L-train rumble of G Herbo. (Certainly, it is not the stuttering, mid-life crisis of Chicago’s prodigal son and number-one Charlie Kirk fan, Kanye West.) In a city where other rappers tend to be painfully cloying or brutally blunt, he’s acerbic and salty. Crack makes elemental, soul-looping boom-bap for the late aughts—no Wild Style, just wild shit-talking. With Being Woke Ain’t Fun, his third project in four months, Crack is attempting to further carve out this niche, one punchline at a time.
Luckily for Crack, a number of fellow Chicago outcasts have joined in on his harangues. Ugly Boy Modeling, Gzus Piece, and MC Tree—with whom Crack has a pair of commendable EPs, TreeSwag and Tree + Crack—add bite, but it’s Vic Spencer who’s Crack’s most potent foil. Their albums together, Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? and Blessed, have coincided with Crack’s artistic growth; he no longer runs roughshod over beats like a seven year-old riding a sugar high, and instead sits calm and measured in the pocket. On “Coochie Nectar” and “Plair, Nephew, Pleighboi,” Spencer’s gravely baritone and dyspeptic demeanor offer a counterpoint to Crack, who’s high-pitched and punchy. Spencer claims to be eating “quesadillas with your bitch”; Crack, after asking rhetorically whether the Feds are tapping his phone, answers, “Man, fuck them niggas.” They’re tremendous assholes together, like Statler and Waldorf, or Rick Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer, or Ernest Hemingway and a daiquiri.
Still, the album feels overburdened by guest features—not for their lack of quality but their frequency. Of Being Woke’s 11 songs, over half include other rappers. It seems less like a Chris Crack solo project than it does an inspired bullshit session at Crack’s house, scored by August Fanon’s production. It sounds spontaneous, but spontaneity doesn’t always equal unbridled brilliance.
With Being Woke Crack tries to tread a very thin line between remarkable productivity and rushed, slapdash workmanship. On occasion, his album lands on the wrong side of that divide. Crack is a markedly improved rapper from his early tapes, but he’s still mostly unconcerned with choruses or sequencing; depending on your tastes, two-minute bursts of rap are either pleasant little kernels or too-thin bits of nothing. (While I generally like them, the experience can leave me empty.) The album’s most glaring weakness, though, is the inertia and uniformity of many of Fanon’s instrumentals. His soul loops often lack the richness of their source material and, instead of building and releasing tension, they tend to float by like clouds of vapor. Fanon’s capable of getting it right—the cascading drums of “Explanation Kills Art” are exceptional—but his beats on Being Woke are not his finest.
For those curious about Crack, Being Woke Ain’t Fun is a fairly straightforward introduction to his solo milieu. It’s likely Crack’s best album to date but, given his recent efforts—May’s Let’s Just Be Friends and July’s This Will All Make Sense Later—it’s one he’s likely to surpass. Maybe now, after a summer of slick punchlines over soul samples, the narrative of Chicago rap will allow for an eccentric like him to flourish. | 2018-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | New Deal Collectives | August 14, 2018 | 6.6 | 4872947e-cb1d-4eb9-9e05-bb3d9c5525a2 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from the Madrid-based garage-pop quartet Hinds, is a record of human contradictions, the admissions of vulnerability, and the realization that these things are beautiful. | Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from the Madrid-based garage-pop quartet Hinds, is a record of human contradictions, the admissions of vulnerability, and the realization that these things are beautiful. | Hinds: Leave Me Alone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21343-leave-me-alone/ | Leave Me Alone | The Madrid-based quartet Hinds makes fuzzy garage pop that seems as intrinsically linked to the warmth and sunshine of their home as California-infused idleness is to many Burger Records bands. They began as a duo called Deers after Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote met back in 2011. Inspired by bands like the Black Lips, Mac DeMarco, and the Strokes, the pair wrote woozy pop tracks about love, partying, and the complicated problems that occur when mixing the two. After releasing their first single, 2014's DEMO, Hinds completed their lineup with Ade Martin on bass and Amber Grimbergen on drums, and soon after were forced to change their name due to legal issues (Hinds means a female deer). Hinds may be aware that their casual origin story and goofy demeanor (catch them cracking beers and dancing on tables in their videos) may cause some to think they are not a serious project, so the foursome chose to challenge themselves on their debut LP Leave Me Alone, and the decision pays off.
Hinds have described the 12 tracks on Leave Me Alone as the various "faces of love" they experienced while writing their debut, and therefore is more emotionally varied than their previously lighthearted singles. While the title indicates detachment, a majority of the songs suggest the opposite, pleading quite literally on "Fat Calmed Kiddos" "please don't leave me." Leave Me Alone is a record of human contradictions, of the admissions of vulnerability, and the realization that these things are beautiful. It's no coincidence that the phrase "You're on my mind" appears on several songs; for better or worse, Hinds realize that there are some feelings that cannot be escaped.
Leave Me Alone's singles focus on their purely poppy side, from the smooth opener "Garden" to the glorious jangle of "San Diego" to the wailing harmonies of "Bamboo." The previously released "Castigadas En El Granero," which translates to "punished in the barn," is perhaps the most frenzied track on the album, which is only amplified by rapid-fire, somewhat absurd observations like "All I see is a big cow/ And now I'm eating all your corn." Another particular standout is "Fat Calmed Kiddos," a sunny whirlpool of a song with a particularly poignant chorus: "And I needed to risk 'cause I needed to try/ And I needed a breath 'cause you were out tonight."
These tracks show off what truly sets Hinds apart: Cosials and Perrote's shared vocal responsibilities, which fit together perfectly. Cosials' voice switches between a silky drawl and a Joplin-like howl while Perrote's is grounding and steady. When one is singing, the other often emphasizes or counters, the Ego and Id so to speak. The best moments on Leave Me Alone occur when Cosials and Perrote are going all-out, belting together without restraint.
But even on the "slower" songs (there isn't really a lull on Leave Me Alone, except for the midway instrumental interlude "Solar Gap") the possibility exists for the energy to be cranked up all the way. After a few final mellow jams like the spacey "And I Will Send Your Flowers Back" and "I'll Be Your Man", Hinds conclude with "Walking Home", a fuzzy and almost-tropical declaration of love. The song embraces silly metaphors like "You're the map to my toe" and "You're the rice of my bowl" before softly fading out with the words, "You're the love of my life." "Walking Home" is a lovely reminder of two important facts: that love does not need to be complicated and that Hinds are not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves. | 2016-01-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | January 5, 2016 | 7.5 | 4872b7fe-d084-41ff-8f08-48f634503357 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
In the mid-’90s Guided by Voices were a mysterious outfit from Dayton, Ohio, that the music press didn't know what to do with—a rumor as much as a band. Their Matador debut was a turning point. | In the mid-’90s Guided by Voices were a mysterious outfit from Dayton, Ohio, that the music press didn't know what to do with—a rumor as much as a band. Their Matador debut was a turning point. | Guided by Voices: Alien Lanes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22292-alien-lanes/ | Alien Lanes | The passage of time has done nothing to make the mid-’90s heyday of Guided by Voices seem any less extraordinary. Released at the height of the band’s underground popularity in 1995, Alien Lanes supposedly cost $10 to make (excluding the cost of the beer consumed as it was recorded) while garnering GBV an advance worth nearly $100,000 from its new record label, Matador. GBV’s 37-year-old mastermind and only permanent member, Robert Pollard, had already been around a while, recording several albums in the ’80s and early ’90s that virtually nobody heard. But Pollard’s latest opus was a big deal: famous mastering engineer Bob Ludwig mastered Alien Lanes. (Among Ludwig's prior credits was Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, possibly the most celebrated "lo-fi" album ever.) Upon release, Alien Lanes was greeted with a laudatory four-star review in Rolling Stone comparing GBV to the twin pillars of ’90s alt-rock, R.E.M. and Nirvana. “The new drunk drivers/Have hoisted the flag,” Pollard sings on Alien Lanes’ opening track, “A Salty Salute.” The bravado was warranted.
Bandcamp has since normalized the idea of a bedroom tunesmith from flyover country releasing a self-recorded masterpiece to the world, and getting semi-famous in the process. Will Toledo was once a high school kid from Virginia who wrote and recorded dozens of songs in the backseat of his parents’ car, and now Car Seat Headrest is one of 2016’s biggest new indie bands.
But the lack of online distribution channels was hardly GBV’s only disadvantage before Alien Lanes. By the time GBV’s would-be swan song, 1992’s Propeller**, became a surprise critical hit, Pollard was a family man from Dayton, Ohio, who by rock‘n’roll standards was over-the-hill. By day, he worked as an elementary schoolteacher, and on weekends, he blew off steam by getting drunk in his garage and laying down weird, succinct, and insanely catchy songs informed by ’60s and ’70s prog and psych-rock on a four-track machine with guys from the neighborhood. And for many years, that was basically the extent of Pollard’s music career.
Even after GBV finally made its mark, Pollard’s unabashed devotion to the less fashionable sectors of classic rock (Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Who’s Next, Cheap Trick) put him out-of-step with indie’s entrenched punk orthodoxy. “King Crimson with a short attention span and a sixpack,” was how Craig Marks described Guided by Voices in the Spin Alternative Record Guide, published just as the band’s notoriety was peaking. While the King Crimson comparison would’ve flattered Pollard, it wasn’t meant as a compliment in the alt-era.
What Guided by Voices lacked in traditional indie cool, it made up for in songs. So many, many songs—great songs, bad songs, OK songs that became good because they were short and worked as segues between the great songs. With 28 tracks dispensed in just 41 minutes, Alien Lanes offered up more songs than any other GBV album, and they were dense with in-jokes and non-sequiturs about a pimple zoo, the Amazing Rockethead, and Baron Von Richtofen, among other obscurities. Pollard’s method was to write five duds in order to get one perfect tune, and then release all six songs. In the end, making art was like breathing for Pollard—you can’t inhale oxygen without exhaling carbon dioxide.
GBV also had mystique to burn. After 1994’s Bee Thousand made them bona-fide indie sensations, music critics talked about the band in terms that recalled the romanticism once foisted on the Band, as it transitioned from Bob Dylan’s backing group to the rustic fantasia of 1968’s Music From Big Pink. Like the Band, GBV were perceived to be “proud brothers,” to quote “A Salty Salute”—regular, blue-collar guys who drank cheap domestic beer without irony and imbued prissy indie conventions with jocular earthiness and a refreshing lack of pretension. As far as New York City-based music writers were concerned, Dayton might as well have been situated in the middle of the woods, a la the Band’s mythical headquarters in West Saugerties. (In reality, Dayton was a good-sized Midwestern city with a population of about 175,000 in 1995.) But Pollard’s image as a hick-savant wasn’t entirely media-created—he played his own role in cultivating it.
Consciously or not, Pollard integrated GBV’s “regular guy” image into the songs and iconography of Alien Lanes like never before. On the back cover there’s a photo of GBV’s ever-shifting lineup at the time of the album’s creation, seated on a couch in what appears to be a basement. Pollard is in the middle, staring upward and looking dapper in red, white, and blue Chuck Taylors. To Pollard’s right is guitarist Tobin Sprout, the George Harrison to Pollard’s Lennon/McCartney, and bassist James Greer, a Spin writer who profiled the band and then didn’t want to leave. (Greer exited the group soon after, though he later became GBV’s biographer. Greg Demos is commonly referred to as the “classic lineup” bassist, and he’s also listed in the liner notes.) To Pollard’s left is drummer Kevin Fennell, Pollard’s former brother-in-law, and lead guitarist Mitch Mitchell, a chain-smoking Keith Richards-type who first played with Pollard in a late-’70s metal band called Anacrusis.
“When you saw them live, it was just so fucking powerful; it rocked so hard, it was physically powerful,” Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy tells Greer in Guided by Voices: A Brief History. “I was expecting something way more low-key, like the records.” Alien Lanes seems like an attempt to rectify any “low-key” misconceptions, with songs like the caterwauling “Striped White Jets” and Who-like “My Son Cool” approximating the arena rock of Pollard’s youth. But while portions of Alien Lanes were recorded live, most of the tracks were assembled via Pollard’s usual recording methods.
For the propulsive power-pop number “Game of Pricks”—which sounds like a bootleg of an imaginary, amphetamine-fueled Beatles gig from 1965—Pollard met with Fennell and Sprout in Fennell’s basement. After running the through the song a couple of times, Pollard laid down guitar and drum parts with Fennell, and then overdubbed bass and vocals. Sprout’s job was to operate the Tascam recorder—he turned the bass knobs all the way down and the treble all the way up, per Pollard’s request—and make sure the inexpensive Radio Shack microphones scattered about the room were turned on. Once Sprout performed a quick mix, “Game of Pricks” was finished in about 30 minutes.
While he entertained an offer from Warner Bros. before opting to sign with Matador, Pollard wasn’t yet interested in making a slick, radio-friendly record. (That would happen later with 1999’s Do the Collapse, when it was probably too late for GBV to make any real commercial impact.) In A Brief History, Greer writes that Pollard expressed his desire for “a wall full of gold records” while meeting with Warner Bros. But Pollard was also insecure about the viability of his songs and paranoid about the record industry. He wanted a large audience, but GBV’s flash of indie-fame also made him squirm. “I couldn’t hide anymore,” Pollard told Marc Woodworth in 2006. “I was full of second guessing.”
“Echos Myron” sums up the jovial mood of Bee Thousand: “We’re finally here/And shit yeah, it’s cool!” But on Alien Lanes, the good vibes were replaced by nostalgia for lost innocence and crippling anxiety about what lies ahead. Dark warnings permeate the songs: “Don’t let anyone find out/Or expose your feelings” (“Striped White Jets”); “Try to be nice and look what it gets you” (“Closer You Are”); “Temptation creeps to you like rapists in the night” (“(I Wanna Be a) Dumbcharger”); “You could never be strong/You can only be free” (“Game of Pricks”). The most disturbing track on Alien Lanes is “Always Crush Me,” a nightmarishly mechanical piano ballad that reimagines Gilbert and Sullivan as a John Cale deep cut. “Always crush me/Picture my amazement/When it doesn’t always pain me/And I will reproduce faster,” Pollard yelps over clipped keyboard plunks, obliquely referencing GBV's newfound commercialism.
Elsewhere on Alien Lanes, Pollard goes out of his way to deface his most beautiful songs, whether it’s overdubbing an obnoxious snoring sound on the sparkling “Ex-Supermodel” or warping the tempo, like a Walkman operating on dying batteries, on “Chicken Blows.” What was Pollard afraid of? Whatever the answer, Alien Lanes sold worse than Bee Thousand and was generally considered inferior. “I met Kim Deal when we did Bee Thousand. She really loved that record, but Alien Lanes she wasn’t crazy about,” Pollard told Mojo in 2002. “She thought it was too much, too bombastic, but that’s what I like about it.”
“Pop for perverts,” was Robert Christgau’s assessment of GBV in 1994. The legendary Village Voice music critic dismissed them as “pomo smarty-pants too prudish and/or alienated to take their pleasure without a touch of pain to remind them that they're still alive.” I humbly submit that Christgau just didn’t understand the Midwest.
Pollard’s genius was creating a band framework in which he could become anything he wanted—specifically, a hotshot 22-year-old British rock star from 1969—while remaining exactly who he was outside of it. Alien Lanes is the sound of a man reconciling his dreams (which had come true, more or less) with his reality (which had splintered, though he tried for a while to maintain his band and his marriage). The omnipresent hiss on Alien Lanes was necessary because it was Pollard’s way of signaling to the people back home that he wasn’t getting too full of himself, a reflexive impulse bred into every middle-American.
The trebly bombast and pronounced discursiveness of Alien Lanes was read as typical indie caginess in 1995, but 21 years later, it’s this tension between Pollard’s big-time rock classicism and self-defeating sonic fuckery that’s aged best. In retrospect, Alien Lanes can be viewed as a nexus point in rock history, representing the end of an era when the record business believed that a band like this could make a million dollars, and the beginning of our current era in which rock is essentially folk music, where it’s kept alive not out of financial imperative, but because rock can act as a safe space for people who have consciously decided to ignore financial imperatives and exist outside of mainstream culture.
In my view, Alien Lanes is the greatest post-modern classic rock album ever made, because it exemplifies the songwriting and posture of classic rock while also implicitly commenting on rock’s cultural decline. This was already underway in 1995, the year after Kurt Cobain died, when the top-selling rock artists were Hootie and the Blowfish, Alanis Morissette, and Live. It was this world that Guided by Voices was tasked with taking over, though when you listen to Alien Lanes, all you hear is Pollard’s ambivalence.
In “Motor Away,” which lives at the heart of Alien Lanes both sequentially (it’s the 15th track) and spiritually, Pollard sings about the liberation of blasting down an open road in order to “belittle every little voice” in your crummy town that ever doubted your ability to escape, while also acknowledging that those people might be right. “You can’t lie to yourself that it’s the chance of a lifetime,” he sings, which is all the more remarkable for the surging, life-affirming music that surrounds it.
The point of “Motor Away” isn’t to give up hope because the destination might not end up being what you envision, but rather to enjoy the thrill ride that takes you there. On Alien Lanes, the journey is what matters—the act of creation, the party in the garage, that magical sensation of being carried to the lake, even if the lake turns out to be dry. In the meantime, do not fret. The bus will get you there yet. The club is open. | 2016-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 2, 2016 | 9.2 | 4886f25d-6c19-4471-b5ee-673c6fb0b3a1 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Tame Impala, and Bad Bunny guest on the latest album from Damon Albarn’s cartoon band, but despite the marquee names, the record feels frustratingly like Gorillaz as usual. | Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Tame Impala, and Bad Bunny guest on the latest album from Damon Albarn’s cartoon band, but despite the marquee names, the record feels frustratingly like Gorillaz as usual. | Gorillaz: Cracker Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gorillaz-cracker-island/ | Cracker Island | As a band supposedly made up of cartoon characters, Gorillaz could theoretically do anything: record in outer space; make hip-hop beats out of fish teeth; revive the lambada—an unlimited horizon. Which makes it slightly frustrating that on Cracker Island, their eighth studio album, Damon Albarn and co. do little that’s out of the ordinary. This is ostensibly the group’s Los Angeles album, inspired by a relocation to Silver Lake, and it does have a handful of very Californian guests in the form of Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, and the Pharcyde’s Bootie Brown. Overwhelmingly, though, Cracker Island leans on classic Gorillaz tropes: a handful of attention-grabbing features, a touch of hip-hop, a splash of dub, and great big helpings of Damon Albarn’s big-hearted melodies to bathe the record in misty sunshine. Classic, at least, is one way of putting it. Routine would be another.
There are bright spots: “Silent Running” and “Skinny Ape” are among the best songs Albarn has written in the last decade, sporting those little-pop-star-lost vocal performances he does better than anyone else. The melody of the verses on “Skinny Ape”, in particular, is an all-timer, delectable and dejected in one gorgeously vulnerable package.
And the guest list is elite, especially considering that Gorillaz have persuaded names like Nicks, Tame Impala, and even Bad Bunny to play second fiddle to a bunch of slightly wearing animated characters. Nicks’ enchanting rasp sandpapers some of the gloss off “Oil,” adding a cathartic depth that the song doesn’t quite deserve, while Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker brings a snoozy charm to “New Gold.” Even better is the performance of Adeleye Omotayo, a member of Gorillaz’ Humanz Choir, on “Silent Running,” where his perfectly measured voice is a celestial shadow to Albarn’s urban melancholia, a little like Peven Everett’s show-stealing turn on Gorillaz’ 2017 single “Strobelite.”
On the whole, though, the production and songwriting are more “solid!” than “exhilarating!” Gorillaz frequently default to mid-paced grooves, bright keyboard lines, guitar, and bass. (This is a band, lest we forget, who invited both the National Orchestra for Arabic Music and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble onto their third album, Plastic Beach.) The drums sound simultaneously big yet flat, as if subtlety had been sacrificed for impact. The glossy disco of “Tarantula” is weightlessly low-key, entirely pleasant, and totally forgettable. Meanwhile, the album’s lyrical conceits—there’s something about two competing cults who live next door to each other, combined with grandad-ish complaints about social media overkill—feel incredibly convoluted, like a band in desperate need of a narrative to cling to.
The problem is that Gorillaz have become bogged down in a world of their own invention. Albarn and his animated pals helped fashion the genre-hopping world of contemporary pop across more than two decades of diverse musical guests and adventurous fusions. But Cracker Island’s slightly lackluster impact feels like a sign of diminishing returns. Gorillaz have already worked with Beck and Bootie Brown, while new invitees Thundercat and Tame Impala sound so much like the kind of people who would guest on a Gorillaz album that their appearances fail to shock, much less thrill. It doesn’t help that Thundercat’s signature bass sound is buried in the mix, where bolder production would have highlighted its sticky textures.
The exception to this lassitude is “Tormenta,” featuring Bad Bunny. This isn’t the first time Gorillaz have worked with a Latin artist—Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer guested on 2001’s “Latin Simone (¿Qué Pasa Contigo?)”—but Benito is the only collaborator on Cracker Island that you can’t imagine popping up on any other Gorillaz album from the last 10 years; his appearance is the only nod, in fact, to the dramatic changes in pop music that have accompanied the rise of Latin (and more generally, non-Anglophone) artists. “Tormenta” is the most interesting song on Cracker Island: a kind of ambient reggaeton full of jazzy chord sequences, water-bed bass, and an exquisitely commanding vocal performance from Bad Bunny, who sounds utterly languid while hitting all the notes and beats, like a 21st-century Frank Sinatra seducing a late-night microphone.
Dependability is a good thing in friends, trains, and accountants. In mischief-making pop bands, not so much. With “Tormenta,” Gorillaz show that they aren’t quite ready for the steady waters of the nostalgia circuit. But that song’s eccentric angles and willingness to take risks show up the slightly humdrum nature of much of Cracker Island, an album that walks a very thin line between playing to the band’s strengths and relying too heavily on old tricks. | 2023-02-23T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-23T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Warner | February 23, 2023 | 6.5 | 489476fe-c8d7-4ef1-9394-8954c5be1905 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Despite its intriguing concept, Lil Yachty’s voyage into soul and psych-rock runs aground. | Despite its intriguing concept, Lil Yachty’s voyage into soul and psych-rock runs aground. | Lil Yachty: Let’s Start Here. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-yachty-lets-start-here/ | Let’s Start Here. | At a surprise listening event last Thursday, Lil Yachty introduced his new album Let’s Start Here., an unexpected pivot, with a few words every rap fan will find familiar: “I really wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, not just some SoundCloud rapper or some mumble rapper.” This is the speech rappers are obligated to give when it comes time for the drum loop to take a backseat to guitars, for the rapping to be muted in favor of singing, for the ad-libs to give it up to the background singers, and for a brigade of white producers with plaque-lined walls to be invited into the fold.
Rap fans, including myself, don’t want to hear it, but the reality is that in large slices of music and pop culture, “rapper” is thrown around with salt on the tongue. Pop culture is powerfully influenced by hip-hop, that is until the rappers get too close and the hands reach for the pearls. If anything, the 25-year-old Yachty—as one of the few rappers of his generation able to walk through the front door anyway because of his typically Gushers-sweet sound and innocently youthful beaded braid look—might be the wrong messenger.
What’s sour about Yachty’s statement isn’t the idea that he wants to be taken seriously as an artist, but the question of who he wants to be taken seriously by. When Yachty first got on, a certain corner of rap fandom saw his marble-mouthed enunciation and unwillingness to drool over hip-hop history as symbols of what was ruining the genre they claimed to love. A few artists more beholden to tradition did some finger-wagging—Pete Rock and Joe Budden, Vic Mensa and Anderson .Paak, subliminals from Kendrick and Cole—but that was years ago, and by now they’ve found new targets. These days, Yachty is respected just fine within rap. If he weren’t, his year-long rebirth in the Michigan rap scene, which resulted in the good-not-great Michigan Boy Boat, would have been viewed solely as a cynical attempt to boost his rap bona fides. His immersion there felt earnest, though, like he was proving to himself that he could hang.
The respect Yachty is chasing on Let’s Start Here. feels institutional. It’s for the voting committees, for the suits; for Questlove to shout him out as the future, for Ebro to invite him back on his radio show and say My bad, you’re dope. Never mind if you thought Lil Yachty was dope to start with: The goal of this album is to go beyond all expectations and rules for rappers.
And the big pivot is… a highly manicured and expensive blend of Tame Impala-style psych-rock, A24 synth-pop, loungey R&B, and Silk Sonic-esque funk, a sound so immediately appealing that it doesn’t feel experimental at all. In 2020, Yachty’s generational peers, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti, released Eternal Atake and Whole Lotta Red: albums that pushed forward pre-existing sounds to the point of inimitability, showcases not only for the artists’ raps but their conceptual visions. Yachty, meanwhile, is working within a template that is already well-defined and commercially successful. This is what the monologue was for?
To Yachty’s credit, he gives the standout performance on a crowded project. It’s the same gift for versatility that’s made him a singular rapper: He bounces from style to style without losing his individuality. A less interesting artist would have been made anonymous by the polished sounds of producers like Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait, and pop songwriters Justin and Jeremiah Raisen, or had their voice warped by writing credits that bring together Mac DeMarco, Alex G, and, uh, Tory Lanez. The production always leans more indulgent than thrilling, more scattershot than conceptual. But Yachty himself hangs onto the ideas he’s been struggling to articulate since 2017’s Teenage Emotions: loneliness, heartbreak, overcoming failure. He’s still not a strong enough writer to nail them, and none of the professionals collecting checks in the credits seem to have been much help, but his immensely expressive vocals make up for it.
Actually, for all the commotion about the genre jump on this project, the real draw is the ways in which Yachty uses Auto-Tune and other vocal effects as tools to unlock not just sounds but emotion. Building off the vocal wrinkle introduced on last year’s viral moment “Poland,” where he sounds like he’s cooing through a ceiling fan, the highlights on Let’s Start Here. stretch his voice in unusual directions. The vocals in the background of his wistful hook on “pRETTy” sound like he’s trying to harmonize while getting a deep-tissue massage. His shrill melodies on “paint THE sky” could have grooved with the Weeknd on Dawn FM. The opening warble of “running out of time” is like Yachty’s imitation of Bruno Mars imitating James Brown, and the way he can’t quite restrain his screechiness enough to flawlessly copy it is what makes it original.
Too bad everything surrounding his unpredictable and adventurous vocal detours is so conventional. Instrumental moments that feel like they’re supposed to be weird and psychedelic—the hard rock guitar riff that coasts to a blissful finale in “the BLACK seminole.” or the slow build of “REACH THE SUNSHINE.”—come off like half-measures. Diana Gordon’s falsetto-led funk on “drive ME crazy!” reaches for a superhuman register, but other guest appearances, like Fousheé’s clipped lilts on “pRETTy” and Daniel Caesar’s faded howls on the outro, are forgettable. None of it is ever bad: The synths on “sAy sOMETHINg” shimmer; the drawn-out intro and outro of “WE SAW THE SUN!” set the lost, trippy mood they’re supposed to; “THE zone~” blooms over and over again, underlined by Justine Skye’s sweet and unhurried melodies. It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe. Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with Currents and Blonde and IGOR. It might just work, too.
Instead, consider this album a reminder of how limitless rap can be. We’re so eager for the future of the genre to arrive that current sounds are viewed as restricting and lesser. But rap is everything you can imagine. I’m thinking about “Poland,” a song stranger than anything here: straight-up 1:23 of chaos, as inventive as it is fun. I took that track as seriously as anything I heard last year because it latches onto a simple rap melody and pushes it to the brink. Soon enough, another rapper will hear that and take it in another direction, then another will do the same. That’s how you really get to the future. | 2023-02-01T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-01T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown | February 1, 2023 | 6 | 48a17339-847d-4b77-a3b1-98563523d846 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
After the two-dimensional art-school-kid clichés of Man on the Moon, kiD CuDi partially makes good on his promise to loosen up his music. | After the two-dimensional art-school-kid clichés of Man on the Moon, kiD CuDi partially makes good on his promise to loosen up his music. | Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14875-man-on-the-moon-ii-the-legend-of-mr-rager/ | Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager | Kanye West has repeatedly called kiD CuDi his "favorite living artist" ("and not just cause he's on my label," he assured us on Twitter). CyHi Da Prince excepted, West's taste in musicians is usually sound, and CuDi is talented. His taste for forlorn melody, chilly electronics, and empty space basically brought 808s and Heartbreak into existence, and his fingerprints are visible all over Kanye's upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. As a member of Kanye's revolving door of creative inspiration, he has proven himself to be indispensable.
As a solo artist, well... his second full-length, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager manages to render the jury still out. His 2009 debut, Man on the Moon: The End of the Day, was a modest commercial success but a mortifying creative face-plant, a compilation of the most two-dimensional art-school-kid clichés (I'm sad, I'm stoned, I'm deep) imaginable, over unrelievedly monotonous electro tracks. It was hard to find a more self-satisfied and less likable pop record that year. Man on the Moon II, the sequel, is still a bumpy listen, but it tweaks his formula enough to at least hint at the massive promise Kanye sees in him.
First, and most crucially, he perks up the tempo a little. After Man on the Moon came out, CuDi told MTV.com that his next album was "gonna be the complete opposite of what Man on the Moon was. Man on the Moon was so serious. This one is gonna be more playful and fun. It's about having a good time." It's not, really, unless he's referring to all his dead-eyed bragging about how fucked-up he's capable of getting. But the music is brighter: "Erase Me" is a chugging guitar-rock song with a big, slick chorus that could have sat comfortably on late-90s alt-rock radio. (It also features a Kanye verse that ends with a ridiculous "diarrhea" pun.) On "REVOFEV", he dispenses aw-shucks big-brother wisdom like, "Things might get tough/ No need to stress," over a tumble of piano chords and acid-rock guitar.
Even his trademark sadface stuff, though, is more fully realized. "Don't Play This Song" starts with a somber, harmonically rich string quartet and adds a throbbing pulse and a wailing Mary J. Blige; the track's elements shift slowly and subtly, giving the groove a fluid and hypnotic feel that Cudi echoes with his stuttering "ra-ra-ra-ra-right" delivery. CuDi's lyrics, though, still carry a wince-inducing "Bill and Ted" ring to them. The chorus of "Don't Play This Song" goes: "Wanna know what I sound like when I'm not on drugs?/ Please, please don't play this song," which I would feel comfortable interpreting as pure comedy if he didn't say, "I love the dark, maybe we can make it darker/ Give me a marker," in dead earnest on "Maniac", a song that gathers a St. Vincent sample, CuDi, and emo-rapper Cage in the same room for probably the first and last time.
Thematically, Mr. Rager is most compelling when it leaves behind moping alone in your room for moping while you're out on the town-- being a coked-up asshole. CuDi's blank, artless affect makes a more interesting vehicle for these semi-poisonous sentiments: "Hide the pain with some pussy and mimosas," he mutters on "Wild'N Cuz I'm Young". The only true biographical detail we get on Mr. Rager hints at his troubled family-- "I wish I could tell my brother/ Something for motivation to get him out that gutter/ He's leaving behind a family and a mother" ("Mojo So Dope")-- and also provides a glimpse of what CuDi's music might sound like if he provided actual emotional content instead of just gesturing repeatedly towards it. | 2010-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music | November 18, 2010 | 6.7 | 48a3b521-1a4e-4c8b-acef-0b4f59571b8a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Shielding vulnerability beneath layers of cranked-up bass, the Brooklyn rapper and singer’s new tape is music for baddies who keep in touch with their feelings. | Shielding vulnerability beneath layers of cranked-up bass, the Brooklyn rapper and singer’s new tape is music for baddies who keep in touch with their feelings. | Clip: APPETIZER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clip-appetizer/ | APPETIZER | Clip is a certified fashion scenester who’s shaking ass in the deli with Ice Spice and toured with Rico Nasty. Her own music exists in a haze of cloud rap and dubbed-out digicore: hyper-online emo alt-pop for hot girls. On Instagram in April, Clip wrote: “Although my Instagram can give off that I am living the life, which I’m very grateful for the life I live, I am constantly battling with my mind and reality.” Her new mixtape APPETIZER, which collects tracks that didn’t fit last year’s PERCEPTION EP, represents that struggle. Sparkling and woozy, it shields Clip’s vulnerability beneath layers of cranked-up bass. It’s like making your way through a smoky house party where music rattles the walls, only to find your best friend crying alone on the stairs.
On APPETIZER, Clip’s narrators are caught between outward sex appeal and inner self-loathing. She begins full of energy on opening track “yeahh(L’s),” raspy-voiced over a rush of video game synths reminiscent of Rico’s “Poppin.” Atop a menacing trap beat on “maybe I Am crazy,” Clip flexes, “Got your main bitch, she in the passenger seat throwin’ ass,” then confides, “They can’t relate to our pain/You either play your cards right or get played by the game.” If “yeahh(L’s)” was Clip in denial, “riot” captures her anger, crying out “fuck my fake friends, I’m slowly dying” over a shiny, throbbing beat by producer SACHY that would’ve fit in on Lil Uzi’s Eternal Atake. SACHY produced two of Clip’s biggest songs to date (“Sad B!tch,” “FALL BACK”), and they’ve clearly hit their stride together.
The most tender moment comes on “sandy toes,” where Clip sings about feeling untouchable as she runs across the beach, oblivious to everything except the peaceful, grounding feeling of sand beneath her feet. Though the heavy bass feels like it’s swimming in Jell-O, Clip’s syrupy voice cuts right through. Her songs have always felt deeply intimate, thanks in large part to the way her voice swirls in and out, layered with effects to match the vibe of each track. She has a talent for viscerally emotional songwriting, and in this way the tape’s brevity works to her advantage. APPETIZER isn’t reinventing the realm of gritty, foggy sing-rap, but the moments that make it special are defining for Clip at this point in her career. Her perspective and style are too interesting to get lost in the mix. | 2023-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 17, 2023 | 7 | 48a4f57e-b28e-49cf-885a-c37226647f70 | Allison Harris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-harris/ | |
On this indie pop EP, the Cape Town singer and guitarist generates warmth by pairing innocent inquiry with bright instrumentation. | On this indie pop EP, the Cape Town singer and guitarist generates warmth by pairing innocent inquiry with bright instrumentation. | M Field: M Field EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-field-m-field-ep/ | M Field EP | The rollout for Matthew Field’s debut EP has been, above all, verdant. Since March, the Cape Town native—and lead singer/guitarist for the South African hit pop rock trio Beatenberg—has been issuing singles, each accompanied with a winsome collage of greens and blues. Each of the five tracks has also received a video treatment featuring Field in the outdoors, engaging in activities both mundane (taking a dachshund on an off-leash forest walk in “Fiona”) and quixotic (pushing an iceblock towards the beach as it melts in “Gargoyle”). Throughout these quirky yet determined tasks, he remains as stone-faced as a silent-era comedian. The warmth generated on M Field EP comes as much from the artist’s resolute pondering as it does from the bright instrumentation that surrounds him.
Propelled by Field’s soukous-inflected playing, the record flutters and keens. If you squint you can make out Vampire Weekend—largely due to the shared guitar lineage—but Field doesn’t share the Americans’ interest in footrace tempos and snare raps. His arrangements fizz but never bubble over; they reflect a mind running hot, turning over thoughts while seeking shade. “And I wait for your call/Then let myself fall/From the height of the day,” he sighs on “Ten Is a Number,” over an intricate mix of timekeeping handclaps, piano roll and sparkling guitar. The hazy, Mellotron-led “Leafy Outlook” (also the name of his label) paddles on a twangy ostinato and drum machine patter. The narrator despairs of being stuck at the same address, arguing with the same people. The combined effect is like overhearing someone’s glum monologue while tubing a river; you keep waiting for the scenery to shake them out of it, and surprisingly, it actually does. Overlapping voices babbling about the recording process suddenly appear, capsizing the boat and breaking the narrator’s reverie. However, tranquility returns as the narrator resurfaces, singing vocal harmonies reminiscent of the Beach Boys.
It’s playful, perhaps a bit deadpan—like the EP as a whole—and thus a worthy project for London-based producer Nathan Jenkins. Over the last year, Jenkins has helmed a number of throwback art-pop efforts, both under his Bullion alias and for other artists like Orlando Weeks, Joviale, and Hayden Thorpe. On “Gargoyle,” Bullion and Field cushion a failing relationship (“If you’re a Gorgon/I’m a gargoyle,” Field sings, not unkindly) for impact: dicing a piano figure across the stereo field, summoning a bass cloudmass only to disperse it with a funky synthline, and providing another bridge potentially focused on the recording process: “Pulling on a string/To make it sing/You got to strain/To make it work.”
On the EP’s bookends, Field counsels his friends on how to make their relationships work. In “Andrew,” he urges one friend to go it alone; in “Fiona,” he advises another to stay attached. Each song is nimble and bright, and both pair emotional certainty with a hazy sense of place. The mind is running hot again, and visuals spin out: subway tiles, a lie by the lagoon, two shadows on a rugby field. If you take these songs as conversations to decode, his elliptical approach may frustrate. As a peek into another person’s mental process, it’s charming.
And it does seem telling that the song about going solo is Field at his loosest. On “Andrew”—the arrangement for which has the melodic dexterity of Peter Gabriel—Field chases the refrains by scatting alongside his genial guitar line. “The horn of plenty,” he counsels Andrew, “you’ve got to blow it now.” Beatenberg released their last LP in 2018; in a July interview, Field said that the band was still active, but noted that each member was currently in a different city. In time, we’ll know if this EP represents the first break for greener pastures, or simply a head-clearing stroll. Regardless, this brief excursion suggests that Field has brilliant corners yet to turn.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Leafy Outlook | September 8, 2021 | 7.3 | 48a7946c-1499-48b1-8810-639cd23a4823 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
The Scottish group’s action flick soundtrack lacks their usual maximalist peaks but offers impressionistic sketches. | The Scottish group’s action flick soundtrack lacks their usual maximalist peaks but offers impressionistic sketches. | Mogwai: KIN: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mogwai-kin-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | KIN: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | KIN is a movie about a futuristic bazooka that can blast walls out of buildings and instantly turn people into dust. The music of Mogwai has been known to do the same. But as the Scottish group have amassed enough soundtrack credits to qualify as the four-headed Hans Zimmer of indie rock, Mogwai’s film scores have typically avoided their more anarchic tendencies in favor of their more ambient, meditative qualities. And while KIN marks the band’s first dalliance with a mainstream Hollywood action flick after a handful of documentary and art-house efforts, their soundtrack ultimately emphasizes a subtlety not so readily gleaned from the Comic-Con-courting poster campaign.
For all its explosions, shootouts, and motorcycle-riding aliens, KIN is essentially a gritty domestic drama about a poor Detroit family that’s still reeling from the death of its matriarch when eldest son Jimmy (Jack Reynor) returns home after several years in prison and tries to mend his estranged relationship with his grizzled construction-worker dad (Dennis Quaid). Caught in the middle is Eli (Myles Truitt), the 14-year-old adopted son who discovers the aforementioned killer gizmo while out scavenging for scrap metal, and sets the film’s road-trip narrative in motion.
KIN was made by the same production team that gave us “Stranger Things,” and at the outset, the film shares certain characteristics with the retro-’80s Netflix series—not the least of which is a young, curious protagonist who spends his free time tooling around town on a BMX. But it’s not until around 20 minutes into the film that you realize KIN is actually set in the present day—if Eli’s Detroit stomping grounds have a distinctly ’80s feel, it’s only because economic stagnation has frozen his neighbourhood in time. Likewise, Mogwai’s score leans heavily on the sinister electro-prog synths that have been a regular presence of their sound since 2011’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, but have since become an instant ’80s-flick shorthand thanks to S U R V I V E’s “Stranger Things” theme. However, if KIN’s sudden shifts between conversational, coming-of-age tale and blow-‘em-up summer blockbuster can feel as jarring as the infamous quiet/loud shocks the defined Mogwai’s signature records, the band’s soundtrack ultimately plays more of a mediating role. Subtly fusing synthetic elements with naturalistic touches, their score is the unifying element in a film that plays like The Terminator as made by the Duplass Brothers.
So while a piece like “Scrap” sets an ominous scene with its reverberating, tremolo-like effects, soon a melancholic piano melody and brushed-snare drum beat thaw away the icy atmosphere. “Flee” follows the same playbook to loftier heights, as its circular piano pattern ascends a spiral-staircase atop a juddering foundation of glitchy beats. Throughout the soundtrack, the piano comes to represent the human heart at the core of KIN’s outlandish narrative—tellingly, “Eli’s Theme” lionizes the film’s protagonist with an isolated, ivory-tickled refrain that, like the character, exudes a nervous tension while standing resolute in the face of unforgiving conditions.
But however well they reflect KIN’s mood and themes, these pieces don’t quite cohere into a proper stand-alone album. Independent of the film, they feel more like a series of impressionistic sketches that tease at the eruptions of Mogwai’s definitive work, yet stop short of hitting their maximalist potential. Even the more fleshed-out songs—like the stalking, organ-guided movement “Guns Down” and the dramatic, ethereal-to-orchestral leaps of the title track—ultimately err on the side of restraint, respectively using their thunderclouds of distortion and needling oscillations more as subliminal textures than focal points.
If Mogwai don’t hit their usual peaks here, they at least lead us to some pleasurable plateaus: “Donuts” begins with the sort of dreamy synth swells that typically trigger an EDM banger, but instead embark on a splendorous, slow-motion space-rock cruise. And following the lead of recent breakthroughs like “Teenage Exorcists” and “Party in the Dark,” Mogwai use the film’s closing credit theme, “We’re Not Done,” to further indulge their latent desire to be a shoegazing pop band. As the soundtrack’s lone vocally driven, conventionally-structured rock track, “We’re Not Done” is a glaring anomaly, yet arguably, it’s the track that’s truest to the film’s spirit. After all, KIN may not actually be an ’80s film, but it’s clearly inspired by the era’s multiplex popcorn thrillers and adapts their tropes to a contemporary context. Likewise, with “We’re Not Done,” Mogwai vividly realize a goth-club fantasy of My Bloody Valentine covering the Cure that uncannily blurs the line between past and present. | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. / Rock Action | September 5, 2018 | 6.9 | 48a7d127-f937-4339-ab4d-36de5cf80a06 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Anything Could Happen is the first album in 24 years from Bash & Pop, Tommy Stinson’s short-lived post-Replacements outfit. It’s less an exercise in reliving the past than coming to terms with it. | Anything Could Happen is the first album in 24 years from Bash & Pop, Tommy Stinson’s short-lived post-Replacements outfit. It’s less an exercise in reliving the past than coming to terms with it. | Bash & Pop: Anything Could Happen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22766-anything-could-happen/ | Anything Could Happen | Assuming you have an active Facebook account and care enough about music to be visiting this site, then you’ve probably spent much of the past week wading through an endless stream of posts from friends listing off the Top 10 records that made the biggest impression on them as a teenager. But beyond the “Spin Doctors LOL!” novelty of the exercise, the lists provided a glimpse into a pre-internet age when dramatic philosophical divisions were erected even among bands that were essentially operating in the same realm. For instance, on those Facebook lists, it was rare to see Guns N’ Roses listed alongside the Replacements—even though both were raw, raunchy ’80s-era rock’n’roll bands raised on a steady diet of the Stones, KISS, and New York Dolls. But what they symbolized—deviant decadence in GNR’s case, sad-sack disillusionment in the Mats’—made them ideological opposites to teens trying to figure out their place in the world.
The career of Tommy Stinson, however, is a case study in how those once-rigid distinctions have essentially become meaningless. Once the Replacements’ resident punk wunderkind, Stinson would go on to join Axl Rose’s recombinant version of GNR in 1998. The move was emblematic of how rock’s shift from pop-cultural force to niche concern had effectively erased the aesthetic divisions within it. After the Replacements got back together in 2013, while he was still in GNR, Stinson enjoyed the rare distinction of playing in one of the most respected rock bands in the world and one of the most popular. But now that one group has ended its reunion and the other doesn’t require his services for theirs, Stinson is getting another old band back together—if only in name.
Anything Could Happen is the first album in 24 years credited to Bash & Pop, Stinson’s short-lived post-Replacements outfit. But Stinson isn’t resurrecting Bash & Pop’s original line-up so much as reconnecting with their plug’n’play philosophy, by recording live off the floor with a proper band (featuring GNR drummer Frank Ferrer and North Mississippi All-Stars guitarist Luther Dickinson) after a couple of mostly self-recorded, studio-tinkered solo records. According to Stinson, several of its songs were earmarked for a Mats record that never got off the ground. But in lieu of new Replacements, Anything Could Happen is a decent replacement.
Stinson was in Guns N’ Roses for nearly twice as long as he was in the Replacements, but his songwriting style will forever draw from the latter band’s brew of shot glass-slamming rock’n’roll and the sort of rootsy twang that launched a thousand alt-country groups. The introductory rave-up “Not This Time” kicks open the saloon doors as vigorously as “I.O.U.” did back on Pleased to Meet Me, while the title track’s cathartic, shout-it-out hooks are evocative enough of a certain Tim touchstone that you could rename it “Bastards of Old.” And in the raw acoustic confessional “Can’t Be Bothered,” he updates the early-20s angst of “Unsatisfied” for middle-aged malaise: “The worst things seem to happen in threes/We used to the flip the bird until the bird turned to a dream/Now we can’t be bothered with any of that.”
But more than any specific Replacements record, the tone and temperament of Anything Could Happen most closely recalls Paul Westerberg’s underrated 1993 solo debut 14 Songs, which furthered his maturation as a songwriter while reapplying some of the grittiness that the latter Replacements records smoothed over. (“On the Rocks,” in particular, feels like an unsubtle echo of that album’s “World Class Fad.”) As a vocalist, Stinson is like a Westerberg who decides to call it a night after just three beers—he may not plumb the same dark-hour-of-the-soul depths as his former bandmate, but he can effectively render a relationship’s wreckage with a single brushstroke (from “Anybody Else”: “You’re trying to make a painting a Picasso/Bought a box of sidewalk chalk”) or self-deprecating sentiment (“I’m the wish that won’t come true,” he admits on the honky-tonk heartbreaker “Breathing Room”).
Anything Could Happen is an album of upbeat songs about feeling down and lucid observations about getting fucked up, split evenly between ragged mid-tempo struts and countrified, come-down laments. And for Replacements fans of a certain vintage, it offers a hit of nostalgia more potent than you’ll get from scrolling your high-school buddy’s Facebook list. But for Stinson, Anything Could Happen is less an exercise in reliving the past than coming to terms with it, having survived being in the world’s most intoxicated band, the untimely death of his brother, divorce, and working for two of rock’s most notorious control freaks. That experience has taught him that, even in life’s darkest moments, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s just a cigarette ember. On “Anytime Soon,” Stinson lays down a smoky, miserable-bastard blues to remind himself to quit being such a miserable bastard: “Feeling sad and lonely, yes I know I’m not the only,” he sings, before adding, “you won’t see me dangling from these rafters anytime soon.” Because as Stinson’s unlikely journey from drunk-punk underdog to arena-rock ringer has shown, anything can indeed happen. | 2017-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | January 19, 2017 | 7 | 48a82814-08fe-4702-a8b9-aa82b14e1348 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Johnny Jewel's official soundtrack to the Ryan Gosling-directed film Lost River blends clipped, opiated pop from Chromatics, Desire, and Glass Candy, with contributions by the film's actors and ambient works by Jewel. | Johnny Jewel's official soundtrack to the Ryan Gosling-directed film Lost River blends clipped, opiated pop from Chromatics, Desire, and Glass Candy, with contributions by the film's actors and ambient works by Jewel. | Johnny Jewel: Lost River OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20513-lost-river-ost/ | Lost River OST | Lost River, a film directed by actor Ryan Gosling, was ritually savaged at its Cannes Film Fesival premiere and barely recovered on its official release. Reviews were almost comically awful. It could generously be described as a striking visual work that never really gels: Gosling’s time working with Nicolas Winding Refn on Drive clearly had a profound impact, as Christina Hendricks (who had a small role in Refn’s film) stars and the soundtrack is helmed by Italians Do It Better label boss Johnny Jewel, whose contributions to the Drive soundtrack helped establish the film's neon atmosphere. Cliff Martinez technically handed the composer duties for Drive, but on the Lost River OST, Jewel gets his first real score, writing a soundtrack that runs excess of 90 minutes.
Jewel doesn’t really deal in concision, at least not in album form. His Themes For an Imaginary Film, released under the Symmetry guise, stretched to around two hours, while Chromatics’ acclaimed Kill for Love clocks in at a similar length to this score, indulging in multifarious impulses along the way. Jewel's ease with writing frosted, clipped pop songs (Chromatics' "Yes", from this album, is a great example) provides a fascinating contrast to the way he approaches bigger works. Jewel might be trying to make his own Tusk or Screamadelica, but he hasn't managed a consistent project yet, leaving behind a handful of works that sometimes fall on the wrong side of indulgence. He’s enviably talented, but with each passing album his lack of editing feels more like an Achilles heel.
The material on Lost River falls into three categories. There’s Jewel's familiar, heavily opiated glassy pop, represented by Chromatics, Desire, and Glass Candy; a stretch of drifty, incidental film music; and moments culled directly from the cast of the film, including vocal turns by actors Red Kateb, Ben Mendelsohn (channeling his inner Nick Cave), and former Possum Dixon frontman Rob Zabrecky. Jewel sequences these contrasting bits to make it sound like the music is emerging from a dream. Even the '50s R&B of Billy Ward & his Dominoes, included here in a brief interlude, sounds like it’s floating in from an abstract plane. Jewel finds unlikely common ground between his contemporary work, music for the ages, and drone-y instrumental pieces.
Again, though, Jewel's include-everything impulse works against him. Chromatics’ "Yes" is the standout, alternating between haunting and beautiful passages, perfectly strung across a tightrope of bliss and unease. But there’s no need for three versions of it to be included on the soundtrack, and the three versions of "Deep Purple" and two versions of "Tell Me" feel equally excessive. It’s a shame, because Saoirse Ronan's powerful version of "Tell Me" may have had more weight if it was just a standalone. Chromatics’ version of "Blue Moon", originally featured on the Running from the Sun outtakes compilation, works precisely because it emerges from the gloom, strikes a chord, and never returns.
There’s a trove of solo Jewel compositions outside of the song-oriented tracks here, most of them leaning toward ambient and occasionally bringing to mind Tangerine Dream’s incidental film music. Shorn of context, there isn’t much to hold onto—a tough gap to bridge whenever film music is removed from its visual stimulus. The depth and breadth of this album makes it feel archival, as if someone excavated Jewel’s vaults for material long after the film was released—possibly an unfortunate downside of the exhaustive boom soundtracks have been undergoing in the past decade or so, where every last scrap of B-movie music warrants a $45 luxury vinyl release. This is a cut above the rest, but listening to it occasionally feels like sifting through a yard sale looking for gold. | 2015-04-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Italians Do It Better | April 21, 2015 | 7 | 48aa0554-a8f8-471b-b390-e5649037f26f | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The Canadian rapper and singer’s sense of playfulness is the highlight of a second album that attempts to reach beyond her raunchy sex-rap comfort zone. | The Canadian rapper and singer’s sense of playfulness is the highlight of a second album that attempts to reach beyond her raunchy sex-rap comfort zone. | Tommy Genesis : Goldilocks X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tommy-genesis-goldilocks-x/ | Goldilocks X | You don’t have to dance to break a sweat listening to Tommy Genesis’ humid synths, murmured asides, and raps about spitting and licking and swallowing. The Canadian singer and model calls it “fetish rap,” a term she coined and an apt descriptor for both the content of her lyrics and her musical niche. Like Shygirl, CupcakKe, and Nicki Minaj, Genesis writes playfully and specifically about sex. Her best tracks are slinky and throbbing, instantly recognizable club anthems that keep popping up on TV—hissing over brassy beats in the Euphoria pilot, purring in the background of the candy-colored media drama The Bold Type. On her second album, goldilocks x, she sets out to soundtrack a spectrum of emotions wider than her trademark brashness. “I want people to relate to it, turn up to it, cry to it, fuck to it and just fucking live to it,” she told DIY.
There are still plenty of classic Tommy bangers to assert and re-introduce herself. “You don’t really know me, I’mma keep it that way,” she whispers on “Manifesto,” over producer Charlie Heat’s walloping club-ready bass. But that deliberate distance undermines the more sentimental stretch in the album’s final three tracks, which center on romance and its aftermath. Genesis experiments with almost maudlin hyperpop on “fuck u u know u can’t make me cry,” wailing the title through layers of distortion and glitchy screams. It’s a breakup track with too many stale lines for such a gifted songwriter: salt in wounds, love that sets you on fire, a tip to Frank Ocean’s “white lies and white lines.” On album closer “hurricane,” among the slowest tracks in her catalog, she interrogates a lover about an ex while a guitar trickles through the background. We don’t learn much about the people who’ve put Genesis in this pained state, or access a more fleshed-out version of the singer herself. There’s a thrill in watching a talented artist reach beyond her comfort zone, but the result is disappointingly flat.
When she’s in her element, though, she’s singular and sparkling, screeching, “You not famous, you a fetus!” at a cheating ex and singing about chewing on a lover’s earlobe. She writes about sex through a surrealist lens, body horror turned horny. “I’m taking off my skin, ooh ooh ooh,” she deadpans on the high-velocity “a woman is a god.” She narrates foreplay on “wild child,” licking toes and pulling hair, but the physicality turns sinister: “Now you sucking out my soul.”
There are marketing terms for what Genesis does—empowering, sex-positive, unabashadly queer—but those don’t capture the wink in her voice, the fun of her music. “Try to make it seem like someone cares about you,” she taunts a guy who’s pacing around outside the club on a fake phone call. She shuts down a lover’s small talk by asking frankly if they can get her wet. The inspiration for “men” might sound like faux-feminist chart kibble—Genesis polled her group chats on what they hated most about guys—but the song is clever and propuslive, with laugh-out-loud ad-libs (“Thought you was a goat boy, shoo!”) and the killer couplet: “Selfish, secretive, possessive, condescending/Even when I cum, I’m pretending.” She strives to surprise.
Her sense of playfulness and irony enchant what otherwise might be a dim, hazy record, and Genesis is at her best when she leans into it. “I finger-painted the fuck out of this album,” she said in the same DIY interview, explaining that she considers herself a conceptual artist. On “peppermint,” she raps about a sex partner’s “oozes” and juices, gliding through omnnapoetia over squelching beats. When goldilocks x reaches beyond the dancefloor and the bedroom to the hangovers and breakups—the moments when the lights flicker on and your stomach caves in—it doesn’t bring the same eye for absurdity. There’s a ridiculousness in feeling anything fiercely, a terror inherent to intimacy against which Tommy’s brazen, pointed persona is perfectly matched, but the clarity slips away just when it’s most needed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Downtown | September 21, 2021 | 6.8 | 48ac3994-e937-4d0d-b73a-5c680cf1e9f4 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
After the success of Ty Segall's best album, this year's Goodbye Bread, his former home, the Memphis label Goner Records, has compiled the 25-track Singles 2007-2010. It's a sort of refresher course that serves as a temporary portrait of the restless garage rocker. | After the success of Ty Segall's best album, this year's Goodbye Bread, his former home, the Memphis label Goner Records, has compiled the 25-track Singles 2007-2010. It's a sort of refresher course that serves as a temporary portrait of the restless garage rocker. | Ty Segall: Singles: 2007-2010 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16070-singles-2007-2010/ | Singles: 2007-2010 | "When you play music and you're a person on a stage, sometimes people can put you on a pedestal, and that can do a lot of things to your head. And... what if it actually exploded all over the walls during a show?" That's Ty Segall speaking to SF Weekly earlier this year about his 2011 song, "My Head Explodes". It's a fairly straightforward description of a song that isn't terribly complicated. Guy sings. People watch. Guy's head explodes. It's not hard to picture Segall's head exploding. He sings hard and loud and with the shrill fury of a castrated animal. And he does this a lot. Since quitting his band, Epsilons, less than four years ago, Segall has become arguably the most exciting and probably the most prolific member of San Francisco's evolving garage rock scene, which also includes Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, and Sic Alps (with whom Segall formerly played). Since going solo, he's released five albums of original material; two split LPs; a live album; a cassette-only compilation; eight 7"s; four split EPs; a collaborative album with Mikal Cronin; and appeared on four compilation albums. The man is prolific. Trying to keep up will, if not enough make your head explode, at least incite heavy migraines.
This year's Goodbye Bread, his first release for Drag City, is easily his best, the accumulation of learned songwriting tricks and a developing melodic sense, with an emphasis on sonic clarity and the influence of some august icons, notably John Lennon and Marc Bolan. (Oh yeah, Segall recorded a tribute EP to Bolan's T. Rex this year, too.) In the afterglow of Goodbye's success, Memphis label Goner Records, Segall's former home, has compiled Singles 2007-2010, a sort of refresher course and unheard odds-and-ends set that serves as a tenacious, temporary portrait of Segall. There are hints everywhere at the songwriter Segall would become, but Singles is much more about the flail of youth than honoring tradition. In a few years, he's garnered comparisons to a wide swath of artists, from Nuggets-friendly English bands like the Troggs and the Pretty Things, to working-class American menace-peddlers like the Stooges and Ramones, to early recordings by the White Stripes (especially prevalent on this comp), down to the late Jay Reatard, a significant guidepost for Segall.
Singles is a stew mixing all of those ingredients and more. There are hints of Devo in the mechanized synth and drum tracks on early versions of "So Alone" and "The Drag". (Before forming his band, Segall often played all the instruments on his records, including drum machine.) Listen for ? and the Mysterians-like organ at the outset of "Skin", maybe the best song here. And in that voice, which vacillates from desperate howl to wallowing drone, a little Kurt Cobain, too. It's hard to know what's a relic and what's an advance here. Segall appears in love with surface imitation at times, while peeling the skin back at others. On the faux-British B-side "Fuzzy Cat", you can hear John Entwistle of the Who's gothic goof-off "Boris the Spider". The appearance of a cover of Chain Gang's coiled, minor punk masterpiece, "Son of Sam", feels like a cred grab, but an accomplished one. On "Caesar", which would later appear on 2010's Melted in more polished form, there's a little of the stomping acoustic rock that would become the underbelly of Goodbye Bread. Segall, like so many developing artists, seemed to be constantly toggling between ideas of himself.
Singles, while comprising 25 songs, is still less than one hour's worth of music-- this iteration of Segall was economical. Only now, as his ambition grows, so do the lengths of his songs. Just one here exceeds three minutes-- it's the demo version of "So Alone", which was eventually whittled down to less than two and a half minutes for Horn the Unicorn. After acclaim for the elliptical and sometimes very pretty Goodbye Bread, one might assume Segall's left the crash-and-bash of Singles 2007-2010 behind. But then, his new single, "Spiders", is all doom and drone-- a violent, glorious devolution-- clocking in just under three minutes. So much for obvious trajectories. | 2011-11-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Goner | November 23, 2011 | 8.3 | 48ac4213-d96c-4775-b55e-332553747c5f | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Composer Zach Cooper's debut album blends acoustic instruments, synthesizers and electronic effects into a shifting whole that's part chamber music, part post-rock, and part musique concrète. | Composer Zach Cooper's debut album blends acoustic instruments, synthesizers and electronic effects into a shifting whole that's part chamber music, part post-rock, and part musique concrète. | Zach Cooper: The Sentence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21616-the-sentence/ | The Sentence | There's a not-so-hidden message encoded in composer Zach Cooper's debut album, The Sentence: "This is for us to incite stillness in our hearts and minds." That call to mindfulness, inspired by Cooper's own meditation practice, is spelled out by the one-word titles of the album's 12 cuts, which spin acoustic instruments, electric kit, and synthesizers and electronic effects into a,shifting whole that's part chamber music, part post-rock, and part musique concrète.
For a record that advocates stillness, The Sentence covers a lot of ground. It collages together many years' worth of work, from high-school home recordings to work with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble to assorted rehearsal tapes and—well, who knows what, really. As you might guess from songs titled things like "This," "To," and "In," the individual tracks on The Sentence function less as standalone songs than as parts of an indivisible whole, and it's well-nigh impossible to tease out which bits date to which moments. As a scrapbook, the album's timeline will be legible only to Cooper, although that's presumably partly the point of the whole exercise: to explore the way musical moments repeat, echo, and evolve across the course of a life, piling up on tape in an image of eternal now-ness.
The music's tone is largely hushed, with lots of breathy wind instruments and muted electric and acoustic guitar; there are five percussionists credited on the album, but their contributions tend to emphasize scrapes and thumps and the faraway thunder of reverberant tympani—sounds used more for color than timekeeping. Compositionally, Cooper tends to tease soft melodic phrases out of dissonant, abstract passages, like drawing smooth a tangle of thread in fits and starts. Occasionally, a startlingly beautiful vista opens up: The pensive guitar and horns of "To" sound a little like Tortoise at their most sentimental. But Cooper doesn't dwell on any one idea for very long. That lyric centerpiece is followed by a shout ("Yo, play the jam! We’re gonna jam, dude!") and a two-minute run of vibraphone, cymbal, and electronics that suggests a druggy, paranoid Raymond Scott.
When The Sentence works best, it's led forward by a combination of smart pacing and surprising ideas. But the record has trouble building and keeping momentum. "Stillness," just 3:18 long, encompasses three distinct parts separated by garbed electronics and random clatter: a watery orchestral passage, a folky meditation for acoustic guitar and monophonic synth, and solo acoustic guitar bit that sounds like it was recorded on a Dictaphone. All offer nice sounds and worthy musical ideas, but lead nowhere. Too often the album seems to lack an organizing principle, a structure to make all its discrete moments make sense, and the back half of the 32-minute album drags. It's hard to maintain much investment in a record that simply rolls on of its own accord, like a stream, oblivious to the presence of the listener. | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Styles Upon Styles | March 15, 2016 | 6 | 48ac6839-d06f-439a-a95c-0f4155bed1e1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On her new EP, Sophie Allison rents out a room just for herself, singing covers of Taylor Swift, Pavement, Sheryl Crow, and more. | On her new EP, Sophie Allison rents out a room just for herself, singing covers of Taylor Swift, Pavement, Sheryl Crow, and more. | Soccer Mommy: Karaoke Night EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soccer-mommy-karaoke-night-ep/ | Karaoke Night EP | Sophie Allison might be exactly the type of person you don’t want to do karaoke with: Instead of screeching off-key high notes four vodka crans deep, she’s making it good and making you think. On her new EP Karaoke Night, she rents out a room just for herself, singing covers she’s performed live as Soccer Mommy but never recorded until now. It’s simultaneously an homage to her varied influences and a manifesto for her own dreamy sound.
Some covers make you reimagine what the original actually means, like “Soak Up the Sun,” which Allison released in July to align with Sheryl Crow’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Crow wrote the track while recovering from surgery, and it comes across as a gleaming, upbeat anthem championing a better mindset. Allison’s version is messier and more contemplative, almost as if she’s trying to convince herself of its positivity. The chorus is a fuzzy, watery expanse, leaving only a warped memory of the original bubblegum pop. The words “I’m gonna tell everyone to lighten up” feel more ironic than earnest.
Allison’s treatment of “I’m Only Me When I’m With You” has a similar effect. Swift’s track is classic Debut Taylor, with its fiddle solo and her exaggerated country twang. Allison’s slightly slower tempo and matter-of-fact vocal delivery highlight the gravity of the situation: “I’m only me when I’m with you.” Instead of soundtracking a local hoedown in full swing, the song begins under a spinning disco ball in a barn with only four people left on the floor. Even when the beat kicks in, there’s still an element of ennui that comes through amidst its sweetness.
Other covers offer a direct line to Allison’s work. Pavement’s classic ballad “Here” is even in the same key and tempo range as “Still,” the closer to her 2022 album Sometimes, Forever. Her rendition opens the EP, and her laissez-faire delivery mirrors that of the original, but with an added sincerity: While Malkmus sings lines like “Your jokes are always bad/But they're not as bad as this” with rueful jadedness, Allison sounds like she’s still putting in effort despite exhaustion. The EP’s other bookend is R.E.M’s “Losing My Religion,” a song that has always felt oddly buoyant despite being about unrequited love. Allison leaves no question of its melancholia, changing the main chords to be more dissonant.
Each song on Karaoke Night reckons to some degree with temporality and impermanence, themes threaded throughout Allison’s past projects. “The world is full of noise/I hear it all the time” from Slowdive’s “Dagger” is the kind of quasi-nihilistic line that might have appeared in her songs “Darkness Forever” or “Crawling In My Skin.” It validates that she is not alone in her self-doubt, devotion, and existential malaise, despite how isolated she may feel sometimes. These ideas are ageless, whether they’re shared in front of a crowd or alone with a single microphone. | 2023-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | September 25, 2023 | 7 | 48af3ccc-68dd-42e2-a631-8e8a8edb796c | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
Kurt Wagner uses restraint with a masterful touch on his latest record, applying a light vocodor touch to his voice to illuminate the intimacy of his understated songwriting. | Kurt Wagner uses restraint with a masterful touch on his latest record, applying a light vocodor touch to his voice to illuminate the intimacy of his understated songwriting. | Lambchop: This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lambchop-this-is-what-i-wanted-to-tell-you/ | This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) | There’s a trick Frank Ocean returns to throughout Blonde. After smothering his voice with all kinds of effects for long stretches, he’ll cut the switch and present his voice naked, and every time it’s as satisfying as the first swipe of a wiper blade across a rainy windshield. Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner pulls that move just once on his latest album This (is what I wanted to tell you), but he makes it count, waiting until the final track “Flowers” for the big reveal: His natural, 60-year-old voice, treated so completely throughout the album you begin to forget that he hasn’t always defaulted to a digitalized croon.
Wagner traded alt-country for electronic soul on 2016’s FLOTUS—a radical swap executed so gracefully and lovingly that he somehow made it feel like a natural progression. Still, anybody who missed that record is in for a surprise. Wagner has gone all-in on his vocoded mutter, and he’s reconfigured his songwriting to accommodate it, trimming away the chamber-pop adornments and merry excesses that once distinguished Lambchop’s records to center each song around his gentle prose.
For an artist who came to electronic music so late in life, it’s remarkable how astute his impulses are—and even more impressive still considering Wagner’s background in alt-country, a genre that is rarely prone to innovation. Rather than playing up his reinvented sound on This (is what I wanted to tell you), Wagner opts for tasteful restraint. Every track is cushioned with pillowy pianos and massaging basslines. Even the album’s boldest ideas are understated. With its light, acid jazz groove, “Everything is You” calls back to Us3’s early ’90s staple “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”—you’ll remember it when you hear it—but never pats itself on the back for its own cleverness.
The occasional echoes of Bon Iver, the most prominent indie act to use vocal manipulation as an instrument unto itself, aren’t entirely accidental, since Bon Iver’s Matthew McCaughan produced the album and co-wrote parts of it. But unlike Justin Vernon, who used digital effects to push his voice to the edge of decay on 22, A Million, Wagner processes his voice not to obscure it but to draw warmth from it. Like the music itself, his vocal treatments are fragile and unpretentious. Nothing is obscured, nothing asks to be decoded. Everything about this sound is done in the service of intimacy.
And so it is with his lyrics, which suggest wisdom even as they meditate on uncertainty. On “The Air is Heavy and I Should Be Listening to You,” he relives a couple’s argument that breaks out during a bout of Sunday house cleaning. “The air is filled with lemon-scented displeasure,” he recalls. He writes in fragments of the mundane, juxtaposing direct thoughts with half-completed ones, then padding them with imagery ported from television and cable news (among them “the man with the Nixon tattoo,” presumably Roger Stone, one of those random, unshakable visuals that will serve as a marker for this precise moment in time). On “Crosswords, or What This Says About You,” he loses his partner at the airport, so he enjoys a moment at the bar. “Seems like they used to be much larger than they are right now,” he observes, never specifying what “they” might be.
It’s such a modest album, and yet such it’s a supremely pleasurable one. Wagner sounds humbled by the world, if not the very technology he’s adopted. Before “Flowers” ends the record with a plea for love—“If I gave you a hundred dollars to record just three words, I could make the perfect song,” he sings—he’s made a disarming case for understanding that it’s hard to imagine him pulling off in a setting less masterfully intimate. Wagner’s quarter-century track record with Lambchop only underscores what a gem This is. He’s made great records before, even exciting and unexpected ones, but never one so comforting and compassionate. | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge / City Slang | March 28, 2019 | 8.1 | 48af8784-1f6b-426a-b4c2-2f587f2ae16e | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
A new compilation devoted to the charismatic, underappreciated Indian jazz singer captures her sizzling spirit and illustrates the breadth of her musicianship. | A new compilation devoted to the charismatic, underappreciated Indian jazz singer captures her sizzling spirit and illustrates the breadth of her musicianship. | Asha Puthli: The Essential Asha Puthli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asha-puthli-the-essential-asha-puthli/ | The Essential Asha Puthli | Asha Puthli is a spark of a person: a provocative, self-possessed diva who gargled with champagne, identified her age as “spiritually 6,000” and “emotionally 5,” and obtained a visa to stay in the United States by asking a stranger she met at the Museum of Modern Art to marry her. Unsurprisingly, the socialites and artists of the 1970s were drawn to her: The Indian jazz singer was friends with Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, a muse to Manolo Blahnik, and a sartorial influence for Debbie Harry.
But despite her outstanding cultural impact and kinetic vocal performances, Puthli always skirted mainstream fame. Over the last few decades, her music has had a minor resurgence: The Notorious B.I.G., Diddy, 50 Cent, and the Pharcyde all sampled her psychedelic, slinky “Space Talk,” and she’s appeared on a few electronica releases. Still, her name remains largely unknown. The Essential Asha Puthli, a new compilation from British imprint Mr. Bongo, captures her sizzling spirit and illustrates the breadth of her musicianship, spanning her gritty early covers, her bombastic disco numbers, and her winding jazz vocalizations. The compilation also serves as a document of a captivating woman learning to fully indulge her artistic, romantic, and aesthetic desires.
Puthli’s audacious personality and unabashed sensuality guide these songs, which get bolder as the compilation progresses. Her playfulness and experimental impulses shine on opener “Pain,” which she recorded in 1968 with the Indian psychedelic rock band the Savages—on it, there are wordless yelps, vocal improvisations, and lo-fi textures. By the time she recorded the disco-funk song “The Devil Is Loose” eight years later, she had refined and embodied a sweeping bravado; the song possesses the beguiling conviction of someone shrugging silk off their shoulder. When the 1979 highlight “1001 Nights of Love (Reprise)” arrives, Puthli’s confidence soars. The bubbling synth cascades as Puthli whispers and gasps about the love and sex she craves. The Essential Asha Puthli shows that as her career evolved, she learned to channel that dramatic flair into music that exudes incomparable verve.
Puthli recorded 10 albums, but when none of her music really stuck with audiences in the ’70s and ’80s, she ultimately retired and raised her son in Palm Beach, Florida. In interviews, she has cited the prejudice of American record labels as part of the reason her career stalled: They wanted her to change her name to Anne Powers, and often failed to support Indian artists who didn’t make strictly Indian music.
More recently, she has inspired a new generation of young Indian American fans and artists—like R&B singer Raveena, who featured Puthli on her album Asha’s Awakening this year. As one of the very few South Asian women working in the entertainment industry at the time, and one who boldly asserted her desires, her story resonates with young listeners.
The intrigue also comes from her unique approach to cultural fusion: Unlike her peers, Puthli generally avoids pulling directly from South Asian instrumentation, language, or spirituality. “Chipko Chipko” is the only song in Hindi on the compilation, and she mostly focuses her innovation on vocal technique. As she said in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, she perceives connections between jazz and Indian classical music because of “the improvisation, the minor chords, the free form, the liberalness of the art.” On “What Reason Could I Give” and “All My Life,” two songs from Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking record Science Fiction that also appear on the compilation, she drew from the Indian classical music technique of taan (fast, improvised sequences of notes) and gamak (vocal embellishments added to notes). It worked: Where another vocalist might have had a difficult time keeping up with Coleman’s meandering compositions, Puthli’s croon sandwiches effortlessly between the rumbling saxophone and flitting drum lines.
Puthli’s sense of self is so strong on this compilation that it almost feels like she could do anything—write a check, read out a grocery list—and it would be just as compelling. She’s an immensely talented vocalist, but the true thrill of her music comes from hearing her play every version of herself. In a conversation for Interview magazine, Penelope Tree once asked Puthli, “Aren’t you royalty?” She responded: “Don’t insult me, I’m divinity.” Her vision of herself was flamboyant and grandiose, and The Essential Asha Puthli confirms that it was entirely warranted. | 2022-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Mr. Bongo | July 11, 2022 | 8 | 48b1f376-4672-44c6-a7f3-8380fd18fc81 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
For the album's fiftieth birthday, an impressive roster of artists, from Steve Gunn to Marissa Nadler to Jim O'Rourke, pay tribute to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. | For the album's fiftieth birthday, an impressive roster of artists, from Steve Gunn to Marissa Nadler to Jim O'Rourke, pay tribute to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. | Various Artists: Blonde on Blonde Revisited | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21997-blonde-on-blonde-revisited/ | Blonde on Blonde Revisited | One of the most famous Dylanisms arose from a conversation with director Sam Peckinpah on the set of the 1973 movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. “Just be yourself,” Peckinpah suggested to a 32-year-old Bob Dylan who, by this point, had already been everything from folk messiah to rock Judas, who had received glowing reviews and miserable ones, who once stood as a pillar of New York authenticity and was now struggling to play the role of a mysterious stranger in a Western movie filmed in Durango, Mexico. Fittingly, Dylan snapped back to Peckinpah: “Which one?”
If Dylan’s 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde is generally viewed among his most iconic, it’s because it was his first album to show all the different Dylans in their best light, with appearances from the freewheeling folk singer from the early ‘60s all the way up to the weirdo bluesman he would later become. It’s not Dylan’s only album that plays genre and mood the way other artists use backup guitars, but it’s the one that made them all feel the most coherent, attractive, and maniacally unstoppable.
For the album’s fiftieth birthday, an impressive array of acts have gathered to pay homage to its thin, wild, multiple personality disorder. Blonde on Blonde Revisited is a worthy tribute, maintaining the album's original track order and flow while also showcasing the wide-ranging talents of the artists collected. Unfortunately, things don’t start off so hot. Malcolm Middleton’s monotonous Matrix-soundtrack-meets-hotel-lobby remake of “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35” at once drains all the brainless fun out of the original while making it sound even more brainless in the process (maybe not everybody must get stoned). Better is Thomas Cohen’s subtle, Britpop remake of “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine,” refitting Dylan's bluesy kiss-off with a jazzy, laid-back groove. As evidenced by last year’s fascinating Bootleg Series, however, most of the songs from this era had already been reinvented and torn apart multiple times before being released: the arrangements that Dylan landed on feel definitive for a reason. For the most part, despite the daring, experimental nature of the album proper, the songs that fare best here are also the ones that take the fewest obvious risks.
Steve Gunn’s thoughtful vocal performance in “Visions of Johanna” and Michael Chapman’s intricate guitar work in “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” are highlights: examples of artists paying homage to Dylan’s songs not through reinvention but through total reverence. Similarly, after contributing some of the most surprising performances on last month’s Day of the Dead, Phosphorescent shows up with a refreshingly stripped back take on “I Want You,” recalling the early Oldham-isms of Pride more than the underwater country of Muchacho. Elsewhere, Marissa Nadler’s austere (even for her) take on “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and Ryley Walker’s stunning “4th Time Around” both make strong cases for each artist’s particular style, illustrating how influential Dylan’s music was for a generation of folk artists hellbent on sounding more like themselves. Like the best of Dylan’s work, these performance sound like timeless standards and unanswerable riddles.
The real revelation here, though, is the closing number. As was the case on the original Blonde on Blonde, Jim O’Rourke’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” takes up the entirety of Side D (and even outlasts Dylan’s by two minutes). O’Rourke refines Dylan’s epic waltz into a gorgeous acoustic ballad– his hushed, emotive vocal recalling The Wild, The Innocent-era Springsteen in its quiet intensity. Calling back to the initial recording of the song, when Dylan’s band treated every chorus like a climax, assured that this must be the last one, O’Rourke inserts a series of found recordings of city streets, ringing phones, and passing cars between the verses. The opposite effect to the original’s eleven-minute runner’s high, these passages find the artist pausing to look out the window, overwhelmed by the task at hand and threatening to quit before coming back with more to say. It’s a fitting tribute to Dylan at a point in his career when he couldn’t even stand still for the duration of a photo shoot, when “being yourself” wasn’t an instruction to follow but an intuitive instinct. Blonde on Blonde Revisited, then, serves an album-length response to Dylan’s comeback. Why just be yourself when you can be all of yourselves, all at once? | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Mojo | June 8, 2016 | 7.6 | 48b340f3-b1d9-4ce0-a1d2-d35ea3c241fa | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Maybe the smartest thing about Laura Veirs' new children's album is that some of its tracks-- including a duet with the Decemberists' Colin Meloy-- aren't children's songs. | Maybe the smartest thing about Laura Veirs' new children's album is that some of its tracks-- including a duet with the Decemberists' Colin Meloy-- aren't children's songs. | Laura Veirs: Tumble Bee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16105-tumble-bee/ | Tumble Bee | Maybe the smartest thing about Laura Veirs' new children's album, Tumble Bee, is that some of its tracks aren't even children's songs. Researching the rich history of American folk music for material she could interpret, Veirs cast a wide net to include not only tunes written expressly for kids, but any other compositions she felt could reasonably slot alongside the likes of "Little Lap Dog Lullaby" and "King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O". Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the way our 21st-century ears tend to hear anything written 50 or 100 or more years ago as comparatively quaint, songs as thematically disparate as the Civil War-era "Soldier's Joy" (here a duet with the Decemberists' Colin Meloy) and a calypso tune popularized by Harry Belafonte, "Jamaica Farewell", don't feel so out of place on a record aimed at little ones.
Then again, another thing many of these songs have in common is being really strange, and occasionally even quite dark. Listening to some of Veirs' cover choices makes you think of Greil Marcus' famous description of the folk material Bob Dylan and the Band mined in the late 1960s as capturing the "old, weird America." There's Woody Guthrie's "Why Oh Why", featuring such bizarre existential quandries as "Why can't a bird eat an elephant?" and "Why ain't my grandpa my grandma?" There's plenty more that's just flat-out macabre, like the title character of "The Fox" informing a pen of doomed ducks and geese that "a couple of you gonna grease my chin." Sure enough he keeps his promise, his whole family feasts on the fowl, and the song ends by gleefully pointing out that "the little ones chewed on the bones." Then there's "All the Pretty Little Horses" (also covered in recent years by Calexico and, earlier, Current 93 with Nick Cave), a superficially gentle (hear the percussive elements kindly mimicing jangling spurs) but deeply haunting African-American lullaby dating back to the days of slavery; many versions have neutered the song by altering its most harrowing lines, but Veirs retains them: "Way down yonder, down in the medder/ There's a poor little lambie/ Bees and the butterflies pecking at its eye/ Poor little thing cried 'Mammy.'"
The title track, a Karl Blau song, is also underlined by a grown-up recognition of disappointment and loss. The music may be jaunty, riding playful trumpets and sparkly keys, but the words and Veirs' fragile voice point to a more sobering reality. "She'll sting me as she longs to be free," Veirs sings of the titular insect. Tumble Bee is a welcome addition to contemporary children's music, not only because it's sufficiently involving to appeal to adults, but also because it further demonstrates that songs for kids don't have to be cloying or sanitized. | 2011-12-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-12-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Raven Marching Band | December 6, 2011 | 7.5 | 48bcd770-06cd-466d-b987-7264d647a80d | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with annihilation and rebirth themes. | The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with annihilation and rebirth themes. | Liturgy: The Ark Work | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20313-the-ark-work/ | The Ark Work | The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. The band seems to have designed it that way: Along with the guitars and percussion, there are horns, strings, constantly hammering glockenspiel, even bagpipes, all blaring at once, like 11 open browser tabs autoplaying or a block of car alarms set off by a passing motorcycle. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the band’s leading force and The Ark Work’s primary arranger, has talked in interviews about realizing the sound in his head; The Ark Work, he claims, is the closest he’s come to sharing it with us. The sound he's designed here feels purposefully too large, a pressurized force exploding out of confinement. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with themes of annihilation and rebirth.
The second way to experience The Ark Work is as a kind of aesthetic gauntlet, hurled with an audible clunk. Liturgy’s previous albums, 2009’s Renihilation and 2011’s Aesthethica, cast Hunt-Hendrix’s imposing ideas—which he has tried to clarify, perhaps comically, in a pair of perfectly inscrutable diagrams included with The Ark Work’s packaging—in songlike forms. The Ark Work is closer, in its 57-minute expanse and grandeur, to a symphony—something long and Germanic, maybe by Bruckner. Long sections of it hang stubbornly in place, pitched between bedlam and boredom, before surging over another exhilarating crag in the music’s development.
Recurring themes pop up, like alpine flowers dotting a mountainside. "Follow", the album’s first full track, begins with a chiming contrapuntal figure in the glockenspiels, led by pedal tones in the bass line. It has a fragile, otherworldly quality, which the band snuffs out briskly when it plunges in moments later. The theme resurfaces a few tracks later, on "Follow II", played by an organ, on "Haelegen", and then again on "Total War". Each time, it feels like a welcome space for contemplation amidst the chaos.
These moments provide navigable markers on what can frankly be an imposing, even dismaying listen. The Ark Work is harmonically rich, but very slow; to say that it moves is to point out that glass is technically a liquid. The most awe-inspiring payoffs occur after agonizing liftoff: On "Follow II", strings and horns lifts the music up, like pigeons on strings tied to a Mahlerian orchestra. The mass seems to hang an inch or two above ground, groaning and threatening to split open, before the seams burst and Hunt-Hendrix’s little voice spills out.
This sense of watching an impossible bulk lift skyward is the most thrilling sensation The Ark Work provides, and it happens two or three times across the album. In these moments, Hunt-Hendrix’s thrashing ambitions feel justified, and they position Liturgy not as descendants of black metal but of Swans, eager to chase exhilaration to punishing, Herculean extremes. The crazed energy of Ark’s best music feels indebted to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Hunt-Hendrix has more than a touch of Herzog’s maddening genius/genius madman dynamic about him. In both cases, the primary question haunting the project's edges is "Is this guy kidding?"
The Ark Work has another unfortunate Herzog parallel, and it’s a specific one: In order to enjoy the grand vision before you, you have to block the sometimes-irritating sound of the creator’s voice from your ears. On previous albums, Hunt-Hendrix screamed in a register that was both shocking and oddly delicate, like gift wrap tearing. On The Ark Work, he drones on a single note, with very little variation, for most of the time. It sounds deadening on first contact, and it doesn’t reveal much depth on repeated listens. He seems to be aiming for a trancelike, occult mood, and he has referenced the triplet flows of Three 6 Mafia as inspiration. The long incantatory passages of "Quetzalcoatl" and "Father Vorizen", which seem like his most direct attempts at applying this rhythm, offer a handy example of just how far a sound can travel from its origin.
That is a charitable way of saying that his vocals often border on unendurable. On "Father Vorizen", his droning is mostly tuneless and nearly rhythmless, a persistent hum that you find yourself wanting to swat away. Because it is competing with massive elements, his voice has been doubled up and set slightly to the side in the mix, making him sound less an entranced cult leader, stoking the flames, than someone mumbling in a corner. When he moans "The doors of perception will open and close/ Hope will exist in a problematic relationship with reason/ Libidinal energy will whirl round like a rattle rattling/ Hearts will be stopped bones will shatter shattering," on "Quetzalcoatl", the prevailing knock on Liturgy as a dog-and-pony show for Hunt-Hendrix’s half-baked musings feels uncomfortably close at hand.
It is an unfair judgment to pass on the glorious, rippling full-band unit, however: Greg Fox, one of the most intuitive, thrilling, and musical drummers of his generation, is back in the band, and his playing, as it did on Aesthethica, feels truer to the spirit of Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophy than any of his declarations. The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of listens. For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends. The stretch of music covering the album’s first five tracks—"Fanfare" to "Quetzalcoatl"—invokes awe, terror, confusion, joy, despair. At this point, however, The Ark Work is less than half over. Inevitably, some chair-squirming occurs. Fatigue sets in; interest ebbs. This is the flip side of grandeur: When you stretch it out far enough, it becomes difficult to distinguish from terminal boredom. | 2015-03-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | March 26, 2015 | 6.4 | 48bdb50a-9921-4ce0-85ed-2526a0dd0d51 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
With his husky, sensitive baritone, this son of Canada’s Prairie Provinces mixes the tales of modern and historic wanderers on his second sterling album of traditional folk and country. | With his husky, sensitive baritone, this son of Canada’s Prairie Provinces mixes the tales of modern and historic wanderers on his second sterling album of traditional folk and country. | Colter Wall: Songs of the Plains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colter-wall-songs-of-the-plains/ | Songs of the Plains | The lessons of the road make poignant songwriting fodder. The highway’s combination of locomotion and seemingly boundless space offers a quiet interiority that other places cannot; with all that time and room, there’s little else to do but think. It’s as if the car window framing each vista were more mirror than postcard. This source of lasting revelations has inspired its own compendium of songs, from George Strait’s homeward-bound “Amarillo by Morning” to Miranda Lambert’s nomadic “Highway Vagabond.”
While Canadian singer-songwriter Colter Wall toured behind his 2017 self-titled debut, the road, as it often does, whispered thoughts of home—his native prairies, to be exact. Literally and figuratively between the steely metropolis of Toronto and the robust majesty of Vancouver, the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Wall’s native Saskatchewan are harder to define. Though Canada dwarfs the U.S. in landmass, the entire country has 3 million fewer people than California alone. Getting from town to town, from here to there, is a different kind of desolate, the beauty reinforced by a vast and varied emptiness.
Wall’s sophomore album, Songs of the Plains, uses the sounds of country icons like Waylon Jennings and George Jones as musical frames for the unfurled feel of those prairie stretches. Borrowing both the stylistic and storytelling genealogies of folk and traditional country, Wall extends a tip-of-the-hat to their golden fields. Two tracks portray the prairielands’ agrarian history through the eyes of the upstarts who settled that part of the country: “Saskatchewan in 1881” and the cover “Calgary Round-Up.” The latter focuses on Alberta’s famed Calgary Stampede, the annual rodeo and exhibition that dates to the city’s first agricultural fairs more than a century ago. Pedal steel and harmonica wind behind Wall’s husky baritone, winking at nostalgia but not giving over to it.
Songs of the Plains are the types of tales told around a crackling fire, those of homesickness (“Plain to See Plainsman”), blue-collar labor (“The Trains Are Gone”), and folk heroes writ large (“Wild Bill Hickok”). This is Wall’s attempt to put Canada more squarely into country’s storyline. He covers two cowboy traditionals, “Night Herding Song” and “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail,” singing the former almost entirely a cappella and shifting its original jaunt into something more somber, haunted. His yipping yodel resurfaces for his take on Billy Don Burns’ “Wild Dogs,” where it conjures the coyote’s howl.
Wall pushes in close against the untenanted space of the middle provinces, filling their geographic gaps with an intoxicating rasp. He sings with a serrated edge, his voice digging crevices rich with heartbreak, homeland, and heritage. “Sweetly taking his time/Drinking all the straight rye/Chasing it with red wine/Heavy on his troubled mind,” he offers on standout “Thinkin’ on a Woman,” the tale of a truck driver who finds little solace in the big-rig route that pulls him away from his paramour. Wall’s voice sustains every line’s third and fourth words, rattling the cage that holds the narrator back from what he wants. The driver’s frustration—targeted at himself, at circumstances binding him to this road—are palpable in Wall’s quavering breath.
Wall said recently that he appreciates atmospheric touches on songs, making his choice of producer Dave Cobb a natural fit. Cobb made Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and Jason Isbell’s Southeastern, albums that succeeded in part on smart textural finishes. For “Night Herding Song,” Cobb made Wall sing into a microphone placed beside an actual campfire. During “The Trains Are Gone,” he underscores the absence of railroad work with a locomotive rhythm punctuated by the whistle-like echo of harmonica. Though the modern-day country of Cobb’s more famous collaborators seems indelibly bound to a certain stateside identity, Wall suggests an alternative: Sing the songs of the country you call home, even if it’s well beyond the 49th parallel. | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Young Mary's / Thirty Tigers | October 15, 2018 | 7.6 | 48ca0c31-e702-4b48-9975-f1973294366e | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Even on a brief EP, Yves Tumor’s prismatic world seems to get bigger as it mutates into certain conventions of goth rock, dream pop, and shoegaze. | Even on a brief EP, Yves Tumor’s prismatic world seems to get bigger as it mutates into certain conventions of goth rock, dream pop, and shoegaze. | Yves Tumor: The Asymptotical World EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-tumor-the-asymptotical-world-ep/ | The Asymptotical World EP | The music of Yves Tumor moves like something molting. At first, it cleaves to genre, taking recognizable shape—a loping bass line, a steady backbeat. And then the shape dulls. It starts to appear as a copy of itself, not a rock song but an imitation rendered from paling memory. And then the form splits, and from the split comes something glistening and new, in the same arrangement as the old, dulled thing but rawer and more perceptibly alive.
Across Tumor’s previous two albums, 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love and 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, the artist plays in this sequence of writhing, shedding, and revealing. Songs skirt close to familiar forms and then bloom into grotesqueries. Often, Tumor deploys negative space to this effect. Take “Gospel for a New Century,” the lead single and opener from Tortured Mind, where a horn riff sampled from a 1978 Korean funk track rings out and abruptly cuts to silence, as if the sound waves produced by the instrument were suddenly and impossibly sucked back up into its bell, the air returned to the lungs of its player. The effect confounds the song’s sense of space, rendering it unstable, pocked with void.
On the new Asymptotical World EP, Tumor injects a similar mutation into certain conventions of goth rock, dream pop, and shoegaze. Squalling guitars tower and topple, straining toward great vertical heights and then spilling out toward the horizon. Songs like “Jackie,” a tight rumination on tortured love that ranks among Tumor’s most direct and immediately gripping songs, channel the fever dreams of late-’80s experimental rock bands from the UK, bearing traces of A.R. Kane and early My Bloody Valentine. As ever, dry humor and a subtle playfulness shine through the deadpan mood, showing in flourishes like “Jackie”’s bass drum hiccup and the phaser wobble in Tumor’s voice just before the climax of “Crushed Velvet.” “We can go wherever/I don’t have a favorite spot/I just wanna look you in the eye,” Tumor speak-sings against a post-punk bass throb on “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important to the Both of Them,” a blase romantic gesture that promptly swings around to sly dismissal: “How can I miss you/If you won’t go away?”
Throughout the record, Tumor eases ever more deeply into the role of prismatic bandleader, shifting readily from tone to tone while sustaining a core sense of authority. The lovelorn wail of “Jackie” calcifies into “Secrecy”’s bitterly cool asides, which then evaporate as unsure sighs on “...And Loyalty Is a Nuisance Child.” Across Asymptotical World’s six songs, Tumor plays a roster of characters gripped in various turmoils, acting them out in different postures, from sweltering and vulnerable to icy and impenetrable.
At the EP’s molten center is a guest appearance from the industrial noise duo NAKED, whose vocalist Agnes Gryczkowska streaks “Tuck” with glimpses of body horror. “I didn’t die for you,” she insists, “I feel myself/Growing big and hard inside you.” Her voice lifts in a conspiratorial whisper amid scattered, buried beats; it’s the only track on the EP that doesn’t foreground the rhythm section in the mix, and as such it feels boneless, amoebic, like it could at any point open its body and swallow its listener.
That is the steady promise of Tumor’s work, and its constant threat: that its strange, inverted intimacy might spill into the listener and turn the self alien. When you recognize the shape of a song but can’t fix its innards, can’t place its emotional register among your catalog of acceptable feelings, what does it do to you? What might meet you there? The Asymptotical World’s motions are recognizable; they come in familiar skin. Under the skin, something ill-fitting thrashes, trying to escape itself, inviting anyone in sight to do the same.
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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. | 2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | July 22, 2021 | 7.8 | 48caf2d0-2bf8-4aa4-a536-ab1e2df3e704 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
DeForrest Brown Jr.’s most ambitious release yet is a 49-minute suite that brings together fractured, shuddering drum programming with spoken-word poetry, collage, and noise. | DeForrest Brown Jr.’s most ambitious release yet is a 49-minute suite that brings together fractured, shuddering drum programming with spoken-word poetry, collage, and noise. | Speaker Music: Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speaker-music-black-nationalist-sonic-weaponry/ | Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry | When DeForrest Brown Jr. says, “Make techno Black again,” it is meant both as a reminder of a historical fact—dance music is Black music—and a rejection of a widespread misconception. To many around the world, techno is the stuff of legend and fodder for memes: a lifestyle accessory reducible to a four-on-the-floor beat, a gram of MDMA, and a bottle of Club Mate. Brown Jr., who also records as Speaker Music, has made it his mission to expose this whitewashed caricature of techno as a lie.
In panels, lectures, and his forthcoming book Assembling a Black Counter Culture, Brown Jr., illustrates the ways that techno, invented in Detroit in the mid-1980s, represents the lived experience of Black people under specific historical circumstances. A kind of sonic archaeologist, Brown Jr. strips away techno’s layers to unearth the artifacts of urban planning, labor relations, race riots, the Great Migration, and Jim Crow before that. Digging far enough down, he finds the centuries-old songs of enslaved people who picked cotton on Southern plantations—a “communal rhythm” that would be replicated on the Ford Motor Company assembly lines manned by their descendants, a rhythm that would fuel Detroit’s two greatest cultural exports, Motown and techno. “It’s all this one sound of trauma and bodily agitation that comes out in various forms,” Brown Jr. told Pitchfork contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim in his newsletter Tone Glow. “When I think about Black music and being here from 1619 to the present, I see a long line of traumatic screams.”
Brown Jr.’s musical output stays true to this expressive legacy while expanding what “techno” might mean sonically. Since December, he has put out two albums of long-form experimental electronic music and an EP, Percussive Therapy, of psychedelic beat music. Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is his most ambitious release yet: a 49-minute suite that brings together fractured, shuddering drum programming with spoken-word poetry, collage, and noise. It does not much outwardly resemble the sleek pulses and iridescent chords of the classic Detroit techno he often invokes; it’s angrier, more turbulent, as committed to formlessness as symmetry. In a PDF booklet that accompanies the digital release, he invokes the poet Amiri Baraka’s Fire Music movement, which linked grassroots community organizing with the radical jazz of musicians like Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler; more than any particular musical lexicon, what Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry draws from those artists is the desire to push beyond established forms.
The backbone of the album is a machine rhythm that runs almost without pause from start to finish: a thrashing groove that pairs booming kicks and toms with jagged hi-hats. Bass and treble trade off like the flash-bang symphony of a thunderstorm. The beat is repetitive but unpredictable; it feels deliberately agitated. Over this buckling frame he drapes a succession of sounds and ideas. In “Techno Is a Liberation Technology,” the New York producer AceMo’s processed trumpet bobs and weaves, contributing to the churning atmosphere. In “Black Secret Technology Is a Traumatically Manufactured and Exported Good Necessitated by 300 Years of Unaccounted for White Supremacist Savagery in the Founding of the United States,” the beat seesaws across the stereo field above icy drones. In “A Genre Study of Black Male Death and Dying,” free-jazz drums are spun through violent pitch-shifting algorithms while a police scanner chirps and sputters over the top.
Although the album plays out as a single, unbroken piece, the most powerful track is the first, “Amerikkka’s Bay,” in which the 18-year-old writer Maia Sanaa recites a chilling poem about Black victims murdered by police: “No more dinner nights and movies with her daddy, kisses from her mommy, dreams of who she would be. He might remember the doll that laid next to her, how it too had 6 bullets lodged into it.” Her reading snaps Brown Jr.’s unstable beats into focus and provides essential context for what will follow. Sanaa’s piece also appears in the accompanying PDF booklet, alongside a collection of poetry and essays that ground Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry in the current moment. An essay by Brown Jr. links the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disproportionate effects on communities of color, to broader systemic inequalities and the failure of “White American utopianism,” a failure previously laid bare in the ruins of post-industrial Detroit. Critic Ryan Clarke captures the unrest of 2020 even more succinctly: “Riots are the voice of the unheard and percussion is the frequency.”
Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is not an easy listen. The disjointed repetition—a beat that stops and starts, starts and stops, over and over—is jarring. The rhythm jitters in place, yet it doesn’t vary across the album; it just drops out for short passages before kicking in again. (It is remarkably similar to the rhythms deployed on Percussive Therapy.) But surely that irregular repetition is part of the point. The beat’s insistently disorienting qualities short-circuit the music’s entertainment value; a track like “African American Disillusionment With Northern Democracy Continues to Smolder in Every Negro Who Has Settled Up North After Knowing Life in the South,” with its nightly news anchors discussing white agitators at Black-led protests, is unlikely to soundtrack a Friday-night dance party. The goal is to provoke, to disturb.
With its long, unbroken stretch of repetitive-yet-not-repeating beats, over which jazz samples, news segments, and police scanners are painted like scenes, Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry plays with linear time in unsettling ways. It often feels less like music than like some other medium—like, say, doomscrolling the timeline, or following a horizontal mural that unrolls new scenes of horror and resilience without end. In the liner notes to 1965’s The New Wave in Jazz, a compilation featuring Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and John Coltrane that was recorded a month after Malcom X’s assassination, Amiri Baraka wrote that the album was “heavy evidence that something is really happening.” Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is a similar form of evidence: Its scroll-like shape is a seismograph of these turbulent, hopeful times.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 8, 2020 | 7.6 | 48ceef50-5846-4e1a-bb2d-82c05ec16709 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Presented as a sprawling three-hour epic, the composer’s drone piece for guitar, cello, and sine wave oscillators seeks new rhythms within the interminable sweep of pandemic time. | Presented as a sprawling three-hour epic, the composer’s drone piece for guitar, cello, and sine wave oscillators seeks new rhythms within the interminable sweep of pandemic time. | Kali Malone: Does Spring Hide Its Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kali-malone-does-spring-hide-its-joy/ | Does Spring Hide Its Joy | Listen closely to the numerous “lockdown albums” released in the past couple of years, and you might hear shared among them the tacit understanding that the cultural reckoning is still unfinished—that anything that attempts to capture what it’s been like to live through this pandemic would be inherently incomplete, and escapism is preferred anyway. The spring of 2020 echoes constantly, but silently.
Does Spring Hide Its Joy, a newly released longform drone piece by electroacoustic composer Kali Malone performed on sine wave oscillators alongside cellist Lucy Railton and Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, was conceived during those haunted months nearly three years ago. Malone didn’t set out to make art that reflects the broader pandemic experience. Instead, she created a musical framework in which to explore the evolving mindspace provoked by its blunted whiplash, giving the listener space to imprint (or release) their own emotions and memories and homing in on the illusory properties of time. “Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight,” she explains in an accompanying statement. “Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.” The piece is performed in 60-90 minute instances, but each performance is different, allowing for an ever-shifting relationship to the material and its genesis.
Endurance is a longstanding element of Malone’s music, but Does Spring Hide Its Joy makes it a central component. Each of the three presentations of the piece featured on this release are an hour long (subdivided into 20-minute movements), and, anchored by a shared tonic drone, they easily melt into one sprawling three-hour epic. The music breathes in slow motion, with massive exhalations of bass ceding to stretches of quiet consonance before the next yawning gasp. Change is omnipresent and can be dramatic, but there’s a veneer of stillness that makes listening feel like observing the swirl of a nebula; the spectacle exists on a scale that’s difficult to grasp in one sitting. The most effective way to ground oneself in the piece is to be with the music as it exists in the moment, listening for incremental shifts as they unfold.
What Malone describes as “hold[ing] time together” involves a process of letting go of traditional musical demarcations of time and forming new ones. Drone music is often perceived to lack rhythm, but Does Spring Hide Its Joy is abundant with it, just on different scales than many listeners might be used to. You can mark time with the moments when Railton runs out of bow and changes direction, which don’t occur at regular intervals. The constant ebb and flow of volume, intensity, and dissonance, which takes place in cycles of dozens of minutes, offers another rhythmic viewpoint. But the most fascinating occurs on a much smaller spectrum of time: As the trio builds up microtonal harmonies, warbling beats caused by harmonic interference contract and expand as the frequencies fall in and out of phase with one another. Depending where the listener’s attention rests, clock time, geological time, and quantum time each become observable.
Creating music this precise and harmonically dense requires superhuman concentration, and it’s clear from these recordings how closely the three musicians are listening and reacting to one another. Rather than conjure impressions of solitude, the spontaneous decisions the trio makes—to dig into coarse dissonance, to let the glorious simplicity of an open fifth ring out, to fade into oblivion—speak to the joys of building something collectively. In a recent interview with Bandcamp, Malone discussed how working on a score by Pauline Oliveros, the composer and Deep Listening pioneer whose methods were championed in 2020 as a balm for isolation, has affected how she thinks about working within and composing for an ensemble. Out of the singular nature of sustained tones emerge entire worlds of sound that arise from each member of the trio understanding not only their own role, but how to mold their contributions around the distinct personalities of their collaborators.
There’s something utopian about music driven by an attention to understanding those around you, music that pushes listeners to expand their understanding of how time is experienced and demarcated. In a period of upheaval, letting go of expectations of how things should be, beginning with how music should move or present itself, can be a powerful step toward reimagining the future. Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward. Just beneath the surface of Malone’s composition lies an alternate path forward: one that is malleable, defined by change and the mysterious complexities of sound. | 2023-01-25T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-25T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Ideologic Organ | January 25, 2023 | 8 | 48cf4aba-49a7-4ff2-9bbf-dd8d5d1b5291 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
The Washington, D.C. band’s second album is dense with ambiguities, sacrificing their debut’s quotable one-liners in favor of character sketches about the everyday banality of evil. | The Washington, D.C. band’s second album is dense with ambiguities, sacrificing their debut’s quotable one-liners in favor of character sketches about the everyday banality of evil. | Priests: The Seduction of Kansas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/priests-the-seduction-of-kansas/ | The Seduction of Kansas | In early 2017, precisely one week after the presidential inauguration, the Washington, D.C. band Priests released their debut album Nothing Feels Natural. The fear and frustration then gripping half the nation was the backdrop for their indelible first impression: a readymade context for alternately hooky and abrasive guitar songs like “JJ” and “Pink White House.” At the time, they were heralded as if they had conceived, written, and recorded a record in a matter of weeks, rather than months or years. In the face of a corrupt regime, punk bands were going to be great again, and Priests had the fortune and misfortune to be mistaken for one.
Two years on, Priests appear ready for a realignment. Their second album is called The Seduction of Kansas, which is snappier than its inspiration, historian Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. They’re still politically conscious agitators, and this time, they want to be clear that they’re taking the long view. Don’t expect a treatise on middle America’s rightward creep, though; geographic Kansas is a distant, metaphorical concern on these songs. The state that receives the most attention is Texas, where the band—minus original bassist Taylor Mulitz, who’s replaced on record by Nothing Feels Natural collaborator Janel Leppin—recorded with producer John Congleton. Perhaps to memorialize the experience, they’ve compressed the region’s geologic and political history into the two compact verses of closer “Texas Instruments.”
Priests’ limited palette of sounds likewise allows The Seduction of Kansas to strike a more restrained tone. “I’m Clean” and “Ice Cream” strip surf rock for parts; new touring bassist Alexandra Tyson’s knotted bass is a highlight of the title track, where bandleader Katie Alice Greer sings of “a drawn-out charismatic parody of what a country used to be.” Kansas is inherently political music, powered by the same oblique fury that made U.S. Girls so compelling. These songs are dense with ambiguities, sacrificing the debut’s quotable first-person one-liners in favor of character sketches and scenarios that prompt more questions than they answer. At the same time, they’re uncomfortably realistic, sprinkled with everyday banality-of-evil references: Augusto Pinochet, the Koch Brothers, Applebee’s. The most straightforward song, “Good Time Charlie,” recounts the United States’ arming of the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, with vivid lyrics inspired by Mike Nichols’ 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War.
Not every track requires such complicated footnotes. On the searing opener “Jesus’ Son,” Greer lets loose a thrilling guttural sneer, indicting American exceptionalism and militarization: “The day I walked on water, the shrapnel ricocheted/Said, ‘Baby give it to me, Savior I’m how the West was won.’” The unnerving “Control Freak” calls upon Dorothy, the quintessential Kansan, slipping the thinnest veil of fiction over a protagonist in the grips of paternalistic mania. “You’re out of the woods, Dorothy/I’m your control freak/I’m your ‘no place like home’/Bedsheets tucking you to sleep,” Greer sings, as hair-raising reverbed chords spin out into a demented boogie.
Though the album’s characters marinate in a toxic brew of fear, normalization, and lies, its aesthetics have more in common with conceptual art. These songs toy coolly with the power of the gaze, at turns demanding attention and deflecting it: “It’s your movie/You wrote starred and directed it/I may only be your muse/But I’m necessary,” goes the closing chant of “68 Screen,” the feminist assertion of a disenfranchised actress. Meanwhile, on digital-only track “Not Perceived,” Greer instructs, “I’m uneasy about anything that might perceive me/Keep your eyes closed.” This is the sound of a band working to privilege interpretation and subjectivity, concepts that cause otherwise reasonable people’s eyes to glaze over. Priests happen to be doing it just as mainstream attitudes about the value of the humanities approach a nadir; no wonder onlookers tend to assume that art must be done at society, rather than in it.
Like some of its more theoretic inspirations, The Seduction of Kansas runs the risk of being seen as shallow, self-important, and a little nihilistic. It’s a critique almost invited by a title like “Youtube Sartre,” a scratchy, brutalist song with the simultaneously existentialist and didactic chorus, “Don’t believe yourself to be/A virtuous thief/Or virtuous about anything.” Too urgent to ignore, too pretentious to easily love, The Seduction of Kansas winds up feeling both high-concept and kind of hollow, whether inherently or in natural reflection of its subject matter—because what, in the long view, is more morally and intellectually bankrupt than American empire? | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sister Polygon | April 8, 2019 | 7.7 | 48cf72d0-b1a3-4700-bde0-6ebf7096a8ae | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The purported final album from the chart-topping hip-hop collective chronicles their rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. | The purported final album from the chart-topping hip-hop collective chronicles their rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. | BROCKHAMPTON: The Family | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-the-family/ | The Family | They weren’t going to live in the frat house forever. From virtually the moment iridescence topped the album charts—capping Brockhampton’s ascent from modest message-board origins—frontman Kevin Abstract promised the end was nigh. “This is going to be over in a few albums,” he told GQ in 2019. “But that’s okay. It’s still a family.” In early 2022, the group canceled an international tour and went on “indefinite hiatus”; at Coachella, they teased a forthcoming “final album,” sporting letterman jackets stitched with the epigraph “All Good Things Must Come to an End!”
The Family is the album foretold at Coachella, though a package of shelved recordings, TM, arrived hours later, earning the distinction—for now, anyway—of being the final Brockhampton release. In terms of personnel, The Family is effectively a Kevin Abstract solo project: Bearface and associate Boylife split production duties, but Abstract’s is the lone voice on nearly all 17 tracks. The record has a calculated fishbowl quality, chronicling the group’s rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. It’s a victory lap with a slightly bitter aftertaste, like champagne left uncorked in a trashed hotel suite.
With most of the group in absentia, The Family retains Brockhampton’s prismatic framework. Taking stock of their improbable stardom, Abstract sketches a series of brief retrospectives full of contradictory and ambivalent sentiments. In Abstract’s telling, Brockhampton’s journey was the thrill of a lifetime, and also a decade-long slog of recording and touring. “All That,” an upbeat interpolation of TLC’s All That theme, depicts the group’s meteoric rise in a panoramic blur. The song’s succession of images—hungry stomachs, disaffected co-stars—makes for a Hollywood cautionary tale, yet the stakes are relatively low. The squabbling bandmates make up in the end; Abstract, at least, is bound for bigger and better things. As a showcase of his one-man-band talent—the nasally ’90s flows on “All That,” the staccato bars of “The Family,” the easy harmonies of “My American Life”—The Family glimpses any number of possible futures.
Some of Abstract’s criticism is directed at himself, albeit with tongue in cheek. On “Good Time,” he cheers the group’s demise like it’s the last day of school, admitting his “toxic” cravings for attention and validation. It’s a poignant realization: The appetites that fueled Abstract’s viral fame made him, by his own account, a bit of a monster. He leans into the persona on the title track, reenacting his most domineering moments: “I don’t feel guilty from wakin’ you up when you sleep/I don’t feel guilty from cuttin’ your verse from this beat/I don’t feel guilty for heat you caught from my tweets/Dead projects I teased from my lack of empathy.” Some revelations feel predictable, others too inside-baseball, but Abstract’s attempt to construct a warts-and-all profile makes The Family his most ambitious conceit to date.
Supposing The Family is, in fact, the group’s swan song, we may as well perform a postmortem: What did Brockhampton mean? The specter of Kanye West looms large across their catalog (the band members met on the fan forum KanyeToThe), and The Family is no exception. “Good Time” and “Boyband” borrow the sped-up sampling technique of Kanye’s early production catalog, the cozy chipmunk-soul sound that defined the mid-2000s. Other elements—the pulsing layers of “Gold Teeth,” Abstract’s grandiosity tempered by self-deprecating humor—feel cribbed from the Yeezus era. As West’s discography is reduced to context for his public meltdowns, Brockhampton’s homage points to the resonance of his best work, and its unprecedented spread among internet communities.
As it happens, West wasn’t even Brockhampton’s most ignominious influence. Their residential incubator model was inspired by Abstract’s reverence for Mark Zuckerberg; Shia LaBeouf, since disgraced, acted as a mentor. To their credit, Brockhampton distanced themselves from other sordid associations, dismissing rapper Ameer Vann after accusations of sexual misconduct. There was a Breakfast Club charm about the unlikely collective—a union of listless chatroom lurkers who, for want of anything better to do, became a chart-topping rap group.
If their formulation as a queer, multi-racial, shapeshifting artists’ colony seemed radical, they’d probably scoff at the notion. Brockhampton never sought a soapbox, but their why-not inclusivity (why shouldn’t a rap group have an in-house app developer?) helped them chart a path around hip-hop’s reverential spaces. And yet none of their affectations—the rags-to-riches mythos, the body paint, the brand synergy—would have landed if the music wasn’t good. The post-iridescence records distilled their frenetic energy into a more technical, melodic palette, maintaining coming-of-age gravitas with fewer motivational platitudes. An epitaph fit for a gravestone: Brockhampton was greater than the sum of its parts. | 2022-11-22T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Question Everything / RCA | November 22, 2022 | 7.2 | 48d209c1-5b27-4fd0-8c98-68223f84cf5a | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The Olympia punks’ second album presents a chiming, inventive take on post-punk that's shot through with sly humor, madcap time signatures, and wild abandon. | The Olympia punks’ second album presents a chiming, inventive take on post-punk that's shot through with sly humor, madcap time signatures, and wild abandon. | Table Sugar: Collected Acknowledgements | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/table-sugar-collected-acknowledgements/ | Collected Acknowledgements | Olympia’s Table Sugar enter a venerable lineage of art-school punks who turned their lack of technical skill into the ultimate virtue: a remarkably original perspective. The band took shape on the hallowed ground of Evergreen State College in 2014, and the current lineup—Pascal, Ella, Aidan, and Jenna—learned to play together through intuition. They gave themselves a perfectly Warholian name: a cheap, everyday product that is sneakily addictive. In one self-authored biography, Table Sugar quote 1970s soft-rock band the Archies and write, “music is hot. and when sugar is hot it turns to syrup. and we’ll stick 2 u.” After a few listens, you can’t shake Table Sugar off.
The wondrous, minimal music of Collected Acknowledgments—a 12-minute 12”, the band’s second LP but first on vinyl—recalls the collectivist energy and grooving resourcefulness of late 1970s post-punk à la Delta 5. At times, too, there are pinches of the brash spark of local predecessors like Bratmobile. But Table Sugar’s humor, madcap time signatures, and general oddity (the organ lines help) feel most akin to contemporaries like Palberta in the Northeast or the recent Indiana punk milieu of the Coneheads and CCTV. Chiming and clanging, Table Sugar are nominally post-punk in style, but the only “post-” you’ll imagine in a Table Sugar song is the hyper-charged, sour-sweet second that just passed you by. This is a thrilling band, the punk equivalent of stopping to smell flowers before yanking out a fistful for a friend.
Table Sugar’s scrappy songs move forward in inventive ways. On “Baby Yaga”—named for the mythological deformed woman—one tactic is to crescendo in volume, getting louder with each intriguing line: “Thought she was talking/She’s only singing/Isn’t that something?” The buzzing, cascading opener “Dog D-Log” is a small spectacle of optimism and joy and sunflower seeds, explosive as fireworks or streamers, like a breeze through a window. “I love limes/And I like lemons/I wanna get into someone’s heaven!” is an unusual and brilliant opening phrase, beguiling and funny and serious at once. The lead vocals have the dual composure and excitement of two exclamation points augmented by a space (yes !!). There are hardly any choruses in these punk-rock joyride tunes, and ideas jump ahead too fast to worry over mistakes. Across Collected Acknowledgments, Table Sugar sprint and scamper at the edges of their celebratory songs, passing the melody around like a volleyball. It is fantastic fun. There’s a palpable sense of discovery, curiosity, and abandon.
The personality of Collected Acknowledgments bursts from all sides. The thrumming, operatically titled “Carmen” speeds and slows like halted traffic; the slightly absurd, 25-second coda “Hot Cola” indeed has a warm effervescence. On “Susan,” less than a minute long, the whole band sounds as if it is hopping in unison while shouting out associative beat poetry. Right at the center is the wiry, rocketing “No Es Nada (Ver. 3),” which seems to describe a situation of sinister uncertainty, but they poke holes in it. “He had a funny/Cigarette!” Pascal shouts, wittily antagonizing each syllable of the smoke.
In the penultimate track, “Million Places”—a bit spacious for Table Sugar, at two minutes and 32 seconds—the band epitomizes its youthful, anarchic spirit (“Take a month to keep a 20 in your wallet/The true joy true love/The million places yeah”) as if describing the price one pays for creative freedom. It feels like a self-reflection right at the edge of the world being yours, and that sense of promise runs throughout Table Sugar’s inquisitive sound. Collected Acknowledgments is captivating in the best sense: For a dozen minutes, this tiny 12” is capable of convincing you that things are actually OK—all you need to do is look from another angle, hear the world in a different way. | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Stucco | July 25, 2018 | 8 | 48d5ae94-979a-466a-bbe6-8e4e56ea7b7c | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Independent rap vet Young Dolph trades bars with fellow Memphis native Key Glock on an album that channels the city’s iconic sound. | Independent rap vet Young Dolph trades bars with fellow Memphis native Key Glock on an album that channels the city’s iconic sound. | Young Dolph / Key Glock: Dum and Dummer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-dolph-key-glock-dum-and-dummer/ | Dum and Dummer | In a rap industry kudzu’d with major-label plants, Memphis native Young Dolph has somehow remained a true independent. The man born Adolph Thornton, Jr. is now more than a dozen mixtapes, studio albums, and EPs deep into his rap career, almost all of it released and distributed by his own Paper Route Empire label.
Fellow Memphis rapper Key Glock, meanwhile, has just three mixtapes to his name. He is younger, and his solo work doesn’t announce itself with the same authority as Dolph’s. Nevertheless, he’s a dependable sidekick, and on Dum and Dummer he trades bars with his elder about the weight of their chains and their weed consumption. There’s not much else going on in Dum and Dummer, but there doesn’t need to be: Their shared charisma is enough.
All the beats are courtesy of producer BandPlay, who adds new colors to Dolph’s palette. There are stabbing, Psycho-like strings on “If I Ever,” and the looping guitars on “1 Hell of a Life” scream “Lil Peep / XXXTentacion Type Beat.” Dolph’s songwriting range has expanded along with his sound, allowing darkness to creep in at the edges. On “Black Locs,” he raps about wearing the eponymous shades so he “can’t see nobody” and taking drugs to “hide the pain that’s inside.”
Key’s six solo tracks are a younger man’s songs, Dolph’s endlessly listenable drawl replaced by rhymes that are clearer in delivery but simpler in construction. Most of Key’s songs are celebrations of himself—“Like Key” is about how “there ain’t another like me”—but his more emotionally inflected songs, like “Monster,” don’t reach Dolph’s depths of self-loathing and despair. Instead, they are classic bootstraps parables: “I came out the slums, I’m the one that made it happen/Now I’m gettin’ back ends, I used to get them bags in.”
It’s that same self-sufficiency that built Memphis rap and made it so appealing to outsiders. Because West Tennessee was ignored by the industry for so long, it became—like Houston, New Orleans, and pretty much every other major metropolitan area in the Southeastern United States—its own alternate universe, one that Three 6 Mafia and associates assembled out of Satanic verses, clouds of weed smoke, and horror-movie soundtracks.
Dolph and Glock place themselves in the lineage of Southern rap greats—on opening track “III,” they readily compare themselves to UGK and Three 6—but their music is classic, not nostalgic. The duo doesn’t need to plunder samples from rare Kingpin Skinny Pimp songs to evoke the aura of the 901; the city and its iconic sound is in their veins. | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | August 8, 2019 | 7.1 | 48dc855e-9091-437a-93d5-b9b3f9f2285b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
French power trio Aluk Todolo have used the basic instruments and fundamental techniques of hard rock and metal to pursue what may seem a musical unicorn—hyperkinetic, heavy instrumental music that’s meditative and absorbing. Voix feels meditative like Sunn O))) or Bardo Pond, Ash Ra Tempel or even Les Rallizes Dénudés. This is, as intended, music meant for submission. | French power trio Aluk Todolo have used the basic instruments and fundamental techniques of hard rock and metal to pursue what may seem a musical unicorn—hyperkinetic, heavy instrumental music that’s meditative and absorbing. Voix feels meditative like Sunn O))) or Bardo Pond, Ash Ra Tempel or even Les Rallizes Dénudés. This is, as intended, music meant for submission. | Aluk Todolo: Voix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21529-voix/ | Voix | During the last decade, the French power trio Aluk Todolo have used the basic instruments and fundamental techniques of hard rock and metal to pursue what may seem a musical unicorn—hyperkinetic, heavy instrumental music that’s meditative and absorbing. That is, they hope to produce a trance for the listener through sheer activity, with shifting rhythms and repeating riffs forming a sort of blanket of busyness.
In interviews and press releases, the former black metal dudes often speak about mysteries and mysticism, summonings and spirits, submitting to the music and sealing off the world. Maybe that sounds like mumbo jumbo or even sonic snake oil. But on Voix—the best and most incisive album the band has yet made—that last bit actually happens. Their carefully coordinated commotion becomes overwhelming and atmospheric somehow, a cocoon of activity. Not in nature but in effect, Voix feels meditative like Sunn O))) or Bardo Pond, Ash Ra Tempel or even Les Rallizes Dénudés. This is, as intended, music meant for submission.
The 43-minute Voix zigs and zags through six untitled, interlocking, and loud pieces. The songs are separated by, at most, a tension-ratcheting full rest, though many slide right into the next through beats that don’t shift and melodies that don’t stop. This maintains the athletic trio’s momentum but also the listener’s state of mind—you hang in this space with them, waiting for the next wave. Aluk Todolo achieve this fugue state by keeping up a sense of constant motion, even when they’re indulging in repetition. During the back half of the second piece, for instance, drummer Antoine Hadjioannou and bassist Matthieu Canaguier march dead ahead with the insistence of something like heavy metal krautrock. But some element is always morphing. Here, it is guitarist Shantidas Riedacker, dancing with his instrument and amplifier and sculpting several sheets of low-level feedback into a rainbow of musical grays.
More often, though, the trio slyly slips between disparate parts, webbing together separate elements with skills that suggest an interest in the symphony and perhaps the Grateful Dead. There is so much going on in these songs, with so many icons and influences distilled into each moment. But at their best, Aluk Todolo force you not to think about what they’ve heard in the past and what you may be hearing now. You notice the specific choices and changes less than the music’s overall embrace and intensity.
Voix will, no doubt, appeal to fans of Sannhet’s Revisionist, the 2015 album that best positioned itself at the restless, roiling intersection of heavy metal tenacity and post-rock sweep. Voix shares many of the same tones and feelings, and the French trio can be every bit as thrilling and heavy as their American counterparts. But there is an essential distinction: Where Sannhet’s music seems like a soundtrack to the city, where busily interconnecting parts score the machinations of some place that never sleeps, Aluk Todolo somehow offers a shield from much the same, a place to hide out while the band takes care of the busy work. How they do that, exactly, remains a little mysterious—maybe it’s those radiant, circular drones that sneak between the beats or the judicious repetition in certain parts. Either way, Aluk Todolo creeps closer to its goal of turning the combined swagger of rock and metal inside out without losing its essence than ever before on Voix. This band works hard so you don’t have to. | 2016-02-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | The Ajna Offensive | February 10, 2016 | 7.9 | 48df0d15-ebdd-4e90-9633-24a31c65ddc3 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Chicago rapper Tree has his sights set on lean, ATL-esque club records here but, perhaps despite himself, Trap Genius’ songs always come out in his own highly specific style. | Chicago rapper Tree has his sights set on lean, ATL-esque club records here but, perhaps despite himself, Trap Genius’ songs always come out in his own highly specific style. | Tree: Trap Genius | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20337-trap-genius/ | Trap Genius | Almost from the moment his digitally warped sampling approach, elastic 808 loops, and gruff, elliptical delivery began garnering him critical attention in 2012, Chicago rapper and producer Tree has been attempting to reframe the conversation surrounding his music. Trillin’, the follow-up to his lauded, self-produced Sunday School mixtape, felt like a direct challenge to those pigeonholing him as some kind of "outsider" artist: The EP took his home city’s drill music for a spin, featuring regimented, hard-nosed rapping over standard-issue production from a third party. His latest full-length solo release, Trap Genius, is in the same lineage, offering a newly straightforward take on Southern-fried street rap.
Tree has his sights set on lean, ATL-esque club records here but, perhaps despite himself, Trap Genius’ songs always come out in his own highly specific style. His ragged but tuneful baritone recalls Howlin’ Wolf more than Jeezy, and, as always, it lends his songs a weighty, soulful quality. He supersedes and reframes beats better than he rides them, especially when they’re not his own.
The primary "trap" signifier is Tree's rigid, triplet-ized flow, which these days is put to use by everyone from unofficial patent owners Migos to trend-hopping chart-toppers like Drake and Big Sean. Tree’s take on it, however, is far from conventional. He's not by nature a nimble rapper—he raps fast, but never treads lightly—and on tracks like "Betta Than Eva" and "Red Yella", a lengthy set of "Versace" triplets creates something of a bull-in-a-china-shop effect. Tree careens across the beat like a heavy projectile, papering over negative space and integrating bluesy inflections, sometimes singing from the gut in a nod to gospel.
The prevailing tone of the songs is celebratory, finding Tree enjoying the spoils of his labor as a rapper; he’s not offering the perspective of a gangbanger, but of an entrepreneur who proudly "got [money] without ever touching the 'cane." However, the ghosts of the lifestyle he grew up in—and his friends who are still caught up in it—lurk in the corners of his verses, and in the newscasts, cop radio dialogs, and field recordings of arrests that break up the tape. But these often faceless figures are side characters. For them, the money in which the rap-famous Tree revels ("Money the only thing matters at this point") is a curse ("All the money in the world couldn’t save a homie") that clouds judgment. One of the album’s standout images is of a friend "sitting in county for weeks contained/ Dreaming of being free and broke."
This best-friend/worst-enemy dichotomy is central to plenty of dope-boy rap, but the picture Tree paints is more complicated and is filled with contradictory perspectives. The cloud-rappy "New or Leins" even finds him telling the story of a woman looking for love in all the wrong places, visiting cheating boyfriends in jail. The panoramic approach is inspired, even when the shifts in vantage are abrupt, and the subjects underdeveloped.
Tree tends to linger between the cracks that define and politicize genres, themes, and flows, pitting them against each other in games of his own creation. He hears something that’s popular, figures out what people love about it, and then flips it at market price. The inclination is evidence of an omnivorous love of music, not an interest on cashing in on trends. What inspired him initially is always sublimated into his own sound; it’s "soul trap" even without the original beats to which the term usually refers. With no production from Tree, Trap Genius might not seem like a good way to get to know him as an artist, but all of his strengths are here, including his unique sense of rhythm, melody, storytelling, and economy. | 2015-03-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-03-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 18, 2015 | 7.1 | 48e715a3-09c8-43fe-bb90-fc783c85e1fc | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The preeminent songwriter and personality of New Weird America moves to Reprise without losing any of his eclecticism or quirk. | The preeminent songwriter and personality of New Weird America moves to Reprise without losing any of his eclecticism or quirk. | Devendra Banhart: What Will We Be | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13645-what-will-we-be/ | What Will We Be | Within one five-month span during 2004, Devendra Banhart-- a hirsute, multilingual, 23-year-old enigma with a wanderer's tale to tell and a sprawling, intriguing debut to his name-- released two 16-song albums: the near-flawless Rejoicing in the Hands and its less cohesive though memorable follow-up, Niño Rojo. He sang about human fragility and little yellow spiders, about old folk songs and with old folk singers, about the beauty of beards and the wealth of the world. With a versatile warble and a graceful touch to the guitar, Banhart seemed slightly manic yet strangely endearing, the rare eccentric who could turn the lightest of larks into irresistible bits of tunes. That winter, the magazine Harp likened him to Van Morrison, John Lennon, and Jeff Buckley, saying he possessed "a deeper connection to the cosmos than most of us share." By year's end, Banhart had emerged as the preeminent songwriter and personality of what was generally dubbed New Weird America, or freak-folk. He was bound, it seemed, for some bigger glory.
Banhart pursued that career in the most expected fashion: In 2005, he left Young God Records and Michael Gira, the small independent label and producer that had served as his guide, for XL, an international imprint of the label group that controls 4AD, Matador, and Rough Trade. Two subsequently guest-heavy records followed and looked to expand beyond those fundamental early works. Disjointed psychedelia concerned with seahorses, nothing tunes about Chinese children, smeared ballads about the war, the Beatles, and the slow burn of memory: Altogether inconsistent but often interesting, those albums seemed to find Banhart pursuing a global vernacular he'd yet to define. His audience grew, certainly, but, with these experiments, real fame still seemed beyond his grasp. He began dating a Hollywood starlet, hired Neil Young's manager, Elliot Roberts, and landed a big-time booking agent. A spotty supergroup with some friends and a New York rockstar followed, as did a bit role in a teenage romance and songs doled out to soundtracks and commercials. And, earlier this year, he signed to Reprise Records, home to Young, among many others-- a platform, it would seem, for [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| that bigger glory.
So one might assume that now is the time for Banhart to complete that cliché ascendance-- to make a levelheaded album of straightforward songs that stands a chance of selling. Well, maybe next time...
At first glance, What Will We Be-- Banhart's sixth album and his first for Reprise-- does feel a bit like the kind of record that might break him to an audience on the right side of an FM dial or using WiFi at Starbucks. "16th & Valencia, Roxy Music", after all, is an agile, escapist folk-disco rave about "ridin' six white horses" and "free dancin'." "Rats" is a Led Zeppelin-baiting anthem with a midsection about, again, dancing, kissing, and general merriment. And from the bright-eyed opener "Can't Help But Smiling" through the whispered, pale country boogie of "Goin Back", the album's first quarter offers a rather sunny, upbeat initiation. Banhart's writing seems normalized, too: "Love is the only thing truly worth needing," he posits at one point. "Every kiss that we miss is another life we don't live," at another. Love, drinks, drugs, colloquialisms, creation myths: What Will We Be could be a great big common lawn for aged hippies, album-rock veterans, and college-rock kids alike.
But across its 14 tracks and 50 minutes, What Will We Be again sounds like Banhart's attempt to prove he can take risks and sound interesting without his acoustic guitar. A mess of scrambled styles that ostracizes more often than it charms, at least one-third of this record plays like a batch of covers cribbed from one of those Putamayo world-music collections at Whole Foods. "Angelika" veers left from its Brazilian-cum-bluegrass lilt to show it can samba and Banhart can twist and yowl in Spanish. "Foolin'" splices reggae with the Beatles and succeeds in sounding just slightly less milquetoast than Eric Clapton's turn at island music. Meanwhile, first single "Baby" gets goofy about romance (which makes you say "holy moly" and feel like a bow-tied kangaroo, apparently) over a flimsy highlife trot.
And every time Banhart lands something genuinely agreeable, he finds a way to hamstring it: "Walilamdzi", one of the most wistful tunes in Banhart's catalog, is a simple fingerpicked reverie. Sung in the mostly lost language of Northern California's Pit River Indians, though, it comes with an inherently off-putting defense. And it's not enough that "The First Song for B" is the latest in a series of sublime Banhart piano ballads. No, it meanders into the acoustic morass "The Last Song for B", where Banhart listlessly intones, "A movement/ Attunement/ A new dream/ Beyond dream." Who knew it was so easy to sound more vague than Akron/Family?
In 2004, Banhart sang, "It's like finding home in an old folk song/ That you've never ever heard/ Still you know every word/ And, for sure, you can sing along." And that's how those early records felt-- familiar yet foreign, as if Banhart had found and reshaped something we didn't know we'd lost. Favorable reviews of What Will We Be will likely toss off adjectives like multicultural or eclectic and epithets like polyglot or plunderer. "He's only exploring," they'll say. But Banhart's third album of unhinged stylistic exploration feels more like a reach than a quest-- a timid attempt to distract with a grab bag of forms rather than to engage any one idea with vigor and innovation. We're left with songs afraid to stake interesting artistic claims ("Goin Back" puts the Flying Burrito Brothers in an autoclave) or defend them (see the needlessly circuitous "Chin Chin & Muck Muck") for very long. More focused on offering Banhart's international and oddball bona fides than crafting songs that feel at all like home, What Will We Be finds Banhart in need of direction and editing. Or, as Banhart sings on that awful dance tune of his, "We don't know what to do." Here's hoping that, someday soon, he may figure it out. | 2009-10-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Warner Bros. | October 30, 2009 | 4 | 48e7e8ea-71f9-46fd-ba3e-38611275e1cf | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Chicago band’s new album balances punk aggression and Sisyphean striving, so wide and claustrophobic that it leaves you disoriented. | The Chicago band’s new album balances punk aggression and Sisyphean striving, so wide and claustrophobic that it leaves you disoriented. | Meat Wave: Malign Hex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meat-wave-malign-hex/ | Malign Hex | Chicago’s Meat Wave is punk directness personified—in the slab-heavy weight of their name, the often two-syllable punch of their choruses (“Work force/Join now/Toll-free/Call now!”), and the clear line connecting them to post-hardcore heroes Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes. In an awed 2018 essay for Talkhouse, Meat Wave frontman Chris Sutter describes Hot Snakes’ Jericho Sirens in high-octane language—“flesh-searing,” “steel-melting.” Then Sutter says something interesting: He’d like to hear their music “played by an orchestra.” If it seems odd to compare a concerto to face-melting post-hardcore, then Meat Wave’s latest LP, Malign Hex, makes his meaning clear. The music is beautifully savage and hard-hitting, but within it lies a neurotic self-confinement—each song a vessel for repetitive structures that sprawl as far as it takes to make the point. The black-hole punk of Malign Hex tunnels into itself, so wide and claustrophobic that it leaves you disoriented.
Meat Wave have operated since 2011, rising alongside Chicago scene contemporaries like Ganser, Melkbelly, and Dehd, among some of the most interesting bands in American post-punk. Malign Hex, the band’s first studio album in five years, is grim garage punk buoyed by a math-y Polvo sensibility and alloyed with the intimate fury of early Protomartyr. The titular hex refers to the burden of family lineage; the tracklist’s encroaching darkness mirrors the inevitability of that curse. Everywhere Malign Hex’s characters turn, they meet stagnation, “wading in a waveless tide” or “steering through the slime” or reckoning within “a maze malign that never ends,” and the instrumentals strive hypnotically alongside them. “Complaint” is a rollicking, panicked spiral; “Merchandise Mart” bristles like an alley cat, its narrator trapped under the banal consumerist shadow of the titular Chicago landmark. The sudden sparseness of the lullaby-like closer “Malign” is as sharp as a temperature drop; a low-voiced Sutter utters no words but “malign” and “malign hex,” but the dread in his lament is as clear as if he’d screamed it.
Sometimes the songs ride too close to their inspirations; great as they are, “10k” and “Ridiculous Car” ring almost identical to the jackknife tempos of Hot Snakes’ Audit in Progress. And when there’s too much repetition without catharsis, as in the lumbering sprawl of “Jim’s Teeth,” the lapse in pace lends the album an uneven quality. But in its self-stymied fury, Malign Hex still offers something uniquely, viscerally raw.
There’s an accidental meta quality to the album’s themes of recursion and confinement. Although Malign Hex is Meat Wave’s first LP since 2017’s The Incessant, it was recorded in 2019, then delayed by the pandemic. When you pair it against the warmer, brighter EP Volcano Park, recorded 2020 and released 2021, the amber-vitrified nature of the material is apparent. Compressed under the weight of distorted time, the new album’s comparative darkness takes on a grim glow, like a surreal premonition of the psychological maze in which the characters on Malign Hex find themselves trapped. But though Malign Hex has been stuck in time for three years, the songs feel novel, challengingly complex without ever compromising Meat Wave’s blunt punk philosophy. | 2022-10-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Swami | October 27, 2022 | 7.3 | 48e86804-72b3-4afb-a3a7-7a63389c8748 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
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 Trail of Dead’s second album, a keystone in the aggressive indie-rock boon of the late ’90s. | 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 Trail of Dead’s second album, a keystone in the aggressive indie-rock boon of the late ’90s. | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Madonna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-madonna/ | Madonna | Superstar producer-turned-Interscope Records impresario Jimmy Iovine didn’t discover ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead in a club, or through college radio, or in a stack of demos. He found out about the Austin, Texas enfants terribles in the same place a lot of people discovered new bands before the internet: the magazine section at a Borders bookstore. But those mundane circumstances say a lot about Trail of Dead’s peculiar situation back at the turn of the millennium.
While the band’s second record, Madonna, had received a wide North American release through Merge, their combustible art-punk was received more warmly in Europe—and upon flipping through an import copy of NME, Iovine became fascinated with this unknown American band who looked like a demonic Beatles and were developing a fearsome reputation for their unhinged live show. “It was the best magazine I ever bought,” he would later tell the L.A. Times in 2001, after signing Trail of Dead to a major-label deal, underwritten with his personal commitment to support their long-term development. “I don’t care how long it takes,” he said. “We’ll sit there and let them do their thing. They have the talent.”
The one thing I’ll always have in common with the 13th richest power broker in Hollywood is that, like him, I had also become obsessed with Madonna, and was willing to go to great lengths to indulge my fandom. In March of 2001, I traveled 1,500 miles from Toronto to see Trail of Dead play in Austin for 15 minutes, at what was supposed to be their triumphant homecoming show at South by Southwest. By the time they took the stage, the bar’s back-patio area was vibrating with anticipation, and Trail of Dead uncorked that festering energy with a new song that, about a year later, we’d recognize as “It Was There That I Saw You,” the titanic lead-off track from their Interscope debut, Source Tags & Codes.
But the moment of glory was short-lived: Jason Reece had busted his kick drum in the middle of the song, leading to a sheepish request for another act on the bill to loan them a replacement. When no one stepped forward to help, Reece tried to make do by placing a small rack tom on the floor in front of his kick pedal—a savvy bit of MacGyvering, but one that effectively forced the band to play this hyped-up show with one hand tied behind their back.
Four songs in, Trail of Dead teed up Madonna’s cataclysmic showstopper “A Perfect Teenhood,” which seemed like a weird choice to drop so early, because it’s the sort of song that only makes sense as a set-closer. But that’s what it was: Even before singer Conrad Keely could fire off the song’s infamous, machine-gunned procession of “fuck you”s, Reece was hoofing his makeshift kit into the crowd, while Keely tossed his guitar aside to tear down the venue’s beer-sponsor signage, narrowly escaping the clutches of some seriously pissed-off bouncers. (Guitarist Kevin Allen, meanwhile, picked up one of the many beer bottles tossed onstage and used it to coax more ungodly noise from his instrument as if nothing was amiss.) Once the chaos subsided, I wasn’t sure if I had just witnessed the worst or greatest rock‘n’roll show I’ve ever seen.
On the one hand, the band’s SXSW massacre could be seen as an impulsive, heat-of-the-moment response to a frustrating technical setback; on the other, it was precisely what the crowd came to see. Whatever national attention Trail of Dead had acquired at the time came largely through their first television appearance in 2000 on the USA Network program Farmclub. Launched by Iovine with Universal CEO Doug Morris, Farmclub was an early attempt by major-label execs to muscle in on the nascent, post-Napster digital-music landscape: it was part online-music portal for unsigned bands, part old-school variety show—or, more accurately, paid Universal infomercial—featuring live performances and couch cameos from Iovine’s rock-star pals. After getting a pep talk from Bono, Trail of Dead performed a particularly rangy version of “Richter Scale Madness” from their 1998 self-titled debut, while the show’s poor go-go dancers tried to keep their rhythm to the sound of a drum kit being destroyed.
Reece later admitted those Farmclub shenanigans were staged—as avowed fans of the Who, Trail of Dead were simply using their moment in the spotlight to plot their very own Smothers Brothers spectacle. But if instrument-smashing has come to be seen as an unnecessarily wasteful act of rock-star excess (heartland troubadour John Hiatt was calling that shit out back in ’93), it remained the most accurate means for Trail of Dead to communicate the emotional tumult and manic ferocity coursing through their early records.
All of Trail of Dead’s sonic signatures were already in full effect on their 1998 self-titled debut: the gliding Daydream Nation guitar jams, the rapid-fire tom rolls that sound like you’re being besieged by an overhead warplane, the throat-shredding vocals from Keely and Reece (who also routinely traded positions on guitar and drums). The band clearly had grand ambitions, but was constricted by murky, low-budget production (not to mention limited distribution—the record was among the final releases on Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey’s Trance Syndicate label before it went under). Madonna was another shoestring operation, recorded by Spoon producer Mike McCarthy during his off-hours before the group had finalized or received an advance from their Merge deal. But in every possible aspect—sound quality, songwriting, sequencing, visceral power, dramatic impact—Madonna represented a super-sized upgrade.
Now that the Strokes/Stripes garage-rock renaissance of the early 2000s has been officially canonized, it’s completely overshadowed the preceding golden age of less retro, more aggro bands who were reanimating rock’n’roll in the late ‘90s. Trail of Dead belonged to a loose aggregate of kindred spirits that included At the Drive In, the (International) Noise Conspiracy, Rye Coalition, Hot Snakes, Les Savy Fav, the Icarus Line, and the Blood Brothers—bands whose music was rooted in post-hardcore abrasion, but who had enough swaggering attitude and appreciation for old-school showmanship to court audiences beyond misanthropic punk kids. With Madonna, however, Trail of Dead distanced themselves from the pack. If their debut positioned them as devout, guitar-stabbing students of Sonic Youth, Unwound, and Fugazi, Madonna revealed they were more philosophically in tune with bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, and Nine Inch Nails—groups that carried the torch for the lavishly packaged classic-rock magnum opus into the ‘90s.
Survey a random group of Trail of Dead fans about the band’s greatest album, and the widely celebrated Source Tags & Codes will likely emerge as the consensus pick. But Madonna is like the Revolver to Source Tags’ Sgt. Pepper’s—it captures the thrilling moments of transformation that precede the more formalized masterpiece. Madonna was released in October of 1999, a time when the ugly specters of Columbine and Woodstock ’99 loomed in our collective psyche just as Manson and Altamont did 30 years prior. And with news programs devoting vast blocks of airtime to Y2K-bug prognosticators and survivalists loading up their cellars with non-perishable food items, the media was intent on making you feel paranoid even if you were fairly certain your purple iMac would boot up just fine on January 1st.
As such, Madonna acquired all the grim gravitas of a proper fin-de-siècle soundtrack, a seamless song cycle that both channeled the unbearable pent-up tension of the era and released it through moments of scorched-earth anarchy. But for all its timestamped qualities, Madonna is ultimately fueled by universal, eternal anxieties and grievances: the searing salvo “Mistakes and Regrets” renders romantic longing as an apocalyptic event, while “Totally Natural” rails at a world where celebrity is forever valued over art. (Though the latter was reportedly inspired by, of all things, Keanu Reeves’ moonlighting stint in his alt-rock band Dogstar, Keely’s murderous contempt can easily be redirected to Instagram influencers who score lucrative book deals.)
“Totally Natural” wrote the playbook that countless other Trail of Dead songs would follow: a flash of hardcore ultraviolence that quickly flames out, only to slowly reignite and burn even brighter. It also signals Trail of Dead’s own metamorphosis over the course of Madonna, where the discord gradually gives way to disarming, piano-gilded balladry (“Clair de Lune”) and multi-part, Wall-sized suites (the “Up From Redemption”/“Aged Dolls”/“The Day the Air Turned Blue” sequence on side two). The band’s debut album showed they could handle more delicate material—particularly the eight-minute shoegaze reverie “Novena Without Faith”—but here, they were no longer expressing their most tender feelings in hushed whispers. And unlike Trail of Dead’s subsequent adventures in prog, Madonna’s most elaborate gestures are still executed with a scrappy intensity. This is the sound of a band storming the castle before they became comfortably ensconced within it.
One reason why Madonna flows so smoothly through its peaks and valleys is that the singers’ roles had yet to codify. From Source Tags onward, Keely would become the resident art-rock architect responsible for the band’s most melodically sophisticated turns, while Reece would deflate the pomp with jugular-bursting displays of fury. But on Madonna, they’re more accomplices than foils, harnessing the album’s careening momentum through performances that teeter between vicious and vulnerable. And for further evidence of a band firing on all cylinders, consider that Trail of Dead’s two principal songwriters weren’t even responsible for Madonna’s centerpiece track.
Bassist Neil Busch’s lead-vocal turns with Trail of Dead can be counted on one hand (he left the band in 2004), but on their early records, he was a crucial cool counterpoint to Keely and Reece’s more volatile personalities, bringing balance to the band’s dichotomous musical universe. With “Mark David Chapman,” Busch delivers an arresting chorus-free anthem that meditates on punk’s empowering kill-your-idols philosophy and the heinous actions of those who’ve taken those words to their literal extreme. (And, fitting for a band that’s always tried to reconcile classic-rock mythology with indie pragmatism, the song sounds just like Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” as interpreted by a young Rod Stewart.) By invoking the name of John Lennon’s assassin, Trail of Dead seemed to be issuing themselves a warning that the pursuit of rock sainthood comes with unwanted consequences.
Of course, that didn’t stop them from shooting for the moon and beyond on later records, even after Iovine stopped returning their calls, but on Madonna, the most epic moment is also the most unforgiving. The album climaxes with “A Perfect Teenhood,” which is at once an over-the-top caricature of an anti-authoritarian teen-angst punk rant, and the platonic ideal of an anti-authoritarian teen-angst punk rant. Emerging from the foreboding piano interlude “The Day the Air Turned Blue,” the track is prefaced by the sound of idle chit-chat in a crowded bar, the patrons blissfully oblivious to the onslaught that’s to come—an eerie invocation of the benign moments that occur before disaster suddenly strikes. What follows is essentially a 90-second hardcore rager that’s stretched out to over three times that length, thanks in large part to an extended, endlessly crashing finale showered in enough “fuck you”s to turn the song into the indie-rock “Killing in the Name.”
Alas, the world didn’t come to an end on January 1, 2000. But as media-fuelled hysteria over a predicted computer apocalypse has given way to legitimate fears of an actual environmental one, Madonna still sounds as ominous and unsettling as ever. When “A Perfect Teenhood” enters meltdown mode, it’s like being trapped inside of a Biblical plague—it’s the sound of crumbling earth, mass panic, and fire raining down from the sky. Smashing your instruments is the only way to make the terror stop. | 2019-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | November 10, 2019 | 8.7 | 48ed1aa5-79a6-4690-9d37-60c0aafc7ffe | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The master of the micro-song goes power pop on an ambitious release whose songs slide along the spectrum from sadness to madness, capturing Molina’s grief over a lost love. | The master of the micro-song goes power pop on an ambitious release whose songs slide along the spectrum from sadness to madness, capturing Molina’s grief over a lost love. | Tony Molina: Kill the Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-molina-kill-the-lights/ | Kill the Lights | You could listen to Tony Molina’s 2013 solo debut, Dissed and Dismissed, in less time than it takes to boil a pot of pasta. Follow it up with the same year’s Six Tracks EP and 2016’s Confront the Truth, and you’d still be hard-pressed to have your meal plated before all three records were done. To say Molina is a fan of brevity would be a gross understatement—this is a guy who covered a Guided by Voices song that was originally 59 seconds long and made it even shorter. His expediency isn’t merely reflected in his 10-minute albums, however. It’s also evident in his restless artistic exploration, which has seen him vacillate between hardcore and pop-focused bands for the better part of two decades, and make dramatic strides over the course of a short solo discography.
With Dissed and Dismissed, Molina conjured images of Weezer locked in the garage with the car running, desperate to blast their way through the Blue Album before they choked on the fumes. Later, on Confront the Truth, he ricocheted in the opposite direction, condensing the aesthetic breadth of the White Album to seven-inch proportions. But on Kill the Lights, he strikes a happy medium between intimacy and urgency, crafting a splendorous power-pop pastorale that channels Big Star ballads, DreamWorks-era Elliott Smith, and post-grunge Teenage Fanclub.
Where past masters of the micro-song often gave the impression that they were drawing from a bottomless well of inspired scraps, Molina’s compositions sound like the result of painstaking refinement. (As the two-year gap between his records shows, his style of concision takes time.) Unlike Bob Pollard’s madcap collages of fragmented tunes, Molina’s albums feel similar to movie trailers that allow you to discern the overall narrative arc of a film by showing you just a few brief, discrete scenes. On Kill the Lights, he makes gestures toward a classic-rock concept album—complete with an overarching theme, recurring motifs, and an instrumental outro titled “Outro”—while remaining faithful to the lean schematics of hardcore.
There are 10 songs on Kill the Lights, and all of them find Molina in some stage of grief over a lost love, sliding along the spectrum from sadness to madness. But he renders his grayscale moods with a varied, vibrant palette. Lead track “Nothing I Can Say” crystallizes the moment of breakup in deceptively joyous jangle-pop, as if to open the album with its own sardonic theme song. Acoustic serenades like “Now That She’s Gone” and “When She Leaves,” by contrast, are gorgeous and ghostly in equal measure, using their sweet Rubber Soul melodies as balms to numb the intense pain chronicled within. And at nearly two and a half minutes, “Look Inside Your Mind/Losin’ Touch” is the album’s musical and cathartic peak, alternating between serene prog-folk passages and dramatic guitar-solo ascensions.
That rare moment of indulgence makes this album the first Molina solo release to creep just past the quarter-hour mark, and the other conventionally scaled tunes here—like the swooning “Jasper’s Theme”—reinforce the notion that he’s tiring of his reputation as a quick-hit artist. But while Molina teases more elaborate arrangements, the embellishments sometimes have the paradoxical effect of making a song feel incomplete. On the quietly devastating “Wrong Town,” Molina contemplates relocating to a new zip code to avoid running into his ex, but the soothing synth tone that takes over in the last 15 seconds introduces a hint of optimism that’s never contextualized. And winding down the XO-worthy “Afraid to Go Outside” just as it settles into its heavenly church-organ groove simply feels cruel. It’s clear Molina has grand ambitions here. But by confining them to a flyer-sized canvas, Kill the Lights becomes his first record that will have you not just marveling at everything Molina can pack into a 60-second song, but also lamenting what he might be leaving out. | 2018-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | July 28, 2018 | 7.5 | 48f8751a-41d3-443e-888f-3836389f0c4e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his third proper Bing & Ruth album, and first for 4AD, David Moore’s electroacoustic minimalism carries its strongest emotional tug. It’s his earthiest and most distinctive record yet. | On his third proper Bing & Ruth album, and first for 4AD, David Moore’s electroacoustic minimalism carries its strongest emotional tug. It’s his earthiest and most distinctive record yet. | Bing & Ruth: No Home of the Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22888-bing-ruth-no-home-of-the-mind/ | No Home of the Mind | Bing & Ruth’s music exists in the cracks between. Project leader David Moore has a degree in music and his earlier compositions, found on the 2010 album City Lake, can have the air of the conservatory. So it makes some sense to slot his work in with contemporary classical. But the era of classical music Moore most frequently evokes—the trance-inducing minimalism of the 1960s and ’70s—has at times been filed as new age. And divisions between *that *genre and the more critically acceptable sphere of “ambient,” a word that sometimes describes Bing & Ruth, have always been porous. Beyond these labels, Bing & Ruth is also hard to pin functionally. Moore’s pieces can feel formal, less like “environments” and more like compositions that need to be tracked carefully over their duration to be understood. Though he’s made music for an ensemble that includes woodwinds and strings, Moore also includes processed tapes and production choices that smudge the lines between acoustic and electronic music.
On City Lake and 2014’s Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Moore’s music evoked the best of what had come before him—Philip Glass’ repetition, the emotional shading of Max Richter, Eluvium’s comfort with rock dynamics—but he’s steadily grown into a sound that feels all his own. No Home of the Mind, his third proper album and first for 4AD, is his most distinctive record yet. His working group is still here, but the arrangements on *No Home *feature Moore’s piano much more prominently, and it’s a more focused record. If City Lake and Tomorrow sometimes found him moving between established styles, demonstrating wide-ranging mastery because he can, the new album stays focused on wringing as much feeling as possible out of narrower terrain. And No Home of the Mind is the earthiest Bing & Ruth record yet. You can smell the sweat that went into it.
One of Moore’s composition signatures is to turn the piano into a drone instrument. Using rapid clusters of repeating notes, Moore creates piano figures that hang in space like clouds of slowly shifting sound, not unlike passages of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano or the work of Young acolytes like Michael Harrison. Where the latter two artists are known for using the piano as a tool for overtones via specialized tuning, Moore creates piano-based drones that serve as the basis for his ensemble pieces. The other instruments’ parts exist in relationship to what he’s doing at the keyboard, offering contrasting textures and leading through varying shifts in mood and tone. It’s almost as if all the separate parts come together into a single instrument, one that is “played” collectively by the Bing & Ruth ensemble.
“Starwood Choker” starts the album sounding like a continuation of the last Bing & Ruth record’s criss-crossing tapestries of sound. But the record really begins to reveal itself on “As Much as Possible,” which finds Moore in the realm of “solo piano with ambient treatments” à la Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s The Pearl. Moore’s chord voicings suggest both gospel music and the spare “furniture music” of Satie. As he moves between modes, extremely subtle bits of tension are introduced, built, and then released, while yawning chasms of drone from the ensemble drift in and out beneath. “As Much as Possible” is Moore’s most tender and affecting piece yet, a filmic work that evokes haunting images on its own.
Throughout the rest of No Home, the piano moves between heavy drone (“Form Takes”), achingly spare and meditative ballads (“To All It”), and pieces that explore how much can be done with simple repetition (“The How of It Sped”). The tracks flow one into the next, which accentuates the connections between them and makes No Home feel like a single massive piece, carefully mapping every inch of its defined terrain. Moore is so gifted at teasing out emotion, it seems inevitable that there will be many film and television scores in his future, if he chooses to go that route. If that happens, No Home of the Mind will be remembered as his breakthrough, the place where all the pieces from earlier records snapped into place. | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | 4AD | February 21, 2017 | 8.2 | 4904bcdb-031c-45f6-b9c0-42c0007163da | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Toronto singer’s album is a country and gospel-infused meditation on death and mourning that flickers between the broadly universal and the devastatingly personal. | The Toronto singer’s album is a country and gospel-infused meditation on death and mourning that flickers between the broadly universal and the devastatingly personal. | Jennifer Castle: Angels of Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jennifer-castle-angels-of-death/ | Angels of Death | Death is resilient, clingy as ivy. When the funeral ends and everyone goes home, it remains, like an unwanted house guest. Death’s branches have long framed the Toronto musician Jennifer Castle’s work. This time, she says, “I wanted to try to put it in my center vision.” But death’s rude presence belies the album’s charming and often breezy qualities. Themes of loss, confusion, and frustration meet burning country and gospel-inspired anthems and sparse, piano-driven ballads. Throughout, she effortlessly conveys the conflicting emotions that accompany loss. Angels of Death exhumes death’s many forms with tenderness, narrating the often inarticulate core of grief—from pain and emptiness to the memories and hovering apparitions.
Album opener “Tomorrow’s Mourning” spotlights the chrysalis that envelops those consumed by death. Her voice a reflection over meandering piano chords, Castle testifies to the universality of mourning. The bare-bones album opener is a sound preamble to what follows. “Crying Shame” is a gospel-influenced howler that showcases the power and range of Castle’s affecting voice. It’s also driven by piano, but with force and precision. Rather than pulling back to capture the full panorama of loss, it hones in on a specific moment. It frames each line in the stanza, each instance within that moment, with regret. “It’s a shame,” she sings at the start of each line. “It’s just a crying shame.”
In the album’s highlight, “Texas,” Castle holds a magnifying glass up to her own experiences. “I go down to Texas/To kiss my grandmother goodbye,” she sings over bouncing acoustic guitar and percussion, before honing on the devastating detail: Her grandmother probably doesn’t remember, because “she forgets things.” It’s an example of Castle’s skill at taking a personal detail—traveling from a big city to a rural nowhere for a heavy and final farewell—and transforming it into something universal. At least that’s how it felt as the song joined me on a similar trip, from Los Angeles to Evansville, Indiana, where my own grandmother was dying from cancer.
Along the way, Castle offers glimmers of the way death affects the creative process itself. “Rose Waterfalls” explores the absurd timing of inspiration—how a muse is never there when you need her—over a pedal steel and twangy electric guitar. The album is divided into two acts, each ending in a reprise titled “We Always Change,” led by warbling slide guitar and flashing strings. That song creates a natural demarcation between the stages of grief, from the rough goings of shock, pain, anger, and depression to the upturn that comes with reconstruction and acceptance. “If you turn into a tree/I will sway/I will sway with you,” begins the second reprise. The song’s first instance is an instrumental, meanwhile, underscoring the idea that it’s difficult to summon words when flooded with darkness.
Angels of Death is not the stuff of support groups or self-help paperbacks, though. It’s a collection of probing reflections over music that gets directly at the heart, without trying too hard to do so. Castle cites Joan Didion’s tragic memior The Year of Magical Thinking as a source of inspiration, which seems fitting. Confusion and devastation ring clearly throughout Angels of Death, via simple, everyday details—like her depiction of a midnight drive—that are relatable and poignant. With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive. | 2018-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | May 22, 2018 | 7.6 | 4904d204-5142-47be-9351-769520d98bfe | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
The debut EP from Los Angeles-based ambient folk musician Helen Ballentine is short but captivating. Even without specific details, her words are deeply felt. | The debut EP from Los Angeles-based ambient folk musician Helen Ballentine is short but captivating. Even without specific details, her words are deeply felt. | Skullcrusher: Skullcrusher EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skullcrusher-skullcrusher-ep/ | Skullcrusher EP | Skullcrusher, the ambient folk project of Los Angeles-based, New York State-raised musician Helen Ballentine, is soft and subtle. Her lyrics are intimate, and when she sings it feels as if she is making unsparing eye contact. While the acoustic confessionalism of her debut EP Skullcrusher isn’t terribly original, it is nonetheless lovely, captivating, and quietly devastating.
It’s tempting to lump Ballentine’s music in with that of Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, but spiritually Skullcrusher is closer to Phil Elverum’s work as the Microphones, with its tendency towards spectral ambiance and steak tartare-level rawness. Opener “Places/Plans” showcases Ballentine’s multi-tracked vocals alongside a simple acoustic guitar chord progression. “Do you think that I’m going places?” she asks with a tinge of irony, following the question with another more heartbreaking: “Does it matter if I’m a really good friend? That I’m there when you call and when your shows end?” The words are straightforward and to the point. With the exception of an overdubbed synthesizer that glows softly as old headlights, the arrangements are sparse.
Ballentine writes about first loves burdened by discomfort and paralyzing uncertainty. On the brief “Two Weeks in December,” she sings about a first encounter with a romantic prospect that eventually turned sour. “I looked cool rolling cigarettes/You were fooled by my jokes/I was too/I didn’t know you,” she sings sadly. You can practically hear her hands move up and down the neck of her guitar, creaking like wooden floorboards. The vast empty spaces between her words can make it sound as though Ballentine is pausing to omit identifying details as she reads directly from a diary. First kisses and first dates often lie, she seems to say, and the versions of ourselves we present to potential partners aren’t entirely real.
Skullcrusher is just a sketch. The EP is less than 15 minutes long; you could grab a glass of water and make your bed and have made it most of the way through these four songs. But “Trace,” a song that feels like the final embrace at the end of a relationship far past its sell-by date, shows Ballentine inching towards something more fleshed out. “When you come over/You don’t ask me how my day went,” she sings in a moment of stasis, before banjos, synthesizers, and bleary-eyed guitars triumphantly coalesce. She questions what it means to stay, and whether or not things will fall apart the second she gets up to leave. But instead of retreating into the shadows of uncertainty and unhappiness, Ballentine takes flight. There are no identifying details to cling to here—just shades of feeling so strikingly familiar that Ballentine might as well be singing about you.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | July 28, 2020 | 7.1 | 49063ba8-0827-4b24-a861-97ab33bf0891 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
In the 1980s, the women of Look Blue Go Purple helped define the Flying Nun label’s Dunedin sound, putting their own enchanted spin on gentle guitar pop. This new comp surveys their catalog. | In the 1980s, the women of Look Blue Go Purple helped define the Flying Nun label’s Dunedin sound, putting their own enchanted spin on gentle guitar pop. This new comp surveys their catalog. | Look Blue Go Purple: Still Bewitched | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23338-still-bewitched/ | Still Bewitched | In the late 1970s, punk swept through the UK and washed away any remaining mop-top mods. In Dunedin, New Zealand—among the furthest possible cities from London—kiwi punks applied this self-sufficient ethos and wrote pop songs. Their lo-fi jangle pulled from the Byrds’ ’60s pop melodies, the psychedelia of Pink Floyd circa Syd Barrett, and the Velvet Underground’s corporeal dronings. It would be dubbed the historically influential Dunedin sound after a 1982 compilation from its most iconic label, Flying Nun Records. Two of the bands on that comp, the Chills and the Verlaines, along with their Flying Nun labelmates the Bats and the Clean, would come to define New Zealand’s mid-1980s indie rock scene. Amid all these humbly named acts, Look Blue Go Purple—Francisca Griffin (formerly Kathy Bull), Norma O’Malley, Kath Webster, Denise Roughan, and Lesley Paris—were bound to stand out.
Like their optimistic, kaleidoscopic moniker suggests, Look Blue Go Purple poured vivacity into a scene that was already chock full of cheery, sparkling songs. But unlike a majority of their peers, the quintet never released an LP, which prevented them from finding a foreign audience despite their mainstream success on the New Zealand pop charts. Still Bewitched, a recent compilation of Look Blue Go Purple’s three EPs and unreleased live rarities, promises to expose a new crowd to the band’s enchanting style.
After forming in 1983, Look Blue Go Purple debuted with a tight, distinct sound on 1985’s Bewitched EP. The five women fused the gentle guitar pop that was then well-established by their Dunedin/Flying Nun labelmates with the post-punk experimentation of the Slits and the Raincoats, and to a lesser extent, Swell Maps and Television. Three of Bewitched’s four tracks each focus on a different sound: the whistling synths of “Safety in Crosswords,” the new-age flute and staggered drumbeat of “Vain Hopes,” and the cloudy chill of “As Does the Sun.” But it’s “Circumspect Penelope” that gathers these elements together and affirms Bewitched’s pleasant distance. “She’s been waiting 20 years/And you just walk in/Telling stories of the sea/She should hate you, your Penelope,” the band bitterly scold The Odyssey’s titular character, whose wife has been waiting years for Odysseus’ return. Thanks to the crystalline sound of O’Malley’s organ, Webster and Roughan’s saccharine guitars, and the tight interplay between Griffin’s bass and Paris’ quick crashing drumbeat, Look Blue Go Purple’s condemnation is by far the poppiest, catchiest track on the EP. But their layered vocal harmonies seem to be the murmurs of sirens from a world beyond.
When Look Blue Go Purple returned the next year for LBGPEP2, the band shed their winter coats for a bright new life. A whimsical song like “Cactus Cat” would have been a shock on the staunchly post-punk Bewitched, but on the LBGPEP2 it feels right at home. “Cactus Cat”’s sun-streaked bubblegum style flows into “Grace,” a hypnotic, lilting tune about a girl whose beauty has faded from her namesake to something far more foul. “100 Times” and “Winged Rumor” recall Bewitched’s subdued mysticism thanks to the former’s hushed, airy chorus and the latter’s reverential flute. But the gossamer feel of both songs give way to a ramshackle groove, something Bewitched’s songs never achieved. The spoken-word incantation “Hiawatha” is the band’s most new wave song, though its punctuations of shrill synths and howls surpass in imagination anything their peers were making.
“Cactus Cat” in particular propelled LBGPEP2 to No. 26 in New Zealand’s pop charts in January 1987. The band used the track’s popularity to address a topic that had haunted their press. At the end of the song’s succulent-stocked music video, an anonymous interviewer queries whether there are any difficulties being a female band. “Only the presumption that it means something, that it’s a bunch of females together,” says Webster. “But we just happen to be five musicians who get on well and play music together but it can be a hassle.” Look Blue Go Purple never labeled themselves as feminist, nor was the content of their music remotely political. The only people who seemed to find the band’s gender worth noting was the media; players in the New Zealand indie scene considered it a non-issue. Women “were very active participants in a very creative and politically active era, charged with post-sexual revolution and determination to create anything but typical male music,” says the Chills’ Martin Phillipps. That said, “[It’s] rock’n’roll, gender has got nothing to do with it,” Griffin concludes in the video.
Shortly after the release of 1987’s* This Is This*, Look Blue Go Purple broke up to pursue other personal and professional ventures (notably, Paris became the manager of Flying Nun). The quintet’s final release is their most indie pop record, and echoed the concurrent work of England’s C86 bands like the Shop Assistants and the Pastels. The bouncy “I Don't Want You Anyway” makes rejection seem fun while the docile “Year of the Tiger” could be a Sarah Records cut. Perhaps because of its spare compositions, for the first time the band’s eloquent lyrics are placed in the limelight. “I’m a fool to believe in love and its channels/I’m a fool to believe in it at all,” Griffin sings on “In Your Favour.” But by the end of This Is This, Look Blue Go Purple fall into the same pattern as *LBGPEP2 *and return to the sleepy melancholy of their first EP.
Still Bewitched ends with seven unreleased live takes handpicked by the band from their final years—all originals except for an impassioned cover of folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Codeine.” The most intriguing of these are the funky sleuthing “Spike” and “A Request,” which show the Raincoats’ abstract influence more discernibly than any of their official releases. The inclusion of these tracks on the compilation is a refreshing peek at what Look Blue Go Purple sounded like in their prime: a little mythical, a little goofy, overflowing with wistful indie pop hooks and eloquence. Without Look Blue Go Purple, any definition of the Dunedin sound is insufficient. | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flying Nun | June 2, 2017 | 8.3 | 49091a52-f4e9-46dd-9da7-3d93f7831c3c | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
The notoriously kooky singer/songwriter's fifth full-length picks up the thread of 2005's schizophrenic Cripple Crow, alternating between kitschy genre exercises and the sweetly emotive folk songs that have always been his greatest strength. | The notoriously kooky singer/songwriter's fifth full-length picks up the thread of 2005's schizophrenic Cripple Crow, alternating between kitschy genre exercises and the sweetly emotive folk songs that have always been his greatest strength. | Devendra Banhart: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10687-smokey-rolls-down-thunder-canyon/ | Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon | In the age of computerized music-listening, calling an album "too long"-- a dubious complaint even two decades ago, when CDs first made track-skipping simpler-- seems absurdly outdated. After all, it's easy enough to make an iTunes playlist of a record's best songs, right? So I don't get it when people call Devendra Banhart's albums too long. Not only is that problem easy to rectify, but his rambling style needs room to breathe, and space to wander toward its inspirations. Banhart's valleys have rarely diminished his peaks, and often provided ramps to them.
But after spending time with the 16-track, 66-minute Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, I'm starting to understand. It's not so much that the quality varies, but that a bloated, lethargic feel permeates the record. Banhart has too much skill and creativity not to hit on something good when given 16 chances to do so. But in the context of the album, even the best pieces sag, bathed in a blurry haze that bleeds over from other songs. And it's hard to shake the feeling that the highlights would've been brighter given the extra time and attention they were deprived of by the lows.
The easiest fix would have been for Banhart to restrict his tiresome love of genres. This cloying infatuation pops up on all of his albums, but he usually keeps it to a minimum, and often tweaks the clichés of the styles he apes. But more than one-third of Smokey consists of indistinct genre exercises. There's a flat Samba piece ("Samba Vexillographica"), a middling Reggae jaunt ("The Other Woman"), a weak Motown rip ("Lover"), and a sub-Santana Spanish rocker ("Carmencita"). Worst of all is "Shabop Shalom", a Jewish love song done in doo-wop style and filled with painful couplets ("When I'm ever in a foul mood/ I've gotta see you in your Talmud"). Banhart labors to distinguish these tunes with his stellar voice, but they remain stubbornly forgettable. Only "Seahorse", a classic-rock epic that's sort of Banhart's "Layla", rises far above mimicry, but even it doesn't make any moves that you can't see coming.
Smokey does have a handful of songs that capture Banhart's idiosyncratic mix of odd folk and warbling emotion. For the most part, this happens when he keeps things simple: Opener "Cristobal" is a modest tune with a worm-like melody, while "Tonada Yanomaminista" is energetic and sharp, practically caffeinated compared to the sluggishness around it. Even better is "Bad Girl", whose gentleness is hypnotic rather than sleepy, much the way the slower shuffles on Stephen Malkmus' solo albums find tension in patient strolls. Over small slide guitar and pitter-pat percussion, Banhart's tale of romantic ambivalence is achingly pretty.
Similar simplicity bolsters the album's end. The Gordon Lightfoot-esque soft rocker "Freely" benefits from a nice Banhart vocal turn, while the wistful piano and voice of "I Remember" feels like an update of "Autumn's Child" from 2004's Rejoicing in the Hands. Best is the final cut, "My Dearest Friend." As Banhart bemoans how he will "die from loneliness," the track does the opposite, gaining strength from its unadorned setting and lack of heavy effects, indulgent flourishes, or winking genre baggage. It's a strong way to close Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but an even stronger reminder of how much better Banhart can be. | 2007-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | XL | September 21, 2007 | 6.5 | 490e484a-53b9-4a04-888a-819fdf586055 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The underrated titan of West Coast gangsta rap stays true to his classic formula on an LP featuring guest verses from spiritual descendants Conway the Machine and Dave East. | The underrated titan of West Coast gangsta rap stays true to his classic formula on an LP featuring guest verses from spiritual descendants Conway the Machine and Dave East. | MC Eiht: Lessons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mc-eiht-lessons/ | Lessons | Two weeks after the 1992 L.A. uprising concluded with 63 dead and 12,000 arrested, Compton’s Most Wanted returned to the studio to cut their third full-length fronted by then-20-year-old Aaron “MC Eiht” Tyler. That the resultant album, the visceral Music to Driveby, didn’t incite the same moral panic as Death Certificate, O.G. Original Gangster, or The Chronic wasn’t a reflection of its quality relative to those records so much as its zoomed-in worldview. Eiht’s bloody tales of blacktop warfare weren’t, at first glance, political in the mode of his neighbors wit’ attitudes. Instead, they charted the insular dynamics of his hometown with nihilistic affect. A mostly unrepentant antagonist prone to flashes of lucid reflection, Eiht approached the carceral state, militarized police, and Southern California redlining with sorrow rather than revolutionary rage. On Driveby’s vibrant follow-ups We Come Strapped and Death Threatz, he leaned into the chaos, flaunting territorial pettiness like a pro-wrestling heel. If he was, as he often claimed, a menace to society, it’s because society was, well, a menace.
It’s testament both to Eiht’s consistency and the sputtering American experiment that his music still resonates three decades on. By the mid-’90s, C.M.W.’s best work had been adapted by lesser descendants like Watts Gangstas and South Central Cartel, but Eiht’s ability to convey his environs in a succinct, visual manner kept him afloat in a crowded market. Lessons is a worthy late addition to the MC Eiht Cinematic Universe, its scenery familiar in a way that doesn’t invoke cheap nostalgia; there’s nothing to be reclaimed or recaptured because, for better or worse, Eiht’s music never strayed beyond these settings in the first place. When he deadpans, “Rollin’ up trees on a magazine/Another n***a died, sippin’ lean” on the smooth highlight “Things We Go Through,” you can hear the disquiet in his grizzled voice. Eiht always made shootouts and drug deals sound like nine-to-five drudgery, and on Lessons they’re relayed with a survivor’s wariness.
The solid guest roster on Lessons adds color to a template of hard snares and sturdy hooks. On the sinister “Get Money Man,” B-Real makes for a perfect vocal foil, his jittery opening verse paving way for Eiht’s dour world-building. Mitchy Slick’s excellent appearance on “Stand Up” is buried a bit within the album’s 20 tracks, but the effect is similar—his eager flow veers around the drum pattern before Eiht steers back to center. Dave East and Conway the Machine appear as emissaries from the new school, but in practice they’re the same breed of glowering quick wit as Eiht. If rappers had coaching trees, Eiht would be Rick Pitino.
The beats, supplied by Ferhan C, Hermanata, D-Ace, and C.M.W. comrade Tha Chill, are clean in a clinical, post-2001 way, sun and palm trees with whiffs of gunsmoke and diesel exhaust. They settle into their grooves and stay there. To say that these tracks would’ve sounded at home in 2005 or 2015 isn’t really a critique, but it does underscore how deliciously weird Eiht’s classic compositions were—while his peers mined the P-Funk catalog for any samples Dr. Dre might have neglected, Eiht enlisted SOLAR Records session player Willie Zimmerman to help build orchestral arrangements and long, rolling “Endoludes” comprised entirely of ad-libs. Lessons offers some adequate chipmunk soul on “That’s Perfect,” a bright horn fanfare on “Ambition.” It’s all professionally competent, if not particularly distinctive.
Eiht’s timeless narratives on “Hood Took Me Under” and “All for the Money” were kinetic and claustrophobic, sweeping cause-and-effect arcs which encompassed decades in the course of individual verses; when he wasn’t scaling fences and fleeing S.W.A.T. teams, he was training his own infrared beams on whichever saps were unlucky enough to be wearing the wrong color. Lessons is comparably static and, it must be said, recounted largely in the past tense. (“I know the theme of this song is familiar,” Young Noble admits on “Magic.” Well, yes.) It’s an unlikely trajectory for the Compton Cyco, but Eiht plays the elder statesman admirably. “Whut U Really On” and the title track do nice jobs dispensing hard-earned wisdom without resorting to soapbox proselytizing.
There’s a real chance Eiht wouldn’t have lived to see 30 if he’d kept making records like Death Threatz. But having listened to his last few projects, I still don’t know much about what middle age looks like for MC Eiht, and frankly I’d like to—he’s a clever writer and a perceptive, charismatic narrator who’s lived a remarkable life. His famous cameos on “m.A.A.d city” and “One Life to Live” were such show-stoppers because they served as reminders of what singular presence he has. If he could manage to land a few weeks with a Rick Rubin or a Madlib, I’d love to see what happens when Eiht’s genius gets loose and deconstructed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Blue Stamp | September 15, 2020 | 6.8 | 491229a1-f0ae-4c76-9f8a-47feae9376fa | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
After the vulnerable masterstroke Alopecia, WHY? unleash a record that's darker in content but often gorgeous in sound. | After the vulnerable masterstroke Alopecia, WHY? unleash a record that's darker in content but often gorgeous in sound. | WHY?: Eskimo Snow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13450-eskimo-snow/ | Eskimo Snow | During an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, WHY?'s Yoni Wolf called Eskimo Snow, "really the least hip-hop out of anything I've ever been involved with." This might just be a less verbally economical way of saying, "we did this with the guy who produced the last Clientele record." Wolf's got a dry sense of humor like that. It's telling that he put it in those terms-- though 2008's staggering Alopecia won plenty of well-deserved plaudits, the most often-heard criticism I heard was a bizarrely general one, essentially that listeners were expecting a hip-hop record and got subjected to 50 minutes of indie rock. The Anticon name must still be heavy in the streets, but the truth is, as long as Wolf continues to be as candid and vivid as he's been in the past, he'll have more in common with the expressionists of outre rap than the straight-laced indie vanguard.
To a large degree, Eskimo Snow comes off like an acknowledgment of that gap rather than a collection of songs culled from the same sessions that birthed Alopecia. For better or worse, Eskimo Snow eschews the musical and emotional contours of Alopecia for a resigned saunter to the gallows. The shift is made apparent from the album's killer first line: "I wear the customary clothes of my time/ Like Jesus did with no reason not to die." But as "These Hands" progresses, it never builds into a larger statement, just an insular word collage.
But thereafter, the latest from WHY? is almost completely devoid of the black humor that typically undercuts Wolf's most uncomfortable confessions, save for centerpiece "Into the Shadows of My Embrace", which serves as the album's reservoir of nebbish quotables. The drum roll that follows "it'd take a busload of high school soccer girls to wash those hospitals off me" could just as easily be replaced by a rimshot. By the song's midsection, Wolf can barely contain himself, hyperventilating, "I wish I could feel close to somebody, but I don't feel nothing/ Now they say that I need to quit doing all this random f-f-ff...," biting his lip at that last word, embarrassed as much by his situation as the ease of the rhyme itself.
That's pretty much the last bit of levity before the second half's unyielding bleakness. Balancing it out-- and Wolf's curdled, nasal honk-- is one of the unexpectedly pretty albums you'll come across. Much of Eskimo Snow continues in the manner of "A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under" (which gets reprised on the stormy piano ballad "One Rose"), favoring loops of mallet percussion, live drumming, and acoustic guitar. "January Twenty Something" introduces honest-to-god vocal harmonies that blossom and split apart with surprisingly delicacy. But as the album progresses, only the brief, coiled intensity of flanger-lashed "On Rose Walk, Insomniac" proves to be a counterpoint to all those literal bells and whistles. Considering WHY?'s shift towards indie, the mixed meters of "Berkeley By Hearseback" seem influenced by Chicago post-rock. Meanwhile, many have remarked on the similarity of "This Blackest Purse" to the more maudlin side of Ben Folds, while the title track is in the style of the exhausted, finger-plucked acoustic send-off that served as the closer on the last couple of Death Cab albums.
It is easy to focus on what's missing here-- nothing strikes with the surprising pop instincts of "Fatalist Palmistry" or the unsettling hilarity of Wolf's far-fetched and yet somehow affecting closet-cleaning about buttfucking Berliners, throwing up behind Whole Foods, or "jerking off in an art museum john til my dick hurts" (this line went over surprisingly well at a performance in L.A.'s Natural History Museum). But as the cryptic refrain of "no flash photography" gives a new dimension to the weary C&W crawl of "Even the Good Wood Gone", it's clear that there's a hangover to be nursed, a need to "feel nothing" after Alopecia had Wolf "doomed to feel too much," as Pitchfork's Jason Crock said. Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities. | 2009-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Anticon | September 25, 2009 | 6.9 | 49131160-fc13-43b5-9135-8198de095f03 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
In songs adapted from her book-length poem Orlam, the British singer-songwriter crafts a hallucinatory dreamworld out of folk instruments, primitive electronics, and warped field recordings. | In songs adapted from her book-length poem Orlam, the British singer-songwriter crafts a hallucinatory dreamworld out of folk instruments, primitive electronics, and warped field recordings. | PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pj-harvey-i-inside-the-old-year-dying/ | I Inside the Old Year Dying | PJ Harvey has dedicated the second half of her career to finding new ways to sound unlike herself. Since her 2007 reboot, White Chalk, Harvey has retired the seething yowl that was once her signature, replacing it with whatever high trills, strained cries, and utterly unlikely expressions she can squeeze from her upper register. During the recording sessions for I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first album in seven years, she committed to stretching her voice even further beyond its apparent limits, employing longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood to overrule her any time she sang in what she now calls “my PJ Harvey voice.”
That sounds like a miserable way to work, with your co-creators acting as a kind of bark collar, correcting you for defaulting to the notes that come most naturally from your throat. But constraint has a way of breeding creativity, and there’s no denying the indelible, almost dissociative quality that Harvey’s left-field vocal choices have given her recent albums, most memorably her 2011 autoharp-freaked antiwar masterpiece Let England Shake. The effect is like witnessing an out-of-body experience—a worshipper speaking in tongues, perhaps, or a method actor losing themselves a little too deeply in character. Her displaced voices create a sense of transportation, discovery, and, fairly often, panic.
With I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey has again crafted something with no precedent in her discography: a hallucinatory dreamworld woven from non-traditional folk instruments, primitive electronics, and field recordings warped and distorted beyond recognition. She adapted these 12 songs from her 2022 book Orlam, an epic narrative poem that she spent the better part of a decade completing, in part because it required mastering the nearly forgotten dialect of Dorset, the English county where she was raised. Her verses depict an upbringing presumably something like her own but heightened by fantasy, juxtaposing the mundanities and seasonal rhythms of rural youth—school days, farm work, sexual awakenings—against a blend of horror and magical realism.
A spiritual realm tugs at the boundaries of Harvey’s imagining of Dorset, with a cast that includes a supernatural oracle in the form of a dead lamb’s eye and a Christ-like figure named Wyman-Elvis and modeled after The King himself. (In addition to lyrics about peanut butter and banana sandwiches and Memphis, “Love Me Tender” repeats as a refrain throughout the album, sung as both serenade and scripture.) Allusions to Shakespeare, John Keats, and Joan of Arc lend additional comp-lit intrigue to her lyrics, though it’s unclear whether they’re keys to unlocking the album’s puzzle or merely Easter eggs.
The mythology of I Inside the Old Year Dying is inscrutable even by Harvey’s standards, a nonlinear story told in a language you can’t fully understand. Dorset’s archaic dialect includes words like mampus, inneath, scrid, gawly, charken, and chammer, and even with the glossary that Harvey has included to help decode them, her sentences still read like a cryptogram that’s been solved incorrectly. “I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh/Just a charm in the woak with the chalky children of evermore,” she sings on the boisterous “I Inside the Old I Dying.” The title track, on the other hand, is hushed and vaporous, trading the other song’s stomp for the raw, lips-to-mic intimacy of ’60s folk records.
In an early imagining, the album was conceived as a theater piece, and Harvey brings a stage director’s sense of sound design to Dying, unsettling her compositions with manipulated and distorted field recordings that create a sense of uncanny nature. Ultimately, the record’s greatest gambit isn’t any individual bold choice but the decision to stack so many on top of each other: the disquieting production, the odd instrumentation, the ancient tongue, the daffy vocals. Her falsetto on “Autumn Term” is so cracked and fragile it’s almost farcical, like something out of a Bob’s Burgers credits sequence. When she pinches her vocals on “Lwonesome Tonight” she sounds like a Punch and Judy puppet’s Neil Young impression.
On another record, those vocals might scan as whimsy. Here they become one more element left disquietingly out of place. Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind. | 2023-07-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | July 13, 2023 | 7.9 | 4913d3b3-bdcc-4b18-a2ad-88232e6a8afe | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Pilloried in the press for her every misfortune, Lily Allen scrutinizes her public persona on an album that dilutes staggering sincerity with uninspired beats. | Pilloried in the press for her every misfortune, Lily Allen scrutinizes her public persona on an album that dilutes staggering sincerity with uninspired beats. | Lily Allen: No Shame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lily-allen-no-shame/ | No Shame | In the four years since Lily Allen released Sheezus, her ill-received attempt at pop-culture satire, the English star has been pilloried for her every misfortune. She’s been targeted for her drinking habits, endured a very public breakup, and—most despicably—gotten blamed for the stillbirth of what would have been her only son. Tracking every sensational headline associated with Allen would require a secondary hard drive, as her public profile has always been shaped by tabloid interpretations of her private life. On her new LP, No Shame, the singer scrutinizes that persona from the perspectives of internet trolls and family members, as well as through her own self-deprecating gaze.
Thematically, Allen’s approach is more nuanced and genuine here than in the celeb-baiting bangers of Sheezus, but thin production bleeds much of the record dry, often draining the color from its impassioned material. The album’s least interesting songs sound like prefab pop, assembled and packaged for any available vocalist. The P2J-produced “Higher,” with its spare finger snaps and bonfire guitar, recalls a Justin Bieber single; Allen’s two-dimensional vocal drifts just above the mix like a paper plane losing altitude. “Your Choice” and “Lost My Mind” suffer from a similar overfamiliarity, both featuring the same rhythmic snapping and whispered lyrics. The issue isn’t that these songs are transparently bad but that they bear no trace of Allen’s personality. On each one, her point of view is buried by the unimaginative whims of her producers.
Fortunately, she resurfaces on “Waste” and “Trigger Bang,” two doses of perfect pop that could have appeared on Allen’s exceptional 2006 debut Alright, Still. The latter has some of the most varied production on No Shame (thanks to Sheezus collaborator Fryars). Its downtempo snares, moody synths, and frolicking piano make for a lovely bit of bubblegum that doesn’t lose its flavor as you chew; Allen is bolstered, not bogged down by the beat. She sounds courageous, reflecting on her gregarious party days, and making the decision to step away from them for the sake of sanity. Opener “Come On Then” is another highlight, addressing how Allen is perceived by the press and her lumpen haters. “Yeah, I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad wife/You saw it on the socials, you read it online,” she coos over a frantic drum machine. Her tone is subtly barbed but vulnerable, a duality she conveys well.
That vulnerability is the record's greatest asset, and Allen communicates it most effectively in the mid-album triptych “Family Man,” “Apples,” and “Three”—ballads that find her wandering the rubble of her marriage and slumping under the weight of parenthood. “Family Man,” produced by Mark Ronson, showcases her most powerful vocal delivery, as she implores her partner to stay while reminding him of her irreparable flaws. Fashioned from even greater despair, “Apples” is the bedridden acceptance of failure that follows the pleading. In her shrinking falsetto, Allen lists off milestones of a defunct relationship as if she’s flipping through her wedding album with a handle of vodka in hand.
“Three” is No Shame’s most affecting song. Over sparse barroom piano, Allen laments being left by a loved one. Its opening measures could be sung from the point of view of a pining wife or a desperate husband, but the perspective shifts when she confesses, “This afternoon I made a papier-mâché fish, mum/I made it just for you/Please don’t go/Stay here with me/It’s not my fault, I’m only three.” It’s a staggering moment, one that communicates the yearning of a child, the guilt of a parent, and the societal pressure to be a perfect mother, all in a couple of concise lines.
If Sheezus was Allen at her most ironic, Allen’s new album marks a return to sincerity—and its assessments of motherhood, failing relationships, and infamy are penetrating. Sadly, these potent themes are often diluted by antiseptic production. The press may love to pile on Lily, but it isn’t her persona that undermines No Shame. Blame it on the beat. | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | June 13, 2018 | 6.3 | 4916e058-b68f-4741-9164-941c61703415 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Avery Springer and her bandmates grow into a bigger, bolder sound on their second album, pushing beyond obvious hooks and taking new risks with their songwriting. | Avery Springer and her bandmates grow into a bigger, bolder sound on their second album, pushing beyond obvious hooks and taking new risks with their songwriting. | Retirement Party: Runaway Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/retirement-party-runaway-dog/ | Runaway Dog | The song titles on Retirement Party’s second album read like a checklist of responsibilities on the path to maturity, each a bit more dispiriting than the last: “Runaway Dog,” “Compensation,” “Old Age.” By the time we reach “I Wonder if They Remember You,” it can be hard to recall that the band’s primary lyricist, Avery Springer, is barely out of college. But even on their debut LP, 2018’s Somewhat Literate, adult obligations loomed in the background, anxieties spurred by the expectations that set in when college finals give way to job applications. The standout song on that record, the blown-out “Passion Fruit Tea,” offered jamming with friends as a respite to the drudgery of work. But two years later, having graduated with a degree in music business, Springer has an understandably more jaded outlook. Her newfound angst is palpable on Runaway Dog, channeled via slick, outsized refrains.
Runaway Dog pursues a more atmospheric and anthemic sound than Retirement Party’s debut, one that doesn’t lean on an onslaught of immediate hooks. This might be a result of the record’s more collaborative process, with drummer James Ringness and bassist/guitarist Eddy Rodriguez providing input from the beginning, rather than simply coming in to record Springer’s fully conceived songs.
The resulting melodies are more patient, their progressions more meandering and less obvious. On “Fire Blanket,” which opens with distorted power chords punctuated by blasts from the drums, it takes almost 30 seconds for Springer to start singing; for a band whose biggest singles previously featured her voice within the first beat or two, it’s a sign of restraint. A gleaming new guitar melody introduced in the second verse propels the song to the final refrain with a newfound polish. The same is true of the title track, which opens with a galloping rhythm guitar; drums don’t enter the picture until nearly a minute in. That deferral—building up the song in layers, stacking two verses before anything resembling a chorus—creates a tension that was missing from their previous releases. Trusting that the audience will stay beyond the hook is a bold choice; executing it so confidently from the first track shows a band eager to transcend pop-punk expectations.
They take risks with songwriting structure as well, with opening lines often beginning somewhat in medias res; on “Compensation,” Springer drops us into an unfiltered lamentation: “Oh when the quality’s poor, how can you sell a feeling/Without unethical means of promotion?” It’s a rapid-fire mouthful, syllables stretched to fit the rhythm guitar, a rambling tactic that seems designed to blunt the force of her criticisms. But lest the song sound like pop punk by way of Slint, the band lands on a shout-along chorus that’s just abstracted enough to speak to generalized anxieties: “I’ll always know to look both ways before I cross the road/If I get hit all that means is compensation.” In context, it’s a bleak evaluation of the current state of the industry, and a line that establishes what Retirement Party do best: cheeky mixed metaphors, often pulling from childhood lessons, that point out the ironies of adulthood.
Verbosity is a standard trope of emo songwriting, one Retirement Party deploy frequently to lend a sense of breathless anxiety to ostensibly cheery instrumentation. But where Springer’s rushed delivery on Somewhat Literate was charmingly dizzying, impressive in its tight enunciation over whip-fast guitars, that approach falters when the band takes its time. With each word painstakingly drawn out, the sheer syllabic effort on slower tracks like “Old Age” and “Afterthought” sounds taxing, as if she’s fatigued by so many vowel sounds. On a record only 10 songs long, the odd vocal crack or awkward rhyme can threaten to derail the momentum so steadily built in the first half.
But the inclusion of slower songs—ballads, almost—also signals a conscious effort to avoid premature categorization. They’re an emo band from the Midwest, but they don’t have the twinkling orchestral melodies of “Midwest emo.” They sing about anxiety over power chords, but their lyrics are couched in a layer of detached poeticism that sets them apart from the frustrated, lovelorn cries of their pop-punk peers. Springer nods to the patterns expected of her band on the quiet, twangy closer “Wild Boyz”: “Write a song that they can sing along with/Make friends that you don’t even have to talk with.” It might be a recognition of the band’s current ambitions, and a confession that she wants something more. As a distorted guitar breakdown sweeps over the track like an approaching storm, we’re left with a band fit for a stadium, no matter the size of the rooms that they’re currently playing. | 2020-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Counter Intuitive | May 23, 2020 | 6.9 | 491ba3f7-1d46-4459-a528-9bf53ade9c2b | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Reissued on vinyl for the first time in four decades, the Yellow Magic Orchestra drummer and vocalist’s 1981 solo album isolates his infectious hooks, powerful rhythms, and modern pop sensibility. | Reissued on vinyl for the first time in four decades, the Yellow Magic Orchestra drummer and vocalist’s 1981 solo album isolates his infectious hooks, powerful rhythms, and modern pop sensibility. | Yukihiro Takahashi: Neuromantic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yukihiro-takahashi-neuromantic/ | Neuromantic | Released only a few months after Yellow Magic Orchestra’s legendary BGM, Yukihiro Takahashi’s 1981 solo album, Neuromantic, attempted to isolate what the group’s drummer and lead vocalist brought to the table. “I wanted to see what would happen if I pulled out only my own part,” Yukihiro Takahashi told music editor Yuji Tanaka in an interview. The album’s title gestures to Takahashi’s fascination with the UK’s New Romantic cultural moment of the early ’80s, while also doubling as a wry pun on his “neurotic” desire for self-expression. A fully formed expression of an artist on the bleeding edge of a revolutionary movement, Neuromantic—reissued on vinyl for the first time in four decades—functions as a process document illustrating the inner workings of one essential piece of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s futuristic machine.
To make Neuromantic, Takahashi took a pilgrimage to London with English DJ and YMO associate Peter Barakan in tow, seeking to collaborate with musicians from the UK. Tony Mansfield of synthpop group New Musik was tapped to provide backing vocals and keys (New Musik’s 1979 hit “Living by Numbers” was a favorite of Takahashi’s), and Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay of Roxy Music—the group credited as a primary inspiration for the New Romantic movement—offered their talents too. “Drip Dry Eyes,” which Takahashi previously penned for YMO protégé Sandii, wouldn’t have sounded too out of place on Roxy’s Flesh and Blood from the year before, with Takahashi giving his best approximation of Bryan Ferry’s silky voice. But there’s something extra here that sets it apart: Takahashi drums with the rigidity of a seasoned session-player-turned-technophile, and YMO bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto lend a hand, imbuing the track with their signature alien synthesizers.
While the other two YMO members appear occasionally on the album, this is Takahashi’s chance to shine, and what comes through clearest is his modern pop sensibility. Gone is Sakamoto’s experimental edge and Hosono’s folksy Americana, leaving only a powerful focus on rhythm and infectious hooks. On “Connection,” Takahashi’s drums roll in over a soaring guitar riff and percussive, stabbing synth as he croons a lament: “I haven’t got a clue/How to connect with you.” The instrumental “New (Red) Roses” sounds more like a typical Yellow Magic Orchestra number—de facto fourth band member Kenji Omura shares a writing credit—unfurling yet another helix of the group’s DNA. Its thumping beat shuffles along in a triumphant march, underpinned by warbling synth. The track is heavily reminiscent of Solid State Survivor’s “Rydeen,” which was, of course, also a Takahashi cut.
Neuromantic’s original working title of Ballet—a name it would have shared with BGM’s opening track, which Takahashi composed—speaks to a prescient understanding of the need to iterate on YMO’s innovations while they were fresh. Takahashi was fully aware that he was in the center of a revolution, and acted quickly to place his personal handprint on the moment before it crystallized. “BGM on the radio,” Takahashi sings on “Extra-Ordinary,” nodding to the popularity of Neuromantic’s sister album; it’s partially a victory lap, but also a signal that he wasn’t finished pushing the envelope.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Alfa | December 13, 2021 | 8.2 | 491bfb6f-daee-4198-86fa-e25ef1fa68f0 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
The grunge survivors leap back into the moshpit of time on a live album culled from their 2016 tour of Europe. | The grunge survivors leap back into the moshpit of time on a live album culled from their 2016 tour of Europe. | Mudhoney: LiE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mudhoney-lie/ | LiE | As anyone—or at least anyone over the age of 30—will tell you, the world is moving way too fast. Five weeks ago might as well be five years ago in today’s news cycle. Our social feeds are loaded with “want to feel old?” listicles of stuff that really isn’t that old. The avalanche of music now available at our fingertips—with our virtual listening piles growing exponentially by the second—can feel overwhelming. But then you remember that Mudhoney are still around, doing what Mudhoney have always done: laying down a fuzz-punk sludge that’s murky and quicksand-thick enough to stop time itself. And suddenly it’s as if order in the universe has been restored. Because in a world where everything is constantly changing, Mudhoney’s decision to endure and staunch refusal to evolve feel less like a case of comfort-zoned arrested development than a valorous act of defiance.
For a band that’s always trudged forward at its own unassuming pace—having survived peak grunge, the Judgment Night soundtrack, the ’90s alt-rock bust, cameos in Chris Farley flicks, the departure of original bassist/unofficial band mascot Matt Lukin, and the near-collapse of the music industry—2018 marks a rare moment of reflection. Mudhoney turn 30 this year, and they’re throwing themselves a party in the form of LiE, their first proper, widely available live album, featuring recordings culled from their 2016 European tour. Its purpose is seemingly two-fold: LiE functions as both career overview (albeit a highly selective one), and a testament to this veteran band’s undiminished snotty insolence.
Anyone who’s seen Mudhoney on recent tours knows the band can still bring it, and then some. After years of having his snarling voice compared to Iggy Pop, frontman Mark Arm has taken to acting more like him, too, by relinquishing his guitar for long stretches of the show, and becoming one of the few men of his vintage who can still credibly command a mosh pit. But LiE is ultimately less a vicarious recreation of the Mudhoney live experience than an oddly procedural vacation-slide-show summary of one. The individual performances are gut-punching in their potency—“Get Into Yours” in particular exudes a raw-nerved, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-1989! quality, while the roiling “Poisoned Water‚” is a worthy ambassador for 1998’s way-underrated Tomorrow Hit Today. But the discrete presentation of the songs sucks them dry, with the abrupt fade-outs robbing the album of any in-the-room ambience and natural momentum.
Given that even the most produced Mudhoney album comes slathered with in-the-red scuzz, what you get here are essentially soundboard-quality live versions of songs that, with a couple of slightly jammed-out exceptions (like an extra-droned “The Final Course”), don’t differ all that much from their studio-recorded incarnations. The sequencing and song selection also leave something to be desired: the sullen Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge dirge “Broken Hands” (the closest this band has ever gotten to a power ballad) feels like a bummer note to go out on, especially when Mudhoney routinely end their nights with a blitzkrieged rip through Black Flag’s “Fix Me.” (As a consolation prize, we get their black ‘n’ blue cover of Roxy Music’s glam stomper “Editions of You” one track earlier, with Steve Turner’s queasily contorted leads ably subbing in for Brian Eno’s sci-fi synth squeals.)
Naturally, LiE peaks in those rare moments when successive tracks from a given show are presented seamlessly—like when the mid-tempo Vanishing Point strut “What to Do With the Neutral” tees up the survivalist rallying cry “I’m Now,” from 2008’s The Lucky Ones. Not only is the latter track the best song Mudhoney has put out this century, it speaks to the band’s current state of mind as soundly as “Touch Me, I’m Sick” did back in 1988. True to this band’s contrarian, anti-sentimental nature, that signature, grunge-spawning single is nowhere to be found here—and neither are any of the other classic tracks from their iconic debut EP Superfuzz Bigmuff or the associated early seven-inches, even though they still comprise a healthy portion of the band’s current set lists. Mudhoney may be celebrating a milestone birthday this year, but LiE would prefer to highlight the band’s agelessness, by showing how more recent rave-ups like “I Like It Small” can hold their own alongside stage-diving standards like “Suck You Dry.” And if nothing else, the album proves that, for Mudhoney, there’s still no time like the present to get ripped apart. | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 23, 2018 | 6.9 | 491c7137-8680-4efc-ac2a-65cc3b48b65b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their Epitaph debut, veteran metal band Converge sound more polished but no less ferocious. | On their Epitaph debut, veteran metal band Converge sound more polished but no less ferocious. | Converge: You Fail Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1595-you-fail-me/ | You Fail Me | Despite their tendon-tearing, odd-time calisthenics, tech-metallurgists Converge are just a bunch of dudes with guitars. Oh, but they're not. They're good at deceiving us: What hits the tongue like straight blitzkrieg metal leaves a peculiar aftertaste.
It isn't always easy to find the mosh-pulse at the center of You Fail Me, Converge's seventh and definitive album, so unless you don't mind a stiff neck, you might want to internalize these songs before rushing out to the band's live show. Converge are some of the most fearsome technicians in metal, but unlike Dillinger Escape Plan, whose songs are like feats of 22nd-century civic engineering, they're unusually organic. You Fail Me is all hardscrabble local hardcore in its gritty viscera.
Ever maturing and honing, Converge have maintained a fairly consistent sound over their nearly 15-year career, so how does You Fail Me differ from cult classics such as Jane Doe and When Forever Comes Crashing? For one, the band have jumped ship from Equal Vision Records-- a veritable subterranean hardcore dynasty and Converge's home for the better part of the last half-decade-- to quasi-major Epitaph. You Fail Me is a more polished album, but this works to their advantage: Not only have Converge retained (even sharpened) their razorblade cut, they're now bolstered by a brawny low-end. Jacob Bannon's vocals are mixed lower than on previous efforts-- a popular metal technique-- and though his sautéed larynx is still a distinctive part of the mix, it takes on a comelier, more elemental quality.
The real magic of the record lies in its pacing. You Fail Me is Converge's first capital-A album. The one-two combo of "First Light" and "Last Light" is an auspicious opening. In the former, Kurt Ballou's echoey guitar peals are a perfect prelude to one of the band's most concussive, exacting and anthemic songs. Ever. "Last Light" is inestimably great, industrially precise but quaking with vitality. Ballou even squeezes in a reprise of his opening cadenza before the super-colossal breakdown, which somehow manages to reign in the song's momentum without sacrificing velocity.
You Fail Me never peters out. Converge are still programmed for hyper-speed, but Ballou throws in some artier stuff where he can, leveling "In Her Blood" and "Hanging Moon" with fairer-- if not quite huggable-- melodies. Can you spell 5/4 without prog? "Heartless" can; its jaunty odd-meter intro is almost danceable, in an early Dismemberment Plan sort of way. The album's totemic centerpieces-- the title track and "In Her Shadow", which combined account for a third of its runtime-- juxtapose the album's densest and most pastoral moments without seeming forced.
Fifteen years is a long fucking time. And yet Converge still look young, to say nothing of the way they play. There's always something to be said for sticktuitiveness, but the unbroken lineal ascent of Converge's ouvre is a lesson to those of us who thought we'd long outgrown our scene days: Don't judge too soon, for the dudes in cuffs may yet return to kick your perfidious ass. | 2005-03-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-03-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | Epitaph | March 6, 2005 | 8 | 491e5ff2-bfaf-4c4f-a6cf-eec7ce7c5cf0 | Pitchfork | null |
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A new reissue of this influential 1991 Japanese psych compilation—with gems from Ghost, Keiji Haino and others—is a revelatory listen. | A new reissue of this influential 1991 Japanese psych compilation—with gems from Ghost, Keiji Haino and others—is a revelatory listen. | Various Artists: Tokyo Flashback | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-tokyo-flashback/ | Tokyo Flashback | Hideo Ikeezumi had worked in Japanese record stores for a decade when he realized “there was almost nothing coming out that I liked.” So in 1980, he started his own shop in Tokyo called Modern Music, stocking it with underground sounds—noise, free jazz, and, most importantly to him, psychedelic music—that mainstream stores wouldn’t touch. A few years later, still unsatisfied with many of the records he heard, Ikeezumi decided to put one out himself. He chose a band called High Rise whose members often hung out at his store, and whom he liked because their music was “obscure and chaotic.”
High Rise’s 1984 debut album, a maelstrom of adrenaline-addicted rock damage, was titled Psychedelic Speed Freaks. Realizing that the record needed a catalog number, Ikeezumi added “PSF-1” to the spine. His label was henceforth known as PSF, and though Ikeezumi didn’t consider Psychedelic Speed Freaks an official name, that phrase certainly fit the music he went on to release. By the ’80s, psychedelic music had been around for almost 20 years, but the artists Ikeezumi supported—most of whom came from the Japanese avant-garde—found myriad ways to give it new life. “At that time, in the ’80s, the people who liked noise and free jazz...understood without explanation the value of psychedelia,” Ikeezumi said in 2000. “When they heard psychedelia, they really got it.”
The freshness of the psych-rock that Ikeezumi championed was clearest on 1991’s Tokyo Flashback, the label’s 12th release and first multi-artist compilation—an underground touchstone that influenced countless musical speed freaks around the globe, but went out of print for years before being reissued this month. Subtitled “a long awaited sampler of 8 artists who drive the Tokyo psychedelic scene,” the eight-track CD included noisy jamming, haunting folk, punkish blasts, and even experimental a cappella. It was all tied together by brutally-primitive sonics—Ikeezumi loved raw, imperfect production—and a communal vibe, due largely to the fact that many participants frequented Modern Music, including several who actually worked there.
The most immediately exciting material on Tokyo Flashback is drenched with fiery guitars and mammoth rhythms, mixed into a cacophonous lava pouring from speakers. High Rise, Marble Sheep & the Run-Down Sun’s Children, and Fushitsusha (whose first two albums on PSF, released before Tokyo Flashback, are legendary for their bleeding psych bombast) all stomp on the gas pedal until it breaks. But there are other gears on Tokyo Flashback too: Ghost’s seance-like acoustics, White Heaven’s Blue Cheer-style string wrangling, Kousokuya’s slow-burning metal, and a closer by Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino that consists solely of his harrowing vocal calisthenics.
Tokyo Flashback’s initial release helped spread PSF’s name internationally and led to wider exposure for several of its artists. Examples include Ghost’s later work on Drag City and the still-growing stature of Haino, whose constant stream of diverse experiments over the past four decades have made him a living underground legend. And while Ikeezumi passed away this past February at 67, he had authorized American label Black Editions to reissue the PSF catalog. Their newly released version of Tokyo Flashback—the first on vinyl—features stunning packaging by Black Editions founder Peter Kolovos and Rob Carmichael, and original liner notes by Hideki Shimoji, a name the label says is likely a pseudonym for Ikeezumi himself.
Over 25 years later, Tokyo Flashback still offers the thrill of glimpsing the Japanese underworld circa 1991, dipping back into a vibrant moment when artists were finding something new and challenging in a forgotten genre. Even better, it’s a chance to connect with the thrill that Ikeezumi enjoyed as a maniacal music fan on a quest to unearth weird gems. “Do we really need this kind of music in this peaceful era of ours? Not necessarily,” Shimoji/Ikeezumi writes. “However, I believe the sounds on this compilation can serve as a good barometer, allowing us to distinguish true music from the overwhelming amount of background dross.” That claim has aged well: Tokyo Flashback still sounds loud, bold, and wild enough to drown out almost anything else that calls itself “psychedelic.” | 2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Black Editions | October 25, 2017 | 8.3 | 4920406a-38ba-4dca-960d-be094997be40 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The 22-year-old singer fits into a burgeoning pop niche where angsty emo rap, frothy trap-pop, sunny Top 40 choruses, and punchy pop-punk riffs congeal. | The 22-year-old singer fits into a burgeoning pop niche where angsty emo rap, frothy trap-pop, sunny Top 40 choruses, and punchy pop-punk riffs congeal. | Iann Dior: on to better things | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iann-dior-on-to-better-things/ | on to better things | Iann Dior grew up writing poetry and worshiping Paramore, pirating pop-punk and popping on headphones to drown out the world with Panic! at the Disco. He stumbled into a studio after a breakup and posted a mournful mixtape on SoundCloud; soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, and within weeks, he’s said, the labels came calling. He connected with the hip-hop production collective Internet Money, known for their work with Juice WRLD and Trippie Redd, and pumped out a track a week, lacing songs about heartbreak and death with chugging chords and candy-coated hooks.
Some listeners thought Dior was a label prop, engineered to succeed in a porous streaming ecosystem; in 2019, his debut album arrived with the tongue-in-cheek title Industry Plant. As he grew more popular, scoring a feature on rapper 24kGoldn’s inescapable 2020 TikTok hit “Mood,” Dior fit easily into a burgeoning pop niche where angsty emo rap, frothy trap-pop, sunny Top 40 choruses, and punchy pop-punk riffs congeal alongside peers like Post Malone, blackbear, and Travis Barker’s recent crop of protégés. The result is perky, digestible music about dread and suffering. Dior’s new album, on to better things, grapples with the fallout of his newfound fame with mopey self-seriousness. At 22, he sounds weary. “I’m picking up where Juice WRLD left off,” he told NME. It’s an ambitious statement and a stark one; so much of the despair in his music feels descended from artists whose success stories became tragedies.
Sorrow is the default in these songs. Dior spends most of the album treading water as he rehashes familiar sentiments—fame is hollow, love is a trap, Instagram is annoying. The momentum comes from how nimbly he switches genres, swerving between sanded-down pop hooks, strutting basslines, and soupy synths. He tries on a tortured rockstar aesthetic, interpolating Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” for an unconvincing breakup ballad (“She not a surgeon, but she really took my heart out”). The stylistic plasticity is a testament to his stable of production talent (Internet Money’s Taz Taylor, Cashmere Cat, and Barker, who’s featured on three of 15 songs), but also the conventions of the artists Dior emulates. He’s said that he considers Machine Gun Kelly a mentor, and he tries his best to borrow Kelly’s slick hooks and disaffected rasp. The Barker-featuring “obvious” sounds like a Tickets to My Downfall B-side with lazier lyrics. (“Got me feeling wavy,” Dior sings, “Don’t fuck up the vibe tonight.”) “thought it was,” a two-minute pity party about the disappointments of fame, opens with a strumming guitar and Dior wailing about his life “in the hills”; it sounds like a diluted version of Kelly’s “I Think I’m Okay,” until Kelly himself shows up to growl about getting high.
The governing philosophy of the album seems to be if you can’t beat them, join them, or at least corral them into a feature. “V12” is the most effective song, a twinkling bauble of TikTok bait that drags Lil Uzi Vert along over thudding, blown-out drums. “Don’t forget who did this shit first,” Uzi lilts, echoing Dior’s chorus but also stating the obvious—this is a blatant copy of his squelchy production and crooning flow. Dior swipes at melancholy almost casually; it’s jarring, on a song like “let you,” to hear him toss out a line about not wanting to die young between spirited acoustic strums and trite lyrics about the breakup-to-makeup cycle. The narratives that drive Dior’s writing—the anxiety of ending a relationship, the depletion of depression—sink into an anesthetized blur. He’s less likely to sing about individual feelings than he is to slot the occasional diamond or pair of designer shades into the general morose template. These songs have the gravity and specificity of a crying emoji.
Dior stays vague and vacant throughout the album, invested in his feelings but short on interesting ideas. (Hollywood? Toxic! Heartbreak? Difficult!) “I’m a punk with a twisted brain,” he wails, and asks us to take him at his word. But there was a sense of fun in the pop-punk that Dior listened to as a kid and venerates now, a playfulness to all the skinny ties and side parts and melodrama. Dior seems so focused on convincing us he’s miserable that he doesn’t leave room for character or charm. “Fame doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” he sings. Fame seems to mean not feeling anything at all.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 10K Projects | January 27, 2022 | 5.2 | 4925e8d9-a53b-4a85-9d8b-c8fe3658f8aa | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
This Brooklyn duo traffics in spare, low-lit R&B, its elements bleeding together or blurring just out of focus. | This Brooklyn duo traffics in spare, low-lit R&B, its elements bleeding together or blurring just out of focus. | Denitia and Sene: love and noir. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22641-love-and-noir/ | love and noir. | “open wide.,” the first video from Denitia and Sene’s second full-length album, oscillates from oversaturated white daylight to bleary nighttime shots of the group. Shot by Brian Marc (Sene’s an alias) that filmic quality carries over to the Brooklyn duo’s music, which renders spare, low-lit R&B with its elements bleeding together or blurring just out of focus. Three years have passed since their debut introduced their fuzzed-out trip-hop/soul, and it wasn’t easy to sort what they were up to at the time. love and noir. continues along the future R&B template they introduced on His and Hers., more often than not favoring a simmering, slow-moving pulse that falls closer to the pace of a resting heartbeat than almost anything else on modern R&B radio.
That deliberate pacing gives opener “favorite.” a gentle feel, weary but calmed, befitting the song’s theme, when the other half has returned from a long day’s work. Synth brass bubbles up and finger snaps accentuate the bass throb, as Denitia admits: “My favorite part of the day is when I see your face/I know it sounds cliché/But when I see your face/Everything’s okay.” But even though the lyrics acknowledge their own triteness, they don’t quite escape it.
The album explores love, doubt, and the pins and needles in between, territory that R&B has traversed for decades. But despite delving into the shadows of love, the duo too often stretch their imagery to the breaking point. “strung.” twines a halting beat and deep bass wobble to a prickly guitar lick that get layered to the point where it approaches shoegaze-thick fuzz. A deft bit pizzicato strings blips up midway through, but listen to the lines about being “torn at the seam” and said strings belabor the metaphor running through the track, which asks: “Whose strings have you strung?”
Denitia and Sene are adept when it comes to establishing a seductive mood for the length of a song, but over the course of this twelve-track album, it turns sluggish. “roulette.” warns “don’t try this at home” against a muffled kick that never rises above the haze and long stretches of the album feel lethargic. “open wide.” remains the highlight of the album, achieving a balance between ’80s anthemic balladry and ’00s R&B noisiness.
Only as the album draws to a close do the slow tempos gain traction and push forward the songs. “alone.” finds Denitia toggling between defiant and forlorn against a slippery breakbeat and pleading guitar. “How far can we go?” the duo harmonize on closer “too far.”, Denitia’s voice reaching a poignant note;. But just as the mood settles in, the beat fades away before the three-minute mark and casual chatter takes over, like a door opening from a darkened studio back into daylight. | 2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Input | December 6, 2016 | 6.6 | 49283a87-d675-4215-8d6e-6965e9efbcbd | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On this impressive debut, the 11-piece Boston band puts its own spin on Ethopian music, mixing a few originals in with a well-chosen selection of "Golden Era" compositions, folk tunes, and troubadour songs. | On this impressive debut, the 11-piece Boston band puts its own spin on Ethopian music, mixing a few originals in with a well-chosen selection of "Golden Era" compositions, folk tunes, and troubadour songs. | Debo Band: Debo Band | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16847-debo-band/ | Debo Band | I've listened to a lot of Ethiopian music, and not just from the most widely-known "Golden Age" of Ethiopian pop so masterfully plumbed by Francis Falceto's Ethiopiques series. I'm talking folk music, modern pop made with synths and drum machines, and the music recorded to cassettes during the long dictatorship of the Derg from 1974 to 1987. Even so, I didn't really know what to expect when I first put on the debut from Debo Band, an 11-piece Boston band that's billed as putting its own unique spin on Ethiopian music, a spin that covers that same gamut rather than simply going to the Ethiopiques well.
The band acquits itself amazingly well, mixing in a few originals with a well-chosen selection of Golden Age songs, folk tunes, and Azmari troubadour songs. They don't limit themselves to a faithful homage to the music. Ethiopian music's reliance on pentatonic scales and modes makes it harmonically compatible with a wide array of other folk music, and even if you've spent hours listening to Mulatu Astatke and Alemayehu Eshete, you'll hear plenty of fresh ideas here, as the band spikes its arrangements with hints of Romany brass and even Celtic melody.
Those moments are flourishes, though, building off a style born of the distinctive sounds of one of the oldest countries in the world. The band is led by ethnomusicologist Danny Mekonnen, an Ethiopian born in Sudan and raised in the U.S., and its vocalist is French-raised Ethiopian Bruck Tesfaye, who sings powerfully in Amharic, the language whose rhythms this music was primarily built around. They've taken their instrumentation in an adventurous direction, giving their horn section a huge low end with sousaphonist Arik Grier and incorporating electric violinist Jonah Rapino and acoustic violinist Kaethe Hostetter (Hostetter has established her own music school in Addis Ababa). Guitarist Brendon Wood also adds a highly original voice to the music. His wild psychedelic leads on "Habesha", "Asha Gedawo", and "Ney Ney Weleba" sharpen those songs' already wickedly funky edge.
All that is what makes Debo Band far more than a genre exercise. These people have clearly spent time in this rhythmic and harmonic world and learned how to use the vocabulary not only to play the music, but to expand it. Tesfaye's pleading, intense vocal on the group's spare arrangement of the traditional "Medinanna Zelesegna" owes a debt to Tlahoun Gèssèssè and other powerful Ethiopian singers of the past, but the way it mingles with Hostetter's melancholy, drone-based violin part doesn't. Likewise the thrillingly dissonant climax of "Habesha" and the snaking accordion solo that follows it. It's not an easy feat to pay tribute and transcend that same tribute simultaneously, but over the course of their debut, this band manages the trick. As I said, I've listened to a lot of Ethiopian music. Debo Band may be from Boston, but this album leaves no question that they deserve to be included in that count. | 2012-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Global | Sub Pop | July 10, 2012 | 7.8 | 492b085e-9f86-41cc-a81d-e8bc41e40538 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Hip-hop legend frustratingly collects the hits, saves some of his best work for a tack-on bonus disc, and adds a few mostly insignificant new tracks. | Hip-hop legend frustratingly collects the hits, saves some of his best work for a tack-on bonus disc, and adds a few mostly insignificant new tracks. | Eminem: Curtain Call: The Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2773-curtain-call-the-hits/ | Curtain Call: The Hits | Frankly, I don't want to hear these songs anymore. Nothing personal, but are there people who think "Without Me" has resonance? Eminem has even worn himself out. It shows in interviews, and as he watches hard-won respect slip through his fingers whenever he shits out another scatological invective like "Just Lose It". He's been swindling his audience for some time now, milking stardom for all its goopy dairy: D12, the 2Pac album, the outrageously overrated 8 Mile, a cartoon, radio station, DVDs, and books. His most recent LP, Encore, was a shell, full of flow-fuckery and canny hooks, signifying nothing. Eminem's rise, in all its Great White Hope glory, paralleled the rise of modern hip-hop as America's dominant musical form. But it also happened mostly in conjunction with Em dipping into the pop well. It's a sad state of affairs now for someone who could have been the premier musical artist of the last decade.
For all intents and purposes, Eminem's position as globo-mega-star and intriguing personality began to wane after the release of his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, a record regarded by most as his masterpiece. But his 1999 debut The Slim Shady LP marked his creative zenith. Only two songs from that album are included here: the hits. "My Name Is" remains blissful and more complex than the novelty it was written off as-- it's funny and bizarre, and each punchline could have been a chorus. "Guilty Conscience", the role-playing jaunt between Eminem and mentor Dr. Dre, also holds up, especially when Em puts his producer on blast as "somebody who slapped Dee Barnes." Eminem's strengths-- verbal elasticity, the ability to write thunderous hooks, chameleon-ism, being white-- have hamstrung him psychologically, but in these early days, before fame, 65 million albums sold, and media persecution, his joy for rapping shone hard.
From the moment Dre and Interscope CEO Jimmy Iovine forced Eminem back into the booth to record "The Real Slim Shady", the cake icing on his colossally important second album, his fate was sealed. The songs Curtain Call culls from that album are fine, but had little to do with the outrage he caught from parents, GLAAD, and the conservative right. "The Real Slim Shady" made him profitable; songs like "Kim" and "Kill You" made him interesting. "Stan", however, still stands out as an exception. Overplayed as it may sound today, it remains a cultural milestone-- throngs of people, fans and not, flipped upon first hearing it, essentially forcing the label to release it as a single. All didn't end well, though: Dido has a career now.
Third album The Eminem Show is repped here by two songs: "Without Me", and the underrated "Cleanin' Out My Closet", which contributed as much to the confusing Freudian glints in Em's persona as anything else he's done. Which leaves the compilation's four new throw-ins: the Nate Dogg collaboration "Shake That", the ridiculously inane "FACK", and new single "When I'm Gone" are all desolate placeholders-- lesser versions of Eminem songs that already piss me off. "Gone" is the worst offender, yet another love letter from Em to daughter Hailie, it, like Encore's "Mockingbird", is heavy-handed and saccharine. The final new track is the live version of "Stan", performed with Elton John at the 2001 Grammys. Its inclusion is pointless.
Eminem has always had a self-loathing streak. He still comes across as uncomfortable with both stardom and his standing as a white rapper, and in a recent MTV interview seemed unhappy with this compilation's tracklist. This isn't his art-- it's his commerce. That's partly alleviated by Curtain Call's seven-track bonus CD, which contains five of the 10 best songs he's recorded. Included are two incredible album cuts from his debut, "Role Model" and "Just Don't Give a Fuck", one of his earliest, funniest thrillers. "Kill You", from his second LP, is psychotic mania but it's also hilarious and paramount to his dichotomy. Also featured are tracks he recorded with two giants: The first, "Renagade", comes from Jay-Z's The Blueprint, and finds each MC handling two liquid verses apiece. It's also a rare occasion in which Eminem's funeral dirge production doesn't sound overwrought. The other, Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous "Dead Wrong", is about as vicious and beguiling a thing as I've ever heard, featuring both men pulling the razors out from under their tongues. The fact that Em stands toe-to-toe in the face of two potent Biggie verses was a sort of unofficial "okay, we can all fuck with this dude" moment for hardcore fans.
Eminem was a battle rapper first, then a backpacker, then a hook-slinger, now a tortured artiste-- the last bastion of the overexposed. He's still a star, but he no longer seems nearly as fascinating as we've been made to think. And Curtain Call, an inevitable and adequate document of his hitmaking, allows him the opportunity to remain in the spotlight while also receding from it. And with that, he's back into hiding for the forseeable future, building mystique: His next album is unscheduled, and, promo for this collection aside, his profile never seems to rise above churning out goth-rap backing tracks for lesser artists. Which, of course, is all probably intended to get me wishing the guy who once pleaded, "Some people only see that I'm white, ignoring skill," would come back around once in a while. | 2005-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope | December 5, 2005 | 6.9 | 4933d250-50e4-4e46-966b-3580be9b4194 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
The Griselda rapper’s second album of 2021 is his statement of reinvention, a neat balance between glitz and grime. | The Griselda rapper’s second album of 2021 is his statement of reinvention, a neat balance between glitz and grime. | Conway the Machine: La Maquina | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conway-the-machine-la-maquina/ | La Maquina | When Conway the Machine launched his imprint, Drumwork Music Group, in 2020, he declared it “another branch on the Griselda label tree,” in the vein of cousin Benny the Butcher’s Black Soprano Family. Even with this clarification, though, Conway’s subsequent retirement tweets earlier this year—along with his absence from the collective’s film debut Conflicted and its accompanying soundtrack—became grist for the rumor mill. Amid speculation of his departure, Conway opens La Maquina with a larger chip on his shoulder than usual.
Opener “Bruiser Brody” promptly squashes reports of tension between Conway and Westside Gunn. “I started Drumwork, and people think it’s beef with my brother/Maybe every endeavor, we supposed to eat with each other,” Conway raps, pledging that his next chapter will be his best. Over JR Swiftz’s menacing production, he sounds invigorated: “Reinvented myself—this the Machine redesigned.” This statement of reinvention proves to be the thesis of La Maquina, and it’s a promise he keeps across the album’s 11 tracks.
Conway’s most impressive retooling is his experimentation with new flows. Since his electrifying appearance on Juicy J’s 2020 album The Hustle Continues, he’s become a notably less rigid rapper, slipping into different pockets like denim. On “KD,” he channels “Bodak Yellow”-era Cardi B while weaving in and out of producer Murda Beatz’s sprinkling of keys. “Scatter Brain” sees him rapping ahead of the beat and shrewdly withholding punchlines. The bars themselves are standard Conway fare—a mix of gallows humor, gun talk, sports references, and the odd pearl either reminiscing on drug dealing or mourning those snatched up by the system—but all these tweaks in his delivery help lighten his hardened bars.
As recently as his last proper Griselda album, 2020’s From King to a GOD, Conway has leaned toward the pomp of contemporary mainstream beats. La Maquina takes his fascination to the next level, bringing producers like Bangladesh and Don Cannon into the fold for the most luxurious tracks Conway has ever touched. Bangladesh’s “6:30 Tip Off” recreates the game-day atmosphere, complete with a swelling horn sample and skittish drums. Cannon’s “Clarity” and “Scatter Brain” both place rattling hi-hats and snares over ominous vocal samples. Conway relishes the challenge, claiming he could pull a muscle handling all his money and inviting haters to watch “this Rolls I parked.” None of these songs approach the gloss of Benny’s recent Burden of Proof, but there’s a neat balance between glitz and grime.
That isn’t to say the filth has taken a backseat. La Maquina’s more grandiose experiments are the exception. Conway frequently revisits the sludgy breakbeats he made his name on and emboldens new guests. He’s right at home over the gossamer vocals and light drums of the Alchemist-produced “200 Pies,” trading bars with a relaxed and reflective 2 Chainz. But it’s recent Drumwork signees Jae Skeese and 7xvethegenius who show out the hardest. 7xve’s mid-range cuts through the pounding rhythm of “Sister Abigail” (“They eyes on me like a token blackie in the mall/Guess that’s the price of bein’ in charge, so, shit, I paid it off.”) Meanwhile, Skeese has three verses across the album and earns the real estate. His retelling of how he connected with Conway and signed to Drumwork on “Grace” reveals the same sharp fundamentals and conviction that pushed the Machine to stardom over half a decade ago.
New blood aside, there’s no passing of the torch or resignation on La Maquina. Conway’s journey hasn’t been an easy one—his struggle with Bell’s palsy alone nearly ended his career before it began—but he’s stayed consistent and staked his claim as one of the fiercest rappers working. La Maquina is Conway’s best project since 2015’s Reject 2, with an eclectic mix of beats and bars that tie everything together like twine around a turkey. Maquina should be the feather in his cap that’s eluded him ever since Griselda first broke big.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda / Drumwork Music Group / Empire | April 21, 2021 | 7.5 | 49402798-b393-4073-8712-021ad11beea9 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On a handful of releases in the early 2000s, the trio of Jay Reatard, Alicja Trout, and Rich Crook mastered a stabby sort of punk/new wave hybrid. Lost Lost is a collection of rarities for Lost Sounds, a group that really didn't have many non-rarities. | On a handful of releases in the early 2000s, the trio of Jay Reatard, Alicja Trout, and Rich Crook mastered a stabby sort of punk/new wave hybrid. Lost Lost is a collection of rarities for Lost Sounds, a group that really didn't have many non-rarities. | Lost Sounds: Lost Lost: Demos, Sounds, Alternate Takes & Unused Songs 1999-2004 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16905-lost-lost-demos-sounds-alternate-takes-unused-songs-1999-2004/ | Lost Lost: Demos, Sounds, Alternate Takes & Unused Songs 1999-2004 | Let me tell you about the time I almost made Jay Reatard kick my ass. This was in 2000, back in Memphis. The Glands were playing a show at a small club ominously named the Last Place on Earth, and Reatard's band, the Final Solutions, had been added as a last-minute opener. It was not a good match: Where the Glands played studious southern indie rock, heavy on ambience and melody, the Final Solutions were loud, snotty, abrasive, and confrontational. They took the stage drunk and dressed in police uniforms. Reatard played drums. (Well, he sat behind the drumkit, but he did more arguing with his bandmates than time keeping.) At one point, he whipped out his dick and pissed all over his snare, while the rest of the band flailed around the small stage, knocking over the Glands' equipment and intentionally alienating the small audience.
At the time Memphis rarely got any good bands coming through, so I was pissed that a couple of locals would ruin an opportunity to see a non-local group. Besides it wasn't like the Glands were the Vines: Despite a breakthrough album, they remained obscure and cult-ish. But even after the Final Solutions' last song, the nightmare was far from over. Reatard planted himself in the audience-- right in front of me and my wife, in fact-- and heckled the Glands throughout their set. "Piss on your drums!" he shouted more than once. "It's been done before," was their deadpan response. Shitfaced, Reatard wobbled and stumbled into people, elbowing my wife drunkenly. Right about the time I was getting sick and tired of it, right about the time when I was ready to give him one big push from behind and watch him hit the concrete floor, right when I was ready to kick him while he was down, his friends finally led him away. The show was ruined, but true violence had been averted.
Such is the dark side of Reatard's talent, which contained both creative and destructive impulses. A member of several local bands-- the Solutions, the Reatards, Terror Visions, Lost Sounds-- he sent energy out in every direction, some of it good and some of it bad. At the time, I thought ruination was his endgame, but with some perspective, I see that he was trying to tear down the scene in order to build it back up. At his most publically belligerent, he made some of the city's most exciting music, and it's unfortunate that it took his tragic death for his earliest bands to reach a larger audience, to be considered as something more than local music.
Of course, the Final Solutions were stunt rock, programmed to piss people off, but Reatard's other outfits proved much more durable, compelling, even exciting more than a decade later. The Reatards rewrote Memphis pop history-- R&B, early rock, Elvis, 1960s frat rock, early-90s lo-fi-- into snotty, ahistorical punk whose self-loathing streak seemed to speak for a city convinced its best shit was in the past. Lost Sounds, on the other hand, sounded like nothing local: On a handful of releases in the early 2000s, the group-- Reatard, Alicja Trout, and Rich Crook, with a revolving door of guest musicians-- mastered a stabby sort of punk/new wave hybrid, full of sharp guitars, inhuman synths, and accusatory vocals. Last year Fat Possum collected their best material on Blac Static, an essential entry into Reatard's catalog: It's some of the bleakest, more relentlessly dark, most nihilistic music he ever made. Lost Lost, a new comp released by Memphis label Goner Records, makes a fine complement: It's a collection of rarities for a band that really didn't have many non-rarities. Even rarer, it's the kind of odds-and-sods collection you might actually want to listen to as much as the albums. Songs like "A Foreign Play", "No Count", and "Total Destruction" rival the best material on Blac Static, even if the noisy between-song interludes prove distracting.
Lost Lost gives the impression of a new band struggling to capture inspiration on tape-- to secure a sound, an identity, a mission. If they sounded almost cocksure on their albums, behind the scenes they had their hands everywhere, grabbing at various genres and suturing them together hastily and sometimes violently. They cover the Crystals' "Frankenstein Twist" as a rattily streamlined surf jam, led by Trout's sulfuric-acid vocals. Ratcheted to a kaleidoscopic keyboad riff, the too-short "No Count" is a fairly straight Nuggets rewrite but may be Reatard's finest moment here: "Well, I'm a retard, baby, and my head don't work right," he sings with a mix of dejection and defiance.
Perhaps the single most defining aspect of Lost Sounds wasn't Reatard's scabrous guitar, but Trout's vintage synths. In the late 1990s, she was fresh out of the sadly short-lived group the Clears, who performed whimsical pop songs in feather boas and full Bowie makeup. If that group sounded joyously deviant with its cheerleader choruses and melted-ice-cream keyboards, Lost Sounds deployed those same instruments toward something dark, nervous, feverbrained. That's nowhere more apparent than on the six-minute anthem "Total Destruction", which begins with a Clash stomp before morphing into what sounds like a giallo soundtrack, like they're eating Argento mid-murder. There's fake blood all over the place. Trout's keyboards allow the band to attack and feint effortlessly as the song unfolds to reveal new layers of apocalyptic dread.
People may come to Lost Sounds to hear Reatard, but I'm guessing they'll stick around for Trout, who currently plays in MouseRocket and the River City Tanlines. Reatard is more of a sideman than a frontman here. Trout is the star, thanks to performances on "Look at Me" and "No One Killer" that mix punk aggression and classic-rock melodicism. It's her delivery of the chorus-- "Ya ya ya ya ya! Total destruction!"-- that puts "Total Destruction" over and justifies its length. By contrast, she adds gravity and vulnerability to the early version of "No Genetic Engineer". Still, despite her strong presence, Lost Sounds never come across as a solo project. The trio was small enough and close enough that it pretty much had to be democratic: By nature of its lineup, every instrument played a prominent role in every song. The personal push-and-pull between the band members (Reatard and Trout were on again/off again dating during this period) created a musical friction that constantly redefined what the band could be from one song to the next, leaving them unsettled and musically adrift. For some bands that might suggest unfulfilled potential, but in this case it was Lost Sounds' potential, a constant cycle of creation and destruction and creation. | 2012-07-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-07-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Goner | July 30, 2012 | 7.4 | 4945d431-4382-407f-8729-8f0ff2882db7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Over the course of his first two albums, New York rapper Roc Marciano established himself as one of the foremost purveyors of classicist New York slick-talk. His latest release, Marci Beaucoup, finds Marciano stepping out of the spotlight and focusing on his production chops. | Over the course of his first two albums, New York rapper Roc Marciano established himself as one of the foremost purveyors of classicist New York slick-talk. His latest release, Marci Beaucoup, finds Marciano stepping out of the spotlight and focusing on his production chops. | Roc Marciano: Marci Beaucoup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18879-roc-marciano-marci-beaucoup/ | Marci Beaucoup | Roc Marciano works in details rather than large, dramatic brush strokes. Like fellow New York MC Ka, Marciano's voice rarely rises above a conversational purr—you need to really lean in close to get the full effect. He doesn't build narratives as much as construct small, distinct images and then stack them on top of each other. Even his beats are designed to shade, rather than color, his songs. Over the course of his first two albums, he's established himself as one of the foremost purveyors of classicist New York slick-talk, digging into a very specific sound and exploring just how far down he can go. His latest release, Marci Beaucoup, finds Marciano stepping out of the spotlight ever so slightly and instead focusing more on his production chops than his already-proven lyrical skills.
Whereas 2012's Reloaded was a comparatively lighter sonic affair than its predecessor, the bleaker Marcberg, Marci Beaucoup hews closer to the grimier aesthetic of Marciano's debut, where the production felt more off-the-cuff and rougher around the edges. Like that album, the beats on Marci Beaucoup are handled entirely by Marciano, and they alternate between minimalist RZA-esque menace and monochromatic soul. As a producer, Marciano shares the same penchant for bite-sized vocal loops that were J Dilla's bread and butter, and he's able to create a palpable tension by drawing out the hypnotic qualities in them. "Love Means" is only allowed to unspool during its brief hook—otherwise, it's all creeping dread masquerading as a serenade. These sorts of little touches can be found everywhere: horns lazily snake into the corners of "Squeeze"; shouts from what sound like children on a playground litter "Dollar Bitch"; elsewhere, a single bleat from an ill-timed chop signals the end of each loop on the loping "War Scars".
These beats are insistent and physical, even when they're made out of lullabies twisted into unnatural shapes, as is the case with "Didn't Know", an example of Marciano's willingness to think outside of the box as a producer. Like every track on the album, a few friends pop by to help out, but only Freeway sounds totally out of his element here, his verse only made worse by the virulent homophobia contained within it.
Because there's not a single track where Marciano raps on his own, Marci Beaucoup feel like a compilation curated by Marciano more than a true solo effort. And as solid as these beats are, they best fit the kind of rappers who operate in a headspace similar to Marciano's, but that's not always who ends up on them. Those with tightly-coiled deliveries fare best—Boldy James scrapes the bottom of "Trying to Come Up" as if he hasn't eaten in a month, and Action Bronson adds some much welcome levity to "456".
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's Ka, the rapper who best compliments Marciano, who steals the tracks he shows up on with his blank-faced gravitas. Unfortunately, too many appearances from third-stringers like Knowledge the Pirate and Maffew Ragazino just made me wish Marciano was rapping instead, and a few more solo cuts would've helped alleviate the frequent soggy stretches. As a proper third album, Marci Beaucoup doesn't stack up to its precursors, but as an advertisement for Marciano's services as a beatsmith, it's much more successful. | 2014-01-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-01-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Man Bites Dog | January 13, 2014 | 6.8 | 494670d6-7681-48ae-92d2-1fc50e333ceb | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
The brooding, cryptic world of Spencer Krug is more straightforward on the latest Sunset Rubdown LP, the easiest to digest of the prolific writer's career. | The brooding, cryptic world of Spencer Krug is more straightforward on the latest Sunset Rubdown LP, the easiest to digest of the prolific writer's career. | Sunset Rubdown: Dragonslayer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13232-dragonslayer/ | Dragonslayer | Sunset Rubdown's 2007 album, Random Spirit Lover, served up richly orchestrated, baroque suites-- each song awash with melody, counterpoint, and complex dynamic shifts. It was rewarding, but it was also cramped and fussy. And it was long, or at least it felt long. There was also leader Spencer Krug's cryptic wordplay and metaphors; he hinted at a narrative that the listener wasn't in on. Across his many projects (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake), Krug often comes off as brooding, wise, and unknowable-- his music attracts because it's difficult to decode his lyrics and untangle his melodies. However, on his latest Sunset Rubdown album, Dragonslayer, Krug gives us a fluent, easily likable version of his work.
Dragonslayer is a looser Sunset record-- easier to like, easier to understand. Tension used to come from stops and starts in the songs, but now the mood changes between tracks. Dragonslayer shifts from stately formality ("Silver Moons"), to heart-pounding new wave skitter ("Idiot Heart") and anxious, head-over-heels tumbles ("Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!"), but it generates continuity between songs. Dragonslayer still centers on piano and keyboard, with Krug picking out (instead of pounding out) the tunes. "You Go on Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)" in particular boasts a beautifully clean melody. But this song-- like many Sunset Rubdown tracks-- gets more strident noisier as it moves. It's just that Dragonslayer moves forward with more finesse.
Krug's lyrics feel, at first, as knotted and complex as ever. But now it's easier to draw connections and dig around for meanings. Thematically, this album has a lot in common with Random Spirit Lover, as Krug continues to sketch half-told tales of lovers or friends caught in their own recklessness. His lyrics seem formal, but with a natural twist. Krug obsesses over the rare and ephemeral: black swans, virgins, or paper lace, which either burns, fades, or "crumples into ugly shapes" ("Paper Lace"). What seems like a pile of metaphors is just Krug simplifying the world. Actions are products of instinct or fate, always out of our control, easier to describe than understand. It's Krug's way of-- perhaps insufficiently-- interpreting the world without fully taming it.
Take "Paper Lace". It first appeared in sparse, hollow form on Swan Lake's Enemy Mine earlier this year. "Those were good ideas, but they weren't diamonds and pearls," Krug sings while the drums laze to the ending. So his work wasn't done. Here he revamps it into a sinewy, shimmering form. Then there's "Paper Lace"'s sly invitation: "Come be a wild thing." Krug knows things will end (badly), and secretly hopes that it is so. There's no doing laundry together, none of the city buses of Wolf Parade's "Grounds for Divorce", no beer runs in Dragonslayer's world. It's escapist fantasy fiction (though there's only one real dragon, right at the end).
But, that's the way we're used to Sunset Rubdown sounding: fussy, untouchable, otherwordly. Let's not associate difficulty wih quality though. RSL had a greater chance for escape and awe; Dragonslayer was built for performance, and it sounds good live because the songs sound comfortable and straightforward. Sunset Rubdown are best when they are unfettered by those concerns, when they are fully soaked in their own set of thematic and sonic touchstones and could give a shit if they're understood or not. | 2009-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Jagjaguwar | June 24, 2009 | 8.3 | 4946b4fa-5522-435f-b8ad-9c4370fa068e | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
Colin Meloy and co. follow their proggy rock opera The Hazards of Love with a breezy country-folk record. Peter Buck and Gillian Welch guest. | Colin Meloy and co. follow their proggy rock opera The Hazards of Love with a breezy country-folk record. Peter Buck and Gillian Welch guest. | The Decemberists: The King Is Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15000-the-king-is-dead/ | The King Is Dead | Like any band with a clear, identifiable concept-- in this case, a penchant for verbose, high-concept screeds-- the Decemberists are beloved and chastised for all the same reasons: The quirks that make them such a target for snickering, disaffected aesthetes (namely, stuffing their songs with arcane historical allusions and library language) are also what make them a boon for drama kids in three-button vests.
Whether the Decemberists are actually any nerdier than, say, Animal Collective isn't worth arguing-- the ambition is the thing, and the Decemberists reached a gumption apex on 2009's The Hazards of Love, a proggy rock opera based loosely on an EP by the British folk singer Anne Briggs. The record follows the story of a woman who falls in love with a shape-shifting creature she meets in the woods; there's forest-sex, spells, an overbearing queen, and plenty of thick, quasi-metal guitar. As an antidote of sorts, the band comes back with The King Is Dead, a breezy country-folk record with no discernable narrative. The concept here-- wait for it-- is that there is no concept.
Recorded in a converted barn on Oregon's Pendarvis Farm, The King Is Dead eschews the high, mystical wailing of British folk for its North American counterpart. Rustic and roomy, the record nods to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, early Wilco, the Band, Neil Young, and especially R.E.M. In places, it almost feels like a disrobing: "Let the yoke fall from our shoulders," frontman Colin Meloy bellows on opener "Don't Carry It All", his voice loose and easy, freer than he's sounded in an awfully long time.
Meloy is an established fan of certain strains of Americana music, and he's enlisted a few inimitable guests: R.E.M.'s Peter Buck plays on three tracks, Gillian Welch sings on seven, and Welch's songwriting partner, the guitarist Dave Rawlings, appears every so often as a backing vocalist. There are moments when the record's twang can feel a little overcooked (the Decemberists have never been great at spontaneity, exactly), but there's an interesting tension between the inherent unpretentiousness of country music-- it's rural, it's populist, it's based in universal emotions-- and the Decemberists' literary cartwheeling. So while there's still plenty of fussy wordplay ("Hetty Green/ Queen of supply-side bonhomie bone-drab," Meloy bleats in "Calamity Song") and at least one Infinite Jest joke, there are also loads of simple, rousing choruses. In the past, Meloy's ability to write a sweet, memorable melody has occasionally gotten lost, but on King, his songwriting shines.
A few tracks feel like homage ("Down By the Water" is an easy analogue of "The One I Love", while "All Arise!" seems to repurpose bits of "Honky Tonk Women"), but mostly they're solid showcases for the band's best features: On the exquisitely pastoral (and guest-free) "January Hymn", Meloy sings about time and snow ("April all an ocean away/ Is this the better way to spend the day?") while Chris Funk adds the tiniest bit of octave guitar to Meloy's acoustic strums.
For all its rural pedigrees, The King Is Dead is still a clean and meticulously crafted album; the production is smooth and the performances are unnervingly error-free. Consequently, it's missing a little vulnerability-- the best Americana records tend to feel a little lawless, but the Decemberists just can't quite relinquish control. | 2011-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade / Capitol | January 17, 2011 | 7.2 | 494f3ffc-1be3-4af5-80de-d8ef99f0b7f8 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
After breakthough Spiderman of the Rings, Dan Deacon returns with another great record whose palette is richer, the samples smoother, the space larger. | After breakthough Spiderman of the Rings, Dan Deacon returns with another great record whose palette is richer, the samples smoother, the space larger. | Dan Deacon: Bromst | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12833-bromst/ | Bromst | Midway through 2007, someone asked me the usual question-- the one about which records I'd want to take with me to a desert island. The first answer that sprang to mind seemed somehow perverse: Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings? I certainly didn't think this was one of the best, most profound, or most life-sustaining records I'd ever heard, and it wasn't as if I had some great personal attachment to it; I'd only first heard the thing that spring. But it seemed like a lifetime on a desert island would get awfully lonely, and there was something about the album that seemed like a solution to that problem. All the happy massed shouting on a song like "Wham City"! There's plenty of music in the world that conjures up the feeling of crowds, but so much of it feels mob-like and jack-booted, or else it's just hero-worship of whoever's posing on the stage in front. Here, on Spiderman, was at least one song where the crowd felt joyous and inviting, like people celebrating the fact of sharing something. Which seemed about as essential, desert-island-wise, as a good sharp knife.
The press material for Deacon's follow-up, Bromst, talks about the notion of community, and the odd knack Deacon has for evoking it, but I'm not so sure that's entirely the point anymore. Sure, Deacon's method and sound remain mostly the same here; if you feel like you recognize the chord progressions from Spiderman, there's every chance you're right. The guy trades, after all, in movements that feel simple: He creates a dense rush of sound and then guides it through changes as broad as mountains, these shifts that slide together like blocks and burrow straight into some basic pleasure center deep in the gut of the western scale. What's different, on Bromst, is the texture and size of it all. Deacon does what most acts do to follow up a small hit: The palette is richer, the samples smoother, the space larger, the programming slightly less buzzy. Actual instruments, the kinds with microphones next to them, abound-- live drums, layers and layers of mallet instruments, a player piano that goes fluttering up and down the scale like it's stuck in the lobby of an avant-garde department store.
As for community? Deacon's still fond of massed shouting, and the overlapping exhortations of electronically processed cartoon vocals-- and all the pounding of toms and ecstatic chanting can leave much of Bromst feeling like the pagan rituals of some woodland filled with chubby, bespectacled Deacon-gnomes.
But those small changes manage, strangely enough, to change everything-- including the question of the happy crowd. Spiderman felt grainy, cheap, and primary-colored, an overload of cartoon buzz and bodies dancing. The denser, more sedate sound of Bromst shoots off in the opposite direction; it makes Deacon's music feel almost solipsistic, like it's ceased to come out of speakers and now lives deep inside your brain. If Spiderman was for dancing on sticky floors, Bromst feels better suited to sleeping, or contemplating the sublime, or anything else that happens mostly between your ears. As it closes, with the gorgeous "Get Older"-- building from malfunctioning-modem synths into dreamy sheets of buzz on an achy major-seventh chord-- it actually begins to resemble the heavy, romantic sound of acts like M83, or Pluxus, or shoegazer bands, or the 8-bit "chiptune" programmers Deacon shares some kinship with. These are people who make music for getting lost inside your own head.
What makes this change worthwhile is the complexity of Deacon's project. Most of us could have been forgiven, after a cursory listen to Spiderman, for not noticing that Deacon was conservatory-trained. But as Bromst rushes steadily by, mostly avoiding the big crowd-pleasing breakdowns and exclamations of its predecessor, the clearer production lets you sink into the minutae of it-- say, the Steve Reich-style rhythms of different mallet or drum patterns overlapping one another. The music becomes something like a natural process: one clean, simple sweep, but built from an insane complexity of detail. And there's enough to un-knot in there to make this a terrific step for Deacon-- out from the sticky basements into a space where he can try to tackle the sublime. | 2009-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | March 18, 2009 | 8.5 | 49515208-e12b-4bbf-891a-a070b385a824 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
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