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It's been over half a decade since HEALTH released a studio album, and Death Magic is a bold, albeit occasionally jarring, step forward. The band finally embraces the pop impulses that seem to have always been lurking in their DNA. | It's been over half a decade since HEALTH released a studio album, and Death Magic is a bold, albeit occasionally jarring, step forward. The band finally embraces the pop impulses that seem to have always been lurking in their DNA. | HEALTH: Death Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20861-death-magic/ | Death Magic | One of the highlights of Nine Inch Nails' Lights in the Sky tour back in 2008 was the added pleasure of watching HEALTH—then a still relatively unknown bunch of L.A. noisemakers—manage to almost steal the show. Of all the acts that Trent Reznor picked to open dates on that tour, HEALTH seemed the like the most obvious heir apparent—a band using bizarro configurations of electronics and guitars to pummel the audience into submission. Theirs appeared to be a very Reznor-approved pursuit: technology employed in service of exploring some of the most base human impulses—to incite, to destroy, and to possibly cause deafness.
It says something about the nature of HEALTH's music that of their now six proper full-length releases, two are remix albums (2008's Disco and 2010's Disco2) and one is the soundtrack to a video game (2013's surprisingly excellent Max Payne 3). In fact, their music has often flourished best in remix form. Hearing the band's music stripped and reworked by the likes of Gold Panda, Crystal Castles, and CFCF (whose sinewy reworking of Get Color's "Before Tigers" remains a standout) shone a light on just what was frequently hidden underneath all of HEALTH's Boredoms-esque roar: namely vocalist Jacob Duzsik's feathery vocals and the band's nascent ear for melody. Given room to breathe, HEALTH's music reveals itself to be much more than "industrial disco"—it's also pop music.
It's been over half a decade since they released a studio album, and Death Magic is a bold, albeit occasionally jarring, step forward. In a recent Pitchfork interview the band happily extolled the virtues of Depeche Mode and Rihanna, all of which makes the outré pop leanings of Death Magic more understandable. Given the early singles teased from the album, there was every reason to think that Death Magic might just be business as usual—and in some ways it is. The first single,"New Coke", materialized via a music video that featured high-intensity blasts of rafter-shaking low-end (not to mention the most lovingly filmed slow-motion vomit shots ever captured in a music video). Similarly, "Men Today" is a riot of barely corralled tribal drums, overdriven synths, and unpredictable beats. The track is pristinely produced and appropriately mountain-sized (Andrew Dawson and Lars Stalfors contribute production duties throughout), but it's not exactly a radical reinvention. Once you dig deeper into the record, however, the dark clouds begin to part.
On Death Magic, the band finally embraces the pop impulses that seem to have always been lurking in their DNA. "Flesh World (UK)" comes swinging out of the gate like a house track—a dancefloor appropriate number with an appropriately grim chorus ("We die/ So what/ We're here") that only occasionally pauses to slam the listener face first into a wall of white noise before advising "Do all the drugs/ But don't hurt the ones you love." "Dark Enough" is a goth-pop power ballad in which Duzsik sings, "Does it make a difference if it's real?/ As long as I still say I love you?" It's the kind of sideways romantic admission that would have sounded out of place—or perhaps just totally unintelligible—on a previous HEALTH record.
The band's biggest and most shocking pop moment comes just halfway through on "Life"—a song that flirts with stadium-size pop sentiments that would not be out of place on mainstream radio or, say, playing during the closing credits of a teenage romantic comedy. To hear a band like HEALTH offer the sentiment—"Life is strange/ We die and we don't know why/ I don't know what I want but I know that I don't know what want/ Nobody does"—feels both exhilarating and perverse. Longtime fans and noise purists might balk, but it's refreshing. The more vulnerable, pop-friendly moments on "Life" and the sparkly "L.A. Looks"—in which Duzsik admits,"It's not love, but I still want you"—make for a much more dynamic and oddly compelling listen than just 45 minutes of synthetic squall.
Though they might bristle at the obvious comparison, it's hard not to notice the Reznorian qualities of Death Magic. With Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor married the formlessness of industrial music to radio-friendly pop melodies. The 12 tracks on Death Magic do much the same, neatly splitting the difference between exquisitely detailed bombast (more than anything they've done before, it's a record that demands a huge stereo system and/or an excellent set of headphones) and something more human. While they still don't have to worry about somehow getting accidentally swept up in the mainstream—a fate unlikely for a band still making scary songs about drugs and releasing vomit-soaked visuals—with Death Magic HEALTH wisely manage to sidestep the errors of so many other ostensibly "heavy" bands, who often chase after extremity to the point of becoming humorless cartoons. After a while, even unremitting noise and relentless nihilism becomes rote and, frankly, kind of boring. Without the occasional beam of light, it's hard to actually appreciate how dark—or how good—a band like HEALTH can actually be. | 2015-08-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | August 3, 2015 | 7.8 | 4b30ef82-335b-4ba8-8427-e9c3f9fc03e2 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
In Tuareg culture, women rarely play guitar; this Nigerien group breaks with that tradition. Their 2019 live recording captures them at a hypnotic high, far from home but in command of an eager, inviting spirit. | In Tuareg culture, women rarely play guitar; this Nigerien group breaks with that tradition. Their 2019 live recording captures them at a hypnotic high, far from home but in command of an eager, inviting spirit. | Les Filles de Illighadad: At Pioneer Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/les-filles-de-illighadad-at-pioneer-works/ | At Pioneer Works | Who gets to be a guitar hero? Does it happen through volume, or tone, or shredding notes like so much confetti? What about those who exist outside of Western industries, whose courage is something more than a mighty riff coursing through electric currents? Enter Les Filles de Illighadad.
Led by Fatou Seidi Ghali, the group formed in Illighadad, a small village in central Niger populated by nomadic Tuareg people. They took on a utilitarian name (“the Daughters of Illighadad”), performing the music of their Saharan upbringing with an electric guitar. They made their way to Western ears through the boutique Sahel Sounds label, releasing 2016’s Les Filles de Illighadad and 2017’s Eghass Malan before touring the United States for the first time in the fall of 2019. Recorded on the Brooklyn stop of that run, At Pioneer Works documents the ensemble at a hypnotic high, far from home but well in command of an eager, inviting spirit.
Rather than chasing the Western canon, the group invests its energy in tende, Tuareg traditional music named for the goatskin drum central to its sound. It’s inherently communal, intended for socializing, celebrating, and healing; women have typically led the singing and drumming, but guitars were out of the equation. Even devoid of this context, recorded in a still brick room and relayed through wires nearly two years later, At Pioneer Works hums with vibrancy. The low rhythm of an askalabo—a partially submerged calabash—sets the tone, bobbing upward to meet a curling guitar part on “Surbajo.”
Ghali holds the distinction of being the first female Tuareg guitarist, having secreted away time with a guitar that her older brother had brought home. Her father told her that she should be looking after cows instead, as she recalled to the Guardian in 2019. But she taught herself to play, later recruiting her cousin Alamnou Akrouni and now Amaria Hamadalher—the second Tuareg woman to play guitar—to join her in the group. Another of Ghali’s brothers, Abdoulaye Madassane, joins Les Filles on the road and At Pioneer Works as a rhythm guitarist.
Les Filles thrive as equal partners alongside Ghali’s nimble leadership, setting the steady groove that act as her launchpad. As they return to some of the songs they’ve previously recorded (it’s a live album, after all), Ghali and company reinvigorate them with new energy. They draw out Eghass Malan’s “Inssegh Inssegh” into nine entrancing minutes, with Ghali chasing a sprightly melody in circles. The title track from the same album finds a new bounce on an urgent, focused rhythm.
Though Ghali’s electric-guitar tone gives Les Filles de Illighadad their definitive character, its presence never usurps the communal spirit of the music. “Irriganan” takes off at a gallop, and Ghali’s bright, knotty picking emerges ahead of the flurry of the women’s voices. Notes seem to spring off of one another on every song, each tightly wound coil bouncing and unspooling in directions that are delightful to follow. The women trade off in call and response, singing about love, meditation, and family. As their voices overlap, it feels easy to disappear among them.
Les Filles de Illighadad began when Fatou Seidi Ghali dared to chase her curiosity past the boundaries that other people set for her. The group’s music imagines longstanding traditions while channeling the enthusiasm of audacious, self-determined freedom. Not all heroes wear capes, but they might start a band on the edge of the desert from time to time.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sahel Sounds | August 5, 2021 | 8 | 4b33dfdf-8da4-4a5a-9e2f-693f03078a60 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The celebrity socialite’s alluringly empty 2006 debut gets a vinyl reissue. It’s a concept album whose concept is: What if Paris Hilton made an album? | The celebrity socialite’s alluringly empty 2006 debut gets a vinyl reissue. It’s a concept album whose concept is: What if Paris Hilton made an album? | Paris Hilton: *Paris * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paris-hilton-paris-hilton/ | Paris Hilton | Picture it: You’re standing in the outdoor area of a bar, elbow-to-elbow with your fellow revelers. As it used to be, the proximity is perfectly safe. You aren’t even thinking about it. The temperature is perfect: 75 or 82 or 90, whatever you like. You’re having such a good time, you don’t even realize it—inoculated by the privilege of being able to take such things for granted. Whatever song is playing—you weren’t paying much attention to it—ends and the vague reggae intro of Paris Hilton’s Top 20 hit from 2006, “Stars Are Blind,” slinks on. Now you’re paying attention. The night’s sparkle brightens.
The communal experience of a beloved pop song from yesteryear sounds so good right now. If you have any relationship with “Stars Are Blind,” the new vinyl reissue of Hilton’s first and, to date, only album might be the perfect serving of nostalgic comfort food. Go ahead and indulge: Pop music is a salve that can provide a respite from fixating on doom and even transcend the politics of its own creators. So, in the spirit of eating the rich—and looking back lovingly at any time other than the present—Paris is both an easy thing to tear into and a hard thing to deny. It is goofy and craven, ear candy and rotted commodity. It’s so simplistic that it could make you swear it’s a put-on, that it’s way savvier than it seems, that it’s so stridently bereft of having any there there that it must be intentional. “There,” Hilton mutters into your ears and smacks you over the head with maroon-and-blonde marbled vinyl containing an amalgamation of mid-aughts pop.
At the time of its release, Paris seemed like a lark—a trifling vanity project from someone who was making a mint off of merely existing. Deadpan and clipped, Hilton didn’t seem even particularly engaged or enthusiastic about doing that. Already a tabloid staple, reality TV star, and absorber of paparazzi flashbulbs, Hilton was trying on pop stardom like a new pair of Louboutins that she’d soon discard. Little did we know that a reggae rip-off of Lord Creator’s 1970 cut “Kingston Town” would become the most enduring relic of her public reign. It couldn’t be anything else. It’s not like people are going to turn to her memoir Confessions of an Heiress, or one of her box-office bombs (The Hottie and the Nottie, anyone?), or DreamCatchers hair extensions to remember Hilton’s heyday by. For all the space Hilton sucked up and never gave anything of substance back to, “Stars Are Blind,” made it sort of worth it.
There is something impressive in the synergy fueling Paris: A person who was famous for being famous turning to pop, a genre whose hits, it has been argued with data, tend to be popular because they’re popular. On the album, privilege is not merely flaunted; it is an adopted aesthetic. All over Paris, Hilton sings of her own appeal without any apparent impulse to illustrate or explain. Fat Joe and Jadakiss join her on “Fightin’ Over Me,” one of six tracks produced by Scott Storch just before he squandered $30 million in six months and his career effectively dried up. Neither Joe nor Jada put up much of a fight (Joe: “Yeah ma, you with the realest, how simple is that?”) despite Hilton’s insistence during the chorus, which is either deathly emphatic or creatively bankrupt: “Every time I turn around, the boys fightin’ over me/Every time I step out the house, they wanna fight over me/Maybe ’cause I’m hot to death, and I’m so, so, so sexy/All the boys, all the silly boys, they wanna fight over me.”
The persona Hilton adopts on the album is like a Sims version of herself: She pursues hot guys at the club, she gets pursued at the club, she loves, she bemoans, she says things like, “That’s hot!” and “I like attention!” in her whispery baby voice. There is something alluring about her deadpan—she’s so committed to its stillness that she might as well be meditating.
Paris is a concept album whose concept is: What if Paris Hilton made an album? With absolutely no surprises to offer, it’s a committed extension of her brand, an album as giant and empty and theoretically iconic as a deflated Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. It seems consciously blank, like an answer to an interview question Hilton hates but is too poised to ignore. Hilton has writing credits on five of its ten original songs. (The album’s 11th is a cover of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” which is redundant coming from someone who is clearly convinced that the answer of each and every listener is yes.)
“Excuse me for feeling,” she sings in “Stars,” and it’s like...yes! Exactly. It’s rare to detect her doing that. “Stars” is one of the few songs where her effort sounds convincing—during the second verse, she sings the word “be” so that it pours out of her mouth like cleavage from a dress. Elsewhere, Hilton’s voice sits somewhere between the doe-eyed wonder of Britney Spears and the vampy charisma of Gwen Stefani, with some of Janet Jackson’s muttering technique sprinkled in. She is by far lesser than each of these singers, though, and none of them are exactly powerhouses. In the synth ballad highlight “Heartbeat,” her voice presses on each note with the deliberation of a small child learning piano. It almost feels like a conscious statement on the extent to which pop can get away with being soulless. When she sings, “With you I feel the other half of my heartbeat,” the physiological shakiness of the metaphor doesn’t even register initially because her admission of half-heartedness makes so much sense. Her words are easy to take at face value.
“Heartbeat” starts as a soft-focus synth-based ringer for Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” before morphing into a retread of Stefani’s “Cool.” Dr. Luke handed Hilton a carbon copy of his “Since U Been Gone” with “Nothing in This World”—there’s also a taste of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” in the chorus’ guitar riff. Some of the rockier songs, like the rumored Nicole Richie diss track “Jealousy,” play as though everything Hilton knows about grunge, she learned from Ashlee Simpson. With all the money in the world, most of the time Paris simply can’t summon more than cubic zirconia pop, an ersatz take on the genuine article.
Paris is a strange record of contradictions. It’s an exercise in noncommitment, an expression of indifference. Hilton emerged from this album a one-hit wonder, which is, all things considered, a fun thing to have under your belt when you have enough money that a career in music would never much affect your quality of life anyway. It’s not that she didn’t go for more in a spate of one-off singles released periodically in the nearly 14 years since Paris’ release (not to mention her seemingly fruitless signing to Cash Money in 2013). She also launched a successful career as a DJ, in which she claimed to receive more than $100,000 per gig. It is quite tempting to shit on Paris at a time when, in the words of the New York Times’ Amanda Hess, celebrity culture is burning as a result of a global crisis’ highlighting of the disparity between the haves and have nots. But so flagrant has been Hilton’s privilege all along that the resentment was always there for the taking. As a celebrity, her moderate musical success is more of a reinforcement of pop’s values than a problem she created. Stars are blind and also tone-deaf. After all, they’re people too.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Real Gone | April 4, 2020 | 5.2 | 4b3613b9-097e-4ffc-a3f5-3f310388b1b3 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
Endlings is the collaboration of Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich with the New Mexico-based composer and noise artist Raven Chacon. Their self-titled album embraces abstraction. | Endlings is the collaboration of Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich with the New Mexico-based composer and noise artist Raven Chacon. Their self-titled album embraces abstraction. | Endlings: Endlings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23203-endlings/ | Endlings | John Dieterich is best known as one-fourth of the daft art-pop outfit Deerhoof, though he’s also lent his impressionistic guitar thunder to albums by Colossamite and the Gorge Trio. For the project Endlings, Dieterich collaborates with composer and noise artist Raven Chacon—whose resume spans everything from KILT’s industrial sabotage to the multimedia collective Postcommodity, which presents work through an Indigenous lens.
Dieterich and Chacon first collaborated at the Albuquerque Experimental Music Festival in 2010, an improvised stew of torrid effects and unhinged guitars. Shortly after, Dieterich relocated from the Bay Area to Chacon’s native New Mexico. Endlings now bears little resemblance to that original performance. But they embrace abstraction.
At times, the duo surrenders themselves to a shuddering, violent minimalism, a sonic no-man’s land where it can be challenging to find or sustain one’s balance. At their harshest, they’re especially oblique: “I Make It Fall” crams dense, near-intelligible guitar scribbles into 73 seconds, “Legal Fiction” suggests a tuning fork tumbling in a gradually accelerating dryer. When the pendulum swings in the opposite direction, their results pulse with a no-fi glow that would have been right at home as interstitials on lost, ’90s outlier classics like Home’s Home X or Bügsküll’s Phantasies and Senseitions. On “Buried in Angels,” threshing effects and shrill whistles yield to sub-tropical waves of ukulele and keyboard.
Endlings is strongest when the band balances legibility with the ineffable. “Thought Signature” crumbles vocals over aqueous, bouncy keyboards. “The Devil’s in the Red Tail” pits watery guitar chords against Native American flutes. “Black Sabbatical” blends twin, turgid heavy metal riffs with claws, never losing sight of its hooks beneath the weight of compounding feedback and distortion. Every Endlings song offers a sneak peek into a distinct, unmoored sound world—one dizzyingly strange, free thread after another, genres turned inside out. With any hope, Dieterich and Chacon will be able to find the time and wherewithal to follow each strand to its end, wherever they may lead. | 2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sicksicksick / Lightning Feet | May 15, 2017 | 6.8 | 4b36ffd9-33d6-4303-b81e-a75807691b33 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a wild slice of ’70s Dylan, an album whose air of magic and misdirection remains utterly unique in his catalog. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a wild slice of ’70s Dylan, an album whose air of magic and misdirection remains utterly unique in his catalog. | Bob Dylan: Desire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-desire/ | Desire | [Scene 1: West Village, New York City, 1975. A legendary songwriter, mid-30s, is surveying the neighborhood where he cut his teeth a decade before. A violinist, younger and without his star status, but striking, with long dark hair and mysterious poise, enters stage right.]
The passerby was Scarlet Rivera, a previously unknown musician whose hypnotic violin became the signature sound of Bob Dylan’s newly minted touring group, the Rolling Thunder Revue, and his gestational new album, Desire. Naturally, Dylan—world historic genius, generational icon, and general weirdo—pulled over his car, resolved to ask her just exactly what her deal was. For an artist so concerned with myth, this chance encounter must have been irresistible. Was she phantom, muse, or curse? Was she really named Scarlet Rivera? “I meet witchy women. I wish they’d leave me alone,” he told Jonathan Cott, in a 1978 Rolling Stone interview, not stopping to consider the possibility that the feeling was mutual. Not long after the album came out, she vanished from his life and the public eye.
As with so much Dylan lore—from the fabled teenage eye contact with Buddy Holly to the arrest in Springsteen’s childhood neighborhood—it seems too unlikely to be true, and too preposterously random to invent. It’s of a piece with the world of Desire, where what’s real and what’s weird are largely indistinguishable.
Dylan’s previous record, the precision-controlled display of omniscient superego that was 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, had set an impossibly high standard for its follow-up. In response, Desire was a fantasia of grave injustices and grave robberies, exotic and dangerous locales, broiling days and fleeting gestures in the face of grim destiny. Its nine songs spread out over 56 minutes, co-mingling protest folk, travelogue tunes, throwback country, and sideways klezmer, all comprising one peculiar episode in the baffling sweep of his career. Blood on the Tracks was a document of personal and romantic trauma that traced an outline around a generation who prized individual freedoms to the point of self-annihilating alienation. Desire is about getting stoned and strange and trying to forget about all of that.
Desire is not a subtle album, and it does not commence on a subtle note. “Hurricane”—an audacious eight-and-a-half minute recounting of the 1966 arrest and conviction of the middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter on charges of triple homicide—begins with the interweaving and insinuating strains of Dylan’s acoustic guitar and Rivera’s violin. One of seven songs on Desire co-authored with the playwright Jacques Levy, it employs stage directions to set its scenery: “Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night/Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall.” Intentional or not, the effect of the dramaturgy is to suggest a not-strictly-speaking-literal recounting of events, introducing the queasy sensation that we are being carried along by storytellers whose commitment to the facts is secondary to their impulse to thrill and desperation to deliver a higher truth.
Indeed, Dylan and Levy take considerable liberties with Carter’s biography and the case against him. He was never the “number one contender for the middleweight crown”; by the time of his arrest, he was circling boxing’s drain toward journeyman status. Neither did his long history of violence outside the ring comport with the beatific “Buddha” portrayed in the lyrics. Still, the song is one of Dylan’s greatest. The story’s grim particulars take root in your imagination: the ultra-violent crime, the summer heat and police lights, the racist cops and all-white jury sealing his fate. The band rolls along, a runaway sea of conga fills and furious energy. By the end no reasonable person could doubt Carter’s innocence, questionable though it may be.
Desire follows one epic with another: “Isis,” a bluesy slow-burn odyssey that considers the relative plusses and minuses of stealing from the dead for a living, like Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” by way of Leonard Cohen’s early frozen-song landscapes. Its account of a two-man grift gone wrong and the women caught in between post-dates Humphrey Bogart and pre-dates Better Call Saul, making for a perfect mid-point in that continuum of heroic losers.
Then the weirdness starts in earnest. “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Oh, Sister” are solemn and prayerful, filled with Old Testament dread and the echoes of an antiquity reaching further back still. “One More Cup of Coffee” seems to describe the morning after a confused night of romance, the narrator asking his erstwhile paramour for a shot of caffeine before he disappears into “the valley below.” “Oh, Sister” is one of several tracks on Desire sung in haunting harmony with Emmylou Harris. With its passionate interpolation of sibling and spiritual mandates, it’s one part Freudian fever dream and one part plea for familial oneness—Neutral Milk Hotel invented in four gorgeously unsettling minutes. “Oh sister, when I come to lie in your arms,” goes the first verse, “You should not treat me like a stranger.” I’m no psychologist, but it’s clear Dylan is dissociating here. The music’s leisurely grandeur only heightens the creeping horror.
[Scene 2: Marin County, CA, 1987. The legendary songwriter, now at a commercial and creative low point, rehearses with an iconic group from his 1960s heyday for a joint tour.]
The union of Dylan and the Grateful Dead was auspicious, but the context was strange. Riding an improbable wave of commercial excitement following their MTV hit “Touch of Grey,” the Dead were playing to the largest crowds of their career. Following a run of desultory ’80s-era albums, Dylan was decidedly not. Without the Dead as his backing band, there was no chance he would be playing stadiums at this dysfunctional juncture. During practices, the Dead requested old Dylan songs they might want to try their hands at playing. Dylan, for once in his life, wasn’t in much of a position to refuse. Preposterously, perfectly, and for all to hear on 1989’s live LP Dylan & The Dead, Jerry Garcia requests “Joey.”
A straggling Gemini-twin to “Hurricane,” Desire’s most indulgent composition whinges on interminably and borderline incomprehensibly about the gangland slaying of an objectively psychotic mafia figure named Joey Gallo. Dylan famously coined the aspirational phrase “to live outside the law you must be honest,” a formulation that “Joey” undermines in every way possible. If you wanted to make the case for “Joey” as his worst song, you might begin with the demented portrayal of Gallo as some manner of saint, whose ahistorical indulgences might be more persuasive had Dylan bothered to string them together with a shred of narrative logic. You might move on to the torpid melody, one of the least memorable he’s ever written. But hey, at least it’s 11 minutes long. The twist is, in the nimble, gleefully amoral hands of the Grateful Dead, this dismal composition became supple and agreeable. Somehow the Dead brought “Joey” back to life. There’s your graverobbers right there.
Desire’s final third leans further into Dylan’s obsessions with love, death, ecstasy, and the liminal spaces between. “Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun!” he exclaims on the opening line of “Romance in Durango,” a legitimately goose-skin inducing Tex-Mex boogie replete with the thrill of adventure and the promise of violence, an invigorating update to his 1973 soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Its lyrics cross the distance between total fantasy and something like a true accounting of events. By the time of the lead cowboy’s inevitable sacrifice-by-desperado, he is so discombobulated that he begins interrogating the libretto itself: "Was it my hand that held the gun?” and “Can it be that I am slain?”
“Black Diamond Bay,” another long story song on an album full of them, is remarkably tuneful, ruefully ominous, and utterly batshit. I have been listening to it for two decades, and I still have no clue what is happening. There is a Greek man, a woman in a Panama hat, a soldier, a tiny man, a volcano. Portends of suicide and disaster percolate: scheming gamblers and sunken islands, betrayals and broken bonds, the kind of Book of Revelation stuff Dylan would get into full-time soon enough. Through some mysterious alchemy, its incoherence yields real beauty, abetted by an incredibly committed performance from his ace backing band—led by bassist Rob Stoner, another musician who figured prominently in Dylan’s career and then seemed to disappear. Try to grasp the details of “Black Diamond Bay,” or just let the imagery carry you away. Like everything on Desire, it’s all misdirection and magic anyway.
[Scene 3: Columbia Records recording studio, midtown Manhattan, 1975. An estranged wife watches her husband sing the song that he thinks will make all the difference. Will it matter?]
Album closer “Sara” is by orders of magnitude the most explicitly biographical song the notoriously private Dylan has ever released. He recounts in forensic detail the fraying of his union to Sara Lownds, his longtime wife and the mother of his children. Even by the contemporary standards of full-frontal psychic nudity, its oversharing is extremely uncomfortable. He conjures their babies playing on the beach. He marinates in his own mythology: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you,” name-checking the sprawling closer of 1966’s Blonde on Blonde. He howls her name again and again: “Sara, Sara/Whatever made you want to change your mind?” Talk about blood on the tracks.
Still, as the song winds its pleading way to its conclusion, something feels off. After Dylan has spent the past fifty minutes recasting “Hurricane” Carter as a man of peace and Joey Gallo as a populist immigrant hero, it’s hard not to wonder what duplicity lies in this depiction of the Dylan-Lownds partnership. The story goes that Dylan held off recording Desire’s final track until his estranged wife could be present at the session, a last gambit for reconciliation. Apparently, she gave no reaction at all as it was recorded. Their divorce became official shortly after.
Desire was a hit, even briefly reaching No. 1 on the US Billboard album charts, and serving as the soundtrack of the wooly second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, as it evolved from an ersatz-folk revival medicine show into a mesmerizing quasi-gothic hellscape. From there, the head trips for Dylan’s audience would proceed in whiplash succession: the tarot-glitz of Street Legal and subsequent Vegas-style live shows, the should-have-seen-it-coming shock of his evangelical years, the drift from his vision in the 1980s, the improbable return as the mustache-twirling Nobel laureate of the new millennium. Were they arbitrary scenes or some part of a connected whole?
He would never make another record like it—its circumstances being unrepeatable seemingly by design—but in some ways Desire is the most explicit manifestation of the central literary irony of Dylan’s career: that the consummate barometer of social and cultural authenticity can’t be trusted with the facts about anything, least of all himself. Perhaps his true desire is to reduce real life to a kind of theater: a zero-sum contest between his sublime powers of expression and the vexing limitations and grinding tedium that more often than not constitute existence. Asked about the song “Sara” in the same 1978 interview in which he complained about witchy women, Dylan struggled to parse what he’d written three years before about his own wife: “Was it the real Sara, or the Sara in the dream? I still don’t know.” For a second there, it sounds like he’s telling the truth. | 2024-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | January 14, 2024 | 9 | 4b372528-1bc7-42c4-b465-696905907443 | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
With more straightforward performances and compositions, the album has its flat spots, but it hints that Bertelmann might have as much to say as his piano does. | With more straightforward performances and compositions, the album has its flat spots, but it hints that Bertelmann might have as much to say as his piano does. | Hauschka: A Different Forest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hauschka-a-different-forest/ | A Different Forest | Feel free to read this sentence a couple of times if you need to: A decade before he became an experimental piano auteur called Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann played keys in a hip-hop group called God’s Favorite Dog. It was sort of a German PM Dawn, to judge from this TV performance of their song “Lake of Life.” In the clip, you can sometimes glimpse Bertelmann’s familiar floppy-haired visage behind the “Boy Meets World” extra rocking on the tambo.
It’s not a short or straight path from there to the Sony Classical label, where Bertelmann, with his new LP, joins the Olympian line of Bernstein and Boulez. But there is a subtle through line. While inching into the classical sphere, Bertelmann never stopped “dipping [his] toes in the lake of life.” This is to say that he renders broad, grand concepts as acute, confined miniatures, more attuned to weft than heft, and he plays like a blade skimming froth off the surface of existence—notably on pop-and-house-inflected fan favorites Ferndorf and Salon des Amateurs.
A Different Forest keeps with Bertelmann’s habit of crushingly literal titles (see also: Foreign Landscapes, Abandoned City). It has a very general concept about nature and civilization, as you might infer from such less-than-imaginative titles as “Hike” and, yes, “Another Hike.” But in truth, he’s burying the lede: This is a significant course change. It should have been called The Unprepared Piano, a counterpoint to the record that put him on the new music map and the process that has sustained him since. Now, rather than altering his piano’s strings and hammers with wood, metal, and paper, and using electronic effects to create ambient, dance, and orchestral timbres, his playing is mostly unadorned by interventions. The resulting album has its flat spots, but at its best, it hints that Bertelmann might have as much to say as his piano does.
The record opens with the perfectly lovely and predictable neoclassical lobby music of “Hike,” almost an etude, with tasteful left-hand chords dusking a plain interval cycling up and down. “Dew and Spiderwebs” is freer and deeper, as Bertelmann draws whorled lines across a darkly pulsing understructure. His pianism is confident throughout, especially on “Urban Forest,” where he rolls out smooth, glittering pavements and embellishes them with diegetic city sounds, and “Hands in the Anthill,” a Mozartian maze of little triumphs, with passages of showy, flowing speed. But several tracks (“Curious,” “Ghosts”) rely on the tug of well-worn harmonic shapes and the weaving of legato lines to entrance rather than ideate, persuade, or startle.
The standouts have more substance, musically and visually. The wide, soft, shining curves of “Skating Through the Woods” conjure its scene without being too literal. A granular texture at large in “Daybreak over Covent Garden” lends it a rogue subjectivity that is absent in the tautly plaited sound worlds elsewhere. But the album’s low-key best composition is profound, coming from a composer more given to zest.
“Talking to My Father” is a somber, nostalgic rumination that exemplifies the narrative potential of solo piano. Bertelmann, who often prefers to follow patterns down rabbit holes, instead gently wrestles with and develops a rich theme, moving through passages of clarity and uncertainty, joy and regret, and ending with a somehow-knowing denouement. It has the arc of a long, complex conversation, and it’s the best indication here that Bertelmann isn’t just cropping up in the top-tier classical world. He might have the vision to stay there. | 2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sony Classical | February 11, 2019 | 6.9 | 4b4b117d-95b0-44b1-9091-1b589d9ef6d9 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
American Intelligence, Detroit house music producer Theo Parrish’s first album since 2007, is a two-hour collection with 10 of its 15 tracks approaching or breaking the 10-minute barrier. Within it, Parrish embraces the paradox of the title: indulgent and defiant, serious and cheeky, political yet intent on getting your dead ass to move. | American Intelligence, Detroit house music producer Theo Parrish’s first album since 2007, is a two-hour collection with 10 of its 15 tracks approaching or breaking the 10-minute barrier. Within it, Parrish embraces the paradox of the title: indulgent and defiant, serious and cheeky, political yet intent on getting your dead ass to move. | Theo Parrish: American Intelligence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20057-american-intelligence/ | American Intelligence | There’s always something of a contrarian streak to Detroit dance music producer Theo Parrish that can also come across as purist, crotchety, fussbudgety. When he first began releasing music in 1996, Parrish and peers like Kenny Dixon Jr., Marcellus Pittman, Rick Wilhite, Andrés, and more did dance music that was not quite in step with the scene. Instead of futurism and the whirring machinations that informed Detroit’s sleekest export, techno, they preferred house’s slightly slower pulse, their tracks infused with their parents and grandparents’ record collections. Swells of church organ, the coos of R&B, jazz’s swing, funk’s rhythmic gunk—some half-century’s worth of African-American music—teemed just beneath the kick drum.
But as house music tightened and grew sleeker, Parrish's tracks loosened and turned viscous. He began dropping disco edits and when edits began to flood the market soon after, his grew uglier. Deep house all the rage now? Well then, Parrish's most recent mix is comprised entirely out of charged 1970’s free jazz. He’s as renowned for not giving you what you want in a DJ set as he is for delivering both the headiest and dankest dance music of the last 20 years.
He gives you all you can handle with American Intelligence, a title that with each passing news day feels more and more like an oxymoron. It’s his first album since 2007 and the end result is a massive listen, a two-hour collection (or else a slightly trimmed triple LP), with 10 of its 15 tracks approaching or breaking the 10-minute barrier. Within it, Parrish embraces the paradox of the title: indulgent and defiant, serious and cheeky, political yet intent on getting your dead ass to move. The man is musically generous, even if a copy in the shop might set you back $50.
The album opens with a subliminal bass tone that will set your subwoofer to trembling. He then carefully drips in closed hi-hats, a snare just a millimeter too fast, a ride cymbal that splatters like a circuit in a rain puddle, all of it embellishing a heart-quickening throb. Parrish then takes his sweet fucking time to whisper to his fellow countrymen: "Where’s your drive? Has it died?" He then answers himself: "It keeps me alive."
Throughout the length of this album, Parrish keeps to the sparest of rhythmic sounds. And as he put it in a recent interview, that was his intent: "What I try to get to is that part of everybody that is childlike and is simple, it goes to the rhythm, the repetition. The idea of a handclap that keeps happening over and over again is the most-simple thing that can happen and is something everybody can do and relate to." He’s the Alice Waters of dance music, turning a handful of fresh ingredients into a feast. Often the rhythm tracks are erected out of little more than a live kick drum, tom, snare, hi-hat, dashes of other hand percussion (bells, rattles), with pads adding a bit more heft. Out of such Spartan percussion, he mesmerizes, to where introducing a new element 5-6 minutes deep suddenly turns revelatory. Some six minutes amongst the echoing bloops and zagging keys of "Tympanic Warfare", the drums start to sizzle and what once seemed abstract and not fully sketched out now feels solid.
The length of tracks slows down AI at some points, while some of the keyboard figures seem to echo melodies found elsewhere, which to newcomers might get misread as sameness. As rapturous as the beatless R&B exhalations of vocalist Ideeyah are on "Ah", it would have been more effective and sublime at five minutes instead of 10. "Helmut Lampshade" turns into a jazz fusion robot run amok. The highway patrol dialogue on "Welcome Back" is a throwaway track, but there’s little doubt it’s rooted in the ugliest of truths about American racism, underscoring the political that is always just beneath the surface of Parrish's music and discourse.
The track well worth wading through is the 13 glorious minutes of "Be In Yo Self". Built from a shuffling cymbal that slowly gathers momentum, aspects of the track are smooth enough to scan as nu-jazz yet it still feels rooted and raw. Guitarist Duminie DePorres delivers a snaking Phil Upchurch-type guitar line as Ideeyah hums and harmonizes with herself, singing ad nauseam: "Being yourself shouldn’t have a downside."
As Parrish explained in the aforementioned interview, the song is "almost kind of like a spiritual. It's a chant." Midway through, the shift comes not from a new rhythmic element, but a lyrical one: "Hey suga, would you dance a little bit closer to me?" It’s deep, not so much in the house sense, but in an emotional way, an honest request to his betrothed. It’s Parrish at his most disarming, and coming as it does in his broad discography, it’s a most agreeable sound. | 2014-12-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-12-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Sound Signature | December 12, 2014 | 8.3 | 4b5222b9-874a-4f38-918e-6e2769a17900 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
This batch of reissues chronicling M83's first three albums measures the artistic progression of Anthony Gonzales. They chart the project's progression towards the kind of big tent, feelings-forward electro-rock hybrid that has become the base stock of most popular indie acts. | This batch of reissues chronicling M83's first three albums measures the artistic progression of Anthony Gonzales. They chart the project's progression towards the kind of big tent, feelings-forward electro-rock hybrid that has become the base stock of most popular indie acts. | M83: M83 / Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts / Before the Dawn Heals Us Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts Remixes & B-Sides EP / Before the Dawn Heals Us Remixes & B-Sides EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19775-m83-m83-dead-cities-red-seas-lost-ghosts-before-the-dawn-heals-us-dead-cities-red-seas-and-lost-ghosts-remixes-b-sides-ep-before-the-dawn-heals-us-remixes-b-sides-ep/ | M83 / Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts / Before the Dawn Heals Us Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts Remixes & B-Sides EP / Before the Dawn Heals Us Remixes & B-Sides EP | It’s hard to imagine a project better suited for the age of enormous festival gigs and indie auteur-focused action movie soundtracks than M83. In the 13 years since Anthony Gonzalez and then-collaborator Nicolas Fromageau released the project’s first, self-titled record, the kind of big tent, feelings-forward electro-rock hybrid that they made has become, in some permutation, the base stock of most popular indie acts. While My Bloody Valentine were—and remain—a good point of reference for M83’s sonic textures, Arcade Fire are perhaps a better touchpoint for their overall approach: lead with emotions telegraphed big and wide enough to fill a stadium, and let the guitars and synthesizers fall into place around them.
This trilogy of reissues beautifully tracks the evolution of Gonzalez’s work from student film, to limited-release, to blockbuster. It also marks a very clear progression from an accessible, emotional electronic music project to what Brandon Stosuy aptly described as “high-concept emo embossed with glittery snow angels.” The story of these three records is not that of Gonzalez filling his music with progressively more embellishment, but rather of Gonzalez learning how to reorganize the core of his musical vision around that embellishment. The glass baubles of M83 became the rhinestone earrings of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which became the crystal chandeliers of Before the Dawn Heals Us.
Sure enough, M83’s self-titled debut album is their stateliest and most deliberate work. The album’s song titles point further towards an emo narrative, but the music itself only hints at this kind of heavy-handed heartstring-tugging; for better or worse, this is M83 introducing themselves as an electronic project with strong emotional undercurrents, and not much deeper than that.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is a transitional record that bridges the gap between M83’s relatively understated beginnings and their bombastic recent output. Listening back 11 years later, it’s notable how messy Dead Cities is; though it still operates in something that resembles an electronic music paradigm, much of its energy is crowded into the upper-midrange frequencies that usually pile up when layering distorted electric guitars. A synthesizer-heavy crescendo is often followed by a bigger, heavier crescendo, with more sounds and ideas piled on even if there isn’t really room for them. Dead Cities makes its case through sheer scale and force of will, constantly running up against the limitations of its own construction. It's dramatic music embroiled in its own internal drama, and it succeeds on slightly different terms from any subsequent M83 record.
Nowhere is this particular formula better articulated than “Run Into Flowers”, the debut single from Dead Cities and one of the most achingly, incessantly beautiful songs Gonzalez has ever released. It layers buzzing synthesizers, dramatic synthesized strings, humming synthesizers, gently sung vocals, and even more synthesizers to create a vast, overpowering swell that starts big and only seems to grow bigger. “0078h” builds to a dizzying crescendo, as beats collapse over themselves and synthesized voices ping-pong unintelligibly like a computer struggling with its own sentience. Even the bleepy and bloopy “Cyborg” builds to a satisfyingly organic conclusion that honors its part-human, part-robot namesake.
And indeed, it’s that human element, in the form of the human voice, that comes to greater prominence post-Dead Cities. Before the Dawn Heals Us marks a number of notable changes from its predecessor, including the departure of Fromageau and the reworking of the M83’s aesthetic from tasteful electronic minimalism to broad-stroke "Miami Vice" expressionism. To whatever extent Dead Cities seemed corny when compared to other electronic albums, Before the Dawn Heals Us is corny and overstated by nearly any measure. But on Before the Dawn Heals Us, Gonzalez actually makes room for all the bombast of his songs. The single “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” finds Gonzalez embracing not just the energy of rock music, but also its dynamics. The drums—or, rather, “drums”—protrude forcefully, rather than getting swallowed up in synthesizers and static. There's a clear and appreciable distinction between lead synths and synth pads. Verses pull back, choruses kick forward.
And then there are the vocalists—including, fittingly, actress Kate Moran—who are cast more like players in a movie than singers on an album. From “Can’t Stop”, which sounds like one of those '70s soft rock infomercials pitched up and put on a loop, to “Car Chase Terror”, which narrates pretty much the exact scenario its title describes via a woman’s voice over the phone, each of the best songs on Before the Dawn Heals Us not only find a unique voice, but also a unique way of situating it. Insofar as Dead Cities evokes people, places, and things through sound and texture, Before the Dawn Heals Us puts those people, places, and things front and center in a very literal way.
Sure enough, the remixes included in the bonus EPs are instructive primarily because they tease out these individual elements, lay them out in a more linear fashion, and give them room to express themselves in a less frantic and busy context. One gets the sense that, when presented sequentially, each of the instrumental tracks in a single M83 song could fill up an entire record. The B-sides included here fall predictably short, largely because they seem to lack the over-the-top commitment of their album counterparts. These songs are, for sure, host to their own subtle charms—but subtlety is not Gonzalez’s strong suit, nor is it what this kind of music calls for. M83's records certainly don’t fall apart under close scrutiny, and they don’t ask for such scrutiny, either. Instead, they ask that you suspend just a little bit of critical disbelief, and let yourself get carried away. | 2014-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | September 4, 2014 | 6.5 | 4b59aff1-7b57-40a0-a5b1-f7ab1736885b | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Zombie armies, mortal standoffs, gravesite robberies: On their ecstatic second album, the Rochester metal band has fun with death. | Zombie armies, mortal standoffs, gravesite robberies: On their ecstatic second album, the Rochester metal band has fun with death. | Undeath: It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/undeath-its-time-to-rise-from-the-grave/ | It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave | Undeath don’t fear the future. And why should they worry when they’re so fixated on our collectively inevitable end? The second album from this young crew of old-school death metal diehards, It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave is so swept up in necromania it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly who is in peril or already perished: you, them, or everyone in the world who isn’t enlisted in the militia of undead bionic mercenaries they amass during an uproarious mid-record tandem. Chandeliers of bone and feasts of flesh, zombie uprisings and pillaged cemeteries: Rise From the Grave is an ecstatic celebration of the fetid and the dead, an extraordinary rendering of the ordinary place where we all eventually arrive. Undeath have so much fun with their necrotic obsessions it’s hard not to listen and be grateful you’re not there yet.
Nearly 40 years ago, Undeath would have been the subject of senatorial scrutiny, members of the prurient-and-satanic cadre that Tipper Gore and her Parents Music Resource Center vilified before Congress. But the Rochester quintet is now able to sprint without worry down the controversial and bloody-minded path that its New York forebears in Cannibal Corpse—or the string of Florida predecessors like Morbid Angel, Death, and Deicide that ultimately drew them south—arduously bushwhacked decades ago.
Despite the stylistic leaps and bounds within death metal in the generation since, Undeath follow those bygone formulas, from album covers depicting fantastical murders and desecrated graveyards to ghoulish scenes forever-grunted over belligerent riffs and relentless drums. There are splenetic solos, eerie electronic intros, and rubber-band bass rumbles. This isn’t the future but, instead, a reinvigorated past. If you have even a marginally informed stereotype of the way primitive death metal sounds or feels, it probably resembles Undeath and Rise From the Grave.
But unlike their sometimes hilariously self-serious inspirations, Undeath grew up online— “internet music nerds” and “overweight gamers from Upstate New York,” as they put it in recent interviews. The most brutal underground death metal and the most addictive mainstream pop, then, were only a click apart, a lesson they incorporate into these 10 wonderfully gnarly and memorable barrages. Undeath aren’t just grinding away, attempting to sound tough or inventive or necessarily hidebound: They’re here to bask in a wonderfully ridiculous taboo—having fun by exaggerating the horrors of death, making it seem more wicked and harrowing than it already is. “It’s about having a good time with us,” admitted vocalist Alexander Jones in Spin, “reveling in this admittedly silly thing…death metal.”
“Head Splattered in Seven Ways,” to wit, details an absurdist armed standoff between two dudes. All the death-metal hallmarks are present—vocals so violent you can practically hear the larynx rip, massive riffs that crash down in waves, cymbals that dance over tides of blast beats. As Jones demands answers from his victim, he repeats, “Tell me the truth,” the band making space for a refrain so barbed you may hum along the second time he coughs it up, even if this is the only death metal song you’ve ever heard.
Or there’s “Necrobionics,” the first of those two tunes about the mounting zombie army. The band is as agile as it is aggressive, with righteous guitarists Jared Welch and Kyle Beam stuffing a symphony of melodrama into their compact riffs. Jones perches above it all like some pop-star gargoyle, squealing “Piles of death/Corpses en masse.” He sells this ludicrous hook by treating each syllable like the opposite side of a melodic seesaw, a trick he might have learned from Rihanna’s “Umbrella” or any number of arena-sized anthems. Either way, it sticks, and it’s possible to imagine audiences not clad only in black shouting it back at Undeath.
This approachability is bigger than hooks. Beam is an intuitively crafty songwriter, tapping simple linguistic tools—alliteration, internal rhyme, rhythmic variety—to magnetize these morbid tales before they even reach the chorus. You get the narrative, even if you don’t understand every word. The band also wedges their own little mementos into these tracks. Bassist Tommy Wall (alongside Welch, new to Undeath for this LP) opens the record with a rumbling line that catches much like the start of the Breeders’ “Cannonball.” The buzzsaw riff of “The Funeral Within,” pushed to a devilish pace by drummer Matt Browning, is nearly as memorable as Jones’ chanted refrain, a rollercoaster of four rhyming lines about mortal sin and rotten skin. Undeath are here to have and supply a good time.
It’s fair to wonder why Undeath—who do very little that hasn’t been done for decades in death metal, no matter the oomph and conviction with which they do it—warrant either a big record deal or the sort of consensus accolades they’re enjoying, present paean included. At least in part, Undeath simply have the good luck of bad times. Their goofy, gory cemetery fantasies serve as welcome pressure-release valves for these fraught days. Undeath are playing games with death, the thing so many of us spend so much of our lives fretting. “Tissue from the brain was dead but is now alive,” Jones barks during “Enhancing the Dead,” the second of those two songs about an army of weaponized zombies. That’s also how It’s Time… To Rise From the Grave might make you feel—a little less worried about dying and a little more alive, at least for these 36 gleeful minutes. | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Prosthetic | April 28, 2022 | 8.3 | 4b5ff3c3-91e5-4376-9c9c-c9826d663c4d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The pop-R&B singer’s long-awaited debut follows a line from crippling self-doubt to pure confidence, adopting a glossy and funky vibe fortified by her exceptional voice and songwriting. | The pop-R&B singer’s long-awaited debut follows a line from crippling self-doubt to pure confidence, adopting a glossy and funky vibe fortified by her exceptional voice and songwriting. | Amber Mark: Three Dimensions Deep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amber-mark-three-dimensions-deep/ | Three Dimensions Deep | Over the past six years, Amber Mark has crafted consistent pop-R&B music with tasteful, glossy precision. The New York artist’s first two EPs, 2017’s 3:33 AM and 2018’s breakthrough Conexão, examined themes of grief and love through lithe R&B, pop, dance, and bossa nova, melding different sounds into one elegant, rhythmic blend. She separated herself from her peers by leaning into stormy, overwhelming emotion, whether swimming through a monsoon of tears on an undulating ballad or demanding equal footing in a relationship over a jubilant house beat.
Mark’s impressive, husky voice suits her genre-hopping music, which hit a stride in 2020 on her quarantine-made covers series that allowed her to stretch her legs and experiment, especially in its more offbeat, cheeky exercises (see: her house-infused, unexpectedly delightful spin on Sisqó’s “Thong Song”). That set serves as a playful aperitif for Three Dimensions Deep, Mark’s polished, long-awaited debut. Moving smoothly between R&B, funk, and pop, the fully realized album foregrounds Mark’s vocals and songwriting, scrutinizing her self-doubt as a way to cast it out and build self-confidence.
The album is structured in three acts mapping Mark’s journey at different stages: identifying her own insecurities, working through the messy parts of self-discovery, and finally reaching a solid sense of self-worth. Three Dimensions Deep’s secondary, figurative throughline is inspired by Mark’s love of sci-fi and interest in heady astrophysics theories, a theme that pops up through celestial metaphors in her lyrics that amplify human concerns to galactic size. In Mark’s world, romance hurtles her to another planet, kisses are astronomical, and searching for her place in the world is posed as an all-consuming, cosmic question.
Mark makes the concept work, using it as a loose framework for plush, tightly produced songs whose subjects range from tossing men in the trash to battling dark nights of the soul. “Trying to see where life leads, where the future lies/Anxiety all of me keeping me up at night,” she admits on “One” over a chopped-up blues sample and knocking beats. The concession feels honest, with Mark taking stock of the uncertainty of her future and emerging freshly determined to take control of it. “On & On” describes another battle with self-doubt over a stomping drumbeat and sumptuous strings, making the mental slump of questioning one’s worth sound refreshingly comforting. She uses the occasional astral image, like looking up into the night sky, to illuminate small junctures of uncertainty and distance.
Mark tempers the album’s vulnerable moments with upbeat songs that traipse through sultry nights out and scenes from her love life. Early highlight “Most Men” unspools slowly, as organ chords give way to a laidback beat at the halfway point and Mark immortalizes the one true commandment when it comes to dating: “Most men are garbage.” Later, she moves on from terrible exes on the seductive “Softly,” which loops the guitar melody from Craig David’s 2000 song “Rendezvous” into a throbbing R&B backdrop for the heated tension she feels with a potential partner. Mark co-produced or engineered over half of the album’s 17 tracks and makes her fingerprints known, shifting easily from velvety, percussive R&B (“Worth It”) to sleek pop-funk (“Darkside”). Small details—a slight key change, stacked murmured vocals, luxuriant extended outros—work like choice accessories on Mark’s signature, memorable style.
As on her previous EPs, Mark’s dynamic voice imbues the album with its most emotive, surprising turns. On the sauntering “What It Is,” she stretches her vowels over cascading, layered vocals and a scorching guitar solo. Later she adopts a conversational flow to indulge in a glitzy lifestyle on “Foreign Things,” and strikes a smoky, melancholy tone during “On & On.” The depth and dexterity make for one of the album’s most engaging qualities; even when Mark reaches for an obvious lyric, as on the arguably outdated chorus of “FOMO” or the neutral-to-a-fault “Competition,” her rich, varied performance transforms the occasional errant choice into an opportunity for another compelling vocal phrasing.
Energetic, lush, and measured, Three Dimensions Deep is a cohesive debut from Mark that doesn’t lose sight of the bespoke sound that she’s developed over the years. Here, Mark’s music accomplishes its goal of making the pursuit of figuring out who you are, what you stand for, and how you can make it through the world feel as immense as a meteor cratering into the moon. But that kind of outsize passion feels exceptionally true to life, especially as rendered in Mark’s capable hands.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | PMR / Interscope | January 28, 2022 | 8 | 4b605c1a-8728-471e-a6fe-b7ff2eaf6945 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
A vinyl reissue of the atmospheric guitar score for Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film reveals a spare and intuitive performance unlike anything else Neil Young has recorded. | A vinyl reissue of the atmospheric guitar score for Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film reveals a spare and intuitive performance unlike anything else Neil Young has recorded. | Neil Young: Dead Man Original Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-dead-man-original-soundtrack/ | Dead Man Original Soundtrack | A few months before Jimi Hendrix unfurled the guitar fireworks of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, Neil Young played a hypnotic one-note guitar break inside “Cinnamon Girl,” the opening track on 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Even if Young’s style never approached minimalism in the classical sense, the very idea—an anti-solo solo—conjured a textural universe that Young has been exploring ever since, most often in live jams with Crazy Horse.
But it took more than two decades for Young himself to make an album of solo electric guitar music, his 1996 soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. In a catalog that has ranged from the 1982 vocoder-touched Trans to the 2003 eco-rock opera Greendale, Dead Man remains the only release of its kind. A new reissue returns the spotlight to arguably the most satisfying oddity of Young’s half-century career, too committed to be dismissed as a novelty.
Young creates a vocabulary of sound as if he’d been improvising movie scores for decades—a landscape of stark, expressive solo guitar to match Jarmusch’s psychedelic black-and-white Western. With the tracks unnamed on their original release, the high fidelity Neil Young Archives site now titles the half-dozen instrumentals as “Dead Man, No. 1” through “Dead Man, No. 6,” plus “Organ Solo.” They alternate with another half-dozen dialogue-based tracks, Young’s guitar pushed to the background while bits of the movie come up, largely featuring Johnny Depp, who reads the poetry of William Blake. Though they provide an emotional structure for the music and are unquestionably atmospheric sound-art, they’d be buzzkills even without Johnny Depp, interrupting perhaps the purest guitar playing of Young’s discography. (These buzzkills, of course, can be bypassed on mediums other than vinyl.)
Young’s closest companion to Dead Man, perhaps even a prequel of sorts, is 1991’s Arc, a 35-minute extended edit of Crazy Horse’s live feedback jams. While Arc might be louder, Dead Man is perhaps even further out, pushing beyond songs and rhythms and noise, and building from the new logic of the world beyond. On “Dead Man, No. 1,” Young’s guitar scratches a fluttering, almost-steady pulse while muted chords flicker, disappearing before they can resonate and reveal themselves. It ends with a 30-second melodic coda that sounds like what the narrator of Young’s 1975 “Albuquerque” might be hearing in their head driving through the New Mexican desert.
Each of Dead Man’s tracks offers subtly different strategies, from the dream swirl of “Organ Solo” to the sustained ghost tones and scandalously indulgent two-note solo of “Dead Man, No. 6.” The centerpiece is the 14-and-a-half minute “Dead Man, No. 5,” filled indelibly with Young’s favorite gestures as a guitarist: aching chord voicings, fuzztones, and spiky colors that open into broader fields of sound as ideas return and change shape.
The form of these compositions remains ambiguous, give or take moments when notes begin to connect into melodic fragments that sound viscerally like Young, accidental shards of musical personality on display. For an artist so famously committed to spontaneity and chasing idiosyncratic muses, including making films of his own, it’s authentically shocking that the now 73-year-old Young has never gone further down this path. The seven fully instrumental tracks of Dead Man are Neil Young at his purest, like a rare electronic voice phenomenon recording of Young’s musical spirit as it rumbles and bends and intersects with the material plane. | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vapor | March 12, 2019 | 7.7 | 4b6088ac-6fb5-4b39-8e6b-b6d66d207bc1 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
After two previous albums together, the rock trio version of the Mountain Goats now sound like a properly developed unit that plays with nuance and purpose. | After two previous albums together, the rock trio version of the Mountain Goats now sound like a properly developed unit that plays with nuance and purpose. | The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15259-all-eternals-deck/ | All Eternals Deck | It seems a stretch to call John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats an embattled bandleader. After all, from the outside, he's been releasing albums for one of the most respected large independent labels in the world, 4AD, since 2002*. The New Yorker* has called him one of the greatest living lyricists, and Spin slapped his praises on its cover just last week. He's recently wowed the late-night circuit, sold out three consecutive nights at the Bowery Ballroom, and released his latest album, the masterstroke All Eternals Deck, on Merge Records, the independent label located within walking distance of his North Carolina home that landed a major Grammy last month. That's not bad for a writer who used to howl and strum into the microphone of his Panasonic boombox and opine that a real songwriter wasn't a career-oriented songwriter.
But in 2002-- when Darnielle made the leap to 4AD and, more saliently, into a proper studio with an ensemble of backing musicians-- his zealous fans started talking about his music as though it were foreign policy. Some loved the new adventurousness and accessibility, apparent from the great bloom of Mountain Goats fans during the last decade. But there are those who insist that the only real Mountain Goats is the atavistic Mountain Goats, the static-y, crackly, mildly manic stuff that Darnielle made mostly alone for more than a decade. To wit, the Mountain Goats forums, which Darnielle hosts on his own website, are a minefield of hot-blooded criticism about the band's rock music, lobbed not by online trolls but by those who might spend hundreds to track down Darnielle's earliest, most primitive releases. After the band released "Damn These Vampires", the positive jam that opens All Eternals Deck, Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster told me the vile was so rich he simply stopped reading the boards.
This matters now because, despite the fan fusillade, Darnielle has pressed on with his rock band, crafting and sharpening his skills and charisma as a frontman. Paradoxically passionate but controlled, uncompromising but instantly likable, All Eternals Deck is a certain career highlight for Darnielle. And, like many of the most memorable Mountain Goats songs, it's also about survival, or battling back from very dark places to "follow the light." Indeed, most every song here holds some key to the future, some talisman meant for perseverance. During "Damn These Vampires" and "Beautiful Gas Mask", it's didactic, warm advice. Occasionally, however, it's a reflection on the past, when some rocky relationship made more sense, when the world seemed framed by more favorable horizons. The poignant "Age of Kings", for instance, reminisces about a wasted love that once suggested a divine blessing. But just as the strings turn anxious, Darnielle remembers the time he might have fixed it all; his regret feels less like self-pity, though, and more like a future lesson.
All Eternals Deck is officially the third album for the rock band the Mountain Goats, or the trio of Darnielle, longtime bassist Peter Hughes, and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster. On 2009's The Life of the World to Come, though, Wurster and Hughes felt more like plainspoken accompaniment, simply keeping time and stretching the sound around Darnielle when not sitting out nearly half a dozen tunes. After four years of live practice, they now sound like a properly developed unit that's comfortable with its ideas and approaches. There are no ham-fisted reggae rubs or overreaching rock moments; instead, the band simply plays with nuance and purpose, elaborating the lyrics by first understanding them.
Darnielle replaces his rhythm section twice here, and the success of both songs suggests that the evolution of the Mountain Goats doesn't stop with a rock trio. "Outer Scorpion Squadron" should forever quell the gripe that Darnielle can't sing. Above an economical string section, Darnielle speaks of survival with grace and delicacy. The record's one great experiment, mid-album curveball "High Hawk Season", swaps the rhythm section for a harmonizing trio known as the North Mountain Singers. Though Darnielle plays acoustic guitar, they treat the song like an a cappella ensemble would, adding bass and texture against his lead line. A call to power, it's one of Darnielle's pinnacles as both a bandleader and songwriter, and a revelatory break from his past. "Who's going to stand his ground, and who's going to blink?" he sings, as though winking to his detractors.
Three songs on All Eternals Deck lift directly from the lives of veteran American actors-- Charles Bronson, Judy Garland, and her daughter, Liza Minnelli. In each instance, we see a star in peril, whether it's Garland during the overdose in London that killed her or tough-guy Bronson trying to hold it together for one more feature. In both cases, Darnielle invokes their birthplace, their cradle of innocence, again using the past as a catalyst for perseverance. On "Sourdoire Valley Song", Darnielle smartly cuts the other way by referencing the Olduvai Gorge, the Tanzanian ravine sometimes referenced as the birthplace of mankind. An old man struggles and dies, and the world turns. Our struggles, the implication goes, are forever and for everyone-- stars, successful songwriters, ancient hominids thought to be extinct. Even if it means you "crawl 'til dawn on hands and knees," though, you keep going if you can. Lucky for us, the rock band the Mountain Goats have done just that. | 2011-03-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | March 28, 2011 | 8.1 | 4b659dee-588e-4deb-8005-ffc33aedb59f | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The solo debut from Heather Trost, formerly of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, recalls atmospheric pop à la Broadcast and Stereolab. Trost is accompanied by members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Deerhoof, and more. | The solo debut from Heather Trost, formerly of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, recalls atmospheric pop à la Broadcast and Stereolab. Trost is accompanied by members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Deerhoof, and more. | Heather Trost: Agistri | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23138-agistri/ | Agistri | Heather Trost’s solo debut Agistri feels built to soundtrack stop-motion animation, a riot of flower petals and pinned butterflies fluttering across the frame. As half of the global trad-folk-inspired A Hawk and a Hacksaw with Neutral Milk Hotel drummer Jeremy Barnes, the two channeled a rustic acoustic otherworld with a committed zeal. And while that band made plenty use of Trost’s violins and Barnes’ percussion, drum kits disappeared entirely from the Hawk and a Hacksaw vocabulary. But on Agistri, Trost’s music sounds timeless in a different way, building miniature haunted worlds in the vocabulary of European space pop—unflashy motorik beats layered with art school swirl—as it might be found on an LP hiding in a secondhand shop somewhere deep on the continent.
With its mysterious-sounding cadence and refrain, the album-opening title cut could equally be part of an eerie soundtrack from the 1970s. It also picks up threads from Broadcast and Stereolab in the 1990s, both playful and haunted in equal turns. Just as much about mood as melody, Agistri finds Trost accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Barnes, Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, and Drake Hardin and Rosie Hutchinson of Mammal Eggs. Finding a home in space age swing and piles of analog-sounding synths, flutes, and strings, Trost spans from the instrumental library music groove of “Abiquiu” to a cover of Harry Nilsson’s familiar “Me and My Arrow” as if arranged by Magical Mystery Tour-era George Martin. Agistri works from a dense palette that’s either vintage or cloned in a vat.
A sense of adventure connects the album’s far reaches, and establishes a space where lyrics feel secondary. “Plastic Flowers” is guided by a rolling organ and an abstract vocal arrangement that recalls the circus-world fun of ye olde Elephant 6 Recording Company, with which Jeremy Barnes has long been associated via Neutral Milk Hotel. Returning to drums for that band’s reunion tours—and more recently for several albums on his and Trost’s LM Dupli-Cation—Barnes likewise occupies the kit with great personality here. Rarely defaulting to grooves, even during the Brazilian feels of “Abiquiu,” his drums find paths of their own without overwhelming Trost’s songs, half-songs, and atmospheres. On “Bloodmoon,” layers of melody spread over multiple keyboards, as a sense of movement threads across the song’s three minutes. Barnes’ drums ride comparably low in the mix, his fills often feeling more like conversational tics than dramatic flourishes.
Though rich, the songs sometimes seem to function more as sound-worlds to slip into, ready for further exploration. Having also played with Beirut, Josephine Foster, and on Thor Harris’ luminous Thor & Friends, Trost’s solo turn is both awaited and worthwhile, cool and cosmopolitan throughout. On the penultimate “Real Me/Real You,” a percussive bassline (or perhaps melodic drum figure) appears in the song’s intro—a sound that’s not vintage at all but palpably of the present, or even of the present's version of the future. As the song breaks down to a vocal arrangement over a squelching keyboard and rises to its chorus, one might hope it’s Heather Trost’s version of the future, too. | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock / Pop/R&B | LM Dupli-Cation | May 20, 2017 | 7.6 | 4b660bc9-f14c-4d8c-9e31-d2104723f88b | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The reggaeton stalwart and Latin trap pioneer embraces contemporary pop and hip-hop sounds on an uneven album that is at its most interesting when it verges into soul, salsa, and other novel styles. | The reggaeton stalwart and Latin trap pioneer embraces contemporary pop and hip-hop sounds on an uneven album that is at its most interesting when it verges into soul, salsa, and other novel styles. | Arcángel : Ares | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arcangel-ares/ | Ares | Of all the artists making trap en español today, Arcángel is arguably the best suited to trace its evolution. 2007’s “El Pistolón,” a product of his partnership with De La Ghetto that features the reggaeton duo Yaga y Mackie, is widely considered to be the first Latin trap track. He’s also got a verse on “La Ocasión,” from 2016, the instant-classic posse cut with Ozuna, Anuel AA, and De La Ghetto that took the sound worldwide. In between, he cut a bunch of reggaeton records, making a name for himself in Puerto Rico, the island that birthed the genre.
Trap en español may be rooted in mimicry, borrowing from the 21st century’s most commercially viable form of urban music, but in its early days as a movement in New York City clubs—which predate “La Ocasión”—that mimicry was merely a key to pass through the gates into the highest echelon of pop. The first DJs and producers knew their crowds loved rap and trap, even if they didn’t understand any of the lyrics, so early remixes brought Latin audiences into the sounds of the moment. Up-and-coming artists shifted their aesthetics to ride the wave, but the ones who stood out always brought their own flavor—the Dominicans in New York, with their ever-shifting Spanglish slang that defies reproduction; the Puerto Rican romanticos on the island, teaching Drake what it really means to be a sensitive thug.
Arcángel is no different. While his early career is rooted firmly in reggaeton, it was his collaborative Latin trap bangers that raised his profile and kept him at the crest of the wave. Now that he’s got your attention, he’s ready for you to hear exactly the music he’s always wanted to make. With his latest LP, Ares, he mostly abandons reggaeton and the dembow riddim in favor of sludgy trap beats and contemporary pop. He was truthful when he told Apple Music, “If you listen to the lyrics on this album, it’s totally different… I’m saying stuff that I’ve never said before.” It’s just that this development isn’t as positive as he may believe.
Ares has its share of cringey moments: “Los 3,” with its incantation, “I know you wanna suck this dick,” might sound bad until you try to parse the inexplicable juxtaposition on “En Su Boca” (In Your Mouth). On the latter track, Arcángel brags about the money he spent on his daughter’s birthday in the same breath that he tells anyone who steps to him to—once again—suck his dick: “Gasté doce en mi sortija (bling, bling)/Y veinticuatro en el cumple 'e mi hija (oh, yeah)/To' el que me tire me chupa la pija ('pérate).”
They’re not the only inclusions that feel superfluous. At 18 tracks and 64 minutes, Ares is a bit bloated, and would have likely benefited from more judicious sequencing. Much of the production is rooted in the standard trap palate of rolling bass, tinny 808 hi-hats, and Auto-Tuned croon; this is a departure from Arcángel’s previous, reggaeton-centric albums, sure, but a muscle already well toned through countless singles and guest features. Yet Ares is most interesting when it steps outside the trap—even when it ultimately misses the mark.
Arcángel has always excelled at adapting his style to fit his collaborators, and on Ares they’re few in number but carefully selected. Bad Bunny (“Original”) and J Balvin (“Corte, Porte, y Elegancia”) are two of the biggest names in Latin pop’s mainstream; Canadian rap&B artist Tory Lanez (“Victoria”), who has embraced urbano artists, has a forthcoming Spanish-language LP with features from the likes of Ozuna. “Original” is a highlight, all pulsing bass, snare claps, and Bad Bunny’s sexy soul-robot vocals—to the extent that the track feels like it should be credited to Bad Bunny featuring Arcángel. This ability to shift styles is Arcángel’s strength, and has made for some memorable posse cuts in recent years.
“Corte, Porte, y Elegancia,” unfortunately, is not one of them. It finds Arcángel attempting a mind meld with Colombian chameleon J Balvin, the reggaetonero turned full-on pop star who flexed his range on his latest LP, Vibras. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, especially amid a tracklist jam-packed with slow-burn trap; when the bouncy disco-funk guitar slides in on “Corte,” the album’s sixth track, the hard left turn is disorienting.
But this experimentation does bear some fruit. The record’s strongest track is “Un Vacilon (Young Maleo),” a tribute to Puerto Rican salsa legend Ismael Rivera, a.k.a. “Maleo.” It samples arguably his most iconic composition, “El Nazareno,” an ode to black Jesus that tells the tale of a man who has a vision of Christ while getting down at a party. The sample is transcendent, and it gets to the heart of why dance music like reggaeton can feel so powerful. When you can bridge the gap between the ancestors and their descendants, you can find God, even in the club.
At its best, Ares achieves this magnificence; at its worst, the album is undeniably cringe-worthy. But it’s the closest we’ve come so far to hearing what Arcángel really sounds like—and when he pushes the envelope, the results are anything but boring. | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Pina | July 31, 2018 | 6.9 | 4b6769d5-110b-4765-8420-2221544ff9b3 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
An exhaustively comprehensive 11-disc box set explores a defining work by the classic rock band alongside the ambitious, shelved concept album that would become Pete Townshend's white whale. | An exhaustively comprehensive 11-disc box set explores a defining work by the classic rock band alongside the ambitious, shelved concept album that would become Pete Townshend's white whale. | The Who: Who’s Next : Life House (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-who-whos-next-life-house-super-deluxe/ | Who’s Next : Life House (Super Deluxe) | At the beginning of the 1970s, the Who wanted to become the Greatest Band In The World. Their 1969 rock opera, Tommy, had vaulted them from theaters into arenas. Explosive performances at Woodstock and Monterey Pop were captured on film for everyone to see, and then they released Live at Leeds, the decibel-shattering record that cemented their legacy as the band heard blaring at full volume from the car stereos of every self-respecting rock’n’roll fan, from the stoners to the nerds. They had worked tirelessly for years to get to this very spot, but as soon as they did, the connection with their fans suffered due to larger venues and higher ticket prices. Reflecting in a 1971 Melody Maker column, Pete Townshend wrote, “At rock concerts you can achieve those rare moments where both group and audience forget themselves and become completely ego-less. The most precious moments of my life are on the stage when all is one.”
This unflagging belief in the bond between the Who and their followers drove Townshend’s work on the songs that ended up on Who’s Next. Its genesis, development, and creation are extensively chronicled in Who’s Next | Life House, an 11-CD box set that beautifully communicates the spirit of the original project by opening up the vaults and inviting everybody inside.
This anniversary release presents a remastered version of the original album, two discs of demos, two discs of working studio sessions, a disc of singles and outtakes, two different live concerts from 1971, and finally, a Blu-ray containing the original album and bonus tracks in Dolby Atmos and 5.1. It’s accompanied by extensive liner notes from Townshend along with longtime Who archivists Matt Kent and Andy Neill and a graphic novel that tells the story of Life House: the ambitious, never-completed concept album that inspired Who’s Next. This is the appropriate level of gravitas for a project that has always been Townshend’s great white whale, a lost epic that he has revisited multiple times, trying to finally get it right. (When Townshend launched his own website in 1999, there was a whole section for Life House, leading to a self-released 6-CD box set titled Lifehouse Chronicles, which sold out immediately.)
The plot of Life House details a dystopic vision of the destruction of planet Earth, a militaristic regime that puts the population into virtual reality suits, and the existence of a central Grid controlled by mega-corporations. Rock’n’roll is banned because it will over-stimulate the Grid, and rebellion comes in the form of those who escaped and make it to the Life House, where each audience member would perform their own individual “note,” and after which they would achieve, yes, perfect harmony and ascend to Nirvana. Now that you can buy virtual reality headsets in a vending machine at the airport, this all sounds less fantastical than it did in the ’60s, but the complexity of this attempt at a coherent summary of the plot is symptomatic of why this box set, half a century later, is probably the closest Townshend will come to his vision being realized.
The detailed liner notes chronicle every painful step and misstep trying to manifest Townshend’s sci-fi dreamworld, accompanied by recordings that reinforce the story. When you listen to the first attempt to record the Life House songs in New York with manager Kit Lambert and compare them to the second attempt with producer Glyn Johns in London, it’s clear why Townshend called off the New York sessions after a week and called in Johns, his friend and the producer of the hour, to start all over again. Johns helped them sort through all of the Life House material and crucially, convinced Townshend that the project should be pared down to a single album for commercial reasons. Whether or not you agree with that decision, the difference in sonic clarity and energy between the Olympic tapes and the ones in New York is remarkable: It’s not hyperbole to suggest that music history would have been much different had this decision not been made.
Cutting the record to a single disc meant that some of the best songs didn’t make it onto the album. Fan favorites like “Pure and Easy,” “The Seeker,” “Naked Eye,” and “Let’s See Action” were setlist regulars for decades and could have survived without being part of a storyline. Their absence makes one contemplate why Who’s Next included bassist John Entwistle’s “My Wife,” a banal lament about domestic life, or “Love Ain’t For Keeping,” a flimsy treatise on relationships, over these gems that are among the band’s best work in this era—or any other, for that matter. On the other hand, it’s clear why other demos, such as “Greyhound Girl” and “Mary,” didn’t make the cut; they’re gorgeous but they’re too intrinsically linked to the storyline.
Another vital element of this set is the opportunity to explore Townshend’s original demos. The demo of “Baba O’Riley” sits in opposition to the heart-stopping anthem that ultimately opened the album. As Roger Daltrey delivers it, “Baba” is larger than life; in contrast, the demo is a ballad, plaintive and searching, on the edge of desperation but full of hope. The dominating instrumentation is piano with a sharp undercutting guitar melody line full of the kind of angular attack that could only be Townshend. Hearing the evolution of the songs and the insight into Townshend’s intricate process is a sharp contrast with the power and immediacy of the Who, which was loud, sweaty, and overwhelming. But the members were always so locked together it felt like magic.
The transformation of the new material is illustrated by the two live recordings from 1971. The impromptu show, recorded at the Young Vic during the recording of the album, is more like expanded rehearsal in front of a live audience. The other performance is from the second night of a stand at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, which rumbles and vibrates with more power and confidence. The Who’s Next songs aren’t so new anymore, and although Tommy gets more space on the setlist, “Baba O’Riley” still gives you goosebumps, and there’s a moment in “Naked Eye,” after Daltrey finishes the first verse, when the guitars and Keith Moon’s drums exquisitely crash into each other, and you’ll wish they’d figured out how to get it on the album. Everlasting quibbles like these may shed some light on why Townshend still considers Who’s Next to have been a “compromise album,” compared to his original concept. And with this massive investigation into the project, you get the sense that he could finally quell his endless devotion to revisiting it—but don’t bet on it. | 2023-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe | September 30, 2023 | 8 | 4b67fe54-1e5b-4367-bdb6-7e88a40ffe0d | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
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 Usher’s 2004 album, a jam-packed icon of R&B and one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop. | 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 Usher’s 2004 album, a jam-packed icon of R&B and one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop. | Usher: Confessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/usher-confessions/ | Confessions | In 2004, Usher wasn’t yet committed to the idea of marriage, a point he made repeatedly during the press cycle for his fourth album, Confessions, marketed as his most personal project to date. In interviews, he told the same story about his breakup with TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, seven years his senior: He’d cheated on her; she’d been pressuring him to settle down; arguments led to fissures, and they eventually split. Chilli hinted at infidelity on the radio but declined to elaborate on the relationship to Vibe or contribute to what she called a “PR move.” Usher said he didn’t view the album as a stunt, even though it was. He described Confessions as autofiction and let the public run with the rumors, which, of course, they did.
But the deception worked on multiple levels. In constructing the narrative around Confessions, Usher omitted certain facts. While it was true that he wasn’t entirely sold on marriage, he told Rolling Stone in 2004 that he did once buy Chilli a 10-karat diamond ring and proposed to her in the most R&B way: in the middle of sex. He said he co-wrote the album’s core breakup ballad, “Burn,” while he and Chilli were still together. A decade later, executive producer Jermaine Dupri said the song was indeed about her but admitted Confessions wasn’t just Usher’s experience, rather a compilation of its male creators’ infractions, promoted as one man’s expunging of sins. The album’s most salacious track, “Confessions Pt. II,” a saga about creeping and getting another woman pregnant, was based on Dupri’s life, not Usher’s. “We wanted the media to ask us questions,” the producer told Vibe in 2014, comparing their artistic license to that of Michael Jackson. “Nobody knows who the fuck Billie Jean is. We’re still looking for her.”
Usher understood that much of a great pop album is simply telling a good story. He had the catalog, choreography, angelic falsetto, and winning grin necessary to be a star. Everyone in America knew the term “Yeah!” not just as an everyday affirmation but as a club smash. But to be worthy of the Michael Jackson-level prestige he coveted, Usher needed a man-in-the-mirror moment. He played up the cheating angle and the rumors and was seemingly forthright about the subject of his ex; and because it worked, he copied that storytelling formula for his subsequent album releases, albeit with less moving results: For 2008’s Here I Stand, he milked his marriage to Tameka Foster for material, and then he made their divorce fodder for his 2010 album Raymond v. Raymond. The ability to draft a persuasive narrative around a project is a skill music fans both scrutinize and take for granted, but the greatest pop stars—Janet Jackson, Taylor Swift, Drake—know how to master the art of packaging. It’s a craft to turn reality into convenient truth, and it’s special when the material transcends the machine. On Confessions, the stars align in Usher’s favor: He had a breakup to cope with and an album to make, and the dramatic backdrop gave him the most compelling work of his career.
And so the truth hardly mattered. Usher spent much of 2004 dethroning himself on the pop chart, earning four No. 1 hits and reaping the benefits of binding his love life to his music. Confessions sold a million copies in its first week at a time when illegal file-sharing had labels frantic over the fate of the industry. Usher thrived between two very different eras of pop—the contemporary R&B rush of 2001 and the hybrid R&B of the 2010s, when Drake unleashed his inner lothario and assumed his role as the charts’ new lover boy. Confessions dropped just three months after Rolling Stone crowned former *NSYNC frontman Justin Timberlake their New King of Pop for siphoning Black music into his solo debut. Though millennial pop had turned swiftly toward boy bands and Britney Spears, one of the top five highest-selling albums of the 2000s is Confessions, a record that sits alongside Boyz II Men and TLC as the only R&B albums to be certified diamond for selling 10 million units. Usher’s coming-of-age story gave R&B the sort of widespread appreciation the genre struggled to recreate in the decades that followed. “So many people are interested in R&B,” he said in 2004, after selling platinum in a week. “I feel like it is the base of everything. I want to make it more prominent.”
Up until that year, Usher was a king in training, a heartthrob with washboard abs, a protégé of Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds’ legendary LaFace Records. Usher Raymond IV, a former choir boy, had started out performing in talent shows in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee before his mother moved the family to Atlanta. At 14, he auditioned for L.A. Reid, singing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men; Reid signed Usher to LaFace that day. The label put him to work recording his debut in a hedonistic environment with Sean “Puffy” Combs (Usher mentioned seeing at least one orgy) and producers like Jodeci’s DeVante Swing. Having launched his career with adult love songs, Usher was ahead of his peers at 15, singing, “Can you get wit’ it/It’s like that/It’s only a sexual thing,” on his 1994 self-titled debut. He had the tender pedigree of a Tevin Campbell, but he was an old soul who embraced a level of showmanship that could veer toward hokey. He skated across stages with the grace of a swan, and he was charming and shameless enough to pull off tricks like dropping his pants mid-pop-lock to reveal his boxers. More important, he was technically gifted and unmatched as a dancer.
While the dexterous moves set him up as a natural heir apparent to MJ, Usher modeled his soul music after the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye. “They’re all great emotional singers who used their experiences in life for the music,” Usher said in a 2004 interview. “You live, you learn and you can sing about it.” Confessions is his portrait of a man contemplating his own deceit and trying to sing his way out of it in under an hour and a half. Star producers like Dupri, Bryan-Michael Cox, Just Blaze, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis create layers of moonlit soul and slow jams that sound like bodies gliding over satin. Yet Confessions didn’t come across as the type of artificial growth many artists try to muster up to prove the worthiness of a new record. Usher really did have something to say—as in, he was actually confessing; it’s just that there were fifty-leven people in the booth with him.
Building on the party-life mood of his third album, 8701, Confessions treats vulnerability as a rite of passage to true partnership and sex as an act linked to lies. The storyline is solidified in “Confessions Pt. II,” a musical telenovela that holds the album’s core thesis about living with a guilty conscience. Usher weighs the options of honesty or silence and talks himself through choosing the former, rationalizing that, “If I’m gonna tell it, then I gotta tell it all.” He cycles through hurt and regret for the love he let go, offering hints of remorse that give the album dimension. The Just Blaze track “Throwback,” which samples Dionne Warwick’s “You’re Gonna Need Me,” finds Usher in a loop of distress over the former love of his life: “Heartbroken when you left my world/Man, I wish I would’ve kept my girl.” But on “Truth Hurts,” he treats a partner like a plaintiff (“I got reason to believe/That you been fooling around…”) and then admits to being driven into suspicion by his own infidelity.
Usher established himself as a hitmaker with 1997’s “Nice & Slow,” a ballad of pure libido. He went No. 1 again with 8701’s charismatic lead single “U Remind Me,” which won him his first Grammy, and then “U Got It Bad.” For his fourth album, he wanted another slow-tempo setup, but “Yeah!” was just the explosion Confessions needed leading up to its release. In Atlanta, Lil Jon was signal-boosting crunk by shouting at the same decibel as a drill instructor, and Usher’s new label, Arista, was looking for a club single. “Yeah!”—with Usher’s smooth narration, Lil Jon’s shrill adlibs, and Ludacris playing the inappropriate wingman—spent 12 consecutive weeks at No. 1. Usher was reluctant to even record it. He preferred the sensitive centerpiece “Burn,” a ballad co-produced by Dupri and Cox that opens with a dramatic swoosh, then a cradle of solemn chords. “Let it burn” was the final, indefinite stage of grief: “I know I made a mistake/Now it’s too late,” Usher sings. “I know she ain’t coming back.” His tone is rich with vitality, lust, or dejection as needed. As Dupri told Complex in 2014, “That’s what it feels like to me when I listen to the song, like somebody’s crying.”
Of Confessions’ original 17 tracks (the deluxe version adds four new titles, including the doe-eyed Alicia Keys duet “My Boo”), the less celebrated songs aren’t so much filler as they are hidden treats obscured by the album’s most transcendent moments. Few sounds are more disarming than an Usher falsetto, at its most melting on songs like “Can U Handle It?” (which Robin Thicke co-wrote) and “Do It to Me,” among a handful of after-hours cuts that find him trapped between temptation and partnership; “Simple Things” is a syrupy lecture on the value of listening to women’s needs. The album’s latter half propels the narrative, turning Usher’s inner monologue into soulful pep talks. On “That’s What It’s Made For,” he worries about the consequences of having unprotected sex (the baby from “Confessions Pt. II”?) singing, “I slipped up, slipped in.” The track opens with Usher declaring, over stealthy keys, “Listen, I got a story to tell.”
In 2020, Usher is still in the business of selling transparency. In a September interview promoting his single “Bad Habits,” a song about being bad at love, he talked about the benefits of therapy and cited Confessions as an inflection point in both his career and personal life. “At the end, can you judge me for being direct with you, the person whom I have to be in this relationship with?” he says, addressing a fictional partner, but maybe also his fans. “I’m gonna let you know who I am. And in the end, you choose to stay or you choose to leave. But you’re gonna know who I am.” For him, honesty ushered in growth and success, and it led to one of the most flawless executions of mythmaking in pop.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Arista | November 22, 2020 | 9 | 4b769558-0c9f-433e-a7c8-7ee7b5becb43 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
David Pajo's latest album as Papa M is wistful and poignant, like all his work. But it ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated. | David Pajo's latest album as Papa M is wistful and poignant, like all his work. But it ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated. | Papa M: Highway Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22630-highway-songs/ | Highway Songs | Pretty much every project David Pajo has participated in—the pioneering post-rock of Slint and Tortoise, his winding instrumentals and downbeat folk as Papa M and Pajo, the blunt heavy metal of Dead Child—has made a virtue of stylistic consistency. Once you’ve heard the few first notes of a Pajo album, you know what you’re in for, and that commitment to cohesion has always been a strength.
All of which makes Highway Songs a risky record. For the first time, Pajo has relaxed his directorial control—“I just would let the songs go on tangents and run wherever they want,” he said recently—and mixed styles rather than picking one. He opens with a lumbering metal jam, switches to an Autechre-like electronic collage, then shifts to soundtrack-worthy guitar accompanied by a sharp drum-machine beat. The rest of the ride on Highway Songs is just as enjoyably bumpy, as contrasting styles continually butt up against each other with little in the way of smoothed-out segues.
What makes it all work is Pajo’s patience in constructing a song. Everything here truly unfolds, gradually moving from an initial idea—a riff, a beat, a simple melody—into a multi-layered composition. You can almost hear him working through the tunes as he’s making them, which gives them an intimate feel. Lots of Pajo’s best music—particularly Papa M’s Whatever, Mortal, and his self-titled Pajo LP—bears this kind of private, homemade aura, enhanced by a voice that’s always on the verge of a whisper.
In the case of Highway Songs, the music is literally homemade, recorded while Pajo was cooped up in his Los Angeles apartment recovering from a motorcycle accident that almost cost him a leg. It’s been a rough past few years for him: in early 2015 he attempted suicide, which he’s been forthcoming about since. You can hear some of that pain and struggle in Highway Songs—take the somber, cautious strains of the acoustic guitar essay “DLVD”—but it would be unfair to say this album is more emotional than any of his others. He’s always infused his music with a wistful, poignant tone, and he’s still great at that.
Besides, Highway Songs ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated. There’s optimism in the sunny strums of “Walking On Coronado,” the chugging riffs of “Green Holler,” and the nursery rhyme of closer “Little Girl,” the only song on which Pajo sings. The lyrics are taken from a songbook Pajo found, but they could’ve easily been custom-written for Highway Songs: “Little girl, teach me to laugh again...to wonder why again.” At this point in his well-travelled career Pajo doesn’t need to learn anything new, but it’s great to hear that he still wants to anyway. | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | November 19, 2016 | 7.4 | 4b7702a2-56f1-4a1b-b797-42c6fd11348c | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Sheck’s raw and unruly debut is a force to be reckoned with, the rare project from an über-hyped prospect that actually delivers on its promise. | Sheck’s raw and unruly debut is a force to be reckoned with, the rare project from an über-hyped prospect that actually delivers on its promise. | Sheck Wes: MUDBOY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheck-wes-mudboy/ | MUDBOY | For some time, rapping has stood alongside the wicked jump shot as one of the only legitimate hood escape hatches, and Sheck Wes tried his hand at both. Two years ago, he even skipped an important high school basketball game to pose in Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 show at Madison Square Garden. His longtime friendship with NBA rookie Mo Bamba led to his breakout hit, which is still his most popular song to date. “Mo Bamba”—a song freestyled in 20 minutes and uploaded to SoundCloud days later without warning (and without Sheck’s knowledge) by co-producer 16yrold—ignited such buzz that Travis Scott and Kanye West signed him to a dual deal with Cactus Jack and G.O.O.D. Music, respectively. The song’s eerie melody and unruly energy serve as proper lead-ins to his full-length debut, MUDBOY. His hoop dreams have been forced to take a backseat now that his rap dreams are within reach.
MUDBOY delivers mosh raps with a cold, steely New York edge. The lo-fi and booming songs antagonize your senses and disrupt your day. Interspersed among the rowdy tracks are stories of Sheck’s trials as a “mudboy,” which he’s described as a process of toiling through grime to become a man. It’s its own coming-of-age album and the rare project from an über-hyped rap prospect that actually delivers on its promise.
Born to Senegalese parents, Sheck Wes split his childhood between Harlem and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has likened being in Milwaukee to being in prison and equated returning to New York with autonomy, and that pursuit of freedom is imbued and sometimes documented in his music. On the cusp of fame, Sheck’s mother shipped him to the motherland to study Islam, a pilgrimage he initially saw as a banishment and betrayal but now credits with a spiritual awakening. MUDBOY drinks all of this in, oscillating between autobiography and thrashing tribal chants. He bridges the gap between the DIY SoundCloud aesthetic and the Harlem youth subcultures he was tempered in.
Sheck collapses the space between “post-regional” rap and hyper-local rap with assists from Harlem producer Lunchbox and Miami producer Redda. Beats have trace elements of sounds near and far. They’re largely nightmarish alternatives to Pi’erre Bourne’s carnival attractions, forcing their way into your ear with the ugly, bass-boosted distortion of Ronny J (who has cranked up the wattage for Lil Pump, Smokepurpp, and Denzel Curry). Some sound extremely localized to NYC, others wouldn’t be out of place on Travis Scott’s Astroworld.
It’s somewhat ironic that Sheck Wes is signed to Scott’s Cactus Jack imprint because he’s almost the anti-Travis Scott. Where Scott is rigid in his raps and backed by a cabal of industry leaders, Sheck is unfastened and going it alone. This intuition extends to his ad-libs, chief among them “bitch,” which pops up frequently and at random, standing as a raw bearing of his emotions. “Why I say bitch so much? Let me explain it: It’s the only word where I can feel and hear all my anger,” he says on “Gmail.” Every utterance of the word—and MUDBOY by extension—feels like spontaneous combustion. His process is one of fluidity and recklessness, in sound and rhythm. Through him, you can hear the Harlem jigginess in his flows, the seismic hums of Kid Cudi, and the loose, informal ramblings of Lil B.
Like Playboi Carti, Sheck Wes was modeling before most had heard his raps, and both put an emphasis on form over function and style over structure. The inclination is to immediately hear Sheck’s songs as slapdash and superficial, owed largely to their lack of text, but doing so misses the point. Taken at face value, his rhymes are simple, but directness is the appeal, a force that delivers huge blows. To write it off as unremarkable is to risk looking like Zedd, being schooled on music theory by “Mo Bamba” co-producers Take a Day Trip after he took a shot at the song. It isn’t basic; it’s straightforward by design. Sheck has spoken openly about people getting “lost in the energy” in his music and missing the message. But as he put it recently: “I’m talking about some shit!”
Inside many of these amped-up jams are tales of self-discovery hiding in plain sight. “They just want the turnt shit/They don’t like the sad music,” Sheck laments on “WESPN.” But he sneaks in poignance anyway. “It gets tragic where I live, everything is negative/Hold the roaches in the crib, elevator full of piss/Everybody grew up tough, bunch of diamonds in the rough/Police ain’t never give a fuck, they just want us in them cuffs,” he raps on “Live Sheck Wes,” as clear and concise an indictment of big-city politics as any in rap. “Never Lost” recounts his month’s long exile to Senegal and all he learned in its aftermath. Later, on “Jiggy on the Shits,” this becomes a key part of his origin story, as he finesses his way back to America. “I turned a couple years into a couple months/I took my plan, and now I’m writing history,” he raps, adding in some Wolof—the native language of Senegal—for good measure. His writing is striking.
While MUDBOY is a strong and holistic statement from an upstart rapper, with the early-album run from “Live Sheck Wes” through “Chippi Chippi” being particularly stunning, these songs feel like underscores for the colossal “Mo Bamba.” It is not only the centerpiece but also a pure representation of what being a “mudboy” means: the fraternities immigrant kids find on the fringes of urban centers, the sense of community fostered in the New York underground, finding your escape hatch—be it balling or rapping—and pushing your way out the hood so that everyone you knew can share in that win. The song is in celebration of putting the city on and a rallying cry for those who might come after, following in his footsteps. That’s the essence carried within MUDBOY: the toil produces a man and a man clears a path for the next. | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cactus Jack / G.O.O.D. Music / Interscope | October 10, 2018 | 8.2 | 4b7990a5-5260-4977-8de7-86e850793aab | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Angel Deradoorian zooms in on the heady, spiritual undercurrent of her past work for the new age Eternal Recurrence, which is hushed, meditative, and bathed in amber glow. | Angel Deradoorian zooms in on the heady, spiritual undercurrent of her past work for the new age Eternal Recurrence, which is hushed, meditative, and bathed in amber glow. | Deradoorian: Eternal Recurrence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deradoorian-eternal-recurrence/ | Eternal Recurrence | On Angel Deradoorian’s debut album, she closed one door and opened a dozen more. Up until that point, the Sacramento-born musician had spent most of her career supporting other people: most famously as a member of Dave Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors and Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, but also singing backup for Brandon Flowers, Charli XCX, Flying Lotus, and even U2. Finally, though, in order to say “yes” to her own instincts—there had been no solo work since her debut EP, in 2009—she had to say “no” to everyone else. The result was 2015’s The Expanding Flower Planet, an almost entirely self-made album in which Deradoorian found her voice by throwing her arms wide open to possibility. Jewel-toned keyboards, Middle Eastern scales, dizzyingly multi-tracked vocal harmonies over a mercurial psych-rock firmament—the album was hybrid to the core, stylistically polyglot, voracious in its embrace of the wider world.
On the follow-up, in what feels like an equally strategic move, she has begun closing doors again. Just six songs and 29 minutes long, Eternal Recurrence sounds like an attempt to zoom in on just one facet of The Expanding Flower Planet—namely, its heady, spiritual undercurrent—and blow it up to larger-than-life size. Hushed, meditative, and bathed in an amber glow, Eternal Recurrence feels like a church service, or a séance. It begins with warm synths that could almost be organs; Deradoorian follows her voice to the edge of language, tracing shapes against quivering drones. The shifts between minor and major are like the intermingling of colors through a rose window.
Patient and repetitive, the opening “Love Arise” is faintly reminiscent of Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi or Meredith Monk’s Book of Days. Setting Deradoorian’s vocal harmonies against chords bristling with overtones, and making the most of her swooping glissandi, it uses minimalism as a springboard to dive into an array of microtonal frequencies. The patient mood of the first song blows into wide-open reverie on “Return-Transcend,” an eight-minute meditation in which Deradoorian traces Middle Eastern runs over hurdy-gurdy drones. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the incense-laced, liturgical mood of Dead Can Dance—but the early, gothic Dead Can Dance, before their schmaltzier instincts got the better of them—and from there the record goes fully new age. “Ausar Temple,” whose title references the Egyptian god of the underworld, is nothing but two-and-a-half minutes of tolling bells, intermittent gongs, and running water engulfed in cavernous reverb.
To get here, she has had to excise some of the things that made her debut album so exciting: The variety, the unpredictability, the hummability. The Expanding Flower Planet is an avant-pop album as riotous as a medieval public square; Eternal Recurrence, its fluid tones draped like the garnet robes of a mystical order, takes a vow of austerity. Fortunately, the B-side’s three tracks step outside the hermit’s lair and back toward actual song form. “Nia in the Dark,” led by solemn electric bass, makes for a post-punk-inspired playground for her vocal experiments; “Mountainside” is a hothouse of piano and flute, and the closing “Mirrorman” is a kind of secular psalm not unlike Breadwoman’s spiritual minimalism.
Throughout, Deradoorian’s voice is the main attraction. Wispy one moment, bellowing full-throated the next, and capable of dazzling melismatic runs, it remains her not-so-secret weapon. It carries the music even when her lyrics don’t feel as transcendent as the subject matter calls for. Eternal Recurrence concerns itself with love’s transcendent power, but where her melodies soar effortlessly, her rhyming couplets (“Love in the morning when I open up my eyes/Love in the evening when the fading sunset dies”) can feel clunky, programmatic—earthbound instead of weightless.
In any kind of tradeoff, the question is always going to be: Was it worth it? And the answer here is yes, albeit with an asterisk attached. Short and potent, the mini-album benefits from its focused mood; I don’t mean to slight it to say that it would surely make for a good accompaniment to yoga or meditation. Unlike her boisterous debut album, it is a calming listen that lends itself to journeys into inner space, even if the lyrics can sometimes be distracting. Some of the record’s best moments are swirled deeply into the mix and arise without warning—like the strange, groaning bass gurgle that closes “Return-Transcend” in a flurry of synthetic whale song, or the closing coda of “Mountainside,” in which a tape-warped buzz hiccups expectantly. It’s in moments like this, where the music feels like it has a mind of its own, that the narrow focus of Eternal Recurrence leads to what feels like an infinite array of passageways, each one offering a potential way forward for the project. | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anticon | October 6, 2017 | 7.4 | 4b7fe757-cc9f-49a6-bfa0-a2619477af8a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The influential 1990s Illinois band is back: Longtime fans will be crying for the wrong reasons. | The influential 1990s Illinois band is back: Longtime fans will be crying for the wrong reasons. | Braid: Closer to Closed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15697-closer-to-closed/ | Closer to Closed | We were the new Nathan Detroits. We assumed everything while Ariel danced in her room and took off her clothes. We were at their last show where Bob Nanna cried and maybe we did, too. Sure, this is a composite sketch, but we repped Braid to the fullest back when emo meant something. Of course, that "something" mostly meant humble Midwesterners with enough start-stop trickery and "auxiliary screaming guy" to crucially place themselves in the cred lineage of Fugazi even if the lyrics yelled "do you like me?" more than "you are not what you own." It's been hard since then: not just because Braid went dormant, but because emo's domination of early-2000s radio was a pyrrhic victory, its ensuing evolution leading to its becoming the single most vilified form in all of indie rock.
But oh shit, Braid are back. Even if Closer to Closed is just a four-song EP, come on! Chris Broach in the building! Unfortunately, the brevity of Closer to Closed only makes it easier to remember that this is also pretty much the same band as Hey Mercedes, a competently forgettable Vagrant latecomer that made Everynight Fire Works, a record I haven't listened to in a decade mostly because I recall it sounding a hell of a lot like this. "This" mostly meaning market-tested emo-pop with the emotion and pop aspects sterilized by an unwillingness to commit to either. It sounded somewhat desperate back when there felt like a reason and a market to sell out for, but now it just sounds utterly clueless.
This year, we've seen Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, and the Get Up Kids attempting to play catch up with themselves, but here Braid bafflingly jettison the goodwill of their past: the palm-muted verses and squeaky choruses, the one-sided conversations of the lyrics, the antiseptic production-- I'll say it could come from anyone because you probably don't remember who the Pinehurst Kids are. With not a single sharp edge provided by any riffs or even Broach (whose guitar doodles enough in the margins to let you know that he actually showed up), you haven't much choice but to sort of pitifully engage with Closer to Closed like a nervous friend before a huge date he's clearly going to fuck up.
During its first two clean-shaven and aloe-moisturized choruses, Chris Broach sings, "It could never be this good again/ You know it's true," and Nanna, "I want a do over, do over, do over." If you want to project your vague romantic frustration onto a blank slate, this'll do. You can just as easily take it as running commentary on Closer to Closed itself, stuck for inspiration outside of constantly introducing and apologizing for its own existence. (Congratulations...I'm Sorry, y'know?) "I wouldn't mind a second try," Nanna chirps on "Do Over", and at its climax, "now is the part where I break your heart" flips to "this is the part where we break some hearts." Hearing them stoop to the Panic! At the Disco-era necessity of establishing some sort of conspiratorial fourth-wall busting narrative with the listener is just such a fucking bummer that you can't even muster the energy to use their own words against them.Which is incredibly easy since Nanna's lyrics have further devolved into pure emo madlibbing.
Of course, it might be just as easy for you to point out that I'm a grown man and wanting Braid to pick up and recreate 1998 on the rebound is no more rational than my college friends expecting me to knock off that bottle of Goldschlager and somehow shake it off before that huge presentation the next morning. But are you seriously asking Braid fans to not care so much? Let us mourn in peace-- Urbana's just too fucking dark, and it's not getting any brighter. | 2011-08-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-08-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 12, 2011 | 2.8 | 4b837c0f-b821-47e8-8338-0acd8ffce0e4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Wendy Eisenberg’s trio combines bludgeoning post-hardcore with off-kilter runs, hairpin turns, and deceptively nonchalant vocals. The subject matter is serious, but it’s clear they’re having fun. | Wendy Eisenberg’s trio combines bludgeoning post-hardcore with off-kilter runs, hairpin turns, and deceptively nonchalant vocals. The subject matter is serious, but it’s clear they’re having fun. | Editrix: Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/editrix-editrix-ii-editrix-goes-to-hell/ | Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell | The first sounds emitted by Wendy Eisenberg’s guitar on Editrix’s second album are screeching arcs of noise. These parabolas of dissonance ricochet for over a minute before devolving into scattered jabs that twitch with anxious energy. Eisenberg revels in the friction of these kinds of uncomfortable tones, frequently pairing discordant harmonies with lyrics that hit in a similar way. Often they sing of the awkward, bitter feeling of being thrown into a world that twists us into shapes that feel unnatural—the cognitive dissonance of living in a society that insists you act in ways that are in opposition to your core values. But even as Eisenberg exploits the expressive potential of discord, they frame these personal and philosophical crises with a disarming mixture of sincerity and irony that is both funny and profound.
Eisenberg’s music takes several forms, including avant-garde jazz and tender folk-like songs they sing by themself, but the bludgenoning post-hardcore of Editrix is their bluntest, most provocative outlet for this discontent. The trio, which includes Steve Cameron on bass and Josh Daniel on drums, pounds its way through Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell’s 12 songs. Each band member bears down on their instrument, and they bolster the intensity with complexity of their interlocking riffs and rhythms, which are frequently disrupted by off-kilter runs and sharp left turns. Those tight hairpins, dextrous in ways that allude to Eisenberg’s extensive jazz training, foster a gripping unpredictability as the band cycles through multiple tempos and melodic passages. Spindly guitars get tangled around beats so heavy with syncopation they make 4/4 feel oddly metered, but Editrix playfully ride these unpredictable waves. It’s clear they’re having fun.
One of the consistent elements between Eisenberg’s solo work and Editrix is their ability to write sticky melodies that fit neatly into knotty chords and chromatic riffs that only occasionally resolve. They consistently find the square pegs that will miraculously fit a round hole, and their nonchalant, intimate style of singing makes the juxtaposition feel natural. Rarely do they shriek, growl, or moan the way a typical punk singer might, and they don’t strain their voice to be heard above the instrumental maelstrom. Instead they sing as they might if accompanied only by a single guitar, their voice perched high atop the mix so each lyric can be deciphered and absorbed.
Abrupt shifts in tone are typical of the album’s lyrics as well, which are peppered with tongue-in-cheek lines that swerve into more severe territory. “The anthropocene means humans are winning,” sings Eisenberg on “Queering Ska” before admitting dire acceptance—“I know that it will end/That it is ending.” When they sing, “It’s 2019, who is queering ska?” gleeful upstrokes seem to answer their own question, but in the next breath, whimsy gives way to the trauma of the following year: “It’s 2020, who is not on Earth?” On “Time Can’t Be Redeemed,” they find a witty way to express dark ruminations: “On the subject of whether or not to live, I’m undecided and can’t be swayed.” It’s not that they use humor as a coping mechanism, but that they understand the absurdity buried deep in the hellish conditions of life under capitalism. Rather than succumb to it, they laugh in its face.
At this point there’s nothing inherently radical about simply stating known truths: We live in a morally corrupt system that prioritizes profit and power over the lives and livelihoods of our neighbors and ourselves. We’re alienated and frustrated. What makes Editrix’s music feel truly radical and transformative is the playful, powerful way the music reflects the everyday paranoia of living during this crisis-laden moment. Like Fugazi before them, Editrix takes punk’s framework and stretches it to its breaking point, pushing listeners to question orthodoxy in all its forms—ethical, ontological, and musical. | 2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | June 13, 2022 | 7.2 | 4b87391b-21b6-4df8-864e-a9effa30f29d | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Though not necessarily nostalgic, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek, the impressive third album from Mitski Miyawaki, is inventive and resourceful in a '90s-indie way. | Though not necessarily nostalgic, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek, the impressive third album from Mitski Miyawaki, is inventive and resourceful in a '90s-indie way. | Mitski: Bury Me at Makeout Creek | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19990-mitski-bury-me-at-makeout-creek/ | Bury Me at Makeout Creek | Yo La Tengo. Fall Out Boy. And, upon the release of her third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski. These three are just about the only rock musicians to successfully reference “The Simpsons” (we’ll leave out metalcore bros Evergreen Terrace for a number of reasons)—a small group considering the show's incalculable influence on people who listen to indie rock. Here’s some context for this particular nod: the cosmic punching bag Milhouse undergoes a fake faith healing ritual that he believes has restored his vision. Caught up in a rapturous song and dance number, he is promised a rare romantic tryst at the apocryphal Makeout Creek. He then gets hit by a truck. With his last bit of breath, he says this album title.
That more or less mirrors the narrative arc here. Opener "Texas Reznikoff" establishes contemporary comparisons—Mitski’s broad, tremulous vocals and sly humor recall Angel Olsen, while the equal split between unencumbered acoustic pining and pummeling, mid-fi indie rock respectively aligns her with labelmates Frankie Cosmos and LVL UP. And it lays out a compact scene of domestic bliss, littered with specificities—a lover who wears socks in bed, reads Objectivist poetry, and serves as the breeze in her Austin nights. The final acknowledgement of romantic contentment occurs less than three minutes into Bury Me at Makeout Creek and by its bitter end, the only thing that can bring Mitski comfort is the thought of dying with a clean apartment ("They'll think of me kindly/ When they come for my things").
The way an outsider might view her narrator is duly noted just by the loaded title of "Townie"—this is someone who’s stuck around far too long after the party ended and almost certainly has a distorted perspective as to whether it was any fun to begin with. “Townie” previews a horrible night out with all the protraction and morbid glee of a suicide pact. Her images are startlingly violent—she wants a love that falls like a body from the balcony, she’s holding her breath with a baseball bat. Guzzling a toxic Pinkerton cocktail of redlining distortion, white-hot self pity, and sing-along hooks, Mitski shouts, "I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be...I'm gonna be what my body wants me to be," a call for freedom that's galvanizing from a teenage perspective, but increasingly sad as songs like "I Don't Smoke" and "Drunk Walk Home" lay out the terrible life plan the body of this self-described 25 year-old "tall child" has for her.
Though not necessarily nostalgia, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek is inventive and resourceful in a '90s-indie way. The choruses here soar like power pop, but are subdued by tempo and fidelity, while cheap drum machines are deployed as much for their tone as their rhythm. And even when Bury Me has full band arrangements, everything calls attention to the narrator's loneliness—awkwardly thumbed basslines, slapdash drumming, a mocking chorale on "Carry Me Out", organ drones that could pass for someone nodding off on the keys.
But anything that gives you the sense of amateurism or self-defeat has intent and purpose. As tempting as it is to praise Bury Me at Makeout Creek by trying to quantify its intangibles—charm, relatability—the craft here is obvious, as is the accruing confidence of someone who’s developed a compelling voice in obscurity. Mitski can lay on the emo melodrama ("One word from you/ And I would jump off of this ledge I'm on, baby") just enough so things aren’t too real and mundane, and while these songs are first-person and personal, they're meant for an audience. It’s fitting to see a mutual respect between herself and Joyce Manor, whose Never Hungover Again is a similarly fantastic record of pop gems about choosing self-pity over feeling nothing at all and finding a kind of pleasurable agency in it. And as a result, Mitski Miyawaki is starting to gain a bit of separation from her band; Bury Me at Makeout Creek still sounds like a breakthrough even if nothing’s coming up Mitski in these songs. | 2014-11-14T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-11-14T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | November 14, 2014 | 7.7 | 4b8aa194-0866-43df-bd3c-b7f74de78763 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Zayn’s reputation as a skillful interpreter of pop is tested on his second solo album, a tome of love songs with a concept that hinges on excess and its trickery. | Zayn’s reputation as a skillful interpreter of pop is tested on his second solo album, a tome of love songs with a concept that hinges on excess and its trickery. | Zayn: Icarus Falls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zayn-icarus-falls/ | Icarus Falls | Zayn—fka Zayn Malik, fka one-fifth of the British boy-band supernova One Direction—named his second album after the myth of Icarus, the seraphic optimist who flew too close to the sun and snuffed himself out as a result. It’s in keeping with Zayn’s status as a reluctant pop star: He was the first member to depart from his Simon Cowell-sutured group (four months before the other four went on indefinite hiatus), his social-media presence is mostly low-key, and the promotion around his new releases are comparatively low-key affairs. Too much excess chatter, after all, results in the music, the reason Zayn became Zayn in the first place, receding to the background.
Mind of Mine, Zayn’s 2016 solo debut, was steeped in the dry-ice chills of modern R&B, Zayn’s still-lithe tenor guiding the listener through tremulous, sexually charged tracks. Icarus Falls, its followup, treads more of the same ground—a lot more, actually—while also serving up a few surprisingly sublime pop moments.
On first glance, the 27-track length of Icarus Falls indicates a data dump, those streaming-age behemoths made to be played on repeat by stat-happy fans while they sleep. And it’s partly that; Zayn told British Vogue that some of its tracks were rescued from the sessions for Mind of Mine, which resulted in some “60-something” completed songs. But Icarus Falls is actually a double album, cleaved in two by “Icarus Interlude,” which features Zayn hammering home the concept over spindly guitars. “I guess I flew too close to the sun/Myth’ll call me legend, that might be why,” he muses before label-dropping Yves Saint Laurent.
Icarus Falls opens with Zayn in love, or at least something like it: “Sweet baby, our sex has meaning,” he murmurs over the percolating guitars and plush synths of the album’s first track, the bedheaded devotional “Let Me.” (His ability to just barely pull off that bodice-ripper-worthy line is a sign of his skillful interpretative sense.) It’s a gorgeous opening, straddling the space between the breezy acousti-R&B that dominated the late ’00s and the snare-heavy rhythms of modern trap-pop while also flaunting Zayn’s falsetto. It’s followed by a slew of love songs, some of which leap from speakers a bit more readily: The sparse, snap-assisted “Back to Life” turns a lover into a lifesaver; “Stand Still” places Zayn, pleading in chorus with himself, within chilly synths and a rubbery guitar solo; the sumptuous “I Don’t Mind” rides a laconic groove with hope and swagger. Zayn’s belief in the power of love utterly blinds him on that last one—“You can tell me all your lies/I don’t mind,” he declares.
Then come the aforementioned interlude and the back half of the album, the new mood signaled by a sample of the tremolo guitars that open Nancy Sinatra’s torchy version of “Bang Bang.” Zayn’s wail zooms in, and we’re off to the races, plunging into love’s dark side on “Good Guy,” being emotionally withholding on “You Wish You Knew,” and writing a poison-pen letter to an ex on “Entertainer.” The more volatile lyrical content of the back half seems to feed into its more exciting, varied music—“Sour Diesel” reforms the “I Wanna Be Your Dog” bassline into a tether for blissed-out funk-pop, “Scripted” smashes and glues back together the string-laden ballad ideal, and the tense “Fresh Air” pairs fuzzy yet insistent drum-machine hits with a drowsy loop, underscoring the pressure-cooker lyrics that outline a relationship on the rocks. (There’s also “Good Years,” a jaundiced look back at One Direction past that, possibly ironically, echoes the sort of Ryan Tedder-style balladry that might have padded one of the group’s earlier albums.)
Icarus Falls, as a high-concept pop album, is fine. It shows off Zayn’s reluctant charisma and love-song-ready voice amid R&B ideas that are fully immersed in the present, for the most part for the better. True, it’s long, but given that its whole concept hinges on the idea of excess and its trickery, maybe that’s yet another sly wink from one of teen idoldom’s most enigmatic artists. | 2018-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | December 18, 2018 | 6.4 | 4b8cebba-2baa-4b9c-bb3b-50398561bde9 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
Between 1977 and 1979, Andy Kaufmann taped 82 hours of audio from his everyday life onto a microcassette recorder. A keenly edited version of those tapes make up the 48 minutes of Andy and His Grandmother, a comedy album on Drag City that is, fittingly, unlike any other comedy album. | Between 1977 and 1979, Andy Kaufmann taped 82 hours of audio from his everyday life onto a microcassette recorder. A keenly edited version of those tapes make up the 48 minutes of Andy and His Grandmother, a comedy album on Drag City that is, fittingly, unlike any other comedy album. | Andy Kaufman: Andy and His Grandmother | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18256-andy-kaufman-andy-and-his-grandmother/ | Andy and His Grandmother | Between 1977 and 1979, Andy Kaufman-- and his act-- changed. In '77, the comedian (or, as he preferred, "song-and-dance man") was 28 years old, and his bits were marked by wide-eyed innocence. At that point, it often seemed like his characters were pre-pubescent or eerily unaware of the adult world; in fact, much of his material at the time was culled from previous stints entertaining childrens' birthday parties as a teenager or hosting a kids' show, "Uncle Andy's Funhouse," in college. For Kaufman, retaining this child-like perspective was essential-- he even took up Transcendental Meditation in an attempt to hold onto this aura as he entered his twenties-- and it helped to inspire a similar feeling in his audience, to make them think back to a time before bills and heartbreak and death. A TV special he taped in the summer of 1977 epitomized this era as it featured his hopelessly naive Foreign Man character, a sincere interview with Kaufman's childhood idol Howdy Doody, and a step-by-step tutorial on how to make chocolate milk. The showcase ended with a sing-along to a song called "This Friendly World".
Due to its unabashedly offbeat nature (is he kidding? is he serious? what is he?) that special was shelved and would not air until two years later, after Kaufman had gained more fame with his role on "Taxi". But by then, in the summer of '79, the performer had, as one TV critic put it, "turned." He had started wrestling women onstage because he loved wrestling and its ridiculous theater. He also found the activity quite arousing and, according to Bill Zehme's definitive biography Lost in the Funhouse, it was a good way for Kaufman to break the ice with girls he wanted to have sex with after the show. Not very innocent. He also invented a new character, Tony Clifton, who was the exact opposite of his lovable Foreign Man-- a Vegas-style lout in a bad toupee, tumbling gut, and hideous moustache. Clifton was pure id, a reaction against Kaufman's kid-friendly former self. Looking back, that period between '77 and '79 was especially pivotal for Kaufman-- it's also the timeframe when he taped 82 hours of audio from his everyday life onto his newly purchased microcassette recorder. A keenly edited version of those tapes make up the 48 minutes of Andy and His Grandmother, a comedy album that is, fittingly, unlike any other.
The inspiration behind Kaufman's home recordings may be a man that his confidant and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda calls Mr. X (due to fear of retribution) in his book Andy Kaufman Revealed!. Zmuda worked for this apparently psychotic Hollywood screenwriter who would get himself into dangerous or outlandish real-life situations-- like insulting a mob boss' mother at her birthday dinner-- record them on audiotape, and then use those recordings as catalysts for his writing. Such mixing of fact and fiction was catnip for Kaufman, whose life often seemed like a series of pranks and put-ons. So Andy and His Grandmother-- compiled by veteran comedy writer/producer Vernon Chatman ("Louie", "South Park", "The Chris Rock Show") and documentarian Rodney Ascher (the Shining-obsessed Room 237)-- isn't merely a recording of Kaufman's stand-up performances, but rather recordings of real-life conversations that would plant creative seeds in his eccentric mind. Considering that many of the record's most memorable moments document wildly heated phone calls, it can seem like Andy and His Grandmother is more similar to a Jerky Boys album than comedy classics by Steve Martin or Bill Cosby.
Because, by-and-large, this is a record of provocation. It's also probably one of the most clear-eyed accounts of the "real" Andy Kaufman in existence, a serious feat considering his notoriously slippery relationship with what most of us call reality. The candidness here can be startling, even by 2013 standards. A track called "Slice of Life" has Kaufman talking to one of the many women he bedded while on tour in the late 70s. "We just screwed and here's the afterward conversation," he announces, before continuing: "It didn't look to me like you were enjoying it that much." But this isn't laugh-out-loud funny. It's unflinching. He asks her, "What happens if you got a baby?" to which the unnamed woman responds, "I'll hop a plane to Toronto and get a little abortion." Naturally, she asks for him to turn off the tape (there's an entire track here devoted to the voices of people requesting-- often in an incensed tone-- for Kaufman to "shut that off") but he's adamant: "Why is it that nobody understands that the kind of conversations that nobody wants me to tape are the kind of conversations that should be taped?" It's the sort of philosophy that runs through the work of many great comedians, from Woody Allen to Louis C.K., laid perfectly bare, without the filter of a camera lens, script, or stand-up routine.
Later on, a series of phone calls show up in which Kaufman diabolically riles up a woman who doesn't appreciate her feelings being used as some sort of meta comedy exercise. "You are fucked up!" she screams. "I WANT THOSE FUCKING TAPES!" The call is followed by Zmuda and Kaufman plotting how they could release the contentious conversations with this one tremendously angry woman as an album. "The concept would be funny because it's real, but it would be dramatic at the same time," Kaufman says, before excitedly suggesting to Zmuda, "Wouldn't it be great if she killed me and you have the tapes?" It's uncomfortable comedy, the kind that Kaufman would perfect with Tony Clifton and his inter-gender wrestling career. And these talks with various women accentuate the more problematic sides of his personality, the parts that were addicted to prostitutes and womanizing. "He hated that he needed to be with women," says friend Wendy Polland in Lost in the Funhouse, "because he didn't like the mind games they played with him. Which I guess was sort of ironic, wasn't it?" Andy and His Grandmother shows him fighting back against these women, and it can sound as compelling as a car crash.
But it's not all unusually cringe-worthy. There are moments when Kaufman's more lighthearted, '77-era persona shows up, like when he takes his grandmother out for a car ride and tries to convince her that a radar is guiding the vehicle (though that track cannily jump-cuts to a confrontation with a traffic cop who threatens to "knock the shit" out of a belligerent Kaufman). And all that phone yelling toward the end of the album is foreshadowed by another phone bit, "Andy Can Talk to Animals", where Kaufman gets into a shouting match with what sounds like a squealing pig: "Yeah, whaddya want? Say it fast." [pig squeal] "I had to change my fucking clothes so I can go out and have a good time and you just made me miss my appointment, so fuck you!" It's funnier than the real arguments-- likely due to the absurdity and lack of actual consequence-- but as Kaufman progressed through the late 70s, coaxing laughs from his audience became less and less of an imperative.
At one point during the album, a wronged woman lashes out at Kaufman in a particularly discombobulated-- but not inaccurate-- manner: "You think that I really don't know when you goof on me, and you think that I really don't know, and really I know, and you know that I really know, but you say I don't know." These are the mental hoops this one-of-a-kind performance artist would force people to go through on a regular basis, whether onstage or in front of his tiny personal recorder. It's why he still resonates and fascinates in our world of meta-this and post-that, why anyone would care about a collection of cobbled together personal recordings from an enigma who's been dead for nearly three decades. Based on Andy and His Grandmother, Kaufman comes off like an asshole, a hopelessly naive loser, a crazy person, a hothead, a hopelessly sweet grandma's boy, a sexually confused teenager, and a manipulative monster. In other words, he comes off like Andy Kaufman. | 2013-07-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Drag City / Process Media | July 17, 2013 | 7.2 | 4b8ee890-d5cd-473a-a170-2676a3ec402c | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade ... | Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade ... | Wolf Parade: Apologies to the Queen Mary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8794-apologies-to-the-queen-mary/ | Apologies to the Queen Mary | Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade's debut will contain bad wolf puns, Modest Mouse references (Isaac Brock recorded much of the album), riffs on Montreal's music scene by those who couldn't locate the city on a map, and namechecks of the quartet's pals, the Arcade Fire and Frog Eyes. Amid the noise, what Apologies might not receive is the close listening it deserves.
There's no question the lonesome crowded sound is here, but when Wolf Parade dig in and dust off their influences, the band rolls like a Ritalin-deprived power-Bowie or 70s Eno flexing piano-based hooks over Pixified rhythms. Component ingredients include electronics, keyboards, guitar, drums, and two spastically surging, forever tuneful vocalists (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug), but there are also surprises: A theremin cries in the slow-poke "Same Ghost Every Night"-- one of the longer tracks, it grows in pageantry as it swells to the six-minute mark-- and a spot of noise-guitar echoes throughout Krug's windy "Dinner Bells". And unlike most participants in indie rock's million-band march, Wolf Parade makes familiar elements mesh in special ways.
Groups like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Arcade Fire inspire listeners to both feel their music and listen closely to what's being said. Wolf Parade's Boeckner and Krug sing so energetically it can be difficult transcribing, but as lyrics reveal themselves on multiple listens, Apologies is populated by ghosts, crumbled brick, haunted technology, Marcel Dzama animals, fathers and mothers, off-kilter love songs, rusted gold, and endtime/brand new world scenarios that furnish the album's ornate instrumentation and clever arrangements with an inspired if elliptical story arc.
The album's roughly split between Boeckner and Krug, their tracks often alternating to a tee. But there is a non-cut/dry bleed between them, with both showing up on the same song, backing each other, screaming at the same time. I wouldn't want to inspire a quarterback controversy, but I tend to be a Krug man-- to my ear, he's the more intriguing lyricist, a Bowie-inflected guy tackling nonstandard song constructions. On the other hand, Boeckner is more traditionally palatable, which may make him the favorite by consensus: His work is often less unhinged or unpredictable, and this focus allows for some of the album's most immediate standouts.
Apologies starts with Krug's mousy "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son"-- also included on the band's self-titled EP-- and Boeckner's "Modern World", but it really takes off with "Grounds for Divorce". Honing in on one of the album's main themes, the track finds a momentary beauty and romanticism within potentially alienating technology: "You said you hate the sound of the buses on the ground/ You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town/ I said, 'Pretend it's whales, keeping their voices down.'" Spiraling behind Krug's vocals, Boeckner mingles his guitar splashes with textured keys and a distant shout of affirmation.
Boeckner's best are the anthemic "Shine a Light" and his lovely, ragged closer, "This Heart's on Fire", which induces thoughts of the Boss in full grease-monkey Valentino mode. Krug's key tracks also come toward the album's end: the regal swagger of the Frog-Eyed "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"-- note its absolutely sublime vocal cadences and group hug-- and "I'll Believe in Anything", one of my favorite tunes of the year. (Diehards can scope out an eviscerated take on Krug's Sunset Rubdown album, but in either hip-shaking form it's unexpectedly moving.) Tangy video-game synth, half-Moon drums, and pretty guitar reps embrace a maniacally charming Krug come-on: "Give me your eyes, I need sunshine/ Your blood, your bones/ Your voice, and your ghost." Boeckner's guitar distorts, the keys trill, Krug somehow finds even more energy in his pocket, and the fucker continues for another two-and-a-half blissful minutes with a shopping list of promises of escape and hope that culminates with: "I'd take you where nobody knows you/ And nobody gives a damn either way."
On paper this all could sound average, but Wolf Parade's true talent is transforming the everyday into the unprecedented. Fittingly, then, the record isn't going to change the direction of modern music, but it will enrich small moments of your life-- lying in bed alone or with a loved one, the morning commute, the dancefloor, a house party.
If you can, block out the baggage of its built-in hype machine and take this stuff for what it is. I still remember the excitement felt when I first heard Modest Mouse more than a decade ago. At the time, my friend and I talked about how it sounded like this or like that or whatever, but beneath the snobbery and geeky influence-detecting, we were excited, and so obviously into what the band was doing. If given the chance, Wolf Parade should engender similar scenarios: In a few years, other folks will still remember where they were when they first heard Apologies to the Queen Mary. | 2005-09-25T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-09-25T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 25, 2005 | 9.2 | 4b9ac0aa-a9a2-4286-8161-6ced06d082bd | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The songwriter takes an uncharacteristic breather with a collection of faithful, occasionally brooding covers of 1980s hits like “Forever Young” and “The Safety Dance.” | The songwriter takes an uncharacteristic breather with a collection of faithful, occasionally brooding covers of 1980s hits like “Forever Young” and “The Safety Dance.” | Angel Olsen: Aisles EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-olsen-aisles-ep/ | Aisles EP | Angel Olsen doesn’t want you reading too much into her new Aisles EP. On the heels of two of her most emotionally taxing albums yet, she’s recorded something entirely out of character: a covers EP of ’80s hits she’s heard at the grocery store. It’s not a declaration of a lighter new direction, or a sign that she’s entered a Weezer-y, internet-pandering phase of her career. They’re just some covers, she insists. “I know it’s not really in my history to do something unintentional or just for the hell of it,” she writes in notes accompanying the EP. “I just wanted to have a little fun and be a little more spontaneous.”
If that’s a lot of preface, it’s because you’re about to hear Angel Olsen cover “The Safety Dance,” and some assurances it’s a fluke might take a little of the sting out of that. Trading on her icy presence, Olsen’s slow-motion rendition of Men Without Hats’ 1982 hit is pure schlock, the kind of moody novelty cover that might soundtrack a trailer for an Ozark ripoff on Amazon Prime. Only the slightest indication of a smirk in Olsen’s otherwise robotic voice betrays that she’s in on the joke, that yes, this is ridiculous, and no, she doesn’t care that you assumed she was above this kind of thing.
Laura Branigan’s Euro-disco banger “Gloria” gets a similarly brooding makeover that slows its strobing tempo to a graveyard crawl. But elsewhere Olsen plays these covers pretty straight. She preserves the prom-dance tenderness of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” and the direct hookiness of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “If You Leave,” both of which highlight the brighter corners of her voice. Aside from softening the guitars and cutting out Billy Idol’s extremely ’80s rap, her take on “Eyes Without a Face” is otherwise faithful to the original.
There are some pleasurable little details dotted throughout these songs, though they’re subtle: how the tangles of strings and synthesizers faintly tease the dense, dramatic arrangements of All Mirrors on the slower numbers, or the way Auto-Tune lifts and coddles her vocals on the more upbeat covers. For a few moments when the drum beat picks up on “If You Leave,” the EP imagines how sensational that voice might sound over an actual dance track—a prospect that no longer seems so improbable.
Aisles is most endearing when it leans into frivolity, largely because there’s little else with such relaxed stakes in Olsen’s discography. After five albums of roiling, car-crash emotional intensity, there’s something gratifying about hearing her knock out a few undemanding covers. At times her distance from this material becomes its own muse: These aren’t, after all, songs she grew up loving, or treasured family favorites. They’re just some tunes she’s enjoyed while grocery shopping, and she interprets them with fitting nonchalance. It’s an unusual departure for a songwriter who’s always staked everything on her conviction, but if any artist has earned the breather, it’s Olsen.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | somethingscosmic / Jagjaguwar | August 24, 2021 | 6.5 | 4ba72609-866b-4941-b461-7f212f1f8585 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Colombian and Canadian musician’s second album is a symbolic reclamation of her crown. On one level, she’s recollecting intimate relationships; on another, she’s calling entire countries to task. | The Colombian and Canadian musician’s second album is a symbolic reclamation of her crown. On one level, she’s recollecting intimate relationships; on another, she’s calling entire countries to task. | Lido Pimienta: Miss Colombia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lido-pimienta-miss-colombia/ | Miss Colombia | When Lido Pimienta recorded her first EP, Color, in 2010, her then-husband produced every track and refused to teach her how. It was, she said, “a way of keeping me dependent on him.” Nine years and one divorce later, Pimienta does things differently. She recorded the majority of Miss Colombia in her home studio, wrote and arranged each song herself, and co-produced the album with fellow Torontonian Prince Nifty. The result is a staggering exhibition of her skill as a singer, songwriter, and shit-stirrer.
Pimienta came to mainstream attention in 2017, when her debut LP La Papessa won the Polaris Prize, Canada’s highest musical honor. Self-released, funded by a $6,000 Ontario Arts Council grant, and nominated alongside albums by Leonard Cohen, Gord Downie, and Feist, La Papessa was the definition of a dark horse. Despite the global boom of reggaetón and cumbia, Latin genres remain critically underrepresented in Canadian music. Little wonder, then, that Pimienta’s Polaris victory, and her calls for “brown girls to the front,” rankled the alt-right.
Named after Steve Harvey’s gaffe at the 2015 Miss Universe contest, Miss Colombia is Pimienta’s symbolic reclamation of her crown in an industry fraught with racism and misogyny. Crafted with deep passion and careful attention to detail, the record sounds like the full realization of a long-held dream, made possible at last by a wider platform and a bigger budget. Its palette is warmer, richer, and more reliant on traditional Colombian instrumentation than the chilly “digi-cumbia” (a label she shuns) of La Papessa. Pimienta places herself within a starry constellation of guests, including Colombian icons Sexteto Tabala and Bomba Estéreo’s Li Saumet, and outshines them all. These 11 songs form a full-throated declaration of mastery, all the more impressive for Pimienta’s insistence on prioritizing Afro-Colombian rhythms and instruments in an overwhelmingly white musical landscape.
Sung almost entirely in Spanish, Miss Colombia conveys rage and solidarity more than chipper positivity. Pimienta often writes from the perspective of someone who has drunk deep from the poisonous wells of misogyny and racism. The funereal dirge “Nada” is an early, devastating exercise in this mode. Its narrator, a woman scorned, says that she does not fear death: “Soy mujer y llevo, el dolor adentro.” (“I’m a woman and carrying pain is what I do.”) On “Pelo Cucu,” a eugenics allegory à la Ham’s Redemption, a mother yearns for her “nappy-haired” daughter to marry a “niño blanco, de pelo bueno… pa mejorar la raza.” (“A white boy with that good hair… to improve our race.”) By laying hatred bare, in plain, unadorned language, Pimienta deftly exposes how people vulnerable to bigotry often absorb that bigotry, replicate it, and hurt others like themselves.
The self-loathing in these songs is made all the more poignant by Pimienta’s irrepressible confidence. She refuses to rescue any more immature partners (“Coming Thru”), relaxes after escaping an emotional vampire (“Te Queria”), and rallies her listeners to fight anyone who makes them feel small (“Resisto Y Ya”). There is a pleasant, slippery ambiguity in these songs. On one level, Pimienta is recollecting intimate relationships; on another, she’s calling entire countries to task for their failure to protect black and brown women. Both Canada and her native Colombia are on the receiving end of her blistering critiques. Still, she’s optimistic about a future where she can live in these countries free from harm. “Ya llegó la oportunidad,” she sings on “Quiero Que Me Salves,” “para arreglar nuestro pasado.” (“The chance has arrived to fix our past.”) She might be singing to a lover; she might be singing to a head of state.
In the three years since the Polaris Prize’s early vote of confidence, Pimienta has ably realized her potential and silenced those who doubted her deservingness. She has opened herself up both to collaboration and to mentorship, working with aspiring indigenous musicians and fundraising for Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu. She is still an extreme rarity in Canadian music: an Afro-Colombian queer woman with indigenous Wayuu heritage, a single mother, a Spanish speaker. The great promise of Miss Colombia, and of her new leadership in a predominantly white scene, is that brown girls will hear it and be inspired to surge to the front.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | April 18, 2020 | 8 | 4ba7f0f0-9d76-42c7-a16b-f9ce6e707024 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The ninth Rick Ross album features tons of guests including Young Thug, Future, and Nas. As the Bawse enters his 40s, his bite has weakened, but he still owns his lane in luxury rap. | The ninth Rick Ross album features tons of guests including Young Thug, Future, and Nas. As the Bawse enters his 40s, his bite has weakened, but he still owns his lane in luxury rap. | Rick Ross: Rather You Than Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23110-rather-you-than-me/ | Rather You Than Me | On Rather You Than Me, the ninth Rick Ross album in just over a decade, the Miami rapper calls himself “so divisive,” but that isn’t true anymore. At some point—probably around 2010’s Teflon Don—Ross became a strange point of consensus. He shrugged off the 50 Cent-led character assassinations; he came out looking like the lone success story from Jay Z’s reign as Def Jam president. (Jeezy blew up in this period, too, but the popular perception was that he was ushered into stardom by T.I.) This decade, even as the rap zeitgeist moves further and further from his aesthetic wheelhouse, he’s been a fixture at radio and on the albums of his famous peers. *Rather You Than Me *is a smooth, enjoyable attempt to wrestle the spotlight back onto his solo work.
A three-song stretch on the album’s A-side (“Trap Trap Trap” through “She on My Dick”) aside, Rather You Than Me plants itself somewhere off the Atlantic coast, on a yacht with saxophones and fine linens and Michael McDonald. The perplexing and endlessly impressive thing here is that while this style has mostly fallen out of vogue (J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League no longer has multiple singles in the Top 40), it still suits Ross incredibly well. From the grand, contemplative “Scientology” to the velvety “Santorini Greece,” the record frequently sounds more foreign than it really is, like a love letter to the long-ago Obama years. Both of those songs mentioned are produced by Bink!, the Virginia native who matched Just Blaze and Kanye West beat-for-beat on The Blueprint; they fit neatly alongside duets with fellow vets like Nas and Raphael Saadiq. Rather You Than Me is an album that’s comfortable in its middle age.
There are times when Ross seems to strain too hard to recreate “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” “Dead Presidents,” an otherwise very good, if impermanent, collaboration with Future, Yo Gotti, and onetime rival Jeezy, feels frustratingly like a retread. “She on My Dick,” with an assist from Gucci Mane, would be an admirable play for radio if not for its impossible-to-clean-up hook; the Young Thug- and Wale-featuring “Trap Trap Trap” is by far the best of the three, where the template is updated to allow more negative space, in fitting with 2017.
The most newsworthy song on the album is “Idols Become Rivals,” which is introduced by a Wing Stop-hawking Chris Rock and which flips a Camilo Sesto sample the same way the producer T.T. did for The Dynasty’s “Where Have You Been.” (As an aside: shouldn’t Jay and Beanie Sigel’s soul-baring on this beat be sacrosanct?) Ross takes Birdman to task over Cash Money’s notoriously suspect business practices, from his alleged refusal to pay producers their fair share to his treatment of Lil Wayne and the rest of the former Hot Boys. The subplot is that, after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, Birdman and Wayne moved to Miami (“You came to my city, nigga”). Ross casts himself as a custodian of Dade County—and, implicitly, of hip-hop—and he takes his post seriously.
Tucked toward the end of Rather You Than Me is the fifth installment of Ross’s “Maybach Music” series; unlike previous installments, which were either packed to the gills with guests or at least nabbed a lone A-lister, this one features the Detroit rapper Dej Loaf—an extraordinary talent, but, you know, not Jay Z. On that song, Ross says, “Maybe this my magnum opus,” but that isn’t true. It’s a veteran settling into a comfortable rhythm that will probably ferry him into legacy act waters at some point in the future. For now, it’s a quiet yacht ride. | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic / Maybach | April 1, 2017 | 6.9 | 4ba83fcb-ee55-4b34-b543-9723d7f0ac1b | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Linda McCartney’s first and only studio album was released to resounding silence shortly after her death in 1998. But she and Paul shared a musical chemistry as singular as Yoko and John’s, and as emblematic of their shared interests. | Linda McCartney’s first and only studio album was released to resounding silence shortly after her death in 1998. But she and Paul shared a musical chemistry as singular as Yoko and John’s, and as emblematic of their shared interests. | Linda McCartney: Wide Prairie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/linda-mccartney-wide-prairie/ | Wide Prairie | Linda Eastman met her second husband Paul McCartney in 1967 at a club in London called Bag O’Nails. The Beatles were busy launching their new album Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Linda was photographing the event. Divorced and supporting her young daughter Heather, Linda had begun making a name for herself in photography. She was noted for her ability to freeze-frame rock stars in moments of quicksilver humanity—see this perfect picture of Jimi Hendrix yawning, or Jimmy Page making room for an older lady to pass him on the sidewalk. Decades later, Paul said he “just saw her across the room and fancied her like mad.” They were married two years later.
As with Yoko and John, Linda’s interests bent the course of Paul’s own career—if Paul was ever associated with animal rights activism or vegetarianism, it was because those were Linda’s concerns, and she devoted her life to them, as well as to her family and photography. And as with Yoko, Linda became an instant magnet for misogynist hostility—she was an interloper, a non-talent leading her genius husband astray. When Paul put Linda’s name beside his for his second post-Beatles album, Ram, the result was the most roundly belittled release of Paul’s career, the one that Rolling Stone called “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far.”
When she started a new band with him called Wings—well, they were Wings. Not even Paul and Linda liked Wings: “We just picked the wrong people,” Linda later said. “Paul is such a good musician, and none of the Wings were good enough to play with him…including me, for sure.”
Over the next several decades, Linda and Paul remained inseparable. Linda would become a force in vegetarian cooking, releasing several cookbooks and developing a line of meatless frozen foods. She stepped away from the spotlight, more or less—she still popped up in Paul’s videos from time to time, but the era in which she played keyboards next to her husband, decorating the stage with lava lamps and scarves, was over.
Yet her music career never strictly ended. Over the years, she released a trickle of songs as one-off singles and EPs, where they would not attract undue (and presumably unkind) attention. One of those songs, “Seaside Woman” (under the pseudonym Suzy and the Red Stripes), became a minor hit, peaking at #59 in the U.S. In 1985, she cowrote and executive-produced the animated children’s special Rupert and the Frog Song, which featured “Seaside Woman” and the surreal “Oriental Nightfish.” But otherwise, Linda McCartney ceased to be known in the public eye for her music.
When she died of breast cancer on April 17, 1998, she and Paul were in the process of assembling her first and only studio album. The track listing was composed of odds and ends she had written with Paul over the years, and the result was released to resounding silence shortly after her death. “Let’s just note, as gently as possible, that Wide Prairie is not any good,” wrote the Washington Post. And that—once again—was it.
Now that Wide Prairie is being reissued, it’s probably time to look at Linda’s music a little more squarely. Yes, there are painful moments here, particularly her attempts at a “howdy, pardner”-style country accent. But she and Paul shared a musical chemistry as enviable and singular as Yoko and John’s, and as emblematic of their shared interests. The songs here glow with the comfort and warmth of domesticity. “I’m the cook of the house,” Linda boasted on the song called “Cook of the House,” followed by the sound of a sizzling pan. Domesticity was also the wellspring for Ram, and showed just how slyly subversive such celebrations could be (“Eat at Home” is not about cooking.)
They also harmonized together in a way that was hard to imitate—Linda’s wild, untrained voice against Paul’s choirboy tenor generated a messy, gratifying wholeness. Linda’s voice is thin, yes, but decades of punk (and a few years of SoundCloud rap) have trained pop listeners to hear differently. There is a peculiar yowling joy to their rumpled reggae-lite cover of “Mister Sandman,” a trifle that nevertheless feels as inviting as a hammock. She made him sound rougher, and he made her sound sweeter. They sounded better together.
Away from critical and commercial scrutiny, Linda allowed the antic musical theater touches of Ram to run amuck. Wide Prairie is silly and exuberant, almost relentlessly so, but also deeply strange: Nearly every song is an exhaustive mini-medley of pop-song styles—music-hall oom-pah horns, country fiddles, skiffle keyboards, electric-blues guitar riffing, monster-movie synthesizers on “The White-Coated Man.” Sometimes, when all the horns are tooting, it can feel like you’re being trampled underfoot by an army of first graders.
But poke beneath the whimsy and you will find a delirious buffet approach to the American songbook not too far from Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle. Her ear for melody was highly unusual, and she made the kinds of harmonic leaps that other songwriters did or would not. The piano ballad “Love’s Full Glory” picks its way across the keys with the kind of wayward, meandering melody that Paul was noted for, but with unpredictable stagger steps in the progression that felt inimitably Linda’s.
The best moments are the simplest and most relaxed, with the fewest instruments and the most straightforward words. “When it comes, you will go with quiet dignity/Across the yard, up the ramp,” she sang on “Cow,” a song about exactly that. “Going to meet the final man/With nothing on your face/Except for that familiar beauty/And he will eat you/Because he didn’t look.” The words might provoke giggles on the page, but in the song, they are disarmingly sweet—Linda plays a Casio keyboard as a backing track, its tinny sound a reminder of the childlike innocence of the message. What child, after all, hasn’t come to the horrified realization that the cute animals in the field are the same ones we eat?
Though few current artists acknowledge her as a godmother, you can hear echoes of Linda in Girlpool, in Fleet Foxes, in any number of indie pop and freak-folk albums. One might say she got the last laugh, but she didn’t seem the type to need it. “I always thought I could do anything I liked doing,” she told Playboy. She seemed to live her life in accordance with an internal compass, with serene disregard for the opinions of observers. She liked making music, she liked taking pictures, she liked spending time with her husband. When she died, it was in Paul’s arms.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | MPL / Capitol / UMe | August 8, 2019 | 6.8 | 4bad520f-c91e-4cb0-81e5-3cc2934d5217 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
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 Type O Negative’s third album, a brooding and influential reinvention of goth metal from 1993. | 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 Type O Negative’s third album, a brooding and influential reinvention of goth metal from 1993. | Type O Negative: Bloody Kisses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/type-o-negative-bloody-kisses/ | Bloody Kisses | One day in the early 1990s, Peter Steele crammed his monstrous frame into a New York City Parks Department truck and set out for the Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station. Located on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, it was a holding ground for thousands of tons of trash before the trash was ferried to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. He was hauling 40 cubic yards of human waste, and there was a backup at the station, a line of garbage trucks stopped along the road. He liked the job—it paid $40,000 a year—and it gave the Type O Negative bassist and lead singer time to write.
Steele looked like a more Nordic Undertaker, or Glenn Danzig but a foot taller. He was an archetype for the brooding, hypermasculine metalhead that crawled out of the primordial ooze. And for three hours, while sitting in traffic waiting to unload a truckful of excrement, he composed a song in his head. It was, he later told an interviewer for the deluxe reissue of his band Type O Negative’s landmark third album, Bloody Kisses, about “the ultimate goth girl” who was “in love with herself.”
The vampire of South Brooklyn, who shoveled shit between band practices, cut both a relatable and controversial figure. “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” is a send-up of the goth-girl archetype (”She’s got a date at midnight with Nosferatu/Oh, baby, Lily Munster ain’t got nothing on you”), the title referring to the only thing a Little Miss Scare-All could ever truly fear: the roots of her hair showing. But Steele made an industry of synthesizing the ironic with the sublimely earnest. In that same interview, he reveals that the song has some verisimilitude: “It’s about the girl I fucking slashed my wrists over,” a reference to his 1989 suicide attempt.
Goth metal, then still in its infancy, was made popular in the early ’90s by “The Peaceville Three,” which included My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema, all from Northern England. The genre was a self-serious mashup of death metal and doom that left little room for outsized personalities like Steele. But Steele didn’t care about the death metal part; he just wanted the doom. Coming out of the 1980s as an all-star in the New York City thrash metal world—a scene that bred bands like Anthrax, Overkill, and Nuclear Assault—he entered the next decade with that same brash attitude, but with an urge to slow things down. In creating Bloody Kisses, Steele re-invented goth metal by grasping on to influences like Black Sabbath and the Beatles, and creating a lane for mainstream goth-influenced bands from Finland’s HIM to Evanescence. Never again would Steele make an album that straddled these two worlds, with one foot in a mud-flecked work boot, the other in pristine black leather.
Steele hinted at Type O Negative’s style back in 1987, the same year he started in the Parks Department and released his thrash band Carnivore’s second and final album, Retaliation. Glancing merely at the tracklist, Retaliation anticipates most Type O Negative albums: a joke opener (“Jack Daniel’s and Pizza”), classic rock cover halfway through (Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”), and a smattering of offensive song titles (honestly, take your pick). The album is good, if musically unremarkable, crossover thrash.
What Steele became infamous for in the mid-’80s, though, was his racist and misogynistic lyrics—written off by fans and hagiographers as “sarcastic”—and by extension, his perceived worldview. He penned the words for fellow New York hardcore band Agnostic Front on their 1986 song “Public Assistance,” a racist screed against so-called welfare queens. He’d repeat this theme on Type O Negative’s debut, Slow, Deep and Hard, in the lyrics to the song “Der Untermensch,” and in interviews throughout his career.
Originally called Repulsion, Type O Negative emerged in 1990 after the grindcore pioneers with the same name enlisted a lawyer. Steele, along with childhood friends guitarist Kenny Hickey, keyboardist Josh Silver, and drummer Sal Abruscato, settled on naming their gothic doom project Type O Negative—after a short stint as Sub-Zero, also taken—because “it didn’t sound too metal.” According to Silver, the band preferred ambiguity, so that “you couldn’t tell what kind of band, what type of music it would be.” Steele had a reputation from his time in Carnivore, and the band didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just another thrash act, a genre that broke into the mainstream that year with landmark albums from Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, and Suicidal Tendencies.
The first two Type O Negative albums, though, were indications that Steele wasn’t quite ready to leave the past behind. They were still being booked at Carnivore’s old stomping grounds, in the East Village at The Ritz and in Brooklyn at L’Amour. And his crude sense of humor carried over from the ’80s. The cover of 1991’s Slow, Deep and Hard featured a blurred image of a penis (maybe Steele’s) and the follow-up, a “live” album—versions of songs from their first LP with fictionalized stage banter and a fabricated booing crowd overdubbed—released the following year, The Origin of the Feces, is famous mostly for the cover depiction of his anus (definitely Steele’s). Carnivore’s speedy thrash riffs and howling vocals have survived, but midway through, songs slow to a crawl, infused with foreboding synthesizers and mournful church organs. Both records are mixed bags, as if the band is a chimera struggling to become something not entirely unsettling.
Type O Negative found their true form when they retreated to Silver’s home studio in Brooklyn to record demos of what would become Bloody Kisses. Roadrunner, Carnivore’s label, stuck with Steele after he formed Type O Negative, and when VP of A&R Monte Conner heard what the band had come up with, he was blown away, recalling that it sounded like “nothing before and nothing after.” The tape contained the majority of what would eventually become Bloody Kisses, including a complete version of “Christian Woman,” which crystalized their new musical identity. Instead of a tossed-off hardcore song with slow parts thrown in, Conner heard Sisters of Mercy gloom, Sabbath riffs, and Beatles harmonies underneath Steele’s new baritone delivery, which weaves together sexual and divine themes.
With four tracks over seven minutes long and four instrumental interludes, Conner heard a cinematic epic, importantly, one that would cross over to fans in multiple genres: goth kids, metalheads, maybe even soft-rock fans, who would get a doom-laden cover of Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze.” Roadrunner sent the demo to Jim Steinman, a producer on Sisters of Mercy’s 1987 album Floodland, who remarked, “There’s nothing I can add to this.” The label never again insisted on a producer for the band. Once they could reinvent a genre whole cloth by themselves, they never again had to answer to a label.
While “Black No. 1” is the band’s trademark song, the 11-minute, organ-drenched dirge “Bloody Kisses (A Death in the Family)” is the album’s emotional centerpiece. Ostensibly about a woman who died by suicide, it’s actually a veiled tribute to Steele’s elderly cat Venus, who died while he was writing the album. It’s also Steele’s first stab at describing emotional pain without couching it in humor or veiled misogyny—a heartbreaking ode to a creature he adored, one who used to sit on his chest while he did bench presses. “No one wants to hear a guy who’s six-foot-eight with long black hair and fangs crying about his fuckin’ cat,” Steele said, “so I had to make it extremely metaphorical.” The title track is a characterization of Steele as a person to this point in his life: deeply emotional and sentimental, struggling to convey his humanity. For the first time, fans were exposed to how raw Steele could be when he really tried.
However, this is not the case throughout the album. Steele would still hedge his real misanthropy and pain with tongue-in-cheek New York brashness. Even the cover of the album, a pair of goth women, with parted bloodied lips and closed eyes in apparent ecstasy, is difficult to take seriously, especially knowing the two album covers that preceded Bloody Kisses. Is Steele skewering goth girls, as he does on “Black No. 1”? Did he tire of producing albums that would be judged, quite harshly, by their covers? Steele never gave a definitive answer, and the band later complained that they hated the finished product. Steele, obsessed with the color green, complained that the particular shade of green was all wrong, after spending hours rifling through color swatches that designers use.
It was also around this time that Steele began to employ a type of vampiric affect in his vocal delivery. In the first verse of “Black No. 1,” he stresses final consonants in “dark,” and “milk,” trilling the “t’s” on the phrase “trick or treat,” sucking air through his fangs before cooing, “Happy Halloween, baby.” Left to their own devices, Silver and Steele purposefully added a layer of sensuality to the vocals, putting Steele front-and-center. Silver added more compression than usual to the microphone, which is, according to Conner, “why you can hear every time Peter smacks his lips.” The intended effect was to go a step beyond what forebears like Sisters of Mercy were doing in creating a sense of mystique and sexuality—and it worked. “It’s like you’re inside his mouth,” Conner said. “It’s all so immediate.”
Doing press for the Bloody Kisses tour, Steele was asked about this vocal transformation, and in typical fashion, he couldn’t describe his art in a straightforward or neutral manner. “I’ve really gotten sick and tired of all these male vocalists with low testosterone levels that sound like little girls having their feet tickled,” Steele said. “I think men should sound like men.” This is a hill Steele would die on. From his time in the New York hardcore and thrash scenes through Bloody Kisses, and even near the end of his life, he spoke in a heteronormative, gender-biased tongue. In his final interview, in 2010, he said, “I admit, I am a sexist,” before throwing off another one-liner about being sexist against men only, but there is truth in humor. He didn’t appear to care that people thought of him this way either, which, in addition to the publicity these interviews would create—without any truly negative consequences—is why he kept giving them.
Metal and punk bands are rightfully called to account by fans, critics, and artists in these subcultures for a fraction of what Steele has said into a microphone or tape recorder. Part of the reason Steele has gotten a pass is a longstanding narrative that frames him as a wan, unreliable narrator who is maybe-maybe-not just stirring the pot. After all, his recipe for most things was half-sincere, half-ironic, as if he could never really commit fully to one genre. The closer, “Can’t Lose You,” is a sitar-laden dirge that features Steele crooning “I can’t lose you” repeatedly. It appears as an unironic plea to a lost love for five minutes, until fading out with the so-called Bensonhoist Lesbian Choir—e.g. his bandmates and friends from Brooklyn who would hang out in the studio—chanting, barely audible, “Everybody smokes pot/Monte Conner sucks cock.” (Conner would later brush the intended insult off, saying, “It wasn’t meant to be mean.”)
Type O Negative would evolve further into the goth rock side of gothic metal. Though the music would never be better than it was on Bloody Kisses, the band eventually took (overt) homophobia and misogyny off the records. For what it’s worth, Steele tried to walk back some of his words in that final interview, speaking of “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else,” from Slow, Deep and Hard: “When I used the words ‘slut,’ ‘whore,’ and, ‘cunt’… I’m not proud of that language.”
After Bloody Kisses was released in August 1993, Type O Negative, by association, became both a beneficiary—and a casualty—of the 1990s goth and nu-metal subculture, no doubt reinvigorated by the films of Tim Burton, the rise of Marilyn Manson, and the ubiquitousness of Hot Topic, which specialized in merchandise depicting the films of Tim Burton and the music of Marilyn Manson. Type O Negative also shared bills with labelmates Coal Chamber, Fear Factory, and Spineshank as Roadrunner shifted its focus to nu-metal near the end of the decade. They no doubt made converts out of fans of their sleeker industrial and nu-metal openers, but along the way became lumped in with the black JNCOs set.
And that’s despite Type O Negative hitting on a mid-90s pop-culture trifecta in the wake of Bloody Kisses. Beavis and Butthead, watching the “Black No. 1” video, gave a rare favorable review, calling the sound, “A cross between Danzig and Megadeth.” Steele appeared on a 1995 The Jerry Springer Show episode called “Sexy Groupie Girls Tell All!” where a woman with a crude tattoo of the Type O logo on her shoulder calls him “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen.” And, infamously, eager goths opened that year’s August issue of Playgirl to see a fully nude Steele unfurl from the centerfold.
Today, you can still buy a Bloody Kisses T-shirt at Hot Topic, just as you can purchase an officially licensed Jack Skellington oven mitt. But you can also find numerous editions of obscure Type O Negative designs from any number of bootleg T-shirt makers on Instagram alongside ones for well-regarded metal bands like Bolt Thrower and Obituary. On Halloween 2017, I sipped bourbon at an Austin dive bar as metalheads chanted the chorus from “Christian Woman” as if at a revival church. The Type O Negative logo—a negative symbol inside a circle, both green—is newly iconic, like the Crass cross or the Black Flag bars. It has become a token of both goth and metal culture, not just because of its austere radioactive design, but because Bloody Kisses remains a unifier of goth and metal, an uncut gem stuck between the dump and the landfill.
When Peter Steele died from sepsis on April 14, 2010, the most revealing tribute for Steele came from Julius Spiegel, Brooklyn Commissioner of Parks:
I remember Pete Ratajczyk [Steele’s real name] not at all like the dark character some of the blogs have portrayed, but as a very hard-working, sweet and respectful guy, always eager to please. Even after he had achieved notoriety, he would visit us, occasionally even coming to our hokey dinner-dances, just to reminisce. He often joked (at least I thought he was joking) about coming back to work at the Parks Dept.
Spiegel nails Steele in three sentences: the blue-collar mentality, Steele’s penchant for nostalgia, his cryptic sense of humor, and, importantly, the dichotomy between Steele’s public and private personas that came to fruition during the making of Bloody Kisses. The self-described “monster” and “psychopath” was really a sweet lunch-pail-type guy, according to a coworker who knew him pretty well—a braggadocious behemoth with prehistoric views, who swigged red wine by the bottle when he performed to combat stage fright. It was that duality that forever cast himself and his band in that absurd, singular, toxic green light.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | February 23, 2020 | 8.7 | 4badaf29-09b1-42a7-a2df-ceb0109b1b2f | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Empress Of is the alias of Lorely Rodriguez. Her debut EP consisted of shimmering synthpop, and now, she's stepping up as an avant-R&B auteur with pop star potential. Her first proper LP, Me is not just Rodriguez's most outwardly pop-focused work to date, but also her most restlessly experimental and lyrically raw. | Empress Of is the alias of Lorely Rodriguez. Her debut EP consisted of shimmering synthpop, and now, she's stepping up as an avant-R&B auteur with pop star potential. Her first proper LP, Me is not just Rodriguez's most outwardly pop-focused work to date, but also her most restlessly experimental and lyrically raw. | Empress Of: Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20976-me/ | Me | Lorely Rodriguez's evolution over the past half-decade mirrors the twists and turns of indie rock itself. She first appeared as a member of Brooklyn's Celestial Shore, a quirky art-rock quartet rising in the wake of Dirty Projectors and Vampire Weekend. After debuting her Empress Of alias with a series of color-coded song snippets on YouTube, she released an EP of shimmering synthpop just as kindred spirits like Phantogram, Grimes, and Purity Ring were crossing over. Now, she's stepping up as an avant-R&B auteur with pop star potential—like a Björk unleashing her inner Beyoncé. But each step of the way, Rodriguez has gradually become a more captivating singer, compelling songwriter, and creative producer. And what makes the first proper album from Empress Of so impressive is that it's not just Rodriguez's most outwardly pop-focused work to date, but also her most restlessly experimental and—as suggested by that stark, Horses-style cover shot—lyrically raw.
It's that last point that provides the real revelation on Me. True to its title, Me is a vessel for Rodriguez's most personal thoughts; she wrote these songs during an extended sojourn to central Mexico, where she lived alone for five weeks at a friend's house in a remote small town. The intense isolation provided the opportunity to reflect upon her life back in Brooklyn with great clarity, as she laments the financial hardships of trying to make rent in a gentrified city (the steamy slow jam "Standard") while acknowledging the luxury of living in a country with potable H20 (the rippling house of "Water Water"). But for the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.
The bulk of Me forms a concept album of sorts documenting the life cycle of a relationship. She takes us from the sloppy hook-up sex of "Make Up" ("Nothing comes between us/ But a piece of latex/ When you tear my clothes off/ Like I was a paycheck") to the obsessive dependency of "Everything Is You" ("All I want to be is you"). She chronicles the lapse into domesticity on "Need Myself" ("Can we stop watching the TV?/ Can I get up off of my knees?") to the intoxicated post-breakup haze of "To Get By" and the heartache-induced insomnia of "Icon" ("Close my eyes/ I see your face/ I just keep myself awake"). Rodriguez's writing is loaded with vivid details ("I can hear you grind your teeth/ When you're laying fast asleep"), but the scenery will feel familiar to anyone who's languished in a partnership after the thrill is gone, and agonized over the decision to break free.
If the songs on Me resemble diary entries, the pages have been torn out and shuffled, so that events fall out of order. We are continually shifted between pre- and post-breakup experiences, which mimics the experience of sorting through a failed love. After all, our memories rarely materialize in chronological order—a fleeting fond reminiscence of an ex has the power to momentarily override the longing and pain that fueled it. The narrative goes beyond Rodriguez's candid lyrics into the production itself, which offers dramatic commentary or reinforcement. When she confronts some cat-calling bros on "Kitty Kat", the track responds to her simple plea of "let me walk away" with a cluster of claustrophobic synth jabs. And the tripped-up groove of "To Get By" comes off like a bad trip in the middle of a nightclub, where your stomach turns queasy, knees wobble, and the faces of the dancers around you become slow-motion psychedelic smears.
But Rodriguez is equally adept at channeling her inner turmoil into euphoric release, like on the Herculean house romp "How Do You Do It" and the pitch-shifting space-disco delirium of "Threat". On the latter track, Rodriguez effectively coins Me's don't-look-back mission statement by declaring "our memories are a threat"—and by the time that chorus is punctuated by the blare of synthesized trumpets, her troubles are already forgotten. Rodriguez may spend much of Me inside her mind, but it’s as much an invitation to get out of our heads. | 2015-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Terrible | September 8, 2015 | 8.2 | 4bae6805-cca0-4e59-ab8d-90bea06d2c4d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Death Index is the collaboration between Carson Cox, lead singer for Merchandise, and Marco Rapisarda, a regular in Italy's hardcore scene. Unlike most hardcore or punk records, Death Index was made layer-by-layer in a studio, creating a cool distance between vocals and music that allows for some fascinating contrasts. | Death Index is the collaboration between Carson Cox, lead singer for Merchandise, and Marco Rapisarda, a regular in Italy's hardcore scene. Unlike most hardcore or punk records, Death Index was made layer-by-layer in a studio, creating a cool distance between vocals and music that allows for some fascinating contrasts. | Death Index: Death Index | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21545-death-index/ | Death Index | Merchandise’s evolution from wounded bedroom pop to vivid college rock was paralleled by vocalist Carson Cox’s public contemplation of punk, a slide from weary respect for its values to exhaustion with its dogma. In 2012, Cox told Pitchfork, "Punk is still the spiritual music of my life, but I’m not interested in being that kind of person anymore." In 2014, ahead of Merchandise’s 4AD-released After the End, he demurred to NME, "I was born after punk died, so whatever." To Noisey: "I’m just sick of fucking punk scenes." Fittingly then, Cox and collaborator Marco Rapisarda’s collaboration as Death Index didn’t involve rehearsal, gigging, or any other trappings of scene participation. It’s the next passage in Cox’s personal history of estrangement from punk.
Death Index was recorded in Berlin, Tampa, and Italy. Cox sings on every track. Rapisarda, a regular in Italy’s hardcore scene, plays everything else. A few songs surfaced online late last year, grabbing attention from high-profile U.S. hardcore label Deathwish. Their live lineup is forthcoming at the moment of Death Index’s release, meaning the record was made by in-studio, part-by-part layering. It's a novel way to create punk or hardcore—which typically celebrate live ensemble combustibility and recordings that capture it—and the oblique approach helps explain Death Index’s alien charms and rudderless missteps alike.
The recording process’s fragmentation seems to have yielded an album where Cox sounds as distant from the music as he apparently feels from punk itself. Sometimes that distance makes for fascinating contrasts, setting Rapisarda's deft, muscular performances against Cox's emotionally textured vocals. Musically, opener "Fast Money Kill" is rousing, concise hardcore that Antidote fans will recognize as nearly identical to "Life as One." But Cox’s full-bodied singing, with its aching quiver and trill, evokes the dreary post-punk of Manchester. His nuanced, wounded croon also distinguish the throttling "Fuori Controllo" and the leering "Little N Pretty," the music's insular, sealed-off atmosphere allowing for the unlikely combination to flourish.
Sometimes, though, the sound skews antiseptic and clinical on songs that crave deformities. The dirge-like "FUP," on which Cox professes his numbness in rather hackneyed terms, ("I’m so fucked up/ That I fall down to my knees/ Where you can’t feel anything") and the spare synth pulsations of "Lost Bodies" feel like orphaned intros, over before they start. "The Meal" and "We’ve Got a Number" feature martial rhythms and rollicking riffs in the style of post-punk acts such as the Birthday Party but it's missing the dynamics, the urgency, the frantic, headlong motion, and the threat of splintering apart. Here it feels more like a grid plotted with leaden thwacks and blackened leads. In these moments, Death Index sounds too steady; undergirded by the metronomic logic of the studio, it precludes the mutations, even mistakes, that live collaboration instilled in its influences. | 2016-02-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Deathwish | February 22, 2016 | 7 | 4bbec76e-7869-4931-8832-af3ffe0ccb62 | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | null |
The Canadian shoegaze band’s singer teams up with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember in an attempt to push past their comfort zone into electronic territory. | The Canadian shoegaze band’s singer teams up with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember in an attempt to push past their comfort zone into electronic territory. | No Joy / Sonic Boom: No Joy / Sonic Boom EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-joy-sonic-boom-no-joy-sonic-boom-ep/ | No Joy / Sonic Boom EP | In an ideal scenario, artistic collaborations work a kind of magic: Two talents add up to more than the sum of their parts, with creativity and curiosity yielding an end product that wouldn’t otherwise exist. That’s what Jasamine White-Gluz of Canadian shoegaze band No Joy had in mind when she began emailing with Sonic Boom, a.k.a. Pete Kember from Spacemen 3, in the fall of 2015. The more her band stayed within the confines of rock, the more White-Gluz wanted change. So No Joy decided to release three EPs that departed from the band’s shoegaze and noise-pop past, starting with 2016’s Drool Sucker and 2017’s Creep. The final installment in this series, No Joy / Sonic Boom, sees White-Gluz venturing into unfamiliar electronic territory with Kember. But while the pairing of their two sounds is unexpected, that initial surprise is about as far as the EP goes. It’s tepid from start to finish, offering little that feels exciting or inspired.
From the brusque opening of “Obsession,” No Joy / Sonic Boom sets itself up as a pulsing yet clumsy listen. The 11-minute opener begins well enough, with bass thumps building a trance beneath paranormal EQs as White-Gluz’s vocals smear across the higher registers. Her voice warps itself in alluring, subtle ways across the EP: It’s manipulated into a keyboard choir effect that can start or stop with the lift of a finger, gets pitched up to capitalize on its honeyed texture, and loops endlessly like a synth in the background. It’s easy to forget she’s contributing, though, due to Kemper’s habit of getting lost in his own experimentation. While soothing and inviting at its best, his electronic ambling ends up drifting off in aimless directions on all four tracks—that is, until he comes barreling back into the frame, like when the end half of “Obsession” finally returns with a sudden, misplaced drum fill. It’s as if neither artist, working remotely from their respective homes of Montreal and Portugal, felt comfortable pushing the other to refine their ideas past the rough draft stage.
The only song that makes effective use of White-Gluz’s and Kember’s complementary skills is “Triangle Probably.” Comically, it’s also the song most akin to the shoegaze sound White-Gluz hoped to ditch with this project. Chopped guitars whirl through echo pedals in a propulsive motion. In the distance, alternate vocal lines fade into focus and synths click like a spoke card on a bicycle wheel. Though it features a similarly abrupt reprise like the one in “Obsession,” this track keeps a tighter grasp on its intentions and proposed payoffs, sounding like a true meeting of minds instead of a not-especially-necessary Sonic Boom remix of No Joy.
Throughout No Joy / Sonic Boom, you can hear White-Gluz finding the borders of her comfort zone and looking for guidance when she makes it to the other side. The trouble seems to be that Kember does little to develop her ideas once she gets there, settling instead for familiar deadpan loops. There’s not nearly enough give and take to make the collaboration work. The result is an EP that feels hesitant to leap into any of the worlds it builds, however appealing they sometimes appear. | 2018-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Joyful Noise | March 31, 2018 | 5.8 | 4bc0c4b6-d6f9-45a9-8003-517de78bcbd4 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
At just over 40 minutes, Four Tet's new Jungle-steeped Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts. | At just over 40 minutes, Four Tet's new Jungle-steeped Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts. | Four Tet: Beautiful Rewind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18649-four-tet-beautiful-rewind/ | Beautiful Rewind | Brows were furrowed and lips pursed when "Kool FM", the advance single from Four Tet's Beautiful Rewind, was released. Gutty and tuff, "Kool FM" appropriated the name of a legendary pirate radio station that existed during the rave and jungle era, abstracting that era's chopter rhythms and throaty MCs. Kieran Hebden has developed a bit of a johnny-come-lately reputation among certain observers, though, his plunges into UK bass music viewed as harmless and well meaning but perhaps a bit awkward. "Kool FM" seemed to be the latest instance of Hebden chasing dance music's tail: over the last 12 or so months, many artists returned to the breakbeat-based club music—popularized in the UK in the early and mid 90s—whose rhythms are sourced from funky, sampled drum breaks rather than from more rigid and electronic drum synthesizers. Even amongst those who sought only to commemorate jungle, rather than recreate or refine it, Hebden might've been late.
But if Hebden has been hopping trends, he's been doing so fruitfully. "Love Cry", from 2010's excellent There Is Love in You, became an actual club hit, as did several of the tracks from last year's Pink, a compilation of extended, dance-friendly singles. Hebden found a way to adhere to dance music's strictures and conventions while still applying his sun-dappled psychedelia, stretching his easy melodic ideas over terse rhythms and rubbery basslines. Pink was "Four Tet does dance music" but, hey! Four Tet's doing dance music!
Likewise, Beautiful Rewind borrows without apology from a trend but sounds undeniably like a Four Tet record. Jungle, with its mighty musical appetite and don't-give-a-fuck sampling culture, might be a nice fit for Four Tet, whose music has always relied heavily on samples. Crucially, it's not jungle's mangled breakbeats that interest Hebden so much as its MCs: sound-system junkies shouting up the DJs, themselves, or just babbling rhythmically. These gruff utterances run counterpoint to Hebden's beatific melodies and cooing female voices. There's plenty of friction: jungle and rave famously threw traditional notions of good musical taste out the window, while Hebden's output, with its patient tunefulness and cordial radiance, is nothing if not tasteful.
Beautiful Rewind echoes the ephemeral aspects of jungle, the infectious rush of the new, the patter of voices through radio static, rather than the functional signifiers—quickening tempos, mangled breakbeats—that defined it. The album serves as a compact, romantic remembrance: prettier, milder, and less funky than its inspiration. It also feels very personal, like these moments are Hebden's own recollections, his own tangential relationship with a subculture. Where albums like There Is Love in You and Rounds felt inviting, loving even, Beautiful Rewind sometimes seems like it's drawing connections that mean more to Hebden than they ever will to us.
Take, for instance, late-album stormers "Buchla" and "Aerial", which masterfully integrate sampled MCs into their herky-jerky rhythms but fail to complement "Unicorn"'s shimmering pools of melody. The stirring, chaotic opener "Gong" recalls Hebden's collaborations with Burial, but its steamy urban roughage is cleansed by "Parallel Jalebi"'s tidy thrum. It's during transitions like these when Rewind comes unstitched, when it feels more like a small bundle of Four Tet productions than an album.
At just over 40 minutes, Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts. Hebden has previously turned a lack of precision into broad, idyllic albums, but Beautiful Rewind feels as though it's circling, cautiously looking for a place to land. There are still plenty of treats, especially when those jungle MCs are able to unmoor Hebden from his default state of bliss-y, pastoral expanse. Beautiful Rewind is staked on the past, but for as much flack as Hebden takes for repeating what other artists have already done, Rewind falters most when Hebden does little more than repeat himself. | 2013-10-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Text | October 17, 2013 | 7.4 | 4bc445de-8db7-4908-aa74-8e6b152b3809 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
With one of her most harrowing and powerful albums to date, Margaret Chardiet zeroes in on the locus where global horrors register on the individual. | With one of her most harrowing and powerful albums to date, Margaret Chardiet zeroes in on the locus where global horrors register on the individual. | Pharmakon: Devour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pharmakon-devour/ | Devour | Throughout her work as Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet stages existential conflicts—between the self and the body that houses it, between the individual and the unknowable other—by setting her own voice in opposition to brambly, industrial electronics. She cries out against nightmares of her own making as if in the grips of pain or panic. Her fourth full-length album, Devour, simulates a skirmish whose boundary lines are less clear. Instead of pitting the self against an external antagonist, she grapples with the horror of the self attacking the self.
Chardiet dedicates Devour to “all who were lost to their own demise, all who have been institutionalized; whether in prison, psychiatric facilities, or drug rehabilitation.” Institutionalized people are often scapegoated for individual problems with systemic causes; crime, self-harm, and addiction get painted as character defects, rather than symptoms of a dysfunctional world. With one of her most harrowing and powerful albums to date, Chardiet zeroes in on the seam between the sick person and the sick ecosystem, the locus where global horrors register on the individual.
Devour is the first Pharmakon album Chardiet has recorded live in studio. The A and B sides of the record each comprise a single, continuous session, which lends momentum and immediacy to the music. Though she doesn’t uproot her longtime palette of abrasive electronics, Chardiet deploys new strategies for her vocals, which wobble and fray against a blaring bass tone on opener “Homeostasis.” She howls against instrumentation that seemingly wants to smother her, singing deeply from her diaphragm as if straining to be heard. If some of her earlier work, 2014’s Bestial Burden especially, induced a sense of claustrophobia, then Devour does the opposite: It radiates in open space, as though Chardiet were screaming for help into empty darkness.
Between lurches of electronic noise, Chardiet squeals and rasps and growls, her voice lacerated by the barbed-wire sieve of effects. These songs center her prowess as an industrial vocalist, someone who can transmute the chronic trauma of survival under capitalism into an appropriately scathing outburst. But somewhere between the hypnotic throb of “Spit It Out” and the military clip of “Self-Regulating System”’s percussion, Chardiet’s chaos paradoxically prompts a deepening sense of calm. It’s as if, by giving voice to the mesh of self-loathing strangling so many of our brains, she can momentarily dislodge it.
One of the most enduring images of autocannibalism is the ouroboros, the snake who eats its own tail. It’s a symbol that creates itself in an attempt to destroy itself: The snake wants to eat its own body, to vanish inside its own digestive tract, but in doing so becomes something more than just a snake. Externalizing the desire to obliterate the self similarly reroutes a destructive impulse into an act of creation. With Devour, Pharmakon furthers industrial music’s decades-long history of seeking truth about the self in noise and negation, of boring holes in the propaganda that assures us everything about the system is working just fine.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | September 14, 2019 | 7.9 | 4bcc8590-34c6-40e5-9362-e3709b3b4b11 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On their debut, Spiritualized seemed to emerge from the ether perfectly realized, creating rock music that was serene, spaced-out, and shamelessly untroubled. | On their debut, Spiritualized seemed to emerge from the ether perfectly realized, creating rock music that was serene, spaced-out, and shamelessly untroubled. | Spiritualized: Lazer Guided Melodies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spiritualized-lazer-guided-melodies/ | Lazer Guided Melodies | Spiritualized’s debut album, released a short time after the band had floated free from Spacemen 3, is a record both in thrall to rock’n’roll tradition and ambivalent about rock’s foundations in heaviness and grit. While rock’n’roll is a corporeal movement, the sound of bodies moving in time, Lazer Guided Melodies—which is being reissued on 180-gram vinyl—feels almost weightless, an astral take on the blues that seems to drift by on cosmic winds. It’s one of the most gentle rock records of its time, with spaced-out guitars and rolling bass lines tenderly nudging Jason Pierce’s vocal melodies along like a weathered stone rolling slowly down a hill.
As Spacemen 3 fractured at the start of 1990s, Pierce asked members Will Carruthers, Jonny Mattock, and Mark Refoy to form Spiritualized, with the second side of Spacemen 3’s final album, Recurring, serving as a Spiritualized record in all but name. And yet the leap in quality— and, indeed, clarity—between the slightly murky promise of Recurring and Lazer Guided Melodies, which was released in 1992, is startling. Pierce has said that Recurring was the sound of a band finding their way; Lazer Guided Melodies seemed to emerge from the ether perfectly realized, the work of a band utterly in control of their fate.
Lazer Guided Melodies’ effects-laden guitars and hushed vocals may have had something in common with shoegaze bands like Slowdive and Ride, who were then emerging onto England’s indie rock scene. But Spiritualized went further back for their inspiration: “Run” is a brilliantly rolling half-cover of a song by American blues guitarist J. J. Cale, while “Shine A Light,” with its chorus of “Lord, shine a light on me” and languid saxophone, draws on the gospel tradition. This song also demonstrates what a sharp songwriter Pierce can be, with two lines of perfect vocal melody gliding languorously about the mix.
In calling back to gospel and the blues, Spiritualized joined a long and storied list of UK bands, from the Rolling Stones to The Animals, who have taken advantage of—some would say exploited—Black American musical traditions. Like the Stones before them, though, Spiritualized succeeded in drawing out their own, very English, take on this music. Using quivering fuzz guitars, bass lines arranged high in the mix for melodic effect, organ drones and a wealth of echo, phase, and other effects, Spiritualized created music that was serene, spaced-out and shamelessly untroubled, the blues blissed out in heroin’s sexless embrace. “Shine A Light” closes with the kind of musical freak out that The Stooges perfected on Fun House, but it sounds entirely without venom, a bad trip glimpsed from the corner of the eye. On “200 Bars,” Kate Radley, who joined Spiritualized on keyboards shortly after they formed, calmly counts out the song’s bars in her listless English accent, like an admin clerk noting lines in an Excel document, while the music slowly pulses behind her. It is the perfect realisation of the band’s rock’n’roll/un-rock’n’roll dichotomy. And yet Lazer Guided Melodies is not entirely retro: the beautiful “Symphony Space” is a drifting ambient number that has more in common with Spiritualized’s contemporaries The Orb and Screamadelica-era Primal Scream than J.J Cale.
While Spiritualized's third album—a noticeably heavier record—bore the mantle of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, it is Lazer Guided Melodies that merits the cosmic laurels, an album of hypnotic power that marked a high point in the British reinvention of American musical tradition.
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. | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 26, 2021 | 9 | 4bcccfc5-df1a-48c6-bcff-1439f0a524a4 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The rising Brooklyn rapper’s new mixtape gets over on sheer maximalism just like its predecessor, with enough deft touches to keep things exciting. | The rising Brooklyn rapper’s new mixtape gets over on sheer maximalism just like its predecessor, with enough deft touches to keep things exciting. | Pop Smoke: Meet the Woo Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pop-smoke-meet-the-woo-vol-2/ | Meet the Woo Vol. 2 | You couldn’t get far in Brooklyn last summer without hearing Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party.” The Canarsie MC’s window-quaking single gave the borough a bonafide hit and signified the arrival of its burgeoning drill scene on the charts. Much of the excitement stemmed from Pop’s alpha-dog charisma, manifested in a voice that sounds like he gargles gravel every morning. His swagger has only grown since then; he’s already proclaimed himself the king of New York on record despite being a total unknown before last year.
The 20-year-old has managed to back it all up thus far; he dropped a thrilling debut in July and its follow-up, Meet the Woo 2, provides more gritty drill music you can clench your jaw to. It all sort of sounds like “Party,” but it gets over on sheer maximalism like its predecessor did, with just enough deft touches to keep things exciting.
A perfect example of this is the opener “Invincible,” a fierce slab of bravado over a teetering violin beat. With his gruff bark, Pop paints himself as a warrior à la 300, except he’s marching through a room full of unfamiliar dudes somewhere deep in Brooklyn. As with most of his work, the song contains a few shaky lines (“I’m feeling horny, and I shoot like Robert Horry” stands out here), but Pop’s lyrics aren’t built for close inspection; they work best hurling out of a big speaker system.
He says as much himself on the following track, a collaboration with Migos frontman Quavo, when he threatens on the chorus, “How about I shake the room?” The song’s heavy beat, supplied by “Party” producer 808Melo, demonstrates the UK beatmaker’s sonic growth; a soft vocal sample and a swerving bass line fill space more subtly than the brazen bass hits of their breakthrough. The energy is more haunting and meditative than the the white-knuckle ride of Vol. 1.
But it’s all centered around aggression, of course. On his verses, Pop usually can be heard asking some poor soul to take things outside or threatening more sinister acts of violence, like on “Christopher Walking,” when he declares that he’s going to “tie that boy up like a cowboy.” His grim boasts are usually delivered without wit, but Pop’s bluntness occasionally leads to slivers of humor, as on “Get Back,” where a judge snaps, “Why you actin’ like a dick?” at him.
Meet the Woo 2 starts to slow on the back half, which is made up of more bare-bone instrumentals, as well as material that’s already been released, including, inexplicably, “Dior,” a single off Vol. 1. Pop’s voice holds more than enough weight to carry a track, but he operates at one breakneck speed, never adding much variance to his flow. Thus his songs typically need something—a melodic layer, a unique bassline—or they start to bleed together. That’s the case with songs like “Mannequin,” which is fabricated around a paper-thin sample and runs out of momentum midway through, and “Dreaming,” a song that’s almost entirely low end with no hint of a melody.
Pop’s detractors on social media often point out how his songs sound too sparse or similar. But if they were to step outside in NYC, chances are they’d encounter a car nearly rattling its rims off with his music. That means the drums and bass will continue to sit high in the mix, his flow will remain militant. For the most part, the recipe still works brilliantly. | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | February 13, 2020 | 7.3 | 4bd96db9-303b-4cb3-b1a4-6dadb44696d4 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
The comedian-turned-musician’s concept album about his adolescence tunnels toward a series of deeper truths about how we end up as the adults we are. | The comedian-turned-musician’s concept album about his adolescence tunnels toward a series of deeper truths about how we end up as the adults we are. | Tim Heidecker: High School | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-heidecker-high-school/ | High School | Over the past decade, in his musical side-career away from comedy, Tim Heidecker has amassed a deep catalog of soft-rock songs about mortality and heartbreak, political dystopia and everyday existentialism. And yet, one of the most poignant tracks on his latest album, High School, is mostly about a Neil Young video—more specifically, Young’s 1993’s Unplugged performance of “Harvest Moon.” The story goes like this: Heidecker is a teenager in Allentown, Pennsylvania, watching MTV on a Saturday night. Transfixed by Young’s performance, he learns the song on guitar and plays it for his parents. They say he sounds great, but then again, that’s what they say about everything he does. He goes out and buys the album and feels disappointed by the more elaborate studio rendition. Eventually, he learns to appreciate that version, too, and includes it on a mix CD for a crush, who breaks up with him not long after.
As far as autobiographical songwriting goes, this is not the most riveting source material. And as Heidecker sings it—one humdrum detail at a time, with little poetic embellishment—he seems to amplify just how ordinary the whole thing is. But there is something profound and true about Heidecker’s journey through the past on High School, a home-recorded concept album about his adolescence. Co-produced with a backing band of Drew Erickson, Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats, and Mac DeMarco, the music glides with the reflective sheen of 1980s singer-songwriter statements like Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love and Randy Newman’s Trouble in Paradise. With a buoyant, lived-in sound and some of Heidecker’s warmest and most empathetic writing, each song feels like a spiral toward some deeper truth about how we end up as the adults we are.
Take, for example, the central character in “Buddy,” a local stoner whose devolution into a cautionary tale happens so subtly that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it takes place. It’s a eulogy delivered like a campfire singalong, as Heidecker’s perspective shifts from a character study to a moment of self-interrogation: “Do you think I let you down? We lost touch the minute I moved out of town,” he sings, sadly. Many of the songs take similar leaps, never offering a sense of resolution or a moral to their stories. Instead, Heidecker focuses on why these open-ended childhood memories tend to stick with us, why we revisit them decades later, still turning them over and retracing our steps.
As with everything Heidecker does, from his spot-on parody of Joe Rogan to his multi-part celebrity courtroom spoof The Trial, there is a lightness that allows him to tackle big issues without ever seeming preachy or self-serious. He favors conversational language and intuitive rhymes paired with breezy, major-keys melodies that mask just how sharp his songwriting has become. Even when he’s recounting specific memories, his characters can seem like archetypes, while his more zoomed-out observations (“I’m thinkin’ every day/Hopin’ I can stay this young”) gain real-life resonance from repetition: You may start singing along before you recognize the darker message below the surface.
After collaborating with Weyes Blood on 2020’s ambitious Fear of Death, Heidecker tightens his scope with a smaller group of collaborators: Jonathan Rado adds some “Night Moves”-style piano drama to “Stupid Kid,” and Kurt Vile offers his distinctive electric guitar and speak-sing throughout “Sirens of Titan,” a groovy highlight that could have been a novelty hit in the late ’80s. Otherwise, the record is performed by a core group of musicians, carrying lo-fi textural threads from song to song. The cohesive approach helps unite the material, making less narrative-based tracks like “Future Is Uncertain” sound like moody dream sequences between the larger breakthroughs, circling Heidecker’s adult anxieties before diving into the formative experiences that led him there.
Which brings us back to “Harvest Moon” and Heidecker’s initial fascination in “Stupid Kid.” Dreaming of his own future as a musician, he wasn’t drawn to the open-hearted romance of the lyrics, the crisp, early-autumn harmonies from Linda Ronstadt, or the realization that a song this good could arrive during the fourth decade of an artist’s career. Instead, Heidecker keeps returning to the fact that Young was able to express himself with such a basic set-up—“Didn’t have a band,” he notices, “Just some dude sweepin’ a broom”—and how it made him realize a regular guy like him might stand a chance. Heidecker’s song, of course, ends with a break-up—a reminder that not everybody will always see that potential in him. But that’s not the point: High School glows with the hard-earned belief that someone, somewhere could hear his story and reach the same epiphany about their own future. | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Spacebomb | June 27, 2022 | 7.5 | 4be5ab30-bacb-4161-8a84-49ece74ba964 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Irish musician’s spacious, shapeshifting synth pop submerges acoustic strums and babbling streams into a tender exploration of life’s inherent chaos. | The Irish musician’s spacious, shapeshifting synth pop submerges acoustic strums and babbling streams into a tender exploration of life’s inherent chaos. | Henry Earnest: Dream River | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/henry-earnest-dream-river/ | Dream River | An amalgamation of uncontrollable structures—weather, time, traffic, vibes—shapes our path in life. Often we may feel like agentless vessels floating down the waterway of universal causality. Dream River, a poly-genre journey into serenity and chaos by shapeshifting synth-pop musician Henry Earnest, explores the ways in which we are pulled and pushed by life’s current. Earnest, a Dubliner and a Pisces, recorded much of the album in 2020, while living in a house with artist friends in Lisbon. The production sounds like a collective effort, weaving together acoustic banjo and bodhrán (Irish drum) with spacey sound design, trap snares, and bright synthesizers. It’s a departure from the lo-fi drum loops and fuzzy samples of Earnest’s 2018 debut, When You Get Caught Between the Moon & Dublin City; with Dream River, Earnest attempts to find his own lane in a crowded field of music fusing indie rock and electronic.
Guided by the sounds of streams babbling beneath a narrator’s spoken-word recitations, the album shifts from ethereal ambient to maximalist hyperpop to folk rock. Opener “Water” establishes an experimental electronic motif as the album’s narrator asks, “Who knows where the water will take you?” The hazy ballad “‘Free’” folds banjo strums and a saxophone solo into gossamer synths. Dream River shines in this mellow, sinuous mode, but misfires when Earnest heads down a poppier path: “Wings” begins with what sounds like a gun being cocked and drops into a cloud-rap beat, a dissatisfying diversion from the previous tracks’ promise.
Singing with pitch-shifted vocals, Earnest’s voice sounds like an innocent coo embodied with a sense of nervous hope. At its best, the vocal manipulation invites comparisons to Frank Ocean or Alex G. “‘Free’” closes with a moment that feels almost explicitly Blonde-like: lo-fi, Auto-Tuned lines warbled over tremolo guitar. Yet at times Earnest’s transposed twangs have a hard time shining through weak lyrics. The hook on “Wings” starts with the line, “Words so cold make a snowman brrr,” which would be cringey even for a braggadocious SoundCloud rapper. When Earnest’s lyrics follow the established theme of surrendering to life’s chaos, his anxious delivery works perfectly. On “Hymn,” when the narrator tenderly asks you to give in to the direction of the river, Earnest sings a response: “That’s the way that everyday goes/Everyday I have no control.”
While the lyrics sometimes miss, the care and detail in Earnest’s production make the album shine. The best parts of the record are the most understated: Water whispering through tense strings on “Hymn,” a saxophone howling over drones on “‘Free,’” distant synths whirring under gentle poems on “Stand.” Even the out-of-place “Wings” finds a moment of respite as the sound of the river re-emerges over a bass synth before the song reaches its saw-toothed climax. The restraint of the instrumental breaks makes Earnest’s approaches toward maximalism hit harder.
“Stand” is a perfect example of Dream River’s ability to weave together quiet ambient moments and louder, faster-paced pop. Singing a simple but energizing melody, Earnest acknowledges his limits and his desire to push past them: “I gotta speak with my small mouth and my weak lungs.” The beat builds into a relentless chase, then greets us with dreamy filtered synths and the familiar voice of the narrator. From this underwater bliss, the song resurfaces and jumps back into a hard-hitting beat. In standout moments like these, Earnest reveals the guiding ethos of his work—carving a free-flowing path from his wide-ranging influences. | 2022-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | 3K Europa | March 15, 2022 | 7.1 | 4be76045-bf5e-4cc0-988c-a453f00d1f52 | Arjun Ram Srivatsa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arjun-ram srivatsa / | |
In one of his final recorded appearances, the late dub visionary trades the mixing desk for the mic on an album fusing parallel strains of heavy, psychedelic music. | In one of his final recorded appearances, the late dub visionary trades the mixing desk for the mic on an album fusing parallel strains of heavy, psychedelic music. | New Age Doom / Lee “Scratch” Perry: Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/new-age-doom-lee-scratch-perry-lee-scratch-perrys-guide-to-the-universe/ | Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe | You’d be forgiven for not yet being aware of New Age Doom: The pet project of a bunch of Vancouver doom-metal hippies and mainstays of the city’s indie scene (Limblifter fans of the world, unite!) generated some buzz with last year’s Himalayan Dream Techno, but they only really turned heads recently, upon revealing that they’d somehow convinced Lee “Scratch” Perry to record a prog-jazz-dub album with them; the Jamaican icon died just weeks after the announcement. The band thankfully takes full advantage of this serendipitous last act of generosity on Scratch’s part, pulling on a far broader palette of local and prestige talent than Himalayan Dream Techno did, notably including key players from David Bowie’s Blackstar band, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and drummer/synth player Tim Lefebvre, whose presence lends a haunted quality to the performances. Together, on Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe, New Age Doom use the dub founder’s commanding presence as a lightning rod for channeling a syncretic new type of heavy music, one that draws equally on the jagged, glacial chords of distorted guitars, the viscous, amniotic fluidity of dub, and the churning orbital dynamics of Afrofuturist jazz.
Even compared to Perry’s most far-out dub productions, Guide to the Universe instantly stands apart. The familiar one-two rhythm of reggae has been almost entirely jettisoned, replaced by a lumbering rhythmic skeleton recognizable from sky-scraping post-rock; Mono drummer Dahm Majuri Cipolla contributes both drums and gong. The group instead conjures the deep, sensual motion of Perry’s dubwork around doom metal’s throbbing low-end riffs, while the whole structure is shot through with dissonant horn solos reminiscent of classic jazz fusion and contemporary post-Dilla movements. At its best, the album constitutes a ’70s synthesis 50 years in the making—Sabbath meets electric Miles meets, well, Perry himself, who is able here to simultaneously revisit his most fertile period while breaking heretofore unexplored musical ground.
On Guide to the Universe, the famed Upsetter assumes the role of Gandalf at the court of Rohan, casting off his beige robes and emerging to reveal the cosmic depth of his soul and life purpose. Perry serves as intermittent agitator and conduit for the spirit, his characteristically impenetrable argot pared down to its barest essentials: “Be patient, be perfect, and be pure.” “If you don’t ask, you won’t get it, so ask for it.” “Brush your teeth with a toothbrush.” Any My Bloody Valentine fan will be familiar with music that reaches that kind of visceral place with the fewest chords possible, but Perry applies this logic to his poetic impulses as well.
“Fulfillment, armageddon,” Perry intones thrice on “Holy Dub,” as drum fills loop intermittently with gyroscopic Leslie speaker effects. Meanwhile, acoustic bass is layered with electric, and a trumpet solo meanders through scales in the corner of one audio channel just as a synthesized pattern does the same in the other. By matching Perry’s studio machinations with their own real-time instrumental echoes, the band members play on Perry’s oft-quoted description of the Black Ark: “The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality.” Perry always understood the value of treating machines like human beings, but on Guide to the Universe, he pairs those cybernetic aspirations with a simpler observation about society: “Life is an experiment,” he says. “The more you experiment, you make the world better for each other.” Experimentalists like Perry break down barriers over the course of their lives, creating new technological and aesthetic space; for New Age Doom to have fashioned their own style of shape-shifting experimental music to serve as a vessel for that philosophy makes for a fitting tribute to the late dub visionary.
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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. | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | We Are Busy Bodies | November 11, 2021 | 7.8 | 4be8f409-6ee9-47e7-be6d-55e6d433a3be | Austin Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/austin-brown/ | |
An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap. This isn't it. | An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap. This isn't it. | 8Ball / MJG: We Are the South: Greatest Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11964-we-are-the-south-greatest-hits/ | We Are the South: Greatest Hits | An honest-to-God best-of from the Tennessee rap duo 8Ball & MJG would work something like a pocket history of Southern rap. On 1993's Comin Out Hard, their national debut, they kicked exaggerated crime-life tall-tales for six or seven minutes at a time over homemade car-trunk beats, never bothering much with hooks or structure. But the highlights from their last two albums, for Diddy's Bad Boy label, were exemplary streamlined head-knock club-rap. (Those last two albums, in particular, are the reason best-of albums were invented: a few undeniable snarls surrounded by seas of halfhearted radio-targeted filler.) Their outlaw-duo chemistry was there from the beginning, but over the years since Comin Out Hard, the two cultivated a fascinatingly schizo approach, swinging haphazardly from visceral bone-chilling pimp-talk to warm, openhearted up-from-nothing inspirational tales. And iPods being what they are, it's not hard to construct that narrative for yourself, to watch these guys develop over the years. But that's not what We Are the South does.
Ball & G recorded too much material for too many record labels for a real best-of to ever happen, and We Are the South is more quickie cash-in than anything else. The bulk of the album comes from On Top of the World and In Our Lifetime, Vol. 1, two albums that the duo recorded for Tony Draper's Suave House label in the mid-1990s. The good news: Those albums are both classics, arguably the two high-water marks of these guys' aesthetic. Over woozily patient soul beats, the two spent these albums shading and developing their personas, adding depth and resonance by opening up and getting emotional without ever sacrificing the ripping impact of their hardest stuff. If you were going to assemble an 8Ball & MJG best-of from two albums, these would probably be the ones. On "Pimp in My Own Rhyme", 8Ball spits urgent mushmouthed threats over unforgivingly trebly G-funk synths. On "What Can I Do", an uncommonly candid MJG gives a harsh clarity to his memory of getting arrested for dealing drugs in front of his whole family. On "Throw Your Hands Up", the two play granite-heavy foils to the stuttery speed-rapping of guests Outkast.
But this stuff is great enough that I can't conjure any real reason not to hunt down the complete albums instead of wasting time with a compilation that rips the songs out of their contexts and haphazardly shuffles them up. We Are the South comes padded with a few relative rarities from the two's not-as-good solo albums and from random mid-90s Suave House compilations. Of those, the only one that really demands to be heard is the sinuous banger "Lay It Down", with its surprisingly on-fire guest-appearances from Ice Cube and Diddy, of all people. The other tracks are mostly solid, but it's not like 8Ball & MJG were ever the type of group to save their best material for odds-and-ends comps.
The only song here I'd actually call bad is the mediocre plastic-funk 8Ball solo track "Starships and Rockets". Other than that, it's a perfectly decent listen, especially if you're driving around on a lazy summer afternoon. But the essential stuff is easy to come by in more flattering contexts, and the inessential stuff is completely inessential. You're better off making your own best-of at home. | 2008-07-10T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-07-10T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Koch | July 10, 2008 | 5.4 | 4bf8f63b-786f-4931-b24f-62fa6a540cb8 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Snoop Dogg's dalliance with reggae was documented in the film Reincarnated and this is the companion album. Snoop's leaden vocalizing and dreadful fake patois are occasionally saved by the strong production from Major Lazer, Vybz Kartel collaborator Dre Skull, and producer/songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid. | Snoop Dogg's dalliance with reggae was documented in the film Reincarnated and this is the companion album. Snoop's leaden vocalizing and dreadful fake patois are occasionally saved by the strong production from Major Lazer, Vybz Kartel collaborator Dre Skull, and producer/songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid. | Snoop Lion: Reincarnated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17920-snoop-lion-reincarnated/ | Reincarnated | Snoop Dogg has spent the last decade of his career building a persona based on intrinsic and intentional humor. So when he announced his metamorphosis into the reggae singer Snoop Lion last year while casually referred to himself as the reincarnation of Bob Marley, it was hard not to have a chuckle. The transformation seemed likely to blow over the same way Snoop’s stints as talk show host, sketch comedy actor and porn director did-- another half-remembered bit of listless bond diversification from a rap luminary grown bored of rapping. But Snoop really seemed invested in this Lion thing: his plan to hang out in Jamaica to record a reggae album quickly became a full-fledged Rastafarian spirit journey with guidance from Marley bandmate and roots reggae legend Bunny Wailer and the Rastafari Millennium Council. All of which was ultimately documented in the film Reincarnated and consummated in the album of the same name. Upon release, though, the film immediately infuriated Bunny, who issued a withering polemic castigating Snoop for what he felt was a cavalier and opportunistic misappropriation of Rastafarian culture.
Many of the complaints about the film could be made against the album: Reincarnated is constantly on the hunt for a sense of communion with a world just out of its reach. Snoop’s hardly a natural as a reggae singer, and his performances here are riddled with leaden vocalizing, fortune cookie-grade lyrical mundanities (“Take care of Mother Earth cause-ah she be the planet”) and dreadful fake patois. He wisely buttresses himself with a coalition of singers and actual reggae artists tasked with lending this project the hooks and credibility that he can’t muster. The result is something akin to his short-lived career hosting and directing adult film: you sense Snoop milling around in the background while professionals do the heavy lifting. Singer-songwriter Angela Hunte’s extensive co-writing and backing vocals provide the understated beating heart of the record, and guests like Mavado and Popcaan shine for knowing their way around a reggae fusion record. But the guests can’t always carry the weight: dancehall stalwart Mr. Vegas can’t save “Fruit Juice” from its clunky concept, and the Akon cover “Tired of Running” aims for profundity but lands on karaoke, even with vocals from the man himself to guide the way.
Reincarnated’s strong suit is its production, which was handled in large part by Diplo’s Major Lazer braintrust with help from Vybz Kartel collaborator Dre Skull and producer/songwriter Ariel Rechtshaid. The album’s sonic architects ease off their trademark futuristic dance floor bedlam here, opting instead for what sounds like a lovingly cultivated genre-bending mixtape. Reincarnated flits from the rock-reggae fusion of “Rebel Way” to the old school dancehall of “Here Comes the King” to the lumbering boom bap of “Lighters Up” early on. And then it makes stops at roots reggae for “So Long” and spectral dub on “No Guns Allowed”, which cleverly lays a mellotron line reminiscent of Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood” over a loop of Beirut’s “Nantes”. Things get hairy with “Get Away”, which rehashes elements of “Pon de Floor” in spots, and “The Good Good”, a drab acoustic jingle better suited to pad out the back end of a Matisyahu album, but missteps on the production front are mercifully scant.
Snoop Lion’s sage choice of collaborators saves Reincarnated from his limited vision of reggae songwriting and Rasta culture, and the album gets its biggest payoff from its most unlikely contributor. Album closer “Ashtrays & Heartbreaks” parlays Snoop’s partying in memory of lost loved ones into a devastating bridge from Miley Cyrus about pulling it together when your buzz wears off and a chorus both wracked with grief and brimming with determination. “Ashtrays & Heartbreaks” flips Snoop’s pat Hallmark musings and crutch-like over-reliance on more nimble singers into assets to deliver the album’s one true stunner. Reincarnated is spotted with little moments like these, where you begin to see how a batshit late career gear shift might make just a dash of sense executed correctly. Reincarnated doesn't make a case for Snoop as a singer of any stripe. He should honestly stick to rap. And it doesn’t offer much evidence that this Rastafarian conversion isn’t the marketing ploy Bunny Wailer is convinced it is. Too much of it is an ill-advised cultural safari that’s too weird to fly but too monied to fail. But where it succeeds, Reincarnated forces you to forget the principal ridiculousness of the enterprise, and that is no small feat. | 2013-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | RCA / Vice / Mad Decent / Berhane Sound System | April 24, 2013 | 5 | 4bf93c50-917d-4a87-93b9-ecb30ead30f9 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
oddCouple, a Chicago producer who has worked with Jamila Woods, Joey Purp, Saba, Kweku Collins, and others, gathers his most talented friends for a warm, relaxed affair full of pleasantly hazed beats. | oddCouple, a Chicago producer who has worked with Jamila Woods, Joey Purp, Saba, Kweku Collins, and others, gathers his most talented friends for a warm, relaxed affair full of pleasantly hazed beats. | oddCouple: Liberation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22574-liberation/ | Liberation | Over the last few years Chicago has been one of hip-hop’s most conspicuous artistic incubators. This year alone, the hip-hop and R&B artists Jamila Woods, Joey Purp, Saba, and Kweku Collins have enjoyed breakout attention as indie auteurs with respective solo projects. All of them have worked with Chance the Rapper and others in the same scene, and two are signed to the same label, Closed Sessions. Now, that label’s house producer, oddCouple, is getting his turn with a new record called Liberation, which gathers up a bunch of this familiar Chicago talent for a showcase compilation.
Born in Milwaukee but long based in Chicago, Zach Henderson adopted oddCouple as a solo act several years ago after initially sharing the name as half a duo. Henderson played bass and cello earlier in his life, and he now folds live instruments into his beats, which are warm and muffled and frequently meander towards breakdowns instead of looping back on themselves.
Liberation follows 2015’s Chatterbox, which oscillated between a soulful instrumental beat tape and a rappers' roll call. This new one is more fleshed-out and timely, and finds oddCouple doubling down on the recent success of his counterparts and elevating his own craft at once. There isn’t an outright misstep, but since many of the featured artists on Liberation have recently released their own singular statements, a few performances feel second-rate or less than vital. Still, nothing here screens like a called-in favor, and Henderson is a smart matchmaker.
Joey Purp stands out on “Visions,” a twinkling chipmunk soul loop that gets the producer’s characteristic build-it-up-to-break-it-down treatment. Purp is a casual, confident rapper with the rare knack to boil things down to palatability while avoiding cliche. “It’s the places we live in that they refuse to go/So when we speak about struggles they can refuse to know,” he raps. The woozy and feverish “Love Above” is set compellingly against a chorus that is upbeat and whimsical. The song switches up several times, back and forth between Kweku Collins and Jamila Woods, but its Woods’ wonky chorus that sticks.
Several songs on Liberation feature strings, but none feel as big as those near the end of the album. On “Hereditary” oddCouple rolls out the red carpet for GLC, a veteran Chicago rapper who quietly helped pave the way for the city’s current relentless indie bent. (“Why you ain’t signed?/Wasn’t my time,” he rapped triumphantly on Kanye West’s first album.) The emcee hasn’t lost a step or the slur in his voice, never a flashy rapper but always a commanding presence. The Cleveland artist and Closed Session signee Kipp Stone gets a deserved look here too, making the best of a thoughtful hook with his raspy baritone, shouting “Just listen at me" and "Hands up, don’t shoot!” before the elder statesman launches into a gorgeous pair of verses.
Musically, the most interesting moments on the album come at the end of songs, when Henderson redirects and then turns away from the vocalist he’s holding up, usually stripping back elements from the beat. He has a nimble way with transitions within a song, and is never abrupt about switching gears into sparse, live-played trail-offs; these moments feel like carefully placed and immediately recognizable fingerprints. Some of that effect is missing on the lone instrumental, a sleepy track that swells towards the dance floor but never commits fully. Still, a solitary send-off is a smart maneuver on a wider scale as well, and Henderson has done more than enough to stamp out his identity as a producer throughout. | 2016-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Closed Sessions | November 5, 2016 | 7.2 | 4bfaec87-749d-4d36-b820-326d2f003764 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Canadian artist Lydia Ainsworth is a studied classicist with distinctly modern curiosities. Her debut album, Right from Real, doesn't attempt to resolve those differences in ideologies, but rather culls vitality from the meditative space between their opposing forces. | Canadian artist Lydia Ainsworth is a studied classicist with distinctly modern curiosities. Her debut album, Right from Real, doesn't attempt to resolve those differences in ideologies, but rather culls vitality from the meditative space between their opposing forces. | Lydia Ainsworth: Right from Real | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19846-lydia-ainsworth-right-from-real/ | Right from Real | Lydia Ainsworth flourishes amidst contradiction. A Canadian artist raised in a "household soundtracked by Björk, The Beatles, Nirvana, and Arvo Pärt," she taught herself the cello from the age of 10, while insisting that she's terrible at the instrument. Ainsworth nonetheless went on to study film scoring at McGill University and NYU, and landed her first feature-length credit in 2011 for Matthew Lessner's painfully self-aware escapist satire, The Woods, which claimed to "build upon the...contradictions of young modern day Americans." Yet it was during these cinematic pursuits that she found a love for pop composition and vocals, and quietly began to write songs from the perspective of her diverse and disparate musical backgrounds. As such, Ainsworth is now a studied classicist with distinctly modern curiosities; her debut album, Right from Real, doesn't attempt to resolve its differences, but rather culls vitality from the meditative space between its opposing forces.
Because of their ties to Montreal's Arbutus Records, comparing Lydia Ainsworth with label mate Grimes may come quick and easy, but the two have little in common outside of a taste for electronics. Right from Real is orchestral pop in the vein of Kate Bush and Bat for Lashes, albeit from an artist who would cite a love for Meredith Monk and Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem in the same breath. Ainsworth isn't as experimental with regards to her songwriting approach, though, nor is she so spiritually cathartic. Much like the Knife's Silent Shout, Right from Real exists in a dusky, cobalt-hued twilight, after the real world has drawn its curtains closed and before the mystical realm starts to come alive. The music illustrates those enchanted hours in detail with soft-sweeping strings, modest electronic tinkering, pointed spates of percussion, and Ainsworth's confident, versatile self-harmonizing.
The eight-song album was released in two parts, and though each standalone EP is strong enough on its own merits, Right from Real only gains more impact as a full package. Early singles "White Shadows" and "Malachite" sketch out the basics of Ainsworth's musical etymology—the first of which exhibits her knack for spectral moods and string arrangements, while the latter song is darkly affecting synth-pop with an eye on the Visions playbook. (Even the gloving and waacking dance moves in "Malachite"'s bizarre video invoke the Grimes aesthetic more than something Lydia could call her own.) But the record's bottom section is where Ainsworth speaks to her true potential in a unique yet vaguely recognizable voice.
"Moonstone" opens the second half with an incandescent waltz, a more magnetic and creative entry point than the light, orchestral patter of early album track "Candle"; in a way, it offers a portal into the deepest levels of Right from Real. The slow-swaying balladry in "Hologram" seems directed at the idea of desire, which Ainsworth ponders through cooed stanzas and stately piano phrases. "PSI" synthesizes Right from Real's overarching thematic and musical elements into a gush of ardent chamber pop. For the most part, the song feels down-to-earth, and yet is unafraid to soar on the wings of powerful emotions without name or purpose, as Ainsworth sends each updraft through impressionist lyrics that zoom in on the divide which separates dreams from reality.
That said, it's still difficult to discern Ainsworth's concrete artistic identity. She's a formally trained singer, musician, and composer with an interest in Baroque art, who also refers to contemporary dance choreographers as "genius"; she's an artist who performs her music flanked by a violinist and a cellist, but has no problem adding a live snake into her onstage arrangement; her songs rely as much on the delicate '80s pop of Peter Gabriel's So as they do 19th century choral music and Bulgarian folk singing. Throughout Right from Real, Ainsworth refuses to ever be only one thing, so by the end of her debut, it's clear she's an artist capable of most anything. | 2014-09-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Arbutus | September 25, 2014 | 7.9 | 4bfb2056-d4cb-4682-82a2-4fdcfc22d9f4 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
These recently unearthed sessions find Betty Davis working with members of Jimi Hendrix's band, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and others, honing the sound she'd bring to her incendiary solo albums. | These recently unearthed sessions find Betty Davis working with members of Jimi Hendrix's band, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and others, honing the sound she'd bring to her incendiary solo albums. | Betty Davis: The Columbia Years 1968-69 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22111-the-columbia-years-1968-69/ | The Columbia Years 1968-69 | In February 1968, Durham, North Carolina’s Betty Mabry released a 7”—“Live, Love, Learn” b/w “It’s My Life”—that received limited distribution and even more limited airplay despite a pop-friendly arrangement by Hugh Masekela. Five years later, she re-emerged on record as Betty Davis and released a string of LPs more renowned for their outrageousness and rawness than their commercial success, a swing apparently too far in the other direction for the general public. Tina Turner and Alice Cooper were both big in ’73, but imagine the former howling and sneering like the latter and it’s easy to understand both why Davis startled both sides of the funk/rock line she stood astride, and why later enthusiasts of underdog artists took to her like a great lost icon.
Betty’s relationship with and eventual marriage to Miles is renowned for the effect she had on him: At 22, she got the pop-detached Miles into the giants of psychedelic rock, including Jimi Hendrix, that would revitalize his inspiration and lead to his revolutionary electric period. Betty wasn’t just a scenester or a hanger-on; she was a tuned-in tastemaker with deep charisma and the kind of attitude that could’ve made her a superstar in a less-anxious world, and she was both quick to learn and driven to direct. It’s one thing that Betty got Miles into Hendrix, but another thing entirely that she got a couple of Hendrix’s fellow band members to record with her—and had them join a group that included some of the key players on Bitches Brew, the album whose name was suggested by Betty herself. Still, Betty Davis’ story isn't quite as cut-and-dry between her Mabry years and her emergence as the woman touted as too wild for Miles—especially when you explore the actual recorded results of her and Miles’ mutual influence, as the newly unearthed sessions on The Columbia Years 1968-1969 prove.
The inspiration might have radiated both ways; John Ballon’s liner notes point out as much, with Betty vividly recalling Miles as a catalyst and a mentor who’d inspire her later solo run. But her full potential wasn't realized until years after these recordings, which primarily work as a sometimes exciting, sometimes half-sketched prelude to the more iconoclastic things that’d follow in the ’70s. For a set of recordings that feature the Billy Cox/Mitch Mitchell rhythm section of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's final incarnation and some of the most revolutionary players of Miles’ electric period—Harvey Brooks, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Larry Young, and Wayne Shorter—just about everyone here, Betty Davis included, sounds like they’re just getting warmed up. This hybridized Hendrix/Miles vision of the band hadn't rehearsed prior to the recording session, and it shows: You can actually hear them start to click mid-song as early-take vamping starts to tighten up.
Over the course of two sessions in May 1969, less than a week apart, the band was directed by Miles and co-signed by Betty to charge through Sly-esque funk-rock (the dizzy carousel rides of “Hangin’ Out” and “I’m Ready, Willing & Able”), a Southern-soul Ike & Tina Revue rave-up (“Down Home Girl”), and covers of Cream (“Politician,” retitled as “Politician Man”) and Creedence (“Born on the Bayou”). They’re game enough, of course, and with further time they all could’ve cut a record so undeniable that Miles’ attempts to shop the record around could’ve overcome Columbia's stated reluctance to push R&B albums. (At the very least, a little seasoning could've made them strong crossover-potential labelmates of the Chambers Brothers.) But “I’m Ready, Willing & Able”—or the ninth take of it included here—is the closest we get to evidence that it could really measure up to everybody's reputations, with Betty’s subdued-but-sharp vocals and the tight, nervy guitar/organ interplay driving things home. (The specific musicians aren’t credited from track to track, but it’s not hard to pick up the distinctly heated tones of Young’s B-3 and McLaughlin’s sharp-edged riffing.)
The other tracks’ more freewheeling feel can provide a certain kick. The sweetly sung “Politician Man” is just loose enough to feel scuzzy without sounding sloppy. And the fourth-take “Down Home Girl” captures the point where the quality of the band’s jazz-guys-do-Southern-soul routine started approaching the other-way-around version that Booker T. & the M.G.’s would do two years later on Melting Pot. But you can still feel the tension of the musicians trying to make sure everything falls into place, whether it does or not, and even the Teo Macero production credit can’t hide that these songs feel like they could’ve used just a little more polish.
Just not, you know, *too much *polish—the three tracks she cut with Hugh Masekela in 1968 attest to that. Betty’s interviewed in the liner notes here, and she lets slip a funny-if-awkward anecdote about leaving Hugh for Miles in both a musical and relationship sense. (As she recalls Hugh lamenting during a chance encounter at an airport: “How could you marry my idol, Betty?”) It feels like, especially through retrospective looks back from both parties, that the musical side of the relationship was rewarding but just a bit ‘off,’ with Masekela’s impending pop breakthrough via “Grazing in the Grass” foreshadowed in these tracks more than the fusion-edged township soul-jazz hybrids of his later ’60s and early ’70s were. Davis didn’t entirely fit, either: she sounds fiercely independent and iconoclastic belting out “It’s My Life” and fiercely seething on “My Soul Is Tired,” but the fact that the saccharine, string-drenched, light-headed ballad “Live, Love, Learn” was what Columbia chose for the A-side of her only single for the label points square at why Betty needed a clean break and a new start in the first place.
But above all else, whether it's during the sessions with Masekela or with Miles, it’s illuminating to hear Betty Davis’ voice when she's still in the process of figuring out how to let it off the chain. She’s not the ‘nasty gal’ yet, with “Politician Man” as close as she gets to the provocateur cool she’d cultivate starting with her solo debut. That particular impression lingered, at least; an ad-libbed purr of ‘get in the back seat’ was enough to inspire Miles to title a *The Man With the Horn *cut “Back Seat Betty” more than ten years later. But it’s the studio banter included at the end of that track that hints at the deeper stuff: Miles comes in with gravelly authority to state “That’s good, ah, you can overdub that,” only for Betty to exclaim “*Overdub *that?” with all the disbelief of someone who knew exactly what she wanted. A false-start take of “I’m Ready, Willing & Able” is thrown in later, not just to pad the release to just barely over the 30-minute mark, but to show Betty in command of her vision, getting the feel for arranging and rearranging a track to work for her. These ’69 sessions were a solid start, but the real thing would come sooner—and wilder—than even anyone who’d heard this session was prepared for. | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Light in the Attic | July 15, 2016 | 6.8 | 4bfb5d29-0c76-46ed-92a9-6939a94379cf | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Ascendant outré-dance imprint Tri Angle pays tribute to jailed starlet Lindsay Lohan with a mixtape covering her pop songs (remember those?). | Ascendant outré-dance imprint Tri Angle pays tribute to jailed starlet Lindsay Lohan with a mixtape covering her pop songs (remember those?). | Various Artists: Let Me Shine for You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14506-let-me-shine-for-you/ | Let Me Shine for You | Sometime between Mean Girls and the point when her life began to spiral so publicly out of control, Lindsay Lohan recorded a few pop records. They weren't good, necessarily-- the sort of spit-shined radio rock and dance-pop expected from an actress-cum-singer-- but cute enough in their own way. The albums sold well, but at this point she was still a valuable Hollywood commodity and people still bought records. Not long after, as we all know, shit started to go bad for Lohan. Substance abuse, an exploitative family, freaking Herbie: Fully Loaded-- they all took their toll on her, and now homegirl's in jail.
This all-too-common Hollywood tale is the subject matter for Let Me Shine for You, a strange little mixtape from the ascendant outré-dance imprint Tri Angle. The basic idea is that Tri Angle artists and friends of the label, who share a dark and twisted take on pop music, deconstruct Lohan's tracks and build new, eerie songs out of their pieces. Sounds like a potential disaster, but it actually works. These producers-- like the sample-minded oOoOO and beat-smearing Stalker-- thrive in a cut-and-paste style, and thematically the notion of a fallen starlet, tragic yet trashy, pretty much fits their aesthetic perfectly.
For the most part, these tracks sound nothing like Lohan's. Sometimes an artist will hang her vocals in the background as a kind of ghostly presence, but usually the originals are mutilated beyond recognition. Screwed, chopped, sped up or slowed to a crawl, and often fleshed out with new instrumentation. Warp's Babe Rainbow turns "Stuck", a pretty basic dance-pop number, into lurching trip-hop; newcomer Autre Ne Veut runs with the club feel of "Bossy" but makes it sound like something fit for a bondage party. The tracks all share a threatening and somber vibe, but there's a lot of stylistic diversity: Laurel Halo's contribution skews dubstep, while Oneohtrix Point Never plays with noise and drone.
This variety is one of the nice things about the album and part of what makes Tri Angle such a promising label. These are all ostensibly "witch-house" tracks, but that they each sound so different makes a strong case against the idea of the label as a one-trick pony. But as an individual release, Let Me Shine for You is simply a really cool experiment in how leftfield musicians interpret relatively bland radio music. That it's Lindsay Lohan's music just provides another level of intrigue. The revamps are so foreboding and so much about decay that they do on some level feel like a suitable soundtrack for her decline. You just wouldn't expect celebrity downfall to sound so good. | 2010-08-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-08-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Tri Angle | August 2, 2010 | 7.6 | 4c05142e-de6d-4966-a73d-7118698fbf4e | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The Chicago rapper and singer makes a name for herself with an airy, flexible voice that flows effortlessly between the sensuous and the sorrowful. | The Chicago rapper and singer makes a name for herself with an airy, flexible voice that flows effortlessly between the sensuous and the sorrowful. | Jean Deaux: Empathy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jean-deaux-empathy-ep/ | Empathy EP | Almost a decade ago, Jean Deaux met Saba and his brother Joseph Chilliams at a youth open-mic event. Since then, the rapper/singer born Zoi Harris has become one of the most versatile features in and beyond Chicago hip-hop. Early in her career, she landed collaborations with UK psych-pop band Glass Animals and London electro-soul singer Sampha. And though she’s regularly self-released projects on SoundCloud, Deaux is perhaps best known by association with her impressive list of collaborators: Saba, Mykki Blanco, Kehlani. With last October’s Krash EP, she began working to make a name for herself—building an identity around her airy, flexible voice and affinity for weightless house-hop beats. On her new EP, Empathy, she raps with restraint, revealing a glimpse into a wide inner landscape.
Throughout Empathy, Deaux’s soft vocals emulate sweet-toned greats like Janet Jackson and Brandy. On the Kehlani-featuring standout “Anytime,” her voice smolders as she outlines her plans for a certain someone: “Call me anytime you wanna get it/I could have it crackin’ for you,” she sings, before jumping into a high-pitched falsetto that aligns her with funk-inspired vocalists like Childish Gambino or Smino. Though her voice rarely rises above a whisper, she flows effortlessly between the sensuous and the sorrowful. On the EP’s final track, “Speakerphone (Trust Issues),” she raps vaguely about someone who’s left, her scattered language suggesting an emotional stand-off. “I know you planning to tell a lie/I wear my power, you see it on,” she raps, her tenderness now evoking dejection and betrayal.
She shares the talent for emotional pivots with fellow Chicago rapper Tink, who writes about relationships with gripping melodrama. But Deaux’s spoken-word poetry background shines through with songs that decline to follow a concrete storyline. “Henny straight, wanna taste mine?/Lil’ baby gon call me up, he wanna FaceTime/I tippy toe’d out the party, mami gon’ make time,” she raps on “Break Time,” flashing a staccato string of images rather than methodically setting a scene. This impressionistic songwriting can feel slippery; it’s hard to know exactly what she’s rapping about or why she feels a certain way. At the same time, the open-endedness creates intrigue. “Life Lines” conjures a scene so arresting it doesn’t need a backstory: “I can’t read your damn mind/But when I hold your hand/I can see your... life lines,” she sings, dragging out the notes.
“Life Lines” ends with a recording of Deaux discussing the concept of empathy with Bari, another Chicago rapper and close collaborator. “Instead of reacting or taking something personal,” she explains, “be like, ‘Damn, you probably going through some shit.’” Perhaps it’s only natural for a skilled and evocative performer to be fascinated by emotional awareness. Yet Deaux’s reluctance to spell out the details of a situation creates distance within her songs, a slight fog that protects her from full transparency. Ultimately, empathy is what she asks of her audience. When you listen to her words closely and begin to recognize their subtleties, Empathy is her most layered and sumptuous project yet. | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | June 21, 2019 | 7 | 4c05f09d-65b6-40ba-a178-3813fb91002a | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Excuses, excuses. Kim Deal's got a million of 'em. How else could she manage to put off releasing her ... | Excuses, excuses. Kim Deal's got a million of 'em. How else could she manage to put off releasing her ... | The Breeders: Title TK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/923-title-tk/ | Title TK | Excuses, excuses. Kim Deal's got a million of 'em. How else could she manage to put off releasing her first original music in six years, not to mention following up on Last Splash, the radio and retail-friendly juggernaut from nine years ago?
"I haven't found the right drum sound," she'd say to engineer after engineer. "I'm going to take some time off and learn how to play the drums myself" (she's been working that one since 1995, when Tammy and the Amps-- Deal's basement solo project-- eventually became The Amps, with ex-Breeders drummer Jim Macpherson). "I can't do this without Kelley," she'd tell interviewers, despite having toured as the Breeders in 1997 with a Kelley-less lineup that included Macpherson, the Amps' Nate Farley, and violinist/vocalist Carrie Bradley. As engineers, studios and musicians were discarded as casually as cigarettes, and potential release dates came and went, the vultures-- and VH-1's Behind the Music-- started circling. Legend even has it that Kim Deal, having spent the Breeders' royalties and advance money long ago, has been living on fees generated by the Prodigy's "Firestarter," a song that, fortunately for Deal, sampled Last Splash's "S.O.S."
After years of being just around the corner like that Hopi Indian freak in Mulholland Drive, at last Title TK is upon us. And it's not bad. Far from being the chilly product of Deal's reputed perfectionism and production overkill, Title TK is a loose, spontaneous, even messy affair, and a blast to listen to once Deal's pop curiousities begin to take shape in the listener's imagination. Steve Albini should get a stipend from Nike for finally corralling Deal in his Chicago studio, convincing her to can the excuses and just do it.
"Round up, holler girl," are the first words from Kim Deal's mouth in six years, on opener "Little Fury," a rough-edged call-and-response with divebombing guitars, driving bass, and sister Kelley's dissonant harmonies. "Hold what you've got," Deal rasps on the chorus as hired guns Richard Presley and Mondo Lopez (of Los Angeles punk band Fear) and drummer Jose Medeles pound out a labored groove. Forget Last Splash and The Amps-- Title TK picks up where Pod left off in 1989, with a jagged sound nowhere near as tight as the Pixies' but a heartfelt enthusiasm for creating music. "Yeah, I'm leaking pure white noise," Deal sings on "London Song." It's not the most accurate statement, as this ain't exactly Merzbow, but it's an accurate reflection of what the Breeders are shooting for with Title TK: something uncomplicated, as pure and unaffected as static.
While the Thom Yorke school of songwriters, bored with conventional pop structures, slice their music apart and reconstruct it digitally like a Burroughs novel, Deal's latest compositions are disjointed by design-- trying on and chucking lyrical ideas and musical motifs with abandon, almost elevating ADD to a kind of art form. "Dumb as a fuckin'... and missing from the party," Deal sings in "Little Fury." Dumb as a fuckin' what? Attempting to decode Title TK's musical Mad Libs can be maddening-- it's easier to let Deal slur her words and catch the occasional fragments of brilliance that only weed-fueled midnight recording sessions and happy accidents can produce.
Title TK also finds Deal dabbling with new sounds, with hit-and-miss results. "The She" is built around a Stereolab-ish keyboard vamp, and while you shouldn't expect grooves as tight as Le Tigre's, the Breeders' rough-and-tumble brand of funk is convincingly nasty. But the silly slap-back percussion of "Sinister Foxx" and Record Engineering 101 channel-swapping guitars on "Huffer" aren't exactly cutting edge. Still, when the Breeders set out to rock-- and the chugging guitars and stomping drums of standout "Son of Three" will bring a knowing smile to Pixies afficianados-- they get the job done.
Title TK also contains two unexpectedly beautiful songs-- the disarmingly spare "Off You," with its lonesome guitar and gorgeous bass solo, is some of the creepiest headphone listening since The Wall. "I've never seen a starlet, or a riot, or the violence of you," Deal sings in a weary, muted voice. "I am the autumn in the scarlet, I am the makeup on your eyes." "Forced to Drive," a woozy travelogue bouyed by shimmering arpeggios and effects-pedal-to-the-metal choruses, merges Last Splash's summery hangover with the Velvets' "Ride into the Sun."
"Title TK" is journalistic shorthand for "title to come," and Title TK does feel incomplete in many ways-- from the hand-scribbled song titles on the back sleeve to the sometimes tuneless (and always somewhat haphazard) delivery of the vocals. Keyboards buzz from out of nowhere, guitars hit bum notes intentionally, basslines amble up and down the scale, sometimes two at a time. When Title TK loses people-- and I suspect it'll lose many-- it'll be with the langorous, abstract half-songs like "Put on a Side" (a listless anti-song built around a fretless bass groove, spare guitar and a single piano note) or "Sinister Foxx" (largely a meditation on the repeated phrase "Has anyone seen the iguana?").
And for an album so highly anticipated for so long, Title TK feels awfully skimpy, at just over 38 minutes, and pretty shamelessly padded. Did we really need the two false endings and an extended jam that stretches "London" past the three-minute mark? Or the rockabilly remake of The Amps' "Full on Idle," which barely deviates from the original? Isn't the two-minute "T and T" essentially just an extended instrumental intro to the short, sharp "Huffer"? Deal has been flogging many of these songs since that 1997 Breeders outing, including "Forced to Drive" (released on a fanclub single way back when), "Too Alive," and "Huffer." And what about Kelley's "Fire the Maid," a live favorite discarded from Title TK at the eleventh hour?
Still, it's a hell of a lot of fun to hear these fortysomething twins still singing about whippets and the quality of Jersey weed, and when the Breeders are on, they're still on. Just don't come to Title TK expecting the note-perfect pop confections of "Cannonball" or "Divine Hammer," because it's not that kind of record. And let's hope nobody samples Title TK on their big hit single, or it might be another ten years before the next one. | 2002-05-30T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-05-30T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD / Elektra | May 30, 2002 | 7.4 | 4c07b6d8-6ac2-4e08-83b2-7c87d4666ab3 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Maryland sludge-doom band's latest album (and first for Relapse Records) is a downright lethal—and impressively inclusive—listen. | The Maryland sludge-doom band's latest album (and first for Relapse Records) is a downright lethal—and impressively inclusive—listen. | Ilsa: Corpse Fortress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ilsa-corpse-fortress/ | Corpse Fortress | In 2006, a cadre of crusties, metalheads, and other misfits started raising hell in a shabby brick house in the D.C. suburbs. The Corpse Fortress, as they called this Silver Spring, Maryland, arts space, went on to supply the DMV underbelly with a thriving heavy-music hub and party spot for over five years, until county officials forced its close in fall 2011. Dispatches from the Corpse Fortress’ last stand that September 24 set an anarchic scene: sketchy kids passing around laced joints and throwing bottles, teenagers fucking in the bushes with abandon, and down in the dungeon-like basement, the Maryland sludge-doom band Ilsa bringing the devil-worshippers to their knees.
Ten years and four albums in, Ilsa’s sphere of influence extends well outside their capital region stomping grounds, thanks to a slew of split releases with ascendent metal bands from across the globe (Finland’s Hooded Menace, SoCal’s Seven Sisters of Sleep, and Japan’s Coffins), as well as their signing with metal bastion Relapse Records in 2015. Irate neighbors and civil servants might have been able to shutter the Corpse Fortress’ physical location, but just like a crust-punk zombie uprising, its spirit will never be quashed so long as Ilsa are on the hunt. Their fifth album and full-length Relapse debut, named for the bygone venue, makes for a downright lethal listen, even by their genre’s crushing standards.
For all their primordial madness, Ilsa have always favored cold, mechanical discipline. Frontman Orion Peter recently declared to Noisey that “If metal is a machine, then we are that blood-encrusted, hair-matted machinery after it’s ground up every worker in the factory, sputtering and rumbling on.” He’s not exaggerating: to experience Ilsa’s latest is to hole up in said deathtrap for 48 minutes on end, throwing up the horns even as the gears grind your bones to dust. “Nasty, Brutish” fashions driving rhythms and chugging riffs into the sonic equivalent of a rusted chainsaw, effortlessly soldering grimy hardcore to factory-grade steel, while “Prosector” mines black metal’s coffers for weeping riffs and double-bass percussion.
Contemporary sludge-spewers frequently approach their arrangements from a binary standpoint: Black Sabbath’s heavy-lidded wars of attrition on one end, Eyehategod’s deep, quick clobberings on the other, with no room for a band that draws on both. Here, that false dichotomy falls to the wayside. Whereas Corpse Fortress’ funeral marches (“Hikikomori,” “Drums of the Dark Gods,” “Long Lost Friend”) position Ilsa closer to the former camp, the Integrity-esque rippers rounding out its first half (“Nasty, Brutish,” “Old Maid”) stir up the punkish fugue associated with the latter. This dual strategy, with both sounds juxtaposed throughout the track sequence, provides a much-needed dynamic escape hatch for the times when Corpse Fortress’ agonizing churn devolves into a mucky slog, like on lesser-spirited siblings “Cosmos Antimonos” and “Long Lost Friend.” By giving their bubbling cauldron a furious stir now and then, the group render its potion more potent.
Ilsa are the filthiest of modern doom’s foul misanthropes—they named themselves after a Nazi-themed sexploitation film, for Satan’s sake. Beyond the surface, though, they’re much more interested in building bridges and fostering community than torching everything to the ground. As a partially-queer, multi-racial, and ardently anti-fascist band signed to one of the biggest metal labels, the posse has already made significant strides in that direction. Between the feats of genre-juggling and the all-consuming roar, Corpse Fortress has a similarly inclusive effect. This album is well more than the sum of its mangled parts. Just don’t expect to make it out alive. | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | March 9, 2018 | 7.2 | 4c090f23-2ce0-4eef-b5ca-2ce6ff2f032e | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
On their debut, the Montreal art-rockers come off like a cootie shot against self-seriousness and boredom. | On their debut, the Montreal art-rockers come off like a cootie shot against self-seriousness and boredom. | Pottery: Welcome to Bobby’s Motel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pottery-welcome-to-bobbys-motel/ | Welcome to Bobby’s Motel | What does “new wave” even mean, really, besides too weird for spin class and weird enough for college radio? Montreal-based five-piece Pottery fit squarely within these parameters, wide as they are. Welcome to Bobby’s Motel, their full-length debut and follow-up to last year’s No. 1 EP, evokes the jubilant freakiness of the genre’s progenitors—Devo and The B-52s, chiefly—with a yawp like Parquet Courts (with whom they toured in 2019), so eager to ride the groove that they often scale up into shouts. Along this yardstick, the record teases the far-out, the riotous, and the anthemic, and in its efforts to push art-rock boundaries, it comes close to a novel sound, if not an entirely new wave.
Album standout “Texas Drums Pt. I & II” demonstrates this reach and ambition, a cowbell-laced, guitar-powered earworm that could play at a soda fountain on Mars. Around three minutes, the pings that signal “go” in a Mario Kart race kick off a raucous second half where the drums build to near-masturbatory excess, like an art-rock version of edging. It feels more like a late house-show finale than self-indulgence, locking into a rhythm that crests on energy rather than depleting it.
This bombast flavors most of the tracks on Bobby’s Motel, but “Reflection,” which one could mistake for an homage to Peter Gabriel’s So, cools the frenzy right on time, so the sweat can dry and Pottery can lament a culture of superficiality without tenderness. “Old receipts and body cream, where’s your passion?” they ask, and halfway through the song, they harmonize about the weight of empathy, a departure from the preceding raucousness. They are adept at finessing the soft alongside the hard, the goofy alongside the baleful.
It’s only due to this sharpness and surprise that other moments on the album feel dull. “Hot Heater” might be a standout track on a lesser record, but it’s less zesty than counterparts like “Under the Wires” or “Take Your Time” and more tepid than its name implies. Closer “Hot Like Jungle,” with its jingle bells and Rick Astley croon, stagnates at mid-tempo and comes closer to reaching for the ashtray than the stars.
This band is at its best operating at the edge of kitsch and excess, as with the “Monster Mash” voice inexplicably mumbling over “Bobby’s Forecast.” Groups like Pottery are a cootie shot against self-seriousness and boredom, and on subsequent albums, one can only hope they further indulge these freakier impulses, as jet-powered and stratospheric as the weirdos who made waves before them. | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | June 5, 2020 | 6.7 | 4c0ce1c5-2550-4b35-9a4b-20cfbe1725bc | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The emo band's second album is a step forward, increasing the intensity with more careful arrangements. If anything, it has more going on than the debut, but it’s all done more tastefully, and the album’s warm, open production makes it easier to take in just how sophisticated these arrangements are. | The emo band's second album is a step forward, increasing the intensity with more careful arrangements. If anything, it has more going on than the debut, but it’s all done more tastefully, and the album’s warm, open production makes it easier to take in just how sophisticated these arrangements are. | The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Harmlessness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21037-harmlessness/ | Harmlessness | Emo is a genre built on divisive vocals, and the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die represented the entire spectrum of such voices on their debut Whenever, If Ever. Between the screamy guy, the yelpy guy, the nervous guy who sang as if sweating through his pocket protector, and the open invitation for anybody else in the band to pipe in whenever they felt it might lend an extra energy to a song, it was a love-it-or-dismiss-it affair, even by the standards of an emo revival that favors messy, overstuffed statements. The eight-piece band may have filtered their updated emo through the sensibilities of some of the most broadly popular indie rock of the '00s, but they were fundamentally a niche act.
On their sophomore album Harmlessness, they become less of one. In an effort to smooth out their rough edges after some lineup changes, TWIABP start with the roughest of them all: those voices. The screamy guy is gone, and the singer who emerges as the de facto pack leader, David Bello, has ironed most of the jitters out of his delivery. Those more approachable vocals set the tone for a record that's more orderly than its predecessor but no less sweeping. These songs still build, crash, weep, and rejoice, often all within the span of a few minutes, and the band still has no interest in moderation. If anything, Harmlessness actually has more going on than Whenever, If Ever, but it’s all done more tastefully, and the album’s warm, open production makes it easier to take in just how sophisticated these arrangements are—without all those voices crowded on top of each other, for instance, you can hear every violin stroke. TWIABP have succeeded where past generations of emo bands have often stumbled: tidying up their sound without losing any of the exuberance and immediacy that made that sound so striking in the first place.
TWIABP tuck their most audacious song toward the front of the record. Condensing a subject loaded enough for a full concept album into five-and-a-half minutes, "January 10th, 2014" tells of Diana, the Hunter of Bus Drivers, the anonymous avenger from Juárez, Mexico, who shot and killed two factory bus drivers in retaliation for the rampant, unprosecuted sexual assaults committed by drivers on late-night routes. She became a folk hero, honored with statues in two cities. The song lifts some lyrics directly from a "This American Life" episode about her myth, including an exchange that’s acted out between Bello and singer/keyboardist Katie Shanholtzer-Dvorak. He voices a driver weary of a passenger who might be Diana; she speaks as every woman relieved to finally have some power over potential predators. "Are you afraid of me now?" she sings. "Well yeah," he responds, "Shouldn’t I be?"
The moment is so on-the-nose, so borderline musical theater, that it’s bound to make some listeners wince, but even those put off by it have got to admire the band’s temerity. Though Harmlessness’s primary fascinations lie with familiar subjects—overcoming depression, navigating changing relationships, finding a place in the world—the band detours from that safe territory to confront listeners with an uncomfortable moral quandary about whether taking a life is ever justified. The song sympathizes with Diana’s crusade while acknowledging the gruesome irony of celebrating a murderer.
Of course, Harmlessness does the safer subjects well, too. One of Bello’s many songs about wrestling himself from depression’s grip, "Rage Against the Dying of the Light" builds to a hooky alt-rock riff, then pivots right into the album’s celebratory highlight, "Ra Patera Dance", which channels the grizzled cheer of Good News-era Modest Mouse. Harmlessness is loaded with these kinds of seamless transitions, and the band’s smart sequencing keeps the record moving with brisk efficiency. "Haircuts for Everybody" takes just a minute and a half to build to its brutally pretty climax.
Where TWIABP’s last album ended with an epic seven-minute closing statement, "Getting Sodas", Harmlessness doubles down with two of them (actually, two and a half, if you count the lovely little hidden track tacked on to the end of "Mount Hum"). Stacking so many moments of grandiosity on top of each other should be overkill, but it isn’t; each suite pays off triumphantly. With Harmlessness, the World Is a Beautiful Place have accomplished a rare feat: a lofty, loaded album with the grace and momentum of a far leaner one. | 2015-09-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | September 28, 2015 | 7.9 | 4c0de5a1-3d26-4ff2-97b4-ec9e81042610 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Nodding to Bowie and the Beatles on songs about climate change and capitalism, the 21-year-old songwriter roots his political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock. | Nodding to Bowie and the Beatles on songs about climate change and capitalism, the 21-year-old songwriter roots his political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock. | Declan McKenna: Zeros | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/declan-mckenna-zeros/ | Zeros | “What do you think about the rocket I built?” howls Declan McKenna on the first track of Zeros. It’s a cheeky nod at the gap between his uneven 2017 debut album, What Do You Think About the Car?, and this one: not a natural progression, but a staggering improvement. McKenna, a 21-year-old British singer-songwriter once hailed as a teen prodigy, has shed his boy-wonder baby fat. Zeros is an ambitious attempt at his own Tommy, a sprawling concept album about scrappy survivors spiraling through space and searching for meaning at the end of the world. Its characters war with one another across a musical palette that spans Sgt. Pepper to “Space Oddity.”
The record’s standout track, “Daniel, You’re Still a Child,” is its Rosetta Stone—not to mention the best U2 song in about 15 years. The character of Daniel recurs throughout the album, but McKenna leaves his role ambiguous, a narrative Rorschach test. He seems to me a boozing absentee father, but he could also be a lousy boyfriend or a troublemaking prodigal son. The video for “The Key to Life on Earth” suggests a spookier storyline: Daniel as sinister doppelganger, played by actor Alex Lawther, invading McKenna’s home and eating his food before bludgeoning him to death.
The video could easily double as an episode of Black Mirror; fans will recognize Lawther as the blackmailed sex criminal of Season 3’s “Shut Up and Dance.” But McKenna relegates science fiction to the album’s opening tracks. The elaborate musical nods to Bowie and the Beatles on “You Better Believe!!!” and “Be an Astronaut” place space exploration squarely in the 1960s, when it was still a democratic pursuit, not a hobby for union-busting billionaires. “You were born to be an astronaut,” McKenna sings of Daniel, “and you’ll do it or die trying.” Daniel settles, sadly, for the latter. The Space Age comes to an end. A chilly Bono-in-Berlin vibe sweeps through the album as Daniel degenerates, giving way to Blurry Britrock as modern forms of villainy—online radicalization (“Twice Your Size”), climate change (“Sagittarius A*”), surveillance capitalism (“Beautiful Faces”)—rear their ugly heads.
This approach occasionally makes the album feel like a collage of 40 years’ worth of MOJO covers. But McKenna isn’t in the business of imitation or idolatry. He deploys these references carefully, in chronological order, drawing a clean arc through history to root his own political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock. Take “Rapture,” where, with absolute confidence, he mispronounces “the laws of nature” to force a rhyme with “Mrs. Thatcher.” At first, it may seem a bit retrograde—a Margaret Thatcher takedown in 2020? But the song makes an elegant argument: The witch isn’t dead at all, but risen again; the stench of her corpse lingers in modern Britain. There is a straight line from the Sex Pistols’ grievances to McKenna’s own.
McKenna’s strongest work, prior to Zeros, was the blunt FIFA protest anthem “Brazil,” written when he was just 15 and stunning in its maturity and moral clarity. Those qualities return in the defiant eco-feminist arc of Zeros. He begins the album on a rocket in outer space, screaming, “We’re going to get ourselves killed!”, and ends on a “marvelous beach,” accepting the impermanence of life on Earth: “Everybody leaves eventually, darling.” By making peace with his own mortality, McKenna underscores the urgency of ensuring our planet outlives us. “Sagittarius A*” condemns industrialists for their delusions of escaping climate emergency by colonizing Mars: “You think your money’s gonna stop you getting wet? … Noah, you best start building.” There is a subtly Luddite bent to the political demands of Zeros, which are threefold: Disconnect your phone, burn your money, and commence your walk eastward into the rising sun.
With Zeros, McKenna expands his conceptual scope and introduces more shades of grey in his storytelling. Not all of his creative risks pay off, though. The best concept albums carefully offset their arena-rock assaults with moments for the mosh pit to catch its breath. Zeros would benefit from another down-tempo “Emily” or two, as well as more connective tissue and clarity in its narrative. But despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tomplicated | September 9, 2020 | 7.3 | 4c0f69d5-aa12-4d0b-9368-5584f94102a3 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Sweden's Little Dragon have a distinct and immediately alluring style, and on their third album, they double down on their futuristic pop sound. | Sweden's Little Dragon have a distinct and immediately alluring style, and on their third album, they double down on their futuristic pop sound. | Little Dragon: Ritual Union | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15672-ritual-union/ | Ritual Union | Sweden's Little Dragon are a band blessed with a distinct and immediately alluring style. Their rhythms are dry and metronomic; their synthesizers either provide a distant ambiance or seem to glow like neon lights that flicker in time with the beat. Frontwoman Yukimi Nagano's phrasing touches on conventions of modern-- particularly British-- iterations of R&B, but errs on the side of aloof understatement. They are essentially an R&B band, but the major elements of their style are skewed enough that while the music seems vaguely familiar, it doesn't sound quite like anyone else.
A lot of listeners had their first exposure to Nagano and Little Dragon last year when the group guest starred on two tracks from the Gorillaz's excellent album Plastic Beach. Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn was very clever in his deployment of the band on those cuts, making the shift into a sequence in "Empire Ants" highlighting Nagano's smoky, serene voice and Håkan Wirenstrand's stunning keyboard textures seem like a sudden cut from muddy, dimly lit footage to vibrant, super-saturated color. If one of Albarn's goals in collaborating with the band was to showcase their best qualities, he did an amazing job of it.
Ritual Union, the band's third album, does not stray from the sexy, futuristic sound of their previous record, Machine Dreams, or their team-up with Albarn. If anything, they've doubled down on their aesthetic by leaning harder than ever on moody synths, nearly subliminal bass lines and impossibly crisp snare hits. A few of the songs, like the sleek title track and the brisk, funky "Nightlight", rank among the group's finest work. All through the record, Little Dragon are extremely effective in delivering the most attractive elements of their style, resulting in a set of songs that come across like the ideal soundtrack to a night on the town in some exotic sci-fi city.
The problem with Ritual Union is that even though every song on the album is built on the foundation of some very good musical ideas and at least one engaging hook, the material nevertheless seems rather under-written. "When I Go Out", "Please Turn", and "Crystalfilm" all get stuck in groovy ruts, while cuts like "Little Man", "Summertearz", and "Brush the Heat" seem like they are one extra hook, middle eight, rhythmic shift, or chord change away from becoming truly outstanding pieces of music. This doesn't diminish the charm of the music, per se, but it can be very frustrating to hear songs right on the precipice of greatness. Little Dragon have clearly mastered their style on this album; hopefully next time around they will deliver more songs worthy of their sound. | 2011-07-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-07-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Peacefrog | July 26, 2011 | 6.7 | 4c1ce1a0-7461-4f8e-aa79-0759c9c29dac | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The Los Angeles folk-punk singer-songwriter steps into a more expansive, considered sound, blending various strains of American roots music into a quietly idiosyncratic style. | The Los Angeles folk-punk singer-songwriter steps into a more expansive, considered sound, blending various strains of American roots music into a quietly idiosyncratic style. | Sunny War: Anarchist Gospel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunny-war-anarchist-gospel/ | Anarchist Gospel | Is Anarchist Gospel—whose title hints at political consciousness—Sunny War’s call to action? It’s not an inconceivable notion. The Los Angeles singer/songwriter has hovered on the fringe of polite Americana circles since the early 2010s, parlaying her early years as a folk-punk busker into handsome, modest records often released on her own independent imprints.
A trace of those beginnings is discernible in Anarchist Gospel, a record that culminates with War paraphrasing the legendary anarcho-punk band Crass on the closing “Whole,” but this is by no measure a punk record. The album marks a step into the big leagues as War joins New West, a prominent Americana imprint whose roster includes acts like Pernice Brothers and Drive-By Truckers, and her choice of collaborator here is as striking as her label. Andrija Tokic, who made his reputation working with Alabama Shakes, sits behind the boards, performing a task similar to the one he did on his records with Hurray for the Riff Raff, both streamlining and opening up War’s music without sacrificing her eccentricities.
The expansion is apparent from the opening “Love’s Death Bed,” which unfolds with swirling ease before settling into a relaxed gospel-blues groove. The song introduces a wash of color far more intense than anything on Simple Syrup, War’s deliberately restrained—and quite effective—2021 album. The shift only seems bracing to those familiar with War’s past work: without that knowledge, the music merely seems casually assured, blending a few strains of American roots music into a quietly idiosyncratic style.
War receives assistance from the harmonies of singer-songwriters Allison Russell and Chris Pierce on “Love’s Death Bed,” two of the many cameos that help shape the album’s contours. They resurface on a folky cover of R&B singer Van Hunt’s “Hopeless,” and guitarist Dave Rawlings—best known for his work with Gillian Welch—plays on three tracks, while My Morning Jacket’s Jim James appears on “Earth,” a song that sighs and cascades with the grace of a waterfall. None of the guests overshadow War; like Tokic’s production, their contributions merely illuminate the layered emotions lying at the core of her music.
Tokic’s warm, painterly production helps disguise the fact that much of Anarchist Gospel chronicles the intensely painful dissolution of a relationship. If the title of “Love’s Death Bed” didn’t give away the game, a cover of Ween’s “Baby Bitch” is War’s tell. She attends to both its gorgeous psychedelic melody and its vulgarity—accentuated by what sounds, incongruously, like a children’s chorus—while teasing out the pain lurking in the heart of Ween’s nasty kiss-off.
While this flash of humor is welcome, it’s the warmth of War’s delivery that lingers, not just on “Baby Bitch” but throughout. Always an empathetic vocalist, War sometimes seemed a shade too earnest on her earlier records, hitting each emotion squarely on the nose. Here, she alternates between wry reticence and bruised confession, qualities that are enhanced by Tokic’s subtly shifting, textured production. The wider canvas and broadened palette reveal the complex human emotions within War’s music, resulting in a breakup record that’s emotionally resonant and curiously hopeful. | 2023-02-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B / Rock | New West | February 9, 2023 | 7.4 | 4c22c156-8256-4708-a2be-332dc8f2357f | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
With influences ranging from Afrobeat to choral symphonies, the Brooklyn-based group’s debut is bright and bursting with detail. | With influences ranging from Afrobeat to choral symphonies, the Brooklyn-based group’s debut is bright and bursting with detail. | The Narcotix: Mommy Issues EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-narcotix-mommy-issues-ep/ | Mommy Issues EP | When they were in high school, best friends Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas could be found goofing off in yet another chorus class. Their instructor was an overzealous Corky St. Clair type who took his job a little too seriously. He “spent a lot of energy trying to make us the choir of his dreams,” Foinchas said in a 2018 interview. The curriculum included old Gaelic hymns and arrangements from the 1700s, which Foinchas jokingly referred to as “catholic, castrated boys music.” Despite the pair’s teenage skepticism, those lessons had a lasting impact. Now at the helm of Brooklyn-based group the Narcotix, Foinchas and Quansah flex a deep understanding of melody, and the group’s debut EP, Mommy Issues, spotlights their honed, dynamic voices.
Mommy Issues is sonically grand and expansive, taking inspiration from Foinchas and Quansah’s African heritage. (Their parents are from Cameroon and Cote D’Ivoire, respectively.) The Narcotix cite African wedding music, choral symphonies, and Afrobeat as major influences on their style, which they describe as “West African art-folk.” Sierra Leonean guitarist Adam Turay is a distinct presence on the record; his bright, sharpened riffs pierce through denser compositions like “Lilith” and the sweeping “Adonai.” The latter track is built on Foinchas and Quansah’s interwoven vocal melodies, which range from sweet and theatrical to gruff and guttural. With a spirited outro that echoes call-and-response music in the West African tradition, it is one of the EP’s finest moments.
These six tracks are packed with mythological imagery and allusions to the Old Testament. Often, the religious references work as a vessel for storytelling, the way fables use familiar imagery to convey universal truths. Titles like “Rebecca,” “Esther,” and “Adam” all have biblical origins—but they are also names of band members. “John/Joseph,” whose title aligns with drummer Jonathan Joseph, is the tale of a daughter struggling to find her lost mother. Foinchas and Quansah pepper in images of Mars, the Ancient Ones, and impending darkness that suspend the narrative above reality. The missing “mama” at the song’s center could be a matriarch, a maternal deity, or even Mother Earth.
The Narcotix build worlds from this kind of loose symbolism while managing to escape the mystically inclined tropes of New Age music. Foinchas and Quansah craft gorgeous melodies, but they’re not afraid to scuff up their voices, a technique that keeps their work grounded. The sun-dappled arpeggios of “Rebecca,” the EP’s tamest track, are disrupted by a dry croak near the end of the song. On “Esther,” they interrupt their braided melodies with harsh bursts of breath, trailing off into a screeching wail and wicked laughter. Joseph’s crisp percussion, meanwhile, slaps against the reverb-heavy vocals, maximizing surface texture. These rough edges and imperfections help bring the EP to life. Early in their career, the Narcotix have a knack for subverting expectations. Their songs are bright and bursting with detail, fueled by an affection for the music they’ve inherited and the myths they’ve built from it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | self-released | June 14, 2021 | 7.5 | 4c248eea-3b41-4429-b386-80cd16df4270 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
These Systems Are Failing is Moby’s most furious album in twenty years, a return to his hardcore days, but it's still oddly cold and routine. | These Systems Are Failing is Moby’s most furious album in twenty years, a return to his hardcore days, but it's still oddly cold and routine. | Moby & the Void Pacific Choir: These Systems Are Failing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22515-these-systems-are-failing/ | These Systems Are Failing | Moby’s thirteenth album comes packaged with a 28-page booklet, which might lead you to expect Richard Melville-Hall’s most long-winded liner-notes broadside to date. But instead of railing against the sort of hot-button issues he has addressed in releases past—Christian hypocrisy, say, or mass incarceration or factory farming—we get page after page of the man’s photography and the lowercase statement “these systems are failing” every so often atop images of graveyards, airplanes, a family with golden skin, and what might be a “Bojack Horseman”-themed pool party at Moby’s old castle in the Hollywood Hills (though he’s since downsized).
These Systems Are Failing is Moby’s most furious album in twenty years, since he neatly derailed his electronic career with the righteous punk spurt of Animal Rights back in 1996. Mission of Burma covers might have befuddled ravers ready for the E rushes of “Move (You Make Me Feel So Good)” and “Go,” but it hearkened back to Moby’s own heritage, growing up a punk in New York City in the early ’80s. In circling back to shout-along raucous punk two decades and many real estate deals later though, there’s not much grist for Moby’s mill.
It’s an angry album, which in this case means Moby is running drum machines through banks of distortion and sullying up every synth line with fuzz, tempered by the kind of pressurizing rhythm guitar lines redolent of Joy Division and post-punk. A drum beat not unlike “Take on Me” opens “Hey! Hey!” paired to a hornet’s nest of guitar and synth. It’s a promising enough start, if only it didn’t just nosedive into a chintzy melody that even a fist pump-along chorus of “Hey! Hey!/Look how they hang us out to dry” can’t resuscitate. Feverish guitar noise and club-loud toms give urgency to “Break.Doubt,” with Moby doing his best Ian Curtis deadpan, but he can’t help but fall back on facile production choices, like simply making everything louder and layering his voice so that you hear an imaginary mosh pit of fake sweaty Mobys pogoing.
As long as you don’t cringe at the overused “Los Angeles” vocal sample and gospel turn by the Void Pacific Choir, the best balance Moby strikes is between the ’90s breakbeat and throwback acid line on bonus track “Almost Loved.” But no matter the song and level of outrage, Moby can’t seem to get beyond the presets that Trent Reznor outgrew around Pretty Hate Machine nor the new romantic/ goth vocal delivery that –regardless of the levels of distortion on his voice—always makes him sound like a dour Count Chocula.
Moby’s lyrics lash out at planetary polluters and capitalist greed, but he saves his most acute anger not for these faceless systems of power, but for those who personally embody love lost for him. He lashes out at the girl who lied to him on “And It Hurts,” the one who walked away on “Don’t Leave Me,” not to mention the one who he accuses of giving him an insufficient love that “was old and looking back” on “A Simple Love.”
It may be too far along to inform Moby that the conceit of a simple love is delusional and misplaced, that any romantic break-up requires a long gaze in the mirror and not just yelling about perceived slights. Maybe this sense of hurt and mistrust would be more palatable if it were distinguishable from his rage against the machine. It’s hard to sit through lines about “Selling off heaven for a perfect hell” and corporate greed when he himself opened the floodgates. Selling every last second of an album to multiple advertising campaigns (Play), peddling bottle service-style club music as nostalgia,not to mention partnering with the same luxury hotels that now litter the city. Moby’s own rising economic fortunes mirrored that of Manhattan, so his bald embrace of “the city’s absurd cult of money” is what he now blames for ruining New York’s creative culture, exculpating himself in the process. Moby’s indignation just sounds like Walrus and Carpenter-level tears of rage. Rather than feel cathartic or caustic, it’s oddly cold and rote. | 2016-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | October 21, 2016 | 4 | 4c2bbe69-f516-4994-995b-07eafd0b1201 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
After two exceptional black metal records, Wolves in the Throne Room return this year with a new EP and LP. | After two exceptional black metal records, Wolves in the Throne Room return this year with a new EP and LP. | Wolves in the Throne Room: Black Cascade / Malevolent Grain EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13030-black-cascade-malevolent-grain-ep/ | Black Cascade / Malevolent Grain EP | As much as one can call anything associated with black metal a crossover record, Two Hunters-- the sprawling second album from Wolves in the Throne Room-- was just that. Extolled by critics, embraced by indie rock kids, appreciated by metal legions, Wolves' overwhelming crescendos and glowing decrescendos, beautiful and brutal, spoke as much to worshippers of Emperor's Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk as acolytes of Radiohead's Kid A. The band offered an enigmatic allure, too, speaking of its communal farm outside of Olympia, Wash. And Wolves' espousal of a pagan approach to black metal-- a genre long bound to an upside-down cross-- was refreshing. So purists be damned: Two years ago, Wolves in the Throne Room offered a rendezvous for two very unlikely demographics by aiming extreme in several directions.
Whatever bridges Wolves might have built in 2007 are mostly a memory this year, though: The EP Malevolent Grain and the LP Black Cascade disassemble the integrated power of Two Hunters and its predecessor, Diadem of 12 Stars, by plucking the black-metal sections from their former surrounding swells and stretching their ends until what's left feels mostly like a flatline. Imagine cutting cheap wine with water and trying to get drunk: It's unnecessary work for little payoff.
Excepting the first side of Malevolent Grain, each of the six Wolves cuts is a smear, smoothing black metal's disruptive bursts into 10-14 minute trances that slowly, sparingly shift in meter and volume. The idea-- to create a stable atmosphere from music that traditionally gnashes any space it fills-- is more interesting than its execution. For instance, "Hate Crystal", Malevolent Grain's B-side, is an 11-minute march that opens at full blast and ends mostly at the same clip. The guitars move in orthodox progressions, and the drums steadily chew from beneath, adding variety with the occasional extra cymbal splash or snare drop. Only the song's understated coda-- where the parts fall out of lockstep and apart from one another without fading out-- offers intrigue. Like William Basinski's The Disintegration Loop I-IV, the object's corrosion is more interesting than the object itself. Also, that's not a compliment.
All of Black Cascade pounds away with a similar notion for four tracks and 50 minutes, offering four black metal tides that occasionally shift into some texturally bankrupt, wintry drone. Separated from its once-intriguing surroundings, Wolves' music feels listless and dull-- music doing its best to get by on size, not strength or sound. It's not compelling. At least it's listenable.
Side A of Malevolent Grain isn't: Released in America as a limited run of black vinyl and in Europe as a set of 700 12" picture discs that sold out almost immediately, Malevolent Grain is barely worth the Google search it takes to find free, high-quality rips. The EP splits the band's powers between the record's halves, so that the heavy stuff comes on the B-side. The A-side, then, is a workshop for Jamie Meyers, this effort's token female. She possesses less nuance than Jessica Kinney, the Two Hunters vocalist who seemed so well suited for those tunes. The three-piece rock rumble suggests an eventual eruption, but the band simply varies its speed, volume, and density, lashing repeatedly against a few notes and themes. Maybe that sounds nice, but-- left alone above it all, minus a structural or sonic foil-- Meyers sounds like Evanescence leading a tribute to Enya. It's a 13-minute cringefest.
Perhaps these releases are concessions to the difficulty of climbing from a tour van nightly and recreating such complex music onstage. Then, of course, there's the frustration of disappointed fans who expect it all and get only the band's heavier tendencies with the price of admission. That's fair enough, I suppose. But must a live show meet a record's standards? And should a performance dictate a record by a band that once took such risks? Indeed, the live experience is an extemporaneous one-- here tonight, restarted tomorrow. But a great record, one hopes, can be its own statement, something that lives forever in a world of its own design. With its deity talk and complete grandeur, Two Hunters worked like that. It was adventurous, engaged, imaginative. At their best, though, Malevolent Grain and Black Cascade, are just sort of there, kicking up a thin cloud of dust they're hoping you'll perceive as pitch black. | 2009-05-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-05-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | null | May 21, 2009 | 2.8 | 4c2bfae1-ad9e-4641-9ca1-04938983b42b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Though longer and mellower, Cloakroom’s second album still has an anxious, open-ended feel. They take the appealing parts of a masculine pose without being wholly trapped by them. | Though longer and mellower, Cloakroom’s second album still has an anxious, open-ended feel. They take the appealing parts of a masculine pose without being wholly trapped by them. | Cloakroom: Time Well | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cloakroom-time-well/ | Time Well | Northwest Indiana trio Cloakroom take a muscular approach to shoegaze by adding a wallop of fundamental metal crunch, and while that’s a well-worn fusion at this point, they don’t quite sound like other bands who attempt this. They draw on conventional ’90s rock, and especially its affinity for chunky riffs. Despite moving to the metal-oriented label Relapse for their second album Time Well, they cut back on overt heaviness and lean more on bittersweet dream-rock. In doing so, they strike a better balance of the two and reveal themselves to be slyer than they appear at first glance.
Their debut Further Out was defined by a dour air, and even though it’s longer and mellower, Time is riddled with the anxiety that comes from feeling more open-ended. It doesn’t come roaring out of the gate with hard rock nostalgia like Further Out did with “Paperweight,” as “Gone But Not Entirely” is more simmering doom. A good deal of the album’s second half—“Sickle Moon Blues” and “The Sun Won’t Let Us Go” in particular—are driven by ambient currents carrying somber guitars. Guitarist and vocalist Doyle Martin sings in a slightly lower register on Time, removing the stereotypical “emo” whine and delivering in a more full-throated Justin Broadrick fashion, elongating his drawl to fit the spaciness of the music. It’s a contrast to the mid-’00s Midwestern emo yell of bassist Bobby Markos’ previous band, Native, where he was the vocalist despite never being entirely comfortable with the role. Such an approach wouldn’t work here, and his comfort in holding back shows. Softening their approach works in their favor in other ways: “Concrete Gallery” takes a noise-rock jangle that’s been beaten to death and washes it in cleans that strip the menace out and feels approachable. It slouches in instead of snarls forth, leaving the energy to where it’s needed.
When Cloakroom do rip into big riffs, it’s more than satisfying. “Seedless Star” takes the “Paperweight” role as the most charging song of the record. They understand the appeal of the riff and how a simple driving line can go a long way. “Seedless Star” would work as an up-tempo doom song without the shoegaze elements, and with them, the sorrow neck-and-neck with the righteous guitar is amplified. While it appeals to a more base sense, it’s also a smarter take than loudness for the sake of loudness.
Time replicates a half-awake state: it’s not so dreamy that it gets unmoored in endless seas of effects, and yet the heavy guitars, appealing as they are, aren’t exactly a dominating gravitational force. “52hz Whale’s” drone is as light as any of the less heavy moments here, and “Gone” and “Big World” both recall the trudge of Earth’s Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. Martin’s voice also plays into this vibe; it’s soothing but cryptic, not exactly a lullaby. (He’s a professed black metal fan, so it makes sense that his voice isn’t always forthcoming.) These dynamics reveal a tenderness that’s often lost by going on either extreme. Time will make as much sense in a loud rock club as it will alone in a room lit only by faint lights. Cloakroom inhabit the space of artists who take the appealing parts of a masculine pose without being wholly trapped by them. There’s a power that comes from not having to choose between being tough and being vulnerable. | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Relapse | August 21, 2017 | 7.3 | 4c344ff2-9ccc-486e-b5aa-85b1d605a8af | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The heavy Bay Area band’s eleventh and latest full-length is also their briefest by a sizable margin. It sags often, but Fires With Fires ends with a staggering exhibition of quiet power. | The heavy Bay Area band’s eleventh and latest full-length is also their briefest by a sizable margin. It sags often, but Fires With Fires ends with a staggering exhibition of quiet power. | Neurosis: Fires Within Fires | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22476-fires-within-fires/ | Fires Within Fires | Ambition has long been Neurosis’ hallmark. When the Bay Area band, which started out playing crust-caked hardcore in the ’80s, turned toward longer songs and stranger textures on 1990’s The Word As Law, there was no blueprint to follow. Instead, they spent the next decade forging one barrier-obliterating album after the next. By 1999’s Time of Grace—released with an ambient companion album by Neurosis’ alter ego, Tribes of Neurot, which was meant to be played on top of Times of Grace—the group had morphed into an entity of ritualism, dark spectacle, and metaphysical sprawl. Since then, they’ve gradually whittled down their vision to a more manageable size, but even then, their prodigious albums never fell below the hour-long mark. Yet their eleventh and latest full-length—the 41-minute-long Fires Within Fires—is, by a sizable margin, their briefest album since The Word As Law came out 26 years ago.
Granted, there are more ways to gauge ambition than album length. But for Neurosis, the mystique of milestones like Souls at Zero and Enemy of the Sun went hand in hand with how far they were willing to push themselves. Neurosis’ music is meant to be immersive, a labyrinth, something to be wandered into warily and only eventually escaped from. That gravity is largely lacking in Fires. Sure, the tracks are heavy as ever, from the vein-bursting riff-mongery of “Bending Light” to the more corrosive future-psychedelia of “A Shadow Memory” and “Fire Is the End Lesson.” The last features some tried-and-true, staccato-vocal interplay between guitarists Scott Kelly and Steven Von Till, but it doesn’t add up to much more than an exercise in the familiar. “Bending Light” doesn’t even properly feature Neurosis’ main strength—the layering of instruments to an inhuman degree of atmospheric density. Instead, everyone is just kind of playing at the same time. When the inevitable soft part lurches clumsily into the inevitable hard part, the loudest sound is a checklist being checked.
Fires sags in both the beginning and the middle, but it ends, however lopsidedly, with a staggering exhibition of quiet power. “Broken Ground” and “Reach” are cut from whole cloth, concluding the album with a combined 20 minutes of hushed, chanted, circular folk-metal. That said, “Broken Ground” works so well because it sounds like one of Von Till’s solo songs that just so happens to be fleshed out by Neurosis. This is where the band’s heart seems to reside circa 2016—in a convocation of towering, cosmos-scraping arpeggios and eschatological warnings about “psychic waves” and “the end of all we’ve seen” that’s more Swans and Lungfish than the old sludge-and-doom routine. Why Neurosis hasn’t committed to this subtle, skeletal approach more fully on Fires is anyone’s guess, but the album suffers for that indecision. As good as these final two songs are, they’re not enough. At only 40 minutes total, Fires feels like it’s over just as it should be hitting its climax.
If one of the album’s weaker tracks, like “Bending Light,” were to be removed, this would be a solid, four-song EP of the same duration and scope as 2000’s respectable Sovereign. Instead, it’s neither fish nor fowl: Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP. There’s no shame in this, but at this point in their career Neurosis are being vastly outperformed by a legion of younger bands they’ve influenced, from Pallbearer to Inter Arma to Dead to a Dying World. That doesn’t in any way diminish what Neurosis has accomplished over the decades; these younger bands have yet to touch the horrific magnificence of Neurosis’ 1996 masterpiece Through Silver in Blood. But as that album celebrates its twentieth anniversary, it’s becoming clearer that these days Neurosis are fueled less by ambition and more by reiteration. | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Neurot | October 6, 2016 | 7.1 | 4c35735c-0e29-4970-98eb-7f81ddeeccbc | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Recorded in the storied Funkhaus studio in Germany, All Melody is pianist Nils Frahm’s grandest statement yet, yet it maintains the inquisitive, exploratory spirit of his most playful recordings. | Recorded in the storied Funkhaus studio in Germany, All Melody is pianist Nils Frahm’s grandest statement yet, yet it maintains the inquisitive, exploratory spirit of his most playful recordings. | Nils Frahm: All Melody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nils-frahm-all-melody/ | All Melody | It’s hard for Nils Frahm to resist the pull of a good concept. For 2011’s Felt, the German pianist draped a heavy cloth over the strings of his instrument—a gesture of respect for his neighbors that yielded an alluringly tactile sound. The following year’s Screws, written and recorded with a broken thumb, comprised nine songs for nine fingers. And the year after that, to capture the grandeur of his live shows—neoclassical, post-techno, maximally minimalist affairs performed on multiple acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments, in the spread-eagled style of the progressive-rock keyboardists of yore—he collaged Spaces out of two years’ worth of thrumming, rippling concert recordings. But a recent collaboration with the German musician F.S. Blumm proved that he’s just as good, if not better, without a big conceptual framework to prop him up. Their album Tag Eins Tag Zwei is a wonderfully low-key set of improvisations.
All Melody is Frahm’s first major work since 2015’s Solo, and it feels like his biggest statement yet. He has fleshed out his usual arsenal of keyboard instruments—piano, synthesizer, pipe organ, etc.—with strings, trumpet, tympani, gongs, even bass marimba. The whole thing was recorded in the Funkhaus, a 1950s-era recording complex in the former East Berlin where he spent two years painstakingly building his dream room, right down to a custom-built mixing desk. The album’s rich dynamics are a direct extension of that building’s pristine acoustics. He availed himself of the Funkhaus’ natural reverb chambers—concrete rooms into which sound is projected and re-recorded—and he fashioned his own jury-rigged version out of a dry well at a friend’s house on the Spanish island of Mallorca. There’s even a choir, London’s Shards, whose wordless voices open the album on “The Whole Universe Wants to Be Touched,” a bold scene-setter whose melody moves like wind through reeds. The title alone suggests that Frahm is swinging for the fences.
But All Melody never feels imposing or overwrought. Despite its ambitious scope and somber mood, it is infused with the same exploratory spirit that made Tag Eins Tag Zwei such a delight. True, it’s not a wildly varied record: The tempos are generally slow, the moods contemplative, the melancholy almost all-pervasive. But within that framework, he explores as much ground as he can, from grand, sweeping choral passages reminiscent of Arvo Pärt to understated piano études. “Human Range,” where a silvery trumpet melody tangles with a mossy ambient backing, is reminiscent of Bill Laswell’s extended remix of the Miles Davis catalog; the more electronic, rhythmically oriented cuts, particularly the twin centerpieces “All Melody” and “#2,” find common cause with the British producer Floating Points’ way of balancing programmed and improvised music.
If there’s a theme here, it’s that holistic idea hinted at in the title: the ur-sound, the pedal tone of spiritual unity. In the liner notes, Frahm rhapsodizes about the morphological orchestra of his dreams: “My pipe organ would turn into a drum machine, while my drum machine would sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes. I would turn my piano into my very voice, and any voice into a ringing string.” That sense of fluidity gives the record its shape-shifting identity. It’s often unclear what you’re listening to at any given moment; even songs that sound like solo piano turn out to have cello and bass marimba lurking somewhere within their folds. Turn it up loud enough, and you can get lost in details like the creaking of the hammers on Frahm’s piano, or the sound of birdsong, presumably recorded outside his riverside studio, along the banks of the Spree.
The Funkhaus is a mazelike complex, and the way the record is structured often feels like a scale model of its sprawl. Across 12 songs and 74 minutes, All Melody functions as a single, cohesive piece of music, with recurring themes interwoven throughout. It’s easy to get lost in the album and then, hearing a familiar motif, come up short, as if turning a corner in a long hallway and wondering if you hadn’t passed the same spot just a moment ago. It’s a pleasantly disorienting sensation. And after traversing long, repetitive tracks like “Sunson,” “All Melody,” and “#2,” encountering a highlight like “Forever Changeless,” a short, melodic sketch for piano, feels like stumbling upon a hidden chamber illuminated by a stained-glass window.
Yes, he can be tasteful to a fault, and some of his melodic instincts occasionally tip slightly too far toward drawing-room prettiness. But the gorgeous closing track, “Harm Hymn”—a kind of coda for the whole album, just a handful of chords played on a whisper-soft harmonium—shows that his strength as a musician isn’t in the complexity of his composition, but in the nuances he gets out of his instruments and onto the tape; it’s in the echo and in the air, and in the way that he plays the room itself. For once in his career, there is no grand concept—just the space of the Funkhaus itself, which proves to be more than enough. | 2018-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | January 24, 2018 | 7.8 | 4c3d1ac6-2392-4063-84b1-d936c7478312 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Brooklyn quintet explore the parallels between small-town drama and big-city alienation. | Brooklyn quintet explore the parallels between small-town drama and big-city alienation. | The National: Alligator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5719-alligator/ | Alligator | The National are stuck somewhere in the emotional recesses of life, the characters in their songs adrift on roads both literal and metaphorical. They're stuck between the country and the city, but not in the suburban or exurban senses-- their music reveals the parallels between small-town everybody-knows-everybody drama and big-city alienation. The Brooklyn (via Cincinnati) quintet engage with their American anxiety with a somewhat European elegance, and Alligator-- their third album and first for Beggars Banquet-- finds them pushing the tempos and trying on bigger shoes without losing the stately sense of pacing and dour melody that made their first two albums so pleasing.
Drummer Bryan Devendorf is the backbone of Alligator, his efficient, well-textured timekeeping featuring high in the mix and neatly delineating the band's newfound sense of rhythmic consistency. The music around him moves between lushness and austerity, bursting with chamber pop ornament and collapsing into wasted after-hours reverie. Matt Berninger's dry baritone deadpan is strangely emotional-- at times he almost sounds too tired of life to aim for a high note, and it brings an odd honesty to lines like "I'm sorry for everything." As he repeats the line over the violins and roiling guitars of "Baby, We'll Be Fine", he seems as if he's not only apologizing for everything he's ever done, but also everything that's ever happened that he couldn't control.
The slower, piano-driven death-pop of "Karen" offers some unusual chord progressions as Berninger warns a fading lover: "Whatever you do, listen/ You better wait for me/ No, I wouldn't go out alone into America." "This isn't me, you just haven't seen my good side yet," he tells her, but he's obviously doomed and he grows more desperate as metaphorical black birds circle his bed. On "Lit Up", he grows more confident, even swaggering: "My body guard shows a revolver to anyone who asks" he deadpans gracefully over jagged electric guitars, while his band shouts along for the chorus. The shouted chorus returns for the "Thunder Road"-sized rocker "Abel", the closest the National have come to writing an anthem.
Massed vocals and backing harmonies are two of the few things the National have added to their sound since their last album, and though Alligator is satisfying and engaging, it's not quite as bracing as their stellar sophomore outing, 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. Still, the band's nocturnal vision of American pavement and deteriorated personal relations is engrossing, revealing itself slowly, peeling back the luxuriant layers and exposing intricate detail. | 2005-04-04T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-04-04T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | April 4, 2005 | 7.9 | 4c467c8b-b6c2-4031-9458-abc91b0a72b6 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Promising band issues its second album and looks to build on compelling indie pop gem "Roscoe". | Promising band issues its second album and looks to build on compelling indie pop gem "Roscoe". | Midlake: The Trials of Van Occupanther | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9191-the-trials-of-van-occupanther/ | The Trials of Van Occupanther | The future ain't what it used to be, so these days the past can seem like a thing of the future. To wit: The sophomore LP by Texas-based rock group Midlake opened at #14 on the UK indie charts more than a month before gracing its sullen native shores. Similarly, Midlake take a step back from the synth-age psychedelia of their solid 2004 debut Bamnan and Slivercork on follow-up The Trials of Van Occupanther, an encouraging but ultimately disappointing contemplation of time's ceaselessness, love's promise, and Harvest-era Neil Young.
Speaking of time, Midlake waste little at first. Opener "Roscoe" keeps getting compared to Fleetwood Mac but actually comes closer to the pristine, high-concept chug of the Alan Parsons Project's paranoid 1982 hit "Eye in the Sky" (in a good way, gang) or the similarly anxious space-rock of the late Grandaddy. "Whenever I was a child, I wondered/ What if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe/ Been born in 1891, waiting with my Aunt Rosaline," whispers frontman Tim Smith, his phrasing elusive, his grassy tenor warming into multi-part harmonies after one of the year's most casually compelling pop moments.
Alas, nothing else here comes close: A fuzzy guitar solo goes Lindsay Buckingham's way on the legitimately Mac-like "Head Home"; monotonous single "Young Bride" chases ramshackle dance beats and skittery violins through a haunted and hookless forest; and "Bandits" pairs anachronistic wit ("Do you want to be overrun by bandits?") with mild woodwinds, an acoustic intro recalling "Mother Nature's Son", and gray Coldplay piano.
Throughout the album, the desperation for meaningful human contact glimpsed in the record's lonesome centerpiece "Van Occupanther" underpins images of mountaineers, stonecutters, and frozen pines. The album's second most affecting track, horn-sprouting "Branches", further illuminates the protagonist's heartbreak through ominous minor sevenths, "Exit Music (for a Film)" triad-inversion segues, and a canny reference to the Jackson Browne-penned classic "These Days". "It's hard for me but I'm trying," Smith delicately repeats, his voice falling between Young's woozy falsetto and the sinuous timbres of Thom Yorke. The second half of the disc, however, drags amid bell-like vintage synths, pastoral singer/songwriter strums, and a stolid mountain of midtempo melancholy. "On a clear day I can see my old house and my wife," intones Smith, still struggling against the passing seasons for an irrecoverable romance.
After Bamnan and Slivercork's Flaming Lips progressivism, The Trials of Van Occupanther may seem like a retreat. Yet despite all the shag-carpet throwbacks, Midlake's new one rises above retro pastiche to probe its central character, the lovelorn, calendar-confined Van Occupanther; spacey production and allusive songwriting mark the album as a present-day artifact. "We'll pass by for the last time," the disc concludes, but surely a band this promising will be back for more. | 2006-07-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-07-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Bella Union | July 25, 2006 | 6.8 | 4c47d0c3-6212-42d7-b1d8-3ea56c3de755 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The uncompromising UK art-pop group returns with a record that continues down the path of Two Dancers, paring its sound down even further. | The uncompromising UK art-pop group returns with a record that continues down the path of Two Dancers, paring its sound down even further. | Wild Beasts: Smother | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15436-smother/ | Smother | "It's about saying, are you going to come in and listen or not? Because if you're not, we're not going to accommodate you, to let you be part of and involved in this intimacy." That's Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe speaking to The Quietus this week on both Smother, his band's latest, as well as the unmanageable position in which they've found themselves at home in England over the years. When the relatively isolated Kendal four-piece first arrived on the scene in 2007, their brand of flamboyant, almost vaudevillian indie rock was peerless in a landscape dominated by Arctic Monkeys and post-Libertines lad rockers. Thorpe's voice in particular-- a song-carrying instrument that moves between frilly falsetto and bulldog growl-- divided at most turns. You were either compelled to hang on every jagged syllable or run the other way.
And then they decided to streamline some: For the curvy art-funk of 2009's Two Dancers, they reigned in their more baroque tendencies. Thorpe brushed his voice soft, the lower register croon of bassist Tom Fleming was worked in further to act as anchor, and a band that seemed too difficult and bizarre to shoehorn into the pop conversation was sorta kinda flirting with exactly that. Well, that's how it looked from the outside.
Despite the many critical successes of that album, Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that's why it succeeds. Thorpe and Co. have continued down the path of Two Dancers, paring their sound down even further. What they're left with is naked in arrangement, nocturnal in tone, and deeply, deeply sensual. And that, actually, seems to be the "intimacy" to which Thorpe intimated in conversation with The Quietus. From the first moments of "Lion's Share", an opening, piano-led crescendo: "I wait until you're woozy, I wait until you're lame/ I take you in my mouth like the lion takes its game." It's a line he delivers in a very controlled, sympathetic manner, one that would have stumbled out of his mouth four years ago.
And while the dimpled electronic grooves of Smother do make for close listening, Thorpe's overtly sexual couplets provide a slinky analog to the sonics at play. In "Bed of Nails", a melodic marvel in its own right, he uses a skittering bridge to proffer a few grunts, howls, and moans. But again, what makes this all work so well is the remarkable amount of restraint and rhythmic know-how these four employ. This band has come long way in that regard-- it's not easy to integrate the sounds of sex into song without coming off like the kind of guy with a favorite tree from which to creep.
Additionally, all of these songs undress very beautifully on their own terms as well. The ribbons of guitar that bind "Loop the Loop" together at its halfway point are stunning, praises that can also be sung for the acupunctural textures of closing beauty "End Come to Soon". Wild Beasts have never been an especially easy outfit to connect to either forebears or contemporaries, but here they've found certain amount of kinship in the dusky, liberated grooves of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis. You can hear it in the somber tick-tocking of "Invisible", just as much as the orbit of single "Albatross". But that's about as strong a link as you're likely to find, a feat in its own right. This is gloriously layered music that opts to celebrate its quirks and cowlicks rather than suppress them. Organically. There's a great amount of comfort that comes in hearing something like that. Thorpe delivers a unforgettable line in the circular prowl of "Plaything", a new age sex jam if there ever was one. "New squeeze, take off your chemise, and I'll do as I please," he quivers. "I'm not any kind of heartthrob, but at the same time I'm not any kind of slob." He makes a good point. | 2011-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | May 13, 2011 | 8.2 | 4c4ccb9d-2d63-40b9-a388-83f869a600c0 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
The Hague-based composer and pianist explores music’s transcendent qualities on an album of minimalist piano with subtle new-age overtones. | The Hague-based composer and pianist explores music’s transcendent qualities on an album of minimalist piano with subtle new-age overtones. | Leo Svirsky: River Without Banks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leo-svirsky-river-without-banks/ | River Without Banks | In Russian musicologist Henry Orlov’s book Tree of Music, a chapter titled “A River Without Banks” details a throughline between several types of sacred music, including Gregorian chants, Indian ragas, African drumming, and Indonesian gamelan. Orlov argues that art allows people to become participants in a “higher reality” and experience “symbolically significant change.” Leo Svirsky first learned about music’s transcendent qualities from his childhood piano teacher Irena Orlov, Henry Orlov’s wife. Following her death last year, Svirsky affectionately wrote that she taught him “how music is alive, how when we play music we tell someone’s story.” Dedicated to Irena and borrowing its title from Henry’s writing, River Without Banks is a minimalistic piano record that’s informed by the Orlovs’ grand musical philosophy—Svirsky’s monument to the importance of their teachings.
River Without Banks establishes its overarching mood within the first few seconds. Stately piano notes reverberate, their fluid melodies creating a hypnotic rhythm amplified by simple delay effects. The atmosphere is simultaneously dreamy and homey; the opening track’s title, “Field of Reeds,” refers to the paradisiacal location that ancient Egyptians believed they would travel to in the afterlife. Periodically, sounds that draw attention to Svirsky’s presence (most notably, the thump of the pedals) contribute to the arresting intimacy of the composition and its performance; these quotidian noises ground the sublime piece with a needed sense of humanness, bridging the gap between the earthly and celestial.
Svirsky’s River Without Banks is far more melodic than his previous output. His duo with Katt Hernandez relished in exuberant atonality and a brash style of playing. Heights in Depths, on the other hand, explored static drones and their associated psychoacoustic phenomena. River Without Banks most recalls a mixture of other artists’ works: the relentless piano minimalism of Charlemagne Palestine or Lubomyr Melnyk, the tenderness of Erik Satie’s compositions, the resplendence of new age. It’s all shrouded in a telestic aura, contemplative and heartening and unpretentious. In “Trembling Instants,” cascading piano melodies are enveloped in a cloud of ambience, their continual playing less like rigid latticework than impressionistic filigrees. Equally soothing is the more modest “Fanfare (after Jeromos Kamphuis),” where sparse, delicate chords evoke a sense of serenity. Like Svirsky, the titular Kamphuis also lives in the Hague and has studied under composer Antoine Beuger; the track feels like a small but heartfelt celebration of their friendship.
The majority of the album is characterized by Svirsky’s piano, with other instruments—many of which are played by other musicians—rounding out each track. On “Rain, Rivers, Forest, Corn, Wind, Sand,” the interwoven sounds of double bass, wind gong, and trumpet create layered but cohesive drones. Their unobtrusiveness allows for the piano to freely traverse different rhythms and moods. From expressive tone clusters to a whimsical frolic to a more percussive staccato style, Svirsky’s piano conjures a picturesque view of nature’s wondrous breadth. On the title track, the wavering rhythm mirrors the winding path of a river, while the countless notes feel like the bevy of different microorganisms that thrive therein. The song becomes more robust in its final third when double bass and a Tibetan singing bowl transform the piece into a lush musical tapestry fit for spiritual meditation.
It’s not always easy to tell when River Without Banks’ songs begin and end: The album’s six tracks aren’t considerably different from each other, neither musically nor emotionally. But this uniformity is what makes the album so immersive; it’s easy to become lost in its ruminative tone. In The Tree of Music, Henry Orlov noted that for people who are attuned to a particular type of sacred music—“to whom the music is his breath and movement”—their experience is heightened. They become “one with its flow,” and River Without Banks grants opportunities for just that. Svirsky’s album evokes a mystical sensation Orlov described as an “ever-lasting and therefore timeless now.” | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unseen Worlds | August 23, 2019 | 8 | 4c5727a3-860f-4db8-a631-94597d1368a0 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Following a searing, four-song demo tape released last year, Perfect Pussy's proper full-length debut Say Yes to Love is an unrelentingly intense experience—23 minutes of five people pushing themselves to their absolute limit. | Following a searing, four-song demo tape released last year, Perfect Pussy's proper full-length debut Say Yes to Love is an unrelentingly intense experience—23 minutes of five people pushing themselves to their absolute limit. | Perfect Pussy: Say Yes to Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19086-perfect-pussy-say-yes-to-love/ | Say Yes to Love | Syracuse five-piece Perfect Pussy sound like a hardcore band fronted by Joan of Arc: A swirling maelstrom of fire engulfs a singer who shouts with the ecstatic conviction of someone who would rather die than apologize. Following a searing, four-song demo tape released last year, their proper full-length debut Say Yes to Love is an unrelentingly intense experience—23 minutes of five people pushing themselves to their absolute limit. Frontwoman Meredith Graves has called the band's songs "happy revelations about incendiary events," and this remains the most fitting description of their music. It doesn’t feel corny or hyperbolic to call this record life-affirming, so perfectly does it capture the flashes of gratitude, self-knowledge, and inexplicable joy that often follow an experience of great pain.
A Perfect Pussy song comes together in layers, and the group’s writing process is a kind of sonic avalanche. Graves has said that her bandmates Ray McAndrew (guitar), Garrett Koloski (drums), and Greg Ambler (bass) usually record a totally clean track first, and then she and keyboardist Shaun Sutkus come in and "make noise on purpose." That approach gives these songs an energy that is both chaotic and collaborative—the instruments sound like they're wrestling each other for space instead of working in harmony. And the textures of the eight songs on Say Yes to Love are damaged but also luminous; even at its most assaultive moments, like the gale-force ripper "Advance Upon the Real", jangly chords and a bright melody shine defiantly somewhere below the surface.
Say Yes to Love is so relentlessly pummeling that it's almost meditative, and its songs are caked in so much sludge it's often hard to make out what Graves is saying. Until, very suddenly, it's not. You know the feeling when you're in a place that's so loud and crowded that you have to scream into the ear of the person next to you, and then suddenly the room goes quiet and now everyone can hear you? And how this always seems to happen when you're saying the most private and potentially embarrassing thing? In a Perfect Pussy song, this happens to Graves constantly—"AND I WANT TO FUCK MYSELF/ AND I WANT TO EAT MYSELF," she is caught saying in one of these moments of jolting clarity. But a great power emerges as she delivers even her most vulnerable lines without a twinge of shame. She sounds emboldened by silence, her presence growing to fill it, like a person whose voice has been stifled and is now overjoyed by the chance to be heard.
It's easy to be overtaken by the primal force of this music but there's also an incentive to dig deeper. Say Yes to Love is a convincing argument for reviving that practice of reading along with the lyrics while listening. Graves' lines are full of vivid, visceral, and often unsettling images ("You can read the story of my last six weeks/ In little black bruises and marks from boys' teeth") and the sort of bold confessions plenty of people wouldn't tell their best friends. And her delivery is at once shit-kickingly tough and childlike, sometimes reminiscent of Life Without Buildings vocalist Sue Tompkins' wide-eyed swagger.
Perfect Pussy have been criticized for the buried vocals and often unintelligible lyrics, but the approach serves a purpose. There's tension in this music between vulnerability and defenses, between the things we tell each other and the things we feel the need to keep hidden. The lyrics to songs like "Interference Fits" and "Dig" (which meditates on sex and violence) are so intense that hearing every word could almost be a distraction—it'd be hard to pay attention to anything else. So you're given a choice of how to experience these songs: You can lose yourself in the rush, or you can follow along and think more closely about what they're trying to say.
There are a few moments in "Big Stars" when the feedback squall sounds like it's bleeping out something Graves is saying. If it's intentional, it's a pretty good joke about arbitrary censorship—a topic Perfect Pussy know well as they've quickly gone from being evangelized in limited-run underground zines to being covered in publications too refined to print their name. But an irony that we're just starting to understand as a culture is that, for women in particular, the first word in Perfect Pussy's name is much more obscene than the second. If you're female, it's far more socially acceptable to express self-deprecation than self-love, and it's more acceptable for anybody to express numbly detached nihilism than Perfect Pussy's particular brand of hard-won, audaciously blazing joy. Something about Say Yes to Love—the way Graves' bright, confidently optimistic vocals are threatened to be drowned out at every turn—speaks to the forces that make women in our society feel like they must exist in a constant state of perceived inadequacy. And fuck all that, says Graves at the end of the careening "Dig": "If I'm anything less than perfection/ Well shit, nobody told me!" Say Yes to Love is one of the hardest and most jarring records I've heard in a long time, not because it's trying to shock you with darkness, but because it's unafraid to stare directly into the light. | 2014-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Captured Tracks | March 17, 2014 | 8.6 | 4c5a7a27-1c4e-4a83-bf8a-54933a2580d2 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Though former Drive-By Truckers member Jason Isbell's previous solo albums displayed promise with songwriting standouts, his new LP Southeastern is his most gripping and most personal album to date. | Though former Drive-By Truckers member Jason Isbell's previous solo albums displayed promise with songwriting standouts, his new LP Southeastern is his most gripping and most personal album to date. | Jason Isbell: Southeastern | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18283-jason-isbell-southeastern/ | Southeastern | In recent interviews with the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, Jason Isbell has been admirably forthcoming about his alcoholism, admitting that he can’t remember much of the time he spent with the Drive-By Truckers, who decided to move on without him after several attempts at rehabilation. Isbell's solo albums, especially his 2009 self-titled LP and 2011’s Here We Rest, ended up sounding cursory, as though he was trying too hard and not hard enough; there were too many go-nowhere genre excursions and not enough focused storytelling. It didn’t help that the music sounded too polished, too polite, too professional, with too little grit and personality.
Fortunately, Isbell’s story appears to have a happy third act. His friends confronted him about his drinking and checked him into rehab, and he emerged sober, determined, and newly focused. He got married (to the fiddler/songwriter Amanda Shires, who spearheaded his intervention), stayed clean, and recorded a new album*, Southeastern*. To his considerable credit, Isbell has very little interest in recounting his long fall or his darkest moments. This album doesn’t wallow in alcoholic squalor; its real subject is not what it means to hit rock bottom, but what happens after you pick yourself up. How do you allow yourself any kind of contentment or security when you’ve done such bad things? How do you live with that dark half lurking just offstage?
Isbell the storyteller knows this is rich subject matter, as the day-to-day conflict of not taking that next drink or not falling back into old ways proves much more compelling and humanizing than the non-conflict of simply bottoming out. That approach makes Southeastern his most gripping and his most personal album to date. “Live Oak”, the dark heart of the album, opens with Isbell singing a cappella: “There’s a man who walks besides me, he is who I used to be / I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me.” It’s a deeply revealing line, but “Live Oak” isn’t a direct confession from Isbell. Instead, it’s a piece of fiction about a murderer wandering Pre-Civil War America who finds tentative redemption with a forgiving woman. It does not have a happy ending.
Isbell inhabits similar men throughout Southeastern, and there’s a new clarity in these characters to match the new vigor in his voice. To an extent they become proxies to recount Isbell’s own recent transformation, which prevents the album from becoming too hermetically introverted. As a storyteller, he has a generous empathy toward the people inhabiting his songs, most of whom display a hard-won humanity despite the extremes of their situations.
On “Elephant”, a barfly tries to comfort a friend dying of cancer, unsure what to do but finally understanding that just being there and raising a toast is enough to ensure she doesn’t die alone. It’s an epic rebuke of those hideous cancer ballads that infected mainstream country music for so many years; when Rascal Flatts hear a line like, “There’s one thing that’s real clear to me: No one dies with dignity,” they ought to just pack in their Ed Hardy shirts and head home. An emotional kneecapping, “Elephant” is a standout on Southeastern, but for once it’s not one of two or three. Rather, it’s a crucial part of a statement album, one that draws as much from literary influences-- Peter Matthiessen, Shelby Foote, Colum McCann-- as from musical ones.
Southeastern is easily Isbell’s best solo album-- his most richly conceived and generously written. If it’s not quite the album that lives up to his considerable talents, it’s mostly the music that’s to blame. The production, courtesy of Dave Cobb, tends to buff away the rough edges of Isbell’s songs, which can rob his stories of impact and nuance. It’s not the 400 Unit backing him this time, but this group of musicians can’t sell the rocker “Super 8” or give it the boisterous urgency it demands. It threatens to become make-do country rock, lacking the specificity and idiosyncrasy of Isbell’s songwriting. Perhaps it’s fitting that the one instrument that stands out is Shires’ fiddle, which eddies and shimmies throughout “Traveling Alone” before adding a solo as eloquently understated as Isbell’s chorus. Of course they have chemistry. | 2013-07-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-07-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Thirty Tigers / Southeastern | July 11, 2013 | 7.7 | 4c605e42-bf02-41c5-b113-1f0fc9ca02a5 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Bowie was never more popular during this period, one he looked back on with guilt and bile. But Loving the Alien offers a reset for listeners—to hear these albums fresh, liberated from their composer’s dismissive opinions. | Bowie was never more popular during this period, one he looked back on with guilt and bile. But Loving the Alien offers a reset for listeners—to hear these albums fresh, liberated from their composer’s dismissive opinions. | David Bowie: Loving the Alien (1983-1988) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-loving-the-alien-1983-1988/ | Loving the Alien (1983-1988) | Every autumn since 2015, a new David Bowie career retrospective box set arrives. These are comprehensive (just about every remix and single/album edit is compiled, some albums even appear twice if their sequencing changed at some point) and yet incomplete (they omit bonus tracks found on Bowie’s early 1990s Rykodisc reissues). The apparent aim is an “official release” Bowie master narrative, in boxes sturdy enough to prop up a table.
Five Years (1969-1973) is the Major Tom/Ziggy Stardust figure eternally beloved by rock retrospectives; Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) is Kabbalist Plastic Soul Bowie; A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) is “Bowie in Berlin.” And the latest, Loving the Alien (1983-1988), is mass-consumption Bowie, the Man Who Sold (Himself To) the World. He was never more popular than in the period documented in these 11 discs (and 15 LPs): writing songs for kids’ movies, singing with Tina Turner for Pepsi, duetting with Mick Jagger for Live Aid, recording some of the biggest hits of his life.
It’s also a period with scant critical respect, a consensus that Bowie affirmed. He later rubbished many of his 1980s albums, calling them his “nadir,” claiming he was barely around while they were being made. As early as the Tin Machine era in 1989, he looked back on his ’80s with guilt and bile, acting as if he needed to quarantine himself from it. He even made up a story about burning his Glass Spider prop in a field at the end of his 1987 tour, a sacrificial bonfire of his mass-market ambitions (in truth, it was disassembled and sold for scrap). So Loving the Alien offers a reset for listeners—to hear these albums fresh, liberated from their composer’s dismissive opinions.
In January 1983, Bowie signed a lucrative multi-album deal with EMI and hired Nile Rodgers to make him some hits. If still considered to be as major an artist as Fleetwood Mac or Michael Jackson, he was nowhere in their league in terms of units shifted. So the massive global success of Let’s Dance was no fluke—the album was planned as intricately as a troop landing or royal wedding. Made with economy (as Bowie hadn’t signed with a label yet, he funded the sessions and watched every penny like a hawk) and recorded and mixed in less than three weeks, Let’s Dance was an EP’s worth of songs padded out with covers and remakes—one of which, a new version of his and Iggy Pop’s “China Girl,” was a sure-fire hit, Bowie predicted. He was right.
He was ready-made for MTV, but Let’s Dance was also a counter-move: an “organic” soul- and jazz-influenced sound instead of synth pop, even if having some of most colossal gated drums heard on a rock album to date. It was hooky, its tracks given booming sing-along choruses, its players included Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Chic rhythm section. And it had a remorseless sequencing: Its first side is three hit singles, back to back to back, with “Without You” as a cooling dish. The rest of the album is more or less B-sides, some odd (“Ricochet” mixes W.H. Auden with a clunking attempt at West African highlife), some ghastly (“Shake It,” whose refrain is the theme of a game show in hell). Let’s Dance had enough Bowie weirdness to make it stand out from other 1983 hit albums—“visions of swastikas” in “China Girl;” the cheery nihilism of “Modern Love”; the dark undercurrent in “Let’s Dance,” a lonely, desperate song beneath its trappings.
To crown his chart successes, he toured throughout 1983. Its document is Serious Moonlight, a Vancouver live recording heretofore only available as a DVD. Serious Moonlight is him starring as the jet-setting author of “David Bowie songs,” taking audiences through a guided tour of his catalog. Setlists were more adventurous than one might expect (Lodger’s “Red Sails” made the cut, “Suffragette City” didn’t) and the core of the band—Carlos Alomar, Carmine Rojas and Tony Thompson—were a supple unit who likely grooved better without Stevie Ray Vaughan as lead guitarist. Playing to the biggest crowds of his life, the tour kicked off his “Phil Collins” years, Bowie later said. Audiences were an uneasy mix of glamsters with lightning bolts painted on their faces and yuppies who woke up whenever Bowie played a new hit.
Tonight (1984) was the hangover: a curious, well-recorded, and often terrible record. Moods fluctuate from brittle exuberance to sleep-stung exhaustion to whatever Bowie channeled for his nightmare interpretation of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” It was the result of Bowie, mere months after his tour ended, stuck in Canada making a self-loathing album that he lost faith in midway through, opting to reuse “the EP’s worth of new tracks larded with covers and remakes” formula. Amid supper-club reggae (“Tonight,” “Don’t Look Down”) and amateur-hour rock opera (“Neighborhood Threat”), its few bright spots were “Blue Jean,” one of his most charming minor hits, the throw-anything-at-the-wall Iggy Pop and Bowie duet “Dancing With the Big Boys” (“Death to the trees!” “Your family is a football team!”) and the box set’s title track, “Loving the Alien,” a song that moves awkwardly, yearning to be a masterwork and falling short.
He didn’t tour Tonight, barely promoted it, soon wrote it off. That said, the album was still a hit—going platinum in months, reaching No. 1 in the UK. Re: Call 4, the latest edition of the “singles and oddments” disc that’s in all of these Bowie sets, collects the rest of Bowie’s mid-1980s commercial peak. He was inspired by contract work, cutting tracks for four different films. Some were his best songs of the decade: “This Is Not America,” with the Pat Metheny Group; the beautiful, doom-struck “When the Wind Blows” for Jimmy T. Murakami’s anti-nuclear-war film; and his last grand moment as a pop singer—“Absolute Beginners,” the theme for a Julien Temple musical, and which nearly became a UK No. 1. Loving the Alien also has Dance, a collection of remixes. An earlier version was proposed in 1985 as a stop-gap compilation and blessedly wasn’t issued at the time, although Arthur Baker’s remixed “Dancing With the Big Boys” is even more garish fun than the original.
The set’s centerpiece is Never Let Me Down (1987). Unlike Tonight, this was no contractual-obligation record. He labored over it and returned to hard rock, updating Ziggy Stardust for the late Reagan years. His songs would offer social commentary while also inspiring interpretative dances on tour; he even played some guitar solos. It wound up being an overcrowded, exhausting record whose aesthetic is a puree of Judge Dredd and Heavy Metal, the film Streets of Fire, mid-1980s “Doctor Who,” and BBC documentaries on “urban scenes” in New York and L.A. There were attempts at Neil Young eco-horror (“Time Will Crawl”) and reviving the Beatles as Day-Glo zombies (“Zeroes”).
While its first side was a solid run of tracks, the album fell apart on the flip, which has some of the most gruesome compositions Bowie ever wrote. (He considered “Too Dizzy” so irredeemable that he cut it from reissues: Its exile continues on this set). There were too many ideas, too many competing needs, too many overdubs. Some of Never Let Me Down sounds as if it’s been stitched together in a moving car. See “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love),” which has Jim Carroll dopers, Joe Strummer mercenaries, a Mickey Rourke rap, Prince and Smokey Robinson cosplay vocals, and Bowie singing “I-could-make-you-hap-py-ev’-ry-god-damn-sin-gle-day-of-your-life!” as if he was reading off a Telex in the vocal booth.
For all of its flaws, Never Let Me Down has a unity—the album has a somewhat charming period-piece feel to it now. It’s one of the most time-stamped “1987” records ever made. In its retooled, rearranged, and remastered form, Never Let Me Down 2018 often comes off as an upper that’s been turned into a downer—a song as gauche as “Beat of Your Drum,” a “Lolita number” (as per its composer) sung by Bowie all but resuming the role of Jareth the Goblin King and singing “I like the smell of your flesh!” is now weirdly somber. As Bowie’s vocals remain from the original record, and as these were over-the-top performances to ensure Bowie stood out in the traffic-jam mixes, hearing these vocals over downtempo and sparse new backing tracks can be jarring. The revised “Zeroes” in particular feels off, with Bowie’s vocals (and Peter Frampton’s sitar, an odd holdover from the original track) and the new backing tracks sounding as if they were taped at different speeds.
There are inspired revisions. The new “Glass Spider” makes Bowie’s most Spinal Tap performance legitimately eerie while preserving its “wait, what?” sense of absurdity. Exhumed horns on “Day-In Day-Out,” which had been replaced by synthesizer stabs on the original album, give that track more bite. But there are questionable calls. Why turn “Shining Star” into a bad song from the early 1990s, and replace poor Mickey Rourke with Laurie Anderson, who has a cool, wry presence but still says lines like “blew heads out of shape in the name of Trotsky, Sinn Fein, Hitler, cash down”? And the sweet “Never Let Me Down” feels overworked with Nico Muhly’s strings, like a colorized film. The remake doesn’t improve on Never Let Me Down as much as it honors the original’s all-over-the-place frustration; it’s an interesting curio.
Loving the Alien also has a Glass Spider tour performance which had only been available as part of a multi-media set in the 2000s. As the original sounded like a bootleg soundboard recording, it’s sonically an improvement at least. The tour was Bowie attempting things he’d do better at other times—filling setlists with mostly new or relatively obscure songs; having percussive dancers. Like much of his ’80s, Glass Spider offers more than the standard take suggests, if it’s still a holy mess at times. In Bowie’s highest-profile era, his work had a particular degree of tension—he wanted to make hits, he couldn’t quite do it sometimes, he half-hated doing it. Mass-market Bowie was still an oddity. | 2018-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 20, 2018 | 7.1 | 4c655fac-12b6-4c68-b387-9894a3451461 | Chris O’Leary | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o’leary/ | |
The UK musician’s latest release is her most substantial work yet, adding a new sense of momentum to her ambient dream pop. | The UK musician’s latest release is her most substantial work yet, adding a new sense of momentum to her ambient dream pop. | Lucy Gooch: Rain’s Break | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-gooch-rains-break/ | Rain’s Break | Using her voice, a synthesizer, some reverb, and little else, Lucy Gooch makes music of surprising complexity. Graceful and unhurried, it could soundtrack dramatic aerial footage of natural wonders: mountain vistas, sweeping steppes, glaciers calving into the sea. Its billowing dimensions and cloud-like shapes resemble ambient music; it is atmospheric in the extreme. But where ambient music’s runtimes can often sprawl into the double digits, Gooch’s work rarely breaks the three-and-a-half-minute mark. These are pop songs cloaked in cascading vocal harmonies and opulent robes of reverb. Imagine a garment that could make the wearer’s limbs resemble ocean waves: That’s what Gooch’s flowing production does to the trim melodic frames she drapes it over.
Born and raised in Norfolk, England, and currently based in Bristol, Gooch debuted last year with Rushing, a five-song EP that framed the dream pop of the Cocteau Twins in the language of sacred music, right down to the church organ on the title track and the Old Testament psalms she quoted in its lyrics. A similar air of mysticism permeates Rain’s Break; her songwriting and sound design alike are radiant and suffused in wonder. In the hands of a less talented artist, music so keenly focused on transcendent feeling is a risky proposition; it can easily tip into kitsch, or worse, pure hokum. But on Rain’s Break, Gooch manages to keep pushing outward while remaining grounded.
Like her debut, Rain’s Break has five songs; the EP is actually 30 seconds shorter than its predecessor, yet it feels bigger and more substantial. Gooch says that she upgraded her synthesizer on this record from a Roland to a Prophet, which perhaps accounts for the added sense of presence in her keys. Her synths have extra bite here, an almost imperceptible hint of serration in their edges, and she uses them in new ways. While pneumatic chords and buzzing organs remain her stock in trade, she also experiments with staccato textures and subtle pitch-bend effects that give her songwriting a newfound sense of movement.
In music this spare, patience is everything. Gooch lets the contours of her synthesizer dictate the pace of the title track; her call-and-response vocals follow the breath-like rhythm of the notes as they swell and decay. Many of the record’s songs drift through multiple movements and even the occasional key change. The first two minutes of “It Brings Me Back to You” are taken up by the back-and-forth motion of soft, unobtrusive string synths. Then, just as you are lulled to the point of distraction, the notes fade, and her voice rings out above a plucked bassline: “Oh and the silence, it brings me back to you.” Suddenly, we are seated alongside Enya, rigging slapping against the mast—an unexpected and delightful place to be. Still, despite the songs’ tendency to wander, they betray no trace of excess. Gooch has said that many were pared down from three- or four-part suites; the editing has served them well. For an artist whose favorite trick is the seemingly infinite crescendo, she clearly knows the value of restraint.
Gooch cites the influence of postwar British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s sumptuous use of color and atmosphere—Raymond Chandler wrote of their 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going!, “I’ve never seen a picture which smelled of the wind and rain in quite this way”—and even for those unacquainted with their work, it’s easy to see how the language of cinema has inspired her songwriting. Her imagistic lyrics (“Coloured in ash and orange”; “Rain falls hard on leather leaves”) lend to the music’s synesthetic pull, contributing to the overwhelming swirl of texture and color.
She has a lovely voice—clear, slightly breathy, and powerful in an understated way. Her vocal melodies are more agile than on the previous EP, her technique more ambitious. Like Elizabeth Fraser, Gooch sometimes sings in made-up syllables, but from there her lyrics morph into more clearly articulated ideas. There is a sense that she is homing in on private revelations: You can feel her pulling her thoughts out of the ether, mouthing the words before she is conscious of their meaning—a kind of divining trick. “I’ve been living with a quiet ache,” she admits on the opening “Rain’s Break”; in the closing “Ash and Orange,” she allows a chord modulation to pave the way for a moment of catharsis: “In my head/In my heart/I take it with me wherever I go.”
The record’s apotheosis comes halfway through, on “Chained to a Woman.” The song begins with soft, chiming synths that gently echo Hiroshi Yoshimura’s GREEN; Gooch’s voice comes sneaking in like water rising in a flooded house. As she sings of a secret desire being expressed for the first time, the chords take on its shape, twisting and turning into sensuous new forms: “All those things that I suppressed in order to survive/They really weigh me, weigh me/Down to my inner world, a tulip with its wings unfurled.” The chords pivot and her harmonies stack like the stripes of a rainbow, blurrily laddering skyward: “Wanting to pretend/Wanting to pretend.” It is a stunning finale, the opposite of the song’s subdued beginning; her transformation feels embodied in each quivering waveform. Where Rushing sometimes seemed to use its layers of reverb like a weighted blanket, a therapeutic form of obfuscation, “Chained to a Woman” hits with the force of a revelation. Gooch’s dream pop is opening up new dimensions; the deeper she goes, the more she uncovers.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Fire | July 8, 2021 | 7.8 | 4c668325-168b-4747-badb-78b90d4e09db | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Nashville singer-songwriter’s second album is a deft and subtly surprising inquiry into romantic illusion. | The Nashville singer-songwriter’s second album is a deft and subtly surprising inquiry into romantic illusion. | Katy Kirby: Blue Raspberry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katy-kirby-blue-raspberry/ | Blue Raspberry | Nashville native Katy Kirby initiated her second album as a songwriting experiment—directing swooningly lovely country songs to an imagined female lover. Funny the things music can tell us about ourselves. Shortly after writing Blue Raspberry’s title track, Kirby entered her first queer relationship. The finished album is a thoroughly lived-in document of a complicated romance: no longer genre exercise in yearning but a philosophical inquiry into it.
On Blue Raspberry—which takes its name from an artificially flavored gas-station drink—Kirby positions her songs in between artifice and reality, dissecting the ruses, contrivances, and willful hallucinations that sustain romantic fantasy. She studs the album with suitably unsubtle metaphors: fake diamonds, glitter, candy. At first, the songs sound as unthinkingly lovely as anything within the “sapphic yearning” strain of indie pop (think Clairo or girl in red). Repeat listens reveal a more jagged and complex version of intimacy, one replete with well-navigated confusion and contradictions.
As a lyricist, Kirby is inventive and exhilarating, though she occasionally overwrites. Though each line on Blue Raspberry overflows with excellent, original ideas, she tends to pile them high rather than give them the breathing room they deserve. “You’re the prettiest mermaid in the souvenir shop/But if you’re coming home this late, you know you’d better be drunk,” she sings on “Cubic Zirconia,” allowing what should have been a hard-hitting rejoinder to fall flat.
The songs themselves are soft and sauntering, built around close-mic’d guitar and piano and occasionally offset with strange, barely perceptible flourishes that evoke subtle unease. On “Hand to Hand,” a high, quiet chirp rings out like a fire alarm in heaven. On “Fences,” Kirby plays guitar as though she’s gently chucking it for wood. Throughout, she sustains a near-whisper, like she’s singing to a lover underneath a quilt. Her light-as-air melodicism helps take the weight off the more verbose lyrics.
Kirby’s best writing shows off her talent for contracting abstract ideas into the kinds of pithy lines that inspire furious underlining. She describes romance as “diminutive contrition”; falling in love “a carpet bomb of estrogen.” Her ability to give clarity to chaotic, contradictory forces sets her apart. She holds a poetic fascination with metaphorical fences, for instance; the ways in which they both excite and evade intimacy. “Good neighbors make good fences,” she sings on “Wait Listen.” It’s a heady reversal, rendered so tersely as to obscure the brainwork behind it. Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend. | 2024-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | February 5, 2024 | 7.4 | 4c6ff762-8ed1-43fd-9ad5-3fa1bce9a113 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The expanded reissue of Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney's Sebadoh debut now features 52 tracks (up from 32), turning something once familiar into a gargantuan 79-minute lo-fi opera. | The expanded reissue of Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney's Sebadoh debut now features 52 tracks (up from 32), turning something once familiar into a gargantuan 79-minute lo-fi opera. | Sebadoh: The Freed Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10448-the-freed-man/ | The Freed Man | "My soulmate is a special girl, a girl that's just like me/ She'll share tremendous oral sex and try everything she sees/ She won't be insane or hung up like most other girls/ I'll worship her until it hurts, 'cause she's on top of my world." Those lines open Lou Barlow's wonderfully warbled love ballad "Soulmate"-- on which, in less than two minutes, the gently tapping troubadour collapses into a hyper-strummed folk implosion. It's what I remembered most from Sebadoh's The Freed Man. I played the cassette version obsessively when it was released by Homestead; until recently, I hadn't heard it in close to a decade. It's weird what you forget.
When the expanded reissue of Sebadoh's debut outing arrived on the doorstep, I dug through the boxes in my closet containing seriously musty Shrimper, Union Pole, Search For Terrestrial Intelligence, Eldest Son, and Catsup Plate cassettes. Beside two coffee-stained copies of Sentridoh's Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93, I uncovered a very worn The Freed Man Homestead original. The newbie has the same photo of Barlow and Eric Gaffney smiling and waving on the front. Listening to the oldie beside this expanded edition, though, is an entirely different experience.
For starters, Lou and Eric's original pre-Homestead cassette has more than doubled in length. That first version is an incredibly rare self-released edition of 25 or so copies -- 30 minutes with two 15-minute sides, as Gaffney told me via email. He explained, "I duped copies and sold those at Main Street Records, Northampton, MA for $1.00 in a box I made with Dr. Seuss art." I have the Homestead cassette (32 songs), but was too cheap to splurge on the Homestead vinyl (which Gaffney told me was "muddy, botched, redone a 2nd time"). It's kind of like detective work piecing together all these drafts. Gaffney noted that this new 52-song reissue is actually the fourth version: "The reissue contains songs and versions (one each, not multiple) from the orignal cassette release... from the LP version [i.e. the Homestead version], a few of my songs, re-recorded, off The Freed Weed CD, and unreleased tracks, along with the 2nd and 3rd 'singles' and part of the first split." Got it? Probably not. Whatever the math, the extras and different mixes/takes shift something once familiar into a gargantuan 79-minute lo-fi opera. It's fascinating from an archival standpoint, and I love that Gaffney painstakingly organized a brand new collage.
This Freed Man is overstuffed and weird, studded with some duds, and entirely fitting. Part of the joy of early Sebadoh-- this collection through Bubble and Scrape, aka the Gaffney years-- is the clash of egos and brilliant songwriters. It's totally evident on this new version: 25 songs by Lou, 25 by Eric, and two covers, including a garage-punk take on the Beatles "Yellow Submarine". Pretty telling, right? To take it even further, the cassette was re-mastered at Abbey Road Studios.
It's a lot of fun reading the separate notes provided by each player and figuring out the different histories. Gaffney's liners provide background about the record and trivia about his songs. Barlow's are briefer, but still historical: He mentions his favorite song of the bunch ("Jealous Evil"), and includes the totally dead-on statement that "this record was intended to be a mess, a stinking garden of delights." Hence the swamp-side photo on the cover (also mentioned by Barlow). Contextual shit aside, it's just great to hear Lou's downer folk countered by Eric's noise-punk-- that massive push and pull.
Fittingly, random feedback invades even the album's prettiest ballads. Chaotic cut-and-paste cassette noise tramples ambling pop songs. Fragments are held together by 4-track tape experiments, thorny acoustic bits, psychedelic hardcore, samples of television and family time. After Gaffney left, the band felt emasculated and boring, so for a fan of the old shit, this is a rare treat. I remember certain days as a kid fast-forwarding through some of the noisier pieces to get to "Soulmate", Barlow's gently tapping "True Hardcore" ("True hardcore is forever young"), and "Healthy Sick", or cringing at the dorky "Lou Rap." Other days you stuck to Gaffney's amazing fuzzcore, like the bottomed out, phased "Nest".
In the extras it's amazing to find skeletons: The patterns of "Elements" reborn as III's manic finale, "As the World Dies the Eyes of God Grow Bigger". Or to remember the things that were there all along like the forgotten brass on "Punch in the Nose", the crazed screaming and bleeding sounds turning into the harmonizing pop nugget, "K-Sensa-My" (Barlow, '86). So many new discoveries, too: "Oak Street Raga", "Dance," "Fire of July", "Jaundice", "The Lorax". The earliest material is Barlow circa 1984 ("Pig", not yet freed) and the newest, a live version of Gaffney's "Attention" (Hadley, MA, 1990).
Of course, the irony of releasing The Freed Man now is pretty huge. The title was partly a response to Barlow's recent freedom from Dinosaur and his control-freak nemesis, J Mascis (his thoughts, not mine). At this point he's not only back with Dinosaur J, they managed to record a new record. It sounds great, sure, but it's divorced from the time that made it essential. This shit, though, is so of its time and place. It's necessary for anyone who prefers the Mountain Goats on cassette or likes noise with their morning breakfast and summertime poetry. It breathes gorgeous dope-smoking breaths all over the place. (Crazy to remember this was going on alongside Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me, Bug...all so amazing, but so amazingly different).
Okay, before listening, consider this set-up: A DJ and zine editor who delivers pizza for the Pizza Factory and collaborates with the late Charles Ondras (who went on to become Unsane's amazing drummer, RIP) joins his Sentridoh pal, Dinosaur's bassist, who comes armed with a cheap, parent-purchased 4-track. The two start smoking pot ("things sounded better slow..."), experimenting, feeling giddy with the results. This is a history I actually care about. It's gorgeous on so many levels. | 2007-07-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-07-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Homestead | July 20, 2007 | 8.6 | 4c70db09-a676-4e66-a680-278b4eeaee97 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The Miami sludge-pop band's third album feels like an attempt to make a break with the past, but they might not be able to, at least not yet. | The Miami sludge-pop band's third album feels like an attempt to make a break with the past, but they might not be able to, at least not yet. | Torche: Harmonicraft | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16533-harmonicraft/ | Harmonicraft | Miami's Torche have spent the bulk of their career in transition, whether moving among labels, cutting and recruiting members, or flipping from pop-metal to instrumental sludge cascades. Their third album, Harmonicraft, is a summation of in-flux firsts: This is Torche's first full-length since the wonderful 2008 breakthrough, Meanderthal. It's also their first for Volcom Entertainment after stints on Hydra Head, Robotic Empire, and Rock Action. And it's their first since the departure of lead guitarist Juan Montoya and the addition of Andrew Elstner. You'd be forgiven, then, for expecting something fresh.
But given all Harmonicraft's inherent turnaround, it's surprising to hear just how codified and predictable Torche sound at this point. The band's early works (and live shows) came possessed by extreme senses of adaptability and possibility, with heavy lumber erupting from heartfelt limber without notice, and vice versa. On Harmonicraft, those assets are subsumed largely by structures and strategies that feel settled from the start. "Reverse Inverted" comes off like a song Torche simply forgot to put on any of their previous releases; the chug of "Skin Moth" picks up the pace and even adds a bit of falsetto at the start of the hook, though it otherwise might as well be mimeographed from Torche's seven-year-old debut. Despite the new member, the group's stylistic approach feels petrified here, with frontman Steve Brooks constantly staggering his way through mid-tempo verses before shouting mantras above harmony-heavy choruses. Though it's less than 38 minutes long, Harmonicraft starts to mire in monotony before it is half over. As bassist Jonathan Nuñez told Spin in a track-by-track preview earlier this month, "I don't know, man. They all kind of blur together after you've been talking about them. For me this song is just solid, intense Torche." He was, mind you, only on track eight of 13.
That's not to say that Harmonicraft is an unequivocal loss. Despite their proclivity for change, Torche have always embraced a good time, smiling and maybe shirtless on stage, even as they growled through their most viscous marches. "Kicking" is the sort of ricocheted anthem that deserves an arena lights show and a mass of gleeful people singing along, while the chromatic psychedelics and malevolent pulse at the start of "Snakes Are Charmed" create thrilling juxtaposition. Brooks lifts his voice a bit for opener "Letting Go", thinning his tone until it nears a yelp, suggesting Wayne Coyne with actual blood on his face. Elstner's solo at the start of 90-second ricochet "Walk It Off" affords Torche's hum a surprising, delightful squeal, as do his heroic spirals throughout "Sky Trials". Time and again, however, these songs skip back to the same middle ground of insistent throb and itinerantly thick vocals, stunting the surprises with typecasts.
With tracks named "Letting Go", "Walk It Off", "In Pieces", and "Solitary Traveler", Harmonicraft feels thematically like an attempt to make a break with the past, to show that Torche have survived their split with Montoya and an indecisive EP as a trio to emerge as a renewed recording-and-touring quartet. There are bursts that certainly suggest they want to do that, but others that indicate they might not be able to, at least not yet. The title track, after all, is a roaring Neu! recast, with the motorik beat hitting a little harder, with the guitars tuned to sound a little meaner, the pedals programmed so as to drown the rest of the sound. It's the cleanest break Torche have ever made with their reputation and probably the best thing here; it's unfortunately the outlier for a record best summarized by its own orthodoxy. Maybe this is Torche again dealing with a state of transition, wheels spinning deep into the rut as the band tries to push toward something new. Harmonicraft is not without its moments; it's just that, sometimes, spans of monotony and predictability make remembering or caring for those moments more work than they're worth. | 2012-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Volcom | April 23, 2012 | 6.5 | 4c7b253b-6f72-4941-8d39-08311b6c053d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
There is chemistry between the Sonic Youth guitarist and the This Heat drummer, but their collaborative album feels more like mood pieces for skronk heads and completists only. | There is chemistry between the Sonic Youth guitarist and the This Heat drummer, but their collaborative album feels more like mood pieces for skronk heads and completists only. | Thurston Moore / Charles Hayward: Improvisations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thurston-moore-charles-hayward-improvisations/ | Improvisations | On paper, Thurston Moore and Charles Hayward are such a logical pairing it’s surprising they’ve waited until 2017 to cut an album together. Both have spent over 30 years camped out in the space between experimental music, pop, punk, the gallery world, and psychedelia, each having long ago established a deceptively simple sound signature. In Sonic Youth, Moore’s revolutionary guitar style and mumbly vocal delivery helped the band traverse expanses of noise among oblique poetics, nervous anthems, and thrilling rave-ups. An aesthete of all things underground, his downtown beatnik space cadet persona was the perfect passport between headliner status and DIY basements. Meanwhile, Hayward was a prog rock defector whose white-knuckle drumming helped make This Heat one of the greatest unheralded punk bands. Existing somewhere between Can and Crass, their studio collages and ragged, spindly songs tackled nuclear war, geopolitics, and suicide with unabashed seriousness.
What both groups excelled at was the effortless marriage of dissonance and hooks. While liberally indulging their respective avant inclinations, both bands wrote music that stays with you. “S.P.Q.R.”, “Bull in the Heather,” “Not Waving,” “The Diamond Sea,” and “Shadow of a Doubt” are just a few examples which expanded the language of the song, stretching it to surprising ends without breaking. Daring as they are, you can hum them in the shower.
The same cannot be said for Improvisations. Banged out in a single afternoon, the album’s seven tracks have a single, dominant mode, a jumbled, freewheeling momentum that blasts through its own murkiness with a limber energy. These tracks wash over you, their narrow palette reducing contrasts and amplifying the core vibe. Though the two have some chemistry, Improvisations is a sketchy listen overall, mood pieces for skronk heads and completists only.
The album opens with one of its longest sessions, the 10+ minute “A1.” (All of the tracks here are untitled.) Moore’s introductory slow-motion string scrapings set an evocative mood, with deeper bass notes floating in the distance. Promising as it is, they soon switch to a standard issue mid-tempo backbeat and some escalating noise textures. Five minutes in, they finally hit their stride with a series of detours spurred on by Hayward, who has a particular knack for turning drum fills into wormholes, pivoting away from the main beat without losing the groove. Like a human loop pedal, he grabs small gestures and then repeats and expands on them, rolling into fresh terrain where most drummers would fall back.
Moore’s playing, meanwhile, is all vibe and no parts. Smeared and rugged, he slices through thick, grungy distortion with sharp shards of metallic noise and detuned harmonics. It’s cool for a bit, but so blurry and indistinct that he cancels out his own impact. It will also be familiar to anyone with a working knowledge Sonic Youth’s canonical output. They weren’t historic improvisers—they were an art-rock band with a deep record collection and enough charisma to match their pretensions. A song like “Death Valley 69” is thrilling precisely because their noise bleeds so heavily into their melodies. Moore has certainly earned the right to slather on the sludge as thick as he likes, but it doesn’t make for memorable moments.
Another longer piece sags under its own weight. “A3” starts off with a motorik groove that glances towards “Born to be Wild” through a fog of overdrive before derailing into seven minutes of fumbling. Many of the ideas tossed at the wall could stick if Moore and Hayward would allow them time, but instead, they jump around aimlessly, juicing the energy when things get a little too lost. They’re clearly reacting to each other but haven’t really found a common ground where music can come to life.
In between, the more digestible tracks keep the same vibe going but benefit from their relative brevity. “B2” hits a nice chiming modal melody halfway through, while Hayward’s percussion exhales gracefully. As the album progresses, the mood opens up ever so slightly, closing on the best track of the record. “B4” plunks and wheezes with refreshing restraint, finishing off with some church bell harmonies and simple cymbal washes. It makes you wish they had booked a second day, or perhaps even a third. For all the racket, there simply isn’t enough focus, enough control, or enough music. Improvisations hints at the duo’s potential but is a fundamentally insubstantial listen. | 2017-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Care in the Community | December 12, 2017 | 5.6 | 4c844f7b-38d8-4905-bb1c-b7cd2fe85350 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Intended as a rallying cry against shifting trends, Pantera's most abrasive album comes off more like a cry for help that reveals the turmoil eating the band from within. It's also thrilling. | Intended as a rallying cry against shifting trends, Pantera's most abrasive album comes off more like a cry for help that reveals the turmoil eating the band from within. It's also thrilling. | Pantera: The Great Southern Trendkill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22559-the-great-southern-trendkill-20th-anniversary-edition/ | The Great Southern Trendkill | “Fuck your magazine,” growls Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo on the album-opening title track of what is easily the most abrasive and chaotic album in the Texas thrash band's storied career. As its title suggests, The Great Southern Trendkill was supposed to be Pantera’s re-dedication of purpose amidst a musical climate where metal was falling out of favor. In a way, it was. More than that, however, the album exposes the personal turmoil that would later sink the band for good.
Perhaps it’s understandable that Anselmo and company felt like the world was closing in on them. By the time they set out to make The Great Southern Trendkill in late ’95, Pantera were one of the lone remaining thrash-era metal acts that could still reasonably expect to shift half a million units. More crucially, they were one of the only ones doing so without diluting their sound. In fact, Pantera were growing more successful by getting heavier with each record. Whether or not we accept the popular narrative that the so-called alternative revolution had rendered metal “uncool” again, most of Pantera’s peers had hit steep career drop-offs and were struggling to remain visible.
So it must have felt convenient for bands like them to point the finger at a fickle music establishment they felt was turning on them. But that was a curious position for Pantera to take considering they’d managed to achieve world-beater status in 1992—right in the heyday of Lollapalooza and “120 Minutes”—and debuted at Number One on the Billboard album chart with 1994’s Far Beyond Driven. They may have seen it differently, but the truth is Pantera were riding a momentous wave of success when it came time to record The Great Southern Trendkill. And regardless, in spite of his chest-beating against the band's supposed enemies in the music press, on Southern Trendkill Anselmo exposes no one else but himself as his worst enemy.
In one of the breakdown sections of second track “War Nerve,” for example, Anselmo stops singing altogether and spits-up a tirade: “For every fucking second the pathetic media pisses on me and judges what I am in one paragraph, look here: FUCK YOU ALLLLLLLLLLLL.” To be fair, Anselmo is hardly the first performer to vent against critics (and one can only imagine how much more venomous his lyrics would have been had music blogs like this one been as prominent back then as they are now). But it’s telling that he can't keep his ire focused on an external source for the entire song, which begins with the lines “Fuck the world for all it’s worth/Every inch of planet earth/Fuck myself/Don’t leave me out.” Sure, Anselmo’s stream-of-consciousness wordplay often targeted multiple adversaries in single songs in the past, but “War Nerve” betrays his then-increasing tendency towards self-loathing and incoherence.
Anselmo caused a furor this past January when he made a Nazi-salute gesture and screamed “white power” onstage. Indeed, hints of Anselmo’s racial anxieties shadowed Pantera throughout their career, with Kurt Loder addressing them point-blank in a 1994 MTV News clip. And in a 1995 onstage rant that’s made the rounds on YouTube for years, Anselmo weighs-in on his disdain for rap culture and the “stop black-on-black crime” slogan in front of a Montreal audience. Though Anselmo starts off by saying “we’re not a racist band,” he later urges the audience to have pride in its white heritage. Crucially, in that clip he uses the word “trend" to describe what he’s railing against—the implied subtext being that we were moving too far towards a restrictive PC culture. It doesn’t take a mathematician to put two and two together here and see how easily such statements lend themselves to a white-supremacist agenda. And so hearing Anselmo spew bile against “trends” on the The Great Southern Trendkill, one has to wonder what else was on his mind that he didn’t have the guts to say flat-out.
Whatever else you can say about him, though, you have to acknowledge that in his prime Anselmo was an electrifying performer—one of metal’s all-time greatest frontmen—with a relentless drive to create. (His prolific output in numerous bands bears that out.) Just four years earlier, Anselmo’s unparalleled intensity had supercharged the band's breakout album Vulgar Display of Power with an undeniable electricity. Listening to it, you couldn’t help but feel emboldened and empowered. Following up with Far Beyond Driven, Anselmo was able to keep up the same motivational demeanor, but a darker, more personal set of lyrics pointed to a cracking psyche behind the bravado. By the The Great Southern Trendkill, Anselmo’s psychic degeneration is alarmingly complete, and what was once a cathartic roar begins to verge on psychosis as Anselmo’s bandmates push themselves further and further to extremes as well.
Previous Pantera albums presented aggression as an athletic high. By contrast, on Southern Trendkill’s most frantic moments, the aggression hews closer to self-mutilation—a last-ditch attempt to provoke sensation when you’re too numb to feel anything. On songs like the title track and “Suicide Note Pt. II,” Pantera trade-in their trademark high-velocity boogie grooves for blurry spasms of noise. Fittingly enough for a band so openly plagued by substance abuse problems, on Southern Trendkill the “high” in the heaviness is gone. The album offers zero of the euphoric rush of the band’s earlier efforts, and there's almost no release to be found in its negativity. All that’s left is to wallow in the despair.
It was also telling that Anselmo—by this point deep in the throes of heroin and prescription painkiller addiction—recorded his vocals separately from the rest of the band at Trent Reznor’s Nothing studios in New Orleans while his bandmates recorded the music at guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott’s home studio in Dallas. According to the liner notes, Anselmo was actually present for writing and demo’ing material with the band in pre-production. But the fact that producer Terry Date needed to serve as go-between speaks to a communication block that couldn't have been good for the creative process.
Nevertheless, even all that internal dysfunction wasn’t enough to blunt the searing vitality of the final product. When it comes to music that captures the personal implosion of an artist about to go off the rails, The Great Southern Trendkill is about as thrilling as they come. It’s also the first time that Anselmo truly shows his fragility, ugly and wretched as it may be. As harried as its outlook is, The Great Southern Trendkill's seething hopelessness reveals a desperation that Far Beyond Driven hinted at but downplayed in favor of balls-out swagger. This time, Pantera no longer sound larger-than-life but instead like actual three-dimensional (and very fucked-up) people.
The Great Southern Trendkill gets extreme in spots, but it showcases the contrasts in the band’s musical DNA more than any of their other albums. The title track, for example, suddenly lurches from its blistering near-grindcore pace to a slow-moseying blues rock section laced with a trademark Dimebag solo, his love for original KISS guitarist Ace Frehley’s hummable leads still as evident as ever. Even more jarring, the energetic main riff on “Living Through Me (Hell’s Wrath)” recalls the vibe of classic ’80s thrash. But that period suddenly feels innocent and far back in the rearview mirror in comparison to the gloom that engulfs this album, especially when the song switches into a creepy dark-industrial mid-section that reflects its narrative about a harrowing sexual encounter between two junkies.
In another experimental detour, on “Suicide Note Pt. 1” Pantera actually try their hand at an acoustic ballad. Perhaps more shockingly, the song sounds like a cross between (then-trendy!) Stone Temple Pilots and Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Anselmo—an infinitely more capable singer than his harsh screams might indicate—drops his guard and opens up about his own suicidal urges. For once, the band gives us a glimpse into pain that’s genuinely affecting.
The Great Southern Trendkill’s rough-edged flaws help generate the music’s unique power almost as much as the band's blind determination to keep ratcheting-up the intensity level, come what may. It perhaps sums up the album’s mood best that, while touring to support it, Anselmo overdosed from heroin and was pronounced dead for over four minutes after a show in Dallas. Incredibly enough, he played the next show. Listening back to the album, both the overdose and the decision to just keep going make perfect sense. The band, apparently, had so much fire in its veins that it couldn't even stop itself—at least not right away. | 2016-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Rhino | December 22, 2016 | 7.7 | 4c8bde1c-7bee-4c37-9883-12a4a1214533 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
With assistance from the London Contemporary Orchestra, the prolific Canadian composer’s arrangements propel dense, elliptical mythologies that unravel like fantasy novels. | With assistance from the London Contemporary Orchestra, the prolific Canadian composer’s arrangements propel dense, elliptical mythologies that unravel like fantasy novels. | Owen Pallett: Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/owen-pallett-island/ | Island | The unpredictable chord changes of Owen Pallett’s orchestral-pop arrangements give way beneath you like a pulled rug. Aching piano melodies dip in and out of brass and wind sections, turning just when you least expect to play up Pallett’s quietly sturdy voice. Over the past decade, the prolific Canadian composer has offered string arrangements to Frank Ocean, Fucked Up, and even Tim Burton, who recruited Pallett and longtime collaborators Arcade Fire to contribute to last year’s Dumbo remake. On their introspective solo albums, however, Pallett’s weaving arrangements propel dense, elliptical mythologies that unravel like fantasy novels.
Their fifth album, Island, marks the return of Lewis, a “young, ultra-violent farmer” from the fictional 14th-century land of Spectrum, first introduced on 2010’s Heartland. That album’s deeply meta theological crisis centered on Lewis’ rage at a god named Owen Pallett, culminating in a bloody battle that seemingly vanquished Owen the deity for good. The gloomy world of Island picks up directly afterward: Owen is gone for now, and Lewis has washed ashore alone, enduring a grim journey of self-reflection during Pallett’s most delicately scaled-back work yet.
Heartland couched Lewis’ monologues in baroque, off-kilter pop songs that burst with life; Island is far more downcast and restrained. Pallett envisioned the album as a suite of orchestral music, recruiting lush accompaniment from the London Contemporary Orchestra to bear out the idea. The first half of the album offers murmurs of the orchestra’s full weight, with sepulchral suspended piano notes and spare acoustic guitar gently forewarning of tragedy to come. The slowed-down pace allows Pallett to lean into the folk inclinations of their early-2000s group Les Mouches, creating bounding fingerpicked guitar lines on songs like “Transformer” and “Fire-Mare” that give Lewis’ story an earthiness to match his new life as a cigarette-smoking, booze-swilling misfit.
Through the Lewis avatar, Pallett explores questions of life, death, and faith while remaining oblique. It makes for a bizarre game of interpretation, one Pallett invites both by casting themself as the omniscient creator of Spectrum and through straightforwardly vulnerable lines that recall 2014’s troubled In Conflict. As Island’s story spirals, depressive lyrics bleed through the narrative dressing. “I am a wound un-healing,” they sing in an airy upper register on “The Sound of the Engines,” when Lewis gets into a fight and wakes up in an ambulance. Album centerpiece “A Bloody Morning” depicts Lewis drunkenly crashing a sailing ship with the frank admission, “I’ve mistaken self-indulgence for self-care.” Crashing cymbals and pummeling timpani recreate the waves, while Greg Fox’s insistent drumming forms a frantic heartbeat as passengers tumble overboard. The chaotic, terrifying scene is one of Pallett’s most heart-rending, painting out Island’s narrative climax in vivid colors.
The album climaxes with “Lewis Gets Fucked Into Space,” where Lewis senses the deity Owen’s presence once again in an erotic mind-meld of the two characters. The song is a self-reckoning, ascending on tapping percussion, fanfare, and celestial strings. “I wonder who will sing of me when I am gone?” Pallett mourns, guiding Lewis to an astral sense of clarity. The album’s cinematic ending takes stock of devastation, from Lewis’ egotistical mission on Heartland to the literal wreckage of Island. “Let me be your confessor/Lay your burdens down on me,” Pallett lilts on closer “In Darkness,” a sweep of elegiac strings drifting in behind him. “You don’t need to die to be forgiven.”
These small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary. Much the album moves so subtly that the songs at times feel interchangeable, rewarding multiple revisits rather than a casual listen. But as intentionally dark and foreboding as Island can be, it gives Pallett room to breathe, clearing away the violin and piano loops that gilded In Conflict and Heartland to bring world-weary questions into focus. Its languid, ruminative pace is the time required to reveal a glimmer of hope through the gloom. | 2020-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | June 2, 2020 | 7.7 | 4c927a9b-0e61-4b35-a7aa-cfd55c11b415 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman self-produced her bold fourth LP. From front-to-back, this is the first Weather Station album that sounds as fleshed-out and powerful as the world it contains. | Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman self-produced her bold fourth LP. From front-to-back, this is the first Weather Station album that sounds as fleshed-out and powerful as the world it contains. | The Weather Station: The Weather Station | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weather-station-the-weather-station/ | The Weather Station | Tamara Lindeman’s work as the Weather Station has always been an interrogation of the self: putting sparse, intricate music to the narratives we construct from our lives and memories. While Lindeman often includes other characters in her songs, their presence mostly leads to deeper insight into her own mind. In “Shy Women,” from 2015’s Loyalty, she observes another woman’s increasing hardness with age, “as though it were mine.” In another track, she sings about a friend who looks so similar to her that they get mistaken for sisters. The pair laugh it off, but there’s a quiet anxiety, she suggests, of having someone accidentally become an appendage to your life.
The Toronto songwriter’s self-titled fourth album further explores that strange intimacy. Its songs are passionate and sprawling, formless and unwieldy. Often, Lindeman fills them with more thoughts than they seem capable of containing. “I don’t know what to say,” she sings at one point, “So I say too much.” There’s a desperation to her words, but Lindeman’s voice has never sounded clearer or bolder. She risks so much fear in her writing—fear of losing time and power, or her mind and her identity—for the cosmic payoff of happiness with another person: “You and I, we are complicit,” she sings, “Now we’re gonna live with it, our open eyes.”
In other words, this is Lindeman’s relationship album. For an artist whose breakthrough LP was called All of It Was Mine, there’s a startling generosity to the subject matter: after spending her career protecting and studying her psyche, she now devotes an entire album to it. In “You and I (On the Other Side of the World),” she describes a brief moment of happiness at the beach before a storm, “You in my old cardigan, and I in your blue jeans.” But the same things that draw these characters together also become a burden. “I cannot tell us apart,” she sings sadly in “In an Hour.” Lying beside each other, the couple are at once interchangeable and “dizzied by distances.” There’s a question, throughout these songs, of how to stay true to oneself while holding onto one another. It’s a balancing act that can swerve in a heartbeat from romantic comedy to psychological horror.
In addition to being self-titled, The Weather Station is self-produced by Lindeman. She finds new ways to bring her words to life, backed by a band with more urgency and energy than ever before. The guitars are largely electric, with driving rhythms where once she favored quiet brush strokes. Most of these songs avoid typical structures in favor of long, escalating verses, and Lindeman builds backdrops that offer complimentary dynamics to her lyrics. The single “Thirty” is an immediate stunner: dusty and simmering, with a faded, psychedelic flute accompaniment that buzzes like mosquitos in a desert. For other songs, she arranged full string sections, and in “You and I,” the strings accent her slow shifts of mood and tone. “We got good at walking,” she sings, before clarifying, “Walking in step—we can’t help it.” From front-to-back, this is the first Weather Station album that sounds as fleshed-out and powerful as the world it contains.
Throughout her career, Lindeman’s music has fit firmly within the folk lineage. This is both due to her preferred instrumentation (fingerpicked guitar, piano, banjo) and her subject matter, songs filled with rivers and roads, snow and rain. On The Weather Station, she largely forsakes that rural setting in favor of a domestic, sometimes claustrophobic landscape. When she turns to nature, it’s viewed through a wistful lens, like she’s locked inside and watching from a window through half-closed blinds. “I was raised to hear the curlews, I was raised to notice light,” she sings in “Complicit,” “And I watch the little swallows delicate in their flight.” Here, the gentle imagery arrives in a moment of tension: a declaration of identity torn from the environment she recognizes. It’s her heaviest, toughest song yet.
The emotional stakes on The Weather Station are particularly high; Lindeman refers at various points to a broken economy, to mass shootings and climate change. But the most vivid devastation she describes is internal. The album ends with the dreamlike fragment, “The Most Dangerous Thing About You.” Its closing lines are striking and mysterious: “And all of the sadness you can’t explain poured from you like a summer rain, hand in hand with your child in the morning,” she sings, before a sudden sweep of strings enters and disappears just as quickly. Lindeman narrates the song from afar, inconspicuously, in stark contrast to the closeness that defined the preceding tracks. Still, she makes these observations feel just as touching and true. “Love, it is no mystery,” she tells us in “You and I,” “I love because I see.” By the end of the album, she shows us there is no other way. | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | October 9, 2017 | 8 | 4c92f687-a79c-43fd-91a3-83a1b51263d7 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Devendra Banhart’s ninth LP continues on with the wispy, low-stakes coziness of 2013’s Mala, though it’s much darker. Its best moments are a reminder of why Banhart touched a nerve in the first place. | Devendra Banhart’s ninth LP continues on with the wispy, low-stakes coziness of 2013’s Mala, though it’s much darker. Its best moments are a reminder of why Banhart touched a nerve in the first place. | Devendra Banhart: Ape in Pink Marble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22423-ape-in-pink-marble/ | Ape in Pink Marble | The cornerstone of Devendra Banhart’s career was an album called Cripple Crow. Released in 2005, the 22-track record presented Banhart as an artist brimming with ideas, surrounded by friends, and firmly at the center of a movement that was beginning to gain traction outside his indie bubble. Since then, Banhart’s career has been characterized by less momentous events: a DOA major label debut, some forgettable collaborations, a few art books. Especially considering his newfound penchant for breezy, non-confrontational pop music, in 2016, it’s hard to imagine Banhart being at the forefront of anything. While the artists he came up with have been striking career-bests through dramatic reinvention and childhood psychoanalysis, Banhart seems mostly content to plink away at his keyboard and entertain himself.
On the whole, Ape in Pink Marble, his ninth album, doesn’t sound much different than Mala, his solid 2013 release. Teaming again with that album’s collaborators, Noah Georgeson and Josiah Steinbrick, Ape shares Mala’s wispy, low-stakes coziness. Despite the chilled-out atmosphere, however, Ape is a much darker listen, and its best moments are a reminder of why Banhart touched a nerve in the first place. Opener “Middle Names” laments the loss of a close friend over a chord progression not far from Dan Bejar’s “Chinatown.” The following “Good Time Charlie” is even better, tying a burbling folk melody to a weirdly touching narrative about a police officer. “Sometimes I breathalyze/And he gives the DUIs,” Banhart swoons before subverting the romance with a haunting question: “Is it love or just blood in his eyes?” With their gentle, psychedelic guitars and lilting vocals, these opening tracks come as close to Banhart’s sweet spot as he has since he first ventured out of it a decade back.
Around the time of his last album in 2013, Banhart addressed a common criticism of his recent music: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a friend [say], in this tender and discreet voice, ‘It’s just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please.’” Despite his self-awareness and the intimate strength of the opening tracks, Ape is not the return-to-form his friends have been pushing for. It’s dragged down by the same aimlessness that’s affected most of Banhart’s releases. Things get particularly dire in the middle stretch, with a pair of goofy tracks—“Fancy Man” and “Fig in Leather”—that are at once grating enough to disrupt the flow of the album and still anonymous enough to soundtrack a Chipotle. Even Banhart’s best albums had their share of jokey self-indulgence (let’s not forget that the “real good time” Banhart promised to have in 2004’s “This Beard Is for Siobhan” was just between him and a false set of teeth), but these songs represent the nadir of his recorded output.
After those missteps, the album’s second half plays it fairly straight. Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance. “Mourners’ Dance” is simple but effective, with a calming synth-and-vocals atmosphere that justifies Banhart’s Morrison-esque “raise the dead” intonations. Early single “Saturday Night” is the closest this album comes to a straight-up radio pop song—something that Banhart’s had his eye on ever since 2009’s “Baby”—and, with a dusky, OVO moodiness, it makes for one of the record’s finest moments.
Ape closes with a pair of languid, burnt ballads, almost forcing the listener to drift out of focus. These tracks, however, are not entirely without charm. “Lucky” might seem like a plain admission of admiration, with its lovesick chorus and soulful guitars, but deeper listens reveal it to be more like a sigh of relief at the end of a troubled relationship, a quiet acceptance that the flame is gone. “Baby I can see the sun is setting in your eyes,” he sings as guitars twinkle around him, “Another reason why I’m lucky.” There’s a sense of freedom in his voice, hinting at a clean break from the past and a move toward more comfortable, if less inspired, territory. It just goes to show that Banhart might be more in control than we think, even when it seems like he’s barely there. | 2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Nonesuch | September 27, 2016 | 6.6 | 4c954bf9-cce1-48bd-8809-4505ac882ee5 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
After an illegal remix made him a TikTok hit, the Brooklyn rapper-singer struggles to create an identity on his debut, enlisting high-profile guests like Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, and Future in the effort. | After an illegal remix made him a TikTok hit, the Brooklyn rapper-singer struggles to create an identity on his debut, enlisting high-profile guests like Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, and Future in the effort. | SAINt JHN: While the World Was Burning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saint-jhn-while-the-world-was-burning/ | While the World Was Burning | SAINt JHN was crooning woozy knock-off Future verses when a 19-year-old in a village in Kazakhstan illegally made him a hit. In 2019, three years after the song was released, a budding DJ named Imanbek Zeikenov uploaded a remix of SAINt JHN’s glowering “Roses.” In Imanbek’s version, SAINt JHN’s voice is pitched up to a bouncy, unrecognizable register amid constantly thwacking bass. Enter TikTok: The remix became inescapable on the app this spring, with its rows of sweatshirted teens (and Jason Derulo) wriggling along to the beat. The track’s success made an intriguing dilemma for a rapper who once created a fake PR company to promote himself — virality without recognition, ubiquity without any sense of identity.
SAINt JHN’s new project struggles to build a persona for him from these confusing beginnings. The album is laden with shockingly high-profile features—Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, Kehlani, Future himself—and amorphous, vapor-like production from f a l l e n, a relatively unknown producer who shares SAINt JHNs proclivity towards aggravating name stylizations. The production is both anonymous and instantly familiar, recalling the hazy crooning and dribbled-out drums of both Travis Scott and Gunna. There is a vague sadness at the record’s core, but SAINt JHN only spells it out occasionally and clumsily. “I’m scared of overdosin’/I’m scared of falling in love,” he moans on “High School Reunion, Prom,” but there’s no emotion in his confession.
We get wisps of SAINt JHN’s background: allusions to the poverty line, a lyric about being kicked out of his mother’s home on New Year’s Eve, the words “abandonment issues.” Unfortunately, most of these details are packed into the opener “Sucks to Be You,” which gets bogged down in its grating guilt trip of a chorus. “It sucks to be you, ‘cause I would have loved you,” he wails. “I’d watch the whole world burn to see you dance.” This tendency towards clumsy, cringe-inducing lyrics punctures the album’s better tracks. “I don’t think I even thought twice that I thought it,” he mumbles on “Gorgeous,” one of the sleeker and more propulsive tracks.
On “Ransom,” an almost-tender track anchored by Kehlani and 6lack features, SAINt JHN finds a smoother, more assured balance between singing and rapping. But the chorus hinges on a garbled metaphor that compares texting to a hostage negotiation, made more absurd by SAINt JHN gravely proclaiming, “I’m too handsome.” Like much of the album, “Time for Demons” cobbles together a pastiche of rap tropes, blurring them into nonsense. “I’m savage mode, I’m not average, I’m on demon time, just in my cabbage,” he chirps. “Cut from a different cloth, from a different upholstery,” he states on “Pray 4 Me,” fumbling for meaning with soft murmurs and glistens of piano, before Kanye deploys a verse that mentions Israel and centrifugal force like so many MadLibs.
While the World Was Burning presents itself as a victory lap for SAINt JHN. Three of the thirteen tracks are old, repurposed songs; two of those are versions of “Roses.” DaBaby remains apparently game as ever to hop on any remix, and he updates the plodding “Monica Lewinsky, Election Year” with a leering verse. (The actual Monica Lewinsky has said she wished she got royalties for the song.) And then there’s the second-most popular version of “Roses,” where Future’s adlibs and dynamic, gravelly rasp are in direct contrast with SAINt JHN’s shuffling verse. It’s a symbolic, full-circle moment, the imitator collaborating with his inspiration, but the gravity Future instinctively brings to any track gets lost here. In SAINt JHNs songs, like so in much of TikTok, sadness becomes aesthetic and anesthetized, until it’s just another vibe.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Godd ComplexX / HITCO | November 23, 2020 | 5.7 | 4c9980d1-67fa-4c1d-8170-bd10cee8b59e | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The latest viral rapper absorbs Black influences while marketing himself as if he doesn’t. His songs are fine, but he is a cipher, a husk, and a vacuum of taste. | The latest viral rapper absorbs Black influences while marketing himself as if he doesn’t. His songs are fine, but he is a cipher, a husk, and a vacuum of taste. | ian: Valedictorian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-valedictorian/ | Valedictorian | Yeah, there’s another viral rap sensation. I know, this happens basically every other week, but this is our reality. Some are cool as hell; some I hope to never hear again. There will be many, many more. This one is named ian. Yes, just ian. After a few years of uploading music to SoundCloud, he blew the fuck up in early 2024 through a combination of outrage clicks and undiscerning excitement. The reason was simple: He was a white guy dressed like a frat boy on his way to his 8 a.m. finance class who made technically OK music that sounded like he was in Slayworld, the internet-famous group that once included Summrs, Autumn!, Izaya Tiji, and Yeat. Yeat is white, too, but unlike Yeat, who tried to distract from his whiteness with the questionable use of turbans and alien-speak, ian leaned into his suburban white kid schtick: vanilla outfits (white tee, sweats, slides) and a From the Block video for his breakout song “Figure It Out” shot at an outdoor lunch with his sitcom-looking real-life family, where you can spot full wine glasses, a prep school hoodie, and an American flag swaying in the wind.
“Figure It Out” is the lead single to ian’s first full mixtape, Valedictorian, which includes artwork that mimics the “You know I had to do it to ’em” meme and premiered at a packed listening party on the streets of New York, blasted out of the sunroof of a minivan. It’s probably his best song, though that isn’t saying much. Through his slurred, ATL-style melodies, he delivers a sprint of catchy flexes like, “Can’t choose what color I’m feelin’ today, thank God it’s a two-toned watch” and “My big brother like Marshawn Lynch, he’ll run through somebody.” The official Lyrical Lemonade video (anywhere there’s a popular rapping white boy, you’ll find Cole Bennett) even includes a cameo from Marshawn Lynch, which is pretty cringe because you just know the joke is supposed to be Tough, Black ex-NFL star hangs out with suburban white rapper.
That right there explains the problem with Valedictorian: It’s making a joke out of the music and culture it’s trying to swagger-jack. Everything is so tongue in cheek: Look, isn’t it so funny that a college-age white kid who you could imagine playing lacrosse at a New England private school has a mixtape hosted by DJ Holiday, famous for talking his shit on some of the greatest Gucci Mane and Chief Keef projects? “This the coldest motherfucker I seen in a long ass time, dressed white as hell though,” says Holiday, laughing (probably in disbelief about how much he’s being paid). “Fuckin’ rich ass prick.” Look, isn’t it so funny that he’s got beats that sound like old Zaytoven (all except one by producer Sxprano)? “Judgment,” with its calming strings and crafty drums, sounds like a replica of something Zay would have given to Yung L.A. Look, isn’t it so funny when he raps a bunch of car puns like Young Dro (“They go both ways in the Cullinan truck, the doors must hate each other,” from “Grand Slam”), or imitates the Auto-Tune melodies of Dirty Sprite-era Future (“Bentayga”), or wants so badly to be Chief Keef (“AirBnb”)? The irony is there to distract you from the fact that this is empty music. If you heard it without a face attached, you would click on it, observe that it’s a sauceless copy of its influences, and keep scrolling.
That said, none of Valedictorian is unlistenable—just devoid of any personality or imagination. Performing an amalgamation of melodic regional rap of the last decade or so, ian lacks the ability or intention to do anything other than replicate music that already exists. He’s not rewiring ATL swag of the past like Bear1boss or dissecting nostalgic dance rap like Xaviersobased. He’s just a white kid that has heard a lot of rap, and there are lots of them. After years spent falling down SoundCloud wormholes, I’m almost numb to white rappers that would probably do the surgery from Face/Off with Chief Keef or Young Thug if it were possible.
So my initial instinct with the ian phenomenon was to shrug and say it’s not that deep—at least he isn’t Lil Mabu or Brennan Jones, rappers so clearly making a mockery of the genre to feed their thirst for fame. At least there aren’t any nascent signs of a pop-country or indie rock pivot, not yet. But the more I think about it, there is something unsettling about ian’s fast rise. He’s stumbled onto a simple, repeatable blueprint that absorbs Black influences while presenting and marketing himself as if he isn’t. That might be scarier than all of the obvious rip-offs of the past, because suddenly you can imagine opening your eyes to see a mainstream rap landscape overrun with ians. (Introducing your Rolling Loud headliners owen, hunter, and dust1n, brought to you by Backwoods and Meta!) Another step toward the far-away, or not so far-away, day when we will have to remind the people around us about the Black roots of rap, because Spotify playlists sure won’t. Well, until then, see you next week when another rapper falls from the cloud. | 2024-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dogdog | May 23, 2024 | 4.1 | 4c9e1143-4524-49ca-9926-c5ff6f0cb6fa | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
As D.C. punks with ties to Priests, Fugazi, and Comet Ping Pong, Flasher are expected to have something to say about politics in 2018—but their debut album would have felt just as timely 30 years ago. | As D.C. punks with ties to Priests, Fugazi, and Comet Ping Pong, Flasher are expected to have something to say about politics in 2018—but their debut album would have felt just as timely 30 years ago. | Flasher: Constant Image | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flasher-constant-image/ | Constant Image | In their two years of existence, Flasher have existed at the cross-section of what makes Washington, D.C. an exhilarating and terrifying place to create political art. They've recorded in the studio of Fugazi’s Brendan Canty. Guitarist Taylor Mulitz was previously in the radical rock band Priests and continues to oversee its Sister Polygon label, which launched Downtown Boys andSnail Mail. And all three members of Flasher have also worked at Comet Ping Pong, the suburban D.C. pizza joint and DIY venue made famous by the psychedelically absurd and legitimately chilling alt-right conspiracy theory Pizzagate. All of this makes them exactly the kind of act that is expected to have something to say about 2018. What’s surprising—and thrilling—about their debut full-length, Constant Image, is that its social commentary would have felt just as timely at any point in the past 30 years.
The current tendency to view music primarily through the lens of politics can be aggravating and even, at times, counterproductive. But Constant Image makes the case that it’s willfully ignorant not to acknowledge how a calculus of independent choice vs. structural power governs the majority of our waking moments. The only alternative is an off-the-grid life, and that is nowhere near Flasher’s reality. The band members all attended prestigious institutions of higher learning and are now saddled with student loans and service jobs (whose monotony they view as a perk). They’re part of a lineage of countercultural art that attracts young, creative types to urban hubs and subsequently prices them out. Even now that they’ve signed to Domino, where their labelmates include Arctic Monkeys and Blood Orange, Flasher’s spare, scabrous form of punk seems unlikely to win over the lucrative festival crowds that can make indie music a full-time job.
The first lyric on Constant Image is “Doing drugs at midnight”—a succinct, vivid portrait of those in Flasher’s predicament, for whom recreational highs inevitably accompany career lows. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” are the album’s final words, on “Business Unusual,” and it’s clear from the context that cutting up a few lines after work is a far lesser evil than shoring up whatever power you have by taking away others’ freedoms: “Make the team/FOP, ICE, POS supremacy.” Distraction is the best you can hope for in the absence of real joy. Or, as the band puts it on “Material,” “Laughter in this century/Is a misery afterglow.”
While there are traces of shoegaze beauty, new wave jitters, and studious ’80s college rock in their sound, Flasher are effectively genreless. Similar to Spoon's early-2000s work, the songs on Constant Image are both minimalist and rich with percussive texture. Sunlit, harmonious hooks suffuse “Material” and “XYZ.” There’s a saxophone solo in the record’s final chorus. Even touches as subtle as shakers and tambourines feel rigorously vetted for maximum effect. Flasher never sound overwhelmed by their ideas, though the streamlined Side B run from “Skim Milk” to “Punching Up” throws their ingenuity in the album’s opening half into relief.
Constant Image peaks with “Who’s Got Time?” which chooses a shitty relationship over none at all. Described by the band as “a celebration of disappointment and failure,” the track indulges in some common punk tropes: ennobling underdogs who just can’t help themselves, finding triumph in camaraderie rather than traditional success. But Flasher don’t romanticize the times when the adrenaline nightshift gets way too real, fueled by whatever stimulant gets them through that thing they do to keep the lights on; they highlight the power structures that keep them on that treadmill. People who share the band’s demographic profile and financial straits like to joke about what’s “tired” and what’s “wired,” what’s “woke” and what’s “broke.” Constant Image recognizes that they are all of the above—and have been for quite a while. | 2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 12, 2018 | 7.9 | 4ca2e7a2-f4c6-462a-a9c4-0979880197e8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The latest from experimental musician David Tibet is an arduous but rewarding album, the feeling of listening to a preacher behind the pulpit, or a doomsayer on the soapbox. | The latest from experimental musician David Tibet is an arduous but rewarding album, the feeling of listening to a preacher behind the pulpit, or a doomsayer on the soapbox. | Current 93: The Light Is Leaving Us All | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/current-93-the-light-is-leaving-us-all/ | The Light Is Leaving Us All | For disciples of Current 93, David Tibet has always had the air of a prophet. The eccentric singer-songwriter and permanent leader of this revolving band seems a kind of sage or guru, a grey-bearded mystic of deep, arcane wisdom. His industrial noise and mournful neo-folk teems with hymns, incantations, and transcribed dreams. These qualities are the hallmarks of what is by now a familiar and well-defined sound. They are what draw people to Tibet’s music, and what brings him perilously close to self-parody. How seriously can you take songs in earnest about witches and magic and apocalyptic auguries?
Tibet has said of his albums that they often begin “with a conceptual idea, which is often just a phrase.” One can assume The Light Is Leaving Us All started with its title. This evocative construction presides over the record as a constant, portentous refrain: It is exclaimed and whispered and enchanted over and over across the album’s 46 minutes, blazoned to the listener as if from a preacher behind the pulpit, or a doomsayer on the soapbox. As on many Current 93 albums—on the 2006 masterpiece Black Ships Ate the Sky most particularly—Tibet is both in command of the words and in thrall to them. Hypnotized. He exhausts their power through extreme repetition.
Pet obsessions abound: a thousand witches, flaming “horsies” as Tibet calls his equine friends, red barns, wolves, stars, the sea, the moon. Birds sweetly singing—sometimes literally, as chirps join the usual piano and acoustic guitar backing instrumentation. Absent the coterie of famed guest vocalists that has lately diversified Current 93 albums, we are left with Tibet alone among his enthusiasms and passions. He acknowledges early on the resulting sensation of seclusion and almost manic single-mindedness: “Call the surgeon/The surgeon is dead/Call the policeman/The policeman is dead.” There’s nobody around. It’s just Tibet and his fixiations.
Such fanatical purpose makes The Light Is Leaving Us All an arduous listen. When “A Thousand Witches” ends and “Your Future Cartoon” begins with the words “one thousand witches,” it is hard to elude the feeling of captivity, as though Tibet has us trapped in the bleak realm of his dark imagination. One escape hatch is humor. I found myself, as Tibet rounded into an account of “the messiah-seeking donkey,” laughing at the absurdity, perhaps because finding this stuff ridiculous provides relief from the gloom. And yet it is only when one accepts Tibet on his terms—when one takes his somber omens seriously—that one can access its rewards. Because while The Light Is Leaving Us All is quite silly, it is also beautiful. Tibet’s visions are wonderful even as one must suppress skepticism to fully share them.
Images as distinct as those Tibet is uniquely capable of expressing would not exist if they were insulted by ironic distance. He has to embody the mystic and the guru to do it. “In the first book, and in the last book, and in all the books in between, and between the books and the words, there is something at war with nothing,” Tibet intones in “30 Red Houses.” “There is someone at war with no one, and everything at war with you.” This is a stunningly realized description of art and creation, wedged in between repeated lines about bird songs and dead horsies and yet more witches. It’s all part of the swirling riot of Tibet’s strange decrees. Nightmares rage on with insane nightmare logic; he reads “in the tea leaves” and scans “in the stars,” as “Bright Dead Star” tells. Through it all, we must choose sincerity. The light has to leave us all. | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | The Spheres | October 18, 2018 | 7.2 | 4ca411d5-b5dd-46ad-b76d-ab8009c516ce | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
On this intriguing debut EP, the 17-year-old Archy Marshall, who formerly recorded as Zoo Kid, pairs his deep, cracked voice and a bleak, restless tension with warm instrumentation. Jazzy stand-up bass and string hits lend a redemptive, hopeful quality to the music. | On this intriguing debut EP, the 17-year-old Archy Marshall, who formerly recorded as Zoo Kid, pairs his deep, cracked voice and a bleak, restless tension with warm instrumentation. Jazzy stand-up bass and string hits lend a redemptive, hopeful quality to the music. | King Krule: King Krule EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16011-king-krule/ | King Krule EP | This summer's riots in London were unique in that a great deal of those taking part were essentially kids-- young people whose opportunities have been squeezed tight over the past years with widespread youth unemployment and huge University fees. Generational divides can often make the things young people do seem kind of alien, and the riots-- with no spokesperson and no manifesto-- were difficult for some people to comprehend. At just 17 Archy Marshall, aka King Krule, belongs to that frustrated section of the populace, and although he told Pitchfork recently that he didn't riot himself, he understood why others did.
His debut EP might not be overtly political lyrically, but there's a wellspring of tension and bleakness running through the record that taps into those feelings of discontent that hung in the air this summer. Often the tension in Marshall's songs is restless and unresolved. "Lead Existence", for example, builds for just a minute before snapping shut on the line "I lost the soul to my blues, a long time ago"-- in itself a pretty haunting line for somebody so young.
Then there's his voice, which doesn't seem like it should come from a figure so slight-- it's at turns gruff, deep and often cracked. There are shades of Leonard Cohen in that delivery and a similar drawl at times to Billy Bragg (who himself championed Marshall back when he was going under Zoo Kid). It's an expressive voice, changing and morphing with the mood of the songs. On "Bleak Bake" Marshall sounds more laidback over a canvas of dubby keys, 808 drums, and deep bass. That calm delivery makes the violence in the lines, "My heart got hold of my head and ripped it to its seams," and, "Now I'm covered in blood on the bed/ And its a familiar scene," seem all the more chilling.
While most of Marshall's lyrics can be bleak or even violent, the instrumentation almost always strikes a warm contrast. There's beauty in the clean, echoing guitars that are all over King Krule and some unexpected moments too-- the jazzy stand-up bass on "363N63" or the string hits in "Bleak Bake", for example. These textures and sounds lend a redemptive, hopeful quality to the music.
EP highlight and closer "The Noose of Jah City" is the most complete and focused song on the record. It pivots on an echoing guitar line and sparkling keyboards as Marshall's vocal, enveloped in reverb, spills across that background. In the verses he sounds poised, imagining his own death, stoically predicting, "My body found, but my soul was left to drown/ Suffocated in concrete." Marshall's anxiety about his mind and soul is a recurring motif throughout the EP and, like the beauty in some of the instrumentation, makes for a detached, almost mystical contrast to the kitchen-sink vibe of the rest of the drama.
There's a documentary realism to much of these recordings, from Marshall's cough at the start of "Bleak Bake", to his spoken introduction to "The Noose of Jah City". Those moments make you feel like a voyeur sneaking a listen to a work in progress. If there's one flaw, it's that King Krule does seem quite slight in its brevity, and ideas are often left to hang in the air rather than chased to their conclusion. But the record also feels like an important moment in time marked on a door frame-- it's an intriguing peek into the restless, youthful development of King Krule. | 2011-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | True Panther | November 11, 2011 | 8 | 4cb37d10-e0ae-4999-ab16-6ffb7872e653 | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
The ritualistically anonymous GOAT return with a double album of psychedelia rendered primarily with acoustic elements. Though still veiled, they reveal more of their heart and personality than ever. | The ritualistically anonymous GOAT return with a double album of psychedelia rendered primarily with acoustic elements. Though still veiled, they reveal more of their heart and personality than ever. | GOAT: Requiem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22450-requiem/ | Requiem | Whether they’re parlaying their carefully cultivated mystique into pop stardom, or just outed by the press, camera-shy buzz acts generally don’t stay anonymous for long. But the masked members of GOAT have now made it to their third album without breaking character or being doxxed, which is no small achievement for a self-mythologizing entity in the age of oversharing. And even if they’re the only ones still recounting their incredulous origin story with a straight face (or a mask depicting a straight face), GOAT are still clinging the conceit, and to this day, interviews with the band put journalists in the awkward position of picking up the phone and asking to speak with somebody named Fuzzmaster.
And yet in GOAT’s case, the ridiculous high-concept package ultimately reinforces the sincerity with which they approach their pan-cultural psych-funk fusion. Unlike fellow Swedes Ghost—whose campy black-mass theatrics seem like an awful lot of effort for what’s essentially melodic ’80s pop-metal—there’s very little ironic distance between GOAT’s image and execution. For them, costumery is not a means of drawing attention to themselves but deflecting it back onto their collectivist music. If GOAT aren’t actually a small-town sect reinterpreting the ritualistic sounds of the ancients (and are really just crate-diggers with robust internet connections and unlimited budgets for Afrobeat imports), what’s important is that they genuinely resemble one.
On Requiem, that narrative becomes further entrenched, as GOAT lure us deeper into the woods for a communion ceremony under moonlight. This is their Zeppelin III move, a psychedelia rendered primarily with acoustic elements, pastoral brushes, and field-recording ambience. But even in stripped-down mode, GOAT are unrepentant maximalists, and the full weight of the ensemble is always felt. They’ve dialed down the volume, but not the frantic exuberance. On the joyous Afropop of “Trouble In the Streets” and the mandolin-powered raga “Try My Robe,” the band’s female mouthpiece blares as loudly as she did on past acid-rock ragers, while the chirpy flute-folk of “Union of Sun and Moon” and “I Sing in Silence” do little to temper the band’s innate sense of groove.
But while there’s a greater emphasis here on compact songcraft (“Alarms” could be a brown-acid Mamas and the Papas), GOAT are still at their most transfixing when they engage in rhythmic hypnotherapy. Requiem is a double album, granting the band the real estate to stretch out more than usual and, at times, you wish they’d go even further: the thundering “Temple Rhythms” teases the connection between campfire drum circles and piano-house raves, though it fades out before the band can properly build upon its vibrating foundation. However, with the self-referential “Goatband” and “Goatfuzz,” Requiem erects its towering tentpole tracks: The former is a mesmerizing jangle jam where GOAT’s wah-wahed shredding dissolves into a textural haze; the latter is a rare moment of amped-up aggression whose electric-boogie breaks imagine Grand Funk Railroad riffing on "Yoo Doo Right."
Despite their mosaic of international influences, GOAT are, at heart, a classic-rock band in pagan clothing. Even at their busiest, the group rarely veer toward confrontational chaos, and despite their sinister appearance, their lyrics are incense-scented, hippy-dippy platitudes (at times excessively so—this band has no compunction about giving its ballads names like “Psychedelic Lover”). But if you’re wondering how long GOAT can keep up the cult-rock gambit, well, there’s evidence here to suggest GOAT are pondering that very question, too.
Requiem’s penultimate track is an instrumental titled “Goodbye,” which could very well just signal the album’s end, however, the sense of finality is compounded by the fact the song sounds like the Doors’ “The End” given an Indo-funk remix. It’s followed by the closing curio “Ubuntu,” which reveals that GOAT haven’t just copped their sense of rhythm from African funk records, but their way of life as well. Atop free-form organ doodles, we hear recordings of men and women from the continent explaining the titular philosophy of connectedness and sharing, their sanguine sentiments (“I’m not human without your being present”) folded into GOAT’s own communal ethos through a distant flashback of “Diarabi,” the first song on the band’s first album, World Music. It’s the sort of full-circle move that suggests the closing of a chapter—but even if GOAT’s faces remain a mystery, with Requiem, they’ve at least showed us a bit more of their heart. | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sub Pop / Rocket | October 10, 2016 | 7.3 | 4cbaaa46-101b-41e4-8fcc-fcefc31e4e0e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With pop stars once again performing garish exaggerations of what seems like real personal trauma, Shirley Manson & co. have timed their return perfectly. | With pop stars once again performing garish exaggerations of what seems like real personal trauma, Shirley Manson & co. have timed their return perfectly. | Garbage: No Gods No Masters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/garbage-no-gods-no-masters/ | No Gods No Masters | Garbage made music for ’90 teens on the hunt for mild subversion but wanting sharper hooks than Nine Inch Nails or Smashing Pumpkins proffered. They weren’t so much a band as a proposition: Nirvana and Pumpkins producer Butch Vig, together with friends Duke Erickson and Steve Marker, hooked up with Shirley Manson, the keyboardist of Scottish non-starters Angelfish, to record an amalgam of goth, shoegaze, and ’60s girl groups, all held together by electronically processed guitars. On two platinum albums released during the dotcom era, the deal worked. Then their context dried up. Now, with Lil Nas X and St. Vincent performing garish exaggerations of what seems like real personal trauma, Garbage suddenly return to friendlier climes. Faster and friskier than expected, No Gods, No Masters is their strongest album since Version 2.0.
Manson and her crew don’t regard songs as vehicles for self-expression so much as iconographic collages, fan letters to a shared past, and demonstrations of mixing-board flimflammery. Skeptical of the straightforward, Garbage decorate tracks without cluttering them. The bad-boyfriend lament “Flipping You the Bird” could’ve gotten by on its toy piano alone; Vig et al. find room for more ear-catching details anyway, not least of which is the audible delight with which Manson caresses the line, “You spread your legs and gesticulate.” “Godhead”opens with programmed swooshes and vaguely Indian melodic swirls before settling on the whispery-whiskery dynamics Manson used to creepy effect on 1998’s “Hammering in My Head,” only this time she has earthier pleasures in mind: “If I had a dick/Would you blow it?” She expects no answer. Selling the drama, baby!
Pop stars require the media to realize themselves. David Bowie triumphed in the era of the talk-show appearance and the rock-press interview; Lil Nas X thrives on TikTok. Garbage during their prime relied on the more traditional means of promotion, and they looked and sounded like the parts they played. Goth still suits Manson like a pair of vinyl boots: the genre for drama queens, self-styled freaks, and anyone who turns eyeliner into a reflection of the soul. “Pour your misery down on me!” she demanded on Garbage’s greatest single. We know she takes her emotions seriously because she puts scare quotes around them. “Stuck inside my head/All the fuckin’ time,” she chants twenty-five years later, an audible eye roll on opener “The Men Who Rule the World.” Garbage are most powerful when they find musical complements for that din in Manson’s head. With the help of a topsy-turvy synth part and her lovely lower register, Manson turns “Uncomfortably Me” into a confessional that consumes itself; the resignation has a kick.
Applying thick globs of black lipstick to received pop forms doesn’t lead to Hall of Fame nominations. Nevertheless, Version 2.0 remains my favorite album of 1998, the sharpest corner of a triptych of college-radio staples by women (Polly Jean Harvey, Courtney Love) blowing up from the inside the stereotypes projected on them. Manson, foraging through several decades of female lead-singer tropes, gained confidence; Erickson, Marker, and Vig pulled and molded and burnished material with thousands of dollars spent on aural gewgaws—a Parallel Lines for a blighted decade. I’m not sure whether No Gods, No Masters equalling Version 2.0 matters on any scheme, but, then again, Garbage have never been a band for whom significance was a thing.
And yet they do matter. They have new colleagues: A landscape where Japanese Breakfast, Wolf Alice, and Olivia Rodrigo can release albums whose stars revel in their oversized emotions establishes Garbage as an act with a lineage instead of mere plunderers of history. The young ’uns gotta top this, though: “I gotta bend or we will fall/My reality’s a metaphor,” Manson shouts over the clattering din of “The Creeps.” Gauntlet thrown.
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. | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Infectious | June 14, 2021 | 7.3 | 4cbb8be3-eff8-40e6-a9de-82de625f2f7d | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Having eased back significantly since 2009's ambitious What Will We Be, Banhart draws from pre-Beatles concepts of pop and rock on Mala, and writes from distinctly non-punk perspectives such as loving with levity, and aging with grace. | Having eased back significantly since 2009's ambitious What Will We Be, Banhart draws from pre-Beatles concepts of pop and rock on Mala, and writes from distinctly non-punk perspectives such as loving with levity, and aging with grace. | Devendra Banhart: Mala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17800-devendra-banhart-mala/ | Mala | Insofar as anything about Devendra Banhart was ever considered "underrated," the man rarely got enough credit for his sense of humor. He was often called "playful" or "mischievous," or some other lightly stepping compliment that aligned more comfortably with the image of him as the kind and gentle Cosmically Transcendent Avatar of Freak-Folk. But check his track record: "This Beard Is For Siobhan", "Chinese Children", "The Beatles", Megapuss, and, oy vey, "Shabop Shalom"-- dude's got jokes. If you still don't get the picture, witness the title of his latest album Mala. It's a term of endearment that loosely translates to "sweetie pie" in the native tongue of his fiancée, Serbian artist Ana Kraš. But as a guy who frequently sings in Spanish, Banhart must be very aware of how most people will initially read it-- especially in light of the artistic freefall he's been in for the past six or so years. If he's baiting us with a pun, it's a great relief to find out he's earned the right to fuck around, as Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade-- largely because it's his loosest and funniest.
While not exactly a trend within itself, it's interesting to see how Banhart's latest follows a similar route to recent solo albums from Christopher Owens and Jim James, longhairs who had similarly been burdened with messianic praise and rock savior archetypes. Like those men, Banhart has eased back on multiple levels after increasingly ambitious records, digging up pre-Beatles concepts of pop and rock while writing from non-punk states such as loving with levity and aging with grace. Mala's no less diverse than Cripple Crow or Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but it's exponentially less heavy-handed in its genre-hopping. As the lovely instrumental "The Ballad of Keenan Milton" attests, he hasn't completely foresworn solo acoustic performance, but otherwise, these songs are short and spare, little more than reverbed electric guitar accompanied by light drumming and rudimentary synth tones. It retroactively posits him as something of a missing link between Ariel Pink and Owens, which is an accomplishment within itself.
Most importantly, these are by far Banhart's most plainspoken and legible songs. Considering they're in the form of soft-shoe jazz or playful R&B, there isn't urgency per se, so much as immediacy resulting from how Mala often feels like snippets taken from Banhart's daily life. "Daniel" namechecks bars and street names as well as "waiting in line to see Suede play," while the record's cloaking, murky production gives the impression that he stills lives on a more mysterious plane than most of us. It also gives Banhart the freedom to get a little goofy even when Mala sounds dead sober. The muffled disco strut of "Für Hildegard Von Bingen" reimagines the 12th-century mystic as "a VJ on location" and leaves it as just a passing fancy Banhart felt worthy of capture rather than some high-minded metaphor. Likewise, "A Gain" is more of an interlude than a song, about a minute of free-form violin and Banhart muttering lines about being a disappointment to his mother, hair gel, and the W Hotel. As he rushes to jam in every last word in the line "love is gonna be a long lost biological father," he's laughing at his own emo capacity as well as the nakedly "confessional" format.
For the most part, Mala makes good on its titular inspiration by way of including plenty of silly songs about love. Which is different than "silly love songs" in a crucial way-- Banhart's light touch with the more embarrassing aspects of relationships cuts against the occasional whimsy, and his self-deprecation feels earned, humanizing him as someone who can be a jerk in mundane ways: a guy who dated starlets but probably got yelled at for leaving the toilet seat up. Banhart takes on a deeper register that's equally suave and fatuous on "Never Seen Such Good Things", a song that borders on rhinestone cowboy pop. He laments a lost love with momentary nobility before the gawky phonetics and crude sentiment of "if we ever make sweet love again/ I'm sure it would be quite disgusting" make it a multilayered joke at the expense of our faulty memories regarding exes. This is even more pronounced on "Your Fine Petting Duck", a duet where Banhart and Kras play ex-lovers on opposite ends of a proposed reconciliation; Kras wants him back, Banhart is quick to remind her of the numerous ways in which he was a total ass: "If he ever is untrue/ Just remember I was too... and so much more so." For whatever reason, it switches midway to a lo-fi electro-pop thump while Banhart and Kras sing in German, because... why not? Even if it's fiction and decidedly anti-romantic in content, the feel is that of an inside joke between two people who really like each other; in practice, it's an ironic Valentine that's a powerfully effective demonstration of the conspiratorial giddiness of new love.
So it's best to think of Mala as a new beginning for Banhart than a triumphant return to form-- for one thing, this is not the sort of record that will bring back the diehards who felt he fell off the moment he traded in his four-track, to say nothing of cleaning up his image and reneging on the promise of "Long Haired Child". And he still isn't the most fastidious editor of his own work; on the whole, it's for the best that his mojo and humor are given equal billing on Mala, though he should've kept the Zappa pastiche "Hatchet Wound" to himself. But one overly bawdy locker room joke is a small price to pay as Banhart sounds refreshed and relieved here, someone happily on the outside looking in rather than trying to situate himself as a countercultural star, and finally taking the opportunity to show that he doesn't take himself as seriously as a lot of people take him. | 2013-03-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Nonesuch | March 12, 2013 | 7.6 | 4cbe1e8f-045b-41f0-8f09-7b94617d821f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Belgian beatmaker ups his game, roping in guest vocalists Siifu, Spote Breeze, and Mamoyo on a breezy, 22-minute album that, at its best, recalls golden-age Slum Village. | The Belgian beatmaker ups his game, roping in guest vocalists Siifu, Spote Breeze, and Mamoyo on a breezy, 22-minute album that, at its best, recalls golden-age Slum Village. | ShunGu: A Black Market Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shungu-a-black-market-album/ | A Black Market Album | Throughout his brief career, the Belgian beatmaker ShunGu has been simultaneously so ahead of the curve and so underground that you worry he’s in danger of being hit by a subway car. He turned heads in 2014 with a series of beat tapes named for the astrological signs, a good three years before the first @NotAllGeminis Instagram post. His beats were influenced by the genre’s godheads—Dilla, Madlib, Knxwledge—but set apart by a healthy amount of personality and wit that seemed specific to Louis ShunGu’s vision. He would take rap classics like “Da Art of Storytellin’” (on The Leo Tape’s “All.Love”) and transpose them to a setting so different that it was as if you had never heard the original before. And he showed himself to have good taste in collaborators, partnering with some of the brighter lights of Bandcamp’s rap scene, including Chester Watson and the Hot Record Société.
On his new record, A Black Market Album, you can tell that ShunGu, now 28, makes a point of keeping up with his contemporaries. There’s a good amount of Kaytranada in this thing, as well as some sounds derived from the Internet’s standout beatmakers, Matt Martians and Steve Lacy. But the compact set of beats and raps ShunGu serves up here is, with its perfectly chosen drums and subtle swagger, reminiscent of nothing so much as golden-age Slum Village and other pre-Donuts J. Dee classics.
“Roll With Me” is the first song to give you that old Detroit feel. Its drum sounds hit hard and distinct, never disappearing into the mix, as important as Pink Siifu’s excellent raps. (The gruff, belching bass, meanwhile, borrows from a later Dilla trick, one showcased on the posthumous track “E=MC2”). After a lovely, Slum Village-like sung interlude, “Groove It Baby,” we’re back to rap with the track “Drop Knowledge.” The song carries an echo of its predecessor; you can still hear the voice singing, “We just gotta groove it baby,” as Spote Breeze walks up to the mic.
How does ShunGu choose his collaborators? The ever-compelling Siifu, the Oakland-based Spote Breeze, and Mamoyo, the spoken-word lyricist featured on the last track, are all good at the whole words thing. But what unites them further is their sense of musicality. The happiest contradiction on A Black Market Album is the way that standout elements seem inextricable: The drums, lyrics, synths, and melodies all stand apart, yet each is impossible to envision functioning without the others. It’d be hard to guess which sound was produced first; you imagine them all springing into being simultaneously.
Spote Breeze’s verse on “Drop Knowledge” deserves a little extra attention, with nested jokes as dense as Doom’s. It took me a couple times to figure out why he was rapping about Romney retaking office. Finally I realized that he had made a crack about people trying to catch his jokes, “but the mitt won’t fit.” (Many of his punchlines come a bar or two after they’re expected, which heightens the pleasure of the landing.) Like Baatin and T3 before him, Breeze’s raps are breezily lyrical, clever, and politically informed. He’s a smart guy, and he doesn’t care whether you think so or not.
The back half of A Black Market Album is mildly less compelling. With its glimmering synths and multi-patterned drums, the minute-long beat “Let’s Go Outside” is just a little too indebted to Kaytranada for comfort. While the other short beats back here (“There’s a War Outside” and “Tokyo Express”) are diverting, they’re less original than ShunGu’s work with his trio of wonderful lyricists. But the record is only 22 minutes long, so these (perfectly good) tracks breeze right by until suddenly you arrive at the closer, “Touch by Sun,” on which ShunGu bathes Mamoyo’s poetry with warm sonic rays. Spoken word sometimes gets a bad rap, but this is pretty unimpeachable.
Shungu is from Brussels and, as with the best of YouTube’s “lofi” channels (most of which are run from the Continent), it’s fascinating to hear the lineage of instrumental hip-hop refracted through a European lens, continuing a long tradition of Europe taking America’s music and making it just a little bit weirder. As with the lofi channels, there’s a sense of community that radiates through the record (Siifu, characteristically, even shouts out his parents), giving the lie to the idea that true communities can’t form online. A Black Market Album doesn’t seem thrown together, by any means, but it’s just as casual as a rooftop party on the first truly warm day of the year. That easy feeling makes sense, given the producer’s process: “I cut my sample with my ears,” he explained in a 2014 interview. “I just follow my ears.” | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sunthings | April 20, 2019 | 7.3 | 4ccfac53-7079-47ed-90fb-e39a3761ba2c | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Prince’s hip-hop-influenced ’90s comeback is the subject of a new box set that offers fascinating insight into a prolific, if uneven, period in his career. | Prince’s hip-hop-influenced ’90s comeback is the subject of a new box set that offers fascinating insight into a prolific, if uneven, period in his career. | Prince / The New Power Generation: Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-and-the-new-power-generation-diamonds-and-pearls-super-deluxe-edition/ | Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition) | Once upon a time, there was a Prince who was so powerful that he could write a hit song on command. It happened when he was making his watershed 1999 album. In Alan Light’s Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain, the artist’s former manager, Bob Cavallo, recalled telling Prince he was missing a first single for the set. Two weeks later, the guy came back with “1999,” which would become one of his signature songs. Same goes for Purple Rain. The movie’s director, Albert Magnoli, told Prince that he needed a track to play over a mid-picture montage, tying its themes together. The next day, Prince handed him “When Doves Cry,” another signature and his longest running No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
It happened again with Diamonds and Pearls. Ahead of the 1991 release of a major comeback for one of the titans of ‘80s pop and the unveiling of his new band the New Power Generation, suits in the Black-music department of his record label, Warner Bros, weren’t hearing a lead single for R&B radio. Prince disagreed but he took the weekend and came back with “Gett Off,” a pummeling interpretation of new jack swing that contained a string of slick pick-up lines—some rapped—from Prince and the promise of “23 positions in a one night stand” from N.P.G.’s in-house rapper Tony M. It became a No. 6 R&B song, and its orgiastic video portraying an HR nightmare of a dance audition lived in heavy rotation with the persistence of a vibrator that summer on MTV.
“Gett Off” was a perfect single, and not just because it reoriented Prince in a hip-hop context while sounding both fresh for him and the genre. It also sported the radio-friendly ambition that guided the album it previewed. Diamonds and Pearls was tailored to be a success. “He wanted a big—capital B-I-G—pop record,” Marylou Badeaux, former Warner exec in the promo department, recalls in one of the extensive essays in the new Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition, a package that’s almost as big and heavy as a tombstone (at least on vinyl). The album was a shot at regaining chart relevance after flops like 1988’s Lovesexy and 1990’s Graffiti Bridge album and movie. Prince engaged in an “uncharacteristic sweep of industry showcases,” according to the zine Uptown, and even deigned to speak to journalists.
The early ’90s was a time when many veteran Black acts who had, to one degree or another, been accused of ignoring their Blackness and their Black audience, made a concentrated effort to prove that chatter wrong. Whitney Houston hooked up with Babyface and L.A. Reid on her third album, 1990’s I’m Your Baby Tonight, and Michael Jackson had Teddy Riley co-produce roughly half of 1991’s Dangerous. This was all before the R&B craze that would find marathon runs at No. 1 from the likes of Boyz II Men—but it was just before it. For Prince’s part he incorporated samples, loops, and raps and… hired a band, which was actually not very contemporary-R&B of him at all. But he was Prince. It was always going to be at least a little weird and he was going to do his damnedest to make it work. The album spawned both R&B and pop hits and went double platinum. It contained his strongest string of singles since Purple Rain, including the regal title track; “Insatiable,” the perfection of his quiet-storm aesthetic; and “Cream,” which is so simultaneously self-affirming and horny that it’s as close to autofellatio as any Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 ever got.
Engineering hits and demographic goodwill was just part of Prince’s M.O. on the varied and uneven Diamonds. Subliminally, the album shrieks, “Look what we can do!,” as Prince takes his shiny new band out for a spin. Included in the lineup were master craftsmen: Michael Bland on drums, Levi Seacer, Jr. on guitar, Tommy Barbarella on keys, Sonny T. on bass, Damon Dickson and Kirk Johnson on percussion, and Rosie Gaines, whose voice is nothing less than titanic. Prince seemed proud of them, saying their names during the tracks and thrusting them to the front of the mix. They flew through jazz, glam rock, operatic balladry, and, yes, quasi-hip-hop. The resulting album is playful and projects a palpable joy, but absent the futurism of Prince’s best work, it doesn’t wow. It’s merely a funky fait accompli.
Inspired by the era’s hip-hop, Prince promoted back-up dancer Tony M to the NPG’s in-house MC at a time when slapping rappers on a track was de rigueur in dance-pop. The uptempo hip-hop/dance tracks are the weakest on Diamonds (aside from “Gett Off,” which has a spareness that the others don’t), and the anti-manager “Jughead” is often considered the red-headed stepchild of Prince’s catalog. But these songs are slightly more tolerable when seen through the everyone-is-doing it lens of early ’90s beat-based music. (Prince, it has been said, was a fan of C+C Music Factory at the time.) They’re disposable, but that’s capital B-I-G pop records for you.
Regardless, Chuck D was a fan of the dabbling, or so he writes in a brief essay included in the D&P SDE: “I remember being fascinated with the rapper on the album, Tony M,” whom he describes as “just dope.” In another piece, Tony M, who comes off as a swell guy who sincerely appreciated his time in the spotlight, expresses his trepidation about Prince’s incorporation of hip-hop after the artist had mocked it (and so eye-rollingly) on The Black Album’s “Dead On It.” Tidbits like these make this deluxe edition more than just a deep dive in a shallow pool. Duane Tudahl’s extensive notes on every track—including the haul unearthed from the vault—endow the songs with captivating backstories. “Push” featured samples referred to as “dogs in heat,” and one of the loops in “Daddy Pop” was labeled “animals doin’ it.” Among its many layers, “Insatiable” (a solo production) features a loop of Prince whispering “push and pull.” Most shocking: That indelible, sneezy shriek at the start of “Gett Off” was unleashed not by Prince but by Gaines.
Naturally, the point of interest for many diehards here goes beyond the remastered album and its collected remixes and B-sides. We’re here for the vault. Thirty-three previously unreleased songs are spread across three CDs/five records. But even though these songs could technically fill entire albums, most of what’s here is only relevant in the context of a very close look at a post-peak album. Unlike the would-be-classic vault material on the Sign ‘o’ the Times and 1999 Super Deluxe Editions, the “grooves and grooves up on the shelf” here are mostly one-spin curiosities.
Of the 33 new-old tracks, 13 are Prince’s reference versions for songs that were ultimately released by other artists. These could easily have been assembled for a follow-up to the excellent 2019 compilation Originals, which featured Prince’s demos of hits he wrote for others. But nothing here was a hit in its ultimately released form. These songs largely represent his conformist streak to replicate what was working on radio, and they’re generally devoid of the eccentricities he was still endowing his own music with, so there’s some generic new jack swing (“Skip to My You My Darling,” which went to Jevetta Steele), adult R&B (“Open Book”), and some frivolous dance pop he worked on with Martika (including the frisky, double-entendre-laden “Martika’s Kitchen”). However, “My Tender Heart,” co-written with and eventually recorded by Gaines, features a luscious and mournful vocal from Prince, and the arrangement predicts the kind of weepy Babyface-generated dirges that would, in less than two years’ time, overtake Top 40 radio, asserting R&B as pop music, period.
Diamonds sat on the shelf for a while at Warner Bros’ urging and so, according to engineer Michael Koppelman in Ronnin Ro’s book Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, “we just kept working on it.” That drafting process may account for the many alternate versions that populate the vault discs, including an extended title track (with even higher vamps from Gaines), a more swinging version of the anti-war song “Live 4 Love,” a sparser (and cooler) version of the B-side “Horny Pony,” and a remix of “Jughead” dubbed “The Last Dance (Bang Pow Zoom And The Whole Nine)” that’s less cluttered and features an endearing moment of Prince cracking up Tony M with a self-effacing punchline.
Eleven of the vault tracks—a third of them—weren’t released in any form. They include the gag track “Work That Fat” (using a pitched-down voice a la The Black Album’s “Bob George” over the “Martika’s Kitchen” instrumental, Prince objectifies and mocks fat women and then learns a valuable lesson), “Schoolyard” (which lived on early configurations of the D&P tracklist, and according to a 1990 Rolling Stone interview is about “the first time I got any”), the moving instrumental Miles Davis tribute “Letter 4 Miles” (recorded two days after the innovator’s death), some early rock noodling that the N.P.G. would hone in subsequent years, and “I Pledge Allegiance To Your Love” (a killer torch song that Prince curls his vocal around, like smoke on fingers at a nightclub a few decades ago).
The vault tracks show Prince as reliably prolific in the early ’90s, though there were now very clear bounds on his creativity—at least in the studio, and especially when writing for others in attempt to gussy them up in the day’s fashion. Onstage was a different matter, as evidenced by the blistering performance recorded January 11, 1992, at Prince’s Minneapolis club Glam Slam that appears in both audio and video in this set. It was an intimate version of the Diamonds & Pearls tour he was about to take to larger venues and it’s absolutely insane. At its most populated, there are damn near 20 people onstage (including the five-piece NPG Hornz and the vocal group the Steeles, who join for an extended, gospel-infused version of the then-unreleased “The Sacrifice of Victor” from the Love Symbol album). Prince dons four different outfits—he both ties his tie onstage then undoes it along with his button-down shirt a few songs later, during a seductive “Insatiable.” Virtually everything here outdoes its studio counterpart. “Cream” is funkier. “Gett Off,” at over 14 minutes, is longer. “Jughead” is… more tolerable. The show climaxes with Prince practically floating back and forth across the bar.
Also included on the Blu-ray is Prince’s performance at the 1992 Special Olympics (as well as its soundcheck) and the Diamonds and Pearls Video Collection. Missing, though, is the “Gett Off” video maxi-single, which included videos for its B-sides like “Violet the Organ Grinder.” There are also many tracks associated with this era, like “Gett Off’s Cousin,” “Player,” and “I Wonder,” that are absent from the vault discs. The Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition makes the picture of Prince’s creativity during this period more complete but it’s still far from complete. It’s a solid study of a genius after he’d peaked creatively, but it doesn’t transcend that mission. There are some gems, yes, but we already knew about those. Too few are the diamonds in the rough. | 2023-10-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner | October 30, 2023 | 7.8 | 4cd07612-434b-4726-a628-d60f7888f0d4 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
The Wrens’ songwriter Kevin Whelan’s bittersweet solo debut is a rousing, unabashedly sentimental indie rock album that stakes out a sweet spot between the anthemic and the intimate. | The Wrens’ songwriter Kevin Whelan’s bittersweet solo debut is a rousing, unabashedly sentimental indie rock album that stakes out a sweet spot between the anthemic and the intimate. | Aeon Station: Observatory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aeon-station-observatory/ | Observatory | The Wrens’ final album now exists only as a broken promise. For years, the New Jersey band pledged a follow-up to their 2003 masterpiece The Meadowlands, periodically even claiming the record was all but complete, only to blow through whatever deadline they’d set for it. The holdup, by most accounts, was the band’s de facto leader Charles Bissell, a notorious perfectionist who always found more work to be done on songs he may never be satisfied with. “My best years and work are clearly behind me,” Bissell posted in 2014, in one of the regular status updates Wrens fans had learned to expect in lieu of new music.
Bissell’s painstaking process left the band’s other songwriter, Kevin Whelan, sitting on a batch of songs that, contrary to Bissell, he believed were the best he’d ever written. And perhaps inevitably, Whelan grew tired of waiting for others to hear them. Bissell and Whelan don’t agree on all the details of the Wrens’ implosion, which has left both musicians tossing around the word “betrayal,” but the unhappy ending was confirmed in a New York Times article this September where Whelan revealed plans to release his own album, which he recorded with two of the three other Wrens. The nail in the coffin? Observatory, Whelan’s debut album as Aeon Station, would include five songs he’d tracked for The Meadowlands’ follow-up.
If there’s an upside to Observatory’s dispiriting origins, though, it’s that the album is released from the impossible expectations of living up to one of the most beloved indie records of the last 20 years. And that helps, because The Meadowlands looms large over the Observatory, a rousing, unabashedly sentimental album that’s even more explicitly about recalibrating fading dreams than its predecessor.
Many of these songs seem to be commenting on their own backstory. The chiming “Everything at Once” in particular reads like a eulogy for Whelan’s former band. “We were the pilots to all the young dreams we wasted all away,” he laments. On “Alpine Drive,” he depicts the Wrens’ creative process as a Sisyphian exercise: “One thousand night shifts all end with the sun/Still breaking rocks into songs we never get done.” Though Whelan cast these songs as ostensibly hopeful, with takeaways about embracing change and rebuilding, they linger an awful lot on the setbacks and missed opportunities along the way.
As on The Meadowlands, Whelan stakes out a sweet spot between the anthemic and the intimate. Where Arcade Fire and some of the other bands the Wrens inspired sometimes conflated catharsis with spectacle, Aeon Station’s gambit is that it doesn’t need scores of strings and choirs to make its grand moments soar. Instead, Observatory achieves its goosebumps with minimal embellishment—a few accompaniments from friends, little splashes of backing vocals, guitars that break open at just the right moment. Whelan’s instincts are exquisite. His melodies are sweet, but never overstated. His songs rise and swell, but it’s never too much, always just enough. Even when they go unabashedly big, as the back-to-back stunners “Leaves” and “Fade” do, they’re grounded in a sense of humility.
Observatory is not, however, The Meadowlands. It doesn’t sustain the golden ratio of gut punches to bangers as that album, although in stretches it can come impressively close. Without Bissell, it’s missing The Meadowlands’ dueling perspectives, of course, but also some of its texture and scale. The Meadowlands was an hour long and still felt like a small slice of a vast expanse, suggesting an entire world just outside the frame. Even at a lean 40 minutes, Observatory’s borders show.
The tragedy of Observatory is it can’t escape the shadow of an album that can now no longer be. In a profile last month for The Guardian, Pitchfork associate staff writer Jazz Monroe shared an anecdote that’s bound to torment Wrens fans. Bissell let the writer sample a more intricate, alternate version of the Observatory rocker “Queens” that he’d punched up for the Wrens album. “My stomach somersaults upon hearing this mothballed labor of love,” Monroe gushed. “With just a few Bissellian flourishes—eerie harmony, close-miked guitar filigree—there’s an uncanny transformation to the song.” The Aeon Station version of “Queens” is plenty invigorating, to be sure. But no, it won’t make your stomach somersault.
So which is preferable, a mythic album that doesn’t exist, or a very good, if merely mortal LP you can play right now? Whelan’s pragmatic approach may not be as romantic as Bissell’s pursuit of perfection, yet Observatory’s songs support the possibility of settling for something different than you’d hoped and still coming up a winner. Near the end of the album, there’s a celebratory track called “Better Love,” the only song on Observatory that portrays an unqualified victory, with no regrets about what might have been. “Here comes a better love/Here comes the one you dreamed you’d always have,” Whelan cheers. You can’t avail yourself of something better, these songs contend, without giving yourself permission to move on.
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. | 2021-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | December 14, 2021 | 7.6 | 4cd6974c-97ad-4967-b90c-71e104465dcb | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Major Key is DJ Khaled’s ninth studio album in 10 years, and it’s undoubtedly his best. Depending where you stand on the Khaled spectrum, that may mean nothing or everything. | Major Key is DJ Khaled’s ninth studio album in 10 years, and it’s undoubtedly his best. Depending where you stand on the Khaled spectrum, that may mean nothing or everything. | DJ Khaled: Major Key | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22191-major-key/ | Major Key | No one could have predicted the trajectory of DJ Khaled except Khaled himself. Well before he ascended to Snapchat stardom in his soy milk-and-cocoa-butter'd glory, he was a local Miami radio DJ pushing brand-worthy catchphrases (“Listennn…”; “We the best!”) and promoting unity and self-belief with a persistence that was as endearing as it was annoying. His bombastic statements seemed to be a nod to his reggae soundclash bonafides, but it was actually a ‘hood-oriented manifestation gospel. Khaled wasn’t just beating his chest, he was willing his success to existence—comparing himself to his apparent betters such as Quincy Jones and Russell Simmons; later he placed himself alongside icons like Jay Z and Kanye West in a way that suggested good-natured delusions of grandeur. It started as cute and laughable, but it quickly became clear that Khaled was justifying his place in the big leagues with a succession of hits—to the point that, when he claimed that “All I Do Is Win,” it was hard to disagree with him.
Khaled’s ascent is one of the most remarkable in the past decade of hip-hop history: He started as a bit player in Fat Joe’s Terror Squad, but has outlived (and maintained) that association to become a living meme, motivational figure, and controller of culture nonpareil. He may not have the cachet of the people he regularly rubs shoulders with, but he often transcends them with the depth of his connections and the breadth of his reach. He helped reestablish Miami as a creative export factory and has been instrumental in the rise of just about every notable commercially successful hip-hop movement that has popped up since 2006. It’s hard to imagine the prominence of Rick Ross’ MMG, Drake’s OVO, and Baby and Lil Wayne’s Cash Money and YMCMB without Khaled serving as the glue between those factions, even as they splintered and openly warred with one another. It’s been a running joke that Khaled—who has sporadic production credits, some under the alias Beat Novacane—doesn’t do more on his records than shout, but that ignores that fact that many DJs have tried their hands at compilation albums, and none have been as consistently successful at it as DJ Khaled. (For a quick comparison, one can listen to DJ Drama’s recent Quality Street Music 2; while Drama has had the golden touch with his Gangsta Grillz* *mixtapes, his official albums haven’t left the same footprint as Khaled’s efforts.)
Major Key is DJ Khaled’s ninth studio album in 10 years, and it's undoubtedly his best. Depending where you stand on the Khaled spectrum, that may mean nothing or everything, but it should be noted that—its awards show lineup of guests accounted for—this is the most streamlined and focused album that he's ever masterminded. Yes, he still swings for the fences too hard and too often, but he's also become a more well-rounded player. The first five tracks of Major Key—featuring, Jay Z, Future, Drake, Nas, Big Sean, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole—are the shrewd mix of some of the most respected craftsmen and hitmakers of the past 20 years and past 20 weeks alike. Sometimes, these songs work only because of Khaled: “I Got the Keys” is a sub-par Jay Z song and an okay Future song, but somehow emerges as a great Khaled song. It’s not a number either artist would make on their own, or together without Khaled, whose motivational “special talk” peppers both stars’ verses.
Some songs seem to have nothing to do with Khaled. Nas—over a filtered Fugees sample courtesy of Cool & Dre—is forensic and poetic on “Nas Album Done” about the recirculation of the Black dollar; J. Cole is characteristically vulnerable, earnest, and weary about the personal and the political over a meditative thump provided by Khaled himself (on “Jermaine’s Interlude”); on “Holy Key,” Big Sean touches on everything from race and police violence to self-help ideology to Christianity to veganism, admirably doing his best to redeem himself from his “Control (H.O.F.)” roasting, but Kendrick Lamar spazzes with a technical and vocal madness that makes a line like “hair like ODB” seem like the most important and original rhyme in history. There’s also Betty Wright taking everyone to church the way only a 62-year-old soul singer who was dropping gold records on her own record label before her collaborators could walk can, and it’s all majestic.
*Major Key *contains a smattering of his usual overblown numbers, which somehow sound like everything else on the radio only slightly more so. “Do You Mind” features Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, August Alsina, Jeremih, Future, and Rick Ross, making it feel longer than its five-and-a-half-minute run time, and yet it’s the perfect cookout song, in tone and temperament. “Tourist” sounds exactly like what you’d expect Lil Wayne and Travis Scott duet to sound like—druggy, garbled, and robotically melodic—but both contributors are firing on all cylinders, because no one comes to a Khaled project with a half tank.
Some numbers, pitched directly at the ignorant, misogynist, and unwoke—“Pick Those Hoes Apart,” “Fuck Up the Club,” “Work for It”—are exactly the kind of disposable songs that have littered Khaled's past albums. They’re serviceable, but not necessary or novel. But Khaled ends on an on-brand note. If you can see Mavado’s “Progress” for the tacked-on bonus cut that it is, the album closes with “Forgive Me Father,” featuring Wiz Khalifa, Wale, and Meghan Trainor. Here, Khaled is audacious enough to try to recapture the crossover power of Wiz’s “See You Again,” allowing Trainor to over-riff with singing-the-National-Anthem-during-the-World-Series desperation, which is the only kind of thing that actually works for a song this saccharine and cloying. Khaled’s only voiced presence on this song is to calmly declare “another one,” and it's hard to disagree with him. Like all of his albums, *Major Key *is a mixed bag, fitting for a maestro who traffics in a blend of chest-thumping and humility that’s both as comical as it is prophetic. | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | August 5, 2016 | 6.9 | 4cd94f80-1c75-46e4-85bf-ce645811eac0 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
The Queensbridge rapper’s sequel mythologizes his business acumen and doubles down on the formula of its predecessor to mixed effect. | The Queensbridge rapper’s sequel mythologizes his business acumen and doubles down on the formula of its predecessor to mixed effect. | Nas: King’s Disease II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-kings-disease-ii/ | King’s Disease II | Nas tends to cast his life in prophetic terms. From the “ancient manifested” street tales of Illmatic to the Afrocentric history lessons of songs like “I Can” to the “God’s Son” tattooed on his stomach, he’s long insisted he’s anointed by a higher power. At his best, that fascination with the divine made his music feel grand and stately even when it was about smelly elevators and petty crime. At his worst, his spiritual streak has fueled a bland prosperity gospel. Last year’s King’s Disease, while an improvement from Nasir, was mostly the latter: the Queensbridge rapper mythologizing his business acumen and the personal experiences that helped shape it. The sequel doubles down on that formula to mixed effect.
Continuing where its Grammy-winning predecessor left off, King’s Disease II’s main themes are maturation and tutelage. Nas, emboldened by his longevity in rap and successful business ventures, invites listeners to “MasterClass, Escobar,” as he puts it on “EPMD 2.” This rap elder template fits a Nas who seems more stimulated by an investment opportunity than a sick snare, but the songs here aren’t illustrative. Nas’ mogul talk is mostly a highlight reel: “Money off tech, pushing a Tesla/Rolled up a fresh one/It’s one IPO to the next one,” he raps on “Store Run,” mechanically referencing Illmatic. It sounds like he’s introducing himself at a corporate luncheon.
Hit-Boy returns as the main producer, again matching Nas’ monied raps with elegant beats befitting a wine tasting. The partnership works. Nas’ kingship goes down easy over Hit-Boy’s clean drums and neat arrangements, which indulge Nas’ nostalgia without kowtowing to it. Hit-Boy even occasionally coaxes Nas out of the executive suite. “YKTV” channels the sour glitz of Bronx rappers like Lil TJay and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, the latter making a guest appearance. “Rare” swings from spare breakbeats to snappy hi-hats and a spirited organ loop. Nas seems to power up as the beat builds, his flows spry and unforced.
The moment passes. Where Nas’ clunkers used to at least feature a striking rhyme or image, now they just fall flat. “Correctional facilities never do it correctly,” he says on “The Pressure.” “Only island that my niggas knew was Rikers or Staten,” he says on “40 Side,” a line that’s neither clever nor true—his native Queensbridge neighborhood is just across Roosevelt Island from an island called Manhattan. On “My Bible,” he notes that jewelry and cars can be cursed. “Let that soak in your mind,” Nas says. These misfires rarely tank a song or verse, but they underscore how forced the boss posturing is. Guests EPMD, Eminem, and Lauryn Hill (reemerging from recording hiatus with a fiery verse) land all of the standout lines.
When Nas’ rhymes aren’t clumsy, his storytelling is. For “Death Row East,” he journeys back to the height of the 1990s coastal rivalry, relaying an ultimately futile reconciliation attempt between himself and Tupac, who died before they could parley. The account never becomes more than a footnote, Nas speedrunning through his own nostalgia. “Moments” is just as slapdash. “I never met Muhammad Ali, wish I did/My brother saw him, champ told him nothing is real/Gave me the chills, thought about it, that’s how I feel,” he raps. That’s the whole story.
There’s a hint of survivor’s guilt in Nas’ fixation on the past. The first verse of the album opens with “I ain’t made it till we all can say that we made it,” and throughout, Nas pauses to note the people he’s lost, as well as dead rappers. He’s clearly taking stock of his career and his life, but his insistence on a moral to his life story crowds out detail and texture, turning his soul-searching into grandstanding. His version of history is a perpetual victory lap, an eternal bacchanal of self-help gruel—or “Brunch on Sundays,” as he puts it. King’s Disease II isn’t the worst legacy-obsessed rap album in recent memory. But it’s a reminder of the emptiness of rap as monument, the way fetishizing posterity reduces the genre. Nas is blessed, yes. Is that it?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | August 11, 2021 | 6.1 | 4cde3f86-ae06-41f6-a2d9-aa97e8095f23 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On her latest record, Shura is at the vanguard of a scene of young queer pop stars who are updating the ’80s model of self-sufficient, fully liberated mainstream pop. | On her latest record, Shura is at the vanguard of a scene of young queer pop stars who are updating the ’80s model of self-sufficient, fully liberated mainstream pop. | Shura: Nothing’s Real | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22075-nothings-real/ | Nothing’s Real | Like Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener,” the title track of Shura’s debut album steals a second of control during a seizure. Barnett laid out her value system in the middle of an anaphylactic shock when she remarked of a paramedic, “She thinks I'm clever because I play guitar/I think she’s clever because she stops people dying.” In “Nothing’s Real,” doctors tell Shura that her panic attack has no medical basis, and hook her up to an ECG to prove it. “I see my heartbeat inside a television screen,” she sings, niftily marking the distance between fact and feeling with an image right out of the kind of ’80s pop video her music would have once called home: “Nothing’s Real” struts and whirls like Kylie Minogue spinning around in a Devonté Hynes disco mix.
Born Aleksandra Denton to a Russian mother and British father, Shura lived in Manchester as a kid and later became a youth footballer for Manchester City. She came out, moved to London for university, and started making music, first with producer Hiatus, then former Athlete frontman and songwriter-to-the-stars Joel Pott (possibly the anti-Hynes, as instant cred goes, though a fine partner here). The panic attack came when their song “Touch,” an anxious, tender number about a romantic connection dimming, blew up on YouTube in late 2014, and major labels came knocking. (Once she had established she wasn't dying, she went with Universal.)
The result, Nothing’s Real, is a coming-of-age record documenting that period when, per Shura’s hospital experience, feelings become untrustworthy. “Maybe I knew right from the start and that’s exactly how I broke us down,” she frets on “Kidz N Stuff” (a title that also neatly outlines 20-something imaginations of adult relationships). She’s great at the acute intimacy of awkwardness: rolling a cigarette even though she gave up smoking, and wearing her cap back to front, “trying to be someone I saw on TV once.” After a major breakup, she's “one girl on the last train/Small change in the universe,” which is almost certainly the loveliest way anyone's ever described the midnight overground to Shepherds Bush. These ticks are lonely moments of action in a record overflowing with mental anguish about what to say or feel.
Nothing’s Real focuses the approach of the strong but sometimes scattershot alt-pop of the past few years (“Everything Is Embarrassing”-era Sky Ferreira, Haim’s Days Are Gone, Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION**) and smoothes the weirder edges of those records without lapsing into empty R&B aching. There’s a strong historical foundation here, too, evoking the softness of Janet Jackson’s Velvet Rope, and further back to the effervescent demands of Madonna’s 1983 debut. What Shura lacks in diva-ish range, she makes up in character, dressing up the odd line with enjoyably overheated phasing that plays against the nerves she’s expressing. It’s not hard to imagine Janet steaming up the windows of the excellent “2Shy,” while “What Happened to Us” has the Lindsey Buckingham urgency and “ooh! ah!” production ticks of Tango in the Night.
Even the slower songs have a kick to them. There’s a moment in “Touch” where you can hear Shura’s heart drop in her chest—“I only need you to be friends with me”—only for it to skip back into action for the fluttering chorus. Her ballads are never gloopy or pouting, retaining an endearing, incandescent naivety and propelling forward on gasps of adrenaline. That youthful optimism powers her biggest tracks, too, which, other than “Nothing’s Real,” rarely dare to broach out-and-out euphoria. Instead, there’s something understated and ecstatic to a song like “White Light,” where she's in awe of a girl who illuminates the room in a different way, and “What Happened to Us,” which channels Tunnel of Love-era Springsteen through a pastel haze.
Pott co-produced most of Nothing’s Real, with the exception of “Tongue Tied” and “What’s It Gonna Be,” a Greg Kurstin number that applies his love of perfectly cheesy synths to Shura’s addictive pep rally ultimatum for a dilly-dallying girl. The video, which upends high school movie archetypes, is set in Shermer High, the fictional institution from John Hughes’ movies, but Shura’s music is sharper and more nuanced than the rampantly nostalgic Hughes-core that proliferated five years ago. Her videos have been much more radical than rote ’80s analog graphics, too, shining a soft light on young gay couples and seekers. Along with Years & Years, Christine and the Queens, and Tegan and Sara, she’s at the vanguard of a scene of young queer pop stars who are updating the ’80s model of self-sufficient, fully liberated mainstream pop. That seemed to skip a couple of generations, or at least vanish beneath the specter of the bionic popstrels that followed in its wake. Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality. | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor | July 15, 2016 | 7.7 | 4ce3e9e3-a3b0-472f-a935-5ded3b899868 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Captured live a year before Helm’s death, this reunion of old friends and kindred icons is a testament to perseverance, faith, and mighty backing bands. | Captured live a year before Helm’s death, this reunion of old friends and kindred icons is a testament to perseverance, faith, and mighty backing bands. | Mavis Staples / Levon Helm: Carry Me Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavis-staples-levon-helm-carry-me-home/ | Carry Me Home | By the summer of 2011, both Mavis Staples and Levon Helm—dual icons of the ’70s then newly in their 70s—were basking in late-career renaissances. Staples had inked a deal with the label Anti- less than a decade earlier, launching a formidable run of records that funneled her gospel origins, soul might, and status as a civil rights mainstay into singular hour-long sermons. You Are Not Alone, her Jeff Tweedy-produced triumph, had just introduced her to a new generation. And Helm, a decade after a throat-cancer diagnosis, had regained control of his gritty Southern warble to make two occasionally great records that corralled his Arkansas upbringing and broad rock experience. After the post-millennial folk revival, Helm felt like a hero returning to claim his status. So when the old friends reunited at Helm’s place in Woodstock in May 2011 to rehearse and perform, the premise was clear—they had made it separately, but they were here to celebrate together.
Helm, at least, had the good sense to get behind the cannonball of Staples’ fiery voice, not in front. On Carry Me Home—a 12-track document of their performance that Friday night in Helm’s Barn, backed by a powerhouse tandem of their combined bands—Helm remains largely in the corners. He adds harmonies of ragged glory, only taking the lead briefly during an inevitable and sauntering finale of “The Weight.” But his drumming is unmistakable, a jolly canter that seems to bask in the glow of Staples’ command. From start to finish, she leads these songs of resilience and long-term redemption with a minister’s conviction. The dozen-plus musicians around her—including her sister Yvonne and Helm’s daughter, Amy—became her de facto choir. Carry Me Home is a jubilant lesson in living history.
Politics are paramount here. Staples and Helm rendezvoused, after all, a little more than two years into Barack Obama’s first presidential term, when the Tea Party and racist birthers were still ascendant. Staples considers all three in the sardonic verse she adds to “This Is My Country,” a new American anthem Curtis Mayfield penned four decades earlier while still in the Impressions. Opening the album, it doubles as a joyous fuck-off and wry come-on-in. Toward the end, their darkly funky take on Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” begins to suggest a warning. As Staples repeats the titular mantra and ticks off all the things her Lord is to her (“a mighty good doctor… a lawyer”), she seems to be taunting the Christian right wing, daring them to tell her about values.
Consider just how astonishing and galvanizing it must have felt for Helm, the white Southerner, and Staples, the scion of a Black Mississippi native, to witness that recent election after the toil of the civil rights era. (Staples was once arrested at gunpoint while crossing into Memphis.) Carry Me Home cherishes progress, however slow or imperfect it may be. Where Nina Simone made the freedom of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” sound like some faraway dream, Staples—buttressed by blaring horns and quilted harmonies—roars with a gusto that suggests she’s almost there, that it will soon be hers. An astounding a cappella rendition of the hymn “Farther Along” deals frankly with death and heaven, but it has just as much to say about the aspirational quests of the living—freedom, happiness, community.
The gospel songs here speak to that same perseverance, that trust in reaching better days by whatever means necessary. Staples is a longtime master of making religious music feel ecumenical, as wide as the world’s problems. Carry Me Home is no different. Her delightful run through “When I Go Away,” written by Helm’s ace guitarist Larry Campbell, finds release and salvation, not fear, in the great beyond. Lifted from the Babylon of the Old Testament, “Hand Writing on the Wall” is an imprecation against the powerful and wicked, serving notice that they will eventually fall. Staples turns the promise into a party, exalting in overthrows to come.
Much has changed, of course, in the decade since Staples and Helm reunited for this set in Woodstock. Less than a year later, Helm died in a New York hospital, losing his battle with throat cancer after 28 radiation treatments. Cancer also took Yvonne Staples—a force of her own, even at her sister’s side—six years later. But the real tragedy and the true impact of this set stem from how current it feels now and how it will likely remain that way. Staples’ odes to faith and survival, as well as her quips about bad politics, are as relevant now as they were then, if not more.
“I’m only halfway home,” she sings during “Wide River to Cross,” the big band lifting behind her. “I’ve got to journey on.” It’s a Buddy and Julie Miller song, presumably about heavenly ascendance. But surrounded by family and friends, Staples grounds it here on earth, making it about the push for everyone’s progress. Make no mistake: This is fight music, rendered with soul strong and sweet. | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Anti- | May 24, 2022 | 7.5 | 4ce4ea09-f3f8-4a94-861a-e5dc1eaf7a14 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Destined to be loved or hated, it's heartening how little Passion Pit concern themselves with decorum or trend-watching in search of an irresistible hook. | Destined to be loved or hated, it's heartening how little Passion Pit concern themselves with decorum or trend-watching in search of an irresistible hook. | Passion Pit: Manners | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13169-manners/ | Manners | Even if the rock kids aren't doing the standing still as much these days, indie-friendly electro-pop bands are still liable to have their own backs against the wall-- Hot Chip with their Urkel affectations, Junior Boys' overriding permafrost, Cut Copy and their unflappable cool. Despite residing on the always trustworthy Frenchkiss, Passion Pit aren't cool. Their approach to danceable rock music is more Friday night than year-end-list. It's also distinctly, for a lack of a better term, American. It's extroverted, brash, and unconcerned with nuance, each synthesizer used for maximum melodic impact instead of texture. Most of the time, singer Michael Angelakos' half-eunuch/half-Jeremy Enigk voice is likely voicing some sort of commentary on his feelings. There's an almost archaic belief that a record should have at least four singles and the nagging feeling that Passion Pit could just be another garage/emo band that traded in their guitars for samplers. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, just about all of this works in Manners' favor, as it's the sort of heart-to-heart populist record that's every bit as sincere as it is infectious-- though Angelakos sings in a manner rarely heard outside of a shower with unpredictable temperature control, it feels symbolic of a band that's completely unashamed, not shameless, in its pursuit of a human connection.
It's easy to be skeptical. I understand. Passion Pit are, after all, following a buzzed-about EP, Chunk of Change, that attracted detractors and admirers in equal measure. The story of Manners, however, is how Passion Pit evolve from a one-man pet project to a fully fleshed concern that gives substance to Angelakos' melodic sensibilities over the course of more focused song lengths, more dynamic arrangements, and 40 minutes of joy-buzzer pushing.
Chunk of Change certainly had its rickety charms, but while "Make Light", "Moth's Wings", and "Eyes as Candles" retain the EP's building blocks-- glycemic keyboards, insistent major keys, and falsetto-- their compositional aspects go beyond what Passion Pit were capable of as a solo affair. "Make Light", despite working patiently towards a satisfying hook, would've likely plateaued during its midsection, but Nate Donmoyer's live drums keep it skidding perilously towards an organic collapse Chunk of Change never allowed. The elegiac tempos of "Moth's Wings" and "Eyes as Candles" veer closer to first-kiss soundtracking than even Chunk's mushier moments, but they're rendered fleshy with slowly blossoming arrangements of church choirs, saxophones, and a winding synth lead on the latter that catches you off-guard with its similarity to "Walk of Life".
Barely past drinking age, Passion Pit are obviously overjoyed with the studio as romper room, but the toy that has gotten the most attention is the kiddie choir that pops up on two of the first four songs. Call them behind-the-curve as they double up the "higher and higher" part of the chorus from "Little Secrets" (that's the one that sounds like "D.A.N.C.E.", Jarvis), but it's more over-the-top, and that's kind of the point-- in a weird way, it's heartening how little Passion Pit concerns themselves with decorum or trend-watching in the search of an irresistible hook. Manners does go for the quick knockout, pulling a similar trick five minutes later on the Hissing Fauna branch-off "The Reeling", and while Side B tends to delay gratification, Manners is deceptively consistent even beyond its singles-- if you like one Passion Pit song, you'll probably like them all. Or you might not like any at all-- though "Sleepyhead" has proven to be something of the consensus, its real-time chipmunk soul ambitions fitting in better on Manners than it did tacked as a transitional track at the end of Chunk of Change.
But as "Let Your Love Grow Tall" ushers in last call with a big ol' group hug, I realize how it puts me in a difficult position as a music critic: what happens when you're scrambling to think of why a record is worth hearing and you keep coming back to "it makes me happy"? Too often, we use a band's debut simply to conjure comparisons to other bands, but Manners is every bit as likely to bring to mind a successful night out with friends, or the party where you finally got to talk to that person you've been eying all semester. The video for "The Reeling" certainly helps with that visualization, but in a manner similar to layers of faux-flesh being peeled off Angelakos' face, the cracked-up lyrics themselves ache for some sort of connection after realizing the futility of physical and emotional bunkers*.* It's a fitting contrast for a record that's certainly not the most innovative or cred-boosting you'll hear this year, but quite possibly the one that most demands to be socialized with and is just so easy to love back. | 2009-05-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-05-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia / Frenchkiss | May 22, 2009 | 8.1 | 4ce9e2f1-1f4a-42c4-88f9-2c451c0244e2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a groundbreaking 1970 album, a lovely but tragic record led by a pioneering force in country music. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a groundbreaking 1970 album, a lovely but tragic record led by a pioneering force in country music. | Linda Martell: Color Me Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/linda-martel-color-me-country/ | Color Me Country | In the summer of 2020, the 79-year-old Linda Martell sat in her daughter’s home in Irmo, South Carolina, recounting a phase of life that had faded nearly five decades prior. She sounded at peace but, at times, still peeved over what could have been. “Don’t get me wrong, there were some beautiful people,” she told David Browne of Rolling Stone, “And some not that beautiful.” The occasion for this meeting was the 50th anniversary of Martell’s 1970 debut solo album, the groundbreaking Color Me Country, which, at the time of its release, was hailed as the harbinger of a new generation of Black women artists who would find commercial success in a genre that had long shut them out. But Martell’s legacy has been greatly overlooked, referenced only periodically in the longstanding criticism of the country music industry’s determination to remain as white and male as possible, regardless of how the nation’s demographics shift.
Martell’s journey began about 30 miles west of where she sat for the Rolling Stone interview, in the small town of Leesville, South Carolina. She was born Thelma Bynem, one of five children, and like many in the African American musical tradition, she nurtured her skills in the church choir. In her teens, she formed an R&B trio with her sister and cousin called the Anglos which, most notably, released a 1962 single with the New York label Fire Records that included songs “A Little Tear (Was Falling From My Eyes)” and “The Things I Do For You.” On the latter, a 21-year-old Martell sings sultrily about the lengths she’s willing to go for the man she loves. It’s the kind of song that could have been a substantial hit if luck had somehow been on their side.
The Anglos played a few shows but never got much traction and soon disbanded. Martell began gigging around the Carolinas as a solo R&B act, and, while performing covers of country songs at an Air Force base, she happened to meet a Nashville furniture store owner named William Rayner. Rayner had record industry aspirations, and when he saw a Black woman playing country tunes, a lightbulb went off. In 1969, he offered to pay for her to cut a demo. Soon after, he introduced Martell to Nashville industry player Shelby Singleton Jr., who had her record a cover of Washington, D.C. soul group the Winstons’ “Color Him Father” and immediately signed her to a one-year contract—with a label literally called Plantation Records.
“Color Him Father” is a song of appreciation for a step-parent who filled the shoes of a father who died in combat, and the Winstons’ version had a rhythmic bounce that allowed the vocals to come across as conversational and charismatic. In 1969, their rendition hit No. 7 on the Hot 100. But in Martell’s sweet reconfiguring, designed to fit elongated banjo riffs and dreamy harmonica play, the intensity of deep familial love cuts through with more emotional precision. Singleton released the single days after signing her and, in the same year as the Winstons, Martell’s version reached No. 22 on the Hot Country Songs chart. From there, she aggressively toured the South to gain recognition, enduring slurs hurled by racist audiences. Her most legendary introduction to the scene was a performance at the famed Grand Ole Opry in the same year she was signed, making her the first Black woman to stand in the circle.
Months later, in a short profile titled “Country Music Gets Soul,” Ebony magazine gushed over Martell’s quick rise to notoriety and how refreshing it was to hear a Black artist incorporate her gospel and R&B roots into country, after opportunistic white acts had spent years stealing “all the little tricks of soul.” The future appeared prosperous. Martell received an offer to host a country variety show and was projected to earn $50,000 (just under $400,000 today) by the end of 1970. But having her value reduced to what kind of money she could make her handlers—projections that regarded her Blackness as a marketing tool instead of a lived experience within an anti-Black society coming out of the Jim Crow era—had severe ramifications.
Color Me Country—recorded in one 12-hour marathon session—was released in August 1970. And like Martell’s career up to that point, it performed well, peaking at No. 40 on the Top Country Albums chart. Revisiting the album now, it’s challenging to get a sense for just how much of the South Carolina singer’s true self was ever allowed to be on the project. She recorded a version of “San Francisco Is a Lonely Town” a tale about a couple who takes a Greyhound out to the Bay Area in search of a new life, but soon after arrival, the guy hits the streets, gets wrapped up in the city’s nightlife, and gradually drifts away from his partner altogether. Martell’s inflections when singing, “There were good times for a little while/But now his new friends say I cramp his style/I guess I’m in the way now. He don’t need me hanging ’round,” feature those resonant “tricks of soul” that Ebony alluded to in their profile.
One of the album’s singles, a honky-tonk number called “Bad Case of the Blues,” is directed at another no-good man whom, against her better judgment, Martell’s narrator just can’t let go. Watch the imperial Martell perform the song on Hee Haw: When she yodels, a big smirk streaks across the side of her face. On “Then I’ll Be Over You,” she sings about desperately wanting to recover from heartbreak, yet the production is bare enough that you can get lost in her melodies. Most of the songs on Color Me Country fall somewhere in this thematic range. Martell’s singing is sweet, mellifluous, but the umph in her voice on songs with the Anglos never really shows up here. Maybe it was the anxiety of auditioning for music-industry bosses, rather than collaborating with family; maybe it was the pressure to deliver the kind of mainstream success that now seemed within reach. Still, the conventions of rhythm and blues remained imprinted in her musical DNA.
“When you choose a song and you can feel it, that’s what made me feel great about what I was singing,” Martell told Rolling Stone. “I did a lot of country songs, and I loved every one of them. Because they just tell a story.” Over half of the album’s songs were written by Margaret Lewis and Myra Smith, a duo of white women who are some of country music’s most celebrated songwriters. The songs they didn’t work on were penned by Ben Peters, with contributions from a few others. Relying on professional songwriters was industry standard at the time, but, even today, the merit of a country performer doesn’t necessarily rest on the strength of their pen; rather, it’s their posture and delivery, their ability to make an everyman scenario feel intimate and personal to the listener. And Martell handles business on Color Me Country.
“The Wedding Cake,” which Lewis and Smith initially wrote for country singer Connie Francis a year prior, is transformed from a wistful number to something more vigorous under Martell—a direct result of her gospel-to-soul trajectory. When she sings, “It’s facing shadows of the future, praying they will fall away,” it feels like she’s drawing from the ebb and flow of her personal life. “Old Letter Song” takes an amusingly meta approach, making light of cheesy songs about nostalgia before eventually succumbing to their kernel of truth. And on “I Almost Called Your Name,” a song that’d been recorded by a handful of artists before it reached Martell, she hollers about the awkwardness of finding new love while still hung up on the last dude. Listening to her rendition feels like witnessing a riveting scandal in an audio soap opera.
During that 12-hour recording session, Singleton threw songs to Martell and a team of musicians to perform and, in return, she produced a boundary-breaking piece of art that wouldn’t be duplicated for years to come. But despite her meteoric rise and well-received album, by Martell’s estimation, her momentum at Plantation Records came to a halt when white female singer Jeannie C. Riley of “Harper Valley P.T.A.” fame became the label’s primary focus. When Martell tried to find work elsewhere in Nashville, Singleton thwarted her by threatening to sue prospective new record companies. Her career was left incomplete—a series of dispiriting what ifs? In the decades that followed, Martell bounced around the U.S. doing the music-industry equivalent of odd jobs—singing on a cruise ship off the coast of California, opening a disco and R&B record store in the Bronx, fronting an R&B cover band in Florida—before returning to her South Carolina hometown as a teacher and school bus driver. Even after failed attempts to rehabilitate her career as a recording artist, Martell’s life still orbited around a profound love for music.
In the decades since Martell’s country career fizzled, Black women country singers like Ruby Falls, Rissi Palmer, Brittney Spencer, Mickey Guyton, and others have experienced some semblance of success, though none have charted higher than Martell did over 50 years ago. In 2023, mainstream country music thrives in spite of the demographic and cultural changes taking place in America: The country stars who have enjoyed the most success this year are ones that have, in one way or another, declared opposition to those changes. Country music veteran Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which has been criticized as a coded call to action encouraging rural white Americans to pick up their guns in the event of perceived unruly behavior, became a No. 1 hit. “Last Night,” a country song decorated with trap-style percussion, sat at the top of the charts for 16 weeks when singer Morgan Wallen re-emerged after saying the n-word on camera in 2021. Perhaps the year’s most surprising country chart-topper is “Rich Men North of Richmond,” from out-of-nowhere Farmville, Virginia singer Oliver Anthony. The song tugs at the frustration of poor and working-class whites who feel stifled by “new” social norms and envious of migrants and welfare recipients; Anthony’s wails add palpable dramatic effect.
“There is no other massive cultural industry where we would accept that it is OK for it to be this straight, this white, and this masculine,” University of North Carolina professor Tressie McMillan Cottom said on a recent episode of Vulture’s Into It podcast focused on country music’s present-day racial dynamics. When Black audiences embrace non-Black artists in genres like hip-hop and soul, McMillan Cottom says, “We don’t just give them an audience, we give them legitimacy. This is what country music denies Black artists. In country music, even when the music is produced by Black artists… it has to be separated from Black people to be considered legitimately country. That’s the difference.”
Those words ring excruciatingly true over the incomplete career of Linda Martell. Money-hungry men from Nashville never considered the singer in her fullness. She was an avatar fixed for white imagination, never granted the opportunity to tell a story that transgressed beyond songs with safe, established themes about women occupied with love (or the lack of it) from men in their lives. Her story inspires its justified share of rage and heartache, but in that same breath, it’s no less remarkable; a Black woman’s voice storming through an industry she wasn’t supposed to be part of, breaking records by sheer existence and leaving hard evidence of the kind of impactful work that outlasts even the hottest commodities of the moment. | 2023-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Plantation | September 10, 2023 | 7.5 | 4cea83ec-3264-4f47-841e-97734a5bafda | Lawrence Burney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lawrence-burney/ | |
On their astonishing fourth album, the Danish punk band reach for pop-gothic grandeur with more tenacity and abandon than ever. | On their astonishing fourth album, the Danish punk band reach for pop-gothic grandeur with more tenacity and abandon than ever. | Iceage: Beyondless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iceage-beyondless/ | Beyondless | Aren’t punks supposed to look at flowers and hate them? Not Iceage, it seems, who performed recently in Tokyo subsumed by flowers of every hue. Electric blue, royal red, magenta, periwinkle. Observing the Danish rock band in this breathtaking setting on Instagram, I imagined a funeral. The botanical barrage was, it turned out, an installation by the artist Makoto Azuma, famous for sending a bonsai into space. Maybe it was just supposed to look pretty. If so, this striking picture compounded beauty, softness, violence, ecstasy—not unlike Iceage’s new music. It felt like a commitment to the idea that we are not what you expect, of performed vulnerability, of embodying a question mark.
Iceage have spent a decade inching towards a twisted glamor: a sullen band fronted by a Draculian poet, constantly experimenting, carrying forth the clangoring drama of post-punk innovators such as Rowland S. Howard in The Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls. Their guiding principles play out in their best songs: With “Ecstasy,” their expressiveness; with “The Lord’s Favorite,” unblinking humor; with “How Many,” romanticism. And even as their strengths converge upon this astonishing odyssey of a fourth album, Iceage remain a moving target still.
On Beyondless, Iceage reach for grandeur with more tenacity and suspending energy than ever. On the opener, “Hurrah,” Elias Rønnenfelt sings of “roaring free-jazz fireworks” as if to introduce the band’s lushest yet palette of sax, trombone, trumpet, piano, and violin, which they play with the pummeling dynamism of contemporary Swans. Beyondless sparkles like a champagne bottle smashed in slow motion. Rønnenfelt’s lyrics—which he says wrote while hidden away, late at night, in a tower—can be Biblical or Shakespearean or they can just coldly stare you in the eye. To think of this heightened style alongside the crude, vicious hardcore of their 2011 debut is inspiring. The whole sound of Beyondless, from pop hooks to hints of cabaret jazz, seems to be fantastically coated with cheap gold paint.
Rønnenfelt, now 26, has always been an actorly frontman—his voice can sound demonic, detached, drunk, sometimes all at once—but now with a more concrete grip on English, he’s fully in character, like Rimbaud born into the Addams family. He compares himself to a rat and talks to God. He sings ridiculous lines about the end of the world and STDs in his mouth. He longs for “arbitrary thrills” on the LP’s druggish “Catch It,” and on the oceanic title track, he is “perfectly lost at sea internally.” Seedy desperation is a recurring theme. Rønnenfelt wields his pen with a new level of rigor and conviction, and he makes phrases like “anesthetic laison” and “derisions of the flesh” and “wretched pantomime” roll off the tongue. When he wallows through a couplet like “As above, so below/These transgressions take me higher,” he narrates his debasement with such command that it clears the air, and charges every crevice of the song, like opera.
But he also knows when to reel it in. Beyondless is Iceage’s poppiest music by some margin, and Rønnenfelt sometimes employs extreme repetition in his songwriting, like a vintage jukebox breaking down. “Part of me wants to be a pop star,” he said in 2014, and he lives out that fantasy on “Pain Killer,” a raw glitter-bomb of a duet with Sky Ferreira. Rønnenfelt sings a whole host of desirous metaphors about spider webs and death and “the altar of your legs and feet” with great stealth. When the pair ring out the instantly classic hook “I rue the day you became my pain killer,” it sounds like they’re pushing the sky, delightfully tormented together. It’s the sound of destiny; they’re perfect foils. You can practically see the words crawling on a crackling karaoke screen.
Rønnenfelt is an avid reader of fiction and he makes Beyondless brim with novelistic detail. The title comes from the absurdist author Samuel Beckett’s void-like 1983 novella Worstward Ho, which has no plot as such. (Beckett tried to use a bare minimum of language: “No. No place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless.”) But the tales of Beyondless seem to reflect themes of discomfiting modern life. Rønnenfelt sings of Pre-Raphaelite architecture and dead butterflies on “Thieves Like Us” while describing a disturbing hostage situation, in which he wants to “file a restraining order on humanity or myself.” On “Hurrah,” he seems to embody a warmongering soldier who grotesquely can’t, shouldn’t, and never will stop killing—persistently chanting the line like a person who has been conditioned to murder. Iceage is not a band I really want to hear attempt protest songs, but in place of that, this subtle topical grist adds another layer of purpose.
“Showtime,” meanwhile, is pure vaudevillian madness. For one unlikely track, these ex-hardcore kids take their Bowie-ist logic of incessant change to an unimaginable extreme, pulling off the sound of a New Orleans brass band stuffed into a smoky lounge. Rønnenfelt innocently describes a theater scene: tickets purchased, small talk, a crowd of “upper crust and working folks, blockbusters, dishwashers, lady killers and floor-moppers.” The dizzying specificity throws “Showtime” into giddy comic relief—but then Iceage terrorize it. When the star of the show pulls a gun and “blows his brains all over the stage,” the derisive crowd want their money back. It feels like a comment on spectacle, capitalism, apathy, and the bleak realities of the performing arts, and it is the most shocking thing Iceage have done.
For the promotion of Beyondless, punk icon Richard Hell wrote a fawning essay about Iceage. He talks about their intelligence and anarchy and even compares the singer to their shared spiritual predecessor, Charles Baudelaire. This kind of validation feels rare for a band of Iceage’s ilk, and it could only come from a punk-literary elder today. In 2018, Iceage are still extreme outsiders—too cloistered-off for mainstream indie, not DIY enough for punk. It’s fitting that they’ve instead forged connections with artists like Ferreira, the painter Elizabeth Peyton, the opera singer M Lamar, or the flower visionary Makoto Azuma.
Iggy Pop also once called Iceage the only current punk band “that sounds really dangerous.” But where danger is concerned, Iceage’s earlier iteration pales in comparison to the daring of Beyondless. What is truly dangerous is to put your work on the line and take legitimate, consequential risks—which become an invitation to risk, and to possibility, and aliveness, for anyone who cares to listen. | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 7, 2018 | 8.6 | 4cef0f62-4ec5-4c10-8175-005d355ad28f | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
On their latest album, the free jazz collective expands their palette to great effect, channeling the hopes of the past to demand liberation in the present. | On their latest album, the free jazz collective expands their palette to great effect, channeling the hopes of the past to demand liberation in the present. | Irreversible Entanglements: Open the Gates | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/irreversible-entanglements-open-the-gates/ | Open the Gates | Born in the wake of the murder of Caribbean immigrant Akai Gurley by NYPD, Irreversible Entanglements harnessed the righteous rage they felt on their self-titled debut LP. Since then, the band’s experimental jazz has expanded, comfortably taking up more space and broadening in sound and scope. Their 2020 LP Who Sent You? looked to the past with a more restrained approach, as poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) reflected on the systemic racism and disenfranchisement that led us to this point. On Open the Gates, alternative histories are explored in an attempt to reshape the present and pave the road for a better future. This might seem like an impossibly abstract idea, but Ayewa has dedicated years to thinking through how Black and Afro-diasporan traditions of time relate to these principles. For her, music is a practical tool for time travel, and on this record, the quintet persuasively uses improvisation and incendiary poetry to channel past hopes in order to demand present liberation. Rooted in the free jazz tradition and Black experimentalism, the record is an exhortation to demolish the concrete and mental barriers that prevent radical change.
Beginning with Ayewa’s cry of “Open the gates, we arrive, energy time,” the record starts with eyes clearly focused on the future. Driven by Tcheser Holmes’ galloping rhythms and Luke Stewart’s looping bass, it marches ahead with resolve as surging horns swell with mounting tension, like a call to battle. But soon enough the cosmic instrumentation of “Keys to Creation” beams us back in time, with percussion that ticks away expectantly. Filled with determination, Ayewa’s voice dances with Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet as she finds strength in her forebears. Here their nod to the ancestors most clearly evokes New York Art Quartet and their work with Amiri Baraka, whose words “the future is always here in the past” echo throughout the album. But their improvisational approach is one that has a long lineage, and in their hands it is just as compelling, able to viscerally capture the deep emotions of the present moment while liberating minds from everyday struggles. “Lágrimas Del Mar” is one of the album’s most freeform pieces, and a testament to band’s sheer force, as the shifting rhythms and powerful improvised brass lines create a battering ram capable of challenging the foundations of oppression.
Just as important is Ayewa’s reverence for the Black women who’ve come before her. On “Six Sounds,” through the mournful peals of Keir Neuringer’s sax and a tentative rhythm section, she invokes, “Billie, Nina, Sarah, Nina, Betty, Abbey,” and asks, “Was it a dream to be more than healing?” It’s an ode to those that paved the way, and by celebrating this heritage she forges a way forward.
On Open the Gates, Irreversible Entanglements delve into new terrain, adding electronic instrumentation and lengthening their free jazz workouts. Synthesizers appear sparingly, but contribute to weaving tense and expansive atmospheres, further deepening the emotional breadth of their music. At times, post-apocalyptic synths appear as sudden tectonic shifts, capturing the anxiety of the moment, while opening new possibilities for the future. “Water Meditation” channels the foreboding energy of a brewing thunderstorm. Sprawling for twenty minutes, it is a collision of sound that shakes with propulsive drums, Ayewa’s shouts, and clamorous horns. While the lyrics are often cryptic, they contribute a demanding presence to this barrage, summoning you to the band’s vital call.
For Irreversible Entanglements, it is the tangible prospect of liberation, rather than immediate anger, that adds fuel to the fire. On “Lágrimas Del Mar” a better world feels within reaching distance, as Ayewa chants, “Cause I’m so close. Because we are so close to the good news” over interweaving, pointed horn lines. It’s a rousing sentiment, born out of a lifetime of engagement and struggle, carried by the longing of those who came before.
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. | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Don Giovanni / International Anthem | November 18, 2021 | 7.8 | 4cf017f8-fcc7-428c-a894-9f6163b12eb1 | Megan Iacobini de Fazio | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/ | |
Will Oldham has a doppelganger of sorts in Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter behind Songs: Ohia. No, Molina hasn't been ... | Will Oldham has a doppelganger of sorts in Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter behind Songs: Ohia. No, Molina hasn't been ... | Songs: Ohia: Ghost Tropic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7336-ghost-tropic/ | Ghost Tropic | Will Oldham has a doppelganger of sorts in Jason Molina, the singer-songwriter behind Songs: Ohia. No, Molina hasn't been known to sport a Marxian beard, and he's long since ditched his multiple monikers. But he has a few other things in common with Oldham, alt-folk's reigning Prince of Darkness. Consider the following: in 1996, Molina released a single on the Palace imprint; he now consistently records with a rotating cast of musicians; and Ghost Tropic was Molina's second full-length release of 2000 (The Lioness came earlier in the year).
But the connection runs deeper. Molina also plays hushed, somber folk music, usually with sparse instrumentation. His lyrics, while more personal, are nearly as poetic and dark. Then, of course, the most obvious comparison: the fragile voice. Generally speaking, Molina's pipes are cleaner than Oldham's-- a fact that becomes particularly apparent during those rare high notes. But when low-key, his voice sounds disconcertingly similar. Thus, given that since 1999's Axxess & Ace-- his highwatermark thus far-- Molina has become subtler and even more subdued, and his voice has moved closer in nature to Oldham's. On Ghost Tropic, where Molina's voice is now similarly broken, the difference would be indistinguishable to the untrained ear.
The comparison between Molina and Oldham has been made time and again, and is probably as sickening to Songs: Ohia's fans as it is to him. But there's a reason I insist on making the tired comparison: never before has it been more apt. Ghost Tropic, the band's fifth proper full-length, makes even The Lioness seem, at the very least, content. For his version of "I See a Darkness"-- or rather, "I See a Heart of Darkness"-- Molina again enlisted Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out, who also played on The Lioness, as well as members of Lullaby for the Working Class. Their influence, though, goes sadly undetectable.
Ghost Tropic was recorded at Dead Space Recording Studio in Lincoln, Nebraska, but sounds as though it were recorded live in a haunted hut somewhere in an Ecuadorian rainforest. At night. Take, for instance, the opener, "Lightning Risked It All," which begins with wooden percussion, a sparse acoustic wrenched out of tune after each note, and the lines, "Still no guides/ It's not a generous world/ It is a separate world/ The bad luck taste of the dark/ The broad luck of blood on the water." But these words aren't delivered with any rapidity: you're given enough time between each line to consider eternity. A random kickdrum might snap you back to reality, as might subtly increasing percussion. Or you might continue wandering off, set further adrift by the increasingly restless wooden clacks that sound like water dripping in puddles.
The rest of the album isn't much different, with the bulk of its tracks rarely progressing from where they begin. South American percussion usually offers tempered accompaniment along with a thunderous piano, both of which are occasionally complimented by a Spanish guitar, pedal steel, glockenspiel, eerie keyboard-chorus or shrill triangle. And Molina's voice inevitably enters in, usually after the one-minute mark, to deliver, in a death-bed rasp, lines such as, "Death as it shook you/ You gave it a fool's look/ You said I am an empty page to you" ("The Body Burned Away"), or, "Simply to live, that is my plan/ In a city that breaks us/ I will say nothing" ("No Limits on the Words").
But what really holds the album together-- perhaps better than the choice of instruments, lyrics, or Molina's voice-- are the tropical birds. Unlike, say, Phish or Quasi, Molina doesn't tactlessly plop a mess of birds in the middle of his album. Instead, birdsong slides in now and then, reminding you where you are (the tropics, fool). Only occasionally do the chirps reach a cacophony, as on the two instrumental tracks entitled "Ghost Tropic," where the birds sound as though they've been awaked by the unsettling music emanating from the hut.
None of the eight tracks that comprise Ghost Tropic are true songs. They're more like movements that make up the larger whole of the album, which acts as a 51-minute song. There are no tangible choruses; at best, you'll hear a couple lines repeated two or three times. In short, this is a mood piece. As such, it'll suit your needs perfectly at times, and incompletely at others. The two 12-minute tracks that essentially end the album-- separated only by one of the short instrumentals-- won't seem long enough for you one day, and will be horrendously sluggish and repetitive on another. It's like watching a Brita filter a liter of water: sometimes you're too damn thirsty to wait, so you give in to tap water; other times you hold out, knowing that your patience will make the experience entirely satisfying. | 2000-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2000-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | November 13, 2000 | 7.5 | 4cf33147-6918-4d00-b057-739003aad578 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Tel Aviv-based electronic music producer Yotam Avni mines the trenches between tech, tribal and deep house, adding in choral elements that mingle the ancient with the futuristic. | The Tel Aviv-based electronic music producer Yotam Avni mines the trenches between tech, tribal and deep house, adding in choral elements that mingle the ancient with the futuristic. | Yotam Avni: Tehillim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22694-tehillim/ | Tehillim | For the last thirty years, Israel’s electronic music scene has operated in fits and starts. When India opened up their borders to Israeli passports in 1988, many youths who had finished their conscription services poured into the country and became entranced by Goa trance, bringing that rave aesthetic back home with them. But by 1997, police cracked down on bigger festivals, driving electronic music further underground. The last few years have seen an uptick in hotly tipped young Israeli producers such as Moscoman, Autarkic, Deep’a & Biri, and Red Axes (not to mention Moscoman’s always intriguing Disco Halal imprint). Of them all, Yotam Avni might be best positioned to crossover to larger festival crowds, as his resumé links him with the likes of Derrick May, Osunlade, and Terrence Parker.
Avni knows every side of the industry, beginning as a music journalist before moving to party promoter (AVADON) as well as his own club, Resek. Across a handful of singles, the Tel Aviv-based producer has mined the trenches between tech, tribal and deep house, his tracks popping up on both Ben Klock and Âme & Dixon’s Essential Mix. Following up on this summer’s “Monad XXII,” this four-track EP (also on the Berlin-based Stroboscopic Artefacts imprint) continues to push him towards a sound at that’s more assured, though he continues to take risks to varying degrees of success.
“Orma” strikes a plangent, ominous chord and quickening hi-hat pattern for the techno. Just when it seems like it might just plunge deeper into darkness, Avni introduces a saxophone skronk and lets it echo. Quick fillips of tom and an incessant beep are added, but despite the horn and the possibilities it suggests, the track never quite moves beyond its original components. “Shtok” features glimmering struck bell tones not unlike Pantha du Prince, which Avni then sullies with sweeps of white noise and a phantasmal wordless vocal, just balancing between beauty and menace.
“Even” mixes the EP’s stoutest beat with the most elegant filigree of strings –both plucked and bowed—and piano. For the title track, Avni builds a rhythm of rattling gourds and thumped wood, harkening back to his tribal house productions. Before it goes down that route though, a men’s chorus enters, making the “Tehillim” (or “psalms”) of the title a literal reference. The first few times through, the combination of choir and drums feels more like a throwback to Enigma. But Avni unleashes squalls of feedback and noise that give the track some grit, so that a mix of the ancient and futuristic also has a bit of the messy present in it. | 2017-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Stroboscopic Artefacts | January 5, 2017 | 7 | 4cf3dd41-f145-4259-94bd-982dc33ff5b2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Natasha Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Featuring collaborations with Beck, Rob Ellis, David Sitek, Portishead's Adrian Utley, and others, The Haunted Man is at once striking and enigmatic. | Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Natasha Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Featuring collaborations with Beck, Rob Ellis, David Sitek, Portishead's Adrian Utley, and others, The Haunted Man is at once striking and enigmatic. | Bat for Lashes: The Haunted Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17174-the-haunted-man/ | The Haunted Man | Natasha Khan has said her third album as Bat for Lashes is partly inspired by studying her own family history. This is informative. Her father, a trainer for the Pakistani national squash team, left suddenly when she was 11, and his departure casts a shadow on the fairytale drama of Bat for Lashes' debut, 2006's Fur and Gold. Yeah, but one of the guys Khan's dad coached? Her cousin, Jahangir Khan? He went on to become a six-time world champion and basically his sport's equivalent of a Pelé or Michael Jordan. You don't need Natasha's Ancestry.com password to know there's competitive drive in her blood.
That's her up there in The Haunted Man cover art. Naked, un-retouched, and un-made-up, with a similarly naked man draped around her shoulders. The suggestion is that her follow-up to 2009's lavishly sensual Two Suns is more intimate and stripped bare, and sure enough, there's less reverb on Khan's voice, and the lyrical concerns have moved from an otherworldly New York to the English countryside. But what the Ryan McGinley-shot art most closely shares with the music you'll find within is that it's at once striking and enigmatic-- and artfully constructed.
Some albums sound effortless. The Haunted Man sounds like effort magnificently realized. The rawness of feeling is achieved through equally raw ambition. Bat for Lashes' sophisticated blend of art-rock grandeur and synth-pop directness again carries echoes of 1980s luminaries like Kate Bush and the Cure, gleaming with autoharp, Abbey Road-recorded strings, and a continuing exploration of electronics. Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and one of the year's most beguiling albums.
Two Suns' sublime, Karate Kid-nodding "Daniel" won Britain's Ivor Novello songwriting award. The potential hits here are just as overpowering. "Let's Get Lost", the sumptuous slab of goth-bubblegum Khan did with Beck for 2011's Twilight: Eclipse OST, was a promising sign of what to expect. On slinky, guitar-centric "All Your Gold", Khan is the one who's haunted, but it only takes a few listens before Gotye's awfully similar smash sounds fleshless in comparison. "Marilyn" adapts the 1950s matinee-idolatry of Lana Del Rey to a dream-pop production worthy of its "silver screen," with a staggering, spectral bridge-- and several instrumental contributions from Beck (plus arranging by ex-Ash member Charlotte Hatherley).
Though sometimes over-reaching, the less likely singles here are as darkly enigmatic, sonically curious, and thematically textured as their equivalents on Two Suns. The centerpiece is the title track, with its "Scarborough Fair"-tinged male choir marching up that distant hill. "Yes, your ghosts have got me, too/ But it's me and you," Khan replies, summing up the album's main conceit: the way previous experiences can twist our current relationships. On M83-gauzy, Dave Sitek-assisted opener "Lilies", though, "the figure of a man" answers a life-affirming, womanly prayer. Druid-like male voices on "Oh Yeah" introduce the poised yet passionate exultation of a narrator "in bloom." As on the album cover, Khan's music can acknowledge the female body without reducing it to sex-kitten cliché.
In fact, if the last album was about contrasts-- between two suns, two lovers, even two sides of the narrator's persona-- then The Haunted Man is defined by balance, between the bare and the polished, between the communal and the personal, and between the respective ghosts haunting our personal interactions. Compromises can lead to breakthroughs: "Where you see a wall, I see a door," Khan sings on "A Wall", another Sitek-backed, baroque synth-pop anthem. By the restrained yet intricate closing lullaby "Deep Sea Diver", which meets the bar set by Two Suns' collaborative finale with famously reclusive crooner Scott Walker, Khan finds a compromise for two people separated by masks: "Darling if you can't see out/ You know that I can hear you shout." They're together, alone, shaking through.
The most overtly naked track here, "Laura", is also the most transcendent. With a gently orchestra-kissed piano-and-voice arrangement, this goosebump-inducing collaboration with the former Lizzy Grant's "Video Games" co-writer Justin Parker is the clearest example of how Bat for Lashes perches on the fulcrum between indie-associated sincerity and pop-oriented savvy. We'll never know Laura, really, but we can feel what it might be like to know her. On an album with more names in the credits than Khan could ever use for song titles (also including Portishead's Adrian Utley, among many others), the greatest testament to her strength of will might be just this: She has added a new unforgettable character to pop's family tree. | 2012-10-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | October 22, 2012 | 8.4 | 4cfd2d66-978d-4863-be2d-e10202535f96 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The mostly solid debut album from the South African producer Okzharp and vocalist Manthe Ribane foregoes their earlier sound for something slower and more ponderous. | The mostly solid debut album from the South African producer Okzharp and vocalist Manthe Ribane foregoes their earlier sound for something slower and more ponderous. | Okzharp & Manthe Ribane: Closer Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/okzharp-and-manthe-ribane-closer-apart/ | Closer Apart | Much of the electronic music that the wider world hears from South Africa is by turns tough (gqom), weird (Die Antwoord) and frenetic (Shangaan electro). Okzharp—aka South African producer Gervase Gordon—is no stranger to all three. As one third of the group LV, he contributed to tunes like “Sebenza” and “Boomslang,” which flowered with the energy of a bristling South African scene, while his two EPs with vocalist, artist, and dancer Manthe Ribane hid a muscular energy among their drum machine bounce.
For their debut album Closer Apart, Okzharp & Ribane (alongside filmmaker Chris Saunders, who has produced a sumptuous video accompaniment) have rung the changes. Out goes toughness and energy in favor of what Ribane calls her “‘Lady’ side.” “I grew up listening to jazz, classic, and Gospel, I am a very soft-spoken person and it resonates with being confident with that,” she said. What this means in practice is that the BPMs on Closer Apart are lowered to a crawl, the production nods more to R&B than dance-floor house, and Ribane’s vocals, which had the rebel-rousing swagger of a confident MC on early tracks like “Maybe This” and “Fede,” are delivered in a tone that is altogether more ponderous.
It is a move that makes a certain sense for an electronic act on their debut LP, as they move away from the ephemeral thrills of the track in favor of a format that is theoretically more lasting. And yet, it puts a focus on Okzharp & Ribane’s songwriting in a way that leaves them exposed. The album’s lyrics, the majority of which are in English, are often poor, relying on the kind of rhyme-restricted universal truths that would make even Noel Gallagher give it a second edit. “Make U Blue” raises the ghost of high school poetry in couplets like, “I got something I need to say/Hey is that ok? /I’m gonna say it anyway,” while “Why U In My Way?” buries the asininity of “What is that you say?/There’s no yesterday/Don't you fade away” amid endless repetition of the song title. This situation is hardly helped by the slow, deliberate, and sometimes rather tuneless way in which Ribane delivers her lines, her voice drenched in the kind of modish vocal effects that only serve to date the album.
The production, meanwhile, is solid rather than brilliant. The drum machine programming may be full of stutter and invention but the instrumental melodies rarely rise above the acceptable and the overall sonic palette invites comparison to Okzharp & Ribane's Hyperdub label mates. Opener “W U @” has the misty instrumental mope of early Burial, for example, while “Make U Blue” recreates the wipe-clean synth sound of Fatima Al Qadiri’s Asiatisch. At times—notably on the disjointed “Never Thought”—the music and vocals are working at cross purposes, as if shunted together by necessity rather than invention. Okzharp has said the album was made “in hotel rooms, planes, and airports in the brief periods of time that we spent together” and you wonder if Closer Apart has come out undercooked.
What makes this particularly galling is that when Okzharp & Ribane do connect they create moments of verve, invention, and emotional impact that rival anything on their first two EPs. “Time Machine” brilliantly captures the mournful disconnect of being lost in an airport, complete with vividly surreal imagery (“Airport queues/Cerulean blue/Viper trails/Cross the skies”), while “Treasure Erasure” balances drumline energy with a melody of ecstatic melancholy. Best of all is lead single “Dun,” which marries a tough, lolloping beat to queasy keyboard blips and a grand-standing vocal performance from Ribane at her cocksure best.
That the best track here is also the one closest to Okzharp & Ribane’s brash rhythmical past is telling. On paper, the decision to mix the raw invention their early work with the melodic catharsis of jazz and gospel sounds fascinating, while Closer Apart’s weirdly gorgeous companion video makes a case for Okzharp & Manthe Ribane as an enthralling visual act. But the album itself feels frustratingly limp, making you wish Okzharp & Ribane had stayed true to the kinetic force that lit up their EPs. | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | July 14, 2018 | 6 | 4cfd4fea-ffc9-4a3a-b432-8d3a8b7166d2 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Recorded in the same sessions as April’s excellent Life Metal, the drone metal band’s new album is a rich, fundamentally life-affirming experience. | Recorded in the same sessions as April’s excellent Life Metal, the drone metal band’s new album is a rich, fundamentally life-affirming experience. | Sunn O))): Pyroclasts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunn-o-pyroclasts/ | Pyroclasts | Stephen O’Malley once described Sunn O))) as his “guitar band,” which is a striking understatement. Over the band’s nearly two-decade run, they’ve never deviated from a singular mission: crushingly glacial guitars played at devastating volumes. Since 2009’s Monoliths & Dimensions, the duo has gracefully slipped the shackles of heavy metal, remaining rooted in its ferocious aesthetic while pursuing high concept collaborations and drone at its most incantatory. Sunn 0))) is a guitar band like a hurricane is wind.
April’s Life Metal had a distinct back-to-basics quality, stepping away from the orchestrations and composer commissions for some of the pure, indefinite-hiatus riffage on which Sunn 0))) built their name. Recorded by Steve Albini, the album showed Greg Anderson and O’Malley summoning a sound of overwhelming scope and elegance, moving with just a little bit of extra authority.
Pyroclasts is a companion to that album, recorded in the same sessions but stripped even further back. At the start and end of each day of recording, the group and their collaborators would perform a simple exercise: explore a single modal drone for 12 minutes; Albini would capture it, and they would move on. These four selections can be experienced as a sort of frame for Life Metal’s more definitive statement. Not compositions, nor exactly improvisations, the group describes them as “a daily practice,” calling to mind a regular meditation or yoga routine (except at pain-threshold dB). And like a series of stretches, these sessions were intended to open up the musicians as they worked through the album.
None of that would matter if they didn’t open the listeners up, too. But, of course, they do. The experience on even the biggest headphones won’t ever be the same as Sunn 0))) in concert, but a full run through with Pyroclasts cranked all the way will leave few moods unaltered. Though visually steeped in the quasi-medieval occultisms of Scandinavia’s most notorious groups, listening to Sunn 0))) has always been a fundamentally life-affirming experience. Their tunings are too rich, their gestures too focused for nihilism. The titular inversion of Life Metal suggests a manifesto, and Pyroclasts could be Exhibit A in their argument.
There’s little use discussing the relative merits of one track over another. Though variations span the length of the album, the feel is so consistently immersive you lose track of yourself in the sound, which seems like the point. “Frost (C)” howls and shudders, its low end seeming to extend to the deepest, cruddiest bowels of the earth. Around the five-minute mark of “Ampliphædies (E),” someone takes what might loosely be called a solo. No surprise that it focuses mostly on one note; rather than articulating melodic flourishes, it feels like it’s clawing its way out of a mudslide of distortion, gasping for air before being subsumed into the mass. Finally “Ascension (A)” lunges with a triumphant drive worthy of its title.
“You’re inside of it,” O’Malley recently said of his sound in an interview. “That’s something that’s been part of my own development as a musician… evaporating.” Here one might think of buddhist monks in the Himalayas. The chant “om,” when pronounced correctly, is supposed to come from the throat, through the mouth and then the lips before returning to the silence from whence it came. This completeness is a sacred expression of the radiant, transcendent infinity of the universe. Pyroclasts feels about as close to that completeness as a metal album by a druid-robed group named after their amplifiers can get.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | October 29, 2019 | 8 | 4cffabcc-4f6d-4037-8d12-29387a82439b | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ |
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