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…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin finds the Roots in some version of the comfy purgatory they've been residing since How I Got Over. That isn't to say there isn't plenty to think about on Cousin, but most of that thought comes from mood, arrangement, and implication. | …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin finds the Roots in some version of the comfy purgatory they've been residing since How I Got Over. That isn't to say there isn't plenty to think about on Cousin, but most of that thought comes from mood, arrangement, and implication. | The Roots: ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19332-the-roots-and-then-you-shoot-your-cousin/ | ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin | "Yes, @TheRoots have NEVER been conventional in anything__--__least of all our album titles," Questlove tweeted wryly, announcing the Roots 11th studio album, ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. The way the title is worded, it could almost be the title of a "Louie" episode. But the phrase comes from KRS-One's "Step Into A World": "MCs more worried about their financial backin'/ Steady packin' a gat as if something's gonna happen/ But it doesn't, they wind up shootin' they cousin, they buggin." It's a joke, but a bleak, mirthless one, with nothing but dread at its core. Maybe Louis CK really could use it.
Questlove has actually called this record satire, adding "but in that satire, it's an analysis of some of the stereotypes perpetuated in not only the hip-hop community, but in the community." He has had these things on his mind even more than usual lately; witness his series of thoughtful essays on how hip-hop "failed Black America" for Vulture. "The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range—social contract, anyone?—but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black star-liner," he wrote.
In many ways, these have been Questlove's concerns since the beginning. The Roots' late-90s high-water mark Things Fall Apart opened with sampled dialogue between Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington from Mo' Betta Blues. "It incenses me that own people don't realize our own heritage, our own culture—this is our music!", says Washington."The people don't come because you don't play the shit that they like," Snipes retorts. In the liner notes, Quest notes the exchange, musing "But what if you gave people what they need? Hmm."
This basic assertion—that there is something people need from pop art that they don't know to ask for—underlines the Roots' career. It's a tricky, contentious notion, but they've always managed to tread this want/need line deftly, even as people shouted at each other over the their shoulders. Roots albums, no matter the landscape around them, always feel sturdy, firm—responsible, in the classic Gangstarr way. To paraphrase what Guru once said, they have a formula, but they update that formula. They've been representing the idea of "Adult Hip Hop" for a shifting demographic for 20 straight years now, and order to keep yourself at such a dignified arms'-length from the prevailing zeitgeist for that long, you actually have to have a pretty canny grasp on it.
In some ways, the Roots are in middlebrow-culture heaven: They are well-supported by a cushy, high profile, well-paying TV gig, one that loosens them up to do whatever the hell they want. But they are in a weird place right now. Their last album started with a neck-kicking snare and closed with a four-movement wordless jazz suite; it sold about 35k in its first week. Around the same time, the Roots backed Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa, who played their Bruno Mars-assisted single "Young Wild & Free", from the execrable 2012 stoner movie Mac and Devin. The soundtrack debuted in the Top 10.
…And Then You Shoot Your Cousin, then, finds the Roots in some version of the comfy purgatory they've been residing since How I Got Over. The album itself is "uncompromising" in the way all Roots albums have been—the sequencing is fluid and streamlined, and touches of avant-garde jazz and older forms of black pop bleed into the fabric. The mood is dour and bleak, and the rappers who assist Black Thought—Dice Raw, Greg P.O.R.N.—are full-time members of the group by now, as far as listeners are concerned. D.D. Jackson, the pianist who crafted Undun's four-movement suite, returns, and he helps whip the conclusion of "The Coming" into a panicked frenzy. The astringent strings swarm the song's edges like locusts clouding a window, and they are the wildest, most anarchic sound here.
"Black Rock", which samples the same clotted, smoke-clouded rare 45 that Black Milk used on Album of the Year's "Deadly Medley", is one of the hardest-hitting and most baleful songs on the album. The Roots always surprise when they let their edges fray just a bit—Questlove has admitted that he enjoys the moments where he can stop "icing out" his technical precision and let his playing go sloppy. It's an infectious feeling you can hear spread through the entire group; "Black Rock" is the exact meeting point where Quest's cerebral grit meets Black Thought's all-body-blows rapping. They work beautifully this way, the group's own Lennon/McCartney, in ways that they don't when they stray into more conventional, rock-album formalist ambitions.
Black Thought remains a spectacular rapper, decades into a career with plenty of invitations to burn out. He hasn't slackened an inch. His flow patterns on "Understand" hit like flurries of jabs to the sternum. The problem for listeners, of course, remains that he never quite knows how to stop dancing on his toes; he always sounds like he's high-stepping through a tire-field. His writing lands on a vividly sculpted image—"I was born faceless in an oasis, folks disappear here and leave no traces," from "Never", or "I'm down to 95 dollars, that's the extent of my riches/ Out of 99 problems, 98 of them is bitches," from "When the People Cheer"—just as often as it tapers off into bars and bars of stock phrases. It keeps Quest's concept-album ambitions on the frustratingly muddy side.
That isn't to say there isn't plenty to think about on Cousin. But most of that thought comes from mood, arrangement, and implication. The opening track, "Theme From Middle of the Night," is just that—Nina Simone, singing the luxuriously wallowing theme song for the 1959 film. Mary Lou Williams' gothic, frightening "The Devil" gets sampled for a 40-second snippet that cuts off on the baleful warning "The Devil looks a lot like you and I." The song leads directly into "Black Rock", the two voices carefully lined up to feel like a direct continuation of each other. There is a squalling burst of musique concrète in "Dies Arae", which erupts with Scott Walker fierceness out of the blank space and marauds through the mix for a minute. The album feels haunted, even plagued, by other voices and memories.
And, of course, the records sounds spectacular. Black Thought's voice sounds raspier and more guttural the older he gets. The snares on "The Dark (Trinity) feel like fingers flicking your ear drums. The Roots have gotten very proficient at making Roots albums. But the hooks on "Never", "When the People Cheer", and "The Coming"—sung by Patty Crash, Modesty Lycan, and Mercedes Martinez, respectively—are somewhat flat and generic-sounding. And the songs themselves rely on a Roots template that feels a little too well-worn to generate much friction anymore—midtempo, muted, built around a minor-key piano line and heavy with intimations of doom. It's in those moments, the comfortable, careful ones, that you wonder how closely the Roots examine the symbolic freight aboard their own vessel, how far they would be interested in shaking themselves up. | 2014-05-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | May 23, 2014 | 7.2 | 4d0f5eef-648c-4240-9a06-06a2335ee877 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
A Lot of Sorrow, the National's collaboration with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, found the band playing their song "Sorrow" repeatedly for six hours at MoMA PS1. They've now released the entire performance as a box set composed of nine clear LPs featuring approximately 105 iterations of the song. | A Lot of Sorrow, the National's collaboration with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, found the band playing their song "Sorrow" repeatedly for six hours at MoMA PS1. They've now released the entire performance as a box set composed of nine clear LPs featuring approximately 105 iterations of the song. | The National: A Lot of Sorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20511-a-lot-of-sorrow/ | A Lot of Sorrow | That the National were going to spend six hours repeatedly performing the same song in an art gallery was one thing. A collaboration with Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, A Lot of Sorrow wasn’t intended as a physical endurance test, but a study in the evolving emotional tenor of a work stretched to its limits: National frontman Matt Berninger described its aim as “reaching a different sort of euphoric, mantra-like state.” Releasing the entire performance in a box set composed of nine clear LPs, however, strips away the sad communion of the original Sunday afternoon show, leaving just the listener and approximately 105 iterations of “Sorrow”, spanning six hours, five minutes.
“Sorrow” is the second track on the National’s fifth album, 2010’s High Violet, and one of the few moments of joy on that fraught, scared record. “[It’s] about a person’s love affair with his own sadness,” Berninger has said. “Sadness is not always the worst feeling. Sometimes it’s a really pleasurable thing to be overwhelmed with sadness.” It works beautifully: High Violet marked the point when Berninger started reaching for livelier vocal harmonies, but his helpless, heavy monotone on “Sorrow” is the perfect forlorn center, caught between resisting sanctuary while craving its embrace. The band anchor him there: Bryan Devendorf’s drums are a subtle hiss with a ‘60s girl group dimple, while guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and bassist Scott Devendorf modulate between three richly thrumming chords.
The luxurious purgatory that Berninger sings about in “Sorrow” is a crucial part of the National’s appeal, which A Lot of Sorrow tests. Every fan wants to believe that they have a special relationship with their favorite band—that they can access something within their work that others could never see—so choosing to engage fully with this kind of project is predicated on the hope that it would induce some kind of transcendent state. (Or, masochism.) But it is a lot—even for a card-carrying National devotee who’s seen them play 25 times in six years, who can’t make it through Alligator without listening to “Baby, We’ll Be Fine” a dozen times straight, or High Violet without lingering on “Lemonworld” for half an hour. I enjoyed an hour of it through headphones on the way home to the suburbs, half-drunk after a Sharon Van Etten show (a very National way to listen to the National), and did the remaining five hours in one go, partially while laying prone on the floor, and soon felt in need of a cold shower.
But A Lot of Sorrow clearly isn’t intended as a consumer item to be placed on your turntable in solemn, linear fashion, which justifies asking what it is for, divorced from its live, physical origins. This release exemplifies pretty much everything that the National’s detractors hate about them, which is rarely just their indulgently sad music. The Ohio-born five-piece are the best dressed straw men in the business, making people bristle at the idea of identifying with the ascendant, middle-class Brooklynite angst of their records. At any rate, it’s a social strata you’d probably have to occupy to afford a copy: sets cost $198 + a hefty postage charge (with all profits benefitting Partners In Health). A week prior to release, the 1500-edition run hadn't sold out yet.
There’s nothing quite as serious as a dead-weight of clear vinyl, yet the existence of A Lot Of Sorrow feels like a cosmic joke, both at the expense of the band’s self-seriousness (an image they’ve been trying to shed with their recent videos and the Mistaken For Strangers documentary), and of those who would accuse them of having made an entire career out of playing the same song over and over. If it weren’t for A Lot Of Sorrow's artistic origins, you could almost interpret it as elegantly weaponized monotony, like Mark Kozelek’s prolific prosaicness, and Aphex Twin apparently dumping his entire hard drive on Soundcloud after releasing his first album in 13 years. You want blood? We got it.
But much as it’s exhausting and unrealistic to absorb in one go, as much a millstone as a symbolic objet d’art, A Lot of Sorrow rewards patience in the most literal fashion. (Another inadvertent joke at the perception that everything the National make is “a grower”…) “I don’t wanna get over you”, Berninger sings in a faint plea every time, an Old Testament pop trope that works as an act of self-preservation and insurance against the responsibility of being the one who has to change. It’s a voluntary slow-death sentence, which he bears stoically throughout the six hours: joking, singing with a mouth full of sandwich halfway through Side O (Kjartansson brought them food and drinks throughout), and saying they’ll have to start over after he coughs during a chorus.
It’s only at the end of Side Q, around the 95th take, that Berninger breaks down. He gasps halfway through “sorrow’s a girl inside my cake” before missing a line and crying, having lost his nerve because he couldn’t see his wife and daughter in the crowd. His live performances are frequently marked by a frightening volatility, and he often openly declares that he needs someone in song, but he’s rarely vulnerable like this. Guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the band's backing musicians take the lead on vocals (and the crowd joins in), and Bryan Devendorf intuits that he should sit this one out.
Throughout, the unspoken conversation between the band is mesmeric: early on they play more muted versions, like steady long-distance runners. They never break between songs—there’s always that hissing drumbeat or a steady guitar line to guide the transition—and the Dessners constantly experiment with different textures. Sometimes the guitar parts swing like slack machinery; later they tremble with the seismic presence of a Richard Serra sculpture, shriek like birds, and swell drunkenly. I didn’t see the original performance, and had wondered if it might mirror William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, fading as energy and morale grew dim, but the ceaseless invention here keeps the song alive.
We’re often curious about how a band—and particularly the singer—can remain engaged with the circumstances that originally informed their music night after night. Not that it’s the most apt reference, but perhaps it’s worth remembering the part of Katy Perry’s Part of Me documentary where she emerges beaming on stage seconds after crying over the breakdown of her marriage. After over 100 renditions of “Sorrow”, the National still sound close to its emotional heart, rather than inured to it. No naysayer will be converted by this completely absurd artifact, but it’s a moving manifestation of the relationship that fans have with any band that means anything to them, playing their songs over and over to tempt the point where the magic fades away. A Lot of Sorrow is a strange achievement and vindication. Stay down, champions, stay down. | 2015-06-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | June 23, 2015 | 7.2 | 4d106b48-6ae2-43d8-81ec-8d5abef80c91 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Leyland Kirby, aka V/VM, creates a 3xCD set of anodyne melodies focused on mood, composition, and performance. | Leyland Kirby, aka V/VM, creates a 3xCD set of anodyne melodies focused on mood, composition, and performance. | Leyland Kirby: Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Once Was | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13891-sadly-the-future-is-no-longer-what-it-once-was/ | Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Once Was | James Leyland Kirby is an artist first and a musician second, which is another way of saying that his records can be more rewarding to think about than actually listen to. But that's not a value judgment, it's a confession and disclaimer-- and, effectively, a statement of fact that you can verify by trudging through some of the prose inspired by Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Once Was.
All the high-minded talk about Sadly is strange given how intuitive the music sounds. Where Kirby's first records (as V/VM) were little nightmares of aggression and pure provocation, Sadly-- three discs of anodyne melodies wandering through static and echo-- is all mood, composition, and performance. It might be dull music, but it's definitely music, which constitutes a radical change for a guy who once released a record filled with the sound of pigs feeding.
The music on Sadly isn't ambient, or at least not how I think of ambient music. It doesn't meet the world halfway. Instead, it's a little like Charlie Brown's personal raincloud: all-encompassing, portable melancholy. Its monotony is part of the point, I think, and its consistency is one of its virtues-- sometimes I forget that it's on until it's over and I'm sitting in my room feeling lightly bummed out about something I can't describe. Kirby is situating himself in a continuum with composers like Erik Satie and Harold Budd, or groups like Deathprod-- music whose finished state sounds half-erased and feint. The conceptual thrust-- if you accept conceptual thrusts-- is a kind of faded-photograph feeling, an effort to represent loss through degraded and scraped-away sounds. The concept is ethereal, and the consistency of the product's effect can't really be guaranteed-- one person's hollowed-out futurescapes of ruined beauty is another person's bore.
Kirby's sound has mellowed, but his approach-- three discs, four hours, little variation-- is still extreme. While I hear the dark undercurrents in his music, I'm not sure he's any more interested in the evocation of emotion than other abstract instrumental composers, nor am I presumptuous enough to say whether or not he's better at evoking them. Sadly is a record I admire more often and more deeply than I feel it, but I definitely admire it-- mostly because Kirby makes music of stasis that doesn't announce itself as much as it seeps. It never grates and it never bores. At worst-- or, at best, depending on which side of the concept you're on-- Kirby's music just vanishes. | 2010-02-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-02-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | History Always Favours the Winners | February 4, 2010 | 6.8 | 4d17b8ae-c092-46c6-83e1-e2e441be2468 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
This fine second album from Annie Clark's project finds the one-time member of Sufjan's band sharpening her songwriting and expanding her arrangements. | This fine second album from Annie Clark's project finds the one-time member of Sufjan's band sharpening her songwriting and expanding her arrangements. | St. Vincent: Actor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12985-actor/ | Actor | Annie Clark, the musician otherwise known as St. Vincent, projects an aura of eerie perfection-- beautiful, poised, good-humored, and well-adjusted to a degree uncommon for rock performers, let alone ordinary people. She's clearly not oblivious to her disarming qualities. On the covers of both her albums, her wide eyes and porcelain features give her the appearance of a cartoon princess come to life, and in the songs contained therein, she sings with the measured, patient tones of a benevolent, maternal authority figure. The thing that separates Clark from any number of earth mother Lilith Fair types, however, is her eagerness to subvert that effect. Her album covers may showcase her pretty face, but her blank expression and the tight framing leave the images feeling uncomfortably ambiguous. Her voice and arrangements are often mellow and soothing, but those sounds mainly serve as context as she exposes undercurrents of anxiety and discomfort hidden just beneath a gorgeous façade.
The songs on St. Vincent's second album, Actor, are primarily sung from the perspective of women who feel stifled and restless in their safe, orderly lives. Her characters worry about the judgment of neighbors and strangers, struggle with boredom and complacency, attempt to sublimate or defuse their anger, and, in one of the record's darkest selections, fantasize about disappearing completely into a new identity. Her lyrics are sympathetic observations rendered with clear, economical language focused on a specific moment of conflict or epiphany, occasionally undercut with self-deprecating asides and subtle humor. Even when the music is at its most dramatic, as when songs slip out of placid, Disney-esque string accompaniment into jagged, distorted guitar passages, Clark consistently understates her characters' angst, and buries their negative emotions under layers of denial, stoicism, and subservience to the desire of others.
The sound of the recordings depict the nuances of these deliberately muted emotions with uncanny accuracy, but the result is not overly polite or unaffecting. On the contrary, Clark's compositions hone in on precise fluctuations in mood, and flesh out complex inner worlds for the women suggested in her lyrics. At some points, as in the climax of "Black Rainbow" and the groovy, robotic hysteria of "Marrow", she achieves a harrowing expression of panic and desperation, but she does just as well in conveying the tension and pressures within less bombastic numbers such as "The Bed" and "Save Me From What I Want". The latter, which takes its title from one of artist Jenny Holzer's best-known aphorisms, is particularly successful in the way its faintest textural details communicate an unease at odds with its airy tone and steady beat.
Since Clark's voice seldom strays from a calm, lovely tone, her guitar parts articulate much of the record's anxieties and provide its moments of cathartic release. Her style is melodic and controlled, conjuring abrasive textures that nevertheless have a clean, meticulous quality that complements her immaculate arrangements as well as her characters' temperate demeanor. Despite a reliance on processed tonality, she manages to avoid a sterile coldness, and has a way of performing her most tightly composed hooks with a touch of looseness and immediacy. In her heaviest, most warped riffs, Clark finds the grace in her subjects' frustration and purges their fear and repressed anger with a glorious, singular noise.
In "Actor Out of Work", an atypically straightforward rock song early in the album's sequence, Clark uses the title phrase as a sad epithet for an inappropriate yet attractive suitor with an inability to lie convincingly. Acting, of course, is a lot more than just lying and pretending. It's about inhabiting characters, being able to fill in subtext with cadence and gesture, and having the empathy required to understand the motivations and actions of the person being portrayed. With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill. | 2009-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 5, 2009 | 8.5 | 4d1a93bd-52cc-41d0-8a7e-27e472e32bc5 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Deftones’ ninth album reaches for a plane beyond loud and quiet, where the band is free to indulge its harshest and most gentle impulses at once. For the first time, they make it look easy. | Deftones’ ninth album reaches for a plane beyond loud and quiet, where the band is free to indulge its harshest and most gentle impulses at once. For the first time, they make it look easy. | Deftones: Ohms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deftones-ohms/ | Ohms | For Deftones fans, the relationship between frontman Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter carries mythological importance: two opposing gravitational pulls that keep the band’s beautiful and bludgeoning music hovering precariously in between. Carpenter is the proudly unreconstructed metalhead, delivering slabs of distorted low end on 7- and 8-string guitars and publicly airing grievances about songs that aren’t heavy enough. Moreno is the sonic experimenter and starry romantic, with a voice that sounds misty and ethereal even when it breaks into a scream—the man whose band gave a generation of angry young rock radio listeners their first exposure to the Cocteau Twins. Moreno and Carpenter’s personal relationship is surely more nuanced than that, and Moreno is clearly a metal fan, too. But the push-pull between musical elements is real, and the reason why Deftones albums continue to feel exciting and alive while nearly every other band once labeled nu-metal now looks like self-parodic kitsch.
The Deftones catalog is full of moments that illustrate this fundamental tension, but none satisfies in quite the same way as “Urantia,” the third song from their ninth album Ohms. It begins with a jagged one-one riff played with disorienting power, gearing you up for a sustained assault. Instead of attacking, the song veers hard in the other direction: spacious and tender, riding a variation of the lithe, hip-hop-influenced hi-hat groove drummer Abe Cunningham developed around the time of 2000’s high-water mark White Pony and has been refining ever since. It’s a satisfying reversal, and becomes something greater than that when the riff comes back—as big and loud as it was the first time, but newly seductive and agile, guiding Moreno’s airy vocal through a series of pop chord changes toward a chorus that floods the room with light. Suddenly, the band’s two driving instincts are no longer in tension at all, but perfectly natural complements, each lifting and twirling the other like partners in the world’s most brutal figure skating routine. For the first time—after years of strife and a hard-fought comeback in 2016’s Gore—Deftones are making it look easy.
Moreno signaled in a recent Uproxx interview that Ohms would satisfy fans of Deftones’ most intense material, while also giving himself some plausible deniability: “‘Heavy’ is kind of subjective, you know? The last thing I ever want to do is be quoted saying, ‘This is our heaviest record!’” He’s right that “heaviest” isn’t quite the proper distinction for an album that never wields the unrelenting sledgehammer force of “Elite” or “When Girls Telephone Boys.” But it also forgoes the crystalline hush that seems to bother Carpenter so much, never offering respite for more than a minute or two before slamming you again. Instead, Ohms reaches for a plane beyond the simple loud vs. quiet dichotomy, where the band is free to indulge its harshest and most gentle impulses all at once. On “The Spell of Mathematics,” an eerie high synthesizer line softens the sludge metal guitars that churn beneath it; against the grinding feedback and noise of “Error,” Moreno purrs lovelorn free associations instead of adding his own howls to the fray.
In the three decades since their origins as Sacramento skate rats, Deftones have struggled with addiction, lost bassist Chi Cheng to a coma and eventual death from heart failure, and repeatedly appeared on the verge of implosion over Moreno and Carpenter’s musical differences. At some point amid the turmoil, they became elder statesmen—and not just in the commercial hard rock world, but to younger, hipper bands like Nothing and Deafheaven that proudly wear their influence. They’ve earned the right to relax, and they’re not attempting to radically shift your notion of what their music can be. For those of us who have stuck around, that’s just fine; a Deftones album that effortlessly twists their familiar components into a few genuinely new shapes is plenty exciting.
On Ohms, they keep their most adventurous sounds to the margins. “Pompeji” dissolves into a wash of ominous synth drone, lulling you into complacency before the hydraulic rhythms of “This Link Is Dead” arrive to shake you awake; “The Spell of Mathematics” spends half its runtime on a gorgeous instrumental coda, with placid guitar chords draped like a security blanket over anxiously shuffling drums. At times, I wish the band would integrate moments like these more wholly into the songs themselves, but perhaps doing so would upset the delicate equilibrium they seem to have reached. Still, Deftones thrive on tension; there’s a reason none of Moreno and Carpenter’s side projects, where each is free of the other’s constricting influence, has produced anything as resonant as their main band’s best work. If they’ve reached a détente, don’t expect it to last for long. In April, Moreno live streamed a DJ set that paired extreme metal like Blut Aus Nord with left-field electronic music like Suicideyear; in August, Carpenter announced he’d added a ninth string to his guitar.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Warner | October 1, 2020 | 7.6 | 4d1b0614-6d8b-45bd-b815-9bf62bc29244 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
More than two decades in, the Omaha electro-rock band finds new reasons to stay angry and keep dancing. | More than two decades in, the Omaha electro-rock band finds new reasons to stay angry and keep dancing. | The Faint: Egowerk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-faint-egowerk/ | Egowerk | The Faint haven’t always had the convictions to match their fury. On 2014’s Doom Abuse, the Omaha electro-rock outfit sounded more than ever like a band in search of a machine to rage against, settling instead on a succession of ever-sillier anti-tech, anti-conformity, anti-everything screeds that it’s hard to imagine even they took very seriously. Substance has always been secondary to style for these guys, but it’s still no fun listening to a band that doesn’t buy their own sloganeering.
If the Faint are still smirking on Egowerk, their first album in five years, then they’re doing a better job disguising it. They’ve focused their ire on a subject a good deal more topical and resonant: social media, specifically the ways online platforms play into society’s worst instincts and exacerbate cultural divides. Singer Todd Fink doesn’t need to overstate the fallout, because we’re all living it. Especially in the wake of 2016, we’ve seen how people willingly spread misinformation, bully each other into eating disorders or worse, and viciously attack anybody perceived as the opposition. “Chameleon Nights” details the entrenchment: “Everybody’s talking but we don’t know shit/You fight, I fight, it’s an ego trip/It’s a video game and you’re an avatar/What you fake becomes what you are.”
The damage isn’t only confined to the comment sections. There’s also the gradual erosion of your self-esteem that comes from spending so much time in an artificial environment where everyone you know is trying their best to make their lives look better than yours. “Life’s a Joke” captures the fruitlessness of seeking validation online. “You want to fit in/But you want to stand out,” Fink sings over grinding, distressed synths. “You want to trust your body/But you’re best without.”
As usual, the music is fitfully vicious. Opener “Child Asleep” may be the Faint’s most colossal track yet, a gnarly frenzy of rumbling 808s and electric jolts. Self-producing has served the band well; the drums have the uncanny synthetic clap of techno, yet they sound like they’re reverberating off of real walls. It won’t surprise anybody who’s caught their live show that the group is still in fighting shape. Long after casual listeners misplaced their copies of the Saddle Creek 50, the Faint continued drawing surprisingly large, passionate crowds, and some of those stage reflexes carry over to Egowerk’s dramatic halts and breakdowns. Even as the group has graduated beyond the reedy electronics of their early ’00s dance-punk and immersed themselves more fully in EDM, the music has retained its urgent physicality.
Still, it’s probably for the best that the Faint continue working at their recent leisurely pace of about an album every half decade, because this band burns through their ideas fast. Toward the end of Egowerk the songs grow thinner and more obvious in their ’80s references. Gary Numan synths flutter over the four-on-the-floor electro-funk of “Young & Realistic,” the album’s most faithful callback of the Danse Macabre days, while “Automaton” robot dances the record to the finish line with no particular ambition to awe. A little bit of the Faint goes a long way, but as long as there’s technological angst—and it’s impossible to imagine a time when there won’t be—there’s always going to some life left in this sound. | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | March 15, 2019 | 6.5 | 4d20e213-c0e6-437f-a903-1247eb27e7dc | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
One of the most dependable big-name producers in rap takes a turn as an MC, camouflaging his weaknesses and sometimes even turning them into strengths. | One of the most dependable big-name producers in rap takes a turn as an MC, camouflaging his weaknesses and sometimes even turning them into strengths. | Swizz Beatz: One Man Band Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10606-one-man-band-man/ | One Man Band Man | Swizz Beatz is one of the most dependable big-name producers in rap. His clanging, anthemic keyboard-beats were one of the main forces behind the late-90s rise of the Ruff Ryders crew, and more recently he's kept buys churning out dense, furious club-bangers for the likes of Beyonce and T.I. But he's not a rapper. "It's Me, Bitches", the Swizz solo single that hit radio early in the year, is a total mess. On that track, he huffs and puffs, grunting a lot and saying absolutely nothing, repeating the same verses twice, attempting to make a hook out of "chillin' in my Beamer, listening to 'Ether'" despite the fact that "Beamer" doesn't even come close to rhyming with "Ether." And yet "It's Me, Bitches" is one of the best rap singles of the year. The song is a delirious burst of energy, oscillating synth-blips and churning martial strings hammering away while sirens scream and drums shatter. The track keeps interrupting itself, flying apart and then back together before ending in a great incendiary scratch-solo. Any actual rapper would have a hell of a time navigating this minefield, but Swizz just plays hypeman for himself, screaming catchphrases and adding to the clutter rather than trying to stay above it. "It's Me, Bitches" is a forceful and mindless dumb-out classic, and it feels like a glorious fluke, the sort of success that could not possibly repeat itself. As great as "It's Me, Bitches" might be, it doesn't exactly give the impression that Swizz Beatz would be capable of making a good album.
Somehow, though, One Man Band Man is a good album, though by no means a great one. The album works because Swizz for the most part internalizes the lessons of "It's Me, Bitches", camouflaging his weaknesses and sometimes even turning them into strengths. The album's best songs are meaningless shots of adrenaline built on the dizzy energy of that first single. Follow-up "Money in the Bank" is even busier and nearly as inspired; its tire-screeches, stadium-drums, finger-snaps, stadium-chants, bass-rumbles, and squeaky sped-up vocals somehow cohere into something simple and infectious. "Top Down", meanwhile, swirls riotous bursts of 70s-soul horns and strings around one another.
Best of all is "Take a Picture", which slightly slows the tempo without losing the album's sense of exhilaration. Built on top of a luminous sample of the joyous burlbing bass from Bill Withers' "Take a Picture", the song works as a loopy, euphoric grin, even if Swizz doesn't do much more than brag about his funny. In fact, Swizz's clumsy-ass rapping has a sort of goofily naive charm to it. He delivers all his lyrics in a breathless bark and repeats himself constantly: one song after "chillin' in my Beamer, listening to 'Ether,'" he's "cruisin' in that Lambo, lookin' like Rambo." He sounds utterly elated to be rapping, blissfully unaware that virtually every line is a certifiable clunker.
The album is short: Ten songs, one obligatory all-star remix, and one pointless voicemail message from Snoop Dogg. It's over in roughly half and hour, which barely gives the energy any time to lag. Confusingly, the only rapping guest to appear on any track other than the all-star remix is Ruff Ryders refugee Drag-On, who turns up on "Bust Ya Gunz" and who's only barely a better rapper than Swizz. Even more confusingly, Swizz himself only produces about half the tracks, though the guest beatmakers mostly do a good job at recreating his antic aesthetic. Against all odds, One Man Band Man never wears out its welcome.
The album only falls to pieces when Swizz tries to get serious, which he does on tracks bad enough to cast a huge shadow over the whole thing. On "The Funeral", Swizz tries to sound haunted and paranoid, but he ends up with a handful of ridiculously dumb pseudo-goth images like "it's been nothing but black clouds and black cats/ And every night I see an old man with black slacks." Lyrically, the sleepy, downtrodden poverty-reminisce "Part of the Plan" may be even worse: "I wish I could fly away on a unicorn/ I'm from the ghetto, and every day a human's born." Confusingly, the track is billed as featuring Chris Martin, but that guest-appearance turns out to just be a sample from "X&Y", which isn't even a good Coldplay song. If "Part of the Plan" manages to end the recent trend of rappers looking to Chris Martin for choruses, it'll justify its existence. Meanwhile, Swizz is a whole lot better off yelling over sirens and talking about his money. | 2007-09-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-09-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Motown | September 4, 2007 | 7.1 | 4d229482-1399-4bb2-991d-813c0ac9b675 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The debut mixtape from Detroit’s Tee Grizzley argues for him as a sober, sincere street rapper with the potential for some crossover success. | The debut mixtape from Detroit’s Tee Grizzley argues for him as a sober, sincere street rapper with the potential for some crossover success. | Tee Grizzley: My Moment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23184-my-moment/ | My Moment | There are 13 songs on Tee Grizzley’s debut mixtape, My Moment, but the first three minutes alone will convince you of the young Detroit native’s exceptional talent. With no instrumental, the 23-year-old beats out a drum pattern on a kitchen table, snaps his fingers, and adds his own harmonies to a rhyme about the stomach pains and betrayal he felt while serving time in two states. It drips with pathos: “I sat there and waited/For niggas to help me/All that talking they did, them niggas ain’t show it/I sat there and starved/I remember the hunger.” My Moment was written during Grizzley’s incarceration, and argues for him as a sober, sincere street rapper with the potential for some crossover success.
Prior to his time in the spotlight, Grizzley, born Terry Wallace, was sentenced to 18 months for second-degree home invasion in Michigan and nine months for a jewelry store robbery in Kentucky. The former charges stem from his time at Michigan State University, where he studied accounting and finance; an acute financial crisis of his own inspired him to raid a series of dorm rooms before being caught with nearly $20,000 worth of cash and electronics. This was February 2014. Grizzley was released pending an investigation and then fled to Kentucky, where he was eventually picked up during that botched jewel heist.
All told, Grizzley’s legal troubles only lasted about two and a half years—a far cry from the 30 years he claims to have been initially offered in a plea deal. As he raps on his breakout single, “First Day Out,” which is included here: “My first offer was 30 years, not a day lower/I told them crackers, holla at me when they sober.” My Moment frequently feels like a series of formal exercises, someone taking his mind off of his immediate circumstances by diving into his work. “Catch It” could slot into most rap radio playlists, perhaps between Big Sean’s “Bounce Back” and Future’s “Fuck Up Some Commas.” “Country” is like a rapid-fire resume for Grizzley as a technical rapper, and the hook on “How Many” sounds as if it could be a reference for Ty Dolla $ign.
Speaking of those technical points, Grizzley follows in the long line of Detroit rappers whose syllables frequently spill out on either end of the bar. It’s a careening, freewheeling flow, where phrases are expanded and contracted seemingly at random, but where the sum total is a near-perfect groove. (If you’ve ever heard a Big Sean song and wondered why he’s rapping off-beat, he isn’t—he’s approximating this very approach.) There’s a bonus effect to this. A song like “Day Ones,” with its more perfectly coiffed delivery, stands out as a departure on My Moment, where on an industry-trained rapper’s record, it might get lost in the din.
As great as some of the new songs on My Moment are—see “10K”’s bounce in particular—“First Day Out” remains Grizzley’s masterwork. It’s as defiant as could be expected for a song he recorded in the same clothes he was wearing as he left prison, but it’s also somber, an elegy for those left behind behind bars or for those already departed. “First Day Out” is extraordinarily dense with names, nicknames, and references to real people in Grizzley’s life, to the point where quoting its lyrics feels invasive. Maybe that’s what’s so enrapturing about My Moment: despite Grizzley’s newfound buzz, and despite the commercial aspirations betrayed by some songs, the tape feels like it was made for his friends and family, a love letter to everything that brought him to this point, good and bad. | 2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | April 25, 2017 | 7.2 | 4d22dc07-7ef7-4e51-be30-e58742c426b4 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The Staten Island quartet follows Why There Are Mountains, its self-released debut of 1990s indie rock alchemy, with a difficult and potentially divisive sophomore LP, a lyrics-first record that puts confidence in the listener's attention span. | The Staten Island quartet follows Why There Are Mountains, its self-released debut of 1990s indie rock alchemy, with a difficult and potentially divisive sophomore LP, a lyrics-first record that puts confidence in the listener's attention span. | Cymbals Eat Guitars: Lenses Alien | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15757-lenses-alien/ | Lenses Alien | Cymbals Eat Guitars have followed Why There Are Mountains, their self-released debut of 1990s indie rock alchemy, with a difficult and likely divisive sophomore LP. Which isn't all that surprising-- these things happen when the "next step" involves signing to a label, hiring a venerated producer (John Agnello, who also worked this year with alt-revivalists Male Bonding), turning over half of your personnel, and releasing an 8 1/2-minute song as the "first single." Here's the thing: Lenses Alien doesn't really sound all that different from Why There Are Mountains, which is a tribute to how fully formed and musically tight CEG were right out of the gate. Perhaps the most challenging thing about Lenses Alien is how it makes what it sounds like fairly unimportant: Like last time, almost none of its sonic touchstones exist outside of the Clinton administration, but Joseph D'Agostino takes an enormous leap of faith by doubling down on his brick-thick verbiage during a lyrics-first record that puts more confidence in the listener's attention span than pretty much anything else I've heard this year.
It's become something of a cliché to praise an "album in the mp3 age," and while Lenses Alien certainly isn't intended to be strip-mined for singles, it's meant to be experienced on a remarkably micro level. It's actually more ambitious than the already grand Mountains, but it doesn't manifest in Byzantine song structure or far-flung sonic touches. While there's a peripheral shift from the more blue-collar, populist likes of Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and the Wrens into the deconstructive and unfairly less celebrated Cap'n Jazz (when it's loud) and the Appleseed Cast (when it's quiet), the craft is evident in how every lyric and riff is exactingly honed to be of near equal importance.
The rest of Lenses Alien doesn't take after the sprawl of "Rifle Eyesight (Proper Name)"-- it's about twice as long as anything else-- but it lays out the record's rules of engagement. I've talked with others who consider its flow to be somewhat clunky, which is understandable considering what listeners typically expect from a song of that length, particularly an opener. There's not an epic build or a cataclysmic blowout: D'Agostino occupies the mind of an unstable, possibly predatory narrator, changing perspective and mood from verse to verse, the extended floods of physically punishing guitar feedback acting as outbursts of mental anguish linking unorthodox yet accessible and sprightly vocal lines. I'll call it anticlimactic as a compliment: Over an ugly, gnarled cluster of notes, D'Agostino asks, "What former police sits at the bus stop offering rides?” and the song ends abruptly like a stunning reveal. After eight minutes of psychodrama played out in his head, the camera pans out for you to imagine the yellowed teeth or cold, vacant stare of its main character.
So many of Lenses Alien's enduring moments come from these mergers of sensation-- the chorus of "oh-whoas" from tired passengers on the cunningly catchy "Shore Points" underlining an abrupt change of plans along the Jersey coastline; a picture of motorboats and Styrofoam coolers amidst the burst of crowd-pleasing guitars during "Keep Me Waiting". Then there's the liquid, unsteady near-instrumental of "The Current" stopping to make a brief and lucid prayer for a universe free of physical suffering, while "Gary Condit" offers the record's final grasp at understanding: "Is it teeth-shaking polyphony, grace, and completion or nothing?" delivered as an unholy, desperate cry for help.
The need for release runs throughout Lenses Alien, as it condenses the spacious travelogues of Mountains into claustrophobic ruminations on the metaphysical, moving cars, and D'Agostino's mind existing as purgatories. "Plainclothes" opens suggesting a True Crime story, but it's a passing thought during a paranoid drive up a New York highway interspersed with startling, vivid details-- the tricks cops pull on unsuspecting drivers during initiation season, the sensation of being haunted by ghosts of past partiers in a guest house. This unsettling otherworldliness continues through "Definite Darkness", a mysterious police investigation causing a sleepless night that fades out on a coda of wearied sighs.
Considering all the paranoia and fleeting revelations, drugs unsurprisingly play a big role here, particularly psychedelics whose side effects are less about hedonism than discovery. D'Agostino and friends have relatable freak outs and puke in sand dunes, pass out with their shoes on, roll down hills on skateboards, and remark upon how "dried mushrooms taste a lot like communion wafers." They’re disarmingly naïve about worlds opening up to them, seeing gas leaks, air force bases, and the suburban and rural expanses of the northeast United States as reflections of celestial significance.
The downside is how the music occasionally buckles under the weight of its own restlessness and D'Agostino’s words-- a slightly skewed ratio of visceral immediacy to cerebral satisfaction making it a slight notch below Why There Are Mountains. While packed with forceful riffs and quirky melodic turns, "Another Tunguska" and "Secret Family" are such slippery compositions that D'Agostino's backing can sometimes feel incidental. But once you stop looking for the hooks and choruses as they might be defined traditionally, dozens of inventive melodies emerge: Is the elegant, Elliott Smith-esque melody of "Shore Points" less sticky because there’s no chorus? Do the soulfully swooping harmonies of "Wavelengths" constitute a chorus even though the lyrics don’t repeat?
I suppose it's indicative of Lenses Alien's strange magnetism that it raises as many questions when it's catchy as it does when it's inscrutable. After all, it's so thick with overlapping images, memories, stray thoughts, and second guessing that I sense D'Agostino's asking us throughout: How real are our own emotions? Are you guessing at your own feelings? It's heavy stuff, never answered in an easy way, and can really feel out of step with their peers who treat lyrics as placeholders and thoughts as fact. More than the sound of the 90s, Lenses Alien recalls, at least to these ears, the way we might’ve interacted with those records at the time: poring over the lyrics sheet, having a real sense of investment.
It's no slight to say Lenses Alien isn't at the level of Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica -- it's not a masterpiece. But while Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record. | 2011-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk / Memphis Industries | September 7, 2011 | 8 | 4d25e049-1d56-4b43-ac51-40ca609e33af | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Experimental electronic producer Jan Jelinek partners with vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita to create gorgeous clouds of shifting sound. | Experimental electronic producer Jan Jelinek partners with vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita to create gorgeous clouds of shifting sound. | Masayoshi Fujita / Jan Jelinek: Schaum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22434-schaum/ | Schaum | You’d be forgiven for thinking that, after a playful and prolific run through most of the 2000s, the peculiar electronic music producer Jan Jelinek had taken an extended break. Since 2006’s Tierbeobachtungen, there hasn’t been a full-length released under his name. There have been collaborations (though it would appear that his work with Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples is, like his Ursula Bogner releases, simply another iteration of Jelinek working under another name) as well as a series of wonderfully weird vinyl-only 12”s that collected radio pieces and art commissions. One release—in an act of surreal prescience four years before the fact—even opened with a sample from eventual Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Throughout this time, Jelinek’s one constant has been an ongoing collaboration with Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They released an album in 2010 and followed it up with a live EP in 2013. Now comes a second duo album, and the dialogue between the two is so sympathetic it's hard to tell just where Fujita’s prepared vibraphone ends and Jelinek’s whirring mechanisms and blipping loops begin. It’s a musical relationship that lends itself towards atmospheric explorations, the sounds taking on the hazy sheen of a particularly muggy afternoon. As Jelinek writes on the back cover of Schaum, he notes that the tendency of their work tends towards the tag of “tropical.” “I have long been obsessed with the tropics,” he writes. “This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness.”
So the grayscale palm frond on the cover is fitting, though “extravagant” would be a deceptive way to describe these eight woozy, mainly unhurried pieces, but there is something deliciously irrational about all of them. Small, fluttering drones mix with swamp gas and what sounds like a clock being wound up on “Urub,” and “Helio” sounds like R2-D2 getting burped. The bubbling glitches and cricket sounds that open up “What You Should Know About Me” soon turn queasy and comical, a bicycle bell and thrummed piece of metal providing a rhythm not unlike a submerged bumper car thumping against a sea sponge. Or is that a gamelan bobbing against the sides of a bath tub?
So gentle and breezy is Schaum that the density of sounds the two players actually stir up is easy to miss. “LesLang” and the aptly titled “Vague, Yet” could be a nature recording that’s gently processed into an ambient wash. But home in on the sounds that mimic chirping frogs and soon you’ll note that crickets and coos come into greater detail, as do all manner of squiggles, buzzes, plonks and squelches, to where your ears toggle between focus and fuzziness, just like listening in nature.
On the exquisite nine-minutes close “Parades,” Jelinek’s observations and obsessions come true and the album transforms into an uncanny landscape worthy of Henri Rousseau, weirdly flat and deeply detailed all at once. Each piece of Schaum is open enough so that they can be perceived as formless or self-contained microcosms. It’s an album immersive enough to suggest dense foliage or a wavering landscape completely submerged underwater, depending on your idea of paradise. | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Faitiche | October 3, 2016 | 7.9 | 4d278116-2f7c-4c4a-ba71-5a6c81297fdc | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
null | I'd call it "fast", as in: alarmingly out of control, spiraling nowhere but in a righteous hurry to get there. This is life I'm talking about, and it's killing me at the moment. I suppose that's what life does, ultimately, but must it move at so breakneck a pace? The past month has been one of feeling caught up in the flow of people, work, and events just hoping to come out on the other end: Day job's a mess, the train rides are long, my poor wife is being dragged all over the country by her job, there are | William Basinski: Silent Night / Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11663-silent-night-variations-a-movement-in-chrome-primitive/ | Silent Night / Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive | I'd call it "fast", as in: alarmingly out of control, spiraling nowhere but in a righteous hurry to get there. This is life I'm talking about, and it's killing me at the moment. I suppose that's what life does, ultimately, but must it move at so breakneck a pace? The past month has been one of feeling caught up in the flow of people, work, and events just hoping to come out on the other end: Day job's a mess, the train rides are long, my poor wife is being dragged all over the country by her job, there are cats to feed and bills to pay and too much e-mail, and it's all enough to make one quite sleepy, but at the same time too agitated to fall asleep easily.
So. Everybody feels this way now and then, but what the crap does this have to do with William Basinski? Well, everything and nothing. Basinski has really nothing to do with fast or the too-quickness of life and everything to do with the antidote. I'm not even going to skirt around it: Lately, I've been listening to basically nothing but Afrobeat and drone-based ambient music. It's a strange combination, but this month that's what I'm in the mood for. Basinski's records, of course, falls in the latter camp (I've yet to find anything that falls into both camps-- if anyone out there has a tip, drop me a line).
Basinski has his own unique ambient voice. Slowness is the thing with Basinski-- well, not the only thing, but one thing, and an important one-- and as if to drive home the point, his most celebrated work, The Disintegration Loops, took a couple of decades to make. Not by design, mind you, as he had no way of knowing how his stored tapes would decay over time, but it's nice to think about a piece of music incubating before finally being offered to the world at large. But more broadly, his music is unhurried and develops very slowly, rather unlike the information-soaked world it's meant to enrich. His two most recent releases are not things you just listen to in dribs and drabs. You need to actually have a seat and take them in; you need to put aside time to be alone with the music, which is marvelous, I think, because it forces you to realize just how much you're rushing in your daily comings and goings.
Silent Night is the shorter of the two pieces and can be succinctly described as an ambient excursion built of soft, humming drones that swell and recede under and over a hissing, bug-like drone. For an hour. That's all it is, superficially, but there's so much more going on here, manifested in the irregular intervals between swells, the way a rapid succession of hums play off of the drones, and the alternately melancholy and joyous manner in which the sounds recede and return. And the sound. Ooh, such timbres. These are sounds you can really dig into-- rounded, water-smooth sounds with palpable surface tension and mile-thick bass whale calls that seem to have a soul. Unfortunately, the bugs get the last ten or so minutes to themselves, but up 'til then it's magic.
Variations, like The Disintegration Loops, was originally created in 1981, remained unreleased for ages, and involves metamorphosis through reiteration. It sprawls, to say the least, over two discs-- each split courteously into four sections for listening ease-- all made of the same elements: piano loops played against each other in endless variations. The piano recordings aren't laid straight out in front of you, though-- they're coated in a layer of thick, pillowy muffling, which not only takes away the sharpness of the piano's attack, but also makes it sound alien and wombed in from the world. On the first piece, the loops dance around the stereo spectrum in a disorienting ballet; on the second, they build ever outward as more loops are added and echoed and set randomly against each other, creating heaving, oscillating waves of liquid piano.
Basinski's liners refer to the process of setting the loops against each other and multiplying the sound as allowing the sounds to "breed," and that's basically what they do. A short, melodic piano figure is the basis for each piece, and the breeding of the loops makes for moments of both startling beauty and dense, opaque numbness, much more the former than the latter. There's a terrible kind of sadness in these loops as they waver and repeat, clouding themselves over and generating swells of feedback-- the sepia piano tone and the choice of notes play like a hazy memory of loss.
This is part of what separates Basinski from other minimalists and experimental composers. There's an obvious process, even a theory, operating in his work, but it never sounds scientific or cold-- the human element of emotion comes first and is multiplied by the process. As such, Basinski's work has the potential to appeal to many listeners who otherwise wouldn't care to listen to hours of slow, incrementally changing tape loops. And, of course, sometimes the slowness of the music itself can be all the justification needed for setting aside an hour to get outside of our up-to-the-minute existence and really, truly listen. | 2005-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | February 15, 2005 | 7.7 | 4d291c80-6f8c-42fb-bb0a-b90656f46ba1 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The powerhouse DJ trio returns with a sprawling 17-track album and a solid Weeknd collaboration, though the forays into menacing, murkier sounds prove less satisfying. | The powerhouse DJ trio returns with a sprawling 17-track album and a solid Weeknd collaboration, though the forays into menacing, murkier sounds prove less satisfying. | Swedish House Mafia: Paradise Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swedish-house-mafia-paradise-again/ | Paradise Again | Swedish House Mafia songs are relentless, pounding like the first slice of light through the curtains on your most hungover morning. Maximalism is the minimum—their tracks start with a gargantuan beat drop and explode outward, confetti so thick you can’t see through it. The producer-DJ trio of Steve Angello, Axwell, and Sebastian Ingrosso fused together in the late 2000s and quickly became staples for the glowstick and glitter set. They raged at Ultra and Electric Daisy Carnival; they surged on the dance charts; they sold out Madison Square Garden in nine minutes, the first DJ act to headline the venue. And then the lasers and light shows started to sputter out. “We came, we raved, we loved,” Swedish House Mafia wrote in a 2012 missive announcing their breakup. But three months later, the group released what would become their biggest single, a track so successful they had no choice but to embark on another round of shows, which they titled One Last Tour.
“Don’t You Worry Child” twisted inane, earnest vocals into a song that sounded boundless. The lyrics are cloying, the sentiment overbearing, the stomping lead-up to the beat drop just short of suffocating. But the synths tower; every beat shivers. Swedish House Mafia steamroll their way into emotion, the blithest shortcut to bliss. After that triumphant last tour, the group receded, popping up only every few years for one-off sets. Last summer, they made another dramatic announcement: The band was back together, signed to Republic and ready to release a new record, Paradise Again. The sprawling 17-track album is richer in texture and grander in scope than previous releases, but the group’s forays into menacing, murkier sounds prove less satisfying than the crystalized euphoria that made them crowd pleasers.
When Swedish House Mafia hit their peak, EDM was at the center of pop. The dance music scene is more fragmented now, and perhaps as a response, the group has adjusted its approach. Paradise Again opts for a darker sound, crammed with buzzes and whirs. “Mafia” is a wordless trudge that sounds more apt to soundtrack a video game than an arena rager; midway through, the drums slump and then pause, like the song itself needed to gasp for air. A faint drone hums under the entire track, an effect that’s ominous at first but eventually becomes draining. Swedish House Mafia used to make songs that crashed over you like a wave; far too often on Paradise Again, they sound like they’re treading water. “19:30” falls into a smudge of bleats and beeps; sirens reverberate around a limp beat drop on “Don’t Go Mad,” grating under frazzled layers of distortion. Swedish House Mafia are great at shaking you awake, but they aren’t very scary: They recruit A$AP Rocky for “Frankenstein,” an attempt at a foreboding mosh pit anthem, but the song crosses into caricature, with Rocky on autopilot as he chants about fucking up the club.
It takes The Weeknd for Swedish House Mafia to succeed at sounding sinister. Together, Abel Tesfaye’s sullen, sparkling disco and the trio’s incessant throb form both sides of the case for hedonism—the Weeknd exudes nihilism, and Swedish House Mafia turn it into a party. The group produced some of the most propulsive songs on Tesfaye’s recent album and are slated to headline Coachella alongside him; their collaboration here, “Moth to a Flame,” is Paradise Again’s best track. They build into it with a palate-cleansing instrumental interlude from Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad, a pocket of stillness on a constantly churning album, before the beat rises once again. “It’s just one call away/And you’ll leave him, you’re loyal to me,” The Weeknd croons, equal parts terrorizing and tender. The tingling production is more elegant than Swedish House Mafia seemed capable of a decade ago.
In their time off, the group has mastered more polished, contained songs that could still shake a stadium. Now, they’re able to braid a delicate beat or piano interlude into the walloping soundscape. “Home,” a toned-down track with a sleek percussive exoskeleton and occasional sprigs of guitar, shocks because it sounds so muted. On “Lifetime,” Ty Dolla $ign and 070 Shake’s voices glint and echo as they sing about the glaring lights of a city skyline, the promise of clasped hands. The lyrics in Swedish House Mafia songs have never attempted poetry—Ty fumbles through a line about “the best sex,” and the album opener features the inscrutable pronouncement, “It takes a man to be real/It takes a woman to know that.” But the group is at its best when it balances excess and exuberance, when its sparse snippets of quiet feel like clarity, not compromise. | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Republic | April 15, 2022 | 6.2 | 4d291f9d-0c8a-4808-91dd-e5eae8decc7f | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Kirk Knight is a member of Joey Bada$$' Pro Era crew. His debut has some of the Pro Era reference points (Madvillainy, Wu-Tang) but Knight shows that although he's learned from the past, he's not living in it. Featuring Mick Jenkins, Joey Bada$$, Thundercat. | Kirk Knight is a member of Joey Bada$$' Pro Era crew. His debut has some of the Pro Era reference points (Madvillainy, Wu-Tang) but Knight shows that although he's learned from the past, he's not living in it. Featuring Mick Jenkins, Joey Bada$$, Thundercat. | Kirk Knight: Late Knight Special | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21132-late-knight-special/ | Late Knight Special | Brooklyn rapper Kirk Knight begins his debut album Late Knight Special quite boldly, with a sample from Sun Ra's Space Is the Place sci-fi film. For Knight, Ra's otherworldly musings are irrelevant: He picks the sample because Madlib uses the same audio clip to end Madvillainy's absurdist "Shadows of Tomorrow". Knight's connection to the 2004 classic ends there: His narrative-driven lyrics don't resemble MF DOOM's post-modern syllabic wordplay in the slightest. But by leading with an obvious and familiar sample, he indicates to the listener where his hip-hop allegiances lie. Unlike fellow Pro Era member Joey Bada$$, Knight doesn't try to compete with his more accomplished forebears. At its best and its worst, Late Knight Special is an unassuming project.
That opening track, "Start Running", encapsulates much of its successes and shortcomings. Knight flows smoothly and competently, but hardly any notable lines emerge, and he spends much of the song simply telling the listener that he is rapping, which doesn't work without artful twists of wordplay. It's the song's production—Knight's forte—that makes "Start Running" worthwhile: The light hi-hats allude to boom bap, but Knight manages to avoid copycat '90s-worship. Throughout the album, Knight shows that although he's learned from the past, he's not living in it.
The more daring Knight gets with his production, the more interesting Late Knight Special becomes. When he cranks up the bass and ventures into the minor key, he gets more intense on the microphone and sharpens his focus. "Brokeland", for example, very much recalls Wu-Tang Clan's "C.R.E.A.M.", complete with a send-off from Knight that "everybody know that money is the root of all evil." The song is also built on an obscure Italian harpsichord sample of which RZA would surely be proud. Knight's lyrics focus on concrete details: "With the Hammer pants, I keep security cards in my sneakers." The tales from the block—which have the potential for honesty and insight—suit Knight well.
During a mid-album suite of poppier love songs ("One Knight", "Scorpio", and "Down"), Knight makes the hooks his focus. He actually has quite a knack for choruses and half-sings most of them himself. The accompanying bars, however, fail to register. As the album comes to a close with a series of deeper, more ponderous songs, the earworm hooks disappear and the beats remain relaxed, leaving Knight to hold attention with his bars. Ultimately, his Chicago guests Mick Jenkins and Noname Gypsy end up making as much, if not more, of an impression. On "Dead Friends", for instance, which also features Thundercat on bass, Knight meanders his way into a story about an older friend who had taken him under his wing; he later finds out secondhand that the friend died. It's a thoughtful sentiment, but lacks urgency. Noname, on the same track, jumps in with biblical, Billie Holiday, and Yeezus allusions in her first two lines.
Kirk Knight's rapping career is very much nascent. Before this debut, his biggest look as a rapper was probably his guest verse on Joey's 2013 "Amethyst Rockstar". It's as a producer where Knight's had plenty of opportunities to excel. He's got credits on legitimately popular songs, such as Joey's "Big Dusty". This imbalance shows through on Late Knight Special, for better and for worse. The whole thing sounds crisp and determined, but he hasn't yet showed us why he deserves to be center stage of his own productions yet. | 2015-11-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Cinematic / Pro Era | November 6, 2015 | 6.4 | 4d2a6144-57ce-41a9-af79-60b8d701130c | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Another record of entrancing, spectral folk and English ballads. | Another record of entrancing, spectral folk and English ballads. | Marissa Nadler: The Saga of Mayflower May | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5908-the-saga-of-mayflower-may/ | The Saga of Mayflower May | Marissa Nadler's 2004 album Ballads of Living and Dying was a burnished gem of entrancing, spectral folk, and with her follow-up she not only returns to the luminous musical landscape of her debut but also to her enigmatic character Mayflower May. Though not the cohesive narrative its title implies, The Saga of Mayflower May again finds Nadler skillfully echoing the forms of traditional English balladry as she crafts another captivating collection of songs steeped in the melancholy of distant, half-forgotten passion, doomed love affairs, and various crimes of the heart.
As a vocalist Nadler is considerably less idiosyncratic than such peers as Joanna Newsom or Josephine Foster, and here her dusky, lived-in soprano settles diffusely between contemporaries like Hope Sandoval and Chan Marshall, and 60s-era folkies like Vashti Bunyan or Mimi Farina. On these 11 tracks her arrangements are kept simple and powder dry, typically featuring only her 12-string guitar and the occasional flourish of organ, ukelele, or flute as accompaniment.
With this spare instrumentation providing an understated backdrop, Nadler sounds increasingly relaxed and confident throughout the album, and each performance sparkles with haunting, rain-swept emotion. Tracks like "The Little Famous Song" and "Horses and Their Kin", are further distinguished by mesmerizing wordless passages where it almost sounds as though she's attempting to use her voice to approximate the lonesome shimmer of a singing saw.
The significance of the character Mayflower May to these songs is unclear. Nadler has previously described May-- who also made a couple appearances in the lyrics of Ballads of Living and Dying-- as a lonely old woman of faded beauty. And though May is never mentioned by name on any of these songs, perhaps one is to assume that nostalgia-laden, first-person accounts like the opening "Under an Old Umbrella" or the rapturous "Calico" are intended to feature May as narrator.
Also a talented visual artist, Nadler naturally fills her lyrics with color, and these songs abound with azure skies, turquoise eyes, and (especially) ruby red blood. On tracks like "Yellow Lights" and "Mr. John Lee (Velveteen Rose)" Nadler fearlessly enters traditional murder ballad territory, exquisitely depicting a world where love is forever shadowed by loss.
Curiously, for the dramatic "Lily, Henry, and the Willow Trees" the album's lyric sheet includes a final, particularly gory verse that leaves little doubt as to the fate of poor Lily. Perhaps finding these lines out of keeping with her music's otherwise deft, subtle touch, Nadler leaves them unsung, one of the few instances on this enthralling album where she pulls any punches whatsoever. | 2005-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Eclipse | May 12, 2005 | 7.8 | 4d2c1995-19e1-4202-8268-7ea54e95b496 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
MGMT’s fourth album marks a shift in tactics. Abandoning the belabored excess of their last two albums, they opt for streamlined synth-pop. | MGMT’s fourth album marks a shift in tactics. Abandoning the belabored excess of their last two albums, they opt for streamlined synth-pop. | MGMT: Little Dark Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mgmt-little-dark-age/ | Little Dark Age | This could have been MGMT’s last chance. The narrative around the duo is well known by now: College buddies stumble into a few fluke hits, capturing a generational mix of youthful exuberance and modern ennui. Then they rocket to stardom, only to spend the next two albums kicking against everything that fans, critics, and their record company expect of them. One look at their first three albums’ declining streaming numbers on Spotify—2013’s MGMT has just four percent the plays of their 2007 debut—confirms that the band’s fan base has steadily winnowed over the past 11 years, whether or not MGMT fully intended it.
That’s hardly surprising. Indie has changed over the last decade-plus, yet MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser have seemed uninterested in keeping up. A glimpse at some of 2007’s other big albums—by Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Of Montreal, Arcade Fire, et al.—suggests to what extent their initial success fit into a broader trend of yelpy, brightly-hued indie with a toe dipped gingerly into electro-pop. But the zeitgeist quickly shifted toward bigger, bolder sounds, and as Chvrches, Purity Ring, and scads of other acts popped up with sleeker, more commercial versions of “Electric Feel,” MGMT stubbornly doubled down on wooly psychedelic navel-gazing.
The good news is that Little Dark Age marks a welcome shift in tactics. Much of the belabored excess of the last two albums is gone. They have traded the shaggy 1960s references and overstuffed arrangements for comparatively streamlined pop, and they have rediscovered their ability to write hooks. The dark undercurrent that has always permeated their music is still here, but the lyrics are less diaristic and more focused, less acid-soaked and more acid-tongued.
The opening “She Works Out Too Much” shows just how much the duo has evolved in a relatively short time. Slathered in jazzy chords and funk bass, it’s almost unrecognizable as MGMT. Ostensibly, it’s a song about dating-app fatigue. The chorus is a he-said/she-said battle of gym memberships; it’s introduced by a narrator who might be a PC Music–schooled spin-class instructor. A vocoded voice in the chorus sounds like it’s singing “Destroy.” The whole thing is absurd, and far more fun than it has any reason to be. It’s also a good bellwether for what follows.
They go goth on “Little Dark Age,” a synth-heavy dirge that sounds like a B-side to Gary Numan’s “Cars.” On “When You Die,” they ponder the void (“It’s permanently night/And I won’t feel anything”) over a breezy tune that sounds almost like Metronomy, and the contrast between the song’s suicidal urges and its chipper mood is what makes it so engaging. “Me and Michael” is a note-perfect rendering of a mid-’80s John Hughes soundtrack, a mode they pick up again on “One Thing Left to Try,” a fence-swinging festival anthem. Two of the album’s best songs are its most unassuming: VanWyngarden drops his voice to an exaggerated baritone on the wistful “James,” sounding pleasantly like Stephin Merritt. And “Days That Got Away,” the album’s lone instrumental, poses a dubby thought experiment: What if chillwave still existed in 2018, and didn’t suck?
Not all of this stuff is necessarily necessary. “One Thing Left to Try” sounds suspiciously like Empire of the Sun, and one of them is more than enough. Similarly, the album probably doesn’t need two songs about the evils of the hand-held internet. (In addition to “She Works Out Too Much,” we also get “TSLAMP,” or “Time Spent Looking at My Phone,” which, spoiler alert: They are none too pleased about it.) But the duo’s delight in sound itself is often infectious. The album is a riot of vintage synthesizers, dubby effects, and sumptuously gated snares, and they round out that ’80s fixation with just the right amount of psych-pop. Flangers flange, phasers phase, and the stereo panning spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl, but for once, the bells and whistles don’t drown out the songwriting.
While VanWyngarden’s lyrics have often strayed toward the impenetrable, here he’s more focused, settling into a dark mood that feels timely. Little Dark Age is an album about certainties dissolving. “Welcome to the shit-show/Grab a comfortable seat,” VanWyngarden sings in the very first song, pretty much summing up the second half of the current decade. It’s telling that the album’s most sing-along-friendly refrain is the rousing “Go fuck yourself!” of “When You Die.” Toward the end of the LP, “When You’re Small” makes a compelling argument for strategic downsizing: “When you’re small/You don’t have very far to fall.”
At this point, MGMT probably know a thing or two about the fear of falling. They seem to acknowledge as much on the closing “Hand It Over,” which, like Congratulations’ eponymous final song, is a kind of reckoning with their career, a self-aware snapshot of the whole complicated business of being MGMT. “If we lose our touch/It won’t mean much,” sings VanWyngarden, as if acknowledging their tenuous grasp on whatever brass ring the music industry once offered. The Beach Boys harmonies and Sgt. Pepper’s horns are familiar—it’s the first time on the album they sound like the old MGMT, really. “The joke’s worn thin,” he sings, early in the song, and, later, “The smart ones exit early.” It’s a long way from the rock-star fantasies of “Time to Pretend.” But if Little Dark Age is a new start, it’s a promising one. | 2018-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | February 9, 2018 | 7 | 4d2d1ddb-2c2c-45c8-92d3-ffc6a8a077ed | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Kings of Leon have laterally shifted from one easily understood linear narrative (festival band) to another (arena rock band), turning themselves from the Southern Strokes into the Southern U2. | Kings of Leon have laterally shifted from one easily understood linear narrative (festival band) to another (arena rock band), turning themselves from the Southern Strokes into the Southern U2. | Kings of Leon: Only By the Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12204-only-by-the-night/ | Only By the Night | After years spent building a career on the enduringly romanticized Stillwater archetype, Kings of Leon have laterally shifted from one easily understood linear narrative (festival band) to another (arena rock band). Dropping the transparently hayseed act, the band could have turned an artistic corner; yet the first single from Only By the Night is called "Sex on Fire", so if there was any debate about whether Kings of Leon are in on their own joke, I think it can be put to rest. If we're misreading them, we're missing out on one corker of a comedy album based on an "SNL"-level premise: What if Bono got lost in the Blue Ridge Mountains and was replaced by a local yokel? (Suggested band name: Y'All2.)
But even the move from "southern Strokes" to "southern U2" is way better in theory than in practice-- these are the same clunky Kings of Leon songs, just now presented in an incredibly weird context. It all starts with Caleb Followill's never-ending need to play to type, and if you've kept up to this point, you know the drill-- though his band has toured the world several times over, dude can't see past his own dick. He sings terribly on Only By the Night, any modicum of youth and young manhood compromised by "real talk" overemoting and an accent that seems to have no geographical origin.
But why go on when Followill is more than happy to hoist himself on his own petard, doling his typical mix of stock characterization, open misogyny, and bizarre non-sequitirs. You can hear the brooms sweeping as the lonesome guitars of "Revelry" attempt some sort of last-call poignancy, but it's spoiled from the time Followill opens a mouth full of Meatloaf-- "What a night for a dance, you know I'm a dancin' machine/ With the fire in my bones and the sweet taste of kerosene." This goes on before you get the dominant KoL ethos on the chorus: "With the hardest of hearts I still feel full of pain/ See the time we shared it was precious to me/ But all the while I was dreaming of revelry." It's basically "The One I Love" with no riff and no irony.
Meanwhile, "Sex on Fire" turns out to be disturbingly literal, while the dopey travelogue of "Manhattan" has Caleb waxing with the naïve enthusiasm of a senior yearbook quote: "We're gonna set this fire we're gonna stoke it up/ We're gonna sip this wine and pass the cup/ We're gonna show this town how to kiss these stars," and it's nearly impossible to stifle your laughter when he punctuates each verse with a smarmy soul-papa "I SAAAAIIIID!" All that's missing is the attendant video where Caleb walks the NYC streets and gives dap to passers-by while the band taps away at their idea of funk. You'd figure "17" would be right in their wheelhouse, because what's a better Kings of Leon topic than underage pussy? But after the first line (I'll spot you "Winger" as a hint and let you guess what it is), it just sort of trails off, leaving the last memorable moment of an album that still has about 20 minutes to go.
No longer steeped in Dixieland signifers, Kings of Leon now weirdly owe a debt to Washington state. If the rumbling toms, splashy cymbals, and cascading synth strings of songs like "Notion" or "I Want You" sound familiar, I'm willing to bet you have a copy of Sunny Day Real Esate's The Rising Tide or a recent Death Cab record. Strange bedfellows, and not really the right ones-- while the latter two were trying to adjust their modest hooks and personal lyrics to a larger scale, Kings of Leon have always been as emotionally cavernous as the drum sound here, and when the tempo slows, ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in swamp. Followill is haunted by all that he can't leave behind, trying to have it both ways with riffs that are supposed to bellow with reverb and bite with distortion. The band never soars, instead mostly muddling in a bog of muffled echo that liberally applies Caleb's cottonmouth to every other instrument.
At its best, Only By the Night at least gives the impression that Kings of Leon is actually an interesting band that would be exponentially and immediately improved with someone even average at the controls (call it the Tavaris Jackson Corollary). Musically, "Closer" sets the bar unrealistically high for the rest of the album, building on squeaking, modulated keys, tricky polyrhythms, and a solid melody unfortunately piledrived by Followill's self-pity ("You took my heart and you took my soul.../ Leaving me stranded in love on my own"). "Crawl" could pass for something off the first Secret Machines record with its hydraulic, distorted bass and hotly mixed percussion, but even before they can seal the deal with some dubious conspiracy mongering (something about the red, white, and blue crucifying you), you get the usual KoL idea of sweetalk: "You better learn to crawl before I walk away." Next thing you know, "Sex on Fire" starts and Kings of Leon's fourth album has peaked after seven minutes. Surely, we can do better for the platonic ideal of a rock band than four guys gunning for a spot rightfully inhabited by My Morning Jacket but instead coming up with the best songs 3 Doors Down never wrote. | 2008-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | September 16, 2008 | 3.8 | 4d3544da-5106-4d73-ac53-0c93b70f4ba7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Jay Reatard’s early band Lost Sounds veered from rock‘n’roll primitivism into synth-punk futurism, but the result wasn’t dance music—it was panic music. | Jay Reatard’s early band Lost Sounds veered from rock‘n’roll primitivism into synth-punk futurism, but the result wasn’t dance music—it was panic music. | Lost Sounds: Black Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lost-sounds-black-wave/ | Black Wave | For much of his career, Jay Lindsey’s reputation for being prolific was matched only by his reputation for antagonism. And the artist better known as Jay Reatard was a fighter to the end—in his final tweet, typed out 36 hours before his body was found in January 2010, he was issuing a bounty on the heads of the New Jersey garage band Liquor Store. But at the time of his passing, Lindsey’s volatile public persona had begun to contrast sharply with his artistic maturation. The album that proved to be his swan song, 2009’s Watch Me Fall, found him trading adrenalized punk for Flying Nun-inspired jangle pop, and those in his inner circle say he had designs on venturing into mellower Neil Young-style country-rock territory and retiring the Reatard moniker altogether. But if Lindsey’s late career was marked a growing disconnect between his creative and destructive impulses, these two sides fused perfectly in Lost Sounds.
Active from 1999 to 2005, Lost Sounds seemed destined to live up to its name until Lindsey became a hot underground property with his 2006 solo debut Blood Visions. A team-up with his then-girlfriend Alicja Trout (formerly of indie-pop hopefuls the Clears), Lost Sounds took a sharp left from rock ‘n’ roll primitivism into synth-punk futurism, a reaction to the aesthetic conservatism Lindsey encountered in the garage trenches with his notorious first band, the Reatards. But even during the garage-rock and post-punk crazes of the early ’00s, Lost Sounds slipped through the cracks—they were too feral, too strange, too bleak. If the Meet Me in the Bathroom era served in part as an escapist response to 9/11, Lost Sounds stewed in the distress of the times. This wasn’t dance music—it was panic music.
Shortly after Lindsey’s passing, Lost Sounds were commemorated with a best-of compilation and collection of rarities that introduced their music to newer fans who were still making sense of his vast catalog. In comparison, the timing of this reissue—a no-frills remaster of the band’s 2001 double-album, Black Wave—feels more random. Still, it reaffirms the confrontational and visceral qualities that made Lost Sounds’ music seem marginal at the time and vital now. Black Wave—the title a half-joking nod to new wave and black metal—became a double album simply because Lindsey and Trout were writing songs at too furious a rate to contain. The record feels like a 19-round challenge to see who could push the group to even more ferocious extremes while adhering to pop-song orthodoxy.
Black Wave’s cover image— the band running through empty city streets, fleeing a sinister alien force looming overhead—suggests 9/11 paranoia, but the terror within is more psychological: Trout’s throat-shredding screed “I’m Not a Machine” sounds like a prescient rallying cry against encroaching technocracy, while Lindsey repeats the title of the electro-shocked “Do You Wanna Kill Me” with the blood-curdling hysteria of a young Black Francis.
And yet, through the album’s black-mold production, it’s clear that Jay isn’t merely engaging in nihilism-by-numbers. Throughout his life, both his combative attitude and do-or-die work ethic were attributed to his hardscrabble upbringing in the rougher parts of Memphis. And nowhere in his bottomless discography is that impetus more evident than on “1620 Echles St.,” named for the semi-detached home where, while babysitting his little sister, a young Jay overhead a rape happening in the house next door. (As he recounted in the documentary Better Than Something, the incident ended with cops kicking the shit out of the perpetrators and inviting the kids on the block to pelt rocks at them.) When he cries, “Is this the life for me?,” it’s the desperate plea of a scared kid for whom making music would never just be some idle pastime.
But for all its relentless aggression and suffocating sense of doom, Black Wave yields early signs of the manic melodicism that would flourish on Blood Visions: the stormtrooper stomp of “Heart Felt Toys” blindsides you with a chorus that sticks out like a puff of cotton candy floating in a pool of black tar, while “Dark Shadows” could be a warm-up for a better known, similarly titled song in his canon.
The bridge to Blood Visions would be further fortified on Lost Sounds’ subsequent, increasingly refined two albums, but Black Wave is less a portrait of a future indie-rock star finding his voice than one being pushed to the next level by an equally industrious foil. While Lindsey may have embodied Black Wave’s agitated essence, Trout’s contributions—from the berserker B-52’s bomp of “Lost and Found” to the goth-metal convulsions of “I See Everything” to the ’60s go-go swing of “Soon This Tomb”—brought depth and character to their monomaniacal attack. In 2017, Trout and fellow surviving members Rich Crook and John Garland rebooted Lost Sounds under the name Sweet Knives, following the emergence of a wave of groups—from fellow Memphis noisemakers Nots to Aussie icons Total Control—carrying the torch for dystopian synth-spiked punk. Now, with his death even further in the rearview, it’s easier to see that Lost Sounds was more than just a pit stop on Jay Reatard’s road to infamy. They were a visionary group with a legacy all their own. | 2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | FDH | July 22, 2019 | 8.2 | 4d442861-6df8-4693-8743-25cc297aa359 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Yumi Zouma’s first album closes a longtime distance between its members and delivers bright, complex disco-rock. | Yumi Zouma’s first album closes a longtime distance between its members and delivers bright, complex disco-rock. | Yumi Zouma: Yoncalla | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22058-yoncalla/ | Yoncalla | Distance has long defined Yumi Zouma. Two of the group’s founding members moved away from their native New Zealand after the devastating 2011 Christchurch earthquake, forcing them to piece together tracks across land and sea. It makes sense that gaps between people, both physical and emotional, served a central role across their first two dreamy, disco-accented rock EPs, which caught the attention of Lorde and Chet Faker.
The four members of Yumi Zouma recorded Yoncalla, their debut full-length, in the same place while on tour, marking the first time they’ve worked in a room together. Closing the ocean-sized distance works, not surprisingly, to their advantage; it’s a polished record on which their balmy dream-pop remains intact, sweetened by new intimacy. Their music has always sounded suited for warm climes, existing in the same sun-dappled terrain as JJ’s poppier cuts or Air France’s Balearic-tinged escapism (the latter of whom Yumi have covered), and Yoncalla features some of their brightest songs to date, from the dazzling synth-pop of “Short Truth” to the Fleetwood-Mac-indebted strut of “Yesterday.”
Yumi Zouma also push their dance inclinations in more directions now, starting with the opener, “Barricade (Matter Of Fact).” It’s a delicate number built on airy keyboard notes and singer Christie Simpson’s rousing personal pep talk: “Just breathe/Just breathe/And then over the barricade,” she cajoles, the music beneath her building like an anticipatory deep breath. Beneath the breezy guitar playing and dance floor-ready rhythms, Yoncalla’s lyrics find Simpson in a contemplative mood; “Text From Sweden” is a woozy meditation on travel and how it affects relationships, while “Short Truth” embraces pessimism and frank talk to oneself. Many dream-pop numbers seek escape from the outside world, or at least foster a place to wallow, but Yumi Zouma have little time for either.
Yoncalla’s swift pacing ensures that moments of joy balance lurking regrets, and “Haji Awali,” the most guitar-centric inclusion here, finds Yumi Zouma pinpointing just where to start their recalibrations to optimism. Plus, Simpson has a great sense of humor about it, which lifts the tension a bit. (“I’m screaming in my dreams like it’s going in and out of fashion,” she drawls on “Yesterday”). Yoncalla highlights all the best elements of Yumi Zouma, wrapped up in some of the prettiest music they’ve made yet. Hopefully this leads to more face time together for them. | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Cascine | June 27, 2016 | 7.4 | 4d446e76-23c9-48bf-863e-f82e720fc2dc | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
The Seattle black metal duo Inquisition's first album for major metal indie Season of Mist follows 2011's excellent Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm. It's another impressive collection, one that's about as catchy as a pure black metal record has any right to be. | The Seattle black metal duo Inquisition's first album for major metal indie Season of Mist follows 2011's excellent Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm. It's another impressive collection, one that's about as catchy as a pure black metal record has any right to be. | Inquisition: Obscure Verses for the Multiverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18620-inquisition-obscure-verses-for-the-multiverse/ | Obscure Verses for the Multiverse | Inquisition’s last album, 2011’s Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm was hailed as an instant classic, and rightly so. The Seattle black metal duo had been quiet for several years before its release; since then, though, they've thrown themselves into the business of being a full-time band. Their recent signing to major indie Season of Mist is a satisfying notch on the bedpost for vocalist/guitarist Dagon and drummer Incubus, who've reacted to their alliance with a “big label” by changing nothing whatsoever about their music or their approach towards occult exploration. Fans never expected them to react any differently, and the great wailing and gnashing of teeth that usually accompanies the announcement of a beloved underground band stumbling into the spotlight has been absent. After all, as even the webboard warriors seem to know, a new album is another opportunity for the band to stalk in and show everyone else how it’s done.
Obscure Verses for the Multiverse picks up where its predecessor left off. As usual, Dagon’s guitar work blends seamlessly with Incubus’ drums, and they remain merrily bass-free. Like some bizarro-world version of (until recently) bassless grind savants Pig Destroyer, they’ve hit upon and perfected a formula that would leave a lesser band sounding flat and soulless. Inquisition built their reputation upon a small selection of ironclad riffs and dynamic devices—every note follows a predetermined script, one that they’ve had memorized for decades, and it works.
Consider “Darkness Flows Towards Unseen Horizons”. A characteristic down-tempo melody opens the song, which hurtles immediately into a relentless blast, then back again. The band’s fondness for a good mid-song tempo shift has become one of their calling cards, and an Inquisition tune bereft of its appearance feels a bit off-kilter. Groove-laden tracks like “Master of the Cosmological Black Cauldron” and “Inversion of Ethereal White Stars” are beefy head-nodders that feature some of Dagon’s best guitar work as he manipulates and torments his strings into all manner of eerie tones. Outside of his propensity for note-bending, it’s worth noting the man’s uncanny knack for molding a gloomy shred of melody into an improbable earworm. While there are no obvious “hits” like on Ominous Doctinres, the album is still about as catchy as a pure black metal record has any right to be. A triumphantly powerful melodic break forms the centerpiece of a “Spiritual Plasma Evocation”, a track that despite its lack of ravens or winterdemonry, emphatically gives legs to the Immortal comparisons that have dogged the band for years.
The songs’ carefully cultivated atmosphere and aim towards an organic-sounding production leaves plenty of room for Dagon’s esoteric tales of space, time, and the Devil to unfold. This album is focused even more heavily on the cosmic and the metaphysical than past efforts, and the lyrics are an absolute trip. As the title track goes, "Only darkness in the skies/ When you came light was shined/ Wisdom from cosmic snakes of dimensions you create/ Spawning humans as a slave serving kings of astral thrones." Here’s hoping you can understand them, though, since Dagon’s infamous vocals are in full display.
His froggy croak may sound like a direct descendent of Abbath’s own strangled ribbeting, but comes from a far more evil place; it’s the former’s effort to sound as inhuman and alien as possible to accompany their occult cosmic ceremonies. In truth, though they began life as a thrash band, Inquisition still predates Immortal by several years. While the two bands developed and released their first important works during the same time period, it’s worth noting that Dagon was already croaking up a storm before Abbath even donned the paint. It seems almost passé to make a reference to the Norwegian demons here, but the parallel between the two entities’ melodic make up (not to mention that voice) is undeniable.
As the story goes, Inquisition originally formed while Dagon was living in Colombia in 1989, predating the famed Second Wave’s most active period and ensuring that the band’s early days would be spent learning from greats like Reencarnación, Blasfemia, and Parabellum. They’ve been there since the beginning, and will be here making outstanding records long after the rest of their peers have given up the ghost. Dagon’s 1996 move to the United States only aided them in their mission, and now, it seems as though this cult favorite is finally beginning to reap the rewards of a lifetime of hard graft and black magic. | 2013-12-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-12-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Season of Mist | December 9, 2013 | 8.1 | 4d4688f4-d7e3-4580-b781-de8da8e131cb | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | null |
Mavis Staples presents her signature hope on the taut and lively If All I Was Was Black, another collaboration with Jeff Tweedy. But it doesn’t come as naturally as it once did, as she makes clear. | Mavis Staples presents her signature hope on the taut and lively If All I Was Was Black, another collaboration with Jeff Tweedy. But it doesn’t come as naturally as it once did, as she makes clear. | Mavis Staples: If All I Was Was Black | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavis-staples-if-all-i-was-was-black/ | If All I Was Was Black | Does Mavis Staples sound a little angry on “Who Told You That,” one of the 10 highly topical tunes on her new album? The song is less about everything that makes us angry at the moment and more about how we respond to it all, as the 78-year-old singer addresses those too timid to take a stand and take it to the streets. “We don’t want to rock the boat? Who told you that?” she asks, as Jeff Tweedy’s guitar stomps in the mud. Her voice dives deep into her lower register, and it definitely sounds like there’s some fury in her questions, as though she’s squaring off against anyone who types “thoughts and prayers” without taking the action that might answer someone else’s thoughts and prayers. Written by Tweedy, who produced three of her last four albums, the song reveals a darker, more outraged side of Staples than we usually see.
If you’ve pissed off Mavis Staples, then you’re doing something seriously wrong. Nicknamed Bubbles for her sunny disposition, she’s been singing professionally since the late 1940s, when her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples formed a family gospel band. Her career with the Staple Singers and later as a solo artist paralleled an especially tumultuous few decades in American history, from civil rights to the first black president. Through it all she’s maintained an unwavering faith in her country and its people that shone through in ebullient songs like “Heavy Makes You Happy” and “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me).”
That sense of hope carries over to If All I Was Was Black, but she makes clear that it doesn’t come as easily or as naturally as it once did. It’s now something she has to practice, something she has to work at. “Don’t do me no good to pretend I’m as good as I can be,” she sings on “Try Harder,” which is addressed to herself as much as to anyone else. It might be her age, although neither her voice nor her animating spirit seems especially diminished. Or it might be the times. “Something is wrong—it’s all gone haywire,” she told the L.A. Times recently. “I get angry… This man Trump, talking about ‘Make America great again.’ Well, I don’t think America has lost any of its greatness. But we do need change, and these songs are gonna do it—they’re gonna bring us together, make us love one another.”
If Mavis can be considered a bellwether of the national mood, then If All I Was reflects bleak times indeed. Rather than dour or defeated, her mixed emotions make these songs sound livelier, more determined, more rousing. Tweedy keeps the music taut and minimal, augmenting her solid touring band with Spencer Tweedy on drums, Glenn Kotche on percussion, and backing vocalist Kelly Hogan. Unlike their previous records together—2010’s You Are Not Alone and 2013’s One True Vine—the music is less grounded in gospel and geared more toward a loping ‘70s funk-folk, with occasional flourishes of distortion and dissonance evoking the violence she’s singing about. The guitars duel from the left and right speakers on opener “Little Bit,” as though taking sides in an argument. “Build a Bridge” rides a laidback groove that only hints at larger tensions mentioned in the lyrics: “When I say my life matters, you can say yours does, too,” Mavis sings. “But I bet you never have to remind anyone to look at it from your point of view.”
With that, If All I Was Was Black is an album about American perspectives and the compassion it takes to see the world from someone else’s point of view. Tweedy understands that his songwriting credits might lead some listeners to think the album represents his perspective rather than Staples’. “I don’t think I put anything in Mavis’ mouth that she didn’t want to sing,” he told the L.A. Times. “Tweedy knows me,” was her response. A singer of remarkable power and expression, Staples essentially rewrites these songs simply by singing them, imbuing each line with fine gradients of emotion and authority. She emerges as the active agent in the project, delivering these songs from her perspective as a black woman, as an artist, as a daughter and sister, even as a Christian.
Anger is a part of that perspective, as are compassion and love. “When they tell their lies, spread around rumors,” she sings on “We Go High,” and she might be talking about Fox News commentators or she might be talking about your racist friend on Facebook. But then she adds, “I know they’re still human and they need my love.” It’s not easy to practice love in the face of hate, but Staples is not giving up on us yet—or on herself. | 2017-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | November 16, 2017 | 7.6 | 4d470216-5589-4821-b1ac-2c80a998b82f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Wilkes-Barre hardcore band blends singalong accessibility, purgative heaviness, and thoughtful craft into songs about the disconnect between dreams and reality. | The Wilkes-Barre hardcore band blends singalong accessibility, purgative heaviness, and thoughtful craft into songs about the disconnect between dreams and reality. | One Step Closer: Songs for the Willow EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/one-step-closer-songs-for-the-willow-ep/ | Songs for the Willow EP | One Step Closer’s music overflows with emotion. On their new three-song EP Songs for the Willow, the Wilkes-Barre hardcore band layers guitars so thick and textural that you can’t see the bottom; they’re churning and breathless, driven by a biting rhythm section. Vocalist Ryan Savitski is raw and unrelenting, not so much yelling as crying out, like he can’t stop until something is expelled.
Yet the secret to their sound, hidden amid the deluge, lies in its nuances. They use barely audible harmonies, unexpected melodic twists, and glistening buried riffs to build a stronger emotional structure than a simple heavy barrage would. There’s a similar richness to Savitski’s lyrics; while they occasionally lack subtlety, a common and generally forgivable pitfall in hardcore, he can offer moments of truly striking imagery. On opener “Dark Blue,” he sings, “The months go by and the blue jays fly to the apple trees tonight.”
This EP is One Step Closer’s first release since their debut LP, 2021’s This Place You Know. That album, written during the pandemic, was about a longing for escape, whether from a physical place or a general feeling of dissatisfaction. If they could just get out, their songs suggested, a new, rosier life would await. Get out they did; their victory-lap touring schedule after This Place You Know included every corner of the U.S. and several trips to Europe. On Songs for the Willow, Savitski grapples with the idea that achieving what he wanted didn’t really solve anything. All three songs are torn between living the dream of success and the heartbreak of seeing life slip through your fingers.
On “Dark Blue”—a song that takes place on the van ride to the next tour date—Savitski ponders a faltering relationship back home while watching the scenery fly by. “Home is not worth missing,” he realizes. And on “T.T.S.P.” he admits, “This dream just clouds all my way.” The hardcore community tends to romanticize the road warrior’s quest—an almost religious pursuit of cathartic purity, a rejection of everything that isn’t hardcore punk. But on Songs for the Willow, 23-year-old Savitski pulls the cover back on how hard and conflicting that can be for a young adult finding their place in life.
There are lots of pleading requests in Savitski’s lyrics—“Turn to me,” “Stay with me,” “Please hurry home.” Delivered with his wounded howl, they convey a feeling of overwhelming desperation. The end section of “Dark Blue” does the same thing musically. There’s a feeling of chaos and turmoil in the weighty guitars bouncing off each other; Savitski punctuates clean backing vocals with his screams, both sides mixed low enough to sound like they’re battling with the instruments behind them, desperate to be heard. Similarly, when “T.T.S.P.” kicks into gear, dropping like an anvil after a foreboding intro, it emits an enveloping cloud of hopeless gloom. “Turn to Me” harnesses a surge of energy on the chorus, as the tempo picks up and an ultra-catchy (yet no less tortured) clean vocal comes in.
The crowd reaction is built into hardcore songs, and these moments will send fans at future shows berserk—you picture it as you hear it, bodies flying and colliding, fingers pointing as contorted faces spit words back at the band. One Step Closer are exceptionally good at blending singalong accessibility, purgative heaviness, and thoughtful craft; it’s impressive for a hardcore band to tick all of those boxes at once and so well. Songs for the Willow cements the young band’s transition from promising newcomers to undeniable force. | 2023-01-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | January 18, 2023 | 7.4 | 4d4bb20b-0c6e-4faa-8ebe-c292723a7bd2 | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
The third album from the 25-year-old UK fire-spitter is a wickedly assured, highly entertaining, coming-of-age marvel. | The third album from the 25-year-old UK fire-spitter is a wickedly assured, highly entertaining, coming-of-age marvel. | Little Simz: GREY Area | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-simz-grey-area/ | GREY Area | Little Simz is still seeking a sense of direction on her wondrous new album GREY Area. The “grey area” in question is her mid-20s, a “strange place” she’s eager to navigate through and out of, by the sound of it. “I just wrote the album from a place of confusion,” the rapper born Simbi Ajikawo recently told Noisey, making the uncertainty of a quarter-life crisis seem like navigating the fog of war. A similar search for certainty ran through her second album, 2017’s Stillness in Wonderland, a Lewis Carroll-based introspective adventure throughout which she sought a better understanding of self. Armed with lessons from that stumble down the rabbit hole, she is far more assured on GREY Area. It is a coming-of-age marvel.
Wonderland was tangled and overwrought. The album was full of ideas and unsure how to express them. But working on GREY Area, Simz uncovered the source of her disorientation: she was taking in too much outside noise and losing her bearings. In her effort to solve the impossibility of being young and indecisive (coupled with the sensory overload of trekking across Europe), she has improved as a songwriter and storyteller. She is so grounded in her perspective that even her examinations of societal decay feel deeply personal. She buoys these probing looks into the heart of darkness with intimate glimpses from inside her life in motion. The drudgery of touring, the struggle of modern relationships, processing the trauma of a friend getting murdered, each handled with a delicate and deft touch that never dulls her piercing flows. These are the songs of a woman responding to a nebulous time by making her own way forward. “Sometimes we do not see the fuckery until we’re out of it,” she explains on “Therapy.” “Some people read The Alchemist and still never amount to shit.”
The entire album was produced by Simz’s childhood friend, Inflo. Using more live instruments in place of sampling—guitars, strings, pianos, and drums, mostly—they never settle into one space. No two songs on GREY Area sound the same, even when they’re similar the objectives vary, as she probes into their many grooves. “I’m JAY-Z on a bad day, Shakespeare on my worst days,” she snaps through the scuzzy bass and strings on “Offence.” “Therapy” seems to invert that song’s template for something more downtempo and cleansing. By the time the album settles into the gorgeous bed of “Flowers,” which reunites Inflo with singer and guitarist Michael Kiwanuka, Little Simz has already proven herself a master of her universe.
At turns both acerbic and unguarded, GREY Area feels like the grand culmination of everything Simz has been puzzling out to this point. She’s a preternaturally gifted lyricist, a prodigy who recorded her first raps at nine and released her earliest tapes in her teens; it simply took a while for her to apply that acuity to her songcraft. She delivers her wonted precision here, but she doesn’t just slash all beats to ribbons. Sure, there are still savage songs like “Venom,” which finds her darting through sharp, fast-moving bow strokes and claiming the spot in the rap hierarchy the patriarchy sees fit to deny her, but even amid those shows of strength, she sees her ideas through. Little Simz is learning that taking things step by step is the best way to plot a course, and retracing those steps is the easiest way out of the labyrinth. | 2019-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Age 101 / AWAL | March 7, 2019 | 8.1 | 4d4c045b-42f6-4c6a-acab-3aa918c4b45c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Solo albums by rock frontmen are often a safe space to play with ideas too indulgent for the main gig. But Conrad Keely's Original Machines does the opposite; it is a clearinghouse for modest songs nowhere near indulgent enough for his band ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. | Solo albums by rock frontmen are often a safe space to play with ideas too indulgent for the main gig. But Conrad Keely's Original Machines does the opposite; it is a clearinghouse for modest songs nowhere near indulgent enough for his band ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. | Conrad Keely: Original Machines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21433-original-machines/ | Original Machines | ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead divided one of their albums into suites by guitar tuning and convinced a major label to greenlight this video. They are also named ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. I can’t imagine Conrad Keely hears "no" a lot within the context of Trail of Dead, or even at all. So it stands to reason that Keely releasing his first solo album this far into his career wouldn’t serve the same purpose as most ventures of this sort, i.e., to provide a safe space to play with ideas too indulgent for the main gig. Original Machines does the opposite, a clearinghouse for modest songs nowhere near indulgent enough for Trail of Dead.
At the very least, it confirms the sneaking suspicion that Keely could’ve been a Buzz Bin hitmaker had he been born a decade earlier. He writes zippy melodies perfectly suited for his keening, try-hard voice, one that cuts through any amount of distortion and compression with nasal EQ-ing that can recall either Billy Corgan, Liam Gallagher, or Perry Farrell. The mere hint of bongos throughout the breezy "Warm Insurrection" is apparently all it takes for a Keely song to pass as Porno for Pyros.
In addition to the extravagant musical ideas expected of Trail of Dead, Original Machines rids Keely of the necessity to attach high-art pretensions to his lyrics. It’s likely that Keely would consider every Trail of Dead song to be personal to some degree, though the emotions were often filtered through another's perspective, be it Maxfield Parrish or Michael Jackson. Nothing hits as squarely as Worlds Apart’s overtly autobiographical "The Summer of ‘91," though there are allusions to travels through his current home in Cambodia, while "Warm Insurrection" and "In the Words of a Not So Famous Man" immediately establish Keely’s muse as the process of songwriting itself—this just lets you in on the fact that Keely has been living in Cambodia and writing a bunch of songs, information that requires no familiarity with Original Machines beyond its tracklist.
There’s only so much talk of restraint that can surround a record that also happens to contain 24 tracks. Then again, the longest (and slowest) track is three minutes and 48 seconds and everything careens into each other in a way that reminds you that Keely is a Guided by Voices fan—the highlight of otherwise career nadir So Divided was a cover of "Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory" that imagined if Robert Pollard spent his Matador advance money on a string section rather than beer.
Keely can write songs every bit as punchy and abrupt as GBV, but while the latter’s were frequently, if not always, dashed off, they always sounded done. Original Machines doesn’t necessarily face the presumption that these are meant as demos, yet every aesthetic choice (or limitation) keeps raising the question that otherwise wouldn’t have been asked. Drum machines, keyboards, thumbed bass—just about everything besides Keely’s guitar and vocals—have the eerie inhumanity of synthesized presets, the appearance of placeholders chosen for their immediacy rather than texture. The production as a whole should be familiar to anyone who’s played a demo on a mid-to-high-range home digital recorder, providing a clean, crisp, but flat character that renders an unfortunate double meaning from "CD Quality."
There’s not much friction in really any aspect to provide for a spark on *Original Machines—*the forays into trip-hop, psych rock, and folk are far too tentative for a record that has to answer to no one besides its creator and the diehard Keely fan who will pay for it. But what’s truly missing from Original Machines is a sense of stakes; this quality is what distinguishes his best work in Trail of Dead’s as well. Source Tags & Codes arrived in the middle of the ironically named New Rock Revolution holding the torch for Drive Like Jehu, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi, ready to burn down the whole thing down. Worlds Apart was maligned for having its facile, Clear Channel-friendly hooks, anti-Clear Channel sentiments, and batshit visual ideas coexist in the same space, but its brash self-assurance in the face of astronomical expectations from both the Internet and Interscope was admirable. Since Trail of Dead is still chugging along with a more streamlined approach not all that dissimilar to Keely’s here, what’s at risk? What does he have to prove? The ephemerality of Original Machines assures that Keely never gets bogged down in any bad ideas, but often times, those are his most interesting ideas. | 2016-01-28T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-28T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Superball Music | January 28, 2016 | 5.7 | 4d519b39-340a-49a5-9dc1-f08a4efff2cb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A career compilation that highlights the gentler side of White, some in a stripped-down Detroit setting and others in a homespun Nashville setting. | A career compilation that highlights the gentler side of White, some in a stripped-down Detroit setting and others in a homespun Nashville setting. | Jack White: Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22350-jack-white-acoustic-recordings-1998-2016/ | Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 | Detroit is a city of extremes—of Fortune 500 wealth and epidemic poverty, of beautiful art-deco landmarks and ruins that are so apocalyptic, they’ve spawned a mini-tourism industry. Native son Jack White has likewise displayed a fondness for blinding contrasts, and the White Stripes’ candy-cane dress code was the least of it. Over the years, White has gamely pit bluesy authenticity against bullshit artistry; virtuosity against amateurism; punk credibility against Hollywood celebrity; small-business boosterism against Coca-Cola shilling. He’s a garage-rocker who’d rather chill on the front porch, a man who can write songs that fill football stadiums even though sports might just make him miserable.
Those paradoxical qualities have ultimately elevated White’s songbook above mere blues-rock revivalism. That tension is baked right into his music, where the scorching six-string pyrotechnics have routinely been hosed down by soothing sing-alongs. He’s an electric warrior and eccentric warbler, a Page and Plant in one perfect rock-star package. If he didn’t exist, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction committee would have to will him into existence.
However, a new collection wants you to think of White less as a self-mythologizing guitar god and more as a humble storyteller. Though its title may suggest a bounty of rough-draft demos, Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 is really a straightforward, chronological cherry-pick of the songs in White’s discography (peppered with alternate mixes) that don’t feature electric guitar as the primary instrument. It’s White without the red, a Starbucks-worthy sanitization of a scuzz-rock icon. But even though it lops off one side of White’s split personality, *Acoustic Recordings *still provides a vivid portrait of White’s evolution over the past 18 years; like a phantom limb, the absence of noise becomes a form of presence.
As the compilation reasserts, White has been writing on an acoustic since day one, however, the kinds of acoustic songs he writes have changed considerably over the years. On the first White Stripes album, “Sugar Never Tasted So Good” offered White a chance to exhale between garage-rock grunts, though this suggestive serenade was spiritually in tune with that record’s devil-music worship. But already on 2000’s De Stijl, White was using the acoustic format less as an unplugged antidote and more a foundation for experimentation. With the radiant “I’m Bound to Pack It Up,” he used modest Zeppelin III means to telegraph Houses of the Holy ambitions. And on White Blood Cells hits like “Hotel Yorba” and “We’re Going to Be Friends,” the Stripes’ acoustic side became as crucial to constructing their childlike fantasias as their block-rockin’ rave-ups.
Acoustic Recordings’ first disc—charting the backwoods path to the Stripes’ 2007 swan song Icky Thump—could essentially be replicated by any Stripes completist dragging album tracks into a playlist. (The lone prize find is the hushed Get Behind Me Satan outtake, “City Lights,” the rare acoustic White tune to showcase the sort of guitar wizardry he brings to his electric repertoire.) So it’s appropriate that the more revelatory second disc should kick off with the first official release of “Love Is the Truth,” the winsome 2006 Coca-Cola jingle that symbolically came out around the same time White finally ditched Detroit-scene politics to set up shop in Nashville, heralding his transformation into a multimedia mogul. (The move also coincided with the formation of his supergroup the Raconteurs, represented here by countrified alternate takes of “Top Yourself” and “Carolina Drama.”)
Once the timeline reaches White’s 2012 solo debut, Blunderbuss, the Acoustic Recordings concept practically becomes moot, as the 90/10 ratio of electric/acoustic songs that once governed White Stripes records had effectively reversed (perhaps because White was channeling his most aggressive impulses to the Dead Weather). If White’s early acoustic material conveyed a certain bedsit intimacy, the vibe here is more communal kitchen-party hootenanny. With a wide cast of Music City pros at his side, tracks like “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” and “On and On and On” key in on the homespun spirit of the Band, the Faces, and Exile-era Stones. At this point for White, stripping down means gussying up: with its barrelhouse piano, fiddles and gospelized backing vocals, the “acoustic mix” of the Lazaretto romp “Just One Drink” is essentially honky-tonk glam-rock.
In his journey from the Gold Dollar to the White House, the blues has remained foundational to White’s acoustic songwriting, though, these days, it’s less about the bare-bones style than an existential state of mind. His acoustic catalog used to be a space where he could reveal a more gentle, whimsical side. But in his sometimes fraught adjustment to A-list celebrity—with all the publicized fistfights, divorces, shit-talking, and lawsuits that have come with it—White’s conversational writing has, at times, turned more tense and terse. “I want love to/Change my friends to enemies/And show me how it’s all my fault,” he seethes on *Blunderbuss’ *“Love Interruption” like a man scorned, and that wariness would become further entrenched on Lazaretto’s “Entitlement”: “Every time I’m doing what I want to, somebody comes and tells me it’s wrong/Whenever I’m doing just as I please, somebody cuts me down to me knees.”
More than just showcasing his tuneful side, Acoustic Recordings is a shrine to White’s self-sufficiency, in both the musical and ideological senses. After all, White has always been one to take matters into his own hands, whether he’s building guitars from some spare wire and wood, opening his own record press, or ensuring aliens have access to a turntable. And until he can get off this godforsaken planet and join his records in space, Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid. | 2016-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | September 12, 2016 | 8 | 4d576707-d5d6-4743-ba34-4224006175cc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Nina Nastasia’s new project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod is a lonesome, deliberate meditation on memory, freedom, and loss. | Nina Nastasia’s new project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod is a lonesome, deliberate meditation on memory, freedom, and loss. | Jolie Laide: Jolie Laide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jolie-laide-jolie-laide/ | Jolie Laide | As a young girl from Southern California, Nina Nastasia found her sense of freedom on the Pacific Coast Highway, a stretch of road that promised picnics on the beach, lazy heat, and days that felt oceanic and undefined. Nastasia was confronted with freedom once again in her mid-50s, when she relearned to drive and returned to the Pacific Coast Highway in search of a home that no longer existed. Jolie Laide, Nastasia’s new self-titled project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod, is a kind of travelogue that traces the line between freedom and empty aimlessness: a child’s oceanside liberty that becomes an adult’s existential terror.
Prior to her trip, Nastasia had lived the majority of her adult life in New York City, sharing a small apartment with her partner and musical collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson. From the late ’90s to the mid-2000s, she earned a cult following for her songwriting—part gothic, part Americana, full of emotions that confused and contradicted one another. John Peele and Steve Albini counted Nastasia among their favorite musicians. She released her sixth album in 2010 and then, for over a decade, seemed to disappear. In 2022, she released Riderless Horse, her first album in 12 years, which was written in the immediate aftermath of her partner’s death and partially explained her absence. Riderless Horse was a spartan, frenzied retrospective of the couple’s complicated years together, plainly and painfully transposing Nastasia’s grief.
She re-learned to drive and soon after reached out to MacLeod, a musician she’d met some 20 years earlier, when he played with the dark dream-pop outfit Cape May. MacLeod is a largely improvisational guitarist, riffing on and subverting well-worn Americana tropes. The electric guitar features sporadically across Nastasia’s previous output, but it’s at the center of the mix on her first project with MacLeod; his playing adds a sense of place and cultural topography to Nastasia’s cross-country roadtrip. On Jolie Laide, MacLeod digs into the repertoire of American popular song to represent West Coast musical history and dredges up sludgier tones for Nastasia’s desert dirges. His guitar adds a sense of sweetened dread to Nastasia’s emotional realism, an inventive expression of her internal world.
“Back to the west,” Nastasia begins the album, singing in her breeziest voice. MacLeod’s guitar is similarly buoyant, but each upstroke introduces a sense of creeping dread. The songs’ lumbering sense of tension is keenist on “Away Too Soon,” a song that Nastasia and MacLeod perform with a touch of heaviness, as if trying and failing to drag themselves out of a dream, searching for a satisfying burst of energy that never comes. Nastasia’s voice is like a stress ball; no matter how much pressure she applies, it always returns to its original, equipoised form. Similarly, MacLeod’s guitar goes back and forth between major and minor, two oppositional forces canceling out.
Jolie Laide has a clear narrative and novelistic form. In the West, Nastasia finds a lover, someone to “move her along,” a brief and unsustainable source of hope. “We’ve got horses to ride,” she sings on “Moves Away Towns,” gesturing back to Riderless Horse. By the album’s middle, romantic disequilibrium gives way to the volatility of alcohol. MacLeod’s guitar grows hazier, Nastasia’s voice more lethargic. She trades existential emptiness for an empty horizon, recreating the small world of childhood through the routine of bar-hopping and blacking out. “Drinkin’ us thin till we both fade away,” she sings on “Why I Drink,” MacLeod’s guitar veering between a tottering riff and a drunken strum. He provides an irreverent foil to Nastasia’s downward journey on Jolie Laide, bringing a dynamic frisson and exchange that deepens her storytelling.
In the album’s final act, Nastasia is no closer to finding her home nor closing in on her terrible freedom; she feels only the familiarity of a hangover on the strangeness of the road. With all sense of lightness abated, her voice lowers to a sneer. It’s in this darkness—and particularly on “Isolation View,” the album’s grimmest song—that MacLeod and Nastasia allow themselves a moment of release. MacLeod’s glowering counterpoint stands against Nastasia’s powerful weariness and achieves a kind of exhilarating devastation. “Your isolation tank is like a bubble,” she scoffs, abstracting the home she sought to find into an almost unintelligible image, her once bright-eyed view fuzzed over. In freedom, she finds herself, finally, alone. | 2023-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Oscar Street | December 6, 2023 | 7.4 | 4d5c8c21-3741-4534-995b-eb5026ec1d95 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
[The following is a partial transcript from the third and final debate between Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush and ... | [The following is a partial transcript from the third and final debate between Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush and ... | At the Drive In: Relationship of Command | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/329-relationship-of-command/ | Relationship of Command | [The following is a partial transcript from the third and final debate between Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush and Democratic Candidate Al Gore:]
Jim Lehrer: Okay, gentlemen, you know the rules as established by the Commission of Presidential Debates. The questions will come from citizens in our audience. You have two minutes to answer each question; your opponent may then offer a rebuttal. I will then ask a follow-up question at my discretion. The next four questions pertain to At the Drive In, a rock music group from Governor Bush's home state of Texas. The first, to Governor Bush, will be asked by Clara Thompson. Where are you, Ms. Thompson? ...There you are.
Clara Thompson: Uh, yes, Mr. Bush. Do you think that At the Drive In's new album, Relationship of Command, matches the intensity of the band's live show?
George W. Bush: Thank you, Ms. Thompson. As Governor of Texas, I'm proud of these young men from El Paso. I take both young people and the arts very seriously, as I think my record shows. But, uh, the question here, really, is: who do you trust, and who do you think will get things done? I am a uniter, and not a divider. Also, you can't hear At the Drive In's afros on record.
Jim Lehrer: Mr. Vice President.
Al Gore: I'm glad you asked this question, Ms. Thompson, because this is an area in which Mr. Bush and I differ. While no album can ever approximate the complexity of the live concert experience, the sonic intensity of Relationship of Command makes it a good second choice. Andy Wallace mixed the album, and if that name doesn't ring a bell, let me remind you that nine years ago, he mixed an album called Nevermind by a band called Nirvana. The punch his mix brings to these guitars is impressive. So, while Relationship of Command doesn't quite compare to seeing this group live, you'll surely want to mosh-dance in your bedroom when you listen to this recording.
Jim Lehrer: Moving on, this question comes from Mr. Frank Lee and is for Vice President Gore.
Frank Lee: If you are elected president, what do you propose to do about the inconsistencies of Relationship of Command?
Al Gore: Well, yes, I do think this album is largely inconsistent. Right now, music is the most innovative it has ever been in the history of the universe. We have many, many options open to us in these times. Under the Clinton administration, we have brought music into a period of growth, of expansion, of limitlessness. But I'll tell you this: if you want a country filled with records like Relationship of Command that are light on memorable riffs from bands steeped in punk and 70's classic rock, [gestures to Bush] this... is your man.
Jim Lehrer: Governor?
George W. Bush: Creativity in music is up right now, yes. But rock music for pure rock purposes has suffered under the Clinton administration. They're trying to muck up our loud, old fashioned noise with their Washington politics and fuzzy math-rock. Now, these boys... the singing... either you love it or you hate it. But the important part is, it gets by. It gets by on a handful of truly catchy, anthemic rockers. "One Armed Scissor" is the most arena-ready of the songs on Relationship of Command. It has an infectious vocal hook. It has a punchy riff on the chorus. It gets into your subliminable mind, and it more than makes up for the quavering, affected vocalizing on the verses.
Jim Lehrer: The next--
Al Gore: Can I just say one thing about that?
Jim Lehrer: No, I'm sorry, that's--
Al Gore: Okay, alright.
Jim Lehrer: The next question will be asked by Ms. Sandra Hartford, and is for you, Governor Bush. Ms. Hartford, where are you?
Sandra Hartford: Mr. Bush, do you feel At the Drive In frontman Cedric Bixler's vocals are in need of reform?
George W. Bush: Well, I certainly won't claim to have... uh... invented them. [gasping laugh]
[polite laughter from audience]
George W. Bush: I, uh... no. I think the man is very intense. And intensity is a great thing. If I am elected President, I can promise you, it will be very, very intense.
Jim Lehrer: Vice President.
Al Gore: Ms. Hartford, I'm glad you asked this question because this is an area in which Mr. Bush and I differ. Intensity can be a great thing, but is not always. Cedric Bixler has two main vocal styles. Now, one of those is a punk rock bark that recalls Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha. The other is an operatic wail that resembles Ronnie James Dio. The self-conscious aggression of the de la Rocha bit is tiresome, I find, but the Dio channeling is odd and occasionally fun. Take "Sleepwalk Capsules," if you will, for example. In the song's chorus, he's in full-on metal god mode. You could even say his soaring pitch conjures the image of a youthful Tom Cruise sitting in the cockpit of an F-15 fighter. But under Governor Bush's plan, it would not. What he proposes is that we strip Tom Cruise naked, kill his family, burn his house and shoot down his fighter. Now, I see a time when--
Jim Lehrer: Mr. Gore, your time is up. Governor, do you have a rebuttal?
George W. Bush: Well, no.
Jim Lehrer: Then, on to the next question. This comes from Mr. Hannity Colmes and will be fielded by Vice President Gore.
Hannity Colmes: What song on Relationship of Command do you feel most encapsulates its strengths and weaknesses?
Al Gore: Definitely "Invalid Litter Dept." The slower passages of this song are really not what the American people need at this time, with its 80's metal guitar tone and know-it-all spoken word vocals. And honestly, you'll find yourself wanting to hate it. Tipper certainly hated it. But the chorus of the song is such a fist-pumping, singalong triumph you'll find yourself returning to it again and again. And that's really this album in a nutshell: alternately annoying and powerful.
Jim Lehrer: Governor Bush?
George W. Bush: In the great state of Texas, we have a saying: people with afros should be shot. [gasping laugh] People need to have consequences for their afros, and that consequence is death. During my term as Governor, I've fried hundreds of men, and it wasn't always easy. You know, sometimes the switch jammed, or we'd get low on power or something. But I know one thing: there cannot be a harsh enough penalty for bad hair. Now, technically At the Drive In have not committed a crime, but what would you do if it was your hair? What would you do if your four year-old daughter came home from school, crying, with all them products dripping down her cheeks? I'm sure you'd want the maximum penalty implemented. I know I would... | 2004-11-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2004-11-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Grand Royal | November 9, 2004 | 6.1 | 4d5fea14-2f6c-4b37-b707-02c7c0485dee | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | 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 Bill Callahan’s masterful 1999 record as Smog, a breakup album about discovering new ways of being in the world. | 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 Bill Callahan’s masterful 1999 record as Smog, a breakup album about discovering new ways of being in the world. | Smog: Knock Knock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smog-knock-knock/ | Knock Knock | The small South Carolina town of Prosperity, pop. 1173, didn’t necessarily seem touched by God’s good grace. It was a strange place for a musician with a growing international following to wind up, but then, Bill Callahan had bounced between a lot of strange places. Born in 1966 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and having spent part of his childhood in the North of England, where his parents did some kind of clandestine work for the NSA, he’d shuffled from city to city—Sacramento, California; Buford, Georgia; Dover, New Hampshire—rarely sticking around for long. Noncommitment came naturally: A three-time college drop-out, he’d picked up the guitar as a teen, given it up out of frustration, and then tried again. By 1997, when he landed in Prosperity, it seemed like the only reason he came was to find a reason to leave.
By this point in his career, Callahan had built a tidy little reputation as Smog. Beginning in the late ’80s, he had put out a handful of self-released tapes on his own Disaster Records, named after one of his zines; by 1992 he’d graduated to Drag City, a fledgling Chicago label cultivating a roster of acts like Pavement, Royal Trux, and Silver Jews—bands that took the willful ethos of American underground rock and flipped it into stubborn high art, scruffy and proudly nonconforming. Not exactly an outsider but definitely not an insider, he occupied a liminal space—making out-of-the-way sounds in out-of-the-way places, forever trailing rock music’s dominant strains the way a decommissioned highway shadows a six-lane interstate.
Callahan had grown up with a transistor radio pressed to his ear at night, listening first to soft-rock AM stations and then the hardcore punk he discovered at the far left of the dial, and it showed: His taste for low volumes had been tempered by the former, and his fondness for scabrous textures forged in the fires of the latter. In the beginning, Smog’s music fit the moniker: gray, formless, acrid. When Callahan played guitar, he might have been attempting to decipher hidden messages from moldy John Lee Hooker records. But over time, the outline of an actual songwriter started poking through the haze of busted stompboxes, pause-button edits, and Dadaistic pranks.
On albums like 1995’s Wild Love and the following year’s The Doctor Came at Dawn, the guitar tone became cleaner, the stereo field more uncluttered, the words darker and more biting. “I’m gonna be drunk, so drunk at your wedding,” he taunted in one song; in another, he sighed, “Maybe you should have a drink/I don’t know why you ever stopped anyway.” He could channel real ugliness, speaking the language of ne’er-do-wells and abusers, but the tenderness in his music could be as unexpected as the bile. In “To Be of Use,” he admitted in a sad, honeyed voice, “Most of my fantasies are of/Making someone else come.” As masculine myths of young adulthood go, it was the oldest story in the book: the class clown with a curdled heart, just waiting to be made whole.
Callahan’s lyrics gradually grew from post-adolescent expressions of garden-variety self-loathing into something far more unusual and often more ominous, in the sense that they seemed wrapped around actual omens—magic phrases throbbing with eerie portent. He sang of blood-red birds, a headstone on a wharf, a widow’s ghost driving a horse cart full of apples. Often, an object or a turn of phrase would keep turning up across the course of a record, like a bad penny. These imagistic verses felt like fragments of something essential and enduring, splinters of the Old Weird America that had burrowed under Callahan’s skin and burst into strange, spindly blossoms.
Callahan had come to Prosperity in 1997 to live with Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power. The two of them were shacked up in an eight-room farmhouse next to a used-car lot, surrounded by green fields and old machines gone to rust; the rent was $425 a month. Callahan was fresh off the Jim O’Rourke–produced Red Apple Falls, an expansive breakthrough in his catalog. Marshall, to hear her tell it, had given up music for good, despite having a string of sublime and unsettling records under her own belt. But at some point in their cohabitation, things went south; Callahan drove north. He’d later say that he wrote an album’s worth of material on the drive from Prosperity to Chicago, sitting behind the wheel of his Dodge van, staring into the middle distance. Those songs would become Knock Knock, his ninth full-length as Smog, and his sixth for Drag City.
Knock Knock anticipates the openness of Callahan’s later albums, particularly the ones under his own name. The languid Red Apple Falls was a head record, a pastoral daydream of piano laments and pedal steel, flecked with French horn and fingerpicked acoustic guitar; Knock Knock is a road record, smooth as worn asphalt—a record about motion, distance, flying blind. Where before his gaze had often been fixed on lovers, exes, or his own scowl in the mirror, here he looks outward, at the world, as well as more reflexively, even beatifically, inside himself. If Red Apple Falls was a misfit’s badge of honor, Knock Knock is an unburdening, a breakup album about discovering new ways of being in the world.
Again, Callahan recorded with Jim O’Rourke; this time they spent 10 days in the studio, twice what Red Apple Falls had taken them. Drummer Thymme Jones, a Chicago fixture who had played on the previous album, returned for the new one, joined by Vandermark Five drummer Tim Mulvenna. Plush’s Liam Hayes, a session player on numerous Will Oldham records, handled guitar on some songs, while the prolific post-rock guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors took top billing in the credits. (The lyric sheet doesn’t specify who played on what.)
To record with a full band was exhilarating, Callahan would recall: “It’s a different energy when you have three or four people playing. Knock Knock was intoxicated with that feeling. I was taking some of the responsibility off my back, and having more fun.” It didn’t hurt that O’Rourke, who also contributed guitar, bass, and piano, actually liked Callahan’s music, and was creatively invested in a way that previous studio engineers—like the one who methodically worked his way through a six-pack during recording, barely acknowledging Callahan’s presence—had not always been.
Accordingly, Knock Knock often sounds bigger and more ample than its predecessor. O’Rourke kept his experimental tendencies in check, ceding the spotlight to Callahan’s voice—warmer and fuller than it had ever been recorded before, a reluctant river of feeling lit by purple dusk—and rounding it out with gentle strokes of cello, Velvets-style motorik chug, and classic-rock choogle. The album could hardly be described as minimalist, but it is economical to the extreme; no song admits anything beyond the bare necessities required to express itself. The one indulgence they permitted themselves, in addition to a string quartet, is a children’s choir that turns up on a couple of songs, lending the grim “No Dancing” and the determined “Hit the Ground Running” an air somewhere between Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and a camp-town revival meeting.
Callahan called Knock Knock his album for teenagers, though it’s hard to know how seriously he meant it; this was the era when he still preferred to conduct interviews by fax, and journalists often came away grumbling that they’d been made fools of. (In truth, his answers were simply smarter than the vast majority of their questions.) He told interviewers that the record cover—with its jagged lightning bolt and peevish-looking wildcat—was meant to represent objects that young folks like. “Some of the themes are things I associate with teenage years—having big plans, thinking you can live like a gypsy,” he told the Chicago Reader. “There’s a lot about moving and traveling on the record. Most adults let that die.” Even the hand-drawn text on the sleeve had a vaguely heavy-metal shape, like a band logo a kid might scrawl on his Trapper Keeper.
No stranger to classic rock, Callahan had previously sampled the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and referenced AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” This time, he said, he wanted to make anthems, and he did. “Held” is an incandescent swamp rocker. Palm-muted guitars give “No Dancing” the feel of something you might have heard emanating from pickup trucks doing donuts in parking lots, the weeds littered with empties. “Hit the Ground Running” is a straight-ahead mid-tempo Southern rocker, wrapping an inspirational chorus about fleeing the country for the open road around a far bleaker frame: “Bitterness is a lowest sin/A bitter man rots from within/I’ve seen his smile, yellow and brown/The bitterness has brought him down.” Its finale, complete with perkily ascending strings and that jubilant children’s choir, is an infallible day-brightener.
These riff-heavy songs gave Knock Knock a quality that people weren’t used to hearing from Smog albums: It sounded fun. That was especially true of “Cold Blooded Old Times,” a highlight on a record that hardly wants for stellar songs. Like Callahan’s best work, “Cold Blooded Old Times” is sneaky, smuggling the evil that men do inside a deceptively appealing, practically quaint frame. Picking up the ’60s-flavored skip and shuffle of Red Apple Falls’ “Ex-Con,” it sounds at first almost peppy, a straight-up dance number complete with an irresistible, indelible chorus. (That catchiness carried it all the way to 2000’s High Fidelity soundtrack, where it featured alongside songs from the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, Elvis Costello, and Bob Dylan.) But listen past the strumming and the handclaps, and a darker picture emerges: It’s a story of abuse, of a father—whether the song’s subject’s, or someone else’s, it’s not clear—who beat his wife, terrified his children, and possibly carried out even more unspeakable acts. It is a chilling song wrapped in a cozy sweater of a chord change, with one of the all-time great lines in Callahan’s oeuvre: “Cold blooded old times/The type of memories/That turn your bones to glass.” It’s an image so vivid, so tactile, it seems almost like something you could hold in your hand—a small, glinting monument to cruelty and shame.
These uptempo tracks, even when they hid ugly secrets, were a punchy riposte to the many critics, especially in the UK, who seemed to find Callahan an incorrigible downer. One descriptor had followed him across the broad stretch of the 1990s: “miserable.” The word often took the form of “miserabilist,” an odd back-formation, kin to “ventriloquist” or “illusionist,” suggesting a person uncommonly skilled in the art of despair. And, OK, sometimes that characterization was actually kind of true. But on Knock Knock, even the slowest, softest tunes pulsed with life. Just consider “Teenage Spaceship,” a wistful song loosely based on Callahan’s adolescent habit of wandering his neighborhood in the small hours, when everyone was in bed but him. Imagining himself as a flying saucer, he describes flying around the houses at night, remote and alone, untouchable; “Landing at night/I was beautiful with all my lights,” he sings, his voice dropping down to gravel, drawing out “lights” into two exquisite syllables.
The song’s four hushed, reverent minutes are full of possible meaning. “I was a teenage smog/Sewn to the sky” calls back to one of Smog’s first albums; it also anticipates, however unknowingly, the day that Callahan would eventually abandon the alias in favor of his own name, against the protestations of his label. (“The word ‘Smog’ meant nothing to me—just like symbols on a slot machine, like a cherry or a horseshoe,” he would later say. “I realized that’s what I was broadcasting, that’s the face I was giving to people.”) Hovering eerily between his past and his future, “Teenage Spaceship”—one of the gentlest, most beautiful songs in his entire catalog—comes to appear like a beacon that cuts through time and space.
As would become standard procedure on many of Callahan’s albums, both as Smog and under his own name, Knock Knock’s 10 songs fit into a loose narrative arc. He had experimented with recurring themes on Red Apple Falls, but this was something new: an implicit story, with a beginning, middle, and end. “Let’s Move to the Country,” the opening song, sketches the broad outline of the tale: A wandering man is ready to settle down. Over skeletal, clean-toned guitar and an ostinato cello pulse, the song’s protagonist lays all his cards out on the table:
Let’s move to the country
Just you and me
My travels are over
My travels are through
Let’s move to the country
Just me and you
For a while, it’s smooth sailing. There are songs about finding security (“Held”), about confronting anxiety (“No Dancing”), about solitude (“Teenage Spaceship”). The circle closes with the album’s final, three-song stretch. By “Hit the Ground Running,” Callahan—or at least, the Callahan of the song—is behind the wheel, crossing state lines like they were sidewalk cracks. “I Could Drive Forever” is the hushed yin to “Hit the Ground Running”’s ebullient yang: a measured rumination on regret, a fuzzy dream of an infinitely receding horizon. “I should have left a long time ago/The best idea I ever had,” he sings, his voice strengthening against a watery tremolo backdrop. Weary and resigned, “Left Only With Love” wraps up the album with a farewell to the person that he has left behind, a soft expression of regret. Callahan’s unsteady voice is nearly naked but for threadbare guitar strings and velvety reverb. It is the mirror opposite of the opening song’s boundless optimism.
Of course, these songs are never simply “about” their subject or their themes, much less dependent upon the particulars of Callahan’s own existence, however much a given lyric might have been rooted in something he lived. The joy of them is in their fabric, the warp and weft of truth and lies. In moments both loud and quiet, Knock Knock feels luminous, phantasmal, hovering three feet off the ground—a thing not quite of this world. How could anyone pin such a creation on something as unremarkable as one man’s quotidian existence?
“Autobiography is not something I’m interested in,” Callahan told a blogger in 2001. He reiterated to The Independent, “I try to keep myself out of it as much as possible.” Nearly a decade later, he was still shooting down questions about the veracity of his songs, sometimes to the point of annoyance. “It really has to be that either everything is autobiography or nothing is autobiography, with nothing in between,” he told The Quietus in 2010. “That's the only way to deal with this age-old question of which I am, pardon my French, not remotely interested in.” That same query just kept coming, until finally he relaxed into something resembling a zen mindstate. “It’s music,” he told City Pages, as though such a thing might not be obvious. “It’s a creation. They’re songs. Songs are about music. They’re musicbiographical.”
One of my favorite songs on the album is the one most difficult to interpret, at least within a biographical framework. On the surface, “River Guard” is about a prison guard who takes his prisoners to a swimming hole. The mood is contemplative, daydreamy. He sits in the grass, watches them floating on their backs, then looks away. Is he toying with the idea of letting them escape? When he hauls them back in, he tells us, “They always say/Our sentences will not be served/We are constantly on trial/It’s a way to be free.” It’s a cryptic line, and a good one, good enough for him to repeat the final couplet again at the song’s end. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean, honestly. But particularly in the context of later songs like “The Well” and “Writing,” where Callahan takes evident pleasure in grappling with the creative process itself, I wonder if it isn’t in some way about the act of interpretation. Perhaps the prisoners are his songs. “We are constantly on trial,” they say. “It’s a way to be free.” The lifeblood of a song depends on deferring final judgment, making sure the gavel never falls.
There’s another lyric on the album I come back to a lot. It’s in “Held,” a song about contentment, trust, the security of being held “like a big old baby.” There’s a lot going on in its 15 slim lines, including a blanket of ants and a jet plane exploding in the sky. But at the song’s climax, Callahan marvels, rapturously, “For the first time in my life/I am moving away moving away moving away/From within the reach of me.”
Nearly two decades later, Callahan would admit that these were not his best years. “I was kind of a little putz,” he said. “Inchoate. Wandering. I didn’t know how to be honest with myself and others, for the most part. Or at least there were certain personalities I couldn’t deal with in a healthy, self-preserving way. You can slip through the cracks and have a lot of adventures for a long time and when you get older you wonder if that was good for you, necessary, or a waste.” Whatever else “Held” might be about, it sounds like a song about growing up, or at least trying to—shedding dead skin, escaping his worst tendencies, even if just for a spell. Callahan wasn’t leaving Prosperity in order to find himself; quite the opposite. The whole album was a disappearing act. Callahan, the man, had dissipated, like a blanket of smog scattered by the north wind. What was left—what is left—were these songs: a testament to the endurance of the work, and the irrelevance and impermanence of all other concerns. | 2020-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 2, 2020 | 8.7 | 4d7c71a8-9a6f-4f41-b712-006753bbe99a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Despite fans ranging from Trent Reznor to Thom Yorke to the Coen Brothers, this L.A. neo-shoegaze band never crossed over. Six years later, they finally return. | Despite fans ranging from Trent Reznor to Thom Yorke to the Coen Brothers, this L.A. neo-shoegaze band never crossed over. Six years later, they finally return. | Autolux: Transit Transit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14540-transit-transit/ | Transit Transit | If what they say about patience is true, Autolux are amongst the most virtuous motherfuckers alive in Los Angeles. Two of its members served in Failure and Ednaswap-- respectively, some dudes who had a cup of coffee in the Buzz Bin with "Stuck on You" after the post-Nevermind boom and the band who wrote and first recorded Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn". Drummer Carla Azar had what was feared to be a career-ending elbow injury in 2002 but a risky surgery and eight screws allowed her to get back on the skins. And despite having vocal cheerleaders ranging from Trent Reznor to Thom Yorke to T-Bone Burnett to the Coen Brothers, their sophomore bow Transit Transit follows up an album that came out six years ago. For some perspective, when Future Perfect was released in 2004, Silversun Pickups was best known in L.A. as a liquor store.
Problem is, they ask the same patience of the listener on Transit Transit, without being really explicit about where the payoff lies. They occasionally dip into a bag of digital trickery-- in particular, the title track is a gripping introduction of unpredictable drum machine rattle with longing trumpet and vocal sighs akin to Radiohead's "Videotape". For the most part, though, Autolux hone in on the same iterations of shoegaze as the Pickups. Yet despite the MBV worship, they also haven't forgotten about Swervedriver or Ride. Guitarist Greg Edwards forgoes fuzz tones almost completely, preferring gnarled, forceful chords that, combined with Azar's metallic clatter, can give Autolux some brawn. And yet, they're too hesitant to step on the gas and Transit Transit maintains a puzzling lack of urgency for an album so long in the works.
You can get an occasional jolt from the steel-girder riffs of "Census" or "Audience No. 2", yet the tempo never gets past a slow boil. Hushed electro ballads like "Highchair" and "The Bouncing Wall" could conceivably work on a subliminal level, or they can just as easily be tuned out. The sparse self-production does them no favors either, stripped down and dry as a bone but lacking the warmth and intimacy of a live performance.
It's a shame because you hate to use the term "professional" to describe a record's best asset. In a festival setting, I imagine Autolux's technical proficiency is vice tight and visceral, odd because a record like Transit Transit that (intentionally?) lacks strong hooks is usually considered one that benefits from close listens. But ultimately, it all comes back to the idea of patience in the face of a lack of memorable songs-- at some point, you have to demand to be heard and Transit Transit is the sound of three skilled musicians being all too careful not to step on each other's toes. | 2010-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | TBD | August 10, 2010 | 5.4 | 4d7d1e23-f418-4567-9027-ccf2dce4ace1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The third and best installment of Mexican Summer’s collaborative EP series pairs two soft-focus psychedelic bands to righteous effect. | The third and best installment of Mexican Summer’s collaborative EP series pairs two soft-focus psychedelic bands to righteous effect. | Dungen / Woods: Myths 003 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dungen-woods-myths-003-ep/ | Myths 003 EP | The charm of Marfa does not take long to take hold. On a recent weekday afternoon, I drove to the West Texas town, leaving the rugged peaks of the state’s pie-slice panhandle behind on long strips of flat blacktop that cut across the scrubby Chihuahuan Desert like tightropes. Maybe it was the blessed mix of sunshine and breeze or the pregnant stillness that seemed to lurk in the streets of the community of about 2,000 people, but everything felt suddenly at ease and open. During the last several decades, Marfa has become famous as an unexpected artist’s outpost, where city folks (sometimes controversially) move to make a permanent vacation of their vocation. And so, the outlandish happens—massive minimalist sculptures stand amid the chaparral, edgy art galleries thrive in abandoned adobe buildings, and an evocative Prada store simulacrum stands 30 miles outside of town. Wandering the streets, having a drink, or even buying groceries, I got the inexplicable sense that everything was possible, that here people had space and time to ponder something different.
That sense of sacred possibility presides over Myths 003, a little seven-song wonder conceived and cut by members of Sweden’s Dungen and Brooklyn’s Woods in 2017. It is the third and best edition of Mexican Summer’s annual Myths series, each of which has been recorded together by two acts during a weeklong residency ahead of the label’s Marfa Myths festival each spring. The event is a bit like a post-South by Southwest exhalation, a smartly conceived escape from the grab-bag madness of Austin; like its host, this festival seems more concerned with creativity than commerce.
Tourmates a decade ago and friends ever since, Dungen and Woods are both soft-focus psychedelic bands who love sharp hooks but have very distinct impulses. Woods tuck their idiosyncrasy into the crevices of their pastoral pop-rock songs, hiding their intricacies like Easter eggs. Dungen is more obviously aggressive and extroverted, splitting harmony-heavy tunes with drum solos, fantastical flute vamps, or one of Reine Fiske’s lysergic guitar solos. Those differences become shared assets here—it’s the rare collaboration where each band actually adds what it does best to the other’s song. Dungen supplies frisson to the typical drift of Woods during “Turn Around,” from the spiraling guitar lead that starts it to the piano that pounds at the horizon. Surrounded by harder edges and higher dynamics, Jeremy Earl’s slight falsetto sounds that much sweeter; it is one of the most magnetic Woods songs in years. And on the muted, Dungen-led “Jag Ville Va Kvar,” Woods insert filaments of noise and distortion, providing depth and ballast to a song that might have otherwise floated in the clouds.
Speaking of the sky, five of these seven tracks are instrumental (or, at least, wordless, sometimes deploying distorted vocals as an astral texture), suggesting stony jams simply cut to fit on an LP. But they share more direction and narrative tension than that. “Marfa Sunset” and “Morning Myth,” for instance, are a complementary serenade and aubade, fitting one another as opposite sides of a shared cycle. During “Sunset,” rays of guitar noise and glints of keyboard melodies bounce from the sides of a loping groove, fading into the distance after a busy day. But “Morning” is jittery and caffeinated, its rubbery rhythm and stunted West African guitar line practically bounding between a duet for Gustav Ejstes’ flute and Earl’s refracted vocal samples. Both tunes are concise and controlled, in accord with their functionality as music for ending or beginning the day. Even “Saint George,” the album’s six-minute epic, is well-scripted, as the bands steadily work a funk beat into an intense krautrock lather. They never lose you in the expected haze, never sacrifice the momentum of the rhythm and riff for overindulgence, even as sheets of distortion wash over it all like a flash flood. This is a righteous instrumental anthem.
For a decade, the much-missed series “In the Fishtank” pulled two bands into the studio for a few days and challenged them to make something new, to take a risk by breaking from their customs. There were, almost by design, some misses, but several of those records still feel like unexpected gifts from known quantities, as when Low met the Dirty Three or Tortoise sparred with the Ex. Three albums into the series, Myths is close to reaching those heights. On Myths 003, both Dungen and Woods seem to have found a new spark. These songs are both more urgent and exploratory than the last albums by either band, though they were both very good. There’s a real sense of shared wonder here. Maybe it was the mild heat of the high Texas desert or the spell of the mystical Marfa lights. More likely, it was four sympathetic musicians being given the space and time to do whatever they want, in a town that seems to demand only that. | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | March 16, 2018 | 7.6 | 4d7de52e-d901-4132-a4ab-3f757740e0c6 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Once content with tantrums, the Boston grunge-pop outfit Krill are now flirting with an almost anthemic sound. On their latest album, A Distant Fist Unclenching, frontman Jonah Furman remains self-deprecating, but there’s a purgative quality to the music that feels almost joyful. | Once content with tantrums, the Boston grunge-pop outfit Krill are now flirting with an almost anthemic sound. On their latest album, A Distant Fist Unclenching, frontman Jonah Furman remains self-deprecating, but there’s a purgative quality to the music that feels almost joyful. | Krill: A Distant Fist Unclenching | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20161-a-distant-fist-unclenching/ | A Distant Fist Unclenching | There was a time when you might have confused Krill with a band who cared more about actual shit than giving one. "Turd", from a 2014 EP released by the grunge-pop Boston slackers, found frontman Jonah Furman imagining himself as the titular piece of fecal matter. "If I could just be ate/ At least someone might say I was worthy," he sings, resigned to a life as an undigested peanut.
So yeah, Krill are a little juvenile and a lot insecure—the title of that EP, Steve Hears Pile in Malden and Bursts into Tears, refers to Krill’s admiration for (and low-key jealousy of) fellow Bostonians and Exploding in Sound label-mates Pile. On Lucky Leaves, Krill’s borderline-paranoid 2013 album, Furman defended the right to feel like a failure. But in the year that followed the release of Steve, something changed. "I was thinking about how Lucky Leaves had all of this sad shit, and I believed in it and totally agree with it, but I wanted to see where you could go after that," Furman told Rolling Stone last month. The result is the band’s best album to date, the bigger, brighter and bolder A Distant Fist Unclenching, which locates a weird confidence in the universality of our individual anxieties.
Pile-worship aside, Fist finds more evident kinship with another band just a few hundred miles north: Montreal's Ought, whose More Than Any Other Day was one of last year’s finest indie rock releases. Both Furman and Ought’s Tim Beeler deal in open-ended questions and nervous tics, suggesting worried young men striving for uncommon lives. Though Fist has more passion than anything Krill have done, Furman is still a dyspeptic figure, asking God to grant him strength to deal with his "brain problem."
But for all of Furman’s neuroses, there’s a purgative quality to Fist that feels almost joyful. It helps that the band has become powerful enough to lift Furman out of his own head for a little while, boosted also by cleaner production and more distinctive guitar work. Their secret weapon remains drummer Ian Becker, whose dynamics and off-kilter rhythms keep everyone on their toes. Once content with mere tantrums, Krill are now flirting with an almost anthemic sound, with songs like "Squirrels" and "Brain Problem" climaxing in ways big enough to inspire listeners to keep their fists not only clenched, but aloft.
Fist will present a few sticking points for some listeners, the most notable being Furman’s voice. Like an unfortunate cross between Eef Barzelay and Jeremy Freedman (plus a little Bobcat Goldthwait for when he gets really riled up), it scans anywhere from vaguely comical in its jittery frogginess to weirdly precious. And while he's deft with odds turn of phrase, Furman is often too reliant on metaphors either too simple ("It Ends") or too open-ended to connect. But when they get it right, like on the stuttering S&M allegory "Torturer", everything clicks into place.
Above all else, A Distant Fist Unclenching is an album about embracing clarity in the face of constant, nagging doubt ("To be given one shot, and to know I could blow it," Furman wails on "Squirrels"). On seven-minute centerpiece "Tiger", the titular unclenched fist appears "in the distance," but "in the nearness," Furman sings, "there is a bad day ending." Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain. | 2015-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound / Double Double Whammy | February 18, 2015 | 6.9 | 4d8d4d86-0f7a-4fbd-a182-94702b6cf3a0 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Working with producer Mark Ronson to get the best 1960s-style production sound money can buy, Black Lips have crafted a very solid album. | Working with producer Mark Ronson to get the best 1960s-style production sound money can buy, Black Lips have crafted a very solid album. | Black Lips: Arabia Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15494-arabia-mountain/ | Arabia Mountain | There comes a time in every rock'n'roll band's career when they have to decide whether to get out of the garage or stay mired in the grease. Black Lips seem to want it both ways. With the release of their fourth studio album, 2007's Good Bad Not Evil, the Atlanta rockers saw their audience expand well beyond the garage-punk underground, thanks to a new alliance with Vice that yielded fawning New York Times profiles, Conan O'Brien appearances, and Virgin Mobile ad placements. At the time, a Hives-sized crossover success didn't seem out of the question, but the Lips seemed to handily kibosh that possibility with 2009's 200 Million Thousand, a sprawling mess that seemed designed to prove Black Lips could still out-scuzz and out-slop the lowest of the lo-fi.
The band's decision to record Arabia Mountain with Amy Winehouse producer Mark Ronson is surprising, not because they're at odds aesthetically-- the two camps do share an affinity for 1960s retro recording techniques-- but because of the timing: hooking up with an A-list producer is the sort of move that would've made more sense two years ago, to capitalize on Good Bad Not Evil's mainstream-breaching momentum. But whether they're responding to Vice's vocal dissatisfaction with 200 Million Thousand or following the example of their late friend Jay Reatard-- whose 2009 swan song Watch Me Fall saw him cleaning up his buzzsaw-pop sound without compromising his essence-- Black Lips seem more eager to play ball this time around. And unlike previous cautionary examples of garage-rock bands teaming up with Top 40 hitmakers (the Hives and Pharrell, the Mooney Suzuki and the Matrix), Ronson thankfully doesn't try to make Black Lips into something they're not.
Though an early single had the loaded title "New Direction", Arabia Mountain sticks to the same Nuggets-style playbook that's governed all previous Black Lips releases. Ronson, who produced nine songs and mastered another two recorded with Deerhunter's Lockett Pundt, simply gives the band the most faithful faux-60s production money can buy. If anything's changed here, it's Black Lips' point of emphasis on the Nuggets spectrum: Arabia Mountain draws less from the sinister psychedelia of the 13th Floor Elevators or the deranged blues of early Beefheart, and more from the toga-party-rockin' likes of the Sonics and the Premiers. So it favors the more amiable aspects of 60s garage-- frathouse-rocking saxophones, songs inspired by comic-book superheroes and baseball mascots, and grooooovy singing saw-- over anti-authoritarian attitudes and fuzzbox abuse.
Black Lips have never been shy about showing off their playful side, but in the past, these moments (Let It Bloom's poignant, poor-boy ballad "Dirty Hands", Good Bad Not Evil's outsider anthem "Bad Kids", 200 Million Thousand's sober-up pledge "Starting Over") nicely complemented their more raucous rave-ups, revealing a sincere softer side to the band's notorious delinquent image. With Arabia Mountain exuding a mostly cheeky and cheerful demeanor, you do lose some of the oppositional tension between innocence and insolence that always distinguished Black Lips from the garage-punk pack. And with a somewhat bloated 16-song tracklist, the album's abundance of open-roof Thunderbird anthems-- "Go Out and Get It", "Time", "New Direction"-- starts to feel somewhat interchangeable.
But Arabia Mountain's chiseled production and considerably tighter songcraft provides a better forum for showcasing the band's subversive sense of humor. The best songs here play up the dichotomy between their retro sound and modern preoccupations: bad acid trips at the Louvre (the Yardbirds-ish freakbeater "Modern Art"), exotic fad diets (the breezy Beach Boys-via-Ramones romp "Raw Meat"), and post-recession survival tactics (the spot-on country-Stones send-up "Dumpster Diving"). And in anticipation of those old-school fans who might view Arabia Mountain as a calculated act of careerism, the Lips throw a late-game curveball with the queasy closer "You Keep on Running", a creepy haunted-house trawl that finds Cole Alexander issuing the title's warning in a high-pitched squeal that's equally unnerving and silly. Its inclusion sends a none-too-subtle message to anyone who thinks they've got Black Lips all figured out: Arabia Mountain may be poised to push this band further over-ground, but they're not going up without a fight. | 2011-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vice | June 10, 2011 | 7.7 | 4d8f035c-6366-4d27-ba39-59c17c7117b3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On their new album, Fifth Harmony are at their best when grappling with the age-old girl-group concern of how to reconcile independence with love. | On their new album, Fifth Harmony are at their best when grappling with the age-old girl-group concern of how to reconcile independence with love. | Fifth Harmony: 7/27 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21932-727/ | 7/27 | If “The X Factor” has done one good thing in its many years of manufactured drama and purposeful audition mockery, it’s near-singlehandedly keeping alive the decades-old tradition of the pop girl group in the West. While they never disappeared worldwide—girl groups and their alumnae dominate J- and K-pop, for instance—the only two Western girl groups with consistent pop clout are the UK’s Little Mix and the States’ Fifth Harmony, both products of their respective countries’ “X Factors.”
There are some downsides to this. Most groups that get far on “The X Factor” are assembled from failed solo auditions, and while plenty of girl groups are unglamorously cobbled together via some backstage machination or other, it’s one thing to know that and another to watch five solo hopefuls get rejected on live-TV and then jettisoned into a band with three consecutive names slapped onto it, one of which was a Bruno Mars family act and one of which was a Musiq Soulchild song. And while the “X Factor” process selects for vocal talent and marketable personality, it rarely selects for the two together; what you end up with are a lot of singers with indistinguishably winning voices and #winning presence. Fifth Harmony’s early singles sounded less like the work of a coherent group than a diva scrimmage, each singer trying to outperform the rest—inevitably, because that’s literally what they came on the show hoping to do.
It’s been several years and hits since then, though, and Fifth Harmony’s had some time to grow into themselves. The first track on *7/27—*the day the group originally formed—is as good a State of the Cowell-Administered Union as any. It begins like a retread of past hit “Worth It,” down to the deliberately squawky sax beat, but soon becomes a pep talk for fans complete with cheerleader whoops, a call to (immaculately toned) arms, and a showcase for each vocalist, now with discernibly individual personae: Ally on lead and Dinah on backup, Normani with the near-rap, Lauren’s cool alto balancing Camila’s Ring Pop of a voice. (Rumors of the latter being groomed for a solo career, at least as of this album, are exaggerated; 7/27 is as vocally egalitarian as any girl-group album of the past decade or so, and better for it.) It’s easily the best potential single the group’s ever released.
It also sounds exactly like 2003—specifically, like a cut off Christina Aguilera’s Back to Basics or Mya’s Moodring. An even eerier flashback comes with “Not That Kinda Girl,” which rehashes the look-don’t-touch theme that was everywhere in pop in ‘03 and adds Missy Elliott, who as usual lately is operating at maybe 50% of peak but is welcome nevertheless because 50% of peak Missy is still pretty damn good. The echoes of early-'00s R&B radio seem to say more about the length of the pop nostalgia cycle than anything about Fifth Harmony in particular, which points to a larger issue: For all the group’s done to establish each singer vocally, they’ve yet to pin down a sonic identity, nor a lyrical identity beyond vague empowerment, and 7/27 dutifully triangulates every trend and radio format of the past couple years. There’s stuttery, pitch-shifted EDM with “The Life.” There’s the fake r&bass track “Work From Home,” wherein Dr. Luke protégé Ammo imitates rap producers imitating DJ Mustard. There’s even diluted reggae and Fetty Wap collaboration, both on “All in My Head (Flex),” which samples Mad Cobra’s “Flex.” About half the tracks have tropical-house synths stuck in like cocktail umbrellas.
Unsurprisingly, the trendier the track, the worse Fifth Harmony showcase it proves. Several of the songs also suffer from brutally protracted lyrical metaphors that function as near-parodies of pop song form. It’s not entirely Fifth Harmony’s fault, for instance, that r&bass ceased to be a thing well before “Work from Home,” or that everyone missed Jordin Sparks’ near-identical 2015 single called “Work From Home,” or even that everyone (somehow) missed a certain megastar’s No. 1 single about work-work-work-work-work-work. It’s definitely their fault that this single involves a lot of metaphorically sexing up the freelance life, which is perhaps the least sexy labor arrangement in world history. (More accurate first verse: “worried about basically everything, wearing ripped pajamas”). Or that only Ty Dolla $ign—whose verse is one big leadup to a T-Pain-esque “put in overtime on your *booooddddyyyyyyyy!”—*takes the material as seriously as he should, which is to say not at all.
Like most girl groups, Fifth Harmony trades in the kind of pop-cultural press-quote feminism where the group can say they are out squash gender roles and “gender-institutionalized thinking” while recording a fantasy of a stay-at-home sexter reassuring the household breadwinner that he’s the boss at home. And like girl groups historically, they grapple with how to reconcile that independence with love. The original girl groups were as liable to record love songs as wistful, even macabre cautionary tales. Modern groups Little Mix and Spice sing love songs, but they couldn’t be more obvious that their heart belongs to their besties. Destiny’s Child, with few exceptions, repudiated love entirely: “if you ain’t in love, I congratulate you.”
7/27, though, approaches the subject with full abandon. “I Lied” thoroughly rescues its conceit from Michael Bolton hell and turns it into a sighing, feverish surge reminiscent of “Countdown.” Bonus track “Dope” is even more crushed-out, with a track that sounds like jittering through the whole runtime of a slow jam and lines delivered like so many words to stumble over en route to the big confession: “I don’t know what else to say, but you’re pretty fucking dope.” It strikes that rarest of balances for crush songs—confident but skittish, sure of one’s exact feelings but clueless about what to do next, independent but nevertheless absolutely swooningly done for—and also feels like a first. Mediocre girl-group material is a cartoon simulation of women’s lives. Good girl-group material reflects them. Great girl-group material recasts them in 3D with all the color cranked up. Finally, albeit in flashes, there are hints that Fifth Harmony may reach that peak. | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | June 3, 2016 | 6.2 | 4d97c169-633d-4b4b-ba99-2f3ebb69e17b | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The Big Thief drummer excels at creating ambient worlds, and his second release under his own name evokes the spine-tingling sensations of ASMR as well as a persistent anxiety. | The Big Thief drummer excels at creating ambient worlds, and his second release under his own name evokes the spine-tingling sensations of ASMR as well as a persistent anxiety. | James Krivchenia: A New Found Relaxation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-krivchenia-a-new-found-relaxation/ | A New Found Relaxation | James Krivchenia’s second record under his own name, A New Found Relaxation, creates a sterile, imaginary world of spa days and mineral baths, and was largely recorded near the New Mexico town of Embudo. The community of approximately four hundred along the Rio Grande, where the Big Thief drummer lived for a year and a half, is not a wellness getaway by any means. But because Krivchenia melds his recordings with Muzak, spa radio, and clips designed to induce Autonomous Meridian Sensory Response (ASMR), A New Found Relaxation suggests a New Mexico healing experience that’s both IRL and online. The samples move quickly, spiking the ambience with appropriate doses of anxiety.
Krivchenia recorded some of the album’s 500 fragments at home, while messing around online with his computer plugged into pedals and effects processors. His resulting patchwork of gurgling internet rips and field recordings is expertly arranged, which makes sense, considering Krivchenia’s pedigree as the recording engineer for Big Thief's debut Masterpiece and the most recent album by the underappreciated Mega Bog. He’s put out deconstructed dance music under the alias 1000000000s, and on 2018’s No Comment, he reworked body-camera audio of warfare and gun violence into a discomfiting collage. Like No Comment, A New Found Relaxation is a conceptual record.
But while No Comment was full of doctored samples that bore little relation to their disturbing source material, the stems on A New Found Relaxation are evident underneath layers of loops. It’s drumless and fairly placid, in keeping with the new-age theme. Water predominates, and the song “Legendary Liquids” even shares a name with a hugely popular ASMR video. Yet instead of trying to elicit a euphoric, physiological response, Krivchenia undercuts the world of wellness with consistent drones. The stereo panning on “Loveless But Not Joyless,” for example, feels paranoid, as though a sedating video is playing in one ear while dissonant noise rumbles through the other. Talking ruins the sensory experience, as anyone who’s spent time exploring ASMR videos knows. Krivchenia’s soundscapes seem to mumble away like a nervous internal monologue.
He certainly isn’t the first contemporary electronic musician to comment on ASMR’s spine-tingling sensations and the YouTube stars commited to provoking them. Composers like Holly Herndon and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith have approached the phenomenon with eyes toward satire and reverence, respectively, while fetishizing the videos’ audiophile-grade sounds. The relative scrappiness of Krivchenia’s take centers the same source material around his life in New Mexico. Perhaps tellingly, he left the region for Los Angeles at the end of 2019. Listening to the album, it’s easy to imagine him jittery in Embudo, trying to stay calm and appreciate his surroundings. Feeling preoccupied in a remote location of natural beauty is a singularly disorienting experience. Is the problem with the area and its culture? Or is the problem with you? A New Found Relaxation never answers these questions, which makes it work as music, rather than wellness philosophy: Krivchenia passes us through all of the necessary, agitating trials of the self before we can breathe our first sigh of relief. | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | June 29, 2020 | 7.3 | 4d9b2e26-02b8-4a81-ba1c-b7ddb550f3e2 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Nic Oogjes’ lounge-lizard alter ego makes heady, gleefully ridiculous no wave pastiche held together by flamboyance and a predilection for showmanship. | Nic Oogjes’ lounge-lizard alter ego makes heady, gleefully ridiculous no wave pastiche held together by flamboyance and a predilection for showmanship. | Cong Josie: Cong! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cong-josie-cong/ | Cong! | As de facto leader of Melbourne dance-punk collective NO ZU, Nic Oogjes is known as a party starter: a singlet-and-suit-clad frontman who yaps and yowls as the sometimes 10- or 11-piece band behind him whips up frantic, ESG and Liquid Liquid-indebted grooves. Over the past decade, NO ZU and their self-described “heat beat” have developed a cult audience on the Australian touring circuit—a feat that, for Oogjes, has come with drawbacks. “NO ZU has become a big beast with (perceived) expectations associated and a lot of members to organize,” he said last year. “I really needed a more immediate, free-er and efficient outlet.”
He found it in an alter ego anagram, Cong Josie: a cokey, coquettish lounge lizard more likely to be found prowling the club after the other partygoers have gone home. On Cong!, his first album as Cong Josie, Oogjes eschews NO ZU’s hot-blooded funk influences in favor of touchpoints from the chillier end of the no wave spectrum—namely Suicide. Drawing from the sounds of downtown New York in the 1970s but littered with references to ultra-specific Australian iconography, Cong! is a heady, gleefully ridiculous piece of genre pastiche held together by Oogjes’ flamboyance and predilection for showmanship.
Oogjes wears his references so proudly, and wrings so much out of them, that Cong! risks coming across as little more than hero worship. He is a clear Alan Vega Martin Rev devotee: Most every track on Cong! is anchored by chintzy synths and hard-edged, plasticky basslines that give the whole record an insistent, strung-out atmosphere. “Leather Whip,” a louche highlight, feels like “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne” with a little less sparkle—“Rhinestones, Velour, Cava,” perhaps. Like Alan Vega drooling out signifiers of nightlife luxury until they’re little more than sounds, Oogjes repeats the song’s title with an elastic, rockabilly quiver in his voice, a distended parody of sadism and machismo.
Produced by Oogjes and written with NO ZU’s Cayn Borthwick, Cong! covers a surprising amount of ground within its relatively spare palette: the sax-gilded stomp of “Flamin’ Heart” is a theatrical, villainous highlight, while “Wedding Bells” sounds like ’60s girl-group pop remade as slow, rimy EBM. A lot of the album is extremely funny, too, toying with the absurdity of Australiana, as on “Snake Oil Speeder,” a largely unintelligible track in which detached bits of animal names—“goanna,” “red-headed,” “thorny”—float to the surface like pond scum. You can practically picture Oogjes on QVC, a soused, gimlet-eyed hustler selling tonics made of echidnas and spiders to unwitting city folk.
On “Cong the Singer,” one of the record’s best tracks, Oogjes narrates one of Cong Josie’s misadventures as if he were some kind of rock god, peppering the story with painfully mundane markers of Melbourne suburbia—the EastLink freeway, Springvale Road—as if they were Sunset and Vine. Delivered in an ocker deadpan instead of his usual rockabilly moan, the monologue is a charming, edge-softening moment: It recontextualizes Cong! as not just a piece of no wave fetishism but a pulpy fantasy dreamed up from the suburban fringes—a vision wherein the gray suburban roads of Oogjes’ youth led to electrifying avant-garde nightlife, rather than linoleum-floored RSL clubs and drab strip malls.
Even if you can’t connect to this very Australian—and, in a sense, very Gen X and millennial—subtext, Oogjes is still a consummate entertainer, and even at its most parochial, Cong! is enjoyable, tightly produced EBM that never takes itself too seriously. The energy that made Oogjes such a magnetic bandleader in NO ZU is plain to see: Whether he’s delivering his words in a porny, sweat-dampened shudder or a rubbery, drunken wail reminiscent of Chris Isaak, his presence is undeniable. His tone often seems to be more important than the lyrics, which are frequently lost among his slurred croons. Sometimes, a phrase comes through (“With you, I’ll never never be blue,” he sings on “Persephone,” a touching song written for his daughter) but even when they don’t, the vibe is never lost. Cong! runs on karaoke principles: If you sing with enough feeling, do words even matter?
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. | 2021-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | It | December 9, 2021 | 7.2 | 4d9d6389-924d-4248-9211-d4ba7ed19f1d | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The beguiling new album from producer Elysia Crampton is a dizzying, hyper-conceptual collection of miniatures. It highlights a number of her hallmark sounds before pushing into strange new territory. | The beguiling new album from producer Elysia Crampton is a dizzying, hyper-conceptual collection of miniatures. It highlights a number of her hallmark sounds before pushing into strange new territory. | Elysia Crampton: Spots y Escupitajo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23340-spots-y-escupitajo/ | Spots y Escupitajo | The first identifiable sound you hear on Spots y Escupitajo, the beguiling new album by producer Elysia Crampton, is a flushing toilet. The next is a creepy, Chucky-style laugh set against a revving motor, screeching tires, crashing metal, and the tinkle of broken glass. Crampton’s in a nihilistic mood, it seems—but if you’re not careful, you might miss her cues. After a mere 19 seconds, the album has already reached track three—or in this case, “Spot 3.”
Spots y Escupitajo is a set of blink-and-you-missed-them miniatures. “Spot 1” through “Spot 8” occupy only the opening minutes of the collection, and they function like a recap of Crampton’s output to date, flagging a number of her hallmark sounds in a flurry of activity before pushing outward into strange new territory. It’s a dizzying run, each over before it really registers, each dense with chaos yet familiar. Crampton may have a side hustle in the works—these spinback-laden bridges could function convincingly well between chart toppers on an adventurous Latin American radio station. The rest of the album builds on this hyper-conceptual premise, with knotty, uneasy explorations of Crampton’s emerging sound.
Spots is a difficult listen, though—a record that will surely finds more fellow-feeling in the gallery world than among casual fans. On “Battle & Screams,” thunderous destruction and cries of agony are scrambled into a grotesque shimmer via a comically low bitrate. Later, “Sombra Blanca Misteriosa (y Rara)” reads like an traveler’s audio diary overdubbed with a plunky single digit piano figure. Stark and disorienting, it raises plenty of questions about what’s being heard while remaining emotionally at arm’s length; it practically demands an artist statement.
Of course, Crampton has proven to be comfortable giving artist statements. A 2015 feature by Resident Advisor was peppered with dense quotes that swam happily in the seas of cultural theory. For example, “To go further and consider ourselves on a geological level ruptures hierarchies and taxonomical divides as we find ourselves already deeply enmeshed in the strangeness and vast timescales of the lithic.” If the rhetoric risked confounding some thinkers, the music itself—2015’s American Drift—was entrancing and accessible, dealing in tapestries of melody set against drowsy halftime rhythms. The chuckles, sound effects, and radio announcer voices (which return on Spots) floated through the EP, a fever dream of cultural identity, post-colonial trauma, late capitalism, gender, race, class.
The new album’s apt title, meanwhile, itself offers a clue into Crampton’s thinking: the self-identified “spots” are situated at the front while the *Escupitajo—*spittle—fills out the rest. An unsettling film of disgust covers these pieces, refusing to coalesce. Crampton coats her works with possible meanings and interpretations, but with few hooks. Near the end, two songs serve as the record’s spiritual apex. “Chuqi Chinchay” is built around an ode to a dual-gendered god, performed in a voice reminiscent of a video game monologue. Chintzy strings emote in the background, softening ambient gunfire and a steady stream of disheveled audio. Inspired partially by Transformers, the song evokes a potent intersection between the banality of mass entertainment and the enduring power of myths. Crampton’s explorations of our spiritual nature, tethered inextricably to our bodies, our material world, and our histories, teases out remarkable subtext from pop culture dreck, illuminating the ways ancient themes seem to manifest in even our most disposable products.
“Spittle” follows with the opposite. For nine and half minutes, Crampton wanders around a piano, sketching dreamy and dissonant figures. No voices jut in. There are no synthesizers, no samples, though some of her harmonies harken back to American Drift’s most stunning passages. Occasionally aimless, it’s nonetheless a moment of unvarnished, concept-free vulnerability amid a deluge of high-concept rigor, and it works.
Crampton’s music always feels so suffused with context, subtext, citations, and inverted meanings that it’s tempting to assume Spots has a puzzle to solve, or ever more meaning to be dug up. But Spots is an intriguing subversion that doesn’t quite stick; as with much conceptual art, the concepts often eclipse the art. Maybe they strike a chord in you that you barely knew was there. Maybe they leave you coldly comprehending, without a way in. Regardless, Spots is the type of sounds-good-on-paper work you really ought to check out once. | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | The Vinyl Factory | June 1, 2017 | 7.2 | 4d9e9b98-883f-4198-b61f-a2e554d0d1fb | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Though no song on the Chicago rock band’s all-covers album is particularly wild or ambitious, the collection is faithful, fine-tuned, and thoughtfully curated. | Though no song on the Chicago rock band’s all-covers album is particularly wild or ambitious, the collection is faithful, fine-tuned, and thoughtfully curated. | Whitney: Candid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/whitney-candid/ | Candid | Whitney found their voice by idolizing the voices of others. This is as foundational to the band as floral instrumental arrangements, great hair, and Julien Ehrlich’s pinched falsetto. Before Whitney was a widely beloved retro-rock group, “Whitney” was their muse: a fictional character invented by co-bandleaders Ehrlich and Max Kakacek whose thoughts they channeled into their first songs. In those early days, they moonlit as the backing band for the proudly rinky-dink diva Jimmy Whispers, alchemizing their full, brass-tinged sound into the warm glow of a spotlight pointed at someone else.
The band quickly struck gold with “Golden Days,” the anthem of their 2016 Laurel Canyon-revering debut album, Light Upon the Lake. Elton John was spilling his guts to Ehrlich over the phone within months; Ehrlich gushed back to him about the singer Weyes Blood. But since that year, Whitney haven’t sounded quite so emphatically in love with their influences. Last year’s album, Forever Turned Around, was much more internal and melancholy. Their golden glow became that of embers, instead of sparks. It seems possible that they’ve scuffled with writer’s block: With their new all-covers album, Candid, Whitney have now formally released almost as many cover songs as they have originals.
Whitney approach Candid like an inspiration board with 10 portraits tacked up—Ehrlich quite directly calls it “an exploration into how we can evolve as a band going forward.” The artists whom Whitney had covered before now generally scanned with their country-soul sensibilities: Neil Young, Allen Toussaint, NRBQ, Wilco, Dolly, Dylan. Here, not exactly: On Candid, Whitney tackle pithy folksters (the Roches, Blaze Foley) and enigmatic men of introspection (Moondog, Damien Jurado), but also women of heady, swirling R&B (SWV, Kelela), David Byrne, and a 1972 instrumental interlude by the French film composer Jack Arel that might be best known as a Mick Jenkins sample.
For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them. Impressively, the band commits to an entire nine- or 10-piece arrangement for Moondog’s spare, longing piano song “High on a Rocky Ledge” like it was there all along: Kakacek’s lilting guitar refrain leads the way, and Ehrlich doesn’t shy away from pronouncing “mädel edelweiß.” SWV’s extremely sensual “Rain” and Foley’s resigned lament “Rainbows & Ridges”—probably the two most aesthetically unalike songs covered here—are slotted next to each other at the end of the album, but Erlich’s tender singing voice seems to connect them without stretching. Only “Strange Overtones,” a highlight of Byrne and Brian Eno’s second collaborative album, lands awkwardly—dance rhythms just aren’t a natural fit on Whitney.
Candid has a second, more interesting function, though, one that’s independent of Whitney’s taste or talent as players. It has to do with the fact that most of these songs were not their creators’ most famous—they’re the ones that get buried a little further under better-known work, and all the rest of the music in the world, with each passing day. It’s not just that these picks are obscure or diverse, or that Ehrlich and Kakacek probably make outstanding playlists. It’s how they seem to select a few interesting pebbles from an infinite beach, polish them, and place them on a mantle. It’s how they pluck one of Labi Siffre’s many dozens of good songs, place it alongside one of Damien Jurado’s, and behold the pairing. This feels like the “candid” to which Whitney refer: not in the sense of frank and direct, but of capturing moments that weren’t necessarily destined for preservation.
Their inclusion of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is the obvious exception, but a verse by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield—Candid’s lone feature—single-handedly validates the choice. The folk-rocker and born Southerner sounds crushingly genuine as she pays loving tribute to her musical and geographical roots; after hearing Crutchfield sing it, you’ll feel almost guilty to have ever found the song’s ubiquity grating.
It nearly qualifies as Candid’s finest moment, but that title goes to the other selection here that was its original artist’s signature song, though nowhere near as successful. “Hammond Song,” the 1978 track by singing sisters the Roches, is about as underappreciated as perfect folk songs come—and, as far as modern bands not named Haim go, Whitney are maybe the most logical choice to interpret it. Ehrlich synthesizes the sisters’ three harmony lines into one melody as he takes on their fears that the song’s subject is “on the wrong track” in moving to the titular Louisiana city and leaving behind family, home, and all other prospects. Whitney have yet to truly lose their way, and it’s because they wear influences like this so well.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 18, 2020 | 6.5 | 4da040a3-2c88-432b-93fd-ef2ff35a24b1 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Rapper G Herbo doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths. | Rapper G Herbo doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths. | G Herbo: Ballin Like I’m Kobe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21153-ballin-like-im-kobe/ | Ballin Like I’m Kobe | Can street rap really raise alarm bells? Or are profit-minded artists merely preaching to the sociological choir—did you know the hood is fucked up?—while affirming and banking off conservative America's worst stereotypes? Certainly it would be difficult to suggest gangster rap tropes are winning a PR war over middle America. But at the same time, the implicit realism of Chicago's street rap scene makes armchair cynicism about its stars' motives impossible: Ballin Like I'm Kobe is no lazy b-ball double entendre, but a reference to Jacobi D. Herring, a friend of G Herbo's who was killed in 2013, and over whose tombstone he crouches on the tape's cover. Likewise, "I'm Rollin", the tape's underground smash single, opens with a roll call of lost friends, and the drug they'd do with Herb if they were here today.
That Southside-produced track comes near the tape's conclusion, and it's the most structurally compelling on the album. This isn't the kind of hit you can force; it just happens. It sounds as if it were hewn from craggy granite, each segment of the song—the beat, the backgrounds, the chorus, Herb's rapping—grinding into place, sparks flying. It takes up an aggressive amount of space, forcing listeners to open themselves to its heft and rough edges. Formally, the record is his most innovative, one which ambitiously reimagines the rules of songcraft. Thematically, it captures the strange dissonances of what's been called drill music, its heightened stakes and tragic context contrasting starkly with its artists' armored detachment.
No other song on Ballin Like I'm Kobe feels quite so one-of-a-kind. Sometimes it's pro forma; drill records like the DJ L-produced "Gang" sound as if they could have been recorded any time within the past three years. But outside of "I'm Rollin", Herbo's doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths. His more traditional approach is an ability to wring narrative pathos from the song without letting his voice's cracked shell fully break. His vocal style is ragged but forceful, and in contrast with the East Coast influences to which it might be readily compared—the LOX, say—there's a sense of Herbo's words scratching past the lines, moving with a looser, less precise rhythm, as if to suggest an anxious undercurrent. And likewise, his subject matter seldom moves toward the humor of classic New York mixtape artists, preferring to shift from the autobiographical to very real-seeming threats.
There's a tendency to approach Herb—in contrast with other artists on the scene—as if he were his genre's moral conscience, the Manichean good to drill's unmitigated baseline of evil. This reduces the genre's complexity to a simplistic binary. Herb's strength is less about moralism than it is about showing a complete human being in your speakers—an honest rendering of a morally compromised soul. These are the album's best moments. There is the DJ L-produced "Eastside", with scribbled double-time verses and contradictory tones of resignation and pride. It's an approach that works similarly on opener "L's": "The shit I been through made me heartless, all my feelings on this glock." And it's readily apparent on the melancholy "Bottom of the Bottom", which frames the rapper's aggressive approach with a crying string sample, which lends an echoing power to an atypically pointed chorus: "Now the judge hang us with a hundred years, used to hang us with a tree." | 2015-10-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Cinematic / Machine Entertainment Group / 150 Dream Team | October 21, 2015 | 7.2 | 4da4548c-b5f0-45a2-8ab1-36f5e7bff702 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
The latest from the incarcerated L.A. rapper, stemming from the same frenzied recording period just before he went to prison, is an hour of lived-in, reliable street rap that continues to shape and contour the psyche of a rapper in his final days of freedom. | The latest from the incarcerated L.A. rapper, stemming from the same frenzied recording period just before he went to prison, is an hour of lived-in, reliable street rap that continues to shape and contour the psyche of a rapper in his final days of freedom. | 03 Greedo / RonRonTheProducer: Load It Up, Vol. 01 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/03-greedo-ron-rontheproducer-load-it-up-vol-01/ | Load It Up, Vol. 01 | In a summer declared “lost” by partygoers and beach-dwellers, 03 Greedo barely felt the sun on his face. The transcendent L.A. rapper was enclosed in a cramped cell at the Middleton Unit in Abilene, TX, serving year two of a 20 year sentence for gun and drug trafficking charges. And starting on July 1, for 40 days and 40 nights, he was cut off from the outside world—no phone calls, no visits, not even fresh air—as Middleton went into total lockdown, tightening its vice grip on thousands of incarcerated people in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
At the start of his sprawling new album Load It Up Vol. 01, Greedo talks through prison phone static about the meaning of its title. It’s a mindstate—“I know I had to load up on songs and albums in order to feed my family while I was gone,” he says. It’s also lingo, a command to the album’s sole producer Ron-RonTheProducer—“Me and Ron-Ron would work from, like, 9pm to 9am, nigga playing beats. Soon as I hear some hot shit, I be like ‘load it up.’” The call ends, Ron-Ron’s tag plays, and what follows is an hour of lived-in, reliable street rap from a couple years ago that continues to shape and contour the psyche of a rapper in his final days of freedom.
Greedo’s greatest, bleakest accomplishment since incarceration hasn’t been any one album, but rather that he unfurled so much of himself into his brief months in the studio before he turned himself in. He was effectively forced to create at a hyper-accelerated pace, to drain himself into stuffy, exhausting nights with a rotating cast of rappers, producers, A&Rs and journalists just so he could feed his family and keep his name alive while the system put him away. In that stretch, he allegedly recorded dozens of projects. So far, we’ve gotten five: two tightly coiled albums with A-list producers Kenny Beats and DJ Mustard; two EPs with Travis Barker and Nef The Pharaoh; and now, Load It Up Vol. 01, with longtime collaborator Ron-RonTheProducer. It’s by far the most classically Greedo of the bunch, open and percolating and reminiscent in sound and form to projects like The Wolf Of Grape Street and God Level.
On Load it Up, Ron-Ron and Greedo tap into a brooding, midtempo groove that navigates the purple hues between trap and L.A. street rap. There are no love songs, no experiments in pop. These are lusty, self-possessed screeds that flow with the buzzing synergy of a wired night in the studio. Greedo doesn’t directly allude to his then-impending prison sentence more than a few times on this album, but his frantic race against time is noticeable. There is a palpable urgency in the way Greedo, for instance, raps through error and mumbling, as though there’s no time for retakes. On to the next song.
Still, Greedo finds fascinating ways to weave together disparate thoughts into numbing, transportive images. On “Gucci Of My City,” he compares himself to Gucci Mane—a star who, like Greedo, spent his prime years behind bars — then shrouds his whole world in the tinted glass of car windows and Gucci lenses, almost to suggest that he’d rather stay anonymous even when he’s free. And on “Scary Movie,” he draws a line through Friday The 13th and AKs, headless horsemen and hollow tips, all to paint a ghoulish picture of the projects. This is writing that isn’t writerly, full of impressionistic detail; it’s the mark of an artist constantly observing, constantly connecting.
Most rewardingly, it is still such a thrill to just listen to Greedo. For how conservative the production feels, Greedo is still wholly unpredictable, one of the best with Auto-Tune this side of Future. He’ll twist the tails of phrases into oblique, ballooning shapes (“Gwap”), launch into breathless, croaky tirades (“Choppa Hold A Hunnit”), warble on high notes while they flutter through pitch-correction (“Same Zone Interlude”). His energy is whirring and kinetic and seems to rub off on the guests—Chief Keef, Sada Baby, Key Glock, and more—who all deliver top-flight verses.
That feeling of witnessing the rapper deeply in his zone recalls earlier, more hopeful times. Such is the tragic, inescapable truth of Greedo’s pre-prison recording spree: how it ceaselessly transports you to alternate timelines and more forgiving worlds. Greedo has lost a chunk of life over drug and gun charges that could be traced back to a litany of systemic factors, including losing his father as a child, moving into Watts’ insular, oppressive Jordan Downs projects as an outcast teenager, facing bouts of homelessness, having a baby at 18, and losing his closest friend Lil Money in a gunfight. Load It Up, Vol 01 is undeniable; it’s also inextricably tied to these cold, cruel facts.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | August 27, 2020 | 7.5 | 4da73714-58fc-48fa-a073-a5908663ba72 | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
Bitchin Bajas' second, self-titled album finds the experimental trio blending musicial personalities of the past to create their own sonic identity. There are no forced attempts at edginess, even though their simple techniques keep the music loose and live-sounding. | Bitchin Bajas' second, self-titled album finds the experimental trio blending musicial personalities of the past to create their own sonic identity. There are no forced attempts at edginess, even though their simple techniques keep the music loose and live-sounding. | Bitchin Bajas: Bitchin Bajas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19615-bitchin-bajas-bitchin-bajas/ | Bitchin Bajas | The line between homage and mimicry is so blurry that it sometimes doesn’t even exist. But is it possible to arrive at homage by jumping over the divide, and diving into the deep end of mimicry? It sounds like Bitchin Bajas are testing that theory on their self-titled double LP. Band founder Cooper Crain hasn’t been shy about his influences, citing 20th century minimalists such as Terry Riley as guiding lights. But this time around, the antecedents are clearer than ever. The aforementioned forefathers and a bunch of others (try German drifters like Cluster and Popul Vuh) pop up all over Bitchin Bajas—and since there are only eight tracks spread across the album’s 77 minutes, they get lots of space to reveal themselves.
Even though there's lots of references to be heard on Bitchin Bajas, very little of this record sounds plagiaristic. It's almost like listening to the thought processes of Crain and bandmates Dan Quinlivan and Rob Frye, rather than what they think goes on in their heroes' minds. They manage this not despite their influences, but because of them; there are no gratuitous divergences, no forced curveballs to prove the trio aren’t stealing. Their blending of past musical personalities creates a new one, much the way a thoughtful cover can change your view of the original. Bitchin Bajas journey so far into their inspirations that they find something of their own inside.
Bitchin Bajas is largely comprised of long journeys. 18-minute opener “Tilang” could exist as a single release on its own, progressing from mournful Stars of the Lid-like strings to rippling organs, whistling flutes, and harp-like glissandos. The way those sounds fold into each other recurs throughout the album, as the trio devise methods to make many voices (woodwinds, synths, xylophones) sing the same tune. The constant cross-dissolving can occasionally sound generic: “Field Study” opens with clichéd field recordings of water bubbling, birds chirping, and insects creaking. But even that piece resolves into something unique, as subtle beats make the music more about psychic relaxation than nature worship.
Relaxation may seem an unambitious musical goal, but Bitchin Bajas are proud to chase it. Crain said last year that “making music that is relaxing and comforting to us is important,” and the band even made a separate cassette version of Bitchin Bajas dubbed Relaxation Mixes that eliminates what they call “the intense peaks.” So naturally there’s little abandon on these two LPs; the trio only sound like they're losing control during the overlapping synth squiggles of the 12-minute “Bueu”.
But Bitchin Bajas' relaxation plan works because they’re committed to it. There are no forced attempts at edginess, even though their simple techniques keep the music loose and live-sounding. This purist approach puts them in the company of other recent post-new age wanderers—bands like Emeralds and Mountains, who are best when they sound most committed to their laid-back causes. For all their reverence toward the past, Bitchin Bajas know how to live in the present – there’s no knowing distance here—so at its best, Bitchin Bajas doesn’t give you ideas about sounds, but the sounds themselves. | 2014-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | August 28, 2014 | 7.5 | 4db0aa7b-59f4-4973-9bb1-b8e6d31831b3 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Kinks legend uses Americana to blaze a path through both America's rock’n’roll history and his own. Its back-to-basics energy and prosaic storytelling make it his best solo album in years. | The Kinks legend uses Americana to blaze a path through both America's rock’n’roll history and his own. Its back-to-basics energy and prosaic storytelling make it his best solo album in years. | Ray Davies: Americana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23104-americana/ | Americana | As suggested by the title Americana, the former Kinks frontman is a cultural and musical paradox. The most emphatically English of all the British Invasion bandleaders, Britpop’s beloved father argues throughout his new album (and 2013 autobiography by the same name) that he spent much of his band’s 32-year career chasing the American Dream.
Even so, many of the Kinks’ most enduring hits—from 1965’s “A Well Respected Man” to 1977’s “Father Christmas”—drew explicitly from England’s class system, customs, and culture. While nearly every major UK act downplayed their Englishness once psychedelic pop morphed into acid rock, the Kinks defiantly celebrated it with Anglo-specific artistic peaks so out of step with the times they doubled as commercial failures, like ’68’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.
But back in 1964, when Sir Ray and baby brother Dave practically invented heavy metal with “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” the Kinks were imitating black American bluesmen. Then, when they partnered with master mogul Clive Davis and toured America almost nonstop through the late ’70s and early ’80s, much of their output so aped U.S. arena rock that nearly all of it bombed back home. Principally played by Ray Davies and the Jayhawks, the rowdiest chunks of Americana echo the wild riffs that animated those fist-pumping anthems.
Quoted at length in Americana the book, “The Great Highway” and “Wings of Fantasy” both lyrically and musically recall those road-hog years when Davies aimed to reclaim the mass audience (and dollars) the U.S. establishment denied him during the British Invasion’s reign. Flaunting soupy arrangements of straightforward power chords, these cuts aren’t Americana as the rootsy genre is now defined, but they sure sound American–nearly a Coors ‘n’ tailgate reference away from bro-country.
Yet most of Americana avoids the hammy growling that marred earlier Davies solo records like 2006’s Other People’s Lives and 2007’s Working Man's Café, even though, as the book reveals, some of its songs predate those albums. On the opening title track, Davies so abandons his usual music hall delivery and near-Cockney accent that he’s barely recognizable. Having finally achieved West End success with 2014’s still-running jukebox musical Sunny Afternoon, Davies redirects his theatricality into Americana’s narrative. Like the book, it forgoes chronology as it zigzags from childhood dreams of Wild West buckaroos to delusional Hollywood aspirations; back to the Kinks’ maiden voyage to America, when their long hair and pervy moniker initially marked them more threatening than the Stones; and forward to being shot in 2004 by a mugger nearby his adopted New Orleans home.
No matter where he dwells, Davies remains an outsider, and that alienation unites Americana’s jumble of eras and places. On “Poetry,” he kneels in gratitude at the local KFC for the abundance that corporations bestow upon us. This is Davies in Dylan mode, hyperbolic but as dazzling with prosaic details as his student Jarvis Cocker. And unlike his previous post-Kinks cohorts, the Jayhawks steer clear of Nashville gloss while conjuring the appropriate C&W-tinged folk-rock fare. Keyboardist Karen Grotberg even duets with Davies on “Message from the Road,” evoking the tumbleweed kitsch of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood while still pulling heartstrings.
Preceded by a quote from the book about his New Orleans neighbor, the late Alex Chilton, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Cowboys” provides the other poignant highlight. It’s a eulogy for rock’s rebels as well the music itself that’s delivered as a bittersweet bluegrass waltz, and it extends a metaphor of the formerly outlaw genre as a vanquished frontier. “Your time’s passed, now everyone asks for your version of history,” he mournfully croons. “Do you live in a dream, or do you live in reality?” He poses the question without answering it himself; there’s no need. | 2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Legacy | April 18, 2017 | 7.3 | 4db50509-ea2e-45d1-b143-f13dbda79ea8 | Barry Walters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/barry-walters/ | null |
The New York-based composer offers two experimental, evocative pieces featuring cello, viola, and double bass to uniquely recreate and interact with the spaces in which they were recorded. | The New York-based composer offers two experimental, evocative pieces featuring cello, viola, and double bass to uniquely recreate and interact with the spaces in which they were recorded. | Lea Bertucci: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23004-all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air/ | All That Is Solid Melts Into Air | The two compositions on New York-based artist Lea Bertucci’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air are the product of the two spaces in which they were recorded: ISSUE Project Room’s 22 Boerum Place theater in downtown Brooklyn, and the cavernous main room of the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens (both cornerstones of New York’s experimental music and performance communities). As an instrumentalist, Bertucci generally works with woodwinds, but here she composes and conducts for strings. These challenging, durational works tease a range of sounds and narratives out of these instruments, experimenting with how they resonate in the distinctive spaces in which they were recorded.
“Cepheid Variations,” with Leila Bourdreuil on cello and Jeanann Dara on viola, was written for the 22 Boerum Street theater when Bertucci was a resident at Issue Project Room, premiering there in early 2015.It begins as a delicate conversation between cello and viola, conducted initially in sustained, crystalline harmonics. This picks up, occasionally, in miniature palpitations of rushed sound, until Bordreuil and Dara’s instruments meet, ringing out. From there, a sort of dissolution occurs, the sound of bowed strings swallowed by scraping and whining. Bertucci enters the score with live tape manipulations, lending texture but also upending the sense of familiarity and solidity afforded by a richer-sounding and more recognizable string instrument. Her concrete sound moves in space quite differently from the strings, and the juxtaposition of the two instills an unsettling and thrilling sense of multidimensionality.
“Double Bass Crossfade” is the more conceptual of the two pieces, relying not just on resonance in space, but on a pair of players’ movement through it. To record, James Ilgenfritz and Sean Ali were positioned at opposite corners of Knockdown Center’s massive main room, their double basses amplified wirelessly. For just over forty minutes, we’re told, they moved in the space: first toward one another, crossing paths and then journeying on to the spot opposite from where they started. In a recorded version, of course, such movement is less immediately audible, though there’s something charming about projecting an image of the two musicians traveling and interacting onto this relational performance.
They toy with scale, pulling tones from all over the bass’s register, but particularly following the splintering harmonics of “Cepheid,” “Double Bass Crossfade” maintains a physicality, a sense of weightedness. If the former resembles the auditory equivalent of a sharp graphite drawing, the latter brings to mind rough smears of oil. As the players approach one another, their instruments pick up volume and develop textures below their plaintive scrawls. The double basses begin to growl in—well, not really in harmony, but as they hit their respective low ends, their rumbling melts together, producing a totalizing effect.
Though these pieces often build to moments of breathless intensity, they both unfold in a distinctly unhurried way. One gets the sense that Bertucci arrives at her work not with an idea to impose, but a question to develop. The groundlessness of the music isn’t altogether surprising, and, as evidenced particularly well in “The Cepheid Variations,” can propel the listener somewhere new (a place that I’m not convinced even Bertucci could, or would want to, put language to). It was strange to be considering site-specificity while listening to these works in no particular place. What does it mean for a recording to hold traces of a location when those traces are largely immaterial? I think, at least, of the fact of venues so willing to be transformed through the introduction of chaotic harmonics and strange resonances, of Bertucci being afforded space to fill and warp. | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | March 23, 2017 | 7 | 4db5fe2f-8ed0-4007-8a9c-4ae4a5371265 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The debut album from Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and drummer Tom Skinner’s new group is instantly, unmistakably the best album yet by a Radiohead side project. | The debut album from Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and drummer Tom Skinner’s new group is instantly, unmistakably the best album yet by a Radiohead side project. | The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smile-a-light-for-attracting-attention/ | A Light for Attracting Attention | When Thom Yorke introduced his new band at their first gig a year ago, he took a moment to explain their name. “Not the Smile as in ha ha ha,” he said, his faux laugh echoing eerily, “more the Smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” Of course, no one figured that the most uncannily accurate doomsayer of the modern age was taking a sharp left to clown town with his latest project, but the Smile are not just aimed at shifty politicians, either. Their pearly grins are myriad, taking inspiration from smiles of love and deceit, bloody smiles and blissful ones, smiles that mend and smiles that destroy. At 53, Yorke has seen them all. And once again, he’s battling the absurdity of existence the only way he knows how: by offering a salve for his anxieties without letting anyone off the hook for turning everything we hold dear into one big joke.
This bid for transcendence amid chaos isn’t the only thing that’s familiar about the Smile. The trio also includes Yorke’s main songwriting partner in Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner, whose eclectic resume includes work with jazz-funk explorers Sons of Kemet, electronic fusionist Floating Points, and UK rapper Kano. It’s the first time Yorke and Greenwood have collaborated on a major project outside of their main gig, and, not coincidentally, A Light for Attracting Attention sounds more like a proper Radiohead album than any of the numerous side projects the band’s members have done on their own.
We’ve got Greenwood’s lattice-like fingerpicking and saintly electric guitar tone. There’s Yorke’s voice, still in pristine form, wailing like an angel in limbo and gnashing like a punk who woke up on the wrong side of the gutter. There are synths and Greenwood’s sidelong orchestral flourishes signaling end times. Longtime producer Nigel Godrich is in the control room, giving each sound an immense and terrifying and beautiful glow. How about some wonky rhythms that keep your mind from slipping into passive mode? Yep, lots of those too. All due respect to the guys from Radiohead who are not in the Smile, but if A Light for Attracting Attention were presented as the triumphant follow-up to the group’s last album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, I’d bet that most people would have happily been fooled.
Then again, considering Radiohead’s infamous aversion to repeating themselves—a tendency that has at times brought them to the brink of self-destruction—perhaps it makes a strange kind of sense that this very Radiohead-y album isn’t an actual Radiohead album. It might be too obvious, too expected. So after recently retracing their own past with deluxe reissues, Yorke and Greenwood’s version of ripping it up and starting again takes the form of a new band plumbing humanity’s depths in a way that anyone who’s followed their old band over the last 30 years could appreciate.
The Smile spotlights the creative relationship between Yorke and Greenwood like never before. The two first met in adolescence, while attending Oxford’s Abingdon School in the 1980s: As Greenwood has told it, he was playing in the school’s drum room when Yorke, three years his senior, pushed him aside and told him to try a nearby upright bass instead. There was one problem—Greenwood had no idea how to play bass. Yorke, undeterred, said, “It’ll be fine, just attack it.” Since then, Greenwood has not only attacked but mastered many instruments in his role as Radiohead’s resident avant-garde musical guru, while also becoming one of the most progressive film score composers of his generation. Yorke still prefers a more intuitive approach. (“Jonny is absolutely adamant that I should not learn to read music,” Yorke once said. “He wants me to be the idiot savant.”) The duo’s left brain-right brain dynamic has proven to be one of the most adventurous in rock history.
A Light for Attracting Attention starts with a duet of sorts between Yorke and Greenwood called “The Same.” It’s the only song on the album that doesn’t feature any other players—no drums, no strings, no horns. On the track, Yorke offers a plea for human connection. “We are all the same, please,” he sings, emphasizing the last word like a man facing the barrel of a gun. On paper, you could imagine Chris Martin singing a line like that, but this is no hokey Coldplay anthem. “The Same” begins with a spare synthesizer throb vaguely reminiscent of Kid A opener “Everything in Its Right Place” that serves as the song’s heartbeat. But as it goes on, more and more sounds slowly surround that pulse, like so many nattering voices sowing discord. A repetitive piano figure bobs up and down. The modular tones begin to swarm and then fray at the edges. The effect is disorienting, almost frightening. Even if we are the same, the song seems to suggest, the static we drift through every day is working overtime to keep us apart.
From there, the album alternately combats the horrors of modern life with roiling anger and Zen-like serenity. It churns through an all-too-common cycle: see red, get fed up, take a few very deep breaths, do it all over again. A Light for Attracting Attention’s stiffest middle finger comes with “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” the most raucous Radiohead-related track since Hail to the Thief’s “2 + 2 = 5” nearly two decades ago. Armed with three distorted chords that could have filled CBGB in 1977, Yorke puts on his best sneer while standing up to a “gangster troll” who’s lording his power over an aspiring young woman. Given its explicit reference to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” sex parties, this chivalrous salvo for the #MeToo era could very well be aimed at that disgraced politician, who was once convicted of soliciting sex from a minor. Or maybe Yorke was thinking of Harvey Weinstein when he wrote of a “sad fuck” with “piggy limbs.” The fact is this song could reasonably be directed at so many different terrible men. As Yorke growls out lines like, “Take your dirty hands off my love/Heaven knows where else you’ve been,” you can practically see the spittle leave his lips.
Also likely on the Smile’s shit list: the 45th president of the United States. “A Hairdryer”—with its barbs about someone who flies south for the sun, blames everyone else for his screw-ups, and spins reams of lies—certainly seems like a swipe at the magically coiffed former head of state. Does the world need another Trump diss track right now? Probably not. But will the anxious song, which skitters on the back of Skinner’s pointillistic hi-hat work, feel increasingly relevant over the next couple of years, as the world braces for the next clusterfucked U.S. presidential election? Most definitely yes. That’s part of Yorke’s power as a dystopian seer: Every description of the present seems to also foretell the future.
When the Smile aren’t venting, they’re surfing the slime, reaching for specks of pleasure and solace wherever they can find them. “The Smoke” is a beguiling waft of understated funk that sounds like a collaboration between Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and Marvin Gaye—thanks to Yorke’s wobbling bassline and falsetto moans hinting at sensuality and self-immolation, it’s the sexiest thing he’s ever set to tape. “Free in the Knowledge,” the album’s most direct song, deserves a spot among classic Radiohead ballads like “True Love Waits” and “Give Up the Ghost.” It’s about wishful thinking in a world where authoritarianism seems so far away—until it isn’t. “A face using fear to try to keep control,” Yorke sings, before his mind tentatively turns to revolution: “But when we get together, well then, who knows?” This isn’t a call to arms, though. It’s an admission of fragility that rings painfully clear and true. The floating hymn “Speech Bubbles” mines a similar uncertainty. Over airy percussion and Greenwood’s fluttering strings and piano, Yorke sounds like a refugee with nowhere to go. As he wails about cities on fire and a sudden sense of dislocation, it’s easy to connect the words to images of Ukrainian families torn apart, waiting for the next text from a loved one left behind.
The time Yorke and Greenwood spend traveling through their own history reaches a heady apex on another weightless elegy that flows like entrance music for the afterlife. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” Yorke sings over celestial synths on “Open the Floodgates,” evoking a classic rock cliché he’s spent a lifetime trying to dismantle. “We want the good bits/Without your bullshit/And no heartaches.” This internal monologue has been taking up space in the singer’s mind since at least the In Rainbows era in 2006, when Radiohead first sound-checked a version of the song. Its numbness in the face of impending death goes back even further, to OK Computer’s “No Surprises,” and Greenwood’s gently chiming guitar recalls “Let Down” from that same 25-year-old album. When the hook does arrive, it’s fraught and spare. “Someone lead me out the darkness,” Yorke repeats, as the cloud of synths begins to dissolve behind him. It’s an appeal that doubles as a pact between artist and audience—a pact that dredges resilience out from the abyss, that asks for absolution so we can receive it. A pact that, through it all, remains intact. | 2022-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | May 12, 2022 | 8.6 | 4dba8302-60ff-432f-a520-03ae4215dedf | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
On his debut album, Ro James delivers a pleasant but only sporadically exciting R&B affair. | On his debut album, Ro James delivers a pleasant but only sporadically exciting R&B affair. | Ro James: ELDORADO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22000-eldorado/ | ELDORADO | Ro James made a relatively big splash late last year with the single “Permission,” a smooth dedication to consensual sex that managed to be both steamy and responsible. “Come on, give me that green light/You can let your hair hang down, but only if it feels right,” he purred over a sample of Willie Hutch’s “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out.” It was a magnetic debut and a fresh, comforting spin on a slow jam.
The rest of James’ debut album, ELDORADO, rarely matches that high. The follow-up to James’ Coke, Jack, and Cadillacs trilogy of EPs, it is a pleasant but only sporadically exciting R&B affair, one that only hints at his soulfulness and youthful exuberance. The German-born, American-raised James has raw talent but is clearly still forming his identity, and working to streamline his songwriting; he’s occasionally but passively engaging, like a subway singer might break through the commuter haze with a quick burst of melody. In James’ case, when he breaks free of Miguel cosplay, he can be riveting.
“A.D.I.D.A.S. (All Day I)” encapsulate much of the record; it’s serviceable but feels recycled, down to the lascivious acronym. The same could be said for the dizzying electro track “GA$,” which pulses along on reverberating synths and heavily processed falsetto yelps. It smacks more than a bit of Prince and the Weeknd, all its components familiar to the point of fatigue.
However, ELDORADO does have standout moments of lush, heartfelt R&B. The guitar-laden “Last Cigarette” is a gorgeous song about leaving one relationship in search of the right one, in the hope that the next love might be the one that lasts. “Looked her in the eyes, say goodbye/This is my goodbye/I walked through the door to explore/‘Cause I wanted more reasons to be loved” is a heart-wrenching moment of vulnerability. In the interlude for “Bad Timing” James harmonizes sleepily, “A nigga got a baby already, and I'm barely making it/I ain't faking it/Girl, I ain't ready.” It’s a rare, welcome show of complicated feelings on an R&B record caught up mostly in ideals of love and sex. ELDORADO needed more of this open emoting.
Considering R&B’s current state of eating its own tail, largely favoring artists who attempt to tap into nostalgia instead of innovate, any injection of fresh style is welcome. James has the potential to be that artist in the future. More than anything, ELDORADO is reminiscent of Frank Ocean’s The Lonny Breaux Collection: a hit-or-miss early set of songs that showed a faint blueprint of who the artist would eventually become. To his credit, ELDORADO has its moments, but James still needs to dig deeper. | 2016-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA / Bystorm | June 21, 2016 | 6.5 | 4dbd70ef-6b6b-4ca5-a593-b077c2c9fdb0 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
This free set collects unreleased tracks from Kieran Hebden's project that were initially created between 1997 and 2001. Containing many elements that he would explore in more detail later, 0181 proves that consistency is Hebden's strongest asset. | This free set collects unreleased tracks from Kieran Hebden's project that were initially created between 1997 and 2001. Containing many elements that he would explore in more detail later, 0181 proves that consistency is Hebden's strongest asset. | Four Tet: 0181 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17681-0181/ | 0181 | Last November, BBC Radio 6 DJ Gilles Peterson released a mix that Kieran Hebden had done for the station back in 1999. It was the same year that the then-young producer had released his debut album Dialogue under the moniker Four Tet, and the set was quick to reveal the him as a quirky experimental producer whose approach built on the sound of his post-rock high-school band Fridge. This high school, it turns out, was the Elliott School in Putney, a visual and performing arts school that counts members of Hot Chip, the xx, and William Bevan of Burial as alumni (all three would later collaborate with Four Tet). Which brings us to 0181, a collection of the producer's unreleased works from those early years-- starting from 1997 through the material made around the time of his second full-length, Pause, in 2001-- that Hebden issued to SoundCloud for free last week.
0181 as a whole serves as a reminder of the cyclic nature of this kind of instrumental production. Creating the electronic music of the future involves sifting through the past to re-discover sounds. 0181 bring to mind this sort of time-shift not because the sounds within are regressive, but rather because despite their 12-16 years of being hidden away, they feel surprisingly fresh. Made public as one long 38-minute track, 0181 has the flow of a mixtape, a wide-ranging showcase for Hebden's early production flair. Unconnected in any real way beyond their sequencing are hushed melodic interludes, moments of ambient static, jazzy constructions, and the naked bones of early 2-step.
At times it can be frustrating simply because the abrupt ends of some of the minute-long tracks leave us wanting more. The first thing we hear is a glimmering shower of piano keys that recalls some of Hebden's lush recent work like like Pink's "Jupiters", but then this sound dies out and we're then launched into scattered 2-step percussion. Twenty-eight-or-so minutes in you'll find folky, syncopated guitar plugs that serve as a reminder of why Four Tet was branded with the briefly fashionable term "folktronica." The jazz-inflected tracks that foreshadow Hebden's later collaborative projects with percussionist Steve Reid (The Exchange Sessions, Tongues, NYC) are where 0181 stretches the farthest and has the most room to develop, and these tracks also sound the most fixed in time. But even these moments pass quickly: around 20 minutes in, a lazy tune grooves along at the hands of a dreamy, smoky horn melody and a drum-kit, and it lasts all of three minutes.
In unearthing and presenting his earlier work now, Hebden accidentally proves that consistency is his strongest asset. His 15 years of music can easily be viewed through the lens of this scattered set, and it strikes the same chords now as it did then, in terms of both construction and feelings. All along, he's been building nuanced cinematic landscapes brimming with exploration. | 2013-02-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-01T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Text | February 1, 2013 | 7.3 | 4dc131f8-c6a3-40c9-b458-c7610216396d | Puja Patel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/puja-patel/ | null |
Excising the weak and awkward bits that marred his other records, the Atlanta emcee's confidence here seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing. | Excising the weak and awkward bits that marred his other records, the Atlanta emcee's confidence here seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing. | T.I.: King | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8319-king/ | King | T.I. has always been a great rapper, warm and fluid and confident, his loose elastic voice winding under tracks with force and finesse. Before every other mainstream rapper was talking about drugs, he was doing it with a weary lived-in authority, proudly defiant and sheepishly defensive at the same time, bragging about getting money but lamenting the fact that he only had one way to do it. But great rappers don't always make great albums, and every one of T.I.'s previous full-lengths had a fatal flaw: desperate grabs at radio love, grossly insincere sex-jams, cobbled-together non-cohesion, or all three. Last summer, I thought Young Jeezy's Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 was the album T.I. should've made. Jeezy isn't half the rapper that T.I. is, but his album-- stunning in its focus and monolithic swagger and deeply nihilistic in worldview-- had more cinematic sweep than anything his progenitor had ever done.
All that changes on King. From the opening seconds, something is different: low ominous strings, a regal horn fanfare swooping over funk guitars, and eerie horror-movie pianos welling up from some unseen abyss. The track's producer, Just Blaze, never makes tracks for Southern rappers, but here he's given T.I. a monstrous banger, something very few rappers will enjoy in their careers, and the emcee takes it like it's his birthright, stretching his drawl over the hectic boom like he just didn't have anything better to do. Over the first four tracks, nothing lets up. Texas legends UGK revisit one of their classic trunk-rattlers on "Front Back", and T.I. sounds like he's doing them a favor.
Single "What You Know" is truly epic, DJ Toomp's swollen synth woozily curling up and T.I. eating the track for lunch, beating Jeezy at the ad-lib game before delivering one of those choruses that gets stuck in your head all day and you don't even mind. And "I'm Talkin' to You" brings back Just Blaze again, laying down horn-blats with Bomb Squad urgency and T.I. coming heated and dangerous as fuck, utterly destroying some unnamed opponent ("How many different ways is it to say I'm getting cheddar more/ Than niggas twice as old, more popular and even selling more?") before busting out a head-spinning double-time flow on the last verse. When the dust finally settles, it's for "Live in the Sky", a maudlin but pretty ballad, T.I. bitterly lamenting dead friends before going on to regret his own mistakes, the storied seven felonies that mean his life could basically end after one slip-up, Jamie Foxx gingerly cooing the chorus.
And so the rest of the album goes, excising the weak and awkward bits that marred his other records. T.I.'s confidence seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing. If anything has been lost in his metamorphosis into aristocratically vicious Machiavellian monarch, it's his uncertainty, the touchingly awkward humility that crept into his voice when he begged neglected kids for forgiveness on Trap Muzik's "I Still Luv You".
But that stuff had to go-- as did the ugly bursts of misogyny that would occasionally surface. When he talks to women now, he's conversational and courtly. On "Why You Wanna", he leans over the languid house pianos from Crystal Waters' "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)": "What, he think he too fresh to show you that you're the best?/ Compliment you on ya intellect and treat you with respect?" On "Goodlife", he pulls off two miracles at once: making the Neptunes' recent schmaltzy Vegas-lounge glide sound good (not even Jay-Z managed that too often) and beating guest Common at his own fondly melancholy nostalgia game: "I was born into poverty, raised in the sewage/ Streets will always be a part of me; they made me the truest." And on "I'm Straight" he's right at home on, lazily bragging over lilting 1970s-soul flutes and wispy guitar twirls, next to a hard, greasy B.G., and a gasping, larger-than-life Jeezy. Even the album's most glaring misstep, the weak r&b; track "Hello", finds T.I. talking warmly to the girl who left him, which is nice. He can do that. He doesn't have to prove anything anymore. | 2006-04-04T02:01:20.000-04:00 | 2006-04-04T02:01:20.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / WEA | April 4, 2006 | 8.4 | 4dc68e36-cada-4e2e-b7ca-215b81f99a4c | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Kevin Barnes delivers more ambitious psych-pop in the vein of Hissing Fauna or Skeletal Lamping, here with help from Jon Brion and Janelle Monáe. | Kevin Barnes delivers more ambitious psych-pop in the vein of Hissing Fauna or Skeletal Lamping, here with help from Jon Brion and Janelle Monáe. | Of Montreal: False Priest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14640-false-priest/ | False Priest | Is Kevin Barnes tired of sex? In the past three years, the waifish Of Montreal auteur has reinvented himself as a psychedelic Prince, leaving behind the innocent Elephant 6 storybook for a sweaty concoction of synthesizers and seduction. On the masterful Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Barnes battled depression and gave birth to a lascivious Mr. Hyde. Things only got more X-rated on Skeletal Lamping, an overstuffed orgy in both lyrical content and musical density overseen by Barnes' transvestite alter ego, Georgie Fruit. False Priest, the third part of this tarted-up trilogy, shows that Barnes is serious about his new phase, while also suggesting it might have gone stale.
For someone so concerned lately with coupling, Barnes' recording process over this period has been a largely solitary pursuit. False Priest is billed as a more collaborative effort, both on the production end with musical savant Jon Brion and in the spotlighted duets with divas Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles. The outside influences play the role of Ritalin to Barnes' ADD, but the leaner sound reveals flaws even as it proposes ways to rebuild.
Take the duets, which offer the opportunity for Barnes' R&B fantasy camp to become reality; putting aside the fact that Barnes had already gotten pretty good at singing in duet, or trio, or chorus, with himself. "Enemy Gene", with Janelle Monáe, fares better of the two, not surprising given how her The ArchAndroid revealed Monáe as one of the few spirits restless enough to keep pace with Barnes. Turning particle physics and evolutionary biology into pillow talk, the (relatively) subdued track both features and is aptly described by Mellotron. However, Knowles' appearance, "Sex Karma", is a straightforward Jacksons pastiche built around the lamest double-entendre in Barnes' career: the John Mayer-esque leer, "you look like a playground to me."
Elsewhere, the duet is less between voices but between the musical palettes of Barnes and Brion, which prove compatible but are clearly differentiated. The letdown is that Brion's influence sounds less collaborative than cosmetic, as though Barnes showed up with a 95% complete album on his laptop and the duo merely set about punching up Of Montreal's characteristically thin sound. Still, the places where Brion's fingerprints (and gear) are most apparent are some of the album's highlights: the Wendy Carlos-style vocoder on the chorus of "Like a Tourist", the thicker guitar chug of "Coquet Coquette" and "Famine Affair", the lush, astral coda of "Our Riotous Defects".
But the first part of "Our Riotous Defects", handcuffed by funny-once spoken-word, is one of several indications that this Of Montreal era is running on fumes. The most enticing aspects of the band's R&B are the places where it deviates from the recipe: its acidic, self-loathing undercurrent, its sugar-high unpredictability. Barnes' tongue isn't quite as sharp on False Priest, and all the shock value has worn off of falsetto-funk tracks such as "Hydra Fancies" or "I Feel Ya' Strutter".
I wouldn't worry about Of Montreal, as they've proven themselves more than capable of evolving. The distance from their early tales of wax museums and mad scientists to Barnes' electro-glam hedonism is immense, but the switch produced an unlikely second, higher peak in the band's career. If False Priest signals that we may be on the downhill side of that summit, it may also contain the embryonic stages of the next ascent, just as 2005's The Sunlandic Twins contained the seeds of Barnes' metamorphosis. Should budget allow, a truer collaboration with Brion could speed the arrival of Of Montreal Mk. III, but it might also be time for Barnes to find his muse outside of the bedroom. | 2010-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | September 15, 2010 | 6.7 | 4dc8174d-fb48-41e4-a9fe-c01bb60ee3b9 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The fourth volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary retrospectives looks at the more danceable end of the imprint's wide spectrum. Along with an unearthed Burial cut are highlights from Cooly G, Kode9, and more. | The fourth volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary retrospectives looks at the more danceable end of the imprint's wide spectrum. Along with an unearthed Burial cut are highlights from Cooly G, Kode9, and more. | Various Artists: Hyperdub 10.4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19980-various-artists-hyperdub-104/ | Hyperdub 10.4 | It's been a trying year for Hyperdub. The deaths of the Spaceape and DJ Rashad loom over every other positive development, from the reliable greatness of Burial to the continued ascension of Cooly G, Ikonika, and Laurel Halo. If the time for reflection and what-next speculation arrived with remembrances of Spaceape and Rashad, the fact that it coincides with Hyperdub's 10-year anniversary and the accompanying extended campaign to chronicle the label's arc is a dose of cold irony.
And yet it's hard not to feel hopeful. Taken in as a massive whole, Hyperdub's 10 series has done a fine job in blurring the lines between their strengths of the past and present, showing their points of origin and possible futures. And 10.4, its final installation, digs deep to showcase all the here-and-now movements set forth by the label. These two discs' worth of cuts emphasize just how danceable their canon really is, with a focus on techno, funky, and bass influences highlighting just what can result in the different hybridizations between the genres. That it does so by drawing on the core of contributors most associated with the Hyperdub continuum since the acts' early singles means the line between legacy artist and forward-thinking iconoclast might as well not exist for them.
The big pre-release buzz around 10.4 is that Kode9 finally got around to unearthing a previously unreleased Burial track. It's a strong start to the first disc's impressive run of vault material and new cuts, but it's also a curveball: "Lambeth" takes Burial's characteristic plastic snares and atmospheric crackles and ramps up the pop immediacy, UK garage roots resonating off its foggy chimes. Even its humming dark undercurrents feel warmer than usual. That's just the kickoff, though, and the first disc's succession of selections leans on the more energetic sides of core roster members.
Kode9 himself contributes "Oh", a feverish trip to Detroit that makes the bass bubble and switches up its clap beat out of left field while still keeping things fluid. Ikonika's relentless "Position VIP" reconfigures the piledriver pulse of her late-summer single to run both leaner and stronger, as though the route through Aerotropolis' vintage dance-pop tribute left her with an urge to create LinnDrum blast beats. And two Cooly G selections, "Him da Biz" and "Love Again", are a far cry from the charismatically lascivious R&B of this year's Wait 'Til Night: her voice recedes, though still resonates, behind sharp vintage techno that isn't as instantly warm as her more familiar work but makes up for it in pure energy.
Other rare tracks on the first disc come from artists who joined the Hyperdub collective after the half-decade 5: Five Years of Hyperdub, and the evolution is welcome. The boiling-chemical bassline and spring-loaded toy piano distortion of DVA's "Monophonic Nightmare" is a prime example of just how off the deep end the label's gotten when pushing the boundaries of house. At the other end of the spectrum, Walton's "Laser War" lures you in with a metallic zap-to-the-forebrain riff, only to drop it out a couple times to reveal that the real core is how he lets his drum pattern mutations run absolutely rampant. And two offerings from London collective Funkystepz ("Vice Versa" and "Fuller (Rev Vip)") are straight-up no-bullshit UK bass anthems that offer some of the collection's simplest yet deepest grooves.
As for the second disc, well, it's pretty much just gravy. As a more traditional best-of selection, it focuses on a lot of the label's most well-loved releases of the last five years, from the Tyco niteglow noir of Burial's "Street Halo" to two sides from Cooly G's first Hyperdub single, "Narst" and "Love Dub Refix", which revealed her potential for heart-tugging house and jagged UK funky from the start. There's no reason anybody invested in the first volume of this series, let alone the fourth, shouldn't have these already, though a few underrated deep cuts are always welcome. (Ill Blu's ringing stomper "Bellion" and the serpentine ragga-house of LV/Okmalumkoolkat collab "Boomslang" especially so.) But it's good to have that additional context, and while the presence of Kode9 & the Spaceape's seethingly intense "Love Is the Drug" hints at what we've lost, there's a powerful sense in 10.4 of what Hyperdub still has to come. | 2014-11-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Hyperdub | November 14, 2014 | 8.2 | 4dce24d1-bd10-4fcd-b933-5d41547b4d26 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Album number 18 was recorded in the band’s homes during the pandemic, and trades psych-rock blitzes for a finely-woven sprawl of synth programming and MIDI sequences. | Album number 18 was recorded in the band’s homes during the pandemic, and trades psych-rock blitzes for a finely-woven sprawl of synth programming and MIDI sequences. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Butterfly 3000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-butterfly-3000/ | Butterfly 3000 | In 2010, Peter Gabriel shared a theory that many artists have held since time immemorial: “Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write.” That same year, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard embarked on a journey of building a self-contained universe of demented prog and acid-fried freak-outs. It might be realms apart from “Solsbury Hill” and much of their own catalog, but the dreamy ease of Butterfly 3000 makes the Gabrielian promised land of “happy music” seem close at hand.
For all their forward motion, the Melbourne band specializes in a certain mazy non-linearity. On albums like Nonagon Infinity and Flying Microtonal Banana, they created diversion after diversion, cloaking waypoints for songs deep inside riffs and motifs. Butterfly 3000 flips the script by offering up one 44-minute suite, written mainly in a major key, and created with the intent to be listened to as one continuous piece. But the big curveball here goes beyond structure and form: Album number 18 was recorded in the band’s homes during the pandemic, and trades psych-rock blitzes for a finely woven sprawl of synth programming and MIDI sequences. What their Reddit-dwelling diehards refer to as the “Gizzverse” now allows for some serious self-restraint.
The band’s deep abiding love of ’70s rock titans like Yes and Hawkwind has never stood in the way of breaking new ground. Butterfly 3000 filters a fresh range of influences, and is the net result of sharing simple ideas—mainly modular synth loops—in lockdown. Opener “Yours” weds drummer Michael Cavanagh’s far-out 4/4 stomp with silken arpeggios, evoking Ashra or Trans Am at their most zonked. But the showpiece is “Interior People,” with its bubbling synths and unrestrained Neu! worship. It’s the closest King Gizzard have come to reimagining kosmische in their image. Mackenzie's acoustic phrases here, and on the likes of “Shanghai,” make the absence of electric guitar feel curiously trivial.
Mackenzie’s lyrical themes have veered between scenes of cyborgs, altered beasts, and necromancers puppeteering the undead. On Butterfly 3000, he pares back the batshit, and peers inward to fixate on dreams and metamorphosis. By mirroring the fragmentary nature of sleep with songs that mention the lens flares of the subconscious and falling upwards through clouds of glue, the frontman becomes oddly relatable. “Black Hot Soup” suggests tasting infinity can’t happen in the land of the living and on “Blue Morpho,” Mackenzie incants about a “hand outstretched” calling his name. But it’s “Dreams” where his disdain for waking life is most lucid. Above pitch-bent melodies, its refrain (“I only wanna wake up in my dream/I only feel alive in a daze”) distills the album’s heavy-eyed energy.
As closer “Butterfly 3000” comes to a sudden halt, the microtonal magic of King Gizzard’s recent double album, K.G./L.W, may as well be a mirage. Butterfly 3000 lands like a conceptual arrival point, and makes the band’s more elaborate—and relentless—career peaks that little bit more emphatic. Above all else, it’s a reminder that King Gizzard usually peak when wandering far beyond a clear-cut path. The coming of their most concise and carefree release truly could not have been better timed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | KGLW | June 11, 2021 | 7.5 | 4dd41745-6d88-4aad-9ba7-794950801d5e | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
On his new album, the Chicago rapper known for his muted, monklike delivery struggles to realize his full potential, even when assisted by Harry Fraud’s lush instrumentals. | On his new album, the Chicago rapper known for his muted, monklike delivery struggles to realize his full potential, even when assisted by Harry Fraud’s lush instrumentals. | Valee / Harry Fraud: Virtuoso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/valee-harry-fraud-virtuoso/ | Virtuoso | Just a few years ago, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Valee would be a star. He materialized fully formed in 2015 as a new kind of Chicago rapper. Instead of drawing from well-established lanes—Kanye West’s soulful, sample-driven sound or Chief Keef’s hard-charging drill—he paired elements of Atlanta trap with an elegant but striking flow. Valee is a technician but an understated one, quietly tiptoeing over beats that his peers might stomp on. Before long, the entire industry was leaning in to hear what the monklike rapper had to say. A deal with G.O.O.D. Music, an EP that reworked some of his mixtape material, and a string of hot singles all followed in 2018. But while he remained active on the mixtape circuit, Valee didn’t issue a full-length or any more buzzy singles until last year. In the interim, plenty of rappers borrowed elements of his sound, to the point where his 2022 commercial debut Vacabularee felt a bit stale. With its follow-up, Virtuoso, Valee attempts to reframe his career by approaching his flow the way a chef might a rare ingredient, searching for pairings that intensify his flavor profile.
Virtuoso is a collaborative album with Harry Fraud, the New York producer best known for mixtape-era hits like French Montana’s “Shot Caller.” Fraud’s lush production cuts a sharp contrast to the woozy, minimal trap beats of ChaseTheMoney, whose style defined Valee’s early career. Everything here feels textured: the fish scale arpeggios of “Sea Bass,” the cascading keys of “Uppity,” the mournful organs of “Dutty Laundry.” You’d think Valee’s reedy voice would get lost in all those layers, but the mixing ensures that his bars float above the beats. This sample-based sound is fresh and works surprisingly well for Valee, especially since he never rapped over Kanye West production like other G.O.O.D. signees. The choice recasts him as an artist working within a Chicago lineage, rather than an iconoclastic Midwestern street rapper.
But sadly, like most mid-career rappers, Valee doesn’t sound as hungry as he once did. His delicate touch remains, though his delivery feels a bit muted, more workmanlike than fastidious. There are still a few flashes of his signature charisma: It sounds like he’s muttering under his breath over the chipmunk soul of “Vibrant,” while on “Sea Bass,” he is commanding to match the song’s ascendant tone. Even Valee’s everyman punchlines are less clever this time around. While there are a handful of solid one-liners (“My SS robotic, move like WALL-E”), there are just as many bars that are outright corny (“I slide on you like a trackpad”).
His guests pick up the slack, but the features often highlight their own skill, rather than complementing Valee’s. 03 Greedo continues his dazzling post-carceral run with a verse that raises the stakes from mere flexing to life and death (“How am I supposed to feel about my n****s getting killed/While I was out of town and doing time for doing deals?”). Longtime Fraud collaborator Action Bronson sounds right at home on “Vibrant”; eschewing the exotics that Valee favors, he raps about lifting Ford F-150s and getting sideways in Mazda Miatas. If you had to identify Valee’s exact stylistic opposite, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better fit than fellow Chicagoan Twista, who pops up on “WTF,” charging in with his beloved chopper flow before pulling back to a bouncy, old-school cadence.
Virtuoso’s most interesting feature comes from someone you probably wouldn’t imagine on a track with Valee and Harry Fraud: RXK Nephew, the relentless weirdo known for his stream-of-consciousness YouTube dumps, lack of allegiance to any style, and rambling conspiracy theories. Nephew has a tendency to invent new flows on the spot, and here he adopts Valee’s deadpan, but pairs it with a clenched enunciation that makes it sound like he’s spitting through the wire. His delivery starts out flat, but he becomes more forceful as his verses build momentum, eventually punctuating his bars with yelps. Like Valee’s rapping, RXK Nephew’s verse draws power from restraint—but it also feels menacing, inventive, and exciting in a way that Valee doesn’t.
Overall, Virtuoso is a breezy listen: The songs are short, the beats are sturdily built, and the features are well-curated. But as a showcase of Valee’s talent and songwriting, it often falls short. On a technical level, the rapping here is nowhere near the best of his career, and the hooks are often forgettable. While Harry Fraud’s production pairs well with the Chicago rapper’s form, Valee doesn’t show up with many new tricks to take advantage of these beats. The man is a dexterous, sophisticated rapper, but after nearly a decade in the game, it still feels like he has yet to realize his full potential. Even virtuosos need to continually refine their skills in order to stay relevant. | 2023-07-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Srfschl / Fake Shore Drive | July 24, 2023 | 6.5 | 4dd4b34e-ff36-49bf-b986-155ff9d1b541 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Like an American Jarvis Cocker, Craig Finn narrates tales of kids who dance and drink and screw cuz they've got nothing else to do-- and he does it all with a depth and scope rarely seen in contemporary rock. | Like an American Jarvis Cocker, Craig Finn narrates tales of kids who dance and drink and screw cuz they've got nothing else to do-- and he does it all with a depth and scope rarely seen in contemporary rock. | The Hold Steady: Boys and Girls in America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9474-boys-and-girls-in-america/ | Boys and Girls in America | When Pitchfork finally received a full-art copy of Boys and Girls in America, it came with a Hold Steady coaster, a wink at the received logic that Craig Finn and his cohorts are members of "America's #1 bar band." That's an ill-fitting tag for a couple of reasons; first, because the vast majority of the bars in the U.S. feature DJs and jukeboxes not bands-- let alone ones as unique and powerful as the Hold Steady.
Second, and more importantly: Although the characters in the Hold Steady's beery tales are big drinkers, you can't imagine many of them bellied up to a bar. That sort of drinking-- introspective, sometimes done alone, indoors-- is the antithesis of the imbibing in Hold Steady songs. These characters are drinking at apartment parties, at festivals, in fields, in cars. In "Stuck Between Stations", the protagonist and his friends "drink from [a] purse"; "Massive Night" has the boys "feeling good about their liquor run"; and in "Party Pit" the female character is "gonna walk around and drink some more." They're not reflective or nostalgic, and when frequent Finn heroine Holly is contemplating the past, it's with regret she can no longer get as high as she used to.
So it's no wonder that critical darlings the Hold Steady aren't exactly indie rock heroes. Marginalized to that world almost by default-- radio and video are, for the most part, unkind to new rock bands not targeted at high-schoolers-- the Hold Steady craft classic rock-indebted music that would sound better sandwiched between Born to Run and Back in Black than Illinois and Tigermilk. In other words, the more likely you are to use music as a social lubricant than as a social balm, the more likely you are to enjoy the Hold Steady.
And if you dislike this band, you wouldn't be alone. After years of making detail-heavy music with both Lifter Puller and now the Hold Steady, Craig Finn enjoyed a critical breakthrough last year with the divisive Separation Sunday-- a loosely conceptual album based around a trio of characters named Charlemagne, Gideon, and Holly-- which wowed critics with its back-alley poetry and willingness to reach the cheap seats, but left many listeners cold over Finn's gruff sing-speak vocals and his band's tendency towards licks rather than grooves.
On Boys and Girls, some things have changed that will make the band more palatable to doubters yet could disappoint Separation Sunday fans: Finn sings more than speaks, and his lyrics have a big-picture approach, allowing listeners to fill details of their own lives into the songs rather than be required to commit fully to those of his characters. Putting less emphasis on lyrical detail than in the past, Finn claims in opener "Stuck Between Stations", a paean to poet and suicide-victim John Berryman, that "words won't save your life"; later, on "First Night", he writes that "words alone can never save us." It's the difference between working more in character, creating a low-rent version of street and suburban life, and creating songs that, as Pitchfork's Stephen Deusner observed, "Finn's characters might want to listen to."
One way in which Finn does this is by ratcheting up the force and power of the music, layering guitar and trebly keys and multiple hooks on top of one another like a mid-1970s E Street Band or an E-boosted Happy Mondays. It's rock'n'roll before it was ashamed to do either, and unlike on past efforts, lyrics can sometimes be summed up by lines that approximate the effect of a chorus, even if they're presented more like a thesis statement: "I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere," "When they kiss they spit white noise," the aforementioned "Gonna walk around and drink some more."
The lack of specificity also means Finn is acknowledging the universality of his themes, which-- although he's still mostly writing about the Twin Cities-- reflect the experiences of kids across the country. Whereas Finn's spiritual predecessors, Bruce Springsteen and Jack Kerouac (whose On the Road lends the album its title), romanticized the open road and the possibility of escape, his characters travel not to start again or get away but as a diversion, as on "Chillout Tent", in which a pair of kids so desperate for something big to happen in their otherwise humdrum lives-- he on his "first day off in forever, man" and she on a break from her studies-- awkwardly try to squeeze as much decadence as possible into a single afternoon.
Finn is less a 21st century Springsteen than he is an American Jarvis Cocker; he's the poet laureate for the U.S.'s have-nots in much the same way the Pulp singer was for the UK's common people in the 1990s. Unlike Cocker, however, Finn doesn't write angrily, perhaps a telling indication that the stereotypically British self-loathing is equitable to the "colossal expectations" and lack of discipline of the boys and girls in America. Just as one wouldn't imagine Cocker writing escapist fantasies such as "Chillout Tent", nor would Finn pen something as bitter as "I Spy".
In a sense, however, this album, thematically, is as self-aware as Cocker's work at his height of fame-- the ambitious, zeitgeist-grabbing Different Class and hangover album This Is Hardcore. But rather than moan about too many nights on the tiles, Finn channels his diminishing energy into characters older and younger than himself: His epitaph for Berryman ("he was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected") and Holly's laments over stoner burnout in "First Night" could both be read as autobiographical.
They could also be seen as a lament for the type of music Finn's making, the straightforward arena rock that, these days, often settles for critical acclaim and respect rather than connecting with lots and lots of people. For all of Finn's holding his lyrics at arm's length here, he remains one of the best writers in rock, demonstrating grit and spunk and wit and intelligence in each track. Unlike many of those who've translated big, arena-ready guitars into arena-sized audiences, Finn doesn't resort to confidently sung platitudes like "It's a beautiful day!", "Look at the stars/ See how they shine for you," or "I'm not OK." He not only has a commanding, rousing voice but he also says something worth hearing, displaying gifts for both scope and depth that are all too rare in contemporary rock-- indie or mainstream. | 2006-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Vagrant | October 2, 2006 | 9.4 | 4dda1a04-d0cb-4354-af3a-001b4644e5ff | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
After a decade of searching for the intersection of hip-hop and country and a star turn on Cowboy Carter, the Virginia-born singer finds much more than a party on his third album. | After a decade of searching for the intersection of hip-hop and country and a star turn on Cowboy Carter, the Virginia-born singer finds much more than a party on his third album. | Shaboozey: Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shaboozey-where-ive-been-isnt-where-im-going/ | Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going | In mid-April, after struggling for a decade to find a new intersection between country and hip-hop, Shaboozey released “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” amid the wave of adulation that followed Cowboy Carter, the Black country maypole on which he appeared twice. It seemed like the epitome of a one-hit wonder. A near-universal anthem about despising your job that barely begets survival and drowning in as many rounds as the bartender can summon, it became a near-universal sensation, streaming three million times in 24 hours and charting all around the world. After all, how could a whistle-out-loud interpolation of a 20-year-old J-Kwon smash that nodded to the Black roots of Jack Daniels while towering atop the lily-white country chart not be a flash in the pan, some glitch in the Music Row matrix? This was surely Shaboozey’s “Achy Breaky Heart” and “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” his mainstream introduction and farewell all at once.
But Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going does not feel like a mere receptacle for one of the year’s most unlikely hits. Shaboozey’s remarkably assured third album is a sophisticated self-help journey that only occasionally masquerades as a good time. He has spent a long while trying to find some space where the sounds of hip-hop and country could overlap, where the defiant swagger, nostalgic circumspection, and quivering heartbreak of both genres could fuse together. The parties of “A Bar Song” and “Drink Don’t No Mix” offer the same sort of escapes that he suggests in “East of the Massanutten” or “Let It Burn,” where the Great American West becomes the frontier for fleeing, respectively, the persecutions of the South or an abusive relationship. Shaboozey seems to always be asking how we can last a little longer and live a little better in this strange place, even as he’s grinning while reaching for another shot.
If you’re the type of listener who writes off the last dozen years of mainstream country music, especially its best-selling bro-country core, as bullshit, Where I’ve Been will at first sound like a tough hang. He uses Auto-Tune to exaggerate the contours of his drawl during cowboy-coopting opener “Horses & Hellcats,” a trick he nevertheless smartly returns to. He favors processed, billowing harmonies that emphasize his epiphanies, as on “Highway,” the frustrated testimonial of a traveler almost broken by the choices that make him alone. And he inches toward rap, his voice oozing over the second verse of “Vegas,” where he stares into the bottom of his emptied cup and empty life with deep shame. “Came out of the gutter, covered in dirt/Got it all over me,” he offers, each brief pause landing like another jab into his own ribs.
Wait: Songs about the wrong end of the bottle and the weary traveler far from home, plus references to the mighty strides of beautiful Palomino horses and Dan Post boots? Indeed, Where I’ve Been is, in some regard, a wildly reverent country album, from its opening sonic triumvirate of whistling wind, pedal steel, and acoustic guitar through its banjo-traced closing trot complete with a fiddle solo. Every song here hinges on the acoustic guitar, whether it’s the rhythmic R&B-style loop that anchors “Drink Don’t Need No Mix” or the massive, major-chord strums of “Anabelle.” Shaboozey purportedly wrote an entire country album before Lady Wrangler, his chimerical 2018 major-label debut that flopped in part because he could not decide how its constituent pieces cohered; Where I’ve Been works so well because he starts clearly with country, then rearranges it to fit his needs.
Those needs almost invariably involve what’s next and better. This forward gaze is the true hip-hop element of these 12 songs. “East of the Massanutten” is a remarkable piece of work. He alludes to the Confederate king of guerilla warfare, John Mosby, to justify his drive to head west and seek out “a land full of dreams/With milk, gold, and honey/Just waitin’ for me.” It’s an emancipation song, as are “Anabelle” and “Let It Burn,” overdue goodbyes to lovers who will not stop wrecking your life. “My Fault,” his gorgeous duet with Noah Cyrus, is a radical counterpart to Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It”; rather than return to a relationship’s welcoming stability, both parties seek it by striking out separately to escape a cycle of “bar games” and blackouts. “Last of My Kind” first offers a whiff of retrograde nostalgia (and Paul Cauthen’s Kid Rock-lite cameo does not help), but its unique brand of survivalism ultimately promises a kind of readiness for whatever shall come. It also reads, gloriously, like a Black rejoinder to the dog-whistle paranoia of Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.”
Where I’ve Been ends with “Finally Over,” a bedraggled riff about the battles between perseverance and forfeiture, self-doubt and belief, heaven and hell. Is this album, he seems to wonder, his music-industry exit, the last gasp of the label deals? This is terra firma for country, where the paradox of rural folk seeking big-city fame has long created compelling existential tension. It’s astonishing that he wondered aloud on this track if he should sell his soul for “another viral moment” just before “A Bar Song” soon made him very famous. But this, thankfully, is the work of someone with more to give than a mere viral moment. Rooted in the past but keyed to the idea of finding a better future by whatever means necessary (leaving, burning, boozing, fighting), Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going epitomizes not a one-hit wonder but a songwriter who has found both his mode and his moment at the exact same time. | 2024-06-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rap | Empire | June 5, 2024 | 7.7 | 4dda31f6-97b6-4969-a79f-d0e31084d423 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The four early-'90s LPs in this box set remain Red House Painters' most magical records, and some of the most beautiful works of Mark Kozelek's career. If you're someone who's been put off by his feuds and outbursts, put aside those reservations—these records deserve it. Even after all these years, that mystery somehow still remains. | The four early-'90s LPs in this box set remain Red House Painters' most magical records, and some of the most beautiful works of Mark Kozelek's career. If you're someone who's been put off by his feuds and outbursts, put aside those reservations—these records deserve it. Even after all these years, that mystery somehow still remains. | Red House Painters: Box Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20517-box-set/ | Box Set | Red House Painters were fairly popular in the early '90s, but details on them were scarce. This was all before the Internet, so you basically had what a jewel box told you. It's hard to imagine at this point, but when I first heard them, I didn't know anything about Mark Kozelek, the frontman and mastermind behind the project. I'm not sure I knew his name, and I definitely didn't know what he looked like, or his personality outside of the songs. I also had no idea the band was a quartet, or that they lived in San Francisco (in Kozelek's case, via Ohio). At least for me, Red House Painters existed outside of a scene, too. They had a familiar record label with its own distinct aesthetic, but that was the only real touchstone.
Not that any of this is bad. The songs on the first four albums—1992's Down Colorful Hill, 1993's pair of self-titled albums (the first nicknamed Rollercoaster, the second Bridge, after the photographs on their covers), and 1995's Ocean Beach (here packaged with the Shock Me EP from a year earlier)—felt personal and private enough that it was easy to get lost in your own head while listening. They featured heartbreaking, personal lyrics and were accompanied by stark, often naturalistic photographs on the covers. The package came with the crystalline, spacious production and Kozelek's clear, powerful voice, and these things merged in an almost mystical way. The material felt less composed or worked over; it was more like the songs were birthed fully formed. They could drift on for more than 10 minutes, but you kind of gave up on keeping track of this kind of thing.
When old albums get reissued, which they increasingly do, the practice usually offers a chance to hear familiar songs again, sometimes with remastering, maybe a few bonuses. Some listeners are feeling nostalgic, seeking to recreate the original context in their minds, while many others are learning about the material for the first time, and aren't all that clear on the context beyond the updated liner notes. 4AD's decision to reissue Red House Painters' first four albums as a fairly spare limited-edition Record Store Day box set (on bronze vinyl, with individual album reissues on black vinyl to follow) offers a unique angle: The band's cantankerous frontman (as we can now call him after that whole War on Drugs debacle) is much better known, and known quite differently, all these years later. Now you do know exactly who Mark Kozelek is, or at least you think you do.
It's important to remember, though, that the group wasn't just Kozelek. At least not at the beginning. For the first three full-lengths, it was Kozelek on vocals and guitars along with drummer Anthony Koutsos, bassist Jerry Vessel, and guitarist Gorden Mack. (Koutsos and Vessel continued with Kozelek to 2001; Mack left in 1995 and was replaced by Phil Carney, who still plays with Sun Kil Moon now and then.) Starting with Songs for a Blue Guitar, which followed Red House Painters' last album for 4AD Ocean Beach, Kozelek basically started doing everything on his own. He released it on Supreme Recordings, a label owned by John Hughes and under the auspices of Island Records, which reminds me that he's the only person from Red House Painters who also went on to act in movies.
Even accounting for the added years and maybe some Kozelek burnout, the four LPs in this boxset remain Red House Painters' most magical records, and some of the most beautiful works of Kozelek's career. If you're someone who's been put off by his feuds and outbursts, put aside those reservations—these records deserve it. And, really, when you come back to them, even after all these years, that mystery somehow still remains. In fact, now and then I need to remind myself just who it is I'm listening to. Unlike later SKM, the vocals are treated with airier effects. The production is deep and spacious, and sounds very 4AD. Kozelek's lyrics are personal, and moving, but come cloaked in ellipses and metaphor rather than the tell-all logorrhea of Benji.
The first song we heard from Red House Painters is "24", the magisterial slowcore opener on 1992's Down Colorful Hill. It's from the point of view of someone, aged 24, worrying about growing old: "Oldness comes to rile/ The youth who dream suicide." This is a concern across all of Kozelek's work, and it's easy to imagine him worrying about these same things when he was 9 going on 10.
The start of "24" is nearly silent—gentle minimal guitar before drums come in; it almost sounds like the start of a Codeine track. These songs were demos, and are lightly touched up for the proper 4AD debut, but still sound spare and homemade and thin in the best way (a way that works with the confessional tone of the material). Red House Painters are more of a definable rock band on Colorful, though, with fuzzed guitars, martial drumming, and more basic structures; on the slinky post-rock of "Japanese to English", you can imagine them in a practice space, jamming it out. In this sense, it's less otherworldly than the next two albums.
On the anguished second track, "Medicine Bottle", he offers up some of the detail-rich run-on lyricism that he returns to later with SKM. There's a playful country western-tinged sendup "Lord Kill the Pain", which takes Kozelek's depressing lyrics to a comical extreme with lines like: "Kill my neighbors/ And all my family too/ They doubt my direction." Of course, he's likely partially serious, too. This humor is something Kozelek has maintained, even when his critics think of him as being peevish or over-sensitive.
There's the nostalgic, quietly heartbreaking "Michael", a song about someone wondering whatever happened to their best friend from years earlier with both funny ("Do you remember our first subway ride?/ Our first heavy metal haircuts?") and moving ("I remember your smile in the sun/ The day-dreaming boy without your shirt on…") details. It ends with Kozelek noting that the connection is still there: "You're the oldest juvenile delinquent bum/ My best friend."
It's the gorgeous title track that hints most at the truly brilliant second collection, Rollercoaster. It's nimble. It feels effortless. It expands to 11 minutes without seeming to push very hard. It barely matters what he's saying because of how it's paced and how it's said. On Rollercoaster*,* it felt like RHP existed outside of everything, and listening now, it still feels that way. Down Colorful Hill is an excellent, idiosyncratic debut, but it doesn't quite prepare you for the 1993 collection. Mark Kozelek produced Rollercoaster, and it's proof enough that he's the best person to be handling the knobs on his own songs: the guitar sound is perfect, songs burst and bloom, the vocals are placed perfectly like ghosts. Overall, Rollercoaster and Bridge, released the same year and featuring songs from the same session, move away from the more songwriterly approach of the other work in Kozelek's career—the production is more distant and expansive, and the instruments are given to lengthy excursions and big blasts of guitars.
There are technically 14 songs on Rollercoaster, but it's not the kind of album where you stop to note these kinds of distinctions: Each song feels like a detail in a large painting. On it, Kozelek fears the violence in his blood, remembers being an outcast, worries about getting older and losing meaning and connections ("Scares me how you get older/ How you forget about each other"), dismisses a girl in New Jersey, acts like a romantic asshole ("I still feel the sting in my hand/ From when I hit you/ I keep your picture tidy and safe in a shrine"), confesses that he's afraid to drive, and manages to do all this in moving, atmospheric anthems that resonate two decades later. The songs tend to go on forever, and it seems like Kozelek assumes if he stops, his subject might disappear.
He returns again and again to the idea of forgetting, and he doesn't leave out the details that could make him look bad: "I've had enough of the/ Brutal beatings and name callings/ To lose me to this bed/ Bruised internally, eternally." You get warts and all, even in songs that feel like they could be sonnets. He wonders a lot where people are. The 13-minute "Mother" is filled with the sort of raging fear of loss that we hear later on "I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love". The album also features "Katy Song", a classic Kozelek eight-and-a-half-minute paean to not being enough. If you ever need to cry on command, I recommend taking a listen. Rollercoaster closes with the brief, compact "Brown Eyes", a two-minute acoustic jangle of a song that suggests where he goes on Ocean Beach and onward (and, itself, ends with a lovely 40 seconds of quietly expansive drums and dainty guitars).
Rollercoaster was followed by Bridge in October of 1993; it featured songs from the same recording session as Rollercoaster, and on paper looks like an odds and sods—its eight songs include a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock", a feedbacking rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and a more electrified, revved-up take on Rollercoaster's "New Jersey". But Kozelek is a master of covers, and makes the songs his own; plus, there are more than enough originals here to balance it out.
The standouts here are the songs that sound most like they'd fit on Rollercoaster, the pastoral "Bubble" and the dark, strummed "Uncle Joe", which starts with the line "where have all the people gone in my life?" and finds him in pain after late-night television is over. (I've seen kids on lyric "meaning" sites likening "Bubble" to Internet dating because of lines like "I embrace the moment, I'm in love with a dream/ And toy with ideas that burn deep inside me/ Cause a picture is all you are to me/ A picture is all you'll ever be.")
Throughout, the tone is eerier and somehow more quietly violent than Rollercoaster. This comes to a head on the eight-minute "Blindfold" that moves through lyrics like "What possessed you not to include me?/ How have you failed to invite me/ How could you laugh with her in that theater?/ When you're off and I'm alone?" and ends with Kozelek howling his best grunge (nay, metal) howl, raging louder than the drums or clashing guitars around him.
The final album on the box, and his last for 4AD, is 1995's Ocean Beach. It opens with a sunny, lilting instrumental called "Cabezon", three breezy minutes of pleasant music. The album, in general, seems to be Kozelek's California record, and stands out from what came before it.
The first proper song, "Summer Dress", is in the more usual downcast Red House Painters' mode, but the songs are folkier and less amorphous; overall, this is the one RHP offering you could compare to Toad the Wet Sprocket and be basically right. The hooks are immediate, the sequencing rock-album complete: The wistful "Summer Dress" transitions to the gently fuzzed rock of "San Geronimo" which moves into the piano-led ballad, "Shadows". You get almost hippie-like noodles on the steel-guitars of "Over My Head" (before which we get studio chatter that jokingly mentions "new age windchimes") and an echo of past melancholia with "Red Carpet". It's a stately, well-composed collection, and it's beautiful. The use of feedback is delicate (even on the more searing close of "Moments", which is reminiscent of the way Yo La Tengo use feedback).
It closes with the 13-minute "Drop", one of Kozelek's best heartsick pieces: "I'd like to come home to see you/ And to catch your sickness by the bedside/ But then you'd know how much I really need you." With him it's never easy, of course, and he adds: "But then my hate for you/ Makes my feelings altogether drop." It's a masterful closer, and an example of how Kozelek can draw you into his world and make you forget time's passage, even as he obsesses over it.
For this box, its sister is the four-song Shock Me EP. "Shock Me" is a Kiss cover, though you wouldn't know it unless you'd memorized the 1977 original. You get it here in both its four-minute "electric" and 11-minute acoustic version, along with two very good, shorter songs, "Sundays and Holidays" and "Three-Legged Cat". It's great to have it in the box, though sonically, it would've made more sense to pair it with either Rollercoaser or Bridge.
Listening closely to these records now shines a light on the rest of Kozelek's career. It's the most you can hope for as far as reissues go, and it really does feel like a skeleton key returning to these albums you thought you knew so well. You think of these songs, with their fear of growing old and dying, and put them in context with all the songs from his youth he and his band have covered (by artists like AC/DC, Kiss, Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver, Paul McCartney), and where he's ended up now, singing about being old, and you realize that time itself was always the preoccupation here, as well as the inevitability of death, even in your happiest moments. And you realize, listening, that you got older, too. | 2015-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 6, 2015 | 8.2 | 4ddd696a-e8c5-4cd8-844c-d54f592288f3 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Toronto's Fucked Up continue their outsized ambition with a lengthy rock opera featuring a twisted storyline and epic guitar-driven songs. | Toronto's Fucked Up continue their outsized ambition with a lengthy rock opera featuring a twisted storyline and epic guitar-driven songs. | Fucked Up: David Comes to Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15513-david-comes-to-life/ | David Comes to Life | Punk rock has had its share of ambitious bands producing ambitious records-- Double Nickels on the Dime, Zen Arcade, Sandinista!, and The Shape of Punk to Come spring to mind-- but few groups in this sphere have pushed the envelope as often as Fucked Up. For the last few years, they've been releasing singles as part of a series based on the Chinese Zodiac, each of which usually runs over the 10-minute mark. For a 2007 charity Christmas single, they managed to get James Murphy, Nelly Furtado, and "Degrassi: the Next Generation"/"90210" actress Shenae Grimes (among many, many others) to appear on the same song; during a 12-hour (!) NYC concert in 2008, they got moshers to smash along to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig doing Descendents covers. Their reach continues unabated on their new album, David Comes to Life, a 78-minute rock opera.
The story of David Comes to Life is fairly complicated and, at points, heavily meta. It concerns a factory worker named David Eliade who falls in love with a woman named Veronica Boisson. They conspire to build a bomb together and death, destruction, and redemption follow; along the way, the story's narrator does battle with David for control of the plot. There's a long tradition of rock concept albums that aren't easy to understand, and this one is no exception; but enjoying it doesn't depend on decoding the tale. The record is divided into four separate acts, with a narrative focus that shifts from scene to scene-- a few songs are told from the overarching narrator's perspective, while David's ex-girlfriend, Vivian Benson, offers her side of the story in the album's back half. While a few guest vocalists are employed to help out-- Cults' Madeline Follin and singer/songwriter Jennifer Castle represent Veronica and Vivian, respectively-- the story is largely told by the band's screaming frontman, Damien Abraham, aka Pink Eyes. Taking into account the album's relatively limited range-- almost an hour and a half of straight-up bashing and riffage, with moments like the jangly acoustic figure that opens "A Slanted Tone" as a rare respite-- it becomes apparent that you will need a few listens and a lyric sheet to apprehend David Comes to Life's ambition and follow its labyrinthine storyline.
Or, you could just sit back and let the record's dense, visceral blast of guitar squall wash over you. More than any single Fucked Up record, David Comes to Life is thick with walls of noisy melody. It's hard to get a handle on just how many guitar tracks are on a given song, and Shane Stoneback deserves a medal for mixing the sheer bulk of the sound into something so clear. But for all the shoegazey textures and blistering sonic assault, David Comes to Life is also direct and immediate. Hooks are piled on top of hooks, bursting through torrents of spacey noise ("I Was There") and peppy rhythms ("The Recursive Girl") alike. At points, the primal appeal of the blunt and effective riffing even brings to mind the bar-band rock of the Hold Steady.
Out front, Abraham still retains his scorched-earth bark. He's been finding ways to broaden his voice's impact, and it's never sounded better than it does here. Abraham knows his range and limitations and is finding new ways to work within them while adjusting to the band's forward lurch, in effect becoming another instrument in the mix. His stomping melancholia on "Turn the Season" feels like a gut-check, while he follows up his sole quiet moment on album closer "Lights Go Up" by shouting amidst curled screams, "I'm still in love with you/ After all of this time!" Besides the aforementioned appearances by Follin and Castle, Kurt Vile delivers a typically slack backing vocal on "Lights Go Up", too-- but, really, this is The Pink Eyes Show, and it's never been so compelling to watch.
That said, all the howling and the album's extreme length might be a tough thing for those new to Fucked Up. For people in this category, it might be best to check out Hidden World first; it's a good representation of how fun and hooky Fucked Up are when they're in the zone, and in many ways it's a simpler, spiritual precursor to this record. Regardless, David Comes to Life is absolutely worth the commitment, a convincing demonstration of what can happen when a band works without limitations. | 2011-06-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Matador | June 8, 2011 | 8.6 | 4de6ed86-4605-427e-af3e-43d1712638a5 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Zombi get their name from the Italian title of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, but keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore has said he considers his group a post-rock band that just happens to use the vocabulary of soundtracks. On their fifth album, Shape Shift, he and drummer Anthony Paterra play with a fire most soundtrack music lacks. | Zombi get their name from the Italian title of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, but keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore has said he considers his group a post-rock band that just happens to use the vocabulary of soundtracks. On their fifth album, Shape Shift, he and drummer Anthony Paterra play with a fire most soundtrack music lacks. | Zombi: Shape Shift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21171-shape-shift/ | Shape Shift | For decades, the theme from the film Halloween has been about as well-known as a piece of music can get, but it's only lately that iconic horror filmmaker John Carpenter has embraced the spotlight as an electronic musician and quote-unquote composer. Listen to any record by the one-time Pittsburgh-based duo Zombi, though, and it's obvious that keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore and drummer A.E. Paterra wear their film-geek affinities on their sleeve. The band's name is, in fact, derived from the Italian title of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was filmed at Moore's hometown shopping mall and scored by Italian prog rock outfit Goblin, a huge influence on Zombi along with Carpenter and other film composers such as Fabio Frizzi and Riz Ortolani.
Paterra and British documentary/video game composer Paul Lawler recently collaborated under the moniker Contact, while Moore has embarked on a side career scoring films on his own, most recently supplying the score for Belgian director Jonas Govaerts' 2014 horror movie Cub. Relapse Records is, in fact, releasing Zombi's fifth full-length Shape Shift and the Cub soundtrack on the same day. It's impossible to ignore the common thread between the two albums, and since the Cub score doesn't do enough to re-contextualize Moore's approach to harmony, it only serves to reveal his limitations in Zombi. But, as Moore has made clear in recent press, he and Paterra have always considered Zombi a post-rock outfit that happens to use the vocabulary of soundtracks. In their view, their work has more in common with, say, Battles or Trans Am than it does with those aforementioned cinematic influences.
Indeed, Zombi's third album, 2009's Spirit Animal, combined the stately gesturing of Genesis' 1974 prog epic The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with the ominous intonation of film music. Somehow, Moore and Paterra managed to evoke the murky synthesizer ambience of the 1970s while also infusing their music with a decidedly modern aura. Though Shape Shift marks the first time since 2006's Surface to Air that Moore and Paterra made music in the same room with one another, the throbbing analog synth pulse of album opener "Pillars of the Dawn" suggests that the pair might have lost their ability to draw on their influences without getting stuck in the past. Paterra's drums very precisely recall the tone and feel of drummer Neil Peart's performance circa Signals, Rush's 1982 head-first dive into synth-driven rock. From a purely sonic standpoint, it's an impressive feat to recapture the acoustic fingerprint of Peart's drums without using sample triggers, but you can't shake the sensation that you've just stepped out of a time machine and landed in the wrong year.
In that way, Shape Shift initially comes across as pandering to retrophilia when Moore and Paterra have already demonstrated that they're clever enough to not have to resort to that kind of thing. That said, it doesn't take long for the band's underlying attitude to breathe life into this material. Two tracks in and it becomes clear that Moore and Paterra play with a fire that their musical forbears lacked. Paterra in particular—the way his drumming both drives the music and makes room for it to breathe, the nuanced variations in the way he strikes the snare, hi-hat, and the bell of his ride cymbal—gives Shape Shift a gritty, utterly human quality that complements Moore's synthetic palette. In general, Zombi favor mid-tempo grooves that require a lot of reserve, but Paterra reminds you at all times that you're listening to a rock band with an underlying sense of millennial angst, even if that angst is never explicitly articulated.
We are, after all, talking about long-winded mathy instrumental music here. But that's the thing: at some point while listening to Shape Shif**t, it dawns on you that you can actually hum all of these tunes. Sure, there are times when Moore and Paterra let their instincts to impose changes for their own sake get the better of them. Not far into the 8-minute-plus "Interstellar Package", a groove built out of an oscillating low-pitched synth throb grows to a majestic crescendo that prematurely gives way to six minutes' worth of undifferentiated drone, a move that short-circuits the tune's potential payoff. Nevertheless, in their own way Moore and Paterra write catchy music. That their tastes position them as soundtrack-buff outsiders at the fringes makes the cohesion, listenability, and passion of Shape Shift that much more of a triumph. | 2015-10-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Relapse | October 16, 2015 | 7.2 | 4de917b3-543b-4747-97b7-3a26ae6c645a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Wu-Tang Clan member's long-awaited sequel to his 1995 classic is finally here, and yes, it's as good as fans have been hoping for. | The Wu-Tang Clan member's long-awaited sequel to his 1995 classic is finally here, and yes, it's as good as fans have been hoping for. | Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13441-only-built-4-cuban-linx-pt-ii/ | Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II | Yes, it exists, and yes, it's as good as fans have been hoping for. We'll get more in depth on that shortly, but with the two most important questions surrounding this album finally answered after four years of anticipation, that leaves a third one: why a sequel? The easy conclusion is that Raekwon needed a benchmark-- that he couldn't just put together any slapdash collection of skits and weedcarrier features and b-grade beats, then slap the words Cuban Linx on the cover. So while some people might read this album's title as a gimmicky hook to lure in bring-NYC-back nostalgists, it actually acts more as a reassuring seal of quality from an MC who some people think lost his way the moment he released Immobilarity without a single RZA beat.
The connections to Cuban Linx's roots of grimy, Mafioso opulence run deep here, starting with a partial reprise of the original album's closer "North Star (Jewels)" as Pt. II's opening track. In 1995, Popa Wu admired the way Raekwon was growing and coming up in the world in the same way a master teacher regards his star pupil; 14 years later he's simultaneously marveling at Raekwon's success and warning him of the treachery that elevated status brings. From there we get not so much a single narrative as a vivid overview of a criminal empire that's grown in scope since the first Cuban Linx. Raekwon's gift for deep focus-- homing in on an adversary's apparel one moment, zooming out to take in an entire hood's social system the next-- is at its sharpest, and in running the gamut of criminology rap from kitchen stove to prison yard, he reinforces his reputation as a lyricist with a supreme ability to simultaneously set an evocative scene and turn a slick phrase.
Two early detail-oriented highlights come back-to-back: "Sonny's Missing", a compact, Pete Rock-produced narrative concerning the grotesque interrogation of a rival segues into the strangely calm crack-cooking setpiece "Pyrex Vision", where Rae simmers his voice down to a murmur and gives a tactile snapshot of the crack-cooking process. That mixture of tightly knit procedural storytelling and lyrical virtuosity carries through on the other solo showpieces, the business plan/inventory rundown "Surgical Gloves" and the confrontation with a kiss-blowing, shit-talking Jamaican dealer in "Fat Lady Sings" chief amongst them.
But it's the guest spots that make the album widescreen, particularly with the involvement of every remaining Wu-Tang member (except for U-God, possibly as a canonical continuation of his being "killed off" on the first Cuban Linx). Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, and GZA bolster the narrative, Method Man provides a couple respites from the criminal theme with some flat-out vintage lyrical boasting on early-leak highlights "New Wu" and "House of Flying Daggers", and the the RZA has a memorably unhinged cameo at the end of "Black Mozart". Even ODB's there in spirit, with the Dilla-utilizing "Ason Jones" cutting through all the mythologized goofball eccentricity to depict him as a wise man with real love in his heart. All that, and you get Jadakiss and Styles P waxing grimy on "Broken Safety", Beanie Sigel at his remorseful best on "Have Mercy", Slick Rick pulling diabolical Queen-mocking hook duty on "We Will Rob You", and Busta Rhymes dialing down his characteristic bellow to growl on "About Me".
And then there's Ghost. Maybe the biggest strength of the original Cuban Linx was how well Ghostface and Raekwon complemented each other, with Tony Starks' rampaging wail underscoring Chef's calculating intensity, and Ghost's appearances here hold that same power. He opens his verse on "Cold Outside" with one of his most evocatively disturbing lines ever-- "They found a two-year-old strangled to death/ With a 'Love Daddy' shirt on/ In a bag on the top of the steps"-- and expands that into a ball-of-confusion breakdown of friends' betrayals, AIDS mothers, "swastikas on the church," being broke during Christmas, and the need for troop withdrawal from Iraq. Later on, he has a sharp back-and-forth dialogue-style prison-hustle account with Rae in "Penitentiary", castigates a street soldier after being caught getting a blowjob from the man's girlfriend in "Gihad", and has a classic outrageous-swagger line in "10 Bricks": "the currency rushes like poppin' a wheelie/ Holdin' a bike with one hand, the other countin' the billies". Listening to him going R&B on Wizard of Poetry's gonna be weird after this.
That said, there's one crucial difference between the two Cuban Linx records that could've tripped this album up: The switch from an all-RZA palette of beats to an all-star roster of production names. RZA does contribute three of the best tracks-- the fuzzed-out cinema funk of "Black Mozart", the choral headknock sway of "New Wu", and the lavish, orchestral mid-70s soul of "Fat Lady Sings"-- which fall between his classic first-wave style and a less out-there strain of the experimentation that alienated Ghost and Raekwon circa 8 Diagrams. But aside from Dr. Dre getting a bit too polished and joylessly glossy on the faux-Latin cheese of "Catalina" and the plodding "About Me", the rest of the production proves to be an eclectic yet fitting take on the classic Wu-Tang aesthetic. "House of Flying Daggers", "Ason Jones", and "10 Bricks" benefit from a trip to the Dilla vaults that brought back three of his most RZA-esque beats. The Alchemist's chopped-up chimes and woozy guitars give "Surgical Gloves" a hypnotic edge. Pete Rock maintains the integrity of his style with the flute and horn-driven bounce on "Sonny's Missing" (repurposed from NY's Finest track "Questions" and an even better fit here). And Marley Marl gets a lot of atmospheric mileage out of the subdued yet gripping guitar loop that comprises the 55 seconds of "Pyrex Vision".
Between the hype, the anticipation and the attachment of a legendary album's legacy, anything less than a classic would have proven to be a major disappointment. Few albums have gone through this much turmoil and delay in the planning stages yet turned out so cohesive and tight. The last time a Wu-Tang record came together with this kind of personnel and succeeded under a grand conceptual vision, we got Fishscale, and calling Cuban Linx II Raekwon's equivalent to it isn't out of the question. Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it. Consider this a triumphant defense. | 2009-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | EMI | September 17, 2009 | 8.8 | 4deb5367-0dce-49f9-92ba-a507afad147f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Across a relatively lean, stakes-free mixtape, Wiz Khalifa riffs on his only meaningful muse, weed, with a level of buy-in that he rarely grants his commercial projects. | Across a relatively lean, stakes-free mixtape, Wiz Khalifa riffs on his only meaningful muse, weed, with a level of buy-in that he rarely grants his commercial projects. | Wiz Khalifa: Laugh Now, Fly Later | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiz-khalifa-laugh-now-fly-later/ | Laugh Now, Fly Later | Though laughter has always been part of Wiz Khalifa’s image, it doesn’t come naturally to him. His catchphrase is a forced “a-ha-ha-ha”—not an actual laugh but the phonetic pronunciation of one, recited like an actor confusing a script’s cue to chuckle for the word “chuckle.” Like so much about Khalifa’s rapping, it signifies fun without delivering it, or even demonstrating any real understanding of what it’s like to experience fun. He laughs not out of joy but obligation.
Khalifa’s wooden laugh might be less conspicuous coming from a rapper who at least attempted a punchline from time to time, but on his recent studio albums, especially, Khalifa hasn’t been in a joking mood, nor has he felt the slightest obligation to disguise how little he’s enjoying himself. There are worse rappers on the charts, but none who take so little pleasure in their own music: Between his nagging voice, rote rhymes, and the grueling, clock-punching nature of their delivery, he exudes all the enthusiasm of a DMV clerk. Each of his albums, then, has been an elaborate workaround, a cover-up for the vacuum of charisma somehow cast, despite his apparent resentment, as their star attraction, with the industry’s best-paid songwriters, producers, and ringers propping up the lethargic rapper like the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s, hoping the party disguises its lifeless host.
Given Khalifa’s dismal track record with official albums, the best thing Laugh Now, Fly Later has going for it is that it isn’t one. It’s a label-sanctioned mixtape, a stopgap to tide fans over until his upcoming Rolling Papers 2, so it’s freed from any commercial expectations. That means no cringingly unromantic R&B songs, no shameless Fast and the Furious tie-ins, and no illusions of revealing the “real” Wiz Khalifa (a construct that, to judge from 2016’s Khalifa, is somehow even duller than his one-dimensional stoner persona). Instead, for a relatively lean, stakes-free 10 songs, Khalifa simply riffs on his only meaningful muse, weed, with a level of buy-in that he rarely grants his commercial projects.
He displays flashes of the old, effortless charm that he long ago began to conflate with plain apathy, spitting a pair of showy verses over the bottom-heavy G-funk of “Long Way to Go” and generating actual heat on “City of Steel,” one of several sumptuous 1970s soul homages. On “Letterman” he even holds his own over a trap beat, usually one of the weakest of his many weak spots, revving himself up over some flatteringly cavernous production from 808 Mafia. This is the Wiz Khalifa the world assumed it was signing up for after Kush & OJ, a performer who raps without sounding like he’s struggling to decipher whatever sweat-blurred lyrics he jotted on his palm in a smoky haze the night before.
As much of a relief as it is to hear it again, however, Khalifa’s A-game isn’t elite enough to carry an entire project on its own, and while Laugh Now is relatively misstep-free, its highs are modest. At times the project begs for a little label interference: a few undeniable hooks, or at least a couple of cameos to keep things interesting (Casey Veggies is Laugh Now’s lone guest, and although his leadoff verse on the opener “Royal Highness” sends off the mixtape on a running start, it also sets a bar the rest of the tape rarely lives up to). Wiz Khalifa albums are tradeoffs: We tolerate the low energy and transparent cynicism in exchange for an occasional “Black and Yellow” or “We Dem Boyz.” Laugh Now, doesn’t have one.
Midway through “City of Steel,” Khalifa stops rapping and shares one of those state-of-myself fireside chats rappers often include on mixtapes previewing big albums, trying to drum up excitement for Rolling Papers 2. “Been working on that motherfucker for three years now,” Khalifa says. “It’s finally done, and it’s gonna be worth it, too.” If Khalifa can muster this mixtape’s caliber of rapping on that album’s blockbuster material, maybe it could be. Considering his history of delivering only when it doesn’t count, though, smart money says otherwise. | 2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | November 15, 2017 | 5.2 | 4dedd813-13f4-43d3-80a3-93d348bd5079 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On the 25th anniversary of their debut, Throwing Muses release the 2xCD retrospective Anthology. It's more a mixtape compiled by the band than an exhaustive box set or greatest-hits collection, but it's still an accessible entry point to the band’s formidably deep catalogue. | On the 25th anniversary of their debut, Throwing Muses release the 2xCD retrospective Anthology. It's more a mixtape compiled by the band than an exhaustive box set or greatest-hits collection, but it's still an accessible entry point to the band’s formidably deep catalogue. | Throwing Muses: Anthology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15781-throwing-muses-anthology/ | Anthology | In 1983, at age 16, Kristin Hersh was hit by a car. She landed on her head and lost a lot of blood. When she was recovering in the hospital she started, for the first time, to hear songs-- "sonic hauntings," as she called them in her 2010 memoir, Rat Girl. Initially humming, mechanical tones, they quickly organized themselves into the familiar grammar of guitar chords, drum beats, basslines, and surreal melodies. She didn't feel quite right until she got them out of her head: "As soon as I give a song a body in the real world, it stops playing and I breathe a sigh of relief, in precious silence." She played the chords herself and taught the other parts to her friends Dave Narcizo and Leslie Langston and her stepsister Tanya Donelly, and they became the earliest material recorded by their band, Throwing Muses.
It's a hell of a creation myth, but an easy one to believe: pretty much every song Throwing Muses ever recorded sounds like an exorcism. Though indebted to punk's passion, fury, and occasional goofiness, the Muses were punks only in the spiritual sense of the word: Even by their teens, the original four were all accomplished musicians well-versed enough in music theory to create the weird, irregular chords and erratic time signatures that would become hallmarks of their sound. There was something almost Zen-like about the band's approach: Dump the contents of your busy brain out onto the street, and see what sounds they make on impact. The offspring of hippie idealism (Hersh grew up living on a commune and calling her dad "Dude") and post-punk disillusionment, the Muses' rhetoric was not about breaking the rules so much as transcending them completely. In a recent interview, Hersh said of her earliest days in the band, "I realized that in order to play with the voice you would have if you grew up on a desert island without a radio you need to forget rules."
Anthology, the first retrospective collection of Throwing Muses material, comes to us on the 25th anniversary of their (first) self-titled record, a stammering, brutal masterpiece that managed to capture both late adolescent angst and feelings well beyond its years. Producer Gil Norton made Hersh's most intimate moments of near-delirium sound epic: like portions of someone's diary blown up to billboard size. Ever wary of commercial appeal, the band said it didn’t want to make anthems, so before its next record its label 4AD passed Norton onto the opening act on the Muses' European tour, fellow Bostonian scenesters Pixies, who were looking for someone to record their next album, Doolittle. Though the histories of the two bands are deeply, famously entwined, the Muses have enjoyed a fate harder to identify than the burden of being hugely influential (even though they were in certain corners: It's almost impossible to imagine the visceral bleats of singers like Corin Tucker or Marissa Paternoster without Kristin Hersh). This moment of reunions, reissues, and boundless nostalgia seems a good time to ask: where did Throwing Muses fit in?
Anthology doesn't quite answer this question. Neither an exhaustive box set nor a greatest-hits collection, Anthology is more like mixtape personally compiled by the band, making a very characteristically Muses argument for the personal over the canonical, for a song’s appeal as something that's more subjective than objective. Though it eschews chronology and omits some of their most popular tracks (there’s only one song on here from 1991’s The Real Ramona-- and it’s the deep cut "Two Step"), Anthology is still an accessible entry point to the band’s formidably deep catalogue-- for the already initiated, it’s a relatively taut refresher.
The first disc is 21 tracks culled from major Muses releases, skewing heaviest on their late-80s output-- over half of the material comes from a three-year run that spanned the exquisitely dank Chains Changed EP to the somewhat brighter Hunkpapa in 1989. There are classics ("Fish", "Hate My Way", "Marriage Tree", "Bright Yellow Gun") and a few surprises ("Mr. Bones", "Two Step", "Pretty or Not"), but there’s a remarkable cohesion to the collection’s flow. When the band released its 2003 self-titled album after a long absence, even its biggest fans were kind of astonished at how well the group had been able to capture the sound and spirit of its earliest recordings. Two songs from that "reunion" album made the cut here: I'd bet anything that Anthology listeners coming to the band for the first time wouldn't be able to pick them out of the bunch without peeking at the liner notes.
Naturally, the B-sides and rarities disc is spottier-- I could live comfortably in a world without the tepid version of "Amazing Grace" or the instrumental "Manic Depression", which could pass for the interstitial music on an old Ken Griffey baseball video game. But once you get to the material from the Firepile EPs, it offers a killer middle stretch: "Snailhead" (featuring one of the most blistering Hersh vocals on the whole collection) segues into the smoldering slow-burner "City of the Dead". I’ve actually found myself spinning Disc 2 more than Disc 1, probably just because most of the material is fresher to my ears. It's not the most essential entry in their discography, but it's solid.
To some people, the word Anthology might promise something bigger or more definitive than what the Muses have given us here, but most fans will appreciate the personal flourishes all over this collection (especially Hersh's always poetic liner notes). Anthology isn't exactly a totemic bookend to Throwing Muses' long and lively career, but as the band’s 2003 record and upcoming reunion tour suggest, maybe there’s still too much life in them for a definitive ending. | 2011-09-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-09-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 6, 2011 | 8 | 4df2ac40-a3e4-4c88-b0e4-971f5fa33c44 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The dream-pop legends breathe new life into old songs on a slight, unsurprising, but reliably lovely EP of dreamy desert blues. | The dream-pop legends breathe new life into old songs on a slight, unsurprising, but reliably lovely EP of dreamy desert blues. | Mazzy Star: Still EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mazzy-star-still-ep/ | Still | For a band that moves at Mazzy Star’s glacial pace, progress must be measured in steps and inches rather than leaps and bounds. Still may be their first release in four years, but its four songs include an alternate version of the title track of their 1993 classic So Tonight That I Might See and two compositions that appear to have been kicking around since at least 2000. Nothing on the EP would sound out of place amid the dreamy desert blues of the band’s 28-year-old debut album, She Hangs Brightly.
That’s not to say that the Still is simply a retread of old ground. Opener “Quiet, the Winter Harbor” uses piano as its lead instrument, with David Roback’s guitar making its bow in the song’s second minute. This isn’t entirely without precedent. Uncut has reported that they performed the track live as early as 2000. In an audio clip apparently recorded at a London show the same year, the band plays a gorgeous, piano-based arrangement of “Look on Down From the Bridge” from 1996’s Among My Swan. But the EP’s lead single does mark a new and enchanting chapter in Mazzy Star’s recorded output.
The piano gives “Quiet” the feel of a muted torch song, its irresistible melody dampened by Hope Sandoval’s hushed delivery and Roback’s pointed restraint. In other hands—Adele’s, say—its straight-from-the-heart vocals might have ramped up to the kind of overwrought climax that sucks every last nuance into its emotional vortex. But Sandoval is as understated as ever. Her soft power precludes raising her voice, and it makes “Quiet” sound like a private plea to an absent-hearted lover. Roback adds twinkling touches of guitar, his simple melodic lines complementing rather than overpowering Sandoval’s words.
The only apparently new track on the EP, “Still,” marks another first for Mazzy Star: It is the least melodic piece they’ve ever committed to tape. Throughout their career, Sandoval has sporadically employed the same vocal style that’s present on the song, walking the line between spoken word and the drawl of a more ethereal Jim Morrison. Usually, this minimal approach is backed by enough instrumental dramatics to carry the song. But on “Still,” Sandoval’s vocal plays over a one-chord acoustic guitar thrash and overlapping violin drones, creating a fever-dream atmosphere that, while novel, sounds a bit like being laid up with the flu feels.
At just two minutes long, the song works best as an extended intro to the EP’s last track, the eight-minute “Ascension Version” of “So Tonight That I Might See.” This alternate take is one of the most savage listens in the Mazzy Star catalog, led by ominous organ notes and guitar feedback and ending in the kind of fuzzy guitar freakout a band might indulge in at the last show of an arduous tour. You can imagine this all working well in a live setting, where the audience could feel the crackle of the guitar pulse through the air. On record, though, it fails to deliver the transcendent experience a word like “ascension” promises.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the best track on Still is also the least groundbreaking. “That Way Again,” with its bluesy, country-rock feel, is classic Mazzy Star. Live recordings of the song from the band’s 2000 tour document a simple yet affecting acoustic lament that gently picks through the ashes of a failed romance. The new recording remains faithful to those early performances, adding only plaintive guitar lines that bring to mind the Rolling Stones circa Sticky Fingers.The result is a luscious late-night tearjerker that’s sure to earn a spot on cathartic breakup mixes. Mazzy Star’s pace may be slow—and Still may feel slight—but “That Way Again” is proof that their hearts still burn brightly. | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhymes of an Hour | June 6, 2018 | 7.1 | 4df611e8-4dcc-4f03-afe1-d15f0593f3aa | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
13 years after the death of his Go-Betweens partner Grant McLennan, Forster offers reflections with a spring in his step. | 13 years after the death of his Go-Betweens partner Grant McLennan, Forster offers reflections with a spring in his step. | Robert Forster: Inferno | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-forster-inferno/ | Inferno | A singer-songwriter with strong affinities for the boho life, Robert Forster has followed few of the dictates of what others might call a career. In the ’80s. he wrote an essay explaining what products to use on hair as boring as his. He titled a tune “I Love Myself (And I Always Have).” He records when he has enough songs to fill an album, which these days takes a while. About the only rock star thing he’s done in recent years is release a memoir, the most literate of the dozens by artists, boho ancestors included, who have also entered the memoir stage; Forster’s is written, not assembled.
Thirteen years after the death of his musical partner and best friend Grant McLennan put an end to the triumphant second-act return of the Go-Betweens, Inferno finds Robert Forster in a typically reflective mode, but one with a spring in his step. The man who often sang as if he were a library quiet room in human form finally gets caught out. Thanks to Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave, Beth Orton), Forster’s seventh solo album has a presence and warmth missing from 2015’s emaciated Songs to Play; it’s as if he thought his tunes then were so strong that they required no embellishment. From his wife Karin Bãumler’s violin in “One Bird in the Sky” to Earl Havin’s muted kick drum on manifesto “I’m Gonna Tell It,” Inferno tests Forster’s commitment to rock and roll: he wants it punchy but with folk and classical filigrees too. That’s fine—the Go-Betweens also made a career out of an ambivalent relationship to rock. Inferno won’t sell in the millions. Forster knows it. He sounds chipper anyway, as if saying, “Eh, fuck it.”
If Inferno should become his last record, then he’s circled back to his first: the Go-Betweens’ 1978 “Lee Remick”/“Karen” single, which praised a librarian for introducing him to Genet and Brecht. In those days, Forster came off as a virgin whose songs fashioned the images of the women he sought—the classic learning curve of the heterosexual poet. In Bãumler he’s found a musical and intellectual equal. He opens the record with William Butler Yeats’ poem “Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement,” set to a shuffling beat and piano lines that lighten an exchange between a woman who desires a love that takes “the whole body and soul” and a would-be male lover who would “scoff and lour” at her demands. Saving all this from preciousness are Bãumler’s keening background vocals: she plays a woman imprisoned by a poetic dude’s presumptions. Her violin also coaxes “Remain,” about Forster’s resolution and independence, into bloom.
Inevitable, really, that this Velvet Underground fan would find a simpatico partner in a musician who scratched welcome dissonances out of a string instrument. He thanked Bãumler as early as 1990’s “I’ve Been Looking for Somebody,” a passing angel jonesing for a smoke. “The party’s over, then she came,” he sang, atremble with gratitude. The rest of the band, dubbed by Forster the Magic Five, go tight or loose as the material requires, a marriage adapting to the times. Havin’s bongos and Scott Bromiley’s low sustained organ chords give “Life Has Turned a Page” a goofiness often missing in Forster’s work, equivalent at least to “that striped sunlight sound” description to which the Go-Betweens often aspired.
In 2008 Forster released The Evangelist, an album that wasn’t haunted by the ghost of Grant McLennan so much as Forster had made McLennan’s words into flesh, or, rather, his melodies. Forster’s partner wasn’t dead; he was right here, buoying “It Ain’t Easy” and “Demon Days.” Offering itself as a coda if, say, his non-fiction becomes more than a sideline, Inferno shimmies with the vigor of a man who can keep this up so long as the tunes, one a year if necessary, keep coming. Just don’t press him. As “One Bird in the Sky” reminds listeners, “I eat only when I eat.” | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tapete | March 9, 2019 | 7.7 | 4df93a57-1fd2-4b4f-a1c0-09f94f0edd59 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The former Gil Scott-Heron collaborator’s first solo album in over 20 years is forged in the vein of his work with the late poet, and rewrites some unfair narratives. | The former Gil Scott-Heron collaborator’s first solo album in over 20 years is forged in the vein of his work with the late poet, and rewrites some unfair narratives. | Brian Jackson: This Is Brian Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-jackson-this-is-brian-jackson/ | This Is Brian Jackson | It’s been over five decades since teenage piano protégé Brian Jackson first crossed paths with a thin bohemian beatnik named Gil Scott-Heron at Lincoln University, where the man who would go on to become a counterculture icon had a collection of poems to his name, but no record deal. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Scott-Heron had the prescience to invite Jackson to perform and co-write large sections of his first studio album, Pieces of a Man. That stone-cold classic was the first of nine LPs the two recorded together over the next nine years. Jackson received joint billing on the majority of these albums, but the credit didn’t make him one-tenth as beloved. Too often, public perception of their work has always been in line with the cover of their brilliant 1977 record Bridges: Scott-Heron, the star, in the foreground; Jackson in the back, a facilitator of Gil’s troubled genius.
The partnership fractured in the early 1980s: Scott-Heron eventually slipped into a creative wilderness and struggled with addiction, by which time he had taken Jackson’s name off their publishing rights, denying him years of royalties. They would eventually reconcile, but when Scott-Heron died in 2011, Jackson had spent much of the intervening years working as an information technology specialist at New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services. For a time, Jackson was angry. But leaving his day job has helped bring him back to his first love. “I had all this music in my head,” he recently told The New York Times. “I tried everything. And the only thing that worked was actually retiring.” This Is Brian Jackson is his first solo effort in over 20 years, a piece forged in the vein of his output with Scott-Heron that seeks to rewrite some unfair narratives.
This time, it’s Jackson who required a trusted collaborator. He found one in Daniel Collás, of the New York psychedelic soul collective Phenomenal Handclap Band, who serves as a producer and co-writer of five songs. On first listen, it’s difficult to determine the direct input Collás had on the sound of This Is Brian Jackson, which most closely resembles Jackson’s Bridges era: thick keyboards, analog synthesizers, funky guitars, jazz flutes. Hear how heavy the band squawks on the instrumental “C’est Cette Cométe,” or the satisfying funk of “Little Orphan Boy,” one of two songs here (alongside “Hold On”) that incorporate parts recorded in the 1970s on the revolutionary, room-sized TONTO synth. But easy to perceive are Collás’s bongos, congas, and timpani that underpin Jackson’s play and help propel the arrangements.
Opener “All Talk” stirs into life with the sound of Collás rapping the rawhide of his percussion instrument in a Latin rhythm. From there, Jackson’s Fender Rhodes ushers in some slick grooves and, in a wonderful voice—smaller than Scott-Heron’s beckoning baritone, but with no less conviction—delivers an exciting melody as he preaches social justice, peace, and love as the great healer. Similarly, “Force of Will” is dedicated to the inextinguishable human spirit in the face of adversity. Jackson may be speaking in broad generalities rather than directly engaging in specific modern political and social movements, but the nostalgic sound and undimmed energy evokes the activism of his youth: The heart of a radical still beats inside his chest.
The wingspan of This Is Brian Jackson stretches across history and continents. “Mami Wata,” a traditional composition that honors African water spirits, opens with chants indigenous to West Africa before sounds reminiscent of the Afro blues of 1960s and ’70s Nigeria and Ghana emerge. “Path to Macondo / Those Kind of Blues” is Jackson in conversation as he speaks directly to his listeners to redefine the relationship between slave songs and 20th-century blues music. “So don’t tell me that all the slave songs were about being sad and dejected and depressed, you know, and that’s where the blues came from, because that was just part of it,” says the 69 year old, the casual nature of the chat not dissimilar to parts of his late collaborator’s performance on I’m New Here. Like Scott-Heron’s last classic, This Is Brian Jackson is a salient reminder that great artists, no matter where they are on their journey, can rediscover themselves. | 2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | BBE Music | June 6, 2022 | 7.5 | 4dfb2787-41fa-42e8-a3fb-b2706d1173e2 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On his Fools Gold debut, the anxious and acerbic rapper knows he’s rounded a corner in his career, but remains on edge, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror. | On his Fools Gold debut, the anxious and acerbic rapper knows he’s rounded a corner in his career, but remains on edge, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror. | Chris Crack: Might Delete Later | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-crack-might-delete-later/ | Might Delete Later | Chris Crack has adapted to the streaming era like a runner to a hill. Seemingly emboldened by the demand for shorter songs, he’s turned the inhospitable dynamics of the attention economy into a personal challenge to be more visible, more fleet. Even when his songs are short they never feel breathless; they are filled with personality and purpose. Might Delete Later, his sixth album in 10 months, continues down this path and deviates from it, to mixed results.
There’s a victory-lap feeling to the record. Released by Fool’s Gold, Might Delete Later is Chris’ label debut, a fact that’s more a backdrop than a selling point. While the songs here are notably longer, and he works with artists and producers beyond his usual tight circle of Cutta and Jimi Wingate, Chris remains on edge. For every celebratory line like, “I ain’t going back to my villain ways/Shit, I’m stomping in Gucci, spilling this lemonade,” off “Poisonous Paragraphs,” there’s a sobering rejoinder like, “Our lives decided by them white mouths and shaded boxes,” from the same song. Chris knows he’s rounded a corner in his career, but his eyes remain glued to the rearview mirror.
That swing between relief and anxiety powers his stream-of-conscious raps, which are full of sharp turns that range from absurd to consoling. “Fapping Ruined My Life,” a hookless song reminiscent of Danny Brown’s J Dilla-influenced Detroit State of Mind mixtapes, bounces from insults to personal disclosures. “Said that it was jammin’ with your sister and your mama, and they sandwiched me/I handled it/Let me speak to management, that’s damagin’/Fuck this rap shit/Man, I’d rather be a good dad,” he raps, breaking the rhyme scheme for the last line. His verses are constantly splitting off and opening up, giving his songs a sense of propulsion and surprise.
The production is just as quicksilver, ranging from the silky soul loops Chris favors (“Jesus Dropped the Charges”) to horny R&B (“Creampies are Consensual”) to tinny G-funk (“Keisha Cole Slaw”). The album turns rudderless when Chris cedes the spotlight to guests, none of whom match his sense of economy or knack for color, but the varying production suits Chris well, especially in such quick succession. The three-song suite from “King of the Living Room” to “Raw Sex as Friends” showcases the elasticity of his voice, a quality that could be muted in his past albums, which would often inhabit a single mood or style for their entire runtime.
Though lively, the record’s shapeshifting isn’t always rewarding. From empty couplets like “10 bad bitches dancing ’round my house with pimp canes/Piccolo or Dende” and duds like “She a bird like Hitchcock” to the middling features, Might Delete Later misfires more than usual. And even when Chris’ focused, Might Delete Later lacks the self-discovery and introspection that’s powered Chris’ previous albums, especially 2020’s charmingly twee Cute Boys and pimp-inspired Washed Rappers Ain’t Legends. Where the record’s title implies vulnerability so risky it’s immediately regrettable, in practice Chris is often distant and mechanical, never quite baring his soul. Chris has found his footing in the algorithm, but he’s always been more interesting when he’s hellbent on hacking it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | February 23, 2021 | 6.7 | 4dfc6454-8148-4f92-a460-9509e3af3906 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
In the wake of the 2012 breakthrough LP Lucifer, Peaking Lights are now at the point where their humble recording project has become a full-fledged career, one that requires regularly breaking out of their cocoon. Cosmic Logic heralds a dramatic aesthetic shift where a once-mystical entity emerged as an extroverted force, as the band hardens their liquefied sound into more modular shapes and promotes vocals from textural detail to featured attraction. | In the wake of the 2012 breakthrough LP Lucifer, Peaking Lights are now at the point where their humble recording project has become a full-fledged career, one that requires regularly breaking out of their cocoon. Cosmic Logic heralds a dramatic aesthetic shift where a once-mystical entity emerged as an extroverted force, as the band hardens their liquefied sound into more modular shapes and promotes vocals from textural detail to featured attraction. | Peaking Lights: Cosmic Logic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19854-peaking-lights-cosmic-logic/ | Cosmic Logic | Psychedelia is traditionally a means of escape and out-of-body transcendence, but in the case L.A.-via-Wisconsin duo Peaking Lights, its function is more insular and grounding. For creative and life partners Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis, bliss really is a product of hugs, not drugs: their dubwise, synth-smudged psychedelic pop is as lyrically sentimental as it is musically ethereal, and offers proof that the hot-blooded rush of romance and the dizzying delirium of new parenthood are as potent as any chemical supplement. But in the wake of their 2012 breakthrough LP Lucifer, Peaking Lights are now at the point where their humble recording project has become a full-fledged career, one that requires regularly breaking out of their cocoon. Given that Coyes and Dunis’ music has always pointed a kaleidoscopic lens on their personal lives, it’s only natural that their sound has changed to reflect their new reality—both the joy of interacting with larger audiences, and the anxieties that result when domestic bliss is disrupted by the demands of making a living on the road.
For Peaking Lights, Cosmic Logic heralds a dramatic aesthetic shift similar to that undertaken by Animal Collective on Strawberry Jam or Beach House on Teen Dream, where a once-mystical entity emerged as an extroverted force, hardening their liquefied sound into more modular shapes, and promoting vocals from textural detail to featured attraction. And from a sonic standpoint at least, Cosmic Logic is a triumph, retaining the heady allure of the band’s earlier records but infusing it with enough rhythmic intricacy and fidgety energy to warrant a band-name change to Tweaking Lights. Within the album’s first three seconds, we’ve already been catapulted several galaxies beyond Lucifer’s subaquatic serenity: Where the beats on previous Peaking Lights albums rarely rose above a tick-tock titter, Cosmic Logic opener “Infinite Trips” surges forth with a thundering drum break that provides the bedrock on which Dunis’ calm coo squares off against space-bound synth oscillations and a Daydream Nation-esque guitar pattern.
The songs on Cosmic Logic are half as long as the ones on Lucifer, but equally stuffed with wondrous detail, giving these compact tracks the compressing effect of a squeezed-out toothpaste tube: “Little Light” craftily invokes both slow-motion dub drowsiness and peak-hour piano-house elation; the seemingly slumberous “Dreamquest” intensifies into a twitchy tropical funk; and “Eyes to Sea” piles on acid-house freakery until its titular incantation starts to sound like “ecstasy.” But even with the punchier, dancefloor-friendly presentation, there remains something comfortably cozy about the sound of Cosmic Logic—Peaking Lights may sound more eager to get crowds moving this time around, but they’d still sooner DJ a rager in your apartment living room than a superclub.
It’s too bad then that Cosmic Logic’s entrancing, otherworldly effects are diminished by some nursery-rhyme-naïve lyrics. Of course, Peaking Lights’ lyrics have never been especially deep (unless you’re referring to their traditional position in the mix). But Cosmic Logic forcefully flips their traditional script, placing Dunis’ voice high above the percolating productions where they were once deeply embedded within them. And, unfortunately, this can place undue emphasis on the inflexible quality of her voice and the rote, reductive nature of her words. She may be singing louder, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s become more emotionally expressive: “Telephone Call” (chorus: Telephone call, telephone call from space/ Calling all, calling all the human race”) feels less like a comment on our modern-day addiction to constant connectivity than the dumbstruck observations of someone who’s just awoken from a 20-year deep sleep and handed their first iPhone. The YACHT-rockin’ “Hypnotic Hustle” and digi-reggae groover “Breakdown”, meanwhile, render the manic rhythm of daily life as a strobe-lit ballet, but Dunis’ anodyne delivery feels oddly disconnected from the tension/release described within; even when she’s issuing explicit directives for us to get down, Dunis seems to be dancing like somebody’s watching.
But on the late-game electro-disco workout “New Grrrls”, Dunis fully acclimatizes to her new home in spotlight, and opens up to convey something more resonant than the simple, nondescript sloganeering proffered throughout much of Cosmic Logic. On the surface, the song is a roll call of trailblazing female heroes—from Kim Gordon and Yoko Ono to black-power activist Angela Davis and sex educator Betty Dodson—that feels like a shout-out to another song that was itself a series of shout-outs. But it’s a necessary update, wherein Dunis tries to reconcile her radicalized riot grrl past with her seemingly more prosaic present as a parent, and finds the two are fuelled by the same ire: “Can’t stop to be just a mom/ The choice to stay at home is gone/ Worker, lover, mother, wife/ Gotta do it all in this life.” And with that line, this album’s equilibrium-upsetting aural eclecticism comes into sharp focus: even if you’re not a working mom trying to function on four hours of sleep per night, the buzzing busyness and hallucinatory disorientation of Cosmic Logic are liable to make you feel like one. | 2014-10-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Weird World | October 6, 2014 | 6.5 | 4dfe00bf-3d1b-4d6b-8ae8-edd135c8a028 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Julianna Barwick's Will is a looser, less polished album than Nepenthe, and that rough-around-the-edges intimacy turns out to be a great part of its charm. | Julianna Barwick's Will is a looser, less polished album than Nepenthe, and that rough-around-the-edges intimacy turns out to be a great part of its charm. | Julianna Barwick: Will | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21782-will/ | Will | The voice may be the original instrument, as the groundbreaking experimental singer Joan La Barbara put it, but in Julianna Barwick's music, the voice itself isn't necessarily a point of origin. Layering and looping her often-wordless singing into hypnotic and otherworldly configurations, she enters her songs as though slipping into a stream. The music, she seems to say, precedes us, and it will outlast us; we don't so much carry songs as allow ourselves to be carried along by them, swept up in their current for a little while.
From the beginning, the Louisiana-raised, Brooklyn-based singer has used her voice as a means of stressing a sense of union with forces greater than oneself. It's something she learned growing up singing in church, but also singing alone, "so lost in it that I would cry," as she told Pitchfork. Her music joins the massing voices of the congregation with the wordless reverie of aloneness, and that union of togetherness and solitude is a big part of the unique emotional register she achieves. Collapsing oppositions like interior and exterior, self and other, her songs convey the sublimity of being immersed in an unfathomable vastness, of being part of an indivisible whole. Her music is deeply, powerfully emotive, but it doesn't so much express emotions as conjure them; it feels not so much like soaring through clouds as being made one with them.
Her last album, 2013's Nepenthe, marked a shift from working largely in solitude to collaborating with others: She traveled to Iceland and recorded with the Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, along with members of Múm and the string quartet Amiina. But Will moves in the opposite direction. Recorded in a variety of different places—upstate New York, North Carolina, Lisbon—it highlights Barwick's own voice in simpler configurations. It is a looser, less polished album than Nepenthe, and that rough-around-the-edges intimacy turns out to be a great part of its charm.
If her last album was a journey to the furthest edges of alien realms of sound, the opening song on the new album, "St. Apolonia," grounds us firmly in the here and now, with the distant hum of traffic wreathing her quavering vocal loops. The sumptuous reverb, a regular feature of her work, comes in this instance from architecture, rather than any trick of circuitry or silicon. That's no effects pedal, our ears tell us; that's an overpass. Where once she sang in the hollow of a tree trunk (the magic place referenced on 2011's The Magic Place), here she's wringing music from the hollows of the city, and throughout the album, the reverb around her voice suggests physical space rather than infinity; it's just one of the ways that Will scans as humble and homespun in comparison to Nepenthe's effortless opulence.
Beyond voice and natural reverb, the most frequently used instruments are reedy, inexpensive-sounding synthesizers and watery piano, the kind you might encounter at a distant relative's beach house—its strings gone faintly out of tune over the long, boarded-up winter. Melodies often feel like they're folding back in upon themselves: Her piano playing ruminates on repeated sequences, lingering on the same few notes and small, simple chords. On "Wist," heavy reverb pulls at her descending lines, blurring her words and tugging them back into the folds of the earth. You can tell that there are words in many of these songs, but the difficulty of teasing out their contours reinforces the impression that this is private music. She doesn't entirely turn her back on those grand, windswept vistas: "Same," with its wailing vocal harmonies and vibrating strings, has a real arms-thrown-wide-open, standing-before-the-void quality to it that contrasts nicely with the muted vibe of the rest of the album. And the closing "See, Know" is built around a delightfully incongruous synth lead, easily the most hi-def sound ever to grace one of Barwick's recordings.
Between the piano and the omnipresent hush, the record that Will most resembles is probably Grouper's Ruins (which, coincidentally, was also recorded in Portugal; the effects of saudade upon visiting musicians are apparently very real). But where Grouper's album was isolationist to the extreme, Barwick's never stops letting in the wider world. The swirling synthesizer loop of "Nebula," almost indistinguishable from a humming voice, recalls the gracefully spinning arpeggios of Meredith Monk's Book of Days; the simplicity of "Big Hollow" suggests Low at their most demure; the weightless ecstasy of "Same" fires up the same pain-and-pleasure centers as This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren." And something about the melody and atmosphere of "Wist" even brings to mind Swans' ethereal "Blackmail," as though heard resonating through a cistern. It's not that Barwick is imitating these songs, but it's impossible to shake the sense that she is picking up on fragments of a greater melody, a harmonic continuum, a song that belongs to all of us. Will may at first seem small, private, and modestly appointed—just a room with a piano, a synthesizer, and a looping pedal—but once you settle in, it feels as vast as the universe in there. | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dead Oceans | May 9, 2016 | 8.2 | 4e03d823-6426-4b14-be6c-2423030ba617 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
In the ’90s, Blige prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music. The hits on this collection show her just getting started. | In the ’90s, Blige prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music. The hits on this collection show her just getting started. | Mary J. Blige: HERstory Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-j-blige-herstory-vol-1/ | HERstory Vol. 1 | As a singer, Mary J. Blige didn’t have the church-choir precision of a Whitney Houston or the range of a Mariah Carey. What she did have was a bottomless well of soul and swagger. When she signed to Uptown Records in 1989, she began working with a guy named Sean Combs, then an employee at Uptown Records and still years away from being known as Puff Daddy. Together with the upstart producer, she prophesied a future in which hip-hop would be baked directly into pop music.
With her 1992 debut What’s The 411?, Blige folded the nascent sounds of hip-hop into her music and its aesthetic into her style. HERstory Vol.1, a box set available in 7-inch, LP, CD, and digital formats, reflects on that era and on Blige’s emergence as the “queen of hip-hop soul.” The collection, spanning singles, collaborations, and remixes, maps her early trajectory from “Real Love” all the way to 1997’s “Love Is All We Need.” Even alongside some of the most acclaimed rappers of all time—Jay-Z, Method Man, Nas, and Biggie—Blige pierces through.
To someone listening for the first time in 2019, her style might even sound dated. But even when they extracted influences from her sound, few singers could access her desperate yearning. Blige’s “Real Love” would serve as something of a blueprint for hip-hop soul—powerful hooks, smoky singing, slang-informed writing, and textured, sample-based beats that could easily be rapped over. “If I stay strong, maybe I’ll find my real love”—this ability to evoke pain, desire, and an iron will would characterize much of the rest of her career, elevating her as an icon of triumph and transformation. HERstory Vol.1 offers the reminder that she had that power as young as 18 or 19.
Long before it was the norm, Blige was forthcoming about the difficult circumstances that shaped her world. She’d endured childhood sexual abuse and a drug and alcohol addiction that began when she was 16. In her music, she imagined an escape from that misery, even if she couldn’t quite see it at the time. With her second album, 1994’s My Life, Blige grew from singer to songwriter, crafting some of the biggest hits of her career. Songs like “Be Happy” and her cover of Rose Royce’s 1976 soul single “I’m Goin’ Down,” steeped in the darkness of her own experiences, offered the mingling of agony and hope that became her signature. “All I really want is to be happy,” she begs on the hook of “Be Happy,” stretching a simple statement into something pained and profound.
She would soon realize that wish, escaping an abusive relationship, finding sobriety, and transforming into the anti-drama crusader we know her as today. “I am the living proof that any person going through any tragic situation in their lives, you can get out,” she said in a 2011 episode of VH1’s Behind The Music. Today, Blige enjoys “beloved auntie” cultural status; in recent years, she has been both a meme and a record-breaking Oscar nominee. When she made the music of HERstory’s first volume, she was just getting started.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | UMe | December 11, 2019 | 8.3 | 4e093ae8-1b70-432e-b469-a36a80730b73 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
The Chicago R&B upstart pairs with producer Steve Lacy for five tracks of inventive modernist soul. | The Chicago R&B upstart pairs with producer Steve Lacy for five tracks of inventive modernist soul. | Ravyn Lenae: Crush EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ravyn-lenae-crush-ep/ | Crush EP | When Steve Lacy, known for his work as part of the Internet and for composing one of the best beats on Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. using only his iPhone, was offered an opportunity to produce an EP for Chicago R&B upstart Ravyn Lenae, he went for it. “She’s so young and she’s not locked into a certain style or vocal range, so anything I’d give her, she’s like, ‘I got you.’” he told Beats 1 late last year. He looks at his relationship with Lenae as his Pharrell-Kelis or Timbaland-Aaliyah moment.
Those are bold comparisons, but Lenae and Lacy’s alchemy on Crush bears them out. When Lacy works with artists like Kendrick or Tyler, the Creator, he often pushes them to change their style to adapt to his own delicate style of soul and funk. With Lenae, they’re exploring together, and “Sticky,” the EP’s irresistibly catchy single, makes it clear they’ve found something special. On the song, Lenae’s not just proffering lyrics about a crummy relationship—she slips and slides through cadences over Lacy’s unconventional riffs, and her “woo-hoo-hoo”-ing is as muscular as the bass. She’s got the range to take on Lacy’s contemporary SoCal soul.
The 19-year-old singer’s past work—including stints touring with Noname and SZA—suggested an artist who doesn’t just want to be famous, but who wants to build herself a new musical world. Her first two EPs, produced by Chicago’s Monte Booker in 2016 and 2017, paired her soul-inspired vocals with his signature off-kilter beats. Their artistic success hinged on Lenae’s ability to find herself in the music, adapting her supple and versatile voice to the producer’s idiosyncratic palette.
The same ability makes her an ideal partner for Lacy. He gives Lenae a psychedelic guitar backdrop to coo and sing falsetto over on “Closer.” “Computer Luv” is a buoyant duet sung from in front of screens on separate sides of the world. Lenae and Lacy sing the hook in unison: “I shed a tear down/My face, drip and drown/My feelings into this one text/I wonder what is next/Will I catch real feelings for you?” People have been falling in love on the internet since it came on a free AOL diskette, and in 2018, meeting online is mundane. Even so, the pining is still real, and “Computer Luv” captures that longing in the interplay between Lenae’s and Lacy’s vocals.
That strikingly personal tone persists throughout Crush, which makes sense: If you spend your summer vacation on tour with SZA, the current queen of expressing the many shades of heartache, you might well come home a more detailed lyricist. Even when Lenae is singing about something as ordinary as getting ready to go out on “The Night Song,” it’s not about looking hot, it’s about loving yourself: “I wanna be no one but me/I give a thang ‘bout what you say or think.” She makes pre-party primping sound more meditative than superficial—and as with nearly every song on this remarkable EP, she sounds utterly self-assured as she does it. It’s the sound of a promising young talent maturing into her own signature style. | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Three Twenty Three | February 13, 2018 | 7.9 | 4e0a0312-cc48-4367-aafd-454fd0d00ddd | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
null | null | Echo and the Bunnymen: Crocodiles / Heaven Up Here / Porcupine / Ocean Rain / Echo & The Bunnymen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11727-crocodiles-heaven-up-here-porcupine-ocean-rain-echo-the-bunnymen/ | Crocodiles / Heaven Up Here / Porcupine / Ocean Rain / Echo & The Bunnymen | So what kind of drugs do you think it was? I only ask because it seems fairly obvious that Echo & The Bunnymen were a band christened during a period of impaired judgment. I can see it sounding funny on a drunk Saturday evening, but to seriously go through with it and start releasing albums under the name The Bunnymen (Echo was their drum machine) is just beyond reason, not only because it's a silly name, but because it's a name that engenders skepticism immediately when you say it. I can't count the number of times I've found myself saying, "No, seriously, they're really quite good once you get past the name," to someone unfamiliar with their work. And the fact is, they really were a good band in their day (and actually still are in their reconstituted form today), but it's hard to find anyone who really takes them all that seriously.
Granted, there are reasons aside from their moniker that people might shy away from Echo & The Bunnymen. Ian McCulloch's (melo)dramatic, psychedelic crooner vocals and frequent forays into quasi-religious lyrical imagery are something you just have to accept without overthinking it, but the fact is that this band made that kind of stuff sound great. The Liverpool quartet created an absolutely huge sound on record to match their frontman's flair for grandiosity, and they bore it to you on the backs of bassist Les Pattinson and drummer Pete DeFreitas, a rhythm section whose sheer power and imagination is chronically overlooked.
Listening back to the band's five original albums on Rhino's excellently remastered reissue series in an age when rhythm is returning to the fore of the underground, it's hard not to notice just how charged and visceral some of these records were. The epitome is "Back of Love", from 1983's Porcupine, an album that initially wasn't even released stateside, but in hindsight proves to be the band's definitive statement. "Back of Love" is simply the astonishing highlight of the group's career, featuring frenetic drumming, laser-focused basswork and Will Sergeant's choppy, heavily delayed guitar chords. The way the music drops out of the treble range and yields to a deep, miles-thick synthesizer groan behind McCulloch's frantically shouted chorus is disorienting and breathtaking-- it's an anthem for adrenal glands.
Porcupine was loaded with songs like that, unfolding with the cascading stomp of "The Cutter", one of the band's best singles with its weird, elastic synthesizer melodies. While it showcases some of The Bunnymen's most aggressively rhythmic material, though, Porcupine also houses its share of strange, abstract material such as the title track and "My White Devil", songs that lurch on Spartan rhythms and mix disparate textures like Spanish guitar and cravenly artificial synthesizer, a fact that's led many to inaccurately characterize the album as the band's "difficult" record, something it's really not.
Of course, it's not as straightforward as its two predecessors, 1980's Crocodiles and 1981's Heaven Up Here. The Bunnymen hit the ground running, and their debut album is a stunning statement of purpose, with McCulloch already in full dramatic swing and the band at their most straightforward-- any band that uses as much reverb as this one is hard to label "raw," but "Pride" and "Do It Clean" nonetheless hit hard, and "Rescue", with Sergeant's massive opening riff, manages to turn a chorus that should sound like a plea into a rallying cry. Heaven Up Here ranges more widely, and makes motions toward the slightly funkier band that turned up on Porcupine on the aptly titled "Show of Strength" and "With a Hip", while also stretching out their theatrical side on the slow-burning, flute-laden "All My Colours" (also frequently referred to as "Zimbo" for McCulloch's weird, droning nonsense refrain).
The Bunnymen mellowed to a degree for their fourth album, the widely acclaimed Ocean Rain, but all it did was cause them to get weirder. The album is stuffed with queasy midtempo tracks and bizarre orchestration, but it's by no means impenetrable. The strangest song, "Yo Yo Man" limps through skewed verses, building to McCulloch's refrain, "I'm the yo yo man/ Always up and down," which triggers a startling interjection by vigorously bowed strings, percussion and Sergeant's spastic guitar. Most of the album is considerably less warped, but a chilly, haunted ambience settles over the whole recording like a fine dust.
The creative strain of recording Ocean Rain took a lot out of the band, and it took them three years to deliver a follow-up, in the form of their self-titled record, which is as odd a collision of commercial sensibility and inescapable weirdness as you're likely to find. The band's attempt to reach a wider audience worked out when they splattered the hook-heavy reverb bomb "Lips Like Sugar" all over American college radio, but the backward guitar solo on "Lost and Found" is more representative of the album as a whole. The sunnier production watered the band's sound down a bit, but they still managed to turn out "All in Your Mind", a throbbing beast of a pop song swimming in twitching guitar and aggressive synth bass, and god, that is so obviously Ray Manzarek of The Doors playing organ on "Bedbugs and Ballyhoo" that you don't even need the liners to clue you in-- it works almost purely on improbability.
The folks at Rhino have done an admirable job of expanding each album to include relevant bonus material, trucking out standout B-sides "Fuel" and "Angels & Devils" and some bone-crushing early live tracks, but they've also somehow managed to leave off "The Puppet" completely, and non-album singles "Never Stop" and "Bring on the Dancing Horses" are represented in atypical versions, which smacks of needless obscurantism. Still, these albums deserved another look, and the reissues offer a good one. If you've never heard The Bunnymen before, their career overview, Songs to Learn & Sing, is still the best introduction, but you can't go too wrong diving right into Porcupine. Either way, The Bunnymen are a band worth exploring-- you know, once you get past the name. | 2004-03-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-03-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | March 2, 2004 | 8.2 | 4e0a7261-fbeb-4567-9512-1d9876332112 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
After two albums of fantastic club-pop, the versatile UK duo dial back to a pastoral, folksy indie-electronica sound. | After two albums of fantastic club-pop, the versatile UK duo dial back to a pastoral, folksy indie-electronica sound. | Goldfrapp: Seventh Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11128-seventh-tree/ | Seventh Tree | One thing writers often don't give musicians enough credit for is the rationale for their restlessness. If a well-known pop artist alters their style-- especially if it deviates from a sound that made them a commercial success-- there's often this urge to label the musician as bored and impulsive, chasing new trends or jumping off bandwagons as if holding off stagnancy is their only motivation to test their creativity. It can be upsetting to longtime fans, but often times the only real hurdle to these new directions is unfamiliarity-- just look at Goldfrapp, who startled their earliest fans by shifting from the surrealistic elegance of their 2000 orchestral-pop debut Felt Mountain to a beat-heavy mid-decade run at the dance charts. With two hard-to-top electro-pop albums under their belts-- 2003's Black Cherry and 2005's Supernature-- it's safe to assume that Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are perfectly happy with getting some closure on what they've accomplished in the last few years and are moving on to something else out of a feeling more substantial than impatience. It was unprecedented enough that a group which started out trafficking in cabaret eeriness and cinematic grandiosity would ease so naturally into club-pop, so it's not out of the question that dialing back to pastoral, folksy indie-electronica would unearth another side of a duo that was shaping up to be one of the decade's most versatile.
So how could a group that's already established success with slow, lush ballads-- think 2000's "Pilots", 2003's "Forever", or 2005's "You Never Know"-- release an album filled with a whole bunch of uncompelling attempts at them? It could be because Goldfrapp's best songs, regardless of how downbeat they were, at least had something to grab the ear melodically, where most of the material on Seventh Tree focuses more on subtle, slow-moving ambience. This ambience is often so subtle and slow-moving it doesn't seem to go anywhere, and it coasts on some frothy sense of pleasantness that evaporates the moment the song ends. Like the bulk of the album, there's a certain beauty in opener "Clowns", but it's an empty one-- more lullaby than pop song, it's symptomatic of what happens when you take all the grandeur out of big sweeping melodies.
Other songs attempt to use these flimsy backdrops to build up to big, epic crescendos-- the Nick Mason drums cutting into the narcoleptic Air-circa-Virgin Suicides swoon in "Little Bird"; the latter-day Moby bombast that rears its head in the second half of "A&E"'s Sarah McLachlan-isms-- and it feels false and gratuitous, as if it were the only way to maintain any actual momentum. At its best-- the desolation of "Cologne Cerrone Houdini" and "Some People", which inject the ambience with a much-needed eeriness-- this stuff's fairly soothing; at its worst it evokes that old "Mystery Science Theater 3000" bit about the two-note chords of New Age music: "Put your finger down here...now put another finger down...now hold it down for an hour...now hold it down 'til you get a record contract from Windham Hill." At least "Caravan Girl" provides a nice, upbeat Neu!-meets-ABBA distraction, but it's too little too late.
All of Gregory's codeine melodies would be a lot more salvageable, however, if Alison undercut it with the trademark strengths of her voice. It's what made the Marlene Dietrich mood of Felt Mountain so intriguingly weird, while Black Cherry and Supernature would have simply been slightly-above-par electro-glam ephemera without her Kylie-gone-sinister purr. But she's not assertive or seductive or mysterious here; what she's offering is the kind of mannered, chirpy delicacy you could get from any number of indie-folk and adult contemporary artists piped through off-brand coffeehouses everywhere. There's still some interesting dissonance in hearing this fragile version of Goldfrapp's voice wrap around lyrics that occasionally match the ominous nature of her older songs; "A&E", shallow as it sounds, hints at a pill overdose.
But with all the excitement and decadence drained out of the music and the voice, the trite themes stand out a bit more clearly: you can be happy if you give money to people who promise to make your life better ("Happiness"); birds have wings and are free ("Little Bird"). That's assuming you can understand Goldfrapp's lyrics in the first place, since she mumbles incoherently and is muffled under a swampy mix through half the record, which only highlights the feeling of sleepy halfheartedness. Even if Seventh Tree is sonic dishwater, I'll give Goldfrapp enough credit to assume that this isn't change for its own sake, that the motivation for this album's tone wasn't simply a fatigued boredom with their old sound. It's just too bad most listeners won't be able to say the same about their own reactions to this new one. | 2008-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | February 25, 2008 | 4.6 | 4e0b03b3-8fd4-4e88-bc34-f1d1873937c5 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The New York-based composer’s newest project with the Attacca Quartet highlights the significance of language while exploring the narrative potential of contemporary classical music. | The New York-based composer’s newest project with the Attacca Quartet highlights the significance of language while exploring the narrative potential of contemporary classical music. | Caroline Shaw / Attacca Quartet: Evergreen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-shaw-attica-quartet-evergreen/ | Evergreen | Caroline Shaw has demonstrated time and again that her Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices was no fluke. In the nine years since the achievement, Shaw has continued to prove her compositional prowess, creating imaginative works for solo instruments, orchestra, percussion, and various chamber arrangements. In 2019, the New York-based composer teamed up with the Attacca Quartet for their first collaborative record, the wild and wide-reaching Orange. Their second project together, Evergreen, expands this partnership by exploring the relationship that contemporary classical music has with language, narrative, and nature.
Evergreen unfolds in distinct parts. It begins with Shaw’s composition “Three Essays,” a 2018 work inspired by language, in particular the lilting prose style of novelist Marilynne Robinson. Each “Essay” has its own unique topography defined by varying string techniques, deliberate pacing, and vibrant dynamics brought to life by the Attacca Quartet’s interpretation. Highlight “Second Essay: Echo” begins with the gritty crunching of the bow against strings, as if bark is slowly breaking underneath heavy footsteps. Shared breath is audible from the musicians, each sniff or light gasp signaling the quartet’s performance as a singular, unified force. The capricious “Third Essay: Ruby” foregrounds puckish pizzicato and longing Romantic lines that give way to explosive non-resolutions. Shaw makes strategic use of pizzicato throughout Evergreen, employing the articulation to build suspense like many composers before her (Johannes Brahms, for example, notably did this in the third movement of his piano quintet).
While “Three Essays” directly references language and the written word, Evergreen also highlights the physical voice. Shaw sings throughout the record; its closing piece, for example, is a 5/4 vocal setting of the French poem “Cant voi l’aube.” Her vocal standout is the angelic “And So,” a reimagining of the immortal Shakespearean “What’s in a name?” monologue from Romeo and Juliet. Originally composed for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, “And So” feels more personal and intimate on Evergreen, given the smaller size of the ensemble. Above the quartet’s tentative and smoky strokes, Shaw wonders: “Would a song by any other name sound as sweet and true?” The contour of the composition follows each question she poses; her voice rises in volume and pitch with the line, “If you were gone/Would I still know [...] how to grow?” And when Shaw asks “Would scansion cease to mark the beats if I went away?” the strings pulse methodically, as if marking stresses above each word of a handwritten poem; when she mentions the word “time,” pizzicato plucks mirror a ticking clock. This tone painting also occurs in “Other Song,” a modest, reflective reinterpretation of a track from Shaw’s 2021 album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with Sō Percussion. Here, her voice slides upward on the word “higher,” glazing through several notes to eventually land on its target, an effect the strings first explored in “First Essay: Nimrod.”
The focal point of the record, “The Evergreen,” encompasses the imagery central to each of its four movements. Take the first, “Moss.” Moss is a plant that lies on the exterior of other natural structures; its tendrils exist without roots and only become solid when they are compressed together. Shaw’s composition parallels this property: The strings’ fluttering harmonics float above the head throughout; they rarely dip below the surface to a wider, more settled sound, and when they do it is only transitory. By contrast, the last movement, “Root,” feels immediately grounded, opening with the lowest instrument in the quartet, the cello, digging itself into the ground with a rocking, anchored melody. Shaw begins Evergreen by establishing a connection between contemporary classical music and narrative style; by the end, she has shown that in the right hands, music can be just as descriptive as literature. | 2022-10-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | October 3, 2022 | 7.6 | 4e0bfaa0-4b20-430c-bf7c-b279f6ee7543 | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
The Singaporean indie pop trio’s second album sparkles, but under all the glitter, there are somber truths about love’s uncertainties. | The Singaporean indie pop trio’s second album sparkles, but under all the glitter, there are somber truths about love’s uncertainties. | Sobs: Air Guitar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sobs-air-guitar/ | Air Guitar | Sobs are a sunny oasis in the melancholy landscape of Singapore’s indie scene. The trio’s debut album, Telltale Signs, exuded defeatist languor and ended with an exasperated sigh, capturing the frustration that emerges when a relationship lacks direction. While their scuzzy guitar-pop was reminiscent of Frankie Cosmos and Jay Som, underneath their lush dream pop arrangements were snappy hooks and danceable sensibilities. Even then, Sobs’ pop ambitions felt larger than anything their bedroom stylings could ever hold.
Sobs’ second album, Air Guitar (and their first for U.S. indie rock label Topshelf Records), is a full-fledged realization of those pop aspirations. During a period of burnout in the four years since Telltale Signs, vocalist Celine Autumn briefly stepped away from her guitar and instead embraced the effervescence of hyperpop. Although guitarists Jared Lim and Raphael Ong had brought some sheen to Sobs’ music in the past, Autumn’s self-titled solo EP as Cayenne was pure pop gloss. Co-produced with Lim, Cayenne was a sugar rush, replete with carbonated synths, glitchy distortion, and magnetic hooks. Sobs blend that same fizzy pop production with their summery indie rock on Air Guitar—the album glitters without blunting the trio’s sharp edge.
Sobs don’t just offer a snapshot of Singapore’s indie rock scene on this record; they also sketch a history of guitar-driven indie pop. The narrator comes smartly prepared for inevitable rejection on “Last Resort,” but the ‘80s new wave shimmer evokes the teenage nostalgia of obsessing over a kiss in your bedroom. The song is a rosy fantasy, even as its protagonist anxiously awaits abandonment. Elsewhere, frustrations on “Lucked Out” are masked in the sweetness of compact, jangly arrangements that recall acclaimed Japanese indie pop group Advantage Lucy. The fuzzy static of “Burn Book” evokes Singaporean shoegaze band Cosmic Child—whose frontman Zhang Bo plays bass and guitar on a few tracks here—but adds a spark with a twinkling riff straight out of Midwest emo.
Bedroom pop’s intimate sensibilities still inform Sobs’ lyrics. Across the record, Autumn plays a passive character, trapped in a relationship that should have ended long ago. On the bright bubble-grunge of the title track, she comes to grips with the romance’s shortcomings: “Your lips don’t taste the same, you’re no longer mine/You’re not worthy of the fight,” she professes. Gutless to properly end things, the song buries its remaining sheepish confessions like whispers under a distorted guitar. The spirited guitar line at the end of the song makes Autumn’s last attempt at escape feel even more momentous, despite her resignation. “Friday Night” recounts a similar predicament: Autumn drifts through a cramped house party, her nervousness fading to disappointment as she laments yet another emotionally unavailable partner. In a flash, “Friday Night” conceals her despair as the saccharine power pop transforms into an electric drum’n’bass breakdown.
One painful realization after another, Air Guitar is candy-coated without dulling the pain of heartbreak. If Autumn isn’t surrendering to the reality of an absent and thoughtless partner, then she’s helplessly pleading for someone more reliable. “Please don’t call me back, ‘cause I don’t want to hurt you,” she begs on “LOML,” exhausted from the fatigue and uncertainty. But there are also clear moments that disavow that pessimism, like the earnest and tender power pop of “World Implode.” Sobs translate the cyclical feeling of falling and out of love into gleaming, guitar-led confections across Air Guitar, exuberantly delivering on the promise of going big. | 2022-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Topshelf | November 9, 2022 | 7.5 | 4e123f5e-1dde-4e0b-a77e-8f2b56b1e197 | Michael Hong | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-hong/ | |
A Sunny Day in Glasgow's latest and best album has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it sound a bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy. | A Sunny Day in Glasgow's latest and best album has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it sound a bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy. | A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Sea When Absent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19478-a-sunny-day-in-glasgow-sea-when-absent/ | Sea When Absent | What would shoegaze sound like if it had its eyes on the sky? Over the course of several albums, the intercontinental six-piece A Sunny Day in Glasgow have been toying with an answer to that riddle. Their latest and best record, Sea When Absent, has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it sound a little bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy. Beneath dense textures, melodies pop like fireworks. Like their previous albums, Sea When Absent doesn't sound like much else out there; genre tags are only worth mentioning to show how they don't quite fit. It sometimes sounds like a psych record, made not by the kids smoking up behind the bleachers but the most devoted members of the glee club.
Since their freewheeling 2007 debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal, A Sunny Day in Glasgow have flown under the radar, apart from any discernible trends. Until now, their greatest achievement has been their criminally under-heard 2009 album Ashes Grammar, a panoramic collection of pastel-soft dream-pop that moved fluidly between ambient passages and hazy but immaculately structured pop songs like "Failure" and "Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs)". Actually, "passionate introverts" is a pretty good way to describe at least one member of the band: the guitarist and ostensible leader Ben Daniels, a biostatistician who moved in 2009 from Philadelphia to Australia. "I am pretty antisocial," he said recently, when asked if he still felt connected to the Philadelphia scene. "I know that if I were in Philly I'd still mostly be hanging out in my apartment reading books and playing with synthesizers." That makes sense: Even in its most ambitiously full-screen moments, A Sunny Day in Glasgow's music has a certain bedroom-pop feel. Community often makes for great art, but music as unique and unclassifiable as ASDIG's usually springs from somebody shutting himself in his room and trusting his own weird way of seeing the world.
Ashes Grammar was a sprawling and occasionally drifting record, but Sea When Absent finds the band tightening up their sound just enough, bringing the interlocking vocals of their two singers, Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson, to the forefront of the mix. For the first time, they've brought on an outside producer, Jeff Zeigler (War on Drugs, Kurt Vile), and though he's helped clarify their sound, that doesn't come at the expense of complexity. Each song on Sea When Absent structured like a maze: it's easy—and dizzying in the best way—to get lost in its twists and turns. "The Things They Do to Me" begins as weightless, space-rock reverie and then abruptly makes a hard left into a more pastoral earth-bound soundscape; "The Body, It Bends" pivots between an unassuming acoustic folk tune and a song that ought to have its own laser light show at a planetarium; a towering riff crashes down in the middle of "Boys Turn Into Girls (Initiation Rites)", sudden as a summer storm. These tonal shifts are so dynamic that they sound fresh on every listen; you could hear these songs 100 times and they'd still find ways to catch by surprise.
Music that overflows with so many ideas runs the risk of sounding cluttered, but Sea When Absent manages to avoid that pitfall. And that's pretty impressive, given the disjointed way it was recorded: The six members of the band (Daniels, Goma, Fredrickson, drummer Adam Herndon, bassist Ryan Newmyer, and multi-instrumentalist Josh Meakim) are now scattered across Australia, New York, and Philadelphia, and the album came together as they sent each other snippets of songs, with creative decisions made via lengthy group email chains. The result is an album structured in layers with many overlapping ideas, as fragmentary and luminous as light through a prism. The sweetly singsong-y "MTLOV (Minor Keys)" has the feel of a round, with Goma and Fredrickson's voices braided into rich harmonies. Then there's the stone-cold gorgeous "In Love With Useless (The Timeless Geometry in the Tradition of Passing)", which flirts with moments of dissonance and glitchiness (the pre-chorus sounds like nothing so much as a poorly connected Skype call) only to make the moments of sudden clarity feel that much more satisfying.
When A Sunny Day in Glasgow put out "In Love With Useless" as a single, they also released a lyric video for it—which is kind of funny, because they're not exactly a "lyrics band." Granted, they've pushed the vocals higher into the mix this time around, but it's usually next to impossible to understand what Goma and Fredrickson are singing. Not that it matters; ASDIG's music is more about the experience of getting blissfully lost in a feeling, and if their music were too literal or word-based it might take you out of that odd, dreamlike state.
"When Ashes Grammar came out," Daniels recently recalled, "I thought it was a really loud rock record for a year, and then a friend was like, 'This is really chilled-out and ambient.'" With Sea When Absent, A Sunny Day in Glasgow have finally made that loud rock record—full of crashing percussion and screaming guitars—but without abandoning the ambiance that makes them so distinct. Sea When Absent has the quality of one of those spectacularly bright summer days when they color in everything seems a little over-saturated, and it induces the same dizzy, woozy feeling you get after staring directly at the sun. Play it loud enough to see spots. | 2014-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lefse | June 24, 2014 | 8.5 | 4e17436b-7e8e-4095-8d17-9f1a329f520d | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Vancouver’s atmospheric noisemakers team up with Norwegian dream-pop artist Tuvaband, whose luminous voice brings focus to the group’s sprawling avant-prog. | Vancouver’s atmospheric noisemakers team up with Norwegian dream-pop artist Tuvaband, whose luminous voice brings focus to the group’s sprawling avant-prog. | New Age Doom / Tuvaband: There Is No End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/new-age-doom-tuvaband-there-is-no-end/ | There Is No End | Bands that peg their name to their sound risk painting themselves into a corner, but on their earliest DIY recordings, Vancouver duo New Age Doom embraced truth in advertising. If not quite as gimmicky as their moniker might suggest—what if Laraaji made a Sunn0))) record, lol—releases like 2019’s self-titled anthology and 2020’s Himalayan Dream Techno staked out the middle ground between the cathedral and the commune, filtering heavy metal’s black-mass grandeur and percussive thunder through the free-flowing serenity and found-sound ingenuity of ’70s private-press ambient recordings. But since then, the New Age Doom name has come to represent less a cheeky genre mash-up than a guiding philosophy, a means to manifest the balance of natural beauty and apocalyptic chaos that governs life on Earth. Sure, New Age Doom are the sort of act who will set up shop on the street to startle unsuspecting passersby, but they also just might be the only noise band with their own brand of plant-based cashew dip.
Though centered on the core duo of guitarist Greg Valou and drummer Eric J. Breitenbach, New Age Doom have broadened their horizons on every album, often with help from collaborators. The most notable of these was 2021’s Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe, where New Age Doom and a team of guest players backed up the dub legend on the final album he recorded in his lifetime. Their new release enlists many of the same musicians—including Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and trumpet player Daniel Rosenboom—to support another vocalist, but the lead-role casting and musical approach couldn’t be more different. Where Guide to the Universe saw New Age Doom play a more subservient role to Perry, complementing their hero’s stream-of-conscious poetry with suitably zoned-out soundscapes, There Is No End has them constructing more concrete arrangements around the Norwegian dream-pop artist Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, aka Tuvaband, whose luminous voice functions as the beacon that guides them through the stormiest passages.
There Is No End builds a bridge between the two projects’ respective worlds. Its opening track, “In the Beginning,” expands upon an idea introduced on Tuvaband’s “By the Time You Hear This,” the centerpiece of her 2023 album New Orders, where Marschhäuser asks, “Is this the end of the start of the end of the start of the end/Or is it the start of the end of the start of the end of the start?” In their original context, those words seemed to address the uncertain status of a relationship, but on “In the Beginning,” she weaves a similarly cyclical sentiment into something more like a Zen koan: “In the beginning, I’m just beginning,” she states matter-of-factly, “and in the end there is no end.” New Age Doom put that doctrine into action with a track that slowly whips itself into a towering inferno of tambura melodies, transcendental trumpet flourishes, and surging percussive grooves, before everything comes crashing down at the six-minute mark. But what initially sounds like a dramatic, drum-set-toppling finale is actually a gateway to the song’s extended coda, where the expanded ensemble smashes and thrashes with furious intensity for five more minutes until the clamor gives way to clarity.
The greater melodic definition and more purposeful song structures of There Is No End aren’t a complete surprise. For all the group’s avant-drone acumen, New Age Doom’s roots are in power pop: Breitenbach is also a member of Canadian alt-rock hitmakers Limblifter, a band that’s shared membership with the New Pornographers and whose lead singer, Ryan Dahle, serves as the mixing and mastering engineer here. The New Age Doom crew also includes Cola Wars, better known as Sloan’s longtime keyboardist, Gregory MacDonald. There Is No End is hardly a wellspring of jangly guitars and sun-kissed harmonies, but it does belong to a venerable lineage of adventurous, worldly rock music that connects the mid-’70s Middle Eastern fascinations of Led Zeppelin, the klezmer-powered crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the recent microtonal explorations of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, making this the sort of experimental album that could still be embraced by people who think Bandcamp is a place you go to learn the cello in the summer.
But on a record that features such eclectic noisemakers as gongs, saz, and marxophone, Marschhäuser’s voice remains the most captivating and commanding instrument, whether it’s the focal point of a song or a subliminal texture within it. “Fearless Talisman” is essentially seven minutes of Breitenbach bashing out a ricocheting backbeat while the brass section unloads the psych-jazz firepower, but the emergence of Marschhäuser’s wordless choral incantations reframe this manic jam as a mournful elegy for a world gone mad. And with There Is No End’s closing title track, she’s given the space to showcase the mercurial qualities of her voice. Like the album’s opener, it riffs on a circular end-is-the-beginning logic, but where the joyful noise of “In the Beginning” signified rebirth, “There Is the End” is imbued with regret. For its first four minutes, the song resembles the sort of tranquil, sax-sweetened indie-pop ballad that wouldn’t sound out of place on Tuvaband’s own records. But after shifting into a Portishead-like dub-noir groove, her words suddenly seem less vulnerable than vindictive, transforming the most heartfelt track on the record into its most haunting. When they released their anarchic first recordings four years ago, there was little to suggest Valou and Breitenbach would ever steer the project toward music as sophisticated, dramatic, and emotionally layered as this. But with There Is No End, they’ve successfully updated their doom for a new age. | 2023-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | We Are Busy Bodies | November 1, 2023 | 7.6 | 4e180c32-d3c8-40c3-9b78-9f3169fcdf77 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The UK band stakes out even more ground on their glorious second album. The chord changes are more elaborate, the rhythms more twisted, the pretty parts prettier, the heavy parts heavier. | The UK band stakes out even more ground on their glorious second album. The chord changes are more elaborate, the rhythms more twisted, the pretty parts prettier, the heavy parts heavier. | Black Midi: Cavalcade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-midi-cavalcade/ | Cavalcade | Let’s start with the ending, an orchestral finale so grand it might as well come with a title card attached: That’s all, folks! The last two chords of Cavalcade, black midi’s second album, form a harmonic exclamation point that would have been recognizable to listeners even centuries ago, indicating that it was time to pack up their opera glasses and head home. After the previous 40 minutes of Cavalcade, an avant-rock labyrinth of maddening intricacy, navigated without any such conventional signposts, this is a perverse way to wrap things up. Arriving with an abrupt cut from the full band’s pummelling and caterwauling, the gesture’s familiarity makes it unsettling, surreal, like the punchline to an obscure joke. How could a record so full of noise and contradiction ever end on such a fine point?
black midi became a sensation among adventurous rock listeners almost immediately after releasing their first single in 2018, and with good reason. They were just out of high school but played like they’d been woodshedding for decades. There was something almost obscene about their early performance videos, that those gawky kids were playing like this. The giddiness you felt upon watching was not unlike that of seeing a particularly outrageous internet meme. They seemed to have completed multiple lifetimes worth of left-field listening by the time they made Schlagenheim, their debut album—The Fall, Touch and Go post-hardcore, Miles Davis in the ‘70s, King Crimson in the ‘80s—and channeled those touchstones in songs that were exuberant and alive rather than fussy and reverent.
The excitement had something to do with their dazzling instrumental expressiveness; drummer Morgan Simpson, especially, was like a free-jazz virtuoso going undercover in a punk band. It also involved guitarist and de facto frontman Geordie Greep, whose hectoring anti-charisma may be the band’s most distinctive element, whether you love his free-associative rants or wish he’d dial them back just a hair. (For me, and I suspect plenty of other fans, it’s a little of both.) Finally, there was the sense that black midi were discovering their powers in real time as you listened, an impression they heightened with frequent onstage improvisation. For all the hours they’d evidently spent doing their homework, the music never felt charmlessly studied or proficient. It was raw.
If there was any pressure to flatten out their idiosyncrasies for Cavalcade, they clearly rejected it. The album is a good deal more ambitious and more difficult than its predecessor, stretching even further in almost every direction that Schlagenheim staked out. The chord changes are more elaborate, the rhythms more twisted, the pretty parts prettier, the heavy parts heavier. Schlagenheim aspired toward jazz fusion and 20th-century classical; Cavalcade has passages that sound like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Olivier Messiaen. Schlagenheim had its fair share of dopey-awesome metallic grooves and guitar parts; Cavalcade comes thrillingly close, a handful of times, to Primus or System of a Down. Greep, who handles vocals on six of the eight songs, has upped his flair for the theatrical, abetted by new contributors on sax, violin, and keyboards. Listening to Schlagenheim, it was easy to imagine black midi kicking out the jams in a basement somewhere. Now, the imagined setting is more like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, or a three-ring circus. There is a vague but persistent feeling that someone involved might be wearing a monocle.
“John L,” the album’s first song, is also its most broadly representative. The central theme creaks and lurches like a see-saw in need of WD-40 and Greep slurs out a portrait of a cultish political leader at the end of his rope. When the singer takes on the voice of John L himself, offering his followers a blend of nationalist fear and capitalist wish fulfillment, a grotesque vocal effect enters the mix to underscore the message’s dark familiarity: “A man is his country, your country is you/All bad is forewarned, all good will come true.” When there’s simply too much going on, the band creates powerful tension by paring things away: deconstructing their own groove in the song’s electrifying middle section, or plunging into cavernous silence between outbursts of drums and violin.
In building so elaborately atop the black midi framework, Cavalcade loses a bit of Schlagenheim’s spartan urgency; there’s nothing like “Near DT, MI,” the Flint water crisis cri de cœur that provided the debut with its most searing two-minute stretch. But the band’s willingness to indulge every impulse also leads them to wild new territory. “Slow” and “Diamond Stuff,” the two songs fronted by bassist Cameron Picton (who also led “Near DT, MI”) are among the best in the black midi catalog. The former’s manic prog-jazz pounding imagines a surprisingly fruitful middle ground between Swans and Steely Dan. The latter is eerie and spacious, transfixing without rising above a whisper.
There’s an aesthetic developing among jazz-schooled and internet-fried musicians like Louis Cole or DOMi and JD Beck, propagated on YouTube and social media more so than on proper albums, which has brought youthful new verve to wonky old virtuosity by acknowledging that there’s something a little funny about being able to play so ridiculously well. Whether intentionally or not, black midi have always had a bit of this quality—something like a joyous Are you fucking kidding me? was an appropriate reaction to those early live videos—and they bring it closer to the surface on Cavalcade. It’s there in that queasy-beautiful final cadence, and in the wink of the chord progression that underpins the verses of “Ascending Forth,” the closing song, which ascends by a fourth whenever Greep hits the titular phrase. It’s there in “Slow” and “Hogwash and Balderdash,” both of which feature variations on the same musical gag: in the middle of an intensely technical passage, the band suddenly drops out, leaving a single instrument to jitter nakedly for one measure or less before everyone barrels back in. More than any particular rock artist, it reminds me of Carl Stalling, the brilliant house composer for Looney Tunes.
When Cavalcade is at its most antic and cerebral, the “rock” part of the black midi equation becomes almost ancillary, like they could just as easily be exploring the same regions if they were free improvisers or composers for orchestra. The music’s relentless complexity, insularity, and high drama can be challenging even for a listener predisposed toward those qualities. The band seems to understand this, and they are more willing to meet you in the middle than you might think. Again and again, as a given song teeters toward lunacy, they return to primal call-and-response: one, two; a bang, then a crash; the rumble of a power chord followed by the wail of a sax. These moments are consistently among the album’s most satisfying, perhaps because of the relief they provide from an otherwise overwhelming procession of big ideas. They repeat a few times, you bang your head and catch your bearings, then the cavalcade continues.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | May 28, 2021 | 8 | 4e1c38eb-2f81-4e15-b4b8-1bf41c55fc61 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Memphis-based rockers crank out their third full-to-bursting LP of jarring garage-rock that transcends the genre through its deep knowledge of local and national pop and soul. | Memphis-based rockers crank out their third full-to-bursting LP of jarring garage-rock that transcends the genre through its deep knowledge of local and national pop and soul. | Reigning Sound: Too Much Guitar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6922-too-much-guitar/ | Too Much Guitar | Despite its somewhat questionable reputation as the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Memphis is a city marked by death. In addition to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination at the Lorraine Motel, Elvis croaked at Graceland; Al Jackson Jr. was murdered in his home; Otis Redding died in a plane crash; David Prater died in a car crash; Stax went under and was torn down; Chris Bell drove into a telephone pole off Poplar Avenue; Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River. Ineluctable tragedy has seeped into Memphis' mythology and mindset, as pervasive as muddled civic government, and it bubbles out through the city's music.
Not many Memphis musicians understand this municipal obsession with mortality as well as Greg Cartwright, who fronted the 90s noise-rock trio The Oblivians until the group disbanded in 1997. Afterwards, he formed the Reigning Sound with three other local musicians, releasing Break Up Break Down and Time Bomb High School, two full-to-bursting albums of jarring garage-rock that transcended the genre through its impossibly deep knowledge of local and national pop and soul. On their new album, Too Much Guitar, the Reigning Sound make it clear that they would be playing the same songs with or without that genre's recent revival.
Not that the garage-rock trend has been especially good to the band. After Time Bomb High School, the Reigning Sound were on the verge of breaking up, held together by the power of a dozen or so new songs and the promise of studio time. Guitarist/keyboard player Alex Greene left in 2003, which left Cartwright, bassist Jeremy Scott, and drummer Greg Roberson, the latter two forming a tight-as-ever rhythm section reminiscent of their Stax forebears. Splitting time between Memphis and North Carolina and recording several tracks in Cartwright's now-closed Legba Records store, they brought in a few local musicians-- including Alicja Trout and Jay Rensley of Lost Sounds-- to create an album full of stomping backbeats, scorching guitars and soulful melodies.
On the opener, "We Repel Each Other", the band promise to live up (or down) to the album's cheekily self-critical title: Cartwright's voice is buried beneath piles of guitar noise, as if he's singing from six feet under. It's an odd tactic: Cartwright is blessed with an amazing voice for the music he plays, able to convey defeat and defiance, hangdog sadness and poisoned disdain, all in the same breath. At points on Too Much Guitar, he's barely audible-- although you hear more of him with each listen. However, the album's messy production exponentially increases its raw spontaneity and desperate urgency.
Not surprisingly, death informs much of the record, which directly equates love and loss. Songs like "If You Can't Give Me Everything" and "I'll Cry" lament the end of a relationship as if performing an exorcism. Even when a song celebrates romance-- such as the cover of Sam & Dave's "You Got Me Hummin'"-- fear always countervails happiness and contentment, making these songs seem restless and gloomily resigned to love's futility. Or, as Cartwright sings on "Funny Thing", "Love is a funny thing/ You don't know it's real 'til it's caused you pain."
Sometimes death is very literal, as on "Drowning", which begins ominously: "I went walking the other day/ Under the bridge to Arkansas." He promises to tell us what he saw, but only mentions that the sparkle in her eyes died. On one of the album's standouts, "Let Yourself Go", Cartwright sings, "Keep your feelings inside/ All your thoughts of suicide/ Oh, let yourself go." He's not promoting death, but exhorting listeners to "live your life like the end is near." Cartwright seems to be heeding that advice: Despite being so recently in the throes of their own demise, the Reigning Sound sound lively and vital as ever. | 2004-08-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-08-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | In the Red | August 19, 2004 | 8.3 | 4e1e3a23-ee9d-479e-977d-47a7e5f21170 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
This Brighton bass-and-drums duo have swiftly become the most universally deified emergent UK rock band since the Arctic Monkeys first thawed out eight years ago. But by using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA. | This Brighton bass-and-drums duo have swiftly become the most universally deified emergent UK rock band since the Arctic Monkeys first thawed out eight years ago. But by using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA. | Royal Blood: Royal Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19814-royal-blood/ | Royal Blood | In the year 2014, the only thing more tired and predictable than mainstream rock is the perpetual reports of its demise. But then, the gatekeepers of tradition need us to believe rock is dying in order to keep selling us a new resurrection narrative, like any consumer product in the mature phase of its life cycle and in need of a good marketing hook. But the audience for rock music never disappeared, it merely pluralized. Classic-rock radio may still play Black Sabbath alongside the Eagles and the Police, but the modern-day descendants of those bands are now funneled through discrete radio formats that serve different demographics. When you consider the combined festival-filling fanbases for metal, indie, and new country (and whatever derisive invented subgenre you’d apply to bands like Magic!), there’s still a healthy demand for songs played on plugged-in guitars and backed by bass, drums, and (budget permitting) pyro. Rock may no longer be the center of popular culture, but it still occupies vast amounts of space around it. When purists lament its supposed death, what they’re really lamenting is not so much the disappearance of guitar-strapping bands as a dearth of ones we can all believe in.
Still, this circumstance has never stopped the British music press from making a weekly sport of anointing new saviors for the country to rally around. And with Royal Blood, they've hit the jackpot: the Brighton bass-and-drums duo have swiftly become the most universally deified emergent UK rock band since the Arctic Monkeys first thawed out a decade ago. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Royal Blood share management with the Monkeys, whose drummer Matt Helders famously endorsed the then-unknown band through a t-shirt shout-out at Glastonbury last year.) Royal Blood’s self-titled album debuted at No. 1 in the UK last month and was nominated for the Mercury Prize shortly thereafter; now that they’re already duking it out on the top of the charts with the likes of Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran a mere year after their formation, Royal Blood are, for many young Britons, not just The Only Band That Matters, but The Only Band, period.
It’s not as if Royal Blood have been actively advertising their messianic qualities; if anything, they’ve been quick to defuse any such hyperbole. And yet, a little self-aggrandizing swagger would go a long way in making Royal Blood seem like they have any aspirations beyond just cranking out proficient assembly-line riffage as if they’re playing a live-action reenactment of Rock Band. Though Royal Blood confine themselves to a limited instrumental palette, the issue here isn’t so much a uniformity of sound: frontman Mike Kerr feeds his brawny basslines through a NASA-worthy dashboard of effects pedals that can make it sound alternately like he’s shredding on an SG or coaxing alien frequencies out of a Korg. And no doubt, Kerr and stickman Ben Thatcher can lock into a crushing, contorted groove with a telepathic sense of connectivity (like with the epileptic lurch of lead single “Out of the Black”), as if drop-and-dragging their favorite bits from the Led Zeppelin, Jack White, and Queens of the Stone Age discographies into a GarageBand file to build the ultimate indestructible riff. It’s the pro-forma songwriting that transpires between those brontosaurus blasts that ultimately proves problematic. By using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.
Kerr has been particularly vocal about his reverence for Josh Homme, and it’s as much for his singing as his fretwork; as he told Clash magazine earlier this year, “Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf was a massive album for me. That album’s so melodic and so huge, without any screaming.” Accordingly, Kerr’s smooth, steady voice serves as a cool counterpoint to the rockocalypse erupting around him, but unlike Homme’s arch, playfully effeminate delivery, it’s less a subversive device than a subservient one, unable to elevate songs like "Careless" and "Ten Tonne Skeleton" beyond their humourless, all-too-familiar expressions of blue-balled frustration.
The best a young band working with such a well-worn template can hope for is to imprint their own peculiar personality upon it—see: the White Stripes’ theatrical vamping or Alex Turner’s keen, colloquial, observational wit. There are promising flashes of that sort of attitude here: “Figure It Out” and “Loose Change”—not coincidentally the two songs that bust out of the band’s usual slow-motion boogie and accelerate into feverish finales—find Kerr exhibiting a more flamboyant, cocksure pose he should parade more often. But Royal Blood have a long way to go before cultivating a mythos of their own, outfitting mid-tempo chugs like “You Can Be So Cruel” and “Little Monster” with generic girl-done-me-wrong/girl-do-me-right lyrics that readily conform to the thematic expectations of blooze-rock rather than make any attempt to redefine them. That such an unassuming, workmanlike outfit has been so immediately lionized is ultimately less a measure of Royal Blood’s exceptionalism than rock'n'roll’s overblown inferiority complex: If this is all it takes to save rock, then it really couldn’t have been hurting that much to begin with. | 2014-09-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | September 16, 2014 | 5.6 | 4e1f15ed-6195-4182-ac37-561092e3b191 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The legendary Senegalese band's first album in six years, consisting in part of re-recordings of the group's earlier songs, continues its impressive record of seamlessly fusing the traditional and the modern. | The legendary Senegalese band's first album in six years, consisting in part of re-recordings of the group's earlier songs, continues its impressive record of seamlessly fusing the traditional and the modern. | Orchestra Baobab: Made in Dakar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11595-made-in-dakar/ | Made in Dakar | The music biz being what it is, Orchestra Baobab never quite got their due in the West. They disbanded in the mid-1980s, just as more and more people were growing aware that there was music being released all over the world, some of it-– gasp!-– not even in English. Still, the Senegalese group had it better than most. During their initial run, at least, Orchestra Baobab ruled West African pop, and their impact and influence were such the group eventually reconvened, at last getting the star treatment not just locally but around the globe.
Orchestra Baobab's aptly titled 2002 comeback disc, Specialist in All Styles, encapsulated many of the ever-evolving group's strengths, in particular their knack for musical assimilation. Equally informed by Cuban and indigenous African musics, not to mention hybrids like Congolese rumba and Senegal's own pop strain mbalax, the disc found them picking up where they left off. Six years later, Made in Dakar continues the voyage with still more seamless style blending. Of course, nothing here is as crass as, say, rap-metal. Orchestra Baobab's fusion is far more subtle, and always rooted in traditional music. While world music elitists might prefer their sounds obscure, exotic, and mysterious, Orchestra Baobab is so smooth, so deceptively accessible, that for once the liner notes actually significantly enhance the listening experience.
We learn that the lead track, "Pape Ndiaye", stretches back to 1968, and marked one of the first modern updatings of a traditional griot song. We see that "Nijaay" was first performed by Baobab back in 1972; the version here features a cameo from Youssou N'Dour, whose own stardom eventually came to eclipse Baobab. "Beni Baraale" is a tribute to Guinea's equally groundbreaking Bembeya Jazz; Guinea guitarist Baba Nabe joins Baobab guitarist Barthélemy Attisso in what amounts to a tip of the hat by way of ethno-musicology.
Each song here-- with vocals performed in Wolof, Portuguese Creole, French, and Malinke-- is equally rich in history, testament to one of the few positive outcomes of European occupation as they deftly incorporate soul and salsa, rumba and jazz, reggae and country, an exercise in cross-pollination made all the more impressive by the near invisibility of the threads connecting it all. That's ultimately what makes Orchestra Baobab such a joy: It's dance music, pure and simple, made for others to have a good time, easily appreciated on the basis of its musicianship alone (Attisso is particularly inspired throughout) but becoming more impressive the deeper you dig into what's actually being done. | 2008-06-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-06-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Global | Unknown | June 18, 2008 | 7.6 | 4e20cae3-c323-45c5-b12d-8f7d4e7dbc0e | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Though Stephen O’ Malley, Randall Dunn, and Oren Ambarchi have exhausting rosters of collaborations and contributions, their respective drone-and-doom credits remain preeminent for many. On Shade Themes From Kairos, this trio’s collective résumé turns the preceding four tracks into a wonderland of intrigue, where disparate influences twist and turn into uncanny phantasms. | Though Stephen O’ Malley, Randall Dunn, and Oren Ambarchi have exhausting rosters of collaborations and contributions, their respective drone-and-doom credits remain preeminent for many. On Shade Themes From Kairos, this trio’s collective résumé turns the preceding four tracks into a wonderland of intrigue, where disparate influences twist and turn into uncanny phantasms. | Oren Ambarchi / Stephen O’Malley / Randall Dunn: Shade Themes From Kairos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19349-oren-ambarchi-stephen-omalley-randall-dunn-shade-themes-from-kairos/ | Shade Themes From Kairos | Yes, indeed, Shade Themes from Kairos includes a gorgeous metal-plated drone, the sort of 21-minute electric yogic saga you might expect from the triumvirate responsible for this five-track album. Though Stephen O’ Malley, Randall Dunn, and Oren Ambarchi have exhausting rosters of collaborations and contributions, their respective drone-and-doom credits remain preeminent for many. O’ Malley, for instance, is best known for co-founding the metal monolith Sunn O))), a band that Dunn not only records in the studio but engineers and mixes on the stage, too, serving as a shadowed albeit essential auxiliary member. Ambarchi, an Australian multi-instrumentalist with an insatiable taste for new musical idioms and approaches, seems to release another album every quarter; still, to casual listeners, he’s most associated with powerful contributions to the most recent Sunn O))) albums or, at best, a set of LPs released through the band’s own Southern Lord mothership a decade ago.
So, then, Shade Themes satisfies its stylistic prerequisites by closing with “Ebona Pagoda,” an ultra-coruscant reduction of the epics that shape as Sunn O)))’s core. Gently distorted guitars hang like fog over oscillating peals of organ. When those sounds intersect at just the right angle, the hum breaks through the amplified haze like sunlight, the solitary beams refracted into infinity. It’s beautiful, but that’s not the reason you should listen to Shade Themes.
Instead, this trio’s collective résumé turns the preceding four tracks into a wonderland of intrigue, where disparate influences twist and turn into uncanny phantasms. O’Malley, Dunn and Ambarchi initially composed these pieces for Kairos, the film component of an extended multimedia project by Belgian artist Alexis Destoop. In the film, time is mined like minerals and commodified for a society that’s already ruined it. The trio based their score around unedited footage, responding to scenarios and scenes in a process that allowed, Destoop notes, “a blurring of the line between diegetic and non-diegetic sound.” That’s not the only line that the group blurred: This hour of music reaches wide to pull together strands from the trio’s expansive orbit of enthusiasms and experiences.
There’s the aforementioned tidal drone and the occult choogle that Dunn conjures with his own Master Musicians of Bukkake. There’s the space-warping electronica experiments endemic to some of Ambarchi’s best work, and the agile bullying of Nazoranai, O’Malley and Ambarchi’s trio with their spirit guide into directed discursion, Keiji Haino. Throughout Shade Themes, it’s possible to detect dub and IDM, krautrock and Sufi trance, Fluxus-like collage and, of course, a little rock ’n’ roll gusto, all within the same track.
This composite approach especially directs the album’s first half. Opener “The Space Between” disorients Spaghetti Western themes, bending guitar leads around beats that mope like reggae on tranquilizers. “Temporal, Eponymous” balances twitchy noise-rock with a rhythm section that favors hypnotic repetition, casting a spell of unequal parts meditation and agitation. But the most brilliant instance of this stylistic frisson comes at the album’s center, near the middle of “Circumstances of Faith”. For five minutes, the trio works through an electroacoustic mirage, suggesting the pioneering archives O’Malley has reissued of late through Recollections GRM. When Ambarchi’s drums finally arrive, however, he presses against the din until he disrupts it, leaving only a throbbing bass and a coiled wire of noise suspended against the silence. A guitar suddenly moans across the room. The band seems at the edge of eruption. It’s only a tease. Instead of bedlam, tablas percolate, doubling and tripling the meter and pushing the trio toward an unseen drum-jam crescendo.
Sandwiched between these instrumental collages and curves sits “Sometimes,” one of the most surprising pieces in any of these musician’s respective catalogues. The delicate voice of Japanese singer-songwriter Ai Aso arrives like a whisper spoken too loudly. She threads through a lacelike latticework of processed acoustic guitar plucks, microscopic electronic clicks and drums brushed so delicately they barely register. It’s prismatic chamber folk, rendered so as to split the difference between the austere electroacoustic stable of Touch and the deliberate motion of fellow Drag City songwriter Bill Callahan. Again, there are precedents for this sound with all three principals here: O’Malley released Aso’s wonderful Lone earlier this year, Dunn produced Marissa Nadler’s exquisite July, and in 2012, Ambarchi began his own Audience of One with “Salt”, a patient pop stunner that wouldn’t feel out of place sung by James Blake or Bon Iver. Still, “Sometimes” sits like the solitary bloom in a warzone, a focal point of beauty in a landscape of ordered disorder.
Shade Themes from Kairos arrives five years after this trio first gathered in an abandoned radio studio in Belgium, accompanied by an army of equipment. Given the schedules that these three keep, it seems unlikely that they’ll find a similar furlough and charge anytime soon. Just this year, Ambarchi has already released two albums, while O’Malley is preparing for a reboot of Sunn O))). Dunn is emerging not only as a go-to producer for metal but also for indie acts looking to add more edge and atmosphere. That’s too bad. Together, this trio excels not just at the expected but also delights in the quest to find a common vernacular amid multiple musical languages. That’s the challenge and the charm of Shade Themes from Kairos, a record that minds borders only long enough to maneuver around them. | 2014-05-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-05-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Metal | Drag City | May 27, 2014 | 7.4 | 4e2502fe-551e-490a-89e5-34ce632208fc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Neil Young's troubled, long-fabled "Ditch Trilogy" is finally released in full alongside an unexpected, mercurial coda. | Neil Young's troubled, long-fabled "Ditch Trilogy" is finally released in full alongside an unexpected, mercurial coda. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Time Fades Away/Zuma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22343-neil-young-neil-young-crazy-horse-time-fades-awayzuma/ | Time Fades Away/Zuma | Neil Young boasted of steering his career into “the ditch” in the early 1970s, choosing to make sad, lonely, difficult records in the wake of Harvest’s wide success. The “Ditch Trilogy” (as Young enthusiasts dubbed it) of Time Fades Away, Tonight’s the Night**, and On the Beach marks his creative peak—yet for decades, this era was neglected and incomplete. On the Beach only made it to CD in 2003, and Time Fades Away was never reissued digitally.
Thanks to the vinyl revival, the trio is finally available. Rereleased initially as a pricey Record Store Day box set, and now as individual LPs, the “Ditch Trilogy” records—plus its sunnier epilogue, *Zuma—*are back in print for the first time since their original releases. So while On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night are well-established masterpieces, now’s the time to consider the on-ramp and the off-ramp to the Ditch, and understand how Young entered that dark spiral and how he escaped it.
Time Fades Away is the album Neil Young didn’t want us to hear; in several interviews over the years, he’s bluntly referred to it as his “worst album.” In Waging Heavy Peace, Young’s 2012 memoir, the 1973 live album is mentioned exactly twice, which is approximately 1,000 times fewer than his electric Lincoln and his Pono music service. Even when major missing pieces of his ’70s catalog were patched in 2003, Time Fades Away was left to rot in the archives.
Several theories have circulated to explain the conspicuous snub, most often returning to the cursed fog that hung over Young’s 1973 tour. Originally, the band was supposed to include Danny Whitten, Neil’s guitar foil in Crazy Horse—but, fighting drug addiction and alcoholism, Whitten couldn’t hack it at rehearsals in fall 1972, and he was fired and sent back to Los Angeles. That same night, he was found dead from an overdose of alcohol and Valium. Whitten’s death cast a shadow over the tour, which started the following January and wormed its way across the United States in a rigorous 62 shows in 90 days.
The stories from the tour, as regaled in Young biographies, are like a nightmare version of Almost Famous, replete with drug indulgences, money arguments, audience riots, medical issues, and technical problems. Two-thirds of the way through, Neil’s vocal cords were shot, leading to show cancellations and inclusion of David Crosby and Graham Nash, to no great help. Young’s band the Stray Gators, the murderer’s row of session musicians from Harvest, didn’t translate to basketball arenas; drummer Kenny Buttrey had the worst time of it, with Young asking him to play louder and louder until he literally bled on his drums. Legendary producer and arranger Jack Nitzsche, playing piano, self-medicated his stage fright with alcohol; for his own part, Young spent the tour chugging tequila and trying out a new Gibson Flying V guitar instead of his totemic Old Black, his dissatisfaction with the sound leading to endless soundchecks and after-show spats.
So this wasn’t exactly the tour you’d want to commemorate for eternity with a live album—but at least initially, Young was perversely excited to reflect its chaos, and left the recording mostly free of the overdubs that glossed many live albums of the era. “Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me, but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while,” Young wrote in the liner notes of 1977’s Decade.
But in retrospect, he was too harsh. The Stray Gators were one of Young’s most interesting bands: they were fragile, straining, and desperate. One could easily see where their heavier material, such as “Yonder Stands the Sinner” and “Last Dance,” would have fit Whitten-era Crazy Horse. Here, pedal steel wizard Ben Keith levels up from a classy hired hand on Harvest to assume Whitten’s role, his instrument providing wobbly, intoxicated howls that amplify the haunted mood. Nitzsche plays a deceptively clunky piano that turns “Time Fades Away” into a chicken-wire saloon and creeps with tinkling anxiety around the edges of “Last Dance.” When Crosby and Nash show up, they create an alternate-dimension CSNY that uses their harmonies as a weapon instead of a balm, with Young and Crosby’s “Yonder Stands the Sinner” choruses particularly deranged.
Coming on the heels of the slick Harvest, Time Fades Away was a crucial swerve for Young, and it established the proudly flawed aesthetic that has kept his work immediate and powerful for decades. These are weary, acidic songs about the hollowness of stardom—recording them during a tour from hell is an asset, not a flaw. Even the crowd noise between songs heightens the despair—blissful, oblivious applause from an audience too remote to see Young’s naked pain. Songs previously lost on Time Fades Away are key parts of Young’s story. “Don’t Be Denied” is one of Young’s best autobiographical songs, wistfully telling the story of his Canadian childhood through Buffalo Springfield’s early days. “L.A.” is a wonderfully cynical kiss-off to the city where that band found stardom, a land of dreams beset by earthquakes, traffic, and smog.w
Because Zuma was packaged with the trilogy for the Record Store Day vinyl box set, there’s been some recent chatter of a “Ditch quadrilogy.” But Zuma is a poor fit with the other three; it’s a record made on a beach instead of On the Beach, a happy reunion and fresh beginning for Crazy Horse, and a goofy boys’ club hangout released only five months after Tonight’s the Night’s tortured slog. It hits the reset button in many ways—most literally with its opener, “Don’t Cry No Tears,” which recycles the melody from “I Wonder,” one of Young’s first recorded works with his high school band, the Squires.
It also marked Young’s decision to reform Crazy Horse for the first time since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, with new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro filling the big rhythm guitar shoes of Danny Whitten. That Young could even stomach replacing Whitten, two years after his death, signaled that the session in Malibu would be one of recovery and rebirth. That period was particularly debauched, with the recently divorced Young and his bandmates enjoyed the company of California girls and Colombian powder, and the party carried over into the “studio” (essentially just a room in producer David Briggs’ rental house). There, the new Crazy Horse got to know each other over some hastily written material, simplified to work with Poncho’s rudimentary guitar.
This lackadaisical formula explains the uneven nature of Zuma, which is equally filled with classics and duds. “Cortez the Killer” and “Danger Bird” are two triumphantly moody, electric epics—lesser cousins to the “Down by the River”-style sprees of the first Crazy Horse, but still spacious opportunities for Young to revive his trademark lacerating guitar tone. It’s here that the sludgy Crazy Horse known today takes shape: the trade-out of the communicative Whitten for Sampedro’s simpler style creates that blunt sound. The rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina lurches menacingly through “Cortez” and “Danger Bird,” and Sampedro’s blocky guitar caddies for Young’s lengthy soloing.
The album’s two other highlights revive a breezy, poppy Young that had been missing since After the Gold Rush. “Don’t Cry No Tears,” is simple twangy country-rock well in the Horse’s wheelhouse, gilded with innocent backing harmonies. “Barstool Blues,” despite being a fairly shameless rip of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” is a convincing and catchy depiction of drunken euphoria—and a pretty accurate portrait of Zuma’s making. On the less lovable side of the endless party, “Stupid Girl” is nowhere near good enough to justify its casual misogyny and title swipe from the Rolling Stones, and “Drive Back” is barely a song beneath its mighty riff and creepy piano. Leftovers tossed in from Homegrown (“Pardon My Heart”) and the aborted second CSNY record (“Through My Sails”) don’t quite fit the mood, presaging the less cohesive and spottier records over the rest of Young’s decade.
Still, if Zuma is an epilogue to the Ditch Trilogy, it’s also a prologue to the rest of Young’s career, kicking off his fickle, impulsive zig-zagging between genres and volume levels. That restlessness would keep Young vital long after his peers faded—and it can be traced all the way back to the stoned sunsets of Malibu, where Young decided to cry no more tears and move onward down the road, swerving all the way. | 2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 13, 2016 | 9.1 | 4e2531df-f649-4ed3-ac95-091d0c8896e4 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Twinkling riffs collide with dial-up static and blown-out drums on a collaborative album from the bit-crushing electronic maximalists and the South Korean dream-pop darling. | Twinkling riffs collide with dial-up static and blown-out drums on a collaborative album from the bit-crushing electronic maximalists and the South Korean dream-pop darling. | Fax Gang / 파란노을 (Parannoul): Scattersun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fax-gang-parannoul-scattersun/ | Scattersun | Fax Gang’s hyper-compressed songs sound like murmurs transmitted from virtual reality. The multinational collective—currently made up of Philippines-based vocalist PK Shellboy and producers GLACIERbaby, maknaeslayer, and kimj—are known for bit-crushing Drain Gang-esque vocals and electronics into distorted masses of sound. Parannoul, meanwhile, is a pseudonymous South Korean artist who crafts fuzzy sketches using synthetic instruments like MIDI guitars. Within their insular worlds, each act explores feelings of insecurity and depression through different processes, yet both produce similarly raw music.
Fax Gang and Parannoul’s new collaborative album, Scattersun, bursts outward with messy energy. The way Parannoul’s heavy-lidded voice drifts above the sparkling keys of opener “Quiet” might resemble After the Magic, but the song’s movements are volatile and sharp, cresting in sudden explosions that mirror the artists’ anxious mindsets. Written and produced entirely over text, Scattersun is constantly cracking open, expelling static hiss, breakbeats, and stray metallic clangs from its airtight casing. Any space for quiet is often crammed with soundbites, like the rev of a motor or a screwball saxophone solo.
To match the blown-out landscape, Fax Gang explore alternatives to the flattened vocals of their previous work. On the twitchy stream of consciousness “Double Bind,” PK Shellboy switches between a partially bit-crushed effect and their unaltered voice, squeezing out enough dread to match the UK garage beat’s foreboding shuffle. Though outclassed by South Korean rapper Mudd the student’s verse on “Wrong Signal,” PK Shellboy’s wheezy rambling is more convincingly paranoid. Their unease sounds visceral: “Time keeps on passing with every day/Yet nothing gets better,” they gasp, voice tense and filled with trepidation.
Parannoul remains a characteristically demure presence, anchoring the record with faint keys and a hushed voice. His balmy verse on “Lullaby for a Memory” offers a reprieve from PK Shellboy’s anxiety about growing older, even as it’s pelted with harsh breakbeats. Only on “Soliloquy” does Parannoul’s voice rise to a full-throated scream, a forceful moment overshadowed by the surrounding noise. If PK Shellboy raves about turning into the devil, Parannoul sounds like just one resident of Hell.
The lure of Scattersun is its contrasting textures—twinkling riffs against dial-up static and explosive synths over hollowed-out drums. Occasionally, the many layers fuse into a monolith. The title track’s 10-minute span recalls “White Ceiling,” from Parannoul’s To See the Next Part of the Dream, but where that song laboriously built to catharsis, “Scattersun” stitches several ideas together, each demanding equal intensity. “Sometimes/I feel like I’m in a car crash/Nothing I can do to stop it,” PK Shellboy announces at the top. The track’s spontaneous turns from apocalyptic rave synths to gliding four-on-the-floor to condensed noise might replicate the vocalist’s turbulent moods, but those same abrupt changes can be draining to listen to. More dynamic than either artist’s work alone, Scattersun pushes them into the burning wreckage of reality, where everything feels brilliant yet overwhelming. | 2024-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Electronic / Rock | Topshelf | June 18, 2024 | 7 | 4e2dd8bd-9e23-479b-8092-6ff8dc927941 | Michael Hong | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-hong/ | |
Will Oldham and Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy come together on an album of duets that pays tribute to songs originally recorded by the Everly Brothers. They steer clear of the harmonizing duo's most famous tracks and focus more on obscurities by other songwriters cut after their 1950s chart peak. | Will Oldham and Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy come together on an album of duets that pays tribute to songs originally recorded by the Everly Brothers. They steer clear of the harmonizing duo's most famous tracks and focus more on obscurities by other songwriters cut after their 1950s chart peak. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Dawn McCarthy: What the Brothers Sang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17797-bonnie-prince-billy-dawn-mccarthy-what-the-brothers-sang/ | What the Brothers Sang | The “Brothers” up there are the Everlys, Phil and Don, who in the 1950s set an impossibly high standard for pop harmonies with hits like “Bye Bye Love”, “Wake Up Little Susie”, and “All I Have to Do Is Dream”. Working under mentor/guitar god Chet Atkins, the brothers were a versatile duo who played pop, country, rock, folk, and R&B with equal ease, and they helped launch the careers of numerous songwriters, including-- perhaps most notably-- Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (“Love Hurts” and “Rocky Top”, among many others). While they couldn’t quite sustain the success of those singles in the late 50s, the Everlys weathered the 60s and 70s, and their legacy now spans literally every rock-and-roll generation. Their songs have been covered by Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, by R.E.M. and Eddie Vedder, by Cat Power and Neko Case.
By recording a full album of Everly covers, Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy join a long line of musician-fans who've paid tribute. What the Brothers Sang isn’t their first collaboration. McCarthy played Oldham’s vocal foil on his 2006 album The Letting Go, and since then they’ve recorded an EP, Wai Notes, as well as a gently demented Christmas-themed seven-inch, Christmas Eve Can Kill You. Of all of Billy’s many female co-vocalists, few such an easy rapport with him as McCarthy. Many, including Cheyenne Marie Mize and Angel Olsen, counter Oldham’s studied detachment with a warm engagement, which worked well on Among the Gold and Wolfroy Goes to Town, respectively. But McCarthy can sound just as out there as Oldham himself; he voice is dry and husky, with a subtle expressiveness very much like his. Rather than churning the kind of sexual energy that has driven so many duos from Parton/Wagoner to the Civil Wars, theirs is more of a Platonic tension.
In other words, McCarthy and Oldham haven’t re-gendered the Everlys’ songs for co-ed vocalists. Rather than two lovers having it out in songs, they sound like two friends drinking over shared memories and commiserating over separately broken hearts. Oldham is her “best unbeaten brother,” to quote his own song. With no driving interpretive concept here, the focus is largely on the Everlys’ adventurous taste in songs. Most of the tunes on What the Brothers Sang hail from the 60s, well after their heyday; hits are passed over in favor of deep catalogue cuts. “Milk Train”, by Tony Romeo (most famous for writing the Partridge Family’s “Hey I Think I Love You”), is told from the point of view of a train switchman; “Poems, Prayers & Promises”, by John Denver, could be a hippie anthem, which is about the furthest thing from the Everlys’ clean-cut image of the 50s. Still, all of the songs on What the Brothers Sang sound like they might have sprung from the same pen, bottling up all the complexities of broken hearts and presenting them with languid, sophisticated country-rock arrangements.
While it occasionally saps these songs of some of their tension, that sense of camaraderie enlivens the album and energizes the performers. Oldham hasn’t sounded quite so animated as he does on the cover of the Everlys’ cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s cover of Jackie Edwards’ “Somebody Help Me”, although even his invested, in-character vocals can’t quite sell the period piece “Milk Train”. Every bit his equal, McCarthy thrives in this austere setting. Without the distractions of the Faun Fables’ Americana drama, she displays a remarkable range, belting like the Heart sisters one minute, sounding indistinguishable from Oldham the next. Still, What the Brothers Sang is best when it’s simplest and most direct. “Devoted to You” and “So Sad” are all the more powerful for being so spare in their arrangements, as though illustrating the power of a small country bar band. On the other hand, “Omaha” has an exurban sprawl that sounds out of place among these more private meditations, and the rustic psychedelica of “My Little Yellow Bird” distracts from rather than reinforces the wistful melody and the lyrics’ immense longing.
Ultimately, What the Brothers Sang is a tribute to what the brothers sang, not necessarily how they sang it. The album’s true subjects are the many songwriters behind the Everlys-- an incredibly wide and eclectic sampling. McCarthy and Oldham wear the weight of that history lightly-- perhaps too lightly. This is a spirited album, yet somehow slight. It’s a modest monument to their heroes, although perhaps that is the whole point: Perhaps What the Brothers Sang is specifically intended to leave you wanting more substantial, in order to inspire listeners to dig deeper into the Everlys’ catalog and beyond. | 2013-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | February 20, 2013 | 7 | 4e3cba4e-1382-4d2b-be27-817e4f3c4bf5 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
An understated landmark of underground house, Galcher Lustwerk’s 2013 DJ mix receives a remastered 2xLP release. His defiantly unchanging beats feel charged with the knowledge that every party ends. | An understated landmark of underground house, Galcher Lustwerk’s 2013 DJ mix receives a remastered 2xLP release. His defiantly unchanging beats feel charged with the knowledge that every party ends. | Galcher Lustwerk: 100% Galcher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galcher-lustwerk-100-galcher/ | 100% Galcher | For once, the system worked: Galcher Lustwerk uploaded a mixtape to the internet and it made him famous. It was 2013; nobody outside his circle of friends in Providence and New York knew anything about the Cleveland-born producer or his music. But White Material, a label run by his buddies Young Male and DJ Richard, had recently turned a few clued-in heads with its first two vinyl releases, and the label’s word-of-mouth acclaim was enough to secure Lustwerk—an alias that the recent RISD grad had gotten from an internet CAPTCHA—a slot with Blowing Up the Workshop, a fledgling online mix series.
Lustwerk’s set, published around the time that his debut EP dropped, was 12th in the series, following mixes from under-the-radar artists like Helm and Tuluum Shimmering. Instead of recording a standard DJ session, he opted for a production mix—that is, a set composed entirely of his own tracks. (Hence the title, 100% Galcher.) The songs, ruminative deep-house head-nodders all, were low-key; so was the anonymous artist’s self-presentation. By way of an introduction, he merely offered, “Some tracks and stems from 2012 compiled into a promomix.” None of it—the suggestion that these were rough drafts; the lack of an artist photo; the cheery signoff, “Hope you enjoy!”—augured an imminent breakthrough. The internet, after all, is awash in free mixes; other Blowing Up the Workshop sets have slowly accumulated play counts in the low four digits. But nine years and nearly 200,000 streams later, 100% Galcher is a milestone in that decade’s underground house music. With nothing more than pitter-pat 808s, powdery synths, and his own drowsy baritone rapping, a dark horse of deep house came up with a style that didn’t sound like anything else in dance music—not then, not before, not since.
The set launched Lustwerk’s career, paving the way for three full-lengths under his main alias and more from various side projects. It also spawned its share of imitators. But while standout cuts like “Parlay,” “Put On,” and “I Neva Seen” turned up on subsequent EPs, much of the material in the mix never came out commercially: Lustwerk accidentally fried his laptop and lost half the tracks in the process. Ghostly’s 2xLP version of 100% Galcher marks the first time that all 15 tracks—rescued from the damaged hard drive and remastered—have been released in their full-length, unmixed versions. If you’ve listened to that mix once, you’ve probably listened to it a hundred times, which gives the reissued 100% Galcher a feeling of familiarity shading into deja vu; it’s reasonable to ask if anyone other than DJs should care about the reissue. After all, this kind of music is created largely for the purpose of being mixed—the DJ set is its natural habitat. Why sit through 32-bar intros when you can cut right to the chorus?
Yet not only do the tracks hold up as standalone pieces—not just building blocks but real songs—the album breathes in a way that the mix doesn’t. The fleshed-out tracks suit Lustwerk’s deeply repetitive style; the longer his skeletal drum patterns stretch out, the more consequential the most trivial filter tweak feels. The extended ambient interludes are miniature worlds unto themselves, casting an unearthly glow over the heads-down dancefloor cuts, like the sun coming up over an afterparty in its final throes. Josh Bonati’s remastering job is subtle but significant, bringing out crucial depth and detail without sacrificing the songs’ atmospheric murk, and highlighting the idiosyncrasies of Lustwerk’s production.
Much iconic electronic music boils down to the uniqueness of its palette, and with 100% Galcher, Lustwerk hit upon a mix of sounds and timbres that referenced classic deep-house producers like Larry Heard while still sounding singular, even otherworldly. His drums are dry and grudging, with short sustains and quick decays, offering just enough envelope to reveal each sound’s identity—hissing shaker, crackling woodblock, clipped snare—before letting the surrounding silence swallow it again. His synths, on the other hand, are soft and yielding, morphing like lava lamps between gentle sunrise chords and coolly fluorescent leads. Everything is richly tactile, right down to the coarsely ground purr of his voice.
Lustwerk’s voice is his music’s secret ingredient, reeling off casually rhymed couplets in a way that’s neither intrusive nor reticent. Aside from 1980s hip-house, there’s little tradition of rapping in house music, which meant the terrain was his for the taking. (In a text accompanying the reissue, he credits his signature blend of levitating house beats with short, catchy phrases to a long, stoned night playing Basic Channel records back to back with Juicy J cuts.) His lyrics might not look like much on paper, but to fall under the spell of his sing-song cadence is to dissolve into a lysergic stream-of-consciousness that’s remarkably faithful to the feeling of a long, blurry weekend of clubbing. Lustwerk says that he wrote this music after an intense period of partying with friends in DIY spaces, and those subjects are at the forefront of the songs, which zig-zag from the dancefloor to the driver’s seat to the sidewalk outside the club, an endless circuit settling into a blissfully subdued groove. They’re not so much stories of nights out as staccato visions glimpsed with each flash of the strobe.
But this isn’t party music, exactly. “I wanted to feel like you were tripping, maybe having a bit of heatstroke, or dehydration,” Lustwerk writes of his inspirations for these tracks. “Your body feels detached, your jaw clenched. People become furniture. Light becomes the main character, surfaces show their age in real-time. Wabi-sabi shit.” Those sensations come across in pulsing synths that shimmer like mirages, basslines that seem to hover several feet off the ground, hi-hats that evaporate like sweat off the back of your neck. Despite the frequent references to drugs, these tracks never feel particularly hedonistic: By turns jubilant and brooding, they amount to a snapshot of youthful freedom, encapsulating the fleeting feeling of being independent and unencumbered, with no more pressing concern than which record to put on next. Maybe that’s also why such a powerfully wistful undercurrent runs through the music. You can hear it in the way the chords of “Put On” linger in the air, scented with the sorrowful suggestion of ephemerality. Lustwerk’s defiantly unchanging beats feel charged with the knowledge that every party ends; every high fades. Eventually, the plug gets pulled, and you find yourself on a cracked vinyl seat in the back of a yellow cab, reconstructing disconnected moments already dissolving into memory. | 2022-12-02T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-02T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | December 2, 2022 | 8.2 | 4e3e7c11-b79f-4b45-bb83-c535ef1df642 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
As a member of Duster and Built to Spill, Jason Albertini was often in the background. The latest album from his own band feels like a chance to come up for air. | As a member of Duster and Built to Spill, Jason Albertini was often in the background. The latest album from his own band feels like a chance to come up for air. | Helvetia: This Devastating Map | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/helvetia-this-devastating-map/ | This Devastating Map | As one-third of San Jose slowcore icons Duster—and bassist for Built to Spill from 2012 until 2019—Jason Albertini is well-versed in indie rock that peers inwards to find a way out. As the core member of Helvetia, a project that he has helmed since 2005, his pining lo-fi multi-instrumentalism delves deeper still. Alongside a rotating cast including Built to Spill alumni Scott Plouf and Jim Roth, records like 2007’s The Acrobats and 2015’s Dromomania packed in sleepyheaded guitar-pop that Albertini awakens on his tenth full-length, This Devastating Map.
When Duster returned in 2019 after almost 20 years away, Albertini, Clay Parton, and Canaan Dove Amber were both seasoned industry vets and somewhat anonymous. Recorded in Albertini’s Portland home last summer, This Devastating Map shirks the urge to recede any further, and feels more substantial than the wiry 4-track musings of Fantastic Life, released in January. After years spent reflecting just slightly beneath the surface, its candor feels like a chance for Albertini to come up for air.
Still, there’s a sunken, almost submerged quality to many of these songs—the kind of thrifty reverb glow and soft-focus hiss that makes Albertini’s studio seem to be situated not just in his basement but far below it. Stretching this quality to its outer reaches, Albertini—backed by ex-Built to Spill drummer Steve Gere and Tiburones’ Samantha Stidham on bass—fills out a sphere of sound. Fizzling melodies nestle in the furthest reaches of each channel on opener “Devastating Map,” sounding like North Carolina indie rockers Polvo on Ambien. On “Inverted,” Alex G-esque guitar shapes and tumbling drums sound like they’re climbing over each other, clamoring to be heard.
Insofar as it can be parsed, Albertini’s loose, candid lyricism has always seemed to center on first thought, best thought. Which is why, even 10 full-length LPs in, there’s still room for shortcomings and sore points. “Love Me” cuts to the chase right away: “Love me and I’ll do anything for you,” Albertini pleads. Sedate, at times foreboding tonal shifts take center stage here and on “Echo Location,” where a slow, unsteady crawl finds its feet across four minutes. In a statement accompanying the song’s video, Albertini offers some curt but telling context: “[It was] the first song I recorded after rehab. A march to the sea where I accidentally end up at some cliffs and call the whole thing off.” Sketching a giddy scene of “clean living,” sun-split lead single “Reaktor” underscores the prevailing sense of returning from the brink to hard-won domesticity. Reeled off above scorched wah-wah leads reminiscent of Doug Martsch, dishwashing and taking one’s daughter to the dentist sound akin to bliss.
If the self-described “desperate, purring distress” of Duster’s paeans to summer days spent inside your head felt uniquely slo-mo, This Devastating Map almost comes to a grinding halt. But like meteors in the night sky, even the briefest songs leave lasting impressions. Maybe it’s that the stakes seem so low, or that the songs demand so little, but the way Albertini teases out quiet, spindly majesty from dread feels vital. As “Long Beach” tails off with a parting minor-key bob evoking fellow Portlanders Quasi, Helvetia’s inward-peering mystique is at all-time low, and Albertini’s growing willingness to be seen looks all the more compelling.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | August 8, 2020 | 7.3 | 4e3f8e44-cb60-4973-8c28-9c35b4c1b792 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
On her first official release, the 17-year-old songwriting prodigy offers six slickly produced electronic dream pop tracks whose streaks of misery feel discernibly teenage. | On her first official release, the 17-year-old songwriting prodigy offers six slickly produced electronic dream pop tracks whose streaks of misery feel discernibly teenage. | Hana Vu: How Many Times Have You Driven By EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hana-vu-how-many-times-have-you-driven-by-ep/ | How Many Times Have You Driven By EP | Small acts of public vulnerability feel radical today: crying at the supermarket, crying on Instagram, crying at the club. With the megaphones in our pockets, we have grown accustomed to amplifying our personal sadness, to subverting the idea that emotional excess is weak or wrong. “Crying on the subway send tweet” is about as universal as human sentiments come. Hana Vu wrote a song about that.
“Crying on the Subway” is the lead track from her EP, How Many Times Have You Driven By, a coolly minimal collection that the 17-year-old recorded and produced on her own. Following three-and-a-half years of self-released material from Vu—who has used Bandcamp like an emotional diary, in the vein of Frankie Cosmos and Soccer Mommy—How Many Times is her first release for the label Luminelle Recordings (run by the folks behind the still-kicking MP3-download-era blog Gorilla vs. Bear). Her version of bedroom pop is one that clearly aspires to a slick, sophisticated level of production, like that of Jay Som. Vu’s primary mode is electronic dream pop with streaks of misery that feel discernibly teenage: “I’m always on the phone/I’m always doing nothing,” she sang on the 2016 album Sensitive, which included a collaboration with Willow Smith called “Queen of High School.”
How Many Times spans such styles as loungey downbeat pop and yearning indie rock balladry, but it is all tied together by a charmingly droll vibe and Vu’s deep, soulful voice. Her elliptical sensibility makes “Crying on the Subway” more subtle and restrained than you’d expect. The song doesn’t convey the claustrophobia so typical of city music, like Chandra’s “Subways,” nor does it contain the gut-wrenching despair of girl-group weepers. Instead, “Crying on the Subway” is emotionally vacant in a way that feels real. It is a muted daydream with a wobbly bass sway, the sound of quiet longing and a resigned single tear, of a person who really is trying to just get by. “In my dreams I’m in that gray room/In my chest I’m feeling dark blue,” Vu sings, evoking the colors of her mood music. “Take the red line into downtown/I’m trying to escape you.” Her richly layered vocals feel like a long sigh, like infatuation steadily deflating, like a cold stare. The entire song conveys loneliness and comfort at once.
Across the minor keys and twinkling chords of How Many Times, Vu sings about mundanity, failure, disappointment, and fear. “426” has a melancholic, retro shuffle with shades of Lana Del Rey cool. “Cool” is Vu’s understated loner anthem about hiding out and staying home to work on yourself: “It’s OK to be alone/’Cos I’m gonna make it happen,” she sings. “Gonna make it perfect/Better than it has been.” When Vu proclaims, wisely, “I’m tryna make it cool/....Don’t tell me that I’m wrong/’Cos ain’t nobody right,” it feels like her personal aesthetic thesis. The focus of How Many Times attests to it.
On the whole, Vu’s knowingly detached vision feels cohesive, and her productions shine. But in terms of lyrics and melodies, nothing else on the EP resonates quite as strongly as “Crying on the Subway,” and often the smoothed edges threaten to turn these songs into chilled-out indie muzak. When the rapper Satchy adds a sleek verse to “Cool,” their voices sound complementary, but it’s a bit of a disruption. Still, How Many Times is an intriguing glimpse of an artist at the beginning of a skillfully carved path—even if it leaves you wondering what it was that made her cry in public in the first place, what makes her tears dry. | 2018-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luminelle | July 7, 2018 | 7 | 4e422817-dbda-4e3f-a39e-05214a36a25a | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The second album-length remix collection from HEALTH finds artists like Pictureplane, Crystal Castles, and CFCF re-working songs from Get Color. | The second album-length remix collection from HEALTH finds artists like Pictureplane, Crystal Castles, and CFCF re-working songs from Get Color. | HEALTH: Disco2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14348-disco2/ | Disco2 | Though HEALTH improved on the Boredoms-inspired sound of their self-titled debut with last year's more melodic Get Color, they still shine brightest on their remix collections. They followed up the 2007 release of HEALTH with Disco, a surprisingly coherent collection that re-jiggered their sinewy, abrasive tunes. On Disco, artists like Pictureplane and Nosaj Thing channeled HEALTH's chaotic rhythmic power into tight, four-on-the-floor tracks and created sweaty, spazzy, and sexy songs from the noisy source material. And most importantly, Disco seems to have influenced them in making new music. Get Color found HEALTH taking cues from those remixes, growing in a more streamlined, synth-heavy, groove-oriented direction.
Which brings us to Disco2. You could say that it's a remix album of a studio collection that was influenced by a remix album. But rather than becoming an indistinct photocopy of a photocopy, the album brings HEALTH's strengths sharply into focus. Though the heavy tribal pounding and drum freak-outs of the originals are mostly stripped away, the new beats highlight how central rhythm is to these songs. The remixes also give a newfound heft to Jacob Duzsik's reedy, almost-feminine voice, which is already higher up in the mix on Get Color than on HEALTH. Javelin's version of "In Heat", for example, uses Duzsik's otherworldly vocals as its jumping off point, cushioning the singing in a funky bass line. Fleshing out the productions, the album is carried forward by waves of shimmering synth figures, many of which are ripped from HEALTH's originals, an approach that shines a spotlight on the band's underestimated way with hooks.
Though Disco2 is ostensibly a collection about HEALTH, it also serves as a nice survey of some of the more interesting producers on the scene. Montreal-based artist CFCF takes on "Before Tigers" and gloms onto the ethereal vocal melody that lurks beneath the guitar squall of the original, turning it into a bittersweet, shimmering song marked by nostalgic 80s synths. But British producer Gold Panda's version of the same track is completely instrumental, a hypnotic stew of repetitive reverberations and glottal percussion. And while both Denver electro-punk Pictureplane and Black Moth Super Rainbow's Tobacco take on Get Color's best track, "Die Slow", their versions-- the former an astral rave jam of Balearic beats, the latter a syrupy psychedelic concoction of squelching synths-- couldn't be more different.
There is one new HEALTH track on Disco2, "USA Boys", and the band was smart to kick the album off with it. With its dark, cyclical synth riff, droning, outer-space vocals, and gothy dancefloor melody, "USA Boys" not only fits in amongst the cleaner, glossy-electronica vibe of the record, but is also one of its best tracks. This promising development suggests that Disco2, like its predecessor, may be a bridge to the next phase in HEALTH's evolution. | 2010-06-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lovepump United / City Slang | June 23, 2010 | 7.8 | 4e4f0358-2be2-40c5-a1ca-1346e8e2bb06 | Pitchfork | null |
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On his debut album, the Berlin musician sets aside his techno proclivities in favor of a moody journey into a more innocent era of electronic music. | On his debut album, the Berlin musician sets aside his techno proclivities in favor of a moody journey into a more innocent era of electronic music. | RIP Swirl: Blurry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rip-swirl-blurry/ | Blurry | There are few things as surreal as watching the cyclical maw of nostalgia slowly swallow itself whole. If we’re to believe in the 20-year rule, right about now we should all be getting ready to cast off our throwback Matrix rave gear and Y2K-worshiping pop idols to make way for a roaring return of the dreadful Bush years. Yet it feels as if our window for reassessing the past has gotten smaller and smaller. With the last two decades of pop culture merely a thumb swipe away, much of our recent zeitgeist has been defined by how we’ve chosen to reconfigure images of the past in a way that suits our present selves. The divides between scenes, genres, and styles have become blurrier and messier as every last cultural artifact has been turned over to see what hidden jewels might lie underneath.
Luka Seifert, aka RIP Swirl, feels like a product of this pop-culture ouroboros. The Hamburg-born producer has all the traits of a typical underground DJ, having spent the last few years orbiting Berlin’s club scene both as part of the Einhundert art collective and through his own Paradise House parties, even scoring runways for prominent fashion brands along the way. He’s left behind a string of cassette-torn house tracks with a tastefully retro quality to them, but his more extended releases for Public Possession have given a deeper peek into his mindset, filtering his hypnotic electronic music through a dense haze of lo-fi guitars and muffled, alien dream pop.
Despite his techno proclivities, Seifert comes off like a ’90s alt kid at heart. He counts Duster and Dinosaur Jr. among his favorite bands, and the enigmatic name of his project is a veiled reference to The Larry Sanders Show. After the pandemic put a halt to his DJ bookings, Seifert retreated to the alternative music of his youth and set out to record his debut album, Blurry. Pulling influences from trip-hop, shoegaze, and movie soundtracks (specifically Lost in Translation and Trainspotting) that now feel like charming relics from indie cinema’s great boom, the resulting album is a moody journey into a more innocent era of electronic music. It’s a remarkably confident change in direction for RIP Swirl, its nocturnal mood capturing the playful sophistication of early-’00s electronica as seen through the fashion-damaged club culture of today.
While much of Seifert’s native dance-music culture revolves around a utopian ideal of communal, hedonistic release, the styles he draws on here are much more subdued. This is headphone music for late-night bus rides—the lonesome soundtrack for the long drive home after leaving the club a bit earlier than everyone else. After revving up with the snapping breakbeats of the title track, Seifert immediately drops us into full Maxinquaye territory with the snaking groove of “Love Song,” layering his acoustic snares with a shroud of hanging guitar feedback. He takes lessons from Yves Tumor’s big-beat revival and George Clanton’s washed-out Y2K pop, building many of Blurry’s tracks around perfectly concise drum loops that feel strangely timeless in their booming simplicity. Even when Seifert calls on guest vocalists, as he does with Clayjay on “Smiling Dog” or Ydegirl on “Pass Out,” these moments feel less like songs and more like impressions of bedroom pop condensed into narcotic loops.
For most of Blurry, however, Seifert wisely avoids the classic producer mistake of over-relying on guest vocalists, placing most of the focus on his own richly textured production. On “gUts,” he slows his rhythm down to a disassociated crawl, turning the sound of his hand sliding up and down the neck of his guitar into a mesmerizing downtempo pattern. With its delayed, head-nodding hi-hats, “Better” channels the intimate beatmaking exercises of experimental hip-hop acts like Prefuse 73, while “Alone Awake” rides along on a Four Tet-style slide, driven by a chalky drum pattern and Seifert’s layered, slithering guitar. Much of Blurry is instrumental for the better—until Seifert’s own vocals emerge on the penultimate “Slipping My Mind,” bringing the album to its climax with a druggy, disaffected chiller anthem that sounds like a forgotten cut from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack. In its reversed synths and gently epic sway, the entire song is infused with the same psychedelic awe Caroline Polachek has been dabbling in lately; it’s a wonderfully primitive embrace of the kind of wide-eyed sincerity that we seem to have lost somewhere down the line.
Culture has continued to evolve, whether we’ve been locked inside or not, and there’s a growing unease that the world we enter post-pandemic may not entirely resemble the one we left behind. RIP Swirl responded to his own isolation by simply returning to the music that made him and figuring out how to make it work in a post-rave landscape. By playing with the nostalgia of sounds that haven’t been reassessed yet—without giving into pure genre gimmickry—Seifert has created an album that marries the electronic underground of today with the dreamy guitar music that has endured in our cultural mythos. For all its murkiness, what makes Blurry stand out is how refreshingly earnest it feels. | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Public Possession | February 25, 2022 | 7.4 | 4e51f98d-347f-4b70-8cad-f8fc74a09cd5 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The Glasgow-based graphic artist's mostly instrumental Regional Surrealism brings together half-remembered childhood memories, severe dreams of the future, pastoral-electronic wistfulness, and a guest spot from Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite. | The Glasgow-based graphic artist's mostly instrumental Regional Surrealism brings together half-remembered childhood memories, severe dreams of the future, pastoral-electronic wistfulness, and a guest spot from Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite. | Konx-om-Pax: Regional Surrealism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16954-regional-surrealism/ | Regional Surrealism | Tom Scholefield has created his own brand of hyperreality in his work as a graphic artist, forming a world where the real and the synthetic pile-up through colossal stacks of imagery. Human skulls, machinery, plant life, broken-down cars, barnacles, teeth, and satellite dishes all feature in his work, which includes the monochromatic cover art for Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts and the more colorful 3D animation of Kuedo's video for "Ascension Phase". For the cover art of this debut album under his Konx-om-Pax moniker, Scholefield imagines a space where mountainous terrain is chiseled out to host to a large factory building, which in turn is under threat from reedy, grass-like tentacles slithering up around its metal façade. He stops short of imagining a future where these elements can peacefully co-exist, instead creating an anarchic face-off where humankind, machines, and the natural world are all straining to gain the upper hand.
It's a feeling that seeps into the music on Regional Surrealism, a mostly instrumental album caught somewhere between the chillwave-plundered "half-remembered childhood nostalgia" trope, impossibly severe dreams of the future, and the pastoral-electronic wistfulness of Scholefield's fellow countrymen Boards of Canada. That flitting back and forth between styles is emblematic of his wider work in the art and design fields, which has taken in projects with fellow Glaswegians Hudson Mohawke, Rustie, and Mogwai (whose Stuart Braithwaite features on "Zang-Tumb" from this record). Konx-om-Pax feels like various strains of abstract thought circling one another, with only the loosest of ties binding them together. It takes place in a juncture between the big and the small, the real and the unreal. On the vast "Pillars of Creation" Scholefield constructs a fantastic glacial empire all of his own; on "Let's Go Swimming" if feels like he's straining to see a reflection of himself in a tiny, muddy puddle.
That fissure quickly opens up when Regional Surrealism begins and never closes up into anything that could be described as a hermetic Konx-om-Pax sound. This material has been collected from various points in the past six or seven years according to an interview Scholefield recently gave to the Quietus, which helps explain its scattershot whims. "Intro" encroaches on the kind of plastic pining Joe Knight regularly conducts under his Rangers guise, while "Slootering" is a slavish piece of Perrey/Kingsley worship that directs the album down a surprisingly quirky detour following the growing feeling of atrophy that precedes it. "At Home with Mum and Dad" best represents the latter feeling, with a series of loops shifting lugubriously across the same axis of yearning/darkness that Demdike Stare try to bridge, where the sound moves so sluggishly that it resembles the actions of someone scaling a mountain with a sack of rocks tied to their back.
The abundance of gloom shouldn't be a total surprise-- the name "Konx-om-Pax" is taken from the title of a series of essays published in 1907 by famed occultist Aleister Crowley, himself a beloved reference point for myriad musicians from many different backgrounds over the years. Regional Surrealism is only loosely anchored in that domain, but it's when Scholefield crawls into those blackened corners that he can divine his most impressive material. "Glacier Mountain Descent" is particularly striking, offering a subtle twist on Werner Herzog's opening for Aguirre: The Wrath of God that hints at an ambition for Konx-om-Pax that far outstrips more frivolous material like the Braithwaite-featuring "Zang-Tumb". Those hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world. The potential for Konx-om-Pax feels boundless if he can find a way back to that latter space more often. | 2012-07-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-07-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 27, 2012 | 6 | 4e525b7b-de46-4573-abff-9a4975df17cc | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
On her debut album as Cruel Diagonals, the Oakland experimental musician Megan Mitchell turns samples sourced from ethnomusicological archives into ambient music that’s both expressive and empathetic. | On her debut album as Cruel Diagonals, the Oakland experimental musician Megan Mitchell turns samples sourced from ethnomusicological archives into ambient music that’s both expressive and empathetic. | Cruel Diagonals: Disambiguation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cruel-diagonals-disambiguation/ | Disambiguation | The title of Megan Mitchell’s debut album as Cruel Diagonals seems ironic at first. Disambiguation suggests a process of clarification, yet Mitchell’s music is full of mystery. Her songs often retreat, with sounds fading soon after they emerge, and silence always threatening to overtake her atmospheres. It’s tough to make out the words in her shadowy, disembodied singing, if there are words there at all. Her track titles acknowledge all this in terms such as “oblique,” “vague,” and “liminal.”
Yet in one crucial respect, Disambiguation is loud and clear. That’s Mitchell’s use of bold, distinct beats. Nearly every track centers on a prodding pulse, providing skeletons for other sounds to float around like a ghost’s billowing sheet. To make those sounds, Mitchell used field recordings and samples from the ethnomusicology archives at the University of Washington, where she studied Library and Information Sciences. As a result, her rhythms seem to arise from the depths of nature. It’s as if you can hear wisps of history inside their spellbinding echoes.
Because Mitchell’s beats are so strong and willful, they give Disambiguation a lot of force. Everything moves forward deliberately, and soon enough all the sonic obscurity becomes a tool with which to express emotion and build ambience, instead of a cloak to hide behind. Rather than pushing you away, her subtle music beckons you to come closer. Naturally, there is some loneliness and even desolation emanating from her restrained approach, but there’s also a lot of empathy. The feeling of solitude she creates is honest in a way that can make you feel less alone.
Disambiguation’s enveloping moods develop gradually. On the best Cruel Diagonals tracks, Mitchell starts slowly, establishing an aura before infusing it with a rhythmic arc. On “Oblique Ritual,” long tones make room for a minimal beat, which eventually rises to meet Mitchell’s vocal hums. A far-off drone gradually works its way into focus on “Render Arcane” before transferring momentum to the kind of chiming repetition often associated with Steve Reich’s loops. Mitchell can also hit the ground running: “Enmeshed” begins with a bounding rhythm that’s soon echoed in her foggy moans, which are so haunting it sounds as if it she recorded them during a previous lifetime.
Mitchell’s sonic environment evokes some other dark electronic music (particularly the murky concoctions of Demdike Stare), but mostly it feels singular. The danger in building such a unique sound world is the possibility of stripping the archives she samples of their original cultural contexts. But she treats all of her sounds with such care and thought (much like her direction of Many Many Women, an index of women and non-binary sound artists) that her process of reworking respects her sources rather than exploiting them. The result is music that’s both sonically and thematically inclusive. By the end of Disambiguation, what’s left isn’t so much an impression of Mitchell’s own identity as her ability to meld it into something bigger than herself. | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drawing Room Records | July 18, 2018 | 7.4 | 4e5654af-1255-4727-886d-5a3929d89148 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The latest installment of the Bootleg Series excavates live recordings and demos from Dylan’s infamous, fruitful, and polarizing era as an evangelical Christian. | The latest installment of the Bootleg Series excavates live recordings and demos from Dylan’s infamous, fruitful, and polarizing era as an evangelical Christian. | Bob Dylan: Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-trouble-no-more-the-bootleg-series-vol-13-1979-1981/ | Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981 | In the autumn of 1978, Bob Dylan began performing a new version of “Tangled Up in Blue.” In addition to a complete melodic makeover, he updated a lyric that had previously referenced an unnamed Italian poet to address a more specific source text: “She opened up the Bible and started quoting it to me/Jeremiah, Chapter 13, verses 21 and 33.” Debuted during the tour behind his directionless Street Legal LP, his new arrangement of the beloved track offered a glimpse at Dylan’s next reinvention: You can hear a white light starting to seep in.
Right around that time, Dylan introduced a new song to his band called “Slow Train Coming.” That track appears in four vastly different versions on Trouble No More, the fascinating new Bootleg Series release covering his fruitful but polarizing era as an evangelical Christian songwriter between 1979 and 1981. The earliest rendition on the collection stems from his ’78 tour rehearsals when the verses were not yet finalized and Dylan mostly just hammered in the chorus: “There’s a slow/Slow train coming/Around the bend,” he sings over and over again as his backing vocalists’ performance grows increasingly dramatic with each repetition. It’s a stirring, uncanny document of an artist discovering his new sound—an ominous take on gospel to which he’d devote himself for the next three years.
”Slow Train Coming” would become the title track to the first entry in Dylan’s “Christian trilogy.” These albums, which draw on the grainy, burnt-out blues sound he’d adopt more fully in the 21st century, remain the most mysterious items in one of rock music’s deepest, most daunting discographies. On principle alone, they turned off multitudes of fans who once admired Dylan’s staunch individualism and leftist politics. But for Dylan, they signified a rebirth, both creatively and personally. By the end of the decade, his longevity as a rock icon was unprecedented: Elvis was gone; The Beatles had been broken up as long they’d been around; the “new Dylans” like Springsteen were now welcoming their own disciples. When the “old Dylan”—just pushing 40—found himself uninspired on what had become known as his “Las Vegas Tour,” the Bible offered a way forward, even if it didn’t provide the answers he might have wanted.
For the most part, the songs on Trouble No More do not reflect the hope or contentment usually associated with praise music. They are as venomous and full of doom as Dylan’s more celebrated writing on war, politics, or love. Neither as warm and embracing as Cat Stevens’ nor as spiritually wise as Leonard Cohen’s, Dylan’s religious work seems to come from a place of fear—borderline paranoia. Inspired by the best-selling Hal Lindsey book The Late Great Planet Earth, he constantly pairs his acceptance of Jesus with warnings of an imminent apocalypse. In a catchy song called “Precious Angel,” propelled by a bouncy, pinched Mark Knopfler guitar riff, he looks to the future and sings of “darkness that will fall from on high/When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die.” In many songs, Dylan quotes directly from the Bible. In others, he sings as first-person “I,” instructing “you” to follow his lead and make a change or risk facing unthinkable consequences: a strange play on the messianic presence he’d assumed in the lives of his fans. “I told you the answer was blowing in the wind, and it was,” he allegedly announced at a show, “I told you the times they were a-changing, and they did. And I’m telling you Christ is coming back—and he is!”
To perform this material live, Dylan pressed reset on his songbook, ignoring the nearly two decades of work that preceded Slow Train Coming. He was debuting new music at every concert—songs that would eventually appear on the sharply focused Saved in 1980 and the more eclectic Shot of Love the following year. In the absence of his hits, he fleshed out setlists with faithful covers of devotional songs like Dallas Holm’s “Rise Again” and hymns performed by a four-person gospel choir who toured with him. Fans were perplexed. Throughout a stunning San Francisco performance of “Pressing On,” one of his finest gospel songs, the audience remains silent. They refuse to clap along during the a capella break, inadvertently bringing the hard-won battle in its lyrics to life. There’s a captivating tension in hearing an artist so revered, so evangelized, preach to empty seats—an energy that pervades the set and makes this one of Dylan’s most haunting and vulnerable collections of music.
Trouble No More exists in several editions. The most comprehensive set includes two live shows from the era; two discs of tour highlights; two discs of outtakes and rarities; and a bizarre concert film interrupted by newly filmed scenes of actor Michael Shannon reciting sermons in a vacant church (likely in the absence of Dylan’s own between-song sermons, which have mysteriously and perhaps mercifully been edited out). These recordings beat out their studio counterparts at nearly every turn. Stemming largely from live shows and rehearsals, they avoid the tinny production and glossy pastiche of the records, highlighting this era’s latent strengths: the unnerving conviction in Dylan’s vocals, his killer backing band, and, most of all, the underlying strength of the material.
Songs that previously felt like hidden gems in Dylan’s catalog become centerpieces. A live rendition of “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” features bombastic, blazing guitar solos from guest performer Carlos Santana as Dylan spits his way through the lyrics, making its surreal narrative even more impassioned. “When He Returns,” the closing track on Slow Train Coming, appears in stark, definitive form, on solo piano and organ at a 1980 show in Toronto. Dylan’s voice sounds beautiful, fanatical, and somewhat insane, which is exactly how this material should be delivered.
Unlike other editions of the Bootleg Series exploring Dylan’s mythically productive studio sessions, the outtakes are not the main draw here. The slow, stately “Making a Liar Out of Me” comes closest to a lost classic, though the band’s performance is too tentative for it to truly transcend. Less ambitious tracks like “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody” and “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” are pleasant but steer close to “Schoolhouse Rock!” levels of singalong didacticism. While Dylan was writing prolifically at this time, his relentless output felt more like a search for the right words as opposed to an overflow of inspiration. For the most part, the best songs all ended up on the albums. What’s more interesting is how the material evolved from its early forms to the studio renditions and onto the stage. With key tracks appearing in multiple incarnations, the set examines how Dylan reapproached this material the longer he lived with it: how “Gotta Serve Somebody” ascended from a bitter confession to a twisted roll call, or how the livestock in “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” slowly disassembled over the course of the tour.
By 1981, Dylan eased up on his evangelism. He introduced decidedly secular new material to his shows—like the excellent “Caribbean Wind” and the not-so-excellent “Lenny Bruce”—and welcomed back old favorites like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Soon, he would disown this entire era. He abandoned its material in later setlists and denied he’d ever even been a Christian, citing it as just another example of the media’s unfair insistence on labeling him at every turn. “I mean, nobody cares what Billy Joel’s religious views are,” he spat at one interviewer, who could have responded by pointing out that Billy Joel never wrote a song called “Property of Jesus.” Regardless of his true beliefs, Trouble No More offers living proof of Dylan’s commitment at the time. Across these 102 tracks, he sounds as devoted to his work as ever, puncturing a style of music built to offer definitive answers with his own heavy brand of cosmic nihilism.
The era came to a close with “Every Grain of Sand,” the final track on Shot of Love. Allegedly written fully-formed at the piano in the summer of 1980, it remains one of his most powerful compositions: If the sole purpose of his religious search was to lead him here, then the journey was worth it. The track appears twice on Trouble No More, as an intimate rehearsal midway through the tour and a full-band performance on its very last night, before he took a three-year break from live shows and mostly abandoned religious music (at least until his 2009 curio Christmas in the Heart). Between those two takes, Dylan’s voice lowered and the song’s pace slowed, trading its epiphanic intensity for a comforting sense of foresight and calm. Together, they summarize the story told throughout Trouble No More: one man’s path from fear to acceptance, obsession to understanding, getting born and pressing on. | 2017-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia Legacy | November 4, 2017 | 8.1 | 4e58f3f0-98d0-4953-b7b6-c80dc316356b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Luca Guadagnino’s remake of a horror classic features Yorke tackling a broader range of styles and ideas than any of his previous solo work, and all of them shine. | Luca Guadagnino’s remake of a horror classic features Yorke tackling a broader range of styles and ideas than any of his previous solo work, and all of them shine. | Thom Yorke: Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thom-yorke-suspiria-music-for-the-luca-guadagnino-film/ | Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film) | Thom Yorke is an unexpected choice of composer for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic. The original’s iconic soundtrack came from Goblin, an Italian progressive-rock outfit who brought a wild, cacophonous aesthetic to Argento’s moody mind-fuck of a film. Shoveling all manner of seemingly incompatible ideas into the blender—Baroque harpsichords, synthesizers, tabla, splatter funk, even intimations of death metal—they yielded a score even gorier, in its sticky dissonance, than Argento’s gaudily fake blood.
Yorke, on the other hand, is, well, Thom Yorke—the brainy, sensitive possessor of a falsetto and a perpetual melancholy that lingers like a head cold he can’t quite shake. To call him “anemic” might sound unkind, but a scene from Argento’s film comes to mind: Protagonist Suzy, following a faint and a nosebleed, is prescribed bed rest, bland food, and a nightly glass of red wine. “It builds the blood,” enthuses the unctuous doctor, and one suspects he’d probably want to get Yorke on a regular Sangiovese regimen as well.
But unlike Argento’s film, with its almost cartoonishly supersaturated, blood-red hues, Guadagnino’s remake favors a drab, wintry, washed-out palette, which is precisely what the Radiohead frontman does best. Just listen to something like “There Is No Ice (For My Drink),” off his last solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes: In Yorke’s hands, even muscular club tracks come off sounding like vaporous sighs. (For what it’s worth “suspiria” is Latin for “sighs”; the film’s title comes from Thomas de Quincey’s essay “Suspiria de Profundis,” or “Sighs from the Depths.”)
However it may work in the film, on its own, Yorke’s score tackles a broader range of styles and ideas than any of his previous solo work, and all of them shine. There are appropriately cinematic, minor-key passages for piano and strings; great sheets of electronic buzz; gorgeous choral miniatures with a whiff of Arvo Pärt’s arctic grace; brooding, gothic Americana; and striking forays into pure electronic abstraction, the kind of thing you might have found on the German experimental label Mille Plateaux in the late 1990s.
There are even a few bona fide songs. “Suspirium,” a lilting ballad largely for piano and voice, wouldn’t sound out of place on a Radiohead album, and though the lyrics gesture at some of the film’s themes, they’re oblique enough to stand on their own, and spooky enough to sound haunting even outside the context of the movie. “Unmade,” a stately showcase for Yorke’s voice at its most moving, is cut from similar cloth, and “Has Ended,” a droning dirge set to a hurdy-gurdy grind and a slow, almost funky drum shuffle, is even more compelling, if only for a Mellotron-like solo about halfway through. It’s only some 15 seconds long, but it has a powerful impact, transforming sullen trip-hop into something transcendent.
While Yorke’s score doesn’t sound anything like Goblin’s, you can hear the influence of their spooky central theme—a minor-key melody for celeste and bells that Argento deploys as a means of anticipating moments of awful violence—in a handful of skeletal melodies that lend cohesion to the soundtrack, primarily in the form of piano figures pacing haltingly against an orchestral morass, tritones hanging in the air like echoes of a scream.
Despite the tension between songs that could pass for Radiohead’s repertoire and more soundtrack-like material, the whole album flows remarkably well, particularly given its 80-minute running time. Tracks run together, connected by viscous strings and unsettling sound design; the “proper” songs float along a vast expanse of half-frozen slurry. Occasional Foley effects—footsteps, rustling, ominous groans—serve a function similar to the muffled screams of Goblin’s score, infusing the music with a subliminal pedal tone of terror. Yorke has said much of his compositional process entailed extensive studio tinkering, and that’s borne out in the richness of many of his sounds here—particularly in “Olga’s Destruction (Volk tape)” and “Volk,” where brooding piano and synth melodies dissolve into eerily detuned fugues reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s microtonal experiments.
Of all the obviously cinematic pieces, as opposed to “singles” like “Suspirium” and “Unmade,” one stands out: “A Choir of One,” a 14-minute study for voice and, presumably, electronics. For nearly a quarter of an hour, wordless vocal harmonies float like some sulphurous vapor hugging the treeline of a haunted forest, queasily rising and falling in pitch, with a dark shimmer reminiscent of Ligeti or Xenakis. It is shapeshifting, almost formless; it sprawls like a glistening oil slick, and it serves as the album’s de facto finale. It’s followed only by a handful of short sound-design experiments, which conclude with “The Epilogue,” a brief collage of organ drones, Foley effects (traffic noise, a ticking clock), and, after a fade to silence and a false ending, a deep, rumbling analog throb, a sound as bleak as the void itself. I’d imagine—I hope—that’s what’s playing when the credits roll. In its minimalist opacity and Vantablack depths, it’s the polar opposite of Goblin’s playfully neon-hued approach, and it’s in going to that extreme that Yorke has made Suspiria his own. | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | XL | October 27, 2018 | 8 | 4e5cb9c3-e702-4476-9865-1a2595c5e943 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Congolese ensemble pairs with the Angolan-born producer Batida, and their best moments resemble a Ferris wheel spinning off its moorings, letting grooves careen and rumble as they might. | The Congolese ensemble pairs with the Angolan-born producer Batida, and their best moments resemble a Ferris wheel spinning off its moorings, letting grooves careen and rumble as they might. | Konono N°1 / Batida: Konono N°1 Meets Batida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21696-konono-n1-meets-batida/ | Konono N°1 Meets Batida | Congotronics, the 2004 album by the Congolese ensemble Konono No. 1, resonated with Western ears in part because it didn't hew cleanly to any one region or genre. Sure, they deployed traditional instrumentation, but their likembés were amplified via car batteries as well as percussion hammered out on scrap metal. The scrappiness and noisiness seemed to situate them along a punk and industrial axis rather than a world music one: Konono No. 1 got compared to Einstürzende Neubauten, toured with The Ex and Tortoise and recorded with Björk. And that was before they found themselves mashed with the likes of Andrew Bird, Glenn Kotche, and Micachu & the Shapes on a peculiar remix set.
So while Konono N°1 Meets Batida might scan as yet another cultural exchange, Konono has actually moved closer to the sound of their home country now. Batida, the alias of Pedro Coquenão, is Angolan-born and Lisbon-based and most sympathetic to the ensemble’s sound, since he does similar work, but updates Angolan music with software rather than metal. In addition to the group, Batida also recruited guitarist Papa Juju, vocalist Selma Uamusse and MC AF Diaphra, though the passing of founder Mingiedi Mawangu no doubt hangs over the group. It's an impressive influx of new talent, but you would be hard-pressed to hear it for most of the album.
Batida’s beats give "Nlele Kalusimbiko" a firm foundation, and Diaphra’s verses give the number a velvety growl, before the likembés flare to the fore for the last half of the song. A pitter patter of drum machine opens "Kuna America," which seems rather thin at first. But when the distorted melody buzzes to life nearly two minutes in, the polyrhythms and whistles give the track the feel of a moveable Carnival. The new members tuck into Konono’s sound well enough, but don’t do much to differentiate it from albums past. One might not be able to suss out the collaborative part of the album, mistaking it instead for initiates into the ensemble finding their way. Some of the songs do little more than tread water until the likembés lurch into earshot.
For all of the music that the Congolese group has released in the past decade, songs were never really Konono’s forte, so much as building up a headful of steam and letting things careen and rumble as they might. Their finest moments remind me of a ferris wheel gone off its moorings, the likembés making a metallic churning that cycles in ever widening patterns; it's an astonishing sound that both mesmerizes and rolls over everything in its path. So the most effective track here is the eleven minutes of "Nzonzing Família," where it sounds like Batida stands to the side, deftly fills in some of the spaces with small sounds and just allows the group churn towards the horizon. Perhaps that’s Konono’s fate, to always be taking their collaborators for a ride but never getting taken to some new destination. | 2016-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Electronic | Crammed Discs | April 22, 2016 | 6.8 | 4e6454e3-0395-459b-810a-260cde6ec6cd | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Stones Throw reissue and expand this 2003 through-the-mail collaboration between Madlib and the late Jay Dee. | Stones Throw reissue and expand this 2003 through-the-mail collaboration between Madlib and the late Jay Dee. | Jaylib: Champion Sound: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10333-champion-sound-deluxe-edition/ | Champion Sound: Deluxe Edition | It shouldn't have worked. And maybe, in 2003, it didn't: When a series of through-the-mail beat trades between Madlib and Jay Dee eventually coalesced into a full-length collaboration, the final result felt a little gimmicky at first. A pair of producer/MCs taking turns rhyming over each others' beats is unconventional enough, but when both of them had such disparate approaches at the time-- ever try listening to Jay Dee's smooth, uncluttered banger Welcome to Detroit and Quasimoto's blunted, dubbed-out The Unseen back to back, much less shuffled together?-- it was hard not to feel initially disoriented. Many critics (this one included) originally saw it as an enjoyable if disjointed effort, then eventually forgot about it once Madvillainy dropped a few months later.
Stones Throw's reissue of Champion Sound, then, seems to work largely as a "hey, remember this?" nudge, coming off the heels of the recent deluxe edition of Dilla's Ruff Draft EP in a similar bid to reestablish the value of an underheard record. Unlike Ruff Draft, Champion Sound was a widely-released, full-fledged album-- more slept-on than scarce-- and it's aged a bit better than early reviews might've anticipated. More than a few underground rap albums these days have shot for Champion Sound's stoned-in-the-club vibe and fallen short, while Stones Throw has become indie rap's "it" label in recent years with albums much like this: collaborative efforts infused with Madlib's unpretentiously avant-garde spirit, weird enough to stay on the margins of current pop culture but accessible enough to stick on Cartoon Network's [adult swim] (where it seems a bit less bizarre next to willfully batshit stuff like "Saul of the Mole Men").
The main thing to keep in mind about Champion Sound is that the two main artists involved adapted to each other's production styles just as much as they contrasted. It's easy to theoretically pit Madlib's muddy, crackly, blown-out organics as a barely-compatible counter to Dilla's pristine digital precision, but there's a stylistic bleedthrough that seeps both ways. Madlib's beats here lack much of the skewed jazz eccentricity that his more familiar Quasimoto and Madvillain productions do. Instead, he fine-tunes his approach so that his more far-out tendencies-- reassembled bop flotsam and beats that have a hard time staying put-- are left to sneak in through the margins. There's odd little touches like the title track's Bollywood vocal (which, post-"Addicted", didn't skew too far away from the mainstream anyways), the piercing, slightly warped-sounding sustained string note that runs through most of "The Mission" and the Asian/Middle-Eastern horn that trills through "Survival Test". But like the best Dilla tracks, the bass and drums are at the forefront and do most of the heavy lifting, and a couple of Madlib's beats, like the booming fist-pump rhythm of "McNasty Filth" and the insistent stutter-thump of "Strapped", feel like low-fi versions of Jay Dee's Slum Village work.
Dilla's tracks don't rewrite his own plan as much-- which makes sense, since many of them preceded the idea of the collaboration in the first place-- but they're a bit filthier than usual, his glowing digital bass pushed until it strains; not for nothing is his best beat on here, a heavy slab of big-bottomed g-funk built around a disembodied soul wail and a airlock-tight drum loop, repurposed for a track called "The Red". And there's a few points that pick up the slack for the prog-fusion bizarreness Madlib pushed to the background: the melody for "React" is based around what might be a guitar riff or a clarinet sped up to a hummingbird tempo, "Raw Shit" hammers away at a tinny Farfisa that sounds like it's on its last legs, and "Strip Club" features a giggly steel drum that's about as sexy as a coconut bra.
Even if they're not much worth commenting on lyrically-- "Shoulda never been allowed in the game/ All y'all fake gangstas now" and "My thug niggas know what I mean/ A live bitch, that's what I need" are typical Jay Dee lines, while Madlib's appeal is mostly in his muttering, halting delivery-- the vocals also fit their productions in a complementary way. Jay Dee's elementary rhymes seem as loosely-assembled and grimy as Madlib's beats, while Madlib returns the favor by vocally skulking across Dilla's precision engineering with his conversational counter-rhythms. A few guests keep things switched up: Kweli's turn on "Raw Shit" has more value in his endearingly ridiculous half-sung hooks than his unremarkable verses, Frank-n-Dank give "McNasty Filth" the confident swagger the tear-the-club-up beat requires, and Percee P throws out so many acrobatic battle-rap turns of phrase on "The Exclusive" ("Perce is nice, worth the price, every verse entice/ one of the most praised men to surface twice on this earth since Christ") that it's easy to forget he's only rapping for about 40 seconds.
Along with the requisite bonus disk of instrumentals and a couple hard-to-find bonus tracks (including the hilarious Madlib-helmed "Pillz"-- "Oh shit, I just took an X pill/ now I'm ready to thwoop"), the supplemental material includes a handful of remixes that don't quite fit in with Champion Sound's original vibe. The beatbox-driven remix of "The Official" and the rework of "Champion Sound" that sounds like "Whole Lotta Love" on a busted harpsichord have their place on the second disc, far out of reach of their superior originals, but might not be enough to justify a purchase for fans who already got the CD first time around. Given its single-disc price, the Deluxe Edition of Champion Sound, like most reissues, has the most value for those who haven't gotten around to hearing the CD until now-- and they're coming to it at just the right time. | 2007-06-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-06-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | June 20, 2007 | 7.5 | 4e6af8bf-ce97-4d5b-b13a-7f7179b05125 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Revisiting electronic pioneers Autechre’s earliest albums, now reissued, is like returning to a previously uninhabitable planet and being startled to find residents living and thriving there. | Revisiting electronic pioneers Autechre’s earliest albums, now reissued, is like returning to a previously uninhabitable planet and being startled to find residents living and thriving there. | Autechre: Incunabula / Amber / Tri Repetae | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22592-incunabula-amber-tri-repetae/ | Incunabula / Amber / Tri Repetae | The past few years have been both a bounty and something of an endurance test for Autechre fans. This past May, the duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth released elseq 1-5, over four hours of new material. It earned comparisons to dumping off a bag of clothes at a second hand store and a Netflix show binge. That followed on the heels of last year’s AE_LIVE, which was over nine hours of live shows and 2013’s Exai, which ran for two hours (though still under the length of a modern superhero film). It sounds daunting—and yes, what the duo conjures up sounds daunting—as Autechre is shorthand for a type of difficult strain of electronic music once deemed “intelligent dance music.” There’s a good chance the word “algorithm” will be used when writing about their music, and despite their longevity, they remain at the vanguard, the Cecil Taylors of their field.
But for all that impenetrability, there's a lifelong friendship and dialogue that takes place between the two, regardless of the fact they now live in separate cities, building and swapping MAX patches from a distance. It’s a dialogue begun back in the late ‘80s, when they were electro-obsessed teens coming up in Manchester, swapping ideas and tracks on cassette tapes, jamming on analog synths and drum machines in their flats. It’s a dialogue that you can parse on their earliest albums, Incunabula and Amber, finally reissued on vinyl after they’ve changed hands online for three-digit sums. That complex and private language is evident from the start, situating Brown and Booth as the Poto and Cabengo of techno.
“Eggshell,” from their 1993 debut Incunabula, subtly reworks “The Egg,” a track from the epochal Artificial Intelligence comp that forever saddled them with the “intelligent dance music” tag . The Incunabula track locates a purgatory between the graffiti-friendly snare and hi-hats and disarmingly gorgeous, slow-moving synth line that evolves almost without notice behind the beat. The landscapes they evoke can seem post-industrial and dystopian, but the chord progression of “Kalpol Introl” still feels melancholic and definitely human. And while its approximately 75-minute length is unwarranted—the acid squelches of “Windwind” exhaust with their 11-minute runtime—there are both time-stamped presets as well as plenty of clues as to their evolution embedded in the album.
An early highlight, “Bike,” finds Autechre at their most songful, the bolts-on-concrete sounds of the 808s giving way to a beautiful ambient passage before that metallic beat returns. Even odder is “Basscadet,” a fan-favorite hit of sorts back in 1994. Built from what sounds like a hand drum tattoo and featuring a cheeky vocal sample saying “I don’t have any idea ‘bout what’s going on,” it features the abrasive electronic tones and scoured-metal aesthetic that would soon become the keystone to their future work.
Next year’s Amber might most closely resemble Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, but even then it shows them subtly begin to slide away from their techno roots. Some of their most ambient tracks are here, though it also finds them favoring darker, more industrial timbres that earned those early Cabaret Voltaire comparisons. It’s still disarming to see them use real words like “Glitch” and “Montreal” rather than the semantic jumble that would soon define their tracks. “Foil” builds with a beat that sounds like a whip against the titular material, the turbid washes decidedly more malicious than on their debut. The synth melodies of “Slip” haven’t aged very well, and the sharper aspects of “Glitch” and “Piezo” feel dulled and gentle in hindsight, knowing just what nasty and brutish sounds they would soon wring out of their gear.
What makes Amber fascinating to revisit decades on is to hear vestigial organs and sonic cul-de-sacs that Autechre would bin almost immediately after. Brown would look back and deem these melodic bits “cheesy” but if anything, it proves that at one point the duo was human after all. “Silverside” might be Autechre’s most haunted five minutes, even if the surge of orchestral soundtrack strings and distorted voice are two tricks that we’d never hear again. “Nine” might be the closest they ever got to the placid sounds of new age while “Further,” with its slow heaving minor key swells are as emotive as anything Autechre ever released. The flickering lullaby melody and spare pads of “Yulquen” reveal a soft, contemplative side that few could even identify as an Autechre track.
With 1995’s Tri Repetae, Autechre obliterated all that they—and most of their Warp roster mates—had done before. Rather than cut away vestigial parts, they scoured off all flesh and “cheesy” bits entirely, trash-compacted their hard drives and went full cyborg instead. While Aphex Twin used a dentist drill-high frequency to wheeze atop his single “Ventolin” earlier that year, Autechre made it their entire aesthetic, reconfiguring each component of their productions with that same level of sonic intensity. From the deep, sawing sinewave and rockslide of low tones that open “Dael” to the metallic thrums and chilling hiss of closer “Rsdio,” Tri Repetae served as Autechre’s superhero origin story, revealing a monstrous new power while also obliterating any trace of their previous selves. Rather than be able to trace the twisted metal of Tri Repetae to old Detroit techno singles and Mantronik sides, the lineage goes directly to Merzbow’s white-knuckle noise and the hammered metal of Einstürzende Neubauten. They’d push into more experimental and complex music for the next twenty years and never quite be as gentle or linear as those first two efforts.
The pewter sleeve bereft of any markings, the images of metal shafts and casings suggest that the humans behind Autechre were replaced not with robots but rather old radiators instead. Since then, experimental and dance artists alike—be they on labels like PAN, Tri Angle or Editions Mego—have absorbed certain aspects of Autechre’s sound. Whether you go for Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca, Holly Herndon, Russell Haswell, or Powell, they inhabit a world that Autechre helped make conceivable, so that even the cold metallic tones of their third album have somehow warmed with time. The bass growl that lurches forth on “Clipper” now feels triumphant rather than menacing, the whinnying frequencies of “Rotar” slowly tease out a melodic line. The spaceship vibrations of “Eutow” bears a low-rider beat at its center and the factory clatter of “Gnit” still reveals something quirky behind all the machinations. Revisiting Tri Repetae twenty-one years later is like returning to a planet previously filled with sulfuric acid clouds, volcanoes and liquid mercury pools. A hostile, post-human sound at the time of its release, it’s now startling to find residents living and thriving there. | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | November 21, 2016 | 9 | 4e6f3077-5ff6-4306-8111-c656627cd164 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Underneath the ill-advised MLK quotes, you’ll find an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make Bieber a star. | Underneath the ill-advised MLK quotes, you’ll find an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make Bieber a star. | Justin Bieber: Justice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/justin-bieber-justice/ | Justice | Justin Bieber’s decision to open his sixth album, Justice, with a sample of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech—and to plop in another one halfway through—is revealing, but perhaps not for the reasons he intended. In the half-century following Dr. King’s assassination, liberalism has turned him, a revolutionary figure once hated by the majority of white Americans for his commitment to racial, religious, and economic justice, into a convenient accessory through which to signal a vague, corporation-safe message in support of Black people. And if Bieber is anything, he is a corporation; perhaps that is why I don’t find it especially jarring to hear King’s exhortation for radical sacrifice juxtaposed with a song about being horny enough to walk through fire. On Instagram, I see this style of cognitive dissonance, or willful cynicism, deployed almost daily by media companies, influencers and celebrities, people I knew in college, even an Etsy plant store. This is just how we communicate now. Leave it to Bieber to, however unintentionally, hold up a mirror to a culture that doesn’t want to see itself.
Paradoxically, behind the cringeworthy MLK controversy is a surprisingly compelling record, an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make him a star to begin with. Bieber, now 27, seems to be having fun for the first time since his well-documented pubescence. After all, he is in something like the spring solstice of his life, having emerged from a period of distress that included heavy drug use and suicidal ideation into a well-adjusted millennial adulthood, grounded in the joys of marriage and the salvation of Christ. Whereas his last album, 2020’s R&B-led Changes, was burdened by the compulsion to prove to an antagonistic public that he’s no longer the baby-faced teen they first met nor the tempestuous shithead he soon became, Justice shows Bieber experimenting with ideas that are new to him, even if they are not new to the pop landscape.
It’s buoyed by surprises at every turn, but never loses focus. The stadium jaunt “Die for You,” featuring Floridian pop parvenu Dominic Fike, ventures into pop-rock territory, a completely novel mode for Bieber. The synth-pop single “Hold On” begins as a ballad until the beat drops and curls around a serpentine bassline. “Ghost,” a song about grief, launches with a UK garage-lite beat, swells into a colossal hook, and eventually settles over a folky acoustic guitar. There might not be a hit on here the size of “Sorry,” but that's partly by design: This is Bieber's smoothest album-length statement to date.
The absence of Poo Bear, Bieber’s primary songwriting collaborator since 2013’s Journals, is conspicuous. Instead of falling into the predictable, adult contemporary-style R&B they made together, Bieber is marching decisively towards capital-p Pop. Justice dances between collaborations with post-genre singers including Khalid and the Kid LAROI, production from Post Malone hitmakers like Andrew Watt and Louis Bell, and songwriters like Rami Yacoub and Gotye. With songs like “Somebody” and “Hold On,” he even indulges in the power-poppy ’80s nostalgia that has recently transitioned from the fringes of pop to its main stage. While he hasn’t fully abandoned the diasporic sounds that granted him some of his farthest-reaching hits, they aren’t his center of gravity; the breezy collabs with the dancehall artist BEAM and the Afropop superstar Burna Boy are serviceable, if not brimming with chart-topping promise.
Bieber is not a powerhouse vocalist, but he is a compelling one, casually dropping in a stray yodel here, a Mariah Carey-indebted set of runs there. His voice has a palatable smoothness; he’s mastered push-and-pull dynamics, and he swings effortlessly from a placid chest voice to a zephyr of a falsetto. That litheness and control are on full display across Justice. Even when the songwriting is spiritless and the production rote—and it occasionally is, as on the confessional “Unstable” and the saccharine “Deserve You”—he still sings the hell out of it.
In fact, Justice delivers some of the strongest, most tightly controlled vocal performances of his career. Two standouts are the piano slowburn “2 Much” and the acoustic-guitar ballad “Off My Face,” a play on his newfound sobriety that is sweet, full-hearted, and entirely convincing, in spite of the cliché. The singles “Holy” with Chance the Rapper and “Peaches” featuring Daniel Caesar and Giveon, share warm instrumentation, a swinging beat, and a lived-in sense of groove that suits him. In recent live performances, accompanied by the five-piece We the Band, he even tested out jazzy interpretations of the songs; his NPR Tiny Desk set is almost transcendent, imagining a future in which Bieber might deliver an artistic statement that functions as a complete thought.
Where Justice fails is, of course, that it is not really about justice at all. The surtext is marital bliss, the subtext is worship. Religious references abound: “I get my light right from the source,” he sings on “Peaches”; “Heaven is a place not too far away,” he promises on “Hold On”; “You prayed for me when I was out of faith,” he trills on “As I Am.” Nebulous references to a generous and all-consuming love are the stuff of both Bieber’s style of pop music and the contemporary praise of his post-Hillsong Christianity. But even when it’s unclear whether Bieber is singing about his wife or his god, the renewed vigor in his performance points to the transformational potential of love, be it terrestrial or heavenly.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RBMG / Def Jam | March 23, 2021 | 7.2 | 4e76184f-4687-405c-a27f-12e902f12ee5 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Mirage nixed any suggestion that intra-band drama was their sole animating force, and flourished in the emotional void they occupied: heartbroken, strung out, and alone at the top. | Mirage nixed any suggestion that intra-band drama was their sole animating force, and flourished in the emotional void they occupied: heartbroken, strung out, and alone at the top. | Fleetwood Mac: Mirage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22134-mirage/ | Mirage | After two records about cheating on each other, it was inevitable that Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine and John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood would begin to cheat on Fleetwood Mac. They were traveling in separate limos by the end of the bad-tempered Tusk tour, where Buckingham had kicked Nicks onstage, and they’d circled Europe on Hitler’s old train. “Looks like the end of the line,” the New York Post warned in March 1981, as solo careers started to proliferate. Fleetwood released The Visitor in June. Where Tusk had taken a year to record, Nicks’ debut album, Bella Donna, was nailed in a few days, released in July, and certified Platinum by October—just as Buckingham’s Law and Order limped to No. 32. Her blousy mystique was the antithesis of his uptight theme, and to dent his fragile ego further, it had been validated by serious men: collaborators Tom Petty, Don Henley, and producer Jimmy Iovine, who she was now dating. According to Buckingham’s then-girlfriend, Carol Ann Harris, he liked to refer to “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” as “Stop Draggin’ My Career Around.”
Having accepted that the band weren’t interested in “shaking people’s preconceptions of pop,” as he sniffed to any reporter who would listen, Buckingham resolved that Fleetwood Mac’s next album should be a proper group effort. Mostly minus Nicks, they mingled their ghosts with those of the haunted Château d’Hérouville, just outside Paris, a destination chosen to accommodate Monaco resident Fleetwood’s tax affairs. Harris observed communal meals eaten in silence. The drug intake exceeded even that of Tusk, according to co-producer Ken Caillat. It’s hard to find any comment about why they chose to name their thirteenth record (and fifth under this lineup) Mirage, though the resonance is obvious in hindsight: It’s the illusion of the band, rather than the full-blooded beast. Buckingham tossed off his songs in under two months. “What can I say this time/Which card shall I play?” Nicks sings on “Straight Back,” sounding like a woman in search of an idea. She pulls out her well-worn tarot deck—wolf, dream, wind, sun—and whips up an unconvincing sandstorm about how “the dream was never over, the dream has just begun,” while Fleetwood Mac increasingly resembled an inescapable nightmare.
Fleetwood Mac’s internecine relationships and betrayals outdid any soap opera, though by 1982, they had plotted almost every conceivable love triangle and finally found partners outside the group. Mirage nixed any suggestion that drama and vicious recriminations were the band’s sole animating force, and flourished in the emotional void they occupied: heartbroken, strung out, and alone at the top. “Every hour filled with an emptiness I can’t hide,” Christine McVie sings on “Wish You Were Here,” referencing her split from the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Love and happiness become an illusion, an unattainable idyll only accessible to the gods: “Knowledge not meant for mortal fools,” Buckingham sings on “Book of Love,” though that doesn’t stop him and his cohort from clinging to the belief that someone, something out there can save them. “Never take your love away, begging you, baby,” McVie pleads on “Love in Store,” turning a trope into a frantic plea.
Yet Mirage has a sunny desperation. Rumours’ harmonies return, the rhythms shuffle, xylophones tinkle, and acoustic guitars add innocent flourishes to every refrain. There’s a similarly nostalgic optimism to Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, also released in ’82: Where Vietnam and Korea cast an ominous pall over Fagen’s paradise, Fleetwood Mac’s collective mania makes Mirage feel like fiddling while Rome burns. Buckingham in particular is hell-bent on leaping back several decades to escape all this mess: “Standing in the shadows, the man I used to be/I want to go back,” he growls on the peppy “Can’t Go Back.”
Some of Buckingham’s perception-shaking DNA remained intact: “Empire State” is the opposite of “Oh Diane,” a daring pop song indicating that Tusk was the result of calculated genius, not just megalomania and madness. Buckingham praises the Big Apple and denigrates his native LA with a wild, removed lust that looks right through the object of his affection; when he sings about “flying high on the Empire State,” the lurching keys and harmonies make him sound like he’s being spun on his axis. (Fleetwood’s drums also sound fantastic, recalling Dennis Davis’ work on Low—also recorded at the Chateau.)
Nicks also mainlines nostalgia, though hers is motivated more by loss than bitterness. “That’s Alright” harkens back to the country music of her childhood, and the precise mix is as rich as a watercolor where every color blurs and accentuates the next one. There’s a grace to her lyrics that’s absent on Tusk, conceding to a partner who just can’t work it out: “I can’t define love like it should be,” she sighs. “That’s alright, it’s alright.” And you can only imagine how mad Buckingham was when she swept in and stole the show with “Gypsy,” its chrome glint distilling her loss of self and the death of a childhood friend, and the optimism the couple felt as young bohemians in San Francisco. Buckingham is always attempting to harness his overheated energy to open up some kind of tear in the fabric of time and space, to step through and rediscover innocence. Nicks, though, conveys the sad wisdom of someone who knows you can never go home again.
As ever, it’s McVie who maintains the most poise on Mirage, even as she languishes over Dennis Wilson. She’s just as lachrymose as on Tusk, but her songs rediscover the body she lost there. There’s adult acceptance in her voice on the Carole King-indebted “Wish You Were Here,” though the lyrics convey an adolescent morbid streak: “I can’t help feeling lonely/There’s no way, no way that I could stop.” “Hold Me” is one of the few moments on the record where McVie, Nicks, and Buckingham sing together. It’s the polar opposite of Tusk’s title track, where the three singers hissed their spurned collective demands. (“Don’t say that you love me! Just tell me that you want me!”) Instead, even as McVie is singing about Wilson, it plays as a plea for understanding and reconciliation between the estranged five-piece: “I don’t want no damage/But how am I going to manage with you?”
They barely did. They fought on the video shoots for “Gypsy” and “Hold Me,” and the Mirage tour was short. Unsurprisingly, given the perfunctory nature of the sessions, there are few whole songs from the cutting room floor on this reissue: Nicks’ “If You Were My Love” is solid, and a more aggressive version of “Empire State” shows what might have transpired had Buckingham been allowed to make Tusk II. Warner Bros. were relieved that he didn’t: Mirage took the band back to No. 1 for the first time since Rumours, and spent five weeks there. The public preferred Fleetwood Mac as soft-rockin' comfort food. In a state of exhaustion and addiction, the five-piece papered over the cracks with an apple pie lattice, and saw other people for five years. | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | September 26, 2016 | 8.5 | 4e798787-427c-42d7-ab9c-5863d1e1bda5 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the soaring 2004 album from the first American Idol winner, whose earnest charm and everywoman appeal charted a brand new course for pop stars. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the soaring 2004 album from the first American Idol winner, whose earnest charm and everywoman appeal charted a brand new course for pop stars. | Kelly Clarkson: Breakaway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelly-clarkson-breakaway/ | Breakaway | The most interesting thing about Kelly Clarkson seemed to be that she was not interesting at all. Even as she became the inaugural winner of American Idol and released Breakaway—one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century—journalists regularly marveled at the unpretentiousness of the former cocktail waitress from Texas. She was the quintessential girl-next-door, “warm-as-a-popover” and “safe-as-milk.” Sure, she had a protean, phenomenal voice—one that made you happy she covered Aretha or Whitney, instead of feeling mortified that she had tried—but she was not overtly sexy, ostentatious, or hip. “It is hard to spend time with Clarkson without wondering if she even realizes she has moved to Los Angeles,” a writer remarked in a 2005 profile of the singer, quipping that the only place you’d spot her in US Weekly was in a “Got Milk?” ad. She went to Chili’s, not wild bashes thrown by Justin Timberlake. Her personal assistant was her brother. She still very earnestly said “cool beans.”
In other words, she was not Britney or Christina—stars whose promiscuous image and mass-market gloss in the public’s perception had made them the subject of a ceaseless media swarm in the early 2000s. A few years earlier, teen pop had replaced grunge in the monoculture: “It’s as if a legion of music fans and bizzers, stunned by the grim finality of [Kurt] Cobain’s act, collectively decided… give us artifice and showbiz,” an Entertainment Weekly writer remarked. The result was boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, bubbly ingenues trained in Disney’s sunshine factory. Like Avril Lavigne, Clarkson was seen as a corrective to the “midriff-baring aristocracy”—because of her wholesomeness and relatability, not any mutinous attitude. Pushing against the sanctimony, Clarkson told a reporter, “I love Britney Spears… People always say, ‘Oh, I’m sick because it’s not about voices, it’s about body and everything.’ Well, that’s what people are buying.” Still, by 2004, Clarkson had charted a very different path for women in pop.
Raised by a schoolteacher and a contractor in Burleson, Texas, Clarkson was a devout Christian who performed in the choir, played sports, and starred in theater productions. After high school, she recorded a demo, eventually saving enough money through odd jobs to move to L.A. with a woman she met performing at Six Flags. Very little happened there. Carole King’s longtime songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, was maybe interested in using her as a backup singer, but it didn’t pan out. Other producers dismissed her as too heavy, “too Black”-sounding, too whatever. Then, in the ultimate stroke of misfortune, her apartment burned down in a fire—right after she had earned enough money to afford a bigger place. Drained of hope, she returned to Texas and took a day job distributing Red Bull samples. A friend told her about what was then just a novelty singing show. “I just auditioned for this thing that said they’d pay you, and it happened to be American Idol,” she recalled. “I went into it thinking it might pay my electric bill.”
Clarkson showed up to Idol auditions in muted make-up and a kitschy denim dress that she’d made by stitching together old blue jeans. Whatever she lacked in glamor, she made up with her poised, masterful renditions of Etta James’ “At Last” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and her easygoing humor. Quipping with the judges, she switched places with Randy Jackson, who for his “audition” got onto one knee and sang R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” To Idol’s resident British hardass, Simon Cowell, this stunt was the only memorable thing about her; he initially wrote Clarkson off as “just a girl with a good voice.” But she kept progressing, round after round, and by the time 10,000 hopefuls had winnowed down to one, Cowell had come to appreciate her “normality.”
Over the course of Idol’s debut season, tens of millions of people called in to the show’s toll-free number, including Natalie Maines of the Chicks, who ultimately voted for Clarkson five times and later declared, “I knew from the first episode that Kelly was the best one there.” Inaugurating a reality television explosion, the competition program presaged the social media era, in which millions of fans can propel a nobody to viral stardom through the click of their phones. By the second season, it had partnered with AT&T to launch a new voting format, precipitating the rise of text messaging.
But winning a popular election doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be consequential or compelling. From the get-go, critics identified the tendency for shows like Idol to produce technically skilled but insipid winners, those who’d “never hesitate to warble seven notes where one would suffice,” as a New York Times writer described. Clarkson’s finale song and debut single was “A Moment Like This,” one of those treacly, awe-inducing ballads in the vein of “I Will Always Love You” that treats love as a kind of transcendent bliss. (It hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts and was featured in gauzy, libidinal advertisements for Sandals Resorts.) Her debut, Thankful, didn’t challenge expectations. With the exception of tracks like “Miss Independent”—a boinging R&B-pop single originally written for Christina Aguilera—it was a fairly uninspired attempt at pop-gospel. Clarkson didn’t want to be boxed into her Idol reputation though: “I want to record an album with personality… I love ballads, but I also want my albums to rock out.”
So for her follow-up, she mussed her hair, smudged her eyeliner, and practiced her withering glare. Breakaway taps into the kind of lacerating pop-rock established by Alanis Morissette in the ’90s and Avril Lavigne in the early 2000s. Lavigne’s debut, 2002’s Let Go, helped steer pop into a spiker, more sour direction and she lent Clarkson Breakaway’s title track. Clarkson is brassy and embittered, incinerating men who’ve wronged her, striding over the scorched earth. “Your eyes they sparkle/That’s all changed, into lies that drop like acid rain,” she seethes on “Gone,” whose abrupt, punched-in guitars are like heel stomps. On the funky, irresistible “Walk Away,” she roasts a dude for being so tremblingly incompetent that he relies on his mother, his brother, everyone else to tell him what he wants. “I’m looking for attention, not another question,” Clarkson snaps. In other words: shut up and stop wasting my time.
With her tremendous voice, Clarkson didn’t have to just pirouette and soar; she could be gritty, affected, full of rage. Its visceral power imbued Breakaway’s radio-friendly pop with gusto; when she confessed to being “torn into pieces” on “Behind These Hazel Eyes,” hurtling into the feeling, she sold you with the force of her conviction. Clarkson may have grown up belting Mariah Carey in her closet, but her favorite band of all time was the Texas post-grunge group the Toadies, whose singer Vaden Todd Lewis’s voice she adored for its primality: “sexy, dirty, drunk, broken.” To give the album a darker, more gnarled edge, she enlisted help from Evanescence’s David Hodges and Ben Moody, whose presence is most felt on the ghostly “Addicted.” Clarkson sounds tortured and histrionic; her gothic wails are swaddled in noise, while violins screech in the background. And then there’s “Hear Me,” which was actually co-written by former writers for Ashlee Simpson and Avril Lavigne, but sounds like a repeat of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.”
“The problem was I wanted to write a lot of my own songs on Breakaway,” Clarkson told TIME, “Nobody else wanted me to.” After sparring with RCA’s Clive Davis, she eventually co-wrote six Breakaway tracks, including one she penned when she was 16 that had been rejected from her debut. “Because of You” is the saddest and most personal song on the record, a piano ballad about the trauma of her parent’s separation. (Clarkson’s father had walked out on their family when she was six, never to be heard from again.) The song is an outcry from one’s “inner child,” rendered in schoolyard metaphors (“Because of you/I never stray too far from the sidewalk”). And while the ubiquity of divorce now may make the song seem both overblown and quaint, “Because of You” summons the very real betrayal of discovering that adults don’t know what they’re doing, and as a child you’ll have to compensate for their mistakes. The cost of self-preservation is becoming hardened and on-edge: “My heart can’t possibly break/When it wasn’t even whole to start with,” Clarkson bellows.
The most indelible song of Clarkson’s career, though, has always been “Since U Been Gone,” a perfect storm of indie-rock nerve and pop ecstasy. It was Swedish producer Max Martin’s rebrand from the Backstreet Boys, whose squeaky-clean formula had fallen out of fashion, and the breakout smash for Dr. Luke—although Clarkson found working with Luke so demeaning that the next time they’d collaborate, for 2009's All I Ever Wanted, she’d deny a co-writing credit just to avoid the association. The original demo of the song was “very contrived, very pop,” as Clarkson recalled, so she demanded something harder: louder drums, more guitars. Then one day, Martin and Luke heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s “Maps” on the radio and thought it’d be perfect if it just had a massive chorus. So they wrote one, and boy did they: “Since U Been Gone” is deliciously screamable and anthemic, with a cleverly sad sleight-of-hand in the lyrics that suggests one of the worst casualties of a break up is the pity you receive from other people: “Thanks to you, now I get what I want.”
Karen O was a raucous art school iconoclast who’d written “Maps” as a vulnerable plea to her boyfriend, shedding real tears in the music video—and she would notably describe the experience of hearing “Since U Been Gone” as like “being bitten by a poisonous varmint,” her life cannibalized by the machine. In response, a Rolling Stone reporter pushed back, proposing that she should feel “honored to share Clarkson’s mall cred.” “Since U Been Gone” was released the year that then-New York Times music critic Kelefah Sanneh wrote his landmark essay about “rockism,” and for better or worse the borders between pop and indie, mainstream and underground had been starting to crumble, accelerated by the rise of the internet. Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos proudly told SPIN at the time, “We’re non-elitist music.”
“Since U Been Gone” was at the center of it all. Thanks to the Yeahs’ cribbed riff—and verses that sounded like Interpol’s “Obstacle 1”—the single was covered by Tokyo Police Club, A Day to Remember, and alt-rock artist Ted Leo, whose acoustic mash-up of “Since U Been Gone” and “Maps” became an internet sensation. Seeking to discover how Clarkson had become so cool, MTV conducted an “informal survey of hipsters and rockers,” which revealed that people saw the Idol winner as just a regular girl with good songs, who’d succeeded through a combination of down-to-earth amiability, feverish ambition, and indisputable talent. "At the end of the day, she’s an amazing singer,” Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump said. Ted Leo described her charm simply, “She’s not some heiress with a Chihuahua.” Blender Magazine crowned Clarkson their Woman of the Year in 2005, running the headline “Everybody Loves Kelly,” including in her list of fans “teenage girls, housewives, gay men… Oprah, Dave Grohl, the cast of Laguna Beach, your mom.”
After Clarkson won American Idol, her friend Ashley told the Dallas Morning News in 2002, ”I don't think she’ll forget us or forget where she came from.” That sentiment is echoed directly on Breakaway’s title track, a sweet, Goo Goo Dolls-style acoustic ballad about being a small town girl pursuing better things, grateful for those who helped her along her journey and eager to move on. “I'll make a wish, take a chance, make a change/And breakaway,” Clarkson sings, with the innocence of a child tossing pennies into a fountain. In the autobiographical music video, which was also promo for Princess Diaries 2, she goes from a restless 8-year-old staring out a car window to a teenager working at a movie theater to, finally, a pop singer crooning on stage.
None of the studio albums she’s released in the 18 years since Breakaway has soared quite the same, whether due to repeated clashes with RCA that compromised her vision or an ill-advised return to the cliched sentimentality of her Idol days. Her combination of goofy excitability, candidness, and humility now shines on her daytime television show, which has become so successful it's set to take over Ellen DeGeneres’s coveted slot. On a cozy set that looks like a suburban living room, she riffs with celebrities from Tom Hanks to stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race, regarding them as if she’s simply mindblown to be in the same room; she also covers about 180 songs a season on her much-beloved segment “Kellyoke,” where she proves that there’s nothing—Radiohead, Ariana Grande, Toni Braxton—that she can’t sing. When Simon Cowell dismissed her as “just a girl with a good voice,” he was right—he just didn’t anticipate how far that could get you.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2022-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | May 15, 2022 | 7.6 | 4e7d1572-8e2b-451f-987c-1d24200453a2 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
The latest project from the Sacramento by way of Mobile rapper is a rich portrait of loneliness, suspicion, and weariness, showcasing his eye for observation and a knack for self-examination. | The latest project from the Sacramento by way of Mobile rapper is a rich portrait of loneliness, suspicion, and weariness, showcasing his eye for observation and a knack for self-examination. | OMB Peezy : Loyalty Over Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omb-peezy-loyalty-over-love/ | Loyalty Over Love | So far, the story of OMB Peezy has been a tale of fusion. Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, then transported to Sacramento, California as a pre-teen, the young rapper has established himself as a human bridge between NoCal funk and Gulf Coast bounce. With his springy, unmistakably Southern lilt, and close connections to West Coast artists and producers like Nef the Pharaoh and Cardo, Peezy’s open ties to his two homes scan as tradition, not trend-chasing, culture, not curation. Loyalty Over Love, however, shifts focus away from his dual regional heritage and onto the artist himself. A rich portrait of loneliness, suspicion, and weariness, the mixtape showcases his eye for observation and a knack for self-examination. It’s a proper introduction.
Forgoing an origin story or even a central narrative, Peezy begins the tape by blowing off steam. “Venting Session,” consisting of a single verse over a snappy, smoldering DrumDummie beat, epitomizes Peezy’s writing style. Peezy often structures his verses like rants, swinging between thoughts while simultaneously reacting to them; it’s like he’s both recollecting and reliving his past. In most hands, rants feel directionless, but for Peezy there’s a palpable sense of orchestration to his zig-zagging. In one slick sequence, he shifts from being on the run to skewering the carceral state: “Paid informants closing in on me, gotta beat the case/Undercovers plotting on a nigga, tryna make a way/Capitalize, capitalism done upped the murder rate/Capital murder, they’ll lock your stupid ass behind the gates.” On paper, “capitalize” looks like filler, but the way it bleeds into “capitalism” and “capital murder” feels like a moment of realization. By confronting his past, Peezy plots his future.
“Deeper Than You Think” is more structured, and just as intense. At times Peezy’s squeaky yowl has a slight husk to it that gives his words a sense of history. “A couple niggas went left but I don’t need ‘em,” he raps with disgust, compressing old relationships into lasting imprints of pain. At a glance, this habit of cutting stories short can read as vagueness, but his voice is so modular and shifty that the betrayal, whatever it was, feels lived through. As he sings the crabby chorus—“this shit deeper than you think, it is, nigga/Think, think, think, think it is, nigga”—it feels almost invasive to pry further. He seems to live in torment.
This isolation—from former friends, from strangers, from the world—is a running theme in Peezy’s music. He often uses distance to characterize relationships and justify his trust or suspicion of the people around him. “Rain” is a roll call of past abandonments. Recalling police raids, times without money, and leeches, he divides his life into rainy days and sunny days, noting how the metaphorical weather determined who was by his side. Jail and street life are often his sharpest dividers. On “Been Through” he recounts being locked up and feeling aggrieved during phone calls but knowing he had to save face in front of fellow inmates. “Little boy this street shit ain’t for you, you better go to prom,” he huffs with worn exhaustion. Standout “Mind of Overkill” is a tempest of angst and loneliness that gives way to defiant self-reliance. “I can’t remember one time I let a fuck nigga faze me/I taught myself shit, I feel like a real nigga raised me,” Peezy declares.
Loyalty Over Love isn’t all storm clouds and dark skies. “Yeah Yeah,” a collaboration with former Disturbing Tha Peace artist T.K. Kravitz, is a breezy bopper that celebrates tacit loyalty. On the Dubba-AA-produced “It’s Whatever,” streaks of electric guitar and stabs of bright synths supercharge Peezy and Atlanta rapper’s Paper Lovee’s zooted flows. “Rain,” too, has some lift. DrumDummie’s tiptoeing keys and groovy bass licks create neat pockets for Peezy’s winding flows to slither in and out of. Still, it feels like Peezy has made a conscious decision to steer his music toward candid self-expression, his life as lived rather than mapped. Loyalty Over Love can be a bit hazy if you’re seeking strict autobiography, but there’s a constant and gripping emotional honesty that makes even his omissions feel resonant. Sometimes a story doesn’t have to be told when it can be felt. | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sick Wid It / 300 Entertainment | August 13, 2018 | 7.4 | 4e7d8519-a8af-4f09-ba61-66c8c0bf0554 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
America is both Dan Deacon's most expansive album and his most inward-looking. The first half's an attempt to extend his range as a songwriter beyond human freak-out. The second half's four linked pieces add up to his most intricate, involving piece to date. | America is both Dan Deacon's most expansive album and his most inward-looking. The first half's an attempt to extend his range as a songwriter beyond human freak-out. The second half's four linked pieces add up to his most intricate, involving piece to date. | Dan Deacon: America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17094-america/ | America | A title like America promises an ambition-- a sweeping take on life in these United States, or at least one man's personal panoramic view of same-- that people may not be expecting from Dan Deacon. And yeah, that's unfair. As carefully constructed as the work of any highbrow electronic savant you'd care to name, Deacon's music alone should clearly paint him as a smart dude, a thinker, and a craftsman.
Then again, the music's immediate, bracing surface blare, and the joyful communal whomp of Deacon's live shows, offer something more visceral. It certainly feels, while it's happening, less head-scratch and more belly-laugh. Which gets confusing for swathes of his audience. Apparently certain folks still can't reconcile the "contradictions" of an egghead dance-party maniac with an affinity for both systems music and the get-stoopidest jams in history, a guy who'd lovingly deface the memory of Bobby Darin one minute and jump on the furrow-browed krautrock express the next.
True, writers always mention Deacon's serious schooling in art music, as if it weren't obviously the structure holding up his love of noise and bubblegum from every era, even though Deacon's whole career is a testament to swirling highbrow and lowbrow together until it sounds the way a neon spin-art painting looks. If you never bothered to listen, America would seem to be him asserting his composer's chops, what with the thematic scope implied by that damn title, and the tracklist with its four-part closing suite, making it look like a prog-era concept album. And so people have been grumbling, worriedly, that this is where Deacon defangs his art by trying for Art.
Well true, America probably won't appease the short-attention span crowd, but then Deacon's 2009 album, Bromst, was already drifting toward longer durations, more intricate structures, and immersion rather than pop's immediate gratification. But a full-on contemporary experimental composition-type album is not quite what we get here, as if that's inherently a bad thing anyway: America is both Deacon's most expansive album so far, and his most inward-looking.
The first half is an attempt to extend his range as a songwriter beyond jam-master or human freak-out. The second half is his most intricate and involving piece yet, though it's trying hard to be a lot more than a song suite, even a 20-minute one. That first half proves the less successful, though at the same time the opening three-song run may be the best thing Deacon's ever recorded. For all its jittery and hyper-percussive excess, with cartoon-tribal drums the lead voice on "Guilford Avenue Bridge" (the breaks of which sound a little like Don Caballero playing a hoedown) and static all but drowning out Deacon's own voice on "Lots" (gleeful yelping in search of transcendence), this stuff flows, which is increasingly one of Deacon's great virtues as an album programmer. If his earliest records could feel like various intensities slammed at you until you staggered away dizzy or elated or both, he's grown much more assured at dynamics, bringing you in and taking you along for the ride.
And that opening run's got "True Thrush" stuck in the middle, Deacon's most affecting song so far. Deacon's singing is clear and sad-eyed, though he still can't resist digitally scrunching his voice into computer pixie noises at various points, and he even throws in some angelic back-up harmonies, which make an unselfconsciously beautiful counterpoint to the information-overload of the music. It's the middle of the album that fizzles slightly after the bracing crunch and buzz of the first three songs, which bring new emotional dimensions to Deacon's music without totally skimping on the energy that was his earlier stuff's reason for being. "Prettyboy" is gorgeous, undoubtedly, but it's still on the level of really top-shelf video game music.
It's the second half of America that promises and more or less delivers something great and new for Deacon. Where he really shoots off for parts unknown is on "U.S.A.", the album's finale of four linked pieces. This is not the portrait of America you're probably expecting from the portentous, inclusive sweep of the album's title, one of those Wilson/Parks style attempts to thread many strands of American music, from the conservatory to the vernacular, into a cohesive pop whole. Instead it's more like a musical self-portrait, albeit one on the scale of a Chuck Close painting. It's still recognizably Deacon's work; the ultra-bright buzzsaw textures would probably tip you off even if you were listening blind. It's just his biggest canvas yet.
Way before Spiderman of the Rings hit in 2007, Deacon undertook a half-crazed tour of the whole country via a commercial bus line, just himself and his gear, crisscrossing the Fifty Nifty. That's what I hear on "U.S.A.": the sound of someone trying to recreate the awe of watching the vastness of the country unfold from the seat of a steadily moving vehicle. So the whole piece moves along to a steady motorik-style pulse, even when the drums drop out. He tosses in some Copland/Ives strings as a kind of emotional thickening agent, but the most prominent influence from the Serious Composers pantheon would be Terry Riley's all-night pieces, where acid rock, early synthesizer blare, and orchestral minimalism fused into one hypnotic feeling of moving forward and standing in place at the same time. Deacon's still got too much pop and rock in him to go the full-on endlessly unfurling route. He's still got climaxes here, in other words, but at the same time the trip's as much about admiring the scenery as taking in the "wow" moments.
What America most reminds me of, at least during the second half, is Arthur Russell's orchestral music. Reminds me in spirit, of course, hardly in sound. Because even when Russell was operating in Serious Composer mode himself, there were often strong links to his idiosyncratic-unto-inscrutable takes on disco, folk, pop, etc. But those pieces were still about immersion, oblique narratives that build slowly from the tiniest details, the evocation of distance via duration. So is America, at least in that final stretch. This is still an album of big gestures and arresting noises, but it's also a mistake to come to it expecting the fizzy thrills of Spiderman or even the dark communal playfulness of Bromst. Loosen up on your need for three or four minutes of bottled catharsis, though, and there are some gorgeous vistas to get lost in here, even if, yeah, that means meandering as much as charging forward with frontier spirit. | 2012-08-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | August 30, 2012 | 7.1 | 4e7fbf9a-b95a-4842-b8de-d2d8535ce08c | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin reintroduces his solo project’s backing band as an amorphous collective; their largely instrumental album pairs psychedelic instincts with cinematic aims. | Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin reintroduces his solo project’s backing band as an amorphous collective; their largely instrumental album pairs psychedelic instincts with cinematic aims. | Bolts of Melody: Film Noir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bolts-of-melody-film-noir/ | Film Noir | Seventeen years separated the end of Swervedriver’s first run and their 2015 comeback effort, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, but it’s not as if fans of the Oxford shoegaze pioneers were lacking for cosmic-pop thrills in the interim. After the group disbanded at the end of 1998, singer-guitarist Adam Franklin barely give his amps a chance to cool down before resurfacing with Toshack Highway, which represented both a more experimental and chilled-out antidote to his former band’s sense-obliterating squall. Once that project dissolved, he returned to his comfort zone on his 2007 solo debut, Bolts of Melody, which effectively reimagined Swervedriver with less flange and more jangle. That album title then became the name of his backing band: from 2010 onward, he released albums as Adam Franklin & the Bolts of Melody. Now, with Swervedriver’s second act seemingly on pause after 2019’s Future Ruins, Franklin is embracing the Bolts branding once again—but in this case, he’s reviving an old name to signal a new direction.
On Film Noir, the Bolts of Melody moniker stands on its own. If Franklin’s name is no longer at the top of the marquee, it might be because he’s not really playing the role of frontman here. While Film Noir features several recurring players (including Locksley Taylor of Southern Ontario shoegaze faves Sianspheric, Swervedriver drummer Mikey Jones, and the late Josh Stoddard, who contributed to the record prior to his death in 2021), the album reintroduces Bolts of Melody as an amorphous recording collective. Its ranks have expanded to include Franklin’s heroes (J Mascis), his spiritual progeny (Montreal space-rockers the Besnard Lakes), and even a former EastEnders cast member (UK actor/singer Sukie Smith), among others. While the aesthetic is still plenty psychedelic, this iteration of Bolts pulls from a broader palette of sounds and instrumentation—from vibraphones to electronics—to achieve the desired otherworldly effect.
Across his many bands and projects, Franklin’s cool, melodious voice has always been the focal point, but on Film Noir, he greets us more or less to say goodbye. The opening “555” marks one of the few times you hear him sing on the album, and even here his minimal, mantric vocal is but another texture in a lushly layered cosmic fantasia that more readily conjures the magisterial psych rock of Dungen and Lonerism-era Tame Impala than Franklin’s fuzz-pedaled past. As the Film Noir title strongly suggests, these 12 (mostly) instrumental vignettes were envisioned more as cinematic scores than proper rock songs. But if the songs are meant to conjure soundtracks to ’70s Euro sci-fi flicks and spaghetti westerns that don’t exist, listening to the album feels a lot like channel-surfing through B-movies at 3 a.m., stopping just long enough to get a snapshot of a film’s vibe before flipping over to the next one: “The Village Sleeps” summons all the pomp and circumstance of a royal parade in 38 seconds flat; “Harpsiglass” takes little more to show you what Pet Sounds might have sounded like if were made for a Sergio Leone film.
Film Noir throws so much at you in such short spurts—kosmische trap beats one moment (“Vibratune”), Air-like prog-lounge with spoken-word the next (“Suzuki’s Dream”)—that the album can feel less like a unified statement than an audition reel for a music-supervision company. But when they give themselves more than 90 seconds to breathe, Bolts of Melody can offer more than mere bursts of moods. Dub vignette “Cops Raid Easy’s” deftly balances jazzy elegance with suffocating intensity, while “Black Flower” showcases the group’s collaborative frisson at peak strength: its Floydian synths trigger a dramatic, castle-storming march, guided by Smith’s wordless vocals and Mascis’ shredding. Yet even when his mic is switched off, Franklin’s melodic instincts are ever present. The Neu! Order motorik cruiser “Hi-Rise Decade” is so pretty and precise, you might wonder why Franklin didn’t just top it off with a proper vocal hook. But like true cineastes, Bolts of Melody understand that when a scene is so carefully set, adding anything more would just clutter up the shot. | 2024-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Outer Battery | January 23, 2024 | 7 | 4e827b54-b8f7-4253-a3fe-7edfade62b16 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Michigan indie rocker’s final album in a trilogy is a despairing look at the world and the life of a songwriter told with great wit, melodies, and self-deprecation. | The Michigan indie rocker’s final album in a trilogy is a despairing look at the world and the life of a songwriter told with great wit, melodies, and self-deprecation. | Fred Thomas: Aftering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fred-thomas-aftering/ | Aftering | On “Good Times Are Gone Again,” the first single from Fred Thomas’ new album, nobody’s talking about how incredible their summer’s been. Maybe they had an incredible summer, but they’re sure not gonna talk about it—what an insult that would be to everyone else suffering from this pervasive American malaise that makes enjoying a tall glass of lemonade seem like a willful act of ignorance. Because it’s 2018, we have to assume it’s probably about Donald Trump. Because it’s a Fred Thomas song, he sings “bad things are happening now,” because bad things are always happening to anxious, depressed people in his music, often himself. The song certainly could’ve appeared on All Are Saved and Changer, two albums written before the election that, with Aftering, form a kind of thematic trilogy. You know that famous Isaac Bashevis Singer quote about how if you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of becoming a prophet? By that metric, Thomas is a modern-day Nostradamus who’d quit the job if he wasn’t so damn good at it.
The press release claims Aftering is loosely modeled after Neil Young’s bummer classic On the Beach, split between an emotional burnout’s last flares and long, desolate stretches of watching the smoke clear. Thomas teased it as, “Basically all of my deleted tweets and drafts I was too fearful to publish, just in song form” I’d say he’s got a better grasp of his music’s appeal. The word “aftering” is an apt coinage for the process Thomas has undergone over the past five years—reliving past mistakes with no intent to learn from them, breathing life into stale grudges and resentments, hitting “send tweet,” picking whatever poison that provides some modicum of immediate relief before dealing with how it made things much worse, just like it always does.
Aftering is naturally the most hungover record of the trilogy, even more so than the one where Thomas threatened to hunker down in his apartment and drink a whole case of beer out of spite. And so much of it takes place on the most hungover day of the year: “January 1st, no one’s waiting for a shift in eras/No one’s waiting for the anxiety to dissipate because we all feel it daily,” Thomas sings halfway through the queasy eight-minute drunkalog, “House Show, Late December.” The narrator on “Alcohol Poisoning” flips the calendar with a three-day hangover while clinging to the saddest lie an addict can tell you: “I’m never doing this again.” “When you tried to make yourself puke/Well, it was no use/It was already in your bloodstream,” he taunts on the very next song, helpfully titled “Hopeless Ocean Drinker.” In the progression of addiction, we’re past the “fun with problems” stage and right into “problems.”
The tuneful first half of Aftering could blur this distinction, but Thomas’ chipper melodies add insult to injury, a mocking reminder of what it felt like to get your hopes up in the first place. They can also inspire a feeling of actual injustice—how is it fair that a principled, respected indie rock lifer spends the most celebrated stretch of his career going into brutal, granular detail about playing another half-empty show and living check-to-check? Then again, this is the unique power source of Thomas’ music, accessing raw nerves to transmit these paralyzingly visceral feelings of bitterness, envy, and self-negation that most artists can’t bring themselves to admit and most listeners would rather turn a “shut up and play” deaf ear.
On “Slow Waves,” a sleep-deprived Thomas speaks with grim resignation about “two shows outside of Philly that will pay my rent completely,” grateful for the opportunity but also not finding himself all that far removed from the hand-to-mouth existence of his first real tour with Aloha in 2000. “28 shows in 31 days/three hundred $1 bills in the band fund/U-Haul trailer dragging uphill,” Thomas recalls on “House Show” with a glimmer of nostalgia before fast-forwarding through nearly two decades of the “high fructose corn syrup corner stores,” “blunt wrap bodegas” and now, the depanneurs of his new home in Montreal: “17 years later, I’m still in the same jail/I’m still sending out these cassette tapes in the mail.”
As a final chapter, Aftering promises some kind of resolution, maybe something approaching hope. But the closing “What the Sermon Said” offers no big reveal: Thomas recalls his parents taking him to a new church when he was 8 in a desperate and futile attempt to introduce him to new friends. Afterward, the family eats in awkward silence and Aftering becomes the most heartbreaking album to end in an Arby’s.
Aftering’s second half of ambient tone poems puts Thomas in direct comparison with guys he’s been tangentially evoking over the span of the trilogy: Mark Kozelek and Phil Elverum, mercurial, prolific songwriters who made sharp pivots to pure logorrhea and somehow vaulted to higher levels of critical and popular acclaim than ever before. The irony here is after years of being perhaps too stubborn, too scattered, or too cynical for the aughts indie stardom that he deserved, Thomas might be too accessible, idiosyncratic and relatable in this mode to have his Benji or A Crow Looked At Me. The trilogy began with Thomas’ dog dying and ended up with him eating curly fries; in between, he vented about famous friends, old girlfriends, Olympia street punks, watching Sonic Youth videos, and working at American Apparel. None of it was meant to generate bigger points about the way we live or the way we die, it’s just the way we get by. | 2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | October 3, 2018 | 7.5 | 4e848f5d-2a28-4c54-a0dc-ccbb27f96564 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The 30th-anniversary edition of Kick affirms its status as a jewel of ’80s pop-rock. It’s a showcase of the band’s opulent production, slithery grooves, and the allure of Michael Hutchence’s simplicity. | The 30th-anniversary edition of Kick affirms its status as a jewel of ’80s pop-rock. It’s a showcase of the band’s opulent production, slithery grooves, and the allure of Michael Hutchence’s simplicity. | INXS: Kick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inxs-kick/ | Kick | INXS recorded albums made for communal euphoria. With thick bottoms and light funk filigrees, their songs fit all the needs of 1980s pop radio, but it was singer Michael Hutchence who distinguished the Australian sextet from Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon could sing about unions of the snake but not shout, “I’ll take you where you really need to be” as INXS’ hit “What You Need” did. The lead single from 1985’s Listen Like Thieves inaugurated a five-year period during which they were as inescapable on radio and MTV as Whitney Houston, George Michael, and U2. Hutchence’s suicide in 1997 has lent this era a beguiling glow: for a while, INXS earned the right to act as if they were a new sensation, a shimmering novelty instead of vets six albums into a career.
If time has proven Listen Like Thieves a superior album, the 30th-anniversary edition of Kick makes clear why the six-times platinum release is better remembered. Thanks to Chris Thomas’ sumptuous production, miraculously free of the ’80s’ production stereotypes that scolds like to claim are “dated,” Kick fulfills the title’s promise. Besides, Listen Like Thieves didn’t have “Need You Tonight” and a trio of follow-up singles that kept Kick in the Top 30 for close to a year. By the time the album/tour cycle expired, INXS were one of the world’s most popular concert draws, competing with U2, especially in South America (where they remain, according to conversations with my students, as beloved and canonical as U2).
Meanwhile, one thing hasn’t changed: Kick sounds fucking great blasting from the car. This edition makes the point rather too sumptuously: a three-CD/one Blu-ray set, including a Dolby surround-sound version of the original release and a welter of previously available demos and 7” and 12” mixes. In case you don’t need the Kookaburra Mix of “Guns in the Sky” as much as I do, starting with “Need You Tonight” is a good idea. Before it hit No. 1 in January 1988, INXS’ biggest American hit sounded like a classic upon its release, and like many such miracles, its simplicity was the key. Guitarist-keyboardist Andrew Farriss, co-writer of many of the band’s hits, claimed that “Need You Tonight” came to him while waiting for a cab to pick him up at the airport; when he got to Hong Kong, he and Hutchence finished the lyrics.
What you hear is a beefed up demo: Farriss’ drum part recorded on a Roland 707 drum machine, keyboard bass, and that riff—maybe the most recognizable opening three notes of the late ’80s. Huffing, whispering, leaping into falsetto, and squealing, Hutchence turned in a performance that was a karaoke version of itself. When Bonnie Raitt covered it in 2016, she didn’t even try to compete; she didn’t have to. All “Need You Tonight” requires is a performer who understands the folly of outsinging the groove. In video form, “Need You Tonight” segued into the nonsensical “Mediate,” during which Hutchence and an obviously hungover band, imitating Bob Dylan in the iconic clip of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” but fabulous in leather, dropped title cards.
The other three singles aren’t so much advancements as refinements. Over a rippling guitar line that showed how much INXS had heard from their former producer Nile Rodgers, “New Sensation” shows Hutchence in the declamatory mode that best suited him, with Thomas isolating instrumental elements every time the chorus swings around: a sax bleat, a terse guitar interjection, synth horns; it’s “Original Sin” recast as a plea for world domination. “Devil Inside” is even better: Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” with bull’s blood in its veins. The fourth single, released as Kick’s promotional cycle wound down, was the first to peak outside the American top five, but ask anyone born after 1985 and “Never Tear Us Apart” will be the INXS song they know. This ballad, anchored by keyboard strings, is rather blowzy—Hutchence can do the grand manner, but he’s too intense, as if still in that declamatory “Need You Tonight” mode. But millions of fans of Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut disagree, and so did the band: “Never Tear Us Apart” blasted as Hutchence’s coffin was carried out of St. Andrews Cathedral in 1997.
If no one has tried reclaiming Kick as classic, blame the album tracks, which are vestigial at best. “The Loved One” is the band embarrassing themselves with Steve Winwood yuppie blooze. “Calling All Nations” and “Wild Life” boast identical dueling guitar parts, one of which is tuned to “shred.” For a while, though, INXS had enough concentration to cough up a reasonable facsimile like 1990’s X; the top ten single “Disappear” boasts Hutchence’s most convincing show of soul. As they entered the 90s, the band’s steady commercial decline mirrored Hutchence’s personal decline: drugs and a taste for violence led to desultory albums like 1993’s Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, in which Farriss can’t hide his distaste for the pseudo-grunge material he forced himself to write. Hutchence’s death forestalled an ignominious fade.
Enough of that. Releasing a collection as overstuffed as Kick: 30th Deluxe Edition in 2017 hearkens back to the opulence of the INXS era itself; to ask whether the album deserves the incense is beside the point. I’m sure U2, obsessed with significance, will get similar treatment. But Kick’s slithery grooves are at least a match for The Joshua Tree’s hymns, and, as the live versions of “Mediate” and “Never Tear Us Apart” included therein attest, INXS at their peak summoned a grandeur no less numinous for being sex-drenched. At this stage in their careers, INXS were more authentic about their lightness than U2 were about their meaningfulness. After all, Bono, a chum of Hutchence’s, also wrote about the devil inside; Michael Hutchence sang as if he’d confronted him—and liked the cut of his jib. The devil was himself. | 2017-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic | December 1, 2017 | 8.4 | 4e864bb6-ced5-46ca-8808-b3bbfcdf8ba1 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The experimental musician’s sweeping, ambient album works in small, fascinating ways from moment to moment but has a cumulative force that is unlike anything he’s done in years. | The experimental musician’s sweeping, ambient album works in small, fascinating ways from moment to moment but has a cumulative force that is unlike anything he’s done in years. | Fennesz: Agora | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fennesz-agora/ | Agora | Among the wave of experimental electronic music artists who came to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, Christian Fennesz was the scene’s great romantic. His laptop compositions were as formally rigorous as those of his peers, but his music always carried with it an element of grandeur and a touch of the sublime. Unlike many of the producers who were once gathered together under the umbrella of IDM, Fennesz’s work never had a strong connection to dance music. There were beats on early tracks like 1997’s “Blok M,” but these were the exception. Fennesz’s musical heart lay somewhere far from the dance floor.
Even in the exploratory world of electronic music, Fennesz was different. If Autechre’s music could be traced to the metallic thwack of early American electro, Aphex Twin to the machine-heart pulse techno proper, Tim Hecker to shoegaze and the high art world, Fennesz’s strongest aesthetic antecedent was the new romantic ’80s pop that followed in the wake of Roxy Music. This music flourished in an era in which productions were heavy with reverb and effects, where you weren’t sure when the synths ended and the guitars began. Fennesz’s link to the sound of this period was further affirmed by work he did with David Sylvian, the singer, songwriter, and former frontman of the ’80s band Japan, both on the latter’s album Blemish and via Sylvian’s guest spot on Fennesz’s album Venice. And then there was Fennesz’s version of A-Ha’s “Hunting High and Low,” put together for a covers comp in 2008, which showed how the lush twang of his processed guitar fits perfectly into a new wave context, its naked emotionalism worlds away from what first comes to mind when thinking of “computer music.”
This vision of the ’80s provides the thematic context for Fennesz’s new full-length, Agora, his first solo album in almost five years. These pieces are thick with luscious texture and assembled with a symphonic sweep, building from barely audible scrapes and clicks to epic climaxes large enough to blot out the sun. Each of the four tracks has its own dramatic arc, some subtle and some utterly titanic, and the record as a whole has a cumulative force only possible when those are stacked one atop the other.
The title of album opener “In My Room” brings to mind not only private communion with sound, but also, of course, the Beach Boys, another artist that Fennesz covered early and referenced, in part, with the title of his 2001 breakthrough Endless Summer. But this track doesn’t try for the liquid warmth of that album, and instead zeroes in on a thick, piercing, multi-layered drone. After an opening bass throb so low it’s on the threshold of audibility (and if you listen on cheap earbuds you might miss it entirely), “In My Room” gathers new sonic elements one-by-one, like a great ball of sound rolling down a hill. By its final minutes, the tension it builds begins to leak out, as everything comes together and it moves from anticipatory to blissful.
The 10-12 minute range, in which each of these tracks falls, is just the right amount of time for Fennesz to introduce his ideas, develop them, and then twist them into a gut punch. Both “Rainfall” and the closing “We Trigger the Sun” feature blends of synthesizer and processed guitar that bring to mind, however obliquely, the darkly beautiful chords found on the Cure’s Disintegration. The former moves forward in fits and starts, a clanging rattle of sonic energy, and deep in the mix are wisps of buried vocals, more of a suggestion than a statement. The title track, with cavernous echo that evokes grand expanses, not unlike the virtual desert-scapes of ambient composer Steve Roach, is the one stretch of relative calm, but an underlying ripple of anxiety remains. These tracks have the immediacy of pop, but stretched out and blown up.
Fennesz is a consistent album artist, someone who knows what he’s good at, and he’s never made an album that’s less than good. But there’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works. Listening to it, I kept going back to that A-Ha cover, those ’80s guitars, and what they meant to someone who came of age during the time. This was music about big feelings and human connection that took on a new resonance when heard alone. The blurry sonics framed by those guitars, and then channeled by Fennesz into an entirely different kind of music, recall teen pop fans who were in thrall to the glamour of MTV, but who also appreciated the music in the comfort of their bedrooms, where it gave them space to dream. | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | April 2, 2019 | 8.5 | 4e869097-c1dc-4c42-b127-569e2b332ced | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ |
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