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The trio’s collaborative debut stumbles into lovely stretches, coasting on the beauty of the singers’ voices. But it leaves you wondering why such an obviously winning combination falls short. | The trio’s collaborative debut stumbles into lovely stretches, coasting on the beauty of the singers’ voices. But it leaves you wondering why such an obviously winning combination falls short. | dvsn / Ty Dolla $ign: Cheers to the Best Memories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dvsn-ty-dolla-sign-cheers-to-the-best-memories/ | Cheers to the Best Memories | Dvsn and Ty Dolla $ign could inject grace, pain, or meaning into the “Kars4Kids” jingle. Individually, the three are a force in contemporary R&B, sculpting gooey ballads and tingling hits about doomed relationships and humid, haunting nights from their respective silos. Dvsn—the union of singer Daniel Daley and producer Nineteen85—have made elegant, expansive albums about sex and security on Drake’s label OVO; Ty Dolla $ign, for his part, has made his presence known everywhere, slathering gravelly vocals on pop songs and rap tracks and his latest triumphant solo album. Together, the trio forms a steamy supergroup. But the experience of listening to their collaborative debut becomes less about basking in the glimmering harmonies and more about wondering why such an obviously winning combination falls short.
Ty and Dvsn should be natural partners on all things carnal. Ty’s last joint album, a buoyant, deeply horny record with Jeremih, kept a fluorescent focus on the playfulness of hooking up, while Dvsn’s albums can feel like meditations for the bedroom. The latter duo’s ability to treat sex as both a drama and a language has shone in their previous work. On Cheers to the Best Memories, its absence is glaring. Instead of splitting the difference on the record, they go for the clumsy and obvious. “Sexing” gets crooned as a verb. Ty rhymes “ass and breast” with “more than sex;” later, he fumbles at a quarantine reference in his incessant quest to get laid: “We’ve been inside for too long/For me to be outside of you,” he hums. These songs drift through flirtations, sometimes with a captivating silkiness. You can get lost in the layered coos about private rooms and bedspreads until a particularly cringe-inducing lyric comes along.
The lazy writing often defaults to misogyny. “God made bad bitches rude,” Ty grumbles on his designated interlude, complaining about an ex’s “pussy power.” “Can’t Tell” has some of the record’s most fun production, with shimmering synths and a catchy YG verse, but the chorus’s menacing line—“Hope that you’re not a tease”—pierces the song’s sheen. The group casually embeds entitlement into their depictions of seduction: “I came all this way/Now it’s time for you to show me what it do-ooh-oooh-ooh,” Ty warbles on “Outside.”
There are moments where the album does sink into reverie, where Nineteen85’s production becomes sparse and airy and thrumming, and the trio’s voices braid into a kind of elegy. “Don’t Say a Word” unspools over steady, plumbing bass as Daley sings about navigating a secret romance. Ty’s croaking vibrato is in full force here. “Don’t compare me to your ex,” he sings with a palpable sting. “I deserve way more respect.” The track swells into an interlude, layers of women’s background vocals building into a Greek chorus: “Can you take it?” Ty and Daley ask over and over, sometimes in gleaming harmonies and sometimes in whips and whimpers of falsetto. The double entendre is clear: the song offers a literal sexual play-by-play, but there are pleas for clarity and connection seeped into all the sweat. On “Fight Club,” their harmonies swirl past sputters of trumpets as they admit their lover is right, and that needing can be a stronger urge than arguing.
Still, too many of the choices here are confusing, glaring commercial bait, or both. “Somebody That You Don’t Know” is a radio play that sounds jarring and out of place with the rest of the album’s tracklist, with smeared guitars, a vaguely Latin-inspired beat, and a banal storyline about lusting after an anonymous woman. Nineteen85 crafted Dvsn’s earlier records with intricate, intimate minimalism; he trades that in for campy handclaps that underpin “Wedding Cake” and overpowering, glitchy AutoTune on “Memories,” a track Drake’s longtime collaborator 40 also produced. The album seems to stumble into lovely stretches, coasting on the sheer beauty of the singers’ voices. “Better Yet,” Dvsn’s interlude, surges, and searches. Nineteen85 dribbles a smeared synth here, a pulsing drum pattern there. There is no grand message or takeaway, just obvious, aching craft. You’re left wishing that could be enough.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | OVO Sound | August 25, 2021 | 5.9 | 4e8b5177-a912-4ce5-9c5b-691570319f73 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The Montreal synth-pop duo explore an alternate ’80s where ethereal, post-goth dream pop sounds almost indistinguishable from lush, adult-contemporary soft rock. | The Montreal synth-pop duo explore an alternate ’80s where ethereal, post-goth dream pop sounds almost indistinguishable from lush, adult-contemporary soft rock. | Sorry Girls: Deborah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sorry-girls-deborah/ | Deborah | On their 2016 self-released debut EP, Awesome Secrets, Montreal duo Sorry Girls sounded like they were putting together an audition tape for the Bang Bang Bar. Heather Foster Kirkpatrick’s glowing voice conjured the ghosts of bygone ’60s girl-group singers, while partner Dylan Konrad Obront doused her torch-song serenades in ripples of country-noir guitar and a Badalamentian synth mist as thick as mountain fog. Their first full-length for Arbutus, Deborah, is likewise a fusion of luminous, eerily familiar melodies and obfuscating ambience. But here, Sorry Girls are less interested in capturing a specific nocturnal mood than in exploring the Rorschach-test ambiguity inherent to much synth-based pop music: that is, what some might consider ethereal, post-goth dream pop, others hear as lush, adult-contemporary soft rock.
Just as the passage of time has obliterated the rigid aesthetic divisions that once governed pop music and replaced them with genre-agnostic, era-specific radio formats, Deborah imagines an alternate ’80s where 4AD went MOR, and Cocteau Twins shared Top 40 chart space with the Thompson Twins. The album’s directorial analog is more John Hughes than David Lynch, displacing Awesome Secrets’ earthier elements and uncanny atmosphere with soft-focus pleasures and heart-on-sleeve poignancy. Pretty much every song begins in ambient haze before fortifying into the sort of passionate, heartstring-tugging address that could soundtrack a pivotal scene in a seriocomic teen flick. And in true cineaste fashion, Sorry Girls construct their musical mise-en-scènes with an auteur’s eye for detail: Anyone can program a synth to sound like a hit single from 35 years ago, but a true connoisseur of the era recognizes that glassy acoustic guitars (“Something’s Gotta Give”) and breezy harmonica solos (“Under Cover”) were equally crucial components of the ’80s pop palette.
And yet, for all of Sorry Girls’ unapologetic invocations of the past, Deborah rarely feels like an exercise in nostalgia—because all its shimmering surfaces can’t gloss over the distress stewing underneath. Kirkpatrick’s voice is both highly expressive and enigmatic: It veers in and out definition like a camera that just won’t auto-focus, echoing the feelings of indecision at the core of these shapeshifting songs. For all its sunrise-summoning optimism, “Waking Up” is really a plea for escape from an unfulfilling relationship (“Maybe I’m waking up to see the ways that I’ve been blinded/By the love that’s in my eyes/I want to send it all crashing down”), while the tropical chillwave of “Easier” sails into the sunset of a tryst as the parties involved lie to each other that “it never meant anything” to soothe their pain. But Deborah counters these portraits of disaffection with vigorous statements of self-determination, like the vogueing piano-house bop “H.O.N.E.S.T.Y.” And with “Give You Love,” Sorry Girls deliver a synth-sparkled affirmation that plays like a spiritual sequel to Robyn’s “Show Me Love,” with Kirkpatrick declaring her intentions in no uncertain terms. “I’m ready to be the one you need, I’m ready to be someone,” she sings to her potential partner—though the bold pop leaps taken on Deborah suggests she’s courting a potentially larger audience, too.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Arbutus | October 21, 2019 | 7.1 | 4e8c112a-5667-41d7-b0e0-254a64a63e10 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Dotted with cool surprises and intricately plotted melodies, the veteran indie band’s Sub Pop debut shakes things up without breaking their pattern of low-key, late-period releases. | Dotted with cool surprises and intricately plotted melodies, the veteran indie band’s Sub Pop debut shakes things up without breaking their pattern of low-key, late-period releases. | Built to Spill: When the Wind Forgets Your Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/built-to-spill-when-the-wind-forgets-your-name/ | When the Wind Forgets Your Name | Doug Martsch remains committed to deflating his own myth. For decades the Built to Spill frontman has shot down any suggestion that he’s a particularly notable songwriter or a great musician. “I’m not very good at guitar playing,” he insisted in a recent interview, his latest effort to downplay the achievement of architecting three of the defining indie rock albums of the 1990s. Whatever greatness fans hear in his music, Martsch contends he doesn’t.
Perhaps that posture began as humility, but at some point Martsch started to internalize the notion of his own unremarkableness. Since Built to Spill’s hot streak ended with 2001’s uneven Ancient Melodies of the Future, Martsch has carried on the group as the very good-not-great entity they’ve always existed as in his head. They’ve continued releasing new albums every five years or so, all of them worthwhile—most of them better than you remember, but never as transcendent as you long for them to be. The woozy charm of the band’s heyday is still there, but the consistency isn’t. Their later albums just don’t stick like the classics.
Built to Spill’s latest, When the Wind Forgets Your Name, shakes things up without breaking the pattern. It’s the project’s first release for Sub Pop, and it was recorded with a new (and already retired) lineup featuring Le Almeida and João Casaes of the Brazilian jazz-rock band Oruã. Those temporary bandmates also assisted Martsch with mixing the album, and the record’s reedy tones, conspicuous overdubs, and psychedelic patina give it a very different feel than the band’s hallmark records with Phil Ek.
This is the first Built to Spill record in a while with new ideas. The whole album is dotted with cool surprises, from the Carnival of Souls-esque organ that waltzes between Martsch’s solos on “Elements” to the patchouli-scented guitars that underscore the bewildered mysticism of “Understood.” The Lifes Rich Pageant chime of “Spiderweb” gives way to one spirited twist after another; it’s the rare recent Built to Spill track with a generosity of intricately plotted melodies that rivals Keep It Like a Secret. And with its jerky guitar fits, “Never Alright” begins as the most overt Dinosaur Jr. homage Martsch has ever attempted. Then it sheds its skin so many times it finishes as something completely antithetical to Dinosaur Jr., a tangle of classic rock, dub, and glockenspiel.
On that song, Martsch returns to his most frequent muse: the difficulty of reconciling the inevitable defeats the world doles out, one after another. “No one can ever help no one not get their heart broken,” he sings. “Never Alright” is immediately followed by a more hopeful counterpart, “Alright,” but hope is always relative on a Built to Spill record: “Life goes on and on year after year,” Martsch sings. “Don’t recommend it, but I’m glad I’m still here.”
If When the Wind Forgets Your Name doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its many gratifying parts, it’s mostly because of the choppy pacing. Especially in its opening half, too many tracks get bogged down by dreary tempos that stop the record whenever it locks into a stride. Martsch may be incapable of writing a bad song, but the snoozy “Fool’s Gold” is as close as he gets, and he preemptively sucks a lot of steam out of the album by positioning it right after the ripping opener “Gonna Lose.”
Unforced errors like that really drag down an album, but that’s the story of late-period Built to Spill: No matter how solid their records are, they always seem to tease an even-better one that’s just out of reach, taunting fans with what could have been. Nonetheless, When the Wind Forgets Your Name shows that in generous spurts this band can still sound as driven and disarmingly sincere as they did a quarter century ago. If it’s a lesser Built to Spill album that’s because they all are now. But as their lesser albums go, it’s one of the better ones. | 2022-09-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 19, 2022 | 7.2 | 4e8dec3b-9009-4b66-b661-7687b2a62d4b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The debut studio album from singer-songwriter Aly Spaltro is filled with bloody, body-focused epics that call to mind Jeff Buckley, Okkervil River, Jack White, Helium, and the Dirty Three. | The debut studio album from singer-songwriter Aly Spaltro is filled with bloody, body-focused epics that call to mind Jeff Buckley, Okkervil River, Jack White, Helium, and the Dirty Three. | Lady Lamb the Beekeeper: Ripely Pine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17723-lady-lamb-the-beekeeper-ripely-pine/ | Ripely Pine | Aly Spaltro’s stage name and backstory may at first seem awfully whimsical; the name Lady Lamb the Beekeeper came to her in a dream, and she first started playing and practicing in the basement of the video rental store where she worked near her hometown of Portland, Maine. So far, so Fox Searchlight. But forget fey; that basement gave her license to get loud, and the songs on Ripely Pine are true to their original forms, bolstered with rugged, hefty arrangements largely written by Spaltro. Her bodily, biblical epics call to mind Jeff Buckley, Okkervil River, Jack White, Helium, and the Dirty Three.
The lyrics of Ripely Pine are hungry for love and experience and bone-picked honesty. She explains the title as a kind of openhearted longing, though it's gorier than that: “Let’s crawl all over one another like crows on a carcass,” she sings like Sharon Van Etten leading a gospel choir on opener “Hair to the Ferris Wheel”. “Like ants on a crumb starving only for the taste of tongues.” It leaps and pivots through soft woolen strums to freewheeling 1990s alt.rock-- that structural skittishness is a constant throughout-- and establishes Spaltro’s palpable experience of love as a messy, fetid thing, perhaps more remarkable for the fact that she wrote these songs when she was 18, 19. “Love is selfish/ Love goes tick-tock-tick/ Love knows Jesus/ Apples and oranges,” she sighs of its many coexisting contradictions.
“You with the nape that holds my gaze/ You with the tongue that speaks my name,” she glowers on “Aubergine”, slyly sizing up her intended like prey on a plain. The brooding interlude comes amid truly joyous New Orleans-style carnival blasts, and the song’s broiling-over stream of consciousness approach makes it feel like an incredible street party. The best songs on Ripely Pine are unpredictable in a way that’s refreshing because of their sloppy energy, not in spite of it. Some of them have been worked on for five years, but they’re executed with unaffected confidence rather than niggled perfection; there are pitchy vocals here and there, and with only three songs under four minutes and almost everything playing out like the closing number of a headline festival set, it’s much too long. While her gentler solo songs are pretty enough, they can also be samey, making the hour length even less necessary. But what Ripely Pine has that much comparable rousing-but-empty country-tinged trad rock doesn’t have is raw, credulous fire.
The best songs here are all nearly seven minutes long, but their erratic structures make compelling stages to watch dueling tirades of emotion swarm around one another. Spaltro wields ferocity and timidity equally well, to the extent that it’s hard to tell which is her more frightening mode. The incensed “Bird Balloons”, an unresolved tale of betrayal, regret, and acceptance, has an excellent, spat pay-off: “My hair grew long so I fucking cut it/ And when you looked away I stuck those trimmings in your locket, ha ha ha ha.” “You Are the Apple” eases into a bluesy lope and twang, and then a swashbuckling burst of timpani and strings, Spaltro screaming, “I still need your teeth around my organs.” What should be the payoff to the Alabama Shakes-loose “Crane Your Neck” is Spaltro howling “I’m as blue as blood before the blood goes red,” in a cadence borrowed from the hilt of “Fake Plastic Trees”; its “twist yo’ hips” shimmy-to-fade epilogue is unnecessary and a bit rote.
The “blue blood” line crops up a few times on Ripely Pine, notably on “Aubergine”, where Spaltro comitragically sings about how someone makes her “into an egg without yolk,” making it clear that she means the lifeless shade of blood, not the regal kind. Conversely, Ripely Pine is one of the most nourishing, deeply alive records of this young year. On closer “Taxidermist, Taxidermist”, she reconciles with herself: “‘How do you do?’ I say/ ‘I’ve heard such lovely things about who you are and where you’ve been/ But be in me again.’” These songs are about Spaltro five years ago; hopefully reassembling the parts doesn’t mean locking up these messy song banquets for a neater record next time around. The taste is too addictive. | 2013-03-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-03-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | March 18, 2013 | 7.8 | 4e95d13c-b4b3-4782-a6d0-17d552b20618 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On 2010’s Triumverate, the New York metal band Black Anvil's balance of progressivism and putridity led to their inclusion in the canon of overachieving area extremists. Their J. Robbins-produced new album, Hail Death, finds the group boosting both melodics and concepts. | On 2010’s Triumverate, the New York metal band Black Anvil's balance of progressivism and putridity led to their inclusion in the canon of overachieving area extremists. Their J. Robbins-produced new album, Hail Death, finds the group boosting both melodics and concepts. | Black Anvil: Hail Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19440-black-anvil-hail-death/ | Hail Death | Black Anvil may have been forged in the mercurial fires of the New York hardcore scene, but don’t call them punks. When Raeph Glicken, Gary Bennett, and Paul Delaney of esteemed outfit Kill Your Idols branched off to form their blackened band in 2007, they abandoned the rigidity of their former craft almost immediately, focusing instead on long, winding assemblages of weeping guitars, thrashy tempos, and hard rock hooks. For every pound of black and roll gristle the band packed on to their most recent effort, 2010’s Triumverate, there was ample brain power to match—a labyrinthine riff here, a blast-beat there. Black Anvil's impressive balance of progressivism and putridity led to their prompt inclusion in the canon of overachieving area extremists, such as Liturgy or Krallice.
If their new album Hail Death serves as any indication, the New Yorkers have no intention of going back to basics. To buttress their fanged jams and fill in some holes in their current live setup, they’ve added a second guitarist, named Sos, to their ranks, granting a boost to both melodics and critical mass. They’re amping up the concepts as well: Hail Death centers around around the inevitable end, as well as the varying degrees of madness which emerge as its approach hastens. The band treats their theme with wicked reverence, expanding the song lengths to accommodate more swells and swathes of feedback. At the same time, they’re the most batshit band of conductors, ceaslessly toggling between turbo and turbid. There’s “Seven Stars Unseen”, a harrowing ride through the void that straddles the threshold between dirge and d-beat, and opener “Still Reborn”, whose rich Spanish guitar provides a haunting contrast to the electrics that scream in their stead.
Barring the 12-minute “Next Level Black”’, which never seems to muster up enough magnitude, the metamorphic approach bodes well for Black Anvil. This is due largely to their appointment of engineer J. Robbins (Modern Life is War, Government Issue), whose conservative approach to mixing ensures that Hail Death’s many guitars don’t collapse into one low-res mess. By putting Bennett and Sos further back, he creates a pocket of space for the vocalists’ lilting harmonies to seep in, lending straightforward headbangers like “ Until the End” morbid beauty. Distinguishing between individual riffs proves trickier, as their already-reduced presence is placed constantly under threat by the throttle of the blast-beats. The only fretwork left to gawk at are the solos, which follow in the slithering style of Marduk and, while far from revolutionary, serve an invaluable role in maintaining momentum when things slow to a stoned sprawl.
“To us, it’s the next level,” Glicken said in a recent Decibel documentary chronicling the making of Hail Death, "Something to aim for, something to shoot for, something to take me out of this mundane existence.” His vague phrasing begs the question: is Black Anvil’s death drive fueled by their art, or is it the other way around? On Hail Death, the relationship is symbiotic; the album's darkness fuels its shifting sounds, which in turn amplfies the dread. Hopefully, as the outfit continues this march of mayhem, the hellish balance will remain intact, securing the band’s reputation for mongrel metaphysics. | 2014-07-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 9, 2014 | 7.5 | 4e9ac2c0-7502-4dc5-a090-ec89dd710b50 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Scottish band’s eleventh album feels uniquely pensive, even tentative. Nearly every song will have you humming along, though few seem designed to grab your attention. | The Scottish band’s eleventh album feels uniquely pensive, even tentative. Nearly every song will have you humming along, though few seem designed to grab your attention. | Teenage Fanclub: Endless Arcade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teenage-fanclub-endless-arcade/ | Endless Arcade | New music from Teenage Fanclub settles into the world like the first days of spring—subtly, quietly, with a sigh of relief. For fans of the long-running Scottish power-pop band, the defining qualities of their music—chiming three-part harmonies, breezy major-key melodies, and dreamy, lovesick lyrics—have come to feel so pleasant and familiar that measuring their current work against their past can seem a little beside the point: Could it be sunnier? Did it feel more exciting when you were younger? These concerns melt away within a few notes: Just open your windows and let it in.
In a career defined by consistency, Teenage Fanclub’s eleventh album, Endless Arcade, is their first preceded by a sense of rupture. In summer 2018, after much of their catalog was reissued on vinyl, Gerard Love, one of three primary songwriters and vocalists, announced his departure from the band. It was slightly troubling news: Love penned fan favorites like “Star Sign” and “Sparky’s Dream,” as well as many highlights from more recent albums. During the 21st century, his reedy voice and soaring choruses have inspired Teenage Fanclub’s most energetic moments, reminders that this band once caused a frenzy at their shows.
Without Love’s contributions, Endless Arcade feels uniquely pensive, even tentative, among their releases. The moments that stand out initially do so for their novelty: the extended guitar solo that closes “Home,” the uncharacteristically dissonant chord changes in the title track, the presence of newest member, keyboardist Euros Childs, on British Invasion throwbacks like “Warm Embrace.” Songwriters Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley can still write melodies culled from a heavenly jukebox alongside all the lost hits of the ’60s, but while nearly all of them will have you humming along, few seem designed to grab your attention.
Like all of Teenage Fanclub’s albums, Endless Arcade reveals itself slowly, and much of the action takes place below the surface. My favorite song is Blake’s “The Sun Won’t Shine on Me,” with a harpsichord accompaniment that tiptoes around its amiable, waltz-time guitar riff. It is the kind of song that could play on endless loop, and when the dual guitar solo segues into a final singalong round of the chorus, you get the sense they feel the same way. “Back in the Day” has a similar effect: Its airtight, gently aching verse and chorus melodies create the effect of a constant cycle of hooks. “I just can’t seem to find the peace of mind that I knew back in the day,” Blake sings as his bandmates try to replicate that sense of comfort.
This thematic territory—self-doubt, aging, nostalgia—spans the record and can sometimes make Endless Arcade feel like a gloomy concept album. While the title and cozy pace of the opening track “Home” suggest a band settling into their comfort zone, the lyrics tell a different story: “I sometimes wonder If I’ll ever be home again,” Blake sings in the chorus, paraphrasing a Carole King classic about a relationship broken by distance. His words suggest a moment of uncertainty from a band that often plays the role of uplifters, offering their music as a beacon of stability. When the last chorus ends, a long guitar solo takes the spotlight, fuzzy and bittersweet, sprawling out and doubling the length of the song. Winding through just two chords, it neither builds the tension nor resolves it. Slowly, the entire band falls under its spell, swaying back and forth, lapping along. It’s like they don’t want to leave us.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | April 30, 2021 | 7 | 4e9ae109-24cb-44dc-b189-9cd2ec3af800 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On his 25th album, the Chilean-British techno maverick indulges his nostalgia for the dancefloor without sacrificing his habitually mind-bending sounds and textures. | On his 25th album, the Chilean-British techno maverick indulges his nostalgia for the dancefloor without sacrificing his habitually mind-bending sounds and textures. | Cristian Vogel: Rebirth of Wonky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cristian-vogel-rebirth-of-wonky/ | Rebirth of Wonky | Though few others than middle-aged alumni of the IDM listserv may realize it, from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, Cristian Vogel had one of the greatest runs in experimental techno. Club avant-gardists rarely maintain their lofty standards for more than a quarter century; Surgeon and Jeff Mills come to mind, but not many more. But Vogel makes a strong case for entry to that pantheon with his 25th album, Rebirth of Wonky.
“Wonky” was a fleeting musical trend around the turn of the last decade, one that Simon Reynolds described in Retromania as “strands of glitchy electronic, experimental hip hop and spacey seventies jazz fusion” whose “off-kilter beat structures and mutant funk grooves” were embellished with “day-glo synth tones and snazzy riffs that hark back to eighties electro-funk and video-game music.” Although Vogel certainly has created his share of “off-kilter beat structures,” he never really belonged to the wonky movement. He’s too headstrong to jump on any bandwagons.
Vogel, who grew up in Chile and England, seems to have drawn inspiration across his career from both Spike Jones’ jazz hijinks and Iannis Xenakis’ abstruse electro-acoustic compositions, with their caustic and scrupulous timbral attack. Those qualities surfaced early on in Vogel’s productions, but within a techno framework, which made him a maverick’s maverick. On 1999’s Busca Invisibles, he perfected a strain of slapstick techno, as evidenced by the jarring sproings, clangs, and pitch-shifted kazoo stabs that pepper its best tracks. Then, with 2002’s Dungeon Master, Vogel flaunted the purest expression of his ruthless techno-brut instincts.
Given Vogel’s long history of unconventional sound design, Wonky’s first three tracks may trick you into thinking the title’s a red herring, as they’re some of his most accessible works to date. “When You Can’t Go Clubbing Anymore and Have to Dance with Oaks” begins with a woman speaking in hushed tones that are swirled into pebbled sibilance; the only words I can discern are “Return to the source.” Gradually, a subaquatic techno throb emerges, followed by a suspenseful ambient interlude and then one of Vogel’s most melodramatic melodies. It reeks of nostalgia for ’90s clubbing, and who can blame him during a pandemic? “The All Clear” reaffirms that Vogel is much more interested in melody now than at the height of his weird period. This track has the tessellated grandeur of pioneering IDM duo B12, but its rhythm is uncharacteristically stodgy. Toward its end, the piece reverts to vintage Vogel ruggedness and abrasiveness. “Pendula” serves as a palate-cleanser for Wonky’s stranger second half, with its Thomas Köner-like frigid ambience conjuring the sound of icebergs colliding.
“Peace La Roche” bridges the gap between Vogel’s abstract, chiming compositions for Gilles Jobin’s choreography (e.g., his 2010 album Black Swan) and the pugilistic, disorienting techno of albums such as Body Mapping and Specific Momentific. The scattershot beats, rudimentary organ stabs, and tumble of disturbing body and mouth noises of “Thuja” have no utility except to mess with your mind and equilibrium—noble aims that IDM’s vanguard artists were also fostering a quarter century ago. If the martial techno-funk of “Ice Le Fantôme C’est Moi” is not exactly geared to get hands in the air and asses shaking, it may thrill fans of cutting-edge horror-film soundtracks. Most intriguingly, to grok where Vogel may be headed next, check out “Acido Amigo,” an enigmatic abstraction of old-school electro that sounds at once like a nod to Detroit legends Drexciya and a harbinger of future decades’ destabilized quasi-dance music.
Rather than a rejuvenation of the genre that the title may imply, Rebirth of Wonky finds Vogel reasserting his mastery of music that goes awry—in the dictionary sense of “wonky”—in unique ways. The album is a welcome reminder of Vogel’s mad-scientific past while also pointing toward novel odysseys of oddity.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Endless Process | February 4, 2021 | 7.4 | 4e9ef1e1-c9de-4594-bf37-134c1c3335f2 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
The Catalan producer Sau Poler puts an elegantly Iberian slant on house music. His euphoric new EP may be inspired by soccer, but it’s made for dancing on beaches in summertime. | The Catalan producer Sau Poler puts an elegantly Iberian slant on house music. His euphoric new EP may be inspired by soccer, but it’s made for dancing on beaches in summertime. | Sau Poler: Dribble EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sau-poler-dribble-ep/ | Dribble EP | For the last decade or so, one Spanish beer company has used the term “Mediterráneamente” as part of its summer marketing plans, where it accompanies films of young people cavorting around on beaches in beer-based delight, driving home the message that you can’t get more Mediterranean than this particular brew. For all its origins in the cold world of marketing speak, the term—a made-up word that translates to something like “Mediterranean-ly”—could equally apply to Dribble, the new EP from Catalan producer Sau Poler. Alongside the likes of Pional and Pedro Vian, Poler is part of a new wave of Spanish electronic music acts who are putting an elegantly Iberian slant on house music.
This is an EP that reeks of the salt-up-your-nostrils, sunscreen-and-sunglasses appeal of the Mediterranean Sea. Bathed in sunlight and shaded by palm trees, it’s made for dancing on beaches and overheating at summer festivals. Dribble may be inspired by soccer—the three track names, “Etrusco,” “Questra,” and “Mitre,” all refer to soccer ball brands. But this EP evokes the divine skill of Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho in the Barcelona stadium Camp Nou on a sweltering August night, rather than the grinding attrition of the English Premier League.
The key track is “Questra,” a song intended to summon the “evolution and euphoria” of soccer (it has reportedly been championed by house don John Talabot). “Questra” begins with the distant chiming of church bells, which bend and sway while a pulsating disco beat taps its foot impatiently in the foreground. Poler adds in a Balearic-style synth melody and the gentle burble of a 303, used more for its rhythmic qualities than as a lead instrument. As “Questra” evolves, the different synth lines drift in and out of focus, each as delicate and welcoming as a cool Mediterranean breeze. Poler artfully manipulates the tone of the 303, building to a brilliantly jazzy piano break at the three-minute mark, whose filtered chords never quite fall where you expect them to. The effect is of an understated euphoria that is all the more emotive for its subtlety.
“Etrusco,” which opens the EP, has a similar makeup, although this time the synth melodies evoke the nervous hooting of owls at night. The 303, meanwhile, is harsher, dribbled throughout the song in evocative acidic bursts. This nervous tension finds its relief when a throbbing bassline enters three and a half minutes in, its physicality filling the bottom half of the mix like an injection of heavy metals. “Mitre,” the closing track, is about the harshest that Dribble gets. Intended to reflect “the magic and unique spirit of English football,” there is a Parliament-style hard funk edge to the song’s synth bass, with a 303 line that alternates between needling and relaxing. Even then, the song’s end section fills with sun-drenched Balearic delight, spotted with dabs of melody that glow like stars over the ocean.
In soccer, to dribble means to take the ball past your opponent by small, skillful kicks. The Dribble EP is well named then: Poler displays a mastery of the kind of deft production touches that are too often overlooked in electronic music in favor of sledgehammer riffing. He employs a subtle tweak here, or a dab of synth there, to build a wonderfully evocative Mediterranean whole. Come the cold winter months, Dribble may sound out of place, wistfully nostalgic like a sand-encrusted bottle of suntan lotion in November. Right now, though, the EP personifies the joyful release of dancing with friends on a hot summer night. | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Visions Fugitives | July 10, 2017 | 7.8 | 4eaadebc-1f00-40fa-952d-e77d715e6994 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | null |
The Amsterdam-based electronic musician trades his habitual house and ambient productions for blissful bedroom pop influenced by the shoegaze music of his youth. | The Amsterdam-based electronic musician trades his habitual house and ambient productions for blissful bedroom pop influenced by the shoegaze music of his youth. | Suzanne Kraft: About You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suzanne-kraft-about-you/ | About You | On his latest album as Suzanne Kraft, Los Angeles native Diego Herrera, now based in Amsterdam, takes the pulse of a heart in flux. Written during a period when a flourishing romance was abruptly transformed by enforced distance, About You drifts through emotional highs and lows in search of a stable foothold. Musically, too, Herrera continues his history of self-reinvention, trading the peaceful stillness of ambient music—which was itself a departure from the punchy, disco-infused house of the earliest part of his career—for blissful bedroom pop influenced by the shoegaze music of his youth.
“And then I was gone,” Herrera faintly sings in opener “On Our Hands,” pausing to ask: “Did it feel the same for you as me?” The synth chimes are jaunty and the drums laid-back, but there’s an underpinning of doubt to remind you it’s not so simple—when there’s a physical rift between you and the person you love, do they miss you as much as you miss them? Should you even ask, or do you already know the answer? “Waiting” ratchets up the paranoia even further, crashing in with a tidal wave of fuzzed-out guitar as Herrera ponders the anxiety of separation: “You can know somebody for ages,” he murmurs, “but it doesn't change the game” of guessing where things stand. The most striking moment of the album comes when the wall of sound drops out for the briefest moment, mimicking the feel of your heart skipping a beat as the text notification you’ve been on edge waiting for finally pops up.
Herrera also explores the joy of a heart spinning out of control. On “Blush,” he expresses the simple desire to be around his crush while sharing in a moment of wordless tenderness, imploring his sweetheart, “Sigh another sigh for me.” Guitar stretches out into long trails as synth washes like a gentle tide over a lazy bassline, creating an atmosphere fit for cuddling. “Attenuate” leans most heavily into the indie-pop sound Herrera is channeling, prominently showing off a more melodic side of his voice as he bounces over jangly guitar and crisp, snappy percussion. He embraces his shift in direction just as he welcomes the excitement of a new love affair, singing, “Jumping the gun sometimes can be the best.”
Closing track “Going Down” brings it all together, celebrating the pleasure and pain of deep yearning in equal measure. Once again, Herrera displays his mastery of mood-setting, but rather than the airy textures of his ambient music, he swirls together sharper, more vivid elements—breezy guitar and a slithering synth line are joined by a low crackle and smooth saxophone, all jostling for position in the foreground. Herrera sings for the first time on this album, but his voice remains hushed, his words held close to his chest; it sounds almost as if he’s singing through half-parted lips. “Going Down” marks a moment of delicate intimacy not only for the artist, but for his confidant, the listener. About You finally puts the man behind Suzanne Kraft front and center as he offers up more of himself—his voice, his memories, and, most importantly, his heavy heart.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Melody As Truth | June 21, 2021 | 7.2 | 4ead5e57-db31-44df-aac1-b12ae712ab97 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
On his most cohesive album in more than a decade, the re-energized songwriter imparts life lessons to the child he may never have. | On his most cohesive album in more than a decade, the re-energized songwriter imparts life lessons to the child he may never have. | Devendra Banhart: Ma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devendra-banhart-ma/ | Ma | At the start of the century, Devendra Banhart emerged as the ecstatic pied piper of an esoteric folk resurgence, a magnetic singer-songwriter who mingled childlike wonder and guru-level insight over glittering fingerpicked guitar. Unapologetically inquisitive and ardent, Banhart’s early works seemed to provide a sort of instruction manual for life.
But Banhart soon seemed lost himself, or at least distracted in the search for something more. Since 2005’s discursive Cripple Crow, his records have veered wildly into magpie obsessiveness, recombining genres and criss-crossing borders in search of revelations that didn’t come. In the process, he’s made messes of records, though they’ve always included a few stunning moments, songs like “I Remember” or “Never Seen Such Good Things” that insisted the singular spark of those early works remained. The beguiling Ma—his tenth album and best and most cohesive statement in more than a decade—starts to rekindle it.
Approaching 40 and dealing with the death of parents and mentors, Banhart realized in recent years that he may never become a father. Ma, he has said, is his attempt to gather the insight he might pass along to his hypothetical child, lessons he wished he’d learned as an adolescent. The broad prompt gives Banhart a necessary sense of direction but ample leeway to roam, a space to pull together the messy threads of his life. There is jubilation and mourning, existential unease and everyday amusement. He sings in four languages, gliding among English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he shifts smoothly during one three-song stretch from electric country-funk to string-buoyed piano balladry to elegiac finger-picking. This time, the moves make Banhart’s messages feel ecumenical rather than disjointed, hard-won wisdom he’s ready to dole out in any way he can.
Banhart steps fully into these songs with a vitality that recalls his beginnings. The songs are arranged and rendered with nuance by a veteran band, as comfortable with synthesizer squall as they are saxophone fantasies. Puckish and tender, Banhart seems again delighted to be here, too. From the opening notes of the smart little “Is This Nice,” where pizzicato strings and loping bass ingeniously invoke the sway of a baby being rocked, he is a singer with renewed purpose. “Is this real? Do I mean it?” he coos in the second verse, in the tone of a nursery rhyme. “I really wanna be here with you.”
The lessons flow freely from there. Banhart handles death with gravity and grace, with “Memorial” honoring the complicated feelings that remain after a person is gone. The irrepressible “Kantori Ongaku” reads like a user’s guide for reckoning with a world more complex than the one you might have imagined. During “Carolina,” wrestling with a bout of unrequited love, he is funny and self-effacing, crooning in Portuguese over dreamlike strings that he’d stand a better chance if he actually learned the language of his would-be lover. He touches on the peril of global warming and the paradoxes of globalism, and he admits that it’s OK to have mixed emotions about living in this world at all. “The older I get, the less I fear anyone I see/And yet all the more, I fear humanity,” he sings, condensing the album’s vast emotional topography into a striking couplet.
In the last decade-plus, Banhart has seemed so busy searching for a new way to say something old that he’s not managed to say much at all. But Ma is a record rich with takeaways, about how to get by and how to be kind in a social order that tempts us to be indolent and indulgent. It is alternately soft and steely, somber and ebullient, confused and confident—as true to life as “The Body Breaks” and “I Feel Just Like a Child.” “I love you the way I want everyone to know/How very much I love them but never told them so,” he sings during “Will I See You Tonight?,” a wrecking ball of a duet with Vashti Bunyan. It is a complicated confession of failure—a fitting end for an album guided, for the first time in years, by Banhart’s probing vulnerability.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Nonesuch | September 19, 2019 | 7.3 | 4eaee089-741d-4938-9e6a-8eb8a1f98633 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
As though channeling supernatural energies, the Colombian experimental musician uses eerie electronics and vocal treatments to imbue unsettling world-building with a mystical sort of grace. | As though channeling supernatural energies, the Colombian experimental musician uses eerie electronics and vocal treatments to imbue unsettling world-building with a mystical sort of grace. | Lucrecia Dalt: No era sólida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucrecia-dalt-no-era-solida/ | No era sólida | Creative practice is a form of mediumship. Artists pull from the ether, from the great cultural unconscious, pawing at the veiled ideas found there until they begin to reveal form and structure. Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt’s new album No era sólida (She Wasn’t Solid) is set in this liminal space, using arrhythmic loops of electronic sound to conjure a mysterious, ruminative atmosphere. The album’s protagonist is a character named Lia who is stretching her metaphysical legs for the first time, speaking through Dalt largely in strings of nonsensical syllables as she cycles through initial reactions to different emotions and sensations. An uneasy album of twisted innocence, it centers on the discomforting process of moving between a space of pure imagination and the reality shared by conscious human beings.
This type of ponderous, character-driven concept is increasingly common in experimental-leaning electronic music (Oneohtrix Point Never’s imaginary alien Ezra, or Oracle, the disembodied voice on Amnesia Scanner’s Another Life), but Dalt’s rendering of Lia resists cliché by letting the caricature frame, rather than dominate, the sounds themselves. Dalt’s use of glossolalia, the invented quasi-language in which she gives voice to Lia, points to religious adherents speaking in tongues, but does so with great subtlety. Her vocals are largely enmeshed with eerie synthesized sounds and further abstracted by delay. The pleasures of No era sólida come not so much from following Lia’s perspective as she goes through the process of becoming as from experiencing the complicated feelings the music evokes as Dalt explores this persona: her tender curiosity, her tentative antagonism, the delicious nausea of high-pitched tones swinging back and forth.
Spacious and quiet, No era sólida’s songs sometimes lock into a kind of stilted groove, but more often they forward with two left feet. Dalt uses loops in a similar way as her collaborator Aaron Dilloway, formerly of Wolf Eyes; both apply repetition as a way to build tension rather than hypnotize, employing a minimal palette that mimics incidental sounds from everyday life and blending them with alien electronics to make the familiar seem inscrutable. The effect is thoroughly psychedelic, and can be experienced as a kind of disorienting naiveté, recasting the commonplace as the unknown. The uneven gait of the electronics, like the perpetually surprising pop of synthesizer on “Di” and the mismatched gulping and clattering sounds on “Espesa,” divorces her sounds from any obviously mechanical process. It isn’t a leap to imagine these soundworlds as representations of a mind just beginning to bring its surroundings into focus, reveling in both glory and grit.
The title track, the album’s final song, acts as a mission statement. It is the only track with words, which are spoken in Spanish, and it surveys the world from the point of view of Dalt’s muse as she emerges into full consciousness. Though the text is at times searching and uncertain (“I can only hear myself in the repeated echo because my voice initially gets confused with myself”), Dalt’s delivery is pointed and confident. It offers a peculiar climax, a moment of certainty following the ambiguity of what came before. It is as if the music, as an entity, is speaking directly to us, its observer.
Dalt is a storyteller, but unlike traditional storytellers, she leaves her character where it came from, in that undulating space between abstraction and realization. Despite its heavy conceptual burden, No era sólida never crumples under its own weight. It shows rather than tells, guiding you through its prickly, unstable moods with a mystical sort of grace.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | September 15, 2020 | 7.9 | 4eaf56a2-35b8-42af-9d3f-954cf8f6eed9 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Chairlift's Moth is a glossy and odd record about being overwhelmed by love and sensation, and it is also the band's most song-for-song consistent release to date. | Chairlift's Moth is a glossy and odd record about being overwhelmed by love and sensation, and it is also the band's most song-for-song consistent release to date. | Chairlift: Moth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21475-moth/ | Moth | Moths seem like an error in evolution. Instead of morphing into the bright symmetry of a butterfly, a caterpillar becomes a dull and monochromatic flicker, flying in meaningless orbits around a light source and sometimes annihilating itself in it. There’s something familiar in this pattern, though; it resembles something as exposed and human as falling in love. "We liked the idea of the moth as a metaphor for vulnerability," Caroline Polachek of Chairlift said in an interview with Pitchfork last year. "There are risks everywhere, but it doesn’t question them."
"Crying in Public," one of the advance singles from the duo’s new album, Moth, is about being so overwhelmed with emotion, with the feeling of falling in love, that the narrator starts crying on the train. "Each autumn leaf and passing breath," Polachek sings. "Each antidote to sudden death." The song captures the near-panicky edge to this feeling, the moment your environment becomes so charged with possibility you find yourself noticing everything: birds, breakdancers, light pouring in through trees. It's too much, and its too-muchness makes you feel small, like an exposed nerve in a vast world. On Moth, Polachek and her bandmate Patrick Wimberly aim to embrace this too-muchness, expanding their sound and opening themselves up, and the result is the indie pop band’s most emotionally generous and consistent effort yet.
"Crying in Public" is the song on Moth that most resembles their earlier work, a kind of flowing and gelatinous synth pop that feels dense and enveloping, the texture of feeling itself. It seems related to the buoyancy of "Bruises," from their debut, or to "I Belong in Your Arms," from 2012’s Something, but while those records described the cellular rush of love, "Crying" describes love’s ability to gently create inner and outer space. There’s also a groove buried in the texture of the song, a kind of irregular flutter at its center, as if Chairlift are deliberately trying to simulate heart arrhythmia.
It’s in this often-fidgety percussion that Moth distinguishes itself from Chairlift’s other records. Sometimes it feels as if the drums were sketched out first and the songs built organically around them. Lead single "Ch-Ching" forms itself explicitly around handclaps alternating with glassy and brittle drums. It’s both animated and oddly inflexible, and the effect is disconcerting, like watching a skeleton learn how to walk. "Show U Off" inherits its groove from Busta Rhymes’ "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See" and fills its blank spaces in with nervous post-disco guitar.
Sometimes this instability intensifies their compositions. Closer "No Such Thing as Illusion" feels so empty that it sort of works like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, its pockets of nothing enhancing the something. "Polymorphing" evolves through at least three different arrangements. The horn charts are possibly the most striking feature of the record; saxophones unreel in trembling ribbons or sprout from the songs in abrupt, harmonic blooms. It’s only when Moth loses this tailored sense of groove that it starts to feel shapeless; "Ottawa to Osaka" melts in and out of coherence, and "Unfinished Business" is only motivated by an irregular, clustering snare and Polachek’s vocal, which approaches notes as if they were mapped coordinates.
Sometimes the arrangements verge on fussy; there’s an airless quality to "Romeo," which is both distracting and appropriate, as the song’s about running, exhaling instead of inhaling. Polachek sings from the perspective of Atalanta, an elusive character from Greek mythology, and the drums underpinning the song give it the rhythm of one of Atalanta’s footraces, to which she would challenge her potential suitors in order to avoid marriage. "I’m going to run/ ‘Til you give me a reason to stop/ To fall on my knees," Polachek sings, as if challenging someone to surprise her, as if she’s allowing herself the capacity for surprise.
For all of these tics and irregularities, Moth is overall Chairlift's best and smoothest long-player statement. As much as the singles on Something thrilled, it struggled for coherence from song to song. The songs on Moth feel related and extroverted, pulled together by a common purpose. They have a charming asymmetry, they drift in sometimes oblique and irregular patterns. This is pop that wants to show you what it’s made of. | 2016-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | January 20, 2016 | 7.6 | 4ebcce4d-fa17-4875-aec2-e97a5236e77c | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
What does it mean to get older in punk? Were the good old days ever that good? Though the titles change, the Pennsylvania band’s song remains the same. | What does it mean to get older in punk? Were the good old days ever that good? Though the titles change, the Pennsylvania band’s song remains the same. | The Menzingers: Hello Exile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-menzingers-hello-exile/ | Hello Exile | The Menzingers write about basically one thing, though contrary to this tweet, it’s not the waitress outside the all-night diner. The seven-year span from their second LP Chamberlain Waits to 2017’s After the Party is a longitudinal study of men in their 20s struggling to process the passage of time, drinking away the tragicomic pain of reliving the good ol’ days that never happened. Imagine “Glory Days” if it was just the third verse, the high-school jocks and heartbreakers replaced by guys in dumpy vans and stalled relationships wishing they committed themselves to something more substantial—or as “House on Fire” put it, “waiting for your life to start, then you die.” After the Party occasionally gave the impression that the Menzingers recognized this form of nostalgia as an artistic dead end, posing “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?” as an existential crisis. Instead, Hello Exile reframes it as a question with a single, obvious answer: They’re gonna go right back to making Menzingers songs about getting older.
“How do I steer my early 30s/Before I shipwreck, before I’m 40,” Greg Barnett announces at the outset, and despite the parallels to the aforementioned line from After the Party opener “Tellin’ Lies,” the intention is different—there’s an unexpected optimism amidst the pervasive societal turmoil of “America (You’re Freaking Me Out),” a willingness to see a wasted 20s as a dry run for responsible adulthood instead of a sunk cost or an endlessly renewable resource for self-loathing. Like most bands in their position, Menzingers commit to living in the moment by proclaiming “we do politics now.” While the title of “Strawberry Mansion” would usually promise yet another hardscrabble account of drinking Keystone Light in the Keystone State, this time, the Menzingers describe the impending environmental apocalypse in the same language as “Born to Run” (“Set a course for the sun/To bittersweet oblivion”).
And while none of Barnett’s insights on “America (You’re Freaking Me Out)” are remotely original—“What kind of monsters did our parents vote for?”; “Cranks for Christians in powerful positions/I’ve always felt like all their pomp and circumstance is just cover for the devil to dance”; “Can’t you recognize truth from clever lies?”— they paint a sympathetic and empathetic portrait. Menzingers’ narrators aren’t radicals, and neither are the Menzingers; their musical progressions are incremental and headed towards predictable outcomes. The slower songs are a little bit more country, the more uptempo ones a bit more rootsy, and all of it is bolstered by typically brawny Will Yip production that cuts through the chatter of any barroom or basement.
Since they perfected their craft with On the Impossible Past, the boundary between Menzingers songs and parodic “Menzingers songs” has all but disappeared, undermining their heartfelt honesty with bingo cards of burly, sensitive-rock-guy tropes seen through Pabst-colored lenses. “I was getting fucked up with a high school friend/Wondering where all the good times went”; “I know what you’re thinking but I can’t stop drinking”; those used to be the subtexts of Menzingers songs, but now they’re choruses on songs literally called “High School Friend” and “I Can’t Stop Drinking.” The plot to “Anna” is quintessential “Menzingers”—a guy starts to realize his girlfriend’s outgrowing him (“It’s like our studio apartment is just a place to keep your stuff”) and can’t summon the confidence to make up the ground between them. Instead, he begs her “please come back to Philadelphia” so they can relive their first days living together, dancing in the kitchen and “drinking cheap red wine.”
As it is in many Menzingers songs (scare quotes or otherwise), “cheap” is an important qualifier, one that cuts against Anna’s job promotion and newfound upward mobility. While people might not ever face abject poverty in a Menzingers song, they’re always one squandered paycheck or shitty tour away from couch-surfing for the next year. But throughout Hello Exile, “cheap” ends up exposing a poverty of new ideas: Barnett wants to rekindle a relationship on “Portland” with “cheap Champagne and roses”; he swears this “cheap motel” is temporary on “Strain Your Memory,” even though you’ll find him plastered off “cheap beer” in “I Can’t Stop Drinking,” and when everyone comes together in a “Farewell Youth,” they’re “drinking the cheap stuff.” “Farewell youth, I hardly got to know you,” Barnett sings, but even though they get older, “Menzingers songs” remain the same.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | October 10, 2019 | 5.8 | 4ebf77dc-0082-4dca-b128-cc5fa954142b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The guitarist continues his 2010s hot streak with some of the brightest, scrappiest music he’s ever made as a solo artist. | The guitarist continues his 2010s hot streak with some of the brightest, scrappiest music he’s ever made as a solo artist. | Albert Hammond Jr.: Francis Trouble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/albert-hammond-jr-francis-trouble/ | Francis Trouble | Albert Hammond Jr. has spent the last half-decade making the most of a second chance. After clawing his way back from the cocaine, heroin, and ketamine habits that nearly cost him his life, the Strokes guitarist has churned out the most focused music of his solo career in 2013’s AHJ EP and his 2015 follow-up, Momentary Masters. His new full-length, Francis Trouble, was inspired by a lost twin who died in a miscarriage while Hammond continued to grow in utero. Reflecting on this family story led him to imagine the titular Francis, an energetic alter ego bearing the spirit of the sibling he never knew. It’s a creative rebirth that aligns with Hammond’s own new lease on life.
It also sounds like a recipe for music that’s somber, if not a little ponderous, and yet Francis Trouble extends Hammond’s recent hot streak: It’s some of the brightest and scrappiest music he’s ever made. You can hear his background as a rhythm guitarist in the album’s arrangements. Beats are uniformly brisk; every riff sounds as clean and crisp as a pressed and fitted button-down. Even the solo on “Set to Attack,” the album’s one moment of guitar heroism, stays orderly until its waning seconds.
Hammond’s writing is sticky enough to override any attempt to plumb the album’s depths for meaning. It’s hard to keep an ear out for oblique references to identity crises or other potential subtexts when melodic guitar lines are being unfurled every few seconds. (Hammond himself has discouraged any sort of close reading in a press release: “What the music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analyzed or taken too seriously.” Noted!) While he’s been writing power-pop stunners like this album’s “Far Away Truths” and “Strangers” for well over a decade, he spends a good chunk of Francis Trouble tip-toeing out of that well-defined comfort zone. “Muted Beatings” strikes a delicate note without giving up any of its nervous energy, and the ominous “Tea for Two” includes an extended passage that sounds like Hammond’s take on Destroyer’s Kaputt. After hearing “ScreaMER,” I dreamed about hearing him on a double bill with the word-drunk gentlemen of Parquet Courts.
Tapping into the character of Francis has unlocked a new degree of confidence in Hammond’s singing, and his vocals throughout these songs are surprisingly varied. He jumps from the classic cool of “Far Away Truths” to the skittish gasping of “Muted Beatings” without pause, where he once might have spent an entire album in the former mode. His impassioned howling on “Tea for Two” creates an urgency that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and he chews on vague-but-stylish kiss-offs like “Tell all your friends/Why we burn at both ends.” Not every choice makes sense: Hammond’s subdued approach doesn’t suit the Thin Lizzy-isms of “Stop and Go,” and he wastes the emotive pre-chorus of “Strangers”—one of the few moments on the album that feels explicitly linked to the loss behind its title—with a lunk-headed chorus and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”-style vocal affectations. Yet he has better luck elsewhere, and Francis Trouble often rings with a happy-go-lucky spirit and easy tunefulness that Wings-era Paul McCartney would have appreciated.
When Hammond’s solo career began with Yours to Keep in 2006, it seemed like little more than a cute diversion from his role in one of the decade's most important rock bands. It was hard to imagine a world in which you could think about Hammond without thinking about the Strokes. Since then, that group has become yet another bloated blockbuster franchise, coming together for a new release every few years even though it doesn’t seem like anyone involved particularly wants to be there. Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay Hammond is that he’s done enough good work to outrun the shadow of the riffs he laid down on Is This It and Room on Fire. And if your candle is still burning for the band that made “Last Nite” and “Under Control,” why waste your time waiting for another Comedown Machine when Francis Trouble—tight, affable, and unpretentious—is ready and waiting? | 2018-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Red Bull | March 14, 2018 | 7.2 | 4ec27de7-2acc-42d2-af8e-e2abeb6529ee | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
After a run of bad luck and tragedy, Rogue Wave reconvene for their second post-Sub Pop album. | After a run of bad luck and tragedy, Rogue Wave reconvene for their second post-Sub Pop album. | Rogue Wave: Permalight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13887-permalight/ | Permalight | Do you know what it's like to have a slipped disc in your neck? I do, and if it weren't for the spinal tap and blood patch procedures that followed, it would probably be the most painful experience in my life. Rogue Wave singer/guitarist Zach Rogue suffered two slipped discs in his neck, essentially rendering him paralyzed for a span of months. When his condition improved and the songwriting muse began to call again, like many who've been laid up for a significant time, it seems like he just wanted his life back: Rogue made Permalight, the most active, physical, and fun album the Oakland band has ever released.
Rogue Wave have two solid albums to their name (Out of the Shadow, Descended Like Vultures), but both used distorted guitars for texture more than visceral force, and had no dance-related influence unless you count playing in waltz time. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, their new drive can be awkward. Even more unfortunately, it's most notable on what should be their catchiest songs. "Good Morning (The Future)" seems to think the future is IDM + fey indie songwriting à la the Postal Service. (Hey, it worked for Owl City.) Both "Good Morning" and the title track are hooky, but both come off like pep talks when they hope to seem like ecstatic roars. The chintzy vocal effects aim tobe inspired production touches; instead, they feel hastily tacked on, almost arbitrary.
Otherwise, Rogue Wave succeed in making their most aggressive album. That's all relative, granted, as hinted at by cautiously aggressive titles like "We Will Make a Song Destroy", "Per Anger", and "Solitary Gun". But due to curiously anemic and trebly production, the guitars comes across thin and brittle-- a band bringing knives to a gunfight. "Per Anger" fares best because its jangle doesn't stray far from Rogue Wave's area of expertise, and "Solitary Gun" has a sturdy melody. Elsewhere, "Right With You" and "We Will Make a Song Destroy" try the Pixies' whisper/scream dichotomy but end up somewhere between R.E.M.'s Green (if we're being generous) and Better Than Ezra's angsty Friction, Baby phase (if we're being realistic).
Rogue Wave are tough to root against, considering they've experienced a run of terrible luck that could have them drinking the Wrens under the table: their "Lake Michigan" used in ill-fated Zune commercials, a split from Sub Pop records despite an astonishing track record with TV music coordinators (four songs on "The O.C." alone!), Pat Spurgeon's debilitating kidney problems, and the departure and, later, shocking death of bassist Evan Farrell. You can't blame them for not dwelling on any of that, but now that Rogue's back in good health, here's hoping his band soon does the same. | 2010-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Brushfire | March 3, 2010 | 5.1 | 4ec3fbc0-c61d-4888-91c8-99406074849c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at the UK band Sade—from quiet storm mainstays to defining a generational vibe—with new reviews of four of their records. | Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at the UK band Sade—from quiet storm mainstays to defining a generational vibe—with new reviews of four of their records. | Sade: Promise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sade-promise/ | Promise | High gloss, high glam, and high production-value defined the majority of pop music coming out of the UK in the mid-’80s. Synth and technopop traveled across the pond to take over U.S. airwaves and MTV programming blocks, while Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Richie, and Tina Turner were redefining the idea of Black pop-stardom.
Through the excess, the London band Sade swerved outside the lane with their anti-pop debut, 1984’s Diamond Life. The cosmopolitan collection of sounds and tales from a life far sexier and more interesting than the listener’s changed music across genres, both ushering in sophisti-pop and pushing urban radio’s quiet storm format to a peak rivaling adult contemporary.
Promise, from 1985, is the ideal second album, firmly establishing the Sade template without retreading the same material of the band’s debut. The album feels like a volume in a series, as does each subsequent addition to Sade’s catalog. I was nine years old when the album dropped, and my parents, part of the young Black middle-class sophisticate set that helped break Sade stateside, kept Promise and Diamond Life in rotation together as though the two were one long extended play. I’ve grown into the music—over the years, Sade has soundtracked my falling in love, recovering from love, and remembering lost love. When my friends became fans with 1992’s Love Deluxe, I was already a deep devotee. To date, Promise is the album that most resonates with me top to bottom.
Promise is lush and unhurried, reclining somewhere between jazz, Brazilian pop, and soul. Multiple articles and reviews from the time of release leaned on the same descriptor for the singer, the band, and the music: “cool.” It’s mood music, at the purest definition: Stuart Matthewman’s sax, Andrew Hale’s keys, and Paul Spencer Denman’s masterful bass envelope listeners, transport them. The live recordings were a departure from the heavily programmed production of the era, and the sparse elegance that some found—and still find—too loungy is one of the primary factors in Sade’s sound and catalog aging beautifully.
The lead single, “The Sweetest Taboo,” was a quick hit. It was likely chosen to kick off the project because it’s the most radio-friendly offering—it could have been tailor-made just for the late-night “quiet storm” radio format. The sexy midtempo was infectious to me even when I was 9 years old doodling the lyrics in English class—lyrics I didn’t completely understand in context—after hearing the song on repeat around the house and in my parents’ car. The percussion loop, Adu’s breathy vocals, the horn showcase in the bridge; “The Sweetest Taboo” is an accessible and efficient sample of all the best elements of Sade. But Promise’s opener, “Is It a Crime,” is Sweetback’s (the name Matthewman, Hale, and Denman perform under as a trio) showcase. This, for me, is the definitive Sade song; for six minutes and 21 seconds, we’re on a ride with Hammond organs and djembes with Adu pleading over big band-style crescendos. She describes her love as one that “dives and jumps and ripples like the deepest ocean,” and that’s what the song does, waves of sax and piano cresting and breaking over Adu’s insistent declaration of love.
“Is It a Crime” is reason enough in itself to laud Promise as a masterwork, but the LP boasts a tighter and more confident Sade unit than Diamond Life, with more intentional story-telling and longer compositions. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts: You can wrap yourself up in the music and Adu’s soft-touch tone, recall or lament life and love through the lyrics, or fully immerse yourself with both. Lyrically, Promise is a collection of short stories exploring the varied stages of love and relationships; some autobiographical to Adu, who co-wrote every song on the album but one.
While Promise—and Sade’s music in general—is often categorized as sexy or relaxing, the smooth ease of Adu’s vocals over the mellow instrumentation belies the melancholy in most of the album cuts. “War of the Hearts” frames the end of a relationship as a standoff; two people exhausted from hurting each other, but too stubborn to call the cease-fire that would end it. There’s “Jezebel,” the deceptively simple story of a sex worker, told in innuendos, “Jezebel, what a belle/Looks like a princess in her new dress/How did you get that?/Do you really want to know? she said.” Even though the lyrics are about Jezebel’s projected determination and control, the track is an example of Adu’s almost halting vocals conveying the emotion and backstory typically attributed to bigger voices.
“Tar Baby,” one of the final tracks on the album and seemingly inspired by her own biracial background, feels under-examined now. Adu has apparently never talked about this song—it’s title heavy with suggestion, not yet considered a slur, but still problematic enough to be intentional during its release in 1985. It starts tentatively—the story of a shameful, unexpected pregnancy. But then it turns in tempo and lyric to a celebration of the undeniable love and joy of a child. The album ends with a sad smile, “Maureen,” an uptempo tribute to a friend Adu lost a few years before recording. Sade remains cheerful even in its refrain: “Never gonna see you again/And you’ll never meet my new friends.”
Promise was the chaser to Diamond Life’s shot; one that positioned Sade for the elusive legend status she and the band have achieved today. They didn’t record Diamond Life with U.S. stardom in mind; that was a trial run. Promise was the commitment—a declaration of voice, sound, and style that was then unlike anything else in the mainstream sphere. Rather than a departure or different direction from the first album, Promise simply executes on a higher level, and the repeated success provided the leverage for the group to continue to follow their own formula, in their own time.
The quiet storm era encompassed everything from straight down the middle R&B (Luther Vandross), to classic soul, to jazzy soul (Anita Baker), to British imports (along with Sade, soul band Simply Red and synth-pop group Art of Noise were popular with the after-dark format). It wouldn’t have been unusual for “The Sweetest Taboo” to follow gospel-bred singer Shirley Murdock’s powerfully delivered “As We Lay,” or precede newcomer Whitney Houston’s glossy and gorgeous “Saving All My Love for You.” But I never needed Sade, the singer, to give me more vocally; I didn’t need the lyrics to go deeper. “It’s all simple and unpretentious, and that’s what music is to me,” Adu shared with Rolling Stone in a rare interview in 1985. “It should take you somewhere and move you in some way, and that’s what I want our songs to do.”
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. | 2020-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | October 9, 2020 | 9 | 4eca5595-4843-4f78-9529-2adf4375e263 | Naima Cochrane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/naima-cochrane/ | |
A versatile dandy, Jidenna tries on many different musical styles with his debut album—but all that changing quickly grows tiresome. | A versatile dandy, Jidenna tries on many different musical styles with his debut album—but all that changing quickly grows tiresome. | Jidenna: The Chief | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22909-the-chief/ | The Chief | Jidenna cut a memorable figure when he emerged in 2015, looking like a roguish extra from a cancelled period drama: natty three-piece suit, slim cane with gilded accents, shiny cufflinks. He proved to be a shrewd repackager on “Classic Man,” which pulled from DJ Mustard’s minimalist bounce and made it No. 22 on the Hot 100. But in his efforts to break out of one-hit-wonder-dom and demonstrate a wide range on his debut album The Chief, Jidenna sometimes comes off as shapeless.
You might have seen this coming: Jidenna has spent the past two years releasing a series of singles with the apparent goal of appearing on as many Spotify playlists as possible. “Long Live the Chief,” carried by a squeaky, nails-on-the-chalkboard synth tone, was a distant descendant of Jeru the Damaja’s 1993 boom-bap classic “Come Clean;” “Chief Don’t Run” paired bluster with a beat that sounded like a more ornate version of Tyga’s “Rack City;” and “Little Bit More” seemed built for the express purpose of giving DJs something to play after Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”
It turns out these singles offered just a sample of Jidenna’s talents—this is a man with a suit for every occasion. “Trampoline” channels festive brass, while “Bambi” attempts an audacious combination of post-war crooning and of-the-moment drum programming. There’s hammy singing with piano (or strings), more strains of pop-hip-hop, you name it, and the 31-year-old stacks a jumble of imagery on this changing bedrock. He loves animal metaphors—“A lion don't ever lose sleep when it comes to sheep” or “shit’s getting wild—safari!”—and drawing from a well worn selection of cultural titans: Frank Sinatra and the Dalai Lama, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, James Bond (“He’s a Roger Moore nigger/I’m a Sean Connery”).
Between all the beasts of prey and Madame Tussauds-worthy famous figures, Jidenna also alludes to police violence and racial inequality, and these moments tend to be his sharpest. “They’ll shoot you down without warning,” he laments on “Helicopters,” displaying the hoarsest—and strongest—part of his voice. The most potent song on The Chief comes second to last: “White Niggas” imagines a white family that is struggling with addiction to prescription drugs and facing the same sort of systematic police oppression that afflicts black communities. It’s a simple premise with a big pay-off.
Jidenna tries on styles and allusions, but he doesn’t always fill them out or imbue them with personality. At a time when many rappers shift tone from syllable to syllable, you’ll find little of that excitement on The Chief. He often delivers rapped lines conversationally and sings cleanly, but neither register has much character. Given this, his turn to the dancefloor on “Little Bit More” represents a canny understanding of his strengths. In the business of making immensely popular songs for warm-weather events, the vocals are meant to be smooth—any sort of burrs represent an impediment to frictionless forward locomotion. Here, where anonymity is prized, Jidenna sounds most comfortable. | 2017-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Epic / Wondaland | February 22, 2017 | 5.8 | 4ecec14d-45fb-4e8f-a4dc-9e0f81078ca2 | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
Lou Barlow's 1987 home-recorded indie folk cassette album is re-released yet again in a variety of formats with an hour of bonus material, and once again under the original Sentridoh name. | Lou Barlow's 1987 home-recorded indie folk cassette album is re-released yet again in a variety of formats with an hour of bonus material, and once again under the original Sentridoh name. | Sentridoh: Weed Forestin' | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16400-weed-forestin/ | Weed Forestin' | In 1986 and 1987, a young dude in Massachusetts played bass in a band that was making some noise in independent music circles. And while his position was enviable for someone of his age (he turned 21 during this stretch), he was already feeling some insecurity about his role in the group. The band was called Dinosaur, and they were led by a savant guitarist and songwriter named J Mascis; the bassist was a kid named Lou Barlow who had more to say musically than this band would allow him. And so, building on the weird acoustic song called "Poledo" that he'd been allowed on the band's second album, You're Living All Over Me, he began recording at home in earnest. Where Dinosaur were known for their blown-out guitar energy, Barlow's solo project, which he called Sentriodoh, was quiet, a conversation spoken in a whisper. Here and there, his friend Eric Gaffney helped out on percussion, but the focus on these early recordings was squarely on Barlow's voice, his brief tunes, and the steady strumming of his guitar and ukulele. He put out a Sentridoh cassette in 1987 in a tiny run and called it Weed Forestin'.
As luck would have it, Barlow had the perfect voice-- chesty and reasonably deep but always on pitch-- and songwriting style for this kind of music. He sounded like someone who'd lived a while and seen some things even though he really hadn't, but his naivety and inexperience turned out to be an advantage. Performing his songs for his four-track, he sounded utterly alone, and the tunes took on a diaristic feel. He sang about being lonely and jerking off and feeling unloved, but he also had a sense of humor and was able to laugh at himself. Many of the songs were just sketches-- there were 23 of them in 45 minutes-- but they never felt incomplete, exactly. It was more that, when Barlow had said what needed to be said and introduced his melodic or lyrical idea, he was cool with just stopping and moving on to something else. This music was more about process than resolution.
Barlow now brings the original vision of Weed Forestin' back into print. It's an album with a strange release history. After those initial cassettes, which were issued in two editions as Barlow added more songs to them, the album was eventually reissued by Homestead on vinyl. By then, however, they came out under the name Sebadoh, the one used by Barlow when in full collaboration with Gaffney (he'd continue to release solo material as Sentridoh). Eventually, Weed Forestin' was combined with an edited version of its Sebadoh follow-up, The Freed Man, and was released on CD in 1990 as The Freed Weed. I'm going to guess that this is the version through which almost everyone who heard these songs in the 90s first encountered them (including yours truly). But this set brings Weed Forestin' back to its initial form, under the Sentridoh name. It comes in multiple editions, including deluxe vinyl (I worked from mp3 promos for this review), and comes with an hour of bonus material called Child of the Apocalypse, which adds early versions, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.
It's worth asking whether a 25-year-old album of home-recorded indie folk is worth reissuing at all. This is, in one respect, music very much of its time, when small-run print zines were the only source of information about this low-key and obscure music, and the independent scene was still very much in the underground. Does Weed Forestin' have anything special to say in 2012 that isn't being said by the thousands of home-recording kids currently on the cusp of turning 21?
It's not an easy question to answer, and, since I encountered this music in the 90s and it opened my ears to a new way of listening to and thinking about music, I may not be the right person to ask. But to my ears, Weed Forestin' holds up very well, and represents a sort of ideal for what a home-recorded singer-songwriter record might be. For one, there's the sheer tunefulness of Barlow's songwriting. Even though he was writing fragments, songs like "New Worship", "Gate to Hell", and "Brand New Love" are filled with fresh melodic turns you don't quite expect and chord changes that lodge in your brain (later covers of some of these tunes would bear out their strength as compositions). Hearing this stuff at the time, Barlow came over like a suburban Nick Drake remaking Pink Moon in his bedroom (which made even more sense when Sebadoh eventually covered "Pink Moon" on Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock). And Weed Forestin' could also be seen as a young dude's version of Joni Mitchell's Blue, another record Barlow came to admire, talking about self-doubt and his place in the world around him and in the simplest and most direct terms.
And the structure of Weed Forestin' elevates it further. It's sequenced to flow, with garbled tape pieces, swells of sampled symphonic music, and even a snippet of Eric Burdon and the Animals' "Sky Pilot" to keep it moving along. It works an appealing edge between a collage and a proper album, and has the feel of a mixtape. Part of the allure of home recording of this kind, which continues to this day, is the blurring of the lines between listening to music and making it. Barlow arranged everything to give it a sense of context that made the completed project feel whole.
All of which explains why the copious bonus material is even more for-fans-only than is typical for this kind of release. We're talking about extras here, for a 23-song album of bits and pieces. And since the assembly of Weed Forestin' proper feels anything but random, the dump of additional material doesn't add a whole lot. There are reasonably interesting tape collages and instrumental and alternate versions of some of the album's better-known songs, but they're not the sort of thing anyone but the most dedicated fans would return to. I'm glad they exist and are available, and it makes perfect sense to include them here, but Weed Forestin' on its own is more than enough.
The first question people ask with lo-fi is whether it's a necessity or an aesthetic choice. For every artist saying, "If I could afford a real studio, I'd use one," there's another talking about the warmth and intimacy of the four-track cassette (or, more recently, the cheap microphone, cracked recording software, and reasonably expensive computer). People who've no choice but to record on inexpensive equipment carry with them an air of purity: They're presumably poor artists who, for one reason or another, are not given access to the means of production (think Daniel Johnston bouncing between dictaphone cassette machines in his brother's garage). Whereas producers making lo-fi by choice aestheticize the the warp, the break, and the hiss. Since we know that cheap recordings can mask mistakes, a certain amount of skepticism for those in the latter group is natural and healthy. But you're eventually confronted with a piece of music that either does something for you or doesn't. For me, modest as it is, Weed Forestin' still works wonders. | 2012-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | March 16, 2012 | 8.2 | 4ed3fec5-2c21-4242-8be0-f68e770e3390 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Congolese American songwriter and guitarist’s debut EP winds in circles, tracing vast spaces that couch thorny emotional quagmires. | The Congolese American songwriter and guitarist’s debut EP winds in circles, tracing vast spaces that couch thorny emotional quagmires. | Christelle Bofale: Swim Team EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christelle-bofale-swim-team-ep/ | Swim Team EP | Christelle Bofale plays the sort of guitar chords you could swim in. The Congolese American songwriter grew up immersed in the sounds of soukous, a rumba-inspired genre of dance music from the Congo. She first started writing songs on her father’s guitar when she was 13 years old. Now 22 and living in Austin, she uses her instrument to trace vast spaces that couch thorny emotional quagmires. In its sumptuousness and delicacy, her debut EP Swim Team calls back to the way the Antlers float guitar lines through foggy air, or the ribboned arpeggios on Frank Ocean’s “Ivy.”
There are songs on Swim Team that soothe, letting the ear bathe in a warm glow even as Bofale describes intense pain. “I built a home for you/You tore it up,” she sings on “Love Lived Here Once,” her voice ringing through a sea of minor chords. The EP’s centerpiece “U Ouchea” grows slowly over seven and a half minutes, each new refrain bolstered by tighter, denser guitar lines. “I’m glowing with fear/I’m pregnant with fear/I’ve gotta get out of here,” Bofale sings, using the image of pregnancy to describe the toxicity that secretly attends so many romantic partnerships. A seemingly happy relationship can quietly harbor abuse; an externally tragic breakup can actually be a story of escape.
Swim Team treads the murky waters of violence disguised as love, and all the weird feelings that can emerge with such a relationship's destruction. “Origami Dreams,” the most straightforward pop-rock song, cruises along on a beat full of momentum and excitement. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry up,” Bofale sings at the chorus, as if impelling herself to get loose from all the history that’s weighing her down. She punctuates the refrain with a chain of notes on guitar that seem to point at some gleaming future, a place of calm and respite she's urging herself toward.
Healing from trauma generally isn’t a linear process. You don’t wake up a little better every day; some days you coil around yourself and collapse back into the sludge you're trying to escape. Bofale’s songs also wind in circles, reaching for peace and acceptance and then shrinking back into harsh reality. The way she plays guitar, layering chords on top of each other and sequencing them so they never quite seem to resolve, allows more than enough room for the complexity of her lyrics. She ends the record by repeating the words, “I am lost out here,” voice rising to a timbre that hangs between despair and thrill. She may be lost, but she is out here and not in there. In there, there's only suffocation. Out here, there are places she can go. | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter | May 31, 2019 | 7.4 | 4edb3e66-ad26-40fa-a579-1517a15285a6 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
With a solo album of playfully retro punk songs, the Against Me! singer lets her hair down but never loses sight of the stakes. | With a solo album of playfully retro punk songs, the Against Me! singer lets her hair down but never loses sight of the stakes. | Laura Jane Grace: Hole in My Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-jane-grace-hole-in-my-head/ | Hole in My Head | It’s 2024, and the time for trans rage is nigh. Enter Laura Jane Grace. Since coming out a dozen years ago in Rolling Stone, followed by 2014’s blistering Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace has affirmed her place as a clarion of righteous anger, unwilling to tamp down a voice she can use against the world’s ills. On Hole in My Head, her second solo album, Grace wields this voice with precision-blade intensity, able to rage, mourn, and find respite in equal measure.
In a tidy 26 minutes, Hole in My Head weaves through the stripped-down style Grace explored on 2020’s Stay Alive and louder songs more akin to her work with Against Me!. None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each. The title track opens the record with a statement of purpose that nods to the singer’s facial feminization surgery, refusing to numb the world’s intensity as she yelps, “You could learn to feel less/That would be a real bore.” On “Dysphoria Hoodie,” Grace retreats into her most beloved protective armor, a worn-out sweatshirt that’s been around for decades. Though the song includes some of the album’s clunkier lyrics (“When it says Adidas on my chest/All day long I dream of sex”), Grace and her guitar amplify one another, sounding as strident as anything she could make with a band.
Where Stay Alive spoke to lockdown-induced isolation, these songs capture an enthusiastic, head-nodding euphoria that represents some of the most playful music Grace has ever made. “Birds Talk Too” rides a mid-tempo garage-rock groove as a stoned Grace imagines feathered friends “just having a good laugh” and jokes, “They don’t play Red Hot Chili Peppers in places like this!” The blown-out guitars on “Punk Rock in Basements” invite her to relive the ego-dissolving experience of being surrounded by a sweaty crowd: “Don’t it make you wonder if you’re following or leading?” she asks.
Hole in My Head is hardly a protest record. At its most easygoing, you hear Grace quieting the dysphoria and building the cozy hermit’s nest she conjures on “Tacos & Toast,” an acoustic ode to sipping coffee, getting high, and leaving unwanted baggage behind. But in today’s climate, Grace and other high-visibility trans people always draw the spotlight. There’s a responsibility there, one that Grace deftly cradles on “Cuffing Season,” the album’s centerpiece. An acoustic guitar rubber-bands around her voice, the chords tensing and then loosening. That voice, one that she’s refused to soften after coming out, always running the risk of transphobic backlash, rises and falls around some of her finest lyrics. “I wanna ghost ride the whip dysphoric and disassociated,” she snaps, bitterness in each note. By the time she sings, “You don’t have to like the truth to know it’s worth the cost,” the stakes are obvious: Whatever hell we might be hurtling toward, far worse is the misery of denying our responsibility to this life. | 2024-02-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | February 20, 2024 | 7.3 | 4eddd70c-5e82-4336-a547-5fe769b2fbd2 | Annie Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/annie-howard/ | |
The 68-year-old guitar virtuoso compiled this understated set of solo recordings from a forgotten folder during downtime on tour. These casual experiments offer a fascinating peek into his creative mind. | The 68-year-old guitar virtuoso compiled this understated set of solo recordings from a forgotten folder during downtime on tour. These casual experiments offer a fascinating peek into his creative mind. | Pat Metheny: Dream Box | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pat-metheny-dream-box/ | Dream Box | First popularized by Chicago jazz singer Judy Roberts and recently resurrected on a compilation of obscure yacht-rock gems, Russ Long’s 1982 composition “Never Was Love” is a fascinating document of its time: as catchy and evocative as anything on Silk Degrees but played with a sophistication that suggests a smoky after-hours club as much as a crowded disco. Hearing these kinds of lost classics tends to invite a litany of questions: What happened to the mysterious figure behind its heartbroken words? What kept its songwriter from catching on beyond their regional scene?
Or if you’re Pat Metheny, you might ask: What would this sound like stripped down to just two sad, solitary electric guitars? The 68-year-old virtuoso’s rendition is a highlight on Dream Box, an understated set of new solo recordings that he compiled during downtime on tour buses and in hotel rooms around the world. On the road last year, Metheny sorted through a folder on his computer where he had stored these casual, off-hours experiments: cover songs, jazz standards, and new melodies captured as soon as they occurred to him. In the liner notes, Metheny describes the songs as “moments in time” more than proper compositions. “I have almost no memory of having recorded most of them,” he admits. “They just kind of showed up.”
For an artist whose name has become synonymous with sleek, smooth hyper-technicality—your guitar teacher’s favorite guitarist—Metheny remains underrated for his unending drive to experiment and challenge himself. While his feathery style on the fretboard remains as distinctive as his robust and permanently windswept mane, no two of his records involve quite the same approach, whether that means finding new collaborators, new instrumentation, or on releases like Dream Box, new ways to channel his creative process.
Like 1994’s Thurston Moore-approved noise excursion Zero Tolerance for Silence and 2003’s mournful, acoustic set One Quiet Night, Dream Box is the type of album Metheny makes when he doesn’t realize he’s making an album. Accordingly it drifts, retreats, and grounds itself mostly with negative space. Many of the songs feature just one guitar part, which he then accentuates with an overdubbed, improvised accompaniment. Favoring minor keys and loose sketches of melody, Metheny embraces the scattered, jetlagged genesis. This is music made for late nights and bleary eyes, wistful and half-awake.
The new compositions are highlights, tracing their central motifs to unexpected destinations. While some of Metheny’s best original work this century has spoken to his ambition as a composer (2005’s The Way Up), his aim here is for simple but immersive mood-setting. After an introduction of electric guitar against chiming, slightly dissonant acoustic chords, the gorgeous “Ole & Gard” swiftly finds its feet and cycles through various settings to return to a recurring bluesy refrain. “From the Mountains” is more formless but just as memorable, navigating its eight-minute runtime with a dreamy sense of focus: The effect is like watching the sun rise over an unfamiliar city, new contours filling in as the light starts to spread.
The cover choices are equally distinctive, from his misty take on the bossa-nova standard “Morning of the Carnival” to the vinyl-only rendition of Miles Davis and Bill Evans’ classic “Blue in Green.” And then there’s “Never Was Love,” a moody, propulsive interpretation that best encapsulates the album’s inspiration. Metheny has covered the song once before, contributing it to a compilation released after Russ Long’s death in 2006. The two share a home state of Missouri and played in a group together early in Metheny’s career, before their paths verged dramatically. One late night on the road, he might have been thinking about the strange journey he has taken, from a young prodigy accompanying Joni Mitchell to the closest thing jazz guitar has to an arena rock star all the way up to the present day, when he got to his hotel room, put on his headphones, listened back to some demos, and heard the beginnings of a story he had yet to tell. | 2023-07-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Modern Recordings | July 5, 2023 | 7.6 | 4ede9eee-c489-498c-873b-7d5d442e1e45 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The debut album from the rising country artist aspires for universality but fares best when highlighting her singular voice and defiance of the status quo. | The debut album from the rising country artist aspires for universality but fares best when highlighting her singular voice and defiance of the status quo. | Mickey Guyton: Remember Her Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mickey-guyton-remember-her-name/ | Remember Her Name | Country singer Mickey Guyton has billed her debut as a closing chapter rather than an introduction: “Remember Her Name is a culmination of the last 10 years of my life in Nashville,” she explained. This is a crucial distinction for the rising songwriter, who has spent the past decade in a sort of Music Row purgatory. While it’s common for aspiring country artists to find their careers stalled out on the road to widespread recognition, Guyton has faced a disproportionately long time in limbo as a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white industry. Though she signed to Universal in 2011 and released a minor hit in 2015’s “Better Than You Left Me,” it took another five years before Guyton would even have the chance to record a proper full-length.
The timing of Guyton’s rise within the country music mainstream during the past year-and-a-half isn’t necessarily a coincidence. Last summer’s George Floyd protests were a rude awakening for the industry, highlighting its long history of racial exclusion just as the genre had been enjoying several years of uninterrupted pop and hip-hop crossover success. In the midst of Nashville’s fumbling attempts at course correction, Guyton appeared onstage at the ACM Awards in September 2020 to sing “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?,” a striking ballad that speaks plainly to the lack of opportunities for Black girls and women in the U.S. It was a landmark moment, even if Guyton has long been skeptical of these kinds of opportunities: “I look back in my career, and I was a token in so many different ways,” she told the New Yorker this year, when asked about the performance. “I remember there would be corporate events where—in order to make the company look good—who did they have front and center as one of the artists they’re excited about?”
Guyton’s unique ability to speak to the injustices she has faced, both in and outside the industry, informs many of Remember Her Name’s strongest moments. “My daddy worked day and night/For an old house and a used car,” she sings on “Black Like Me.” “Just to live that good life/It shouldn’t be twice as hard.” Her voice, which carries a hint of her Texas upbringing, has the same unwavering warmth of hitmakers like Carrie Underwood, bringing power and patience to songs that are likely to make country’s old guard bristle. On “Do You Really Wanna Know,” she sings about therapy, recovering from alcoholism, and learning to resent small-talk niceties. “If I tell you the truth, will your heart be big enough to hold it?” she asks, knowing that even in a genre that prides itself on plainspoken honesty, her perspective could present a barrier to entry.
Despite Guyton’s singular point of view, Remember Her Name strives for universality, and the more upbeat moments play with the same genre conventions that once ensnared her. “Rosé” is a winking subversion of the classic beer-and-whiskey country drinking tune—“You can call it what you want,” she admits in the chorus, “but everybody loves a good cliché”—while “Smoke,” produced by pre-1989 Taylor Swift collaborator Nathan Chapman, is a rare success in the marriage of trap beats with banjo and pedal steel. Guyton partners with Chapman again for the triumphant “Higher,” where the pop-rock bravado that bolstered early Swift songs like “Sparks Fly” and “Fearless” now serves as a pedestal for Guyton and a full gospel choir. It’s pure stadium-concert serotonin, destined to become a staple at her live shows.
Remember Her Name falters when it sticks to the status quo—namely, the bland country-pop production that has come to dominate radio airwaves. The cosmic guitar plucks and vaporous piano chords of the title track are meant to serve as an inspirational opener, but the abstract lyrics on overcoming adversity could be sung by anyone. The same slickness permeates the snappy “Different” and wedding-playlist-friendly “Dancing in the Living Room.” While some may feel empowered by these songs’ accessibility, they dilute the specificity that makes the rest of the album so striking. As country music continues to grapple with its racial reckoning, Guyton has had no qualms about calling her white peers’ complacency to task, and it’s a relief that her defiance has carried over into the music. At its best, Remember Her Name captures her steadfastness and grace in equal measure.
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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. | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Capitol Nashville | September 27, 2021 | 7 | 4edf9687-22fc-4a1e-a674-3869f3aee277 | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
Mike Hadreas' third album as Perfume Genius is Hadreas' most extroverted album to date, a record about shattering illusions, defiantly looking away when you feel like it, and boldly staring back at those who hate you. Portishead's Adrian Utley and PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish contribute. | Mike Hadreas' third album as Perfume Genius is Hadreas' most extroverted album to date, a record about shattering illusions, defiantly looking away when you feel like it, and boldly staring back at those who hate you. Portishead's Adrian Utley and PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish contribute. | Perfume Genius: Too Bright | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19798-perfume-genius-too-bright/ | Too Bright | The first line on Perfume Genius' third album, Too Bright, is a basic observation, one we've heard a million times in songs: "I can see for miles." Mike Hadreas, the Seattle songwriter behind the project, sings it over a spare piano, something that won't surprise people familiar with his music. The sentiment, though, is a bit unexpected: Hadreas has made a habit of writing powerful, intimate, and sometimes introverted songs that look closely at his inner life, warts and all, and at the inner lives of the people around him. These words find him peering outward.
The rest of the lyric finds Hadreas acknowledging the cliché, and averting his eyes: "I can see for miles/ The same old line/ No thanks/ I decline." What he sees is an "Angel just above the grid/ Open, smiling, reaching," but he rejects it. Later he uses the line again, on the raucous "Grid", with the same decision to look away. At that point, though, "There is no angel/ Above the grid." It's been replaced by "A diamond/ Swallowed and shit/ Then swallowed again." He adds: "At least we know where it's been."
All of this is important to consider because Too Bright is, by far, Hadreas' most extroverted album to date, a record about shattering illusions, defiantly looking away when you feel like it, and boldly staring back at those who hate you. It's also about personalizing your experience, and rejecting the clichés placed on it by outsiders. As Hadreas has explained, "A lot of these songs are me trying to claim some power in situations that would typically depress or alienate or victimize me...I've seen faces of blank terror when I walk by. Sometimes from seemingly strong, macho dudes—somehow my presence confuses and ultimately scares them. There is a strange power to it that I've only recently begun to understand and embrace."
Too Bright follows 2012's excellent Put Your Back N 2 It, a quiet record that offered variations on a central sound; sonically, Hadreas pushes things much further here. He recorded Too Bright with previous collaborator Ali Chant and Portishead's Adrian Utley, who also played bass and synth. Additionally, PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish plays drums on a number of tracks that, fittingly, are reminiscent of fuzzed-out Harvey songs. There are still elemental, stripped-down moments, but the sound is generally denser and weirder. For the first time in Hadreas' career, he's giving equal time to the textures as he is with his words. That said, his vocals are more muscular, too, more clear and naked-sounding. His voice takes on a shape-shifting quality on Too Bright, sometimes warping into odd, ambient shapes; on the finger-snapping "Fool", his powerful falsetto sounds like it could fill a cathedral and then crack it in half.
"Queen" features heavy, fuzzed bass along with synthesized vocal choirs and rhythmic oomph backing the great, cocky line, "No family is safe, when I sashay." The frenetic, fucked-up "Grid", with immense banshee howls, horns, and repetitious, burly bass is reminiscent of Swans (the video, on the other hand, resembles Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" as done by David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona). On "I'm a Mother", Hadreas performs muffled, creepy falsetto that sounds like Antony whispering beneath a pillow. The title track is a ballad with piano and Hadreas' crystalline voice, mixing in chiming clarinet, synth washes, and escalating ghost choirs; "Longpig" possesses a booming '80s synth line, ricocheting handclaps, and violent burts and blooms with lines about burying meat for mama. As on Put Your Back, there's a sock-hop quality to many of these songs, especially the closer "All Along", but the structure is toyed with and flayed, shifting on a dime.
The approach to writing lyrics here is more elliptical and mysterious, too. There isn't the same kind of fleshed-out narrative storytelling found on previous highlights "Mr. Peterson" or "Dark Parts". These tracks often zero in on overall textures, but this doesn't mean the lyrics aren't nakedly intimate. "I wear my body like a rotted peach/ You can have it if you handle the stink," he sings on "My Body". On "Queen", he tosses out and reinscribes gay stereotypes: "Don't you know your Queen?/ Ripped, heaving/ Flowers bloom at my feet/ Don't you know your Queen?/ Cracked, peeling/ Riddled with disease."
There are brilliant insights and images that reveal themselves over multiple listens. On "Fool", he makes a dress, lays it out on "the couch you bought," then bleeds out on that couch in one version and dances in another. He finds power in being able to hold the hand of the man he loves, no longer needing to keep secrets: "I carry their names, the secret shapes/ An aching braid around my heart/ Traced in the park, an outline I chalk." And, as he sings on the closing track, "All Along", "I don't need your love/ I don't need you to understand/ I need you to listen."
He's also shifted his look to match his new sound. In the past, Hadreas donned cozy sweaters and black hoodies; on the golden cover of Too Bright he looks buffed and polished, and in recent videos he's wearing smart suits and designer clothes with colorful splashes of makeup. He's always had a knack for the quietly devastating; there was his basic, simply shot, romantic, and playful video for Put Your Back's "Hood", with the beefy gay porn star Arpad Miklos (who committed suicide a year after the clip), and Hadreas and his mother climbing into a tree at the end of "Dark Parts", a song in part about her being molested by her grandfather. Here, he finds a way to maintain that personal feel while strutting down a board room table in high heels.
Hadreas' sexuality is obviously a huge part of his work, but he's above all a human—one who's spoken about battling addiction and sickness and sadness, and one who possesses the ability to write about it in a way that feels universal. A huge part of what makes the work so strong is the generous human spirit that bleeds into it, and Too Bright is the best example to date of the lengths he goes to confront his fears and demons. These songs feel less like songs and more like treasures, ones that fill you with power and wisdom, and as a result, Too Bright seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who's ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or "other-ized," regardless of sexual orientation. | 2014-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Matador | September 23, 2014 | 8.5 | 4ee9a358-98b8-418f-b3e4-93455e6d63ca | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
On this highlight from the Nyege Nyege Tapes label, Bamba Pana takes a more abrasive approach to Tanzanian singeli music: drilling synths and tinny drum machines played at impossibly fast speeds. | On this highlight from the Nyege Nyege Tapes label, Bamba Pana takes a more abrasive approach to Tanzanian singeli music: drilling synths and tinny drum machines played at impossibly fast speeds. | Bamba Pana: Poaa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bamba-pana-poaa/ | Poaa | At first glance, Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes is representative of a widespread phenomenon of small labels across Africa and the African diaspora surfacing local sounds for a global public. Launched in 2016 with Disco Vumbi’s Boutiq Electroniq, an EP of chakacha and benga fusions titled in tribute to a club night at the center of Kampala’s underground electronic scene, Nyege Nyege Tapes might be compared to Gqom Oh!, an imprint dedicated to Durban, South Africa’s percussive gqom sound, or Lisbon’s Príncipe, a laboratory for a nascent mix of Afro-Lusophone styles known as batida.
But from the beginning, Nyege Nyege Tapes has cast a wider net than some of its peers, with a regional, pan-stylistic focus that reaches across East Africa (and beyond). Otim Alpha’s Gulu City Anthems reimagined traditional Larakaraka wedding songs for an all-electronic context, not unlike what Omar Souleyman did for Syrian dabke; the Los Angeles producer Riddlore’s Afromutations melded field recordings from his three-month residency in Uganda with hip-hop and club beats. A recent anthology of the mbira master Ekuka Morris Sirikiti’s radio broadcasts envisioned the thumb piano as something like an accidental cousin to Western strains of noise music. With the Sounds of Sisso compilation, the label turned its focus to the Sisso studio in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where a group of producers is building upon the rapid-fire sound known as singeli, pushing short loops of tightly syncopated keyboards and percussion to a stuttering, hyper-speed blur.
Bamba Pana (born Jumanne Ramadhani Zegge) is part of the Sisso collective, and his take on the music as heard here may be even more extreme than the sound showcased on the compilation. Singeli itself is not an underground style; rooted in poor communities, it has become a major force in Tanzanian pop music. Despite the breakneck tempos, sticky synths and Auto-Tuned choruses keep the mood light; singeli videos, some of which have a million views or more, offer a mix of aspirationalist flash, astonishing dance moves, and even the occasional dab. But Zegge takes an edgier approach, highlighting abrasive textures that are a world away from the comparatively dulcet sound of Msaga Sumu, the self-proclaimed “king of singeli.” Bamba Pana’s cadences are relentless, with the tempo often hovering at warp speed; the knotty, skipping rhythms have a way of making the pulse feel even faster. And the needling electronic tones and bright, faintly dissonant keys only heighten the intensity of the experience, like a dose of laughing gas that makes the whine of the dentist’s drill that much more shrill.
Opener “Agaba Kibati” barrels along at 160-odd beats per minute, roughly analogous with footwork or drum ‘n’ bass tempo, with drum-machine congas, shakers, and woodblocks bouncing atop tinny synth stabs. It sounds a little like a Casio preset with the tempo fader pushed all the way up—an effect that faintly recalls the Dominican Republic’s speedy mambo de calle (or merengue de calle) sound—and a helium-tinged MC reinforces the sense that the playback speed is wrong. But the minute-long intro is just a warm-up: With “Biti Three,” we plunge into a bewildering, quadruple-time fugue state strafed with garish synths and sped-up yelps, hurtling ahead at more than 200 beats per minute. At that speed, the results sound more like a fragment of EDM that’s been sped up dangerously fast and then looped almost without variation or dynamics for nearly six minutes. It’s such an extreme proposition—so unrelenting, so in your face—that it makes the “deconstructed trance” of Lorenzo Senni and his peers look almost tame in comparison.
Most of the rest of the album cruises at that same dizzy altitude, though the palette varies with each track. “Baria” rolls out comparatively placid marimba phrases over jagged keys and rolling percussion, sounding like an Awesome Tapes From Africa cassette played back with a finger on the fast-forward button; “Jpiya” incorporates synthesized funk horns; and the shuddering “Kusini” combines a loping, batida-like groove with North African trills and a squealing synth effect straight out of Daniel Bell’s minimal-techno playbook. The tracks that feel most successful tend to be the most complex ones, which go zig-zagging unpredictably through different rhythms, melodies, and sound sets, often changing course with no prior warning.
One song, “Linga Linga,” is included in both instrumental and vocal versions, and there’s no doubt that the one featuring the Tanzanian rapper Makaveli is a lot more fun to listen to: His nimble delivery brings some much-needed dynamism to a beat that’s about as flexible as a diving board. Still, when confronted with a sound this unusual, it can be hard to know how to judge it in the first place: Does the brick-in-the-face overload of “Biti Three” represent a lack of dynamics, or is that unyielding onslaught the whole point of the thing? The closing “Poaa Bama Rmx” is flat-out mind-boggling, arraying stuttering vocal samples over loops so hyperactive they feel cartoonish. One wonders if, a generation or two down the line, these beats will simply sound normal, the way a once-radical genre like jungle does to many people today. Is this the sound of the future or is popular music’s quest for speed reaching the point of absurdity? Even at its most haywire, Bamba Pana’s music is so utterly joyful, it’s hard not to get swept up in its momentum. | 2018-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Nyege Nyege Tapes | August 28, 2018 | 7.2 | 4eee32f0-87a1-4ec5-a1cd-a372f0738d92 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
null | An album as good as *Ghosts of the Great Highway* should never go out of print. But the world's not a fair place, as our parents constantly remind us. In the interval between the album's original street date in 2003 and its deluxe reissue in 2007-- a relatively short span for a reissue-- Sun Kil Moon's former label, Jetset Records, let the album fall into limbo. During that same interval, however, frontman Mark Kozelek started his own boutique label, Caldo Verde, which has already produced a handful of releases, including Sun Kil Moon's notorious Modest Mouse covers album and Kozelek's | Sun Kil Moon: Ghosts of the Great Highway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9958-ghosts-of-the-great-highway/ | Ghosts of the Great Highway | An album as good as Ghosts of the Great Highway should never go out of print. But the world's not a fair place, as our parents constantly remind us. In the interval between the album's original street date in 2003 and its deluxe reissue in 2007-- a relatively short span for a reissue-- Sun Kil Moon's former label, Jetset Records, let the album fall into limbo. During that same interval, however, frontman Mark Kozelek started his own boutique label, Caldo Verde, which has already produced a handful of releases, including Sun Kil Moon's notorious Modest Mouse covers album and Kozelek's Little Drummer Boy Live. Considering these factors, this reissue seems almost inevitable, an act of survival instead of a mere moneymaker or legacygrabber.
Ghosts continues-- even fine-tunes-- the work Kozelek did with his former band, the Red House Painters. These songs are virtuously stoic Americana-- all shimmery guitars, measured tempos, malevolent moods, and wandering melodies. His voice, then as now, sounds like Neil Young's, especially in the effortlessness with which he hits the high notes then returns to a lower, earthier texture. But Kozelek possesses a steady imperturbability that Young, with his soul-music background, eschewed. As the title suggests, Ghosts is a travelogue of sorts, speeding through the Midwest and the West; in this sense, it's the male equivalent to Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, especially in the imperfect mirroring of physical terrain and emotional geography. Bruised masculinity is the album's central theme, however, evident in odes to boxers, matadors, serial killers, and musicians, all of whom inhabit the same lonely stretch of road.
The album opens with "Glenn Tipton", a nod to the Judas Priest guitarist. That the song is finally revealed to be delivered from the point of view of a serial killer is a quiet shock: Kozelek's carefully detailed songwriting makes the narrator not just familiar, but sympathetic. The revelation takes the song away from the confessional and into the raconteurish, where the album remains for nine more uniformly strong tracks. Tying everything together is a trilogy about dead boxers, beginning with "Salvador Sanchez" and ending with "Pancho Villa". In the middle is the 14-minute "Duk Koo Kim", which sprawls furtively for several rounds, its guitars bobbing and weaving gracefully and noisily (the song's subject necessarily conjures Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom Mancini", about the boxer who killed Kim in the ring). Kozelek approaches these pugilists-- and all his characters-- like he's Raymond Carver, parsing the details until he finds the one that makes them real.
Typically, it's the musical details that do just that. The band Kozelek assembled for Ghosts-- Anthony Koutsos (Red House Painters), Tim Mooney (American Music Club), and Geoff Stanfield (Black Lab), along with a few guests-- ably but subtly bolster his lyrics and vocals, generating a steady clip that never flags. Tempos rarely vary between or even within songs, and the guitars find a spectral riff and settle down with it, repeating it with gentle relentlessness that needles the characters and refracts the melodies. The result is an album as hypnotic as highway divider lines whizzing past.
Neglecting demos or earlier works, the six-track bonus EP is notable mostly for showing how easily Kozelek translated these songs from electric to acoustic settings. These alternate or radio readings of "Carry Me Ohio", "Salvador Sanchez", and "Gentle Moon" aren't too far removed from their originals, despite having only Kozelek's voice in common. This testifies to the flexibility of his songwriting and the adaptability of his performances, and yet it all adds up to a pretty lackluster EP, offering no specific insight into the songs' development before or after the album. The remaining bonus tracks consist of an unreleased instrumental similar to "Sí, Paloma" and two versions of the same Leonard Bernstein cover. Fortunately, Kozelek has better luck with "Somewhere" than with any of Isaac Brock's tunes, transforming it from a staged number into a despairing ballad... twice. They're the twin highlights of a skippable EP, but that mild disappointment is considerably assuaged by the fact that Ghosts is back in print. | 2007-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Jetset | March 8, 2007 | 8 | 4ef581a2-f31c-4a2c-8787-56c8f4d61aca | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The 22-year-old pop songwriter’s debut captures the onslaught of young-adult emotion, longing for a state of being where noise and confusion are replaced by certainty and clarity. | The 22-year-old pop songwriter’s debut captures the onslaught of young-adult emotion, longing for a state of being where noise and confusion are replaced by certainty and clarity. | girl in red: if i could make it go quiet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girl-in-red-if-i-could-make-it-go-quiet/ | if i could make it go quiet | A few years ago, a Norwegian teenager named Marie Ulven ran into a problem: She fell in love with a friend. Ulven, who had picked up the guitar a few years prior, naturally decided to write a song about it. “i wanna be your girlfriend,” Ulven’s first single under the name girl in red, bristles with self-confidence and desire. “I don’t wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips,” she sang with a lovesick warble and a hearty strum. In the end, the romance was unrequited and the track’s Bandcamp page offers a word to the wise: “don’t fall in love with a straight girl.”
After Ulven uploaded “i wanna be your girlfriend” to the internet in 2018, she developed a loyal following who were drawn to her honesty about queerness, depression, and anxiety. If these topics were once seen as taboo, Ulven approached them as unexceptional. “I’m just out here being a [expletive] normal human being, falling in love and writing a song about it, just like that other straight girl writing a song about love,” she explained to The New York Times. The phrase “Do you listen to Girl in Red” even became a code that helped queer TikTokers find community.
girl in red’s full-length debut, if i could make it go quiet, continues down this path of candor and self-examination. But Ulven, now 22, has moved away from the lo-fi indie pop that defined her early recordings to play with a wider palette. Like Billie Eilish’s 2019 debut, if i could make it go quiet boasts a refreshingly short credits list. Ulven is the sole songwriter and she co-produced every track alongside Matias Téllez; Eilish’s older brother Finneas is the only guest. Rather than signing to a major label, Ulven released the album through AWAL, a distribution service that allows artists to retain ownership of their masters (the company was recently acquired by Sony).
if i could make it go quiet longs for a state of being where the noise and confusion clogging Ulven’s head and heart are replaced by certainty and clarity. But in reality, her self-destructive thoughts bubble beneath the surface until they combust. On opener “Serotonin,” Ulven reels off a list of uncontrollable impulses and violent intrusive thoughts, “Like cutting my hands off/Like jumping in front of a bus.” The production, courtesy of Finneas, is maximalist, throwing together blown-out guitars, hyperspeed drums, and EDM drops; Ulven speak-raps a verse before her words dissolve into gibberish. This barrage is borderline aggravating—but to be a teenager, which Ulven was when she started creating these songs, is to feel everything at once, and “Serotonin” deftly captures that sensory overload. At the chorus, when Ulven identifies her problem as a chemical imbalance, the song bursts into clarity.
Ulven spends a good chunk of if i could make it go quiet digging into relationships, and all the ways she inflicts and absorbs damage. “Did You Come?” borrows “Serotonin”’s riff as it seethes with infidelity and betrayal. “Was she good?/Just what you liked?/Did you come?/How many times?/Tell the truth,” she demands, before thinking better of it: “Wait, never mind.” “You Stupid Bitch”—here a term of endearment—is a mosh pit-ready plea for someone to recognize their own self-worth, while the sophistipop track “Midnight Love” takes the perspective of a long-exploited lover finally standing up for herself. On the chipper piano number “hornylovesickmess,” Ulven gazes at her own face on a billboard in Times Square and ponders how quickly her life has changed.
The album’s first half leans on pop-punk angst, but it soon opens up to reveal a softer side, with sparse R&B production. “Rue,” a tribute of sorts to the Euphoria character who struggles with drug addiction and her mental health, arrives from the bottom of a depressive abyss. As she acknowledges the loved ones who have patiently cared for her, she chooses to fight her way towards a healthier state. “Apartment 402,” which embraces softly rippling synths, is cut with an image of evocative stillness: a despondent Ulven on the floor of her bedroom, at eye level with specks of dust illuminated by sunlight. Though Ulven’s production acumen is impressive, it sometimes feels as if these flourishes are embellishing one-note ideas.
While if i could make it go quiet is an occasionally uneven listen, it’s a strong declaration of conviction. Although Ulven is still fine-tuning her approach, her eagerness to explore hints at promising potential. In the album’s final moments, Ulven seems to finally tamp down all her inner noise and find some levity. On “I’ll Call You Mine,” she illustrates a freewheeling vision of joy: speeding around in a car, fits of giggles in the warmth of summer, allowing herself to be open to happiness. It’s a nice daydream, Ulven acknowledges, one that is “too good to last.” But it’s a place that she can hold in her heart and return to in the darkest of times.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | World in Red / AWAL | May 5, 2021 | 6.8 | 4ef9fb9a-028d-4f9b-b59e-824c953bdc0d | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
After a year chock full of amazing West African 1970s reissues, the classic and crucial Nigeria 70 comp is reissued. | After a year chock full of amazing West African 1970s reissues, the classic and crucial Nigeria 70 comp is reissued. | Various Artists: Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970’s Funky Lagos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12881-nigeria-70-the-definitive-story-of-1970s-funky-lagos/ | Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970’s Funky Lagos | Last year was a disorienting, somewhat disconnected time if you were looking for any kind of lucid pop music narrative, but one thing was for sure in 2008: All you had to do was wait a month or so, and you'd get the chance to hear yet another entry in an incredible influx of compilations, reissues, and revivals of the music of West Africa in the 1970s. There was Soundway's (so far) three-part Nigeria Special series, which gathered a bountiful collection of highlife, Afrobeat, funk, rock, and disco, and they followed it up with the eye-opening Sir Victor Uwaifo compilation Guitar Boy Superstar. Germany's freshly-minted Analog Africa label assembled a number of incredible highlife/funk/psych songs from Togo and Benin under the title African Scream Contest, then put together the staggering Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou highlight reel The Vodoun Effect: Funk and Sato from Benin's Obscure Label. And amidst all of this, Fela Kuti's son Seun reunited with his father's band Egypt 80 to record his debut full-length Many Things, taking the Afrobeat revival one step further by creating one of the genre's best new records of the last 25 years. All that, and Strut's ceaselessly entertaining Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump, too-- that's a ridiculously bountiful collection of music.
But even amidst all those releases, Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump isn't an afterthought-- it is, after all, the followup to one of the most crucial Afrobeat comps, 2001's Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970's Funky Lagos. The original Nigeria 70 was released four years after Fela Kuti's death and in the midst of a renewed interest in Afrobeat-- Femi Kuti's Fight to Win enlisted Mos Def and Common in a hip hop crossover bid, and Antibalas was really starting to pick up steam-- so it served as one of the most contextually important collections of the genre as it stood in its original heyday. With this reissue, it still holds that status: Nigeria 70 assembles a potent collection of names that were already famous among aficionados of African music (Fela; Tony Allen; King Sunny Ade), augments them with lesser-known musicians that those aficionados would also likely enjoy, and subsequently captures a cross-section of Nigerian culture that covers that country's adaptations of nearly everything that was going on in black music at the time.
Nigeria 70 starts with Monomono's "Loma Da Nigbehin", where the groove is stepped up, the rhythm guitar emphasized, the percussion denser yet livelier, the horn and organ solos heavier-- all developments created in the wake of Fela's revolution in militant funk. Afrobeat in that familiar vein is widely covered here, both inside and outside of the Kalakuta Republic. Two of Fela's greatest Africa '70-era recordings appear in "Upside Down" and "Jeun Ko Ku (Chop 'n' Quench)", while Afrobeat's rhythmic architect and Africa '70 alumnus Tony Allen is represented by his glimmering 1980 recording "No Discrimination". And many of the highlights from less-famous musicians-- Peter King's "Shango"; Orlando Julius Ekemode's "Alo Mi Alo"; Afro Cult Foundation's "The Quest"-- take Kuti's sounds and tweak them playfully until they become a bit more concise or abstract.
But what makes Nigeria 70 particularly compelling is its sonic diversity. Anyone expecting two and a half hours of music that sounds directly informed by Fela might be surprised to find out just how many musicians saw his music as a starting point than the sum of their sound. There's nods to psychedelic rock, both heavily fuzzed-out (Ofo & the Black Company's stomping, wailing "Allah Wakbarr") and Deadhead-friendly mellow (BLO's eerily beautiful reverie "Chant to Mother Earth"). A few forays into the late 1970s and early 80s note a disco influence that informs cuts like Joni Haastrup's 1977 song "Greetings" and Shina Williams & His African Percussionists' 1984 electro-funk workout "Agboju Logun" without removing their Afrobeat backbone. And if you're wondering how Parliament-Funkadelic was received in Nigeria, William Onyeabor's 1978 anti-imperialist synthesizer opus "Better Change Your Mind" is an intriguing hint. You could while away some time trying to figure out just how much or how little of it came from black music in America, and how much of black music in America actually owed to these sounds in the first place-- as cross-cultural development of pop music goes, the Nigerian sound is fascinatingly tangled. And now, even after the West African reissue glut of 2008, Nigeria 70 still sounds illuminating. | 2009-04-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Strut | April 3, 2009 | 8.8 | 4f029bc8-7ee5-477f-b671-18ef22449dea | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Coasting on the success of last year’s “Big Drip”—which finds new relevance now that the phrase “demon time” is trending—the Brooklyn drill rapper shows personality but lacks focus. | Coasting on the success of last year’s “Big Drip”—which finds new relevance now that the phrase “demon time” is trending—the Brooklyn drill rapper shows personality but lacks focus. | Fivio Foreign: 800 BC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fivio-foreign-800-bc/ | 800 BC | Over the past few months, the phrase “demon time,” like so many pieces of localized language that eventually find their way online, has changed contexts. When Beyoncé graced the remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” last week, the term found its way into the updated song’s most quotable bar: “Hips TikTok when I dance/On that Demon Time, she might start an OnlyFans.” The line is a reference to the virtual stages of an Instagram Live strip club where, in the midst of quarantine, celebrities like the Weeknd and Kevin Durant have tuned in to watch performers. It’s also a phrase popularized by Toronto rapper Tory Lanez on his Quarantine Radio live streams, where the nudity on his “demon time” segments became so constant that Instagram shut it down. But this game of digital telephone first started last summer with Fivio Foreign, who might have meant something slightly more sinister when he said he was on “demon time” on his breakout song, “Big Drip.”
Over the past eight months, the Brooklyn rapper has proven himself to be an expert at, to reference another one of his favorite words, creating “viral” moments. Though he’s been releasing music since the early 2010s, his borough’s adoption of drill—an aggressive sound that has itself morphed in context, from its origins in Chicago to its outposts in London, Brooklyn, and even Sydney, Australia—has made way for Fivio’s punctuated rapping and dramatic ad-libs to cut through in his hometown and beyond.
800 BC, Fivio Foreign’s first full-length mixtape, is mostly a collection of his biggest musical moments so far. There’s “Big Drip,” the rowdy anthem that has been out for close to a year and also appeared on his 2019 Pain and Love EP; the “Big Drip” remix, with verses from Quavo and Lil Baby; and “Wetty,” a long-teased single that seemed destined to be the next hit song from the Brooklyn drill scene. “Wetty” succeeds for many of the same reasons “Big Drip” did. On the two songs, both produced by London’s AXL Beats, Fivio brings an unruly, contagious energy to even the simplest ad-libs. The song’s refrain, “I met lil’ mama in the deli/She was a wetty,” is regionally specific and original—it’s a couplet that couldn’t come from anywhere but New York, and anybody but Fivio Foreign.
Still, at eight songs, the project feels lazily thrown together, with mostly forgettable songs placed around these previously released, big-ticket singles. Even when he brings bigger names into his defined sound, the results are stagnant. The verses from Quavo and Lil Baby feel like an unnecessary addition to “Big Drip,” and Fivio’s hook on “Demons & Goblins,” a collaboration with Meek Mill, sounds like it was filled in with predictive text from his most commonly used words. Similarly, “Ambition,” a song with Bronx rapper Lil Tjay, the only track on the project that deviates from the standard drill drum pattern, presents a muted version of both rappers’ strengths. One notable exception is “Issa Vibe,” a solo song where Fivio skillfully switches between melodic flows, introducing a captivating alternative to his usual hoarseness.
Fivio Foreign has Beyoncé repurposing his phrases and Drake borrowing from his lexicon on a drill song, “Demons,” right alongside him. The Brooklyn rapper has channeled his entertaining personality into impactful singles, but he has yet to prove himself able to hold his concentration long enough to command an actual mixtape, or even hint at what a quality version of a fuller Fivio Foreign project might look like. Instead, at least for now, these big moments, and the way they travel up the pop-culture pipeline, are the only things that seem to stick. | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 6, 2020 | 5.8 | 4f07e546-76ed-4e86-beaa-eefbdc4b27ac | Ben Dandridge-Lemco | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-dandridge-lemco/ | |
No band shows more belief in punk rock as an agent of social change, but Beach Slang's punk is the apolitical kind where the right song can unshackle you from self-doubt and pity to get you out of the house and be a part of the world. Their shout-along full-length debut delivers on the promise of their early EPs. | No band shows more belief in punk rock as an agent of social change, but Beach Slang's punk is the apolitical kind where the right song can unshackle you from self-doubt and pity to get you out of the house and be a part of the world. Their shout-along full-length debut delivers on the promise of their early EPs. | Beach Slang: The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21053-the-things-we-do-to-find-people-who-feel-like-us/ | The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us | A few stats on Beach Slang’s glorious and galvanizing debut album: in less than a half hour, it provides 10 righteous bursts of punk rock boosterism. All of them speak of being fucked up, being a fuck-up, or some combination of both. In seven of those songs, James Alex sings the word "alive," in three others, he sings "young," and there's one song called "Young and Alive". Eight mention some kind of amplification—either turning yourself or the radio up. Oh, and the title is The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us, which sums it all up: some people get drunk and unite with other weirdos to listen to rock music as loud as possible because for them there's no better way to feel young and alive.
It’s the most passionate batch of love songs you’re liable to hear in 2015, and they’re all about a specifically anthemic form of punk rock. No band shows more belief in it as an agent of social change, but Beach Slang's is the apolitical kind where the right song can unshackle you from self-doubt and pity to get you out of the house and be a part of the world—go meet somebody, go to show that makes you forget about all of your very real problems. Its societal dynamics and terminology are anachronistic and a cynic could view them as willfully naive—the punks and cops are at odds throughout, but it’s mostly over noise ordinance and open container complaints.
For a record bursting with love for its audience, The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us is divisive by design. If you expect or demand rock bands to create some kind of distance from their work—via irony, cleverness, a desire to look cool—you are one of them and you won’t make it to the first time Alex commands you to pump up the volume on "Throwaways". But if you’ve been impatiently waiting for someone to break through the year of self-conscious indie rock, "I Break Guitars" and "Ride the Wild Haze" make you feel like you're part of Alex's "us." The album actually delivers on the title's promise and there’s really no other band trying to fill this crucial role right now, at least until Japandroids break their silence.
James Alex is 40, significantly older than the other three members of Beach Slang and about 15 years removed from his previous band’s disintegration. He doesn’t hide this fact, and it serves as the basis for The Things We Do’s centerpiece and outlier. "Too young to die, too late to die young," Alex sighs with superhuman earnestness over capoed acoustic guitar (and, since this is the ballad, cue the strings and pianos). It’s a lament from a guy who didn’t live fast or gloriously burn out when he had the chance, and feels like the proverbial old guy at the club even when he’s not at the club. Shoutalong, agenda-free punk rock is aggressively pushed to the margins on all levels in 2015, written off as the kind of music people are expected to outgrow. But what if this is the thing that still does it for you?
Well, then you’re one of Alex's us and your options are to either hide in your records and disengage from the stream of life or celebrate this music that saved your life by adding to it or honoring its intent. Originally appearing as a raw solo cut on a Philly-based benefit compilation, "Too Late to Die Young" was written after Beach Slang’s completely unexpected success and, as usual, there’s an utter lack of artifice and a confrontational vulnerability as Alex looks at the gathering crowd and realizes, "I swear right now, I’m alright." Thirty seconds earlier, he admits having been ready to give up and not 30 seconds later, he’s shouting, "The basement is alive and loud/ We’re alright now" on a song called "I Break Guitars". This is Alex and Beach Slang’s triumph, but he makes sure it’s big enough for all of us to share. | 2015-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | November 5, 2015 | 8 | 4f0d3ded-7192-4ab0-9ebc-6a9cf6555b8b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Swedish quartet make dance-oriented electronic-leaning pop that foregrounds ambiance and texture, as Tricky once did so well. | Swedish quartet make dance-oriented electronic-leaning pop that foregrounds ambiance and texture, as Tricky once did so well. | Little Dragon: Machine Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13701-machine-dreams/ | Machine Dreams | Throughout much of the past decade, dance-oriented electronic-leaning pop music has erred on the side of stark utility, reducing beats and hooks down to an elemental thud and grind. What tends to get lost in this sparsely arranged music, particularly when we're dealing with lesser artists and total hacks, is color and atmosphere. Without these things, songs can feel incredibly clinical and soulless-- throbbing grooves almost completely devoid of context. Little Dragon, a quartet from Gothenburg, Sweden, are not entirely removed from the electro and modern R&B influences of their time, but their arrangements make a point of foregrounding ambiance and texture. Whereas too many post-Timbaland, post-electroclash records can seem like sentences stripped of adjectives and proper nouns, the tones on the group's sophomore album Machine Dreams suggest complex emotions and vivid scenery with exquisite detail.
The emphasis on atmosphere is made clear from the very start of Machine Dreams, as album opener "A New" begins and ends with electronic drones, as if to bracket the song in ellipses like an unfinished thought. The subsequent song, "Looking Glass", is firmer, more beat-driven, but as much as its groove is steady, as a whole it seems to wander. Motion and physicality is strongly implied by the rhythm, but the leisurely pace and subtly shifting keyboard tones indicate changes in setting, evoking a sense that we're stumbling around lost in some strange, beautiful city. This sets the tone for the rest of the album, which goes off on the tangents of different rhythms into other textural zones, but maintains a feeling of searching around for something, whether it is a person, a destination, a state of mind, or the right words to express some ineffable thought.
Little Dragon's palette is broad enough to lend the album a rich, luscious sound, but specific enough to ground the work in a particular time and place, though the definition of both terms is left to the listener's imagination. Some of the songs, like "Looking Glass" and "My Step", sound like a 1980s version of the future, and owe a debt to the keyboard aesthetics of freestyle and Prince circa Sign 'O' the Times. Others, like the gorgeous ballad "Feather" and the claustrophobic "Thunder Love", bring to mind the dystopian sexiness of Tricky's early classics on Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension. Yukimi Nagano, the band's charismatic Swedish-Japanese vocalist, has a smokey yet agile voice, and it serves as the anchor of each song. She avoids melisma, but her phrasing is in the general wheelhouse of modern R&B, particularly British iterations of the genre. As with every other element of their sound, Nagano's voice places Little Dragon's music in a lineage of recognizable influences under a vague "urban" umbrella, but it all comes out just a bit off, which is to say, unexpected and original.
Machine Dreams is at once familiar and slightly alien, and the emotional center is both intuitively obvious and intentionally vague. Nagano is the type of writer and singer who lets her words roughly sketch out a feeling that she embellishes with her voice. This approach puts more faith in the unique effects of music-- there is no sense in being direct and literal when singing can convey the sort of nuance that is almost impossible to express in other forms of communication. The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates. That mood is slippery and hard to define, but that's not so much a problem as it is part of the appeal, as the band navigate the strange spaces between big, easily identifiable emotions. | 2009-11-16T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-11-16T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Peacefrog | November 16, 2009 | 7.7 | 4f1679ef-0641-435a-b74f-0c77ef647b1e | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Dead Can Dance's first new album together in 16 years finds Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard in fine form, seamlessly incorporing sounds from around the world. Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical and satisfying progression from the band's mid-90s albums. | Dead Can Dance's first new album together in 16 years finds Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard in fine form, seamlessly incorporing sounds from around the world. Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical and satisfying progression from the band's mid-90s albums. | Dead Can Dance: Anastasis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16906-anastasis/ | Anastasis | Dead Can Dance, the long-running project of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard, are inextricably linked to the 4AD that defined a different generation. Not the current one of Bon Iver or Grimes, but the one of Bauhaus, This Mortal Coil, and the Cocteau Twins-- 1980s art goth of a particular kind. But neither label nor their bands sought that tag. And since Dead Can Dance's music incorporated sounds from around the globe and across the centuries, the description seems particularly limiting. Anastasis, the duo's first new album together in 16 years (following a variety of solo works and collaborations as well as a retrospective 2005 tour), finds Dead Can Dance firmly in their comfort zone, at a time when neither Gerrard nor Perry should feel they have anything left to prove.
Dead Can Dance always avoided a curatorial or purist approach to global music, and that trend continues here. They're as open to new technologies and recording possibilities as they are to ancient instruments like the yangqin and the bodhrán, but they also eschew the collision of samples and beats that often defines other experimenters in the field. But over time, the influence of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard has reached far and wide. From Future Sound of London's early techno landmark "Papua New Guinea", which samples Gerrard's voice, to cover versions by bands such as arty metal types the Gathering and the more experimentalist impulses of recent bands like Prince Rama-- not to mention Gerrard's own now extensive work on a wide variety of film soundtracks -- Dead Can Dance's approach to sound has resonated widely.
Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical progression from the band's mid-90s albums as well as Brendan and Gerrard's respective solo work since. There's nothing here quite as jawdroppingly melodramatic or proclamatory as old classics such as "Anywhere Out of the World" or "Host of Seraphim", where Perry and Gerrard's vocal strengths were matched with the sense of vast spaces, agog and in awe. But Anastasis often comes close, especially with the concluding "Return of the She-King" and "All in Good Time". Gerrard's breathtaking vocal range remains strong, while Perry's deeper, ruminative voice still feels less like a singing brogue than a calm invocation of ancient knowledge.
The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned. Perry's forthright mysticism on songs like "Amnesia" and "All in Good Time" return to the origin of the band's name, the idea of awakening a greater consciousness. On strong opening "Children of the Sun", strings, crisp rolling drums, and elegant keyboards suggest an ancestral, courtly ritual, though lyrically Perry runs the risk of creating a naive paean to flower power. Yet it's precisely his controlled delivery and lack of irony-- even with a nursery-rhyme nodding couplet like "All the queen's horses and all the king's men/ Will never put these children back together again"-- that transforms the song into something with palpable force.
Gerrard's vocal ability is fully intact, and her instrument makes most singers seem limited, or at least unadventurous. The other key element in her singing-- employing glossolalia, substituting comprehensive language with a melodic, exploratory rapture conveyed by her range alone-- defines her lead performances in turn, first appearing to the full on "Anabasis", her rich warmth flowing across everything from strings that suggest Egyptian orchestras to electric guitar to, at one breathtaking moment, near silence.
There's a suffused steadiness that steers the album, but with time, the individual strengths of each song manifest; the slow vocal and instrumental raptures toward the conclusion of "Agape", the beguiling sway of "Opium", where Perry sings about being unable to choose a way forward. And "Return of the She-King", one of the band's very few duets, sums up the exact reason Dead Can Dance retain their appeal. It's the kind of impact and elegance that can be hard to put into words, but searching for a perfect expression is arguably exactly what Dead Can Dance have always strived to achieve. Here, they find it more often than not. | 2012-08-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | PIAS | August 10, 2012 | 8 | 4f176760-ca9f-465a-9081-614f8c5fd116 | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
Debut 4AD EP from the L.A. brothers and Prince acolytes turns out to be a maximalist grotesquerie of minimal sounds. | Debut 4AD EP from the L.A. brothers and Prince acolytes turns out to be a maximalist grotesquerie of minimal sounds. | Inc.: 3 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15661-3-ep/ | 3 EP | We don't really know each other, but I'm gonna guess that you love Prince. Or, at a minimum, you respect the man even if he really hasn't done much worth a shit in the past 15 years or so. This shouldn't be a problem except there's probably no pop music figure of the past century whose universal acclaim is matched by an almost total inability of his acolytes to create proper homage. We come across respectable integrations of Bowie, Dylan, Lennon, and Brian Wilson, but-- especially amongst rock musicians who use the Purple One's legacy as their mainline to R&B-- the whole of his work is often distilled into a falsetto and a bunch of terrible sexual puns. Well, if Inc. prove anything on their 4AD debut EP 3, it's that you can plunder the lesser-known regions of his discography, boast impressive instrumental chops, and still be no better off than some hapless power trio trying to rip off "Little Red Corvette".
At its core, Inc. (formerly known as Teen Inc. during their particularly galling 2010 CMJ set) is comprised of Los Angeles-based brothers Daniel and Andrew Aged, both of whom are experienced session musicians. Which shows, not so much in the sense that 3 displays their virtuosity as much as their keytar-swinging live show, though there are plenty of geeky timestamps and frilly synth doodles. It's more in how its overcooked arrangements bear the mark of backup players overcompensating after finally getting ahold of the mixing console, and 3 turns out to be a maximalist grotesquerie of minimal sounds. "Heart Crimes" wanders around in search of a tune or even a beat for nearly five minutes while occasionally busying itself with Three 6 Mafia's 32nd-note hi-hats, vocal snippets that drift like paper bags in the wind, and synth slap-bass presets so offbeat they sound more like Spike Jones sound effects. This may not be particularly shocking, but mixing all of those elements turns out to be a total fucking disaster.
Slightly more successful are the two tracks that play with straightforward melody. At first glance, the arrhythmic hook of "Swear" ingratiates due to its own nagging repetition, but if you're steeped enough in the realm of 1980s radio pop to appreciate Inc.'s simulacra, odds are you'll eventually recognize it as a pretty brazen rip of "Sussudio". Not that there's anything inherently wrong with "Sussudio", but once that connection is made, it can never go back to being "Swear". "Millionairess" sounds like a way out of their own rut, or at least a chance to bat one-for-three, but they abandon its quick-hitting chorus for a mess of vocal mutations that barely acknowledge a slowly simmering New Jack Swing beat. Credit where it's due for trying to enter Zapp & Roger and Andre Cymone into the PBR&B conversation without being total ironists, but "Chromeo, except no fun at all" isn't what the game's been missing. | 2011-07-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-07-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | July 25, 2011 | 4.8 | 4f1a4535-e661-430a-9f38-0fed9d4dc1e0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The debut full-length from the “Drew Barrymore” singer isn’t designed for conscious, focused listening. This is music for poolsides and basements. | The debut full-length from the “Drew Barrymore” singer isn’t designed for conscious, focused listening. This is music for poolsides and basements. | Bryce Vine: Carnival | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bryce-vine-carnival/ | Carnival | Bryce Vine describes himself as “OutKast and Blink-182 got drunk with the Gorillaz.” Perhaps a more apt comparison is KYLE taking bong hits with Dave Matthews Band, or Jason Mraz sniffing poppers with Doja Cat. At 31, Vine is at an unconventional age for frat-rap prominence. He established a fanbase nearly a decade ago, as a contestant on “The Glee Project,” a reality television show based off the Ryan Murphy high school drama. His real rise came with 2017’s “Drew Barrymore,” a swirl of neon synths that went platinum, possibly by being added to every “Chill Vibes” playlist in existence.
“Drew Barrymore” is the best song on Carnival, and the best encapsulation of Vine’s problems and promise. It leans into the grit that his other songs just wink at; when the computerized beeps and buzzes fall away in the chorus, a more muted drum and Bryce’s unfiltered rasp take over. But the words are inane: “You’re the next Drew Barry, and I want more,” he sings, taking pains to emphasize the wordplay. Glimpses at specificity slice through the bullshit. “Coffee on the Flintstone, jewelry on the ottoman,” he croons, before sliding into this portrait: “The TV hasn’t worked in ages/Probably got a shorted cable/Way too busy fucking on the sofa or the kitchen table.” It’s not poetry, but it conjures something akin to a real relationship.
Compare that to the album’s first song, “Classic and Perfect.” Gleaming piano chords and ra-ra handclaps almost beg you to ignore the lyrics, a cringey pastiche of Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, and One Direction. “You’ve got a mind and you’ve got a soul,” he chirps, sounding shocked. In “Drew Barrymore,” he sings the creepy line, “Baby let me in/’fore I get way too adamant about it.” This ignorance extends beyond women. “Factory Love,” an unconvincing strum-along ode to “pharmaceutical pleasure,” sounds like it was written by Googling drug lingo.
But Carnival isn’t designed for conscious, focused listening. It’s a mood-setting operation: a fog of layered vocals, splashes of trumpets, guitar licks that sound like an impromptu dorm-room jam session. Production flourishes are precise: a chime-like sound effect here, a splatter of drums there. This is music for poolsides and basements. Lyrics exist to fill a void in a vibe.
Vine strikes an odd tone in rap-adjacent music: not the melodic, death-consumed teenagers who sing their verses instead of speaking them, nor the buoyancy of Chance the Rapper, nor the sex and money flexes that clog SoundCloud. His stage name is short for “vinyl,” and many of his songs feel nostalgic for the stolid inertia of story-centered, good-times pop. He used to tour with Hoodie Allen, patron saint of frat boys turned rappers. He could very well continue on that path, doubling down on bad puns and frenetic drum loops, writing about objects with more clarity and grace than he writes about women. Or he could embrace Carnival’s rare moments of authenticity, and sharpen his music into something that sticks. | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sire | July 30, 2019 | 4.9 | 4f202617-5690-4d0d-aa0f-493d46553844 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
With Ernest Green’s pastoral Georgia home as its emotional backdrop, Washed Out’s fifth LP clears the haze from his structured songcraft and winds up feeling inert. | With Ernest Green’s pastoral Georgia home as its emotional backdrop, Washed Out’s fifth LP clears the haze from his structured songcraft and winds up feeling inert. | Washed Out: Notes From a Quiet Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/washed-out-notes-from-a-quiet-life/ | Notes From a Quiet Life | Forgive Ernest Greene his absence; he’s been gettin’ busy living. The Facebook post announcing Notes From a Quiet Life—the fifth Washed Out LP, and first in four years—closed with “welcome to Endymion.” It’s a reference to the 20-acre, Macon-area horse farm he purchased in 2021 and converted into a combination homestead and artists’ estate. The property is central to the album’s promotion: An illustration of a ranch house adorns Sub Pop’s press release, which is mocked up to resemble mid-century letterhead. Last month, Greene posted a short film (also titled Notes From a Quiet Life) about his day-to-day at Endymion: changing diapers in the magic hour, exploring the woods, tending to his mindfully arranged spheres. Washed Out appears as chillwave personified: a Southern-fried bedroom musician, beating an emotional and sonic retreat to the past in the face of an austerity-wracked present. Endymion feels like the future that Greene’s cohort was sold.
How curious that none of this made it to the record. Despite the fingerpicking depicted in the film, this isn’t Washed Out’s For Emma, Forever Ago, or even a folktronica turn. This time, he actively avoids musical influences. Visual artists, primarily sculptors, were Greene’s inspiration: Barbara Hepworth, Donald Judd, Henry Moore. Those are the leftfield citations of a noise musician or an ECM jazz composer, and an acknowledgment that Greene, too, is refining his own well-recognized forms. The life may be quiet, but the notes seem cribbed: The easiest way to describe this record is 2020’s Purple Noon with the fog burned off. “A Sign” snaps the dissolute lovers rock of Purple Noon’s “Paralyzed” to the grid. The fluttering, fatalistic closer “Letting Go” is a modal cousin to the Balearic reggae of “Time to Walk Away” (to say nothing of Chris Isaak’s transcendentally simpering “Wicked Game”). Where “Reckless Desires” used rhythmic koto figures to remain aloft, “Second Sight” is content to deploy the instrument as a vaporwave glissando.
Notes From a Quiet Life is, somewhat surprisingly, the first Washed Out album Greene has produced alone. Perhaps he cleared the haze in order to better reveal the classical structure of his songwriting. The results sound great: punchy snares and widemouth synth bass. And to an unprecedented degree, his voice—a careful baritone that recalls Beck at his most plaintive—occupies a large part of the space. He brings a stateliness to the expected places: the tender “Got Your Back,” with its wordless lullaby of a hook, and the twinkling “Wondrous Life,” which nearly topples into power balladry. But it’s also present on the dissolute lovers rock of “A Sign,” a crush song that generates its heat from overthinking (“But I think I’m falling hard/Am I taking this too far?”) instead of attraction. “Say Goodbye” is a slow strut of a breakup song, so assuring and frictionless it’s like being sent home in a hovercar.
All this plain speaking can be a drag after a while. Even at his most ponderous, Beck is still good for an arresting image or turn of phrase. The sincerity of Notes From a Quiet Life has no whimsy to counterbalance it, and none of chillwave’s day-drunk reverb to muffle it. And Greene’s attempt to augment his conversational clichés with narrative heft—accepting OpenAI’s commission of a Sora-generated music video for the pop-rock heartbreak of lead single “The Hardest Part”—was a grisly stumble, a shortcut to dream logic from the figurehead of a genre that plays effortlessly with nostalgia and memory.
In the mini-doc, Greene talks about the grind of touring for a musician now in his forties, and his attempts to take better care of his body. With that in mind, you could read this album as a purgative act: a rejection of quick-hit stimuli (narcotic synths, Stones Throw-style beatmaking, house music) in order to find something sustainable. Maybe it’s in the languid R&B of “Wait on You,” with its choice combination of a pitched-down vocal hook, lovestruck coos, and a restless rhythm guitar. Or perhaps in the elevated ’90s adult contemporary of “Running Away,” in which he holds his vowels so long he’s in danger of a shot-clock violation. Despite its slightness, Notes From a Quiet Life is still a landmark in Washed Out’s catalog: a true solo turn and a complete break from chillwave sonics. But having finally acquired all this space, Greene seems unsure how to fill it. | 2024-07-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sub Pop | July 5, 2024 | 6 | 4f20bdff-db2e-44d4-95af-0425a071cbd0 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
Working out of their home studio in the Washington woods, experimentally minded brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver return to their roots in atmospheric black metal, but they no longer sound like pioneers. | Working out of their home studio in the Washington woods, experimentally minded brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver return to their roots in atmospheric black metal, but they no longer sound like pioneers. | Wolves in the Throne Room: Primordial Arcana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolves-in-the-throne-room-primordial-arcana/ | Primordial Arcana | Wolves in the Throne Room’s early albums imbued black metal’s towering riffs and pummeling drums with a striking sense of place. Brothers Nathan and Aaron Weaver shared a deep communion with the forests and rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and they sought to capture that beauty and power in music. Their so-called Cascadian black metal felt like a uniquely North American answer to the frostbitten sound of Norwegian bands like Immortal and Enslaved. On Primordial Arcana, the band’s disappointing seventh album, they sound like they need to come out of the woods.
In the decade since Wolves in the Throne Room released the excellent Celestial Lineage, they’ve seemed adrift. On 2014’s Celestite, they eschewed black metal for a pale imitation of Popol Vuh’s kosmische synth experiments, while on its follow-up, Thrice Woven, they made a conscious return to black metal, with results that took cues from their best albums but felt limp in execution. Primordial Arcana is another misstep. Though WITTR are apparently firmly committed to making black metal again, they’ve started to sound like any of a million other bands aping the Cascadian formula the Weavers helped create. Some of their boldest experiments have been failures, but failure would at least be more interesting than the rut they’re stuck in now.
To the band’s credit, they do still know how to write a stirring black-metal song. “Mountain Magick” opens the album promisingly enough. An ominous synth drone twists itself into a muted melody before giving way to a propulsive riff and a blasting drum pattern from Aaron Weaver, who sounds as spry behind the kit as ever. The rest of the song unfolds with grace, if not necessarily any surprises. Historically, much of the power of WITTR’s best work has come from its ability to entrance the listener through repetition and hypnotic, densely layered riffing. “Mountain Magick” never quite finds that mesmeric groove. All but one track on Primordial Arcana clocks in shy of the 10-minute mark, and while it’s likely the brothers were trying to make their music more direct, they end up sounding like they’ve run out of steam. The lone exception, the imposing “Masters of Rain and Storm,” is the finest song on the album, and the one that most evokes the WITTR of old.
Synthesizers, while not as front and center as they were on Celestite, remain omnipresent in this incarnation of WITTR. The band has cited the symphonic black metal of the ’90s as a key reference point for Primordial Arcana, and when the synths mimic a vast choir or take over a main melody from the guitars, you can hear that influence. Some of the best moments on the album echo Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk-era Emperor. Yet even this feels like a missed opportunity. Rather than using their doubtlessly impressive collection of synths to create something novel, WITTR sound content to borrow from their past. We’re living in something of a golden age for atmospheric black metal right now, with dozens of bands carving thrilling new tributaries of the sound the Weavers pioneered. They don’t sound especially interested in being trailblazers anymore.
The Weaver brothers and bandmate Kody Keyworth did nearly everything themselves on Primordial Arcana, including producing and mixing the record in their newly built home studio in the Washington woods. A lack of outside input can help a band bring a fierce, uncompromising vision to life. It can also excuse self-satisfaction, and unfortunately, it sounds like that’s what happened when WITTR opted not to work with an outside producer for the first time. The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | August 24, 2021 | 5.5 | 4f24231f-0f08-40dc-b198-a399674cd45f | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Broadening its sound and tightening its lyrical focus, the Brighton post-punk band conjures mantras of despair and anthems of pure frustration. | Broadening its sound and tightening its lyrical focus, the Brighton post-punk band conjures mantras of despair and anthems of pure frustration. | Porridge Radio: Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porridge-radio-waterslide-diving-board-ladder-to-the-sky/ | Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky | If it helps anyone distinguish Porridge Radio among the UK’s thriving nation-state of young, verbose, and ambitious post-punk bands, Dana Margolin would prefer if you compared them to nu-metal or emo: “They’re as cringe as me,” she jokes in a press release. Whereas their peers emote through cryptic metaphors, wry wordplay, dense allusions, or deadpan humor, Porridge Radio revel in being the kind of people who dream of showing up to your birthday party just to scream “I don’t want to be loved” over and over again. Breathlessly titled like an early Bright Eyes deep cut, Porridge Radio’s third album Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky honors Margolin’s self-appraisal: an inversion of teen-pop that doesn’t engage in time travel so much as allow adult listeners to keep their most immediate and mortifying mindsets close at hand. If they could write uplifting, emotionally mature love songs, I’m not sure they would.
They came close with “Lilac,” the crescendo to 2020’s breakthrough Every Bad, where Margolin hoped for a future of collective kindness and self-care. On Waterslide, it’s clear that didn’t come to pass, as Margolin deals in concerns that don’t resolve themselves in the span of two years: the struggle to define self-worth, a hyperbolic vision of “love” that encapsulates extreme elation and depression rather than any exchange of intimacy between two equal partners. Most pressingly, she writes about the fear of death and the fear of dying, which her feverish inflections on “Birthday Party” imply are two very different things.
As much as the pandemic itself amplified Margolin’s anxieties—Every Bad was released two days after the WHO declared a global pandemic in March 2020—there was also her experience of fronting a buzzing indie rock band when the expectations for doing so were completely upended. Porridge Radio began writing “Back to the Radio,” Waterslide’s delirious opening track, toward the end of 2019, right when the promotional cycle for Every Bad was revving up and Margolin began to absorb everything that would soon be required of her band. How would their friendship survive their first international tour? How would their music be interpreted or misinterpreted? Can vulnerability scale? Understandably, their first response was to self-impose quarantine: “Lock all the windows and march up the stairs/And you’re looking to me but I’m so unprepared for it,” Margolin bellows. It’s Porridge Radio’s first intentional anthem, with a rousing chorus that accrues momentum and mass with each repetition, like a soccer chant shared by a swaying, shoulder-to-shoulder crowd—that is, if it wasn’t written to suit someone drinking away their fear of change in total seclusion.
Processing overwhelming and conflicting impulses within closed spaces is where Porridge Radio’s music functions best. While the vast, tidal expanses of Every Bad often invoked the band’s roots in seaside Brighton, Waterslide is less musically temperamental, its peaks never pushing into the red and its quieter moments indulgently stewing in their indulgently sullen moods. Forgoing their past reliance on blunt force, static, and stabs of distortion, Waterslide broadens Porridge Radio’s sound with honking synths, megaphones, horns, studio luxuries with the patina of junkyard grime—the influence of Rain Dogs smuggled into radio-friendly indie rock vis a vis Modest Mouse.
Still, it’s Margolin alone who determines the trajectory of each song. Even as she reaches her peak of dysregulation on “Birthday Party,” the volume behind her barely rises; it’s not like witnessing a full-blown meltdown, but rather someone about to be calmly asked by a friend, again, “Please don’t make a scene.” Rarely does a minute go by without Margolin recalibrating the stakes of every interaction to an impossible height. The errant lover from “End of Last Year” doesn’t just break hearts—they break everything they touch. On “Jealousy,” Margolin confesses, “Nothing makes me quite as sad as you.” She is an apple rotting from the inside out, an overripe tomato waiting to be cut in half and squeezed into pulp. As she helplessly watches her dog refuse to pick up a stick, she sees a greater metaphor for a cruel, unfeeling world. By the desolate closing track, little exists between heaven and hell.
These aren’t passing states. Most of the time, Margolin anchors a verse’s worth of tangential thoughts and inventive phrasing with a despairing mantra: “Don’t want my body to be touched/Don’t want to mean anything to you,” “It stops the rot from spreading,” “You’re all that I want.” But where this tactic felt like an artist discovering their signature on Every Bad, the thematic reiteration turns all of the self-recrimination and emptiness and brokenness into an emotional brownout as Waterslide progresses. “I want one feeling all the time/I don’t want to feel a thing,” Margolin shouts on “Birthday Party” as a quintessential lyric; if they’re gonna feel nothing, they want it to the extreme.
Still, the intentionality and humor in Margolin’s repetition keeps it from becoming a crutch. Despite noting the influence from the sound and spirit of arena acts like Deftones and Coldplay, Porridge Radio never allow themselves to fully project their pain outward, where it can reach the cheap seats. There’s certainly the potential for catharsis in comparing yourself to a splinter and begging your partner “don’t cut me out” until you’re out of breath. But throughout Waterslide, Margolin instead conjures the sound of pure frustration: desires unheard, needs unmet, people experiencing their most juvenile impulses in an adult body and no longer able to solve them with the cheap thrill of acting out in public. | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | May 19, 2022 | 7.9 | 4f26da35-9a4f-484f-9256-9b29d736b7cd | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The heady electronic duo that gave Netflix’s sci-fi success story its signature sound are back for another round, with plenty of nostalgia and some new tricks. | The heady electronic duo that gave Netflix’s sci-fi success story its signature sound are back for another round, with plenty of nostalgia and some new tricks. | Kyle Dixon / Michael Stein: Stranger Things 2 (A Netflix Original Series Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kyle-dixon-michael-stein-stranger-things-2-a-netflix-original-series-soundtrack/ | Stranger Things 2 (A Netflix Original Series Soundtrack) | “Stranger Things,” Netflix’s sci-fi success story, hit the zeitgeist last year with the force of an invisible telekinetic blast from a psychic pre-teen on the run from government operatives. It did this by unabashedly culling references from 1980s pop culture, repurposing the pulpy horror tropes of the era into a story that resonated with a contemporary audience. There’s nothing wrong with “style over substance” as a guiding aesthetic for a series like this; when done well, that sense of surface-level nostalgia can help create a world that feels both familiar and intriguing. With music, however, the same effect can be trickier to pull off. More often than not, when artists wholesale copy well-known motifs and themes, you’re left with an empty pastiche or an uninspired facsimile of a better musician. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, the two electronic composers who have scored both seasons of “Stranger Things,” don’t have that problem. Their lush, deep music gave the show’s first season a crucial emotional dimension, and their second time around once again steers away from cliché, maintaining the pace they’ve set for themselves while subtly shifting tactics just enough to keep fans hooked.
Discovered as members of the Austin, Texas experimental synth four-piece S U R V I V E, Dixon and Stein have gone on to a level of mainstream success thanks to “Stranger Things” that would have otherwise been unthinkable for a band so heady and niche. In September, they took home the Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme, putting them in the company of past winners like Randy Newman, Danny Elfman, and John Williams—and raising yet another expectation for the duo to live up to.
The pitch-perfect genre influences that made both S U R V I V E and Dixon and Stein’s first-season soundtrack immediately relatable for ‘80s synth buffs are front and center, yet again, on Stranger Things 2. You can hear echoes of Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter, as well as the ethereal unease of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells, Part 1” (also known as the theme to The Exorcist) and Mark Snow’s “X-Files” score. Beyond these fan-favorite references, drawn from highbrow and populist sci-fi and horror scoring alike, Dixon and Stein weave in original interpretations of more contemporary soundtrack work. Pale imitations of Hans Zimmer’s Inception score have plagued filmmaking since that movie was released seven years ago; here, “Descent Into the Rift” makes similar bursts of atonal keyboards sound freshly jarring. The track builds around screeches of dying machinery, imploding into darkness, as the void slowly fills with climbing synth blips and misty, creaky chords.
Beyond these well-executed allusions and reinterpretations, Dixon and Stein’s deep knowledge of analog synthesizers lets them explore the full gamut of sounds and moods created by their machines, from ambient, gliding tones to harsh industrial blasts. As soon as you’re lulled into into a sense of security by a warmer, dreamier track—say “She Wants Me to Find Her,” with its almost new age soundscape cresting like a hazy sunrise—Dixon and Stein begin ratcheting up the dread until you’re caught off guard by “It’s a Trap,” which sounds like a bunch of silverware being thrown down a flight of iron stairs in slow motion.
For much of its running time, though, Stranger Things 2 finds the space to be exactly what you’d expect, which is prudent for a sequel at this level of popularity. By the time you reach track 12, “Looking for a Way Out,” Dixon and Stein are revisiting the arpeggiated, squelching synths of the show’s intro theme, unleashing the same unsettling sci-fi aura to maximum effect. One of the longer tracks on the record, “Symptoms,” deploys almost three minutes of wandering, ebullient notes before launching into another Carpenter-esque rhythmic melody. While its title is obviously steeped in the lore of the show, “Eggo in the Snow” sounds exactly like that: a frozen grid trapped on a fluffy cloud of ice.
All of this color and shading comes from Dixon and Stein’s dedication to the art of the synth, which is ultimately what sets their soundtrack work apart from, say, Kavinsky’s opening theme for Drive or Trent Reznor’s more subdued collaborations with Atticus Ross. While Stranger Things 2 may not necessarily be best enjoyed on its own, it’s vivid and complex enough to be more than just a companion piece to the TV series. And if it’s not as in-depth or immediate as S U R V I V E’s full-on cosmic assault, it doesn’t need to be. While staying true to the series' airtight aesthetic, Dixon and Stein continue to find ways to push beyond. | 2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lakeshore | November 1, 2017 | 7.2 | 4f27d319-7ebb-4998-8062-d5bcb5b98b4a | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
Reissues of Warp's genre-defining compilation and its 1994 sequel. | Reissues of Warp's genre-defining compilation and its 1994 sequel. | Various Artists: Artificial Intelligence / Artificial Intelligence II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11714-artificial-intelligence-artificial-intelligence-ii/ | Artificial Intelligence / Artificial Intelligence II | Compilations like Warp's Artificial Intelligence don't come around often enough. Everything about it was gutsy. Warp had started three years earlier as a dance-oriented label that grew out of a DJ shop. Its founders had fallen in love with Detroit techno and set about releasing music that would further that tradition. But they noticed that in addition to dancing at clubs and raves, people were using electronic music in another way. The iconic cover illustration said it all: A robot, reclining in his living room, quite possibly stoned, with Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd LPs strewn about his floor. They envisioned a post-rave head session, a time for a contemplative and cerebral journey into music's future.
A bit hippie, isn't it? Warp didn't care. And they didn't just suggest these things with a title and images; they laid it all out explicitly on the record's cover. "Artificial Intelligence is electronic listening music for long journeys, quiet nights and club drowsy dawns" and "Artificial Intelligence is the first in a series of 'listening albums' from Warp." These statements now sound like they would be affixed to some sort of Ultimate Chill compilation sold at a coffee shop circa 1999, but this wasn't polite, head-nodding downtempo. Most of Artificial Intelligence was just a click or two away from the music that would have filled a dance floor. Tempos were a little slower and textures were more labored over but the LP was built on techno's sturdy foundation.
The idea was to retreat to a place removed from the utilitarian demands of the dance floor to engage in electronic music R&D.; Everything about the package was presented as a paradigm shift, all the way down to the disarmingly earnest answers to standard questions ("Why did you contribute to A.I."?) supplied by the artists on the inside sleeve. In sum, Warp said "Here is something new and original, and you are going to be hearing a lot more if it," and then delivered on the promise. A genre was born, but Warp's "Electronic Listening Music" term never caught on. Instead, we got the much-reviled "Intelligent Dance Music," named after the popular e-mail list of the same name.
With Warp going out on a limb to place itself at the forefront of "progressive" electronic music, revisiting both newly reissued volumes of Artificial Intelligence more than a decade later is in some ways problematic. You want to hear tracks as music first, but you can't help but listen to it as a historical document. I can say that nearly all of Volume I still sounds great. Richard D. James kicks things off as the Dice Man on "Polygon Window", and while his synths sound slightly crude by today's standards, the datedness is ultimately appealing, the weight of history adding substance in the same way as, say, heavy reverb does to countrypolitan. Autechre here is ridged and steeped in early futurist hip-hop; they contribute two great tracks including the astounding "The Egg", with its heavily chopped and rhythmically precise vocals. Naturally Dr. Alex Patterson brings the most archetypal ambient with the gauzy, sound-effects heavy "Loving You Live". I never particularly cared about Speedy J but the Dutch producer lightens the mood effectively with the bubbly and popish "De-Orbit" and then closes with the drifting "Fill 3".
Relatively speaking, the second volume doesn't hold up nearly as well. Oddly, while it has more variety it also seems more generic. By 1994 there were a lot of people making "electronic listening music" and this doesn't feel like a particularly special assemblage of what was out there. Canned breaks ruin Link's "Arcadian", while a recurring sample of a woman intoning "Feel...strange..." throughout Mark Franklin's "Release to the System", unlike the Richard D. James synth textures mentioned earlier, loses meaning when plucked from its rave-era context. Tracks by Richard Kirk and Higher Intelligence Agency are pleasant and engaging techno but not particularly memorable. The peak again comes from Autechre, whose "Chatter" finds them fusing half-speed Cybotron-style electro with languid acid textures, the soundtrack for breakdancing ecstasy in slow motion.
In the liner notes to the first volume, the Autechre boys then just 19 and 21, respond to the question "Electronic Music. Where next?" with an unintentionally prophetic answer. "When people run dry copying each other, a deeper more creative music will occur where ideas and originality will play a central role." By now they are all too aware that the well of mimicry is essentially bottomless and there may not be as many original ideas as we once thought. Listening to the first Artificial Intelligence compilation is a reminder of how nice it must have been back in 1992 to dream such a thing. | 2005-08-25T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-08-25T01:00:02.000-04:00 | null | null | August 25, 2005 | 8.8 | 4f2a21c4-d29d-476d-87de-328499929469 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The gruff-voiced rapper and dusty-groove producer are a perfect match as they connect for a seamless ride to the heart of the gangster. | The gruff-voiced rapper and dusty-groove producer are a perfect match as they connect for a seamless ride to the heart of the gangster. | Freddie Gibbs / The Alchemist: Alfredo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freddie-gibbs-the-alchemist-alfredo/ | Alfredo | Hip-hop’s obsession with the Italian Mafia has always been curious. While there’s certainly something perversely romantic about Hollywood’s paeans to La Cosa Nostra, the characters at the heart of these stories—both in real life and on screen—were incorrigibly racist. Mafiosos said and did awful things to black people. And yet rappers have been glorifying dons and capos ever since Kool G Rap and DJ Polo’s Road to the Riches, idolizing men in custom suits smoking cigars who often saw them as less than human.
Alfredo, the collaborative LP from rapper Freddie Gibbs and producer the Alchemist, tugs at the root of this fascination. From its Mario Puzo-esque cover art to the various gangster-movie samples throughout its 35-minute runtime, it celebrates the mafioso aesthetic while simultaneously acknowledging its ugliness. And at its core, the Mafia’s role in hip-hop has always been one of aspirational criminality, based in respect for the hustle above all else. Rappers who rap about selling drugs in the trap don’t want to be holed up in a dilapidated vacant home, they want to be dining on fine china in designer clothes. Mafiosos showed them how to do that, all the while thumbing their noses at a WASPy aristocracy that saw them as second-class citizens.
Throughout the album, Gibbs and the Alchemist’s reference points suggest a deeper understanding of this dynamic. Its anti-heroes aren’t white mobsters with mulignan in their mouths like John Gotti or Tony Soprano, but Harlem kingpins Frank Lucas and Bumpy Johnson, black gangsters who lorded over a black neighborhood selling drugs to black people. When those figures do appear, like in the sample of Chazz Palminteri as Joseph Bonnano in the TV series Godfather of Harlem on “Baby $hit,“ their naked disgust for black people is laid bare. An extended sample of the ’70s blaxploitation flick The Black Godfather (“Look at Me”) suggests the kind of narrative that a dope game rapper like Gibbs might aspire to: a street kid clawing his way to the top, wresting control over his neighborhood’s criminal enterprise from its white interloper.
Gibbs has long exhibited a mastery of this duality, with a rap flow so seductive it makes a life of crime sound extremely attractive...until he drops a bar so foul and gnarly it lifts the veil. He doesn’t rap in the abstract either, nor try to justify any of it; on “Skinny Suge,” he raps, “Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked up part about that is, I know who supplied the nigga that sold it.” And while the Alchemist’s upbringing—white, Jewish, born in Beverly Hills—stands in stark contrast to Gibbs’, his gift lies in crafting bespoke beats that suit not just a rapper’s flow, but their entire style and ethos. He makes it easy for Gibbs to be Gibbs.
And on Alfredo, that style is vintage luxury, bathed in elegant piano with faded textures colored by time that sound even more beautiful now than when they were new. On “Look at Me,” he plucks the high note from the Moments’ song of the same name, warping it into a warble that swirls around strings and horns. And the first notes of “Scottie Beam” are so opulent that you’d expect to hear Rick Ross’ deep, velvety purr regardless of whether or not you’d peeped the album credits.
For his part, Gibbs skates over these beats, effortlessly gliding in and out of the pocket. Even the moments of stark contrast feel natural. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs channels the Merovingian from the Matrix trilogy—who memorably likened cursing in French to “wiping your ass with silk”—barking obscenities over a somnambulant Miami Beach cocktail lounge type beat. And on “Baby $hit,” the most buoyant of Alfredo’s compositions, he balances his drug kingpin image with his life as a father: “Rabbit potty training every morning, ho, I’m cookin’ dope and cleaning baby shit.”
By this point, neither Gibbs nor the Alchemist have much of anything to prove—the former has been rapping circles around nearly everyone for the last five or six years, and the latter has been a go-to beatmaker for A-list rappers since the turn of the century. But their pairing here seems particularly inspired, even within the context of each other’s individual producer/rapper collaborative albums. The two have been working together since at least 2004, but ever since their 2011 collaboration on Curren$y’s “Scottie Pippen,” Gibbs has been sharpening his raps to the point where it seems like he can slice through any beat. And it’s somewhat stunning that even amid a career full of rap classics, the Alchemist’s current production run may represent a new high-water mark. As neither party seems content with letting this be their last collaboration, Alfredo is likely just a taste of what they can accomplish together. | 2020-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ESGN / ALC / Empire | June 3, 2020 | 8 | 4f30c5d8-170a-4aa9-ba94-040534cd2c8e | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Prog-esque band finds a middle ground between math-rock and technical hardcore/metal. | Prog-esque band finds a middle ground between math-rock and technical hardcore/metal. | Gospel: The Moon Is a Dead World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3681-the-moon-is-a-dead-world/ | The Moon Is a Dead World | Let's face it: Prog has never been cool. Your first guitar teacher, the one with the Yes shirt, was not cool. The kid I knew who worshipped Neil Peart, and had a license plate that read "DRUMGUY" was not cool. And no matter how much you may love Genesis, that won't erase the fact that Peter Gabriel eventually left Phil Collins in charge. On the other hand, Gospel are cool. Cool enough to get approval from the white-studded belt, sideways trucker hat, back pocket bandana crowd, and the unadorned (and girlfriendless) music geek crowd.
What makes Gospel so cool? It could be the patchwork of functional King Crimson via Converge riffs, sprayed out drum work that's reminiscent of Damon Che of Don Caballero fame at his drunkest, and Dazzling Killmen-esque guttural yells. Then again, it could just be that the band sprawls out on a nice medium ground between math-rock and technical hardcore/metal. It's not a crowded genre as the years have shown that heavy bands with prog influences end up becoming black metal, Dream Theater, Ruins, or a brutal prog era Weasel Walter project.
It's a good thing Gospel have an entertaining drummer: His corrugated beats are the highest item in the mix. We're actually allowed some prominently displayed keyboard work as well, which is abnormal for a non dancepunk album that's fit to be sold at Hot Topic. But how do you get the kids with scene hair to listen to mutant prog? Just make all the tracks hover around the five-minute mark. Cautious? Of course. But the nine-minute "A Golden Dawn" proves why this works-- it's by far the poorest song on The Moon. It fails to shimmer and ends up sounding like an outtake from a Trail of Dead practice.
Gospel use the tools of the trade to fix the problems attention deficit listeners (hardcore kids) had with prog. The spiraling arms of the guitar lines and the splotchy drums of "Yr Electric Surge is Sweet" bridge the gap between the rage of hardcore and the extensive rehearsal of prog. "And Redemption Fills the Emptiest of Hearts" evens manages to inject a perverted version of the most standard of hardcore gimmicks, the breakdown. Sure, they disguise it a little, but not enough to displease the ears of Norma Jean kids, and then they move straight into King Crimson-inspired keyboard and synthed guitar interplay. They even go so far as to make Tool palatable to the underground with the Middle Eastern guitar lines and echoing soundscaped instrumentation of "Opium". (I was digging Gospel until they made me reference Tool and lose what little cred I had as a music reviewer.)
Tricking the kids would be shameless if I didn't wallow in Gospel's message. Granted, they're displaying their influences a mite too visibly. Gospel strip down their influences to compensate for many of their favorite band's substituting polish for violent energy. Maybe Gospel are cool because they are smart enough to meld prog with today's updated hardcore. But knowing today's hardcore scene, maybe Gospel are just cool because Kurt Ballou of Converge recorded their album and Converge make some of the hippest hoodies on the market. | 2005-08-28T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-08-28T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Level Plane | August 28, 2005 | 7.8 | 4f338e12-52a4-4aa4-a44f-ad988995f03a | Austin Gaines | https://pitchfork.com/staff/austin-gaines/ | null |
The 67-year-old soul singer's third album on Daptone feels like his most straightforward and best to date. | The 67-year-old soul singer's third album on Daptone feels like his most straightforward and best to date. | Charles Bradley: Changes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21763-changes/ | Changes | It’s easy to root for Charles Bradley, the 67-year-old soul singer who has spent the last few years enjoying a breakout career on Daptone Records. Bradley’s underdog narrative has remained as genuinely endearing as it has perpetually marketable, and Changes, his third album, feels like his straightforward best to date, the result of an improved dynamic between the singer and his band. If he ever sounded awkwardly patched in on previous recordings, Bradley now seems to command ownership of his songs like never before. It’s an accomplished skill in the world of retro-soul, and Bradley sounds vital instead of nostalgic because of it.
Changes’ lyrics are immediately and sometimes overly familiar, but Bradley’s unmistakable voice is the obvious draw throughout. For a guy who has often been affectionately pigeonholed—Bradley has earned a tagline as the “The Screaming Eagle of Soul”—the new album instead finds him at his most versatile and complete. The record opens with a soulful gospel rendition of “God Bless America” in which the singer delivers an organ-laced testimony; the same keys pop up in funkier form on follow-up “Good to Be Back at Home.” After spending much of his seventh decade as a first-time international headliner, Bradley sings about the mixture of relief and disappointment in his return trip. Like other songs on the album, the song is vaguely and upliftingly political: On “Changed For the World” Bradley tells us "Heaven is crying, the world is shaking." Half singing, half preaching, he warns “God is unhappy, the moon is breaking / Blood is spilling, God is coming.”
Musically, Changes fits squarely into the Daptone house sound, but the session players—primarily from Menahan Street Band but also Bradley’s touring group The Extraordinaries—are more restrained here to make room for Bradley's big presence and even bigger voice. But the album is nonetheless inflected with the referential post-funk and hip-hop drum sounds of label guitarist Thomas Brenneck and company. Near the end of “Nobody But You” a horn line quotes the unmistakable saxophone from Seals and Crofts 1972 hit “Summer Breeze,” whereas the opening piano-laced drum break on “You Think I Don’t Know (But I Know)” conjures up Freddie Scott’s “(You) Got What I Need,” now perhaps better known to all as the sample chop Biz Markie finagled into “Just a Friend.”
Much of the album is about love: searching for it, being wronged by it, basking in it. Of the spare forty-minute tracklist, “Things We Do For Love” might be the most satisfyingly retro offering, complete with a dose of doo-wop accompaniment and a nimble, romantic groove. The album’s greatest accomplishment is in its most unexpectedly personal moment though, in which Bradley wrestles an out-of-character Black Sabbath ballad about a breakup into an agonizing paean to his late mother. After spending a lifetime estranged, Bradley patched up his relationship with his mother in time to serve as her caretaker before she passed, and also early enough that she got to see his career finally take off. In her absence and in the midst of post-success family quarrels, Bradley sounds heartbreakingly alone when he wails “I’ve lost the best friend I’ve ever had.” “Changes,” and its accompanying video, show the singer at his most emotionally unhinged and dramatically vulnerable.
A few years ago, Bradley’s success seemed more romantic in its improbability. “We found an authentic soul man that liked our music,” Brenneck glowed of his band’s initial collaboration with the singer in 2012. Changes somehow feels more natural, in which Bradley comes off as an obvious star, like he's belonged here the whole time. Surrounded by talented revivalists half his age, the singer remains a precious commodity: the real thing. He’s not reenacting or revisiting, he’s on his first run through. And it's still inspiring to watch him live it out at last. | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Daptone / Dunham | March 31, 2016 | 7.1 | 4f35647b-fd8d-4219-a7d6-f0dd30e3e087 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The Venezuelan artist's latest single-track piece contains some of her most delicate and astonishing work. | The Venezuelan artist's latest single-track piece contains some of her most delicate and astonishing work. | Arca: @@@@@ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arca-aaaaa/ | @@@@@ | Since releasing her initial solo EPs in 2012 and working in the producers’ room for Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, the Venezuelan-born artist Arca has made a name for herself using dextrous and playful mutations of electronic music’s familiar forms. Vocals appear on nearly all of her full-length works, but until her self-titled 2017 album, they were shrouded in icy digital effects. Arca allowed her to stake new ground as a singer, an artist who used the (mostly) unmodified sound of her voice to great effect alongside carefully orchestrated synthesizer production. Arca’s latest, a 62-minute single titled “@@@@@,” calls back to her early music both in its name and its slippery, wandering structure. But it integrates what she learned from molding raw vocals to her unmistakable sonics, resulting in some of her most delicate and astonishing work.
Framed as a radio broadcast by a character named Diva Experimental, “@@@@@” corrupts the listening environments into which it was released. Though it moves much like a mixtape, flitting from sequence to recognizable sequence (Arca calls them “quantums” and has named and demarcated them with timestamps), the song appears on streaming services as a solid hour of sound. If an algorithm eats it up and sorts it into a playlist, it will profoundly disturb the usual automated flow. If a listener hopes to hear a specific moment in the outsized track, they’ll have to pan through its length by hand, dropping their cursor in a precise spot on the progress bar like aiming the needle of a record player at a specific groove. By its nature, “@@@@@” reintroduces some measure of physicality to the listening process, disrupting the inscribed habit of letting Spotify’s impartial code do all the work.
Throughout the piece, moments of turbulence—stuttering drum beats, chopped and looped vocals, detuned synth leads, all familiar gestures in Arca’s music—give way to serene oases. The conceit behind the music proposes a world surveilled by omnipotent AI, a dystopian future that feels a heartbeat away from our own technocratic present. Fear courses through the music, punctuated by palpable relief. An ominous background drone gets crowded out by a sample of near-maniacal laughter; the panopticon looms, and the Diva frolics away from its gaze.
Arca invites moments of play and serenity even within the piece’s most oppressive tones. Her voice, muted and processed but recognizable in its grain, coos from beneath the roar of an electric guitar or a cascade of irregular beats. During the quantum “Psychosexual” (around the 23-minute mark), a digitally deepened and abraded voice invites the listener to “shake that pussy, bitch...I don’t care what genital you were born with/You can shake that pussy.” Pussy is rendered as a construct, a state of mind rather than of biology.
As in her previous work, the most compelling moments on “@@@@@” are also its most mournful. “No me lo digas, no lo digas,” Arca repeats near the track’s halfway point—don’t tell me that, don’t say that. Her voice is pitched up to an icy soprano, but unmistakable in rhythm and phrasing. Beneath her words, a chorus of background voices hums and a sparse beat lurches forward. “No lo digas/No lo digas/A menos que lo sientas/Porque no quiero que haya resentimiento.” Don’t say it unless you feel it, because I don’t want resentment. Her voice warps in the tangles of the machine she’s using to manipulate it. The quantum builds to an emotional peak, never losing its charred undertones but finding in them an opportunity for romantic vulnerability, a place to beg a partner not to dissemble, to lay bare their needs.
In the stunning climactic quanta, “Form,” Arca’s voice slithers beneath a membrane of effects—garbled, bedazzled, and Auto-Tuned. Her words come through only in glimpses, language forming and then dissipating. No percussion accompanies her, only languid washes of synthesizer. Her voice, in all its processing, shines through with immense tenderness. Her music has never sounded so warm or so intimate; never before has she beckoned quite like this.
Under seemingly omniscient surveillance, the question arises of how to communicate with others while remaining unintelligible to the hostile infrastructure that hosts our words. How do we find each other across gulfs that want us separate, alienated, desperate? Music, especially future-tuned music like Arca’s, slips beneath language. Its structures can be algorithmically analyzed, its emotional overtones guessed at by machines, but what it does to people, how it moves them and binds them to each other, can be unpredictable, harder for a computer to grasp. How do you survive in an environment spilling over with the stress of being watched? You look for what surprises you, for confusion, for those moments and objects which feel as if they hold the power to repel the gaze of the watcher. | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | XL | February 26, 2020 | 8.1 | 4f3fe5c4-3fa2-4181-a80e-fe130e47493e | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
As radical reinventions go, Third-- the first Portishead studio album since 1997-- is surprisingly natural. Darker and bleaker lyrically than their previous work, Third is a sort of re-debut-- the band's sound after it has excised every possible remnant of trip-hop from it. | As radical reinventions go, Third-- the first Portishead studio album since 1997-- is surprisingly natural. Darker and bleaker lyrically than their previous work, Third is a sort of re-debut-- the band's sound after it has excised every possible remnant of trip-hop from it. | Portishead: Third | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11438-third/ | Third | Can an album really be a departure if it's the first thing a group's released in 11 years? It ideally would be for a genre-bound band turned brand name like Portishead: As much as there is to miss about the mid-late 1990s, the time for any trip-hop revival is far into the future, and picking up right where they left off in 1997 would make Portishead some kind of sad cipher coasting on the fumes of an exhausted trend-- something they've always been above. If the voice of Beth Gibbons wasn't so ingrained in the consciousness of a whole generation of indie kids, you could look at Third as a sort of re-debut; it posits that the sound of Portishead can actually exist even after the group excises every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.
As radical reinventions go, Third is surprisingly natural. You can credit Gibbons as the familiarizing factor: She possesses a voice that seems impossible to shackle to just one musical setting, even if it already sounds perfectly at home in brooding downtempo ambience. As the most recognizable component of the group, she has the most established stylistic tendencies-- subtle quivers, an ability to go from hushed to piercing without laboring over the transition, an aching timbre that expresses anxious vulnerability better than nearly any other singer-- and she slips back into them comfortably when she needs to.
But it's also a style that works in more contexts than we've previously heard, something she hinted at with Rustin Man on 2002's folk and jazz-influenced Out of Season, and Third is the culmination of this. Pitted against the jarring mechanical stop-starts of first single "Machine Gun" or the chase-scene-paced opener "Silence", Gibbons sounds like both a defiant accuser and someone clinging on for dear life. Quieter numbers, like the slow-build electronic ballad "The Rip" or the softer moments of the cabaret highwire act "Hunter", highlight the fragility in her voice. And since almost every song on Third addresses some sort of emotional or mental helplessness-- typically a deep and profound sense of loss and isolation-- it's almost as though this shift in sonic identity is there to mask the fact that this is an incredibly bleak record lyrically. Gibbons' wounded tone can take commonplace-on-paper sentiments ("I'd like to laugh at what you said but I just can't find a smile"; "I can't deny what I've become/ I'm just emotionally undone") and give them a kind of pathos that's almost uncomfortably voyeuristic to listen to.
As for how the music itself has changed, long story short: Third is a psychedelic rock album. It opens with a rhythm that's nearly twice as fast as almost everything else Portishead have done, the percussion on most of the songs is frequently muffled or buried under layers of noise and sometimes just stops short of being non-existent (though it's heavy and propulsive when it does make itself known), and their keyboards and strings have graduated from relaxed tension into dissonant rumbles and shrieks. There's a brief acoustic folk song ("Deep Water"), an abrasive and jittery electro-industrial number ("Machine Gun"), free jazz horns ("Magic Doors"), analog freakouts from the United States of America-fueled early days of electronic psych ("The Rip"), and a song that sounds a bit like Clinic's droning, rhythmically dense garage-kraut, except somehow spookier ("We Carry On"). Portishead as you previously knew them are represented, barely, by the last song on the album-- the sleepwalk-paced, David Axelrod-esque "Threads"-- and even then, its intermittently fuzzed-out tension-and-release dynamic would've made it one of the harshest-sounding songs on Dummy or Portishead.
You could say that this would be unrecognizable as a Portishead album without Gibbons' voice, and you'd be sort of right; guitarist and contributing songwriter Adrian Utley mentioned in a recent New York Times article that one of the rules they set for Third was that they couldn't fall back on any instruments-- or even any trademark sounds-- that they'd used on previous albums. But their style here isn't particularly out of character, comparatively experimental as it is; Utley's guitar still twangs sharply when it's not doing things like interjecting "Iron Man" growls in "Hunter" or splintering into Syd Barrett-isms at the coda of "Small", and the melodic identity that he and Geoff Barrow built on a foundation of minor keys and sinister grandeur still holds sway. In the terms of a group that was frequently lumped in with film composers as much as Bristol axis peers, Portishead's Euro-cool John Barry intrigue has been pushed into the disquieting territory of John Carpenter's compositions and Bernard Herrmann's Alfred Hitchcock scores.
Keep in mind just how out-of-nowhere this all seems: The notion of a new Portishead album had, for many fans, fallen out of the realm of possibility. If Third had come out in 1999 or 2000, maybe writers would be calling it Portishead's answer to Massive Attack's Mezzanine, another third album by trip-hop icons eschewing dinner-conversation music by embracing anxiety and moodiness. Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again. | 2008-04-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Island / Mercury | April 28, 2008 | 8.8 | 4f4200b0-09e4-472b-b68a-ac1fde877225 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Jack Antonoff’s stately sophomore effort as Bleachers has all the affectations of an over-the-top pop masterpiece, with some soaring anthems. But it’s a largely uneven album. | Jack Antonoff’s stately sophomore effort as Bleachers has all the affectations of an over-the-top pop masterpiece, with some soaring anthems. But it’s a largely uneven album. | Bleachers: Gone Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23215-gone-now/ | Gone Now | Jack Antonoff has achieved a rare type of success in pop music by ignoring everything going on around him. As the sound of radio has grown sleeker and sexier, Antonoff’s music remains bold and bombastic. He’s worked as a producer and songwriter on music beloved on a wide scale (Sara Bareilles’ “Brave,” Zayn and Taylor’s “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever”) and more cultishly appreciated (Tegan and Sara’s “How Come You Don’t Want Me,” Grimes’ “Entropy”)—but you know his work when you hear it. Antonoff’s first solo album as Bleachers, 2014’s Strange Desire, was a lovable exploration of the ideas at the core of his sound: all the piano breaks and gated-reverb drums, the gang vocals and the ceaseless, head-spinning barrage of hooks. But to the world at large, it was less of a breakthrough than a sturdy business card. By the end of that year, he’d be better known for accompanying one of the world’s biggest pop stars on her biggest album yet.
In an interview with Pitchfork, Antonoff discussed his guiding principle as a collaborator: “If I ever work with someone else, all that I think about is: Do you want to make the best album you’ve ever made in your life, or not?” It’s a lofty standard, but one he also sets for himself as a solo artist. The best song on Strange Desire was called “I Wanna Get Better”: While its title was a response to hitting rock bottom, it’s a sentiment that also applies to the heights of his success. In fact, if there’s any major similarity between Antonoff and Bruce Springsteen—an artist he frequently cites as an inspiration—it’s his unabashed ambition: a conviction so earnest and ingrained that it could be mistaken for humility.
Regardless of what people think of Gone Now, Antonoff's stately and uneven sophomore album, he’s already mythologizing it and shaping a world around its songs. Antonoff clearly believes that Gone Now is his masterpiece, and everything around the record suggests as much. He’s somehow touring the bedroom where it was conceived as a “moving, living art installation”: an act of hubris so indulgent even Jay Z waited 20 years before attempting it. From beginning to end, Gone Now has all the affectations of an over-the-top pop masterpiece. There are spoken-word samples, saxophone solos, and sound effects; guest appearances, multipart reprises, and allusions. In the opening lines of the self-reflexive first track “Dream of Mickey Mantle,” Antonoff is romanticizing the album’s creation: “All the hope I had when I was young/I hope I wasn’t wrong/I miss those days so I sing a ‘Don’t Take the Money’ song.” Here, he poses the driving question of Gone Now: Is Antonoff really as great as he thinks he is?
Occasionally, you’re inclined to believe him. Early singles “Don’t Take the Money” and “Everybody Lost Somebody” are worthy additions to his catalog, soaring anthems made all the better for their insistence on indulging every pleasure center at once. Other songs take a refreshingly nuanced musical approach, like the gentle pulse of “All My Heroes” or the stark synths in “Nothing Is U.” Too many songs, however, get lost in a middle ground, like “Hate That You Know Me,” a Carly Rae Jepsen collaboration that bursts and fizzles like cheap fireworks until reaching its triumphant but all-too-brief conclusion. The otherwise pleasant “Goodmorning” loses its appeal by spawning a series of recurring reprises throughout the album: its reappearances quickly become grating and only increase the massive debt Antonoff already owes to the chorus of “All the Young Dudes.”
With all its repeating themes, it’s easy to search for some kind of narrative within Gone Now. Antonoff’s lyrics, however, often feel hollow. “Let’s Get Married” is built around an honest instinct, responding to feelings of hopelessness by bringing your loved ones closer. But Antonoff’s oversimplification of the subject matter clashes with the momentous music, creating an effect like watching someone proposing on the Jumbotron at a half-empty stadium. The conversational lyrics in closing number “Foreign Girls” are almost charming in their banality (“I walk to the pawn shop/Now I’m at the pawn shop”). At the end of the record, Antonoff’s aimlessness sounds like an admission of defeat, like even he is unsure what all the preceding fanfare was for.
By aiming for the textbook definition of a big-picture pop album, Antonoff has ended up with the epitome of a vanity project: an album that revolves entirely around one person, made more enjoyable the less you expect from it. This is likely not the most memorable work Antonoff has to offer this year (or even this month for that matter, with Lorde’s highly anticipated Melodrama, which Antonoff co-wrote and co-produced, due in two weeks). In a recent New York Times profile, Antonoff discussed his post-fun. rebranding, from primary member of a massively successful pop group to lone wolf auteur: “I remember immediately—immediately—feeling like, ‘I don’t want to play ‘We Are Young’ when I’m 35,’” he said, “‘I don’t want to be defined by this.’” By now, he’s accrued a strong enough songbook to successfully render that single a mere footnote to an enviable and flourishing career. Somewhere even further down his resume, there’s a place for Gone Now. | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 2, 2017 | 6.1 | 4f51f670-5ad8-40ab-920e-84398b04e1dc | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | 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 Annie Lennox’s 1992 solo debut, a joyous and liberated pop album with a prophetic message about the disillusionment of fame. | 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 Annie Lennox’s 1992 solo debut, a joyous and liberated pop album with a prophetic message about the disillusionment of fame. | Annie Lennox: Diva | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/annie-lennox-diva/ | Diva | From the very beginning of her rise to international stardom, Annie Lennox desperately wanted to transcend her own fame. Her breakout single as one half of Eurythmics, 1983’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” encapsulated her anxieties as a frontwoman in the increasingly panoptic public eye: “Everybody’s looking for something,” she warned. Her androgynous fashion in the song’s music video—the buzzed, radioactive orange hair, the tailored men’s suit—was a form of defensive armor against a tabloid culture fixated on, as she phrased it to Rolling Stone at the time, the “bum-and-tits thing.” Even then, barely a year into her global ascent, she doubted her ability to define her own image: “Of course, you’ll never find a way around it.”
But before Lennox dreamed of escaping fame, fame provided an escape. Eurythmics co-lead Dave Stewart’s privileged upbringing (he once lamented to Rolling Stone that working-class kids in his hometown of Sunderland, England brushed him off as a “richie”) and the band’s promotional cycles—which grew progressively more outlandish, leading up to a £50,000 launch party in Antibes for 1989’s We Too Are One—often obscured Lennox’s own childhood poverty. Born on Christmas Day to a shipyard workman and a housewife, she was raised in the tenements of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she and her parents shared a cramped two-room unit. Longing to experience the bustling cultural hub of London, she enrolled in the Royal College of Music as a flutist. To supplement the small grant she received from the conservatory, she worked as a waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, where eventually she was introduced to Stewart. The two dated and formed the short-lived mod band the Tourists. By 1981, they’d romantically separated and reinvented themselves as the experimental arthouse duo Eurythmics.
Like an international spy, Lennox used clothing and makeup as tools of professional disguise, continuously shapeshifting: 1985’s Be Yourself Tonight introduced the ethereal femininity of “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)” and the vamping Motown singer in “Would I Lie to You?,” while 1987’s Savage added a deranged vixen to her repertoire. Unlike David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Elton John’s Rocket Man, Lennox’s stage personas were firmly grounded in postmodern interpretations of life on Earth, from the grandiose excess of the French royal court to the listless drudgery of the Friedanian housewife in “Beethoven (I Love to Listen To).” While many of Lennox’s characters served as commentary on societal perceptions of fame, wealth, and gender, they more immediately were an attempt to defer judgement on her personal life, which was nevertheless devoured by UK tabloids. Her rotating forms of self-presentation were a crucial attempt at self-preservation.
But even if her facades had successfully warded off the media’s leering eye—even if she hadn’t been dubbed “Britain’s most tortured rock star” after a brief, failed marriage to a Hare Krishna devotee and an appearance in the Al Pacino flop Revolution—Lennox might still have justifiably burnt out by the end of the decade. Eurythmics were incredibly prolific, releasing almost an album a year starting with their 1981 debut In the Garden. Almost every album begot an international tour, with little downtime to recuperate. “I had this vision constantly towards the end of the Eurythmics period,” Lennox later told Q, “my life was a bus, but I was running behind it. I just could not catch up with that fucking bus.”
By the time she and Stewart released We Too Are One, their seventh studio album, both seemed irritable and detached from their art. Lennox often barely spoke a word in interviews. Stewart, the posh eccentric, was increasingly frustrated by the way Lennox’s magnetic presence had come to overshadow his contributions. Whether intentional or not, the album’s cover—Lennox’s blue eyes sharply front-and-center, with Stewart blurred into the background—summarized the tense disparities in their dynamic. The duo quietly split a year later without officially acknowledging a hiatus.
Though Lennox continued to accept awards for her work with Eurythmics through the following year, she badly wanted to step back from the band’s constant pressures. In addition to the grueling release schedule and public scrutiny, she had experienced a deep personal loss with the stillbirth of her first child immediately prior to recording We Too Are One. Upon receiving the Brit Award for Female Solo Artist in 1990 (her fourth since 1984), she told reporters that she was retiring for two years “to refuel my batteries, relax with my family, and get involved with the causes I feel very strongly about.”
As Eurythmics faded, it seemed as if Lennox could finally find peace in privacy: In 1988 she married the documentarian Uri Fruchtmann, and in 1990, gave birth to a daughter, Lola. But after a decade of constant reinvention, Lennox, understandably, felt a bit listless at home. “When I was pregnant, I had a lot of time to fill,” she told Maclean’s. “I just discovered that there was this itch, because I wasn’t writing.” Diva, her solo debut, was born from her deliberate attempt to withdraw from the spotlight.
She began writing the album during her pregnancy with the help of synth whiz Marius de Vries, recording at her home in Maida Vale before and after Lola’s birth, alongside producer Steve Lipson (who had recently worked with Simple Minds). After years in Eurythmics, Lennox initially felt paralyzed writing without Stewart’s guidance, and she struggled to create art out of her contentment. “Sometimes I feel I’m just not miserable enough,” she later confessed. Lipson, according to Lennox, dealt with her writer’s block by telling her she was on her own: “You’re the writer, that’s your gig,” she recalled him saying. “I’m not going to help you, go downstairs and do it.” After 15 months of wrestling with her newfound artistic independence, she finally completed the record.
Diva broke dramatically with Eurythmics in style and substance: Where her work with Stewart trafficked in restless anxieties, her solo work was a step towards the wistful, patient resolve of womanhood. That maturity is reflected in her directness, as if motherhood had diminished the returns of wry metaphors. “Precious” celebrates Lola’s birth with effusive gratitude: “I was lost until you came,” she sings, her words thick with sentimentality. The protagonist of “Legend in My Living Room” leaves home at 17, just as Lennox had, an atypically autobiographical and unsubtle portrait of her early aspirations. “Have mercy,” she pleads—it’s difficult to tell if she’s singing to the audience, or to her younger self. Though she only occasionally addresses the “diva” persona in her writing, the pressure of celebrity underscores her anxieties throughout: the existential ennui of “Little Bird,” the regrets of “Cold,” the longing to be accepted in her own skin on “Stay by Me.”
For an album so difficult to write, the music goes down deceptively smooth. Songs about heartbreak, loneliness, the loss of a child and of youthful innocence are adorned with punchy synths, jazzy bass, and tropicália melodies. Lennox’s first and favorite instrument is the piano; it’s her go-to for live performance and what she used to compose the record. In Stewart’s absence, her compositions find room to breathe. After a decade in the shadow of buzzing electronics, her piano feels utterly liberating on Diva—the cascading notes of “Why” accent the elongated vowels of her croons, while the run that opens “Stay by Me” conjures the image of a virtuoso at the keys before launching into an appropriately ’90s trip-hop beat. But the song where Lennox sounds most musically free is also the album’s heaviest thematically. “Walking on Broken Glass” pairs a Carribean-inspired piano line with a mirrored melody on pizzicato strings, and like so many of Eurythmics’ best records, it takes an incredibly depressing concept—romantic abandonment—and maps it onto an irresistibly danceable tune.
Despite the velveteen, varied instrumentation on Diva, Lennox’s voice is the album’s most essential and expansive element. While Eurythmics often incorporated guest singers, Diva’s vocals are entirely hers, from the smooth curves of her balladry to the perhaps regrettable rap-singing on “Money Can’t Buy It.” Her voice was always a central component in her previous band, but here her vocals become a veritable one-woman orchestra. From the harmonic overdubs of “Walking on Broken Glass” to the soulful belt of “Precious,” she sounds entirely fluid. “Little Bird” offers the broadest sampling of her vocal bag of tricks: She chants, she reaches into her falsetto, she sings backing harmonies that range from Greek chorus to men’s choir. When the instrumentation is heavy-handed—canned synth strings, Law & Order basslines, over-the-top percussive flourishes—her voice marries the melodies.
Lennox approached the promotion of Diva as an ironic exploration of its title. “I’m singing about how people respond to the act of performing and also how I respond to it,” she told Billboard. The accompanying video album adds texture to her concept of a “diva who has seen better days.” Directed by Sophie Muller, who also worked on the video album for Eurythmics’ Savage, the 10 clips examine identity and beauty with an unwavering fixation on Lennox’s striking visage. “Why” opens on a barefaced Lennox with dampened hair, an almost jarring image after a career of wigs, face paint, and costumes. Then, with eyeshadow and feather boas, she gradually transforms herself into the titular diva, becoming barely recognizable beneath a massive feathered headdress. It’s a peek into the machinations of celebrity, the pains Lennox took to keep a mask between public perception and her own self-image. In the video for “Little Bird,” she appears as a ringmaster, extremely pregnant with her second daughter Tali and surrounded by look-alikes dressed as her personas from past music videos, from the Big Brother boss of 1983’s “Sweet Dreams” to the contemporary diva from “Why.” The women compete for the spotlight, crowding Lennox out of her own performance. It’s a bold metacommentary on both the visual iconography of her career and the media’s propensity for conflating the character onstage with the person beneath the costume.
Though many of Diva’s singles still resonate, it’s Lennox’s cynical, camp approach to celebrity culture that remains most futuristic and profound. From Lady Gaga’s concept of a “Fame Monster” to personas like Marina Diamandis’ Marina and the Diamonds, exploring the darker side of fame through exaggerated precautionary tales has become a well-trodden path for avant-pop stars. Even in the world of bubblegum smash hits, there are echoes of her influence: The miserable rich girl drowning in diamonds on “Money Can’t Buy It” shares a strange, sad kinship with the lonely star of Britney Spears’ “Lucky.” And thanks to a chance meeting via a shared manager, it was Lennox who encouraged the members of the Spice Girls to evolve their individual styles into the group’s now-iconic five distinct characters—Emma Bunton would be not just a cute blonde, but Baby Spice. In an ironic twist, Lennox helped to conceptualize one of the most hyper-commodified pop vehicles in recent history.
In a decade marked by the meteoric rise of prefab boy bands, the explosion and subsequent implosion of Britpop, and the tragic, paparazzi-fueled death of Princess Diana, Diva is a prophetic warning about the acceleration of fame. Even at the time of its release, Lennox recognized the dangers. “I don’t see an end to it,” she said of Madonna’s ascent at the time. “It’s a kind of power craving that I think is rather insatiable.… Are we supposed to admire power for its own sake?” In her eerily predictive manner, Lennox identified Ivana Trump as a bellwether for the growing influence wielded by, as she put it in 1992, “people famous for being famous.” Public recognition was no longer correlated to talent, she argued, but was instead fueled by the craving for power and control. The same MTV that drove Eurythmics’ success would soon pivot to fame-hungry reality programming: The Real World premiered the month after Diva’s release.
In a rare happy ending for the tabloids’ “tragic Annie,” Lennox was able to exit the endless carousel of celebrity. Though Diva immediately topped the UK album chart, she did not tour the record, instead taking time to care for her daughters and pursue anti-AIDS activism. Her records since then have been infrequent, never attempting to match the breakneck pace of Eurythmics. Many are cover albums, perhaps a subtle way to step into new personalities without excavating her own past selves. Lennox was keenly aware of what she called the “Faustian deal” between exposure and artistic fulfillment. “I can deal with it now,” she reasoned just after Diva’s release, “because I think I can jump off anytime.” Diva was the fitting beginning to a tactful denouement, a graceful and grandiose leap into a more private life.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | July 18, 2021 | 8 | 4f52415f-45bb-4225-8938-17271b34d0cc | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Dave Grohl's directorial debut, Sound City, pays tribute to the classic L.A. recording spot of the same name. For the soundtrack, he enlists musicians like Paul McCartney, Trent Reznor, Stevie Nicks, and Rick Springfield to cut an album at his studio. | Dave Grohl's directorial debut, Sound City, pays tribute to the classic L.A. recording spot of the same name. For the soundtrack, he enlists musicians like Paul McCartney, Trent Reznor, Stevie Nicks, and Rick Springfield to cut an album at his studio. | Dave Grohl: Sound City: Real to Reel OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17810-dave-grohl-sound-city-ost/ | Sound City: Real to Reel OST | About halfway during the time that elapsed between Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the release of the first Foo Fighters album, Dave Grohl made his first public, post-Nirvana showing in the most unlikely of places: On "Saturday Night Live", manning Tom Petty’s drum kit for a couple of weed-scented folk-rock jams from Petty's Wild Flowers release. But if the surprise cameo provided little indication of Grohl’s imminent future as the guitar-slinging, camera-ready leader of one of the last arena-rock bands left standing, it was the harbinger of another role he would grow to relish over the next two decades: that of a dutiful gatekeeper of classic-rock tradition. Grohl’s essentially the middle-man who helps the geezers look cool to the kids: He’s got an open-door policy for Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to join him onstage anytime; he’s got enough charm and charisma to coax the most reclusive living member of Led Zeppelin out of semi-retirement; and he’s always on hand to help Grammy Awards producers mitigate the encroaching influence of EDM. This sort of cross-generational appeal has made Grohl not just the nicest man in rock, but its Employee of the Month for nearly 20 years running.
And no doubt, he’s probably the only person who could have made Sound City happen. Grohl’s directorial debut pays tribute to the legendary-- and recently shuttered-- L.A. studio that produced Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 self-titled effort, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes and what seems like every other album in perpetual classic-rock radio rotation, not to mention alt-rock touchstones like Rage Against the Machine’s debut, Weezer’s Pinkerton, and, of course, Nirvana’s Nevermind. But if the impetus for the film is a certain they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to nostalgia, its accompanying soundtrack release-- also documented onscreen-- is a noble attempt to put the lie to that sentiment. Having purchased the facility’s hallowed Neve 8028 board and installed it at his own 606 Studios, the Foo Fighters frontman used his documentary as an occasion to gather various famed Sound City alumni together to create new music using an old-school tool.
However, “being friends with Dave Grohl” is not the most coherent unifying principle for a stand-alone album, given that his friends here include everyone from Stevie Nicks to Corey Taylor of Slipknot. And a mutual admiration for a bygone recording studio doesn’t provide much of a conceptual conceit to build a record around. Grohl, naturally, sounds the most invested in the cause: His epic showdown with Trent Reznor and Josh Homme on “Mantra” climaxes with a rallying cry (“And all of this will never be the same”) that essentially reads as an indictment against the technological and economic shifts that drove the studio out of business. But other artists, like the Black Rebel Motorcycle dudes on “Heaven and All”, simply show up as if they were cutting their own album. With its hit-and-miss deviations in tone and quality, Real to Reel feels less like a tribute to a studio that created some of the greatest albums of all time, and more like an approximation of a typical Active Rock Radio playlist.
The album works best when embracing the sheer absurdity of its ad-hoc supergroup combinations. Back in 1981, Rick Springfield and Lee Ving (of L.A. hardcore heretics Fear) represented the polar opposites of the rock-frontman ideal. Here, we find them on back-to-back tracks leading various Foo Fighters with equal amounts of bravado and self-deprecation. Springfield’s “The Man That Never Was” makes for a cheeky comment on his own faded celebrity, while Ving’s berserker turn on “Your Wife Is Calling” feeds on the neuroses of the domesticated aging punk. But the 62-year-old Ving is neither the oldest nor most impetuous guest on hand here: After making its surprise debut at last December’s Hurricane Sandy tribute concert, Paul McCartney’s “Cut Me Some Slack”-- which sees the former Beatle backed by the surviving members of Nirvana-- still excites with its “Helter Skelter”-scaled bombast, hoarse-throat howls, and fierce double-timed outro. It’s the best representation of Grohl’s intent for his Sound City mission, to recapture some of the raw spontaneity that’s been lost in an era where so many recordings are clicked and cut with clinical precision.
It’s too bad that many of the other collaborations here feel as generic and laborious as a ProTools tutorial. Grohl, Masters of Reality’s Chris Goss, and half of Rage Against the Machine team up for “Time Slowing Down”, which comes off like a rejected Stone Temple Pilots audition for The Crow soundtrack; “From Can to Can’t”, meanwhile, squanders the power-pop chops of Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen and desert-burrowing bottom end of Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder on a plodding post-grunge power ballad belted with clenched-neck earnestness by Corey Taylor. But it’s the date with Stevie Nicks that feels like Real to Reel’s biggest missed opportunity: “You Can’t Fix This” is a forced attempt to update the witchy-woman archetype of “Rhiannon”, but its heavy-handed lyrics about dancing with devils forsake mysticism for melodrama. And yet, even Real to Reel’s failures are a testament to the greatness of Sound City Studios-- in that they prove it takes more than the right equipment, the right people, and good intentions to recreate the magic of what once was. | 2013-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Roswell | March 13, 2013 | 5.3 | 4f5a50d0-87fa-4d74-996e-a5ffdcc79cdb | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The second album of improvisational jazz from Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz tones down the bluster, stretching out in slow-moving pieces that rely heavily on space. | The second album of improvisational jazz from Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz tones down the bluster, stretching out in slow-moving pieces that rely heavily on space. | Baldi/Gerycz Duo: After Commodore Perry Service Plaza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baldi-gerycz-duo-after-commodore-perry-service-plaza/ | After Commodore Perry Service Plaza | No one files Cloud Nothings under jazz. Their moments of spontaneity are rare, and even their occasional jams are contained within tightly structured, reliably hooky rock songs. Though it’s not immediately apparent from their best-known work, both Cloud Nothings guitarist and singer-songwriter Dylan Baldi and drummer Jayson Gerycz have experience with the avant garde. Gerycz has been consistently active in noise circles with several abstract side projects; Baldi came to punk as an avid free jazz listener, searching for a parallel to the extremes he first heard in the holy cacophony of Pharoah Sanders. As Baldi/Gerycz Duo, the longtime collaborators tap directly into their more esoteric roots, abandoning structure with improvised duets consisting of just saxophone and percussion.
After Commodore Perry Service Plaza is the second album of Baldi/Gerycz Duo’s live room improvisations, released just six months after their first, Blessed Repair. The debut took cues from high-energy ’60s and ’70s free jazz, at times sounding like a punk approximation of Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe’s uncontainable 1973 classic Duo Exchange. After Commodore Perry Service Plaza tones down the bluster considerably, stretching out in slow-moving pieces that rely heavily on space.
The 18-minute suite “Hermit Thrush/Vat of Oil” cycles through lulls, allowing long, careful tones from Baldi’s alto sax and almost imperceptible cymbal splashes to break into short-lived swells of energy that recede before gaining momentum. “Frog Congress at Dawn” pares back to muted toms, brushed bells, and auxiliary percussion instruments that sound more rustled than played, chattering back and forth with intermittent sax figures or breathy rasps. Hovering in a soft emptiness, the duo respond to each other’s restrained gestures with contemplative murmurs. When they reach a point where the song could predictably build or resolve, they instead opt to keep pushing forward. The album’s first half hour is a sprawl of soft-spoken tangents that unfold like a glassy-eyed conversation hours into an overnight drive.
The third and final track, “The Holy Retrievers (In Transit),” shatters the calm with high-speed drum rolls that tumble in tandem with clusters of overblown notes. The playing is volatile, but as focused as the more subdued stretches. Even at high velocity, the pair maintain enough control to keep the frenzied blur from devolving into a mindless freakout.
Baldi and Gerycz’s jazz improv may look unrecognizable beside their comparatively accessible indie rock, but both extend from the same DIY impulse. Neither player has any traditional jazz training beyond high school band, and their raw, self-taught style depends more on intuition and communication than technical mastery. The most amorphous corridors of After Commodore Perry Service Plaza move erratically, lingering on certain passages until they fray and crumble. It’s a groggy, confused take on the spiritual upheaval of free jazz, imbued with the sullen atmosphere of a sparsely attended noise gig. If their improvisatory dialogue sometimes feels seasick, Baldi and Gerycz keep it afloat through attentive listening. Their years of playing together have created an attunement that bonds their minimal freeform, which reaches its sharpest clarity in expanses so slight they seem to be on the verge of dissolution.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental | American Dreams | January 6, 2021 | 7.1 | 4f5d4c2a-3a8a-4490-8e85-3a143fa870c6 | Fred Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/fred-thomas/ | |
On his debut EP as a solo artist, the jazz musician and composer weaves various wind instruments through eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy. | On his debut EP as a solo artist, the jazz musician and composer weaves various wind instruments through eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy. | Shabaka: Afrikan Culture EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabaka-afrikan-culture-ep/ | Afrikan Culture EP | A few years ago, while doing research for a story, I found some archives detailing South Carolina’s “Negro Code,” a 17th-century relic that forbade enslaved Africans from playing or owning horns, drums, loud instruments and any others that could give “sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.” Whether it’s the sounds of mbira sharply knocking against the balancing rocks in Zimbabwe, a kora ringing through the harmattan breeze in Mali, or drums signaling the start of a rebellion in Palmares, African instruments have a life that reverberates across frontiers. Shabaka Hutchings—bandleader of several acclaimed groups including Sons of Kemet—believes in the galvanizing capacity of African instruments that served to unnerve white inhabitants in the Carolinas, and more so, he is drawn to their ability to soften and comfort. On Afrikan Culture, his debut EP as a solo artist, Hutchings weaves eight tracks that thrum with kinetic energy, submerging listeners into an experience that draws them inward as he simultaneously steps into the role of a solitary performer.
From the opening notes of “Black meditation,” Hutchings maps out the compulsions of the EP—an impatient need to tap into every undiscovered melody. While playing the shakuhachi (a Japanese bamboo flute) he lulls listeners with low and heavy notes. It’s in the surrounding sounds—lightly tingling bells and low-key horns—that Hutchings compels his audience to experience the textures and scents of the places that their minds fall into when they are at peace. On “Call it a European Paradox,” the kora with its hollowed, calabash interior makes every string land like it’s coming from the bottom of a well where the acoustics can induce envy, as easily as they could be inaudible. It takes a particular kind of skill to make the sounds hit as lightly as they do, without losing that unmistakable tension that gives the instrument its solid heart.
Hutchings shared a little about the creative process for the EP, centering the explorations that led him to create an album that produces “a forest of sound where melodies and rhythms float in space and emerge in glimpses.” This fleeting presence is made clear on “Memories don’t live like people do,” a skipping stone’s attempt to crystallize precious moments into a long-lasting escape. Slightly over one minute long, the shakuhachi builds and recedes, falling in and out of step as quickly as memories fade, before it suddenly drops into silence. You are left wondering what the melodies were before they fall off, and you’ll replay over and over, trying to find the note that will become the memory. “The dimensions of subtle awareness” finds Hutchings sitting with mbira—the instrument known among Zimbabwe’s Shona people to summon the ancestors—and deliver messages, warnings, and insight from lost ones. Zimbabwean composers such as Stella Chiweshe, the band Mbira dzeNharira, and the late singer-songwriter Chiwoniso Maraira have leaned on the instrument for its clarity and layers, concealed between chiming metal twines. Hutchings hums along with it, a vocal arrangement you could miss tucked between the ever-present shakuhachi.
It’s not an album that struggles, but it does lag, a strange occurrence for a project that mostly rests on a track’s ability to rearrange the mundane, and intertwine with a listener’s own desire to self-soothe. And maybe that’s where the uncertainty comes because when you think you are about to let out a scream, the melody switches and pulls your body back into stasis. Often it’s in the ways our bodies expel distress that our minds can quieten, and Hutchings doesn’t offer enough room to physically contort oneself back into shape. “Explore inner space” could have been that genesis, but for over six minutes, the flutes, although captivating, are an anchor keeping us in place and ultimately stuck.
To call “Rebirth” the closer would be a misnomer because Hutchings is aware that he is beginning a different course with this EP, and aligning his musicality with something far less tangible than an orchestra—he wants to be a part of your space, transmitting into your private silence. Much like noted peer and fellow multi-instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding did on last year’s release, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, this is an EP of aural inscriptions meant to be as fluid as memory, with the certainty of a lived past. There are wicked things afoot in African instruments—wickedly vivid, and mutable. With Afrikan Culture Hutchings is coaxing introspection while urging us to be less cautious and follow the memories. Even if they last just a second. | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | May 26, 2022 | 7.4 | 4f5d50a9-cdc8-4609-b30d-394cb41bad74 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
After a pop-oriented push on 2012’s One Second of Love, Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez reclaims the murky, DIY vision of her Altered Zones-era releases. | After a pop-oriented push on 2012’s One Second of Love, Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez reclaims the murky, DIY vision of her Altered Zones-era releases. | Nite Jewel: Liquid Cool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21974-liquid-cool/ | Liquid Cool | As music fans, we're accustomed to reading about epic clashes between artists and major-label record execs. But even musicians on smaller labels can run into grievances. For Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez, her disillusioning run came not from Sony or Warner Music or any of their many wholly owned subsidiaries, but from the indie hub Secretly Canadian—hardly the kind of greedy corporate fat cats you picture artists duct-tapping their mouths in protest over. As Gonzalez tells it, though, Secretly Canadian pushed her in a pop direction she was never quite comfortable with for Nite Jewel’s 2012 One Second of Love, forcing collaborators on her and pressuring her to cede the very control she built her career around.
“They were making the process feel toxic because they were putting too much pressure on me to create something that, I didn’t really even know what they wanted me to do, because their version of pop is so unusually different than mine,” Gonzalez explained in an interview. “It’s like, how do you come to terms with the fact that you can do something better yourself, and you’re also not giving money or rights to a basically unknown entity of like, Midwestern bros?”
One Second of Love was good enough for what it was, yet it felt like a half-measure—not quite a complete enough embrace of contemporary pop to land her real radio play, but enough of a departure that her songs lost the rough edges and fragile intimacy that gave her early work its intrigue. (It didn’t flatter the album any that it arrived right after Grimes had made a similar transition from hermetic electro to sugary pop on her own terms, without compromising any of her individualistic spirit.) And so on Liquid Cool, Gonzalez effectively declares a mulligan. Recorded at her own pace, on her own property and for her own imprint, the album undoes its predecessor’s makeover and reclaims the murky, DIY vision of Nite Jewel’s Altered Zones-era releases.
If all that makes Liquid Cool sound reactionary, it can be, especially in its guarded opening stretch, which seems designed to weed out anybody hoping for another fix of One Second’s breezy, R&B melodies. The album’s vaporous opening tracks are almost pointedly light on hooks, but there are rewards for listeners who stick it out. A bittersweet portrait of digital infatuation, “Kiss the Screen” plays like a demo of a would-be hit, and even with its modest production it’s catchier than anything on One Second. Gonzalez delivers it with the enthusiasm of a John Hughes character singing Madonna into a hairbrush.
Nothing else on the record is nearly so personable, but the frolicsome “Over the Weekend” and swooning, house-informed “Boo Hoo” are similarly light on their feet. For an album that begins in such a defensive posture, it ultimately goes down easy. The sequencing gives it a nice little arc, too: it opens hesitantly, but gradually warms up and comes out of its shell before returning to seclusion on the wistful closer “All My Life.”
Liquid Cool’s backstory makes it hard not to root for the album. How inspiring would it be if, newly emancipated from her overbearing label, Gonzalez went on to record her Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a triumph that proves how musicians are better when left to chase their own muses? Gonzalez never sets her sights that high, though. Instead, Liquid Cool is just another likable if unexceptional lo-fi electro-pop record. But it’s hers, and that counts for something. | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Gloriette | June 16, 2016 | 6.2 | 4f5f64f5-0ee8-4230-9e77-2f5648b93c06 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
One month after releasing 7G, the PC Music founder refines his synthesis of futurist pop and experimental electronic music, flirting with cerebral schmaltz and information overload. | One month after releasing 7G, the PC Music founder refines his synthesis of futurist pop and experimental electronic music, flirting with cerebral schmaltz and information overload. | A. G. Cook: Apple | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ag-cook-apple/ | Apple | PC Music founder A. G. Cook settled on Apple as an album title, he says, because the word evokes so many things: the eponymous tech company (which, historically, has been regarded as the opposite of the Windows-based personal computer, or “PC”); the Beatles’ record label, where the group could stretch their legs and play with genre; the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s indulgence from the tree of knowledge is an apt metaphor for Cook’s output. Like most things with Cook’s name on it, Apple—his second album this year, following last month’s 7G, a seven-disc collection of sketches and experiments—is a staggering and potent amalgamation of numerous genre influences, but it also has moments of information overload, where its boundarylessness becomes too much.
The crunchy slow jam “Lifeline” makes a strong case for Cook’s alchemical formula. He imbues pop-punk earnestness with the sweeping scope of an ’80s power ballad, an elemental pairing that could easily be saccharine or cloying, and then offsets them with static and mutating vocals, idiosyncratic touches that keep Cook straddling the fence between full-on pop and genre-agnostic experimentalism. “Beautiful Superstar” similarly displays a kind of softness that, on an intuitive level, is almost nauseating. Yet it is so devoid of irony, sincere in its performance, and tight in its production that it becomes irresistible.
Cook’s cerebral schmaltz comes into sharp relief on the album’s brassier songs. “Xxoplex” has harsh Eurodance elements and PC Music’s signature chipmunk whoops, while the maudlin “Animals” sounds like it could have come from Kanye’s Yeezus moodboard. The polarity apparent at each turn on Apple shows how deftly Cook sees the underlying kinships between disparate sounds and makes them work harmoniously together. “Haunted” is probably the best example: Restrained acoustic guitar morphs into synthy Siren calls that sound almost like emergency sirens by the end. But if these formal tricks are meant to be thought-provoking, some of those thoughts boil down to, Wait, why is this happening?
This could also just be PC Music’s curse. Long pegged as the future of pop, they’ve been around for almost a decade, yet their work still urges deconstruction, which raises the question: Are we there yet?
But Cook and PC Music have long banked on pop’s ineffability. The style has no dependable definition, Cook recently told the New York Times, beyond “packaging it to be approachable or consumable.” Today, the form is more amorphous than ever: Late rappers like Lil Peep and Juice WRLD were more avid students of pop-punk than your average 2005 high-school garage band, and artists like Deb Never and Billie Eilish embrace a singer-songwriter ethos while traversing in contemporary rap themes and melodies. Genrelessness abounds, but Cook’s music has nothing to do with restoring the monoculture. His work is confounding and sometimes irritating, but totally singular to his mind. This can’t be the future of pop; no one else could do what he does, even if they tried.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PC Music | September 24, 2020 | 7.5 | 4f5f95c5-5667-45ba-be7a-7430d4e0dd08 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
Rivers Cuomo toys with Renaissance Faire shtick on the first of four planned EPs inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. | Rivers Cuomo toys with Renaissance Faire shtick on the first of four planned EPs inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. | Weezer: SZNZ: Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weezer-sznz-spring/ | SZNZ: Spring | SZNZ: Spring appeared on the vernal equinox, a Sunday; it is the first of four EPs inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons that Weezer plan to release throughout the year. It’s a fitting gambit for Rivers Cuomo, and not only because The Four Seasons might be considered The Blue Album of Baroque music. The alt-rock icon who once invoked Stravinsky to justify returning to Harvard to learn computer science has always seen himself as a composer who happens to be a KISS fan. Cuomo has yet to go full Gesamtkunstwerk, but on SZNZ, he teases the collision of his opposing interests: After making his tribute to Pet Sounds with last year’s OK Human, why not make his own Der Ring des Nibelungen? Weezer have also found new life on TikTok; why not convert the zoomers to LARPing? Spring is the happy compromise, one that should be almost critic-proof: This is a beloved band with a multi-generational fanbase that’s down for anything Cuomo is selling, even out of morbid curiosity. Maybe Cuomo with elf ears and a creepy Easter bunny playing mandolin behind him are exactly what Weezer fans want now. So SZNZ: Spring may be the Weezer album we deserve, but not only is it not very good; it’s also not good in a way that’s new for Weezer.
On “Opening Night,” Cuomo interpolates the famous allegro melody of Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, but that’s about the extent of the EP’s classical heft: Cuomo singing the first 10 seconds of “La primavera” and a clever Brian Bell guitar solo on “Opening Night” are the only Vivaldi we get on the entire EP. From there, it’s Weezer as usual, now playing more relaxed tempos and no songs about California. But whereas all the fun and loud riffs from last year’s Van Weezer were able to hide the usual Weezer lyrical speedbumps, there’s a new feeling of defrosting on Spring that leaves the band exposed; this might be the Weezer release with the least guitar distortion. Producers Jake Sinclair and Suzy Shinn are back from OK Human, now joined by Phoebe Bridgers collaborator (and John Williams’ grandson) Ethan Gruska, and it’s unclear if this group of professionals was tasked to make this defrosting to honor Vivaldi, or just to make the Shakespeare in this 51-year-old’s mind relatable to 14-year-olds.
What we get from all these professionals is a song like “Angels on Vacation,” where the guitars sound like they were recorded in the bathtub of a Cialis commercial. Or “Garden of Eden,” which is about as bucolic as Shrek the Third. Or “The Sound of Drums,” where the band recreates an imaginary Renaissance festival, or “All This Love,” where Cuomo seems to have stolen the coconuts from Monty Python and the Holy Grail for a chorus that sounds more like a parody of music than anything the Pythons ever did. If this EP really does channel springtime, it’s the whiplash of expecting warmer weather only to be hit again with yet more winter. For anyone still invested in alternative rock, listening to Spring might also evoke fellow Hella Mega tourmates Green Day and their own cycle, 2012’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tré! trilogy, a collection of not terribly written songs magically transformed into terrible music. This is where SZNZ enters new territory. Unlike the expensive-sounding and often pretty OK Human—and a rarity for any proper Weezer release—SZNZ sounds cheap. These are the same Weezer songs we’ve been hearing for decades, and Pacific Daydream is still probably their worst release, yet Spring is proof that there is a difference between songs and recordings, and this is easily their worst collection of recordings ever. In Cuomo’s mind, Vivaldi sounds like GarageBand. It sucks.
Yet poorly recorded Weezer is still major-label alt-rock juggernaut Weezer. Cuomo can sneeze out hooks like no other, and the catchy melodies throughout “A Little Bit of Love” make it the right choice for a single. It’s the one song that could live on another late-career Weezer LP and the only other moment that justifies the EP’s Renaissance theme (in this case, thanks to a steady mandolin), not to mention the only place you can actually feel Scott Shriner’s bass. That’s how dispiriting this EP is; just hearing the bass is a highlight. Still, every Weezer release has at least one “OK, fine” moment, and this is it. The EP also ends on a hopeful note. The conflicting tempos and dynamics of “Wild at Heart” recall the best of The Red Album; it feels like five songs are fighting for attention, with some classic Weezer metal riffs fighting off Pat Wilson’s energized drums to the very end. It’s a thrilling moment of weirdness that has nothing to do with the theme of the EP, and it once again reminds us that Cuomo can still be compelling when he wants to. Hopefully, this weirdness will reappear this summer, and these songs will make more sense when taken with all of SZNZ.
In a recent interview with NPR, Cuomo said that OK Human and SZNZ marked his shift from writing songs on guitar to piano. None of these songs feel any less guitar-driven than past Weezer songs, but what’s notable is what Cuomo says later: that 90% of SZNZ was written during lockdown, with the remaining work now recording and producing the remaining EPs on tight deadlines. That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it. | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crush | March 29, 2022 | 4.4 | 4f65b92d-bb19-4a79-b6d4-6b5c800a74ba | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
The Irish-Filipino singer’s elegant new mixtape blends soulful grooves with sci-fi dreaminess. | The Irish-Filipino singer’s elegant new mixtape blends soulful grooves with sci-fi dreaminess. | Uly: 1822.demos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/uly-1822demos/ | 1822.demos | The stylistic son of Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and Maxwell, rising funkster Uly (né Rafino Murphy) invokes the progressive soul music of ‘70s fusion mavericks and their ‘90s neo-soul cubs. His vintage vision includes soft guitar licks, soulful trumpet play, basslines turned right up, snare drums that hit dry and hard, and a falsetto that would make D’Angelo’s heart flutter. These velvety tunes, with all their nostalgic production goodness, feel like placing a grainy, desaturated Instagram filter onto your field of vision.
The Irish-Filipino singer and multi-instrumentalist, who is based in Dublin, has recently made an impression thanks to placements in the popular TV adaptations of two Sally Rooney novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends. The extra attention follows his work in the alt-jazz trio INNRSPACE, close collaborations with the rapper Nealo, and a series of short-form solo releases, including the 2020 EP if you were a day, you’d be sunday (songs to go walking to), plus a slew of singles and loosies. The title of his latest release, 1822.demos, suggests something half-baked, like a bunch of unloved WAV files sitting on his desktop. But at 12 tracks, this is both Uly’s longest and most fully-formed project yet—a more complete glimpse at his R&B alchemy.
The project begins with an immersion into Uly’s kaleidoscopic universe, putting his eclectic sensibility on full display. “king smooch returns (pt. I-III)” chronicles a smooth loverman’s return to an old part of town a decade after his disappearance. The song is split into three consecutive arrangements, each distinct: First, there is a blast of salacious funk, then a head-bobbing beat, and finally, a dusky slice of lounge jazz distinguished by Uly’s supple horn, which boasts the sleek aura of French nouvelle vague cinema. Mostly, 1822.demos is tender and romantic. “cold mountain air” is an intoxicating, dimly lit ballad. Uly’s voice is warm and conversational, as though he’s making pillow talk under the glow of lava lamps; a massive guitar solo towards the end of the track sends it skyward, recalling Prince’s “Shhhh” in particular. Uly isn’t a straight-up retro revivalist, though: “tryin’” contorts vocals and piano loop into a hip-hop instrumental that would appeal to the odd proclivities of New York rapper MIKE.
The music has a psychotropic streak that complements Uly’s existential queries. “Lately I’ve been thinking about the stars/And how I’ll never get to reach them,” he repeats on “white dog.” The single “emperor’s new groove (for klara)” re-envisions Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, with Uly adopting the perspective of a sentient android that tries to grasp human conceptions of compassion and love. “Just one minute, I can feel something surging through my body,” he sings, the wondrous sense of new, ineffable emotions swirling in his spider web-delicate voice. Then there’s “slow waltz on the moon,” a duet with singer Chi Chi. It depicts two astronaut lovers trapped in the emptiness of space, knowing that being physically intimate would mean their death. With its soothing melodies, spacious piano chords, and a distant electric guitar, you can almost picture the couple looking into each other’s eyes through the visors of their pressurized helmets, slowly spinning hand-in-hand in grand circles on the lunar hemisphere.
The connection between 1822.demos’ impressionistic psych instrumentation and sci-fi lyrics is a striking departure from the archetypal subject matter you find in soul music. Here, Uly is synthesizing his broad stylistic influences into a cohesive vision. 1822.demos is an elegant, cosmic collection that buttons up the first phase of his solo career. Anyone searching for old spirits—especially the kind dedicated to bygone eras of funk and soul—can get behind him. Uly may be a child of the greatest traditions, but he’s also etching out his own corner. | 2023-03-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | March 17, 2023 | 7.4 | 4f666651-509f-4fe9-bcbf-f4d7f758e324 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
John Darnielle’s band returns to visceral guitar-rock directness for a collection of songs that embrace and humanize the familiar tropes of action cinema. | John Darnielle’s band returns to visceral guitar-rock directness for a collection of songs that embrace and humanize the familiar tropes of action cinema. | The Mountain Goats: Bleed Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-mountain-goats-bleed-out/ | Bleed Out | As anyone who’s seen The Raid will tell you, there’s purity in the brutal simplicity of action movies. There are good guys and bad guys; they try to shoot and/or beat the shit out of each other; ultimately, one side prevails. That black-and-white milieu might seem an odd fit for the pen of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, whose writing tends to leave room for pesky complications like subtlety, nuance, and omnidirectional empathy. But on Bleed Out, his new collection of songs inspired by a pandemic spent devouring classic action films, Darnielle both humanizes and embraces the familiar tropes of action cinema. He indulges in the escapist fantasy that action movies offer, while taking the real cost of living like one of their heroes all too seriously.
Each song on Bleed Out unfolds like an action epic in miniature, and although the scenarios depicted run the gamut from chase sequences to hostage situations, the main throughline is a single-minded pursuit of exacting vengeance from one’s foes. “I'm doing this for revenge,” Darnielle brays in his trademark yawp on the chorus of opening track “Training Montage,” succinctly capturing the motivation that drives the death-defying stunts of protagonists like Keanu Reeves’ John Wick and Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey. It feels as though half of the lyrics come in the form of threats of grievous bodily harm: "I'm going to leave a mark on you"; "I'm going to make you suffer”; "I'm coming to swat you down like flies."
Darnielle has written song cycles about dysfunctional married couples, Dungeons & Dragons, and the plight of the aging California goth. More than anything else in their catalog, Bleed Out resembles the Mountain Goats’ 2015 pro-wrestling album Beat the Champ. Like wrestling, action movies are a form of violent escapism that often tell elemental stories of good versus evil. But where Beat the Champ delved into the personal lives and tribulations of the men and women who dedicate their lives to wrestling, Bleed Out never really breaks kayfabe. It’s not about actors playing action movie protagonists; it’s about honest-to-god vigilantes in desperate life-or-death situations, cliches dragged from make-believe to cold, hard reality by the specificity of Darnielle’s songwriting.
Those urgent stakes are reflected in the album’s sound. Since the early days of John Darnielle yelling into an old Panasonic boombox, the Mountain Goats have evolved into a tight, road-tested quartet. Their music has grown beyond its lo-fi roots to become progressively lusher and more expansive, with session players brought in to add color and texture through organs, horns, and strings. Bleed Out, by contrast, limits the personnel to the band’s core members plus key addition Alicia Bognanno of Bully, who produces and plays guitar. Shepherded by Bognanno, Bleed Out is Darnielle’s most immediate and focused full-band album in years, with the stylistic flourishes of latter-day Mountain Goats jettisoned in favor of a visceral guitar-rock directness that hits like a fist to the face.
As in the action flicks it draws from, Bleed Out succeeds on a pure popcorn entertainment level. Envisioned by Darnielle as an album of “uptempo jams,” it’s full of hurtling drums, sparkling hooks, and anthemic choruses, and it’s easy to imagine songs like “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome” becoming fan-favorite sing-alongs when performed live. The trick of series like Rambo or Death Wish, both referenced in the deceptively poppy “First Blood,” is making a toxic power fantasy seem badass and fun. That’s the same trick that Darnielle plays on Bleed Out, rendering his narrators’ doomed quest for bloody revenge as crowd-pleasing, fist-pumping power-pop that’s all too easy to get swept up in.
Darnielle doesn’t let up on the gas until the album’s eponymous closing track, a dreamy reflection from a man slowly bleeding out on the ground: “There won’t be any words of wisdom from me/Just a lake of blood for all the world to see.” Darnielle, like most sane human beings, knows that seeking revenge is ultimately pointless—that’s exactly why it’s so alluring. “You never learn to tell the difference between/The probable projections and the best parts of the dream/The fragments that stick with you, the ones you really feel/Those parts aren’t real,” he sings on “Extraction Point.” But there’s real catharsis in pretend violence, in living out fantasies of meting out justice without any consequences. Bleed Out deconstructs the tropes of action movies just as it lovingly recreates them, letting us have our cake and bludgeon our enemies to death with it too. | 2022-08-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 23, 2022 | 7.6 | 4f6acecc-e32e-411f-85c1-bf1de8e6481c | Peter Helman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-helman/ | |
The Pet Shop Boys have persisted long enough that their return to club music feels calmly liberated, without any grasping for pop hits. On their latest, Super, they recall their own past with trademark arch wit. | The Pet Shop Boys have persisted long enough that their return to club music feels calmly liberated, without any grasping for pop hits. On their latest, Super, they recall their own past with trademark arch wit. | Pet Shop Boys: Super | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21576-super/ | Super | "I’ve been a teenager since before you were born," Neil Tennant sang on "Young Offender" 23 years ago, a sigh of bravado. The Pet Shop Boys have persisted long enough that their return to club music feels calmly liberated, without any grasping for pop hits—why bother, when EDM already reclaimed that territory? They stood very still while ears craned towards them. 2012’s Elysium had the detachment of a wet stamp, but Electric, recorded with producer Stuart Price, pushed the beats ardently uptempo, the bass leaping between octaves. Electric’s ready-for-the-weekend anthem saw Tennant asking his lover to stay until the end of it, the flirtatious chimes marking time.
The second entry in a planned trilogy produced by Price, Super elaborates and intensifies Electric’s approach: Louder, brighter, more. It doesn’t have the sustained arc of that album, but Price specializes in renovating house and disco, modernizing with care, and his small details still beguile. Amidst the mounting noise of "Inner Sanctum," a single piano note falls as if to the bottom of the ocean. The synths bounce like color through glass. Familiar Pet Shop Boys ideas or tricks appear faintly beneath it all, like they've attacked a palimpsest with crayons: "Happiness" begins as attenuated techno, and then, like "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk," Tennant lays down what might be a country singer’s guide vocal.
These oversaturated shades spruce up a few clichés. "Burn" has a premise older than disco itself (this club will be kindling for our desire), but it plays out as romantic pomp, Tennant’s voice turning hushed and androgynous: "It feels so good, it feels so good, it feels so good." The Boys trusted Price enough to leave several tracks nearly instrumental, but you can sense their editorial hand slackening a little—Super is actually shorter than Electric, yet it runs three songs longer. "Sad Robot World" is an inadvertent Kraftwerk parody; despite the usual nuance ("That’s how you are, or have to be"), "Twenty-something" references smartphones, startups, and "trending ideas" as if practicing a venture-capital pitch.
Super’s best songs are no more subtle, but their noise produces strange contrasts. "The Dictator Decides" imagines an idle demagogue yearning to get strung up by his heels, Morrissey ghosting for Bashar Assad. "Will someone please say the unsayable?" Tennant pleads. "Will someone please tell me I’m wrong? I live every day like a sad beast of prey, for I have to appear to be strong." As he frets over secret prison facilities, the drumbeat marches to swiveling jackboots and distant gunfire. "I’d rather that you didn’t shoot me / But I’d quite understand if you did," he sings, subsuming violence under fine manners in a distinctly English manner. Syria’s ruined borders, after all, were imposed in the first place by a diplomatic baronet.
A Pet Shop Boys narrator is so often the bereft observer: Like Carly Rae Jepsen's characters, they tremble as they ache. "The Pop Kids" distends that feeling back across time, describing two friends who shared dances, favorites, and a passion neither could fully acknowledge. Tennant breathes "Ohhh, I like it here," the sound of someone glancing around and knowing, with wanton contentment, that they would rather be nowhere else. As ’90s house piano swells each chorus, the characters might be thrilling to some Behaviour remix—the Pet Shop Boys are distantly recalling their own past too, memories in a stranger’s dream. | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | x2 | April 4, 2016 | 6.9 | 4f6f0235-f1c1-4725-a3bd-9c297990687c | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | null |
Working with producer Jason Lytle, formerly of the band Grandaddy, Ben Bridwell has crafted his best album in nearly a decade, but problems still remain. | Working with producer Jason Lytle, formerly of the band Grandaddy, Ben Bridwell has crafted his best album in nearly a decade, but problems still remain. | Band of Horses: Why Are You OK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21995-why-are-you-ok/ | Why Are You OK | Why Are You OK? doesn’t sound much like Poco or .38 Special, so longtime fans are likely to hear it as Band of Horses’ best work in nearly a decade on general principle. Don’t assume they’re the majority: Mirage Rock was unfortunate truth-in-advertising for Band of Horses’ ultimate devolution into platitudinal fairground music, but it was still favorably reviewed, debuting at No. 13 on Billboard with even greater success in Europe. While Ben Bridwell may have been disappointed over Mirage Rock’s inability to please everyone, it offers an opportunity whereby Why Are You OK? can somehow sound like an edgy rebranding: even if this album doesn’t sound much like “The Funeral,” Bridwell is at least willing to acknowledge that Band of Horses was once a beloved indie rock band.
So the optics are better this time around. Band of Horses partnered up with Rick Rubin’s label and the production has changed hands from someone responsible for the first couple of Steve Miller and Eagles records to the dude behind The Sophtware Slump**. Whether the partnership with Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle is inspired or productive, it’s at least new, which is just as good. While Why Are You OK? lacks the specific sense of place that Seattle and South Carolina embedded in their first two LPs, “Broken Household Appliance National Forest” is a more interesting setting for the same old Band of Horses songs than the 4 p.m. slot at whatever festival still focuses on guitar music.
Lytle’s fingerprints are all over Why Are You OK?, and this is the closest thing you’re going to get to a Grandaddy record without actual Grandaddy: the seven-minute, prog odyssey “Dull Times/Moon” could be heard as Bridwell’s attempt at an “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot”-style opening gauntlet and nearly every open space thereafter is crammed with analog, squelchy synthesizers, ticky-tack drum machines and voicemail messages.
But Lytle’s presence ultimately serves as a reminder of what you miss about Grandaddy rather than Band of Horses. The quirks are try-hard in a way that makes Why Are You OK? unfavorably compare to the recent triumphs in capricious, quasi-indie southern rock. Whereas My Morning Jacket’s*The Waterfall *and Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color felt like the work of songwriters who can upscale their eccentricities to an arena setting, Bridwell’s the inverse—these are populist, mundane songs that tack on their idiosyncrasies in post-production like Instagram filters.
The superficially pleasant aspects of Band of Horses have not yet abandoned them: Bridwell’s unorthodox enunciation and convivial persona are immediately identifiable, and it’s no longer necessary to compare him to any number of high lonesome indie types. And when Why Are You OK? charms, it does so in the humble, disarming manner that's come to be expected. “In a Drawer” fully commits to its aw-shucks nostalgia by having J Mascis pop in for the chorus in a welcome, well-timed “sitcom neighbor” sort of way. When Bridwell writes a song that’s meant to be bashfully beautiful, he gets there (“Whatever, Wherever,” “Lying Under Oak”), and when Band of Horses try to rock out, they succeed and do so functionally.
Bridwell's plainspoken lyricism can still be effective. Amidst the bong-loaded ambience of “Dull Times,” he tries to talk his way through writer’s block and he spends the duration of Why Are You OK? creating domestic still lives—when he sings about sitting on a bearskin rug listening to grandpa, or getting drunk or just sitting on the porch killing time, those songs are about just that. Elsewhere, he’s clutching knives in his sleep, screaming so loud upon awakening that he’s worried the cops will come. He later admits, “Getting me arrested was the strangest way to show me that you’re mine/But it saved my life,” and all of the above is presented with the same genial, arms-around-shoulder amity of rock songs that could be heard within any bar or drive-time playlist between Band of Skulls and Kings of Leon.
Then again, maybe that’s proof of a low-key genius at work here. Much of Why Are You OK? was inspired by Bridwell’s experience as a father of four—recording all night and taking his kids to school looking like the “fucking scariest dad.” Fatherhood teaches some to put their own problems aside and recognize what’s really important when other people are depending on you. That’s great parenting, not necessarily great artistry, and the title of Why Are You OK? becomes as unintentionally truthful as that of Mirage Rock. Every darker, weirder impulse got glossed over while the music gives an agreeable shrug. | 2016-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | June 14, 2016 | 6 | 4f72553c-5452-47c2-8f44-14a48db25971 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Displaying an atmospheric sensibility reflecting her soundtrack work for fashion campaigns and short films, the UK producer balances ’80s-inspired synth epics and contemporary, club-adjacent sounds. | Displaying an atmospheric sensibility reflecting her soundtrack work for fashion campaigns and short films, the UK producer balances ’80s-inspired synth epics and contemporary, club-adjacent sounds. | E.M.M.A.: Indigo Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emma-indigo-dream/ | Indigo Dream | Depending on your perspective, indigo can be the first or the last stripe of the rainbow: either the darkness into which all color melts, or the starting point from which the entire spectrum unfolds. London-via-Merseyside producer E.M.M.A. shifts back and forth between these viewpoints on Indigo Dream, where widescreen ’80s excess—all neon pinks, retro-wave fonts, and cocaine euphoria—runs into moody, intricate atmospheres reminiscent of the soundtracks for indie video games like Wilmot’s Warehouse, Limbo, and Monument Valley.
In the years since her first LP, 2013’s Blue Gardens, E.M.M.A. has turned to soundtracking campaigns for fashion houses including Gucci and Chanel, as well as scoring a clutch of short films. After the clubbish lean of Blue Gardens, Indigo Dream tilts toward the cinematic and the intimate. Synths take center stage here, but with a cool restraint throughout. “Interlude” exhibits a painterly approach; “Wave” trills and glistens; “Shell” stirs on a swollen bed of woven arpeggios; and there’s a moment halfway through “Ballad of Janet” when the bassline gives way to an electrifying wash of synthetic strings. Occasionally these touches feel overwrought and meandering: “Ryan Gosling in Space” attempts to wrench color and emotion from a dense, reverberating array of keys and snares, but what should be punchy comes off as wandering and unfocused.
Some of the tracks here date back as far as 2015, but much of the dancefloor-dependent drum work that threaded its way through previous outings (see the abrasive Baroque-step of 2017’s “Mindmaze”) is absent here. It appears in occasional flourishes—the delicate, snapping menace of “Shell,” or the rounding kicks and bitcrushed claps of “Echo”—but elsewhere E.M.M.A. makes inventive percussive use of a whole range of other sounds: fizzes of white noise on “Gold,” a plucked synth on “Interlude” that conjures water droplets breaking the glassy surface of some otherworldly lake. The occasional insertion of field recordings and found sounds (birds chirp on “Ballad of Janet”; “Into Indigo” conceals a distant thunderstorm) offer an organic presence in an otherwise computer-generated enclave.
Despite the album’s slight, 35-minute runtime, recurring movements and motifs across the nine songs make it feel weightier and more substantial—like a slowly unwinding conversation or, for that matter, a dream: the type you strain to keep a grip on as another morning pulls you from slumber.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Local Action | July 29, 2020 | 7 | 4f72f932-a354-4059-a20d-23ee96bde829 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The latest album from Philly songwriter Zoe Reynolds embraces the synths and glitter of pop music, but it feels most luminous when it’s raw. | The latest album from Philly songwriter Zoe Reynolds embraces the synths and glitter of pop music, but it feels most luminous when it’s raw. | Kississippi: Mood Ring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kississippi-mood-ring/ | Mood Ring | Under the moniker Kississippi, Zoe Allaire Reynolds makes gleaming pop music that exudes a sense of triumph over heartbreak and playfulness over pain. The Philadelphia songwriter doesn’t cover up the hurt so much as dress it with glitter, making it easier to reflect on. She works primarily in the tradition of pop acts who find a way to dance among the emotional wreckage, using confessional lyrics to outline the carnage, twisting heartbreak into a hook. On her second album, Mood Ring, Reynolds isn’t interested in stewing in sadness; she finds joy in feeling so much in the first place.
On earworm highlights like “Moonover,” Reynolds sounds right at home over pumping percussion and glittering keys. Empowered by the music, her lyrics suggest that caring too much can be a sign of strength, even wisdom: “I couldn’t let you go,” she sings. “I know I was yours long before you were mine.” Elsewhere in the track, she shakes a can of yerba mate for percussion while producer Andy Park joins in with a Lexapro bottle. It’s a fitting accompaniment, using these everyday objects for healing as a kind of rhythm in songs that seek the same results.
This music is a swerve from the gruffer indie rock of Kississippi’s 2018 debut, Sunset Blush. In place of that record’s moody electric guitars and unpolished vocals, these songs lean closer to Taylor Swift circa 1989, especially “Around Your Room,” which pairs poppy ’80s synths with tongue-twisting lyrics about the early mythology of a relationship: “Keeping your hands to yourself in the backseat/Carefree, windows down like we’re 16.” Sometimes, as on the sedated, surf-dazed “Dreams With You,” Mood Ring relies too heavily on the serotonin-boosting synths: The mood starts to feel repetitive and formulaic as opposed to celebratory.
The dilemma that Reynolds confronts throughout these songs brings to mind some crucial questions about darker pop music: How long can you dance when your world is crumbling? How much glitter is too much? Occasionally, Reynolds succumbs to her emotions, and her delivery is less refined, emerging as a strained yodel. She embraces this quality on the closing “Hellbeing,” where she lets the highest range of her vocals cascade into the ether over the staticky strums of an electric guitar. Verging on an emo cadence, it feels like a guttural cry after the rest of the album’s blissful shimmer. In these moments of imperfection, when Reynolds reveals some rust among the gold, she is most luminous.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | August 9, 2021 | 6.7 | 4f7451a7-bd0a-4ab7-ac7c-3422f9f39b08 | Sophia June | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophia-june/ | |
The creative arc Lee Gamble’s music has taken is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. The electronic producer's latest is a sprawling record, containing 16 tracks spread out over more than an hour. It takes time and patience to figure out what Gamble is going through, and even then, there are no easy answers. | The creative arc Lee Gamble’s music has taken is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. The electronic producer's latest is a sprawling record, containing 16 tracks spread out over more than an hour. It takes time and patience to figure out what Gamble is going through, and even then, there are no easy answers. | Lee Gamble: KOCH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19730-lee-gamble-koch/ | KOCH | The creative arc Lee Gamble’s music has taken is a strange and wonderful thing to behold. It began with a literal tearing apart of his influences, and then set off on a journey to see how much further away he could progressively move from them. His first full-length release, Diversions 1994-1996, tore passages from jungle mixtapes, stripped all the beats out, and reimagined them as dysfunctional bad dreams. The word “abstract” is never far away when people reach for descriptions of the London-based producer—and with good reason. His second release for Pan, Dutch Tvashar Plumes, was a hollowed out shell of techno, where all semblance of form and shape was lost long ago, leaving only fragments of a former good time. Gamble’s music is staged in an unusual place, somewhere between the unreal and the all-too-real, where wretched drug experiences at past-peak club hours somehow end up in a form of metaphysical drift into the following morning.
KOCH is a sprawling record, containing 16 tracks spread out over more than an hour. It takes time and patience to figure out what Gamble is going through, and even then, there are no easy answers. It’s a work of complexity, although its parts, when isolated, don’t necessarily form knotty riddles. “Motor System” quietly pounds out a rudimentary beat while flattened voices curl around it, suggesting a highly mechanized form of industrial music. Often there are layers of distortion coating everything, such as on “Caudata”, where Gamble constructs graceful shapes over a wall of fog, putting it in a similar place to Leyland Kirby’s work with old 78 rpm records on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Another technique he’s fond of is spinning out the club experience in slow motion, or making it feel like it’s happening in a place that’s far away but just close enough so the tiniest welt of bass can still be heard (“You Concrete").
The overriding feel on KOCH is one of removal, of distant observation. Gamble’s music has the feel of someone floating above it, looking in, only tangentially participating in what’s going on. Beats are muffled, signals echo for an eternity; on “Head Model”, there’s acres of room between the parts being triggered, but it never feels like there’s a ton of space opening up. Instead, it’s all dense, claustrophobic reflection, with many of Gamble’s tracks trapped in one very specific moment without any forward flow at all. Occasionally there’s movement, but even that verges on the cyclical. “HMix” begins with a charge of muddied beats and bass, only to get filtered into reedy compression that resembles the worst kind of amphetamine headrush. There’s a similar mindset here to others who have attempted to scoop out the innards of electronics to see what remains—Actress, Autechre, Pan Sonic—but Gamble is in an even more detached place, where the inclusionary side of club culture appears utterly alien.
An emergent motif on KOCH is the awkwardness Gamble siphons into his work, where parts only just fit or threaten to fall out of sequence altogether. “Ornith-Mimik” is all glistening, high-pitched tones sloppily vying with a straight pulse and random video game interference, while “Gillsman” is so purposefully clumsy it gains a drunken lop to its stride. It fits perfectly with the sense of separation this album is built on, as this is not music that has easily definable origins beyond Gamble’s headspace. It all revolves around small glances and split-second patterns, resembling the minutiae of club culture, taken and amplified into a bigger space where there’s barely any room left for it to breathe. At times, KOCH is so microscopic it feels like there’s barely any place left for this music to go. But Gamble keeps finding new ways to take it apart and reassemble it, to the point where something so closed off, so concerned with the smallest of gestures, feels thrillingly open. | 2014-09-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | September 11, 2014 | 7.2 | 4f774673-5814-41ab-84e8-b7e4c72d4f1c | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
On his first album in 11 years, Compton rap veteran MC Eiht’s no-frills approach hasn’t changed one bit. Executive produced by DJ Premier, the record is a who’s who of 1990s rap. | On his first album in 11 years, Compton rap veteran MC Eiht’s no-frills approach hasn’t changed one bit. Executive produced by DJ Premier, the record is a who’s who of 1990s rap. | MC Eiht: Which Way Iz West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mc-eiht-which-way-iz-west/ | Which Way Iz West | Over the course of his 20-plus-year career, Compton rapper MC Eiht has been the neighborhood’s straight-talking watch leader. Under the dark of night, amid the wail of police sirens, he’s the lookout in a city where crooked cops and gang members can kill you all the same, where too much flash makes you a target. There’s a voyeuristic approach to his flow, a feeling that he’s seen some shit and doesn’t want you treading that same road. Twenty-four years ago—on 1993’s “Streiht Up Menace,” Eiht’s breakout single—the rapper weaved a cinematic portrayal of a young man growing up in Compton, whose father was killed and mother struggled to make ends meet. Ultimately, the character—loosely based on the protagonist in the film Menace II Society—joins a gang and dies while protecting his block. It’s the type of dismal narrative that would partially influence someone like Kendrick Lamar, whose rhymes are set on the same Compton-based cautionary tales. Now, MC Eiht is a veteran in West Coast rap, and he’s still telling you about the hustle, about the daily struggles of merely existing in South Central Los Angeles. He’s still ducking one time, all with a smirk and a “geah.”
Five years after his riveting verse on Lamar’s “M.A.A.D. City,” Eiht is back with his first album in 11 years, Which Way Iz West, an all-in recording executive produced by DJ Premier and featuring a who’s who of 1990s rappers: WC, the Outlawz, Kurupt, the Lady of Rage, Xzibit, Big Mike, B-Real (of Cypress Hill), and Freddie Foxxx (aka Bumpy Knuckles). With that lineup, West is the kind of album that could work well or not work at all. For whatever reason, rappers aren’t often allowed the space to age; once they get into their 40s, they’re considered too old to release music with any large-scale effect. For the most part, though, Eiht and company sound rejuvenated here, sans an awkward Kurupt verse on “Gangsta Gangsta” that feels ill-prepared and doesn’t fit (“Ready or not, here I am/Katrina is my bitch, I’m breaking levees and dams”). Elsewhere, on the menacing “Heart Cold,” the Lady of Rage turns in a fluid, battle-ready verse that plays equally well in any era—whether in 1998 or 2017. “She’s aight, but she’s not Rage,” she proclaims. “Sheit, neither is he though/I’m ill, I need chemo.”
Eiht is a no-frills MC whose cadence and topical concepts haven’t changed one bit. Even as gangsta-rap gathered steam in the early- to mid-‘90s, Eiht’s blend remained especially dark, which helped him earn a cult following, but he never quite rose to the levels of popularity enjoyed by Cali contemporaries like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube. Instead, he’s lived in a weird purgatory: his name rings out, but it doesn’t resonate as loudly as it should. “Fuck the radio, ban me, they can’t stand me/Never winnin’ a Grammy, still gon’ jam…,” Eiht quips on “Got That,” an album highlight. “...Tryin’ to make that shit that make ya feel good/Never commercial, ain’t real hood.”
At this point, it’s clear Eiht makes music for the love of it. He’s not tethered to any sort of fame or notoriety; instead, Which Way Iz West is an album for nostalgic rap heads who want to relive the so-called golden era of ’90s hip-hop, where gritty beats and complex rhymes took precedence over booming 808 drums. As good as Eiht sounds on West, he benefits from a bright soundtrack largely produced by frequent collaborator Brenk Sinatra and overseen by DJ Premier. Throughout the LP, Sinatra and Premier split the difference between West Coast G-funk and golden-era boom bap, arriving at a sound that caters nicely to Eiht’s rhymes. He’s keeping you on the straight and narrow, whether you know it or not. | 2017-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Year Round / Blue Stamp | June 29, 2017 | 7.1 | 4f7e66bf-fd6a-4065-86c9-ab0044501ec1 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Corinne Bailey Rae's lush new album features Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney, R&B group KING, and others. The mood feels wide open, centered on spacious grooves. | Corinne Bailey Rae's lush new album features Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney, R&B group KING, and others. The mood feels wide open, centered on spacious grooves. | Corinne Bailey Rae: The Heart Speaks in Whispers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21900-corinne-bailey-rae-the-heart-speaks-in-whispers/ | The Heart Speaks in Whispers | If you’ve kept up with Corinne Bailey Rae over the years, your mind likely goes to one place—to that dusty road where, in the video for “Put Your Records On,” she and a few friends biked casually through the countryside. It was a lovely scene, a strong sign of togetherness and femininity, set against a sunlit backdrop. It was the second single of Rae’s 2006 debut album, and one of the first times we saw the singer/guitarist, whose blend of soul music is equally weightless and captivating. Rae quickly became a star; in 2007, she was nominated for three Grammy awards and three Brit awards, and her debut record has sold four million copies worldwide.
Yet in 2008, Rae’s husband, Jason, died after an overdose of alcohol and methadone. It led to a creative hiatus and a moment of intense reflection. “For a huge period, I didn’t want to do anything,” Rae told The Independent in 2010. “It was like a barrenness which I’d never experienced; this sense of time just stretching and stretching and not having anything to put into it all.” As a result, Rae’s follow-up album—The Sea—felt sullen, full of edgy sounds expressing loss and despair. That was six years ago.
Following yet another hiatus from music, Rae is back with a new album and a lush new sound. The vibe is far more colorful than anything she’s done previously, and her collaborators—KING, Esperanza Spalding, Moses Sumney and others—set a high bar for unique alternative art. The Heart Speaks in Whispers was partially recorded in Los Angeles where, according to Billboard, Rae fell in love with its black Bohemian alternative scene. “All these musicians know each other and hang out,” she told them. “Thundercat, J Davey, Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington—all the people who circle around Kendrick Lamar...I felt like I was in heaven.” You hear those influences throughout, especially on songs “Been to the Moon,” “Green Aphrodisiac,” “Horse Print Dress,” and “Taken by Dreams,” gentle pop/R&B hybrids with a California sheen. Aided by KING members Paris and Amber Strother, who collaborated on parts of this album, you hear vestiges of their sound on “Tell Me,” a cavernous pop jam worthy of the group’s own stellar LP. Spalding, who also released a great record this year, sings background on “Green Aphrodisiac,” and Sumney lends his golden voice to “Caramel.” While this is Rae’s album, Heart feels like a group effort in that regard, like the result of several jam sessions set by the crew’s collective energy.
Unlike The Sea, with its dark themes and heavy rhythms, Heart offers broader emotional range, and Rae seems at peace with her life and newfound direction. The mood feels wide open, centered on spacious grooves, and the lyrics seem lifted from Rae’s diary, a heart-fluttering prose that lands softly on your ear. She sings about dreams, of walking through figurative darkness in search of brighter days. “Hey, I Won’t Break Your Heart,” a meditative ballad near the album’s beginning, speaks of summertime romance and the cautious optimism of a new relationship. Heart represents the best of Rae’s first two albums, connecting the understated charm of her debut with The Sea’s pensive tone. It makes for a fascinating listen, one filled with catharsis and inspiration. Rae doesn’t directly mention her past struggles, but her light permeates this record, leaving a shining example of strength and perseverance. | 2016-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin | May 14, 2016 | 7.6 | 4f7e85bb-7268-4dc7-a982-275b108725cb | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The follow-up to the Norwegian band's radical 2010 breakthrough, Blackjazz, trims the excess and foregoes the over-involved lyrical complications to wind up as a heavy baroque rock'n'roll record. Shining suddenly seem as good at songs as they have been at lengthy suites. | The follow-up to the Norwegian band's radical 2010 breakthrough, Blackjazz, trims the excess and foregoes the over-involved lyrical complications to wind up as a heavy baroque rock'n'roll record. Shining suddenly seem as good at songs as they have been at lengthy suites. | Shining: One One One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18099-shining-one-one-one/ | One One One | If you’ve listened much at all to Norway’s Shining, you’ve likely learned not to be surprised by their ceaseless surprises. For more than a decade, the band has often functioned as a pinball ricocheting between musical enthusiasms with delightful unpredictability. Initially a jazz band, they’ve since shot between psychedelic and progressive rock, spasmodic noise and iron-fisted metal, ostensibly directed by little more than mercury and whimsy.
After four albums, though, 2010’s radical Blackjazz-- their public and aesthetic breakthrough, all at once-- showed that their path had been, if not deliberate, then not without its instructive moments. That previous decade, Blackjazz proclaimed, had been one of stepwise accretion, where all the heavy metal and free jazz, long-form experiments and stylistic adventures had gathered around the core of charismatic producer and frontman Jørgen Munkeby and pliable drummer Torstein Lofthus. Suddenly, they were able to mine all of those past sounds for an album that could not sit still. In 57 minutes, they jerked from Naked City-speed eruptions to Ministry-sized beatings, from Meshuggah-bordering technicality to Melvins-dumb lumber. Hell, they ended with a King Crimson cover. If you didn’t come to expect surprises, you’d come to deal with whiplash, vertigo, or nausea soon enough.
But any record as adventurous and idea-saturated as Blackjazz creates a de facto albatross for the band that’s made it: Hit repeat, and you’ve made yourself obsolete. Push the hybridization to the limits again, and you run the risk of becoming merely tedious. (See Shining’s collaborators in Enslaved for a case in point.) So on One One One, their first studio LP since Blackjazz, Shining has smartly pulled back and inward, delivering nine incredibly understandable but willfully baroque modern rock singles in about 36 minutes. Rather than find several dozen new ways to surprise, Shining landed upon just one-- trim the excess, forego the over-involved lyrical complications, and make a rock’n’roll record. One One One likely won’t rearrange anyone’s imaginations regarding how much motion a band can fit into one album, but it does lift the veil of obtusity from Shining, a band that’s suddenly as good at songs as they have been at suites.
One One One opens with a short squall of guitar noise and an immediate drum groove, funneling into a verse that runs with the same italicized spirit as most any rock number you’ll find along the FM dial. Roaring keyboards and chugging riffs swell beneath Munkeby’s hook, pushing the signal outward. It’s just one of several instantly memorable numbers here: “Walk Away” is little more than a series of refrains, with Munkeby repeating the title over a tech-metal riff by way of mere introduction. By the song’s end, Shining’s toggled between at least three passages that could count as hooks. With its throbbing electronics and calliope keyboard, the hilariously titled “My Dying Drive” crams Nine Inch Nails and King Crimson into the same four-minute space; the result is a defiant pop-rock song about fucking with the man even at death, anchored by a refrain meant to be shouted out in some sweaty pit. That’s a consistent feeling throughout One One One: Shining no longer seems to be a post-everything oddity, making music best analyzed from some safe distance. They are making visceral, economical anthems, meant to be felt first and fussed over later.
To that last point, though, these songs do brim with the sort of compositional depth that’s now expected from Shining, even if they take a while to tease out. “The One Inside”, for instance, seems to get stuck on a drum roll at one point, creating a bed for Munkeby’s voice that feels both shifting and stable. Just beneath the thrust of the song, the bass steps on top of and away from the groove, while the guitars fan outward from the central riff, creating the illusion of feathered density. And then there’s the saxophone solo that fuels the sudden burst of black metal-- it’s Shining doing Shining, just in delightfully compact form. Speaking of saxophone, “How Your Story Ends” might be the first song to mix an unmitigated metalcore chorus with moments of Motörhead rumble and a horn solo that borrows liberally from the blues and Middle Eastern melodies. These complications make the song no less direct; they simply make it something you’ll want to listen to again and again.
In a recent interview with Noisey, Munkey admitted that, for a decade, he was too busy with jazz and classical fare to pay much attention to heavy metal or industrial music. When he stumbled back into heavier sounds several years ago, Shining soon shifted toward its complicated machinations. “I started rediscovering metal,” he listened. “I listened to my old stuff, Death and Emperor, and then I started discovering newer stuff like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.” That sort of joyous newness defines both Blackjazz and One One One, creating the effect of a child high on sugar, racing around a room for an hour until collapsing. The shifting approaches of Blackjazz redirected some of that energy, while One One One focuses it directly into successive four-minute bursts. That’s exhausting and exhilarating, yes, but it’s also the symptom of a band that’s still fascinated by what they accomplish. That is, the surprises likely aren’t over. | 2013-06-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-06-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Jazz / Metal | Prosthetic | June 3, 2013 | 7.5 | 4f8468c7-9c71-40ec-82dd-9d2535a31947 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Wolf Alice have gained attention for their powerful live show and four EPs. Their debut is a tentative coming-of-age story, as guitarist/singer Ellie Rowsell refuses to settle for a single identity. | Wolf Alice have gained attention for their powerful live show and four EPs. Their debut is a tentative coming-of-age story, as guitarist/singer Ellie Rowsell refuses to settle for a single identity. | Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20680-my-love-is-cool/ | My Love Is Cool | What a relief it is that the next big British indie sensation isn't a bunch of anointed lads with stadium-sized savior complexes. Wolf Alice's debut album is one of 2015's most anticipated homegrown debuts, thanks not to them running their mouths or having the right management, but three years of hard touring punctuated by just four EPs. In the UK, My Love is Cool is being touted as grunge’s second (or, ninth) coming, when really it affirms the tentative coming-of-age story in guitarist/singer Ellie Rowsell’s lyrics by refusing to settle for a single identity at this early stage.
Wolf Alice are best at capturing sensations. The chiming rush of "Bros" freeze-frames the heady teenage abandon of the lyrics—bad haircuts and hopping buses with a best friend you'd die for—as Rowsell's wistful vocal turn establishes her increasing distance from that time. Meanwhile "Freazy" is Wolf Alice's us-against-the-world mission statement: "You can hate us all you want but it don't mean nothing at all." There's a neat Haim-like snap to the choruses, but the dreamy verses clash with Mike Crossey's intense production sheen, evoking a time when Tin Tin Out were pop's go-to remixers.
When Wolf Alice rage, they usually do it with stealth. It takes 90 seconds for "You're a Germ" to turn from grave whispers about a bad boy in cheap leather to an indictment of the "dodgy fucker." Rowsell's a limber vocalist: "Lisbon" starts with Azure Ray sweetness as she clings to an ex's stolen cigarettes and threadbare t-shirt, but by the end it sounds as if she's rounded up the rest of the band to smash in every window of his house. Forgoing restraint in favor of hard-edged, exhilarating swagger, "Giant Peach" and "Fluffy" confront the suffocating element of remaining in the place where you grew up. "What the hell keeps me here/ In a dark old town that I've adored?" Rowsell snarls on "Giant Peach". "The rules don't seem so clear/ And change, it feels like fear/ It's all you know."
That sense of vulnerability also informs some of Rowsell's bleaker lyrics, which unpick the social implications of mental health issues while conveying their claustrophobia. "Silk" mutates from spare coldwave to a dark nursery rhyme that rejects the idea of depression as an interesting character trait. On "Soapy Water", a distant-sounding Rowsell hides inside a mesmerizing disco swirl to conceal the effects of anxiety from her parents. It's crushing but strangely comforting, like repeated viewings of The Virgin Suicides.
Concealed at the end of My Love Is Cool is the secret title track, a bedroom demo of Rowsell and her electric guitar. "Teach me, teach me/ Teach me rock and roll," she sings softly. But the confident diversity of My Love Is Cool indicates a band who have their own thing all figured out, who shouldn't veer from their own strange path to live up to outdated narratives that dictate what a young British band should be. | 2015-06-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-06-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA / Dirty Hit | June 30, 2015 | 7.4 | 4f858a6a-d717-4986-b0da-ace65f6e3513 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Portland-based metal outfit the Body take doom metal as their core template and shred it to pieces until it's completely unrecognizable. On their new I Shall Die Here, the Haxan Cloak's Bobby Krlic comes on board as producer, helping drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/singer Chip King rip the guts out of their sound to achieve maximal brutality. | Portland-based metal outfit the Body take doom metal as their core template and shred it to pieces until it's completely unrecognizable. On their new I Shall Die Here, the Haxan Cloak's Bobby Krlic comes on board as producer, helping drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/singer Chip King rip the guts out of their sound to achieve maximal brutality. | The Body: I Shall Die Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19180-the-body-i-shall-die-here/ | I Shall Die Here | Genre boundaries mean nothing to the Body, who celebrate 15 years in the business with their most audacious statement to date in I Shall Die Here. The band, now based in Portland, Oregon after years spent in Providence, Rhode Island, take doom metal as their core template and shred it to pieces until it's completely unrecognizable. The band, a two-piece of drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/singer Chip King, plus longstanding studio collaborators Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, clearly felt something needed to change after their 2013 album, Christs, Redeemers. That album felt like a retreat, a surrender, a settling into type, where prior form and function was repeated, not forwarded. Enter Bobby Krlic, the British musician who records jaundiced electronic works under his Haxan Cloak moniker, who comes on board as producer, helping Buford and King rip the guts out of their sound to achieve maximal brutality.
Something that's evolved over time with the Body's work is their use of space, not just in their choral collaborations on prior records, but also in their other material. On I Shall Die Here it's their most potent weapon, giving the sound a greater sense of suggestion than ever before. The dips into near-silence, where machine noise is allowed to trail quietly in the mix, effectively work as cues to pry open the imagination. At times they even function like a scene in a horror movie, where you just know something bad is coming around the corner, but the sense of anticipation is so expertly orchestrated that the fear is only heightened when the moment finally hits. "Our Souls Were Clean" is the best example of that here—it's all echoing electronics that resemble a machine repeating on itself long after any human hand has touched it, ultimately turning into a convulsing swirl of noise that feels like being trapped in a constant spray of vomit over the two-minute close of the song.
It's not always clear who did what here, or how much Krlic overhauled the sound of the Body. In a sense it's better going into I Shall Die Here without knowing whether samples changed hands, or how strips of guitar were pulled out and inserted elsewhere. A strong air of album-as-standoff results, with musicians from different disciplines throwing daggers into each other's work, making it feel like everyone was eyeing each other uneasily across the studio floor. Such working methods could turn into a mess, but here it results in a great weight of tension sinking into the material. It's hard not to feel suffocated by it all when the death march beat of "To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me" pulls in layer upon layer of oppression. But there are also strong dynamics at work in "Seeds", especially when the song gets stripped down to the bare bones and a great sweep of noise jolts it back to life—a trick mirrored on the opening "Consumed" from Krlic’s Excavation. It makes it feel like ten tons of electricity are suddenly pulsing through the track.
An unrelentingly bleak worldview is presented throughout the Body's work, and often in their interviews as well. Occasionally they substitute desolation for ghoulish thrills, which is marginally less successful. The pitch-shifted spoken word intro to "Alone All the Way" adds an unwelcome touch of schlocky horrorcore, although the subsequent track—all air raid distress calls and isolated screeches in the dark—brings the murky air of pessimism that curls up around the album firmly back into view. At its strongest, on the standout "Hail to Thee, Everlasting Pain", it's an album that takes a mazy journey through styles, not so much seeking common ground between them, but actively looking for the point of agitation that arises as they brashley bruise up against one another. So "Hail" takes in a great lattice of sound, bringing samples on board that resemble the compact structures of Autechre's Amber, along with treated industrial drums, great slabs of drone-y guitar, and King's blood-curdling shriek.
The collective work on I Shall Die Here makes it feel like all involved were searching for illogical endpoints, driving strains of metal and electronic music to some kind of brink of extremes that the Body and the Haxan Cloak's individual output had never taken them before. There's certainly an end-of-all-things atmosphere, but perhaps more importantly a strong sense of unlearning everything they knew in an attempt to push music into a totally new space. Not that this is music without precedent; there are shades of Demdike Stare, Prurient, Earth, and Sunn O))) at various times. But the execution of I Shall Die Here is so full-blooded, so committed to forcing your head underwater to the point of blackout, that it's hard not to view this as a singular piece, out there on its own, in a place most people wouldn't want to go anywhere near. It adds a chillingly lonely air to the work, making it morbidly fascinating to see its participants head out on a road pointed eternally downward, landing in a place wracked by torment and lost hopes. | 2014-04-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Rvng Intl. | April 3, 2014 | 7.8 | 4f8733cb-bcea-4189-85a7-6687d311db62 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Chad Ubovich returns from the brink with a dark, ambitious psych-rock record. The fuzz-drone riffs are big enough to hit the rafters and there’s plenty of niche touches for the heads. | Chad Ubovich returns from the brink with a dark, ambitious psych-rock record. The fuzz-drone riffs are big enough to hit the rafters and there’s plenty of niche touches for the heads. | Meatbodies: Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meatbodies-flora-ocean-tiger-bloom/ | Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom | Psychedelic rock has long been a means to distort and escape reality and, as such, it has a reputation for being a passive, emotionally detached artform, born from the state of being too fucked up to feel. But few contemporary artists seize upon the genre’s disassociative powers with such intensity and urgency as Meatbodies’ Chad Ubovich. Where his band first appeared 10 years ago as a high-octane punk-fueled satellite in the greater Ty Segall Universe, Meatbodies’ transportive ambitions have, perhaps not coincidentally, expanded dramatically as Ubovich has grappled with the many hard-knock realities he’s sought to escape.
After spending most of his 20s on the road with Meatbodies and various other affiliated acts (including Mikal Cronin’s live band and proto-metal power trio Fuzz with Segall and Charlie Moothart), Ubovich reached his physical and mental breaking point after the release of 2017’s Alice and hit the pause button—only to replace the all-consuming mania of tour life with the all-consuming mania of drug use. Upon getting sober, he began working on Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, in 2019, but had to abort mission partway through once COVID lockdowns took effect in early 2020. (While waiting out the pandemic at home, Ubovich and drummer Dylan Fujioka dusted off some scrappy old demos and punched them up for 2021’s stopgap mini-LP, 333.) And once it was safe to properly resume work on Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich lost his home and nearly his life: the house he had been living in for eight years was condemned, but not before its contaminated environs spurred a debilitating case of pneumonia that left Ubovich hospitalized for a month, to the point where his recovery involved relearning how to walk and play his instruments. So if anyone’s earned the right to check out from reality and indulge in the transcendental properties of psychedelic rock, it’s this dude.
But despite all the chaos and upheaval Ubovich has endured, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is a testament to his clarity of vision. And for Ubovich, that means fine-tuning his iconoclastic inspirations to suit his own feel-good needs: Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom regularly consults the Spacemen 3 playbook for both its fuzz-drone riffs and ambient orchestrations—there’s even an instrumental interlude unsubtly titled “(Return of) Ecstasy”—but applies them to more classically styled ’60s psych-pop tunes; songs like “Billow” mirror the tambourine-rattled stoner sway of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but rock much harder. And while Ubovich shares a mischievous melodic sensibility with his old pal Segall, Meatbodies project more of an anthemic bravado that transforms their niche record-collector concerns into mass-appealing, festival-ready rock music: “The Assignment” imagines how Oasis’ Be Here Now might’ve turned out if the Gallaghers spent more time doing acid than coke, while “Hole” is part DIY “Cherub Rock” grungegaze groover, part Laser Floyd synth spectacle.
However, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom’s kaleidoscopic radiance and rhythmic verve are ultimately vessels for Ubovich’s darkest thoughts. If psychedelia is a portal to an out-of-body experience, Ubovich is floating away with one eye on the ground below, bracing for the moment when the spell is broken and he crashes back down to earth. While “Silly Cybin” appears as a playful, acoustic-based singalong that matches the spirit of its punny title, there are bad-trip horrors and suicidal ideation cataloged within. But if that song establishes a stark contrast between bliss and psychosis, the cryptically titled “ICNNVR2” completely blurs it: “I carve the crosses right into my arms, in the purple drunken dawn,” Ubovich declares, before he rides straight into an incoming brass-blasted storm, much like another stoner-punk who once tried to assure us he was feelin’ alright in the midst of a raging saxocalypse that suggested otherwise.
If Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom is Ubovich’s attempt to channel negative experiences into positive energy, the album’s searing centerpiece, “Move,” is all the more captivating for its refusal to sugarcoat its bitter sentiments. Cut from the same blood-splattered cloth as Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” or The Gun Club’s “For the Love of Ivy,” the song’s menacing motorik throb and sinister aura are intensified by Ubovich’s spiteful address to a former confindate (“I can count the reasons/ the reasons we don’t talk”), en route to an extended, echo-drenched descent into madness and furious finale. (The track is seven minutes long, but you can easily imagine Meatbodies stretching it out to twice the length in concert and making it their go-to set-closer till the end of time.)
But while “Move” counts as this album’s most agitated and aggressive outburst, you can sense Ubovich finding strength and resolve in its ugly emotional exorcism—the song is effectively a primal-scream and hypno-therapy session all in one. And that sense of catharsis is ultimately what grounds Meatbodies’ hyper-referential rock in the here and now. Among the requsite thank-yous to friends and famliy, Ubovich’s liner notes for Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom include shout-outs to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Spacemen 3, Iggy Pop, and the 13th Floor Elevators “for changng music” and, presumably, his life. But more than just advertise Ubovich’s influences like patches on a jean jacket, those dedications function as Meatbodies’ pledge to honor their legacies—not by merely making music that sounds like theirs, but by furthering their mission of using primal rock‘n’roll as a pathway to spiritual awakening. And with Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich offers a resounding reaffirmation that psych-rock is forever, even if the escape it provides from our cruel world is ultimately temporary. | 2024-03-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | March 12, 2024 | 7.6 | 4f9540e3-289b-40cf-8691-1d73cef81193 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Working with a stripped-down palette of synthesizers and almost no drums, the UK producer reconnects with the fundamental sense of strangeness that runs through his best music. | Working with a stripped-down palette of synthesizers and almost no drums, the UK producer reconnects with the fundamental sense of strangeness that runs through his best music. | patten: GLOW | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patten-glow/ | GLOW | One unforeseen side effect of the pandemic is that our collective sense of time has been thrown out of whack. The arrow of our days no longer flies true; it moves more like a crinkled paper plane—soaring briefly, plunging without notice, skidding gracelessly sideways across the floor. Sometimes it seems almost to loop backward. The London producer patten’s GLOW, recorded entirely during the UK’s lockdown, is propelled by this elastic timekeeping and steeped in the uneasy mood of the day. Created using a relatively stripped-down palette of synthesizers, it features almost no drums but could not quite be called ambient. It is restless in places and directionless in others; the mood is emotionally numb, except when it is sullen. Sometimes it is even a little boring, but not in an unpleasant way. Like a ticking clock in a quiet room, its blankness is the sort that leads the mind to wander. And the chance to wander, these days, is to be prized.
The absence of beats marks a notable shift for patten. On early albums like 2011’s GLAQJO XAACSSO and 2014’s ESTOILE NAIANT, which kicked off a brief tenure on Warp, he harnessed a welter of hyper-compressed, low-bitrate sounds and squished them into a lumpy sort of beat music: Imagine a fistful of lossy YouTube rips fed through a Play-Doh noodle maker. Last year’s Flex took a step away from the psychedelic murk of those albums, incorporating the icy clarity of trap and grime along with some of the brawn of breakbeat-driven bass music. The results often sounded less original—and less interesting—than his foundational work. But with GLOW, patten reconnects with the fundamental sense of strangeness that has run through his best music, even without the tangled rhythms and messy textures that once were his stock in trade.
On most of GLOW’s 14 tracks, patten plays his cards close to his chest. Each song is made up of a slim handful of moving parts that tend to spin slowly and aimlessly in place; loops trundle along in parallel, patterns stumbling almost imperceptibly. These sequences and arpeggios sound less like impeccably executed digital commands than the product of fingers idly drumming against the keys, the musician half-asleep in the studio chair, deep into the small hours of the night. There are no big emotional payoffs; most tracks just play out until they don’t anymore. In “Clandestine Modal,” distortion gradually creeps across an expanse of airy synths, covering them in fuzz, like mold consuming a piece of fruit. “Screen Burn,” mostly just heavy pads and buzzing FM bass, spins like a leaden mobile in thick, humid air. “Rorschach” suggests the theme from The Exorcist played on kalimba and run through dub delay, underscoring the anxious, horror-film mood that lies just below the album’s surface.
Many of these pieces could work well as film cues. That goes equally for the simplest tracks—like the dissonant “Chronoblur,” its reverb as opaque as a frosted window—and the few that are more complex. “Memory Palace” unfolds with a particularly gratifying unpredictability, playing a garbled guitar melody off fluorescent-tube hum, like Oneohtrix Point Never remixing the Cure’s Pornography. “Valley Commerce” is even better. Over plodding, minor-key piano and soft horns, a palm-muted guitar rhythm rises in the mix, triggering unexpected memories of ’90s alt rock. It’s an attention-grabbing climax on an album that mostly keeps drama at arm’s length.
Despite patten’s description of the record as an album with “no beats,” the faintest outline of a drum pattern appears on the penultimate track, “Lariat,” where rigid eighth-note taps click insistently against a gelatinous synth figure, as though determined to rein it in. Behind that, a fragment of what sounds like voice is spun backwards and forward, over and over, suggesting a bored filmmaker slumped over the edit bay, toggling a snippet of video back and forth. It’s an effective encapsulation of GLOW’s entire outlook: stuck in place, marking time, and stolidly waiting—for what, exactly, nobody quite knows.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 555-5555 | July 13, 2020 | 7.2 | 4f985240-aee9-4476-9d5e-3996664ea409 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Föllakzoid hail from Santiago, Chile. But with their rigid rhythms, their chemtrail synths, their afterburner guitars, their sound is pure Düsseldorf, circa 1971. And this krautrock-worshiping quartet's fascination with all things kosmische isn't merely musical. | Föllakzoid hail from Santiago, Chile. But with their rigid rhythms, their chemtrail synths, their afterburner guitars, their sound is pure Düsseldorf, circa 1971. And this krautrock-worshiping quartet's fascination with all things kosmische isn't merely musical. | Föllakzoid: II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18015-follkazoid-ii/ | II | Psychedelia is supposed to be boundless-- gobble enough indoles, and all the old categories start to dissolve, freeing you up for transcendence. Psychedelic warriors Föllakzoid hail from Santiago, Chile, but-- with their rigid rhythms, their chemtrail synths, their afterburner guitars-- their sound is pure Düsseldorf, circa 1971. But this krautrock-worshiping quartet's fascination with all things kosmische isn't merely musical: their primary concern seems to be untethering themselves from the earth. Their debut leaned toward desert rock, but the interplanetarily minded II is a bold shift in perspective from their earthbound origins, an all-out swing into a very different sound that follows its own alien logic. For Föllakzoid, though, space seems to be the place.
Vocalist Juan Pablo Rodrigues, with his unbudging deadpan, spends much of II playing the ghost in the machine. So when he starts muttering "is it getting lonely?" as "9" intensifies, you wind up feel in positively marooned, all alone while the track's latticework tightens. And even as the song lengths skirt double-digits, Föllakzoid's commands your attention. Just as you start to admire the music's weightless beauty of the synths and guitars, they seem to close in on you. While "Trees" throbs, guitarist Domingo Garcia-Huidobro provides the scenery, his massive, ever-expanding riff drawing up the topography of the cosmos. Keeping the rhythm section lean and the synths fairly sleek and steely might seem to put a lot of pressure on Garcia-Huidobro's guitar. But he, too, knows when to step up, and more importantly, when to hold back. This keen sense of drama means every time "Trees" brings that riff around again, it's not just a reprise, it's an event. "99" plays like a Dali painting, every surface ripples like a pond, every instrument double-helixing around itself.
I've seen a 12-minute version of "Pulsar" floating around; mine's 15. Either way, "Pulsar" takes a little too long to get going, and doesn't do quite enough when it does. Once its initial pulsations melt away, a Deodato-style mecha-disco groove floats to the surface, one too troubled to ever quite lock into. II's vastness is impressive, but between Rodrigues' inhuman mumble and the way every note seems to echo off some faraway mountain, certain stretches feel a bit barren. And all the sci-fi I've ever watched has me conditioned to expect a third-act payoff greater than the one II provides; Föllakzoid would like you think some atom-smasher's just around the next turn, but there's no such blowout here, just a few smaller skirmishes. Still, this is strange new terrain for Föllakzoid, and they go after it boldly, conjuring worlds in the process. | 2013-04-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-04-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | April 24, 2013 | 6.9 | 4fa016cc-a865-48f1-9881-55ce8e076431 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Def Jux star issues his most personal album to date, which, in its own neurotic way, is also his most optimistic. | Def Jux star issues his most personal album to date, which, in its own neurotic way, is also his most optimistic. | Mr. Lif: Mo' Mega | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9121-mo-mega/ | Mo' Mega | On its surface Mo' Mega appears to be more of the same renegade rap on which Definitive Jux has built its reputation. All the Jukie generals are lined up behind a battery of El-P's thunderous howitzers, barking commands, but this time something is different. In the past a Lif/El-P collusion meant mayhem and doomsday, but Mo' Mega is, once the smoke clears, a personal, and, in its own neurotic way, ultimately optimistic album. Lif's realizing there is no revolution and no winnable wars. He's spent years calculating his dissension, and the woes of the world have only gotten worse. So, finally, he makes a record that expresses universal frustrations instead of weirding everyone out with labyrinthine rants about things we already know, and, in the process, finds a way to live a little.
Let me say up front that I've always had a soft spot for Lif's robo-Rakim monotone, but often enjoyed his albums the same way I enjoy crack music-- by reveling in the syntax and ignoring the contents. Only with Lif, it was because he was shirking responsibility by abstracting it instead of ignoring it altogether like, say, Cam'ron. From Enters the Colossus to I, Phantom, Lif distanced himself through elaborate conspiracy theories and album-length allegories. Technically interesting, but hardly an attempt to connect. He revealed a bit more of himself on last year's Perceptionists album with songs like "Love Letters" and "Breathe in the Sun", yet nothing that really indicated the revelations on Mo' Mega.
Lif claims this is his most sincere album, but stacked against the mechanical rhetoric of his priors, it's his only sincere album. He's not yet the rap James Taylor, but he is relatively vulnerable, saying, "I wish I could ring the blood outta your clothes/ Give back your afros and your strong black nose...And I yawn and grow weary/ Succumb to old theory that strips my wits of thoughts I used to hold dearly," on "Take , Hold, Fire!". And he actually sounds angry on "Brothaz": "The Bush Administration's worth nothin' Just fuck em!/ Throw ‘em in a barrel Buck ‘em!...Fuck Clinton too!/ You ain't really down because you live Uptown, bitch/ Rwanda!" It may not look that emotional on paper, but it's the equivalent of Al Gore 2006 vs. Al Gore 2000. It's both frustrating and energizing that someone with Lif's ability is finally being himself after years of cryptic bullshit. And that's before he gets to the songs about cunnilingus.
Where Lif really succeeds here is in taking things personally. The pronouns are now "I" and "my," and his problems with the government are now the missed moments with his lady because he has to make a check. He's articulating the prospect of having a family when you're getting older and can barely provide for yourself, and the daily frustration of feeling like your country has failed you. None of these are musical or artistic epiphanies, but it's Lif's realization that his problems are commonplace that makes Mo' Mega more interesting than his other stuff.
El-P continues paring down his signature maelstroms to focused goth-funk. The guitars now riff, the keyboards stab. His drums pummel harder given more space, and odd little bits of nostalgia surface from the rubble with a sampled piano roll or horn blast. And when El-P gives up the controls, things even threaten to get fun (shhh). Edan contributes another seamless fast rap rumbler on the absurd "Murs Iz My Manager", Lif himself flips a dancehall riddim on "Washitup!" (the aforementioned ode to going downtown), and Nick Toth channels Boston progenitor Ed O.G with his plinks and strums on "For You", Lif's letter to his future seed. Not to be left out of the good times, El-P uses the musique concrete of enthusiastic sex for percussion on "Long Distance". It's almost like Def Jux is lightening up, and Mo' Mega is the new mission statement. If that's the case, it's about time. | 2006-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | June 15, 2006 | 7.9 | 4fa10cf5-7d7e-4cff-a778-df70cbf3b2f0 | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
The Flint, Michigan, doomgazers’ follow-up to 2019’s New Hell dabbles in new styles while doubling down on the unrelenting misery. | The Flint, Michigan, doomgazers’ follow-up to 2019’s New Hell dabbles in new styles while doubling down on the unrelenting misery. | Greet Death: New Low EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greet-death-new-low-ep/ | New Low EP | Meet the new hell: not quite the same as the old New Hell. On their 2019 album for Deathwish, Inc., Flint, Michigan miserablists Greet Death took their label's name to heart on songs like “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and “Do You Feel Nothing?,” wrapping their nihilism in deceptively uplifting melodies. But their new EP makes overwhelming self-loathing the whole point.
A 21-minute collection of five singles released roughly every other month since September 2021, New Low initially scans as a transitional and exploratory work. Sam Boyhtari’s vocals on “I Hate Everything” and “Panic Song” dabble in mesmeric bedroom indie and oversaturated shoegaze, while Logan Gaval sticks to the low, lonesome gloom-country he favored on New Hell. Thistime, though, the mud-caked guitar forms a Pigpen dirt cloud, rather than blowing the roof off.
Yet despite the piecemeal assemblage, New Low is the most cohesive Greet Death release yet, a place where the band’s nebula of influences condenses into its own stylistic shorthand. As songwriters, Greet Death have embraced sharpness in every way—more hooks, less repetition, more concision; “Your Love Is Alcohol” is about as complicated as metaphors get. Gaval and Boyhtari once made tentative attempts to merge their two extremely disparate vocal styles, which invert their respective instrumental roles as lead guitarist and bassist. Whereas they cleanly split the lead vocal duties on Dixieland and occasionally swapped lines on New Hell, the two have achieved a newfound harmony on “Punishment Existence”; the shift in tone is subtle, but the perspective remains—that boulder isn’t going to roll itself up that hill.
The self-aware grimness of “Punishment Existence” gets at Greet Death’s most salient quality: the kind of distinct point of view that is often a secondary concern in a style of music that can be as reliant on vibes as the vibiest Spotify playlist filler. Unlike the goth Americana or impressionistic swooning that usually accompanies slow-and-low doomgaze, Greet Death embody a relatable workingman’s dread, a middle path between the bleary tones of slowcore and rugged Midwestern yearning; though the gliding guitars on “Panic Song” evoke Ride and Slowdive, just imagine either of those bands singing about gas station food. Greet Death don’t romanticize their depression; there are no cataclysmic breakups, no untimely deaths, no single event that shakes someone to their core. The narrators on New Low go to work and come home having completely lost track of where the past eight hours went. Strip these songs down to an acoustic guitar, swap out a word or two, and they could be earnest folk songs.
Then again, songs like “Punishment Existence” and “I Hate Everything” also indicate that, nearly a decade into their career, Greet Death have developed a healthy sense of humor about themselves. The unrelenting misery of New Low’s tracklist is kind of a fan service, balancing the deadpan hilarity they convey through their stage banter and social media. “Sometimes it feels like everything’s coming to an end/I wish I could escape from this existential dread,” Gaval moans on “Punishment Existence,” and while there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity, I can imagine him making air quotes around “existential dread.” Though the record lacks a quintessential Greet Death monument to pity like “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done,” New Low confirms that the only way to follow an album like New Hell is by digging a deeper hole. | 2022-07-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Death Wish | July 6, 2022 | 7.4 | 4fa167d0-7357-4342-8791-40511f5195e2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Pusha’s partnership with Kanye West has brought stability, and more importantly, direct involvement in a hit parade steered by one of the best producers in the industry; on his latest mixtape, he's aware of his peculiar place as both a seasoned rap veteran and a relatively untested commercial commodity. | Pusha’s partnership with Kanye West has brought stability, and more importantly, direct involvement in a hit parade steered by one of the best producers in the industry; on his latest mixtape, he's aware of his peculiar place as both a seasoned rap veteran and a relatively untested commercial commodity. | Pusha T: Wrath of Caine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17758-pusha-t-wrath-of-caine/ | Wrath of Caine | As one half of the Clipse, Pusha-T felt the havoc that finicky rap labels can wreak on a career; the group’s decade-long tenure is fraught with shelved albums, excruciating stints in label purgatory, and critically acclaimed commercial flops. When his brother Malice found religion on a sabbatical from rap, Pusha’s alignment with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint redoubled his rap industry stock, earning him name recognition, chart successes, and award nominations that eluded him in the Clipse. His initial solo releases were shaky, though. His 2011 debut mixtape Fear of God was brittle and half-baked, and while the album-length EP Fear of God II: Let Us Pray fared better, it did so by cannibalizing the best songs from the mixtape and padding out its tracklist with appearances from famous guests. Nearly two years on, Pusha has bested the Fear of God series with Wrath of Caine, a stopgap mixtape of originals meant to tide us over until the release of his forthcoming solo album My Name Is My Name, whose title quotes Marlo Stanfield of HBO’s beloved cop drama The Wire.
It makes sense that Pusha-T would fixate on Marlo, a ruthless drug dealer who kills his way into a higher tax bracket only to find himself at a loss for what to do with his newfound money and dominion. Pusha’s partnership with Kanye West brings stability, and more importantly, direct involvement in a hit parade steered by one of the best producers in the industry. For an underdog whose kingdom was built on a dealer’s twin thrusts of entrepreneurialism and danger, whose displays of wealth were couched in the hard luck stories of how it was acquired, to suddenly lose that underpinning of struggle is jarring. It makes for a lot of brazen talk of money. Wrath of Caine is Pusha-T coming to terms with his place in the rich asshole bracket he and Kanye detailed with “Runaway.” “Peasants ain’t sittin’ with the kings, Goliath ain’t worried ‘bout your sling, and Cassius ain’t bothered by your swings”, he raps on “Doesn’t Matter”.
Wrath of Caine’s caustic witticisms work in contrast to the gossamer production. Chief Keef associate Young Chop imbues the larger-than-life kingpin posturing of “Blocka” with pillowy low end and spectral synths, with very little in between. Harry Fraud’s work on “Road Runner” and Boogz and Tapez’ “Only You Can Tell It” both warp vocal samples into massive, stately productions that sound like trap music rebuttals to the seraphic grandeur of Clams Casino. Jake One serves up sedate reggae for “Take My Life”, while SK and Arthur McArthur recreate the mood of reggae with swaying, oceanic synths on “Trust You”. Pusha seems pretty taken with Jamaican culture lately: “Blocka” features vocals from newly minted dancehall star Popcaan and a video shot in Kingston, and Wrath of Caine is peppered with spirited patois toasts from a gangster’s spoiled moll. (It’s also worth noting that “Pain”, My Name Is My Name’s lead single, samples the Nyabinghi drums of Rastafarian religious rituals.) It’s a fitting connection for Pusha, as his own history, insofar as rappers’ autobiographical tales are to be believed, is a kind of winding Shottas-esque story of drugs, shady business associates, and unbelievably good luck.
Pusha-T has navigated this improbable second act of his career with caution. His visibility is as great today as it has ever been, but he moves with an astute awareness of his peculiar place as both a seasoned rap veteran and a relatively untested commercial commodity. That means playing by the rap majors’ rules, keeping his buzz warm by giving away fully realized songs for free online and ceding lyrical real estate to feature artists du jour like Rick Ross and his Maybach Music Group henchmen. Wrath of Caine’s guests neither add to nor subtract from the proceedings, and where he can, Pusha wisely relegates them to hook duty. After Fear of God’s withering batch of middling freestyles and rangy originals and Fear of God II’s pervasive sense that the artist with top billing was a guest on his own album, Wrath of Caine is really the first hint of what Pusha-T is capable of as a solo artist. He’s not really relatable anymore, and hard times are distant memories rather than palpable realities, but he’s still got sharp wit and snarling lyrical intensity to fall back on, and Wrath of Caine thrives off of that gritty elan. | 2013-02-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-02-20T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music | February 20, 2013 | 7.2 | 4fb57068-a300-436c-9271-a02a2d12e293 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Former Slint, Tortoise, and Zwan member releases first LP under his own name. | Former Slint, Tortoise, and Zwan member releases first LP under his own name. | Pajo: Pajo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6575-pajo/ | Pajo | Like another singular musical intelligence named David, Dave Pajo is intimately familiar with changes. First he was in this band called Slint; apparently they were some kind of big deal. Ditto Tortoise. And as a solo artist under the guises of M, Papa M, and Aerial M, Pajo has quietly staked out territory at the nexus of pastoral folk and minimal electronica. He is a dim yet essential star in a musical constellation that includes Leonard Cohen, Iron and Wine, and Windsor for the Derby. Given his retiring demeanor and the subtlety of his solo work, everyone was thrown for a loop when he hooked up with the Great Pumpkin to glam out with Zwan. We all know how that turned out. After washing off his stage makeup and shaking the glitter out of his hair, Pajo is back in the murky, spare musical environment where he seems more at home: His new solo LP, recorded under his own name this time (reaffirmation of identity after hanging with the ego-devouring Corgan?), picks up more or less where Whatever, Mortal left off.
Pajo's solo output has stayed within fairly narrow stylistic borders, but he's made minute adjustments in style and personnel. We talk about evolution when an artist makes a drastic change from one album to the next, but Pajo's growth seems more faithful to the spirit of the word: A slow, incremental process of refining and tweaking-- natural selection rather than rampant mutation. This time, he used a bare-bones recording process that enhances the aura of mystery surrounding his enigmatic meditations, producing the album with cheap software that came with his laptop and singing directly into the computer's microphone. Sounds sketchy on paper, but it works: If you're familiar with Pajo's music, you know he needs fancy production like Corgan needs a hairnet, and the hissy, unfettered recording makes the songs sound like decaying artifacts.
Still, Pajo requires a few passes before the songs begin to differentiate and expand: Pajo's voice is a gray, remote apparition that tends to shade into a hoarse whisper. It's remarkably placid and still, and has a strange negating effect that can only be described as audible silence, if you'll forgive the abstraction. Forgoing instrumentals this time in favor of shimmering, spectral folk with electronic dressings, the eerie quietude does not relent, from the initial skittering dirge "Oh No No" to the final spoken-word echo chamber "Francie", even on the borderline rocker "Baby Please Come Home". This record doesn't intend to blow your hair back; it wants to get under your skin, and with its twinkling arpeggios, morbidly graceful lyrics, and barely there electronics, slowly, it does. | 2005-06-21T02:00:16.000-04:00 | 2005-06-21T02:00:16.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | June 21, 2005 | 7.3 | 4fb574bb-949f-4fbb-a189-a538d68b037b | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Daniel Brandt is the percussionist of Berlin’s Brandt Brauer Frick ensemble, which balances modern classical and dance music. His first solo album is better suited to isolated contemplation. | Daniel Brandt is the percussionist of Berlin’s Brandt Brauer Frick ensemble, which balances modern classical and dance music. His first solo album is better suited to isolated contemplation. | Daniel Brandt: Eternal Something | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23056-eternal-something/ | Eternal Something | In 2012, the Brandt Brauer Frick ensemble, a German 10-piece chamber orchestra cranking out avant-garde techno music, made their U.S. debut at Lincoln Center. The following night, the core namesake trio brought their live act to Santos Party House for a late night marathon at the now-defunct Manhattan club. Since their start in 2008, Brandt Brauer Frick have split their time in performance venues at opposite ends of the spectrum like this: suit-and-tie fare one night, sweaty dance clothes the next.
As an ensemble, the group hones a balance between modern classical and dance music that hinges on deep repetition. For his first solo album, Eternal Something, the outfit’s percussionist Daniel Brandt has whittled the larger group’s acoustic approach to repetitive music down to his own solitary inklings. As a result, Eternal Something seems better suited to isolated contemplation than the dancefloor, even when the tracks build up to full-fledged drum attacks. Beyond the sounds he plays himself, Brandt has enlisted three others. Florian Juncker joins on trombone, Andreas Voss contributes cello, and then there is Manu Delago on the hang—a steelpan-derived instrument that was invented less than 20 years ago, looks like a flying saucer, and pings before it hums when struck.
Throughout Eternal Something, Brandt commands and layers sounds as percussive elements first and foremost, often obfuscating timbre in the process. The constant cello bowing on “Kale Me” becomes a quiet drone element beneath the pattering of stacked piano and guitar. On “Turn Over,” the hang seems to spiral around like a ticking clock falling through space, but the effect is propped up by ambiguous chirps and blips. It’s rare to hear an instrument run its full range, which muddies any attempts at parsing them out. Instead, riffs often drone in two or three-note variations, looping back on themselves quickly and constantly, ready to lock in-step with new sounds darting through. Brandt builds and diffuses rhythmic tension urgently, producing songs too busy and finicky to function as background noise.
The album’s opener, “Chaparral Mesa,” is the longest and most rewarding of the bunch. It begins with what sounds like a pair of intertwined guitars plucking single notes just out of unison. Brandt braids a wall of conspicuous, clean noise made up of single notes; some six minutes in, distorted strums lurch towards a thumping house break. Like much of the rest of the album, the effect is propulsive, tense, and entirely mesmerizing. Likewise, Juncker’s trombone creaks and swells ominously at the end of the title track, playing out more like an enveloping movie sound effect than dance fodder.
In that way at least, Eternal Something will sound familiar to any Brandt Brauer Frick fan, but Brandt’s solitude bears out an intimacy often missing in the group’s rigorous chamber music. These songs never feel preordained in the way that orchestral compositions do; they instead seem to work themselves out naturally. “On the Move” is a stunning kicker that builds from a plod to a chugging, horn-helmed swell. It’s the type of track that demands a full listen, lest you abandon the progress too early or miss out on the momentum by jumping in too late. This is the trick Brandt pitches throughout Eternal Something, carving out a path and begging you to see it through. Thankfully, he rewards patience with captivating twists and turns. | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | April 4, 2017 | 7.6 | 4fbff680-3402-478a-a833-10ce4947659f | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Shel Silverstein’s reputation rests on his children’s books, but he also had a long, illustrious songwriting career in Nashville. No one performed his ribald, irreverent songs more than the progressive country singer Bobby Bare, and this box set collects their work. | Shel Silverstein’s reputation rests on his children’s books, but he also had a long, illustrious songwriting career in Nashville. No one performed his ribald, irreverent songs more than the progressive country singer Bobby Bare, and this box set collects their work. | Bobby Bare: Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bobby-bare-bobby-bare-sings-shel-silverstein-plus/ | Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus | Buried within the book for the hefty box set Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus lays a disclaimer by liner notes author Dave Samuelson: “Newcomers to the Bare/Silverstein catalog should note several of these recordings contain language that may surprise if not shock more sensitive ears. Always the iconoclast, Silverstein generally directed his ribald, often dark humor to a predominantly male audience. His world straddled both the ‘Playboy’ philosophy and the bohemian Beat Generation of the 1950s. Anyone offended by his depiction of women should remember his work mirrors the attitudes, sensibilities and humor of an earlier era.” A content warning may be necessary for listeners who are only familiar with Shel Silverstein as the author of children’s books, blissfully unaware of the existence of such gleefully pornographic records as 1972’s Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball.
Much of Silverstein’s reputation rests upon the enduring popularity of The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic, children’s books published between 1964 and 1981, years where he also worked as a cartoonist, a Playboy satirist, and a folk singer, a vocation he pursued despite the inconvenient fact that he couldn’t sing, he shrieked. He might not have been able to carry a tune, but he could write one, a talent recognized by Johnny Cash, who was drawn to the literal gallows humor of Silverstein’s “25 Minutes to Go” and put it on his 1965 LP Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West. Four years later came “A Boy Named Sue,” a near-novelty written by Silverstein and delivered with thundering menace by Cash—a combination that gave the Man In Black his biggest hit and opened up Nashville for its songwriter.
Silverstein found some kindred spirits in Nashville—he wrote Waylon Jennings’ 1970 hit “The Taker” with Kris Kristofferson and authored Loretta Lynn’s 1971 “One’s on the Way” on his own—but he discovered his muse in Bobby Bare, a towering progressive country singer who had been kicking around Nashville for over a decade. Bare had a hit straight out of the gate in 1958 with “The All American Boy,” a loving parody of Elvis Presley, then scored a pair of career-making singles in 1963 with the lonesome “Detroit City” and “500 Miles Away from Home.” The country Top 10 was no stranger to Bare throughout the 1960s, a period where he demonstrated an ear for distinctive songwriters, helping bring Tom T. Hall, Mel Tillis, and Tompall Glaser into the spotlight. Before he met Silverstein, Bare cut “Sylvia’s Mother,” the number-five hit for Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.
“Sylvia’s Mother” was one of the last hits Bare had at Mercury Records before he returned to his old home of RCA, lured back to the label by then-president Chet Atkins’ promise that he could produce his own records. Ever since he heard Joe South’s Introspect on the radio in LA, he wanted to make a concept album, asking all of his songwriter friends to write him a song cycle, but they all demurred. Then, Bare met Silverstein at a Country Radio Seminar party one Saturday night in early 1973. The singer told the songwriter about his hard luck. That next Monday, he got a call from Silverstein saying he had an album’s worth of songs ready to go.
The resulting Lullabys, Legends and Lies kicked off a lifelong collaboration between the pair. Until Silverstein’s death in 1999, Silverstein wrote country songs with Bare in mind, while Bare turned to Silverstein whenever he needed a new project, as he did for his 1998 supergroup Old Dogs. That record isn’t featured on Bear Family’s hefty new box set Bobby Bare Sings Shel Silverstein Plus, as the box set focuses on recordings made between 1972 and 1983, a period where Bare released three full albums devoted to Silverstein songs, recorded another complete set that sat in the vaults for decades, released another two where Shel dominated all other songwriters, and then regularly fit a Silverstein song or two onto his other LPs, leaving a handful of other tracks unreleased. All told, Bare recorded well over 100 Silverstein compositions during this period, and that sheer number is proof of their symbiotic partnership: the singer found his songwriter, the spinner of yarns found his storyteller.
Their potent chemistry was palpable on Lullabys, Legends and Lies, the concept album Bare longed to make. Silverstein gathered some old tunes of his, wrote a few new ones, then handed Bare a bunch of songs hanging off the very loose notion conveyed in the title. Acting as his own producer, the singer kept things cheap and lean, creating the impression that he and his band were singing and picking at home. The immediacy of this intimacy was striking but Silverstein came up with an ingenious notion: record an in-studio audience’s reaction to the playback of the album, then add their whoops, laughter, and off-key singalongs to the finished product, giving the illusion of a concert album.
Their gamble paid off. “Marie Laveau” gave Bare his first number one country hit and “Daddy, What If,” his sticky-sweet duet with his young son Bobby Jr., almost cracked the Top 40, sending the album into Billboard’s Country Top 10, its success paving the way for other self-produced mavericks like and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. If Lullabys, Legends and Lies didn’t prove to be as enduring as what followed in its wake, chalk it up to the album’s contrived charm working a little bit too well: Some of Silverstein’s stories are a bit too cutesy, as is the framing device of the crowd. Still, the record is powerful, particularly in how Bare’s casual authority undercuts Silverstein’s impish tendencies, a quality evident in the still, plaintive “In The Hills of Shiloh” and, especially, how the singer keeps the winding story-song “The Winner” compelling, delivering each successive punchline with an widening smile.
“The Winner” would wind up as the template for much of the work Bare and Silverstein would do together, but first they had to attempt to replicate the success of Lullabys, Legends and Lies. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s oral history Working, Silverstein decided to address the plight of those downtrodden by the recession of 1973 through Hard Time Hungrys, but it took a long time to weave his stories with man-on-the-street interviews, so the pair decided to bash out Singing in the Kitchen first. Billed equally to Bare and his family, Singing in the Kitchen built off the success of “Daddy What If,” finding the amiable patriarch singing kid-friendly songs with his children. Listening to it is like viewing snapshots of another family, one you might not know particularly well: their affection is evident, but not quite contagious. Still, Singing in the Kitchen bought Bare time to complete Hard Time Hungrys, the most ambitious record he ever made. The attempt to cross-pollinate Silverstein’s storytelling with audio vérité is admirable but also exhausting. Every time the music gains momentum, like when the tongue-in-cheek blues “Alimony” rambles into view, the interviews cut in and derail the record.
These three albums may have flaws, but they’re flaws born of ambition, and that adventurousness helped place Bare in the vanguard of the burgeoning outlaw country movement. He also was scoring just enough hits to gain the attention of other labels, so he decided to jump ship for Columbia in 1978, a move that coincided with a brief ill-fated association with rock manager Bill Graham. RCA, particularly its Nashville president Jerry Bradley, didn’t take well to this news. Bradley never agreed with Atkins’s decision to let Bare produce his own records, so when the singer decided to leave the label, RCA buried Great American Saturday Night, a Silverstein-written concept album capturing all the different kinds of debauchery and despair on a random weekend night. Originally planned for 1977, the version on this box is longer than the BFD release from earlier in 2020 and, in this narrative-filled edition, it’s the clear bridge between the duo’s earlier records and Bare’s sleazy, Silverstein-heavy 1980 records Down & Dirty and Drunk & Crazy; it tempers its cinematic scope with earthy lasciviousness.
Bare recorded songs by other writers during the latter half of the 1970s—1977 brought Me And McDill, a salute to Bob McDill—but he still found a way to fit Silverstein songs onto his other concept albums (1975’s Cowboys and Daddys) and kept him by his side when he took a stab at crossover success with Bare, his 1978 debut for Columbia. This box collects these tunes, as well as several unreleased cuts, as a pair of “Stray Bare Tracks” discs, collections that have more in common with the middle-aged crazies of Down & Dirty and Drunk & Crazy than the redneck hippie dreamer of Lullabys, Legends and Lies. The contrast between these two phases is startling. The first three records are intimate and sweet, sometimes hinting at earthier concerns, but their good intentions triumph over their devilish instincts.
That’s not the case with the rest of the material on the box. Once Bare and Silverstein grew comfortable with each other, they indulged in each other’s strengths and excesses as only a pair of close friends can. Appropriately, as the pair’s familiarity increased, the music turned bolder, even burly, with the productions accumulating some slick period flair. Bare’s records wound up pitched halfway between swaggering outlaw and smooth Urban Cowboy country-pop crossover, a transition that suited Silverstein’s narrowing of vision.
Where he once devoted himself to myths and finding the mysteries in everyday lives, he now busied himself with mundanities of modern life: telling dirty jokes, sucking on a glass of wine at TGIFridays, and cursing diets. He still could summon some genuine pathos—as late as 1983, Bare cut the hard barroom weeper “Drinkin’ from the Bottle”—but these Stray Tracks also show how Silverstein sometimes like to push Bare right up to the edge and the singer happily went along. With its chorus of “does anybody here want to fuck or fight,” the title track of Great American Saturday Night itself is testament to this fact, but “They Held Me Down”—an unreleased Bare track Silverstein recorded for his 1978 LP Songs and Stories—is a veritable index of immoralities, delivered with a sideways grin.
Bare channeled some of this cheerful perversion onto Drunk & Crazy, an album where he laments his hard-rocking band and celebrates the sloth of “Drinkin’ and Druggin’ and Watchin’ TV.” Drunk & Crazy is also home to “If That Ain’t Love,” a song that could have earned the box set’s disclaimer all on its own. With his tongue firmly in cheek, Silverstein’s narrator chronicles a list of domestic terrors, and while the abuser is clearly the one the songwriter is targeting as the butt of the joke, the intensity of the imagery (“"Baby I’m sorry I done you like that/I called you a name and I gave you a whack/I spit in your eye and gave your wrist a twist/And if that ain’t love, what is”) is as jarring as the rowdiness of the performance. That seediness illustrates that it was a long road from the genial tall tales of Lullabys, Legends and Lies and the dive-bar soundtrack of Drunk & Crazy. Hearing Bare and Silverstein make that journey over the course of these eight CDs leaves you with a new appreciation for their funky, off-color chemistry.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Bear Family | October 8, 2020 | 8.2 | 4fc0aaa7-22a8-4a65-be21-af7cb4adf9a6 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The duo’s 1988 goofy but undeniably catchy double-album mixed hip-hop bona fides with an effervescent MC. It would win over Middle America and score the first-ever Grammy for a rap album. | The duo’s 1988 goofy but undeniably catchy double-album mixed hip-hop bona fides with an effervescent MC. It would win over Middle America and score the first-ever Grammy for a rap album. | DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince: He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-jazzy-jeff-and-the-fresh-prince-hes-the-dj-im-the-rapper/ | He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper | DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper is no one’s idea of a revolutionary document. It’s proudly, cheerfully, purposefully corny: The first song is a Nightmare on Elm Street parody featuring the line, “He’s burned up like a weenie/And his name is Fred.” Listening to it often feels babysitting a room full of fourth graders for a few hours. And yet, it racked up a lot of “firsts”: It was the first hip-hop double album and the first rap album to win a Grammy; in fact, it was the first year the Grammys even acknowledged rap.
It was not fashioned with global conquest in mind; it was recorded in a month or so by two kids from West Philly who met a few years earlier at a house party. Nonetheless, when Will Smith and Jeffrey Townes learned of their Grammy nomination, they grasped the significance of the moment. And when they learned that the Grammys refused to televise it, they pleaded and made their case, even appearing on “the Arsenio Hall Show” to demand that the academy allow their moment some airtime. But the Grammys held their ground and the pair boycotted the ceremony—it was only later, when someone called them, that they learned they had won.
The Grammy boycott may have been the only time that Will Smith—one of the most supernaturally ingratiating humans of the 20th century—refused to show up. He seemed to have decided early on that he was going to make it virtually impossible for the music industry and culture’s gatekeepers to miss him. Extroverted without mania, likable but thoughtful, swaggering but goofy, confident but mildly self-deprecating, he grinned and mugged and belly-laughed and said “yes” to everything with such vigor that he cratered into the heart of Middle America. In the history of charm offensives, Will Smith is Alexander the Great, and He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper was his first invasion of the world.
It was not, however, his introduction to the world; Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince’s 1987 album Rock the House had scored some minor success with the campy, cautionary tale “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble,” which hit the radio just as Smith was graduating high school. From then on, their ascent was quiet and frictionless: their record label Jive sent them to London to hole up in a hotel to record their follow-up. They worked tirelessly, with Jeff mostly confined to his hotel because of a cast covering his leg from a car accident back in Philly. Before Jive approached, the two of them had been hashing out material for a DJ album, and Jeff suggested they combine those cuts with the new music and voila: rap’s first double album. It was an inauspicious creation myth, and when they finished, they packed up, came home, and immediately went on the Run’s House tour alongside Whodini, Run-D.M.C., EPMD, and Public Enemy.
Amid these heavyweights, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were decidedly the underdogs, the cheerful kids along for the ride. While Chuck D. raided white supremacy, the colorful, kooky video for “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was busy entertaining suburban homes. Then, three weeks in, their manager Russell Simmons appeared at a venue to present them with a gold record. On a gamble, Smith asked the crowd to complete a line from “Parents Just Don’t Understand”—20,000 voices roared every word of the song right back at them. Steadily, the wholesome underdog kids ended up becoming the focus of the all-star tour, and soon the duo with the songs about Burger King and Freddy Krueger were going on after Public Enemy. He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper would eventually go on to sell three million copies.
There were some subterranean industry shifts rumbling just beneath them that no doubt boosted the album’s velocity. The business of hip-hop was shifting solidly from fast-and-cheap singles to album formats, which meant that major labels could—and did—carpet-bomb the box stores of America with their products. Hip-hop was also entering its first widely acknowledged Golden Age, with Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy, and KRS-One filling out rap’s first real popular-culture Mount Rushmore. “Rap is in a phase in which it is simultaneously acceptable to the companies running the show, the artists making the music and the audience out there buying it,” Peter Watrous shrewdly observed for the New York Times in June of 1988, just as the album was released. The ground was softened for something as transparent, likable, and immediate as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.
With Smith mugging to the very last cheap seat in the rafters and Townes quietly cutting up records with blinding virtuosity, it was guaranteed that at least half of the duo would nullify some of your reservations. If you were leery of hip-hop because you were A) old, B) white, or C) both, Smith was a one-man disarmament machine. If on the other hand, you were a hardcore hip-hop fan, busy memorizing the meter of Rakim’s lines the year he laid them on wax, then Jeff’s pyrotechnics allowed you to swallow Smith’s antics. He was the DJ, Smith was the rapper.
Smith, understandably, hasn’t been cited much for lyricism or for influence as an MC. He’s also been the subject of multiple ghostwriting allegations, although Nas, frequently cited as a writer for Smith, has vigorously denied it. But he remains a genial and effective rapper, a guy you recognize from the second he opens his mouth. He flowed like a Saturday-morning-cartoon version of Big Daddy Kane or KRS, with compound rhymes and sentences that flowed over line breaks to slyly draw your attention to the tricks he was playing: “It was kind of an accident, the way that it happened/One day I was rapping, and on the beat Jeff was backing/Me up, and all of a sudden, he brought in a cut/And I dropped my microphone and said, ‘What the—?’” He rapped on “Brand New Funk.”
It was nothing that wasn’t being done already by Rakim and Kane and other bolder innovators, but Smith injected the sunbeam of his personality into it. Has anyone ever chuckled mid-flow more convincingly than Smith? His voice is clear and chipper, with every single word as audible and legible on first listen as ten-foot high neon-green graffiti letters. He grinned into fisheye lenses in his videos, full of puppet-show props and sped up, Looney Tunes-style antics. A young Marshall Mathers might have been absorbing every word of LL Cool J’s records at the time, but there’s no question, looking at Eminem’s breakthrough videos for “My Name Is” and “The Real Slim Shady,” that the Fresh Prince’s “friendly scamp” presentation resonated somewhere in his subconscious.
There are a couple of troublesome reminders in Smith’s lyrics of just how hard it is to remain in the perceived “middle,” or rather reminders that “the middle” is simply a peephole for what those pushing on either side allow you to see. Did you remember, for instance, that one of the punchlines in “Parents Just Don’t Understand” is Will Smith almost having sex with a twelve-year-old? Or that he shouts out “all the homeboys that got AIDS be quiet” as a way of getting the crowd to cheer on “Live At Union Square, November 1986?” This was right around the height of the AIDS epidemic, but popular awareness of AIDS was years away from critical mass, so the joke dinged off American consciousness like a Nerf bat. In 2017, it feels like a bludgeon.
When the duo blew up, they were in fact widely derided as the hip-hop equivalent of Nerf bats. “That’s when we started hearing, ’Aw, man, that shit’s for the suburbs,’ Townes remembered. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Southwest Philly is so far from the suburbs. You have no idea the shit I’ve seen or have gone through…’ I paid very close to attention to that. We were cool as long as we stayed on black radio and stayed amongst our hip-hop peers.”
It’s understandable that Townes would bristle. With his sterling hip-hop credentials, he was quietly doing brilliant things on those supposed harmless and flyweight songs. On “Brand New,” he cuts up a drum and horn break from Pleasure’s “Bouncy Lady,” speeding it and warping it until it sounds like a crumpled-up ball of paper. On “Let’s Get Busy Baby” he isolates a little hiccup in the rising sunbeam of Stevie Wonder “Sir Duke” horn lick, and builds a little burbling 8-bit Atari groove from it. On “Time To Chill,” he broke down a flip of George Benson at a time when almost no one in hip-hop was reaching for satiny-smooth, plush samples. This was the age of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad air-raid squeals, the stark, hard drum breaks of Eric B, but on “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” he cut up a chuckling little burble from a Peter Frampton song and turned it into a five-minute long Whoopie Cushion. He’s a genius, alternately working in plain sight and hidden comfortably there, where he’s remained for decades, allowing Will Smith to soak up the spotlight. There is perhaps no old-school hip-hop legend in history with a savvier or more comfortable relationship to fame than Jeffrey Townes.
Meanwhile, by 1990, Smith had blown through a million dollars, an unfortunate occupational hazard for a rich teenager. While hip-hop was scaling up and outward around him, he found himself in debt and on the precipice of fading into the history books along with all his firsts. So, looking for a way forward, he signed on with producer Quincy Jones and a TV writer named Andy Borowitz for a pilot about a young West Philly youth who moved in with his rich relatives in Bel Air. He and Jazzy Jeff knocked out the theme song more or less overnight, and a pilot was made. The pilot did well: as Borowitz remembered, years later: “The audience loved Will right from the start.” | 2017-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Jive | October 1, 2017 | 7.2 | 4fd11781-b5ee-4007-93ee-2f4b29e27c7b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The underground hip-hop veteran’s new EP flirts with chess metaphors, but the mundane raps don’t help the thematic wallpaper hold up. | The underground hip-hop veteran’s new EP flirts with chess metaphors, but the mundane raps don’t help the thematic wallpaper hold up. | Tha God Fahim / NicoJP: Chess Moves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tha-god-fahim-chess-moves/ | Chess Moves | Rap music is no stranger to the world of chess. RZA and GZA of Wu-Tang Clan are the most recognizable chess players in the movement and have crafted entire songs dedicated to the world’s most popular strategy game. But aside from countless references and several of the genre’s most iconic figures being avid competitors, chess and rap have shared themes too: Both historically pride themselves on being games of cunning that involve eyeing down an adversary. As RZA once told The New York Times, “Hip-hop is a battle game. Chess is a battle.”
It makes sense that a rapper as meticulous as Tha God Fahim would be drawn to the world of knights and queens. A veteran of rap’s current underground renaissance, Fahim approaches rapping and producing like building a Gundam model, subtly tinkering with and reassembling his brand of melancholy hip-hop. Lately, he’s been rhyming more and producing slightly less, as he does on Chess Moves, an EP helmed entirely by Venezuelan-Mexican beatmaker NicoJP. It’s a steady, workmanlike effort, one drip from an exhaustingly prolific stream of music. His consistency and the nasal twang of his voice have endeared him to several generations of rap purists, but here, that steadiness and a lack of variety make the project feel longer than it actually is.
Though his style befits someone who might be into chess—the boasts and business-minded mentality of his lyrics betray the reserved, even aloof tone of his voice—the actual game is often superficially invoked here. Outside of track titles and a handful of vocal samples, there’s very little mention of chess at all; just elegant window dressing for Fahim’s raps and Nico’s loops. As a producer, Nico is a student of the Alchemist and Nicholas Craven school of psychedelic sampling. Check the clean guitar licks zigzagging across the horizon of the humid “War Spear,” or the spindly piano keys and harp strings creeping in the background of “Tha Fog” and “New Alert,” respectively. Sometimes the instruments float by with no percussion; other times, the drums bludgeon everything in their path.
This approach leaves Fahim a decent amount of room to talk his shit, and he pulls directly from his trusty blueprint: raps about entrepreneurship, struggling to survive in the cold streets, small pieces of advice, and showy displays of his mic skills. On “Picking Bones,” he talks about staying on work calls for hours and being grateful to breathe in such harsh times, the subtle rhyme scheme helping the generic message land. Some of his bars are bland, stalling on the most basic descriptions, like, “My only choice was to be a rider like Ghost Rider” on “Tha Dark Saga.” Fahim raps both for inspiration and aspiration, pointing out the strategy in his climb and making sure we are aware of the 10,000 hours that earned him his prosperity. In that sense, chess does subtly manifest as a theme for Fahim and Nico’s ruminations. But it’s thin enough to swap out for any other thematic wallpaper about honor or strategy, mainly because Fahim’s descriptions are often so formulaic that his own perspective disappears.
Like many of today’s independent rappers, Fahim has worked tirelessly to establish himself in a crowded scene. He’s even done it with different alter egos: Dump Gawd, the Wolf on Wall Street, the Dark Shogunn Assassin. None of these are discrete personas in the MF DOOM sense—they just give Fahim more room to rap about getting ahead in life and money. Chess Moves doesn’t budge from this template much; if it weren’t for the atmospheric beats, most of these thoughts would blur together. It’s like Fahim’s pulling off a castle move—a transition that puts him in a better position to strike on his next turn. | 2023-02-03T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-03T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Odd Harmonics | February 3, 2023 | 6.5 | 4fdaaf42-5e17-4e6c-b047-941def975303 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Red Hot comp features Arcade Fire, Spoon, Feist, Decemberists, Cat Power, Antony, Bon Iver, members of Sigur Rós, and many others. | Red Hot comp features Arcade Fire, Spoon, Feist, Decemberists, Cat Power, Antony, Bon Iver, members of Sigur Rós, and many others. | Various Artists: Dark Was the Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12717-dark-was-the-night/ | Dark Was the Night | Charity albums all start wonderfully-- with good intentions and noble causes. Alas, they frequently end poorly, entering the world as collections of outtakes, abandoned ideas, and uninspired covers. Whether that matters is another thing: If you share Natalie Portman's interest in the value of microcredit, or any number of executive producers' hope for more Darfur awareness or money for Doctors Without Borders, getting a decent Death Cab song or Afrobeat comp should simply be a bonus "thank you" for your minimal contribution.
For 20 years, the Red Hot Organization has been-- along with War Child, more on them in the upcoming days-- the gold standard for the charity album. Battling HIV and AIDS via pop culture, Red Hot came out of the gate with an eclectic winner, the Cole Porter covers record Red Hot + Blue (1990). Most of our readers are likely more familiar with their 1993 No Alternative disc, which collected tracks from Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pavement, and others. Two decades later, they follow with Dark Was the Night, a collection of 31 new and exclusive songs from most of the heavy hitters of the NPR-friendly wing of indie music.
Produced by Red Hot, along with the National's Bryce and Aaron Dessner, the vast majority of the songs on this collection are worth owning regardless of where the money is going. The first of the two CDs, in particular, is full of gems. David Byrne and Dirty Projectors keep their vocal affectations on the right side of awesome on "Knotty Pine"; Feist adeptly teams with Death Cab's Ben Gibbard on a cover of Vashti Bunyan's "Train Song" and later slow burns through the outstanding Grizzly Bear collaboration "Service Bell"; and both Yeasayer's nimble "Tightrope" and My Brightest Diamond's smoky version of "Feeling Good" are eyebrow-raising lateral moves.
A few things that looked a bit too on-the-nose on paper turn out to work: Bon Iver, in the process of breaking away from the lazy "guy in a Wisconsin cabin" narrative, delivers a song about... a small town in Wisconsin; the Books, a half-cello, half-electronics duo, and José González, a Nick Drake-like singer-songwriter still best known for his covers, get together to do Nick Drake's "Cello Song"; Kronos Quartet boldly transform Blind Willie Johnson's gut-wrenching, crucifixion-inspired 1927 blues moan "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" (the track that gives the comp its name) into a chamber ensemble piece.
Not to be outdone by their invitees, the National shout-out Pavement on the languid "So Far Around the Bend", recalling Pavement doing the same to one of their favorite bands (R.E.M.) on No Alternative. Aaron Dessner pairs with Bon Iver for one of the record's several ghostly tracks, "Big Red Machine", while brother Bryce goes one better, teaming with Antony Hegarty to cover Bob Dylan's take of the traditional ballad "I Was Young When I Left Home". Antony in particular shines, giving it a somber matter-of-fact reading that lends the entire song, not just the purgatory of its final verse, a note of tragedy.
Disc One saves its best for last though: Sufjan Stevens breaks his relative silence with a cover of the Castanets' "You Are the Blood", scrapping his baroque preciousness for tactile avant-pop. Infusing the track with a twitchy, restless quality, Stevens re-imagines the song-- musically as well as lyrically-- as a tussle between the subject and his body, an appropriately haunting quality for this compilation. (Buck 65's remix, "Blood Pt. 2", isn't as successful.) Stevens teams a more cacophonous version of his traditional arsenal of horns and choral vocals with the sort of minimalist electronics he leaned more heavily on in the days before he earned indie-level fame.
Disc Two is more of a mixed bag. Spoon kick it off with a badly needed injection of rhythm; their "Well-Alright" feels like the jaunty bar-bandisms that used to soundtrack National Lampoon films-- think "I'm Alright" or "Holiday Road". Arcade Fire follow with a similar but less-interesting version of the same idea. From there things oscillate between meh and engaging, with quality contributions from the New Pornographers (covering one of their bandmate Dan Bejar's Destroyer songs), Yo La Tengo, Riceboy Sleeps (featuring members of Sigur Rós), and Conor Oberst with Gillian Welch.
Standing out even more positively, My Morning Jacket's laid-back "El Caporal" and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' swivel-hipped Shuggie Otis cover "Inspiration Information" bring warmth to the proceedings; Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch-- one of the few non-North Americans here-- adds lyrics to an old Scottish folk song, and the resulting "Another Saturday" is one more quiet triumph for him in a career full of them. Best in class on this disc, however, goes to TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, whose version of the Troggs' "With a Girl Like You" is like a Stephin Merritt pastiche with horns grafted onto it, but it's glorious because of, rather than despite, its obvious homage.
I confess though: My first reaction to listening to this all the way through was negative. When focusing on what's not here rather than what is, Dark Was the Night comes off as a gray, monotone look at the current indie landscape and, as a result, works best in small batches. It's missing not only rhythm and electronics-- more hip-hop, anything in the DFA axis, M.I.A., Animal Collective, etc.-- but volume and velocity as well. Sure, it's a charity record not a party soundtrack, but No Alternative was full of actual rock songs. On this evidence, today's guitar-based indie is primarily folkie tunefulness, baroque lines in which the guitar is subservient to other instruments, or, based on the original Simon Reynolds definition of the word, post-rock: "Using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords."
Dissecting the reasons for this and determining the consequences, if any, is another matter altogether, but it's a shame that the diversity of previously successful charity comps-- the Red Hot ones mentioned, War Child's The Help Album-- is missing here. Naturally these artists are more popular than their experimental, electronic, and rock brethren-- Gang Gang Dance, Air France, or No Age would sell fewer records than the Decemberists on any day of the week-- but the idea that rock is less central than folk music in underground North American music is not only really weird but a very new phenomenon. Again though, these songs are uniformally excellent, so it's a minor and possibly misplaced quibble. And, who knows, maybe-- hopefully!-- Red Hot is in the process of asking the Hold Steady or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Hot Chip or the Knife, to help craft sequels. | 2009-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | 4AD | February 26, 2009 | 8.6 | 4fdbab93-c800-4339-81d2-7fdc39c97dfe | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The R&B legend's new album features collaborations with Disclosure as well as British pop figures like Sam Smith, Naughty Boy, and "Latch" songwriter Jimmy Napes. But the young producers are shown up by old heads Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins and UK garage forefather MJ Cole. | The R&B legend's new album features collaborations with Disclosure as well as British pop figures like Sam Smith, Naughty Boy, and "Latch" songwriter Jimmy Napes. But the young producers are shown up by old heads Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins and UK garage forefather MJ Cole. | Mary J. Blige: The London Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20050-the-london-sessions/ | The London Sessions | This past January, Mary J. Blige appeared on a remix of Disclosure’s "F For You"—an unexpected but instantly natural pairing that at the time seemed merely like a coronation of sorts for the legendary R&B singer. Instead it was a harbinger for both the individuals involved and the scenes they represent. As 2014 played out, the Lawrence brothers would see their breakthrough hit "Latch" become a surprise staple on rap and R&B radio stations, while Blige used her turn on "F For You" as the launching pad for a complete career digression—if not an overall reinvention.
Her new album The London Sessions features primary collaborations with Disclosure as well as fellow British pop superstars Sam Smith, Naughty Boy and "Latch" songwriter Jimmy Napes. That it stands as one of the final major releases of the calendar year is fitting as a summation of R&B in 2014. As the sound of pop mutated into dance music a few years back, R&B lost its footing in the American mainstream, leaving even its established superstars in the lurch. But R&B clawed back some of its relevance this year thanks to danceable, appealing songs that didn’t immolate the genre at the altar of pop radio. Chris Brown’s "Loyal", for instance, was a massive hit, but more instructive in the context of Blige’s new album were Kid Ink’s "Show Me" and Jeremih’s "Don’t Tell 'Em", two hugely popular DJ Mustard-produced songs that showed a younger generation how R&B could fuse with house beats in a way that feels completely natural.
All of this—from Mustard’s wizardry to R&B playlists finding room for "Latch" and Smith’s "Stay With Me"—has helped provide a soft landing spot for Blige, whose career has been floating aimlessly for a few years now. Blige is nothing less than a titan of R&B music, but she had fallen into a trap familiar to many popular musicians two decades into a career: by trying to cling to the zeitgeist she was making music that felt stale. Blige’s albums since 2007’s Growing Pains have been patchy, and she hasn’t had a true hit single since that album’s "Just Fine".
No single from The London Sessions has yet changed that latter issue, but as an album it certainly doesn’t feel stale. Instead, it’s a seamless and occasionally thrilling listen that establishes a fact many could have predicted: Blige’s throaty vocals, as passionate and emotional as ever, are an ideal fit for house music. Nonetheless the album doesn’t exactly play out how you might expect.
For instance, it opens with a quartet of ballads, only one of which—a classic Blige self-help anthem called "Doubt", co-written with Naughty Boy collaborator Sam Romans—rises to the level of the album’s better, later songs. Despite Blige stoking the album’s narrative with its name and by listing six songwriters on its cover, we are eased into the album slowly, as if we are wading into cold water. It’s like Blige couldn’t bear for her core fanbase to immediately hear a four-on-the-floor beat. The real meat of the album comes after these opening tracks—the album opens with a few wobbly steps, making the sequencing curious at best.
Then there is the matter of the big name collaborators. Disclosure and Sam Smith are the starry names here peeking out from behind the curtains, though they even get their moments in the spotlight in the form of spoken word interludes in which they gush openly about Blige. The thing is that, although these three might have been the inspiration for The London Sessions, their contributions don’t exactly stand out.
"Right Now", a Disclosure production with a Smith co-writing credit that was the first song released off the album, is not only one of the album’s most forgettable tracks, but it’s also so bland that it seems like Disclosure and Smith (along with Napes) were almost afraid to disturb Blige. Their reverence is clear in the clipped interludes—"To me she was this untouchable goddess," Smith says in one of them—but that too often translates to a sort of distance. "Follow", the other Disclosure track (though this time without Smith), is better, but with its simple skipping garage drums and rubbery bassline it still feels like a Disclosure starter kit.
The Lawrence brothers are actually shown up by a few old heads. The album’s best track is "My Loving", which was produced and co-written along with Blige and Romans by R&B god Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins. The track is a pure '90s house throwback, and it’s the first song on the album that really seems to electrify Blige. "I’m in heaven, every time you lay your body next to me," she sings early in the track, letting her vocals run just slightly. Blige is channeling dozens of great, and often anonymous, house divas here, and naturally she fits in their lineage perfectly.
That song kicks off a run of tracks that really stabilizes the album. "Long Hard Look", which sounds like a take on Sampha’s broken keyboard confessionals, is the album’s best slow number. It’s followed up by "Whole Damn Year", another vintage Blige ballad that features quietly arresting vocals: "It took a whole damn year to repair my body/ It’s been about five years." Following that is the second instance in which the young kids get taught old tricks: "Nobody But You", the album’s second-best uptempo track, allows Blige to really belt a devotional house chorus, and she delivers. It was produced by UK garage forefather MJ Cole, who shows Disclosure how to stay out of Blige’s way with some clicking drums and piano chords while still giving her a song she can really sink her teeth into.
The album ends with another ballad, one that suspends Blige’s voice over pounding, chunky piano chords and a blush of strings. It is a final reminder that even if the surroundings change, Blige can wring emotion out of her voice like very few people on Earth. That, 20-something years on, she found a new way of showcasing this is why she is who she is. | 2014-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | December 9, 2014 | 7 | 4fe7d07d-ce01-45b8-bd1c-61f7005c7446 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Equipped with whirlpooling guitars and a newfound supply of silvery electronics, the South London band chronicles anxiety and ennui in songs full of spine-tingling dissonance. | Equipped with whirlpooling guitars and a newfound supply of silvery electronics, the South London band chronicles anxiety and ennui in songs full of spine-tingling dissonance. | Goat Girl : On All Fours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/goat-girl-on-all-fours/ | On All Fours | On the best song from Goat Girl’s 2018 self-titled debut, the South London band fantasized about smashing in a pervert’s head on a train. Yet the record mostly thrummed with the unsettling energy of a more otherworldly form of transport: the night bus, crisscrossing the capital at witching hour when normal senses, faculties, and decorum have slipped away. None of the awful creeps, shitheel politicians, or scuzzy encounters they sang about came from the realm of fantasy, but each bizarre story of the city whizzed past in a surreal blur, like warped William Hogarth street scenes glimpsed through a smeared window.
The lurid playfulness—set to a restless soundtrack of clattering post-punk and gothic country—suited a band you’d swear lifted their stage names from an old kids’ horror comic (singer Clottie Cream, guitarist L.E.D., drummer Rosy Bones, and bassist Holly Hole, who replaced Naima Jelly in 2019). But that dark, carnivalesque exuberance is in shorter supply on On All Fours. Where its predecessor crammed 19 songs into 40 minutes, these 13 stretch out languidly. Rather than lurching between styles, they mostly stick to whirlpooling guitars and a newfound supply of silvery electronics—sometimes pulsing, sometimes throbbing, sometimes seemingly on the brink of short-circuiting. Half mellifluous and half menacing, they often chronicle the draining toll of anxiety and depression. “Please don’t leave me alone/Staring out the window,” intones L.E.D. on “Anxiety Feels,” lost and listless in its woozy, downbeat swirl.
Ennui and disillusionment pervade the LP: The spacey, shimmering “Sad Cowboy” starts as a magical moonlit tour of Clottie’s neighborhood, but ends with her realizing that the pretty sights aren’t what they seem. Often, the songs juxtapose glimmering arrangements with more discordant sounds, similar to how Stereolab contrasted murky ideas with Laetitia Sadier’s sweet vocals. “Where Do We Go?,” a takedown of a lying, venomous blowhard, chimes like a nursery rhyme before introducing a synth as shrill as a dentist’s drill. “I’m sure it stinks under his skin/Where pores secrete all the hate from within,” Clottie murmurs. “Closing In,” meanwhile, chips away at its dreamy ice-cream truck melody with nagging synths, echoing the way treacherous thoughts poison her mind like “stagnant night soil.”
That sense of dissonance is even more effective when On All Fours switches focus to bigger horrors. Although opener “Pest” rages against the climate crisis, rank Western hypocrisy, and people smugly sleepwalking toward oblivion, it eschews abrasiveness for a gorgeous, celestial score. Later, Goat Girl chrip the refrain of the breezy “Babidaba” as if absentmindedly singing while doing the dishes, ignoring the electronics that wobble like a demented fairground ride. “Feels like we’re an infection,” deadpans L.E.D. “Carry on like we’re protected/As if we’re unaffected.” It plays out like the soundtrack to a nightmarish Twilight Zone episode where reality is collapsing but everyone insists nothing’s wrong.
More pedestrian bands would likely fashion something worthy and dull from such weighty themes, but On All Fours is too off-kilter to be preachy. “The Crack,” a rumbling, clanging song about humans fleeing a pollution-ravaged Earth for space, channels the spirit of a lost Arthur C. Clarke story; “They Bite on You” turns an account of having scabies into body horror. Most startling is “P.T.S.Tea,” a blackly comic farce which details yet another public transport run-in with an entitled jerk, this time a man on a ferry who burns Rosy with a cup of boiling hot tea. “Dumb man wouldn’t even look at me,” they seethe, but their voice keeps its sing-song sweetness while manic synths blurt like a Saturday morning cartoon theme, burying anger beneath forced cheerfulness. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how On All Fours refines Goat Girl’s sound: Whatever else changes, finding strange ways to tell grim truths is still what they do best.
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. | 2021-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | January 29, 2021 | 7.1 | 4ff002ad-7ff1-4614-84bd-0c9c15f7e8c1 | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
Moebius’ friend Tim Story gathers loops and samples left behind by the late krautrock pioneer and reworks them with the assistance of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Michael Rother, Sarah Davachi, and others. | Moebius’ friend Tim Story gathers loops and samples left behind by the late krautrock pioneer and reworks them with the assistance of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Michael Rother, Sarah Davachi, and others. | Tim Story / Dieter Moebius: Moebius Strips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-story-dieter-moebius-moebius-strips/ | Moebius Strips | In 1969, Dieter Moebius played a 12-hour gig at an art space above a Berlin shopping mall. Behind the drumkit of newly formed improvisational trio Kluster, he had the markings of an artist most at home when embracing the unknown. As a member of two game-changing krautrock acts in the 1970s—Kluster, later Cluster, and Harmonia, a group that Brian Eno once dubbed “the world’s most important rock group”—the Swiss-German first threw caution to the wind, then made it an art form. Six years on from his passing, his close friend and collaborator Tim Story curates a release that sees the vast potential in loose ends.
Alongside Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Moebius—or “Moebi”—set the pace for a radical career by recording the first two Kluster albums with visionary krautrock producer Conny Plank in a single night. “The concept,” said Moebi in 2012, “was to not have a concept.” It may sound tame nowadays, but back in 1969, it was a bold plan of action. Schnitzler up and left in 1971, Kluster became Cluster, and Moebi and Roedelius honed their idea of non-conceptual music via the droning industrial hum of Cluster and Cluster II. On Moebius Strips, Story rekindles that adventurous spirit—which Moebi nurtured on many solo and collaborative releases—across 15 tracks assembled from a trove of loops and samples that he left behind.
That each piece—or “strip” or “segment”—feels like wandering into various rooms at a dimly lit art space is no fluke: Originally created as an immersive multi-channel audio installation, Moebius Strips has an almost tactile quality, a kind of three-dimensional sonic sculpture. In this drift space, which is filled out with arcs and interactions between Moebi and others, the urge to reach out feels natural. With synth stabs and squalling soprano sax, “Elbow 9b” evokes a loft of creaking doors and trapped ghosts. Melding piano plinks with disembodied chimes, “Riff 2G” sits well with “Roomtone Elbow” and its Doppler-effected frequencies and unknown spinning sounds.
A love of collaboration steered much of Moebi’s most luminous work (beyond Cluster and Harmonia, alongside Roedelius and Neu! founder Michael Rother, After the Heat, with Eno and Roedelius, is a high water mark). Here, Story renews that tradition by curating not just a document of Moebi’s diffuse influence, but a cross-generational collaboration that flips time and space. As well as making his own contributions, he invites an illustrious group of musicians to leave their own mark on the strips. “Segment A,” by Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak>), is a masterfully mangled effort bridging the tumbling rhythms of Can’s Jaki Liebezeit with the scorched drum sound of Portishead’s “Machine Gun.” Another peak, “Strip 11” finds Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh wrangling a mesh of agitated beats and fizzling kosmische that would fit snugly as a breather on Pitch Control, Moebi and Plank’s 1983 album with Guru Guru’s Mani Neumeier.
As a work created in no one place in particular, Moebius Strips brings inner spaces outwards. Like a light bouncing off a fog-covered lake at night, Sarah Davachi’s “Segment U,” with its dancing melody amid an organ swarm, evokes the gorgeous zero gravity of Cluster’s Sowiesoso. No less gossamer, “Segment X” by Japanese avant-garde vocalist Hiromi Moritani, aka Phew, channels the fraught but muted signals of an escape pod roving into infinite space. It weighs heavy here, but Moebi’s presence is more keenly felt in the hands of kindred spirits. While the modular back-and-forth on Roedelius’ “Strip 2” hits like a brief interaction between two old friends, Rother’s “Strip 30” takes the sentiment to its natural conclusion. Like a long-lost Neu! edit, slowed down to a near standstill of backwashed synth and glacial slithers of guitar, it speaks to an eternal connection in under five minutes.
The haphazard numbering of Moebius Strips’ tracks suggests the existence of many more snippets that didn’t make the final cut. This refusal to be precious or exhaustive feels like an extension of Moebius’ own philosophy. Besides, the bigger picture tells a more interesting story. By smudging what constitutes beginnings and endings, along with preconceptions about authorship, Moebius Strips is—just like Moebi was—many things at once. It feels here and there, past and present, his and theirs. Ours, too. With a confidante like Story at the helm, it honors the legacy of a friend and pioneer whose enviable status as the godfather of electronic krautrock is beginning to feel like a case of underselling.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Rock | Curious Music | October 4, 2021 | 7.6 | 4ffc4d96-6948-4c65-8d2d-ae538f31fb00 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
The 1978 double-LP live set At Budokan gets a remixed, remastered release of its source recordings, becoming the next maligned Dylan album ripe for critical revision. | The 1978 double-LP live set At Budokan gets a remixed, remastered release of its source recordings, becoming the next maligned Dylan album ripe for critical revision. | Bob Dylan: The Complete Budokan 1978 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-the-complete-budokan-1978/ | The Complete Budokan 1978 | Given enough time, every one of Bob Dylan’s transgressions in taste is bound for reappraisal. Self Portrait, the double LP that Greil Marcus infamously dismissed upon its release with “What is this shit?,” had its reputation restored through The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971). Dylan’s misunderstood Christian phase sounded fiery and invigorating on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979-1981. It would seem at least possible that The Complete Budokan 1978 could perform a similar feat, challenging conventional notions about a Dylan album that critic Dave Marsh claimed was “his worst record by such a wide margin it’s hard to fathom it.” The 1978 double-LP live set At Budokan, one of the beloved artist’s least beloved releases, is the next maligned Dylan album ripe for critical revision thanks to this new 4xCD box containing all of the source recordings for the original LP.
The Complete Budokan 1978 comprises two concerts, held February 28 and March 1 in Tokyo, at the beginning of the tour Dylan launched in 1978 with the express intent of raking in badly needed cash. Fresh off a divorce and tapped out from making Renaldo and Clara—his rambling four-hour half-fiction, half-documentary film about his touring extravaganza Rolling Thunder Revue—Dylan turned to Jerry Weintraub, the manager who’d greased the wheels for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra’s transitions into stadium-conquering touring juggernauts in the 1970s.
Bassist Rob Stoner, who played on the Rolling Thunder Revue and stayed on through the 1978 world tour, remembered that “Weintraub told Bob, ‘If you want to take it to the bank, you gotta do one of these slick, money-making tours. Just go out for a year, bust your ass, then you can go back to doing whatever you want.” Dylan heeded his manager’s advice. He expanded a basic band retained from Rolling Thunder with a trio of backing vocalists and saxophonist/flutist Steve Douglas, dressing the entire ensemble in matching stage outfits. When he received word that the Japanese promoter insisted he haul out his greatest hits for the tour’s opening stretch at Budokan, Dylan responded by reworking the tunes to showcase the full range of his band’s skills.
Aware of the shifting tides of the business and the culture, Dylan aimed these rearrangements at an audience that was maturing toward the middle of the road, partially inspired by witnessing a Las Vegas spectacle by Neil Diamond—another Weintraub client—in 1977. “Vegas” became a common buzzword in the reviews that greeted both At Budokan and the tour once it arrived Stateside later in 1978, an intended pejorative surely stoked by the spectacles staged by Weintraub. Time may have softened those Vegas associations, yet a listen to The Complete Budokan 1978 shows they’re warranted. A galloping soft-rock instrumental rendition of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—a hoedown performed as a show tune—sets a suitably loungey tone, one sustained by the snazzy flourishes scattered throughout the concerts. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” punctuates each verse with stabs of horns; the blues of “Maggie’s Farm” is reduced to a glitzy stomp; “I Shall Be Released” gets consumed by swaths of saxophones. Hints of modern radio drift into the arrangements: The tropical gale blowing through “Shelter From the Storm” evokes Jimmy Buffett and the island vibes intensify on the reggae bounce of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” As telling as the specific arrangements are the straightlaced performances of Dylan and the band: They’re dutifully hitting their marks, playing the songs the same way both evenings.
Dylan was still in the process of road-testing his band and these arrangements, which could explain some of the restraint heard throughout The Complete Budokan 1978. The North Carolina show from December 1978, captured on the bootleg Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, showcases a band playing with energy and verve absent from the Budokan concerts. Compared to the original At Budokan release, the expanded length does offer glimmers of a livelier set, primarily in a pair of blues covers performed early each show to help loosen up the band: from the first night, “Repossession Blues” by Roland James, and from the second, Tampa Red’s “[You’ve Got to] Love Her With a Feeling,” both played with a raucous vigor that makes the rest of the record feel straightlaced.
Those two blues covers vaguely hint at the roadhouse ramble that came to characterize Dylan's Never Ending Tour a decade later, as do the startling rearrangements of familiar songs. A case can be made that the 1978 world tour is the genesis of Dylan’s latter-day incarnation as a restless and mercurial road warrior. That knowledge doesn’t change that, as an album, The Complete Budokan 1978 isn’t just a drag, it’s often dorky, too. Hearing the band galumph through an attempt to turn “All I Really Want to Do” into a cheerful shuffle crystallizes how Dylan’s attempt to entertain just winds up as enervation. | 2023-11-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / Legacy | November 25, 2023 | 6.1 | 5001dd79-a12e-44c3-84f7-c17923b505f1 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Rabit is the producer Eric Burton. His work bears traces of grime and industrial, but has developed its own bleak vision. Communion is violent music, and it plays out like a kind of fever dream in which there are only brief moments of respite. It is thrilling even when it leaves a sick pit in your stomach. | Rabit is the producer Eric Burton. His work bears traces of grime and industrial, but has developed its own bleak vision. Communion is violent music, and it plays out like a kind of fever dream in which there are only brief moments of respite. It is thrilling even when it leaves a sick pit in your stomach. | Rabit: Communion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21081-communion/ | Communion | Rabit (Eric Burton) is from Texas, and though his music has generally maintained a loose dialogue with UK grime, it has also increasingly nurtured its own identity. His early work found an uneasy midpoint between violence and grace: On 2013's Sun Showers EP, misty synths crept on cat feet, surrounded by jabbing, staccato rhythms. This year's Baptizm EP, his first for Tri Angle, amped up both his tendencies in equal measure, but on Communion the truce has broken, and all hell breaks loose.
Communion is definitely not grime, even with the genre's telltale signifiers—bruised 808 kicks, broken-glass and gun-cock samples, lurching 140-BPM tempos. It's definitely not industrial, either, though it draws inspiration from the queasy frequencies of acts like Throbbing Gristle and Coil. It is violent music, and even though part of living in the 21st century entails being desensitized to all kinds of mediated awfulness, Communion feels genuinely unsettling: You emerge even after just a few minutes' worth of the album's unrelenting barrage of beats and palette of sampled shrapnel feeling dazed and punch-drunk. Needless to say, it is also thrilling, even when it leaves a sick pit in your stomach.
The sullen melodies are studiously minor key, and with the exception of the occasional desolate spoken-word fragment ("The flesh covers the bone"; "There aren't any people") there are no vocals, just yelps of distress. In "Fetal", the listener swings to and fro as though lashed to a pendulum above a riot, between machine-gun rhythms and gibbering voices and a whinnying horse. These juxtapositions offer their own kind of enjoyment, but he's not afraid to fight against pleasure, either: "Pandemic" is plodding and heavy-footed, and its climactic machine-gun volley is so intense that it is no fun, but you suspect that's the point.
It's not all brutal, exactly. The opening "Advent" features a sad synth melody reminiscent of the Cure's "A Forest", and "Artemis" toys with tentative vocal samples reminiscent of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman". "Burnerz" and "Black Gates" feel almost like traditional grime tunes, with their concussive kicks and synth stabs, and "Trapped in This Body" might be deconstructed drum'n'bass, with pitched-down sirens and beaten-up tech-step framed by radiophonic bleeps. These are welcome respites; if the album has a drawback, it's that the grim consistency of its palette and techniques leads many songs to blur together in your memory. Still, I'm guessing that is by design. Communion plays out like a kind of fever dream, a delirium of cold sweat and disturbing visions in which there are only brief moments of daylight before you're plunged back into the maelstrom once more. | 2015-10-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tri Angle | October 26, 2015 | 7.9 | 50044dd6-4f91-4c59-af21-09ea46c7f2c1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Between post-punk and shoegaze live Chastity Belt, whose latest album displays a new kind of aggressiveness and gravity. Their songs relay the psychological slog of trying really hard just to be OK. | Between post-punk and shoegaze live Chastity Belt, whose latest album displays a new kind of aggressiveness and gravity. Their songs relay the psychological slog of trying really hard just to be OK. | Chastity Belt: I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23302-i-used-to-spend-so-much-time-alone/ | I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone | Emo might be a safe haven for the sad kids, but it doesn’t often reflect the day-to-day drudgery of mind-crushing depression, which sounds less like screaming and more like the final whimper you emit before finally becoming part of the floor. Leave that to shoegaze or post-punk, or to the tuneful mark between the two that Seattle rock band Chastity Belt hits on their third album.
Though it’s buffered with slices of relative optimism—opener “Different Now” lays out a few answers to what band wrestles with for the rest of the album—I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone curls into dark corners, exploring the depths of desperation and self-loathing that Chastity Belt only hinted at on their last two albums. Instead of belting out smirking shoutalongs like “Cool Slut” (about the joys of sleeping around) or “Pussy Weed Beer” (self-explanatory), lead singer Julia Shapiro enters a headspace with new gravity, where the word “pussy” isn’t funny anymore and sleeping with someone—or otherwise—is out of the question. The album sheds Chastity Belt’s former tongue-in-cheek bubbliness for the kind of world-weariness that only sets in with time and only time can ease.
“Fucked up, anxious, full of fear/How did I get here?” Shapiro hollers on “This Time of Night,” playing her own antagonist in a song about curling up in bed and shutting out the world: “Pull the sheets over my eyes.” It’s the most aggressive Chastity Belt has ever sounded, thanks to the full-bodied attack Gretchen Grimm hammers out on drums during the verses. While that song still offers the guitar curlicues that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Real Estate album, “Stuck” is smeared with Slowdive reverb, “Something Else” borrows its octave-jumping trebles from Joy Division, and the lovesick rumble “It’s Obvious” could have been snatched from the B-sides to Hum’s 1995 LP You’d Prefer an Astronaut.
The varied taxonomy of the band gels together as they relay the psychological slog of trying really hard to just be OK. Rhythm guitars fall like thick curtains behind the meandering leads, while Grimm and bassist Annie Truscott weight each song down like a lead apron. Their playing grounds Shapiro’s thorny subject matter, which against lighter dressing might come off flippant or mean. Instead, her sarcasm sounds like the final weapon she’s got left in her arsenal against the totalizing blankness of twentysomething ennui.
There’s a word Shapiro keeps using while muscling her way through the clouds over her head. “I just fall on my face when I’m trying to have fun/Do you ever dream about what it’s like to give up?” she sings on “Complain.” “Dream” isn’t the first word most lyricists would use on the lead-in to “give up,” but Shapiro neutralizes its positive connotations over and over again. On “Caught in a Lie,” she’s “caught in someone else’s dream,” a prison of expectation where she tries to play a role someone else has thought up for her. "Is this what you want?/Is this who you want me to be?”
Maybe it’s in tribute to depression’s cyclical nature that Alone’s opener also plays like it’s conclusion. Instead of sounding haggard and beleaguered, Shapiro sings from a place of calm on “Different Now.” It’s as if she’s figured out how to save herself from her worst moments and wrote the song as an instruction manual. “Take away your pride and take away your grief/And you'll finally be right where you need to be,” she advises. But it’s only track one, the eye of the storm, and before long, the clouds roll right back in. | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | June 6, 2017 | 7.4 | 5004d6d9-9745-4574-83db-2d792a645645 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
On his latest project, the Atlanta rapper struggles to break the mold while searching for vulnerability with middling results. | On his latest project, the Atlanta rapper struggles to break the mold while searching for vulnerability with middling results. | Yung Bans: Vol. 5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-bans-vol-5/ | Vol. 5 | As the rap vanguard bleeds into its rock and new-wave era, the rockstar persona has become the go-to mode. One glance at Yung Bans’ David Bowie-inspired artwork for Vol. 5 and there’s no doubt the Atlanta rapper is digging for gold in the same vein. The experimentation is encouraging, but it’s hard to tell which artists use these reference points as conduits for genre-bending as opposed to some ornamental aesthetic. Bans seems to be stuck in the middle.
Like many of his contemporaries, the work of the 19-year-old is consequently more radio-ready than the early output of his de facto mentor Future, or Young Thug, or Chief Keef. He operates at a lower vocal register than Thug, without Future’s trademark warbling or songcraft, and doesn’t experiment with flows as much as either. Now that audiences are used to their vocal templates, Bans’ less eccentric style makes the music more easily accessible, especially with unsung producers like MexikoDro and Danny Wolf in his corner.
Over the course of nine tracks and 23 minutes, Bans searches for some semblance of vulnerability to middling results. The high points on the album—much like those of his predecessors—come when he tinkers with vocal malleability and sonic landscape, or turns the studio booth into a confession booth. Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. To his credit, Bans is considerably younger than Future was when he reached the national conscious, with an open murder case hanging over his head that could limit non-confidential subject matter.
His circumstances are unfortunate—the autobiographical points on Vol. 5 are more aligned with the emotive nature of the rockstars Bans strives to emulate. By the second verse of “Wish I Had,” he’s confessing growing pains with himself, his mother and incarcerated father, and the subsequent men in her life: “He ain’t even show up to court, but I’m a bigger sport/Still love that lil bitty whore/I’m still your second little boy/I mean no disrespect but mama, this just how I feel/Why you out here lookin’ for love? I heard that love kills.”
“Ridin” is a clear party standout, as Bans’ melodies mesh well with the infectious ukulele and steelpan, lulling the listener into a scene-stealing verse from YBN Nahmir. The most sobering moment, however, comes on the closing track, the XXXTentacion tribute “So Long My Friend.” In the wake of the murders of young rappers like X, Da Real Gee Money, Lil Snupe and others, it’s distressing to ponder the legacy of America’s youngest musical genre as it moves into its fourth decade. Even with knowledge of X’s abusive past, “Pushin’ up, we want revenge, we don’t do no grieving” is a jarring but familiar response to cyclical violence, one that doesn’t inspire hope for reconciliation.
On Die Lit, Playboi Carti broke out of a creative slump by tweaking his vocal inflections to a comical degree (see “Flatbed Freestyle”) and it would serve Bans well to do the same. If not, opting for more unorthodox trap production could elevate his otherwise flat tone across Vol 5. Rap narratives have reached critical mass and autobiographical or conceptual content are the most effective ways to bring something new to the table. It’s obvious Yung Bans has a working knowledge of Atlanta’s sonic tendencies. But he hasn’t tapped into the city’s upper echelon or their willingness to break the molds placed before them. | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Yung Bans / Foundation | July 11, 2018 | 6.3 | 500d095f-3b2e-4740-ad36-bb2022cf074c | Torry Threadcraft | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torry-threadcraft/ | |
Gathering inspiration from Maltese folk and ’70s psych-rock, the UK-based band makes complex, ambitious post-punk with the chaotic energy of an informal jam. | Gathering inspiration from Maltese folk and ’70s psych-rock, the UK-based band makes complex, ambitious post-punk with the chaotic energy of an informal jam. | ĠENN: Unum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/genn-unum/ | Unum | The sound of art-punk quartet ĠENN reflects their collective experience: tenacious drum lines from UK post-punk, sinuous vocal melodies inspired by Maltese folk music, and the heavy guitars of modern psych-rock or even nu-metal. Formed in Malta before moving to Brighton, the quartet has played together for a decade, releasing an album titled Titty Monster under the name Cryptic Street in 2018. On Unum, their debut as ĠENN, the group balances their uneasy search for identity with a confident presentation. It’s an ambitious record that still leaves room for mischief.
Leading the charge is songwriter and vocalist Leona Farrugia, who draws on the alienation that comes with being an outsider to examine the search for identity. “Rohmeresse” begins on a deadpan group chorus (“I wanna stay in all day, I wanna sleep in all day, all day!”), then shifts into wordless, exploratory prog rock. On the chorus of “Heloise,” Janelle Borg incorporates downtuned nu-metal guitar, drummer Sofia Rose Cooper borrows from math rock, and bassist Leanne Zammit leans into ’70s prog, while Farrugia’s howls of romantic obsession channel Karen O and Sue Tompkins simultaneously. Unexpected touches like the clave accent on “A Muse (In Limbo)” or the birdbrained zoneout “Le Saut du Pigeon” play like endearing inside jokes, relieving the musical tension. It’s undoubtedly a studio record, but one with the chaotic energy of an informal jam.
On less dense songs, there’s less to hide behind, and the straightforward approach produces more mixed results. “Days and Nights,” led by Zammit’s snaking bassline, is an old-fashioned rocker about contemporary uncertainty, with a great line about “strolling aimlessly with a heightened desire to survive.” “A Reprise (That Girl)” is all-out dance-punk complete with handclaps and deadpan sprechgesang, where satirical judgements about social-media influencers give way to a larger proclamation: “Death upon the mundane!” But while “Rohmeresse” invokes French New Wave director Éric Rohmer by name, the lyrics could fit any filmmaker known for depicting modern ennui.
ĠENN’s frenetic, jagged riffs and discursive arrangements are as arresting as those of any band working in the same space. Great as the bluster sounds, though, its purpose is not always clear. There are moments of deeper insight (about the way capitalism bleeds over into relationships on “The Merchant Of,” or the solace to be found in peeling potatoes on “Rohmeresse”), but it’s never revelatory in the same way as the band’s best arrangements. Unum still covers an impressive amount of ground in 40 minutes: ĠENN have a knack for embedding accessible hooks and silly musical details within complex and unconventional structures. There are worse foundations to build upon. | 2023-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Liminal Collective | October 13, 2023 | 7 | 500f6240-d8e0-4ae0-a7bc-2d54cbfc0f89 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Blending psychedelic sensory overload with riotous club bangers, the shape-shifting electronic duo’s ninth album is their most entertaining in years. | Blending psychedelic sensory overload with riotous club bangers, the shape-shifting electronic duo’s ninth album is their most entertaining in years. | The Chemical Brothers: No Geography | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-chemical-brothers-no-geography/ | No Geography | The molecular structure of the Chemical Brothers’ various albums has typically taken one of two forms: brash, psychedelic odysseys in retro rave, or scattered forays into pop-rock and hip-hop assisted by aging rappers, wispy folkies, and Brit-rock flavors of the month from back when NME was still in print. The pros and cons of both approaches are evident in Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ three-decade career. The Revolver-esque end-of-a-century blowout Surrender aside, the boombastic rocktronica of the duo’s early output now smacks of a certain aggressive staleness; as for the Chem Bros’ dismal, collab-heavy 2000s run—which included songs about Osama Bin Laden and dancing like a salmon, as well as an aptly titled slice of miserabilia called “No Path to Follow”—the less said, the better.
One of this decade’s most pleasant surprises, then, has been watching Rowlands and Simons achieve the type of critical redemption that’s proven all too rare for survivors of the big-beat and electronica fads that presaged EDM. (The duo’s proximity to such fleeting trends has often overshadowed their deeper relationship to dance-music history; legend has it that Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” only took off as a single after Rowlands and Simons started airing it out in DJ sets.) Further, from 2010, effectively reconfirmed the pair as masters of beat-based transcendence—it might be the Chem Bros’ best album to date—while 2015’s Born in the Echoes threw indie and indie-adjacent heroes like Beck, St. Vincent, and Cate Le Bon into a trance-inducing spin cycle, the resulting wash possessing a satisfyingly spotless sheen.
So where do you go when you finally prove that you’ve mastered both of your established creative approaches? To throw yourself a proper rager, of course. No Geography, the duo’s ninth full-length, is their most party-hardy album since the millennium-flattening swarm of Surrender. They’re back in full-on psychedelia territory again, with Norwegian synth-pop singer AURORA their main collaborator here, but despite being a studio production, No Geography also recalls their 2012 live album and concert film Don’t Think, as good a reproduction of their overwhelming stage show as couch-surfers could ask for. There’s crowd noise all over the new album’s 47-minute runtime, bursts of laughter and distant cheering that crest and swell amid the punchy synths and roiling percussive attacks.
It’s not too far-fetched to claim that No Geography is the most fun the pair have sounded this decade; Further’s pleasures were of the brainy variety, while Born in the Echoes mainly alternated between sinister and solemn sonic motifs. The shape that No Geography takes, comparatively, is often reminiscent of the Avalanches’ cut-and-paste approach to blissful beat music—the seamless, bongo-driven transition from opener “Eve of Destruction” to the disco-stabbed “Bango” is a dead ringer for the easy slide between Since I Left You’s title track and “Stay Another Season.” At their best, the Avalanches make every unearthed sound shine like a freshly opened toy on Christmas morning, and a similar sense of sampledelic discovery is streaked across No Geography’s funhouse framework.
While Chem Bros have long been known for memorable pop-leaning singles, the last 15 years have seen them coming up short in that department—a room-for-improvement category in which No Geography provides ample course-correction. “Got to Keep On” may be a streamlined riff on their indelible Come With Us single “Star Guitar,” but what a gorgeous riff it is, with cotton-candy vocal sighs and chiming bells that could loop for hours without growing stale. The rowdy “We’ve Got to Try” is one of the most satisfying club bangers Rowlands and Simons have dreamed up in ages, with a serpentine acid squelch delivering the type of buzzsaw drop that French brutalist Gesaffelstein failed to provide on his latest; paired with its sentimental courageous-canine video treatment, it’s the rare Chem Bros crowd-pleaser that stands to trigger the tear ducts.
Still, despite featuring some of the strongest and most straightforward singles of their surprisingly successful last decade, No Geography is best consumed as a front-to-back experience. Most of its 10 songs flow into each other as separate suites, the opening trio forming a perpetual build not unlike Boredoms’ Vision Creation Newsun before blasting off with the splashy drums and Drive-redolent synths of the title track. The centerpiece and closer—respectively, the lovely yawns of “Gravity Drops” and the squiggly comedown “Catch Me I’m Falling”—exist as breathers amid No Geography’s perpetual exhilaration.
Even given song titles like “Mad as Hell” and “Free Yourself,” this is not a political album by any means, but No Geography’s cartoon cover art—a tank facing off against pink clouds assembling in the shape of a face, at once goofy and menacing—feels timely nevertheless. Thirty years in, the Chemical Brothers are still digging their own purely escapist sonic rabbit holes. At a time of great cultural and global insecurity, there's never been a more tempting time to get lost in their sensory overload. | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | April 12, 2019 | 8 | 5016c7d2-908f-4d0f-afdd-b18256ff0b46 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Braiding together searching raps, fizzy beats, and charming pop hooks, the underground Atlanta rapper’s new album is a swirl of conflicting emotions animated by near-constant ad-libs. | Braiding together searching raps, fizzy beats, and charming pop hooks, the underground Atlanta rapper’s new album is a swirl of conflicting emotions animated by near-constant ad-libs. | Key!: I Love You Say It Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-i-love-you-say-it-back/ | I Love You Say It Back | Key! has never made a straightforward love song. The underground Atlanta rapper lives in a swirl of conflicting emotions, a frenzy of dread and jealousy and pleasure. The best song on his last album catalogued his paranoia over a girlfriend’s frequent trips to Miami. “If I lose you, I lose my damn mind,” he moaned, and then paused: “Psych, baby, I was just gassing.” Nearly every confession he blurts gets an inevitable retraction; the insults Key! lobs at his lovers turn into indictments of himself. Any declaration of love or grief or pain seems only as real as the joke or bit that follows it. His new album, the winkingly titled I Love You Say It Back, braids his raps together with dazzling pop hooks and choruses, but gloom is never far from Key!’s writing. Every bouncy synth and fizzy beat is equally ready to soundtrack disses and disdain.
What differentiates Key! from other rappers stitching together anguished hits out of past relationships is the sense of eavesdropping on an internal dialogue. He animates his music with near-constant ad-libs; they seem to literalize a conversation he’s having with himself, particularly when he carves choruses out of questions. “Who do you think you, who do you think you are?” he moans and sighs over a slick, flute-heavy 14Golds beat on “Let’s Go,” pleading with a woman to cut the small talk. “How’d that go? Wait, what you mean?” he demands on “Sugar & Rice,” a sunny-sounding standout about a breakup. The interrogation pierces through the gooey, AutoTuned verses, and after a few repetitions he arrives at a stark, quintessentially Key! admission: “I’m lying to myself, I’m coming over.”
Key! can also sing, which sets him apart. On last year’s So Emotional, his occasional croons anchored the album’s catchy pop hooks; this time around, they help take his sound in new directions. “Boys Don’t Cry” is a standard Key! song in content—“Who am I kidding, I’ve been kidding myself,” he wails—but the sound approaches emo rap, layering chanted chorus vocals over a muted, throbbing drum as he sing-shouts about self-medication and surviving trauma. On “Bottom of the Bottle,” producer TrapMoneyBenny smears Key!’s howls in AutoTune, softening and smoothing the grit in his voice. “I can love you if you let me,” Key! sings. “Oops, that’s just the bottom of the Henny.”
The incessant asides might grow tiring if Key! weren’t so obviously, infectiously charming. Listening to him take digs at his exes, you’re not concerned about growth or maturity; you’re caught in the propulsive glimmer, in FKi 1st’s high-velocity drum patterns, in the way the layers of Key!’s voice pack into every corner of a song. There are no duds on the compact, 24-minute album, but the tracks that fail to sparkle stand out. The smooth, Kenny Beats-produced “Vibin” is relatively forgettable compared to their thrashing, frenetic collaborations on Key!’s breakout album, 777. Blown-out speaker effects and urgent, twitching drums push “Anakin” towards cartoonish darkness, but the song is more menacing in tone than in lyrics: “Don’t get on my bad side,” Key! growls, “But if you do, it’s okay, alright.” Then, for nearly a full minute, his voice is conspicuously absent—not bragging about rebounding from a breakup, not admitting that his ex is still on his mind, not pleading for his date to put down her phone. That’s when Key! accomplishes what he seems to crave most: That you miss him when he’s gone. | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Hello! | June 17, 2020 | 7.4 | 501f8d8e-2fac-4cb7-b2ab-a9db57342872 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
After four LPs that pushed the boundaries of what's expected from a rock band, Radiohead internalized leftfield electronics yet embraced straightforward rock. | After four LPs that pushed the boundaries of what's expected from a rock band, Radiohead internalized leftfield electronics yet embraced straightforward rock. | Radiohead: Hail to the Thief: Special Collectors Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13384-hail-to-the-thief-special-collectors-edition/ | Hail to the Thief: Special Collectors Edition | By 2003, Radiohead were trapped in a musical era they helped invent. By that time, they had essentially completed the ideal life cycle of a rock band, rising from an intermittently promising debut to become one of the world's biggest bands, creators of twin masterpieces that captured the fear, exhaustion, alienation, and anxiety of modern life in near-perfect musical settings. There is no rock record that did more to set the tone and establish the parameters for rock music in this still-young century than Kid A, an intentional masterpiece so brimming with creativity it spawned a sequel in Amnesiac.
How does a band follow that up? Well, for one thing, it doesn't try to make another masterpiece. The record Radiohead did make, Hail to the Thief, is almost an anti-masterpiece, a well-sequenced collection of songs that finds them internalizing the blend of experimental electronics and straightforward rock they wore so far out on their sleeves just a few years earlier. They basically started over, and on the record, the band sounds aware that it's peaked in a way, and perhaps less sure of where it wants to go. I hear the tension between a band that started to make the back-to-basics album guitarist Ed O'Brien so frequently mentions in interviews and a band that self-consciously want to do something new each time out and perhaps even feels guilt when it fails to innovate. They'd pushed their horizons so far already that they didn't have much exploring left to do.
Confusion and apprehension are written all over the album. Just look at the tracklist: "Scatterbrain". "A Wolf at the Door". "Sit Down. Stand Up". "2+2=5". "Backdrifts". They couldn't even decide what to call the songs, giving each one an obtuse parenthetical co-title. When Thom Yorke sings, "I don't know why I feel so tongue-tied," on "Myxomatosis", he sounds as though he's talking himself out of a creative eddy, and what better way to do it than over a crazed, fuzzed-out odd-metered groove? At 14 tracks and 56 minutes, Hail to the Thief is easily the longest Radiohead album, and it doesn't seem accidental that two-thirds of the way through lies a song called "There There", as if the band is consoling itself, recognizing that there are worse challenges than carrying forward in a successful rock band.
"There There" has one of the album's many ambiguous refrains in its "just cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there" turnaround, which could be taken as a brief rebuke to the anxieties expressed earlier. But what's even more striking about the song is how unremittingly gorgeous it is. It has a melody fitting for a jazz standard, but just as important is the rhythmic undercarriage. Drummer Phil Selway hardly plays a conventional rock beat anywhere on the album, here using kettle drums to give the song a distinctive buoyancy, while Colin Greenwood's bass part constitutes a second melody. Selway and Greenwood run away with "Where I End and You Begin", creating a rushing current to carry along the queasy synths and understated vocal.
It's one of the album's few vocals that could reasonably be called understated. Thom Yorke uses his full range across the record to give voice to anger, defeat, affection, frustration, and longing. He's a fantastic singer in general, but his real strength is in the way he can latch onto a simple phrase like "over my dead body" and twist and pull it to mean whatever he wants it to. His most virtuoso performance on the album comes on its breathtaking closer, "A Wolf at the Door", where he balances a frantically paced, paranoid verse with a towering chorus. It's on songs like this where you realize that this album, more than any of their LPs since The Bends, simply lets you concentrate on a what a good band Radiohead is without distracting you with thematic concerns, conscious innovation, or attempts to force a bend in the band's artistic arc.
Hail has a few low points and could probably be edited to make it that much more digestible-- apart from its tumbling bridge, "We Suck Young Blood" is a momentum-killer between the sinuous groove of "Where I End and You Begin" and the tangled loops of "The Gloaming" (it's also somewhat similar to the superior "Sail to the Moon"), while the brief "I Will" is pretty distracting from the album's overall flow. I would've been happier with it as a B-side. "A Punchup at a Wedding" has a disappointingly flat refrain, but makes up for it with the funky swagger of its rhythm track. Even the lowest points have their considerable merits, though, to the point where it even bears wondering whether Radiohead can even make a bad album at this point.
The tracks they did relegate to B-sides, now included on the second disc of Capitol's reissue, were certainly well-suited to their release format. "Paperbag Writer" is an interesting, even worthy experiment with programmed beats, a whacked-out bass line and creepy strings courtesy of Jonny Greenwood that at first sounds like an update on Martin Denny's version of "Quiet Village". Its counterparts sound for all the word like odds and ends. Even the title of "I Am Citizen Insane" sounds forced, "Where Bluebirds Fly" is an exercise in creating texture with almost no content, and three of the four remixes and alternate versions that backed "2+2=5" aren't especially interesting (Four Tet's take on "Scatterbrain" is the squirming exception). Yorke's piano sketch "Fog (Again)" is nice, and the quiet, acoustic "Gagging Order" is practically a throwback to the stuff they were putting on B-sides in the mid-90s, which is to say it's by far the best B-side included in the bonus material.
Even if it is a cash-grab by Capitol (and who can blame them the way things are going?), the bonus disc is a convenient aggregator for the band's fans. The video content on the third disc, meanwhile, offers little you can't experience easily on the Internet. The reissue also offers a chance to re-assess an album that's oddly failed to develop a solid reputation over the years since its release-- I've heard it described as everything from a disappointment to "their best album" to "too long" to "I don't remember what it sounds like" by fans of the band. For a while, I identified most with the last statement-- there's no denying that Hail to the Thief took longer to settle for me than any of their four preceding albums. Time and persistence have been kind to it, though. Hail to the Thief isn't Radiohead's best album, but it doesn't need to be, either. There are other albums for that. It did, however, prove that there can be life for a band after its landmark statement, and that life sounds pretty damn good. | 2009-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 27, 2009 | 8.6 | 50222be8-f041-4b4f-9244-c4e79dd7259d | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Chromeo have made it a decade without a widely beloved full-length—instead, they're known more for a few great singles and their winking revivalist aesthetic. But in 2014, this works in their favor: with no classic hanging over their heads and no true expectations, it's easy to be seduced by their quietly fantastic fourth album White Women. | Chromeo have made it a decade without a widely beloved full-length—instead, they're known more for a few great singles and their winking revivalist aesthetic. But in 2014, this works in their favor: with no classic hanging over their heads and no true expectations, it's easy to be seduced by their quietly fantastic fourth album White Women. | Chromeo: White Women | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19337-chromeo-white-women/ | White Women | The tenth anniversary of Chromeo's debut album She's in Control happened a few months ago, and the fact that there were no essays or oral histories commemorating the occasion is a reminder that Dave 1 and P-Thugg have made it a decade without a widely beloved full-length—instead, they're known more for a few great singles and their winking revivalist aesthetic. But in 2014, this works in their favor: with no classic hanging over their heads and no true expectations, it's easy to be seduced by their quietly fantastic fourth album White Women.
One reason why the two have endured (and still kicking on a major label, no less) is the strength of their songwriting. No Chromeo album has ever quite struck the perfect balance between playing it straight and letting irony seep to the surface, but the bedrock of this group is its chops: the ability to write tunes good enough to justify the shtick. Yet, as the shtick has become less important—no longer a selling or conversation point, it is what it is—the songs have gotten stronger, which is clear from White Women opener "Jealous (I Ain't With It)", a song powered by chunky, ringing guitar chords.
In an interview, P-Thugg said Chromeo rejected the riff (written by the production duo Oliver) for being "too Katy Perry", but pop looks good on Chromeo: the guitar-powered first verse slides right into a soaring chorus that's immediately one of the most obviously catchy hooks the band has ever written. Elsewhere, the Toro y Moi collaboration "Come Alive" quickly returns to Chromeo's electrofunk roots. Still, it's not just a classic Chromeo song, but a classic Chromeo song, with rippling guitar lines and plucked bass that give way to a slick, multi-layered chorus.
Though White Women starts in an uptempo mindset, the album's strength lies in its softer, more vulnerable moments. There's always been a humanity behind Chromeo's carefully constructed facade—a sweet, almost fumbling, open-heartedness that allows you to connect with the guys behind the characters—and earnestness has never worked better for them than it does here. "Lost on the Way Home" is a crystalline duet with Solange about always having your partner's back that features a perfect, aching outro; "Ezra's Interlude", named for and featuring Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, is a fluttering trifle that's nonetheless a powerful hit of straight pathos. "Old 45s" is about dancing to a jukebox, and it has a slowly cascading chorus that tugs at your heartstrings along with a guitar solo that pokes you in the side.
White Women is the closest Chromeo have come yet to fully realizing their sound, but it's also far from perfect. Lead single "Sexy Socialite" is retrograde on a number of levels—from composition to worldview, it feels like a leftover from that She's In Control—and its final third needlessly drags. Still, even though closer "Fall Back 2U" rubs up against the six-minute mark, it's still a great song with slicing disco strings and a tricky chorus melody. It also serves as a reminder that Chromeo, even on its most emotionally resonant album, are jokesters, too: the track ends with a sax solo, a vocoder solo and a choir. It shouldn't work so well, but it does—which, in Chromeo's tenth year of existence, also applies to the band's approach. | 2014-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Atlantic / WEA / Big Beat | May 14, 2014 | 7.6 | 5023e0b4-adb0-4596-9c35-04c7b76d1557 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Helmed by Jack Antonoff, the ’70s-themed soundtrack for the children’s film features covers and collaborations from Phoebe Bridgers, St. Vincent, Diana Ross, Tame Impala, and more. | Helmed by Jack Antonoff, the ’70s-themed soundtrack for the children’s film features covers and collaborations from Phoebe Bridgers, St. Vincent, Diana Ross, Tame Impala, and more. | Various Artists: Minions: The Rise of Gru (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-minions-the-rise-of-gru-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Minions: The Rise of Gru (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Minions are—in so many words—Twinkie-shaped henchmen who love bananas, speak in gibberish, and have names like Bob and Kevin. In goggles and form-fitting overalls, they embody a childlike impishness while also possessing an unquenchable thirst for servitude, turning the many Bobs and Kevins into tragic figures if you think about it too hard and for too long. While the Minions and their soft-hearted supervillain leader, Gru, always make a mess of world domination, in reality, the Despicable Me franchise has had no trouble conquering every sector it desires, from films to theme parks to the entire meme industry.
This is to say that there’s money in Minions—just ask Pharrell Williams, whose soundtrack for 2013’s Despicable Me 2 brought us the flashmob-irritant “Happy.” Another Producer of the Year winner, Jack Antonoff, helms the soundtrack of the franchise’s latest installation, Minions: The Rise of Gru. (A quick plot summary for those who have yet to suit up for a screening: In the 1970s, a pre-teen Gru gets revenge on a league of flamboyant villains by swiping their powerful stone, which one of the Minions—a scene-stealing newcomer named Otto—misplaces after mistaking it for a pet rock and falling in love. Classic Minions stuff.) Antonoff’s soundtrack is a fever dream of a lineup featuring a handful of artists who were actually present in the ’70s, a wide survey of this generation’s rising artists who take influence from the era, and some truly out-of-left-field recruits whose presence only highlights the unmoored absurdity of the project.
Like any decent soundtrack full of covers, The Rise of Gru has a few winners. Weyes Blood’s take on Linda Ronstadt’s No. 1 hit “You’re No Good” is a showstopper. Likewise, pairing Phoebe Bridgers with the Carpenters’ power ballad “Goodbye to Love” works well as her bittersweet delivery elevates the track’s inherent melancholy. Thundercat’s rendition of the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” is the picture of space-funk heaven, while Brittany Howard conjures up soulful bliss on a version of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star” that features original bassist Verdine White. Gary Clark Jr.’s spin on the Ides of March’s “Vehicle” is another faithful rendition that never veers too far from the source material’s tenacious infatuation and souped-up horns.
In spite of its stacked roster and hypothetically enjoyable concept, intriguing pairings are undermined by heavy-handed production choices. For some reason, Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” is covered twice, once by Caroline Polachek and then again by the Hong Kong singer G.E.M. Both versions reject the original’s ominous stillness in favor of slinky horn flourishes and lackluster vocal performances that erase any sense of drama. And then there’s the cover of “Instant Karma!” by Antonoff’s own band, Bleachers, which romanticizes his cosplay of John Lennon’s yelping vocals—as well as the saxophone as an instrument—at the expense of the track’s incisive commentary on ego. The irony is not lost.
The two worst offenders are reason enough to avoid The Rise of Gru entirely. If Kool & the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging” sold Los Angeles as a promised land full of “stars, movies, women, and cars,” Brockhampton’s rewrite of the 1974 classic makes the Sunset Strip seem like a boulevard of broken dreams. Interspersing the song with rapped verses of their own original lyrics—“Came a real long way to make it here/Ain’t no thing you could do to change it here”—conveys a profound sense of exhaustion. (According to Kevin Abstract, the song has been completed for two years, but “Hollywood Swinging” makes you wonder if the group decided to disband midway through recording.) Removing the joy from songs about big city dreams is a recurring theme: St. Vincent’s version of Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” is soul-suckingly stiff with her vocals obliterated by a vocoder, a curse which also befalls Tierra Whack’s “Black Magic Woman.”
The soundtrack’s only moment of true glee is the Minions’ own rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia”—if your brain is full of holes, this will burrow right in like a worm to an apple. Representing the more tasteful side of the soundtrack is Diana Ross and Tame Impala’s “Turn Up the Sunshine,” an attempt at disco whose forced-fun vibes will likely earn its place on a few wedding playlists for the next three or four years. It’s a reminder that this soundtrack never needed to be an artistic triumph for any of the involved parties. On the Minions’ path toward world domination, all it needed was a hit. | 2022-07-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | null | Decca | July 6, 2022 | 6 | 502635b1-2b31-4e70-a0e9-2706cca3c24b | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Sabrina Teitelbaum’s self-titled debut is a candid snapshot of early adulthood, a cruel rotation of bad substances, scummy men, and friendship anxieties. | Sabrina Teitelbaum’s self-titled debut is a candid snapshot of early adulthood, a cruel rotation of bad substances, scummy men, and friendship anxieties. | Blondshell: Blondshell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blondshell-blondshell/ | Blondshell | The world according to Sabrina Teitelbaum can be brutal. It is populated by dirtbag men, wayward friends, and the constant lure of mind-numbing substances. “Ur just doing ur best and life is like ‘hehe I’m gonna present u with the biggest challenges ever,’” the 25-year-old songwriter, who records as Blondshell, says. Across the nine songs on her self-titled debut, she sifts through the muck of early adulthood, searching for intimacy in a dreary loop of partying and bad sex, but her revivalist alt-rock and stadium hooks offer a bracing release from the hangover.
Blondshell is a tale of two cities. Teitelbaum was raised in Midtown, Manhattan and graduated from the prestigious Dalton School, which boasts distinguished alumni like Anderson Cooper and Wallace Shawn. She then relocated to Los Angeles to study at USC’s Thornton School of Music, dropping out after two years to focus on her solo pop project BAUM and releasing “Fuckboy,” a Chainsmokers-lite track that went viral. But working as Blondshell, she succumbs to her childhood love of ’90s alternative rock acts like Hole, Liz Phair, and the Cranberries, leveraging lean drums and loud, jagged guitar to capture faded days in flashback: the stink of vodka, a heap of crushed cans, frequent blackouts, drugs seeping out of the pores.
Teitelbaum, who is now sober, traces her coast-to-coast voyage with a shaky red line, examining the teenage antics that mutated into addiction over the years. On the spacious, heat-warped “Sober Together,” she confronts a friend who’s sliding off the wagon. “Not in a position to judge,” she sings in a glassy falsetto, “I know with drugs/There’s never enough.” She is skeptical of the friend’s urge to resolve things by fleeing to New York, knowing that her own cross-country move failed to erase any problems.
People are included on her list of potential toxins. On “Tarmac” and glimmering closer “Dangerous,” she admits to fearing her own friends, a troubled but magnetic bunch that recalls the venomous cliques of Mean Girls and Heathers. And then of course there’s love, a chemical dependency Teitelbaum explores on the shadowy grunge ballad “Olympus.” “I’d still kill for you/I’d die to spend the night at your belonging,” she drawls over scratchy acoustic and skeletal drums. It’s a pitiable confession that most of us can relate to—contorting every cell of your being to make a lover stick around. Sometimes the dude is not worth the risk. On the clever “Sepsis,” she growls about a pathetic boyfriend—“He wears a front-facing cap/The sex is almost always bad”—before a swell of distorted guitar slams back in with the damning chorus: “It should take a whole lot less/To turn me off.” Teitelbaum doesn’t offer many specifics on Blondshell, but her lyrics are stronger and more relatable when she scrawls down a few dirty details like this.
For all of her self-flagellation, Teitelbaum is far more potent when she’s pissed off. On the revenge scorcher “Salad,” she plans the murder of a friend’s assailant. “She took him to the courthouse/And somehow he got off,” she grumbles over muted power chords. “Then I saw him laughing with his lawyer in the parking lot.” In the chorus, Teitelbaum’s band kicks into full-blown arena rock, dissonant, high-pitched piano keys clanging amid brassy guitars. Her voice pitches up into a pained cry as she lands a chilling line: “It doesn’t happen to women I know.”
Teitelbaum doesn’t write happy endings, but Blondshell’s best song is its most hopeful. The blistering “Kiss City” finds the artist belting about the desire for healthy, unapologetic love. “Palm in palm/It turns me on/When you tell me you’re not going away,” she sings, her voice fraying a little at the edges. For Teitelbaum, security is foreplay—the calm that precedes the crescendo. But she stands just outside of the romance, “adjacent to a lot of love,” as she puts it. In its closing minute, “Kiss City” cracks open; Teitelbaum switches to a megaphone holler, as a searing guitar solo cuts through like a symphony of bottle rockets. Tangled in the noise, she is vulnerable, imperfect, and rapturous. | 2023-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | April 14, 2023 | 7 | 50299e6f-49f1-43ad-98b7-deeb4132b697 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
If you first heard this 9th Wonder-produced album from the hottest-spitting woman in rap when it was leaked back in 2004, its commercial release will hopefully remind you how damn good it is. | If you first heard this 9th Wonder-produced album from the hottest-spitting woman in rap when it was leaked back in 2004, its commercial release will hopefully remind you how damn good it is. | Jean Grae: Jeanius | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12378-jeanius/ | Jeanius | Jean Grae has always been a fascinating if somewhat perplexing presence in underground hip-hop; as an artist and lyricist, she's capable of both traumatic vivid imagery and lighthearted just-fuckin'-around comedy, quick-witted tongue-twisting and conversational observation, send-you-home-crying battle raps and gripping narrative storytelling. Unfortunately, every time she's seemed on the brink of some major breakthrough, something somewhere gets thrown off the rails. Jean has every right and reason to be as well-known as, at the very least, the Roots and Talib Kweli (who she's collaborated with successfully over the last few years). But for whatever reason-- bootleggers, disillusionment, label jerk-around moves, the industry's inability to properly market a female artist who operates more as a superhuman MC than as a sex symbol-- she's wound up operating closer to the fringes than someone with her experience and skill deserves, wavering between contemplations of retirement and selling 16-bar guest appearances on Craigslist.
So it's easy to wonder what things'd be like for her if Jeanius came out as scheduled, way back in 2004, rather than earlier this summer. That's because it's the kind of album you pull out when you want to convince a friend that this rapper he hasn't heard can do all this incredible shit, a potential career-definer that people can turn to when they want to quickly and definitively sum up the qualities of an artist with one easily-recommendable release. Longtime heads have known this for a while now; when the album leaked four years back and subsequently got shelved, it became one of those cause-celebre great lost albums like the Ghostface/MF DOOM Swift & Changeable collab or Q-Tip's original 2006 draft of Live at the Renaissance. When Jeanius finally did drop legit on Kweli's Blacksmith label with little changed but some of the track titles, the familiarity had already set in-- which means this album's had a presidential term's worth of time to establish itself as a contemporary classic.
Jean the battler is in top form, and the half of the album where she goes about the business of shit-talking is superb: "You don't like the way I flow/ 'She needs more emotion, though'/ I'll give you emotion, it's you, holdin' your broken nose"; "controversy works, and plus I got a pussy/ But even with that, people scared to push me/ Who's a pussy first?"; "Fuck the hearsay, please, Jean's superior/ Y'all yellow, same color of your bladder's interiors." But her ability to convincingly go from supreme self-confidence to moments of doubt and personal tragedy reveal what a complete, relatable and human MC she is-- whether it's something like the self-aware battles with her own hard-headed personality traits on "Don't Rush Me", or "My Story"'s harrowing confessional of her post-abortion experiences-- or on "Desperada", where she pledges to overcome it all and come out stronger on the other end. Jean's been accused of sounding cold and monotone by dudes who apparently forgot what made slick, collected cats like Guru and Erick Sermon great, but to these ears her flow sounds like a laser-focused, clear-spoken declaration of strength and perseverance.
All these emotional facets need a solid, consistent sound to keep them tied all together, and 9th Wonder is at the top of his game here, providing the bulk of Jeanius' production (with a couple tracks from fellow North Carolinians Khrysis and Fatin). At their best, 9th's beats do a good job of carrying tracks without making themselves the center of attention, but here they stand as some of his finest work because of how well he balances between heart-pulsing, head-nod beats and moody, grey-skied atmosphere: the piano/choir loop in "Don't Rush Me" sticks with you because it somehow pulls off the trick of sounding triumphant and mournful at the same time, and the way the "Top Billin'"-in-a-straitjacket drums complement the recurring dubbed-out mournful vocal snippet from the Marvelettes' "Uptown" gives "Billy Killer" a strong, chilling undercurrent of jealous fury that Jean's lyrics etch into stone. Word has it Jean Grae and 9th are working on a grip of tracks for an upcoming release, Phoenix, and if that album's anywhere near as good as this one, we should finally stop having to ask "what if" and move on to "how far." | 2008-10-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-10-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Blacksmith | October 30, 2008 | 8.3 | 50310084-c4d3-4dcc-b8e8-f0b575375760 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Another fantastic Georgia metal band, Baroness offers a fully realized record that is more ambitious, more accomplished, and simply bigger than anything they've done before. | Another fantastic Georgia metal band, Baroness offers a fully realized record that is more ambitious, more accomplished, and simply bigger than anything they've done before. | Baroness: Red Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10646-red-album/ | Red Album | Like prophets, Savannah, Ga., metal quartet Baroness named its earliest releases First and Second. Their third-- and first for Relapse Records-- is called Red Album, and it's seven minutes longer than its predecessors combined. It's also more ambitious, more accomplished, simply bigger: Here, the ideas Baroness have offered since 2003-- a colossal, airtight rhythm section backing sludge-of-the-South vocals and guitars-- are realized with purpose and aim.
Of the four current genuinely unorthodox metal bands from Georgia-- Mastodon, Harvey Milk, Kylesa (whose Phillip Cope produced Red Album), and Baroness-- it's Baroness that are perhaps the most comely. The band shares some of the most appealing traits of its fellow statesmen-- Mastodon's steaming guitar trips, Harvey Milk's teasing maneuvers and crushing payoffs, Kylesa's generally crusty countenance. But on Red Album, those qualities culminate into a dynamic, moving landscape, full of unexpected pitfalls, lifts, and classic bait-and-switches. The album's most energetic coda, for instance, collapses into a contemplative piece for finger-picked acoustic guitar, and its most ferocious pocket of thrash has winding instrumentals for bookends.
Baroness juggle motifs and ideas, making patterns only to toss them and catch them later. Ascendant, spectral guitar phrases ease the album in, supplying the sort of radiant hum that shaped Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Cymbal splashes and aberrant notes tease that flow, obliterating it when the guitar finds its theme and the drums land their mid-tempo, kick-and-tom gallop. But the next 15 minutes are pure power. Intervening tracks "Rays on Pinion" and "Isak" turn laptop speakers into arsenals of cannons and automatic weapons. John Baizley's voice is dually capable of shouting down a spirit or etching melody from the same monolithic growl, and his guitar interplay with Brian Blickle is all energy. But four tracks in, those introductory ebbs wash back, slightly less predictable and graceful. Before they seemed pure, but now-- as drummer Allen Blickle pounds away in the encroaching distance-- things are panicked. Tongue-and-groove guitarmonies sometimes lift the band's reins, letting the rhythm section flip tempos just beneath. On "Aleph", Baroness even inverts that pattern, killing the rhythm to let the piercing, lock-and-key guitars diverge and cobweb into silence through long, corroding riffs.
As replete as it is with changes, Red Album's relation to prog runs the risk of being overstated at the sake of Southern rock, the Georgia bone-and-blood genre that, at its best, challenged prog as a dynamic equal and emotional master. When Baroness are swiveling through intertwining, fast-fingered melodies like those of "The Birthing" or letting the big, bouncy groove of "Pinion" stand alone, they're channeling a local lineage that began in Macon with the Allmans. And on the acoustic "Cockroach en Fleur", Baroness nod more to the mountain music one state up and to the humid blues two states over than to trans-Atlantic psychedelia or prog-minded folk. The source of those sidetrips-- Southern steam over proggy smarts-- has two consequences: Red Album, full of Baizley lyrics about bearing the world's load and "resign[ing] ourselves to soar home," is a workhorse. Most importantly, though, is Baroness' consistent return to a comfortable, languid groove after every excursion. The album roars and creeps, but it's best when it's somewhere in between, riding a slightly above-mid-tempo pace.
Red Album stands to lose Baroness a clutch of longtime devotees, wont to damn these simmering textures and time-lapse payoffs in favor of First and Second's maul and fervor. But it's the type of album that can help a band begin to gain a Mastodon-sized legion. The double-guitar chug and dirty-bass thrum of "The Birthing"-- juxtaposed as they are with Baizley's distended, growling melody-- are readymade for today's dominant mixed metal crowd, where half of a room loses its mind near the stage as the other more stoic half nods at the pit's perimeter. And, in Baroness' case, that's perfectly fine: Purity's never been a concern. It's just that, on Red Album, the band's disparate cores finally have more space and more effect. The textures have become holistic atmospheres, the peaks anthemic strongholds, and the clashes unavoidable cataclysms. When they intersect in the middle, Red Album is hard to doubt. | 2007-09-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-09-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | September 20, 2007 | 8.4 | 50357553-8ccb-4df5-a07d-94f525795988 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Atticus Ross (Trent Reznor's film-scoring partner) and Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, soundtrack this documentary about a priest who rescues drug-addicted youths from the streets of the Ukraine. | Atticus Ross (Trent Reznor's film-scoring partner) and Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, soundtrack this documentary about a priest who rescues drug-addicted youths from the streets of the Ukraine. | Atticus Ross / Leopold Ross / Bobby Krlic: Almost Holy OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22270-almost-holy-ost/ | Almost Holy OST | On the surface, Steve Hoover’s documentary Almost Holy could be a feel-good story. Its protagonist, altruistic Russian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko, rescues and rehabilitates homeless, drug-addicted youths from the streets of the Ukraine. Judging solely by the soundtrack, though, it sounds like a horror movie. With half its songs made by brothers Leopold and Atticus Ross (the latter a partner with Trent Reznor in scoring David Fincher films) and the other half by Bobby Krlic (aka the Haxan Cloak), Almost Holy’s music is heavy, pounding, and at times purely bombastic.
It turns out that Mokhnenko himself has a dark side—some reviews of *Almost Holy *suggest his savior tactics verge on abduction—that dovetails with all these ominous sounds. But regardless of their role in the accompanying film, the songs on *Almost Holy *work as worlds of their own. The producers craft dense environments with reverberating drones, soaring synths, and heartbeat-like rhythms. A few approach the melodramatic foreboding of John Carpenter. But the music of *Almost Holy *is less about narrative than atmosphere.
That’s in keeping with both the recent soundtrack work of the Rosses and Krlic’s last effort as Haxan Cloak, which Pitchfork’s Nick Neyland called “more soundtrack than regular album.” Nobody here delivers anything unexpected, but all three play well to their strengths, which overlap significantly. The echoing, apparitional tones of Krlic’s cavernous “Pharmacies” and the brittle “Coursing” show his knack for turning alien abstractions and discordant textures into moving music. The Rosses’ contributions are more conventional but just as effective, especially “Punching Bag,” which morphs from metallic sheen into a grinding pulse, and the harrowing dissonance of “Distance.”
*Almost Holy *only falters when it drifts toward the generic. That’s a danger with any soundtrack, since music that has to serve multiple purposes can easily get reduced to a common denominator. In opener “One Block Further,” the Rosses’ rote piano chords and default beat resemble library music filed under “dramatic techno.” But more often, conventional tropes work in the producers’ favor. Take Krlic’s closer “The End,” which plays like an obvious denouement, as rising, choir-like tones cascade into a bombed-out climax—and yet, every moment is tense and gripping. Like the rest of Almost Holy, the idea may be familiar, but the execution is compelling. | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sacred Bones | August 20, 2016 | 7.2 | 50363fb0-ae7f-4c73-b69a-243d0b832543 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Breakin’ Point, PB&J's sixth album, enlists big-name producers like Paul Epworth, Greg Kurstin, and Emile Haynie. The result is the big pop album they've always seemed on the verge of making. | Breakin’ Point, PB&J's sixth album, enlists big-name producers like Paul Epworth, Greg Kurstin, and Emile Haynie. The result is the big pop album they've always seemed on the verge of making. | Peter Bjorn and John: Breakin’ Point | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21961-breakin-point/ | Breakin’ Point | An indie band’s commercial breakthrough, when and if it comes, is a tricky landmark to pass unscathed. If the follow-up doesn’t catch, the band tends to go one of three ways: They can call it quits, accepting their commercial decrepitude; wind things down over a couple of albums, continuing to tour the hits as a glorified karaoke act; or, as a last resort, enlist some decorated pop producers who will, in theory, affix makeshift wings and propel them into the stratosphere. So it is with Peter Bjorn and John, a Swedish trio inseparably wed to a pretty whistling melody from 2006, whose songwriting smarts always promised an elusive second wind.
Breakin’ Point, their sixth album and first in five years, attempts to reclaim unpaid dues: written as the trio studied ABBA’s greatest hits, recorded in that band’s old studio, and completed with Paul Epworth, Greg Kurstin, Emile Haynie, and other major producers with considerable résumés. (The band's Björn Yttling, a notable producer in his own right, worked alongside Kurstin on Lykke Li's recent albums.) They return a new band: edges planed, eccentricities jettisoned, with a strict emphasis on the effortless hooks that made Writer's Block click. Song to song, they apply the formula with some success. But three albums on from that breakout LP, Breakin’ Point seems an optimistic title—in 2016, the record arrives almost a decade too late.
That’d be by-the-by if the songs served a purpose beyond mainstream expansion, which they sometimes do. Highlight “Hard Sleep” is convincingly euphoric, full of jubilant falsetto and carnival bombast. Its winning formula—lyrics of waning romance, choruses determined to bounce and soar regardless—is capably reproduced throughout the record. But the song stands out as a rare home-run on an album too blandly ambitious to stick in the memory.
Interestingly, PB&J have history folding their musical ennui into the songs themselves: Gimme Some’s “Second Chance” scans as a commentary on the struggle to replicate “Young Folks”’ success, while “It Don’t Move Me,” from Living Thing, juxtaposes post-relationship blues with self-referential allusions to a creative impasse. Into that lineage step the title track, with its throwback whistling melody, and “Pretty Dumb Pretty Lame,” a cautionary tale of ballooning egos and one-night-stands—“getting hooked on all the strangers barking your name.” It’s hard to tell whether the latter is a reprimand to industry prima donnas or a jab at the band itself. “If you enjoy what you do, don’t let it ruin you,” is the lyrical conclusion, before an ambiguously apathetic chorus: “Hey, don’t let it get to your head/Hey, others could do it instead.” Along with the decorated producers, the abandoned sonic trademarks, it makes you wonder if Breakin’ Point isn’t a vague experiment in which PB&J try, with maximum self-awareness, to “sell out.”
If that is the case—and fair play to them if so, they just haven’t quite pulled it off—you might’ve expected a finer focus on why great pop resonates. The songs are skilful constructions: dynamic, propellant, with jingly verses and big, punctual choruses. But PB&J are prone to fluffing the details—take “Dominos”’ unconscionably irritating chorus, or “Nostalgic Intellect”’s make-you-think lyrics: “What’s the point with a phone that smart/If you don’t have a flexible heart?” Clunky words aside, the songs, while uncluttered, suffer a particular kind of too-muchness. “We treated the album like 12 singles, rather than an album,” Peter Morén said recently, “which of course makes a very good album.” While there’s nothing wrong with that notion, the problem is that when a song’s drama simply exists—when every line throbs with urgency, yet the characters feel less like conflicted people than vessels for indie-pop intensity—the stakes feel low, the conflict superficial. For all its rousing clap-alongs, Breakin’ Point sounds like the lonely work of a band who’ve forgotten how to love their own music. | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ingrid | June 9, 2016 | 5.7 | 5037bc2f-3902-4c8d-8e7f-7402502ec428 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The D.C. rapper’s major label debut is made of loose, richly textured hip-hop that weaves a colorful tapestry from his city’s musical history featuring Wale, the Internet, and Kaytranada. | The D.C. rapper’s major label debut is made of loose, richly textured hip-hop that weaves a colorful tapestry from his city’s musical history featuring Wale, the Internet, and Kaytranada. | GoldLink: At What Cost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23109-at-what-cost/ | At What Cost | In recent years, Washington, D.C. has become an unlikely incubator for worldly, adventurous dance music: the mutant grooves of Future Times, the Ethiopian house of 1432 R, Peoples Potential Unlimited’s retro-futuristic funk. More than any of his contemporaries, DMV rapper GoldLink has drawn up these sounds like a sponge. On mixtapes like The God Complex and last year’s collection of And After That, We Didn’t Talk remixes, he presented an aesthetic he called “future bounce”: a fluorescent, kinetic sound that’s as indebted to house music as to hip-hop. For his major label debut, At What Cost, GoldLink digs deeper into his city’s musical history, pushing the elastic rhythms of go-go and funk to the fore while keeping a foot firmly planted in the current moment. It helps that he’s found a few kindred spirits to help him refine his sound, postmodern traditionalists like Montreal producer Kaytranada and Matt Martians and Steve Lacy of the Internet. Still, the sound of At What Cost is quintessentially that of GoldLink’s hometown: loose, organic, as humid as a D.C. summer.
The album’s opening third establishes a strong sense of place. “Hands on Your Knees” is a straight-up go-go number produced by Kaytranada; rather than rapping, the track is overlaid with D.C. lifer Kokayi emceeing a party over crowd noise. The end result is a song that captures the atmosphere of a go-go as much as the music. “Have You Seen That Girl?” sputters like a jalopy crawling down U Street on a hot day, its Casiotone beat just barely pushing the song forward. On “Meditation,” Kaytranada builds an entire track around the closing minute of his own “TRACK UNO”: decaying synths, a four-on-the-floor beat, a bassline that’s almost dubstep-sized. “Shake, shake, shake/Shake the nerves off/In the name of dancehall, shake the nerves off,” Jazmine Sullivan instructs on the hook. The song ends with the sound of gunfire erupting outside of a party, a not unfamiliar scene in the world of go-go.
Elsewhere, At What Cost looks outward, drawing in sounds from far outside of the District. “Herside Story,” a remix of Irish group Hare Squead’s song of the same title, feels almost impossibly buoyant, Jessy Rose’s braying hook floating atop the track’s harp melody like Kirby in Dreamland. The way he makes the word “down” vibrate in his throat is near magical. GoldLink wrestles the soaring track back down to earth: “Pop a nigga like we pop a wheelie, niggas going crazy in the city.” Lead single “Crew” stands out for its gleaming, Atlanta sound, but it’s also just a straight-up stunning rap song. Baltimore crooner Brent Faiyaz lays down a silky hook that’s confident yet conflicted, while fellow Washingtonian Shy Glizzy contributes a verse that practically leaps out of the speakers (one particularly acrobatic stretch: “Stop that madness, I’m a savage, in traffic with MAC 11’s/Baddest bitch and she Spanish, I fly her to Calabasas”). GoldLink, meanwhile, remains characteristically collected, even as he races to cram every last syllable into his bars. Just like on the rest of these tracks, he sounds right at home.
In its attempt to deliver a promising D.C. rapper onto the national stage, At What Cost recalls the last great major label rap debut to come out of the city: Wale’s Attention Deficit. Like that record, At What Cost is ambitious, slickly-produced, and relies a great deal on live instrumentation. However, where Attention Deficit’s jumbled tracklist smacked of design-by-committee compromise, At What Cost is clearly guided by GoldLink’s vision from start to finish. He’s leveraging the music that shaped him, working with producers with whom he has real chemistry, and putting on as many DMV artists as he can, ranging from the unknown (Ciscero) to the obligatory (Wale) to the surprising (where has Mýa been, anyway?). In its ability to move fluidly between artists, styles, and ideas, At What Cost also recalls a more recent hip-hop album: Drake’s “playlist” More Life. Though while Drake restlessly roams the globe in search of new sounds, GoldLink is largely content to bask in the richness of his hometown's music. It’s for this reason that At What Cost feels like an album that only GoldLink could make, one that’s forward-looking yet firmly rooted in D.C. tradition. | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Squaaash Club / RCA | April 11, 2017 | 7.5 | 50383907-e54a-4b1e-a5f4-0f1126864c34 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
On his second album inspired by journeys in the Arctic wilderness, Finnish electronic musician Sasu Ripatti makes even the most hostile environment feel homey. | On his second album inspired by journeys in the Arctic wilderness, Finnish electronic musician Sasu Ripatti makes even the most hostile environment feel homey. | Vladislav Delay: Rakka II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vladislav-delay-rakka-ii/ | Rakka II | Sasu Ripatti knows that few things will humble you like time spent in the wilderness. “You learn to face your own limits and fears,” he’s said of his Arctic hiking experiences. His latest solo albums as Vladislav Delay take inspiration from these trips, the kind where you’re confronted with terrifying, awe-inducing grandeur. The title of the pair of LPs, Rakka, refers to the rocky terrain he traverses outside his home in Finland. The covers depict these spaces as spectacles in their own right, with pink and green smears that recall Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s gargantuan land art. And the music is some of the most outrightly turbulent of his decades-long career. But despite the rapturous sonics, Ripatti is doing what he’s always done best: crafting detailed soundscapes that make you feel small, forever at the mercy of his intricate productions.
Recorded during the same sessions as Rakka, Rakka II aims again to overwhelm with wind-tunnel drones, electrifying noise, industrial crunch—anything to get you bracing for dear life. Ripatti finalized the material for this second installment only recently, and he says that his time away from the music led to a more hopeful, optimistic album. Such positivity isn’t immediately audible: “Rakkn” drops you into whooshing sirens and mechanical whirring, opening the album in a state of panic. Stuttering beats creep ominously underneath, but then everything fizzles out, and all that’s left is vapor.
Much of Rakka II is about this process of diving headfirst into chaos and finding serenity therein. “Ranno” begins with sputtering static atop a constant kick drum, and its progression is decidedly linear—a stark contrast to the cacophonous start-stop rhythms of Rakka. As the track’s first half feels like anxious preparation for something larger, it transforms the same elements into blissful ambience, ending like one of the Field’s looping reveries. Even “Raaa,” responsible for the most whip-lashing structure here, has reason for its riotousness: Its sudden shifts provide for on-the-fly recalibration. After a mid-song passage of cool, airy drones, the return of a pounding beat reads more meditative than oppressive.
Beauty is the defining feature of this record. “Rakas,” which translates to “beloved,” is misty and thalassic, its synths tranquilizing in their intimacy, and “Rapaa,” with its high-pitched beeps and bristly drone, arrives like a tender massage rather than a relentless skull-battering. Ripatti’s vision of beauty is one of abundance, and Rakka II presents a never-ending flurry of sounds: Synth pads ebb and flow, beats erupt in scattershot patterns, and tracks are adorned with a bevy of atonal noises. While his early works, like Entain or Anima, may have felt like looking into a microscope to find countless squiggling organisms, Rakka II offers a more life-sized experience: It feels like Arctic winds are rushing straight at you, and these songs’ constant, surprising shifts make the immensity of it all feel invigorating.
Ripatti’s entire career has been built on ping-ponging between disorientation and close engagement: His dubbiest records are relaxing and richly textured, his footwork endeavors are always atmospheric, and his Rakka albums make hostile environments feel homey. Even “Raaha,” defined by its massive, lumbering beats, is supremely pretty: It’s rhythm distilled into its purest form, bearing the raw danceability of Esplendor Geométrico’s proto-industrial techno. “Raato,” which means “carcass,” sums up the album: it’s a power-ambient epic that quietly grows in intensity before dissolving into soft textures and stumbling drums. It’s moody, poignant, euphoric. One can imagine an expanse of Arctic tundra, of bones dotting craggy rock—a vision of death couched in acceptance. Rakka II suggests that severe conditions make you check your ego, and that doing so—while appreciating one’s single, fragile life—is a nourishing, wonderful thing.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cosmo Rhythmatic | April 20, 2021 | 7.8 | 503bec65-9faa-4cec-9529-a37a0049cd58 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
With two epochal singles and some of the decade's most engaging production and remix work under his belt, the DFA's James Murphy unveils his full-length debut with LCD Soundsystem. Also included on a bonus disc are-- at last-- his seven previously released A- and B-sides. | With two epochal singles and some of the decade's most engaging production and remix work under his belt, the DFA's James Murphy unveils his full-length debut with LCD Soundsystem. Also included on a bonus disc are-- at last-- his seven previously released A- and B-sides. | LCD Soundsystem: LCD Soundsystem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4978-lcd-soundsystem/ | LCD Soundsystem | James Murphy makes great tracks. He isolates cowbells and places the microphone at just the right distance from the hi-hat so you get the analog-crisp sound post-punk bands took for granted because they didn't know how good they had it with engineers like Paul Hardiman and Rick Walton. Murphy, obsessed with Can and Liquid Liquid, has the right influences at the right time in the right city-- which is to say, if he couldn't be French, New York is the best place for LCD Soundsystem. Like Parisian duo Daft Punk (who get their second Murphy shout-out on this album), LCD makes substance from style, content from form, something from nothing. That's a rockist attitude, of course, but then LCD Soundsystem is a rockist fantasy: full command of the history with none of the high-caloric obligation to "meaning" or purity. Murphy even puts together a live show that out-pummels the noise bands a borough over.
LCD Soundsystem has been anticipated since Murphy's 2002 splash "Losing My Edge"/"Beat Connection", and like it, makes clear that although his musical reference points (Suicide, Eno, Can, ESG, Talking Heads, the Fall, and on and on and on) are upfront enough to be conspicuous, they never quite cross the line into hipster-wallpaper. In fact, if anything, Murphy has a given a good name to cooler-than-thou poses, presenting his music, if not irony-free, then as earnestly as can be expected from someone emulating Mark E. Smith's pronunciation-uh. And yes, his flare for singles is pretty amazing: "Losing My Edge"/"Beat Connection" and "Yeah" are two of the most ubiquitous 12-inches released in the last 20 years-- at least in the neck of the woods where folks are likely to get the Fall and Suicide references. Heck, even "Give It Up" rises near the top of DFA's crop of punky dance anthems, and that the second disc appending LCD Soundsystem contains all of this music shows both generosity and considerable foresight on the part of Murphy and DFA.
However, it's still debatable whether or not Murphy makes great records. Where the singles emphasize his strengths-- impeccable arrangements (especially his signature drums-plus-drum machine attack), pacing (the dynamic expansion of "Yeah (Stupid Version)" is almost unchartable) and the gift of less-is-more-- his debut full-length lacks similar allure for almost the exact same reasons. It doesn't so much have a pace, per se, as nine distinct flavors of the LCD Soundsystem agenda, be it cowbell-ridden dancepunk, homages to any number of 70s and 80s hip rock icons, or rubbery would-be house jams just sloppy enough not to qualify as house. The production is as you would expect-- and therein lies the letdown: There aren't very many surprises here, either in the bank of sounds Murphy pulls out, or in how he uses them. Still, that wouldn't be bad if the songs lived up to the promise of his singles. The worst I can say about LCD Soundsystem is that there are precious few moments that stand up next to his most lauded singles.
But we'll start with the best-- which is to say, he'll end with the best: "Great Release" is a very non-dancefloor number pulled out of the Big Book of Ambient Pop. Beginning with soft, pulsating drum machine pliff, the song glides for more than two minutes using only a stately chord progression on piano before Murphy's distant, obviously Eno-cribbed vocal enters. The song builds and builds, in a manner typical of many other LCD Soundsystem songs, but does so via lush echo, like ocean waves, watercolored synthesizers and Murphy's "dat-da-da-da" harmony vocals near the end. And where "Great Release" shines with a symphonic glimmer, "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" and "Disco Infiltrator" stick to bare-basic LCD pump; yet, they're just as rewarding. (In fact, "Disco Infiltrator" should really have been this album's first single, rather than the comparatively indistinct Fall rip "Movement").
"Never As Tired As When I'm Waking Up" is a near-brilliant pastiche of both White Album Beatles and Dark Side Floyd, with only its telegraphed George Harrison lead-guitar riff at the end and chord progression ripped from "Dear Prudence" keeping it from making as grand an emotional impact as it might. Likewise, "Too Much Love" seems just a bit too close to Talking Heads for comfort, though as with all things Murphy, the imitation is masterful. House-centric songs like "On Repeat" (a low key take on the structure of "Yeah", right down to the disco explosion near the end) and the excellent "Tribulations" (which prudent fans will know leaked months ago) should sate the danceheads, though they might have wished for more songs like the latter and some of the fat trimmed from the former. Ultimately, LCD Soundsystem suffers a similar fate: plenty of good-not-great stuff, and a tad unfocused. | 2005-02-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | DFA | February 2, 2005 | 8.2 | 503f8606-72b0-4712-8814-687eb8cec680 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
Six decades into his career, Bob Dylan delivers a gorgeous and meticulous record. It is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood and comes down to meet its audience. | Six decades into his career, Bob Dylan delivers a gorgeous and meticulous record. It is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood and comes down to meet its audience. | Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy-ways/ | Rough and Rowdy Ways | For 60 years, Bob Dylan has been speaking to us. Sometimes breathless, often inscrutable, occasionally prophetic, his words have formed a mythology unto themselves. But his silence holds just as much meaning. Less than a minute into his 39th album, which he has decided to call Rough and Rowdy Ways, the accompaniment seems to fade. It’s a subtle drop; there wasn’t much there in the first place—a muted string ensemble, a soft pedal steel, some funereal motifs from classical and electric guitars. It’s the same twilight atmosphere that comprised Dylan’s last three studio albums, a faithful trilogy of American standards once popularized by Frank Sinatra. But now he’s singing his own words, and about himself. He compares himself to Anne Frank and Indiana Jones, says he says he’s a painter and a poet, confesses to feeling restless, tender, and unforgiving. “I contain a-multituuudes,” he croons, to anybody who hasn’t realized by now.
The rest of the album follows this thread: furnished with more space than his words require, sung gracefully at the age of 79, speaking to things we know to be true, using proper nouns and first-hand evidence. In other words, it is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood, that comes down to meet its audience. In these songs, death is not a heavy fog hanging over all walks of life; it is a man being murdered as the country watches, an event with a time, place, and date. And love is not a Shakespearean riddle or a lusty joke; it is a delicate pact between two people, something you make up your mind and devote yourself to. “The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors,” Dylan told the New York Times. So when he sings about crossing the Rubicon, he’s talking about a river in Italy; when he tells you he’s going down to Key West, he wants you to know he’s dressing for the weather.
Still, he is Bob Dylan, and we are trained to dig deeper. (In that same Times interview, he is asked whether the coronavirus could be seen as a biblical reckoning—a difficult question to imagine posing to any other living musician.) We have learned to come to Dylan with these types of quandaries, and more often than not, we have left satisfied. But for all his allusions to history and literature, the writing drifts toward uncertainty. In a macabre narrative called “My Own Version of You,” Dylan sings about playing god as he scavenges through morgues and cemeteries to reanimate a few notable corpses and absorb their knowledge. Among the questions he poses: “Can you tell me what it means: To be or not to be?” “Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?” We never get the answers; all we hear is the depravity: slapstick horror rendered as existential comedy.
The vaudevillian spirit that ran through 2001’s Love and Theft and 2006’s Modern Times is mostly limited to this one song. But there are other head-turners. “The size of your cock will get you nowhere,” he grumbles to a sworn enemy, who might be death itself, in “Black Rider.” “I’m the last of the best, you can bury the rest,” he boasts in “False Prophet,” summoning the gnarled lunatic who narrated most of 2012’s Tempest, the voice that seemed to be choking while cursing you for trying to help. These twists lead to some memorable lines—and welcomed moments of levity—but his biting, absurdist humor is not the focus. There are no distractions; he speaks carefully, quietly, earnestly.
It results in a gorgeous and meticulous record. The lyrics are striking—dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs. Played by his touring band, with understated appearances from Fiona Apple and Blake Mills, the music is a ghostly presence. Its sound is threadbare and hypnotic, backed by small choirs and acoustic instruments, a sharp turn from the raucous blues reenactments of his 21st-century records. As depicted in Daniel Mark Epstein’s book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait, Dylan kick-started those sessions by playing his bandmates another artist’s “prototype” track to apply to whatever batch of songs he brought to the studio. There are obvious reference points for this music as well—Billy “The Kid” Emerson in “False Prophet,” Jimmy Reed in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”—but the performances are less formal, more impressionistic. It is blues and folk music that seem to drift in and out of consciousness, an in-between-world described in its opening lines: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too/The flowers are dying like all things do.”
Since 1997’s Time Out of Mind, an atmospheric return-to-form after a long period of wandering, death has been Dylan’s chief concern, to the extent that some have read it as a personal obsession. Which, of course, has only aggravated him. Yes, his recent songs deal with mortality. “But I didn’t see any one critic say: ‘It deals with my mortality’—you know, his own,” Dylan observed. It seems that he has accepted this grievance as an artistic failure and has returned with songs whose subjects cannot be misinterpreted. The last two tracks on Tempest addressed the sinking of the Titanic and the murder of John Lennon—historical events that now exist through a greater cultural consciousness. He continues and improves upon this method throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways, using notes from history to reflect something universal about our own brief, ordinary legacies. “I hope that the gods go easy with me,” he sings in “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” For a minute, you forget the status of the man singing; his prayer sounds as humble, as fragile as anyone’s.
Dylan previewed this music in March by releasing “Murder Most Foul,” the longest song in his catalog and now his very first No. 1 single. The 17-minute ballad closes the record by inverting the structure of its other death songs: He begins with the ending. In concrete terms, Dylan describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “They blew off his head while he was still in the car,” he sings. What follows is a story of life: the world, its culture and art, that sustained without him. Through its stunning final moments, with an arrangement that sounds like a small orchestra packing up their instruments, Dylan makes a couple dozen requests to the iconic ’60s DJ Wolfman Jack: “Mystery Train,” “Moonlight Sonata,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” It’s a radio show—one of Dylan’s favorite mediums, that disembodied voice speaking to us through other people’s words. But as the music plays, it also becomes a wake, a gathering of spirits, the perfect distraction for our host to slip out into the night, alone.
“I just heard the news about Little Richard and I’m so grieved,” Dylan wrote on his social media a month ago. “He was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy.” He sounded crestfallen; after all, Dylan has repeatedly cited Little Richard with the invention of his job, his sound, even his hairstyle. This vulnerability was almost jarring. We are used to meeting Dylan from a distance—in verse or in code, somewhere just beyond our reach. Now, he was asking us to imagine him as a kid in Minnesota, listening to the radio and imagining what his future could be. In its quiet way, Rough and Rowdy Ways is another invitation. “Forge my identity from the inside out,” he sings in “Mother of Muses,” “You know what I’m talking about.” Take him at his word and it’s an outreached hand, a chance to see the world through his eyes before it crumbles into ruin. The view is beautiful; even better, it is real and it is our own.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 18, 2020 | 9 | 504ab475-163e-4347-976c-e68c08be784c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
To paraphrase Grace Slick, "If you can remember the 80s, you never suffered\n\ any serious head trauma." Ladytron remember ... | To paraphrase Grace Slick, "If you can remember the 80s, you never suffered\n\ any serious head trauma." Ladytron remember ... | Ladytron: 604 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4633-604/ | 604 | To paraphrase Grace Slick, "If you can remember the 80s, you never suffered any serious head trauma." Ladytron remember the 80s very, very well. These youngsters fly the new wave flag and keep feeling fascination, passion burning, love so strong. But Ladytron's musical interests stretch back before MTV, to 70s Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Cluster. They're like an unabridged Encyclopedia of musical Eurotrash with a sharp pop sensibility. And with 604, they've made a fine debut full-length.
I had a pronounced tinge of déja vu when listening to 604, but it wasn't the retro sound that made me feel like I'd been here before; it was the fact that three of the songs here were on the band's four-song Commodore Rock EP. Looks like they missed the memo from the Department of Redundancy Department. Don't you hate that? You probably didn't buy Commodore Rock, though, so you're not going to mind the overlap. In fact, if this is the first time you're hearing "Play Girl", you'll be damn glad they decided to include it on both their releases. It's an ace pop song that Allen Hunter would have been proud to announce the world premiere of, and it would have sounded great between Nena's "99 Luftballons" and "He Was Really Sayin' Somethin'" by Bananarama and Fun Boy Three. Great stuff.
"Play Girl" is sung by Helen Marnie, and with her relaxed, breathy tone, she's definitely the more engaging of Ladytron's two vocalists. "Another Breakfast with You" is another great track she fronts, with a fat Moog drone that gives it the feel of early Stereolab. "The Way That I Found You" is the third major score for Marnie, with a bouncy, anthemic melody over some dark, Naked Eyes-style keyboards. These three songs approach new wave pop perfection.
Mira Aroya is around to give the more "arty" tracks a serious Continental flair. Her deep, Bulgarian-accented voice is used both for humor (as with "Paco!", where she offers a tour of a department store over a dense electro background) and to provide a dark, gothic element to the background (as on "Discotrax"). When Aroya and Marnie come together to sing the Kraftwerk homage "He Took Her to a Movie", which borrows its melody and hook from "The Model", both slip into robotic Ralf and Florian mode with excellent results.
Rounding out the album are several instrumentals that range from dreamy computer love ambience ("CSKA Sofia" could be from the second side of Autobahn) to dense analog synth textures in the style of Add N to (X) ("Laughing Cavalier"). The tracks on 604 are sequenced intelligently and keep this slightly overlong album purring along nicely. Latter-day new wave may be old hat, but there's still room for it when it's done right. Enter Ladytron. | 2001-03-31T01:00:12.000-05:00 | 2001-03-31T01:00:12.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Emperor Norton | March 31, 2001 | 7.5 | 5054b0b1-8f56-4a51-bfa0-65d8dca72826 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Seattle doom duo embarks on an audacious mission—a beautiful and melancholy three-album cycle about eternal returns and daily toil. | The Seattle doom duo embarks on an audacious mission—a beautiful and melancholy three-album cycle about eternal returns and daily toil. | Bell Witch: Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bell-witch-futures-shadow-part-1-the-clandestine-gate/ | Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate | Stepwise and slowly, Bell Witch have been forever approaching The Clandestine Gate, which is not only the Seattle duo’s new 83-minute, single-song album but also the first volume in a trilogy meant to loop eternally. A decade ago, the sans-guitar pair used bass and drums to make turgid but familiar doom, the dozen-minute songs of their debut, Longing, lurching toward glory. The follow-up, 2015’s Four Phantoms, felt epiphanic by comparison, its dual tandems of much longer and more radiant pieces seeming to reach skyward from hell, like Hieronymus Bosch enshrined in dual wheels of black wax.
The 2016 death of co-founding drummer Adrian Guerra only seemed to amplify the ambitions of bassist Dylan Desmond, as though existential urgency led him to slow down and stretch out even more. Mirror Reaper arced and ached for more than 80 uninterrupted minutes, the constant friction between its colossal parts tossing off radiant sparks. One of the longest metal tracks ever, it felt beautiful but conclusive. Where does a band with a single piece so long it’s split between two CDs go, aside from maybe the conservatory?
Bigger, retorts The Clandestine Gate. This sprawl opens with a mighty organ dirge, rippling like a massive flag swaying in a faint breeze. That is how Bell Witch’s proposed three-album cycle, Future’s Shadow, will also likely finish, the organ returning to reconnect the end to the beginning to form a cycle that actually has no ending or beginning. The Bhavacakra, the ouroboros, the eternal return: Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman lifted this pan-cultural motif from some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous works. As much as The Clandestine Gate is the culmination of Bell Witch’s last decade, it also marks the surefooted start of their next several years, the first step in a truly audacious and titanic mission.
Ceaselessness permeates these howled, groaned, and hissed lyrics, full of “recurring dawn[s]” and “arrow[s] loosed at forever.” Dark fades into light, life into death, on and on, again and again. But the more immediate and enduring result of this approach to infinity is structural. A small clutch of riffs and rhythmic figures thread through The Clandestine Gate, disappearing only to reappear in slightly warped form. The record is more orderly motel than sprawling mansion, a few motifs repeated through the maze of levels and hallways.
The Clandestine Gate moves in a string of interconnected three-to-five-minute segments, the larger piece always shifting subtly just before tedium sets in. Early on, it’s the way Desmond’s high bass notes begin to trace a careful filigree over Shreibman’s steady organ; nearly 45 minutes later, it’s the way distant monastic chants finally coil into death-metal growls, severing the reverie and sending it back to solid ground. These eternal returns are less about infinite lives and more about pedestrian repetition, or surviving social structures that often ask the same of us at least five days per week. An earthbound interpretation of Nietzsche, The Clandestine Gate sets up life as the ultimate endurance exercise.
Still, in spite of The Clandestine Gate’s modular design, any record this long and involved can feel intimidating. And despite its grandeur and volume, its real power stems from its subtlety; check out, and you’ll put in an hour of listening with shallow rewards. Take The Clandestine Gate on a four-mile walk someplace quiet and even boring, where distractions are nil. It only gets richer.
Notice the way the rhythm expands and contracts, with Shreibman and Desmond pulling close and spreading apart, improvising with patience and precision that seem telekinetic. This dynamic pace mirrors breath itself, slowing and speeding as the task at hand changes. When Desmond’s riff tightens, Shreibman often springs beneath him, his heavy hits helping lift the notes with a sudden heave. This sense holds for the textures, too. Listen for the way Desmond’s distorted basslines echo the bright, clean leads he picks out with the high strings above them. Or spot Shreibman’s faint synthesizer harmonies rising in the distance during the quiet bits, like miserable fog framing another gray morning.
All this proffers itself as a readymade punchline, of course. An 83-minute doom album that is actually the first third of a four-hour opus seems a sort of galaxy-brained terminus, the ostensible slag of two stony dudes sitting for far too long in some smoke-clogged rehearsal room, tossing off absurd hypotheticals. Its minimalism becomes not just maximalism but also mannerism, so far up the form’s ass it may seem hard for outsiders to peer in. But Bell Witch are blessedly self-aware, adding one second of silence to The Clandestine Gate just to make it longer than Mirror Reaper, then sharing a laugh in interviews about the ridiculous choice. They get that this is a lot, that most folks don’t have the space for four hours of doom about, well, being doomed.
But aside from the riffs that glide through the haze, that gumption is perhaps the best part of this entire enterprise—how entirely out of step The Clandestine Gate feels with most everything about how we consume culture right now. This is metal that may have made Pauline Oliveros proud, because its rewards demand you submit fully and listen deeply, to slow down and crawl inside. To wit, on streaming services, Bell Witch have not bothered to break this into bite-sized segments in order to make more money. It is one piece, meant to be played and heard without interruption. The Clandestine Gate is about our cycle of daily and perhaps even eternal toil, or how, as the last verse has it, “the down-stroking rapacious eye of doom” never turns away its gaze. This is an 83-minute break from that torment that Bell Witch hopes, two albums from now, may never end. | 2023-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | April 26, 2023 | 7.5 | 50551db6-6b5d-416c-89fc-352a7e0d0012 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
In 1977, electronic composer Laurie Spiegel's "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds" traveled to the edge of the solar system as part of Voyager 1 and 2's "Golden Record". This reissue of her 1980 LP shows how Spiegel always contemplated orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through her compositions, while remaining affectionately human. | In 1977, electronic composer Laurie Spiegel's "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds" traveled to the edge of the solar system as part of Voyager 1 and 2's "Golden Record". This reissue of her 1980 LP shows how Spiegel always contemplated orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through her compositions, while remaining affectionately human. | Laurie Spiegel: The Expanding Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17067-the-expanding-universe/ | The Expanding Universe | In 1977, American astronomer Carl Sagan selected the composer Laurie Spiegel's computerized realization of Johannes Kepler's 1619 treatise "Harmony of the Worlds" for inclusion aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft's "Golden Record". Kepler's "Harmony of the Worlds" was the lead cut on a collection that held recordings of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, selections from Beethoven, Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry, for the sake of demonstrating to other life forms in the galaxy that there is intelligent life on our planet. And now, Laurie Spiegel's music has traveled to the edge of our solar system.
Back on Earth, the New York label Unseen Worlds has obliged us with more Laurie Spiegel, reissuing her 1980 album, The Expanding Universe, and adding over 100 minutes of additional music. At a time when crucial female electronic composers like Pauline Oliveros and Suzanne Ciani are receiving new recognition for their work, Spiegel's music continues to resonate and often sounds strangely contemporary. That her work can be simultaneously dystopian and luminous speaks to Spiegel's talents. She can evoke the chilling cosmos while also crafting something small-scale and warm. When Voyager launched, President Jimmy Carter said: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings." His statement applies just as readily to The Expanding Universe.
Spiegel attended Julliard before researching at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and at Connecticut's Electronic Music Laboratories on the nascent music systems being developed there. (Ultimately, she chose to pursue programming, forgoing musical composition altogether.) The notes within this reissue show the room-sized computers with which Spiegel concocted her music, and her anecdotes recall disk drives the size of washing machines preserving mere seconds of code. She offers details like: "This 32k DDP understood FORTRAN IV and DAP II 24-bit assembly language. It could do an integer add in as little as 3.8 milliseconds but a floating point multiply could take up to 115.9 microseconds. You can bet we all wrote the tightest, smallest, fastest code we could."
Whatever its heady origins, Spiegel's music is inviting, playful, and visceral. As she explained to The Wall Street Journal recently: "There were all of these negative images of computers as giant machines that would take over the world and had no sense of anything warm and fuzzy or affectionate." Yet "Patchwork" has the buoyancy of the ARP figure from the Who's "Baba O'Riley", "Old Wave" is woozy and syrup-slow, and a number of melodies anticipate the analog splendors of Jürgen Müller or Boards of Canada. Her intellectual curiosity led her to investigate African and Indian polyrhythms-- which inform the throbbing and lively "Drums"-- as well as the modal Celtic tunes she heard while studying American folk music in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which permeate three iterations of "Appalachian Grove".
Thrilling as these shorter studies might be, it's in her longer, more contemplative works that Spiegel's sensibilities become clearest. "The Expanding Universe" is nearly a half-hour of swelling, evolving tones, and she stresses that the composition is neither "minimalist" nor "ambient," and that it exists wholly in its own space. Even if Spiegel's music weren't already launched into the firmament, it would finds its natural home there; it's when she contemplates orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through sound that her imagination is unparalleled. While Kepler mused that the "Harmony of the Worlds" would be audible only to the ear of God, what reaches human ears via Spiegel's realization is bracing, menacing, and disorienting, the piercing tones not unlike a choir of air raid sirens. An alien life form encountering it on Voyager's "Golden Record" would conclude that our world was a maddening, maniacal place. | 2012-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unseen Worlds / Philo | October 24, 2012 | 8.5 | 50557710-af43-4ba6-9d0a-9e1ff0c1c277 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
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