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The Japanese post-rock band's latest features backing strings from the Wordless Music Orchestra and the maximalist production of Henry Hirsch (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Lenny Kravitz). | The Japanese post-rock band's latest features backing strings from the Wordless Music Orchestra and the maximalist production of Henry Hirsch (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Lenny Kravitz). | Mono: For My Parents | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16985-for-my-parents/ | For My Parents | Mono are a post-rock band with a well-tested formula that they have been working for years: lay out a weepy string theme, fatten it up slowly over nine or 10 minutes, and then nail it to the wall with guitars. On their latest album, For My Parents, there isn't much juice remaining in it: You can anticipate every single dynamic shift in its five compositions, which is not typically an asset for instrumental music meant to take you on an emotional journey. There isn't much of a journey to be taken on For My Parents; the music doesn't develop, darken, or tell a story so much as it expands and deflates like a balloon. Trying to engage actively with it, to search its contours with your mind, is like poking a soap bubble.
As they did on their live album Holy Ground, they enlist the Wordless Music Orchestra to back them, and the added heft of their strings makes the bombast even harder to take seriously: This is music destined for helicopter-panning shots of majestic rainforest canopies, close-ups of dewy-eyed Olympic athletes, and little else. They also stepped out from Steve Albini's production to enlist producer Henry Hirsch, who gathered the band and the orchestra in his cavernous cathedral space, Waterfront Studios, where every kettle-drum thump and overdriven guitar could resound into the heavens. The album sounds beautiful, in the way that Peter Jackson's visions of heaven in his critically reviled adaptation of The Lovely Bones looked beautiful: picture-book simple but vivid and clear.
The Wordless Music strings play their melodies with a nice arm-twisting dab of schmaltz, which is necessary when you are navigating the Mr. Holland's Opus-caliber key modulations in the finale of "Legend". They manage to make a simple rising major scale on "Legend" feel like dawning rays of morning sunshine. It's an uphill struggle, though, to claim real pathos from such transparently cheesy material: The guitar melody for "Nostalgia" directly plagiarizes some Suzuki Violin School tune-scrap my memory is still struggling to place from my childhood years in group classes. The melody to "Unseen Harbor" has a similar children's-exercise obviousness to its progression. It's hard to turn a nursery rhyme into Tchaikovsky.
Mono's music is better used than listened to actively. As a vigorously marked road map to emotional catharsis, I can imagine it being helpful: If I were, say, doing a particularly tough yoga class, I'm sure that cueing up "Dream Odyssey" at the right moment would help me sink more deeply, more meaningfully, into my Warrior Two. Other music functions this way, creating a space for you to have your own thoughts more than it bothers to have its own. But you can't exactly sink into a soothing bubble bath while Mono plays, either, as every piece works its way into a thundering, Trans-Siberian Orchestra climax that would have me scrambling out of the tub for the volume button.
The garish maximalism would be fine if the pieces did more to distinguish themselves from each other. Or if they were truly exciting. But For My Parents suffers, somehow, from both tastefulness and tastelessness: Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out. If they really want to make the post-rock equivalent of a Michael Bay film-- try a dirtier distortion pedal, for instance, or bring in the brass or better yet, a big heavy gong-- I'm there. But that kind of awesome would likely entail risking more genuine awfulness than Mono probably have in them. | 2012-09-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | September 10, 2012 | 5.4 | 505d9e93-ebac-4a9e-86d3-7393ea1c97b9 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On a scrappy solo album inspired by grief and personal upheaval, singer-songwriter and Joyce Manor guitarist Neil Berthier explores new musical outlets for emo. | On a scrappy solo album inspired by grief and personal upheaval, singer-songwriter and Joyce Manor guitarist Neil Berthier explores new musical outlets for emo. | PHONY: At Some Point You Stop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phony-at-some-point-you-stop/ | At Some Point You Stop | After Joyce Manor guitarist Neil Berthier’s father passed away from dementia in 2020, Berthier responded to a plea from friend and fellow musician Petey, packed his bags, and moved from Boston to Los Angeles. These conflicted emotions clouds At Some Point You Stop, Berthier’s latest album as PHONY (and third solo record following the dissolution of Donovan Wolfington, the band he once led). But in the throes of such heartache, Berthier lets his complex emotions guide his most expansive set of songs yet.
A quiet sense of despair defined Berthier’s first two records as PHONY, Songs You’ll Never Sing and Knock Yourself Out. The feeling lurks on the new album’s opening tracks “Christmas Eve Day” (featuring vocals from Ratboys’ Julia Steiner) and “The Middle.” But as the fingerpicked guitars and dreamy synths in the background of “Christmas Eve Day” transition into the harsh, reverberating drum machines of “The Middle,” this shadowy despair transforms into something much larger and louder as Berthier—drawing on the text of a letter he wrote as he processed his grief—pleads to his late father to “just meet me in the middle.” The track trades the snarky, emo revival-era punk of his previous work for heavier, slowcore-inspired indie rock, a sound he’d explored on Knock Yourself Out but revisits with greater purpose in the wake of tragedy.
Throughout the album, Berthier rifles through his own history and popular music at large. As he moves from icy, vaporous post-punk (“Animals”), resonant piano ballads (“Kaleidoscope,” which features Petey), and upbeat psychedelia à la Hüsker Dü (“Great White”), Berthier’s passionate performances connect the dots. The scrappy production on the album is both a compliment and a detriment to Berthier’s songwriting: While songs like the fast and fuzzy “Otherwise” benefit from a more hands-off approach, the bombastic chord progressions of outro “Winter’s Warm” don’t hit quite as hard as it should in the context of such a cathartic record.
Though At Some Point You Stop is Berthier’s most adventurous work yet, his attempts to cover so much new territory means its scale doesn’t always match his ambitions. Yet there’s a tenacity throughout the new album that wasn’t as present on the first two PHONY albums, especially Knock Yourself Out. While that record featured long stretches of dejection with the occasional moment of urgency, At Some Point You Stop flips that equation. Instead of letting the gravitational pull of grief and self-loathing drive him towards isolation, as Berthier hints at on “Wedding & Funeral Family,” he seeks love in the comfort of community. This shift in perspective, corresponding with the cross-country move and life-altering tragedy, makes his new album feel like the work of an artist in the process of finding their new form. | 2022-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Phony Industries | August 4, 2022 | 7 | 5062b4a7-570b-4ec8-b344-5f45110bee39 | Matty Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matty-monroe/ | |
Already out in his native Canada, this singer-songwriters debut LP of spare, soft songs is now issued by Sub Pop. | Already out in his native Canada, this singer-songwriters debut LP of spare, soft songs is now issued by Sub Pop. | Chad VanGaalen: Infiniheart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8542-infiniheart/ | Infiniheart | Maybe this is just an American's projection onto our northerly neighbors, but I imagine Chad VanGaalen knows the cold very intimately. He hails from Calgary, where he busked street corners and subways for years, gradually building up a large catalog of original songs. Using a variety of instruments and equipment-- some of which he's fashioned by hand-- the relentless DIY'er has recorded hundreds of his songs in a makeshift studio in his bedroom, where you can imagine him retreating from a frigid evening. On his debut album, Infiniheart, which was released in Canada earlier this year and which Sub Pop is now releasing domestically, that crisp chill hangs over every chiming note and every booming beat. Even the packaging cannot escape the cold front: Snow-white and ice-blue dominate the cover artwork, and the inner sleeve is wind-chapped pink.
This chilliness suggests an album full of spare, soft songs conveying subtle emotions, which is accurate but only to a degree. While he keeps his accompaniment to a minimum, VanGaalen is no minimalist. His songs are balanced with only a few carefully chosen elements, as if he has expended a great deal of energy trying to avoid adding another instrument here or overworking a beat there. But the range of sounds on Infiniheart is impressively wide: When VanGaalen culled these 16 from the hundreds in his vault, he chose with an ear toward the eclectic, showcasing his musical ingenuity.
In fact, there's an almost maximalist spectrum of sound on Infiniheart, and the album is all the more impressive for creating and maintaining such a specific mood over 16 songs. Brushes stir against snares on "Blood Machine" imitating slow respiration, and the prismatic guitars of "Liquid + Light" and "Somewhere I Know There Is Nothing" evoke the cutting cold in the air and the sharp glare of sunlight off frozen snow. On "1000 Pound Eyelids" a bleary trumpet suggests the bending metal and breaking bones of a car crash, and the sharp notes of a dobro and a breezy penny whistle pierce "Sunshine Snare Hits".
VanGaalen's guitar can be gentle or brutal, his beats reserved or ostentatious, and he has sequenced the album to showcase this dynamic. The two-guitar coda of "Kill Me in My Sleep", which is perhaps best described as "gossamer", is immediately followed by the instrumental "J.C.'s Head on the Cross", which bounces frenetically on thudding beats. He sings these songs in a voice that stretches towards a shivering falsetto, which cracks noticeably on "Chronograph #1" and adds to the otherworldliness of "Red Blood" and the videogamey "The Warp Zone/Hidden Bridge".
If this chilliness enlivens the music, it unfortunately dampens VanGaalen's songwriting, which relies too heavily on weighty, sci-fi concepts that seem frozen and immobile. In theory, such reliance suggests a unique vision, unflinching in its conception and execution, but in practice, he too often sounds coldly remote, more aloof than elusive. "Clinically Dead" starts the album with the demise of a man-machine: "Clinically he was dead, and the modem inside his head was still working." Conceptually, it recalls the Flaming Lips (who based an entire album on the heartbreaking inner conflict of a crime-fighting cartoon) and Grandaddy (who based an entire album on the melding of humanity and machines in a post-apocalyptic world), but those artists play with the distance between their subject matter and the emotions they intend to communicate. Very rarely does any self-awareness come through on Infiniheart.
When his flights of fancy are anchored in the actual, Infiniheart becomes a powerful combination of words and music. "After the Afterlife" asks about such mundane matters as a mother's haircut and a father's drug habit before conjuring eerie seaweed imagery that hints at tragedy. And "Chronograph #1", about a party whose guest of honor is noticeably absent, possesses more gravity than any of his oddball lyrics. But still, those cumbersome songs stand out the most, especially "Blood Machine", which imagines a Matrix-like underworld where everyone is hooked up to a "giant machine that could circulate blood." He tries to connect it to larger, existential issues, but despite the fluttering guitarwork, the song falls flat: "One of them explained to me/ how they used to be free/ Before the machines got built/ And before there were laws regulating free will." To his credit, VanGaalen invests those clunky lines with a vocal intensity that's surprisingly graceful and even poignant. That's ultimately the sticking point with *Infiniheart: VanGaalen's songs tend toward folly, yet it's impossible to discount his commitment to the material. * | 2005-08-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2005-08-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 18, 2005 | 7.1 | 5064c631-7c04-45b6-abcc-84c64a1b4462 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The hardened Detroit traditionalist finds a surprising foil with the New Zealand producer Leonard Charles. | The hardened Detroit traditionalist finds a surprising foil with the New Zealand producer Leonard Charles. | The Leonard Simpson Duo: LSD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-leonard-simpson-duo-lsd/ | LSD | Guilty Simpson is the kind of rapper traditionalists love—weathered as old boots, lyrically focused, incapable of tethering himself to any fashionable sound. He forged his style in Detroit way before 8 Mile burned an image of the city into hip-hop consciousness. As the years passed, some of his contemporaries went on to bigger things while others fell by the wayside, and his trusted ally J Dilla died far too young. All the while, Simpson mastered the art of remaining true and staying still. It’s 2020, and he is still worshipping the gods of boom-bap, still unleashing that cast-iron voice, still making old-school Detroit hip-hop.
Guilty’s best album is the decade-old OJ Simpson, in which Madlib’s kaleidoscopic beats snapped together with his collaborator’s monotone flow. But with the once-touted OJ Simpson 2 nowhere near materializing, the rapper required a new collaborator, a partner in crime outside the hip-hop ecosystem that would appeal to his singular tastes. As things turned out, Simpson needed to look halfway around the world.
Enter Jeremy Toy. The New Zealand producer and engineer—operating here under the name Leonard Charles—has enjoyed a nomadic career as an multi-instrumentalist and producer in an island nation with about half the population of Michigan, but his spiritual link to Detroit was forged when he dared to remake J Dilla’s Donuts with live instruments. Some would argue that touching the postmodernist instrumental masterpiece qualifies as sacrilege, but Toy is nothing if not audacious.
Simpson and Toy have dubbed their partnership The Leonard Simpson Duo, and their album title bears the abbreviated initials LSD. The hallucinogenic name foreshadows the freaked-out sound: Trading in psychedelica, the union resembles a rap blog-era mash-up of ’90s street rhymes and ’60s San Francisco psych. It’s sometimes jarring, like spotting a time traveller strolling through the hippie-era Haight-Ashbury in Cross Colours.
Take the strangely haunting “Nobody,” which rides a sample of Marlon Williams and Aldous Harding’s 2018 duet “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore” manipulated to sound like a ’60s folk ballad. Over washed-out guitar chords, Guilty shares space with an angelic vocal loop before making way for a sour guitar solo. There’s even a couple of instrumental interludes peppered throughout LSD, resembling a teenage band working through a fixation with the 13th Floor Elevators.
When in the mood, Charles can cook up a meat-and-potatoes classic. On “G.U.I.L.T.Y.” he takes a spelled-out sample of Simpson’s name cuts it with heavy ambient and psychedelic tones, gifting the rapper an eponymous anthem in the vein of Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” or Cam’ron’s “Killa Cam.”
After years spent driving towards a more hardened street sound, Simpson is tested by Charles’s orchestration. It’s fair to say that Guilty’s writing isn’t always at its peak—“I’m inspired by hate/It makes me want to be great,” he says on “My Inspiration”—but there are moments when he is extremely fun. The swirling electronics and hard-knocking drums of “Bricks” gives Simpson a chance to unleash his blunted syllables gloriously. “Friends,” meanwhile, resurrects the famous hook from Whodini’s song of the same name over knocking drums and light keyboard licks. It’s pretty funny to hear a grizzled old 40-something rapper rant about the snakes in his friend group. It perhaps encapsulates LSD, a strange odyssey of opposing elements and counterintuitive choices. | 2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Jakarta | February 4, 2020 | 6.9 | 50696285-b09c-4a0b-af37-8c7c1e1e0d31 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
With soft synth pads and fathomless echo, Ukrainian electronic musician Dmitriy Avksentiev creates a mournful ambient meditation on wartime upheaval. | With soft synth pads and fathomless echo, Ukrainian electronic musician Dmitriy Avksentiev creates a mournful ambient meditation on wartime upheaval. | Koloah: Serenity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koloah-serenity/ | Serenity | On last year’s Millennium Sun, Dmitriy Avksentiev grappled with futurism’s pleasures and terrors by revisiting the past. Inspired by classic science-fiction films like Blade Runner and Akira, the Ukrainian electronic musician, aka Koloah and Voin Oruwu, set out to craft an album about our own era, “where science and technology coexist with wars and dictatorship, where world hunger exists alongside space travel.” In keeping with that tangled timeline—which echoed an observation often attributed to William Gibson, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet”—the music’s high-tech overtones tangled with echoes of the past 30 years of electronic music, mixing alien textures with familiar strains of jungle and techno. There was a dystopian cast to some of the album’s darker moments, with pummeling breakbeats wreathed in minor-key synths, and TB-303 patterns dripping like acid rain. But placid ambient tones transmitted a message of cautious optimism.
Then dystopia came knocking on Avksentiev’s door. On February 24, Russia attacked Ukraine, launching the first salvo in an invasion that continues to wreak destruction on the country more than two months later. As rockets flew over Kyiv, Avksentiev grabbed his laptop and his cat, packed some clothes, and began a 70-hour odyssey in search of safety. The story of his flight is printed on the front cover of Serenity, an album he completed since settling down in a new, undisclosed location, where the sounds of sirens and explosions continue. “In daily hell, music became my support, my therapy,” he writes. “Now I want to share my strength and support with others. I created this album to reflect on what is happening to us: tears, nostalgia, dreams of the future, and faith in a bright tomorrow. We will survive, return to our hometowns, and rebuild the country when the war is over.”
Serenity picks up where Millennium Sun’s few purely ambient tracks, like “Hope” and “See You in 1000 Years,” left off. There are no drums, no hard edges, and few obvious melodies. Arpeggiated synths churn in deep pools of reverb; plangent chords hang like heavy mist, while bells and choral pads hint at liturgical contexts. Avksentiev completed half the album’s tracks before the war broke out and finished the rest after fleeing Kyiv, but it’s impossible to say which songs belong to the before times and which the aftermath. (The lone exception is “Seachless,” which he previewed on Instagram on February 16, shortly before the invasion, after performing it that week at Kyiv’s Malaya Opera.) All eight tracks draw on a stripped-down palette of soft pads and fathomless echo; less than half an hour long, Serenity is bound by a focused and meditative energy. Listening on headphones, you feel cocooned in Koloah’s soft, radiant webs of sound.
The mood is more reflective this time around, mournful but never maudlin. “Before the Storm” launches the album with long held tones that recall the foggy unease of Burial’s Antidawn, pensive and unresolving; in “Seachless,” gently spiraling arpeggios circle the root note warily, as though searching in vain for answers. “Serenity” and “Overlook” smear gaseous (and GAS-like) synthesizers into sweeping, elegiac shapes, swells teasing at climax without ever reaching one. Yet Serenity is, above all, hopeful, particularly in its second half, where the tones brighten and melodies come into sharper focus. Veiled forms in the mix suggest a sense of possibility looming on the horizon, and the closing “New Dawn” and “Dyvo” toy with major harmonies. What could have been a solemn affair becomes strangely uplifting. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes Serenity feel particularly timely. But it’s the obvious care that Avksentiev has put into the music, as well as the depth and the range of feeling he communicates, that makes it matter. | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Salon Imaginalis | April 22, 2022 | 7.5 | 506a494f-3db3-46fd-98fe-f13449dd9ca2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The zany, ’80s-inspired debut from the 24-year-old pop singer and TikTok star showcases a promising young artist in the age of internet virality. | The zany, ’80s-inspired debut from the 24-year-old pop singer and TikTok star showcases a promising young artist in the age of internet virality. | Hemlocke Springs: Going...Going...Gone! EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hemlocke-springs-going-going-gone-ep/ | Going...Going...Gone! EP | Hemlocke Springs explains her creative process as a haphazard exercise with only three steps: collapse into neurosis, keyboard smash on your preferred DAW, and spill your guts. It's a characteristically insular approach for a young bedroom pop songwriter, but Springs winds up with something more eccentric than her peers. Her music is kitschy and yearning, drawing from 1980s synth-pop and 2010s alt-pop alike, delivered with the anguish of a 19th-century woman being sent out to sea. The 24-year-old artist, born Isimeme “Naomi” Udu, found an audience after uploading her music to Soundcloud and later TikTok while she was completing a master’s degree at Dartmouth. On her debut EP Going…Going…Gone!, she fleshes out her sound, highlighting a promising young artist in the age of internet virality.
Every song on Going…Going…Gone! can be imagined in a different scene of an ’80s rom-com. Springs captures that era’s endearing cheese with bright tones and singalong hooks, wearing her influences—Depeche Mode, Prince, and Tears For Fears—on her sleeve. At the same time, her music also hearkens back to the pixelated laptop experiments of an artist like Grimes. She presents herself as the unlucky heroine pining for love and then hating herself when she can’t find it, emphasizing her agony with vocal melodrama. She yelps, croons, and growls on tracks like “girlfriend” and “the train to nowhere,” blending the most theatrical moments of several decades of pop icons into the EP’s brief runtime.
Springs’ lyrics make her sound like a cursed Victorian ghost, doomed to live in heartbreak for all of eternity: “I need your attention/In this frail dimension of a brain,” she pleads on “gimme all ur luv.” “enknee1” has verses posed as racing thoughts, synthesizing embarrassment, dejection, and naivety all at once: “But I have made a mistake, it’s such a shame, I don’t think you’re into my kind,” she sings as she grapples with feeling inherently incapable of love. Later, the song explodes into half-time fantasia that could fit right into SPELLING’s The Turning Wheel. The EP scratches that nostalgic itch for a time when everything feels bigger, scarier, and more complicated than it actually is, so you let it out because it’s the only way to feel better.
The last three tracks of the EP were written in quick succession after Springs visited Los Angeles, and at times, that hastiness is evident. On “pos,” she is at her most mercurial, too preoccupied with self-destruction to realize she’s destroying a relationship. The skeletal, cowbell-embellished production struts forward; her voice goes from raspy to shrill, and then she trills her lips. It’s exciting to see her push her weirdness, but the lyrics can make you scratch your head: “We should take an Andrew Jackson with tact and check in the movies at two.” But messiness is part of the journey, and Going…Going…Gone! is zany enough to feel unique and relatable enough to make you want to scream along at the sky. | 2023-10-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | October 6, 2023 | 7.1 | 506adb55-020d-4664-b1f4-74b7bb593a35 | Jaeden Pinder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jaeden-pinder/ | |
Much as it always has, the married duo’s confectionary indie pop lands somewhere between pleasantly forgettable, reliably vibey, and genuinely inspiring. | Much as it always has, the married duo’s confectionary indie pop lands somewhere between pleasantly forgettable, reliably vibey, and genuinely inspiring. | Tennis: Pollen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tennis-pollen/ | Pollen | After more than a decade of dedication to a singular sound and soft-focus vibe—not to mention the marriage, the boat, the name—it may be time to accept that Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley are not doing a bit. They simply like what they like, and that’s making confectionary indie pop.
To be fair, they have stripped away some of the whole Tennis thing over the past decade. They’ve dialed back the nostalgia, both visual and aural (back in the day of Cape Dory, their fixation on reverb-y, boom-clap Beach Boys production bordered on parody). They went earnest for Yours Conditionally, a densely packed 2017 album dedicated to the ups and downs of marital devotion. On 2020’s Swimmer, their last full-length, Tennis’ sound finally felt truly broken in, with a new groove and a subtler atmospheric touch.
On Pollen, Tennis’ latest, their persistent melodies quiver with the same earnestness as always, and their self-production continues to hit its stride. Against the stately hush of Moore’s voice, Riley’s bass thunks satisfyingly, and their songs groove harder than ever. Warbled and muffled pianos contrast with acoustic guitars, and a few zany synth choices set Moore up to knock out some vocal delights.
Tennis smartly avoid the thunderous pronouncements that their peers reach for—the lyrics on Pollen, typical for the band, don’t so much untangle emotional knots as paw at them. Where another songwriter might pen a plodding lament about America, on “Glorietta,” Moore spares us, simply cringing at the “patriotic displays” and complaining that the air show is blocking the sunset. And the song has the decency to bop. And they’re still married as fuck—Pollen has not one but two songs about the couple’s first meeting, when Riley worked as a valet. The closest the album comes to erupting is its penultimate track, “Never Been Wrong,” but instead of heart-stopping strings or crashing guitars, there’s a cascade of glimmering arpeggios and a suspenseful stretch of choir-ish coos. The overall airiness on Pollen gives the sense that Tennis are continuing to have a blast making music that glides from one hook to the next.
This is not to undercut Moore’s writing as simplistic; in their recent albums, she has developed a deceptively gothic sensibility. Pollen actually ends with a song called “Pillow for a Cloud,” and an announcement from Moore that she’s “terrorized” by time’s “evidence,” which is “carved into my skin and over everything I ever loved.” But even as she gets darker, the music prances. As she sings in a particularly sticky hook on “Let’s Make a Mistake Tonight,” “I’ll take my pain with pleasure any day.”
Indie pop’s politeness means that it can scan as a (quaintly, charmingly) unambitious genre. And it doesn’t always work on Pollen; “Gibraltar” feels two-dimensional, like it was written around its title, and on “One Night With the Valet,” they sound like a pastiche of themselves. But Tennis are content with modest ambitions, writing songs that, when they catch the right way, can work themselves into your head for weeks, and warm your heart—songs that land somewhere between pleasantly forgettable, reliably vibey, and genuinely inspiring. Unless you’re pursuing some dizzying state of perpetual jouissance, some degree of ordinariness is just part of the ride. If so, it should be this well crafted. In “Pollen Song,” Moore captures a sentiment Tennis have been seeking pretty much all of their decade-and-a-half-long career: “Baby, you and I/We go cruising over highways/Your hand on my thigh/I got one hand out the window.” Sounds like a good time to me. | 2023-02-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mutually Detrimental | February 13, 2023 | 6.7 | 5072a501-3137-4f4d-8ae8-04af330eb9c6 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
Recorded over one night in 1976, Hitchhiker is an acoustic snapshot of Neil Young’s creative process, captured at a time when he was crafting music strong enough to last his whole career. | Recorded over one night in 1976, Hitchhiker is an acoustic snapshot of Neil Young’s creative process, captured at a time when he was crafting music strong enough to last his whole career. | Neil Young: Hitchhiker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-hitchhiker/ | Hitchhiker | One night in Malibu in the summer of ’76, Neil Young drove a Cadillac convertible to Indigo Ranch Studios and recorded an album called Hitchhiker. Its ten songs were united by sparse arrangements and a tenuous grasp of time. Names like Kennedy, Nixon, Brando, and Pocahontas commingled with mysterious figures from Young’s own imagination. His writing was looser, funnier, and more surreal than the junkie nightmares that comprised his recent records, though he’d retained their hard lessons: detachment and disillusionment as side effects of getting older. While Young narrated each song in first person, the man himself, then 30-years-old, never seemed fully there. He was always in transition: a lonely visitor, a hitchhiker on the road.
The session was lost to time, but the songs were not. They were re-recorded and spread across several decades of Neil Young albums, from Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps to Hawks & Doves and Le Noise. Presented together for the first time on this new archival release, they play more like a cohesive set of demos than a missing chapter in his story, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting. Hitchhiker, produced by longtime collaborator David Briggs with no overdubs or noticeable effects added, is an intimate snapshot of Neil Young’s creative process, captured at a time when he was crafting music strong enough to last his whole career.
Young writes about Hitchhiker in his second memoir, Special Deluxe. “It was a complete piece,” he tells us, “Although I was a little stony on it, and you can hear it in my performances.” Note the low, mischievous giggle that introduces “Hawaii,” one of two previously unreleased songs on the collection. In his book, Young recalls that the only breaks during the sessions were for “weed, beer, and cocaine.” All three substances audibly influence the recordings: Songs open with muttered studio banter or mic adjustments. Some end abruptly or fade distractedly. There are missed chords and mumbled lyrics. The sense of comfort suits the transitory subject matter, coating the album in a playful haze. It breezes by like no other release in his catalogue.
The best songs on Hitchhiker are some of Young’s finest songs, period. “Campaigner,” which was eventually released on the greatest hits set Decade, benefits from its placement among other work that shares its sad, percussive sprawl. “Powderfinger” always enthralls, whether it’s backed by the boozy chug of Young’s band Crazy Horse or the shaky strum of his acoustic guitar. The Hitchhiker rendition flows from verse to verse like a folk standard, uninterrupted by solos, showcasing the fragile quiver of Young’s voice. Other Rust Never Sleeps cuts like “Pocahontas” and “Ride My Llama” are not dissimilar to their album versions. The former finds a more urgent pace without its psychedelic background vocals, and the latter goes down in less than two minutes so that its smoky hallucinations linger just long enough to resonate.
The “new” tracks are equally appealing, if less essential. In the chorus of “Hawaii,” Young stretches out the final syllable of the title in a reedy whine, lending it the same awkward musicality that once turned “Albuquerque” into a long, exhausted sigh. The widely bootlegged “Give Me Strength” is more straightforward: a searching power-pop number that Young bangs out on acoustic guitar like he’s trying to summon the force of a backing band using just his right hand. Its plainspoken wisdom after a breakup is one of the set’s more personal dispatches, along with the title track’s litany of his brushes with addiction. These songs—which tell stories through disoriented scenes, overlapping visions, half-remembered advice—reflect an increasing disinterest in narrative coherence: one that he also applied to his own career.
Several weeks before Young recorded Hitchhiker, he abruptly ended a tour with his former bandmate Stephen Stills that marked the 10-year anniversary of their old group Buffalo Springfield. Sick of singing old parts to old songs and already dreaming up concepts for new material, Young decided to pack it in early. “Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way,” he wrote to his bandmates. He’d close the year on the road with Crazy Horse, playing new versions of songs he’d recorded for Hitchhiker and a few others that’d show up even further down the road. Young was on the verge of an epiphany in the summer of ’76: his past, present, and future cohabitating in a body of work with the potential to get torn up and rewritten with any sudden vision, any chemical impulse. Beautiful, strange, and stoned, Hitchhiker lets us in on one of those nights. | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | September 12, 2017 | 8.4 | 5080fdf5-fff9-4491-b244-c77d50297533 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Swiss producer reframes electronic music as a mode of spiritual searching on an album that deemphasizes grooves and lyrics in favor of icy, alien sounds and high, inscrutable cries. | The Swiss producer reframes electronic music as a mode of spiritual searching on an album that deemphasizes grooves and lyrics in favor of icy, alien sounds and high, inscrutable cries. | Aïsha Devi: DNA Feelings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aisha-devi-dna-feelings/ | DNA Feelings | Most electronic music chases the motion of the body, but Aïsha Devi is more interested in the subtle noise that rises from the body in stillness. Since dropping her Kate Wax moniker and co-founding the label Danse Noire, the Swiss producer has intertwined her experimental computer compositions with her meditation practice. She doesn’t make dance music; she makes music that sounds like the body forgetting itself, losing feeling in the extremities as mind and breath conjoin.
Devi’s 2015 album, Of Matter and Spirit, dissolved her classically trained voice in an unsteady sea of echoing electronics, testing the line between human and machine. Her second album under her given name, DNA Feelings, delves even deeper into the abstract. It’s a chilling listen, with few grooves or lyrics to grab ahold of, and its icy alien angles prove Devi’s patience and boldness. Few producers have this much restraint.
Like contemporaries Holly Herndon, Arca, and Fatima Al Qadiri, Devi would rather denature established song forms than adhere to them. Her voice still suffuses DNA Feelings, typically in one of two modes: high, inscrutable cries serrated with vocal effects or confrontational spoken words. Neither performs the voice’s usual role as an entryway into an electronic piece. If anything, the vocal parts are more alienating than the restless, intermittent drum beats and the cascades of synthesizer notes. Devi’s voice resists contextualization. It does not tell a story so much as it embeds itself in each song’s architecture.
A well-trained voice confers power; it reveals an investment in a hierarchy of skill and allows the singer to ascend that hierarchy. To warp a trained voice, then, is to interrogate power, a project Devi seems eager to undertake, however subliminally, on DNA Feelings. The advance single “Dislocation of the Alpha” centers Devi’s filtered speaking voice, which follows a rhythm but is not quite a rap, as she issues an oblique call to disidentify with the oppressors of the world—to starve out the “alpha” by denying him affinity. The method of listening this album demands disrupts the typical flow of identification from listener to musician. Left marooned in a field of sound, without many handholds, you start to question how and why you automatically identify with certain music.
The best thing an album like DNA Feelings can do to you is make you feel lost, and it does, frequently. “Light Luxury” tears its vocals to ribbons, then chases its uneasy introduction with a seasick synth riff so high-pitched it borders on the range of microphone feedback. “Aetherave” marries a placid, aquatic arpeggio to a bassline quivering at twice its speed. “Inner State of Alchemy” perforates a club beat with gaping pauses, and lets its sky-high vocal refrain, laced with trance reverb, hang in empty space. The lack of a beat under the track’s most melodically gripping moment is like a trap door giving way beneath your feet, a collapse of context. The voice is beautiful and urgent and falling through a void.
The album’s strangest and most striking moment arrives on “Time (Tool)” and continues into “Time Is the Illusion of Solidity.” “If you name me, you negate me,” says an echoing robotic voice. “You’ll unravel your ghostly matter, have visions of alchemy. You will smile when you die. You will not name me. I am the prophet and you are me.” These words come unaccompanied by music at first, then reappear in “Time Is the Illusion of Solidity” shrouded by ambient groans and synthetic church bells. They carry the weight of a sermon, and yet their meaning is impressionistic. Devi suggests another way of eluding power; by refusing a name, shedding markers of individuality, you also refuse surveillance and social control. You unstitch yourself and become more than a citizen of a technocratic hell-state.
Real human power, DNA Feelings suggests, lies not in the individual but in the collective—in the confusing of “you” and “me,” in the blurry region outside language, structure, and time. By reconceptualizing electronic music as a mode of spiritual searching, Devi alchemizes confusion into healing. To be without context is to be given a chance to start anew. | 2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | May 11, 2018 | 7.4 | 5087ccbf-11e6-4c14-811a-e3ac7a04c877 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Big Black Coat leaves behind introverted electronica of previous Junior Boys records. There's some mid-era Kraftwerk in its place, as well as a big debt to Detroit techno, that sweet spot in the mid-'70s when krautrock met disco, several of Arthur Russell's many house aliases, and even Prince circa Controversy. But it never lapses into boredom and pastiche, standing instead as one of the highlights of their discography. | Big Black Coat leaves behind introverted electronica of previous Junior Boys records. There's some mid-era Kraftwerk in its place, as well as a big debt to Detroit techno, that sweet spot in the mid-'70s when krautrock met disco, several of Arthur Russell's many house aliases, and even Prince circa Controversy. But it never lapses into boredom and pastiche, standing instead as one of the highlights of their discography. | Junior Boys: Big Black Coat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21513-big-black-coat/ | Big Black Coat | For well over a decade now, Ontario-based duo Junior Boys have released consistently stellar, deeply personal records, balanced perfectly between the body and the mind. In the five years since their excellent fourth studio album, It's All True, they've moved past the introverted electro-pop of their previous records into territory that feels both fresh and pointedly familiar. On Big Black Coat, you hear some mid-era Kraftwerk, a big debt to Detroit techno, that sweet spot in the mid-'70s when krautrock met disco, several of Arthur Russell's many house aliases, and even Prince circa Controversy. It's an impressive juggling act, and most importantly, it never lapses into pastiche or boredom, wearing its influences squarely on its sleeve while standing as one of the highlights of Junior Boys' discography.
The album is purposefully sexy, but never orgiastic: Like actual, real sex, it's a mix of abandon and introspection. When frontman Jeremy Greenspan sings "C'mon Baby," it's a plea, a supplication, not a wanton come-on. On "No One's Business," the line "When I kiss you/ I'm on fire" sounds as painful as it does lustful. The ultra-warm synth stabs of album opener "You Say That" offers a cocooned sense of security, paired with the kind of driving cymbals you feel in your legs before your ears. But the song ends abruptly with Greenspan hacking a cough into the mic, as if he's just taken this new, dancier version of himself to its absolute limit. It's funny, irreverent, and refreshingly self-aware: In other words, it's pure Junior Boys.
A handful of tracks even delve boldly into techno, like the epic "What You Won't Do for Love," Greenspan's understated falsetto bubbling up from beneath a sea of arpeggiated tones. Follow-up "And It's Forever" would fit perfectly in a comedown house set, down to its repetitive vocal edit and pulsating bassline. It sort of sounds like if your friends tried to take you to the club after a breakup, but you cancelled on them last minute and spent the night cruising Discogs for old vinyl.
On the title track and closer, they sum up both where they've been and where they're going. It's a sprawling melting pot of a song, and you can hear techno, house music, bedroom pop, IDM, disco, and more, all packaged smartly into seven minutes. It's impressive and frankly unusual to see a band five albums into their career experiment with new sounds and actually make it work, but Junior Boys have pulled it off. Career longevity looks good on them. | 2016-02-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | City Slang | February 4, 2016 | 8 | 508858a2-e2fe-43af-88d5-52eb6fdd28b5 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Iggy Pop's newest, which he co-wrote and recorded with Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, recaptures the avant-rock frisson of his early collaborations with David Bowie. | Iggy Pop's newest, which he co-wrote and recorded with Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, recaptures the avant-rock frisson of his early collaborations with David Bowie. | Iggy Pop: Post Pop Depression | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21586-post-pop-depression/ | Post Pop Depression | In June of 1977, Iggy Pop appeared on Dinah Shore’s morning variety show, ostensibly to promote his debut solo album, The Idiot, with its producer—David Bowie—in tow to provide moral support. Instead, what transpired was almost an intervention, with Shore expressing quaint maternal concern for Iggy’s troubling behaviour, which included (but wasn’t limited to) chest-slashing and abandoning teenage groupies at airports. He may go down in history as the patriarch of punk and one of rock’s greatest provocateurs, but Pop's most subversive quality has always been his ability to charm the squares—after all, this is a guy whose songs have been covered by G.G. Allin and Tom Jones.
Some four decades on from his Dinah! stint, Iggy is once again making the rounds on the talk-show circuit with a dapper, red-haired rock-star pal who can help him gain a foothold in the mainstream: Queens of the Stone Age kingpin Josh Homme. While Iggy may no longer be paraded before national audience for the freak-show factor (he seemed positively bashful in the face of reverential audience applause on his recent Colbert appearance), he finds himself in the same position he was in during the mid-’70s, with the future of the (reformed) Stooges in doubt and the singer in need of direction. Where Bowie whisked Iggy off to Europe to be his electro-shocked "guinea pig," Homme lured him out to Joshua Tree last year to take stock of his life, reflect on his legacy, and contemplate his place in a modern world where he’s no longer the first "Iggy" to come up on a Google search.
The result of these private sessions is Post Pop Depression, a record that recaptures the avant-rock frisson of Iggy’s Bowie collaborations, in exploratory spirit if not explicitly in sound. For a frontman, Iggy has always done his greatest work as a passenger, riding shotgun with a musical force as potent as his personality (be it Bowie, Ron Asheton or James Williamson), and submitting himself to their sonic abuse just as he’s subjected himself to pelted ice cubes and batteries from his audience. Now, with the man making none-too-subtle hints about impending retirement, he has found a co-conspirator that can nudge him out of his comfort zone.
The album may have been recorded in secrecy, but it has become an act of public mourning. Homme's friends in The Eagles of Death Metal were caught in the crossfire of last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris, and Iggy is grieving the recent loss of his long-time champion and career savior. As the name and context suggests, Post Pop Depression is awash in a fog of melancholy. The title reads like a harbinger of the come-down that will kick in when he inevitably has to hang up his shirt (or, in his case, put one on). "I’ve got nothing but my name… I am nothing but my name," he ruefully intones during a moment of quiet reflection, bracing himself for the moment when Iggy Pop has to go back to being Jim Osterberg. Essentially, Post Pop Depression furthers the existential conversations Iggy initiated on 2013’s (likely) Stooges swan song, Ready to Die, though here he’s given more freedom to be introspective without having to overcompensate with songs about worshipping big-breasted women. But unlike previous dark-alley detours like Avenue B or Préliminaires, Post Pop Depression d0esn't sacrifice his swagger.
Musically, the album is certainly not the Queens of the Stooge Age psych-punk blowout the advance billing may have suggested and, at times, the album's ruminative nature makes you long for a little less search and a little more destroy. But it channels Iggy’s legacy in more oblique fashion, through hypnotic, bass-battering grooves (bolstered by QOTSA/Dead Weather multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders) that hearken back to the singer’s original Detroit assembly-line inspirations. And that thunderous thump is matched by lush textures: the radiant shoegazey shuffle of "Gardenia"; the orchestral swirl that caps the tough disco rumble of "Sunday"; the Kraftwerkian synth shading on "Break Into Your Heart" and the "China Girl" echoes of "American Valhalla."
The record also reasserts Iggy’s facility with simple, suggestive phrases. Pick-up lines don’t get much creepier than the album’s opening couplet: "I’m gonna break into your heart/ I’m gonna crawl under your skin". The difference is that this time, he's singing about a culture of me-first indulgence and accordingly, Iggy spends much of Post Pop Depression trying to curb his appetite for excess. "Gardenia" may playfully revel in film-noir images of seedy motel hook-ups, but amid the hedonistic throb of "Sunday" and jazz-punk swing of "In the Lobby," he posits that a lustful life can only lead to a six-foot ditch. ("I hope I’m not losing my life tonight," he sings on the latter, punctuating that last word with genuinely terrified, "TV Eye"-style shriek.) And the deceptively sweet "Chocolate Drops"—a serenade worthy of early-’70s Steely Dan—packs the record’s most bitterly sardonic sentiment: "When you get to the bottom, you’re near the top/ the shit turns into chocolate drops," a comment on the fleeting, phony nature of success from a man who’s ridden the bumpy roller coaster of fame many times.
The elaborate, theatrical set pieces that demand more of Iggy—like the spaghetti-western folk opera "Vulture" and the swashbuckling blues grind "German Days"—feel overcooked and impersonal in comparison, and bog down the mid-album momentum. But if Post Pop Depression’s refined execution has you missing the more unhinged Iggy of old, rest assured, he’s not going down without a fight. The breezy west-coast strummer "Paraguay" may find him ready to throw on the Bermuda shorts and drive off into the sunset, but he abruptly pulls a U-turn for one final middle-fingered rant to the straight world. "You take your motherfuckin’ laptop and just shove it into your goddamn foul mouth, down your shit-heeled gizzard, you fuckin’ phony, two-faced, three-timing piece of turd," he screams to no one and everyone in particular, as Homme and crew egg him on with a Queens-sized crunch and chain-gang chant. And if that proves to be the last gasp of history’s first punk, well, he’s leaving us exactly how he came in—flipping off a world that’s no fun. | 2016-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | March 10, 2016 | 6.9 | 508a13cc-4d42-4aa3-8f68-185bb33dad6e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The ninth album from the metalcore architects is sharp and urgent. Jacob Bannon’s songwriting shines as he turns his back on interpersonal torment and faces something bigger and more existential. | The ninth album from the metalcore architects is sharp and urgent. Jacob Bannon’s songwriting shines as he turns his back on interpersonal torment and faces something bigger and more existential. | Converge: The Dusk in Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/converge-the-dusk-in-us/ | The Dusk in Us | Jacob Bannon does not want to fight anymore—or, at the very least, he doesn’t have time for it. Somewhere near the middle of “Arkhipov Calm,” the most belligerent speedball from Converge’s gripping and oddly comforting ninth album, The Dusk in Us, the preternaturally aggressive singer and screamer waves, of all things, his white flag. “With every barb that you threw, I saw you list to the side,” he howls above drums so powerful and guitars so charged that they suggest an approaching army. “And I won’t sink with you. I have so much more to do.”
The song takes its name and credo from Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer whose vote against firing nuclear weapons from a submarine in 1962 became the historical footnote that prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into a conflagration. Here, that kind of cool head becomes Bannon’s logic—an unapologetic proclamation that he doesn’t have the energy to squander on fussing and fighting. “It’s the fires that we quell that save us from our hells,” he sings, “It’s the wars that we don’t fight that keep love alive.” It’s a necessary call for stability in preposterously uncertain times, rendered with enough might to make you listen.
Bannon—like all of us—hasn’t always been so collected, so reasonable. Sixteen years and five albums ago, Jane Doe staked Converge’s claim as metalcore architects. Bannon’s poetic bile was its keystone. “I think he pulled that trigger to empty that memory/I think he cut out the weight to end the floods of you,” he moaned back then on a record that coped with betrayal through violent reflection and angry demands. Then came 2004’s You Fail Me, 2006’s No Heroes, 2009’s Axe to Fall, and their 2012 opus All We Love We Leave Behind : They all expressed deep senses of regret and loss, of longing and despair. Bannon was the emotional pugilist, the guy who ended a song sarcastically called “Hope Street” with the imprecation that “No one will break your fall.”
But The Dusk in Us turns its back on the battle, or at least on the interpersonal torment that has mostly defined Converge until now. Throughout these 13 songs, many of them the best the band has ever written, they recognize that the real enemies are bigger, the problems more existential. The invocation of nuclear war is telling, but it’s merely a start. Bannon inveighs against police brutality and senseless violence, hereditary madness and original sin, firearm obsession and feudal overreach. He’s moved beyond bickers and betrayals as his reasons for fisticuffs, taking up the issues that threaten not just him but the child or lover he seems to address during “A Single Tear,” the record’s opener and linchpin. He has, he admits, finally found a reason to fight the good fight. “When I held you for the very first time,” he sings clearly and cleanly, making sure we all understand what’s bound to become a tattoo or two, “I knew I had to survive.”
Rather than looking for a fight, Bannon instead suggests a prepared pacifism, a steady strength that wins these wars with attrition. “Don’t need a helmet if I have my heart,” he stammers and slurs at the start of the gnarly “Under Duress,” an earnest middle finger in the eye of his oppressor. He suggests, over and over, that we rise above these foes—with solidarity, with smarts, with the sense that there’s more at stake here than winning little quibbles. “Reptilian,” for instance, commands us to outthink our base animal instincts, to “lose sight of who we are to know what we can be.” He bids farewell to the very temptation of arms, calling a truce and making his commitment clear. “You have to bury the gun to finally make sense of it,” he sings with the album’s best hook. Converge is his standing army, the force around him that makes you take those standing demands seriously.
Now near the end of their third decade, Converge offers a modern elder’s model for upstart bands or, really, anyone at all. The Dusk in Us is Converge’s first record in five years, and every moment feels earned and alive, like the band hit “Record” only when it had something to say. Between records, they helm or contribute to half a dozen other bands; guitarist Kurt Ballou runs one of the most crucial rock studios around, while Bannon helms Deathwish, a label that’s been testing the borders of heaviness for years. At a time when the problems that give Bannon reason to scream seem only to be getting worse, such self-sufficiency represents an inspiring antidote to the imbalances at the core of The Dusk in Us. Bannon implores us to overcome; Converge, by its very existence, shows us how.
And if Bannon’s lyrics reflect a quest for personal growth and self-preservation in a world that feels ever more fractious, Converge has offered a musical roadmap for as much for decades. They’ve constantly refined their core—a jagged mix of hardcore power and death metal kinetics—while spreading and evolving their sound, too. They’ve added ghoulish dirges, scabrous noise-rock, and bona fide pop hooks. All of that is here on The Dusk in Us, from Ballou’s feedback squall throughout “Murk & Marrow” and Nate Newton’s blunderbuss bassline at the center of “Trigger” to Ben Koller’s start-stop-and-sprint drumming during “I Can Tell You About Pain.” As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation. | 2017-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Epitaph | November 2, 2017 | 8.2 | 50a3f994-d8c9-42c6-8212-29b2da26cf46 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Taking full advantage of his voluminous, one-of-a-kind voice, experimental pop artist serpentwithfeet offers complex visions of queer love on his debut album. | Taking full advantage of his voluminous, one-of-a-kind voice, experimental pop artist serpentwithfeet offers complex visions of queer love on his debut album. | serpentwithfeet: soil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/serpentwithfeet-soil/ | soil | Since releasing his debut EP blisters in 2016, serpentwithfeet has built up a generous aesthetic universe full of clashing textiles, warm light, and Barbie dolls. When the singer born Josiah Wise performs live, he sets up a kind of shrine onstage, draping patterned fabric over his equipment table and arranging figurines from his collection to watch him sing. His live show is an environment into which he invites the audience; he even sings his stage banter in quick, R&B-inflected runs, drawing those present deeper into his music. The Brooklyn-based artist’s debut album, soil, provides a similarly welcoming feel. It expands the template set by blisters, taking that EP’s baroque-pop flourishes and growing them into a fully realized electroacoustic milieu with the help of texturally adventurous producers Clams Casino, mmph, and Katie Gately. This is an album you can set up camp and live inside.
While blisters made use of the Haxan Cloak’s dark ambient production and a striking classical music sample to render a portrait of abject heartbreak, soil delves into a fuller, more complex vision of queer love. There are breakup tracks, like “mourning song” and “slow syrup,” but there are also songs that indulge the exhilaration of falling for someone new. In between those poles, a multifaceted excavation of human connection emerges. In serpentwithfeet’s world, love doesn’t come easy—and he wouldn’t want it any other way.
Take “fragrant,” where he sings of tracking down an absent lover’s exes so they might collectively savor what they have left of him. A slow, scraping beat carries his words, solidifying their desperation and uncertainty, while minor-key synthesizer chords flesh out the atmosphere. Though the object of his affections remains missing, Wise finds communion with the others who miss him by the end of the song. “Their bodies coiled around mine/We sang your name in harmony,” he sings, diverting the mourning of a loved one from a place of loneliness to a place of collective celebration.
These complex emotional registers run throughout soil, as though Wise cannot feel just one thing at a time. A song about sexual rejection, “wrong tree,” ranks among the album’s most upbeat, while the devotional songs often take on a weighty tone. “Already I need you/Someday I’ll plant seeds with you,” Wise sings on “waft,” and though the lyrics swell with the promise of new love, he delivers them in a timbre befitting a requiem. Growing a future with another human being is not an endeavor he takes lightly—he recognizes just how heavy and frightening that undertaking can be.
In singing about love, Wise also frequently sings about work. Images of labor accompany images of connection throughout soil, as on the album’s stunning peak “cherubim,” where he sings at the top of his tenor range, “Sowing love into you is my job.” Sound designer and pop experimentalist Katie Gately’s astounding vocal production multiplies his voice into a grotesque choir as he sings the refrain: “I get to devote my life to him/I get to sing like the cherubim.” The vibrato across the different vocal tracks falls ever so slightly out of sync, creating a reverberating effect and lending the song a sense of profound texture and depth. Rarely has the human voice sounded quite like this. The plurality of Wise’s presence here makes it seem as though he were professing his love before a crowd, as at a wedding, which is not just a celebration of romantic coupling but a bold declaration of commitment to a life’s work.
The album comes to rest on “bless ur heart,” a gentle piano ballad about falling in love, writing about the experience, and then gifting that writing to “a kind and burrowing creature” so he might share the words with his family underground. “What was once a whisper will become a deep, rumbling sound,” Wise sings, conjuring the image of love poem as earthquake. It’s a lovely conclusion that reiterates how love never really belongs to just two people: At its best, it’s a connective force, not an isolating one. It draws you more deeply into the world and the people you share it with; it teaches you to open yourself, to be porous. With soil, serpentwithfeet deeply engages with the complex membranes between the self and a loved one, the self and the world. Few albums attempt this much nuance in articulating love; Wise’s success in his ambitions feels like a gift. | 2018-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian / Tri Angle | June 14, 2018 | 8.1 | 50a53121-402c-4c36-b940-28e95931d101 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
With their second collaborative project, this rapper/producer duo offer a well-studied paean to hip-hop’s past. You could call it a boom baptism. | With their second collaborative project, this rapper/producer duo offer a well-studied paean to hip-hop’s past. You could call it a boom baptism. | Blu / Nottz: Titans in the Flesh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22171-titans-in-the-flesh/ | Titans in the Flesh | At this point, there are few artists capable of doing justice to the styles and sounds rap gone by, but West Coast rapper Blu and East Coast producer Nottz are among the most proficient historians left in the game. Blu, 33, is a product of both gangsta rap and underground consciousness who credits Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” the 1994 lament about hip-hop losing its original essence, with changing his life. Nottz, 39, is a student of Dilla, Diamond D, Pete Rock, and Dr. Dre who was raised in the competitive Virginia beatmaking scene that spawned Timbaland and the Neptunes before making his name providing no-nonsense beats to everyone from Ghostface to Snoop across the last 18 years.
Blu and Nottz’s first collaborative project, 2014’s Gods in the Spirit EP, mostly got lost in the shuffle, surrounded by individual triumphs like Nottz’s brutally raw beat for Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar’s “Nosetalgia” and the official release of Blu’s acclaimed NoYork! album. But Gods in the Spirit was a successful trial run for the pairing, reminiscent of Nottz’s early work for Busta Rhymes and Rah Digga, and loaded with sampled strings and compact raps. The duo’s latest tag-team effort, Titans in the Flesh, is a spiritual successor to that release.
Blu has a long history of working on projects with a single producer, including this year’s Crenshaw Jezebel with Ray West, last year’s Bad Neighbor with Madlib (alongside M.E.D.), and two albums with Exile, including his most well-received project, Below the Heavens. This streak suggests that Blu likes chemistry and continuity, structure and routine. And of the producers Blu has worked with, none are more committed to a singular method than Nottz, who almost exclusively toys with cinematic sounds, fashioning them into set-dressing for craggy thumpers that chug along thanks, in part, to conservative loops compressed on his drum machine. Nottz’s technique has grown predictable, but it’s still remarkably effective, and it’s perfectly suited for Blu, whose jump-cutting raps make use of the extra space afforded by open arrangements. Side-by-side, they’re classicists emblematic of the legendary soul-and-substance rapper-producer duos of rap’s Golden Era—teams like Gangstarr and Pete Rock & CL Smooth.
Titans in the Flesh doesn’t look to do anything differently than its predecessor, but it tweaks the process in spots—the production is bigger, the posse cuts are deeper, the rapping is far more clinical—and it commits to the duo’s tendencies at full tilt, all in the service of creating a cool throwback. This is a complete submersion into hard-hitting traditionalist rap that delivers the knock, especially on “To the East” and “Giant Steps,” which even has a Premier-esque scratch-and-sample hook. As a producer, Nottz samples everything from the Psycho score to ABBA B-sides with the intent to condense big sounds into tight casings. The production is decidedly no-frills, particularly on dusty-drummed slappers like “The Truth” and “Atlantis.” Meanwhile, Blu performs in his usual herky-jerky style, which splits phrases at their joints: “Django of the star spangle/My chain dangle/The city of the lost angels.” The whole thing is familiar—sometimes maddeningly so—but the cuts vary just enough to keep the mind flickering for connections, and to keep nostalgia’s pull just out of grasp. This is hip-hop broken down to its core elements: turntablism, cranking loops, bars. It’s a rap purist manifesto. | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Coalmine | July 25, 2016 | 7.2 | 50b71009-8570-4ce0-971a-f75a2cedd839 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
On his Warp debut, the Italian producer Lorenzo Senni deploys a Roland JP8000 synthesizer to isolate the builds and breakdowns of trance, to thrilling effect. | On his Warp debut, the Italian producer Lorenzo Senni deploys a Roland JP8000 synthesizer to isolate the builds and breakdowns of trance, to thrilling effect. | Lorenzo Senni: Persona EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22618-persona-ep/ | Persona EP | For his first release on Warp, the Italian electronic producer Lorenzo Senni drew on impish visual artist Ed Atkins’ video piece “Ribbons.” If you haven’t had the fuddling pleasure of seeing Atkins’ videos in-person, they involve hyperreal digital animations—usually avatars of himself—as they stumble through video game-like realms, muttering pop songs in bedrooms, airports, pubs, clubs, and other surreal and mundane spaces. Atkins’ sodden protagonists may croon the likes of Elton John and Randy Newman, but his aesthetics match those of Senni. His tracks also revel and find depth in synthetic surfaces, make pop allusions, and simulate the maddening sensations that arise from the digital corporeality of our modern life.
Senni finds all the thematic material he needs in one of electronic music’s most maligned genres: trance. His early albums were forays into glitch and ambient, but with trance, Senni sought the ecstatic in isolating that music’s builds and breakdowns. He excludes the elements where most listeners would find pleasure centers of such music, in its bass and drums. Like Heatsick with his Casio and Aphex Twin’s own rabbit hole plunge with the Cheetah MS800, Senni maniacally deploys but one keyboard for all of his sounds, the Roland JP8000. As he told Fact last year, “if I had to approach trance music, I had to have that synthesizer.”
Persona is denser than Senni’s previous albums, as the JP8000 is now layered, each bit of space filled with more effects. The result is maximal. The delirious BPM and synth stabs that gush forth on “Win in the Flat World” are cheesy and over-caffeinated, initially bringing to mind the productions of Nozinja and even PC Music. But while the track keeps up its whiplash machinations, slowly little tears form in its synthetic fabric. A curlicue of electric sax appears, the dense chords dissolve, and a single key is left to fidget. “One Life, One Chance” is equally cartoonish, a festival’s-worth of fist-pumping anthems freeze-dried and then shoved into three-minute pop length. A smear of bright brass and color, EP standout “Rave Voyeur” is a dizzying carousel—which makes its fluttering breakdown and subsequent build-up, halfway through, all the more thrilling.
Trance may be what Senni references explicitly, but it’s when he lightens his tracks by just a few clicks that the underlying intent and intensity of Persona get teased to the surface. On a less-manic number like “Angel,” Senni wrings a sense of contemplation out of the fast arpeggios. Closer “Forever True” seemingly settles on a breakneck speed, but Senni slams on the brakes and the track turns spare, slow, and hushed. A catchy, if halting, melody emerges, and one can almost imagine a synthesized Atkins avatar awkwardly lurching to it. | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 18, 2016 | 7.5 | 50bb6b07-e082-4a5e-998f-5c8d3fbce65b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The weirdly fascinating South African outfit tries to make its rap-rave sound and conceptual underpinnings fit the LP format. | The weirdly fascinating South African outfit tries to make its rap-rave sound and conceptual underpinnings fit the LP format. | Die Antwoord: $O$ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14766-o/ | $O$ | Die Antwoord were always a group of musicians of course, but chances are you didn't first hear about them because of their music. More likely, you first encountered them as a viral video, a meme, a performance art collective, a joke that left you searching for the punchline, or some combination of the above. Hell, when we first profiled the group, it was under the headline "Who the Hell Are Die Antwoord?"
Our introduction came last winter, when Boing Boing first posted a pair of their videos. Combining documentary elements with a surreal undercurrent, the clips were funny, confounding, and unique, the sort of thing that you forward to your friends and then do online detective work to learn more about what you're watching and sharing. There was a full music video for their second single, "Enter the Ninja", but the first thing most of us were entranced by, the element that articulated and contextualized in some small way who DA were, was a promotional piece about the group called "Zef Side". There was music in it, but it served only as a soundtrack to the band's off-the-charts personalities-- you got leader and MC Ninja's testicles dancing in Pink Floyd shorts in slow motion, along with the first hints at fellow MC Yo-Landi Vi$$er's strident, low-rent toughness, which was eventually cited by David Fincher as a potential cinematic look for the femme-hero of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books.
Ninja and Yo-Landi aren't just striking visual curiosities, either; they're underrated MCs and pop personalities-- much more talented on the mic than they're credited for. They're also captivating live, where the visual fakery of what they do isn't lost; the simple challenge and central difficulty of their debut record, $O$-- most of which was released as a free download last year-- is to fully put across who or what Die Antwoord are when all you have to guide you through their world is recorded music.
It does all come together on "Enter the Ninja"-- still a fantastic single-- in part because it's an origin story. Ninja here works in and around aspirational hip-hop tropes and clichés, giving listeners me vs. the world self-helpsims alongside superhero boasts alongside regular-guy humility. It's catchy, clever, and funny-- full of excellent deadpan jokes ("They said I was a fuckin' psycho... well look at me now!") and forceful rave-rap. Also touched upon are the notions of racial confusion and an introduction to Zef culture, a sort of South African version of white trash. But while this bait to intellectualize the project might carry more weight in the racial powderkeg of SA, it's confusing at best outside of it, requiring more footnotes than most will have time for. No fault of Die Antwoord of course, but the racial and social implications of various ethnic groups in and around South Africa was always going to lose much of its potential power and cachet away from home. That in itself is a lamentable reality: South African apartheid, a more literal black-and-white issue, became a global civil rights cause in the 1980s; the subtle, complex, and all-too-real racial politics and biases since are more difficult to address, confront, and defeat.
The loss of the Zef and racial aspects of the project also highlight how much the Die Antwoord project suffers the further away from visuals it moves. For all the shit Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj get about their potential cultural signifiers not showing up in their music, they at least create tracks that work on their own. So too did great conceptual pop stars of the past like the KLF or Adam & the Ants or the Sex Pistols. Die Antwoord try here and often fail, for some of the same reasons that the concepts themselves are confusing-- they're a jumble sale of mixed-up ideas and items. Ironically, Ninja and Yo-Landi's vast array of skills betray them here, and songs too often feel overstuffed or schizophrenic.
Frustratingly, most songs have great ideas in them, sitting alongside creative dead ends. The overall sound of the record-- to be reductionist, rave-rap-- is a welcome trend, and it proves they have their ear to the ground. If this is to be an ongoing project, they're off to a weirdly good start, despite the many reservations here on this record: They've put together a group of people with skills, ideas, and personalities, and they seem more than capable of piecing together an excellent 21st century rap record. But this isn't it. Still serving to introduce the project, despite much of the music being around now for months, the album is mostly a literal retread of the sounds a lot of us heard in February and March. It seems like one piece of the conceptual puzzle rather than something that stands on its own.
Ideally, Die Antwoord can now move forward with the freedom to not simply be "that Zef side group," but to be a hip-hop group full stop. That's often a death wish for pop stars-- the charismatic performer wanting to take full control of their vision in order to prove their artistry. Thing is, DA have proven gifted at doing both. Creating music and then adding meme-friendly visuals in aid of that, rather than the other way around, could actually find them improving by leaps and bounds, without losing what's special and unique and head-turning about them in the first place. | 2010-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Cherrytree | October 20, 2010 | 5.5 | 50be1537-d167-4415-980d-9547a890c79a | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
On his new EP, San Jose rapper Antwon raps about sex and drugs and general excess. | On his new EP, San Jose rapper Antwon raps about sex and drugs and general excess. | Antwon: Double Ecstasy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21837-double-ecstasy-ep/ | Double Ecstasy EP | San Jose rapper Antwon is not an easy read. For every vulnerable song there's another that feels insufferably ironic, and all of the above are unwaveringly libidinous, some more mature than others. Returning now with the five-song, 16-minute Double Ecstasy EP, Antwon has refined his vision as well as his aesthetic choices, but the overall message remains consistent. He's still a conflicted hedonist, adept at both indulgence and self-loathing.
Double Ecstasy makes more sense sonically than Antwon's previous work. The diffuse cloud rap of 2014's Heavy Hearted in Doldrums, which made any genuine confessions feel like jokes, has been replaced with pounding club-ready songs. On "Luv," Antwon openly raps about visiting the strip club to make himself feel happy like his friends (who consume drugs, in their own right, to ease life's pain), but at the most audible on the hook, he wouldn't dare say he's going to "the booty club" to "fall in love."
"Luv" is an important step forward for Antwon, as it's one of the rare times he sounds at home over an instrumental that's as powerful as his natural vocal delivery. On "Girl, Flex," however, Antwon falls right back into his musical and behavioral traps, rapping bland and juvenile lines like "I'm chillin' with my lil bitch at the mall." Unlike "Luv," there's no self examination, and he doesn't make sex sound particularly fun.
When artists like Future, Danny Brown, and Young Thug rap about excess, they're so beyond the pale or dejected that trauma is clear. But Antwon never manages that level of complexity. Still, the songs on Double Ecstasy are enjoyable and, at times, captivating. They're uptempo and Antwon's voice is inviting, his delivery incredibly consistent. But the EP also leaves the rapper at a crossroads. He could continue to make solid tracks that occasionally pop when all the circumstances align, or he could further explore his more confessional side, but at this point, it would make sense for him to commit one way or another. | 2016-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Anticon | April 26, 2016 | 6.9 | 50cb6a82-efda-441d-8a3d-36642fc3cee5 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Tom Krell's intimate second How to Dress Well album uses the common tools of R&B and pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art. | Tom Krell's intimate second How to Dress Well album uses the common tools of R&B and pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art. | How to Dress Well: Total Loss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17046-total-loss/ | Total Loss | Tom Krell has never been shy about naming his influences. On Love Remains, his How to Dress Well debut, they were pop and R&B acts like Ready For the World, Shai, Michael Jackson, and Bobby Brown. He's no less forthcoming about the inspirations behind his heartbreaking second LP, Total Loss. During the penultimate apologia "Set It Right", he provides a roll call: Ryan, Dan, Mama, Grandma, Francey, Robbie, Nicky, and the list goes on. None of them are famous, none are musicians. They're real people in Krell's life. Some have died (his uncle and best friend), others are living but have slipped out of view, many including himself are struggling with depression. So the title Total Loss gives you fair warning about what to expect. Where Love Remains drew much of its power from emotional suggestion and tactile sensation, Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.
The cruel irony of Total Loss is that it finds Krell striving for directness and candor with family members who've become unavailable to him through breakups, depression, addiction, or death. The record's first lyric-- "You were there for me when I was in trouble/ You could understand for me that life was a struggle"-- is addressed to Krell's mother and reprised later on. Otherwise, the listener is in the position of the "you" populating so many of Krell's thoughts.
The sleek, alabaster sound of Total Loss is a far cry from the heavily distorted and distant Love Remains. That album wasn't considered a drug record for the same reasons Ambien isn't considered recreational, but its shrouded production mimicked the effect the drug can have when it starts to kick in: the sensation of controlling yourself in an out-of-body experience. That feeling is foreign to Total Loss. It's still flooded with reverb, but the anesthetic is gone.
As a result, Total Loss feels subject to heightened sensitivity both sonically and lyrically, and the effect is made more unnerving by the sharp, sudden movements of its elements-- harp plucks, ticking hi-hats, slapped snares and, of course, Krell's own voice. It's high, thin, and boyish, but in no way timid. His quavering falsetto creates an intriguing friction against the newly aggressive, seething tone of his lyrics, particularly when he grapples with the self-blame, hopelessness, and betrayal that survivors of suicide victims often experience. "Say My Name or Say Whatever" begins with a recording of a homeless teen from the 1984 documentary Streetwise describing the freeing effects of flight. "The only bad part about flying," he says, "is having to come back down to the fuckin' world," a projection of Krell's own idealism and disillusionment.
Though it contains Total Loss's most visceral, even sexual music, "Cold Nites" sounds downright angry. The hook boasts, "But I keep on doing it/ Ain't gonna stop until we're through with this," and it's an anger born from Krell's perception of his own shortcomings-- "Tell me what I've got to do to get better." Album opener "When I Was in Trouble" is a piano hymn that takes its cues from William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, decaying in real time. Krell moans, "Dear Mama, didn't you try to tell me everything was going to be safe?" and then repeats the line in a rare lower register. The effect is chilling, and indicative of the confusion that permeates Total Loss: Whether Krell is trying to find relief in hurting himself or others is left open-ended.
Fortunately, How to Dress Well's malleability prevents Krell from getting too ponderous. If you found his orchestral direction on last year's Just Once promising, there's the string interlude of "World I Need You, Won't Be Without You (Proem)" which is reprised on the emotive centerpiece "Talking to You". "& It Was U" pulls a similar deception, as Krell's accumulating harmonies disguise an imploding relationship over joyous new jack swing. It maybe lacks the shock of his earliest singles, and that's fine: Coming from someone discovering that his love for a style of music and his ability to pay it homage are starting to intersect, it's every bit as promising.
The rhythmic backbone of Total Loss's second half slackens a little, which can make the album feel frontloaded on the first few passes. Though Love Remains was more of a compilation than a proper album, its highlights were spread out judiciously. Total Loss doesn't fully compensate for its lack of clear standouts like "Decisions" or "Ready for the World", but it does benefit from a narrative cohesion that Love Remains lacked. Its path of grief follows psychology's Kübler-Ross model in chronology, from denial to bargaining to something resembling acceptance-- the lyric sheet even shows a smiley-face emoticon appending the "Set It Right" line, "as far as love goes, it's one step at a time." "Struggle" revisits Krell's love for blown-out reverb, obscuring gut-punch lyrics that attempt to reconcile the joys of reckless behavior with that sort of action's deadly, consumptive attraction: "I remember drinking with you in your bed… But in the morning we'd go and start again." And while "Ocean Floor for Everything" wasn't a stunning first single, erring too close to melodies Krell has used before, it's an apt sendoff for Total Loss, the point where the pain has settled in. But any hope here is implied. It's not explicitly a happy ending.
It's a fitting conclusion to a record that is very lonely for Krell and risky for How to Dress Well. In light of the "PBR&B" digs that initially circled Love Remains, it's notable that many of the most exciting artists to arrive in its wake (the Weeknd, Jessie Ware, AlunaGeorge) are nominally "indie" but incorporate modernist R&B in a similar manner. Krell hasn't benefited much from that swell of momentum, operating in a space that's far more niche and less overtly "pop," in both genre and populism. But Total Loss is similar to the xx's Coexist in retreating to further minimalism and introspection after a groundbreaking debut. It feels like more of a success because there's no dissonance between its artistic intent and its optimal home-alone listening experience. Its effectiveness is a result of its intimacy-- or, as Krell puts it on "Set It Right", being "true to you, I'm true to me, too." | 2012-09-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Acéphale / Weird World | September 20, 2012 | 8.4 | 50cd44b0-1394-42c3-9659-663539e9583d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Though still a bit shaky and cloying, the New York band strikes a good chord with a power-pop sound and starts to carve out a space of their own. | Though still a bit shaky and cloying, the New York band strikes a good chord with a power-pop sound and starts to carve out a space of their own. | Sunflower Bean: King of the Dudes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunflower-bean-king-of-the-dudes-ep/ | King of the Dudes EP | Since the band’s inception, Sunflower Bean has struggled to define their musical identity. In 2015, they rooted their debut album in a vogue New York milieu, as lead singer Julia Cumming adopted the vocal style of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher. Then, in an effort to depart from their early “fashion band” branding, Sunflower Bean went anti-trend in their 2018 sophomore album, embracing more soft rock sound and taking cues from Fleetwood Mac while performing a slightly more knowing pastiche.
While these references seemed incidental, on King of the Dudes there’s finally a logic and cohesiveness to the band’s musical inspirations. With Cumming increasingly at the center—her voice once a whisper, now a growl—the band’s latest EP spins around a stylized axis of femme, sugar-kissed power-pop, both finally carving out their own space, and sounding not totally unlike Hole in the process.
Right from the EP’s riffy get-go, the band finds the sweet spot between the grit and gloss of “Celebrity Skin” and the pop-rock artists—Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, the Veronicas—who followed it. This combination of soft aggression and sheened moxie is potent enough to have its own gel pen scent. The clean production, the rutilant guitar sound, the hybridization of pop and glam are all so irresistibly nostalgic that it’s hard not to be transported back to a time when physical objects—posters, magazines, cherry-stinking stickers—more routinely accompanied music. King of the Dudes is a badge to put on a backpack, a call to break the boy-girl partition at a school disco.
It’s clear that the band are now trying to position themselves among a—for a severe lack of a better term—“women in rock” chronology. “Women are fed up,” Cumming vaguely opined to Rolling Stone, “and we needed a way to express that,” she says, sounding more like an obligation than a rallying cry. She does her best Joan Jett on opening title-track; on “Fear City,” her mediated sentimentality sounds a bit like Hayley Williams’ later vocal stylings; on the closer, “The Big One,” she tries her hand at a Shirley Manson snarl.
While their contemporaries—Veruca Salt, Garbage, Hole—forcefully staked out their own claim, King of the Dudes feels predictably and meretriciously rebellious. The title track, which has Cumming proclaiming herself “king of the dudes,” wasn’t of her own volition. In the same interview with Rolling Stone, the band confirmed that it was producer Justin Raisen’s idea to incorporate the phrase. That might be why Cumming sounds so unconvinced by her own protestations. She’s the king of the dudes “if you want me to be,” she sings.
Lead single “Come for Me” sounds just as editorialized as the opener. Its chorus is bolstered by a gauzy funk guitar line and punchy snares intended to dynamize, but the lyrics “do you really wanna come for me?” feel unworthy of the band’s bombastic setup. It’s the sexual equivalent of a “your mom” line on a diss track, and it follows a slew of empty, artless machoisms. Its opening line: “I’m looking for the manly solution” is an attempt to maintain the already unconvincing “king of the dudes” persona, and it feels about as on the nose as a blackhead.
The EP’s strongest moment by far is “Fear City.” Guitarist Nick Kivlen puts in his best work, as he supports Cumming’s verses with a fluid, tinkering riff, before breaking off into staccato strums during the chorus. Meanwhile, Cumming really embraces that old Umberto Eco adage: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us,” as she sings, “We walk down the boulevards/Open hands and open hearts,” in a way that finally seems to touch on the band’s own experiences. It’s a moment not about what they think they should say, but rather a simple moment of reflection, edging into a space of introspection that the band so sorely need. Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound. | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | January 28, 2019 | 6.9 | 50ce655f-e7f7-45bf-be74-8f46b3e1744a | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The psych-pop outfit's contribution to the long-running LateNightTales series is heavy on obscure turn-of-the-1970s psych-folk and the more pastoral end of 80s post-punk and indie. | The psych-pop outfit's contribution to the long-running LateNightTales series is heavy on obscure turn-of-the-1970s psych-folk and the more pastoral end of 80s post-punk and indie. | MGMT: LateNightTales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15885-mgmt/ | LateNightTales | For MGMT, the best thing about selling a million copies of your debut album is not all the cocaine, heroin, elegant cars, and models for wives that a platinum record presumably affords you. No, the real reward is in being elevated to a position where your words suddenly carry some weight, where a simple endorsement can provide a career boost to an unsung forebear. In retrospect, MGMT's wiggy, divisive 2010 release, Congratulations, was less a premeditated ploy to alienate their more casual fans than a noble attempt to turn them onto some of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser's more eccentric influences, via songs named after cult heroes like Brian Eno and Television Personalities founder Dan Treacy. And if but one of the 39 million people who've watched the "Kids" video on YouTube was inspired to pick up a Spacemen 3 record on account of seeing Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember's name listed in the Congratulations liner notes, then his producer's fee was worth it. (Likewise, when recently invited to perform a cover for Pink Floyd Week on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon", MGMT passed over the Floyd's deep well of FM-radio standards in favor of Syd Barrett's menacing "Lucifer Sam".)
That same charitable spirit more explicitly informs MGMT's curatorial contribution to the LateNightTales series, which draws evenly from obscure turn-of-the-1970s psych-folk, the more pastoral end of 80s post-punk and indie, and modern variations thereof. The tracklist is dotted with some notable avant-rock icons (the Velvet Underground, Spacemen 3, Suicide), but they're represented by serenely atypical tracks ("Ocean", "Lord Can You Hear Me?" and "Cheree", respectively) that serve to set up this compilation's more esoteric selections. And as if to further increase their aesthetic distance from Oracular Spectacular's day-glo pop hits, the mood here is almost uniformly somber, if not downright ominous (hello there, "Pink Frost" by the Chills). More so than previous participants in the series, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser take the LateNightTales concept at face value, weaving together their song choices into a dark-night-of-the-soul narrative heavy on themes of isolation and 4 a.m. introspection. Even the band's own contribution is a straightforward rendition of the one Bauhaus song ("All We Ever Wanted Was Everything") that perfectly suits this stoned-and-dethroned mood.
VanWyngarden and Goldwasser take great care to ease you into this despairing headspace, opening with the fortuitously timed inclusion of a track from the recently resuscitated Disco Inferno (the gorgeously glistening "Can't See Through It"), and offsetting more droll depictions of loneliness (the Television Personalities' "Stop & Smell the Roses", Julian Cope's "Laughing Boy") with affecting instrumental interludes (Felt's "Red Indians", the Durutti Column's "For Belgium Friends"). However, everything on this compilation feels like a set-up for and recovery from the harrowing "Drug Song" by Dave Bixby, a 70s-era Christian folk singer whose songs of spiritual reawakening are nonetheless colored with melancholy and regret; divorced from their born-again context, lines like "How did I get this way/ It's so unreal/ I'm no longer a person/ I can't even feel" seem especially resonant for a couple of guys who went from recording in their dorm room to suddenly finding themselves playing VIP parties at upscale department stores. MGMT may have gotten famous by ironically declaring they're fated to pretend, but with LateNightTales they take solace in building a soundtrack for when shit gets real. | 2011-10-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Late Night Tales | October 5, 2011 | 7.8 | 50d2ea0d-e07c-4c91-ab52-0846caa97c12 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
In what is ostensibly a solo record with a few high-profile collaborations, Dave Longstreth masterfully peels away layer after layer of heartbreak across a strange, dizzying pop album. | In what is ostensibly a solo record with a few high-profile collaborations, Dave Longstreth masterfully peels away layer after layer of heartbreak across a strange, dizzying pop album. | Dirty Projectors: Dirty Projectors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22913-dirty-projectors/ | Dirty Projectors | Like most people going through breakups, Dave Longstreth wants you to believe he’s doing just fine. The nine songs on Dirty Projectors delve into his separation from former bandmate and girlfriend Amber Coffman, whose arresting voice over the past decade was as vital to Dirty Projectors’ sound as Longstreth’s own yelps and howls. It’s impossible to ignore the context of the record, largely because Longstreth makes it impossible to forget. He’s quick to admit that “a song isn’t a newspaper” and that Dirty Projectors isn’t entirely autobiographical, even if the album’s narrator sings about writing a tune called “Stillness Is the Move.” Memoiristic or not, he’s found a way to express the lonely anthologizing of events that matter only to you and one other person, couched within a strange, dizzying pop record.
For a band who once felt like an army of mannered Brooklynites and is now ostensibly the solo project of one bearded Longstreth, Dirty Projectors have always brought pop music to their homemade sound. Since his last album, 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan, Longstreth has worked alongside Rihanna, Kanye West, and Solange (who co-wrote this album’s “Cool Your Heart”). But much of Dirty Projectors takes its inspiration from further back, comfort food for someone who may very well be nostalgic for the halcyon days of 2009. The stop-and-start buzz of “Death Spiral” is as delirious and slick as a Futuresex/Lovesounds interlude. “Cool Your Heart,” with its fancy-car music video and massive chorus, is a feel-good R&B trade-off with D∆WN that calls back to the same era of weirdo pop duets as Moby and Gwen Stefani’s “South Side.” The music on Dirty Projectors sounds like the propulsive, hyper-curated nostalgia you put on to forget your heartbreak.
Instead, Longstreth uses it to help reveal what hurts. In the stunning “Little Bubble,” he lies around the house, cursing his “dumb and meaningless” dreams and longing for death. In “Winner Take Nothing,” he reflects on a broken relationship, unable to find anything positive to say in its wake. “This has turned me against myself,” he sings, “In losing you, I lost myself.” For anyone wondering what Kanye song he was listening to on the Taconic Parkway in “Up in Hudson,” my money’s on “Blame Game,” when Kanye fragments his vocals to represent the myriad demons haunting him at once. Longstreth incorporates a similar tactic throughout the album, pitch-shifting his voice, distorting and layering it to mimic the hocketing sound that’s long defined his songwriting. But what once felt whimsical and communal now sounds suffocating and paranoid. Longstreth is trying to escape himself.
“Maybe love is a competition that makes us raise the bar/We better ourselves,” he sings on “Work Together,” a selfish way to define a relationship but a viewpoint that seems to have inspired a sense of confidence. Using this freedom to find new collaborators like Solange and Tyondai Braxton, Longstreth has refined and upgraded himself, becoming bolder in the process. In fact, Dirty Projectors, in its own warped way, might be the sharpest, tightest record he’s made yet. Like Joni Mitchell’s epic “Paprika Plains,” which layered a sweeping string arrangement over an autobiographical improv piano piece, Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.
The fatal flaw in this work, the same one that’s haunted every Dirty Projectors album from the elaborate Black Flag rewrites of Rise Above to the faux-folksy love songs of Swing Lo Magellan, is the feeling of conceptual overload. But overthinking is a core part of Longstreth’s aesthetic and here it balances the drag of a post-breakup bloodletting, when even the album's title feels, to say the least, confrontational. You can hear Longstreth analyzing his thoughts in real time throughout these songs, sometimes finding a sense of resolution in the process. On the closing track, “I See You,” he reaches for a happy ending in the most characteristic song on the whole album—it’s the only thing here that wouldn’t sound out of place on Bitte Orca. But the lyrics hint at a transformation. “The projection has faded away,” he sings right after landing on a line that’s extremely corny, slightly condescending, and maybe even romantic: “I believe that the love we made is the art,” he sings sternly. He knows it’s not perfect, but for now, it’s the best he’s got. | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | February 24, 2017 | 7.8 | 50d2f422-342b-4515-a56f-d9b31aecb79d | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Five albums recorded in the late 1950s capture the skill and the frailty of an acclaimed jazz trumpeter on the brink of disaster. | Five albums recorded in the late 1950s capture the skill and the frailty of an acclaimed jazz trumpeter on the brink of disaster. | Chet Baker: The Legendary Riverside Albums | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chet-baker-the-legendary-riverside-albums/ | The Legendary Riverside Albums | Chet Baker had two careers. Through the mid-1950s, he was one of the biggest stars in jazz, a strikingly beautiful man who played trumpet and also sang in a strange and androgynous voice that seemed too fragile for this world. He won both critics’ and readers’ polls in DownBeat magazine, and his recordings, particularly his early work with baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan, were essential documents of West Coast jazz. But in the years following Baker’s descent into heroin addiction, he became a cult artist, a figure whose musical output was often eclipsed by the tragic narrative of his life. His gaunt and caved-in face told the story of a promising young talent gone to seed.
In the late ’50s, after his first run of legal problems connected to his accelerating drug use, Baker spent a year cutting albums for the Riverside label. It was a transitional period, a moment when Baker hovered between one career and the next. He still sounds young—he would turn 30 just after recording these LPs—and he’s surrounded by top-shelf supporting musicians, the kinds of bands that would be difficult for Baker to assemble once he became an industry pariah.
Baker began his year on Riverside with It Could Happen to You, a vocal album aimed at a pop-leaning audience. His singing—unsteady in pitch, frail and delicate, with a disorienting mix of sexiness and naiveté—has always been an acquired taste, but there’s a context for it now that didn’t exist then. Its damaged innocence and dreamy loveliness carry a hint of irony that, 60 years on, brings to mind sounds we might hear in the unlit corners in David Lynch’s universe. You can hear that quality all over It Could Happen to You—take “My Heart Stood Still,” where Baker sings at the higher end of his natural range for an effect both chill-inducing and slightly creepy. Outtakes and Alternates is heavy on vocal numbers from the It Can Happen to You sessions. Some songs are even more haunting (“While My Lady Sleeps” is downright gothic, with Baker close to the microphone and singing way behind the beat), while others were shelved for a reason (he sounds especially high on this alternate take of “Everything Happens to Me” and struggles to articulate some words). If you can tune into Baker’s unsteady frequency, the voice showcased here is like nothing in jazz.
Baker was obsessed with Miles Davis’ cerebral Birth of the Cool and one can trace a significant portion of his trumpet style to those sessions. Like Davis, Baker mostly avoided the extremes of his horn’s range and focused on its middle, the frequency band where his melody lines could evoke a human voice. He had a natural ear for phrasing, and would alter the melodies of familiar tunes to wring a maximum amount of feeling from a minimum number of notes. Chet Baker in New York pairs Baker with two veterans of Davis’ rhythm section, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones, along with Al Haig (who played with Charlie Parker) and saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Continuing the homage, the group even tackles Davis’ tune “Solar.” Baker was strung out and in rough shape around the time In New York was cut, and the idea, according to Riverside label owner Orrin Keepnews (who also produced the session), was to “cover him over cosmetically with the best supporting cast, try to bury him.” To an extent, the approach worked. “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” is lush and romantic—a little vacant, maybe, but easy to get lost in—while “Hotel 49” is a satisfying 10-minute blues on which Griffin shines.
Much better is Chet, a set of pure floating atmosphere cut directly after In New York. Most of the tunes were recorded with pianist Bill Evans, who was at a peak moment of his career, and his style fit perfectly with Baker’s. “It Never Entered My Mind” is a poignant showcase for Baker’s horn, his judicious use of vibrato elevating the sadness as the rest of the ensemble falls in the mix to allow his phrases to linger. On some tunes Baker plays eloquently with other soloists: A duet with baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams on “’Tis Autumn” allows their horns to entwine as if in an embrace. On “Alone Together,” Evans improvises a haunting opening refrain that sounds like a trial run for “Blue in Green,” the piece he would record with Davis on Kind of Blue a few months later. Mature and beautiful, with a great selection of songs rendered in slow motion, Chet is one of Baker’s best albums.
Plays the Best of Lerner & Loewe, another instrumental LP cut later in 1959, finds Baker paying homage to the composers of My Fair Lady. It’s the weakest of these records, though it has its charms. Ballad-heavy and recorded with heavier reverb, there’s something almost crass about it, a sickly glamour that sounds good in the right mood. Baker completed it after serving several months at Rikers Island, and the rest of the 1960s were disastrous for him: an endless series of busts and jail time, mostly in Europe, that led to his expulsion from several countries. In 1966, he was injured in an assault likely related to a drug deal; he lost some teeth, impairing his ability to play, and his music career ground to a halt. Eventually he returned, first to make novelty records that ought to count as some of the worst music ever made—try “Sugar, Sugar,” from Blood, Chet and Tears—and then for the decades-long cult period, in which he recorded and gigged constantly and once in a while made something great. The Riverside period, flawed but occasionally brilliant, is the last, missed exit before he got on that road.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | null | November 27, 2019 | 8 | 50dcc112-dddf-42b8-bed3-1f4e856f3f67 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Channeling the scrappy ache of ’90s emo, the New York City band’s DIY rock songs voice the joy and catharsis of creating in community. | Channeling the scrappy ache of ’90s emo, the New York City band’s DIY rock songs voice the joy and catharsis of creating in community. | Blair: Tears to Grow EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blair-tears-to-grow-ep/ | Tears to Grow EP | For the Brooklyn band Blair, emo is an action, a summoning of feeling from the spark where it forms. On their new three-track Tears to Grow EP, Blair channels the tattered glow of ’90s Midwest emo and blown-out Northwest indie rock through the hearts and minds of young born-and-bred New Yorkers. Theirs are songs not for long drives, but for anxious subway rides. When the members of Blair lock in, though—when the poised noise of the guitars weaves with the textured swoop of the drums, when the call-and-response vocals collectively build to a scream, when they make room for a rushing solo before all crashing back together—the sound of Tears to Grow reflects the joy and catharsis of creating in community.
Blair began shortly before the pandemic, releasing their debut single, “day one homies,” in 2019 and performing in both the city’s underground punk and rap scenes. You might recognize drummer Anysia Kym Batts’ name from her expansive collaborations with New York rapper MIKE. And before Blair, singer-guitarist Genesis Evans was known for his streetwear brand, Humble, as well as his skillfully understated skateboarding. Fellow skateboarder and emo instigator Ian MacKaye once said, “Skateboarding is not a hobby or a sport; skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.” In their ecstatic DIY rock songs—rounded out by guitarist Pauli Ocampo Zapata and bassist Nico Chiat—Blair ride that radical perspective and open it to others.
Tears to Grow evokes the scrappy ache and daydreaming of early Jawbreaker, the droll introspection and bent melodies of Alex G. But Blair’s lyrics, which voice earnest appeals to overcome self-loathing and learn self-love, are uniquely affecting. More than one song expresses care and concern for a mother, while acknowledging the facts and grave injustices of being young and Black in this country. “Hi Mommy, I’m sorry/I’d like to speak eventually,” goes one devastating measure of “by the c.” “Take a step back/Could have been me/Who died last week.”
In a 2020 interview, Evans discussed Blair’s origins, how he grew up rapping and singing on friends’ beats but “always wanted to try creating it all from scratch”; Batts has noted a similar impulse behind her expressive drumming. Describing Blair’s collective influences, from hardcore to jazz and R&B, Evans cited other young Black artists, like Navy Blue and Mal Devisa, who use “their voice to talk about their struggle, Black liberation, mental health issues.” This amalgam plays out beautifully on Tears to Grow’s six-and-a-half-minute closer, “promise,” an emo epic in three movements.
“Promise” sounds like memories cascading in real time—a call dropping, a door closing, time running out—reaching forward by way of Blair’s own nonlinear logic. It’s a song about the promise Evans makes to his mother to not hurt himself, about the promises his father has left unsaid. And it contains a promise to potential listeners, too, as Blair sing about how “no one’s as misunderstood/As that lonely Black child/Who’s born and raised in the hood/Who’s so capable of anything/No one’s told ’em that they could.” Actively encouraging self-worth, peaking into shouts, “promise” turns the candor of emo into a positive force. Every note feels charged by the power of vulnerability as a vital component of liberation. “We can do anything as long as we begin,” Blair sing. “We’ll heal from it all/Promise/I know we can.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | April 22, 2021 | 7.7 | 50e68a35-e9ad-41d9-85ed-1c970dd920e3 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Angel Olsen taps deeper into her country influences on a warm, self-assured album whose fluid narration unites love and grief, past and present. | Angel Olsen taps deeper into her country influences on a warm, self-assured album whose fluid narration unites love and grief, past and present. | Angel Olsen: Big Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-olsen-big-time/ | Big Time | For over a decade, the highwire eloquence of the Angel Olsen songbook has been grounded by the emotional weight of living mostly in your mind. The heaviness of solitary dreaming—“Hiding out inside my head”; “I like the thoughts I think…without you”; “Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind”—is paired with comforting grace when reflected through Olsen’s fever-pitched warble and incisive lyrics, her schema of gravity and wonder. Like other artist-philosophers of the human heart before her, Olsen creates a spirit of hard-won knowledge, the feeling of steadiness in a brutal world.
Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease. Having journeyed from folk-rock poet to jukebox rock’n’roller to baroque epicist on her last proper record, 2019’s monumental All Mirrors, she is reborn on Big Time as an alternately smiling or crying cowgirl. Olsen teases out the twang and pedal steel of her longtime country influences, like the audacity of Skeeter Davis and Tammy Wynette, or the blistering ache of Hank Williams. The tough-and-tender extremity of country music has always been present in her yearning cadences, now more lucid than ever, but here she leans further into its in-the-room glow, its honesty and resilience. As her heights magnify, so do her depths.
In the months leading to the recording of Big Time, Olsen came out as queer with a new partner. She told her parents, who by chance both passed away within weeks. Big Time absorbs the entangling transformations of grief and new love, their power to clarify, and reprioritize, everything—the album, she said, is the work of a person “irreversibly changed.” The titular concept of Big Time is not just an evocation of its glistening Nashville sound, nor is it only a declaration of overflowing, abiding love, as when Olsen croons “I’m loving you big time/I’m loving you more.” In one time-collapsing swoop, that refrain echoes words of affection Olsen received from her partner as well as from her late mother. All of Big Time is charged by an elevated awareness of the clock’s hands, how they fold in on each other: time Olsen loses track of; time she spends in vain, “to be somebody”; time that physically slows and that quickens to the instant. This is a record about how time billows out from the center of now—forward, backwards, inside and down, like in a science fiction novel.
Where Olsen once sang of being a fool in love as if it were uncool, Big Time presents dignity in such a position. On the closer, “Chasing the Sun,” she sends her partner a “postcard” from another room: “I’m just writing to say that I can’t find my clothes/If you’re looking for something to do.” The golden hour title track beams with the quotidian intimacy of Frank O’Hara in a pickup truck: kissing, coffee, nature, sunshine, “talkin’ with your eyes.” A songwriter who formerly wished that she could only buy into all that was promised to her is now a believer, soundtracking the crystalline clarity of feeling connected, at last, to herself and others.
But Olsen still takes her pen like a scalpel to emotional wrongdoing, voicing bemusement through a skeptical Mona Lisa grin. “Ghost On” is grounded by Lucinda-caliber feminist defiance, each forthright word held at the edge of a simmer: “I don’t know if you can take such a good thing coming to you/I don’t know if you can love someone stronger than you’re used to,” she sings, seeing straight through the smoke and mirrors of a bad relationship. Olsen refuses to make herself small. The soulful opener “All the Good Times” sets the tone of biting self-possession from the start. “I can’t say that I’m sorry when I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” she sings with calm conviction, before the Mellotron and horn arrangement bursts widescreen. Olsen offers scant particulars of a subject who does not earn complexity. “So long, farewell, this is the end,” she sings dryly. It seems straightforward until you realize it could be a goodbye to a former self.
Big Time is filled with moments like these, which seem to contain other moments within them, the past and present as one. The emotional undertow of Olsen’s gentle arrangements is crucial to this narration of nonlinear time. On “Dream Thing,” her voice is in tight, immediate focus, even as she begins to recall a dream about the future: “I was looking at old you, looking at who you’ve become,” and suddenly, “I was just a kid/I was searching my mind for the words to that Black Captain song”—a reference to her one-time bandmate, Will Oldham. Her voice becomes cellophane on “This Is How It Works”—written about phone calls to her mother—as she admits, “I’m barely hanging on.” “It’s a hard time again,” she sings, the last word a continuum of pain.
Nowhere is Big Time more arrestingly or fearlessly attuned than on its tightrope of a centerpiece, “Right Now.” The spare choruses crash down, distilling the air around Olsen’s measured vulnerabilities. “I won’t live another lie about the feelings that I have/I won’t be with you and hide,” she sings, “I ain’t the past coming back to haunt you/I’m telling you right now.” As the song delicately raves up, Olsen incants those last words of hope as if they could save her life. She’s not the only one. | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | June 3, 2022 | 8.1 | 50f03a2b-b357-4586-9e80-05efad6d7164 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Doom outfit Pallbearer's ascension as one of metal's crossover acts started with 2012's Sorrow and Extinction, and with the release of their brilliant second album, it's easy to imagine them gaining even more popularity. Foundations finds a band firing on all cylinders and surpassing what already seemed like a watermark for the genre. | Doom outfit Pallbearer's ascension as one of metal's crossover acts started with 2012's Sorrow and Extinction, and with the release of their brilliant second album, it's easy to imagine them gaining even more popularity. Foundations finds a band firing on all cylinders and surpassing what already seemed like a watermark for the genre. | Pallbearer: Foundations of Burden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19570-pallbearer-foundations-of-burden/ | Foundations of Burden | When underground metal bands appeal to non-metal listeners, it's often because they've found a way to tweak, expand, or do away with genre conventions. Outside of iconic heavy classic rock or shiny mainstream metal, this doesn't mean the music is easier to listen to as a result—there's the collaborative art-drone of Sunn O))), as unlikely a crossover band as any, and Deafheaven's blend of shoegaze guitar textures and screamo/black metal vocals. It's rare that a contemporary group remains entirely in the metal world and still manages to find an audience outside of it, but the vintage-doom players in Pallbearer have done just that. Their ascension started with their debut, 2012's excellent Sorrow and Extinction, and with the release of their brilliant second album, Foundations of Burden, it's easy to imagine them gaining even more popularity.
When the Arkansas quartet put out Sorrow, they had already built excitement in the metal underground based on a three-song 2010 demo; but for most people, the five-song, 49-minute LP—with its gorgeous guitar tones and sky-soaring vocals—was their first taste of the group. Pallbearer ended Sorrow's thank you list with "and, of course Black Sabbath," which made perfect sense because they appeal to that diverse cross section of people who also thank Black Sabbath for their own personal reasons.
Two years later, they've returned with a collection that feels even more connected to the pure, unadulterated aspects of doom, and Pallbearer have transcended the need to thank anyone but themselves. The group were given a bigger budget from their label Profound Lore to record Foundations, and they did so with Billy Anderson, who also sat behind the controls for the classic Sleep oeuvre and has recorded seminal works for High on Fire, Melvins, Jawbreaker, and others (including Red House Painters, who's early material had a sense of space that makes sense in this realm).
In an interview I did with Pallbearer co-founder/co-lyricist/bassist Joseph D. Rowland, he said Anderson told them he's never recorded a band that used so many guitar tracks—an element of Pallbearer's sound that explains the massiveness of Foundations, as well as how they saw *Sorrow'*s successes as an opportunity to deepen and strengthen their craft. This is an ambitious record that doesn't feel at all over-worked or stale, and while Sorrow and Extinction holds up beautifully two years later, Foundations is the stronger collection to the point that Sorrow almost comes across as demos for this new material.
Though Pallbearer arrived fully formed, vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell's stirring voice was a little pitchy live, suggesting that he was sometimes straining beyond his abilities. When I reviewed Sorrow, I said that "Campbell has been described as a young Ozzy Osbourne, and that influence is certainly there, but imagine if a young Ozzy had the ability to transform into Geddy Lee." His singing on Foundations has more ease, soul, and grit, and he sounds steadier, smoother, and more assured. It helps, too, that bassist Rowland and guitarist Devin Holt offer their own vocals on three tracks, adding details, depth, and complexity to the melodies. When they join Campbell, you get the sense of a madrigal, with overlapping harmonies that will give you goosebumps. You get a taste of it right out of the gate on the 10-minute opener, "Worlds Apart", a song that features cascading three-part vocals powering upward between layered guitars that crunch at the same time as they soothe. On "The Ghost I Used to Be", Rowland's screamed vocals mix with Campbell's more honeyed voice, creating a raw, almost punk dynamic for Pallbearer that didn't exist previously.
There's dense, regal play all over Foundations: guitars collide, a Rhodes adds subtle details in the distance. There are new textures, bigger tempo shifts, and dynamic turns. It's a great headphone record, but you'll want to be listening to these songs in a larger room where you can move around and make contact. Where Sorrow often felt like a great solitary album—especially in its focus on death and mortality—Foundations is clearly built for larger communal spaces, as even the quiet moments are massive. Pallbearer are patient, and the textures they build feel painterly (kudos to Anderson, many times over). There are moments where things drop out, like on "Watcher in the Dark", where you get some low-level fuzz accompanied by Mark Lierly's nimble drumming (he's a more agile, technical player than original drummer Chuck Schaaf). When the rest of the instruments return at full volume, it's physically impossible not to want to move. In the same song, there's a limber guitar solo over gentle piano parts; elsewhere, synthesizers hum, bells chime, the band showcases a newfound swagger to go with the psychedelia and '70s prog.
The music's catchy, too, and full of hooks. Pallbearer are proud fans of rock groups like Boston and Rainbow, and these songs, while long, go down easy. As Rowland told me, "[Our songs] are all almost exactly three times the length of a standard pop song, almost to the second, so I decided that that's our version of writing pop songs." With the twinkling three-minute "Ashes", you actually get to hear them doing doom-as-dusky ambient pop.
Rowland has talked about how Sorrow was focused on a loved one's death, and that the subject matter of Foundations is more varied; even so, these songs deal in ashes, formless voids, feasting on blood, time crushing things, and in general, loss. Still, it's never a bummer. In "Worlds Apart", Campbell sings "Where lays our heart of hearts defined/ My darkness and your light, still yet remain entwined." This mixture of light and dark seems to be the crux of Pallbearer, a group who make sadness seem uplifting, darkness seem bright, and songs about mortality seem life-giving. The final words of the album are: "We're always shifting/ And always becoming." The sentiment comes during the stampeding moments of the heady, muscular "Vanished", and that endless becoming is fitting on both an emotional and conceptual level. Foundations finds a band firing on all cylinders, and surpassing what seemed like a watermark for the genre. As obsessed as Pallbearer is with endings, the music here is timeless. | 2014-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | August 12, 2014 | 8.6 | 50f0b7ff-78fb-4ac7-b761-f56a6abceaad | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The new N.E.R.D. album is full of guests: Rihanna, Kendrick, Gucci, 3000, M.I.A., Wale, Ed Sheeran. They all help elevate an album that is occasionally ineffectual in its attempts at protest music. | The new N.E.R.D. album is full of guests: Rihanna, Kendrick, Gucci, 3000, M.I.A., Wale, Ed Sheeran. They all help elevate an album that is occasionally ineffectual in its attempts at protest music. | N.E.R.D.: No_One Ever Really Dies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nerd-no-one-ever-really-dies/ | No_One Ever Really Dies | In 1978, the science fiction author Douglas Adams was trying to dream up a kind of interstellar Long Island Iced Tea—a drink that could get all the alien races of the universe equally trashed. He called his concoction the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and in his radio series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he noted that consuming one was like “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”
What Adams was describing, to perfection, was the experience of listening to a N.E.R.D. single: the strange, visceral pleasure to be found in what is too often excruciatingly painful. “Lapdance,” “Everyone Nose,” “She Wants to Move”: Even if you liked these songs (and I did), you were responding to the idiot provocation of the beats, to the thundering simplicity of their repetitive choruses.
You might be able to add “Lemon,” the first single from N.E.R.D.’s first album of original songs in seven years, to that list if not for Rihanna. She’s the first of several guest stars to elevate No_One Ever Really Dies, which features Future, Gucci Mane, Wale, Kendrick Lamar (twice!), André 3000, M.I.A. and even Ed Sheeran. It’s the first N.E.R.D. record to include such an extensive list of guests. One of the best decisions that the trio of Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shae Haley make on their new album was calling in those favors.
In the early aughts, Williams and Hugo’s duo the Neptunes pushed rap forward with their percussion stir-fry, candied samples, and tolerance for negative space. But N.E.R.D. is often dismissed, as this website once put it, as “a reliable repository for all of Pharrell’s worst” ideas. And it’s true that the lesser N.E.R.D. songs, the B-sides, are often sewn together from scraps that the super-producers wouldn’t have dared to offer an A-lister. Still, particularly on 2002’s In Search Of… and 2008’s Seeing Sounds, there was something thrilling about these pedigreed engineers of pop breaking their toys and making jagged things out of the discarded parts, creative little mergers of rock and rap that anticipated the genre-mixing we’re seeing today.
Unfortunately for the group’s apologists (which include Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, and, well, me), a newly woke Pharrell has decided that the operative mode of No_One Ever Really Dies is activist chic. It’s a pretty disastrous look. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news or who’s running my country but it’s a real fucking shit show,” he told The Guardian recently. “I’ve never seen such desperation in my life.” Leaving aside the question of whose desperation he is referring to, Pharrell does not sound equipped to make a protest record here, nor does he sound interested in making one. That means even the better songs here are hamstrung by stabs at seriousness so vacuous that they seem like parodies. “Deep Down Body Thurst” includes this bumbling salvo, ostensibly directed at President Trump: “Oh you won’t get away/The way you treat Islam/Oh you won’t get away/Jesus will open his arms/Oh you won’t get away (hey hey)/Mr. Wizard of Oz.”
Still, the album’s first half sounds relatively strong, powered almost exclusively by that poised Rihanna verse on “Lemon” and Kendrick channeling “B.O.B.”-era OutKast on “Don’t Don’t Do It”—a song inspired by Keith Scott, the black man who was fatally shot by police in Charlotte, N.C. last year. Tune out its lyrics, and “Deep Down Body Thurst” is urgent and catchy, opening with the downtempo piano chords that the Neptunes have long favored and slowly pumping itself as bass, drums, and Spymob-style guitar chords are added to the mix.
But No_One Ever Really Dies runs into a wall midway through, as old ideas rear their heads like those nobbly-headed creatures in Whac-a-Mole. The band has long loved interludes and presents some good ones here. “Voilà” includes a fun little chant. The melody in the middle of “Rollinem 7’s,” though it forestalls André 3000’s verse, makes for a decent digression. But Pharrell’s impatience also bloats the worst songs out of proportion. “Esp,” the record’s nadir, runs on the fumes of bass blasts and bad lyrics for five and a half minutes. And while it’s possible to develop a soft spot for the melodies on the otherwise dopey “Lightning Fire Magic Prayer,” there’s no reason it should be nearly eight minutes long. Elsewhere, do we really need “Drop It Like It’s Hot”-style bubble pops on both “Lemon” and “Lifting You”? Or a song like the pandering “Secret Life of Tigers,” which, musically, offers nothing that Britney fans didn’t hear in 2001?
That’s perhaps what’s most striking about No_One Ever Really Dies: the way these former architects of Future Sound have become handmaidens to their past. The weaknesses on their previous records (other than Nothing, which every good N.E.R.D. fan ignores) came from ideas that pointed off in new directions even if they weren’t fully fleshed out. Here, even the better songs are recycled, as the band lives off blood infusions from its guestlist. Out of the game so long, the N.E.R.D. antennae have picked up on something extra-musical in the air, and crafted their old sound around it. It sadly renders as a piece of resistance-bait, one whose clumsy, on-the-nose message slams you in the head harder than most of its songs. | 2017-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | N.E.R.D. Music | December 18, 2017 | 6.2 | 50f36b50-21ad-4291-af0f-ad6e3856947c | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The new album from Irish producer Iglooghost presents an alien landscape with only rare bits of human comfort. Even at its most elegant, it unfurls like a sensory attack. | The new album from Irish producer Iglooghost presents an alien landscape with only rare bits of human comfort. Even at its most elegant, it unfurls like a sensory attack. | Iglooghost: Neō Wax Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iglooghost-ne-wax-bloom/ | Neō Wax Bloom | There is barely a repeated moment on the bizarre Brainfeeder full-length debut from Irish producer Seamus Malliagh, aka Iglooghost. It’s a more radical prospect than it might seem. Put aside the bewildering nature of his actual sounds—painstaking maximalism on a shapeshifting grid—and Neō Wax Bloom is frantically composed. There are no loops at all, and there is rarely a sustained melody to latch onto; that many of his alien-sounding electronic bursts are immediately fleeting makes their novelty all the more jarring. Neō Wax Bloom is an insanely ambitious inversion of the comfort of repetition, and the whole album spills forward to unnerving effect.
The audiovisual concept behind Iglooghost is a zany hallucination: an invented backstory replete with graphics of googly-eyed kitsch, which actually do help explain the neurosis of his sound. When Brainfeeder released the album’s second single, “White Gum,” Malliagh took to the YouTube comment section to explain himself: “PLS IMAGINE A MONK CALLED YOMI & A LITTLE BUG BOY IN A CLOAK CALLED USO HAVING A HUGE FIGHT - HOPPING OVER LEVITATING FRUIT & FIRING LASERS AT EACHOTHER [sic],” he wrote. Malliagh has earnestly designed a sound that belongs to Yomi’s laser and another that belongs to Little Bug Boy’s, and every moment on Neō Wax Bloom is ostensibly a prop or landscape element in their universe. Of course, none of that alleviates the confusing thrill of listening to the song itself, which seems to crumble and crackle under its own weight in a constant morph.
Malliagh once said his first impulse, when he started making music, was towards “terrifying breakcore,” and he’s strayed well beyond that ambition with Neō Wax Bloom. But the album does carry that genre’s attendant fidgeting. Malliagh weaves manic combinations of footwork and techno for aggressively paced tracks. “Göd Grid” tops out at more than 220 BPM without ever settling into a groove, seemingly dozens of sounds flurrying forward to combine for the record’s harshest track. “Super Ink Burst” feels like a barrage of body punches despite its cartoony landscape: a frantic saxophone trickles up and down, a kick adds a breakneck thump, the invented synth sounds glitter relentlessly. On “Pale Eyes,” Malliagh pits that same saxophone alongside an anxious harpsichord sound, as bulbous little meeps and moops share background space with not-quite-human gasps and moans.
Throughout, Malliagh injects manipulated vocal samples that are often twisted beyond recognition into a chipmunky gibberish. On “White Gum,” he flips the grime rapper AJ Tracey’s already relentless “Naila” vocals into a peculiar high-pitched attack. The ambiguous underground rapper Mr. Yote shows up for an original feature on “Teal Yomi / Olivine,” braving the storm of complexity with his own other-worldly pitch shifting. The pair have worked together before, and here they push avant-garde hip-hop that demands exacting listening. With an opposite approach, the Japanese dream-pop vocalist Cuushe glides over “Infinite Mint,” a succulent ballad that devolves into one of the album’s most soulful appendages. Malliagh softens his edge for moments like these without sacrificing the encompassing effect of his excess.
There’s a glistening sheen to nearly everything Malliagh touches, and his songs blend together if for no other reason than their similar hue. He’s also self-referential, sampling his own work throughout the record as a rare bit of continuity. There’s a soaring, soulful vocal sample that needles its way throughout several tracks as a shimmering mirage of familiarity. It seems to have first appeared on a previous Malliagh production, last year’s “Gold Tea,” and it pops up throughout Neō Wax Bloom like a beaming signpost, a rare bit of human comfort in an otherwise austerely alien landscape.
Even at its most elegant, the album unfurls like a sensory attack. This seems to be Malliagh’s odd equation as Iglooghost: filtering outlandish electronic music through his saccharine world-building to intensely emotional effect. To his credit, he’s architected a world entirely unto itself. It’s the type you might take deep a breath before jumping into, knowing that the strangeness of it all is not built to last. | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | October 4, 2017 | 7.3 | 50f78c68-3c31-4229-ac10-6e09dcd3280b | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
In 1965, the Buffalo-born folk musician Jackson C. Frank cut a 10-song Paul Simon-produced masterpiece. Only now, 16 years after his death, are we learning that his slim output and tiny reputation stand as one of the great legacies of a movement in which he's sometimes considered but a blip. The Complete Recordings pairs earlier excavation attempts with the latest finds from Frank’s archive. | In 1965, the Buffalo-born folk musician Jackson C. Frank cut a 10-song Paul Simon-produced masterpiece. Only now, 16 years after his death, are we learning that his slim output and tiny reputation stand as one of the great legacies of a movement in which he's sometimes considered but a blip. The Complete Recordings pairs earlier excavation attempts with the latest finds from Frank’s archive. | Jackson C. Frank: The Complete Recordings of Jackson C. Frank | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20865-the-complete-recordings-of-jackson-c-frank/ | The Complete Recordings of Jackson C. Frank | Jackson C. Frank could never quite come back. In 1965, under the aegis of producer Paul Simon and with the assistance of sideman Al Stewart, the Buffalo-born Frank cut a 10-song masterpiece of the transatlantic folk revival. Frank’s self-titled debut gathered together the requisite folk threads of his day and refashioned them with his steady picking and a tenor that lilted, even as it moped. Frank could be topical and timely, as on the Dylan social nod "Don’t Look Back", or he could web simple phrases and patterns into enigmatic, illusory anthems, as he did for "My Name Is Carnival". He made existential unease charming on "Just Like Anything", and he updated Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s ancient American banjo trot, "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground", for a new generation of post-beatnik vagabonds.
Frank got to all of those feelings at once during "Blues Run the Game", reportedly the first song he ever finished and, for most, the sole perfect number that forms his entire legacy. On The Complete Recordings, the most exhaustive assembly of his catalog to date, Frank’s standard tellingly appears three times—at the start of Jackson C. Frank, in an extra tender 1968 take from John Peel’s radio show and in its reverb-enhanced, slide-gilded 7" form. A mantra for those who can never outrun their own tail of perennial sadness, whether they catch a boat to England or try another city, it doubles as the perfectly tragic summary of Frank’s own life. Before his death in 1999, he would suffer impossible penury and injury and drift into anonymity, but he would never record another album. Frank, you could say, never outfoxed his self-diagnosis of perpetual blues.
A year before Frank made his auspicious but low-selling debut, he left the Northeast for London, where he became an influential implant in that scene’s vibrant and varied lot of writers and pickers. Though new to songwriting, he seemed one of the scene’s certain stars, carousing with the names of the day and soon signing a deal with Columbia. Though only in his early twenties, Frank had already survived a great amount of sadness. When he was 11 years old, a school furnace exploded, burning him and many classmates so badly that he spent months in the hospital. The incident seemed to trail and torment him his entire life, responsible in part for the shadow that hung over many of his songs and made them so immediate but also for the depression that debilitated him. Frank tried time and again to restart his career, just to fumble again. Only now, 16 years after his death, are we really learning that his slim output and tiny reputation stand as one of the great legacies and losses of a movement in which he has sometimes been considered but a blip.
In the five decades since Frank recorded his only proper album, a dozen efforts to revivify his catalog have come and gone, from covers by people like Bert Jansch and John Mayer to deluxe reissues. The Complete Recordings pairs those earlier excavation attempts with the latest finds from Frank’s fragmented archive, though much debate remains about just how complete this set is. Ba Da Bing is issuing Recordings in conjunction with the arrival of Jackson C. Frank: The Clear, Hard Light of Genius, the most tender and authoritative biography on the singer to date. Befitting Frank’s entire career, though, the coordinated schedule hamstrings the set itself, as a truncated and badly edited essay serves as the surrogate for proper liner notes.
At least Recordings begins brilliantly, with Frank’s debut LP in its wonderful, remastered entirety. It then backtracks four years to the campus of Gettysburg College, where Frank and some friends slur through "CC Rider", creep through "In the Pines", and race through "John Henry". According to Mark Anderson, the friend with which Frank cut many of these songs, there were at least a dozen more, but it matters little. These collegiate curios mostly show us the roots of Frank’s musical development. They dovetail well with his ramshackle teenage take on "Heartbreak Hotel" (recorded in 1957, the year he met Elvis) and a 1960 session of folk standards Frank cut on the cheap back in Buffalo. He’s less a stylist on these standards than a teenager piecing together his toolkit; these songs would matter to his overall approach, yes, but these takes do not.
The jewels of Recordings come, in many cases, more than a decade after Frank’s debut, long after he and others had already tried to resuscitate his career. The scraps from his aborted follow-ups don’t hang together quite so well as his lone album, but taken together, they reaffirm and expand his general mystique. The terse, romantic existentialism of "Cover Me With Roses" overcomes the tawdry blues guitar beneath its chugging chords; a song about the raw deals we all make and deal with "if you can," it adds pep and a bit of wit to the essential premise of "Blues Run the Game". "Madonna of Swans" is as graceful as the title suggests, with Frank’s lush chords and gentle harmonics lifting his wavering voice.
But it’s the loping "Spanish Moss", recorded in 1974, that haunts most. One of the brightest songs Frank ever cut, it is his preemptive "Tangled Up in Blue". He details a romantic rendezvous that feels sinister in its execution—"She opened a picture of Lucifer in chains," he haltingly offers—and melancholy in its temporary necessity. "Her hair hung like a sacrament," he relays, "our bodies to begin." It’s perhaps the most vivid narrative language in the emotional impressionist’s entire songbook, an unfulfilled promise for the possibility of the other scenes he may have soon set. "Spanish Moss" is sexual, sophisticated, and playful, the work of a writer who had momentarily shrugged aside his blues, even if he would never fully break their spell.
He didn’t, of course: During the next two decades, Frank sometimes found himself homeless or committed to sanitariums. He lost an eye in a senseless shooting but was eventually rescued by a fan who got him money from royalties and a new guitar. Some of the most poignant and compelling numbers in Frank’s oeuvre arrive at that point, nearly 20 years ago. In 1994, Jackson cut several songs in a proper studio, and the results rival the best material of his debut. "October" is a meditation on the judgment of the drunk and the way that time can never be captured. "I Don’t Want to Love You No More" is an attempt to deny the undeniable, a transmission from someone working to regain some semblance of sanity and civility. It’s like George Jones’ "He Stopped Loving Her Today" rewritten by the survivor. In these sunset songs, you can hear premonitions of Richard Buckner and Damien Jurado, Will Oldham and Bill Callahan, songwriters who would soon similarly mumble and croon their way to measures of success Frank never enjoyed.
By 1997, when Frank recorded a set of fragmentary songs and false starts in a kitchen, both his voice and verve had stiffened considerably. His late-life charm had faded. That material is hard to hear, really, as you can tell that Frank’s quest for redemption is slowly drifting into oblivion. The whole situation recalls one particularly excruciating passage from "Goodbye (To My Loving You)", my favorite Frank relic from 1994. "Now that love is leaving," he ends one of his saddest, sharpest verses ever, his voice quaking, "there’s nothing left to show." Nearly three decades later, blues would finally end the game, he seemed to say, just as they had run it for so long. | 2015-08-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ba Da Bing | August 19, 2015 | 8 | 50fc74d9-180c-4945-a5fb-987061cfaed8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The kinetic French singer Hélöise Letissier lets us into the whole of her life, creating an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid pop-funk. | The kinetic French singer Hélöise Letissier lets us into the whole of her life, creating an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid pop-funk. | Christine and the Queens: Chris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christine-and-the-queens-chris/ | Chris | Most of us have a hard time seeing people for who they really are. We reduce even those we love down to two-dimensional sketches so they fit into our lives neatly and without concern. Christine and the Queens’ new album Chris is remarkable for a few reasons, but this is the one that’s sticking with me: It’s impossible to deny the complexity of the person at its center. She uses masculinity like a sledgehammer to enrich her womanhood; she’s a crude, libidinous woman, but her heart is still tender; she has the courage and creativity to make a life for herself outside of the status quo, but she still feels the pain that comes with choosing a path other people don’t understand. Chris is a portrait of an instantly memorable character making utterly gleaming pop music.
Chris didn’t just spring into being fully-formed. After touring in support of her 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine and its 2015 re-release in English, the French artist Hélöise Letissier felt herself changing. The rigors of dancing and performing every night made her body tougher and more athletic; she reached new levels of wealth and confidence that had until recently seemed hard to imagine. And while she was experiencing these transformations, her newfound fame granted her access to the inner sanctums of culture and celebrity. She considered the boundaries that male stars were permitted to cross while their female counterparts were held back. “They can be sexual, flawed, and incredibly charismatic,” Letissier told GQ. “Complexity and intricacy is reserved to men. Women must make it unthreatening, simplified. I wish I could be Nick Cave or Mick Jagger.” Unlocking the persona of Chris—a “horny, hungry and ambitious” woman, as Letissier told The New York Times—liberated her to step over those boundaries and more fully embrace the whole of her being. Instead of becoming Cave or Jagger, she created a seductive, slutty hero of her own.
The resulting album is an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid, sizzling pop-funk. Dewy lead single “Girlfriend” lays down the terms of engagement: Chris may not feel like your girlfriend, but she could get used to being called your lover. She’ll leave for an early workout and push you back into bed just when you’re ready to wake up: “Came back steaming in sweats in the morning,” she pants. “I muscled in, for I wanted to hold him.” (I heard it and thought about Justin Theroux jogging through the first episode of The Leftovers in one of this decade’s most infamous pairs of sweatpants.) “Damn (What Must a Woman Do)” explores the “shame and isolation” women are made to feel about their lust; Chris’ cool, pointed whisper suggests Erotica-era Madonna working over production from Junior Boys. Shimmering opener “Comme si” equates the act of listening with a carnal pact. The confidence Letissier draws from tapping into Chris is radiant: “There’s a pride in my singing/The thickness of a new skin/I am done with belonging.”
While Chris’ vigor is intoxicating, Letissier hardly conceals the trauma and hurt women like Chris are made to endure before achieving this degree of self-possession. Her approach to conveying emotion through her singing is subtle and refined: When she opts for restraint, it says as much as when she chooses to explode. On the kinetic “Doesn’t Matter,” verses about overcoming suicidal thoughts and being tempted by nihilism are delivered in a controlled, distant near-monotone. She only leaps into the higher end of her range once she pulls herself back from the brink, encouraging the listener to move forward as if they “stole a shard of sunlight.”
You can hear a moment of dark clarity break through the heat of a sexual transaction on “5 Dollars”: “Some of us just had to fight/For even being looked at right.” The heartbreaking “what’s-her-face” is a reflection on years spent bullied and tormented, leaving wounds that are always threatening to be reopened. Here and on spare late-album highlight “Make Some Sense”—an anguished look back at a childhood crush who morphs into an infamous, violent attacker— her voice is softer and more pliable, but it’s still anchored by a fundamental strength. It’s the sound of bending but never breaking.
The song that best captures the complexities of Chris is “The Walker,” which chronicles the kind of indefinite stroll you take when your blood is thundering through your veins and you need to clear your head. Chris sets out with no fixed route, and her rage is simmering just beneath the surface. She sends birds flying out of her way with concerted stomps; when she passes by other people, they “politely smile to make sure I won’t come any closer.” Her pain has no definite source or target. When enough time passes, she starts to come to terms with the feelings coursing through her body. “It hurts, I feel everything/As my sense of self’s wearing thin,” she sings, her voice feeble. Just when she’s threatening to collapse, you can hear her regaining her vitality with every new word: “Such pains can be a delight/Far from when I could drown in my shame!” Isn’t that what it means to be alive? Isn’t it better to embrace the slings and arrows launched your way than to curl yourself into a ball and settle for something less than your purest possible truth? Chris answers those questions with a resounding yes. | 2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | September 21, 2018 | 7.9 | 50fed310-9180-4ca5-ab1e-a4aab54618ca | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Summer Walker’s follow-up to her 2019 debut album offers a quick tour through the Atlanta singer’s world—a couple sultry strip club joints, a couple guitar-led ballads, and a playful reunion with PARTYNEXTDOOR. | Summer Walker’s follow-up to her 2019 debut album offers a quick tour through the Atlanta singer’s world—a couple sultry strip club joints, a couple guitar-led ballads, and a playful reunion with PARTYNEXTDOOR. | Summer Walker: Life on Earth EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/summer-walker-life-on-earth-ep/ | Life on Earth EP | Watching Summer Walker spray and wipe down a pole in the video for her Over It single “Stretch You Out,” you see three of her lives colliding. Before she became a sought-after singer, she was a janitorial entrepreneur offering $25 fridge-cleaning deals; before that, she danced at an Atlanta strip club. Over It, her successful debut studio album, solidified her place in contemporary R&B with a mix of moody trap-soul, ’90s nostalgia, and singer-songwriter charm. Walker’s music works through identity and relationships with candor, and her autobiographical lyrics strike at the heart of being in and out of love with others and yourself. Her follow-up Life on Earth EP offers a quick tour through Walker’s world—a couple sultry strip club joints, a couple guitar-led ballads, a playful reunion with PARTYNEXTDOOR—but on this trip, the endearingly keen insights into sex, love, and self are harder to find.
Walker’s first big hit was the remix to “Girls Need Love,” a gentle antidote to slut-shaming, which earned its popularity with a Drake assist. Her vulnerability drew out some of the most tender and understanding bars from a man who’s been rapping about women for more than a decade. On Life on Earth, three out of five tracks have features, all by men, but the guests are less captivating. New York newcomer NO1-NOAH appears on both the sensual “SWV” and “White Tee,” and doesn’t add much to either. On “SWV,” he meets Walker’s delicate trills with flat, Auto-Tuned singing, taking up space she could have used to expound on the loose ideas around wealth, isolation, and desire in her first verse. They’re a stronger pairing on “White Tee,” where Walker meets NO1’s Nav-ish vocal with a sing-talking performance as a money-hungry sex kitten. He plays her target trick. Still, Walker vividly embodies the role—“I throw my lil’ fits, I talk my lil’ shit, and I always be getting my way,” she purrs—while his cool act feels uninspired.
That’s not to say her talents are fully deployed here, either. Walker’s vocals are as pristine as ever when she leans into them, and her rap-like cadences on “White Tee” and “My Affection” are cute and bouncy. Her verses, though, are rarely as tight and clear as in her previous work. Walker can be incredibly direct, telling a lover that they’re passionless, that they’re out of their league, or that they’re missed with precision and poetry. Lines like, “Days gettin’ longer/And drugs been gettin’ hard to find,” on “My Affection,” or “I want to give in but scared to rely,” on “Deeper,” show traces of her usual thoughtfulness, but they arrive buried in scattered or shallow ideas about romance, fear, and regret.
“My Affection” is the EP’s most fun moment, allowing Walker and PARTYNEXTDOOR to feed off one another’s boasts about growing and glowing up, huffing and sighing over incessant, rhythmic ringing. Opener “Let It Go,” though, is its most emotional, and comes closest to tapping into the frankness and introspection of Walker’s older music. She’s ethereal over live instrumentation, as on her first EP, Clear, and on “Let It Go,” an acoustic guitar radiates over subtle, programmed percussion. Walker has always had prescriptions for good relationships (“When you have somethin’, you treat it good/And you want it bad and you need it”) while finding herself in messier ones (here, she describes a partner calling the police because she tried to leave). Such beautiful and crushing truths from a “weird” young woman trying to make sense of her experiences create a special kind of R&B. Life on Earth can be a joy to listen to— smooth, sexy, and bright—but it’s missing the searing songwriting Walker is capable of.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LVRN / Interscope | July 18, 2020 | 6.7 | 50fee9b3-2341-41fe-8048-9c4176ea1c22 | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
These belligerent North Carolinians epitomize the crossover vitriol of metal and punk in 2018 and help signal the crucially political personality of their label. | These belligerent North Carolinians epitomize the crossover vitriol of metal and punk in 2018 and help signal the crucially political personality of their label. | Funeral Chic: Superstition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/funeral-chic-superstition/ | Superstition | A Southern drawl opens Superstition, the second album from North Carolina metalpunk upstarts Funeral Chic: “I got your melancholy, baby,” murmurs someone in the studio. And then, a chaos and a relentlessness leave no question that Funeral Chic sport the mark of the devil. Funeral Chic’s sound is a snarling summary of extreme metal in 2018, a menacing hodgepodge of blackened crust, hardcore punk, and putrid black’n’roll. This particular recipe of unholy crossover has been steadily gaining ground, thanks to Prosthetic Records and a handful of like-minded labels that have all embraced it with gusto, from Halo of Flies and Alerta Antifascista to Southern Lord. Funeral Chic is a perfect distillation, a rare beast that could just as easily open for Mayhem in a big rock club as headline an anarchist squat in Berlin. They’d probably feel more comfortable at the latter, at least politically.
Superstition opener “Rotten to the Core” is a bloody, belligerent manifesto, its frantic d-beats and off-kilter solos muddled by blasting black metal and an anthemic build that recalls Tragedy and Watain in one fetid breath. “Red Laces” serves up bruising metallic hardcore to the tune of Cursed, while “Off the Rails” is a wild-eyed pit invocation replete with gang vocals. Backed by tireless percussion, singer Dustin Carpenter is free to move all over the place—roaring, spitting, howling, and sometimes even belching up the sort of satisfying grunt that kicks off “Deep Pockets.”
Funeral Chic’s choice to sign to Prosthetic seems significant. While most of the big indie metal labels—Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Relapse—tend to take reactive approaches to their signings, Prosthetic has made a concerted effort to move in one very specific direction: crusty, fast, unabashedly political. Given that the label first rose to prominence during the metalcore boom of the early 2000s and often struggled to find its own distinctive voice, Funeral Chic’s ferocity suggests they’re getting close. (This shift mirrors Southern Lord’s own metamorphosis from doom-and-drone warehouse to purveyor of thrashy hardcore and blistering metalpunk.) Prosthetic’s roster remains a mixed lot, but Funeral Chic joins the ultra-political Dawn Ray’d, Venom Prison, and Neckbeard Deathcamp and fast-and-furious crossover crews like Dödsrit, Wildspeaker, and Trap Them.
While Funeral Chic aren’t nearly as overtly partisan as some of those labelmates, they’re not shy about their allegiances. Their motto, after all, is “VITOA (Violence Is The Only Answer),” which they have explained is their own take on “Fuck Nazis forever.” They’re vocally anti-cop, a running theme that is especially apparent on “Decorated.” Over crunching riffs streaked by Swedish death, Carpenter’s growl becomes a sneer as he rails against “Pigs of law on the prowl, like a pack of wolves/Rats that scurry, hiding from traps, selling out brothers for food.”
Funeral Chic’s impact will likely be felt in the trenches—on the road, in the underground. Their sound pulls in the best bits of multiple grime-encrusted metal and punk subgenres, the results lobbed overhead like a Molotov. They’re too ugly for the main stage, but that seems to be exactly how they like it. | 2018-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Prosthetic | November 20, 2018 | 7.1 | 5107dec8-0fed-4027-92f0-4641d1e7b878 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
Literary, emotional, and filling in pockets between indie and post-rock, the Los Angeles band’s third album is not a conversation piece, but a dialogue meant to be shared. | Literary, emotional, and filling in pockets between indie and post-rock, the Los Angeles band’s third album is not a conversation piece, but a dialogue meant to be shared. | Young Jesus: S/T | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-jesus-st/ | S/T | A name like Young Jesus is either deadly earnest or a total piss-take. This record’s literally called S/T, a statement in itself as if to say, “Please do not call it “Young Jesus’ self-titled album.’” Its seven one-word song titles can be read as a strange poem and the last two of them take up over half of S/T’s 47-minute run time. The band is listed as “composers” in the credits. It comes not with a “RIYL” list but a reading syllabus. Their most prominent interview for this album cycle was done by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Young Jesus are not at all ashamed about the lengths they’ve gone to make a big ol’ piece of art, and it might be completely insufferable if S/T didn’t prove them to be acts of generosity that break down the boundary between the artist and listener—Young Jesus’ third album is not a conversation piece, but a dialogue meant to be shared.
This is an important distinction between S/T and their sorely, but understandably, overlooked previous work. 2015’s Grow/Decompose was hyperliterate, barfly talk-rock that recalled pickled lifers like the Hold Steady and Protomartyr, but it was also a concept album that explored spiritual and sexuality confusion and fluidity—that’s frontman John Rossiter dressed in drag on the cover. Reflecting the band’s transplantation from Chicago to Los Angeles, there wasn’t any of the jocular referentiality, Midwestern rumination, or classic rock poses that made those other bands such an easy sell to aging critics.
The authorial aims of S/T are no less ambitious: “There’s a theory I’ve got cooking/about the way the body moves,” Rossiter intones on “Desert,” but it’s more of an invitation to converse, not a lecture. Compared to the ripe prose of Grow/Decompose, S/T does a lot less talking with its economic poetry: “You are a room/If you want to settle down,” introduces “River,” a plea for reconciliation that reaches a crushing, predictable conclusion as Rossiter sings with faltering stoicism: “I guess I’ll see you around.” The 10 minutes of “Feeling” become intimidatingly literal, taking extended instrumental stretches to meditate on a single verse about the metaphysical sensation of feeling the feels. These are the rare moments of emotional brinksmanship on S/T, which is more interesting in exploring the life happening in between, perhaps inspired by Mount Eerie, a key passage finds Rossiter looking at crows and trying to divine meaning. Unlike Phil Elverum, he doesn’t just find it, but it’s one that makes him feel joyously overwhelmed by meaning (“I feel a fullness/feel entire moments always change”).
At times, this awareness becomes overwhelming in the opposite direction: “Every little landscape breaks my heart,” Rossiter muses on “Desert,” later screaming, “Every little landscape breaks apart” in desperation on “Storm.” Rossiter is always in touch with his surroundings throughout S/T, abetted by a shockingly stark recording; there’s almost nothing associated with production, almost no perceptible overdubs or even reverb, the ambience arid and alien like a desert in the winter night. Or, as Rossiter puts it in “Green,” “A stranger in a strangely intimate embrace.”
Freed from conventional post-punk, Young Jesus truly earn the title of “composers,” refashioning the tools of rock music as transportive devices: “Green” flows blissfully towards a coda of harmonic feedback, while “River” is an interstate heartbreak song, surveying scenes of nothing but cracked flatland and twisted metal. In its quiet moments—most of the time—S/T shares the same out-of-time, transportive, aural sandbox appeal of Young Team, Laughing Stock, Spiderland—a working title for “Eddy” could’ve been “Getting Stoned to Slint.”
As for side-long closer “Storm,” imagine Broken Social Scene’s ”It’s All Gonna Break” rewritten as a feverish drunkalogue. “Back in ‘95/Mom and dad were screaming/And you were leaning out the back door of your mind,” Rossiter shouts. It’s initially left to interpretation whether he’s an omnipotent narrator, but his role becomes more clear as “Storm” unfolds: “Ten years later at the Holiday Inn breakfast, I started crying...I called and said I’m sick/I inherited something I can’t deny,” to which that friend or brother or substitute father figure replies, “You gotta deal with it.” It traverses 12 years in as many minutes until it finds Rossiter back in the present, standing in his kitchen under the weight of it all. “Is this existing? I’m gonna make it work,” serves as the valedictory sendoff of S/T, but it sounds like they band is just getting started. | 2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | November 20, 2017 | 7.8 | 5108f4d6-b034-4b4c-baba-ffd359e58576 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
An expanded edition of 2004’s alarm-sounding masterpiece presents the century’s greatest Southern rock band at its most powerful and its most poignant. | An expanded edition of 2004’s alarm-sounding masterpiece presents the century’s greatest Southern rock band at its most powerful and its most poignant. | Drive-By Truckers: The Complete Dirty South | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drive-by-truckers-the-complete-dirty-south/ | The Complete Dirty South | The Corvette that killed Buford Pusser nearly 50 years ago remains on public display, its mauled frame and twisted wheels perched atop a little platform in a small-town Tennessee museum. In the early ’60s, Pusser—a one-time Chicago wrestler with a head like that of a pitbull—returned to southern Tennessee to wage legal war on rebellious confederations of bootleggers, gamblers, and thieves along his home state’s chaotic border with Mississippi and Alabama. His efforts and resulting assassination attempts made him a movie star in the loose biopic Walking Tall, at least until he fatally crashed his Corvette at top speeds in 1974. But his all-too-convenient death has remained the stuff of local legend in subsequent decades, with persistent rumors that his specialized car had been sabotaged for murder. Perhaps the steering rod had been sawed, to ensure that the locals trying to make an illicit fortune would never again have to “watch out for Buford.” Though Pusser is long dead, his Corvette endures, both a reminder and portent of regional chaos.
This conspiracy and that warning are the premise of Drive-By Truckers’ “The Buford Stick,” the centerpiece of a four-song suite about the warfare for homeland sovereignty, as riveting as any movie about Pusser. It arrives late in The Complete Dirty South, an expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece. A complicated survey of power dynamics and strife in a benighted region rich in half-true folklore, hydroelectric power, and heroes who stunt-double as villains, The Dirty South has been this century’s most compelling document of Southern rock since its release 19 years ago. With the addition of three scrapped songs that eventually appeared on later records (and a multitude of archival illustrations by the band’s visual world-builder, the late Wes Freed), The Complete Dirty South adds even more nuance and intrigue through tales of family-man suicide, small-town crooks, and simple country pleasure.
Two decades ago, the Truckers were so prolific that it actually pissed off their then-new label, New West. When the band revealed in early 2004 that it had nearly finished its second double-disc opus in four years, or just six months after New West heavily invested in the already-sprawling Decoration Day, the label balked. Sure, the Truckers were unsteadily climbing a ladder of Southern rock stardom after 2001’s ballyhooed Southern Rock Opera, but how high could that actually go in the 21st century, anyway? If the label was going to release The Dirty South, the band would need to trim it to a single disc, meaning the Truckers excised three of its 17 songs.
Late in 2001, less than three years before releasing The Dirty South, the hard-touring, hard-partying band had locked into one of the most potent lineups in modern rock history. Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood had played together for 15 years by that point, excavating hardscrabble Southern stories in rock every bit as rough as the subjects. And then Jason Isbell—a sensitive marching band geek from Muscle Shoals who, at 22, had seemingly slogged through a lifetime of woe already—enlisted, creating a three-singer, three-songwriter, three-guitarist chimera whose font of stories suddenly seemed inexhaustible.
As a young writer, Isbell could look at any fucked-up scene (including his own) and extract grace and empathy, adding a welcome softness to the Truckers’ worn steel chassis. And as a burgeoning multi-instrumentalist who knew his way around a Wurlitzer or 12-string and whose horn parts sometimes came to him in dreams, he also imparted a textural depth that left the Truckers a better band even after he left a drunken mess. At the start of 2004, with steadfast drummer Brad Morgan and new bassist Shonna Tucker, the Truckers were at the very peak of their form, the most poignant and powerful they’d ever be at once.
For the Truckers, The Dirty South is the social geographic region of places, people, and attitudes that have shaped so much of their work. Though the band was inspired by the storytelling acumen of Southern hip-hop and sounds that rose from historically Black blues, their constellation of characters is largely white.“They understand that they lack the expertise to inhabit the voice of Black characters,” Stephen Deusner writes in his history of the band, Where The Devil Don’t Stay, “or speak to that experience because they have not lived close enough to it.”
They have lived close enough to poor white grievance, however, to nail its substance, spirit, and sound, even when they don’t agree with its finer points. In The Dirty South, wonder and ambition get you sucked out of a small-town auditorium by a twister, as on Hood’s “Tornadoes,” or warp you into a sad sack set on self-destruction, as on Isbell’s “Danko / Manuel.” If the martyrdom of “The Day John Henry Died” represented a victory of human willpower, it also signaled the eventual dehumanization and disappearance of blue-collar jobs. On Hood’s “Goode’s Field Road,” a narrator decides to get himself killed just to feed his family with insurance money; Hood even considers throwing himself off “Lookout Mountain” to escape creditors and tax collectors. The heart-rending closer “Goddamn Lonely Love” is the farewell transmission, one last sigh when there’s nothing left to do or say. If life is only about working hard enough to survive, the Truckers collectively reason, why bother with either?
But they sing for the survivalists, too, the hustlers who sell whatever part of their soul is required to keep up the fight. That is the essence, after all, of the songs about Buford Pusser and all the Southern outlaws that defied him. The Truckers have long and lovingly called such folks “Heathens,” even giving them a theme song by that name on Decoration Day. They are simply trying to exist, even when that means killing someone to do so. It’s the firefighter who gets paid to set car dealerships aflame or the deep-woods scion begging “the ATF and the ABI” to fuck around and find out. And it’s the Walmart employee of the masterful “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” looking back at his life as an outlaw and tripping over an existential crisis therein. Those old days offered the kind of living that might have killed him fast, but this new existence just means slowly dying without too much living at all. “I could clothe and feed my family,” Hood sings of those dangerous days, his voice cracking like a desiccated patch of red clay. “Still have time to love my pretty wife.”
For all the pains and struggles that radiate through The Dirty South, there is joy here, too, a feeling that this updated set bolsters. It was always there, of course, especially in Cooley’s songs. Yes, “Where the Devil Don’t Stay” is a Southern noir scene of class conflict and hypocrisy, but the narrator’s dad plays stump-top poker as he mans his backwoods moonshine still. There are worse ways to live, let alone die.
Previously relegated to a B-sides compendium, the linchpin here is Isbell’s “TVA,” an ode to the simple pleasures of the very complicated Tennessee Valley Authority and the 49 dams it uses to power the South and manage its waterways. The massive federal project destroyed ecosystems and small settlements, a Truckers subject long before Isbell even joined. Isbell nods to these problems, but he focuses on the little personal wonders he found atop Wilson Dam, the massive neoclassical beauty near the Truckers’ Muscle Shoals homeland. He fishes as a kid from the top with his raconteur father, gets to second base at 15 atop its locks, and then realizes as an adult his ancestors may never have endured the Great Depression without its existence.
From Pusser’s assassination to the insurance men investigating the clandestine suicide of “Goode’s Field Road,” The Dirty South ripples with anti-authority rhetoric. “TVA,” however, refuses to look FDR’s gift horse in the mouth by finding at least some happiness in what you’ve got. As his acoustic shuffles and the pedal steel sighs, Isbell’s hangdog tone is less about glory than whatever contentment he can muster. The Truckers have made a career articulating the assorted “dualities of the Southern thing.” A government gift that also ruined lives, Wilson Dam is both gift and curse, the duality encapsulated by 1.3 million cubic yards of concrete.
Back in 2004, the domain of The Dirty South might have felt mythical and far-off, its cast of outlaws, pariahs, and survivalists all part of some distant land that surely didn’t exist amid the digital promise of the glittering 21st century. The Drive-By Truckers sang of a fractious but quaint past, fading into the rearview of the future. American anxiety during those Bush-Cheney years hinged on outside peril, not the scorn festering in our national backyard. We know better now: The pernicious resentment and fear of poor if privileged whites have become dominant political themes of the last decade, an essential raw ingredient for the rise of Donald Trump and associates. In their way, the Truckers—some old enough to remember when Pusser died, others old enough only to have seen his scorched Corvette in a museum—called it.
“Motherfucker in the White House said a change was comin’ round,” Hood sings late into “Puttin’ People on the Moon.” “But I’m workin’ at the Walmart, Mary Alice in the ground.” It’s a perfect post-industrial American jeremiad, reducing the wages of Reaganomics, government bloat, and private healthcare cruelty into five irascible minutes. Like The Dirty South as a whole, it has aged tragically well, as the vein of rage it exposed with such clarity has come into full public view. The Drive-By Truckers didn’t invent these woes, of course, and their progressive politics have long since suggested they don’t believe in many of them. But few other American rock bands, Southern or otherwise, have better sounded the alarm bells of its own region than the Truckers did on these 17 songs. | 2023-06-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | June 21, 2023 | 8.7 | 510a12d8-c1f5-437e-872f-d37c499593e7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Following the success of his viral hit “White Iverson,” Post Malone releases a 68-minute album that shows exactly why he should have never been given the chance to release a 68-minute album. | Following the success of his viral hit “White Iverson,” Post Malone releases a 68-minute album that shows exactly why he should have never been given the chance to release a 68-minute album. | Post Malone: Stoney | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22686-stoney/ | Stoney | “White Iverson” is not a foundational brick; it is a sandcastle on a windy day with a high tide. No one who appreciated the breezy distraction of a radio song in 2015 wanted to hear nearly 70 minutes of Post Malone a year later. There are new one-hit wonders to enjoy; there are pop icons making important works; there’s probably a book somewhere worth reading.
The song was charming, though: Through the haze of its production and Post Malone’s slurred delivery was a certain nostalgic desire and childlike wonder. Somehow, he hopped on a tour with Justin Bieber, and Universal subsidiary Republic Records believed that Stoney, a 68-minute long dirge, was the correct use of his talents. Even if you liked “White Iverson,” was there anyone who thought to themselves, I want to hear this guy’s story! What’s he all about? We need to know more!? For all of Stoney’s faults, its most damning one poisons the record at the source: This thing is completely soulless.
It’s not for a lack of trying, however—Post Malone (real name: Austin Post) is presenting his most authentic self here, talking openly about relationships and taking too many drugs and drinking a little too much, amidst numerous “we made it” anthems. But he’s simply not a compelling artist; he doesn’t say anything new about these struggles, doesn’t frame them in a particularly memorable way, and has nothing to say now that he’s wrestled with his fame. What pushes Stoney past being merely forgettable and into a kind of cynical, punishing listen is the access to a bunch of producers and songwriters that came together behind the 21-year-old to ensure a product so highly polished, and so clearly connect-the-dots, it robs him of any trace of charm. The album ends up doubling as a tacit acknowledgment that, hey, maybe this guy is just not that interesting.
If it’s lowlights you want, Stoney’s got them: “I Fall Apart” brutally crashes the party, appearing right after “White Iverson.” The song is full of acoustic guitars, and features Post’s most obnoxious crutch: that weird little vibrato thing he does, a vain attempt to convey emotion. “I Fall Apart,” a self-lacerating breakup anthem, recalls Staind, working that same woe-is-me white boy pain with an unpleasant voice slathered all over it. “Go Flex” boasts a foot-stomp chorus and enough echo to sound exactly like the Lumineers or any other faceless “whoa-oh-oh” band; it’s as unholy as it sounds on paper.
Stoney indulges in a few huge, expertly written, admittedly catchy hooks, but since Post doesn’t have a strong voice and is usually not saying much more than cliches, many of these faux-triumphant songs sound tailor-made for headphone commercials. See: “Congratulations,” with a “let me collect this check” Quavo appearance, or “Too Young,” a song that’s probably about a year old, and already in line to appear on the soundtrack for the next movie about a white boxer.
To its credit, Stoney lets its best run of songs loose near the beginning of the album, after turgid opener “Broken Whiskey Glass.” “Big Lie” has a nice, booming DJ Mustard beat, sounding like something that could’ve been on Anti or SremmLife 2, and one of the record’s strongest hooks, mostly because it plays into the same kind of sleepy-eyed charm of “White Iverson.” The baroque beats on songs like “Dej Vu,” with Justin Bieber, and the Pharrell-assisted “Up There,” are begging for someone with a little more humor to show up, maybe Young Thug or any of the under-21 Atlanta guys. Still, Post Malone finds those grooves nicely, and they are the least burdensome songs on the record.
I have a perhaps wishfully optimistic hope that Stoney could mark the end of a specific kind of rap album: the spiffy cash-in after the viral hit or mixtape run. Post feels like the flimsiest artist yet to get this treatment, and he got such an extravagant treatment at that. With a recent era of mixtape rappers on the decline, along with the steady hemorrhaging of album sales and bigger names taking bigger risks, it seems as if this type of hollow release could soon become as anachronistic as an $18 CD is today. | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Republic | December 15, 2016 | 4.5 | 510a49e9-863f-483c-bdbc-f9fc343cc970 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | |
On her 1992 album, the iconoclastic vocalist and her band of German experimentalists pushed each other to virtuosic extremes, spanning styles and genres. | On her 1992 album, the iconoclastic vocalist and her band of German experimentalists pushed each other to virtuosic extremes, spanning styles and genres. | Phew: Our Likeness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phew-our-likeness/ | Our Likeness | In 1981, a young man sat quietly in Conny Plank’s legendary Cologne recording studio, watching Japanese singer Phew record her debut album. She had been whisked from Osaka to Germany at only 20 years old on the strength of her first single with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Her backing band included krautrock legends Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, some of the only musicians in the world who the young iconoclast adored. The band decided to improvise, and Phew wrote lyrics on the spot. Miraculously, her voice, though sometimes small and uncertain, gradually found its place amid Czukay and Liebezeit’s bang and clatter.
The spectator during those sessions was Chrislo Haas of German new wave bands D.A.F. and Liaisons Dangereuses. Though he didn’t introduce himself at the time, he contacted Phew almost a decade later in Tokyo to suggest they record together. Haas masterminded the sessions for Phew’s eclectic 1992 record, Our Likeness, inviting Liebezeit back to record with a new generation of the German underground in Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten and Thomas Stern of Crime and the City Solution. Now in her early 30s, Phew reprised her role as vocalist in Plank’s studio. This time she came prepared.
The years between Phew’s self-titled debut and Our Likeness, which is now being reissued by Mute, were turbulent but productive. The first Cologne recordings were pivotal for her—she has admitted that she likely would not have continued making music without meeting Plank—but they triggered a period of aimlessness. Encountering Plank’s immaculate studio and his meticulous recording techniques challenged her punk rock ethos. She spent five years reconciling what she observed in Germany with her own simple, go-ahead approach. Meanwhile, her legend grew as the vocalist who recorded with Sakamoto and Can and then disappeared. She returned as a more assured artist with 1987’s View, a poppy, synth-driven affair with relatively restrained, melodic vocal lines.
Though Our Likeness is Phew’s third album, it is the spiritual sequel to her debut. On both albums, Liebezeit’s percussion unlocked the potential of Phew’s vocals across their language barrier. “Music is a language, and the music a person makes is dictated to a certain degree by their mother tongue,” she explained in a 2003 interview for The Wire. “You can hear it particularly in the drumming. Listen to a German drummer and you will be able to detect the influence of the German tongue on his playing.” Frustrated by the constraints of singing in Japanese, Phew catapults her vocals off of the taut platform of Liebezeit’s hyper-precise drumming, twisting and stretching her words with confidence that she will land back in the pocket.
The German experimentalists transform each track of Our Likeness into a world of its own. The band does its best Liquid Liquid impression on “Our Element” while she barks over their dance-punk groove until she runs out of breath. “Being” is the most surprising song for its big, dumb, heavy-metal riffage, but Phew’s growls succeed in making the track more disturbing than silly. Elsewhere, her lilting, sing-song melody lifts the chiming guitars on “Spring” into sublime, airy territory, setting the stage for Hacke’s soaring guitar solo.
Phew complements Haas and company’s most outré tendencies. On “Smell,” sound effects of water splashing, coins dropping, and spooky sci-fi ambience are punctuated by crashing guitar chords. The track becomes tensely dramatic as each sound contrasts with Phew’s calm syllable-by-syllable recitation, as if some malevolent force is threatening to interrupt a child’s bedtime story. These unstructured moments contrast with the blissful pop of the title track, whose twangy guitars and clockwork drumming build to a climax of Phew’s tightly controlled vocal acrobatics, hovering and twisting above the instruments like calligraphic skywriting. Like a punk-rock Meredith Monk, Phew has tirelessly developed her inimitable singing style for over 40 years, from her late-’70s punk band Aunt Sally to her recent run of solo records. When her 1981 debut went out of print, it was heralded “the great lost Can album.” On her triumphant return to Cologne, Phew stepped out of the shadow of her collaborators and made music that sounded unmistakably her own. | 2023-02-22T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-22T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mute | February 22, 2023 | 8.3 | 510c2691-4f52-4106-8ae6-b0c4d0ddc795 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The New York rapper aims for political awareness on his latest, trading out his clever rhyme schemes for more clarity. Though varied and sometimes powerful, its themes feel undercooked. | The New York rapper aims for political awareness on his latest, trading out his clever rhyme schemes for more clarity. Though varied and sometimes powerful, its themes feel undercooked. | Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23092-all-amerikkkan-bada/ | All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ | Joey Bada$$ began his career rapping about his rapping. The subject matter was secondary to how deftly he jammed together as many words as he could into his bars and most often, he executed effectively. Now on his second LP, Joey has elected to use his elevated exposure to address the societal ills of our time. As he said recently, “I personally feel like I was put here on this Earth not only to inspire, but to wake people up.” On All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, Joey raps about police brutality, systematic oppression and its consequences, and of course, Donald Trump. It’s a thoughtful and mature step for the 22-year-old Brooklyn rapper, five years removed from his days as the precocious teenager behind 1999. On the new record, Joey favors lyrical clarity over the tongue-twisting rhymes of his younger days. Despite the directness, however, he does not surpass surface-level awareness, rendering AABA little more than a good intention.
Joey aims for positivity on AABA. The first half, which he calls “The Heroes Side,” is relaxed—a return to form after the darkness of Summer Knights and B4.DA.$$. It’s light and melodic music with boom-bap drums providing the rhythm—the kind of unimposing tunes to soundtrack a backyard party; they just happen to veer near dark topics. The opening tracks (“Good Morning Amerikkka,” “For My People,” and “Temptation”) reflect the sunny mood, sounding like polished and complete updates of the spare Golden Age music Joey revered so greatly on past releases. Later, he cements his commitment to hope when he raps, “I exchange my negative for a positive,” on the back-half cut “Super Predator.” (As with other backwards-looking efforts, it brings to mind Q-Tip’s own 1991 request to “get in the zone of positivity, not negativity.”) The upbeat attitude both underscores and undermines the album. Optimism is an asset in times of progress, but it can sound like blissful ignorance, as on “Temptation,” where Joey chides someone who is “complaining all day but in the same condition,” and apparently “enslaved by their religion.” Yet, he offers no alternative to this ill-established problem, rapping only, “Watch me use my prophets/Get them all to listen/I’ve been on a mission.” The panacean message and “mission” remain unclear.
Joey excels greatest on AABA when he does not try to use the album as a thesis paper that tries to scan as many injustices as possible. “Rockabye Baby” and “Ring the Alarm,” which slot into “The Vindictive Villainous Side,” are tough songs that embody Joey’s anger. They are also his greatest lyrical showcases. He doesn’t prescribe advice, nor does he seek solutions. The former is a boastful call-to-arms, and the latter is a lyrical barrage with lines like, “It’s the double entendre monster/Taking haunting constant trips through your conscious,” which is among his best ever. While constant one-liners were a bit leaden on B4.DA.$$, they are sorely missed on AABA.
Along with his political ambitions, AABA is Joey’s most commercially-minded endeavor to date, containing his first gold single, “Devastated.” It’s an anonymous song that conveys no original thoughts or sounds, with lines like, “Just getting better each day/Stackin’ that cheddar cheesecake.” There’s also the similarly banal “Land of the Free,” which presents many facts but does not advance any discourse beyond what we already know: “Donald Trump is not equipped to take the country over.” Got it, thanks.
All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ is a survey of consciousness. The title of “Super Predator” could potentially prompt a young listener to learn more about the explicitly racist term favored in the ’90s ; the song, however, will teach little. The closing “Amerikkkan Idol” has a bad Lionel Richie pun and tired lines of “killing the game,” but it also has uplifting lines about black excellence, as well as a spoken word outro that name-checks the late Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old black man whose death at the hands of Baton Rouge police last summer sparked national protest and outrage.
The record is a starting point for those who may not have thought much of economic, social, and political disparity. Joey even said as much, explaining recently, “I’ve been watching all these events over the last four years and I’ve been feeling helpless…. But I feel like this is where it starts: me opening up the conversation.” Likewise, it’s a beginning for Joey, who’s still figuring out how to bring broader thinking into an artform he’s, at times, mastered. (A recent “Mask Off” freestyle should be proof enough that he can really rap when stakes are less daunting.) Throughout, the album is trapped between explication and relatability, delivering only undercooked ideas. As he says, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ may be an introduction, but for now, it is a sacrifice of Joey Bada$$’s natural ability as he navigates toward enlightened communication. | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Pro Era / Cinematic | April 10, 2017 | 6.4 | 5113f210-06e2-4487-b778-17a764934ca5 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Although Protomartyr's debut album takes several Detroit reference points in its stride, it's more than "a Detroit record": Their characters aren't hollow archetypes, but people with ideas, struggles, and stories set to dextrously played speed punk, psych melodies, and gentle fingerpicking. | Although Protomartyr's debut album takes several Detroit reference points in its stride, it's more than "a Detroit record": Their characters aren't hollow archetypes, but people with ideas, struggles, and stories set to dextrously played speed punk, psych melodies, and gentle fingerpicking. | Protomartyr: No Passion All Technique | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18192-protomartyr-no-passion-all-technique/ | No Passion All Technique | It's easy to speculate what kind of impact the city of Detroit has on a Detroit-based artist's work. With the general perception of the city's decay (and its "halftime in America" stereotype), anything "angry" in a song could quickly and cheaply be attributed to the artist's surroundings. Maybe that's partially due to some long-held MC5- or Ted Nugent-based aggression archetype. On some records, though, Detroit's presence is pretty well spelled out. Tyvek's last one, for example, had "Wayne County Roads". Similarly, Protomartyr don't hide their hometown on No Passion All Technique, their debut album. There's "Jumbo's", which is about the bar in Midtown, and "Ypsilanti", a city 40 minutes away. On their debut album, they tell stories set in these places (and others), and back them with a diverse rock'n'roll ecosystem.
"Machinist Man" is the story of a night foreman who works all week in the city. Come the weekend, he's drinking High Life after High Life. But then, Protomartyr counterbalance the foreman's story with this sentence: "There are things that are built in the skulls of men." And that line, bellowed in Joe Casey's baritone, embodies why No Passion All Technique isn't just "an album about Detroit". It's set in Detroit, its characters live in and around Detroit, but this album is bigger than one place. Protomartyr's characters are more than hollow archetypes or faceless B-roll factory workers from Searching for Sugar Man. These are people with ideas, struggles, and stories. The three schizophrenic gentlemen detailed in "Ypsilanti", for example: One of them throws books out windows, one of them "could still punch through walls," and the third delivers an enigmatic monologue: "Call me not interference, my name is I.R. Dung. If I see my hands, sir, I know they do no wrong."
These are stories delivered with an alarming amount of sonic dexterity. While "Hot Wheel City" has the anthemic rafter reach of a Hold Steady track, "Free Supper" is pure speed punk. "Jumbo's" falls into a droning, hypnotic psych melody, and though it stays on a specific course, it keeps gradually fluctuating in volume, suddenly adding layers of instruments and suddenly stripping them away. Then there's something like "Three Swallows"-- paced, fingerpicked, warm. There, the band quietly ruminates on drinking-- a topic All Passion No Technique picks up a few times-- plus loss, aging, and heartbreak. It's a devastating and human track, and the song doesn't settle for sonic or tonal simplicity. Midway through, it gets a set of loud and chunky acid-washed guitars. After about two minutes, it's over way too soon.
Scouring the lyrics sheet for No Passion All Technique, you'll find cold detachment and cynicism all over the place. "Jumbo's" opens with the rigidly delivered line, "I will touch the screen no more/ I will not have a drink." But this album is never bitter, and it's never a slog. A song like "Feral Cats" even borders on absurdity. Frantic instrumentals accompany Casey's vocals, which are paranoid about dust, nurses, and warfare. Then, with a big triumphant hook and a shouted vocal, they sing, "Just like feral cats!" Is this a joke? Is this legitimate concern, like how we should probably honest-to-god fear feral pigs? It's a song delivered with either gravity or a smirk, and either way, it's a great song.
What's refreshing about No Passion All Technique is its lack of immediate sonic reference points. There are loose ones-- vocals like Nick Cave, punk guitars-- but this is a record in its own universe. There's jittery instrumentals, cynicism, and paranoia, sure, but you can't define it by those things. There's also heartwrenching loss and awesome guitar solos. And there's a humanness and empathy to this material that's increasingly rare in rock songs. For a debut LP, No Passion All Technique is an impressive showing of sonic, lyrical, and emotional range, and it all falls under a cohesive banner. | 2013-06-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-06-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Urinal Cake | June 17, 2013 | 7.8 | 5119a891-e0d1-49be-8b83-063264f2378e | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook’s latest installment of power pop ventures into Laurel Canyon and post-punk without clouding its permanent sunshine. | Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook’s latest installment of power pop ventures into Laurel Canyon and post-punk without clouding its permanent sunshine. | Young Guv: GUV IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-guv-guv-iv/ | GUV IV | In 2020, a spring tour opening for White Reaper took Ben Cook, aka Young Guv, as far as New Mexico before the live music industry collapsed. With the remaining tour canceled, Cook’s finances devastated, and his apartment in New York already sublet, all he and his band could do was stay put. They spent nine months in New Mexico, holed up in a sustainable Earthship structure with little else to do but write songs.
This detour resulted in two records—Guv III and this one, Guv IV. The songs on Guv III fit Young Guv’s best-known sound: sunny, Britpop-y power pop, driven by Cook’s sweet, earworm melodies. On Guv IV, he branches out. Leisurely harmonies and intermittent slide guitar give “Change Your Mind” a Laurel Canyon feel. “Cry 2 Sleep” is a little bit yacht rock, while “Maybe I Should Luv Somebody Else” adopts a brazen country strut, and “Nervous Around U” whips out the drum machine for dancey post-punk.
As on all Young Guv albums, the music is lovestruck and yearning. Dreams and memory pervade the lyrics; there’s a sense of absence making the heart fonder, perhaps of Cook filling in imperfections with half-constructed memories. It all gives the songs a feeling of distance; they’re dreamy and not quite solid. This mostly works in Young Guv’s favor. He’s an artist who deals in vibes more than real emotional heft. The swagger in his songwriting, and the way his vocals are simultaneously achingly earnest and crisply nonchalant, make the evergreen breakup themes feel classic, not cliché. His best lyrics float on surface level, short and sharp rhymes arranged around a single-line hook. When he ventures into more poetic territory, like on “Change Your Mind” and “Wind in My Blood,” it starts to get a little purple; still, his knack for melody helps.
Sometimes these songs are too insubstantial and simply don’t stick. “Sign From God” is pleasant, but not much else. Sandwiched by more memorable cuts, the restrained tempo and unaffected vocals of “Love Me Don’t Leave Me” drift into the ether. When Cook works within his signature sound, as on Guv III, the familiar and crafted-to-perfection style promises a reliably good time. But his stylistic experiments are spottier, leaving his weaker ideas more exposed. The album’s best twists, like the hazy slow-down of “Change Your Mind” or the antsy grooves of “Nervous Around U,” prove that a more varied Young Guv would work well with tighter editing instead of sprawling double releases. As it is, Guv IV is a fun summer spin, but doesn’t coalesce into the memorable statement a pop songwriter like Cook could be capable of. | 2022-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | June 29, 2022 | 6.7 | 511b68a0-dc04-4c51-a018-6e0a90a94c72 | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart have worked with Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Wilco. On their first album as a duo, they make improvisational art rock with an inquisitive, surrealist bent. | Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart have worked with Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Wilco. On their first album as a duo, they make improvisational art rock with an inquisitive, surrealist bent. | Ohmme: Parts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ohmme-parts/ | Parts | Like an existentialist in a sundress, the Chicago duo Ohmme has a distant, relaxed allure. On their debut album, Parts, Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham (who works for the company that helps produce Pitchfork Music Festival) let their two guitars gambol as drums nuzzle up to nimble, unpredictable vocals. Their music is improvisational art rock that flings itself high into the atmosphere but lands lightly, like it didn’t just crash down from outer space.
Ohmme have a wholesome origin story: They went to the same high school, a few years apart, and noticed each other’s talents from afar. Cunningham was captivated by Stewart’s voice when she saw her in a high school production of Little Shop of Horrors; Stewart had seen Cunningham play in a local rock band. Deeply embedded in the young Chicago music scene, the pair sang with Chance the Rapper on Coloring Bookand Surf. Stewart co-fronted her high school band with Vic Mensa, while Cunningham sings backing vocals with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on tour. When they formed Ohmme in 2014, it was as an experiment. They mostly improvised in the beginning, and still do in their live shows.
Cunningham and Stewart bring a strange bounce to their music. On the title track, they harmonize on free-associative lyrics like, “We were hot for a minute like two boiled eggs, and at times I want to crush the ceiling in between my legs”; it’s a slipstream shift between reality and surrealism. Like a Carmen Maria Machado short story, their concise, bracing vision of our world is just warped enough to feel accurate. In “Sentient Beings,” they deal with mislaid faith, but they’re so calm about losing their religion that it makes the ordeal even more disorienting. Depending on your tolerance for instability, the lack of solid ground in Ohmme’s landscapes could feel terrifying or thrilling.
If there’s a grounding element in the project, it’s Cunningham and Stewart’s mutual appreciation. Each piece of Ohmme’s sound is flexibly loving of the others—and flexibility is a theme of Parts. They’re into the bendiness of life, the contortions. Lyrics that indulge private thoughts and music that allows the pair to highlight each other’s talents give listening to the record the frisson of eavesdropping. Ohmme’s close harmonies can ascend into bluegrassy exaltation. The improvisational guitars intensify and ease up against each other; sometimes it sounds like they’re poking at one another, trying to tease out a lush, full strum. Percussionist Matt Carroll, a late addition, does astounding work curving around the duo with finesse like Fiona Apple’s collaboration with Charley Drayton on The Idler Wheel.
Parts, for the most part, is mysterious and indirect. This constant elusive smirk could wear on you if you’re not into that type of thing. Ohmme like to raise provocative questions, then fuck off with coy guitars. “There’s a myriad of whys,” they admit in “Liquor Cabinet.” If you would like them to tell you what the answers might be, if you would like them to show their cards, then you have to pay close attention, because it only happens in quick flashes. “Pick me a peach,” they say, and you urgently need to find one. “I want a new icon,” they say, and you’re like, Fuck! I do too! It is really satisfying when Ohmme make demands.
Most of the time, Ohmme linger at the threshold of, and in the spaces in between, feelings: anger, clarity, elation. They’ve gotten close enough to each one to interrogate it with curiosity and sensitivity. Scattering the puzzle pieces, as Cunningham and Stewart do on Parts, has its own function—that’s how you find all the strange little edges. You start to see the insight you can gather when you’re forced to look at each part of the whole. | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | August 27, 2018 | 7.6 | 511cb27d-8f44-4f51-80ed-f680c7b4557f | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
On their debut album, the German duo Africaine 808 reinvent the entire concept of "world music" from the ground up. Although they sample styles ranging from Nigerian funk to spiritual jazz to cumbia, what unifies their work is its deep sense of musicality. The songs evolve as inscrutably and as naturally as the movements of a crowd. | On their debut album, the German duo Africaine 808 reinvent the entire concept of "world music" from the ground up. Although they sample styles ranging from Nigerian funk to spiritual jazz to cumbia, what unifies their work is its deep sense of musicality. The songs evolve as inscrutably and as naturally as the movements of a crowd. | Africaine 808: Basar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21398-basar/ | Basar | Three songs into Africaine 808's debut album, over rippling drum machine and hand percussion, a British DJ named Alex Voice declares, "Sound systems—that's where it began." He's talking about the enormous stacks of speakers that have rocked the UK ever since they were imported from Jamaica in the 1950s, and his voiceover is part history lesson, part autobiography and part sermon. The title of the song, "Language of the bass," comes from a refrain that he intones with the gravitas usually reserved for scripture, and true to form, the song's synthesized bassline writhes like a thing alive, its portamento glide and nimble syncopations as expressive as glyphs.
But Basar isn't really a sound-system album; with the exception of "Language of the Bass," UK dance culture barely figures. Instead, it's an album about hybridity, about the way that far-flung styles and sounds can make excellent dance partners. Refreshingly, there is nothing didactic about the German duo's approach. Rather than reprising established histories, Africaine 808 seem determined to devise their own narrative, one that reinvents the entire concept of "world music" from the ground up.
This has been their way since the beginning. One of Africaine 808's early singles, "Lagos, New York," built a bridge between Nigerian rhythms and New York disco, while "Cosmicumbia" linked cumbia, cosmic disco, and Afrobeat. Basar incorporates a host of disparate musical styles and conventions, but never in a tokenistic way: Instead, it's a joyful mélange of sounds and rhythms, all underpinned by intricately programmed TR-808 patterns. In "Ngoni," a West African string instrument provides the center of gravity for a rich, evolving array of rolling hand percussion, marimba, and fat, throbbing synthesizers. "Crawfish Got Soul" begins with the kind of jokey sample you might expect to find on 3 Feet High and Rising—a barking seal, a vintage recording of an MC exhorting people to loosen up and dance—and quickly launches into a sprightly, Southern-fried mix of upright bass, blues guitar, horns, vibraphone, and Farfisa organs.
Their hybrid approach is an extension of the DJ-friendly edits of African and Latin music that the duo's members, Dirk Leyers and DJ Nomad, have been making for their Vulkandance parties for years. But Basar doesn't limit its perspective to the dancefloor: "The Awakening," the album's opening track, deploys airy horns and strings in a way that's reminiscent of spiritual jazz, and the 808 doesn't even enter until halfway through the track. All of the album's songs tend to follow similarly serpentine arrangements, evolving as inscrutably and as naturally as the movements of a crowd. When they want to, they can also write flat-out beautiful songs: "Ready for Something New" is a tender tune featuring the vocals of the Israeli singer Ofri Brin, while "Fallen From the Stars" sounds like a melancholy response to Beanfield's great broken-beat ballad "The Season."
What really unifies the album is its deep sense of musicality. The album wouldn't be the same without the contributions of the Congolese/German percussionist Dodo N'Kishi, a longtime collaborator of Mouse on Mars, and the Ghanian percussionist Eric Owusu, who has played with Ebo Taylor. On "Language of the Bass," the interplay between bassline, squeaky synth lead, hi-hats, and myriad other accenting sounds amounts to a dazzling feat of syncopation. Despite that song's title and voiceover, what ultimately makes it sing isn't just its bassline, but how the pieces conjure the whole. With Basar, they have assembled a vast glossary of fresh sounds, considerably enriching the language of contemporary dance music in the process. | 2016-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Global | Golf Channel | February 16, 2016 | 7.9 | 5123e57c-42a8-4827-94f1-83361bbede9e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Brooklyn band's explosively verbal, shapeshifting, and snarky emo-pop explores how intersectional identities move within predominantly white spaces. | The Brooklyn band's explosively verbal, shapeshifting, and snarky emo-pop explores how intersectional identities move within predominantly white spaces. | Proper.: I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/proper-i-spent-the-winter-writing-songs-about-getting-better/ | I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better | When Erik Garlington changed his band’s name from Great Wight to Proper., his fans immediately assumed the stylization was an Into It. Over It. homage. Considering his rich history of playing emo inside baseball, they could be forgiven. After all, Great Wight included a song about a life-changing Tiny Moving Parts basement show on 2017’s The Suburbs Have Ruined My Life, and while that album title could pass for a Wonder Years lyric, I Spent the Winter Writing Songs About Getting Better comes from an actual Wonder Years lyric. The reality is that “Proper.” is a reference to the one topic that always takes priority in Garlington’s lyrics: “We got it from white people telling us, 'You talk white. You talk, like, real proper. One of your parents must be white!'” The subject matter hasn’t changed much from The Suburbs Have Ruined My Life—Garlington is still venting righteous frustration over the ways his band’s intersectional identities function in predominantly white spaces, but his view has expanded far beyond their local emo scene or Kansas City to encompass the near-entirety of American society.
Garlington has said he envisions Proper. as the realization of the extremely weird-but-apparently-real Max Bemis and Kanye West collaboration that occurred sometime during The Life of Pablo. Truth be told, there’s far more Say Anything than Kanye in Proper.’s explosively verbal, shapeshifting, and snarky emo-pop, which has earned apt comparisons to Modern Baseball and respect from Los Campesinos! As far as Kanye, Proper. share his tendency to, well, say anything and an insatiable grudge against higher education. As it did on The College Dropout, this tends to result in the rare moments where I Spent the Winter doesn’t quite land right.
On “Toby,” Garlington takes the perspective of a self-conscious high school senior who has no idea what they’re doing in college (“I was just a kid last year, now I’m planning my life out at 18”). He actually manages empathy for the kind of suburban Bible Belters who tormented him throughout his life, those that follow the path of least resistance into their 50s and lack the conviction to follow any ambitions that deviate from the norm—“I start a creative writing class next week/Maybe I’ll finish that novel I started at 20/God, I hope they like me,” he sings. Conversely, “IDFWA (Art School)” vents bile at his peers while also having the greatest number of lyrical clunkers (“You’re just not into politics/Unless it’s about weed/Then you’re a proletariat/Armed with sickle and bong”).
Yet “IDFWA” performs a necessary function as I Spent the Winter’s release valve, given the lifetime of interconnected indignities Garlington can recall at a moment’s notice. “I hope you don’t mind if I tell a few stories about my life,” he meekly asks on “Curtain’s Down! Throw In the Towel,” and every single slight comes under the microscope for reexamination, whether the humiliations are relatively minor (“Joined the band to play drums, they put me on fucking trombone”) or traumatic. “I just want other black kids to like me someday,” he sings as his sixth-grade self on “Lime Green Jheri Curl.” But he’s into Rocky Horror Picture Show and Dragonriders of Pern, which means “my white friends say the n-word more than me and that it’s okay because they’re blacker than me.” Then none of them show up to his birthday.
Trying to take in I Spent the Winter in one sitting, as the man once said, is way too much. In all likelihood, Garlington is trying to make the act of listening to Proper. as overwhelming as experiencing his life firsthand. As with Bemis’ most potent work, I Spent the Winter’s words writhe on the page, emitting the kind of radioactive energy that circulates when someone says something they know can never be taken back. “When you hear this you’ll call me ungrateful, but mom, it’s true,” he spits on “White Sheep,” a song that hinges on the chorus “I hate my family/Fucking hate my name.”
As with “Lime Green Jheri Curl” (“Am I broken/Am I an alien/I don’t think there’s anywhere I belong”), the cracked melodies and universal feelings of alienation in these hooks could be extracted from the most lily-white suburban Drive Thru Records CD, even if they’re attached to the extremely specific experience of Erik Garlington. It’s one of the many ways Garlington validates his choice to forgo college and/or “the military industrial complex” to cast his lot with an all-black emo band in Brooklyn, because this is the kind of music that created a real community for him—“There could be someone who looks just like me that needs to hear they’re not alone/Or at least they don’t have to be.” With the exception of the last Great Wight record, I can’t say I’ve heard anything quite like I Spent the Winter, and Proper. has made it their life’s work to make sure that’s no longer the case. | 2019-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Scary Monsters | August 17, 2019 | 7.4 | 51282202-b55b-4abb-972c-a86d78f9b429 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The restless avant-garde soul singer is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future, now more than ever on the most pop-focused album of her prolific career. | The restless avant-garde soul singer is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future, now more than ever on the most pop-focused album of her prolific career. | Georgia Anne Muldrow: Overload | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/georgia-anne-muldrow-overload/ | Overload | Picture Georgia Anne Muldrow as a cosmic traveler tinkering with the limits of humanity’s musical norms. You’re dealing with an artist who has deeply studied both the Book of Sun Ra and Baduizm. Her interpretation has spawned one of the most daring catalogs to hit this planet—a vast, urbane suite that draws from historic spirituals, the R&B avant-garde, Afrofuturism, Madlib beats, and the soul of Roberta Flack. The epic scope of Muldrow’s body of work forms the funkiest of odysseys.
Overload is the singer’s 17th album since 2006. With an affinity for warping classic sounds into new forms, Muldrow looked well-placed at the turn of the decade as a group of emerging artists (Miguel, the Weeknd, Frank Ocean) created daring new music that attacked soul’s old boundaries. But the California virtuoso was too different—too out there—to insert herself even into this pack of renegade stars. There are few R&B norms that Muldrow hasn’t looked to contort. Her penance for the approach has been near-zero mainstream reward.
On Overload, Muldrow is in her most pop-focused space ever. The songs are tighter and the melodies are chirpier. It’s a release that refuses to pander to any identifiable trends, using sophisticated cosmic synths, rumbling basslines, and cutting lyrics. Look at this as Muldrow’s second debut—the record that future crate-diggers who have mined this undervalued-in-her-own-time star will recommend to friends first, before they work their way through her weird and wonderful catalog. It also might be her best album yet.
Her first record with Brainfeeder, and featuring Flying Lotus as an executive producer, we get the kind of limitless musical eccentricities that made Los Angeles a beat music mélange. Muldrow’s eclectic tinkerings will play well to fans of label star Thundercat—“Bobbie’s Dittie,” in particular, is cast in the same modern speed-jazz style. But even with Brainfeeder’s backing, Muldrow collaborations roster features some surprise draft picks. There’s Mike & Keys, aka the Futuristiks, whose client list includes G-Eazy, Nipsey Hussle, and Dom Kennedy. The pair helm four tracks here, offering Muldrow fresh looks that fit comfortably.
Take the title track, a loving portrait of a sturdy relationship that’s been built over time. The Futuristiks serve up rat-tat-tat drums, very little bass, and keyboard riffs that flutter like butterflies in the stomach. “I’m on overload and overdrive/I’m overwhelmed,” Muldrow sings sweetly, presumably to husband and long-time collaborator Dudley Perkins. There have been a million songs that cover similar subject matter, but “Overload” boasts a giddy happiness not always found in songs about long-term bonds.
Even as she tests new sonic realms, Overload is defined by one of Muldrow’s long-term remits: immersing herself in as many forms of Black expression as possible. “I.O.T.A. (Instrument Of The Ancestors)” features traditional African vibration delivered with spacey synths and pulsing drum machines. Leave it to celestial star to interpret human history so creatively. “Williehook (Skit)” has some of the same upbeat pop motions as Prince’s “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man,” so it’s disappointing that it only exists here in a 55-second form. Elsewhere, “These Are The Things I Really Like About You” evokes enough flavors of old New Orleans Dixie music and big band swing to give André 3000 a rush of blood to the head. Perkins adds a suitably wonky verse, admiring the inner spirit of “the coolest dame” and granny sweaters.
It’s not all peace and love. “Blam” preaches self-defense as Muldrow, preparing for what she calls an “ancient war,” arms herself to repel all threats against her family. “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave,” she repeats over the song’s back end, evoking the defiance of generations of iron-willed revolutionaries. It’s a reminder that Muldrow’s most potent weapon has always been her pen. On Overload, the pop song structures, coupled with the economic, purposeful instrumentation, yields her most concise and moving set to date. A dozen restless years into her recording careers and Muldrow is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future. | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Brainfeeder | November 6, 2018 | 8 | 51298756-d717-47da-9870-f2f1f5ce31b1 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but his solo work displays a furiously complicated musical mind chattering to itself. On his new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Aheym, Dessner produces vivid, fierce chamber pieces. | Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but his solo work displays a furiously complicated musical mind chattering to itself. On his new collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Aheym, Dessner produces vivid, fierce chamber pieces. | Kronos Quartet / Bryce Dessner: Aheym | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18702-bryce-dessner-aheym-by-kronos-quartet/ | Aheym | Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but he's also a classical composer, and in his side work—working on commssions for the American Composers Orchestra, collaborating on David Lang records—you can hear a furiously complicated musical mind chattering. Dessner's sensibility as a composer is furtive, urgent, intense—nothing at all, in other words, like his rock band. The National's sound has always been mellow and rich, a rock band as a foaming, blooming cup of pour-over coffee. Dessner's sensibility churns like stomach acid.
Aheym, Dessner's collaboration with contemporary- classical hip-uncle figures the Kronos Quartet, is the result of a working relationship that dates back a few years. Three of its four pieces were written specifically for Kronos, and the title track has been a fixture of their concerts for a few years now. "Aheym" begins with all four members digging into their strings and producing hard, sinewy sforzandos, or sudden, violent accents, before subsiding quickly into an agitated, seething hum. The cello plays lopsided arpeggios, each one nervously edging forward, while pizzicato prickles tension higher. It is fierce, vivid music.
The rock-friendly post-minimalism of Bang on a Can looms heavy over Dessner's work, but that's less a statement on Dessner's originality than BOAC's sheer ubiquity. BOAC's long-running All-Stars summer program is the feeder college largely responsible for populating the indie sphere with conservatory rockers like Dessner in the first place. But they aren't the only audible reference point: "Little Blue Something" traces lightly bowed figures in the cello against warm surges from the rest of the ensemble, and the effect is like a more earthbound Arvo Pärt. Pärt's touch pops up multiple places, like in the spidery refractions of harmonics that cloud the air in the thirteenth minute of "Tenebre", or the way sobbing vibrato bowing condenses from a dry mist of harmonics on "Aheym."
It's only with the final piece, "Tour Eiffel," that the tension in Dessner's work recedes. The piece is a setting of a poem by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Opening with just the chorus, the piece nudges into dewily picked guitars and some piano, offering the only glimpse of a sound world related, however distantly, to Dessner's band. The textures glow softly, the choir coos, and the ensemble dances inventively between minimalism and something like recognizable song form. There is no obvioustime-stamp on the work, which keeps surging in new directions, making interesting new things happen. Dessner is part of a chummy coterie of musicians, like Annie Clark of St. Vincent and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, and sometimes the air inside the clubhouse can get a little thick. But Dessner's mordant vision is uniquely his; these are real, meaty works, troubling and beautiful. | 2013-11-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-11-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Anti- | November 8, 2013 | 7.9 | 512b8b9d-16ab-4803-9024-ed978a411093 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The grief-stricken Chicago rapper’s latest is a marvel of craft, musicality, and emotion. Through Saba’s inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling. | The grief-stricken Chicago rapper’s latest is a marvel of craft, musicality, and emotion. Through Saba’s inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling. | Saba: Care for Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saba-care-for-me/ | Care for Me | Last year, Saba’s cousin was stabbed to death in Chicago after a brief scuffle on the train. The killer tailed him for half a block before fleeing, just to make sure he would die. The way Saba raps about his cousin—born Walter Long Jr., who performed as Dinnerwithjohn and was a founding member of Saba’s Pivot Gang crew—you’d think he was magical, kissed by fortune his entire life. He was Saba’s mentor, his wingman, dauntless and deathless until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
To be young is often to be fixated on your own presumed indestructibility. Reality has a way of knocking that right out of you. Saba’s gorgeous, meditative new album, Care for Me, begins with him singing the words “I’m so alone.” Isolation and trauma go hand-in-hand when you lose someone close, especially when that someone served as your shield for so long. “Jesus got killed for our sins, Walter got killed for a coat,” he raps. “I’m tryna cope, but it’s a part of me gone, and, apparently, I’m alone.”
Care for Me processes grief and its attendant loneliness, the paradox of feeling secluded during the most connected era in history, and having to manage that misery inside the social gratification matrix—the machine of hearts, smileys, and dopamine hits. The album, in turn, bears out the exhaustion that comes with simply processing. Saba attempts to grapple with his ongoing depression as he wonders aloud if he’s really the only one. Through this inner turmoil, he finds his most powerful and diaristic storytelling.
“Carefully editing every word, everything got to be charity/Give it my all, these melodies therapy,” he raps on “Grey,” a kind of subtitle for the all-caps plea of the album’s name. The songs are cathartic, yes, but they are also engaging. He seeks solace for his audience as much as he seeks it for himself. His writing carries within it an empathic power, the sensation of peering into a photograph so long it conjures the textures of a memory. “Life” uses personal dread as a lens through which to examine the rat race that is trying to survive. “They want a barcode on my wrist/To auction off the kids that don’t fit their description of a utopia (Black)/Like a problem won’t exist if I just don’t exist,” he raps before nose-diving into a more pervasive existential crisis: “Life don’t mean shit to a nigga that ain’t never had shit.”
Given the context under which Care for Me was made, Saba’s 2016 debut, Bucket List Project, feels almost prescient. That album challenged listeners to see their ambitions through because time was of the essence. It was a sonic wishing well of sorts, a hopeful album of unfulfilled dreams and limitless potential. With a Walter-sized hole in Saba’s life, reassesses that optimism. Through carefully collected and arranged memory fragments—some clear and focused, some concealed and disorienting—Saba considers what it means now for his cousin’s dreams to go forever unrealized.
Composed entirely by Saba with producer DaedaePivot and multi-instrumentalist Daoud, Care for Me is meticulously structured, orchestrated, and arrayed. Songs reveal themselves to be mementos of transformational moments in his life. A choice few attempt to capture something more ephemeral: the fleeting feeling of being safe, being comfortable and well-adjusted. (At one point, Saba waxes nostalgically about a time before insomnia, sleeping peacefully and living sober and college-bound, harkening back to a childlike innocence.) The 23-year-old’s fleet, singsongy raps bend and tuck into his largely piano-centric arrangements, which build sets for the scenarios he’s reliving. His voice can sway from muted and understated to insistent in an instant; he subtly shifts from conversational to explanatory whenever the mood calls for it, but never at the expense of the narrative flow. He sees his reflection in these remembrances and confronts his own mortality, but in the process he finds something divine.
So much of Care for Me is an ongoing conversation trying to reconcile a cruel, unforgiving world with God’s plan. Saba hasn’t lost his faith, but his patience is running thin. Each note and phrase on the album is colored to depict this struggle. The instrumentation is bracing, almost as if played live for a crowd, but it has the intimate tenor and tone of Saba recording the entire thing alone in his basement. “Fighter” is submerged and glassy, its watery sheen glistening like it’s catching sunlight; Saba surfaces from this shimmer as if cresting in a wave pool. “It’s harder to love myself when all these people compliment me,” he raps, conflicted. It’s brutal moments of vulnerability like this that make Care for Me such an enveloping experience.
Saba’s stunning exploration of loss builds to a restorative climax: the one-two punch that is the dewy-eyed odyssey “Prom / King” and the skyward-bound drifter “Heaven All Around Me.” The former chronicles Saba’s relationship with Walter, as seen through key events in their shared history—Walter finding Saba a last-minute date for prom, the pair getting skipped over at open mics, and early attempts on Walter’s life, leading up to the instant Saba learned his cousin was missing. “We got in the car, but we didn’t know where to drive to/Fuck it, wherever you are, my nigga, we’ll come and find you,” he raps. His writing is so dense yet free-flowing, so delicate and tactile. The drums crescendo into a frenzy on “Prom / King,” to the point that Saba keeps his own time, untethered to rhythm, while never missing a single beat. The song is devastating, but it would feel almost hopeless without “Heaven,” a glowing conclusion to the saga that imagines a reborn Walter ascending to a better place, looking down watchfully at his loved ones and looking after Saba. It’s a remarkably powerful scene, a moment where Saba comes to realize that, despite everything, he was never alone and he never will be. | 2018-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Saba Pivot LLC | April 12, 2018 | 8.7 | 512f43a3-f606-48eb-b195-d44450a8df89 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
A new reissue of Lou Reed’s final solo album spotlights a side of the New York icon that few ever got to see: a quiet ambient composer. | A new reissue of Lou Reed’s final solo album spotlights a side of the New York icon that few ever got to see: a quiet ambient composer. | Lou Reed: Hudson River Wind Meditations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lou-reed-hudson-river-wind-meditations/ | Hudson River Wind Meditations | For all the chaos in his music—and despite his famously combative reputation—Lou Reed was a dedicated practitioner of yoga, meditation, and martial arts. He began studying tai chi as part of an effort to get off speed and booze and strengthen his wrecked body as the 1970s drew to a close. An early teacher recalls Reed’s hands shaking so hard he could barely hold the positions, but he stuck with it. When he toured, he brought along his swords and instructional VHS tapes, practicing in hotel gyms and conference rooms; upon returning home he was known to take the taxi straight from the airport to class. In the final six years of his life, he intensified his focus, doing six days of tai chi followed by one day of yoga, week in and week out. Laurie Anderson, his partner of 21 years, said he was “looking for magic.” He was doing breathwork when he died, in fact—eyes wide open and hands in a tai chi position, with Anderson’s arms around him.
Newly remastered and reissued with extensive liner notes by Light in the Attic, Hudson River Wind Meditations was first released in 2007, on a small Louisville, Colorado, label specializing in self-help and spirituality. But in the beginning, it wasn’t meant for public consumption at all. According to Anderson, Reed made early versions of these pieces to accompany guided meditations recited by Shelley Peng, an herbalist and acupuncturist. The music eventually morphed into a soundtrack for his tai chi practice, although not all his classmates were on board. Some fellow students preferred the traditional Chinese music that their teacher, Master Ren GuangYi, typically played, and asked for Reed’s tape to be turned off. One student walked out the door and never came back. (Reed’s drone music always did have a polarizing effect on listeners.)
But Reed and Ren kept playing the tape, and according to Anderson, anyway, some of his classmates eventually came around, saying that it was the best tai chi music they’d ever heard. One wonders to what extent Reed’s fame—or perhaps simply his legendary stubbornness—greased the wheels. In an amusing anecdote in the liner notes, yoga instructor Eddie Stern says that when he worked with Reed, “Whether we were doing yoga or meditating, the Hudson River Wind Meditations came on, and even though I am a silent meditator and don’t normally recommend listening to music when meditating, I would let it slide for Lou.”
The bulk of the release is taken up by two long tracks offering markedly different visions of what ambient music could be. The opening “Move Your Heart” is the more minimal of the two. It consists of a single oscillating tone, or cluster of tones, that opens and closes, over and over, for nearly 29 minutes, with very little evident variation. Rooted in a bassy throb, it begins throwing off sparks as a growling, high-resonance filter combs through the frequencies; for a brief moment, it’s a softly reassuring major triad, and then the filter clamps down once again, grinding everything into the rumbling muck. The cycle moves like waves, or breathing, yet despite its seeming steadiness, the repetition is never quite exact, and that almost imperceptible sense of uncertainty heightens its power. You never know quite what the music is going to do next, even though it never really does anything. It’s calming yet never fully subdued: The piece seems to move with a life of its own, and its raw, unburnished sonics feel far away from the politeness of more placid relaxation music. At times, as the bass tones thicken and congeal, it feels downright unruly.
“Find Your Note” is both wilier and more skeletal. Here, Reed dials up the uncertainty. While a bassy hum scours the low end, eerie tendrils flit across the upper register as ghostly harmonics materialize from out of nowhere. It sounds like a chorus of worried tea kettles, maybe, or a very lonely spaceship whistling to itself, long after its crew has died. More concretely, it recalls the work of drone titans like Éliane Radigue, Folke Rabe, and Kevin Drumm. Filaments flare up without warning and are snuffed out just as swiftly; trembling tones join to form fleeting harmonies, then spin away as if magnetically repulsed. The sense of movement is remarkable. I gave it a meditative test drive on headphones recently, sitting at the wooded edge of a grassy clearing, and was struck by how neatly it complemented the scene playing out before me: hawks circling warily in the distance; sunbeams grazing the flat bottoms of slow-moving clouds; wind rustling in the branches of the trees. When a flock of starlings streaked above my head, the shape of their formation—a kind of controlled chaos, a single organism moving as an elastic assemblage of points in space—felt mirrored in Reed’s trembling, unpredictable tone clusters. Two short closing tracks on the album incorporate the sounds of wind recorded from the window of Reed’s apartment, underscoring the music’s link to the rhythms of the natural world.
There are obvious parallels between Hudson River Wind Meditations and Metal Machine Music, Reed’s infamous 1975 album of multi-tracked guitar feedback—which, depending on your perspective, was either a nastily sarcastic way of fulfilling a record-label contract, or the angel song accompanying the birth of noise music. Both are durational, instrumental works that flirt with atonality. But the similarities end there. Metal Machine Music is abrasive and amphetamine fueled, as cozy as an icepick to the eye socket; Hudson River Wind Meditations is gentle and enveloping, in keeping with Brian Eno’s vision of ambient as something like a kind of musical incense, subtly flavoring the air wherever it plays. “The idea is to make things better, to make things more beautiful,” Reed said in an interview with the spirituality website Beliefnet around the time of the album’s release; to “be able to ground yourself, be able to experience something in a more agreeable environment.” Of course, “agreeable” isn’t a word one often hears in relation to Reed; the album’s most fascinating, and moving, aspect may be the glimpse it offers of a side of the musician that few ever got to see.
To hear Reed tell it, the creation of the music was a fluke. He was working with a Minimoog Voyager and assorted effects pedals; producer Hal Willner says that Reed also played with the feedback from a guitar leaning against his amplifier, much as he had on Metal Machine Music. But Reed claimed that he didn’t know exactly how he came up with the sounds. “I'm not sure what exactly did it, but I’ve never been able to get it back, because I didn’t write it down,” he told Pitchfork in 2007. That kind of caginess is perfectly in character for an unabashed self-mythologist like Reed, but the music really does sound like it was pulled from thin air. It’s easy to imagine him slipping into a trance-like state as he twisted knobs, then coming to and wondering exactly how those sounds found their way to the tape. If Reed was looking for magic in tai chi, he found something very much like it in these bewitching, evanescent transmissions from the ether. | 2024-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | January 13, 2024 | 8.4 | 512fa4d8-923c-47da-b706-9d1d214a1d06 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Following a string of albums deconstructing Lambchop’s sound, Kurt Wagner continues to reinvent his band, this time using MIDI-assisted piano melodies to write love songs to music itself. | Following a string of albums deconstructing Lambchop’s sound, Kurt Wagner continues to reinvent his band, this time using MIDI-assisted piano melodies to write love songs to music itself. | Lambchop: Showtunes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lambchop-showtunes/ | Showtunes | On Showtunes, Lambchop’s 15th studio album, Kurt Wagner whiles away an afternoon contemplating an old standard. “I’m listening to that ‘Old Devil Moon’ and the day outside is slowly flying by me,” he sings on “Blue Leo,” his voice subtly distorted over a shape-shifting beat. On another verse of the same song, he’s at the supermarket picking out vegetables when he hears “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” right as the sprayers turn on. “The band is getting wet,” he deadpans. These are small moments that gesture to larger feelings and ideas—a Wagner specialty—and in this case the overarching concept is how our favorite songs can hold lengthy, funny conversations with our innermost thoughts.
As Lambchop’s frontman and, lately, sole guiding force, Wagner has always been a keen listener, attuned to the world of sounds and songs around him. On early albums, “Nashville’s most fucked-up country band” (as their label described them) did frequent covers of songs by their friends (East River Pipe) as well as deep cuts by their heroes (Curtis Mayfield). With the notable exception of last year’s covers album TRIP, Lambchop rarely play other people’s music anymore. Today Wagner is more likely to sing about a song than he is to actually sing that song, but on Showtunes, he plants those references in his lyrics so strategically that music seems like an unstoppable force, as invasive as kudzu but certainly not malignant. Listening is the album’s central theme—the pleasure of processing sound, the reassurance of a familiar song, the way a melody or an instrument can remind you that you’re alive and breathing the earth’s air, even if you’re just bumming around the house or buying okra. Wagner just assumes that any fan of Lambchop naturally feels a similar joy or consolation. “Are you listening?” goes the sample that opens the dissembling “Drop C,” to which the sampled crowd responds, “Yeah!”
Showtunes feels like the third act in a trilogy of albums that have deconstructed the Lambchop sound, reassembled it slightly akimbo, and changed the way we hear this band. Working either alone in his home or with a very small group of collaborators who aren’t necessarily band members, Wagner has tinkered with technology in order to bend his songs into new shapes without sacrificing warmth, wit, or humanity. It’s been a wildly productive phase, with FLOTUS and This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) sitting among the best albums to carry Lambchop’s name on the spine. Wagner, to his credit, doesn’t seem to view these recent albums as a break from the group’s early days as a sprawling orchestra, but rather an extension of the anything-goes philosophy that has defined the band for nearly 30 years.
To create these new tunes, Wagner recorded guitar tracks first, then converted them into piano tones via MIDI, re-editing them after the fact. Those new sounds changed the nature of the music, which he described to Fader recently as “show tunes for people who don’t like show tunes,” echoing a sentiment many still apply to country music. He had intended to debut the album onstage, working with Ryan Olson (Gayngs, Poliça), Andrew Broder (Fog), and German producer Twit One to develop arrangements for the Eaux Claires festival in 2020. For obvious reasons, that performance never happened, but those collaborations formed the basis for the album, providing raw material that Wagner could further manipulate into new sounds by cutting, pasting, and rearranging. Even outside the live context, the songs retain their showtunefulness on record. None of Wagner’s songs sound much like Kiss Me Kate, but there is a theatrical flair to the album, as though Wagner has decided to address his audience directly.
Showtunes doesn’t rival its predecessors, but all the album really lacks is surprise. We’ve gotten used to Wagner in this setting, so the sense of discovery that animates his other albums is missing, as is the high-wire excitement of an established artist so thoroughly rethinking his sound. That’s only a minor complaint, especially considering that Showtunes has its own peculiar melancholy. The horn arrangements, courtesy of C.J. Camerieri, have a mournful tone, more like a New Orleans funeral than a Broadway pit orchestra, which color Wagner’s lyrics a dark shade of blue. He ponders the nature of romantic love, how it elevates and also isolates us, but he’s also interested in musical love—the way that songs are both means of expressing affection, and objects of affection themselves. On “A Chef’s Kiss” he even daydreams up plans to go into show business, become a matinee idol, and “blow a kiss to a song.”
By emphasizing the pleasures of listening, Wagner invites you to savor the small, exquisite moments on Showtunes, like the way James McNew’s upright bass thumps against the loungey piano on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone Journalist,” recalling one of Lambchop’s most divisive albums. Or the way he rhymes “man on the streets” with “jumpsuit with pleats” to create a perfect couplet on “Unknown Man.” Or the way he seems to duet with a disembodied opera singer on closer “The Last Benedict.” (Actually, it’s Broder manipulating a recording.) “The interstate and trees sound just like waves,” Wagner observes. “A voice beyond the leaves sings in a lazy kind of yodel, softly spraying airy thoughts.” In that moment, Wagner might well be singing about himself and his own band, imagining himself as the voice beyond the leaves, both music maker and music lover, forever twining those two pursuits together in his own songs.
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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. | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 25, 2021 | 7.4 | 5131eeb8-1e56-420e-a2b5-019a7ff05516 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The hitmaking producer’s latest album brandishes his ardent ambition, attention to detail, and gift for curation. | The hitmaking producer’s latest album brandishes his ardent ambition, attention to detail, and gift for curation. | Metro Boomin: Heroes & Villains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metro-boomin-heroes-and-villains/ | Heroes & Villains | In the extravagant trailer for Metro Boomin’s new album, a deranged criminal (played by LaKeith Stanfield) drives a flame-throwing fire truck through a burning city. Metro watches the mayhem unfold from the roof of a compound while Morgan Freeman dissuades him from intervening. “Your place in history is already cemented,” Freeman tells him. “You’ve built a legacy, something people will clearly kill for.” A stoic Metro then snatches a chain floating behind a glass case before hopping into a Batmobile-like whip and jetting into the city. It doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t have to: Like Metro’s music, the trailer is expensive, exciting, and crammed with vibrant characters—the plot or message hardly matters. Enjoy car chases and sinister 21 Savage verses? Spectacular explosions and generic Travis Scott hooks? Metro Boomin has an album for you.
Heroes & Villains, though, is more than just fireworks and big-name features. It’s an ambitious, detail-rich record that splits the difference between streaming fodder and world-building. The rappers featured here are either aging out of the spotlight (Future), transitioning into corporate avatars (Travis Scott) or, unfortunately, serving time behind bars (Young Thug, Gunna). While Heroes & Villains scans as an opus of psychedelic trap and star-laden singles with cool comic book packaging, it almost feels like a last triumphant gasp from the past decade’s most prominent rappers and their favorite hitmaking producer.
But Heroes & Villains proves that Metro aspires to more than hits. He first demonstrated his wide-scale vision on 2018’s Not All Heroes Wear Capes, a project in which his sparse, moody beats grew thicker, grander, and more intricate. When he attempted to swerve from his signature sound, though, his limited range was exposed: Metro is great when he makes Metro-type beats, shaky when he ventures outside of his comfort zone. On Heroes & Villains, he surpasses his standard quota of bangers while also taking a few fun risks. A symphonic, Francis and the Lights-esque intro? Why not. An interpolation of Mario Winans’ “I Don’t Wanna Know,” featuring the Weeknd and 21 Savage? Let’s do it. Metro is thinking outside the box a bit more, without sacrificing the foundation of what makes his music so appealing in the first place.
Chief among these appeals is his ability to mine grade-A material from his guests. His beats are distinct enough to sound good on their own, yet understated enough to afford a vocalist stylistic freedom. Few artists melodically thrive over a Metro beat like Don Toliver, who delivers two of the album’s more magnetic vocal performances on “Too Many Nights” and “Around Me.” Even Future’s got a little pep in his step here, particularly on the anthemic “Superheroes (Heroes & Villains).” But it’s Young Thug, on “Metro Spider,” who steals the show. Slithering over a menacing string note and ominous piano, he snaps off a string of vivid, eccentric bars about luxury watches and feeling more famous than the president. Unlike other Thug verses that have emerged since his incarceration, “Metro Spider” hardly feels like a leftover—in fact, Metro positions it as the album’s centerpiece.
There are some duds, to be sure. Travis Scott sounds half-asleep on the unimaginative “Raindrops (Insane),” and even less compelling on the throwaway track “Lock On Me.” Chris Brown shows up at the end of “Superheroes (Heroes & Villains)” to complain about people who don’t want to see him win, bringing the album’s sporadic flashes of toxicity into stark focus. But other than a few misses, Heroes & Villains is a crisp, cohesive record that nails all the little things: end-of-song outros, dazzling sequencing, surprising beat switches, and perfectly staggered features. The album’s main characters—Future, Scott, and 21 Savage—are spread out in smart pairings, popping in and out of the frame like lead actors in an ensemble cast. Even A$AP Rocky, who joins the late Takeoff on “Feel the Fiyaaaah,” has several small cameos before earning his own song. This sort of attention to detail matters; Metro succeeds in constructing a self-contained universe stuffed with various narrators, antagonists, and anti-heroes.
It’d be intriguing to hear some younger, hungrier rappers on these songs, but it’s hard to fault Metro for having fealty to the guys he came up with, especially when they’re generation-defining artists like Thug and Future. Even the most lauded stars eventually fall out of favor: Travis Scott is embattled in legal issues after the Astroworld catastrophe, Future is nearing middle age, and Thug and Gunna are facing sweeping RICO charges. The album gestures toward these realities on “Walk Em Down (Don’t Kill Civilians),” a run-of-the-mill 21 Savage horrorcore slapper that, midway through, transforms into a piano-backed, choir-lined meditation on grief. Sung by Toronto artist Mustafa, the song’s second act explores the trauma and turmoil caused by 21’s depictions of street violence. The juxtaposition, however, resists landing on a clear moral. Who’s the hero here, and who’s the villain? Metro’s answer seems prudent: Yes. | 2022-12-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Boominati Worldwide / Republic | December 8, 2022 | 7.2 | 513eaa15-6df6-417b-a5b8-4057cb632262 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
On the follow-up to their massive 2013 hit Settle, the brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence have dialed down the BPMs significantly and turned toward slow-burning, R&B-inspired grooves. Much of Caracal is vaguely pleasant music you can put on in the background while you’re working—but is that really what we look to Disclosure for? | On the follow-up to their massive 2013 hit Settle, the brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence have dialed down the BPMs significantly and turned toward slow-burning, R&B-inspired grooves. Much of Caracal is vaguely pleasant music you can put on in the background while you’re working—but is that really what we look to Disclosure for? | Disclosure: Caracal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21034-caracal/ | Caracal | Looking back, the intro to Disclosure’s Settle almost reads like a warning to their future selves: "As much as you like to control your environment, the reality is, everything changes." Sure enough, Guy and Howard Lawrence’s sophomore full-length Caracal arrives just two years later but in a markedly different pop landscape—thanks in no small part to the brothers' own influence. Their pristine syntheses of UK garage, Midwestern vocal house, and hook-happy pop structures re-oriented the British pop charts and trickled into the American ones, opening the doors for pop-adjacent neo-house acts like Duke Dumont, Years & Years, and Rudimental (not to mention for Sam Smith). Disclosure have never really been the types to throw curveballs: they do what they do, and they do it impeccably. But it’s understandable they’d start feeling restless, especially as the scope of their influence rendered their own tunes increasingly indistinct. "That sound is everywhere now," Guy, now 24, admitted in an L.A. Times profile this summer. "The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it."
Scrubbed of much of its predecessor's overt 2-step and house homage, Caracal suggests the duo's also grown bored of the conversation that's surrounded them from the start: how dance and pop music can and "should" relate. On one hand, here were two young men making wide-reaching dance tracks that weren’t reliant on drops, builds, or any of festival EDM’s creatine-crazed trappings. These guys scanned as "tasteful," for better or worse. But on the flip side were classicists and underground dance fans who pegged the duo as milquetoast gentrifiers of scenes they were too young to fully appreciate, repackaging history with the context and kinks ironed out. There is some sting in the charge, but it's not entirely fair: Disclosure’s work has always made the most sense within the framework of pop, in terms of both form and demographic. In that sense, calling Disclosure contrived or formulaic misunderstands how pop works. Their music may be one-size-fits-all, but it’s also immaculately crafted and catchy as fuck, smudging the divide between the universal and the personal to the point where "Latch" somehow seemed to grow more poignant the more ubiquitous it became.
Those dance classicists will likely be less territorial with Caracal: the brothers have dialed down the BPMs significantly and turned toward slow-burning, R&B-inspired grooves. But as they’ve edged away from giddy neo-nostalgia toward a sound with less identifiable anchor points, they’ve begun to blend into the background. On "Omen", the brothers reunite with Sam Smith for a single presumably meant to reprise the massive success of "Latch". And it’s fine—plodding along at a stately downtempo strut with a hint of a 2-step hitch, Smith’s voice a bit mired in that familiar elastic bassline. But it’s nowhere near as immediate, or as gripping; here, when Smith sings of missed opportunities for emotional connection, "Latch"’s obsessive I-will-never-leave-your-side-god-dammit conviction feels like a distant memory. Much of Caracal is vaguely pleasant music you can put on in the background while you’re working—but is that really what we look to Disclosure for?
Meanwhile, where Settle set the tone for years of pop hits to come, Caracal seems content to fall back amidst the pack. Opening track "Nocturnal" is a showcase for R&B’s man-of-the-moment the Weeknd, and it wouldn’t sound out of place on Beauty Behind the Madness. Its synth arpeggios seem to aim for Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principles’ "Your Love", but the vibe is closer to late-'00s Hype Machine dance tracks (halfway through, the track practically breaks into its own Classixx remix). This makes sense, in a way: much of the Billboard pop and R&B charts over the last year have embraced this sound, from Nick Jonas’ "Jealous" to Jason Derulo to the current bumper crop of vaguely Balearic "tropical house" singles and remixes. But for Disclosure, the move feels like a step backward, an aim at broader relevance that’s only watered down what once made them feel thrilling.
There are bright spots: lead single "Holding On" retains their signature bounce and features stunning vocals from jazz songwriter Gregory Porter, and "Good Intentions", with its understated Miguel appearance, is the best example of their smoothed-out new direction, keeping a brisk pace but leaving more open space. Still, it’s getting harder to shake the sense that these redemptive guest spots have become a crutch for a lack of ideas. Both of the album’s two featureless tracks feel instantly forgettable—particularly "Jaded", a beige wash of cheeseball lyrics that chastise a dishonest companion with all the depth of the "Why You Lyin" Vine.
When Disclosure’s hype was at its peak circa Settle, they were often compared to turn-of-the-century acts like Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk—acts who successfully recontextualized older house and disco influences into something reverent and contemporary. But a significant part of both groups’ appeal—and, crucially, part of the outright critical revulsion at the time, too—was their lack of self-seriousness, their willingness to get a little cheesy. Those guys’ nostalgia embraced the kitsch along with the classicism; they had fun. The Lawrence brothers have good taste, sharp instincts, and pristine craftsmanship: playfulness, not so much. Even the album’s most unbuttoned track falls flat: "Bang That", a (relatively) raunchy promotional single now relegated to the bonus tracks with a gratuitous sample of 313 Bass Mechanics’ "Pass Out", feels a bit cringey, like Kidz Bop does ghetto house. Ultimately, Caracal just doesn’t feel much fun, and even its highs are nowhere near Settle’s polished bliss. Once trendsetters, here the Lawrence brothers too often fade noncommittally into white noise. | 2015-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Island | September 25, 2015 | 6.6 | 513ef2f8-5885-46f1-bb03-145d645f4663 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The Japanese producer makes records that are absurd and exhilarating in equal measure—behind every drum hit lies a trap door. | The Japanese producer makes records that are absurd and exhilarating in equal measure—behind every drum hit lies a trap door. | Bisk: Vacation Package | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bisk-vacation-package/ | Vacation Package | Bisk, aka Tokyo’s Naohiro Fujikawa, has been chrome-plating chaos for a quarter century, turning out records that are absurd and exhilarating in equal measure. A Bisk song rarely follows a straight line for long: The Japanese producer’s drum programming weaves through knotty thickets of syncopated beats and white-noise bursts, chasing ghosts and dodging potholes. His samples are fragmentary dispatches from far-flung points, and any given musical phrase might shoehorn multiple worlds into wobbly union—free improv with easy listening, kindergarten recess with NASA Mission Control. Beneath each drum hit lies a potential trap door, and his melodies, if that’s what you can call his tangled scraps of electric bass and modal keys, ricochet like pinballs repelled at every turn by shuddering mechanical bumpers. Bisk’s productions give the impression of someone who is both addicted to repetition and allergic to it.
Much like his music, Fujikawa’s career has progressed in fits and starts. Between 1996 and 2000, he recorded four albums for the Belgian label Sub Rosa, a hub for music from the fringes. It was a heady time in electronic music: Disparate traditions from dance and the avant-garde were colliding and accordioning like a multi-car pileup, with sounds like illbient, drill’n’bass, and hypermodern jazz spinning out of the debris. Bisk’s early albums offered a fractured mirror of the times, variously reflecting the breakbeat mutations of Amon Tobin and DJ Krush, the side-eyed synths of Atom Heart and Aphex Twin, and the referential free-for-all of Christian Marclay and John Zorn. Then he disappeared for a dozen years, returning in the mid ’10s to release a handful of sleeker, more streamlined albums before falling silent again. Now Bisk is back—this time on Ominira, a label run by Leipzig’s Kassem Mosse, whose grudging, lo-fi machine minimalism is the virtual opposite of Fujikawa’s hyperactive antics. Bisk, though, sounds as cheerfully unhinged as ever.
“Sectional View” opens the album with a feint—it could almost be a relatively conventional footwork track. But instead of leaning into the groove, all the added elements—cut-up R&B vocals, errant brass stabs, overdriven Rhodes riffs—peel forcefully away from it, as though balking at the idea of falling into line. It all adds up to an octopus’ garden of brightly colored shapes that adamantly refuse to cohere. Similar high speeds and wayward organizing principles apply to most of the album. “Suddenly Appeared” drizzles electric-piano runs over rapid-fire tabla and kalimba, throwing off bright harmonics that dazzle like one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror-dotted infinity rooms. “Like Peaches,” a highlight, employs rippling drum’n’bass cadences and naive synth melodies recalling Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things. There are Zapp-like talk-box leads, cooing choral pads, and so many layers of shape-shifting synthesizer, all in perpetual flux, that they’re almost impossible to tease apart. In “Winter Spreading” and “Sweet Conquest,” rich chord progressions lend a surprisingly sentimental air, as though Paul Bley were sitting in with Flying Lotus.
Music this agitated can wear on the nerves, but Bisk’s doesn’t. His songs are mercifully short; the vast majority are under 3:30. And as much as Fujikawa packs into every measure, he also leaves plenty of breathing room. The rests are so generous that you could drive a truck through them. It helps that it never feels like Fujikawa is trying to be clever; as hectic as the music gets, it’s refreshingly free of “look ma, no hands” showoffery. The album’s material is based on club sets he performed at a “small but very radical” Tokyo venue called Forestlimit in late 2019 and early 2020, and knowing that he pulled all this off live makes his polyphonic pyrotechnics all the more impressive. His music sounds like the work of someone hunched over his computer mouse, diligently mapping out maze-like MIDI sequences on the screen. To imagine this stuff flying out of his machines in real time offers a whole different impression. It becomes clear that jazz, for Fujikawa, isn’t just a reference point, a readymade mood to be cut and pasted into the mix. It’s an ethos. His knotted-up kinks and curlicues are pathways, escape routes, idiosyncratic lines of flight. All that blurred motion is an attempt to capture a snapshot of freedom in mid-stride.
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 | Ominira | February 4, 2021 | 7.8 | 513fc5ad-d3e0-49ea-a3b5-88e4dbd67af7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Dropping the club-centric vibe of his previous work, the New York rapper shifts toward trap and Top 40 rap sounds—an unconventional move that might be more progressive than it seems. | Dropping the club-centric vibe of his previous work, the New York rapper shifts toward trap and Top 40 rap sounds—an unconventional move that might be more progressive than it seems. | Le1f: Blue Dream EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/le1f-blue-dream-ep/ | null | Just as Le1f’s energetic, experimental debut album lived up to its title, Riot Boi, the name of his new EP is fitting. Gracing the cover with middle fingers raised to his bloodshot eyes, the genre-busting rapper (aka Khalif Diouf) titled the record after a particularly relaxing strain of marijuana, and—surprise!–dropped it on 4/20. But Blue Dream isn’t just a not-so-subtle reference to weed culture; it’s also a sonic departure from the club-influenced, dancefloor hip-hop Le1f is known for. While still drenched in his trademark flair, shade, and rapid-fire bars, the record’s beats and production feel more like part of the contemporary rap landscape.
“Blublockers” opens with a hollow, steel-drum-like hook that could be straight off an early Gucci Mane mixtape. A signature trap beat shuffles in before Le1f turns the whole thing on his head, rhyming a mile a minute instead of giving into the track’s syrupy tide. “They wanna cut-copy-paste/I hit delete, I don’t even see ‘em” he spits, with the cockiness he’s effortlessly showcased his entire career. “Yo,” the EP’s opener, feels even more like a new direction, but not necessarily an exciting one: A truly straightforward trap number, it seems rushed next to the type of meticulously produced music that has kept Le1f relevant all these years. His voice sounds weirdly out of place, almost a hair ahead of the beat, as if his speedy rhymes are too intelligent for the woozy beat.
That being said, this definitely isn’t a case of a popular underground artist abandoning their sound for a mainstream bid, and Le1f’s dedication to the genres that shaped him still shines through. “Fatty Acid” is driven by an effervescent beat that’s almost reminiscent of New Orleans bounce, or that sweet spot in pop/dancehall fusion right before Major Lazer took over the airwaves. “Ay yo, New York/The sales is goin’ down at Trader Hoe’s, y’all!” yells Le1f as the track begins, expertly walking the line between banjee realness and hard-edged Brooklyn swag, a space he has rightfully claimed as his own over the years.
While the EP lacks some of the immediacy of, say, his jittery club banger “Koi,” it’s a worthy stab at something slower and darker than the party vibes he’s known for—which may be a more progressive gesture on his part than it seems at first glance. Although rap still has its issues with inclusivity, some of the most innovative players in hip-hop right now have made a name for themselves by aesthetically redefining their masculinity (think Young Thug or Lil B’s fashion choices, or even Migos’ obsession with Versace silk). This may have helped create an environment where the indiscriminate “gay rapper” headline has lost some of its newsworthiness, and in 2018, that’s a good thing. It’s a position that Le1f himself has always seemed wary of: “I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with it,” he told The Daily Beast back in 2012. “As a child, I used to imagine that I would be shot on stage or something just for being a gay rapper. Now I feel it’s more and more probable that there are going to be several cool, mainstream gay rappers in the next few years.” Moving his own music toward the mainstream is one way of making good on that prophecy. | 2018-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 5, 2018 | 6.9 | 513ff74c-3d9d-4646-9873-89c4d4f3d0d3 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
A totemic box set from Numero Group collects the output of the Midwestern emo band, whose melodic, sentimental take on D.C. hardcore served as a microcosm of the genre’s transition. | A totemic box set from Numero Group collects the output of the Midwestern emo band, whose melodic, sentimental take on D.C. hardcore served as a microcosm of the genre’s transition. | Current: Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/current-yesterdays-tomorrow-is-not-today/ | Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today | The history of emo is retold with waves, but it tends to happen more in tides—its heady peaks obscure the longer periods of quiet regeneration, but there’s always motion. For instance, consider the eight or so years between Thrasher’s “Notes From the Underground” column that coined the term “emocore” and Sunny Day Real Estate’s 1994 debut Diary, a period filled with out-of-print cult favorites that lack the historical import of Revolution Summer and the commercial visibility of the Second Wave. Over the past few years, Numero Group has become an unexpected champion of this period, and Current is the latest beneficiary, a Midwestern band with a more melodic and sentimental take on D.C. emotional hardcore—neither emocore nor Midwest emo, a band that serves as microcosm of an entire genre’s transition.
The mere packaging of Yesterday’s Tomorrow Is Not Today gives a totemic quality to Current’s scant output: about 90 minutes of original material made over the span of about two years, spread over three LPs with the band’s history retold in a loving and thorough 20-page insert. But it doesn’t argue for Current as misunderstood visionaries. At the time of its release in 1993, Current’s sole full-length, Coliseum, would more likely be heard as the tail end of the first wave rather than the beginning of a new era. The artwork, the production, the pressing, and the tour booking were all the product of state-of-the-art, DIY pluck. While Current previously featured a requisite Fugazi-style vocal dynamic, Matthias Weeks ended up taking the role of the singing and the screaming guy. “In beauty you shall be my representation, my song, my medicine,” he barks on its first line, the delivery only bashful in comparison to what surrounded them in the Detroit hardcore scene at the time.
In the next few years, a more accessible style of Midwest emo developed alongside the frat parties and football games in massive college towns like Madison, Urbana-Champaign, and Lawrence. Meanwhile, Current took shape near the University of Detroit Mercy, an urban Jesuit school of 5,000 students and almost no campus culture. The DIY scene in Detroit proper was still at the mercy of the most aggressive forms of metal and punk. As guitarist Justin LaBo recalled, “There was usually skinheads there… there was always fights and violence.”
Much like the peers they’d soon discover in Kalamazoo, Arkansas, Oakland, and suburban Illinois, Current were Dischord fanboys bought into the communal uplift of straight edge but not its absolutist worldview. From the beginning, their striated screams and searching, clean guitar passages were situated somewhere between the more meditative sides of Fugazi and Slint—in other words, post-hardcore in the truest sense. Nearly 30 years later, Coliseum is revelatory mostly in how familiar it sounds; “And I knew that she carried her life on her fingertips, with painted nails she carried her life,” Weeks intones as spoken word, predicting the florid poetry and stoic delivery endemic to the New Wave of Post-Hardcore. The acerbic hook of “Dial”—“I need your ratings to keep me alive/Until tomorrow”—now comes off like a primordial, pre-internet precursor to Drug Church’s hectoring alt-rock. Both the neck-jerk riffs of the title track and the eco-optimism of “Outside Is Better” hint at a future where 311 and hardcore are seen as inherently compatible. It’s worth noting that Weeks is sporting dreadlocks throughout the Yesterday’s Tomorrow liner notes and the cover features LaBo’s very alt-rock Les Paul.
Current’s brief and impressive touring itinerary suggests a promising future had they stuck around; they opened for Jawbox at a 1,000-cap room in Detroit for their third-ever show and later played with Cap’n Jazz, Unwound, and godheadSilo. Perhaps they would’ve emphasized their avant-punk leanings and gone on to a label like Kill Rock Stars or Sub Pop. Or, we could read into their gigs with both the Offspring and Rancid and imagine Current on Epitaph. The sequencing of Yesterday muddles the trajectory; it begins with Coliseum, an album they made as the lineup regenerated itself after cross-country moves, college semester breaks, and Scott Ray’s pivot from vocalist to roadie. He returns on Feasting & Mirth, the third LP which includes an early 7" and a KXLU performance recorded several weeks after the release of Coliseum, an album on which he does not appear at all.
On their Is 4 EP and subsequent splits with fellow travelers Chino Horde and Indian Summer, Current got sharper and sleeker. Some argued that they got too good. The massively influential Maximumrocknroll zine singled out the Indian Summer/Current split as an example of the music they weren’t going to cover anymore, with Tim Yohannon calling it, “today’s post-hardcore answer to early ’70s progressive rock,” i.e., alternative rock, one of the most cutting insults available to a myopically territorial punk at the time. Zines like HeartattaCK and Punk Planet immediately popped up as counterprogramming, as did Green Day’s “Platypus (I Hate You),” the 924 Gilman Street answer to “Ether.” Meanwhile, Current started Ottawa, an aggro side project explicitly intended as a response to MRR. Weeks’ lyrics on “Key” hardly bore any of the bloat or complacency of prog- or alt-rock (“I carve my key from wood/For inexpensiveness/I carved my key from stone/For everlastment,” but the MRR non-review struck a nerve. Despite a successful tour throughout the summer of 1994, Current broke up for the same reason most emo bands do: Some of the members start getting into indie rock, others into metal. Oh, and they had a big fight after their van broke down during their final gig. Yet there’s something poetic about how that final show happened at Fireside Bowl, the Chicago venue at the epicenter of a regional explosion. Where Current ended, Midwest emo began. | 2022-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Numero Group | December 14, 2022 | 7.7 | 51439ad1-4937-4ceb-a5a3-b6bb97c51c95 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Interscope takes further advantage of the holiday shopping blowout with this deluxe edition of yet another 90s alt-rock staple. Here's Trent Reznor's best-known (and most highly regarded) work, The Downward Spiral, bulked up to include Dolby 5.1 surround and SACD mixes, and an entire second disc's worth of B-sides, remixes and rarities. | Interscope takes further advantage of the holiday shopping blowout with this deluxe edition of yet another 90s alt-rock staple. Here's Trent Reznor's best-known (and most highly regarded) work, The Downward Spiral, bulked up to include Dolby 5.1 surround and SACD mixes, and an entire second disc's worth of B-sides, remixes and rarities. | Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5802-the-downward-spiral-deluxe-edition/ | The Downward Spiral [Deluxe Edition] | You may have noticed that we here at Pitchfork HQ occasionally get excited about what we perceive to be the next new sound, be it in the form of an individual band or an entire newfangled genre. I myself am not above such occasional ballyhoo, most recently biting the hook hard on recently fashionable hyphenated mergers of electronics and rock, be it dance-punk or lap-pop or lance-ponk. I was completely convinced (and still am, to some extent) that guitars and computers were on the verge of ending their long, heated standoff, and that they would start making the hip new music of the future.
Well, among the many public services of the reissue is to remind us that there is usually nothing new under the musical sun, and so now, here's a 10th anniversary edition of The Downward Spiral to remind me that The Postal Service are just NIN in a better mood. When the album was first released, I wasn't concerned with any technological achievements Trent Reznor may have been conjuring-- I was too distracted by his concepts of fucking like animals, god being dead (and no one caring), and I am a big man yesIam. Sure, NIN might have provided a perfect dose of loud guitars and screaming to score my melodramatic years, but what most drew me to collect Halos was the atmosphere: fake snuff film videos, drummer microphone injuries, the Sharon Tate murder house, and lyrical self-mutilation that made Cobain sound like Vedder.
Now that I'm old, boring, and presumably less susceptible to the trappings of angst, it's possible to peel back that surface layer of fishnet and makeup and take a peek at the music underneath. And surprisingly, for music built on what I'm sure was cutting edge audio technology of the early 90s, The Downward Spiral sounds only the slightest bit aged, and not too far flung from the aggro-beats that still rule alt-rock formats. I'd even go so far as to affix Reznor with the cliché label "ahead of his time," despite the decade's worth of Wax Trax! 12-inches that surely influenced him. Still, even with all that precedent, Reznor must've done something to usher industrial music into the mainstream.
My best guess is that Nine Inch Nails hit upon just the right amount of dance music content to gloss up his dire tunes without scaring off the homophobes. Reznor's dance leanings are constantly bubbling just under the surface of The Downward Spiral, and it nearly goes without saying that the breakout hit, "Closer", leaned a bit more obviously in that direction than most of the rest of the album. Easily the record's sexiest song and slinkiest beat, its disco thump still sounds markedly current. Meanwhile, "Heresy", for all its Nietzsche-inspired deicide, is a couple clicks of the distortion dial away from being a Depeche Mode song. And don't forget, "March of the Pigs" beat "Firestarter" to the digital hardcore punch by three years.
The B-side-filled second disc of this reissue assists this hindsight. Reznor was always fond of emphasizing clubby rhythms rather than tortured screams on his many, many self-remixes. I've always preferred "Piggy (Nothing Can Stop Me Now)" from the excellent Further Down the Spiral EP to the album version. The remix replaced the original's jazzy sparseness with a graveyard of broken breakbeats. "Closer to God" and "All the Pigs, All Lined Up" confirm two of my above appraisals of Downward Spiral album tracks. And for fuck's sake, there's even a cover of Soft Cell's "Memorabilia" to balance out the much-too-easy goth karaoke of "Dead Souls", the set's other homage.
Of course, The Downward Spiral wasn't just opening my early-teen eyes to the wonders of blasphemy and extended remixes, but also to the joy of the concept album-- in coordination with Melon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, 1994/5 was a bumper crop for thematic excess. Reznor might've gone off the art-rock deep end with The Fragile, an album I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever, but The Downward Spiral still holds together, aided by a few musical reprises and its monochromatic lyrical content. Reznor had his album dynamics down pat at the time, chasing the brutal Gaspar Noe rape of "Big Man with a Gun" with "A Warm Place", the closest thing a teenager got to Eno in that era. Even the much-overrated "Hurt", which I didn't even like in the hands of a dying country singer, is a suitable post-storm calm.
That Reznor's chainsaw guitars haven't dulled after a decade of Stabbing Filter Manson knockoffs is gratifying, and that they still cut glass-- remastering or no-- is a credit to his production skills. With the benefit of Dolby 5.1 and SACD somethingorother, I'm sure the scream typhoons of "The Becoming" and the sedimentary synth layers of "Eraser" sound delightful on stereos I can't afford; (Best Buy wouldn't let me blast "Ruiner" in the demo room.) But even in obsolete stereophonic, the peekaboo drums of "Piggy" and the oscillating broken piano of "Closer" still impress.
Which is why it's a shame Reznor has largely been in seclusion since The Fragile shattered on impact. Since then, he's only emerged to restart old feuds and produce a terrible Zach de la Rocha single. Even if his songwriting talents flamed out after The Downward Spiral's extreme catharsis (how do you out-dread "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel?"), why has he been so selfish with his talents behind the board? While NIN remains in limbo, watered-down versions pollute the airwaves, hysterical critics forget that electronics and rock have met before, and only the occasional anniversary reissue reminds them that a Pennsylvania goth with a bad haircut was on to something underneath all the provocation. | 2004-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope / Nothing | November 28, 2004 | 8.3 | 5143c02c-63a2-40dd-a50f-1f6fe756a0ab | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On his second album, the viral rap star makes some of the most charming music of his still-young career. | On his second album, the viral rap star makes some of the most charming music of his still-young career. | Rich Brian: The Sailor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rich-brian-the-sailor/ | The Sailor | Like many viral rap stars, Rich Brian initially treated his music like just another bullet point in a personal-brand sales pitch. The outlines of that pitch are well-known by now: Young Chinese-Indonesian teen Brian Imanuel learns English on YouTube, dubs himself Rich Chigga, goes viral with a song called “Dat $tick” on which he throws around the n-word with startling nonchalance, rhyming about scenarios with which he almost certainly has no firsthand experience (e.g. shooting cops) while wearing a large fanny pack. As a listener, your choices are to write him off as a troll or enjoy his competent, syrupy flow while trying not to dwell on the problematic specifics. If you’re really being honest, unpacking it all gives you a headache.
But that was three years ago. In the short time since Brian arrived as a polo-clad edgelord, he’s traded shock value for an actual career. Now 19, Brian is no longer Chigga, no longer courting controversy for clicks. His interviews reveal a hungry young man with a worldly perspective: “My goal is to go mainstream—partially because I really want to pave the way for Asian kids to be themselves,” he has said. His label, 88Rising, has become an undeniable part of the global pop landscape, with Brian as its biggest star and de facto ambassador. On his first album, Amen, he fashioned himself as a bridge between a new Asian underground and mainstream hip-hop, exploring his unusual place in the culture with occasionally deft observations. Mostly, though, he rhymed about the internet and partying. “Catch me chillin’ with Offset in a luau,” he rapped on “Attention,” an oddly plausible scenario.
The Sailor, Rich Brian’s second album in two years, is another bid to distance himself from his teenage output. By and large, it is a successful one: The Sailor is often charming, featuring some of the best music of his young career. Brian’s obsessions—life away from home, his search for emotional connection and sex—pop up all over the record, often as absurdist juxtapositions. “Bad energy, man, where my palo santo at?/Told her ‘Don't fuck me,’ ’cause this shit get sentimental fast,” he raps on the title track. (It should probably be noted here, though it may go without saying, that Brian has spent much of the last few years in Los Angeles.)
Brian’s flow is remarkably malleable, his production choices doubly so. He pulls off a Migos-indebted staccato on “Confetti.” On the family-and-friends anthem “Kids,” he channels Drake with the memorable boast: “You big in your city, I’m the king of a continent.” On “Yellow,” he references his backstory with a flex made for the times: “I did it all without no citizenship/To show the whole world you just got to imagine.”
While he used to gravitate toward trap, he now pulls in boom-bap drums, emo-rap choruses, even Spanish guitar and psych rock. His songs have become more melodic and bittersweet, losing the hard edge he never sounded particularly comfortable with in the first place. On “Drive Safe,” for instance, he invokes Kid Cudi, while “No Worries” glows with Frank Ocean moods like orange paint on a BMW M3. His most heartfelt tracks toe the line between confessional and saccharine. “Shouts out to the ones doin’ things/Everyone was afraid or unable to do, man/The world needs more of you,” he raps on “Curious.”
There are two moments on The Sailor that point to where Brian still might go. The first is RZA’s feature on “Rapapapa,” which is more motivational speech than verse: “Rich Brian was born to be rich with talents and balance/And the ability to face life challenges,” the Wu general intones awkwardly. “Represent your artistic intelligence/Your genetic pigment, your culture, your power.” It’s a goofy knighting of sorts, one wrapped up in the Wu-Tang’s complicated and storied relationship with Asian art. The second is the outro of “The Sailor,” in which Brian is confronted by a “mysterious young girl” en route to the corner store for passion fruit iced tea. She asks him a series of “whoa, dude” questions about life and death, the last of which is “What is a life if a moment can end in the blink of an eye?” Like all things Rich Brian, it falls between laugh-out-loud ridiculous and oddly sweet. But his career is getting harder and harder to dismiss. | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 88rising | August 7, 2019 | 6.8 | 5147600e-fd3f-488b-8441-304dac00559c | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | |
The Stereolab frontwoman's latest solo LP renders her old band's political focus into a sort of fashionable socialism, for a breezy, pretty record that occasionally bows beneath overpowering and obvious political theories. | The Stereolab frontwoman's latest solo LP renders her old band's political focus into a sort of fashionable socialism, for a breezy, pretty record that occasionally bows beneath overpowering and obvious political theories. | Laetitia Sadier: Silencio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16858-silencio/ | Silencio | On Stereolab's 1994 single "Ping Pong", 60s French lounge music and Farfisa organ lent a retro patina to singer/lyricist Laetitia Sadier's Marxist commentary on capitalist boom/bust cycles, which she rendered with a thick layer of irony. "You see the recovery always comes 'round again/ There's nothing to worry for things will look after themselves," cooed the woman born in Paris in May 1968, playing tongue-in-cheek about capitalism's invisible hand. Six years later, when pets.com was put down by the dot-com bubble's burst, things looked bad. They got even worse eight years after that, when Wall Street's credit-default swaps turned American suburbs into ghettos. Nero fiddles, Rome burns, and all most are left to do is murmur "dum dum dum dee dum dum dee-da-dee-da-dee," like Sadier at the end of "Ping Pong", waiting for the next volley to come over the net.
Marx's theory was proven right by our most recent financial crisis, so it's not too much of a shock that Sadier's second solo album for Drag City, Silencio, would mark a return to pop punditry after the more personal and straightforward pop of 2010's overlooked LP The Trip. Don't expect the Occupy campers to wheel out the Moogs just yet, though: The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa. Robert Christgau once described Stereolab as "Marxist background music," and Sadier's lyrics have always treated politics as another set of cultural symbols to work into fanciful new shapes.
Particularly in a year when the internet blew up at burgeoning lefty Megan Draper chirping "Zou Bisou Bisou" to Don during the "Mad Men" season premiere, Silencio feels as timelessly hip as a pair of Wayfarers or an Eames chair. The album matches Sadier's husky alto with lush synths, pretty melodies, and the occasional presence of a café-infused Latin-style acoustic strum that suggests a Wes Anderson-directed make-out scene. As always, Sadier works best when asking generic Big Questions that tip over into the surreal or absurd: picking the brain of her friend Sue the mathematician (in "Find Me the Pulse of the Universe") or eating jambon crudité and wondering about the gap between perception and reality (in "Moi Sans Zach"), both presented with the breeziness of Jobim or early Gainsbourg. The chicken-scratch mod-funk of "Fragment pour le future de l'homme" is a surprise highlight, nodding back toward Stereolab's pureéd guitars while lyrics promise a brighter future for a generation caught spinning its Vespa wheels.
That doesn't make those moments when the political theories overpower the songs themselves any easier to overlook, though. This wasn't a problem with the likes of Stereolab's "Ping Pong" or "The Noise of Carpet", both of which offered the choice of tuning out the message for the catchy tunes, or intellectually merging and deconstructing the two components instead of reading Derrida for the next day's critical theory seminar. But on Silencio, a song like "There Is a Price for Freedom (And it Isn't Security)" is a mouthful, the sort of slogan you'd expect to see on a leaflet foisted upon you on a college campus. The production strives for the sort of fauxchestral grandeur that Super Furry Animals perfected on their own politically themed concept albums Rings Around the World and Phantom Power, but can't push past a groaner like "Follower of conformity/ Happy to identify with a reflection in merchandise." I'll spare you detailed quotes from "Ausculatation to the Nation", but just know that while the composition is fine enough, the lyrics are transcribed word for word from a caller's rant to a French political talk show. With this as a contrast point, it's best that the album ends with a Sadier spoken-word monologue, recorded in an old French church, during which she expounds on the resonant qualities of silence before letting the recorder pick up the tone of the cavernous, otherwise empty room. | 2012-07-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-07-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Drag City | July 24, 2012 | 6.8 | 514d9a15-003a-43f0-85a1-37d30733a8da | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The sludgy death-metal group draws inspiration from the story of the satanist Sean Sellers on their roaring latest LP. | The sludgy death-metal group draws inspiration from the story of the satanist Sean Sellers on their roaring latest LP. | Ilsa: Preyer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ilsa-preyer/ | Preyer | On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown into a crowd of workers and their families who had gathered to hear speeches from a handful of prominent anarchists and labor organizers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The police, who had arrived moments before to bark out a dispersal order, opened fire; seven of their number were killed in the fracas, and multiple civilians were left injured or dead. As one of most infamous dates in American history, May 4, 1886 has also become a cultural touchstone for many of those on the left, from book publishers to breweries to metal bands. To the latter example, it’s etched into Orion Peter’s knuckles, and is thus on full display whenever the rangy, pierced-up vocalist takes the stage as part of D.C death doom outfit Ilsa.
Ilsa is often dropped into the sludge metal camp, and while those doom elements are certainly apparent in their tempo and songwriting, when it comes down to brass tacks, they’re simply one of the best death metal bands going. Their band’s new full-length, Preyer, leans into that trademark bludgeoning rumble. While their approach may be muddied by their allegiance to punk rock, in tone, in tenor, and in lethal potential, Preyer could just as well have come crawling out of Stockholm in the mid-1990s than the D.C. suburbs in 2020. On top of that, the band’s queer, anti-racist, antifascist politics are as front-and-center as Peter’s tattoos—though the finer points of their lyrics are often obscured behind his guttural roar and the band’s three-guitarist attack.
Ilsa may be an excellent death metal band, but they are far from typical; garden-variety lyrics about blood, guts, and virgin sacrifices are of no interest here. Rather, one of the album’s standout tracks, “Lady Diamond,” is a beastly reimagining of a medieval ballad—and it’s not even the strangest lyrical turn in this eleven-track compendium of complaints against Christian theocracy. Album opener “Epigraph” announces itself with a monologue from murderer and satanist Sean Sellers, who claimed that demonic possession fueled the 1986 killing of his parents and later converted to Christianity prior to his 1999 execution by the state. According to the band, Sellers’ story was a useful avatar for the “exploitative intersection of religious, media, and state authority,” and provided something of a guiding light for the album’s conception.
But despite Ilsa’s deep love for B-movie horror, Preyer is not merely focused on death. Rather, it fixes a gimlet eye directly on the arcane evils of heaven and hell, howling mockery at the cross and the prayerful predators that it has shielded through the centuries. In the album’s most explicitly political and anti-religious song, “Shibboleth”—a triumph of grimy, down-tuned d-beat—Peters rails against the “puritanic scum” and exhorts his own followers, “Raise the Devil’s black flag high! Anti-Christofascism!”
Elsewhere, Ilsa takes aim at mass media as a lever of control on the tectonically shifting “The Square Column,” and pays special attention to religious fanaticism, the sins of the church, and blasphemous ritual (as on the exemplary bruiser “Widdershins”). For someone like me, who was both raised Catholic and got into death metal at a rather tender age, Preyer often cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. The lurching title track is a bitter condemnation of Catholic complicity, and comes with a warning: “Pedophile protectors/Reproduce repression/Shame on you/Hell is real/Still to come/In this life.”
Preyer is due out on November 20th. Nine days (and 133 years) before, on November 11, 1887, four of those Haymarket martyrs—Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer—had swung from the gallows after a sham trial. Over a century later, the country remains in the grip of right-wing hegemony, and Ilsa’s latest effort offers both a razor-sharp critique of power and a distortion-drenched cry of rebellion. As Spies cried out before he died, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” Preyer may be an outlier in the often uninspiring American death metal landscape, but its message—and its music—make for a powerful weapon nonetheless.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | November 23, 2020 | 7.3 | 51508098-90a8-4155-8e5a-e3f6356f2348 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
The 17-year-old rapper-producer’s solo debut is pastel pretty in the Surf Gang tradition, coating pristine samples in a thin layer of digital grime. | The 17-year-old rapper-producer’s solo debut is pastel pretty in the Surf Gang tradition, coating pristine samples in a thin layer of digital grime. | FearDorian: FearDorian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/feardorian-feardorian/ | FearDorian | FearDorian beats are potent enough to leave you with a contact high. Their enveloping chaos feels structured, as if you synced playback on two completely different songs until they formed an alien vibe of their own. Like his stylistic forebears-turned-collaborators in Surf Gang—Dorian used to make dance videos set to the collective’s songs on Triller—rap, indie rock, and vaporwave are clear influences. Bending those sounds into different shapes and sizes is the 17-year-old rapper-producer’s default zone. This is a kid who’s sampled Amy Winehouse for a Milwaukee rap track, who pulls as much inspiration from Midwest emo records and James Ferraro as he does from Chicago rapper-producer Lucki. Take the droning guitars and booming trap drums that power Seattle rapper Ghoulaveli’s 2019 single “no!,” or how the addition of twinkling strings to the synthetic claps on AyooLii’s “Andele” makes it just a bit zanier. Dorian’s production reflects the borderless imagination of the postmodern rap internet while remaining solid enough to not dissolve in its own haze.
After years of offering up beats to his growing network, Dorian uses them to tell his own story on FearDorian, his self-titled solo debut. Unlike AyooLii or Florida rapper 454, whose pitch-shifted chortles tend to hover above the beat, Dorian’s whispered croak is nonchalant, always on the verge of being consumed by its surroundings. Even when he’s grappling with the ennui that plagues every teenager, he doesn’t necessarily sound timid or unsure. Early highlight “Acrid Taste” fishtails through emotional heel turns: Out-of-body experiences at parties and fears of turning into his father give way to cheeky second-wind optimism (“I feel like I’m dyin’, I tell bro to pass the water”). But what stands out most isn’t the melancholy lyrics or the silky beat—a sample from a song by Philly shoegaze band They Are Gutting a Body of Water combined with tinny, blown-out 808s—it’s Dorian broadcasting from the epicenter.
The songs on FearDorian aren’t as grandiose as the stadium-sized rock-rap of someone like Kenny Mason. They don’t fully fit the Hot Topic-by-way-of-Nike-tech aesthetic of evilgiane or Polo Perks either. Dorian’s percussion is warbly and busy but soft, more interested in setting a mood than inciting a mosh pit (not that that’s stopped anyone trying). The album’s harshest beat is “Raining in Brooklyn,” where chiptune-esque synths drape around thundering drums and non sequitur bars. Otherwise, the beats on FearDorian are post-Surf Gang wonders, pastel-pretty with just a touch of digital grime. Lead single “Highschool” pits skipping hi-hats against swelling keyboards, recalling SenseiATL’s work with Tony Shhnow if it were retrofitted into an HD remake of Nights Into Dreams, while “Virginia Hymn” suggests MexikoDro remixing Dirty Projectors.
Dorian has rapped before, but those earlier lyrics usually came in short bursts, serving more as set dressing for the beats. And while he doesn’t boast mind-bending couplets or breathless technical ability, the raps on FearDorian are poised and focused, stacking flexes, ruminations, and slice-of-life details in quick succession. On “What Happened,” he compresses every stage of a party, from the pre-game session to the stuck-in-bed malaise the morning after, into less than 10 seconds. The words themselves aren’t profound, but the way he skips over the chanting vocals and drum claps creates a gnawing anxiety. Bad thoughts loom on the margins of Dorian’s songs like scabs begging to be picked, but he’s locked in on racks, new love, and the occasional self-deprecating joke. “Don’t know what you see, girl, but I’m glad you see it/’Cause I ain’t slept in weeks,” he says on the otherwise gossamer “Still Here,” fighting off insomnia with affection.
What teenager doesn’t have days when they’re on top of the world and stuck in quicksand at the same time? In an interview with No Bells, Dorian mentioned rapping about things he wants—accolades, swag, money—as if each song were an act of manifestation. Buying a designer bag for a love interest is cool and all, but sometimes the most important goal is to make it through the day, or the depressive episode, in one piece. FearDorian doesn’t have cures for those loaded feelings, and it doesn’t ignore them, either. Dorian just invites you into their fidgety cores. | 2024-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 10, 2024 | 7.4 | 51567362-99af-4c1f-af93-59fd70fbe988 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Canadian singer/songwriter/producer turns in a more focused album with a sonic palette reminiscent of his recent production work for Women. | The Canadian singer/songwriter/producer turns in a more focused album with a sonic palette reminiscent of his recent production work for Women. | Chad VanGaalen: Diaper Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15428-diaper-island/ | Diaper Island | In addition to turning in three very solid albums of his own in the past few years, Chad VanGaalen also produced fellow Albertans Women. The two albums he made with that band in his basement were distinctly homespun and lo-fi sounding, but packed with some of his characteristic idiosyncrasies-- from recording on boomboxes to unexpected appearances of synth to flourishes of odd percussion. There was a sense that Women were being let into VanGaalen's world rather than the other way around.
So it makes sense that he returns to the sound of the two Women albums on his fourth LP, Diaper Island. VanGaalen's previous records are characterized by their eclecticism, veering from acoustic folk songs to electronic synth workouts, and they often sound like grab-bags drawn from his apparently prolific recording habits (he recently told an interviewer he had recorded 80 songs leading up to this record). Part of what makes Diaper Island a success is its cohesive sound and restraint. There's an economy in his instrumentation and recording that allows a set of well-written songs to take center stage.
On Diaper Island VanGaalen internalizes feelings of restlessness into the fabric of his songs, giving them more depth than before. The de-tuned guitars of "Peace on the Rise" hew close to the sound of 1990s indie-- bands like Sonic Youth and Pavement loom large here-- spinning a downtrodden riff that's also quite an earworm. But the song's melancholy tinge takes an unexpected nosedive halfway through the song in a beautiful, droning mid-section that opens out with horns and rough textures. It's a characteristic left-turn, the kind of unexpected shift that VanGaalen used to perform with production switches on previous records.
But there's a lot of surface-level enjoyment too, as VanGaalen's excellent riffs compete for the spotlight. The best of these comes on "Burning Photographs", as glassy guitar propels zig-zagging verses in front of a loose, ticking drum beat. There's a satisfying energy at the heart of many of these songs, and VanGaalen allows them to sound slack and jammy as he launches into taut solos on "Replace Me" and "Blonde Hash".
The record manages to be compelling even during some of its weaker moments, such as spiky second-half cuts "Freedom For a Policeman" and "Can You Believe It!?". Both have an almost mean edge to them. VanGaalen sounds prickly on the latter song as he sings, "That fucking mind scanner/ That made me piss myself/ Now that I'm calming down/ I'm really thankful they erased it." It's not the most instantly enjoyable track on the record, but it shows a different side of VanGaalen's character and makes his songwriting feel more engaging on the whole.
VanGaalen closes the record with the line, "Baby, will you love me/ I'm really feeling ugly," on a song called "Shave My Pussy", and Diaper Island-- as hinted at with that title-- isn't the prettiest record he's ever made. Instead, it's gritty and honest. Beneath the surface-layer thrill of some of these songs are subtle character shifts and brave one-liners, all of which confirm VanGaalen's status as gripping songwriter as well as a producer. | 2011-05-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-05-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 16, 2011 | 7.5 | 51635a2a-4168-435f-bc04-50acd45f397d | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
Caroline Polachek, of the recently disbanded synth-pop outfit Chairlift, offers eighteen sparse instrumental tracks, with reedy sine wave tones moving meditatively in negative space. | Caroline Polachek, of the recently disbanded synth-pop outfit Chairlift, offers eighteen sparse instrumental tracks, with reedy sine wave tones moving meditatively in negative space. | CEP: Drawing the Target Around the Arrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22822-drawing-the-target-around-the-arrow/ | Drawing the Target Around the Arrow | Caroline Polachek—of the recently-disbanded synth-pop outfit Chairlift—has characterized her forays into sine-wave synth composition as a recuperative process, “an ear break from working on whatever I was working on.” Drawing the Target Around the Arrow, released under her initials, CEP, collects eighteen of these sparse instrumental tracks, recorded between 2012 and 2016. Polachek’s songwriting for Chairlift and solo projects like Ramona Lisa often skews dreamy and ornate, sometimes edging into cloying, but these compositions embrace a neutral, elemental sound. Drawing the Target is less a departure than a detour, but it’s a lovely one all the same, offering a sort of instinctual minimalism without conceptual baggage.
Sine waves are sound in its most elemental (and, in a sense, least stylized) form; aesthetically, Drawing the Target is made of thin, its reedy tones bending into one another but rarely intersecting. Full of negative space, it’s the kind of music that gets lost if it’s competing with conversation, or street sounds, or the rush of a subway car. In this sense, these tracks are personal by design, cultivating something of a contemplative space. Some melodies on the album emerge more resolute than others— “Singalong” repeats, in vibraphone-like staccato, a sweet, optimistic phrase, and “Sleeping Fish” sounds like it could be a sketch for a B-side from Huerco S.’s recent album—but it’s just as likely to softly growl and hum. “Borg Pillow” is almost pure texture, quietly groaning in and out, and “Pupil” sustains the same unchanging notes for its full five-and-a-half-minute duration.
The overall tone is generally unobtrusive, and the individual tracks often run together. To this effect, it almost seems odd that the songs have been given titles that conjure physical objects, nature, and human emotion: perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this release is its definitively non-linguistic form of expression. And yet, even if the sine wave is a distinctly unvarnished tool for music-making, Polachek’s compositions are also stylish in their way. Minimalism is often embraced as a utilitarian salve to cultural overload—in this case, applied as a practical break from pop music's loaded emotional structures. But the smart elegance that drives Drawing the Target, I imagine, will also map well onto the fleshier pop songs Polachek has to come. | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Panonica | January 30, 2017 | 7 | 5164dfc9-0bc9-456c-a9a8-db48bdfa4589 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The Danish DJ Courtesy’s label pivots from Copenhagen’s fast-techno sound to a more nuanced and mysterious snapshot of the city’s electronic sounds. | The Danish DJ Courtesy’s label pivots from Copenhagen’s fast-techno sound to a more nuanced and mysterious snapshot of the city’s electronic sounds. | Various Artists: Kulør 006 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-kulor-006/ | Kulør 006 | Humor and heartbreak are two sides of the same coin; both invoke the absurdity of being alive. At least, that’s what Kulør 006 has me feeling. The second compilation on Danish DJ and creative director Courtesy’s label Kulør, it showcases the work of local producers and musicians from her hometown, Copenhagen. The first, Kulør 001, was a snapshot of the city’s “fast techno” scene, which has more in common with trance motifs and rave aesthetics than it does Berlin’s minimal take on the Detroit sound. Courtesy used to co-run another label, Ectotherm, that centered on this particular facet of Copenhagen dance music, but it wound down in 2018. She started Kulør the same year with the intention of exploring a wider sonic palette, which is where Kulør 006 steps in. Kulør, she explained in an interview, is “like a living organism that can grow and morph into things that I can’t even imagine now.”
If that description could peel itself off this page and make a home inside your ears, it might sound a lot like Minais B’s delightfully eccentric “To Levende Væsener” (or in translation, “Two Living Beings”). Seesawing synthesized strings make way for a chorus of digital mouth sounds that land somewhere between the croak of a frog and the yap of a small dog. While sonically distinct, they tickle the senses in a not dissimilar way to a particularly squelchy acid line. Purists like to paint electronic music as a wholly serious endeavor, but wise practitioners know that a spot of ludicrousness can light up a dance floor like nothing else.
The sense of humor that Varnrable wields on “Cold Bright Hard Light” is dry to the point of brittle, but just as effective. Filtering post-punk energy through sharp synths, the artist narrates a desire to escape to the countryside, anticipating a cold welcome, before deadpanning the quintessential millennial stance: “Thank god for good Wi-Fi connection, right?”
Laughter’s the best medicine, they say, but tears also clear a path for healing. Interestingly, the only two artists on Kulør 006 who also appeared on the hedonistic first compilation—Schacke and IBON—are also the ones who dig deepest into the comedown zone. Schacke spells it out with “The End of Ecstasy,” a subdued looping melody that feels in conversation with “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix)” by Sabres of Paradise, an association I’m perhaps more sensitive to given Andrew Weatherall’s recent passing. Where “Smokebelch II” is tinged with joy, “The End of Ecstasy” has a curled-up and contemplative energy, characterized instead by burnt textures and feelings alike. IBON’s contribution, a watercolor synth track called “Sorgpad,” also exists in the lonely hours that stretch out between the last record of the night and the relief of a new day. Eschewing melody, IBON uses incremental shifts in tone and timbre to tell a story that seasoned ravers will recognize.
There’s plenty more for curious ears to explore, and it is nothing if not surprising. On the vinyl version, the A-side has a scrapbook pop moment with Sofie Birch’s “Look,” which recalls the sweetly scruffy production of London in the early 2010s (think early Sampha, Micachu, and Kwes), and a slice of polyrhythmic heaven in Astrid Sonne’s “Swirl,” which performs an endless build without losing traction. Over on side B, “Never Rest” by Lyra Valenza traverses ambient, industrial, and trance territories, while “Dares Soar” by X & Yde combines spoken word, slabs of bass, and squiggly sax. And that’s not even everything! Kulør 006 is a thrilling peek inside the multidimensional mindspace of this network of Copenhagen artists that counts Courtesy at its heart. | 2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Kulør | February 25, 2020 | 7.5 | 516c6109-5eb5-4e3b-a873-ed3287fe1a87 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
Serious is a subjective term. In 25 years as a band, writing songs on such blithe yet cosmically related topics ... | Serious is a subjective term. In 25 years as a band, writing songs on such blithe yet cosmically related topics ... | Descendents: Cool to Be You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2547-cool-to-be-you/ | Cool to Be You | Serious is a subjective term. In 25 years as a band, writing songs on such blithe yet cosmically related topics as girls, television and spicy food, the Descendents have been called a lot of things, and serious isn't one of them. On the other hand, ten albums and a best-of collection is a pretty serious output, regardless of the band's sometimes trifling subject matter. And though they've always affected an irreverent, lighthearted persona, the Descendents have written more than a handful of seriously great songs. Ever battling a self-styled "war against mediocrity," the band have witnessed the relentless ebb and flow of countless cultural trends, and on Cool to Be You, their first album in eight years, they continue to resist deviation from a sound they helped bring to the fore in the early 1980s.
After spending most of their first two decades on SST, the band moved to Epitaph in 1996 to release Everything Sucks, a wontedly transient collection of pop/punk nuggets, many of which saw immediate induction into the Descendents pantheon. "Coffee Mug" was a memorable, if paltry, punk seizure that beat Michael Johnson in his best 400 meters, and more importantly, kept pace with other classic sprints in the band's catalog. But following that effort, frontman and cover art muse Milo Auckerman returned to his on-again, off-again career as a chemist, effectively putting the Descendents on the backburner.
So behold the fruits of eight years' relentless experimentation-- that is, real experimentation, in an actual biochemical laboratory. Though it appears Auckerman's day job has finally earned him the bankroll to support a new pair of horned-rims, the Descendents have emerged as their same old selves. During their downtime, members Karl Alvarez, Stephen Egerton and ex-Black Flag drummer Bill Stevenson managed to release three studio albums as the wacky but inessential spin-off All, and while that band has never pulled the critical weight of the Descendents, it seems to have kept them sharp technically-- now reunited on Fat Wreck Chords, the group seems strong as ever, thrashing as always in the name of food and flatulence. Case in point: "Blast Off", a song that attempts to reconcile both interests with lyrics like, "Stay away from the chili verde/ Unless you want to get blown away," and, "Capsaicinoids are a thing to avoid/ Unless you want to burn in that 'roid."
While maturity may not have gained any import to the band in their time off, they remain as good for a hook as they were 20 years yore. "Talking" is the most anthemic of the Cool to Be You lot, featuring a winsome guitar melody, a giddy bassline, and Auckerman's typically pining verses. "Nothing with You" revels in their signature braindead juvenilia, and its music is pleasantly complementary. Meanwhile, on "Dreams", Milo affirms his reputation as an inwardly self-loathing nerd, spitting cynical, clever salvos like, "Why do I get my hopes up at all?/ I've been living this Walter Mitty life for too long." The song represents Cool to Be You's fiercest moment, and though it lacks pubescent humor, it would feel right at home amongst the band's 80s arsenal.
Elsewhere, the band waxes serious: On EP-carryover "'Merican", they step outside their teenage matrix and reach for relevance. The result, however, betrays the tongue-in-cheek introspectiveness that won the band the bulk of their adoration, and its lyrics about American arrogance and double standards not only lack the dumb fun of the rest of the record, but are also disconcertingly trite. Luckily, "One More Day" and "Maddie" are redeemingly heartfelt and riff-laden, while the album closer, "Dry Spell", catchily (if needlessly) reiterates the point. Its speedy final chorus seems somewhat anticlimactic-- but somehow, it seems humbly appropriate: Rather than forcing an ostentatious grand finale, the Descendents unassumingly steal away, leaving their legacy fully intact. | 2004-05-13T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-05-13T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Fat Wreck Chords | May 13, 2004 | 7.1 | 516cdb33-fd5c-4473-9566-bf6aae0e56ee | Pitchfork | null |
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The nine tracks on High on Fire’s masterful seventh album, Luminiferous, are among the most enthusiastic and bracing of the Oakland metal band's career. Featuring mammoth riffs and hooks, it feels like a classic compendium of High on Fire’s successes. | The nine tracks on High on Fire’s masterful seventh album, Luminiferous, are among the most enthusiastic and bracing of the Oakland metal band's career. Featuring mammoth riffs and hooks, it feels like a classic compendium of High on Fire’s successes. | High on Fire: Luminiferous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20651-luminiferous/ | Luminiferous | Matt Pike has become a punchline again. In the weeks leading up to the release of High on Fire’s masterful seventh album, Luminiferous, listeners began to notice that the singer’s long-latent suspicions and esoteric interests had morphed at last into legitimate conspiracy theories. During "The Black Plot", the album’s exuberant opener and first tease, Pike grunts about the need to hide your mind because of nearby aliens and relents to the damage an evil global scheme has already caused. During subsequent browbeater "The Sunless Years", Pike growls about dropping acid, spotting satellites, and huffing chemtrails. "Someone please tell them," he shouts mid-verse, "this is our fucking lives." When Rolling Stone asked Pike about those ideas, he reinforced them rather than recant: a book by noted snake oil salesman David Icke had opened his eyes. 9/11 was an inside job. And the aliens built both the ziggurats and pyramids. “Dude, I say a lot of fucked-up shit!” Pike admitted. As it does, the metal Internet laughed online.
But if that’s the stuff that drives Pike and his increasingly volatile and complex rhythm section to play with the gumption and zeal of Luminiferous, so be it. These nine tracks are among the most enthusiastic and bracing of High on Fire’s career, with mammoth riffs and hooks spurred on by a momentous band. Luminiferous feels like a classic compendium of High on Fire’s successes. There are mid-tempo marches, like the arching wallop of "The Falconist", and breathless moments that push the accelerator on doom metal until the pedal seems to stick, like the clawing "The Dark Side of the Compass" and the irrepressible "The Black Plot".
The parts themselves have never sounded better. Pike, who supplies a solo for every song, is an audacious, unapologetic leader. Drummer Des Kensel has become an exceptional drummer, able to shoehorn blast beats inside weighted sludge riffs and actually swing through the most straightforward moments. Bassist Jeff Matz is an expert at interlocking with both sides, sharing the load of the riffs and the rhythms until they’re all too big to resist. Now approaching their second decade as a consistent trio, High on Fire’s interplay has become a marvel. To wit, Pike’s set of brief solos during "The Falconist"—and the way Kensel and Matz subtract and add time around it—warrants jazz-level scholarship.
Still, Luminiferous is at its best when High on Fire seem to be preaching about these zany ideas, as if Pike has some great revelation that must be shared with his disciples. "Slave the Hive", for instance, ricochets between hardcore built by a doom metal toolkit and shout-out-loud classic rock played by madmen on speed. "They got us wired to the reptile brain," the band howls during the hook. "Your life is not the same. This world is insane." It’s the kind of silly, serious rallying cry that’s meant to be yelled back at the band onstage, even if you don’t buy it. That infectious feeling applies to the relentless title track, too, a pick-sliding monster that reaches back to the days of punk-and-metal crossover to lecture on theories of Hertz-based mind control and the deeds of white-wigged barristers. Pike unleashes soul-scraping yells between the verses and over the coda. It is a quasi-religious paroxysm; he’s hollering about despising government overlords the way a gospel shouter might scream about loving the Lord.
Every number on Luminiferous—and for the most part, in High on Fire’s entire collection—begins with some jolt, be it a heavy drum roll from Kensel or a big swipe at the guitar from Pike. But late into this album, High on Fire take one of their most unlikely detours ever, opening "The Cave" with a pensive bass solo and colorful clouds of textural abstraction. Acoustic guitar trots along to a steady beat, and Pike legitimately croons lines about putting life, the road, and even conspiracy theories on hold long enough to fall in love. They seesaw between distorted, supercharged choruses and muted verses, arriving somewhere between a power ballad and a post-grunge acoustic anthem. It suggests broader possibilities for High on Fire than the established strum-churn-and-solo modus operandi and provides a welcome break to this parade of heavy hitters. What’s more, "The Cave" indicates that Pike’s time in the reunited Sleep has served him well, causing him to slow down and be more than some shirtless 43-year-old dude with tough-guy lyrics. Al Cisneros, "The Cave" suggests, is not Sleep’s only surviving master of mood.
Speaking of Sleep, two decades ago, the hard-living Pike couldn’t help keep that band together long enough to release its third album, an epic poem about a mecca made of marijuana. Few might have predicted that, countless narcotic trips later, the now-sober Pike would be one of metal’s most trustworthy bandleaders, fronting a trio so consistent that Luminiferous feels only like the next point in a long line of remarkable records. Yes, High on Fire add a few new tricks here, especially through an enhanced ability to push and pull tempos at will. But for the most part, they remain a powerful trio with perfect chemistry, capable of embedding great hooks and marvels of rhythm section athleticism within riff-worshipping hits. "Before, I’d be all like, ‘How do we top the last one?’" Pike told Rolling Stone of Luminiferous in the same interview that turned him back into a minor metal meme. "It’s not better—it’s just a different version of myself that I’ve been trying to express all along." That’s not crazy talk. That’s fact. | 2015-06-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | eOne Music | June 16, 2015 | 8 | 516e5e19-3924-44f9-8f8c-87f0172bdae1 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The artist’s full-length debut is an honest step forward, but emotional vulnerability can’t save it from the clichés of confessional songwriting. | The artist’s full-length debut is an honest step forward, but emotional vulnerability can’t save it from the clichés of confessional songwriting. | Gracie Abrams: *Good Riddance * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gracie-abrams-good-riddance/ | Good Riddance | Gracie Abrams is a two-fold industry baby: Her father is Star Wars director and Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams, and her mothers are Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers. The artist’s 2020 debut EP minor is a collection of diaristic tracks with ashen vocals, recalling her predecessors’ heartfelt divulgence. Although it inspired Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout song and has amassed nearly 300 million streams on Spotify, the EP is underdeveloped, with simple production and promising (but sometimes cliché) confessional writing. Her debut full-length Good Riddance dives deeper into personal accountability and sincere reflection on the fallout of complex relationships, revealing more of Abrams than ever before. But with melodic repetition and unadventurous production, the record is often stagnant, leaving you wishing for a more sophisticated, compelling take on whisperpop.
Abrams’ creative relationship with producer and co-writer Aaron Dessner is central to Good Riddance. While the two collaborated on a few songs for her 2021 EP This Is What It Feels Like, Abrams described their dynamic on this record as “a very tiny bubble, which felt like such a safe space to work through what I needed to process in these songs.” This comfort is palpable across the record: There are moments that display an admirable capacity for self-interrogation (“Used to lie to your face 20 times in a day/It was my little strange addiction” on “Best”), even if others feel like a middle school lesson on writing a metaphor (“I’m your ghost right now/Your house is haunted”; “I’m a rollercoaster/You’re a dead-end street” on “I know it won’t work” and “Full machine,” respectively).
The duo’s work remains mostly inside the box here. Taylor Swift’s recent collaborations with Dessner put her songwriting skills on full display, while adding newfound subtlety to her work, like the understated 5/4 discomfort of “tolerate it” and the unexpected stomp beat of “closure.” Knowing what he’s capable of inspiring, his input feels muted on Good Riddance. What he does offer is delicate acoustic guitars, pastel percussion, and the occasional unique embellishment. Abrams’ vocals are soothing and hazy, but their whispered quality risks being static. Repetitive, few-note melodies make this problem especially apparent; on tracks like “The blue” and “Best,” Abrams’ vocal performance sometimes lacks the energy needed to keep the songs engaging. You want her to wander somewhere unpredictable—to do something that would make these ostensibly intimate moments more special.
Some songs on Good Riddance don’t deliver on their promise of vulnerability, a frustrating truth considering the abundance of literary lyrics here. “Where do we go now?” tackles a failing relationship at a crossroads; in each verse, Abrams succinctly captures the guilt and confusion that comes with romantic uncertainty. But the relentless, B-flat synth pulse and the constant repetition of the question in the song’s title quickly force the song into tedium. With each hook, the production expands bit by bit, but every time it draws back, the track’s valuable momentum diminishes. Maybe this is the point; the song is, after all, about not knowing where to go. But just because it might be intentional doesn’t mean it works. If it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere...it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.
Undeniably, there are tracks on Good Riddance that show Abrams’ and Dessner’s ability to tap into something especially profound. “Amelie” is bewitching, capturing a sense of aching beauty that stands out amongst the album’s more passive moments. Against a simple, finger-picked acoustic guitar and foggy piano notes, Abrams’ voice breaks with a post-cry elegance; recorded in just one take, she sings, “I met a girl once/She sorta ripped me open…Why’d it feel louder/When all of it went unspoken/All I can do is hope that this’ll go away.” The song is a misty balance of the universal and the personal, leaving one commenter on Abrams’ Instagram announcement to ask earnestly, “Okay but does anyone know what this song’s about?” To dip so eloquently into one’s psychic interiors—only to pull away from the last few details—resembles the sense of longing Abrams identifies in herself. In this context, “Amelie” could be anyone: a past lover, a lost childhood friend, an alter ego.
Good Riddance is, in a word, nice. But there are plenty of other diaristic artists, ones whose music displays a certain sense of individuality: Consider Mitski’s poetic disaffection, Rodrigo’s playful angst, or Bridgers’ acute melancholy. Abrams’ writing is honest and personal, offering moments of clear, quiet charm. Writing with emotional transparency is only one part of the equation, especially given the ubiquity of “sad girl” songs these days. As of now, it’s a bit difficult to see what sets Abrams apart from the rest. | 2023-02-28T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-28T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | February 28, 2023 | 6.2 | 51708455-9b68-44d2-88bf-fc6820e39e30 | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
A compilation from Nina Kraviz’ трип label connects the dots between leftfield techno, acid, and breakneck hardcore, forging an adventurous style evocative of warehouse raves in deepest Siberia. | A compilation from Nina Kraviz’ трип label connects the dots between leftfield techno, acid, and breakneck hardcore, forging an adventurous style evocative of warehouse raves in deepest Siberia. | Various Artists: Don’t Mess With Cupid, ‘Cause Cupid Ain’t Stupid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-dont-mess-with-cupid-cause-cupid-aint-stupid/ | Don’t Mess With Cupid, ‘Cause Cupid Ain’t Stupid | Like Warp Records, Factory, and even Motown before it, Nina Kraviz’ трип (Trip) has the three defining characteristics of a great record label: a distinct but ever-evolving sound, a staunch core of artists, and a particular geographic base, with most of трип’s music coming from Russia and Iceland. Most importantly, трип, though still in its infancy, has forged its own internal logic. If you wondered what links the glacial IDM of Biogen with the industrial hardcore of Marc Acardipane, or the oddball techno of PTU with the acidic attack of Aphex Twin’s Universal Indicator project, then the answer is трип itself, the label providing the contextual thread that binds these disparate elements together.
Acardipane, aka German hardcore pioneer Marc Trauner, is the notable newcomer to the трип stable on this release. His contribution, a slice of 165-BPM dark hardcore, is merely rugged rather than nosebleed extreme, but his presence on Don’t Mess With Cupid enforces the idea that трип is a label operating at electronic music’s fringes. It also, alongside the appearance of a vintage Richard D. James tune, suggests that the curatorial scope of the compilation, rather than the top-down sweep of the artist album, is where трип’s unruly aesthetic truly thrives.
Much like Kraviz’ audacious DJ sets, what unites the 10 tracks on Don’t Mess is not so much genre or BPM but a certain feel: an adventurous menace and steely electronic funk, doused in the kind of chilling atmospheres that raise images of freezing Siberian plains and Icelandic perma-dark. This thematic cohesion means that the frantic acid techno of “15 c7”—a raw, nervous dancefloor track originally found on Universal Indicator’s Red album, released on Rephlex back in 1993—sits snugly alongside the mechanical ambience of Roma Zuckerman’s “Zero,” which leads elegantly into the harsh rhythmic whirl of Kraviz’ “Opa.” You could, at a push, call all three tracks “techno,” but this techno remains true to the pioneering spirit of the genre’s American originators without getting trapped in slavish devotion to their sound. A very European take on the genre, it leans on the classical precision of Kraftwerk more than warm Detroit nights.
This spirit of adventure is best found in the compilation’s highlights—Bjarki’s “3-1 tap lush,” Shadowax’s “I want to be a stewardess,” and PTU’s “Castor and Pollux”—which bend techno’s electronic futurism into fascinating new shapes. “3-1 tap lush,” a staple of Kraviz’ DJ sets, is both delightfully twisted and strangely gentle, resting on an undulating and unnerving vocal sample that sounds like a child discovering silly mouth noises while exploring the echoing of an abandoned hospital. PTU take a similarly impudent approach: “Castor and Pollux” continues the pick-and-mix approach the Russian duo pioneered on 2017’s A Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day, throwing grandiose, arcane noises against a juddering techno beat and seeing what sticks. “I want to be a stewardess” is even more unlikely, combining cinder-block techno thump, clipped Russian-language vocal, and a twisted jungle break into a blood-boilingly exciting, shape-shifting whole that cascades up and down the octave while ratcheting up the metallic intensity.
Against such invention, the rather square 4/4 thump of Exos’ “Grasshunter” and Nikita Zabelin’s edit of DEKA’s “Pearl” are too straight-laced for comfort, while Pilldriver’s “Pitch-Hiker” feels a little tame for an artist revered as a wizard of the dark hardcore arts. But odd individual moments never threaten to derail a magnificent album of join-the-dots adventurism and pointed thematic elegance. All of трип’s releases have been brilliant over the last year, but the label’s spirit really shines on compilations like this one, offering a reminder that curation itself can be an act of creation when done with this degree of taste and vision. | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | трип | July 18, 2018 | 7.7 | 51762a80-79a4-47a6-b8fb-009953412b27 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Backed by a 36-piece orchestra, Rufus Wainwright puts on the Ritz and pays a track-by-track tribute to Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall performance, which has been dubbed the "greatest night in showbusiness history." | Backed by a 36-piece orchestra, Rufus Wainwright puts on the Ritz and pays a track-by-track tribute to Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall performance, which has been dubbed the "greatest night in showbusiness history." | Rufus Wainwright: Rufus Does Judy Live at Carnegie Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11020-rufus-does-judy-live-at-carnegie-hall/ | Rufus Does Judy Live at Carnegie Hall | "When I was a kid, I always wanted to be Dorothy," drawls Rufus Wainwright, between songs, clearly having the time of his life on stage at Carnegie Hall in October 2006. "Except for the bad days, when I wanted to be the Wicked Witch." Rufus Does Judy... is the fulfilment of this childhood wish and the ultimate Judy Garland tribute: A song-by-song recreation of her legendary 1961 set on the same stage, the show which established the troubled singer as "the world's greatest entertainer". As a kind of conceptual drag act, it's comparable to Far From Heaven, where Todd Haynes had a similarly gay old time paying lavish homage to the melodramas of film director Douglas Sirk.
Rufus Does Judy is a lovingly meticulous recreation ("I feel like Judy Garland's secretary!" he sighs at one point), right down to the flubbed lyric in "You Go to My Head" and the babbled banter before "A Foggy Day in London Town", but it's no diligent impression. Wainwright's reedy tenor is no match for Garland's brassy vibrato, but, to his credit, he elegantly outdoes her on a couple of the ballads. Listen again to Garland's original double album-- an oddly primitive recording, full of microphone crashes and a drummer a few clangs short of his trolley-- it's clear that, in concert at least, she was less a singer than an overwhelming dramatic presence, a force of showbiz nature. In fact, in a funny way, the most impressive tracks aren't the songs themselves but rather the astonishing waves of cheers and applause, the sheer rush of devotion from the audience.
That's an intensity that Wainwright clearly craves. On his own records he's seemed increasingly trapped in the prissy prison of his languid chamber pop, an orchid blooming in an arid greenhouse. But his talent is far too gaudy to stay cooped up, and over the course of this performance, channeling the chutzpah, getting high off the roar of the crowd, he comes to high-kicking life. Nothing is too corny for him: "When You're Smiling", "That's Entertainment", even a shit-eating "Swanee". He revels in the broader than Broadway bravado, it seems such a central part of his persona, but it's often simply refined out of his records completely. Of course Garland's real showbiz heir isn't Wainwright-- it's Britney Spears. So I wonder if, at heart, this splendid celebration isn't simply mourning a distant dawn-of-the-60s moment, when it was still possible to believe in the amusements of entertainment, and the chance of happy endings for child stars.
But is this more than just shits and giggles for devotees of the American songbook? Does it have anything to offer the curious yet showtunephobic indie kid? Well, maybe. In the truly Garlandy spirit of family revue, Wainwright introduces his sister Martha, who turns in a stunning, showstopping "Stormy Weather" in an appropriately brazen bid to steal the show. And he himself cuts to the quick of Garland's art with heartfelt performances of the ballads, particularly "Do It Again", "The Man That Got Away", and "If Love Were All".
"I believe that since my life began, the most I've had is just a talent to amuse", sang Garland on that last number in 1961, making Noel Coward's words her own, milking the self-dramatizing self-deprecation that moved her audience so. Sung by Wainwright the words take on a different ring. He already has the arthouse chic, the operatic range, and the high-class plaudits that Garland coveted. You suspect he would dearly love to have "just" that talent, or, in fact, that audience to amuse. He's said that he started listening to the Carnegie Hall album in the weeks and months after September 11, craving some cheap showbiz cheer, but wound up discovering something deeper. Of course, you can dismiss that as camp denial, a kind of wishful clicking together of the heels in the face of terror. But the bluebirds and rainbows of Garland's songs and movies were borne out of real horrors of the 1930s and 40s, and her own very particular demons. What her audience loved about her was her stout, sweaty, determined, ultimately doomed, defiance. | 2008-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2008-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | January 7, 2008 | 7.5 | 5177dfc6-40c4-44ac-8dfd-7f0a8067d965 | Pitchfork | null |
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Something More Than Free is Jason Isbell's sparest record yet, and feels noncommittal: not quite folk, not quite country, definitely not rock. Isbell's lyrics keeps thorny issues at arm's length, and Free sounds nondescript and—worse—placeless as a result. | Something More Than Free is Jason Isbell's sparest record yet, and feels noncommittal: not quite folk, not quite country, definitely not rock. Isbell's lyrics keeps thorny issues at arm's length, and Free sounds nondescript and—worse—placeless as a result. | Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20648-something-more-than-free/ | Something More Than Free | Jason Isbell's fifth studio album opens with a familiar face. The narrator of the cheery "If It Takes a Lifetime" is a man settling down after years on the road, adjusting to an empty house and a dead-end job while acclimating to the lowered expectations of a lonely life. The song's chief conflict is summed up by the line, "I keep my spirits high, find happiness by and by." There's more than a little bit of Isbell the touring musician and recovering alcoholic in that narrator, not only in the lines about the road ("I thought the highway loved me but she beat me like a drum") but also in the references to not drinking ("I don't keep liquor here, never cared for wine or beer"). "If It Takes a Lifetime" sounds like Isbell playing a game of What If: What if his solo career hadn't taken off after he departed the Drive-By Truckers eight years ago? What if he hadn't emerged as one of the most popular voices in the thriving Americana movement? What if he had just settled down in one of the small towns he depicts so vividly in his lyrics?
It's a fine song, sporting a spare, defiantly upbeat arrangement and a melody that celebrates rather than laments the narrator's situation. With an eye for telling details that accrue into specific settings and characters, Isbell is one of few songwriters today who can turn a line like, "Working for the county keeps me pissin' clear" into a solid earworm. And yet, I can't quite shake the feeling that I've heard "If It Takes a Lifetime" before, in some iteration or another, at some point in Isbell's catalog. Five albums plus two live releases into a solo career, any songwriter will find his themes solidifying, his sound coalescing into something recognizable and, if he's lucky, something completely distinctive.
"If It Takes a Lifetime", however, introduces an album that contains too few surprises. These are, as usual, not story-songs so much as they are character sketches: Very little happens beyond a character reflecting on past mistakes and present circumstances, which means the narrative arc—the big decisions, the major conflicts; in short, the action—has been consigned to the distant past. As a result, Isbell's narrators tend to be surprisingly passive, observing the world without doing very much. "I don't think on why I'm here or where it hurts," notes the main character on the title track, who lives in his own memory more than in the present world.
"Children of Children", which serves as the album's centerpiece, wrestles with some tangled issues in a family with "five full generations living," but Isbell seems more interested in the romance of sepia-tone photographs than in the reality of a great-great-grandparent. It's an odd hull of a song, whose weirdest element is the way it borrows the female hardship of childbirth only to bolster male drama: "All the years I took from her just by being born," the narrator says of his teenage mother, even though he's really talking about the burden of his own guilt. The arrangement is spare and languorous, with Derry DeBorja's Mellotron adding a windswept quality to the music. Isbell and producer Dave Cobb put that instrument to fine use on Southeastern, where it played like a jerry-rigged orchestra and conveyed an immense sense of isolation. On "Children", however, the ersatz strings generate only ersatz drama.
In general, the music does little to distinguish these characters or enliven the lyrics. Cobb is one of the most adventurous producers in Nashville, and together they have made Isbell's sparest record yet, with an austere palette dominated by acoustic guitar. The results are noncommittal: not quite folk, not quite country, definitely not rock. Even Amanda Shires' fiddle sounds stripped of the eccentricities she typically brings. It's a shame, as Isbell's home state boasts a lively and surprisingly diverse music scene, with bands like Alabama Shakes, St. Paul & the Broken Bones, and Wray slyly subverting and therefore rejuvenating Southern conventions. Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and—worse—placeless.
In 2015, Southern identity occupies the center of a number of heated debates, and few artists are better poised to comment on its complexities than Isbell. But race has never been a compelling issue for him, and while class underlies every one of his songs, he long ago stopped writing about it with much acuity. His approach has become internalized, rooted in a self-consciously literary first-person perspective. And while he's created strong work within these parameters, I still lament the lack of urgency to engage with anything too far beyond the reach of his customary stand-ins. Isbell once again shows the world through familiar eyes, but here it just feels like we've seen it all before. | 2015-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Southeastern | July 14, 2015 | 5.8 | 517d44e1-87ad-4957-b407-a70e8583227a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
For decades, the Mississippi septuagenarian has self-released idiosyncratic fusions of blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient, and modern composition. This reissue confirms him as a true American original. | For decades, the Mississippi septuagenarian has self-released idiosyncratic fusions of blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient, and modern composition. This reissue confirms him as a true American original. | David Michael Moore: Adagio Fishing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-michael-moore-adagio-fishing/ | Adagio Fishing | For decades, David Michael Moore has been composing, songwriting, inventing his own instruments, and making albums that almost no one hears. He hails from the tiny riverside town of Rosedale, Mississippi, where he’s been playing since the 1970s and self-releasing his music under a variety of aliases since the ’90s. In 2021, the boutique label Ulyssa encountered his work and began a reissue campaign. You can imagine their excitement when they found it. Moore’s songs are sly and surreal documents of everyday profundity, with the mysteriously resonant imagery of mid-’60s Bob Dylan and the breezy equanimity of J.J. Cale. His instrumental compositions touch on blues, bebop, zydeco, ambient, and modernist classical music. And he plays them all on instruments like the homemade buzz box and the dog-bone xylophone. At 70-something years young, he’s a genuine American original, like a Mississippi Moondog.
The primarily instrumental Adagio Fishing, recorded in 1994, is the second in Ulyssa’s series of reissues, and the first re-release of material that Moore initially conceived as an album, following last year’s excellent Flatboat River Witch, a compilation of highlights from across his catalog. “Birth of Love (A Major Adagio),” Adagio Fishing’s opening track, might give new listeners the wrong idea about what sort of artist he is. Five and a half minutes of luxuriant synthesized strings, with chord changes whose ambiguous yearning could soundtrack an alternate-universe Twin Peaks, it’s not entirely unlike the sort of dusty private-press new age that’s kept the lights on at various reissue labels over the last decade or so, albeit with an unusually rich harmonic palette for that style. Moore returns to this devotional mode a few times on Adagio Fishing, but on the whole the album is a lot stranger than its introduction suggests, and better for it.
“My Prosperity Package,” the second piece, opens with an audio play of sorts. We hear a charismatic radio preacher, evidently recorded and sampled from the Mississippi airwaves, and a helium-voiced regular Joe who seems to be listening to the sermon (presumably Moore himself with a pitch-shifting effect). The preacher promises deliverance from poverty and strife, and the listener starts murmuring his assent. But it’s hard to tell if he really means it: There’s something puckish and sarcastic in his squeaked uh huhs and alrights, like maybe he knows the guy on the radio is a fraud, and he’s mocking him by playing along. Before the sketch can reach a resolution, Moore interrupts it with a brief, elliptical piano solo, its chords first strutting low and bluesy and then becoming vaporous and impressionistic as they ascend. It’s difficult to know what to make of “My Prosperity Package,” but it has the feeling of a thematic signpost, in part because it contains some of Adagio Fishing’s only legible words. In both the music and the dialogue, it holds the celestial in tension with the earthbound, reaching for transcendence in one moment and laughing at the very idea in the next.
Adagio Fishing has the air of outsider art, not due to any naivety of technique—Moore has serious chops—but because of his apparent disregard for the way his music might be received by the market. Oddities like “My Prosperity Package” share space with comparatively straightforward fare like “Maria of Egg Sandwiches,” which could nearly pass for a Classical-era bagatelle if not for its down-home title and the chintzy bell-like keyboard patch Moore uses to play it. Along with his custom-built instruments and a few traditional ones, Adagio has lots of these then-contemporary, now-dated synth sounds, whose uncanny aspects Moore seemed to sense and savor even at the time. At the climax of “Maria of Egg Sandwiches,” he leans heavily on his keyboard’s pitch-bend wheel, turning notes into gooey squiggles. The gesture is both deliriously out of place in the elegant environs of this particular tune and perfectly in keeping with the wigged-out sensibility of the album at large.
Adagio Fishing’s stylistic jumble can make for a disorienting listening experience, but the force of Moore’s personality as a player and composer has a unifying effect: Whether grandly orchestrated or performed solo, forthright with its charms or evasive, each piece offers a sense of uproarious mischief tempered by reverence and curiosity. “Cracks in the Sidewalk,” with its jaunty gait and dissonances that suggest a Cubist painter’s take on the blues, evinces a deep affinity for Thelonious Monk, one of American music’s greatest tricksters. “Kildeer Sing (Where the White Meets the Muddy)” tethers symphonic grandeur—harp, strings, cascading percussion—to a nagging refrain played on a synth that recalls a dollar-store slide whistle. “What’s Going On (Okies on Ham),” the furthest-out track by a wide margin, brings back the radio samples and the high-pitched interlocutor, setting them among all manner of unidentifiable pings and squelches. This time, the squeaky guy acts as a stand-in for the listener, repeating the first three words of the title with increasingly frenzied incredulity—the only appropriate reaction.
Given the breadth of Flatboat River Witch, the compilation that introduced Moore to a slightly larger listening public, it seems that Adagio Fishing presents only a portion of his artistry. According to Ulyssa, there are plenty more albums in the vault. They aren’t available online, which means that this reissue campaign will be a fun one to follow for a certain sort of crate-digging music fan. Who knows: the next record could be a singer-songwriter album, or a set of jazzy solo piano improvisations, or an atonal dog-bone xylophone showcase, or an electronic sound collage. From what we know about Moore so far, we can safely assume two things: It may be confounding, but it won’t be boring. | 2023-12-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | ULYSSA | December 4, 2023 | 8 | 5183ee3a-96df-46e3-a8c9-e3e1830daf66 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Miley Cyrus only appears once on the Flaming Lips’ claustrophobic new full-length, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives. | Miley Cyrus only appears once on the Flaming Lips’ claustrophobic new full-length, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives. | The Flaming Lips: Oczy Mlody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22769-oczy-mlody/ | Oczy Mlody | Last year was a relatively quiet one for the Flaming Lips. Sure, the Oklahoma vets take an average of four years or so between proper albums, but they’re rarely out of sight, whether they’re upholding their reputation as a festival clean-up worker’s worst nightmare, launching side projects, or just generating headlines over something outrageous Wayne Coyne has said/done. But, ironically, their most scattershot extracurricular activity to date—backing up Miley Cyrus on her teen pop-repudiating, Soundcloud-clogging Dead Petz project—has, in hindsight, proven to be a guiding light for this ever-exploratory band.
Over the past three years, Cyrus has gone from being Coyne’s instant Instagram BFF to becoming his go-to girl with kaleidoscope eyes to serving as the Lips’ muse—the potty-mouthed, pansexual Nico to their expanding plastic inflatable. It’s a friends-with-mutual-benefits relationship: Cyrus uses the Lips as a wrecking ball to her past, while the Lips use her a conduit to relive theirs.
Cyrus only appears on one song on the Lips’ new album, but the record wouldn’t sound the way it does without her presence in their lives. Oczy Mlody is a Polish phrase that translates to “eyes of the young,” and, here, the Lips strap them on like a VR headset. After spending much of 2013’s The Terror in a disorienting haze and ruminating on loss, lust, and impending apocalypse, on Oczy Mlody, Coyne reconnects with his childlike sense of wonder, populating its lyrical universe with unicorns, demon-eyed frogs, and wizards (not to mention enough f-bombs to challenge Cyrus in a swear-jar contest). And joining Cyrus’ squad shaped the album’s sonic direction as well: After sharing the console with Mike WiLL Made-It on Dead Petz and becoming party pals with A$AP Rocky, Coyne and co. have adapted their low-end theories to the Lips’ future-shocked psych-pop.
But if Oczy Mlody lacks The Terror’s weighty themes, it retains its claustrophobic, science-lab atmosphere, yielding songs as dense, tangled, and intricately structured as the gear set-up likely required to produce them. The Lips haven’t functioned as a straight-up rock band for two decades now, but never have they felt more like a pure studio entity—this is their first album to barely feature any (perceptible) drums, leaning instead on a wobbly rhythmic foundation of tinny programmed beats, bass-frequency throbs, and finger-snapping hooks. But while Oczy Mlody finds the Lips still eager to stretch the parameters of their aesthetic 30-plus years into the game, this time, it leaves them sounding a little distended and shapeless.
As harebrained as some of the Lips’ sideline experiments can seem, all those existentialist sci-fi-flick soundtracks, six-hour jams, and kooky karaoke exercises are important whiteboard workshop exercises for ideas that eventually get refined into holistic, conceptually focussed albums like The Terror and its predecessor, Embryonic. By comparison, Oczy Mlody feels more, well, embryonic. If the Lips’ 2009 opus introduced this current iteration of the band with a thundering Soft Bulletin-sized statement, and The Terror was its more subdued Yoshimi-scaled counterpoint, then Oczy Mlody is the At War With the Mystics moment, where the band sounds like it’s being pulled into too many directions at once, and struggling to reconcile their crowd-pleasing and contrarian tendencies.
Oczy Mlody’s fairy-tale fantasias are hardly unchartered terrain for a band that found its greatest success making a quasi-concept album about karate battles with robots; the difference here is that the whimsy is delivered in stern, serious tones, as if reciting a children’s storybook as docudrama. But just when you’re willing to overlook the goofy lyrics of a song like “There Should Be Unicorns” (“There should be day-glo strippers/Ones from the Amazon!”) and surrender to its tense, twitchy electro groove, the hypnotic spell is broken by a silly spoken-word intrusion from comedian Reggie Watts where he ruminates on horn-headed horses like Isaac Hayes doing pillow talk. The song finds a superior counterpart in “One Night While Hunting for Faeries and Witches and Wizards to Kill,” another tale of an epic quest for mythical creatures—set to an intensifying techno-powered thrust. But in lieu of a dramatic finale, it simply dissolves into the chintzy, chipmunked synth pop of “Do Glowy.” (Sample lyric: “Glowy, glowy, go/Let’s get together, yeah/Glow, glow, glow, glow.”)
These pendulum shifts—from frustrating to fascinating and back again—play out within the songs themselves. While the compelling near-instrumental “Nigdy Nie (Never No)” navigates a linear path from cosmic avant-R&B reverie to subwoofered robo-funk, dead-weight tracks like “Galaxy I Sink” and “Listening to the Frogs With Demon Eyes” force you to wade through meandering tracts of sputtering drum machines and free-floating guitar jangle to reach their brief, sky-clearing moments of radiance. Even a pretty reprieve like “Sunrise (Eyes of the Young)”—which repurposes a melody previously heard on Cyrus’ “The Floyd Song (Sunrise)”—isn’t immune to the album’s impulsive tendencies, with each plaintive verse answered by a momentum-stalling choral flourish that feels like a placeholder for a proper chorus. (The album boasts a better ballad in “The Castle,” a bittersweet, trip-hoppy serenade that would sound right at home on the back half of Yoshimi.)
Where The Terror appended its sullen song cycle with an ebullient bonus track (“The Sun Blows Up”), Oczy Mlody’s unlikely closer—the Coyne/Cyrus duet “We a Famly”—is presented as part of the official tracklist. But given the scatterbrained nature of all that precedes it, the song’s appearance is both moot and highly welcome. “We a Famly” reportedly dates back to the Dead Petz sessions, and it differs from the rest of Oczy Mlody in every possible way, from its traditional rock-anthem structure, to its real-world references to Wichita, to the presence of a joyous, arm-swaying chorus on a record that otherwise does its best to avoid them. Certainly, “We a Famly” will give amorous Lips fans something else to slow-dance to at their weddings besides “Do You Realize??” But in these divisive times, the song also functions as a more pointed statement of solidarity—for America at large, or, at the very least, among two generations of Oklahoma freaks who prove the president-elect doesn’t have a monopoly on watersports-related headlines in 2017. | 2017-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | January 18, 2017 | 6.2 | 518ab747-03cf-4af8-80b9-20b8ce3119dc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Earth bandleader Dylan Carlson returns with his third full-length in three years under the solo guise of Drcarlsonalbion. Gold comprises 24 instrumental vignettes that originally served as the score for a 2013 film that chronicled the ruinous journey of seven German immigrants into the northwest during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail end of the 19th century. | Earth bandleader Dylan Carlson returns with his third full-length in three years under the solo guise of Drcarlsonalbion. Gold comprises 24 instrumental vignettes that originally served as the score for a 2013 film that chronicled the ruinous journey of seven German immigrants into the northwest during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail end of the 19th century. | Drcarlsonalbion: Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19542-drcarlsonalbion-gold/ | Gold | When Dylan Carlson’s electric guitar swells from silence to an acute roar at the start of “Gold XIII”, from his third full-length in three years under the solo guise of Drcarlsonalbion, the sound induces a sudden shiver, as though a closed window has been unintentionally sprung during the middle of a fierce winter gale. It’s a harrowing tone, a somehow glowing rush of cold that Carlson lets linger. He eventually flicks a few isolated notes over the lonesome drone, letting them fade into the backdrop like ghosts vanishing against the night. When the 30-second instrumental goes almost quiet, Carlson strums a few quick, bright chords, like he’s willed the sun to rise again. It’s a moment of hope that borders on optimistic, but it barely lasts 10 seconds before Carlson shifts to the snarling, aching blues figure of “Gold XIV”.
That’s the general temperament of Gold, which comprises 24 instrumental vignettes that originally served as the score for a 2013 film that chronicled the ruinous journey of seven German immigrants into the northwest during the Klondike Gold Rush at the tail of the 19th century. It’s often been suggested that Carlson’s despondent instrumentals with Earth—both the monolithic early iteration that established drone metal as a genre and the latter-day take known for its blues-crawl refinement—would serve as suitable soundtracks for film renditions of Cormac McCarthy’s books. The westward Klondike trek killed thousands, subjecting the naïve to the abject nature of untamed wilderness and lawless humanity, so Gold is a litany of awful events, where hardscrabble characters endure painful deaths and existential crises, abject loneliness and corrupted dreams. It is, at least, in the McCarthy milieu, finally offering an appropriate cinematic environment for the slow sweep of Carlson’s guitar.
In the movie itself, Carlson’s miniature instrumentals serve mostly as frames, musical borders that guide transitions between scenes and help reinforce moods. But you can trace the same worry, regret, uncertainty and foolhardy aspiration that define the movie through the pieces, too. Together, “Gold III” and “Gold IV” form a brief miasma of self-defeat, each note that Carlson elicits suddenly swallowed by the noisy roar of his amplifier; every picked string is the start of a trip that stands no chance of success.
“Gold XIX,” one of the longer numbers here, staggers along the edge of a slow, angled melody, a precipice rising above a dangerous descent. By track’s end, though, Carlson can barely move through the riff, his motion beset by whorls of noise and the rising wash of Davies’ cymbals. It’s the sound of trouble morphing into terror. The sparkling, if sullen, theme of “Gold XXIII” renders halcyon moments of deliverance. Whether through the release of death or the relief of a stream and clean water, the at-risk adventurers seem to find some relief, maybe even a mirage of it. Carlson lets the end of each phrase float skyward, ascending toward anything else, anywhere but here.
The music on Gold isn’t difficult. The riffs are simple patterns that most anyone with a guitar and a sense of scales could soon pick out. They’re largely unadorned, too, accompanied only by splashes of cymbals and, once, a bass drum from Earth drummer and Carlson savior Adrienne Davies. That might make Gold a hard sell for many. Both the rhythmic grace of recent Earth and the overwhelming volume of early Earth—the band’s central assets for many—are all but absent. But the twist, and the real feat of Gold, comes instead in the guitarist’s simultaneous control and exploration. These are mostly solitary conversations between Carlson, his instrument, his amplifier, and a few effects pedals. Sometimes, it seems, he’s playing pieces of riffs only to hear what they sound like when they decay; at other times, he repeats fragments of melodies in a process of accretion, their repetition building until he can coax feedback from a gently picked purr.
To that end, Gold suggests a crossroads of the dual versions of Earth, where the deliberate melancholy of the latter fuels the amplifier worship of the former, albeit in a much more restrained and reserved space. In their own modest way, these 24 pieces suggest systems music, where the configuration of the guitarist in a room with his guitar and its accessories is more important than the input of what he actually plays. It’s a system with a predisposition for the forlorn, a ghost in the machine that allows these snippets to work onscreen and off. | 2014-07-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-07-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | self-released | July 25, 2014 | 7.2 | 518f97bb-a00a-4a29-a884-6c6d70cb6507 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The new album from Jonti—a part-time touring guitarist for the Avalanches—is aesthetically omnivorous, encompassing dream pop, electronica, hip-hop, and R&B. It sounds unrestrained and overproduced. | The new album from Jonti—a part-time touring guitarist for the Avalanches—is aesthetically omnivorous, encompassing dream pop, electronica, hip-hop, and R&B. It sounds unrestrained and overproduced. | Jonti: Tokorats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonti-tokorats/ | Tokorats | Jonti does not subscribe to the philosophy that less is more. Indeed, the Johannesburg-born, Sydney-based songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist can never seem to do enough: His busy perfectionism makes his every song an epic of pop flamboyance, lavish and wildly ornate. Jonti’s third album, Tokorats, has been almost six years in the making—recorded, then discarded, then recorded from scratch again. Jonti claims to have produced hundreds of variations of each of the album’s 15 tracks. And what is a tokorat? “A multicolored weirdo mutant composed of all the elements of your story and all the complexities of your character,” Jonti explains. Well, Tokorats is all that, and then some. It is the unwieldy work of an artist seemingly incapable of self-restraint.
Before he was a musician, Jonti was a painter. When he painted, he has said, he “always tried to get as much detail on the canvas” as he could—an indulgent impulse he admits “carried over a little onto music” and that remains entirely apparent from song to song. (Even the album’s long list of collaborators feels like a product of this voracity.) Of course, maximalism isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: the same sort of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink extravagance is the presiding spirit of a number of magnificent albums, from J Dilla’s Donuts (which Jonti cites as a major inspiration) to Since I Left You by the Avalanches, for whom Jonti serves as a part-time live guitarist on tour. The difference is that those artists had a vision. Jonti seems to just enjoy the sprawl.
Tokorats is aesthetically omnivorous. It encompasses a wide range of styles and moods: ethereal dream pop, sparkling electronica, vibrant hip-hop, mellow R&B. There is playful brass on “Zuki,” a spontaneous laugh riot on “Island Rose,” a melody of Atari bleeps and bloops on “Papaya Brothers.” But the musical diversity is flattened by Jonti’s doting, and in consequence the whole thing sounds the same—fussy and overproduced. The manifest intricacy of the material is totally at odds with the vague and nebulous result. The instrumentation may be elaborate, and the arrangements complex; nevertheless, Tokorats merely feels bogged down. Listening, one is wearied by the homogenous effect. Even the record’s most sprightly pop songs often lumber past the five-minute mark, making this slog more tedious still.
Over all of it looms Jonti’s unifying persona: sanguine, buoyant, and wildly earnest. At times this sunny, heart-on-sleeve temperament seems harmless and even quite endearing. More often it simply grates: he’s too precious, too twee. But the whimsy is inseparable from the man: “It usually starts with a silly idea,” Jonti has said in an interview about his approach to songwriting. “Like, ‘I wonder what it would sound like if Kermit and Missy Elliott wrote a song together?’” Nothing on Tokorats sounds like a Kermit-Missy collaboration, to be clear. But everything sounds like the product of an artist who thinks that way. One imagines him sequestered in his suburban garage, tinkering with a delicate keyboard arrangement with obsessional fervor, dreaming up these “silly ideas” and slavishly realizing them. It may be such flights of fancy, as much as his perfectionism, that made his process last so many years. | 2017-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Stones Throw | November 6, 2017 | 5 | 518ff123-a9d0-47b7-a6a3-dd2e5c21be3e | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Jack White takes a stronger, more central role on the second Dead Weather album, sharing vocal duties almost evenly with Alison Mosshart. | Jack White takes a stronger, more central role on the second Dead Weather album, sharing vocal duties almost evenly with Alison Mosshart. | The Dead Weather: Sea of Cowards | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14237-sea-of-cowards/ | Sea of Cowards | If anyone thought the Dead Weather was going to be the project where Jack White let someone else take the lead, those notions end a minute and 38 seconds into Sea of Cowards opener "Blue Blood Blues", when White tears into one of his most nonsensically badass couplets ever: "Check your lips at the door, woman!/ And shake your hips like battleships!/ Yeah, all the white girls trip when I sing at Sunday service!" It's fantastical tough-guy gibberish worthy of Bo Diddley, and it's the sort of line that only an extremely confident singer would ever attempt, let alone pull off. It reveals the Dead Weather to be just another White vehicle-- the one that plays host to his most deranged impulses.
On last year's Dead Weather debut Horehound, White largely ceded frontperson duties to Kills singer Alison Mosshart. But on Sea of Cowards, the two split lead-vocal duties almost completely down the middle, with White unleashing his full range of vocal tics: yelps, mumbles, arch sneers, growls, screeches, groans. Mosshart mirrors every one of those inflections, to the point where it's not always immediately apparent which one is singing. When Mosshart's howling full-bore, her bottomless blues wail could pass for PJ Harvey's. But even more than on Horehound, Mosshart stays within White's freaked-out range, each singer firing off one outrageous non sequitur after another. Together, they sound like two feral cats circling each other outside a dumpster, trying to figure out whether to fuck or fight.
For two people capable of writing gloriously catchy rock choruses in their sleep, White and Mosshart sure stay away from them here. There are barely any choruses on Sea of Cowards, but that's not to say there are no hooks: the catchiness is all in the thud and flail of the band. This is some serious locked-in rock-dude shit: discordant guitar leads, fuzzed-out organ blurts, clattering falling-down-stairs drum fills. It's unhinged classic-rock explosiveness that sounds like it could be the result of a few vicious jam sessions-- the rumblings of scuzz-rock lifers given a chance to air out all their purest expressions of fuck-you-up ire. And when a chorus does emerge from the swampy ether, as on the ferocious first single "Die By the Drop", it cuts deep.
Little details jump out. The backfiring keyboard on "The Difference Between Us" sounds like nothing so much as the Faint, circa Blank-Wave Arcade-- electro-rocking harder than most actual rock. The two guitar leads on "I Can't Hear You" sound like they're in the middle of a fiery lovers' argument, one staying maddeningly calm and steady while the other bleats and rages. White and Mosshart are old-style rock stars, the types who don't feel like they have to explain everything to you, or share it with you. And even if Sea of Cowards sounds more bashed-out than labored-over, it works. It's a heavy, snarly, physical rock album, and it feels like the work of people so secure in their ass-kicking abilities that they don't have to sweat the details. | 2010-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | May 11, 2010 | 7.8 | 51907eec-4cf5-4baf-9825-9d60d5884e5d | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Recorded in single takes with minimal overdubs, the San Francisco band’s latest album—its first sung entirely in Satomi Matsuzaki’s native Japanese—is a confident set of small epiphanies. | Recorded in single takes with minimal overdubs, the San Francisco band’s latest album—its first sung entirely in Satomi Matsuzaki’s native Japanese—is a confident set of small epiphanies. | Deerhoof: Miracle-Level | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhoof-miracle-level/ | Miracle-Level | Since forming almost three decades ago in pre-dotcom San Francisco, Deerhoof have been some of indie rock’s most effective ambassadors for the power of anarchic creativity. A sense of mischievous delight is never far from the controlled chaos of their intricate melodies, zig-zagging rhythms, and unpredictable song structures, whose admirers have included Radiohead and ?uestlove as well as not-so-famous kindred spirits like John Dwyer and Wendy Eisenberg. Nowadays scattered across different cities, the current quartet, intact since 2008—bassist/singer Satomi Matsuzaki, drummer Greg Saunier, and guitarists Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich—has continued to gamely experiment without losing that prankster merriment, whether espousing radical change, going full concept record, or ushering in multi-genre collaborators.
Deerhoof are at both their most whimsical and most energetically approachable on Miracle-Level, their 19th LP. Billed as the first Deerhoof album written entirely in Matsuzaki’s native Japanese, it is also the first to be recorded from start to finish in a proper studio. The album was produced by Mike Bridavsky, better known as the “dude” of the late online-celebrity cat Lil Bub, but Deerhoof’s air-quotes “studio debut” doesn’t so much smooth their scruffy charm as sharpen it up. Concentrating only on songs that could be done in one live take, with minimal overdubs but ridiculously lavish guitar textures, it’s a confident set of tiny epiphanies.
Swapping languages opens up new realms of expression. For listeners who don’t speak Japanese, Matsuzaki’s titular entreaty at the start of opening track “Sit Down, Let Me Tell You a Story.” isn’t that much less intelligible than the nonsensical playing-cards references on 2003’s “Dummy Discards a Heart” or surreal vegetable imagery that kicked off the last album, 2021’s Actually, You Can. Yet the feline exuberance of Lil Bub-dedicated “My Lovely Cat!” leaps over any linguistic barriers—particularly given the universality of terms like “Instagram” and “TikTok.” Sitting down with a translation nicely focuses the listening experience while uncovering deliciously absurd Easter eggs: What a joy to find that, amid the Latin-jazz organ groove of “The Little Maker,” Matsuzaki sings, “Doesn’t this song sound different from usual Deerhoof?” Sort of!
The band’s sound here is a live-wire version of whatever “usual Deerhoof” might be, with plenty of space to breathe and an overwhelming illusion of being in the room with them for every herky-jerk start and stop. “Everybody, Marvel,” which benefits from lyrical cognates (“records” sounds almost the same in both languages), is stunning dream pop that somehow name-checks Eurythmics. The marching-clown clamor of “Momentary Art of Soul!,” which at around five minutes is the longest song on the album, feels like it could go on forever; it locks into a teetering polyrhythm that evokes the giddy transcendence of artists as variously virtuosic as Horse Lords, Mdou Moctar, and Xylouris White.
Miracle-Level is no less captivating when Deerhoof take their feet off the gas. The coruscating undulation of “The Poignant Melody” wouldn’t be out of place on a recent Jeff Parker album; it helps that the phrase “melody” is another close cognate, and it helps even more that the translation attributes to ’70s shlock rockers Journey the idea that a melody needs to mean something: “But what does it mean, this melody?” Any way you want it, Neal Schon. Tender finale “Wedding, March, Flower,” a keyboard-based ballad that tasks drummer Greg Saunier, this time, with singing a non-native language—his vocals are in Japanese too—is genuinely moving: “Let’s walk closely together/Let’s live/I can hold an umbrella for you for a long time,” the English translation of the lyrics concludes.
The idea of miracles recurs across Matsuzaki’s lyrics. The clapping, swaying title track proclaims that “we need only ‘love’ songs,” but this is no ordinary love: “I’m talking high-level!/I’m talking religion-level!/I’m talking miracle-level.” The mesmerizing, convulsive “And the Moon Laughs” begins with a light-hearted nod to “non-drinking teens [who] compete/Shaking butts at cell-phone,” but soon becomes a terse parable for an age of disenchantment: “Non-miracle said:/That’s not my problem. I give nothing./ Well, I am not your slave. Become ice-cream then!” With bass synth, cowbell, and circuitous twists and turns, “Phase-Out All Remaining Non-Miracles by 2028” calls for the magical-realist goal it states in its title, but ends on a fantastically optimistic note for humanity: When it comes to “non-miracles,” the translated lyrics read, “Luckily there aren’t that many.”
Miracle-Level celebrates the heady euphoria that can result when skill and craft meet with serendipity and happy accidents, like a long-running indie band teaming up with the former owner of Lil Bub and hustling out a full album in two weeks’ studio time. “The idea that an artist even knows what they’re doing … I think it’s a lie,” Saunier said in a recent podcast interview. “It’s an illusion that we tell ourselves for the purpose of making selling the record easier. We dumb it down to a blurb.” A melody doesn’t have to have a meaning, it just is. Or, as Saunier told another recent interviewer, “Generosity, creativity, and love are just as much human nature as competition, coercion, and brutality.” Do you believe in miracles? No? Become ice cream then. | 2023-04-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Joyful Noise | April 3, 2023 | 7.9 | 5196f161-e1f1-4286-b416-4b4ec442c538 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
It's not necessary to become fully acquainted with shape-shifting LA musician M. Geddes Gengras' output to enjoy Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, a limited collection of instrumental work. Gone are the sunshine and purity from 2012's bright collaboration Icon Give Thank, with a strong sense of embrace replaced by something far more inward looking and ruminative. | It's not necessary to become fully acquainted with shape-shifting LA musician M. Geddes Gengras' output to enjoy Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, a limited collection of instrumental work. Gone are the sunshine and purity from 2012's bright collaboration Icon Give Thank, with a strong sense of embrace replaced by something far more inward looking and ruminative. | M. Geddes Gengras: Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18400-m-geddes-gengras-collected-works-vol-1-the-moog-years/ | Collected Works Vol. 1 The Moog Years | It's easy enough to get to know M. Geddes Gengras, a Los Angeles-based musician whose career to date has been a super-charged blitz through myriad genre shifts and musical accomplices. (Fortunately, he has a huge amount of music streaming for free on his Bandcamp page, and the Out Door comprehensively chronicled his work in a feature from earlier this year.) It's not necessary to become fully acquainted with Gengras' output to enjoy Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, a limited vinyl and digital release of contemplative instrumental work. In fact, anyone familiar with his most popular release to date, as part of the Gengras/Sun Araw/Congos culture crash that gave us the euphoric Icon Give Thank, will find themselves stepping onto craggier land here. Gone are the sunshine and purity from Icon, with a strong sense of embrace replaced by something far more inward looking and ruminative.
Gengras' work with the Moog largely sidesteps common sounds connected to the instrument. This isn't the giddy, frothy, bubbly tone found on countless covers records in the vein of Moog Plays the Beatles. Gengras cites Stereolab as the first band he heard who used the instrument, but their avant-pop approach lies in sharp contrast to his work here. Instead, he's remarkably restrained, choosing to tease out tiny motifs, letting oscillators softly pulse in the background, barely leaving a trace of hefty bass. It's not clear which Moogs Gengras was using, but clearly he's more enamored with using them to paint fainter traces than he is with going into all-out attack mode. It's a sound with more common companions in the past than the present, at times recalling Daphne Oram's moody "Brociliande" or the processor noise of Suzanne Ciani's "Second Breath".
The strong shift in mood strung across Collected Works is to be expected from something that was recorded in different periods, but what's surprising is how well that creates a sense of journey across the record. Compilations don't often hang together well, usually forging rather awkward trails that hint at how ideas evolved. But here it's mostly seamless, with a lament punctured by noises that sound like a fried circuit board ("Resistor") segueing perfectly into a minimalist composition that resembles the work Aphex Twin was indulging in around the time of Selected Ambient Works Volume II ("Untitled #4"). Gengras can alternate between big and small in a heartbeat-- the opening "10.17.2009" has a boundless feel that positions it in a place as vast as Mountains' most recent output, while "Inductor" meshes a mix of twinkly electronics and new age yearning that aligns it with Laurie Spiegel's The Expanding Universe.
Clearly Gengras is well schooled in this stuff, but there are only a handful of too-obvious steals from the music that preceded him in this field. Mostly he's focussed on setting and mood, reaching down to a place that makes it feel like he's trying to make the electronic equivalent of an old blues record. At its best this album has a weather-worn feeling, a sense of analog circuitry entering old age, maturing gracefully from frivolous beginnings. It fits well with the idea that these synths are very personal instruments, with each having unique quirks and characteristics. It's not always successful, but Collected Works reaches moments of poignancy, usually when a bank of synth noise rolls in and provides a dark cloak to hang over the track. In those moments you can almost picture Gengras carefully stabbing at a Moog keyboard, trying to figure out where the emotional center of such a surprisingly malleable instrument could possibly lie. | 2013-08-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-08-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Umor Rex | August 27, 2013 | 6.8 | 519e7d7b-4340-4714-8c58-63a83b90813b | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
A transitional record, Deerhoof's latest finds them sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past. | A transitional record, Deerhoof's latest finds them sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past. | Deerhoof: Deerhoof vs. Evil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15039-deerhoof-vs-evil/ | Deerhoof vs. Evil | Deerhoof's drummer Greg Saunier recently noted that "if there's any pressure on us, it's actually a pressure to not repeat." That's an admirable goal, and so far they've mostly stuck with it. They've spent most of their career as a fast-and-bulbous hybrid of a super-heavy, experimentation-minded art-rock band and a sweet little pop group, equal parts chirp and pummel. In the six-album-plus run from 2002's Reveille to 2008's Offend Maggie, they perpetually pushed the sound of the band into fresh if occasionally awkward territory.
They're also a totally idiomatic band, one of those groups where you usually only need to hear a few seconds' worth of any song to know it's them, whether or not bassist Satomi Matsuzaki is singing at the time. That puts Deerhoof in a difficult position: Their identity is built around all four members' particular quirks as musicians, but they're struggling not to repeat themselves, so they're hunting for new rooms within the house they have constructed for themselves.
It's been more than two years since Offend Maggie-- an unusually long stretch by their standards-- but Deerhoof vs. Evil is less a leap forward than a transitional record, along the lines of 2005's Green Cosmos EP. They're sticking to their M.O. of repeating a single odd musical or lyrical phrase ("I did crimes for you, they're coming true!") again and again until it sounds like a hook; beyond that, you can tell that they're trying to wriggle out of what they've been doing in the band's previous phase, but haven't quite figured out what comes next.
In particular, they keep sidling up to the kind of heavy rock that's been their secret weapon in the past, then bolting away from it. Deerhoof have always had a difficult relationship with great big stomps and riffs, but in the past their clever self-sabotage has often let a cracked-but-intact rock song sneak through-- Friend Opportunity's "+81", Apple O''s "Dummy Discards a Heart", Offend Maggie's "The Tears and Music of Love".
There's nothing anywhere near as direct as those songs here. Instead, we get the likes of "The Merry Barracks": A handful of rhythmically lopsided loops that eventually synch up with Saunier murmuring "Hello hello hello/ Atomic bombs are going to explode," then a passage where Matsuzaki's clear-voiced, unemphatic simper alternates with the band going WHAM WHAM WHAM, 15 seconds of the whole group doing their best imitation of '92 shoegaze, a free-noise guitar solo, and so on. It's also the first of two different songs that include the line "everyone, everyone, sing!" (The Saunier-sung closer, "Almost Everyone, Almost Always", begins with a variation: "Everyone, everyone, in a bow tie.")
What keeps Deerhoof entertaining even at their most distracted is that they actually mean that "everyone sing" bit: they're as open-hearted and goofy as egghead experimentalists get. "No One Asked to Dance", one of the prettiest songs they've ever recorded, could be incidental music from a late-60s European art movie; "Let's Dance the Jet" actually is a cover of a Mikis Theodorakis piece from a 1967 film, The Day the Fish Came Out-- a drone-plus-freaky-rhythm instrumental that's a welcome reminder that Deerhoof didn't invent this stuff.
Saunier indicated in a recent Popnography interview that all four members of Deerhoof individually write songs, which the other members then alter until everyone's satisfied with them. Sometimes that works out nicely: "Must Fight Current", a duet between Matsuzaki and guitarist John Dieterich, adopts the old Sleater-Kinney effect of two different songs that just happen to work when they're superimposed, then dials it down to a prickly, dissonant samba. Often, though, what's left of these songs is too much or too little. There's a lot to be said for ADD-- it's a pretty good strategy for not being boring-- but Deerhoof are fighting so hard to avoid obviousness and stasis that they're starting to undermine themselves. | 2011-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Polyvinyl | January 27, 2011 | 6.7 | 519f2ac7-4bc4-4bff-a8fd-2779713fc4a6 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
On this double album, the madly prolific psych-rock band synthesizes everything they do into compact songs that still allow their weirder impulses to flourish. | On this double album, the madly prolific psych-rock band synthesizes everything they do into compact songs that still allow their weirder impulses to flourish. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: K.G. / L.W. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-kg-lw/ | K.G. / L.W. | Everything about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is governed by perpetual forward motion, from their music’s relentless momentum to their frequent reinventions to their tendency to release new albums with the regularity of a Substack newsletter. But while there’s a lot of joy to be had in hitching yourself to the Melbourne psych-rockers’ careening locomotive, the group’s recent track record suggests they could benefit from erecting some guard rails, with the honky-glam hoedown of Fishing for Fishies and the doomsday thrash of Infest the Rats’ Nest veering too sharply into the silly and the sullen, respectively.
Of course, the nice thing about a band this prolific is that any missteps are swiftly left in the dust and a course correction is all but inevitable, and in King Gizzard’s case, not even a global pandemic can slow their roll. On top of dropping multiple live releases, two concert films, and a slew of Bandcamp keepsakes in recent months, King Gizzard recorded two albums’ worth of new material while in lockdown, with each member of the now-sextet laying down their parts in isolation at their respective home studios. The results have been delivered in two installments: K.G., released this past November, and its freshly minted counterpart, L.W. They’re discrete records, but interlock to form a continuous double album, wrapped inside a trilogy: K.G. and L.W. are being billed as the remaining parts of a triptych that began with 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, where the band fully embraced the equilibrium-upsetting effects of quarter-tone tuning.
But while the works may be connected on a technical level, the K.G./L.W. combo deserves its own unique standing in the band’s labyrinthine catalog. Arriving in the wake of King Gizzard’s 10th anniversary, the albums serve the same function as the sprawling Freedom’s Goblin did for their equally industrious psych-punk peer Ty Segall: They cap a decade of furious activity by reconciling all of the band’s far-ranging influences into a complete, 360-degree portrait of the group. The wild stylistic variation in the King Gizzard canon has made them the kind of band where 10 different fans might name 10 different albums as their favorite; K.G./L.W. strives to be the one that everyone can agree on.
Bookended by two radically versions of their new de facto theme song “K.G.L.W.”—which sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack given prog-folk and doom-metal makeovers—K.G./L.W. boasts a circular structure that recalls the group’s 2016 infinite-loop opus Nonagon Infinity. But the albums’ sense of cohesion is more than just a product of savvy sequencing. Over the course of these records, King Gizzard synthesize their entire musical palette—British psych-pop and proto-metal, German kosmische rock, West African rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies, sitar-speckled psychedelia, American roots music—into compact songs that still allow equal room for the band’s songcraft and improvisational impulses to flourish.
K.G., in particular, has a natural fluidity that belies its piecemeal construction, and a steady rhythmic thrust that mirrors the urgency of its scorched-Earth lyrics. As the album unfolds, each song appears like a new scene on some never-ending dystopian Disney boat ride through the gravest threats to our civilization: unchecked AI (“Automation”), radicalized right-wing trolls (“Minimum Brain Size”), the untenability of modern capitalism (“Straws in the Wind”), pandemic-stoked xenophobia (“Some of Us”).
On this opening stretch, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard reaffirm their status as the house band for post-Trump geopolitical tumult, but in lieu of conceptual suites about barfing robots and intergalactic colonization, K.G. feels much more grounded, even personal. The album’s vigorous peak-hour standouts, “Ontology” and “Oddlife,” each ponder the meaning of life from opposing macro and micro angles. Where the former translates its big unknowable queries (“Why is there anyone?/Why do we think?/What is the point of it?/Why anything?”) into an existential crisis you can dance to, the latter is an unglamorous look at the physically grueling, mentally exhausting experience of touring: “No concept of geography,” keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith sings, “I wake up and I’m still fatigued/I’m drinking till I’m dead asleep.”
But if “Oddlife” seems at odds with the rest of the album’s topicality (not to mention somewhat ill-timed for a moment when many groups would kill to feel burned out by touring again), it ultimately speaks to a universal conundrum: the fact that we’re often left too drained by our working lives to fight bigger battles. And as “The Hungry Wolf of Fate” closes out K.G. in a fuzz-metal firestorm, we’re reminded that a failure to break our complacency and heed the warnings of history will have disastrous consequences for us all. “We’re mindless pissants” who “haven’t learned sense,” bandleader Stu Mackenzie seethes, suggesting that not only is our demise all but assured, but well-deserved.
So after you’ve consigned the fate of humanity to the dustbin, what’s there left to do? Well, if the opening of L.W. is any indication, there’s still time for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard to cross “form the world’s weirdest Steely Dan tribute act” off their bucket list. L.W.’s lead-off track, “If Not Now, Then When?” snaps into a crisp, clavinet-spun Aja groove while Mackenzie shows that Kevin Parker isn’t the only Aussie psych-rocker concealing a killer falsetto. The ruinous imagery remains—rising oceans, raging wildfires, endangered species—but the surprisingly sleek execution betrays their deft touch at repackaging the same messages.
As that sudden change of direction indicates, L.W. is more of a grab bag, and a feeling of diminishing returns creeps in as tracks like “O.N.E.” circle around the same musical and ideological territory. In effect, L.W. resembles K.G. after three additional months of lockdown: It’s more antsy, more angry, and less concerned about letting its gut hang out, allowing the motorik acid-folk of “Static Electricity” to gallop toward the six-minute mark in a blaze of microtonal shredding. But if the songs are looser, the targets are more precise. Kenny-Smith’s “Supreme Ascendancy” is a scathing attack on the Catholic Church’s history of sexual-abuse cover-ups; “East West Link,” meanwhile, protests the namesake freeway plan that’s become a political lightning rod in Melbourne, resulting in the most exciting song about an urban-planning proposal you’re liable to hear all year.
But as much their social conscience and worldly observations have become central to their identity, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard still have the feel of a secret society—and the closing eight-minute version of “K.G.L.W.” is its national anthem, a sludge-metal mantra that repeats the band’s initials as if casting an ancient spell to awaken some long-dormant mythical beast. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s rabid fanbase has been casually referred to as a cult on many occasions; consider this song—and K.G./L.W. as a whole—the official indoctrination ceremony.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly attributed a lyric to Stu Mackenzie; it is actually sung by Ambrose Kenny-Smith.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | March 3, 2021 | 8 | 51a1e356-e1bf-4fed-92b0-ad1d2ec98385 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
A second volume of the Los Angeles composer’s archival work highlights pieces that attempted to bridge academic research with emotional accessibility, with mixed results. | A second volume of the Los Angeles composer’s archival work highlights pieces that attempted to bridge academic research with emotional accessibility, with mixed results. | Carl Stone: Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carl-stone-electronic-music-from-the-eighties-and-nineties/ | Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties | In the cloistered realm of academia, experimental composers often occupy a unique position. Careers can be focused on pushing musical systems, emerging technologies, or conceptual frameworks to the point where all but the most invested audience members are left behind. In 1937, John Cage expressed the daunting situation succinctly: “The composer… will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time... No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s reach.” But this perspective can lead to a deep suspicion of anything with crossover appeal, simple melodicism, or a steady beat. After all, these tools are known quantities. And if your goal is to push into the unknown (the theory goes), you want as little of that baggage holding you back as possible.
Carl Stone did not have this problem. Though he came up through academia, his circuitous route to composition was born in the early-1970s via a student job archiving Cal Arts’ LP library to cassette. By chance, he found he could listen to multiple albums at the same time, and soon discovered what today every novice with a pair of turntables (or open YouTube windows) knows: layering records is fun. Inspired by Steve Reich’s mid-1960s tape pieces and the phenomenological compositions of Alvin Lucier, he began editing, looping, and juxtaposing other people’s works. In a word, he was sampling, still a radical idea at the time. The groundbreaking approach helped him to skirt the typical issues of mandated esotericism and evolve his practice in sync with the development of samplers and home computers. Two years ago, the label Unseen Worlds compiled his formative years on Electronic Music From the Seventies and Eighties. The follow-up, Electronic Music From the Eighties and Nineties, is a retrospective of four mature pieces. Though noteworthy on technical and historical levels, Electronic Music flags emotionally, vacillating between maudlin optimism and a half-baked minimalism.
The compilation mostly acts as a best-of, revisiting three previously released works alongside the never-before-heard “Mae Yao.” All four pieces strike a balance between unabashed accessibility and complex methods. “Banteay Srey” slices and bends unknown source material into a breathy whalesong, wrapping it around a simple bass harmony. The music’s slow-motion dawn echoes the pregnant-with-meaning sampledelia of Boards of Canada, but oversells itself. Cinematic to a fault, it’s the kind of music that might nudge the listener towards a quiet epiphany on headphones but suddenly seems a little embarrassing when played for friends. At over 14 minutes, it’s also at least five too long. On the other side, “Sonali” highlights crisp, synthetic marimbas. It’s clearly influenced by the minimalist composers that preceded him by a decade, but the effect ends up much closer to Hollywood’s cheap rip-offs—“Sonali” begs to soundtrack a montage of brisk accomplishment. It’s “Music for Brainstorms.”
This is the album’s central flaw. Stone is clearly reaching for an emotional connection, but he remains oddly disengaged from the complexities of real life. Instead, the album smothers you in the kind of thin characterization of commercial middlebrow dramas. The hummingbird flutters of “Woo Lae Oak” or the jaunty ripples of “Sonali” gesture toward meaning without allowing even a hint of darkness or ambiguity. In Stone’s hands, all sounds get along. Only “Mae Yao” breaks form, processing a gamelan orchestra into a glitching seizure with more brow-furrowing rigor. Not quite a half hour in length, it feels like the A-minus work of a graduate student. Stone demonstrates technical fluency and works out his process with a not-unimpressive economy of means, but “Mae Yao” never actually blossoms into affecting music.
Absorbing those jarring pops and jumps, the gentle ebbing of sound around the stereo field, and the glassy, digital artifice reimagined as a source of wide-open pathos, it is impossible not to think of another artist active in the 1990s: Oval. The work of Markus Popp and co. deployed many of the same techniques as Stone—the group was famous for using skipping CDs, deep sampling, and long runtimes to both soothing and oozing effect. One wonders how Oval’s work can be so entrancing while Stone’s, remarkably similar on the surface, just spins its wheels. Perhaps it’s a matter of priorities. Oval explored the computer like a lost continent, mapping its terrain with barely a thought given to the human experience back home. Stone, on the other hand, seems all too concerned with making sure his listeners feel safe and attended to, and the work suffers as a result. In the academy, an appealing artist statement and a complex process can go a long way, but for music to make a real impact you need to take a leap beyond the page. Electronic Music jumps up and down with impressive energy, pointing excitedly towards the future, but in the end stays put in a quickly receding past. | 2018-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Unseen Worlds | July 6, 2018 | 6.1 | 51a8a3ee-4087-4b0e-b1e2-02a3f08fd32b | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
With multiple drummers, bassists, guitarists, and one gnarly violinist, this Austin collective turns repetitive rock music into a glorious mind eraser. | With multiple drummers, bassists, guitarists, and one gnarly violinist, this Austin collective turns repetitive rock music into a glorious mind eraser. | Water Damage: In E | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/water-damage-in-e/ | In E | Forget music that makes you feel no pain. What about music that makes you feel like nothing at all, that pushes and pulverizes you until every woe, hope, and worry disappears like dust? That is the marvelous strength of Water Damage, an amorphous collective of about a dozen Austin underground heads whose high-volume indulgence in repetition is a force both obliterative and purifying. They ride the divide between noise and rock, pounding out rhythms like a power trio caught on an eternal trip to nowhere, all beneath feedback streaks and microtonal bleats. In New York in the late ’70s, the Ramones at CBGB inspired young composer and avant-impresario Rhys Chatham to repeat an electrified E above drums until the overtones turned into a fever dream, the vision fulfilled by his Guitar Trio. Nearly half a century later, Water Damage have turned that challenge into an obstacle course with In E, their third and best album and a reaffirming testament to just how ecstatic and mighty minimalism can be.
In E arrives as four side-long tracks, each charging down a single alleyway without ever wavering, glancing back, or bothering to do anything more than shift in barely perceptible ways. “Nice!” someone seems to yell 15 seconds into “Reel E,” the phosphorescent violin and colossal rhythm section presumably pausing just long enough to check the levels.
And then, their marathon begins, blown-out bass and brain-fried guitar unfolding like an imagined ocean. The drums fall in line like a marching band, at least two kits shaping an ironclad pocket. But the bristled violin of Mari Maurice Rubio—who records as the great more eaze—slices through the sides of the beat like she’s trying to make an escape. And that’s mostly where the piece hangs until the band breaks down and Maurice outlasts the rhythm long enough to sail into this open void. Loud, relentless, unrepentant: Lock into that tug of war, and you may forget where you are, how you are, who you are. It feels fantastic, a rare mind eraser for our increasingly plugged-in times.
Water Damage unlock the same effect on “Reel EE” and “Reel EEE” with very different approaches. For the former, the rhythm section summons a rock band that’s about to count in to their greatest hit, but they simply sit there, repeating the meter and doubling the bass until it all blurs into a trance. Don’t expect it to change when the guitars finally arrive, either, their slow wave of serrated tones washing over everything like insoluble oil. It is a web of interwoven drones, with feedback, distortion, and fragmented chords cohering into sustained chaos. “Can textures alone make a riff?” Water Damage seem to ask. The Motorik march compels you to nod along whether or not you agree.
“Reel EEE,” on the other hand, begins with the hum, its amplifier buzz and scraped strings slowly accreting into some demonic instrumental choir. Imagine Appalachia’s great Pelt, plugging in and zoning out. When at last the drums come, they swing like a GIF of someone dancing to disco on an endless loop. That beat bullies the layers apart, so that you can hear the collective hum’s individual threads—the plangent guitar, the shrieking violin, the plucked strings. Focus on any of them long enough, and again you’ll disappear, lost and locked inside a beautiful melee. When the tape runs out 15 minutes later, you may ask where the time has gone, maybe wonder if the clock itself has somehow skipped.
Water Damage, of course, are not the first band to muster these sorts of barrages. Whether their particular headwaters are somewhere in Germany at the start of the ’70s or in Memphis and the Delta below decades earlier, their path runs through the Grateful Dead and no wave, Load Records, and, more recently, 75 Dollar Bill. They nod to this lineage of proud cacophony with closer “Ladybird,” a demented 2005 opus of Austin-via-London project Shit and Shine. Much like Water Damage, Shit and Shine can expand and contract as needed, incorporating guests and stretching jams until last call. (Shit and Shine henchman Craig Clouse plays in USA/Mexico with Water Damage’s Nate Cross alongside King Coffey of another obvious antecedent, Butthole Surfers.)
And, again, much like Water Damage, Clouse once described Shit and Shine as “Repetition. Noise. A little humor.” As Water Damage near the end of their 20-minute romp through “Ladybird”—where distorted guitars surge through militant drums only to be swallowed up again, where the vocals sound like they’ve been trapped in a heat-warped spool of magnetic tape for decades—you hear that humor. This is gloriously absurd music, pushing rock ’n’ roll toward a threshold at which you either have to submit or simply walk away. Just go for it already.
In October 1972, Tony Conrad—the iconoclastic violinist who had helped name the Velvet Underground and helped give La Monte Young’s eternal music its theoretical underpinning—rendezvoused with the ever-mischievous Faust in Hamburg. Their session, Outside the Dream Syndicate, became a hypnotic classic, Conrad’s drone tunneling through the thrum like it a rusty razor blade. But Conrad often dismissed that record, saying they all sounded like hippies. That was especially damning for that moment, as the Vietnam War’s chthonic horrors reached new lows. The late Conrad might have loved Water Damage. On In E, they start from the same basic premise—put a big beat beneath a wild drone—and howl, offering none of the sense of safety or quarter Conrad must have heard in Outside the Dream Syndicate. Water Damage roar and rage against the troubles of our own time, their volume and power making you forget for at least 20 minutes at a clip. And then, they start again. | 2024-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 12XU | April 22, 2024 | 7.7 | 51aa1636-bcad-4867-8cf9-64bccc41e24e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The New York rapper’s tenth album showcases his turn from athletic feats on the mic to more expressive modes, backed by some of his best production yet. | The New York rapper’s tenth album showcases his turn from athletic feats on the mic to more expressive modes, backed by some of his best production yet. | Aesop Rock: Integrated Tech Solutions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aesop-rock-integrated-tech-solutions/ | Integrated Tech Solutions | Aesop Rock opens his tenth album with a parody of Silicon Valley corporatespeak. “ITS is a system of industry applications designed to curate a desired multi-experience,” he says over a pastiche of ’80s synthpop. “Using a unique hybrid of machine learning and on-site scrum sessions, our specialists have redefined tech-centric problem-solving. Disrupt. Innovate. Refine.” The technobabble pokes fun at both TED talkers and Aesop Rock’s reputation for verbosity. A Def Jux alum and Rhymesayers signee, he knows the taste of word salad. He also knows none will be served on Integrated Tech Solutions, a smorgasbord of stories, images, and textures. The record builds on Aesop Rock’s decade-plus of rehabbing his style, which has shifted from gnarled abstraction to bug-eyed omniology.
Aesop Rock still raps in lurching torrents of interlocking syllables and layered rhymes, but his delivery has grown more rhythmic and laid back, more conversational than combative. His production has come a long way, too; what was once functional scaffolding has become a pillar of his music. He’s now more interested in rap as expression than athletic feat, a turn that has made his songs more deliberate and searching. With this refined skill set and vision, he’s made subjects as trivial as skateboarding at night and as fantastical as a superpowered bullfrog feel engrossing and personal. That casual fluency drives Integrated Tech Solutions, an album loosely about life under technocracy. In a world where artists have been reduced to brands and data points, Aesop Rock asserts his multiplicity.
The record boasts some of his most fully realized songs. “Living Curfew,” a song about the magic of golden hour in a city, darts from a stoop to a Flatbush Avenue bodega to the bloodwork from Aes’ latest doctor visit, each detail rendered in 4K yet propelling the verse forward. The images accumulate like a Katamari ball, swelling into “Whirlwind country/A world flushed from the brush pen of Kim Jung Gi/Swirling, junkyard tires and loveseats and house pets/All swept up into one beast.” The trip-hop beat’s crawling bassline and looped moans heighten the flood of details; the song feels like wading into a mural. And that’s before billy woods sweeps in with an equally omniscient verse about witching hour, that other magical time of day.
Single “By the River” is just as exquisite. Rapping over a loop of soft percussion and a jazzy horn, Aes confesses his love of rivers. East, Hudson, Amazon, Willamette, Susquehanna—he admires them all, communing with a beaver and the ghost of his departed friend Camu Tao in a winding verse that’s broken up by the simple declaration, “I like rivers, I like rivers.” It’s the rare concept song that is as revelatory as it is intricate.
Aes does a lot of storytelling on this album, extolling the beauty of pigeons on “Pigeonemetry,” memorializing his late grandma on “Vititus,” and narrating a bizarre home invasion on “Aggressive Steven.” The latter gets unwieldy as the story drags on, but Aes’ rhythmic virtuosity shines in this narrative mode. He’ll often insert an exclamation or aside to imbue a line with color, or to transition into a different flow or rhyme scheme. “Mr. T is fucking real?” he spit-takes on “100 Feet Tall,” channeling the astonishment he felt when his family ran into the celebrity in the ’80s. On the Watchmen-referencing “Salt and Pepper Squid,” a monologue about mentoring younger skaters sidles into a conversation: “I like to help the younger rippers clip up/A little hype to reignite the nimbus when they hiccup/How’s your weekend?/Is it house on a beach with a view, and tea for two?” Elite technique is clearly second nature for him at this point, but he’s constantly in search of ways to rap his ass off without showboating.
The production is just as accomplished and purposeful. Outsourcing just one beat, he goes full mixmaster. On “Infinity Fill Goose Down,” chopped and scratched vocals, squiggles of funk guitar, and an arcade cabinet’s worth of synths fade in and out over nimble percussion. Pigeon coos undergird the ornithological paeans of “Pigeonometry;” porch-stomp drums thunder over reverbed electric guitar on “Bermuda”; a burping bassline loops over a crisp breakbeat on “All City Nerve Map.” He’s long been an omnivorous producer, but he’s recently learned to emphasize rhythm as much texture. (This applies to his verses too: His odes to junk food on “Time Moves Differently Here” straddle the bass notes like a lover, his slowed flow drawing out the pleasure of every delicacy.)
As on Spirit World Field Guide and The Impossible Kid, a fear of mortality lurks beneath the levity and wonder. In addition to his typical jokes about being a hermit and living fossil (“Aes from before the first Star Wars/I survived Action Park, I survived lawn darts),” he also ponders the legacy of his art. In an interlude, he considers the arc of Vincent van Gogh, who was considered a failure in his lifetime. Van Gogh is the patron saint of flop eras; people evoke the Dutch painter when they need validation during perceived downturns. But for Aes the prolific post-Impressionist is interesting because he was productive, period. Even if his art hadn’t survived, he still made it, a devotion that inspires Aes. Integrated Tech Solutions illustrates how that commitment continues to deepen even as Aesop Rock eyes the clock. “O death, o death, could ya please hold a moment?/I am so in effect,” he raps on closer “Black Snow.” He’s got more to say. | 2023-11-13T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-10T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | November 13, 2023 | 8 | 51acde2a-8a81-48d5-addc-8765dfc90f8b | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Detroit rapper’s latest EP is more polished than anything he’s made before but shines best when he sticks to his Midwest roots. | The Detroit rapper’s latest EP is more polished than anything he’s made before but shines best when he sticks to his Midwest roots. | Babyface Ray: Unf*ckwitable | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babyface-ray-unfckwitable/ | Unfuckwitable | Detroit isn’t the same place it was five or 10 years ago. Back then, the city’s brand of wicked punchlines and cheap-sounding pianos would rarely receive widespread recognition outside of towns with familial ties like Milwaukee, Columbus, and Oakland. However, behind a run of hit singles—Tee Grizzley’s “First Day Out,” Sada Baby’s “Whole Lotta Choppas,” and 42 Dugg’s duet with Lil Baby, “We Paid”—there’s no longer a career ceiling on the quintessential Detroit rapper.
A cornerstone of this flourishing scene is Babyface Ray, who raps about the most inconsequential parts of the most eventful moments. On “Meg Thee Stallion,” he’s being trailed but is more concerned about whether his outfit is fly enough for photos. On “Trill Spill,” he imagines a scenario about death, though not the actual dying part—just what type of suit he’d have on at his funeral. Almost every Ray song feels like a collection of fleeting thoughts built off frivolous details and delivered with the indifference of a person making small talk with a DMV teller.
Unf*ckwitable, Babyface Ray’s new EP, is the product of the city’s musical boom. It’s cleaner, polished, and mixed better than anything he’s made before, but the brief seven-song collection also feels like a transparent marketing move. Not many things are less fun than hearing a rap record that makes you aware of the business of it all. It’s inescapable on Unf*ckwitable, which, in adopting a heavier Southern influence than his past music, is an unsubtle attempt to introduce Ray to an audience less familiar with Detroit rap and to stumble into playlist ubiquity.
It’s hard to blame Ray; after all, almost every rapper wants their music to eventually live in those influential Atlanta clubs. Last year, 42 Dugg seamlessly blended melodic Atlanta flows and production with the stylistic foundation of Detroit, and it made him a breakout star. With Ray, this transition is less natural. There’s a way to make this leap without watering down his homegrown sound. That path might be longer and more frustrating, but at least it would avoid songs like “If You Know You Know,” where Ray trades forgettable punchlines with Memphis streaming juggernaut Moneybagg Yo—over a thudding cowbell-heavy beat that seems as if it was supposed to be sent to DaBaby’s inbox instead. Similarly, the Hit-Boy-produced “Allowance” has the most brutally generic hook; it badly wants to be a strip club anthem.
The traditional Michigan mixtape intro, “Real Niggas Don’t Rap” seems like Ray’s way of bargaining with fans. But the trade-off is worth it just to feel like you’re sitting around a campfire listening to Ray rattle off stories about how there’s nothing to do in the pandemic but get money, or about the time he spotted a woman in the airport with a “Coke-bottle shape.” When Ray is focused on filling in small lyrical details instead of the big picture, his music shines. “Pink 10s,” a conversational back-and-forth with rising Louisville rapper EST Gee, is another upbeat record to go along with “If You Know You Know,” except here, Ray isn’t trying to escape his Midwest roots. It’s time to move past the mindset that you have to temper your regional flair to advance your career. A Detroit rapper can be a star while sounding like a Detroit rapper.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Wavy Gang / Empire | February 11, 2021 | 6 | 51adfed2-7d5d-4162-a159-34f7420c5d2a | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere over-share on their sloppy and tedious new album, though it still contains a few gripping moments. | The Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere over-share on their sloppy and tedious new album, though it still contains a few gripping moments. | Atmosphere: Fishing Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22210-fishing-blues/ | Fishing Blues | For nearly 20 years, the Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere—Slug (Sean Daley) and Ant (Anthony Davis), respectively—have been trying to find a balance. The alt-sloping founders of the indie rap stable Rhymesayers have been teetering between identities as idols (to a cult-like following of passionate fans) and beleaguered hand-wringers (to everyone else). They’ve earned an “emo rap” tag by delivering plainspoken pleas in spoken-word cadences that saunter through dusty MPC loops, and they cornered the market on a specific subset of pre-internet rap by fearlessly divulging to anyone who’d listen.
Slug and Ant have always functioned well as a duo because they’re in search of the same thing: shared feelings. Ant once said he’s a “sensitive fucking person” who’s “totally just about truth,” peddling his emotions through a blues-tinged soundboard, and Slug is a working class MC who shares every painstaking thought from deep in his tortured soul. But we’re now reaching the point (or maybe we’re past the point) where thinking out loud has turned the corner into over-sharing. On their latest album, Fishing Blues, Atmosphere make rap just for the sake of making it. This thing has no function or utility.
Atmosphere albums haven’t been interesting (or necessary) for a few years. The two partners worked at a distance for the first time on their last one, 2014’s Southsiders, which was their second dad-rap record (following The Family Sign). Southsiders tried to sort out exactly what Atmosphere songs inspired by fatherhood and domesticity might sound like. The results were predictably lame. The ideas were overwrought, gracelessly executed, and sometimes just straight-up boring. Fishing Blues makes a lot of the same mistakes, only it’s way longer and even more uneven. This is the Atmosphere take on the vanity project where even the self-deprecation is half-assed: On “No Biggie,” Slug raps, “Take a photo with the number one loser/Trying to get used to living in the future.” Take that lyric at face value and it says Slug is having trouble adjusting to what’s current, which would explain some of this album’s dated choices—e.g. its lead single is called “Ringo.”
But as proof this isn’t just an age or longevity problem, there’s “When the Lights Go Out,” a song that features rap veterans Kool Keith and DOOM in different roles. Both deliver admirably. DOOM gets a verse, and though it’s far from his best, it’s more than enough to stand out here. Aesop Rock, who just this year proved the adventurous Year 20 indie rap album was possible, pops up. pops up for a chanting outro, but he doesn’t get to do any serious rapping on “Chasing New York,” which he could’ve salvaged.
Fishing Blues has no stakes—with or without this record, the Atmosphere legacy is cemented—and the sloppy writing, disinterested rapping, and overall conservative artistic decisions seem to reflect that. Some of the lines are bad (“We on a spaceship, crash land from above/We on a lazy river, fly fishing for love” from “A Long Hello”) and a lot are lazy (“She was encyclopedia thick” and “attitude of a hot bowl of cat food” from “No Biggie”). This is a tedious listen with little replay value, where the only reprieve from the droning is a laugh from a clunker.
It should be noted that Slug is a very good rapper and Ant a skilled producer, so any Atmosphere record, even the most purposeless one, is bound to get it right at least some of the time, especially on a release with 18 tracks. The most gripping moments on Fishing Blues either step way outside the parameters of traditional Atmosphere, like the electro-fused “Seismic Waves,” or double down, like on “Besos,” which accents a boxy breakbeat with flutes. There are a handful of really intricate rhyme structures scattered throughout (On “Everything”: “I got the coldest shoulder in the solar system/I know because I drove around this whole existence”). The second verse of “Besos” is a technical marvel, an unconscious performance with tightly-written scheming. Slug does some of his best rapping about race and heritage on “Perfect,” with self-aware bars like “Some say that I pass, none say that I'm passive/White trash with a fraction of blackness” and “Irish name, Scandinavian frame/I'm a Rubik's cube, I'm the American dream.”
Politically-charged and socially conscious records might the next frontier for Atmosphere. In “Seismic Waves,” there’s a great lyric about Trayvon Martin and Ronald Reagan. And Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer. In the hands of a less capable thinker and lyricist, this concept would be an epic fumble, but Slug pens an expert indictment of a militarized police force: “It all depends on how you fit into my spectrum/From lectures, to handcuffs, to beat downs, to death wish/I was told to tell a one-sided story, and that's why I had to eliminate your perspective.” It’s one of the few times you get the sense that he still has reason to rap, and it’s a reminder that Atmosphere can still make great music, when given the proper motivation. | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | August 18, 2016 | 5.6 | 51b26461-2f75-420d-9b13-1f978aa35d23 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
On their fourth solo release in three years, the former Women member strikes a provocative balance of ’60s pop bliss and horror-show unease. | On their fourth solo release in three years, the former Women member strikes a provocative balance of ’60s pop bliss and horror-show unease. | Cindy Lee: What’s Tonight to Eternity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cindy-lee-whats-tonight-to-eternity/ | What’s Tonight to Eternity | Two-thirds of the way through What’s Tonight to Eternity, the stakes are laid plain. In a spoken-word sample of religious testimony, a woman describes finding herself abandoned by Jesus, stuck in a kind of purgatory where she can neither live nor die. Fed up, she resolves to reject Satan, even if that means being cast into the ether. “I would rather spend eternity in nothing,” she declares, “than to spend eternity with you.”
On their fourth solo release as Cindy Lee in three years, Patrick Flegel sounds far more ambivalent. Equally seduced by shrieking noise and devotional beauty, What’s Tonight seesaws between joy and despair, body and spirit, heaven and hell. Many of its most infernal songs are also its most corporeal, grounded by throbbing baritone synths and bodily basslines. More optimistic tracks are either falling apart at the seams or sound as if a breeze might turn them into dust. It is a vision of two similarly unappealing choices: a physical world suffused with evil, and a spiritual escape that threatens to obliterate the self.
Cindy Lee emerged from the ashes of the Calgary quartet Women, which at the end of the aughts put out two workmanlike albums of psych-friendly lo-fi that sailed on the prevailing winds blowing out of Georgia and Montreal. Flegel eventually picked up the gender play of Women's name and ran with it, with a new musical identity to match. “Ugh, I’m so bored of being a boy in a fuckin’ guitar band,” they’ve said about the birth of Cindy Lee, a project that sounds haunted by guitars, rather than built around them. “Last couple years it’s been just me, traditional drag-style.”
Women sometimes flirted with oppositional elements, shimmering guitar melodies joined by feedback glare. But as Cindy Lee, Flegel has vastly expanded these countervailing palettes of divine harmony and clamorous decay. With their brother Andrew joining on drums, What’s Tonight delivers these sonic qualities with more precision and more instability than any Cindy Lee record yet, refusing to settle for the reductive conclusion of an easy extreme.
What’s Tonight begins in Youth Lagoon-esque territory of lightly psychedelic whimsy, with blooping whale sounds over serene keyboards and a dash of smooth-jazz saxophone beamed straight from some 6-CD changer. Soon, though, the already decaying audio will be overwhelmed by shrieking static and aggressive squawks that, with an added beat, sound like they could go viral on TikTok—as if the placid recording studio were suddenly torn apart by a tornado. But, like Dorothy being whisked away to Oz, the storms that pepper the album lead somewhere fantastical. The epic “I Want You to Suffer” is a capsule of the album in song, with cherubic backing vocals that heel-turn into screams of trauma before ultimately dissolving into ecclesiastical organ.
Another, non-biblical carpenter has provided salve and solidarity for many who feel excluded and abandoned by the powers that be. As Karen Tongson wrote in Why Karen Carpenter Matters, the “profound despair underlying an intense California sunniness” in Karen Carpenter’s music, and her personal struggle with the anorexia that eventually claimed her life, turned her into an unlikely icon for many people who might feel otherwise alienated by the mainstream culture she was supposed to personify. This includes Flegel, who cites her story, artistry, and the musical magic she conjures “in the negative space, out of exclusion” as an inspiration for Cindy Lee.
The characteristic intimacy of Karen Carpenter’s voice is absent here, with Flegel’s earnest falsetto often rendered as a galactically distant echo. Instead, the singer’s presence is felt through other aesthetics often associated with her, like Richard Carpenter’s saccharine string arrangements and doo-wop-inspired backing vocals. Flegel has spoken about the way that performing in drag as Cindy Lee allows them to adopt a “diva fantasy,” and perhaps a protective costume of sorts is the key to surviving What’s Tonight’s hellish world. “Plastic raincoat,” they sing on the opening track, “protect me from rot.” But the retro fetishism here isn’t only limited to the cheerful. Cindy Lee also dabbles in the baroque horror-show affectations popular throughout the 1960s, with clomping harpsichord parts both baleful and strident.
Though suspicious of pat closure, the album’s final third ultimately realizes a middle path between nothingness and the pain of the world. The ruminative electric piano on “Speaking From Above” sutures the song’s harsh distortion to its fleshy bass, finding a satisfied groove amid the ongoing discomforts of being alive. And “Heavy Metal” filters this internal conflict through a parodic costume of girl-group fadeout, reaching a tentative rapprochement between these many selves. All dolled up in the past, the sacred and sinister can coexist—for now.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | W.25TH / Superior Viaduct | February 14, 2020 | 7.1 | 51bb13f3-777e-4788-819a-d0139f5ace9e | Jack Denton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jack-denton/ | |
Composer Daniel Wohl specializes in pieces that bridge the divide between acoustic and programmed elements; at their best, his works confuse your sense of what is played live and what is manipulated. His new album Holographic features singers Olga Bell and Caroline Shaw. | Composer Daniel Wohl specializes in pieces that bridge the divide between acoustic and programmed elements; at their best, his works confuse your sense of what is played live and what is manipulated. His new album Holographic features singers Olga Bell and Caroline Shaw. | Daniel Wohl: Holographic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21419-holographic/ | Holographic | With 2013’s Corps Exquis, composer Daniel Wohl offered a set of concise, punchy pieces joining glitchy electronic verve with traditional chamber music lyricism. At some points, the digital manipulations were identifiable as processed versions of parts being played by the musicians, and at others, they operated independently of each other. In the best moments, you couldn’t tell what was live and what was pre-programmed.
On his follow-up, Wohl includes a pair of two-movement works that show how suited he is to larger canvases. A slowly moving, two-note drone launches "Replicate, Pt. 1," and operates in the background throughout, while the live musicians work with pitched percussion figures that build on themselves slowly. Brisk electronic beats introduce the piece’s second half—though the composition never scales the frenetic peaks of Corps Exquis.
This comparative restraint pays off when a gorgeous vibraphone ostinato emerges in the closing minutes of "Replicate, Pt. 2." Wohl playfully manipulates the groove, letting the tempo quicken and slack unpredictably. "Holographic," another piece that stretches across two tracks, also builds its momentum in a natural, relaxed fashion, underlining the subtler chops of the musicians who make up the often-clangorous Bang on Can All-Stars group.
The album’s initially deliberate, patient air ensures that its hyperactive set piece registers strongly. With an evident love for unusual, junkyard sonorities and febrile rhythm, "Progression" brings the maverick sound of mid-century American composer Harry Partch into the electro-classical present day. And its tightly interwoven writing for strings and percussion also suggests that Wohl could compose just fine in purely acoustic settings if he wanted.
In between these pieces are a few items that sound slight next to the more ambitious material. It’s not difficult to imagine how the singers who show up for "Source"—Olga Bell and Pulitzer-prize winner (and Kanye West collaborator) Caroline Shaw—might inspire Wohl, though the meeting winds up sounding merely pleasant. Elsewhere, the Mivos Quartet—the same group who pairs up so winningly with Mantra Percussion on "Progression"—have much less to do during "Formless." Still, the electro-acoustic balance on these tracks is expertly handled. It just happens to be the case that this notoriously hard-to-perfect blend might not be Wohl’s greatest talent, after all. | 2016-02-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | February 15, 2016 | 7.7 | 51c28cb7-74fc-4620-9242-2fe68ebd30a8 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
After dying at the age of 45 in a California hospital in 1986, Robbie Basho's reputation as a pioneer of finger-picked acoustic guitar passed like a shadow behind the music and myth of his friend John Fahey. After more than three decades out of print, his 10th album, 1978’s Visions of the Country, is back in circulation, and it serves as an ecstatic testimonial for a guitarist in need of a popular resurrection. | After dying at the age of 45 in a California hospital in 1986, Robbie Basho's reputation as a pioneer of finger-picked acoustic guitar passed like a shadow behind the music and myth of his friend John Fahey. After more than three decades out of print, his 10th album, 1978’s Visions of the Country, is back in circulation, and it serves as an ecstatic testimonial for a guitarist in need of a popular resurrection. | Robbie Basho: Visions of the Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18390-robbie-basho-visions-of-the-country/ | Visions of the Country | Robbie Basho died in a California hospital room more than 27 years ago. His vertebral artery ruptured during a visit to a chiropractor’s office. He had a stroke, slipped into a coma and, at the age of 45, passed away. In the decades that have followed, his already-wavering reputation as a pioneer of finger-picked acoustic guitar experimentation has passed largely like a shadow behind the music and myth of John Fahey, Basho’s old pal who released several of his earliest albums.
It should be remembered that Fahey experienced a renaissance in the 90s. The music press famously championed his early work and helped goad him from semi-retirement. He followed the laurels both with a string of strange, daring records and a brilliant new record label, Revenant, which advocated alternate strains of the avant-garde and the hillbilly music that had helped inspire his own. Basho, being dead, enjoyed no such revival. In fact, a large chunk of his catalogue now languishes out of print, serving as grails for collectors rather than essential bits in a narrative much broader than Blind Joe Death. And that’s a shame: Nearly 30 years after his death, and after multiple waves of guitarists have risen to revive the mantle Fahey and Basho both helped shape, Basho’s manic, hyperkinetic approach to playing, singing, songwriting and living in general have very few peers. Basho’s tenth album, 1978’s Visions of the Country, was the fifth album Windham Hill Records ever released. After more than three decades out of print, it is finally back in circulation; on its 35th anniversary, it serves as an ecstatic testimonial for a guitarist in need of a popular resurrection.
Basho’s relative anonymity isn’t only a byproduct of his untimely death, of course: Even when he was alive, his allegedly inscrutable personality and debated quirks kept him a bit at arms length. Those same strange traits are part and parcel to his music. He did not aim for Fahey’s steady, solemn gaze or Leo Kottke’s eccentric approachability. Rather, Basho’s music was a blunderbuss of feeling, tied to unstoppable technique. He whistles loudly over the Keith Jarrett-sized piano clouds of “Leaf in the Wind”, as though it were his aim to spoil the song’s billowing beauty. And he ends Visions of the Country by urging listeners to “follow the Milky Way-- home!” in a voice that suggests Mr. Rogers.
Indeed, Basho’s singing generally wasn’t what you’d call pretty or subtle. During “Night Way”, from the second side of Visions of the Country, he obscures the wonderful ribbons of his six-string guitar with singing generously described as zealous. He wails a ceremonial Navajo chant, his voice locking into and falling from falsetto, its vibrato smearing the track with warble. For the listener, the guitar is the star here, but you have to peer past the bleat to find it. During “Orphan’s Lament”, he slurs and nearly screams his tribute to the poor and peripatetic above sheets of stacked piano notes, delivering empathy like a bar-side Irisman. These aren’t songs you’d really put on during a party or in a mix for a love interest. Basho’s sound is dramatic and yearning and very personal, altogether unapologetic for the way he saw the world.
What’s most remarkable about Basho is how busy and emphatic but absolutely effortless his songs could feel, especially when he touches the guitar. At once, Basho could appear to be laying it all on the line and simply breezing through the notes. During “Rocky Mountain Raga”, he practically howls as he sings “Oh, you grand Rockies,” pretending that he’s an opera star. But even so, his fingers are frantic and unfailing, delivering a perfect and convoluted stream of notes that never loses momentum just because he’s now got something to say. Early in his career, Basho was a rather plainspoken folk musician. A natural roamer, though, he developed an enthusiastic embrace of world religion and music-- from India to Ireland, from Native American lore to Sufi teachings. On Visions of the Country, those polyglot tendencies allow him to slip Middle Eastern accents and chamber ensemble flair into “Variations on Easter”, a four-minute fantasy that’s as close to a “simple” acoustic instrumental theme as he ever really got. Conversely, he’s comfortable singing a pretty song over somewhat plain chords, too. On “Blue Crystal Fire”, he sustains that falsetto, his voice curling like that of Antony Hegarty in a song that’s coincidentally about natural wonder-- “Smooth singing sunshine/ wrap your blanket around me.” Basho constructed his ecumenical complications above solid foundations. Visions of the Country uniquely shows every layer.
Gnome Life’s reissue of Visions of the Country won’t be enough to resuscitate Basho’s reputation, to turn him, like Fahey, into shorthand for adventurous acoustic guitar. But that’s OK. Basho will never have the same broad appeal or the same cyclic story as Fahey. His music is, at first, rather off-putting, but ultimately, he imagined modes for the guitar and composition that we’re still reconciling. Marnie Stern sometimes maneuvers against her instrument in the same way, and James Blackshaw explores the same nebulous majesty. But Robbie Basho’s music mostly remains a pan-everything oddball, and Visions of the Country is, at last, once again living proof. | 2013-08-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-08-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Gnome Life | August 15, 2013 | 8.7 | 51c59959-2238-41c3-8e97-dda936a14aae | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Recorded at Nashville’s famed Butcher Shoppe, Vile’s lovely and bittersweet new EP mixes covers and originals, including a duet with the late John Prine. | Recorded at Nashville’s famed Butcher Shoppe, Vile’s lovely and bittersweet new EP mixes covers and originals, including a duet with the late John Prine. | Kurt Vile: Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kurt-vile-speed-sound-lonely-kv-ep/ | Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP | Kurt Vile and John Prine were natural collaborators. In addition to their knack for using observational humor to magnify pathos and pathos to magnify humor, both have talents that have been largely overlooked. Prine is such a remarkable and idiosyncratic songwriter that his lyrics often overshadow his innovative guitar playing, which involves a two- instead of three-finger picking style. Vile is such an ingenious guitarist that his playing often overshadows his equally imaginative songwriting. In recent years they’ve shared stages together in Philadelphia and Nashville (including the Grand Ole Opry), and earlier this year, just months before Prine’s death, they even recorded a song together. Vile calls himself a fanboy; Prine called him a “mellow rock and roller in a stroller.” I have no idea what that means, but it sounds true.
The song they recorded during their joint session, a cover of Prine’s “How Lucky,” off 1979’s Pink Cadillac, anchors Vile’s new EP, which serves as a loose tribute to his hero. There’s also a solo cover of the 1986 tune “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” which Vile covered with Prine on Prine’s final tour, and Prine’s spirit lingers in the two new originals. But speed, sound, lonely (kv) is also an ode to the city of Nashville, to all the amazing musicians there, and to the spirit of collaboration that still thrives in the city after so many revolutions within the music industry. Vile booked sessions at the Butcher Shoppe, the studio and hangout owned by producer David Ferguson, known for his work with Prine, Sturgill Simpson, and Johnny Cash. In addition to Matt Sweeney and Dan Auerbach, his backing band was stocked with some of the finest musicians in the city, representing generations of country artists: keyboardist Bobby Wood, bassist Dave Roe, mandolin virtuoso Pat McLaughlin, and drummer Kenny Malone.
Recorded over several years during several visits to Nashville, the EP could easily have turned out like vacation photos: interesting to those who were there and a snooze to everybody else. But these songs not only sound great—mostly acoustic in their arrangements, crisp and warm in their production, and lively in their performances—but that sense of camaraderie draws out something essential in Vile’s singing and playing. As a guitarist, he’s fine at monologues, but he’s a better conversationalist. On these songs, he reacts to these veterans and lets their ideas swim around in his head for a little bit. That comes through on “Gone Girl,” his cover of a deep Cowboy Jack Clement cut. Vile savors the eccentricity of the melody, but he seems fascinated by the parallax overlay of instruments, how they snap together tightly but loosely, especially during the long sing-along outro.
This is an EP full of lengthy outros, where the band just keeps on playing. Closer “Pearls” even includes a false stop; the music kicks up again almost of its own accord. There’s no purpose to it other than simply enjoying the sound. Vile loves small moments like these, everyday joys that might go unnoticed. He even gets a full song out of a simple dandelion: “You can blow on ‘em or you can just hold ‘em,” he sings, finding beauty in the fleeting moment as McLaughlin’s mandolin trills like those little white tufts caught in the breeze.
Vile’s music can be reassuring and, at its best, transporting. Featuring both men singing and picking together, “How Lucky” considers all the glorious details in the world that greet us every day, but acknowledges there are infinitely too many for our brains to catalog and archive. The point is, you’ll never run out. “There was all these things that I don't think I remember,” they sing together on the final verse, before realizing, “Hey, how lucky can one man get.” It doesn’t feel quite as momentous as you’d expect from a meeting of these two mellow rock and rollers, and that’s okay. It’s sweetly minor, much like the other songs on here. That might not be enough to sustain a full album, but it’s lovely for an EP.
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. | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 7, 2020 | 7.5 | 51d0d0d3-8970-4e95-97f8-ed1b7ce2a35c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Cleaners From Venus, the lo-fi pop project of the English musician Martin Newell, offered a mix of rough edges, distanced vocals, definite hooks, and unexpected mixing choices. This box set features the first three 1980s cassette-only efforts with liner notes, flyers, buttons, and unreleased tracks and photos. | Cleaners From Venus, the lo-fi pop project of the English musician Martin Newell, offered a mix of rough edges, distanced vocals, definite hooks, and unexpected mixing choices. This box set features the first three 1980s cassette-only efforts with liner notes, flyers, buttons, and unreleased tracks and photos. | Cleaners From Venus: Blow Away Your Troubles / On Any Normal Monday / Midnight Cleaners | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16553-blow-away-your-troubles-on-any-normal-monday-midnight-cleaners/ | Blow Away Your Troubles / On Any Normal Monday / Midnight Cleaners | The album art for these rereleases by UK stalwarts the Cleaners from Venus reproduces the covers of the first three early 1980s cassette-only efforts released by core figure Martin Newell and his sole bandmate during that time, Lol Elliott. They're almost almost an inversion of the perceived Instagram model for photographs: instead of artificially aging the now, it's the past blown up and made precise, the gaps in the ink strokes made readily apparent along with the clear signs of where further coloring stopped. For any cassette release from that time that's received a retrospective celebration, whether via Messthetics, Minimal Wave, or something else again, that feeling always seems to hang heavy over the end result, at once strange and slightly humorous, like it snuck into something bigger by accident.
Doubtless Newell, long settled into a continuing career of poet, essayist, and musician as a kind of across-the-Thames cousin of the admittedly more scabrous Billy Childish, feels like that would be perfectly appropriate. As the liner notes describe, it wasn't that Newell and Elliott didn't want to keep their work hidden from the world but they probably didn't expect that efforts initially dubbed at home a few at a time would ever have more than a fleeting attention paid to them by similarly minded souls. Considering how immediate so much on these three albums are, though-- and, quite simply, how fun they often sound, regardless of lyrical intent at points-- it's almost hard to think they wouldn't have found some wider audience one way or another.
In retrospect, though, what's clear even from the start of Blow Away Your Troubles' "Swinging London" is how perfectly positioned the Cleaners' sound, or even more crucially their overall aesthetic was, in terms of a break between past and future. No measurable listening audience in 1981 beyond the DIY underground would have expected anything to sound like this did, with a mix of rough edges, distanced vocals, definite hooks, and unexpected mixing choices, plus interjections and diversions that harkened back to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and "The Goon Show" among other sources. (Not to mention songs that fully embrace those routes-- "Alien", with its recurrent dialogues between human and outer-space visitor, is one of the most ridiculous things around.) It's theoretically new wave if you squint, but not the major label or even most indie label kind.
Of course, as the double-vinyl Blow Away Your Troubles, originally released in 1981, rapidly establishes, it wasn't about obscurantism for its own sake-- it's a stretch to say that it would be obvious in later years that Andy Partridge would end up producing Newell based on the evidence of songs like "A Blue Wave" or the piano-and-metronome-paced "Wivenhoe Bells" telling of small incidents in a small town. But in its weird way Newell arrived first where XTC would end up, an implied tension having relaxed to allow strange humor, political unease, and breezy rather than frenetic melodies and choruses to set a new course. A song like "Modern TV", a kind of relative-across-the-water of Black Flag's "TV Party", is all about serenely catchy surf-derived choruses and distant keyboards, while a sense of something epic and mournful is all over "Marilyn on a Train", achieving a kind of casual grandeur on its verses in particular that any number of post-punk dreamers would probably have loved had they heard it. Even something like "A Minimal Animal", an attempt to tackle reggae via several kind of distances down to stretched-out and echoed vocals and the utter pisstake "So This is Modern Jazz, Is It?"-- more like a bizarre scat-singing attempt from a long dead lounge-- all works perfectly in context.
On Any Normal Monday, released in early 1982, found the Cleaners in slightly changed circumstances, its liner notes talking about Newell's acquiring a four-track machine and Elliott's increasing personal attention elsewhere. It's not quite the Newell solo show yet (especially considering that he put out both a stand-alone tape and an archival one pre-Cleaners with the Stray Trolleys soon thereafter), but things are a little clearer, a touch crisper, and maybe inevitably a touch less frenetic, though a newer version of "Marilyn on a Train" retains its elegant sweep. Admittedly songs like "European War" aren't meant to be giddy regardless, but the humor of "Be an Idiot Popstar" seems a touch less goony in all senses of the word.
By the time of Midnight Cleaners, which also came out in 1982, Elliott's appearances were even more sporadic and the genteel TV-theme feeling of "This Rainy Decade" heralds something that was increasingly Newell's own particular flag of convenience. Hearing a bit of winning guest saxophone as it first appears in the extended introduction to "Corridor of Dreams" seems strangely monumental in context, even if it was only a year since the duo's debut effort. But if songs like "Only a Shadow" and "Time in Vain" are more polished and straightforward power-pop efforts with a crisp, slightly thin sound and steady drumming as opposed to the wiggier songs that helped inaugurate the band to start with, there's always the slightly cryptic spoken word, sax, and beat mix of the title track and the shimmering rush of "Factory Boy" in contrast. Meanwhile, a new version of "Wivenhoe Bells", with bells, phone samples, and children's voices added to the energetic flow of the arrangement, nicely squares not-too-distant past and present.
Newell's later efforts as the Cleaners from Venus and in other ventures would continue to explore the possibilities of home pop/rock recording, much as other figures worldwide as Chris Knox and the stalwart R. Stevie Moore would, though the resultant flood that's followed has almost overwhelmed that past to a large degree. It's nice to see this tip of the hat back via these reissues, though, an acknowledgement that it came from somewhere and from someone who followed his own inspired logic toward an end result with the tools to hand. | 2012-05-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | May 1, 2012 | 8.2 | 51d4f89a-9e84-40e1-a496-d9804b569edc | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
milo's so the flies don't come is wonderful, laidback California rap. But don't let the aesthetics fool you—he's a fierce lyricist with a killer sense of humor. A perfect album for weird days and off kilter listeners. | milo's so the flies don't come is wonderful, laidback California rap. But don't let the aesthetics fool you—he's a fierce lyricist with a killer sense of humor. A perfect album for weird days and off kilter listeners. | milo: so the flies don't come | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21199-so-the-flies-dont-come/ | so the flies don't come | Some of the best and weirdest alt rap in the country is coming out of Hellfyre Club, a Los Angeles-based collective founded in 2011 by California battle rapper turned rapper’s rapper Nocando. The roster boasts a host of eclectic wordsmiths like Project Blowed associate Open Mike Eagle, L.A. veteran Busdriver, and NxWorries member Anderson .Paak, who recently started to garner public attention after being prominently featured on Dr. Dre’s Compton. In 2013, the collective’s 17 track compilation, Dorner vs. Tookie, spotlit yet another featured lyricist: milo, aka Scallops Hotel, a Wisconsin transplant who carves poetry out of multisyllabics, scheming in micro-bursts and tightly woven yarns.
Last year, milo (whose real name is Rory Ferreira) released his refreshing debut album, a toothpaste suburb, which delivered wisecracks with a straight face, matching sharp barbs into sequences and carefully squeezing in references to Harry Potter, Jean Genet, Clementine Hunter, Kant, and Kim Kardashian—and that was just the opener. milo has a deadpan he uses to serve up witticisms that often double as smart jokes (and sometimes crude ones). Not all of his bars are one-liners, but they are all connected to at least one tangentially.
His latest album, so the flies don't come, is his most fascinating work to date, filling weird, side-winding productions that deflate and wheeze with tumbling lyricism delivered in near spoken word cadences. The project is entirely produced by electronic-leaning hip-hop producer Kenny Segal and the two have a real chemistry, with a shared inclination for the off-kilter and the oddball. Segal’s beats, synth-heavy abstractions that turn chords into cushions, make fitting soundbeds for milo’s staggered raps. Occasionally milo nestles into the sidewalls, like on "souvenir", and then quickly lurches out into pockets of dead space before retreating back. His blank, sometimes wooden demeanor is often betrayed by the snappiness of his writing, which somehow manages to capture Nietzche-esque nihilism with the comic simplicity of the shrugging emoticon.
milo has a knack for using quips as a lens through which to stare into the void, but his greatest strength lies in his very particular way with words. Songs like "an encyclopedia" and "napping under the Echo Tree" tell stories in their own language, something milo himself seems to understand; on the former, he opens, "No one taught me the language of rap song/ I was born speaking it." With such an innate understanding of rhythm and timing, it certainly sounds like it. His speech patterns vary, not so much abiding by the restraints of production as acknowledging them before ignoring them.
When milo isn’t playing around with funny phonetic sounds or fidgeting with tricky taunts, he’s just making flat out great hip-hop. The song "going no place" proves he’s capable of adhering to conventional rap standards with compact verses. On the closer, "song about a raygunn (an ode to Driver)", he gives a critical reading of aesthetics, something like a thesis: "Parse good from the nonsense/ Never let the form dictate what's the content/ It's never art for art's sake/ Despite whatever the corpse of a Marxist thinks." He closes the thought—and the album, with, "I guess I'm stupid/ Following a rule is just too hard for me/ It's hardly me." But if there’s one thing milo isn’t, it’s dumb. It’s his inability to follow the rules that makes his music so smart. | 2015-10-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht / The Order Label | October 14, 2015 | 7.4 | 51d670d6-211f-4f7c-9618-596bbf01ee7b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
It's a bit of a stretch, but a while ago I compared Boards of Canada's seminal Music Has ... | It's a bit of a stretch, but a while ago I compared Boards of Canada's seminal Music Has ... | Boards of Canada: Geogaddi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/837-geogaddi/ | Geogaddi | It's a bit of a stretch, but a while ago I compared Boards of Canada's seminal Music Has the Right to Children with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. I wasn't saying anything about the similarity or relative quality of the actual music, of course; I was just making an observation about how each album has a remarkably wide appeal that stretches beyond fans of its respective genre, while simultaneously carrying great weight with more experienced and discerning listeners. Because of this dual nature, both records are considered ideal "first purchases" for those curious about the musical world they come from. The comparison fails in other respects, but there's no doubting the consensus of opinion that has formed around these records, shared among both newcomers and schooled aesthetes.
The reputation of Music Has the Right to Children has everything to do with why Geogaddi is one of the most anticipated records of 2002 for indie and electronic music fans of all stripes. It's been four long years since this Scottish duo's landmark debut, and during this time, we've seen an uncountable number of "kind of like Boards of Canada" bands drifting by, with only a toddler's handful of new material released by the Boards themselves-- namely, the In a Beautiful Place out in the Country EP, released in late 2000. As Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison toiled away in secrecy in their Hexagon Sun studio and remote artists' compound, fans speculated about possible new directions: where would they go next?
Geogaddi provides a clear answer: not so far, really. As similar as this album is to the rest of the band's catalog, it seems a safe speculation that the concept of "reinvention" is not part of the Boards of Canada M.O. Their exceptionally distinctive and oft-imitated sound emerged fully formed on the early EPs, and for now, at least, they're sticking with it. While some will complain about Boards of Canada's failure to cover new territory, which puts them apart from the praised eclectic "searchers" of the music scene (Miles made only made one stab at Kind of Blue before moving on, after all), the rest of us will delight in what we see as a very accomplished album packed with great music.
When it comes to discussing records, though, similarities are boring, so let's talk about what makes Geogaddi different. The first thing that comes to mind is the shift in mood. While the band continues to traffic in childhood and nostalgia, the atmosphere on this album is a shade darker than on previous releases, and comparatively tense with a noticeable thread of paranoia. Boards of Canada have always had a disorienting cast to their music, in part because of their proclivity for the quivery modulation of their analog synths. But where the warbles once seemed designed to evoke the sensation of strained memory, the distortions now have a disturbing undercurrent, suggesting that something frightening might lie beneath the surface.
Part of this darker trend comes from a thicker production environment and apparent aversion to unused space. On Geogaddi, Boards of Canada have replaced silence with the drone, and the master tapes are saturated with the sounds of the duo's customized machinery. There's none of the wistful airiness of a track like "Turquoise Hexagon Sun," nor the lighthearted warmth of a Music Has the Right to Children track like "Aquarius." Gone, too, is the gentle pastoralism of In a Beautiful Place out in the Country.
In its place, we find the swirling claustrophobic winds of "Julie and Candy," menacing swells of feedback anchoring the rhythm of "Dawn Chorus," and the lonely, isolated Nuno Cannavaro-isms of "The Devil Is in the Details," whose two sampled voices are a crying baby and a monolog given by a woman who might be drowning. Some of the beats on Geogaddi compliment this new, darker undercurrent and stand out from previous work. The pummeling, mechanized drum loop that drives "Gyroscope" is downright violent, and seems squarely aimed at the distorted child's voice in the background. And on "Alpha and Omega," hints of tabla mix with multi-layered percussion, lending an intriguing live band feel to an otherwise unremarkable track.
So, yes, the Boards have implemented their trademark tools on Geogaddi, but in the service of a slightly gloomier vision. Granted, the familiarity of their sound could prove to become a liability on their future releases, but it's easy to see why Eoin and Sandison have played this record so close to the vest. If you'd perfected a sonic playground like this, you'd probably want to explore it a while longer, too. | 2002-02-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-02-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | February 21, 2002 | 8.6 | 51dd2fee-d451-46a5-af00-81764dda8d68 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Composed by the director himself, the score for Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk-horror film floats ambiguously between beauty and dread, creating tension through mystery. | Composed by the director himself, the score for Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk-horror film floats ambiguously between beauty and dread, creating tension through mystery. | Mark Jenkin: Enys Men (Original Score) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/enys-men-original-score/ | Enys Men (Original Score) | Behind the isolation and terror at the heart of Mark Jenkin’s second feature film Enys Men is a clever act of deception. The film, the title of which is Cornish for “Stone Island,” follows a volunteer ecologist living on a small piece of land, studying the growth of a unique set of flowers. As she goes about her lonely daily routine of taking measurements and observing the world, her mental state begins to fray; she experiences disturbing, reality-blurring visions of violence and ghostly workers inhabiting a long-abandoned mining operation. While the main character’s existence appears solitary, in actuality, there’s a bustling, noisy farm right next to her home. The island itself is a work of fiction, its craggy landscapes composed of shots of mainland Cornwall.
This cinematic illusion is a testament to Jenkin’s artistic approach: He looks at the world and digs out the horror lurking amid everyday scenery. This penetrating disquiet is echoed in the film’s score, composed by Jenkin himself, which collects dreary ambient pieces, placid field recordings, and clipped radio static that float between beauty and dread. As the cues billow and evolve, it can be hard to tell what they’re meant to evoke, which only makes them more unsettling.
The record’s 10-and-a-half minute opener “Enys, Pt. 1” illustrates this uneasy duality. It’s built around a droning synth melody, which twists softly and slowly as if being nudged by a breeze; with each fuzzy repetition, it starts to feel a little darker, a little more strange. Its flirtations with silence evoke both serenity and sorrow in a way that recalls William Basinski’s thoughtful tape work or Fennesz’s texturally rich ambiance. Much of the score is composed of these richly suggestive and emotionally opaque pieces. “Goelann,” for example, is a short cue that weaves together woodwind-like electronics with the gentle roiling of the wind and sea. It’s wispy and elusive, and then it’s over, which only adds to its mystery.
The score ventures to more explicitly foreboding places, like on the grayscale loop of “Hunros, Pt. 1.” Like a sonar blip warped on old tape, the piece rumbles and whirrs until a distant threat comes into view, culminating in a distress call over a crackly radio on the following track. “Knoukya Knoukya” evokes similar fear through seasick bass drones and clipped conversation, before building to a flurry of noise. These are momentary diversions, but they’re enough to make listening to the record and watching the film a tense experience.
Enys Men could be described as a horror film, but it’s more slippery than what the label traditionally evokes. It’s like a daydream, languidly tracing scenes and images with a meditative logic—and sometimes taking you to a darker place than imagined. The music is built to accompany that kind of journey, both in the film and outside of it: Each delicate synth line guides listeners into hypnotic reverie, then each burst of static snaps them violently back to earth, leaving them on terra firma for a moment until a vision begins anew. | 2023-04-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Invada | April 24, 2023 | 7.3 | 51deba47-fa53-4e21-93b4-35e0c8ec91db | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos all join Ambarchi on a dense and rewarding album that never succumbs to the weight of its collaborators. | Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos all join Ambarchi on a dense and rewarding album that never succumbs to the weight of its collaborators. | Oren Ambarchi: Hubris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22608-hubris/ | Hubris | Since the late ’90s, Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi has composed drone metal and free jazz, sculpted ambient soundscapes and collaborated with many (if not most) of experimental music's biggest names. Over his prolific career, Ambarchi has toured with Sunn O))), played with Boris and Merzbow, drummed with Keiji Haino—and that's just a drop in the bucket. In many ways, Ambarchi is a quintessential musician’s musician: an adept drummer and guitarist, hugely respected within his own scene, whose fans study his work like stoned math majors pouring over a Mandelbrot set. Whether inspired by krautrock, metal, or jazz, Ambarchi’s work demands patience and attention, but along with his singular musicianship, Ambarchi's work reaches for the extremes of human experience, the sorrowful, the sublime.
On his latest album, the three-part, forty-minute Hubris, Ambarchi teams up with an army of avant-garde musicians, among them Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos. O’Rourke is a frequent collaborator with Ambarchi (together the two made 2011’s Indeed and last year’s Behold) and his presence is felt throughout the record. Both musicians are experts at locking into grooves, then breaking out of them in strange, unthinkable ways. On “Hubris Pt. 1,” Ambarchi lays down an arpeggiated guitar loop which serves as a baseline for his collaborators to play off and the track’s 22-minute runtime provides an ample canvas. According to Ambarchi, the composition was inspired by New Wave and disco—particularly Wang Chung’s soundtrack to the 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A.—but its sound and structure owe much to the patient loops of minimal techno.
As with some forms of meditation, where practitioners are taught to focus on subtle differences in the body’s perception of the world, Ambarchi and his partners introduce ripples that swell into waves. While it's hard to parse who is responsible which sounds, O’Rourke's guitar-synth stands out, evoking retro graphics, John Carpenter soundtracks, and William Friedkin thrillers. Similar to the Field, Ambarchi’s loops instill a sense of wonder with their unflagging momentum, but while Axel Willner has a tendency toward big crescendos, “Pt. 1” stays rooted. Tension is heightened, but there's only a small release, just a fading sense that something beautiful is gone.
“Pt. 3,” which includes contributions from Villalobos and DNA’s Arto Lindsay, is a different sort of beast—as unhinged and electric as anything Ambarchi has recorded. Villalobos, a godhead in the minimal techno arena, once sampled a small portion of Christian Vander’s “Baba Yaga La Sorciere,” turning it into 17 minutes of rhythmic ecstasy. Similarly, Villalobos, along with drummers Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, bring a circularity to “Pt. 3,” with Lindsay's guitar adding a no wave edge to the funk-prog undercurrent.
Similarly, Villalobos, along with drummers Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, bring a similar circularity to “Pt. 3,” with Lindsay's guitar adding a no wave edge to the funk-prog undercurrent. Unlike “Pt. 1,” which stays within set confines, “Part 3” sheds formal constraints gleefully. By the time for Ambarchi’s guitars join Lindsay's, the track has become a maximalist hurricane of weird.
Taken from a distance, Hubris is shaped something like an hourglass, with “Pt. 2” serving as a connector between the two halves. Tranquil guitar and sampled voices serve as an homage to Albert Marcoeur, a French art rocker known for sampling nursery rhymes, paints a pastoral picture. The track serves as a palette cleanser between the ethereal momentum of “Pt. 1” and the chaos of “Pt. 3.” It also puts a spotlight back on Ambarchi’s guitar, which is ostensibly what he is most famous for. In some ways “Pt. 2” is a synecdoche for Ambarchi himself. Few artists could assemble a group of musicians like that those found on Hubris at all, but Ambarchi lets everyone do their part, then fade into the background. It's the difference between hubris and vision. | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | November 12, 2016 | 7.5 | 51e1e66c-958b-4e11-865a-467a1c5cac3b | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Following the viral success of her Pharrell-approved hit “Alaska,” this young singer-songwriter searches for an original sound on her major label debut EP. | Following the viral success of her Pharrell-approved hit “Alaska,” this young singer-songwriter searches for an original sound on her major label debut EP. | Maggie Rogers: Now That the Light Is Fading | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22901-now-that-the-light-is-fading/ | Now That the Light Is Fading | Maggie Rogers’ “Alaska” was born with the kind of serendipitous discovery story entire TV series are commissioned to replicate. She was one of many students at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a school with enough largesse to commission Pharrell Williams for a masterclass. That half-hour listening session made it to YouTube in its entirety, but the highlight was obvious. Eighteen minutes in, when Rogers played an early demo of her song “Alaska,” a star was born: Rogers, in a casual sweater and jeans, eyes averted, wincing in that way one does when hearing their own voice; Pharrell, moved to tears, invoking Stevie Wonder and the Wu-Tang Clan in his praise. The video went viral on the musical enclaves of Reddit, always ready to laud anything that sounds acoustic or authentic, and thus followed everything virality brings: getting signed, a headlining North American tour, the interview circuit, and hundreds of thousands of fans from the get go.
Like most famous discovery stories, though, this one doesn’t quite start at the beginning. Though she’s since been fêted around as an entirely new voice, Rogers has four releases on Bandcamp dating back to 2012. Recorded in high school, they show great promise in a specific genre: banjo- and ukelele-driven folk indebted to Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. There are hints at Rogers’ current expanded direction on these early tracks, in the cirrus flicks of synths on “Drift” off 2014’s Blood Ballet, the cello-enhanced “Satellite,” or the entirety of The Response, a remix album of 2012’s The Echo that proves Rogers’ music is amenable, at least in theory, to dance. But for the most part the Bandcamp material provides thoughtful examples of a genre that’s simultaneously thriving and, unless your surname is Mumford, deeply, deeply unmarketable.
Rogers credits her new, synthier direction on “Alaska” and subsequent five-song EP Now That the Light Is Fading to a year of clubbing in Europe, but an equally apt explanation may involve facts of the marketplace. Pharrell said “Alaska” was like nothing he’d ever heard, but in 2017 it fits right in: a gently lilting beat that vaguely evokes tropicalia (or, for that matter, the Neptunes in their prime) along with a falsetto pre-chorus that vaguely evokes R&B. The result isn’t far off from Broods, or early Ellie Goulding, or, to go back to the last time folktronica blew everyone’s minds, early Beth Orton. Follow-up single “Dog Years,” dotted with pan flutes, comes across as the exact midpoint of Peter Gabriel, Lorde, and “Bleeding Love,” and while no one’s done that particular intersection lately, the industry’s certainly revived everything in the vicinity.
Perhaps this is why Now That the Light Is Fading feels transitional, as if Rogers is unsure how far from trad-folk she wants to stray. On one end of the spectrum is “Color Song,” which consists of bird chirps, Rogers’ multitracked choral vocals, and not much else. The track’s melody drifts up and down the scale like an old hymn or trad-Americana cut as the lyric lingers on certain evocative details (when she sings the word “creeping,” her vocals are tracked a split second off one another, letting the consonants crackle in the air), and nothing anywhere suggests Pharrell’s involvement, spiritual or otherwise. “On + Off” floats Rogers’ voice above a choppy, Flume-like backing track and insistent piano loop, and “Better” lets her sink amid a drone; both directions are promising, but in separate ways that don’t quite cohere. Rogers is a promising songwriter when unattended—“Alaska” in particular is full of understated heartbreak, sort of like a PG take on Tori Amos—but the poppier tracks here often dissolve into soft-rock nothingness.
A lot of this might resolve itself in time. Rogers is still very young at 22, after all, and she takes several game attempts at subtlety throughout the EP—the pan flute, the guitar line rippling through “On + Off” like wind chimes, the featherlight harmonies. She has a platform. She’s got ideas. But like all discovery stories, the real reward lies in what comes next. | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | February 16, 2017 | 6.5 | 51e32334-201b-4913-93ad-9710626a626b | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The new project from the head of XL Recordings features collaborations with Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Ghostface Killah’s son. | The new project from the head of XL Recordings features collaborations with Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Ghostface Killah’s son. | Everything Is Recorded: Everything Is Recorded by Richard Russell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-is-recorded-everything-is-recorded-by-richard-russell/ | Everything Is Recorded by Richard Russell | To best understand Richard Russell, watch him play “Please Forgive My Heart” in the studio with Bobby Womack. Outside of a few taps on his MPC, Russell’s almost not there, but as piano, bass, and drums move around the legendary soul survivor’s voice, his invisible touch provides the song’s underlying heartbeat. That unobtrusive quality helps explain how Russell has helmed XL Recordings into one of the lone record label success stories to be had in the 21st century, from signing a teenager named Adele to serving as the imprint that notoriously fussy artists such as Thom Yorke and Frank Ocean trust to press up their music.
While Russell put his own creative work on the backburner for decades, when he was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome in 2013, he decided to focus on making music again. That didn’t necessitate a move from the background towards the spotlight. For his latest project, Everything Is Recorded, Russell has surrounded himself with the XL Junior Varsity Team—meaning no Adele or Vampire Weekend, let alone Frank or Thom, but a few appearances from Sampha, Ibeyi, and Young Turks-signed Kamasi Washington. The bigger names that do appear on this album follow a similar attention-deflecting strategy to Russell’s, with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside near impossible to pinpoint without a credits list. The ultimate effect of all that ego sublimation is a somewhat scattered album with quietly stunning highs, if not much of a centering force.
Russell’s niftiest trick is take the premise that “everything is recorded” to heart, relying on his sampler to make voices from generations past duet with new artists in the present moment. But “Close but Not Quite” winds up being too on the nose. The song springs from a studio session where Russell paired Sampha with a snippet of Curtis Mayfield, finding a common ground not just in their heavenly, heart-breaking falsettos, but also their “gentle soul[s], in an era where a lot of soul artists were quite macho,” as Sampha put it in a New Yorker profile. The juxtaposition of string-laden early ’70s soul with 21st century machine rhythms is intriguing, but when both gentlemen address the theme of “speak[ing] the unspoken,” they end up undifferentiated, their messages redundant across the span of time.
Russell does better when he chops up a sample of Keith Hudson, whose haunting, brooding music in the ’70s and early ’80s earned him the nickname “The Dark Prince of Reggae,” for “Wet Looking Road.” The gloomy atmosphere and desolate vocal from Hudson provides an ink-black backdrop for British rapper Giggs. Similarly, when Russell utilizes the slink of Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing” for “Mountains of Gold,” the sparseness of the track allows space for Sampha, Ibeyi, and Ratking’s Wiki all to operate effectively around Ms. Jones.
The surprise sax solo from Washington that closes “Mountains of Gold” feels like an afterthought, though, tacked on to the end of the song. The same goes for “She Said,” which pairs Washington with recent Rising subject Obongjayar. It’s a more nimble showing from Obongjayar than the abrasive song on Everything Is Recorded’s 2017 EP wherein Obongjayar shrieked over a distorted din from the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. Yet once again, Washington’s bold playing is reduced to a non-descript sax solo, made to grapple with a flatulent digital bassline from Russell.
The slower that Russell moves, the better for allowing the disparate components of Everything Is Recorded to settle into something exquisite, as on the gorgeous “Bloodshot Red Eyes,” an R&B ballad adrift in outer space. Quivering electric keys and a simple clap, plus a smattering of synthetic strings, are all that newcomer (and son of Ghostface) Infinite needs to send the track soaring. His voice transubstantiates heartbreak into something approaching the beatific.
The album’s other standout is “Be My Friend,” which also foregrounds Infinite, his voice layered this time so as to become a choir. Russell brings in a sample of Dallas preacher TD Jakes talking about the illusion of solitude: “It is possible to be alone and not live alone/It is possible to feel alone and not work alone.” It’s a poignant insight, but the same sample crops up multiple times across the album, so that by the time it lands here, it sounds like a rare miscue from Russell—a heavy-handed move from someone who’s trained us to expect a light touch. | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | XL | February 21, 2018 | 7.2 | 51e9337f-efcc-48ef-95db-ceffa4d6b2a4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On the jazz trumpeter’s fifth album, Akinmusire and his extremely tight band are after your immediate emotional response. It’s music that seeks peace not just despite a world of unrest, but within it. | On the jazz trumpeter’s fifth album, Akinmusire and his extremely tight band are after your immediate emotional response. It’s music that seeks peace not just despite a world of unrest, but within it. | Ambrose Akinmusire: on the tender spot of every calloused moment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ambrose-akinmusire-on-the-tender-spot-of-every-calloused-moment/ | on the tender spot of every calloused moment | Ambrose Akinmusire’s fifth studio album opens underwater and drowning. Midway through “Tide of Hyacinth,” Akinmusire starts to clip the ends of phrases on his trumpet; the pulse speeds up behind Justin Brown’s tense drumming; Sam Harris’s piano grows into threatening waves; Harish Raghavan’s bass notes escape in small clusters like bubbles frantically rising to the surface. As the track runs out of time, the featured vocalist and percussionist Jesús Díaz enters, singing in the West African dialect Yoruba with a soothing tenor as if to beckon you towards a light.
A virtuosic trumpeter who’s also plenty decorated as a bandleader and a supporting player (he’s played trumpet for albums by Esperanza Spalding and Kendrick Lamar), Akinmusire goes great lengths to present his albums as visions that transcend instruments and improvisation. He chooses titles that read more like stray Shakespeare excerpts than names of songs or albums: The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint; “The Garden Waits for You to Match Her Wilderness”; “The Lingering Velocity of the Dead’s Ambitions”. He invites guest vocalists to take the mic on occasion, or even for an entire album. We can only imagine what he sees behind his eyelids as he closes them for the portrait on the album’s cover. Judging strictly by the sound of on the tender spot of every calloused moment, it must be a thorny but magnificent picture.
Akinmusire obsesses over the musical particulars as much as the presentation ones—even, for example, swapping in Díaz late in the process for “Tide of Hyacinth”’s original planned singer, Akinmusire’s own father. on the tender spot... seeks what Díaz achieves in that moment: peace not just despite a world of unrest, but within it—a light while submerged in the dark. The nimble, selfless interactions between the four main players here suggest that human connection is where to find it. Akinmusire, Harris, Brown, and Raghavan have now been playing together for more than a decade, and they embrace a new level of strength as a unit. On “Moon (the return amplifies the unity),” Akinmusire ends phrases by stammering on one note like a skipping record; Harris rolls over the same four-note pattern with accentuating chords in different places each time; Brown absolutely loses his shit on his drum set. “Roy,” on the other hand, finds them in complete agreement, solemnly harmonizing beneath Akinmusire’s golden vibrato for a slow, deferential salute to the late great trumpeter Roy Hargrove.
This gesture of meeting the listener halfway, of delivering a plainly beautiful moment for every one where they completely break free, reinforces the sense that Akinmusire and his band are after your immediate emotional response. Tonality, space, studio shenanigans—none of these things matter to them if the songs don’t also shed some blood or tears. It’s cerebral jazz music that doesn’t care about the synapses in your cerebral cortex as much as the air in your lungs. Harris, in particular, steps into the core of their sound with several gut-punching moments. As the band snaps together at the peak of “An Interlude (that get’ more intense),” his piano seeps and swirls like dark blue ink, into which Akinmusire dips the pointed quill of his scribbling solos.
It comes to a traffic-stopping conclusion with “hooded (read the names outloud),” which has no vocals, no bandmates, no trumpet even—just Akinmusire alone at a Rhodes keyboard, playing simple intervals. It’s a funeral procession. On past albums, Akinmusire has included tribute tracks, which spoke the names of Black victims of police murders out loud. This time, he says them with silence. It’s hard not to think back to the drowning sensation that opened the album. As his heart grows heavier, his Rhodes only gets lighter, twinkling as he walks his fingers further to the right of the keyboard; it sounds like a music box on its last rotation, plucking out its faint final notes. For maybe the first time, his melody leads the ears: As it reaches a high seventh, you know that the root is coming next to mark the album’s end. It lands, right on time, and it feels like a breath.
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 | Jazz | Blue Note | June 18, 2020 | 7.8 | 51fbe80e-8a4f-46b1-acd1-76de949515b6 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
While his diehard fans await his long-delayed Man on the Moon III*,* Kid Cudi opted instead to release a 90-minute, double-disc rock album. Unfiltered, unpolished, and uncomfortable, the album is a failure, and not even a noble one. | While his diehard fans await his long-delayed Man on the Moon III*,* Kid Cudi opted instead to release a 90-minute, double-disc rock album. Unfiltered, unpolished, and uncomfortable, the album is a failure, and not even a noble one. | Kid Cudi: Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21351-speedin-bullet-2-heaven/ | Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven | Is Kid Cudi serious? This is the first thing I asked myself listening to Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven, and it's not as snide a question as it sounds; it's genuinely hard to tell. While his diehard fans await his long-delayed Man on the Moon III*,* Cudi opted instead to release *this—*a 90-minute, double-disc rock album, unfiltered and unpolished even compared to his 2012 side-project WZRD. Cudi is not a very good singer or guitarist, and his artlessly blunt lyrics are even more exposed in this context. So what are we to make of this? It's tough to guess the motives of someone who commissions Mike Judge to wedge painful "Beavis and Butthead" skits in between songs about self-harm with nihilistic lines like "I’m feeling I’m a goner."
There is something morbidly compelling about the tenacity of this project: "Wedding Tux" plods along for two-and-a-half minutes on two chords and has a hook that goes, "everything, everyone sucks" until it almost grows mesmerizing. "Judgmental Cunt" sounds an awful lot like self-laceration ("look at you, dumb stoner little boy") with Cudi breaking his voice while screaming. On "Trauma," he offers this: "When I was eleven I saw my dad’s corpse." The discomfort level might be high enough to inspire rubbernecking from people who wouldn’t otherwise care about a new Cudi record.
But Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them. The album is a failure, and not even a noble one. Cudi insists on calling the album "alternative," and with the "Beavis and Butthead" narration, the shout-out to Cobain on "Man in the Night," and a flat drawl that curls into awkward Layne Staley or Scott Weiland impersonations, it’s clear his approach to making a "rock album" is even more dated than Lil Wayne’s, grounded in ideas and sounds that are now two decades old.
There are fleeting moments, here and there. On single "Confused!," he manages one of the album’s more memorable lines, repeating "hate the drugs but I love the numb." When he hits on a nice guitar tone or melody or lyric, the songs are so simple that they assume a semi-meditative quality. The title track is the best song here, with a nostalgic breakbeat and Cudi softly singing about manic depression: "If I crash, or when I land, no matter the case, I’m all smiles." It’s a simple but effective tone poem.
And sometimes the songs are so uncomfortably direct it feels wrong to be evaluating them at all: How do you judge the value of "Fuchsia Butterflies"' chorus "I’ll be happy getting shitfaced by myself?" It might be a confessional, but again Kid Cudi undercuts himself: If he is committed to this direction, and the album’s flaws are just the result of his limited voice and guitar skills, why include "The Nothing," a song that’s a riff on "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary"? Moments like this only reinforce the impression that the whole project is one long failed joke, a comedian bombing onstage trying to will it into performance art. So again: is he serious? Either way, Speedin' Bullet is a remarkable flop, and there is a certain amazement whenever something this self-indulgent and messy gets released on a major label. | 2016-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Republic | January 6, 2016 | 4 | 520240e1-cc89-47ea-a70f-2de685dca59d | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Field Music Play… pulls together covers of songs by Syd Barrett, Pet Shop Boys, Leonard Cohen, Roxy Music, the Beatles, and others. Musically and curatorially, it showcases the duo as pragmatists with an impossibly dry sense of humor. | Field Music Play… pulls together covers of songs by Syd Barrett, Pet Shop Boys, Leonard Cohen, Roxy Music, the Beatles, and others. Musically and curatorially, it showcases the duo as pragmatists with an impossibly dry sense of humor. | Field Music: Play... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17195-play/ | Play... | There's always been a Rosetta Stone quality to the pop song cover. Hearing a group's version of an established tune can reveal things about each via comparison, like setting a decoder ring to the proper coordinates between two acts. When I heard that Field Music were applying their prim British Invasion melodies and jazz-derived rhythms to a set of interpretations, I dialed in my hopes to the usual suspects: the Kinks, Sparks, something from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, perhaps, maybe an early Talking Heads cut, a take on Kraftwerk's "The Model", or XTC's "Making Plans for Nigel". I didn't imagine Syd Barrett's "Terrapin" or Leonard Cohen's covered-to-death "Suzanne", nor the Ringo-sung White Album cut "Don't Pass Me By". Expectations successfully subverted, the Field Music Play… compilation, which pulls together these and five other covers, manages to be more than worthwhile, while teaching two important lessons about the group's approach. Musically and curatorially, the duo are undeniable music pragmatists with an impossibly dry sense of humor.
The pragmatism extends beyond the compositions and to the reasons for even considering some of the cover choices. The duo is reluctant to call Play an album; the majority of these versions were done for other projects. The well-trod modern standard "Suzanne" and left-field choice "Terrapin" were done for special issues of Mojo Magazine. As for the latter, David Brewis told me via email that he was much more in favor of covering Barrett's "No Good Trying", but it had already been scooped up by J. Mascis. That would explain the approach they took to "Terrapin"-- a folksy dirge far outside of their wheelhouse-- shoehorning it into the group’s twangy take on George Harrison-styled classic rock. Their version of Roxy Music's "If There Is Something"-- originally recorded for a School of Language B-side-- is a more successful translation. They swap out the glam pioneers' bluesy swagger for hospital corners and modernist lines, but manage to retain the original's sense of self-aware oddness, while highlighting the similarities between Brewis' and Bryan Ferry's vocal styles (perhaps a result of their geographical affinity).
But even when the covers here are a matter of picking from the leftovers, Field Music manage to create original versions invested with their own arid humor. Two cuts, originally issued as a 7" for 2012's Record Store Day, are drawn from the Pet Shop Boys' classic Actually, complete with with a tongue-in-cheek title (actually, nearly) and re-appropriation of the original album's cover photo. The thematic connections shared by PSB and Field Music are a revelation in their own right, but it certainly helps that the Brewises nail their version of the ever-great "Rent". It's not just a matter of the groups' mutual perspective that links love with financial necessity, either: "I ended up singing it as half gay love story and half love/hate open letter to Field Music itself," Brewis told me. "You pay my rent, but only just."
The highlight from Play is easily the duo's version of the Beatles' anti-classic "Don't Pass Me By", which would seem like an ironic jab at the British pop canon were it not a lemon-into-lemonade scenario in which they took a funny and quite inventive approach to the Fab Four's catalog. Also selected from the already picked-over for a Mojo compilation, the Brewises took the Residents' approach to the tune, mixing in elements from throughout the Beatles' discography. On the chorus, they lapse into "Don't Let Me Down", in a hilariously literal gambit. Listen closely (it's worth it), and you'll also hear bits of "Blackbird", "A Day in the Life", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "Yer Blues". Here lies the lesson of Play, and one of the core truths of Field Music's rewarding discography: There is dark humor and interesting angles-- even joy-- to be found in basic realities and mundane commitments. | 2012-10-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | October 2, 2012 | 6.8 | 52079669-9728-4041-8f6f-63dae7f2cfc5 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
This 3xLP box set surveys the influential New York group’s long career, reinforcing their post-punk bona fides and tracing their evolution over the course of four decades. | This 3xLP box set surveys the influential New York group’s long career, reinforcing their post-punk bona fides and tracing their evolution over the course of four decades. | Bush Tetras: Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-bush-tetras-rhythm-and-paranoia-the-best-of-bush-tetras/ | Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras | Bush Tetras never wanted to be pigeonholed as a no wave band. Though guitarist Pat Place co-founded the group after leaving no-wave luminaries the Contortions in 1979, bringing roadie Laura Kennedy as Bush Tetras’ original bassist, they outlasted the short-lived but deeply influential NYC underground movement, evolving through multiple eras. In a 2019 interview, late drummer Dimitri Papadopoulos (better known as Dee Pop) explained that they consider themselves to be “part of the lineage of great bands that evolved from the CBGB’s scene” such as the Ramones, Television, or Patti Smith. Across 29 songs (plus two digital-only bonus tracks), this chronologically organized 3xLP box set compiles highlights from each of Bush Tetras’ periods of recorded output—the early 1980s, late 1990s, and late 2010s—revealing just how vital they remained in each decade.
While Bush Tetras can and should be considered a quintessential New York band, Dee Pop is the only member who grew up in Queens. Place moved to the city from the suburbs of Chicago with aspirations of becoming a visual artist, joining the Contortions after playing guitar for only three weeks. Kennedy arrived in NYC from Detroit, and singer Cynthia Sley from Cleveland, both drawing on inspirations from Motown and James Brown. Sley recalled Bush Tetras hanging out in the Harlem hip-hop scene with rapper Fab 5 Freddy, who teamed up with Blondie for the Christmas-themed remix of their song “Rapture.” Thanks to these diverse influences, they arrived at a sound fusing no wave discordance with relentlessly funky post-punk and mutant disco, zipped up as tight as a leather jacket.
Bush Tetras’ debut single, “Too Many Creeps,” has been their calling card since it hit the streets in 1980. Following Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1 as the second release from tastemaking NYC label 99 Records, this timeless classic laid out the quartet’s approach with a rumbling bassline and tough-as-nails attitude. Sley has described the song as an “anti-anthem” about how they were forced to “dodge the dangerous creeps who were both hitting on us or hassling us about our androgynous looks.” She returned to this lyrical theme on the dubby “Das Ah Riot,” released the next year on a 7" from UK label Fetish, delivering a thinly veiled threat: “When the heat pick up the street/You’re gonna hope we never meet.” Over a groove that moves like a freaky trip to “Funkytown,” her empowering words point to a place beyond frustration on “Stand Up and Fight,” as Sley urges listeners to “Come on and take control/Lose your body/Lose your soul.”
Even when they set their sights on the dancefloor, Bush Tetras offered ultimatums. “You Can’t Be Funky,” another signature song from the band’s 1981 Rituals EP, cuts aspiring suitors to the core: “Your eyes are shallow/And your glance is cold/You can’t be funky if you haven’t got a soul!” This 12", released by Stiff Records and produced by the Clash’s drummer Topper Headon, marked a striking divergence from Bush Tetras’ earliest material as they blurred the line between no wave and new wave. Sley’s quivering vocals on the cowbell-clopping “Cowboys in Africa” are reminiscent of Jello Biafra, while the title track, “Rituals,” drifts into a spookier psychedelic sound, hinting at the music Dee Pop would make with the Gun Club several years later.
As they moved into the ’90s, Bush Tetras squabbled over creative directions. Prior to his time playing with free-jazz bassist William Parker and saxophonist Andy Haas, Dee Pop’s inclinations had already shifted from punk to avant-garde, while Place remained interested in a different alternative. “How are we going to meld Soundgarden with Albert Ayler?” he wondered. They didn’t end up sounding much like either. “Page 18,” from a 7" produced by Henry Rollins, is supercharged with screams hair-raising enough to make Lydia Lunch shake in her boots. “Mr. Lovesong,” featuring the legendary Darlene Love, is an unlikely collision of girl-group pop and groovy death rock. This era culminates with “You Don’t Know Me,” the squealing standout of Bush Tetras’ second album, Happy. Sounding just as pissed off as anything from the previous decade, Sley sarcastically comments on a veteran underground artist’s place in the pantheon: “I’m nailed/Hailed/Impaled/Then forgotten.”
In a 2015 interview, Sley remarked how Bush Tetras’ snarling exterior and determination to speak their minds set them apart from many of their peers: “You see the other bands with women up front, like the Go-Go’s and the Bangles, and we were totally alien compared to them.” On their best songs from recent years, such as 2018’s “Red Heavy,” Bush Tetras still sound like nobody else. New bassist Val Opielski lays down a mesmerizing, slow-moving groove as the founding trio thrashes and bashes like it’s done for the past four decades.
Sadly, Dee Pop passed away just one month before the box set’s release, making it as much a monument to his life as to the band’s legacy. Until this collection, keeping track of Bush Tetras recordings spread across labels, continents, and decades has felt like a daunting task. Rhythm and Paranoia provides a definitive overview of their trajectory, integrating influences from each era while balancing on the twin pillars of tough and funky. They might never become household names, but Bush Tetras’ place in the New York lineage has been cemented.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | November 13, 2021 | 8.4 | 520a1fdd-d9b9-420c-a29d-7aa53f22ffa8 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have become a cause célèbre as emo reemerges as a viable genre of independent rock rather than a pejorative adjective. The Connecticut collective's ambitious debut LP is powered by an almost frightening will to live. | The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have become a cause célèbre as emo reemerges as a viable genre of independent rock rather than a pejorative adjective. The Connecticut collective's ambitious debut LP is powered by an almost frightening will to live. | The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Whenever, If Ever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18423-the-world-is-a-beautiful-place-i-am-no-longer-afra-whenever-if-ever/ | Whenever, If Ever | By the time you've finished reading the name "The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die," you've likely made two assumptions about this band and both are warranted-- yes, they identify as "emo" and yes, they have little to no use for restraint and understatement. Though on a much, much smaller scale, TWIABP resemble Arcade Fire prior to Funeral, having made their name on a promising EP and unpredictable, cathartic live performances that feature nearly a dozen people making music at the same time. But the greater similarity lies in Whenever, If Ever being a rare debut that’s powered by an almost frightening will to live, a desperation that strongly suggests the people involved have no other option to deal with what's inside of them-- when Thomas Diaz screams “let's hope that this works out/ this has got to work out!" during the frantic conclusion of “Fightboat”, you realize “this” means everything.
TWIABP have already become a bit of a cause célèbre as emo reemerges as a viable, visible genre of independent rock rather than just a pejorative adjective. Understandable, even if there wasn’t anything like them the first time around-- for one thing, they’re from Connecticut and roll about 10 deep, switching vocalists on the fly and utilizing strings and horns to create textures that are more based in post-rock or mid-00s indie rock. And at the risk of revisionist history, I’m just going to put this out there: Cap’n Jazz, Jazz June, and all that other jazz was never this melodic, never this instrumentally tight, and never this well-produced. But if that sound meant everything to you at some point or if you’ve been waiting for a comeback for the sole purpose of airing out old grievances, Whenever, If Ever suits your needs.
They have a weakness for the emo trope of singing being the truest form of self-expression, an act even purer if you don’t have any kind of studied vocal capability-- "we sang songs/ but we never learned your words or melodies", "and when our voices fail us/ we will find new ways to sing," things like that. And on first proper track “Heartbeat in the Brain”, TWIABP sounds like the kind of band where you get the lead vocals simply by wanting it more-- there’s the adenoidal guy, the screaming guy, someone named "Shitty Greg" who might not be either of them, and they sometimes sing in tandem, initially exaggerating their hiccuping modulations to a degree that feels like trolling; you’ll know pretty quickly if you’re built for this stuff if “Kinsella” is your safe word. There are the musical cues as well-- searching arpeggios over palm-muted clean chords, spastic drum fills, nasal Casio synth leads. Hell, “Fightboat” might even cause squabbling amongst the old heads as its introductory horn line recalls the one from American Football’s “The Summer Ends”, which some people still complain about to this day.
It takes a little while for Whenever, If Ever to get going, but once it does, TWIABP establish they are not an emo revival act, but more of a spiritual descendent of Danielson Famile or an early 00s Saddle Creek band, a community whose albums serve as a time capsule, a documentation of their lives. It’s unclear exactly when that click happens, but it’s definitely during “Picture of a Tree That Doesn't Look Okay”. Perhaps it’s the part where Greg Horbal asks over desiccated, detuned guitars, “Do you think the landlord’s pissed?/ We left a car parked on the lawn again”-- it’s an inside joke that doubles as a conspiratorial invitation, indicating that you’re welcome to join in and, hell, maybe you were there the whole time (the car ends up on the lawn again by the very next song). Or it could be the point where Whenever, If Ever starts to incorporate clever segues to establish a chronology and continuity to the story-- a delayed guitar resembles a bong rip as “Picture” drifts into “You Will Never Go to Space” and the final line of that song ("Did we dream when we were skeletons/ or did we just wish for our skin?") becomes foreshadowing for “The Layers of Skin We Drag Around”. Or, maybe it’s after the pace picks up and TWIABP shake off the slowcore rust, a drum roll crescendo leading into a rousing call and response coda where the hooks work out their kinks and become singalongs.
Either way, once “Picture” passes, TWIABP already have accrued the confidence and wisdom to do things they seemed incapable of only minutes prior. “Ultimate Steve” distills the band’s post-rock and emo extremes into concentrate, an all-together-now, 30-second shoutalong bookended by a gorgeous build and fade. During the revolutionary final third, the stakes and consequences of this life pursuit start to push back on TWIABP. “Gig Life” bears the record’s most instantly memorable melody and lyrics, an acoustic power ballad that would’ve been intolerable if performed with the same abandon from earlier. Diaz sings, “You ran away/ You were afraid to make mistakes/ but that's the biggest one you made." It’s unclear to whom it’s pointed (a former bandmate? A high school friend? An ex?) or where "somewhere to the west, I suppose" even entails, it could be New York City or the next town over for all we know. But “Gig Life” establishes that TWIABP understand the sacrifices and the rewards of their chosen gig life and are saddened at losing this person, that it might be a personal failure on their behalf. Still, being stuck in West Virginia with the same old Rival Schools albums and food from the nearest Sheetz are their occupational hazards; those of your “gig” might entail water cooler talk and the occasional bagel, but it's still a gig. Are you satisfied?
“Low Light Assembly” follows as a solemn, final hymn ("the parking lot where we lay is more than home now") before the stunning closer “Getting Sodas." A brooding, minor key bassline gives you pause to realize just how far TWIABP have come in barely a half hour-- they’ve established a community, this one’s for an audience. And it’s big room stuff: the guitars peal and ring rather than hang and drone, the low end is heavier and reverbed, the screaming sounds aimed rather than scattershot. And it closes on a chorale that the band created itself to express: "The world is a beautiful place/ but we have to make it that way... and if you're afraid to die/ Then so am I."
Yeah, it sounds like Arcade Fire and it sounds like Bright Eyes too, but the intent of those words is more crucial. It reminds me of Win Butler promising to build tunnels as the world collapses around him and his lover, Conor Oberst demanding the tape roll so that he and his friends can document their love for each other. It’s a spirit available to everyone and possessed by no one, yet so few bands choose to pursue it even as those that do tend to be rewarded-- it’s a realization that you can be ambitious and striving with kindness, pushing against a palpable resistance without turning existence into an "us vs. them" zero sum game. Whenever, If Ever fights against fears, societal expectations, preconceptions, and the metaphysical for the greater good of society, and I mean, for crying out loud, the cover just says jump right in and do it. And sure, TWIABP make mistakes on Whenever, If Ever because they’re scared of not doing so, but it’s flawed in a way that can make a listener feel like it’s theirs, something that might inspire them to make a more perfect version of it. Whenever, If Ever probably won't ever be Funeral or Lifted or Ships or Diary on a mass level, but you know TWIABP feel like it’s their best shot at it and don’t care whether a dozen or several thousand people end up feeling the same. | 2013-08-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-08-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Top Shelf | August 21, 2013 | 7.8 | 520aeda2-43b6-48c6-b471-1ae8a2b4ad55 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The second entry in the band’s Vivaldi-inspired quartet of EPs gives a perfunctory nod to the concept before resuming Weezer-by-numbers. | The second entry in the band’s Vivaldi-inspired quartet of EPs gives a perfunctory nod to the concept before resuming Weezer-by-numbers. | Weezer: SZNZ: Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weezer-sznz-summer/ | SZNZ: Summer | At this point in their career, Weezer are the musical equivalent of The Simpsons. Hacky, pandering, and decades past their best work, they relentlessly strive to remain relevant with feeble attempts at becoming a meme. Anything that succeeds feels like an accident, and engaging with it critically is rarely worth the effort. Thirty years on from their first demo tape, the Californian quartet led by the perpetually dorky Rivers Cuomo have released the second entry in a series of EPs based on Vivaldi’s violin concertos, The Four Seasons. The concept tastes stale even before you hear the songs, which Cuomo has described as “21st-century ’90s.” Overproduced to the point of sounding completely generic, SZNZ: Summer is yassified butt-rock with cringe-inducing lyrics that aren’t half as clever as they think they are.
As a teenager, Weezer’s mix of nerdy self-deprecation, sexual frustration, and ripping guitar solos spoke to me. Then I grew up a little bit and realized “Across the Sea” is disgusting. Cuomo has called Pinkerton “a hideous record,” and has been attempting some kind of squeaky clean return to form since 2001’s Green Album. There are decent songs sprinkled through the last 20 years of their discography, but it’s mostly been one embarrassing joke or half-baked concept after another. Their glossily produced gimmicks now come across like an unholy combination of OK Go and Oliver Tree.
Repeating the trick of “Opening Night” from SZNZ: Spring, “Lawn Chair” begins the second EP with violins interpolating a melody from Vivaldi. Many people have compared his early 18th-century compositions to heavy metal, thanks to the way their dramatic chords evoke the images of a “violent storm” or “stinging winds” in the accompanying sonnets. This makes sense as a source of inspiration for Cuomo, who once styled himself like a member of Stryper, but an album-length exploration of orchestral metal would have been much more interesting. Instead, they give us a perfunctory nod to the concept before resuming Weezer-by-numbers.
The beefy riffs of “Records” travel the well-trod path of “Hash Pipe,” “Dope Nose,” and a million other variations on a tired formula. Vinyl scratches add a literal interpretation of the song’s lyrics, which also include lazily rhymed references to Lana, Rihanna, and Nirvana. The choruses about a record spinning “round and round” are almost as incessantly annoying as Blue October’s “Jump Rope.” Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, we get “Blue Like Jazz,” as Cuomo begs someone to teach him how to be “cool like that” with a pained falsetto and corny shredding that sounds like Evanescence.
The band has described SZNZ: Summer as an “angrier, indignant scorcher of an EP” compared to the “light-hearted tone” of SZNZ: Spring. This is most obvious on “What’s the Good of Being Good,” a Stanley Ipkiss-style incel anthem about nice guys finishing last with “no loving wife to smile at me/No daughter to dote on with pride.” Sadly, Cuomo seems like he hasn’t learned anything in the 26 years since he sang about a woman who should be attracted to him even if she’s not interested in men. If Weezer ever wants to evolve, they should start by reflecting on why they still write songs like whiny teenage boys. | 2022-06-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crush / Atlantic | June 30, 2022 | 4.2 | 520eec34-2481-407b-acc2-e9e519ed0ef4 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
A new boxed set documents Iggy Pop’s formative years working alongside David Bowie in Berlin, the moment Pop left the sound of the Stooges behind and came into his own as a lone icon. | A new boxed set documents Iggy Pop’s formative years working alongside David Bowie in Berlin, the moment Pop left the sound of the Stooges behind and came into his own as a lone icon. | Iggy Pop: The Bowie Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iggy-pop-the-bowie-years/ | The Bowie Years | In the mid-1960s, after years of listening to the British Invasion, a teenage Iggy Pop got sick of rock’n’roll. He had unearthed the blues originators of popular bands like the Beatles and the Kinks, and started listening to Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and John Lee Hooker instead. In these groundbreaking artists he heard a vitality and backbone that hadn’t translated to their diluted white mimics. At age 19, in 1966, Pop—then known as Jim Osterberg, Jr.—left his native Michigan for Chicago and arrived at the West Side doorstep of blues drummer Sam Lay, hoping to be taken under his wing.
Lay let Pop shadow him, and eventually Pop started sitting in on gigs. He slept on Lay’s floor and absorbed the music around him. “I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was ridiculous for me to make a studious copy of it,” he said decades later in an interview for Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. “I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs...So that’s what I did.” He called his high school friend Ron Asheton to come take him back to Detroit, and with Ron’s brother Scott Asheton and their friend Dave Alexander, they rounded up the Stooges.
Across three studio albums, the Stooges channeled their violent white ennui into an abject, unraveled rendition of the blues Pop had studied so fervently. Where British Invasion bands moved in friendly lockstep, the Stooges played with an almost confrontational looseness, as if at any moment they could quit their instruments and go at each other’s throats. As the band’s frontman, Pop earned a reputation for his outrageous stage presence. Offstage, Jim Osterberg was small and shy. In performance, as Iggy Pop, he swallowed up the room with his physical contortions, his drag getups, and his deranged, wounded howl.
The band’s inflammatory shows caught the attention of musicians like David Bowie, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and the future Ramones, who latched onto the wildness and self-degradation of Pop’s act. By 1974, five years after releasing their debut LP, the Stooges had imploded. They played a final show at Detroit’s Michigan Palace, where Pop viciously taunted his audience and his audience threw beer bottles onstage.
Deep into several varieties of hard drugs, Pop spent the next two years adrift in Los Angeles, getting arrested for everything from unpaid parking tickets to wearing full drag in public at a time when “female impersonation” was still a bookable offense. The LAPD got sick of him, and pressured him into a stay at the city’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he worked to kick his addictions. He reconciled with Bowie, who had disavowed their friendship amid the mess of latter-day Stooges, and the two agreed to collaborate. Pop tagged along on Bowie’s Station to Station tour in 1976, and then the two relocated to Berlin, where they’d produce some of the most singular work of their respective careers. During this fertile period, Bowie recorded the legendary streak of albums Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger. Pop, with Bowie serving as co-writer and co-producer, issued The Idiot and Lust for Life, both now compiled on the 7-disc boxed set Iggy Pop: The Bowie Years.
The Idiot, Pop’s solo debut, decisively shut the gates on his time with the Stooges. Where once he was infernal and freewheeling, he now became cool and restrained by Bowie’s careful, calculated producer’s hand. He still sang in a tone of abjection, still retained his sense of being a debased and decrepit subject, but where he once showed a grimace he now wore a smirk. His Cold War surroundings provoked icy, glib reflections; taking cues from Kraftwerk over in Düsseldorf, Bowie and Pop adopted cool detachment as a primary artistic mode.
Predictably, The Idiot enraged those who championed the Stooges for their unhindered squalls; the legendary music critic Lester Bangs called it “phony bullshit.” And it’s easy to see how a voice beloved for its fire would turn fans cold after dimming its spark. But by reining in Pop, Bowie and his effete European sensibilities drew out a new range of nuance in the singer. The Idiot may lack fury, but it compensates with sardonic humor and perfectly tuned melodrama—both tools that would become wildly popular across all artistic media in the 1980s.
Against clipped percussion, whining guitars, and thin synthesizer tones, Pop’s voice turns barbed and sour on The Idiot. The closest he comes to unfiltered emotion is “Dum Dum Boys,” an elegy of sorts for the Stooges, and even there his keening is ringed with a sneer. Mostly, he sounds distant; the sleazy, hilarious “Nightclubbing” is less an ode to Berlin’s vibrant nightlife than it is a monument to alienation—the numbness of being among people in their moments of joy and sharing none of it. Pop’s circular lyrics reveal the song’s emptiness: “We see people/Brand new people/They’re something to see.”
Also released in 1977, The Idiot’s follow-up Lust for Life breathes some punk grit back into Pop’s performance. Its title track, driven by Hunt Sales’ animated and playful live drumming, could be a marginally tidied-up Stooges song; rather than sounding dwarfed by the instrumentation surrounding it, Pop’s voice resumes its fevered snarl at the front of the mix. He sounds alert, embodied, no longer a Bowie-animated cadaver but an enlivening force in his own right.
Pop’s performance shocks itself awake on Lust for Life, but the album’s most enduring track clings to alienation as its principal subject. “The Passenger” makes a saga of passivity. Written alternately in the first and third person, it watches a man riding a car, or a train, or a bus, seeing a city slip past his window, feeling the seal around himself. He is not of the city, just in it, gliding through. The city has “ripped backsides,” a vaguely homoerotic anthropomorphization; the passenger, who both is and isn’t Pop, stays “under glass,” sees “the bright and hollow sky,” as if for all he devours with his hungry eyes there were nothing of substance inside it. Four guitar chords, briskly strummed and punctuated by rests, roll onward, never budging from a single progression. There’s no chorus, save for a wordless repeat of the verse melody with Bowie chiming in on backing vocals. Pop moves but someone else is driving. “All of it was made for you and me,” he asserts towards the end, as his voice breaks composure, and threatens to “take a ride and see what’s mine.” So he arrives at a paradox: He’s an inert body rolling through space, and also the rightful owner of all he sees. He does nothing but owns everything, the whole empty world and all the nothing inside of it.
More than his chirpier singles from the era—the boisterous “Lust for Life,” the Orientalist fantasy “China Girl” (written about an unrequited affection for a Vietnamese woman, and later done better by Bowie alone)—“The Passenger” intoxicates with its refusal to yield what is hidden. It is an emblematic high point of Pop’s career, an example of how his quiet perception held as much power as his wildness. With the Stooges, Pop screamed across the space that separated him from other people, desperate to hear something in return besides his echo. With the albums he made with Bowie, he scrutinized the space itself.
In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. These live offerings, whose recording quality varies, show Pop and his band playfully mussing up The Idiot’s slick tracks, but do little to lend them dimension. Mostly, they vivisect the musician at a moment of transition, performing both Stooges and solo tracks, leaving the sound of his band behind and coming into his own as a lone icon.
Working with Pop allowed Bowie to get darker in his songwriting and production than he dared in his solo work; working with Bowie allowed Pop to focus his flailing instincts into refined, careful songcraft. For two albums, they served as each other’s perfect foils, and their work together would inflect music made on both sides of the Atlantic, from Joy Division and Depeche Mode to Grace Jones and Nine Inch Nails. Their stoic cynicism presaged the austerity measures of the ’80s and their continuing ramifications; amid the dregs of capitalism, these lonely melodies and their battered delivery keep resonating. “Can you hear me at all?” Pop asks on The Idiot’s “Sister Midnight.” The answer is “no,” and he keeps singing.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 6, 2020 | 8.6 | 52163598-9ab1-4f8f-a451-344abc15e121 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Being Lou Reed in 1972 was a raw deal: two years after walking away from one of the greatest and ... | Being Lou Reed in 1972 was a raw deal: two years after walking away from one of the greatest and ... | Lou Reed: Transformer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6731-transformer/ | Transformer | Being Lou Reed in 1972 was a raw deal: two years after walking away from one of the greatest and most influential bands in rock history, he found himself a penniless, strung-out wreck, with a career suddenly and seriously on the wane. To make matters worse, his self-titled solo debut, released earlier that year, was a monumental flop, a hastily thrown together collection of second rate re-recordings of Velvet Underground outtakes that lacked the intensity and focus of his earlier music. Reed was at a crossroads, unsure of which direction to take his newfound independence.
At the same time, a new trend was emerging across the pond. Glam rock began to flower in 1971, and by the following year had swept up countless British kids, turning them from restless, discontended youths to consummate, androgynous hipsters decked out in platforms, sequins and imposing hair. It was the first mainstream rock movement to openly acknowledge the Velvets' influence, and in Marc Bolan, Ian Hunter and Bryan Ferry, Reed began to see his protégés: the coarse, primal rock 'n' roll he pioneered had found its audience.
One of his progeny, a young David Bowie, was hot off the success of his chart-topping The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and was perhaps the most vociferous in his love of the Velvets and the incalculable influence they'd had on his music. When given the chance, Bowie and guitarist Mick Ronson offered to produce Reed's solo follow-up: what followed was undeniably one of both glam rock's and Reed's finest moments, one that gave him a left-field radio hit and a blueprint for much of his solo work to follow.
Thirty years on, Transformer still sounds startlingly fresh, free from many of the clichés that taint other similarly minded records of the period. It also works as an interesting diversion from most of VU's work: where they clearly had a full-band aesthetic, and often leaned toward the avant-garde, Transformer took the strong pop undercurrent that ran throughout their records and indulged. It's still fascinating to hear Reed outside the messy underproduction of the Velvets, yet even with Bowie and Ronson broadening the arrangements, Transformer feels remarkably natural. Their production work was so loaded that, were it not for the incredibly focused songs beneath, it might have been overbearing. But with a solid base, the ornate arrangements help bring these songs to life, lending Reed's music a broader palette. Lou himself, by contrast, sounds as intimate as ever on the record's more sedate tracks, crooning in a sensitive lilt that maintains his blissful, effortless cool.
Transformer kicks off with the aptly titled "Vicious", a stiff, snot-nosed Godzilla of a rock song, decked out in leather and eye shadow, and drenched in the kind of punchy power chords intimately familiar to anyone owning VU's odds-and-sods compilations. Its gleefully tongue-in-cheek lyrics are among the album's highlights, with Reed's impetuous condescension beating down his subject's ego: "When I see you walking down the street/ I step on your hands and I mangle your feet/ You're not the kind of person that I even want to meet."
Elsewhere, "Perfect Day" earns the distinction of being among the least characteristic songs Reed ever wrote; while its power ballad production and melody are enjoyable on their own terms, the song feels trapped under his dry vocal delivery, and falls somewhat flat as a result. "Satellite of Love" is still the bizarrely affecting centerpiece, serving as a poignant reminder of Reed's underrated gift for melody, which often eclipsed the signature, visceral abrasiveness he's more often recognized for. And of course, there's "Walk on the Wild Side", the classic tale of NYC gender-bending that garnered Reed the only real commercial airplay of his career.
This new edition adds acoustic demos of "Hangin' Round" and "Perfect Day", the latter notable for a newfound emotional push in its minimalism. The remastering is nicely executed, clarifying the sound without bastardizing the occasionally dated production. This, along with the incredibly thorough liner notes and beautiful packaging make the reissue worthwhile for those who already own the record, and a must for first-timers just delving into Reed's solo work. | 2003-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | March 11, 2003 | 8.4 | 521b44f3-a36c-4aaa-a2cc-b231fe839774 | Pitchfork | null |
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For her debut album, now reissued on vinyl by Ninja Tune, Abra draws on the cynicism of darkwave and its brooding hues, while making room for brighter beats, quicker tempos, and lyrical vulnerability. | For her debut album, now reissued on vinyl by Ninja Tune, Abra draws on the cynicism of darkwave and its brooding hues, while making room for brighter beats, quicker tempos, and lyrical vulnerability. | Abra: Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/abra-rose/ | Rose | As the angst and disillusionment of punk’s advent exploded towards the end of the 1970s, its vanguard began looking elsewhere for inspiration. Post-punk drew on the cadences of electronica, glam rock, reggae, and even pop—an era just as nebulous and splintered as its predecessor. Abra, the self-styled “Darkwave Duchess” of Atlanta, Ga.’s Awful Records collective, derives her secondary moniker from one of post-punk’s offshoot movements—and some of her sound, too. For her 2015 debut album Rose, recently reissued on vinyl via Ninja Tune, she embraces the cynicism of darkwave and its brooding hues, while making room for brighter beats and quicker tempos.
From the melancholy, synth-heavy opener “Feel” through to the heart-on-sleeve vulnerability and upbeat house syncopation of “No Chill,” the first eight tracks of Rose are a triumph of good sequencing. Abra is the album’s sole producer, and she experiments deftly with vocal sampling and effects, distilling electronic, pop, and R&B sensibilities into varied but equally compelling beats. The lyrical content on Rose veers between earnest and despairing, but it’s always honest. On the standout track “Roses,” a metaphor-heavy composition about a complex love affair, the nihilist thread that runs along the album’s seams is most apparent: “Everything dies and everything changes.”
“Pride” and “Atoms” best capture the essence of dark 1980s synthpop, while “$hot” recalls “My Superman,” a cut from Santigold’s genre-melding debut album that in turn interpolates “Red Light” by post-punk icons Siouxsie and the Banshees. The homage is never ham-handed, but while “$hot” adds an element of interest to the moody atmosphere that Rose otherwise creates, a somber energy is hard to abide for long. On an album that runs for just shy of an hour, “$hot” also marks the point at which Rose starts losing steam, burying a colorless guest verse from Stalin Majesty after four of nearly seven allotted minutes.
The unvarnished, lo-fi qualities of Abra’s music are often its distinguishing features; some of her best known work was recorded in a bedroom closet using basic equipment. But on Rose, they are occasionally a distraction, usually where the vocal performance is concerned. Abra knows how to use her voice well; on “U Kno,” she serves as both lead and background vocalist, without over-reliance on corrective effects. Yet, especially for the ad-libs peppered across the album, she uses the thinnest part of her range for what ultimately comes across as discordant singing. (That this technique resurfaces on Princess, her follow up EP from 2016, is confirmation of a curious stylistic decision rather than something to improve upon.) It seems like a shame that Rose closers “Human” and “Game,” two sparse piano-led versions of “Feel” and “No Chill” respectively, wind up highlighting the scattered vocal quality and inflate the album’s running time unnecessarily.
Nonetheless, Rose isn’t entirely undone in the final quarter. It’s a strong debut that lets listeners into Abra’s universe while she retains the intrigue surrounding her persona (she chooses to keep her real name and age secret). Instead, she bets that her lyrical vulnerability and the evident autonomy over her creative domain will keep listeners coming back, and they do. | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ninja Tune | October 17, 2017 | 6.6 | 521eab46-30d0-4936-9237-d8c0a72ea06b | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | |
The 14-piece ensemble Tredici Bacci pays loving and exacting tribute to the lush spaghetti western scores of Ennio Morricone without getting musty or dull: This is reverent, goofy, and fun music. | The 14-piece ensemble Tredici Bacci pays loving and exacting tribute to the lush spaghetti western scores of Ennio Morricone without getting musty or dull: This is reverent, goofy, and fun music. | Tredici Bacci: Amore Per Tutti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22652-amore-per-tutti/ | Amore Per Tutti | Tredici Bacci bandleader Simon Hanes really loves the work of Italian film composer Ennio Morricone. Hanes’ love isn't subtle. Even if he didn't discuss Morricone so much in the press, the Morricone influence literally screams out at you from the music on Tredici Bacci’s debut full-length, Amore Per Tutti. Deriving its title from Fellini’s Nino Rota-scored classic Juliet of the Spirits, Amore Per Tutti is nothing if not defined by Hanes’ college-age immersion into 1950s and ’60s Italian cinema as his attraction to Morricone grew into an obsession.
It’s always a risky proposition when an artist references a specific influence with such laser focus. Listeners who lack the artist’s passion for the source material are likely to shrug, while fellow aficionados are bound to nitpick the music as not authentic enough on the one hand or too authentic on the other. Likeminded acts such as Antibalas, Debo Band, and Secret Chiefs 3 face a similar conundrum—and even inspire culture-vulture debates—with their respective modernizations of Afrobeat, Ethiopian, and Persian forms.
To his credit, even as Hanes pilots the 14-piece Tredici Bacci through narrow stylistic straits, his enthusiasm burns through in the band’s exuberance. He also injects the music with a persistent sense of levity that the band sustains even during the album’s most soaring moments. Additionally, Hanes wrote these tunes as an attempt to extract the poppiest aspects of Morricone’s scores, which gives Amore Per Tutti a concise feel in spite of its grand orchestral sweep.
On album opener “Columbo,” a grainy electric guitar figure blends seamlessly with horns that echo and harmonize against the same root notes while also heralding a grand arrival—the type of thing you might hear in an old Hollywood epic to invoke a sense of ancient Roman glory. Those horns do announce a grand arrival, but it comes in the form of a snakelike central hook with heavy traces of Greek/Turkish modality. The band maneuvers through such sequences with an impeccable agility that's easy to miss behind the music's melodramatic exterior.
Meanwhile, the album doesn’t attempt to recreate the musty ambience of old film. Instead of making you feel like an archivist poring over film footage and academic texts written by grad students, the music's crisp production feels very much anchored in the moment, which only accentuates the music’s springy good-time bounce, and very nearly passes Morricone off as party music. (It would have to be a certain type of party, of course, but one imagines Hanes wants us to crank the music up and have fun rather than sit there namedropping cinematic references for sport.)
On “Avante,” for instance, the band cranks-up the melodrama, as playful operatic vocals accompany a guitar line and galloping rhythm that are obviously fashioned in “spaghetti western” style. It’s funny, even goofy; in fact, it's hard to listen to a song like “Avante” without breaking into laughter, as you picture clip-clopping horses and the strangely distorted Italian conception of the American west. Hanes probably wouldn't have it any other way. | 2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | NNA Tapes | December 2, 2016 | 7 | 522d6029-72c1-4937-b8b4-0cd484cd773c | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
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