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The South Florida rapper internalizes his skeptical gaze, yielding music that’s more deliberately self-reflective, with few ragers or bangers. | The South Florida rapper internalizes his skeptical gaze, yielding music that’s more deliberately self-reflective, with few ragers or bangers. | Denzel Curry: Melt My Eyez See Your Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/denzel-curry-melt-my-eyez-see-your-future/ | Melt My Eyez See Your Future | Denzel Curry likes to power up. His delivery—half war cry, half panic attack—tends to intensify over the course of a verse, his flows gaining speed, his voice hardening like a hand becoming a fist. That aggressive style, and the frenetic, bass-boosted beats that accompanied it, helped define the South Florida scene that birthed SoundCloud rap, but Curry’s most memorable music often departs from that template. Building on 2018’s melancholic TA13OO, *ZUU—his rich 2019 ode to multiple generations of South Florida rap—showcased his knack for melody, storytelling, and the underappreciated art of rapping slow, which requires finesse and presence rather than sheer intensity.
On Melt My Eyez See Your Future, Curry again retools his sound, trading livewire energy for introspection and vulnerability. The album lacks the vividness of his past releases, but its concept offers a glimpse into Curry’s roving mind. In interviews, he’s described the project as more intimate, saying “this album is about me, Denzel Curry. No alter egos, no nothing. Just Denzel Curry.” The comment overstates the distinctness of his personas, none of which were fully formed identities, but it illustrates his approach to writing. Throughout Melt My Eyez, he focuses on himself, internalizing the skeptical gaze he usually applies to larger political issues. That pivot yields music that’s more self-reflective, with few ragers or bangers.
Curry presents the world behind his eyes as a hushed, penitent space. The beats are largely soft and uncluttered, full of neat drums, gossamer piano, and spectral vocals. Instead of sprinting through these mellow instrumentals, Curry ambles, his words measured and deliberate. The first verse of “Walkin,” a highlight, unfurls like a house cat in sunlight as Curry floats over a yawning vocal sample. “Walking with my back to the sun/Keep my head to the sky/Me against the world/It’s me, myself and I/Like De La,” Curry raps in a loose, lolling cadence. When the Kal Banx beat flips into a trap number midway, Curry slips into his signature double-time—but he trots rather than gallops. Even when he’s animated, he’s unrushed and loose.
Forward momentum and acceptance are constant themes. “Watching people dying got me being honest,” he says on “The Last,” one of many moments of pandemic-induced lucidity. “It’s all in mind/But I’mma feel fine once I’m melting my eyes,” he chants on “Mental,” singer Bridget Perez’s sweet coos reassuring him. Curry invokes that image a few times, casting it as clarifying in all senses of the word: warm, liquefying, cleansing. The metaphor cleverly flips crying—a messy, mucusy, and literally blurring physiological reflex—into an orienting experience.
But Curry never fully realizes the conceit. Despite the album’s emphasis on candor and self-examination, many of Curry’s takeaways are vague and distant. “Bullshit” is a frequent descriptor, appearing in two choruses (“Worst Comes to Worst” and “Angelz”), and the album is short on storytelling and melody, the pillars of his best work. “Troubles,” a bubbly but empty collaboration with T-Pain, is all cliché. “Got some troubles that these drugs can’t fix/We might struggle because life’s a bitch,” Curry sings. The writing on the otherwise thrilling drum ‘n’ bass track “Zatoichi” is just as lazy. “Life is short/Like a dwarf,” slowthai and Curry declare on the chorus. Sure, dudes. These elisions might be more engaging if they were clearly intentional. When Kendrick bleeps out names in his songs or Vince Staples raps like the booth is wiretapped, the omissions underscore the gravity of the information being withheld. Curry’s glosses don’t feel as loaded.
The best moments on Melt My Eyez embrace free association. “The Smell of Death” is pure flow, Curry bouncing rhymes off a misty Thundercat beat. On “X-Wing,” the album’s best track, Curry swings between urgent thoughts about the life expectancy of rappers, references to professional wrestling and Star Wars, and slick wordplay. “Am I killing it or am I losing it?” he asks amid the stream-of-consciousness. The question, and the song, show a mind intent on processing the world rather than escaping it. | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | March 28, 2022 | 7.3 | 52406dbd-42d6-420c-94cf-9240fb2d7a13 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Dublin group has spent a decade making folk music sound foreign and transfixing. Its spellbinding new album uncovers eerie new depths in centuries-old forms. | The Dublin group has spent a decade making folk music sound foreign and transfixing. Its spellbinding new album uncovers eerie new depths in centuries-old forms. | Lankum: False Lankum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lankum-false-lankum/ | False Lankum | “Go Dig My Grave” has been known by many names and sung by many voices. It derives from a folk song typically known as “The Butcher Boy,” though in the American tradition it has reappeared as “The Railroad Boy.” “The Butcher Boy” developed within a family of songs whose verses were rearranged and harvested from older ballads, some dating as far back as the early 17th century, but the story typically goes like this: A young woman is abandoned by her lover (the titular butcher boy), hangs herself, and is found by her father, along with a suicide note with instructions on her burial. The Clancy Brothers sang a version with Tommy Makem in the 1960s; Kirsty MacColl, Elvis Costello, Sinéad O’Connor, and Lambchop all have their own “Butcher Boy.” There are many ways in which you may be familiar with pieces of “Go Dig My Grave,” but none of them will adequately prepare you for what Irish folk experimentalists Lankum present as the opener to the new album False Lankum.
The Dublin group renders this classic folk song of love and death as a gaping wound that aches across generations. Radie Peat’s vocals are unnerving, cutting; she sounds decades older than she is, an aged woman recalling a seismic trauma. Disembodied notes bend and bleed around her, until the song lurches into a foreboding outro straight out of a horror movie. The long life of “Go Dig My Grave” is exactly how folk music works. But over the last decade, Lankum have gone from musicians somewhat faithfully playing within tradition—having cut their teeth the old-school way, learning songs at sessions in pubs around Dublin—to musicians who understand the history enough to warp it into something foreign and transfixing. They take songs that trace back to lost worlds and make them sound instead like a future built on the ruins of today.
This approach coalesced on Lankum’s last album, 2019’s The Livelong Day. Previously, they’d garnered some respect in folk circles for earlier albums, 2014’s Cold Old Fire and 2017’s Between the Earth and Sky. Each had just a hint of something different afoot—like the natural, psychedelic drones of the uilleann pipes drawn out into something resembling slowcore. But with The Livelong Day, the quartet teamed with producer John “Spud” Murphy—now their unofficial fifth member, also producer for Black Midi and caroline of late—and their sound blossomed into a gorgeous, dark reimagining that managed to break new ground in various folk traditions. It won them Ireland’s Choice Music Prize for the album of the year, and marked the potential for a crossover into more mainstream notoriety.
After that success, False Lankum was conceived in uncertain circumstances. During Dublin’s recurring pandemic lockdowns, the quartet—Peat, brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, and Cormac Mac Diarmada—gathered in an old fort on the sea to write the followup to their acclaimed breakthrough. In isolation, they looked out over Dublin and the water, and they returned with a successor that takes what worked on their previous album and pushes further in every direction. False Lankum sprawls, dense with ideas.
By their own admission, the band is chasing greater extremes this time around. False Lankum alternates between moments of calm, fragile beauty—“Clear Away in the Morning,” “Newcastle,” and “On a Monday Morning” are all straightforward acoustic numbers—and further abstracting and fragmenting the traditions they’re pulling from. “Master Crowley’s” follows Livelong Day standout “The Pride of Petravore” in turning a lively reel into something that wheezes and heaves as if constantly in threat of collapsing in on itself. It eventually drops out into scratching strings and ominous clangs; a similar trick happens in one of Daragh Lynch’s originals, “Netta Perseus,” built on rippling guitar until the song ruptures with synths and tumbling percussion. “The New York Trader” is a rare moment hinting at the Lynch brothers’ punk youth, displaying a frothing intensity and aggression atypical for Lankum.
At times False Lankum plays less like discrete songs and more as one long fever dream composed of scenes from across centuries, familiar forms made unrecognizable once filtered through the band’s idiosyncratic vision. That ever-durable metaphor of the sea became a foundation for the album—Lankum swimming through histories, later realizing that every song is somehow related to the water and the horizon, whether in violence or serenity. “The Turn,” another original, ends the album with a ship sailing off into the distance, and a long refrain ceding to a final drone. It feels like False Lankum fading out into the mythology that birthed it, continuing to forge ahead into unknown waters in search of something as eternal and human as it is alien. | 2023-03-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rough Trade | March 24, 2023 | 7.7 | 5241e40a-06e6-4596-883c-c360eb404858 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
Kode9 delivers a very sad, very compelling stare into the void with Nothing. Perhaps his most compelling work, it starts from scratch, sometimes building to footwork but often bleeding into something spare and serene. Fully crafted in the wake of his music partner Spaceape's death, there are moments of memory and beauty woven into this varied, unique album. | Kode9 delivers a very sad, very compelling stare into the void with Nothing. Perhaps his most compelling work, it starts from scratch, sometimes building to footwork but often bleeding into something spare and serene. Fully crafted in the wake of his music partner Spaceape's death, there are moments of memory and beauty woven into this varied, unique album. | Kode9: Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21221-nothing/ | Nothing | Kode9, also known as Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman, always creates multilayered tracks that sound built from another era or planet entirely. From his work driving the early dubstep scene to the formidable rise and influence of Hyperdub, Goodman’s vision is one that is singular in its devotion to the connective tissues of electronic and dance music genres. In Kode9’s music (and littered throughout the Hyperdub roster) is a harmonious bridge between styles. His music is not without history and ideas, and Goodman openly embraces it.
The most complicated forms of techno and footwork are built simply, from the ground up, and on Nothing, we hear the simplicity of each component and how it all comes together to make the music that we love. "I’ve always tried to be open to the idea of music as transversal, as impersonal – like a cloud, or a virus that passes through populations," Goodman told The Guardian. "It might start with an individual producer, but once it’s out in the world – as an entity that’s inhabiting, parasiting, using human bodies as hosts – somehow it attains a collective intelligence all of its own."
Consider the unnerving pull of a synth that sounds like a dying insect working in tandem with piano on "Vacuum Packed". The track builds into footwork-light with hyper-paced rhythms and a cutting beat that is maybe the record’s most danceable moment. "Void" is a slow-burning and dubby wonder that contains empty moments where his former musical partner Spaceape, who died in 2014, was originally intended to vocalize. "Holo" is the record's brightest and most enjoyable moment, built on airy samples and a spastic beat that is difficult to forget. Nothing leaves you awash in the sounds of the everyday: The static of the television not turned entirely turned off, the lull of old appliances stumbling to stay on after years of wear and tear.
There is a precision and effort laced in his two previous albums, 2006’s Memories of the Future and 2011’s Black Sun, that clearly mark a singular producer’s craftsmanship. But on his latest work, this point feels more eloquent from start to finish. Goodman described this record as one about zeroes and about "nothing." In that same interview with the Guardian, Goodman said, “If replication and distribution costs are tending towards zero, this is one of the most important engines in the transformation of the music industry. We don’t know where it’s heading. ‘Nothing’ was like a little encryption key that enabled me to finish the album."
A quick glance at song titles confirms this trend, at least stylistically. There is "Zero Point Energy" and "Notel". There is "Void" and "Zero Work". And there is the album closer, "Nothing Lasts Forever", a nearly 11-minute journey through the noise of silence, a kind of John Cage tribute for the new millennium. Awash in static and the sporadic, indescribable clanging of the day-to-day, the track helps define the work as a whole in a clearer way than the songs before it. If, as Goodman notes, things are tending toward "zero," then this track is the literal manifestation of this idea. Still, there is value in the zero and value in "Nothing Lasts Forever". In the absence of music, in the zero, there is still presence, still sound, still something to hear (and even enjoy). | 2015-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | November 18, 2015 | 7.6 | 52420d8b-e4cc-43cb-8959-006f61a68838 | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
On an intimate collaborative album, Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz push beyond their common ground toward moments of grand catharsis and melancholy ambience. | On an intimate collaborative album, Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz push beyond their common ground toward moments of grand catharsis and melancholy ambience. | Midwife / Vyva Melinkolya: Orbweaving | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midwife-vyva-melinkolya-orbweaving/ | Orbweaving | Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz make music at the intersection of beauty and sorrow. In Johnston’s pensive, minimalist work as Midwife, she finds moments of soul-stirring radiance amid thick clouds of synth and guitar. As the leader of Louisville’s Vyva Melinkolya, Diaz plumbs emotional depths in a somewhat more conventional interpretation of classic shoegaze. Both Johnston and Diaz are adept at conjuring heaviness without reaching for metal’s typical volume. (Johnston characterizes her music with the amusing and accurate descriptor “heaven metal.”) On their first collaborative album, Orbweaving, the two songwriters tap into an easy compatibility when exploring their common ground, and they touch the transcendent when they push beyond it.
Orbweaving is the result of a recording residency that Diaz undertook at Johnston’s New Mexico studio in August 2021, but the two didn’t enter the sessions as strangers. Diaz had recently contributed guest vocals to a song on Midwife’s Luminol, and a friendship that began in music soon transcended it. Diaz and Johnston became confidants during a tumultuous period in each of their personal lives. Orbweaving, recorded between nighttime hikes spent looking for snakes and spiders, feels accordingly intimate. It’s the sound of two kindred spirits in harmony, reaching for catharsis in unison.
The first four of Orbweaving’s five songs sound like what you might expect from their team-up. The Johnston-penned “Miss America” opens with a plaintive clean guitar part, which repeats for the song’s duration while both singers layer gauzy, reverb-heavy vocals on top of it. “Hounds of Heaven,” Johnston’s other songwriting contribution, offers a little more crunch and a more elaborately detailed arrangement, with pitch-shifted vocals and glitchy, programmed drums augmenting all the guitar fuzz. Both tracks are built on repetition, with a scant handful of mantra-like lyrics and melodies. It’s an approach similar to Johnston’s on Luminol, gaining power from the insistent recurrence of small ideas.
The Diaz compositions “NMP” and “Plague X” are similar to Johnston’s songs at first blush, but they signal Orbweaving’s grander ambitions. “NMP” blooms from the same kind of guitar line as “Miss America,” even introducing its diaphanous vocal part in an almost identical way. Over the course of its nearly eight-minute runtime, the song builds to the album’s showiest crescendo, swelling and crashing before resolving in a muted denouement. “NMP” makes the most explicit use of Diaz’s shoegaze background, but it also introduces the album’s strangest sounds—twisting synths, gnarled feedback, hissing drums. The quieter “Plague X” puts synthesizers on equal footing with guitar, letting them fuse into a single gloomy alloy. (Diaz and Johnston’s vocals melt together in a similar manner throughout the album.)
Orbweaving saves its biggest swing for last. The 12-minute title track closes the album in a fog of blurry, crumbling synths. There’s no percussion, no vocals, and only the faintest hint of melody. It’s by far the most challenging song on Orbweaving, but it’s also the most rewarding. By abandoning the familiar textures of rock music and stripping the core of their sound, Johnston and Diaz created a piece that’s at once more impressionistic than their usual work while every bit as emotionally vivid. Orbweaving is the product of two musicians with similar sensibilities, but just as instructively, it’s the sound of two friends sharing a glimpse of their bond with the world. | 2023-05-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | The Flenser | May 16, 2023 | 7.6 | 5248ad9f-359f-4431-9b1e-45f9d8faae71 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The 90s electronic totems have seen their classic work age extremely well, yet oddly struggled to sort out a clear identity in the here and now. | The 90s electronic totems have seen their classic work age extremely well, yet oddly struggled to sort out a clear identity in the here and now. | Underworld: Barking | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14655-barking/ | Barking | It's a little ironic that, while Underworld's mid-to-late-1990s albums have aged extraordinarily well, the band itself hasn't. They lost Darren Emerson to globetrotting, Ibiza-rocking DJ glory at the beginning of the decade and they haven't quite found their stride in the two (now three) albums since. This was perhaps inevitable: Karl Hyde's wild-eyed, front-of-the-mix personality always ensured that Underworld would age more like a rock band than an electronic act. (Witness how a touch of gray has bolstered the wisdom of folks like Carl Craig and the Chemical Brothers.)
My favorite song on Barking, "Diamond Jigsaw", talks about a white stretch limo and features "pre-mi-um te-qui-la" prominently in its chorus. It sounds cheesy, but it's fantastic: the world absolutely needs more songs about those nights when you're flush with cash and having a really good time. Moreover, Underworld is exactly the type of band to write these songs, because aside from aging like rock stars, they also got rich like rock stars. There are worse places to end up than "thoughtfully content headliners," and a recent, leaked live set/mix from the Privilege club in Ibiza proves that they can still transform their mid-level angst into thumping party-starters.
Barking doesn't contain nearly enough of these moments, but the ones it does contain feature the kind of backlit, uplifting anthem-making that Underworld have only occasionally dabbled in (think: "Rez" or, more recently, "Two Months Off"). It's a really good fit for the band. On "Scribble", Hyde sounds reconciled: "And it's okay/ You give me everything I need." The arrangement is bright and lithe. It features the same rush-rush-rush drum programming of heyday Underworld, but it doesn't feel like the song is trying slap you in the face; it feels like it's trying to make you drive your car a little faster. It's refreshing to listen to Underworld embrace small, personal thrills.
Hyde may well be the same drug-addled crazyman he was during the 1990s, but he doesn't sound like it anymore. "Grace" is a classic "the club...is dark and confusing"-track, but Hyde sounds like he's envious of Interpol's pathos, which, Jesus. "Louisiana", a slothful, album-ending ballad, immediately enters the competition for "worst ever Underworld song," so pale is Hyde's slurring. At different points on the album he talks about being "violently in love" and "quietly violent," but these sort of ominous dictums seem sapped of any real strength. It's weird to say, but Hyde just sounds so much better now when he's celebrating.
Barking inhabits an odd place: half-dolorous electro-pop, half-affirming sunnyside jams. You can attribute this to some of the help they had: Underworld farmed Barking's tracks out to various producers, and it shows. "Hamburg Hotel" contains hints of Appleblim's tense nighttime wandering, and Paul van Dyk is all over "Diamond Jigsaw". These "collaborations" seem like a better marketing tool than a musical one, however, as Barking's sonic variance is truthfully no greater than that of most Underworld albums.
Underworld receive a lot of credit for being a great albums band in a singles genre, but the lukewarm reception their last two albums received glossed over the fact that each has housed one or two great tracks. So Barking stays the course, with the added prospect of a fitter, happier Underworld on the horizon. It's about time. | 2010-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cooking Vinyl | September 21, 2010 | 5.9 | 5249d38f-dff0-4363-81d0-d195564cb87f | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Italian-born pop artist Mauro Remiddi has covered an impressive amount of physical and aesthetic terrain in his years as a working musician. On his bleary, atmospheric Porcelain Raft debut LP, he sounds like he no longer exists on this planet. | The Italian-born pop artist Mauro Remiddi has covered an impressive amount of physical and aesthetic terrain in his years as a working musician. On his bleary, atmospheric Porcelain Raft debut LP, he sounds like he no longer exists on this planet. | Porcelain Raft: Strange Weekend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16208-strange-weekend/ | Strange Weekend | Mauro Remiddi, who currently records as Porcelain Raft, has covered an impressive amount of physical and aesthetic terrain in his years as a working musician. Italian-born Remiddi's wanderings have led him to playing indie pop in London, gypsy klezmer music with the traveling Berlin Youth Circus, piano in off-Broadway productions, and even to performing in North Korea.
Considering how much globetrotting Remiddi has under his belt, it's no surprise that his music might start to evoke a sense of rootlessness and impermanence. However, as Porcelain Raft, he's taken it to the logical extreme of sounding like he no longer exists on this planet. On Strange Weekend, Porcelain Raft's debut full-length effort, Remiddi sounds like nothing if not a weary sojourner resigned to endlessly floating through the interstellar or spiritual cosmos. His forerunners in this respect are Marc Bolan, John Lennon, and David Bowie, performers who consistently sought some kind of transcendence of the corporeal, struggling to achieve earthly connections and understanding while chafing against the bounds of time and space.
Song titles like "Drifting in and Out", "Shapeless & Gone", and "Put Me to Sleep" give an excellent idea of what Remiddi has in store. Porcelain Raft borrows liberally from both the shoegaze and dream-pop playbooks, and so we get layers of sonic gauze shot through with delicately strummed acoustic guitar patterns and Remiddi's reedy, rather androgynous voice. In the spacey somnolence applied to venerable classic rock sounds and structures-- Lennon's most obviously on "Unless You Speak From Your Heart", Bolan's on "Picture"-- Remiddi very much shares a kinship with Beach House. There's some of Porcelain Raft touring partner M83's elegant sweep here too, while the woozy, hypnotic beatscapes of "Is It Deep Enough For You" and "If You Have a Wish" aren't far removed at all from chillwavers like Neon Indian. Many of the melodies feel familiar but can't easily be precisely placed, which not only makes them good earworm candidates but also enhances the album's dreamlike, half-remembered feel.
The record's pervading sense of wistfulness and resignation extends to the lyrics-- they're often buried or abstracted, but occasionally something nakedly direct emerges, like the ingenuous sentiment conveyed in the title of "Unless You Speak From Your Heart", or, perhaps a bit more artfully, Remiddi's assertion in "Backwords" that "I hope you're in a nice hotel/ Playing cards in your room/ With someone who cares over you."
As you'd expect from such a bleary, atmospheric album, Strange Weekend hangs together well as a whole-cloth statement, though that doesn't mean there aren't standouts, particularly "Backwords", with its exhausted grandeur reminiscent of Pink Floyd, as well as the gorgeous "Put Me to Sleep", which seems tailor-made to soundtrack a scene where Carey Mulligan is sad in some major metropolitan city. Which is presumably a situation to which a well-traveled melancholic like Remiddi can readily relate. | 2012-01-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Secretly Canadian | January 30, 2012 | 7.4 | 525140a9-d69a-4169-b1ee-abd6cb8cf54f | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Stones Throw interrupts its wise exploration of alternative hip-hop and puts its goodwill on the line in order to release a thoroughly mediocre gangsta rap album. | Stones Throw interrupts its wise exploration of alternative hip-hop and puts its goodwill on the line in order to release a thoroughly mediocre gangsta rap album. | Guilty Simpson: Ode to the Ghetto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11171-ode-to-the-ghetto/ | Ode to the Ghetto | At the risk of sounding thick, I'll admit I needed a second to get the joke of Guilty Simpson's name, so you can imagine what kind of endorsement it is to say that's what passes for "clever" on Ode to the Ghetto. Just as Lupe Fiasco diverts interviews to boast about his gully Chicago upbringing, Stones Throw interrupts its wise exploration of alternative hip-hop and puts its goodwill on the line in order to release a thoroughly mediocre gangsta rap album.
Not that Ode to the Ghetto was likely to be any better in the event it was inspired by cartoons and video games instead of more traditional muses, since like his namesake, Simpson creates a document of violent crime that's hard to take seriously even if it's based in reality. Detroit's reputation obviously precedes itself, and yet Motor City native Simpson robs the city of its menace by presenting it in the most generic terms possible here, rendering it as replicable as a Levittown. Dope boys have the block on lock ("Footwork") and are more admirable than the cops trying to stop them ("Pigs"). Guns pop off and mouthy bitches won't shut the fuck up ("She Won't Stay at Home"). Perhaps it's meant as some sort of commentary on the universality of ghetto hardship, but I think that's giving Simpson far too much credit after suffering though the pointedly low ambitions of "The Real Me" and "Getting Bitches" (rhymes with "getting riches"), or hearing Sean P show him how this C-list rap shit is done ("Run").
At the very least, Simpson finds more inspiration in popular undie rap's leading beatsmiths; Madlib, Oh No, Black Milk, and J Dilla (oddly responsible for championing this dude) gamely give "A" efforts while Simpson ramrods everything with a bullish flow reminiscent of a blue-collar hardhead like Obie Trice. At times, he'll wisely refrain from any sort of attempt at a hook, but the times he goes in-- the off-key ramble of "Robbery", for one-- are painful. And his attempted slang-slinging on "Footwork" makes Juelz Santana's awkward "Clockwork" sound Webster's-bound.
If you're feeling generous, you might call "I Must Love You" Simpson's Mike Skinner moment; potentially penetrating in its detail, an already faltering relationship is upset by a perceived flirtation in a Red Lobster. But Simpson's boredom with the actual argument with his girlfriend spills over to him sounding bored relating the story, at which point you want to be involved in this about as much as he did. He eventually closes it with "why you actin' like a bitch again," a question that really can never be answered, but it's appropriately honest for a record that's mostly incapable of inspiring any sort of meaningful reaction. | 2008-02-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2008-02-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | February 28, 2008 | 4.5 | 525150ce-3687-4d9d-800c-15f8ab159fe9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The anonymous artist’s rustling, swirling ambient techno is as immediate and enveloping as anything leftfield electronic music has produced this year. | The anonymous artist’s rustling, swirling ambient techno is as immediate and enveloping as anything leftfield electronic music has produced this year. | Topdown Dialectic: Topdown Dialectic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/topdown-dialectic-topdown-dialectic/ | Topdown Dialectic | The Topdown Dialectic project lies at the intersection of clarity and obscurity. The clarity part is self-evident: Most of their rustling, swirling ambient techno has come out on clear cassettes packaged in clear, plastic freezer bags—packaging so minimalist that it doesn’t include titles, credits, or any information beyond the artist name and catalog number.
That’s where the obscurity kicks in, because Topdown Dialectic’s identity is a mystery. The only confirmable fact is that they are part of Aught, a label collective whose members—Elizabethan Collar, De Leon, Xth Réflexion—are also anonymous (if they are even different people at all). This kind of mystique is hardly new in electronic music; it is part of a hallowed tradition that runs from Basic Channel through Burial. But Topdown Dialectic’s facelessness feels specific to the current moment. Trying to trace their trail back to the source, there’s a strong sense of being haunted by the internet’s recent past. They have not tweeted in more than three years. The Facebook page linked from their SoundCloud no longer exists; neither does their Tumblr. A Blogspot account associated with the label behind their debut cassette has gone inactive. It’s a trail of digital breadcrumbs ground down to dust.
That also makes for a pretty good description of Topdown Dialectic’s music. Since at least the release of a 2014 self-titled EP for Seattle’s Further label (it’s hard to know what their 2013 debut cassette sounds like, since it has disappeared from the internet without much trace), they’ve hitched their horse to the grainy, dub-techno aesthetic popularized in the mid-1990s by Vainqueur, Vladislav Delay, and other artists affiliated with Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction label. Topdown Dialectic’s sound is a graphite smear of static, clatter, and hints of whispers: textures of gravel and elastic, shoe polish and sand, all arrayed over a submerged techno rhythm. A loose weave of murmurs and wormholes, the music itself is bathed in mystery, its contours foggy and its provenance uncertain. Dub techno, with its emphasis on circuitry and spring reverbs, is a resolutely analog genre, but here it gets spun through a dizzying digital echo chamber of post-internet obfuscation.
Topdown Dialectic’s first album for Los Angeles label Peak Oil bears many similarities to its predecessors. It is also self-titled, and it does without track titles. These tweaks to industry convention seem designed to disorient and unbalance, to leave the listener bobbing in a grayscale interzone without reference points or compass. The music’s means of production have historically been another point of obscurity. Streaks of drum and delay pile up in an onionskin palimpsest of fakeouts and false endings; voices bob through the murk, and the occasional sharp-edged synth bass cuts through, but there’s no telling how any of it was made. With this release, we finally learn something about the artist’s methods, which the label claims entail unspecified “software strategies” and “captures and edits of various nonlinear sound-systems.” Whatever that means, it sounds like a kind of digital alchemy—a figurative black box that translates unknown inputs into a fountain of pulse and shimmer.
But the new album immediately feels more developed than previous work. The sound is fuller, the structures more composed. What once seemed incidental now feels more intentional, even expressive. In opening track “A1,” a blurry railroad chug of fractured breakbeats gives way to moments of crystalline definition, like a taut electric-bass note or the rosy chords of classic Detroit techno. In the Pole-influenced “A3,” fluttering chords and a hint of voice flash out over rolling sub-bass; “B3” takes after the chiffon-textured deep house of Vladislav Delay’s Luomo alias, with a beat as brittle as kindling offset by the occasional yelp, soulful and grounding.
Throughout it all, the music is governed by the tension between difficulty and ease. The sense of some hidden code at work is reinforced by the fact that all eight tracks are exactly five minutes long, with each song ending in medias res, in a simple fadeout—which surely is not a coincidence. (This isn’t the first time Topdown Dialectic has deployed such a tactic.) Ultimately, though, any subtextual riddles are secondary to the tracks themselves, which are as immediate and enveloping as anything that leftfield electronic music has given us this year, with sumptuous textures reminiscent of Skee Mask’s Compro—they’re just less melodic and less overtly melancholy, marked instead by a seductive kind of stone-faced cool.
On the album’s closing cut, having crumpled dub techno’s blueprint in any number of ways, Topdown Dialectic smooths out the wrinkles and sinks into a deep, bassy approximation of the style at its most quintessential. There’s no discernible percussion at all, just rolling waves of rumble and hiss. It’s the perfect capstone to the project: “B4” could have been made at any point in the past 25 years, and with a surface worn down like limestone, it luxuriates in its anonymity. Yet once you become accustomed to the quirks of Topdown Dialectic’s sound, the track couldn’t be mistaken for the work of anyone else. | 2018-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Peak Oil | July 3, 2018 | 8 | 52534679-7c7e-4830-8265-f5c34f08db9a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The first posthumous album from Lil Peep stands as an act of tribute and preservation for an artist whose legacy is still very fragile. | The first posthumous album from Lil Peep stands as an act of tribute and preservation for an artist whose legacy is still very fragile. | Lil Peep: Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-come-over-when-youre-sober-pt-2/ | Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2 | When Gustav Åhr died, his career was hovering just above the ground. He was 21 years old with four tapes and a few EPs under his stage name Lil Peep—just enough work to carve out an aesthetic and build a corner of the world. He had just released his album Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 1, which was generating more attention than anything he’d done before. At shows, fans were starting to chant back every word of his songs. He seemed bemused by the shudders of national attention around him. “I’m here, doing my thing,” he shrugged in an interview with Montreality in April 2017, a few months before his sudden death from an overdose of Fentanyl and Xanax. Later in the interview, he was asked where he’d be at age 86. He laughed at the idea, hard.
Lil Peep lived close to death and seemed comfortable with his proximity to it, which is not the same as wanting to die. He accepted the idea that he veered closer to the edge than some and that he might, at some point, cross the line, a clarity that came through simply and consistently in his lyrics. He never minced words about his depression or his struggles with addiction, nor did he make them seem bigger than they were. He spoke of his pain clearly, and for this, he comforted legions of young fans who felt safer in their own sorrow when blanketed by his.
This plainspoken depiction of deep depression was the emotional center of Peep’s work. It radiated out from everything he did, and reverberates through Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 2. The project has gestated for over a year, as Peep’s close friend and producer Smokeasac pored over the unfinished album and Peep’s vocal takes alongside his mother, Liza Womack. Womack isn’t just a bereaved mother but a steward of Lil Peep’s work, and she has spoken of her investment in Come Over Pt. 2 on an emotional level as well as an aesthetic one. “If you care enough to pay for an artist’s work, then trust the artist’s work,” she said.
You can feel that devotion poured into the result, evinced as much by what’s here as by what’s not. There are no tagged-on features, no maudlin tributes, no voices pushing from the margins to share the spotlight with Peep. There is nothing but his downcast music, as he would have made it. It is an act of tribute and preservation for an artist whose legacy is still very fragile.
“My All & Broken Smile,” the first track, opens with one of the only unusual flourishes, a programmed steel drum hit that sounds like a children’s music box. It is a cinematic touch that fades soon into the classic Peep Sound: alt-rock guitar and moaning heard through a fishbowl, viscous melodies that drizzle and pool in your brain crevices. His music sounds like it’s drowning—in dysphoria, in self-awareness, in reverb and low-pass filters. It is pickled in sadness. This wasn’t the only music Peep made—he also rapped over harsh, abrasive goth-trap beats—but this is undoubtedly the sound that he was most famous, and beloved, for.
At the center of the mix, placed where it deserves to be, is Peep’s voice. He was a canny stylist. Like a rapper who lags behind the beat on purpose, he assumed a drowsy delivery, suggesting someone singing for the first time, or someone making fun of their own singing voice. But he was, in fact, a real singer. His voice sounded like Chester Bennington’s yowl caught in a laptop and smoothed over for irregularities. This was evident seeing him live, as well—his voice emerged from his scraggly throat sounding already Auto-Tuned.
His ear for melodies was similarly astonishing. His songs are simple, so simple that they come right up to maddening. But you can look at a Casio keyboard and try to plink out memorable melodies from three or four keys, and you will not stumble across the ones that Peep has picked out. They have a drain-circling, centrifugal force, only enhanced by his bored tone. They pull and pull and pull until you ask yourself why you are resisting and you tumble down with them.
His lyrics were alternately deadpan, wry, bone-chilling, and empathetic, and he wrote as often about intimacy and codependency as he did about cocaine. On “Sex With My Ex,” he pairs the harsh “Fuck me like we’re lying on our death bed” with the tender “Hear the sadness in your laughter.” He would put banalities right beside piercing observations, mimicking the texture of actual conversation. On “Hate Me,” he takes “the long way home,” but balances it with the freeze-frame image, “Got a couple hundred missed calls in my phone.” He will often keep a song in place with one line: “Break my bones but act as my spine/Wonder who you’ll fuck when I die,” he wonders on “16 Lines.” On “Life Is Beautiful,” as he muses, “When I die, I’ll pack my bags, move somewhere more affordable,” it’s hard to imagine anyone else writing a lyric quite that devastating or sly.
Some of his lines are so vivid they could serve as screenwriting prompts. “Life Is Beautiful” offers something like an inverse reading of Modest Mouse’s “Float On”—horrible things happen every day, most times life is not okay. Each lyric cuts a little deeper in the same spot: “Tryna keep it cool at your grandfather’s funeral,” or, “You think you’re adorable, she thinks that you’re intolerable.” In real life, you might tell someone you want to die in one breath and complain about a pair of pants in the next; Peep’s lyrics ably seesaw between these poles.
Meanwhile, the guitar lines offer a million minor rewrites on the four-note opener to Metallica’s “One” and Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” little stick-and-poke tattoo riffs that an eighth-grader plays at a Guitar Center. It is an era as much as a sound, evoked powerfully: Printed tablatures, water-damaged Linkin Park CD booklets, middle school Weezer cover bands, Alternative Press back issues moldering in an old childhood bedroom.
Despite that—all that—Come Over Pt. 2 lacks a single, a glittering pop-punk exclamation point like “Awful Things” or “The Brightside” to break up the album’s long drift. But that’s OK, really. The album is a valentine offered to Peep and to his fans, and it is built for immersion, not for persuasion. It adds some indelible entries into Peep’s now-truncated canon—“Life Is Beautiful,” “16 Lines,” “Hate Me,” “IDGAF.” And it honors his clear-eyed gaze, even beneath the fog he suffered.
Now that Gustav Åhr is dead, of course, there are lines that hurt to hear. But they are no different than dozens of macabre lines over the course of his career, and if he didn’t flinch at them, perhaps we should take his cue. None of this should overshadow Peep’s winsome positivity; he had a sweetness that was impossible to miss. “He was not as sad as people thought he was,” mused Åhr’s brother, Oskar in an interview after Gustav’s death. “It’s frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother.” In the same Montreality interview, Åhr parts his dirty hair to show something to the interviewer. “On my face, I got a humongous tattoo that says Cry Baby … to keep me grateful,” he says, smiling a little. “To remind me that I’m blessed.” | 2018-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | AUTNMY / Columbia | November 9, 2018 | 7.2 | 5257adbc-3f53-4d67-baa2-9bf40685a5a8 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Matmos, and Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka are among participants in a remix LP that's more like a comp of excellent experimental music. | Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Matmos, and Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka are among participants in a remix LP that's more like a comp of excellent experimental music. | Melvins: Chicken Switch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13545-chicken-switch/ | Chicken Switch | Lots of Melvins releases in the past decade could be called either conceptual or gimmicky, depending on your perspective. There were the collaborations on The Crybaby with everyone from David Yow to Leif Garrett; full-album partnerships with Jello Biafra, Lustmord, and Fantômas; a staged "live" version of Houdini; and whatever the intermittently awesome Hostile Ambient Takeover was supposed to be. Interesting music at every stop, but overall an uneven track record, one that encourages doubts about any new Melvins diversion.
Still, the idea behind Chicken Switch is promising. The band gave entire albums (and sometimes more) to noisy experimental artists, letting each melt, slice, and demolish the music into five-minute-or-so chunks. And the concept works, mostly because the band chose interesting remixers rather than famous ones. The only well-known names here are Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, Matmos, and Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka, and even Melvins fans may not recognize the other participants. But everyone involved attacks their work with vigor, precision, and an insatiable desire to test limits. And they all bring their A-games to Chicken Switch, making it less a Melvins remix record than a compilation of excellent experimental music.
In other words, these aren't Melvins riffs set to dance beats. Occasionally the diehard fan might recognize the odd chord or familiar rhythm-- take Eye's loop of chugging riffs, or Ranaldo's busy multi-song edit, one of the few tracks with recognizable vocals. But more typical is the entry from Germany's Christoph Heemann. "Emperor Twaddle (Remix)" opens with three minutes of ringing drone-- stretching and thickening the intro of Honky's "They All Must Be Slaughtered" well past its original length-- followed by 30 seconds of riffs and beats blurred into cacophony.
Most of Chicken Switch employs that kind of scorched-earth approach. Rather than rearranging the Melvins' basic atoms, the remixers split them apart, creating unpredictable bursts of noise and texture with completely new DNA. In that sense, "remix" is too narrow a term for what's going on here. Better to call these reincarnations, with the participants basically murdering the original music and pumping new breath and blood into its hollowed-out remains.
This process produces impressive diversity. German artist RLW (who himself crafted a similar guest-remix project called Tulpas in the late 1990s) makes what sounds like a minimalist string quartet dragging their bows across metal objects. Viennese electronic group Farmers Manual compose a symphony of blips and growls, like a farther-out version of Black Dice. Japanese noise king Merzbow offers a soothing din chopped up by a clanging beat. And former Melvin David Scott Stone stretches King Buzzo's vocals into a wordless choir of gurgling drones.
The highlight of Chicken Switch comes from Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple. "4th Floor Hellcopter" opens with a slow, crunchy beat, slides into forbidding feedback, then ascends into burning metal guitar and stereo-spanning dissonance. Kawabata bridges the gap between recognizable riffs and all-out abstraction, pointing out the rich diversity inside the Melvins' music. As a whole, Chicken Switch does the same. Its wide sonic range is testament to how much lurks beneath the surface of every Melvins album. Whatever faults one can find in their experiments, their work is clearly deep enough to be worthy of such off-center explorations. | 2009-10-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-10-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Ipecac | October 7, 2009 | 7.8 | 526141fb-ef94-40a7-9d02-fb67e0e634d7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
I'm tired of attending funerals for David Bowie's career. I mean, they're always pleasant, catered affairs, and ... | I'm tired of attending funerals for David Bowie's career. I mean, they're always pleasant, catered affairs, and ... | David Bowie: Heathen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/882-heathen/ | Heathen | I'm tired of attending funerals for David Bowie's career. I mean, they're always pleasant, catered affairs, and the chance to hobnob with a star-studded crowd of washed-up mourners like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop is undeniably great, but David never actually shows up. Critics have tried to write him off for more than a decade, and his work has been mostly sub-par even longer. But somehow, some way, he's managed to scrape together enough of the old Bowie charm on every release to keep alive the hope that he might just have one final hurrah left in him. Unlike some of his contemporaries (I'm looking at you, Iggy), he might, conceivably, still have a fighting chance. But while everyone's busy measuring his latest work against the towering legacy of Ziggy and the Spiders and looking ahead to his next last gasp, it would be easy to overlook that Heathen is the best Bowie release in years.
But so what? Bowie committed the unpardonable sin of being too good, too soon. For an artist to produce an album as exquisitely relevant and inventive as Hunky Dory is rare, but to follow it with the colossus of Ziggy Stardust, and even Aladdin Sane, Low, and Scary Monsters-- he made genius sound so easy. With those first few groundbreaking albums, though, he utterly screwed himself. The shadow of his early work will follow him forever, and having hit the twilight of his career after tripping and falling over that 1987 snot-rocket, Never Let Me Down, it has loomed larger than ever. Heathen will surely be condemned by those who cannot forgive him for his past greatness, and will likely be loved by a few who still imagine strains of "Space Oddity" beneath its refrains. It's hard to shake the thought that even thirty years later, some people still seem to be expecting another Ziggy.
Yet Heathen doesn't herald a second coming for David Bowie-- not by a longshot. The youthful urgency of his early work is long gone. But that hasn't stopped him from making an album that is easily his best work since the halcyon days of faux-cockney accents and gender bending theatrics a la Scary Monsters, and that's good news. Bowie seems to have finally realized that he's just been trying too damn hard. Where 2000's Hours was a brooding, wrist-slitting account of Bowie's laments about growing old and irrelevant, Heathen is the sound of acceptance. He's relaxed, even serene, and the songs clearly reflect this with a nonchalant charm reminiscent of the Bowie of old.
This is not a particularly cheery record: "Sunday" is a somber, almost sinister chant that builds into an ascending chorus of warm synths and percussion-- a tense, minimal remix of the best moments of Earthling, if you will. In what will surely be the song most often quoted by record critics, "Slip Away," Bowie muses: "Some of us will always stay behind/ Down in space it's always 1982/ The joke we always knew," a brief moment of smiling recognition at the state of his career, fans, and detractors in the wake of his past glory days. Gorgeous and sad, it evokes the simplicity of the past as Bowie sings of "sailing over Coney Island" to a lone piano melody and a compelling Moog-y electronic refrain.
"Slow Burn" is the strongest of Bowie's original material on Heathen-- a moody, bouncy piece with a bass/sax combo that vaguely elicits a 60s pop undercurrent with guitar work from Pete Townshend (yeah, that Pete Townshend!). Townshend's help here is appreciated, mostly because it means the guitar isn't being played by Reeves Gabrels. If Bowie had considered bringing him in earlier, he could have avoided the horror of a car crash like Hours' "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell." Fortunately, Townshend's guitar noodling never steps into the realm of being entirely gratuitous, and as with all the best songs on Heathen, Bowie's vocals are wisely left to dominate.
But oddly, it's the covers that are truly the highlight of the album. Bowie tries his hand at the Pixies' "Cactus" (a move which might make the album's title sound ironically appropriate)-- but take a deep breath. Everything's going to be okay. Mercifully, he handles the song very faithfully, and actually does it justice. He's a far cry from Black Francis, but Bowie's voice is so amazingly distinctive that it almost sounds like a different song. He then moves on to Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You." I don't know what's caused the current rash of Neil Young covers lately, but at least Bowie's old enough to make this sound a little more natural than most might. Bowie hasn't touched rock 'n' roll like this in years, and that he can still carry it off this well is a pleasant surprise.
Heathen's piece de resistance, though, is the phenomenal cover of "I Took a Trip In a Gemini Spaceship" by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Name-based alter ego issues aside, this song is smooth. It's got a fast-paced electronic rhythm to quicken the pulse, and dulcet tones to soothe the ear-- nothing but laid-back electropop fun from start to finish. It's the kind of thing they'll be playing in the lounge of the International Space Station in about ten years or so, assuming the capsule doesn't get pimped out as an orbiting bachelor pad for N*SYNC or something stupid like that.
Bowie is obviously never going to recapture his trend-setting finesse of yesteryear, but at least he seems okay with that. And that's this record's greatest strength. Back when he was busy reminding everyone how out of it he really was by touring with Trent Reznor, he started to play "The Man Who Sold the World" and I actually heard a kid, maybe only two years younger than me, say, "Oh, cool. He's covering a Nirvana song." If that's not a warning sign, I don't know what is. Yes, David, the music world is moving on without you, but you can't end things with Heathen-- some of us, myself included, are still waiting for that final blaze of glory. Before you go, you've got to let the kids know what they missed out on. | 2002-06-16T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2002-06-16T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / ISO | June 16, 2002 | 7.8 | 52626812-cf64-4ae2-8f78-145cfe90d343 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ impressive debut album as Huerco S follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes. Filtering his work through yesterday’s technology, he makes techno folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future. | Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ impressive debut album as Huerco S follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes. Filtering his work through yesterday’s technology, he makes techno folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future. | Huerco S.: Colonial Patterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18520-huerco-s-colonial-patterns/ | Colonial Patterns | Colonial Patterns is a fine album title, suggesting so much yet giving little away. Read it one way and it's an allusion to the arrogance that nations are doomed to repeat. Glance again and it conjures up the lines that such behavior razes, replaces, and retraces on the land. Both readings reverberate throughout Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ debut album as Huerco S. It follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes on exemplary small labels from both sides of the Atlantic-- including Opal Tapes and Future Times-- and sounds like the work of an artist hitting his stride, rather than one making his first big statement.
Leeds’ focus is the hidden histories of his homeland in the American midwest. He signposts as much with titles like “Quivira” named for a mythical place “discovered” by a Spanish explorer in the 16th century, “Canticoy”, a word of Native American origin that means a lively social gathering, and “Monks Mound (Arcology)”, which is an ancient earthwork in Illinois. References aside, his music is heavy with layers, symbols, and signals. Form wise, he takes futurism’s theme tune-- techno-- and filters it through yesterday’s technology: cassettes, synths, and cheap software. The ensuing collision of temporal zones creates a bewildering, all-encompassing present, which might be why Colonial Patterns presents a soundtrack for both blunting jet lag and long road trips in which the landscape is continuously cut and framed by the windshield window.
“Plucked from the Ground, Toward the Sun” moves like cloud formations, calling to mind school science classes and the water cycle chart that detailed water’s cyclic shapeshifting from evaporation to precipitation. “Skug Commune” sounds like a forgotten quiet storm song trying to break through a broken transistor radio, or a conversation half lost down a faulty line, while the raw metallic percussion of “Quivira” evokes an image of acid rain falling on aluminum cutlery.
There are a number of contrasts and conflicts between the natural and manmade world. “'Iińzhiid” laps and rolls like water, its rhythms reflecting and refracting into an infinite horizon. On “Struck with Deer Lungs”, the circling sub-bass turns with the exhausted pallor of an ancient ceiling fan. Lead single “Prinzif” is weighted with a creeping anxiety that smacks of Twin Peaks, a not-so unusual relationship when you consider the cult TV show is probably the most successful illustration of contemporary culture’s fear of the ancient/(super)natural and modern/manmade worlds colliding.
Of course, Colonial Patterns does not exist in a vacuum. There is dialogue with Actress and Laurel Halo’s handling of techno as a form not immune to time, one that can disintegrate just like the vast metropolises that inspired it, leaving fragments that distill into something new once again. Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica and Forest Swords’ Engravings are also relatives, for their exploration of the nature of memory and excavation of history respectively. Like his contemporaries, Huerco S. seeks to unearth new languages-- trace new patterns-- within established musical world orders. In his hands, techno is a folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future. The final track “Angel (Phase)” is both culmination and affirmation of his archaeological digs: a vision of an ancient ambient techno gathering bathed in campfire light and dreaming into the night. | 2013-09-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-09-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Software | September 23, 2013 | 7.9 | 5267a123-b3a7-43db-85c6-6372a08ae9c9 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | null |
The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. She's such a singular artist, there's an easy temptation to contrast her excellent new album, Reality Show, with everything else. | The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. She's such a singular artist, there's an easy temptation to contrast her excellent new album, Reality Show, with everything else. | Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20175-reality-show/ | Reality Show | The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else—to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows. For example: No one will look to this album's sonic signatures to discover the texture of R&B's future. But if it's more difficult to speak to what Sullivan does, that's our failure, an inability to recognize R&B as a discrete, heterogeneous genre. Because more than any artist, Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. Every maneuver can appeal to about as wide a range of R&B fans as exist, in 2015—aside from those looking exclusively for something "different." They'll have to deal with something exceptional instead.
"It's almost impossible to break as an African-American woman right now without TV," R&B singer and reality TV star K. Michelle said about the harsh economic realities of being a performer to Fader magazine late last year. "Reality TV put eyes on me—but it makes it difficult when it comes to Grammy nominations." Sullivan has built a strong fanbase without a show and despite this catch-22. Of course its hard to imagine a performer of her talent wouldn't be more widely celebrated in any other era. But though R&B's commercial fortunes dropped precipitously over the past decade, Sullivan's creative success and consistency over the course of three albums (she released the equally accomplished Fearless in 2008 and Love Me Back in 2010) defy gravity. Though the title of her album can be read as coy commentary on R&B's dependence on television for star-making, it can also be read simply as truth in advertising. Like many of the stories she tells, Sullivan works in layered meanings for a more convincing realism, leaving a definitive interpretation in doubt.
The strand running through Reality Show is Sullivan's performance itself, rather than any particular approach to production. Every character she inhabits is one of hard-earned principle: You may judge their choices, but they are performances of unblinking honesty and an acceptance of consequence that makes our judgement beyond the point. This often means a certain fatalism: "#HoodLove" is cinematic in its portrayal of a relationship's loyalty down to the .45 its protagonist packs in her purse, but the couple are poised at the precipice. "I'ma rock this bitch till the wheels fall off," she sings with the conviction that they'll both be around to see exactly that happen, until finally at the end: "And he ain't always right, but he's just right for me." Doomed though they may be, she finds meaning in conviction.
Sullivan's earlier albums had a more distinct sonic approach: '90s R&B in sensibility (2010's "Holding You Down (Goin In Circles)" used Nas' "Affirmative Action" beat, a familiar maneuver for many Clinton-era R&B acts), Sullivan's performance was still at center stage, locating joy in demonstrative vocal runs. Here, melisma is dimmed to a purposeful shadow; when she does explore the range of her powerful voice, it's as if to indicate the loss of self-control. On "Veins", her voice arcs with searing, yearning electricity. Like many moments on the album, it feels like several songs at once: Its slinky rhythm and backgrounds suggest an external world of physical seduction, while the intensity of her main vocal implies the burning internal passions of anxious obsession.
Though the production is unobtrusive, it seldom holds on to a single style (opener "Dumb" is a march, "Stanley" is a disco record, and "Stupid Girl" is an incredible song with Winehouse-lite production that may be the album's only real misstep). It's still Sullivan who gives the record its shape and tone. Her voice is one of R&B's best instruments. There's a slight grain to one frequency, like a stripe of prematurely grey hair, which gives her vocals an immediately recognizable character and resonates with her stories of hard-won wisdom. Men are eyed with suspicion; "Stupid Girl" is a cautionary tale, but like every song it suggests multiple interpretations—"Run after the boys, or take over the world," Sullivan suggests, but how sincere is she? "When you love 'em like I do, you'll be a fool." Even on "Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)", about the realization of self-love, her voice suggests the dimension of pain into which it was born.
Inevitably we have to make a comparison between Reality Show and R&B more broadly, but it's as easily expanded to popular music as a whole. Sullivan, better than singers and songwriters in almost any genre, creates worlds where relationships take on more complex dynamics, but are immediate in their effect. "Mascara" is complicated in its construction—the character portrait is sympathetic, damning, or neither, depending on how you hold it up to the light. Her songs work so well because they allow the listener to experience them at face value or more holistically, shifting perspectives as rapidly as in life itself. Despite this, Sullivan does not equivocate. Her point of view is not muddled. The album's closer, the rushing, cathartic "If You Dare", makes its argument for moral courage explicit. | 2015-01-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-01-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | January 30, 2015 | 8.1 | 526c4bb2-3d3d-4c71-8b4a-c1c4d8aa5f0e | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
Electronic musican Laurel Halo's releases since 2012's Quarantine can be read as a reaction to that album and its reception, as she has steadily retreated from that album's vocally oriented post-pop into the harsh instrumental strictures of techno. Her second album, the dynamic, bracing Chance of Rain, continues this transition. | Electronic musican Laurel Halo's releases since 2012's Quarantine can be read as a reaction to that album and its reception, as she has steadily retreated from that album's vocally oriented post-pop into the harsh instrumental strictures of techno. Her second album, the dynamic, bracing Chance of Rain, continues this transition. | Laurel Halo: Chance of Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18678-laurel-halo-chance-of-rain/ | Chance of Rain | The chief talking point that emerged from Laurel Halo's excellent debut album, Quarantine, was Halo's decision to emphasize her vocals. It seemed a hard left turn for an artist who, through a spate of EPs, had practiced obfuscation, both in her music and in her public persona. Halo's releases since Quarantine can be read as a reaction to that album and its reception, as she has steadily retreated from that album's vocally oriented post-pop—and the transparent artistic agency that it implied—into the harsh instrumental strictures of techno. Her second album, the dynamic, bracing Chance of Rain, continues this transition, further mussing her artistic motives via industrial rhythms and corrosive synth textures.
The music on Chance of Rain defies easy placement—probably on purpose. It flickers between 90s-era IDM fussiness, warped hypnagogic sentimentality, and actual club music meant to inspire dancing. Sometimes it stops, mid-song—as on the title track—to wade through a pretty, jazzy piano melody, only to later return to its choppy, crunching kick drum attacks. This sense of placelessness, its ability to obscure its purpose and cloak its creator, defines Chance of Rain. It's a Laurel Halo album in name; when it plays you don't spend much time thinking about its creator or her motives.
Two pretty, jazzy piano pieces bookend Chance of Rain, reminding us of the oft-repeated fact that Halo is a formally trained musician. In between, Chance of Rain is a near constant churn of effects and shifting rhythms, frequently interrupting itself to wander in new directions. The longer tracks—"Oneiroi" and "Thrax" in particular—are stop-and-start affairs whose tough beats resist momentum. There's a crankiness to Chance of Rain, as noxious, cloudy chords hover above even the most motive tracks ("Ainnome", "Serendip"). Tonally, Chance of Rain is peers with the hoary machine music being churned out by the L.I.E.S. label, but there's an odd iridescence to Halo's work not found in other noisy, underground dance music.
When Chance of Rain slows down, as on the perplexing "Still/Dromos" or "Melt", it feels industrial, chemical in its potency. There's an undiluted quality to the sounds Halo conjures, and its 44 minute runtime requires some endurance. Frequently ugly, Chance of Rain doesn't court affection, and it's hard to nestle up to something that's continually slew-footing you. Quarantine was a difficult listen because it sounded as if Halo was right in your ear; on Chance of Rain she only appears to chop at your knees before dashing back into the shadows.
Halo spoke to Wire magazine about becoming more comfortable as a producer; Chance of Rain sees her place her gnarly sounds front and center, the way Quarantine did with her voice. The result is still unnerving, though in a more subtle way (no one is likely to tell Halo her synthesizers are too loud, or not tuneful enough). When the album finds a moment of peace—like when the title track dissolves into a simple, noir-ish outro—it feels forged. Craggy and hard as hell, you'll wish Chance of Rain forged a few more such moments, but its consistent, nagging ability to knock you off balance is worth wrestling with. | 2013-10-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 30, 2013 | 7.4 | 526de9d6-ce3d-4796-973c-7acb3233bc5c | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On their second album, the buzzy UK group only sometimes overcomes their style-over-substance sound that coats their glossy songs. | On their second album, the buzzy UK group only sometimes overcomes their style-over-substance sound that coats their glossy songs. | Jungle: For Ever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jungle-for-ever/ | For Ever | The British soul collective Jungle wear their second-hand influences with pride. They come about disco by way of Disclosure, Marvin Gaye by way of Pharrell, and Sly and the Family Stone by way of Portugal. The Man. With less industry savvy they might just be a wedding band that does a mean “Get Lucky,” but thanks to their viral videos and a supportive British music press, they’re one of the UK’s buzziest acts, and a magnet for royalties and licensing fees. It was prescient that they titled their biggest track “Busy Earnin’,” because it sure has been.
Despite its superficiality, Jungle’s 2014 debut was an effective jam-delivery vehicle that doled out one agreeably brainless funk track after another. On their follow-up, For Ever, they strive for something a little more substantial. While writing the album, band principals Josh “J” Lloyd-Watson and Tom “T” McFarland both ended long relationships, and many of these songs find the two nursing wounded hearts. Whether the For Ever of its title is a deliberate nod to Bon Iver’s For Emma is unclear, but there’s a good dose of Justin Vernon’s tortured falsetto in the guys’ voices on the yearning “House in LA” and the funereal “Pray.” Or maybe they borrowed that from James Blake (again, their musical influences usually boil down to whatever’s newest).
Los Angeles looms over the record, not as a symbol of sunshine and opportunity, but as a failure, the city they couldn’t make work. After Lloyd-Watson moved there for a relationship, the band began recording the album there—and, truly, if there’s anywhere a band this plugged into to the musical zeitgeist belongs, it’s LA—but they returned to London after the sessions (and the relationship) didn’t pan out. “Truly you care if I’m getting on that plane,” they sing on “House in LA,” “So ask me to stay/Oh God, in the hope that you can heal my pain.”
So there’s an emotional arc here, which, on paper, is a welcome change from the style-over-substance approach of the band’s debut. “We’re using the music to put our thoughts and feelings and fears into, rather than just thinking, ‘This has got to be a song that people like,’” Lloyd-Watson told the Evening Standard. “We weren’t really doing that before.” Unfortunately, heartbreak isn’t this band’s strong suit, and neither singer has the type of voice that make listeners invest in their pain. Their reedy, one-note falsettos barely have the range for dance tracks that ask almost nothing of them, and For Ever’s mopier material is at odds with the very specific, frivolous itch that listeners come to this band to scratch.
Jungle fare best when they stick to the grooves. “Heavy, California” splits the difference between Off the Wall and Junior Senior, while “Beat 54 (All Good Now)” rides an airy disco loop. But this band lacks the songwriting prowess or basic self-awareness to make their tracks anything more than mildly pleasurable pastiches. Their critique of consumer culture on “Happy Man” (“Buy yourself a dream/How’s it looking?/Buy yourself a car and a house to live in”) would sound a lot more convincing coming from a band whose best-known song wasn’t literally used as a car commercial. It’s ironic, given Jungle’s success in marketing themselves, that just about the only thing this band can’t seem to sell is their emotions. | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | September 20, 2018 | 5 | 526f39e9-3127-4cb1-a50e-64021b685015 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On his feature-heavy new album, the Oakland rapper takes stock of his achievements so far while looking toward a new stratum of success with clear-eyed gratitude. | On his feature-heavy new album, the Oakland rapper takes stock of his achievements so far while looking toward a new stratum of success with clear-eyed gratitude. | ALLBLACK: TY4FWM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/allblack-ty4fwm/ | TY4FWM | Seeing your name in lights is an emotional experience for any artist, equal parts ego-inflating and awe-inspiring. The cover of ALLBLACK’s 2020 album No Shame 3 featured his rap moniker in big, bold letters on the marquee of Oakland’s historic Fox Theater. But despite the confidence boost that comes with recognition, the self-proclaimed “Hardest out the O since Keak da Sneak” has made humility a defining feature of his work, often thanking the producers who supplied his beats on the record and crafting a trademark ad-lib out of his gratitude toward listeners and collaborators: “Thank you for fucking with me,” which supplies the fitting title for his new album TY4FWM.
Featuring production from the likes of DJ Fresh—the Bay Area legend behind The Tonite Show mixtape series—No Shame 3 synthesized three decades of Bay Area rap history and saw new-generation acts like DaBoii and Guapdad 4000 mingling with legends like Too $hort. TY4FWM builds similar connections with headliners and takes stock of ALLBLACK’s achievements so far, but it also plots future plays and looks toward a different stratum of success. Though he released the album through his independent label Play Runners Association, he’s clearly eyeing a path beyond regional stardom.
TY4FWM is feature-heavy, but as the gracious title implies, it seems like everyone genuinely fucks with ALLBLACK. There’s a hang-out vibe, a feeling of mutual respect and camaraderie amongst an All-Star roster of current West Coast rap, from mainstream artists like G-Eazy and Vince Staples to acclaimed cult favorites like Drakeo the Ruler and ShooterGang Kony. It’s easy to see why ALLBLACK has made connections with rappers from the Golden State: he’s hard-working and humble, serious when he needs to be, and casually funny when the time is right. On “10 Toes,” he comes off as more of a straight man alongside clown prince E-40—G-Eazy is void of charisma when put up against the other two and one of the album’s few moments of dead air. “War Stories” recruits Sacramento’s Mozzy and Peezy for a shit-talking session among street veterans, swapping tales of danger and paranoia from the frontlines like Robert Shaw showing off his sailor tats and shark bites in Jaws. The three rappers reflect as much as they flex.
There’s a constant interplay between the fast and furious rap flows popular right now in Michigan and California, so Sada Baby is a natural addition on “Do or Die,” driven by a sultry pop vocal from singer Carrie. The omnipresent Kenny Beats rears his head on the Drakeo-featuring “Ego,” which feels like the cut most likely to blast from car speakers—Drakeo and ALLBLACK are similarly dry in their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it wit, though ALLBLACK lacks Drakeo’s distinct weirdness.
ALLBLACK might thrive as a tag team partner, but he’s equally adept as a solo performer, and he does some of his most impressive rapping on feature-less tracks like “Cobra Kai'” and “Anejo.” His flow is straightforward and focused, with precision and just a little grit in his throat, and the lyrics are relatively reserved in their pop culture references. When he does name-drop a movie or athlete, it packs a more brutal punch, comically and emotionally: “When I mob, I really mob, it look like City of God.”
With production handled mainly by DTB, these are the kinds of beats that will be familiar to listeners of recent Cali and Detroit rap, heavy on wet and bouncy synth lines that feel as much like acid house as G-funk. It’s hardly hip-house, but many of ALLBLACK’s tracks are at a higher, almost danceable BPM, and album opener “Life of a P” builds from the same Mr. Fingers rhythm Kanye West pilfered for “Fade,” with goth-funk crooner Kossisko on hook duty. TY4FWM occasionally features soulful vocal samples, stripped down and buried under layers of watery filters, most noticeably the oft-flipped “Saturday Love” on “Anejo.” Just when you feel like you’ve settled into a groove, ALLBLACK flips the script. On “Cobra Kai,” the drums and beat disappear halfway through the song, replaced by a frantic series of piano lines that are eventually joined by thumping percussion.
ALLBLACK might have reached a level where his name can stand alone on a marquee, but he doesn’t seem comfortable in the solitary spotlight; the cover for TY4FWM shows him surrounded by his association of play runners. Many artists might sever connections or leave loved ones behind to get ahead. ALLBLACK makes it clear he’s not going anywhere unless he can bring his family, his team, and his hometown with him.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Play Runners Association / Empire | May 13, 2021 | 7.1 | 5270314f-dba4-49c6-8049-ac41441684bc | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Perhaps familiar from being sampled by the Avalanches, this New York tween was an inspiring underground star in the early 1980s, a reputation confirmed by this archival collection. | Perhaps familiar from being sampled by the Avalanches, this New York tween was an inspiring underground star in the early 1980s, a reputation confirmed by this archival collection. | Chandra: Transportation EPs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chandra-transportation-eps/ | Transportation EPs | When the Avalanches returned in 2016 after an absence of nearly two decades, a sampled koan lurked at the heart of “Subways,” their swooning comeback: “You walk on the subway/It moves around.” The voice belongs to Chandra Oppenheim, a veteran of the New York downtown scene who attended New York Dolls shows, rubbed elbows with Madonna, opened for Laurie Anderson, played the Mudd Club, staged performance art pieces at the Kitchen, and performed with her band on “Captain Kangaroo.” Not bad for a tween: Chandra was just 12 when she and her band of the same name cut “Subways” and three other songs for a now-coveted 1980 EP.
That EP, an unreleased second one, and two four-track demos form this fidgety new reissue, a welcome resurrection since the band hasn’t gotten much notice in the decades of New York comps that have followed. After splintering from late 1970s punk band Model Citizens, Eugenie Diserio and Steve Alexander formed kinetic no wave group The Dance with future Material and Scritti Politti drummer Fred Maher. They also found themselves taken with the young Oppenheim, becoming her backing band and fostering her nascent songwriting. “Chandra would blow us away with her lyrics,” Alexander remembered in an interview with The Guardian. “We were always like, ‘Don’t change a thing.’”
The four songs Chandra actually released in 1980 recall fellow nervy New Yorkers ESG and Y Pants, plus the vim of the Slits and LiLiPUT. Oppenheim adds touches of organ and even post-punk melodica to the mix. After that first EP, Diserio and Alexander put together a band of peers to back-up Chandra, all closer to her own age. Despite that youthfulness, the resultant six songs are slightly less rambunctious, hewing closer to the polished synth-led sound of new wave. Jittery bass and guitar deliver bounce to “Get It Out of Your System,” while hand claps and more melodica add a post-punk edge to “Stranger,” which anticipates Le Tigre. During the spiky “Tish Le Dire,” Chandra rails against teachers and her elders before taking a dark turn at the song’s end: “What about suicide?/Don’t you think we tried?/It was a lie!”
While the Avalanches’ own “Subways” has a sunny (yes, even childlike) disposition, Chandra’s original feels like real New York, bristling with everyday observations and a slowly encroaching paranoia. After that sampled opening line, Oppenheim lets her mind wander, imagining all manner of fears that are fitting for an adolescent girl riding public transit alone: falling on the tracks, missing her stop, hearing anonymous screams, not being able to stand clear of the closing doors.
“Kate” is as beguiling, and a seemingly pat opening line again reveals myriad conflicting emotions. “There’s a girl named Kate, and she thinks she’s really great/But she’s not!” Oppenheim yips at the start, seemingly disgruntled by a particularly magnetic classmate. The springy rhythm suggests Talking Heads, though a queasy melodica burrs against the groove like John Cale’s viola in the Velvet Underground. With each successive line, Oppenheim reveals another emotional fold, her scorn giving way to sympathy and the urge to shield Kate from the male gaze.
Turns out, Kate was not her competition, but rather her friend, evidenced by the two playfully posing on the original’s back cover. In the Snapchat age, when many parents and adults seem newly mystified by what transpires in the minds of middle-schoolers, hearing Chandra’s brief musical outburst almost 40 years later feels fitting. It’s a reminder that the interiority of adolescents remains complex, self-aware, defiant, and disarming. | 2019-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Telephone Explosion | January 10, 2019 | 7.8 | 52717a8c-96a8-495f-9789-8f13c97f6337 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
This sprawling set comprises all seven Blur albums, three DVDs, and five-and-a-half hours' worth of rarities. For its breadth and complexity, the box tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well. | This sprawling set comprises all seven Blur albums, three DVDs, and five-and-a-half hours' worth of rarities. For its breadth and complexity, the box tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well. | Blur: Blur 21 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16877-blur-21/ | Blur 21 | Choose Damon. Choose Graham. Choose Damien Hirst's cheekily agit-pop country house or Sophie Muller's teen-spirit-stinking squat. Go pop, then spend a decade slowly deflating; study the songbook so you can tear it up with precision. Choose irony, choose sincerity. Choose your own worst NME: a Gallagher, any Gallagher, or maybe just yourself ("Do you feel like a chain store? Practically floored?"). Choose fame, or flee from it fast as you can in a milkman's suit. Choose Ray Davies, choose Stephen Malkmus; choose la-la-la or wooo-hoo. (And before you answer this next one know that the Queen is watching.) Choose Britain. Choose America.
Or, you know, don't choose. Blur have been a band for 21 years, and their story is long enough to speak a bunch of contradictions. That's what happens to bands that house four egos and a pair of dueling geniuses. They rarely move in straight lines. One example of many: Blur arrived in New York for the first time on the day Nevermind was released. When asked on radio what they thought of the new Seattle sound, Graham Coxon said, "I fucking hate it." Later he'd be the one to lead the band toward a post-grunge, indie-tinged sound, a nugget of which will be blared alongside "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at sports arenas until the end of time. Another? In 1994, Damon Albarn wrote a snide little number about the cultural allure of the West (sneeringly: "La-la-la-la-la/ He'd like to live in Magic America/ With all the magic people"). Three years on, he was a bit more forgiving (one more time, with earnestness: "Look inside America/ She's alright/ She's alright"). It's not despite but because of these pivots and complexities that it feels appropriate to call Blur a defining band of the past two decades.
Up until now, listeners have been urged to take one of two positions: 1) "Great pop band, until they went to America and sold out!"; or 2) "The early stuff is too British, but I love all that weird shit they did later on." There was a sense that you couldn't love it all-- the witty, theatrical, Kinks-inspired character sketches perfected on 1994's Parklife and the impressionistic elegies of their 1999 sad-bastard masterstroke, 13. And the choice was loaded. Think I'm exaggerating? Just read some of the reviews of their last two greatest-hits collections, 2000's Best of Blur and 2009's Midlife, both of which favored their later stuff. "Let Blur bash their way on towards the margins," Steve Sutherland wrote defensively in a 2000 issue of NME. "Just because these [early] songs embarrassed them once they started listening to broadsheet critics and retreated wounded from the big-sales battle with Oasis doesn't mean that we're morons to love them." Nine years later, Scott Plagenhoef observed on this site, "Few bands from the 90s increased their stature this decade among America's self-identifying indie set as much as Blur." Midlife, he said, "can be seen as a more Americentric look at Blur's career, which makes some sense as they still have a lot of fanbase growth potential in the States."
Three years after Midlife-- and with the whole world turned to their second reunion at the London Olympics closing ceremony-- it's time for a truce. So here it is, Blur 21, the inevitable box set comprising all seven albums, three DVDs, and five-and-a-half hours' worth of rarities. And even if you can't afford the thing on vinyl, its very existence presents us with the perfect opportunity to rethink the band's history. Because for its breadth and complexity, the box actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.
Be patient, though, because we're going to start at the beginning, and their 1991 debut, Leisure, is not very good. It shows a melodic gift and hints at the Syd Barrett obsession that would plant seeds for future experimentation ("Sing"). But mostly, it's the work of a band still searching for its identity. Prior to signing with the London label Food Ltd., Blur were known as Seymour, a madcap art-punk four-piece that generated a mild buzz in late-80s London with their boozy, chaotic live shows. That anarchic energy is all but absent from Leisure, though it's captured on the box's first disc of rarities, including early Seymour demos and a 7" containing the endearingly awkward baby picture "Superman".
When Leisure came out, baggy was all the rage in the UK. The label's intention was to turn Blur into the next Stone Roses-- or better yet, the even better-selling Food signees Jesus Jones. They wanted Blur's first single to be the baggy-by-numbers "I Know" but, in the first of many well documented band-vs.-label throw-downs, the band fought for the shoegazey "She's So High". Blur won, and 21 years later, this art-over-commerce victory feels prophetic, even if the song doesn't. "High" is still a better track than "I Know", but it has a kind of time-stamped anonymity that pervades even the best moments of Leisure: pretty, vacant, and vague.
1992 would light a fire under Blur, kindled by a few factors: a bad management contract that left them in significant debt; critical and commercial disappointment; intra-band conflict (a flame that never stopped burning); and, above all, grunge. Blur toured North America for the second time that year. And just a year into the post-Nevermind world, flannel, disaffectedly mumbled lyrics, and buzzsaw guitars were the new normal. "Nothing in England counted and that really pissed us off," Albarn recalled in 1999. "So we decided to make a record as English as possible; a record full of English references and English cultural icons." Therein lies the irony of their breakthrough 1993 album, Modern Life Is Rubbish. Though it wouldn't hit big in America, it was conceived with the same spirit of roguish overthrow as Nevermind itself. Albarn's newfound articulateness was, actually, an act of punk rebellion, a sneering rejection of the status quo.
The artistic leap between Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish is roughly the same size as the one between Pablo Honey and The Bends: unpredictably huge. It's a statement record in title, sound, and content. What else can be said of an album that begins with a once-upon-a-time as dramatic as, "He's a 20th-century boy..." and draws upon an lineage of English guitar pop ranging from the Kinks to the Who to T. Rex? Blur would improve on these ideas on their next few records, but Modern Life remains a finely observed, tartly disillusioned snapshot of post-Thatcher Britain, buoyed by exquisite pop hooks. "Colin Zeal" and "Chemical World" also mark Albarn's first forays into the character study songs he'd later become known for. Into theater since his teens, Albarn would occasionally let drop in interviews that his greatest influences were Brecht, Weill, and Artaud's "theater of cruelty." Modern Life began to fulfill that promise: Blur were suddenly a band of ideas, though none so pompous that it weighed down the immediacy of their music.
Parklife is the masterpiece of this era. Pop-art bright, stingingly funny, and at times suddenly poignant, it remains the defining artifact of Britpop. It's a nationalistic record in the same way Born in the USA is a nationalistic record: It might look like sloganeering patriotism if viewed from outer space, but up close it's a finely detailed, intricately cracked document of a very particular national malaise. The disco smirk "Girls & Boys" (propelled by one of Alex James' best basslines) finds its hedonistic vacationers "avoiding all work, 'cause there's none available," while the tragicomic "Tracy Jacks" sketches a lonely civil servant who goes quietly mad. With humor, pathos, and nostalgia, Parklife tells of a modern world where dreams have been boxed in by materialism, conformity and routine, and even the once-space-age future has lost its sparkle. "End of the century," Albarn shrugs over Coxon's minor chords. "It's nothing special."
The millions-selling, Brit-Award-sweeping Parklife was also the record that made Blur into bona fide pop stars, a role that some members embraced more readily than others. "I made a point of drinking two bottles of champagne a day for 18 months," is how bassist Alex James remembers 1994. "England only imports something like 100,000 bottles a year, so I reckon I drank 1% of England's total champagne import." At that point Coxon was, arguably, drinking even more, but without the joie de vivre; instead, he was increasingly uncomfortable with the band's success. The Great Escape, the improbably strong 1995 effort they churned out amidst the squeals of Parklife mania, is fittingly a record of baroque excess (lots of brass) and tension. It's Blur's poppiest album, but it's puffed within an inch of bursting: "Stereotypes", "Charmless Man", and "Entertain Me" are all deceptively dark, stretched like a smile pulled eerily tight. Escape's crown jewel is the brilliant, Pulp-like single "The Universal", an exploration of anhedonia, a state of mind the band knew intimately at this point. Coxon retreated further, and for a moment it looked like he'd leave the band. What happened, though, was just the opposite. He steered them toward their biggest re-invention yet.
"Death of a Party" (which now sounds like the first proto-Gorillaz Blur song) is the most apt song title on 1997's Blur. Recorded partially in self-imposed exile in Iceland, it is a post-success record, what happens when the odd burdens of mega-fame don't destroy a band but instead sends it diving into uncharted waters. It is 1995's hangover. Exquisitely bleary-eyed ("I'm Just a Killer for Your Love", the oddball sprawl of "Essex Dogs") and often jolting ("M.O.R.", "Chinese Bombs"), Blur sounds like staying up for six days and then accidentally catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. And somehow, amidst the claims of career suicide, it was a huge international hit, the one that finally broke them in the States. (Which is to say that yes, this is the "Song 2" album.)
Blur found Pavement in the mid 90s the way Dylan found Jesus in the late 70s: The transfiguration was that complete, that apparent, that difficult for longtime fans to swallow. Coxon had long been evangelizing American indie rock to his bandmates, and, wearied of fame and looking for a new direction, they finally started to listen. To call Blur Coxon's record is a huge simplification (it also marks the height of Albarn's Bowie phase), but it does contain the first song that Coxon wrote and sang on a Blur record, the sweetly wooly "You're So Great". Much has been made of the Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. influence on his virtuosic playing, but Coxon has said that the record he was listening to most while making Blur was Big Star's elegiac Third/Sister Lovers. Alex Chilton was an artistic kindred spirit for Coxon. Both had experienced intense, Tiger Beat-cover-style adoration (Chilton had a No. 1 song with the Box Tops before he was 18) and had figured out early on that commercial success wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Chilton, of course, lost his foil too early when Chris Bell left Big Star and died in a car crash not long after. The tension that kept Blur going, in a creatively fertile, decade-long state of about-to-combust, was the push and pull between Coxon and Albarn.
"Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to," says drummer Dave Rowntree in the box's liner notes, "But you can't do that in a band with Damon." 13, their second masterpiece, finds Albarn and Coxon's opposing sensibilities bleeding into each other like a muddy watercolor. Both were hurting. Coxon was depressed and still at odds with the rest of the band, and Albarn's long relationship with Elastica's Justine Frischmann had just ended. A coping method he'd picked up from blues and DIY alike, Coxon knew how to translate personal pathos into Blur's music. Both the Blur songs on which he sings lead, "You're So Great" and 13's "Coffee and TV", are candidly about his drinking, and on 13, he guided Albarn toward confessional songwriting, too. Albarn had always used character songs to express emotion, but his songs on 13 strip away the protective covering of wit. "I hope you're with someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep," he croaks on the gorgeous closing lament "No Distance Left to Run", while the wounded pop-spiritual "Tender" is an obvious career highlight. William Orbit's brilliant, painstaking production pushes Albarn's ever-present pop sensibility to the brink of dissolve. The Third/Sister Lovers comparison feels more apt here: 13 is a record in a sustained state of elegant unravel, full of the unexpectedly beautiful sounds that pop songs (and people) make while they're falling apart.
As time goes on, 13 sounds more like a definitive statement, and 2003's Think Tank sounds more like a post-script. Recorded in Morocco after the first Gorillaz record and Coxon's departure (he plays on just one track, the gloomy "Battery in Your Leg"), it may be the only Blur record that suffers in retrospect. There are some great tracks ("Out of Time" and "Sweet Song") but it doesn't quite pack the punch it did a decade ago. On the other hand, the newest track in the box, the archly grand "Under the Westway", feels like a return to form, which is to say it finds the band sounding like it hasn't quite sounded before. In the liner notes, James points to something true, recalling the Think Tank tour: "It took at least four people to replace what [Coxon] does. Two backing singers, another guitarist, and a lead guitarist. And a percussionist." Now that the band is-- tentatively, feebly, and contemptuously as ever-- back together, it's even more clear that Blur is the alchemy between these four people.
Like any box set worthy of attention, the sprawl of rarities offers some illuminating gems (an early demo of "Beetlebum"; the underrated oddball 1992 single "Popscene"), plenty of cheeky throwaways (a Seymour-era cover of "Maggie May"; an orchestral pop snippet called "Sir Elton John's Cock"), and, of course, omissions for never-satisfied diehards to whine about (mine include the original, Leisure-era recording of "1992" and the mid-tempo demo of "Song 2"). The box also contains DVDs of two complete live performances, which tell two very different tales. The first is a show at Alexandra Palace in North London from October 1994. Blur are at the height of their first wave of fame, and the young audience is whipped into such a frenzy that they even sing along with the melody of the instrumental filler "Lot 105", as if they just need something to scream; the band gets off on it. Five years later, they are at Wembley Arena playing all 20 of their singles in chronological order. They look as weary as second-term presidents as they slog through the motions for the first three-quarters of the setlist, but at "Tender" everything shifts. Suddenly, they embody the material, coming achingly alive again, reborn on the stage.
If you need a through-line, try the story that those selected bookends tell: Blur are a triumph of feeling. They spent the first half of their career creating modern characters who'd become fashionably distanced from their own emotions and the next half actually, unfashionably, emoting. But that's just one straight line you could draw; why should you have to choose? Modern life is full of champagne and hangovers. So is Blur. | 2012-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 31, 2012 | 8.5 | 52769682-6eb3-4437-8970-a8eab5acaa1b | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The Texas rap star’s new album has something for every type of Megan Thee Stallion fan—and the strain of catering to the masses has begun to crowd out the goofy charm of her best music. | The Texas rap star’s new album has something for every type of Megan Thee Stallion fan—and the strain of catering to the masses has begun to crowd out the goofy charm of her best music. | Megan Thee Stallion: MEGAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/megan-thee-stallion-megan/ | MEGAN | It is hard to overstate Megan Thee Stallion’s success: She is not just a rap star, but the kind of supercharged celebrity who appears in commercials and movies and hobnobs with pop stars, all while serving as the new flagbearer of Houston rap heritage. On MEGAN, her newest album, you can feel the pressure on her to keep all those plates spinning—to maintain momentum, to not fuck it up. After Tina Snow, the 2018 EP that cemented Megan as a rapper who’s as raunchy, funny, and charismatic as anyone, all of her full-length projects have, to varying degrees, felt like exercises in becoming everything to everyone. But it’s never been as distracting as it is on MEGAN, an uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.
Do you share Megan’s infatuation with anime? Then you will get a thrill out of “Otaku Hot Girl,” which samples a song from Jujutsu Kaisen and features an intro from one of the show’s voice actors. Bankroll Got It’s drum-heavy flip of the soundtrack is uninteresting—though it’s not like he’s working with an anime renowned for its music—and the character references are earnest but unbearably corny. The better song that leans into her fondness for Japanese culture is the multilingual “Mamushi,” which pulls off the theme without flattening her personality. Maybe instead you need new Megan to play at your Pilates class: She’s got you with the feel-good “Worthy,” a Lizzo-coded pop song. Those muscles are put to more effective use on “Spin,” where the silky Victoria Monét hook complements aggressively flirty Megan verses. The fluffy finger-snap beat sounds like it could have been on Love/Hate. (Come to think of it, Megan would have ripped “Shawty Is Da Shit.”)
Then there are the songs for those deeply invested in Megan’s beefs and squabbles. I can picture fans gathering in group chats, dissecting subliminals and clues like they’re in an Agatha Christie book club. After the last three months, I’m all feuded out, so I’m less interested in that game. Still, she lands a few good jokes on “Hiss,” where she calls out the misogynistic dudes in rap who can’t keep her name out of their mouths. (Drake has had a one-sided vendetta toward her for a while now; Megan hits back with some BBL Drizzy theories of her own.) “Rattle,” which has a fast, groovy beat that melodic South Florida rappers would eat up, leaves a sting. “’Cause the niggas don’t beef with the niggas/They scared of each other, but beat on the women,” she attacks; she could be talking about a dozen different rappers, which makes the song feel like a sharp indictment of hip-hop culture in general. As critical as that line is, she still has fun chanting, “Ain’t got no tea on me, this ho’ think she TMZ” while hitting a Harley Quinn cackle in the background.
Megan doesn’t fool around like that enough. Even tracks made to light up the club feel as if they’re satisfying expectations. On the would-be party anthem “Where Them Girls At,” Megan reworks the nostalgic Facebook-era twerk sound of Kansas City’s Kstylis. She doesn’t add anything new to his style; I can only imagine how TisaKorean, a Houston native who is always having a good-ass time tinkering with the past, would have sauced it up. Megan loosens up alongside Glorilla on “Accent,” capturing the tipsy bounce she’s always had in freestyles and features, like Latto’s “Sunday Service” remix. When she’s in that mode, she’s incredibly funny. “That ain’t my bae, he really more like my bidet,” she raps on “B.A.S.,” a Teena Marie-sampling club drill experiment that works because she’s all in. She’s even got a whole song (“Down Stairs DJ”) about masturbating before she falls asleep—not unexpected from Megan, but silly in a way her best music can be, going back to “Big Ole Freak.”
For all my reservations about MEGAN, I do understand the pressures, especially in rap, where hitmaking women have historically been discarded quickly. Foxy Brown got caught in label purgatory after 2001’s Broken Silence wasn’t as huge as Def Jam hoped; Trina had dirt thrown on her name when she did her own thing away from Trick Daddy. The stories are endless. The fears are real. If Lil Baby drops an album that makes zero cultural impact, he can go back to the drawing board. If Megan does? Who knows. She’s not trying to find out. This reality isn’t just depressing on a systemic level, but also because of the effect it has on an artist like Megan Thee Stallion. Even for one of the most celebrated Texas rappers of her generation, nurturing a fanbase takes priority over the music because it feels like a matter of time until the hip-hop industry finds an excuse to turn its back. | 2024-07-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Hot Girl Productions | July 2, 2024 | 6.6 | 527b1f88-8fb3-40a8-a952-0e5807e0a8d2 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
It's difficult to fathom today, but Stardust-- a collection of standards-- was a risky left turn for an artist of Willie Nelson's power and magnitude. Now the record is reissued with a set of other Nelson covers from throughout his career. | It's difficult to fathom today, but Stardust-- a collection of standards-- was a risky left turn for an artist of Willie Nelson's power and magnitude. Now the record is reissued with a set of other Nelson covers from throughout his career. | Willie Nelson: Stardust: Legacy Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12091-stardust-legacy-edition/ | Stardust: Legacy Edition | The standards album has suffered a lot of abuse during this decade, as aging singers use it as a shorthand for artistic revitalization and as a shortcut to career revival. Nothing communicates serious intent quite as earnestly or as cheaply as recording a 75-year-old song, as Rod Stewart, George Michael, Cyndi Lauper, and others who used to be much cooler have discovered. As a result, even the word "standards" provokes an admittedly healthy skepticism in many listeners, but it wasn't always so. Thirty years ago, Willie Nelson took a typically left turn and followed up a string of successful albums (starting with 1975's career-making Red Headed Stranger) with a covers album of songs made famous by decidedly non-country musicians like Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong. It's difficult to understand today how unusual this sort of album was, going against the grain of the contemporary country business. Label execs initially balked, but Stardust become one of the best-selling country albums of all time, spending nearly a decade on the country charts.
Stranger is touted as country's first concept album and one of the foundations of outlaw country, which gives it a sheen of originality in a genre nominally interested in tradition more than innovation. But Stardust sounds like the riskier album and is by far the more rewarding collection, which is to take nothing away from Stranger. What makes the record so thrilling and very often beautiful-- and what separates him from today's ham-handed vocalists-- is Nelson's facility as an interpreter. It's not enough for him just to sing "Georgia on My Mind" or Kurt Weill's "September Song" or even to translate these songs into a country setting. With his tender, textured voice and intuitively around-the-beat phrasing, Nelson gives these songs fresh readings, with just the touch of sentimentality and nostalgia they demand. The cliché "makes them his own" certainly applies here: He sings them as they've never been sung before or since, which is quite a feat considering their age and popularity.
Hardened from endless touring into a tough, tight roadhouse revue, Nelson's band gives a surprisingly supple performance on each song, which reinforces the album's sweetly ruminative mood. Producer Booker T. Jones, of Stax fame, facilitates every aspect of the band's sound, showcasing the performers' range while ensuring the arrangements play to the lyrics and vocals without overwhelming them. The organ and restrained rhythm section hint at the soul records Jones made a decade before, while Bobbie Nelson's piano, perhaps mimicking her brother's vocal style, adds gospel and jazz flourishes to "On the Sunny Side of the Street" and Mickey Raphael's harmonica, one of country's most distinctive instruments, moans lonesome on "Moonlight in Vermont". Nelson and his band blur the distinctions between all of the stylistic elements to create a sound that is best described as simply "American." As such, Stardust has the force of a statement album, yet it's unlikely anyone ever intended it as such. Its casual demeanor may ultimately be the record's most winning trait.
Stardust, however, was not an anomaly in Nelson's career. Previously, he had regularly tackled standards and non-country tracks, and he has continued the practice up to the present. Rather than weigh down this 2xCD Legacy Edition with lesser-quality alternate versions or sessions outtakes, compiler Gregg Geller has collected Nelson's versions of other chestnuts from previous and subsequent albums like Angel Eyes in 1984 and The Promiseland in 1986 (both of which, stunningly, are out of print). The range of material on this second disc, if not the quality or overall cohesiveness, surpasses even that of Stardust, with Nelson returning to Carmichael ("Ole Buttermilk Sky") but also tackling the Dixieland jazz of "Basin Street Blues" and the smoky lounge of "The Gypsy". That these songs are all previously released and most of them readily available doesn't diminish their impact here. This reissue, besides being absorbing as music, almost has the feel of an essay on Nelson's interpretive abilities.
It's not being billed as such, but this Legacy Edition marks the album's 30th anniversary. While country music has changed dramatically since then, Nelson continues to tour like crazy, record nearly constantly, and generally follow his own muse wherever it takes him. In the past few years he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Ryan Adams and Kenny Chesney (surely Timbaland is in line). He rarely writes new material anymore, but continues to reinterpret his own and others' past hits. Generally the songs he chooses are so durable and his style so personal that they allow and even reward countless variations. As such, even more than the sustained narrative of The Red Headed Stranger, Stardust set both the template for Nelson's career and the standard. Few artists have treat the American Songbook so affectionately and so cavalierly. | 2008-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | August 15, 2008 | 9.3 | 527ee59a-c3a4-466e-b281-56b31e3514db | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Australian psychonauts embark on a two-part mythological synth odyssey. It’s one of their wackiest and most uninhibited records to date. | The Australian psychonauts embark on a two-part mythological synth odyssey. It’s one of their wackiest and most uninhibited records to date. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: The Silver Cord | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-the-silver-cord/ | The Silver Cord | In 2013, Giorgio Moroder sat down to give Daft Punk some advice. “Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want,” he monologues on “Giorgio by Moroder.” Consider King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard enlightened: They’ve abided by that method for their entire career, yielding microtonal trilogies, thrash metal climate criticism, and occult-themed hip-hop. If you’ve ever wondered Have King Gizzard made a song like this?, chances are they have.
Inspired by Moroder’s free-spirited approach, the Australian sextet presents The Silver Cord, a synth-based improvisational odyssey that retells ancient mythologies. In an echo of the extended remixes Moroder created for stars like Donna Summer and Blondie, the album appears in two forms, one that runs about 30 minutes and the other stretched as thin as possible into 90 minutes. Skeptics might ask why; the band would probably answer, “Why not?” Even 25 albums in, it’s one of their wackiest and most uninhibited records to date.
The 30-minute mix is clearly the more approachable. Twinkling opener “Theia” might trick you into believing The Silver Cord resembles Butterfly 3000, the mid-pandemic Gizz album that sought to escape into a world of lush synth loops. Closer inspection reveals the new album is more like an electrified sibling of Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, whose mellow, free-flowing songs emerged from open-ended improvisational jam sessions. Though the band has traded guitars, drums, and bass for Rolands, Junos, and Moogs, you can hear familiar techniques, like Michael Cavanagh’s breakneck synth drum fills on “Chang’e” and Stu Mackenzie’s throaty growls on “Gilgamesh.”
The extended mix is where the band really runs wild, creating elaborate imaginings of mythological worlds. It feels most organic on the brighter tracks, like the chameleonic “Theia” (now pushed to 20 minutes), the head-bobbing “Set,” and the celestial “Chang’e.” Named for the Chinese deity who escaped to the moon, “Chang’e” is dreamy and invigorating, with synths that oscillate like waves. In the second half, the tempo rises and the synths pitch up, rocketing to the exosphere; then just when the song threatens to burst, it opens onto a new expanse, as if landing on the lunar surface. The brooding 11-minute version of “Gilgamesh,” on the other hand, drags on with little purpose except to challenge your attention span, and the chants of “Gila! Gila!” feel out of place amid the digital pulses.
The band takes another cue from Moroder with the metallic groove of “Set,” which picks up with a stuttering beat mimicking a turntable scrub. Rapping like a fourth Beastie Boy, Ambrose Kenny-Smith riffs on the Egyptian god of war and chaos with the psilocybin-infused lyricism Gizzard fans have come to expect: “Lucifer inverted/Slender usurper/Piece of work/Struggling stranglehold akin to poison and going for broke.” Certain King Gizzard albums would make welcome trip companions, while others you’d fervently hope to avoid. The Silver Cord lands right in the middle: The band’s retellings of these deities’ stories can be graceful (“Theia,” “Chang’e”) and other times so overwhelming they induce paranoia (“Swan Song,” “Extinction”).
The Silver Cord won’t convince every listener to join King Gizzard’s Phish-like fandom, but it stands out as one of their most playful records in recent years. And compared to some past gimmicks—like an album intended to be played ad infinitum—offering 30- and 90-minute options is practically fan service. Thirteen years into their career, and the band’s stamina is endless. They’ve traversed ancient Mesopotamia to outer space and it still feels like they’re searching for new terrain. | 2023-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | KGLW | November 8, 2023 | 7.1 | 5289e4ae-7dfc-4ad1-93e5-71bf2ebbfbb9 | Jaeden Pinder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jaeden-pinder/ | |
In their seemingly telepathic interplay, the London post-rock trio eschews typical song forms in favor of a kind of collective flickering; their music tracks the process of its creation. | In their seemingly telepathic interplay, the London post-rock trio eschews typical song forms in favor of a kind of collective flickering; their music tracks the process of its creation. | Still House Plants: If I don’t make it, I love u | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/still-house-plants-if-i-dont-make-it-i-love-u/ | If I don’t make it, I love u | Whatever ineffable force makes music feel both contained and alive, Still House Plants have it. Their beautifully fractured sound seems made of nerve endings, like the band’s process is on view and we’re hearing the very moment of a Still House Plants song taking shape. The London trio of vocalist Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, guitarist Finlay Clark, and drummer David Kennedy, who met about a decade ago at the Glasgow School of Art, once said they practice only the starts and endings of their songs, which underscores how each one works: as a vessel for abandon.
Is it telepathy that guides them? When Still House Plants made their U.S. debut in New York last spring, they often communicated among themselves with just their eyes. Elongated silences held between notes would put the audience on edge before everything crashed together at exquisitely incongruous angles. On stage as on record, the trio inhabits the free space of punk and the capaciousness of free improvisation at their own frequency.
Like 2020’s Fast Edit, which established Still House Plants as one of the most exciting experimental rock bands around, If I don’t make it, I love u still eschews conventional song forms in favor of a kind of collective flickering, with rhythms that speed and slow by their own logic and carry the persistent charge of small epiphanies. But this is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music; “I’ve been trying to get much stronger,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings on “MORE BOY,” a thesis. Kennedy brings the inquisitiveness of a free-jazz drummer while Clark uses their guitar to synthesize the glimmer of Midwest emo and ’90s slowcore with the choppy minimalism of no wave. Hickie-Kallenbach’s deep, soulful singing suggests Tirzah’s R&B rasp if it were more elastic and ecstatic. The band applies the tropes of electronic music (samples, breaks, loops) in the way they construct, or more accurately deconstruct, songs with only guitar, voice, and drums. A Still House Plants song is a three-way search forward. It’s always a high-wire act.
The album is divided into 11 tracks, but it feels anchored more discernibly by specific moments within songs: notes and tones that make you think, What’s that? The answer might be some unknown glitter in the guitar, or some marvelous friction, like the sparks that punctuate “M M M” or the buzzsaw discord that cuts through “Silver grit passes thru my teeth” like a flash of shoegaze. The melted chords of “Pant” and wobbly edges of “3scr3w3” make me think fleetingly of Autechre (and it’s hard to imagine another band that could simultaneously conjure Autechre and American Football while speaking their own language entirely). On “MORE BOY,” when the drums pick up midway and Hickie-Kallenbach’s singing locks in, ascending over Clark’s chiming guitar, it’s chilling. The singer’s guttural vocals glitch, digging into a repeated phrase, as if she were sampling herself using only her voice. “MORE BOY” also proves Kennedy’s assertion in an interview with The Wire that withholding drum fills “helps in building up a continuous phrase that never finishes,” a liminal sound.
Still House Plants play with an egalitarian ethos; no one instrument dictates how a song moves. “It’s natural to think that the voice sits at the front, the drums drive, and the guitar is like the bricks, but we move all that around quite a lot,” Hickie-Kallenbach recently told The Quietus. Clark said that “it’s important to remember [the guitar] is just metal and wood,” and “not to get too caught up in what a guitar is ‘supposed’ to do.” Perhaps this extends to the way Hickie-Kallenbach’s lyrics, which are often inscrutable, don’t seem to determine what a song is about—as she told The Wire, she distances herself from the mandate to “narrativize” as the vocalist.
But when her words do ring clearly, If I don’t make it, I love u offers a unique mix of mystery and disclosure. “Deeply sensitive, deeply watchful, mostly head down,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings shyly on “no sleep deep risk,” putting a character inside the music’s abstractions; “I really like it my way.” On “M M M,” I’m pretty sure she croons, “I just want my friends to get me/I want most to support them,” between admissions that “I just want to be seen right” and “I wish I was called Makita,” the melisma of “called” lasting five full seconds. This heartfelt sentiment feels just as risky as the improvisatory bones of the music. It emphasizes the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in their cracked-open musical dialogue. The very title of the album is an emotional prism: If I don’t make it, I love u could be what you’d say to a friend when you’re not sure if you’ll make their birthday party, or it could be the most tragic text message ever composed.
There are precedents for Still House Plants’ postmodern collage and fragmentation. This is the process-oriented essence of ’70s post-punk, prioritizing deconstructed sounds over impossible wholeness—a fractured aesthetic for our fractured, plural selves. Still House Plants have cited other ’90s and early-’00s math-rock and slowcore influences (like Bedhead, Life Without Buildings, and Red House Painters, who inspired their band name). Yet to fixate on the past feels at odds with the unfixed music. If Still House Plants truly evoke anything about those predecessors, it’s how firmly their vision feels of its time—not only in the fevered assembly and unraveling of their stylistic melange, but in the fusion of emotional candor, electronic technique, and conceptual art strategies.
It speaks further to Still House Plants’ rare power that this record comes out via a tiny UK label called Bison, which was created after its founder, an employee of London avant-garde music hub Cafe Oto, saw a 2016 set by the band and established the imprint to release their debut. Maybe the space inside the tracks allows us to bring what we want to the music, but I associate Still House Plants with the conditions of how I first heard them, a time when my mind and heart were rearranging themselves with the stark, uneasy clarity of a new beginning. Note by note, If I don’t make it, I love u seems pitched to that generative, indeterminate energy. “It’s hard to know about anything,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings on “Pant.” “But feeling is good by me.” | 2024-04-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bison | April 23, 2024 | 8.5 | 5298af8f-29bf-433b-b5fe-43f83ae6215b | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Ernest Greene floats back into the slipstream with an album of innocuous, Balearic-influenced makeout jams that sound lush but are mostly empty on the inside. | Ernest Greene floats back into the slipstream with an album of innocuous, Balearic-influenced makeout jams that sound lush but are mostly empty on the inside. | Washed Out: Purple Noon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/washed-out-purple-noon/ | Purple Noon | Ernest Greene seemed like he was finally about to turn a corner on 2017’s Mister Mellow. He switched labels, moving from the long-running Seattle indie Sub Pop to the more beat-oriented label Stones Throw, and shapeshifted samples from crate-digger classics, resulting in an album that felt plucked from the speakers at some chic beachside bar. He wasn’t shattering zeitgeists or anything, but he’d roughed up and tripped out his sound a little bit, creating an album that felt properly realized. His new record, Purple Noon, has Greene back at Sub Pop and opting to make a more streamlined album of innocuous makeout jams; background music that you can put on and forget about. The resulting record is one that feels distilled, extraordinarily meandering, and sometimes too chill even for Greene, the godfather of chillwave.
A great Washed Out track is one that rejiggers and reimagines otherwise forgotten dance music. Usually this means some combination of sleazy Italo Disco, cultish disco tracks, and funk from the ‘70s and ‘80s. On Purple Noon, Greene seems most interested in yachty Balearic pop, and the results are mixed. “Face Up” is laden with plenty of oohs and ahs, cavernous bass, and whopper-sized production flourishes, the blue-eyed song is sterile, and feels true to its Balearic inclinations. There is, however, something unusually anesthetic about the song; it feels impersonal, hollow, and noxiously relaxing. There is little to no scaffolding here, and the track gives off the vibe of a muzak playing in an empty office building.
Greene has always been a bit of an impressionistic songwriter, writing short, simple morsels of verse. Most of these songs are about the dissolution of a mercurial relationship with a lover. On “Paralyzed,” he sings about their amazing chemistry, and how much he longs to see her again. “Each time I think about/You doing those things that drive me wild/Makes me go crazy at the thought,” he coos, like a lost member of the Rat Pack, over a celestial synthesizer and a lazy drum machine loop. The pulsating “Reckless Desires” is meant to be listened to while wearing a pair of boat shoes with a coupe of champagne in hand. Pretty to the touch, Greene isn’t sure what to do about his love interest once again. “You find yourself in someone’s bed again/The lies begin to start/And our story falls apart,” sings Greene tearfully. The statement conveys a sense of intense longing, but there is such a lack of substance in the details.
Purple Noon is missing that joy of discovery that makes Greene a compelling artist. He is at his best when he takes elements of eclectic music from the past and bounces them off his otherwise relaxing sound beds. He shines when he successfully reinterprets the music he is excited about, and that does not happen at all on this record. Diving into Balearic music here seems too obvious for Greene, there is not enough high-contrast tinkering for the results of this record to be anything other than expected. On his past records, Greene has mixed oil and vinegar together, creating music with a satisfying difference in density that might be chill but is never boring. What we have on Purple Noon is more like the product of mixing two different tomato sauces together and then adding a dash of some vaguely horny, cursed relationship drama into the mix. Over a decade into his career, Greene is more than capable of producing technically interesting music that comes across as deceptively simple. Unfortunately, Purple Noon falters and feels too safe and lacking in substance.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sub Pop | August 10, 2020 | 5.8 | 529f750b-425f-4f90-a000-be756c4c3d3a | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
For their first release in seven years, Garbage faced a conundrum similar to that of many artists who found success in the alt-rock 1990s: Do you update your approach to conform to a more contemporary sound, or do you keep partying like it's 1998? | For their first release in seven years, Garbage faced a conundrum similar to that of many artists who found success in the alt-rock 1990s: Do you update your approach to conform to a more contemporary sound, or do you keep partying like it's 1998? | Garbage: Not Your Kind of People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16606-not-your-kind-of-people/ | Not Your Kind of People | I don't know how long it's been since you've listened to Garbage's best and biggest albums, but there's a good chance that 1995's self-titled debut and 1998's Version 2.0 are more brutal than you remember. The former is all sneering, lapsed-Catholic angst (on "Vow", a scorned Shirley Manson compares herself to "Jesus Christ coming back from the dead" and utters the words like they're curdling in her mouth) and dark sensuality ("This is what he pays me for," she breathes on the early single "Queer", "I'll show you how it's done"). Version 2.0 focused even more on internal demons: There's the forlorn "Medication", the asphyxial trip-hop of "Hammering in My Head", and the feel-good anxiety disorder anthem of the 90s, "I Think I'm Paranoid". Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig supplied the sort of relentlessly keyed-up, cranked-to-11 racket you get with a band full of producers, matching Manson's macabre with a persistent sense of unease. "When I grow up, I'll be stable," went the optimistic refrain of one of their bigger radio hits, but those familiar with the deep cuts knew that was wishful thinking.
Garbage reigned in the late-period glory days of alternative-rock radio, probably because their sound was a hectic amalgamation of almost everything that mingled on the format's airwaves: electronica, punk, industrial rock, grunge, and the occasional trip-hop. But given the recent decline of the alt-rock format, the radio station on which you first heard Garbage's big hits probably changed formats years ago. So when Garbage entered the studio to record Not Your Kind of People, their first release in seven years, they faced a conundrum that many other artists who found success in the alt-rock-crazed 90s are dealing with, too: Do you update your approach to conform to a more contemporary sound? Or do you say fuck it and just party like it's 1998?
We got a hint of Garbage's answer earlier this year, when Manson called off plans for a solo album because her label wanted it to have a poppier, more radio-ready sound. ("Too noir," Geffen Records said of the demos. When she later scrapped the record, she issued a public statement: "We had the funeral…it made such a beautiful corpse that we had an open casket.") And, indeed, Not Your Kind of People is in some respects a return to form for Garbage. The material is tighter and more kinetic than their last two records, the relatively tepid Beautiful Garbage (2001) and Bleed Like Me (2005). There's the exhilarating opener "Automatic System Habit", which finds Manson spitting venom over a steely crunch of keyboards and percussion ("Not for you, not for me, not for your other lover/ I won't be your dirty little secret.") On the gentler side, there's the lush "Felt", which buries her vocals under an avalanche of arena-sized Siamese Dream guitars. It's a soothing moment on the otherwise pummeling record but, characteristically, Manson can't help but sound a little sinister as she sings, "They're only feelings, baby."
Growing up hasn't made Garbage any more stable. Their music is still focused primarily on pain and darkness, so much so that it occasionally feels rote, as on the melodramatic, predictable "I Hate Love". Then there's the unfortunate finale "Beloved Freak", a brooding ballad that ends with Manson reprising "This Little Light of Mine". It's a moment that aims for catharsis but veers into the maudlin. Though not without highlights, Not Your Kind of People contains nothing as memorable as their big hits, and it's heavier on the filler than their earlier albums.
The great irony of alternative rock was how relative that term is; as Thomas Frank once asked in the title of an essay about the whole phenomenon, "Alternative to What?" In the mid-to-late 90s, Garbage didn't feel so much in opposition to the times as they did a frenzied synthesis of everything that was happening in rock at the moment. That'd be a harder task to accomplish now, in more sonically diffuse times, but now-ness is no longer Garbage's aim. "It's not our job to reinvent the wheel," Manson said in a recent interview, reflecting on the new album. "That's the playground of the young." So Not Your Kind of People is a statement from a band that's stuck, combatively, to its guns. The times have changed but Garbage haven't, and now, for better and for worse, they've at last become alternative to everything. | 2012-05-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | STUNVOLUME | May 17, 2012 | 6.4 | 52a85853-75a3-4b81-bdb6-3487a0182781 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Continuing in the tradition of 2003/04's double-shot of Want One and Want Two, Release the Stars finds this singer-songwriter flitting between opposite poles-- lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked-- with rumpled uncertainty. | Continuing in the tradition of 2003/04's double-shot of Want One and Want Two, Release the Stars finds this singer-songwriter flitting between opposite poles-- lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked-- with rumpled uncertainty. | Rufus Wainwright: Release the Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10235-release-the-stars/ | Release the Stars | After a decade-long career and five albums, Rufus Wainwright's best work is still ahead of him. His heritage implies this; much like his father Loudon and his mother, Kate McGarrigle-- as well as spiritual contemporaries ranging from Randy Newman to Van Morrison-- Wainwright is cut from the cloth of songwriter for whom youth isn't an essential component of creativity. A quick scan through Wainwright's discography reveals he often falters when he self-consciously asserts his age. Whether in occasionally cringeworthy attempts to massage fragments of popular culture into his comi-tragedies (see 2003's "Vibrate", on which he crooned "My phone's on vibrate for you") or his increasing propensity for folding rock music into his otherwise anachronistic cabaret pop, Wainwright generally works best when he's trying to be outside of his time, not of it.
Continuing in the tradition of 2003/04's double-shot of Want One and Want Two, Release the Stars finds Wainwright flitting between opposite poles-- lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked-- with rumpled uncertainty. To be fair, it doesn't take much to locate the source of his wanderings; unlike most new artists, Wainwright came out of the gate with an incredibly assured aesthetic. Both his 1998 self-titled debut and his 2001 follow-up Poses were remarkably developed records-- the former establishing his way with a wending, operatic arrangement; the latter proving his songs nicely amenable to tidy flourishes of 70s AOR. Since then, whether out of boredom, excitement, or desire for the mainstream acceptance he's so frequently pined for, Wainwright's expanded his sound, tempering his natural inclination towards opulence with different song styles and textures, always with mixed results.
A theatre buff, Wainwright has always known the value of a good opener, and Release the Stars is no exception. "Why does it always have to be fire and brimstone?" he wonders in the explosive curtain-raiser "Do I Disappoint You", which itself sounds a bit like five orchestras playing out the second coming. That's followed by first single "Going to a Town", which balances simple piano chords against a uncommonly pointed lyric: "I'm going to a town that has already been burnt down/ I'm going to a place that has already been disgraced/ I'm gonna see some folks who have already been let down/ I'm so tired of America." With all kinds of satisfying variations and twists on the main melody, it's the rare political song that actually hits its mark, and is easily the album's highlight.
As is often the case, Wainwright's ballads account for a disproportionate amount of the standout moments. With its gentle turns of phrase and slow string arrangements, "Nobody's Off the Hook" recalls what still might be his finest single song, 2001's "Poses". Elsewhere, "Leaving For Paris No. 2" finds Wainwright at his most lovelorn, wrenching a meandering ballad out of a churning piano motif.
As he's always been better about writing about romance than sex, there are some clunkers to contend with as well. None of are more forgettable than the tepid bar-room rock of "Between My Legs", in which a small army of lite rock guitar peels soundtrack Wainwright "shedding a tear" you know where. Meanwhile, allegedly based on Wainwright's one-night stand with the Killers' Brandon Flowers, "Tulsa" opens with a killer jab ("You taste of potato chips in the morning/ Your face has the Marlon Brando club calling") and descends into self-aware pointlessness. Even worse is "Slideshow", a six-minute epic that rests on a ludicrously overwrought refrain: "And I better be prominently featured in your next slideshow."
Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall. Nonetheless, it's hard to take away from what he's already accomplished. At only 33, he's quietly amassed a body of work, the best of which rivals most of his singer/songwriter contemporaries. If we do ever get that masterpiece, it'll be straight icing. | 2007-05-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | May 17, 2007 | 6.7 | 52b988e7-988c-4ee9-9df4-0d9c5bc23aa1 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Bob Dylan’s masterful comeback, 1997’s Time Out of Mind. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Bob Dylan’s masterful comeback, 1997’s Time Out of Mind. | Bob Dylan: Time Out of Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-time-out-of-mind/ | Time Out of Mind | Not long after attending the California funeral of his friend Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan found himself snowbound at his Minnesota farm. He would listen to the storms and write after the sun sank from the winter sky. Those songs turned the cold environment into a crystalline lens on the tiring world—a place that was “not dark yet, but getting there,” where “the blues [were] wrapped around my head.”
What Dylan had left to say or whether he had any enthusiasm left for saying it had, for a while, been unclear. Seven years had passed since he had released an original new tune, and that album, Under the Red Sky, was a near-catastrophe, scuttling what had seemed a comeback after Dylan crept through his polarizing ’80s evangelism. He had grown disillusioned with the cycle of writing and recording, he later said, and simply wanted to play.
During the ’90s, he issued two solo acoustic albums of earnest, sometimes poignant renditions of American standards, delighting those who had pined for the lost days of the folk kid from Greenwich Village. But coffeehouse covers hadn’t made Dylan a spark of resistance in the ’60s or a source of bittersweet reckonings with reality in the ’70s. He had become a legacy act, accruing lifetime achievement laurels and touring his hits for Boomers in khakis. Possibly for the first time in his career, Dylan was beginning to blend into the scenery.
But months after Garcia’s funeral, Dylan approached the audacious producer Daniel Lanois. Since helming the contentious sessions for what many had prematurely considered Dylan’s actual comeback, 1989’s half-stepping Oh Mercy, Lanois had cut U2’s Achtung Baby and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, a wondrously atmospheric abstraction of the singer’s gorgeous and aging country vision. In a New York hotel room, Dylan read Lanois the lyrics and asked him if he had a record. “I said, ‘Yes, Bob, I think we’ve got a record,’” Lanois remembered with a sly laugh during a recent phone call.
Dylan sent Lanois home with a list of reference records to study—Charley Patton, Little Walter, Little Willie John, a mix of ragged blues and primordial rock. “I listened to these records, and I understood,” Lanois wrote in his memoir, Soul Mining. “A new birth with the old dogs under your arm, like a stack of classic books.” In the end, that rebirth was Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s 30th album and one that doesn’t sound much like the basic blues at all. Instead, it is an essential post-modern reappraisal of them, an experimental consideration of what could become of the blues’ sound and spirit and a mutual communion of articulate, exquisite despair. At the last minute, Lanois took Dylan’s blurry snapshot for the cover of Time Out of Mind; on tape, that’s exactly how he had captured him.
The next year was a reminder of what Dylan said he despised about making records—extended seaside sessions on the Atlantic and the Pacific, guitars smashed in anger, a militia of Nashville crackerjacks and world-class session players who had to be told more than once to play a lot less. Lanois and Dylan fought like hell in the parking lot of the Miami studio where they recorded, but after more than half a year and many mixes, overdubs, and lyrical revisions, Time Out of Mind—11 songs that would transform Dylan from seemingly obsolete icon to wise, wizened visionary almost overnight—was finished. And then Dylan nearly died.
Four months before Time Out of Mind arrived and just days after his 56th birthday, Dylan was admitted into a Los Angeles hospital after persistent chest pains that suggested a heart attack. Instead, acute pulmonary histoplasmosis—a nasty fungal infection caused by bird-and-bat feces in the country’s most fertile river valleys—had inflamed the covering around his heart and nearly killed him. “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he said later. For weeks between his hospital release and the album’s release, Dylan was bedridden, emerging just in time to play for the pope in Rome and sit for a series of high-profile interviews that inquired not only about his near-death experience but also that of his career.
Dylan’s brush with Elvis made for an easy press hook, especially given the twilit misery of Time Out of Mind. In its four-star review, Rolling Stone noted the album “confront[-ed] his advancing years and the prospects of failing health.” In a moment of too-soon chicanery, Newsweek’s cover joked “Dylan Lives.”
But Time Out of Mind is not merely about death, though its inevitability looms at the periphery of these songs with the certainty of the setting sun; sometimes, death even seems for Dylan like the easy, desirous exit. Instead, Time Out of Mind is about dealing with life and its itinerant lows, knowing how it will all end, anyway. The blues become an emotional state of being. Through the cobwebs of his beleaguered voice, Dylan musters all the feelings of losing love, full of pride and insanity and lust and violence and humor, implicitly navigating the five stages of grief.
He writes with the hardened edge of Hemingway, trying to cloak feelings with callouses and sweetening his bitterness with a dash of wit. A portrait of the sometimes-awful truth about life and love, Time Out of Mind stands alongside Mark Rothko’s so-called Black Paintings, conceived in poor health just before he killed himself, for its ability to stand at the lip of an abyss and stare into it. If you look long enough at the Rothko or listen closely to the Dylan, the most unexpected shapes will eventually stumble out of the dark.
Dylan begins in a bout of denial. At the start of “Love Sick,” he shuffles through empty streets in the rain, a tangle of warped guitar, haunted organs, and faint drums aptly framing his bleak mood. He is mad at the world, judging its smiling people and castigating its illusion of happiness. “I’m sick of love/I wish I’d never met you,” he calmly seethes in the closing chorus, addressing his ire not at anyone in particular but at the idea of human connection at large. “I’m sick of love/I’m trying to forget you.”
But the first five minutes of “Love Sick,” which sound so preternaturally cool and ultimately unaffected that the song was immortalized in a Victoria’s Secret advertisement, are purely a pose. After Dylan sashays through that last refrain, he collapses into the confession that sets the tone for most of Time Out of Mind: “Just don’t know what to do/I’d give anything to be with you,” he sings, his voice now curdled. The band pulls back from the pulse and lets the melody dangle against the open air, as if they too are surprised by the sudden candor of their maestro. This is the moment where we get to the heart of Time Out of Mind, where Dylan crawls inside his own depression.
For most of the next 70 minutes, that’s where he stays: Dylan’s misery is so exhaustive that, during “Dirt Road Blues,” he turns the sight of a rainbow into an instance of pain. Elsewhere, parties give him headaches. He is alternately cold and broke, hot and aimless. “It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay,” he half-howls during “Cold Irons Bound,” an aired litany of grievances that finds him losing most everything he holds sacred. “It’s sadder still to feel your heart turn away.”
Dylan hits rock-bottom during a duo of creeping existential crises, mercifully separated here by a swaggering barroom prowl. During “Not Dark Yet,” he tells us he has been to “London… and ‘gay Paree,’” reminders that he is a worldly sort who has had success and lived well. But here he is, shattered by the most pedestrian of things—love, or the loss of it—and tragically concluding “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere.” A decade before, he was coming down from his great Christian awakening. Now, he doesn’t “even hear the murmur of a prayer.” How could he fall further?
Lanois’ production has often been criticized for warping Dylan’s voice too much, for burying it in a cloud of effects. In early Time Out of Mind demos and outtakes, after all, Dylan practically sounds like Etta James, riding on top of his blues; on the record itself, he is pushing the words upward as an act of mere survival, letting them out so he can breathe back in. But the pervading murk of “Not Dark Yet” is exactly what these lyrics demand. As with the transmuted blues of Loren Connors or Grouper, Lanois lets Dylan flicker at the threshold of existence here, giving his troubles a sense of mortal urgency.
“Trying to Get to Heaven” is about being uncomfortable with everything and everyone everywhere—kicked out of Missouri, given false consolation in New Orleans, taken for a ride to nowhere in Baltimore. In the end, he simply falls asleep to escape inside his dreams, a world that now seems as concrete and meaningful as the actual people around him.
Strange as it may sound, “Trying to Get to Heaven” has long felt inspirational, given the subsequent arc of Dylan’s career. “When you think that you’ve lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more,” he half-grunts toward the end, reaching the apogee of his sadness. But Time Out of Mind won three Grammys and kick-started Dylan’s true second coming—a string of self-produced, hyper-stylized albums that turned his love of the blues, standards, and literature into impressionistic, intricate Americana and helped him on his way to a Pulitzer. In your grimmest moments, just remember how near-death Dylan sounds here—and exactly how much life he actually had left.
Even deep in his own hurt, Dylan maintains a sense of pride, hoping to preserve some dignity as he approaches his end. Amid the sad, stately waltz of “Standing in the Doorway,” he tells his best lie: “I would be crazy if I took you back,” he sings, the slide guitars curling beneath him like confused question marks. “It would go up against every rule.” This is what he is supposed to say, of course, to save face when the entire album is about how not getting her back will be his ruin. Who hasn’t been here before—completely despondent, but trying to pretend you’ve got the upper hand in some romantic standoff?
This is the softer, more playful side of Dylan’s anger, but it occasionally flashes into hints of violence. When he croons “Don’t know if I saw you, if I’d kiss you or kill you” early in the album, it feels like a lonely abstraction, a what-if penned from a distance. By record’s end, though, it has morphed into real menace. Breathing fast, pulse racing, he’s doing his best to hold himself together during “Can’t Wait,” trying not to lash out or do something he will live to regret. The guitars slash, and the organs roar, fighting the same urge to explode. “If I ever saw you comin’, I don’t know what I might do,” he yells as best he can. “I’d like to think I could control myself, but it isn’t true.” His sadness, at last, has beaten his civility.
In spite of its presiding gloom, Time Out of Mind actually delivered a new Dylan standard—his first hit in decades and a song that has become almost as ubiquitous as “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Forever Young,” even if he mostly hasn’t been the one to sing it. A month before Time Out of Mind arrived, Billy Joel turned the spare ballad “Make You Feel My Love” into a bombastic, string-swept single, shouting the lyrics and howling behind the harmonica like it was he who stepped onstage at Newport in 1965. Twin versions by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood soundtracked the 1998 rom-com Hope Floats, while takes from Neil Diamond, Ed Sheeran, and Kelly Clarkson have followed. But it was Adele’s piano-and-cello lament—and its subsequent appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent”—that turned Dylan’s ostensible love song into an international standard and, according to Adele, made Dylan at least a million pounds in a year.
But what is there on Time Out of Mind to suggest that Dylan had suddenly turned soft for three minutes, that he would dip so smoothly into guileless piano ballads? Absolutely nothing. In the preceding song, he’s so tormented his crops are dying and all his friends are traitors; in the next song, he wonders again if he could control his violent impulses if he encountered his paramour. This isn’t the sort of person who shuffles over to the piano and readily forgives. This is the sort of person your friends warn you about, the guy who shows up drunk at 3 a.m. and slurs drunken promises as he bullies the doorbell.
All the song’s romantic images about warm embraces and dried tears and self-sacrifice are purely hypothetical, things he “could” do if the subject would simply submit to his advances already. In the five stages of grief, this is bargaining, and it’s a particularly nasty business here. “I know you haven’t made your mind up yet, but I would never do you wrong,” he pleads, the trace of guilt in his voice vanishing as quickly as it appeared. He makes his demand clear. “I’ve known it from the moment that we met/No doubt in my mind where you belong.” In context, “Make You Feel My Love” is not a romantic bauble; it is an ironclad threat in a velvet glove, one final attempt to force love from the listener at any cost.
The Dylan faithful largely hated “Make You Feel My Love” from the start. Ian Bell—the late British journalist and exhaustive Dylan analyst—quipped that the song “should have been shipped off instantly, gratis, to Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, and the rest of the balladeers who would take the vapid things to their sentimental hearts.” It is a song worth reconsidering, though, not in Joel’s mawkish translation or even Adele’s austere one but instead in its original setting. Those famous covers alternately sound triumphant or plaintive, suitable enough for a standalone single.
But even as Dylan plays tender piano above a pillow-top organ, he sounds absolutely broken, the cracks of his voice widening into chasms. There’s occasionally a whisper of percussion and a distant acoustic guitar lick, but he’s mostly left to wrestle these feelings himself. This is the real pit of his desperation, concealed to read like romance in order to save face. It is an essential piece of this picture, a last-ditch attempt for sanity from someone who has lost control.
In the end, Dylan pulls himself together, at least enough to survive for a while longer. Time Out of Mind ends with “Highlands,” a brilliant and occasionally hilarious 17-minute shuffle that frames life’s endless numbered days as a string of largely meaningless moments. “Feel like I'm driftin’, driftin’ from scene to scene,” Dylan mumbles in a monotone fit for someone who has simply resigned himself to exist. “I’m wonderin’ what in the devil could it all possibly mean.” He listens to Neil Young, avoids a sad dog, ponders his wardrobe, envies young people, and details an awkward encounter with a waitress in a Boston café that paints him as an artist perennially uncomfortable with his audience. All the while, he daydreams of the Scottish Highlands and its verdant scenery—for him, heaven, or “where I'll be when I get called home.” He understands his age and fate, even if he longs for youth. Without the ballast of his love, this moribund acceptance becomes his life.
The total craft of Time Out of Mind, the dry spell that preceded it, and the saga that produced it collectively serve a cautionary function. If you hadn’t given up on Dylan by 1997, you were either a zealot who would eke merit from most anything he made or a casual fan who had stopped paying enough attention to have a strong opinion. But the sophistication and nuance of Time Out of Mind work only because Dylan had become a wunderkind, gone electric, faced backlash, crashed his motorcycle, wrecked his marriages, found his faith, faltered in it, fathered a family, seen his kid become a rock star, lost old friends, wavered in relevance, and wondered if he cared about any of it anymore at all. The extra grain in his voice, the lessons of his words, the disorienting blur of his band: It is the sublimated sound of actual pain, lived and analyzed and announced in songs that show you exactly how dark the world can get.
Time Out of Mind feels like the antithesis of our pervasive need to have an opinion about everything all the time. It is a reflection on a life lived, not a reaction to someone else’s ideas. There’s a place for both, as Dylan’s own brash, youthful songs made clear a half-century ago. The difference is one of insight, of 55 years of life slowly distilled into wisdom. Everything won’t be alright, but desolation can be its own unlikely source of triumph. Dylan had a grief that gave him nowhere to go but the grave—or, as he did, onward. | 2018-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | May 13, 2018 | 9.4 | 52bc1dbd-e5f0-4302-ad58-2ea2a314dff8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The New Zealand musician’s third album is a collision of hard electronics with a touch of R&B. Though it contains moments of great power, it sounds like a work that’s stuck between two places. | The New Zealand musician’s third album is a collision of hard electronics with a touch of R&B. Though it contains moments of great power, it sounds like a work that’s stuck between two places. | Kimbra: Primal Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kimbra-primal-heart/ | Primal Heart | It’s been four years since Kimbra released The Golden Echo, her audacious and futuristic second album, one that established her beyond just the other voice on Gotye’s 2012 hit “Somebody That I Used to Know.” That LP further ensconced the New Zealander born Kimbra Lee Johnson as a one-woman odd-pop machine; a producer, an arranger, a multi-instrumentalist, and a unique dynamo vocalist. Oddly, there has been little fanfare around the release of its follow-up Primal Heart.
Perhaps tellingly, this album comes at a transitional point in her live show. Kimbra has pared down her prior set-up with a full band to just a small rig where she programs beats alongside only two shrouded players. Her intention is to arrive at a simplistic core, relying majorly upon digital sounds. Outside of tour, she’s built her own studio in her new home of New York (since The Golden Echo, she’s moved from Los Angeles) and she’s further indulged her technical geekery alongside co-producer John Congleton, known for his work with St. Vincent and Nelly Furtado, among others.
Kimbra insists that she’s given herself time for a more vulnerable phase of artistic growth. Her intention has been to strip away the bombast and locate her raw essence, hence the title Primal Heart. The results show that she’s still unable to let her ideas breathe without suffocating them beneath layers of quirks and tricks. Despite the protracted process, the album sounds like a work that’s stuck between two places; reaching for a larger audience but clinging on to her offbeat nuances. In its quieter minutes, even Kimbra seems to have realized this. “Version of Me,” a standout, is a soft ballad that positions Kimbra at her most exposed. She sings about the human truth of never being the finished article. “There’s a better version of myself/Stay for the person I’ll be,” she pleads of a love interest. She could be asking the same question of her audience, or even of herself.
Primal Heart is a collision of hard electronics with light sprinkles of au courant R&B making for Kimbra’s most mainstream statement yet. And though she’s described her approach in making this album as being one of “radical fearlessness,” the album contains only a few moments of power. On lead single “Everybody Knows,” she sings with great conviction about being “young and gullible.” It’s the sonic accompaniment to a Tumblr post she wrote last October about experiences she and friends have had as women in studio environments. Conversely on “Human,” she juxtaposes that individualism by pining for another’s affections and validation to survive. The track happily reinvents a classic soul sound with little percussive ticks and booms, providing strong evidence of what Primal Heart can be when the songs are restricted in scope and home in on one intention.
However, her most ambitious efforts don’t quite reach their apex, causing her somewhat cocky assertions to land flat. On “Top of the World,” she semi-raps over a Skrillex-assisted beat that builds to a climax about limitless success. “Talk like I be the Messiah,” she says, with excessive hubris. It’s the kind of statement you want to root for by such a hugely talented artist. Her vocal delivery, however, isn’t fierce enough to pull it off. Other than a few attention-grabbing choruses, the results are largely limp. | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | April 25, 2018 | 5.9 | 52bcb8f0-c38c-40c4-8a82-308146cbf162 | Eve Barlow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eve-barlow/ | |
Beneath a shroud of dry ice and woodsmoke, the UK producer’s new record discards the conventional cadences of dance music. | Beneath a shroud of dry ice and woodsmoke, the UK producer’s new record discards the conventional cadences of dance music. | Blawan: Dismantled Into Juice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blawan-dismantled-into-juice-ep/ | Dismantled Into Juice EP | The words inked across Blawan’s knuckles—KICK DRUM—offer shorthand to the UK producer’s credo: a paean to the life force that is rhythm, the pulse at the heart of all things. The heart, of course, is also a muscle, and Blawan—real name Jamie Roberts—has spent the past 13 years sculpting percussion with a boxer’s obsessive focus. His drums (often, his tracks are nothing but drums) are big, bruising things, swollen with ill will and latent violence. Behind every beat lies the threat of a knockout blow.
But Blawan’s latest EP, the thrilling and bewildering Dismantled Into Juice, complicates things. It is one of the heaviest records of his catalog, yet those kick drums are practically nowhere to be found. Rather than the elegant symmetry of the four-on-the-floor, the record evokes a maelstrom of distributed violence. Rhythm as matrix, rhythm as mesh; a sticky web of mayhem bobbing in the breeze, snaring everything that comes close.
Take the opening “Toast.” The vibe is jittery, over-caffeinated; the drums thrash in spasms, fibrillating wildly, kick and snare locked in a vicious shoving match. Paroxysms of rolling toms establish a bizarre call-and-response pattern with gurgling rave stabs, like a machine gun in conversation with a water fountain. Warps in the groove give the impression that the tempo is perpetually speeding and slowing in bursts, like an industrial-strength YKK yanked back and forth across battered rows of interlocking teeth. There’s something almost cartoonish about the song’s lumbering motion, but where tracks like Pearson Sound’s “Earwig” or Pangaea’s “Bone Sucka” are spirited and goofy, “Toast” just sounds deranged.
“Panic” is even heavier, riding a bass-fueled bulldozer that recalls the Bug’s speaker-shredding low end. This time, Blawan shifts his attention from rhythm to texture. His drums sound like they’ve been hollowed out by termites; the high end quivers like crinkled cellophane. “Body Ramen” does even more with the same damaged patina. On the surface, it’s an almost-conventional mix of halftime beat and Knife-like trance arpeggios, but the real action is in the sandpapery surface, the gravelly pocks in the varnish. Despite the sound design’s cataclysmic crunch, there’s a weird clarity to it—most of the frequencies have been sucked out of the mixdown, leaving pockets of severe highs and crisp mids silhouetted over an ominous, ultra-low throb.
The textural fuckery extends to the vocals, which are credited to one Monstera Black, but sound, in their abrasion and confusion, like the output of an AI. Swaddling a dulcet refrain in the close, clammy reverb of a clogged drainpipe, “You Can Build Me” toggles between sweetly major-key passages and rude explosions of atonal bluster. Everyone knows that Cocteau Twins represent the apotheosis of dream pop, but what this track presupposes is, maybe they were actually an industrial sludge band?
“Dismantled Into Juice,” whose bubbling sounds seem to have dropped us directly into a witch’s boiling cauldron, is the most batshit of them all, not so much for its charred vocal melody but for the tricks it plays on the timekeeping. Set to a brisk andante, the swinging rhythm glides easily yet doesn’t quite make sense. It’s like two contradictory gaits fused into lockstep, a three-legged race that’s jaunty and determined, tottering and lithe, all at once.
It’s this counterintuitive approach to rhythm that makes Blawan’s record so dazzling: Beneath a shroud of dry ice and woodsmoke, he has completely discarded the conventional cadences of dance music. There’s nothing here you could easily call house or techno or drum’n’bass, nothing that shows even the slightest interest in familiar templates. Since the nascent days of jungle, UK dance music has always been about switching up the beat, throwing fresh kinks in the syncopation—finding new places to put the kick drum, basically. In that sense, Dismantled Into Juice is part of a long, proud tradition of UK club tracks that turn the dancefloor on its ear. Blawan’s two-fisted attack flips it much further, and more giddily, than usual. | 2023-05-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | May 23, 2023 | 8.1 | 52c1269e-5fd1-468d-858f-749c4b6d3098 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The East New York rapper’s complicated relationship with wealth, poverty, and his neighborhood fuels his debut, an album about what happens when you leave home in search of fame and money. | The East New York rapper’s complicated relationship with wealth, poverty, and his neighborhood fuels his debut, an album about what happens when you leave home in search of fame and money. | Jimi Tents: I Can't Go Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23356-i-cant-go-home/ | I Can't Go Home | Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, like so many neighborhoods in the city, was once ravaged by the crack epidemic. As dealers supplied junkies and prompted violent crime, a community long crippled by poverty, negligence, and disenfranchisement became a forgotten public housing cesspool. As recently as 2011, the neighborhood had the highest murder rate in New York City. These surroundings raised Jimi Tents and sharpened his critical eye.
Now, the poor Brooklyn neighborhood has become the darling of city officials and private investors, a pearl to be pried from a clam shell of minority indigence. Earlier this year, East New York was deemed the “hottest new neighborhood” in the city, inspired by rezoning and speculation. Dubbed “gentrification’s last frontier” by Curbed, the old East New York is vanishing. However it may change, this is Jimi Tents’ home, and he’s constantly wrestling with what exactly that means to him, for the neighbors being pushed out, and for the invaders doing the pushing.
It’s nearly impossible to listen to I Can’t Go Home without thinking about the transition of East New York. Gentrification and reclamation are big forces in his world, and Tents is the mouthpiece for local dreamers. There’s a certain stress charging each bar, producing high-powered raps that flex in and out of breaths. The strain of bearing the hope of others, and carrying a place with you wherever you go can be taxing, but it can be inspiring, too. In 2015, gentrification hit Jimi close to home when his childhood residence faced foreclosure. The album’s title can be read as a relation of this painful truth, but the lyrics suggest otherwise: within brews a homegrown resilience, as a prodigy refuses to return from his rap quest empty handed.
Jimi writes carefully-worded stories, unpacking where his pursuit of fame has taken him. Upward mobility often means dislocation for the people below, and as he evaluates his own hunger for affluence, he mourns those being displaced by WASPs with similar ambitions. On the skittering dash “Right Now (I Wanna Interlude),” Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “I wanna rock right now” goes from casual profession of skill to exasperated imperative. Sometimes he raps like he’s pursuing entry into an imaginary hall of fame, sometimes he raps like he has no choice. The dichotomy produces breathtaking displays of timing and finesse.
When Jimi Tents broke through with his 5 O’Clock Shadow EP, he came off as a proud New Yorker who refused to shackle himself to the plagues of the city’s contemporary rap scene. Many of those conversations were internal and without geotags, more universal ruminations on police brutality and depression. Each song on I Can’t Go Home spirals outward from Brooklyn, considering his brief career arc in the bigger picture and placing it in context. The album’s most powerful moments, confessionals like “Should’ve Called, Pt. 2” and “Below the Surface” with Saba, pulse with life as Jimi explores his city, his relationships with the people in it, and how they shape his outlook.
On the surface of opener “NY vs. LA,” the track merely balances local promise against bicoastal aspirations. But in the fringes, Jimi can’t help but think about how his actions affect the folks back home, and subsequently, just how much of the process is in his control. Intricate ideas are broken down into their simplest components. On “No Looking Back (Glance),” he raps, “Left my hood with no problem/Left my home for the squatters,” a single lyric that balances the culpability of black flight and gentrification in the reshaping of poor neighborhoods like his. There’s always an underlying sense of responsibility as if he’s wondering what role he plays in society’s systems, particularly the ones dismantling his home. Even after experiencing the violence of commerce first hand, he still surrenders to his desires on “The Shining,” where a gospel staple becomes a critique of materialism: “This little light of mine/Shine a little different/Bright as I am, I am still victim/To buying, buying/I’m materialistic/Cause being broke hurts to feel, nigga.”
For 42 minutes, Jimi considers the tangle of poverty and wealth, his complicated relationship with his home fueling his richest work. His raps expand and unwind to suit any circumstance with a wide-ranging series of elastic flows that coil around the beat. I Can’t Go Home is a statement album, but not in the way it’s meant to be: like an eyewitness account from the frontlines of a shifting neighborhood, delivered by a rapper tracing his path from the projects to fame, and measuring the potential costs. If home truly is where the heart is, then there’s so much at stake when you lose it. | 2017-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / Vate | June 9, 2017 | 7.8 | 52c2236e-9d3b-4f6f-88af-cfc0235dafd2 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Swedish pop duo Galantis are gleeful vocal manipulators who have written for the likes of Britney Spears and Icona Pop. On their new LP, their maximalism takes on the halting sounds of tropical house. | Swedish pop duo Galantis are gleeful vocal manipulators who have written for the likes of Britney Spears and Icona Pop. On their new LP, their maximalism takes on the halting sounds of tropical house. | Galantis: The Aviary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galantis-the-aviary/ | The Aviary | The Swedish duo of Linus Eklöw and Christian Karlsson, aka Galantis, specialize in making familiar-sounding dance pop with heavily obscured singers. Independently, Eklöw co-wrote Icona Pop’s breakout “I Love It” and also works under the moniker Style of Eye; Karlsson is one-third of the dance pop act Miike Snow. They are both vets of scenes—deep house and pop—where vocal manipulation is a standard approach: a way to concoct peculiar emotional valences. Together, they gleeful scramble frequencies as if to stay ahead of codebreakers.
Their debut EP crumpled Britney Spears—who’s worked with Karlsson since “Toxic”—into a sigh and launched her into orbit. “Runaway (U & I),” the biggest hit off Galantis’ 2015 release Pharmacy, pitched English singer-songwriter Cathy Dennis low on the verses and Sweden’s Julia Karlsson (no relation) to a child’s range on the chorus. Pharmacy’s other big hit was the soul stomper “Peanut Butter Jelly,” in which they desiccated Dragonette frontwoman Martina Sorbara’s vocal, then pumped it full of hot air, the better to match its Steely Dan-indebted mix of privilege and menace: “Sleepless nights at the chateau/Visualize it/I’ll give you something to do.”
On The Aviary, Eklöw and Karlsson are still calling from the same playbooks. Now, though, the halting pings of tropical house largely supplant Pharmacy’s four-on-the-floor synths. It may be a necessary update, but sometimes it’s the frame for flimsy structures. The creeping “Hunter” is a lyrical mess: “Got them red eyes in the night,” sings London’s Hannah Wilson, dangerously close to patois, “like a panther, outta sight.” It’s not a total loss: at the end, Galantis chop up her vocal and toss it onto a scaling electro figure. English singer Leon Jean-Marie fronts “Hello,” a plea for romantic sanity. He goes big on the chorus—singing from his heels over massive piano decay—but the sentiment is immediately scrambled by trop-house patter. Galantis have him try on different pitches until he delivers the title like Kurt Cobain.
“Hello” shows how Galantis treat melancholy: like spilled ink that needs to be blotted. “Girls on Boys” begins with gospel piano, as Philadelphia-based EDM artist ROZES bears witness to a party’s aftermath. At the chorus, the duo switch course in a blink, as a clipped guitar and synth-trapped vocal chirps relive the festivities. These kinds of shifts should make more sense on the festival circuit, where Galantis (ever faithful to the Scandipop charge to entertain) are a hyperkinetic live draw. They succeed when they forsake tonal right angles for the emotional shifts inherent in their vocal production style. “Hey Alligator”—featuring songwriting heavyweight Bonnie McKee—transforms a standard power ballad (a plea for mercy to a “cold-blooded, hot-headed” lover) into something more inscrutable. McKee’s already performed the song in concert, replacing Galantis’ pensive synth pings with alt-rock arpeggiation. Though she’s in the same key on the record, her vocal is pitched downward, into a register at once more devastated and puckish.
This kind of theme—desire despite pain—is a pop evergreen, and Galantis do their best with it. Still, jubilation remains their surest mode. On “True Feeling,” they attempt to write an entire song around a kind gesture on a cold evening. The producers convert a steel-pan figure into a resolving phrase; Los Angeles songwriter Stephen Wrabel performs his ooos in a meditative state; the rise builds to a determined gallup.
With help from L.A.-based producer Hook N Sling, Galantis perform their sharpest wizardry on “Love on Me,” featuring X Factor alumna Laura White. White’s vocal is deployed in haphazard combos: high-pitched close harmonies on one verse, low- and high-pitched harmonies on another. Shot through with strings and steel-pan synth bubble, the effect is euphoric, if ruthless. That might be the norm now that they’ve established their festival bonafides (they jumped into the top 40 of DJ Mag’s poll last year, one spot ahead of Jack Ü) and, crucially, have a pop hit. Last year, they made their debut Hot 100 appearance with album closer “No Money,” a shrill anti-bullying anthem featuring Reece Bullimore, the pre-teen son of Beatbullyz’ Andrew Bullimore, who co-wrote the track. “You can call me what you wanna,” Reece sneers over a fast-moving trop-house riff, “I ain’t givin’ you a dollar.” His range is already high, but in Galantis’ hands, no one is safe. As usual, they pitch his chorus all the way to the premium suites. | 2017-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Atlantic | September 16, 2017 | 6.4 | 52c3e759-f7ea-4b18-b9d8-c0a902d9b3b4 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable.
I ... | Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable.
I ... | Coldplay: Parachutes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1539-parachutes/ | Parachutes | Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable.
I have just summed up in 19 words what I am about to say about Coldplay's debut full-length, Parachutes, in 600. Aside from being seemingly tailor-made for the paper-thin adult contemporary market, what is it about this Britrock quartet that's driving them up the American charts? Is it their popularity in their home country, or their Mercury Music Prize nomination? Could it be their charming, boyish good looks? Perhaps, even, a reputation built by Noel Gallagher's projected insistence that they're "a bunch of fuckin' pansies, the lot of them?"
In reality, Coldplay's secret deadly weapon is vocalist Chris Martin. With the ability to mimic a Brit-accented Dave Matthews one minute, Jeff Buckley revived from the dead the next, and sometimes even a young Peter Gabriel, Martin's heartfelt delivery seems to be what's winning the hearts, wallets and alternative radio request lines of Americans young and old. That's not to say that the rest of the group isn't sharp. Guitarist Jon Buckland provides plaintive, strummed acoustic guitar with the occasional amplified wail, and bassist Guy Berryman with drummer Will Champion form a competent rhythm section.
Oh yeah, the songs. They're nothing special. Most of the 10 tracks on Parachutes are indeed pleasant enough, often consisting of standard alterna-pop fare with the occasional folky ballad. They're innocent and inoffensive in general, but in turn, they're also exceedingly generic and immediately forgettable-- so much so, in fact, that after a minute of one song, you've usually already forgotten what the last song sounded like. And that's even after a few listens.
Parachutes opens with "Don't Panic," the title of which is likely lifted from British mock sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, despite the fact that the song has nothing to do with it. This subdued, dreamy opener contains Martin's falsetto chorus of "We live in a beautiful world," which seems to sum up the overall sentiment of the record; the record also closes with the inspirational swinger "Everything's Not Lost."
Most of the other songs sort of drift in and out of consciousness, with the exception of the second track, "Shiver." It's the only truly decent song on Parachutes, but simultaneously, it's the only one that blatantly shows its influences. In fact, the influence can even be pinned to a single song: Jeff Buckley's "Grace." Martin has his Buckley impression down cold, complete with dynamic range and the trademark vibrato. But as enjoyable as the song may be, there's no question that Buckley did it better.
And of course, you've probably heard their smash hit single, "Yellow," by now. Indeed, it's the most obvious choice for a single, and it represents Martin's vocal stylings effectively, but it's also the record's weakest moment. Buckland's grating, slightly tuneless guitars seem jarring, especially when sequenced in the middle of a series of songs that generally lack dissonance. And the saccharine lyrics are those that might have caused Mr. Gallagher's hypothetical remark: "Look at the stars/ Look how they shine for you/ And everything you do." You'd practically expect the band to show up at your doorstep with a wilting bouquet and Hallmark card.
Parachutes is ultimately a promising debut for Coldplay, if by "promising," I mean, "promising them a windfall of cash and international popularity." If nothing else, it's harmless and pretty. Unfortunately, it's nothing else. If that's what you look for in your music, by all means, go for it. If you want substance, I suggest moving on. | 2000-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2000-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Nettwerk | November 7, 2000 | 5.3 | 52c7ae76-e6c4-4176-81f3-a4fd1722f032 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Atlanta metal band’s new double album is its least ambitious collection yet: an inoffensive, occasionally alluring, but overwhelmingly dull 90-minute slog. | The Atlanta metal band’s new double album is its least ambitious collection yet: an inoffensive, occasionally alluring, but overwhelmingly dull 90-minute slog. | Mastodon: Hushed and Grim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mastodon-hushed-and-grim/ | Hushed and Grim | In 2014, Brent Hinds took a potshot at Dave Grohl. The Mastodon singer and lead guitarist shared a meme that read, “Making rock’n’roll safer with every red carpet all star jam.” Perhaps Hinds was merely being flippant to an old pal—seven years earlier, Grohl interviewed Mastodon for Revolver. But it’s confounding, then, that Mastodon—a metal band that has for years continually reinvented itself at the risk of driving away its core fans—chose such a safe route for its follow-up to 2017’s Emperor of Sand, a highly regarded album that flirted with grunge and earned them their first Grammy win. Their new double album, Hushed and Grim, is an overstuffed collection of downtuned alt-rock with occasional flashes of greatness. Coming from a band that masterfully executed a sludge metal concept album about Moby Dick, it’s an inoffensive, occasionally alluring, but overwhelmingly dull 90-minute slog.
Most frustrating to fans who have remained on the Denim Vest Express, after the extreme metal diehards jumped off around 2009’s hard turn into prog, Crack the Skye, is that the band can still flat-out shred. It’s all the same members, too; Hinds and Bill Kelliher form a twin guitar attack, and drummer Brann Dailor and bassist Troy Sanders retain the low-end connection that has long provided their music’s weightiness. But without any sense of direction, Hushed and Grim should feel alienating for all factions—the longtime fans, and those willing to give the veterans another shot.
There are a few fleeting moments in which Mastodon teases what could have been a fruitful new direction. What the band shows for the first time—in depressingly short order for the amount of space they allot themselves—is a sneaky ability to write incredibly dense, chest-tapping emotional music. Hushed and Grim is, paradoxically, at its best when the band leans into a high-gravity, supercharged version of circa-1997 Crank! Records emo—the kind with breakdowns for solemnly nodding your head instead of banging it. But instead of leaning all the way in, Mastodon continually take refuge in long, meandering passages that merely highlight the valuable experiment that Hushed and Grim could have been.
Halfway through “More Than I Could Chew,” one of a few highlights, the guitars cease their endless chugging for a minute. Hinds and Kelliher unfurl dense, mathy guitar lines that float atop a slow and methodical distorted bassline. The repeated lyrics, “I have lost my way/Reaching for today,” aren’t quite poetry, but with room to breathe, the songwriting is as intense as any riff they’ve ever played. These brief passages of emotional resonance make everything else feel relatively anonymous. Mastodon repeatedly hints at this new direction but never actually commits.
Case in point is the mid-tempo “Teardrinker,” highlighted by an earworm of a lead guitar melody. An obvious single, it features emotive wailing about a failed relationship without crossing into mid-dial detritus. But Mastodon quickly grows bored with its new, introspective self, inexplicably tossing in an unsettling bass solo: It’s unclear if the band is being earnest or if they’re aping Led Zeppelin’s much-derided “The Crunge.” Moments like this feel like self-sabotage.
Crueler still, they place the album’s best song, “Gigantium,” at the very end of the album. After wading through a swamp of mostly bromidic alt-rock, there it is: the jewel of Hushed and Grim, and, incidentally, the song that sounds most adventurous, unlike anything in the band’s catalog. Evoking Meanderthal-era Torche, Mastodon hints that it could be the sludgiest nu-emo band on the planet. It’s ironically the one track I wish I could live inside for much longer, craving a third mystical guitar solo, even. “Gigantium” is proof-of-concept for another new version of Mastodon. But the band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.
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. | 2021-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Reprise | October 29, 2021 | 5.7 | 52c9acb0-6932-4539-a97f-afcbb35de9fd | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Jeff Tweedy and co.'s latest does what its title implies, consolidating their eclectic style into a coherent statement of identity. Leslie Feist guests. | Jeff Tweedy and co.'s latest does what its title implies, consolidating their eclectic style into a coherent statement of identity. Leslie Feist guests. | Wilco: Wilco (The Album) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13237-wilco-the-album/ | Wilco (The Album) | At this point in Wilco's 15-year history, the band have been a lot of things, all of them sort of nebulous: alt-country, Americana, neo-folk, quasi-experimental, and, if you insist, "dad rock." Miraculously, the disparate strains within the group's catalog have somehow flowed together into a unifying aesthetic, largely due to Jeff Tweedy's distinctive singing voice and remarkable consistency as a songwriter. Though their previous releases, particularly the schizoid A Ghost Is Born, have embraced this eclecticism, the band's seventh proper LP, Wilco (The Album), does just what the title implies, and consolidates their style into a coherent statement of identity.
This is something of a mixed blessing. Though Wilco (The Album) is a good, concise distillation of the band's strengths, it is not their best work, mainly because it lacks the audacity of their four previous efforts. The group's 2000s output thrived on Tweedy's restlessness and perversity, as if each song were penned in part to challenge the preconceptions of listeners eager to pigeonhole his work. The new songs sound like the work of an artist confident enough to step back from personal innovation in order to develop styles and themes already in his playbook. This yields some fine results, such as the flagrantly George Harrison-esque "You Never Know" and the amusingly self-aware "Wilco (The Song)", but the record is more comfortable than exciting or interesting. The more extreme elements of Wilco's style are present-- the sinister Krautrock of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" resurfaces in the paranoid murder fantasy "Bull Black Nova" and the sort of delicately arranged instrumental passages that characterized Sky Blue Sky are evident in a more abbreviated form on "One Wing" and "Country Disappeared"-- but these tics are toned down considerably, blending in seamlessly with simple, straightforward numbers such as "Solitaire", "I'll Fight", and the Feist duet "You and I".
Every song on Wilco (The Album) is written and performed with immaculate precision, though the subtleties in the work gradually reveal their charms upon repeated listening. "Deeper Down" in particular is a marvel in the way its textures shift dramatically from verse to verse without diverting attention from the relative simplicity of its melody and rhythm. Similarly, the way the band effortlessly evokes waves of guilt, anxiety, and fearful resignation in "Bull Black Nova" is masterful and makes the song potentially painful to hear if you're already feeling any of those emotions. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are moments of unapologetic, unguarded beauty, as in the lovely lead guitar and piano parts in "Country Disappeared" and the melodramatic orchestral swell in the otherwise understated "Everlasting Everything".
This is not the music of men trying to be cool; it is the work of veterans unafraid to express mature emotions with an appropriate level of musical depth and nuance. There is certainly more thrill to be found when the band is acting out but there is something rather pleasing about hearing a band sound so comfortable in their skin. Even if you don't connect with the music on Wilco (The Album), you may come away from the record envying their relaxed self-assurance. Being a chilled-out grown-up may not always be exciting, but it's certainly something to admire and respect. | 2009-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | June 29, 2009 | 7.3 | 52cd7cea-913b-40a0-8107-4af402e30ad6 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Having recently gone through his country, psychedelic pop, and even ambient phases, the omnivorous EDM DJ turns his attention to house music on his first solo full-length in 18 years. | Having recently gone through his country, psychedelic pop, and even ambient phases, the omnivorous EDM DJ turns his attention to house music on his first solo full-length in 18 years. | Diplo: Diplo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diplo-diplo/ | Diplo | Diplo has long branded himself as an agitator-entrepreneur, mining underground sounds to shake up for young, thump-thirsty ears. The ubiquitous producer makes no apologies for his chameleonic, appropriative approach. “Culture is meant to be fused,” he told The New Yorker. “It’s complicated, but I don’t fucking care.”
But what happens when the shake-up itself begins to feel stale? When fans want more than kitchen-sink collaborations and cross-cultural mash-ups? After a string of recent genre-jumping projects failed to leave a mark (his country, psychedelic pop, and ambient swings all felt half-hearted and formulaic, more like kitschy clickbait than genuine self-expression), it was time for Diplo to remind us why we started listening to him in the first place.
With his self-titled album–billed as the artist’s first solo electronic LP since 2004’s Florida–he returns to what he has said is his first love: house music. It should have been a slam dunk—glossy, commercial variations on the Chicago sound are dominating mainstream dance music, and Diplo is one of the few surviving EDM overlords who still has a full calendar of DJ gigs. (Say what you want about his catalog, the man knows how to rev up a room.) But Diplo is surprisingly low on innovation, adventure, and emotion. It feels less like a triumphal homecoming and more like another tourist trap. Lately, no matter where Diplo goes, it feels like he’s visiting.
The album is billed as “underground,” but don’t be fooled, bro; these are big names (Miguel, Leon Bridges, Lil Yachty) plugged into comfy frameworks geared toward casual listeners—most of the tracks hover in the FM sweet spot of three and a half minutes. Even Diplo admits he wasn’t diving very deep. “I made a bunch of pop songs and then dressed them up as dance records,” he told Billboard. “If you aren’t familiar with dance music, you can learn it [on this record] because I literally have everything on there for you.” Dance pop has evolved considerably in the last few years, with melodic deep house replacing EDM as the flashy, crossover sound. But Diplo, largely devoid of new ideas, feels disappointingly trendy, favoring quick-hit interpretations of whatever is selling right now. We should expect more from a producer of his stature, especially on his own genre turf. With Florida, he offered listeners a peek into a few deep, peculiar corners of underground music. Here, he piles everyone into the party bus and drives it to Times Square.
Because Diplo doesn’t think dance albums “work conceptually,” he approached this project like a mixtape or something you’d hear out at a club. But these sleek, polished cuts lack the spontaneous energy of a sweaty dancefloor. Instead, they unfold with eerie detachment, like a “House Party!” playlist left on shuffle. For an artist who thrives on perpetual reinvention, Diplo relies heavily on recycled concepts and safe, accessible arrangements. “Promises,” one of the album’s three Kareen Lomax team-ups, capitalizes on the success of 2021’s “Looking for Me” by once again laying her Tracy Chapman-esque vocals over lush, mid-tempo piano house. The Damian Lazarus/Jungle collaboration “Don’t Be Afraid” somehow doesn’t sound like either of them, and could instead be cut and pasted from emo-house duo Bob Moses. And “One by One,” a joint effort with Elderbook and the German duo Andhim, is a cocktail of mainstream dance-pop trends all swirled together: gooey beats, vaguely spiritual synths, and washed-out vocals that recall the easy breeziness of tropical house. Even the Lil Yachty collaboration “Humble” sounds generic and overeager, with beats that bump so hard they drown out everything except for the flicker of Auto-Tune.
Diplo has always drawn inspiration from his travels, and a few of these songs were sparked by recent trips to Burning Man and its sandy sister, Tulum, where the thump of dense, dusty tech-house is as ceaseless as the ocean waves. But neither scene is known for particularly mind-blowing music (ketamine, perhaps), and those predictable, melodramatic soundscapes creep onto this LP. He channels some of his transcendent experiences on wistful tracks like “Your Eyes” and “Make You Happy,” but outside the context of a sunrise bender, they feel vacant. If there is one consistent error Diplo makes throughout this record, it’s not putting more human emotion into the fold. If house is a feeling, it needs to be alive.
There are a few wins. The immersive progressive house track “Forget About Me (Nite Version),” co-produced with Durante and Aluna, achieves real feelings of suspense and release, the lone glimpse at rave music in an otherwise lighthearted LP. The bouncing blockbuster “On My Mind,” an almost cartoonish tribute to ’90s R&B-house, is genius in its sampling of “Steelo” by the girl group 702; when paired with Jocelyn Brown’s climbing “ooh-ooh-ahh-ahh,” it’s the sort of massive deep-house banger that can change the temperature of a party in an instant.
But the track that gets closest to house music’s sensual, kinetic core is the tantalizing Seth Troxler team-up “Waiting For You (feat. Desire).” A tunnel of prickly synths, high-pitched coos, and shuffling rhythms designed to glue your feet to the dancefloor, it’s the only song that carries real, physical tension. When her breathy soprano morphs into a pleading whisper (“I’m sick, I’m sick/Lock the door, bury the key”), the only thing to do is close your eyes and surrender. It’s too bad the rest of the LP doesn’t concern itself more with the unspoken intimacy of the club experience, or with house music as a vehicle for human connection. Rather than nourish that friction and vulnerability, these songs feel passionless and removed—full of sparkle but missing anything like a soul. | 2022-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Higher Ground | March 10, 2022 | 5.5 | 52d5c1e8-1a43-405c-99af-c88f1347cdd3 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
The rowdy and promising debut from this London septet is further evidence of the London jazz scene’s vitality. | The rowdy and promising debut from this London septet is further evidence of the London jazz scene’s vitality. | Nérija: Blume | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nerija-blume/ | Blume | The loud and energetic septet Nérija is just the latest formidable voice to emerge from London’s jazz scene. In the last few years, the city has produced some of the most vital players in improvised music, including drummer Moses Boyd, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, and tuba player Theon Cross, all of whom draw on influences as disparate as grime and Afrobeat. Now, Nérija has entered the discussion with Blume, a collection of earthy, atmospheric, and danceable tracks. Although it folds in sounds from all over the world, there is a distinct sense of terroir—you get the sense that this music could only have come from London.
The group—including tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey, alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, trombonist Rosie Turton, guitarist Shirley Tetteh, drummer Lizy Exell, and bassist Rio Kai—play all across the city in various configurations. They have released one promising EP, but the 10 original compositions on Blume stand apart. The players have a familiar rapport that still allows room for risk, and the music thrums with tension while never losing the reggae and funk bits that remind you this is club music at heart.
The horn lineup puts forth gritty, layered voicings that give the septet the air of a big band. The first track, “Nascence,” feels like it could have emerged from a horn-heavy Blue Note album circa 1965—Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock, perhaps. Then the rhythm section enters with a stuttering cadence rather than a swing feel, throwing you off balance. Mid-album tune “EU (Emotionally Unavailable)” begins with just the rhythm section of Tetteh, Exell and Kai; settling into a heavy, rock-ish vamp, deep and satisfying, they sound like they could plausibly produce a fine album of their own.
Nérija bill themselves as a collective, not a group, and they leave plenty of room for individual voices to shine. Garcia, whose excellent debut Nubya’s 5ive was released in 2017, blows sultry, fluid lines as well as thick, repeated phrases that bring to mind a jam-band saxophonist crossed with Coltrane. Maurice-Grey and Turton are both loose and smeary players, roughing up the music’s finer edges. Kinoshi is a dexterous improviser, as on “Swift,” but still makes room for long tones that give her solos emotional depth. Exell, a master of funk, makes great use of her drum kit, with a gluey snare, a resonant bass drum, and dark, chunky cymbals. Kai’s lines hold everything loosely in place.
Tetteh emerges as the album’s unexpected star. The absence of another chordal instrument like the piano gives the guitarist room to stretch out when it comes to melody, harmony and texture. Her rhythmic accompaniment is tight and in the pocket, but often gets weird and spacey, sounding like a mixture of Nile Rodgers and Mary Halvorson. Her improvisations—particularly on “Riverfest” and “Partner Girlfriend Lover,” which she wrote—are superb, crisply stated, and engaging. Tetteh—who also sings on her solo project, Nardeydey—has one of the most distinct voices on the album, and that’s saying quite a bit. At its best, Blume is a testament to the rich aesthetic diversity of London’s jazz scene.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Domino | August 6, 2019 | 7.3 | 52db2dd4-873d-438f-8c7c-ad93498b4204 | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
A new box set, collecting four albums released between 1983 and 1986, is a fascinating look at the early stages of an underrated UK post-punk act. | A new box set, collecting four albums released between 1983 and 1986, is a fascinating look at the early stages of an underrated UK post-punk act. | The Jazz Butcher: The Wasted Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-jazz-butcher-the-wasted-years/ | The Wasted Years | Glass Records, the London-based label created in 1981 by musician Dave Barker, was home to an unusually motley collection of pop and rock acts. Some were castaways from defunct bands (David J. of goth originators Bauhaus and Nikki Sudden of cheeky experimentalists Swell Maps signed to the imprint after their respective projects crumbled in the early ’80s), others were new artists like synthpop outfit In Embrace and the psychedelic preachers Spacemen 3. No one artist sounded much like the rest of the roster; what seemed to connect them was a cavalier indifference to their potential commercial prospects.
No artist in the Glass stable exemplified this spirit better than the Jazz Butcher, a project led by Pat Fish (real name: Patrick Huntrods), a singer/songwriter from Northampton, England, who, at the time, was cobbling together lo-fi demos in his bedroom using a cheap tape deck. The band signed to Glass in 1982 and went on to release a quartet of albums and a smattering of singles that experimented freely with dubby pop, jazzy rambles sung in French, tumbledown rockabilly, and fuzzed-out rock.
That stylistic range fit well within the electrifying, unsettled post-punk aesthetic of the time, but somehow the Jazz Butcher hasn’t been canonized in the manner of many of its contemporaries. That could change with the reissue campaign that Fire Records recently launched, starting with The Wasted Years, a multi-disc set compiling the group’s first four LPs for Glass. Shaggy and often uneven as the records are, together they provide a fascinating spotlight on how Fish’s songwriting evolved from spirited insouciance into mature introspection.
The Jazz Butcher’s progression was steep and fast. Separated by only four years, the albums that bookend this collection‚ 1983’s In Bath of Bacon and 1986’s Distressed Gentlefolk‚ share plenty of the same DNA, but feel miles apart. On the debut, Fish has yet to shake off the sensibilities of the bedroom demos that got him a record deal. “It’s really just the sound of a few mates failing to take seriously the fact that they’ve got an LP to make,” he has said. That’s a little dismissive to the music he was making at the time, an appealing jangle-pop minimalism akin to Tracey Thorn’s early band Marine Girls, with small spurts of virtuosity from guitarists Max Eider and M.K. Daley. But Fish’s comment does jibe with his boyish lyrical concerns on Bacon, which include food poisoning, a hotel for sasquatches (“Bigfoot see a neon sign/Bigfoot reach for his credit card”), and “Girls Who Keep Goldfish.”
Those interests stay pretty much the same on the follow-up, 1984’s A Scandal in Bohemia—it’s the music that improves markedly. By this point, the Jazz Butcher was a full-fledged band, with Fish and Eider joined by David J. on bass and drummer Owen Jones. These seasoned musicians, and the guiding presence of producer John A. Rivers, give the music a new verve on the wobbly sea-shanty folk of “My Desert” and the winking garage-rocker “Caroline Wheeler’s Birthday Present.”
The Jazz Butcher’s final two releases on Glass set the stage for the rest of Fish’s career to date. The wonderful 1985 mini-LP Sex and Travel retains a loose, playful approach to guitar pop, while Fish’s lyrics become more focused and sharp, whether exploring his romantic troubles as heard on “Only a Rumour” and the bitter “Walk With the Devil,” or the insanity of the Cold War (“President Reagan’s Birthday Present”).
Gentlefolk completes his transformation into a fully-formed songwriter. Credited to the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy (with like-minded friend of the band Felix Ray replacing David J), the record boasts some of Fish’s finest material: “Still in the Kitchen” is a devastating glimpse into a depressive mind (“Be lonely/You’re already all alone anyway”), while the smoldering “Angels” balances the agony of heartbreak with gratitude at the support of his loved ones. Fish diminishes the impact a bit by mixing in Jonathan Richman-like goofs like “Domestic Animal” and “Big Bad Thing,” but even those moments are presented with wit and a welcoming smile.
In the years that followed, Fish would only get better. He would soon leave Glass for Creation Records, a label with far more clout and the money to support his creative growth. Their relationship resulted in some of his most commercially-successful efforts—his 1988 cover of the ’60s pop classic “Spooky” gave him his best-ever position in the UK indie charts—and a crystallizing of his persona as a sensitive freak who pours his heart out to a female companion with the same fervor that he imagines, say, contracting the bubonic plague. (The high point: 1993’s Waiting for the Love Bus is a frothy delight, with Fish at his most lovestruck and giddy.)
The Wasted Years, despite its sardonic title, is a worthwhile look back at the path he took to get to those heights. While it’s not a complete document of the band’s start—this set ignores standalone singles and b-sides from this era, like a rollicking cover of the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”—it sets the table for a three-decade-plus journey that continues to surprise, confound, and satisfy. | 2018-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 10, 2018 | 6.7 | 52dcb332-6d65-4c80-a231-605dc6864c47 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
First released on Gruff Rhys' label, the debut from this Cardiff singer/songwriter buries the pop hooks and lets her freak-folk flag fly. | First released on Gruff Rhys' label, the debut from this Cardiff singer/songwriter buries the pop hooks and lets her freak-folk flag fly. | Cate Le Bon: Me Oh My | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14218-me-oh-my/ | Me Oh My | Wales is used to being overlooked. Seven centuries of English occupation will do that. Almost 15 years after Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Catatonia, and Manic Street Preachers drew attention to their tiny country's music scene, newer Welsh artists like Race Horses and the Joy Formidable are plugging along amid considerably less media fanfare. Now add Cate Le Bon to that list, with a bullet.
On her debut album, the Cardiff-based singer/songwriter introduces a beguiling, idiosyncratic voice almost designed not to call attention to itself. No relation to Duran Duran star Simon, Le Bon is probably best known for her fembot guest spot on "I Lust U", from Super Furries frontman Gruff Rhys's Neon Neon project a couple of years ago. Yet on Me Oh My-- first released via Rhys's fledgling Irony Bored label last fall, and finally for sale in the U.S. this month-- she buries her pop hooks like the childhood animals that gave the album its working title, Pet Deaths, and lets her freak-folk flag fly half-mast instead.
Me Oh My is an understated work, but by no means an underwhelming one. Le Bon's coolly enunciated vocals, resembling an earthier Nico or an eerier Victoria Bergsman, are the biggest draw. But the "Pale Blue Eyes" twang of "Sad Sad Feet" ("Baby, I'm headed for the black") or recession-era Neil Young of "Shoeing the Bone" ("These are hard times to fall in love") should earn enough repeat listens for the rest of the songs to reveal themselves. Accompanied by members of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Le Bon elsewhere updates the 1970s Welsh psych-folk reveries and fuzztone free-for-alls that Rhys has ably documented on his Welsh Rare Beat compilations. If side two opener "Terror of the Man" is a rare droney snoozer, rough-hewn details such as the retro-futurist synths on the title track help make up the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| difference. "I fought the night and the night fought me," Le Bon sings. The night wins, of course. But, on a modest scale, so do we. | 2010-06-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-06-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Control Group / Irony Bored | June 1, 2010 | 7.3 | 52e457c8-a484-4746-8673-b152824cea95 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Steve Earle’s excellent new album marks a much-welcomed return to country music. He sounds more energized and powerful than he has in years. | Steve Earle’s excellent new album marks a much-welcomed return to country music. He sounds more energized and powerful than he has in years. | Steve Earle & the Dukes: So You Wannabe an Outlaw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-earle-and-the-dukes-so-you-wannabe-an-outlaw/ | So You Wannabe an Outlaw | Steve Earle is a staunch traditionalist who has always somehow been ahead of his time. In the 1970s, he ran away from home for Nashville, and he ended up appearing in the documentary Heartworn Highways—barely 20 years old—looking up to the masters as he honed his craft. In the 1980s, as country music was getting glossier, he was taking inspiration from Born in the U.S.A. and getting grittier. In the 1990s, he was fresh out of jail, singing songs about the hard lessons he’d learned and spinning stark tales of sobriety into new standards. Lately, Earle’s been on a prolific streak, releasing new albums at a fiery pace while serving as a spiritual godfather for country’s current renaissance. He embodies an artistic ideal for young artists attempting to maintain their authenticity while continuing to evolve. In other words, it was only a matter of time before the genre caught up with him.
On the opening track of his excellent new album, Earle decides to let you in on some of his secrets. “So you wanna be an outlaw, buddy take it from me,” he sings with a snarl. “This living on the highway ain’t everything it’s supposed to be.” It’s a warning, but it’s also a pretty alluring invitation, signaling Earle’s return to country music following his 2015 blues album Terraplane and last year’s folksy
collaboration with Shawn Colvin. For the second verse, he brings in Willie Nelson to take the lead, coaxing a growly, near-indecipherable delivery from one of country’s most amiable voices. Pedal steel and winding guitars roar behind them, exquisitely produced to sound like a bargain-bin record blasting from an old turntable, with all the grit reflected in their pipes.
Such is our introduction to So You Wannabe an Outlaw, an album dominated by simple pleasures. But it’s more than just a pleasant throwback: Earle sounds more energized and powerful than he has in years. In the roaring fireman’s anthem “The Firebreak Line,” he sounds particularly pissed off; when he tells you, “Ed Pulaski is a friend of mine,” you might worry that you somehow offended him by suggesting otherwise. In “If Mama Coulda Seen Me,” he effectively sneezes out the entire scope of outlaw country in one succinct sentence: “If my mama coulda seen me in this prison she’d’a cried but she cain’t.” Best of all is “Fixin’ to Die,” a pulverizing rocker that feels like the intro to “When the Levee Breaks” spread throughout an entire country song. During these tracks, Earle sounds not just comfortable within the genre’s limitations, but thrilled at the prospect of telling new stories within them.
The album’s second half slows down a bit, but it maintains the focus on songcraft and mood. Coming off her own recent career-best, Miranda Lambert joins Earle for the deceptively sunny-sounding co-write “This Is How It Ends.” The album’s gnarly production is used to great effect here, tying their voice together like ex-lovers reminiscing over a bittersweet phone call. The fact that both songwriters have gone through their own highly publicized divorces in the last few years only elevates the drama. “You Broke My Heart” mines similar territory but finds its rhythm in the boozey balladry of Phases and Stages-era Willie, with Earle delivering his lyrics more lazily, like he’s rocking back and forth on his porch with a bottle of whiskey.
Being a music scholar like Earle isn’t necessary to enjoy these songs, but it certainly helps. Earle—who also hosts a show on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country channel, for which this album might serve as a living advertisement—imbues his songs with a dizzying number of homages and allusions. On the deluxe edition of the album, there’s even a suite of classic country covers that segues naturally from the closing notes of “Goodbye Michelangelo,” Earle’s touching tribute to the late Guy Clark. Atop the heartland power-pop of “Sunset Highway,” Earle shouts out Darkness on the Edge of Town and muses about a melody he heard about in a “dream, or was it a song.” It’s emblematic of the album’s motivating principle, that the key to succeeding in country music isn’t just by studying the past: it’s by living it. | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Warner Bros. | June 22, 2017 | 7.7 | 52e707ea-6702-4e73-a23c-6f554adae486 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
This 10th-anniversary collection gathers loose tracks from the band’s first four years, as they explored disparate genres and song structures amid the bedlam. | This 10th-anniversary collection gathers loose tracks from the band’s first four years, as they explored disparate genres and song structures amid the bedlam. | The Men: Hated: 2008-2011 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-men-hated-2008-2011/ | Hated: 2008-2011 | “This group is an open forum for anything,” the Men’s Nick Chiericozzi told Pitchfork in a 2012 interview. At the time, the singer/guitarist was speaking to the stylistic eclecticism of the band’s third album, Open Your Heart, the record where the Brooklyn quartet first embraced the idea that the most punk thing a punk band can do is not sound “punk.” They had added a permanent lap steel player; before long, they were making records in the woods and hiring horn sections. While they’re not immune to the odd noisy regression these days, the band’s 2018 album, Drift, presents another open forum, floating between goth-soul serenades and psych-folk serenity.
If the Men were once like a dilapidated house refurbished into an artfully designed living space, then the 10th-anniversary retrospective, Hated: 2008–2011, documents the period where they were still mired in black mold and choking on dust. Its 17 tracks come from a variety of sources—demo tapes, 7"s, an EP, and, quite possibly, live-bootleg cassettes found garbled in an old dictaphone—and all sit somewhere on the spectrum between lo-fi and no-fi. The feral feeling is enhanced by the presence of Chris Hansell, the fearsome bassist who shared lead-screamer duties with Chiericozzi and (then-drummer/eventual second guitarist) Mark Perro; his serial-killer stare embodied the era’s aggression.
On Hansell-led ragers like “Ailment” and “Twist the Knife,” the Men stewed in the venom and self-loathing paranoia of My War-era Black Flag. Meanwhile, the anti-internet rant “Digital Age” finds Chiericozzi repeating the song’s lone, Tinder-prophesying lyric—“How do you make love in a digital age/There’s no way”—until he reaches Lemmy-like hoarseness. But even in their most violent state, the Men were never ones for circle-pit stomps. They were always trying to harness their attack into a sustained motorik roar, like amateur pilots attempting to a steady a plummeting airplane. It’s easy to hear tracks like “Hated” and the instrumental burner “Impish” as angry, ugly music, but you sense joyous abandon, too. The band shift between one-chord patterns in search of the ur-riff, hammering at it until maddening repetition becomes hypnotic bliss.
“Throughout my whole life, I’ve always been trying to understand songwriting,” Perro said in an interview with Noisey earlier this year. “I’ve always wanted to write songs in a very traditional sense.” You can hear that process take root on Hated, albeit in a counter-intuitive fashion. Where songwriters typically start with a basic melody before figuring out the arrangement, these recordings capture a band committed to building a cinder-block foundation before adding ornamentation. A handful of these tracks amount to little more than tentative genre experiments as basic as their titles, like the droning Indian-psych doodle “Free Sitar” or the tossed-off twang of “Cowboy Song,” a tease for later songs that may appeal to actual cowboys. But where the cover of The Breakaways jangle-punk nugget “Walking Out on Love” betrays the Men’s latent power-pop affinities, the ragged, Replacements-like rendition of Devo’s “Gates of Steel,” the gorgeously blurred “Saucy,” and the dramatic thrust of “Wasted” feel like dry runs for the more affecting songcraft that would fully flourish on Open Your Heart.
Just prior to that album’s release, Hansell parted ways with the band, symbolically severing the Men from their hardcore roots and liberating Perro and Chiericozzi to fully indulge their burgeoning classic-rock fetishes. But as Hated proves, even when the Men were blowing out eardrums and PAs in the dingiest DIY dives back in the late 2000s, they were already fueled by a restless spirit and striving for an emotional connection that could cut through the noise. | 2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | November 17, 2018 | 7.4 | 52f53b2c-3781-438e-a744-0c7c67f9c670 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On her full-length debut, the Tamil Swiss singer and rapper presents a lively and ambitious blend of R&B, rap, and Tamil folk. | On her full-length debut, the Tamil Swiss singer and rapper presents a lively and ambitious blend of R&B, rap, and Tamil folk. | Priya Ragu: Santhosam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/priya-ragu-santhosam/ | Santhosam | Like so many in the South Asian diaspora, 37-year-old Tamil Swiss singer and rapper Priya Ragu is hungry for art that speaks to the complexity of our experiences. She has said that there’s no single theme to her new album, Santhosam, which touches on topics as varied as combating familial pressure, craving a vacation, and contesting police brutality. But throughout her career, her work has centered around her desire to express her perspective as the child of Sri Lankan refugees and to reach other South Asian listeners in the process. She called her debut mixtape damnshestamil. She wears saris with T-shirts in performances, sings in her mother tongue, and dedicates a song on the new album to her grandmother (a common gesture among South Asian diasporic artists). In her music, she pulls equally from R&B, rap, and Tamil folk, creating a blend she calls “Ragu-wavy.”
“Ragu-wavy” pairs the boisterous production of Santigold and fellow Tamil diasporic artist M.I.A. with the adroit vocal stylings of Snoh Aalegra or Sade. Ragu is also a student of the Tamil music she grew up hearing at home: She specifically draws from kuthu, a fast-paced, drum-forward type of folk music found in Kollywood (Tamil-language cinema) films and sampled by M.I.A. The bombastic arrangements of tracks like “Escape” and “Adalam Va!” convey the self-determined optimism suggested by the title Santhosam (Happiness), whether Ragu is singing about a burgeoning relationship or urging us to hold onto our faith. She sounds confident and dexterous when she raps in Tamil, as in the chorus of audacious self-love anthem “Power,” where she hopscotches defiantly over cascading violin and synth.
Album closer “Mani Osai,” which Ragu wrote with her father and brother, makes her mastery of South Asian musical traditions especially clear. Gentle tabla and humming synth establish a slow-moving ambient river while violin swells, golden bansuri notes, and layered vocals that sound right out of an A. R. Rahman composition flutter like confetti. Ragu sings patiently and warmly in Tamil, delivering her most affecting vocal performance on the record.
As she builds her vision for South Asian diasporic pop, Ragu looks to an earlier generation of Black American artists for inspiration. She cites Lauryn Hill, Stevie Wonder, and Brandy as influences and draws on elements of R&B and rap. The most political track on the album, “Black Goose,” was written amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement to honor George Floyd’s life. There’s a long history of Asian musicians allying themselves in solidarity with Black artists; Ragu specifically identifies a connection between the Black Lives Matter movement and her family’s history surviving the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. But by invoking anti-Black oppression in the first person—“Officer don’t shoot, I got so much shit to do,” she sings in the chorus—she winds up conflating racialized experiences in a way that feels vague and appropriative rather than supportive.
At times Ragu’s songwriting can feel like a missed opportunity to know her better. The Afrobeats-inflected “Hit the Bucket” is a laundry list of flexes interwoven with a directive to dance. Quotables like “Melanin dream with a hella mean sheen” and “Don diva fold my hands like Shiva” edge close to a “representation matters” genre of feel-good art that celebrates the signifiers of identity without exploring what it is they signify. On “Vacation,” Ragu dreams of slowing down, healing, and turning off her phone, generic sentiments that could hang beside a “Live Laugh Love” plaque.
The best South Asian diasporic art is a balm for an enduring sense of placelessness. It is rooted in a deep familiarity with disparate cultures and artistic traditions yet requires a willingness to innovate something new. Ragu offers her most memorable portrait of this experience on “School Me Like That,” where she contrasts the expectations of her family and workplace with the urgency of her own dreams. (The song follows a message in Tamil from her grandmother asking her to get married.) “How can I stay awake for somebody else dream when/I got so much life in me that I should be living?” she asks. Music and message coalesce in words that capture both where she comes from and where she wants to go. Santhosam could use more songs with this level of intentionality—songs that reach beyond proclamations of self-love or dancefloor hedonism to meet the richness and complexity of Ragu’s sound and aesthetic. | 2023-11-29T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-29T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner UK | November 29, 2023 | 7 | 52f7e741-abf5-4d0d-bf17-c1563c90f038 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
No Life For Me, a team-up release between Nathan Williams of Wavves and Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, is the most effortless music either has produced in years. It ultimately serves as proof of how easy it is for both Baldi and Williams to write good songs and also the care it takes to make them great. | No Life For Me, a team-up release between Nathan Williams of Wavves and Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings, is the most effortless music either has produced in years. It ultimately serves as proof of how easy it is for both Baldi and Williams to write good songs and also the care it takes to make them great. | Wavves / Cloud Nothings: No Life For Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20799-no-life-for-me/ | No Life For Me | It's an algorithmic dream date: Google "Cloud Nothings" or "Wavves" and in each case the other band is one of the top entries in the "people also search" field. The overlap is inevitable: two critically acclaimed indie rock bands that actually rock, ones that qualify as pop and punk but somehow not pop-punk. Yet, Wavves X Cloud Nothings represents a sudden intersection after the two artists have spent the past five years aiming in opposite directions. Dylan Baldi wants esteemed producers to act like P90x coaches, helping him shed the flabby baggage of his earliest recording for something meaner, leaner, and shredded, whereas Nathan Williams employs them like high-end makeup artists. You'd have to go back to 2009 for the last time Wavves and Cloud Nothings were functionally similar, or No Life For Me can save you the trouble.
Before the turn of the decade, both bands were solo projects manufacturing confectionary nuggets about being young, bitter and bored, wrapped in metallic hiss—the equivalent of eating chocolates without removing the foil. There's no obvious reason for either Baldi or Williams to be nostalgic for this period, as their careers have continued to evolve and prosper along with their music. Maybe they're eager to revisit a time when their every move wasn't subject to scrutiny, though slapping both of their highly recognizable brands on the cover doesn't exactly lower expectations, despite the modest rollout.
Still, this album is the most effortless music either has produced in years, which ultimately serves as proof of how easy it is for both Baldi and Williams to write good songs and also the care it takes to make them great. There are solid hooks scattered all over No Life For Me, and they sound like they could've been knocked out in five minutes—each melodic note notches in the expected place over thrumming power chords and steady drums. The seven proper tracks are all opportunities to parse the fine difference between urgency and immediacy: much of No Life For Me happened without much noticeable struggle, but did it need to happen?
In the end, "Wavves X Cloud Nothings" manages to be misleading on numerous levels. It implies a full partnership or at least participation from both bands—this is essentially "Wavves feat. Dylan Baldi", as it calls on Nathan's brother Joel as a producer and his drummer Brian Hill, who is not Jayson Gerycz. Hill is a fine drummer but he's not one of the few plus-value drummers in rock music, a guy who can singlehandedly change a band's trajectory and take a song from an 8 to a 10. This might've reflected more on Baldi than Hill had the dreamy, drumless closer "Nothing Hurts" not been the LP's highlight. However, "Come Down" and the title track are essentially Cloud Nothings deep cuts with a solid rhythm section that never pushes against Baldi's vocals, never threatens any kind of chaos. It's possible Hill could've provided these things had No Life For Me been the result of more protracted sessions, but you might come out of this record thinking Gerycz is somehow still underrated.
Moreover, the nominal "X" implies a factorial relationship between the two acts—maybe this could've been a muscling up of Wavves' wiry surf-and-skate physique or the achromatic bleakness of Attack on Memory or Here and Nowhere Else given a suntan. Tilt that "X" 45 degrees and you've got a more accurate formula: This is more an example of addition, two artists with very similar writing styles piling on top of each other.
In fact, Williams and Baldi are virtually indistinguishable emotionally or sonically here. The same themes of intransigence, ennui, and self-pity that serve as the basis for nearly every one of their previous songs is shuffled and endlessly reworded, Wavves and Cloud Nothings lyrics turned into magnetic poetry tiles grabbed out of a bag. Their blunt admissions never sound insincere despite being shared and workshopped, just pro forma—"I'm such a fucking mess/ Don't know at all how it's gonna go," "I feel it open up around me." "Sometimes, you'll find nothing ever comes down."
Looking at the most recent, productive relationships between established songwriting entities—Run the Jewels, FFS, for example—there's a provision of contrast, a clear quid pro quo where each party has something the other wants or needs. Whether or not there's chemistry between Baldi and Williams, there's no volatility. They don't even sound like they're having fun: the bummer attitude was a given, but neither is inspired to go beyond their own sonic boundaries, nor is there any sign of friendly one-upmanship, no indication that a truly great idea from these sessions wouldn't be tucked away for private usage. That wouldn't be much of an issue had this partnership reflected its low-key creative process by having Wavves X Cloud Nothings go by a different name or having the results given away as a freebie or just a lark. But No Life For Me is a 21-minute record with two instrumentals that costs $10—the same price you could pay for Attack on Memory or King of the Beach. Which is to say that Wavves X Cloud Nothings didn't need to result in a good album to justify its existence, but No Life For Me did. | 2015-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ghost Ramp | July 20, 2015 | 6 | 52f8277d-436b-4a69-aa4d-290fe3fb206e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Gavin Russom, once teamed with Delia Gonzalez, goes his own way on his heavily nostalgic debut DFA album as Black Meteoric Star. | Gavin Russom, once teamed with Delia Gonzalez, goes his own way on his heavily nostalgic debut DFA album as Black Meteoric Star. | Black Meteoric Star: Black Meteoric Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13231-black-meteoric-star/ | Black Meteoric Star | All but the brashest dance music carries at least a whiff of cosmic consciousness, a belief that the right combination of repetitive beats and unknown variables can plot a course to crack the stratosphere. But that transcendental urge is rarely so explicitly articulated as on Gavin Russom's self-titled album as Black Meteoric Star. The album is, in many ways, a direct extension of the smoldering freakouts of Days of Mars, a 2005 album Russom recorded with Delia Gonzalez. There, they harnessed a battery of vintage and home-built synthesizers to create their own version of classic ambient music-- liquid, evolving, nominally "beatless," but imbued with unmistakable pulses cycling at different speeds. You could trace its sounds and ideas to electronic and compositional pioneers such as Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze, Steve Reich, Pete Namlook, and Carl Craig, but the obviousness of the lineage never stood in the way of the music's immediate, visceral qualities.
On Black Meteoric Star, Russom takes the duo's obsessive pursuits and applies them to the well-worn conventions of classic house and techno. Marked by simple, contrapuntal synthesizer arpeggios and jittery drum machine patterns, the music at first recalls the humid, shorted-wire minimalism of pioneering house and acid; it's not surprising to hear Russom namecheck Chicago's TRAX label and some of its artists in an interview with London's FACT magazine.
Sounds evocative of classic machines like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and TR-707 Rhythm Composer contribute to the vintage feel. Hallmarks of original house productions-- woodblocks, tambourines, hi-hats-- are now deeply rooted tropes, but Russom doesn't get tangled up in his piety. (The current vogue for intoning phrases like "house music" or "Detroit" over generically shoomping chords and congas is blissfully absent here.) He flirts with funk, but Black Meteoric Star isn't much interested in the humor or sensuality that animated Chicago's mid-80s house musicians. Instead of Robert Armani or Phuture's needling minimalism, he tends to a maximalist, sprawling psychedelia.
Ultimately, what Russom draws from his analog dance-music forebears has more to do with process than sound. Early house music derived much of its curious charge from the constraints its producers faced. Mothered by necessity, they made do with obsolete, bargain-basement instruments, often turning them on their ear and perverting their intended uses; they arranged in step time and recorded live, with none of the cut-and-paste convenience available in contemporary audio software. Russom likewise sticks to an all-analog setup combining vintage synthesizers and drum machines with more obscure boxes of his own invention; he records live in single takes. This necessitates a strict economy of means: the music is stripped down to only as many elements as can be reasonably manipulated in real time. His tracks batter a handful of ideas over and over again, with most of the variation a result of twisting filters and tweaking envelopes. But where TRAX emphasized the negative space that yawned in between the notes, Russom uses distortion and delay to smear his sounds into something corroded and verging on the limits of control. On "World Eater", there's at least one point where the beat audibly slips, most likely the result of his machines' wonky, loose-leashed timekeeping. (Synchronizing jerry-rigged circuitry like this, without the controlling hand of MIDI pushing things forward, is a notoriously dodgy affair.)
It's not as jarring as you'd think-- only a DJ in mid-mix would likely notice the slippage. But it's a reminder that Black Meteoric Star comes at "dance music" with an outsider's perspective. This stuff is worlds away from contemporary house and techno's relentless professionalism, perfect timekeeping, and pristine compression. The tracks are abuzz with line noise; the first four tracks bleed warm, tubelike distortion, while the final two sound like they were recorded live to a room mic, one possibly draped in milk-soaked cloth. That's part of the music's appeal, and also one of its ironies: At a time when the "democratizing" effect of music software has led to a glut of functional, professionally competent but imaginatively bankrupt music, the insistence upon a lo-fi aesthetic-- or better, ethic-- becomes something like a badge of honor, an auteur's protest.
Doth Russom protest too much? Maybe. The music doesn't always measure up to its conceptual ambitions. "Death Tunnel", one of the album's shortest tracks, barely merits its 378 seconds, and makes a self-defeating opener for the album. The rhythm plods, its eighth-note hi-hats cutting awkwardly into mushy arpeggios. And as intriguing as the basement-inventor backstory is, all that hand soldering sometimes makes you wish for more. In an interview with TheFader.com, Russom explains that he built his own machines because they allow him to do things that aren't possible with commercially available gear, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from the music itself. The drum patches are familiar from a thousand recordings; far more radical sounds have been conjured by synthesists with modular systems or even over-the-counter analog gear. And I'll admit to a slight resentment of the fact that the DFA imprimatur assures Russom the kind of press that any number of artists who have long worked in a similar idiom (Mark Verbos, Ra-X, Legowelt, Unit Moebius, Giorgio Gigli, Donato Dozzy, even Omar S, and many of them more skilled and engrossing than BMS) will never enjoy. But in Russom's defense, he's not trying to re-invent the wheel, just forge his own from the materials.
Something about Black Meteoric Star sucks you in, undeniably. A year ago, I was skeptical about the first four tracks I heard, longer versions of four included here; my doubts didn't abate when hearing the finished album. But after an initial near-dismissal, I found myself coming back to the record again and again, then searching for interviews with the artist to find out exactly what motivated these strange analog hailstorms, which worry away at their material with obsessive determination. All six tracks are suffused with high drama; there's something almost tectonic about them, the way rocky patterns are shoved aside by colliding plates of sound, overtones flying off like sparks in hot ash.
It's clenched, anxious music, but there's something profoundly relaxing about it. Depending upon your state of mind, it hunches in the background like a cushion of white noise, or, turned up loud, heaves the horizontal axis on high-- a vision of the dance floor as space elevator. It's no coincidence that the strongest tracks here are the longest ones (though the six-minute barrage of "Dominatron" is as forcefully evil as its title would suggest). The slack, toe-scuffingly funky "World Eater" and the grinding "Anthem" are both 10-minute samples of infinity. At 14 minutes long, "Dreamcatcher" dares to attempt more ambitious structures, juggling drum tracks and piling up counterpoints into a honeyed churn. And the andante "Dawn", sounding like the soundtrack for underwater breakdancing, turns 18 and a half minutes into a spaced-out blink of an eye.
That kind of expansive vision is nothing new in dance music, of course; if anything, it's becoming routine, in the wake of quarter-hour anthems from the likes of Ricardo Villalobos and Lindstrøm. But I get the sense that Russom's neverending sequences come from listening to the world around him: specifically, the days-long club culture of Berlin, where he lives now. These intense, sustained workouts are as spiritually inclined as the most gospel-infused "spiritual house," just in different ways; they're reaching for the void that turns the dance floor inside out. (The irony is that you'd be hard-pressed to hear any of these tracks served up on Berlin's minimal smorgasbord, which recycles house music's watered-down tropes like a sushi restaurant serves up limp tuna on its endless conveyor belt.)
It's true that there's something a little bit precious about it all-- for instance, the fact that Russom once performed the project as part of a collaboration with the multi-media artists Assume Vivid Astro Focus that featured costumes, balloons, laser, and video projections. (In video clips of the performance, the balloons are a reminder of David Mancuso's Loft, while the projections and dancers more mundanely recall, well, just about any mainstream club from the Meatpacking District to Mitte.) But why shouldn't Russom at least try to do something special with his presentation-- especially when coming from the spectacle-shy world of indie rock? "Projecting a 'fantasy environment' is important to me when I make dance music," Russom told FACT. "It's something I do half-consciously, imagining the place where the music would fit ideally or what people would be wearing, etc. Like, 'What is the world that this belongs in?' It's quite sad that the dance floor is disappearing from the cultural landscape. It's a very important place." Russom may come from a house outsider's background, but just like he and Gonzalez got ambient, I think he gets dance culture. Black Meteoric Star is a spiritual thing, a body thing; a cheeky thief and a generous giver. It's a long night out and a longer walk home, mind abuzz, ears ringing. | 2009-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | June 18, 2009 | 6.8 | 52fb1da7-7f9f-47b3-87bc-e65713a33b06 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
This raucous, epic live album compiles several nights' worth of shows at the Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium, where Titus Andronicus celebrated the release of 2015's The Most Lamentable Tragedy. | This raucous, epic live album compiles several nights' worth of shows at the Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium, where Titus Andronicus celebrated the release of 2015's The Most Lamentable Tragedy. | Titus Andronicus: S+@dium Rock: Five Nights at the Opera | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22168-sdium-rock-five-nights-at-the-opera/ | S+@dium Rock: Five Nights at the Opera | No band in the past decade has worked harder to reassert the notion that rock ‘n’ roll is capital-I Important than Titus Andronicus. Everything they do is powered by the belief that listening to rock ‘n’ roll can save your life and that playing it can save the lives of others. To ensure that transformative tradition carries over to future generations, they've resorted to the most extreme measures—epic narrative concept albums, encyclopedic cover-song selections, relentless touring, 9,000-word essays on The Replacements. If their records can overwhelm, it’s not due to their length, but because their commitment to hitting you on all levels—physical, emotional, visceral, lyrical, spiritual—never wavers. And while those aren’t the sort of qualities that guarantee stardom in the 21st-century, the least Titus Andronicus can do is make their home base in a roughshod Brooklyn DIY space, call it Shea Stadium, and get treated like The Beatles every night.
This Shea Stadium was, naturally, where Titus Andronicus stationed themselves last July to celebrate the release of their 2015 triple-album rock opera, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, and ringleader Patrick Stickles’ 30th birthday. But it was also a moment for the band to take stock of their remarkable 10-year run to date and reconnect with old friends and heroes over the course of five sold-out shows at the venue. Judging from the setlists and sweat-soaked footage, they looked like truly special events, with each show boasting a uniquely epic, career-spanning repertoire dotted with the deepest of deep cuts and rare experiments (like performing the various installments of their “No Future” song cycle in sequential order). And that’s to say nothing of the karaoke-bar procession of covers—Springsteen, the Stones, Weezer, Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” hell, even the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”—they attempted with guests like Ted Leo and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. The Shea Stadium residency yielded precisely the sort of freewheeling, one-of-a-kind shows that deserve a proper live-album document—one that could serve as both a greatest-hits overview of Titus’ expansive catalogue and a portrait of their extended community. Sort of like a Last Waltz without the sense of impending demise.
Alas,* S+@dium Rock: Five Nights at the Opera* harbors no such aspirations. Rather, the album is essentially a single-platter sampler of highlights from The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a record so dense, it features an actual intermission. Ten of S+@dium Rock’s 11 tracks are taken from that record, or constitute variations thereof; the exception is album outtake “69 Stones,” a weight-bearing drifter’s lament that—true to the band’s penchant for rock-referential puns—also happens to resemble the sort of country-honked serenade that’d be right at home on Let It Bleed.
Taken as a whole, S+@dium Rock ultimately feels less like a document of an historic homecoming event and more like the sort of bonus material that comprises the extra disc of a deluxe reissue. Beyond the lamentable lack of covers and guest appearances (one-night-only elements that would greatly enhance the sense of occasion), this set sacrifices Titus’ most crucial quality: their sense of carefully plotted momentum, which has always made navigating their sprawling albums feel less like a slog and more like riding an expertly engineered rollercoaster. The album is tripped up by patchy pacing from the outset: just as we’re thrust into the thick of the pit with the exhilarating opening rip through “Dimed Out”, an awkward, mid-banter fade-out leads us to an extended riff on “Lonely Boy”, the sort of limb-loosened jam that makes more sense as a mid-set breather.
But if S+@dium Rock’s intent is simply to strip away TMLT’s imposing conceptual framework and present Titus as a populist party band, then mission accomplished. For all their intimations of depression and prescription-pill dependency, songs like “I Lost My Mind (+@)” and “Fatal Flaw” were meant to be shouted back by drunken, dehydrated crowds smushed up against the stage in a claustrophobically humid, low-ceilinged room. And S+@dium Rock ’s more fluid second half—which showcases an uninterrupted six-song stretch—also retrofits some of TMLT’s more meditative songs to better suit the raucous atmosphere: The piano-ballad reverie “No Future Part V: In Endless Dreaming” is transformed into a raging, amped-up shanty, while the album’s squeezebox-wheezing last gasp, “Stable Boy,” is dramatically reborn as a last call–summoning climax. And that, in turn, sets up the closing “Stranded (On Our Own),” a veritable remix of the TMLT rave-up “Stranded (On My Own)” that strip-mines the latter’s last line (“I thought that you and me were really get along”) and repeats it with manic, mantric abandon.
In these moments of inspired de/reconstruction, S+@dium Rock brings to mind the Who circa Live at Leeds, another raw retort to a grandiose rock opera. But as that last song fades out, you can hear Stickles say, “it’s getting to be that time folks…”—suggesting that we just heard wasn’t the grand finale, but merely a set-up for even greater moments yet to come.The best live albums make you feel like you were there, and this one is hardly lacking for vicarious thrills. But by revealing the seams of its selective setlist, S+@dium Rock also oddly emphasizes what we missed. | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 1, 2016 | 7 | 5301e943-0ea6-4a93-a403-b3da1d5aa37e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With her latest batch of unreleased freestyles and loosies, the Houston rapper reminds the world that breathless raps are her foundation. | With her latest batch of unreleased freestyles and loosies, the Houston rapper reminds the world that breathless raps are her foundation. | Megan Thee Stallion: Something for Thee Hotties | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/megan-thee-stallion-something-for-thee-hotties/ | Something for Thee Hotties | Before she became one of the biggest rappers on the planet, Megan Thee Stallion was best known for her freestyles. The Houston rapper’s mother performed under the name Holly-Wood and passed the bug down to Megan at a young age, even bringing an infant Meg to recording sessions instead of leaving her at daycare. Megan began writing her own raps at 14, and by the time she was a freshman at Prairie View A&M University, she was chomping at the bit to let them loose. Two victories at on-campus cyphers in 2013 eventually turned into a flood of freestyle videos on social media, all of which centered her sex-positive gangster persona and sharp technical skill that, by 2018, had legends like rapper-producer Q-Tip desperate to help her sign a record deal.
Since her breakout mixtape, 2018’s Tina Snow, Meg has spent the last three years proving her early supporters right. Her latest project, Something for Thee Hotties, is a pointed attempt to continue feeding that titular fanbase, bringing a handful of recent freestyles and unreleased songs to streaming services for the first time. Hotties couldn’t come with lower stakes, which makes the quality of most of these loosies and B-sides all the more impressive.
The tradeoff for lower stakes is always more room to breathe artistically, but as much as Megan relishes in her victories, she isn’t afraid to remind fans of the beef and adversity she’s shouldered. She sneak-disses her alleged shooter Tory Lanez on 2020’s “Megan Monday Freestyle” and memorializes her mother on “Southside Forever Freestyle,” released earlier this year. Starting with these moments makes Juicy J’s acknowledgment of her Popeyes deal and other ventures on “Trippy Skit” hit even harder, recontextualized as winking snapshots in this new sequence. But once Megan is done rubbing sand in haters’ eyes with the first batch of freestyles, the road opens up and Hotties shifts fully into mixtape mode. The atmosphere is overwhelmingly about raps, raps, raps.
She doesn’t deviate from any of her usual subjects—pimp shit, money talk, stunting regardless of how much anyone loves or hates her, the occasional anime reference—and that doesn’t dilute her never-ending power and finesse. “Megan’s Piano” features vintage Meg bars (“Big ass stack in this purse so/these niggas gon’ work/and I’m holding this glock in my Birkin”) over an uncharacteristically minimal Lil Ju beat, nothing but stabbing piano and a bouncy bassline. She plows through beats reminiscent of early-2000s New York (“I ain’t a gold digger, but what the fuck I look like/fuckin’ broke niggas?” she raps on “All of It”) and some that sound like 2021 interpretations of blaxploitation theme songs (“Kitty Kat”). The run of tracks from “Megan’s Piano” to “Pipe Up” has the buzzy energy of a marathon studio session, and a good number of them—particularly “Eat It,” “Kitty Kat,” and “Opposite Day”—wouldn’t sound out of place on any of her most recent projects.
The details littered throughout Something for Thee Hotties amplify the project’s sense of fun. References both contemporary and dated turn songs into guessing games about when they were made—she mentions her recent Nike deal on “Megan’s Piano” and the soon-to-be-divorced Kimye on “Bae Goals.” Texas rap legends Bun B and Paul Wall each get space to heap praise onto Houston’s current star player in recorded voice messages, cementing her legacy as a hometown hero.
On the surface, Hotties is little more than a data dump and an excuse to attach extremely popular freestyles to the DSP milking apparatus. But its tone is too light and loose, and Megan’s raps are too polished and fierce for that criticism to hold. With no ceiling for her celebrity in sight, she’s reminding the world that breathless raps are her foundation.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | November 3, 2021 | 7.4 | 53021248-732f-4950-abf8-57b4291f112a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Alright, this is how it is. You don't know it yet, but this is your favorite album of the ... | Alright, this is how it is. You don't know it yet, but this is your favorite album of the ... | King Geedorah: Take Me to Your Leader | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4443-take-me-to-your-leader/ | Take Me to Your Leader | Alright, this is how it is. You don't know it yet, but this is your favorite album of the summer. Shit, of this whole foul, corporate-owned, Republican-approved year of our lord, two thousand and three. What MF Doom can do is on par with anyone you can name off the top of your clever, underground noggin', and he most likely does it better. Never mind that his re-entry into the game, Operation: Doomsday, was a masterstroke of genre-shaming samples and beats that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Kool Keith's otherworldly approach to hip-hop (while keeping in touch with the asphalt, and digging a little deeper, one finger on the trigger and the other checking the TV Guide for B-movies on cable). Heads will be discovering that album for the next ten years, and it'll still sound fresh. So: What to do when you've dropped a classic and carved your name in granite after returning to the scene?
First step is to smoke trees, and catch up on your monster movies.
Using the same lo-fi, direct-from-the-VCR dubbing he used to narrate the rise and fall of the iron-faced ruler of Latveria on Doomsday, MF lies out the mythos of King Geedorah over the course of Take Me to Your Leader, drafting an outline of the rubbery behemoth's exploits (it doesn't quite qualify as a concept album), then uses it as a guide to piece together some of the most jaw-droppingly, neck-twistingly, brain-meltingly inspired cuts this side of Q-Bert's Wave Twisters. "Monster Zero" is the epicenter of that approach, a cut-n-paste narration of Geedorah's arrival on planet Earth via visitors from the future, backed by a languid soul loop and distorted, bizarrely syncopated snares; the monster in question-- a mutated, irradiated, three-headed fucker who once terrorized the inhabitants of Planet X-- is namechecked and invoked throughout Take Me to Your Leader, and a few of the guest emcees hide behind the monikers of other Godzilla friends and foes to cement the theme.
The King Geedorah project, unlike Doom's recent outing as Viktor Vaughn, finds MF almost exclusively behind the boards, comfortable with rocking the SP1200 and letting others turn out the mic. Only two tracks feature Doom rhyming, but at least one of them is an album highlight: Along with Mr. Fantastik's GZA-by-way-of Humpty Hump delivery and a sleazy, greasy blues guitar, Doom pushes "Anti-Matter" straight to the top of the heap. Even without Doom's verbal skills, the roster here lives up to Metal Fingers standards, with nary a wack emcee in sight (compare that to a record like Peanut Butter Wolf's My Vinyl Weighs a Ton, which featured a few lightweights in the pack). Kurious (billed here as Biolante) sets the bar high on "Fastlane" with an unflappable and confident delivery that fits in amazingly well with the squealing guitar riff that forms the track's hook. In a rare moment of introspection, Hassan Chop does some ruminating on past mistakes and lost friends in "I Wonder", and it's to his credit that the song is affecting without tripping headlong into melodramatic cliché.
"Next Level" throws another curveball, eschewing Doom's taste in bizarre source material with a sultry, piano-laced jazz groove that hearkens back to early 90s fixtures A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde, complimented by lyrics from Lil Sci ("I got a gift called/ Hip-hop prophecy/ 2003/ The year of the jiggy emcee"), Stahhr and ID 4 Winds that bring a smooth Black Star flavor to the proceedings. Gigan takes the prize for delivery, though. "Krazy World" finds him delivering couplets at a cross-country runner's pace like Jack Kerouac with a dutchie in his back pocket: "Check it, playin' em/ Bungle them chumps till I abolish 'em/ Been doin' it since double-oh-one with five dollars/ We be sparklin' in a Siegfried shirt/ With wide collars." Just as Prince Paul pulled quite a crew together for A Prince Among Thieves, MF has enlisted some strong soldiers here, heads that don't find his expansive vinyl universe intimidating.
Kutmasta Kurt and Madlib aside, I haven't heard anyone lace a track like Doom. Take one listen to the Quincy Jones soul loops on "Krazy World" or the indelible Motown strings backing Hassan Chop on "I Wonder" and I think you'll agree. The sharp spacescape of "Lockjaw" is straight out of Fantastic Planet, right down to the hokey 70s science fiction flourishes and theremin frequencies. And most of the album cuts do double duty, breaking ground in the disjointed rhythm department ("No Snakes Alive"), while bridging the gap between the sci-fi themes of King Geedorah and Doom's established jazz tastes ("Fazers", "Next Level"). The beatboxing on "The Fine Print"? Don't get me started. And when an emcee just won't do, Doom enlists the aid of his crates and the wheels of steel to get his message across. Besides "Monster Zero"-- which is more a silly-as-shit audio collage anyway-- Doom applies his cut/paste technique to "One Smart Nigger", exploring racism and linguistic symbolism by letting his wax do the talking. The effect should have emcees checking their notebooks before they attempt another "socially conscious" verse.
Take Me to Your Leader will excite you in a way most hip-hop projects just aren't able: It's not straining for credibility nor putting effort into being revelatory; it just is. Everyone involved got their kicks making this record, and the enthusiasm drips off the jewel case. Like Bobbitto Garcia says: "Create and share with the world." In the album's press release over at Big Dada, MF says: "You should listen to the album for what it is and not expect it to be like the average 'rap' stuff you're probably used to... a blend of ill lyrics and instrumentals. To me, it's way iller than any of the wack shit out now." And not like you'd expect a chef to say his dishes taste like shit, but this time the horse's mouth speaks the absolute truth.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this review contained a phrase that did not meet current editorial standards and has been removed. | 2003-07-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-07-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Big Dada | July 7, 2003 | 9 | 530ada4f-3c6e-4ad3-a9b3-5bdbaeea012a | Pitchfork | null |
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Raekwon assembles a crew, claims they're on his level, and "presents" their debut LP. Turns out he was mistaken about their quality. | Raekwon assembles a crew, claims they're on his level, and "presents" their debut LP. Turns out he was mistaken about their quality. | Ice Water: Polluted Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10627-polluted-water/ | Polluted Water | It's hard to question someone's judgement when they've been responsible for a pretty good run of quality material, especially when he's giving some shine to his friends. Raekwon hasn't had the extended streak of holy-shit greatness that fellow Wu-Tang members Ghostface and GZA have, but he started a legacy with Only Built 4 Cuban Linx-- a coke-rap catalyst so widely revered that people are still fiending for the long-delayed sequel-- and if later solo records Immobilarity and The Lex Diamond Story aren't nearly as acclaimed, they're at least good enough to keep the Chef from staining his rep. So when he says in interviews that the Ice Water crew are on his level, another dynasty, that no big-name stars would be seen collaborating with them if they weren't real on some level...shit, he had enough faith in these dudes to mentor them, tutor them, even let 'em share a name with one of the sickest tracks from Cuban Linx; better give him benefit of the doubt.
Don't strain yourself too hard, because the doubt will set in about four tracks in to Polluted Water. Ice Water has kicked around Staten Island spitting thug raps for a while, with one of the members, Raekwon's longtime friend Polite, having ricocheted through assorted Wu-family offshoots. Polite could've theoretically joined the Wu at the beginning if he wasn't in prison at the time the group was formed, but he went on to pay dues in American Cream Team and an early version of Ghostface Killah's Theodore Unit, so he's got some mileage. It's easy to recognize Polite amongst the other members of Ice Water, not necessarily because of his voice-- which is authoritative in a fairly indistinct way-- but because he's the member that isn't in over his head.
The other three MCs debuted on The Lex Diamond Story and proved to be less memorable than the skit where the dude gets killed by chimpanzees. They've hardly improved here: Stomach starts hitching for breath by the end of his verses, apparently a sign that dumb punchlines ("They said I'm wylin'/ Plus I'm from the Island, somethin' like Gilligan") and uncreative threats ("I'm spittin' ammunition, now your man is missin'/ And your body gets found by an old man fishin'") can be a heftier workout than previously thought. The crew is rounded out by Paulie Caskets and Donnie Cash, who go by the helpful abbreviations P.C. and D.C. (as if they weren't interchangeable enough) and generally jockey for position as to who can spend more time being an indistinct third-verse tough guy. (P.C. at least gets points for his what-the-fuck ambush-job verse in "Click Click": "Everybody in the spot thought that I was a chick, I played it so cool/ Sippin' a martini with a wig on.")
And they rarely have anything illuminating to say: Ice Water have exact same hey-didja-remember-when BDP/Kane/MC Shan rap nostalgia as everyone else ("Hip-Hop Tribute"), the same complaints about golddiggers ("Love Don't Cost [A Thing]"), the same I-push-weight swagger (the entire middle third of the album). Their ordinariness is thrown into greater relief when the guests come filing in, Raekwon himself chief among them. Rae's got seven guest spots on a 17-track album, and he's consistently good, not just compared to the headliners but in keeping with his typical material; when he spits status raps on "Do It Big" alongside a grimy Busta Rhymes or cases a joint in "Click Click", it lends weight to an overlong record that desperately needs it.
But it's impossible to pin everything that goes wrong during this album on Ice Water themselves. The production is scattershot and almost uniformly irritating, with the soulful, Marvin Gaye-derived "Mercy Me" and the grindhouse funk of "Let's Get It" the closest the album comes to any sort of Wu atmosphere. Everything else sounds like mercenary club music, indecisive as to whether it wants to be Dirty South or thugged-out NYC. Most of the production pushes towards straight-up annoyance (re "I'm a Boss": Oh, so that's why some people hate Rick Ross) when, like the quarter-assed g-funk of "Actin' Fly" or the tinkly Jim Henson's G-Unit Babies non-bump of "Gangsta", it isn't busy being too perfunctory to even register as anything other than a half-step above a click track. Still, while you can't blame all the bad beats and the lyrical dullness on Raekwon himself, it's pretty obvious that Ice Water's mentor still has a whole lot of lessons to teach them. | 2007-09-17T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2007-09-17T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap / Rock | Babygrande | September 17, 2007 | 4.1 | 530c2b9a-b2b4-4250-85bc-ff7aebbf5bfc | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Berlin producer is unafraid to throw a wrench into her steady grooves, and her latest disregards clubland’s status quo for more imaginative terrain. | The Berlin producer is unafraid to throw a wrench into her steady grooves, and her latest disregards clubland’s status quo for more imaginative terrain. | rRoxymore: Face to Phase | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rroxymore-face-to-phase/ | Face to Phase | The most interesting dance music right now isn’t coming from house and techno; it’s happening in the margins, where producers are unafraid to fuck up a steady groove every now and then. Where mainstream house and techno (and their standard-issue “underground” variants) are concerned with getting everything just right—the right EQ on the drums, the right compression on the bass, the right number of bars leading up to the climax—the really interesting stuff right now takes its pleasure from getting the right things deliciously wrong.
The UK label Don’t Be Afraid is helping lead this charge leftward. Even its clubbiest records are wobbly and moth-eaten, and with artists like Karen Gwyer, one of its most unpredictable talents, it has blazed new trails into the unknown. The debut album from the Berlin producer rRoxymore continues that trajectory: The French-born artist has spent the past decade crafting an increasingly idiosyncratic take on classic club styles, wrapping unvarnished drum machines in analog squelch and treating dance music’s most cherished rules with blithe disregard. Her early single “Wheel of Fortune” slows precipitously halfway through, threatening to derail any DJ who might be attempting to mix the record. On Face to Phase, she gives her experimental tendencies free rein.
Face to Phase is still plenty forceful, and even danceable in places: “Passages,” which kicks the album into full gear following a dreamy ambient intro, wields its broken rhythm with serious strength, its burly kick drums landing like blows to the sternum; “Forward Flamingo,” which follows, boasts the kind of skulking, mysterious groove you could imagine hearing from a Lena Willikens set. Throughout, the music has all the hallmarks of sci-fi intrigue—shimmering Detroit pads, eerie chromatic progressions, Theremin-like tremolo squeals—with none of the self-consciously retro affect that’s customary in electronic music. The label says that most of the album was produced “in the box”—that is, primarily on the computer. So while it may sometimes sound analog, she’s clearly not much concerned with repeating old glories.
Even at its most powerful, the music seems less interested in forward motion than in carving out space for exploration—the freedom to try out a knotty drum groove or an unusually iridescent palette—and then move on without looking back. By track four, “Energy Points,” which drizzles soft marimbas over irradiated background noise, dance music’s touchstones are beginning to dissolve. “Someone Else’s Memory” hints at the shakuhachi intro of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” before launching into a stern, industrial march and then dropping the beat out just as abruptly, as though led by an absent-minded drum major. By the closing “What’s the Plan,” the slow-motion beats have succumbed to fatal enervation, stumbling and falling back into the glistening ooze.
That might not sound like it’s supposed to be exciting, but it is; not many artists are this willing to short-circuit dancefloor function in the service of more idiosyncratic ends. It all adds up to an unusually expressive album, one that disregards clubland’s status quo in favor of far more imaginative terrain. The opening track, “Home Is Where the Music Is,” sets out to map that territory: a beatless synthesizer fantasia as tender and moving as a piano ballad, it sounds like old certainties being melted for scrap and turned into something new. | 2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Don't Be Afraid | September 30, 2019 | 7.7 | 530ca202-1e79-4e1f-8e4f-e8296eebce6d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After last year’s Tommy EP, the South London electronic musician turns her abstracted sound collages to more pointedly cathartic ends: complex music that brims with conflicting emotions. | After last year’s Tommy EP, the South London electronic musician turns her abstracted sound collages to more pointedly cathartic ends: complex music that brims with conflicting emotions. | Klein: cc EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klein-cc-ep/ | cc EP | The South London electronic musician Klein is clearly comfortable playing roles. Her 2016 EP Lagata was written from the perspective of “a Nigerian ruler from a fictional film,” while in February she wrote, directed, and scored a “fantasy musical” at London’s ICA. cc, Klein’s third EP, sees her step away from this role-playing in favor of something more personal: Klein calls cc a “come-of-age record, with the classic teenage spirals,” that was “written about myself to myself.” What emerges is a hugely poignant work that explores the emotional depths of life, death, and growing up.
Whereas last year’s Tommy EP for Hyperdub was thick with bewildering abstraction, cc often feels like one of the saddest records you will hear, refracting the raw sound of sorrow through digital production. The harrowing “apologise” samples Heather Donahue’s snot-flecked apology monologue from The Blair Witch Project, her jerky, tear-laden breath forming a scratchy rhythmic loop that sits under torturous repetitions of Donahue’s mea culpa and builds to a howling climax of gasps and machine rhythms. Like the iconic scene from which the sample is taken, the effect is devastating, an overspill of unadulterated emotion that transcends its origins as a piece of consumable culture.
This anguish is prolonged by “last chance,” which follows. Like many of the songs on Tommy, “last chance” is based on a brilliant vocal riff, the kind of catchy melodic motif you could imagine adorning a mainstream pop hit. But here Klein focuses in on the desperation with laser intensity, as the riff’s refrain of “I can’t take it” is chopped, degraded, and pitched-shifted into a ghoulish chorus that bobs up and down in the mix like an abandoned boat at sea. The production here is similar to Tommy, but where that record was thick as tar, cc ’s individual sounds are largely distinguishable, even within the music’s soupy swirl.
Sad as those these two songs might be, cc is nothing so straightforward as a record of misery. Moments of emotional ambiguity are scattered throughout the EP’s seven tracks, many of them linked to the idea of childhood. Opener “collect” features the American artist/poet Diamond Stingily relating memories from her family over eerie synth chords and harp trills. This creates a pungently bittersweet atmosphere, as tales of her brother at three years old give way to reflections on growing pains and death. “stop” even skirts the edge of happiness, marrying what sounds like children cheering to wonky drum rhythms that nod to house and rock music, a rare appearance for conventional percussion sounds on this EP.
Meanwhile, “explay” is not so much downhearted as furiously despondent. In what might be cc’s most unusual moment, the song combines a fairly conventional rap cadence, with lyrics that explore rage and despair (“All the bitches want to talk to me yeah...Fuck this guy, I don't give a damn, I just want my mum”) delivered over a musical backing that resembles a demented fairground carousel. The two elements operate in largely unrelated musical worlds, bound together by Klein’s brilliant musical obstinacy.
This combination may sound abstruse and unwelcoming on paper, but Klein delivers the last line with a laugh that sums up the record's endearing emotional complexity. cc is a brilliant work of labyrinthine twists and turns—of production trickery, degraded melody, and abstraction. But it is one where emotion always trumps musical craft. There is sadness here, but it is woven into complex parcels of emotions, where melancholy gives way to anger, which gives way to humor and joy. That makes cc not just personal, but also overwhelmingly human. | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | May 30, 2018 | 7.7 | 53108261-a00a-4e8b-ba6c-8886ddacdfa9 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Prog-metal's best band returns with a record that may be even better than its monumental Leviathan LP. Please welcome the new monsters of rock. | Prog-metal's best band returns with a record that may be even better than its monumental Leviathan LP. Please welcome the new monsters of rock. | Mastodon: Blood Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9426-blood-mountain/ | Blood Mountain | There's plenty afoot in the metal underground-- it's the mainstream version that desperately needs a new set of heroes. While junior-high faves Ozzy Osbourne, Guns n' Roses, and Metallica look like they could no longer eat the rich without gnawing on their own fatuous fingers, Mastodon are on the cusp of arena-sized success. The Atlanta quartet's already released two excellent full-lengths, 2002's Remission and 2004's Leviathan, as well as formative material in 2001's Lifesblood EP (which resurfaced earlier this year on Call of the Mastodon). If Blood Mountain, their brilliantly upsized and unrelenting third album, doesn't confirm their position as the greatest big-time metal crew on earth, I demand a state-by-state recount.
Anyone paying attention to heavy rock knows Leviathan is held in near-religious regard in metal circles-- it's an album that tops critical checklists and makes the kids shit their pants. I've spent a lot of time listening to Leviathan and the new record in tandem, and at first I couldn't believe it myself but... Blood Mountain may be even better. No, I'm not fucking with you. These 12 new tracks operate on a similar sonic level as their predecessors: Blood Mountain has the same producer, ex-Minus the Bear/current metal tweaker Matt Bayles, and though he obviously spent a lot more time layering substrata this time around, the recording's a lovely shade of dense.
Here, Mastodon's songwriting technique is refined, built upon, and doubled up, pushing the ingredients from their last album toward a more complex assault. It lands the band in totally fascinating realms: Leviathan's post-Remission exploratory impulse picked up and sharpened, with the entire band playing rich polyrhythms at a level that (for now) appears unsurpassable. I've heard shouts that the record's just too precise. Nope. Tech for tech's sake? How? Stranger yet, some have even written that Blood Mountain doesn't have hooks. It certainly does-- especially when those syrupy, psychedelic choruses and bridges feature increasingly stunning vocal performances by Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders, who've further developed as lyricists and howlers.
Leviathan left listeners reaching for Moby Dick, on which it was based. Now ditching those literary analogues, Blood Mountain moves from the white whale to the band's Ahab-sized vision-quest up a fabled peak. For it, the band has concocted a conceptual world-- and like any good game of Dungeons and Dragons its journey includes trials, blizzard-condition soul searching, cannibalism, and various beasts, including a half-sasquatch cyclops ("Circle of Cysquatch") and a monster constructed from various smaller, leafy creatures that, together, form a forest ("Colony of Birchmen"). It's a fantastical trek, and it allows the group to remain on an elemental theme-- Remission was fire, Leviathan water, and Blood Mountain is earth-- while glorying in their own Maiden-sized storytelling. Considering all the farting that takes place in the band's Workhorse Chronicles DVD, I'm afraid of what they'll do for wind.
Songwise, Mastodon break out of the gate with "The Wolf Is Loose", a showcase of rapid-fire technical skill and songwriting chops. As usual, the guitars jab and interweave, drummer Brann Dailor melts minds with his fills, and the switch between vocalists finds the lyrics jumping from gruff gut-checks ("The belly of the whale/ Refusal of return") to Sabbathian soul ("As the solider walks through the crimson side"). There are more compelling costume changes and time shifts than you can count-- and from there, it never lets up. Starting with Dailor, this time playing 50-gallon drums like an shadowy marching band, the hydra-fed "Crystal Skull" includes a blistering vocal assist from Neurosis' Scott Kelly. "Sleeping Giant" opens elegantly with a gloomy Isis nautical feel, before ripping into another slow psychedelic streak.
It's a taut, flaw-free opening triad, and looking beyond it, there isn't a dud in the bunch. Highlights? "Capillarian Crest" is mathy prog-metal that glides unrelentingly between whip-smart crescendos. "Circle of Cysquatch" tackles dark Meshuggah-esque thrashing and includes a bleak vocoder part. Jazz-fucking instrumental "Bladecatcher" layers Drive Like Jehu birdcalls over crunch and classical scale-riding. Guest vocalist Josh Homme adds trills to "Colony of Birchmen"'s dense fun-house mirror, providing the album's catchiest moment. The record's final few tracks are increasingly huge, culminating in the "Siberian Divide", in which our hero eats his own flesh when his mind is fucked by the Snow Queen. The Mars Volta-style intro had me nervous, but it's yet another perfect shapeshift between psych density and metal growl. And props where props are due: Cedric Bixler-Zavala contributes and actually adds an interesting vocal angle.
The one misstep? After the last track, following 17 minutes of silence, Homme stumbles over a supposedly self-penned fan letter to the band: "Dear Mastodon, my name is Joshua, I'm a big fan from Southern Cal. Really diggin' on your new scene. That's why I hope you don't mind when I got your new demos for your new CD, I had to sing parts on them and send them to you as a tribute," etc. Dorky, yeah, but giddy enough and easily overlooked. Plan: When you get to the final notes of "Pendulous Skin", press stop and start again.
The record's liners contain mountain-climber texts that add a great old school-sized aspect to Blood Mountain, but that trek to the snowy summit could also refer to Mastodon's ascension of the major label monolith. On the way, they may not have literally battled a cyclops or scored the crystal skull (though, guessing they found some okay weed), but they have returned to solid ground with their most awe-inspiring album to date. Please welcome the new monsters of rock. | 2006-09-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Reprise | September 20, 2006 | 8.7 | 53111683-73ac-42cb-9e5d-5e64d7dd41aa | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Featuring members of Protomartyr and Preoccupations, the post-punk supergroup’s debut is refreshingly blunt and ambitious. | Featuring members of Protomartyr and Preoccupations, the post-punk supergroup’s debut is refreshingly blunt and ambitious. | Bloodslide: Bloodslide EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bloodslide-bloodslide-ep/ | Bloodslide EP | In 2018, Protomartyr and Preoccupations, two of North America’s most reliable and forward-thinking post-punk bands, teamed for a split single. The gothic, reverb-heavy songs on Telemetry at Howe Bridge were exactly what you might expect from their collaboration. By comparison, the new supergroup Bloodslide—which features Preoccupations drummer Mike Wallace, Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee, and vocalist AJ Lambert, the daughter of Nancy Sinatra—is nearly unrecognizable. Presented as a “multimedia art powerhouse,” their four-song EP and accompanying visuals explode with ambition while showcasing a grotesque, riveting blend of post-rock and shoegaze.
A far cry from the favored sounds of her collaborators, Lambert’s solo work has spanned from jazz standards to Spoon covers, and the theatricality of her voice is a surprising fit for this alien noise-rock project. Often, her presence tempers the brutality. On “Trap Door,” she sings with wrathful, operatic flair about “summer lies that started along like a dog.” The unsettling imagery of “Pica,” meanwhile, is thrown into the light with the frightening evenness of her delivery. As if reciting a spell, she chants of “ash in your gut,” “soap in your mouth,” and “chalk on the tip of your lips.”
The visual aspect of the EP also speaks to the group’s interest in exploring beyond their past work. The bold aesthetic, presented in a series of music videos and the accompanying artwork, is refreshingly blunt: cybergoth in a way that recalls Grimes as much as horror-punks Grave Pleasures, and conjuring the world of Resident Evil in the compulsive motion of its AR-integrated videos. Ahee’s textural experimentation takes a similarly wild approach. His previous collaborations already had a near-hyperactive range—from the woodwind section on Protomartyr’s Ultimate Success Today, to the DIY indie pop of Turn to Crime’s Down in the Basement, through the hypnagogic iciness on Matthew Dear’s Bunny. Here, he and Wallace create immense detail in every landscape, as in the brightly piercing, Interpol-like outro on “MVP” and the leaden electronic teeth of “Pica.”
Occasionally, the wall-of-sound experimentation can lean towards excess, and the momentum of the EP falters with the tempo of the closing Nancy Wilson cover, “How Glad I Am.” For all their ambition and cybernetic innovation, Bloodslide don’t seem interested in writing The Shape of Post-Punk to Come, or offering anything near a manifesto. The complexity and scale of their music instead comes from its intimacy: a shield from outside influence and expectations. They steep themselves in post-punk conventions only so they can more freely brush them away.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | August 10, 2021 | 7.1 | 53134dd3-ec8b-46ba-9fef-03ae3d9f55c9 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The North Carolina trio’s fifth record show a softer side, but some moments yearn for their trademark snarkiness. | The North Carolina trio’s fifth record show a softer side, but some moments yearn for their trademark snarkiness. | Spider Bags: Someday Everything Will Be Fine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spider-bags-someday-everything-will-be-fine/ | Someday Everything Will Be Fine | Dan McGee’s obsession with the tragicomic predates his decade-long tenure as the frontman of the North Carolina trio Spider Bags. In the early 2000s, he launched a raucous punk band “with the most obnoxious name we could find”: DC Snipers. The band’s songs, like “All Humans Are Garbage” were accordingly provocative, but their knack for making self-loathing sound like a joyride carried over to Spider Bags as well, delivered in the form of grungy, countrified rock songs whose fervor amplified their absurdist messaging.
But the title of Spider Bags’ fifth full-length, Someday Everything Will Be Fine, signals a change. Throughout the album, McGee keeps himself partly rooted in angst and apathy, while, for the first time, also directly expounds on the healing powers of love. We witness a more holistic and honest McGee, but it often comes at the expense of his gallows humor and it renders his narratives a bit tepid. A handful of moments yearn for his trademark snarkiness: For all the morose talk of pills that can’t make a man care and children sleeping in hearses, the mid-tempo rocker “Burning Sand” takes the rancid air out of the album with its overly earnest mode. When McGee vows to “Crawl across the burning sand/If I could only be your man,” it lands as emotionally dull.
Fortunately, the group —which also includes drummer Rock Forbes, bassist Steve Oliva, and contributions from a cast of friends including Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles—compensates for the occasional frictionless lyric with some of their most impassioned roadhouse punk yet. Recorded to tape with a vintage Tascam 388 8-track, Someday drips with a loving sloppiness and a grimy sheen that was largely absent from their last album, 2014’s Frozen Letter. The blankets of distortion and rusted squawks of guitar convey the giddy familial air of a band that might still relish sleeping together on the studio floor during recording sessions. The sub-minute rush of “Cop Dream / Black Eye (True Story)” recalls DC Snipers’ elemental punk, complete with a sinewy guitar line straight out of the Pixies, and the band balances sentimentality with irreverence on “Reckless,” a hodgepodge of unused songs that begins as a crushing mass of atonal slop and goopy effects before pulling itself out if its own muck. “I wasn’t born...to give a fuck,” McGee yelps at the song’s apex before playing his full hand: his partner is the only balm that can soothe his own worst tendencies.
The album’s centerpiece is a glowing and revved-up cover of Charlie Rich’s 1977 country hit “Rollin With the Flow,” an ode to staying weird even as middle-age begs you to take the straight and narrow. It’s an intriguing statement from McGee, once a beer-drenched Peter Pan, who is now married with kids in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While he longs to keep one foot planted in Rich’s hedonism, he has instead landed on a lukewarm contentment that speaks to the album’s title. Love has saved Dan McGee, but as he and Spider Bags effectively remind us, it hasn’t killed his demons. | 2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 8, 2018 | 7 | 5313b2fe-4f61-48ac-b1b1-b2a5da7489f6 | Max Savage Levenson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-savage levenson/ | |
On their first project in five years, Saba's crew sounds like a bunch of friends at the lunch table trying to out-rap each other for fun. | On their first project in five years, Saba's crew sounds like a bunch of friends at the lunch table trying to out-rap each other for fun. | Pivot Gang: You Can't Sit With Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pivot-gang-you-cant-sit-with-us/ | You Can't Sit With Us | “You can’t do this shit alone, you gon’ need a crew,” Saba posits on Pivot Gang’s “Mortal Kombat,” a sentiment as true in life as it is in rap. Just consult one of the many lettered rap fraternities: A$AP, YBN, OMB, etc. Saba has been building with his crew since 2012; rappers Joseph Chilliams, MFn Melo, and Frsh Waters and in-house producers daedaePIVOT and SqueakPIVOT, who are joined unofficially by multi-instrumentalist Daoud. On the cover for You Can’t Sit With Us, the crew’s debut album and first project in five years, they gather before a portrait of Pivot co-founder John Walt, who was killed in 2017. “Since *NSYNC broke up, I figured it’s our turn,” Chilliams raps, following Brockhampton’s lead. This project has the warmth of lifelong friends finding comfort in each other’s presence after tragedy.
Not that the music feels weighty or somber: The Pivot Gang album is full of good-natured, low-stakes sparring among playmates. Chicago compatriots and YCA alums Smino, Jean Deaux, Mick Jenkins, and Femdot tag along, as well as other like-minded out-of-towners Kari Faux, Benjamin Earl Turner, Sylvan LaCue. Together, they sound less like a crew than a like a bunch of friends at the lunch table trying to out-rap each other for fun.
Pivot is an ensemble with a pyramid structure: at the top is, obviously, Saba, not just the best rapper in the group but among the best rappers in his age bracket. He is the only one who appears on every song. Almost as active are Chilliams, Melo, and Frsh Waters. Chilliams’ similes don’t always track, but they’re hilarious nonetheless (“Sleeping on me is like fucking an assassin”); Melo sounds like a schoolteacher in search of the most perfectly lucid phrasing; Waters is the crew’s inner monologue, popping in to offer guidance or real talk (On “Bible”: I’m them thoughts when you get smoked up/Feel the world up on your shoulder”). The foundation of their outfit is the producer trio—daedae, Squeak, and Daoud—who, frankly, make everyone sound better. Things all clicked into place for Saba on CARE FOR ME, in part because of the gorgeous soundbeds that perfectly complemented his intricate, carefully spoken raps. Here, they build upon that sound, one they’ve been honing with loosies for the last few months.
Saba, for his part, is still projecting the messages of CARE FOR ME, sneaking lyrics like “I don’t wanna waste time, I don’t wanna Facetime/I wanna be where you are,” or “They might comment on your social/But they can’t love you, they don't know you” into his verses. But his album was a searing personal statement dedicated to a lost love one; he opens himself up to pleasure here. With amusement comes the leeway to attempt gnarlier, and also sillier, maneuvers in a safe space. His “Mortal Kombat” raps are lacernating in their precision, while his “Hero” flows lean heavily into intoned cadences that curl up at the ends before dissipating.
The best crew albums establish dynasties or rebuild them, spotlight minor members who make star turns, or are representative of a hyper specific rap epoch. You Can’t Sit With Us doesn’t do any of these things, but it avoids ephemerality because Pivot Gang have invested so much love and care into it. Everything about the album is thoughtfully put together, and it is at points funny, charming, playful, and pretty. Most of all, they move as a unit, not as Saba and Friends. “Carnival,” the only posse cut to feature all the Pivot rappers, presents each member, along with Benjamin Earl Turner and Sylvan LaCue, seamlessly as if on a conveyor belt. When they’re weaving in and out with Femdot in tow on “mathematics,” it’s like watching a highly skilled double dutch team; it’s probably inconsequential in the grander scheme, yet you can’t help but be awed by the synchronicity and timing. | 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 30, 2019 | 7.5 | 531f3943-d41a-4f94-b372-8e0ee587905d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
German pianist/composer follows his excellent 2008 album, Ferndorf, with an album of chamber and piano pieces inspired by various locales. | German pianist/composer follows his excellent 2008 album, Ferndorf, with an album of chamber and piano pieces inspired by various locales. | Hauschka: Foreign Landscapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14726-foreign-landscapes/ | Foreign Landscapes | Volker Bertelmann, the German pianist/composer who records as Hauschka, likes to keep things small. His instrumental sketches rarely exceed the five-minute mark, and they completely eschew "big" dramatic moments. At their best, they function like a series of a wistful, drifty postcards from some middle memory of places and things. This approach served his 2008 album Ferndorf well enough; an homage to his childhood village in Germany, it's charmingly naive and occasionally bittersweet, something you could imagine nicely scoring a sentimental coming-of-age film.
Foreign Landscapes takes Ferndorf's chronicling principle on the road. The album consists of pieces inspired by locations around the world, from New York City's Union Square to Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Like its predecessors, it is scored mostly for three or four chamber musicians and Hauschka's piano, which he lightly prepares, John Cage-style, by placing objects on the strings. A colorful travelogue concept could be ideal for the prepared piano's wilder possibilities: in the right hands, it can resemble a Chinese zither, or a gamelan ensemble, or a horde of buzzing locusts. But Hauschka's preparation serves only to make his piano sound slightly more toylike; the result is that on Foreign Landscapes, the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira and the Japanese city Kamogawa come off sounding like the same quaint, sleepy little 18th century village square.
There are fleeting moments of prettiness in all of Hauschka's work; he has a wonderful ear for evocative bits of sound. But when he fails to find anywhere convincing to steer them, they don't leave lasting marks. "Alexanderplatz" opens with a pungent gypsy violin scored by some bracingly sour woodwinds; in "Iron Shoes", a violin sings a lovely almost-quote from the second movement Dvořák's famous "American" string quartet. Rather than build on this, however, Hauschka falls back on the same sprightly, anonymous churn all of his pieces eventually succumb to.
As a result, it becomes kind of hard to know what to do with his music, exactly. It doesn't reward close attention, but it doesn't fade successfully into the background, either; his arrangements are too scrappy and jostling for that. The strings and woodwinds often just sort of rattle around each other like loose parts in a shoebox, jolting the music to the forefront without doing much to command it once there, and it can make for a maddening listening experience, like someone tapping you insistently on the shoulder only to stare at you blankly when you finally turn around.
The best moments come when the tootling woodwinds and strings disappear, and Hauschka just lays out a pretty piano melody. The drunken, faux-Rachmaninov sway of "Mount Hood" is the album's richest piece, and the only work that makes truly compelling use of John Cage's prepared-piano technique. What sounds like a combination of pins, screws, and ping-pong balls bounce up and down on the strings while Hauschka plays a mournful minor-key piano steeped in pedal haze. The rickety, groaning sounds that result add an ineffable layer of sadness: It evokes the image of a pair of ghosts dancing together slowly on a sunken ship. It is the exception to the rule, unfortunately, and Foreign Landscapes enters a deadly boring lull before its second half and never recovers. The result has the energy of a cup of tea slowly going tepid in the Sunday afternoon sun. | 2010-10-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-10-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | 130701 | October 12, 2010 | 5.5 | 5320c6a2-2176-430f-92ab-8ed399ef1a4b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Cameron Graves, the pianist for Kamasi Washington and a founding member of the West Coast Get Down collective, makes his own searing mark with an enrapturing and assured solo album. | Cameron Graves, the pianist for Kamasi Washington and a founding member of the West Coast Get Down collective, makes his own searing mark with an enrapturing and assured solo album. | Cameron Graves: Planetary Prince | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22003-planetary-prince/ | Planetary Prince | The collective known as the West Coast Get Down may have made its emphatic mark on the jazz world in 2015, but the bandmates have been honing their sound and approach for nearly two decades together in Los Angeles. They’ve put in their Gladwellian 10,000 hours, just not in New York or at Berklee.
If tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington—with his sprawling, uncompromising record The Epic—was the subject of the most column inches in 2015, this may be the year for some of his long-time collaborators like Cameron Graves, a beguiling pianist who just released Planetary Prince, his rousing debut as a bandleader. Fellow WCGD musicians Ryan Porter (trombone), Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner (bass), drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr., and Kamasi Washington (as a sideman) return for this set, with the addition of trumpeter Philip Dizack and Hadrien Feraud, another bassist, both of whom are immersed in the L.A. jazz scene.
It’s at once an addendum to The Epic and an extension. It was recorded during an eleven-hour session, and at 80 minutes it has the feel of a concept album, channeling Graves’ interest in astrology and The Urantia Book, the 2,000-page spiritual/science text of unknown provenance that served as inspiration for outré composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-day opera “Licht.” (Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia also carried around copies in their rucksacks.)
The authorship of the music, though, is all Graves, who, it’s been reported, enjoys death metal and Chopin, hip-hop and prog rock, and has played with Jada Pinkett-Smith’s band Wicked Wisdom and pioneering fusion bassist Stanley Clarke. The eight tracks on the album reveal Graves’ influences, which seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. There are whiffs of McCoy Tyner, especially from his early- mid-’70s groups, Abdullah Ibrahim, and somehow Joe Sample, yet he doesn’t particularly sound like any of them.
As a youngster, Graves studied classical piano, which is apparent from the gorgeous opening bars of the first piece, “Satania Our Solar System,” before it quickly transitions into an uptempo fusion-esque romp with a charging back beat. In the subsequent title track, Graves, who plays acoustic throughout the set, bursts out in percussive form—he’s often thunderingly percussive, as in “The Lucifer Rebellion” later—and follows with a busy, jabbing solo. Washington, with his singular, bravura tone, soon joins and verges on obfuscating the material, but stays just on the right side of his ecstatic-expressionism. “Andromeda” shifts to a quieter side, or as quiet as the WCGD can get. Feraud, a Parisian, recalls Jaco Pastorius on an inspired electric bass solo, and Ronald Bruner—who also shimmers on “El Diablo”—coerces all sorts of vibrant colors out of just his cymbals. The theme, especially when played by the horns, has a dream-like touch, as if penned by Wayne Shorter.
On “Isle of Love,” the leader opens with vigor, before Kamasi returns for another towering solo. Graves takes us out softly and by himself, which is exactly how “Adam & Eve” begins. Kamasi lets loose one more time, but the three horns that finish the tune—and Porter’s trombone adds lovely texture here, as it did on The Epic—underscores the unselfishness that marks the work of the WCGD. “The End of Corporatism,” an uptempo piece, further captures the Collective’s (and Graves’) drive and spirit, one that is enraptured, assured, grandiose in moments, but never self-aggrandizing. Planetary Prince might not shift the tectonic plates the way *The Epic *did, but Graves, while earthly-bound, has his gaze set upward. | 2017-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Mack Avenue | March 4, 2017 | 7.7 | 532b87c7-9431-4a62-9b2b-c6f99937e92b | Michael J. Agovino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-j. agovino/ | null |
One of the year's most anticipated albums turns out to be worthy of the hype, as Grizzly Bear continue to expand their approach to lush chamber pop. | One of the year's most anticipated albums turns out to be worthy of the hype, as Grizzly Bear continue to expand their approach to lush chamber pop. | Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13078-veckatimest/ | Veckatimest | Veckatimest ain't perfect; lord knows it tries. More than most any album in recent memory not named Chinese Democracy (please keep reading), it is compositionally and sonically airtight, every moment sounding tweaked, labored over. Perfection-- and the pursuit thereof-- has its price, and in less able hands (with all love to Axl), this obsessive attention to craft and execution could lead to something dull. What's perhaps the most remarkable thing about the truly remarkable Veckatimest, however, is how very exciting much of it is; no small feat for a painstaking chamber-pop record that never once veers above the middle tempo.
2007's Friend EP had me worried that Grizzly Bear's insistence on having everything in its right place had forced formula onto what had seemed to that point freewheeling and free-associative. For every inspired moment on Friend, there was another that fell back on the tried-but-true: a quiet intro bleeding into a big, harmonic midsection followed by an eventual denouement. That sound characterized a few of the better tunes on 2006's Yellow House-- and a fair bit of what little Grizzly Bear has released since. That said, we've had no shortage of Grizzly Bear-related music: Dan Rossen's recently resuscitated Department of Eagles made a pretty great record last year, Chris Taylor's done some stellar production work with Dirty Projectors and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, and the band proper have lined up onstage collaborations with high-minded sorts like Nico Muhly and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. In Veckatimest, one sees the fruit of that variegated labor as well; between records, these dudes have been busy getting better at all the things they do, and as it turns out, Veckatimest manages to do Yellow House at least a few better on nearly every metric.
First, the songs. By now, many of you should be familiar with the stunning bounce of "Two Weeks", the skyward swoon of teen creeper "Cheerleader", and the surefooted shuffle of "While You Wait for the Others". (In fact, I'm painfully aware you may just be intimately familiar with the whole damn thing. If that's you, listen good: that windtunnel 128k leak you nabbed that fateful night back in March? That is not Veckatimest. Get thee to a buying place.) Highlights, all, but there's more where that came from. The fluttering opener "Southern Point" takes off and circles back like a flock of birds, as inviting as Yellow House's "Easier" and a whole lot more to the point. The Rossen-sung "All We Ask" does the Rossen thing, starting soft and slow before exploding around the halfway mark, but it does it as well as or better than anything we've heard from him before. The record's final stretch, from "While You Wait" through the head-swimmer "I Live With You" to the masterful, muted "Foreground" closes Veckatimest on three very strong notes.
But this is Grizzly Bear, and despite an increased confidence in their pop sensibilities and an overall strengthening of melodies, they're still meanderers at heart. Highlights abound, but Veckatimest does sound as though it was conceived as a whole piece, and one must consider both the overall structure and the connective tissue between the abundant highlights to judge it a success. Save "Cheerleader" and the lilting "Ready, Able", the stretch between "Fine for Now" and "While You Wait" wanders a bit; certain moments, like Rossen's "swim around like two dories" line and the wispy, wheezing "About Face", hit harder than others. But you'll be looking for a while to find anybody who thinks the center of Veckatimest is as strong as the stuff surrounding it.
Beyond irking folks predisposed to slagging off intricate and, yeah, "sophisticated" music like this-- you stay punk, I'mma stay fascinated-- this trip down yonder to the minor key will doubtless be the big complaint about Veckatimest. But really, couldn't we say the same about Yellow House? I mean, there's some jam in between "Knife" and "On a Neck, On a Spit", but there's an awful lot of wide-open spaces and deliberate left turns in there, too. Yellow House was not a record defined so much by its two or three big numbers as it was by the slightly haunting impression it left when you played it front to back; it sounded deconstructed, whereas Veckatimest feels built brick-by-brick. As I mentioned, Veckatimest handily beats Yellow House in the bangers department, and while you're not gonna hear "Two Weeks" on any radio station that isn't already playing Ted Leo, there is something prim and proper about the record. Yet the pop moments on Veckatimest feel even bigger after the slight deviation at its core; surrounded by a few sour notes and sidesteps, "Cheerleader" and "Ready, Able" becomes that much stronger, and even the less effective numbers ("Hold Still", "Fine for Now") seem only to cower a smidge as a result of the staggering heights they're placed next to. Out of context, they're every bit as good as the more sinewy stuff that wove Yellow House together.
I walked into Grizzly Bear's much-lauded set at the church down at SXSW this year a skeptic and came out a convert; I knew what a powerful live band they could be, having seen 'em twice before, but my fear about flatlining and my initial (and incorrect) impressions based on the Veckatimest leak had me convinced I'd get my "Knife" and my "Two Weeks" and then perhaps a very welcome nap. What I got instead was as great a testament to band democracy as I've seen onstage; these new tunes require a terrific amount of concentration and skill to pull off in that setting, and any band whose sprightliest number ("On a Neck", still) sounds like half a ragtime had to work awfully hard to win me over after I'd spent the prior eight hours replacing beer-sweat with more beer. Yeah, Veckatimest sounds worked-over, but in the best of ways; carefully embellished, stripped bare when applicable, full of the joy of sounds colliding with other sounds. Grizzly Bear was once Ed Droste's band, but no longer; it's a family affair, and only four guys so completely serious about music-making could come together to make an album this labor-intensive sound so airy, so natural.
I get it; Grizzly Bear can come across to some as boring. Lord knows I could go my whole life never reading another Ed Droste Tweet about pho or seeing Chris Taylor use a neti pot. But this little microcosm of imperfection indie rock's been working through lately could use a foil like Veckatimest, a record that, in searching for perfection through meticulousness, feels beautifully flawed and gloriously off-kilter without either side serving as the entire narrative. Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did. | 2009-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | May 26, 2009 | 9 | 53321e71-4144-438f-a95f-24f1b6629596 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Inspired by the tranquility of the Greek island of Gavdos, the Italian ambient musician luxuriates in leisurely synth passages and gentle piano melodies. | Inspired by the tranquility of the Greek island of Gavdos, the Italian ambient musician luxuriates in leisurely synth passages and gentle piano melodies. | Gigi Masin: Calypso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gigi-masin-calypso/ | Calypso | The Italian composer Gigi Masin’s music has long mirrored his fascination with the natural world. His 1986 debut, a collection of gentle, flowing pieces for piano and synthesizer, was simply called Wind. Many of his subsequent titles have referenced waves, clouds, and insects. In 2014, Music From Memory pulled together an archival collection of his music, with a title that underscored his music’s dialogue with the world around him: Talk to the Sea. His songs are largely wordless, but they nevertheless echo these sorts of images. The melodies are simple and slow-moving, but in a powerful, unpredictable way. There’s a placid joy in tracing the movements of songs like “Clouds,” watching textures and rhythms coalesce and dissolve like ripples on a lake.
On his new album Calypso, Masin made his music’s connection to nature even more explicit. In a documentary about its creation, he explains that he retreated from his home in Venice to Gavdos, an island south of Crete that he’d wanted to visit for decades. The small isle has a mythical significance—legend has it that it’s the same island on which Odysseus was imprisoned by Calypso—but Masin was struck by its simple beauty. Being surrounded by sun, sea, and salty air was a way of escaping from the mundanities of life back home. It’s the kind of place, he says, “that regenerates, enlightens, [and] opens your mind.”
Calypso echoes the emotional experience of Masin’s respite. At nearly 90 minutes long, it’s a leisurely paced album with a lot of repetition. Each piece is full of slowly sighing synth passages and languorous piano melodies that mimic the strange way time dilates when you remove yourself from the rhythms of the city, the way an afternoon alone at the beach can feel like a beautiful eternity.
Masin has said that he’s accepted that his music is a sort of “non-idea.” He approaches the process of making music as intuitive and egoless; he’s more inclined to follow sounds where they lead him rather than dictate where he wants them to go. “This gives me the freedom to not have to make too [many] decisions,” he says. You can sense that approach in the wonderful biodiversity of Calypso. His music has always been varied, especially in the time since he’s returned to more active music-making, after spending most of the ’90s working an office job. Calypso is ambient in a broad sense, but it covers a lot of different moods and sounds.
The album opens with a delicate flurry of strings and synthesizers, but it quickly moves into a sleepwalking rhythm that feels like equal parts Portishead and L.A. beat scene on “Bellamore”; the trumpet-draped ambiance of “Nefertiti” recalls Jon Hassell’s mystic experiments. Each of these first three tracks could be worth exploring for an entire record, but Masin moves quickly through each successive style. It continues like this over the course of the record, no song too similar to the last. And yet, because it’s designed to echo the feeling of the island that inspired it, each piece still nevertheless takes place in this beautiful shared universe of sunny synthesizers and delicately purring electronics. If the through line connecting these tracks sometimes becomes hard to follow, that’s probably part of the point. There is a certain pleasure in getting lost in paradise.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Apollo | March 21, 2020 | 6.7 | 5338380f-2372-4961-aa90-99704798abdb | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On her second album, one of Nashville’s biggest new stars ups the ante with a stark survey of a country in crisis. | On her second album, one of Nashville’s biggest new stars ups the ante with a stark survey of a country in crisis. | Margo Price: All American Made | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margo-price-all-american-made/ | All American Made | America, in Margo Price’s country music, is not majestic, sprawling, or inviting. It’s broken. It’s oppressive. It’s stolen. Her second album, All American Made, plays out like a realist, modern Western film, offering a stark survey of a country whose “cowboys” are city-dwelling music industry vampires; whose farms are bankrupt and acquired by corporate overlords; whose citizens are treated like dirt because of their gender. The album’s loaded three-word title—a phrase that peers like Kacey Musgraves might sell with a sharp irony or Jason Isbell with a writerly wistfulness—ends up feeling more like an admission of complicity. Throughout the LP, Price tackles Steinbeck-sized issues with a no-bullshit humility in search of answers. When she turns to the late Tom Petty in the album’s final moments—“Tell me, Mr. Petty, what do you think will happen next?”—it’s a sincere, haunting question.
While her debut album, last year’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, succeeded through stark autobiography, Margo Price now seems a lot less interested in telling her own story. One of Nashville’s biggest recent breakout stars, Price doesn’t attach herself to any particular style so much as she does to an ethos defined by independence and self-motivation. She has noted that, despite selling off many of her possessions to record her debut at Memphis’ famed Sun Studios, the goal was never to make it big. Instead, she intended to craft an honest document of her experience, one that she could stand behind. “Maybe 20, 30 years down the road, or after I’m dead, somebody would find it and it would become a cult thing like Nick Drake,” she reflected in a recent New York Times profile.
On the contrary, the album took off instantly, culminating in a tour with the platinum-selling Chris Stapleton and a head-turning performance on “Saturday Night Live.” Her streak of country domination continues on the loose, wandering All American Made, which puts her side-to-side with a legend in its first 15 minutes. Sharing vocals with Willie Nelson in the slow-burning “Learning to Lose,” she bonds with him over their humble beginnings and the lingering self-doubt that remains in spite of success. “The only enemy I know is in my mind,” Willie sings wearily, sounding every bit his 84 years. When Price—half a century younger—joins for the chorus, she sounds bold and weightless as she weaves around his weathered croon. Their voices in tandem, never quite in harmony, are comforting and wise, like a community in song.
Alone, Price’s voice can summon multitudes. She crafts a hook out of one long howl sustained with primal intensity in the swaggering, soulful single “A Little Pain.” Softer moments, like the heart-wrenching title track and its sister song “Heart of America,” are sung tenderly. Like Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, on which Price balanced first-person accounts of recklessness and grief with rolicking, full-band fun, All American Made highlights a wide range of moods—a balm in one song and a bullet in the next. In its sharpest moments, she takes aim at the patriarchy. “We’re all the same in the eyes of my God/But in the eyes of rich white men, I’m no more than a maid to be owned like a dog,” she sings in a song called “Pay Gap."
The structure of All American Made works in a strange way, grouping like-minded songs together and moving at a galloping, constantly shifting pace. It hits its peaks at the beginning and end. While the opening salvo of retro country-soul songs seems designed to bring the house down in concert, her songwriting shines brightest in the more intimate closing tracks. When she performed the title track for NPR’s “Tiny Desk” last year, it was the morning after election day. Her eyes were red with tears as she sang about losing her family’s farm and heading west in an American-built pick-up truck. A lyric that might have once inspired hope now just seemed to make her feel more helpless. “The part of me that hurts the most is the one I just can’t spot,” she sang, “And it’s all American made.” Back then, her words seemed to suggest that there was no escape ahead. A year later, on All American Made, she finds power in sticking around and bearing witness. | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Third Man | October 30, 2017 | 7.6 | 53392d51-1724-42da-95db-3ed4c988c725 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The indefatigable punk icon reworks his anthemic 2020 album No Dream as ska, and wouldn’t you know, it works. | The indefatigable punk icon reworks his anthemic 2020 album No Dream as ska, and wouldn’t you know, it works. | Jeff Rosenstock: SKA DREAM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-rosenstock-ska-dream/ | SKA DREAM | Like a surfer at sunrise, or a lieutenant general girding for a melee attack, ska fans are always scanning the horizon for the next wave. The Jamaican first wave reshaped music; the British second wave proposed a cross-racial, working-class solidarity. At the back half of the 1990s, a slew of screwy ska-punk from like Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish, and Dance Hall Crashers introduced the actual idea of a wave: ska as a natural, recurrent phenomenon. Since then, the big question is… has that fourth wave hit yet? Should we celebrate or dread its arrival? Are chart hits the harbingers? Perhaps it happens when ska is spliced into new contexts. At some point, the indefatigable underground punk icon Jeff Rosenstock took his place at ska’s vanguard. After the dissolution of his Long Island ska-punk act Arrogant Sons of Bitches, Rosenstock recorded an album—which he credited to “Bomb the Music Industry!”—at home. 2005’s Album Minus Band took full advantage of the bedroom format. The expected frenetic guitar upstrokes were supplemented with superhuman cymbal taps and plugin anti-theft hiss; Rosenstock leapt from folk-punk to ska-core to synthpunk like he was cutting a promo reel.
It wasn’t the shape of ska to come, exactly, but it was a bracing, omnivorous statement, one that Rosenstock elaborated upon as he added members to BtMI and styles to his repertoire. But by the time of 2011’s Vacation, the horns suggested Neutral Milk Hotel more than Mustard Plug. There were as many ska tracks as Brian Wilson-indebted wordless interludes (one). It was Rosenstock’s favorite Bomb release, and the band’s last album. Since then, he’s leaned harder into pop-punk, power pop, even heartland rock. In a 2018 interview, Rosenstock recalled his approach to Vacation. “I felt that with the songs I was writing I’d be shoehorning ska parts into them to make them ska songs,” he said. “I thought, why the fuck would I do that?”
Why the fuck indeed! On 4/20, Rosenstock announced the release of SKA DREAM, a skanktified rework of last year’s anthemic, exhausted NO DREAM. Anyone with the barest interest in Rosenstock’s career knew that this wouldn’t be some Covid-induced stopgap. Sidelined from the club circuit, free to track whatever he wanted, he chose to turn a group chat goof into a celebration of ska. To up the ante further, he did so with an expanded cast of players, all of whom had to send him their parts from across the country. Some of the guests (Fishbone’s Angelo Moore, Skankin’ Pickle singer/Asian Man Records founder Mike Park) are ska royalty; some—like Jer Hunter, the hepped-up proprietor of the popular Skatune Network channel, who contributes trumpet and trombone—are up-and-comers in the genre. Other guests are merely ska-adjacent, like Oceanator mastermind Elise Okusami and the pop-punk band PUP. And some guests, incredibly, are George Clarke of Deafheaven.
There is very little here that seems shoehorned. That’s due in large part to regular supporting cast Death Rosenstock, who utterly rearranged everything on NO DREAM. The insistent klaxon guitar intro of “State Line” becomes an air-raid siren on the dubby “Horn Line,” as drummer Kevin Higuchi holds down a Specials-inflected reggae lope. (At one point on SKA DREAM, Rosenstock cribs a bit of “Nite Klub.”) “Monday at the Beach” was a perfectly breakneck pop-punk number, and could have been easily translated to, like, skacore. But “Monday at Back to the Beach” slows things down to a Sublime crawl, with Rosenstock’s hazy croon suggesting Brian Wilson trying chillwave.
This is not to say Rosenstock and company overthought this: the absurdly peppy opener “No Time to Skank” matches its counterpart punch for punch. “SKrAm,” another third-wave remake, swings hard upon Rosenstock’s sturdy vocal line. At points, “SKrAm” sounds like some mythical Asian Man crossover hit from ’97. The illusion is shattered once Bay Area rapper Boboso pops up with some nerdcore bars (“Brain is feeling scrambled/Homer Simpson in the bramble”), but goofiness was integral to the third-wave project. Spiritually, it works. Lyrically, it’s the only real addition to the original album.
That’s the other reason this set holds together: Rosenstock’s a damn good songwriter. Turns out, the poignance of “Honeymoon Ashtray,” with its portrait of mutual flailing stasis, translates even if you throw a steppers’ groove on it, or chase it with toasting. On NO DREAM’s “The Beauty of Breathing,” Rosenstock uses prickly power pop to suggest his frustration with unhelpful mental-health advice. “The Rudie of Breathing” sees him withdrawing instead of pushing back, quietly keening over a midtempo 2 Tone groove and sympathetic horns.
For anyone without the constitution for ska—someone who, say, can’t see the magic when the Aquabats don spandex, deep into middle age—SKA DREAM may sound like a quarantine-induced crackup, along the lines of Old Dominion Meow Mix. (The 4/20 release date surely won’t help.) For longtime fans of the genre, though, each hup and pick it up is truly affecting. At its best, the third wave was a paradoxical state of being: profoundly goofy. Pushing Jah Jerry rhythms to absurd tempos alongside 10 of your closest friends, half of whom have known each other since seventh-grade concert band? And welding all that—the show-band brass section, the ingratiatingly chipper off beat, the dang porkpie hats—to the alienation of American punk rock? What a dream.
Regardless of its ample artistic merit, SKA DREAM represents something rare: an act re-doing an LP because they felt like it. Album do-overs are almost always undertaken under duress. In the mid-2000s, Victory Records began prepping a reissue of Catch 22’s ska-punk classic Keasbey Nights. That was unpleasant news for Keasbey’s principal songwriter, Tomas Kalnoky, who had left Catch to form Streetlight Manifesto (also signed to Victory). As a compromise, Streetlight released Keasbey Nights 2, a dutiful take that only postponed the inevitable. A more modern example would be—of course—Taylor Swift, who has a Rosenstockian propensity for surprise album releases during pandemics. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) practically invites the listener to discern how Swift’s psychographic landscape has shifted since her country-pop days. SKA DREAM is the reverse: as a goof, Rosenstock invites the past to inhabit the present. Can you believe it? The Airwalks fit.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | May 5, 2021 | 8 | 533b58fb-1095-4e92-8ab5-7b4418c26fcf | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
To celebrate five years in business, the Hyperdub label gathers tracks from Burial, Flying Lotus, and more into a convincing statement on the range of dubstep. | To celebrate five years in business, the Hyperdub label gathers tracks from Burial, Flying Lotus, and more into a convincing statement on the range of dubstep. | Various Artists: 5: Five Years of Hyperdub | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13614-5-five-years-of-hyperdub/ | 5: Five Years of Hyperdub | Beatportal.com user Yield Load thinks "dubstep is wicked music, but I didn't know how your suppose to dance to it." The grammar's not there, but the idea is: Dubstep-- the nocturnal, claustrophobic subgenera of British electronic music that emerged from garage and 2-step-- is descended from dance music but doesn't sound like it's made for dancing. The tempos feel slow, the mood is usually threatening, lonely, or both. If there's any movement I can imagine going comfortably with dubstep, it's what Three 6 Mafia's DJ Paul rapped about on "Side 2 Side", and the standard step at indie-rock shows worldwide: "I'm in the club posted up, got my arms folded... twistin' my body from side to side."
Of all the videos of dubstep dancing I clicked through online, two stick out in my mind. One is by an overweight teenager in what is likely his parents' living room, a decorative ship's lifesaver on the wall between what appear to be illustrations of the seaside, a large desktop computer at one end of the room, an open door leading to a yard on the other. A track by the producer Skream comes on, and he starts to move his fists up and down like a child banging steadily on a table, taking very deliberate steps across a carpet. That's it. The other is of two men, one black and one white, dressed in suits, dancing in some kind of white, computer-generated void, as the names of their dance steps flash across the bottom of the screen. My favorite is called "Lost in the woods (with bewildered stare)". I don't know if the comedy was intentional. Either way, it's a sign that dubstep has reached a particular position of cultural importance: hundreds of thousands of people are watching a suburban kid dance to it on YouTube.
Hyperdub is usually cited as dubstep's most prominent and progressive label, but it's hard to even call most of their releases dubstep, strictly speaking. They've released off-centered hip-hop (Flying Lotus), brooding chill-out music that recasts the chill-out room as a bunker (Kode9 & the Spaceape), and misfit rave music (Zomby). Hyperdub's sound isn't dubstep, it's urban noir in the 21st century, or at least how the 21st century looked in 1970s science fiction: A procession of florescent signs over an empty street. 5: Five Years of Hyperdub-- their first CD compilation-- has the tall task of trying to anthologize the label without making it seem like they've run out of ideas. Their solution is sensible: One disc of new material; one disc of classics.
Like any label compilation, 5 functions as a kind of mission statement: Here's what we've done; here's what we do. Most of the music on it sounds made for the head, not the feet. In a way, it's like a modern analog to Warp's 1992 compilation, Artificial Intelligence, whose sleeve was a picture of an empty armchair in a living room-- electronic music that has a place in the home.
Describing his music to The Guardian in 2007, the producer Burial said, "I want it to be like a little sanctuary. It's like that 24-hour stand selling tea on a rainy night, glowing in the dark." His two albums, Burial and Untrue, have more in common with Massive Attack and ambient music than anything you'd hear at a club. Zomby, on the other hand-- whose Where Were U in 92? sounded like jungle and drum'n'bass chewed up by a Game Boy-- described his daily routine to XLR8R magazine as "lots of rolling joints" and "eating some chicken-based dish à la carte." These guys aren't public faces, they're lost in the crowd-- they're people spacing out in their living rooms, alone. Burial's identity was secret for two years after he started putting out records. Zomby will be photographed only while wearing a mask.
Anyone familiar with Hyperdub-- or dubstep in general-- will know most of the classics disc. That's the point. One of the label's first singles-- Kode9 & the Spaceape's bloodless cover of the Specials' "Ghost Town"-- doesn't even have a beat behind it; it floats. Burial shows up twice, once with "South London Boroughs", once with "Distant Lights". There's Zomby's nightmarish "Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)", whose sampled vocalist sings, "One spliff a day keep the evil away," over a track of 8-bit garbage and what sounds like synthesizers in a deep fryer. (The music captures weed's paranoia more than its elation-- I mean, is it supposed to make me like pot or fear it?)
The word "classics" has a kind of accelerated, lax definition in dance music, and some of the tracks on the second disc are from as recent as earlier this year. The heaviest is Joker's "Digidesign", a spacious, bone-simple piece of 80s-style R&B based around a handful of acidic countermelodies, so elegant it almost plays like a jingle.
The first disc-- the new one-- is good, but doesn't hold up to the classics. Those expected to bring it, as it were-- Burial, Zomby, Joker, Flying Lotus-- do, just not in any revelatory ways. Of the bunch, Zomby is probably the most satisfying because he's so hard to pin down: "Tarantula" doesn't sound exactly like anything he's released before, and his most recent single, "Digital Flora"/"Digital Fauna" doesn't sound like "Tarantula". I was never sold on Quarta 330's chiptune routine, nor on Kode9's music either-- their new contributions roll off. The only track that actively perplexes me is Black Chow's "Purple Smoke", whose junkshop hip-hop beats are the most brainlessly retro flourish on the whole compilation, and whose come-hither Japanese vocalist confuses sexy with corny. Minor complaints. Hyperdub deserves this: They've reshaped the little world they work in, and they've reached out to a wider one-- whether that world dances or not. | 2009-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Hyperdub | October 28, 2009 | 8.2 | 533c67f1-c26f-43ea-b8b8-fd7ed3a143ba | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Released shortly after Boosie's emotionally gripping In My Feelings mixtape, which grappled with his cancer diagnosis, Out My Feelings reflects on a life covered in scars and pain—not just his own, but those of the people around him and people he’s interacted with. Since his release from prison in 2014, the Baton Rouge rapper seems committed to living up to the 2Pac comparisons his ardent supporters have given him. | Released shortly after Boosie's emotionally gripping In My Feelings mixtape, which grappled with his cancer diagnosis, Out My Feelings reflects on a life covered in scars and pain—not just his own, but those of the people around him and people he’s interacted with. Since his release from prison in 2014, the Baton Rouge rapper seems committed to living up to the 2Pac comparisons his ardent supporters have given him. | Boosie Badazz: Out My Feelings (In My Past) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21598-out-my-feelings-in-my-past/ | Out My Feelings (In My Past) | Since his release from prison in March of 2014, Boosie Badazz has made some of the best "adult" rap music imaginable. This is partly by design: Baton Rouge and the backwoods Southern communities that gravitated toward Boosie appreciated him for the thoughtful street rapper he always was, even as he came to fame off songs like "Wipe Me Down" and ratchet culture, and since his release, it feels as though Boosie has committed to living up to the 2Pac comparisons those fans gave to him. The other part of this is that Boosie (government name Torrance Hatch) has been through so much strife and ill will that it would be hard to talk about anything else on record. Past the familiar story of the existential dread that comes from street hustling, he went from staring the possibility of a death penalty in the face to serving time in one of the harshest prisons in Louisiana to a freedom nobody believed he’d get to see to the discovery that he had kidney cancer.
It’s this diagnosis that led to Boosie’s most emotionally gripping album to date: In My Feelings (Goin’ Thru It), released just earlier this year. After a nephrectomy to remove half his kidney, Boosie was declared cancer-free: news that is both cause for joyous celebration and introspection on a life lived. His newest album Out My Feelings (In My Past) is borne of this introspection, filled with solemn musings about the old-school street life he came from, the people lost to prison, death, or just time over the years, and his inability to understand how much street codes have changed amongst the youth of today. "We grew up youngstas on the corner, tryna make a livin/ Tryna make it back home, so we take a pistol," he begins on "Takem Back," painting a grim snapshot of the most impressionable and vulnerable time in a young black man’s life in a rough environment.
Throughout Out My Feelings, Boosie reflects on a life covered in scars and pain. Not just his own, but those of the people around him and people he’s interacted with; on "Look at Life Different" he raps about a mother with sons who are stuck in jail, one who is gangbanging and another abusing drugs. His tone is somber but resigned—he knows this story too well: "Asked me to pray wit her and asked me can I call Johnny/ That’s her baby boy who wylin’, catchin body after body." It's clear from his ragged delivery that he hurts for her and her sons the way he hurts for his own mother and the grief he brought her during his own wild days. "Thank God for Boosie" is repeated throughout the song, and the implication is that rap was the only thing that saved Torrance Hatch from these dire fates.
Out My Feelings doesn’t have the rawness of In My Feelings, but its production is impeccable where that one was spotty, and it soars when Boosie reminisces on his pre-rap days or makes statements in line with Black Lives Matter about the murders of unarmed black people by cops. Its lows come more sporadically and feel uncomfortable—like the homophobic lyrics found on "The Truth," for example—and the lecturing to young street kids about not sticking to the code of his youth is understandable but carries an "old man yelling at a cloud" vibe after awhile.
Incidentally, one of the best songs on the album is "Wanna B Heard," a wistful love letter to the forgotten where Boosie raps about the pull of gang life and the cry for help that the violence and crime committed by street kids really is. The most potent line: "I saw Glenn had something on his mind, I should’ve asked him what’s wrong/ Probably would’ve told me instead of blasting his dome." Above anything else, Boosie’s intense popularity began with those most ignored. He was their star, because he listened and he understood and recognized that their pain was real and it mattered in a way a lot of self-proclaimed "street" rappers have never been able to do. Thank God for Boosie. | 2016-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 12, 2016 | 7.6 | 5346429e-01e6-4d7c-b8c8-86922c6ee662 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
The new album from electronic artist Phil Tortoroli earns the optimism of its title. There are dark themes, but his music is brighter than ever, cut with Maya Angelou and James Baldwin samples. | The new album from electronic artist Phil Tortoroli earns the optimism of its title. There are dark themes, but his music is brighter than ever, cut with Maya Angelou and James Baldwin samples. | James Place: Voices Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23265-voices-bloom/ | Voices Bloom | The electronic music that Phil Tortoroli makes as James Place is usually layered and abstract—not exactly what you’d call music with a message. But there’s clear meaning in “Courage to Ask,” the opening track of his new album, Voices Bloom. Over a sharp beat and dramatic synth tones, Tortoroli samples Maya Angelou praising, “The courage to ask, to ask, ‘Will you be my brother?’,” and ends with a bite of James Baldwin insisting, “All men are brothers. That’s the bottom line.”
Nothing else is that lucid on Voices Bloom, but the positivity of Angelou and Baldwin echoes throughout the rest of the album. In the past, Tortoroli has often buried his beats under dense surges of sound, but here he pulls them closer the surface, giving everything an insistent momentum. His synths and samples are generally brighter now, more like sunbeams than stormclouds. There are still many moods in Tortoroli’s music; he doesn’t let the light block out dour themes. But overall, Voices Bloom earns the optimism of its title.
In fact, for anyone familiar with James Place, some tracks on Voices Bloom are surprisingly bouncy. “Robin Weep,” which follows “Courage to Ask,” feels eminently dancefloor-ready, with its clicking beat and rippling synths relentlessly pushing air. “Rumor and Choir” has a similarly excited pulse, plus a nearly-giddy sense of humor via an organ loop that evokes a carnival carousel. Yet neither track trades pace for depth; throughout, Tortoroli paints textures onto his bubbling canvases that give them new hues when viewed from different angles.
One of those textures comes from Sam Sally, a singer who Tortoroli has collaborated with in the past when she would send him isolated vocal tracks to use. Searching for a layer to add to Voices Bloom, he dipped back into an old folder of her files, and incorporated them into some of the album’s most stirring cuts. Her contributions shine most vividly on “Move in Blue,” whose ice-blue beats melt into her sky-seeking presence. It’s a pretty simple formula—ethereal voices over cloudy music—but Tortoroli arranges those elements in such a way that you can never quite pinpoint the song’s character.
That knack for making music feel emotionally three-dimensional is what connects Voices Bloom to Tortoroli’s previous work. This kind of moody electronic music is all about choices: presented with infinite options inside the machine, how do you choose which sounds will be the most resonant, and stick in the memory instead of floating pasting ears? Tortoroli excels at that kind of decision making. Take closer “Wild Theme Unseen.” By far the album’s longest cut at 10 minutes, it continually rises in waves of synths buttressed by small rhythmic clicks. Structurally, it’s an outlier on the album, since it’s almost solely about repetition. But thematically, it’s exactly right: upbeat music that contains downbeats, on a bright album that’s not afraid of the dark. | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Umor Rex | May 26, 2017 | 7.4 | 534a3c06-d6df-4d41-9007-ff5e4192e9d0 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The London band’s deeply self-aware debut is worthy of being taken seriously even when it’s not serious. | The London band’s deeply self-aware debut is worthy of being taken seriously even when it’s not serious. | Sorry : 925 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sorry-925/ | 925 | The Elvis Presley costume Asha Lorenz wears in the video for Sorry’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Star” is closer to a last-minute Halloween costume than a genuine impersonator. Dancing and skipping through rainy streets, Lorenz exudes the same combination of sarcasm, silliness, and begrudging cool that runs through her band’s debut album, 925. Though they’re barely famous yet, Sorry act like they’re already over it. The London band’s sound is omnivorous but austere, absorbing elements of post-punk, pop, and jazz into a tongue-in-cheek, deeply self-aware update on indie rock. Few new rock bands seek to telegraph their most cliché ambitions so clearly—they aren’t even the first to call a song “Rock ’n’ Roll Star”—but few bands are as ambitious as Sorry.
Lorenz met Louis O’Bryen, the band’s co-founder, guitarist, and sometime vocalist, when they attended the same private school in central London. They formed Sorry (original name: Fish) with three additional live band members in 2016 and gained attention at events put on by the south London collective Slow Dance, an early supporter of futuristic prog rockers black midi. After releasing a string of woozy alt-rock songs on Domino, Lorenz and O’Bryen opted out of university to spend time honing their sound. The result is 925, an album Lorenz says is named after the percentage of precious metal in sterling silver (92.5). There’s room for other interpretations, too: the most obvious is “9 to 5,” the type of job Sorry have so far managed to avoid.
The album is full of these slippery double entendres and onomatopoeic puns, like the howl-at-the-moon guitar on “Wolf.” On “Ode to Boy,” Lorenz’s self-conscious rhymes of “baby” with “maybe” are pitched up into a literal baby voice. Sorry don’t hesitate to add their own irreverent slant to familiar pop music tropes: the obstinately catchy opening track “Right Round the Clock” interpolates Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” while “As the Sun Sets” twists Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” into a nightmarish inversion. In a listless tone, Lorenz sings about running into an ex with someone new. What a wonderful world for them, she seems to say, as she sarcastically riffs on Armstrong’s timeless chorus.
Lorenz’s nakedly honest voice, often uncomfortably close in the mix, is the most arresting and consistent feature of a chaotic record full of zany sound effects and saxophone riffs. The sparse, eerie “Snakes” showcases her prowling lower register, while the closing track—a polished-up rework of Sorry’s first single, “Lies”—hinges on her brittle performance, including a devastating half-laugh as she rips apart the line, “I make lies like we should be together.” But she’s just as good when she’s being silly, heaving “eurgh” on the strutting chorus of “Starstruck” or echoing O’Bryen’s vocal line by shrieking “a boy!” on the otherwise sweet and straightforward “Heather.”
925 is a strange and searing debut, worthy of being taken seriously even when it’s not serious. Occasionally, the band’s sardonic send-up of rock clichés overshoots and winds up sounding grating: “I want drugs and drugs and drugs and drugs,” insists “More.” Their parodic humor can feel like a defense mechanism, a strategy to hold the listener at arm’s length. But powerful songs like “Starstruck,” “Wolf,” and the delicate ’90s-style grunge duet “Perfect” lift the curtain to reveal genuinely inventive songwriting. On 925, Sorry lovingly poke fun at themselves and at rock history—but they also prove they’ve got the talent to go further than their gags.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 6, 2020 | 7.7 | 535d79a1-068c-4796-833a-53fb45216d8e | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Unapologetic about his intelligence, Angel Del Villar is the type of rapper beloved by hip-hop traditionalists: proudly old school, technically savage, and lyrically sharp. His debut EP for Stones Throw is his best work yet. | Unapologetic about his intelligence, Angel Del Villar is the type of rapper beloved by hip-hop traditionalists: proudly old school, technically savage, and lyrically sharp. His debut EP for Stones Throw is his best work yet. | Homeboy Sandman: Subject: Matter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16271-homeboy-sandman-subject-matter/ | Subject: Matter | The old order of Underground Rap went rudderless for a variety of reasons. Illegal downloading ruptured the already weak tendons of small independent labels. Fans favored 1990s nostalgia over out-there artistry. Top producers got tired of dealing with rap-biz bullshit and opted for MC-free experimentations with jazz, soul, and electronic. But my favorite theory is that most people got tired of rappers rapping about rapping.
Due to its nature as a reactionary sect, for the underground to evolve, it had to do something more than stand athwart history and yell, "chill!!" (In this re-enactment, William F. Buckley is played by KRS-One). And there is no more elliptical act this side of a Steve Reich riff than writing lyrics about your lyrics. Yeah, it might have been a building block in the on-and-on-to-the-break-of-dawn days, but as George Harrison and Fatlip pointed out: All things pass. Swag will be ill before we know it.
Over the last 24 months, an ideology-free counter-culture rebuilt itself, waving different banners and maintaining few borders. It's an underground in lowercase letters, a constellation encircling everyone from Detroit amphetamine enthusiast Danny Brown to sardonic arsonists Das Racist and Open Mike Eagle, to anesthetized Oakland cloud rappers, to the Prosciutto-plumped adenoidal New Yorker Action Bronson, and the cold-hearted Hempstead Rambo, Roc Marciano. It includes older gods like Ishmael Butler (Shabazz Palaces/Digable Planets), Aesop Rock, Brooklyn Bomb Squad scion El-P, and the Dungeon Family's Killer Mike. So fluid are its boundaries that the latter two did a record together funded by Adult Swim money.
Enter Sandman. So anachronistic as to appropriate the slang, "Homeboy." Born name: Angel Del Villar. An ex-teacher, Ivy League undergraduate, and Hofstra Law student psychologically aligned to the older underground of 1995, when the term meant Beatnuts and Do You Want More?!!!??!, not Jurassic 5 and flip-flops. Sandman is the type of rapper beloved by hip-hop traditionalists: proudly old school, technically savage, and lyrically sharp. In the all-star game of the new subterranean, he is the guy with flawless fundamentals, wearing his socks high and his cleats sharp and polished. So it was little surprise when the surviving infrastructure of the 1990s immediately supported Sandman: underground hip hop radio, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the XXL Chairman's Choice column, and rap's Daily Worker, Okayplayer. The straw poll was sealed when Sandman signed with Stones Throw, one of the last garrisons of the late 90s, an imprint blessed with the resources to shower him with proper promo, branding, and an array of dazzling sun- and smoke-carved beats.
East meets west on Subject: Matter, Sandman's debut EP for the label of Madlib and Dâm-Funk. To accompany the introduction, Sandman added a subtext to his six-song collection, noting on its cover that they encompass content that "no one has ever rapped about before in the history of rap music. Unfortunately not a very difficult thing to do." Sandman is as Queens as the Unisphere, and his braggadocio bears a boldness that suggests that he grew up in the Bridge not Elmhurst. It's probably unnecessary arrogant, but it also reflects a welcome sign of ambition. Few deducted points from Lil Wayne for boasting that he was the greatest rapper alive (even if 49 percent of the electorate disagreed). Nor should they blame Sandman much for his myopic history.
After all, the man can rhyme. A former saxman, Sandman takes a modal approach with his screwball flow that dips and dives, stops and starts. He bevels his patterns at bizarre angles, employing a vocabulary worthy of Lisa Simpson. He's unapologetic about his intelligence, and even if it skirts the line of pretension, he keeps a progressive approach. Not only does he carefully weigh the importance of "being nice," he's focused on vivid storytelling too. Subject: Matter is both a self-challenge and the hurling of a gauntlet. Sandman wants to see his peers expand their imagination. And while the modern-day rap world has no scarcity of songs channeling topics of the zeitgeist (the entirety of XXX, 1/3 of Watch the Throne, whatever you make of Lil B), his originality is warmly welcomed, if not demanded.
So though "The Miracle" parallels the storylines of Pharoahe Monch's "Rape" and Mos Def's "Love", it offers a penetrating analysis of the act of creation from Sandman's side. "Unforgettable" tells the tale of the woe brought onto a man too sprung on his ex. It mirrors a less-graphic version of Ghostface Killah's "Marvel", but Sandman spins his own saga of picking up mediocre girls at Best Buy and sexing them while reminiscing on his last conquest. "Canned Goods" is about canned goods. Closing track "Soap" pictures a biblical deluge washing away the inequities of the world.
The psychedelic, elegiac beats are handled by 2 Hungry Bros, Ben Grymm, the Audible Doctor, rThentic RTNC, and the latest Stones Throw rated rookie, Jonwayne. Despite the diffuse cast, the EP feels exceptionally cohesive; it's also a throwback to the days when A&R departments actually existed. A half-decade ago, a record like this would've been needlessly over-hyped, with true-schoolers rushing to anoint Sandman the bulwark against an ineradicable tide of commercialism and greed. Now that the "Hip Hop is Dead" era's over, Sandman merely needs to be good. And he is.
With a healthy number of his peers engaged in shoving rap onto strange terrain, Sandman is another vivid character adding to the expansion. Subject: Matter might be Sandman's best work yet, but more importantly, it's a salient reminder that a song's only perimeter is the limits of human imagination. | 2012-02-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-02-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | February 9, 2012 | 7.7 | 535ea1db-8781-4787-91b7-8de215e4a7b3 | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
The UK-born, L.A.-based rapper and beatmaker vacuums up Jersey club, Brazilian funk, classic soul, and Auto-Tune melodies for a crispy, kinetic mix with a foot in every corner of the internet. | The UK-born, L.A.-based rapper and beatmaker vacuums up Jersey club, Brazilian funk, classic soul, and Auto-Tune melodies for a crispy, kinetic mix with a foot in every corner of the internet. | skaiwater: #gigi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skaiwater-gigi/ | #gigi | It’s the beginning of summer, skin is exposed, and the urge to get up and move is growing. Enter skaiwater: a Nottingham artist, currently stationed in L.A., who’s breaking out of the web underground with a kinetic blend of blown-out bedroom rap, futuristic R&B, and electronic experimentation. Initial iterations were moody, subdued sketches in a similar vein to Travis Scott. But when skaiwater took production into their own hands, they started multiplying the tracks in the DAW, adding layers of detail and pent-up drama. “#miles” and “eyes,” experiments indebted to Jersey club, kept the style’s pounding drums and danceable rhythms but substituted the usual raunchy lyrics for heartfelt pleas to a love interest. These singles couldn’t be as easily categorized, melding frenzied dancefloor energy with intimate thoughts typically reserved for private conversation.
The imaginative tinkering culminates on skaiwater’s new album, #gigi. Primarily self-produced, it mashes together some of the decade’s most prevalent sounds into a crispy mix that plays like an amalgamation of SoundCloud likes. Beats venture all across the African diaspora; skaiwater makes excursions to chaotic Brazilian funk, Jamaican dancehall grooves, and the jittery litefeet that turns up NYC parks. Distorted bass and random EQ hijinks will terrorize your speaker. Vocal pitches fluctuate all over the place.
Taking inspiration from this many places at once can mean spreading yourself thin or bloating the final product. skaiwater makes it all work by never directly emulating specific genres, instead using them as jumping-off points. Their adventurous splices generate brand-new compounds: “real feel” grabs the skittering hi-hats and shattering 808s that accompanies the off-the-wall maximalism of a natecxo beat and lays them over a ’70s soul sample. On “richest girl alive,” Auto-Tuned emo wails find pockets of melody between funk-infused drum patterns. The PARTYNEXTDOOR-core serenade “princess” builds up a pillow of delicate acoustics before climaxing into Young Thug-esque ad-libs. On “run,” Milwaukee low-end claps and New Orleans bounce rhythms poke through skaiwater’s dejected vocals.
These engrossing sound beds shield a raw display of feelings. “wna torture me tn?”, a team-up with Atlanta rapper Karrahbooo, flirts with masochism: “Sacrifice me like a lamb,” skaiwater croons. “Box” sandwiches hints of obsession (“Prized possession, hang you up in my archive”) between Jersey-club bed squeaks. Confidence fuels the freeform Atlanta-sourced flows in “bleach” and “rain” as skaiwater cycles between admiration and disdain for a lover. Even Lil Nas X captures some of that suavity in his feature on “light!,” the album’s most radio-ready track and only song not produced by skaiwater: Producer 9lives’ glimmering synth piano leads the way for a streak of catchy, celebratory bars about an overdue breakup.
Those sighs of relief rarely last long. skaiwater surfs between moods and soundscapes at a moment’s notice, omnivorous in a way that’s reminiscent of a young Kanye West. Perpetually restless, #gigi mines the full spectrum of musical ideas percolating through the internet, sourcing niche ingredients for a meal that offers something for every taste. Sometimes the broad scope and fast pace swallows up the endearing quirks that define specific scenes. But more often, it feels like firing up a freshly jailbroken phone: a ticket to endless possibilities concealed just out of sight. | 2024-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | GoodTalk / Capitol | June 26, 2024 | 7.4 | 5362484f-7fd1-4d79-8d51-37230e898406 | Serge Selenou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/serge-selenou/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/66705785292b89d0a9b021cd/2:3/w_2000,h_3000,c_limit/skaiwater-%20#gigi.jpg |
Angel, the third album by Austin’s Pure X, is lackadaisical in its tempos and moods, coming on at an almost laughably leisurely pace. But while there’s a lot of emphasis on mood and texture, they never get in the way of the songwriting, which is consistent and generous with its hooks. | Angel, the third album by Austin’s Pure X, is lackadaisical in its tempos and moods, coming on at an almost laughably leisurely pace. But while there’s a lot of emphasis on mood and texture, they never get in the way of the songwriting, which is consistent and generous with its hooks. | Pure X: Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19174-pure-x-angel/ | Angel | Angel, the third album by Austin’s Pure X, is lackadaisical in its tempos and moods, coming on at an almost laughably leisurely pace. A chiming electric guitar chord, as well as some actual chimes, make for a half minute of aural sage-burning to introduce the opening track “Starlight”. From there, the album is an intricate but not overwrought construction of clean, twinkly tones that distills George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, the more gently decadent moments of the T. Rex catalogue, and other high points of rock’s early-70s post-hippie chill-out phase. All along, Angel just sort of cruises on with tempos pegged to double-digit BPMs and the mood locked on “as mellow as humanly possible.”
That doesn’t mean it’s a boring record, though—it has a healthy pulse, even if it never really climbs above an exceptionally relaxed state. There’s a lot of emphasis on mood and texture, but they never get in the way of the songwriting, which is consistent and generous with its hooks. The album’s surprisingly broad spectrum of influences seem to include a decent amount of Big Star—the melody lines on songs like “Valley of Tears” and “Every Tomorrow” have some of the zero-gravity quality of some of Chilton and Bell’s more pop-perfect moments. (And if the more brooding, swoony “Livin’ the Dream” is any indication, Big Star acolyte Elliott Smith’s probably well represented too.)
Angel’s promotional material emphasizes the fact that the album was written and recorded in a hundred-year-old dance hall in a remote corner of central Texas over the span of just five days, but that aspect of its creation doesn’t come through in the recording in an obvious way. A modern studio offers musicians interested in texture and atmosphere a more or less limitless range of options, but Pure X wisely keep things simple here. Beyond layering gentle acoustic guitars, ethereal multi-part vocals, and the occasional subtle flourish of analog synthesizer, they stick to a basic four-piece rock setup; the songs never fall victim to their own ambition and the music remains appealingly and accessibly human-scaled.
Pure X draw heavily from the past—not only Harrison, Bolan, Chilton, and Bell, but from the troves of vintage private press psychedelic folk records that in recent years have been uncovered and rescued from terminal obscurity. Their forbears offered a personal, pastoral cosmic transcendence that made sense in its own time, when Summer of Love naiveté was eroding into Nixon-era cynicism. Angel serves as a balm in another era defined by mass pessimism and doubt. It’s easy to criticize it for its escapism and refusal to grapple with a reality that extends outside the listener’s personal space. But on “Heaven”, when vocalist Nate Grace promises that, “heaven is a feeling,” it sounds believable, an offer to find shelter and peace in Pure X’s blissed-out cloud that’s almost too appealing to pass up. | 2014-04-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 1, 2014 | 7.4 | 53628ff8-bff8-4d83-9b4e-9c28dcddd69c | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
A 4xCD/Blu-ray box set unpacks the bombast behind the UK band’s sprawling 1989 hybrid of soul and neo-psychedelia, recorded over four years and hundreds of hours of experimentation. | A 4xCD/Blu-ray box set unpacks the bombast behind the UK band’s sprawling 1989 hybrid of soul and neo-psychedelia, recorded over four years and hundreds of hours of experimentation. | Tears for Fears: The Seeds of Love (Super Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tears-for-fears-the-seeds-of-love-super-deluxe-edition/ | The Seeds of Love (Super Deluxe Edition) | To transform from a bedsit synth-pop outfit with a thing for prim diction to a global phenomenon projecting miserabilist pensées at arena scale must have ground Tears for Fears into a fine powder. Relaxing in a Kansas City hotel bar while promoting 1985’s quintuple-platinum Songs from the Big Chair, singer-guitarist-songwriter Roland Orzabal and singer-bassist Curt Smith were entranced by Oleta Adams, the Seattle-born R&B singer at the piano. Something went off in Orzabal’s mind. A couple years later, deep into recording their third album, he contacted Adams with a request: would she join their sessions?
What became The Seeds of Love resulted from hundreds of hours of peripatetic experimentation, and, when the sessions stretched almost four years, probably just seemed pathetic to their dismayed label. By this time even Phil Collins and fretless bass wonder Pino Palladino had been enlisted alongside Adams. Released in 1989 to cautious reviews, The Seeds of Love dropped at a time when formerly obscure acts like The Cure and Depeche Mode were earning Top 10 singles. “Sowing the Seeds of Love” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, and, for the sake of Fontana/Mercury’s promo department, it better have. But The Seeds of Love had trouble keeping its audience. UMe’s fulsome box set, packed with jam sessions, discarded mixes, okay B-sides, and a remaster of the original, hopes to find a new one. The Seeds of Love remains a not-great album, but Orzabal finding the Little Feat in Songs from the Big Chair’s bombast has a seductive pull.
The Seeds of Love marks the culmination of the neo-psychedelic soul hybrid that Orzabal had not stopped Rubik’s Cubing well into the summer of 1989. The allusive, Thatcher-baiting “Sowing the Seeds of Love” (“Kick out the style, bring back the Jam,” indeed) still thunders like the most tuneful of anomalies. Several sections grafted together, stitches showing, unfurl in Orzabal and Smith’s Beatles revue: trumpet solos, the lilting callback to “I Am the Walrus,” the love-power ridiculousness of the thing. It still sounds fabulous—the next chapter in Songs From the Big Chair’s “The Working Hour.”
The other singles are better, if that’s possible. Skip the radio mixes of “Woman in Chains,” and “Advice for the Young at Heart”; luxuriate in the longer album versions, on which Orzabal, Smith (on occasion), and their players make silence as loud as six guitar solos. Neither Talk Talk nor Peter Gabriel could have come up with “Woman in Chains,” impressive in the specificity (and prescience) with which Orzabal examines his masculinity. It also plays like a gospel song interrogating itself, notably when the full band joins them for a “Hey, Jude” singalong finale whose prayer (“So free her!”) forgets God and looks Man straight in the eye. Earlier, as Adams takes over for the second verse, her plummy contralto hovers in its own space, somewhere between Palladino’s discreet plucks, Collins’ superhumanly steady rimshots, and an eerie sampled flute from Orzabal’s Fairlight; unlike the title character, who “calls her man the great white hope,” she’s asserted herself. The creamy, assured “Advice for the Young at Heart” boasts Smith’s only lead vocal; his falsetto suits what is in essence Tears for Fears’ sophisti-pop track, in which bongos and Nicky Holland’s piano add the lightest of jazz colorings.
The album tracks don’t proffer such immediate pleasures; the band must have agreed, for the set includes no less than five versions of “Badman’s Song,” a boogie track fussy and ungainly in its original form but crisp in the so-called Townhouse jam sessions in which Tears for Fears rehearsed the material. Although the organ line perilously evokes Steve Winwood, Adams and Orzabal duet with such congruity that the discrete parts meld. (On the other hand, a version from discarded sessions with Alan Langer and Clive Winstanley has horn parts so zealous that the rhythm section sounds pinned against the wall.) “Year of the Knife,” which Tears for Fears never got quite right either (seven versions here, not counting remasters), lurches from a “Head Over Heels/Broken”-styled raver to a mix for Canadian radio that features a programmed dance rhythm with Madchester overtones.
After debuting at No. 1 in the UK, once “Sowing the Seeds of Love” failed to dethrone Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” in America, The Seeds of Love sank, a victim of record company jitters. They wanted another “Shout,” another “Head Over Heels”—they might even have settled for another “Mother’s Talk.” In a year when baby boomer musical icons turned persistence into platinum—the year of Lou Reed and Neil Young comebacks, sure, but also Donny Osmond and the Doobie Brothers—Tears for Fears could’ve exploited pop culture’s obsession with the ’60s, reified and reformatted into Richard Marx readymades. Study the busy album sleeve: Sgt. Pepper with hints of a Benetton ad. Hell, months earlier XTC released Oranges and Lemons, a college radio hit awash in received 1968-isms.
The stretch from 1989 to 1990 turned out to be the year of the knife for Tears for Fears. Tired and sidelined, Smith jumped ship after the tour. Orzabal, a devotee of their brand, released two enervated follow-ups under the band’s name. But the seeds he’d planted for Adams didn’t lie fallow: Her decent Orzabal-produced debut Circle of One included Brenda Russell’s “Get Here,” a Top 5 smash in 1991 and reality TV mainstay for years, and “Rhythm of Life,” found here in its Tears for Fears demo. At a friend’s funeral last March, her version of “Everything Must Change” devastated my fellow mourners. Smith rejoined Orzabal for 2004’s Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.
To absorb The Seeds of Love box set is to admire it anew as a culmination, not an aberration. Thanks to this set, we can hear Orzabal assembling “Sowing the Seeds of Love” from blocks into its unwieldy, epic final form. In the call-and-response moments of the Townhouse sessions we can appreciate why Adams entranced two Arthur Janov-influenced Englishmen; noting how well Orzabal and Adams harmonized is a delightful surprise. And the still, sparkling “Famous Last Words” remains a forest pond of sound. “As the day hits the night/We will sit by candlelight/We will laugh/We will sing/When the saints go marching in,” Orzabal sings in the voice of a comforting pal. Four years of tumult to end here, from the mouth of the guy who sang, “Time to eat all your words.”
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. | 2020-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe / Virgin | October 10, 2020 | 7.2 | 5364886d-4cc0-4874-b419-f84828ecd32d | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The Florida teen rapper’s ambitious new project pulls together disparate strands, from plugg to shoegaze and emo balladry. It’s messy, but it works more often than not. | The Florida teen rapper’s ambitious new project pulls together disparate strands, from plugg to shoegaze and emo balladry. It’s messy, but it works more often than not. | jaydes: ghetto cupid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaydes-ghetto-cupid/ | ghetto cupid | jaydes references the online and regional rap sounds of the 2010s like a daily poster in a niche hip-hop Discord community, the type who nitpicks small moments in seemingly inconsequential songs and fantasizes about what they would do if they were their favorite rappers. Last summer, the Broward County teen released his breakout mixtape heartpacing, which rewired plugg by pairing emo croons with the lush, blissed-out production typical of the style. His newest project Ghetto Cupid ambitiously tries to pull more musical strands together, from the layered guitars of shoegaze to the faded and cloudy murmurs of Lucki songs. It’s messy, but it works more often than not.
Over 17 tracks, a majority of which are credited to the pseudonym yen (it’s confusing because there aren’t any noticeable differences between yen and jaydes but just rock with it), jaydes layers soft, lovelorn melodies over a wide range of beats. His raw lilts evoke XXXTentaction’s tortured balladry, but jaydes songs are not nearly as heavy; they’re gloomy but in a bored teenager kind of way. When jaydes delivers his most melancholic lines, he usually follows up with a fun detail that feels retooled from rap of the recent past. “Sometimes I would rather be alone/Sometimes I stay off of my phones/Sometimes I wonder if she the one,” he sings almost unemotionally on “let me b,” which is then immediately followed up with a Carti-like vomiting ad-lib as if he’s disgusted by his own corniness.
jaydes is a decent writer, but his songs are more about mood, his forlornness felt even when he’s not saying a whole lot. Brief bits add texture to the melodrama: the exasperated lip flap at the beginning of “Undercover,” or the spammed producer tag—“you have no heart”—on “Horror,” repeated to the point that it sounds like he’s channeling some sort of Candyman-esque spirit. I like when he gets swamped by the instrumental, for example on the blurry “Fallen”—produced by marcusbasquiat, who was behind the boards on a couple of the most desolate-sounding Lucki cult favorites—or the blaring shoegaze intro “Rose.” On both, he sounds lost, fighting to be heard through all the distortion and mayhem.
But the other guitar-driven joints on Ghetto Cupid—he flips Weezer on “Misery,” for example—are too on the nose. I get it—he wants to make sure we know that his influences go beyond rap. But the appeal of his music is that he applies the sort of sentimental sing-rapping usually done on GothBoiClique-type beats to production with a Southern flair. Listen to how much more singular he sounds over plugg, his bread and butter. Usually plugg sounds kind of dreamy, but he gives it a vulnerability that I associate more with Florida pain rap in the mold of Lil Poppa or T9ine. Only someone as tapped in as jaydes could make the emotional tweaks on the fluttering “<3,” the twitchy “Witchy Bitchy,” or mellow “Damage” sound right. | 2023-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 23, 2023 | 7.5 | 5366ce4e-5f67-4739-af4e-09a0f80dca62 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
With hard-nosed bars and ominous, bass-heavy beats, the Canadian rapper’s debut album is her most cohesive and narratively ambitious effort to date. | With hard-nosed bars and ominous, bass-heavy beats, the Canadian rapper’s debut album is her most cohesive and narratively ambitious effort to date. | Haviah Mighty: 13th Floor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haviah-mighty-13th-floor/ | 13th Floor | Midway through “In Women Colour,” the defiant empowerment anthem that kicks off Haviah Mighty’s debut album 13th Floor, the Brampton-via-Toronto rapper vividly recounts an experience with a high school bully on the basketball court. She confronts an antagonist who’s thrown the ball out of her reach, only to find herself in a chokehold, beaten up for being a tomboy. “It’s just my struggle with the power divide,” Haviah reflects over distorted synths and peals of electric guitar. She gets the last laugh, but not before laying out the challenges she’s faced as a rapper because of her gender and skin color in unapologetic detail.
Whether solo or with hip-hop trio the Sorority—formed after its members met at a widely shared Toronto International Women’s Day cypher in 2016—Mighty wears her underdog badge with pride. Although she’s put out several self-released projects, including 2017’s evocative EP Flower City, 13th Floor is her most cohesive and narratively ambitious album to date. Mighty co-executive produced the record alongside Tim “2oolman” Hill of Canadian indigenous electronic group A Tribe Called Red, and a cadre including younger brother Mighty Prynce, frequent collaborator Young Dreadz, and Somali-Canadian beatmaker OBUXUM provide genre-diverse, radio-adjacent production.
The album’s title refers to both the superstitious tradition of buildings without a 13th floor and the 13th Amendment, forming a framework for Mighty’s impassioned commentary on cultural and socio-political identity. Over 13 tracks, she recalls harrowing brushes with racism in her neighborhood and classrooms growing up, and the close-knit family who taught her the importance of independence and perseverance. On the clique-celebrating “Squad,” she pays tribute to her parents and siblings, proudly claiming “Jamaican blood, Bajan blood, Canadian blood, UK in my blood, no Aryan blood, no alien blood.” The soulful, piano-led standout “Thirteen”—which Mighty has called “the only one that actually makes me feel like crying whenever I listen to it”—is an unflinching examination of North America’s history of slavery while acknowledging the continuing struggle for equality.
Elsewhere, 13th Floor captures the spark-plug energy of her live performances with ominous, bass-heavy beats and hard-nosed bars that could go toe-to-toe with any challenger. Like “Vamonos,” the 2018 collaboration with producer Book featured on HBO’s Insecure, “Blame” and “Fugazi” are packed with gleeful flexes and instantly rewindable punchlines (“Heard you want a resolution, ironically I’m not Aaliyah”). When she occasionally cedes the mic, it’s to like-minded Toronto artists who share her multitasking DIY ethos: Sean Leon and Clairmont the Second are prolific independent MCs themselves. “Fistful of dollars, punchlines kick ass like Chris Wallace,” Leon boasts on “Waves,” while on “Smoke,” Clairmont somberly reflects on the institutional racism and violence affecting young black people in his community. Sister Omega Mighty completes the family affair, lending a patois-peppered verse to the Fugees-referencing, Caribana-ready dancehall highlight “Wishy Washy.” Both it and “You Don’t Love Me” allow Haviah Mighty to show off her melodic chops, letting down her emotional defenses ever-so-slightly while scoffing at prospective suitors foolish enough to underestimate her.
Though the other two members of the Sorority—Keysha Freshh and Lex Leosis—are absent here, 13th Floor is an opportunity for Mighty to stretch her legs, not the beginning of the end for a promising group. They’ve recently promised new music, as well as solo releases from Freshh and Leosis, a breath of fresh air in the male-dominated Canadian rap landscape. “I do think the climate is opening up a little bit more to change. You're hearing a little bit more content from people that actually want to say something—not even just the women but also some of the men,” Mighty said in a recent interview. “And there's a little bit more openness as well. We’re a little bit less okay with certain types of ignorance.” As she puts it on “In Women Colour,” “I gotta do two times more to get four times less,” but she’s not doing it alone. | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 21, 2019 | 7.5 | 536a249c-0fc1-4b3c-af2e-8b33a9cf8bca | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
Morrissey and his Tormentors continue their 21st century winning streak with a record that, while offering no new twists or surprises, finds the former Smiths co-leader in strong voice-- both as a singer and songwriter. | Morrissey and his Tormentors continue their 21st century winning streak with a record that, while offering no new twists or surprises, finds the former Smiths co-leader in strong voice-- both as a singer and songwriter. | Morrissey: Years of Refusal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12640-years-of-refusal/ | Years of Refusal | Last time we saw Morrissey, on a rather slapdash Greatest Hits compilation, he was singing a song called "All You Need Is Me" and promising "You'll miss me when I'm gone." Neither proposition seemed watertight: His 2000s return to action had been welcome but rarely spectacular, and the man looked set on a twilit career of gently diminishing returns. So Years of Refusal comes as a gratifying shock: It's his most vital, entertaining, and savage record since 1994's Vauxhall and I.
What's surprising is that so little seems different. The personnel are largely unchanged: backing band the Tormentors and co-writers including old hands Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte. The approach is unchanged: muscular rock with plenty of room for Morrissey to roam and gesture and half an ear on live performance. Even some of the songs are unchanged: the new tracks from Greatest Hits show up again, though "All You Need Is Me" is transformed by context-- surrounded by fine new songs, you notice its snarl, flamboyance, and garage rock grind. Rather than try and reinvent himself, Morrissey has rediscovered himself, finding new potency in his familiar arsenal.
Morrissey's rejuvenation's most obvious in the renewed strength of his vocals. On the barnstorming opener, "Something Is Squeezing My Skull", he switches from fruity to fierce with impeccable timing-- the ringing leaps up the scale on "skull," the matter-of-fact checklist of drugs and mental treatments, and then the break into anger and desperation: "How long must I stay on this stuff?" On his old album sleeves, Morrissey would sometimes capitalize stray phrases for particular emphasis-- these days, when he wants to make a point, you hear those capitals.
By "Skull"'s ferocious closing he should have won stray fans back, and he keeps the energy levels high across most of the record. Much of the album was tracked live in the studio, and their leader's vigor seems to have rubbed off on the band. Not only do the songs have a snappy ferocity, they're full of unexpected touches in the arrangement-- the discordant keyboards on "Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed", or the cod-mariachi flourishes on "One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell". This makes Years of Refusal a rarity-- a Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.
When you do pay attention to the words, Morrissey is on typically quotable form. He long ago got into the habit of paring his lyrics down into aphorisms-- "You don't like me but you love me/ Either way you're wrong"-- which run the risk of sounding too pat and polished: The source of much of the "self-parody" flak that flies his way. There's plenty of sigfile fodder here, but it's balanced by more startling imagery: "I've hammered a smile across this pasty face of mine"; "I was a small fat child in a welfare house"; and perhaps his most eyebrow-raising couplet ever: "The motion of taxis excites me when you peel it back and bite me."
For much of Years of Refusal Morrissey is turning his fire outwards-- taking on lovers, enemies, wannabes, or some combination of all three. On "The Last Time I Saw Carol", his younger admirer winds up dead and Morrissey responds with detached regret. On "You Were Good in Your Time" he paints a mournful and wandering picture of a dwindled hero-- he knows and you know he's self-aware enough to be singing partly about himself. But only partly: This is Morrissey's most venomous, score-settling album, and in a perverse way that makes it his most engaging.
Fitting then that Years of Refusal's peak is its angriest track: "It's Not Your Birthday Anymore" starts tender, but something callous is stewing beneath its padding drums and gentle croon. "Did you really think we meant all those syrupy sentimental things that we said?" sings Morrissey, before the song takes a still darker turn into grudgeful, violent sexuality. In its cruelty and intensity, it's a cousin to Pulp's "This Is Hardcore", and it's the most disturbing, gripping Morrissey track since 1994's "Speedway". Even though the album dies away after "Birthday", it and its more raucous predecessors suggest an artist as pugnacious, confident, and necessary as he's ever been. | 2009-02-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-02-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Lost Highway | February 3, 2009 | 8.1 | 536d0846-b415-4f07-a0a0-89d7d74e2309 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles' second solo release of the year was quickly written and recorded after the deaths of his closest friend and some family members. | Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles' second solo release of the year was quickly written and recorded after the deaths of his closest friend and some family members. | Wymond Miles: Under the Pale Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16720-under-the-pale-moon/ | Under the Pale Moon | Under the Pale Moon is Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles' second solo release this year. The first, Earth Has Doors, is an ornate, intricately composed four-song EP culled from a backlog of songs accrued over several years. Meanwhile, Pale Moon was written and recorded within two months. Compared to the EP, the album's origin story reads like a burst of cathartic inspiration; according to Sacred Bones, his closest friend and some family members passed away within a short period of time, inspiring him to write and record the album's 10 songs. (The final line in the liner notes: "in memory of robin.") That explains why heartbreak, tragedy, and poetic melodrama hang heavy over Pale Moon.
Almost every song seems to come from a place of pain, confusion, or struggle. And as he explained in an interview, that's probably the case: "Lyrically, [the album is] a fairly direct mirror of my life at the time." The most direct example of that is "Pale Moon", where the lyrics are riddled with loving analogies before revealing some hard truths ("you want to be free from me," and "I just can't go on when I'm this tired"). And "Youth's Lonely Wilderness" seems to speak directly to Miles' loss ("Here we stand, two broken friends/ One beyond and one below"). But as the album goes on, the lyrics get more and more symbolic with varying degrees of success. The devil is brought up, as are ashes, darkness, and "a murder of crows." They're all deeply resonant images on their own, but after the album's 40 minutes are up, it's easy to feel like he's dipped into the Dictionary of Symbols one too many times.
In some instances, his lyrics are buoyed by the emotional heft of his instrumentation. As Earth Has Doors revealed, Miles is excellent at conveying a feeling in his compositions; "As the Orchard Is With Rain" managed to be mournful and contemplative without offering any lyrical narrative at all. Here, he sets the mood with a strong core hook, like the jangling backbone of "Pale Moon", which shifts from a major chord progression to a minor chord progression as the song thematically moves from warm nostalgia to grim reality. And he'll top the hook with a complementary flourish, like that same song's Spanish guitar solo. (Since this is an album of weighty material, it's easy to forget that he is, in fact, a great lead guitarist in one of the Bay Area's best garage bands.)
But the secret weapon behind Pale Moon is Miles' voice, which sounds as sensitive and pained as the instrumental moods he's set and his open-wound lyrics. He croons every song with a delicate, throaty warble that's flawed (he'll occasionally overemphasize a syllable), yet effective in its ability to tap into a specific song's mood. Because he packs so much emotion in his vocal delivery, his voice sounds like it could be an affectation. But when he trades out his go-to whisper for a cornball manly belt on album closer "Trapdoors & Ladders", the former is clearly much more preferable.
That final song marks a major issue with Pale Moon: The record starts to drag before it reaches the end. While side one is packed with solid hooks, like the slow-building jangle of "Strange Desire" or the slightly heavier riff and solo on "Run Like the Hunted", side two is a comparative slog. The hooks get a little less interesting and a little more repetitive ("You and I Are of the Night"). The lyrics begin to feel more corny (from "Badlands": "With your drinking habit and worn out leather jacket/ You're a burnout castaway of rock'n'roll"). And although it includes some interesting tinges of atmosphere, the self-serious symbolism in the lyrics for "Trapdoors" seems to have jumped out of a prog-rock caricature.
It's a disappointing place to leave Pale Moon, which is front-loaded with moments that are devastatingly honest and flat-out beautiful. And although there are several easy and semi-accurate comparisons to be made to early Cure records, Miles didn't have those things in mind. "I went in making this record without any conscious stylistic choices," he said. "I just wanted something raw and true to the moment of writing." Despite the album's flaws and thudding conclusion, that's the best gift of Under the Pale Moon-- it wasn't toiled over for years. It's a document of what he needed to get out in that moment. | 2012-06-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-06-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | June 28, 2012 | 7.2 | 536d377d-d4bf-4f40-972f-1cc1c36cd6ba | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
At their best, this Montreal quartet locate the aching sincerity in pop clichés. | At their best, this Montreal quartet locate the aching sincerity in pop clichés. | TOPS: I Feel Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tops-i-feel-alive/ | I Feel Alive | As of this writing, the pop quartet TOPS adorn the cover of Spotify’s “Montréal Chill” playlist. They look how I’d like to imagine myself looking when I’m chilling—pouty and photogenic, elegant and thin. Their music is a fitting soundtrack for the sort of glamorous melancholy that reliably passes for depth. TOPS’ songs are “big moods,” with their slow-blooming synthesizers and guitars and vocals from frontwoman Jane Penny, who always sounds somewhere between tender and disappointed.
But they begin their new album sounding ready to push through that malaise and on to something weirder. On opening track “Direct Sunlight,” prancing keyboard lines eventually give way to a cascade of voices cooing “sunshine” and a flute solo from Penny. This is TOPS at their most ambitious, showing their knack for taking references that might otherwise be dismissed for their cheesiness or chintz and finding the sincerity in the cliché. Here, and on the call-and-response “show me love” chorus on “Drowning in Paradise,” they show their aptitude for excavating half-remembered pop oddities. TOPS are at their best when they keep digging.
Elsewhere on the album, though, they’re just chilling. They’re as despondent and nostalgic as ever, but back to the kind of windswept indie rock that is their trademark. Their perennial reference point is Fleetwood Mac: “Witching Hour” has a churn worthy of Mick Fleetwood, and Penny sells her Nicksisms when she commits to them. But whereas on the best Fleetwood Mac tracks you can hear them stumble, baffled, into awkward truths, the wistfulness on I Feel Alive can seem reflexive rather than felt. Even the title track, with its vague verse imagery, undercuts its own nicely understated refrain. In these moments, the album threatens to collapse into a mood board.
But sometimes it’s okay to be sad for no reason at all. The title of “Ballads and Sad Movies” may prompt eye rolls, but it’s the song in which I Feel Alive clicks into place. When Penny wails, at the song’s climax, that she doesn’t know who she is anymore, the familiarity and comfort of nostalgia is ruptured, exposing the hopelessness and confusion beneath. Self-mythologizing is a survival strategy, and sometimes you’ve just got to indulge yourself if you’re going to stay sane. And cliché as the spoken-word French interludes and lyrics about missing-something-but-not-knowing-what may be, TOPS’ songwriting remains intuitive and rewarding when the band is firing on all cylinders, validating our tendency to mythologize our own petty tragedies.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Musique Tops | April 7, 2020 | 6.7 | 53732c1a-4a3f-4703-ab63-f5b78ef215ea | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, the Bon Iver percussionist's new solo EP feels like the soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. | Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, the Bon Iver percussionist's new solo EP feels like the soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. | S. Carey: Hoyas EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16587-s-carey-hoyas-ep/ | Hoyas EP | One of the profound truths we learned from the post-Grammys Who Is Bonnie Bear? meme is that there's still a good deal of confusion about whether "Bon Iver" is a guy or a band. It's understandable: The Walden-esque tale of Justin Vernon's isolation while recording For Emma, Forever Ago is now the stuff of legend, but in the years since he's assembled a legion of quietly formidable collaborators who have helped flesh out the Bon Iver sound. Among them is former music student and fellow Wisconsinite Sean Carey. After first hearing For Emma on Myspace in 2007, legend has it that Carey spent two weeks in his bedroom figuring out all the songs' percussion parts and harmonies. Booked as the opener for one of Vernon's early Bon Iver shows, Carey sang some Emma songs backstage and Vernon asked him to join the band that night. While this story doesn't exactly have the mysterious allure of Vernon's whole cabin-in-the-woods creation myth, it does pretty accurately capture Carey's role in the band: the talented yet dutiful behind-the-scenes guy with an ear for deconstructing arrangements.
Carey's first solo offering, the ambient-inspired folk of All We Grow, was a muted rustle of a record, and what it lacked in the strong vocal and storytelling elements of Bon Iver's music it made up for in elegantly realized arrangements and a warmed-breeze atmosphere. But if All We Grow had the benevolent glow of a Wisconsin sunset, Carey's new EP, Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep. Muffled by a fog of gently distorted guitar chords, pulsating synths, and horns that sound so distant it's like they were plucked from somebody else's dream, Carey's voice never raises above a whisper.
Vocals and lyrics are usually the least compelling elements of Carey's music. The guy's definitely not a bad singer, he's just not a terribly distinct one, and on Hoyas, he proffers an interesting-- if kind of low-hanging-- solution to this problem: How about some Auto-Tune? All of the tracks except for "Two Angels" feature the sort of vocals that can't help but recall the Bon Iver's Kanye-famous a cappella track "The Woods". Carey's Auto-Tuned vocals don't serve the emotional gut-punch that Vernon's do, but his monotone delivery on the tracks "Inspir" and "Avalanche" show that stirring catharsis isn't exactly his aim. Instead, Hoyas expresses a fascination with the relationships between the synthetic and organic, between distance and intimacy, and between folk tradition and digital vocabulary. But the steely elegy of "Inspir" shows that across all of these divides, Carey's not interested in taking sides, instead mapping the terrain where they all converge.
That Carey's day job is playing in such an acclaimed, frequently be-memed band as Bon Iver is, of course, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will prove difficult for him to shed the "guy from Justin Vernon's backing band" tag should he ever choose to do something radically different, but for now, because Carey's music never strays far from that familiar neck of the woods, it means he's got a built-in fanbase. Carey might be a lackluster frontman, but he's an expert vibesman-- and maybe Vernon's infamous squirminess to his own acclaim has shown Carey that it's not a terrible position to be in; it's probably no great disappointment to Carey that he's unlikely to earn any solo Grammys or spawn any joke Tumblrs any time soon. Hoyas is at its best when it sounds like Carey's disappearing. | 2012-05-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-05-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 8, 2012 | 7 | 5373a840-6b9d-46dc-9c4c-290dfa2029f6 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Richmond-based singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus' No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record. Lead guitar lines pour in like slow columns of sunlight, and Dacus' voice itself is a comforting blur. | Richmond-based singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus' No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record. Lead guitar lines pour in like slow columns of sunlight, and Dacus' voice itself is a comforting blur. | Lucy Dacus: No Burden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21609-no-burden/ | No Burden | Two songs on Richmond-based singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus' debut album No Burden contain the same chorus: "Without you I am surely the last of our kind/ Without you I am surely the last of my kind." The songs, "Dream State..." and "...Familiar Place," seem to complete each other elliptically, and approach their shared lyric through two different paths; the first describes a flood, both emotional and physical, while the second finds its narrator crawling through a dead garden. Both choruses seem to obey the physics of dreams: people are lost irretrievably, landscapes shift from domestic to alpine. Dacus conveys the warm, human perspective at the center of this turning vortex, a person trying to survive the infinite flow of change.
No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record. Lead guitar lines pour in like slow columns of sunlight, and Dacus' voice itself is a comforting blur. "I let my mind get turned inside out/ Just to see what the kids were laughing about," she sings on "Direct Address." "And it wasn't worth understanding/ Something I could've gone my whole life not knowing." Her perspective is sober and carefully composed, but the blur in her voice also gives her songs the casual, permissive dimension that usually slips in after two or three drinks. "I thought you'd hit rock bottom, but I'm starting to think that it doesn't exist," she sings in "Strange Torpedo." "You've been falling for so long and you haven't hit anything solid yet."
The record is full of these candid and severe observations. "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" describes the arthritic inflexibility of social roles. "Is there room in the band?" Dacus asks. "I don't need to be the frontman/ If not then I'll be the biggest fan." Dacus herself intended to study film before focusing on music; "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" and the rest of No Burden seems a product of this wavering and observational focus. The people in her songs seem to naturally settle into realms of instability and ambiguity.
Becoming "no burden" means exerting zero pressure on the world, suspending yourself in a sphere of your own consciousness, as if sealed into a dream. Of course, removing yourself from the world and others is its own inverse pressure. Your body, mind, and their obscure combinations will carry, shift, and broadcast weight from any position they take up in space. "If you hadn’t come over, I would be so much colder," Dacus sings in "Dream State…" "I would be much less confused." Everything, No Burden seems to suggest, is burden. | 2016-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | EggHunt | February 26, 2016 | 7.8 | 537979e3-f4bb-4eca-b33a-4f945d9b892a | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
The Olympia, Wash., black-metal band returns with the climactic, colossal, final installment in a trilogy that started with their 2007 album, Two Hunters. Here, they mix lengthy tracks with heavily textured interludes and make beautiful use of vocals from collaborator Jessika Kenney. | The Olympia, Wash., black-metal band returns with the climactic, colossal, final installment in a trilogy that started with their 2007 album, Two Hunters. Here, they mix lengthy tracks with heavily textured interludes and make beautiful use of vocals from collaborator Jessika Kenney. | Wolves in the Throne Room: Celestial Lineage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15835-celestial-lineage/ | Celestial Lineage | In a 2009 Show No Mercy interview with Olympia "astral black metal" band Wolves in the Throne Room, I mentioned that, as a byproduct of their relative success outside of the underground, they'd inevitably be on the receiving end of plenty of scenester backlash. (Black metal can be a strange place: at times, it's more acceptable to remain boring and unknown than be ambitious and heard.) A couple of years later, United States black metal in general is at an interesting point. The scene, or lack thereof, is something I've been going on about for the last few years; now, on the backs of crossover "experimental black metal" acts like Krallice and Liturgy, it's nudging into even more mainstream corners. And this time, there's more at stake than the ire of a 16-year-old Darkthrone fan.
Sure, there are longtime USBM diehards like Inquisition, Absu, and Averse Sefira, groups who've been there for decades, and who will keep releasing strong albums without showing up on your non-metal friend's iPod. That said, even three years ago, nobody would've expected Liturgy to share the stage with Dirty Projectors at a New Yorker festival. (Or, earlier this year, to play MoMA on their own merits, and not as part of a Banks Violette black metal-themed installation.) There will always be an underground, but these days, once you are outside of it, the opportunities are bigger. More important than scene cred and these crossovers, though, is the fact that American black-metal bands-- no longer the punchline of Scandinavian lifers-- are making truly staggering music.
Wolves in the Throne Room sit somewhere between the crossovers and the kvlt. Since forming in 2004, brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver (and the occasional rotating bandmate) have tied early-90s Northern European sounds (especially Burzum and Ulver) and the progressive reach of San Francisco forebears Weakling to the Pacific Northwest, pushing the genre into new places without sacrificing its core. (Outspoken environmentalists, they live on a self-sufficient farm in Washington state.) To the chagrin of many of the band's later fans, they followed their biggest moment, 2007's Two Hunters, with 2009's Black Cascade, a collection of less-penetrable, 10-plus minute, stripped back, droning, unrelenting time-stretchers. Despite the running time, it was a pure, concise collection-- the sound that remains after the last log turns to ash in your campfire. Celestial Lineage, on the other hand, gains power via accumulation. (Press materials reference Popul Vuh, the Grateful Dead, Neurosis, and "Theosophists, beatniks… the back-to-the-land movement, satanic hippies, tree-spiking anarchist punks.") It takes the blisteringly insistent, gorgeously rousing, hypnotic repetitions on Black Cascade and jams them back into the more sylvan earlier records, 2006's Diadem of 12 Stars and the aforementioned Two Hunters.
Where the past two albums each had four songs of longer duration, Celestial gives us seven, spacing out the mammoths with briefer interludes. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who first surfaced on Two Hunters and has also worked with Sunn O))), Sun City Girls, Asva, and Mamiffer, sings on three tracks. Former Isis howler (and current Mamiffer member) Aaron Turner contributes atmospheric chanting of the two-minute "Permanent Changes in Consciousness". "Rainbow Illness" introduces noisy synth washes, and the dramatic, goth-liturgical chimes of the female-fronted, six-minute "Woodland Cathedral", feels like a continuation of Two Hunter's "Dea Artio".
It probably is. Wolves in the Throne Room consider Celestial Lineage the last installment in a trilogy that started with Two Hunters, and perhaps their last album as a band (at least in its current form)-- this is the climactic, colossal finale. In that regard, the epic, more metallic outpourings are the best they've done. We've posted the ethereal, harsh, 12-minute opener "Thuja Magus Imperium", with its psychedelic guitar freakouts, chiming bells, female choirs, field recordings, endless guitar/synth sustain, buzzing shoegaze, and monster dynamics. The seven-minute "Subterranean Initiation", in turn, spirals into infinity, layering in keyboards that come off like a celestial choir amid the frantic drums and levitating guitars. They locate a harsher, more earthly feel on "Astral Blood", a song with an anthemic, post-punk vibe that surfaces after a windy, gently pastoral acoustic interlude. The 11-minute closing track, "Prayer of Transformation", works as a synth-entwinted instrumental for 5 minutes before Weaver screams: "Lay your corpse upon a nest of oak leaves/ Wrapped in a star shroud repent your flesh/ A shadow child dissolves/ Meditate in a den of skins and straight poles... A vessel awaits built from owl feathers and moss," among other things. It's rare for a black-metal song to choke you up.
Despite being relative latecomers to the game, and even though they're fucking with the template more than purists would like, Celestial Lineage feels like the contemporary American scene's defining statement after San Francisco group Weakling's seminal 2000 offering Dead As Dreams. Since their early days, Wolves have grown assured, but haven't overstepped. The sound is enormous, but remains organic (at times, you can almost hear leaves rustling). It's true black metal creating its own rules, and a testament to the band that it can tweak something this much and still sound like it's sticking to the script. That said, though it's not the purest version, it's also not the most eccentric. In some ways Celestial feels like a throwback when compared to the claustrophobic experimentation of some of Leviathan's headier pieces or the genre-shifting hyper-speed "occult metal" of contemporary Absu. Thing is, though, unlike a lot of that other stuff, it also feels like a classic. | 2011-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | September 23, 2011 | 8.6 | 537b213d-2c76-46ba-9348-70d6f0a31021 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Recorded over three years, the former Grandaddy leader's debut LP sounds like... a Grandaddy album. Thankfully, a good one. | Recorded over three years, the former Grandaddy leader's debut LP sounds like... a Grandaddy album. Thankfully, a good one. | Jason Lytle: Yours Truly, The Commuter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13037-yours-truly-the-commuter/ | Yours Truly, The Commuter | It bears repeating: What a strange world Jason Lytle inhabits. As the frontman for Modesto, California-based Grandaddy, he sang about homemade pets, homesick space miners, and carpool jockeys struck dumb by the natural world. Three years after that band's final breaths, his world has grown no less odd. On his first solo album, he sets songs about dead dogs and birds on suicide watch to technorganic arrangements featuring ELO guitars, from-the-heart-of-space synths, and steady, stoic drums-- if drums can be said to sound stoic, which in Lytle's world, why the hell not? With Grandaddy, Lytle sung his mock epics with such earnestness that many took them as ironic, which itself is a little ironic. But then as now, his songs work because they are deeply sincere, and that sincerity makes them sound all the more awestruck and imaginative.
So Yours Truly, The Commuter sounds an awful lot like a Grandaddy album-- not just another Grandaddy album, though, but a really good one, the best since Sumday. Relocated from Modesto to Bozeman, Mont., he recorded these dozen songs over three years, sequestering himself in his home studio to indulge the perfectionism he says he couldn't entertain with the band. It's a return, of sorts, to his roots: Grandaddy was born as a solo bedroom project for Lytle in the mid-90s and mutated into a full band. Such care and attention show through in these songs, which generally sound a little spacier and synthier than the band's records. On the other hand, in three years you'd think he could have come up with a better album cover.
Yours Truly opens with what sounds like a thumb piano playing a quiet overture, which is interrupted first by a foundational bass rhythm and then by Lytle's warmly familiar voice:
Lytle: "Last thing I heard I was left for dead."
Comically high-pitched chorus: "Yeah?"
Lytle: "I could give two shits about what they said. I may be limping, but I'm coming home."
Is this a rebuke to critics who greeted Grandaddy's final breaths with enthused ambivalence, to no-longer-amicable bandmates, or to some made-up tormentors too quick to turn their backs on him? Whatever the target, the song strikes a defiant early note, and because it's not only a solo album but a solo debut, it's tempting and perhaps way too easy to read way too much into such moments. But Yours Truly is strong enough to absorb whatever interpretation you throw at it and still retain some of its mystery. Besides, defiance fits Lytle like s a sleek spacesuit. The title track immediately restores some of the old grandeur to his signature sound, and songs like the defensive "Ghost of My Old Dog" and the piano lament "This Song Is the Mute Button" have unexpected bite.
"I see the pretty in things," he sings on the latter, "but you disappeared like a dream." Lytle offsets the somewhat caustic tone that creeps into some of these songs with tender ruminations on absence, which fills the album. "Rollin' Home Alone", possibly a sequel to the title track, grafts a distorted synth line to sugary canned strings to evoke a great American expanse, as if to soundtrack some long, lonely road trip. "Flying Thru Canyons" creates a churchly ambience perfectly summed up by that title. On the other hand, "It's the Weekend" is Lytle's Loverboy moment, a churning power-pop anthem that sounds like a Friday-afternoon staple on classic rock stations of the future.
As with previous albums, Yours Truly benefits from creative sequencing that winks at expectations. There are two obvious closers here, and neither of them come at the album's end. The first is the opening title track, whose chorus-- "I may be limping, but I'm coming home"-- makes Lytle sound like a true survivor, and the second is the soft lament "You're Too Gone", which ends with him singing "So long, so long" like he's floating away in a space pod. Instead, everything closes with "Here for Good", a tender, almost entropic ballad that sounds less like mission accomplished than a mission never undertaken. Again, it's tempting to read real-life connections in a song like "Here for Good". It's not that they're not there, but they don't matter. Such autobiographical trappings aren't necessary to make Yours Truly sound strangely affecting or Lytle newly reinvigorated. | 2009-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | May 21, 2009 | 7.4 | 537c37be-9b1b-4433-970b-3bfcb8a57144 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The New Zealand indie rock band’s thoughtful, witty, and brief songs pit surrealism against the malaise of workaday life. | The New Zealand indie rock band’s thoughtful, witty, and brief songs pit surrealism against the malaise of workaday life. | Wurld Series: What’s Growing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wurld-series-whats-growing/ | What’s Growing | Wurld Series seem to know how to escape millennial disaffection more than most. The Christchurch band, led by songwriter Luke Towart and producer and drummer Brian Feary, fight the encroaching threat of an optimized, internet-led existence by translating the pains of day-to-day corporate life into bizarre, nursery rhyme-like ditties. The resulting songs are pint-sized tonics to cure disillusionment, often-sub-two minute tracks that loop and lope away from everyday grind towards something surreal and energizing. On What’s Growing, their second album, Wurld Series shake off the lo-fi trappings of their early work, further exposing the wit and ingenuity of Towart’s lyricism and, in the process, distinguishing themselves as a band more thoughtful—and more pleasantly looney—than your average ’90s revivalists.
It would be tempting to brush What’s Growing’s sound as little more than Slanted & Enchanted-gone-2021: first single “Nap Gate,” which chugs along atop a dense, overdriven guitar groove, certainly paints an image of Towart and co. as obsessives of ’90s American indie rock. “Nap Gate,” though, doesn’t tell the whole story. There is something distinctly rural about What’s Growing due to its ever-present Mellotron lines that pick up a thread of pastoralism present in British indie music from ’60s and ’70s psych-folk through to the Young Marble Giants, channelling it into droning, mostly-instrumental passages like “Growing (For Now)” and “To the Recruiting Officer.” At the same time, Wurld Series are distinctly New Zealand-born, and occasionally feel of a piece with classic New Zealand pop bands like the Tall Dwarfs, most notably in the hypnotic, tabla-heavy interlude “I See.”
The familiarity of Wurld Series’ recombinant DNA is no issue when Towart’s writing is so gleeful, visual, and distinct. As a lyricist, many of his songs seem to focus on the ambient terrors of the platform economy, social media, and the spectre of endless work — topics that could be dull but are instead painted as compelling oddball vistas. On “Nap Gate,” hawkish, watchful bosses are rendered as gruesome monsters, standing by as a protagonist drowns in managerial gobbledygook: “Bog Lord will state that he’s never been slicker/What is your name and the service you deliver?/Company time, you’ve got to work at a loss.”
Later, the pensive “World Beating System” turns the dissociative fugue of social media overload into a single, elegant rhyme: “Everything broken down and digested freely/And through your eyes I’ll hear it, and through your mouth I’ll see/And through your nose I’ll taste it, and then I’ll cease to be.” On the see-sawing “Eliminator,” life is a video game that’s impossible to win, its villain constantly “living behind your eyes” no matter how far you run or high you climb. There is a surprising joy to be found in these simple subversions of the discomforts of everyday life, in the way they make such pressing, ineffable specters so small.
Occasionally, What’s Growing’s images become inscrutable—“Grey Men” is a decidedly sinister alien invasion fantasy set to one of the record’s most animated, noodling guitar lines, while pensieve finale “Eighteenth Giant Brother,” one of Towart’s most beautiful vocal performances, provides no image beyond the 18 giant siblings of its title. Still, that strangeness feels by design: What’s Growing pits the surreal and the avant-garde against the all-consuming sludge of late capitalism, providing an entirely new set of tools with which to escape it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Melted Ice Cream | March 22, 2021 | 7.1 | 537e264c-0634-46e4-a69f-2cf209c43db7 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Hewing faithfully to Jackson Phillips’ characteristically crisp, concise guitar pop, Pastlife is a coming-of-age album for 30-year-olds, concerned with newfound commitments and misbegotten ambitions. | Hewing faithfully to Jackson Phillips’ characteristically crisp, concise guitar pop, Pastlife is a coming-of-age album for 30-year-olds, concerned with newfound commitments and misbegotten ambitions. | Day Wave: Pastlife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daywave-pastlife/ | Pastlife | Listen to any given Day Wave song and you’re bound to hear the same tried-and-true formula, save for a tweak or two: sparkly guitar riffs, galloping drums, and hazy vocals that convey delight even when the writing betrays otherwise. When Bay Area native Jackson Phillips released his debut EP, Headcase, in 2015, his alt-rock influences floated so close to the surface that it was hard to say what, exactly, differentiated him from all the other bands who emulated New Order, Phoenix, and the Radio Dept. In the following years, Day Wave’s work became sharper and more detail oriented, but Phillips rarely diverted from his signature sound; 2015’s “Drag” and 2020’s “Potions,” for instance, could be mistaken for the same song. Phillips’s guitar pop has progressed in a straight line—a sing-along hook here, a set of ohs and ahs there, a looped guitar riff that refuses to noodle outside the lines—and even after collaborating with Saba and producing an album for Pete Yorn, he doesn’t seem all that interested in making songs that veer too far from his playbook.
His new album, Pastlife, nearly perfects the Day Wave formula while also taking a few much-needed risks. It’s a gorgeous, energetic record full of tight, concise melodies and unsentimental lyrics. Phillips’ voice is occasionally gilded with a sheen of fuzz; layers of guitars unfold in rich, legible patterns. But although each song sounds excellent on its own, the album relapses into the same safe structures again and again.
Much of Phillips’ early work centered on nostalgic longings and flailing relationships, and though there’s still plenty of that here, his focus has shifted. Pastlife is a coming-of-age album for 30-year-olds, mostly concerned with newfound commitments and misbegotten ambitions. “So much for finding our way/Arguing into the day/And I don’t know what’s left to chase,” he sings on “Blue,” which sounds like an early Alex G demo. One of the album’s best songs, “Loner,” looks at the complicated nature of letting go: “You locked onto something that would make you feel alive/But it never stays.” Despite his lament, the crisp acoustic guitar and sinewy fingerpicking give the impression that he’s gazing calmly into the source of his suffering, smiling despite the strain of it all.
The music’s simplicity suits Phillips’ straightforward writing. As ever, the songs are built from breezy guitar licks and snappy, uptempo drums. The record’s at its most compelling when Phillips makes minor alterations to his blueprint. “Before We Knew” includes a chanted chorus perfect for screaming at a show, while “Where Do You Go” features lush harmonies and subtle adlibs. But in the album’s second half, the chippy snares and bright guitars begin to wear thin. For an artist with such tight control over his production, Phillips could benefit from a little messiness—a surprise sound, an unexpected switch in tempo, anything to break the songs free from their geometric rigidity.
One of the few moments where Phillips tries something new is on “Great Expectations,” an elegant acoustic song that’s reminiscent of Carrie & Lowell-era Sufjan Stevens. Reversed synths and fingerpicking slink behind doubled guitars as Phillips sings some of the album’s most poignant lyrics: “Seems to be I’m not anything I wanted.” Languishing in self-pity is a temporary fix, though, and soon he’s back to pondering where the hell his life’s going. Confronted with the scary unknown, he opts for comfort: cuddling safely into the well-worn type of song he clearly loves to play, even after he’s wrung every iteration of it dry. | 2022-08-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | PIAS | August 8, 2022 | 6.9 | 538132a9-5e23-41fe-a778-2b174f84ca69 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Though it’s less outlandish than previous projects, the Queens rapper’s new album confirms his status as one of New York drill’s most important innovators. | Though it’s less outlandish than previous projects, the Queens rapper’s new album confirms his status as one of New York drill’s most important innovators. | Shawny Binladen: WiCKMAN STiCKMAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shawny-binladen-wickman-stickman/ | WiCKMAN STiCKMAN | New York drill has gone through an astounding number of mutations in the last nine years. Technically, it’s a third-generation copy of a subgenre that already had two distinct homebases: the warbling 808s of the UK’s AXL Beats and the haunted, concrete-hard menace of Chicago drill, which was first popularized by Lil Durk, G Herbo, and Chief Keef. The Brooklyn iteration spawned firecrackers like Bobby Shmurda’s 2014 track “Hot Nigga,” as well as flex anthems, like all of the songs that Pop Smoke dropped in 2019. A then-lagging New York rap scene put its weight behind these two budding icons, who were either locked away in their prime or tragically murdered.
Instead of fizzling out after the death of Pop Smoke, even more East Coast offshoots emerged: Producers in Jersey and the Bronx, like Great John and Cash Cobain, began incorporating samples into their drill beats, while others in Jersey and Philly created a hybrid of club and drill by ratcheting up the tempo to ankle-shredding BPMs. The regional subgenre has expanded impressively, so much so that the lurching tension of Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel’s “Computers” and the pepped-up horniness of Cobain and Chow Lee’s “Vacant” can exist within the same rich spectrum.
Queens rapper Shawny Binladen, the self-proclaimed king of sample drill, is most comfortable in the middle of that binary. His ear leans toward busy, even chaotic beats, ones that leverage samples and drums in the way an amateur mixologist might use a touchscreen Coke machine. But within the chaos, his voice is chill, launching threats, jokes, and come-ons with an unnerving insouciance. Who else could float over chipmunk soul and what sounds like Clams Casino leftovers blaring through a busted computer speaker on the same album? WiCKMAN STiCKMAN tinkers slightly with the intoxicating formula he’s been savoring since 2020. It sounds a touch more expensive—and lacks noticeable samples compared to his earlier work—but it is no less raw.
Shawny’s breathy delivery keeps the songs as energetic as the beats do. Though he rarely rises above a whisper, its rasp, combined with punched-in vocals that often drag a hair behind or skip a step ahead of the beat, make the songs stretchy and unpredictable. His voice billows through the dense bed of drums and synths on “The Reaper,” or floats across “Larry Lobster” while he rants like a chatty supervillain. On the clubby “Wick Jr.,” he uses his choppy flow to hop from topic to topic; he laments his opps’ mothers’ need to start a GoFundMe, then claims he’ll have his son smoking on opp pack when he turns 20. Most drill artists are either manic or stoic in both form and content, but Shawny’s indifference gives his animated boasts a devilish edge—fitting for a man who named himself after a notorious war criminal.
He’s not the most thoughtful lyricist in the world—every song features some combination of antagonizing rivals, repping his Grinchset crew, having sex in every position imaginable, and the occasional homophobic slur. But details bring the bleakness of his surroundings into focus. There’s a moment on “TLC” where Shawny reckons with the roughness of his twisted city: “All you see is RIPs, white tees, and black hats/Had to run it up, now that wocky in my backpack.” They’re only glimpses of the conditions that force Black boys into this image of manhood, but Shawny is only as callous as the environment that raised him. Flows, punchlines, and grim scene-setting give WiCKMAN an episodic feel. It’s like returning to a comfort series after abandoning it for a few seasons: These are the same stories told in different ways, but they rarely get old.
There aren’t any on-the-nose Cash Cobain-style sample flips to be found here, but other longtime collaborators, like Natt Carlos, Chubby El Hefe, and several others, are responsible for the booming grayscale beats that Shawny rips through. Not to say there aren’t any samples at all: Choirs, sirens, and horns rub against the project’s bubbling low end. “Makman” features a twinkling guitar sample that could’ve been pulled from a spaghetti Western. “Hate Datt” is anchored by club drums and synths that gleam like comets. Even the more standard takes on drill have neat little flourishes, like the distorted violin sample at the heart of “The Reaper,” or the piano keys on “On God.” These are among the most refined beats Shawny’s ever rapped over, and he wastes no time finding his place in them.
Any indication that New York drill was just a fad has gone out the window, much like the reputation of New York mayor—and self-appointed enemy of drill—Eric Adams. Alongside Griselda’s chunky revivalism or the warped experiments of the underground scene, drill’s thumping urgency is just one of the multifaceted sounds of modern Gotham. Shawny Binladen has staked his claim as a drill innovator, and while WiCKMAN STiCKMAN isn’t quite as outlandish as last year’s Wick the Wizard or 2020’s Merry Wickmas, it’s still a wild ride through the troubled and creative mind of one of drill’s finest. | 2023-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | April 21, 2023 | 7.4 | 538c8c08-3667-4102-b92a-f43babb9eba8 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The debut album from this Swedish multi-hyphenate, an associate of Yung Lean and Yves Tumor, trades hip-hop for an expressive—and surprisingly pretty—take on contemporary pop. | The debut album from this Swedish multi-hyphenate, an associate of Yung Lean and Yves Tumor, trades hip-hop for an expressive—and surprisingly pretty—take on contemporary pop. | Ecco2k: E | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ecco2k-e/ | E | Ecco2k’s work until this point has been in the service of other people’s visions: The Swedish artist (aka Zak Arogundade) is creative director for his compatriot Yung Lean, editor of music videos for Yves Tumor, and an occasional runway model. He’s also a member of Drain Gang, the Yung Lean-adjacent collective that includes producer Whitearmor and vocalists Bladee and Thaiboy Digital. There’s been an air of mystery to Arogundade’s output as a multi-hyphenate creator; his career can be traced through guest features, behind-the-scenes credits, and cameos in the background of his friends’ videos.
Perhaps somewhat unusually for a hyper-prolific jack-of-all-trades with his fingers in multiple artistic economies, Ecco2k seems fine letting his collaborators take most of the credit, happy to offer his varied skill set as a helping hand to other artists. But wherever he turns up, it’s impossible to mistake Ecco2k’s voice for anyone else’s. That his fluttering, almost angelic falsetto has appeared only sporadically on other people’s records has made Drain Gang’s devoted fanbase—self-described “drainers”—even hungrier for his debut.
Beauty might be relegated to the background of Yung Lean’s music, in dialectic with the darkness of his lyrics and the occasional awkwardness of his delivery, but Ecco2k places aesthetic pleasure and warm feeling up front. More than anything else, the word to describe Ecco2k’s music is pretty, like a gentle tune from a music box. His light wail is often refracted through Auto-Tune but other times hangs plain and soft, devoid of digital manipulation.
Thaiboy Digital and Yung Lean’s take on rap is a looking-glass version of the American mainstream, but they can clearly be described as rappers. Ecco2k is different, and on E he jettisons most everything resembling hip-hop save for a loose, familiar framework of pounding 808s and occasional Soulja Boy references; this is the Stockholm rap scene’s most explicit stab at pop yet. Most tracks are still produced by Gud and Whitearmor, but Ecco2k strays from the Drain Gang house sound on “Fruit Bleed Juice” and “AAA Powerline,” both produced by genre-hopping compatriot Yves Tumor. On tracks like “Calcium,” Ecco2k alternates between very light rapping with a vaguely pop-punk vocal performance over beats that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Charli XCX project. These songs offer the vague outline of radio hits, filled in with an uncanny substance.
Tracks quickly rewind and fast-forward, sputter and start again, phrases repeated like fading memories turned over and over again in your mind. The opening track, “AAA Powerline,” is built largely around the repeated refrain “Zip-tied up/Can’t move my arms.” Ecco2k’s lyrics twinge with anguish and self-loathing. “Every time I look in the mirror I see monsters,” he laments on “Security!,” a song built on the desire to disguise a perceived ugliness inside: “How did you get so perfect?/I wish that I was perfect.”
As much as he might feel at odds with himself, the strongest track on E is a resolute commitment to self-expression. “Peroxide” plays up the contrast between Ecco2k’s ever-changing hair and the color of his skin: “No peroxide/I stay dark.” In a 2016 interview, a then-21-year-old Arogundade reflected on his experience growing up mixed—his mother is Swedish and his father is British and Nigerian—in a region known for racial homogeny: “I used to not want to be in the sun because I didn’t want to get sunburned; I didn’t want to get darker skin and just, like, really dumb stuff like that. But now it’s kind of the other way around, so I’m very much embracing being a black person.” That self-acceptance radiates from “Peroxide,” even if the world around Ecco2k still labels him an outsider: “They all stare at me/I don’t care at all.”
When Yung Lean and his Sad Boys collective first emerged in 2012, the appeal of their music lay mostly in the dissonant juxtaposition of childish lyrics with achingly beautiful beats. As his work matured, Lean ditched the novelty of profane juvenilia, reaching for something more honest and introspective. Ecco2k has never really messed around with gimmickry or mimicry, shooting straight for the heart from the start. When he sings of breaking out of straitjackets, he’s referring as much to the confines of genre as the limits of his own identity. Ecco2k is committed to staying dark, but his music gleams bright in a region and rap scene known for its cloudiness. No longer just a below-the-line collaborator or background associate, on E he finally steps into the spotlight. | 2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Year0001 | January 6, 2020 | 7.4 | 53a446bb-defc-4d05-9990-c55e8745bff4 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The South African producer behind 2019’s viral hit “Untold Stories” tests the limits of amapiano, fusing its trademark log drums with established club genres. | The South African producer behind 2019’s viral hit “Untold Stories” tests the limits of amapiano, fusing its trademark log drums with established club genres. | Vigro Deep: My House My Rules | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vigro-deep-my-house-my-rules/ | My House My Rules | Amapiano, the South African club strain that’s equal parts slick and thunderous, finds itself at an inflection point—its third in as many years. Having solidified in 2019 around the thunk of its log-drum basslines (rather than the more amorphous, bordering-on-corny piano licks that gave the genre its name in the early 2010s), the sound filtered across Africa and then further afield during COVID-19 lockdowns. Since clubs reopened, amapiano has gone from underground buzzword to its own category on Beatport. In 2022, it’s been sprinkled across albums from stadium acts including Burna Boy and Stormzy, and in Asake’s “Peace Be Unto You (PBUY)” it gained a definitive pop anthem.
Vigro Deep, the cherub-faced producer out of Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, has been there at each shift, helping to cement the log drum with his 2019 viral hit “Untold Stories” and then touring relentlessly and adding a mainstream sheen to the sound with his vocal experiments (including at least one extraordinary nu-metal flip). Now, with My House My Rules, he reckons with the sound’s future, picking from a slate of more established club genres to see what sticks.
Vigro Deep’s DJ sets are snappy, tune-juggling affairs, and they offer plenty of payoff for amapiano’s lengthy and titillating intros. This album is languorous by comparison, but with no less opportunity for intrigue as he takes a mixologist’s approach to combining sweet, salt, and sour. The rough rhythmic edges of bacardi house rub up against saccharine vocals on “Ngizokulinda,” while the whistles and grainy synths of gqom and latter-day dubstep cut through a clatter of snares on “My World.” With an approach this expansive, there are bound to be misfires—the Ibiza-lite beach-club sounds of “5am Set” are unmemorable, and “Beats of No Nation” is more aimless wander than global odyssey—but Vigro’s willingness to try on new styles, and to execute with such exactness, is impressive. It also sets him apart in a scene that’s risked settling on a single binding identity.
With that said, the album’s standout moments still come soundtracked by amapiano’s established components. The “yay” and “yo” of “Shukushuku” are paced for meditation, but the rattling drums tell a different story. “My Rules” is seemingly lab-tested to turn heads: Whirling, syncopated synths twist in on each other like a shoal of fish evading shark attacks; the thwacking, thrumming log drums provide one of the year’s most devastating and understated choruses. The appeal here lies in just how physically these songs arrive, be that in the belly—where the bassline churns—or the ever-present shakers and off-kilter snare hits that keep all four limbs jangling, as if on strings. Vigro Deep’s grip remains firmly on the marionette’s cross. | 2023-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Rinse | January 3, 2023 | 7.3 | 53ae4819-9c81-4c48-ab51-94cc8abc8f9e | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The duo of OFWGKTA members Hodgy Beats and Left Brain burrow deeper into their own world on their sophomore album, a collection that raises the question: What's the end game for MellowHype? | The duo of OFWGKTA members Hodgy Beats and Left Brain burrow deeper into their own world on their sophomore album, a collection that raises the question: What's the end game for MellowHype? | MellowHype: Numbers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17119-numbers/ | Numbers | Though it slipped under the radar, MellowHype's "La Bonita"-- the first single off their sophomore album Numbers-- was an interesting new direction for the duo of Hodgy Beats and Left Brain. Odd Future got popular without really ever going pop, but "La Bonita" threatened to change that. It didn't, of course, but for all the hosannas that Odd Future have issued in the direction of Pharrell, this was the first song to sound like it could be dropped straight into a classic Neptunes mix. Pharrell's attempts at this kind of light, slinky funk in the past half-decade have yielded results frighteningly close to Jimmy Buffett, but "La Bonita" pops, thumps, and pays off at the end when Hodgy nearly cops Pharrell's honeyed falsetto.
So it comes as a disappointment that Numbers itself is a retreat into insularity. Though it's the nominal follow-up to the group's debut album, Numbers follows more in the footsteps of Hodgy's Untitled EP, which was a pleasant, though unspectacular, foray into weed-fueled indie rap. But both that EP and Numbers lack the blistering energy of MellowHype's debut, and that's something that the group initially made its name on. There is no "Fuck the Police" on Numbers-- a song like "Untitled L", which aims to play that role, feels like its going through the motions. Odd Future's greatest asset as a collective was that they demanded you pay attention and form an opinion, and BlackenedWhite succeeded at doing that as well as anything the group put out. Numbers does no such thing. Above all, it asks one question: What's the end game for MellowHype?
That's because there's nothing wrong with making rap for stoners, but Hodgy-- the group's main MC-- isn't exactly MF Doom. He can rap on a technical level, but Numbers begins to reveal flaws in MellowHype's formula. Hodgy raps quickly but not exactly creatively, and without the foot-through-door bangers that pepper BlackenedWhite, his verses and Left Brain's wonky productions begin to bleed into each other in a way that does its individual songs no favors. Where the group's debut explicitly suggested that you play it while wreaking havoc on Halloween, Numbers is dragged down by a distinct aimlessness and lack of direction.
There are high points, but a lot of the album feels interchangeable. If songs like "Break" or "GNC" or "Monster" exchanged titles or switched out verses, it would be hard to tell. "La Bonita" doesn't have that problem, nor does "Snare", which effectively deploys a group of singing children (or at least the simulation of one). "P2" and "Astro", which feature Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean, respectively, also stand out, but even those magnify the lack of starpower that is Numbers' relative downfall.
If there's one thing that could've improved the album, it would be the increased presence of Left Brain. His production, whether he's playfully pawing at your face with sampled guitars on "P2" or pounding out radio-ready synth melodies as on "Astro", is fantastic. His beats are mostly built from the noise up, and it would be difficult to be as obsessed with sounds as Left Brain seems to be without making beats that are formless. But that's Left Brain's charm-- the central gurgling synth figure of "Beat" shouldn't really work, but it's one of the most repayable things on the record. He appears too infrequently as a rapper, though-- his charming goofiness and laid-back charisma cuts through Hodgy's unflinching seriousness but isn't deployed enough.
Numbers is a solid rap record, but MellowHype have shown themselves to be capable of more. They further burrow into their own world here, but it results in exponentially diminishing returns. The group that offers skewed takes on Waka Flocka Flame and the Neptunes is galvanizing, but the MellowHype on Numbers is standardized, and that's something it never quite seemed they would be. | 2012-10-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Odd Future | October 12, 2012 | 6.7 | 53b18c6c-e498-4c2c-a731-af5d17fcd891 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Recorded live with no overdubs, Maxwell Allison’s latest electronic album is more groove-oriented than his previous work, his hardware noise sounding both vintage and pristine. | Recorded live with no overdubs, Maxwell Allison’s latest electronic album is more groove-oriented than his previous work, his hardware noise sounding both vintage and pristine. | Mukqs: 起き上がり | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mukqs-/ | 起き上がり | Maxwell Allison’s music as Mukqs lies at the meeting of various opposing forces: high and low tech, shimmer and crunch, structure and chaos. He is a member of the freeform Chicago improv trio Good Willsmith; he’s also no stranger to four-on-the-floor kick drums and other trappings of dance music. But when it comes to beat-based fare, he is a denizen of the same corner of the American electronic underground as Container, where soldering irons and four-track tapes are the tools of the trade, rather than laptops and soft synths.
His solo rig comprises a hodge-podge of cassettes, looping pedals, synths, and anime samples ripped from YouTube, and his early releases could be staunchly unvarnished, sometimes blistering affairs recorded live in single takes with no overdubs. As recently as early last year, on the Umor Rex tape ダメ人間, concessions to beauty—like the coruscating opener “My Baby-Tachi”—were balanced with a mangled metallic clank that evoked submarines crumpling. But recently he’s been exploring more streamlined sounds: Last spring’s fine mini-album 11,666,666,666,666,666,666, for Chicago’s Midwich label, settled into a steadier groove, wreathing crisp drum-machine programming in the rosy sunrise synths of Terry Riley—a homegrown style you might call “beatific beat.”
His new record is even more groove-oriented, with the fullest, most pristine sound he has achieved yet. Like its predecessors, it was recorded live with no overdubs and no laptop. But heard in the context of a DJ set, you could easily mistake some of this stuff for the output of a self-identifying dance-music producer, rather than something with its roots in the noise scene. Take “ゾッド,” a slowly evolving house excursion that rolls ahead at a textbook 120 beats per minute. The bass, fashioned from tuned toms, is chest-massagingly deep, and the snare and hi-hat programming is a marvel of efficiency. You can hear an echo of early-’90s releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label in its elegant clockworks, while the new-age synths that spill over lumpy machine percussion, like a fogbank cascading over mountaintops, suggest the dreamy style currently emanating from Vancouver, B.C.
The other long track here, “ベヘリット,” also has a slightly vintage feel, which might have something to do with both his choice of gear and his studio methods. (In the early 1990s, even the straightest, most club-centric electronic music was often made without the use of a computer, and single-take recordings were not uncommon.) The bass and drums are even more driving, and an eerie, note-bending melody lends to the noir atmosphere. Allison’s hands-on approach plays out in shape-shifting timbres that morph from banjo to mallets to flutes against a shimmering backdrop of layered synthesizers.
Not everything is so straight ahead. “Ronaldo Kuriki” takes a page from minimalism’s rulebook and wads it up, collapsing pulsing keyboards into a tangle of crinkled vectors; the no-frills synths give it the feel of a kind of Casiotone kosmische music. “Marble Gallery” is even more disorderly: Yanking away at knobs on his sampler, Allison juggles crashing cymbals, horror-film atmospheres, and bowed prayer bowls. It sounds like a lava flow swallowing a carousel, and the closing “Redfield,” nodding to both Oval and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, is similarly spasmodic, if marginally more muted.
Somewhere in between those extremes lies the opening “Al Saiduq.” Wreathed in electronic fizz, its pinging metallic groove sounds at first almost like techno, but its rhythmic cadence resists parsing, and unlike most techno, it resolutely refuses to follow a straight line. Two minutes in, a short reverie filled with elegiac synths and arrhythmic claps serves as a prickly palate-cleanser, like a sorbet stuffed with thumbtacks, before Allison wipes the slate clean once again; the track’s final stretch juggles North African-sounding synth melodies over jumbled drum machine. It’s an example of his balancing act at its most vertiginous—and its most thrilling. For now, anyway, Mukqs’ sweet spot is this relatively unexplored interzone where noise and groove collide. | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Doom Trip | February 3, 2018 | 7.1 | 53b319e4-0708-40f2-a2f9-00df8aabf540 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Hamburg musician’s second album is a spartan mix of techno, acid, EBM, and coldwave. Even at her most damaged, Helena Hauff’s take on noise is nothing short of opulent. | The Hamburg musician’s second album is a spartan mix of techno, acid, EBM, and coldwave. Even at her most damaged, Helena Hauff’s take on noise is nothing short of opulent. | Helena Hauff: Qualm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/helena-hauff-qualm/ | Qualm | High fidelity has never been Helena Hauff’s bag. Once, in what she’s described as her most disastrous DJ experience, an angry clubgoer berated her from the crowd, shouting, “Can’t you hear how fucking shit all your bass drums sound?” But as any fan of Wolf Eyes or Black Flag or the Jesus and Mary Chain could tell you, for many listeners, “fucking shit” is the whole point. And the German DJ and electronic musician has crafted her entire career around precisely that: techno at its nastiest, gnarliest, and most ragged—as bracing as a mouthful of bees or a toaster on the edge of the tub.
The irony is that Hauff’s bedraggled beats are actually exquisitely crafted. Spend some time with her new album on both headphones and a proper sound system and it quickly becomes apparent that cans won’t cut it: Her bass and drums, degraded as they are, cry out for big, fat speakers. This is lo-fi music, made on battered analog gear, and swimming in the sounds of line noise, tape hiss, and tube distortion. But translating all that muck—the spring reverbs, the janky patch bays—requires a hi-fi listening experience. Making those sounds sing calls for speakers capable of pushing serious air. Like a ruined building in a vacant lot, her wreckage needs to breathe.
Qualm is the Hamburg musician’s second album, and it is largely of a piece with everything she has released over the past five years, including 2015’s A Tape, a sort of pre-debut LP collecting early sketches and stragglers, and her proper debut, Discreet Desires, from the same year. Her productions stem from her tastes as she honed them as a resident at her hometown’s Golden Pudel, a notoriously go-for-broke underground club. (DJ Koze told me about the time he jumped from an outdoor staircase onto the roof and fell clean through the ceiling to the dancefloor; the one time I went, I ended up in the emergency room with a gash in my head.) Working largely with hardware instead of computers—classic machines like the Roland Juno-60 synthesizer and TB-303 bass synth—she turns out a whorled mix of techno, acid, EBM, and coldwave with no obvious hallmarks to date it. Most of it could be from any point in the past 30 years.
Hauff has called Qualm “a kind of strong, weird, one-drum-machine-and-one-synthesizer thing,” and that description pretty much nails it. The album is grimy, her coldwave influence has largely burned off to reveal a brutal, incandescent core. At points, she may even be overstating her album’s range: On the opening “Barrow Boot Boys,” it’s not one synth and a drum machine; it’s pretty much just one damn drum machine—a slo-mo blast of hammering kicks, toms, claps, and cymbals, all run through distortion until they crumble like the white crust of a burned-up briquet. “Lifestyle Guru,” which makes use of the same drum sounds and adds searing acid squelch, is more agile and less corroded but just as grimly focused. Unlike a lot of grayscale techno, though, Hauff’s tracks are also lots of fun (no surprise that she cites the Stooges as a teenage fave). There’s a real knuckle-dragging sense of abandon in her music; this is primal stuff, its alarm-bell buzz designed to trigger the same fight-or-flight instincts that have been bubbling through our collective blood since long before homo erectus got wise.
It’s not all so hardcore; some tracks are more like mood pieces. “btdr-revisited” is a three-minute fugue for bleeps and claps that careens like colliding space debris, and a few cuts are purely ambient fantasias or chiming studies in counterpoint. Others, though, are proper journeys. “The Smell of Suds and Steel,” an eight-minute 303 workout, bangs incessantly away at a barely varied drum pattern, yet coming out the other side still feels like emerging from some kind of dancefloor wormhole with your atoms subtly rearranged. The same goes for “Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg”: Acid might be dance music’s most done-to-death subgenre, yet she still manages to find something fresh in a mix of textures that’s evocative of gargling thumbtacks and diamonds. Even at her most damaged, Hauff’s take on noise is nothing short of opulent, and it’s that alternatingly grating and sparkling attention to detail that makes Qualm so exciting. What might at first sound retro turns out to be simply timeless. | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | August 3, 2018 | 7.8 | 53b49ec6-1c72-4f37-89f7-44a5ae3aaac5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Baltimore noise-rock quartet's sophomore album, their first for Drag City, finds them softening their sound but still nailing the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness. | The Baltimore noise-rock quartet's sophomore album, their first for Drag City, finds them softening their sound but still nailing the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness. | Dope Body: Natural History | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16638-natural-history/ | Natural History | On their debut album, Nupping, Dope Body hit loft-show paydirt by splicing noise-rock with melodies salvaged from the junkyard of 1990s FM radio. That may sound like an unpalatable combo, but the Baltimore four-piece used each genre to subvert the other's worst tendencies. A swatch of Red Hot Chili Peppers homage could complicate the menace from a song stacked with splintering feedback. A few atonal squelches helped tweak a pummeling riff's macho momentum. The result was heavy music that possessed moments of levity but avoided parody. Now, perhaps weary of having Anthony Kiedis comparisons lobbed at them, Dope Body have backed away from the butt-rock influences.
On their follow up, Natural History, they've chilled out a bit. Maybe some of the mystical neo-Americana vibes championed by their new label, Drag City, have rubbed off on them. The first sound on the album isn't a blast of feedback but the tingling of wind chimes. That song, "Shook", lilts back and forth on a languid two-chord vamp with frontman Andrew Laumann grunting quasi-mystical pronouncements, striking closer to Lungfish's Daniel Higgs than Zack de la Rocha. "Crystallize the eyes/ Let them know you can feel it/ I feel it all around," he grunts.
Even in its most jittery, Nintendo-nostalgic moments, Natural History is a roomier effort than its predecessor. On Nupping, guitarist Zach Utz loaded songs with sonic belches and abstract gurgles. This time he's more selective with the audio-graffiti. His playing has taken a more melodic turn, incorporating elements from Holy Ghost Party, his tropical-psych guitar side project with Dope Body drummer David Jacober. On "Weird Mirror" he plots out a pattern of robot-rock riffs that make the band sound like the Cars channeling San Francisco sci-fi proto-punk duo, Chrome.
Brutishness is still Dope Body's forte, though, and they haven't abandoned it. During the chorus to "Road Dog", Laumann gets inspirational, chanting the lines, "Do what you want to do... Be who you want to be." But he barks the words like a gym teacher on the edge of blowing his anger-management course, commanding listeners to either self-actualize or drop and give him 20. "Out of My Mind" churns like an off-center cement mixer, with a bassline that probably owes a few royalties to Soundgarden's "Slaves and Bulldozers".
It's one of the only flickers of 90s worship on Natural History, but there are still plenty of moments when the line between goofball antics and freakish punk-rock blowouts gets blurred. They may have changed up their game, but Dope Body still nail the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness. | 2012-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | May 21, 2012 | 7.9 | 53b7b4ff-f2a1-4f10-8da8-4b0f544e9942 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The two Bay Area presences come together for a short but supremely fun trip on the latest in the Tonite Show series. | The two Bay Area presences come together for a short but supremely fun trip on the latest in the Tonite Show series. | DJ Fresh / Ezale: The Tonite Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22403-the-tonite-show/ | The Tonite Show | Ezale is a human emoji. He’s always smiling, dancing, or on fire in some way that swirls his thin braids around. When he burst onto the rap scene in 2013 behind “5 Minutes of Funktown”—an intersection between nostalgic beats from Whodini and Rick James and dumb Oakland swagger—he felt less like a rapper and more like a giddy tour guide. When he collected that world-building origin story and other great singles “Foreal Foreal” and “Too High,” he put on the appropriate costume and titled his 2013 mixtape Drug Funnie, a riff on the Nickelodeon show “Doug.”
On the cover of his collaboration album with DJ Fresh, The Tonite Show, Ezale and Fresh share detailed, slightly grotesque Adult Swim-type caricatures. DJ Fresh is an old-fashioned DJ who loves making music. He crisscrosses influences into a funky, pastel patchwork that reflects the diversity of Oakland and growing up surrounded by every type of music (never mind that DJ Fresh is actually an East Coast transplant). He builds common ground between Bay Area slap and G-funk through ’80s sounds, connecting the dots from soft rock to quiet storm, adult contemporary pop, disco, and new jack swing. While some of Fresh’s Tonite Show albums have drawn attention by featuring artists who would seem incongruent (like Gary, Indiana’s Freddie Gibbs and Houston’s Trae tha Truth), not since D-Lo has Fresh worked with someone as unique and compelling as Ezale, a talent complementary to his own.
DJ Fresh productions are a perfect stage for feeling out the sound of words, and while Ezale doesn’t lift off into the gumbo of slang that Bay Area rappers are sometimes known for, his personality is similarly airy and charming, the guy at the party who wants to ask you if you got any pills, not if your friend is single. “Used to bust down zits, now I ship out packs,” he offers on “Stop Come On,” and it’s a great, self-deprecating image and sneaky clever, a dynamic that a lot of rappers, even ones who are trying to be funny, fail miserably at. He’s never hateful or mean, because Ezale is just knocking words back and forth until he finds a joke he likes or a bit of wordplay he can slide into (“I need green bags like Sun Chips/I can’t afford to go to Rita off some dumb shit,” from the introspective “Got the Game From the OG’s”)
True to most Tonite Show records, this one moves at a clip. Fellow Oakland producer Hawk Beatz takes the reins on a few songs to switch it up, most notably by sampling another Bay Area figure Jocelyn Enriquez and her jam “A Little Bit of Ecstasy,” finding Fresh’s bloodline within the slinky beats of ’90s electro. Ezale gets quietly poignant, breaking the fourth wall to hit you with, “My brother coulda made it to the NBA/But it didn’t go his way/But don’t worry, one day,” and “Livin’ life in the Town make it hard to pray/cause they say a stray bullet took my brother away.”
Everything that works on the sub-half-hour* Tonite Show* is contained in “We Want Some Pussy,” a terrific end-of-summer song that prominently samples 2 Live Crew but takes the energy level down a few notches, not even riding a swing-for-the-fences beat that you might conceive while thinking of marrying Miami bass with Oakland slap. It’s this kind of subtle stylistic switch-up that is so compelling—how many different ways can these guys convince you they want some drugs, they want to fuck, they want to party—and how many different ways can it sound great? The answer to both: a lot. | 2016-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fresh in the Flesh | September 17, 2016 | 7.4 | 53b98736-d616-4fc0-860a-ce7fe5f288ff | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
The Queensbridge legend’s 13th album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone, one that suits him even as it yields diminishing returns. | The Queensbridge legend’s 13th album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone, one that suits him even as it yields diminishing returns. | Nas: King’s Disease | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-kings-disease/ | King’s Disease | By all measures, the rollout of 2018’s NASIR, the fourth project of Kanye West’s chaotic Wyoming summer, was a mess. Marred by Nas’ lazy flows and conspiracy theories, the album also arrived under the troubling cloud of domestic abuse allegations from his ex-wife Kelis. Nas’ 13th album, King’s Disease, seeks a return to the cozy wistfulness of 2012’s Life Is Good, a late-career opus which toured ’80s stash spots and triumphant nights at the Apollo while ostensibly interrogating the dissolution of his marriage. The new album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone—one which suits Nas, even as it yields diminishing returns.
There’s desperation in the way Nas endlessly plumbs the scenes of his adolescence, like a red-eyed wedding guest clutching your shoulder three hours into the reception and pleading, “Remember?” This is the rapper who cruised “Memory Lane” at 20, who at 28 excoriated peers unable to leave behind the emotional confines of their Queensbridge childhood. Yet by his late thirties, Nas had become so convinced of the importance of those years—the sanctity of Cold Crush park jams, the unforgettable eyelashes on that girl down Vernon Boulevard—and, in an odd display of humility, less concerned with his own place in them. On “Car #85,” a summertime ride through Koch-era New York, Charlie Wilson’s background vocals lend period-specific authenticity to Nas’ vivid memories of “White Castles at midnight, fish sandwiches, forty-ounces and fistfights.” In middle age, he’s a full-on evangelist for the lost city of his youth, and for the days just before Illmatic changed everything.
By now groaning about Nas’ beat selection is the rap-fan equivalent of complaining about the weather, but Southern California native Hit-Boy, best known for his credits on “N****s in Paris” and “Backseat Freestyle,” acquits himself pretty well as the resident producer on King’s Disease. Despite the synthetic sheen of his single-tracked pianos, digitized snares, and clap drums, his beats are stately without defaulting into the prescriptive mood music Nas generally prefers. His audio templates have proven adaptable enough for the likes of Dom Kennedy and SOB X RBE; he evokes an easy brightness on the Anderson .Paak collaboration “All Bad” and the A$AP Ferg-featuring “Spicy.” Nothing jumps out as an anthem or single, and it’s hard to fathom which prospective consumer demos are mobilized by Big Sean and Lil Durk’s appearances.
Just as relieving for those who suffered through NASIR’s arrhythmic vocals, the flow which seemed to abandon Nas after Life Is Good appears more or less restored on King’s Disease. Even in his heyday, Nas would never have been mistaken for the most musical MC, but his ability to ride a bassline conferred a smoothness to his hyper-literate bars; on NASIR, the looseness of Kanye’s capacious productions resulted in something akin to a poetry slam. Long gone are the nested, multisyllabic rhyme schemes of the Illmatic-to-Stillmatic arc, but Nas sounds positively energized on “Blue Benz,” rapping about Jersey City madams and excursions to the Tunnel with Chris Lighty. He delivers an inspired opening verse on “The Cure,” keeping time without a snare until the song’s second-act beat switch.
Nas tends to falter when tackling capital-S Subjects (King’s Disease is blessedly devoid of any Plandemic speculation), and he’s better at coaxing pathos from characters he observes or creates than he is at autobiographical soul-searching, his stony affect strained by intimacy. King’s Disease unfolds with a thematic scope suitable for reminiscence and self-coronation, with a bit of the Marcus Garvey-inspired liberation theory he’s dabbled in since “If I Ruled the World.” In a few instances, the record manifests a vulnerability rare even in Nas’ most personal work, as on “Til the War Is Won,” when he curses God for taking his doting mother instead of his jazz-playing, jet-setting father.
But where the song is on its surface a paean to single mothers, Nas’ bemoaning of broken families culminates in a mealy-mouthed admonishment: “Women, stop chasing your man away/Men, stop acting crazy, chasing your woman away.” King’s Disease makes overtures of applauding women in a manner that feels defensive in light of the 2018 allegations. Still evident is the backhanded slut-shaming so eagerly cribbed by J. Cole, the unwitting as-a-father-of-a-daughter misogyny of 2012’s “Daughters”: on “Car #85” Nas recalls chasing a teenage crush to Co-op City only to find 10 fellow suitors waiting outside her building. Both “Replace Me” and “All Bad” address nameless exes, vacillating between spite and remorse without enough nuance or transparency to disburse any appreciable insights.
King’s Disease climaxes with “Full Circle,” which reunites The Firm’s 1996 lineup of Nas, AZ, Cormega, and Foxy Brown. In past Firm reunions, the reconvened members—titans of New York’s blockbuster era—looked back on their wild youths, warily contemplating their divergent paths. “Full Circle” is the closest they’ve come to an honest reckoning, each acknowledging missteps along the way. AZ, perpetually mid-champagne flute in toast to his impossible good fortune, admits to dishonesty in relationships: “The games that I was playin’ was silly/Similar to them days when I was packin’ that milly, it could’ve killed me.” Cormega, never one to forgive a slight or forget a grudge, rues his past control issues: “Thinking my girl was my possession—I stand corrected.” (It’s strange that Foxy Brown was conscripted for this exercise in male redemption, and her verse belongs on a different song altogether.) There’s a memorial air to the proceedings, running mates who’ve drifted to the suburbs and whose kids attend different schools. Nas remains a prisoner of his own device, but that doesn’t mean his comrades can’t move on.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | August 27, 2020 | 6.3 | 53c09c2e-2344-4761-bdaf-214da111556d | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Techno star's latest album further explores pop accessibility, bringing a new sense of songform to his shapeshifting production work and drawing comparisons to LCD Soundsystem, Beck, and Caribou. | Techno star's latest album further explores pop accessibility, bringing a new sense of songform to his shapeshifting production work and drawing comparisons to LCD Soundsystem, Beck, and Caribou. | Matthew Dear: Asa Breed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10289-asa-breed/ | Asa Breed | Between the animalistic funk of 2003 single "Dog Days"-- a dance track that cheerfully nuzzled its way into a SXSW/CMJ mindset-- and 2004's Backstroke LP, there was a lot of talk of Matthew Dear's shapeshifting abilities. He'd already proven, both under his own name (recording for Ghostly and its Spectral sublabel) and as False (for Richie Hawtin's Plus 8 and Minus labels) and Jabberjaw (for Perlon), that he could stretch and twist his Slinky-like tracks to traverse any hairpin of techno's staircase. Now, word was, Dear was turning towards even greater accessibility with a record that would bring a new sense of songform to his gritty, agreeable beat structures.
But while six of Backstroke's eight tracks featured vocals (as did "Dog Days") and fell into the occasional verse/chorus structure, the record failed to deliver Dear a wider audience. His voice, even with its odd pitch, put its shoulder to the wheel in the service of pop, but the tires were worn from burning rubber behind a disco stoplight; its tracks felt like retreads-- cracked, wobbly, a little thin. I still enjoy the record, but compared to the staggeringly confident tracks Dear released as Audion in just the last year -- "Mouth to Mouth", "I Gave You Away", remixes for Claude VonStroke, Hot Chip, and Black Strobe, anthems all-- it's difficult to hear Backstroke as the work of the same individual.
With his new album, Asa Breed, Dear finally makes good on his long-awaited metamorphosis. It's not that the record is a straightforward pop romp: It's still anchored in Dear's lumbering beats, its rhythms cobbled together from misfiring drum machines and colored with barely-in-tune keyboards and yellowing room tone. Still, Dear pulls together his widest array of elements yet, not just in terms of instrumentation-- electric and acoustic guitars, live drums, and haphazard percussion all play strong roles-- but also style: Hints of new wave, indie rock, Afropop, and even country enliven Asa Breed. Dear's mercurial approach to genre, however, feels less like dabbling than a kind of shambling dandyism, trying on mismatched styles with a sidelong wink in the mirror.
The most immediate change is that Dear's voice now sits front-and-center in every track. Actually, make that front-and-center and side-to-side: Virtually every song features two- or three-part, multitracked vocals, encompassing his natural baritone, a more idiosyncratic midrange, and finally a warbly falsetto, generally digitally smeared as a sort of pitch-correction. It's not the greatest voice in the world, but he uses it well, sliding into the notes, lingering on his vowels, and greasing the mechanistic clutter of his backing tracks. It's a suggestive and evocative voice, though exactly what's being suggested is often left ambiguous. On the downcast "Deserter" it's impossible to miss the influence of Joy Division's Ian Curtis; on the ruminative "Fleece on Brain", his backing Ooh-oohs sound like a scrap of 1960s pop that's wafted in on some errant, psychedelic gust. Sometimes, the vocals themselves mutate into something approaching pure musicality, more sensibility than sense: On "Will Gravity Win Tonight?" it might take you dozens of listens to realize that the background babble is really the mantra-like repetition, "More work to be done."
Asa Breed is a moody record, thanks in no small part to its affirmational lyrics and plaintive guitars. Some critics have found fault with Dear's way with words, and he does occasionally misstep, but more often than not, his slightly cryptic character sketches work well, allowing ambiguous narratives to sprout from the cracked pavement of his productions. The lyrics invite all manner of questions. Who are "Don and Sherri"? If love is "such a tricky thing/ Can include diamond rings," is that a good or a bad thing? (Dear is married.) And in a record so filled with self-doubt, how much is pure literary invention, and how much points to a crack in the artist's own psyche? It's so rare to get any sense of dance artists' personae that Dear's ambiguous, occasionally confessional lyrics take on extra weight. Part of the pleasure of Asa Breed is its introduction of a character we've never met before; Dear's reluctance to reveal only sends you back into the music looking for answers. (Some of those answers will surprise you: the closing country dirge "Vine to Vine", featuring a Johnny Cash-like spoken word drawl, is about a paternal ancestor of Dear's that was allegedly gunned down by Texas Rangers over a century ago.)
The other thing that keeps me returning to Asa Breed again and again, beyond its individual songs' inventive, engrossing composition and production, is the pacing of the album. It's moody, yes-- even a jaunty track like "Fleece on Brain" feels haunted and fraught with anxiety-- but the record's sequence pinballs from brassy electric bumpers to pensive pits and suspenseful pauses. The first four songs seem to circle a common mood as if poking and prodding from every angle, shining a Maglite in the recesses of a deep funk. (The way he wields phrases suggests the minimalist he's always been, twisting and spinning a few sinewy strands into a rope as tough as woven steel; you can hear Audion's druggy abandon throughout, in slow, grinding synthesizers and tones that change color as gradually as a darkening, stormbound sky.) With "Elementary Lover", Dear abruptly changes course, channeling the Tom Tom Club. "Don and Sherri" plunges back into the murk of a humid dance floor. "Will Gravity Win Tonight?" is bitter black tea as a sort of palate cleanser; "Pom Pom" is a bizarre, Beach Boys-influenced miniature (at 2:39, it's the shortest song on the album, by two seconds); "Death to Feelers" is a kindergarten tale of unrequited love for toy piano and tambourine. And the last four songs usher us out in a kind of extended dream sequence of organs, acoustic guitars, country yelps, the Sea and Cake lounge jazz, and the totally unexpected American Gothic of "Vine to Vine".
Maybe it's because Dear has worked on the album, off and on, for the past three years that its stylistic drift is so wide; what's remarkable is how well all the pieces sit together, and how convincingly they lay out a series of stepping stones. Ultimately, the path leads back inside the album itself, breeding as many questions as certainties. One thing remains clear, though: As producer, songwriter and persona, Dear has come into his own with Asa Breed, a bootstrapping album that not only reveals the miles walked, but an ambitious road map ahead. | 2007-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | June 5, 2007 | 7.9 | 53c46c14-6929-464b-b137-5376584a92a8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On her self-assured second album, this singer-songwriter uses her mordant wit to confront serious subjects, exorcising trauma with hooks and humor. | On her self-assured second album, this singer-songwriter uses her mordant wit to confront serious subjects, exorcising trauma with hooks and humor. | Caroline Rose: LONER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-rose-loner/ | LONER | “Sarcasm is hard to get through in music,” Caroline Rose lamented in a recent interview with Rookie. “Especially if you’re making pop songs, and you’re singing about something that’s pretty serious.” Rose, a singer-songwriter from New York with a penchant for cherry-colored tracksuits, certainly likes serious subjects: Her second album, LONER, is full of songs about misogyny, self-doubt, disillusionment, and death, each confronted with unflinching candor. But it’s Rose’s mordant wit that makes those songs work—and Rose is very funny. “I go to a friend of a friend’s party,” she sings, martini-dry, on “More of the Same.” “Everyone’s well-dressed with a perfect body/And they all have alternative haircuts and straight white teeth/But all I see is just more of the same thing.” Sarcasm might be hard for other songwriters, but not for her.
There’s a constructive quality to Rose’s sense of humor: It affords her the room to exorcise trauma in a playful spirit. “Cry!,” a full-throated power-pop jam built around bass synths and pedal-steel guitar, wallows in the gross invective hurled at women near-daily while implicitly mocking the retrograde attitudes behind it: “You’re gonna cry, little, little girl!” Rose sneers. “You silly thing/You will learn your place yet.” Its counterpart, “Smile! AKA Schizodrift Jam 1 AKA Bikini Intro,” is a caustic minute-long fuck-you to every strange man who has commanded a woman in the street to do just that. The rock-depth low spirits of “Getting to Me,” a painfully relatable song about loneliness, culminate in a resigned sigh that’s bitterly hilarious in its understatement: “I think it might be getting to me,” she sings, oddly upbeat. “I think it might be finally getting to me.”
Musically, Rose has no less fun than she does with the content of her lyrics. “I’d say this album was as much inspired by Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears as it was late-’70s punk,” she declares in LONER’s press materials. These are references that some artists might put on for effect—many musicians like to seem omnivorous, even if that range doesn’t manifest in the actual music. But Rose’s tastes really are that comprehensive. LONER spans squawky rockabilly (“Money”), sleepy trip-hop (“To Die Today”), and what Rose herself describes, unimprovably, as her “riot grrrl feminist surf-punk anthem” (“Bikini”). Sometimes she sounds a little like other super-charged fast-talkers, like St. Vincent or Eleanor Friedberger; sometimes she has the exuberant swagger of, say, Craig Finn. And, as promised, she even channels JT, on the distinctly FutureSex-esque “Animal.”
LONER may come as a surprise to admirers of Rose’s previous album, 2014’s I Will Not Be Afraid. A front-to-back collection of alt-country and blues, all whisky-soaked wails and Americana twang, it sounded pretty much like what you’d expect of a record whose first song bears the title “Blood on Your Bootheels”—not a bad debut by any means, but in truth only moderately promising. So what happened? Rose has described her evolution between the two albums as a matter of finding the right sound to match her personality. That sense of discovery is evident not only in the wide spectrum of styles she adopts here, but in the certainty with which she adopts them. LONER is a singular artistic statement, from its unforgettable album art all the way down. It represents for her a major change—a change she totally commands.
If Rose has located her voice, she remains as lost as the rest of us when it comes to the big questions. “The world don’t stop/Even when you’re living in color,” she croons on “Jeannie Becomes a Mom,” awash in a rinse of synths. “No, the world don’t stop/Time is only gonna pass you by.” It’s a fairly wretched sentiment articulated with surprising cheer, as is Rose’s wont. “Every so often I’ll have bouts of pretty bad anxiety, where it feels like I’m running out of time,” she has explained of the song. “It makes me think about my goals, that no matter how many dreams I fulfill I’m never going to be able to outrun time or my often rude reality.” Well, none of us really will—that’s life. But in committing these anxieties to tape with such wit and good humor, in speaking for everyone who experiences similar problems on their own, she’s made reality a little bit easier to handle. | 2018-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | March 14, 2018 | 7.6 | 53c658cb-42fd-419f-94f8-56966a536441 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
The Japanese fashion designer’s passion project is characteristically stylish and star-studded, featuring contributions from Pharrell, Kanye West, Tyler the Creator, and the late Pop Smoke. | The Japanese fashion designer’s passion project is characteristically stylish and star-studded, featuring contributions from Pharrell, Kanye West, Tyler the Creator, and the late Pop Smoke. | Nigo: I Know NIGO! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nigo-i-know-nigo/ | I Know NIGO! | If you were a viewer of Japanese variety shows around 2005, you likely noticed a man dressed in fluorescent camouflage who looked very much out of place in the parade of poised stars and goofy comedians. Nigo was then a Japanese designer in his mid-30s but he looked more like an American rapper, down to the chains draped around his neck and the grills he wore in his teeth. Though he wasn’t yet a household name in Japan, his clothing line, A Bathing Ape, was making waves in the U.S. thanks to early adopters like Pharrell Williams and Clipse (Pusha T’s ongoing feud with Drake can be traced back to Lil Wayne wearing a BAPE hoodie on the cover of VIBE in 2006). Right around this time, Nigo launched his first serious attempt to pivot to music, the hip-hop group Teriyaki Boyz. He served as the group’s DJ and svengali, assembling a crack team of Japanese rappers and calling in favors from friends like Daft Punk, Ad-Rock, and DJ Premier. The group’s Def Jam debut was a modest success in Japan but the mostly Japanese-language album predictably failed to break through in the U.S.
Nearly two decades later, having cemented his legacy as one of the most influential streetwear designers of all time (“Bape is my generation’s Chanel,” the late Virgil Abloh once said), Nigo is giving music another shot. This time around, the album bears his own name—his first international solo release since 2000’s Ape Sounds—and he’s enlisted Pharrell to serve alongside him as co-executive producer, as well as a rotating cast of A-list rappers. The bulk of the production on I Know NIGO! is credited to Pharrell and the Neptunes, with a few additional producers filling in the gaps; the beats are as sturdy and tuneful as you’d expect but not as adventurous as you might hope. As for Nigo, his role in creating these songs seems to be similar to that of James Lavelle’s role in Unkle (incidentally, Lavelle put out Ape Sounds on his Mo’ Wax imprint): not as much a musician as an ideas guy with a deep Rolodex.
Nonetheless, Nigo and Pharell manage to produce a largely enjoyable and consistent compilation that recalls DJ mixtapes of the mid-2000s. If nothing else, the standout tracks are worth seeking out. While it’s not quite “Potato Salad,” “Lost and Found Freestyle 2019” demonstrates that Tyler and A$AP Rocky have chemistry to spare; both here and on the album closer, “Come On, Let’s Go,” we’re reminded that Tyler is incapable of phoning in a verse. Just as noteworthy, “Punch Bowl” reunites the Thornton brothers with the Neptunes for the first Clipse track since 2019. While No Malice admittedly sounds a bit rusty, it’s oddly heartwarming to hear him spit lines like “My Chingo Bling meet me at Dulles” alongside his brother. Pusha T also gets a solo turn on the Kanye West-produced “Hear Me Clearly,” which feels of a piece with his last few years of reliably great solo work.
As tends to be the case with DJ mixtapes, a few tracks fall short of their potential or fade into the background. “Arya” is fairly rote as far as late-period A$AP Rocky goes—it sounds sophisticated, refined, and pretty inert: rap music for art dealers. If you find Kid Cudi cloying, the rave-like “Want It Bad” will not change your mind. On paper, “Heavy” sounds like a clear highlight: Lil Uzi Vert facing off against a lumbering, funereal beat from drill mainstay AXL Beats. Sadly, Uzi sidesteps the challenge by rapping in half-time, instead of trying to keep pace with the drums. It’s still one of the better tracks here, even though it feels like Uzi is holding back.
I Know NIGO! is clearly a labor of love, from a man whose passion for all things hip-hop has never been in question. Even so, there’s an uncomfortable question that hangs in the air around figures like Nigo: When you’ve made a career out of selling your proximity to Black American culture, what, in turn, might you owe to actual Black Americans? “It is hard to witness the pain of friends,” Nigo wrote in 2020, announcing a campaign to raise funds for Black Lives Matter. “...I have been thinking about what I can or should do as a Japanese person.” Plenty of fashion designers were conspicuously silent during that summer of protests, so Nigo’s effort is commendable. As a recording artist, though, it’s instructive to compare him with one of his contemporaries, Abloh, whose advocacy for new artists in both music and fashion was tireless. In place of a Gunna feature or yet another posthumous Pop Smoke song, which new artists could Nigo have used his platform to highlight? I Know NIGO! is a fun project and its marquee names largely deliver but it serves to further fortify Nigo’s legacy rather than pay it forward. | 2022-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | April 1, 2022 | 7.1 | 53c77060-5283-43dc-af80-f563b21748f5 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Conor Oberst and company have not lost their taste for grandiosity on their first album in nearly a decade, setting familiar woes against a dazzling collage of sounds. | Conor Oberst and company have not lost their taste for grandiosity on their first album in nearly a decade, setting familiar woes against a dazzling collage of sounds. | Bright Eyes: Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bright-eyes-down-in-the-weeds-where-the-world-once-was/ | Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was | This—[gestures broadly]—is happening, and Conor Oberst is singing over a “Hotline Bling”-type beat. The uncanny moment occurs almost halfway through Bright Eyes’ 10th album, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. “The world went down in flames and man-made caves,” the beloved Omaha bandleader sings on “Pan and Broom,” backed by the sort of rudimentary drum-machine clicks that powered Drake’s world-conquering 2015 smash. Though the musical setting is contemporary, the message is familiar for Bright Eyes, with lyrics that are as personal as they are apocalyptic. In between a push down the stairs and a flight to Tulum, Oberst’s narrator uses the titular pan and broom to sweep up his dreams.
Since rising up out of the flat and corny Midwest in 1995 like a quivery-voiced derecho storm, Bright Eyes have never shied away from the maudlin, a tendency that once caused non-teenagers to look down their noses. In recent years, as Oberst has focused on solo projects and other collaborations, the band’s cultural status has solidified: Post Malone interpolated them for Young Thug, Mac Miller covered them, Lil Peep sampled them. Oberst is now bandmates with Phoebe Bridgers, in their open-hearted folk-rock duo Better Oblivion Community Center. And the 1975’s Matt Healy, for one, endorses those scare-quoted mid-’00s “new Dylan” comparisons. Bright Eyes have belatedly found critical acceptance as a kind of musical rite of passage for smart, sensitive youths. That’s not faint praise, but it still seems to sell them short as their first wave of fans age into their 30s and 40s.
The emotional outpourings of a wunderkind are easy to dismiss as raw passion. With Down in the Weeds, the painstaking craft of Oberst and the other two longtime Bright Eyes members—producer Mike Mogis and multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott—is on vivid display. As related in innumerable quarantine interviews, the band deliberately ransacked disparate aspects from their back-catalog: lush orchestral pop, twangy Americana, warped electronic textures, blown-out distortion, tremulous whispers-to-a-scream. Flea plays slap bass on several tracks and never raises an eyebrow. Rather than try to recapture lost youth, as their tour through past sounds might imply, the group glories in incipient middle age. Oberst, who has recently gone through a divorce and the death of his brother, brings that perspective to his ornate but piercing lyrics. You can scream along to Down in the Weeds, but also quietly appreciate it—a testament to the artistry that went into this Bright Eyes album and all the others from which it draws.
Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way. On the bizarro wedding-dance swooner “One and Done,” before pointing at “the masochists all celebrating love,” Oberst mentions “the final field recording from the loud Anthropocene,” and that lofty sense of doom suffuses the record. Standout “To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)” links visceral introspection (Oberst asks, “What’s it like to live with me here/Every fucking day?”) with the tragic 2015 attacks on the Bataclan in Paris and, as if moving by dream logic, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” “All these same fears/Year after year,” Oberst sings, paraphrasing the classic-rock standard. It’s an apt mission statement for Bright Eyes’ return: Age hasn’t dimmed the relevance of their existential anxieties. Or, as Oberst told an interviewer, “I take no joy in being right about all of this stuff.”
The specters of Oberst’s ex-wife and late brother hang over the proceedings. The first voice on the album is the Spanish-language, spoken-word lilt of Corina Figueroa Escamilla, who still shares two dogs with Oberst, on a ragtime- and mushrooms-inspired opener that establishes the audacious, très-Bright-Eyes scope of the record. The folk-rock romp “Tilt-A-Whirl” begins with Oberst singing, “My phantom brother came to me.” A queasy Marxophone interlude can’t lighten the misery: “Life’s a solitary song,” the lifelong singer sings, “no one to clap or sing along.” On another highlight, the melancholic “Stairwell Song,” Oberst constructs a specific-yet-ambiguous story that could address either lost partner, or neither. He concludes with a wink, howling “You like cinematic endings” as a triumphant swell of horns and strings cues the credits.
Not all of the satisfactions of Down in the Weeds are so baroque. Joined by a gospel choir on the comparatively buoyant “Forced Convalescence,” Oberst is hilarious as he sings about “catastrophizing” his 40th birthday, and the inability to escape from “housework, or the bank clerk, or the priest.” On the piano ballad “Hot Car in the Sun,” Oberst might be “dreaming of my ex-wife’s face,” or having sad visions of overheating dogs, but in the real world he’s just chopping celery for soup: “Didn’t have much else to do,” he confides. On the wide-screen finale, “Comet Song,” he sets out a household scene that’s uncomfortably easy to picture: “You clenched your fist/You threw the dish/And called me Peter Pan/Your aim’s not very accurate.” The whole of this album is more than the sum of the parts, but the parts can still be devastating.
But Down in the Weeds falters when it loses touch with its essential grandiosity, in a handful of songs that feel more like standalones than threads in a tapestry. “Dance and Sing,” a jaunty and well-earned call for love and endurance, is more easily digestible than many songs here, but also less dazzling. The most conventional pick among the pre-release singles, the slick stadium-rocker “Mariana Trench,” also works well enough, its lyrical purview spanning from Mt. Everest to “your other brother’s grave,” but doesn’t reach into the next level of detail that raises goosebumps elsewhere.
Down in the Weeds, recorded before the global pandemic, suits the daily desolation of lockdown. It also makes me regret that Oberst can’t perform these songs live, where young fans and old could form bonds as lasting with them as with Bright Eyes’ past staples. On “Nothing Gets Crossed Out,” a confessional from the 2002 classic Lifted, Oberst worried aloud about the future, singing, “I’m just too afraid of all this change.” Down in the Weeds begins with the vow, “Got to change like your life is depending on it,” and peaks about the point where Oberst looks back on his psychic aches and stutters, “All that’s constant is that change.” Running over the same old ground, Bright Eyes have found the same old fears. Wish they were here.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | August 20, 2020 | 7.4 | 53cc59cb-2b9d-4c5f-bf02-a754819dd3ca | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
null | The announcement of his engagement to singer-actress Mandy Moore capped a strange start to 2009 for Ryan Adams, who had kicked the year off with even more cryptic blog posts and a threat/promise that he was quitting music for good. That entry was quickly deleted, signaling either a renewed commitment to songcraft or a realization that he's more qualified to be a singer-songwriter than anything else. So perhaps his impending nuptials are the reason for the more-intense-than-usual weirdness emanating from Camp Adams and for *Extra Cheese*, an iTunes-only EP featuring six previously released songs and a studio version of an | Ryan Adams: Extra Cheese EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12687-extra-cheese-ep/ | Extra Cheese EP | The announcement of his engagement to singer-actress Mandy Moore capped a strange start to 2009 for Ryan Adams, who had kicked the year off with even more cryptic blog posts and a threat/promise that he was quitting music for good. That entry was quickly deleted, signaling either a renewed commitment to songcraft or a realization that he's more qualified to be a singer-songwriter than anything else. So perhaps his impending nuptials are the reason for the more-intense-than-usual weirdness emanating from Camp Adams and for Extra Cheese, an iTunes-only EP featuring six previously released songs and a studio version of an obscure, 10-year-old live track. Ostensibly this collection of babymaking music is a Valentine's Day tie-in, but it might double as a mixtape to the future Mrs. Adams. Or triple as a sort of non-chronological career retrospective-- a greatest-hits package with no actual hits.
As such, Extra Cheese is fairly thorough, drawing from nearly every stage of his Universal/Lost Highway career. So there's no Whiskeytown or Heartbreaker, which is a shame, but also no Rock N Roll or 29, which is a relief. Instead, the EP culls from Gold, Demolition, Cold Roses, Easy Tiger, Follow the Lights, and Cardinology-- arguably the highlights of his tenure at the labels. "Two" may be the best song here and one of his best songs period, with a strong hook justifying the laidback vibe and Adams' voice mixing nicely with Sheryl Crow's. It actually could have been a hit, or at least the soundtrack for a sappy TV drama (oh wait, it was). "Answering Bell", from his would-be breakout Gold, is less impressive. Adams affects his vocals mawkishly, the band pales next to the more inventive Cardinals, and hey, is that Hold Steady tourmate Adam Duritz singing backup? "Blossom", which is not about the 1990s sitcom, hails from deep within Adams' short-lived Grateful Dead phase with a steeply ascending hook that shoots for pretty but comes off as gangly.
As Extra Cheese proceeds, Adams strips away the instruments until only he, an acoustic guitar, and a harmonica remain. "Desire" sounds like it was scribbled on a Waffle House napkin at 2 a.m., then stuffed into his jeans pocket until he discovered it weeks later and hit "<RECORD>". It feels lived in and off-the-cuff-- a setting where Adams shines-and after so many full-band tracks, its modesty is refreshing and reassuring. "Evergreen" and "My Love for You Is Real" both reach for the same intimacy, but like much of Adams' recent material, they sound too slick and deliberate. Finally, there's "Hey There Mrs. Lonely", which is only sorta new: The song first appeared on the bootleg Live at Almost Blue in 1999, recorded around the time Whiskeytown disbanded. Even on this studio version, with its double-tracked vocals and intertwining guitars, "Hey There" remains spare and melodic, but the young Adams' lyrics overreach: "I'm the plastic three-inch armies you destroyed," he sings. "I'm the monster underneath your bed you ain't afraid of yet."
What makes "Hey There Mrs. Lovely" stand out isn't its newness, but the hints of conflict and lust mixed in among the childhood metaphors. There's no real angst and very little desperation in these songs; instead, a general neediness permeates Extra Cheese, trying to pass itself off as heart-on-sleeve earnestness. But Adams is much more interesting when he's writing and singing about romantic confusion than when he's pledging his desire and devotion, and he gets no points for acknowledging his schmaltziness with that tongue-in-cheek EP title. This drowsy set of songs may represent the mainstream crossover Adams aspires to be, but it gives little clue to the complex artist he actually is. | 2009-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Lost Highway | February 19, 2009 | 4.1 | 53ce56fe-ad43-4dce-8547-3aa23fc29f10 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On Metronomy's new Love Letters, songwriter Joseph Mount arrives with another rearview glance at pop and rock history, aging backwards into a gray space between late psych and early glam. | On Metronomy's new Love Letters, songwriter Joseph Mount arrives with another rearview glance at pop and rock history, aging backwards into a gray space between late psych and early glam. | Metronomy: Love Letters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19101-metronomy-love-letters/ | Love Letters | Joseph Mount just can't stay tethered to a moment. Metronomy's 2008 LP Nights Out was the headlong dive into pop's peak-coke gloss, archly tweaking disco, new wave, and all points in between. Three years later, Mount dusted off some old vintage navy blazer and got yacht-rockish for The English Riviera, trading California beaches for the boardwalks of English seaside resorts and almost pulling off the integration.
With another three years passed, Metronomy arrives with another rearview glance at pop and rock history, aging backwards into a gray space between late psych and early glam with a bit of pastoral Kinks ennui mixed in to whatever's left of the old indie-dance pedigree. (He even booked Toe Rag Studios for that special analog-purist touch.) But there's a wide gulf between the idea of Love Letters as pleasant, throwbackish pop-rock nugget and the vapor-thin nonentity it became. What worked for The English Riviera's mellow beachfront reveries—subdued instrumentation, placid vocals, clinical studio-band polish—doesn't stick as well when the tempo's edged back up a notch or two towards something a bit more trad-rock. And what simple-enough songwriting chops there are to this album's credit are delivered so flimsily it's less twee than just plain weak.
If you're looking for a specific culprit, pin that on Mount's voice. Ten seconds and twelve words into opener "The Upsetter", Mount tries pushing his luck at the end of the phrase "straight from the satellite" and creaks out this whimpery Bowie affectation that's a pained balloon-squeak of a noise. It's viscerally grating, and there's more where that came from: When he's not reducing his passionless mumbling to a caricature of a non-committal indie-slacker voice (at its slackest on lite-Kraut "Call Me" and the dozy quasi-waltz "Never Wanted"), he's trying his hand at a fume-drunk midpoint between 60s UK pop and velvety R&B that creaks and shudders under the burden of a voice better built for flatness. Even through a number of permutations—Holiday Inn lounge Motown ("I'm Aquarius"), chirpy analog-organ dance-craze pop ("Reservoir"), drunk-dial Clientele ("The Most Immaculate Haircut")—it sounds like he's holding back, looking at his feet, trying not to cause a scene.
The big shame is that all these side-route trips into oddball drum-machine garage rock or motorik-a-go-go soul had the making of something daringly weird, intentionally out of step with your typical Brit-indie fare, yet still giddily catchy. After three NyQuilcore tracks that make the drum machine from Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together" sound like a Clyde Stubblefield/Ginger Baker showdown, the title track feints towards another woozy slog for a bit over a minute before breaking out in a big stomping piano-pounding number that actually shakes the needle. If only the rest of the record caught on to that out-front force—the words on Love Letters might scan as more than lonely fridge-magnet poetry, the beats might feel like more than just placeholders, and the music could be something to dance to instead of just drift off to. | 2014-03-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because | March 10, 2014 | 5.2 | 53d0076f-f5b3-4a20-9e53-c83755e59995 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Featuring John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Coleman Hawkins, Monk's Music was the world's introduction to the pianist's most famous songs. It helped define the future of jazz and the mind of Monk. | Featuring John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Coleman Hawkins, Monk's Music was the world's introduction to the pianist's most famous songs. It helped define the future of jazz and the mind of Monk. | Thelonious Monk: Monk’s Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22961-monks-music/ | Monk's Music | The summer of 1957 would seem to mark the redemption of Thelonious Monk, the summer he made Monk’s Music in one night.
He was then a 39-year-old New York jazz pianist of great repute who hadn’t been able to work at most jazz clubs in New York for the past six years. His cabaret card, a relic of New York law enforcement since prohibition, had been revoked in 1951 after a spurious narcotics charge. And so he hadn’t been easy to see, which means he might have seemed elusive. He was introverted and sometimes guarded; such behavior has never been unusual in jazz. In fact he lived with bipolar disorder—undiagnosed at the time, though we know about it now, especially through the work of the scholar Robin D.G. Kelley, whose book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is the principal source of much biographical information here.
At the end of 1955, Monk’s mother, Barbara, had died. In early 1956, an electrical fire destroyed his New York apartment on West 63rd Street, totaling his piano and resulting in his family of five, basically destitute, having to stay for months with friends—15 people in a three-room apartment. At the beginning of 1957, Monk spent three weeks in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, taken there by a policeman he'd been unresponsive to after a car accident. (What else was going on in his bloodline? Kelley’s book, at this period, contains a chilling sentence: “Thelonious did not know that his own father had been living in a mental asylum for the past fifteen years.”) In May, his wife Nellie developed an illness which resulted in a thyroidectomy, leaving her frail and depressed, which had a relay effect on Monk. Also during this time, Monk got himself a manager, began a close musical relationship with John Coltrane, made several albums for Riverside records including Monk’s Music, regained his cabaret card, and started a six-month job at the Five Spot Café—a gig which would re-establish his performing career, serve as Coltrane’s finishing school, and be described thereafter as a high point in New York jazz culture.
This is all a relatively easy story to tell. There is a reversal of fortune; Monk makes a great album; he wins. Like any cliche, it only applies badly to Monk.
As a pianist, Monk, who would have turned 100 this year, was not a dazzler-virtuoso like Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson. He phrased in a wide circumference around the beat, leaving a lot of silence in an improvisation, enough for you to notice. He made polytonal clonks on the keyboard by playing the desired note as well as the key adjacent to it. The assumption, often, was that either he didn’t have much technique, or was withholding it because he didn’t want to be understood or known too quickly, and why would someone do that?
A common initial reaction to Monk was skepticism. The pianist Randy Weston, then 18, first saw Monk playing in Coleman Hawkins’ band. “Who is this cat on piano?” Weston remembers thinking, in his memoir African Rhythms. “I can play more piano than this guy!” In other words: it’s unclear what this person knows. Another reaction was humility. The drummer Art Blakey described in a 1973 interview how Monk had been his sympathetic guide through what Blakey called the “cliques” in New York jazz when Blakey first arrived from Pittsburgh in the early ’40s. Blakey watched Monk defend his own music and insist on the right way to play it. “He was very outspoken,” he said. “He knew what he wanted to do, and he did it.” In other words: this person knows a lot.
Much of the talk around jazz, and around Monk, turns on ideas of knowing and not-knowing. (I keep the hyphen, as for related reasons did Donald Barthelme in his essay of that name as well as various Buddhists and psychotherapists, because by “not-knowing” I mean flexibility, working without a fixed outcome, trusting oneself to find a new vocabulary, as opposed to what I would mean without the hyphen: ignorance, lack of awareness, incuriosity.) By one understanding, jazz is a consensual language of rhythm, harmony, and form, and a consensual repertoire accumulated over the last hundred years. That’s about knowing. If you want to work in jazz, you have to get the basic songs under your fingers. Those songs—including, say, “All the Things You Are,” “Donna Lee,” “Footprints,” and about ten by Thelonious Monk—are a part of what holds the tradition together.
The larger part is the fact that jazz is essentially African-American in musical vocabulary and disposition. Jazz is cultural memory. For many African-American musicians, to know is also to be aware of the values and dangers; to know is not to forget. Monk’s music suggested the cumulative past as a wider present: something older from within jazz—boogie-woogie or early Ellington—along with other vernacular traditions adjacent to it: rumba, gospel, or rhythm and blues.
Jazz is further defined by the discipline of improvising, which some say is an express-lane to thinking through time progressively and allowing possibility, the greater idea of not-knowing.
From the first seconds of “Well, You Needn’t,” the second track on Monk’s Music and the record’s greatest eleven minutes, much control is in evidence. You hear Monk, with only the bassist Wilbur Ware thrumming in the back, working upward from the C below middle C over an F pedal in half-steps: C, Db, D, Eb, E. Monk is playing in an implied three-beat rhythm, and punching out his notes a little roughly, as you might imagine yourself punching an elevator button. But he is doing it in between the beats, with style and purpose. He climbs his five notes twice, each time bringing you one step away from resolution in a perfect cadence; he is building tension and expectation in a classical and idiomatic way, alerting you that something is going to take place here, and it’s going to be an event. Then it arrives: the song’s hard opening, with John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins and the rest of the septet piling in, Art Blakey’s drumming shoving it forward.
The band plays the theme together and Blakey crashes on its last beat. Now it’s Monk’s turn. He doesn’t start until the cymbal quiets down, and so for the first measure and a half there is silence. His solo begins as a restatement of the song’s melody, according to convention, but picks it up like a sentence started in the middle. He speeds up and slows down, experimenting, stamping his foot a little, testing the strength of the rhythm and his own relationship to it. Three times he brings his hand down on a strange five-note chord: a stack of fourths, all black notes. Each time he lets it ring for six beats. “Well, You Needn’t” was not a particularly famous song in 1957—Monk had recorded it ten years before for Blue Note, also with Blakey—but it sounds colossal here.
Monk wasn’t an album artist per se. Monk’s Music—produced by Orrin Keepnews, recorded at Reeves Sound Studios on East 44th Street, released on Riverside Records—is contradictory: strident, reassuring, fractured, centered. It isn’t perfect, whatever perfect means. Here and there it sounds like a rehearsal or a jam session. Some solos wander, particularly on “Epistrophy,” and the trumpeter Ray Copeland and alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce are comparatively weak links. But Monk’s Music also sounds loose and deep and urgent. At its best it suggests a party in a specific room; you come to know the room. After Monk finishes his solo in “Well, You Needn’t,” he shouts “Coltrane! Coltrane!” to signal who’s up next. Ravi Coltrane, John’s son, told me that when he first heard Monk’s Music he was 21, listening in a university library with headphones on. At Monk’s shout, he startled, thinking someone was looking for him.
The band includes the saxophonist John Coltrane, Monk’s new student, who sounds dry, driven, searching; the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, Monk’s old mentor, with a gallant and knowing affect that he puts to special use on Monk’s ballad “Ruby, My Dear”; and Blakey, a kind of younger brother, pro-active, explosive, rendering the dance impulse in super-titles. Monk himself does nothing strange by his own standards. He is brusque and vatic and intimate, moving through funny, orderly, supremely affective songs. The first track is the exception in several ways: it is only a melody, played in straight rhythm by the horns alone; it is a hymn called “Abide With Me,” also known as “Eventide,” composed in the middle of the 19th century by the English composer William Henry Monk. Destiny’s Child liked to put their gospel songs at the end of their records; Monk put his at the beginning.
Monk’s Music includes the first renderings of a harmonically rich song that would become one of Monk’s standards, “Crepuscule With Nellie,” written for his wife at a fragile time. Monk plays it unnervingly slowly, and bids the band to do the same with him. (One of his drummers at the time, Frankie Dunlop, in an interview from 1984 extraordinary for the secret knowledge about rhythm it reveals, as well as for Dunlop’s imitation of Monk’s speaking voice, called Monk’s approach to tempo “a different musical category altogether.”) Really, it’s a radical slow dance. During the Five Spot gig, while others soloed, Monk began the practice of dancing on stage: a soft lurch, turning in a circle, imitating the greater circle around the beat.
A lot came together for Monk in 1957. Shortly thereafter, starting in the 1960s, he shifted up to touring theaters with a steady band. His records became elegantly repetitive and often staid. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964; from then on, till his withdrawal from playing in the 1970s and his death in 1982, he was “known.”
You can make fun of jazz writers from the distant past all day, but some of their early published ideas about Monk in the ’40s, especially in Down Beat and Metronome, were only as naïve as Weston’s. If they liked him, they were describing a European-style avant-garde hero, desiring to cut loose from the known. If they didn’t like him, they were describing music they found incomplete or antisocial. They described him as “too too,” “for the super hip alone,” “neurotic,” and—worst of all—“bad, though interesting.” All these reactions imply Monk’s fecklessness or lack of control. They are the reactions of people encountering a critical intelligence and not knowing what to do with it.
Monk’s story is a story of relationships. Born in Rocky Mount, NC, he grew up among Southern and Antillean families at 234 West 63rd Street in Manhattan, on a block now called Thelonious Monk Circle. A couple doors down, No. 224, was the Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center, his social hub and the site of his early gigs. His engagement in the jazz culture of Harlem through the ’40s, alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Kenny Clarke, created several new languages in jazz, collectively and roughly described as bebop. All his interviews, all the anecdotes, illustrate that Monk, to a great degree, knew his own value and had no interest in being strange on purpose. (“I don’t like the word ‘weird,’ anyway,” he told Nat Hentoff.) He knew who he was, and that knowledge allowed him the freedom of not-knowing.
One of the best lines in Kelley’s book comes in a secondhand story told by the poet Ted Joans. Be skeptical, but here it is. At some point in the second half of 1957, during a set at the Five Spot, Monk wandered off stage as the band continued to play, out the doors of the club, and walked for a few blocks. One of the club owners chased him down and found him looking at the sky. He asked Monk if he was lost. “No, I ain’t lost. I’m here,” Monk is said to have responded. “The Five Spot’s lost.” | 2017-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Riverside | March 12, 2017 | 9.1 | 53db4cc0-ca8f-4f05-bc5e-2165951dc248 | Ben Ratliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-ratliff/ | null |
Influential sample maestro Jack Dangers’ first album since 2010 is a moody, playful exhibition of his strengths. | Influential sample maestro Jack Dangers’ first album since 2010 is a moody, playful exhibition of his strengths. | Meat Beat Manifesto: Impossible Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meat-beat-manifesto-impossible-star/ | Meat Beat Manifesto - Impossible Star | It’s no slight against Impossible Star, the first album by electronica innovator Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto in nearly a decade, to begin this review by outsourcing it to another critic: my six-year-old daughter. “My favorite part is that it doesn’t just sound like one thing,” she said after listening to the album on a lengthy car ride. “Some songs are creepy, some songs are funky. I like that.” Who could disagree? The delights of a good Meat Beat record—a magpie approach to collecting sounds, combined with a tasteful precision in arranging and deploying them—are apparent even to a child’s ears, and Impossible Star is a very good Meat Beat record indeed.
Meat Beat Manifesto debuted with 1989’s Storm the Studio, a furious onslaught of gigantic beats, dizzyingly dense samples and barking agitprop from then-vocalist Jonny Stephens. Its influence on the industrial-dance scene of the day was major, and it sounds as savage as ever to contemporary ears. MBM’s subsequent releases have ranged through a dozen or so beat-oriented subgenres, sometimes all at once, slowing down after 2000 as Dangers’ eclecticism developed greater focus. All of these efforts sounded sincere, though some (his turn leading a full-fledged jazz quartet on 2005’s At the Center) made for more successful entertainment than others (his incorporation of dubstep wobbles and drops on 2008’s Autoimmune and 2010’s Answers Come in Dreams.)
Impossible Star, then, is a proverbial return to form. While less bombastic than Dangers’ ’90s albums, many of which came strapped with absolute banger singles (“Asbestos Lead Asbestos,” “Radio Babylon,” “Helter Skelter,” “Acid Again,” etc.), it evokes their wide-ranging combination of macabre moodiness, driving dance beats and playful aural collage, all while sounding surprisingly contemporary. Its prevailing sound is a blend of Tim Hecker’s fearful noise and Kieran Hebden’s shiny, happy studio wizardry, from an artist who predates them both and long ago recognized the thrilling emotional and intellectual power of that combination.
The album’s opening quartet of tracks displays these strengths concisely enough to serve as an introductory-level Meat Beat 101 course. “ONE,” the kickoff, begins with a quiet voice uttering the title precisely one time, giving way to several minutes of ominous, vibrating electronic gongs and tones, with dimly audible murmuring in the background. The next song, “Bass Playa,” juxtaposes a skittery dancehall beat and bassline with spaced-out “ahhhhs” and a high-pitched, head-nodding hook. The jittery “We Are Surrounded” takes its title from a vocal sample in which a man with an unplaceable accent warns against “liars” and “deceivers” through a haze of radio static. Finally, “Unique Boutique” creates a pummeling mid-tempo rhythm around the robotic repetition of the titular nonsense phrase, leaving the impression that the song was made just for the sheer silly joy of it.
Elsewhere, the title track wedges a stentorian sample of the phrase “PEACE IS THE WORD” (you hear it in all caps) with Dangers’ ghostly, pessimistic, vocoder-processed response: “It’s impossible.” The album’s emotional high point is “T.M.I.,” a dub-bass-driven trip-hop composition reminiscent of MBM’s gloomiest ’90s work. “Too much information/It’s gotta go away...Misinformation is all we’re gonna get now,” Dangers sings, his echo-shrouded voice sounding increasingly worried with each repetition. It’s an astute lament for our bullshit-overload era. But MBM’s long history of sampling from Space Age sci-fi and Atomic Age “this is only a test”-type assertions has always been about demonstrating that our civilization’s norms are anything but normal. If any artist was poised to make a comeback in the time of “fake news” and “bot armies,” it’s Jack Dangers.
Impossible Star closes with “The Darkness,” its title rendered ironic by a perkily staccato beat and soaring, spacey melody. It’s the album’s most optimistic song—the sonic inversion of the dour, unsmiling face staring at us from the album artwork. The contrast is fitting. After all these years, Dangers has earned the confidence to cheerfully plumb whatever depths he chooses. | 2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 31, 2018 | 6.9 | 53ddab38-8644-4cc7-9410-bcf3f2288a9d | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
A huge influence on the summery and Balearic sounds in indie over the past two years, Barcelona's El Guincho returns with his sophomore album. | A huge influence on the summery and Balearic sounds in indie over the past two years, Barcelona's El Guincho returns with his sophomore album. | El Guincho: Pop Negro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14637-pop-negro/ | Pop Negro | Pablo Díaz-Reixa's first full-length as El Guincho, 2007's Alegranza!, predicted the whole chill-obsessed, beach-minded trend that we've been more or less stuck with for two years running now. What made that record so fresh and engaging, though, wasn't its crystal-ball nature; it was Díaz-Reixa's disorienting, drum-heavy style and use of repetition. Sheets of pounding rhythm, joy-packed vocals making every structural shift sound like a parade turning a street corner-- El Guincho knows repetition can be bliss, but he also knows (unlike many of his followers these days) that bliss doesn't have to sound so goddamn boring.
Alegranza!'s formula seemed as if it would benefit from further refinement-- which is why it's more than a little disappointing that Pop Negro, Díaz-Reixa's follow-up, ditches said formula almost entirely. Instead of feeling warm and a little bit lived-in, the songs here sound relatively chilly and fussy. The percussive elements are more conventionally linear-- less a full-on rhythmic assault-- and the song structures are frequently disjointed and fidgety, as if he had trouble in staying in one place for very long.
This new approach ends up working a few times, most successfully on opening track and lead single "Bombay", which carries more than a little bit of a Balearic bounce in the steel drum hits that vibe under Reixa's expressive melodic phrasing. "FM Tan Sexy" embodies at least two of the words in the title (guess which ones) with a taut backbeat and sliding sighs, while "Ghetto Fácil" and "Novias" aim upward with tropical effervescence.
More often than not, though, the restlessness of Pop Negro cements its mediocrity. Too often, Reixa works himself into an enjoyable groove that is then disrupted by melodic transitions so ill-fitting they seem nearly discordant. There's some good ideas in these songs-- see: the carnival chorus of "Soca Del Eclipse", the ocarina'd fluttering of "Lycra Mistral"-- but all the clutter and overstuffed arrangements (really, every time a saxophone shows up here, it doesn't work) seem designed to ensure that those ideas only half-stick before sliding down the wall. Indeed, Pop Negro feels transitional. El Guincho has a clear abundance of talent; he simply didn't harness it this time around. | 2010-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Turks | September 15, 2010 | 6.1 | 53de4891-9a57-4b5f-99ec-92225598e89d | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Patrick Haggerty was raised on a dairy farm outside Seattle before the twin shocks of the Stonewall riots and his ejection from the Peace Corps radicalized him. In 1973 he released Lavender Country, widely regarded as the first country record by an openly gay person, in an edition of 1,000. Now that the label Paradise of Bachelors is reissuing the collection, the richness of Haggerty's achievement can be appreciated again. | Patrick Haggerty was raised on a dairy farm outside Seattle before the twin shocks of the Stonewall riots and his ejection from the Peace Corps radicalized him. In 1973 he released Lavender Country, widely regarded as the first country record by an openly gay person, in an edition of 1,000. Now that the label Paradise of Bachelors is reissuing the collection, the richness of Haggerty's achievement can be appreciated again. | Lavender Country: Lavender Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19088-lavender-country-lavender-country/ | Lavender Country | Some artifacts can only be referred to by themselves: A kidney bean is a kidney-shaped bean, and Lavender Country is the best country record by an openly gay person released in 1973. It is an object singular enough in music history that the Country Music Hall of Fame officially recognized it in 1999. Patrick Haggerty, the man who wrote and recorded it, was raised on a dairy farm outside Seattle by a loving and accepting family before the twin shocks of the Stonewall riots and his ejection from the Peace Corps radicalized him. He responded with Lavender Country, pressing about 1,000 copies with the help of a local gay community organization and selling them by word-of-mouth and in the back pages of gay magazines. Once those were gone, that was more or less it—Haggerty remained a staunch advocate of gay rights, and performed Lavender Country songs at pride events and community centers. But his record receded into history, to a rumor perfuming the edges of record collector conversation.
Now that the resourceful and adventurous North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors is reissuing Lavender Country, the enduring richness of Haggerty's achievement can be appreciated again. Haggerty didn't just write a "gay country album" for the political theatre. There are winking lyrics about tumbling in the hay and a rewrite of "Back in the Saddle Again" as "Back in the Closet Again", but the country signifiers aren't just cheap hay-bale-and-tractor-bed props for a message. From the inexpertly sawed fiddle of Eve Morris to Michael Carr's saloon piano to Haggerty's reedy, searching tenor, it is a country album through and through. The sound is wobbly and amateurish, but in a playful, "come on y'all" sort of way, and you can easily imagine a roomful of enthusiastic participants in folding chairs at a community-center basement, singing along at Haggerty's encouragement.
Like any good culture-clash project, Lavender Country stops to have fun with sly subtext. "There's milk and honey flowin' when you're blowin' Gabriel's horn", Haggerty leers on "Come Out Singing". On the title track, he envisions a utopia where you wear your "frilly blouse" to "The People's Outhouse" and "the folks will hang around and pee for days." "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears" claimed the FCC license of a DJ brave or foolhardy enough to play it on the air. On it, Haggerty's backup vocalist Morris sings the words "cock-sucking tears" with a clarion earnestness, like Joan Baez working blue. It is a fresh joy to hear every time it comes along.
But Lavender Country is not a really a "funny" album. The songs address life inside the gay-rights struggle, and the specifics hurt. On "Waltzing Will Trilogy", Haggerty rails against the "pack of straight white honky quacks" administering shock treatment to homosexuals—"they call it mental hygiene but I call it psychic rape," he barks. Young men are beaten to death by police and sodomized by prison guards. "Back in the Closet" and "Straight White Patterns" detail the quiet torture of living within a straight white regime. And "I Can't Shake The Stranger Out of You" is a lovelorn take on gay cruising, a pickup song that doubles as a lament. "I reckon you're lookin for some neckin, yes I do," Haggerty sings, inviting the song's subject to "climb right up on into my manger, but let me warn you about one small danger, babe/ I can't shake the stranger out of you." The song's tone is masterful—sexy, sad, and tender all at once.
This is why, despite the references to the struggles of the era, Lavender Country never feels like a footnote, historical or otherwise. Haggerty's songs are resonant and wonderful, folding pain into jokes and vice versa and exuding heartbreak and anger and wry good humor. You could never switch the gender pronouns on a song like "Georgie Pie", where Haggerty beseeches a would-be lover who remains closeted, and yet the song speaks to anyone who has ever felt the sting of a rebuke. Haggerty's playfully frank "Your body odor lingers in my toes and in my nose and in my head" on "Come Out Singing" will make you grin with recognition if you've ever picked up and smelled someone's t-shirt.
Haggerty kept moving after Lavender Country, running for local office twice and working in anti-police brutality and anti-apartheid movements. He is 70 years old now, and often plays to senior centers (he mostly sticks to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn). Lavender Country is a piece of his past, one moment in a busy life spent in social justice. But, any way it is viewed, it's a tremendous feat, a remarkable act of bravery and honesty as well as a statement on the universality of love and lust and belonging. Pop songs are limited vessels for social justice, but the good ones do a remarkable job of teaching empathy, a few minutes at a time, and Haggerty's songs build a better world to live in, for forty minutes or so. There aren't many achievements more exalted than that. | 2014-03-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-03-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | March 25, 2014 | 8.6 | 53deee63-7d66-4a81-94cd-7900cf929c4e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Fucked Up's new album is a relatively compact, dense piece of metacriticism taking an unsparing look at the genre of its creators and its social mores. It's a very personal work and, more crucially, one that doesn’t preach or provide answers. | Fucked Up's new album is a relatively compact, dense piece of metacriticism taking an unsparing look at the genre of its creators and its social mores. It's a very personal work and, more crucially, one that doesn’t preach or provide answers. | Fucked Up: Glass Boys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19400-fucked-up-glass-boys/ | Glass Boys | Get past the audacious concepts, the profanity, and Damian Abraham’s boarish grunt, and Fucked Up are essentially pragmatists, driven by a mission to rage within the machine. While Abraham may be conflicted about playing shows with Foo Fighters, being nominated for major awards and appearing on TV networks that still can’t say his band’s real name, they’re all necessary to give Fucked Up’s message the populist outreach it requires to be effective. Because unlike previous insurrectionists-turned-inside-operatives like the Clash or Refused, Fucked Up’s message isn’t political.
Rather, Abraham is hardcore's ?uestlove, a burly, gregarious, and eloquent music nerd maintaining a likable “What am I doing here?” outlook regardless of his successes, fixated on making the State of the Art as important as the State of the Union. Coincidentally, Glass Boys is similar to the Roots’ most recent album, ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin—a relatively compact, dense piece of metacriticism taking an unsparing look at the genre of its creators and its social mores. The problem is that its message is also far more developed and interesting than the medium.
Glass Boys clocks in at 10 songs and 43 minutes, a canny move that preemptively neutralizes backlash or skepticism that would’ve arisen had Fucked Up tried to top 2011’s hour-plus rock opera David Comes to Life in any measurable way. It’s obvious that the aspirational Abraham conceded to guitarist/producer Mike Haliechuk’s desire to make a record befitting a “normal band.” And yet, with no ostensible “plot” and Abraham as the only recurring character, Glass Boys is more complex and thought-provoking than its predecessor. Most of the time, it’s like a Talkhouse piece-on-tape, with insider intel regarding art vs. commerce, nostalgia vs. forward thinking, individual vs. community, and why we have to frame these things as dichotomies to begin with. So make no mistake, this is heady stuff: while Abraham pours mulch and gravel all over his florid poetry ("Rejuvenations ocean spume perfume"), Glass Boys alludes to the patronage system, Greek mythology, primitive ritualism, pre-verbal communication, and basically everything short of the 2001 monolith to present Fucked Up as a tiny blip in the eternal timeline.
For all of its discourse and rhetoric, Glass Boys remains a very personal work and, more crucially, one that doesn’t preach or provide answers —though Eurycles pops up in a cameo, the album's inquisitive, open-ended discussion is more influenced by Socrates. In opener “Echo Boomer”, Abraham gives voice to Haliechuk’s reminiscence of being a 15-year old mesmerized by the possibilities of music. But by the penultimate “The Great Divide”, he looks back puzzled and guilt-ridden, wondering if youth is wasted on the wasted youth who put their faith in bands like Fucked Up rather than something greater (“We ushered in all that corrupts/ Now we’re drowning in the glut”). In between, Abraham and Haliechuk cop to confessional songwriting as a "Jesus Christ Pose"-style farce (“Paper the House”) and spitefully air grievances (“Led By Hand”), before ultimately accepting their fate as part of the continuum as an honor. After all, if an echo booms and no one hears it, did it even happen?
These are conversations worth having, and you can have them simply by reading the lyrics sheet, watching the videos, and reading interviews with the band. For all the talk of Fucked Up getting streamlined and concise, it turns out that streamlined, concise songs are nowhere near as interesting as their wildest, most highfalutin concepts; Glass Boys finds a Great Punk Band making a Good Rock Record that’s weirdly superfluous.
And let’s be clear, this is a rock band, increasingly a hardcore-derived version of the Hold Steady, with static classic rock riffage serving as a platform for functional, verbose one-note vocals (the Van Halen-evoking “The Art of Patrons” could even be swiped from Separation Sunday). On their early breakthroughs Hidden World and the Chemistry of Common Life, Fucked Up set themselves apart not by pushing hardcore in a new direction so much as completely blowing it wide open in a manner unseen since The Shape of Punk to Come or even Zen Arcade. But now, Fucked Up have channeled all of their symphonic ambitions for the sole purpose of making Glass Boys sound like it has as many overdubs as a record four times its length.
That’s literally the case as far as the drums go: Jonah Falco is playing four different drum tracks throughout Glass Boys, another example of Fucked Up’s delightful, crackpot scheming—it’s a cool idea that no punk band would pursue, either out of economic hardship or just the innate knowledge that playing four drum tracks at the same time might detract from the visceral impact of the music. There’s even more of a homogenizing effect on the guitars; rather than contributing contrast, melody, dynamics or texture, it’s the kind of indiscriminate layering that appeared on Be Here Now and MACHINA/Machines of God, turning a presumably hard-hitting rock record into a gelatinous ooze that surrounds and consumes the listener rather than attacking their ears. Though less so than on David Comes to Life, Abraham remains omnipresent and indistinct, a grit amidst a sound that emanates like toothpaste.
At times, the saturation of Glass Boys creates a wonderful, psychedelic effect—“Echo Boomer” is possibly meant to describe Abraham and Fucked Up as reverberations of a punk rock Big Bang, though it’s every bit as applicable to the actual sound of the song. Meanwhile, “Touch Stone” is an aural illusion where a two-chord modulation sounds like it’s endlessly, upwardly cresting. Combined with the spirited call-and-response of “Sun Glass”, the opening salvo of Glass Boys bears the promise of everything a direct and hook-filled Fucked Up album could be. But after “Warm Change” unravels into aimless guitar soloing and panned drums, Fucked Up usher in a second half that fails to distinguish itself in any way. Once again, there are guest vocalists supplementing the symphonic guitars—the credits lists cred-deficient Canucks such as Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie and Alexisonfire’s George Pettit, as well as indie heroes J. Mascis and Kurt Vile; with the exception of Mascis’ donkey bray on “Led By Hand”, they’re all just faint echoes struggling to be heard.
Glass Boys is a record dense with metacommentary, so it's possible that the record's claustrophobic production is meant to reflect Abraham and Haliechuk’s concerns about the walls closing in on Fucked Up. They’ve been deferential and self-effacing about their legacy, admitting they’ve lasted about a decade longer than even most successful hardcore bands. But they opted out of actual hardcore long ago; since signing with Matador, the genre has served as a theoretical control group for Fucked Up, something to compare the results of their experiments. Now, you can only hear faint echoes of their past greatness underneath the lard-laden production; it’s something that will please the fanbase Fucked Up have deservedly built and enrage the younger, angrier hardcore bands who will dismantle and try to improve on it, fueled by their own ideals and self-belief, however foolish it may seem in retrospect. Which actually validates Glass Boys’ ideas about hardcore's cycle of life—it just doesn’t make the music any more thrilling. | 2014-06-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Matador / Arts & Crafts | June 2, 2014 | 7 | 53defcf6-e4ee-4355-9fd5-ae082b3dfc40 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Greg Dulli and co. return with an eclectic, haunted set that feels untethered to their past work. They seem less interested in living up to expectations than upending them. | Greg Dulli and co. return with an eclectic, haunted set that feels untethered to their past work. They seem less interested in living up to expectations than upending them. | The Afghan Whigs: How Do You Burn? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-afghan-whigs-how-do-you-burn/ | How Do You Burn? | After Top Gun: Maverick, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and Beavis and Butthead: Do the Universe warmed things up, the most highly anticipated sequel event of the summer has finally arrived—well, for Afghan Whigs fans, at least. Seven songs into the band’s ninth album, we hear a familiar voice, and it’s not Greg Dulli’s. Back on the Whigs’ 1993 album, Gentlemen, Dulli’s roiling cocktail of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing was splashed right back in his face by guest vocalist Marcy Mays; her star turn on the ballad “My Curse” centered the voice of a woman trapped in a toxic relationship with the sort of lothario that Dulli’s so fond of portraying. And now, 29 years later, we get a status update in the form of “Domino and Jimmy,” the emotional centerpiece of How Do You Burn? Decades removed from the turmoil, both characters are still traumatized by their rancorous romantic history: “Like a living ghost, you get lost inside my head,” Mays sings with a combination of resignation and resolve, before Dulli takes the mic to repent. But “Domino and Jimmy” opens up these old wounds to heal them once and for all—in contrast to the plate-smashing unrest of “My Curse,” the new song exudes the purifying quality of a sunrise swim in the ocean, suggesting both principals are now in a better place. Their curse may never fully be broken, but they’ve learned to live with it, and even draw strength from it.
Beyond bringing a sense of peace and closure to one of the most harrowing songs in their canon, “Domino and Jimmy” is also a measure of how much the Whigs’ have grown over the past three decades. An archetypal four-man indie-rock band during their initial ‘90s run, the post-reunion Whigs have become an ever-widening storm of serial collaborators, auxiliary members, and celebrity guests, with Dulli at the center (inheriting the open-door policy of his interim outfit, the Twilight Singers). Even the presence of bassist John Curley—Dulli’s most loyal right-hand man since 1988—is seemingly no longer a prerequisite for getting an Afghan Whigs record off the ground. Sessions for How Do You Burn? began amid COVID restrictions in September 2020, with Dulli and drummer Patrick Keeler (Raconteurs) holing up in the Joshua Tree studio of new guitarist Christoper Thorn (ex-Blind Melon), while Curley, guitarist Jon Skibic, and keyboardist Rick Nelson Zoomed in their parts from home later on.
So between the ever-changing membership and desert recording locale, the Afghan Whigs have essentially become Dulli’s Queens of the Stone Age, a point hammered home by the new album’s opening Hommeage, “I’ll Make You See God,” a pure, pedal-to-the-metal motorik rocker that counts as the fastest, heaviest, and most relentlessly bull-headed song in this band’s entire oeuvre. (Naturally, its impetus was as soundtrack fodder for the video game Gran Turismo 7.) But of course, the Queens connection runs deeper than that—both groups had long-standing ties to the late Mark Lanegan, who provided How Do You Burn? with both vocals and its title (which was his way of asking the question: what gets you excited?). Tellingly, Lanegan doesn’t get a star feature on the record—his voice is used more texturally, as a doomy echo of the darkest thoughts bouncing around Dulli’s head. Amid the elegantly Beatlesque chamber pop of “The Getaway,” he follows Dulli’s lead like a shadow: When Dulli boastfully exclaims that he’s “sitting on a wire, hiding on display/Waiting for the night as I destroy the day,” Lanegan repeats the words underneath in a weighty whisper that suggests he’ll actually make good on the threat.
For all the darkness that clouded its creation (Lanegan’s death was preceded by that of guitarist Dave Rosser in 2017), How Do You Burn? vibrates with an irrepressible ecstatic energy. Threading its horror-movie orchestration with wordless wails from class-of-1965 alumna Susan Marshall, “Catch a Colt” has all the makings of another clamorous Whigs workout, but the song’s frenzied batucada-style percussive pulse redirects the drama to the discotheque floor; the more steady-paced but equally boisterous “Take Me There” channels Dulli’s primal desire into the closest thing this band has ever had to a soccer-stadium chant. Even the song bearing the album’s most classically Dulli-esque title—”A Line of Shots”—proves shockingly sanguine, framing its tale of lost souls on the run in a blissful balance of tremolo and groove that evokes ‘80s college-radio standards like the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” and R.E.M.’s “Finest Worksong.” Likewise, the track that feels like the purest distillation of Dulli’s anguished essence—“Please, Baby, Please”—is more prayer than confession, an organ-smoothed late-night serenade for the one you hope will stick around in the morning.
Many ‘90s alt-rock heroes have returned to cash a reunion-tour paycheck; a precious few have enjoyed a sustained second act as a recording entity. But the Afghan Whigs of 2022 belong to an even more rarefied realm: a veteran band less interested in living up to expectations than upending them. If 2014’s Do the Beast reaffirmed the Whigs’ doom-soul bonafides, and 2017’s In Spades gestured toward the epic Scorsesean set pieces of the Black Love era, How Do You Burn? boasts a mixtape-like eclecticism, communal bonhomie, and psychedelic texture that feel untethered to the Whigs’ past playbooks. Even as the closing “In Flames” places Dulli’s narrator in all-too familiar setting—“Snowblind and left behind/I’m on the street, looking for a good time”—the track unfolds like a last-call sing-along in a saloon that’s been set ablaze, erupting into a towering tempest of hair-raising strings, jabbing pianos, brain-melting guitar solos, and howling harmonies. This is how the Afghan Whigs burn: by turning up the heat until the line between chaos and rapture has been thoroughly obliterated. | 2022-09-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Royal Cream / BMG | September 9, 2022 | 7.8 | 53e0fb8f-46fe-4af6-9a4b-86b7c42733ee | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his first album in seven years, the UK producer embraces chaos: ten guests, 22 tracks, countless genres. Yet it can sometimes be hard to locate SBTRKT’s musical identity amid all the commotion. | On his first album in seven years, the UK producer embraces chaos: ten guests, 22 tracks, countless genres. Yet it can sometimes be hard to locate SBTRKT’s musical identity amid all the commotion. | SBTRKT: The Rat Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sbtrkt-the-rat-road/ | The Rat Road | When SBTRKT recently returned to the public eye after a six-year absence, it wasn’t with a bang so much as a groan. The groggy, distorted vocal of 2022’s “Bodmin Moor” suggested an artist waking from a coma, cotton-mouthed and baffled by the world around him. Eleven months later, a similarly uncommercial questing spirit hangs heavily over The Rat Road, SBTRKT’s sprawling and abstruse fourth album.
SBTRKT—real name Aaron Jerome—may have ditched his trademark mask sometime around the middle of the 2010s. But, as on his 2011 self-titled debut and 2014’s Wonder Where We Land, he remains content to sit in the shadows on The Rat Road, ceding the spotlight to a stream of featured vocalists, including serial collaborator Sampha. His production remains similarly varied, with the house/UK garage/electro/R&B/broken beat/hip-hop stew of his first two albums oozing ever outward to take in techno, drum’n’bass, classical, jazz and more.
“More” appears to be the album’s guiding principle: twenty-two songs (whittled down from 400), 10 special guests, numerous beat switches, and enough genres to give a Spotify playlister cause for a lie-down. The single “L.F.O.” alone features two vocalists and three distinct sections and bears the influence of everything from Detroit techno to samba. The only way in is to embrace the chaos: Maybe it doesn't make sense that the frenetically unstable “You Broke My Heart but Imma Fix It” is followed by the refracted, beat-free wash of “Palm Reader,” or that the production on “Demons” constantly threatens to slip under a sea of reverb. But it does make for a lot of fun, albeit of the slightly exhausting, long-day-at-Disneyland type. Doing all this and starting a largely electronic album with “Remnant,” 90 seconds of bittersweet orchestral soundtrack, is pure mischievous flex.
This roguish spirit is matched by a long-standing gift for finding and nurturing new talent. In 2011 SBTRKT gave early appearances to Sampha and Jessie Ware; in 2023 London singer LEILAH, who has just one solo single to her name, lights up The Rat Road on songs like “Forward,” her voice drifting around gorgeously dejected melodies like the fluttering petals on a rainy spring day, while poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s Tricky-esque growl is chillingly eloquent on the nerve-busting “Coppa.” At times, the closest point of comparison for The Rat Road’s heavily-guested, pan-genre sprawl is Gorillaz, with the electro-pop soul of a song like “No Intention” a kissing cousin to the more reflective moments of Damon Albarn’s merry bunch (think “Empire Ants”). But unlike Gorillaz, who have Albarn’s peerless voice as a connecting thread, SBTRKT’s retiring presence works against him. You’d recognise a Gorillaz track on a blind listen, but what makes SBTRKT SBTRKT, particularly in a world where multiple guest vocalists and stylistic shifts are simply what pop does?
How much this matters depends on your expectations. As an artist album, The Rat Road is too self-effacing, an avalanche of great ideas in search of a vision. As a producer album, The Rat Road is frequently stunning. “L.F.O.” combines what sounds like a randomly generated system of electronic tones with a sensuous back-and-forth between vocalists Sampha and George Riley and somehow makes it work, like a one-in-a-million alchemy of clashing browser windows. “Days Go By” immerses Toro y Moi’s vocal in an unsettling but inventive patchwork of effects, sending his voice aflutter on mechanical wings; and “Limitless” does an excellent impression of a Frank Ocean song collapsing in on itself under intense sunlight. SBTRKT also has the melodic skills to match his production chops, from the poignant, inquisitive chord sequence that beckons in drum’n’bass number “You, Love” to the cycling synths of “No Intention.” That song, in particular, is proof that SBTRKT can produce satisfyingly cutting-edge pop music when he puts his hand to it.
Ultimately, it’s hard to decide whether The Rat Road’s structured chaos has obscured SBTRKT’s musical personality, or whether all this disorder is simply who SBTRKT is. Could Jerome reveal a little more of himself on record? Or is he already showing himself to us? The Rat Road offers no easy answers and—frankly—not all that much easy listening. But if you’re looking for a sometimes baffling yet often entertaining adventure, The Rat Road delivers. | 2023-05-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Save Yourself | May 9, 2023 | 7.3 | 53ea6175-e2a5-4ce0-a220-0a738a2e52ac | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the classic rock staple from a band who rebounded from tragedy to record one of the biggest albums ever made. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the classic rock staple from a band who rebounded from tragedy to record one of the biggest albums ever made. | AC/DC: Back in Black | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/acdc-back-in-black/ | Back in Black | For many bands, the sudden and horrific death of their lead singer at the peak of their popularity would be a career-ender. AC/DC took a few weeks to regroup and then recorded one of the biggest albums of all time.
Back in Black is claimed in equal measure by the jocks, the stoners, the nerds, the delinquents, and the teachers. Nashville studios used it to test their acoustics. The title track boasts nothing less than one of the most gloriously elemental riffs ever devised—the perfection of the form, the ne plus ultra of jock jams, destined to be clumsily chunked out for eternity by teens testing fuzz pedals in God’s own Guitar Center. It might not necessarily be AC/DC’s best—if their career can even be measured in units of particular albums rather than one long, loud, continuous mid-tempo guitar riff spanning five decades. But it is their most album—most accessible, most successful, most enduring, most emblematic, and, given its genesis, most unlikely.
In 1979, AC/DC had made the leap from workingman Australian hard-rock band, opening arena tours for the likes of Cheap Trick and UFO, to bona fide headliners in their own right. Highway to Hell—their seventh album in five years—had gone platinum in the U.S., thanks in large part to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, whose kitchen-sink ethos would define the sound of rock radio for the next decade. (Previous AC/DC albums had been produced by the legendary Australian songwriting duo of Harry Vanda and George Young, the latter of whom happened to also be the older brother of AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young.) The success of the album cemented the image of the band as libidinous but harmless dirtbags, perfecting carnal anthems tuneful enough to attract normies seeking an edge and heavy enough to keep the metal faithful in line. Angus was as much mascot as musical director, a perpetual motion machine decked out in a schoolboy uniform, but ultimately less threatening than an actual teenager.
Though not necessarily the band’s focal point, their lead singer was 33-year-old Bon Scott, a hard-partying, Scottish-born, impossible-voiced dynamo for whom the word impish was invented. He died alone in the passenger seat of a car on a freezing February night in London in 1980 following a night of drinking, having asphyxiated on his own vomit; authorities ruled it “death by misadventure.” The Young brothers retreated doing the only thing they knew how—coming up with shitloads of guitar riffs—then kicked off a search for Scott’s replacement in earnest almost immediately.
Among the candidates to join the band were Australian rock mainstays like Jimmy Barnes and John Swan, as well as Stevie Wright, who’d been in George Young and Vanda’s band the Easybeats in the ’60s. It was Mutt Lange who recommended Brian Johnson, lead singer of British glam band Geordie and owner of a cat-in-heat vocal register that was unlike anyone’s other than, as luck would have it, Bon Scott’s.
Johnson was 32 and living with his parents in Newcastle, in northern England, and running his own shop repairing the vinyl roofs of classic cars when he got the call to meet the band. “In the rehearsal room sat the boys of AC/DC, looking quite bored—they’d been auditioning singers for a month,” Johnson wrote in his 2009 memoir Rockers and Rollers. “When I walked in, I introduced myself and Malcolm said, ‘Ah, you’re the Newcastle lad,’ and promptly gave me a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. He said, ‘Well, what do you wanna sing.’ I told him ‘Nutbush City Limits’ by Tina Turner.” The next afternoon, Johnson got a call asking him to return, and that was that. AC/DC decamped to record their eighth album in the Bahamas, again with Lange, and were finished seven weeks later. By July, the album was out, nearly a year to the date after Highway to Hell, and about five months after Scott’s death. This would prove to be the most acrobatic mid-career personnel change in pop history.
Although sketches of some songs had begun with Scott, Johnson was given free rein to write his own lyrics. Nothing strayed from the band’s tried and true formula of meditations on rocking and/or rolling. The first new song they did together would prove to be their biggest: “You Shook Me All Night Long” was a Top 40 hit, something that had eluded Scott-era AC/DC. While Back in Black is largely an extension of the things that worked on Highway to Hell, “You Shook Me All Night Long” was as close as the band could come to an outlier, yet never felt like pandering. It was a pure, melodic sing-along, and possibly the best to ever compare a vigorous sexual encounter to a car, a meal, and a boxing match all in three and a half minutes. The single’s success may have been thanks to beginner’s luck and inspired songwriting, or possibly an assist from beyond the grave.
“I remember sitting in my room writing that and I had this blank sheet of paper and this title and I was thinking, ‘Oh, what have I started?’” Johnson said in 2000. “I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, it’s alright son, it’s alright. This kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon, but I can’t because I’m too cynical and I don’t want people getting carried away.”
But that was as far as Johnson would color outside AC/DC’s pre-drawn lines. He did not try and will the band into some sort of new direction or bend them to his taste. The degree to which the transition felt seamless was a triumph of branding as much as human resources: The idea of AC/DC prevails over any one song or album, but Back in Black happens to be the moment when that idea found its purest form and its widest purchase. If someone says “AC/DC,” you will think of the logo before you think of anything else, and Johnson’s fast acceptance and immersion, without any appearance of ghoulishness or greed, was the ultimate validation. His omnipresent tweed newsboy cap quickly became as central to the band’s iconography as Angus’ schoolboy getup. His voice may have lacked Scott’s nuance and character—a belt sander with one less speed—but there is no way of knowing how many people who embraced Back in Black in 1980 didn’t even realize there was a new singer. It definitely wasn’t zero.
Back in Black doesn’t ignore Scott’s passing but isn’t maudlin or cautionary— you can’t spell death by misadventure without adventure. “Hells Bells” opens the album with the clanging of the one-ton iron bell the band had custom-made to bring on tour, but that is as mournful as things get. Johnson howls, “You’re only young but you’re gonna die,” more as permission than warning before genially big-upping Satan and coming down squarely on the side of tempting fate in the name of a good time, of celebrating the abyss rather than stepping away from it.
Five tracks later, “Back in Black” is similarly defiant—“Forget the hearse ’cause I never die”—but that is pretty much it for discussion of mortality beyond the tacit assumption that the bereaved want to fuck, too. “Have a Drink on Me,” a gleeful ode to getting absolutely hammered, might be an odd choice for a band whose previous singer just drank himself to death, but Back in Black was not meant to be a reckoning, it was meant to be a reaffirmation.
Helping matters was the fact that AC/DC were funny, almost always intentionally. “Givin’ the Dog a Bone” is half an entendre short of a double entendre but thanks to its big, fat chorus of layered background vocals, you laugh even if you think you know better. AC/DC seemed to invite absurdity: The T-shirts sent to be sold at the North American tour’s first stop in Edmonton were all misprinted as “BACK AND BLACK.” They didn’t walk the fine line between stupid and clever, they drew it.
A year later, the one-ton “Hell’s Bells” bell was replaced by the “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” cannon, keeping the streak of acquiring heavy antique iron totemic metaphors alive. Lange returned for a third and final time and 1981’s For Those About to Rock hit No. 1, something that Back in Black did not do. Their 1976 album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, which had not been released in the U.S., was, finally, in the wake of Back in Black’s success, giving Bon Scott a proper posthumous bow at the considerable risk of confusing new fans. A band that was on the brink of oblivion instead became the paragon of consistency and longevity for another four decades.
There is no such thing as a bad AC/DC song. You can certainly not like an AC/DC song, which would then mean you probably don’t like any AC/DC songs, which is fine. But none of them really fail at what they intend to do and they all intend to do more or less the same thing. Some turns of phrase are less dunderheaded than others, some riffs make their point more indelibly than others. They didn’t really have an experimental phase unless you count the bagpipes in “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” but that wasn’t really an experiment because it totally worked. There were no ballads, no curveballs, no symphonies, no DJ remixes, no synths or pianos, no unplugged sessions, no cute covers, no BIG HAIR. Their greatest hit features the line, “You told me to come but I was already there” and may have been co-written by a ghost. They were the Ramones chopped and screwed, and similarly frozen in amber, eternally wearing their teenage uniforms.
Beyond the tens of millions of copies sold, it is easy to overlook the legacy of something like Back in Black. The album didn’t signify any sort of change or cultural marker; it instead proved the power of stasis, of doing something well, then doing it again but louder and with more money. In a sense, the success of Back in Black helped predict the current reboot moment: Give the people what they want, but more. The music does not feel of any time or place; it means now what it meant then. The record’s ultimate legacy comes less from the artists it influenced or even the songs that remain staples of whatever is left of commercial rock radio than in its confirmation that evolution can be an overrated quality. And, as ever, AC/DC were their own best messengers for this simple idea, laid bare in the final moments of their most famous work: “Rock’n’roll ain't no riddle, man.” | 2019-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Leidseplein Presse B.V. | June 16, 2019 | 8.8 | 53ed0b44-0fd5-436a-80f0-523365b8fb20 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ |
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