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The Minneapolis emo band broke through in 2017 with a giddy pop-punk sound; two albums later, they are taking bigger chances but falling flatter. | The Minneapolis emo band broke through in 2017 with a giddy pop-punk sound; two albums later, they are taking bigger chances but falling flatter. | Remo Drive: A Portrait of an Ugly Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remo-drive-a-portrait-of-an-ugly-man/ | A Portrait of an Ugly Man | For an emo band, Remo Drive never got too hung up on the whole “emotions” thing. At a time when the scene’s prestige acts were leaning harder than ever into unflinching depictions of mental-health crises, the Minneapolis group kept things light on their 2017 debut Greatest Hits, reveling in giddy, smart-ass pop-punk that refused to take itself seriously. It's no wonder Epitaph signed them: Their Get Up Kids-worshipping hookiness made them a clear candidate for a crossover audience in a scene that hadn’t had much luck crossing over. Was the record all a little too easy, too obvious? Sure. But it ripped.
Three years later, Remo Drive hasn’t released anything that's given Greatest Hits a run for its money. Maybe it was the band’s decision to cut out drummer Sam Mathys, reducing the group to a duo of brothers Erik and Stephen Paulson, but the old alchemy has been disrupted. Subsequent releases have been more ambitious—less punk, more alternative, perhaps—but depleted of the mischief and buoyancy that made Greatest Hits such a kick. The difference was noticeable on last year’s Natural, Everyday Degradation, and it’s even more pronounced on their third full-length A Portrait of an Ugly Man, a record that takes bolder swings than its predecessor while falling even flatter.
At least nobody can accuse them of playing it safe anymore. Erik Paulson has retired his standard-issue emo whine in favor of a scenery-chewing bellow clearly indebted to Morrissey. He really goes for it—on “Dead Man,” his incensed wail reverberates off the rafters—but his showboating quickly wears thin. He's got the gumption to go loud but lacks the gravitas to carry the quieter moments. The guitars, meanwhile, channel the thunder-and-chime of late ’80s alternative bands capably but without dazzle, a Sam’s Club imitation of a name brand.
The bigger problem with Remo Drive’s The Queen is Dead makeover is that it leaves Erik Paulson’s lyrics front and center, which only spotlights the clunkers. And man, there are clunkers. “Honey, if you want to make me crumble at your touch, you’ll have to dress up like an apple and take me to the Genius Bar,” he sings on “True Romance Lives.” It’s a pun in search of a joke. Morrissey knew how to undersell his zingers, burying them so deep in melodrama that there was no distinction between his wry declarations and his earnest ones. Paulson, however, can’t resist patting himself on the back for every so-so turn of phrase. “I’ve heard the grass is so much greener/When strangers offer it to you,” he sings on “A Flower and a Weed.”
Remo Drive probably didn't do themselves any favors releasing A Portrait so quickly after the last one, while the disappointment of their sophomore flop was still fresh but too soon for their debut to carry any real nostalgic weight. After Natural, Everyday Degradation, it felt premature to tag the band as a one-album wonder. It sure doesn’t anymore.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | June 26, 2020 | 5.4 | 557f60bd-e062-4970-a0b2-bc21ab801dc1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Haim’s glossy second album is slyly complex. The California sisters remain masters of rhythm and create spacious, hook-filled pop-rock full of heartbreak, longing, and betrayal. | Haim’s glossy second album is slyly complex. The California sisters remain masters of rhythm and create spacious, hook-filled pop-rock full of heartbreak, longing, and betrayal. | Haim: Something to Tell You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haim-something-to-tell-you/ | Something to Tell You | Stevie Nicks told Haim to keep diaries. It was 2014, shortly before the three sisters from The Valley would begin writing their second album Something to Tell You, and at Nicks’ request, they were paying the Fleetwood Mac singer a visit at her mansion. When Nicks inquired, “Do you guys keep a journal?” the eldest Haim, bassist/singer Este, said she keeps notes on her phone. (Alana, Danielle, and Este all write lyrics.) But Nicks extolled the virtues of paper: On the right-hand page, you recount your day; on the left-hand page, you poeticize it.
The glossy and aching Something to Tell You—full of longing, betrayal, and the torment of feelings left unsaid—is at once poised and emo enough to suggest that Haim took Nicks’ advice, but drew from both sides of the diary. More to the point, this summit—a blessing from the high priestess of pop-rock heartbreak—was a testament to just how powerful Haim’s reverence of 1970s and ’80s soft-rock has become, proof that Haim are deeply admired within music’s pantheon and ever-closer to dominating the world at large. Collaborating with the trio recently, Bobby Gillespie called Haim “gospel singers” whose internal logic and virtuosic harmonizing comes from “this celestial telepathic thing.”
Something to Tell You—released exactly 10 years on from Haim’s first show together beyond their oldies family cover band Rockenhaim—does not radically depart from their taut and gleaming spark of a debut, 2013’s Days Are Gone. But there’s still nothing like Haim around. No other rock band in popular music (an anomalous statement already) has mixed styles so seamlessly—rattling and gliding from one hook to another—so as to garner a remix from Giorgio Moroder, a feature from A$AP Ferg, an onstage jam with Jenny Lewis, and an opening tour slot for Taylor Swift. Time collapses; Haim’s music is the distinct result of a band schooled by their parents on Motown and funk while TLC was on Top 40, fronted by Danielle, whose formative experiences included sneaking out to Rilo Kiley gigs.
Haim let in some new styles on Something to Tell You, but they crucially remain masters of rhythm. Though none of the sisters sit behind a kit at shows, and only Danielle handles drums in the studio, they were all drummers first, and Haim’s latticed arrangements and heavily percussive melodies make their music fly. There’s an unmistakable, crisply-strummed nod to George Michael’s “Faith” on “Ready for You.” “Little of Your Love” recalls the swaggering bubblegum notes of their former tour-mate, Swift. And “Kept Me Crying”—with its story of willfully, desperately hanging on the telephone for an ex-lover who hardly deserves it—yearns so irreducibly and with such a raw current of sadness that you could picture the Shangri-Las singing it, or a rhinestone cowgirl. “If you want me, I’m waiting for you,” Danielle sings. “You kept me crying for so long that my tears have dried.”
As ever, Haim’s dynamic songs are tricked out with plenty of studio magic, echoes, and shimmer; Ariel Rechtshaid returns to produce (“our fearless leader,” the credits read) along with touches from Rostam Batmanglij (“our biggest cheerleader”). Strange flourishes abound: pitch-shifted vocals all across the album; the blissfully perplexing likeness of a horse’s nay on “Want You Back”; the monotone mantra of “It’s obvious/Be honest” on “Nothing’s Wrong,” which nearly recalls UK post-punk band Au Pairs’ similarly robotic refrain. The emptied production and episodic structure of “Right Now” is also unusual, and this risk-taking makes it one of the best songs here. “Right Now” conveys the severe, almost nauseous feeling of love that goes frustratingly unresolved; the music has a wrongness about it and never quite settles. It just ends, and sometimes that’s all you get in life: the numb fadeout that lingers on until it turns into hard-earned wisdom. “Did you think this would be easy?” Danielle sings after the song crashes open. “Finally on the other side now/And I can see for miles.”
At the center of Something to Tell You is its peak, the Dev Hynes co-write “You Never Knew,” silver and incandescent, the disco ball beneath which the album grooves. Its mix of cascading, Rumours-like acoustic guitars with a deep, glitter-bomb beat makes it bob along gloriously, refracting all its romantic wreckage into heavy breaths and sparkles sharp enough to cut. In the lyrics, Danielle sorts through the mess of something that was too beautiful to last, of memories you can’t wrap your arm around. “Go on and say it,” she sings. “Was my love too much for you to take?/I guess you never knew what was good for you.” Her sisters slide into the mix with light-beam harmonies, like a finger-wagging girl gang behind her (“You couldn’t take it! You couldn’t take it!”). As with many Haim songs, there’s strength in their camaraderie; it makes even the most melancholy line sound doubly empowered.
“I need to hear you say it,” Danielle sings on “You Never Knew,” getting at the theme of this album and Haim generally: the exalted feeling of clarity. On their thrillingly disaffected Days Are Gone hit “The Wire,” Danielle sang, “I’m bad at communication/It’s the hardest thing for me to do.” Well, people dream of hearing things elucidated as plainly as some of the lyrics on Something to Tell You, like on the wild-hearted single “Want You Back.” Economical but often potent, the lyrics are about saying things straight—they sound like the very last words you’d arrive at in a difficult conversation when you want the truth. “Walking Away” is about as snappily-written a song as you could hope for about leaving someone in the dust. “Nothing’s Wrong” describes a love that is indeed so wrong it reminded me of the photographer Nan Goldin’s movingly distraught “Couple in Bed.” The downside of these broad lyrics, however, is that they can just as easily scan as dubiously pat or overly safe. But on the whole, Haim and their collaborators are remarkable architects of pop’s tightrope moments, suspended in air; they know exactly where to place a dash of overblown emotion, how to make a simple line take the air out of the room.
In 1997, Kathleen Hanna coined the phrase “Valley Girl Intelligentsia” to underscore how even a young person with an airy accent could be smart and capable. Haim—who have roots in a prefab mid-aughts major label band that was literally called Valli Girls—write songs so impeccably savvy and clear-headed that Something to Tell You feels like a sly pop-music manifestation of this idea. As on Days Are Gone, its sheen is current and its spirit out of step. Beat by beat, Haim are the classic sound of heartbreak alleviated, if only for a moment. | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | July 7, 2017 | 7.8 | 5582647e-85b7-487b-90ce-9ebb617520ec | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Sasami Ashworth’s debut union of synthesizer decay and guitar reverb that embodies shoegaze’s supernatural ability to conjure sadness from the void. | Sasami Ashworth’s debut union of synthesizer decay and guitar reverb that embodies shoegaze’s supernatural ability to conjure sadness from the void. | SASAMI: SASAMI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sasami-sasami/ | SASAMI | There is an indescribable melancholy to shoegaze coursing just beneath the surface. The music seems designed to overwhelm you with unnamable feelings: I am sad and I listen to Loveless Every Night is the name of a Facebook group, yes, but it’s also a lifestyle. Even the brightest songs by the Cocteau Twins carry an undertow of sorrow. Sasami Ashworth’s shoegaze invokes similar feelings; the Los Angeles-based polymath has made her name over the years as the synth player in Cherry Glazerr. Her debut record, SASAMI, is a union of synthesizer decay and guitar reverb that embodies shoegaze’s supernatural ability to conjure sadness from the void.
Ashworth has described her songwriting process as akin to drafting a long, angry text in the Notes section of an iPhone and then letting it simmer—although when listening to this record the first few times that’s not entirely clear. It’s easy to mistake SASAMI as a gentle, soothing album, but then the words begin to creep their way out of the ground, and Ashworth’s dark heart begins to reveal itself. Take a song like “Not the Time”; on first blush, it seems a bit benign. Its smartly hemmed guitar parts glow like an Asobi Seksu track while Sasami sounds uncannily like Trish Keenan. But as you crawl further inside, the song reveals complexities: “Even though we tried to make it work, it doesn’t/Even though each time it only hurts for a moment,” she sings. The arrangement practically bleeds empty space—prismatic guitar work from Ashworth’s brother, JooJoo, stretches out into the far corners of the mix, while the percussion from Cameron Allen sounds as weightless as a moth fluttering around an attic.
There are moments when Ashworth seems too comfortable with a default prettiness. She is incredibly adept at writing lovely melodies and synth parts, but the most exciting moments come when she threatens to break loose. On “Free,” Ashworth’s vocals quiver, as if she’s containing herself in front of someone who has broken her heart. “The city held us as its own/We walked as far as we could go/We had to choose, so we took off our shoes,” she sings as her accompaniment grows noisier, moving into space-rock territory. The first single, “Callous,” burns with the cosmic energy of Souvlaki-era Slowdive. The cycle of memories she explores here are especially gutting: “I lost my callouses for you/And you didn’t even ask me how my day was.” Even the tracks that scan as crowd pleasers, like “Adult Contemporary,” which features an ensemble cast of musicians like Soko and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, are deeply personal.
Listening to Ashworth unpack her relationships can verge on voyeurism. Writing about sadness and suffering is difficult to do, especially in the space of a debut album, when you are still figuring out what to say and how to say it. But dig beneath the surface of her songs, and the bitter secrets she has buried there bloom. Sometimes Ashworth sounds like she’s yearning to startle her own music’s hypnotically pleasant surface, and there are times you wonder if the gauziness of shoegaze is doing her a disservice, hiding her in plain sight. But SASAMI is a powerful first effort, and Ashworth is a compelling presence. Shoegaze was named because its practitioners supposedly couldn’t meet your eye, but if you spend long enough with SASAMI you will find Ashworth staring right out at you. | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | March 8, 2019 | 7 | 55852af6-925b-4714-a27d-e208f9184671 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Co-produced by Wye Oak, the singer-songwriter’s new album reckons with a past of self-doubt and a present of intense uncertainty in order to shape something like a satisfying future. | Co-produced by Wye Oak, the singer-songwriter’s new album reckons with a past of self-doubt and a present of intense uncertainty in order to shape something like a satisfying future. | Madeline Kenney: Sucker’s Lunch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madeline-kenney-suckers-lunch/ | Sucker’s Lunch | For three albums, Madeline Kenney has poignantly and often playfully articulated the absurdities of modern adulthood. On her 2017 debut, the Toro y Moi-produced Night Night at First Landing, the Oakland baker, dancer, and singer-songwriter with the neuroscience degree sang post-grad mantras for herself, mid-20s reminders that tough times were inevitable but endurable. She got specific on 2018’s Perfect Shapes, reckoning with the burdensome workload of a creative class underfunded by a gig economy and the suspicion that existence itself is a deleterious process. And now, nearing 30 on Sucker’s Lunch, Kenney asks herself for permission to fall in love, or to reckon with a past of self-doubt and a present of intense uncertainty in order to shape something like a satisfying future.
Kenney seems to have found both a mentor and friend in Jenn Wasner, the Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes linchpin who produced Perfect Shapes. Their rapport shaped that album’s sense of discovery, illustrated by a crosswalk sample that became an unlikely and compulsory hook. For Sucker’s Lunch, though, Kenney worked not only with Wasner and a cast of her own past collaborators but also with Andy Stack, the other multi-instrumentalist half of Wye Oak. Aside from Wye Oak’s own records, it’s the first album the pair have produced together. They lend Kenney a righteous heft here, their experience fortifying songs that, in the past, might have felt wispy.
It’s tempting to hear Sucker’s Lunch as another extension of Wye Oak, a full-length collaboration with a novel singer rather than a joint production. Many of their chief hallmarks are here—the way the harmonies and keys pirouette over lumbering drums during “Sugar Sweat,” the emphatic rhythmic punctuation that ends “Tell You Everything,” the euphoric and arcing repetition of “Double Hearted.” If you landed on that last song without checking the title or the credits, you might assume Kenney is simply a Wye Oak acolyte—or that the band itself sounds different this time around.
But Sucker’s Lunch inverts Wye Oak’s general approach. Where Wye Oak’s songs often seem purposefully resilient, designed like body armor meant to safeguard the feelings they ferry, these 10 songs wear their feelings on the skin. The sighing organs and yearning guitars of “Jenny” perfectly capture the bittersweet sting of remembering your past and hoping for a better future. Likewise, the surging and glorious “White Window Light” captures the uneasy excitement of committing to new love even if it might backfire, of “jumping in the water without plans.”
Despite all its lyrical prevarication, there’s a newfound directness to much of Sucker’s Lunch, a definitive step beyond the self-aware cleverness of Kenney’s earlier records. “Sucker,” for instance, surveys our modern malaise with prismatic snapshots of political fractures, mental fatigue, and endless worry. The band renders a wonderfully blue country shuffle beneath them, with luminous guitar harmonies that suggest Nels Cline and drums that feel like slumped shoulders. Kurt Wagner—for almost 30 years, the maestro of Lambchop’s own exquisite moodiness—deadpans the verses alongside Kenney, offering a cross-generational reminder that exasperation is a preexisting condition. And “Be That Man” springs from a gothic country creak into big, open-hearted rock, its chorus a perfect nugget of would-be AM Gold that needs no complications.
Such transmutation is the enduring lesson of Kenney’s small catalogue so far: Turn life’s impasses into empathetic rock songs, little anthems for overcoming self-renewing heartache and exhaustion and anxiety. On Sucker’s Lunch, Kenney gets closer to the core of that idea than ever before thanks to sharper writing, stronger hooks, a versatile voice, and a continued partnership with friends who allow her to try new approaches. These are the results, it would seem, of growing up—the same complicated process that gave Kenney the grist for these 10 songs about figuring out what’s next.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | July 31, 2020 | 7.4 | 558dd521-91e7-49b0-8f3a-5b146a6929d7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Jim James' new solo album contains some of his most psychedelic music, as well as his most directly topical lyrics, offering new ways for him to wield his otherworldly voice. | Jim James' new solo album contains some of his most psychedelic music, as well as his most directly topical lyrics, offering new ways for him to wield his otherworldly voice. | Jim James: Eternally Even | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22570-eternally-even/ | Eternally Even | The idea of a Jim James solo career was slightly perplexing at first. My Morning Jacket is a band in a true, old-school sense—now with a fixed lineup, any character in which would be hard to replace—but Jim James is the sole songwriter, and it has always been his vision driving them. What, exactly, was he leaving out? Yet as 2013’s Regions of Light and Sound of God suggested and his new record Eternally Even confirms, there are other ways to wield his hardly-of-this-earth voice, other ways to meld genres within his idiosyncratic hybrid of American music—music that wouldn't quite fit in the MMJ framework, but which needs to exist nonetheless.
Eternally Even, logically enough, is more of a companion to James’ last solo LP than it is to My Morning Jacket’s stunning 2015 release The Waterfall, particularly in its deeper indulgence of James’ soul influences. But it takes those soul elements and submerges them in psychedelic textures, making for a head trip of an album. Regions was a strong record in its own right but felt less like a statement than a collection of songs—which, with material dating over the course of a few years, it sort of was. But Eternally Even sounds as if it was sequenced as one piece that requires front-to-back listening.
James goes all-in on a frayed, psychedelic-soul aesthetic—“True Nature” sounds like an old funk song dropped in an aquarium. Many of the songs are built off of small instrumental passages that weave the album together: The simmering, festering bed of synths, bass and guitar in opener “Hide in Plain Sight” recurs in “We Ain’t Getting Younger Pt. 1,” which in turn pairs with its Pt. 2 to create the monumental core of the record. Eternally Even has also been touted as his most directly political writing of his career—pointedly released just before Election Day. This is another thing that, at first glance, could go almost awry—a topical Jim James record almost sounds like an oxymoron. James is not a literal writer, or at least not at his best when he’s being literal. His lyrics don’t work that way; his voice very much does not work that way. James can be most evocative when you have no clue what the hell he’s talking about. Who knows the meaning behind “Steam Engine,” yet it’s one of the most powerful songs he's ever written; this is the guy who wrote a song literally called “Wordless Chorus” and has penned numerous catharses built on “oh-ah” refrains and guitar freak-outs rather than narrative journeys.
But he winds up succeeding, thanks to the haunting quality hanging over much of Eternally Even, reflecting the tensions of 2016. In fact, James only occasionally dips into concrete imagery you could associate with America’s political climate, with other songs only making oblique references. Sure, it’s clear where “Same Old Lie” is coming from, with lines like “If you don’t vote it’s on you not me” and “Is there any peace to be found in a lifetime?” Otherwise, it's one meditative note among many: There’s the rumination on mortality in “We Ain’t Getting Any Younger,”and then the more personal reckoning in “Eternally Even.”
The album’s impact is rooted in how, collectively, humanity searches for hope for the future. As the album draws to a close, that seems to be where James wants to lead us. After all the twists and ruptures across the album, we get the floating hymn of “Eternally Even”—a song with James in near-reverie, letting his voice glide over an instrumental that sounds like clouds parting. That’s where the James we always knew comes through: offering his trademark transcendence, that voice cutting through the haze and murk of the album, of this year. And it acts as a salve when we most need it. | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol / ATO | November 7, 2016 | 7.9 | 5591289e-e620-4c88-8475-f9709e47b11a | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
The latest release from stalwart New York underground rap duo Armand Hammer, aka billy woods and Elucid, continues their hot streak. Even as they take on weighty societal issues, the pair maintain a light touch and a near-telepathic bond. | The latest release from stalwart New York underground rap duo Armand Hammer, aka billy woods and Elucid, continues their hot streak. Even as they take on weighty societal issues, the pair maintain a light touch and a near-telepathic bond. | Armand Hammer: Paraffin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armand-hammer-paraffin/ | Paraffin | One summer in the mid-1990s, a young woman from Santa Cruz was renting an apartment in Harlem, off 139th Street. Earlier that same summer, she’d introduced her boyfriend—who had just finished his freshman year at a nearby college and who often stayed at the apartment with her—to a 16-year-old rapping prodigy who was evidently very into comic books. The two young men became fast friends. One day, burglars broke down the door to that apartment and stole, among other things, the young woman’s entire collection of CDs and tapes. The home invasion would be unremarkable if it hadn’t been recounted at the start of one of the pivotal records in underground rap, Cannibal Ox’s 2001 opus The Cold Vein. The rapping prodigy turned out to be Ox’s Vordul Mega. The older friend, who Vordul encouraged to rap, would kick around the fringes of the scenes in New York and D.C. for years after the fact. It wasn’t until 2012 that billy woods, armed with decades of trial-and-error and with many lifetimes’ worth of baggage, re-emerged with an album, History Will Absolve Me, that indicated he was finally, fully formed.
Since History, woods has dropped three distinct, excellent solo albums—two of which were produced by Blockhead who, years earlier, was as responsible for Def Jux’s sound as any producer not named El-P. But the work woods has done with the rapper and producer Elucid as Armand Hammer is even more daring. They’ve made four releases together, including last fall’s ROME, which dealt with the nature of power and the way digital and corporeal life pick at and morph one another. Their latest, Paraffin, is their most kinetic effort, the one that feels the most like it’s made of sinew and instinct.
Armand Hammer records are not unlike The Cold Vein: the writing is jam-packed with naturalist detail and esoteric asides, so dense that you can at times get lost in it, fully immersed, or let it wash over you and begin to miss things. But like Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, woods and Elucid are musically gifted enough to enmesh their vocals with the beats in a way that invites close attention but allows breathing room for those ebbs and flows of focus. They construct songs the way a good film editor will direct viewers’ eyes back and forth across the screen. Paraffin is extremely well-paced, on both micro and macro levels—see the way “ECOMOG” rises and falls, or the way the tension in the first three songs is paid off by the chanted release of “No Days Off.”
The verses return, time and time again, to the dark comedy of Western capitalism (“You don’t work, you don’t eat”), to the particulars of American racism (“I elect ‘Nature of the Threat’ as the new black national anthem”), to cutting words from relatives at tense wakes (“Still remember something foul my uncle said/Yeah, I’ma carry that to the end”). The production, from Willie Green, Kenny Segal, August Fanon, Messiah Musik, Ohbliv, and Elucid himself, skews distorted and dissonant, toward the black-and-white of the album cover.
Elucid, who in the past several years has issued his major, confrontational work in 2016’s Save Yourself, along with a series of shorter dispatches from Cape Town and East New York, opens the album alone. At first, his verse works on a mostly percussive level but ends with a missive for “the mamas locked behind the prison.” Few rappers working today are better at wringing substance from style; Elucid is comfortable sinking into the ether and rattling off a list of disconnected images, then synthesizing them into something thoughtful in the matter of a couple bars. His style is less outwardly conventional than woods’, but the two take turns tethering the other one back to the here and now. What makes their working relationship fascinating is that on a given song, their verses will have deep thematic connections, but little direct interplay, as if they exist on parallel planes. On “Hunter,” for instance, Elucid raps about bodies as moving targets in American killing fields, while woods writes about the way heroin dealers crane their necks to catch the ambient light.
Given the weight of some topics, it helps that both rappers are genuinely funny and brimming with personality. On “Black Garlic,” for instance, Elucid calls YouTube provocateur DJ Vlad the “big boss at the end of the internet”; on “VX,” woods raps, “The money imaginary—I’ll send it to your phone” then mocks the collections agent who’s badgering him: “wiping cappuccino foam out the beard like, ‘How do you reckon?’” And a thread that runs through not only Paraffin, but the rest of the Armand Hammer catalog, is the foolishness of anyone to cast himself as a wise old sage.
Paraffin will not bring about a sea change in rap the way The Cold Vein did; it is, by sensibility and by economic reality, something that needs to exist on the fringes. Regardless, both woods and Elucid find themselves with few peers in rap today, each in the midst of a five-plus year hot streak that shows no signs of cooling down. This is a record that’s uniquely attuned to the political, physical, and ethical realities of 2018 without being weighed down by its pop culture arcana or its attendant industry concerns. | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | September 5, 2018 | 8.1 | 559b8091-0e3b-4a3b-b392-dfcd906095c0 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Incorporating synths, ambient drift, and stark percussion, the Baltimore band, fronted by onetime folk eccentric Jana Hunter, widens its sonic palette and scope on this richly detailed sophomore LP. | Incorporating synths, ambient drift, and stark percussion, the Baltimore band, fronted by onetime folk eccentric Jana Hunter, widens its sonic palette and scope on this richly detailed sophomore LP. | Lower Dens: Nootropics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16555-nootropics/ | Nootropics | There are bands who arrive fully formed and there are those who take a little while to find their footing. Sometimes all it takes is one song. In the case of Baltimore's Lower Dens, who are fronted by onetime folk eccentric Jana Hunter, that track was "Brains". Released in advance of this record, the single added krautrock and electronic touches to the group's signature guitar swirl and suggested a new dimension and a new confidence. Everything hit with more impact: the drumming was crisper, Hunter's singing was richer and more evocative, and there was an extra layer of prettiness, but also menace. The message seemed to be, "Here's a band you can't ignore anymore."
Nootropics strengthens that argument, building on the promise of "Brains" and vastly widening the band's sonic palette. Richly detailed, dark, and ethereal, the album is a feast for sound-first listeners drawn to expressive shifts in color and tone. To suggest that it's a creative step forward for Lower Dens is not to knock their 2010 debut, Twin-Hand Movement, which was a fine album but pretty specific in its appeal. (A moody nighttime listen, ideal for a 2 a.m. drive home by yourself or a late-night glass of whisky.) Nootropics is at once more inclusive and varied, though. And the band achieves this by pulling a clever trick: taking some of the most well-loved elements of the rock canon and making them their own.
"I listened to Radioactivity by Kraftwerk pretty much constantly while writing this record, and... we listened to a lot of Eno and Fripp and the Iggy Pop record that David Bowie produced," Hunter said in an interview. And you can certainly hear those influences at play. Robotic synths, ambient drift, stark percussion-- many of the touchstones of 1977 art rock are on display in tracks like "Lamb" and "Candy". It doesn't feel like by-the-numbers mixtape-ism, though, partly because Hunter's singing is too dynamic to allow for that. Her androgynous voice can be airy and lilting or times throaty and masculine, and it lends an eerie otherness to the songs. Even when backed by a simple motorik bassline, Hunter sounds beamed-in from somewhere else.
This is one of those albums that creates its own little sound world, and a lot of its appeal has to do with qualities like texture and atmosphere. These are terms so overused in music writing that they've nearly lost their meaning, but here they're important. Take for example the very tactile percussion of "Alphabet Song". Snares and cymbals click-click-click like someone with long, fake fingernails tapping on a car window. Or go back to "Brains", which does an excellent job of building tension and transferring energy with those outward-spinning guitars. For a while they kind of chime in place, but then right before the chorus hits, they step down an octave and there's an exhale. The mood changes and takes you along with it.
With so much attention on the sonics it can be easy to ignore the words, and actually I'd say the lyrical content is the record's least interesting aspect. In that same interview from above, Hunter discussed the subject matter, going into some heady stuff about Dada and transhumanism and "denying our animal selves." I'm not sure what she meant, and I'm not sure that it matters. This isn't an album about a specific narrative, it's about sounds and colors and the way a synth tone or cryptic string of words hits you and makes you feel something. When the guitars are chugging and the drums are crackling and Hunter sings, "When I finally let my guard down, I was in the middle of the sea and drowning," I don't know what she means exactly, but it gives me goosebumps. Every time. | 2012-05-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ribbon Music | May 1, 2012 | 8.2 | 55a04073-ac05-492c-9f0f-44b36a552782 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
A revered musician in Balochistan, Pakistan, Ustad Noor Bahksh debuts internationally with a twangy, enveloping collection of reinterpreted and original compositions for the benju. | A revered musician in Balochistan, Pakistan, Ustad Noor Bahksh debuts internationally with a twangy, enveloping collection of reinterpreted and original compositions for the benju. | Ustad Noor Bakhsh: Jingul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ustad-noor-bakhsh-jingul/ | Jingul | The benju is a twangy, droning keyed dulcimer that originated as a Japanese instrument called the taishōgoto. In the 1920s, Japanese sailors brought a toy version of the taishōgoto to Pakistan, where local musicians modified it, doubling its size and making it louder. Since then, the benju has become an integral part of the folk music from the Balochistan region of the country.
One of Pakistan’s most legendary benju players is Ustad Noor Bakhsh, who plays an electric version of the instrument on an amp powered by a car battery and a solar panel. He has long been regionally celebrated but only recently gained international acclaim when videos of his playing went viral earlier this year; in June, he performed live from Karachi for Boiler Room. Bakhsh’s debut album, Jingul, is a collection of four interpretations on Balochi poetry, shepherd’s tunes, and qawwali, plus one original composition. Throughout this electrifying project, the benju twists through sorrow, ecstasy, and epiphany, embroidering a vivid tapestry of emotion.
Much of the emotional impact of this music comes from its trance-like qualities. Bakhsh’s style of playing is frantic but also iterative: On “Bundar Nari,” his interpretation of a traditional flute song, he embellishes on one twinkling refrain over and over until it feels like a meditation. “Jingul,” an original composition inspired by the sounds of the birds in the jungle near his home, is similarly repetitive but more assertive: The benju spirals over a pounding backbone established by the damboora, the two-stringed lute that is the only other instrument on the album. Thanks to the vigor and confidence of his playing, listening to Bakhsh circle a few notes is an enveloping experience.
One of the album’s most melodious song is “Shahbaz Qalandar,” a shortened interpretation of a classic qawwali song, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar.” The instrument sounds incandescent here, like light refracting on fresh snow. As ruminative and heady as Bakhsh’s music often is, “Shahbaz Qalandar” shows that he’s just as compelling when his delivery is playful and exploratory.
Jingul was recorded live at sunset, and the poignant melancholy of dusk permeates the music. The metallic, plucky sound of the benju is distinct, as are the particularities of Bakhsh’s trills and cascading improvisations. But the ethos that guides these compositions—the unending pursuit of beauty, the simultaneous embrace of sorrow and transcendence—is familiar. You might find it in the astral harp music of Mary Lattimore, or the kaleidoscopic guitar playing of Mdou Moctar. It’s the kind of music that leaves you grasping for the spiritual and indefinable, that burrows into your soul and glows there. | 2022-09-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | honiunhoni | September 14, 2022 | 7.6 | 55a08347-b020-48db-81e5-49cbc370ebf0 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Montreal band delivers an edgy, restless set of dark romanticism and muscular guitar. | Montreal band delivers an edgy, restless set of dark romanticism and muscular guitar. | The Besnard Lakes: Are the Roaring Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13973-are-the-roaring-night/ | Are the Roaring Night | You can only be the dark horse once. The Besnard Lakes may have been a (mostly) unknown quantity when they broke out to a wider audience in 2007, but they were also insiders of sorts-- guitarist/vocalist Jace Lasek had done production work with Montreal heavyweights Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. Fitting of its title, Are the Dark Horse had a subtle, almost shy, quality-- on many songs, the group's quiet side slowly swelled into a symphony. On the follow-up, Are the Roaring Night, husband-and-wife duo Lasek and Olga Goreas map out a sonic landscape that follows the peaks and valleys of their previous work, but the terrain is more ragged.
New songs like "Glass Printer" sound more electrified and easily triggered from the outset. Marching forward with the inexorable, unforgiving pace the title implies, "And This Is What We Call Progress" pairs a steely two-drum pulse with a line of static suspended by an EBow. Even the slow, pretty interludes often exude more tension than the suspended-in-space, Spiritualized vibe of an older song like "For Agent 13". There's more unease in the band's bold space rock-- vocal harmonies mask that sense of menace on the two-part "Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent", which opens the album with oscillating notes and fluctuating guitar. After trading cloying choruses with Goreas, Lasek sings, "Deciphered your lines from the short wave/ It said 'Kill all the swine, young and old.'" Darkness and destruction are also central to "Land of Living Skies", made even more poignant after an opening segment of sinister radio transmissions.
Talk of scrambled signals and short-wave technology is fitting considering Lasek's production background (check out the online gear list for his Breakglass studio). An impressive array of crunchy guitar tones courses throughout the album, pushing forward two-part epics so the steady cycle of build and release doesn't become overwrought. Craftsmanship permeates the peels of reverb-laden melodies or the Loveless-like gyre of lead single "Albatross". Are the Roaring Night sounds richer, and while it doesn't rewrite the formula, it contains many small refinements to the band's songwriting and production skills. Outside of the twinkling, sub-orbital synths on the closer "The Lonely Moan", there isn't anything that would be considered a radical departure. But when you make the kind of entrance the Besnard Lakes did, there isn't much to fix. | 2010-03-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-03-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | March 16, 2010 | 7.8 | 55a2b20e-47d0-4948-8f7f-a944e0d05621 | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
On their third album for Stones Throw, the L.A. avant-pop practitioner juggles themes of identity and physicality with music that reclaims the eccentric aplomb of their early records. | On their third album for Stones Throw, the L.A. avant-pop practitioner juggles themes of identity and physicality with music that reclaims the eccentric aplomb of their early records. | Jerry Paper: Free Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jerry-paper-free-time/ | Free Time | Jerry Paper’s syrupy sonic world comes straight from the pages of a tripped-out children’s book, where the secret to happiness is just being yourself. For the Los Angeles experimental pop practitioner, that’s always seemed to come naturally; since their early releases for labels like Orange Milk and Hausu Mountain, Paper has shown fearless individuality as they’ve built a peculiar toybox of multicolored MIDI funk and post-Mac DeMarco bedroom R&B, brought to life by their joyous, crooning live performances.
But as Paper’s profile has increased, some of what made the project so special has sadly gotten lost along the way. Since 2016’s Toon Time Raw!, Paper has slowly swapped out their uncanny-valley keyboards and tick-tocking drum machines for a more streamlined full-band setup, graduating to the Stones Throw roster in the process. Their first two records for the label, Like a Baby and Abracadabra, sounded like hi-def Jerry Paper, but those gains in fidelity came at the cost of originality: The excessively mellow songwriting didn’t sound terribly different from the lackadaisical chill-dude-core you’d hear from the likes of Homeshake or Mild High Club. For an artist who up until then had excelled at inventing their own rulebook, these records came across like an unfortunate case of just trying to fit in with the crowd.
Fortunately, Free Time spells out a fresh beginning. Paper’s first record since coming out as nonbinary in 2020, Free Time is the most dynamic they have sounded in years, with hilariously expressive grooves that feel like a great casting off of chains (there’s more than one way to read into its punny title). Juggling themes of identity and physicality with music that reclaims the eccentric aplomb of their early records, Paper expands their sound into wily new territory, wrangling together knotty garage rock and tripped-out dance music to serve as the backdrop for personal tales of self-discovery. It taps into that goofy magic that made Paper’s music so fascinating in the first place.
The concept of self-actualization is front and center throughout Free Time, from the second that “Kno Me” fires up the album with Paper’s most overtly glam-rocking song yet. With its Elvis Costello-ish snarl and chugging guitars, the song recounts the first time Paper decided to leave the house wearing a dress, its instantly hummable chorus capturing the anxious defiance that comes with having to worry whether the cashier at Ralph’s is going to make an uncomfortable comment about your nail polish or not. This charged-up energy manifests in myriad ways throughout Free Time. On “DREEMSCENES,” Paper delivers their tribute to house music—a genre that has long acted as a bastion of queer acceptance—in a cosmic-jazz workout complete with vocoder and an absurdly wailing saxophone solo.
Even the songs where Paper works in their usual style reflect a melodic and textural depth that fully capitalizes on their strengths as a singer/songwriter. With its elevator-music flutes and campy Marvin Gaye crooning, “Just Say Play” goes down smoother than a glass of lemonade on a balmy summer afternoon, complete with cartoonishly harmonized “why, why, why”s as earwormy as anything Paper has ever written. “Gracie III” moseys along on a softly yearning Steely Dan strum, while on “Duumb” Paper returns to their squishy Tim & Eric-style funk for an extended slow jam that culminates in a kooky sound collage (topped with screams straight out of Tom & Jerry). On all these moments, Paper is clearly in command of their element, fleshing out their bizarro universe with songs as cheeky as they are bracingly heartfelt.
If on previous records Paper has kept a lid on their wacky, oversized personality, Free Time feels like a huge leap toward a more liberated sound. Part of what’s always made Paper so compelling is their theatrical balance of silliness and sincerity; between all the clownish sound effects and drawled references to “shaking ass,” there’s a vulnerability to Paper’s songwriting that’s surprisingly moving, their jerky movements reflecting an awkward soul just screaming to be let out. As the album reaches its close with “Flower, a Square,” Paper confronts one of the saddest aspects of coming out: reckoning with all the time spent in the closet that you’ll never get back. “I’ve wasted hours, countless hours of my precious time/Calling a flower a square,” Paper weepingly intones as the song blossoms from its quiet intro into a warm, brass-laden R&B anthem. It’s a melancholy moment, but before long, Paper breaks it down into a funky, acoustic-guitar-riffing strut, shaking off the sadness to simply bask in the sun. It’s a delightful final flourish, one final wink so sweet you might miss the tear behind it. | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Stones Throw | April 15, 2022 | 7.3 | 55a3ddc0-06b9-403e-9ab9-8403aaa15b72 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
null | These reissues complete Rhino's ambitious treatment of the Replacements catalogue, with all eight of the legendary (a shopworn word in rock criticism, but these guys deserve it, for reasons good and bad) Minneapolis band's official releases in expanded and remastered deluxe editions. Rhino's decision to release the records in two flights-- the first covering the Twin/Tone years, the second their time on Sire-- cleaves their career into distinct halves, a division that seems sharper now than it did at the time. Yeah, everyone back then noticed *Tim*'s horrible record cover and weird production, but to those not tuned into major/indie | The Replacements: Tim / Pleased to Meet Me / Don't Tell a Soul / All Shook Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12266-tim-pleased-to-meet-me-dont-tell-a-soul-all-shook-down/ | Tim / Pleased to Meet Me / Don't Tell a Soul / All Shook Down | These reissues complete Rhino's ambitious treatment of the Replacements catalogue, with all eight of the legendary (a shopworn word in rock criticism, but these guys deserve it, for reasons good and bad) Minneapolis band's official releases in expanded and remastered deluxe editions. Rhino's decision to release the records in two flights-- the first covering the Twin/Tone years, the second their time on Sire-- cleaves their career into distinct halves, a division that seems sharper now than it did at the time. Yeah, everyone back then noticed Tim's horrible record cover and weird production, but to those not tuned into major/indie politics, it just seemed like "The record after Let It Be," not a talking point for a discussion on what happens when underground bands sign with a major. But returning to these four records after a lengthy re-immersion in the Twin/Tone platters, one gets a sense of exactly what had changed. The run of 1981's Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash to 1984's Let It Be, for all the variety on display, feels of a piece, the work of a wildly creative and energetic band with a strong sense of exactly who they were. Each of the Sire albums, on the other hand, seems to begin with, "Well, I guess we can try this and see what happens." There's no sense of continuity, nothing builds from record to record. Every one seems to come from a band starting over.
Given its superior distribution and marketing push, Tim was the first Replacements album many people heard, which, as is so often the case, means that it's frequently mentioned as the favorite. And that's understandable. "Hold My Life", "Bastards of Young", and "Left of the Dial" are anthems, no doubt about it, real voice-of-a-generation kind of songs. But Tim also has range. The jazzy, midtempo "Swingin Party" is Westerberg with perfect emotional pitch-- funny ("Bring your own lampshade, somewhere there's a party") and also vulnerable (the narrator admits to being ignorant, weak, and terrified, but if he can find someone in the same situation to hang out with, he'll live). "Kiss Me on the Bus" is light, melodic, and charming guitar pop, another new wrinkle.
Great songs abound, but Tim has its share of issues. Something that had changed markedly-- and whether it was erratic lead guitarist Bob Stinson's rapidly diminishing role in the band or self-consciousness, I can't say-- is that the Replacements would never again sound convincing on a dumb rocker the way they had so many times over on those first four records. You take "Run It" from Hootenanny or "Customer" from Sorry Ma and place them alongside "Dose of Thunder" or "Lay It Down Clown", and the latter seem downright anemic. The Replacements were having a harder time with "silly," something that was as natural as breathing in the early days, but they kept trying all the way until the end.
Tim's other big problem is the sound. The remastering on all of these discs is done well, but problems with Tim go much deeper. Originally produced by Tommy Erdelyi of the Ramones, Tim comes over as thin, limp, and weirdly distant, hitting with less than half the force of the Let It Be. Ironically, since Erdelyi is a drummer, Chris Mars' percussion is especially feeble. The six bonus tracks included throw the production shortcomings into relief. The demo of "Kiss Me on the Bus"-- recorded with Erdelyi, but it sounds live in studio-- is raw and direct. The two outtakes of "Can't Hardly Wait"-- a song that wouldn't be officially released until Pleased to Meet Me, one acoustic and one electric-- both suggest a sonic road not taken in addition to highlighting how much Westerberg refined songs over time.
Pleased to Meet Me could be heard as an overcompensation for Tim's failings. Much was made of it being a digital recording, which in 1987 was seen as extravagant, the kind of thing Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits indulged in. "Look ma, no hiss!" read a review discussing the moment of silence between the horn hits in "Can't Hardly Wait" (the fact that there were horns to hit-- not to mention strings-- was also shocking) and Pleased to Meet Me was presented as the Replacements finally ready for the big time. The reality, though, is that the record was all over the place, too schizophrenic for the band to be easily grasped, kind of like Hootenanny with fleshed-out ideas, more confidence, and way better songs. Here the Replacements were tacking cocktail jazz ("Nightclub Jitters"), wholly acoustic ballads (the gorgeous "Skyway"), gritty proto-grunge ("The Ledge"), and paying tribute to their Memphis surroundings-- local hero Jim Dickinson produced-- on buoyant, Big Star-channeling power-pop ("Can't Hardly Wait" and "Alex Chilton").
Perhaps with Bob Stinson now out of the band (he died of drug-related causes a decade later), Westerberg felt freer to experiment, to try genres that would have been given an ironic reading a few years earlier. The obligatory burners ("Shooting Dirty Pool" and "Red Red Wine") once again feel forced, but Westerberg more than made up with that with three of the best rock songs he ever wrote: "I.O.U.", "Never Mind", and "Valentine". More personal and specific than their counterparts on Tim, this trio is littered with lines that bands since have built an entire identity on. Songs like "Birthday Gal" and "Photo", which didn't make the record and are now included as bonuses, suggest that Westerberg was on a songwriting roll, and alternate versions of "Alex Chilton" and "Can't Hardly Wait" are welcome.
And then the bottom dropped out. Or, so the story goes, anyway. For many, Don't Tell a Soul, with its slick production-- saxophones and violins were one thing, but synths?-- and generally muted tone spelled the end of the Replacements as we knew them, and the only point to debate is whether this record or All Shook Down was their career nadir. "End of the Replacements as we knew them" I can agree with, but then, they were pretty much a new band with each of their two previous records as well. Don't Tell a Soul was met with plenty of derision at the time, but an even larger reason for its bad rep since likely has to do with the fact that this is the sound emulated by the Replacements worshipers that took the band's somewhere bigger, your Goo Goo Dolls and Ryan Adams types. Not to mention that you can hear echoes of Westerberg's lackluster 90s solo output throughout, and "I Won't" is possibly the most unconvincing rocker they ever recorded, with its wailing harmonica and a mix that sounds like four guys recorded their parts on different continents.
But I submit that the softer, more careful, and certainly more polished band on display here-- one clearly hoping to straddle the gulf between college rock and MTV's "120 Minutes" and pop radio-- succeeds on its own terms. "Asking Me Lies" and "Talent Show" are damn catchy pop songs, and the latter is both bravely dorky ("It's the biggest thing in my life, I guess/ Look at us, we're nervous wrecks/ Hey, we go on next") and, as especially revealed in the superior studio demo included as a bonus, has a great riff. Ballads "Achin' to Be" and "They're Blind" are a little on-the-nose lyrically, but they capture that "I want the world to know that I'm special, but I also want to hide in a closet" feeling endemic to being a teenager as well as anything this side of Morrissey. And "I'll Be You" completely transcends its production and could fight for a spot in an all-time Replacements top 10. The bonus tracks here also might be the strongest of this whole batch, with the fine country-ish "Portland" (its "Too late to turn back, here we go" chorus was cannibalized for "Talent Show"), straightforward studio demos that show the hearts of good songs beating beneath the plastic exterior ("Talent Show" and "We'll Inherit the Earth"), and an appealingly weird studio goof with Tom Waits that's almost as good as that sounds (B-side "Date to Church").
All Shook Down, originally envisioned as Westerberg's solo debut, really does feel like the end, and it's not a happy one. The acoustic guitars are out in full force, singing is hushed, and Westerberg made much of the record with studio musicians, with only a couple of tracks featuring contributions from Tommy Stinson, Chris Mars, and Slim Dunlap, (the latter replaced Bob Stinson on Don't Tell a Soul). There are some pretty good songs-- "Merry Go Round", "When It Began"-- but the overall mood is sleepy, fatigued, and some of the songwriting feels rote ("Bent Out of Shape", "Attitude") with melodies and chords plugged in in a predictable way. Westerberg still had a way with a heart-tugging ballad ("Sadly Beautiful") but even then, that fine line between the affectingly melancholy and self-pityingly morose is crossed with some regularity. The bonus material here, appropriately enough, is by far the least interesting of the eight records, consisting mostly of warbly lo-fi demos. When Westerberg emerged with two underwritten, slight, but ultimately fun solo tunes on the Singles soundtrack two years later, it was like a breath of fresh air. All Shook Down is depressing in ways only partly intended.
The Replacements may never have figured out what kind of band they wanted to be or how they wanted to sound after leaving Twin/Tone, but there's still a clear thread binding almost all of their work together, and that was the worldview of Paul Westerberg. He didn't just tell stories with his songs, though he could do that too; he offered a way of looking at things that seemed both disarmingly familiar and previously unarticulated. Westerberg's POV also dovetailed perfectly with his band's career arc in a way that in retrospect seems uncanny. He celebrated people with talent who were scared of growth, those ready to upset the natural order of things not out of careful consideration of power relationships-- as was the case with politically oriented punk-- but because they were either hopelessly bored, had a childlike curiosity, or were just plain afraid. The outlook he tapped into was more universal than he could have imagined, and had been underrepresented in rock music until he came along. Now, of course, they're indie rock staples. The Replacements' influence on the alt-rock explosion of the 90s has been overstated, but their approach has continued to resonate in smaller scenes, where you feel like you're experiencing music up close, less mediated by rock star iconography. Their songs touch on some heavy shit, the kind of feelings best expressed in a more intimate space, but there's also plenty of room in there for some laughs. That kind of mixed-up place is right where the Replacements belong. | 2008-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 26, 2008 | 8.7 | 55b6f797-1157-4417-b65d-0c9714c7c755 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Pared back to a duo, the storied Austin band sounds unexpectedly winsome on their revelatory tenth album. | Pared back to a duo, the storied Austin band sounds unexpectedly winsome on their revelatory tenth album. | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: X: The Godless Void and Other Stories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-x-the-godless-void-and-other-stories/ | X: The Godless Void and Other Stories | Even by ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead’s notoriously grandiose standards, X: The Godless Void and Other Stories is one hell of a proggy album title. Likewise, the accompanying cover painting—of demon-eyed lions and dragons flanking a mysterious woman wearing psychedelic armor that looks like melting flesh—is catnip for those who prefer their albums partitioned into roman-numeraled suites and their dice to come with 20 sides. But for a band so enamored with dramatic flourishes that they named their new album’s opening crescendo “The Opening Crescendo,” the boldest thing about X: The Godless Void and Other Stories is its relative humility and grace.
For all the musical and personnel changes this band has undergone over the years, it’s easy to forget Trail of Dead began as a two-piece featuring revolving singers/guitarists/drummers Conrad Keely and Jason Reece—and now, a quarter century into their existence, that’s where they find themselves once again. But The Godless Void is less a scrappy back-to-basics move than a full-circle summation of where this band has been and a glimpse into where its principals could be headed as they approach their 50s. Sure, this album features all the churning noise, machine-gunned drum rolls, and regal piano interludes you’d expect from a Trail of Dead record, and the towering centerpiece track “Children of the Sky” has the sweep and swagger of a Source Tags & Codes standard. But while Trail of Dead have always been driven by a fearless, go-for-broke sense of conviction, The Godless Void taps into a more sobering and introspective vein as they grapple with the aging artist’s eternal lament: How do you find your passion and purpose when your heart’s just not in it?
After six years of living in Cambodia, Keely returned to the band’s home base of Austin in 2018, and not by choice. As a UK native who had lived in America on a green card, Keely was forced to come back to the U.S. to retain his residency status. Keely’s Cambodia retreat was, by his account, a relaxing experience spent playing with local country bands and putting together his playfully eclectic solo album. By contrast, his Stateside reunion with Reece occurred at a time when it felt like America was coming apart at the seams. That sense of displacement and disappointment is all-consuming on The Godless Void. The album’s first proper song, “All Who Wander,” is the sound of feeling frustrated but too defeated to fight, with Keely cataloging his ennui (“When you wanna breathe/ But no air can be found”) over a muscular, wah-wah-slathered groove imbued with struggle and strain.
He usually pushes his voice to the breaking point in order to compete with the band’s crashing arrangements, but Keely is surprisingly subdued here, not so much seizing the spotlight as haunting the shadows. The acoustic melancholy of “Something Like This” is less dream-pop than insomnia-pop, a bleary-eyed Keely teetering on existential crisis as he tries to reacquaint himself with his fretboard: “I’m sure the chords went something like this/I don’t know if I can sing them like I did before/Or if I can feel them anymore.” That desire to reconnect with his muse is amplified by echoes of the group’s past: the looped band-name chant that opens that record evokes their 1999 masterwork Madonna, while “Gravity” repurposes lyrics from So Divided’s cheeky travelogue “Eight Day Hell” into a sorrowful expression of romantic longing. In the album’s most affecting turn, “Don’t Look Down,” he bids adieu to the one he left behind over an urgent jangle-pop sprint. Trail of Dead have covered The Replacements in the past, but this is the first tune of theirs that could be credibly covered by Paul Westerberg.
While Trail of Dead have plenty of melodic songs in their canon, never before have they sounded so wistful and wounded. However, where Reece has often served as the aggro counterpoint to Keely’s vulnerable moments, here he provides borderline-joyful catharsis, turning the alt-metal wallop of the title track into a heroic mantra and forging the middle ground between Beatlesque psychedelia and ’80s heartland arena-rock on “Blade of Wind.” Of course, it wouldn’t be a Trail of Dead record without the occasional tip of the scales into pure bombast—see the doomy eco-parable “Who Haunts the Haunter”—but it feels out of place on a record that thrives in more intimate, personal spaces. Elaborate but rarely ostentatious, The Godless Void is a true revelation from a band 25 years into the game—the rare Trail of Dead record that lets Keely’s shell-shocked performances chart the necessary emotional peaks without needing the music to follow suit. | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dine Alone | January 24, 2020 | 7.8 | 55b9b054-c808-4d0e-8dd2-3595d0a7ec31 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
T.I.’s eleventh album is more concerned with sprinting alongside Atlanta’s new generation than with cementing his legacy or exploring his politics. | T.I.’s eleventh album is more concerned with sprinting alongside Atlanta’s new generation than with cementing his legacy or exploring his politics. | T.I.: The L.I.B.R.A. (The Legend Is Back Running Atlanta) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ti-the-libra-the-legend-is-back-running-atlanta/ | The L.I.B.R.A. (The Legend Is Back Running Atlanta) | On 2018’s “Ye vs. the People,” T.I. gave Kanye West an earful about publicly supporting Donald Trump. He played devil’s advocate to West’s MAGA-hat musings, and in the process, found a way to bring his characteristically thoughtful, loud, and direct public commentary to music. T.I. dropped his tenth album, Dime Trap, soon after, picking up where “Ye vs. the People” left off with a loving sendoff to the trap music subgenre he’d ushered into existence 15 years earlier. Dime Trap positioned T.I. as a veteran on the cusp of a major career turn—ready to tackle the tensions that his politics bring to his music. Two years later, T.I.’s eleventh studio album The L.I.B.R.A. (The Legend Is Back Running Atlanta) represents the first taste of what promised to be a new era. But though it arrives during the world’s worst modern pandemic and widespread social unrest (topics that T.I. has engaged publicly), it has nearly nothing to say about the moment at hand. The L.I.B.R.A. is more concerned with sprinting alongside Atlanta’s new generation than with cementing his legacy or exploring his politics.
In 2020, T.I. has seemingly tried harder than ever to become the spokesperson of Black America. The L.I.B.R.A. looks past this, leaving his passionate speeches on the internet. Opening track “The L.I.B.R.A. Introduction” sets the tone with a mythologization of the rapper’s story, courtesy of comedian Ms. Pat. “Do you know how hard it is to have to flip the script and odds into your favor?” she asks, calling the rapper the “baddest motherfucker in Atlanta” and noting that, 20 years in, he still doesn’t have any grey hair in his beard. That seemingly meaningless observation sticks in your brain as The L.I.B.R.A. goes on, a reminder of what the album is really focused on: proving that T.I. is just as capable of being rap’s “it” guy as anyone half his age.
Plenty of rappers pine for the attention of younger generations, but it’s especially grating given T.I.’s propensity to speak about topics that actually define our times. “Pardon,” with its use-once-and-toss instrumental, is primarily a means of attempting to rap like guest star Lil Baby. “Hit Dogs Holla,” an ominous, bass-knocking brag fest featuring Florida rapper and Grand Hustle signee Tokyo Jetz, is the kind of high-energy missile that any current Atlanta rapper would sound at home over. These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.
L.I.B.R.A. leaves the heavy thematic lifting to interludes featuring Black women, but even those are a mixed bag because half of them are focused on T.I. Ms. Pat’s adoring opening is nearly identical to Rapsody’s “Air & Water Interlude,” a wasted opportunity for one of hip-hop’s most talented women, who uses her wondrous poetic dexterity to explain that “Without T.I.P., the world might tip.” By the time a message of substance arrives, the album’s already halfway complete. On “Fire & Earth Interlude,” actress Ernestine Johnson Morrison delivers a poignant spoken-word piece about the Black community. But, weirdly, it features a hypocritical moment where Johnson says, “I dare you to rap about anything but your pussy/Or how good you suck his—/How good you look and how tight your Fashion Nova fit/I remember when rap queens really used to spit.” You want to cringe at the audacity, then roll your eyes when you realize that nearly the entire album up until that point is about how good T.I. looks and acts.
The most memorable moments on L.I.B.R.A. come when T.I. introduces the real young people he keeps up with: his children. On standout “Family Connect,” T.I. brings in his son Domani Harris to express how it feels to live in his father’s shadow. Domani handles the topic with dexterity: “I’m most definitely my daddy’s son, it’s no denyin’/I used to run from my last name/I was mortified of being that nigga that live off a nigga at 25.” T.I. feigns curiosity in his response, but you can tell he’s a little hurt. “Ridin’ round in a Vanquish, tryna stop for complainants/’Cause my kids won’t let me help ’em and I just can’t ascertain it,” he says. The closer, which features T.I.’s daughter Deyjah Harris speaking about her Black experience, doesn’t make up for the album’s lack of a political voice, but it offers a bit of soul—something there should have been more of altogether.
For the duration of his career, T.I. has been obsessed with respect, to the point of proclaiming that he would die to have it put on his name. With that in mind, The L.I.B.R.A. looks like death by a thousand cuts—an album so obsessed with claiming respect, and with fitting in, that it doesn’t truly need to exist. In searching for the respect that he’s already earned over the course of his career, T.I. suddenly appears to occupy a position where people might fail to acknowledge it at all.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grand Hustle | October 22, 2020 | 5.4 | 55ba19a6-7196-4311-a0c9-9bfdd929e58b | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
Despite its title, Joseph O’Connell’s second release for Western Vinyl is his most distinctive release to date, an elegant study of life’s circularity set against a backdrop of slowcore folk and woozy rock. | Despite its title, Joseph O’Connell’s second release for Western Vinyl is his most distinctive release to date, an elegant study of life’s circularity set against a backdrop of slowcore folk and woozy rock. | Elephant Micah: Genericana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elephant-micah-genericana/ | Genericana | On his umpteenth album as Elephant Micah, Joseph O’Connell transforms his comfortable Midwestern folk into something harder to define. The compact six-song cycle—only his second record on Western Vinyl, after many years of self-releasing—begins and ends with the sound of staticky waves crashing through stereo channels. These are the most pronounced of many subtle concentric circles that ripple through the album’s lyrics and structure. 2015’s Where in Our Woods was a pretty good Will Oldham record, but it was more deserving of the hilarious title Genericana than the slowcore folk and woozy rock, colored with analog electronics and vocal delays, that composes O’Connell’s most distinctive release to date. If Arthur Russell had been a product of the Elephant 6 collective rather than downtown New York art music, he might have written songs like this. But there’s more to Genericana than that.
The change in Elephant Micah’s music feels at least partly related to a change in scenery. A former resident of Indiana, where he worked as a folklorist, O’Connell now lives in North Carolina, a couple of hours from the coast. If his old music had something familiar, landlocked, and level about it, Genericana is shaped by both the stranger’s fresh perspective on new terrain and the ambient call of the sea. There’s also a new toy in play: Working with his brother Matt, who is a former Moog employee, and Jason Evans Groth of Magnolia Electric Co., O’Connell built an analog synth he calls the Mutant. A small console with (of course) a woodgrain finish, its wet, spongy, gentle timbre endows O’Connell’s sparse, low-slung percussion and spindrift guitar licks with oceanic depth and weight.
I just segued sharply from nature to technology, it’s true—but that’s because O’Connell does it, too. Genericana is discreetly meta, conflating the natural world and the mechanical medium that captures it. This juxtaposition and O’Connell’s fixation on circles whorl together most elegantly on opener “Surf A.” The bass thumps as slowly and evenly as O’Connell’s lonesome voice does, while the Mutant burps and moans forlornly. “If I were a taper, I’d magnetize this tone, press rewind at the end,” he sings. At one point, with vocal delays, he adds, “Go around on the track. I’d circle and come back.” The song churns with wheels within wheels, O’Connell’s voice wrapping around itself like the album does, and like the sea, and like magnetic tape, and like, if we follow the line to its logical conclusion, life itself. The simple, longing strains conceal a thorny philosophical question: Eternal recurrence, anyone?
Just one hissing cymbal serves as the song’s muted climax. O’Connell isn’t given to grand, impulsive gestures; he prefers patient development and sculpting. “Surf A” bears such careful scrutiny because it funds the rest of the album with its circular motifs. They go underground in “Fire A,” a trad palate cleanser with lazy, sweet tangles of electric guitar and peaceful vocal refrains, and “Life B,” a minimalist dream pastoral that wills itself into motion with stoical slowness. Then they resurface in two songs—“Fire B,” which gives the Mutant’s wobbly trills an interlaced workout, and “Surf B,” a crashing rock finale—where the opener’s rhetorical structure and vocal melody recombine, like the solution to an equation.
It would come as no surprise if there were an arcane mathematical structure behind Genericana’s deliberate permutations of words, melodies, and textures. But you don’t need to know what it is. You feel it as a force, a sort of inward spiral—a circle shrinking to a point, a pinhole through which the circle bursts back into fullness. “We start all over again. Let it turn into dust. It’s gone, whatever it was,” O’Connell concludes, but nothing’s gone. We’re cycled back to the rolling waves where we began, the same words and gestures snapping into their preordained places again. | 2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Western Vinyl | August 7, 2018 | 7.2 | 55ba9122-d277-4528-8b63-df5ebbe546ba | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The avant-garde composer and the tabla master orchestrate a controlled collision of their approaches, with harmonious results. | The avant-garde composer and the tabla master orchestrate a controlled collision of their approaches, with harmonious results. | Shuta Hasunuma / U-zhaan: 2 Tone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shuta-hasunuma-u-zhaan-2-tone/ | 2 Tone | Look around and find the nearest ordinary object. Anything will do, really. You might be staring at Shuta Hasunuma’s next musical instrument. The 34-year-old composer’s idea of an orchestra is as likely to resemble a cluttered attic as a string ensemble. Those aren’t hypothetical examples: On the top floors of a gallery in Brooklyn, Hasunuma’s current interactive exhibit, Compositions, invites visitors to make sounds using objects including glass bottles, a tattered cardboard Amazon delivery box, and a basketball. Elsewhere, in a recent open call for his philharmonic orchestra, Hasunuma urged applicants not to worry whether or not something qualifies as an instrument before using it to audition. Which brings us back to that nearby object—is it your computer? Perfect. As he noted in that same open call, if you bash a computer with a rock, it will make a sound, and thus music.
Hironori Yuzawa’s craft has a tighter definition: He plays the tabla. Where Hasunuma has probed a thousand different instruments, seeking the right pitch from each, Yuzawa mainly sticks to just the one, coaxing a thousand different voices from the compact South Asian drums for his recordings as U-zhaan.
The two Japanese musicians’ new collaborative album, 2 Tone, is a controlled collision of these opposite approaches, with harmonious results. It’s a mostly tranquil piece, with unexpected splashes of sound disturbing the gentle ambience that Hasunuma creates using keyboards and synths. The two musicians’ ultra-light touch pulls you in, at which point their surprises come out.
Hasunuma is the lead architect here, but it’s U-zhaan’s skill that really opens doors. His tabla is, at various moments, a percolating coffee machine, a cockroach scampering under a rug, and a heartbeat. “Music for Five Tablas” features nothing more than generously spaced tabla hits, with U-zhaan reaching beyond rhythm with some pitch-perfect intervals. “Radio S,” the best of the three tracks here that stretch into the seven-to-eight-minute range, opens with serene raindrops, eventually develops a frantic rhythm, and then settles somewhere in the middle. The track comes full circle in its just-polyrhythmic-enough final minute, powerfully positive and twice as danceable as the duo gets anywhere else.
They expand 2 Tone’s world further with three guest features from experimental luminaries. Ryuichi Sakamoto brings down the mood for a spell on the dark and dissonant “Lal,” while Arto Lindsay sings his own lyrics and adds guitar effects to the anaesthetized “Green Gold Grey,” which sounds as though it’s being breathed into the ear. Each of the cameo tracks is a success in its own right, even if they somewhat distract from an otherwise focused experiment. The Devendra Banhart-murmured “A Kind of Love Song,” especially, feels like an intrusion from a different album. It’s graceful and contemplative, but as a piano ballad in the midst of Hasunuma and U-zhaan’s formless exploration, it’s out of place.
That’s not to say that the balanced partnership at 2 Tone’s center is necessarily incongruent with pop-leaning songwriting, and the album’s best highlight attests to this. On the penultimate track, “Dryer,” Hasunuma gives a warm and friendly lead vocal performance—his only singing on the album—while U-zhaan does triple duty, contributing horn and acoustic guitar on top of his usual percussion. The song shifts accordingly, from a calmly strolling chorus to a bridge of over-caffeinated 16th notes and back again. And then, after all the push and pull, it finds a peaceful resolution. | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Birdwatcher Records | March 26, 2018 | 7.4 | 55bcfed4-4c03-43f9-abc5-843ba52268cb | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Recorded in Los Angeles in 1957, the jazz legend’s classic album—the first to use the now-standard saxophone-bass-drums trio—looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence. | Recorded in Los Angeles in 1957, the jazz legend’s classic album—the first to use the now-standard saxophone-bass-drums trio—looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence. | Sonny Rollins: Way Out West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonny-rollins-way-out-west/ | Way Out West | Sonny Rollins doesn’t fear the familiar. He’s persistently original, yes—those lucky enough to see him live before his deteriorating health prevented him from playing remember a “limitless” improvisor, one of jazz’s best. It only takes a cursory listen to what we now know were his final albums, the live Road Shows series, to hear how inventive the now 87-year-old jazz legend could be. Even now, unable to blow the horn that made him a colossus, he told Vulture last year, “I can’t get rid of [musical ideas]. It’s just a little trial that I have to endure.”
But even in his last concerts, he was still performing some of the same standards he injected so much life into throughout his seven-decade career—including those that appear on 1957’s Way Out West, an album that looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence. The project, one of Rollins’ canonical recordings, has gotten a 60th-anniversary reissue in the form of a two-LP box set which includes previously unreleased outtakes and some in-studio dialogue. (A digital version is also available.) All these years after its release, Way Out West still shows Rollins’ unique ability to revere his musical heritage without losing his edge. Old songs, new sound.
At 26, the New York native was visiting California for the first time while on tour with drummer Max Roach. When Contemporary Records asked him to put together an album during his visit, the inspiration was obvious: the wide open spaces of Los Angeles and the Hollywood Westerns Rollins had grown up watching. “I was really living out my ‘Lone Ranger’ thing,” he remembered later.
There’s certainly a literal level to the album’s Western theme: “I’m an Old Cowhand,” Johnny Mercer’s 1936 ode to city slickers, “Wagon Wheels,” and “Way Out West,” an original by Rollins, all offer some degree of country shuffle and even a few woodblock horse-hoof clip-clops from drummer Shelly Manne. The cover, an instantly iconic study in subverting kitsch (Rollins had an explicit interest in the oft-overlooked history of black cowboys), shows him heeled with his horn instead of a Winchester.
But this half-concept album gets more significant inspiration from the idea of the frontier than from shootouts and Stetsons. This was the first jazz album to use a saxophone-bass-drums trio, a now-established ensemble that Rollins concocted to allow for a more liberated approach to improvisation. Without the accompaniment of a piano or guitar, suddenly even the most conventional song is just wide-open space. It didn’t hurt that the rhythm section Rollins assembled was bassist Ray Brown and Manne, two of the best of their time, and ever.
Everyone in the band had other studio dates and gigs, so there wasn’t time to rehearse before the now-legendary 3 a.m. session. They started with a standard, Duke Ellington’s “Solitude”—though it would have been familiar to everyone in the band, the original liner notes suggest that Rollins might have supplied the lyrics. (In some of the audio from the reissue, he’s reciting “I’m an Old Cowhand.”) You can hear them, somehow, in his opening notes, which swoon without schlock: “In my solitude, you haunt me…” He’s both vocalist and accompanist, never straying too far from the melody while garnishing it with soaring, distinctively Sonny arpeggios and squawking, virtuosic runs. It’s a feat of evocative improvisation, and was effectively the warm-up for the session itself.
From the driving hard bop of “Come, Gone” to the pleasantly off-kilter title track, the band seems to exist as one organism: Sonny and Ray in seamless contrapuntal motion supported by deep, driving swing from Manne. Their collective restraint leaves plenty of breathing room, both for each other and for the listener, which helps temper each tune’s inherent sentimentality. Rollins’ brash tone, somehow bluesy and sensitive and modern at once, also adds some acidity without ever losing the thread of the original composition. The same is true of “There Is No Greater Love,” where he lopes along with an easy lyricism that’s punctuated by asymmetrical gurgling and emphatic honking, giving the timeless melody a gutsy new twist.
The best part is that the listener might as well be in the middle of the studio: You have Rollins on your left, his horn wailing in your ear, and Brown and Manne on your right, each bass rattle and heat-of-the-moment vocalization jumping out of the speaker. It’s a remarkably intimate, casual aesthetic for such timeless performances—add some applause and it could be live. The instrumentation may be an exercise in understatement, but Way Out West’s 45 minutes go by all too quickly once its beautiful details begin to emerge. Brown’s beefy, fluid basslines are worth a separate listen, as are Manne’s almost imperceptible embellishments.
With Rollins’ melodies, there’s something new to hear every time. The variations in each song—fleshed out with the newly released alternate takes—offer an ever-more-complete portrait of an artist who was completely earnest in what became a lifelong quest for authentic expression. The listener is privy to ideas being worked out, experiments taking place, and mostly, endless creativity. There’s the sense that the band could have kept playing forever, if only they’d had enough tape. | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Craft | February 17, 2018 | 8.8 | 55bd51f6-8746-4a15-9fa9-c02f67f1bdb9 | Natalie Weiner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natalie-weiner/ | |
The rapper, singer, and designer envisions transition as the ultimate creative moment on a release that transforms her racing thoughts into crackling electricity. | The rapper, singer, and designer envisions transition as the ultimate creative moment on a release that transforms her racing thoughts into crackling electricity. | Kilo Kish: Mothe EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kilo-kish-mothe-ep/ | Mothe EP | One of the key tricks that video game designers use to facilitate immersion is to beautify lag. Using a range of visual and audio cues, games fill gaps in play with skeletal but engrossing ephemera: animations, jingles, loading screens. These transitional sequences are virtually never the highlight of playing a game, but they epitomize the ways in which change can be connective and catalytic, keeping established spaces alive as old forms fade. Savoring the uncertainty of change, rapper and singer Kilo Kish envisions transition as the ultimate creative moment on Mothe. It’s a snapshot of her ideas in motion and at rest.
Kilo Kish has been in transition since she debuted. In a 2012 profile she described rap as a “little art project” intended to serve as a stopgap between graduating from design school and finding a job. The little art project has remained small as planned, but only relative to her extensive list of interests. Between collaborations and tours with Vince Staples, Gorillaz, and the Internet, she has designed clothing, modeled, built art installations, and edited a design blog. The range and quality of her music have evolved tremendously during this period, but music has never been Kilo’s day job or even her second job. Her quirky 2016 album Reflections in Real Time attempted to make sense of all that life outside of music but ended up sounding tedious and stilted.
Mothe recalibrates. Building from the stream-of-consciousness style that characterizes most of her catalog, Kilo Kish turns her racing thoughts into crackling electricity. Preceded by an installation and a video game interface (also titled Mothe) that debuted earlier this year, the EP is a concentration of Kilo’s various artistic instincts.
Her voice is still a lithe, intimate murmur, but here it expands and condenses, splits and reconstitutes, taking on new dynamism and zest. Her verses on “Like Honey” zig-zag around a wall of pounding bass and strobing synths, cutting oblique paths and images. “I fly into the night from the restroom/They fold my napkin like a crane/I’ll powder my face/Go ’head and have it your way,” she sings. There’s no narrative here, but her details suggest many plausible scenarios: an embittered couple bickering over appetizers at some posh noodle house, maybe, or an exasperated speed dater slipping into the restroom for a meltdown. This expressionist approach allows Kilo’s writing to take on shapes better suited to her voice. Where Reflections relied on transparency that verged on oversharing, Mothe embraces haze and elusion. On “Void,” her casual singing staggers behind pulsating synthesizers, highlighting her flows, which can be hard to detect given her conversational way of rapping. Awash in gothy synths on “Prayer,” Kilo’s soft timbre warps the sting of self-deprecating zingers like “Somewhere in the discourse/Don’t you see me wrapped up in the wrong cause?” and “We’ll disappear, for sure.” It’s unclear whether she’s resigned, or bemused, or indifferent. She could be alluding to online debates, or climate change, or nothing—she doesn’t clarify. But as “Prayer” shifts into an amelodic whorl of spoken word and whirring distortion, that ambiguity becomes defiance. “I laugh in the dark/You search the ground in the dark,” she taunts.
Kilo’s abstraction and ambivalence take their most beautiful shape on “Elegance.” As Ray Brady’s centrifugal production churns around a distorted bass riff that swallows every other sound, she breezily raps and sings through the calm and the storm. Her verses are indistinct, but the way the chorus bubbles up is cathartic. Ultimately, what’s thrilling about Mothe is that it feels like both a capstone on Kilo’s days as a cloud rapper and a template for her future—a sublime moment of lag before she reaches the next level. | 2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Human Re Sources | September 12, 2018 | 7.7 | 55be72f5-4a80-426a-9e5e-9bb999cec64b | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Alabama rapper’s second project of the year is a mixtape-length “First Day Out” that serves as a timestamp of this moment in his developing career. | The Alabama rapper’s second project of the year is a mixtape-length “First Day Out” that serves as a timestamp of this moment in his developing career. | NoCap: The Hood Dictionary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nocap-the-hood-dictionary/ | The Hood Dictionary | The Hood Dictionary arrived on streaming services less than 24 hours before NoCap’s release from Mobile County Metro Jail. In September, the Alabama rapper turned himself in to police on charges of allegedly shooting into an occupied residence. He marked his surrender in much the same way at the time, inverting a popular rap trope with “First Day In.” The song, which now appears as the penultimate track on the new project, helps explain why NoCap has begun to cut through in a packed lane of melodic rappers: It’s both deeply personal and invitingly vague, somber and triumphant in equal measure. He sings to open the verse, “Turned myself in in Off-White/Tell myself that it's alright.”
A decade removed from Gucci Mane’s “First Day Out,” the celebratory freedom song has become a rap-industry standard, an opportunity for artists to address their fans and capitalize on increased attention. For NoCap, The Hood Dictionary is a mixtape-length “First Day Out,” as he elaborates on traumatic experiences in Mobile, the circumstances that landed him in jail, and his wins in spite of it all. And while the project—NoCap’s second full-length of the year—is an effective showcase of his developing strengths as a singer and storyteller, it primarily serves as a timestamp of this moment in his career rather than as a significant step forward in his catalog.
Most listeners outside the region likely first heard NoCap on Lil Baby’s Street Gossip mixtape in November 2018. The two rappers share a twangy vocal register and a love of guitar loops, but NoCap takes the latter to an extreme. Seven of The Hood Dictionary’s 16 songs feature prominent guitar melodies; the results are among some of the project’s most memorable moments, allowing NoCap to find the pocket where he’s clearly most comfortable. “Still Me” is a skillful combination of confessional and catchy writing, “Take Care” is a rare instance of carefree joy amidst the pain songs, and “Heaven Gates” offers a slowed-down moment of introspection: “Mark ain’t never comin’ home, he tried to kill the police/I know the police comin’ home if he ever kill me.”
At times, the chords and riffs begin to feel forced. Towards the end of the project, NoCap croons about “F-150s and Durangos” on the hook of “Country Boy,” a strange song that feels generic and cliché in its references. Similarly, the punchlines that have become NoCap’s lyrical calling card are inconsistent. For every entertaining play on words (“Pissin’ haters off, my next chain gon’ be yellow” on “What You Know”) there’s a phrase that falls flat (“My bitch ain’t O’Neal, but I really hope she kill [Shaquille] for me” on “Take Care”). NoCap is capable of making straightforward come-up bangers, “Bankroll” being the strongest example here, but he’s best as a cuttingly honest narrator. When he drops his voice to a low mumble to admit, “I made the wrong decision, they put my sister in jail,” it hits harder than any double entendre.
As far as rappers who sing go, NoCap is currently somewhere in the middle of the pack. Over the past year, he’s shown glimmers of solidifying his own distinct voice and moving past the Lil Baby comparisons. On The Hood Dictionary, that comes through clearest in the moments when he’s eulogizing his friend Fred, raising his voice up a few notes to belt out a hook, or describing memories that couldn’t belong to anyone else. But the project feels like a lateral move from The Backend Child, released in May. Even its peaks don’t provide much new information about NoCap or resonate in a way that feels like they’re meant to last into the next decade. | 2019-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 5, 2019 | 6.5 | 55befc63-3765-4abd-94ba-8cd1d6ff37e4 | Ben Dandridge-Lemco | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-dandridge-lemco/ | |
Tyondai Braxton and his distinct vocals have moved on, but Battles remain committed to making complex pop-prog sound like fun. Gary Numan guests. | Tyondai Braxton and his distinct vocals have moved on, but Battles remain committed to making complex pop-prog sound like fun. Gary Numan guests. | Battles: Gloss Drop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15469-gloss-drop/ | Gloss Drop | Let's get one thing out of the way: Gloss Drop shouldn't really be compared to its predecessor, Mirrored. The sole Battles record to feature Tyondai Braxton's digitally cartoonified vocals, Mirrored is now consigned to brilliant one-off status in the Battles catalog; Gloss Drop, created after Braxton left the group entirely, is more of a refinement and expansion of Battles' early work. In a way, for fans, the loss of Braxton was the best thing that could have happened to Battles. It meant they couldn't record a true follow up, which might then pale (or just come off as more of the same) next to one of the most distinctive and unexpected debut LPs of the 21st century. Battles could have recorded an all-instrumental album in the Mirrored mold, or they could have drafted in another singer to try and imitate Braxton's crucial contribution. Instead, they forced themselves, having lost their most immediately striking and divisive element, to move in a new and potentially radical direction. So the important questions with Gloss Drop become, "Is this new direction interesting?" and "Have Battles made it thrilling?"
The answers are: "Yes," and "More often than you might guess." Mirrored was an album that made its impact via complexity and speed and wild humor, a sound that owed as much to the orchestral zaniness of classic cartoon soundtracks as the grimmer heads-down virtuosity of the metal and math-rock bands in which the Battles members made their names. Not only could these guys pull off these wild instrumental zigzags at high velocity, they made ultra-tricky, computer-assisted pop-prog sound like fun. For their circumstances-dictated new direction, Battles have slowed their roll a bit, foregrounding both the pop and propulsive qualities of the music rather than its can-we-top-ourselves inventiveness. It still sounds like devious fun, but the sort you get from a band tweaking audience expectations.
Gloss Drop is the most ride-the-groove record Battles have ever made, owing plenty to both the straight-forwardness of house and rock and the crazed syncopations of soca and dancehall, where Mirrored's whole point could seem like leaving listeners breathless with this-could-go-anywhere prog invention. And considering Battles are possibly the tightest man-machine unit going now that LCD Soundsystem are dead, you can imagine how hot these grooves burn, and how meticulously they're constructed, their most audacious attempt yet to make the line between "programmed" and "played" completely invisible.
Of course I say these two albums shouldn't be compared, but that won't stop most people from doing just that. Inevitably the starker differences between the two will leap right out on first listen, but if you're worried about a complete makeover, Gloss Drop still does sound an awful lot like Battles. There's the same blurring until you can't be sure what instrument is responsible for which melodic or rhythmic element of the mix: Are those steel drums all over this record, or a guitar processed to sound that way, or some sort of "Caribbean" software patch? There are still the same surging moments when you're reminded, for all the band's post-human rhythmic complexity, what a great rock drummer John Stanier remains. There's still the sense of thrill that comes from music where any element coming loose would mean everything falls apart, and there's the surprise that music this fussed over can still hit so hard.
In a way, that's been the constant in their career, and there's often the feeling here that Battles haven't forgotten their pre-Tyondai days, where they seemed to be applying the hyper-detailed structures of math-rock to the feel of minimal techno. Battles' early EPs offered one of those shouldn't-work-but-does hybrids: prog rock, with all its furrow-browed instrumental digressions, that still somehow follows the straight-line pulse of dance music. The difference is that they learned how to be a (far) left-field pop band on Mirrored, and there probably wouldn't be much thrill in ditching that just to look backward. Though the tone remains gleefully plastic and mechanical, Gloss Drop is less forbiddingly dense, chilly, and opaque than those instrumental EPs. "Sweetie and Shag", with appropriately dream-pop-esque vocals from Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino, is the most tender song the band's ever recorded, not a praise term you would have previously applied to Battles. If those early records resembled an auditory obstacle course, this is more of a playground, strange but inviting. Not for nothing does so much of Gloss Drop resemble carnival music, both in the "rides and games" and "Caribbean parade" senses of the word.
Sometimes this slave-to-the-rhythm approach doesn't quite come off, as on "Futura", where trad dance-rock is just given a frosting of virtuosity. There are moments like this on Gloss Drop where you remember Battles are capable of so much more than trad anything. And there are also times when the joyous silliness that runs through the record becomes oppressive, like the band's hammering you with the fact that serious music can also be super whimsical. But when it all comes together, as it does more often than not, it works on every level. "Ice Cream", with vocals from dance producer Matias Aguayo, is both the band's biggest and best pop moment since "Atlas", with a real disco bounce, but also totally perverse in its construction, like a mutated Phoenix single. And on "My Machines", they even call down that old (literal) tech metal thunder, with the added bonus of a big drama-queen performance from Gary Numan, one of their spiritual fathers in linking electronics with rock. Despite all the guests, and the nods to global pop, Gloss Drop will still be best enjoyed by groove heads, whether they come from the rock or dance worlds, but if you worried Battles would run out of surprises on album two, who knew they'd find common ground between post-punk devotees, Yes fans, and the children of UK funky? | 2011-06-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | June 7, 2011 | 7.4 | 55c0f459-997b-46bd-b8b7-2065c95bee44 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Breakout UK producer Tim Reaper and his collaborator Comfort Zone convey the power and possibility of jungle. | Breakout UK producer Tim Reaper and his collaborator Comfort Zone convey the power and possibility of jungle. | Tim Reaper / Comfort Zone: Banoffee Pies White Label Series 01 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-reaper-comfort-zone-banoffee-pies-white-label-series-01/ | Banoffee Pies White Label Series 01 | Spend a minute listening to jungle and you’ll feel its torrential power right away: the immediacy of whiplashing breakbeats; the incessant drive of sinuous melodies; the triumphant integration of Black music, from jazz to ragga to techno to hip hop. The genre was in constant dialogue with everything else in the “hardcore continuum” during the early-to-mid ’90s, and the consequent expansion of UK dance music’s boundaries was fast-paced and exhilarating.
Banoffee Pies White Label Series 01 is a mighty 12" because its four tracks avoid lazy, nostalgic rehashing; these songs may feature hallmarks of classic jungle and drum and bass, but there’s no cutting corners. This makes sense given the presence of Tim Reaper, a prolific and remarkably consistent producer from London. He’s a real head—check his YouTube uploads—and is something of a poster boy for contemporary jungle, having managed to crossover to audiences less jungle-inclined. He’s joined here by previous collaborator Comfort Zone, and together they showcase a masterclass in jungle production.
Opener “All the Time” shows off their chops: Across six minutes, Reaper and Comfort Zone utilize the classic Think Break to anchor a song ornamented with glossy synth chords, fluttering woodwinds, and soulful vocal samples—pure decadence. Elements constantly arrive and disappear, an exchange that keeps everything light. Such airiness is key to the song’s simultaneously loose and linear sense of movement; when heady bass or flecks of punchy vox enter the proceedings, it feels both subtle and surprising. There’s a finesse to the introduction of synth blips, a hard-edged beat turn, or a fake-out ambient move. As the song progresses, a joy accumulates in hearing everything in flux: It feels alive on a microscopic level.
While “All the Time” thrives because of its unrelenting sense of possibility, “Touchdown” finds unexpected beauty in its offbeat linkages. There’s a dash of humor to it: The producers utilize the oft-sampled loon, and its reverberant warble primes the listener for the textural and emotional similarities between it and the rest of the instrumentation, from the psychedelic ebb-and-flow of synths to the resonant cries of vocal samples, even the stuttering of the breakbeat’s snare rolls. Reaper and Comfort Zone use excess economically, treating every sound as a piece of a grand puzzle. And with “Touchdown,” the loon sample goes beyond mere decoration—it’s the lens through which the entire song comes into focus.
The back-and-forth synth melody in “Pacific” serves a similar purpose. The dotted rhythm meanders while the song’s atmospheric passages drift aimlessly, yet all this is set straight with an abrasive and pummeling breakbeat. When the synth melody reappears in the second half, it brings the type of clarity you find after painful soul-searching. “Sherpa,” on the other hand, serves straight-up vibes. While its brooding vocal samples and alien synths have a retro-futuristic aura, it’s really a showcase for the breakbeat itself—every crisp snap and hi-hat shuffle is magnified, and the song often feels like a jazzy drum solo. It’s a representation of what Reaper and Comfort Zone do best on BPWL01: They prove each element counts by finding excitement in every single sound.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | July 16, 2021 | 7.6 | 55c63055-59d2-40b0-a24b-6cdbb01126bb | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
In an underground scene where guitar bands tend to be one trick ponies, pummeling punk duo Urochromes’ unpredictability lends them a rare star quality. | In an underground scene where guitar bands tend to be one trick ponies, pummeling punk duo Urochromes’ unpredictability lends them a rare star quality. | Urochromes: Night Bully EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22779-night-bully-ep/ | Night Bully EP | Urochrome, singular, is the pigment that determines the color of urine. Urochromes, plural, are the pummeling duo from Western Massachusetts that released a handful of noisy hardcore platters over the past two years on underground punk labels. Frontman Jackie Jackieboy commands attention with his rabid, yammering screams. Dick Riddick is the shredder, responsible for solos and the band’s massive, gnarly guitar tone. Their drummer is (literally) a machine. On their first release, 2015’s Get in Line 4 Mental Decline, Jackie shout-sang about pissing in a bottle in his room, and then, pissing on his best friend. At a glance, that appears to be the ceiling for Urochromes—fun, volatile, rapid-fire scatological punk. With their new EP Night Bully, the duo and their robot drummer seek paths beyond hardcore’s aesthetic limitations.
The title track begins with crackling guitars mingling with deep, burbling electronics. Jackie forgoes a scream, focusing all his intensity into an aggressive, rhythmic whisper. The title “Night Bully” suggests intimidation, and there is definitely a posturing pushiness to its narrative. “I am the new muscle/Everyone needs a secret hustle,” Jackie notes, menacingly, before prodding further: “You should know that/You should really know that.” He repeatedly demands that you “be the uromancer”—someone who divines the future by reading urine bubbles. It’s the only overt reference to piss, and it’s puerile, yes, but it's also an incomprehensible, psychedelic call to action.
“Night Bully”’s overall tone isn’t unprecedented for Urochromes. The band had already been working with drum machines, and their obsession with industrial punk acts like Chrome came through loud and clear on their 2015 cover of “Chromosome Damage.” Jackie’s whispers take that aesthetic into new territory. The EP’s closing track, however, comes out of left field. The Northampton, Massachusetts-based coldwave duo Boy Harsher deliver a remix of “Night Bully” that renders the source material unrecognizable. A smooth, beatific synthesizer melody floats over a pulsing drone as a somber Jae Matthews croons the same words Jackie had just been aggressively whispering. It’s a wholly unexpected turn, but the synth pop jam shares Urochromes’ sonic DNA. There are familiar stabs of darkness that come through—demonic voices and the occasional squeal of guitar. It’s a welcome note to end on.
The record’s entire A-side, by contrast, shows Urochromes at the height of their hardcore powers. Riddick’s hooks are polished on “Confront Ya,” and the drum machine ratchets up the urgency. Jackie ladles bile on his target—someone who boasts about finding success while outlining their plans to climb the ladder. “You want to crush me with your boot,” he observes before bellowing with disgust, “You want to move to L.A.!” Jackie’s frustration holds sway on “My Disposition”—his disposition, apparently, is that he always manages to blow a relationship before it even gets off the ground. That’s the nature of Night Bully—they’re frustrated, and they’re lashing out.
Urochromes’ new one is about 11 minutes long (if you don’t count the second Boy Harsher remix that’s offered as a digital bonus), and within those time constraints, they build an emotionally complex and sonically elaborate world. This chaotic, always-fluctuating, heavy music undercuts self-consciousness, bitterness, anger, and an unsettling self-confidence. It’s a record that easily lends itself to shoving or dancing (or, you know, both) before arriving at a shimmering, uncharacteristic come-down. Given how ambitious these 11 minutes are, it’s impossible to predict where they go from here. In an underground scene where guitar bands tend be one trick ponies, Urochromes’ unpredictability lends them a rare star quality. | 2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | February 1, 2017 | 7.8 | 55cd3ee7-0675-4c34-bcd8-6ff95e5c84f7 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Carissa’s Wierd alum makes her first foray into crowd-pleasing synth pop in an intriguing collaboration with Seattle-based producer SYML. | Carissa’s Wierd alum makes her first foray into crowd-pleasing synth pop in an intriguing collaboration with Seattle-based producer SYML. | Jenn Champion: Single Rider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jenn-champion-single-rider/ | Single Rider | Allow Jennifer Champion to reintroduce herself. Since releasing 2014’s Cool Choices as S, the former Carissa’s Wierd co-vocalist has made several changes to her music and persona. In 2015, she announced via Facebook that she would no longer go by “Jenn Ghetto” (a moniker that dated back to her Carissa’s Wierd days), apologizing for “the anti-black racism i perpetuate using the word ‘ghetto.’” Now known as Jenn Champion, a more search-friendly moniker than S, she’s started making synth pop. Her third record for Hardly Art, Single Rider, is the result of a collaboration with Seattle-based producer SYML, as well as her realization that, as she put it, “the record I wanted to make was... a cross between Drake and Billy Joel.”
Single Rider doesn’t actually sound like Drake or Billy Joel, but despite the stylistic left turn it represents, Champion laid the groundwork for this new direction on Cool Choices’ drum-machine-led “Tell Me,” as well as on her 2016 single “No One.” While those songs added new instrumental flourishes to her spare, confessional songwriting, Single Rider goes full-bore pop, to the extent that it barely resembles anything in Champion’s back catalog. The album’s sparkling synths and airy atmosphere are reminiscent of a similar transition made by Minneapolis duo Now, Now, who traded emo for more synthetic sounds on this year’s Saved.
Mainstream-leaning synth pop typically emphasizes the kind of melodies that carry the promise of marketability, so it follows that Single Rider is Champion’s most accessible and immediate work yet. (The fact that the opening synth line of “You Knew” recalls the McDonald’s theme song is an unfortunate coincidence.) The dancefloor spangle of single “O.M.G. (I’m All Over It)” and the laid-back, effervescent pop of “Mainline” are representative of the album’s palatability, even as Champion herself seemingly acknowledges her newly sync-friendly approach elsewhere on the record: “We’re all trying to be real/But we need that mass appeal,” she sings on “Holding On,” her voice floating over handclaps and creating night-drive vibes.
Luckily, Champion keeps her sense of perspective intact: Amid lyrics about love and longing that are native to the genre she’s working in, she manages to incorporate some impassioned (if vague) statements that speak to widespread societal frustrations. “They’re gonna push you out/They’re gonna hold you back,” she proclaims on “O.M.G.,” imploring the listener to “fight the things they do.” “You Knew” finds Champion avowing, “We’re all gonna break this shit wide open/And make it clear again/That we don’t owe you anything.”
Single Rider marks a watershed moment for Champion, even if she hasn’t entirely figured out what to do with her new sound. Style sometimes trumps substance here, and now that she and SYML have mastered the former element, establishing a unique lyrical point of view could help her distinguish herself from the ever-growing synth-pop pack if she chooses to keep making this kind of music. But the album shines brightest when Champion returns to her previous, more organic sound: “Bleed” has a Figure 8-esque skip to it that suits Champion’s anguished lyrics, while the simple piano of “Hustle” builds to a stirring vocal climax as she reaches into her upper register and repeats, “Hang on.” Champion has been doing that for upwards of two decades now, and she still hasn’t exhausted her range as a songwriter and a stylist. | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | July 19, 2018 | 6.8 | 55d703ba-3be8-43f3-9121-a9ac09f4b129 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Faithfully recreating the music of slave organizers, freedom fighters, and abolitionists, a recent compilation sheds light on the politics of collective liberation at the root of 19th-century American folk and bluegrass. | Faithfully recreating the music of slave organizers, freedom fighters, and abolitionists, a recent compilation sheds light on the politics of collective liberation at the root of 19th-century American folk and bluegrass. | Various Artists: Songs of Slavery and Emancipation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-songs-of-slavery-and-emancipation/ | Songs of Slavery and Emancipation | Ending slavery in the United States took much more than a civil war. Decades of conflict between enslaved Africans and white supremacist slaveowners culminated on the battlefield, yet a prolonged ideological struggle set the stage for emancipation even before the American Revolution. Resistance on and off the plantation often took the form of song, either to inspire rebellion or shift public opinion. A new compilation, Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, restores this revolutionary spirit through the music of slave organizers, freedom fighters, and abolitionists.
Released alongside a book and documentary, the double album portrays abolition as a shared language connecting those in bondage with escaped and freed Black Americans. Producer Mat Callahan pieced together solo and ensemble arrangements using archival lyric sheets, tablatures, and oral histories. More than 50 musicians recorded 31 tracks on a single microphone, primarily inside a Kentucky chapel; Callahan claims this environment fostered a “natural sound” devoid of technological intervention.
“Given the sheer volume of music created by Africans held in captivity, fugitives, and their abolitionist allies throughout the Atlantic World, it is not an exaggeration to claim that ‘American’ folk music was forged in the crucible of slavery,” writes historian Robin D.G. Kelley in the liner notes. Kelley critiques how historians downplay enslaved people’s contributions to emancipation, from withholding labor to overthrowing their masters. As such, these compositions undo whitewashed legacies of American folk and bluegrass, rooting them in a politics of collective liberation.
Gospel and Sacred Harp singers coalesce over 19th-century strings and percussion, producing a rich, challenging listen that rewards quiet contemplation. Insurrectionary chants revive vernacular, creolized languages to recall historic slave rebellions (“You can’t keep the world from moverin’ round, nor Nat Turner from gainin’ ground”) or evoke memories of lynched insurgents Jean Saint Malo and “Uncle Gabriel” Prosser. Here, voices of Dr. Kathy Bullock and Givonna Joseph soar between rhythmic cadences and raucous choruses, accompanied only by hand claps and shakers. Meanwhile, harmonious spirituals like “My Father, How Long?” demonstrate how enslaved people sang to bide their time, just as in prison.
Traces of the Black radical tradition hint at broader leftist themes. The cover shows communist artist Charles White’s powerful sketch of a matriarch, Move on Up a Little Higher (1961), named after a Mahalia Jackson tune. “Recognition March of the Independence of Hayti,” an instrumental by Philadelphia freeman Francis Johnson, signals transatlantic solidarity with the Haitian Revolution. Likewise, battle hymn “The Enlisted Men” honors escaped men who joined the Union Army, enacting what W.E.B. Du Bois deemed the nation’s first “general strike.” For these soldiers, the bell does not toll; rather, the “trumpets sound.”
Songwriters of what Callahan calls the “abolitionist playbook,” including fugitive novelist William Wells Brown and New York Committee of Vigilance secretary David Ruggles, penned anti-slavery songs condemning the Southern aristocracy. Underground Railroad conductor Joshua McCarter Simpson critiqued the hypocrisy of Christians enslaving human life in “To the White People of America” and “The Voices of Six Hundred Thousand Nominally Free,” adapted from the French revolutionary anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Kelley claims Simpson’s music inspired Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, whose activism necessitated the war. Yet while women’s voices feature prominently in the recordings, their emancipatory contributions are less evident in lyrical themes outside the penultimate “Woman’s Rights.”
Records of slavery remain scarce due to slaveowners’ erasure of African culture, and today’s conservatives continue this political lineage in suppressing marginalized voices. As such, Simpson’s “Song of the ‘Aliened’ American,” adapted from “America (My Country ’Tis of Thee),” resonates as a psalm of the subaltern. Simpson replaces the final line, “Let freedom ring,” with “Our chains must break,” positioning uncritical patriotism as the enemy of true liberation. | 2022-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Jalopy | August 18, 2022 | 8 | 55dc9db5-5d39-40c9-a21a-2ac9447a7b37 | Billie Anania | https://pitchfork.com/staff/billie-anania/ | |
Jeff Buckley died before completing his second album. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, compiling those sessions, gives a glimpse into an erratic mind that could be too mercurial for its own good. | Jeff Buckley died before completing his second album. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, compiling those sessions, gives a glimpse into an erratic mind that could be too mercurial for its own good. | Jeff Buckley: Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22317-sketches-for-my-sweetheart-the-drunk/ | Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk | Jeff Buckley would be 50 years old this year, and it’s hard not to think about what he’d be up to right now. As an adopted son of New York City’s downtown art scene in the 1990s, he could be wailing truth to power, like Patti Smith. As someone who hated how the early internet infringed on his privacy, he could have turned into an elusive icon, like Fiona Apple. A virtuoso guitarist with perfect pitch and a keen ear for improvisation, he may have leaned into Los Angeles’ embrace of modern jazz, jamming with Thundercat and Kamasi Washington. As a punk purist who was drawn to severe sounds and radical ideas toward the end of his life, maybe he would have turned into an anti-establishment musical figurehead, like Steve Albini. He could have coupled electronics with progressive politics and the voice of a fallen angel, like ANOHNI. Or, as an acolyte of George Carlin and David Letterman who was known for his outlandishly comical stage banter, maybe he would have given up music altogether and tried his luck at biting comedy. Would he have been excited by the way his version of “Hallelujah” became such a ubiquitous hymn, or repulsed by its overuse? Then again, without his tragic story as ballast, would “Hallelujah” have ever seen a resurgence at all?
Such what-ifs are inevitable when an artist dies too soon, but fruitless daydreaming is especially tantalizing when it comes to Buckley. His talents were so limitless, his range so vast, and his explorations of them so inchoate. In his 30 years, he lived a head-spinning number of musical lives, as chronicled in David Browne’s essential biography, Dream Brother. Growing up in Orange County in the ’70s, Buckley was obsessed with the prog theatrics of Styx, Yes, and Genesis. In his early days as a professional musician, he played with reggae and hair metal bands. During that time, he paid the bills as a guitarist and songwriter for hire, creating hacky tracks for a variety of L.A. up-and-comers, from R&B crooners to precious singer-songwriters. He made a proper name for himself in tiny Manhattan clubs through ecstatic solo covers of everyone from Nina Simone to Van Morrison to Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Such fluidity would be unique in any era, but especially in the early ’90s, when the internet had yet to fully flatten barriers between styles, Buckley’s musical interests were freakishly broad. At a 1993 show, he mimicked Khan’s chanting vocals over the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff as a delightfully bemused audience tried to take it all in. Following the impromptu mashup, he quipped: “I’m a ridiculous person.”
This ridiculousness miraculously came together on 1994’s Grace, an album that combined psychedelia, Led Zeppelin-style hard rock, shimmering pop, torch balladry, and a hymn originally written in the 16th century. Released in the middle of grunge mania, it was an ethereal tonic. Grace was not an instant hit by any means—the record sold 2,000 copies in its opening week and only went platinum at the beginning of this year. But Buckley’s label, the Sony-owned Columbia, home to legends like Dylan and Springsteen, put a ton of money into the project nonetheless, sending the singer around the globe with his band on tour to help kick off what they hoped to be a decades-long career. Though he was signed to a major label, Buckley was forever mindful of upholding the sacredness of his music and avoiding the evils of commercialism—necessary objectives at a time when alternative culture was being streamlined by corporations at a breakneck pace. His artsier tendencies sometimes clashed with Columbia’s bottom line, but in general he was given the room—and cash—to make his own choices, with the label figuring they’d eventually recoup on their investment later on.
Buckley was in a privileged position, and he undoubtedly enjoyed the runway he was being offered, but being associated with a global conglomerate weighed on him. He was a punk at heart, after all. He admired the way Kurt Cobain was able to navigate the industry before he killed himself, and hung a photo of the Nirvana frontman in his bus while touring behind Grace. And there was another artist whose battles with commerce were always in the back of Buckley’s mind: his father Tim. Buckley barely knew his dad, but he was well aware of Tim’s legacy as a risk-taking singer-songwriter in the ’60s and ’70s who was chewed up by the business before he died of a heroin overdose in 1975 at age 28. The son was adamant not to follow his father’s path, going so far as to poke fun at such tragic rock‘n’roll mythologies onstage. In this way, Buckley wanted his art to capture all the romantic wonders of ’60s pop while maintaining the knowing cynicism of his own era—a tough balance even without a genealogy filled with alcoholism, mental instability, and dire misfortune.
So under increased pressure from his label, Buckley began nursing a contrarian streak and attempted to trade in Grace’s gorgeous softness for something spikier and confrontational with his second album. There were troubles from the start. The initial rehearsal sessions with his band at the end of 1995 didn’t go anywhere. Soon after, his drummer quit. Columbia started throwing around potential producers to try to get the album on track, radio-friendly names like Butch Vig, Brendan O’Brien, Steve Lillywhite, or even Brian Eno. Buckley had a different idea: erstwhile Television frontman Tom Verlaine. This was years before the Strokes would put Verlaine’s band—and its scuzzy postpunk lineage—back in the spotlight, and the producer was about as far as you could get from a typical hitmaker. Which is exactly what Buckley wanted.
In the summer of 1996, Buckley and his band—including an inexperienced new drummer—recorded their first session with Verlaine in New York. Nobody was happy with the results and, that October, Buckley wrote in his journal: “I’m going to lay off the band.” Instead, he replaced one new drummer with another and continued to work on his in-progress songs, trying to nail down the more lo-fi sound in his head, something like the blunt force of contemporary underground acts such as the Grifters, Polvo, and the Jesus Lizard. He was over the pristine untouchability of “Hallelujah.” Feeling boxed in by Manhattan, Buckley decided to follow his friends in the Grifters to Memphis, where he regrouped with his band and Verlaine for another recording session in February 1997. Once again, the experience didn’t live up to Buckley’s high standards, as he was constantly rearranging songs and tweaking lyrics in search of the right sound and feel. He was a perfectionist with an encyclopedic knowledge of rock history and a masterful musical talent; he had so many choices, and whereas that dexterity once served as a stunning resume, it was now stymying him.
After the February session, Buckley realized Verlaine was not the man to bring his album to fruition, and it was decided that Grace producer Andy Wallace would sit in the control booth when the time was right. The band went back to New York, and Buckley stayed in Memphis, in an empty shotgun shack on a nondescript block with only the house’s jumping fleas to keep him company. He continued writing, taping ideas onto his four-track recorder. Away from the stress of New York, he loosened up, playing weekly gigs at a dive bar to small crowds. His musical brain started to flow and, by the spring, he felt like he had finally figured out what his album should be. He sent demo tapes to each of the three members of his band, summoning them down to Memphis once again on May 29, 1997. But around the same time they were touching down at the airport, Buckley decided to take a spontaneous dip into the nearby Wolf River in black boots and an “Altamont” T-shirt, singing Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” while doing the backstroke. Then a barge glided by. Its current tugged Buckley underneath the water. He was gone.
Following his death, Columbia intended to cull a 10-track album from the two Verlaine sessions and release it under Buckley’s working title, My Sweetheart the Drunk, in late 1997. His mother, who took charge of her son’s estate, nixed that plan, and instead compiled a two-disc set featuring tracks from the Verlaine sessions as well as some of the four-track experiments Buckley was compiling in his small house. Either way, there’s no getting around the fact that Buckley did not want any of the recordings on Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk to be heard. Even so, it’s a fascinating document, one that lifts the lid on a prodigy’s creative process and lets us peer into an erratic mind that could be too mercurial for its own good.
From the first few seconds, it’s clear that this is not Grace 2. Opener “Sky Is a Landfill” is the closest Buckley ever came to agitprop, a denunciation of capitalist and media systems that now reads prophetic, if a bit overwritten. “Turn your head away from the screen, oh people,” he sings, “it will tell you nothing more.” Considering the proliferation of smartphones in the last 20 years—and the untruths and addictions that have come with them—it’s easy to see the warning as wisdom. Meanwhile, the music is stark and fuzzed out, like a post-hardcore version of the Smashing Pumpkins. Its angst has not aged terribly well, though, as with everything on this document, it definitely allows for future greatness—what if he changed that one wordy line, or smoothed out that other transition? Listening to an incomplete work like Sketches, it’s natural for anyone to turn into a music critic, picking at things that could be improved. And it’s reasonable to think Buckley was doing the same exact thing in Memphis.
Though he was aiming for something gritty with the new music, the general rule with Sketches goes: The less distorted the song, the better it holds up. Buckley’s voice, which could go from divinely supple to shockingly overwrought, just sounds better when it’s not trying to blow the room out. Just because he could sing anything doesn’t mean he should sing anything. “Yard of Blonde Girls,” written by a few of Buckley’s friends, is a grungy trifle that has him trying out his best Alice in Chains impression. The singer originally hid the song from Columbia thinking they might glom onto it as a single, and his reservations are founded; unlike Buckley’s best, “Yard of Blonde Girls” sounds carbon-dated to the mid-’90s. “Nightmares by the Sea” fares better, its foreboding atmosphere and quicksilver arrangement finding a midpoint between Grace’s flowering darkness and something more sinister—twist your ear just right and you can almost hear St. Vincent coming up with something similar now.
And like many tracks on Sketches, “Nightmares” can be hard to hear, filled with eerie lines like, “I’ve loved so many times and I’ve drowned them all.” But then, Buckley always used water imagery in his songs. It was an elemental fear for him, something he could not wrap his hands around. So instead of enacting some sort of death wish by wading into the Wolf River—as some have suggested—he could have been finally overcoming a phobia. As for these songs’ scenes of death, that was typical for Buckley as well. As in any important drama, the stakes were always high in Jeff Buckley songs—he fashioned himself a poet, a seer, a gothic diva. Music was his life, so echoes of death were inevitable. He was always running away from them.
“My opinion was that the guy was much better without the band,” Verlaine has said of Buckley, and Sketches bears this theory out. The most beautiful moments occur when Buckley lets himself be beautiful, something he was loathe to do after his high cheekbones, intense stare, and luscious vocals turned him into alt idol following the release of Grace. But these songs aren’t mere retreads—they’re more creepy than consoling. “Morning Theft,” “Opened Once,” and “Jewel Box” are all love songs, but they flutter, never quite landing on a resolution. They are lyrically surreal, dancing around a romantic elusiveness that fuels so much great songwriting. “New Year’s Prayer” is similarly low-key, a mantra between light and dark inspired by Buckley’s infatuation with Sufi devotional music, while “You and I” comes off like an unsettling plea from a damp forest in the middle of the night.
The song hints at yet another future for Buckley: as a Scott Walker-type ghostly menace throwing shadows around his unearthly voice forevermore. Perhaps the most surprising song on the album is “Everybody Here Wants You,” a straight-up R&B number that could sit comfortably aside hits by the era’s neo-soul stars like Maxwell and Erykah Badu. Buckley wasn’t happy with the song, thinking it was too much of a pastiche. He’s probably right, but it’s wild to think that he could toss off such genre-tourist brilliance at will.
The four-track demos, by nature, are frustratingly unfinished, and they require a special sort of imaginative listening to hear what could have been. With its bittersweet resignation and one of the better hooks Buckley ever put to tape, “I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted to Be)” has traces of a rock radio hit; “Murder Suicide Meteor Slave,” with its careening structure, ugly discordance, and self-lacerating lyrics, barely has traces of a song. One of the most intriguing demos, “Gunshot Glitter,” was wrongly turned into a bonus cut but is worth seeking out—riding a steady DIY bass thump, it hints at flamboyant dance rock decadence, as Buckley playfully deems himself a “paranoia politician diva.” The song had the potential to encapsulate all sides of Buckley’s persona—the weirdo, the hopeless lover, the charming clown—into something that could pump both hearts and bodies. It hurts to know we’ll never hear it as it was supposed to be heard.
Even if all had gone according to plan, and the finished My Sweetheart the Drunk was released at the end of 1997, it would have entered a shifting pop landscape. By then, the aggressive male wing of guitar rock was migrating from grunge to nu metal. Teen pop was on the rise, with Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls CDs flying out of chain stores while *NSYNC and Britney were still on the horizon. Hip-hop and electronic were ascendant as well, making the idea of a band of white guys with guitars seem increasingly quaint. There was an exception: Radiohead, whose frontman Thom Yorke counted Buckley as a major inspiration on his vocal style, released OK Computer the week before the singer’s death. That album pinpointed a lot of the anxiety and doom that Buckley was trying to put forward with his own music, but in a way that was epic and widescreen instead of insular and austere—it would have provided some tough competition in the howling-falsetto sweepstakes. Coldplay, perhaps Buckley’s most successful progeny, didn’t arrive until a few years later, essentially unspooling the singer’s complications for mass consumption. But, given his wariness of the mainstream and his quest to subvert expectation at every turn, it seems safe to say that Jeff would’ve hated Coldplay.
Sketches ends with a solo performance of the standard “Satisfied Mind” that Buckley sang on the radio in 1992. It’s a song about maintaining a richness of spirit that everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan to Mahalia Jackson has sung over the years, and he does it justice. “When it comes my time,” he sings, “I’ll leave this old world with a satisfied mind.” But in the context of this release—and the tragedy intertwined with it—the conclusion is too easy, too pat. By most accounts, Buckley’s mind was anything but satisfied when he passed. In the days before his death, friends say he was acting strangely, talking in code, making random phone calls to people from his past. He was also coming to grips with manic-depressive tendencies. All this doesn’t necessarily mean he wanted to die, but it does seem to indicate he was dealing with some serious issues. The volatile nature of Sketches’ four-track demos bear this out too. Plus, satisfaction was never this artist’s goal. He wanted to disrupt, even if that meant going against his most obvious gifts. Dissatisfaction was something Jeff Buckley had to grapple with for much of his life. It’s where he left us. | 2016-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | December 11, 2016 | 8 | 55e18e1b-7510-44f5-bed4-946b0852f5a1 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Reissued at last by the label that borrows its name, the second album from the computer music innovator is less predictable, with dark moods rising to a captivating surface. | Reissued at last by the label that borrows its name, the second album from the computer music innovator is less predictable, with dark moods rising to a captivating surface. | Laurie Spiegel: Unseen Worlds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurie-spiegel-unseen-worlds/ | Unseen Worlds | When Laurie Spiegel first released her computer-crafted compositions on her 1980 debut, The Expanding Universe went mostly unheard. But when New York sound-art label Unseen Worlds reissued her debut in 2012, 32 years later, the material resonated with a new generation of fans. “I wonder what it would have been like if there had been this kind of positive interest in the music and technology when it was new,” she mused to The Wall Street Journal. In the 1970s, Spiegel made Bell Labs’ GROOVE system—that is, Generating Real-time Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment—sing, applying the inspiration of Bach, guitarist John Fahey, Appalachian folk, and the cosmos itself to room-sized computers.
In the wake of The Expanding Universe, though, Spiegel lost access to GROOVE when Bell Labs decommissioned the project. But in the years after releasing Universe, Spiegel began developing her own program, MusicMouse, using a Macintosh 512k to generate tones with the movement of a mouse. It’s the way she created her 1991 follow-up, Unseen Worlds, which met a more ignoble fate than The Expanding Universe. She released it on Scarlet Records, which almost immediately went under; Spiegel issued copies herself, though it essentially vanished. But now, Unseen Worlds comes full circle, reissued at last by the label that borrowed its name.
The opening vignettes, “Three Sonic Spaces I-III,” reveal just how changed for Spiegel since Universe. Her first album showcased incremental layering and meticulous adjustments within the system, her minimal sonic palette always progressing toward transcendence. But here, Spiegel moves mercurially between less predictable moods, rendering unstable atmospheres. Glowing sounds turn pensive. The weight of once-gentle drones becomes crushing. The thrill of outer space quickly turns toward rumination of the void.
Still, the album’s short pieces recall the lyricism and beauty of her previous work, as with the twinkling étude “From a Harmonic Algorithm” and the conceptually and musically charming “Strand of Life (‘Viroid’).” Ever the egghead, Spiegel conceived of the latter while laid low with an infection; she entered a viroid’s RNA into her computer so that it played back as MIDI data. The echoing “Finding Voice” sounds like a lost Balearic ambient track, one that would readily find a home on current labels like Music From Memory or Melody as Truth.
But most of Unseen Worlds instead fearlessly delves into dark sounds and turbid emotions. The bass drones and crystalline high-end of “The Hollows” feel icy enough to turn your breath into hoarfrost. There’s a tactile tingle at the start of “Sound Zones,” but as the piece evolves, those gentle prickles intensify into a Jacuzzi jet and then a sandblast, providing a whiplash between the serene and the skin-scouring. The closing epic, “Passage,” begins like a stuck doorbell chime—incessant, digital, and a little annoying. But Spiegel soon moves into deeper space as a bass rumble takes over. The piece mutates often and rapidly, like countryside seen from a high-speed train. She maintains that sense of great speed even as “Passage” enters more ambient expanses.
Having Spiegel’s slim but profound discography available again should help cement her legacy as a tireless explorer at the frontier of computer music, able to illuminate both the beautiful and ominous sounds such technology can create. Unseen Worlds succeeds not by furthering her previous work but instead by foregrounding the dark matter of her universe. | 2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Unseen Worlds | February 9, 2019 | 8 | 55e80e4f-1753-4770-94a1-725ba80a7654 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Bruce Springsteen's 17th studio album is an overtly political affair, with songs that tackle hypocrisy, greed, and corruption set to a musical backing of Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps. | Bruce Springsteen's 17th studio album is an overtly political affair, with songs that tackle hypocrisy, greed, and corruption set to a musical backing of Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps. | Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16364-wrecking-ball/ | Wrecking Ball | "In America, there's a promise that gets made... called the American Dream, which is just the right to be able to live your life with some decency and dignity. But that dream is only true for a very, very, very few people. It seems if you weren't born in the right place or if you didn't come from the right town, or if you believed in something that was different from the next person, y'know..." With those words, Bruce Springsteen summed up his entire ethos-- searching for the American Dream and coming up short and then searching some more-- during a time of rampant unemployment and disquieting economic inequalities. The year was 1981. Yeah, Bruce has been here before.
Back then, Springsteen expressed his blossoming political awareness as well as the no-way-out stories of his friends back in small-town New Jersey with the stark vignettes of Nebraska. Recorded alone on a four-track, the album hovers like candlelight through a pinhole, its hope-deprived characters somberly trying to reconcile faded dreams with the realities in front of them. The album is an empathetic work with Springsteen's disillusionment coursing through it, offering a personalized stamp on America's Promise, and what happens when that bond becomes weak.
Fast-forward to present day: While the State of the Union may feel familiarly shaky, Bruce Springsteen is attacking his country's hypocrisy, greed, and corruption in an entirely different way on his 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball. The keyword is "attack." Several songs here are polemics from a man who has been betrayed one too many times. "If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight," he threatens on "Jack of All Trades", while nothing less than the sound of shotgun fire is heard at the climax of "Death to My Hometown". Perhaps inspired by the folk songs he covered on 2006's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen fills the first side of Wrecking Ball with his own protest music. Like pretty much everything Bruce does, it's a noble gesture-- biographer Dave Marsh pegged him as "the last of rock's great innocents" in the 1970s, and the title still holds-- but it can also sound misguided.
With Nebraska Springsteen was updating the folk music tradition, whether that was his intention or not. The record was insular and personal, which fit its increasingly splintered times. We Shall Overcome was a communal throwback, but it re-energized its dusty source material with spirited performances and an approachable shagginess that's often eluded Springsteen on record over the past couple of decades. Wrecking Ball guns for such sing-alongs-- its musical roots call back to Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps-- but it fails to support them with ample life.
Part of this can be chalked up to the album's production, which, like nearly all of Springsteen's post-Tunnel of Love material, continually finds a way to professionalize the singer's blue-blooded rawness. While a few E Streeters make cameos here and there, the bulk of the album was played by Springsteen and new studio partner Ron Aniello, whose previous credits include Bruce's wife Patti Scialfa, along with Candlebox, Guster, and Barenaked Ladies. The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons; the "Taps"-like horns on "Jack of All Trades" could be announcing the song's own funeral, and a startlingly bland concluding guitar solo by Tom Morello doesn't help matters. There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.
Springsteen never fell into punk's nihilism in its heyday, instead opting for fuller and more ambiguous pictures of the problems of the American working class. So it's odd to hear him rail against those up on "Banker's Hill" in the sort of black-and-white terms that continue to plague and cleave his home country. Not to say he has a moral obligation to tell the banker's story-- he doesn't-- but his lashing anger largely gets the better of him (and his writing) on Wrecking Ball's opening half, from the simplistic thieves of "Easy Money" to the overly broad characterization of "Jack of All Trades". For Springsteen, the Promise has always been a complex notion, and there's beauty in the tangles. Nothing is easy, not joy nor vengeance. There are always repercussions, always second and third and fourth thoughts behind any given action. "The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone," he sings on opener "We Take Care of Our Own", and the plea is unfortunately carried through the record's first five songs.
In that light, Wrecking Ball's back half acts as something of a rescue mission, for Springsteen's soul, and for the album itself. The two best songs are here, and not coincidentally they're the oldest tunes of the bunch, ones that were written with the full E Street Band in mind. Both of them-- "Wrecking Ball" and especially "Land of Hope and Dreams"-- also feature the unmistakable sax blares of Clarence Clemons, who passed away last summer. That added emotional weight certainly contributes to these songs' heft, but so does the fact that they fit in with Springsteen's lifelong mission in a way that the rest of the album does not. "Wrecking Ball" was originally written to pay tribute to the Meadowlands' Giants Stadium in 2009, when Springsteen and the E Street Band played the venue's final concerts. And indeed, Springsteen personifies the stadium in the song: "I was raised outta steel here in the swamps of Jersey some misty years ago," he starts. Now, this might seem a little goofy and random. But keep in mind that Giants Stadium was being raised in Springsteen's home state just as his own career was taking off in the 1970s, and that he opened the Meadowlands' Brendan Byrne Arena (now the Izod Center) with six sold-out shows in 1981. These hulks of steel mean a lot to Springsteen-- they're his pulpit. And outlasting one of them is no small feat. Across "Wrecking Ball"'s six minutes, Springsteen is harkening back to his sprawling arrangements of yesteryear, and marking it with a glorious bridge that acknowledges the 62-year-old's mortality while defying it all the same. "Bring on your wrecking ball," he sings, over and over, relishing the joy of this ending.
"Land of Hope and Dreams", written around the time of the E Street reunion tour in 1999, follows suit-- it's sprawling at seven minutes and boasts not one but two prime Clemons solos. (In the Wrecking Ball booklet, Springsteen breaks down the duo's invaluable accomplishment: "Together, we told an older, richer story about the possibilities of friendship that transcend those I'd written in my songs and in my music.") This song is huge, not only in length but scope, and is imbued with an all-encompassing, arena-blowing bigness that Springsteen has shied away from in his new material for years. It rolls along using one of Bruce's favorite metaphors: the train. This is the one Curtis Mayfield was talking about on "People Get Ready" (which is called out here), the one critic Greil Marcus rhapsodized about in his essential tome Mystery Train, the one that welcomes all Americans regardless of class, race, creed. Coming out of Springsteen's mouth-- and Clemons' horn-- it's still a touching ideal, a testament of hope when we need it most. And for going on 40 years now, that's Bruce's job-- to remind us of what brings people together when everything around us seems hellbent on proving the opposite. Too hokey? Probably. But the true power of a song like "Land of Hope and Dreams" lies in its ability to overcome self-consciousness and cynicism, a feat that's tougher to achieve now than ever. Hard times come and go-- why spew anger when exultance is in your grasp? | 2012-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | March 7, 2012 | 5.9 | 55e9e927-78d4-4945-837d-e8ed35bf8790 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Aquarius is the major label debut of Los Angeles R&B singer/songwriter Tinashe, after a string of buzz-building mixtapes and the summer-smash "2 On". The album is an anomaly in an age of major label standardization: a debut done unmistakably on Tinashe’s own terms. Clams Casino, Dev Hynes, Future, A$AP Rocky, and others contribute. | Aquarius is the major label debut of Los Angeles R&B singer/songwriter Tinashe, after a string of buzz-building mixtapes and the summer-smash "2 On". The album is an anomaly in an age of major label standardization: a debut done unmistakably on Tinashe’s own terms. Clams Casino, Dev Hynes, Future, A$AP Rocky, and others contribute. | Tinashe: Aquarius | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19910-tinashe-aquarius/ | Aquarius | It was the Platonic ideal of a 2014 chart-topper (Mustard on the beat—check; cheeky interpolation of a throwback hit—check; benevolent but ultimately useless Drake remix—check), so it’s no huge surprise that “2 On”, the star-making lead single from Tinashe’s debut album, Aquarius, proved to be a bit of a red herring. And while it’s still probably the best song of the Los Angeles singer/songwriter’s career, ultimately that’s a good thing. Tinashe’s post-“2 On” rise may have seemed sudden (and especially glaring, in a year where male voices overwhelmed the R&B charts), but the 21-year-old is hardly a rookie. After devoting most of her teenage years to the Stunners, a Vitamin C-founded quintet that briefly toured with Justin Bieber, she spent the last few years at work on a steady stream of promising, if unpolished, mixtapes recorded in her home studio. Those tapes—filled with dusky ballads for spooning a laptop and sounding quite at home among the glut of zoned-out, “alternative” R&B artists—got her a deal with RCA Records, but if the distance between her gently trippy mixtape work and the glossy ratchet-pop of “2 On” seemed potentially unbridgeable, it’s because she never intended to bridge it in the first place. Instead, Aquarius is an anomaly in an age of major label standardization: a debut done unmistakably on Tinashe’s own terms.
Much of Aquarius feels like an ambitious extension of Tinashe’s mixtape tracks, elevated to professional quality where they once felt muddled while leaving breadcrumb trails of idiosyncratic details leading back to her bedroom-producer past—distorted guitar solos, eerie found-sound interludes, somber spoken word bits. Sure, sometimes it’s a little much: wide-eyed lines like “What is truth, if truth is subjective?” read more like “Ever seen the back of a $20 bill on weed?” similar to peer Jhené Aiko, another recent indie-to-major transitioner with a penchant for dorm-room stoner koans. Mostly, though, Tinashe’s polished her act without dulling her edge, as the most interesting tracks on Aquarius come closest to approaching anything remotely like a radio hit—consider “How Many Times”, a Janet Jackson-referencing, late-'80s worshipping duet with Future so sultry it renders his shouty “Sh!t” flow as aphrodisiacal.
But Tinashe's most straightforward songs come with dark subtexts. Production-wise, second single “Pretend” has all the bite of an Avril Lavigne ballad playing during the break between "Lizzie McGuire" episodes (not necessarily a knock—somehow Detail’s mushiest productions are always his best) but the lyrics find Tinashe pretending her deadbeat boyfriend, played by A$AP Rocky, isn’t a scumbag so they can get it in a few more times. “All Hands On Deck”, the album’s sole answer to “2 On”'s club-readiness, has shadowy corners not often found in radio ratchetry, and that’s not counting the song's pan-flute breakdown: what first reads as a blithe dance instructional swiftly devolves into caustic post-break-up stunting, as Tinashe snarls, “Kiss the old me goodbye/ She's dead and gone.”
Though Tinashe’s held on to the self-reliant tendencies that guided her mixtape days, the sense of disembodiment, sometimes verging on aloofness, that often present in her early work—a recurring pitfall of the production-driven “alt-R&B” she once fit into—is mercifully absent. Somewhat paradoxically, too, working with a bigger team has made it clearer than ever that ultimately, she’s calling the shots; even with such a breadth of instantly recognizable collaborators, from Mike WiLL Made It to Clams Casino to Devonté Hynes, the vision remains wholly Tinashe’s throughout. As she’s shed the trappings of distinctly 2010s R&B for something less easily time-stamped, she’s revealed a new and very telling set of inspirations, unmistakably the product of coming of age in the Y2K era of R&B, where Janet Jackson and Aaliyah gracefully countered choreography-happy, big-budget smashes with flashes of something darker and deeply personal.
Tinashe has a bit of the coy, collected swagger of less canonical, "Total Request Live"-era mainstays such as Mya or Christina Milian, too—especially in the sauntering “Thug Cry”—but for all that early-'00s worship, Tinashe’s unshakeable faith in her own vision could only really pay off in a climate like right now, where a record deal is hardly the end-all be-all to a legitimate career. If the risk-taking featured on Aquarius doesn’t pan out, she can do it herself—she already has—so why not use the momentum of the biggest song of your career to propel you in the complete opposite direction? | 2014-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | October 9, 2014 | 7.5 | 55ea9527-5a6f-41b0-a573-8d680b40e663 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The genre-defying violinist levels up as a songwriter on an EP of experimental pop and R&B. It explodes conventional musical logic with disarming ease. | The genre-defying violinist levels up as a songwriter on an EP of experimental pop and R&B. It explodes conventional musical logic with disarming ease. | Sudan Archives: Sink EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sudan-archives-sink-ep/ | Sink EP | Sudan Archives is a 24-year-old violinist with “too much swag,” as she once sang, but that proportion is serving her quite well, actually. Using little more than strings, a looper, and electronic beats and shimmer, Sudan transposes the bounce and swing of R&B and hip-hop onto a fantastically original sound that could only exist now. She has cited as an influence the late, defiant Cameroon composer and ethnomusicologist Francis Bebey, who made a similar hybrid of organic and electronic African sounds in the late 1970s and once told an interviewer, “The artistic challenge is to use the tools of Western progress and [communicate] messages of the African heritage.” Sudan steps up.
The warmth and poise of Sink, her second EP on Stones Throw, bears out her singular confluence of interests and experience—her deep psychic archive. Nearly all of its six tracks contain traces of the North African one-stringed fiddle players who inspire her, lending her work an inviting minimalism. Sudan’s voice moves between a smooth R&B breeze and the blunted real talk of subtle raps. Her lucid singing roots back to the teen pop duo she once had with her twin sister, and, at times, the celestial grooves of Sink evoke “Queen Kunta”—her brilliant 2016 cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta.” Another of Sudan’s stated influences is the Sufi multi-instrumentalist and scholar Asim Gorashi, a world whistling champion known for interpreting Mozart with his lungs and lips. Sudan’s own approach similarly explodes conventional musical logic with a disarming ease: She rethinks the possibilities of her classical instrument, employing the same ingenuity Dorothy Ashby brought to harp and Arthur Russell to cello. She accomplishes the rare feat of honoring tradition while remaining unbeholden to genre.
Beyond this compositional prowess, Sudan levels up as a songwriter on Sink. Her lyrics can be elegant or biting, but they’re always grounding and purposeful. The EP’s brightest point, “Nont for Sale,” opens with the mic-dropping kiss-off, “You only call me when you need something,” as her voice glides over her own effervescent pizzicato. About halfway through, a faint rattle kicks in, like a pencil sketch of a trap beat. “Nont for Sale” is a song of personal empowerment that suddenly flips to become a comment on colonialism—“This is my land, nont for sale”—inspired by a hand-painted sign she saw on a hillside during a recent trip to Ghana (where she filmed a video for 2017’s “Come Meh Way”). “Beautiful Mistake,” an ode to the glorious and inevitable imperfections inherent in being human, pivots on some anti-authoritarian swagger: “They don’t know/They just fuckin’ old people tryin’ to steal all your gold.” Sudan’s words are as sharp as a fingersnap. Her conviction is contagious. And despite the EP’s many moving parts, Sink always finds space; never cluttered, it stands as a cosmic beacon of composure.
Sudan is a musician at the crossroads of multiple dualities: an experimenter with her own vision of pop music, an artist uncovering histories while directly in conversation with her own time. Sink feels refreshingly present, and never more than when she spells out that engagement herself: “My strings propagate/Through space and time/Here and there/At the same time,” she unspools over “Nont for Sale,” with its cloud of bass. “This is my seat, can’t ya tell?” Recently, when a journalist asked Sudan how it felt to make such self-contained music, she said, “I just feel like an African queen, like I’m ruling the world… I can make any sound I want, any world I want, and no one can steer me another way.” Sink is a 19-minute promise that, song by song, her world is getting bigger. | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | May 29, 2018 | 7.5 | 55f19c02-a3e2-408d-82c8-023db60d0ab0 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Brian Eno and John Cale’s 1990 collaboration is an album of contention, contrasts, cycles, and pop songs so layered and euphoric it is one of the best albums either artist has ever made. | Brian Eno and John Cale’s 1990 collaboration is an album of contention, contrasts, cycles, and pop songs so layered and euphoric it is one of the best albums either artist has ever made. | Brian Eno / John Cale: Wrong Way Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-john-cale-wrong-way-up/ | Wrong Way Up | The calls came around 5:30 in the morning. Brian Eno fumbled to the phone and heard an excitable Welsh voice on the other end. “Eno! I’ve had an idea!”
It was London, 1974, and Eno was serving as an “ideas consultancy” for John Cale, who was making his fourth solo album Fear. “I was a kind of consultant or advisor...John was using me to bounce ideas off of, and get reactions from,” he said the following year. “It was a very intense month.” A journalist visiting the Fear sessions found Cale constantly switching instruments and holding court with various visitors while Eno brewed tea and attempted to bring a bit of normalcy to the operation.
These roles—Cale as whirlwind; Eno as accountant—would define their working relationship. After a brief period of camaraderie in the early ’70s (they once crossed into East Berlin together to be stared at by the East Berliners), their studio collaborations became sporadic courtesies. Eno treated Cale tracks like “The Jeweller” and “Helen of Troy”; Cale played viola on Another Green World’s “Sky Saw” and “Golden Hours.” “There was a lot of substance abuse going on,” Cale recalled to Eno’s biographer David Sheppard. “It was obvious to Brian at that point that I was pretty incorrigible...” Once while dining with Eno, Cale set fire to the check. Eno “was helpless with laughter, screaming, ‘Oh horseplay!’ while the bill was in flames in the ashtray.”
Cale was unlike many of Eno’s other collaborators. Six years Eno’s elder, he’d worked with La Monte Young and had recorded The Velvet Underground and Nico when Eno was still in art school. A skilled violist and pianist, he couldn’t be intimidated in the studio by a self-confessed “non-musician.” Recording with Cale meant raucous musical debate with no moderator. Cale seemed to live by an internal set of Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. “Bursts of genius interspersed with oceans of inattention,” as Eno described Cale’s working methods.
In October 1990, they finally released a full collaboration: Wrong Way Up. Though it marks Eno’s first “song” album since 1977’s Before and After Science, and despite being among Eno and Cale’s loveliest, most accessible records, Wrong Way Up has faded from view—out of print on CD and vinyl (despite having been reissued in 2005), not streaming on Spotify.
Its credits read as if dictated by negotiation—most songs were “written and composed” by Eno and Cale, with care taken to note who wrote which lyrics. Eno was producer, Cale “co-producer.” In promo interviews, both admitted they hadn’t gotten on at times, or apparently much of the time. Eno reportedly called Cale irrational. Cale said Eno “would listen to what you said, but he really didn’t have much patience with it...I haven’t figured out yet what Brian’s notion of cooperation, or collaboration, is.”
Yet Wrong Way Up would be far more euphoric than either expected. Eno said, “We both started out thinking it would be quite stark and sort of, industrial...perhaps slightly Eraserhead in feeling.” In the first post-Cold War spring, with the Berlin Wall down and Nelson Mandela freed, “the feelings were hopeful. It was ’Hey, the future looks good.’” Eno was enjoying the World Cup that year and his wife, Anthea Norman-Taylor, recently had given birth to a daughter. “All those elements, those loops, combined in that particular way,” he said. “The World Cup, my daughter, and me singing again. And John, of course. He’s another loop, combining.”
It began the year before. Cale, having set four Dylan Thomas poems to music, sent a tape of a live performance to Eno. As his label had developed contacts in the Soviet Union, Eno told Cale he could get the pieces recorded by a top-rank orchestra in Moscow for a fraction of what it would cost in the West. And he agreed to produce.
A video documentary was made of the Words for the Dying sessions, in April 1989. Throughout, Eno seems irked, flipping off the cameraman, holding a clipboard in front of his face. (Cale has no qualms about being filmed, even when caught screaming “fuck!” in frustration while recording a boys’ choir.) Then, in a sequence caught via monitor camera, Eno and Cale whisk a song together.
A double bassist, the late Rodion Azarkhin, has come in for an orchestral session. Spurred to write a new piece for Azarkhin, Cale sits at the piano, Eno hovering over his shoulder. “This beat doesn't have to have blue notes like jazz does, but that sort of...smoky pace,” Eno says. He keeps time by waving a pen, Cale drums out chords. They move to the control room, giving instructions like “play simple harmonics in between the verses” (Cale) and “get him loosened up, not stuck onto one idea—find something he likes to play” (Eno). Eno mimes playing the double bass; Cale yawns and does a crossword puzzle. It’s like watching two lobes of the same brain interact.
While filling out the album back in the UK, Cale sensed that Eno was growing comfortable with vocal songs again and proposed a full collaboration. It would be a pop album; Eno would sing on it; he would tour with Cale for it. Eno tacitly accepted the terms. Getting Eno to sing again on record was a coup. He spent the ’80s making ambient instrumental albums, mulling ideas like “quiet clubs” and “research gardening,” working on video sculptures and projects like a Tropical Rainforest Sound Installation for the World Financial Center, and being half of the production team that delivered U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. As late as September 1989, he told a radio interviewer, “I’m sure I could, if someone held a gun to my head, crank out a record of songs, but at this point in time I know it wouldn’t be any good, because there’s no conviction to carry it forward.”
Yet nine months later, Eno was in his home studio—in his grand Victorian house in Woodbridge, Suffolk—working on a record of songs with Cale. He’d missed singing, it turned out. Visitors often found Eno humming or singing while in the kitchen. He’d been listening to gospel and Arabic music, and had never lost his love for doo-wop. He and Daniel Lanois had even recently recorded a version of “You Don’t Miss Your Water” for the Married To the Mob soundtrack (it would be a bonus track on Wrong Way Up’s reissue).
If he would return to singing, however, he’d “mass the voices so that the ’individuality’ of a single voice is lost in the crowd.” Eno’s voice was wonderfully described by Geeta Dayal as “paper-thin like a piece of phyllo dough: it stacks well on itself, giving way to a layered, golden richness.” It was made for harmonies. He’d improved as a singer—where he’d sung nasally in the ’70s, he now favored his chest voice, lower in pitch and rounder in tone, with more ornamentation.
Eno would sing nonsense words to create cadences, then develop syllabic rhythms, then move to full phrases (some of his notes are found on the inner sleeve: phrases depicted as em-dashes). “He works out his melodies and lyrics by locking himself up and just starting to sing,” Cale recalled in 1990. “He starts with vowels and works his way into consonants. He’d be in the studio late at night doing that while I would be able to get out and go play squash.” Wrong Way Up is compellingly singable, laced through with melodies—lines like “I am the termite of temptation!” are phrased like hymns.
Under Eno and Cale’s vocals were loops and circles—Wrong Way Up as a collection of orbits. “I am the wheel,” as Eno sings in “Lay My Love,” a track that spins like an orrery—snare fills, 16th-notes on synthesized cymbal, rhythm guitar, a two-phrase violin loop, “cowbell” fills, all circling a central sequencer pulse. The album’s title comes from “Empty Frame,” a sea shanty about a cursed ship going around in circles, never returning to port. The rhythm section, Daniel Lanois’ touring group of Ronald Jones and Daryl Johnson, was broken into shards—a kick drum loop, a sinking root note, an isolated snare hit—and shuffled through tracks. For “Crime in the Desert,” a Cale Western with drive-in gambling and a body left on a racetrack, Cale played a circling boogie-woogie piano riff into a sequencer, which Eno edited into a loop, against which Cale played another piano riff.
There’s also a homemade quality to Wrong Way Up, a sense of being scrapped together from whatever was lying around Eno’s “state-of-the-art 1979” studio (as he called it in the ’90s). He mainly used his storied, “unsophisticated” Yamaha DX7 synth. See the various bottle-clinks and UFO probe whirrs, or the cicada percussion on “Cordoba.” Beats came from the DX7 or a Linn M1, the latter’s beats “severely treated so that they become more industrial sounding than the M1 would normally allow.” Cale and Eno sang into an “old beaten up Shure SM58 microphone...the cheapest basic rock ’n’ roll mike you can get,” their vocals run through an equally old Neve limiter/compressor.
After three weeks’ work, a few other musicians came in, cutting their parts in a few days. Robert Ahwai, the album’s quiet hero, played rhythm guitar that makes tracks like “Spinning Away” and “One Word” sing. Nell Catchpole was the guest star, her soaring violin heard on the opener “Lay My Love” and closer “The River.”
Eno’s studio was bright and airy, with windows that let onto the garden. “Birds would come and sing at the window, for god’s sake!” Cale recalled. He was Eno’s houseguest. When he arrived, Eno had some rhythm tracks done, but Cale’s work habits hadn’t changed. Eno would find Cale reading newspapers and making business calls while listening to playback. And Cale considered Eno to be a control freak, often bristling at his suggestions. It being his studio, Eno had the home-field advantage.
The mood in the studio became that of two only children made to play together by their parents. Eno described it as being like “cabin fever.” Cale missed his wife and young daughter. Tensions culminated when, after one sharp argument, Cale turned to see an angry Eno coming towards him, a chopstick clenched in his hand. “Imagine, being frightened by Brian Eno!...The whole idea is ridiculous,” Cale said. In his autobiography, he said Eno had rattled him. “What if it had been a knife? On his private property, I was an interloper.” Cale called his manager in a panic, saying he needed to check into a hotel. (For his part, Eno said he had no memory of the chopstick attack. He felt Cale’s book “gave an unfavorable and sometimes downright untrue version of what had happened during the making of [Wrong Way Up]”).
There’s something performative in these antics—as if they subconsciously knew they worked best when they dreamed of garroting each other. Eno once compared their relationship to what “may have existed between two neighboring principalities in pre-Bismarck Germany: constant sorties across the frontier and occasional truces and treaties and occasional coincidences of purpose.” Cale’s most essential complaints about Wrong Way Up were that Eno kept monkeying with the mix after he left and, most of all, that he’d reneged on his promise to tour the album. The album’s grotesque cover came from the set design of the Eno/Cale tour that never was—giant playing cards, with their heads at dagger points from the other.
On one spin of Wrong Way Up, Eno seems to dominate. He gets the spotlight numbers and the opening and closing songs. Another listen finds Cale holding his own territory. His songs have his usual mercenaries, drug-runners and itinerants, but he also gets the big pop moment, “Been There Done That,” his and Eno’s high-water mark on the U.S. charts (peaking at No. 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart). Seemingly mixed for transistor radio, it has Cale heartily singing over what sounds like repurposed video game soundtrack chips.
While Eno said that “nothing about this record was particularly democratic,” they influenced each other in subtle ways. Eno recalled “In the Backroom” as being “entirely” Cale’s, but it’s the production touches that linger in the memory—the ominous fade-in, like a noir opening credits sequence; swirls of guitar and synthesizer that move in strange dances through the mix; how Cale’s voice grows so distorted at times that it seems to be breaking apart, a blocked transmission.
”One Word,” however, was an eye-to-eye collaboration—Cale offering a line, Eno volleying one back. In refrains, Cale soars over a company of Enos. Each sings a separate refrain but also answers each other:
You say——one word
the same——one sound
thing——it makes the world
again——go round...
At its best, Wrong Way Up is as sublime as anything Eno and Cale ever did. “Cordoba” came from Eno reading Hugo’s Latin-American Spanish In Three Months. The book had short, declarative English sentences, the bones of the Spanish phrases the learner was meant to recite: The man was sleeping under the tree. He wrote to me from Cordoba. He put the suitcase under the bed. The elevator stopped between the two floors. The sentences, just by being arranged in sets, became a mystery novel, Eno thought. Who is the Cordoban? Why does the elevator stop between floors? What’s under the bed? It suggested a scenario to him, of terrorist lovers who don’t know each other’s real identities, plotting to plant a bomb on a bus. Cale gave the lines a slow, haunted phrasing—”the way he sings it is this strange combination—sinister and tender at the same time.” Cale seems startled by details as he sings them, like he’s suddenly recalling pieces of a dream.
Then there’s “Spinning Away,” a song so lovely that even a cover by Sugar Ray couldn’t ruin it. Eno built it as collisions of speed, with a rolling, off-balance rhythmic base over which Eno’s vocals and Catchpole’s violin (the latter playing in a different time signature) bob like boats.
”Spinning away, like the night sky at Arles.” It’s Eno as Van Gogh painting The Starry Night, but not the hippie saint of Don McLean’s “Vincent” or a century’s worth of tormented artist biopics. It’s Van Gogh as an Eno, as a craftsman: working up sketches, drafting in pencil, moving to oils, bringing the night sky down into the frame of his canvas, making threads from loops and dots. He steps back to see the whole. “I have no idea exactly what I’ve drawn,” he sings. “Some kind of change.” The hub of the album’s circles, “Spinning Away” sings the making of itself. Along with “The River,” it’s the most beautiful vocal that Eno ever sang.
The fruit of a sunnier time, Wrong Way Up, made by two quarrelsome fathers who would never collaborate in this capacity again, is a set of miniatures, full of spies and sailors, turncoats and magicians, Cordobans and the Mona Lisa’s eyes. It’s the closest that a pop record has come to a Joseph Cornell box. Songs are played on “Scarlatti piano,” “dark guitar” and “fairground organ,” are garnished with Shinto bell, dumbek, “little Nigerian organ,” and tabla. The joy of finding the right accumulations. It’s an album of movement, even if moving in a loop. As Cale and Eno sing in “One Word,” “If it all fades away, let it all fade dancing away.” | 2017-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Opal | October 15, 2017 | 8.7 | 55f6a708-e75b-43c4-8f61-df4221006d8e | Chris O’Leary | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o’leary/ | |
Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 avant-garde film The Colour of Pomegranates, is the latest excursion by the producer Nicolas Jaar. It's one of his most unusual projects to date, and often sounds like Jaar's version of musique concrète, but the second half contains some of Jaar's loveliest melodies. | Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 avant-garde film The Colour of Pomegranates, is the latest excursion by the producer Nicolas Jaar. It's one of his most unusual projects to date, and often sounds like Jaar's version of musique concrète, but the second half contains some of Jaar's loveliest melodies. | Nicolás Jaar: Pomegranates | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20791-pomegranates/ | Pomegranates | Nicolas Jaar has had the kind of career only possible in the digital era. After putting out a few singles, he released his one and only solo album, 2011's Space Is Only Noise, when he was 21 and still a student at Brown University. That record introduced a unique sensibility that centered on Jaar's expertly constructed slow-burn rhythms and his unusual voice, which looms between speaking, singing, and chanting in an almost comically low register. He had an aesthetic connection to minimal techno and its attendant fascination with dub, but his voice lent his music a pop sensibility that drew fans from outside electronic music circles. In the four years since, Jaar has done everything but follow up Space's success with another solo full-length. He steered the Other People label, which has a busy release schedule (including Jaar's own EPs) and has experimented with a subscription service. For a while he focused on Darkside, his psych-jam project with guitarist Dave Harrington, which got relatively huge until Jaar left it behind. He created installations and film soundtracks, started yet another duo, pulled off a full-album remix—Jaar's a multimedia artist, and the traditional album cycle doesn't fit his m.o.
Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 avant-garde film* The Colour of Pomegranates*, is the producer's latest excursion, and it's one of his most unusual projects to date. The film, a non-linear depiction of the life of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, has an ornate surrealism that for me brings to mind Matthew Barney, and the soundtrack often serves as a minimal contrast to the onscreen grandeur. Heard just as an album, Pomegranates often sounds like Jaar's version of musique concrète, with buzzing electronics, warped orchestral samples, and jittery recordings of scrapes and rustles coursing through the mix. Jaar's description of it as "a weird collage of the ambient music I had made over the last 2 years" is apt; it's an album of fragments, ranging from abstract sound design to pretty piano solos. There are long stretches, particularly in the early going, where it's more of a sound piece than what is usually described as "music", but the album's second half contains some of Jaar's loveliest tunes.
While Jaar has always had a great ear for texture, his music has been defined by its rhythmic sense, a loping swing that has become his signature. Beats only crop up in a few places, and when they do, they snap you back to the producer's organizing aesthetic. "Shame", for example, with its processed vocal and slow groove, could easily be an interlude on a Darkside release. But the bulk of the record is filled with drifting tracks that defy classification. "Pass the Time" mixes room tone with a pinched vocal sample that sounds like it's been crumpled up and is being dragged around on a string. "The Fool and His Harem" sounds like broken Middle Eastern instruments half-playing a modal melody amid bursts of hiss. "Beasts of This Earth" brings to mind the near-music of Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba, where tracks half feel like something that was found on the ground. If it's not always easy to locate Jaar in these soundscapes, there is always a lot to explore within them.
Pomegranates' other notable element is something we've heard from Jaar since the beginning—piano, sometimes heard in isolation and sometimes mixed in with the electronics. "Nothingness" is almost unbearably delicate, as single notes are played and then electronically stretched into long and thin tendrils of sound. And the record's back half features the piano more prominently, most notably on the solo "Muse", which comes over like a nocturne mixed with a jazz ballad. The piano tracks serves as a kind of tentpole on the record, pulling it back whenever it threatens to seem too much like a collection of sound design without any particular shape. After the textures and the flow lure you in, the melodies rise to the surface, slowly, giving Pomegranates a quiet lingering power. | 2015-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Other People | July 8, 2015 | 7.6 | 55fda9df-3124-46d8-ac52-c0c19b777359 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Kompakt's Michael Mayer follows 2002's Immer-- one of the best DJ mixes of the decade-- with a less-eclectic but still spacious and inviting sequel. | Kompakt's Michael Mayer follows 2002's Immer-- one of the best DJ mixes of the decade-- with a less-eclectic but still spacious and inviting sequel. | Michael Mayer: Immer 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9609-immer-2/ | Immer 2 | Many techno/house fans have their issues with Michael Mayer, with the Kompakt cult of personality, with the whole notion of dance music that appeals to people who don't crawl out of the after-after party at two in the afternoon on a Sunday. Or if they want to get technical, they don't like his selections, which generally favor melody or texture or mood over funk. And they don't like his mixing style, which generally favors playing tracks out to their full length and little in the way of hard chops or other mix trickery. They don't like the gothic mood swings of his mixes, his taste for sharp and smelly cheese, or his fondness for trance. And, of course, someone, somewhere was doing something similar, better, earlier-- and never got the fame or the cred that Mayer enjoys.
To which I say: fuck that. Mayer's mixes may offend deep house purists, confuse analog Detroit techno fans, or irritate "minimal" heads who enjoy Richie Hawtin's affinity for making super long, super boring tracks out of a million smaller super boring tracks, but he is certainly, unashamedly "pop"-- at least within the parameters of his genre. He's kind of like the Cure: Sure, he loves to bum you out, but then he'll throw in a "Love Cats" now and then. On the other hand, there is no way a sequel to-- not to put too fine a point on it-- one of the best DJ mixes of all time wasn't going to be something of a disappointment. Four years and uncountable dancefloor trends and trendlettes separate this Immer from the first. And anyone looking for a continuation of Mayer's earlier mixes-- with their combination of utter corn (guest spots from Nena! Tweeting birdies!) and brooding dancefloor discontent-- will be slightly confused by the less ostentatious and dramatic Immer 2.
Immer 2 finally made sense on a drizzly, horrible fucking morning that I spent at my desk with my hungover head in my hands. Since my skull already felt like it was filled with salt water, the crackles and popping bubbles and Sea Quest pings and blips of the opening Someone Else track slowly eased me in, whereas a Jeff Mills blitz might have just sent me running for the Advil. Mayer is nothing if not a master of pacing, and there's no reason why a home-listening DJ mix can't take its sweet time.
After the 4/4 push begins in earnest, the next four tracks feel like traditional house sloughing off all that briny water and seaweed, the skipping jazzy hi-hats and bumping basslines of tracks like Ian Simmonds' "The Dog" and Frank West's "2nd Booty" moving up from the muck and into the light of the mix's brassy disco middle. This is the biggest difference between the two Immer mixes. Whereas the first third of Immer 2 creeps and crackles with the same crepuscular 3 a.m. vibe as the first installment, it's difficult to imagine a track that samples (according to the fine folks at ILM) a Boz Scaggs disco tune-- as cheeky and lovable Justus Köhncke's "Advance" does here-- fitting alongside the portentous hunk of Mahler's 5th Symphony that Mayer dropped on Immer.
The Todd Terje remix of Lindstrøm's "Another Platform" finds Mayer smack dab in au courant space disco territory. It's as trendy (and speedy) a move as he's ever pulled-- for a moment you might think you were listening to a Get Physical DJ. Needless to say, it's also the mix's most incongruous moment. The final third is more Mayer-esque. It climaxes with the SuperMayer remix of Geiger's "Good Evening", an epic trance workout, the kind of anthem you thought was out of fashion in an era of 13 minutes of tics and tocks and clicks and rustles. It's one of the most shiver-inducing singles of the year, featuring the kind of synth blasts in its first few minutes that feel as good a particularly hot and high-pressure shower nozzle. It only goes up from there.
But the changes this time out have less to do with tempo or Mayer's apparently newfound need to boogie. The first Immer, and especially Mayer's Fabric 13 mix, had personality. Immer 2 is far less eclectic-- there's nothing here like the stuttering cut ups of Jackson's M83 mix, the portentous reversed strings of Richard Davis' "Bring Me Closer", the deranged shuffle of Akufen, or the vampire cotillion vibe of Phantom/Ghost's "Perfect Lovers". If fans want to hear this with fresh ears, I'd advise lopping off the Immer from the title, and enjoying one of the better, spacious, and inviting disco-tech mixes of the year without prejudice. | 2006-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | November 10, 2006 | 7.6 | 5603e8ff-a69e-4f0b-bbe5-d82924b527b6 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
On a triumphant deluxe edition of her 2021 opus, the Philadelphia singer lays the groundwork for growth with several new songs and interludes, including an appearance from Issa Rae. | On a triumphant deluxe edition of her 2021 opus, the Philadelphia singer lays the groundwork for growth with several new songs and interludes, including an appearance from Issa Rae. | Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales: The Deluxe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jazmine-sullivan-heaux-tales-mo-tales-the-deluxe/ | Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales: The Deluxe | Women deserve everything. On this point, Jazmine Sullivan’s Heaux Tales is unequivocal. Her 2021 mini-opus is a communal emotional audit that pairs nearly every song with a confessional spoken “tale” recorded by a personal friend. With candid intimacy, the Black women interviewed in these snippets revealed hard lessons in love, nuanced vignettes of relationships that thrilled or scarred them. Their perspectives, distinct yet harmonious, cast Sullivan’s music as part of a wider conversation, empowering her to interpret their experiences. Writing about women’s true feelings, in the ways women actually talk about them, Sullivan taps into a creativity and boundless empathy that grants her listeners permission to be equally generous.
Though Sullivan is gifted with a voice that can affect braggadocious confidence as readily as searching anguish, the original Heaux Tales was unassuming: eight songs and six spoken interludes, described in early press materials as a project, and sometimes an EP, rather than an album. Within it, Sullivan and her collaborators drew a picture of lust, heartbreak, betrayal, and insecurity so honest and complete it felt instantly familiar. The new deluxe edition, Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales, released ahead of Sullivan’s Valentine’s Day tour, extends the story with five additional songs and corresponding tales. We didn’t, strictly speaking, need them—the original album stands alone. But it’s a rare chance to quickly hear a new body of work from Sullivan, who’s typically spaced out her releases (with six years between Heaux Tales and 2015’s Reality Show). Since her mother’s cancer diagnosis last spring, she’s said, time has felt different and “I can’t see myself taking as long as a break anymore.”
Carrying the energy of the original closer, the H.E.R. duet “Girl Like Me,” the new songs adopt a slightly softer sound and more inward focus. They aren’t quite as sharp-elbowed as the original set; they prioritize their characters’ sexual and emotional needs over financial ones, uncovering new strains of hurt and sources of light. Heauxdom, in Sullivan’s telling, was never strictly about money. Except for “Donna’s Tale,” whose narrator observes (as Venus Xtravaganza once did) that even women in conventional marriages exchange sex for security, the album rarely touches on actual sex work. Its characters are empowered by getting money for sex and by giving it, too—“I pay his rent if he nasty,” Sullivan quips on “Put It Down”—but inevitably the field tilts towards the weight of men’s entitlement. Heaux Tales recognizes women’s right to operate with equal impunity, and the debt they’re owed for putting up with poor treatment this long. When Sullivan imagines life as a millionaire’s housewife on “The Other Side,” singing so longingly of her “dreams to buy expensive things,” I hear in her voice the pain of someone who has paid the price emotionally many times already.
Without dialing back or equivocating, Mo’ Tales uncovers new firsthand accounts and starts calling in loans. When these women can’t get good sex, they make it for themselves: “I fuck for sport. I fuck like it’s being taped,” comedian Mona Love says on “Mona’s Tale,” which introduces “BPW,” answering the big-dick sex jams in the album’s first half with a sultry round of applause for the “Best Pussy in the World.” On “Issa’s Tale,” actor and director Issa Rae describes feeling “used” by a selfish sex partner who “pumped me and dumped me” on his way out of town. Her story ends with a gleeful twist: “I’m so glad I was cheating on him.” Sullivan pairs this revelation with her 2021 summer single “Tragic,” a limp-sex lament that riffs on Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ viral procedural challenge to a Trump official (“Reclaiming my time”) to argue for getting off on one’s own. Rae’s story underlines the sentiment with a cheeky new implication: He can’t waste your time if you’re two-timing him.
One of Heaux Tales’ most radical artistic functions is to present vanity and self-interest as a means of balancing a great inequality in the cosmic ledger. In addition to Anderson .Paak as the beleaguered boyfriend on “Price Tags,” Mo’ Tales presents a new male perspective, a more self-aware young man who recalls the moment he finally confessed his feelings to a woman he’d been seeing. “She said, ‘Bro,’” the narrator of “A Breaux’s Tale” says. “When she said ‘bro’ that killed me….Then [she] had the nerve to say she told me she was dealing with other people….She pulled a me on me.” You feel for this dude, getting domed by his own boomerang, but Sullivan follows up with “Roster,” a ballad from girl players to the objects of their affections. “For you, there’s one more slot left in my roster,” she sings, “so don’t catch feelings.” Her bittersweet tone leaves unanswered questions: Did the “bro”-er herself arrive here after past lovers likewise rebuffed her? Could she be denying her own feelings, too? In moments like these, the bonus tracks call out for extra verve and nuance.
The original Heaux Tales ended in loss and resignation, as Sullivan and H.E.R. wondered how else they possibly could have held on to a lover’s wandering attention. Mo’ Tales moves past such immediate concerns and takes a longer look in the mirror. Where do heaux go from here? They demand better for themselves in the first place, Sullivan suggests, and on “Jazzy’s Tale,” she relates her own experience of seeking validation in toxic relationships. The following song, “Hurt Me So Good,” draws its strength and vulnerability from her rafter-shaking vocal power rather than by spilling all the damning details; perhaps she felt less at liberty to embellish on her own story, or perhaps she’s letting go of revenge. She sounds especially raw on the closer, “Selfish,” a drumless, bluesy, demo-like song about learning to be choosey in love. “Lock it up to keep it from/Anyone whose heart is numb,” Sullivan insists, sounding miles away from the opening track, the regrets and humiliations of “piling up bodies.” Every woman could tell a Heaux Tale, but that’s only half the story. | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | February 16, 2022 | 8.4 | 560e739c-11fd-448e-bd01-1c5e4d3b41e2 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Compiling tunes from the two early Body Talk mini-LPs and adding worthy new material, Robyn ends a great year on a high note. | Compiling tunes from the two early Body Talk mini-LPs and adding worthy new material, Robyn ends a great year on a high note. | Robyn: Body Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14917-body-talk/ | Body Talk | "Fembots have feelings, too." When we first heard Robyn sing those words, on a single promoting what would become a three-volume set of mini-LPs all bearing the name Body Talk, it was easy to focus on the Swedish pop singer's quirky sense of humor. But on this new full-length edition, "Fembot" also reveals itself as a compelling statement of purpose. Playing off contemporary pop's age-old diva-as-robot trope and cautioning that fellow droids who "burn out" are "ready for demolition," Robyn is a pop star who first and foremost projects a need for emotional connection.
If that's Robyn's artistic credo, then Body Talk is living, breathing, cybernetic proof. Melding dancehall with bubblegum pop, heartbroken love songs with hilariously catty weirdness, and euphorically catchy melodies with propulsive rhythms, Body Talk-- which combines the five-song Body Talk Pt. 3 with, outside of Pt. 1's uncommonly wise "Cry When You Get Older", the highlights from the first two mini-albums-- is a deeply affecting pop record. Robyn may not have released three full albums this year as first implied, but her first true full-length in five years is one of the year's best.
What sets Robyn apart from her contemporaries is the three-dimensional complexity of her character, and all sides are on display here. There's plenty of don't-fuck-with-me attitude in the icy electro-throb of "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do", which introduces a shit-talking heroine who may be flawed but won't be anyone's pawn. And with production by Diplo, the mock-outrageous Jamaica homage "Dancehall Queen" proves she's not kidding. But she's also sensitive enough that, during one of Body Talk's most inspired moments-- the soaringly tuneful electro-pop ballad "Call Your Girlfriend"-- she tells her boyfriend exactly how to break it off with the other woman to inflict the least emotional damage.
However, the highlight from this Year of Robyn remains the gorgeous "Dancing on My Own". What's especially remarkable is that there was any room for improvement: The track appears here as an amped-up "radio remix" with bonus synths giving the lovelorn chorus an extra wallop. But then again, Robyn is a master of re-invention: "Indestructible" and "Hang With Me" were first released as emotive acoustic ballads, and later given revved-up Eurodisco overhauls that ramped up the intensity without sacrificing an ounce of their bittersweet charm. Those are the versions included here, and both lend further ammunition to Body Talk's already military-grade stockpile.
Robyn's willingness to experiment with album conventions may feel like an ingenious gimmick, but there's no artifice to the desire for human connection that underlies her vocal quiver and party-starting kickdrums. She communicates heartbreak so convincingly that some of her most devoted fans actually wonder online about her presumed loneliness. She also attacks the charts from the fringes. She explores the fringes from the charts. She should be universal. So why isn't she? With Body Talk, Robyn ups the ante for pop stars across the radio dial and raises her own chances of appearing on yours. And for all her three-album talk, she never forgets that cardinal rule of showmanship: Always leave them wanting more. | 2010-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Konichiwa / Cherrytree | December 3, 2010 | 8.7 | 560fd543-2b43-4eb6-9261-7d3b464c0e84 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
As pleasant and groovy as it is, the collaborative album never feels like a true Roy Ayers work. | As pleasant and groovy as it is, the collaborative album never feels like a true Roy Ayers work. | Roy Ayers / Adrian Younge / Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Roy Ayers JID 002 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roy-ayers-adrian-younge-ali-shaheed-roy-ayers-jid-002/ | Roy Ayers JID 002 | Adrian Younge never wants you to forget he’s the man behind the music. Whether he is offering a sinister take on Philly soul for The Delfonics' William Hart, serving splatter flick grooves to Ghostface Killah, or even making music with his own soul band, Venice Dawn, the producer and instrumentalist promotes his own mythology as a vanguard of old school grooves by adding the words “Adrian Younge presents…” to the records he helms. Now, there’s the Jazz is Dead series, which sees Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (partners on 2018’s The Midnight Hour) team-up with musicians they admire to record LPs at Younge’s Linear Labs studio in Los Angeles. Released in March, Jazz is Dead 001 acted as an introduction to the project by gathering one song from each future installment, including collaborations with such dignitaries as Marcos Valle, Azymuth, and Brian Jackson. Roy Ayers JID 002 is perhaps the most consequential edition of the endeavor. Yet, it rarely feels like the true jazz legend is operating on the front line.
The first question that must be asked is why such an ugly naming system? At 79, Ayers hardly ever records anymore—this is being promoted as his first studio album in 18 years—so any new music attributed to him should be a capital-E event. But by fixing a number to his name, Younge and Muhammad frame the piece as very much their venture. Ayers is credited as co-writing every song and playing his famous vibraphone on seven of the eight cuts, so we can assume he had some agency over the final product. But since fuzzy guitars, low frequency drums, and heavy basslines have long been a staple of Younge’s productions, it’s his fingerprints we see all over Roy Ayers JID 002. And while Ayers’ playing is still smooth and lucious after all these years, his instrumentation is often buried low in the mix. There’s nothing like his 1970s vibraphone-led wanderings like “Mystic Voyage” or “The Third Eye,” and his singing voice never comes to the forefront of the arrangements. Rather than a lost Ayers classic, the album feels more like an interpretation of his music through Younge and Muhammad’s lens.
That’s not to say that Roy Ayers JID 002 isn’t a nice listen in its own right. Using Fender Rhodes piano, electric bass, monophonic synthesizers, mellotron, flutes, and many other toys, Muhammad (operating here as an instrumentalist and not the DJ that A Tribe Called Quest fans remember) and Younge forge a stoned and surly suite that incorporates 1970s R&B, psychedelic soul, and West Coast jazz. The borders of each jam are blurry; tracks are allowed to bleed into one another, further imbuing the record with a dream-like quality.
There are signposts to Ayers’ past throughout. The most obvious attempt at mimicry is “Synchronized Vibration.” Its soft-filtered grooves, female vocal harmonies, and references to that big star at the center of our solar system hark back to his most famous hit, “Everybody Loves The Sunshine.” Ayers early traditional jazz work is recalled on “Shadows of the East,” while the more propulsive Harlem rhythms of “Solace”—distinguished by Phil Ranelin on trombone, Wendell Harrison on tenor saxophone, and Greg Paul on drums—act as a reminder that Ayers’ Coffy soundtrack was a touch point for Younge’s brilliant work on Blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite.
The album signs off with a kick. “African Sounds” features a spoken word vocal from Younge preaching love, unification, and the memory of historical black struggle: “We have the choice to use our colors and sound to rebound against the hate, to circumvent the illusion seen through the misty shades of America,” he asserts. Ayers’ vibraphone rings in the background, the grandee playing the role of session musician with dignity. And that’s the biggest issue with Roy Ayers JID 002. Though Younge and Shaheed Muhammad may enjoy casting themselves as career revivalists, Roy Ayers JID 002, as pleasant and groovy as it is, never quite feels like a true Roy Ayers work. | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Rock / Pop/R&B / Rap | Jazz is Dead | June 23, 2020 | 6.1 | 561fc39e-d949-4239-829a-e1f4ca31d27f | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The folk musician’s latest album is a bittersweet collection full of silence and space. Delivered with empathy, his historical subject matter feels rooted in the present. | The folk musician’s latest album is a bittersweet collection full of silence and space. Delivered with empathy, his historical subject matter feels rooted in the present. | Jake Xerxes Fussell: Good and Green Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jake-xerxes-fussell-good-and-green-again/ | Good and Green Again | The son of a renowned historian and writer who learned to play guitar from blues legend Precious Bryant, Jake Xerxes Fussell has been dirtying his hands in history his entire life. With his string of vivid folk albums over the past seven years, he has interpreted old songs with a sense of wonder. He’s gawked at peaches growing on a sweet potato vine and sold fish that just might have diamonds in their mouths, and his wide-eyed awe at such spectacles could make you believe they were real. Even his blues songs have a sense of play to them, a lightness of mood and rhythm that turns a song like “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,” about harsh working conditions for spoolers and seamstresses, into something exuberant: Speaking out against exploitation became its own joyful reward, its own act of self-liberation. Because Fussell conveys such a sincere and convivial empathy toward his subjects, his music never comes across like homework.
His fourth album, Good and Green Again, gently upends that equation. Still inventive and imaginative, still grounded in his dexterous picking and robust vocals, it’s his most bittersweet album, with a melancholy lingering in each song, no matter its subject matter. Even “Frolic,” with its crisp Telecaster notes, thick brushstrokes of pedal steel, and choo-choo “vocables,” sounds forlorn, or at least caught up in some daydream; it’s less about running and skipping and more about our memories of childlike abandon, when we had no burdens upon our shoulders. Fussell thrives in this setting, not just because his voice carries such sadness gracefully but because he sounds like he’s responding to the present moment. As with previous albums, he roots these historical songs about marching soldiers, crumbling buildings, sinking ships, and parting lovers squarely in the present, which is no small feat.
Working with producer James Elkington, Fussell splits the folk band that backed him on 2019’s Out of Sight. Most of the musicians return, but rarely together. Drums are almost entirely absent, and most other instruments are flourishes rather than leads. The music, as a result, is somehow both sparser and richer: full of silence and space, but also alive to the ideas and memories that might fill them. Elkington, who also plays guitar and piano, highlights the subtle details in the arrangements, like the brushed snare that sounds like a strummed guitar on “In Florida” or the soft uillean pipes on the closer “Washington” (inspired, in a roundabout way, by the first president, not the 42nd state). “Rolling Mills Are Burning Down” pits Fussell’s gentle guitar picking against Elkington’s sympathetic piano, conveying no sense of emergency. Instead, the song is a eulogy for a world that is crumbling before his eyes, as though he’s watching forces at work that he cannot control or change. That sense of powerlessness only makes the song more painfully relatable.
Loss informs all of these songs, especially the centerpiece, “The Golden Willow Tree.” At nine minutes, it’s the longest song Fussell has ever recorded, an epic saga of seafaring espionage and brutal betrayal. Assembling his version from pieces of different songs associated with the Carter Family, the Child Ballads, and Georgia folklorist Paralee McCloud, Fussell recounts the story of a sailor striving to win his captain’s favor by scuttling an enemy ship, and he sings with a sense of resignation about the misdeeds men commit during wartime. The music drones and crests, as though sloshing against the bow, with Fussell repeating the chorus—“sink her in the low and lonesome water”—and changing it subtly each time. Even at nine minutes, it never tries your patience.
As the album title suggests, with every loss comes some hope of renewal. Mills may burn and boats may sink, but there’s always the chance that we might build something even better in their place. Such disasters become opportunities—a hard lesson in the midst of tragedy, but a comforting thought once the dust settles. Good and Green Again chronicles that cycle of death and rebirth, and Fussell savors the fresh perspective the past gives us on our present. | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | March 16, 2022 | 7.7 | 5620e00c-dbde-448d-9d9d-feb47a6bb5f0 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Their debut LP vented disillusionment with hard-charging punk and shouted choruses, but on their followup, the Leeds band channel their misery through a soft-focus dream-pop shimmer. | Their debut LP vented disillusionment with hard-charging punk and shouted choruses, but on their followup, the Leeds band channel their misery through a soft-focus dream-pop shimmer. | Eagulls: Ullages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21868-ullages/ | Ullages | “Hollow Visions.” “Yellow Eyes.” “Tough Luck.” The song titles on Eagulls’ 2014 self-titled practically form a Friday Night Lights locker-room mantra for the sort of outcasts who spent their high-school years getting stuffed into lockers. And yet their hard-charging goth-punk anthems channeled disillusionment into a full-contact sport, with vocalist George Mitchell screaming himself hoarse as if leading a team downfield to annihilate an opponent. Now, after tearing up the turf on their debut, the Leeds band spend their second album trying to build mountains.
As its anagrammed title suggests, on Ullages, everything has been rearranged, but nothing has changed. The band’s marauding gusto and shoegaze overdrive has been replaced by patient builds, soft-focus interstitials and a dream-pop shimmer. (It’s an evolution highly reminiscent of another band of Brits who traded in goth gloom for Big Rock ambition—The Horrors.) But despite the dramatic scenery change, Mitchell remains committed to ripping out his heart and giving us a close-up of the bruises. The crystalline sound simply allows for an unobstructed view of his anguish and anxiety.
It also lets Mitchell get as close to embodying Robert Smith as you possibly can without the jet-black palm-tree hairdo and badly applied lipstick. With the throat-shredding barks of old tempered into a yelp, Mitchell wields more control over his voice. Slow-dissolve anthems like “Euphoria” and “Velvet” feel like the biggest breakthroughs here—their stewing sense of despair doesn’t so much erupt as gradually bubble over, as Mitchell invests their verses with the gravitas of choruses through each increasingly impassioned pass. Ullages also betrays Mitchell’s gift for painting his greyscale world with colorful details and knowing, self-deprecating humor: on the sashaying “Psalms,” an inquiry to a palm reader opens with the comically dreary line, “Is our future grey as the slabs on our drives?” And when he sings, “When all the fruits from all my labor plummets over me” on the Bunnymen-esque “Lemontrees,” you realize he’s only writing about this tropical citrus source because it yields the heaviest foodstuff to drop on his head.
But with its predecessor’s white-knuckled intensity in much more limited supply here, Ullages can sag under the weight of its misery, and struggle to rise above pure Cure karaoke. It doesn’t help that mid-tempo churns like the soggy-ember torch song “My Life In Rewind” and the “Fascination Street”-grooved “Skipping” respectively use cassette-replay and broken-record metaphors to comment on the often cruel cycle of life, while coming off like repetitive slogs themselves. And the sense of inertia is compounded by an album-closing pair of ballads—“Aisles” and “White Lie Lullabies”—that follow the same route from quietude to climax, both gradually obliterating Mitchell’s presence in a cathedral-toppling avalanche of noise. Eagulls’ debut made its catharsis feel communal—a shout-along salvo like “Possessed” was effectively a group exorcism performed in a sweaty, overcrowded basement punk dive. Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result. | 2016-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | May 23, 2016 | 6.6 | 5625d491-ede3-4200-acda-32dd4c3ad1b1 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Angry Angles captured legendary Memphis garage-rock wildman Jay Reatard in between projects and on the brink of his solo career. | Angry Angles captured legendary Memphis garage-rock wildman Jay Reatard in between projects and on the brink of his solo career. | Angry Angles: Angry Angles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21975-angry-angles/ | Angry Angles | Angry Angles captured Jay Reatard at a pivotal point in his career—which, up to that point, hadn’t resembled a career at all. On paper, the short-lived band was just the latest in an erratic string of projects that the Memphis-based garage-punk wild man had been tearing through since the late ’90s, chief among them the Reatards and the Lost Sounds. During that time, he always kept a handful of side projects on the back burner, but Angry Angles seemed different. When formed in 2005, immediately after the breakup of the Lost Sounds, Angry Angles seemed poised to become Reatard’s new big thing, the group that might propel him to the next level of cult infamy. Instead, the band imploded in 2006, leaving a trail of singles in its wake.
*Angry Angles *collects those singles, along with previously unreleased bonus material, and as such it comprises the entire studio output of Angry Angles. Seventeen songs nailed to the wall in a little over a year is nothing to sneeze at—and neither are the songs themselves, despite spackling the slim gap between the Lost Sounds and Reatard’s storied solo career, launched in ’06 and cut short by his death in 2010. With bassist/singer Alix Brown (cofounder with Reatard of the indie label Shattered Records) and alternating drummers Paul Artigues and Ryan Rousseau (the latter a Reatards alum) in tow, Reatard synthesized everything he’d done up to that point. Borrowing some of the Lost Sounds’ retro-new-wave roboticism, but rendered in a more vivid, visceral Reatards-esque spew, Angry Angles tracks like “Crowds” and “Apparent-Transparent” are lobotomized post-punk, whiplash anthems for 21st-century dehumanization.
“Apparent-Transparent” also features one of Brown’s most striking vocal performances, a voice-processed call-and-response with Reatard that pays unabashed homage to Devo. There’s an actual Devo cover on Angry Angles as well, a beautifully bruised rendition by Brown of “Blockhead,” along with reverential versions of classics by Wire (“The 15th”), the Urinals (“Black Hole”), and Reatard’s mentor Greg Oblivian (“Memphis Creep” by the Oblivians). Churned together, these four bands pretty much comprise Reatard’s chemical makeup—not that he was ever shy about his influences, or his hooks. There are some great ones on these songs: the scabbed pop-punk of “Stab You Dead” for one, or “Can’t Do It Anymore,” which mixes feral riffage with a singsong chorus designed to stick in the head like a pickaxe.
Two versions of “Things Are Moving” are included here, but they’re anything but redundant. On the original single version, distortion is smeared across Reatard’s manic chants and punch-drunk guitar; on the abridged alternate version, that noise is whittled to a finer point. “Things are moving around me all the time,” Reatard howls on both. It sums up exactly where he was circa-Angry Angles. His romantic relationship with Brown ended the same time the band did, leaving him to pour his scattershot energy into his burgeoning solo career. Brown moved on to Golden Triangle, then a DJ career; Rousseau moved back to his home state of Arizona to revive the formidable Destruction Unit (an outfit Reatard was originally a part of). And Reatard funneled his turmoil into his 2006 breakthrough solo album, Blood Visions, an album that sounds more and more like a masterpiece as time goes by. Angry Angles* *is a blurry, inconsistent snapshot of his liminal state between dude-in-a-million-bands and burgeoning solo icon—ragged here, refined there, and brimming with vitality. | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Goner | June 1, 2016 | 7.6 | 56265554-a298-46cb-bd35-f90e759c326e | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Ariana Grande’s live album is both a capsule and a capstone, encompassing a nine-month, 102-show tour at what might be the peak of her career. | Ariana Grande’s live album is both a capsule and a capstone, encompassing a nine-month, 102-show tour at what might be the peak of her career. | Ariana Grande: k bye for now (swt live) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariana-grande-k-bye-for-now-swt-live/ | k bye for now (swt live) | We didn’t need an Ariana Grande live album. The sweeping, hour-and-a-half-long recording of her Sweetener world tour offers faithful renditions of recent and past hits; very little is new here, beyond a pre-recorded cover of a song from a Cole Porter musical. These are recitations, not re-interpretations. Videos circulated over the summer of Grande crying during some of her concerts, but on the recorded tracks selected for the album—stitched together from various tour stops, so that she shouts out a different city nearly every song—she is polished and composed. Even if a live album may not have been necessary, k bye for now gleams. It is both a capsule and a capstone, encompassing a nine-month, 102-show tour at what might be the peak of Grande’s career.
While k bye for now may not have much new information, it builds on our understanding of Grande as an artist. We know she has a dazzling voice, but we get to hear it swoop and pierce while the audience shrieks around her. We know she’s lurched and leaned into hip hop aesthetics; on the live album, we hear her chirp into raps over recorded features from Nicki Minaj and Big Sean. We also see different shades of some tracks. “Break up with your girlfriend i’m bored,” a song that can come across as glib and brash as its title, becomes huskier and tender. Sighs and coos trickle into spaces where production was left sparse. “Side to Side” crackles with a live band. The sing-songy flow of “7 rings” becomes more lilting and precise; after the line, “Happiness is the same price as red bottoms,” she blurts out, “Just kidding!”
While the tour focused on Sweetener and thank u, next, Grande weaves in past highlights from her catalog that demonstrate how much she’s grown. The titanic Zedd banger “Break Free” is fun, but can’t compare to the nuance and texture of a song like “God is a woman.” “Break Your Heart Right Back” sounds flimsy and disposable when followed by “NASA.” k bye for now becomes a way to track throughlines of Grande’s career: how feathery murmurs bloomed into dynamic tapestries, how flamboyant love ballads led to delicate pop anthems. One of the live album’s greatest assets is the juxtapositions created by the newly shuffled song order; thank u, next tracks glow brighter beside the softer edges of Sweetener songs. The pleas of “Needy” are more urgent and lovely when preceded by “Breathin,” a galvanic song about anxiety attacks. “Thank u, next” becomes even more stunning when “no tears left to cry” bleeds into it, coaxing a way forward through loss.
Like any live album, k bye for now strains to transmit the feeling of an actual concert, and banter about costumes and dancers is a clumsy reminder. Recordings only capture part of what illuminated the Sweetener tour—not outfit changes or neon lights, but the power of a woman confronting trauma. At a Brooklyn show this past summer, sobs slipped out of me during “get well soon.” Grande was singing about flashbacks, dissociations that wrench you out of your body—feelings I had barely described to other people, and had never heard sang back at me. In the live recording, her voice drops to a low, raw shudder. But just a few tracks later, you can hear her laugh. | 2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | January 7, 2020 | 7.4 | 5626ad47-2254-45d0-a7b2-ef90c26fd970 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips and singer Ma Clément craft alluring jazz fusion songs in miniature. It is heady but not stuffy, precise but not rigid, dense but not cluttered. | Multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips and singer Ma Clément craft alluring jazz fusion songs in miniature. It is heady but not stuffy, precise but not rigid, dense but not cluttered. | Fievel Is Glauque: Flaming Swords | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fievel-is-glauque-flaming-swords/ | Flaming Swords | Zach Phillips places a premium on preparedness and growth: the rehearsals are plentiful, the recording sessions are brief, and the next opportunity for collaboration is always just over the horizon. Since founding the eclectic label OSR Tapes (now known as “la Loi”) in 2007, the Brooklyn-based songwriter and bandleader has released music under myriad monikers—Horse Boys, Nals Goring, Jordan Piper Philips, GDC, Bruce Hart—and with several side projects—Blanche Blanche Blanche, Perfect Angels, etc. When his new partnership with Belgium-based vocalist Ma Clément produced the homespun God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, it sold thousands of copies and landed them a spot opening for Stereolab. Flaming Swords, the first studio album from Fievel Is Glauque, makes God’s Trashmen seem humble by comparison. Cramming highly technical and conversational fusion compositions within sub-two-minute songs, the album has the allure of a puzzle box with no right or wrong answers: just barrages of instrumental hooks and Delphic ponderings of the human condition.
Whereas God’s Trashmen compiled mono cassette recordings across five sessions from five permutations of musicians between 2018 and 2020, Flaming Swords was recorded live in a single evening in Brussels during summer 2021 by a septet of old and new collaborators. As their arrangements grow more complex and texturally rich, Fievel Is Glauque benefits from this immediacy. Johannes Eimermacher’s piquant alto sax leads the opener and title track as Gaspard Sicx’s drums engage Phillips’ keys in a coltish tussle. Clément’s sugary soprano and Eric Kinny’s lap steel swiftly diffuse the kineticism, transforming licks of Biblical fire into a smoke-filled speakeasy. When the rhythm fluctuates, Clément matches it with her phrasing.
It’s one of the most apparent evolutions from God’s Trashmen. Now composing alongside Phillips, Clément has more opportunity to flex her paradoxical ability to ground a piece with ethereal musings. Whether tiptoeing sylph-like across Sicx’s skittering cymbal taps on “Days of Pleasure,” sprinting through a recitation of a French apology letter for the belated arrival of a James Last cassette on “Boîte à Serpents,” wringing every drop of aching fragility from the brief runs of “Constantly Rare,” or soaking up the paranoia of Eimermacher’s swarming locust notes on “Wrong Item,” her range is subtle but stunning. While Clément’s approach can be taken as reticent—favoring cloudy poetry delivered with a lilt—its gentle cadence serves as an olive branch on an album that may otherwise seem daunting.
Phillips declines to prompt listeners to think or feel a certain way about Flaming Swords. “If this music is ‘for’ anyone, it’s ‘for’ the people who play it,” he told Post-Trash. You’d be forgiven for taking that as stubbornness. Fievel doesn’t willingly invite comparison to anyone—let alone contemporaries—and Phillips scoffs at the idea of making music to tap into a market. One could stretch and call them philosophically aligned with the recent wave of “viral jazz,” at least as far as refusing to adhere to strict concepts of what jazz, prog, or avant-whatever represent. Incidentally, Fievel has more in common with the Rock in Opposition movement of the ’70s: Flaming Swords, like Black Midi’s Hellfire, could be regarded as current endpoints of divergent paths from The Henry Cow Legend. But when pressed for influences, Phillips eagerly points fans toward Uruguayan music: specifically, a 100-song compilation titled La Otra Mitad. This affability is woven into Flaming Swords’ tendency to confound: It’s a mysterious friend who’d love it if you understood better, but you’re going to have to work for it.
Still, wispy threads present themselves. The album’s title references the Book of Genesis, where the flaming sword prevents humanity’s re-entrance into Paradise. Fievel implies that quixotic notions are our flaming swords: that the uncritical embrace of idealism and the attempt to control what can’t be controlled block our route toward truth and inner peace. The neurotic introspection of “Save the Phenomenon” wrestles with confirmation bias (“Give me what’s better wrong”) while “Porn of Love” accuses romcoms of distorting our perceptions of romance much in the way pornography can warp one’s view of sex. The conversation between a swordsman and a poet that ends “Days of Pleasure” is most telling: Each participant is envious of the other, longing for what could be and lacking appreciation for what is. The presentation of these ideas is akin to that of a Rorschach: blotchy, based on feelings sparked by intonations, enforced by the re-jumbling of jumbled sequences. We’re all sifting through the mess together.
Flaming Swords is heady but not stuffy, precise but not rigid, dense but not cluttered, and contemplative but not lacking good humor. It exists as a fitful reflection of Phillips’ past decade and a half as a musician and a refinement of lessons learned across dozens of projects, suggesting that the technical music of today need not adhere to a regressive worship of the past nor succumb to a cold, cynically quirky vision of the future. It can be as heartfelt as it is cryptic. It can simply be, a dilated and present moment that translates the psyche as it naturally operates: nebulous, frenzied, contradictory, and beautiful. | 2022-11-30T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-30T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Math Interactive | November 30, 2022 | 8.1 | 5628453c-a65b-46e0-8d6a-cab33082d2cd | Travis Shosa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/travis-shosa/ | |
With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, Mumford & Sons has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad. | With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, Mumford & Sons has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad. | Mumford & Sons: Wilder Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20421-wilder-mind/ | Wilder Mind | Mumford & Sons didn't have to be awful. A British neo-folk band, liberally applying the trappings of Americana, they made big songs well-suited to big stages, and they made them about as well as possible. But awful they were, nonetheless, a band so determined to be huge that they willed themselves into anonymity. Their latest effort, Wilder Mind, is a "rock" record in the least interesting sense of that word—a pastiche of the genre’s most common elements, from big percussion, electric guitars, and warm synths, to poignant but ultimately surface-level lyrics. It has all the elements of radio-friendly 2015 American rock'n'roll, with very timely nods to Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but what it’s lacking in is any kind of originality, or message—and most importantly, it’s lacking in banjo, the only thing that ever set the band apart from the bro-rock horde in the first place. With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, the band has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and, when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.
Love songs are low-hanging fruit, and on Wilder Mind, Mumford picks from the lowest branches. The first words uttered on the album's opening track, "Tompkins Square Park", are "Oh, babe," and like a boyfriend offering a generic apology, the song that follows sounds like it could be applied to any romantic situation at any time. There’s so little actual heart present in the songs, so little heartbreak, that it’s hard to imagine they were written from any kind of real place. This is music without any real center, designed only with montages and "Grey’s Anatomy" climaxes in mind. What the album sounds like, above all else, is easy money. These are songs that reflect emotion but generate none. They don't have feelings, they have #thefeels. The ‘I’ in these songs feels heartbreak but not too much; longing, but not too much; joy, but again, not too much. The influence of Dessner’s production is obvious in the richness of the arrangements, but where the National’s enormous sound is countered by obtuse and specific lyrics, Mumford matches a big, general sound with big, general statements of longing, and it falls flat. Petty and Springsteen are storytellers, bringing tangible and unique perspective to their personal narratives and those of their subjects. Mumford is telling the tale of the everyman, in that their narrative could be literally about every single man.
Songs like "Believe" are so lumbering that they are almost vulgar. "I don’t even know if I believe/ Everything you’re trying to say to me," Mumford sings in his best Chris Martin-soft-voice, before laddering up to a loud, crunchy apex of sound that explodes into a plea for some kind of redemption. The conflict on Wilder Mind is pedestrian—the confusion of someone with nothing real to lose. On "Cold Arms", the only song on the record that provides a vague respite from the formula, pairing Mumford’s plaintive vocals with a single electric guitar, he sings of a relationship where he and his partner are simultaneously "bloodshot and beat/ and never so alive." There’s no evidence of life on the track itself, which follows every imaginable rule so closely that all traces of life are erased.
Many of the songs on the album reference specific locations in New York City, from the aforementioned opener to the galloping "Ditmas", which names the small Brooklyn neighborhood, home to many members of the National, where the album's demos were recorded. But they make no reference to any location outside of their titles, and listened to sequentially, it seems as if any of these songs could switch titles with the next one with no discernible effect. They are 12 variations on vaguely Don Henley-inspired arena schlock, and in this transition, they've found a new bottom. Mumford & Sons' only hope to stand out was lost in favor of a cheap imitation, and not even a banjo can save them now. | 2015-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Island / Glassnote | May 7, 2015 | 2 | 5630e76a-1a54-46d4-97dc-2e81e4f78a8b | Maud Deitch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maud-deitch/ | null |
The Miami producer and vocalist’s expertly curated, shamelessly horny new mixtape revels in reggaeton’s queer and femme club underground. | The Miami producer and vocalist’s expertly curated, shamelessly horny new mixtape revels in reggaeton’s queer and femme club underground. | MJ Nebreda: Arepa Mixtape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mj-nebreda-arepa-mixtape/ | Arepa Mixtape | Arepa Mixtape, the new record from MJ Nebreda, seems designed to leave blue denim stains on basement walls. The Peruvian-Venezuelan producer and singer’s newest release is a clubby reggaeton thrill, one that revels in the genre’s sauciness, sex, and singular sense of humor while providing curative carnal nourishment. The troublemakers in these songs know it’s okay not to be liked. They come quick and make money fast. They post thirst traps for themselves and no one else. Here, being messy and sexy is a way of life—and a perreo sucio is the only appropriate soundtrack.
The Miami artist has only been making music for three years, but Arepa already positions her as a deft newcomer. Nebreda is credited as a writer and producer on every song on the tape. She sparkles as a curator, too, perhaps a result of her former role in A&R. She twists together sticky dembow riddims, chonga aesthetics of excess, and raptor house’s mind-numbing drum loops. On top of all the heat is her insolent voice, which frequently feels like it’s about to break into an orgasmic moan. “Muy Fina” is a full-on playground taunt in which Nebreda and guest Gini Santana assume the role of “pretty bitches” demanding that trifling men cough up (“Better to transfer that money to my PayPal,” they spit in Spanish). In these moments, Nebreda channels reggaeton icons like Glory and Jenny La Sexy Voz—women whose sex appeal was foundational to the genre’s commercial triumph, even if they were almost never credited for their indelible, generation-defining hooks.
Nebreda’s irreverent one-liners often feel liberatory, but never rely on strained or corny empowerment tropes. “Calor,” featuring fellow Miami producer Nick León, is a linguistic romp, the verb tenses and grammatical gender limits of Spanish stretched into an elegantly bratty rhyme: “A mi me sobra lo que a ti rest’/Así que vengase pa’ca/Que te lo compartex.” And then there’s the unabashed horniness. On the title track, she uses the yonic form of the arepa, a Venezuelan national dish, to represent pussy. She and guest Calacote slur the hook on “Agua Sin Gas” so that it ends up sounding like “I’m gonna fuck” in Dominican slang. Later, on “Teta” (Spanish for “boob”), Nebreda threatens to lick your belly button.
Arepa doubles as a showcase of the producers and vocalists defying fixed interpretations of reggaeton as misogynistic and homophobic. This genre has always had ample room for the queer and the femme; all you had to do was hand over the mic. Across Arepa, the pronouns are fluid and so are the genders of whoever you’re fucking. There are appearances from fresh faces like trans and non-binary Puerto Rican artist Ana Macho and the Toronto-based Dominican experimentalist Móry, as well as more established names, like neoperreo matriarch Ms Nina. With a crew of equally ungovernable baddies in tow, Arepa’s directive to misbehave and shake your ass is irresistible.
Arepa illustrates that the most promising artists in reggaeton aren’t signed to Columbia or Universal; they’re building dembow riddims in their bedrooms and raving on the weekends. Only a handful of tracks here sound rough around the edges. “Teta” drills through raptor house bedrock, but the Mussa Medusa verses land in a lo-fi haze, resembling demos more than final products. This is technically a mixtape, so that unpolished finish adds its own charm. Reggaeton is often a pleasure practice, and Nebreda seems less interested in perfection than immersive ecstasy. In the fantasia of Arepa, everyone is a ruthless man-eater or a drop-dead vixen who deserves to feel good. | 2023-10-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Empire | October 4, 2023 | 7.8 | 56397c0d-2287-44ab-9bbb-2a6afcc4fdb9 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
A new reissue of the UK group’s 1979 album captures David Sylvian and his bandmates as they evolved from their glam-influenced early years into the experimental electronic pop of their final two LPs. | A new reissue of the UK group’s 1979 album captures David Sylvian and his bandmates as they evolved from their glam-influenced early years into the experimental electronic pop of their final two LPs. | Japan: Quiet Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/japan-quiet-life/ | Quiet Life | Before they became synonymous with heady, ethereal synth pop, Japan started out under the sway of Bowie and Bolan. On their first two albums, Adolescent Sex and Obscure Alternatives, both released in 1978, singer/guitarist David Sylvian affected a nasal sneer while the rest of the band (drummer Steve Jansen, bassist Mick Karn, keyboardist Richard Barbieri, and guitarist Rob Dean) backed him with icy, funk- and glam-infused rock. They even had the cheek to cover the decidedly unhip “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” a song from the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl. But as the chemistry within the band tightened and their interests expanded to include Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno, they were eager to grow. “We got the first album completely wrong, so we did another and that was wrong as well,” Sylvian recalled in a 1986 interview. He felt so strongly about this that he regarded Japan’s third LP, 1979’s Quiet Life, as the band’s proper debut.
There’s a measure of truth to Sylvian’s ahistorical take on Japan’s discography. As heard on a new deluxe reissue, Quiet Life presaged the mature beauty of the band’s final albums and Sylvian’s eventual solo career. The barbed agitation of Japan’s early work gave way to a controlled, sensual sound built from droning synths, bleating saxophone, and complex, jazzy rhythms, with Sylvian floating above it all like the omniscient narrator of a sci-fi noir film. Alongside other albums of the era like Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope and PiL’s Metal Box, Quiet Life served as a bridge between post-punk and the burgeoning new-wave scene.
Japan’s first step away from those so-called mistakes was a blatantly commercial one. In hope of capitalizing on the success of Obscure Alternatives’ overseas success, their label, Hansa, put the group in an L.A. studio with Giorgio Moroder. The band had already written “European Son” as an homage to the Italian producer’s sequencer throb; rather than produce a version of that song, Moroder insisted they collaborate on something new. The track that came out of that session, “Life in Tokyo,” melds two distinct artistic approaches: Karn’s sliding fretless bass figure and Sylvian’s lyrics of urban disaffection fit perfectly with Moroder’s signature synth pulses and disco diva backing vocals.
While the single failed to chart, the session with Moroder bolstered Japan’s confidence as they continued woodshedding new material for their third album. What came out of the rehearsals were dynamic changes in their sound, placing new emphasis on the interplay between Karn’s rubbery bass playing and Jansen’s oblique rhythms, with Barbieri and Dean coloring in the edges with textural chords and quick melodic hits.
The biggest shift came as Sylvian began to adopt a restrained croon inspired by Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. This new timbre allowed him to vary the emotional temperature of Quiet Life’s material. Some of the snarl of the early albums remains on “Fall in Love With Me” and the ragged “Halloween,” but other tones were creeping in. On the Moroder-inspired title track, his voice evokes the exhaustion and tension inherent in his lyrics, which speak to the strange tug-of-war between the desires for pop success and anonymity. And on the somber album closer “The Other Side of Life,” Sylvian is overcome with wistful yearning, as if already nostalgic for his time in the group, which would disband within three years.
Some of the band’s changes of that period manifest as growing pains on Quiet Life. The plodding cadence and honking sax lines of “Fall in Love With Me” sit uncomfortably between the disco-pop shimmy of the title track and the hissing drum machine and chilly atmosphere of “Despair.” The LP’s second side is even more oddly paced. The faltering beat and glam guitars of “Halloween” do a poor job preparing listeners for a skewed cover of the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” which sets a Fripp-like guitar whine against a Motown backbeat, followed by the stiffly funky prog-pop of “Alien.”
Japan’s label didn’t seem to know what to do with Quiet Life. Outside the UK, Hansa pushed the title track as a single, but on their home turf it was relegated to the B-side of the band’s ill-fitting cover of Smokey Robinson’s “I Second That Emotion,” included here in both its 7" and 12" versions. They also issued a live EP that featured only one song from the freshly released album. (That EP and a variety of mixes of the singles from this era make up the second disc of this set.)
The album and its accompanying singles failed to make a commercial dent in the UK, but the band was still a sizable draw in Japan’s namesake country. On the tour for Quiet Life, Karn recalled in his memoir Japan & Self Existence, fans chased down their taxis and stuffed their phone numbers into the men’s pockets. The screaming during the band’s concert at Tokyo’s Budokan indoor arena in 1980 bears out their popularity there. Unfortunately, that live document, which comprises the third disc in the set, sounds like it was sourced from an audience recording, and the music is muffled and ugly to listen to.
Everything would eventually fall into place for Japan, albeit briefly. After breaking ties with Hansa, they would sign with Virgin Records and produce two confident and stunning albums, 1980’s Gentlemen Take Polaroids and 1981’s Tin Drum, scoring an unlikely No. 5 hit in the UK with the poignant single “Ghosts.” But to get to that point, Japan had to go through the period of growth that resulted in Quiet Life, straining against the limits of their abilities as songwriters and musicians in order to move beyond them. As heard in the context of the group’s history, this album, however imperfect, feels rich with possibility and promise.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | March 9, 2021 | 6.8 | 563a65e2-72ac-4a77-b32a-7865510a8b51 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
After years of wild thrash metal, Metallica simplified everything and became the biggest rock band in the world. The Black Album’s dark, muscular sound would permanently alter the course heavy music. | After years of wild thrash metal, Metallica simplified everything and became the biggest rock band in the world. The Black Album’s dark, muscular sound would permanently alter the course heavy music. | Metallica: Metallica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metallica-metallica/ | Metallica | June 29, 1990: Deep in the guts of Toronto’s CNE Stadium, four shaggy, sweaty, booze-swilling horsemen of the apocalypse are hatching a cultural coup. James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, and Jason Newsted just opened up for Aerosmith, their childhood heroes. Judging by the muffled roars emanating from the arena, Steven Tyler’s got the world wrapped around his finger. The same will be said for Metallica within a year’s time. They won’t settle for anything less than a supervillain death grip.
Granted, Metallica’s approach up to this point has proven hugely successful, a byzantine war machine powered by a spartan tactic Ulrich will later outline to critic David Masciotra as simply: “not fucking up.” Judging from their generous album sales, sold-out tours, Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental Grammy nomination, and hard-won laurels despite crickets from the establishment, “not fucking up” should ensure that their wallets remain as stuffed as the arenas.
But these are the guys who gave us Kill ’Em All; they won’t stop until they’ve slayed Poison, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, and every last one of those platinum-blonde, spandex-wearing false heirs to the heavy metal throne with their own weapons: massive riffs, clean vocals, sharp arrangements, and layered mixes that gush from the speakers like knife wounds. They’ll even tap Bob Rock—the man behind Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, an anti-Metallica album if there ever was one—to ensure the heist goes off without a hitch.
Naturally, Metallica will name this declaration of war and independence after themselves. It’s the best-selling album of the past 25 years, with currently over 20 million copies sold worldwide, more than Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. Even if you handed out three Black Albums to every citizen in Ulrich’s native Denmark, you’d be left with a warehouse full of CDs. Few bands have achieved such ubiquity so that if you know literally one thing about metal music, it is the six-note opening riff to “Enter Sandman.”
Though Metallica were neither unknowns nor underdogs when they recorded their fifth studio album Metallica, the status quo as dictated by music critics, disc jockeys, and MTV framed them as such. Throughout the ’80s, Metallica and their Big Four peers—Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax—challenged metal’s emergent portrait of pomp by way of extreme fundamentalism. In her 1992 book Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, Deena Weinstein compared thrash metal to the Protestant Reformation, framing it as a reaction to corruption: “Both movements [the Reformation and thrash metal],” she wrote, “charged that the established form had become corrupt through extravagance, and both supported a return to the essential message, stripped bare of all adornment.”
Metallica’s rapid ascent throughout the latter half of the decade—from Golden State basement fiends, to Big Four figureheads, to Grammy nominees—shattered the cultural status quo. The group’s first studio three albums—1983’s Kill ’Em All, 1984’s Ride the Lightning, and 1986’s Master of Puppets—are a trio of bloodthirsty, whip-smart chimeras. Their din bears traces of blues, punk, hard rock, progressive jams, and—thanks to bassist Cliff Burton’s virtuosic strivings—even classical music. By identifying the genres’ cathartic common ground and amping up the drama, Metallica reframed the heavy metal revival as a serious movement, as opposed to a perennial retread.
Burton’s tragic death in September 1986 intensified Metallica’s ambition. Shortly after Burton’s death, they’d recruited a new bassist, Flotsam and Jetsam frontman (and lifelong Metallica fan) Jason Newsted; and two years later, they released ...And Justice For All. Between its extensive runtimes, unusual time signatures, and arcane arrangements, it remains a fan-favorite whose genius is often overshadowed by the fact that it sounds like it was recorded through a tin can. Its ramshackle mixing kills the dynamic frisson: Hetfield and Hammett’s dueling riffs collapse into a static, mind-numbing roar; Ulrich’s fills hit like raindrops instead of the usual mortars; Newsted’s bass lines are nearly impossible to make out, positioned so far back in the mix that a group of fans took it upon themselves to release a bootleg, bass-boosted version of the album titled ...And Justice For Jason.
Nevertheless, ...And Justice For All positioned Metallica within striking distance of the mainstream. The LP debuted at No. 6 on the Billboard Charts—a feat practically unheard of for a metal band at the time—and went platinum within nine weeks. It was their most successful crossover to date thanks to its music video for “One,” which got them on MTV. And yet, remarkably, the band looked back on their latest triumph with disappointment. As Metallica’s fanbase grew, more non-metalheads came into the fold. This influx of casual listeners created a communication gap, which was particularly evident in concert. Speaking with Masciotra, Ulrich identified the album’s associated “Damaged Justice” tour as the end of the honeymoon and, arguably, Metallica as most people knew it. “Early on the tour, we started wondering why the songs were so long, progressive, and all-over-the-place,” he said. “We felt that the material did not connect well live because it was too introverted and cerebral.”
In Ulrich’s view, Metallica had taken the progressive side as far as they could. The only way for the band to move on was to look back, to invoke the bad-asses who’d inspired them, and so many others, to pick up guitars and drumsticks in the first place: barnstormers like Motörhead, Black Sabbath, the Rolling Stones, and so on.
Also, the next album needed to not sound like shit. In a huge leap of faith, Metallica began their years-long relationship with Bob Rock—a straight-shooting, detail-oriented guitar band guru who’d manned the boards for Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, and other arena mainstays—to take the reins on production. He accepted their offer after witnessing them live: “I had bought the Justice record, and I just didn’t get it,” he later told Masciotra of the album, which he described as thin. “Then when I saw them play live after the Cult, and they walked off stage, I thought, ‘That’s not the band on the Justice record.’”
Far and wide, Rock’s production comprises Metallica’s greatest source of controversy. While it may be tempting to paint Rock as a sinister interloper, Adam Dubin’s behind-the-scenes documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica positions him, instead, as a grizzled studio sherpa nudging the band away from clunky performances or technical mishaps, often to considerable pushback from his charges. “Lars, will you make the next couple versions a little more peppery off the top? A little more weight into it?” he says Ulrich at one point, like a parent asking his son to clean his room. Lars seethes, “If you want weight, I’m your fucking guy!” Elsewhere, he reminds Hetfield to sing and play at the same time, only to get another tantrum in response: “You wanna hear it with vocals? Go sing it.”
The producer left a new mark on the group: he turned Hetfield from an untrained screamer to a seasoned rock singer, pushed the frontman to step up his lyrical game and brought Newsted out of the shadows, recasting him as the stoic yin to Ulrich’s frenzied yang.
And then, of course, there’s his showstopping mix: the subject of countless late-night road-tests and in-studio arguments, and the long-awaited antidote to the muddled palettes of Metallica albums past. Nowhere is this more evident than in the intro to “Enter Sandman”: Hammett’s riff creeps in from the background, a night-stalker inching closer by the minute. Hetfield swoops in behind him, the violent churn intensifies and, upon Ulrich and Newsted’s entry, finally overflows in a froth: cacophonous, chilling, and definitively anthemic.
Metallica’s twelve tracks may be sorted into three categories: angsty arena anthems, furrowed-brow ballads, and tamer, hybridized takes on Metallica’s famous pit-starters. Aside from “Holier Than Thou” and “Through the Never,” which offer red meat for the black-leathered fans of old, the album skews simplistic, melodically and lyrically. Whereas Ride the Lightning and ...And Justice for All prioritized instrumental stunts over melody, Metallica bets it all on Hetfield, a paradigm shift made all the more noticeable by his bandmates’ restraint. Instead of firing off fills, Ulrich keeps it simple, locked in 4/4 throughout (“It’s a little bit like building a house,” he crows in A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica, chest puffed, shit-eating grin on his face, “If you have a good foundation, then…”) Newsted mostly swears by the root notes, but gives millions of would-be bassists their first homework assignment with “My Friend of Misery”’s percolating refrain. While he’s given plenty of room to show off his solos (”Don’t Tread on Me” and “Of Wolf and Man” are particularly fiendish), Hammett’s riffs skew tamer, more deliberate, and subservient to the Hetfield’s pained yowls.
Hetfield pivots between devastating croons and razor-throated yells like a seasoned “American Idol” contestant. “I’m your dream/I’m your eyes/I’m your pain” he sneers on “Sad But True,” a song Rock labelled the heavy metal “Kashmir.” This technique inevitably draws the listener’s focus to Hetfield’s lyrics, which, while perfectly suited for stadium sing-a-longs, aren’t exactly Pulitzer material. You can see the low-hanging rhymes coming from a mile away—“real” and “feel,” “be” and “see,” “you” and “do.” More damningly, it saps his revealing personal narratives of their latent emotional heft.
“The God That Failed” is a bittersweet ode to Hetfield’s mother, a Christian Scientist who succumbed to cancer because she refused to treat it through any means other than faith. And yet, for every devastating couplet (”The healing hand held back the deepened nail/Follow the God that failed”), there’s two chunks of clunky poetry not far behind (”Find your peace/Find your say/Find the smooth road on your way”; “Pride you took/Pride you feel/Pride that you felt when you’d kneel.”)
The simplicity proves far more successful on “Nothing Else Matters,” an acoustic ballad which, however ham-fisted, stands as one of the album’s most revolutionary moments. Here, smack dab in the center of metal’s hyper-masculine universe, we have one of the genre’s most fearsome luminaries singing the praises not of Satan, sex, or the good sweet leaf, but rather a woman. Given the overarching cultural context, Hetfield’s insistence that he’s “Never cared for what they say/Never cared for games they play/Never cared for what they do/Never cared for what they know” scans as a middle finger to all the meatheads who think intimacy and metal are mutually exclusive. His solo acts as the band’s closing argument, undeniable proof that vulnerability could both rock and sell.
August 12, 1991: At midnight, the coup officially begins. The metalheads don their old concert tees and rush, rapt and stoned, to their nearest record store, where they await Metallica’s fifth album coming in droves. The makers of A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica are on hand to chronicle one such release party, and ask the faithful for their thoughts on this monumental album, and what they think it all means. “Reality, man…some shit you just can’t change.” responds one particularly impassioned mullet-man, shouting over his equally-stoked friend. “Listening to the words, it talks about people who, I don’t know, either can’t forgive, or the people that die unforgiven by others,” a soft-spoken young woman posits, reverent, as if contemplating a Rothko.
Just like Metallica’s lyrics, the band’s fans’ insights scan as invariably vague, slightly naive, and unflinchingly, impossibly earnest. It’s only appropriate that these remarks comprise A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica’s opening scene: They’re candids of the Black Album’s power as a tabula rasa for a young, embittered generation, saddled with their parents’ wars and religious scorn. When the hesher in the “Metal Up Your Ass” t-shirt proclaims, “My parents don’t think anything about Metallica, they just ignore it,” he’s really gesturing to a generational victory: Mom and Dad with their heads in the sand, while the kids raise hell and make history.
Heavy metal had officially set up shop on the main stage. As if to prove their point, they hit the road in 1992 with Guns N’ Roses (the only band who rivaled their power at the time; their contemporaneously released albums Use Your Illusion I and II moved 14 million units altogether) for a massive, effects-heavy arena outing. During the band’s run-through of “Fade to Black” at the August 8 stop in Montreal, Hetfield lost track of the band’s complicated pyrotechnics setup and found himself standing atop an erupting grate, leaving the frontman with second- and third-degree burns and forcing his band to the sidelines for several days.
The real burn, though, was still five years off. In May 1996, MTV screened Samuel Bayer’s surreal, melodramatic visual for “Until It Sleeps”—the moody, ur-Godsmack lead single from the Black Album’s successor Load, which removed thrash from the musical equation even further. Five seconds in, we spot Ulrich, dressed like one of the cock-rockers he loved to loathe: thick black eyeliner, shorn head, silver earrings. He drags his hands down his face, his lips curling in a cartoonish gesture of exasperation as if struggling to understand how he ended up in the get-up to begin with. Elsewhere on Load, Hetfield sings in a voice that would usher in the sound of post-grunge and butt rock for the next decade: “Careful what you wish you may regret it/Careful what you wish you just might get it.”
The words drip with meaning now, knowing Metallica’s long road through the turn of the 21st century would be filled with charges of “hair cuts!” and “sell outs!” as well as their own much-derided suit against Napster. There was Newsted’s famous quip from their episode of VH1’s “Behind The Music:” “Yes, we sell out: every seat in the house, every time we play, anywhere we play,” spoken just a few years before he departed the band in early 2001; his acknowledgements of Metallica’s rise in the public sphere and identity crises embedded therein, however lighthearted, nonetheless presaged the physical and existential temper tantrums captured on 2004’s tell-all documentary Some Kind of Monster. Metallica, however, remains the final bastion of focus: a hubristic request for grace masquerading as a show of force, the prophetic turning point for the world’s biggest ever metal band. | 2017-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Elektra | July 9, 2017 | 7.7 | 563bfd7d-bd8c-4183-9d44-c82653d3bace | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Prolific Princeton, N.J., artist releases his debut full-length, which works as a polite companion to his Cyanide Sisters EP. | Prolific Princeton, N.J., artist releases his debut full-length, which works as a polite companion to his Cyanide Sisters EP. | Com Truise: Galactic Melt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15604-galactic-melt/ | Galactic Melt | It hasn't even been five months since Ghostly re-released Com Truise's formative Cyanide Sisters EP, and already Princeton, N.J.'s Seth Haley is back with a full-length debut. That Galactic Melt has been pretty much in the can for that entire time tells you something about Haley's formidable work ethic; in addition to Truise, he operates under at least three other pseudonyms, none as fully-realized but each as prodigious.
Haley's rapid-fire turnover plays incredibly well on the Internet. He's something of a cottage industry, dispensing original tracks, remixes, podcasts, and accompanying boxfresh graphic designs to his blog readership and Twitter followers with impressive regularity. By capitalizing on the immediacy of the formats, he's also charting his own evolution in realtime. When he writes, "I thought I'd switch it up a little" in reference to a remix he's just posted for Ana Lola Roman's "Klutch", he's acknowledging that his listeners know what he means by "it," and how it's been switched; everything is laid out with a clear progression, one small evolution to the next.
The comparative slow lane of a regular label release schedule, though, has a habit of slowing down the flow of music, crumpling up its timelines and deforming expectations. This usually doesn't matter to the end listener; what's new to our ears is good as new. But since Galactic Melt sounds more like a polite and brotherly companion piece to Cyanide Sisters than it does a proper follow-up, it's hard not to feel like the tactic of waiting to market has robbed Haley of some of some of his momentum.
Part of the problem is Cyanide Sisters. As debut EPs go, it was an accomplished enough turn to raise questions about what Truise might do for an encore. The answer, as it happens, was, well, a slightly more muted version of the same. Don't get me wrong: with its staccato, bonus level synth stabs, keening psychedelia and 1980s-drenched drum sounds, Melt is still very identifiably Truise. But with the exception of the banging double whammy of "VHS Sex" and "Cathode Girls", there's nothing much here to suggest that Truise has upped his game in any meaningful way. Whether you consider that a disappointment will depend on how much mileage you get out of Haley in this mode. | 2011-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | July 5, 2011 | 7.3 | 56445dca-2b00-4763-8806-34fb88fa6528 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
On their first release for the D.C. punk band Priests’ label, the duo finally let a little light into their rough-and-tumble rock songs, celebrating in spite of hardships. | On their first release for the D.C. punk band Priests’ label, the duo finally let a little light into their rough-and-tumble rock songs, celebrating in spite of hardships. | The Funs : Alienated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-funs-alienated/ | Alienated | If you’ve ever seen the Funs perform, you may have noticed the duct tape. Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Jerome Lesicko, who constantly swap instruments between songs, brandish guitars and drums that look as if they will fall apart during the next tune. But they are the perfect tools for the Funs’ sort of rough-edged indie rock—janky, excessively noisy songs that rattle around like loose, rusty parts. The Funs don’t waste time replacing a slightly busted microphone; they slap on adhesive and keep going, an approach that stems from the way they handle life, too. The Funs chose their name, after all, as an optimistic gesture amid the hard times of their early years, including the untimely death of Crane’s brother. They’ve turned an abandoned funeral home outside St. Louis into a recording studio. Still, their sound—grungy, tarry, tough—has rarely conveyed such optimism.
Alienated, their first release for Priests’ Sister Polygon label, finally allows unquestionable rays of sunlight into their songs, hints of the hope for which they’ve long waited. But it begins with a disclaimer on “Enemy,” where Crane aims desperate shrieks inward. “I am my enemy,” she howls, delivering a warning against getting too comfortable when things look up. “Don’t tell me that there’s nothing left/I guess at least there’s still my breath,” she continues. After this sobering first step, Alienated turns the corner, pivoting to the cool-headed “Moderate Overkill” and the anti-romantic pop of “Forget Me Not.” During “Into the Mirror,” Lesicko’s voice is clear and content—a big deal, aptly underlined by big-hearted bashing.
As singers and instrumentalists, Lesicko and Crane haven’t advanced much on a technical level despite a steady stream of releases during the last decade. But that’s kind of the point—to move swiftly, honestly, and imperfectly through the challenges of the world, all the time. Lesicko’s drum fills in the chorus of “Forget Me Not,” for instance, never get off the ground, like a flapping bird that hovers just a few inches above the earth. But he plays with fire, matched by a passionate three-note guitar solo from Crane. It’s the color and tone that matter, not the technique.
For “Power,” the album’s 10-minute finale, the Funs uncharacteristically tackle a grand, conceptual design. It’s like a mumbled, guitar-narrated spin on The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free closer, “Empty Cans”—two versions of the same song, coming to a full stop and starting over, but with a critical perspective shift. The first half thrashes and fumes until it dies, while the second frames the same chords in softer light, like a sunset panorama. Lesicko achieves flight this time with a high-tremolo solo that ushers the album toward its gentle fade. It’s a notably vivid exit for a band that’s so often captured the opposite mood, a rare moment of unadulterated joy worthwhile of a lifelong search. | 2018-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sister Polygon | December 21, 2018 | 7.2 | 5646f470-60b7-4c09-9d43-9c7554415bad | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Even though they were reared amid San Francisco’s lo-fi bonanza, it didn't take too long for the Fresh & Onlys to opt out of the garage rock arms race. Their downcast latest effort is a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil. | Even though they were reared amid San Francisco’s lo-fi bonanza, it didn't take too long for the Fresh & Onlys to opt out of the garage rock arms race. Their downcast latest effort is a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil. | The Fresh & Onlys: House of Spirits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19427-the-fresh-onlys-house-of-spirits/ | House of Spirits | Even though they were reared amid San Francisco’s lo-fi bonanza, it didn't take too long for the Fresh & Onlys to opt out of the garage rock arms race. On the Bay Area quartet’s 2012 LP, Long Slow Dance, it swapped lo-fi gristle for nu-romantic vibes, pairing up singer Tim Cohen’s surreal but self-conscious lyrics with shimmering, Smiths-like guitar riffs. But if you expected jangle-pop ebullience while approaching “Bells of Paonia,” the first single from the band’s fifth full-length, House of Spirits, you might come away feeling a bit confused. The song’s stark, fuzz-bleached minimalism is an inversion of what's expected from the typical Fresh & Onlys track; it's zoned-out, rather than urgent, and the chugging chords are blurred by a generous dose of distortion. The drums have been stripped down to the steady thud of a single kick, and sunshine only sneaks in via the barbershop-style vocal harmonies that buoy the chorus. The shift in style takes a little bit to get used to.
House of Spirits finds the Fresh & Onlys in a gloomy place. It’s a spooky, desert-rock answer to the Cure’s Faith, another record awash in both reverb and metaphysical turmoil. “The point of forgetting is so you can live,” despairs Cohen on the chilly “Animal of One”. “The purpose of living is harder to find.” The Fresh & Onlys’ music has touched on downcast themes before, but in the past, these bummin’ sentiments were often tempered a touch of self-effacing humor. Here, Cohen’s gonzo imagery and weirdo-narratives feel more earnest in their evocation of hard times.
To be fair, there’s been a lot going on for the Fresh & Onlys’ over the last couple of years: most of the band’s San Francisco garage rock comrades have split town, bassist Shayde Sartin’s apartment burned down, and Cohen had a kid and temporarily re-located to an isolated Arizona horse ranch, where he demoed most of the record’s songs. On prior LPs, the rest of the band—Sartin, guitarist Wymond Miles, and drummer Kyle Gibson—took Cohen’s home demos and pushed them into headier territory, transforming a mostly acoustic track like "Tropical Island Suite" into the 7-minute centerpiece from 2010’s Play It Strange. On House of Spirits, the divide between the singer's folksier solo output and his work with Fresh & Onlys has gotten a little harder to spot. With it’s clean guitars and bobbing rhythm, “Ballerina” could have easily slotted into River of Souls, Cohen's latest effort with his side project Magic Trick.
On the second half of House of Spirits, the mood leavens a bit. "Hummingbird" and "April Fools" find Fresh & Onlys sounding a little more like their old selves—and if the bulk of House of Spirits is lacking a bit of urgency, the band compensates in other ways. When they were still recording the bulk of their music at home, the Fresh & Onlys worked fast and as a result it sometimes seemed like the clock was working against Cohen’s lyrics, which recycled or smudged only a few words from verse to verse. House of Spirits, then, contains some of his most uniquely weird and vivid work, whether he's contemplating supernatural-style domestic unrest on "Home is Where" or reconciling abandonment issues with a demonic possessor on "Who Let the Devil". Album closer "Madness" finds Cohen reflecting on an LP's worth of emotional unrest with a touch of nostalgia. "Madness has a heart, letting me rejoice in the most peculiar things," he sings. "Your occurrence in my heart, giving me a voice, is the most beautiful thing."
When the Fresh & Onlys' released their first 7" back in 2009, the band was preoccupied with scuzzy psych-rock homage. Since then, they've covered more grounds than most of their Bay Area peers, swapping in stylistic nods to the gothy end '80s LA punk and '80s UK guitar rock. House of Spirits doesn't bring much in the way of sonic surprises beyond a few drum machines and synths, but it does find the band making subtle changes to its M.O., delivering a set of songs that's less urgent, but—in a freaky-yet-endearing way—more personal. | 2014-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | June 11, 2014 | 7 | 5657a4c7-8317-44de-afb2-c7fe9dc75b4a | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The Japanese composer's first solo album after eight years and a battle with throat cancer is marvelous, using a bounty of textures, moods, and ambience from his esteemed four-decade-long career. | The Japanese composer's first solo album after eight years and a battle with throat cancer is marvelous, using a bounty of textures, moods, and ambience from his esteemed four-decade-long career. | Ryuichi Sakamoto: async | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23118-async/ | async | Ambient music means many things in the present moment. Brian Eno’s Reflection from earlier this year presented its contemplative side, the recent compilation Mono No Aware posits it as a commentary of modern technology, and ambient musician Keith Fullerton Whitman rhetorically wondered: “What music isn’t ambient in the 21st century?” Its modern conception stems from a now-mythologized moment, when Eno was convalescing in a hospital bed after being hit by a cab, the playback on a harp record so low that it blended in with the sound of rain. It’s environmental, but from its inception, ambient music also has roots as a healing music.
Ambient as restorative comes to mind with async, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s sixteenth solo album. In June of 2014, the legendary Japanese composer was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent rigorous radiology treatment to combat it. Three years after that diagnosis, Sakamoto returns with an album bearing a sense of mortality surrounding its every sound. Unlike his ’80s heyday where Sakamoto fearlessly embraced pop and found himself in the studio with Iggy Pop, David Byrne, or Maceo Parker, async is more closely aligned with his 21st-century experimental side and his ongoing collaborations with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits. But there’s a warmth and fragility to the album here that makes it stand apart from these works.
A careful piano melody opens the album, with just enough space between the notes for a noisy chord to rise up and consume it all, shifting from white noise to solemn organ line, revealing both Sakamoto’s penchant for melody and texture and the gap between each. The copious reverb that surrounds each restrained note on “ZURE” would slot right in with Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series. In conceiving the album, the press release states that async was a soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film and the stately theme of “solari” does bring to mind Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterwork Solaris.
But it also hearkens back to Sakamoto’s acclaimed career as a soundtrack composer, scoring Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (where he acted alongside David Bowie) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (Sakamoto won an Oscar for Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) as well as recently scoring Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. For those familiar with the arc of Sakamoto’s four-decade long career, async seems to echo aspects of it all, as if Sakamoto sought to embrace his many iterations of self. The starbursts of “stakra” go back to his earliest days as a synth whiz kid in pioneering Japanese pop act Yellow Magic Orchestra while the stark and heartbreaking “ubi” recalls the Satie-like simplicity of his most famous composition, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” the piano shot through with satellite beacon signals. Detuned strings mimic the traditional koto on “honj” and comprise the furious thrashing noise of the title track.
Near the center of the album, this primarily instrumental collection reveals two pieces with vocals, their words revealing another theme to the album. “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,” says author Paul Bowles, his voice recorded back when Sakamoto was scoring the film adaptation of his novel The Sheltering Sky. Repurposed here, it’s now set against a backdrop of sinewaves, bowed cymbal and spare piano as other voices gather around it. It’s a striking inclusion, a sentiment that no doubt resonated with Sakamoto as he faced his own mortality.
A few songs later, longtime collaborator David Sylvian’s voice arises, reciting a poem from Andrei Tarkovsky’s father, the famous Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky. Sylvian first collaborated with Sakamoto in in 1982, adding vocals a year later to the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence for the elegant ’80s song “Forbidden Colours,” a partnership that’s since carried on into the 21st century. “And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied/You will dream everything I have seen in dream,” Sylvian recites. “Dreams, reality, death, on wave after wave.” There’s an acceptance of mortality, of temporality, a gratitude for the life lived and Sakamoto puts elegiac strings and echoing piano about the poem, the end revealing a hushed melody that ever so slowly brightens in tone. There’s the sense of a weight lifted, the last two tracks bringing a luminous drone forth on “ff” and an ambient drift leading us out on closer “garden,” and in that hanging moment after the record ends, all are healed. | 2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Milan | May 1, 2017 | 8 | 5659331c-6b6c-4c88-babd-34a949d8b79f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The trio’s second album post-hiatus matches the clarity of its arrangements with an unexpected spiritual lightness. Rarely has Duster sounded so pleasant and peaceful. | The trio’s second album post-hiatus matches the clarity of its arrangements with an unexpected spiritual lightness. Rarely has Duster sounded so pleasant and peaceful. | Duster: Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duster-together/ | Together | Duster aren’t so sad anymore. As they release their latest album, Together, the San Jose-formed trio once known for their uniquely murky and dejected mutation of rock music have admitted as much. “It’s a lot more like absurdism than nihilism,” says multi-instrumentalist Clay Parton in a press release. That’s surprising coming from a group who’ve previously described the feeling their music evokes as “desperate, purring distress,” and for whom nearly every song became a meditation on existence, anxiety, and the slog of the end times. Each member—Parton, along with fellow multi-instrumentalists Canaan Dove Amber and Jason Albertini—carried that heaviness into their solo work as well. One of Parton’s projects is called Eiafuawn, short for “everything is all fucked up and whatnot.” But Together aims at something a little brighter, lending new color to Duster’s music and highlighting the thoughtful songwriting beneath the gloom. If they don’t sound happy, exactly, little moments of beauty and clarity suggest a hard-won lightness.
While it’s hard to unhear the despair in the decades of tape-hiss-coated recordings that preceded it, Together offers opportunities to take a new perspective on a band whose songs so often felt deliberately drab. Opening track “New Directions” makes their intentions clear: Gently plucked and warmly distorted guitar lines weave around a delicate whisper, a familiar formula for longtime fans. But shadowy as the instrumental sounds, there are assurances of constancy and commitment woven into its fabric. “I’ve lost touch, I’ve said too much, been opposites and such,” they sing. “But I’ll take care of all of us.” Even as the guitars spin out into feedback and distortion, there’s a sense of comfort and peace.
The record is full of these little oases—moments of self-possession and earned wisdom that break up the bleakness inherent to their slow, sad songs. “Time Glitch” meditates on the weight of the past over distant guitar feedback before happening upon a more thoughtful realization: “Sometimes, memories are kind.” The heavy-lidded drum machines and warbly guitars of “Sleepyhead” make for one of Duster’s most gentle arrangements to date, as they sing about the search for safety and “a quiet place” to rest their heads. Rarely has this band sounded so pleasant and peaceful.
Together also continues to emphasize the newfound clarity and purpose in Duster’s arrangements and production. There are still fresh experiments—like the kosmische synth swells that open “Escalator”—but this record is largely a refinement of the band’s sprawling, slow-paced sound, giving a little focus and momentum to their once-opaque instrumentals. Tape hiss and distortion carried a big part of the mystery around those first Duster albums; every whisper feels a little threatening when you can’t quite hear what it’s saying. Now, when they do indulge in darkness, it only hits harder. One of the record’s final entries is a static-scuffed track called “Feel No Joy” that evokes the mundane pain of its title. It’s heavy, but the open-hearted songs that precede it make it clear that the title alone isn’t the entire truth—there is joy out there, provided you’re willing to spend long enough looking for it. | 2022-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Numero Group | April 12, 2022 | 7.7 | 565d9e3b-e0e6-462f-9248-2f821ce3ac76 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Following 2009's stately Life and Times, Bob Mould's latest solo album is so true to fuzz-pop form you might mistake it for an unearthed bonus disc of quality Sugar outtakes. It arrives as a totem of his continued influence on today's mainstream and indie-level artists alike. | Following 2009's stately Life and Times, Bob Mould's latest solo album is so true to fuzz-pop form you might mistake it for an unearthed bonus disc of quality Sugar outtakes. It arrives as a totem of his continued influence on today's mainstream and indie-level artists alike. | Bob Mould: Silver Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16981-silver-age/ | Silver Age | Like another revered Minnesotan songwriter, Bob Mould is a don't-look-back kinda guy: The noise-pop trail he blazed with Hüsker Dü in the 1980s was roadblocked by a pair of dirgey, despairing solo releases; his short-lived return to rock in the early 90s with Sugar was answered with a series of increasingly sophisticated-- and occasionally electronic-- solo albums informed by his pre-millennial immersion into New York's gay club scene and contented ease into middle age. Always self-aware but never self-obsessed, Mould's divergent songbook serves as a mood-ring measure of his personal journey from angry adolescent punk to out-and-proud adult, and of his wavering desire to engage with the contemporary alt-rock for which he essentially wrote the playbook. But Mould has, uncharacteristically, spent the last few years taking stock of his past, penning a tell-all autobiography with Michael Azerrad, and overseeing Merge's 20th-anniversary reissues of the Sugar catalog. Now, with his demons fully exorcised and emotional baggage tossed aside, Mould is game to plug in and rev up again.
Just as Sugar emerged in 1992 right as Hüsker Dü's legacy was becoming manifest in both the chart-conquering crunch of Nirvana and the underground-overturning squall of My Bloody Valentine, Silver Age arrives as a totem of Mould's continued influence on today's mainstream rock (Foo Fighters, Green Day) and indie-level (No Age, Japandroids) artists alike. Recorded with the band he used to tour 2009's stately Life and Times-- bassist Jason Narducy and Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster-- Silver Age immediately establishes itself as a more roaring, rambunctious affair. In fact, the album is so true to fuzz-pop form that you might easily mistake it for an unearthed bonus disc of quality Sugar outtakes from those recent reissues; the opening anti-sellout screed "Star Machine" could even pass for a 90s-era comment on mallternative-rock chancers. The title track, however, firmly asserts the record as the work of a modern-day Mould when he declares, "I'm never too old to contain my rage," before spitting on the "stupid little kid [who] wanna hate my game." Yet there's a vigor and vitality running through Silver Age that belies those cranky-old-man sentiments; while there is much to admire about Mould's penchant for taking risks and shifting creative course, no fan would complain if he simply delivered euphoric power-pop knockouts like "The Descent", "Briefest Moment", and "Keep Believing" in perpetuity.
The Sugar reissues provide a convenient yardstick with which to measure the strength of the songs here, though they also draw attention to the new album's monochromatic sound*-- Silver Age* would benefit from a destabilizing dose of loopy psychedelia à la "Hoover Dam", or a more direct appeal to heart in the vein of "If I Can't Change Your Mind" to bring greater dimension to the album's workmanlike drive. But just as those classic Hüsker Dü records suggested an infinite depth of noise despite their pancaked production, Mould still covers a lot of ground here while staying in the red. From the dreamy, "Man on the Moon"-style drone of "Steam of Hercules" to the foreboding urgency of "Angels Rearrange", Mould just sounds so perfectly at home when howling in the face of a hurricane-- his voice is as natural a complement to a hazily overdriven power chord as Brian Wilson's is to a harpsichord. Silver Age is a suitably self-deprecating title from an artist whose considerable cachet hasn't always allowed him to cash in; Mould effectively owns up to his contrarian tendencies when, in "The Descent", he admits, "I didn't want to play the song/ That gave people so much hope." But as a showcase of a seasoned master in his element, Silver Age's bounty of direct, distorto-pop hits measures up to Mould's gold standard. | 2012-09-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 6, 2012 | 7.6 | 5660fe24-8211-4042-9c7c-b0cc40eea760 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
This Atlanta rapper with a cult hit under his belt ("1 Night") brings to mind iLoveMakonnen. He inhabits a post-regionalist rap universe, a space defined by digital platforms rather than geography. | This Atlanta rapper with a cult hit under his belt ("1 Night") brings to mind iLoveMakonnen. He inhabits a post-regionalist rap universe, a space defined by digital platforms rather than geography. | Lil Yachty: Lil Boat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21736-lil-boat/ | Lil Boat | Atlanta’s Lil Yachty is a pure creation of the Internet. His cult hit "1 Night" found most of its audience through a viral sketch comedy video, and before that, he was being plugged on Twitter by Ian Connor, a stylist and web curator known mostly for his connection to A$AP Rocky. He’s indebted to Lil B, too, with free-form verses that mimic Based Freestyles and a carefree energy reminiscent of the Based God’s Myspace days. In short, Yachty thrives in Rocky’s post-regionalist rap universe, a space defined by digital platforms rather than geography. One of his producers goes by Digital Nas. He is definitive proof that modern rap has no gatekeepers, and Soundcloud rap’s laziest possible copy-and-paste job.
There isn’t a single thing Lil Yachty’s doing that someone else isn't doing better, and in richer details. On Lil Boat, his debut mixtape, he makes a grating mess of these varying influences. The most obvious creative inspiration is iLoveMakonnen, which becomes especially clear on "Good Day," with its creaky falsetto and warbling melody. But Makonnen brings warmth and a feeling of ease to his tracks, while Yachty is constantly straining, as if just getting the words out of his mouth is a struggle. His rapping is jerky and his voice is so flat that Auto-Tune itself seems to buckle under the weight.
Yachty’s main selling point is "fun." This is all supposed to seem easy and unbothered, and it does on cheery tunes like “Wanna Be Us” and “Run/Running.” But everything feels unfinished or undercooked—a handful of songs are just a single verse and a hook, with no clear relationship between the two. So a song like "Not My Bro" opens with a bang and then shrinks back into nothing, a series of pitchy, singsongy whines. It's a lot of things —irritating, boring —but "fun" isn't one of them.
Yachty’s simplicity works in his favor when it comes to catchy hooks. On the better songs here, he sings/raps over bubbly, retro N64-sounding productions (mostly produced by Burberry Perry) that convey childlike wonder and amusement. But the hooks don’t do nearly enough to balance out Yachty’s painful shrieks, and many of his ideas aren’t just basic, they’re sloppily executed. Attempting to form a working model out of the flotsam of the moment is a fool’s errand. But what else is to be expected of a prisoner of shifting tides? | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 17, 2016 | 4.8 | 5661946f-49b8-4a13-ad53-35bf21c7907e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Damon Albarn's latest extra-curricular project is a supergroup featuring Paul Simonon (the Clash), Simon Tong (the Verve), and legendary Afrobeat percussionist Tony Allen. Together, the quartet create a downcast set of politcally aware songs that reflects the mood of life in the UK during wartime. | Damon Albarn's latest extra-curricular project is a supergroup featuring Paul Simonon (the Clash), Simon Tong (the Verve), and legendary Afrobeat percussionist Tony Allen. Together, the quartet create a downcast set of politcally aware songs that reflects the mood of life in the UK during wartime. | The Good, the Bad & the Queen: The Good, the Bad & the Queen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9778-the-good-the-bad-the-queen/ | The Good, the Bad & the Queen | Damon Albarn has been branded a dictator, a dilettante, even a bit daft. But to be fair, the guy's biggest mistake since entering the post-Blur era has been his failure to recognize it as the post-Blur era. So even as he globetrots to Mali or grooves in Gorillaz, everything Albarn does feels a little bit like a side project, which unfortunately casts his often quite good music as an afterthought rather than the real deal.
If perception is such a big part of the game, though, then Albarn has stacked things in his favor with the Good, the Bad & the Queen-- another name, another band, this one with something for nearly everyone because it features someone for nearly everyone. On bass, Clash veteran Paul Simonon. On guitar, Simon Tong, late of the Verve. On drums, the unimpeachable Afrobeat master Tony Allen. Behind the boards, somewhere, the ubiquitous, beloved Danger Mouse. And Albarn himself on top, his ego and voice the would-be X-factor that ties these disparate kindred souls together.
A name like the Good, the Bad & the Queen, awkward though it may be, implies a certain degree of fun to be had, and on its face you'd think the all-star cast would cinch it, but that's not what Commander Albarn and crew are up to. Feel Bad, Inc. would be a more appropriate moniker for this moody and often dreary outfit. To call the doom-laden tracks on the self-titled disc downbeat would be an understatement. Downtrodden is more like it, as Albarn has (subversively? deviously? deliriously?) instructed or encouraged these purveyors of pulsating grooves to slow things down to a narcotic crawl for most of the record's duration. The results are cohesive almost by default, considering how monochromatic the bulk of the disc comes off. Yet monochrome by design isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when you're out to challenge rather than entertain.
No doubt, it's risky business to follow Gorillaz's well-selling and critically lauded Demon Days with music designed to move you emotionally rather than physically. An undercurrent of dissatisfaction courses through The Good, the Bad & the Queen, with a mumbly Albarn forcing you to lean deep into the murk to decipher his downer words. "History Song" sets the mood, opening with a simple acoustic guitar motif that's soon fleshed out-- barely-- by the submarine bass, haunted backing vocals, and a surprisingly restrained Allen skittering along. "80s Life" throws in rudimentary piano. And for the most part, back and forth the tracks go, reveling in simplicity despite the surplus of talented contributors, never once shaking free of the self-imposed shackles. Even the melodies sound intuitive and unfinished, as if Albarn didn't feel the need to elaborate on whatever spare demos he unearthed that gave birth to this album.
If there's a direct musical antecedent to Albarn mood music of this bent it's the early Blur track "Sing" (most prominently enlisted on the Trainspotting soundtrack), albeit bolstered by Simonon's dubby throb and set on the same paranoid, post-apocalyptic landscape of the two Gorillaz discs. Likewise, "The Northern Whale" and "The Bunting Song" are as prototypically, provincially English as anything by Blur as well, but they sound like sad, elegiac celebrations of what once was rather than what is, reminiscent in mood of Parklife's "This Is a Low". "The medicine man is here 24-7/ You can get it fast in Armageddon," moans Albarn in the first single "Herculean". "Everyone is on their way to Heaven, slowly." It's like his version of the simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic Children of Men-- contemporary malaise and moral decay recast ominously as science fiction.
And what's got Albarn down? Why, war of course. War, or reference to war, permeates or pops up in half the tracks-- "Nature Springs", "Behind the Sun", "Green Fields", "80s Life", "Kingdom of Doom"-- with war's horrors and aftermath alluded to in the rest. No specific war, per se, though one may infer Albarn's disagreement with the engagement in Iraq looms large. Only as presented here, the battle already sounds lost, the sound of a would-be revolutionary or freedom fighter giving up without a fight, weary with resignation as he digs yet another row of graves. "I don't want to live a war/ That's got no end in our time," goes a line in "80s Life", as hopeless a confession as one might hear.
No wonder the disc never really springs to life until "Three Changes", 10 songs in, though lyrically the song remains the same: "Today is dull and mild/ On a stroppy little island/ Of mixed up people" sounds like a mash-up of the weather report and editorial page.
Yet despite the relentless, beautiful gloom, as the concluding title track devolves into a noisy art-glam implosion it does feel like the end of a journey has been reached. But where have we been? And what did we learn along the way? That the world's in a bad place, of course. And Albarn's here to rub your face in it until that sinks in. | 2007-01-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Virgin | January 15, 2007 | 6.8 | 5666975f-d8c7-4f1c-afa1-8bb9c86c5678 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Returning to his best-known alias, the veteran hip-hop deconstructionist scales back his approach, but Sacrifices can feel slight, with songs that too often fade into the background. | Returning to his best-known alias, the veteran hip-hop deconstructionist scales back his approach, but Sacrifices can feel slight, with songs that too often fade into the background. | Prefuse 73: Sacrifices | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prefuse-73-sacrifices/ | Sacrifices | Prefuse 73 principal Guillermo Scott Herren never sits still. He first made his name as a trailblazer: Arriving just a few years after DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… popularized the idea of instrumental hip-hop, Herren helped push the budding subgenre into the laptop age. For a moment, he stood at the nexus of crate-diggers and knob-twisters, crafting music that was glitchy enough for the Warp roster yet rooted in the melodies of long-forgotten records. But, like Shadow, Herren frustrated fans by abandoning his signature sound at its peak, instead following his muse wherever it led: big-name collaborations, baroque electro-psych, goofy hip-hop, an album's worth of minute-long snippets. After years of waning interest from fans and even the artist (who has been almost equally prolific under aliases like Savath y Savalas, Ahmad Szabo, and Piano Overlord), Herren recently found his way back to Prefuse 73’s core sound. One gets the sense that he’s making up for lost time: In 2015, he released an album and three EPs under the Prefuse name, and he now returns with the full-length Sacrifices.
Continuing in the back-to-basics vein of recent Prefuse 73 releases, Sacrifices finds Herren peeling back the layers of his sound in an attempt to further isolate its foundation. At its best, Sacrifices reminds us that subtlety and restraint were qualities that once set Herren apart from his peers. “Late to the Party” wobbles and soars, a stuttering theme for a postmodern silent film. A fuzzed-out dancefloor anthem, "Her Desire Is to Be Left Alone” showcases the deft hand with which Herren manipulates vocal samples. “The World Is Bigger” feels like a bubbly curio you might discover after a deep fall down the SoundCloud rabbit hole, while “Dripping With Excuses” takes its title literally, sounding like a field recording of droplets of water falling off stalactites and onto a marimba.
But at nearly an hour in length, Sacrifices struggles to maintain this level of quality. The album’s lone vocal track, “Silver & Gold,” featuring R&B singer James Tillman, lands firmly in the “easy listening” lane, somewhere between Seal and Coldplay at their drowsiest. To be fair, Herren has flirted with this sort of sound before, say, on Rivington Não Rio’s Rob Crow collaboration, “Quiet One,” or even “Last Night,” his original indie-baiting crossover with Sam Prekop. But here, nestled among so many airy, laid-back, vaguely jazzy compositions, it’s hard to say that it feels like an outlier. Leave Sacrifices on for its full runtime and its songs will first bleed together, then recede into the background. This makes for great music to write emails to, but it’s not likely to sustain many listeners’ active interest for very long.
Herren’s willingness to continually rethink his approach is commendable, though it has made for a frustratingly uneven catalog. Where Rivington Não Rio reminded us of the qualities that made Herren one of the beat scene’s first stars, Sacrifices strips away too many of those traits. Its songs often feel slight and lack the tension, dynamics, and emotional heft of his best work. In the years since Herren first emerged, plenty of descendants have stepped in to fill the lane that he ceded, including Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, and Hudson Mohawke. But Sacrifices doesn’t feel like it’s in conversation with any of these artists. Instead, it too often recalls a different contemporary trend: the inoffensive whirr of made-for-playlists “chill.” | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lex | June 5, 2018 | 5.9 | 566c4210-7e69-4ad1-baa7-b77d1406e72e | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
The experimental composer’s new album is a shapeshifting stream of crackling electronics, wordless singing, and gasping breaths. It’s a stark, solitary listen that radiates an unsettling beauty. | The experimental composer’s new album is a shapeshifting stream of crackling electronics, wordless singing, and gasping breaths. It’s a stark, solitary listen that radiates an unsettling beauty. | Ka Baird : Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ka-baird-bearings-soundtracks-for-the-bardos/ | Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos | Ka Baird entered 2022 feeling adrift. The two years of lockdowns and shutdowns had been difficult for the artist, whose practice—an improvisatory fusion of wordless vocalizations, movement, and crackling electronics—is deeply dependent upon the intimacy of live performance. At Chicago’s Lampo foundation, they developed a new solo piece, Bearings, to be performed 10 times over the course of two nights that spring, for an audience of between one and four people. Pacing the stage, deploying disorienting shifts in lighting and sound design, alternating between bursts of flute and ghostly hissing and chattering, Baird hoped to trigger a mixture of confusion and catharsis—the kind of soul-cleansing experience that might mark a new beginning, helping artist and audience alike get their bearings in a world turned strange. Then, just weeks before the show was to launch, Baird’s mother experienced an unexpected decline in health; the diagnosis was terminal.
Baird went ahead with Bearings—the final performance punctuated, serendipitously, by a fireworks display visible through the venue’s windows. After the shows, they decamped to Decatur, Illinois, where, alongside their brother, they spent the next six months caring for their mother. While she slept, Baird worked on music. On September 1, Karen Faye Lepp Baird died at the age of 79 in her children’s arms, taking her last breath as the sun set. The loss inspired Baird to become an end-of-life doula and also gave shape to their new album Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos, helping to channel the purifying intensity of the Lampo performances into an unpredictable, electric form. Baird’s music has often resembled a metaphorical transmission from another realm. With Bearings, they press forward into the rift.
The album’s organizing principle is the bardo, which Tibetan Buddhism conceives as a portal, such as those traversed by the dying on their passage from life to rebirth. “We are always in a bardo,” writes Baird in the album’s liner notes, “because impermanence never takes a break.” The titling of the album’s 11 tracks, from “Gate I” to “Gate XI,” suggests a succession of doorways, yet Bearings feels less like a collection of discrete pieces than a perpetually unfolding chain of events—a single stream of energy, writhing and twisting and forever taking on new shapes.
The album begins with a low, grinding hum haloed by overtones and bristling with fizz, and it ends with a similar drone pitched exactly one interval higher—as though the idea of ascension were coded directly into the music’s frequencies. In between those bookends, Baird utilizes many of the same techniques that distinguished 2019’s Respires. Their voice sounds more animal than human—hissing, groaning, growling, croaking. Electronic signals pulse in waves, like anxious dial tones; atonal blasts of flute buffet long, flat expanses of wordless singing, like gusts of wind smacking against plate glass windows. The occasional peal of trumpet or plucked viola serve as one of a handful of recurring motifs, like signposts along the soul’s journey. The force that holds it all together is the tension between flowing and stopping—an uneasy give-and-take punctuated by percussive flurries and sudden moments of silence. The only lyrics are a repeated refrain of “Here, disappear, poof,” yet even these words are indistinguishable from a magician’s smoke grenade, just bursts of breath dissipating against the buzz.
Bearings features input from a dozen different players, including saxophonist Andrew Bernstein and synthesist Max Eilbacher, both of Horse Lords; drummer Greg Fox; percussionist Jon Mueller, on gongs; a full string quartet, woodwinds, brass, and even unusual instruments like crystal bowls, waterphone, and saw. (Someone named Nisa—presumably a cat—is credited with “purrs.”) Despite the many players involved, this is an overwhelmingly private-sounding record: solitary, focused, severe. It is not an easy listen, though it’s safe to say that it is not supposed to be. Rather than representing the idea of transformation in idyllic, new-age terms, Bearings underscores the work involved—gasping breaths, dizzying effort, textures as dry as a drought-stricken field. As the album trudges toward its finale, I imagine a body bent double into the wind, pushing forward only because there is no other choice. But the starkness of Baird’s album nevertheless radiates its own kind of beauty. Perhaps the title is not only meant to suggest the metaphorical compass points with which we orient ourselves in times of crisis. Grappling with death, Baird seems to suggest, is a burden every one of us must bear—and in bearing it, we are made whole. | 2024-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | April 18, 2024 | 7.9 | 566d0d1f-0947-43ff-9011-bdce8cc8271a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Ryan Adams’ new album is being positioned as one of his classic breakup records. In terms of its sound, at least, it's a winner. | Ryan Adams’ new album is being positioned as one of his classic breakup records. In terms of its sound, at least, it's a winner. | Ryan Adams: Prisoner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22860-prisoner/ | Prisoner | Ryan Adams gravely misread the pop culture climate of 2015 and his fan letter to Taylor Swift was incinerated on arrival by the hot takes. But at least 1989 was a reminder of a time when he was generating reactions that ran deeper than a respect for craft. For most of the past decade, Adams has made albums of almost oppressive competence: whether the songs from Ashes & Fire and Ryan Adams took five minutes or five years of soul-searching to create, they all come out sounding equally effortless. Purely in terms of its content, Adams’ new album, Prisoner, is more of the same, and how that sits will depend on whether you’ve heard the singles or read the press clippings. It’s another down-the-middle, crowd-pleasing Ryan Adams record at a time when that crowd was expecting him to bring the heat.
Still, as latter-day Ryan Adams albums go, there’s more buzz than usual around Prisoner, and rightfully so. The neural blasts of guitar misfiring all over “Do You Still Love Me?” and “Doomsday”’s pink-mist shimmer outline a convergence point where the heartland comfort food of Ryan Adams, the puckish punk whims of 1984, and the arena-rock aspirations of 1989 meet. Purely as sound, Prisoner unquestionably succeeds; though Reagan-era AOR is basically a primary color of modern pop at this point, Adams’ vocals and lyrical tics are so well established that any genre bends to his will. If the title track and “Anything I Say to You Now” aren’t career highlights, they’re at least ambitions fully realized—quintessential 2010s Ryan Adams, conveying a mis-remembered ’80s where Tunnel of Love and The Queen Is Dead are close neighbors on record shelves and equally revered documents of idealized longing.
Previews of Prisoner have not been shy about stating the obvious: this is Adams’ first album since separating from actress Mandy Moore, which he described as a “humiliating and just a fucking horrible thing to go through.” The context of the breakup is so central to how the album is being heard, news of the event might as well be slapped on a sticker on the cover. But though it lacks the intoxicating, top-of-the-world cockiness that powered Gold through its street-walkin’ low points, Prisoner is Adams’ most complete work since then—he’s not stuck in a single mode. The Deadheaded “To Be Without You” rambles on like Cold Roses, so that the line “nothing really matters anymore” registers like a cashed-bowl shrug, while, the chipper strum of “Haunted House” shows the dark side of the record’s offhandedness, coming very close to Hootie’s “Only Wanna Be With You.”
Adams is the first to joke about his stock phrases, and his self-awareness renders his most objectively miserable work tolerable—any mention of “rain” or "trains" in one of his songs, for example, has a meta quality, his version of a DJ tag. But hearing “Thorn in my side/Pain I can’t hide,” “Oh, my soul is/Black as coal,” or “Feel like I’m headed for a breakdown/Feel like I’m racing and I can’t come down” tossed around carelessly within the same song is enough to question where Adams’ appreciation of soft-rock schlock ends and appropriation begins. Prisoner is filled with lyrics like these, lines that feel like placeholders for universal truths or even personalized expressions of pain that rarely emerge. While it’s impossible to evaluate the album’s sincerity, inspiration is a more tangible quality, and Adams comes off like an A student uncharacteristically frozen by an essay prompt, filling the margins with the hopes that his reputation can get him out of this jam, this one time.
A generous reading of Prisoner can play it off as a commentary on the futility of “breakup albums” at a certain point in your life—that the hurt can feel as debilitating and devastating as it did in similar situations years ago, but the need to dramatize it just isn’t there anymore. In fact, as tell-alls have become the norm for public breakups between artists in recent years—ranging from Dirty Projectors to Dirty Sprite 2, from Tourist in This Town to, ahem, Taylor Swift—it can be a relief to hear something that doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy for the party not present. But the emotional equanimity of Prisoner always feels unintentional, or worse, a byproduct of his unerring craft. While Prisoner clearly aspires to join Love Is Hell or 29 or Heartbreaker as another platonic ideal for a “sad Ryan Adams album,” it can't help but be “another Ryan Adams album.” | 2017-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Blue Note / Pam Ax | February 15, 2017 | 6.2 | 566f3e4b-e373-46d3-8c68-8d50d882be40 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Revered electronic duo Orbital call it quits with their seventh and final album, a nostalgic throwback that's being touted as a culmination of their 15-year run. | Revered electronic duo Orbital call it quits with their seventh and final album, a nostalgic throwback that's being touted as a culmination of their 15-year run. | Orbital: The Blue Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6033-the-blue-album/ | The Blue Album | Orbital's career is ending, fittingly, on the festival circuit. The duo have announced that they'll be taking their final bow at this summer's T in the Park, after headlining the Other Stage at last week's Glastonbury, the site of the stunning 1994 and 1995 performances that secured the band's legend and destroyed the myth that dance acts can't connect with audiences without the home-field advantage of a club. Orbital, of course, were no slouches in the studio either, producing some of the greatest electronic albums of their time and an immaculate string of singles that effortlessly segue from early acid and rave through the headier ambient techno of their mid-90s.
Orbital's swansong, The Blue Album-- their seventh-- is billed, worryingly, as a culmination of their 15-year run-- which, at least conceptually, implies a grab bag of token nods to better-realized ideas, or an unnecessary Cliff's Notes version of their career. Thankfully, it's instead a fitting footnote, one that leaves a much better final taste in our mouths than the mostly disastrous The Altogether-- a record so misguided that it seems to have cloaked its underrated predecessor, Middle of Nowhere, in an ill-deserved shadow of post-In Sides disappointment.
The Blue Album being a stroll through the past, innovation is not something one should expect from the record. In a way, the album simply highlights many of the reasons why Orbital have been so beloved for the past decade-and-a-half. However, one wouldn't come to that conclusion from the album opener, "Transient". Almost beatless, this kaleidoscopic web of harpsichord, strings and bass, unfurls an almost foreboding yet captivating sound, recalling Philip Glass circa Koyaanisqatsi.
From there, Orbital deliver on their promise, taking us on a Russian Ark-like stroll through their career, echoing elements from In Sides (the serene "Pants"), Snivilisation ("Bath Time") and The Middle of Nowhere (the remarkable urban clang of "Tunnel Vision"). Of course, as on The Altogether, Orbital's stabs at humor here produce more cringes than smiles, as neither "Bath Time"'s blend of children's TV theme music and Jean-Jacques Perrey nor "Easy Serv"'s ice cream van xylophone-- add much to the record. Perhaps it would have nice to exorcise the tracks in favor of the sadly discarded "Initiation" and "What Happens Next", but a sense of humor has thankfully always been one element of Orbital's career and, if nothing else, this album is true to their legacy.
More than anything else, however, The Blue Album is reminiscent of Orbital's first two self-titled records, more commonly known as the Green and Brown albums. Sparks collaboration "Acid Pants" is an old-school, almost tribal banger, while the foreboding, abstract "Lost" sounds like an early effort from the Warp camp. Best of all is album centerpiece "You Lot", the one track that could be segued into Orbital's first record without the bat of a single eyelash. More track-y than most of their recent efforts-- but with a soft ambient core, over which is layered a sample of Christopher Ecclestone babbling on about the shrinking distance between the power of man and God-- "You Lot" is the record's best confluence of what made Orbital so special.
The Blue Album closes with "One Perfect Sunrise", the sort of post-rave/pre-dawn euphoria that Orbital perfected on "Halcyon". And although the track borders on the nostalgic with the same potentially pointless intensity as a Jet track and the same emotional manipulation as a trance version of an 80s hit, here context can melt even the most time-hardened heart. As the sunset to Orbital's glorious career, it's fitting that the track encapsulates the dawn, the time of day that has so often ended the most glorious moments of Orbital's career. | 2004-06-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-06-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | HTI | June 30, 2004 | 7.3 | 56724e3c-1e69-4c63-8038-00b6c85c8509 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
As he ascends from grime rapper to generational spokesperson, the charismatic UK star tries to figure out where to go next. | As he ascends from grime rapper to generational spokesperson, the charismatic UK star tries to figure out where to go next. | Stormzy: Heavy Is the Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stormzy-heavy-is-the-head/ | Heavy Is the Head | Stormzy’s second album hit streaming services in the UK just a couple of hours after polls closed in the country’s latest general election. The vote was touted as the most important in recent British history, but, honestly, you’d be forgiven for having lost track by now. Besides, this timing wasn’t planned: The election was called just a matter of weeks ago. Typically this coincidence in timing wouldn’t matter, but in the years since his debut, Gang Signs & Prayer, went to number one, Stormzy has risen to become something of a generational spokesperson. It feels fitting, then, that the album arrived as the country decided on its future.
Since 2017, Stormzy’s music and his activism have been increasingly intertwined. He used a performance at the BRIT Awards to decry then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s response to the Grenfell tragedy. Thousands of people at Glastonbury were broadcast shouting “Fuck the government and fuck Boris [Johnson, UK prime minister]” during his performance of “Vossi Bop” this summer. Elsewhere, he’s established a scholarship fund for black students at Cambridge University, and launched a publishing imprint with Penguin that’s dedicated to showcasing underrepresented voices.
If there’s a unifying theme to this album, it’s the infiltration of black artists—and young black men in particular, who are especially demonised and marginalised in British society—into canonized spaces. It plays out in the Shakespearean reference in the album’s title, and the hanging of its artwork in London’s National Portrait Gallery. “We’re still taking up space,” Stormzy declares on punchy opener “Big Michael,” and with the repetition of “Big Michael’s back, your time’s up” there’s the sense that he’s addressing more than just opponents in petty grime beefs. On “Superheroes” he rewrites the media’s narrative around young black men, calling out the successes of his peers. He underlines the point elsewhere on the album by calling out the endless list of establishment hallmarks and name-checks he’s notched up in the past two years: The Glastonbury headline slot, Elle cover, TIME cover, GQ cover, number one chart spots, BRIT Awards. It all adds up to a powerful picture.
His phenomenal success and influence have compounded the pressure on his still-young shoulders—“How the hell did I buss so fast?” he asks on “Audacity.” For Stormzy, the remaining questions are existential: Is he comfortable with his status as a household name and figurehead? It’s something he pokes at in the opening bars of the album—“Can’t tell where I’m heading,” he brags half-heartedly—but he arguably never finds an answer. Moments of doubt and frustration creep in. “I am not the poster boy for mental health,” he spits on “One Second,” referring to an unsanctioned NME cover from 2017. “Mummy always said if there’s a cause then I should fight for it/So yeah I understand, but I don’t think that I’m all right with it,” he continues. He’s aware of his contradictions—“One week it’s ‘Blinded By Your Grace,’ next week it’s bang you in your face,” as he puts it on the album opener—and they play out in the open here. There’s gravity in these moments of vulnerability, but Stormzy doesn’t always get it right.
“Lessons” is the album’s most tender moment, but arguably its most problematic. The track appears to confirm rumors of the rapper’s infidelity to his radio presenter/model ex-girlfriend Maya Jama, and Stormzy spends the majority of the three minutes asking for forgiveness. However, lines like “Thought I’d say it here than rather fling it in a text” perhaps reveal his misunderstanding of the power dynamics at play. Of course he has every right to address his personal torment in his art, but in this case he appears to ignore the fact that the person who ended the relationship—and did so as privately as possible—might not want the break-up to play out on an album track that’ll be listened to and combed over by potentially millions of people. It also feels slightly disingenuous when followed by a song whose hook is about ejaculating on someone else’s girlfriend’s face.
The heavy politicizing of his work doesn’t mean he’s not having fun, though. At the root of Stormzy’s appeal, as well as his authenticity, is a charismatic swagger. He skips over the beat on “Pop Boy” with such ease that there’s little to do but sit back and revel in it. The Burna Boy- and Sheeran-backed “Own It” follows: A silky pop anthem for a generation reared on dembows. The album is built around one-two punch combinations like this pairing. Adjacent songs are linked with one another sonically and lyrically: “Wiley Flow” and “Bronze” trade grimey taunts over record sales and certifications; “Crown” and “Rainfall” meld praise and introspection in an extension of GSAP’s “gospel grime” tracks; “Handsome” matches the marching tempo of “Rachael’s Little Brother” and links to the song with its “bun down the rave like Rachael Anson” refrain.
These threads between tracks are a cute touch, but feel slightly overwrought as the record slides between pared-back grime, luxurious R&B, introspective trap, gospel confessional, and puff-chested rap. The versatility on show gives a sheen of adventurousness that isn’t quite backed up by the beat selections—the majority of which feel like safe choices for an artist otherwise known for his accelerated ambitions. And while HITH sees Stormzy navigate second album syndrome with apparent ease, it also leaves open the question of where he goes from here. | 2019-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | #MERKY / Atlantic | December 18, 2019 | 7 | 56767bb5-ed07-43b4-b7fa-99150bec9923 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The Toronto singer croons his way into a sapiosexual world of love and philosophy, though not without controversy. | The Toronto singer croons his way into a sapiosexual world of love and philosophy, though not without controversy. | Daniel Caesar: CASE STUDY 01 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-caesar-case-study-01/ | CASE STUDY 01 | There are few R&B singers who would sample J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who helmed the design and research of the world’s first atomic bomb. But Toronto singer Daniel Caesar spotlights a quote from the scientist describing the Hindu deity Vishnu as the “destroyer of worlds” at the start of “Entropy,” setting the mood for his new album, Case Study 01. Coming from a love ballad crooner that previously held a reputation for having an insane amount of people proposing at his live shows, this might seem a little morbid and heady. But considering that 2017’s Freudian, was, well, named after Sigmund Freud as a tie-in to his grappling of ego and id within his romantic serenades, the 24-year-old artist now delves further into his philosophical explorations.
On Case Study 01, Caesar employs science metaphors to work through ideas of death, spirituality, and absolution. He does this best on the aforementioned “Entropy,” where he uses the thermodynamic chemical reaction to represent the chaos in his life and also to suggest we, as humans, have little control over the potentially catastrophic rules of nature. But his resolve is impressive as he quells his concerns and turns to his belief and trust in God. And when he sings about welcoming the end of life (“Raise my jersey to the rafters/Let moths consume me in the light”), his lithe voice trembles. It’s a beautiful, vulnerable display of a young man’s faith, despite his uncertainty of the future. He shows more of this serenity on the standout “Superposition,” as he sings about the natural balance of life through a Buddhist lens, referencing “yin and yang” and the principle of superposition. “I’m me/I’m God/I’m everything,” he sings in his airy falsetto over John Mayer’s hypnotic guitar licks and ghostly background vocals, sounding full of grace.
These transcendent moments are accentuated by subtle production that shifts outward from the more straightforward gospel-R&B of Freudian. The Frank Ocean-inspired closing track “Are You OK?” pans out into a psychedelic dreamscape that opens with the introduction of each instrument: glittering chimes, a touch of slide guitar, a skittering synth, and later, the howling sound of distorted voices. While “Frontal Lobe Muzik,” featuring production and vocals from Pharrell, reveals a scattering of new age-y synth bleeps. They sound like they’re ready to drift into space, mirroring Caesar’s sentiments when he says: “I wanna venture into the unknown.”
Caesar doesn’t completely ditch the love songs on Case Study 01. “Love Again,” a glowing funk ballad features Caesar and Brandy sharing their respective breakup stories and reassuring each other through the heartsickness. This is the mode that he thrives in, as shown in his many collaborations on Freudian with H.E.R., Kali Uchis, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Syd, respectively—their voices providing an extra texture and point of view that complements his so well. But this is Brandy we’re talking about, and she unsurprisingly shows up Caesar on his own song, as her powerful, multi-dimensional voice glides between the sultry and dark, and airy and light.
However, her appearance sits in the shadow of Caesar’s recent controversial comments about race. “Why are we being so mean to white people right now?” Caesar asked his black followers on Instagram live as he defended Yes Julz, the embattled internet personality and “culture vulture,” after she ranted about black women criticizing her. Later he added, “You can’t win the game by choosing to not accept the winning team’s strategy” and urged his fans to “make [him] suffer for his opinion” by boycotting his music. So a cognitive dissonance arises when Caesar admires his lover’s skin, comparing it to “Rich dark chocolate, sweet melanin,” on the Kardinal Offishall-featuring, reggae-tinged bop “Cyanide.” Or when he positions himself as a beacon of enlightenment when he sings, “Follow me to salvation/Your mind still ’pon plantations,” on “Too Deep to Turn Back.” Contrary to false reports that his album flopped due to the controversy, it didn’t result in any major consequences. Case Study 01 debuted higher than Freudian on both the U.S. and Canadian charts.
And while there are flashes of wisdom on Case Study 01, there are also a handful of clunky moments when Caesar’s out of his depth. On “Open Up,” he puts on his best D’Angelo impression by deepening his voice, but fails to provide any of the soul legend’s smoothness, as he sings, “I don’t feel like talking unless it’s ’bout me or philosophy.” And it gets even more unsettling horny when he sings in the chorus: “Then you can open up to me, girl/Let me plant my seed, girl.” Or when he brags about his glow up on “Frontal Lobe Muzik” by saying, “Used to be ugly, but now I hit from the back,” demonstrating the antithesis of his earlier humility and tenderness. Like his contemporaries 6LACK and Brent Faiyaz, Caesar is clearly talented, but he’s got a lot of learning to do. | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Golden Child | July 15, 2019 | 6.7 | 5676b013-92f4-4ffb-b07f-b271ba5e3a75 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Ivy Tripp, Waxahatchee's first album for Merge, shares an unhurried and natural mood with the best '90s indie rock. Though 2012's breakthrough Cerulean Salt had more people playing on it, Ivy Tripp feels bigger, in part because Katie Crutchfield is growing increasingly confident. | Ivy Tripp, Waxahatchee's first album for Merge, shares an unhurried and natural mood with the best '90s indie rock. Though 2012's breakthrough Cerulean Salt had more people playing on it, Ivy Tripp feels bigger, in part because Katie Crutchfield is growing increasingly confident. | Waxahatchee: Ivy Tripp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20437-ivy-tripp/ | Ivy Tripp | Katie Crutchfield is important to a lot of people. She's just 26, but with more than a dozen releases to her name courtesy of projects like P.S. Eliot, collaborations like Great Thunder, and assorted guest spots here and there, she comes off like the leader of a DIY folk-inflected indie rock/punk scene, a spokesperson for a realm usually against spokespeople.
Crutchfield grew up in Alabama, naming her project after Waxahatchee Creek, where her parents have a house on a lake and where she's made a lot of her music. She's in Philadelphia now, an East Coast city that's cheaper than New York and that allows for more time to make music and just live. It follows, then, that there's a thriving scene there, too, with groups like Radiator Hospital (featuring one-time Waxahatchee member Sam Cook-Parrott) and members of her twin sister (and ex-P.S. Eliot bandmate) Allison's band Swearin', among others.
Ivy Tripp, her third album as Waxahatchee, finds her fronting a band featuring multi-instrumentalists Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer (both from Swearin') and still coming off very much like she did on 2012's lo-fi solo effort, American Weekend. She's managed to bring in contributors and a greater range of instrumentation without losing that approachable intimacy. 2013's Cerulean Salt technically had more people playing on it, but Ivy Tripp just feels bigger, in part because Crutchfield is growing steadily more confident. The songs are more cohesive and accomplished—polished isn't the right word, but now and then, there is a kind of shine. Cerulean came off like an extension of American Weekend: it surfaced just as many people were discovering the earlier record, and some listeners were confused by the timeline and which came first. Ivy Tripp, her first album for Merge, feels more like a next step, something that exists on its own, and a move toward something else entirely.
In a statement about the album, Crutchfield said the title of the record is "just a term I made up for directionless-ness, specifically of the 20-something, 30-something, 40-something of today, lacking regard for the complacent life path of our parents and grandparents." She added: "I have thought of it like this: Cerulean Salt is a solid and Ivy Tripp is a gas." This make sense. Cerulean was an album about growing up and losing your innocence and Ivy seems to be about knowing yourself as a grown up, being in the middle of that, and figuring out what comes next. The past is definable and relatively solid; the future is more amorphous and trickier to capture or pin down. You get that sense, of searching, of grasping at something you don't entirely understand, in the album's lyrics and overall narrative.
The exact "Ivy Tripp" line on the record is "Travel the world ivy tripping/ With no spotlight," and it's interesting to see where she's at now, as the spotlight finds its focus. On "Grey Hair" she sings: "You might, wait and see me become/ A candle, precarious psychically among/ The ill at ease, the summer breeze/ But sugar soda pop songs play on the radio." And, as she noted about the record, "I think a running theme [of Ivy Tripp] is steadying yourself on shaky ground and reminding yourself that you have control in situations that seem overwhelming." She doesn't deny the ambition either: "I get short of breath because I can’t slow down," she sings ("Grey Hair").
Many of Ivy Tripp's song titles—"The Dirt", "Half Moon", "Bonfire"—are dusky and colored like earth tones, and that's the setting of the songs as well: moments in transition, the realm between night and day and relationships that have that same kind of momentary feeling. The lyrics feature many maybes and more than a few temporary situations ("You can lean on me for now" in "La Loose"), unread books, and things that may or may not have already ended. "I’ll try to preserve the routine/ And I don’t want to discuss what it means," Crutchfield sings on "La Loose". People "pretend to be strangers/ Lamenting a means to an end" ("Air") and "imitate some kind of love" ("Stale By Noon") instead of just being in love. Music's an "imperfect escape" ("Half Moon").
A low-level anxiety pervades, and on a song simply titled "<" she offers an update on the Blank Generation: "You’re less than me and I am nothing," goes the chorus. Earlier, in "The Dirt", she sings "I’m a basement brimming with nothing great." In "Summer of Love", a photo of people, and not the actual people, are the subject: "The colors allure me but I can’t make out/ A face in the picture of palm trees/ The summer of love is a photo of us." "Sugar" comes up a lot—a sweet thing without a lot of substance, but that tastes good. There's a penchant for finding beauty in small gestures and situations like sleeping or refusing to leave the beach. As well as bigger ones: "You’ll deliver a fable I could live/ And I’ll throw it off the nearest cliff," she sings in "The Dirt".
The one thing that can drag Ivy Tripp down a little is that the lyrics are at times a bit vague or interchangeable. It turns out discussing emptiness can maybe feel a bit empty, and the words here don't always hit as hard as some of her prior work. That said, the way the words are delivered is essential, and with a voice like Crutchfield's—both rough and clear with a slight Southern twang—a lot gets said simply in how these things are enunciated.
That, and the album features a few of Crutchfield's best and catchiest songs. She's mentioned an interest in the New Zealand lo-fi pop band Tall Dwarfs; Ivy Tripp has the feel of classic indie rock. You'll be reminded of other groups here and there: "The Dirt" sounds a lot like the Vaselines, at least compositionally, and much of it would fit in very well at the original International Pop Underground Convention, on Simple Machines, or with '90s Merge acts like Butterglory or Bricks (the fact that she did sign to Merge makes perfect sense—Crutchfield and her cohorts carry the same torch as Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance). She's mentioned Joni Mitchell time again, as well as Cat Stevens, though on Ivy, you may think more about Cat Power's What Would the Community Think.
Maybe as a result of the cross-pollination and familiarity, there's a casual feel to Ivy Tripp, something about it that's unhurried and relaxed. Which doesn't mean it isn't ambitious or accomplished. This is one way it's most reminiscent of the best '90s indie rock: it never feels forced or like she's making some kind of push. It's unhurried and natural and real. You also get a feeling listening to these songs that Crutchfield is just getting started, and it's exciting to hear a young voice rising so assuredly above the fray, one you can imagine inspiring kids years from now, and inspiring them to pick up guitars and sing and take control of their direction, too. | 2015-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Merge / Wichita | April 8, 2015 | 8.1 | 567e9961-2dbd-4363-b9e2-e7f350d1f7c9 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Testarossa, the second-full length collaboration between Serengeti and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf, shows the rapper born David Cohn finding beauty and life in life's smallest details, as usual. | Testarossa, the second-full length collaboration between Serengeti and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf, shows the rapper born David Cohn finding beauty and life in life's smallest details, as usual. | Yoni & Geti: Testarossa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21903-testarossa/ | Testarossa | In the middle of the last decade, Serengeti starting carving out a niche as one of the weirdest and most confounding voices in underground rap, grappling with the tension between art and commerce and the tension between the industrial painter and his smocks. But the Windy City rapper born David Cohn is best known as someone else entirely—Kenny Dennis, the aging rapper he dreamed up, the one who hates Shaq but loves the '85 Chicago Bears, his wife Jueles, O’Douls, brats, beers, and the actor Brian Dennehy.
Kenny isn’t a joke, and he isn’t a one-off; he’s been animated on a handful of full-length records and a masterful EP, and even the fictitious rap group Kenny was supposed to be a member of during the early '90s got its own, very real album. Kenny has hopes, fears, insecurities, blind spots. In short, Cohn knows how to build worlds.
Testarossa, the second-full length collaboration between Cohn and WHY?’s Yoni Wolf, credits the rapper as Serengeti. While swapping one stage name for another is not necessarily truth-telling, it’s implied that when compared to Kenny Dennis, Serengeti more closely approximates the feelings and experiences of David Cohn. But when Geti lets you into his own psyche, it’s through fractured narratives and half-truths, ill-advised blogging ventures and apocryphal trips to the hardware store. The last Geti/Yoni LP, 2011’s Family & Friends, was intermittently brilliant, but also unremittingly dark. (The standout song from that record, "The Whip," is a portrait of a retired UFC fighter trying desperately to get back in the octagon.) The sequel has fewer songs that are obvious conceptual departures, but finds Geti just as slippery, just as evasive.
The album follows a narrative of sorts, purportedly based on a script that Geti and Yoni co-wrote about a fledgling musician who leaves his wife and young children at home to head out on tour, only to watch his family dissolve from afar. As always, Cohn finds the emotional weight of the story in the crevices: in the weight he gained one winter with his wife, in the rental cars he uses to assume new identities in new towns. On "I, Testarossa," his character wrings his hands over the length of his daughter’s bangs and shoves bills into a jukebox to make strangers dance.
The production and Wolf’s vocals are lush and subdued to where the story feels like one long dream sequence. Its best moments come when Geti yanks you violently into a scene, like he does during a conversation with a girl outside a venue on "Down": "I’m waiting for Yoni outside in a coat/ Smelling like coke, sipping on a smoke/ Talking to a young girl, trying to steal hope/ Leaning in like the pope/ ‘Yo, let’s get down.’" There’s that economy of language, that willingness to sneak vials into the Vatican that make him one of rap’s sharpest writers. Unfortunately, moments like that are too infrequent on the album’s spare front half. But in the suite that ends Testarossa, Geti waxes romantic about homework folders and Google Plus in a way that feels more intimate than any revelations about his childhood could hope to be. | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Joyful Noise | May 3, 2016 | 7.2 | 56832413-669e-4dfb-b201-fb0de6df5049 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
For close to two decades, the constantly morphing Michigan trio Wolf Eyes have churned out releases, inspired other low-budget noise-auteurs, and galvanized scenes both locally and globally. I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, their first record for Jack White's Third Man imprint, oozes with eerie tones and seat-edge momentum. | For close to two decades, the constantly morphing Michigan trio Wolf Eyes have churned out releases, inspired other low-budget noise-auteurs, and galvanized scenes both locally and globally. I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, their first record for Jack White's Third Man imprint, oozes with eerie tones and seat-edge momentum. | Wolf Eyes: I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21056-i-am-a-problem-mind-in-pieces/ | I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces | Wolf Eyes have always had a B-movie aura. They’re like the Roger Corman of underground music, churning out releases, inspiring other low-budget noise-auteurs, galvanizing scenes both locally in Michigan and globally in festivals and collaborations. Many of their blunt album titles have a schlock-horror feel: Slicer, Dread, Burned Mind, Human Animal. That feel is in the music too. At turns scary, funny, dramatic, and transfixing, Wolf Eyes’ morphing sound has one constant: creepy, thick tension.
The trio’s B-movie game is in full effect on I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, whose title sounds like either a pulpy confessional or a campy drug-education filmstrip. Song names feel like lost movies too: "T.O.D.D." as killer-robot sci-fi, "Asbestos Youth" as mean-streets teen flick, "Cynthia Vortex AKA Trip Memory Illness" as LSD-soaked journey into madness. Lyrics reference drowning heads, toxic thoughts, burning hairs, suffocation cages. If this album getting released the day before Halloween is a coincidence, it sure is a lucky one.
Most importantly, the music on I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces contains all the ominous suspense of a classic horror movie. Each track oozes with eerie tones and seat-edge momentum, such that something terrifying seems to always lurk around the corner. The album even mimics the narrative arc of a thriller: the first few tracks gradually heighten the plot, until action explodes in the damaged-punk climax of "Enemy Ladder" and its tale of "twisted lands of severed hands." The denouement of "Cynthia Vortex" follows, ending with singer Nate Young’s chopped-up groans that evoke a victim’s final gasps of air.
Though he’s an equal partner in sound-crime with bandmates John Olson and James Baljo, Young is the star of I Am a Problem’s cinematic tremors. His jaw-clenched snarls and subliminal seething get under your skin. Razor-like moans in "Twister Nightfall" curl sharply around a monster-march beat and Baljo’s guitar grind, while Olson’s creaky noises on "T.O.D.D." rhyme with Young’s yelps. Even on "Enemy Ladder", where frantic rhythms swirl into a cloud, Young's bark center things like the piercing eye of a pulsing storm.
Beyond his own vocal dexterity, Young’s recent move toward more subdued music in his solo work (often under the name Regression) has steered Wolf Eyes to a place where small shifts can make huge ripples, and hypnosis is as powerful as confrontation. One of the best Regression albums is aptly titled Stay Asleep, and Young has developed a keen knack for sonically replicating nightmares—"I burn my dreams just to stay warm," he sings in "T.O.D.D."—and making gripping music from dark shadows and subtle motion.
In fact, I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces may be too somnambulant for noise-hounding Wolf Eyes heads, or newcomers impatient for quicker cuts to the chase. You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it—effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors—and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends. | 2015-11-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Third Man | November 3, 2015 | 7.8 | 56833eeb-ac6a-4e8d-96ce-a9d5c9dba7c5 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On an unexpected collaborative mixtape, the two previously unconnected rappers hone their complementary styles in gloomy songs shot through with paranoia. | On an unexpected collaborative mixtape, the two previously unconnected rappers hone their complementary styles in gloomy songs shot through with paranoia. | OMB Peezy / Sherwood Marty: Young & Reckless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omb-peezy-sherwood-marty-young-and-reckless/ | Young & Reckless | Except for being signed to the same label, the rappers OMB Peezy and Sherwood Marty seemed entirely unconnected until a few weeks ago, when they released their first collaborative single and announced a mixtape called Young & Reckless—a sudden, random move that smacks of industry matchmaking. Peezy is a prodigious and pyrotechnic young rapper from Alabama who moved to Sacramento as a child, but well after a heavy Southern drawl had taken hold of his nasally voice. He’s spent the last couple years molding his singular twang into both of his hometown contexts: Bay Area funk and Cash Money nostalgia. Marty, on the other hand, is from Baton Rouge and channels something more broadly regional in the form of fluid trap. Here, they’re both steeped in the same slurry Auto-Tune, and they play off each other’s strengths, even if a full tracklist sometimes reads less like a gelling duo than a ping-pong game of track features.
Young & Reckless feels like a come-up vehicle for Marty and a catalog build-out for Peezy, who burst onto the scene already in stride in 2016, but, besides a string of stunning loose songs, only has a short EP to his name. He raps about a life of street violence with a yappy drawl and a thousand-yard stare, by turns snarling and somber in a despondent fog of the after-effects. On the lead single, “Crash Out,” Peezy tumbles into the first verse in an immediate rage, prowling for vengeance but never numb to the PTSD (“My first mission won’t leave my mind”) or dread (“Mama pray for me, prison ain’t the place for me”) that accompanies. His voice is metallic and icy, and there’s a slithering elegance to the way his lyrics bundle into conversational knots. But because of the bouncy pacing of his register, Peezy’s flow can sound erratic, and that he’s so often leveraging a threat reinforces the pummeling effect of his delivery. It’s no surprise that he’s the main draw throughout, or that “Crash Out,” the same type of woozy Southern funk-trap he built his breakout on, seems to belong entirely to him.
Next to Peezy, Marty sounds like a slack crooner, flatter and less piercing by comparison. But because of his sing-songy baritone he’s got a grounding presence on Young & Reckless that paints his counterpart as the exclamation point. Still, Marty is more than capable of carrying a song himself, and many of these tracks sound like they belonged to him first, sometimes to the point of casting the other as a phone-in. (That goes both ways.) On the generically flaunting “I’m the Shit,” Marty’s the one that fills up the cavernous shell of a beat, not just with predictable brags but also with his own scurrying melody that bleeds from verse to hook. Peezy is there to punch a quick appearance near the end. The opposite is true on the organ-laced “Lights Out,” where Peezy takes the lead on a cathartically told-you-so chorus and sinister main verse that renders Marty an afterthought before the track closes. Sometimes they’re more in lockstep, like when Peezy’s nasally vocals echo Marty’s barking chorus with matching ad-libs on the menacing “Ready.” On the final two tracks, “Better Dayz” and “Ride Wit It,” they trade songs about gloom and paranoia, slinking into each other’s shared street nightmares and grief.
More than anything, Young & Reckless sounds like a pair of disparate rappers honing their voices, acting as one another’s pacesetters even if they’re running different races. Either of them could command this amount of space on his own, but there’s an obvious relief in sharing the spotlight; lowering the stakes of songwriting gives each the freedom to say less. | 2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | January 31, 2018 | 6.8 | 5686869f-8100-41bc-9f6c-4a6c974eca7d | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The Miami producer’s debut morphs between ambient, downtempo, and dub techno. It’s as tranquil as an afternoon spent watching the clouds drift through the sky. | The Miami producer’s debut morphs between ambient, downtempo, and dub techno. It’s as tranquil as an afternoon spent watching the clouds drift through the sky. | Jonny From Space: back then I didn’t but now I do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonny-from-space-back-then-i-didnt-but-now-i-do/ | back then I didn’t but now I do | When you’re a resident DJ at a powerhouse nightclub like Miami’s Club Space, versatility is key. Jonathan Trujillo—better known as simply Jonny From Space—has learned that from experience. His own music is rooted in the leftfield legacy of hometown acts like Phoenecia and their Schematic label; most of his bookings, in the more intimate Floyd (a club within the superclub) tend to be alongside like-minded souls like Ben UFO and fellow Florida DJ Danny Daze. But sometimes, the night’s billing dictates the vibe: Trujillo was once tasked with opening for an extended back-to-back set from EDM chameleons Diplo and Carnage—during Super Bowl weekend, at that. That very same week, he revealed a considerably different side of himself on his debut EP. A six-track compendium of ambient bubblers “made in altered states and meditative spaces,” the record suggested that the “Space” in his alias probably has less to do with his employer than it does his fascination with the outer limits.
Over the past couple of years, Jonny From Space has built up a tidy discography of cosmically inclined material, some of it club-focused, and some not at all. On his debut album, back then I didn’t but now I do, he leans into his more introspective instincts, favoring measured tempos and feathery textures. The choice suits the label putting out the record: Jenny Slattery and Anthony Naples’ Incienso imprint, where Naples—originally known for his club productions—has increasingly turned his focus to cloud-watching vibes. But even at his most chill, Trujillo strikes an unusual balance here: His atmospheres may be wispy, but his drums are tough and resilient, sharp as a sudden jab to the sternum.
The album opens on a resolutely downtempo note with “Crystal Eyes,” whose dubbed-out boom-bap and dreamy pads pay homage to smoker’s delights like Mo Wax’s classic Headz 2 compilation series, a cornerstone of mid-’90s trip-hop. Trujillo has a keen ear for contrast: The drum machine is crisp and declarative, yet the track’s tonal elements are unstable and amorphous, hard to get a bead on. The steady groove and flickering accents give the impression of a small town glimpsed from an airplane at night, lights twinkling in the darkness.
A similarly heady vibe plays out across the record, as he wreathes knotty machine beats in gauzy synths and glowing haloes. When asked about his production methods, Trujillo once said, “I space out and start working on the drums until I have a locked groove. From there everything else just flows like water.” That approach shines through in tracks like “Live,” a sidewinding sketch made out of off-kilter clicks and cartoonish voices, as well as “Slip,” a moody, toe-scuffing hip-hop instrumental. For all the simplicity of his arrangements, they’re sneakily crafted: The beats twist up in ways you don’t expect, giving even his most relaxed cuts an unsettling air, as though everything could fall apart without warning.
In a few places, Trujillo indulges his love of the dancefloor. On “Dream Reality,” brittle jungle breaks plunge through a chorus of bleeps and chirps, like space debris hurtling through a satellite array; “Luna Dance” beefs up foggy pads and brushed snares with insistent, bulletproof bass pulses—it’s dub techno encased in a protective exoskeleton. But “Float,” one of the album’s highlights, more closely aligns with his paradoxical MO: The twitchy rhythm, propelled by tight metallic coils, descends directly from Miami’s history with earth-shaking electro, yet everything else is as nebulous and pastel as cotton candy. Like the best of Jonny From Space’s work, it treats electronic music as a lenticular image. Seen from one angle, it’s a potent club track; from another, a taste of ambient at its most ethereal. | 2024-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Incienso | February 21, 2024 | 7.5 | 568838e0-dc3c-4f3e-ac9c-8ba87374a078 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Queens rapper-singer continues to refine her joyfully lascivious, sex-positive sound, but her best moments are the quiet ones. | The Queens rapper-singer continues to refine her joyfully lascivious, sex-positive sound, but her best moments are the quiet ones. | Dai Burger: Bite the Burger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dai-burger-bite-the-burger/ | Bite the Burger | Queens rapper Dai Burger got her start as a background dancer for rappers like Lil Mama, but since then she’s become a fixture at queer parties around Brooklyn. Her new album, Bite the Burger, continues the evolution of her lascivious sound—foul-mouthed, sex-positive lyrics over thrumming production that pulls from Baltimore club and trap. It’s raucous and it’s fun, but some of the most promising moments are the quieter ones, when Dai’s songwriting chops are given space to blossom.
The biggest example here is “Miss Me,” a slow-burning ballad built around a hissing AutoTuned chant. Dai bounces between singing and rapping, delivering reassurances like “The bullshit made me who I am today” before complicating that pride with petty jabs at exes: “You should miss me, wanna kiss me.” Later on “Pics (Interlude),” a wispy and playful jam about the regret that comes with sending nudes, she issues a blithe, baby-voiced warning: “Don’t leak my shits/Cause if you do, I promise you, I’m going to leak your shits.”
Her ability to both sing and rap, along with her Queens accent and the fact that women MCs are hardly ever allowed to stand on their own, is bound to bring up Nicki Minaj comparisons. But where Nicki’s lyrics are often devoted to her singular place in the spotlight, Dai’s are more illustrative of the people around her, whether it’s friends on the dancefloor or lovers in bed. “The Function,” for example, is a ’90s-style house anthem for the club’s most bold and beautiful, complete with cheesy trance synths. On “Urz,” she giddily dives into the benefits of having a down-low lover, confessing, “We be on that sneaky shit, but it’s better off that way/I just keep you on a shelf, call you down when I wanna play.” The track also stands as a showcase of Dai’s knack for describing sexual encounters in hilariously creative ways, none better than the line, “Playing with this pussy like it’s Ableton.”
Dai’s sexuality has always been at the center of her work, unapologetically divulging the juicy details of past relationships and flings. She wields it like a weapon on the album single “Vitamin P,” using the chorus to clearly outline what the “P” in the title stands for: “P for pussy, P for power, P for pride and prestige,” she growls. The line could serve as a thesis statement for all of her music.
But while much of Bite the Burger sizzles, there are moments that fall short, lyrics that don’t work hard enough. On the aforementioned “Miss Me,” an otherwise-stellar track kicks off with a dud when she hollowly boasts, “Couldn’t even walk a mile in my shoes, cause this shit so high you’re guaranteed to lose.” The verses on “5 Dubbz,” meanwhile, are almost endearing in their one-take quality, but start to stumble as Dai repeats herself: “You wouldn’t know love if it slapped you right in the face... You wouldn’t know love if it walked up and slapped you in your motherfucking face.”
And then there are the trap-leaning songs, like “I Be Knowin” and the title track, which rely on shaky keyboard melodies and plastic drums that sound like they were ripped from a YouTube tutorial. Placed aside the high-energy club-oriented tracks, which are thrilling in their influences from a wide range of dance music, they seem small and mundane. An artist as bold and honest as Dai should never sound so boring. | 2020-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | First One Up | January 3, 2020 | 6.7 | 5688e2c5-ecec-4e3d-be75-65255612308c | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Laurel Halo’s most ambient—and most linear—record to date swims in mysterious electro-acoustic textures; it marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic composition. | Laurel Halo’s most ambient—and most linear—record to date swims in mysterious electro-acoustic textures; it marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic composition. | Laurel Halo: Raw Silk Uncut Wood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurel-halo-raw-silk-uncut-wood/ | Raw Silk Uncut Wood | Voices abounded on Laurel Halo’s 2017 album Dust. Voices sung and simpered, voices repeating isolated Japanese words, voices intoning consonant-rich, ASMR-inducing phrases. The album probed at what exactly the voice could do if split apart and rearranged like any other piece of machinery; it destabilized the voice’s traditional role as pop music’s emotional core. Because the Michigan-born, Berlin-based artist tends to ricochet so rapidly between styles from album to album—avant-pop on her 2012 debut LP, minimal techno on the next—it should come as little surprise that her latest, Raw Silk Uncut Wood, omits the voice entirely. If Dust was a series of cubist portraits, fragmenting the human into new and startling shapes, then Raw Silk is a collection of unpopulated landscapes, pristine and placid in their emptiness.
The sense of restlessness that has characterized Halo’s work to date subsides on Raw Silk. She is no longer so invested in parrying attention from one moment to the next; she’d rather linger on one set of chords, one simple melody, or an unusual percussive pattern. The record begins meditatively on the title track, whose name derives from Ursula Le Guin’s translation of an ancient Taoist text: “What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less.” An organ tone maps a soothing chord progression frosted with synthesizer pads and streaked by low notes from guest cellist Oliver Coates. It is the first of the two 10-minute tracks that open and close the record, and it preempts Raw Silk’s more jittery middle section by inducing a state of stillness. There’s no percussion, no sense of divided time beyond slow variations on a theme.
The title track’s glacial unspooling gives way to four short-form songs that find ample common ground between avant-garde jazz and ambient experimentalism. “Quietude” and “The Sick Mind” both clack away at a rapid, glitching pace, not so much following melodies as exploring the tonal qualities of a single instrument or synthesizer patch (it’s not always clear where exactly these sounds originate physically). “Mercury” matches them in speed with scattershot percussion from Halo’s Dust collaborator Eli Keszler. “The Sick Mind,” in particular, plays out like an anxious brain being observed from a mindful distance, racing but not all-consuming, free to worry itself to exhaustion. Because the tone of these songs is so sparse and so muted, even the most urgent tempos shiver inside an overarching sense of calm. The dancing keystrokes don’t break the spell cast by the album’s opening track. They just roil the hypnotic mood.
Whatever tension arises from Raw Silk’s center comes to a head on its final track, “Nahbarkeit.” Here, the unresolved experiments find closure as Keszler’s percussion stutters beneath a wash of celestial synth chords. The oceanic tone of the record’s first track washes over the agitated beats of its middle, and together, the two techniques elevate one another. The drums spur on the chords, and the chords take the nervous edge off the drums.
Halo’s music often rewards listeners who sit with it long enough to untangle all its knots. Raw Silk Uncut Wood marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic compositions, but as her most ambient record to date, it also boasts some of her most unabashedly beautiful music. The closing measures of “Nahbarkeit” feel like a revelation of sorts, a moment of surrender after so much searching. More than her previous albums, Raw Silk pursues a cohesive, linear narrative structure. It doesn’t aim to unseat the listener’s frame of reference, only to follow its own threads to the end. Rather than probe or distort the base structure of the music she’s making, Halo lets it glow for the sake of glowing. | 2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Latency | July 17, 2018 | 8 | 568bdc13-622b-4165-ba0b-f9eec7f56b59 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Thomas Fec (aka Tobacco) has trafficked over the years in the weird, the uncanny, the not-quite-right. His new album tries for a slightly less confrontational, still-unconventional take on synthpop. | Thomas Fec (aka Tobacco) has trafficked over the years in the weird, the uncanny, the not-quite-right. His new album tries for a slightly less confrontational, still-unconventional take on synthpop. | TOBACCO: Sweatbox Dynasty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22209-sweatbox-dynasty/ | Sweatbox Dynasty | In both his solo work as Tobacco and as the frontman of Pittsburgh-based synth-psych outfit Black Moth Super Rainbow, Thomas Fec has trafficked over the years in the weird, the uncanny, the not-quite-right. He’s done so by taking human elements—often his own voice—and corroding them using filters like vocoder, talk box, and compressed synths that shudder like an atelectatic lung. Like filmmaker David Cronenberg, Fec sees, contained in technology, the most grotesque parts of ourselves.
On Tobacco’s 2010 album Maniac Meat, Fec was able to change guest-star Beck’s speak-sing baritone into something strange and mildly sinister. With 2014’s Ultima II Massage, Fec created muscular pop that was as fetid as it was approachable. But after three albums of increasingly warped solo experiments, Fec’s new album *Sweatbox Dynasty *tries for a slightly less confrontational, still-unconventional take on synthpop.
From the first track, “Human Om,” the keyboards alone make it clear that *Sweatbox Dynasty *is a Tobacco product. Like much of the album, the track takes a deconstructed drum break and overlays compressed synths and Fec’s voice, with processing that alternates between robo-bizarro and playground sweet: “You can be my light come up in the morning/And I can be your spiral spinnin’ down,” he sings. “Gods in Heat” comes the closest to approaching the gonzo pop of *Ultima II Massage’*s best tracks. Though the lyrics are almost impossibly obscured, Fec’s voice anchors the track with a huge chorus—as bubblegum as it is bleak.
When Tobacco’s first solo album, Fucked Up Friends, came out in 2008, Fec’s degraded, deranged approach felt legitimately dangerous. By peeling the skin off of hip-hop, synthpop, and psychedelia, Fec exposed something diseased behind pop’s waxy veneer. But the world has changed, and now Fec’s warped view is mainstream, from “Tim and Eric”’s absurdist horror-comedy to Death Grips digi-fucked rap. So, yes, part of the reason Sweatbox Dynasty doesn’t hit as hard as past efforts has to do with how accustomed we've become to Tobacco’s worldview. But the reality is that these tracks are often just weaker versions of his past work. Whereas Fec previously balanced atmospheric cuts with outright freakouts, Sweatbox Dynasty leans much more heavily on the former, and the resulting tracks, like “Warlock Mary” and “Home Invisionaries,” bubble along but never seem to coalesce. And album closer “Let’s Get Worn Away”—though occasionally quite pretty, in its own Fecified way—can’t justify its six minutes-plus runtime.
Also missing is much of the dark comedy that defines Tobacco’s best work: Fec’s most disturbing songs were often his funniest, but *Sweatbox Dynasty *rarely allows Fec’s puckish side to rise from the muck. Another horror film director, the Italian Giallo master Dario Argento, said “You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring.” It’s a maxim that Tobacco has embraced in the past, but one that he shies away from here. Still, if you want revulsion and titillation in equal measure, few producers achieve the balance—even on their off days—like Tobacco. | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | August 9, 2016 | 6.7 | 56970d4a-6736-4062-8ea7-2b92f98d80a8 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Ricky Reed, the producer behind Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” as well as hits by Jason Derulo and Fifth Harmony, steps out with a solo debut defined by a hazy, late-night melancholy. | Ricky Reed, the producer behind Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” as well as hits by Jason Derulo and Fifth Harmony, steps out with a solo debut defined by a hazy, late-night melancholy. | Ricky Reed: The Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ricky-reed-the-room/ | The Room | Ricky Reed, the producer behind Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” describes the song’s ascent as the biggest thing that’s ever happened to him. Lizzo brings a singular charisma to the song, an ability to make you feel like the main character when you listen to it. There’s a reason it’s been plastered on countless post-breakup Instagram posts and drunkenly belted at every karaoke night. When discussing the process behind creating the song, his response was more visceral than technical: “My natural inclination on this song, or any song, is gonna be to have the bass knock.” That unbridled exuberance is what makes so many of the other songs he’s produced, from Jason Derulo’s “Dirty Talk” to Fifth Harmony’s “Bo$$,” so undeniably fun.
But despite the success of the countless pop hits he produced or co-written, he hadn’t released much of his own music, except for a few singles, until The Room. His debut album features an array of rising artists like duendita and Lido Pimienta, as well as pop-soul acts like Leon Bridges and A-list indie bands like Dirty Projectors. It sets an entirely different pace and tone from his earlier work, one that is much more exploratory and subdued. These are songs for soundtracking solitary, balmy night drives, not for kitchen dance parties with your friends.
The album promotion leans heavily on the narrative surrounding its creation. Most of these songs were written live during his NICE LIVE! YouTube sessions, which Reed saw as a way of staying connected with friends and collaborators during the pandemic. When “Real Magic,” the album’s first single, brought Reed to tears in the middle of the livestream, he felt he had to turn these ephemeral moments into a more permanent project. Certainly, there’s an improvisational looseness to this album compared to the pristine sheen of the pop music he has worked on. But beyond that, none of the backstory that Reed relays is evident in the music.
Generally, there’s a vagueness to The Room, a hazy melancholy that ties the project together without much lyrical cohesion. It’s hard to parse what this album is about beyond the narrative surrounding its creation. Ultimately, most of the songs on The Room just aren’t that affecting, which is disappointing given the star power here. “Real Magic” might have brought Reed to tears, but the rest of us remain unmoved. The lyrics are unobjectionable, if a little saccharine. But as a whole, it doesn’t showcase St. Panther’s frenetic flow as a rapper or her skill as a vocalist the way her own tracks like “Infrastructure” or “Playa” do. The hi-hats are distracting, and the vocal distortion and watery synth subdue her usual vibrancy. And it’s a disappointment to hear duendita’s tremendous voice largely buried in the mix on “Us (How Sweet It Was).”
Elsewhere, the lyrics can be painfully corny. “Fav Boy”’s refrain of “I want to be your favorite boy/I want to be your favorite toy” has the all-too-familiar syntax of Tinder messages from men who are “just looking for someone to go on adventures with.” Especially following a heavy verse about feeling apathy at a relative’s funeral, the line feels like a bizarre non-sequitur. Godfather666’s laments on “No Future,” which address loneliness in the most direct terms, are similarly unrelatable. It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for someone singing, “Who could ever love me?/I’m only nice when I want something.”
There are a few shining moments here, though. “Catch You” lacks the complex instrumentation—brass and electronic flourishes, rich orchestration—that brought Lido Pimienta’s latest album, Miss Colombia, to life. Still, the flute winds beautifully around her gossamer falsetto. The elusive lyricism—“Wait for me/I’ll be with you though/Trust/And the leaves will fall”—is some of the most evocative on the album. “We’ll Be Home Soon,” which quivers like a serpentwithfeet track, is beguiling too. You’re left wondering what the song could have evolved into if it lasted longer than 40 seconds.
As a means of community building, and as a document of Ricky Reed exploring a new sound, The Room is impressive. It’s nice to see him slow down and reach out. But as a project that stands on its own, there’s not much to keep you coming back. In the dreary, hot days of a lonely COVID summer, these watery songs seem to dissipate into the air. It’s hard not to miss the heartbeat of a knocking bass line.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nice Life | September 2, 2020 | 6 | 569ec66f-1ea9-4811-9187-46bd8f3c9f3b | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that grapples with Titus leader Patrick Stickles' manic depression. It is their least specific album but their most universal: The music encompasses everything they’ve ever sounded like and restores their claims to outsized ambition after the somewhat dour Local Business. | The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that grapples with Titus leader Patrick Stickles' manic depression. It is their least specific album but their most universal: The music encompasses everything they’ve ever sounded like and restores their claims to outsized ambition after the somewhat dour Local Business. | Titus Andronicus: The Most Lamentable Tragedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20702-the-most-lamentable-tragedy/ | The Most Lamentable Tragedy | If you've been to Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium in the last few years, you might have encountered Patrick Stickles sitting at the door, selling tickets to shows with crowds far more diminished than those drawn by his band, Titus Andronicus. Such remember-your-roots DIY ethos has always been central to the band’s existence, because at a time when bands are more flexible than ever about taking money to survive, Titus Andronicus are specifically beloved for their refusal to compromise. They start charity funds so their music can be kept out of advertisements; they snidely refer to Kendrick Lamar as a shoe spokesperson, an attitude both rigidly simplistic and technically true.
The Clash were hyped as the "only band that matters," a dubious claim because it was invented by their record label. But for their fans, Titus Andronicus is this type of group. They turn a great, burning eye upon the world and spare no one from their observations, not even themselves. For listeners attracted to rock'n'roll as both flagellating whip and eternal flame, this is powerfully enticing—especially if you also believe the world is on the perennial edge of collapse. (Ironically, they take a similarly analytical approach to the ugliness in themselves and in the world as Kendrick Lamar—only, of course, they'd never sell any shoes.)
Their status was cemented by 2010 breakthrough The Monitor, a wildly ambitious album that used the Civil War as a metaphor for Stickles' life. It was desperate music made for desperate people, filled with howled lamentations about the sorry state of society wrapped around riffs that forced your shoulders out of their sockets. But the follow-up, 2012's Local Business, was unexpectedly dour. Hesitant to accept his band's new position in the music industry, Stickles pulled back. The first line asserted that everything in the world was "inherently worthless," and only grew more precisely negative as it went onward, critiquing the middle-class bubble that allowed a band like them to exist. Music fans will accept a certain amount of doom-and-gloom—many times they actively court it—but there are limits. Few people want to listen to a rock song about why listening to a rock song is bad. That Stickles spent the next few years telling his Twitter followers that Local Business was better than The Monitor (in a run of tweets now gone after he deleted his timeline earlier this year) seemed to cement its status as metaphorical garlic, meant to ward off the punks-in-name-only who today might discover the band through listening to Beats 1.
So when reports first emerged that the band was writing a 30-track rock opera, it sounded outrageous—a pointed gag from Stickles that would probably culminate in, like, an album full of Crass covers. How do you go bigger than an album that uses the Civil War as a metaphor for one's life? But it wasn't a joke: Almost two years later, they announced The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.
The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a story told in five acts that follows the Hero, an unnamed man (who's someone like Stickles) in an unnamed city (which is somewhere like New York) grappling with his neuroses. He's confronted by his doppelgänger—an alternate self that seems to have everything figured out, and pushes him to find solace outside of sin. It’s a protracted allegory for manic depression, which Stickles has publicly struggled with since the band first came to attention. Here, he’s reversed course from the literal transcription of his life’s struggles on Local Business (no "My Eating Disorder"), instead interpreting them to fit his larger vision. The Most Lamentable Tragedy is their least specific album—no granular references to obscure Jersey baseball teams—but their most universal, less dependent on empathizing with the suburban sad sack.
The music encompasses everything they’ve ever sounded like: There are knotty guitar anthems filled with chords like power lines thrumming with electricity ("No Future Part IV", "Stranded"), hot-breathed hardcore exhortations ("Look Alive", "Lookalike"), vamps on musical theater where Stickles sounds somewhere between Billy Joel and Meat Loaf ("I Lost My Mind", "No Future Part V"). They filter the visceral riffage of Thin Lizzy ("Lonely Boy"), the all-hands-on revelry of the E. Street Band ("Fatal Flaw"), and the whiskey-soaked romanticism of the Pogues ("Come On, Siobhán") through a fiery, punk-indebted perspective. True, those are reference points on previous albums, but here the elements blend together like a hearty soup. Fifteen musicians are credited on the record (such as Owen Pallett, who handled the strings) and there's a feeling of camaraderie in the production; at times, it feels like the album was recorded in one, rambling live take over a long night.
The album’s ambitions aren’t only limited to the story, which Stickles has eagerly detailed at the former Rap Genius. Instead, it considers their discography as one giant super-structure. It's packed with callbacks to previous work, which any modest Titus head should be able to pick out. The references range from obvious ("More Perfect Union" follows The Monitor's "A More Perfect Union"; "I'm Going Insane" is a reprise of Local Business' "Titus Andronicus vs. the Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)") to esoteric (lyrical homages to "No Future" and "A More Perfect Union", amongst others) to potentially meaningful: The titular character in "Mr. E. Mann" is the "Electric Man" from Local Business, which was written about a real-life incident in which Stickles was hospitalized after gripping a live microphone during rehearsal for a show.
The idea that electricity and electroshock therapy can cure depression is an old one, hence the smudging of fiction and reality to suggest that the shocks Stickles inadvertently received may have created this fictive doppelganger, who appears to the hero ("I met a mystery man/ On a magic morning") and offers a hopeful path toward clean living. Of course, these layers of potential interpretation are secondary to the fact that "Mr. E. Mann" is simply an enjoyable song, guided by Stickles' sensitive vocal performance and the convergence of harmonica, piano, and strings into what sounds like glistening dew on that magic morning. You don’t need to know that Stickles was shocked by a microphone to enjoy "Mr. E Mann", just as you don’t need to know that he’s from New Jersey to understand the hero's sense of psychic isolation. But like the Hold Steady, the mythology offers deeper enjoyment for anyone willing to burrow into it.
On their earlier albums, Titus Andronicus perfected the art of writing confrontationally self-effacing anthems. Their most potent and most recognized refrains—"You will always be a loser" and "Your life is over"—took on a therapeutic nature when being screamed by crowds of young men and women in the throes of rock-show-as-catharsis. By contrast, the mantras on The Most Lamentable Tragedy look inward. "I hate to be awake"; "I can control something inside of me"; "It's alright"; "I only like it when it's dimed out"; these are confessional observations that sound scribbled in the margins of some diary. Stickles has sounded more personal than this, but never less acidic. This is angst that’s approachable, rather than the starved nihilism that colored their previous records.
With that in mind, the one-two punch of "Come On, Siobhán" and "A Pair of Brown Eyes" is where the record unlocks. In their cover of the Pogues classic, they tweak a few lyrics to change the mood: "One winter's evening/ Stoned as hell." It's marijuana that the hero consumes in this version, not alcohol, because while booze dulls the senses, a real marijuana high makes one ultra-perceptive of all the conditions in one's life. Sifting those thoughts to find some clarity is like navigating a minefield... but here, the hero has a revelation that despite his baleful world view, despite the push and pull between his inner selves, despite the tide of disgust felt toward his surroundings, salvation is possible through someone else. The feeling might be as ephemeral as the high, but for a moment, life looks wide open. It's the first time the band has explicitly sung about love, the transmutation of brutal pessimism into beatific optimism.
This is not maudlin sentiment printed off a Hallmark card, but a hard-fought conclusion following a lifetime of despair. The feeling isn't eternal; a few songs later, the relationship has ended and the hero is plunged back into his depression. But the mood has shifted by "Stable Boy", the last proper song on the album. Over a weeping chord organ, Stickles gazes at the yawning void of "forever" and decides that for all life's dissatisfaction, 'tis better to have lived than not at all.
"Stable Boy" was recorded with the same cassette recorder used for "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", the first song off their first record, which captured Stickles' need to do wrong to everyone who'd done wrong by him. The two tracks sound like bookends to the Titus Andronicus project, introducing and resolving Stickles' profound anxieties about life—the running theme through all of their four albums. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but it's one they fought for. And so: It's taken five years, but they've finally answered the grand expectations created by The Monitor. They could go anywhere from here—record that album of Crass covers, become a full-time bar cover band, or even happily break up. At the very least, they can stop writing songs titled "No Future". | 2015-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 27, 2015 | 8.1 | 56a39748-ac6c-4466-ae46-7250ff68e0c6 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
As another moniker for Danish musician Loke Rhabek, Croatian Amor finds him at his most ambient, exploring the ugly beauty of love and human connection. | As another moniker for Danish musician Loke Rhabek, Croatian Amor finds him at his most ambient, exploring the ugly beauty of love and human connection. | Croatian Amor: Love Means Taking Action | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22408-love-means-taking-action/ | Love Means Taking Action | Croatian Amor’s newest album Love Means Taking Action is the latest entry to the ever-expanding canon of albums that wrestle with the infinite nuances of love. As one of many monikers of Loke Rahbek—a key figure in the Copenhagen punk scene and co-founder of the Posh Isolation label—he explores the idea abstractly, in a fluctuating volley of electronics that communicate everything from ecstasy to despair. Under Croatian Amor, it is the closest he comes to making ambient music, removed from the retro synthpop he plays with Lust for Youth, the power electronics he creates under the LR moniker, or the various explorations of noise he makes in collaboration with Olymphia, Damien Dubrovnik, or Puce Mary. It’s a project that has always been able to balance beauty’s relationship with the ugly.
Never has this dichotomy been more present than on Love Means Taking Action, where both of these elements are amplified more than ever before. It’s perfectly displayed in the opening song “An Angel Gets His Wings Clipped” where a solitary, echoing voice sings a stark melody for a solid minute before all the electronics start swelling around it like steam cutting through earth. The give-and-take emerges, and tension begins to consume everything, setting the tone for what’s to come.
Love Means Taking Action separates itself from Croatian Amor’s previous work because of its ability to maintain an overall mood among its many smaller shifts. Older works like Genitalia Garden would constantly reset tone between tracks, choosing between a darker or lighter sound. Whereas here a song like “No Sex Club” starts so claustrophobically with single-tone electronics and cut up samples of someone panting, only to give way to bright, piano-like chords that shift the whole tenor of the song, while still keeping the original creeping sensation present in the background. These production changes point toward the greater risks Rahbek is taking here. The vocal slicing and splicing on “Like Angel” are reminiscent of Holly Herndon, and the short piano piece “Nadim Call Emergence II” would never exist on previous releases. Here they not only make sense, but give the more traditional Croatian Amor compositions (“Octopus Web,” “Any Life You Want”) more gravity.
These violent contrasts should lead to a complete lack of cohesion. And while the album creates a kind of confusion initially, if this is Rahbek’s attempt to define love, or at least to understand the interaction between other people, then of course there will be odd juxtapositions and gorgeous conflict. But Rahbek ends the album with the title track, one of his prettiest compositions to date, a cheese-filled blossom of skeletal ’80s synths that remains the album’s brightest most cohesive moment as something gorgeous takes hold of everything. It’s as though all the previous chaotic dissonance is a means to arrive, finally, at harmony. | 2016-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Posh Isolation / Alter | September 20, 2016 | 7 | 56a5b404-2675-48b8-b207-cb0669059592 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | null |
Traversing classic UK genres like 2-step and jungle, the duo’s first commercial mix doubles as a celebration of multiculturalism in modern Britain. | Traversing classic UK genres like 2-step and jungle, the duo’s first commercial mix doubles as a celebration of multiculturalism in modern Britain. | Overmono: fabric presents Overmono | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/overmono-fabric-presents-overmono/ | fabric presents Overmono | As modern Britain lurches from crisis to crisis, deeply divided and seemingly at war with its own interests, it may seem futile to look to a mix CD in search of the positives of UK life. Yet fabric presents Overmono, the first commercial mix from the Overmono brothers, takes a pretty good stab at reminding the listener of the deeply ingrained strain of multiculturalism that has made British music—and British life, in general—so rewarding for those who have embraced it.
Overmono, a fraternal duo known for their rugged techno and rave revivalism, wanted their Fabric mix to be “a nod to music scenes past and present” that would capture the feeling of South East London on a cold winter night: “Night buses with steamed up windows. Sirens in the distance.” But the album’s centrepiece, L.B. Dub Corp’s “I Have a Dream,” featuring British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah, suggests that their intentions go beyond music. “I Have a Dream” is gloriously, necessarily unsubtle in its message of power through multiculturalism, providing the mix with a rapturous and timely focal point. While the song’s lines may be delivered with a wink (“It is written in the great book of multiculturalism that the curry will blend with the shepherd’s pie and the Afro hairstyle will return”), they feel considerably less frivolous in a country where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has compared Muslim women in burkas to “letter boxes” and members of England’s soccer team are routinely racially abused on their home turf.
Elsewhere, Overmono make their point through an incisive musical selection that plucks liberally from the last four decades of electronic music. The set’s 29 tracks run a glorious steeplechase through British musical genres, from 2-step classics (Antonio’s evergreen “Hyperfunk”) through ambient jungle rollers (Orca’s “Intellect”), techstep tear-ups (the hell’s growl of Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria”), warped rave revivalism (Anz’s rainbow-colored “Morphing Into Brighter”) and other weird tendrils of the UK bass continuum (Vex’d’s snarling “Pop Pop,” a track that marks the moment where grime and dubstep collided). fabric presents Overmono also devotes space to the throbbing, thrillingly dark take on tops-off techno that has long sent British crowds into rapture, from DJ Misjah’s trance-y banger “Victim” to the grinding psychedelic loops of Surgeon and James Ruskin’s “Sound Pressure Part 3.”
Holding this all together seems a fanciful task, but Overmono manage it with aplomb, favoring the kind of swift transitions between genres that only make sense while listening; 29 tracks speed by in 65 thrilling minutes. Antonio’s “Hyperfunk” positively slinks out from under the industrial rumbling of Milanese’s “Billy Hologram”; the aquatic stomp of Plastikman’s “Fuk” tears at the belly of L.B. Dub Corp’s euphoric “I Have a Dream”; and the unsettling dancehall lurch of Equiknoxx’s “A Rabbit Spoke to Me When I Woke Up” is an inspired partner to Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria,” dusting the duo’s metallic drum’n’bass with trace elements of dancehall. The mix is well sequenced, too: In the wrong hands, “I Have a Dream” could have felt a little strained in its jovial messaging; employed here after a buildup of tough, industrial funk, its heavenly melodic sweeps and chants of “multiculture” carpet-bomb the hairs on the back of your neck. Later on, Actress’ “Caves of Paradise” provides a welcome pause for breath before the coming jungle onslaught.
Overmono’s four productions on this album—three original tracks and a remix of For Those I Love’s stirring electronic eulogy “I Have a Love”—help greatly in these transitions, positioning them somewhere between UK garage, R&B, and techno, distilling the spirit of the mix into vivid three-minute flashes. “So U Kno,” the Overmono track that opens the mix, is particularly excellent: an iron-clad 2-step battleship with an irresistible hook, the steel of techno colliding against the rubbery skitter of UKG.
For all its Britishness, fabric presents Overmono is anything but parochial: There are tracks here from all over the world, while the UK productions remind us that Black music, from reggae to techno, is integral to British culture. As an insight into British music in times of crisis—and a dynamic contrast to the guitar-led wave of post-Brexit post-punk—fabric presents Overmono is Overmono’s defining statement to date.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | July 21, 2021 | 7.7 | 56a5f963-e709-4576-bf01-ddcee746cc01 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Dynamic rock'n'roll lifer and all-around live force Wanda Jackson follows Loretta Lynn's path and has a comeback LP produced by Jack White. | Dynamic rock'n'roll lifer and all-around live force Wanda Jackson follows Loretta Lynn's path and has a comeback LP produced by Jack White. | Wanda Jackson: The Party Ain't Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15042-the-party-aint-over/ | The Party Ain't Over | It's easy to see why Jack White wanted to produce rock'n'roll lifer Wanda Jackson after watching just one two-and-a-half minute YouTube video. The performance clip was taped in 1958 for L.A. TV show "Town Hall Party" and finds Jackson roaring through an Elvis Presley hit single called "Hard Headed Woman". As written, the song doesn't portray women in the strongest light-- "a hard-headed woman is the thorn in the side of a man," goes the 50s-macho hook. But Jackson flips it-- and gives the thing a good hard jolt, too. When she sings the chorus, she adds a blustery "you betcha, yeah!" While many young women of her time were content to pine after Elvis, she dated him while in her teens and symbolically kicked his ass with his own song. But the most startling and awesome thing about the "Hard Headed Woman" clip may be Jackson's badass introduction: "We think this is one of the most beautiful love songs that's ever been written." Kathleen Hanna would most certainly approve.
Jackson's 50s sides would justly earn her the title of "Queen of Rockabilly," and The Party Ain't Over is a reference to her 1958 hit "Let's Have a Party". But, since that early success, the singer recorded many albums of more traditional country, blues, and gospel over the last 50 years. And while her voice was so galvanizing on those early singles-- her signature growl could match any man's-- it would later prove to be tender, lonesome, and gorgeous without a hint of the toughness that originally made her famous. Delving into her catalog now, some of her most lasting music may not be as revolutionary as her gender-busting rockabilly, but it's also less novel; her classy 1964 LP Blues in My Heart in particular is a timeless work, both loose and graceful. But, with The Party Ain't Over, Jack White aims to reconnect the 73-year-old Jackson with her teenage style by any means necessary. So we get truckloads of overzealous horns that sound ripped off from his buddy Conan's late-night band, White's own fuzzed-out guitar, bustling drums, and cartoon-y slide work. The wild excess often ends up shoving Jackson to the sidelines on her own album.
The last time White worked with one of his grandmotherly female idols was on Loretta Lynn's devastatingly personal and loving Van Lear Rose. But there are differences between that project and this one. Van Lear Rose had Lynn writing most of the songs, and White treated them with reverence while maintaining an airy live feel. Jackson didn't write any songs on The Party Ain't Over, which isn't terribly notable in itself considering she hailed from a pre-singer-songwriter era and wrote few of her own tunes. But the songs on the record-- mostly picked by White-- often come off as forced, unfairly anachronistic or both. When the too-loud trumpets and juke-joint piano push Jackson on opener "Rip It Up", it feels a little uncomfortable. It's almost the same uneasy vibe you get when watching that fake old guy dancing up a storm in those Six Flags commercials-- something just ain't right there.
Of course, White's intentions are good here, and chances are many people (including myself) wouldn't even be paying attention if he weren't involved. And if the point was to get folks to revisit this legendary singer's legacy and grant her much-overdue appreciation, mission accomplished. But White doesn't help Jackson make any new classics on The Party Ain't Over. Annoyingly, the last track suggests it didn't have to be that way. "Blue Yodel #6" ditches all the instrumental flotsam as it finds Jackson singing against only White's twanging acoustic guitar. The singer's weathered-yet-vibrant voice and personality finally don't have to battle for the spotlight. It's quite easily the best thing here, as it hearkens back to her post-rockabilly 60s records and shows this undervalued pioneer doesn't need to party to have a good time. | 2011-01-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-01-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch / Third Man | January 28, 2011 | 5.2 | 56ae96e1-d1c8-4810-b0b1-927b85027248 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The UK techno titan’s debut album is a display of his sound-design prowess—as well as a reminder that even the heaviest techno needn’t shy from the pleasures of weirdo pop. | The UK techno titan’s debut album is a display of his sound-design prowess—as well as a reminder that even the heaviest techno needn’t shy from the pleasures of weirdo pop. | Blawan: Wet Will Always Dry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blawan-wet-will-always-dry/ | Wet Will Always Dry | Two minutes into “Careless,” the second song on Blawan’s debut album, Wet Will Always Dry, something unexpected happens: The UK techno don’s voice wafts into the mix, his airy tone suggesting a Belle and Sebastian B-side blown across the festival field. For a producer whose best-known song—2012’s monstrous “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?”—hangs off a distorted vocal hook that hints at murder, the contrast is eye-opening. It introduces a rejuvenating tinge of vulnerability into Blawan’s sometimes stony techno.
The move is not entirely without precedent. Since launching his Ternesc label in 2015, Blawan (aka Jamie Roberts) has eased off the terrible intensity of “Bodies” and his thunderous work with Pariah as Karenn; that softening has coincided with him turning to modular synthesis to produce his music. Roberts’ twin 2016 EPs as Bored Young Adults and Kilner showcased a more introverted take on electronics, while 2017’s Nutrition EP hinted at tenderness within the thunder.
Even so, that cobweb-light voice on “Careless” is an unexpected highlight on an album that subtly turns up the color on Blawan’s hard-nosed production sound. It’s not just that the vocal is fragile; it also has a hook that you could find yourself muttering in the shower several days later. This is the closest Blawan has come to weirdo pop music since “Bodies” or 2011’s bumping “Getting Me Down.” His knack for an understated vocal hook shows up again on “Stell,” where his wistful voice anchors insolently squelching synths in a piece of electronic music that feels designed for staring out the window on an overcast day.
Musical color is also evident in the fantastically visceral sounds that elevate Wet Will Always Dry above the techno horde. Album opener “Klade” is built around a droning noise that evokes the feeling of lying in the long grass watching planes pass overhead, while “North” layers a springy, insistent synth line over what sounds like a bag of potato chips being thrown on the fire. It helps that the album’s mix is bathed in a satisfying sonic warmth whose rich timbre does for the ears what the smell of polished wood does for the nose.
Odd hooks and noises might not sound like enough to sustain an eight-track album. But Blawan has a way of drawing out the subtle drama in his sounds, playing on the tension between the elasticity of the instrumental lines and the tightly wound percussive structure. The rubbery harp-pluck effect on “Nims,” for example, is forever threatening to veer out of control, only to be brought back in line by the click and thud of the regimented drum line. The album only falters when these touches aren’t enough to sustain interest. “Tasser” and “Vented” both feature hugely satisfying noises—the former resembling the ominous, metallic buildup of a sea storm, the latter a ruler being twanged in the bowels of hell—but neither is developed sufficiently to raise their respective tracks above post-Jeff Mills loopery.
Wet Will Always Dry isn’t an album that will rewire dance music or revolutionize modern electronics, but at its best it succeeds in pushing against the expectations of modern techno, bringing vulnerability, warmth, and oodles of enchanting noises to a musical genre whose pursuit of the future sometimes seems to have gotten lost in po-faced respect for the past. Wet Will Always Dry is tender, intense, and dramatic. But most of all it is fun, in a way that only the pursuit of the most ludicrous aural stimulation can be. | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ternesc | June 27, 2018 | 7.2 | 56b1e284-6b04-4b83-b540-d200eaeb749d | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
I have issues with women in rock. Not so much the actual act of female human beings playing that rock ... | I have issues with women in rock. Not so much the actual act of female human beings playing that rock ... | Sleater-Kinney: One Beat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7237-one-beat/ | One Beat | I have issues with women in rock. Not so much the actual act of female human beings playing that rock n' roll music, but the entire media concept of in-quotes "women in rock." I'm tired of Rolling Stone double issues, the VH1 theme weeks, the Tower Records special displays. Condescending, patronizing bullshit, all of it. Now, I won't get into the issue of the built-in misogyny in the rock criticism phrasebook; partially because I wouldn't want to endorse a paranoid shift towards excessively vigilant political correctness, and partially because I myself am guilty of occasionally over-using the adjective 'sultry.'
No, at hand is a bigger fish-- namely, that far too much writing about female musicians gets caught up with the idea that the artist must be saying something about the 'female experience.' Rather than accept these acts as just plain musicians, being a woman playing rock music is automatically assumed to be a declaration of activist intentions. Other than the obvious double-standard (when was the last time you read a review about an all-guy band's songs reflecting the male experience?), this allows the Y chromosome-dominated rock press to focus on gender while still coming off as enlightened. But what of those girl bands that just want to rock, without all that role model jazz?
Consider, for example, indie-rock darlings Sleater-Kinney, just coincidentally the subject of this review! To date, Sleater-Kinney has, in my professional opinion, been a good but not great band with a solid back catalog of energetic but slightly homogenous releases. To the majority of my esteemed colleagues, however, S-K is the three-headed coming of the woman Christ, The Great Female Hope, the band that proves at long last that, hey, girls can rawk too! Never mind the fact that girls are, after all, evolutionarily engineered to have fingers for making chord shapes and strumming, just like boys.
Saddled with such a heavy label, and with unrealistic and undeserved expectations, the three women of Sleater-Kinney could just keep on making the same album over and over again, pleasing their tiny, rabid loyalists and the leather-patched elbow crowd in the press box. Hey, the life ain't too bad for a cult band these days. But, thank god, the Kill Rock Stars trio isn't content to forever meander in that habitat. With One Beat, Sleater-Kinney have turned in an album that absolutely, positively OBLITERATES the gender card, an album so colossal that all prefixes to the label 'rock band' must be immediately discarded.
From the opening, off-kilter drum pattern of the title track, One Beat takes you on a log flume ride through a forest of monumental riffs-- a log flume ride, people! Witness the fretboard slides of "Hollywood Ending", the cocky strut of "Step Aside", the mighty, fist-pumping second half of "Combat Rock" (to which I'd like to just give a premature Forkie for Best Riff of the Year right now). Also, be forewarned that the drumstick-twirling coda of "Far Away" has been shown to provoke sudden miming of snare hits and windmill strums in laboratory animals.
Now, you might be hearing a lot of crazytalk from longtime S-K supporters that the new album is their most disappointing to date. Ignore it; fanbase discomfort is a common symptom of the breakthrough album, proving that the act has tweaked their formula far enough to piss off the vets who want their pet band to stay predictable. Kinney's definitely changed up the recipe (as they had already begun to do with All Hands on the Bad One), but all changes are positive, foremost being a new understanding of how restraint and scaling back can allow for exponentially increased rockage. "Combat Rock" and "The Remainder" stutter along a single riff, teasingly refusing to explode before building to a tantric peak. "Light Rail Coyote" and "O2" both come out with all engines blazing, but retreat to valleys of uncharacteristically subdued hush.
Also helping the cause is an increased singing role for Carrie Brownstein, who sounds more confident than ever sporting a fully developed hiccupy vocal character that plays off Tucker's wail like lime flavoring on Tostitos. For anyone of the opinion that Tucker's banshee act occasionally got out of hand on older S-K material, Brownstein's participation is welcome news for your fragile eardrums. The latest model of the Janet Weiss percussion-cyborg sings a bit, too, but her main contribution is her incredibly melodic drums, strident and full-bodied as ever.
Meanwhile, the band breaks out the required fifth-album accoutrements: horn section, strings, occasional keyboards. It might be predictable timing for the band to expand their sound, but it's handled delicately by producer John Goodmanson, who never allows the spice to overwhelm the dish (er, sonically speaking, of course). The slip-and-slide Moog on "Oh!" drives home the song's oh-woah-woah playfulness, "Step Aside"'s marching band brass lends its revolution beckoning an epic quality, and Sam Coomes' theremin on "Funeral Song" fulfills the FDA requirements for any tune that mentions haunted houses, demons, and Halloween.
So except for a closing track ("Sympathy") where the bluesy over-emoting reminds me of everything I used to dislike about the Sleater, One Beat is an uncompromising, energetic monster of a record. Most of all, it's just accessible (pardon my French) enough to be exactly what the rock world needs these days: the Trail of Dead for those put off by the Danzig-esque lyrics and relentless drum-rolling. It's a dive-headfirst-into-an-empty-pool, take-the-subway-to-Queens, snap-into-a-Slim-Jim, forget-to-bring-back the-library-books, tire-pressure-dangerously-low, sneaking-fireworks-across-the-Illinois-Indiana-border kind of album. That it's performed by three persons of the female gender is entirely beside the point, to anyone who's really listening. | 2002-08-27T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-08-27T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | August 27, 2002 | 9.1 | 56b92afa-4e22-42f2-a990-7974f555e59e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On her second album, the Northern Irish musician graduates from lonesome singer-songwriter to bold art-pop auteur; her growing confidence translates to emotionally probing songs of startling candor. | On her second album, the Northern Irish musician graduates from lonesome singer-songwriter to bold art-pop auteur; her growing confidence translates to emotionally probing songs of startling candor. | SOAK: Grim Town | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soak-grim-town/ | Grim Town | When you’re an adolescent, your world doesn’t extend far beyond your school or your neighborhood. On her 2015 debut album, Before We Forgot How to Dream, the Northern Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson—aka SOAK—provided an unflinching portrait of what it felt like to be trapped inside such a confining space. Written while she was still in her teens, the album bristled with equal parts restlessness and resignation, communicating both the desire to break free of one’s humdrum surroundings and the soul-crushing difficulty of actually attempting do it. “Come on, come on, be just like me,” she sang, a lost soul desperately trying to attract kindred spirits into her own special club. Then she laid out the membership requirements: “Come on, come on, be a nobody.”
If Before We Forgot How to Dream was the direct product of SOAK’s experience growing up gay in the Catholic stronghold of Derry, its indie-folk outcast anthems proved highly relatable to a lot of other nobodies out there: The album made her one of the youngest-ever nominees for the UK’s Mercury Prize. The SOAK we hear on her second album is different; now in her 20s and based in Manchester, she’s at a physical and psychic remove from the dark days that inspired her debut album, and there’s a greater sense of levity and adventurousness to her songcraft. But even if she’s managed to escape her own prison, she’s continuing the rescue mission for those still trapped in theirs.
As Monds-Watson revealed in a recent interview, Grim Town is a cheeky phrase she and her friends use to describe something that’s “a bit shit.” Bringing an inside joke to the outside world, SOAK imagines Grim Town as an actual place where hopes and dreams go to die, complete with its own railway service delivering daily trainloads of society’s rejects. The album opens with a cinematic vignette where a conductor delivers a stern platform announcement: “Please note this train is for the following categories of passenger only—recipients of universal credit or minimum wage, the lonely, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, the lost, the grieving. Those who are unmedicated and who have salaries or pension plans should vacate the carriage immediately.” It’s the sort of declaration that, when set to a funereal organ drone, conjures public transportation's history as a vehicle of segregation and much worse—that is, until you hear the cabin full of ne’er-do-wells in the background, affably chatting away and cracking cold ones open in anticipation of the ride ahead. It’s SOAK’s way of saying: These are my people—let’s roll.
Following that scene-setting intro, Grim Town swiftly drops any explicit pretense of being a concept album. But its overall structure is not unlike a railway trip, with 14 discrete tracks that each chronicle different scenarios yet feel emotionally of a piece, like individual stations on the same line. SOAK has graduated from lonesome singer-songwriter to wide-eyed art-pop auteur, and her growing confidence is palpable from the get-go: The elegantly aching, cocktail-shaken shuffle of “Get Set Go Kid” suddenly shifts gears into an urgent percussive coda topped with a squealing sax solo, while “Everybody Loves You” begins as grayscale post-Portishead trip-pop before swerving into arm-swaying “Hey Jude” territory. But rather than smoothe over the blunt quality of SOAK’s writing, Grim Town’s widescreen sound amplifies it. “Maybe it’s all in my brain/People don’t look at me the same,” she sings on “Knock Me Off My Feet,” elevating the song’s wistful, “In Between Days”-styled shimmer from retro window dressing into pure dancefloor escapism.
SOAK’s confidence can also be measured by her willingness to rip off the bandage and poke at her deepest wounds. In Grim Town’s more delicate turns, she homes in with microscopic clarity on details like the panic attacks that followed her parents’ divorce (“Fall Asleep, Backseat”) or the crippling, post-breakup bawling fits spent curled up on the bed, “pushing your face out to the fabric” (“Crying Your Eyes Out,” which, along with “Valentine Schmalentine,” is one of two songs here that depict the purchase of cheap supermarket flowers as the death knell for a floundering relationship). SOAK’s voice is at once an immediate and elusive instrument, variously recalling the outsized ardor of Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell, the peculiar interior dialogues of Lorde, and old-school Dylanesque grit. She takes particular delight in heightening the tension between medium and message: “Deja Vu” emerges from a synth-pop fog with an ominous opening line (“I haven’t seen you for months/I’ve been waiting up on a call/For a stranger’s voice to ask if I’m sitting down”) and only gets bleaker from there, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, thanks to its ebullient, sun-kissed chorus.
In light of its opening train-ride motif, Grim Town winds up being almost too faithful to the travel experience, in that the excitement you feel at the start of a trip inevitably gives way to a certain fatigue. The album’s back half settles into a predictable pattern of alternating between upbeat, 1980s-slicked indie pop and desolate, dark-night-of-the-soul piano ballads, without the surprise change-ups that animate Grim Town’s standout tracks. But with the waltzing closer “Nothing Looks the Same,” SOAK arrives at her desired destination, delivering not so much a grand finale as a sigh of relief. “I don’t wish I was somewhere else all the time,” she reveals, which is as close to a declaration of peace and happiness as she can likely muster. SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there. | 2019-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | April 19, 2019 | 7.3 | 56bbb2da-d833-4b4a-b0b8-ab0e8100746e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The cult artist's first new studio record since 1995's devastating Tilt was written and produced over a seven-year period, and, like its predecessor, its stories are taken from a varied, almost overstuffed horizon of literature, news stories, Walker's half-forgotten dreams, and otherwise poetic neuroses. | The cult artist's first new studio record since 1995's devastating Tilt was written and produced over a seven-year period, and, like its predecessor, its stories are taken from a varied, almost overstuffed horizon of literature, news stories, Walker's half-forgotten dreams, and otherwise poetic neuroses. | Scott Walker: The Drift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8764-the-drift/ | The Drift | Forty years into his recording career, Scott Walker is still making music that he wants to make; like all great artists, he's making music that only he can make-- and hoping (or not) that other people catch onto something, anything in the big, dark, dense vacuum of The Drift. Walker beats the noise-mongers in New York, the conservatory-schooled theater kids, the gallery poseurs, the reclusive art-pop geniuses, all the perennially stylish genre tourists, celebrity revolutionaries, and outmoded underground icons. He, despite little more than a cult status in his native (and long since abandoned) country, has emerged a visionary, maker of some of the most texturally complex, viscerally emotional, and downright horrific music this side of anyone at all.
But then, the composer of The Drift, Walker's first new studio record since 1995's devastating Tilt, didn't appear from out of nowhere. Rather, the Ohio-born artist (born Scott Noel Engel) staked a claim to the musical territory somewhere between orchestral pop and psychological soliloquy from his earliest solo records. After garnering major success in the UK as one-third of the pop act the Walker Brothers (none of whom were actually related, or born with the name Walker), Scott Walker left the group and released four LPs between 1967 to 1969 (Scott, 2, 3, and 4), each of which is held as a classic by diehard pop sophisticates. The earliest of these records were also successful in the UK, though as Walker's themes became weightier (influenced not only by Belgian singer/composer Jacques Brel, but the dark end of art-house cinema and literature), his audience slowly dwindled. Walker released a string of albums in the early 1970s that retreated drastically from the ambition of his first four before unexpectedly reuniting with the Walker Brothers for 1978's Nite Flights, and unveiling the first glimpses of the major musical artist we hear today.
Walker's Climate of Hunter from 1984 furthered his movement towards the abstract (albeit very gradually), though it wasn't until Tilt that his gift for radical songcraft and sound sculpting came to the fore. If his earliest solo music contained unusual themes for a pop artist, they did at least contain fairly conventional orchestrations and melodies. Tilt threw all that out in favor of a hybrid mixture of modern classical music, found sound, dissonant avant-rock, and hyper-personal vocal expression. It was a masterpiece, even as it alienated fans hoping for a return to comparatively calm waters.
The Drift is still further down an unbeaten path. Written and produced over a seven-year period, this record, like a painstakingly fine Ingmar Bergman film, moves slowly and deliberately, with an intense focus and refusal to turn away from disturbing "images." Like Tilt, its stories are taken from a varied, almost overstuffed horizon of literature, news stories, Walker's half-forgotten dreams, and otherwise poetic neuroses. Speaking visually, the music is mostly darker hues, though sudden flashes of blue light or explosive white beams punctuate an otherwise intimidating monolithic landscape. Walker describes working with "blocks of sound" as opposed to written arrangements, and the record betrays a broad, almost brawny movement, as if being slowly, persistently kicked in the gut by the characters (or characterizations) of the composer's songs.
Lyrically, The Drift (like its predecessor) practically invites volumes of analysis, especially after repeated listens-- but then, the best part about them is that they aren't usually explicit. "Cossacks Are", with pulled quotes like, "A moving aria for a vanishing style of mind" or "A nocturne filled with glorious ideas" could very well refer to Walker's own music, or even poke fun at his reviews. It's hard to say for sure, but impossible to resist looking for clues.
Throughout the album, textures change without a moment's notice: The solemn organ and drum pulse of "Clara" leads like a brick to the head into the wallop of sticks on animal flesh and churning, nauseating strings, only to shed its skin into muffled-scream violins, and back again. Walker sings about a body "dipped in blood in the moonlight/ Like what happen in America," and later describes a vision of the song's namesake ("Sometimes I feel like a swallow/ A swallow which by some mistake has gotten into an attic and knocks its head against the walls in terror"). The images fly by as they would in a nightmare, and the music is no less surreal or paranoid. "Cue" looks at the parasitic life of a virus, proceeding like a Stanley Kubrick movie, free of any particular morality or obligation to end happily, and full of exquisite imagery, as considered as it is obscene.
"Jesse" begins with the hum of jet engines and a mutilated take on Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock" guitar riff. Walker has described this as his "9/11 song," and uses the motif of Elvis and his stillborn twin brother to make a statement about American mythology and hubris-- and yes, that's pretentious, as is most of Walker's output for the last 30 years. It also reminds that "pretension" isn't always synonymous with "bullshit": Walker earns every one of his conceptual pretexts via the iron-fist dynamics of the songs, and his own deep, wet baritone, deepening the scope of every measure it inhabits. Sometimes, his words seem secondary, as on the explosive noise rock intro to "Hand Me Ups", which sounds akin to legendary experimental Japanese band Ground Zero (check the bass sax!), or the pounding, jittery middle section on "Psoriatic". Elsewhere, Walker's voice is held afloat and given center stage by the gentlest accompaniment, as on the subtly wry album closer, "A Lover Loves". If you don't think the guy has a sense of humor, check the "psst-psst-pssts" between every verse.
There will doubtlessly be many listeners who don't understand how anyone could listen to such relentlessly "bleak" music, but Walker is the kind of artist that exposes a lot of would-be art as background entertainment-- and like a great artist, he doesn't actually make a value judgment out of it; he merely goes on about his work, distancing himself from the fleshy pile of pastimes and people who would obscure the most ambitious functions of art. Walker inspires, scares, confuses, provokes-- not because he wants to manipulate you, but because he's an interesting person who's worked a long time trying to make interesting music. Even at its most dissonant and abstract, this record is human to the core, and if you're ready to face a few demons, it's as inspiring as music gets. | 2006-05-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-05-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 9, 2006 | 9 | 56c073e5-1784-4883-829a-3c55c5b3ce79 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The Reminder elevated Feist to something approaching a household name, but the follow-up doesn't pander to her much larger audience. Lacking a clear hit single, the album instead goes for a group of thematically linked songs that meditate on nature, love, and life itself. | The Reminder elevated Feist to something approaching a household name, but the follow-up doesn't pander to her much larger audience. Lacking a clear hit single, the album instead goes for a group of thematically linked songs that meditate on nature, love, and life itself. | Feist: Metals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15878-feist-metals/ | Metals | The headline of one of the best Hollywood gossip stories you're likely to encounter this year reads, "Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay Got in a Really Big Fight Over Feist." To prepare for an emotional scene in Transformers 3, LaBeouf plugged his iPad into a pair of on-set speakers and was vibing to The Reminder ballad "Brandy Alexander" when Bay abruptly shut the song off. Things got heated, "spit [was] flying," and Bay stormed off set. Whatever this incident tells us about Michael Bay (like maybe he's just really impassioned in his opinion that Let It Die was a better record), it tells us even more about where we're currently at, culturally speaking, with Feist. Even among Hollywood titans, she's divisive. She has probably, over the past couple of years, helped an infinite number of jocks and action stars get in touch with their latent emotions ("It's a little feminine," LaBeouf told the Los Angeles Times of "Brandy Alexander", "but it touches me"). But most importantly, the low croon of her honeyed, creaky-door voice has become pop culture shorthand for "the diametrical opposite of what robots blowing shit up sounds like."
And yet, her third album, Metals, is full of dynamic outbursts. There's the chorus of austere, male shouts that punctuates "A Commotion", the towering, climactic swell of strings in "Anti-Pioneer", and plenty more folk-pop numbers that begin small but explode suddenly into stomping, hollering, densely peopled jamborees. Building on some ideas she first explored in The Reminder's lively take on the folk traditional "Sealion", Metals is a record animated with, as she put it, "the movement of a lot of humans." Though her least immediate album-- it lacks The Reminder's pop showstoppers or the charm of Let It Die's restless genre-hopping-- Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself.
To record Metals, Feist-- along with her trusty producers Chilly Gonzales and Mocky (who've been working her since she was Peaches' hypegirl back in early-2000s Toronto)-- headed out to Big Sur and built a studio on the side of a cliff. All the things you might associate with the area (majestic expanse, outdoorsiness, and Kerouac-sized spiritual interrogation) seep into Metals' sound, which conjures panoramic vistas with quiet ease. String and brass arrangements (the latter of which heavily feature avant-saxophonist Colin Stetson) are omnipresent but never overworked: check out the way they briefly balloon into the frame toward the middle of "Anti-Pioneer" and then gracefully recede a moment later. Metals is invested in subtle, textural detail and shifting dynamics; it sometimes stays so quiet that a whole flock of birds would feel compelled perch on it, and then in the next breath it does something surprising enough to send them scattering in a flurry.
Metals is the Meek's Cutoff of Feist records, both in the way it eschews the traditional rules of the crowd-pleasing blockbuster, and also because there's a lot of talk about pioneers and mountains. Nature imagery is everywhere: the serene meditation "The Circle Married the Line" escapes the busy squiggles of modern life ("I'll head out to horizon lines/ Get some clarity oceanside") by boiling down a sunset to its simplest geometric forms, while the gorgeous acoustic number "Cicadas and Gulls" takes flight: "The land and the sea/ Are distant from me/ I'm in the sky." Metals displays a shift in Feist's perspective as a songwriter; after The Reminder she's said she's now less interested in writing songs that could be read as intimate and personal but instead crafting lyrics that read almost like sparse proverbs. (She's likened some of the lines on Metals to "adages and morals that you find embroidered in junk shops.") The resulting tracks feel universal, and not unlike Bill Callahan's Apocalypse, in their attempts to use the contrast the elegance of the things around us with the weird, erratic ways of human beings.
And now to address the break-dancing, earbud-wearing, silhouetted elephant in the room: there's no "1234" on this record. In fact, though it's by no stretch a difficult album, Metals feels deliberately uninterested in courting pop audiences or crafting easy hooks, which is why it feels like such a refreshing and slyly badass statement of artistic integrity. At the same time, this is also the reason it doesn't reach The Reminder's heights. It's a bit too even-keeled to incorporate the sense of pastiche that made her earlier two records so exciting.
Side B's most exquisite highlight is "Anti-Pioneer", a song that Feist started working on 10 years ago but could never quite capture to her liking on tape. Here, she got it so right: An unhurried guitar lick and the bluesy gust of her vocals roll like tumbleweeds over a minimal soundscape as she sings about a woman who was used to moving but, "for a year," set down her roots and "was anti-pioneer." A touring musician since her teens, Feist has spent the past 15 years more or less on the road, so it's hard not to read these lines as autobiographical. But the chorus brings in the universiality, applying that sense of restlessness to a healthy creative process: "When the flag changes colours/ The language knows." It's a fitting statement about Metals, and Feist herself-- shifting between moments of repose and restless explorations of new frontiers. | 2011-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / Cherrytree | October 3, 2011 | 7.7 | 56c44972-8cd6-4c97-8dad-bf0c31194eb7 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The debut from Rich Brian has the fun, wit, and snark of a choice tweet but lacks the essential qualities of a solid well-made rap album. | The debut from Rich Brian has the fun, wit, and snark of a choice tweet but lacks the essential qualities of a solid well-made rap album. | Rich Brian: Amen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rich-brian-amen/ | Amen | Brian Imanuel learned to be an entertainer online. Of Chinese descent but raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, Imanuel joined Twitter at 11 and started posting oddball, almost absurdist Vines that verged on black comedy. He learned English scanning random videos on YouTube and broadened his vocabulary watching Judd Apatow movies. He was intrigued by rap after seeing a Tyga video on TV, and, at 12, first tried his hand at rapping, over Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” As Rich Chigga—a portmanteau of “Chinese” and “nigga”—he flipped a life online into a rap persona on his breakout song “Dat $tick,” saying things like, “I’ma hit you with that .45/Bullet hit yo neck round the bow tie,” while brandishing guns and wearing a fanny pack in the video. But where viewers were open to his sickly clever use of satire on social media, they were less forgiving of the epithet in his name, his flagrant gunman posing, and his blatant use of the n-word. At the top of the year, he shed his problematic alternate skin, rebranding as Rich Brian.
On some level, the appeal of “Dat $tick” was all spectacle. The caricature Imanuel created—taking Asian and black stereotypes and turning them on their heads for a cultural mash-up—was a transfixing, if not controversial, show. It’s part of why his label, 88rising, commissioned a reaction video of other rappers gawking at the song’s visual, finding power in their glee and bemusement. That’s also why some listeners have taken offense, citing his cartoonish portrayal of black culture as thoughtless, causing the uproar that led to the name change.
Brian says now he “regrets” going by Chigga, telling The New Yorker: “I want to write from my own experience.” On his first full-length project, Amen, Rich Brian makes amends by simply being himself, playing up his bizarre origin story. He is still improving as an artist, but he is extremely limited in what he can do at this stage. Not only is the project largely basic in its writing, it doesn’t sound like he’s having any fun whatsoever. It seems like he’s still playacting a rapper on Vine, and many of his songs would benefit from that medium’s brevity; they go on just long enough to expose themselves as replicas.
Brian promised that Amen would abandon the trap posturing, and there are several songs on the project that do try to answer who exactly he wants to be. Some songs consider his rise from internet it-boy to full-fledged rapper, while others involve the toll even moderate fame can take on an introverted, lifelong outcast. But in diverting from his former trap ways he overcorrects, listing off the Snapple facts of his life. On “Arizona,” he raps, “I just talk and they call me a lyricist,” an unwitting self-critique.
Amen borders on autobiographical, and Brian produced or co-produced every song on the project. Some beats are very “listens to Mike WiLL Made-It once,” but then there are details that surprise, like the xylophonic synth plinks on “Occupied” and the oboe whine of “Trespass.” His deadpan, sometimes half-murmured flows chug along between minimalist synth arrangements, rattling off various common occurrences, sometimes as if simply reading back the minutes of his day. Brian is a decent rapper, technically speaking, though he can go long stretches without actually rhyming anything. He could become a good beat maker, but his current strength lies in his wit and the ability to translate his online lifestyle into workable rap boasts.
Brian is most perceptive when he examines his proximity to the internet. There are bars about converting his money to Bitcoin and observing America through a digital lens from Indonesia. He raps a lot about taking Lyfts and staying in Airbnbs. When imitating an overly enthusiastic fan who claims to know him, the character’s tenuous connection to the rapper is that he Postmated him once. “Pressin’ on keys, got my life so sweet man/GoFundMe on your bitch’s pinned tweet man,” he adds on “Cold.” This is who Brian is, really: a web-savvy gag rapper who folds in the snarkiness of a choice tweet. But while he understands how rap songs are supposed to sound, he doesn’t yet know how they actually work, or what exactly they’re supposed to do.
When Rich Brian isn’t just trying to condense his Vine act into one-liners, he’s using pretty cringe-worthy storytelling mechanics. “Flight” documents his first trip stateside without nuance; it’s almost touristy in its snapshots building to his first session in America with Pharrell (who he identifies as “this dude made ‘Happy.’”) And “Kitty” is a convoluted story about a girl’s mom busting in as he loses his virginity just before a friend helps him escape, only to then find out the girl was his friend’s sister. (The logistics of the story don’t really make sense on the song, either.) His narration of the encounter is as painful and clumsy as the events therein. It’s hard to determine if the whole thing is a joke or not, which is telling.
That isn’t to suggest songs on Amen are unlistenable; most work on at least a surface level, and several jam. The Kid Cudi-indebted “See Me,” in particular, is an example of what Brian can be at his nicest. But there is very little happening within his verses right now, and even as he’s pivoted toward the personal, he’s still doing impressions, sonically and stylistically. “Man, let’s face it, they don’t really listen to the music/They just want to take a trend and then go use it,” he raps on “Arizona,” either completely without self-awareness or fully committed to self-parody. That bemused and baffling feeling remains Rich Brian’s best and worst trait. | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire / 88rising | February 6, 2018 | 5.9 | 56c75def-05e5-418e-bb38-bc28ee5805f6 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On the band’s fifth album, singer-songwriter Channy Leaneagh grapples empathetically with the daily life after a terrible accident, but the band behind her can’t keep up. | On the band’s fifth album, singer-songwriter Channy Leaneagh grapples empathetically with the daily life after a terrible accident, but the band behind her can’t keep up. | Poliça: When We Stay Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/polica-when-we-stay-alive/ | When We Stay Alive | In the winter of 2018, Poliça singer Channy Leaneagh was clearing ice off her roof when she slipped and fell 10 feet to the ground. The landing broke a vertebra, damaged her spine, and left her unable to walk. What at first seemed like a curse—being stuck in a brace prevented her from working or taking care of her children—quickly became an opportunity, giving Leaneagh time to sit with her thoughts and confront traumas old and new.
Poliça’s fifth album, When We Stay Alive, features some of the most piercing lyrics of Leaneagh’s career, half of which were written after the accident. But the rest of the Minneapolis electro-pop group doesn’t sound emotionally invested in their performance. As a result, the album is less a humanistic look at what it’s like to be given a second chance at life than it is an example of what happens when your bandmates leave you hanging.
Filled with a renewed appreciation for life, Leaneagh found herself writing songs about her daily lived experience—the chase for stability in parenting, her experience protesting pollution in her neighborhood—which draw empathy from small details rather than grand gestures. She sounds newly raw when wrestling with her post-injury demons, as on the glossy “Feel Life.” “Screaming at death/‘Why won’t you stick?’/To feel I’ve failed, and I felt it,” she sings gracefully, despite the audible fear lingering on her tongue. Her voice alternates between soothing coos and a downtrodden lilt as if she’s breaking bad news gently, a singer finding her form in undesirable circumstances.
But the rest of the band—producer Ryan Olson, bassist Chris Bierdenand, and drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson—can’t keep up with Leaneagh. They dial the production in to the point of sterile perfection, sounding occasionally like a pre-loaded backing track, divorced from the meaning of Leaneagh’s words. The percussion is hollow, and the synths are like afterthoughts; on songs like “Be Again” and “Steady,” unexpected samples pierce the atmosphere like the blade of a pocketknife accidentally swinging open, distracting and damaging instead of flashy or fun. Poliça’s members recorded the parts of When We Stay Alive separately, exchanging files over the internet, and the isolation of that process is discernible.
The band also invited a cast of dance and hip-hop producer pals to tinker with the tracks as they saw fit, which may have exacerbated the emotionless feel of the instrumentation. Poliça intended for this to be a form of musical collaging: a little cello here, some extra keys there. But the end results resemble a boardroom’s out-of-touch predictions for what cool music sounds like right now.
For a band that found fame with live shows verging on jam sessions, Poliça strangely embrace the opposite now: impassiveness, rigidity, disconnectedness. When We Stay Alive finds a certain stride when it emphasizes that mechanical tendency. “Fold Up,” moored by electronic drums and croaking synths, flourishes by upping the tempo, veering toward the pleasantly mysterious territory of Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. A few other tracks start off similarly strong, like the sweeping “Sea Without Blue” and the aptly titled “Driving,” but eventually lose steam, leaving Leaneagh adrift in tepid beats. For a record born from a second chance at life, When We Stay Alive sounds disenchanted with its own message.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | February 4, 2020 | 5.2 | 56c98bd3-7450-45c0-aae3-1113f863c038 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
From its muted-color harmonies to its overly padded beats, much of Caroline Sallee’s witty and beautiful second album sounds like it’s trying to hide in plain sight | From its muted-color harmonies to its overly padded beats, much of Caroline Sallee’s witty and beautiful second album sounds like it’s trying to hide in plain sight | Caroline Says: No Fool Like an Old Fool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-says-no-fool-like-an-old-fool/ | No Fool Like an Old Fool | A friend recently admitted that she hadn’t listened to Caroline Says because the Austin band is named after a Lou Reed song (itself a sequel to a Velvet Underground song). My friend likes Berlin plenty, it’s more about the reference being too on the nose, too eager to broadcast a sensibility before the listener has heard a note. You can’t really blame a band to for sticking its foot in the door before you slam it shut by skipping to the next YouTube video or whatever, but Caroline Says’ sophomore album is anything but pushy. It’s almost funny how much the introspective whisperings of the project’s sole songwriter, performer, and producer, Caroline Sallee, do not sound like one of Reed’s most tragic songs. But No Fool Like an Old Fool does recall a number of other bands and borrow a few song titles. Reference points, it seems, are kind of Sallee’s thing.
The story on Sallee is that she moved from her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to Austin in 2013 to pursue a career in film and the following year put out a tape inspired by her interim travels out West. Titled 50,000,000 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong (after the King’s 1959 compilation), the record of gorgeous surf-pop and psych-folk songs was reissued last year as a prelude to No Fool Like an Old Fool. Sallee made the album as she was settling in Austin and gaining perspective on her hometown, all of which casts a dreamy, dreary feeling on the record. Informed by her new surroundings (a basement apartment where she could hear her crazy landlords’ every move), Sallee recorded the guitar, drum machine, and various other parts during the day and murmured the vocals at night. From its muted-color harmonies to its overly padded beats, much of the album sounds like it’s trying to hide in plain sight.
Even when Sallee fills her quiet rooms with troubled characters, she evokes overwhelming beauty and understated humor. In one of the record’s darkest moments, “A Good Thief Steals Clean,” Sallee coos in ominous reference to a love affair with a heroin addict (inspired by the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park), but her sentiment of half-knowing someone you thought you loved rings true well beyond the admittedly Reedian scenario she hints at. Over a drowsy drum-machine drone, she ends with this ironic but poignant metaphor: “But a person can love a song without knowing all the words/Some people even think words don’t matter much at all.” Perhaps the references strewn throughout No Fool Like an Old Fool are borrowed wisdom, but the crucial knowing wink is all Sallee’s. This is an album that sounds familiar but feels new in its specific way of manifesting dread.
That seems to be the case on the album’s first single, “Sweet Home Alabama,” a swirling, soulful, ’60s-ish homage to realizing you have to leave your hometown. Even as the song twinkles with its looping riffs and gauzy la-la-las, Sallee plods along in her sad little town until she realizes there’s nothing left for her. Like the other standouts on No Fool Like an Old Fool, the sad-happy juxtaposition on “Sweet Home Alabama” is perfectly balanced. Sallee does not wallow in overwhelming uncertainty, but it is something you can drop in on by listening more closely to the cloudy passages in otherwise sunny songs. With its conjuring of Parisian sidewalk cafes, “I Tried” hides someone falling apart just under the surface of its eternal breeziness, pausing the pop jangle just long enough to show a patch of grey.
Occasionally the songs feel a little less her own, recalling the sedated swoon of Real Estate (“Mea Culpa”), the cinematic folk of Grizzly Bear (“First Song”), or the updated surf-pop of the Drums (“Cool Jerk”). Initially off balance, the latter gives way to a less jittery interlude of dejected chanting that suggests how Sallee really feels. The way she’s able to inject these quietly pretty, happy styles of music with an underlying weariness and a clever touch is what makes No Fool Like an Old Fool stand out among the many musicians currently borrowing similar sets of sounds. Caroline Sallee isn’t any band’s mirror—she’s too busy reflecting herself, in case you didn’t know. | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Western Vinyl | March 21, 2018 | 7.5 | 56ca78c3-aef5-4637-bfaf-3bd2c1fb26e1 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
Accolades be damned, the UK star blasts a music industry that has left her feeling drained, adding her voice to a chorus of Black British artists pushing back against the status quo. | Accolades be damned, the UK star blasts a music industry that has left her feeling drained, adding her voice to a chorus of Black British artists pushing back against the status quo. | Little Simz: NO THANK YOU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-simz-no-thank-you/ | NO THANK YOU | Little Simz did everything she was supposed to. She worked hard, minded her own business, built a fanbase on a string of acclaimed releases. When the time came, she lasered in and made a bold, thematic album with a clear arc—a shoo-in for the coveted Mercury Prize, which she picked up in October. There were other honors too. She smiled and said “Thank you” when she was handed the prize for Best New Artist at February’s BRIT Awards, despite being 12 years and four studio albums into a well-documented career. She showed up to the cover shoots, wore designers on the red carpet, nattered at the afterparty. She clung to independence, and exalted its values, even as her distributor AWAL—an initialism of Artists Without a Label—sold out to Sony Music for a cool $430 million. She shouldered the pain of cancelling U.S. shows after the numbers didn’t add up. But now, she’s had enough. On NO THANK YOU she stashes the fanfare and goes back to rap basics, blasting the industry that will claim to have made her but in reality has left her drained. In doing so, she adds her voice to a chorus of Black British artists whose calls for reparations are only getting louder.
When Saul Williams laid out his blistering “List of Demands” back in 2004, there was pent-up rage in the chugging beat and his exasperated delivery. Simz channels the same anger, but her tack is different. From the patter of drums and looping coos that open the album on “Angel,” you’d be forgiven for expecting lullabies or love songs; but with her aim trained on the suits, Simz is unsparing: “They don’t care if your mental is on the brink of something dark/As long as you’re cutting somebody’s payslip/And sending their kids to private school in a spaceship,” she raps in a tight volley, before asking, “Did I stutter?” In seeing how far fame and its accordant trappings can drag art from its purpose, she appears to have found an answer to the question that dominated the Mercury-crowned Sometimes I Might Be Introvert: “Simz the artist or Simbi the person?” Turns out there was never any need to split the difference—and so she lets rip. “You don’t even recognize who it is that you’re becoming/They don’t give a shit, long as the gravy train running,” she spits, coolly, on “Heart on Fire,” her disillusionment distilled into the image of industry parties where the music can’t be heard over the din of people talking shop.
Childhood friend and longtime collaborator Inflo is at the helm across all 10 tracks. His deft touches were threaded through Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and 2019’s GREY Area, and he had a brush with the spotlight’s glare when he was tapped to work on Adele’s 30, but he’s generated the most intrigue for his work at the center of the mellifluous—and mysterious—musical collective SAULT, who have captivated an increasingly cultish audience with their run of rangy R&B albums and apparent willingness to discard industry playbooks (dropping five free, password-protected LPs with no more fanfare than a tweet being just the latest example). Often, NO THANK YOU sounds like a SAULT record fronted by Simz—see the gospel swells on “Broken,” or the slick, cool-as-fuck, plucked-bass bop of “Gorilla”—not only because of the palette of satin strings and funky drums, but because of the charming confidence and faith in collaboration that seep through, as they do on all of SAULT’s transformative records. There’s a lightness to Simz’ tender explorations of Black fatherhood, the failure of her community to help those struggling with mental crises, and the slippery loss of solidarity across economic divides on “Broken.” Sometimes the production’s soft edges can belie the bite of the words, but overall it’s a pairing that brims with possibility.
NO THANK YOU isn’t the first time Simz has channeled pain or frustration through her pen. In 2019, she described the writing process for GREY Area as like attending therapy—but without going “to sit on someone else’s sofa and dish out my issues to a stranger so they could charge me by the minute.” The killing of her friend Harry Uzoka—stabbed to death in 2018—hung as an unsettling shroud over that album. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’s potency was pricked with self-doubt. Here, Harry is the opener’s titular angel “listening from heaven on repeat” as Simz discovers clarity, along with the power of saying “no.” By the end, she sounds exhausted. But she’s no less steeled against her situation—the lines more clearly drawn, she doesn’t stutter. Fuck the spaceship school runs. | 2022-12-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Forever Living Originals / AWAL | December 19, 2022 | 7.7 | 56cbfb0f-8ce0-49f9-b024-7d106c47ee6e | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Descended from Yorkshire’s lineage of extreme computer music, the UK producer’s astonishing second album fuses jungle, singeli, acid, dancehall, and more into audacious yet danceable hybrids. | Descended from Yorkshire’s lineage of extreme computer music, the UK producer’s astonishing second album fuses jungle, singeli, acid, dancehall, and more into audacious yet danceable hybrids. | Rian Treanor: File Under UK Metaplasm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rian-treanor-file-under-uk-metaplasm/ | File Under UK Metaplasm | In 1962, an American ad man named Martin Speckter proposed a new punctuation mark. The sublimely named “interrobang” combined question and exclamation into a single expression of quizzical incredulity: “What are those‽‽‽” This space-age innovation sadly didn’t catch on, but the spirit of the interrobang is close at hand. If you’ve ever found yourself laughing out loud in the middle of an especially audacious guitar solo, or shaking your head at the brazen WTF‽-ness of a track being mixed into a DJ set, then you’ve felt it move through you. Rotherham, England’s Rian Treanor knows how to punctuate his hyper-rave tracks with such bold-faced moments, and his second album strings dozens of them together into an astonishing suite of interrobangers.
Treanor’s signature is readily apparent in all the music he has released since his first EP in 2015: pointillist impressions of the rave continuum wrought from maddening modulations, airless spaces, and nano-shards of footwork, garage, and bleep techno. Danceable yet distinctly academic, his output resembles the contemporary hypno-worlds of Don’t DJ or Barker, as well as a grand lineage of extreme computer music led by fellow Northerners like Autechre and Mark Fell (who happens to be Treanor’s dad). Over time this sound has warmed up a bit, shedding its technical outerwear and moseying towards the center of the dancefloor. On 2018’s RAVEDITS, Treanor fired Whigfield’s ’90s Eurodance smash “Saturday Night” through a splatter gun to hilarious and bruising effect; last year’s debut album, Ataxia, featuring a clutch of stuttering vocal edits, took its name from a condition that leads to uncontrolled bodily movements.
Shortly after the release of RAVEDITS, Treanor traveled to Uganda to play at Nyege Nyege Festival, an offshoot of Kampala-based label Nyege Nyege Tapes. In its four years in operation, this small imprint has had an outsized effect on dancefloors at home and abroad, and the trip was by all accounts revelatory for Treanor. After the festival he spent a few weeks in the Nyege Nyege studio in Kampala, further attuning himself to the speedy vernacular of East African singeli. That influence is unignorable on the opening track of File Under UK Metaplasm, “Hypnic Jerks”—the first of many moments that come stamped with a huge, inky interrobang. What, and indeed, the fuck: A track that starts at 180BPM and still sees fit to accelerate the rubbery kicks into a quadruple-time assault? The recollections of a rappelling window cleaner forced into battle with a swarm of mbira-playing drones? A washing machine filled with rubble and Lego about to combust on its final spin? Words, words, words; the feeling would be more succinctly expressed with a single, unequivocal glyph.
After passing through the molecule-separating centrifuge of “Hypnic Jerks,” the album takes many forms: tough-nut acid footwork on “Metrogazer”; strange dancehall on “Opponent Process,” his sputtering tribute to Equiknoxx; breathless grime’n’breaks on “Debouncing”; and an expedition into an abandoned power station on “Closed Curve.” Treanor’s gyroscopic pattern modulations generate curious conversational phrases, like birds mimicking robots mimicking humans. Surfaces are squeaky, atmospheres arid. The melodic and textural elements resemble the lab-coated curiosity of studio wonks like Errorsmith, Beatrice Dillon, or Gábor Lázár, whose recent albums float upward like helium airships. Underfoot, meanwhile, lurk jackhammer kicks, ricocheting percussion, and sub-bass pulsations—movements from the mind of a DJ, closely aligned with recent gabber revivalism and the binding branches of footwork and jungle. In the spirit of the interrobang, there are laugh-out-loud moments too: On “Vacuum Angle” he twists old-school hoovers into the whoosssht of a CDJ spinback, a time-travelling rave vortex that’s further confused by tabla hits and what sounds like the buzzer from oldies TV game show Catchphrase. Not pulling a screwface to this would be like scoffing a doughnut without licking your lips.
Treanor’s intention is to push “functional” music to the edge, “using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up,” he has said. “I’m really interested in how far you push that before it's just like—no.” In his somatic understanding, the body is the locus of the listening act: functionally calibrated for dancing, but ready to be rendered jelly-limbed by the music’s dysfunction. He nails this on “Metaplasm,” the album’s outrageous apotheosis, a just-about-danceable maelstrom of riddim, bass, and toxic squarewaves that leaves no joint unsprained. File Under UK Metaplasm is the grand synthesis of a long investigation, a record that sounds unmistakably contemporary and, it’s not unreasonable to suggest, immediately classic. | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | October 6, 2020 | 8 | 56cfbcfb-9b25-4111-8158-0a5fb2a53618 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
On a charming new solo album, the HTRK vocalist writes lighthearted folk music about loss and longing. | On a charming new solo album, the HTRK vocalist writes lighthearted folk music about loss and longing. | Jonnine: Maritz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonnine-maritz/ | Maritz | The trajectory of HTRK’s music was irrevocably altered by the death of bassist Sean Stewart after the group’s first album. Each subsequent release was a step in the grieving process, as vocalist Jonnine Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang chose to leave gaps in their recordings where Stewart’s low end should be. When Standish finally picked up the bass, she lit a candle and called upon his spirit to ask permission. On her new solo album, Maritz, she performs a similar spiritual reunion with her late mother, who passed away when Standish was only 21. The album is titled after her mother’s maiden name, which she calls “the most haunted word I know.” Maritz is less a eulogy for Standish’s mother than a voicemail message to her, a brief and playful one-sided conversation that nonetheless communicates loss and longing.
With eight songs in only 18 minutes, Maritz sounds like Standish snuck into a haunted house with a four-track and quickly made do with what she found there. Her arrangements feature a broken metronome, a plastic recorder, and a scavenged glockenspiel, and she is frequently interrupted by birds squawking, dogs barking, and sirens blaring. Despite the album’s tragic theme, this ad hoc approach lends the music a lighthearted air. Opener “I Put a Little Thing in Your Pocket” assures us, “There is no such thing as being haunted/Those of us who walk the earth are not cursed.” Instead, Standish confronts death with liveliness, using comedy to combat tragedy. On “Tea for Two (Boo),” two ghosts named Joe and Stephanie have tea in a graveyard: “Don’t interrupt them,” she warns, “or they might interrupt… Boo!”
While HTRK’s 2021 album Rhinestones stripped their songs bare by trading in layers of fuzz for sparkling acoustic guitar, Maritz leaves only skeletons. Like Devendra Banhart’s Oh Me Oh My…, the album sounds like a demo that has been sitting in a cobwebbed attic. “There is something quite generous about sharing an idea before it is overthought,” Standish explained in an interview. “Here’s where I’m at with this idea, how about you take it over?” At times, she invites us to participate directly: “I Put a Little Thing in Your Pocket” is one fragment of a perfect pop song that can be completed simply by pressing repeat. As with the best folk music, other songs share universal sentiments through melodies simple enough to be sung by anyone. On “Portrait,” Standish croons, “I don’t know, can you sing the song back to me?/In the hope that you’ll hear my prayer/Before you know it you can hear the words everywhere,” an open invitation to take the song and make it your own.
At times, the colder, more detached pose of early HTRK clashes with the charming tone of Standish’s new material. On “There’s Nothing There” and “Blissfully Unaware (of You),” Standish adds reverb and echo to her vocals, as if she isn’t quite convinced yet that she’s making a folk record. As a whole, though, Maritz is a beguiling release, with memorable songs stretched across it like trinkets in a charm bracelet. You’ll want to carry it around with you: a keepsake that you can fit in your pocket. | 2023-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Idle Press | February 16, 2023 | 7.3 | 56d15961-095e-4d86-89a4-8af1698e5080 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Chelsea Wolfe plays folk music but counts plenty of metalheads among her fans. Abyss, her heaviest (and best) collection to date, was produced by John Congleton. Featuring more musicians and a deep, distorted doom guitar, the record is expansive and teeming, adding an anthemic dimension that you won't find in her other work. | Chelsea Wolfe plays folk music but counts plenty of metalheads among her fans. Abyss, her heaviest (and best) collection to date, was produced by John Congleton. Featuring more musicians and a deep, distorted doom guitar, the record is expansive and teeming, adding an anthemic dimension that you won't find in her other work. | Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20866-abyss/ | Abyss | When people talk about Chelsea Wolfe, they'll often mention that the Los Angeles musician covered the controversial Norwegian black metal artist Burzum's "Black Spell of Destruction" a few years ago, and that though she plays folk music she counts plenty of metalheads among her fans, including Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley, who regularly retweets her "Grow old and let your hair grow" adage. That line, about sticking to your given path as a lifer, shows up on Wolfe's fifth full-length, Abyss, during the smeary, intense late-album standout "Color of Blood", and it's a fitting sentiment for her heaviest (and best) collection to date.
Wolfe has incorporated metallic elements into her music since the beginning—especially on 2013's Pain Is Beauty—but she's never really gone full-on metal. And, honestly, she still hasn't, but on Abyss she comes closer than ever, externalizing those tendencies. She's thrown in moments of distortion, animal-like growling, or hiss on her other records, but it could come off like an affectation or add-on; here, it's built into, and integral to, the music, which frequently booms with distorted doom-metal guitar.
Recorded in Dallas by John Congleton, Abyss features Wolfe's longtime collaborator, multi-instrumentalist and co-writer Ben Chisholm, plus regular drummer Dylan Fujioka and viola player Ezra Buchla. The real difference is Mike Sullivan, guitarist for mostly instrumental Chicago post-rock band, Russian Circles. Wolfe sang on the sole vocal track on Russian Circles' excellent 2013 album, Memorial; he returns the favor here, adding an anthemic dimension to a handful of the tracks that you won't find in her other work. Overall, this is the first time you feel like the music consistently lives up to the power of her voice.
The other big difference: She previously produced her albums with Chisholm, and they've done a fine job, but Congleton makes everything sound so much bigger. The production is ambitious—in the past, it could sometimes come off as a bit ill-fitting or unnatural. On Abyss, the sound is fully realized, her voice always at home. Congleton is a prolific producer, who's worked with the likes of Swans, Angel Olsen, Explosions in the Sky, and St. Vincent. If you focus on that small sampling, you'll have an idea of what Wolfe sounds like on here: The songs don't wait around, or take time to build—they are immediately full on, and never stop raging. Wolfe's early work felt solitary, like it was made, and meant to be listened to, alone. The music here is expansive, and teeming, and you can easily imagine it on a large stage, with a crowd singing along.
The songs are long and dynamic, pushing their boundaries to the limit while maintaining spaciousness. "Survive", which opens with a bluesier feel, sprouts Swans-like tribal drums, ghostly and vicious feedback, a super-heavy Mudhoney bass, and a forceful bit of noise that comes off like a football stadium full of cheering zombies. The gorgeous "Iron Moon" was inspired by a Chinese factory worker, and poet, who killed himself because of the monotony of his daily grind and a failed relationship: It explodes in a way that didn't seem possible for Wolfe previously. "Dragged Out", a proper doom track that comes off like a more interesting Windhand, folds in noise, a tolling bell, haunted ghost howls and squeals.
She's said these songs were inspired by sleep paralysis, something she's dealt with her entire life. It's a condition where you want to wake up but can't, and when you finally do, you can't move, and there are a number of lyrics about the different sides of sleep ("In sleep there is no sorrow," "When I dream it steals my wonder," "I’ve been waiting/ In this silence/ While you’re sleeping") and being unable to escape from it ("I’m screaming/ But I can’t wake up," "Set me free from my slumber," "Chasing the sun/ I can’t wake up"). Abyss is night music. As Wolfe put it, "Abyss is meant to have the feeling of when you’re dreaming, and you briefly wake up, but then fall back asleep into the same dream, diving quickly into your own subconscious."
The previously mentioned "Color of Blood" is not that far off from early Zola Jesus, and it's interesting to see that, where Nika Roza Danilova has downplayed her goth tendencies on her more recent, big-pop albums, Wolfe has found a way to remain backed by candelabra and decked in minimalist corpse paint and still locate pop melody alongside the bombast. The sultry ballad "Simple Death" is dark, but it's also gorgeous and catchy: Wolfe is not simply going heavier for heavier's sake, she's mastering her craft, writing songs that you remember immediately, and that you'll find yourself humming now and then. The bigger sound is what the source material, her sleep/dream issues, needed. Which brings to mind that line about letting your hair grow as you get old, of not changing your course. We're all frail and imperfect, and that's fine. But instead of inventing a persona or finding an easier way, Wolfe went deep into herself, doubled down on the horrors of life, and came back with a bleak, beautiful masterpiece—she kept going, especially when it started to hurt. | 2015-08-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | August 7, 2015 | 8.1 | 56d51294-569a-415c-a5d7-8962b4c02490 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Though often plodding and generic, the R&B singer’s third studio album contains vivid flashes of her best songwriting. | Though often plodding and generic, the R&B singer’s third studio album contains vivid flashes of her best songwriting. | Mariah the Scientist: To Be Eaten Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mariah-the-scientist-to-be-eaten-alive/ | To Be Eaten Alive | Here’s a tweet that recently made me laugh: “You think you know your friends then boom you see them posting Mariah the Scientist lyrics on their Instagram story.” It’s a reference to the 26-year-old R&B singer’s famously raw and diaristic lyrics, which, at their worst, tip into the maudlin—the stuff of high-school journals and Tumblr art. Still, when Mariah’s writing does work, as on 2019’s Master and 2021’s Ry Ry World, her poetic vulnerability stuns. “I use my telescope at night, it won’t be for stars/Instead I hope that I can love you from afar,” she sings, resigned to her solitude on Ry Ry World standout “RIP.” Mariah might not have the disaffected tragedy of Summer Walker or the gut-punch neuroses of SZA, but she still knows how to pick apart the remains of a failed relationship with scavenger-like precision.
To Be Eaten Alive, Mariah’s third studio album, ditches the well-drawn, sometimes-treacly origin stories of her first two full-lengths. In their place is a collection of disappointingly aimless and often impersonal takes on distant love. Mariah has been in a highly publicized relationship with Young Thug since around 2021, and the strain of maintaining their bond during Thug’s incarceration could, in theory, make for compelling songwriting material, more so than simply being scorned. Instead, she sounds bored and uninspired, too exhausted by her circumstances to jolt herself awake.
The beats are often the problem here; Ry Ry World blended everything from melancholy trap and muted boom bap to moody Justin Timberlake and Beach House samples. That inventive approach balanced the pitchiness of Mariah’s voice and her limited vocal range, both of which work in her favor when she’s recalling disastrous fights in a deadpan tone. Unfortunately, when she scream-belts her heart out, those qualities are more like liabilities. Save for a few surprising collaborations, including the out-of-place but refreshing Kaytranada-produced “Out of Luck,” the beats on To Be Eaten Alive are mostly plodding and bland, making the album’s 27-minute runtime feel twice as long as it actually is. dvsn’s Nineteen85, a previous Drake collaborator, helms three of the songs here; his mud-thick BPMs and drums drag Mariah down with them, practically damning the songs before they take off. It’s a shame that any of these tracks could appear as a sleepy “Mariah’s Interlude” on a hypothetical Aubrey Graham album.
The listless “40 Days n 40 Nights” and “Good Times” waste flashes of vivid songwriting (“I’ll put a hundred miles on the AMG tonight/And take it anywhere but home,” she sings on the former). Equally sunk are “From a Woman” and “Lovesick,” where Mariah unleashes strained choruses that somehow disappear into the ether; she sounds more like she’s complaining than pleading. When she does find an instrumental with some life behind it, more similar to those on Ry Ry World, she finally sounds awake. The thumping, WondaGurl-produced “Bout Mine” is the Mariah the Scientist sweet spot: a trap-R&B hybrid offset by swaggering, too-cool vocals. It’s also one of the only song titles you’ll remember from the album, even after repeated listens.
When Mariah confronts the excruciating circumstances she and Thug find themselves in, her best songwriting emerges. “I think of your kids, your mother/Then I have to commend my lover/When I think of how it must feel to be you,” she sings on “Lovesick.” She mourns shared dreams of “painting the crib blue” on opener “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” later alluding to the times they “had to keep sticks and illegal tints on all these cars.” It’s heartbreaking all around, a glimpse of the catharsis a more focused album could’ve provided.
Thug himself shows up on album closer “Ride,” the couple’s second collaboration after Ry Ry World’s excellent “Walked In.” Their chemistry remains through the roof. What a joy it is to hear Thug, in full Beautiful Thugger Girls mode, professing his love with his characteristic whine and humor: “I drip love, do you need an IV?” Thug’s chorus is an adoring, slightly overliteral testament to loyalty, but it’s still more enjoyable than the majority of To Be Eaten Alive. Mariah, for her part, returns to the cheeky flirtation she showed on “Walked In,” this time musing that she might change her last name to match her partner’s. It’s bittersweet given the stakes of Thug’s high-profile RICO trial, but as a tragic fantasy, it serves up more feeling than anything else on the album. That’s an unfortunate reality check for a talented young singer who, for the first time, can’t sing her way—or anyone else’s—out of heartbreak. | 2023-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | November 28, 2023 | 6.3 | 56d5c1e7-fa2d-45e5-8d3c-bbcb37419dd6 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
As Fire-Toolz, the Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid creates an abrasive sonic world: Mundane internet ephemera swirls around in a boiling industrial centrifuge, powered by her fearsome growl. | As Fire-Toolz, the Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid creates an abrasive sonic world: Mundane internet ephemera swirls around in a boiling industrial centrifuge, powered by her fearsome growl. | Fire-Toolz: Drip Mental | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22897-drip-mental/ | Drip Mental | Shortly before the turn of the century, the Chicago-based experimentalist Angel Marcloid began self-releasing electronic noise music under nearly two dozen names: WEBSITE ツ, Path to Lobster Believers, and DJ Eyebrow Ring are but a few of the guises. Her first album as Fire-Toolz, Further Down the Files, arrived in 2015, followed by Even the Files Won’t Tough You. The Fire-Toolz project is akin to a postmodern bildungsroman, transcending aesthetics, scenes, and genders. Marcloid came out as transgender during the gestation of the latter release, thereby assuming a new pedestal. “It was like the trans-community handed me a mic and they all were standing there, staring at me blankly, waiting for me to say some angry shit,” she told Life Is Noise last summer: “It did provide a new perspective... But I also felt like I had nothing to say, even though I was (and am) a girl.”
Certainly, Marcloid doesn’t say much on Fire-Toolz’s third album and Hausu Mountain debut, Drip Mental. Instead, she screams—unleashing yell after sandpapery, cord-shredding yell, reducing words to rubble and pushing the listener’s focus outwards into the surrounding digital din. Call it vaporwave hell: an intimidating world where mundane internet ephemera (AIM message sounds, cat purrs, library music samples) swirls around in a boiling industrial centrifuge. Marcloid’s soundscapes are powered by IBM drum machines, cyberpunk synths, and the odd, brittle hip-hop beat. Throughout, her fearsome growl sounds straight from the throat of a black-metal banshee, alternated every so often with a disorienting, pitch-shifted rasp.
On “The Graying of the Crocs,” euro-dance synths and leaden drum machines stab with reckless abandon, rendered all the more dizzying by Marcloid’s mechanized warbling. This Auto-Tuned nightmare doubles as a facsimile for the record’s nostalgic mission writ large: aural salves repurposed as toxins. Intermittently, the artist blesses us with an opportunity to nod our heads (“Libra Virgo Cusp Shit,” “At the Pig Well”), but for every direct connection Marcloid forges with her audience, there is plenty of ugliness and abrasion. In terms of spectacular self-sabotage, it’s on a level with the MTV reality starlet Farrah Abraham’s 2012 album My Teenage Dream Ended, a similarly frankensteined pop record; the only difference is that Marcloid’s self-immolation is intentional, and far more engrossing.
No matter how massive her sound, Marcloid is ultimately a deconstructionist—if not musically, than philosophically. As with the discographies of Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Vektroid, and other “post-internet” luminaries, Fire-Toolz poses a timely, bleak query: How can we humans possibly hope to accomplish our starry-eyed goals of taming the machines, of finding nostalgic refuge in a void so glutted with information? *Drip Mental *serves as a scathing, passionate reminder that we can’t—but we may as well try, or at the very least, wreak as much havoc as possible. Musical formalism, Western pop psychology, the gender binary: Marcloid’s already laid waste to plenty of long-standing systems so far, and it’s hard not to cheer her on from the sidelines as she marches down the warpath. | 2017-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | February 14, 2017 | 6.7 | 56d7e763-7600-4145-ac01-b1eb8eaf5351 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The UK producer expands into ambient territory, finding drama in negative spaces and downtempo explorations. | The UK producer expands into ambient territory, finding drama in negative spaces and downtempo explorations. | Daniel Avery: Slow Fade EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-avery-slow-fade-ep/ | Slow Fade EP | About a year before Daniel Avery’s 2013 debut album, Drone Logic, launched him into techno’s elite, he compiled a cassette-tape mix titled Divided Love. Released in a limited edition of 100 copies, it was a token of the British musician’s dual interests: The A-side featured dancefloor-friendly tracks from underground producers like Chad Valley and Boddika, while the B-side emphasized more ambient works by London bands like HTRK and patten. With fame came headlining gigs, and in the years since then Avery has leaned heavily on the first half of his musical makeup, tastefully refashioning classic rave sounds—acid synths, techno rhythms, long-distance trance builds—into cutting-edge club cuts. Now, it appears he’s eager to broaden that palette with deeper, downtempo explorations. On his introspective new four-track EP, Slow Fade, Avery finds as much drama in the negative spaces as in the concrete forms.
Although the release of the EP was itself a surprise, the expansion it represents probably shouldn’t have been. Even as he’s made a name for himself with big-room sounds, Avery has kept winking at ambient music in sets and compilations (his 2016 DJ-Kicks mix closed with the glacial original “Space Echo”). He frequently praises the emotional power of drone and noise in interviews. And last summer, Avery quietly released Sun Draw Water, a beatless, two-track collaboration with Nine Inch Nails contributor Alessandro Cortini that artfully evokes feelings of blistering heat (“Sun”) and vast, undulating ocean (“Water”).
The evolution heard on Slow Fade is both less radical and less specific. With a wide range of pitches and frequencies spanning meditative and eerie to euphoric and industrial, these songs exist somewhere in the space between the dancefloor and the chill-out room.
The title track sets a sinister mood with staggered percussion and synth swells that bleed into a steady din of white noise. Hair-raising and psychedelic, it resembles the hi-fi, trippy techno of contemporaries Donato Dozzy and Svreca (owner of the avant-garde Semantica Records). It also carries echoes of early Aphex Twin: The kaleidoscopic keyboard loop in “Slow Fade” nearly mirrors the melody in “Schottkey 7th Path,” a haunting number from Aphex’s canonical debut, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, that toes the line between sadness and paranoia. Avery finds brief relief in a shower of radiant cymbals, but the loop inevitably snakes back in. Those dark shadows feel like a U-turn from Avery’s best-known past work, particularly from hits like “Drone Logic” and “Naive Response,” though there are precedents in the more understated corners of his catalog (see 2013’s “Simulrec” and 2015’s “Clear”).
Without distinct beats, vocals or melody lines, “After Dark” is the EP’s contemplative deep breath. The song’s production forces listeners to inhale every little detail as rich layers of gloomy synths oscillate slowly, forming sheets of notes that waft through the air like fumes. The EP’s fourth and final track reverses that mood: “Fever Dream” is a thrilling, warehouse-worthy cut that rumbles with the momentum of an approaching helicopter. Although a subtle wave of warmth washes the song’s second half, the intensity never wavers. What “Fever Dream” lacks in colorful experimentation, it makes up for in sheer velocity.
Avery’s vision comes across most clearly on “Radius,” sequenced between those two poles. “Late nights and hazy mornings,” he said in a press release, “eyes closed as opposed to hands in the air.” The song’s rhythmic foundation is established by a faint kick drum and marching snare that pulse along, patient and soothing. When shoegaze synths crescendo up into the high register, they sing like crystal bowls in a Himalayan sound bath, a dreamworld of vibrations and melody that lasts for a blissful eight minutes. It’s a satisfying resolution of the style hinted at six years ago on side B of Divided Love, and a tantalizing hint of where Avery may be headed when his next album, Song for Alpha, arrives in April. | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Phantasy / Mute | February 1, 2018 | 7 | 56e031e1-4648-413c-9a7e-dd15917da1bb | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
The debut album from the Against Me! singer’s new side project doubles as a deserved break from her very public role as a trans ambassador, but the songwriting too often feels like rock-band karaoke. | The debut album from the Against Me! singer’s new side project doubles as a deserved break from her very public role as a trans ambassador, but the songwriting too often feels like rock-band karaoke. | Laura Jane Grace / The Devouring Mothers: Bought to Rot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-jane-grace-and-the-devouring-mothers-bought-to-rot/ | Bought to Rot | Laura Jane Grace needed a break from her own very public identity. Six years ago, Grace famously announced that the traces of gender dysphoria in many songs by her bracing Florida punk band, Against Me!, had not been fictional muses. For her entire life, she had been uncomfortable in a man’s skin and clothes, so she had recently started the transition into the gender identity and body she’d needed for so long. Grace was an early, essential participant in a much larger conversation about transgender rights and visibility in the United States that soon included past Olympic heroes and current Olympic hopefuls, the right to choose a restroom and the right to exist at all. Grace has shied from neither the spotlight nor the microphone since her announcement, using her platform to explain transgender identity and explore related issues in a frank book, talk show, and more interviews and essays than lead singers of most 20-year-old punk bands get. Those same ideas became the grist of subsequent Against Me! albums, too, the band’s former antiwar and anti-consumerist reflections largely swapped for public examinations of very private matters. It must have been exhausting.
Bought to Rot, Grace’s debut with her economical trio the Devouring Mothers, is the distraction she wanted. Relatively free of expectations and history, the record is intended both as an escape from Against Me! baggage and as an outlet for songs that don’t fit the band’s incisive agitprop schema. Nevertheless, the players are familiar: Veteran drummer Atom Willard has been the Against Me! anchor for five years now, while bassist Marc Jacob Hudson produced the flagship’s most recent live and studio albums. Grace forgoes most any mention of gender dysphoria or politics here, instead exploring rather extreme versions of entirely pedestrian emotions—new friends so simpatico they make the world make sense, relevancy anxiety so intense it induces existential dread, breakup pains so bad they make you curse an entire city. These songs are the sounds of someone sorting through the exigencies of life itself, not meeting spokesperson demands. That’s about the best thing they manage.
This set, Grace has said, is meant to play out like a mixtape, with disparate styles and moods shaping a winding emotional and musical path. For opener “China Beach,” she howls, “Don’t breathe, don’t swallow,” over guitars and drums that sound like teen spirit. Then she offers a shout-out-loud anthem for goths in love, an open-road pop-punk tune about a relationship that never had a chance, and an emphatic acoustic strummer about a friend who even makes the impending apocalypse OK. There’s a born-this-way celebration that echoes the glory days of Butch Walker’s Marvelous 3 and a placating ode that flips between the twinkling reassurance of a lullaby and the power of post-rock with the same wonder as pre-recession Death Cab for Cutie. At the very least, the Devouring Mothers avoid any facile Against Me! echo.
But this turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke, new lyrics dropped into old frames already built by songwriters working at a higher level. “The Airplane Song” is a less vivid version of a Mountain Goats song about the doomed Alpha Couple, from the breakneck verses to the backing vocals as Grace heads for the chorus. During “Amsterdam Hotel Room,” you can picture Craig Finn onstage circa 2005, agitated into a maniacal froth and pushing his glasses back up his nose. “The Friendship Song” is a Hallmark version of the Moldy Peaches with better chops, “Manic Depression” a Shellac-style tirade badly buttressed by soft-core noise-rock. Only the hilarious “I Hate Chicago” seems to have its own personality. At first a philippic against the pizza, music, sports, traffic, and general lack of congeniality in Grace’s home base of the last six years, it’s a feint, a stand-in for Grace’s disdain for any place her ex likes. Unlike the rest of Bought to Rot, “I Hate Chicago” feels upfront and unmitigated, not the product of a preassembled mood board of inspirations.
You can’t fault Grace for needing a diversion from the weight of the last six years, even in a moment where her voice seems necessary. Her openness about her gender and her transition have become so pervasive that almost no one hears Against Me! anymore without viewing everything as another dysphoric breadcrumb. Bought to Rot is an act of self-care, a new hobby meant to lessen the strain of one’s actual occupation. And, who knows, given enough time and attention, it could become Grace’s primary outlet, as it’s long been clear that she has interests outside of bristling pop-punk. But this is an uncharacteristically tentative first step from someone so given to bold moves. | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bloodshot | November 13, 2018 | 5.6 | 56e1f0c8-8a1e-47ed-b8c9-e98e643d8d7d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Soul Jazz reissues the work of this Detroit jazz collective, most striking for its eclectic, without-borders approach. | Soul Jazz reissues the work of this Detroit jazz collective, most striking for its eclectic, without-borders approach. | Various Artists: Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-1976 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14046-message-from-the-tribe-an-anthology-of-tribe-records-1972-1976/ | Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-1976 | People play music for many reasons: to express something personal, act cool, meet people, have fun-- maybe even to make money. Sometimes, people play music because they want to belong to a community. And once in a while, community-driven sounds intersect with a historic and political moment, and music takes on special significance.
Such was the case with the Tribe, a creative collective founded in Detroit in 1972 by trombonist Phil Ranelin and reed player Wendell Harrison and whose media arm included a label and quarterly magazine. The Tribe was born out of the African-American consciousness of the Civil Rights era, and its mission was to further the cause of black empowerment. Its magazine featured news and editorials on the issues of the day-- busing, government corruption, the dimming economic climate-- alongside discussion of music. The label issued the work of area musicians, some of whom made a living as session players for Motown (the company left Detroit for L.A. the year Tribe was founded) while simultaneously pursuing jazz. Everything about the Tribe was local, intent on reflecting and documenting the surrounding community. There was a lot of uncertainty in Detroit in the early 1970s-- the auto industry was declining, parts of the city had been destroyed during riots in the late 60s, and population was in the early stages of a long, dramatic decline. The Tribe was a group of people banding together, trying so sort through it all as it happened.
Message From the Tribe, originally issued in 1996 and now re-issued by Soul Jazz's Universal Sound imprint with new packaging, gives an overview of Tribe's output during its five-year run. The music is most striking for its eclectic, without-borders approach: though "jazz" is an appropriate catchall term and the music feels of a piece, the individual tracks defy easy categorization. In the notes, comparisons are drawn between the Tribe's mission and that of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, but the music here is comparatively accessible, with a steady, danceable pulse, and it never veers into avant-garde abstraction. Ranelin, represented as a leader on three of the comp's 12 tracks, plays jazz, but he was ultimately re-discovered [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| by the rare groove set, which gives an idea of his dedication to hypnotic rhythm. While his "Vibes From the Tribe" combines the ethereal harmonic drift of Miles Davis circa Nefertiti with the bass-driven grooves concurrently being explored by Herbie Hancock, "For the Children", though certainly still jazz, finds him singing as well as soloing on trombone. The music billed to the Tribe-- basically an all-star band drawn from members of the collective, including Ranelin and Harrison-- ranges from the nimble funk blowing session "Beneficent" to the politicized message of hope "What We Need", with vocals by Jeamel Lee. Another vocal cut, Doug Hammond's "Moves", is a strange and haunting ballad featuring Hammond's earthy voice trading melodic lines with violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog.
The music from Message From the Tribe is strong, a great set of open-minded and accessible jazz from an exciting time in the music's history. But the full impact of the package, which includes a 60-page booklet featuring reprints from the magazine along with postcards containing additional covers from the publication, provides depth. Looking through the essays and news alongside the advertisements for black-owned businesses, the music's context as the center of a community becomes clear. There's an article by a student from Wayne State University on Watergate, a piece outlining the basics of the then-current recession, and a feature on Jesse Jackson's burgeoning Operation PUSH. There are also music reviews and interviews. In Tribe-- "Detroit's First Magazine for Black Awareness" was the subtitle-- the lines between politics, activism, art, and entertainment are not just unclear: No one seemed to see any reason to draw them in the first place. When you spend so much time enjoying the easy benefits of commitment-free consumption, it's easy to forget about such possibilities. | 2010-03-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-03-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Universal Sound | March 17, 2010 | 8.2 | 56eb69e2-35f4-4121-ab2f-3857450cc622 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Diplo and Switch recruit vocalists such as Santigold, the women of Nina Sky, Vybz Kartel, and more for an eclectic dancehall-heavy party record. | Diplo and Switch recruit vocalists such as Santigold, the women of Nina Sky, Vybz Kartel, and more for an eclectic dancehall-heavy party record. | Major Lazer: Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13236-guns-dont-kill-people-lazers-do/ | Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do | Major Lazer-- a cartoon Jamaican commando who looks like a sort of military "Mean Joe" Greene-- lost his arms in the secret Zombie War of 1984, before later receiving prosthetic lasers as replacement limbs from the U.S. military. At least according to Diplo and Switch, the producers behind the Major Lazer project and its debut LP, Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do. Why Diplo and Switch (known to your parents in film trailer-speak as "the guys behind 'Paper Planes"') decided to create the unnecessary backstory is a mystery. If it's just to have a little fun, to put together some sort of Super Ape-like cover art, hey fine; if it's in any way about the fact that a white American and a white Brit are here making a dancehall record...this is really an issue?
It feels like it is, in some circles anyway. But the musical dialogue between Jamaica and the U.S. has been strong ever since New Orleans jazz and American R&B began to reach the island via radio, mixing there with calypso, nyahbingi, and other African and Caribbean sounds. In the time since, resourceful Jamaican producers have borrowed from and tweaked soul, Afropop, disco, electro, hip-hop, and more, and the U.S. and UK gave us, uh, Sublime and the Police. (OK, and the Slits, the Pop Group, the Clash, etc., etc.) Plus, you know, there's this whole globalization thing. If it's your first experience with Jamaican music (tsk, tsk), the variety on hand here should help dispel the myth that dancehall or any other Jamaican sound is monosyllabic. (If you need further proof, Soul Jazz's Dynamite! series is a great place for the uninitiated to start...try 200% and 300% first.)
But if you're bugging out over the whole authenticity thing for some reason, Diplo and Switch have lined up a who's-who of Jamaican vocalists: Vybz Kartel, T.O.K., Ms. Thing, Turbulence, Mr. Vegas, Mr. Lexx, and more. Wisely though, they still know their probable audience (i.e. hipsters) and kick this off with "Hold the Line", a song featuring Santigold. (the CD case calls the song "I'll Make Ya", but some discs have been printed with a sticker letting us know the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| song is indeed called "Hold the Line", as already indicated from mp3 tags, MySpace streams, and its music video.)
Whatever you want to call it, with its rumbling bass, "A Milli"-like vocal hook, and spaghetti western atmospherics, it's a hell of a way to kick off the solid-to-killer six-song stretch that opens the album. Well paced and immaculately produced, the first half-dozen Guns songs nicely move between the past 30 years of Jamaican music, from the sweet "Can't Stop Now" [ft. Mr. Vegas and Jovi Rockwell], which recalls the rocksteady-indebted, pre-digital sounds of 80s dancehall, to the politically charged "Anything Goes" [ft. Turbulence], steeped in modern ragga and the give-and-take between the island's music and American hip-hop, particularly that from the post-Cash Money South.
The record derails in the middle, and no points for guessing where based on the tracklisting. "Mary Jane" is the requisite weed song, and sadly it's played off as a sniggering novelty, making it both obvious and annoying. (Major Lazer do humor much better later, taking the Baby T-Pain meme and turning it into a clever skit.) There's also a song featuring Amanda Blank, "What U Like", that's of course a minimalist electro track full of boilerplate sex talk. (Einstein asks the appropriately named Blank if she likes it when badman fucks her, etc.; Blank says yes, actually, I do.)
The rest of the back of the album, despite not having the awesome ebb and flow of the first half, features some of its heaviest hitters: Vybz Kartel and T.O.K. (with a return appearance by Ms. Thing) show up and kill on "Pon de Floor" and the Man Parrish-sampling "Bruk Out", respectively. And closer "Jump Up", with co-production from Crookers (of "Day 'N' Nite" remix fame) would be the perfect au courant dancefloor filler if it weren't for the record's weird trojan horse: "Keep It Goin' Louder" [ft. Nina Sky and Ricky Blaze].
So, yeah, buried deep into Diplo and Switch's dancehall record, they went and hid one of the best pop songs of the year. Let's not declare death of Auto-Tune quite yet-- if this thing could get a foothold on the Hot 97s and B96s across the country it would deservedly shoot up the charts. With about three ridiculous hooks, "Louder" serves as a nice calling card for Diplo and Switch as crossover producers and a reminder that Nina Sky are weirdly underutilized.
Five years after teaming with M.I.A. for the Piracy Funds Terrorism mix and making his excursions to favela funk balls in Brazil, Diplo seems oddly underespected these days. Perhaps it's because he's a better DJ and producer than remixer-- and in the immediate aftermath of his rise to fame, it was a remixer that he got his most work. Perhaps it's because to either those who want pop/youth culture to be somehow segregated-- or to those who believe they've graduated from collegiate suburban solipsism into something more open-eared and less purely straight and white, yet still remain suspicious of other white kids who also enjoy disco/hip-hop/dancehall/pop-- he's an easy go-to negative representation of young white urbanites and their encroaching interest in global black culture (which, historically, is the definition of hipsterdom right there).
Whatever the case, he and Switch are kicking off summer with an armful of perfect cookout-, top down-ready songs, like the daytime soundtrack equivalent of all of the summertime night's rooftop music that's been coming from Swedes Air France and the Tough Alliance and their new wave of American indie disciples, such as Real Estate and Memory Cassette in the past year-plus. Best to enjoy it now, even though it will still also sound great in six months. | 2009-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Downtown | July 1, 2009 | 8.1 | 56ef8aa6-f9d4-4d4f-bdc5-c68e8ac6df42 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The debut collaboration from classical composer Brendon Randall-Myers and metal vocalist Doug Moore is an unflinching testimonial on grief and endurance. | The debut collaboration from classical composer Brendon Randall-Myers and metal vocalist Doug Moore is an unflinching testimonial on grief and endurance. | Scarcity: Aveilut | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scarcity-aveilut/ | Aveilut | During the lockdown in the spring of 2020, the composer Brendon Randall-Myers would leave his New York apartment largely to do one thing: run in the dark. Sometime after midnight most days of the week, Randall-Myers—a former collegiate runner who nearly turned pro—would zip down empty streets and deserted bike paths, thinking about all he had recently lost. A year earlier, an aunt and a close friend both unexpectedly died within one month. He was still stuck in aveilut, the customary Jewish year of mourning for the dead, a cycle compounded by a recent breakup. Running helped him push through those feelings, as did the music he was tracking back home and contemplating while he exercised in the dark. The result, Aveilut, is his debut as Scarcity, and it’s a compelling testimonial to dealing with the long tail of someone else’s death.
A guitarist in the Glenn Branca Ensemble, Randall-Myers has long flitted at metal’s periphery. His songs in the band Marateck sometimes teased black metal, while his compositions for boundless classical collective Invisible Anatomy and pianist Miki Sawada often hinged on a headbanger’s love of density. His remarkable 2020 album Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies, a harsh-to-halcyon performance for an electric guitar quartet, suggested a theoretical “Instrumental Evening with Krallice” in some posh uptown theater.
But Randall-Myers wanted these new pieces to speak directly to the woe at hand, so directly they actually screamed. He recruited Doug Moore, an accomplished metal vocalist he’d met long ago through running, to write and sing to five interlocking instrumentals, a cohesive suite about emotional upheaval. Aside from a decade of expansive tirades in death-metal adventurers Pyrrhon, Moore has also howled over thrash, doom, and black metal. He was an apt choice, since Randall-Myers’ mix of radiant arpeggios and haunted drones, grim noise and mauling blasts had more to do with fully processing his pain than adhering to strict subgenre convention.
Aveilut opens with a foreboding hum, its glowing synthesizers slowly strangled by a tense riff and marching drums that push toward a feverish gallop. This is claustrophobic black metal, caked in the kind of compounding overtones you might expect from a Branca acolyte; it feels overwhelmed and overwhelming, mirroring a mind incapable of outpacing its own burdens. Moore arrives after six minutes to roar a short, reassuring psalm: “They are never truly gone/Those who have shed their forms.” He seems to be convincing Randall-Myers, trying to shout down his collaborator’s suffering.
Moore returns to these same lines 20 minutes later, at the start of “IV,” but he finds the comforting words empty now. He hisses the verse through sculpted doom, colossal drums occasionally punctuating the long tones and feedback screeches. These dual settings for the same text speak to the unsteady way we mourn, how we sometimes slip back into sadness we thought we’d already overcome. “IV” ends in a low tide of curdled noise, like Merzbow trying to make nachtmusik. “We, the shattered, we shall endure,” Moore seethes through the haze of broken circuits, arriving at a terrible truth most of us will one day face—for survivors, someone else’s death is often hell.
Every facet of death has been fodder for one form of metal or another, from lurid celebrations to melodramatic wails. But as a relative outsider, Randall-Myers approaches the concept with a thoughtfulness and honesty that’s independent of expectation or orthodoxy. Aveilut sounds how loss actually feels—spans of misery, flashes of hope, bouts of anger, all lumped into a messy collage that has little to do with some clean Kübler-Ross progression. Where “IV” wallows in despair, for instance, “II,” the album’s masterstroke, tries to find meaning or even redemption in its certainty. An 11-minute sprawl of backlit black metal, coruscant with guitar harmonies and relentless with roiling drums, it has the same passion and intensity as Blut Aus Nord or early Liturgy. “Be without grief when they bear down, those years,” Moore demands, attempting to negotiate with a mortality he well knows is merciless. Desperation soon follows.
Perhaps it’s strange to find such a harsh record about death life-affirming, to hear in its menacing tones and lyrical opprobrium any reassurance. But for Aveilut, Randall-Myers took a particularly challenging time as a chance to try something with which he’d long toyed. Alongside a friend, he turned deep troubles into a work of endurance, of running into the dark hoping that someday you might even emerge from it for a spell. | 2022-07-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Experimental | The Flenser | July 20, 2022 | 7.6 | 56ef9686-b473-44ca-852d-aa6bd892ab24 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
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 Buffy Sainte-Marie’s cosmic, groundbreaking 1969 album, an ecstatic invocation of pain, pleasure, and divinity.\ | 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 Buffy Sainte-Marie’s cosmic, groundbreaking 1969 album, an ecstatic invocation of pain, pleasure, and divinity.\ | Buffy Sainte-Marie: Illuminations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buffy-sainte-marie-illuminations/ | Illuminations | In 1977, on an episode of Sesame Street, Buffy Sainte-Marie became the first person to breastfeed on national broadcast television (“Lots of mothers feed their babies this way,” she explained to a very curious Big Bird.) She was the first person to record a song by a then-unknown songwriter named Joni Mitchell (“The Circle Game,” on Sainte-Marie’s 1967 album Fire & Fleet & Candlelight, released almost a year before Mitchell’s own debut). When she decided she’d rather record her 1992 album Coincidence and Likely Stories at home in serene Hawaii than travel to her producer’s studio in chaotic London, Sainte-Marie became the first person ever to make an album by sending files across what was then still being earnestly called “the World Wide Web.”
Being one of the mainstream’s most visible indigenous entertainers in the 1960s and beyond, Buffy Sainte-Marie was the first Native woman to do quite a few things, among them win a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. She is presumably the only person to have written songs that have been covered by the unholy trinity of Elvis, Morrissey, and Courtney Love. And in 1969, when she unleashed her astounding, trailblazing sixth LP Illuminations, she became the first musician not only to release an album with vocals processed through a Buchla 100 synthesizer (the very same unit that the electronic music legend Morton Subotnik had used to compose his landmark 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon), but the first person ever to make an album recorded using quadraphonic technology, an early precursor to surround-sound.
Here is a brief pause, to let your brain try to catch up with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
And yet, Sainte-Marie has always been suspicious of “firsts”—something about the word itself connotes a narrow-sighted narrative of conquest. She still dismisses hierarchies and what she derisively calls “pecking orders” as rigidly Euro-centric, reeking of colonial absurdity and woefully lacking in imagination. Over and over, she has learned that being ahead of one’s time can be a liability when one does not look the way a vanguard is “supposed to,” which is usually like a white man. “I was real early with electronics, and I just got used to this typical music-biz resistance,” she recalls in Andrea Warner’s 2018 book Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography. “Most of these boys—whether musicians or record company guys—did not want to seem old-fashioned or out of the loop. They didn’t want somebody else—a girl like me—to be ahead of them.”
But she was. Illuminations is a potent artifact from those early days when the synthesizer conjured audible awe and limitless possibility. (Even Giorgio Moroder’s first Moog-driven hit, “Son of My Father,” was not released until 1972.) Illuminations would have been a tough sell in 1969 regardless, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Sainte-Marie learned another factor in its commercial failure: Because of her activism with the recently formed American Indian Movement (AIM) and her outspoken Vietnam-era pacifism, the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations had both led campaigns to blacklist her music from American radio stations and record stores. “Buffy thought that the decline of her record sales was just part of legitimate changes in American public taste,” her biographer Blair Stonechild wrote in 2012’s Buffy Sainte-Marie: It’s My Way. But years after the release of Illuminations, when an American radio DJ was interviewing Sainte-Marie, he shocked her by apologizing for abiding by a government mandate to stop spinning her tunes. She recalled, “He had a letter on White House stationery commending him for suppressing this music, which deserved to be suppressed.”
As the years went by, Illuminations developed something of a cult following; in 1998, the experimental music magazine The Wire put it on a list of “100 Records That Set the World on Fire When Nobody Was Listening.” (“If Dylan going electric in 1965 would have turned folk purists into baying hyenas,” they wrote, “Buffy Sainte-Marie going electronic would have turned them into kill-hungry wolves.”) But, like Sainte-Marie herself, the bewitching, utterly transporting Illuminations has still not gotten a fraction of its due. It is a record overripe for reevaluation—for reasons not limited to but certainly including pissing off the ghost of Richard Nixon.
From the Greenwich Village coffeehouses of the early 1960s up through her Polaris Prize-winning 2015 album Power in the Blood, Sainte-Marie has always moved through the world as though she can peer into a fourth dimension. In the 1960s, she drew equal inspiration from some of the world’s oldest instruments—one of her signature tools was the mouth bow, made from the bark of a chokecherry tree—and some of the most cutting-edge recording technology. Her early version of that Joni Mitchell song was a fitting personal anthem: Where others see straight lines, Buffy has always seen circles; connections instead of divisions. At the end of her book, Warner recalls a telling suggestion Sainte-Marie had made on an early draft of her manuscript: She’d crossed out the phrase “tearing down” and written in its place “creating—in spite of and beyond.”
In the early years of her life, Sainte-Marie experienced much to work in spite of, much to travel beyond. She was born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan, though she’s not sure when, or under what circumstances she ended up in an adoption agency. She knows, at least, that she was born sometime in the early 1940s, and that the traumatic practice of ripping indigenous babies from their homes would continue to be common practice in Canada for decades; the phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “Sixties Scoop.” She was adopted by a white family in Wakefield, Massachusetts and given the name Beverley Sainte-Marie.
Buffy had a creative and encouraging mother, but through the Sainte-Marie family she also came in contact with several male relatives, including her adoptive brother, who inflicted upon her years of sexual and emotional abuse. Her internal life became a place of refuge. “I wasn’t only some traumatized, scared little kid hiding under the bed—which I was—but I was also this other person who had an inner world that was really, really good,” she told Warner. She recalled her daily after-school routine, during the long Massachusetts winters: “I’d drop my books at home, grab my skates, go down the hill to the lake, and skate until dark, Tchaikovsky in my head… as well as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, LaVern Baker, and Chuck Berry. I don’t know if anybody else was skating to ‘Maybelline’ in their heads, but I was.”
Soon enough her own songs began to flood her head; “inner media,” she called them. She taught herself how to translate the melodies onto the piano; she twirled knobs and invented wild tunings on her guitar. She “[sang] her guts out,” like her cross-cultural heroines Édith Piaf and the flamenco artist Carmen Amaya, skeptics be damned (“If I’d been a flamenco performer or a chanteuse in Paris, maybe everybody would have understood. But it was quite unusual to sing with that kind of passion in the USA.”) She didn’t feel bold enough to play her compositions for other people until she went away to college, but at UMass Amherst in the early 1960s, she found a like-minded crew of young folkies. The future blues musician Taj Mahal liked to jam with her in the echoing stairwells, where they could play as loudly as they wanted, reveling in natural reverb.
Her first album in 1964, It’s My Way!, remains one of the most revelatory debut albums of the 1960s, a decade with no shortage of them. It’s stark, clarion: Just a banshee voice and brutally strummed guitar emerging from some dark ether. Her sturdily crafted songs told tales of injustices that were years away from mainstream attention: The escalating conflict in Vietnam (“Universal Soldier”), the agony of opiate addiction (“Cod’ine”), the native lands and populations that were being displaced by corporate greed (“Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”). Her arrangements were relatively traditional, but in her subject matter, Buffy already seemed to possess a glowing portal into the future. The liner notes called her “an Indian Cassandra.”
For much of the 1960s, she was indiscriminately lumped in with the luminaries of the folk scene—Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan—but even within the burgeoning counterculture, Sainte-Marie still felt like an outsider. Always had: Back in college she turned down every opportunity to join a sorority, and in Wakefield, she somehow “flunked” Girl Scouts. As a recording artist, though, the creatively restless Sainte-Marie was cutting her own way—through the mystical devotions of 1966’s Little Wheel, Spin and Spin to the playful country-western drag of 1968’s I’m Gonna Be A Country Girl Again. But by 1969, her “inner media” was crying out for stranger manifestations.
In the late 1960s, what would eventually come to be known as “electronic music” was still, to most casual music listeners, a vaguely threatening abstraction. “The anxiety around automation became attached to the synthesizer in the mid-20th century,” Roshanak Kheshti writes in her recent 33 1/3 book on Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, an album that was enjoying unexpected chart success the same year that Buffy Sainte-Marie released Illuminations. “The Twilight Zone of a post-nuclear world seemed to be descending in the form of the synthesizer, an electrical instrument with the power to shift shape.” The old guard didn’t trust this impersonal, space-age version of the electricity in Elvis’ hips.
Switched-On Bach was comprised of 12 well-known Bach pieces performed by Carlos on a Moog synthesizer—a playful yet meticulously executed meeting of past and future. The familiar respectability of Bach offered a plush welcome mat for those curious about this “Twilight Zone”-esque new instrument, and Switched-On Bach became a surprise hit, garnering three Grammys and breaking into the Top 10 on the Billboard album chart. As with any sudden commercial success, novelty copycats soon followed: Switched-On Rock; Switched on Nashville; Moog Plays the Beatles. Because it had the familiar feature of a black-and-white keyboard, the Moog was the most popular and musician-friendly of the early synthesizers. The Buchla, which would become Sainte-Marie’s instrument, was another beast entirely.
“It wasn’t even as though there was an electric keyboard, it was too early,” she recalled. “We just called it a matrix, a bunch of possibilities you could connect in various ways to modify sound waves.” Subotnik and Don Buchla, who developed the Buchla 100 together in the mid-1960s, were less interested in futurizing recognizable instruments like the piano than they were giving people a blank slate to create new forms. “My basic thought was to be creative with this new instrument,” Subotnik said in a 2017 interview, “to show people how, without black and white keyboards, you could create a new kind of music.” Sainte-Marie—an artist who’d always seen beyond simple binaries—was enamored of this strange new machine.
The Buchla announces its stirring presence in the opening seconds of Illuminations: Sainte-Marie’s voice is patched through and manipulated in such a way that it sounds like a reflection rippling in water. “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” takes all its lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s hallucinatory 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, and it unfurls like an increasingly impassioned rebuttal to Nietzsche’s most notorious claim. “Magic is alive,” Sainte-Marie sings with trembling resolve. “Though his death was pardoned, round and round the world, the heart would not believe.” It is a timeless parable of resilience and the necessity of wonder, placed within a modern frame: It’s easy to hear the connection between “magic” and the otherworldly electronic sounds itching at the foundation of this song.
For an ostensibly forward-marching record, there’s quite a bit of ancient Biblical imagery on Illuminations: Song titles include “Adam,” “Mary,” and “Suffer the Little Children.” (The Smiths would, of course, write their own track bearing a similar title 15 years later, and Morrissey also covered a song from Illuminations on his most recent album, 2019’s California Son.) But this is one of those records that collapses the distance between seeming opposites. The mesmerizing aurora borealis of “The Vampire” and the shooting stars that streak across the coda of psych-rocker “Better to Find Out For Yourself” both depict the cosmos as something enduring and eternal, rather than just a lazy space-age motif. Where were the Magi looking for the Star of Bethlehem, if not on the astral plane? Again, Sainte-Marie is attuned to the interconnectedness of all things: Though they toggle from the Old Testament to New Weird America, the stellar sounds of Illuminations suggest that all these songs take place beneath the same sky.
The pain depicted on this record, though, coexists peacefully with Sainte-Marie’s open-hearted pursuit of pleasure. Illuminations contains a few of the most assertively sensual songs she’s ever recorded, like the rollicking “With You, Honey” (“It’s about your potty mouth, and the way you stand”) and the blazing groove “He’s a Keeper of the Fire,” which ends with Sainte-Marie so overcome that she begins howling at the moon. Her music always has a fierce independent streak—her debut album, after all, was called It’s My Way!—but within it there is also the ever-present possibility of surrendering to love, to tenderness, or maybe just to fleeting satisfaction.
Though it’s rare to find a Buffy Sainte-Marie song on which she’s not singing with wild abandon, Illuminations features some of the most moving vocal performances in her entire catalog. “The Dream Tree”—one of the few songs that does not seem to feature any sounds processed through the Buchla—is a kind of domestic sequel to “Universal Soldier,” an emotionally vivid portrait of wives left lonely and widowed by war. Beneath it all, a nervously finger-picked arpeggio moves like anxious hands knitting to keep themselves busy. The track on Illuminations that most frequently moves me to tears, though, is “The Angel.” The song is, quite literally, an ascension, with Sainte-Marie’s gravity-defying voice mimicking a soul’s heavenward release from its body. “Give up your treasured wounds, let go the temping memory of the pain,” she sings. “And you will live, and you will learn to fly again.”
Like many albums lightyears ahead of their time, Illuminations was a commercial disaster when it was first released. “People were more in love with the Pocahontas-with-a-guitar image,” she once said when asked why she thought Illuminations failed to find a contemporary audience. She’d later learn about the American blacklist, the government suppression, and the reason why she continued to be better-known in other countries started to make sense. “They only have to hold you under water for about four minutes and you’re dead for a long time, when it comes to radio airplay,” she has said. “Things changed. But they didn’t change internally for me. I continued to record better and better songs, production-wise, I think. You just didn’t hear them in the States.”
The ability to harness new technology, of course, is a mighty power. That Buffy Sainte-Marie was using synthesizers and quadraphonic sound to upend conventional narratives about North American colonialism only made her more terrifying to the status quo. Perhaps that is why she has continued to make her life’s work bringing computers and digital technology to indigenous communities, as she has done with her Cradleboard Teaching Project or her 1999 manifesto “Cyberskins.” Emerging technology, she writes, can “counterbalance past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that [indigenous people] are not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are here in this digital age.”
Fifty years ago, Illuminations was a declaration of that same life-affirming truth, and so it remains. It’s a portal to another world, as full of possibilities and alternative realities as that telephone-switchboard-like matrix into which Sainte-Marie plugged cord after cord. Lay down your cool cynicism, your rationality, your linear Western thinking, Illuminations instructs, before leaning close to whisper its secret: “Magic is alive.” | 2020-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Vanguard | February 9, 2020 | 9 | 56efc4c7-1404-49ab-8eaa-f0e67dbf50fd | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | |
The composer, singer and keyboardist Julia Holter's latest album, Have You In My Wilderness, is her sunniest and most accessible. The music has shifted, gaining warmth and weight while remaining essentially mysterious. Instead of unpacking weighty overarching concepts, Holter is telling stories, brief and foggy ones that are often plagued by ambiguities. | The composer, singer and keyboardist Julia Holter's latest album, Have You In My Wilderness, is her sunniest and most accessible. The music has shifted, gaining warmth and weight while remaining essentially mysterious. Instead of unpacking weighty overarching concepts, Holter is telling stories, brief and foggy ones that are often plagued by ambiguities. | Julia Holter: Have You In My Wilderness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20825-have-you-in-my-wilderness/ | Have You In My Wilderness | The composer, keyboardist and singer Julia Holter has pursued her strange, dreamlike visions across three albums of experimental pop, all released in the last three years. In that time, she's also worked with electro-pop act Nite Jewel and psych-folk cult favorite Linda Perhacs, and in all of this activity, you hear her restlessly pinpointing and subsuming new, piquant sounds. Those sounds range widely, from French impressionist classical music and 17th-century madrigals to Talk Talk's jazz-infused post-rock, from the avant music-drama of Robert Ashley and Meredith Monk, to the pop songwriting that evolved in the hills of her Los Angeles hometown in the 1970s. But though these names remain on the tip of your tongue as you listen to her music, none of them describe Holter; they are only points on a broader and more inscrutable map.
Her latest album, Have You In My Wilderness, is by some measure her sunniest and most accessible. There is no overarching concept uniting the music, no references to Euripides or '50s MGM musicals. As Holter told Stereogum, she "[made] up stories for every song" for Have You, but this being Holter, our glimpses of each "story" are brief and foggy, and the vignettes themselves are often plagued by ambiguities ("I hear small words from the shore/No recognized pattern") and moments of overpowering grief or wonder. More questions are asked than answers given in her often-unrhymed prose poems, and statements fold into themselves dizzyingly: "Figures pass so quickly that I realize my eyes know very well/It's impossible to see who I'm waiting for in my raincoat" ("Feel You"). Like a good student of the art music world, Holter clearly hopes that listeners will nurse their own impressions.
The music has also shifted, gaining warmth and weight while remaining enigmatic. Lo**ud City Song was a mess of stylistic dissonances working in the service of one discrete story (borrowing mostly from the 1958 film for the musical Gigi), but Have You… is tied together by music so airy it feels in danger of floating right past you. Despite the heavy cloak of reverb, the record has the clear sound of a small rock band playing the studio, highlighting the inventive but uninvasive upright bass and percussion of Devin Hoff, Corey Fogel and Kenny Gilmore. The haze is also dialed back on Holter’s vocals, making them crystal clear at crucial moments.
Despite the breezy, poppy feeling of the singles "Feel You" and "Sea Calls Me Home", the choruses are not as immediate as those on the earworm-heavy Ekstasis or Loud City Song. But in looser, through-composed songs like the sensual torch ballad "Night Song" and jazz-fusion-inflected "Vasquez," Holter find other, deeper ways to hold our attention. In "Betsy on the Roof" – an inspired reworking of a song Holter previously recorded on 2010’s Live Recordings – she drifts in and out of muted speaksong, sliding from pealing, Newsom-like tones into throaty speech. The chorus ("’Uh oh,’ she said/What of this cloud?"), though, is belted and raw-sounding, and in the wordless coda her gossamer crooning recalls either Christine McVie or Judy Collins.
But what ultimately makes Have You in My Wilderness transcendent – and unique in Holter’s catalogue – is its intimacy. The atmosphere is often light-hearted or even parodic: In the giddy ‘70s singer/songwriter melismas of "Sea Calls Me Home," the husky, Marlene Dietrich-like delivery of "How Long?" or the jokey, clap-trap country shuffle of "Everytime Boots," you hear Holter trying on sounds like costumes, sometimes for only a bar or two. Ironically, the more she shapeshifts, the more we seem to get to know her. For an artist who could sometimes seem forbidding or remote, Have You In My Wilderness feels humane, and with each new release, it seems like a bit more of the personal is teased out of Holter's stately, high-concept approach. Have You In My Wilderness embraces the specific, rather than the eternal, and in her narrowed focus you can sense a palpable self-confidence and a hard-won precision. | 2015-09-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | September 18, 2015 | 8.4 | 56f34bc6-3490-44a2-a6ab-535a2cdedbd1 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The musician and activist’s new album speaks truth to streaming giants, trans exclusionists, and extremely online leftists, but hits its stride at its sweetest and most nostalgic. | The musician and activist’s new album speaks truth to streaming giants, trans exclusionists, and extremely online leftists, but hits its stride at its sweetest and most nostalgic. | Evan Greer: Spotify Is Surveillance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/evan-greer-spotify-is-surveillance/ | Spotify Is Surveillance | Evan Greer’s latest album is a cry against the past year’s numbness. Recorded at the artist’s home in Boston not long after lockdowns began funneling more and more of life into flattening digital channels, Spotify Is Surveillance looks simultaneously to the past and future for motivation and reassurance—anywhere but the deadening now. Greer’s folk-punk songs oscillate between the nostalgic and the propulsive, between grasping at the charge of teenage emotions and envisioning a livable future outside the grip of platform capitalism.
Greer is a digital rights activist as well as a musician, and the title of her new record refers, in part, to a patent Spotify recently secured for technology that would allow it to make music recommendations based on algorithmic voice recognition that could detect attributes like gender, age, and mood. But the title is also a condemnation of how tech companies accumulate data on their users even when they’re not explicitly listening in. A platform like Spotify doesn’t need to hear your voice to surveil you; it starts logging your tastes the second you first hit “play.” Social networks like Twitter and Facebook follow similar logic: They’re only free because users pay for them in taste profiles built from “likes,” making ready targets for advertisers. That’s the bargain Greer rallies against on the song “Surveillance Capitalism,” where she laments the addictive nature of digital connection while collaging together sound bites from radical thinkers like Ursula K. Le Guin (reading her famous “divine right of kings” quote) and Malkia Cyril.
Greer is rightly suspicious of how social media can play host to shallow, showy activism. On the rancorous “Emma Goldman Would Have Beat Your Ass,” she rails against overly online leftists and Cuomosexual liberals alike, putting out an open call for physical bravery over digital posturing. She also takes note of how easily false narratives and bad information can become ammunition in political battles. “The Tyranny of Either/Or,” with its pearly guitar lines and spurring backbeat, touches on the intensifying fight against trans people’s physical and social autonomy, gesturing toward the frame trans-exclusionists typically adopt in their rhetoric. In a weary voice, Greer addresses the enemy directly: “You play the victim/Our existence is a threat/But we are not the ones who declared war.”
More richly layered and crisply produced than Greer’s prior album, 2019’s she/her/they/them, Spotify Is Surveillance hits its stride in its sweeter notes, the songs that prompt longing for physical touch and the now-alien magic of sharing rooms with throngs of other bodies. On “Back Row,” against slow rolls of distortion, she calls on memories of DIY shows, asking gingerly, “Do you remember when/Basements felt like stadiums?” Over a waltzing 3/4 beat, the airy “Willing to Wait” describes a romance on hold during the pandemic, now that physical touch has become a rare and precious commodity. It’s in these melancholy sketches of longing and loss that Greer’s voice assumes its full warmth. As much as she’s practiced in the art of the protest song, the enraged gallop towards the better world, Greer’s knack for storytelling shines most vividly when she’s ruminating on what’s been deferred, forgotten, or lost.
Reckoning with injustice doesn’t only drum up anger. Fear, exhaustion, and sorrow also shade the striving. In her protest songs and her love songs, and in the way they mingle together in the same current, Greer captures the full spectrum of her optimism. It's not just a feeling she sustains in moments of agitation or victory. It’s with her in the lulls, too, the days that feel hollow or wasted, when the present seems unendurable: that pinprick aperture onto the days that are still to come.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Get Better / Don Giovanni | April 14, 2021 | 6.7 | 56fab223-86b7-4663-959a-7be2df0dbd07 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Reworking a trove of cassettes filled with decades-old songs from Kabul, the Arizona native explores his Afghan heritage by collaging traditional melodies, entrancing loops, and psychedelic noise. | Reworking a trove of cassettes filled with decades-old songs from Kabul, the Arizona native explores his Afghan heritage by collaging traditional melodies, entrancing loops, and psychedelic noise. | Naujawanan Baidar: Naujawanan Baidar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/naujawanan-baidar-naujawanan-baidar/ | Naujawanan Baidar | N.R. Safi has never visited Afghanistan, but that country is part of his heritage—his father is of Afghan descent—and for a long time, its music has played in his head. A few years after founding Tucson, Arizona, psych band Myrrors (in which he’s known as Nik Rayne), Safi inherited a trove of his paternal grandfather’s tapes, filled with decades-old songs from Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. This spurred him to ramp up the solo project he calls Naujawanan Baidar, using his cassettes as both source material and inspiration to create new sounds.
The first two Naujawanan Baidar tapes, now compiled together as a double LP, mix traditional Afghan melodies, entrancing loops, outward-bound psychedelic jaunts, and enigmatic noise. Playing non-Western instruments such as the Afghan rubab, Indian tabla, and Persian sorna, Safi recorded directly to cassette, dubbing sounds back and forth through effects that he says “added [a] layer of barely-controlled chaos.” Recording in the American Southwest, he later edited the material in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where he currently lives. The results do indeed evoke a dusty tape unearthed in a market stall in some far-off land, but they also bear an otherworldly aura beyond any specific time or place.
Safi achieves that aura by emphasizing melody and texture in equal measure. Nearly all 15 tracks on Naujawanan Baidar involve simple hooks and rhythms from which Safi rarely wavers. But those elements aren’t just left to toil away on their own. Dense webs of crunchy distortion, brazen in-the-red mixing, and tape decay all wrap each tune in an alluring cloud of smoke. This hypnotic effect is mirrored in Safi’s repetitive song structures, which are so insistent it feels like they’re cutting new grooves into your brain as they play.
Within these loops, Safi generates lots of sonic variety. On “Khyber Sound,” a low rumble and a handclap beat ride under Safi’s fiery yelps. “Mojaherin” follows with a swaying rhythm somewhere between a march and a dance, sounding dubbed from a late-night broadcast of an old epic movie. In places, Safi’s repetitions turn abstract: The hammering “Symmetry of Knives” is seven minutes of metronomic crash and burn, while during the nuclear meltdown of closer “Panj Ruz Pesh,” it’s hard to discern Rafi’s source sounds among all the wreckage. Such hermetic sonics can induce claustrophobia, but they’re also exhilarating, a synthesis of old and new that forms its own kaleidoscopic ecosystem.
At times, Naujawanan Baidar feels like a random spin of an Afghan FM dial (it even opens with a static-filled “Radio Introduction”), not unlike some of the early compilations on Sublime Frequencies, taped straight from the receiver. Yet Safi’s work is bigger than a documentary field recording. He certainly respects the artists he’s building on—he cites Ahmad Zahir, Salma Jahani, and Beltoon and Hamidullah, among others—but his reimagining of this vital slice of Afghanistan’s musical legacy is as much about moving forward as looking back. The name Naujawanan Baidar means “enlightened youth” in Farsi; as he put it recently, “there is a big opportunity today for the children of the diaspora to look to their roots and bring some fresh new ideas to the table.” On Naujawanan Baidar, Safi advances that cause with intoxicating zeal. | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Feeding Tube / Cardinal Fuzz | June 25, 2020 | 7.5 | 56ffbf58-6389-4608-8e4f-d71d0a52f5bb | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The fearless Chicago rapper offers her best album yet, with terrific production and a barrage of raps that reveal Elizabeth Harris to be far more than her hilarious and absurdly raunchy one-liners. | The fearless Chicago rapper offers her best album yet, with terrific production and a barrage of raps that reveal Elizabeth Harris to be far more than her hilarious and absurdly raunchy one-liners. | CupcakKe: Ephorize | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cupcakke-ephorize/ | Ephorize | Elizabeth Harris, better known as the outrageously sexual rapper CupcakKe, had not even been born yet when Lil’ Kim released her super-raunchy debut album Hard Core in 1996. Although there is a long-standing precedent for women rapping freely about sexual desire, it is still, for some reason, noteworthy when a woman expresses those needs. For CupcakKe, perhaps, it is because she is strapped with an anything-goes attitude toward the body and how she presents her own, whether it’s rubbing glazed donuts all over herself in a music video or the unhinged carnality of her lyrics and tweets. Last year she resolved to “suck 2017 dicks in 2017” and a Twitter search finds a cabal of fans, who she calls “slurpers,” curious about her progress.
While she may have a stunning ease dishing out absurdist one-liners about affectionately brushing someone’s pubic hair, it’s clear that she wants to be known for much more than just “sex and killing,” which she laments on her new album Ephorize. On the new record, she tackles self-esteem, LGBTQ issues, and the desire for genuine romance, while peppering her tracks with some of the funniest, absurdist one-liners to appear on a record since the heyday of Ghostface.
Most of the album’s production is handled by the relatively unknown Def Starz, who gives CupcakKe a varied beat palette that flirts with New Orleans bounce (standout “Duck Duck Goose”) and embraces the muted dembow pop varietal known as tropical house (“Total”); she raps over “Mask Off”-like synth flute lines on “Navel,” reggaeton percussion on “Crayons,” and carries on Chicago’s drill tradition with added gloss on “Wisdom Teeth” and “Meet and Greet.” There is no doubt that CupcakKe has incredible flexibility with beats. She doesn’t work within the same molasses-mouthed, lyrically repetitive confines of her contemporaries, endeavoring to play with her delivery and often even eschewing hooks. But her style and performance abilities are superlative when she is delivering the wackiest of sex raps.
Stop anywhere on the aforementioned “Duck Duck Goose” and you’ll strike pervert gold like, “My cakes got fatter by using cum as the batter,” or, “Coochie guaranteed to put you to sleep so damn soon/Riding on that dick I’m reading Goodnight Moon.” A description of her creative process she offered to Vice last year shines a light on why this is where she excels: “Right now I have on maroon. I think of the color red, and I just think of like, period blood. So I’ll say, ‘I made this outfit out of period blood.’”
That kind of one-step-beyond free association—and the lack of self-consciousness it takes to put it out there—is what makes CupcakKe so likable. Her lyrical tricks are unexpected and endlessly quotable (though maybe only in a private group text). On lead single “Cartoons,” she finds a way to flip children’s icons into totems for not taking shit (“If I see carats like Bugs Bunny/I’m Batman, robbin’ for the money… I’m a snack so I attract Scooby Doos/Give ’em Smurf dick, that’s balls blue”) and dedicates a whole hook to using cereal as slang for how her adversaries see her on “Cinnamon Toast Crunch.” She is still fine-tuning her mastery of metaphor and some of the more fun moments are sandwiched with some clunkiness, particularly when she is trying to get real. On uplifting opener “2 Minutes” she delivers dud similes like, “Life go up and down like a light switch” while on the effecting pro-LGBTQ anthem “Crayons,” she needs a little bit more intel on identity politics (see: referring to trans men and women as “transgenders”).
Though, writing a song in praise of the queer community is pretty much unfounded in the space outside of the underground where CupcakKe operates. It separates her from the rest of the pack, as does the distance she keeps from the sound many of her contemporaries employ. She has no dalliances with the Chief Keef-via-Soulja Boy slowed rap style dominating radio and SoundCloud, from Lil Pump to Lil Uzi Vert and beyond. Some of this has to do with how much women in rap have to create an almost fully-realized identity to stay afloat if they aren’t backed by an established male artist, but it’s also clear that CupcakKe is truly invested in the hyperbolic artistry of lyrics—she was a poet long before she sought to detail the myriad locations of where to put a dick.
Her brand is fearlessness, whether it’s being bold enough to fellate a hot dog in a music video or rapping what is actually in her heart, not in her bank account. She doesn’t talk about drinking or doing drugs on Ephorize, save a passing reference to other people smoking weed and a quick comparison of cum to rum. The world she’s building is unique, daring you to not to blush, trusting you to see her real life through it all. You can hear the potential across the album, especially on a track like “Self Interview.” She raps, “Back then we had lipgloss and some overalls, that’s the usual/Nowadays I gotta show skin and wear sew-ins to feel beautiful” to describe the external expectations put on women as they transition from childhood to adulthood. It is one of the many gauntlets she throws on the album to show that CupcakKe isn’t just an outsized character. She has a whole lot more to show us—there is just a whole slew of pussy jokes along the way. | 2018-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 9, 2018 | 8.3 | 5704c1fc-cd95-4034-b67a-8229e26ca093 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
On their latest full-length, Junior Boys find a middle ground between the tricky production of their early work and later 1980s-indebted opulence. | On their latest full-length, Junior Boys find a middle ground between the tricky production of their early work and later 1980s-indebted opulence. | Junior Boys: It's All True | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15507-its-all-true/ | It's All True | Junior Boys started out making ridiculously complex music that had the intimate feel of a bedroom-based indie project. They'd mastered the intricate rhythmic syncopations of UK garage and Timbaland-style R&B, genres that had turned inventive and impossibly tricky rhythm programming into a game of pop oneupsmanship. Which is hardly the sort of thing that you'd want to hear an amateur's take on. But JBs' music was presented as if it were something fragile, homespun, made on a shoestring, full of negative space where the pop fizziness should be. It added an interesting, affecting friction to a sound that had defined glossy marquee pop around the turn of the millennium, like the difference between a love song written to please millions and one aimed at a special someone.
Pretty quickly, though, on 2006's So This Is Goodbye and especially 2009's Begone Dull Care, the JBs music started sounding like a million bucks, whatever it cost to make. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There had always been an element of slick soulful 1980s synth-pop in their sound, and when they jettisoned the new millennium R&B touches, it was shocking and enjoyable to find out they actually had the production chops to mimic that 1980s opulence. But what about that one-on-one intimacy that had originally made them stand out? In that sense, It's All True sounds like the album the Junior Boys have been moving toward their whole career. It's got the same low-key mixtape-from-a-lover charm as Last Exit, but sacrifices none of the appealing slickness of their last few albums.
Opener "Itchy Fingers" is actually a bit of bait-and-switch. It's the most deliriously dense tune on the album-- multiple basslines, stuttering R&B breakdowns, Art of Noise vocal stabs, zapping rave riffs, gleaming Japan/Duran-style guitar-- a master class in just how much you can squeeze into a track without its seeming cluttered. It recalls the carefully plotted textural overload of UK funky producers like Ill Blu, even if the feel is still more disco-house smooth than frantic Jamaican ragga. But "Itchy Fingers" is more or less an anomaly. It's All True mostly dials back the sonic excess in favor of more streamlined grooves. Thankfully, the album also corrects the lack-of-hooks problem that occasionally plagued Begone Dull Care. "Second Chance" is still stuffed with whirling video game noises, and some glorious creamy vocal multi-tracking, but what stands out on first listen is that naggingly catchy bassline. Plus Jeremy Greenspan gives us his best batch of choruses in quite a while, and good thing, too. While this is still headphone music par excellence, all those gleaming little sonic gewgaws and sneaky ear-worm off-beats are often pushed to the back of the mix, meaning the bright lounging-on-the-yacht electro hooks and Greenspan's voice both have to do a lot more work here.
Greenspan's singing is the best it's ever been on It's All True, proving the band's mixing desk skills aren't the only thing that's matured over the past eight years. Where he initially sounded wounded and winsome, almost hiding his voice behind the stark beats, here he displays a bouncy, strident sense of playfulness. Just check the ecstatic peak-after-peak outro on "Banana Ripple". There's also a new subtlety to his breathy just-out-of-bed tenderness that weirdly reminds me of Sam Prekop, no faint praise considering Prekop is the reigning master of this sort of thing. And speaking of subtle and tender, along with the large helpings of dancefloor joy, some of the album's most immediately arresting moments are its sparsest and most fragile. "The Reservoir" is an ultra-delicate experiment in seeing how far a rhythm can be stripped back-- something that would have fit perfectly on Last Exit, though it sounds far richer here, with Greenspan pulling off a falsetto he never would have been able to in the old days. Despite a few curveballs, like the pinpoint precise homage to Kraftwerk and the bleep techno Kraftwerk inspired on "Kick the Can", there's not much "new" here if you've been following the Junior Boys' sound over the last decade. But considering they seem to have perfected that sound here, it's hard not to feel like they should keep making albums like It's All True for a long, long time. | 2011-06-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | June 13, 2011 | 7.8 | 570f0cdf-2deb-4a65-9bbf-10daa989e277 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Damon Albarn and Africa Express organized this concert with 50 musicians from the Syrian National Orchestra. Featuring Julia Holter, Albarn, and others, it reaffirms that art at its best is a gesture of empathy. | Damon Albarn and Africa Express organized this concert with 50 musicians from the Syrian National Orchestra. Featuring Julia Holter, Albarn, and others, it reaffirms that art at its best is a gesture of empathy. | The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians: Africa Express Presents... The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22679-africa-express-presents-the-orchestra-of-syrian-musicians-guests/ | Africa Express Presents... The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests | The Syrian Civil War started five years ago, following the violent response of Bashar al-Assad’s security forces to protests in the southern city of Deraa. Nationwide opposition demanded Assad’s resignation, which was met by swift and violent governmental retribution. In the years since, the violence has widened to an unimaginable scope: a multi-front conflict with numerous international and domestic players vying for control or stability of the region. In April, a UN envoy estimated that as many as 400,000 have been killed as a result of the conflict, and millions of Syrians (some estimates say 11 million) have been displaced from their homes, becoming the subject of a global refugee crisis.
In the election cycles of the past year, Syrian refugees have been used as a scapegoat by any number of demagogues to stoke fear in people that their communities and jobs will be threatened by a slow encroaching wave of “otherness.” Just two days after the British people chose to leave the European Union in a controversial referendum colloquially known as Brexit, in London at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, Damon Albarn and the music collective Africa Express organized a concert with 50 musicians from the Syrian National Orchestra. (Damon Albarn recorded with the Syrian National Orchestra for the Gorillaz’ 2010 album Plastic Beach, beginning a longstanding love affair with the region’s music.) Many of the musicians in this venerable troupe have been scattered across the globe, stranded behind miles of red tape.
The event almost didn’t happen. A week before the rehearsals for the concerts were supposed to begin, it wasn’t yet clear if the organizers were going to be able to get Schengen visas for the 50 Syrian musicians to secure flights. The Guardian mentions “dark rumors about desperate calls to British officials”; apparently Africa Express co-founder Ian Birrell chartered a Boeing 737 for the musicians.
But it did happen, and the concert is finally being offered as an album. During a year when multiculturalism and globalism enduring a severe, sustained battering, the Syrian National Orchestra help prove that beauty, and true sublimity in art can exist even in the most pernicious and divisive of atmospheres. For those who celebrate the heterogenous, open-armed, and loving embrace of a global music community, this two-hour-plus concert one June night in the Royal Festival Hall represents a kind of small victory, as well as an incredible night of music.
The musical canvas for the project is vast. There is a traditional string orchestra onstage, accompanied by players of Arabian instruments like the ney (a kind of flute), string instruments like the qanun, zither, oud, and kora. In front of this assemblage are performers like Damon Albarn, Julia Holter, Paul Wells, and more. One of the first things you notice, listening, is the gobsmacking virtuosity of the players involved. In the thirteen minute track “Al Dahleh,” stand outs like ney player Moslem Rahal and Feras Charestan on the Arabian lap harp display stunning technical prowess. The performance is met with multiple ovations, and as an exercise in technical genius it is astounding. This group of players hadn't seen each other in years, and they cohere seamlessly.
Elsewhere, Julia Holter’s “Feel You” (a track from her resonant 2015 LP Have You in My Wilderness) is transformed by the presence of the Syrian orchestra. Here, it is more than just a piece of lush orchestral pop; it is a cross-cultural paean, proving collaborators who don’t share the same worldly experience can radically transform a piece of art, often for the better. Damon Albarn told The Guardian when organizing this event he said he was disappointed by the rhetoric surrounding the crisis as a “homogenous shadow” to be feared. What he wanted to do with this event is to show an audience the “experience to humanity” that these refugees can express in their art. Some of these musicians still live in Syria, dodging danger so they can continue to practice. Defying all bureaucracy, borders, and strife, this concert and this orchestra proves that art at its very best is a grand gesture of empathy above all. | 2016-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Transgressive | December 9, 2016 | 8 | 571b6d23-fc3e-46e0-b359-fb28bf5c5cae | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The drowsy Atlanta rapper polishes his style and submits some of his best songs, but the same thing that makes Gunna dependable also makes him predictable. | The drowsy Atlanta rapper polishes his style and submits some of his best songs, but the same thing that makes Gunna dependable also makes him predictable. | Gunna: Drip or Drown 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunna-drip-or-drown-2/ | Drip or Drown 2 | After breaking through a year ago with Drip Season 3, Gunna has quickly become a certified rap star, peaking with an album alongside fellow rising local and like-minded droner Lil Baby called Drip Harder. Following a somewhat limited start, he eventually broke new ground with a near-perfect trifecta: a show-stealing spot on Travis Scott’s Astroworld (“Yosemite”), the Lil Baby tag-teamer “Drip Too Hard,” and the Metro Boomin-produced aerodynamic study “Space Cadet,” all songs that advanced his writing, his execution, or his range. Drip or Drown 2 does not further the strides taken on those songs but retreats back toward the center of his sound. And yet it is still the best Gunna solo effort to date, owed primarily to his pronounced understanding of what the average Gunna song does well and how exactly to replicate those same effects.
Gunna is what an inhibited Young Thug might sound like. A protege of the eccentric 300 rapper signed to his YSL imprint and deeply indebted to him stylistically, Gunna raps like his mentor is very tired. There’s a monotonic quality to his performances, in tune and intensity, even as his flows twist and turn. If Thug’s method is astral projection, one impulsive out-of-body experience after another, Gunna’s is closer to lucid dreaming. His sequences seem to have no beginnings or ends, no entry points, with hooks segueing into verses and vice versa, a string of perpetual non sequiturs (“I lied at the precinct/I didn’t sign a 360”) that can range from the completely random (buying pants for Young Thug in Japan that cost more than he made at his show) to the personal (riding in a plushed-out Benz feeling like the world was in his hands). He never seems to punch in. He is amid an endless transition.
Their complementary styles overlap on “3 Headed Snake,” where the pair is constantly switching places over Wheezy production, with Gunna naturally following Thug’s lead. But there are moments when Thug pops out of the mix—“Jeepers creepers, the gators got measles, shit!/I fucked up the bank, bought a rose gold shank,” he yowls at one point—demonstrating a very obvious distance between them. The same predisposition that makes Gunna dependable makes him predictable, and it is holding him back.
Gunna has a very clear and obvious wheelhouse he’s reluctant to stray from, perhaps because it has led him directly to a Top 5 first sales week and a platinum single. In lieu of outward travel, then, he has opted to go deeper. These cuts take standard Gunna formats and reinforce them, reimagining several of his best songs in the process. “Richard Millie Plain” nearly transposes “Sold Out Dates,” but these flows lurch forth. “On a Mountain” flips “Oh Okay,” his whack-a-mole routine with Thug and Baby, and stretches out the melodies. Across the entire album, he is polishing his well-established Gunna maneuvers.
His bars vary from the goofy (“She made me bust a nut, that’s a starburst”) to the confusingly profound (“Time is poured on me when I ride that Maybach”), but it’s his ability to apply his signature inflection to just about any rhythm he conjures up that can make Drip or Drown 2 nearly hypnotizing. Be it the closed-loop chants of “Wit It” and “Same Yung Nigga” or the clipped chirps of “Speed It Up,” Gunna has an uncanny feel for settling his mellowed croons into the thick of any beat; here produced primarily by Wheezy and Turbo, that means bending in and out of shape with washed-out guitar riffs (“Yao Ming”), flickering synths (“Derrick Fisher”), and guzheng plucks (“Who You Foolin”). Occasionally, things all come together for Gunna, when the tune-fueled run-on sentences generate sudden, seeming out-of-the-ether observations that flatter him, as on “IDK Why”: “I don’t work for free/The salesmen that know me in Barney’s say I smell like Biscotti mixed with Creed,” he raps, slipping in an arbitrary but memorable detail that shows some personality. There are just enough of these moments on Drip or Drown 2 to distract from the fact Gunna has yet to take a real, meaningful risk. | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | February 27, 2019 | 6.7 | 573397f4-f201-4d68-8e3c-cfcc1841a4e1 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The collaborative audio-visual project layers Maxwell Sterling’s double bass and Martha Skye Murphy’s limber soprano with a variety of subtle tones and textures that lure the mind to journey where the body cannot. | The collaborative audio-visual project layers Maxwell Sterling’s double bass and Martha Skye Murphy’s limber soprano with a variety of subtle tones and textures that lure the mind to journey where the body cannot. | Martha Skye Murphy / Maxwell Sterling: Distance on Ground | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martha-skye-murphy-maxwell-sterling-distance-on-ground/ | Distance on Ground | When Brian Eno recorded Ambient 1: Music for Airports in the late 1970s, he was intent on reshaping our experience with flying. Eno was put off by the stock muzak piped through most major airports at the time, and he felt that its upbeat nature was intrinsically deceitful. Saccharine elevator tunes screamed “you’re not going to die! There’s not going to be an accident!” as Eno put it years ago. With Music for Airports, the composer offered an alternative reality: “If you die, it doesn’t really matter.” The project was never about denying death, but accepting it as a possibility while strapped inside of a jet at 30,000 feet. The work itself, spare and luminous, kindles a meditative state. Safe in our soothed minds, fears of engine failure and spontaneous combustion would be, hopefully, quelled.
In the past two years, our relationship with traveling has changed significantly. The fears Eno addressed in Music for Airports still exist, but they are buried in a heap of other concerns. “If I fly, will I get sick? If I leave the country, will I get stuck abroad? Will I ever travel again?” In their new ambient audiovisual project Distance on Ground, Martha Skye Murphy and Maxwell Sterling approach travel from a place of longing. The 20-minute record is split into two pieces, “86 km” and “93.3 km,” both of which echo the momentum of forward motion. The wordless compositions grew from improvised sessions between Murphy and Sterling, who collaged the results together after recording stints at London’s Super Symmetry Studios. The album layers Sterling’s double bass and Murphy’s limber soprano with a variety of subtle tones and textures that lure the mind to journey where the body cannot.
The songs comprising Distance on Ground are inherently transportative; “86 km” floats along a calming drone, brightened by Murphy’s glowing, circular chants. Incessant chirps sound like squeaky shopping cart wheels or a flock of seagulls, both of which suggest a sense of motion and destination, no matter how insignificant. At one point, you can hear something, perhaps a piece of luggage, being snapped and zipped shut. It feels like a distinct marker between voyages. If “86 km” is an introspective morning drive, “93.3 km” is a late-night stalk through the bad part of town. Sterling’s bowed bass lets out long belches that combat a storm of shrill frequencies. But midway through, the creeping low end falls away and the song is washed with gliding, legato synthesizer. The braiding of Murphy’s processed voice over plasticky, plucked strings restore a sense of calm and even revelation—like when the instruction to “walk it off” actually improves your mood.
By its very nature, Distance on Ground invites you to experience this music in different settings. The album is accompanied by an interactive website where visitors “can voyage in real time to and with the music in their chosen environment,” as stated on its main page. Listeners are encouraged to play the album and toggle between “rural” and “urban” landscapes, i.e. video footage shot on foot, from car windows, and airplanes. One loop depicts a drive through the muddy countryside, where several boats are marooned on wet grass like toys scattered on an unkempt floor. Another takes the POV of a hiker passing people on a dry California trail. If you score this footage with “86 km,” the effect is contemplative. Set to the tone of “93.3 km,” the placid woodlands seems ripe for a murder plot—and every passing hiker is a suspect.
What’s most interesting about these images is that despite which song is playing, visual perspective is the most potent variable. Video shot from the driver’s seat of a car is overly active and frantic. It asks you to navigate city traffic, to find a parking spot. But the view of a jeweled cityscape or a quilt of grasslands shot from cruising altitude offers remove, calm. You know that you’re in motion, but the miles feel incalculable.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | American Dreams | January 25, 2022 | 7.1 | 573945a0-6957-4a5a-a71f-c2c3c5c42f97 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Recorded in the Tuareg guitarist’s home country over the past five years, these live and alternate takes offer the chance to hear his music in the cultural context in which he forged it. | Recorded in the Tuareg guitarist’s home country over the past five years, these live and alternate takes offer the chance to hear his music in the cultural context in which he forged it. | Mdou Moctar: Niger EP Vol. 1 / Niger EP Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mdou-moctar-niger-ep-vol-1-and-vol-2/ | Niger EP Vol. 1 / Niger EP Vol. 2 | Mdou Moctar’s Niger EP Vol. 1 begins, somewhat incongruously, with the star Tuareg guitarist shredding along to a single tinny drum-machine loop for 13 minutes straight. Moctar is one of the world’s most exciting players, and his improvising on “Imouhar (Drum Machine Version)” is mostly spectacular, diving and pirouetting through a low-slung groove so similar to Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” that you practically expect him to start singing about chopping down mountains with the edge of his hand. Still, 13 minutes is a long time for any soloist to sustain musical interest on their own, especially when the accompaniment has all the rhythmic spark of a karaoke backing track. At times, Moctar seems to be coasting, or casting about for his next move, which he probably is, given that this sounds more like a rehearsal tape than a recording intended for wide release.
As an opening gambit—and followed by another seven minutes of drum-machine jamming on the second track—it gives the false sense that the EP and its companion volume are the sort of releases that will only appeal to the already converted, for whom even the artist’s stray thoughts are worthy of deep investigation. That’s unfortunate, because the two Niger EPs, filled with live and alternate versions of songs from across Moctar’s catalog, recorded in his home country at various dates between 2017 and the present, are otherwise joyous, communal, and inviting, with much more to offer than solitary noodling.
Before touring the world and eventually signing to Matador, Moctar made his living performing at weddings, like many other Tuareg guitarists. Many of the tracks on the EPs were recorded at such celebrations, and the atmosphere of the party seeps in around the edges of the music: a whoop from the assembled crowd, polyrhythmic handclaps keeping time, a nearby vehicle revving up and driving off as a song winds down. For listeners who may never attend a Nigerien wedding, it’s a chance to hear Moctar’s music in the context in which he forged it.
“Iblis Amghar,” which opens Niger EP Vol. 2, is more representative of the records as a whole than the Vol. 1 opener. It strips away the rock drum kit that propels the version Moctar recorded for 2015’s Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, replacing it with sparse hand percussion and claps. Despite the languid arrangement, or because of it, this rendition of “Iblis Amghar” is even more arresting than the studio version. By adorning relatively slow and simple melodies with quick grace notes, Moctar turns his electric guitar into something flickering and unstable, with pitches that seem to warp in and out of each other, changing for slivers of moments before snapping back into their familiar previous shapes.
Some part of the EPs’ magic comes from the recording fidelity itself, which varies significantly from track to track, creating a distinct sonic world for each. “Ibitilan” is scorched with distortion and flecked with raucous crowd noise, giving its pummeling full-band groove a distinctly punk-rock edge. “Chimoumounin” seems to glide on the breeze, its vaporous mix of guitar treble and crash-cymbal shimmer a serendipitous match for its weightlessly ascending chords. As with a particularly musty Grateful Dead bootleg, it’s tough to tell how much of the recording’s uncanny aspect is a deliberate effect of the band versus an accident of the tape. For a listener at home, it doesn’t particularly matter.
Nearly all of the recordings on the two EPs are previously unreleased. Two exceptions are the live versions of “Nakanegh Dich” and “Asditke Akal,” both of which appeared on the deluxe edition of last year’s Afrique Victime. The “Nakanegh Dich” presented here is identical to that earlier version, while “Asditke Akal” gets an additional 30 seconds or so of instrumental introduction that was evidently cut from the tape on the previous release. Given that both the Afrique deluxe edition and the Niger EPs are pitched at completist fans, some of whom will surely buy both, it’s a mild disappointment that those two tracks appear again here. Had Matador focused exclusively on the previously unreleased recordings, which are uniformly excellent, and perhaps cut one or both of the two long drum machine workouts, Niger could have fit snugly onto a single disc.
Though Moctar is thoroughly rooted in traditional Tuareg music, he presents himself to the world as a rock artist—the kind of guy who made a movie inspired by Prince and cites Eddie Van Halen as a major influence. It would be a mistake to hear the raw renditions of the Niger EPs as being somehow truer to the spirit of his music than the auteurist visions on his proper albums, rather than simply presenting another side of his artistry. Take “Layla,” a beautiful song rendered as simply as possible on Niger Vol. 1, with little more than Moctar’s voice and acoustic guitar. The arrangement on Afrique Victime is only marginally more elaborate, but the extra touches matter: swells of noise during the chorus, subtle electric leads, the acoustic guitar recorded closely enough to capture its sparkling, tactile essence. As the Niger EPs demonstrate, a field recorder pointed in the general direction of a band in the middle of a wild party can capture a lot of life. But for some things, you have to head into the studio. | 2022-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 27, 2022 | 6.4 | 5739e4f4-ba48-4add-9812-e171f6b50b48 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
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 cosmic country rockers’ 1969 debut, a strange, short-lived truce in the long battle between hippies and squares. | 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 cosmic country rockers’ 1969 debut, a strange, short-lived truce in the long battle between hippies and squares. | The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-flying-burrito-brothers-the-gilded-palace-of-sin/ | The Gilded Palace of Sin | One of the first times Gram Parsons played an open-mic night at the Palomino, a dive in North Hollywood that, in the late 1960s, was patronized mostly by hippie-hating country-music fans, a bar regular approached him right after his performance. “I want you to meet my three brothers,” the man said to Parsons, who was wearing his favorite pair of satin bell-bottoms and whose chestnut hair was longer than pretty much anyone else’s in the place. “We were gonna kick your ass,” the man continued, “but you can sing real good, so we’ll buy you a beer instead.”
No response could have flattered Gram Parsons more. The grand aim of what he would come to call his “Cosmic American Music”—an aural/spiritual fusion of country, R&B, gospel, rock, and good ol’ Southern charisma—was to find subcutaneous common bonds between people who, on the surface, seemed to be at odds. And in the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War raged and the generation gap widened, that kind of unity was hard to come by. But Parsons sought to bridge divides. He wanted to convince more conservative folks that unshorn draft-dodgers couldn’t be all bad if they could appreciate, say, the bottomless pathos of a George Jones ballad or the glittery grit of Buck Owens. And on the flip side, as the writer John Einarson put in his 2008 book Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons was also interested in “educating the hippie masses on the wealth of wonderfully authentic American music hidden right under their noses.” Parsons had lofty goals for his art. A superstar in his own mind before almost anybody knew who he was, he believed fervently that his Cosmic American Music could deliver nothing short of salvation.
“Cosmic American Music?” Chris Hillman, Parsons’ co-frontman in the first incarnation of the Flying Burrito Brothers, scoffs in Einarson’s book. “What does that mean? It’s the stupidest term I’ve ever heard. It means nothing. It didn’t make any sense then and it still doesn’t. We were just trying to be a country band with a little more backbeat.”
Throw these two perspectives together—the idealist and the pragmatist; the bullshitter visionary and the no-bullshit workhorse—toss in no small amount of drugs, as well as a pedal steel virtuoso who never quit his day job as a claymation animator on Gumby (!), and you get all the tension and late-’60s weirdness that resulted in an imperfectly near-perfect record, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ 1969 cult-favorite country-rock touchstone, The Gilded Palace of Sin.
“Among the worthy, lasting, and influential albums of the last 40 years,” David N. Meyer writes in his 2007 Parsons biography Twenty Thousand Roads, “it’s hard to find one more shoddily produced or sloppily performed than The Gilded Palace of Sin.” That’s quite a claim, to which I could easily throw at least half a dozen counter-examples if I were in the mood to argue (how about every Velvet Underground album and every Beat Happening album, just to start). And although it does have a certain ramshackle energy that suits the band quite well, I’m not here to suggest that the production on Gilded Palace is especially rich. (A&M’s house producer Larry Marks, assigned to helm the debut album of his label’s newest signees, later described his role on Gilded Palace quite humbly, as more of a “hall monitor on the job [to] make sure the album got finished and things didn’t get out of hand.” In that sense at least, mission accomplished.)
But there’s a strange vitality to this record that makes its supposed imperfections feel charming, even meaningful. Many people close to the band believed Marks never got the vocals to sound quite right. Certainly one of the strangest and most polarizing choices he made was, on the many songs that employ the Burritos’ Everly Brothers-inspired two-part harmonies, to split the frontmen’s voices into separate stereo channels: Parsons’ high lonesome drawl on the left, Hillman’s earthy croon on the right—and your impressionable skull in between. But that means listening to the record on headphones gives the intimate and uncanny feeling that you’ve got a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, each murmuring their conflicting advice right into your ears before joining together in the mellifluous conclusion that maybe they’ve both got some pretty good points after all.
Parsons was born, infamously, into a wealthy family that controlled one-third of the citrus crop in Florida. But in the words of a Porter Wagoner classic he’d later cover, one rich man in 10 has a satisfied mind—and not one of them seemed to be in Parsons’ family. Both parents drank prodigiously and neglected their kids’ emotional needs. Parsons’ father killed himself two days before Christmas, when Gram was 12. He left his son a generous but haunting Christmas present: A reel-to-reel tape recorder—a rare thing to own at the time—on which Gram’s father had left a recording telling his son he’d always love him. For a young Parsons, the table was set for recording and self-documentation to become a lifelong repository of unbearable pain and vulnerability.
Around the same time, across the country in San Diego County, Hillman’s idyllic middle-class childhood had become saturated with cowboy imagery and country music. He learned to play mandolin as a teenager and gigged with bluegrass bands like the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and the Hillmen. But then Hillman’s own father died when he was 16, and unlike Parsons, that meant he had to transfer to night school and work a day job to help support the family. From that divide came the lopsided work ethic that would later define their band.
In mid-1968, though, Parsons and Hillman found themselves with quite a bit in common. They’d both just exited serious relationships and they’d both quit the same band, the Byrds. Hillman had been a Byrd since his late teens, and he’d been around for the band’s sudden success. Parsons was a late-comer. His stint in the group lasted less than a year, but he had helped steer them in a new, countrified direction on 1968’s prescient country-rock landmark Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn was never sure that was the right direction—“He turned out to be a monster in sheep’s clothing,” he notoriously said of Parsons, “And he exploded out of that sheep’s clothing. Good God! It’s George Jones in a sequin suit!”—but now in their own band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons and Hillman were finally free to be as twangy as they damn well pleased.
One of the first and finest songs they wrote together was “Sin City,” a mournful ballad that blends Biblical imagery and vivid psychedelia; a smoggy cast of late-’60s-California impending doom holds the whole thing together. “This whole town’s filled with sin, it’ll swallow you in, if you’ve got some money to burn,” the boys begin in tandem. In this song at least, “Sin City” is not the town of latter-day Elvis and roulette tables, but Los Angeles, the dreamscape that each of them had migrated to, hoping in vain to satisfy their earthly desires.
Parsons and Hillman wouldn’t always get along—but they did then. When they were writing some of the songs that would appear on Gilded Palace of Sin, Hillman described them as “two heartbroken bachelor guys sharing a house together.” They rented a three-bedroom rancher in Reseda, far enough from the Sunset Strip to stay focused on writing and relatively out of trouble. Hillman has called it the most creatively productive time of his and Parsons’ lives. “We woke up in the morning and would write as opposed to the usual being out until five in the morning,” he said. “We were writing every day on a spontaneous schedule. I’ve never peaked like that, working with other people.”
With Parsons and Hillman both playing rhythm guitar and splitting up lead vocals, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ sound had room for a lead instrument. Enter “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, a visual effects animator who moonlit around L.A.’s country bar circuit as a well-respected pedal-steel player. He joined the Burritos shortly before they hit the studio in late 1968. (Among many, many other surprising claims to fame, Sneaky Pete wrote the original, distinctly psychedelic Gumby theme song.) Parsons and Hillman had both wanted Kleinow to join the Byrds on the Sweetheart tour, and McGuinn’s refusal was one of the many reasons they both left. Putting such emphasis on Kleinow’s instrument was certainly a gamble. To rock audiences of the time, pedal-steel was the cilantro in the soup—a single element with the dubious potential to overpower everything. Its horizontal frame and tumbleweed wail connoted country conservatism strongly enough to disrupt the delicate balance of opposites the Burritos were trying to achieve.
But, as it takes a certain unbridled mind to look at an emerald glob of clay and bring forth Gumby, “Sneaky” Pete was no ordinary pedal-steel player. He used unique, unorthodox tunings and ran his instrument through a fuzz-box as though it were an electric guitar. The 16-track console at A&M Studios allowed Sneaky to experiment with space and time more than he ever could on stage, overdubbing lacerating licks and layered textures at the forefront of songs like “Christine’s Tune” and “Hot Burrito #2.” “Country is a music of traditional forms; Sneaky Pete played a classically country instrument in an entirely new way,” Meyer notes. His distinct signature blazes through Gilded Palace of Sin like wildfire.
Mississippi-born bassist Chris Ethridge rounded out the band’s original lineup. (They had trouble finding a drummer in the beginning, and a handful of different session players contributed to Gilded Palace.) He, too, was a fruitful writing partner for Parsons: Together they composed two of the record’s most beloved songs, “Hot Burrito #1” and “Hot Burrito #2.” (“I don’t know why we called them that, as a matter of fact,” Ethridge told Einarson. “We did consider other titles.”) The Burrito suite contains Parsons’ only solo lead vocals on the album, and taken together they’re two sides of the same coin—the glinting fool’s gold of human desire.
“Hot Burrito #1” is a swooning, barroom-piano ballad that Parsons animates with a wrenching vocal performance. “I’m your toy, I’m your old boy, but I don’t want no one but you to love me,” he croons, grasping in the direction of something—someone—just out of reach. It is sad-boy canon, so much so that Elvis Costello later added it to his repertoire. Then a song later—as Ethridge’s melodic bassline kicks off “Hot Burrito #2”—he’s got the girl he wanted and now he’s restless as hell, dissatisfied with the sudden demands of domestic life. “When I come home/Carrying my shoes/I’ve been waiting/To tell you some news… And you want me home all night?!” he hollers, in passionate disbelief. It would seem that the burrito is always hotter on the other side.
For a wannabe rock star, Parsons innately understood the power of spectacle. Before the album cover shoot, he took the band to be outfitted for custom Nudie Suits, by the legendary country-spangled tailor Nudie Cohn. Each member’s outfit reflected something of his personality: Hillman looks regal, if a little stiff, in blue velvet, Ethridge plays Southern gentleman in a long floral-embroidered jacket, Sneaky Pete asked for a velvet sweatshirt with a huge pterodactyl on it, because why not. The pièce de résistance was Parsons, who, ever the purveyor of self-mythology, requested a personalized collage of all his vices: Marijuana leaves, pills, pin-up girls, and sugar cubes dotted with acid proudly besmirch the pure white sleeves of his suit.
One good thing about discovering Gilded Palace of Sin long after its 1969 release is that it was not really one of those “you had to be there and see ’em live” things. By most accounts, you did not. “I cannot recall one performance that the original band did where I wasn’t embarrassed to tears,” Sneaky Pete told an interviewer in 1999. It was difficult to replicate all those pedal-steel overdubs on stage, yes. But also quite often various band members would be… well, “high” goes without saying, but sometimes high on different drugs, which makes staying in rhythm a real adventure. (A coked-up lead singer and a bassist on downers is what we call a complicated time signature.) This original incarnation of the Burritos was generally a mess on the road, which did not do much to put them in their label’s good graces. Slashed promotional budgets followed, and though it earned some critical acclaim and coveted co-signs (“Boy, I love them,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone, “Their record instantly knocked me out”), Gilded Palace sold only about 40,000 copies in its first run and peaked at No. 164 on the Billboard chart.
When he co-founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons already had a reputation for leapfrogging unceremoniously from band to band. He left the International Submarine Band before their first album even came out to join the more successful Byrds, and an accelerating factor in his abrupt departure from the Byrds was the fact that he’d suddenly befriended members of the even-cooler Rolling Stones. When Gilded Palace flopped and it became clear that the Flying Burrito Brothers weren’t going to be his ticket to overnight stardom, he veered sharply into self-sabotage until, inevitably, Hillman kicked him out of the band. They continued releasing tighter, if less soulful, records with various revolving-door lineups; a version of the band with no original members and only vague connections to the original name is still making music. Parsons’ drug problems, on the other hand, worsened. He continued to live hard, fast, and impatiently; he died of a morphine overdose in a Joshua Tree motel room when he was just 26.
“How can you compete with a dead guy?” future Eagle Bernie Leadon, who joined the Burrito Brothers before their much lesser second album, 1970’s Burrito Deluxe, asks in Einarson’s book. “You just can’t. It’s the martyr thing. Gram fell on his sword so he’s a dead hero.” It is certainly true that there is a particular and very specifically annoying type of Gram Parsons Dude out there, who glorifies Parsons’ drug use, mythologizes his callous behavior and trust fund, probably rides an expensive motorcycle and thinks it’s really cool that some of Parsons’ friends stole his corpse and lit it on fire in the desert to let his spirit fly free of his body or something. (Admittedly, I think it is kind of cool that they did that. Fucked-up, but cool.)
Gilded Palace of Sin would not exist without Chris Hillman, and for that he deserves infinite credit. It was no small feat to keep Gram Parsons out of his own way for a few focused months in the fall of 1968; the unfortunate failures and tantalizing what-if’s that marked the rest of his recording career are a testament to that. But it’s also true that on this wonderful record Parsons is clearly able to access a current of emotion and vulnerability that still remained elusive to Hillman. “They did the same thing,” Byrds producer Jim Dickson reflects in Meyer’s biography, “but Gram was willing to put feeling into his songs and Chris never was.”
Such opposing forces were destined to fall out of balance, but frozen in time on this record, they hold each other in check. Perhaps because Gilded Palace did not become successful enough to remain forever tied to a certain cultural moment, something about it feels enduringly present-tense. Plenty has been said about this album’s influence on the country-rock of the ’70s and the alt-country boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but I perceive its echoes in even more recent events. In Post Malone’s penchant for unholy Nudie Suits, sure. But also in Kacey Musgraves’ embrace of psychedelia to blur the edges of country on her 2018 masterpiece Golden Hour, and even in Lil Nas X’s bold stare-down with the gatekeepers of country-music purity until they realized he wasn’t bluffing. What is “Old Town Road” if not the 21st-century embodiment of Cosmic American Music?
Parsons’ mid-’70s solo records, GP and the posthumously released Grievous Angel, have an almost talismanic power, but when listening to them it is difficult to forget that you are hearing someone who is slowly dying. Such is their cult appeal. Gilded Palace of Sin is different: Thanks to the stabilizing forces that temporarily surrounded Parsons, it is a snapshot of a more lighthearted and hopeful moment of possibility. The last track on the record, “Hippie Boy,” captures that. It is at once the least and most serious song in the Flying Burrito Brothers’ arsenal—a spoken-word imagined conversation between a long-haired youth and the sort of seemingly close-minded guy Parsons might have encountered at the Palomino bar. Hillman plays both parts, though Parsons directed him accordingly (“He has to drink a fifth of scotch before he does it to feel the whole thing,” he insisted at the time. “He can’t smoke an ounce of grass.”) “Hippie Boy” is a utopian vision of togetherness, so sincere it has to be played a bit ironically. As the song, and the record, concludes, a drunken chorus of off-key voices join together to sing a few quick lines of the old hymn “Peace in the Valley.” It’s a beautifully stirring moment, and it ends too soon. The cosmic promise of a better world streaks momentarily across the sky, and then in an instant it’s gone.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | A&M | May 9, 2021 | 9 | 57460eb7-72a4-49a5-853b-920f8e63685d | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ |
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