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This instant cult classic returns in a lavish deluxe edition complete with bonus material, commemorative playing cards, and yes, a lunchbox. | This instant cult classic returns in a lavish deluxe edition complete with bonus material, commemorative playing cards, and yes, a lunchbox. | MF DOOM: Operation: Doomsday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15359-operation-doomsday/ | Operation: Doomsday | Whether a classic archetype like Superman or a self-fashioned alter ego like Bobby Digital, embodying a comic-book figure holds a large appeal in hip-hop, an art form driven by mythology and boasting of superhuman capability. But Daniel Dumile might be the only rapper who based his persona on a supervillain whose origin story sounds uncannily like his own. To recap: While a promising student at Empire State University, Fantastic Four nemesis Victor Von Doom conducted experiments attempting to communicate with the dead, and a resulting explosion completely deformed his face. After roaming the world and studying under monks in Tibet, he built a suit of armor with a matching mask to protect him as he sought the destruction of those at fault for his disfigurement.
Meanwhile, Dumile, then known as Zev Love X in early-90s rap group K.M.D., suffered the loss of his brother and musical partner DJ Subroc, who was hit by a car. That same week, K.M.D. were dropped from their label when the cover art of their Black Bastards LP proved controversial. Retreating from hip-hop completely, Dumile plotted his revenge on an industry that had broken him spiritually. This meant performing in lyricist lounges with his face completely obscured; all the while, his legend grew as bootleg copies of Black Bastards make the rounds. Then, in 1999, after the release of a couple of singles on Bobbito's Fondle 'Em Records, came Operation: Doomsday, an instant cult classic that now gets a well-curated and altogether fun reissue courtesy of MF Doom's own Metal Face label.
Doomsday was birthed at a pivotal point in rap's trajectory-- at the height of the record industry's boom years. Bad Boy's commercial reign was giving purists plenty to carp over, but it still had crate-digging production and New York rappers in its midst. But soon after, rawer collectives like Ruff Ryders and Ca$h Money subsequently took hip-hop to a more hedonistic, nihilistic, and violent place, with Swizz Beatz, Mannie Fresh, the Neptunes, and Timbaland commandeering a clean break from traditionalist, sample-based production. This opened a lane for underground crews who often defined themselves in opposition of these artists: Anticon and Def Jux sought to completely dismantle hip-hop with abrasive sonics and intimidatingly dense lyrics, while Rawkus and Okayplayer had the magnetic personalities and smooth musicianship to be inside operatives potentially bringing mainstream rap to a more positive place.
On the title track, Doom announces his intent instead to "destroy rap." Operation: Doomsday doesn't sound like much of a manifesto, though: You may have come for the street cred, but you didn't stay for any hang-ups about authenticity or the state of the genre. That's mostly due to the sonic template established here, chunky and proudly un-quantized drums meeting samples you might hear at your dentist's office or on hold with your cable company: saxes, flutes, and smooth, vintage synths. While the autumnal, twinkling backdrops of "Doomsday" or the Coral Sitar-laced "Red and Gold" wouldn't upset tables at your local coffee shop, they provide a truly symbiotic relationship with the paradoxically gruff and calm persona Doom manifests here, where the villainy is more implied than anything.
In fact, for an album that introduced the Metal Face alter ego, it's his warmest and most benevolent work, almost entirely bled of the angrier material that would mark future releases. If anything, Doom is still in mourning here, and there's a palpable sense of loss that rears itself sporadically: Doom imagines rejoining his brother in a tomb "either unmarked or engraved" and holds a seance with Subroc on "?". For an MC not associated with emotional bloodletting, this record has some astounding moments.
If you're familiar only with Doom's post-Madvillainy work, it might be a jolt to hear just how lighthearted this sounds otherwise: Doom sounds surprisingly young, with a sprightly bounce to his muddy rush of words, and the song structures are among his most traditional. Whether it's the entire-verse hook of "Rhymes Like Dimes", Doom and Tommy Gunn flowing like blood brothers on "The Finest", or the Monsta Island Czars posse cut "Who You Think I Am?", Doomsday is above all else an extremely accessible album. In most ways, Doomsday doesn't work on a heady plane: Topically, the majority of it centers around mic skills, women, stick-ups, and alcohol. Though you're never too far removed from a dazzling run of internal rhymes or an "oh shit!" pop-culture namedrop, there's no rhymin' for the sake of riddlin'. Doom's technique, vocabulary, and knack for trivia never asks that you come away impressed. He approaches lyrics the same way he does beats, unearthing gems hidden in plain sight, completely legible without a quick check of Google or Roget's.
Doomsday is often held up as Doom's masterpiece, in part because it's a beachhead upon which he'd begin an astonishing five-year run: as King Gheedorah, 2003's Take Me to Your Leader was a more prominent display of his production prowess, while in terms of sheer lyrical mastery, Vaudeville Villain has few peers. And of course, there's Madvillainy, his crowning achievement. Doomsday does have its imperfections and perhaps more than the LPs to follow. Some of its minor flaws can be read as lo-fi charm, the droning wheezes of Scooby-Doo flip "Hey" bleeding into the red, and the "slow it up, speed it up" gimmick of "Tick, Tick..." outstaying its welcome. And of course, there are the skits and the guest appearances from his Monsta Island Czar crew, which are charming but have little replay value.
The album goes a long way toward demonstrating Doom's incalculable influence on some of the leading lights of current underground hip-hop: Lil B has dedicated an entire album to Doom, the lurching production style of Odd Future owes him a heavy debt (most obviously shown in "Odd Toddlers" flipping the same sample as 2004's "One Beer"), and K.M.D.'s referential raps and playful yet incisive deconstructions of racial politics are a clear influence on Das Racist.
And while Doomsday is a must-hear in just about any format, I can't give enough credit to Metal Face for the actual packaging of the Deluxe Edition. If there's any feeling of sticker shock, you are definitely not simply rebuying a record. The collection of bonus tracks and beats might get a one-time tryout by non-obsessives, but the lunchbox and commemorative playing cards included here are beautifully designed collectors items that justify the purchase price. The coolest inclusion, though, is what brought us here in the first place: the lyrics, fully transcribed and collected with comic sketches and new artwork. Appropriately, the thing is so thick it barely fits into the CD case. | 2011-04-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-04-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Metalface | April 25, 2011 | 8.9 | 58d772c6-43d7-463e-b24a-ad19fd50502f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The divisive pop star still gets bogged down in melancholy, but the charm of Post Malone’s third album is in his versatile voice and his ability to make a great hook inside pretty much any song. | The divisive pop star still gets bogged down in melancholy, but the charm of Post Malone’s third album is in his versatile voice and his ability to make a great hook inside pretty much any song. | Post Malone: Hollywood’s Bleeding | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/post-malone-hollywoods-bleeding/ | Hollywood’s Bleeding | Nothing about Post Malone suggests “career pop musician” but that is exactly what he has become. Speaking purely in numbers, he’s just about the most ubiquitous pop musician alive: His songs multiply in the culture right now like kudzu or prairie dogs. He takes Jimmy Fallon to the Olive Garden and Medieval Times; he sells his own limited-edition Crocs. He emerges from Rolls Royce crashes unscathed and touches cursed objects on episodes of Ghost Adventures. Pop music is a little bit like Post Malone’s very own Hanna-Barbera cartoon right now, and he is somehow both Shaggy and Scooby.
There are plenty of valid reasons to bemoan his dominance. He is kind of a sentient keg stand; he has a pretty lazy and unexamined relationship with hip-hop; there is strong evidence that he might not exactly be the sort of person who thinks through his actions. But if you can wriggle free from all that for just a moment, there is a lot to appreciate in his music. There could be, and have been, far worse pop hegemonies, and in a few years, when his cherubic-face-tatted mug has receded somewhat, the virtues of his music will become more apparent.
Yes, the lyrics can be infuriatingly lazy, particularly when he’s tracing over hip-hop tropes about the Mille on his wrist or the 50 carats on his fist. But Post Malone’s choruses are just stupefyingly good. Each one sounds like it could furnish a down payment on a personal helipad. Hollywood’s Bleeding has about 10 titanium-grade hooks on it, choruses so immediate they erect stadiums in your head while they play—“I’m Gonna Be,” “Staring at the Sun,” “Allergic,” Enemies,” “Myself,” “Wow.” He seems to almost belch these out: “Got so many hits, can’t remember ’em all/While I’m taking a shit, look at the plaques on the wall,” he yawns charmingly on “On the Road.” “Sunflower,” his Swae Lee duet that hit No. 1 at the beginning of this year, shows up again outside of last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack, and its presence here among all these other soon-to-be Top 10 hits feels almost like arm-twisting. We get it.
He is also a sneakily agile singer, switching from red-faced howling to smoky crooning to something warbly and strange in between these two poles. He uses all three of those voices plus a surprisingly lithe falsetto on “Allergic,” which features a chorus that feels like a down-the-middle split between 2003 Fall Out Boy, 2002 Weezer, and 1983 Billy Joel. It is an immaculate pop construction, and the words—“You’re friends with all my demons/The only one that sees them/Too bad for you”—are just delivery systems for the thrill.
Post’s music comes from that zone of confusion where hip-hop and alternative rock overlap. Artists keep wandering out of this spot, which widens every year, but it’s hard to imagine the vortex producing someone as ready for algorithmic dominion than Post. Depending on how hard you squint, his music sounds alternately and suspiciously like Stone Temple Pilots or Sugar Ray or Everlast or Rae Sremmurd or Def Leppard or Tame Impala. The team behind this sound—a chewed-up ball of the last 25 years of rap and rock radio—consists of Louis Bell, Frank Dukes, and Post. Together, they made most of the brightest and most memorable tracks on last year’s Beerbongs & Bentleys, and having established their winning formula, they work it relentlessly on Hollywood. There is no streaming playlist he could not plausibly land on.
There are two kinds of Post Malone songs: Useful and Not Useful. Post Malone’s best and dumbest songs (usually one and the same) are intriguing for the appealing note of panic in them: He might have been singing “She got beautiful boobies” but the way he sang it, it sounded like secret code for Please, the combination to the safe, they have my family. This is Useful Posty, and there is a lot of UP ROI on Hollywood’s Bleeding. “I’m Gonna Be” is a standard inspirational “be yourself” anthem on paper, but Post bellows the hook with a conviction that suggests a trap production of the musical Cats. He sings the hook to “Internet” with the same lunatic gusto—the message is “the internet sucks lol” but he and co-writer Kanye make it sound like a luxury ocean liner going down.
Moody Posty, by contrast, is not Useful Posty. On the title track, he moans about his demons and wonders who will be at his funeral; nobody needs melancholy despair from the guy who headlined a Bud Light Dive Bar Tour. There are too many brooding fashion-plate numbers in general (“Die for Me,” “On the Road”) and they bog the album down. The aforementioned “Circles” is kind of pretty, kind of smooth, kind of sad. It is not a vehicle for Useful Posty: It sounds like a demo that someone meant to hand directly to Sheryl Crow and accidentally sent to Bobcat Goldthwait. His hair sounds combed. Washed, even.
When he’s not wasting time trying to glower, he proves himself surprisingly versatile. “Myself” is a co-write with Father John Misty, of all goddamn people, a wry song about not being about to slow down to appreciate the spoils of success—or, to hear Post tell it, “We slammed butts and Bud Lights to write a cool, top-down, summer cruising song about doing all this shit, being everywhere, but not having the time to fully enjoy it.” Post’s silly-putty voice twists once more until, voila, somehow he’s dirtbag Randy Newman, cruising through the perverse California night. His voice is both malleable and unruly—just as Led Zeppelin attempting reggae somehow managed to sound just like Led Zeppelin, Posty sounds Post-y no matter where you put him.
There are a lot of guests on Hollywood’s Bleeding, and all of them sound engaged; when you are this famous, artists tend to give you their first verse, not their fifth or 10th. Rising star DaBaby crushes his turn on “Enemies”; Halsey, on the otherwise drab “Die for Me," breaks into her boyfriend’s phone, finds all the girls in his DMs, and takes them all home. And then there is the power ballad “Take What You Want,” featuring Travis Scott and Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne sounds pristine and ageless as always; his towering vocals seem teleported directly from the same studio session as “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Post takes over the hook from Osbourne the second time around, and he holds his own against the cyclone of his vocal take—remarkable, considering that by the time the song is over, you have forgotten Travis Scott existed at all. And then: a guitar solo. Not any guitar solo, but one so ludicrous it needs a rider stating it can only be played while straddling twin burning Camaros. It is screamingly wretched and undeniably mind-blowing and the most fascinating musical decision I have heard on a pop song all year.
It makes me think about Rick Ross circa 2010, happy and audacious, enlisting full symphony orchestras for him to rap over, but not before demanding a cigar. There is no one else on earth who would attempt to put such a thing on a pop album destined to break streaming records. These moments—when he dares to suck, gloriously and bravely—is when Post Malone ascends. | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | September 10, 2019 | 6.8 | 58db4138-1cb5-4978-a72f-c42f77a0e732 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Only four months after his exceptional major label debut Islah, Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates returns with a mixtape that plays like a compilation of B-sides or outtakes from the Islah sessions. | Only four months after his exceptional major label debut Islah, Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates returns with a mixtape that plays like a compilation of B-sides or outtakes from the Islah sessions. | Kevin Gates: Murder for Hire 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21957-murder-for-hire-2/ | Murder for Hire 2 | Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates is relentless, both in style and in work ethic. He’s released his latest mixtape, Murder For Hire 2, only four months after his exceptional major label debut, Islah, which is quietly one of the best-selling rap albums of the year thus far, and clearly among the best-made ones. Gates took a sideways route to commercial success, amassing a devoted cult following through his plainspoken and unflinchingly honest raps and a prickly online presence that’s just as confounding. “You know I got a lot of record labels tryin' to sign me / They say if I'm a risk, it's detrimental to the profit,” he rapped on Murder For Hire closer “Khaza.” But his antics haven’t even moderately budged the bottom line, and this sequel is further evidence of a winning formula: stay true to yourself and deliver a reliable product.
Murder For Hire 2 serves as both a true followup to its predecessor and an Islah epilogue. There are lots of similar flourishes to the latter—haunting piano keys, dips into gravelly singsong, and some dynamic cadences—but it models the former’s loose structure, playing like a compilation of B-sides or outtakes from the Islah sessions. Even so, it’s quite a formidable collection of records with some of the rapper’s most forceful and vital flows. Over time, Gates has slowly grown as comfortable in his stylistic tendencies as he is in his own skin; he knows exactly what a good Kevin Gates song sounds like and the specific set of ingredients that go into making one. His acute eye for detail is as effective reliving addiction (“Great Example”) as it is recounting old gun fights.
“Off Da Meter” finds Gates at his most complex, measuring his rising fame against the sadness set upon him by a grief-stricken life (In the hook, he sings, “Getting 50 Gs a feature, my show price is going up / Hard to deal with this depression lately I've been throwing up” before later delivering the equally complicated appraisal: “God love his children, he's awesome / He sent me an angel who's flawless / Got shot in my mouth in '05 / Knocked out my teeth, it was awful”). Kevin Gates is often best playing the fragile thug, letting his shortcomings manifest as bite-sized ugly truths in passing, and on MFH2 he plays up this dichotomy. “The Prayer,” aptly produced by the Villains, revisits facing 25-to-life as a 25-year-old hustler, chastising the futility of “internet beef” in the process. On “Lil Nigga,” a song devoted to camaraderie, he professes his affection for those in his inner circle, then, within seconds, he tracks down and nabs the man that shot him, dispensing his own brand of street justice. He tightropes the divide between hardcore goon and thoughtful companion better than any of his peers, even making the gap indistinguishable at times. "Believe in Me" is vintage Kevin Gates: raw to the point of being tender and exposed.
The hooks aren't quite as catchy or well-written on Murder For Hire 2 as they have been in recent months, and he phones it in on "Fuck It," which repurposes OT Genasis' "Cut It" into a rather bland and affectless replica, but overall the tape is a welcome addition to the Gates canon. It works well as a snack-sized accompaniment to the bigger prize. Just because Gates is only a few months removed from the biggest success of his career doesn’t mean there’s even the slightest chance that he plans on slowing down. “Moving on, better thoughts, cleaner weed, cleaner living / Kitchen bags at the cleaners, even made a cleaner killing,” he raps on “Showin' Up,” continuing to push onward and upward, carrying his momentum forward. He’s an unstoppable force with an indomitable will, and he’s on the verge of becoming rap’s brightest sleeper star. | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bread Winners’ Association | May 31, 2016 | 7.4 | 58e0d24d-6ff3-491e-90f8-ed786f58f308 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The beloved Arizona emo band’s latest is a solid, self-aware effort, missing only a few risks. | The beloved Arizona emo band’s latest is a solid, self-aware effort, missing only a few risks. | Jimmy Eat World: Surviving | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jimmy-eat-world-surviving/ | Surviving | Surviving is apt. Formed in 1993, and featuring the same core members since ’95, Jimmy Eat World has enjoyed a course marked by steady output, frequent touring and quiet durability. As luck would have it, they’ve hung on long enough to find themselves releasing their 10th studio album just as emo nostalgia reaches its zenith. Surviving is both occasion for a survey of the beloved Arizona band’s two-decade-plus career and a further push into arena rock; a driving, if not always transportative, selection that should tour favorably.
Their latest reunites them with Justin Meldal-Johnsen, the producer for M83 and decades-long live bassist for Beck who worked on their triumphant last album, 2016’s Integrity Blues. On Surviving, the producer guides the band’s instincts towards a heavier sound, letting noise from their guitars and Zach Lind’s drums decay. Meldal-Johnsen addresses lacunae in frontman Jim Adkins’ operative knowledge of synth sounds, as on the U2-evocative “555,” an album outlier which features some Fitz and the Tantrums-like hand-clapping. James King, co-founding member of Fitz, shows up for a saxophone solo on “All The Way (Stay),” just like he did on the Meldal-Johnsen-produced M83 sparkler “Midnight City.” Longtime collaborator and former touring member Rachel Haden, of that dog., contributes backing vocals. The track, which considers staying away from the party rather than at it (“Who really says they hope they’ll meet ‘the one’ for the first time at a bar drinking early?”) is one of the more personal allusions to recovery from addiction that Adkins, sober for six years, ventures here.
Lyrically, Surviving is as sincere as their past efforts but less specific. “You’re not alone in pain/Never alone in pain,” Adkins sings on the album’s title track. The band’s shortest LP to date, Surviving moves at a quick clip, losing some of the polish from their last outing with Meldal-Johnsen. They’re conscious when they sound too slick for their own good: The opening acoustic guitar riff on “One Mil” was recorded on Adkins’ iPhone mic in his garage. AFI frontman Davey Havok, who appears on the album finale “Congratulations,” also appears via iPhone.
“There’s no clarity in front of me,” Adkins sings on that song, which serves as a sort of curtain call. At six minutes, it somehow still feels a little short. It’s hard to imagine this iteration of J.E.W. recording another “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” that loitering Clarity closer that would take up nearly half of their latest album’s length. By Surviving’s terminus, listeners might find themselves wanting more risks. But the album on the whole is a solid, self-aware addition to Jimmy Eat World’s catalog, and if the band’s modest strivers’ outlook has proved anything, it’s that there will be another. A band whose biggest song is against writing oneself off always has work to do.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | October 26, 2019 | 6.9 | 58e1cbbb-4e74-4195-93a9-117fdbf48e2a | Thora Siemsen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thora-siemsen/ | |
Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the married Montreal duo explore themes of addiction, loss, and identity in cinematically tinged coldwave. | Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the married Montreal duo explore themes of addiction, loss, and identity in cinematically tinged coldwave. | Essaie Pas: New Path | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/essaie-pas-new-path/ | New Path | After his fourth wife left him, in 1970, Philip K. Dick spent several years in his California home living semi-communally with a rotating cast of mostly teenage drug users and ingesting heavy amounts of amphetamines. These experiences inspired the sci-fi author’s 1977 opus A Scanner Darkly, which envisioned a not-so-distant, dystopian Orange County, featuring a corporate-run rehab center called New-Path. For their second album on DFA, New Path, the Montreal husband-and-wife electronic duo Essaie Pas draw on the novel’s themes, including addiction, loss, and identity, while venturing down previously unexplored sonic corridors.
Although a knowledge of the source material (or Richard Linklater’s 2006 film adaptation, starring a rotoscoped Keanu Reeves) isn’t essential to unpacking the follow-up to Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau’s 2016 LP, Demain Est Une Autre Nuit, its depiction of a paranoid society in the throes of a national drug crisis seems grimly prescient today. The pair have said in interviews that their own and loved ones’ past struggles with substance abuse made it easy to relate to the book’s weighty topics. Subsequently, the six tracks here frequently capture the feelings of claustrophobia and despair associated with a bad trip, using unrelenting percussion, twitchy analog synths, and half-French, half-English incantations.
After working on separate projects for the past year—Guerineau has produced for Montreal acts including Bernardino Femminielli, Pelada, and Sleazy (Davidson and Ginger Breaker)—they’ve brought what they’ve learned back to their own lab. Compared to their previous record, and Davidson’s excellent club-oriented solo effort Adieux Au Dancefloor (released on Veronica Vasicka’s Cititrax sublabel), New Path finds them taking a more experimental approach to song structures. Half the tracks clock in at over six minutes, allowing the duo to build and sustain tension, and occasionally to pull their compositions apart to see how they work, like engineers with a circuit board. More than ever, there’s a cinematic quality to their music, whether in the pulsating chase-scene techno of “Substance M” or the uneasy, string-laden “Futur Parlé.” “Les agents des stups” (“Narcotics Officer”) recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal Good Time soundtrack, layering oscillating synths, whirring sirens, and unidentifiable all-points bulletins into a frenetic seven-minute centerpiece.
What sets Essaie Pas apart from their coldwave contemporaries is their ability to find moments of levity within the darkness. Similar to Davidson’s motorik collaboration with the London-based producer Not Waving, the hallucinatory standout “Complet Brouillé” counterbalances her ominous proclamations (“I don’t expect to live long”) with echoing laughter and distorted dial tones. The biggest departure for the duo is the ambient title track, which recreates dialogue spoken by the novel’s protagonist, Bob Arctor, after being transferred to a farming facility and put to work. While the monologue, made all the more disorienting here by its text-to-speech rendition, is delivered by a character who’s lost his friends and sanity due to drugs, it’s also tangible and vulnerable. Bird chirps creep in toward the song’s closing, but it’s too late for him to hear them.
While New Path is hardly the first album inspired by Dick’s futuristic worlds—genre-diverse artists such as Bloc Party, Gary Numan, and Janelle Monáe have referenced the prolific author in their songs—it is perhaps the one with the timeliest message. “There’s no guide or easy way to deal with such heavy realities, but as they’re rooted [in] our human condition, the least we can do is to acknowledge them,” Guerineau said in a Noisey interview. Beyond simply making surface references to scramble suits and fields of blue flowers, Essaie Pas connect to something deeper—real human emotion. | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | March 16, 2018 | 7.7 | 58e3426e-5a4b-4f3e-a389-8575795016ed | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
Luaka Bop compiles "the funky, fuzzy sounds of West Africa." | Luaka Bop compiles "the funky, fuzzy sounds of West Africa." | Various Artists: World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing; the Funky, Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2083-world-psychedelic-classics-3-loves-a-real-thing-the-funky-fuzzy-sounds-of-west-africa/ | World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing; the Funky, Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa | Without West African music, we wouldn't have pop as we know it. The rhythms of African traditional music and the storytelling craft of traveling griots-- relatives of the early bluesmen-- form a huge part of the ancestral basis for jazz, blues, and, by extension, rock'n'roll, reggae, and all of their modern counterparts. The modern world is a cultural vortex, sweeping disparate strands into new forms, and in the 20th century all of the musical descendants of Africa's rhythmic past-- originally spread through scattered Diaspora by the slave trade-- came flooding back to Africa cross-pollinated with European compositional traditions. In the wake of independence, many young musicians felt the need to break free from the styles their parents had danced to and invent something of their own. It was the 1960s, and ample inspiration flowed in on vinyl from the West, as did instruments, amplifiers, and recording equipment.
Psychedelia, soul, and funk are words we use to broadly describe music, but they're almost intentionally open-ended-- and all three were global phenomena in the 1960s and 70s. African musicians reared on highlife and Cuban rhumba considered them as a unified palette, drawing freely from each as well as their own traditions to create the styles we know today-- Afrobeat, mbalax, soukous, benga, mbaqanga, and so on. The variety of sounds is staggering, and most of it is still waiting to be discovered outside of Africa. With such a huge amount of music and so little means of hearing it, we have to turn to compilations to help us find our way into it and thankfully the range of choices is currently growing steadily.
The latest chance to get your feet wet comes courtesy of David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, in the third installment of their excellent World Psychedelic Classics series and the first to feature a range of artists rather than focusing on just one. Love's a Real Thing draws from across West Africa, focusing on the thrilling juncture of Africa's musical history where experimentation was the rule and Africa, unbeknownst to most Westerners, experienced its own psychedelic era, complete with attendant social upheaval, flared pants, fluorescent colors, odd hairdos, and generation gap. The songs here run a good gamut from the relatively conservative Afro-Cuban groove of No. 1 de No. 1 (the name presumably means "best of the best") to the flailing, heavy acid-funk of Ofo the Black Company.
The disc starts with a single smack of a snare drum, which sets Orchestra Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou Dahomey's "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome" off and running with snaking guitars and jerking rhythms. Benin's best musical export are credited here without the "T.P." prefix they usually affixed to their name, an acronym for "tout pouissant," French for "all-mighty" and not at all a misnomer. Unlike most Afropop compilations, which tend to focus on one country or a specific sound, this one revels in veering back and forth between Anglo and Francophone countries, tossing heavy funk in with British Invasion-tinged soul and conga-heavy neo-traditional psych in an intentional display of stylistic breadth.
They've dug up some real gems, too, such as the title track, by Gambia's Super Eagles, a ripping soul/Britpop song full of sinewy guitar lines and dueling lead vocalists. Moussa Doumbia's "Keleya" takes the organ-heavy sound of the Malian hotel bands and throttles it with a gruff vocal attack, while Sorry Bamba's "Porry" is a brilliant, spacious Saharan riff on Cuban son, swimming in organ and stately Andalusian horns. Cameroon's Manu Dibango is an African funk superstar, but the track they've chosen here, the closing theme to his soundtrack for the Senegalese film Ceddo, is an odd, inspired choice, surrounding traditional African marimba with a slow funk burn for an ultimately majestic instrumental. Nigerian William Onyeabor's "Better Change Your Mind" is a synth-slathered prog-funk killer whose title refers not to changing an opinion so much as an entire mindset, reaching for a decidedly flower power-ish ideal of international harmony and cooperation.
Even with all the variety, there's not a weak selection here, nor anything that feels out of place. A glorious eclecticism is one of the defining characteristics of African popular music in its 1970s golden era, so it's entirely appropriate for a compilation like this to turn on a dime with every track. Beyond that, this offers plenty of other accoutrements like informative liner notes and a multimedia video for "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome", not to mention the fact that only two of these songs are currently in print anywhere else. Simply put, this is a fantastic introduction to a broad range of vintage West African sounds, and one that's likely to please both devoted followers of African music and curiosity-seekers alike. | 2005-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | V2 / Luaka Bop | May 3, 2005 | 8.5 | 58f0fdbf-b19d-4e51-9781-1acfaaa58d3b | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The solo debut from folk singer Alexandra Sauser-Monnig reveals her effortless skill as a songwriter as she delivers an homage to the betwixt and between of a relationship in its twilight. | The solo debut from folk singer Alexandra Sauser-Monnig reveals her effortless skill as a songwriter as she delivers an homage to the betwixt and between of a relationship in its twilight. | Daughter of Swords: Dawnbreaker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daughter-of-swords-dawnbreaker/ | Dawnbreaker | The persistent pluck of guitar strings is the sound of all that’s fleeting: Robert Johnson’s desperate attempt to flag a ride in “Cross Road Blues,” Bob Dylan’s peripatetic lovers in “Tangled Up in Blue,” Phoebe Bridgers’ trek down “Scott Street.” The meandering strings call to mind a stumble towards or away from some urgent place, a march that mirrors the slap of two feet. Daughter of Swords’s Dawnbreaker, the solo debut from Alexandra Sauser-Monnig—one of three singers in the North Carolina folk trio Mountain Man—is the latest album to chronicle these liminal blues, a 10-song homage to the betwixt and between of a relationship in its twilight. In these folksy riffs on well-trod terrain—heartbreak, confusion, hope that looks like the horizon on an open highway—Daughter of Swords adds a layer of nuance and tenderness to the panoply of songs that came before. It’s hardly a new vista, but Sauser-Monnig’s intimate, earthy songs make the view memorable all the same.
Sauser-Monnig can draw the perfect shape of a bruised heart with a blindfold on. There are country ballads (“Easy is Hard”) that conjure sleepless nights listening to the radio on without a single misplaced, derivative note. “Shining Woman” soundtracks the narrator’s admiration of a bicyclist climbing California’s Highway 1, recognizing the role of other women’s kindness and inspiration during lovelorn, dejected times. “Long Leaf Pine,” which conjures an afternoon in the North Carolina woods near Sauser-Monnig’s home, marks the record’s highest achievement, an old-fashioned incantation adorned in harmonies that wears its list of flora and fauna like a ceremonial wreath: blackberry, muscadine, snake, rabbit, all ordered such that anyone from the region could almost teleport to a certain lake, a certain peace that feels like sadness.
Sauser-Monnig’s vocals land lightly, more chickadee than cardinal. She is dexterous and pliant as a willow. It follows that the best songs on the record don’t force a compromise between instrumentation and melody, as with “Human,” whose wistful simplicity is searing. “You can’t will a love to life/But you can do the loving thing/Make like a bird and fly,” she sings. Backed by the simple strums of a guitar, it’s a moment of held breath, like a prayer.
Dawnbreaker has its imperfections. The record’s second half has more heft than its first, where the poppy levity of “Gem” and “Shining Woman” seem hesitant compared to the sparer, more intimate arrangements that suit her best. But even when it falters, Daughter of Swords’ debut captures the sun passing through a hot car in a nowhere town, the Big Gulp melting in the cupholder, the stops on a trajectory whose end is never entirely clear. It’s a record so precise as to be sensory, whose arrangements of harmonies, guitars, and lonesome trills are like the intake of breath before a faltering step.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | July 9, 2019 | 7.3 | 58f45291-2de3-47be-b0a6-fefe2cd9c7b4 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Wedding the experimental free-folk of "New Weird America" to the more conventionally song-focused SF freak-folk movement, Six Organs of Admittance mastermind Ben Chasny comes into his own on this, his first-ever studio-recorded LP. Richly textured and three-dimensional, School of the Flower straddles the line between moody ambient madness and vintage sunlit psych-folk. | Wedding the experimental free-folk of "New Weird America" to the more conventionally song-focused SF freak-folk movement, Six Organs of Admittance mastermind Ben Chasny comes into his own on this, his first-ever studio-recorded LP. Richly textured and three-dimensional, School of the Flower straddles the line between moody ambient madness and vintage sunlit psych-folk. | Six Organs of Admittance: School of the Flower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7203-school-of-the-flower/ | School of the Flower | A contemporary master of midnight ragas, acoustic noise, and finger-picking polysyllables, Ben Chasny doesn't snag as many magazine covers as Devendra Banhart, but there's no doubt the Oakland guitarist is an equally compelling-- albeit more taciturn personality. For starters, Chasny overlaps his Six Organs of Admittance moniker's Buddhist origins with paganism, astral projections, prophetic dreams, surrealism, and a reverence for outsider folk masters. Then, of course, there's his day job as a psych monster in Comets on Fire, his craggy partnership with Deerhoof co-founder Rob Fisk in backwoods experimenters Badgerlore, a touring/recording relationship with Current 93's David Tibet, and a brief European tour with Joanna Newsom this April. As lazy as it is to pin Banhart to one specific scene or motif, Chasny proves even more difficult to jam within the confines of the "New Weird America" tag. It's like pigeonholing John Fahey's ghost.
Now add to all of that an obvious knowledge and love of Southern Lord metal/drone and early 1990s noise. Unlike those who list Vashti Bunyan and Harry Smith as forebears, Chasny cites Ghost, Dead C, Keiji Haino, the Japanese noise label PSF Records, and the vastly underrated contemporary avant guitarist Loren Conners. In the same breath, he talks about the importance of complimenting your Incredible String Band forays with Fushitsusha, Sunn 0))), the radio on white noise, and Skullflower. So while there's no doubt he works within a folk tradition on some level, instead of tagging Chasny with the full-on f-word, it makes more sense to link him with Supreme Dicks or Tower Recordings or other acoustic-minded experimenters.
Either way, Chasny's incredibly prolific by any standard. In 2004, his Six Organs ouput alone included For Octavio Paz-- a shadowy collection of mostly instrumental steel and nylon guitar pieces (with lovely bells and chimes)-- along with the reissues of 2000's Manifestation and 1999's Nightly Trembling. The year before he turned Nikki Sudden with Compathia and his self-titled 1998 debut received the reissue treatment. As Lou Barlow once taught by example, being so prolific can present a dud-heavy obstacle course, but thus far Chasny's yet to lay an overcooked egg. Better yet, his newest foray (the first for Drag City) is his strongest, most satisfying effort to date.
Though his past home-recorded output never felt thin, School of the Flower is his first recorded in a studio (gone is the borrowed cassette 4-track) and the result is a dense, more three-dimensional sound. It's also his most tightly composed effort, a Zen balance between Compathia's lullabies, For Octavio Paz's melancholy six-string intricacies, and Dark Noontide's drifting, fractured downer psych universe. If you haven't heard Six Organs yet, this is where to start.
The album begins with the raucous "Eighth Cognition", wherein Sunburned Hand of the Man/Cold Bleak Heat drummer Chris Corsano does what he does best, sluicing up an elegant dust storm part tornado/part precision rap. The churning, cymbal crash lasts for a little over a minute before suddenly dissipating and blending into the fragile "All You've Left", one of Chasny's gorgeous falsetto ballads.
Taking the whirlpool of "Eighth Cognition" whirlpool a bit further, the 13-and-a-half-minute title track is a guitar/drum meltdown Chasny says was inspired by John Cale and Terry Riley's seminal 1971 collaboration, Church of Anthrax. On it, Chasny's guitar turns into an infinite loop under which Corsano's free to blow to and fro. Inititating a different sense of motion, "Saint Cloud" drifts patiently along Chasny's soft chants and dense "Ohm"'s, some sort of droning, increasingly spiraled feedback, and crisp repetitious strings.
The spare "Words For Two" and "Home" (the later with a star-kiss, Loren Connors-style guitar launch) are Chasny's tightest, most affecting vocal-and-guitar pieces to come gliding 'round the holy mountain. There's also a thoughtful cover of Gary Higgins' folk classic, "Thicker Than a Smokey" from the 1973 album, Red Hash, which was recorded briefly before he went to prison on a two-year, nine-month sentence for possession of marijuana. Chasny's take perhaps lacks the distant small-town melancholia of the original, but when he sings its haunting opening-- "What do you intend to do young man? Where do you intend to go?"-- there are still chills. Chasny has often covered it live and decided to "throw it on the record to put the word out so we could find Gary Higgins." In fact, Zach Cowie at Drag City started writing all the Gary Higgins' he could find and eventually located the red-haired folkie, who just signed a contract with Drag City to reissue his lost 1973 masterpiece. (Like the best records, School of the Flower's legacy extends beyond just its songs.)
As intimated earlier, School of the Flower blooms and dies rather quickly. Put more prosaically, the whole thing runs its course in just under 40 minutes. This might seem like a minimalist shame for amped-up drone junkies, but really it's a tasteful (and very very welcome) gesture. More practically speaking, when Chasny reaches the final jangling sustain of the guitar coda lullaby "Lisbon," he still hasn't made a misstep or tapped a wrong note, so who can blame him for achieving something so sublime and not wanting to fuck it up? Whatever its duration, School of the Flower is one of those rare, understated but compulsive collections you'll want to listen to on repeat until it's time to blow out the incense, dump the wine in the sink, and step fuzzy-headed into the imperfect sunlight of the prosaic, but suddenly potentially transcendent world. | 2005-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | February 9, 2005 | 8.3 | 58f66f19-08a3-46a0-9bdc-ccde52c8a409 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
A decade ago, I loudly expounded upon Beat Happening's Spartan beauty to a pack of rabid, cynical post-hardcore friends ... | A decade ago, I loudly expounded upon Beat Happening's Spartan beauty to a pack of rabid, cynical post-hardcore friends ... | Beat Happening: Music to Climb the Apple Tree By | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1073-music-to-climb-the-apple-tree-by/ | Music to Climb the Apple Tree By | A decade ago, I loudly expounded upon Beat Happening's Spartan beauty to a pack of rabid, cynical post-hardcore friends of mine who, try as they might, could only see childish amateurism in Bret Lunsford, Calvin Johnson, and Heather Lewis's rustic childhood sing-alongs. I was a teenage devotee. When naysayers complained that Dreamy was hollow, I explained that Beat Happening didn't need a bassist because Calvin's voice was deep enough to supply endless roots. When Mel Bay graduates groaned about the primitive rock drumming and simple guitar strums, I wrote essays in the school paper about why the trio's minimalism eloquently flew in the face of cheesy rock star excess; and besides, the Olympians perfected a dark, perverse sweetness I only ever really saw in my favorite books.
In the sparest of tunes about hot chocolate boys, holding hands after sex, or eating wild cherries and french toast at cemeteries, Beat Happening's songs were dumpster-diving romantic. Live, Calvin's oddball dances and wide-eyed charisma created a dose of creepy punk-confrontation-cum-childhood-trauma and was more unnerving than the faceless dudes next door wallowing in a generic sea of uninspired tough-guy Sam Ash tropes. Subsequently, these darker, headier aspects of Beat Happening's poetry were lost to twee-pop groups like Cub, Bunnygrunt, and dozens of pixie-stix-sucking copycat dorks who misinterpreted the trio's outer-id lyricism as a call for lunchbox-toting kindergarten cuddlecore.
Though I'm no fan of Bret, Calvin, or Heather's later work, as Beat Happening they epitomized a Blake-as-teenage-punk philosophy. Their aesthetic was so pared down that it barely allowed room for a misfire from their formative bare-bones autism in the early 80s to 1992's fleshed-out grand finale, You Turn Me On. Second maybe only to Fugazi in my formative musical worldview, and ripe for a reconsideration by youngsters who perhaps only know the autumnal anthem "Indian Summer" through Luna's soporific cover, the band's entire output was collected on last year's Crashing Through-- titled after a track from 1988's Jamboree-- a retrospective seven-disc box set complete with an extensive 96-page booklet authored by fellow salad-day traveller Lois Maffeo.
Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, which was included with that box set, compiles fifteen songs recorded between 1984 and 2000, including the original version of "Nancy Sin" and the four dense, acrobatic tracks that comprised the band's 1988's split EP with Screaming Trees. Other highlights include Beat Happening's newest, but equally spare compositions: "Angel Gone" and "Zombie Limbo Time" from 2000's Angel Gone seven-inch, and the still-great "Foggy Eyes", which was first included on their self-titled 1985 debut and later covered on the 1991 Beat Happening tribute Fortune Cookie Prize by Seaweed in a version predictably raucous enough for even the most macho of naysayers.
Fifteen tracks, of course, is but a tiny blip in a lengthy oeuvre, and despite my high opinion of Beat Happening, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, like most hodgepodge singles collections, not only ends in a preposition, but lacks narrative cohesion as though waiting for the rest of the sentence to show up and complete the thought. I'm a stalwart fan of original album sequences, especially the way songs play off one another after years of close proximity; the new placement of these tracks doesn't feel correct somehow-- it's more like the ahistorical, catch-all desktop of an MP3 fanatic than those fully realized rainy-day adventure stories for which I enjoyed Beat Happening the most.
Most kindly put, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By works as a reminder of a particularly great band, and it had me cycling obsessively through the lost corners of my record collection for my copy of Dreamy. If this is your first listen, use these tiny pop moments as the impetus for a more complete investigation of a band you should already know by heart. | 2003-09-17T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2003-09-17T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | K | September 17, 2003 | 7.7 | 58f7e5a5-2573-47ca-93d4-893d102763a9 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Shifting between dense, sludge-rock epics and upbeat, melodic moments that could fit into modern rock radio playlists, Miami stoner-rockers Torche spread their wings and explore new territory while still creating their heaviest music yet. | Shifting between dense, sludge-rock epics and upbeat, melodic moments that could fit into modern rock radio playlists, Miami stoner-rockers Torche spread their wings and explore new territory while still creating their heaviest music yet. | Torche: Meanderthal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12020-meanderthal/ | Meanderthal | After establishing themselves as fine purveyors of metallic sludge over the course of an album and an EP, Torche's second full-length, Meanderthal, refines their penchant for volume and proves that there's more in their bag of tricks than Melvins-like metal. The record kicks off at a breakneck pace with a half-dozen tar-thick tracks. The fleet-fingered math of "Triumph of Venus" gives way to the triumphant bombast of "Grenades", a track that's barely finished before "Pirhaña"'s stop/start stomp kicks into gear. Through these six songs-- including "Sandstorm", "Speed of the Nail", and "Healer"-- nothing necessarily feels out of the ordinary when compared to what Torche have done in the past.
The hard left turn-- and perhaps the breaking point with "true" metal dudes-- comes with "Across the Shields", a tune that could find a nice home on modern rock radio. Musically, the group finds a comfortable middle ground between their speed trials and more turgid pace, allowing Steve Brooks' militant holler-- usually more reminiscent of Helmet's Page Hamilton-- to take on a melodic bent that could bring to mind anyone from Dave Grohl to Jawbox's J. Robbins. There's even an honest-to-goodness hook: "I am your armor," Brooks sings as the guitars descend. The moment stands out due to producer (and Converge guitarist) Kurt Ballou; the crisp sheen he lends to Torche's sound makes everything stand out and shimmer.
Torche follow that breakthrough with a second half that contains a quick and clean 30-second instrumental ("Little Champion"), more catchy hit-and-run slabs ("Sundown", "Without a Sound"), and a thunderous one-two punch ("Amnesian", "Meanderthal") to finish an album that shows Torche spreading their wings and exploring new territory while still creating their heaviest music yet. It's a fitting send-off to an absolutely killer rock record-- one that's likely to appeal to listeners into any stripe of heavy music from the past 20 years. | 2008-07-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-07-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Hydra Head | July 31, 2008 | 8.2 | 58fa71e7-8000-46ab-b65b-70a332aebb51 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
Saxophonist Anthony Braxton's collaboration with koto player Miya Masaoka is simultaneously dramatic and dreamy, swinging between free improv and ambient passages. | Saxophonist Anthony Braxton's collaboration with koto player Miya Masaoka is simultaneously dramatic and dreamy, swinging between free improv and ambient passages. | Anthony Braxton / Miya Masaoka: Duo (DCWM) 2013 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22726-duo-dcwm-2013/ | Duo (DCWM) 2013 | The composer and instrumentalist Miya Masaoka was already well-versed in experimental practices when she showed up for a 2013 gig with saxophonist Anthony Braxton. As a specialist on the koto, a traditional Japanese string instrument, Masaoka had appeared alongside visionary artists like Pauline Oliveros, in addition to presenting her own pieces on an electronically modified koto. Yet Braxton’s electro-acoustic setup managed to impress her.
“When I entered the stage area, there were six small speakers on tripods that resembled human heads on a stick figure body,” she writes in the liner notes for Duo (DCWM) 2013. “The speakers were facing in seemingly random directions, almost like people facing every which way, as if the speakers were talking to each other at a cocktail party.” Over two ensuing sets (three “experiences”), the duo improvised alongside waves of electronic tones, programmed by Braxton on the interactive SuperCollider platform.
A two-channel mix of that show, newly released on the RogueArt label, narrows the concert’s omnidirectional sonics a bit. But the most striking qualities of that performance have no trouble asserting themselves on the stereo recording. Simultaneously dramatic and dreamy, the duo’s method of swinging between free-improv and more ambient styles follows the loose script of other performances in Braxton’s “Diamond Curtain Wall Music” system. (Or, per Braxton’s preferred album-titling scheme, “DCWM.”)
The album’s first disc is the calmer one, making it the more surprising half of the show. Its lone, 50-minute track (“Experience 1”) shows the improvisers patiently building rapport with one another, and with the placid SuperCollider tones. Masaoka’s “cocktail party” analogy turns out to be an apt way to describe the unusual but convivial air of Braxton’s Diamond Curtain Wall Music system. When the SuperCollider setup enters a duo dialogue already in progress, sometimes it harmonizes ideally. And sometimes the electronic contribution feels like a less elegant interruption, requiring Braxton and Masaoka to adapt on the fly to keep the flow of conversation moving smoothly.
Duo (DCWM) 2013 contains some of Braxton’s most sumptuous playing in recent memory, and Masaoka’s range of approaches is equally advanced. She can improvise motifs on the koto that sound fairly recognizable—with strums or resonant picked lines that evoke traditional Japanese forms. And then she can attack the instrument as though it were one of John Cage’s “prepared pianos,” producing scrapes and twanging echoes. This adaptability makes her a powerful partner for the unpredictable Braxton. Half an hour in, after being spurred on by some of Masaoka’s arpeggiated chords, Braxton cuts loose with some bluesy, rapidly descending lines. Those same licks might have produced satisfied cries from jazz aficionados in a club, half a century ago. But without a vintage, swinging rhythm section supporting those notes, the exultation sings in a newly thrilling manner.
This duo concert is another artifact that underlines the benefits of Braxton's convention-resistant thinking. Some of Masaoka’s improvised themes could pass for ancient chamber-music hooks (as with some gorgeous progressions that come toward the end of “Experience 2,” on the second disc). And her ability to pivot off a wild card played by the electronics is just as keen. There are many other “DCWM” recordings in Braxton’s discography—including the twelve CDs housed in one recent (and often transporting) box set. But this duo's refined power distinguishes this entry with ease. | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | RogueArt | January 10, 2017 | 7.3 | 5909fa9e-ce1b-4f78-bc90-fa220a50c31a | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Mark Oliver Everett returns with another record of sadsack self-pity, without even the tinges of humor that typically color his work. | Mark Oliver Everett returns with another record of sadsack self-pity, without even the tinges of humor that typically color his work. | Eels: End Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13835-end-times/ | End Times | If sad bastard music is looking to nominate a new key-holder, consider End Times as Mark Oliver Everett's formal bid. Over the course of eight studio albums as Eels, Everett has made a career of feeling sorry for himself in some capacity-- typically, these misanthropic leanings have been juxtaposed against childlike flits of whimsy or coffee-black observations of varying degrees of wit. He was, for the most part, never humorless; he was gratingly self-referential and bogged-down by the Leonard Cohen-as-Eeyore thing he does. End Times does the sadness without the humor. Everett has described the album as a reaction to "the state of the desperate times we live in," and it chronicles a very personal break-up through a prism of a collective hard times. It is by all accounts a break-up album, but one that's plodding, boring, and full of icky self-pity. "Now I'm a statistic, but I'm not fatalistic," Everett's sings on "In My Younger Days", "I'm not yet resigned to fate." Like on much of End Times, the guy couldn't be further off-base.
It starts with "The Beginning", a disparate picture of a down-on-their-luck couple that still views the world as "beautiful and free." A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises. Instead, the remainder of the record refuses to delve into any emotion more complex than pity or self-doubt (save for "Unhinged", the only moment where Everett takes a break from blaming himself and musters the courage to call his lover "crazy"), until we arrive at "On My Feet", which really requires no further explanation. This isn't to say you don't kind of feel for the guy-- after all, you'd have to endure some seriously damaging emotional stuff to want to drag your fans through 40 minutes of it as well--especially without any real emotional payout.
Somehow, this makes the outlying "end of times" correlation even more disingenuous. At its least intrusive, it just feels tacked-on: "Gone Man", a rare mid-tempo bid here, effuses like it's drinking to forget, but ultimately finds Everett mulling over every misstep. When there does seem to be something to say about the breakdown (not just the break-up), it comes off even cheaper. "Paradise Blues" finds Everett back in tongue-in-cheek mode, but it blows up in his face so spectacularly, it's pure contrivance. Eventually, Everett's disassociation with himself results in a disassociation with the music, as each painfully plain entry becomes simply exhaustively dull. By the end, he's left singing to the "only friend [he] has in the world," the little bird on the back porch-- just in case you were wondering how sucky this thing could truly get. | 2010-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | V2 | January 21, 2010 | 3.9 | 590b43a9-11b3-4bfc-9bba-bb86ae3ee1bc | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
This monumental box set collects the work of the 80-year-old composer, teacher, and electronic music pioneer: Reverberations fills a dozen discs in almost as many hours, laying substantial groundwork for every electronic drone artist and harsh noise terrorist to come. | This monumental box set collects the work of the 80-year-old composer, teacher, and electronic music pioneer: Reverberations fills a dozen discs in almost as many hours, laying substantial groundwork for every electronic drone artist and harsh noise terrorist to come. | Pauline Oliveros: Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16664-reverberations-tape-electronic-music-1961-1970/ | Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 | With about 10 other people, mostly strangers, I reclined on the floor of an international hand-drum emporium and closed my eyes. We were all trying to cross the internal divide between "the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening," which seemed like it could mean a lot of different things. To me, it was about trying to experience sounds for what they were, not what they meant. The hum of a refrigerator and the whoosh of traffic gradually drifted away from their mundane contexts, revealing the variety and interconnection of what I was conditioned to hear as generic and separate. It was harder to detach the clock's tick from turning gears and passing time. In the moments when I could, I felt very free.
The occasion was a Deep Listening session with certified instructor Shannon Morrow. Deep Listening is less of a thing you do than a way to do all kinds of things-- perform, meditate, communicate, compose, or just be in the world. It's hard to summarize but easy to grasp: a set of broadly accessible philosophies and practices for heightening your awareness of total sound. It's useful for anyone who wants to develop a musical practice or unlearn conventional sonic hierarchies.
It's also the core of the art of its creator, Pauline Oliveros, the 80-year-old composer, accordionist, teacher, and electronic music pioneer who easily ranks among the most innovative and influential musicians of the mid-20th-century avant-garde, which still strongly governs experimental music today. She wasn't the first to become entranced by the pops and whistles in the nether regions of the radio band. But she was one of the first to do something about it, focusing on frequencies instead of melodies, motions instead of rhythms, processes instead of outcomes.
Oliveros only formalized Deep Listening a couple of decades ago, but her curiosity to hear sound out to its very edges-- plus the ingenuity to pull it off-- has been apparent since she made her earliest works on a new frontier cluttered with magnetic tape, hulking computer rigs, tone oscillators, and primitive modular synthesizers. These are collected for the first time on Reverberations: Tape and Electronic Music 1961-1970, a monumental box set from Important Records.
One advantageous thing about tape music is that the performance is also the recording, so there was no shortage of material for this retrospective, which fills a dozen discs in almost as many hours. While any massive tape music collection will have its share of desultory windshear, the vision and variety of Reverberations are incredible, and feel surprisingly untarnished by 50 years of imitation. In the music, two distinct intelligences, one human and one mechanical, circle each other cautiously but inquisitively. We hear unpredictable occurrences, captured in the moment of discovery, becoming first principles for a new generation.
During the 1960s, in the musically thriving Bay Area, Oliveros counted the likes of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Loren Rush as her compatriots. She played accordion in the premiere of In C. She founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Morton Subotnick. She was in the thick of the pure electronic phase predating her seminal electro-acoustic work, using natural sounds and raw test signals as fodder for processing systems of her own design, which could be played almost like instruments.
This distinguished her from her contemporaries, most of whom were meticulous cutters and splicers. Her reel-to-reel delay system predicted Brian Eno's, but instead of dreamy melodies, she stuffed it full of splintering tones, working with magisterial patience through the kaleidoscope of possibilities in the particular control system. The music comes off as incidentally imagistic, but the answerless fact of sound is paramount. It's an elaborate magic show of competing frequencies, which apparently can do very weird things if you know what you're doing, as when a harmony swallows its own root notes so that we hear two absences ringing in tune.
Reverberations feels contemporary, with its twitters and howls and eerie near-vocalizations; its hypnotic flux and explosive events. It should, as it lays substantial groundwork for every electronic drone artist and harsh noise terrorist to come-- anyone who relies on signals behaving semi-predictably to tap into an intuition beyond human capacity. On the spectrum of intensity, Oliveros runs from Keith Fullerton Whitman subtlety to John Wiese violence. This speaks to a certain posture of benevolent radicalism that has been as influential as her technical innovations.
A substantial booklet of essays accompanies this release, and a revealing moment comes in one by the artist Cory Arcangel, who studied music with Oliveros. He recalls her fondly describing a performance in the 60s where she tuned oscillators to the frequency of the hall, so the sound multiplied and sent people screaming. "I want to send people screaming from institutions!" Arcangel thought. The dawn of electronic music must have been an ideal time for that, when a second horizon appeared in music above the first one we'd chased for so long. It's harder to scandalize the academy now, but people are still trying.
I can't even claim to have heard every minute of Reverberations. I tried to play it in my house from morning to night one day, and it was, of course, overwhelming. I found it more interesting to listen to the same parts and notice how they changed each time. From a Deep Listening perspective, the music is completed by its total sonic environment, which is always different. Listening to the 30-minute-plus "Angel Fix" for the first time, it took a while to realize the birdsong entwined in the loopy high frequencies came from the screen door and not the speakers.
This porous boundary between music and world is immediately associated with John Cage, but Oliveros was right there with him, if not slightly out front; she was just behind Stockhausen in developing a common tongue for electronic music. She built technology we take for granted today, listened carefully to what it had to say, and then brought it back into a humanistic and acoustic process during what may be considered her prime career, from the 70s onward. But that would be a discredit to the groundbreaking work captured on Reverberations. Eerily listenable despite its daunting mien, it also has one of the rarest virtues: necessity. If it didn't exist, neither would music as we know it today. | 2012-06-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Important | June 5, 2012 | 9 | 5911bdbd-4c4c-4705-9794-92fe4fc701d2 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Having traded New Orleans for Taos, the Michigan-born singer-songwriter offers a chronicle of her wanderings. The songs roll out as though she’d written them behind the wheel on a long drive. | Having traded New Orleans for Taos, the Michigan-born singer-songwriter offers a chronicle of her wanderings. The songs roll out as though she’d written them behind the wheel on a long drive. | Esther Rose: Safe to Run | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esther-rose-safe-to-run/ | Safe to Run | Chance took Esther Rose to New Mexico. Around the time she released her third album, 2021’s How Many Times, she found herself in line at a coffee shop in Taos and, on a whim, asked if they were hiring. She got the job, packed up her stuff back in Louisiana, and made the long drive west. If she hadn’t become a barista in the Land of Enchantment, who knows where she might have ended up? Originally from Columbiaville, Michigan, and more recently associated with the lively country scene in New Orleans, Rose barely needs a reason to roam, much less a final destination. Her new album, Safe to Run, is a chronicle of her wanderings. “I don’t have a plan, it’s true,” she sings on “New Magic II,” her guitar tracing the highway lines to nowhere in particular. “Just to spend a little time with you/And maybe write a song or two.”
Creativity and constant motion are intertwined in Rose’s music. Full of tactile details and poetic turns of phrase, the songs on Safe to Run have the feel of road-trip musings, as though she were recording stray thoughts from an all-day drive. She worries over uncomfortable memories, ponders big philosophical questions, and puzzles over life dilemmas in songs that grow more complicated with each line. On “Chet Baker,” Rose reminisces about her wild past—those long nights in bars and longer days with frayed edges. But embarrassment and concern (“Twenty-three/Uh-huh, save me,” she sings with an palpable roll of her eyes) give way to a more charitable acceptance of her younger, more reckless self (“Now we’re pretty good”), and her tone telegraphs relief that those experiences could yield a song as buoyant as this.
Like Hurray for the Riff Raff, the Deslondes, and Silver Synthetic—three other New Orleans acts whose members contribute to Safe to Run—Rose remains grounded in country music even as she roams farther afield. Opener “Stay” drips with heavy pedal steel, and “Dream Girl” rewrites generations of country tunes about women who leave small towns for the glamor of Hollywood. Think Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” or Vern Stovall’s “Long Black Limousine” or even Don Williams’ “If Hollywood Don’t Need You.” But Rose writes a happy—and gently subversive—ending for her character. There’s no man shaming her back where she came from, and she doesn’t return humbled or dead.
For Rose, country music is like home, which means it’s as much a place to leave as a place to stay. Especially on its second half, Safe to Run downplays the twang of her previous albums and subtly turns more pop, peppering her songs with chamber strings, drum loops, and chiming ’90s guitar. There’s nothing quite as radical as anything on the 2021 EP How Many More Times, which collected covers of Rose’s songs by Stef Chura, Shamir, Anjimile, and others. But perhaps that release gave her license to roam a little further from familiar sounds, especially in the way she uses her voice. She’s developed a sly trick of speaking a word right in the middle of a line, as though arching an eyebrow or casting a side-eye. “I’ve got two minds about you, I confess,” she tells a lover on “Spider,” then adds, “Now get undressed.” She makes the line sound both funny and sad; it’s as though she’s willing to let one mind override the other, if only for a night.
Rose has two minds about a lot of stuff on Safe to Run, including the whole notion of running. Wandering can be complicated: a natural response to a deep itch in the soul, but also a fossil-fuel extravagance. The title track—which may be Rose’s best and thorniest composition—opens as another song about travel, but gradually expands its scope to consider the environmental impact of all those miles. Fittingly, it’s a duet with Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, whose own albums juggle the personal and the public so well. “Man, to be alive seems we just consume/Everything in sight becoming fuel,” Rose sings, knowing there’s no safe place to run and no safe way to get there. She never pretends to reconcile that contradiction, but lets it hang in the air among the halting guitar and precarious harmonies. It sounds like it takes everything she has just to keep it between the ditches. | 2023-04-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | New West | April 25, 2023 | 7.8 | 5922237b-009c-41a4-8350-59de08c7dee1 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Singing about human complexity, channeling her past with Serge Gainsbourg, and grappling with the death of her daughter, the iconic singer-songwriter sounds battle-scarred but never defeated. | Singing about human complexity, channeling her past with Serge Gainsbourg, and grappling with the death of her daughter, the iconic singer-songwriter sounds battle-scarred but never defeated. | Jane Birkin: Oh! Pardon tu dormais… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jane-birkin-oh-pardon-tu-dormais/ | Oh! Pardon tu dormais… | Death stalks Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, the 14th studio album from Francophile English singer Jane Birkin. In 2013, Birkin’s daughter Kate Barry died after falling from the window of her Paris flat, and on Oh! Pardon tu dormais... Birkin directly tackles the subject in her music for the first time. It is an album, she told Vogue recently, grounded in a distinctly unsentimental idea of what makes people human: “all their defects and their cowardliness and their guilt and their complexity.”
Barry isn’t the only phantom here. Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin’s onetime romantic partner and eternal creative inspiration, haunts the record’s classically elegant arrangements, and there is a sense, on songs like “Catch Me if You Can” and “Ghosts,” of Birkin perhaps looking ahead to the end of her own life in lyrics weighed down by absence and loss. “Catch me if you can, my love/I’m almost gone from view,” Birkin sings on “Catch Me if You Can,” the devastating album closer.
The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France. (This album, in fact, marks the first time she has written songs in English.) Birkin’s name will forever be linked to the songs Gainsbourg composed for her in the three decades after they met, leaving her better known as an interpreter than a songwriter in her own right. But the lyrics on a song like “Cigarettes,” which addresses her daughter’s death to the tune of a haunting cabaret waltz, are both raw and poetic. You can feel the aching, angry disbelief of a grieving mother in lines like “Ma fillette s’est balancée/Sur le pavé on l’a retrouvée” ("My little girl swayed/On the pavement we found her”). It is a song of deadening sorrow.
Birkin’s voice, too, is in immaculate form. She will never be a singer of operatic technique or vocal swagger—those who know her from Gainsbourg collaborations like “69 Année Érotique” will be aware of her breathy husk of a voice, a weapon of musical stealth rather than a full frontal attack. But her performance here is understated and full of character, emotion pooling in every carefully enunciated syllable. It’s like the work of a master film actor rather than a star of the stage, sly Bob Dylan instead of eager Bruce Springsteen: underplayed and totally believable.
Gainsbourg’s musical influence, meanwhile, can be found all over the album’s arrangements, which have been put together with devout care by Jean-Louis Piérot and Étienne Daho, the latter a legend of French pop. The album’s elegant strings, gently plucked bass guitars, and hints of the baroque sound like Air (on “Pas D’accord”) or Suede (on “Ta Sentinelle”), but only in as much as these acts once borrowed from Gainsbourg’s expansive, cinematic style.
It might seem a disservice to continually compare Birkin to her late collaborator. But Birkin hasn’t shied away from Gainsbourg’s towering prestige in the three decades since his death. Her last album, 2017’s Birkin / Gainsbourg : Le Symphonique, featured orchestral versions of Gainsbourg songs, and this record is home to a number of perfectly judged salutes to his style. The title track, in which Birkin and Daho trade the barbs of frustrated lovers, recalls Birkin’s duets with Gainsbourg on songs like “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus,” while “F.R.U.I.T.” calls back to Birkin and Gainsbourg’s “Help Camionneur!” in its references to truck drivers and hitchhiking.
She does not dwell upon her grief: The title track is both funny and tragic in its astutely observed back and forth—the opening lines translate as “Oh, I’m sorry, you were sleeping/Yes but I’m not any more, as you can well see”—while “Je Voulais Être une Telle Perfection Pour Toi!” is unexpectedly funky, its slinky break and chicken-scratch guitar recalling the opulent hotel-lounge hop of French producers like Kid Loco.
Throughout, Birkin seems to draw strength from adversity. Like Bob Dylan’s late-period masterpiece Rough and Rowdy Ways or Marianne Faithfull’s devastating 2018 album Negative Capability, Oh! Pardon tu dormais… is weary but never resigned, battle-scarred but never defeated, a work of personal reckoning marked by a frantic desire to connect, as our time slips away. None of us can cheat death; but to face it with Birkin’s fortitude and poetic skill is to score a minor victory.
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. | 2021-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Verve | February 17, 2021 | 7.4 | 59228e02-a6cb-43ae-8368-02bc88022397 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
You probably know Keith Fullerton Whitman as breakcore maven Hrvatski, a man who played in a few bands\n\ before ... | You probably know Keith Fullerton Whitman as breakcore maven Hrvatski, a man who played in a few bands\n\ before ... | Keith Fullerton Whitman: Playthroughs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8659-playthroughs/ | Playthroughs | You probably know Keith Fullerton Whitman as breakcore maven Hrvatski, a man who played in a few bands before developing an obsession with Squarepusher and deciding to probe the most hectic beats possible on labels such as Planet \xB5 and his own Reckankreuzung, as well as falling into the Tigerbeat6 orbit. You also may know Hrvatski by his pithy electronic music write-ups for the Forced Exposure website, penned while he worked in sales for the revered distributor. But the Keith Fullerton Whitman of Playthroughs has kept a lower profile. Starting last year with the 21:30 for Acoustic Guitar EP, Whitman began experimenting with subtle music based on laptop-processed guitar tones. While he's tinkered with this approach here and there, Playthroughs is his first sustained exploration of quiet sound.
If you've listened to the more drone-focused side of electronic music in the last few years, you've definitely heard the core elements that make up Playthroughs. There is no radical breakthrough in texture here, nothing to make you turn your head and say, "What the hell was that?" Playthroughs consists entirely of processed guitar, but the tones are light on harmonics, with many possessing an almost sine wave-level of clarity. As the thin drones hang in the air and shift this way and that, they harmonize with other drones and find themselves poked with fuzzy implements of static. Nothing terribly earth-shattering about this composition method.
It's true that much of Playthroughs seems familiar on the surface, but I don't think it an exaggeration to say that this record essentially perfects this particular style of music. It's an album of meticulous balance, Zen focus, and tiny gestures that carry great force, where each individual piece of sound is carefully placed to maximize impact. The first 3\xBD minutes of "feedback zwei", for example, consists of overlapping blankets of clean, piercing electronic feedback that remain in constant motion, creating new harmonic patterns with each passing second. And an unexpected cloud of pink noise slowly envelops the sound field, bathing the entire track in a warm digital mist and drastically shifting the perspective. Eventually sub-bass tones provide even more glaring contrast (be sure to listen to this track on good headphones). It all sounds simple on paper, but the emotional impact of the transformation in "feedback zwei" is completely overwhelming, never failing to produce a lump in my throat.
The five tracks on Playthroughs were designed to work together, and a similar palette is used throughout. The opening "track3a(2waynice)" (obviously titles are of no import) finds Whitman trying his hand with the phase techniques of La Monte Young and Ryoji Ikeda, showing how much weird tension can be created when two or three tones that don't quite match up. The style of "fib01a" has the easiest reference point, being quite close in texture and feel to 94diskont-era Oval, minus the CD skips and with a greater understanding of extended tones. "ACGTR SVP" contains the thickest drones on Playthroughs, as guitars processed to sound like organs swell and recede. And the closing "modena" is 17 minutes of sonic bliss, strangely beautiful electronic taps that seem to hang in the air like a handful of airborne glitter catching light in extreme slow motion.
If I were talking to you about this album over coffee somewhere, I'd probably slide my copy across the table, say, "Give it a listen and see what you think," and then change the subject. Everyone knows the problem of building something up to a friend-- after hearing "You're going to love it, it's so perfect-- incredible!" a number of times, your expectations balloon to a size that no actual experience could ever hope to fill. I'm doubly reluctant to tell you what I think of Playthroughs because of the nature of the music. When I was talking up the Boredoms' Super Ae a couple years ago, I knew it was the kind of album that grabbed the listener by the throat and shook him around the room. Love it or hate it, Super Ae had the sort of impact you could feel through your body, and I had no doubt that everyone would understand just how colossal it was. Playthroughs is an entirely different animal, with a much more understated appeal. Still, I'm writing a record review for Pitchfork here, so I have to give you my honest opinion: this is by some margin the best album I've heard in 2002, and there are only about ten weeks left. | 2002-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Kranky | October 22, 2002 | 9.7 | 5926b89a-a1cc-4cd8-a8df-1053f17d8695 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The New Hampshire DJ folds multiple influences—trance, drum’n’bass, breaks, acid, deep house—into shape-shifting tracks that mimic the flow of an ecstatic night of dancing. | The New Hampshire DJ folds multiple influences—trance, drum’n’bass, breaks, acid, deep house—into shape-shifting tracks that mimic the flow of an ecstatic night of dancing. | Octo Octa: Dreams of a Dancefloor EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/octo-octa-dreams-of-a-dancefloor-ep/ | Dreams of a Dancefloor EP | Maya Bouldry-Morrison sees music as a curative force, for both her audience and herself. “I deal with depression and anxiety,” she said in a recent interview, “but when I get out on the decks, I want to translate to the crowd why music is a healing technology. I'm not always successful, but I do it because I need to hear it first.” In the past, her therapeutic missives have taken the form of exuberant vocal samples. In live shows and earlier releases, her messages often came across in chopped-up monosyllables and joyful exclamations. More recently, she’s taken a leisurely, but no less reverential, approach: 2021’s She’s Calling EP ended with a winding meditation beckoning the listener to the woods. On her latest EP, Dreams of a Dancefloor, Bouldry-Morrison—better known as Octo Octa—imparts her dancefloor revelations largely without words, carefully building layered narratives from basslines and breakbeats.
Opener “Late Night Love” is an acid-house opera tracing a rowdy night out into the bleary-eyed bliss of a post-club cuddle puddle. The song starts with a buoyant synth tapping out a fervent rhythm, a hypnotic transmission that sounds like Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn” ushering you to the rave. Echoes of a breakbeat shuffle in the background, suggesting the feverish energy thrumming from inside the club as you wait in the line to enter. After an extended stretch of growing anticipation, the kick drum drops, beckoning toward the sweaty dancefloor. But just as sprightly synths and layers of percussion begin to coalesce, the melody drops out, leaving just a wiry, acid-laced lead and the beating heart of the bass drum. It sounds like the eye of the storm at the center of a long night, the moment when bodies meet and the rest of the world falls away.
An adept student of trance music’s intricately building energy, Octo Octa layers synths so deliberately that the song has gradually envelops you. But unlike traditional trance, she also adds in flavors from her own musical history—drum’n’bass, house—that create episodic, almost prog-like chapters in her songs. The 12-minute “Late Night Love” is among the producer’s longest tracks, but by the end—as syncopated piano washes the scene in sunrise hues, and the night becomes morning—it’s hard not to want to remain in her dream world, keeping the party rolling into the next evening.
Within Octo Octa’s healing framework, certain rhythms impart particular benefits: Drum’n’bass is her “body music,” while her heart is more connected to house. By that logic, the shuffling beats of “Let Yourself Go!” snap the listener back into the corporeal realm after the long metaphysical limbo of “Late Night Love.” While Orbital-esque synths in the background rise and fall like crashing waves, Octo Octa darts between wobbly basslines and pitched-up diva vocals. With each pivot between the two sounds, the breaks seem to pick up momentum. By the time the percussion fades out in the last minute of the song, it’s almost as if the synths have taken flight, launching from a running start into the stratosphere.
When Octo Octa DJs with Eris Drew, her partner and T4T LUV NRG co-founder, the two rotate every three songs. Compared to a traditional one- or two-track B2B set, the stretched-out format allows the pair to build mini-narratives within their setlist, yielding a conversation that advances in complete paragraphs, rather than choppy sentences. Dreams of a Dancefloor flows in a similar way, starting with the giddy tempos of a long night out and maintaining that energy into its second act. Closer “Come Here, Let’s Commune,” marks a notable shift, slowing the pace considerably as if basking in the afterglow of the songs before.
With warm, Balearic melodies and whistling synths that evoke bird calls, it’s a subdued and sublime return to base. But even here, the seamless blend of styles calls back to the raucousness of the songs before: A slithering acid line rears in the final half, as if to suggest that another endless night is just around the corner. For Octo Octa, the club is more than just a vessel for hedonism. Across her career as a DJ, she has strived to create utopias out of booming sound systems: spaces to commune and reflect; to explore and celebrate queer identity; and to build lives that defy societal convention. Dreams of a Dancefloor is another Edenic piece to her ever-expanding puzzle of self-discovery, one that finds nirvana at the core of a never-ending party. | 2023-09-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | T4T LUV NRG | September 20, 2023 | 7.5 | 59299fff-8888-40a9-9fad-a99710db3277 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
On his bleakly comic new album, Open Mike Eagle surveys the damage of one terrible year, using anime mythology as a lens for examining real-life pain. | On his bleakly comic new album, Open Mike Eagle surveys the damage of one terrible year, using anime mythology as a lens for examining real-life pain. | Open Mike Eagle: Anime, Trauma and Divorce | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/open-mike-eagle-anime-trauma-and-divorce/ | Anime, Trauma and Divorce | Open Mike Eagle has spent much of the last decade developing support networks that have enabled his modest success as an independent rapper. In 2019, it all fell apart. Hellfyre Club, the collaborative group featuring Eagle, Busdriver, milo, and Nocando, disintegrated amid business disputes. Comedy Central declined to renew The New Negroes, the show Eagle launched with comedian Baron Vaughn. And Eagle and his wife ended their marriage of 14 years, disrupting his identity as a husband and father.
Eagle isn’t cagey about the inspiration for his latest LP Anime, Trauma, and Divorce—it’s right there in the title. Before Eagle’s traumatic 2019, he’d already planned an anime-focused LP that would explore the role of fictional power fantasies in the lives of marginalized people. His theory that Black people, inheritors of generational trauma, need anime the most, suggests its fanciful depictions of power and heroism provide an escape from Black America’s grim realities. After his own series of defeats, the theory became practice: he needed the escape, too. While his raps are often set in fantastical universes sprung from his imagination, the subject matter here is chillingly mundane and relatable. He finds himself single and middle-aged, questioning the fly “art rap” aesthetic he spent much of his adult life crafting, in a deteriorating dad bod that just doesn’t seem that funny anymore.
Eagle’s fantasies are heavily influenced by two anime in particular: Neon Genesis Evangelion, a morose mecha-anime set in a post-apocalyptic society that forces trauma upon children in order to save the world, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, a multi-generational saga featuring a fashion-forward family that uses super-powered manifestations of energy called Stands to fight evil beings. “I’m a Joestar (Black Power Fantasy)” posits Eagle as a member of the series’ aforementioned family, imagining his Stand with a “glow like Sho’nuff in The Last Dragon.” On “Headass (Idiot Shinji),” he identifies with Evangelion’s teen protagonist, whose epically awful timing often endangers humanity. “Sweatpants Spiderman” nods to the alternate-universe Peter Parker that mentors Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That Spider-Man lost Mary Jane and fell into a depressive spiral, packing pizza slices onto his waistline and crying alone in the shower before being transported across the multiverse to teach Morales how to be Spider-Man. The song frankly assesses Eagle’s post-divorce status, re-evaluating his diet, art, and finances—and feeling every one of his 39 years.
Eagle’s ability to twist his pain into knee-slapping jokes is remarkable. “I'm in a spa, got on a sweet robe, tryin’a hold onto a tree pose/It’s like seeing what my body needs, maybe that's a lot of weed,” he raps on “WTF is Self-Care,” a rundown of various wellness practices meant to cure depression. “Everything Ends Last Year,” the result of his therapist’s suggestion to “write your feelings,” is his summation of the no-good very bad year, neither fun nor funny, and absent of the verbal gymnastics of which he’s capable. Laid over a somber piano melody and a minimal orchestral arrangement, his words are sparse and concise. “It’s October and I’m tired,” he raps, one of the most relatable bars in rap history.
With a few notable exceptions, the production on Anime, Trauma, and Divorce is more somber than angry, reflecting an overall sentiment of contrition rather than resentment. Executive producer Jacknife Lee assembled beats from the likes of Caleb Stone, Gold Panda, Black Milk, and Frank Leone that ooze moodiness, with prominent synth-bass melodies and laid-back tempos. It’s dark without being punishing, unafraid of naked self-reflection but devoid of self-pity.
Eagle would be forgiven for retreating into lethargy after the year he had; instead, he made an album as bleak—and funny—as anything he’s ever done, digging deep into his sense of self with the same sardonic wit that made his breakout LP Dark Comedy so impressive. It helps that he’s not entirely alone. Alt Peter Parker found purpose counseling Miles Morales, teaching him how to use his powers and guiding him through the inevitable trauma of being a superhero. Eagle’s son Asa will undoubtedly need guidance of his own: someone to share the wisdom of their own mistakes, to lead him down a brighter path. And for the first time in his career, Eagle put him on a record, with features for Lil A$e on both “Asa’s Bop” and “Fifteen Twenty Feet Ocean Nah,” the album’s lo-fi live-recorded closer. On the latter, Asa joins his dad in a self-deprecating rap about a near-death snorkeling experience. It’s goofy, absurd, and might have been recorded with a cell phone mic. It also sounds like the most fun he’s had on record in years.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Autoreverse | October 23, 2020 | 8 | 592a9a68-f90b-4bcb-8c66-a0abdef19d00 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, follows three fine LPs of original songs with a tribute to the Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson. | Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, follows three fine LPs of original songs with a tribute to the Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson. | Phosphorescent: To Willie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12656-to-willie/ | To Willie | What could be a better cred-building exercise for a young indie-folk songwriter than to cover the works of Willie Nelson? Yet Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, isn't interested merely in demonstrating the depths of his scholarship and reverence for the forerunners of his craft with his all-covers tribute to the Red Headed Stranger, To Willie. He wants, as Hot Chip might put it, to half nelson full nelson Willie Nelson, to wrestle intimately with the man's songs and what they're capable of communicating. In doing so, Houck proves himself an adept interpreter of Willie's piercing Christian grace, while indirectly revealing by the limitations of his scope-- the true remarkable human breadth of Nelson's artistry.
Houck does a couple of things extremely well, and to his immense credit he spends most of To Willie working in those veins. As he's demonstrated over the course of Phosphorescent's three very fine LPs of original songs, Houck is a master at conveying weariness, desolation, and spiritual hunger, often through a cracked, warbling bleat. That open-throated yelp is absent here, but Houck's keen understanding of fallenness and deliverance suffuses almost all of the album's best efforts. The opening "Reasons to Quit" is an addict's lament Nelson recorded as a duet with Merle Haggard (and was penned by Hag, actually), and while the original may have flashed a perverse resilience towards self-destructive behavior, Houck burrows into the numbing futility contained in a line like "coke and booze don't do me like before." It's followed, powerfully, by "Too Sick to Pray", an overlooked gem from Nelson's 1996 album Spirit that epitomizes spiritual exhaustion, with Houck sadly and perfectly putting across its overwhelming loneliness. Likewise, on "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way", desperation again cracks all of Houck's surfaces, his tremulous uncertainty echoed in the out-of-tune-sounding guitars.
The music of the church has informed Houck's own work for some time, and at his best here he treats Nelson's songs like precious, fragile hymns. "Walkin'," "The Party's Over", and "Can I Sleep In Your Arms" are all undergirded with solemnity, with the third a revelation. It might sound like heresy considering Red Headed Stranger's "Can I Sleep" is perhaps the most revered song of the collection, yet Houck arguably improves it, adding a heartbreakingly delicate lilt to the end of each verse's penultimate line that wasn't there before.
Talented and sympathetic though he may be, Houck is still working with a far more muted palette than Nelson, a fact most evident when he tackles jauntier, more clever material like "I Gotta Get Drunk", "Pick Up the Tempo", and "The Last Thing I Needed (First Thing This Morning)". Certainly it's admirable Houck didn't just pick 11 of Willie's most woebegone efforts to best suit his own forlorn MO, yet it's plain he lacks the wry humor and restless humanity of his interpretive object. Houck's impressive effort nonetheless inevitably sends you back to Nelson's originals, only illuminating their brilliance-- the sly threat of "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way"; the proud, tight-lipped terseness of "Too Sick to Pray"; the bitter wisdom of "Permanently Lonely" (which Houck does a nice job recontextualizing with spacey, narcotized synths). And, of course, there's Nelson's comic facility, which often cloaked his most devastating revelations, like how the accumulation of everyday bullshit on "The Last Thing" ("I opened the door on my knee") gives way to overwhelming loss and grief. It's simply more proof that Nelson's matchless command of so many song styles and emotional states poses a daunting challenge to any presumptive handler of his canon. Houck still deserves plenty of plaudits for nailing the ones he knows. | 2009-02-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-02-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | February 10, 2009 | 7.6 | 5932df7f-c4e6-491d-bafc-606ed0ae2cbe | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The UK rockers summon all their crowd-pleasing, arena-sized ambition on the first half of a double album but lack the panache to really pull it off. | The UK rockers summon all their crowd-pleasing, arena-sized ambition on the first half of a double album but lack the panache to really pull it off. | Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foals-part-1-everything-not-saved-will-be-lost/ | Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 | Foals’ résumé is filled with roles that now look quaint for guitar bands in 2019. They emerged on a wave of hype from the British press with a Dave Sitek-produced debut on Sub Pop, a transatlantic “hipster band” when that still meant something.
Two years later, they were an imperial rock act that won the NME Best Track Award with a nearly seven-minute single as windswept and majestic as its title (“Spanish Sahara”). On their subsequent two albums, Foals became the rare UK act that managed to break America through perseverance and industry muscle: “My Number” and “Mountain at My Gates” made them inconceivable neighbors with Imagine Dragons on KROQ and Cage the Elephant and Silversun Pickups on a “Spring Fling Rock AF” package tour. This lane is all theirs if they want it, but Foals probably had greater ambitions than being the last of the Big Sentimental Boys of Britannia. They have every right to get indulgent with a double album at a point where big bands have to matter. But the “Part 1” appellation to Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is deflating as it is foretelling—Foals are half-stepping all over this thing.
Dropping the whole project its entirety might’ve been the more impressive power move, but the split is sensible. All Foals albums get about 2/3rds of the way to true greatness and the most obvious explanation is that they all overstay their welcome by at least 10 minutes. Or, they’re nearly identically sequenced and have an identical ratio of aerobic funk-rock to ambient lunar rovers that show off the laser-lit production values. But despite the thrown gauntlet as the first part of a double-album, Everything Not Saved doesn’t ask to forget everything you knew about Foals, just to look at their discography from slightly different perspectives. The optimistic view of “Exits” is that it presents a unified theory of Foals, where the cocksure strut of “Miami” or “Total Life Forever” is given the same breathing room as “Spanish Sahara” or “Black Gold,” but it just ends up wearing out its groove about halfway through.
“White Onions” likewise melds the precision of 2008’s Antidotes to the meatier Stooge-rawk of 2015’s What Went Down and Yannis Philippakis’ increasingly anodyne lyricism: “I’m in a maze, I break the cage”—like...which one? Their assumed interest in the textures and propulsion of electronic remix culture is somewhat evident from the flashbulb-popping synths of “In Degrees,” but it’s oddly sweatless. They’re observers from the stage rather than bodies on the dance floor.
Foals have always had the chops to pull off anything that interests them. The departure of bassist Walter Gervers could’ve drastically hamstrung a band this reliant on rhythmic precision yet they’ve never made a song as bass-driven as “Syrups.” What Everything Not Saved lacks is the audacity to risk the embarrassment inherent in making a double album or the panache to withstand it. Foals’ rise notably happened while Arctic Monkeys were spinning their wheels and the 1975 were just warming up, two festival-headlining peers who boldly reinvented themselves last year. It’s fair to assume Philippakis is looking over his shoulder based on the title of “I’m Done With the World (& It’s Done With Me),” but he lacks the charisma and presence of his peers to make a schmaltzy piano ballad transcendent, subversive or something more than it actually is.
Or, Foals’ problem is that they have the same ambitions as just about every other large-font rock band these days and thus the same pitfalls. Making apolitical art feels borderline negligent, and yet it’s easier than ever to feel desensitized to the doomsaying when everything just seems to get incrementally worse. Philippakis feels the same way: “Trump clogging up my computer/But I’m watching all day,” he yelps during “On the Luna,” a line easy to miss amid Everything Not Saved’s most memorable riff and lowbrow know-how that frames Foals as the thinking person’s Red Hot Chili Peppers (“When I was a kung fu kid on the lunar/I was moonin’ at the Bella Luna”).
Everything Not Saved has been hyped as a kind of concept record to be footnoted in the Green New Deal: “In Degrees” and “Exits” could pass as torch songs for Mother Earth (“Now the sea eats the sky/But they say that it’s a lie”), yet there’s never any real sense of urgency to Foals’ crowd-pleasing Coachella-core: It’s less “the ice age is coming” and more “Iceage is up next.” And so as Philippakis sings “Cities burn/We don’t give a damn/’Cause we got all our friends right here,” on the penultimate “Sunday,” the hands-in-the-air-coda arrives right on cue, the perfunctory happy ending for a big-budget disaster flick that doesn’t need a sequel but will get one anyway. | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | March 12, 2019 | 6 | 593c97d5-278d-4428-9552-2f41b2cccb33 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
A mixtape made with half a dozen New York producers tilts the experimental producer’s left-field tendencies toward full-on dance music, but her signature oblique vocals remain a slippery presence. | A mixtape made with half a dozen New York producers tilts the experimental producer’s left-field tendencies toward full-on dance music, but her signature oblique vocals remain a slippery presence. | Eartheater: Trinity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eartheater-trinity/ | Trinity | Alexandra Drewchin titled the fourth full-length release under her Eartheater alias as a nod to the three states matter can commonly take: solid, liquid, and gas. It’s a fitting conceit to drape over her work, which tends to melt from concrete pop forms into ominous miasma and back again. Trinity, a mixtape made in collaboration with half a dozen New York producers including AceMo and Tony Seltzer, crystallizes Drewchin’s experimental slant into a full set of dance music built around her signature oblique vocals. Without sacrificing Eartheater’s compelling strangeness, Drewchin has assembled the project’s most accessible and triumphant offering to date.
Dance beats skittered here and there on past Eartheater records, but more often than not they worked as texturing tools against the rest of Drewchin’s nebulous compositions. On “Curtains,” from 2018’s IRISIRI, a rave beat pulsed against sheets of placid harp, as though leaking into an orchestral musician’s practice session from an upstairs apartment. Trinity hews closer to the traditional dynamics of dance music: Its songs take beats for their backbones, even if those beats often lurch uneasily through dizzying arrangements. For every element on Trinity that’s easy to grasp, another repels and confuses the ear. On “High Tide” and “Supersoaker,” glassy synthesizer riffs echo late-’90s radio trance, while the blunt bass drums on “Pearl Diver” recall avant-garde strains of contemporary hip-hop.
Throughout the record, Drewchin’s voice closes off the easy access points of dance pop, which in its most mainstream incarnations tends to flood listeners with dopamine at every chorus. Layered and thinned with reverb, her singing remains slippery, her lyrics often tricky to pin down. Ostensibly these are love songs, and yet their streaks of affection drip out in confusing, contradictory ways, in double negatives and barely intelligible whispers. “I don’t wanna regret/Something I didn’t do/With you,” Drewchin sings on “Runoff”—a statement that starts out with what sounds like hesitation, which turns into abandon by the end of the sentence.
Because her presence is often elusive, it tends to beckon the ear to sink deeper into each song, to grasp at a salient phrase or an especially tuneful melody. Drewchin makes it easy to get lost in her ambiguous sound worlds, which don’t seem to have clear boundaries but always appear to be deepening in volume.
Trinity’s tensions build toward its final song and thesis statement, “Solid Liquid Gas.” Rather than end the record on an uncertain, sour note, Drewchin and producer Hara Kiri give it the sendoff it deserves—an unleashed, cathartic dance track where Drewchin’s voice clears away the mist that had clung to it. “Don’t make me wait!” she demands, her voice dense and sharp over a frothing synthesizer arpeggio. If latent desire percolates throughout Trinity, voiced in hushed tones, then “Solid Liquid Gas” gives Drewchin the chance to finally let her wanting rush out of her. It’s a blissful release that bursts past the cerebral parameters of her prior work and into new territory—the kind of song that jolts through the whole body, thrilling as it goes. | 2019-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Chemical X | October 26, 2019 | 7.3 | 593d85b5-4aa9-438a-8092-759e6563942b | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Ty Segall’s collaboration with Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel. | Ty Segall’s collaboration with Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel. | Wasted Shirt: Fungus II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wasted-shirt-fungus-ii/ | Fungus II | Ty Segall has never been a wallflower. The Southern California garage-rock prodigy rivals fellow scene members (Thee) Oh Sees in prolific output, producing a wealth of records and side projects that, in aggregate, form a wall of brash, defiant noise. His cover of Funkadelic’s “Hit It and Quit It,” from 2018’s excellent Fudge Sandwich, is emblematic of both his playfulness and his gnarly psychedelia: Popular music goes in one side of Segall’s reverse-exorcism machine and comes back fast, screechy, and rude.
Wasted Shirt, Segall’s joint project with noise rock iconoclast Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt, takes the alchemy a step further. The duo’s individual efforts have earned them well-deserved reputations as devoted experimentalists; their collaboration on Fungus II (they skipped right over installment I) represents two artists pulling each other closer to dangerous, interesting edges. Their brand of amelodic pandemonium has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.
The majority of the 12 songs on Fungus II clock in around three and a half minutes, brisk heirs apparent to Black Sabbath that sound ready to soundtrack skate videos. They’re abrasive, but like so much of Segall’s oeuvre they also telegraph a kind of fanboy earnestness—the baroque, metalhead shredding that might imply an inferiority complex in the hands of a lesser musician instead reads like homage, a love letter to blown-out speakers and the hours after a killer session of “Magic: The Gathering.”
Some tracks accomplish this bombast more successfully than others. On “Double the Dream,” reverb pings in each ear as Chippendale attacks the kit and and Segall shrieks: “Dream, dream!” The song ends with the sound of tape unspooling, racing towards the next set of ears. This propulsive quality owes a great deal to Chippendale’s rabid snares and cymbals, and it’s what makes many of these tracks so bracing. “I’m my own man/Yes, I am a hostage,” Segall groans on “Fist Is My Ward,” sounding positively deranged as Chippendale’s rhythms skitter behind with frightening speed.
When every song attempts the same jaws-of-life intensity, though, a few are bound to feel comparatively dim. “Harsho,” a midtempo vision of driving with “blood on the highway/blood on the wheel,” doesn’t accomplish the same menace as the songs surrounding it. The wild acoustic strumming and heavy ramp-up two-thirds of the way through “The Purple One” would stand out on another record, but beside Wasted Shirt’s weirder, wilder fare, they’re less remarkable.
On the seven-minute closer “Four Strangers Enter the Cement at Dusk,” the pair takes another approach: a deliberately plodding, reverberating walk-up to the cataclysmic moment when both musicians let loose and embrace basement-show chaos. Lengthy, instrumental indulgence is the point; the song showcases Segall and Chippendale’s adept interplay, balancing one’s fever with the other’s sanguinity, and then trading those roles or abandoning them altogether. Their chemistry is unmistakable. Fungus II is its alien-baby result.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Famous Class | March 2, 2020 | 7.4 | 594051f6-b4bb-429c-94bc-62492a0f9cd4 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The UK quartet pairs glowing synth pads and layered harmonies with a distinctly millennial approach to the possibility of total annihilation. | The UK quartet pairs glowing synth pads and layered harmonies with a distinctly millennial approach to the possibility of total annihilation. | The Big Moon: Walking Like We Do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-big-moon-walking-like-we-do/ | Walking Like We Do | The Big Moon are at their best when they don’t overthink it. On “Don’t Think,” the British quartet’s most irrepressibly joyful song to date, lead singer Juliette Jackson breathes: “If you have a gut feeling, maybe you should go with it this time.” With verses describing the kind of nothing-y Friday nights out in which you spill your pint all over yourself and hold conversations that are forgotten by morning, the bass-driven song is an ode to mindless impulses, written to encourage an anxiety-riddled generation to let go. “Just don’t think about a thing,” Jackson trills on the boisterous hook.
The band, which Jackson formed with guitarist Soph Nathan, bassist Celia Archer, and drummer Fern Ford in 2014, have made a minor name for themselves in the UK with hook-driven, Libertines-adjacent indie rock that would sound right at home on a Camden pub crawl. Their 2017 debut, Love in the 4th Dimension, was a clutch of angsty guitar songs nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. But when she came to write its follow-up, Walking Like We Do—alone, as she does much of the band’s material—Jackson said she “wanted to make some music that felt really soothing and cleansing, like a tonic.”
Walking Like We Do arrives in the soft glow of synth pads and layered harmonies. Inspired by the spacious pop production of Frank Ocean and James Blake, the band worked with producer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley) in Atlanta to capture a wide-open, stripped-back sound. Nothing here is radically new—the album’s high points hark back to ’60s girl groups and ’90s pop-R&B—but it’s a departure for the guitar-heavy group, and they commit to it boldly from the first piano chords of “It’s Easy Then,” the lead single and opening track. Over a bed of bubbling synth notes, Jackson heralds their optimistic new sound—but the song’s title, and its buoyant melody, belie the darkness that prickles through its lyrics. In the full context of the chorus, “It’s easy, then/You make it hard.”
Walking Like We Do may have been born from an impulse to create “soothing” songs, but it’s inextricable from the anxious mindset that requires soothing. “Maybe it’s an end ’cause this don’t feel like a start/But every generation probably thought they were the last,” Jackson quips on “Your Light.” Her lyrics touch on what it’s like to come of age amid political and ecological catastrophe, with varying degrees of sincerity. While it’s mostly played for laughs, the bare-bones piano ballad “Dog Eat Dog” offers an earnest reflection on social injustice in the UK, specifically London’s class divide. Its bleak central image is of a pigeon eating discarded chicken on the pavement.
But the album’s surface-level observations don’t always register as heartfelt political commentary, and its most downbeat songs are its most forgettable. The understated approach means that clunkier ideas have nowhere to hide; on the airy ballad “Waves,” Jackson chews on the same musical idea a little too long. She strides more confidently across the playfully camp landscapes of “Take a Piece” and “Your Light,” where the sunny chorus describes a day so good that you momentarily forget you’re depressed.
“Your Light” is one of many flippant, tongue-in-cheek allusions to doom on Walking Like We Do, where the possibility of total annihilation is never far from mind, but also never taken entirely seriously. “Oh our data trail’s long/We’ll never die, we’ll linger on,” Jackson deadpans on “Holy Roller.” Her self-deprecating humor channels what The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino has called the “half-ironic millennial death wish,” the extremely online habit of expressing passion in the form of jokes about one’s own demise. Walking Like We Do has moments of thoughtless escapism—and a couple of earnest bum notes—but it comes into its own when it blends humor with darkness, suffusing everything with gentle, sarcastic nihilism.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fiction | January 9, 2020 | 6.8 | 59406f71-b70f-4f49-ae61-c3e534b84841 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Smart reissue of the enduring holiday classic includes alternate takes of several tracks and liner notes detailing the history of the project. | Smart reissue of the enduring holiday classic includes alternate takes of several tracks and liner notes detailing the history of the project. | Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9688-a-charlie-brown-christmas/ | A Charlie Brown Christmas | Taken like a spoonful of Nyquil just before you pass out from flu exhaustion, nostalgia is no harm at all. In fact, it’s positively uplifting, even if that lift up hampers your hipness standing to the point where you might as well be culturally asleep. Short trips to what was probably an imaginary past—immaculate family gatherings around the tree, perfect junior high summers with perfect junior high kisses—aren’t necessarily grounds for an inner guilt trip. But depending on your references, be prepared to defend your sleepy tastes to anyone who doesn't care for fuzzy focus warmth or the notion that fond reminisce amounts to anything more than premature senility. Enter Peanuts.
Best Buy racks full of oldie television DVDs and forgotten cartoons might otherwise testify to a healthy market for nostalgia, but Charles Schulz’s mini-verse—kids, a dog, unrequited love, and the complete and utter failure of the adult world to play a part in any of it—suggests that the glowing past wasn’t as warm as we remember. This was the genius of the strip: exposing small epiphanies and defeats as the content of real life, even if the lives involved were cartoons, and most (but not all) of the readers were too young to care about the accuracy of Schulz’s observations. Now enter San Francisco pianist Vince Guaraldi.
Playing a smooth brand of West Coast jazz comparable to Dave Brubeck or a very snappy Bill Evans, and having scored a modest pop hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” Guaraldi made an easy choice in 1963 for television producer Lee Mendelson as composer for a documentary on Schulz and Peanuts. The doc was made, but never aired; apparently, the networks didn’t want kids hearing any unnecessary “adult” thoughts about Peanuts. So when plans for A Charlie Brown Christmas came to fruition in 1965, Guaraldi’s music—including the classic “Linus and Lucy” theme—got its chance. The rest is history: The special has been rebroadcast every year since its premiere and, though Guaraldi’s death of a heart attack in 1976 (in between sets at a club no less) prevented him from seeing the full extent of his influence on popular culture, it would be hard to name a more recognizable cartoon theme, give or take a Danny Elfman piece.
But then the reissue of Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas has a lot more going for it than “Linus and Lucy.” Melancholy covers of “O Tannenbaum,” “What Child Is This?,” “The Christmas Song,” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”—and yes, it has the Peanuts kids singing “loo-loo-loo, l-loo-loo-loo-loo”—make for the perfect dysfunctional holiday music. Certainly, I will make a point this year to get too drunk, thereby spending the week after Christmas listening to this record and regretting telling off my grandma. However, it doesn’t have to be so bad; Guaraldi’s rolling, snow-mystic touches on “What Child Is This?” or his reconstruction of “Little Drummer Boy” as the minimalist bossa “My Little Drum” are hypnotic, faithful mappings of the rhythm of snow falling, or the reflections of people walking by store windows.
And “Linus and Lucy” is here in all its deceptively simple glory. In fact, the motive bass line and a perfect realization of the melody are patterns that should be taught to all beginning piano students as models of efficient finger technique. The closest parallel to this music is Philip Glass, and really, “Linus and Lucy” is a lot more interesting than anything Glass has done in years. Guaraldi’s “Christmas Is Coming” is similarly kinetic, shining with the kind of understated elation you’d expect for any music soundtracking the misadventures of kids always ready to celebrate while perpetually shown the downside of Christmas. If there’s a muted quality to a lot of this music, it’s smiling nonetheless.
The reissue includes alternate takes of several tracks, and great liner notes detailing the history of the project. Even the cover is cool, with an animation still and foldout, faux LP-style jacket. If all of this screams “stocking stuffer,” please don’t let me stop you. Nostalgic though it may be, anything that’s as full of introspection, empathy, disappointment, loneliness, and the perpetual hope of better things around the corner can’t be all bad. Like the strip, Guaraldi’s songs here are small, observant miracles. | 2006-12-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-12-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Jazz | Fantasy | December 13, 2006 | 8.3 | 5942eda5-4791-4031-a401-b9aed0db54f3 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | |
The rapper’s latest album, a sleek modern update to a classic formula—helmed entirely by producer Futurewave—expresses a tenderness rarely seen in his catalog. | The rapper’s latest album, a sleek modern update to a classic formula—helmed entirely by producer Futurewave—expresses a tenderness rarely seen in his catalog. | Rome Streetz: Razor’s Edge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rome-streetz-razors-edge/ | Razor’s Edge | Rome Streetz is used to having his back against the wall. Shortly after he was born, his mother moved the two from London to New York, an area where he’d absorb rap music and begin to fully embrace street life. By 14, he’d caused enough trouble for his mother to send him back to London to live with his aunt. Rome’s fascination with New York rap and London’s emerging grime scene in the early 2000s stoked a fire even the Atlantic Ocean couldn’t extinguish. While traveling between countries, he honed his skills, settling on a hard-nosed nasal delivery that nearly earned him a record deal. The deal fell through, he spent time in an American prison, and by the early 2010s, hip-hop had traded the steely-eyed boom-bap Rome had used to build his name for something glossier.
By the time Rome released his 2016 album I Been Thru Mad Shit, the lane he thought was closed forever had been reopened by neoclassicists like Roc Marciano and Griselda. Rome’s voice, high-pitched and nimble as a Gemstar, fit well within this new wave of rap, and he spent the next five years cutting his own path forward. On “Bible or the Rifle,” a song near the end of Razor’s Edge—the latest of at least 10 projects he’s released in the last half-decade—he sums up his ethos with a single line: “Always knew how to turn a lick into a Benjamin.” Never one to let a good opportunity go to waste, Rome reunites with producer Futurewave—who also crafted 2019’s Headcrack—to turn the line separating brash raps and stark intimacy into powder.
Razor’s Edge is the most recent in a long line of Rome projects helmed by one producer. Just this year, he tamed Cypress Hill member DJ Muggs’s grab bag of grimy breakbeats on the excellent Death & The Magician. Where Muggs’s sound is flashier and demands space next to the featured rapper, Futurewave’s style is more subdued, content to set a mood and keep the groove consistent. As an MC with a deceptively adaptable voice, Rome thrives in both scenarios. His performances are structured but elastic, conforming to the bedrock of beats instead of barreling through them.
He sounds as comfortable over the syncopated shuffle of “Same Way” as he does over the standard march of opening track “Mud Into Moet,” casually stretching rhyme schemes to their breaking point. “Moet” flows so effortlessly, it’s easy to miss the fact that Rome keeps the first rhyme scheme going for nearly a dozen bars: “The kicks I rock is made of snakeskin/from all the cobras that I killed on my lawn/They smile in your face, give you handshakes, but want you gone/Salty ’cause I’m far beyond all the shit they on/They washed up, lookin’ sick, and my whole fit Vuitton.” There’s a casualness to Rome’s ferocity, an unpredictable energy that pushes him past being the millionth copy of Nas or Dizzee Rascal.
Many songs on Razor’s Edge express a tenderness rarely seen in his catalog. The title track is an impassioned back-and-forth between Rome and an angel, portrayed by rapper Chyna Streetz; he laments New York’s poisonous street life and its gravitational pull while she reminds him how lucky he is to have survived at all. Both “Sage or Gunsmoke” and “Bible or the Rifle” play up this duality down to their titles, the struggle of having one foot in and one foot out in the world of organized crime. It doesn’t matter whether Rome is puffing his chest out or retreating inward; he’s stylized and grounded all at once, as rugged and colorful as a graffiti mural come to life.
Rome’s work had already been canonized within the modern hip-hop underground before Razor’s Edge. Guest spots on Westside Gunn songs and the aforementioned album with Muggs are their own seals of approval, enough to ensure that backpackers, old and young, will be buying whatever Rome sells for years to come. But even though this is his third album in eight months, he sounds no less hungry than he did crafting odes to Nautica windbreakers in 2019. Grit and all, Razor’s Edge is a sleek modern update to a classic formula.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Influenyce / WAVEGODMUSIC | August 6, 2021 | 7.1 | 5949a3f4-b81a-4056-835e-36b17192ad46 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Full of Hell & Merzbow is a collaboration between Maryland grindcore band Full of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow. Combining noise and metal is a worthwhile pursuit, giving groups the chance to synthesize noise’s freer destruction with metal’s more structured attack. | Full of Hell & Merzbow is a collaboration between Maryland grindcore band Full of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow. Combining noise and metal is a worthwhile pursuit, giving groups the chance to synthesize noise’s freer destruction with metal’s more structured attack. | Merzbow / Full of Hell: Full of Hell & Merzbow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19972-merzbow-full-of-hell-full-of-hell-merzbow/ | Full of Hell & Merzbow | It’s strange to think that the collaboration between Maryland grindcore band Full of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow had its roots in a t-shirt. In the design, Full of Hell appropriated the album art of Merzbow’s 1996 album Pulse Demon, a pulsing visual that works as a testament to the hypnotic waves of that collection. Depending on your opinion of Full of Hell, you’d either call it a tribute or a ripoff. Either way, rarely do shirts lead to actual collaboration, something that came about here when the band met Balázs Pándi—who’s served as Merzbow’s drummer as of late—while on tour in Europe.
Combining noise and metal is a worthwhile pursuit, with groups like Portland’s Knelt Rote and Toronto’s Column of Heaven synthesizing noise’s freer destruction with metal’s more structured attack. In fact, both genres seems to be reversing roles—many of the more critically acclaimed noise records, like Wolf Eyes’ 2004 breakout Burned Mind and Pharmakon’s Bestial Burden, are praised for incorporating structure, while the more extreme ends of black and death metal are rapidly becoming looser and more feral. (Impetuous Ritual’s Unholy Congregation Of Hypocritical Ambivalence, from earlier in the year, is a prime example.) Merzbow is no stranger to metal, having released several albums with Boris, contributed to two songs on Sunn O)))’s Flight of the Behemoth, and has cited death metal as influence on 1994’s Venereology, released through the since-shuttered Relapse sub-label Release Entertainment. This collaboration, however, is frustrating because it falls short of its goals, in part due to Merzbow’s too-reduced role and that Full of Hell don’t make up for the missing space.
"Burst Synapse" begins with a quick rush of powerviolence, an even quicker patch of Merzbow’s static, then continues to be dominated by Full of Hell’s rote playing. "Gordian Knot" and "Humming Miter" offend more in this matter, where Merzbow feels squandered. He doesn’t get to show any of his strengths. Full of Hell are one of those bands that can get people moshing in clubs, but can’t capture that intensity in the studio, and it’s more than obvious here. Merzbow isn’t quite able to bolster their riffs, unlike in Rock Dream, where he helps make Boris’ riffs grand and ecstatic. For his reputation as the antithesis of music, Merzbow has a strong command of rhythm, and if Full of Hell are gonna use Demon's art to gas up their van, they should have embraced that record’s dynamics, not simply its textures.
Some potential arises toward the album’s conclusion, where Merzbow begins to sync with Full of Hell. The blastbeats of "Mute" feel more unhinged thanks to his noise, for once, overcoming the guitar. "High Fells" sees Full of Hell dooming out, and in the process, giving Merzbow more room to cast a wide shadow. There’s even saxophone on here, and in closer "Fawn Heads and Unjoy", which is not only a nod to Merzbow’s love of free jazz, but also lends unpredictability. Full of Hell restrain themselves even more on "Ludjet Av Gud", dominated by booming floor toms and drifting noise undercurrents. (Some editions of the album come with Sister Fawn, a bonus disc of outtakes. They’re long jams of noise and drums, and even if they don’t form a cohesive whole, they’re a much more satisfying listen than the actual record.)
In the end here, Merzbow feels more like a over-hyped, under-trotted guest. It doesn’t even have the muster to serve as a compelling entryway for hardcore kids to get into noise. (As great as Demon and Venereology are, they may be a bit overwhelming for novices; Merzbow’s collaborations with Boris would be smoother introductions.) In an interview with the Quietus last year, Merzbow mentioned a forthcoming, more grindcore-oriented record called Merzgrind. Maybe there, we’ll find the emancipating fury that's lacking in this Full of Hell collaboration. | 2014-12-03T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2014-12-03T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | Profound Lore | December 3, 2014 | 5.5 | 5950d2e8-1883-49b5-a025-11f6c3ceee28 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Lil Peep and iLoveMakonnen’s collaborative album reflects both the kinship they share as pop outsiders and queer rappers. It’s the rare posthumous rap album that actually honors an artist’s legacy. | Lil Peep and iLoveMakonnen’s collaborative album reflects both the kinship they share as pop outsiders and queer rappers. It’s the rare posthumous rap album that actually honors an artist’s legacy. | Lil Peep / iLoveMakonnen: DIAMONDS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-ilovemakonnen-diamonds/ | DIAMONDS | Posthumous rap releases can sometimes leave a sour taste in the mouth. All too often, they are a last-ditch effort at cashing in on an artist's legacy. In the first two years after Lil Peep’s tragic death, his label released several collaborations that felt stitched-together, even designed for commercial appeal: “Falling Down,” a song Peep recorded before his passing, got an unfinished verse from XXXTentacion, recorded prior to his own death in 2018. Meanwhile, some try-hard bars from Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump were awkwardly inserted into “I’ve Been Waiting,” a previously unreleased iLoveMakonnen and Peep collaboration. Since then, Lil Peep’s estate has taken a more sensitive and legacy-minded approach. The focus is now on remastering Peep’s archives and clearing unlicensed samples in his work, instead of constructing new music from the incomplete remains of his recordings.
Both “Falling Down” and “I’ve Been Waiting” originated during Peep’s 2017 sessions in London with Makonnen, which have circulated for several years in bootleg form and now appear in full on the joint album DIAMONDS. According to Peep’s estate, DIAMONDS represents the last “cohesive full body of work” produced by the artist in his lifetime, but it’s also not entirely finished—while many of these songs might sound complete, it’s hard to know whether or not Peep would have kept tweaking with them had he lived, so Gothboiclique producers Fish Narc and Smokeasac, regular Peep collaborators, made a deliberate choice to simply remaster the project rather than add to it. DIAMONDS is not exactly a rough draft, but there’s a sense of looseness that suggests it hasn’t been aggressively curated. The 81-minute runtime is significantly longer than most projects Peep or Makonnen have ever released, resembling a folder of demos more than the tight pop album it might have been.
Makonnen facilitated and approved the tacked-on features from both XXXTentacion and Stump yet those guest appearances feel indicative of how the Atlanta rapper has too often been shut out of hip-hop’s mainstream, in part because of his queerness; it wasn’t enough for the music to stand on its own, there had to be a bigger name attached. DIAMONDS is lightly buffed but largely unpolished, a form that not only preserves the artistic kinship between Makonnen and Peep as pop outsiders, but the queer sensitivity that their work shares. Several months prior to his passing, Peep came out on social media as bisexual, and the pronouns that both he and Makonnen use to refer to their lovers vary throughout the album. Though the two may have inhabited slightly different lanes of rap, they both knew how it felt to be queer men in a frequently hostile industry, and that common experience of identity is part of what drew them together. In an interview with Grammy.com, Makonnen stated that Peep specifically wanted to team up because he felt that a collaborative album from two openly queer hip-hop artists could be a balm to listeners. “[Peep] said, ‘I feel like we can really make a change in the world by showing this because so many of us young fans and young people are dealing with all types of things,’” recalled Makonnen.
In a brief documentary about the LP, producer Fish Narc explains that there was a sense of “joy” that set DIAMONDS apart from previous sessions, with Makonnen’s infectious energy renewing Peep’s focus as an artist. What distinguishes DIAMONDS is that feeling of exuberance, the kind of outright pleasure that can only be generated by two artists joined in creative kismet. There’s a casual affection between Makonnen and Peep that stands in sharp relief to, well, pretty much almost any collaborative project between male rappers you could name. The chemistry is creative, and there’s even a sense of intimacy here. On “Smokin’,” Peep doesn’t show any insecurity about calling Makonnen “baby,” while on “Hocus Pocus,” he coyly thumbs his nose at the no-homo haters: “Want me out the way/Say I’m gay, but they really want me.” DIAMONDS marks an evolution for Peep: He exhibits a newfound vocal confidence, and a sense of freedom around publicly discussing his own identity.
The two artists often function as foils: Makonnen’s voice is bright and bubbly, while Peep’s has a harsher edge. As opposite as they might often sound, both are unafraid to go off-key and offbeat, completely blurring the line between singing and rapping. Tracks like “Nasty Names” and “Sidelines” feature the alt rock-tinged guitars and anguished flow that Peep became known for, but DIAMONDS frequently leaves depressive emo rap behind for up-tempo synth-pop. Mixed in with the trap snares and hi-hats are gentle keyboards, as on “Hypnotized,” or the glistening bells of “Favorite Drug.” Over a propulsive club beat, “November” is a romantic chiptune fantasy, while “Guiltiness” recalls a duo like Erasure or Pet Shop Boys more than any rap tag team. The 12-minute fly-on-the wall jam session “Diamonds Piano Freestyle” documents the pure friendship between Makonnen and Peep, but it also offers an apt metaphor for these once-obscured gems: “I’m a diamond/Just waiting to be found.”
Even on an early song like 2016’s “Beamer Boy,” Lil Peep vocally expressed frustration with the person that he felt fans expected him to be: “They don’t wanna hear that, they want that real shit/They want that drug talk, that ‘I can’t feel’ shit.” On DIAMONDS, Peep explores new sonic directions alongside Makonnen, embracing a sense of positivity that radiates from the project. Where so often Peep rapped about self-destruction, letting his listeners know that they weren’t alone in their emotional pain, DIAMONDS exudes a feeling of uplift, leaving the darkness behind in search of something brighter and more loving. | 2023-09-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | AWAL | September 21, 2023 | 7.4 | 59536eac-47ff-472a-8ffb-e9907abed0d9 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Nils Frahm released a record of solo piano music for free recently, and it is almost exactly what you might expect from a record like this one; it’s spare, it’s lyrical, it’s generally quiet, and it’s very pretty. During its best moments it brings to mind some of the work of Harold Budd, where melody and mood become two sides of the same coin. | Nils Frahm released a record of solo piano music for free recently, and it is almost exactly what you might expect from a record like this one; it’s spare, it’s lyrical, it’s generally quiet, and it’s very pretty. During its best moments it brings to mind some of the work of Harold Budd, where melody and mood become two sides of the same coin. | Nils Frahm: Solo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20471-solo/ | Solo | For many music obsessives, a first close listen to Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies changes everything. The French composer’s three 19th-century piano works serve as an introduction to one kind of minimalism—maximum emotion created with the fewest ingredients—and they show what can happen when you have the right note in the right place at the right time. The formal elegance of the pieces, along with the underlying sense of yearning and clear surface beauty, have made them a natural fit for advertising and film, and the Gymnopédies long ago became ubiquitous, their structure a sort of auditory cliché. But even with the overexposure, the power of Satie’s pieces are still there inside of us, guiding how we respond to simple piano music that leaves a lot of space. Whenever contemporary composers—from Chilly Gonzales to Eluvium to Jandek to Grouper to Aphex Twin—use a piano in this way, they tap into these buried associations.
German composer and producer Nils Frahm’s most recent full-length, his fine 2013 album Spaces, featured plenty of piano but found him putting the instrument into a number of different contexts and adding electronics (the set also included live tracks). But among the earliest works of his career were two albums of solo piano work, and he returns here with a third, an album he gave away free on Twitter two weeks ago. Solo is almost exactly what you might expect from a record like this one; it’s spare, it’s lyrical, it’s generally quiet, and it’s very pretty. Your mileage will vary based on whether that is enough.
Sometimes solo piano albums can get too sentimental, and can begin to sound like bad TV cues; sometimes they can be a little dry and academic, and can come over like an instrumental exercise. This one mostly fits into "just right" territory, balancing general loveliness with space and suggestion. Frahm's piano is creaky and there's a percussive tone coursing through some of these tracks, an extra "pling" that marks time with every keystroke. That extra texture gives a piece like "Merry" a tiny bit of grit to offset a gorgeous melody that might otherwise be overbearing, and gives the more downcast "Some" an extra ounce of dark weight. During its best moments Solo brings to mind some of the lower-stakes work of Harold Budd, where melody and mood become two sides of the same coin.
The album’s second half finds Frahm playing more with form, but oddly the variety, rather than being welcome, actually breaks the spell of the album’s first half. "Wall" is a loud, pulsing piece that is interesting enough on its own but derails the album’s gentle mood, while "Immerse!" leans toward meandering abstraction, foregoing melody and in no way justifying its almost 11-minute length. Still, for a free album that sounds very nice in a room, Solo mostly delivers, tapping into that very specific identification with the solo piano as an expression of wistful sadness. | 2015-04-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | April 10, 2015 | 7.3 | 5959e459-331a-4731-bfc1-fe037b8d5723 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Bearing a title culled from one of Courtney Love's most famously vindictive proclamations, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is a document of the overwhelming power of depression. | Bearing a title culled from one of Courtney Love's most famously vindictive proclamations, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is a document of the overwhelming power of depression. | The Body / Full of Hell: One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21684-the-body-full-of-hell-one-day-you-will-ache-like-i-ache/ | One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache | During a interview about another album his prolific and genre-flouting metal duo The Body had just released, drummer Lee Buford decided he needed to clarify something about the pervasive bleakness of his band’s work: it's "negative, but...a hopeful negative." Not that you'd be able to tell any of that uplift from the curdled sound of the record he was ostensibly there to talk about. Its title was No One Deserves Happiness and its sound matched the sentiment. But traditionally Buford and guitarist Chip King have used their many collaborations (in the past two years alone they've made full lengths with Thou, Krieg, Vampillia, and the Haxan Cloak) for something a little more fun, relatively speaking—a chance to at least stretch the boundaries of their slow, sickly grinding compositions into unfamiliar territory.
That was never really an option when making a record with the Maryland grindcore four-piece Full of Hell; the two groups share too much in common. The Body work in textured, patient torture, death by a thousand cuts, whereas Full of Hell operate more like a woodchipper—but they’re united in the all-consuming gloom that consumes all of their best work. Bearing a title culled from one of Courtney Love's most famously vindictive proclamations, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is a document of the overwhelming power of depression. It's not life-affirming, as Buford seems to argue, but the sheer force of the sound makes a compelling argument for diving into the black anyway.
And that’s sort of what they do. From the record’s opening moments, a subwoofer-rumbling kick drum and a snare trace the edges of an abyss before Full of Hell vocalist Dylan Walker’s steel-wool vocals give you a shove. The effect, especially as it bleeds into the sample-apocalypse of “Fleshworks” is something like standing uncomfortably close to a late-period Rothko canvas—the distressed blues and blacks expand to fill your whole field of vision and any shifts are more textural than tonal. It’s one-dimensional in the same sense that those final paintings were, fixated on the void in a way that’s emotionally affecting—monomania can be compelling, after all.
Throughout they’re taking risks, abandoning straightforward metal trappings to pile noxious noise blasts on shredded 808s (“Bottled Urn”) or turning Leonard Cohen ballads into doom-metal dystopias (though the hypodermic fantasies and Christian imagery on Songs for a Room’s “The Butcher” make that a pretty easy task). But even as they explore alien aesthetics, the Body and Full of Hell are constantly finding ways to uphold the spirit of each other's work. They’re united in their disposition, up until the record’s final moment, a sample of the HBO movie You Don’t Know Jack that seems to sum up what precedes it: “Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss.” | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Neurot | March 22, 2016 | 7.6 | 595e6d76-03eb-460f-8fb5-1b263923c1f2 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
The Miami duo’s new album builds on the strengths of their recent mixtape with speaker-rattling songs about pleasure, power, and strong women unapologetically getting their own way. | The Miami duo’s new album builds on the strengths of their recent mixtape with speaker-rattling songs about pleasure, power, and strong women unapologetically getting their own way. | City Girls: G I R L C O D E | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/city-girls-g-i-r-l-c-o-d-e/ | G I R L C O D E | City Girls’ G I R L C O D E replicates the winning formula of their mixtape Period: speaker-rattling Southern beats, how-to pointers for scheming on rich men, anthems for defying haters and broke boys. Post-Period, JT and Yung Miami secured a feature on a No. 1 hit, among other feats, making them the latest rap sensation from the Atlanta label Quality Control. But ahead of their first opus, like their labelmates Migos, they’ve been overcoming legal obstacles.
On “Intro (#FREEJT),” they address the situation in characteristically defiant terms. The track begins with an incoming call from JT, who is in federal prison for fraud. “Lord knows that I miss her,” admits Miami, “But I'ma hold this shit down for my sister.” Later, JT backs her up: “Get they asses, Miami, don’t let up on ’em hoes.” Their show of sisterhood against the odds is a rare glimpse of vulnerability on an ego-driven tale. G I R L C O D E has no time for feelings. Here, pleasure is non-negotiable, money is power, and being a woman in control is key for survival.
Miami and JT are upfront about sex but have different rules of engagement. Take “On the Low,” which could be a course on risky text messages. Miami wants sex in transit (“I need brain on the train/Let's leave stains on the plane”) while JT prefers nights in and no trace of her escapades on Instagram (“You ain’t on my page, but you in my guts”). When it comes to love, however, their guards are up. The moody “Give It a Try” features a sprung Jacquees, but they dismiss the singer’s begging. “I kinda wish I had time for it, but that love shit not important,” Miami raps, while JT is even more unforgiving: “All men the same, all they ass do is lie.”
It’s no wonder City Girls want men to pay up for their time. The mindset isn’t new. Gwen Guthrie sang, “No romance without finance,” on her 1986 dance-R&B hit “Aint Nothin’ Goin’ on But the Rent.” But City Girls are more savage, especially on “Season,” a schemers’ holiday featuring Lil Baby. “How you a boss and you don’t own shit?” he snaps, interrupting their celebration. The polarizing lyric puts “Season” in the family of notable male-versus-female rap tropes, like Gucci Mane’s “I Think I Love Her” featuring Ester Dean and Project Pat’s “Chickenhead” featuring La Chat.
The bulk of G I R L C O D E is a ready-to-queue party playlist, including “Season,” that’s top-40 friendly. “Twerk” samples the bounce-influenced classic “Choppa Style” and enlists rap princess Cardi B, conjuring a pregame gathering for a girls night out. “Broke Boy,” a warning for the guys “lying on they dick,” invokes an HBCU football halftime show where City Girls are the bandleaders. The trappy “Clout Chasin’” would be an on-the-mark critique of Internet trolls, were it not for a homophobic slur from JT (“I’m tired of you hoes and you niggas sittin’ ‘round, actin’ like dykes.”) Miami was also recently called out for homophobic remarks. These avoidable blemishes dampen the enjoyment of a satisfying project, especially for their black gay fanbase.
If Period was an introduction to the City Girls’ sumptuous lifestyle, then G I R L C O D E is the sequel that proves their mastery of its acquisition. A female rap duo with relatable come-up stories, spitting lyrics detailing women getting their way, is a novelty. The luxury they chase is an escape from poverty, a common theme in hip-hop. But women face more challenges in achieving prosperity—and for City Girls, finessing guys willing to trick is their cunning way of tipping the scales. | 2018-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown / Capitol | November 28, 2018 | 7 | 596a9701-44a7-4af1-bf57-99b025dc038f | Natelegé Whaley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natelegé-whaley/ | |
Floridian death metal veterans Obituary remain a beacon of consistency. This self-titled record is their most energetic effort since reforming in 2003, and it proves their vitality. | Floridian death metal veterans Obituary remain a beacon of consistency. This self-titled record is their most energetic effort since reforming in 2003, and it proves their vitality. | Obituary: Obituary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22992-obituary/ | Obituary | Of the bands that define Florida death metal, which also strongly defines American Death Metal as a whole, Obituary remain a beacon of consistency. Beginning in 1984 under the Executioner moniker, Obituary built their sound around stripping the Gothic cobwebs off Celtic Frost’s mid-paced riffing. They let the guitars become a humid swamp, thick and airy. Singer John Tardy defined death metal vocals by getting as guttural as guitarist Trevor Peres’ rhythms, removing any last vestiges of thrashy snarling. Obituary have been held as models for keeping it simple, and for fans, the idea of a new album from them can seem predictable. But their self-titled 10th record proves Obituary don’t suffer for sticking to their identity.
Peres and drummer Donald Tardy remain at the heart of Obituary and feed off each other in a way few death metal bands do. Peres sounds more mangled when Donald speeds up, and already thick riffs feel impenetrable as his drumming slows. As such, Peres’ low, groveling guitar tone is more flexible than it seems. Obituary begins with two faster numbers, “Brave” and “Sentence Day”—affirmations that they’re not giving up anytime soon. Both are busy for a band who prefers to let a groovy riff sink in, and John in particular lunges with a youthfulness that rivals the band’s heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Some of Obituary’s best work has come from letting flashiness creep in. In 1990, for example, Cause of Death had its sludge punctured by James Murphy’s divebombs and neoclassically-influenced soloing. That album contained their most developed songwriting in terms of leads. Likewise, thanks to Ken Andrews’ lead work here, Obituary is their most energetic record since reforming in 2003 (they originally disbanded in ’97). On “shredder” records, the disconnect between the fireworks of the guitarist and the tepid rhythm section can be jarring. But Peres and Donald’s strong foundation keeps that from happening.
Andrews can also bow to death metal tradition, as he does with the spaced-out, Death-like leads in “Kneel Before Me.” Meanwhile, “Sentence” ends with a one-man guitar battle, as Andrews heralds not just the dueling harmonies of Judas Priest’s Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing but also Slayer’s chaotic interplay between Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King. He’s not just versatile; he sounds like he’s genuinely excited. And that exuberance doesn’t arise from nowhere—Donald and Andrews were once members of Andrew W.K.’s backing band.
This record honors all of Obituary’s history by not compromising. Its reliability is peppered with unrest. Obituary ends the opposite of how it began—slow and yet somehow impatient. “Straight to Hell” recalls the dim flickering-light riffs of 1992’s “The End Complete,” resulting in a seediness that’s constantly promised in death metal and rarely achieved. “Turned Into Stone” centers their Celtic Frost worship, a more gradual unsettling than some of the record’s faster pillages. With these contrasts, Obituary show they’re keenly aware of dynamics in a way most bands could stand to afford. In 2017, the challenge for a veteran metal act is to not relentlessly innovate, but to mine any small new parts of their sound. Kreator and Immolation have proved successful in this regard already, and Obituary, while sticking closer to their roots, have also proven their vitality here. | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | March 20, 2017 | 7.6 | 596de3e4-80c2-4b87-9cc3-5ea06401be14 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The debut solo album from Pavo Pavo’s Eliza Bagg, a collection of pop songs with subtle experimental undertones, is her most outré release to date. | The debut solo album from Pavo Pavo’s Eliza Bagg, a collection of pop songs with subtle experimental undertones, is her most outré release to date. | Lisel: Angels on the Slope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lisel-angels-on-the-slope/ | Angels on the Slope | In her work with the band Pavo Pavo, and as a frequent collaborator of artists like Julianna Barwick and Tim Hecker, Eliza Bagg writes complicated arrangements and string parts masked by doe-like melodies. She exerts god-tier control over her soprano, approaching her work with the dogged precision of serious classical training. The Los Angeles-based polymath brings all this fussy expertise to her debut solo record, Angels on the Slope, under the moniker Lisel. A collection of pop songs with subtle experimental undertones, it’s Bagg’s most outré release to date, albeit one overcrowded by gaudy production effects.
On first listen, Angels on the Slope suggests a pop album seeped in the work of Björk and early Grimes. It’s hard not to notice the chintziness of the keyboards that serve as a backbone on “Hunker Down,” or the sweaty, mildly hypnotic drum machine loop. You could dance to it, or at least bop your head as it plays in the background of a fashionable loft party. Listen a few times more, and you’ll notice the frenetic bursts of saxophone and superfluous Auto-Tune accents. It’s certainly an interesting concept, to imbue straight-laced baroque pop with elements of dance music, but it makes for a convoluted way to bridge the world of freaky orchestral pop and the decidedly less freaky world of prefab synth music.
“Digital Light Field” centers on Bagg’s spectacular voice, spun through yet another layer of Auto-Tune and immersed in naïve pop textures, plus a couple of densely arpeggiated synths. The song is apparently about the light emitted by cell phones, but the lyrics are muddled by enough distortion that you can’t really tell. Angels on the Slope is not a lyrics record, and it doesn’t have to be. The intrigue lies in the mechanics of the arrangements, and in Bagg’s ability to keep you on your toes, never allowing the apparent sheen of seriousness to become too comfortable. That’s not to say there aren’t bland moments: “Hollowmaker” drags, and the overproduced “Mirage” leans a little too hard into self-consciously weird ’80s pastiche, leaving Bagg sounding lost.
Angels on the Slope can’t boast the kinds of surprises that make you jump out of your seat. It’s more about the joys of subtle dissonance, and the need to be unburdened by genre. On “Bloodletting,” the album’s centerpiece, Bagg allows herself to go entirely operatic. Her vocals are pristine, free of over-stylized production tricks. A piano opens like a Venus fly trap, while a saxophone’s upper registers flutter into its mouth; in the song’s soft corners, a synthesizer rotates with the precision of hands on an antique watch. On an otherwise flashy and cluttered record, “Bloodletting” is a moment of lucidity. Bagg has all of the skill and creativity to make beautiful music. It’s time for her to let go of the noise. | 2019-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | Luminelle | July 27, 2019 | 6.8 | 596e05a8-6417-48f7-b704-c138926e5e55 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Working with producer Jay Joyce and Nashville session musicians, the masked cult figure adopts the widescreen scale of mainstream country while stretching his eccentricities to their limits. | Working with producer Jay Joyce and Nashville session musicians, the masked cult figure adopts the widescreen scale of mainstream country while stretching his eccentricities to their limits. | Orville Peck: Bronco | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/orville-peck-bronco/ | Bronco | A gay cowboy with South African and Canadian roots who performs with his face hidden behind a fringed mask, Orville Peck seems like a figure destined to reside on the margins of pop culture. Somehow, this former punk—he guards his true identity but has acknowledged he played in a punk band prior to inventing the Peck persona—struck a nerve with his 2019 debut, Pony, as the novelty of his outlandish act gained audiences far beyond the indie-rock world where he got his start. Soon, Peck made the leap from curiosity to cult figure, climbing his way up the bill at festivals, hosting an episode of the Netflix documentary series This Is Pop, signing with Sony Music, and, to top it all off, convincing Shania Twain—the biggest singer ever to come out of Canada, where he got his start—to sing on Show Pony, the follow-up to his debut.
Bronco, the first full-length released under his new deal with Columbia, is the polar opposite of the spare, spooky Pony. Cut with Jay Joyce—the producer behind all of Eric Church’s albums, along with excellent records by Miranda Lambert, Brandy Clark, Brothers Osborne, and Ashley McBryde—Bronco is so bold and colorful, it’s as if it was written with the silver screen in mind. The escalation of scale feels less like an attempt to dive into the country mainstream than the sign of an idiosyncratic artist seizing all available opportunities to stretch his eccentricities to their limits.
Delivered with all the urgency of a CinemaScope potboiler, “Daytona Sand” gets Bronco off to a galloping start, establishing the album’s musical and emotional parameters: The sounds are overheated, the stories told in arid detail. Peck populates his songs with same-sex love, lust, and longing, never lingering on the fact that open homosexuality remains rare within country music. Then again, Bronco hardly sounds or feels like modern country. Peck weaves a tapestry of mid-century American music, grounding himself in the rock and country made somewhere between the emergence of Elvis Presley and the rise of the Beatles while dabbling in the sun-bleached hippie hangover of the early 1970s. Many of the best moments are nods to that progressive era, especially the shimmering “The Curse of the Blackened Eye” and the warm sighs of “Outta Time,” with references to the PCH and Malibu evoking the peak era of soft rock. “C’mon Baby, Cry” also feels quintessentially Californian, as its swelling chorus, deep reverb, and nimble melody conjure memories of AM golden oldies.
The effectiveness of these pastiches is a testament to Jay Joyce’s skill. Augmenting Peck’s touring band with a number of Nashville session musicians, Joyce helps Peck articulate his vision of an invented American past, giving these fantasias gritty gravitas while managing the trick of being self-aware but not camp. The instrumental details suggest a Nashville sound unmoored from commercial considerations, while the bottomless echo evokes the dusty landscapes created by Lee Hazlewood and Duane Eddy. As on Pony, the ghost of Roy Orbison lurks at the heart of the melodrama. Mostly, though, Bronco sounds like a gothic Elvis Presley, a connection Peck underscores with multiple winks at the King, such as the pointed joke in “Outta Time”: “I meet a girl who’s trying to shoot the breeze/She tells me she don’t like Elvis/I say I want a little less conversation please.”
The emphasis on the rhinestone icon inevitably highlights Bronco’s one failing: The album would be better if Peck could actually sing. Peck may be a master vocalizer capable of wringing maximum ardor out of a song, but he alternates between a portentous mumble and a throaty bellow, the kind of histrionics that were once the speciality of Elvis impersonators. When the production is as over the top as Peck himself, it can be easy to excuse—if not quite ignore—these affectations, but whenever he’s relatively unadorned, as on “Let Me Drown” and “City of Gold,” his unsteady, amelodic quaver is difficult to ignore. All these tics were on Pony, too, yet there they added to the charm. Here, as part of a grander spectacle, they become a distraction—a nagging element that keeps Bronco feeling earthbound. | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Columbia | April 8, 2022 | 6.8 | 59742fc1-e721-41ae-b269-18f366efe699 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Tom Krell follows 2010's terrific Love Remains with a low-key, four-song release that affirms there is something special about this project. | Tom Krell follows 2010's terrific Love Remains with a low-key, four-song release that affirms there is something special about this project. | How to Dress Well: Just Once EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15676-just-once-ep/ | Just Once EP | Tom Krell's debut LP as How to Dress Well, last year's Love Remains, consisted mostly of songs gathered from numerous digital EPs he'd been posting on his blog. Love Remains picked the best of these tracks and arranged them into a set that felt like a coherent outline of the project: ethereal home recordings, more about mood and texture than lyrics or melody, that draw from mainstream pop and R&B but transform some of the formal qualities of those genres via a lo-fi, "feel"-oriented setting. Since then, critics have discussed Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and other artists alongside How to Dress Well to define a loose trend of the young, urban hip embracing a version of R&B, but to me Krell's music has always sounded more like an art project and less like something that truly touches on what is, after all, a supremely populist (and popular) genre. Without the crackling digital distortion, words buried under a mountain of cheap reverb, and blurred visual imagery, How to Dress Well's songs are skeletal, to say the least.
As good as Love Remains was, there was a distinct feeling of "Where can this project go next?" It's a common question these days, when adopting a ready-made style is as easy as installing a new Tumblr theme and bands are sometimes more about abstract ideas than individual expression (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism). "How to Dress Well" is the "thing," in other words, not any individual song or record; the project itself is where the expressive possibility lies. So how has that project changed? And does it need to? To his credit, Krell took the right tack here by putting out a low-key, limited release built around a different concept, something that in no way feels like a follow-up. Just Once is a four-song EP that collects two previously released tracks bearing the name "Suicide Dream", adds a third with that title, and throws in a new version of "Decisions", what I would argue is Krell's best track to date. All four songs have been recorded with a string quartet, and the set was inspired by and is dedicated to a friend of Krell's who passed away.
There's something a little funny about the idea of going from blown-out lo-fi to a freaking string quartet in the space of a single release. But the truly weird thing about Just Once is how the songs once rendered by Krell's presumably cheap home production don't sound all that different given the conservatory approach here. His vocals are still coated in reverb, the intertwining harmonies still given the same arrangements, and it turns out that those elements are what make How to Dress Well's sound distinct. Just Once still feels slightly crude and handmade, despite the instrumentation involved, and there's no mistaking it for anyone else.
The old and new "Suicide Dream" tracks work well together to evoke a sense of yearning and loss. And "Decisions", with its waltz-time shuffle and signature pause every fourth measure, is still glorious, the sound of a song drawing fuzzy, abstracted versions of about five different emotions and swirling them together into one grand whole. Just Once also serves as a potential argument that How to Dress Well is best in short four- or five-song bursts, the way the first few EPs arrived-- you get the feeling Krell's songs evoke for 18 or 20 minutes, and then you move on. Sure, there's no avoiding the fact that some of these songs are appearing for the third time. The nagging "what now?" question isn't going away. But it can be filed away for later. | 2011-07-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Love Letters Ink | July 26, 2011 | 7.8 | 597465c9-fce3-403f-8c6c-57ab4a7e9ca0 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s clear vocals and candid lyrics feel at home in the Philadelphia DIY scene that raised her. | The 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s clear vocals and candid lyrics feel at home in the Philadelphia DIY scene that raised her. | Harmony Woods: Make Yourself at Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harmony-woods-make-yourself-at-home/ | Make Yourself at Home | Before Sofia Verbilla began making music as Harmony Woods, she was dragging friends to gigs around her native Philadelphia, introducing her peers to the city’s DIY scene and pining for a chance to meet her local rock heroes. Inspired by the same bands she moshed to, Verbilla finished writing her first song when she was 16. By 18, she was playing solo sets at the same house show space that members of Modern Baseball once called home. Some of the band even helped her record Harmony Woods’ debut, 2017’s Nothing Special. But there was surely something special about Verbilla; with crystal-clear vocals and evocative lyrics, she was primed to become a fixture of Philly’s underground.
The title of Harmony Woods’ follow-up LP, Make Yourself at Home, is less welcoming than it appears: “So make yourself at home, although you weren’t invited,” Verbilla offers on lead single “Best Laid Plans.” It’s the kind of passive-aggressive comment you might make to someone who’s crashed on your couch a few nights too many, but it’s also an apt summary of a record that examines self-sabotage. Verbilla sings about devoting too much emotional real estate to people who don’t necessarily deserve it, or—in her own meme-formatted words—romanticizing their toxic behaviors. She’s learning to prioritize her own well-being, and Make Yourself at Home unearths the ugly side of that maturation.
Verbilla is an affecting lyricist; her words are candid, unglamorous, and often graphic recollections of trauma. “I can’t feel safe around you/Not when you’re like this,” she laments in the jarring “Misled,” as if channeling pain directly from childhood. “When I was young/My mother’s lover acted the same exact way.” The album also describes the agonizing process of unpicking an abusive relationship, alluding to domestic violence and gaslighting. “You slam the car door shut accidentally/Profusely apologize/You say, ‘That’s not like me,’” she sings on “The City’s Our Song,” with enough hindsight to realize it was indeed characteristic of her subject. “Now all I want is the truth/But you’re frightening me instead/You say, ‘I think you’ve been misled,’” she sings in “Misled.” Verbilla regularly employs her villains’ dialogue, and Make Yourself at Home can feel as much about them as it is about her.
She’s also a fan of recycling lyrics: “Seasons change, people stay the same,” she muses in both “Best Laid Plans” and closer “Halt.” “One day we will die/And only ghosts will be our friends,” she sings in “The City’s Our Song,” only to reiterate the thought on “Ghosts.” On first pass, it can feel lazy—but repeated listens suggest that these are simply Verbilla’s mantras on humanity and mortality. The more hurt she reveals (“Another trauma I’ll have to unpack,” she wails in “Burden”), the more weight her duplicated words bear.
While Verbilla finds strength in this poetry, she’s yet to hit her stride as a musician. “Best Laid Plans” and “The City’s Our Song” boast her boldest, most dynamic choruses, but few moments are equal to them. Compositionally, Make Yourself at Home is rather simple: There are more power chords than intricate riffs, and most of the hooks are a little too banal to stick. It’s easy to wish there was something more complex in the music of Harmony Woods—but after you hear Verbilla’s narratives, it’s also pretty easy to forgive her. | 2019-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Skeletal Lightning | October 5, 2019 | 6.5 | 59767f6f-5b64-41e7-8411-678203e26185 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The 78-year-old folk legend remains in a spirit full of joy, an embodiment of old-time string band chaos and a bastion of enthusiasm for the legacy of music as storytelling. | The 78-year-old folk legend remains in a spirit full of joy, an embodiment of old-time string band chaos and a bastion of enthusiasm for the legacy of music as storytelling. | Peter Stampfel: Holiday for Strings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22505-holiday-for-strings/ | Holiday for Strings | Communicating unbridled enthusiasm the same way Johnny Rotten once vocalized a sneer, Peter Stampfel’s singing is the type that might either drive people from rooms or pull them closer. An underground musician in the early 1960s and an underground musician now, the fiddler-banjoist’s gleeful howl has always framed his music as belonging to some faction of the other, as symbolic as a fuzzed-out guitar once seemed to be. Except in the 21st century, with the out-of-control charge of the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” most lately heard in an Audi ad campaign, Stampfel’s voice continues to be exactly as untamable as it was in the ’60s, an aural pointer to a wild bohemia.
On Holiday For Strings, the 78-year-old Stampfel remains in a spirit of full folky joy, an embodiment of old-time string band chaos before its somber post-O Brother, Where Art Thou reconstruction. An early convert to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and its vision of an “old, weird America” (in Greil Marcus’ term), Stampfel took more to the weird than the old. But having hung on to his weird for three-quarters of a century, he now gets to be both, and his personable croak finds unlikely entrance points to unlikely songs.
Recording with an ensemble dubbed the Brooklyn & Lower Manhattan Fiddle/Mandolin Swarm (for its buzzing three-fiddle-minimum arrangements), the result is actually a chaotic big band that gives Stampfel a sympathetic and ever-changing bed for his singing. It is the sound of people making music together, pianos and steel guitars appearing alongside other vibrations as needed, playing songs entirely dictated by what might be called “the folk process.” With only two of the songs credited fully to Stampfel (the instrumentals “Lily” and “Lonely Goth Girl”), the rest are modified traditional or contemporary numbers or songs with blurrier origins (like a version of the fiddle instrumental “Blackberry Blossom” with lyrics by Michelle Shocked).
As co-founder of the ’60s/’70s folk-imploding Holy Modal Rounders, Stampfel was the first to use the word “psychedelic” in a recorded song on “Hesitation Blues” in 1964 and going semi-electric with everybody else a few years later. But Stampfel has remained a fully committed folkie through decades of bands and creative partnerships, most lately with New York songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. It is here that Stampfel’s very vocal enthusiasm generates meaning within his music, providing a source for his long-term creative energy as much as his in-the-moment expression. On Holiday For Strings, Stampfel takes hold of traditional tunes like “Johnny Get Your Gun” and “Yankee Doodle,” turning the latter into a topical stomp on gun nuts, “Honky Doody.” But the album finds its heart in less-traditional borrowings, like introducing Joe Meek’s 1962 space-age instrumental “Telstar” into the folk canon.
While there’s fun to be had, the album’s best performances come on a trio of tender pop songs, each sounding like a more unhinged version of the recent albums of standards arranged for string bands by Stampfel’s former jamming buddy and one-time roommate, Bob Dylan. Just as with Dylan’s Shadows in the Night, it might be easy enough to giggle while Stampfel’s voice warbles and breaks through “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Ray Charles’ countrypolitan hit written by Don Gibson. But, as with Dylan, that would be to miss Stampfel’s deeply human and well-read performance, as cracked as Gibson’s original is smooth. The same holds true of the album’s two most devastating moments, a nearly straight cover of Lou Reed’s “Cremation,” from 1992’s Magic and Loss, rewritten lightly as “Cold Black Sea,” and “Star in the Wind,” written with Stampfel’s former girlfriend/collaborator, the one-named Antonia. Sounding like something Dylan might get to yet, the words come sourced from a mid-’50s installment of Walt Kelly’s comic strip, Pogo, a poem by the artist about a daughter who died in infancy.
There is a modesty to Stampfel’s half-century of small-scale folk detonations, but also an earnest and inviting curiosity. His verve spills into textual form via grammar-busting liner notes (though Stampfel is also a professional copyeditor), like a musical equivalent of a Facebook wall crammed with annotated YouTube clips. As filled with excitement to be playing and sharing music in his 70s as he was as a teen, Holiday for Strings works just as well as a recruiting poster for the future folkies of America. Like punk, the anarchic arrangements contain the message that anybody can do this, but Stampfel also makes a pretty excellent argument for why it’s still worth doing. | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Don Giovanni | November 14, 2016 | 7.9 | 597a948c-d4e8-423e-9ce0-63077defd303 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
Featuring Agalloch's Aesop Dekker on drums, this Bay Area band moves between doom metal and gentler 4AD-adherent epics on its sophomore LP. | Featuring Agalloch's Aesop Dekker on drums, this Bay Area band moves between doom metal and gentler 4AD-adherent epics on its sophomore LP. | Worm Ouroboros: Come the Thaw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16448-come-the-thaw/ | Come the Thaw | Worm Ouroboros is a hit-and-miss name: The handle sounds frightening, of course, with its image of an annelid stretching into a circle to engulf its own tail. It's the sort of moniker that suggests a gang of crusty punks or a band of black metal bros, all loud and mean and vile. But Worm Ouroboros is actually guitarist/singer Jessica Way and bassist/keyboardist Lorranie Rath, accompanied on each of their two albums by a different drummer. The Bay Area group plays as softly as the two sing, their ethereal harmonies luxuriating above musical atmospheres that shift shapes like thick white clouds. Wading between waters of doom metal and gossamer atmospherics, Way and Rath's music moves with a wonderfully graceful menace that's far less terrifying than the name might indicate. But as "Worm Ouroboros" rightly suggests, the eight-minute drifts and builds that this band makes are borne of persistence, diligence, and care. Their sense of restraint turns the rare trick of making 4AD-adherent epics stop just short of maudlin.
The band's second album Come the Thaw sharpens the focus of their 2010 self-titled debut by giving each instrumental part what essentially amounts to more respect. Like recent records by the blues-crawling Earth, Worm Ouroboros makes layered music that doesn't sound overly dense or distracted, so that each player is able not only to convey shades of meaning but also to push each song along in unexpected ways. Though never very loud, Rath's remarkable bass playing shakes the frame. On "Further Out", her thick lines dart beneath Way's languid guitar, not only shouldering the melody but also serving as the tonal anchor. Way's playing during "Withered" is marvel of dynamics, each steely note refracted as if through a crystal. She finally climbs into a riff, though, and like a spartan Crazy Horse, the rest of the band follows, lashing hard against its back. Its hard-won redemption, the sort of coda that feels deserved.
Drummer Aesop Dekker proves Worm Ouroboros' perfect complementary third. If you've heard his 1990s punk bands or his current black-metal benders Agalloch and Ludicra, you know playing heavy isn't a worry for him. Last year, he wrote about his favorite jazz albums for NPR. By splitting the meter during "Withered" and darting (slowly) around the beat of "Further Out", he proves that such talk isn't a feint, but is instead a tool. Here, he's constantly on the boundary of heavy-- insistent but not impatient, always present but never upstaging. He breaks through only when necessary, adding dimension and weight to the nebulous movement. All the space on Come the Thaw simply galvanizes those bigger moments, affording simple rock-trio-taking-a-solo moments a rare kind of majesty and power. That feeling is appropriate, too, since Come the Thaw lyrically focuses on processes that take months, years or lifetimes to reach-- birth, blossoming, death, discovering-- but only an instant to fulfill. "We feed our days on measured hours," Rath reassures at one point, singing with such softness and slowness that it feels as if these units of time are only foreign abstractions.
During "When We Are Gold", Rath opens with a question. "What have we won/ when all is won?" she sings, pulling at each syllable like strips of gauze as feather-light guitar, bass, and drums wind through each other. This track is not only the album's best but its loudest, pushing from a place close to stillness and silence into, after nine minutes, the sort of near-roar that might fit between two Agalloch bursts or on any record that attempts to truss post and hard rock. But the climax matters here less than that opening credo; in the context of Come the Thaw, an album that's very much concerned with the slow cycles of nature and life, it seems a subtle indictment of music that mistakes volume and motion for emotion and substance. Worm Ouroboros are more concerned with the core of their music than the crescendos that that might propel. It's a good thing, too, because these songs-- however quiet or calm they become-- bear a great weight with remarkable elegance. | 2012-03-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-03-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | March 30, 2012 | 7.4 | 597dc669-fc41-4e0e-8b17-7f297ee4fd4f | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The new Xiu Xiu LP consolidates several of the band’s strengths—mixing hooks, cacophony, and stellar production. Individual moments shine, but the album can lull you into a state of absentmindedness. | The new Xiu Xiu LP consolidates several of the band’s strengths—mixing hooks, cacophony, and stellar production. Individual moments shine, but the album can lull you into a state of absentmindedness. | Xiu Xiu: FORGET | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22893-forget/ | FORGET | Xiu Xiu has always been a polarizing act, though some observations about the band are commonly accepted. Jamie Stewart’s tremulous vocals can feel vulnerable and threatening at once. He likes concept albums. And he is a fan of lots of kinds of music—gamelan, noise, dance, folk, punk—which makes his arrangements wondrously varied. Xiu Xiu has managed the feat of combining hooks and cacophony without spoiling either ingredient. They can offer a good time under the art-rock tent.
They can also be exasperating. As a lyricist, Stewart’s penchant for disturbing themes has become predictable over the last 16 years. No matter how far afield Xiu Xiu travels sonically, the emotional landscape is fixed. That trend continues on their latest album’s opener, “The Call.” The song starts with rapid-fire, nearly rapped lines about a “bitch,” and closes with a coda that goes: “Clap bitches/Why why why bitch/Why why cunt why/...Clap bitches.” At a level of vocal texture, these lines don’t sound like they’re sung by Stewart. (Credits list Enyce Smith as a guest vocalist on the track.) But in conceptual terms, the words definitely sound like they come from the guy who once sang “I Luv Abortion.” The verses and choruses shed little contextual light, and the final effect of “The Call” is one of disorientation—a familiar Xiu Xiu tactic.
By now, a choice like this doesn’t seem all that risky, or even commendably ugly. When he crafts a line like this, is Stewart just ticking boxes on the Xiu Xiu style-bingo sheet? Only he knows for sure. But both the pleasures and discomforts of FORGET involve the way the album invites that question. The set consolidates several of the band’s strengths: The production is stellar, with plenty of room for noise-damage as well as melodies (which are numerous). Xiu Xiu has fielded a wide array of intriguing experimental records in the last couple years, but they haven’t turned in pop-adjacent songs this memorable since 2012’s Always.
On “Wondering,” group backing vocals and distortion squall create a chorus of wild power. The otherwise self-pitying “Get Up” launches an ascending arpeggio at its conclusion, and it’s catchy and startling. Even the songs that don’t register as strongly have winning quirks—as with the timorous breakdown that leads to a screaming climax on “Jenny GoGo.”
But as a collection, FORGET doesn’t cohere in the same way that their best recent projects have. Plays the Music of Twin Peaks allowed the band to show an interpretive wisdom regarding another artist’s aesthetic, while remaining identifiable as Xiu Xiu. A recent collaboration with the contemporary classical group Mantra Percussion showed that Stewart can compose long-form works just as well as some of his ambitious experimental peers, like Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. (Saunier appears on “Petite,” and also co-produced FORGET, alongside John Congleton and band-member Angela Seo.) Those albums had a point of view, and made sustained stylistic arguments. But according to Stewart, the organizing conceit of FORGET has to do with the “duality of human frailty.” On the idea of forgetting, he says: “It is a rebirth in blanked out renewal but it also drowns and mutilates our attempt to hold on to what is dear.”
That’s all true enough (if a bit overwrought). But it’s also thin: a simple observation about a human trait having benefits and drawbacks. Nor is there much evidence of this concept operating inside the record itself. Stewart’s lines are filled with the expected references to “the rape of everything decent” and the like—but not much that’s direct regarding the problems of a solipsism, or a selective memory.
The guests all seem a bit stranded, too. On the album finale, “Faith, Torn Apart,” the carillon tones of New York minimalist legend Charlemagne Palestine sound grafted onto the mix. And while a closing soliloquy voiced by legendary drag artist Vaginal Davis is arresting, it doesn’t connect with anything that’s come before. (In interviews, Stewart has detailed the inspiration behind what Davis says, but its presentation on the album remains vague.) Individual moments shine throughout FORGET: a stunning chorus here, a stirring lick of pitched percussion there. But the album’s strangest attribute is the way it can lull you into a state of absentmindedness regarding those same charms. | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Polyvinyl | March 1, 2017 | 6.4 | 5980b7b7-ac86-4ff1-9cfb-50f170f364d4 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Migos members’ new collaboration is longer than it needs to be, but Quavo and Takeoff can make most scenarios sound exciting, whether life-changing or mundane. | The Migos members’ new collaboration is longer than it needs to be, but Quavo and Takeoff can make most scenarios sound exciting, whether life-changing or mundane. | Quavo / Takeoff: Only Built for Infinity Links | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quavo-takeoff-only-built-for-infinity-links/ | Only Built for Infinity Links | In 2018, Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff reached the point where the only thing more impressive than succeeding together would be dominating apart. Eager to divide and conquer, each member of the Migos released a solo album. Every record had its moments, but none—not Quavo’s QUAVO HUNCHO or Takeoff’s The Last Rocket from 2018, nor Offset’s Father of 4 from 2019—came close to the best Migos material, if only because the trio work so much better as a unit. Takeoff benefited most from charting his own path outside the group’s gravitational pull. Beyond the flexes, it was the little anecdotes that beefed up The Last Rocket: being forced to move drugs during the winter, grappling with stage fright as a superstar. Quavo’s solo outing did the opposite, indulging his worst habits. “If I went a little personal,” he later admitted to GQ, “I think my album would’ve been a little bit better.”
Only Built for Infinity Links, the new collaboration from Quavo and Takeoff sans Offset, functions like a Migos album with lower stakes and without a consistent third voice. It succumbs to the same monotony and bloat that plagued the last two Migos albums, yet stands as proof that young rich niggas bring out the best in each other. Allegedly approved by Raekwon and named after his 1995 mafioso-rap epic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Infinity Links’ similarities to the Wu-Tang classic don’t stop at the title. Both albums are steeped in the paranoia and excess of the drug trade, using it to emphasize the platonic bonds at their centers: friends Raekwon and Ghostface on Cuban Linx and uncle Quavo and nephew Takeoff on Infinity Links. But the mood on Infinity Links is less insular and more celebratory. After its hokey intro, opener “Two Infinity Links” turns into an intense baton-passing session over producer Buddah Bless’ rousing 808s. It’s exhilarating to hear the duo switch flows and drop ad-libs as they recall their early days; “Two Infinity Links” deserves to demolish car subwoofers and concert venue floors the same way “T-Shirt” and “What the Price” did back in 2017.
As a pair, Quavo and Takeoff follow one another’s lead. If one comes to the track with malleable flows, the other holds it down with something sturdier. Sometimes, they take the same approach but play with syllable count and timing. On “See Bout It,” Quavo’s strip club-ready rhymes sputter and stop unexpectedly while Takeoff’s verse anchors the song. On “To the Bone,” they trade roles: Takeoff bends time and crams syllables into tight spaces, while Quavo’s sing-songy raps adhere to the rhythm like a roller coaster car to the track.
Their reliable but unpredictable dynamic does as much heavy lifting as their actual bars. Most of the subject matter is one-note by design—these are rappers who made their name off tracks with repetitious hooks about designer clothing and moving cocaine. But they’ve always diversified with splashes of color, which continue to keep Infinity Links interesting: Take the way “Integration” plays on the idea of Quavo and Takeoff’s blindingly white jewelry mixing with their Black skin, or the way Takeoff compares his former lean habit to a discontinued Rolex on “Messy.” And while neither are open books, their writing shines when it leans into the personal touch that QUAVO HUNCHO withheld. Quavo, in particular, drops a handful of details that reinforce the drama of his early 2010s come-up, like the time Quality Control co-founder Pierre Thomas offered him a garbage bag full of money (“Bars Into Captions”). It’s the closest he comes to sounding tender or wistful, and Infinity Links could’ve used more such reflection.
Colorful descriptions can only take this album so far, though. At 18 tracks, Infinity Links is just one song shorter than 2021’s overlong Culture III, and as fun as its best songs are, a quarter of the album registers as either chintzy or superfluous. “Bars Into Captions” represents the latest attempt to flip a sample of a classic rap song—in this case, OutKast’s “So Fresh, So Clean”—for a new generation, but the beat is uninspired and the constant allusions to the sampled song (including an homage to a bar about Anne Frank’s attic) detract from Quavo and Takeoff’s easy chemistry. “Mixy,” “Big Stunna,” and “Hell Yeah” are as generic as their titles, with the flavor and presence of packing peanuts. Bloat is par for the course on albums like these, which doesn’t make the experience any less exhausting.
Though they haven’t solved all their curation and sequencing issues, Quavo and Takeoff’s compatibility grants Infinity Links an easygoing energy that’s hard to resist. Their uncle-nephew relationship isn’t just a bit of fascinating rap trivia: You can hear their bond in their back-and-forths, the way their mutating styles make slight tweaks to an already solid formula. The best songs on Infinity Links blow the entirety of Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho*—*Quavo’s indistinct and meandering 2017 collab with Travis Scott—out of the water. The future of the Migos as a unit remains uncertain, but this album represents as natural an evolution as any. | 2022-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown | October 20, 2022 | 7 | 5983c7ef-63c6-4a76-a60c-fe6406b15e92 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Working as a true ensemble player, Conor Oberst here cedes songwriting and vocal duties to others on a sizable portion of his new LP. | Working as a true ensemble player, Conor Oberst here cedes songwriting and vocal duties to others on a sizable portion of his new LP. | Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band: Outer South | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12992-outer-south/ | Outer South | Of all the good and not-so-good qualities you can ascribe to Conor Oberst, "ensemble player" isn't one of them. It's not just that his work as Bright Eyes has essentially always been a solo vision, but that he felt the need to name it "Bright Eyes" in the first place, using a collective nom de plume, in the process adding an extra level of presumptive self-sustaining wholeness. More to the point, there's Oberst's artistic persona itself-- his aggrieved yelp, his poetic bloodletting, his political hectoring, and his perpetual navel gaze, which have combined to attract admirers and detractors with equal fervency.
To date, there's not been a whole lot of room for anyone else in Bright Eyes' music, both in the way Oberst sang and in the first-person singular pronouns that so automatically rolled off his tongue. Then came last year's eponymous release under Oberst's actual legal name, and irony of ironies, it turned out to be the most self-effacing, song-driven work of his entire career. Oberst made the album with a newly assembled cadre of players dubbed the Mystic Valley Band, yet it was still solely his name and mug on the cover and almost exclusively his voice and songs on the CD. Which is why it's still hard not to do a double-take upon viewing the credits for Outer South, already tellingly released under the banner of Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and seeing that a full seven of the album's 16 songs aren't sung by indie-rock's former enfant terrible, and that six of those seven weren't penned by him either.
However, Oberst hasn't displayed any modesty within the songs he did write and sing. A full subsuming of Oberst's personality would severely dilute his music's power, but Outer South seems to actually undo many of the beneficially humbling gains made by his last record. Unquestionably, there are dazzlers here, foremost the ripping power-popper "Cabbage Town" and the equally pleasing, jangly "Spoiled", which cannily evokes the ramshackle charm of 1980s R.E.M. and the Cure. Another plus, "To All the Lights in the Windows" gets over on a facile, open-hearted refrain in spite of Oberst's lyrical attempts to bite off more history and myth than he can chew.
Unfortunately, that last qualifier also applies to a few of Oberst's other efforts on Outer South. First single "Nikorette" finds him engaged in one of his regrettably favorite sports-- passing self-satisfied judgments on his fellow man, pronouncing, "There's nothing sadder than a lynching mob/ Full of rational men who believe in God." "Ten Women" and "White Shoes" are stultifyingly ponderous, and of Oberst's songs of sober fervor only "Roosevelt Room" hits its mark, with Oberst remembering his great Desaparecidos trick of replacing Deep Thoughts with pure bile, flashing admirable oppositional rancor at a time when lots of his left-leaning friends are lining up to kiss Obama's hem. Of course, then "I Found a Reason #2" arrives and we have to deal with Oberst eating up the old 60s tropes all over again, from evoking Rolling Stone to nakedly aspiring to be the next Dylan, pealing organs and all.
And remember, these things are taking place on an album that features songwriting and singing contributions from people not named Conor Oberst. As you might expect, Oberst's reversion to logorrhea and emotional extremism here effectively eliminates the possibility that Outer South will possess any ensemble cohesion. There aren't too many personalities with the panache to butt into Oberst's spotlight, and yet his co-conspirators here seem inherently milquetoast-y regardless of context. Jason Boesel ("Difference Is Time", "Eagle on a Pole") does boast a pleasantly dusky, Matt Berninger-ish croon, but Nik Freitas and especially Taylor Hollingsworth only have reedy nice-boy whines to lend to their tunes. Perhaps it's partly a factor of Oberst's essential attention-grabbing nature, but none of these gentlemen offers up a composition that snags the ear better than the most mundane effort from their fearless leader. Perhaps it's simply the case that Oberst is on a busman's holiday here, but either he failed to get the memo to keep things light, or else he should have recruited some more substantial Wilburys. | 2009-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Merge | May 4, 2009 | 4.9 | 59910a8d-4ad2-4e91-872b-221c6b9091e2 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Statik Selektah, a hip-hop mainstay, brings Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Raekwon, Prodigy and more for a boppy, East Coast delight that doesn't make the best use of the producer’s intuition. | Statik Selektah, a hip-hop mainstay, brings Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Raekwon, Prodigy and more for a boppy, East Coast delight that doesn't make the best use of the producer’s intuition. | Statik Selektah: 8 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/statik-selektah-8/ | 8 | There’s a story Questlove has told about J Dilla over the years that helps reveal the depths of the beatnik producer’s genius. As the legend goes, the pair were killing hours one night back in 1999 when Dilla started playing around with Roy Ayers’ righteous jazz number “Ain’t Got Time.” With no obvious point of the song to snatch, he instead took fragments of audio—a second here, a half-second there—and glued together a cohesive eight-bar loop. From that, Jay forged the beat that would later become Black Star’s classic joint “Little Brother.”
That’s the kind of intuition all the great crate-digging beatmakers have: a superhuman ear for harnessing a sample. Statik Selektah is from the DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Madlib, Kanye West, J Dilla lineage—a chop-up-the-soul virtuoso of dusty samples, snappy drums, and quick-hand record scratches. When everything comes together, Statik is capable of slicing off cool cuts of vintage golden age East Coast-style hip-hop. But sometimes he lacks that crucial Dilla-esque clairvoyance for spotting a great sample, and it hurts his batting average. Over 18 tracks, new album 8—because it’s his eighth LP, you see—encapsulates the Massachusetts native at his very best and worst.
One thing you can never argue about is the talent in Statik’s contacts list. Rolling back on previous assertions that 2015’s Lucky 7 would be his last album, 8 resurrects the format all his solo full-lengths have taken: a huge assemblage of rap stars are gathered—from frequent NYC collaborators like Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, to veterans like Raekwon, Juelz Santana, and the Lox—who are seemingly shuffled up and dealt out over Statik’s beats in a manner that sometimes feels random and ramshackle. There’s also a couple posthumous verses from Sean Price and Prodigy, and no album with assists from those two will ever be totally without worth.
8 does have some sizzling highlights. The rumbling bassline and rat-tat-tat drums of “Watching Myself” is a complex soundscape, but Bronson, as loose and funky as ever, successfully rides the beat with swagger. Featuring Prodigy and co-produced by the Alchemist, “Disrespekt” is street rap in-line with the rugged, brass-knuckle psychedelica of Alc and P’s excellent previous collaborations. The best song is probably “No. 8,” featuring Griselda Gang siblings Westside Gunn and Conway, as well as Massachusetts rapper Termanology.
Too many tracks, though, don’t flow with the same elegant groove. Basslines awkwardly bump into samples, the drums can be unnecessarily abrasive, and some of the cut-up loops are grating on the ear. Take “Put the Jewels on It,” a huge coup for Statik producing a song for Run the Jewels, but El-P and Killer Mike are wasted on an instrumental built around harsh, screechy orchestral notes. Similarly, B-Real and Everlast are overwhelmed by the shrill horn stabs of “Shakem Up.”
Elsewhere, the rattling percussion, uplifting piano chords, and neatly plucked bassline of the Wale-featuring “Get Down” fail to mesh together with any kind of cohesion. On “Man of the Hour,” Statik drops the kind of shimmering, indulgent beat that JAY-Z gravitated towards in the early 2000s, but 2 Chainz and Wiz Khalifa lack chemistry with the music and each other, like their verses had been lifted from different tracks entirely.
A lot of the on-mic talent are game. Ex-Clipse star No Malice sounds lively on the choir samples of “Pull the Curtain Back,” while Joyner Lucas dexterously shows his full range of flows on “Don’t Run.” But their efforts are too rarely treated with the kind of care necessary to funnel them into great tracks. Statik is not without gifts and there will hopefully be a demand for producers of his acumen as long as there’s a New York skyscraper left standing. But this choppy solo album format feels less instinctual for the producer and fails to make the best use of his talent. | 2017-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Showoff | December 13, 2017 | 5.9 | 59929495-d56d-49f6-a67f-5b1033e32c3d | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Five pleasantly familiar outtakes from 2022’s Once Twice Melody extend that album’s dream-pop sparkle and festival-headliner sheen. | Five pleasantly familiar outtakes from 2022’s Once Twice Melody extend that album’s dream-pop sparkle and festival-headliner sheen. | Beach House: Become EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-house-become-ep/ | Become EP | Beach House’s very first non-album single, released in the wake of Devotion in 2008, with the “Apple Orchard” demo on the flip, was a scruffy early take on “Used to Be,” a song that eventually appeared in finished, thrilling form on 2010’s Teen Dream. The single version recalled their previous music while hinting at the towering run to come, asking, “Are you not the same as you used to be?” The band’s new Become EP doesn’t pull the same trick, and in fairness Beach House said it wouldn’t. “It’s not really where we are currently going, but it’s definitely somewhere we have been,” they’ve written. Become, originally released for Record Store Day, consists of five songs that Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally didn’t think fit on their most recent album, 2022’s Once Twice Melody. Don’t expect anything radically different, though.
Become is sumptuous and starry enough to play alongside Once Twice Melody without dampening the mood; creating a playlist with these songs tacked on at the end makes for a fine DIY deluxe edition. Its shortcomings also shine a light on the merits of the 18 tracks that ultimately did make it onto the album. Once Twice Melody was distinguished by its double-disc sprawl, its festival-headliner sheen, and, here and there, some uncharacteristically clunky lyrics. Become keeps some of that sparkle but also the occasional awkwardness. It’s pleasant but still feels like an afterthought.
The strengths and weaknesses are most apparent on “Devil’s Pool.” The tinny, Casio-style beats draped with velvety organ will provoke visceral sense memories in longtime listeners. Add Legrand’s breathy purr, Scally’s Twin Peaks guitar twinkles, and a smattering of live percussion, and Beach House are in their ethereal, slow-motion comfort zone. A curious, cicada-like buzzing adds a little variety, and the song’s reassurances to a loved one who’s medicated beyond reach have some promise. But rhyming “in a devil’s pool” with “you don’t know the rules” and “you’re just somebody’s fool” is rote and distracts from the dreaminess.
The other four songs on the EP also have the feel of second-tier material from a first-tier group. With crystalline guitar arpeggios and a propulsive rhythm section, “American Daughter” is cut from the same stadium-size cloth as Once Twice Melody, more School of Seven Bells than Mazzy Star, but “to know her is to love her” is an old cliché—and a reverie about an American daughter is anticlimactic in the year of Lana Del Rey’s “American whore.” The floaty synths and airy, wordless refrains of “Holiday House” achieve the expected Beach House mood, but it’s easy to see why a song that mentions a “sweet little runaway” might’ve been out of place on an album that already has a song called “Runaway.” The title track is more of the same: their characteristic thrum and smolder with lyrics that feel like placeholders, plus a bit of “Fake Plastic Trees” in the strummed guitar.
From a band that continues to give new meaning to “always different, always the same,” more of the same is not always unwelcome. If you’re unfamiliar, Become might even be a decent place to start, but like much else in Beach House’s deep catalog of odds and ends, it’s a reminder that the band’s spellbinding studio albums are not so effortless as they may sound. | 2023-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 29, 2023 | 6.8 | 599bf09a-1d8f-43ad-a385-c521c46951fa | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Last year's Blondes, a collection of singles, found the Brooklyn-based duo offering up tech house at its most unabashedly pretty. Follow-up Swisher builds from that release, establishing the ultimate core of their aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious. | Last year's Blondes, a collection of singles, found the Brooklyn-based duo offering up tech house at its most unabashedly pretty. Follow-up Swisher builds from that release, establishing the ultimate core of their aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious. | Blondes: Swisher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18261-blondes-swisher/ | Swisher | Techno’s narrative of robot soul is music-mythologising at its most seductive and I suspect Brooklyn duo Blondes think about this myth. Last year’s self-titled collection of singles offered up tech-house (with the emphasis on the “house”) at its most unabashedly pretty, all glittering chime loops and warm basslines, and sometimes even the gentle nourishment of a piano vamp. Blondes ploughed this furrow so intently that it felt like a cohesive statement, and one that it was difficult to imagine the duo adjusting it-- let alone surpassing it-- any time soon.
Follow-up Swisher doesn’t abandon the beauty of the duo’s earlier work (“Andrew” and “Rei” could easily be lifted from last year’s album) but it uses it more judiciously. This shift makes Swisher less immediately captivating but somehow more involving than its predecessor, establishing the ultimate core of the duo’s aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious. How to reconcile the gentle machine-clanking of opener “Aeon”-- like a lost treasure from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92-- with the frozen expanses of the appropriately-titled “Poland”, or that with the urgent stop-start stalk of “Clasp”, which harkens back to Dettinger at his most ambitious? These tunes are less distant from one another in strict stylistic terms than in function and intention: The underlying dynamic feels slippery and difficult to pin down, but united in its sense of purpose. This shift in tone coincides so closely with the move away from house and towards techno proper that it’s probably pointless to detangle them.
What carries over from the debut to these undeniably colder, more shadowed arrangements is the naturalism of Blondes’ production, pointillist in precision but still organic in feel. At its most steely and forbidding, Swisher aspires to the kind of warmth-in-coldness of Basic Channel, the percussion like tiny blades gently scraping at the surface of your ears, and urgent low drones like locust clouds hovering below eyeshot. “Bora Bora” builds to a torrent of feedback before relaxing into an outro of unexpectedly Latin-infused percussion, and it’s a mark of just how good Blondes are that they can execute transmutations like this so effortlessly and near-imperceptibly. Similarly, the title track creates an entire gas-planet ecosystem of scratching snare patterns, sighing new age synth rushes, and disorienting, bubbling churns, through which a restless Carl Craig arpeggio coalesces like a nascent life form attempting to will itself into existence.
Rounding out Swisher is “Elise”, which threatens to overshadow all that has preceded in its singularity and directness. The kind of winsome, heart-in-mouth epic for which Jürgen Paape or Superpitcher were once beloved, its nagging chime melody, swishing house percussion, and hesitantly flirty bass pulses evoke the human where elsewhere there is only the sentient. If it wasn’t so lovely, it would seem like a cop-out. Instead, it’s a gift, and a reminder of how the familiar emerges out of the foreign, interpersonal meaning out of seemingly meaningless biological process. As myth-making goes, it’s hard to fault. | 2013-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | July 10, 2013 | 7.9 | 59b0722d-7691-4d27-940e-a58eacbc1155 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
The North Carolina band's second album marks their Merge debut, where Heather McEntire sings of a life yoked to the tides of a town ruled by college seasons. She's country to the core, a quality the rest of the band emphasize by knowing how to hang back. | The North Carolina band's second album marks their Merge debut, where Heather McEntire sings of a life yoked to the tides of a town ruled by college seasons. She's country to the core, a quality the rest of the band emphasize by knowing how to hang back. | Mount Moriah: Miracle Temple | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17590-mount-moriah-miracle-temple/ | Miracle Temple | Mount Moriah is a real college town band-- though not in the pejorative sense. The band formed from a record counter friendship between singer Heather McEntire and guitarist Jenks Miller at the since-shuttered Schoolkids Records, on the University of North Carolina campus. On the band's rootsy, countrified second album (and Merge debut) Miracle Temple, McEntire sings of a life in a town ruled by student seasons, where you stay after everyone goes, leaving summer wide open. Album opener "Younger Days" ends on a question: "August is over so when are you coming back?" McEntire sings it with resigned hope: when they're gone, they're gone.
The album is nostalgic for people and times that can't be had again, no matter what magic you attempt. "You know I really tried, girl/ To lift your small town summer malaise," she sings, in ode to a wild girl who just couldn't hang. "How I tried for years to return there," goes "Union Street Bridge", recalling misspent youth. Most of the songs are in the past tense and measure the chasm between the innocent spoils of then and the sadness of now by what's been lost in the interim: fearlessness, blind love, the ability to make someone weak in the knees. "Go on, disappear," she sings on "I Built a Town", casting out this awful ghost of the perfect past. Miracle Temple orients itself from the knowledge that there is no being restored.
McEntire grew up on Southern Baptist hymns and Springsteen; the influence of both are evident here. The plaintive appeals in her lyrics and the soulful burr in her voice are church skills since refined for secular use. There is some Darkness on the Edge of Town within Miracle Temple; dreams too big for a small town, highways beckoning getaway from all that conspires to keep you there. In lieu of Jersey, high school sweethearts, and Carter-era gloom, it's the Outer Banks, straight girls' drunken flirting, and cruel summers.
But McEntire could be singing about anything with lyrics deep or dumb, and it would hardly matter-- there is that voice of hers. The comparison to young Dolly Parton is not undue; the quiver as she gets to the song's emotional center, the way she reigns herself in right before you expect her to belt it. Like Parton, she reserves her big voice for when she needs to bring out the drama. McEntire often gets pegged as post-punk, due to her proximity to the DIY scene she came up in, but on "White Sands", she stretches "kids" to nearly four syllables (something like "key-yuh-hid-s" with a little hiccup in the middle)-- conclusive proof that girl is country.
Alas, the rest of the band is not. They are very much Southern, but that is not that same thing. They lay in and drift a bit between punctuating, shuffling rhythms-- their loose hooks mimicking a drawl. Jenks Miller, a guitarist with enough confidence to occasionally venture solo as Horseback, keeps his accompaniment spare; his long single note runs to accent McEntire's melody lines fill in the excited silence.
The album's stand out track is "I Built a Town", which is the sort of Muscle Shoals throwback many attempt and few land. The strings swell, the organ whirrs, and you imagine a bouffanted McEntire, a la Dusty in Memphis, wiping her tears away as the back-up girls coo. She gave it all, and now, now there's nothing. It's easy to imagine that doing an entire record that straight would just be a showy genre exercise for them, but that can't keep a girl from wishing for more. The rest of the band obviously knows that McEntire is the showpiece-- songs like "Those Girls" show that they do, setting up her big moments with subtlety and understatement-- reminding us that the real power is in restraint. | 2013-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 25, 2013 | 7.8 | 59b7d4c3-c97b-4f79-ac1a-e32256cffd28 | Jessica Hopper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-hopper/ | null |
The Strokes frontman is back with a new band and a new sound. Tyranny is overloaded with ideas, a palette of vibrant colors swirled together until there’s nothing left but brown; it’s as adventurous as it is unlistenable, a spectacular failure. | The Strokes frontman is back with a new band and a new sound. Tyranny is overloaded with ideas, a palette of vibrant colors swirled together until there’s nothing left but brown; it’s as adventurous as it is unlistenable, a spectacular failure. | Julian Casablancas / The Voidz: Tyranny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19856-julian-casablancas-the-voidz-tyranny/ | Tyranny | Mystique has always been a key part of rock iconography, which might explain why Julian Casablancas has remained at arms’ length for so long. At his main act’s creative peak, the Strokes frontman had a confounding, emotionally distant aura. A notorious Rolling Stone profile from 2003—right around the time of the excellent, second-verse-same-as-the-first sophomore effort Room on Fire—portrayed him as a contradictory, besotted rascal, as he unleashed invectives against Pringles, haggled with a bootleg CD vendor over a Radiohead album, and repeatedly kissed journalist Neil Strauss on the neck before drunkenly commandeering an abandoned wheelchair.
“I just don’t have anything deep to say...I’ve got nothing to hide,” he claimed in what Strauss referred to as “the worst interview ever,” and by the time the Strokes put out the career-deflating 2006 record First Impressions of Earth, he was committing the sentiment to tape. In the years that followed, Casablancas sobered up and more or less faded out of view. Near the end of the '00s, he popped up with a solo album of sugary power-pop in the form of the better-than-you-remember Phrazes for the Young, citing the Choose Your Own Adventure books as sonic inspiration; 2011 brought the Strokes’ fourth album, the curiously flat Angles, which was written and recorded without Casablancas entering the same room as his bandmates. By the time last year’s aptly named Comedown Machine saw release, the Strokes—Casablancas, especially—sounded exhausted, as mediocrity came to define the band’s second decade of existence. Instead of failing outright, the Strokes simply became boring.
Regardless of their place in the rock landscape, Casablancas and the Strokes still represent a certain level of aesthetic “cool,” at home and beyond. Many acts from the early-'00s new-rock explosion have retained a considerable level of popularity in Europe, and the Strokes themselves have a distinctly French appeal. Casablancas himself reached his own Gallic pièce de résistance by appearing on Daft Punk’s year-flattening musical odyssey Random Access Memories, lending a soft-focus vocal to the metronomic, neon-melancholy single “Instant Crush”.
His latest musical venture, Julian Casablancas + the Voidz, is a group comprised of session musicians and alt-rock barnacles—guitarist Jeramy Gritter was a member of the mercifully defunct, reality-show-reject outfit Whitestarr—plucked from Casablancas’ current home base of Los Angeles. The best you can say about the band’s debut, Tyranny, is that it's the most interesting thing Casablancas has done since facing off against Guided by Voices on “Family Feud”; it’s a record that's as adventurous as it is unlistenable, a spectacular failure that smacks of both fellow L.A. denizen and gonzo-pop misfit Ariel Pink’s AM-radio abstractions and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ne’er-do-well Charlie’s warped musical efforts. If Angles and Comedown Machine sounded like the work of a group that was running out of steam, Tyranny is a record overloaded with ideas, a palette of vibrant colors swirled together until there’s nothing left but brown.
Casablancas recently told GQ that he’s optimistic about Tyranny’s commercial prospects, which is hilarious if you've actually heard the album. Clocking in at an endless 62 minutes—10 more than bloated First Impressions of Earth—with six of its 12 songs stretching well over the five-minute mark, Tyranny is designed to be impenetrable, a blaring monolith of excess. There are a few ideas buried in the unending screech, suggesting that Casablancas has a raw and unique creative mind, if not the compositional smarts to pull off something this dense. “Take Me in Your Army” and “Nintendo Blood” begin with gorgeous, digitized sighs, 8-bit renderings of the Strokes’ finest, most subtle melancholic moments, but the latter dissolves in an acid bath of guitar squeals and off-beat drum machines, while the former meanders towards a slow-hand guitar solo that smacks of a “shredding” YouTube video made specifically to mock the work of John Carpenter. “M.utally A.ssured D.estruction” packs thrash metal figures and horror movie synths into an energizing two-and-a-half minutes, while the seven-minute-plus “Father Electricity” offers a kalimba-like rhythmic backbone and, after several minutes of useless dithering, a sprightly Afro-pop melody that doubles as the record’s most pleasant surprise.
On the other end of the spectrum is “Human Sadness”, the nearly 11-minute cut released as the album’s first single, ostensibly to confound the expectations of anyone who hadn’t caught Casablancas + the Voidz’s run of incompetent festival performances over the past year. The song is essentially a modern “Bohemian Rhapsody”, if Queen’s pomp-rock classic was twice as long and had only two or three distinct musical movements. After a brief bit of twinkling ambience and a vocal sample referencing the album’s vague theme of capitalistic pitfalls, Disney strings enter alongside an ambling bass line that sounds like a Strokes song played at half-tempo. Then, the song pretty much stays there, Casablancas alternating between a bedside mumble and glass-shattering vocal histrionics as a parade of sounds—a cackling, distorted laugh, ear-bleeding guitars, video game sounds, crashing drums—piles on top of the song’s dirge-like rhythm. Intentionally or not, it plays like “The Story of Everest” in musical form.
“I love being weird/ It’s so weird,” Casablancas tosses off underneath the grating motifs of “Business Dog”, and this particular line speaks volumes on Tyranny’s try-hard stab at eccentricity. (Good luck hearing it without a lyric sheet, though: the words here are the most endearingly bonkers rantings Casablancas has ever put to tape and the album’s execrable production largely buries his vocals to the point where you can barely hear him.) “He must be on drugs” is a typical invective thrown at artists who flirt with career suicide in the way that Casablancas is doing here, but Tyranny is too willfully weird, too labored-sounding, too beholden to its melted-frequency artifice to be merely the product of a substance-addled mind.
As that GQ article highlighted, the common assumption is that Casablancas wrote the first two Strokes albums, a rock lore factoid that suggests prodigiousness from a guy who’s spent the last 15 years looking like he’s never worked a day in his life; on Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record. Maybe Tyranny will one day have a second life as a misunderstood cult record, but in the here and now, it sounds terrible and beyond redemption. | 2014-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Cult | September 25, 2014 | 4.9 | 59bbd7f3-52ed-4249-b5d3-c665e995e15e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On his third album, the former Vine star grows into a persona that’s playful, gently libidinous, and safely menace-free, but his music too often falls on the wrong side of beige. | On his third album, the former Vine star grows into a persona that’s playful, gently libidinous, and safely menace-free, but his music too often falls on the wrong side of beige. | Shawn Mendes: Shawn Mendes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shawn-mendes-shawn-mendes/ | Shawn Mendes | If Shawn Mendes wasn’t born and raised in the Toronto suburbs, he might’ve been tank-grown in an underground lab at a major label’s behest. He’s a genial, grounded young performer with a body “somewhere between fitness model and party trick”—John Mayer’s words, not mine—and a deep passion for adult contemporary pop-rock. He takes hundreds of pictures with fans in a single sitting without batting an eye. And when you hear hit singles like “Stitches” and “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back,” it’s like you’re watching the cutest counsellor at your summer camp grab an acoustic guitar and surprise a horde of pre-teens with his heavenly pipes.
Mendes’ path to upper-echelon stardom began with jaunty covers of mid-’10s hits on Vine, and his first two albums—2015’s boyish Handwritten and a more muscular 2016 follow-up, Illuminate—channeled inoffensive, mercenary songwriters working in the same vein: Mayer, Ed Sheeran, Jason Mraz. Shawn Mendes, his third and most ambitious full-length, breaks the mold by suggesting alternative paths Mendes might walk. The guitar is still the focal point of his attack, whether it’s vigorously strummed (anthemic lead single “In My Blood”) or ever-so-gently picked. But he dips a toe into modern pop with help from expert collaborators like Julia Michaels and Ryan Tedder on “Nervous” and “Particular Taste,” and he dirties up his goody-two-shoes with a handful of smoldering, grown-and-sexy dalliances.
The songs in the latter category capture Mendes at his most engaging and mature; you hear them and understand why Mayer told Zane Lowe that Mendes is “John Mayer 2.0, without the weird software viruses.” Sublime single “Lost in Japan” is air-fried pop-funk, light and crispy with just a whisper of grease. It uses Mendes’ youth and fame to his advantage: It’s not hard to imagine him—rich, horny, and unoccupied—chartering a jet into Tokyo for a quick hookup and a stroll through the cherry blossoms.
The bleary-eyed “Where Were You in the Morning?” works the same way. He’s old enough for someone to stay the night, but naïve enough to feel crushed when he wakes up alone. “And I thought you really felt this/When we were talking about breakfast,” he sings, sitting up in bed and scratching his head. “You made it seem like we connected/I guess I just didn’t expect this.” He can put together a winning ballad in the same style: “Why” is a bruised ode to a lover (whose identity is a hot topic among fans) that coasts on sandpapered vocal texture and a lovely, unexpected vocoder bloom.
There’s a compelling young adult behind this music, someone who’s playful and libidinous without projecting any menace. It’s too bad that this depth of character is absent from the rest of Shawn Mendes. Meeting these songs head-on and digesting them is less fulfilling than sniffing out hat-tips and moves cribbed from other artists. There’s little distinguishing the gasping, conversational “Nervous” from recent Selena Gomez hits like “Hands to Myself” and “Bad Liar,” all of which were co-written by Michaels. You wouldn’t need credits to guess that “Fallin’ All in You” came from Sheeran, in part because Mendes so closely mimics his vocal style. “Because I Had You” knocks its soft, muted guitar and chorus melody from Justin Bieber’s repellent “Love Yourself,” another Sheeran product. (The highlights aren’t immune, either: I caught myself singing Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” over the chords underpinning “Why.”)
This looming sense of familiarity extends past the album’s musical elements and into its writing. Shawn Mendes is populated with stock characters: the girl who’s a little too high on her own supply, the girl worth waiting forever for, the girl who got away. “Particular Taste” draws up a free spirit who answers phone calls with questions and “only dances when it’s Kanye.” (Anyone who refuses to get up for anything other than “Lift Yourself” must be truly eccentric.) Nothing about these songs belongs uniquely to Mendes, and you can imagine them being recorded by anyone: Nick Jonas, Charlie Puth, a random choice from the One Direction diaspora. These are exactly the kind of B- and C-list contemporaries on whom Mendes is supposed to have a head start.
Transforming average material into compelling, distinctive pop is a tall order for any would-be star, let alone one who’s been asked to undergo all of their artistic development in a viral-fame Instant Pot and doesn’t turn 20 until August. It takes more than sheer talent and good will; you need personality and perspective, the kind of intangibles that develop with time. Mendes deserves credit for recognizing the limits of youthful exuberance and proactively broadening his approach. But Shawn Mendes leaves a key question unanswered: What makes this guy different? | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | May 31, 2018 | 5.1 | 59bc9560-34ce-426e-81c7-4a6092b8ef8d | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
On her second album, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter trades her off-kilter pop arrangements for straightforward, unfussy compositions. | On her second album, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter trades her off-kilter pop arrangements for straightforward, unfussy compositions. | Miya Folick : Roach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miya-folick-roach/ | Roach | On Roach, the sophomore album from Miya Folick, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter grounds her quarter-life crisis in the banality of everyday objects: cigarette lighters, medication, coffee slurped through a plastic straw. These items radiate a noble quality; they are Folick’s reliable companions, something to grasp as she staggers through bad habits and unhealthy relationships. Produced alongside indie hitmakers like Max Hershenow and Gabe Wax, Folick’s songs remain spry and sun-drenched, even as she suffers spiritual ambivalence and ultimately learns that being alone is a fortifying rite of passage. The imagery on Roach is precise and captivating, but the arrangements and production feel reluctant compared with the eclectic pop of Folick’s 2018 debut Premonitions.
If Roach seems to be narrated by two distinct people—one who is sturdy and self-assured, and another who buckles at the slightest disapproving wince—it might be because roughly half of these songs were written when Folick was a little younger. “Oh God,” “Bad Thing,” “Nothing to See,” “Cartoon Clouds,” “2007,” and “Ordinary” were released last year on Folick’s 2007 EP, her first collection of new material since Premonitions. This earlier suite of songs functions as a frame of reference for Folick’s arc—a series of hurdles to overcome. On the spare “Nothing to See,” she spills out a devastating account of soured love over scratched acoustic strings. As her partner chats up 19-year-olds on the internet, Folick contorts herself in order to compete: “I’ve been trying to change the way I look so you like what you see/I’ve been losing weight so I can wear these Dolls Kill jeans,” she sings.
As if that self-flagellation wasn’t enough, on “2007,” she confesses to a lifelong discomfort with her own body. “I’m a little girl with a woman’s past/I’ve never gotten used to having tits and ass,” she sings, synth strobes glowing beneath the surface. These songs are recontextualized on Roach, as Folick takes stock of her insecurities and tries her best to banish them.
Steering away from the off-kilter arrangements of Premonitions, she expresses her awakening in straightforward, unfussy compositions. On the feisty pop-punk cut “Get Out of My House,” Folick sounds like a woman reborn, someone who’s finally embraced the pleasures of her own presence. “I love being on my own without you/Taking off my clothes without you,” she yelps over muted power chords and frothy crash cymbals. “Thought I needed your glow/Needed you to be home/But I’m better off alone/Woo!” You can almost picture Folick bouncing around the living room, joyfully chucking her partner’s record collection out of the window, disc by disc.
On the downtempo “Drugs or People,” Folick basks in isolation after ditching a party—a recurring theme in her work. She practically whispers her favorite scheme, the Irish goodbye: “I’ll go home and turn on SVU/Drink my tea and touch me like it’s you.” After exorcizing an ex from her apartment, Folick is free to luxuriate in solitude, but she hasn’t cured herself of anxiety outright. On “Cockroach” and “Tetherball,” Folick breaks from Zen-like self-sufficiency, picking up a scalpel to vivisect her flaws. The former is a hushed electro-pop lullaby propelled by skittering drum machines and kalimba-like synth patterns. Folick’s gentle delivery, almost childlike, make lines like “I’m a fucking cockroach” scratch like gnawed fingernails. “Tetherball” spells out Folick’s self-loathing in tighter scope. She compares her reckless nature to the titular orb—“swinging till it’s all tangled up”—and to an eight ball of cocaine, leaving smears of white on her tabletop. In these moments, solitude can be a liability.
Like all of her work, these songs emphasize Folick’s innate ear for sweet and vulnerable melodies. She even inserts occasional textures to subvert that beauty elsewhere on the album—a queasy sax solo on “Mommy;” a warped synth on “Shortstop.” But these details whet the appetite for something stranger; you wonder what Folick would discover if she plunged deeper into experimentation. Despite their detailed imagery and alluring melodies, the songs on Roach are ultimately less complex than Folick’s earlier work. A track like “Cartoon Clouds” drifts on an undeniable pop hook, but like much of the album, its production (muted textures, trap snares) is a little thin. The record fails to make use of Folick’s versatile pipes; she sits at a breathy mid-range during most tracks, smack between the guttural depths and spire-heights she hit on Premonitions.
That simplicity might be a thematic choice. Her greatest pop epiphany occurs on the sparkling anthem “So Clear,” when Folick gets off of the couch and heads outdoors. “I’m sun and sea/So suddenly/So clear to me,” she sings, her soprano sharpened to pinpoint precision. It might be a simple solution, even a temporary one, but Folick is happy to walk in the light while it’s shining. | 2023-06-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nettwerk | June 5, 2023 | 7.4 | 59bf4026-d6bd-47e6-bc05-33645468730e | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition. | The Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition. | Mudhoney: Digital Garbage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mudhoney-digital-garbage/ | Digital Garbage | There are several readily available metrics that can help determine just how doomed our world truly is: increasing temperatures, rising ocean levels, species extinction rates, and so forth. But there is a less visible, arguably more accurate measure of gauging whether we’re flat out fucked: those moments when Mudhoney get political. While they’re never lacking in agitation and spite, the Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers tend to direct their ire at more, fish-in-a-barrel targets: posers, douchebags, themselves. But you know things in the world are really getting bad whenever Mudhoney remove tongue from cheek to deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition, be it the rise of evangelical extremism or neocon war pigs. And, in the never-ending shit show that is 2018, that latent impulse has been rudely re-awakened: Mudhoney’s latest album, Digital Garbage, feels less like a collection of songs than a news-saturated social-media feed filled with all the profane polemics of a 2 a.m. drunk-Tweet.
Earlier, this year, Mudhoney celebrated its 30th-anniversary by releasing LiE, a career-spanning live compilation that reified the timeless quality of their snot-nosed noise. Digital Garbage, on the other hand, is an album with no greater desire than to be dated as soon as possible—because that would at least be an encouraging sign that we’ve emerged from the world of shit in which this record is steeped. As the title suggests, Digital Garbage is Mudhoney’s comment on life in the internet age, though it’s most concerned with the insidious offline side effects of unfettered information dissemination. By Mudhoney standards, Digital Garbage’s relentless topicality practically makes it their first true concept album.
Mudhoney are hardly the only band fretting about the fate of humanity these days, but they are the only band with Mark Arm, whose sneering presence ensures that even the most woke proclamations will be in gloriously bad taste. Take the garage-rocker “Paranoid Core,” whose breathless stream of dog-whistled outrage—“Robots and aliens stealing jobs, they’re bringing drugs, they’ll rape your mom!/Beware the city’s dazzling lights where dykes are waiting to steal your wife!”—renders it a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” directed at InfoWars wackos. And as “Please Mr. Gunman” illustrates, dark days inevitably yield the blackest of humour, with Arm requesting that the titular shooter at least have the decency to mow him down “in church.” That may seem like an especially twisted way to commemorate the victims of Charleston; for Mudhoney, it’s a suitably absurd response to an absurd nation where even the most sacred public spaces aren’t safe from assault-rifle rampages.
But even Arm’s most acidic lyrics are tempered by some of the band’s tidiest performances to date. After spending much of 2013’s Vanishing Point fully inhabiting the role of aging cranks waging war on the kidz, Digital Garbage sounds more relaxed in its dad-punk skin. With few exceptions (like the Bad Seeds-style ICE-age lament “Night and Fog”), the spirit here is loose and playful, more Back in the USA than Kick Out the Jams. Arm and guitarist Steve Turner’s usual toxic-sludge fuzz is molded into more refined riffs and arrangements; look past the shotgunned guitar blasts and anti-religion rants of “21st Century Pharisees” and you’ll find a surprisingly soothing synth line holding it all together.
Still, even when compared to Mudhoney’s typical anti-pop, Digital Garbage makes few concessions to melodic accessibility, with Arm’s verbal splatter often forsaking such formalities as verse/chorus structure or rhyme schemes in favor of bluntly unsubtle diatribes. The album hits its manic peak with “Prosperity Gospel,” a rapid-fire inventory of late capitalism’s most odious traits (“Price-gouge medicine!/Let them eat death!/Get rich!/You win!”) that ends with a juvenile yet totally cathartic “fuck off!” But the track finds an unlikely sequel in “Messiah’s Lament,” wherein Arm gets to play the role of Jesus Christ, frowning upon the money-grubbing conservatives who like to thump the bible but seemingly pay no mind to the charity preached within. “Look at what they’re doing in my name,” Arm moans, as the song floats off in an acoustic psychedelic sway. It’s an uncharacteristically wistful turn, both in the context of this otherwise enraged album and Mudhoney’s entire muckraking career. But, thirty years after sardonically begging Jesus to take him to a higher place, the least Arm can do is sincerely return the favour. | 2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 1, 2018 | 7.1 | 59bf6b02-79b3-43a0-b355-48d9c7723d50 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Norwegian pop singer’s second album never met a problem it couldn’t solve by the first chorus. It’s a feel-good formula of uncomplicated emotions and easy endings. | The Norwegian pop singer’s second album never met a problem it couldn’t solve by the first chorus. It’s a feel-good formula of uncomplicated emotions and easy endings. | Sigrid: How to Let Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sigrid-how-to-let-go/ | How to Let Go | There’s a certain kind of pop song that plays at gay clubs that you don’t really hear anywhere else. You know the type: Punchy, vaguely European, empowering in a totally uncomplicated way—songs like Ava Max’s “My Head & My Heart” or Rita Ora’s “Bang Bang,” good enough to dance to and catchy enough to sing along with, but which mostly serve to fill time between “Dancing on My Own” and “Stronger.” For better or for worse, Norwegian pop singer Sigrid excels at this specific sort of banger: Her new album, How to Let Go, features at least three of them. It’s a useful talent—“gay club filler” is an entirely valid, and I would argue vital, category of pop song. But as How to Let Go proves, true neutrality is hardly a solid foundation for a career as a pop star, and, for the most part, Sigrid is working with little else.
Sigrid has always been something of a blank slate; initially, it was part of her appeal. Her debut album, 2019’s Sucker Punch, was emblematic of a new crop of “real girl” major-label pop stars clad in casual fits and sporting natural-look makeup but largely selling the same kind of paint-by-numbers girlboss pop as their catsuit-wearing counterparts. Nestled among moments of faux-rebellion like “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” though, were a couple of real gems: ecstatic, smile-through-the-tears Eurodance songs like “Don’t Feel Like Crying” and “Strangers” that suggested that, were her sound to become little less conventional, Sigrid could one day emerge as a natural heir to Robyn.
How to Let Go, disappointingly, stymies that thought. On this album Sigrid might actually be described as an anti-Robyn—a pop star who trades exclusively in uncomplicated emotions and easy endings, who has seemingly lost any sense for lyrical tension. On nearly every song, Sigrid introduces some kind of problem (she’s lost her sense of self, she’s scared to move away from home, and so on) only to solve it by the first chorus, usually through embracing her own flaws or, occasionally, simply looking on the bright side.
Opener “It Gets Dark” typifies the ease with which Sigrid moves through the world on How to Let Go. “I’ve never ever been this far away from home/And all alone/It gets dark,” she sings over booming, stadium-pop drums, before promptly getting over it: “It gets dark/So I can see the stars.” By the time the interminably dim-witted Bring Me the Horizon collaboration “Bad Life” rolls around nine songs later, metaphor has gone out the window: “It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.” Over and over, these songs present sadness or discomfort as problems to be solved, rather than feelings to interrogate or even just sit with. Although Sigrid sings each line as if it’s eye-openingly profound, anyone looking for depth on How to Let Go will quickly find themselves in the shallow end.
This feel-good formula—the suggestion that you can simply feel better by, like, loving yourself—isn’t inherently bad: It’s what makes Sigrid’s uptempo tracks so compelling. “Mirror,” although an undeniable retread of “Don’t Feel Like Crying,” is lush and anthemic, and while its chorus of “I love who I see looking at me in the mirror” is far from revolutionary, it’s deeply effective when set to a triumphant, string-adorned disco beat. (It doesn’t hurt that, overall, the production on How to Let Go feels a little more textured than anything on Sucker Punch, which still isn’t saying much.) “Mirror” lets its catchphrase-y hook exist as a catchphrase; there’s no unearned pretension or desperate attempt at depth. The hypnotic, guitar-led “A Driver Saved My Night,” about hearing a great song in an Uber, is even better: Recalling ABBA at their weirdest, it’s a song that manages to make empowerment its muse without beating a listener over the head with it. These songs, as well as the similarly fun friendship-breakup track “Burning Bridges,” work because they’re not pretending to be anything other than fun, easily digestable pop—in a way, they know that they’re gay club filler tracks, and they’re content with that. It’s a lesson befitting a Sigrid song: It’s better to accept who you are than strive for something that you’re not. | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | May 11, 2022 | 5.4 | 59c35430-0dcc-424e-bd8c-54287fdc1df6 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Can there exist a fate worse than mediocrity for a band that's had a taste of greatness? How about ... | Can there exist a fate worse than mediocrity for a band that's had a taste of greatness? How about ... | Yo La Tengo: Summer Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8864-summer-sun/ | Summer Sun | Can there exist a fate worse than mediocrity for a band that's had a taste of greatness? How about for a band that's enjoyed perhaps one of the longest runs of greatness in indie rock's brief history? Yo La Tengo formed just as indie rock-as-we-know-it was getting its wings in the mid-80s. Sure, they didn't get really great until Painful dropped in 1993, pointing to a turn away from alt-country dynamics and toward dronier organ-rock and guitar freakouts-- but they sure as shit haven't let up since, kicking out consistently remarkable full-lengths roughly every three years.
2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out was the first sign that they might be running out of ideas. Though an incredibly strong record from any band that deep into a rock music career, and packed with touching breakup songs and beautiful, semi-experimental atmospheres, the across-the-map diversity the band had become known for was notably absent. Unfortunately, Summer Sun confirms suspicions, and, sadder still, marks Yo La Tengo's first album since their 1986 debut, Ride the Tiger, to lack invention altogether.
Summer Sun is pleasant, if nothing else, but that's such a loaded word for an album that clearly aspires to (and ought to be) so much more than it accomplishes. At least if the album had been completely wretched, it could have been dismissed as an unwitting experiment or some such foolishness. But it ain't, and that's the shame of it all; Summer Sun consistently reaches a height of disposability so static and homogenous that it simply must be dispersed over an hour's worth of music. This isn't the sound of one of the most prominent institutions in independent music maturing; it's more like decomposing.
It hurts to write that, but pipe the breezy, wistful blue skies of "Let's Be Still" through tinny elevator speakers, or the sound system of your local Wal-Mart, and it's nothing but indie-muzak. Call it a natural progression from And Then Nothing's moody, twilit explorations of texture and atmosphere, but progression or not, last year's instrumental The Sounds of the Sounds of Science had more creativity and dynamism in a single track than the entirety of Summer Sun, and that was a score to fucking nature documentaries-- never the most fertile ground for inspiration.
For a band that once thrived on its stunning eclecticism, as well as a masterful assimilation of moods and styles, to produce an album that's merely pretty is tragic. Though, even if it smacks of gross underachievement, there is something to be said for the competence and simplicity of a record that understands how to gracefully fade into the background. Inasmuch as none of Summer Sun's songs aim for anything more than hushed, dulcet melodies and passive meditations, most of them basically hit their targets. The same smooth, rolling bass, delicate guitar lines, and airy percussion morph almost imperceptibly from the blue skies and bright eyes of "Beach Party Tonight" to the ghostly call of the Big Star cover "Take Care" and all intermediary points. Additional instrumentation of all stripes (strings, brass, piano, and the list goes on) seems added as necessary for cosmetic purposes, and the results are rarely less than soothing, if unremarkable.
Truly memorable instances are few and far between, and often for the worse; the standout tracks on Summer Sun are primarily the beat-poetry jazz drone of "Nothing But You and Me" and the highly dubious post-fusion wankery of "Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo". It says something, I guess, about the relatively constant quality to be found here that the most notable tracks are the weaker ones, but that's kind of sad, isn't it? Who wants to remember an album for the lowlights?
If any bright spot is to be found on Summer Sun, it belongs to Georgia Hubley, whose gorgeous, dusky alto comes closer to lighting up a room than anything else on this tepid body. Her voice alone stands counter to the various missteps and cardboard cutouts, and alone brings "Today Is the Day" and "Take Care" closest to genuinely intimate, affecting glimpses in the midst of tunes that are all too willing to remain at arm's length. In particular, "Take Care", as the finale to Summer Sun, steeps the preceding hour of beatific, automatic smiles in a beautiful melancholy, like a knowing and regretful farewell. I hope that's not the case, but if this is truly the next step in Yo La Tengo's move toward some abstract concept like artistic maturity, I don't think I want to stick around for the conclusion. | 2003-04-09T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-04-09T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | April 9, 2003 | 6 | 59c49089-2924-4c2e-a8f9-06df70caa0df | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
The fiercely ambitious Chicago rapper turns in a scattered, familiar collection, ditching the epic scope of his past releases and sticking to what works. | The fiercely ambitious Chicago rapper turns in a scattered, familiar collection, ditching the epic scope of his past releases and sticking to what works. | Mick Jenkins: Elephant in the Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mick-jenkins-elephant-in-the-room/ | Elephant in the Room | Mick Jenkins has spent his career holding a mirror to America and delving into the furthest corners of his soul. The loquacious Chicago rapper is fiercely ambitious when it comes to the album as an art form. We’re talking about a man who tried to define the meaning of love on The Healing Component, walk the path of Gil Scott-Heron on the intensely personal Pieces of a Man, and submerge himself into the conceptual depths of The Water(s). On his latest album, Elephant in the Room, Jenkins ditches the epic scope and thematic cohesion of those projects for something shorter and more scattered. By and large, he sticks to what has worked in the past: soft beats, jerky raps, intimate writing, and big-picture examination.
As ever with Jenkins, some of the most notable cuts are the societal critiques. “Thing You Could Die for If Doing While Black” is startling in its forthrightness. Jenkins drops his complex cadences and, in a low-toned voice, lists basic activities that can put him in danger with authorities. His lyrics range from mild offenses, like speeding and casual weed smoking, to the simple act of existing: “Might wanna go for a jog/Might wanna sleep in my car/Might wanna sleep in my bed.” The beat is built from despondent electric piano chords and, later, a bluesy guitar riff that sounds like something out of a noir cop thriller, adding another ripple to this probe on police violence.
On “Reflection,” Jenkins discusses his relationship with his father and his lingering feelings of abandonment: “He 6'2", I’m 6'5", he used to make me feel small/ I used to think he was strong, now I know he just weak.” It taps into the same hurt and resentment that Tyler, the Creator portrayed on the more hostile “Answer” back in 2013, and it reaffirms Jenkins as one of rap’s most interesting portrayers of great, but common, pain.
Not every concept is as strong. “D.U.I.” confusingly repurposes the titular abbreviation to critique the role of influencers. In the lyrics, Jenkins airs grievances toward those who want to take advantage of his fame for their own ends. The writing doesn’t land and he sounds more mildly pissed off than righteously furious. It was an idea best left in his notebook.
Jenkins still sounds most content when he simply raps about girls and stuff: Produced by lophiile, “Gucci Tried to Tell Me”—presumably a reference to Gucci Mane’s Noisy Raps interview—is jazz rap in the lineage of Slum Village, and Jenkins fills the lyrics with sweet nothings: “I’m no Randy Moss, but I'll catch your feels one day.” And with its clicky percussion and double-bass bumps, “Truffles” is in the lineage of older cuts such as “Pressed for Time (Crossed My Mind),” offering further evidence of Jenkins’ penchant for beats sparse on elements but unusual in their sense of rhythm. These highlights cohere into another solid project, but at this stage in Jenkins’ career, adding some new parts to his formula feels pertinent. Getting into a groove is cool, but staying in that groove for too long can become a detriment.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cinematic | November 9, 2021 | 7.2 | 59ce3a49-fc46-4a3a-adc8-446eab4d78e3 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On her fourth album, the Welsh singer Cate Le Bon establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense of some unnamed life rupture that's left her gasping. | On her fourth album, the Welsh singer Cate Le Bon establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense of some unnamed life rupture that's left her gasping. | Cate Le Bon: Crab Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21636-crab-day/ | Crab Day | Cate Le Bon's young niece did not take kindly to the idea of April Fool's Day. Instead, she declared, she would be celebrating Crab Day, and inaugurated an annual tradition of drawing crustaceans. And why the heck not? The budding surrealist realized early on that nonsense is often the best response to nonsense, that the constructs we use to prop up our lives are often totally arbitrary.
Named for her niece's flash of genius, Le Bon's fourth album features a song where the Welsh songwriter adopts an eerie falsetto and sings that she was born on the wrong day. A few years ago, her mum unearthed her birth certificate, and admitted to her daughter that they'd had her birthday a day off for nearly three decades. That sense of misaligned reality is the guiding force on Crab Day, where Le Bon establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense—or make more nonsense—of some unnamed life rupture that's left her grasping. Her perception is muddled, but in her solemn voice, everything appears clear: "I'm gonna cry in your mouth," she sings, like that's a perfectly sensible thing to do.
Last year, Le Bon released Hermits on Holiday, a collaborative album with White Fence's Tim Presley under the name Drinks. It pushed her usual pastoral post-punk into hairy, deep-fried territory; the only rule of its creation was that there were no rules. Le Bon has said that it revived her creativity going into Crab Day, which she recorded with her regular Welsh comrades Huw Evans (aka H. Hawkline) and Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo), and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa. Things aren't as freeform here, but in the absence of her lovely, weathered old melodies, nothing feels quite as it should be; the sound is as precisely off-kilter as touch-typing while gazing out of the window, then looking at the screen to find you've been one key to the left all along. From neatly squawking guitar, curiously skittish marimba, and wry saxophone parps, LeBon forges a chaotic cubist cabaret.
It's unsettling, but Le Bon's sensitivity to shifts in tone and pace, and the strange interplay between her players, make Crab Day feel welcoming, like an old house whose creepy anachronisms become a strange comfort. A good half of its songs wed burbling guitar parts to stark, straight-shooting rhythms, and verses landslide into choruses where her vocals cascade like sycamore leaves, but they establish and normalize Le Bon's uncanny universe, and aren't without their individual touches: the feral cat guitar mewl of "What's Not Mine;" what could be a maniac bashing on a metal trap door in the midst of "I Was Born on the Wrong Day."
Crab Day's primitivism hasn't totally sacrificed her lovely, lilting melodies, which are filled with remorse on "Love is Not Love," and sad acceptance on "What's Not Mine." And she's transmuted the overly literal aggression of "Wild," from 2013's Mug Museum, into songs that pulse with weird rushes of adrenaline. With its racing verses and ambient chorus, "Wonderful" perfectly captures both the mania and distraction of being thrown for a loop, and "We Might Revolve" makes a horror film out of needling marimba and Le Bon's observation that "all the towns are miniature," which she delivers with the stern paranoia of a stoner certain they've seen something sinister in their domestic surroundings.
As much as Le Bon's expression on Crab Day feels abstract and alienating, it also speaks to a deep intimacy—perhaps one that's been lost and provoked all this discombobulation in the first place. Mug Museum made an emotional archive out of the dirty cups she collected in her room. Here, she ascribes impenetrable significance to inanimate objects—she feels like geometry, a dirty attic, and a humid satellite in the face of a lover—but struggles to rationalize the basics of human connection: She and the subject of her address routinely look through each other, the effect like a love story pieced together through split screen. "How would I know you really swim in me?" she asks on "How Do You Know?" "How would I know to stay?"
Crab Day is a voyage into doubt led by a queasy compass, and a ringleader who's prepared to stake out uncertain territory. Le Bon always keeps you guessing, making the old traditions of guitar-oriented rock feel arbitrary, too. Her nervy assessments of the world are filled with equal parts suspense and heart, and beautifully zany riffs, where the feeling of being frayed by uncertainty comes together into a strangely comforting patchwork. | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | April 15, 2016 | 8.1 | 59cf874e-225d-474b-87e7-34b367ec2832 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The Chicago indie-rock trio scrape away 90 percent of what goes into a guitar album and come away with something effortless and uncomplicated. | The Chicago indie-rock trio scrape away 90 percent of what goes into a guitar album and come away with something effortless and uncomplicated. | Dehd: Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dehd-water/ | Water | Dehd are a dissent to excess. The Chicago indie-rock trio, who use a total of four instruments if a snare drum and a floor tom count as two, have grown into masters of maximizing mileage. They’re the plate of noodles that staves off hunger for hours longer than the $15 brunch. They’re the extra-puffy secondhand coat that retains more heat than the North Face winter catalog. They’re the basement unit with bumpy, self-applied caulking that stays watertight while the neighbors’ mansion floods.
On their third release, Water, Dehd scrape away 90 percent of what goes into your average good-sounding guitar album—studio enhancement, stacked parts, precision playing, any cymbal crashes whatsoever—and leave it almost entirely up to their countermelodies and some strong lyrical turns from bassist Emily Kempf and guitarist Jason Balla to carry the load. They pull it off so well that it’s almost possible to forget a crucial detail: Water is also a breakup album, written after the two singers’ long-term relationship ended—and the band went on tour anyway.
Despite the crisis that led up to it, Water feels more like a culmination than a demolition site. For Kempf and Balla, who have been tirelessly prolific in Chicago’s independent music scene for years—Balla with Accessory, Earring, and the late NE-HI and Kempf with a long list of projects that includes her current solo moniker Vail—it’s the best overall set of songs either has made. That’s partially because their music reaches a new level of meaning against the backdrop of their no-longer-romantic relationship, but Water’s lyrics don’t sound like coded words or things left unsaid. These are love songs, plain and simple, only written from the other side of the timeline, the one normally less conducive to love songs. Kempf first flips the script on “Lucky”: “Lucky to have/People in my life with the power to break my heart,” she sings, Balla’s guitar jumping in right on the word “heart,” the downbeat.
The melodic chemistry between Kempf and Balla is natural stuff, the kind that makes it easy to understand why they’d put their band ahead of their personal comfort. Kempf’s prior work often leaned towards booming synth-pop, which explains her intuition for great basslines, while Balla’s was often built around his signature elastic guitar sound—it’s flexy, but can also snap hard enough to sting. Kempf’s singing voice has more muscle; as album centerpiece “On My Side” proves, she can both yelp on-pitch and belt from the gut. Balla’s voice is a little thinner and harsher, which, on songs like the galloping “Wait,” just means it sounds really cool. Together, their parts twist up like bicolor plastic-lace lanyards. It’s effortless, uncomplicated, and never more emotionally saturated than on the sighing, reconciled “Baby.”
There’s one more important dimension to this picture, and it’s drummer Eric McGrady. Onstage, McGrady stands between his bandmates, hitting the tom with his left hand and the snare with his right, as if physically holding his two friends together—the symbolism is almost too obvious to be real. When Dehd were recently asked on local radio if writing songs together is something they’d recommend to other bandmate-exes in the same situation, McGrady chimed in with his only words in the whole interview: “No, not at all.” His presence here makes the case that there aren’t two, but three sides to every split: Don’t forget those caught in the middle. The rhythms are simple but a drum machine couldn’t replace them; the real human being standing there is the whole point. Though he doesn’t sing, he might be the easiest person to empathize with.
Water is also what you might call a good bad-speakers album: You could hear it over speakerphone and still probably get the full effect. There’s no treasure trove of subtleties to discover, no demand for good headphones—though it works just fine on those, too. Dehd would probably take this as a compliment. As fellow Chicago musician CupcakKe once said, “Cheap shit with a rich spirit goes a long way.” | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | May 16, 2019 | 7.7 | 59d61457-f261-4f01-869c-a8c00ce3d13a | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The New York City rap crew’s latest is a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures that bring a whole new level of professional polish to their sound. | The New York City rap crew’s latest is a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures that bring a whole new level of professional polish to their sound. | Surf Gang: SGV1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/surf-gang-sgv1/ | SGV1 | On a recent Friday night, NYC rap clan Surf Gang hosted a free gig in an outdoor parking depot full of vacant trucks and school buses. The location had already been changed twice—once in just the last few hours before, because of police in the area—yet hundreds of fans still made it. People danced and swayed over muddy ground, while others smoked in circles or climbed on top of buses, fists in the air. The concert felt like a pocket of beauty, at once gritty and vibrant with communal warmth, and the space seemed to atmospherically capture the way Surf Gang carves wonder into dissonant music. On SGV1, the group’s producers find intoxicating ways to spin militant vocal commands and bass thuds into something that sounds idyllic.
No definitive list of Surf Gang members exists, but the core associates include producers EvilGiane (recently big-upped by Drake), Harrison, TommyToHotty, and Eera, along with vocalists BabyxSosa, Polo Perks, Moh Baretta, Casper, and Bobainee. The group mixes cloud rap vibes a la Drain Gang with the hazy bounce of plugg beats and drill’s guttural bleakness. The result: moshpit rap with a tinge of glacial glassiness, as if the soundscapes are always teetering on the edge of collapse. You can tell the MCs apart by their textures. BabyxSosa’s tone shines like a neon sign, gloriously sky-high. Polo Perks, in contrast, has the deadpan drawl of someone fed up with life. Bobainee raps like he’s just downed a cup of coffee. Moh Baretta sounds like a resigned CEO. Casper’s helium melodies whistle like icy wind over your ears.
Each rapper is individually transfixing, so when four of them link on a posse cut like album standout “Cinderella,” it feels like you’re watching the SoundCloud rap Avengers unite or some crossover episode between two hit TV shows. The transitions between performers are seamless, sometimes nonexistent; at points, they’re all vocalizing in sync like hyperactive quadruplets—one could be rapping about smoking mimosas while another is grunting and someone else warbling gibberish in the background at the same time. EvilGiane keeps everything smooth with the organizational skill of someone who obsessively slots their emails into color-coded folders. He ensures no one tramples, weaving everyone into his ebullient beat with incredible fluidity. It’s a pure rush to hear the chemistry of every vocalist gliding over and accenting each other.
The vocals are mega-boosted by the instrumentals, which are like mini-museums, full of dazzling sound sculptures and little moments of reverb-rapture that feel as delicate as they are precious. The Harrison and EvilGiane-produced “Party” rocks and gyrates with the gawky swagger of a Nam June Paik robot come alive. Eera’s “24 hrs P2” could score a Legend of Zelda level, its ambiance so lush and holographic it makes BabyxSosa’s shrill echoes sound sacred.
SGV1 brings a whole new level of professional polish to the Surf Gang sound, something you wouldn’t have anticipated from the squad members’ earlier efforts. Polo Perks’s PUNK GOES DRILL took emo hits such as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and flipped them into bizarrely upbeat drill that scanned more like glittering graffiti than music. Moh Baretta’s #THISISNOTADRILL diptych layered drums and barked vocals over indie rock and pop chart hits like Edward Maya & Vika Jigulina’s accordion banger “Stereo Love.” Swapping the weirdness for crystalline cloud beats, SGV1’s producers sometimes make you yearn for some of that off-the-wall experimentation, especially when the tape drags during the middle and the shiny instrumentals begin to dissolve into one glossy goop. Tunes like the barely distinguishable “In My Ear” and “Avianne” sound manufactured for a (not yet created) cloud rap version of the Pollen playlist, that infamous Spotify collection crammed with amorphously vibey indie-pop designed to appeal to the masses.
While most of the tracks revolve around flexing, a highlight, “Problems (Outro),” features Bobainee meditating on how his life has been a series of anxious predicaments. “I was down real bad, so fucked up I couldn’t get a dollar,” he laments. “I got a 1-year-old son, fuck my baby momma… Deep in thoughts, sipping drinks so I can’t think about it.” Over a more kinetic beat, his commanding vocal presence could deceive you into thinking his painful past is only a distant memory, as if he’s no longer sad about it. But the vast, crestfallen instrumental—one of two produced by the trio of EvilGiane, Eera, and Harrison—lets you feel Bobainee’s agony in ways that his deep tone simply can’t provide. The beat sounds as if it’s crying.
Anchored by EvilGiane and the other members’ euphoric production, SGV1 is a mansion of sweet beats and vocal textures. Husky whispers, slow-motion chirrups, reverb-laden echoes that flutter into nothingness. It’s the rare rap album where the vocalists and producers feel like they’re nearly always working in lockstep, a triumph even more impressive considering how many there are. And it feels like a huge moment for New York rap fans, the kids who came out to the show in droves that night. There hasn’t been such an exciting new act in the city since Brooklyn drill pioneer Pop Smoke. Throughout the concert, feverish chants of “Surf Gang, Surf Gang!” soared across the landscape and felt something like a collective exhale.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 8, 2021 | 7.3 | 59d963d4-71d8-4d39-bb89-edbe3a192db8 | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
As much as the Detroit dance producer’s aesthetic may feel familiar, the improvisatory results plunge into a whole new tributary of club rhythm. | As much as the Detroit dance producer’s aesthetic may feel familiar, the improvisatory results plunge into a whole new tributary of club rhythm. | Theo Parrish: Wuddaji | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/theo-parrish-wuddaji/ | Wuddaji | There are hard truths to be gained from burst myths. So it was in 2017, when I interviewed the respected Chicago DJ/producer Ron Trent about the birth of “deep house,” a dance-music genre often reduced to a palette of muted rhythms and moody chords. Trent, regarded as one of the sound’s 1990s architects, and one of Theo Parrish’s childhood friends, dismissed deep house’s genre attributes. It was, he told me, “a phrase we used back in the day to describe music that [Chicago house originators] Frankie [Knuckles] and Ronnie [Hardy] were playing. People had this perspective that house music was electronic shit, but that was considered eccentric. The stuff that Ronnie and Frankie were playing was disco and jazz and underground stuff. So we called that deep house.”
Trent’s insight unpacks the real-life cultural meaning of a phrase that dance music’s (mostly white) terminologists have diluted with their own projections, accentuating stylistic differences rather than celebrating the related virtues of house, jazz, disco, funk, techno, and other Black musical forms. His factual, broader definition of deep house also serves as an important point of reference for Parrish’s Wuddaji, the Detroit producer’s sixth solo album, on which he updates this original notion of “underground stuff” for 2020.
If one of the through lines of Theo’s career has been in setting the record straight—often christened deep-house royalty, he is likely to disregard the epithet as one more example of music-business glad-handing—the other has been to remain true to the spirit of dance music’s origins, even as he steers down rivers of his own choosing. Yet as much as Wuddaji’s dominant aesthetic of Rhodes piano, synths, and percussion may sound familiar, the results plunge into a whole new tributary of club rhythm.
Much of Wuddaji feels improvised, as though it had been made up (or at least mixed) on the spot. It’s foolhardy to call these meticulously layered hues “jazz,” even if the interplay between the keys and the mutating swing moves like a kaleidoscopic funk duo session. Yet this “live” energy, in which minimal elements are constantly in conversation with one another—in handcrafted rather than digitally synched detail—is this music’s distinguishing feature.
“Radar Detector,” for instance, is built around bass synth and a skittish broken beat; low-end echo ghosts the mix, and a shaker occasionally destabilizes the cadence further. Meanwhile, Rhodes and a right-handed keyboard line sing out short phrases before one begins to squeal deliriously. The mood is forceful, mirroring the forward drive of the title; the track’s internal logic emanates the pure id of Parrish at the controls. “Purple Angry Birds” and “All Your Boys Are Biters” are almost wholly percussive affairs, with every element focused on rhythm. The former features an insistent kick camouflaged by the faintest residue of a snare hit and is pockmarked with electronic tones that might represent the title’s subjects; an elegiac piano arrives about 90 seconds before its 10-plus minutes expire. The latter is simpler yet, a drum-programming flex that could easily be a live, one-take MPC masterpiece. They are Wuddaji’s most “techno” moments, but techno as performed by a drumline.
This on-the-fly quality is in keeping with a lot of the recordings Parrish has been involved in since the release of 2014’s exultant American Intelligence. It was there on his four “Gentrified Love” EPs, which featured collaborations with Detroit players who move fluidly and expertly through Black rhythm and improvisation, including trumpeter John Douglas, keyboardist Amp Fiddler and the producer Waajeed, and on his production for a Melbourne soul-jazz quintet featuring keyboardist Silent Jay and the Hiatus Kaiyote rhythm section. Jazz has also been a central element of Parrish’s legendary DJ marathons throughout his career, whether as content (spinning records by everyone from Gil-Scott Heron and Brian Jackson to Incognito to the Black Jazz label) or as form (treating the mixer as his improvisational tool as skillfully as anybody in the game). In lieu of bringing together musicians in a shared space in real time, Wuddaji practices solo improvisations learned partially from those DJ sets—gathering sounds from a long memory, fitting them into a new context. There are times when the interlocking rhythms—programmed drums, percussion samples, percussive audio fabrications—speak in language patterns as though across time.
Two notable deviations reinforce Parrish’s commitment to musical representations of Black joy and resilience. From its name on down, “HennyWeed BuckDance” is the set’s most populist party tune, dicing and looping bluesy electric guitar against vamping electric piano and chugging, bass-heavy drums; slinking along at 106 BPM, it is a groove by any other name and a worthy candidate for every history of soul. “This Is for You,” with vocals by co-writer Maurissa Rose, is something else entirely, one of those instantly classic anthems of simultaneous uplift and strength, melancholy and loss, aligning itself not with the actions of exceptionalists but with everyday heroic toil. Its four-chord melody reinforces the repetition of daily struggle, the beat building and building, and Rose’s voice, at times pleading, at others full of graceful fortitude, balances all the ideas embedded inside a life.
A single originally released in 2019, “This Is for You” could have easily been a record created for the summer of 2020. But it only seems like Wuddaji was made with our immediate times in mind; Parrish’s vision of Black music exists on a much longer timeline. “I do feel that music coming from the diasporic community, it needs to carry weight,” he said in an interview last year. “Whether that weight is a reflection on the experience. Whether that’s weight in terms of it freeing you from what you have to deal with. Or weight that’s talking about direct lessons about how to survive this shit.” That weight was in the records that Frankie and Ronnie played, and it is here as well. I don’t think you can get any deeper.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sound Signature | September 30, 2020 | 8.2 | 59dc2c2d-69b2-43aa-870c-80ca1d77184b | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
Sixth album from the doom metal duo nearly matches their ferocious live power, and features assistance from noise icon John Wiese and experimental guitarist and percussionist Oren Ambarchi. | Sixth album from the doom metal duo nearly matches their ferocious live power, and features assistance from noise icon John Wiese and experimental guitarist and percussionist Oren Ambarchi. | Sunn O))): Black One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7581-black-one/ | Black One | People fixate, but there's more to Sunn 0))) than robes and the Earth and AMP-derived name. Not only does the band's dark, heavy, theatrically composed sixth album, Black One, transcend the duo's previous material, overall it's one of the strongest records of the past year: Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley have unleashed a doom'n'gloom masterpiece.
Ultra cinematic and nearly matching Sunn 0)))'s live power, Black One's seven tracks will even please those who can't deal with uninterrupted drone. Getting assistance from key friends, including harsh noise icon John Wiese, the band overlaps smaller drone bits with the usual gargantuan exercises-- its staged like corpsepainted Noh drama. Opener "Sin Nanna"-- on which the wonderful Australian experimental guitarist and percussionist Oren Ambarchi handles all the instruments-- is the mood setter, and is named for a moon god who sported a lapis lazuli beard and rode a winged bull. It's followed by "It Took the Night to Believe" which transitions the listener into the longer works. The six-minute piece begins in media res, as if the recording tape hits a snag and snaps back into action. Power chords drop in quick succession over smoky bass drone; the brutal ghost cry comes courtesy of U.S.-based black metal favorite Leviathan, aka Wrest. In some regards it's Sunn 0)))'s most straightforward metal song to date, though its series of ebb/flows is anything but typical.
The bulk of the album-- each of the final five tracks are at least eight minutes long, with four of them moving past the 10:00 mark-- begins with an extended cover of Immortal's "Cursed Realms (of the Winterdemons)". Here Xasthur aka Malefic is cast asunder, grumbling about ravens, cursed realms, and the central thesis that "the face of the earth/ Will be to know black silence." It's more than two times as long as the original and built largely around Malefic's sub-tonal scowls and bleeding feedback drone.
Then comes the more old-school Sunn 0)))- and Earth-sounding "Orthodox Caveman", 10 minutes of pure drone made flesh with Wiese's digital noise and Ambarchi on drums. "CandleGoat", which O'Malley says is "an evolution of an artwork collaboration with Savage Pencil," includes soft-lit ambiance at its intro courtesy of Wiese and features a gravel-voiced O'Malley on the mic.
Each piece is strong, but the album's highlight is its glacial, sprawling, anguished closer, "Báthory Erzébet". The track's a reference to Elizabeth Báthory, and likely also the Swedish black metal band her surname spawned. Báthory was an occult-friendly member of the Transylvanian royal family who is reputed to have killed hundreds of young girls. Some legends even claim she thought the lifeblood of virgins would keep her young, so she not only tortured and killed her victims but also bathed in or drank their blood. Báthory died in 1614 imprisoned in her own castle. Perhaps mirroring Báthory's lock-down, Sunn 0))) crammed Malefic in a casket (inside a Cadillac hearse) with only a microphone and his fear of small spaces. His resulting petrified, dry-bones performance and the claustrophobic recording technique should net a Grammy. Leading up to the star turn's a gentle hum throughout which Ambarchi weaves in a gong, bells, cymbal, and guitar. Then comes the teeming Anderson/O'Malley assault, announcing the most triumphant avant-rock moment in recent memory.
Okay, Anderson and O'Malley have long hair and they populate their ambient universes with some likeminded players (whether Julian Cope or Joe Preston), but there's no reason for their work to be ghettoized as some cartoonish Dungeons & Dragons dog-and-pony show. I've spoken at length to O'Malley and can say, without a doubt, that he's one of the most intelligent people I've encountered (from any walk of life) and that he and Anderson plan to continually refine and complicate both their sound and the theories they hold about musical composition. (The last person I encountered so knowledgeable and rigorous about his own work was Tony Conrad.)
With Black One, Sunn 0))) harnesses the sounds and moods of black metal, then expands its palette through meticulous experimentation and a commitment to the physicality of sound. The result is a beautiful, deep, passionate reflection of life's bleakest corners. | 2005-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | December 14, 2005 | 8.9 | 59e1859d-c67f-4b81-af70-8fc30d72e913 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Australia's promising young garage rock band finally has its two best bits of minimalist guitar music issued in the States. | Australia's promising young garage rock band finally has its two best bits of minimalist guitar music issued in the States. | Eddy Current Suppression Ring: Eddy Current Suppression Ring / Primary Colours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13667-eddy-current-suppression-ring-primary-colours/ | Eddy Current Suppression Ring / Primary Colours | The four members of Eddy Current Suppression Ring all worked for a vinyl pressing plant outside Melbourne, Australia. Six years ago, as their company Christmas party wound down, the four began jamming drunkenly together. They'd never penned a song or been in a band. Impromptu frontman Brendan Suppression simply ad-libbed lyrics into a tape recorder. Somewhere in there, more than just chemistry took hold. They settled on one questionable band name, an electrical circuitry term that also yielded three individual monikers: guitarist Eddy Current, drummer Danny Current and Brendan Suppression. Bassist Rob Solid held out. They released a spate of 7" singles on their own with relative ease. Then they unleashed two mighty full-lengths that until recently have never been available outside of their native Australia at the same time. Both are primal slabs of minimalist guitar music.
The "M" word might conjure images of bands falling anywhere between Wire and the White Stripes. While it's easy to detect notes of Wire, ECSR have developed an economy of sound that relies less on spiny riffs and more on an instinctual use of space. Within the clatter of each three-minute blast, Suppression is given the room to do just what he did during that Christmas party, not so much diarizing as slobbering each thought as it arrives to him. In "Cool Ice Cream", he screams for ice cream/sex over some guitar coiling and motorik bass, the end product a lot like a cuddlier, less creepy version of the Fall. And like the thrust of the Stooges, another easy reference point, that sexual drive (or template, really) lives and breathes in the dynamics as well. "Pitch a Tent" marries the same ideas to mangier soloing. When ECSR are at their best, they're working around an insistent groove, building before finally collapsing to saddle up again seconds later. There's little variation, but there needn't be. Even when the songs butt heads with one another, the melodies are pure comfort food. There isn't a weak song in the pack.
The stronger record by a hair, last year's Primary Colours is a very natural, even artfully polished extension of its predecessor. The DNA remains the same, just married with less hitches. As "Memory Lane" opens with nearly identical chopping, Suppression makes a difference by slowing his roll. Always dynamic, he presents himself here as an insightful drunk rather than just a drunk. Take the way "Wrapped Up" runs along some really beautiful ribbons of guitar melody for instance, Suppression going so far as to harmonize the equally warm refrain. "Colour Television" hits harder and with more menace than anything they've done yet, but there's a softening of edges taking place throughout, a band testing limits after having already refined them. Current in particular is able to dictate the climate, forcing the band out of the garage and suggesting they never go back. | 2010-01-14T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-01-14T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | January 14, 2010 | 8.1 | 59e630f3-843a-49de-b942-bdce3b55101c | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Despite Syd tha Kid and Matt Martian's affiliation with Odd Future, the bubbly neo-soul on Purple Naked Ladies, their 2011 debut as the Internet, felt largely disconnected from the larger collective's oeuvre. On their sophomore album, Feel Good, the Internet continue along this path, sharpening their songwriting and slowly reigning in their propensity to wander. | Despite Syd tha Kid and Matt Martian's affiliation with Odd Future, the bubbly neo-soul on Purple Naked Ladies, their 2011 debut as the Internet, felt largely disconnected from the larger collective's oeuvre. On their sophomore album, Feel Good, the Internet continue along this path, sharpening their songwriting and slowly reigning in their propensity to wander. | The Internet: Feel Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18567-the-internet-feel-good/ | Feel Good | "They don't know the struggles that she was raised with... so shut the fuck up," Syd tha Kyd sang last year on "She DGAF" with the sort of middle-finger-up irreverence often found in the music of her crew Odd Future. It was one of the few moments on the Internet's Purple Naked Ladies where you could draw a direct line from the bubbling neo-soul of Syd and Matt Martians to the rest of Odd Future. Outside of a few appearances from Left Brain and Mike G-- the latter of which Syd has produced for in the past-- Purple Naked Ladies felt largely disconnected from the entire OFWGKTA oeuvre, the controversial collective mentioned more out of obligation than because of any musical or ideological kinship. On their sophomore album, Feel Good, the Internet continue along this path, sharpening their songwriting and slowly reigning in their propensity to wander.
The biggest leap forward is made by Syd herself-- where in the past she would sometimes disappear into her surroundings she now takes center stage with confidence, her down pillow-soft vocals claiming the spotlight with an easy swagger. Her voice is still a delicate thing that sounds like it could blow away given the right gust, but it's able to pull off things it wasn't capable of before: the sensual come-ons of "Don'tcha" require a self-assurance Syd hadn't quite developed yet on Purple Naked Ladies, and she injects "Shadow Dance" with a been-here-before poise of someone at least a decade her senior.
She's writing hookier songs, too. "Sunset" unfurls with precision, moments of interest arriving at a steady and consistent clip, whether it's a switch-up in the track's loping groove or a colorful melodic run from Syd. Elsewhere, "Runnin'" finds its sweet spot early on and then spends the rest of its duration playing around with the angle and strength of the light being shone at it. And although the Internet are still interested primarily in fusing the proggier elements of experimental jazz with the patient warmth of neo-soul, there are fewer moments here that'll have you glancing at your watch, an occurrence that happened a little too often on their debut.
But while Feel Good finds the Internet latching onto hooks with greater frequency, they haven't completely excised their tendency to meander into jam session territory where the music loses most of the direction. The album is never aimless-- they always succeed in setting a pleasant, vibe-heavy atmosphere where detours are allowed and exploration is encouraged-- but at times it does feel like the Internet still haven't figured out how to identify what to keep and what to leave out.
There's a proficiency at work on Feel Good that's undeniably impressive-- it's an album full of musicians who can play and they approach this stuff with an endearing alacrity and a willingness to let Syd do more this time around that will pay dividends on future records. She's still got room to improve where lyrics are concerned, with generic clunkers such as "I'm a fiend for your attention" and "You're beautiful, you brighten up my day" exposing her as the fresh-faced 21-year-old she is. But an incremental improvement is still improvement, and Feel Good makes a good case that Syd, like her pals Tyler and Earl, isn't going anywhere. | 2013-09-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-09-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Odd Future | September 24, 2013 | 6.4 | 59e66eb0-0474-4323-8ae6-fb64b067541d | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
On his fifth album, the Portland power-pop musician embraces a spontaneous, home-recorded approach that exudes a playful charm. | On his fifth album, the Portland power-pop musician embraces a spontaneous, home-recorded approach that exudes a playful charm. | Mo Troper: MTV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mo-troper-mtv/ | MTV | Mo Troper doesn’t care much anymore. That’s not a slight toward the Portland power-pop songwriter, but his own confession about everything aside from songwriting. “That’s the most fun part for me,” he told Paste about his fifth album, titled MTV. “So when it comes to recording, I think the first pass is usually best. The more attempts I make, the more sterile things become.” He settled into this attitude in the wake of his labored-over third album, 2020’s Natural Beauty. For its follow-up, last year's Dilettante, he took a vastly different approach: a see-what-sticks 28-track album that came across as Troper’s crack at his own Alien Lanes.
On MTV, Troper embraces spontaneous magic in a more concise way. With the exception of one song from the archives—the full-band, studio-recorded 2016 track “Play Dumb”—Troper recorded and performed the whole thing alone on an 8-track tape recorder after a long, emotionally taxing tour. MTV barely breaches half the track total of its predecessor, but it still manages to incorporate its sprawling philosophy. And while Dilettante flirted with nu metal and screamo parody, the range of these songs feels more meaningful: Even the 31-second “Tub Time” commits to its shtick of “Scott Miller resurrects himself to collaborate with the Wiggles” bathtime jingle in a way Dilettante songs like, say, “Cum on My Khakis” never approached.
When Troper gives his songs the space to breathe, the results are even more remarkable. Whether in the endearingly saccharine lead single “I Fall Into Her Arms,” with its strolling melody and cracking vocals, or “Waste Away,” with its bouncing, clap-along rhythm and airy, euphoric harmonies, Troper breezes through an array of colorful, whimsical modes, even when hinting at a suffering below the surface. “I’ll stick a rope right down my throat/And kickstart my insides,” he sings in “I’m the King of Rock ’n Roll,” before erupting into a fuzzy, swaggering guitar solo in an effort to smother his pain with bravado.
This rousing, darkly humorous anthem is right in his comfort zone, but the intimate folk of “The Only Living Goy in New York,” is more surprising. Here he invokes the hushed shakiness of Elliott Smith while addressing themes of faith and alienation. Cathartic closer “Under My Skin” is similarly stripped-down, but its approach is more cartoonishly angsty, resolving to move beyond heartbreak out of spite, like Pinkerton-era Weezer as interpreted by the Chipmunks. These disparate concepts and influences are tethered together with an unbridled playfulness, despite lyrics about puking, crying, loneliness, and romantic frustration.
When MTV threatens to become topically morose, it’s accompanied by a varispeed pitch shift, embodying the dichotomy between tongue-in-cheek mockery and raw emotional nakedness. Still, calling MTV mature would be disingenuous: Goofy asides and self-pitying lyricism are baked deep into its crust. There are occasions where Troper becomes a bit snide, as in the joyful, vitriolic insults on “No More Happy Songs.” And some of the more experimental diversions—like the chaotic jazz-math-melded meltdown “Power Pop Chat” and the loose, shambling pseudo-medley “Final Lap”—occasionally take a step past liberation into directionless. But on the whole, Troper's childishness has never been more charming, his melodies have never been sticky-sweeter, and his love of music for music’s sake has never been more apparent or inviting. | 2022-09-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lame-O | September 6, 2022 | 7.4 | 59e7b034-0f00-4a47-bd99-f07d8623cb13 | Travis Shosa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/travis-shosa/ | |
Despite the number of British bands still playing under the umbrella of post-punk this decade, there's still so much TNP get right about the sound: scraps of syncopated guitars making the barest insinuations of melody, stiff electronic beats that sound like factory noise, and a singer who barks excitedly but whose message is initially cryptic. | Despite the number of British bands still playing under the umbrella of post-punk this decade, there's still so much TNP get right about the sound: scraps of syncopated guitars making the barest insinuations of melody, stiff electronic beats that sound like factory noise, and a singer who barks excitedly but whose message is initially cryptic. | These New Puritans: Beat Pyramid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11295-beat-pyramid/ | Beat Pyramid | Whether you're a longtime fan of Joy Division or a booster of Bloc Party, there's much you'll find familiar on the debut LP of These New Puritans. But out of all the British bands still playing under the umbrella of post-punk, there's so much that TNP get right about the sound: scraps of syncopated guitars making the barest insinuations of melody, stiff electronic beats that sound like factory noise, and singer who barks excitedly but whose message is initially cryptic. The pattern suits them well and doesn't sound derivative or dated; that may be in part to this record owing as much to its heavy, ominous beats as its guitars or melody. "Numerology (AKA Numbers)" has a bludgeoning thump driving its layered keyboards and chicken-scratch guitars, while "Doppelganger" has atmospheric effects that would fit onto any Prefuse 73 record.
Moreover, there aren't any wide-eyed ballads or snappy, ingratiating choruses here. These New Puritans come at their songs as if they were challenges presented to them and they write them to their own distinctive logic. It's simpler than it sounds: Finding just the right amount of verse to fit in 60 seconds on "Swords of Truth" or how much tension they can wrest from (and how long they can get away with playing) one open note on "Elvis". Rather than verse to chorus and back, the songs seem like chunks of raw riffage and misbehaving machinery sewn together, their sleek edges fitting perfectly. Electronic interludes flow expertly between the tracks, never sounding extraneous, while the songs themselves are full of jagged transitions, like the percussive rant of "C 16th" or the seething patchwork of "Colours": A flurry of drums into a strutting chorus and simmering bridge section. Meanwhile, lyrics bleed from one song to the other, melodies and themes are recycled, titles blur into each other-- the album is almost remixing itself as it moves along, adding to its chaotic overall feel.
Tantalizing advance singles "En Papier" and "Elvis" are both here, with "En Papier" veering between from winding guitar licks to anchorless electronic textures, and "Elvis" maybe the album's most insistent track-- its tension and release is much simpler than many of the other tracks, but the chorus is monstrous, as is the payoff. They're among the album's best, but they don't outshine the rest, and Beat Pyramid proves to be an affirming and promising first step. The mystery and paranoia are mostly communicated through the music rather than the heavy repetition of the lyrics, with their questions about numbers and sums of money coming through in impatient monotones. Making a genre that's become a bankable prospect sound earnest and exciting is no easy feat; hopefully the next step is finding room for some more trenchant messages along with it. | 2008-03-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-03-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | March 18, 2008 | 7.5 | 59e82377-35bd-4805-9059-2d73286a1f89 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
With her second album as Mozart’s Sister, Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant uses aggressively bubbly synth-pop and unhinged vocals to explore the peculiarities of love. | With her second album as Mozart’s Sister, Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant uses aggressively bubbly synth-pop and unhinged vocals to explore the peculiarities of love. | Mozart’s Sister: Field of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22877-field-of-love/ | Field of Love | A few years ago, a tow-truck driver in Texas asked Caila Thompson-Hannant a seemingly simple question: “Do you wanna be big in music?” But the D.I.Y.-bred Montreal artist was taken aback. “I honestly could not answer him,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It kinda shook me, and I thought a lot about it mostly because I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted.”
After playing in offbeat art-rock bands like Shapes and Sizes and Think About Life, Thompson-Hannant went solo as Mozart’s Sister in 2011. Ever since, the dance-pop project has been a conduit for her zany, freewheeling impulses as a songwriter and producer. And with her second album, more than ever, she’s prioritizing her endearing peculiarity over any sort of run at stardom.
Field of Love is an obvious lurch forward from her debut, which at times had Thompson-Hannant coddling some of her quirks in appeasing, indistinct production. By contrast, the instrumentation on the new record is daring, aggressively bubbly, and sharp. As an extension of her love-buzzed lyrics, which can turn from schmoopy to demented in a single line, Thompson-Hannant’s voice has always been unhinged: whooping, cooing breathily, even intoning baby sounds. The beats she’s produced on Field of Love, meanwhile, flirt with unabashed garishness and fully match the whimsy of her vocal theatrics like never before.
The first several songs on Field of Love set a fizzy tone, with lead-off track “Eternally Girl” pushing front-and-center synths that twinkle and plunk over tight, driving kicks. Here and throughout, Thompson-Hannant disarms with a suggestive charm, pre-ordaining an entire relationship from a pang of romance: “I could be the one that you love,” she sings in a soaring alto, before immediately promising, “I will be the one that you love.” It’s a song about feeling like a little girl in love and embracing that excitement instead of qualifying or suppressing it.
Through Mozart’s Sister, Thompson-Hannant has written about romance both fiercely and daintily—at turns and at once—often amplifying the heart’s whims rather than trivializing them. “The minute we sat down to dinner I knew,” she sings on “Moment 2 Moment,” explaining how a new couple didn’t even need to order drinks before adding, “you know how rare that is.” For all her aggressive vulnerability, Thompson-Hannant sometimes drops the sentimentality for a colder edge. On “Plastic Memories,” a tweaked-out and pounding dance track, she compartmentalizes a breakup in order to leave it behind, hushing, “Happy goes away, so does the pain.” On the same song she leans in and chants savagely, “I am a death messenger, things that have happened are gone.” It’s a jarring, fist-pump-worthy epiphany, a promise to live in the moment.
Toward the end of the album, “My Heart Is Wild” reprises an originally stunted song called “My House Is Wild” that first appeared on Thompson-Hannant’s 2014 debut LP, Being. The original covered up a sincere invitation with clunky industrial production, but “My Heart Is Wild” peels down to the core of the song—Thompson-Hannant’s voice, which she samples, triggers, and unleashes with giddy hope. The new version sounds less guarded, like she’s singing and dancing manically about love at a wide-open sky instead of to a dark, throbbing dancefloor. It’s the same effect she nurses throughout Field of Love, doubling down on her gut whims, newly confident. The record reads like a manifesto—a pronouncement that anxiety and empowerment can dovetail, that vulnerability can be menacing, and, of course, that love can be infectiously weird. | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arbutus | February 21, 2017 | 7.6 | 59ea8663-d263-4077-8e08-3ae16e35e7de | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
These days I tend not to "root" for many musicians, to pledge loyalty to an artist I loved when we ... | These days I tend not to "root" for many musicians, to pledge loyalty to an artist I loved when we ... | Junior Boys: Last Exit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4340-last-exit/ | Last Exit | These days I tend not to "root" for many musicians, to pledge loyalty to an artist I loved when we both were young, or circle album release dates or try to anticipate when a record will leak. More often than not, I instead brace myself for disappointment-- even from those whose work I most cherish. It's a pessimistic and potentially sad approach, but one that unfortunately seems to cushion blows more often than result in pleasant surprises. With the debut full-length from Junior Boys, I let my guard down. After two EPs of glacial, silken electro-pop (2003's Birthday and this year's High Come Down), I just flat-out wanted more. Thankfully, I got it. Last Exit may be my anti-A Grand Don't Come for Free-- a little album I waited for with open arms rather than gritted teeth-- but its heights eclipse virtually all other music I've heard this year.
The (to date) quiet rise of the Junior Boys is well-documented in the virtual world of the blogosphere, which for the most part has gone totally bonkers for the Ontario trio. Over the past year, the rapturous praise has been so constant that listing off the band's generous number of touchstones has practically become sport. Tellingly, though, for every time someone says Junior Boys sound like Timbaland goes for New Pop, an amorous two-step trying to coax indie-pop onto the dancefloor, or David Sylvian rummaging through Martin Fry's wardrobe and Basic Channel's outtakes, that person is only telling a part of the tale. More often than not, Junior Boys capture the mood and feel of many of these artists rather than ape their sounds. In fact, each of this record's 10 deceptively simple and very approachable tracks carry the distinct fingerprints of lead songwriter and singer Jeremy Greenspan, who manages to fold elements of nearly a quarter-century of forward-looking pop into a distinct sound without sounding either conceptual or trading on contradictions or the smoke-and-mirrors of attention-grabbing eclecticism.
Four of the album's tracks-- "Birthday", "Last Exit", "High Come Down", and "Under the Sun"-- were first released on last year's EPs and sit nicely alongside the new songs. Thankfully, Junior Boys are neither shying away from what they do best because of the success of those singles, nor failing in an attempt to reach those same heights. Among the new songs, "Teach Me How to Fight" is anthemic Sophistipop, a shrinking violet rallying cry; the nocturnal orchestral maneuvers of "Three Words" delicately flicker beneath "Neon Lights"; and "Bellona" flutters and clicks as Greenspan laments long days and lost opportunities.
So, yes, despite the high dance IQ and its luxuriously monochromatic sensuality, the record does seem very... indie. On "Teach Me", Greenspan is requesting to "show me what it's like to give back pain," as his paper-thin voice projects honesty, vulnerability and the puppy-dog loyalty of sentimental, pale-skinned boys. So thankfully that's the fey, Anglocentric early 80s sense of the phrase "indie," then, albeit dressed up with graceful, hopeful romanticism rather than self-deprecating fatalism. At times, that sense of hope seems buried under throbbing beats or kept at arm's length by cold, pristine sonics, but dip your toes beneath that sleek surface and you'll find an album of great warmth, beauty and even soul. | 2004-06-15T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2004-06-15T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Kin | June 15, 2004 | 8.9 | 59eb974a-e4f0-4913-9488-66ee475ab67c | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
These three tracks come from the last project the beloved emo rapper worked on before he died. They remind us how good he was, but don’t yield new insights. | These three tracks come from the last project the beloved emo rapper worked on before he died. They remind us how good he was, but don’t yield new insights. | Lil Peep: GOTH ANGEL SINNER EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-goth-angel-sinner-ep/ | GOTH ANGEL SINNER EP | Posthumous releases go through a quick, sad diminishing-returns cycle. The first one is usually the closest to the artist’s vision, and subsequent releases require deeper digs into the vault and more intervention to make whatever’s left back there presentable. That’s especially true of posthumous rap projects, which are subject to ever-more questionable guest features and production choices. With every release the artist’s presence grows fainter, the doubts about whether they would have wanted this louder.
Lil Peep’s posthumous output is subject to those same laws of gravity, even if so far the stewards of his legacy have done right by him. Save for a bonus track featuring XXXTentacion that Peep might not have approved of, 2018’s thoughtfully compiled Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2 was, if not quite Peep's vision, at least a respectful imagining of what it might have been. And in some ways its follow-up EP GOTH ANGEL SINNER, short as it is, feels even more like Peep’s creation. Peep revealed the title himself on Twitter in 2017, just weeks before his overdose death at age 21. He performed its opening track “Moving On” on his final tour, and even co-directed the video for its closer “When I Lie.” The video isn’t much—a spur of the moment, one-take shoot filmed in a green room while on tour in Germany—but it’s evidence these three songs aren’t empty leftovers. They are, at minimum, vestiges of a project Peep cared about.
Lil Peep emerged at a time when it was no longer unusual for a young rapper to identify more with Kurt Cobain than Tupac. But where many of his SoundCloud peers embraced rock mostly as an ideal, borrowing its imagery and attitude but not necessarily its sounds, Peep made alternative a foundation of his aesthetic, and like much of his final output, GOTH ANGEL SINNER splits the difference between rap and modern rock. “Belgium” cloaks itself in a flanneled, In Utero-shaped riff, while the guitars on “When I Lie” crackle and glower like Linkin Park.
None of these tracks do anything fancy. They’re disarmingly direct, barebones enough that they feel like demos despite their crisp finish. It’s Peep’s intuitive phrasing that makes them soar. “I was out in Belgium on tour, that’s the day that I convinced myself that I was truly yours,” he scowls, and as wordy as that prose reads on paper, his groggy delivery imbues every syllable with intention and implied backstory. His writing is never flashy, but it’s flowered with nonchalant internal rhyme: “Stick that needle in my eye, just lost my peace of mind/I’m not evil by design but I feel dead at times,” he raps on “When I Lie,” in a flow at once drowsy and purposeful. He was so good at this.
Lil Peep’s fame hadn’t peaked when he died, and GOTH ANGEL SINNER is further evidence of how high his ceiling was. Especially given how Post Malone rode a related strain of emotive, rock-suggestive rap to fame and fortune, it’s easy enough to imagine the star that Peep could have become. But posthumous releases can only tell us so much we didn't already know. They can only speak to what no longer is, not what would have been. And as welcome as any unreleased Peep material is, the declines are already on display on GOTH ANGEL SINNER: It sounds a lot like Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2, but there’s a lot less of it. It’s possible there’s still some worthwhile material left in Peep’s vault, but it’s increasingly unlikely there are any revelations. | 2019-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | AUTNMY | November 4, 2019 | 6.8 | 59ef2d81-a33f-4c46-9f17-f174a03c61c5 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On their mesmerizing collaborative album, the gnomic NYC rapper and the avant-garde poet and musician piece together ideas and sounds from history’s jagged shards. | On their mesmerizing collaborative album, the gnomic NYC rapper and the avant-garde poet and musician piece together ideas and sounds from history’s jagged shards. | billy woods / Moor Mother: BRASS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billy-woods-moor-mother-brass/ | BRASS | Moor Mother and billy woods are both time travelers of sorts. For Moor Mother, an activist and educator with the Black Quantum Futurism collective, time travel is a way to recover obscured Black pasts and multiply Black futures. Evoking black holes and cosmic hauntings, her music crisscrosses timelines to reveal the illusion of time as progress. For woods, being Black is a form of time travel. The past constantly intrudes on his oblique and often comical narratives of the present, a cosmic context collapse. On BRASS, the pair’s wanderings through space and time reach new heights of detail and imagination, piecing together ideas and sounds from history’s jagged shards.
The record is an outgrowth of “Furies,” an Adult Swim single from July that appears here as the album’s opener. Produced by Backwoodz Studioz mainstay Willie Green, “Furies” strikes a deft balance between woods’ grim fables and Moor Mother’s spacey prophecies. Though their verses don’t speak directly, they achieve a kind of parallel harmony, their crystal balls tapping into the same frequency. That rapport deepens on BRASS.
As on “Furies,” the production helps woods and Moor Mother speak the same language. Both artists lean toward harsh, dissonant sounds in their solo work, especially Moor Mother, whose free jazz, spoken-word, and noise collages are often confrontational and bracing. Here, the arrangements are softer, more somber, the production a steady fizz of shifting percussion, thick static, fuzzy samples, and flecks of acoustic instruments. At times this backdrop grows outright ominous, as on “Mom’s Gold,” where a snarl of feedback erupts from the already prickly mix, and “Maroons,” where a morose trumpet and prickly synth wail into the abyss. But generally, the mood is calm, almost meditative, keeping woods and Moor Mother’s spirited performances in the foreground.
The pair works well together, their shared disinterest in meter and linearity giving their songs dazzling shapes. woods is the archaeologist, digging through the rubble of history for absurdities and continuities. A crash course: “Traffic stop, I reached for my slave pass slow” (“Giraffe Hunts”); “Alan Greenspan fucking Ayn Rand/She came, finished him with her hand” (“Rapunzal”); “We waved every day, but good fences makes good neighbors/Like those mountains in Asia (“Blak Forrest”). Moor Mother is the mystic, using history as the jet fuel for her vision quests. Her verses are just as far flung as woods’, but tend to be cheekier, flightier: “Through the air like Kobe Bryant/’08 season, the year after Garnett screaming/Anything is possible” (“Rapunzal”); “You can’t imagine a blacker future than me/Forever young, forever in the zone of the one” (“Tiberius”). Together they treat history as a mass grave and a playground, heeding its horrors yet finding room for dark laughs and cautious hope.
Sometimes they manage both. “Scary Hours” begins with woods narrating a deportation in Wakanda that builds to a reference to the Berlin Conference, the 19th-century European summit that formalized the pillage of Africa. “Sickly white men clad in animal skins/African kings, flies swarm on piles of limbs/Inoculate the babies, inoculate the babies,” he raps, claiming colonizers as African royalty—and suggesting Wakanda is just another evil empire. That sequence would be audacious on its own, but it’s just the prologue: moments after woods’ bleak lament, the sky opens up and John Forte swoops in on a rush of woodwind and horns singing of liberation and escape. Then Moor Mother builds that outburst into a rally cry, gliding over the brass. “Welcome to the party,” she booms, channeling Pop Smoke.
Throughout BRASS, woods and Moor Mother sharpen each other. Though they are individually fond of ellipses and cliffhangers, as a unit they actively seek out ways to riff on each other and expand ideas. On “The Blues Remembers Everything the Country Forgot,” when Moor Mother’s verse ends with a spirited call to arms, rather than matching her indignation, woods lets the tension linger. “We waited and we watched, we waited and we watched,” he chants, showing fury can be as paralyzing as it is galvanizing. Similarly, on “Giraffe Hunts,” the overlapping images from their verses—the bombs, guns, and landmines of a warzone; a leering police sergeant; cobras, rattlesnakes, and bison—create an elegant tapestry. It feels like a shared hallucination.
It’s telling that as the pair zooms through time, they make one explicit stop in 2020, a brisk, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it one-liner from woods. “Hydroxychloroquine unpacked and boxed up again,” he raps on “Rock Cried,” condensing a whole year into the bleak status changes of a medicine. On Moor Mother and billy woods’ looping, geological timescale, this is 2020’s standout episode. Everything else is mundane and indistinct, that regular dystopian shit. BRASS is the rare, mesmerizing album that can throw that kind of gut-punch, land it—and keep moving. It feels like freedom.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Experimental | Backwoodz Studioz | January 6, 2021 | 8.1 | 59f08a64-567d-471c-b9ff-23408c934bb1 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Pete Rock, whose production work helped define rap in the 90s, has managed to stay continually relevant without capitulating to changing tastes. 80 Blocks from Tiffany's Part II, Rock's second collaboration with Bronx duo Camp Lo, achieves rich, dark tones that smartly fill up the sonic spectrum with a minimum of moving parts. | Pete Rock, whose production work helped define rap in the 90s, has managed to stay continually relevant without capitulating to changing tastes. 80 Blocks from Tiffany's Part II, Rock's second collaboration with Bronx duo Camp Lo, achieves rich, dark tones that smartly fill up the sonic spectrum with a minimum of moving parts. | Pete Rock / Camp Lo: 80 Blocks From Tiffany's Pt. II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18353-pete-rock-camp-lo-80-blocks-from-tiffanys-pt-ii/ | 80 Blocks From Tiffany's Pt. II | Over the past few years the chorus calling for a return to “real” hip-hop that’s been going steadily since the 90s has only gotten louder and angrier as the genre’s entered an era of unprecedented experimentation that’s left older fans and artists bewildered. Most of the arguments seem to come from rap musicians who’ve fallen out of style and knee-jerk reactionary hip-hop heads who can’t deal with rappers wearing kilts. Few of them make a convincing case.
Pete Rock, whose production work helped define the 90s “golden age” is a rare exception. 80 Blocks from Tiffany's Part II, his second full-length collaboration with the Bronx duo Camp Lo, offers proof that amidst the expeditions rap music’s launching into new sonic territories like EDM, noisy psychedelia, and quasi-industrial music, the classic boom-bap stuff still has a place.
Rock’s one of the few musicians who made his name in the aggressively unflashy 90s East Coast sound who’s managed to stay continually relevant without capitulating to changing tastes. A Pete Rock beat from 2013 works on the same basic level as a Pete Rock beat from 1993, but it doesn’t sound dated. Unlike some of his contemporaries who’ve been happy to go through their careers chopping up the same old breaks they’ve been playing with for years, he’s been constantly evolving his sounds while his method of putting them together has remained fundamentally unchanged.
“No Uniform", a collaboration here with Brooklyn bruisers M.O.P. is a prime example of Rock’s ability to make old school techniques sound new again. The drum pattern is classic boom-bap, and M.O.P. still flows about the same as they did when they broke through in 2000 with “Ante Up". But the instrumentation replaces the crackling grittiness that typified the roughneck beats of their prime years with richer, darker tones that smartly fill up the sonic spectrum with a minimum of moving parts. And the fuzzed-out guitar sample looping on top of everything is placed over the drums in a peculiar, precarious way that adds a new flavor of tension to the song.
“Megan Good", which features a verse by the increasingly respectable Mac Miller, takes the new-old dichotomy even further. The snappy, dirty drums and one-note hollowbody bass riff that form the song’s bare-bones foundation would have been familiar to crate diggers back at the dawn of hip-hop, but if Rock had arranged them into a snappy, hip-shaking retro-soul-pop confection a decade ago the way he does here, he probably would have incited a riot amongst pop-averse hardcore rap fans.
Like the individual tracks that make it up, 80 Blocks II finds new life in well-worn ideas. Its structure predates the modern definition of a mixtape as essentially just an album without a label. It’s more like what DJs and producers put together when they were still dubbing the results onto actual tape-- a freewheeling collage of songs, extended samples lifted from movies and TV, brief instrumental sketches, and spoken word interludes (delivered here by Rock, with his voice pitch-shifted up to helium-balloon squeakiness) outlining the collection’s purpose and its contributors’ bonafides.
And like a lot of those old school mixtapes, 80 Blocks II runs too long by almost a third. But in smaller doses it’s easily equal to some of the best and boldest rap music being made right now. There’s something incredibly admirable about the way that hip-hop’s been charging full-speed ahead into the future, but Rock’s music is a good reminder that occasionally looking back over your shoulder can be a very good thing. | 2013-08-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-08-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap / Metal / Pop/R&B | self-released | August 8, 2013 | 6.8 | 59f422ad-11e5-4b54-a39f-bc1fdbfebbb1 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Chicago’s Horsegirl mines a loose-limbed indie rock sound on their debut album, with an assist from some members of Sonic Youth. | Chicago’s Horsegirl mines a loose-limbed indie rock sound on their debut album, with an assist from some members of Sonic Youth. | Horsegirl: Versions of Modern Performance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horsegirl-versions-of-modern-performance/ | Versions of Modern Performance | Collectively, the members of Horsegirl are probably 20 years younger than their most recent influence. Gigi Reece and Nora Cheng are college freshmen, Penelope Lowenstein a high school senior, but Versions of Modern Performance glows with the drowsy heat of 30 years’ worth of indie rock. Depending on your age, you might hear Yo La Tengo or Stereolab in the featherlight vocals; maybe the fat, crayon-streaked guitars of Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis or Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch. The longer you listen, the more the album resembles a hedge maze made from familiar references—the yawn of the whammy bar on “Bog Bog 1” swirls in some My Bloody Valentine, while Cheng’s bird call of a melody on “Beautiful Song” evokes Laetitia Sadier. If a group of young people picked up some guitars to make a blurry, pleasing sound at any point in the past seven presidential administrations, you’ll hear echoes of them here.
Horsegirl are breakout members of a largely teenaged Chicago indie scene, and their debut comes decked with auspicious cosigns from scene elders—John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth) is behind the boards, while Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo play on “Billy” and “Beautiful Song.” It’s a compliment, then, to say that Versions could have come out in 1997, or 1987, since that’s entirely the point. Indie rock of this era was loose-fitting, and in order to make it work, everyone has to play that way—hugging the downbeat too tight would curdle the vibe, as would an overly busy bassline. The sound has to stretch, like a dog in the sun, otherwise you’re not doing it right. Lowenstein and Cheng, who trade vocal duties alongside guitars and six-string electric bass, manipulate fuzz tones like batted balloons, while Reece hits the cymbals like someone throwing paint buckets at a barn. They’ve got the balance just right—no explosions, just a steady, nervous churn continuously disrupting the music’s placid surface.
This haze offers excellent cloud cover to hide songwriting surprises, and Horsegirl take the opportunity. You might have to listen to “The Fall of Horsegirl” twice to realize the hook is simply Lowenstein counting quietly to six. “Anti-glory” starts rumpled and messy before pulling taut for a chorus in which they simply snap “Dance!” at you, like they’re tossing firecrackers at your feet. “Billy” builds up a good head of steam before speeding up unexpectedly and veering into a corner.
If there are nice surprises throughout on Versions, there are no revelations. From the studied perfection of its guitar tones to the vocals that closely mimic their heroes, Versions is a bit like an apprentice’s masterwork, a demonstration that they’ve absorbed their lessons. The lyrics are fragmentary, open-ended, and occasionally arresting (“I’m on the run from the severed leg of my son,” from “Option 8”). But any capital-S Statements that Horsegirl might make are probably percolating somewhere in that soupy sound, waiting for the right moment—hopefully album two—when they will emerge. For now, Horsegirl aren’t so much carrying the torch as they are keeping the pilot light lit, low and steady. | 2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 6, 2022 | 7.3 | 5a051e73-8e29-41c2-844a-6aa469f92bd5 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward’s first album together in six years is a low-stakes set of Beach Boys covers, toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious. | Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward’s first album together in six years is a low-stakes set of Beach Boys covers, toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious. | She & Him: Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/she-and-him-melt-away-a-tribute-to-brian-wilson/ | Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson | For all the talk about actors and crossovers that has dogged the duo, She & Him is first and foremost about fandom. Zooey Deschanel never hid her love of bright, shiny pop baubles, and she never appeared overly self-conscious onstage. She didn’t come across as an actor trying to convince us she was a singer but more like a music nerd who really loved all those do-do-do’s and ba-ba-ba’s. Even before she and M. Ward covered Dusty Springfield, Herb Alpert, and Johnny Mathis on 2014’s Classics, you knew these were some of their favorite artists, because those references lived right on the surface of every song they ever recorded or performed. They never bothered to hide their enthusiasm, which along with the distinctive timbre of Deschanel’s voice gave their songs a sense of novelty and purpose—a reason for existing that went beyond just being a vanity project for her or a side project for him.
Fourteen years into their career together, however, there’s not a whole lot of novelty or purpose left. They haven’t released an album of originals in nearly a decade, and they haven’t released anything at all since their second(!) holiday album, six years ago. Their new one, Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson, is another covers record—not a catchall like Classics that shows the range of their fandom, but one devoted exclusively to Brian Wilson. The only surprise is that they didn’t get around to it sooner, given how large the Beach Boys looms in their music. “Zooey and I can wholeheartedly agree that we love everything they’ve ever done,” Ward told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “Those harmonies and chord changes? That’s the sound of California.” Wilson’s influence was reflected in the sunny Golden State innocence of their early originals like “This Is Not a Test” and “I Was Made for You,” and it shows in the obscurities they choose for Melt Away. This won’t be the only Wilson tribute to include “Don’t Worry Baby” or “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but how many others will give space to lesser-known gems like “Good to My Baby” and “Deirdre”? Melt Away, to their credit, is a fan’s playlist.
And yet, there’s a boldness missing from these new versions. It’s not just a matter of being overly reverent or taking too few liberties. In fact, Deschanel and Ward obviously love all the details that go into Wilson’s arrangements, and they take pains to get everything just so: the sitar and piano flourishes on “Kiss Me Baby,” the sobbing guitar on “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” the revving hot-rod rhythm that drives “Do It Again” (which features newly recorded vocals by Wilson himself). But it’s all a little too tidy, a little too perfect. Their version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is bracing simply for sounding so stilted and awkward; it’s a live/studio hybrid, reminiscent of Simon & Garfunkel’s cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” that pits their careful orchestrations against what sounds like an audience’s slightly behind-the-beat clapping. It doesn’t really work; in fact, it prevents you from being carried away by the song or the daydream of finding the right someone to spend a life with. But it’s still the album’s most audacious moment.
Maybe they just weren’t made for these times, or maybe the problem has more to do with size. When Wilson wrote and scored these songs, he made them sound larger than life, adding grandeur to passing daydreams and everyday yearnings. But She & Him’s covers all remain simply life-size, even when the harmonies explode on “Kiss Me Baby” or when closer “Meant for You” pledges lifelong devotion. There’s a warm twee intimacy to the best moments on Melt Away, but it’s just not enough. There’s nothing to suggest that pop music can play a profound role in a listener’s life, beyond just vibe music for a dinner party. Toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious, Melt Away is such a low-stakes endeavor that it never even registers as a comeback. | 2022-07-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fantasy | July 27, 2022 | 5.6 | 5a060a03-0acd-4826-bf3c-92ae34b17bcd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Originally released in 1979, only to sit in the teenaged Emerson brothers’ home studio for decades, Donnie and Joe’s sole record showcases a prodigal talent for blue-eyed soul and landlocked yacht rock that's only just getting its dues. | Originally released in 1979, only to sit in the teenaged Emerson brothers’ home studio for decades, Donnie and Joe’s sole record showcases a prodigal talent for blue-eyed soul and landlocked yacht rock that's only just getting its dues. | Donnie & Joe Emerson: Dreamin’ Wild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16841-dreamin-wild/ | Dreamin’ Wild | If the Seattle-based label Light in the Attic hadn’t already spent more than a year planning a reissue of a peculiar vanity press album from Donnie & Joe Emerson, two teen brothers (ages 17 and 19 respectively) located in the logging community of Fruitland, Washington, they would have had to initiate it for the calendar year of 2012. Some 33 years after pressing up copies of Dreamin’ Wild, only to have it sit in their home studio erected solely for its creation (right next to a concert venue erected 30 yards from the house), its dream is finally turning into a realization.
For an album whose renaissance can be traced back to record collector Jack Fleischer encountering a sealed copy sitting on a mantelpiece in a Spokane antique shop—far from any other dusty record in the place—and posting an entry on his Out of the Bubbling Dusk blog, it’s taken a curious and circuitous route to its current renaissance. Ariel Pink bassist Tim Koh championed it on his Lamaraba blog, Soul Sides repped for it while another blog mocked its cheesy cover. It also popped up on Memoryhouse’s mixtape for Self-Titled magazine and nu-disco producer Psychemagick slotted it alongside Czech disco and Italian synth-prog on his After the Void compilation.
This year alone, Donnie & Joe Emerson’s stunning soul ballad “Baby” has been covered by dubstep rapscallions Hype Williams on their Black Is Beautiful album (without crediting the original), while Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti collaborated with Dâm-Funk for their soulful rendition of the same song. Originally intended for a forthcoming Light in the Attic compilation, Ariel and Dâm’s cover ended up being chosen as the first single from Ariel’s forthcoming album, Mature Themes. Not bad for a financial disaster that derailed a teen’s dream and nearly bankrupted the Emerson family, decimating their acreage from 1,600 down to 65 via a woeful bank loan taken out at 18% back in the late ’70s. Remastered ever so gently, with fascinating investigative liner notes from the Stranger’s Dave Segal (a former editor of mine), the full story behind the album is far more bizarre than the sight of a white jumpsuited, two-headed brother against a JCPenney’s portrait backdrop on the cover would lead you to believe.
In some ways, the Emersons’ story runs parallel to that of the Wiggins sisters from the Shaggs. Just as that their father decided that his girls could make their own music and not just rehash what was emanating from the radio, Don Emerson Sr. also wanted his sons to play their own music and not simply regurgitate the pop hits of the day. It’s only natural for a father to encourage creativity in his sons, but Don Sr. went well beyond ordering a Danelectro guitar out of the Sears-Roebuck catalog and calling it a day. Instead, he took out a loan with his land as leverage in order to erect a log cabin for the boys to woodshed in, then furnished it into a full-blown studio, complete with a TEAC 8-track, amplifiers, drum kit, PolyMoog, and more. (And that’s saying nothing of “Camp Jammin’”: a 300-capacity venue that their father also erected on the property, complete with his/her bathrooms, concession area, balcony and green room.)
And unlike the Shaggs’ endearing/excruciating Philosophy of the World, Donnie and Joe can sing, write songs, and play. In between logging, fence-post digging, and other farm chores, the boys practiced nonstop and put Dreamin’ Wild to tape with little idea of what was happening in popular music (they barely even knew how to load a reel of tape in their studio) other than what emanated from the radio. Listening through, you catch glints of Smokey Robinson, Hall and Oates, the Commodores, Bread, Pablo Cruise, Boz Scaggs, and Chuck Mangione amid the AM bullion. Blue-eyed soul, meandering funk (see “Feels Like the Sun” which encourages you to “sing or play a musical instrument along with the boys”), and landlocked yacht rock are evident. Yet the wide-eyed and utterly sincere vision of a 17-year old Donnie stuns.
Whenever he takes a guitar solo—or when he drops an unhinged psychedelic Moog blast on the vamp of “Give Me the Chance”—his talent is prodigal. That he can then endeavor a naked piano ballad like “Dream Full of Dreams,” deftly wrapping a warm synth line around it, hints at what his future as a songwriter or producer might have been like. Psychedelic slow-burner “My Heart” even shows him knowing how to bring an album to a satisfying close. In another century, Donnie Sr. could have saved the Emerson land by simply uploading a video of his son singing to YouTube and waited for international acclaim that way. Instead, we are left with a curious what-if album that during its finest moments—to twist a Brian Wilson phrase—is a godlike symphony to teenhood. | 2012-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | June 29, 2012 | 8 | 5a072ae1-5843-4708-a0ad-a977a8e153d7 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Hot Hot Heat return to an indie (Dangerbird) and make their best album since 2002's Make Up the Breakdown. | Hot Hot Heat return to an indie (Dangerbird) and make their best album since 2002's Make Up the Breakdown. | Hot Hot Heat: Future Breeds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14350-future-breeds/ | Future Breeds | If you agree with Tony Soprano that "remember when?" is the lowest form of conversation, it hasn't been easy to talk about Hot Hot Heat's sojourn on Sire. That relationship worked out for nobody-- not the band, not the label, and certainly not their fans. Now, living in the shadow of a beloved debut is nothing new, and Make Up the Breakdown is doubly burdened by its P.O.V., since nailing the metropolitan jitters and elegant wastefulness of twentysomethings isn't easy to do twice (see also: Interpol, Strokes).
Hot Hot Heat are back at square one on Dangerbird, and maybe that gave them the message. And while they're not rewriting "Bandages"-- Steve Bays' voice has sanded too many of the edges off his yelp for that-- for better or mostly worse, there's a promising return to getting lost and naked in the city again. Whether it's due to their rough decade or just the accumulating bitterness of age, Bays flips the script on his persona-- no longer a victim, he's now spewing venom outward. "YVR" begins with the sound of a revving engine as Hot Hot Heat rediscover their full-throttle spaz. "Times a Thousand" cops a "Take Me Out" disco stomp and turns it militant-- "It's not my fault that they hate your face," Bays spits.
Future Breeds is also HHH's first self-produced album; like many rookies behind the boards, they seem to want every instrument loud as fuck. I actually don't mind that pressed-against-the-glass sound from a band that flounders when it fails to be punchy. "21@12" is either a threat or conspiratorial pep talk, but it's held together by a spirited hook. The arm-swinging "Implosionatic" lives up to its title, and it's what Hot Hot Heat do best, compact, unpredictable and delivered with the scalding energy of a band about to jump out of its own skin.
Breeds might be #2 with a bullet in their discography, but it tails off whenever Hot Hot Heat dial down the energy. Unfortunately, this has been Hot Hot Heat's cross to bear-- "In Cairo" is still their only successful slow song. Bays isn't a crooner, and when the synths try to play piano ballads, HHH sink into their mid-decade anonymity, almost indistinguishable from Robbers on High Street, White Rabbits, or any other band label heads really hoped people would think sound like Spoon. But even a half-return-to-form was necessary for a group that a lot of people were on the verge of writing off, and a nice surprise if "the best Hot Hot Heat album since 2002" still means something to you and you know what they had to do to get there. | 2010-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Dangerbird | June 15, 2010 | 6.8 | 5a076a54-ef42-43ed-a294-c56a90004aa8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The second album from the promising emo-rap project of Joe Mulherin is sometimes potent, but it buckles from a lack of conviction. | The second album from the promising emo-rap project of Joe Mulherin is sometimes potent, but it buckles from a lack of conviction. | nothing,nowhere.: ruiner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nothingnowhere-ruiner/ | ruiner | Reaper, the 2017 debut from nothing,nowhere., was a sterling emo-rap hybrid in a year when the term became a cultural flashpoint. Vermont native Joe Mulherin’s project stood apart from the crowd through its relative understatement and sense of craft. Unlike the litany of provocateurs applying slapdash Warped Tour aesthetics to Chief Keef flows, the 25-year-old caught the attention of both Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba and The New York Times off of a fluid blend of arpeggiated guitar curlicues ripped from emo forebears like Mineral and American Football, cloud rap production in the vein of Yung Lean, and a vocal style that flitted between the two with grace and dexterity.
On, ruiner, Mulherin adds a potentially welcoming bit of self-awareness but is hamstrung throughout by its depressive cousin, self-consciousness. Much of the lyrical content feels similar to that of Reaper on its face: heartbreak, depression, isolation, the emo works. But where that album often wallowed in those topics, ruiner finds Mulherin genuinely reflecting on them. “I’m fucking sick of writing all these sad songs,” he spits on the jaunty, autumnal title track, before crooning a chorus that reads like a dirtbag version of “Ms. Jackson”: “Oh no/What’s your momma gonna say when I tell her that I broke your heart.” It’s a far cry from “Clarity in Kerosene”’s visceral “I hope you choke in your sleep,” but it’s no less effective, and much less troubling. However, for too much of the album, ruiner falls short of the conceptual task set out by that title track. Only six months after Reaper, Mulherin is losing his confidence.
It’s most noticeable in the production. Unlike Reaper’s gothic spaciousness, the beat-making on ruiner—handled again by Mulherin and Soundcloud mainstay Jay Vee—foregrounds rhythm over melody, submerging Mulherin’s nimble guitar work under Three 6 Mafia for Dummies drum loops. When the guitar is central, such as on the loping, nostalgic “better,” it feels confined to this muted tone that dampens its emotional effect. The most frustrating result is “rejecter,” in which Mulherin’s self-lacerating emoting is sabotaged by amateurish sub-bass production that makes it sound like Drake’s “Doing It Wrong” as performed by the noir-pop of the Neighbourhood.
To go along with the production switch-up, Mulherin also gets in his own way vocally. He’s a far more expressive singer than rapper, but he nevertheless favors the latter on ruiner, and his proficient but impersonal flow never quite makes up for the lack of melodic oomph. “hammer,” in particular, suffers from making the mistake of trying for braggadocio: “Play the guitar like a young Santana/Reppin’ VT like my name Bernie Sanders” wants to be a winking joke but scans as awkwardly self-conscious. Of course, at least he’s noticeable there; more often, like on the droning, boilerplate verses to “vacanter,” Mulherin sounds embarrassingly anonymous, lending unfortunate new meaning to the moniker “nothing,nowhere.”
The sudden lack of conviction is all a little confusing, especially if you came to nothing,nowhere. from Reaper. Considering his recent upgrade from Pete Wentz’s vanity label DCD2 to the emo big time of Fueled by Ramen, it’s tempting to chalk the muddling of Mulherin’s ambition up to A&R overwork, or a misguided attempt at crossover into the more glamorous, Xan cake-adorned corners of the Soundcloud rap universe. He does have a track coming out with dubstep producer Getter, known in sadboi circles through his Terror Reid alter ego and as a prominent collaborator with the more-horrorcore-than-emo $uicideBoy$. But it’s more likely that Mulherin is brushing against the essential contradiction of emo, and even rap: a radical genre too often held back by the limitations of regressive emotional content.
It’s an aggravating album for how close it comes to pushing past its forefathers. On the record’s best track, “sayer,” petulant reflections on a relationship collapse into a shredded “there’s nothing to say now,” followed by what might be the project’s mission statement—“I never meant for this to happen/I turned regret into a habit.” Like its title track, it’s telling and rewarding in its reflexivity and yearning for atonement. Sadly, it never lasts. And through its lack of charisma, ruiner unintentionally communicates that working through a depression offers far less inspiration to Mulherin than indulging it. | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fueled by Ramen | April 20, 2018 | 5.6 | 5a0f53d8-8faf-4c2a-b1ee-11a56c6691a5 | Austin Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/austin-brown/ | |
Somewhere between a demo collection, a live album with no audience, and a lo-fi left turn, the ad-hoc country trio’s desert recording session focuses on the simple joys of songwriting. | Somewhere between a demo collection, a live album with no audience, and a lo-fi left turn, the ad-hoc country trio’s desert recording session focuses on the simple joys of songwriting. | Jack Ingram / Miranda Lambert / Jon Randall: The Marfa Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-ingram-miranda-lambert-jon-rand-the-marfa-tapes/ | The Marfa Tapes | No genre romanticizes the art of songwriting like country music, and The Marfa Tapes is a late-night love letter to its myth. Miranda Lambert, along with collaborators Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, headed to West Texas with just an acoustic guitar and some ideas in a notebook. They recorded these 15 songs by a ranch in the desert, documenting first takes, trading lead vocals, and figuring out harmonies. Between songs, they cracked jokes and reassured each other, poured shots and marvelled at their surroundings. In an accompanying documentary, they’re laid-back and amiable, even giddy, as they get to work. “Not everything has to be a business decision,” Lambert says of their process. “I miss music.”
Somewhere between a demo collection, a live album with no audience, and a lo-fi left turn, this music is a joy to hear, like a vacation on record. Lambert has always crafted her studio albums in the spirit of sprawling travelogues, dynamic enough to house radio singles, earnest tributes, and winking in-jokes. Like 2016’s double album The Weight of These Wings, which featured the trio’s first collaborations, The Marfa Tapes excels in this spacious terrain just beyond the mainstream. While it lacks the gravitas of her more polished releases, it is bound by a cozy sense of quiet that spans tracks that sound like hits (“Anchor,” a ballad sung by Ingram) along with the actual hits (a solo rendition of Lambert’s 2016 song “Tin Man”).
Each of these performances are co-writes, and none aspire to be the definitive take. A turn away from the high-stakes world of country radio, The Marfa Tapes puts the focus on the simple joys of songwriting and delivery, offering the group’s music as something wide open and alive, with room to shift and suit their moods. Somewhere along the way in the chugging, old-school “Geraldene,” Lambert tries a stuttering read of the title, lighting a spark in her collaborators and ramping the energy into something closer to Southern rock. Even the rhyme scheme of “Homegrown Tomatoes” (“See ya later alligator/We’re U.S. prime/Weed and wine/Homegrown tomaterrs”) makes it impossible for the trio not to laugh. If you are in the right mood, these recordings can transport you beside them.
In the same way that Pistol Annies, Lambert’s supergroup with Angeleena Presley and Ashley Monroe, formed a righteous utopia after her mainstream success, The Marfa Tapes is a useful pivot following 2019’s Grammy-winning Wildcard: a campfire summit for country lifers who share a belief that the most exciting part of songwriting is when it’s all still up in the air. The music fares best at its most lighthearted, although one of the ballads ranks among the trio’s finest material together. The opening “In His Arms” is a stunner: a standard in the making, where the simplicity of the presentation amplifies the timeless appeal. The lyrics are a basic rundown of the imagery that informs a release like this: rolling stones and tumbleweed, cowboys and tequila. Lambert sings about the one who got away, dreaming of a day when they will be reunited. Randall strums his guitar and joins for harmonies with Ingram every time the chorus rolls around. They are singing about better days ahead but they’re making the present moment sound pretty good, too.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Vanner / RCA Records Nashville | May 11, 2021 | 7.6 | 5a19938e-31c0-4ad3-ae71-1c440d927ea3 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Underneath it all, the posthumous album from the Florida rapper is woefully aimless and structurally unsound. | Underneath it all, the posthumous album from the Florida rapper is woefully aimless and structurally unsound. | XXXTentacion: Skins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xxxtentacion-skins/ | Skins | At the center of the Jahseh Onfroy story is his domestic violence case, which was never tried but, after his death, is now closed. Before he was shot and killed in an attempted robbery earlier this year, the 20-year-old rapper known as XXXTentacion was accused of physically and mentally abusing his then-girlfriend, terrorizing her, and holding her against her will. He faced charges that included aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness-tampering. According to arrest reports, the victim was punched to the point where her eyes were forced shut.
The charges raised against X didn’t prevent him from becoming one of rap’s most popular new stars, and his death only complicates the conversations surrounding the music of an incredibly polarizing figure. In the aftermath, questions are raised about its lasting impact and how his murder at the age of 20 might change the way he is remembered. Will his art be treated as sacrosanct? In an attempt to rehabilitate his image, Onfroy’s mother started a nonprofit called the XXXTentacion Foundation to provide “relief [for] the poor, distressed and of the underprivileged.” It’s difficult to square this sensationalized, supposedly kind-hearted version of Onfroy with the one recorded admitting to stabbing eight people, the one who allegedly had a woman “scared for her life,” the one who noted, “I will kill that bitch if she play with me.”
If the X estate plans to highlight the rapper’s own characterization as a “problematic genius,” then their first step towards that makeover is to try and push his art to the fore with the release of the posthumous album Skins. Ultimately, it’s a record stripped so bare there’s hardly more in these songs than his uncoordinated instincts. Skins is the worst-case scenario for a posthumous release, not only devoid of meaningful ideas and moving music but making little to no case for its existence in the process.
Musically, there’s nothing complex about what’s happening in X’s songs. His previous lo-fi bedroom recordings, made on what former collaborator Ski Mask the Slump God once called the “worst recording set up,” touted their terrible sound quality and repetitiveness as pillars of naturalism. They are stark in service of power and intimacy. In fact, many of his most popular tracks are decidedly crude, meant to be read as genuine in their incompleteness.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell if these cuts are finished since so many of X’s songs intentionally sounded unfinished. Some of his old songs were apparently first drafts made in only a few minutes, and while Skins was “very close to being done” when X died, you wouldn’t know it by listening. This 10-song, 19-minute run is woefully aimless and structurally unsound. Half the songs don’t have actual verses. At one point, he just screams, “fake eyes, black man,” repeatedly, which wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t feel entirely witless and underdeveloped. There are a lot of whoas and ohs as dummy text when all else fails.
It’s like a collection of amassed loose-leaf pages with unresolved thoughts and doodles on them. Tracks are more like freeform inner monologues muttered into voice memos and sent as a mass text. Where older XXXTentacion songs, like “Jocelyn Flores”—a half-rapped, half-sung meditation on a fan’s suicide—had dimensionality and were rendered fully, these tracks have no such depth.
At his most captivating, X made music like he was doing an “MTV Unplugged” special for no one but himself. Skins mostly defers to that penchant for tenderness, though there are instances where it channels the fury of hardcore punk, a core tenet of the SoundCloud rap he helped popularize. There’s little to be gained in squaring the vulnerable, would-be soother and sage in some of these songs with the real, savage young man who once claimed he bashed open a gay man’s head in juvie and smeared the man’s blood on his face, just because the man looked at him. But it’s hard to hear X seethe through the rap-rock frenzy of “One Minute” and not consider the implications.
When Kanye, a vocal X fan and supporter, offers his blame-shifting lyrics about how X was wrongfully accused during a guest spot on “One Minute” while X spits and screams the hook, his history wells right back up to the surface. Kanye’s verse seems to continue a two-pronged defense of XXXTentacion’s music: first, suggest that X was a casualty of a call-out culture unwilling to allow for his presumption of innocence, and second, posit that death absolves him of his sins and thus should wipe clean the slate so that his legacy can be written.
All this overlooks X’s own admissions to committing acts of violence, the incalculable role violence played in his rise, and the ways violence seemed to inform the music he was making. Those who would invoke “the aesthetic alibi” on X’s behalf are refusing to acknowledge that the morbid ethos in X’s songs is inextricable from his story. If the very power of his music, in the eyes of his cult-like following, lies in its “realness” then it’s impossible to separate that same music from the real suffering inflicted in its name.
“Emo rap” was the genre that made the biggest gains on Spotify in 2018, and XXXTentacion, as its standard bearer, didn’t live to see its lasting effect. He was synthesizing rap and rock through a process that felt integrative and immersive, a depressive mixing the bluster of hip-hop with the toxicity of third-wave emo. But Skins doesn’t even preserve any of what was affecting about that listening experience. It lacks the same force and is unexceptional in every way. The album never makes a case for X as anything other than a thinly subversive figure and never even rationalizes the baggage that comes saddled with it. X’s musical legacy will forever be interlinked to violence. Skins is merely a shallow attempt to overwrite that legacy gone awry. | 2018-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Vibes Forever / Empire | December 14, 2018 | 3 | 5a222004-c2a5-44e7-8b72-cf58dbb22d8a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
After a series of EPs and seven-inches, this post-hardcore, Jade Tree-signed punk band unleashes its excellent debut. Final Fantasy provides the string arrangements. | After a series of EPs and seven-inches, this post-hardcore, Jade Tree-signed punk band unleashes its excellent debut. Final Fantasy provides the string arrangements. | Fucked Up: Hidden World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9982-hidden-world/ | Hidden World | It's amazing that some original punkers either stray miles away from the sound and intent that gained them notoriety or simply put out the same records they always have decades after the fact, while Fucked Up (FU from here on out, pardon my decorum) show us how to grow up gracefully within the constraints of punk-- and this is only their first full album. While they've been more known for EPs and seven-inches until now, Hidden World is the work of a band that sounds much older and more assured than it should.
But even as I type out punk, it doesn't quite fit: You could call it hardcore, as singer Pink Eyes chokes out every syllable like Negative Approach's John Brannon. You could call it experimental because the songs are longer and they have violins; you could still call it punk, as even with all of that, it doesn't stray too far from home base, from four or five blissfully overdriven guitar chords. It steps outside just enough to show you how daring it can be, before reminding you one more time how its gonna fuck you up. Hidden World finds a sort of perfect balance between musical ambition and staying true to the formula, dishing out scads of overdriven three-chord punk pleasers while adding the barest traces of a band with more omniverous ears: Some violins close out "Carried Out to the Sea", a little spoken word adds some healthy pretension to opener "Crusades", and a fantastical element elsewhere to "David Comes to Live". These might sound like shoehorning or attention-grabbing on paper-- truth be told, they're bookends to these songs at best-- but these small touches only serve to make these ambitious songs sound even more enormous.
In "Crusades", a single guitar chord sustains for eons over a twinkling new-age chorus, before their two-note bludgeoning and rabid-dog vocals begin and they maul the familiar formula, leaving those clichés beaten within an inch of their lives. They then run off to dig on some fantastic and impenetrable story about an impatient young boy named David who's "gonna get to heaven tonight," but with an altogether different plan than your Meatloaf-inspired, dashboard-light-style pursuit. All that somehow clocks in at under three minutes; even at their most concise, FU songs like "David" and "Carried Out to the Sea" feel epic because of their extra flourishes.
Yet even at its most straightforward, the record still thrills, nowhere better evidenced than the gloriously confrontational "Baiting the Public", one of FU's best singles: Six minutes of an indomitable guitar and double-bass-drum attack where Pink Eyes berates anyone within earshot, punching in his vocal from either speaker like a Devil on one shoulder and an undead fire-swallower who makes Satan look like a pussy on the other. Calmer and almost classical details follow, however, with a dollop of creepy whispering that introduces the bouncing guitar line of "Blaze of Glory", featuring the album's catchiest hook that praises "small town hucksters, and big city freaks" with maximum fist-pump praise, as well one of the many appearances of Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, Arcade Fire), handling all the album's violin parts.
All this would fall flat on its face if FU didn't do the traditional punk thing so perfectly; as is, their aspirations are just the icing on the cake-- a cake with a file in it, with a grenade on the end of the file. The final chords of "Fate of Fates" grind off each other, echoing back and forth through their own purgatory, only to serve as a dramatic introduction to the spitting venom of "Two Snakes", a groove that never tires over its many permutations, including a muted violin-string pluck and Reich-like build-up in its last few seconds. Pink Eyes, meanwhile, never relents from his foaming, strangulated delivery throughout Hidden World, but not so hoarsely that you can't make out his lyrical concerns, ranging from the Book of Enoch and saving our eternal souls to fucking your wife. No concept or approach is too lofty or too stupid; in fact, Hidden World is an incredible testament to the great art then happens when the two meet. Middlebrow hardcore rules OK? | 2007-03-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-03-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Jade Tree | March 12, 2007 | 7.5 | 5a259d7e-075f-4d2a-b636-623f62212734 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The Thailand-born and Sweden-raised rapper offers a dreamy, melancholic, and abstracted take on mumble rap. | The Thailand-born and Sweden-raised rapper offers a dreamy, melancholic, and abstracted take on mumble rap. | Thaiboy Digital: Legendary Member | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thaiboy-digital-legendary-member/ | Legendary Member | Born in Thailand, raised in Sweden, and influenced by American rappers like Soulja Boy and 50 Cent, Thaiboy Digital (real name Thanapat Thaothawong) testifies to rap’s status as a global commodity. He also illustrates the gap separating the life of the music from its makers; Hip-hop might go where it wants, but human beings often have more trouble, and Thaiboy’s had a number of scuffles with Swedish immigration authorities over the years (he was deported back to Thailand for a spell in 2015).
Those troubles don’t necessarily manifest in the lyrics of Legendary Member, Thaiboy’s debut album, but they have impacted how the album was made. His deportation to Thailand turned his creative collaboration with Drain Gang, a Swedish collective that includes producers Yung Sherman and Whitearmor and rappers Bladee and Ecco2K, into an entirely digital relationship, a wireless transmission pinging back and forth between different countries and disparate styles.
A restless spirit, Thaiboy drifts between relentless and repetitive flows and Auto-Tuned falsetto crooning. There’s a sense of jubilant menace to straight-up rap cuts like “Drainstar Rock” and “Nervous,” which recount the expected tales of Bentley trucks and double cups. The simplicity of Thaiboy’s hooks — Volvo-sized couplets like “Break it in half/Kit Kat” and “Nowhere else to go/Kiss me through the scope” — betrays the complexity of his vocal delivery and the intricate production that buoys it. Thaiboy’s voice drones like a Gregorian men’s chorus when he’s rapping, but his most confident register is the melodic flow he flexes on glossy love songs like “Kiss Me Through the Scope” and “Lip Service.” The latter track, a duet with Drain Gang associate Ecco2K, is Thaiboy at his dreamiest, a lovestruck ode to an angelic raver girl. The production, handled exclusively by producers Gud, Whitearmor, Woesum, and Ripsquad, is equally dreamy: cascades of vocal samples on “Baby,” wind chimes on “Can’t Tell,” the glittering synth line that lends a melancholic chill to “Legendary Member.”
It’s striking to consider how much-maligned American “mumble rap” has opened up space for rappers like Thaiboy and his seasonally affected compatriots in Stockholm, who come to English as a second, third, or fourth language. In an interview with The Fader, Thaiboy Digital describes his thought patterns as a trilingual speaker: “If I get surprised, I think in English. I like to curse in Swedish. And when it’s some real shit, I think in Thai.” Though his lyrics are almost exclusively in English, there are times where it sounds like Thaiboy is rapping in different languages in his mind. His vocal delivery overrides the specific meaning of individual words, making melodies from the sound of language itself.
Mumble rap transforms what would have been considered mistakes or imperfections in another era of hip-hop into stylistic attributes; there’s meaning in how a voice sounds, not just in what it says. Precision and enunciation, the privileges of native speakers, aren’t priorities in hip-hop like they used to be, and it’s reshaped the linguistics of rap worldwide. The words that come out of Thaiboy Digital’s mouth are often slurred and unclear, their exact meaning obscured until you look up the lyrics, but the intended emotional effect is impossible to miss. | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Year0001 | October 1, 2019 | 7.2 | 5a284399-baec-4529-addd-dfa62252151b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Jade Tree's press release hypes Control as a concept album about the dissolution of a "hyper-modern marriage," but Pedro ... | Jade Tree's press release hypes Control as a concept album about the dissolution of a "hyper-modern marriage," but Pedro ... | Pedro the Lion: Control | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6215-control/ | Control | Jade Tree's press release hypes Control as a concept album about the dissolution of a "hyper-modern marriage," but Pedro the Lion's David Bazan has a difficult time sticking to the subject on this, his third full-length. Aside from a few cynical words for pre-nups in opener "Options" and not one, but three meditations on extramarital sex (thanks for sharing, Dave), the album is padded with typical Pedro ruminations on the pitfalls of vanity and technology.
Unlike our esteemed colleague DiCrescenzo, I enjoyed Winners Never Quit, with its thoughtful and highly personal themes of loss, regret, and competition. But where that album moved with confidence and conviction of purpose, Control wallows in an amoral netherworld of overamped midtempo ballads and incomplete thoughts.
Control's lack of focus is best exemplified by "Indian Summer," a synthy rocker peppered with rhyming non-sequiturs such as, "The experts say you ought to start them young/ That way they'll naturally love the taste of corporate cum." A sluggish, vocoder-treated new recording of "April 6, 2039" (now titled "Progress") does little but detract from the spacey, drum-machine propelled futurism of the original. With its refrain of "your father drank a little, you're on liver number two," Bazan's cautionary words of children spoiled by technology and their parents' emotional detachment should be Control's moral centerpiece, yet the lackluster reading here barely registers.
Instead, Bazan obsesses on the seedy details of his protagonists' motel-room infidelities. "The mattress creaks beneath the symphony of misery and cum," Bazan sings on the aggressive, voyeuristic "Second Best." "Still we lie jerking back and forth, and blurring into one." But Control is never more misguided than on the silly, Metaphor 101 observations of "Rapture," which cheaply likens the moment of orgasm to divine revelation and even slows the pace of the song down, post-coitally, before pepping back up again.
Musically, Control breaks little new ground for Pedro the Lion, though Bazan's drumming has improved greatly since Winners Never Quit, best showcased in the loping rhythms and artfully executed fills of "Magazine." Unfortunately, Bazan goes on to illustrate why you should never let a drummer mix his own record on the next cut, "Rehearsal," with some of the hammiest fills since Wayne's World's Garth drummed for U2 and a headache-inducing barrage of overdriven cymbals. Somebody send Bazan a copy of The Soft Bulletin, pronto!
Not that Control doesn't have its moments: "Penetration," co-written with Seldom's Casey Foubert, is a reasonably cathartic requiem for a dotcom layoff, with chiming, Edge-like guitars and a brash, anthemic chorus. Lines like, "We're so sorry, sir, but you did not quite make the cut this time," will ring sympathetically with anyone who's ever been passed over as casually as a grade-school snot picking teams for dodgeball. "Priests and Paramedics," rising majestically from the overkill of "Second Best," is elevated by a lovely, Thom Yorke-ish melody custom made for Bazan's stoned tenor. It's not hard to imagine its tired protagonist stepping out of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead and onto the murder scene of Winners's "Never Leave a Job Half Done." The song's evocative imagery and fetching arrangement deserve a better concept album than the jumbled pastiche of Control.
Even Bazan's occasionally astute observations are offset by such poetry-contest entries as, "It will never rain again/ It should do wonders for the GNP," and, "How does that work for you in your quest to be above reproach?" Or the half-baked philosophy of the dead-on-arrival album closer, "Rejoice": "Wouldn't it be so wonderful if everything were meaningless?" Oh, honestly, Dave.
It would be easy to dismiss Control as a pompous, self-important failure were Bazan a vain and sanctimonious artist. But he's not-- he seems like a soft-spoken, thoughtful, nice-enough guy just like you and me. And while he may never make his own OK Computer or Soft Bulletin or whatever he set out to make with Control, I won't dock him points for trying. | 2002-04-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-04-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Jade Tree | April 18, 2002 | 7.2 | 5a2cb284-2b83-404f-8487-7f11b66bdd7e | Pitchfork | null |
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With a tone palette as rich as anyone working in chillwave, this bedroom producer crafts a promising debut. | With a tone palette as rich as anyone working in chillwave, this bedroom producer crafts a promising debut. | Teen Daze: Four More Years EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14531-four-more-years-ep/ | Four More Years EP | A year on from the summer of chillwave, and we've nailed down what makes this stripe of music "beachy": smeary synths, a danceable pace, hints of memory-dulled nostalgia, invitingly vague lyrics about vaguer feelings, stuff about being a young, stuff about weed. It's not a formula, per se, but in some hands it occasionally feels like one. Bedroom producer Teen Daze has been floating tracks onto the Internet for the last year, matching up squiggly keyboard lines to mild thumps and all the requisite haze. He's got a track called "Shine on You Crazy White Cap" and another called "Gone for the Summer". There's a band Tumblr with a picture of a lake as its background. They are called Teen Daze. But unlike a lot of these bedroom blurmongers, Teen Daze seems in total control; his synths bleed into more brilliant colors, his languid pace more purposeful, his memory bank FDIC-insured, his vagueness earned by the quality of his output.
Daze's debut EP, Four More Years, whirls right into its title track, its big spluttery drums and many moving parts not far from Ernest Greene's work as Washed Out-- until a giant synth, part ELP, part Black Moth Super Rainbow, splits the song open down the middle. It feels brash, towering over the relatively lax backing track, but with so much so-called chillwave finds a gentle groove and sticks with it, but throughout Four More Years, Teen Daze find ways to slip these daringly germane little asides into the tunes, rescuing them from complacency. In the twinkly "Gone For the Summer", it's an electric piano line underpinning the tracks' inherent wooziness; in "Around", it's an unusually kinetic bit of synth programming that Delorean oughta consider stealing; in "Saviour", it's a somewhat ill-fitting vocal sample that repeats throughout the track, creating its own odd logic. Four More Years gleans its color from these bold choices, and Daze's tone palette appears about as rich as anybody's working in the genre.
For as much slack memoryfuzz as he conjures, Teen Daze has an eye on the dancefloor, and quite a few of these tracks sound a bit like Erasure numbers left to melt in the sun. Teen Daze 's dance tracks are solid enough, if a bit interchangeable on their own; his tempos tend to knock similarly, with only the terse "Around" approaching something a sober person might move to. Still, this kinetic backbone proves a fine backdrop for Teen Daze 's immersive sonic explorations, and his dance tracks are every bit as intricately layered and inventively odd as the stuff at more patient tempos. Vocally, there's not a ton to grab hold of-- Teen Daze sings like the Tough Alliance guys but tends to bury his voice under a pile of synths. His hooks tend to be instrumental, not vocal. And there's a certain sameyness to the tempos here that wears a bit even in the record's half-hour runtime. But this is chillwave, and Teen Daze's version of same holds up to more scrutiny than most. In piling on the layers, sidestepping the narcotic lethargy that and making sure to keep things in motion, Teen Daze is making last summer seem like more than just a memory. | 2010-08-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-08-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Arcade Sound | August 9, 2010 | 7.1 | 5a2e4c70-00e9-4409-8e75-4c38db1d38e4 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Chicago trumpeter with hip-hop and indie-rock bona fides steps out as a bandleader, shepherding 18 musicians across a complex, soulful album that celebrates interconnectedness. | The Chicago trumpeter with hip-hop and indie-rock bona fides steps out as a bandleader, shepherding 18 musicians across a complex, soulful album that celebrates interconnectedness. | Resavoir: Resavoir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/resavoir-resavoir/ | Resavoir | When Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper tapped into their cities’ homegrown jazz scenes, it proved mutually beneficial for the rappers and their collaborators alike. Their breakout works were strengthened by a century-old musical heritage, and newer jazz artists like Kamasi Washington and Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment got the chance to shine on their own. Over the past few years, Chicago trumpeter Will Miller has shared the stage with everyone from Whitney to Lil Wayne, A$AP Rocky to the late Mac Miller. Taking lessons from indie rock and hip-hop and infusing the resulting hybrids with his own sensibilities, Miller now steps out as a bandleader with Resavoir. His group draws on the tradition established by other fine Chicago jazz-inflected exports over the years (Rotary Connection, Tortoise, Earth, Wind & Fire) while also pushing beyond categorical boundaries to create a debut that is soulful and ear-catching.
Like his fellow International Anthem labelmate Makaya McCraven, Miller deftly draws upon spontaneous improvisation and methodical studio wizardry alike, melding the two practices together (as well as 18 different players) to create an amalgam stronger and sweeter than the sum of its parts. On “Resavoir,” he toggles between crisp beats and sunny 1960s pop, expertly arranged jazz-funk and experimental electronic textures, but its five minutes feel breezy and conversational rather than overstuffed with details. Subtle but deft jump cuts detour from soaring to meditative and back, with plenty of room for instantly hummable horn charts as well as field recordings of gulls and airy vocal harmonies that drift like afternoon clouds. It’s a complex piece of songcraft that also feels dreamy and sunlit.
On standout “Taking Flight,” harpist Brandee Younger evokes both the ethereal glissandos of Alice Coltrane and the head-nodding soul-jazz of Dorothy Ashby. In surrounding Younger with expertly arranged horns and a crackling backbeat, Miller pays tribute to predecessors like Charles Stepney and Richard Evans, the Chicago producer/arrangers who thrillingly blurred the lines between pop, soul, R&B, and jazz in their heyday.
As effectively as Miller keeps to the background, his electronically treated horn moves to the fore on “Plantasy,” featuring smeared-yet-sharp tones that bring to mind Jon Hassell. Miller doesn’t revel in texture for its own sake; the many layers and whinnying high register move in conjunction with piano and the gentle patter of electronic drums to create something dramatic and poignant. He switches between clean lead lines and small squelches on “Woah,” processing handclaps and percussion in a way that brings to mind TNT-era Tortoise, fusing electronics and instrumentation together in organic fashion.
Most of Resavoir is instrumental, but the tracks run at a concise pop length and the melodies are so catchy that when vocalists enter on the album’s last two tracks, it feels as if they’ve been there all along. Both songs neatly encapsulate the album’s dualities. On “Escalator,” a song about the perils of touring life, saxophonist/rapper Sen Morimoto swings between the quotidian (there are “no fucking cashews” at the gas station) to the cosmic (waking “on another planet with a different language”). And on “LML,” murmured affirmations from Mavis Staples and Noname collaborator Akenya Seymour suggest optimism, but the song’s backstory is darker: It was written in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Like the album itself, the song celebrates interconnectedness, embracing both hard life on the ground and the easy revery of the clouds above. | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | July 26, 2019 | 8.2 | 5a30d4b9-95d6-4f97-bb51-1dd1658ce55f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Originally known as Girlfriends, Boston garage pop trio Bent Shapes draw on proto- and post-punk influences like the Feelies and Jonathan Richman. Their proper debut gathers the frenetic declarations, judgments, and uncertainties that have become part of the band's character. | Originally known as Girlfriends, Boston garage pop trio Bent Shapes draw on proto- and post-punk influences like the Feelies and Jonathan Richman. Their proper debut gathers the frenetic declarations, judgments, and uncertainties that have become part of the band's character. | Bent Shapes: Feels Weird | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18347-bent-shapes-feels-weird/ | Feels Weird | For fans of Boston's relatively cloistered DIY punk scene, Bent Shapes' debut LP Feels Weird is a long time coming. Originally known as Girlfriends, the trio-- bassist Supriya Gunda, drummer Andy Sadoway, and guitarist Ben Potrykus-- has been a hometown hero of small venues and house shows since they formed in 2009, racking up nominations and wins for their high-strung, merciless garage-pop at the Boston Phoenix's annual Boston Music Poll. Aside from a handful of short, micro-distribution releases, however, they were almost exclusively a live act, one that required fans to seek them out in person to get a proper fix. Then in May of last year, blaming a need for change and the addition of a new guitarist (who vanished almost as soon as she appeared), Girlfriends became Bent Shapes. They collected the bitingly catchy punk songs they'd released over their three years as a band and released a compilation called Cull Shorts, a sort of scrapbook retrospective on the Band That Was Girlfriends.
Though Cull Shorts marked the end of an era, its patchwork structure lingers on Feels Weird. Despite the new collection's intention as a formal album, it contains disordered messes of frenetic declarations, judgments, and uncertainties that have become part of the band's character. While incongruous, seemingly unplanned mishmash on a debut would sink a less experienced band, Bent Shapes' honed songcraft is such that missing the forest for the trees is actually a great idea. As a debutante collection-- celebrating the band's introduction to the world beyond New England at long last, something their contemporaries, and they too, until now, have eschewed-- Feels Weird serves as an eclectic, vivid primer on its creators' sprightly misanthropy.
From the outset, "Behead Yrself Pt. 2" establishes the band's innate grasp on the alluring grievance: bullshit abounds, especially in their uniquely overeducated, often self-important city. Drawing on proto- and post-punk influences like the Feelies and Jonathan Richman, each track exposes a different blistering sore; Sadoway's mellow vocals and Gunda's bouncing, all-business ones knock Potrykus off his earnestly charming soapbox in healthy doses. "Brat Poison", the most explicit, electrifying, and outright funny cut on the record by a wide margin, drips with sarcastic contempt as it eviscerates the hypocritical arrogance of loudmouthed local-scene personalities. (With lines like "drum circle jerks" and "Go put yourself into orbit/ where verbose is verboten/ ferocious, forgotten," it's also a quintessential example of Bent Shapes' immaculate attention to wordplay.) You don't have to have spent time in Boston to appreciate its diss-track qualities, but those fans probably get an amplified experience.
At times, their disgust waxes preachy; at others, like on the garrulous "Boys to Men", their need to say something the right way tangles a song in its own feet, like the words of someone who's been holed up alone in his apartment for too many days in a row, and the band stumbles. But for every overstep, there's a song like "Bites and Scratches", a personal and heartbreakingly sweet cut about love amidst baggage, that serves as a reminder that they're also dissatisfied with their own complicity and intimate failings. And even as it bubbles over into excess, it's hard to bemoan Bent Shapes' knack for marrying lyricism and melody. Every song-- save "Hex Maneuvers", a dreamy experiment that evokes Real Estate's aqueous twang with moderate success-- is irresistibly upbeat in its complaint. Their criticisms, on paper, can seem distant, but somehow-- whether it's vulnerable moments like "I'm not saying you need some deep-seated hatred of self/ But it helps" and "I met a girl, to my surprise/ Said 'I'm damaged goods', she said, 'So am I,' / so I held her hand," or the blithe delivery of even the most biting invectives, or merely a trick of the pop-guitar lick-- there's something genuinely warm about them. Ultimately, theirs are statements that both ask for and infinitely reward a second spin. | 2013-08-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-08-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter | August 26, 2013 | 7 | 5a311157-528a-4298-89f0-3bfd7d18aea7 | Devon Maloney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/devon-maloney/ | null |
The British band’s first new album in 29 years is a rare commodity: a comeback record that’s refreshingly free of nostalgic gestures. | The British band’s first new album in 29 years is a rare commodity: a comeback record that’s refreshingly free of nostalgic gestures. | The Psychedelic Furs: Made of Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-psychedelic-furs-made-of-rain/ | Made of Rain | No performer in rock made bad faith as romantic as Richard Butler did. In the first incarnation of the Psychedelic Furs, the British singer issued pronouncements and put-downs with laryngeal splendor; the band matched him with a mighty saxophone-and-guitar racket like a foghorn raising clouds of toxic fumes from dirty carpets. Serious about being a dickhead, Butler constructed scenarios in which he maneuvers himself into the position of being rejected so he can claim the poor girl was wrong to have given him a chance anyway—that’s sort of the point to “Pretty in Pink,” an unflattering character sketch, ostensibly about a girl named Caroline, that’s really about Richard, “the last to remember her name.”
In the most delightful of surprises, Made of Rain, the Psychedelic Furs’ first new album in 29 years, ranks just a notch or two below post-punk classics like 1981’s Talk Talk Talk and 1982’s Forever Now. Expect no mummified mirror moves, though. Coming to terms with legacy acts often means pining for sequels. But in response to the question “What do the Psychedelic Furs mean in 2020?” the answer is simply, “Loud band with sardonic front man,” neither of which is in abundance in contemporary rock. Paul Garisto’s assured drumming and Mars Williams’ astutely deployed sax bleats are pleasures in themselves; thanks to former Love Spit Love colleague Richard Fortus’ robust mix, each instrument occupies a distinct space while still meshing into that familiar wall of sound. There’s some goop that wouldn’t have embarrassed the sodden Furs of 1986’s Midnight to Midnight (“Stars,” ick), but the goop sticks. Butler and bassist brother Tim can still write hooks, and Richard can still clear a room with rancid quips: “When I said I loved you and I lied/I never really loved you, I was laughing all the time,” he sneers in “Come All Ye Faithful.”
Exploiting Gen X memories and good will in the service of a futurist aesthetic that once hoped to “let it stay forever now,” the Psychedelic Furs have pulled off a neat dialectical trick. They included no “Pretty in Pink”s or “She Is Mine”s, and the album’s better for it. The thunderous Made of Rain opener “The Boy Who Invented Rock & Roll” features Williams’ sax imitating the cawing of crows and Rich Good panning his guitar speaker to speaker while Butler self-mythologizes like Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve. The Furs excel at rummaging through trunkfuls of abandoned poses: Amanda Kramer’s keyboards channel “Venus in Furs” on “You’ll Be Mine,” and the full band produces a convincing imitation of Wish-era Cure in “No-One,” an observation that would surely pain Butler. The slippage into a narrative confessional mode is an uneasy fit on “Wrong Train,” but it’s worth sticking around for the sad-sack manner in which he notes he’s got a wife who hates him—and so does her boyfriend.
But here’s the thing: Cynics are sentimentalists, embittered because the world doesn’t follow the schemas in their heads. In the Furs’ warmest songs, Butler acknowledged how “knee-jerk negativity/Just never got me through.” Angling for an American breakthrough encouraged the Furs into glossier expressions of romantic interest, but the tension between the pristine synth patches and the hairballs Butler insisted on singing through kept audiences unsettled—and limited the Furs’ crossover chances to the top 30 placing of “Heartbreak Beat” a little over two years before the Cure and Depeche Mode went platinum. Free of such considerations, Made of Rain includes some of their most insistent love songs. On “Don’t Believe,” Butler gets entangled in a thicket of paradoxes and double negatives, determined not to look a fool when pledging his troth: “Everything I never said/Comes crashing on my tiny head.” Unburdened by nostalgia, accepting the world as is while avoiding complacency, Made of Rain isn’t a comeback—it’s a new road.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cooking Vinyl | August 1, 2020 | 7 | 5a3292e3-9d05-46aa-be32-a406a082b874 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The lead singer and songwriter for Blonde Redhead enlists Ryuichi Sakamoto, Greg Saunier, and others for a cottony swirl of an album where everything is quieter than everything else. | The lead singer and songwriter for Blonde Redhead enlists Ryuichi Sakamoto, Greg Saunier, and others for a cottony swirl of an album where everything is quieter than everything else. | KAZU: Adult Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kazu-adult-baby/ | Adult Baby | Kazu Makino’s voice always served as ethereal counterpoint to Blonde Redhead’s music—if they were a gut punch, she was a gust of wind. Gradually, over the years, the group followed her lead, shedding the thick, serrated dissonance of its early records as though molting a buzzsaw cocoon. Five years since Barragan, the band’s last and presumably final album, Adult Baby marks Makino’s solo debut, and on it she sounds practically disembodied.
It’s an intriguing new direction for both her voice and her songwriting. The viscous drip of the guitars, the electronic exoskeleton of Blonde Redhead’s last few albums—all of it is gone, replaced by layers of Makino’s breathy head voice. She dissolves together gasps, wordless cries, and half-intelligible sung phrases in a cottony swirl of synthesizers, gongs, flute, strings, and other diaphanous textures.
She has assembled a formidable ensemble: Ryuichi Sakamoto appears on five songs, credited with piano, field recordings, and “organic instruments,” though you’d never necessarily know he was there; by design, his contributions are inextricable from the whole. Her drummers play more forceful roles: Ian Chang (Body Language, Son Lux) is an anchoring presence on several songs, his pointed attack a muscular counterpoint to the music’s flyaway textures. The Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refocso (Atoms for Peace, Forró in the Dark) lays down flickering figures on “Salty” and “Coyote,” his touch featherweight and diamond-tipped. And on “Undo,” Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier’s spacious, exacting drumbeats punctuate cloudy keys and a distant, almost inaudible shriek that brings to mind Portishead.
At its best, Adult Baby is a drowsy delight, swaying lazily in waltz tempo. The foggy sonics are suffused in Lynchian mystery, while Ian Mclellan Davis’ lush string arrangements lend a sense of Old Hollywood grandeur. But the album can also be frustratingly opaque. Makino’s lyrics, when they can be made out at all, don’t hold up under scrutiny. Stream-of-conscious and relatively prosaic, they read like diary entries, serving mainly as springboards for her to explore the outer reaches of her range. And it can be difficult to tell the album’s nine tracks apart from one another, or even tease apart the elements of a given song. The mix is hazy and abstracted, everything quieter than everything else.
But that seems like precisely what Makino and her collaborators intend. Adult Baby works best with the volume turned up, a soft mattress beneath you, all distractions on hold. And even though the music often resists forming into anything as solid as a hook, Makino’s vaporous melodies have a way of creeping up on you long after the record has stopped spinning; they have a sneaky tenacity, like a dream you can’t shake, even if you can’t quite remember its particulars.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Adult Baby / !K7 | September 17, 2019 | 6.8 | 5a378cbc-7db9-47b1-ab3b-66bc04607709 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their second LP, Tennis take the Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie-pop production values of their debut and add a bit of rock'n'roll muscle. Patrick Carney of Black Keys produces. | On their second LP, Tennis take the Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie-pop production values of their debut and add a bit of rock'n'roll muscle. Patrick Carney of Black Keys produces. | Tennis: Young and Old | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16252-young-and-old/ | Young and Old | The title of Tennis' second album could almost as easily describe the first. The music on last year's Cape Dory bobbed sweetly between Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie pop production values, and the basic lyrical themes were at least as old as jazz standard "A Sailboat in the Moonlight", hold the moonlight. But the sailing trip that inspired the Colorado-based band's debut also fulfilled something newer: the internet's need for easily digestible narrative. Luckily, core married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley had a real knack for breezy, deceptively simple beach-pop that could get lodged in your head and inspire your own seafaring daydreams. Or at least make you jealous.
Another story would seem to apply to Young and Old, and it's the one about the "difficult" sophomore record. Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity under the oversight of the Black Keys' drummer Patrick Carney, who produced. A few songs still hit at the sense of love-drunk reverie that turned older tracks like "Marathon" and "South Carolina" into blog and college-radio hits. But Tennis couldn't keep writing sailing songs forever, and the new batch doesn't pull us into their world quite as easily-- and it's not only for lack of convenient biographical shorthand. They've gone from under the boardwalk to stuck in the middle.
For all that, a whole lot of what's new here improves on the debut. Under Carney's direction, Tennis upgrade their sonics without losing the fuzz. In fact, sometimes there's even more fuzz, such as in the nicely clanging lead riff on the album's first advance mp3, sprightly piano-popper "Origins". Moore's full-throated lilt and multi-hued keyboard, along with Riley's lissome guitar lines, still aren't that far down the innocent coast from Beach House's supine dream-pop, and now there are extra layers of vocal harmonies, such as the appealingly Free Design-jazzy sha-la-las on "Petition". But Carney especially brings life to the percussion, whether it's the huge handclaps on "My Better Self", a swooning standout reminiscent of the Owls' underrated mid-2000s indie-pop gem "Air", or the snapping snares on "High Road".
"Paradise is all around, but happiness is never found," Moore sings on that last song, which might've been a strong unifying theme for the sophomore album-- a melancholy flipside to the debut's paradise-is-paradise uplift. Sure, the songs on Young and Old occasionally bring back the romance of movement (optimistic "Traveling"), and they're often introspective, but instead the effect tends to be too confused, stilted, or generic to really pack the same wallop. The album's first words, on mellow strummer "It All Feels the Same", are "took a train," a potentially intriguing counterpart to sailing that isn't properly explored elsewhere on the record. Rather than at sea or on the railroad, the lyrics lean toward awkward abstraction: "Will you make my children bear the consequences everywhere?" asks "Origins". Even on "My Better Self", Moore philosophizes clumsily, "What is innate, I do not know/ But meaning comes and it goes."
She sort of has a point, though. As easy as it is to criticize acts that come to us with a ready-built narrative alongside their music, storytelling and image-making have always been crucial elements of pop. What matters isn't whether a record comes with extra-musical buzz attached, but whether the music is good enough to capitalize on that buzz. Cape Dory, to my ears, was; Young and Old is another example of a promising young act that found an audience quickly on the internet before fully coming into its own powers. In other words, it's pretty good, but also a bit disappointing. There's still plenty of time, though, and by album three, the duo that never originally set out to make music will have something else that can be invaluable for a working band: a little more experience in the trenches. | 2012-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | February 13, 2012 | 6.3 | 5a392577-ab05-446e-afda-d398f526156c | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
††† has been framed as “Chino Moreno’s witch house” project, but what you'll find on the trio's self-titled LP is stadium-status electro-rock akin to Depeche Mode's Songs of Faith and Devotion and Nine Inch Nails. In fact, ††† are supposed to be taken on the same scale as Moreno's other band, the Deftones. | ††† has been framed as “Chino Moreno’s witch house” project, but what you'll find on the trio's self-titled LP is stadium-status electro-rock akin to Depeche Mode's Songs of Faith and Devotion and Nine Inch Nails. In fact, ††† are supposed to be taken on the same scale as Moreno's other band, the Deftones. | †††: ††† | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18989-crosses-/ | ††† | Do you have a meaningful relationship with the music of Deftones? Are you in a meaningful relationship with someone who does? If that’s the case, I don’t think I need to tell you the code we follow: Chino Moreno is off. fucking. limits. I suspect he’s become one of the most likable rock stars at his level because when he embarrasses himself—and he definitely has over the years—it happens in a way to which most people can relate. Which is to say, you get overly influenced by your friends, let your enthusiasm get the better of you, and try just a little too hard to look cool or to fit in. And that’s why he’s been forgiven time and time again, even after covering Ice Cube’s “Wicked” on a Korn album, tacking on the since-censored monologue at the end of “Pink Cellphone” and remixing “Dragula” in 2012. My love for White Pony runs too deep to link to the “Pink Maggit (Back to School)” video in good conscience.
And so when word got out about †††, it was framed as “Chino Moreno’s witch house project” and subsequently mocked as if witch house ever was responsible for a song as good as “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”. Or that Moreno could make a bigger ass out of himself in this style than Salem did. As it turns out, “witch house” only applied to their instantly dated font stylization and artwork, as soon we all found out that ††† was on some stadium-status electro-rock shit, think Depeche Mode circa Songs of Faith and Devotion, Nine Inch Nails. Or more, accurately, that song the Cure did for the Judge Dredd soundtrack. Or Filter.
Which is to say that Moreno does embarrass himself here. Quite often. But you can’t blame it on witch house. There are a number of reasons why ††† faceplants in a way that previous Moreno side projects Palms and Team Sleep didn’t—while the latter two were also searching collaborations with trusted friends (here it’s Shaun Lopez of fellow Sactowners Far), they catered to Moreno’s more esoteric tastes and were meant for niche audiences. Meanwhile, ††† played Lollapalooza Chile with only two EPs to their name (both included in full here), so this is meant to be on the same scale as Deftones. And for the most part, you get potential Deftones songs that ensure you never again fail to appreciate the pummeling, inventive musicianship of Stephen Carpenter or Abe Cunningham or Sergio Vega.
You can’t doubt the enthusiasm or commitment, but there isn’t much in the way of craft—despite a professed love of the Tri Angle and Software labels, Lopez, Moreno, and the excellently named Chuck Doom crank the synths and sequencers like they were guitars and ††† retains the same brickwalled, blinding sheen of Far’s proto-emo alt-metal. In fact, most of these plodding, perfunctory beats would’ve sounded dated around the time Water & Solutions dropped. The sickly riffs of “†hholyghs†” bear a heavy influence of Portishead’s “Over”, a few more lope to the same uh-1,2-step as Sneaker Pimps’ “6 Underground”, and many more recall the remix of “Hey Man, Nice Shot” if we’re being real.
But if we’re really being real, Moreno’s the reason we’re here in the first place and a more accurate diagnosis of †††’s failings put the blame squarely on him. Maybe he’s trying to play to arena-goth type, as his concerns on ††† are a confluence of religion, sex, and non-specific menace that can be neatly summed up as—“you’re kinda freaky. That turns me on. Let’s party.” Which is totally not a problem, seeing as how about 75% of White Pony was about the same exact shit. And let’s not forget this a genre where Dave Gahan and Trent Reznor are setting the lyrical gold standard.
And yet, I’ve watched Moreno change...into kind of a creep, and considering the wincing awkwardness of it all, I had to check the credits to make sure Lopez wasn’t still working with Jonah Matranga. The first line on “†his is a †rick” is “something’s changed in your face I notice/ a different sparkle in those crazy eyes,” and from that moment going forward, Moreno’s guyliner’d leering just puts you on the defensive. And it’s hard to enjoy even the good parts of †††, knowing it’s probably a matter of seconds before Moreno spits game like “I gotta tell you something/ I wanna view your dreams/ I wanna pull out your crazy/ pour it over me” or “you make a godly servant/ protect your Bible between your knees.” There’s a 65% chance that “fron†iers” is a love song about strippers, and no one should have to guess about that sort of thing. This is not the same guy who responsible for a track that somehow allowed Maynard James Keenan to sound kinda seductive.
That said, there are good moments here—“†elepa†hy” is something genuinely new, scratching a disco itch and a good deal of ††† isn’t so far off from the booming R&B-metal of the Weeknd’s Kiss Land, albeit with slightly less laughable lyrics. New single “†he epilogue” manages a slinky, KROQ-ready chorus, “blk s†allion” earns its name as an electro inversion of White Pony, while the screaming fits in “bi†ches brew” and “†his is a †rick” prove that ††† would’ve been better off had Moreno just bore his fangs the whole way through. That’s about enough for an EP, but at 15 tracks, ††† fails to establish much flow or continuity or variety, or...oh, fuck it—it’s just too damn long, the longest record Moreno’s ever made unless you think all 32 minutes of silence and hidden tracks at the end of Around the Fur “count.”
Is this is a bad time to mention that Moreno announced Deftones will be taking the rest of 2014 off while he focuses on †††? Hardly. If anything, it shows another reason why it’s so easy to stick with the guy, he keeps this stuff away from his main gig. And really, they’re in a good state*—Diamond Eyes* and Koi No Yokan found Deftones as vital and influential as ever, having recovered from their murky, muddled post-White Pony albums and the tragic, eventually fatal car accident suffered by bassist Chi Cheng in 2008. While ††† may be on the same scale as Deftones, they’re not a replacement, and it stands to reason that Moreno can ascend to the heights of their previous work. But on †††, it’s like he never had wings. | 2014-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Sumerian | February 12, 2014 | 5 | 5a39c223-5ad8-4535-bb74-20f8843f03bd | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power shows his teeth on his new LP as Blanck Mass. *World Eater *is suitable for casual noise fans who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent threshold for pain. | Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power shows his teeth on his new LP as Blanck Mass. *World Eater *is suitable for casual noise fans who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent threshold for pain. | Blanck Mass: World Eater | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22958-world-eater/ | World Eater | Benjamin John Power has always been typecast as one of the nice guys of noise. With Fuck Buttons, he’s played sun-worshipping primitivist, screamadelic raver, and something close to arena rocker on 2013’s Slow Focus. His solo project Blanck Mass maintains similar posi-vibes while working within mesmeric repetition and industrial dance. At the current moment, however, it may be hard to find much truth in “Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic” and “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” (both 2008 Fuck Buttons titles). The cover of Power’s latest Blanck Mass album seems to nod in agreement. At a time when global politics is just one man after another showing his ass, the only sensible reaction is to show your teeth.
World Eater finds one of electronic noise’s most popular and populist artists making his heel turn. Specifically, it happens after the oblong music box melody of opener “John Doe’s Carnival of Error” goes into double time, generating the promise of euphoric lift-off that typified Fuck Buttons’ 2009 Andy Weatherall-abetted album Tarot Sport. But it’s a classic supervillain trick of lulling its victims with a disturbing, playful calm before unleashing indiscriminate destruction. A nine-minute blitzkrieg like “Rhesus Negative” needs no nuance; the only operative principle here is loud. Brutal kick drums compete with twin-turret guitars for dominance in the mix before a return to the black metal shrieking last heard on 2008’s Street Horrrsing. While Power’s prior work offered the possibility of meditative headphone listening or even dancefloors, “Rhesus Negative” is awesome in the most literal sense, meant to paralyze with both admiration and fear.
But it doesn’t feel like an endurance test—instead, the brickwalled production of “Rhesus Negative” recalls industrial-arena monoliths like Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish” or Cold Cave’s “The Great Pan Is Dead.” Like anything under the Fuck Buttons or Blanck Mass names, World Eater is suitable for casual listeners who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent pain threshold. The difference here is that Power looks back on the past decade of electronic music and finds how all of it is capable of showing the kind of domineering aggression that people might only otherwise get from Fuck Buttons, heavy metal, or Tunnel bangers.
World Eater evokes everything from his own up-with-people breakout single “Bright Tomorrow” to Purity Ring’s EDM-indie, from witch house to the trap music populating millions of SoundClouds and Vegas nightclubs. The undulating, pitched-down vocals and skittering drum patterns of “Please” bear the echo of Holy Other and any number of Tri Angle acts, though it sounds murderous rather than haunted. It’s a rare instance of World Eater showing menace and finesse rather than brute strength. Similarly, “The Rat” runs “Rock n’ Roll Pt. 2” through TNGHT’s blown subwoofers. “Silent Treatment” is Power going “POWER,” chopping a choir into a war cry and weaving it through a labyrinthian grid of footwork-inspired percussion.
Just about anything is going to be interpreted as an act of protest in 2017. On World Eater, the coexistence of melody and belligerence, of fragility under an invincible veneer, speak to the constructive and destructive capabilities of man. Power is completely honest about which instinct is winning right now. Nearly every reference on World Eater sounded utopian at one point, and had the album been released during a less turbulent time, “The Rat” could have feasibly been used for the London Summer Games alongside Fuck Buttons’ own “Olympians.” World Eater does not seem like a doomsday device by design, though. It might sound like one now, but Power leaves open the possibility of it being his darkest transmission before the dawn of a new bright tomorrow. | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | March 11, 2017 | 8.1 | 5a3c2206-74d1-4f9a-a2c9-63c607cd64df | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The glitch pioneer returns with his most accessible album to date: a surprisingly colorful set that sounds like he’s DJing a retrospective of his own career. | The glitch pioneer returns with his most accessible album to date: a surprisingly colorful set that sounds like he’s DJing a retrospective of his own career. | Ryoji Ikeda: Ultratronics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryoji-ikeda-ultratronics/ | Ultratronics | To step into Ryoji Ikeda’s world is to be immersed in numbers. Audiovisual installations generated through massive datasets from CERN, NASA, and the Human Genome Project bathe audiences in streams of digits, barcodes of light, and ever-shifting astronomical coordinates. Mathematical abstractions are transformed into overwhelming digital chatter as if in imitation of a computer language that we can hear but not understand. As a composer, Ikeda pioneered glitch music in the 1990s by sonifying data overload, but his technological critique belies his instinct for a good tune. Individual components of his sound, from pure sine waves to unadorned white noise, combine for surprisingly danceable moments. “I learned everything in the clubs,” he said. “Nothing intellectual, just, ‘boom boom boom.’” Ultratronics, a new set of compositions based on material recorded in the ’90s, foregrounds his songcraft over his trademark minimalism for the most accessible album of his career.
Whereas fellow glitch originators Yasunao Tone and Oval use damaged CDs to create waves of stuttering skips, Ikeda begins with the barest fundamentals of sound. Landmark albums like 2000’s Matrix, 2005’s Dataplex, and 2008’s Test Pattern feature little more than sine waves hovering at the edge of perception, filtered 32nd-note clicks panning left and right, and blasts of white noise interrupting. Only at the end of his records would these sparse sounds gradually coalesce into proper songs. Ultratronics does away with this barrier to entry, beginning with fully realized and immediately compelling tracks. Instead of slowly building his tonal palette across the album, Ikeda gathers the main threads and loose ends of his oeuvre into a surprisingly colorful tapestry.
Ultratronics goes in directions that Ikeda has left unexplored for decades. After abandoning the use of samples on recent releases, he prominently incorporates recordings of a robotic narrator named “ULT 708X,” who “can teach you counting, reading, functions, and math problems.” In the playful highlight “Ultratronics 04,” ULT 708X tries (and fails) to count to 30, reminiscent of Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator,” while “Ultratronics 01” garbles its voice completely as in Autechre’s “Ccec.” A young Ikeda might have generated these sounds in imitation of his heroes in the ’90s, but now he incorporates them into his own sonic signature of crystal-clear sine tones, double-speed clicks and cuts, and bursts of dial-up noise. He sounds refreshingly loose, guiding us through his evolution as an artist with gracious humor.
Much of Ultratronics is a patchwork of genres, as if Ikeda is DJing a retrospective of his own career. The breakneck shifts may threaten the coherence of the album, but Ikeda weaves a thrilling panorama out of these various strands: a pummeling industrial beat more appropriate for Throbbing Gristle or Esplendor Geométrico on “Ultratronics 09,” his most compelling IDM since Dataplex’s “Data.Matrix” on “Ultratronics 11,” and beautiful ambience on “Ultratronics 14.” Ikeda has carved an unmistakable niche with his relentlessly minimalist, self-consciously academic meditations on data, but he also risks repetitiveness with uninterrupted years of honing his sound. With Ultratronics, he maintains his precise aesthetic but adds a much-needed sense of levity and fun. If you look closely, you might even see him crack a smile. | 2023-01-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Noton | January 9, 2023 | 7.5 | 5a3e4534-fd91-4463-a174-0700a20d2e26 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The Australian punk trio, birthed out of Melbourne’s feminist punk scene, are at their best channeling their political rage into small moments | The Australian punk trio, birthed out of Melbourne’s feminist punk scene, are at their best channeling their political rage into small moments | Cable Ties: Far Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cable-ties-far-enough/ | Far Enough | Jenny McKechnie doesn’t mince words. After her Melbourne punk trio Wet Lips found themselves billed on a gig as the token “girl act,” the band unleashed her frustration on the fiery “Can’t Take It Anymore”: “Do you think you’re an individual? You're just another guy in a Bad Seeds t-shirt...You’re so rock and roll,” Wet Lips singer Grace Kindellan sneered, pointed disses splattering like drops of lye. But after their shudderingly short and loud self-titled LP and a few 7"s, Wet Lips declared an indefinite hiatus. Cable Ties—their tacit successor formed by McKechnie, along with bassist Nick Brown and drummer Shauna Boyle—turns the same acerbic fury outward, transforming hyper-specific callouts of a toxic, male-dominated scene into broader, more explicit calls to action on their second full-length Far Enough.
Melbourne has become known for a thriving female-oriented rock community, with bands like Camp Cope, Chelsea Bleach, and Amyl and the Sniffers showcasing the city’s rowdy pub scene abroad. But by many accounts, this was a hard-won and recent development, one paved largely by McKechnie herself. With Wet Lips, she started WetFest, a festival that ran until 2018 showcasing female and gender non-conforming-led punk groups. That DIY ethos, one that promotes channeling rage into creativity, defines the spirit of Far Enough.
That’s not to suggest there’s a lack of fury. It’s endemic in their sound—the rumbling bass that cuts through Boyle’s crackling drums; the guitars blown up with reverb. Though invigorating, the instrumentation is hardly novel; the record often leans on familiar garage-rock tropes, so much so that it often dips into homogeneity and predictability. But the band also leaves plenty of room for McKechnie’s booming vocals, by far the band’s most impactful instrument. At once pliable and willful, her voice might morph from a biting howl to a striking vibrato in the span of a verse. Like X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, she occasionally wields it like a weapon, barking about “blood and theft and war” on “Anger’s Not Enough.” That palpable intensity makes the moments where she does regain control of pitch and melody, as on the surprisingly sweet “Lani,” all the more striking, a delicate counterbalance to the band’s grittiness.
But where the vocals lend a sense of ingenuity and innovation, Cable Ties’ lyrics too often fall flat. For a group so ingrained in Melbourne’s feminist punk scene, it is disappointing and even a bit confusing to see the group grasp at dated tropes when trying to stir underrepresented groups to action. “Self-Made Man,” the band’s attempt at an anti-capitalist anthem, is juvenile in its hackneyed critiques, with statements like “He don’t make when he creates/When he takes, he takes away” so broad that they are rendered ineffectual. At times, the band’s attempt at fomenting revolution is so anachronistic that it runs the risk of being regressive. On “Tell Them Where to Go,” what is ostensibly meant to be a searing battle cry for non-male musicians, McKechnie tries to trace an origin story of feminist punk but again settles for obvious platitudes. “Why don’t you walk out your bedroom and steal your brother’s guitar?” she screams, seemingly unaware of the binaries this reinforces. It comes off as tone-deaf, a facile and unsubtle gesture at third-wave feminism that feels immediately outmoded.
The record’s strongest moments instead track more personal politics, the unavoidable contradictions and anxieties that build up simply from participating in a capitalist, patriarchal system. “Hope,” which begins with just a guitar and McKechnie’s voice, takes a more stream-of-consciousness approach: “I’m getting asthma as I run for the train/Is it genetic from my family or is it just harder to breathe these days?” These quiet musings, which connect literal family history to broader political sentiments, paint a more nuanced picture of leftism: fighting with family members over political parties, grappling with feelings of guilt for not fighting hard enough.
It also leaves room for more positive emotions, as tentative as they might be. “It might be hopeless but if I lose hope I bring on that ending,” she sings, wearily but determined. The surprisingly jaunty closer “Pillow” is similarly autobiographical, a sort of “Cat’s Cradle” or “100 Years” for the Doomer generation, tracking her 25th and 26th birthdays through rising sea levels and rising conservatism. The addition of a pounding piano progression and layered vocal accompaniment on the last verse lends weight to her frustrations. There’s a novel terror in admitting that individual radicalism cannot change the world. But Cable Ties succeed when they build collective strength out of that fear.
Correction: An earlier version of this article contained inaccurate information about the band’s origins and songwriting credits. It has since been updated. | 2020-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge / Poison City | March 30, 2020 | 6.4 | 5a48ceb8-a214-4b5d-a105-a693bb4fca8d | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Channeling Sade, covering James Blake, and indulging in some silk-sheets saxophone, the Danish pop producer William Asingh makes a plush, playful, and quietly audacious debut. | Channeling Sade, covering James Blake, and indulging in some silk-sheets saxophone, the Danish pop producer William Asingh makes a plush, playful, and quietly audacious debut. | Vera: Good Job No Conversation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vera-good-job-no-conversation/ | Good Job No Conversation | It’s likely that no one has ever said to themselves, “Gee, I wish Sade would cover James Blake on a coffeeshop soul record slathered in sexy sex and Spanish guitar.” But sometimes you don’t know what you want until it’s right in front of you. Good Job No Conversation, the debut EP from Copenhagen producer William Asingh, aka Vera, which he posted on SoundCloud in late 2017, is like that. If you’re a credits-digger, maybe you know him from his work behind the boards with Danish acts such as MØ, who was featured on Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s international hit “Lean On.” Now, trying his own hand at pop, Asingh is as much curator as musician, weaving vivid cultural references, tony vibes, and uncredited collaborations—a beat from a friend here, a lyric from his girlfriend there—into an instantly captivating, deceptively single-origin artifact.
Rhye fans impatiently counting the days until the duo’s new album drops next month will find plenty to tide them over here. Though Vera’s sultry timbres are as dry as Rhye’s are dewy, Asingh’s miniature orchestrations have the same kind of aromatic bounce, and the vocals, by a singer whose identity Asingh is keeping secret for now, have the same androgynous quality. They’re pitch-shifted for maximum winsomeness and inscribed on the music with mechanical precision, sounding less sung than played on a sequencer’s ribbon slider. But for all its artifice and polished smoothness, the record and its fetching patina feel fresh and personalized. It’s both a great vitamin in the lean early winter and a compelling announcement of a song-shaper to watch.
Let’s not bury the lede: We should talk about “Life Round Here.” It’s bold for a new act to cover James Blake, which could easily come off as a grandiose promotional gimmick. It’s even bolder for him to take such liberties with the melody and lyrics, and boldest of all to make it work like a snake charm. The bass arpeggio of the original is immediately discernible in the piano, and the percussion—those clockwork snake rattles—fits perfectly with Vera’s penchant for coiling Latin rhythms. (He told Consequence of Sound that the cover of the song, an “all-time favorite,” was inspired by the kind of salsafied pop classics he imagined hearing at a bar on vacation.) But, almost shockingly, Asingh replaces Blake’s verses with new lyrics and braids them seamlessly into a spot-on rendition of the original chorus. Craftily mixing fancy and faithfulness, it’s more alchemical tribute than cover, and it’s kind of outrageous that it doesn’t fall flat.
The same could be said of all the smoldering saxchief that presides over Asingh’s plush bossa nova grooves, fluttering percussion, low-slung bass, and breathy electronics. When the mellow horn comes wailing through the cracks in the icy synth pulses of “In and Out of Love”—one of several highlights in the consistently strong material—you might look up to see if Jon Hamm is breaking through the wall. Yet the edge-of-cheesy idiom is held in check by crisp production, sharply etched melodic writing (especially on the contemporary R&B-flavored “Nobody Else,” which begins with a sly guitar quotation of Gerry Rafferty’s prototypical smooth-sax jam, “Baker Street”), and lyrics of striking clarity and depth. The bewitching opening track, “Mystery,” a perceptive study in the betrayed lover’s canny hindsight, taps into some parallel universe where Blonde Redhead and Carlos Santana collaborated on a late-night snuggle anthem garnished with Balearic breezes and nonsense French, and I kind of want to go live there. The music has such immediacy and personality that it will take but a single click to see if you do, too. | 2018-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ultra | January 8, 2018 | 6.8 | 5a4ecf84-5541-4a50-a9e6-92f5a4f2a1f6 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
After infamously bailing out right before Oasis’s 1996 MTV Unplugged performance, the irascible, charismatic Britpop anti-hero gets a second chance. | After infamously bailing out right before Oasis’s 1996 MTV Unplugged performance, the irascible, charismatic Britpop anti-hero gets a second chance. | Liam Gallagher: MTV Unplugged | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liam-gallagher-mtv-unplugged/ | MTV Unplugged | From the beginning, Oasis’ foundation showed visible cracks. Beyond the excesses of drugs and drinking, there was the Gallagher brothers’ fundamentally unstable relationship. But their most seismic fracture came in 1996, when the band was tapped to record an MTV Unplugged session. At the time, earning a place on the show signified real cultural cachet, following a string of multi-platinum Unplugged albums by Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey, and Nirvana. Yet lead singer Liam Gallagher infamously abandoned the group right before they took the stage to begin taping, leaving his older brother, guitarist Noel, to handle vocals. Liam hung in the balcony, swilling beer and heckling his brother. It proved to the world (and perhaps to Noel himself) that Oasis’ primary songwriter—and the technically superior singer, though lacking Liam’s self-destructive panache—was perfectly capable of handling double duty.
Nearly 25 years later, Liam Gallagher gets his second chance, which begs the question, why is the semi-mothballed MTV Unplugged trotting out the Gallagher who spurned them instead of the one who used the gig to prove his own worthiness as a frontman in his own right?
Liam knows that he can never correct for going AWOL in 1996. He even alludes to his walk-off while introducing “Once,” which he dedicates to former Oasis guitarist Bonehead—who joins Gallagher for the performance—for being the only member of the band to play a second Unplugged session. But MTV Unplugged is, at the very least, an indication that the irascible, charismatic frontman can still hold a crowd in the palm of his hand for long stretches. One of those is a remarkable three-song run of Oasis tunes, beginning with Be Here Now’s “Stand by Me” and ending with (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s “Cast No Shadow.” Sandwiched in the middle is an ultra-rare performance of Definitely Maybe non-album track “Sad Song” that is alone worth the price of admission.
Of course, that stretch, like the entire tracklist, is the result of a bit of sequencing trickery. As televised, the MTV Unplugged concert, recorded in August 2019 and aired the following month, was much more heavily tilted toward Liam’s own songs, including a chunk of five solo cuts that opened the concert. The album, though, is whittled down to just 10 tracks—five by Oasis and five by Liam—and cagily scatters the Oasis songs throughout, the better to stoke the listener’s nostalgia (and ensuring that Oasis fans who aren’t Liam lifers never have to hear more than two unfamiliar songs in a row).
The Liam-written songs are largely a drag, just as they are on his studio albums, save for “Now That I’ve Found You,” a tiny post-Oasis diamond hiding among the weeds, presented in an even better version here as a melancholic acoustic guitar and piano ballad. After a pint or two of Guinness, you might even be able to convince yourself that his brother composed it. But a few of Liam’s clunkers are elevated in the live format, helped greatly by the Hull crowd, recorded high in the mix (and rapturously chanting, “Liam! Liam! Liam!” between songs like it’s 1996 again). Gallagher, who notably struggled to find his place in the music world after Oasis cratered and his ensuing band, Beady Eye, petered out, may have found the recipe for his ongoing success outside the studio.
Take the opener, “Wall of Glass,” which appears on his 2017 solo debut, As You Were. There, it’s a simulacrum of the Screamadelica wall of sound: blaring harmonica, crunchy guitars, heavy handclaps, and thudding bass. Live, though, the harmonica is swapped out for a tasteful organ, the trio of female backing vocalists shines, and Gallagher’s damaged but affecting voice, now cracked and weathered after decades of cigarettes and alcohol, can’t hide.
Stripped of artifice, Gallagher’s words—dripping in cliche, to be sure—ring truer here. The Brothers Gallagher have long been known to speak cryptically to each other through song. (According to 2019’s largely hagiographical Liam Gallagher documentary, As It Was, they don’t speak in real life at all, but a report from February hints at a reconciliation). So while “Wall of Glass,” with its talk of throwing stones, is often read as an attack on Noel, Liam’s recent steps toward self-reflection give the song new meaning: The wall might just be a mirror. In the years since he first recorded the single, Liam has, in his own way, sanded down his rougher edges, appearing almost remorseful about his estranged relationship with his brother in As It Was and apologizing to his family a few months before the taping.
As charming as Gallagher’s nasally Mancunian snarl can be on MTV Unplugged, it’s borderline cartoonish on “Once”—he rhymes “pyuwel” (“pool”) with “skyuwel” (“school”)—though perhaps for Liam diehards this is a feature and not a bug. But the Hull crowd lifts him up again (he later called them “biblical”) and before long, “Champagne Supernova” is on the horizon.
Here’s where Noel’s absence is felt for the first time, like a phantom limb. On (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? the mega-hit clocks in at seven and a half minutes, and it would occasionally stretch considerably beyond that in concert, thanks to the psychedelic shredding of its songwriter, Noel. It’s not quite clear how that kind of grandeur is supposed to translate to an unplugged set, with or without Noel, which is why its inclusion is strange to begin with; even more so its abrupt ending at less than three and a half minutes in. Around the two-minute mark, as Liam reaches the cathartic “Why? Why? Why? Why?” bridge, the strings swell and the crowd is on the edge of ecstasy—but without the sublime noise to shape the song’s dramatic arc, it turns out to be a bridge to nowhere. “Champagne Supernova,” the stunted closer of MTV Unplugged, is a metaphor for Liam Gallagher’s output in a post-Oasis world. It’s an amuse-bouche in lieu of an entrée.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | June 15, 2020 | 5.9 | 5a50a7ff-1b25-476a-8433-bd549af65ca9 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Death Grips are angry. It's unclear why. But on their major label debut, the Sacramento noise group's monomaniacal desire to rain down fiery destruction on the powers-that-be is crystal-clear, even if nothing else is. | Death Grips are angry. It's unclear why. But on their major label debut, the Sacramento noise group's monomaniacal desire to rain down fiery destruction on the powers-that-be is crystal-clear, even if nothing else is. | Death Grips: The Money Store | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16512-death-grips-the-money-store/ | The Money Store | Death Grips are angry. It's unclear why. But their thirst for vengeance, their monomaniacal desire to visit fiery destruction on the powers-that-be, is crystal-clear on The Money Store, even if nothing else-- where the hell this album came from; who plays which instrument; what the lead singer is yelling about; and what on earth this band of insurgents is doing signing an Epic Records contract with L.A. Reid-- makes much sense at all. When playing this album, the only thing I'm sure of is my overwhelming desire to split my forehead open on a cinder block.
The Sacramento group seems to have landed from an alternate planet, or at least an alternate decade when defiantly mutant outfits like this were occasionally given major-label backing. They've been persistently tagged as "rap rock" for context, but it's not a very useful description of their music. For starters, not much of The Money Store scans as rock: It's confrontational, abrasive, and chaotic, but only one of its 13 tracks includes a remotely guitar-like noise ("I've Seen Footage") and even that turns out to be a bent, sickly synthesizer. Most of the album is an alien swarm of buzzing and sputtering noises. Death Grips' Zach Hill, a drummer for the fiendishly technical noise-rock band Hella, has also chewed his way through numerous projects, including work with Marnie Stern and Boredoms, and bits of all this float through The Money Store's wildly unpredictable 41 minutes.
Whatever L.A. Reid was thinking when he signed these guys, he surely didn't meddle in their creative process. Sometimes this hands-off approach backfires, but Death Grips have actual designs to be left to, and The Money Store is a million-mph blur of ideas. One can only imagine how many hours it took to make Hill's drums sound like they're traveling inward from every corner of the mix toward its center, but the music seems to be constantly lunging out at you from all sides. A Bollywood vocal sample on "Punk Weight" is obliterated by a mortar-round hailstorm of viciously treated percussion. On "Hustle Bones", a tar-thick drone of indeterminate origin (guitar? computer?) pops into a glitter of synthesized voices. And "Hacker", the final track, hits a peak that the entire album seems to gather towards: With its simple chorus chant ("I'M IN YOUR AREA") and uncharacteristic amount of empty space, it's the only song Death Grips have recorded so far that tugs at your hips as much as it bludgeons your skull.
As for "rap": To call what lead vocalist Stefan Burnett (aka MC Ride) does "rapping" stretches the definition of the word beyond what even an avowed Lil B and Waka Flocka Flame fan like me can endorse. Burnett's deranged shouting brings a lot of things to mind-- Mark E. Smith with his mouth full, Jim Jones during an air raid, Sloth from The Goonies-- but rapping isn't one of them. Follow his lines closely and you'll slam up against the realization that you're largely transcribing word salad: "The fuck you staring at/ You know I'd be so quick to flash/ Terrified of the way a basilisk come out and skin so fast," Burnett barks on "The Cage". But his hoarse, panicked voice functions as primal fight-or-fight communication: Things Are Not All Right.
The clearest link through all the pop-culture static to the music Death Grips make is back to the ultra-aggressive, defiantly ignorant, and proudly dumb American hardcore punk-metal moment of the 1980s-- right along the Suicidal Tendencies/Fear/Cro-Mags axis. I don't watch a lot of skate videos these days, but I know a great highlight-reel song when I hear it, and every moment of The Money Store qualifies. Like those bands, Death Grips appeals to the knuckle-dragging troglodyte and the smirking smart kid in us: thick-headed goonery and bookish, viscera-free nerdiness, making beautifully misanthropic music together. Granted, The Money Store is about as intellectual an experience as a scraped knee. But it's just as good at reminding you that you're alive. | 2012-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Epic | April 24, 2012 | 8.7 | 5a54d516-1b67-4a5f-ac69-3020f4211714 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On its debut album, the country-influenced Austin quartet raises open-ended questions about worry, doubt, and making a living in the gig economy. | On its debut album, the country-influenced Austin quartet raises open-ended questions about worry, doubt, and making a living in the gig economy. | Good Looks: Bummer Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/good-looks-bummer-year/ | Bummer Year | “Bummer Year,” the title track to the debut album by Good Looks, is a mess—but that’s the whole point. The lyrics deal with the familiar process of reconciling memories of old friends from small towns with the politically toxic people they’ve since become. “All my friends from high school, they all bought motorcycles,” Tyler Jordan sings like he’s delivering a eulogy. “Joined up with a bike gang, supported Donald Trump.” Working hard not to dehumanize these characters the way they might dehumanize others, he follows a shaky progression from a drunken brawl—“They’re the kind of people you’d want with you in a bar fight”—to a grassroots demonstration. It’s a stretch, but Good Looks play “Bummer Year” like they’re working through those unresolved feelings in real time. The sense of struggling through confusion gives the song its unexpected power.
Good Looks hail from Austin by way of assorted small towns, and they sound like they’re barely suppressing their accents. Bummer Year is grounded in the indie rock from up in Denton, the outlaw country over at Armadillo World Headquarters, and the dramatically chiming guitars of Austin’s post-rock scene. With a subtle twang in his voice, Jordan has obviously listened to a lot of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He’s got a long way to go before he joins their ranks (who’s even close?), but he already has a knack for making the poetic sound plainspoken and the plainspoken poetic. He evokes the flat Texas desert as well as its hidden oases on “Balmorhea” and “First Crossing”: “I know a secret spot, clear water that can be got/Trespass half a mile, cross the road and go on awhile.” He sometimes lapses into sentimentality, but there’s usually a good riff or an unexpected hook to offset lines like “It’s hard to tell where your heart stops and my heart begins.”
In other words, he found just the right people to back him in a bar fight. The guitars, courtesy of Jordan and Jake Ames, chime and console on opener “Almost Automatic,” churning up some drama for a tale of unrequited love, but they do poignant just as well as they do punchy, which adds a bit of humanity to the title track. While never showy, the rhythm section of bassist Anastasia Wright and drummer Phillip Dunne allows them to extend several songs into high-strung jams that probably sound even testier and more reckless in a cramped club. They lend “Vision Boards” a prickliness that suits Jordan’s worries about his future and the path they’ve all chosen as musicians. Songs about creative and commercial woes can feel self-indulgent, especially on a debut, but the chugging pace of the song makes his concerns sound relatable, even urgent: “I get ten percent of sales, but it’s just not working out/Making money from my art, man, just not working out.” It’s the gig economy in a nutshell.
Is it worth all the trouble? Is a life devoted to making music sustainable? That’s the question on most of these songs, and it’s one that becomes more pressing in light of recent tragedy. On the day after the album’s release, following a hometown show, Ames was struck by a car, which left him hospitalized with severe injuries. American health care being what it is, the band started a GoFundMe page to cover his medical expenses. In their music, Good Looks don’t settle on a decisive answer; as with the title track, they leave their questions purposefully open-ended. Bummer Year becomes an album about trying to quell your doubts, push aside your worries, and get by in a world that breeds doubts and worries. “To the voices in my head,” Jordan yells on “Vision Boards,” “fuck off!” The fight is worthwhile. | 2022-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Keeled Scales | April 19, 2022 | 7.3 | 5a5cd94b-4fd1-497a-8a75-b184fabbb908 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
As a member of other people's bands, Robert Beatty specializes in aggressive, speaker-splitting noise-- which also stretched to his work as an artist of album sleeves. But his debut release as Three Legged Race, a chilly electronic project, is all about restraint, echo, distance, and nuance. | As a member of other people's bands, Robert Beatty specializes in aggressive, speaker-splitting noise-- which also stretched to his work as an artist of album sleeves. But his debut release as Three Legged Race, a chilly electronic project, is all about restraint, echo, distance, and nuance. | Three Legged Race: Persuasive Barrier | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17485-persuasive-barrier/ | Persuasive Barrier | As the founding member of Kentucky noise psych freaks Hair Police and frequent participant in C. Spencer Yeh's Burning Star Core, Robert Beatty is partial to aggressive, speaker-splitting noise. His work as in-demand album-cover artist can be loud too-- it usually features big, bold images with every element clearly in view. There's subtlety in all of his art, for sure, but his starting point tends to be maximum volume.
That tendency is what makes Beatty's solo project, Three Legged Race, so fascinating. The electronic-based music on his debut full-length, Persuasive Barrier, is all about restraint. There's little that could be called noisy or confrontational in its 37 minutes. Instead, Beatty uses echo, distance, and nuance to create a chilly, desolate aura. After years of skilled noise-wrangling, he turns out to also be a master of deep-space vibe. His small blips, short squiggles, and muted beats play like transmissions from a far-off planet.
Exactly what those transmissions mean is unclear, because Three Legged Race is less about concrete ideas than atmospheres. And those atmospheres are wide and evocative enough to sound different to each listener. For me, Persuasive Barrier instills the same eerie feeling I get from the scene in 2001 in which astronauts first encounter the monolith. But for Beatty there's no need for ear-shattering dissonance at the end, just more thick, magnetic sound.
The trippy futurism of 60s-era artifacts like 2001 courses through much of Persuasive Barrier. A few moments-- such as the whirring pulse of the title track, or the rippling lines of "Locked Eyes"-- recall space age bachelor pad music, and others could soundtrack The Andromeda Strain. In weaker hands, these leanings might feel generic. It's a risk shared by many noise types who moved toward electronics in the past few years, approaching new age, industrial, and EDM. And some have in fact been too beholden to the past. But Beatty subverts stylistic constraints, making music that feels less like an exercise than something lived-in and thought-through. As a result, you don't have to be interested in his influences or his past to find something to hook onto.
At his best, Beatty mixes synth-music tropes with less predictable moves, in the process marrying structure to abstraction. In "Magnetic Bride", he combines spacey pulses with what sounds like a robot humming through a vocoder. During "Budgeting Air", Fennesz-like waves of glitch generate trails of phasey tone. Although these and other tracks are wordless, narrative shapes do emerge, with sonic signposts that feel like beginnings, middles, and ends. The shapeliest is closer "Permethrin II". It plays like the entire album in miniature, as Beatty weaves a synth tale not unlike those on Ricardo Donoso's similarly-stellar Assimilating the Shadow. This time, he does end with a 2001 monolith-style din. But it won't make you hold your ears-- more likely, Persuasive Barrier will leave them a little more open than before*.* | 2013-01-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-01-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Spectrum Spools | January 7, 2013 | 7.6 | 5a7371ba-f3d7-44ea-a582-bb0a5569a280 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Toronto's Fake Palms are, fundamentally, a dream-pop band that plays with garage-punk aggression. Here, Fake Palms has evolved from Michael le Riche’s bedroom recording project to a veritable Toronto underground supergroup, with contributions from members of Hooded Fang, Burning Love, and Slim Twig. | Toronto's Fake Palms are, fundamentally, a dream-pop band that plays with garage-punk aggression. Here, Fake Palms has evolved from Michael le Riche’s bedroom recording project to a veritable Toronto underground supergroup, with contributions from members of Hooded Fang, Burning Love, and Slim Twig. | Fake Palms: Fake Palms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20972-fake-palms/ | Fake Palms | There are no real palm trees in Toronto, but the city is seeing an uptick in tiki bars—the sort of bamboo-lined spaces with enough beach-scene murals and evergreen faux-fronds to make you think you’ve stepped into a Tahitian resort (at least after you’ve downed four flaming mai tais). But while scuzz-covered Toronto rockers Fake Palms hardly seem like the types to be strategically capitalizing on boutique cocktail trends, band founder Michael le Riche seems well familiar with the sensation of being caught between the world in which he exists and the one he wishes to inhabit.
Le Riche represents a bridge between divergent Toronto indie rock narratives. His former band, the Darcys, were signed to Broken Social Scene’s Arts & Crafts imprint, and, prior to a lineup shake-up last year that’s cast the group’s future in doubt, were being groomed as the label’s next-gen art-rock lynchpins. But with his new full-time concern, le Riche takes a detour down the burning-embered trail blazed by local art-punk heroes Metz to join the freak scene at Buzz Records, whose name is as reflective of the label’s rising profile as its raucous roster’s overheated amplifiers. And yet, even as Fake Palms has evolved from le Riche’s bedroom recording project to a veritable Toronto underground supergroup (with Lane Halley of Hooded Fang on second guitar, Burning Love’s Patrick Marshall on bass, and long-time Slim Twig associate Simone TB on drums), the band’s self-titled debut still bears an intensely claustrophobic quality. Le Riche isn’t so much stepping out into the spotlight as fortifying the walls around him, finding sanctuary in noise.
Fake Palms are, fundamentally, a dream-pop band that plays with garage-punk aggression, subjecting pristine pop songs to bruising beatings. For them, distortion isn’t a weapon, but the inevitable consequence of a stringent, Dogme 95-worthy approach to recording that emphasizes live-off-the-floor authenticity and forbids overdubs. The in-the-red interaction of le Riche and Halley’s gleaming guitar lines, Marshall’s rhythmic rumble, and Simone’s thwack attack has produced a naturally corroding effect, as if all the sound bouncing off the studio walls formed a storm system that soaked the recordings in static.
That shrouding effect can make it hard to grasp exactly what le Riche is trying to express, though the underpinning ennui is easy enough to parse. On the hard-charging opener "Fever Dream", the only easily decipherable words are "my friends"—repeated at the top of each increasingly inscrutable verse line—but they’re delivered with enough audible distress to suggest le Riche is ready to ditch them. The few other soundbites on the album that emerge from le Riche’s foggy cloud of a voice—"I’m not here/ I never was," "Where did my life go/ It’s on the ground," "I need a change"—suggest the singer is trying to retreat from the world even as his band is trying to thrust him to the frontlines.
This tug-of-war tension permeates the songs’ very structural DNA, constantly yielding surprising shifts: the deceptively upbeat twinkle of "Sun Drips" dissolves into a stalking, slow-motion krautrock strut; the wistful, melancholic verses of "Melatonin" are upended by a stomping, storming midsection powered by a twinned guitar line that sounds like broken glass—sparkling yet dangerously jagged. But if Fake Palms’ obfuscating approach threatens to pummel more outwardly melodic, mid-tempo turns like "Estate" into sluggish sludge, the pin-pricked riffs of disco-not-disco thumper "Sparkles" and "YTMATLDPH" poke holes for their fetching "ooh wee ooh" falsetto hooks to waft through, like steam rising out of the punctured cellophane film on a microwave TV dinner.
Though these songs date back to 2011, Fake Palms has the slight misfortune of emerging mere months after Viet Cong showed us how you can translate similar inputs—goth-schooled brooding, shoegaze haze, needling post-hardcore guitars—into something more expansive and emotionally direct. The structural intricacies and melodic integrity of this otherwise raw recording suggest le Riche is capable of pulling off something similarly bold. But for now, Fake Palms’ ocean-sized ambitions are confined to a grimy fish tank. | 2015-09-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Buzz | September 1, 2015 | 6.9 | 5a73734e-a134-44f2-a225-1ea932aad7b6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Isoviha continues in the harsh, blistering vein of the Finnish producer’s 2020 album Rakka and its sequel. But while the sensory onslaught once felt purifying, the new LP is deliberately disruptive. | Isoviha continues in the harsh, blistering vein of the Finnish producer’s 2020 album Rakka and its sequel. But while the sensory onslaught once felt purifying, the new LP is deliberately disruptive. | Vladislav Delay: Isoviha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vladislav-delay-isoviha/ | Isoviha | Vladislav Delay’s 2020 album Rakka and its sequel from last year were inspired by his trips into the Arctic wilderness north of Hailuoto, the Finnish island where he lives. Isoviha is inspired by the anxiety he feels when he returns, and curiously, they sound like two sides of the same coin. Though Sasu Ripatti has usually reserved the Delay moniker for spacious ambient dub, the music on the Rakka albums was harsh and blistering, burying his characteristic deep pads beneath stinging bursts of noise and percussion. This more or less describes Isoviha, but while the sensory onslaught previously seemed like it was meant to be purifying, like a strenuous walk or a cold shower, Isoviha is deliberately disruptive.
“Isovitutus” opens with a gorgeous chord that’d be at home on one of Ripatti’s sumptuous house-music albums as Luomo, but it’s continually interrupted by rhythmically irregular, violently distorted loops that see-saw back and forth like a severely overloaded printer. The track peters out after two minutes, but just when you think it’s over, the printer from hell comes back for a few seconds to remind us not to get too comfortable. This happens all the time on Isoviha. These tracks never build. We hear a blast of noise; it disappears and exposes the music’s ambient guts; the noise comes back. The irregularity of the rhythmic grid contributes to the sense of disorientation, as does Ripatti’s choice to keep the tracks to two or three minutes each.
Isoviha is Ripatti’s most abrasive album, but it’s also one of his most playful. The artist claims he was inspired by the “dangerous overwhelming potential of ordinary objects and events,” and he has as much fun creating ridiculous exaggerations of our overreliance on machines as Terry Gilliam in Brazil or Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle. “Isotv” keeps being interrupted by car horns. The voice on “Isomulkku” sounds like it’s being pulled apart through the telephone. “Isoteko” is a small masterpiece of sonic comedy, with a video-game synth buzzing maniacally as it’s overwhelmed by wet squiggles, pitch-shifted harmonica squawks, and something that sounds like a cuckoo clock––perhaps the most reliable symbol of mechanized madness in pop culture.
Finns will recognize many of the track titles as colorful vulgarities. They’ll also recognize the title of the album as a reference to the “Great Wrath,” when Russia invaded Finland during the Great Northern War of the 18th century and massacred 800 people in Ripatti's home of Hailuoto. It’s easy enough to connect Isoviha to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine and its potentially nefarious plans for Finland, but those are big ideas for a small album—Delay’s shortest, in fact, shorter than some of his EPs. It feels personal rather than global, and as gnarly as it is, it’s not quite extreme enough to work as a visualization of the horrors of war. It works much better as a record of a man of the wild wandering through the modern world, anxious and a little amused. | 2022-07-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 19, 2022 | 6.6 | 5a7883ad-5e2e-4e6a-9af7-51b9a5bfb055 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop. | Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop. | Cults: To the Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cults-to-the-ghosts/ | To the Ghosts | Joe Meek had an ear for greatness and a brain hellbent on destroying it. Often considered the British counterpart to American pop production legend Phil Spector, he composed most of his biggest hits holed up in a three-floor Islington flat above a leather goods store. He was fascinated with early electronic music and esoteric necromancy in equal measure; he famously dismissed the talents of a young Rod Stewart and called the Beatles “rubbish.” When he had enough of his landlady’s pestering about the ruckus he was making upstairs, he turned a shotgun on her, then himself. After his death, archivists found thousands of recordings he deemed unsuitable for public release, including songs he created for David Bowie. In his quest to create a sound bigger than himself, Meek sabotaged his success in the name of his own exacting standards.
When Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin first formed Cults over a decade ago, the two bonded over a shared interest in Meek’s musicality and madness, the way the first begot the second. Since their 2011 debut, the New York City duo has channeled that influence into girl group gems with a sinister underbelly, writing songs about haunted houses that went down easy thanks to Oblivion’s twinkling piano and Follin’s helium-high vocal harmonies. On their latest album, To the Ghosts, Cults lean into the bleak beauty of Meek’s story, attempting to channel the darkness in his DayGlo melodies. Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop.
Lest we forget their influences, the album opens with an echoing bell reminiscent of Spector’s biggest hits with the Ronettes. That song, “Crybaby,” does little to advance the band’s sound: From rhymes about an immature lover so facile they approach parody to synth melodies that feel recycled from previous albums, it sets the predictable tone of the record. When their songwriting does venture to new territory, it usually runs into an awkward metaphor, as when Follin waxes poetic about apoptosis on “Cells” or contemplates why onions make her cry on “Onions” (it’s the sulfur).
The repetitive palette highlights why Spector’s groups transcended the march of time while Cults sound dated on arrival: Follin’s voice simply doesn’t carry the texture or technique of singers like the Shangri-Las’ Mary Weiss or the Crystals’ Dolores “Dee Dee” Kenniebrew. Across the album’s 13 songs, her voice strains against the band’s layered production (helmed by Follin and Oblivion, along with producer Shane Stoneback), fighting a losing battle against a particularly dense guitar riff on “Leave Home” and rushing to keep up with the propulsive electronics of “Behave.” Layered vocal harmonies prevent her voice from falling into the background completely, but her parts often feel like an afterthought.
To the Ghosts is most promising when Cults veer from their girl group inspirations and experiment with dissonance on songs like “Eat It Cold,” with its descending minor scales, fluttering synths, low kick drums, and twisting vocal inflections. Ironically, the band constructs the most engaging potential future on a song that speaks literally of retreading one’s past. As a guitar plucks out a winding melody in its final third, the band recalls the spellbinding sounds that made Joe Meek’s productions so instantly memorable. But with too few new ideas, Cults risk simply embellishing on the well-trodden melodies of their inspirations, too consumed by creating an immortal pop song to let it live in the moment. | 2024-08-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Imperial | August 1, 2024 | 6 | 5a7b8763-26f1-43ce-b082-9056bf8e94ab | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia pressed her music—faintly liturgical songs and sound poems about self and motherhood—onto dubplates for turntablist Philip Jeck to smear and distort, to uncanny effect. | Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia pressed her music—faintly liturgical songs and sound poems about self and motherhood—onto dubplates for turntablist Philip Jeck to smear and distort, to uncanny effect. | Faith Coloccia / Philip Jeck: Stardust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/faith-coloccia-philip-jeck-stardust/ | Stardust | As Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia was raising her first child with her husband, left-field metal lifer Aaron Turner, she recorded a set of haunting, faintly liturgical songs and sound poems in the windows of time when the baby was sleeping and she could focus her attention on her work. These recordings first found their way onto Here Behold Your Own, her 2019 release as Mára, which played like a real-time audio diary of her experience of new motherhood. “A lot of the material that I used to make this record felt like the last glimpses of ‘me’ before I became another me,” Coloccia said of the music at the time.
That material has surfaced once again in the form of Stardust, an unorthodox collaboration with English turntablist Philip Jeck. The two artists didn’t work together in the same room; instead, Coloccia pressed the raw material for the album, much of which can be heard unadulterated on Here Behold Your Own, onto dubplates. Jeck then used pedals and electronics to smear and distort Coloccia’s recordings, as he’s done throughout his career with the old vinyl records he deploys on his vintage turntables. It’s a leap of faith to give music so personal to a sound artist whose work makes no effort to keep its source material recognizable. But despite Stardust being essentially a remix album, it maintains an uncanny synthesis between the two artists’ styles. It somehow sounds entirely like a Faith Coloccia album and entirely like a Philip Jeck album at once. It helps that both artists are drawn to sounds associated with the church: organs, bells, choirs, pianos.
Coloccia grew up in a Lutheran household, and Stardust shows a hint of Sunday-school irreverence—the puckish desire of many artists who were raised Christian to simultaneously borrow and subvert the sounds and imagery they grew up with. On “Acquire the Air,” a vast, shimmering organ struggles to maintain its dignity as it finds its way through a daisy chain of pitch-shifted effects. The second half of “Creosote” finds Coloccia singing solemnly over a reversed piano loop as Jeck lets an ugly swell of low-end noise sneak up on her from underneath; it’s easy to imagine Coloccia in church singing a hymn, eyes raised to heaven, distracted from the demonic presence stalking her from below. “Speaking Stone,” the only song where Coloccia’s voice penetrates the soup and comes to the fore, sounds like a Gregorian chant until Jeck starts to layer her voice, allowing a little bit of harmony to desecrate this fiercely monophonic tradition.
Jeck’s work is usually shadowed by an alluring pall of static and vinyl crackles. Perhaps because Coloccia’s dubplates were pressed more recently than his customary source material, that static is absent, replaced by an omnipresent swath of reverb. Stardust conjures a tremendous sense of space, as if it were being performed in a cathedral, and all the echo means the tracks blur together a little more easily on Stardust than they did on Here Behold Your Own. Stardust takes the listener on a journey, while the predecessor felt like a record of someone else’s quest. But it lacks the sense of clarity on Jeck’s best albums, like Stoke or 7, which balanced obfuscation with the revelatory feel of clouds lifting. Here Behold Your Own put the listener right beside Coloccia as she went through her time of transformation. On Stardust, seen through the fogged glass of Jeck’s production, her old life seems further away than ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | June 23, 2021 | 7.2 | 5a908308-2b25-4aeb-b994-f6329dcb32b0 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
After two albums of insular restraint, the elegant R&B duo takes an expansive turn, embracing club sounds and multiple guest stars. | After two albums of insular restraint, the elegant R&B duo takes an expansive turn, embracing club sounds and multiple guest stars. | dvsn: A Muse in Her Feelings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dvsn-a-muse-in-her-feelings/ | A Muse in Her Feelings | Daniel Daley has a voice so striking that it’s almost an affront he began his career as a rapper and songwriter; imagine having that gift and not feeling called to flex it. Nineteen85, Daley’s partner in the R&B duo dvsn and an exceptional pop producer in his own right, also had a musical entry point far from where he would end up: in punk bands with names like Coffee Double the Cream. The two eventually linked up in a grittier, pre-Drake Toronto. And after some years of quiet trial and error, they landed on a signature sound, a kind of red-blooded R&B that gave Daley the space to glide between his tenor and falsetto, and gave 85 occasion to focus his chameleonic style. A Muse in Her Feelings, dvsn’s third album on OVO Sound, honors the core of that alliance, but gazes past its perimeter.
A Muse in Her Feelings opener “No Good” is vintage dvsn: assuredly spare, with sparkling, Yamaha-style ’80s electric keys, unfussy drums, and coiled vocal melodies that recall Jagged Edge at their heartthrob best. But its austerity is a foil for much of the hour that follows. After two albums of insular restraint, Daley and 85 have pivoted towards expansiveness, inviting contributions from a surprising number of collaborators. There’s production from Drake and Travis Scott collaborator Allen Ritter, writing assists from James Fauntleroy, and multiple high-profile guest appearances. Future is in peak toxic mode on 2019 single “No Cryin”; Popcaan shines with a labyrinthine verse on “So What.” Buju Banton and Ty Dolla $ign form an inspired pair on “Dangerous City.” For the most part, the guests are wisely directed, buttressing Daley’s tenderness rather than muddying it. One low moment is “Courtside,” which features grating vocals from Jessie Reyez and a paternalistic concept that shares some spiritual DNA with that one City High song.
2017’s Morning After subtly hinted at an interest in the club, and the pair explores that instinct more fully on A Muse in Her Feelings. The album’s most interesting stretch is a risky three-track run that begins with the playful outro of “Outlandish,” builds into the Baltimore club-referencing “Keep It Going” and crests with the lusty “‘Flawless’ Do It Well, Pt. 3,” featuring Summer Walker in the role of an unflappable stripper. 85 wields his skill at turning vocal samples into lush but unlikely springboards for R&B—he repurposes a snippet of Daley’s voice for “Keep It Going,” and 702’s “Get It Together” adds emotional depth to “Flawless.” (The beat change on the latter could inspire a viral TikTok challenge.)
Unfortunately, Daley’s voice is infinitely more evocative than most of his lyrics. He finds inspiration in the slipstream of love lost, but chooses cursory remorse over introspection or profound revelations, and his songwriting largely lacks the specificity that makes a great song a transcendent one. Shallow writing turns “For Us” into a parody of an aching slow jam: “I don’t wanna/Waste a minute of my life without you in it/I don’t wanna/Act like you ain’t been the one from the beginning.” “Dangerous City,” a moody epic about love in the face of violence, features some of the album’s least convincing lyrics: “Baby, it’s safer here with me because they know me/The only crime you'll ever face is feelin’ lonely.”
What’s more, dvsn’s aesthetic choices—a corny album title, cliché visuals—chip away at their mystique. On the cover, Daley and 85 are perched at a pair of wooden easels, while a woman, nude and partially obscured, sits atop a pedestal in the foreground. There are no identifiable art supplies, presumably implying, to great secondhand embarrassment, that they are painting her with their music. Rather than subvert the concept of the muse, one of the most overused sexist tropes in modern art history, they are literally embodying the patriarchal male gaze. The image tracks with much of the album, which feels thin even when it’s skillful. On Twitter, they explained the title a little further: “A MUSE IN HER FEELINGS AMUSING HER FEELINGS I’M USING HER FEELINGS.” The triple entendre doesn’t have the depth dvsn was hoping for and even though there are songs with infinite replay value, the album doesn’t quite have the depth, either. | 2020-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound | April 22, 2020 | 7 | 5a914606-4908-4807-ba4b-c8cbc210d635 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Recorded in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire and in a haze of psychedelics, these luminous pop songs articulate grief as a means of moving past it. | Recorded in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire and in a haze of psychedelics, these luminous pop songs articulate grief as a means of moving past it. | Stephen Steinbrink: Utopia Teased | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stephen-steinbrink-utopia-teased/ | Utopia Teased | Stephen Steinbrink wrote and recorded his fourth record, Utopia Teased, inside a shipping container. It wasn’t a stunt; the East Bay singer/songwriter was seeking emotional refuge in the months after the tragic 2016 Ghost Ship fire. Consumed by grief, Steinbrink created Utopia Teased in this makeshift studio while sleep-deprived but stimulated by a daily diet of LSD. Bereavement, tight spaces, and a steady stream of hallucinogens sound like a recipe for disaster or, at the very least, music that reflects disquieting circumstances. But these dozen songs distill Steinbrink’s anguish into a luminous pop tonic—bitter, bright, and above all, restorative.
For the past 10 years, Steinbrink has made refined bedroom pop that emits an inviting glow. But where Steinbrink’s 2016 LP, Anagrams, flickered with twinkling strings and weightless arrangements, Utopia Teased is a steady shaft of laser light, not a series of sparkles. It can sear the retina as easily as it can light up the dark. Opener “Bad Love” epitomizes the gulf between sonics and subject matter; its lambent beams of synthesizer and electric guitar are seductive and beguiling, contradicting Steinbrink’s frank declaration that life is a series of illusions, with no one here to help you decode them. “In Another Kind of Dream” is similarly deceptive, bouncing on piano chords that sound plucked from a Harry Nilsson tune before disintegrating into a field recording of a violent conflagration. Steinbrink reads an excerpt from visual artist Paul Thek’s diary here, offering an explicit, verbose depiction of banal despair.
Thek’s writing feels unnecessary on a record so rich with beautifully realized turns of phrase. Steinbrink is gifted at the art of concision. His lyrics puncture the beatific patina of his songs, little daggers that stud the album and stab when you least expect it. Clipped verses suggest fully-fleshed character studies with just a line or two. He renders quarter-century nihilism (“You’re 31/You don’t believe in anything”), a despondent relationship (“You’re my keys when they’re lost in the couch”), and the mundane disputes we try to avoid in public places (“I can’t talk about Christmas plans at Starbucks”) with brevity and ease.
As skillful as Steinbrink is at identifying pain and its many culprits, he is also keen to move past it. Utopia Teased was created as a vehicle for overcoming grief, and though that process is rarely tidy or comprehensible, there is a wash of catharsis by the album’s end. “I’m Never Changing Who You Are” offers imperfect but effectual methods for soothing agony, based mostly in acceptance and remaining in the moment. “I only got the time I got,” Steinbrink sings, his voice glassy and trembling, “and I’m not spending it in pain.” The words tumble out softly, like towels on their last whirl in the dryer. But even Steinbrink’s sweet falsetto can’t prevent sharp little truths from poking through this plume of guitar pop. It isn’t long before he reminds us that this “cure could also be your poison… anything can be, anyway.” That pain is the catalyst for so much great art is one of the cruel tropes of creativity. In Steinbrink’s case, on his most beautiful record yet, the bedrock of his pain paves the road away from it. | 2018-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | December 7, 2018 | 7.3 | 5a95472e-c821-41f2-81af-ab285a64ab58 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
DIIV's compelling debut album is a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream-pop record built around verses and choruses that are unusually fluid and intuitive. | DIIV's compelling debut album is a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream-pop record built around verses and choruses that are unusually fluid and intuitive. | DIIV: Oshin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16749-oshin/ | Oshin | I don't think DIIV intend to be subversive; they're a traditionally structured indie rock band with lyrics that are mostly unintelligible if they're not in the song title. But Oshin isn't just a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream-pop record; it's an interesting experiment in whether a band based on voice/guitar/bass/drums can rely on the guitar to carry the song's meaning. DIIV's songs are built around verses and choruses but these are unusually fluid and intuitive, almost post-rock in miniature. And this album is more of a sensory experience than an emotional one. The original name of "Dive" was, according to leader Zachary Cole Smith, touring guitarist for Beach Fossils, a tribute to the Nirvana song and/or an acknowledgment of how each member has a "water" astrological sign. The instrumental tracks that bisect the record are titled "(Druun)", perhaps a flubbed portmanteau of "drone" and "drown." But all three invented words convey the elemental*.* Whereas someone like Phil Elverum or Wolves in the Throne Room attempt to conjure nature's awesome unpredictability, DIIV capture the beauty and comfort of its foreseeable ebb and flow.
The pleasures of Oshin as a full-length are subtle. "Past Lives", "How Long Have You Known", and "Doused" aren't just the most striking individual tracks; their smart spacing at the beginning, middle and end of Oshin has a trickle-down effect. Were "Earthboy" and "Sometime" to pop up on shuffle, not much about their rhythms or melodies would stand out. But within the album's context, they become sensible interludes. On a smaller scale, Smith's vocals are positively tidal, rising in confident and comforting intervals and resolving every bit as smoothly. The guitars bring to mind things like coins in a fountain, pebbles skipping across a lake, and small fish evoking silvery ink. Even the slowly overwhelming distortion of "Wait" incrementally seeps through the mix like a wave of cold, muddy sand, the only interruption the paradoxically arid "Air Conditioning"-- the one track whose rigid, interlocking guitar patterns recall those of Beach Fossils.
The experience of Oshin is aqueous and amorphous in a way that makes using the term "rock" feel uncomfortable. The pliable yet sturdy intertwining of guitar and bass stretches across the songs like a hammock. And at its best, Oshin can feel like an ingenious distillation of the sonorous instrumental passages that took Disintegration's "Fascination Street" and "Pictures of You" toward arena-rock grandeur. The album is mostly parceled out in lines of three-to-five descending notes that become self-descriptive adjectives: "(Druun)" wordlessly projects resolution, confidence; "Past Lives", wistful acceptance; "Oshin (Subsume)", a kind of dead-eyed stoicism; "Doused", white-knuckle tension. Oshin gives you hints and direction, but never tells you exactly how to feel. It reminds me that one of Neil Young's most desolate and gripping records was called On the Beach.
Oshin is notable for what it leaves to the imagination; not just about its own communicative aims, but about DIIV as well. Barely year ago, it was Smith's solo project, a fairly standard dream-pop act. The impact of DIIV's vibrant and muscular rhythm section makes all the difference. They might not rock, but Oshin always offers tactile resistance. And after the second "(Druun)", Oshin starts to coil into a darker pose, emerging from the deep with the tension of early Interpol before turning post-Fugazi emo drunk on reverb.
"Doused" ends abruptly before the closing lullaby "Home", giving the impression that if DIIV recorded any further at this stage, they'd be too far off from where they started for Oshin to cohere as beautifully as it does. It's a snapshot and a potential pivot; DIIV appear to be at a place where bands like Real Estate and the War On Drugs were after their debut full-lengths; similarly good albums which blurred instrumentals and songcraft, evocation and statement. Of course, their next ones were great largely because they made you care about the people who created them. DIIV have made a compelling debut where what the band is actually about is fairly unimportant. But since Oshin deftly defines what they do, and what they do now, this mystery is likely a temporary state. | 2012-06-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 26, 2012 | 8.3 | 5aa2509d-d12a-4700-bcb3-1b14da290a13 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Sun Araw, M. Geddes, and the legendary roots reggae group the Congos follow the excellent Icon Give Thank with a recording of a live performance captured last June at the Village Underground in London. At times, it barely resembles their studio collaboration. | Sun Araw, M. Geddes, and the legendary roots reggae group the Congos follow the excellent Icon Give Thank with a recording of a live performance captured last June at the Village Underground in London. At times, it barely resembles their studio collaboration. | The Congos / Sun Araw / M. Geddes Gengras: Icon Give Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17526-icon-give-life/ | Icon Give Life | Back in 2011 Cameron Stallones, a Los Angeles native who records glitchy psychedelia under the name Sun Araw, and the similarly inclined L.A. electronic musician M. Geddes Gengras decamped to Jamaica to record with the legendary roots reggae group the Congos, whose Lee "Scratch" Perry-produced 1977 debut Heart of the Congos was one of the best albums to come out of Jamaica at a time when the island was producing an unprecedented amount of incredible music. It was an odd team-up, a bunch of older, very serious musicians collaborating across stylistic and cultural gaps with a couple of punkish young noise dudes, but the resulting record, Icon Give Thank, is a surprisingly organic synthesis of traditional reggae and envelope-pushing electronic experimentation. Now, what was originally presented as a one-off partnership, has spawned a live sequel.
Considering the depth of Stallones and Gengras' electronically manipulated production and the improvisatory feel to the recording, it's unlikely the coalition could have reproduced it accurately live, and this performance captured last June at the Village Underground in London at times only barely resembles their studio collaboration. Which is actually fine-- worrying about making an exact recreation of Icon Give Thank would be antithetical to its free-flowing energy, and would be kind of pointless to boot.
Placed side by side the two recordings make interesting companions. It seems fair to call Icon Give Thank the music of the Congos filtered through their new partners' forward-looking sensibilities. Icon Give Life, on the other hand, sounds more like the Congos hauling Gengras and Stallones back to the late 70s and throwing them and their gear into the anarchic electronics assemblage that comprised Perry's Black Ark Studios.
Backed by a group advertised as the Raw Power Band, the Congos, Stallones, and Gengras make a respectable reggae outfit. The grooves are thick and dense, and frequently display the assertive muscularity that characterized the "rockers" reggae that captivated Jamaican audiences around the time that the Congos first formed. The electronic flourishes that gave Icon Give Thank such a unique sound are placed further back in the live mix where they play the same role that Perry's delay-soaked embellishments did in the dubby Heart of the Congos.
Like Icon Give Thank, Icon Give Life wavers between its two musical poles before finding the proper balance. The songs where the spotlight is more directly on the Congos are perfectly enjoyable-- the fine, high voices of founders Roydel "Ashanti" Johnson and Cedric Myton haven't aged too noticeably, and the rest of the group and the Raw Power Band cohere nicely, with the proper amount of looseness to feel more like an actual working band than a nostalgic reproduction of one. The parts that are heavier on the noise dudes are less successful. On the record-closing rendition of "Fisherman", one of the Congos' signature cuts, Stallones and Gengras' attempts to add dubby texture overwhelms the song itself, and for a minute the project does exactly the worst thing an unlikely collaboration like this can do, which is make the listener question what these musicians are doing together in the first place.
But the two sides meld most seamlessly on "Thanks and Praise", one of the songs that the Congos, Stallones, and Gengras composed together. The instrumentation is sparse, with synthesized beeps and whirs bouncing off of hand drums and psychedelically modulated guitar arpeggios. Above this nearly abstract instrumental bed the Congos layer droning vocal parts that are closer to incantation than singing. The song doesn't build any sort of dynamic, it just sort of drifts along, but after two or three of its seven minutes the disparate elements cohere into a vaguely mystical whole, the group onstage transformed suddenly into an unlikely band of shamanic spirit guides. It's a gorgeous moment that you might wish would never end. | 2013-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Global / Experimental | Rvng Intl. | January 11, 2013 | 5.8 | 5aaa2540-1f3c-470e-9f11-b8b55483767d | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Combining the sweetness of adult contemporary pop with a college rock sensibility, the Arizona songwriter presents the raw emotions of a breakup in a familiar, comforting package. | Combining the sweetness of adult contemporary pop with a college rock sensibility, the Arizona songwriter presents the raw emotions of a breakup in a familiar, comforting package. | Danielle Durack: No Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danielle-durack-no-place/ | No Place | Phoenix, Arizona songwriter Danielle Durack had written breakup songs before, but when she played “Eggshells” for her boyfriend of several years, “it started a conversation about everything.” They ended up splitting, and Durack’s third record, No Place, sorts through the decision to part. “Eggshells” is the culmination of a years-long shift in Durack’s music to something rawer and less polished: 2017’s Bonnie Rose was straightforward, cutesy piano pop, while 2019’s Bashful landed closer to slick adult contemporary. Expanding her band to include fellow Phoenix vocalist Sydney Sprague and Pedro the Lion drummer Sean Lane, Durack’s latest is a slow-burning breakup album that draws on myriad influences to eke out something fresh.
Durack thrives in the middle ground between lite FM and modern college rock, the space where Phoebe Bridgers makes a pop song or Sara Bareilles experiments with trip-hop. What her influences share is an emphasis on craft, clever wordplay, and storytelling. The chorus of “Billy” is worthy of one of Bareilles’ ballads, but the ambience and subject matter—watching a friend self-sabotage and end up behind bars—feels equally Bridgers-ian: “You say you can’t avoid it/Your pride is too important... I can’t afford to lose you over something stupid.” Durack’s sincerity makes these songs her own, with a sense of humor that feels friendly instead of ironic. “Broken Wings” is sneakily, genuinely funny: Durack’s intonations of “you’re a charming kind of manic/God, I find it so romantic” and the groaner line “I Cold Stone Gotta Have It” land because there’s real emotion behind the half-rhymes and ice cream puns.
That balance between adult contemporary pop sweetness and self-conscious indie rock whimsy makes the record especially endearing. Producer Sam Rosson, a longtime friend of Durack’s, mostly keeps things from going too far in one direction, adding folklore-esque electronics to ballads like “Now That I’m Alone” or roomy live drums on “Don’t Know If I’ll Stick Around.” The approach isn’t perfect: Leaving “There Goes My Heart” so bare makes the similarity to that one Twilight song a little too obvious. But Christina Perri would not be as precise as Durack is in her writing: “You’re calling me crying to tell me you’re sorry/To tug on my heart strings and call me your darling/And that’s what I wanted, but not what I asked for.” The emotions are raw, but the packaging feels familiar; ideal comfort after a breakup.
No Place doesn’t try to transcend its influences, but modesty can be a strength. It feels like a real person writing about a real breakup, and though the album is not as eccentric or theatrical as it could be, the restraint works. If there’s one song that does reach transcendence, it’s the one that kicked off the heartache to begin. “Eggshells” doesn’t sound like a breakup song at first: The oohs are lifted from early-2000s adult contemporary radio, and the arrangement wouldn’t sound out of place in a Jack Johnson song. Like most of the album, it’s warm, humble, and unsurprising. When Durack sings, “I can’t fight the feeling that we are slowly dying/Like those flowers you always bought me,” the feedback roars in, communicating her anger. It’s thrilling to hear a record so unassuming suddenly cut loose in its last moments, a sign that someone indebted to her influences is coming into her own.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | self-released | January 20, 2021 | 6.7 | 5aaa41a4-3d73-4cb1-b90c-025137c646b8 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Over some dusty boom-bap, the undoubtedly talented Logic spends just way too much time trying to forcibly cement his place in hip-hop history. | Over some dusty boom-bap, the undoubtedly talented Logic spends just way too much time trying to forcibly cement his place in hip-hop history. | Logic: Young Sinatra IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic-young-sinatra-iv/ | Young Sinatra IV | In recent years, Logic has catapulted from an inspirational figure for misfits, into one of hip-hop’s most visible stars. He spends the final four minutes of “Thank You,” the long intro to his fourth studio album Young Sinatra IV, running through phone calls of young fans from damn near every continent thanking him for changing their lives. Logic reciprocates that same energy, showing his gratitude for all the fans who helped carry him to the finale of the Young Sinatra series—which he speaks about with the unearned reverence of Lil Wayne’s Carter series. He then brands Young Sinatra IV his serious album, determined to give the anthology the conclusion he seems to think it deserves: returning to the boom bap beats of his longtime in-house producer 6ix, getting back on his real rap shit, and forcibly trying to cement his place in hip-hop history. Welcome to the cult of Logic.
Here’s the thing about Logic: He can rap. He really can. He can flow over anything. But his obsession with his legacy causes him to violate a 2018 rap truism: no rap song should go beyond two verses. If it does, you better be spitting some mind-rattling shit, and he assuredly isn’t. Logic can start off fine but will often delve into tiresome three-, four-, and even five-verse tracks going off on incomplete, uplifting rambles.
The most memorable Young Sinatra IV moments come when Logic forgets the whole magnum opus thing and stops trying to be the rap Tony Robbins. The title track—Logic’s tribute to the late Mac Miller—samples Nas and AZ’s “Life’s A Bitch” and Logic just spits. It’s six minutes long but it feels weightless as a piano-laden beat change-up keeps it fresh while Logic is at home making his bold proclamations (“Respected by my peers from Drizzy to Cole to Kenny”). “Wu-Tang Forever” should’ve been the worst eight minutes of 2018. Logic dragging his fans into sitting through a bottom-rung flex like getting every living Wu-Tang member on a track isn’t how anyone, even the most diehard Logicians, should want to spend their time. Yet Logic is all in, dedicating himself to fitting in as the latest Wu-affiliate, which rubs off on the Wu who, for once, don’t take that cushiony Def Jam direct deposit for granted.
But most of the time, Logic is chasing his legacy-defining dreams. On the subtly titled “Legacy,” he uses a light five verses to clash with himself about whether becoming a rap legend is worth spending less time with his family. He later tries to convince everyone that something momentous is happening, holding up his 2018 Eminem co-sign as proof: “Shout out to that boy Slim Shady for all the love, yeah!” Then, he uses one of the few hard-hitting productions on the album on “Everybody Dies”—courtesy of Cubeatz and 6ix—to pack in insane hypotheticals: “Man I wish that I could be a dog in a rich family/Oh wow how nice that would be/My life a catastrophe;” all while hoping nobody realizes that behind his smooth flow is a rapper who is completely making it up as he goes.
Logic’s lyrical prowess continues to get in his way on songs like “The Return,” which sounds like a motivational song made for a late night Nike ad: “When shit get rough I get tough and when I’m beaten to the ground/I get up, I get up.” He then continues to appeal to his legion of loyal outsiders by proving he’s one of them in the most over-the-top way possible: “Called a faggot, a ni--er, a cracker who wish he was blacker.” And after it all, Logic still wants to make crystal clear that he just dropped his classic, remaking the finale of Kanye West’s College Dropout, “Last Call.” He takes more than 10 minutes to regurgitate some after-school-special bars (“This for anyone with ambition, calling anybody that’ll listen/I’m wishing all your dreams come true cause mine did”). He seems to see this as the final chapter of a coming-of-age saga that has earned a spot alongside the Kanye college trilogy, but that’s a tragic misreading of reality.
Logic’s music has had depth before, as with his suicide hotline awareness hit “1-800-273-8255,” though it’s arguable if it was any more salient than your average PSA. It wasn’t much catchier. But it touched his loyal fans and created millions more, and that song was likely the engine that caused them to phone in en masse for the album’s intro. He hasn’t come close to the power and pathos of that song since, but lucky for Logic, that emotional connection he made is so strong, people won’t care if he really doesn’t have shit to say this time around. | 2018-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | October 4, 2018 | 5.5 | 5ab17d8c-abf0-429d-9242-b0a4e915c27d | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ |
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