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Rapper/singer Tory Lanez’s primary skill is mimicking others, and on a new pair of mixtapes, the rule seems to be: If it ain't broke, add new drums and put it out again. | Rapper/singer Tory Lanez’s primary skill is mimicking others, and on a new pair of mixtapes, the rule seems to be: If it ain't broke, add new drums and put it out again. | Tory Lanez: Chixtape 4 / The New Toronto 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22789-tory-lanez-chixtape-4-the-new-toronto-2/ | Chixtape 4 / The New Toronto 2 | The rapper/singer Tory Lanez’s primary skill is mimicking others. He greeted 2017 with two new mixtapes, and while some people use the New Year as an inflection point—time to slough off the old and commit to change—Chixtape 4 and The New Toronto 2 show an artist toasting to inertia.
Lanez is known for two singles, both of which rehash previous hits — “Say It” borrows from Brownstone’s “If You Love Me,” while “Luv” swipes Tanto Metro and Devonte’s “Everyone Falls in Love.” In pop, familiarity often breeds success, so it’s not surprising that this pair waltzed to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart. Lanez’s major label debut album arrived last August—a month before “Luv” peaked—bearing a triumphant title: I Told You.
Exulting after those hits is like soaking up sartorial compliments while dressed in someone else’s suit. But Lanez is well-equipped for this sort of work: his filmy voice, blissfully unburdened by texture, allows him to live lightly in past smashes without dulling the pleasant narcotic effects of nostalgia. Lanez also has plenty of practice—songs on the previous volumes of Chixtape mostly pull from a jumbled collage of the last two decades of R&B and rap. This music exists in the same space as Natalie La Rose and Jeremih’s “Somebody,” Diplo and Sleepy Tom’s “Be Right There,” and Cheat Codes and Kriss Kross Amsterdam’s “Sex.” The aesthetic impulse, not far from Hollywood’s vogue for making sequels to movies twenty years old, seems to be: if it ain’t broke, add new drums and put it out again.
This is especially true for the music on Chixtape 4, where the references to golden oldies are as loud and pervasive as ever. The wall-to-wall blanket of homage extends even to a pair of skits, where venerable crowd-pleasers (Cam’ron’s “Hey Ma,” Usher’s “U Don’t Have To Call”) can be heard in the background. Elsewhere, Lanez drizzles come-ons willy-nilly atop of melodies recycled from P. Diddy, Chingy, Fat Joe, R. Kelly, and Aaliyah.
Of course, referentiality is part of pop: to underline this point, Lanez builds a track around the singer Mario’s “Just a Friend” from 2002, which in turn borrowed and revamped the famous melody from Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” (1989), which is based on Freddie Scott’s “You Got What I Need” (1968). Lanez is part of a long and vital tradition, and he knows it. But he has little to add, and after you identify the radio-staple-core of his songs, listening to them has all the drama of watching a friend complete a paint-by-numbers kit. Confusingly, Lanez also tends to muddy and bury the superlative melodies from his source material, undercutting any help they might give him and leaving his beanpole voice to do the heavy lifting.
Lanez’s other new tape, The New Toronto 2, makes it clear why he likes to stay in the vicinity of a sure thing. Populated with battering hip-hop instead of songs cherrypicked from other artists, it’s more energetic than Chixtape 4, but hardly more distinct. Lanez fires off dismissive, unimaginative fusillades like, “I be up way in the clouds/A fuck nigga weighing me down.” The tracks creep and bulge, matching the temperament of your boilerplate radio beat but doing nothing more.
The exception is “Wraith Talk,” a flashy, horn-laden number produced by AraabMuzik; it’s a throwback to the early ’00s, but has more zing than anything else here. Perhaps worried that this song would interrupt the humdrum flow of the rest of the material, Lanez tucks it away at the very the end of New Toronto 2. New year be damned: Lanez’s latest tapes are the work of an artist in a holding pattern. And why would he shift course? With the right coaxing, one of these old hits might be his new No. 1. | 2017-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | null | January 13, 2017 | 4.5 | 5ab6c362-96a0-4c02-a6bc-635945fa32ee | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
The latest batch of Mute's deluxe reissues shows that the 1990s were very good to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. | The latest batch of Mute's deluxe reissues shows that the 1990s were very good to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Let Love In / Murder Ballads / The Boatman's Call / No More Shall We Part | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15476-let-love-in-murder-ballads-the-boatmans-call-no-more-shall-we-part/ | Let Love In / Murder Ballads / The Boatman's Call / No More Shall We Part | The 1990s were very good to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Where the previous decade saw Cave successfully transition out of the Birthday Party's combustible punk toward a more urbane, theatrical brand of rock, the 90s elevated him to the realm of archetype and institution. He successfully party-crashed Hollywood and "Top of the Pops", all while the college-radio charts filled up with emergent artists-- PJ Harvey, Tindersticks, Afghan Whigs-- cut from the Bad Seeds' black-velvet cloth.
The Bad Seeds' mid-90s pinnacle forms the basis of the latest round of Mute's excellent reissue series, which include vividly remastered versions of the original albums, along with a 5.1 surround sound mix, B-sides, official videos, and the latest installments of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's illuminating fan-testimonial documentaries, Do You Love Me Like I Love You? The title of the film series is taken from the two-part song that opens and closes Let Love In, an authoritative show of force that was perfectly timed for the Bad Seeds' insurrectionary appearance on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. The Bad Seeds had always traded in high drama and dissonance, but never before had they sounded this imposingly heavy-- the lecherous intimations of "Do You Love Me?" explode into a torrent of chain-gang vocals and drummer Thomas Wydler's machine-gunned snare rolls, while "Loverman" triggers its quiet-to-loud eruptions so masterfully, Metallica would later cover the song to the surprise of no one.
But amid Let Love In's ballast, you can hear Cave's increased adeptness at exploring his fascinations using sly, pitch-black humor instead of transgressive shock tactics. "Red Right Hand"-- the future theme song of the Scream film franchise-- sets its serial-killer narrative to a seductive swampy groove, and the beautiful piano ballad "Nobody's Baby Now" is a work of such wry, understated elegance, Cave originally thought of giving it to Johnny Cash.
As Let Love In's signature tracks proved, Cave's love songs could easily turn into death songs, so it was inevitable that he'd devote an entire album to exploring that symbiotic relationship. Murder Ballads has a title so obvious and self-defining, it's amazing that it took the Bad Seeds nine albums to use it. And the last thing you could accuse Cave of is false advertising: Dozens of characters lose their lives over the course of the album, which updates infamous folk tales like "Stagger Lee" with enough profanity and gratuitous violence to satisfy the bloodlusty standards of the post-gangsta rap/Quentin Tarantino era.
But the Bad Seeds' most lyrically depraved record is also their most musically ornate and accessible, with the band expanding to accommodate Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis and former Cramps/Sonic Youth stickman Jim Sclavunos (as second percussionist), plus a pair of smoldering duets with PJ Harvey ("Henry Lee") and Kylie Minogue (the unlikely MTV hit "Where the Wild Roses Grow"). In fact, with its densely detailed storylines, heart-racing epics ("Song of Joy", "The Curse of Millhaven") and cheeky curtain-closing cover of Bob Dylan's born-again anthem "Death Is Not the End", it's hard not to imagine Murder Ballads as some perverse, alternate-universe West End musical production. But look past its comically over-the-top presentation and you realize Cave isn't simply indulging in some subversive genre exercise. He was examining the very idea of poetic license, pushing the limits of what an artist can get away with in a song when writing in character.
The Boatman's Call is Cave's plea for redemption, an album every bit as dignified as its predecessor is deranged. After spending much of his career spinning yarns out of other people's misery, Cave-- emerging from a divorce and a highly publicized but short-lived affair with PJ Harvey-- comes clean about his own. On the stirring piano-based hymns "Into My Arms" and "There Is a Kingdom", he looks to religion less as a convenient dramatic device and more as the genuine refuge for the lonely soul. Cave had flirted with tender balladry many times before, but whereas previous turns like "Straight to You" and "The Ship Song" were shot through the Bad Seeds' widescreen lens, here, the atmosphere is so spare and intimate, you feel like you're curled up inside Cave's piano. More than any other album in this batch of reissues, The Boatman's Call is greatly enriched by a remaster that amplifies the magnitude of Cave's loneliness, from the burning-ember ambience of "Lime Tree Arbour" to Ellis' trembling violin lines on the absolutely devastating "Far From Me". But even though The Boatman's Call is Cave's most confessional, open-hearted album, its sense of sorrow and catharsis transcends a strictly personal interpretation. It speak volumes about the album's universality that its songs have soundtracked everything from Michael Hutchence's funeral to Shrek 2.
Following that triumphant triptych, it would be another four years before Cave reemerged with a new album, during which he finally kicked his recurring, 15-year heroin addiction once and for all. Not surprisingly, No More Shall We Part carries the tentative air of an artist and band trying to reconnect with their muse, and with one another. No More feels more like a transitory album than a definitive statement, one that showcases the increasingly crucial role of Ellis' mournful violin-playing to the band's sound, but perhaps at the expense of founding members Blixa Bargeld (who would leave the band in 2003), and Mick Harvey (who would follow suit in 2009). Tellingly, Bargeld and Harvey are nowhere to be seen in the No More set's accompanying installment of Do You Love Me, after making prominent appearances in each of the series' previous episodes.
But amid its stately sprawl and gorgeous guest vocals from folk legends Kate and Anna McGarrigle, No More Shall We Part effectively points the way from the desolate, piano-bar introspection of The Boatman's Call toward the swagger, bombast, and cutting humor that would define the Bad Seeds' output throughout the rest of the coming decade. Following No More's release, Cave would switch labels to Anti- and, with 2003's Nocturama, ignite a more raucous, raw-powered phase of his career that's currently manifested itself in the Bad Seeds' hellacious alter-ego act, Grinderman. But if No More Shall We Part seems less distinguished next to Cave's mid-90s streak and his reinvigorated Anti- output, it represents an important turning point in the Bad Seeds discography. At the onset of the 2000s, Cave had essentially completed the transformation from being an artist who would soundtrack your funeral into one who could provide the first-dance song at your wedding; No More Shall We Part marks that pivotal moment where Cave regains the sensation in his red right hand. | 2011-05-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 25, 2011 | 8.5 | 5aba13a7-dc0b-40bf-8a25-5acac491561f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner make electronic music that feels both organic and alienatingly futuristic. Even at its most mordant, AS somehow remains accessible and exciting, uncomfortable music you can dance to. | The Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner make electronic music that feels both organic and alienatingly futuristic. Even at its most mordant, AS somehow remains accessible and exciting, uncomfortable music you can dance to. | Amnesia Scanner: AS EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21737-as-ep/ | AS EP | The "mysterious European producer" gambit is a standard and well-rehearsed gimmick by now, with varying degrees of success: For every Burial you have 100 snide SOPHIEs. Berlin twosome Amnesia Scanner arrive in front of us with a terse press release, full of mystery. They are self-described "Xperienz Designers," but they refuse to give any "xplanations" for what that means. Instead, they provide the curious schmuck who’s opened their PR email with six unnamed hyperlinks. As you click along, a pitch of absurdity slowly builds, moving from reviews of their work in multiple languages (English, Japanese, German), to a suspicious zip file hosted on Mediafire, and finally the homepage for the Protein Data Bank, an archive for three-dimensional models of biological molecules (proteins, nucleic acids, and the like).
Amnesia Scanner's website, too, is a cacophonous visual medley. Their Twitter and Facebook pages don’t offer much. We know they are affiliated with Berlin’s Janus collective (Lotic, M.E.S.H., Kablam). They contributed to "An Exit" from Holly Herndon’s Platform, and they produced a very interesting Mykki Blanco track two years ago. So there it is, a skeleton of biography. Was the journey worth it? The music would have to be surpassingly vivid to stand out from its surrounding rhetoric. Luckly, the gumshoe Google chase matches the music, which feels like a puzzle that might kill you once you’ve solved it.
By the numbers, AS is misleadingly brief. The six tracks total to a slim 21 minutes, but as a whole the album feels much longer that that. Each of the songs is prefaced by "AS" ("AS Wood Gas," for example), which either signifies a contraction of the band’s name or one half of an unfinished metaphor. Titles like "AS Atlas" or "AS Chingy" just add another level of interpretative chaos. They beg the question of whether or not the song is supposed to embody the object it references. More likely than not, it’s another trap door. Is it possible that they sample late '90s pop-rap superstar Chingy in "AS Chingy"? That might have to be a mystery for another day.
Describing the music of AS is similarly difficult. "Electronic" only suffices if you paint with the widest brush. Sure, the music here was most likely made on a computer, but at its core it is deeply organic. You may never hear a pre-made synth on AS. You are more likely to hear your gurgling stomach or something tumbling down a flight of stairs. These tracks are overflowing, sloshing full of content, and impossibly dense. They can suddenly and brutally evaporate the comforts of time’s steady flow by queering what you think three or four minutes is supposed to feel like.
If there is a steady descriptor for AS, it's "unmooring." There's no way to know where they sourced a particular beat, chord, or vocal. This leaves a lot to imagination. The sounds of AS are primordial and alienatingly futuristic, recalling all the worst parts of the uncanny valley. If we can begin to imagine what a cyborg’s chaotic inner id might be like, you have to to listen to AS.
Intense as AS may be, it never becomes a slog or overly complex. The EP has an acute grasp on the rhythms and mood that make people dance. Even at its most mordant, AS somehow remains accessible and exciting, and prompts discovery by tricking you into dancing along to the strangest sonic triggers. It is a testament to the skill and inventiveness of these producers that they can make tracks like "AS Chingy" and "AS Crust" into implausible bangers. Both are nauseating, vertigo-inducing tracks, stitched together from pleading processed vocals, defiantly herky-jerky percussions, and cold greasy synths. It makes Amnesia Scanner utterly confounding. Even with biographical information in hand, several music videos, and art projects, you can't put your finger on Amnesia Scanner for one second. Music this uncomfortable is rarely so euphoric. | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Young Turks | March 24, 2016 | 8.2 | 5abda460-55e3-4cc6-88dc-f794fe737d25 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Mac DeMarco’s second full-length isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. At its best, it’s an outstanding crystallization of his gifts, the real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess. | Mac DeMarco’s second full-length isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. At its best, it’s an outstanding crystallization of his gifts, the real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess. | Mac DeMarco: Salad Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19170-mac-demarco-salad-days/ | Salad Days | “Ode to Viceroy,” Mac DeMarco’s sun-dappled tribute to cheap cigs from his 2012 album 2, hasn’t lost its smolder. It’s probably the Brooklyn-via-Montreal singer and songwriter’s best-known tune—a laidback guitar-pop daydream, as wobbly and welcoming as a backyard hammock—and it captures a lot of his music’s appeal. “Viceroy” is about taking pleasure in something that could kill you, and the lethal paradox is part of the draw. Somewhere in retirement, Joe Camel must be kicking himself.
This alluring ambivalence is one of DeMarco’s defining traits. He’s the gap-toothed prankster who sings the sighing love ballad. He’s the guy everybody assumes is a stoner, though he claims he never, as they say, touches the stuff. You can’t read about him without seeing the word “slacker,” but in two short years, he’s gone from opening at New York’s 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom to headlining at the 1,500-capacity Webster Hall (could he have done better if he’d tried?). The fact DeMarco isn’t even his real name—he was born Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV—captures the duality almost too perfectly.
Whichever Mac is the better-behaved one has been taking over more and more, as the creepy detours of 2012’s Rock and Roll Night Club EP gave way to the more direct 2. His second full-length, Salad Days, isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.
There’s little here to justify DeMarco’s reputation for divisiveness (“Detractors,” as Steven Hyden put it for Wondering Sound, “tend to regard him as some kind of bullshit artist, a quintessential hipster doofus slumming it under the ironic guise of a hippie dirtbag who gleefully covers Limp Bizkit in concert”). The loping “Blue Boy,” which shares its title with an indie-pop classic by Orange Juice, amiably advises against acting so tough and worrying so much about your haircut. The warm, watery groove of “Brother” recalls the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down”, though its moony lyrical sentiment (“You’re no better off living your life than dreaming at night”) might be more “I’m Only Sleeping.” You’re unlikely to hear a supposedly hip album this year with so many mentions of people’s mothers.
As with Real Estate’s Atlas, DeMarco’s new album is also ostensibly one where the chill bro gets all mature and stuff, and here his inner conflicts return with a suitably nonchalant vengeance. The title track undercuts its narrator’s worries about aging by alluding to the inconvenient truth that the worrier is only 23—not exactly ready for that condo in Florida. Relatedly, anyone hoping for a pot anthem in organ-thick “Passing Out Pieces” will instead find a koan-like complaint about the artist life’s crummy trade-offs. Penultimate “Go Easy” suggests concern for the girlfriend left behind while on tour, but its lyrical non sequitur—“You built it up, just to knock it down”—is a common criticism of the music press that has received DeMarco so favorably and could speak to his uneasy relationship with success. Et tu, Vernor?
It’s telling that Salad Days’ most immediate song, the one with biggest chance of transcending DeMarco’s cult, is one he says he didn’t want to do. “Let Her Go” was apparently the answer to label Captured Tracks’ demands for “an upbeat single” suitable for late-night TV, and DeMarco is still upset about it. He shouldn’t be: It’s an outstanding crystallization of his gifts, the real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess. Of course, even this reversal of the hoary “if you love her, let her go” chestnut undermines its own advice—“Or you can keep her, it’s OK, it’s up to you,” DeMarco counters in a speak-singing outro. It’s only fitting that stick-with-the-girl songs “Let My Baby Stay” and “Treat Her Better” are almost as tunefully plush.
In this context, DeMarco’s non-album antics start to look like another defense mechanism, another way of cutting himself off at the legs before someone else does it for him. That Limp Bizkit rendition showed up as part of a jokey 2013 live release; DeMarco has been vocal about how tiresome that novelty-cover setlist (Metallica, the Police, blah blah blah) became. And he previewed Salad Days with a video for a puckish perv-pop outtake centering on a refrain of “give me pussy.” So while his slack-not-slack aesthetic may point toward rising peers like Australia’s Courtney Barnett, there’s also ample reason Odd Future lightning rod Tyler, the Creator, who cited this album’s synth-dripping “Chamber of Reflections” as DeMarco’s best song, is a fan.
“Chamber of Reflections” is something like Beach House’s “Heart of Chambers,” but evoking a bare, cell-like apartment rather than a misty opium-den boudoir. It’s DeMarco’s most atmospherically exploratory track yet, and it’s also painfully lonely and quietly eloquent about the experience. So when, at the end of Salad Days’ airy instrumental finale, “Jonny’s Odyssey,” he remarks, “Thanks for joining me, see you again soon, buh-bye,” you don’t wonder if you’re missing some April Fool’s joke. You want to offer the guy a light, and then you realize he already has plenty. | 2014-04-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | April 1, 2014 | 8.5 | 5abdb89f-0da1-40fa-a438-1ad0b7228dcc | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The debut from Ivan Howard (Gayngs, Rosebuds) is a frivolous soufflé of soft-rock babymakers and disco deliria that could have been crafted any time in the last fifty years. | The debut from Ivan Howard (Gayngs, Rosebuds) is a frivolous soufflé of soft-rock babymakers and disco deliria that could have been crafted any time in the last fifty years. | De La Noche: Blue Days, Black Nights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/de-la-noche-blue-days-black-nights/ | Blue Days, Black Nights | Now and then, a record comes along that cuts to the quick of our political and spiritual moment. Blue Days, Black Nights has zero pretenses about being one of those records. The debut by De La Noche, which is fronted by Rosebuds and Gayngs member Ivan Howard, is a frivolous soufflé of soft-rock baby-makers and disco deliria that could have been crafted any time in the last 50 years. The song titles are basically just search terms for moods and sounds: “Dreams,” “Blue,” “Lush,” “Stars,” “Spooky,” and “Champagne.” It’s music for lotion-y late nights and cocktails with activated charcoal, like if Rhye dropped his falsetto and made a ’70s Italian film score. It doesn’t cut to the quick of anything, but it’s a lot of silky fun.
If Blue Days, Black Nights is not thematically rich, it compensates with sonic decadence. The songs are drizzled with just enough truffle oil to elevate their essential sturdiness without obscuring it. As you might expect, based on Gayngs and The Rosebuds’ whole-album cover of Sade, the vibe is redolent of ’80s easy-listening and synth-funk from Peter Gabriel to Tears for Fears, but modernized with the refined pulses of contemporary electronic music.
After “Avenues” sets the scene—city at night, lights smeared in the rain—De La Noche gets down to it with “Dreams,” building fluorescent dream-pop over sinister bass lines and topping it with a memorable, heart-tugging chorus, kissed with one perfect pitched-up vocal sample that reminds you that Howard worked with Kanye West—speaking of which, “Blue” is a great “Flashing Lights” pastiche.
The record is so consistent with Howard’s other work that it’s surprising to learn that he came on board after it was written and recorded by his old college friends Robert Rogan and Brian Weeks. Rogan and Weeks recorded the De La Noche songs with scratch vocals and sent them to Howard in Portland to see what he thought. Apparently, everyone was so happy with the results that they wound up Postal Servicing the whole thing. With all the tracks already in place, down to Matt Douglas’s blue-steel sax, it’s surprising how organic and integrated it feels. The long friendship and prior collaboration (Weeks was a Rosebud) surely helped breathe life from afar into De La Noche’s sound, and its particular featherlight heft. | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Get Loud | August 24, 2019 | 7.5 | 5abe50f4-3670-424c-a51d-365893217ec3 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The latest collection from the Watts rapper is an essential piece of West Coast rap, at times pulsating and manic, born from a singular writer and chameleonic stylist. | The latest collection from the Watts rapper is an essential piece of West Coast rap, at times pulsating and manic, born from a singular writer and chameleonic stylist. | 03 Greedo: The Wolf of Grape Street | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/03-greedo-the-wolf-of-grape-street/ | The Wolf of Grape Street | 03 Greedo has an artificially constructed eardrum, metal fused into his left leg, and clusters of grapes tattooed onto his skin. He spent his childhood in Sacramento, rural Kansas, Compton, and St. Louis, where he lived “in the basement in a house made of bricks.” At times he was, effectively, homeless. Around the turn of the century, he moved into Jordan Downs, a housing project off of Grape Street in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Barely a teenager, he fell in with the Grape Street Crips. His rap name is a paper-thin veil for those gang ties—he dropped a digit from 103, for 103rd St., and tweaked “Greedy”—and, in interviews, effectively shrugs at the obviousness. He has a popular mixtape trilogy called Purple Summer, he reasons, and there are those stenciled grapes. “How are they not gonna know?”
As a rapper, Greedo’s momentum in L.A. has been interrupted by jail stints and creative ebbs, but was accelerated in the last 20 months with a deluge of new music: nearly seven hours across the three Purple Summer tapes and Money Changes Everything, each of which is gripping and shockingly consistent. Because he moves so fluidly between styles, it’s difficult to point to a single Greedo song as a distillation of his sound or vision, but the best point of entry might be “Mafia Business,” the tribute to a friend who was murdered in the summer of 2016 that’s become his biggest hit. It sounds like a song you’ve heard before that’s being played in the distance, maybe underwater. Greedo bends his voice into something resembling a prayer for the dead to be allowed free passage; he raps, “I swear I haven’t cried in a hundred years/Last night a nigga cried about a hundred tears.” In the video, dozens of people, most draped in purple, hug, mourn, smile, dance, sometimes holding a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of the deceased with a real purple bandana tied around its neck. It is, to an extent, Greedo’s on-record identity in microcosm: familiar elements rearranged in ways that seem just a little bit foreign.
The lengths of those four breakthrough tapes we intimidating, but they served a welcome creative purpose for Greedo. When a project runs 30 or 40 songs, there’s less pressure on any individual track to carry the narrative or stylistic weight of the record writ large, and so songs are allowed to breathe as one-offs or asides or experiments. Greedo’s free to snap and cheese at the camera and dedicate full cuts to his love of Lil Boosie’s music.
On The Wolf of Grape Street, Greedo folds songs from his past work in with new records, too. But unlike Lil Boosie’s Bad Azz (Greedo cites it as his “Bible”), which roped in hits from his run as a cult mixtape star and was more or less a comprehensive survey of his styles, The Wolf of Grape Street is a careful act of editing, uniform in its urgency, with songs carefully chosen from Greedo’s massive vault and arranged to sound frantic and claustrophobic. It’s a pulsating, manic record from a singular writer and chameleonic stylist.
One of the things that makes Greedo’s music so compelling is the way he collapses the distance between one idea and the next. The ghosts that hang over his music—death, prison—are never too far away, and they color even the songs where they don’t swoop in. On Wolf, this means that a sex song on which Greedo worries his partner might set up him (“Beat That Thang Down”) dissolves into another (“Run For Yo Life) where he’s sleeping with a jailed man’s girlfriend into “Look At Me Now,” which he delivers mostly in a shout, and which starts with him flexing his record deal with the mogul Todd Moscowitz and ends with him repeating “same age that my daddy died.” It has the effect of placing his career as a performer on the same plane as the often unbelievable pain he expresses in his music: there’s no comfortable divide between what he sees in the boardroom and what he sees behind his eyelids.
The Wolf of Grape Street takes its name, obviously, from The Wolf of Wall Street, but where Scorsese imagined coiffed securities agents as the swirling vultures, Greedo was targeted by bounty hunters who shackled him in a van for nearly a week while they extradited him to the Texas panhandle. He’s facing 25-to-99 years on drug charges and 2-to-20 on gun charges. Jail has always figured prominently in Greedo’s writing, but the stakes here feel, understandably, far graver. That real-world legal peril is inextricable from the tortured “Paranoid Pt. 03” (“I think I need another lawyer”), and from the breathless pace of the album as a whole.
None of which to say Greedo’s music, or Wolf in particular, is humorless or oppressively heavy. “If I Wasn’t Rappin’” is bright and propulsive; he dives headlong into gleeful wordplay like, “Love my sisters on some black shit/White girl in my fucking baggage.” Even those men who descended on him from Texas are made to sound like a minor inconvenience: “Fuck the bounty, I’m just laughing.” The self-produced “Neva Bend,” another of his mixtape hits, broaches immense sorrow but is a little alien, drenched in synths and packed with melody and resolve: In the video, he raps, “My mama made me a star” while dragging a pistol across his face.
As a vocalist, Greedo sometimes channels contemporaries from Atlanta like Young Thug, breaking form in his verses to launch into song or hopping off the drums to rap more animatedly. But he’s also comfortable using more linear means to wring the emotion from his records. He’ll slip from pained yelps into crystal-clear diction, from venomous songs about kids getting jacked for their sneakers to sprawling lullabies about drug addiction, punctuated by the sound of seagulls. All of this makes him difficult to pin down in a rote lineage of Los Angeles rappers, but as Greedo will abruptly correct interviewers, he’s not from L.A.—he’s from Watts. The Wolf of Grape Street draws its power from that sort of specificity, but coheres into a broader rebuke of dread, panic, and walls closing in, wherever they might be. | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | March 15, 2018 | 8 | 5ad2e19c-8762-4b9d-ac04-388d013ae10f | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
This expansive double LP from Los Angeles producer M. Geddes Gengras collects four modular synth compositions with a lush, liquid sound. They are rewarding in their instability. | This expansive double LP from Los Angeles producer M. Geddes Gengras collects four modular synth compositions with a lush, liquid sound. They are rewarding in their instability. | M. Geddes Gengras: Interior Architecture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22219-interior-architecture/ | Interior Architecture | The work of prolific Los Angeles producer M. Geddes Gengras is often discussed in terms of “vibes.” This is fair enough, given the wandering modular synth experiments for which he’s known (not to mention his warmer forays into dub alongside Sun Araw, and his stated late-blooming appreciation for the Dead). Lest such language imply a relaxed sort of grooviness, however, his latest full-length—a double LP comprising four barely-discrete compositions, each around 18 minutes—extends into more anxious territory.
Composed and recorded over the last six years, Interior Architecture is so expansive that it can be hard for the listener to find her footing. What’s rewarding, in addition to the lush and liquid sound of Gengras’ indulgent approach, is that very experience of instability. It’s more pronounced than in his previous releases, and here takes on a psychological dimension.
“Wings_Carroms_Fountain_Worm Suite Pt. 1” opens with a foreboding tone, ringing out and slowly layered. Its effect is almost orchestral, with tinny scrawls of metallic textures. The sounds stretch and groan, eventually receding and leaving us with a tumbling rhythm that approximates water dripping in a cave, earthly and unsettling. Those contradictory sounds accumulate, and that’s where unease creeps in. This buildup process reiterates throughout, though there are moments of reprieve: the second track, “Staircase_Pressure Reverie_Structure_Worm Suite Pt 2.,” begins with a forgiving exhale, nodding back to the New Age calm of Gengras’ last proper full-length, 2014’s Ishi. Even still, about four minutes in, a cozy ambient patch is met with discordant piano and mechanical shuffling.
Taking his time to build and disassemble each passage, Gengras seems to work without many constraints. As his compositions develop out, there’s an experiential and pleasure-taking quality to his application of new progressions, even when they’re wholly dissonant. Outside of this project, he collaborates with a number of Los Angeles musicians, but here he’s very much working alone, a fact that underscores the interiority audible throughout. This is briefly disrupted by the introduction of Seth Kasselman on clarinet on “Extension_Breath_Worm Suite Pt. 3,” an element that, though it enters and exits in appropriately abstract squelches, contrasts somewhat curiously with the album’s vocabulary. Gengras otherwise comfortably and loosely fills out space, lost in what he’s making.
It’s a bit funny that he’s used the term “architecture” to title this album, which might imply a tangible presence of organizing systems. Such systems—though they’re floating around somewhere, built into the synthesizers he uses to compose these tracks—are here elusive. That groundlessness and the patience it requires can be frustrating, especially spread across nearly 80 minutes of music; the record is not always as engaging for the listener as it might like to be. Gengras emphasizes the experience of sound over the process of constructing it. With that, the brainy nature of his instrument (something he expressed better on this year’s more restrained Two Variations) is superseded by intuition, by feeling his way through sound—by vibes, you could say, albeit distinctively thorny ones. | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Intercoastal Artists | August 10, 2016 | 7 | 5ad3ed61-9b0f-4dc3-877d-2775f3376d95 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
Heavy on vocal processing and maximalist A. G. Cook production, the PC Music star’s first full-length can’t help feeling a little anticlimactic. | Heavy on vocal processing and maximalist A. G. Cook production, the PC Music star’s first full-length can’t help feeling a little anticlimactic. | Hannah Diamond: Reflections | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hannah-diamond-reflections/ | Reflections | Hannah Diamond’s “Pink and Blue” still sounds bizarre and striking: like a record Hey Arnold!’s Helga Pataki would make with chintzy synth plugins and one day of voice lessons. The track helped catapult PC Music, the collective Diamond and producers A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle belonged to, from SoundCloud oddity to sonic architects for the mainstream: Carly Rae Jepsen, David Guetta, Madonna. But while the producers have become big names (by producer standards), besides early collaborator SOPHIE the vocalists largely have not. Part of that’s how you define success; Diamond’s had her own breakthrough as a visual designer, collaborating with artists like Offset and Years & Years’ Olly Alexander. Part of it’s that PC Music’s vocalists present themselves less as singer-songwriters—as real people—than high concepts. (An early headline: “Hannah Diamond Is Real.”)
More simply, “Pink and Blue” came out in 2013 and now it is 2019. And while Diamond’s cohort have expanded their sound—to the apocalyptic scope of OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES, the New Age soaring of Caroline Polachek’s Pang, or Charli XCX’s bangers-as-an-ethos Pop 2—Diamond’s new album Reflections pretty much still sounds like 2013. That’s because it’s not far removed: Reflections was meant to be a 2016 EP, and over the past decade, most of the tracks have been released piecemeal via mixes and one-offs. If you hate PC Music, you will continue to; if you love them, Reflections will not change that.
But producer A. G. Cook’s done a lot since 2013, so inevitably, these tracks register less as individual Cook songs than as types of Cook song. There are the ones derived from trance, like “True,” which is like trying to recreate a Sash! song in a MIDI sequencer stuck on a slow BPM. There are the ones that emulate video games, like “Fade Away,” which might as well be an arrangement of the star maze music from Super Mario Land 2. There are the ones, like “Shy,” that sound like the Jock Jams that sound like “Party Rock Anthem.” “Never Again” sounds as if Cook, who recently became Charli XCX’s creative director, were so inspired by her True Romance song “Take My Hand” that he decided to remake it on a music box. (It also has vinyl crackles, which on a Hannah Diamond record are like taking a face-bedazzling app and making the icon a skeuomorphistic wardrobe.)
Throughout, Diamond sings largely in straight-tone chorister voice, free of vibrato or aggression —all the better to rush it through AutoTune glissandos, or singe it with electricity, or let it ping away like a metronome. Her lyrics detail love and heartbreak through affectless matter-of-fact recollections like, “I kissed his face in a different place”—a new hookup recalled with all the pulsing romantic immediacy of an Achewood punchline. If there’s an overarching mood, it’s subversiveness: little nihilistic or dissociated asides, the hints of lowered expectations on “Fade Away” (“I always thought I’d be the picture saved on your screen”) or “Make Believe,” a love song delivered less to a person than to an idealized concept. This kind of cleverness has arguably become the going mode for pop; Sofi Tukker essentially rewrote “Make Believe” this year on “Fantasy,” and Diamond’s general shtick has been adopted by LIZ and Poppy. But that doesn’t mean Diamond was first, either. The joke of “Shy” is that you’re too shy to confess your feelings but not too shy to belt about them loudly—the same joke as another “Shy,” from the fairytale musical Once Upon a Mattress.
Diamond’s said in interviews that Reflections comes from real emotional experience, but it’s hard to imagine a listener using these songs for actual crushes, or breakups, or parties, or anything outside one’s own head. It’s all very conceptual; this isn’t “pop music is deep actually,” or even “pop music is fun”; it’s “pop music is shallow as hell, and by the way, isn’t shallow uncanny?” Teen pop does not sound like this. EDM, trance, J-pop, any stated inspiration: none totally sound like this. Really, very little in pop has sounded like this at any point, at least not before the PC Music crew started producing it themselves. There’s a certain freedom there. “No one’s going to be as freaked out by [my music] now,” Diamond told Vice, with some relief.
And it’s true; not only will no one be freaked out, Diamond and company have rearranged collective musical tastes around themselves. But it also makes Reflections a little anticlimactic. Tellingly, the most striking track is a cover: “Concrete Angel,” which isn’t the Martina McBride song (though that would be something) but the Gareth Emery/Christina Novelli trance hit. From the first notes, it’s from a different, less online world: a bassline with sinew and sweat, a lyric and melody that yearn and swoon with minimal AutoTune futzing (for Diamond, at least). Then, the track polymorphs. First comes a snap track and “Popcorn” synths. Then, a Dannii Minogue-y spoken-word interlude. Then, a happy hardcore remix. Then a fidgety, snippetized double-time track. Then something approaching breakcore. More happens in these four minutes than the rest of the album combined; it’s exhilarating, and the visceral emotion of the beginning makes the re-re-remixing feel like a release, rather than a gimmick. “Concrete Angel” isn’t new either—it provided the title of Diamond’s 2017 mix Soon I won’t see you at all—but it’s a reminder of when PC Music sounded like the future, rather than just sounding like themselves. | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | PC Music | December 2, 2019 | 6.2 | 5ad8cbc3-e83c-4867-a117-de2c02566b62 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Tomorrow's Hits is the first record the Men put together in a high-end studio, but a year after New Moon, the message is the same: they’re a rock band and the roll continues. | Tomorrow's Hits is the first record the Men put together in a high-end studio, but a year after New Moon, the message is the same: they’re a rock band and the roll continues. | The Men: Tomorrow's Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18971-the-men-tomorrows-hits/ | Tomorrow's Hits | A few minutes into the Men’s previous album, New Moon, Nick Chiericozzi whooped “I got a rock band now and I’m on a roll!” It was a boast that would be out-of-character for this otherwise earnest group if it wasn’t utterly true on both counts. New Moon was the Men’s third winning record in as many years, and after years of sonic and personal instability, the quintet pooled their energy into being a rock band—one that liked their Neil Young loud, their beer plentiful, and their guitars in threes. A year later, the message on Tomorrow’s Hits is about the same for people who preferred to see them as they were on 2011’s Leave Home, revivalists of nearly every iteration of ugly and abrasive NYC guitar perversion, or as the comprehensive indie-rawkers of Open Your Heart: they’re a rock band and the roll continues.
As with New Moon and Open Your Heart, the Men’s accruing success lends to a welcome, optimistic outlook. There is an element of wishful thinking to Tomorrow’s Hits, from its self-deprecating title to the supposedly unintentional Big Star homage of the cover. This is the first Men record put together in a high-end studio, though we’re not talking about Capitol Studios; Bob Dylan and D’Angelo have walked through the doors of Brooklyn’s Strange Weather and so have DIIV and Total Slacker and O.A.R.. The horns that lace the shitkicking Stones rave-up “Another Night” are supposed to sound like luxuries, though Tomorrow’s Hits only sounds more polished compared to the rustic, cabin-tested New Moon. For all of their abrasive tendencies, Leave Home and Open Your Heart were loud and forthright and never sounded lo-fi.
Regardless of the slight upgrade in fidelity, Tomorrow’s Hits is much like what preceded it, with “the Men” serving as a fantasy camp construct for the record collectors making this record collector rock. “Get What You Give” has absolutely nothing to do with the New Radicals song, although it does share a taste for bubblegummy riffs and enthusiasm for music making: Chiericozzi literally gets out of bed only to chase the songwriting muse (on several other songs, they sleep in or don’t sleep at all). Even if the songs aren’t necessarily about them, the Men like to play up the transformative power of rock'n'roll, as “Dark Waltz” kicks off Tomorrow’s Hits with a litany of classic archetypes: a drummer with a badass, weed-dealing brother and mom buying your first guitar. This story begins in 1974, meaning that Chiericozzi would have to be nearly 50 for this song to be autobiographical.
If you caught them live in 2013, most of these songs should be familiar, since they were all finished and tracked before New Moon was even released. But they’re also familiar in the more general sense, wherein the influences are recognizable to both you, your cooler older sibling, and your dad. New Moon was defined by frayed acoustics and raw soloing, very much in the lineage of Meat Puppets and Dinosaur, Jr., bands that were descendents of Crazy Horse, but unquestionably indie rock. This is the real-deal stuff, BTO boogie, Skynyrd, and according to the band, a hell of a lot of Ted Nugent.
Say what you will about the Nuge and Grand Funk, they wrote some catchy riffs and the Men are still working their way towards their “Stranglehold”, their “We’re An American Band”. Which is to say that Tomorrow’s Hits hints at what New Moon also did—that the Men are great sonic emulators and merely good songwriters. And so, the highlights on Tomorrow’s Hits are the ones that recall the velocity of their early work. It’s easy to get caught up in the breakneck pace of “Pearly Gates” and “Different Days” and think “I bet they kick ass live,” but knowing how the Men operate, there’s a good chance that opportunity has already passed you by. Also, some of these sound too familiar in the sense that they’re kinda like older Men songs: “Dark Waltz” is a continuation of Open Your Heart’s barstool-bound “Candy” (really the song that’s determined their path ever since) and “Sleepless” is barely distinguishable from New Moon’s “Bird Song”, whereas closer “Going Down” sounds like “Half Angel Half Light” being workshopped before they found its bracing chorus.
There’s one lyric that sticks out amongst all of this whiskey-slugging and road-dogging, as Ben Greenberg sings on “Different Days”, “I hate being young.” It’s hard to sense much depression or even anger in that line, and not just because it’s surrounded by Tomorrow’s Hits’ most revved up performance. It just seems like the Men might hate being young in 2014, as opposed to 1978 or 1969, a time when doing this meant being centrist rather than on the indie rock fringe and having to explain yourself. Even before Open Your Heart dropped, the Men wanted to stress that Leave Home wasn't "them." But the greatness of those two records lay in how it was impossible to tell who the Men really were; they sounded capable of doing anything. And hell, being a solid rock band doing yeoman’s work year after year suits them, even if it results in very good records that get them right back out on the road rather than great ones. Who knows if the Men would be energized or completely lost if they took more time next time out, but Tomorrow’s Hits for now mostly succeeds in toeing the line between being on a roll and being in a rut. | 2014-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 4, 2014 | 7.2 | 5ae25bee-1fb4-4118-a5e5-632b744aefb0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Led by drummer and lead singer Kylee Kimbrough, the noise-punk outfit Dasher deliver a murderous mix of garage-rock grime, fuzz-punk overdrive, and black-metal-schooled howls. | Led by drummer and lead singer Kylee Kimbrough, the noise-punk outfit Dasher deliver a murderous mix of garage-rock grime, fuzz-punk overdrive, and black-metal-schooled howls. | Dasher: Sodium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dasher-sodium/ | Sodium | Punk rock has long been an outlet for both physical and emotional release—and few people exploit the full limits of its cathartic potential like Kylee Kimbrough. As both the lead singer and drummer for Atlanta-bred noise-punk outfit Dasher, she gets to have it both ways: she can imagine her enemies’ faces on the skins that she’s bashing, while finishing them off with a fire-breathing scream. She performs with the sort of intensity that makes you check your hands for phantom splinters and blood blisters, while instinctively rubbing your throat to soothe your vicarious laryngitis. But on Dasher’s debut album, the most lasting wounds aren’t so much physical as psychological.
Sodium is a brief, blunt album with a long, tumultuous history. It was first previewed with a couple of singles back in 2014, and momentum was building toward the album’s seemingly imminent release. But then Dasher suddenly fell apart, the recordings were scrapped, and, following a series of personal setbacks, Kimbrough relocated to Bloomington to decompress and be closer to her label, Jagjaguwar. After acclimatizing herself to the local scene, Kimbrough gradually rebuilt her band from scratch, trading up from a power trio to a fearsome foursome. So naturally, on Sodium, Dasher go back on the attack like a feral, foamy-mouthed dog with an empty stomach and a full bladder after being cooped up in a kennel all day.
With opening salvo “We Know So,” Dasher instantly establish Sodium’s murderous mix of garage-rock grime, fuzz-punk overdrive, and black-metal-schooled howls—the same sort of volatile chemistry that powered the earliest assaults of a pre-1979 Death From Above, or the primordial, phlegm-balled blasts of the Men circa Leave Home. And like those bands, Dasher also manage to carve out space for melody amid the melee—you may not always understand what Kimbrough is shouting about in her verses, but she makes sure to broadcast her choruses loud and clear for maximum fist-pump potential. In a 2016 interview, Kimbrough admitted that lyrics are a secondary concern for her, and that she chooses words for their percussive effect as much as their meaning. Certainly, one shouldn’t try to parse any socio-political commentary about the current state of America in righteous ragers like “Soviet” or “Go Rambo” (both of which date back to 2014). And Sodium’s sludgy title track is about friendship and the perils of adding too much salt to one’s diet. (“Totino’s!/Potatoes!/Ramen noodles!/Sodium! Sodium!”)
But on “Teeth,” Kimbrough uses the album’s most serene soundscape—a woozy, discordant psychedelia that imagines a blackgaze Pixies—to deliver her harshest words: “You! Can’t! Save! Me!” It’s the most telling indicator of the deeper distress fueling Dasher’s circle-pit hysterics, and by the time we reach the album’s second side, the emotional bloodletting has become as overwhelming as the band’s jet-turbine roar. The Texan-hardcore stomper “Eye See” is a post-breakup lament drunk on self-loathing that soon curdles into desperation: “Don’t you! Know how! Much I! Miss You!/I feel! Sick when! I can’t! Touch you!” And the harrowing “Trespass” applies a term for breaching property lines to the violation of physical ones: “My body is not yours!” Kimbrough roars, before rendering the exchange in more explicit terms: “Hey, you fucking piece of shit/My blood is all over your dick/You put the knife up to my wrist.”
In its wake, “No Guilt” functions as an exorcism of sorts, as Kimbrough unleashes her demons through overlapping, strangulated vocal parts overtop a queasy, sandblasted groove. “No guilt! No shame!,” she shrieks in the song’s dying seconds, as if using up the very last ounce of muscle strength in her larynx. Sodium is liable to leave you just as drained as its creator, but it’s the sort of exhaustion that feels valorous and victorious. After all, losing your voice is a small price to pay for saving your sanity. | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | July 17, 2017 | 7.8 | 5ae71a3f-c3dd-4047-a99d-0982caaabddc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
This foursome's first full-length is a mix of over-the-top whimsy, extreme rhythms, vise-tight musicianship, and a 21st century man-machine interface between live and laptop. And although it may not mark the introduction of the world's first bionic rock group, Battles have done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno. | This foursome's first full-length is a mix of over-the-top whimsy, extreme rhythms, vise-tight musicianship, and a 21st century man-machine interface between live and laptop. And although it may not mark the introduction of the world's first bionic rock group, Battles have done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno. | Battles: Mirrored | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10225-mirrored/ | Mirrored | Marc Bolan may be dead, but Battles can rebuild him. They have the technology. On "Atlas", the second track on the band's debut album, drummer John Stanier's pistons pump out a steroidal version of Bolan's trademark shuffling stomp-beat. His three bandmates-- Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and Tyondai Braxton-- constrict their two-note keyboards and one-note guitars until the song coalesces into a stiff, slick, swinging robot rock. It's like a skills-exchange workshop where mechanically minded krautrockers are encouraged to share their knowledge with remedial class glam bands only interested in big beat thrills. And as the almost-club-friendly single, it's the perfect introduction to the rest of Mirrored, easing you into the album's mix of over-the-top whimsy, extreme analogue rhythms that are often as much jazz-fusion as IDM as tech-metal, vocals that would do Roger Troutman proud, and vise-tight, "live or laptop?" musicianship connected as much by USB ports and Firewire cables as the improvisatory interplay of four dudes just jamming.
In fact, Battles may be the first band to really play with the way that 21st century software can extend and distend the sound of a rock band in real time; Mirrored moves in ways that Battles' first two instrumental EPs--post-rock played with the locked-down seriousness of modern techno--only suggested. Early Battles shows could sound like a metal band performing Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, and Mirrored spurns solos, favoring a caffeinated maximalism where compositions are built out of 100 microscopic parts. The guitarist/keyboardists string together tracks out of riffs that crisscross with the careful preplanning of a subway system. Each instrument on opening track "Race In"-- Stanier's military-precise massed snares, the guitars tensely climbing up and down a few notes, what sound like synthetic tubular bells-- is added with the deliberate patience of a Terry Riley composition. The song feels nervously repetitive, like it's suffering from OCD.
If you've seen Battles live, you've probably seen the phrase "ex-members of" written on the flyer, and so maybe none of this surprises you. Save Stanier, everyone in Battles is a multi-instrumentalist, playing a prog album's worth of guitars, electronics, and/or keyboards. Braxton's put in time splitting the difference between IDM and avant-garde electronics; Konopka played with underrated indie instrumentalists Lynx, Stanier drummed for scholastic-metal pioneers Helmet; Williams finger-tapped for Don Caballero. But while there's certainly more than a shade of math rock's intricacy on Mirrored, tracks like the terse, tambourine-rattling quasi-funk of "Tonto" or Stanier's time-signature and tempo fuckery on the crescendo-crazed "Tij", the stern stuff is continually undercut by a vibe that's more romper room than po-faced. The "hook" on "Race In" is a whistle-while-you-work chant that they're probably humming down at Fraggle Rock. The astounding "Rainbow" spins into dizzying Rube Goldberg corkscrews of keyboard, xylophone, and giddily speed-attenuated symphonic metal drums. It sounds like the band is trying to recreate the Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs and Daffy are dueling orchestra conductors, each driving their ensembles to crazier and crazier call-and-response peaks.
And what makes Mirrored's merry melodies really stand out isn't the crazy quilt structures or needlepoint precision of the playing. It's the frenzied gibberish of Braxton's pitch-shifted and electronically processed vocals-- a kind of ecstatic robot that's speaking in cartoon tongues. When "Atlas" dropped a few months back, those vocals were a squeaky line in the sand for old fans, and across the internet, everyone had the same thought: "Why are Battles suddenly aping the Animal Collective?" But Avey Tare and company hardly invented high-pitched sing-song vocals-- just ask David Seville. On "Leyendecker", Braxton croons in a falsetto that's been whipped up by technology until it sounds like a neutered D'Angelo. Combined with the music, a low-res quasi-R&B beat as grainy as a glitch track, Braxton's circuitry pushes "Leyendecker" into far stranger places than any the Collective has wandered into. Throughout Mirrored he shreds his vocals with the post-human glee of Warp labelmate Jackson and His Computer Band, whether it's the joyful opening burst of voice on "Ddiamondd" that spits pitch-bent consonants, or "Tij", where Braxton pants and wheezes in a creeped-out asthmatic lower-register. You couldn't even approximate "Leyendecker", or any of Mirrored's 11 tracks, with just acoustic guitars and voices.
At the same time, listen closely to the intro to "Atlas" and you'll hear the pedal on Stanier's kit hitting the kickdrum in the physical world of the studio, pushing air as the hammer connects with the skin. Even when reminiscent of the unfeasible programming of post-drill'n'bass electronica, Battles' spastic drums are being played in real time, with the brute force and metronome-focus of a guy with a background in heavy rock. But its avant-pop hooks and ultrabrite melodies are being dissembled and reassembled by pitiless CPUs in equally real time. It's thrilling and disorienting because the virtuosity of both man and machine means that, unlike earlier rock/techno hybrids hampered by both technically unskilled players and crude technology, Battles sound is indivisible. Battles may not be the world's first bionic rock group, but they've done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno. Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand. | 2007-05-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | May 15, 2007 | 9.1 | 5aec0308-57a4-4772-8f90-0e9e9719c5e8 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The duo of 9T Antiope smashes together sounds from antiquity—singing reminiscent of medieval European folk, lyrics full of chariot and faeries—with hurtling production from the digital future. | The duo of 9T Antiope smashes together sounds from antiquity—singing reminiscent of medieval European folk, lyrics full of chariot and faeries—with hurtling production from the digital future. | 9T Antiope: Of Murk and Shallow Water EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22763-9t-antiope-of-murk-and-shallow-water-ep/ | Of Murk and Shallow Water EP | 9T Antiope, the duo of Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, hail from Tehran and live in Paris, and from the sound of this self-released EP, they may as well be time travelers, for all we know. Part of their sound is very old: Shamloo’s singing bears traces of medieval European folk music, and her lyrics often resemble scraps of heroic verse, full of chariots and faeries and peppered with literary allusions. But Aghiani’s electronic production hurtles back at us from a distant future: digital static, dissonant chirps, the incomprehensible crackle of an AI crunching numbers. The results are eerie and enrapturing, like an itinerant bard warming her hands over a pile of burning dot-matrix printers.
Even though she never sings unaccompanied, the majority of the four-track EP scans, functionally, as a cappella music. Shamloo’s voice not only carries the melody; her singing is virtually the only tonal element here, and the occasional harmonies that she produces in combination with the flickering background buzz resemble someone singing over the drone of a walk-in cooler.
Meanwhile, Aghiani’s electronics balance the flat, affectless grey of a dead television with piercing sine waves and pinprick bursts of color. “Den” begins with two minutes of clanking metal, electrical hum, and panning static; in the background, a crow caws once and falls silent. In these long moments, his ambient industrial soundscapes have the vivid, mimetic feel of a radio play. The gurgling oscillators of “Brute” resemble Bebe and Louis Barron’s Forbidden Planet score. The four tracks work together like the movements of a suite, sharing a single mood and a single palette, and the whole thing comes to a head with the concluding “Edax,” the most melodic song of the bunch, which builds to a dramatic climax of long held syllables and heart-in-mouth glissando.
Shamloo’s lyrics are cryptic by design, which only adds to the music’s mystery; she describes her writing process as a kind of world-building exercise, sketching out elaborate narratives and characters and then boiling them down to a single salient detail. She favors assonant rhymes and slippery syntax, which makes the rare plainspoken phrases all the more powerful. “Men burn the chariots down,” she sings, mantra-like, in “Den,” before slipping into a speaking voice—“The lake is frozen/The lake is frozen”—accompanied by charcoal-colored static and a dull, desolate whine. Whatever it might mean, it is absolutely gripping, immersive and surrealistic, cinema without sight. | 2017-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | January 11, 2017 | 7.8 | 5aedc31a-2636-4276-ac7c-20155edba6cd | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The London-based producer’s nostalgic, two-track EP is a love letter to classic house and the tender, unspoken, human connection found on a dance floor. | The London-based producer’s nostalgic, two-track EP is a love letter to classic house and the tender, unspoken, human connection found on a dance floor. | Jayda G: Both of Us / Are U Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jayda-g-both-of-us-are-u-down/ | Both of Us / Are U Down | Jayda Guy makes intimate club music that asks big questions. Her 2019 debut album, Significant Changes–a product of the years she spent earning her graduate degree in environmental toxicology while establishing herself as a sought-after DJ in Berlin–explored the ways that humans interact with the world around them. Through delightfully peculiar field recordings (crying orca whales, a lecturing biologist) and heady incantations (“This floor is for grooving!” she howled at clubgoers caught scrolling Instagram), the Canadian-born, London-based producer called on us to view both the earth and the club as sacred spaces worthy of preserving.
Her sensual follow-up EP, the two-track Both of Us/Are U Down, is a more emotional inquiry, and one that seems less interested in real answers. Instead, each track simply considers a state of mind––one is yearning and romantic, the other anxious and contemplative––and studies them in the context of blissed-out house. Both songs are steeped in uncertainty; on “Both f Us,” she wonders out loud if she has enough love to compensate for all that’s missing in her life, and on “Are U Down,” she gets stuck in a spiral of doubt and indecision. There is something about the fragility of each of these narratives––their unreliable structures, irresolution, and nagging loops of logic (“I can/I can/I can’t,” she sings)–that feels refreshingly human. If dance floors are sanctums for self-acceptance, shouldn’t our imperfections come with us, too?
Guy turned to early Chicago house records for inspiration, and you can hear the soulful, jazzy touch of producers like Mr. Fingers and Marshall Jefferson, two of the scene’s forebears who used the voice as a textural instrument to bridge the gap between gospel and disco. By chopping it up and weaving it alongside hissing hi-hats, synth vamps, kick drums, and uplifting piano––the bedrock of many classic house tunes––they discovered that vocals could sound at once orgasmic and spiritual. (Here, halfway through Guy’s nostalgic “Sunset Bliss” remix, she cues a joyful, euphoric breakdown in which she sends her voice soaring into a flurry of sky-high howls and sighs.) The sound from this particular era has recently made its way back into mainstream popularity, with mega-club DJs like Calvin Harris, Kygo, and Martin Solveig releasing their own glossy takes. But there is a tenderness and intimacy to Guy’s approach that sets her apart. She sounds shy, bashful, and way up close, like you’re eavesdropping on a personal phone call. At certain moments, it sounds like she’s breathing right into your ear.
That sense of immediate proximity is present all over Guy’s work, but in the context of the current moment it feels like a plea for human connection–that implicit, physical bond that can only be found on a dance floor. Imagine how a sea of sweating bodies would react to the dramatic third act of “Both of Us,” when the beat slows down and the drums drop out leaving just her, hand claps, and piano. It’s a pause that feels custom-made for when the DJ suddenly hits the floodlights and encourages you to take in everyone who’s been dancing alongside you in the dark. For now, it’s a spirited reminder of how precious and fleeting those moments can be.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | July 7, 2020 | 7.5 | 5aedfbcc-1fc1-4c95-8f4e-b92eb24cb68b | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
A decade into a career that found him perfecting an immediately recognizable approach to dark ambience, Tim Hecker makes what could be his best record. | A decade into a career that found him perfecting an immediately recognizable approach to dark ambience, Tim Hecker makes what could be his best record. | Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15124-ravedeath-1972/ | Ravedeath, 1972 | There are plenty of synth and drone artists that make epic, transportive music, but one of the unique things about Tim Hecker is his conceptual ability. Each of his records, from the cinematic rush of Harmony in Ultraviolet to the dreamed-up cartography of An Imaginary Country, explores a specific theme, often in great detail. When he talked to us last month about the artwork for his latest LP, Ravedeath, 1972, Hecker mentioned that he'd been consumed with the idea of sonic decay. "I became obsessed with digital garbage," he said. "Like when the Kazakstan government cracks down on piracy and there's pictures of 10 million DVDs and CDRs being pushed by bulldozers."
That idea, the notion of music as a cheapened, battered object, touches nearly every aspect of Ravedeath, 1972, a dark and often claustrophobic record that is arguably Hecker's finest work to date. The album is based on a single day's worth of recordings in a church in Reykjavik, Iceland, where Hecker used a groaning pipe organ to lay down the foundation for its tracks. (Throughout, you can hear the vastness of this place, as sounds ricochet around, bounce off the rafters.) With help from Iceland-based producer Ben Frost-- whose ominous By the Throat is a touchstone here-- Hecker then finished the record in studio, digitally adding synth wash and wailing shoegaze crunch to his live recordings.
The result is a strange hybrid that lives somewhere between the digital and material realms, and it's remarkable how seamlessly the two are combined. For example, in a track like "In the Fog II", it's difficult to distinguish between the organic church sounds and the processed ones that came after. But while there is harmony between the source material, Ravedeath, 1972 is by no means about prettiness or tranquility. Hecker pits noises against one another in such a way that creates a constant push and pull between discord and beauty. It's a bit like William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, but instead of music aging over time, this is far more combative-- like these songs are being attacked from the inside out.
It's an unusual concept but relevant given the rate at which music is consumed and discarded these days. More important than the record's ideology, though, is what Hecker does with it-- the weight, atmosphere, and contrast he builds into these songs. Take for example the "In the Fog" suite, where over three tracks, Hecker lets dissonant squall threaten an undulating organ drone until it's taken over by wailing guitar noise in third passage. Or the two-part "Hatred of Music", which recalls an Oneohtrix Point Never synth shimmer before it disintegrates into distant industrial creaks. In each case it's not just about the wild, unearthly sounds he creates but the force with which they move around the mix.
Hecker is also smart with pacing and knows when to dial things back or add in softer, interstitial numbers when things start to become overwhelming. That's the case in the record's back half where he uses open-ended pieces to achieve the same foreboding effect. "Studio Suicide, 1980" is almost dreamy but has a sinister undercurrent, sounding something like the more punishing moments of My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" heard through the walls of a neighbor's apartment. I wouldn't go so far as to call songs like this and "Analog Paralysis, 1978", which has a similar celestial vibe, "ambient," but they are subtler than those in the first half and give the album a sense of balance and a natural arc.
If you buy into the concept of Ravedeath, 1972 as an examination of music threatened by technology, there are pretty clear threads that pop up over the course of the record to support that. For one, it seems that the organ sounds Hecker captured back in that Rejkjavik church represent a certain purity of sound and that the digital noise battering it throughout act as the enemy, the corrosive effect. There's an ongoing struggle between the two that's mirrored in the menacing song titles and gripping cover art. It's important, then, that the album closes with "In the Air III", a track that features almost no interference whatsoever, just the plinking organ by itself. If I'm reading it right, it feels like Hecker's point is that music, in its purest form, survives no matter what you throw at it. | 2011-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kranky | February 18, 2011 | 8.6 | 5aef4d03-24dd-4789-b8fb-3e7b367dead0 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
Aluna Francis and George Reid's sophomore album globe-trots through bass and sass-heavy dance tunes that occasionally stall out at their peaks. | Aluna Francis and George Reid's sophomore album globe-trots through bass and sass-heavy dance tunes that occasionally stall out at their peaks. | AlunaGeorge: I Remember | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22400-i-remember/ | I Remember | Few pop bands mix altitudes with the ease of AlunaGeorge. Down in the soil are producer George Reid’s basslines—sluffing, roiling creatures of many legs and the ceaseless forward motion of the animal brain. And up in the ether is singer Aluna Francis’ filmy, nasal falsetto, gathering frost as it drifts along. Off the strength of their first, excellently slippery electro-R&B singles, “You Know You Like It” and “Your Drums, Your Love,” they were shortlisted for the BBC’s Sound of 2013 poll, eventually coming in second (to Haim). Their consolation prize wasn’t bad, though: “White Noise,” a hit collab with Disclosure, scaled the UK Singles Chart to No. 2.
While the duo’s absorbing first album, Body Music, followed faithfully in the vein of their debut singles—chirping, sinuous club tracks, owing as much to Aaliyah as SBTRKT or Quadron—their follow-up, I Remember, kicks up dust in some unlikely new area codes. It cribs largely from dancehall, but stops short of adopting any of that form’s humidity; these diaphanous tracks are a long stream of cool appraisal. Francis thrives again in moments of sass, but she also muses on more overtly dense topics like consent and modern sexuality. They punctuate long spools of interconnected synth beats that perfectly bleed together for a dance floor of noncommittal swaying.
On “I’m in Control,” which features the Jamaican dancehall vocalist Popcaan, she shrugs off a lacking suitor by trilling, “You gotta go deeper than deep to get me off,” at once playful and damning. Its punchy house-lite beat is a distorted reflection of “Mean What I Mean,” another track hewing to themes of sexual consent, ultimately impassive due to Francis’ parceled-out delivery (“I mean what I mean when I say so/Not trying to be mean when I say no/So don’t play the fool and twist my rules”). In one of the bolder dance moments, “Not Above Love,” dark bass lines cave into another listless chorus: “You keep robbin’ my heart like a bank/No thank you.” It’s a curious quirk throughout that AlunaGeorge come in heavy in the verses—stuffing bass into every crevice—and then wind down or duck out by the choruses, stalling the motor.
The title track feels like the lone emotional counterpoint and borrows the well-timed stutters and slow-seeping synths of its coproducer, Flume. “I Remember” is a song so sorely nostalgic and bittersweet, it’s hard to hear on repeat, unless you’re the type to enjoy tilling the soot of past love affairs. Francis flutters around an old beau, remembering the heady and harsh times alike, finally alighting back in his arms. Reid’s slyly crushing, nipping and futuristic beat helps carry the emotion. “I remember, I remember, I remember the fights/Burning deep into the night,” she sings with soft, heartrending hope. “I remember, I remember, I remember your scent/When I just woke up and I’m on your chest.” Remembering the earliest promise is half the fun, after all—because next time, they could still surprise you. | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Interscope | September 26, 2016 | 6.6 | 5af66dea-fcd4-422d-9b63-ad58b3ff363a | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
The shoegaze legends return with their first album in 22 years, a precise and altogether gorgeous showcase of their peerless ability at production, mood, and songcraft. | The shoegaze legends return with their first album in 22 years, a precise and altogether gorgeous showcase of their peerless ability at production, mood, and songcraft. | Slowdive: Slowdive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23254-slowdive/ | Slowdive | Nature metaphors come so readily to mind when listening to shoegaze—clouds, stars, skies, storms, oceans, whirlwinds, maelstroms—that it’s easy to believe that, like the weather it evokes, it just sort of happens. Invest in the right guitar pedals, put the right breathy spin on your vocals, and bam—instant Loveless, or close enough to fool a stoned and heartsick teenager. It’s as easy as walking out your front door and letting the spring air greet you.
For some bands that may well be all there is to it. But song by song, moment by moment, sometimes even note by note, Slowdive do it better. There’s nothing elaborate in the bassline for “Slomo,” the opening track of their first album in 22 years, given the thick bed of guitars it bounces on. Just seven notes, the sixth of which leaps unexpectedly up an octave instead of continuing the bassline’s descent. Or at the end of “Slomo,” when Rachel Goswell’s voice pulls off a similar trick, first when she takes over lead vocals from Neil Halstead, then when she starts singing them at the very top of her register. At the end of “Go Get It,” Halstead sings two different lyrics laid on top of one another simultaneously, like his conversation with Goswell is over and now he's talking to himself.
In a genre beloved for its comfortable reliability, all it takes are these small but striking detours to remind us that this glorious noise is the work of human hands and the skill that move them. If there’s a story to Slowdive—the band’s return to active recording together after decades of slowly mounting critical and audience acclaim—beyond the human-interest angle of the return itself, the swerves in the songcraft tell it: This is an album as thoughtful as it is beautiful.
You can hear the attention to detail even in the album’s most conventionally pop songs. Knockout single “Sugar for the Pill” and “No Longer Making Time” share a similar structure, matching a loping alt-rock bassline with high arpeggiated guitar. But the differences that emerge within that framework are fascinating. “Sugar” avoids the go-for-the-throat, quiet-loud-quiet format which “No Longer” embraces, opting instead for a subdued sophistipop chorus that matches the resignation of its central lyric: “You know it’s just the way things are.” The latter song may lack the former’s restraint, but it makes up for it with the tightest, loveliest vocal harmonies on the album from singer-guitarists Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, plus a fake-out finale that reintroduces the opening riff so deftly you’ll wonder if you hit repeat by accident.
Drummer Simon Scott, returning to the fold for the first time on record since 1993’s shoegaze opus Souvlaki, emerges as a key element not just for the songs’ drive, but of their texture. On “Slomo,” “No Longer Making Time,” and “Go Get It,” he provides not so much a backbeat as a frontbeat, a sound to be reckoned with, not taken for granted. Scott also helped create the vocal and piano loops that comprise “Falling Ashes,” the album’s closer; the repetition transforms Halstead and Goswell’s refrain of “Thinkin’ about love” from soggy sentiment into something that actually forces you to think about love as you listen. Even when Scott plays a more traditional role, as with the martial tempo he provides for the opening minute of “Don’t Know Why,” he’s apt to shift the rhythm beneath the Halstead/Goswell/Christian Savill guitars in unpredictable ways.
Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before. Lead single “Star Roving” lives up to its interstellar title with easily the largest, most high-velocity guitar attack in the group’s discography. “Go Get It” is even better: a wet hot summer groove with a savagely flashy riff to match Halstead and Goswell’s back-and-forth chorus of “I wanna see it/I wanna feel it.” The words evoke Iggy and the Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” in how they can be interpreted as a quest for spiritual, psychological, or sexual transcendence, depending on your mood. An album this consistently shifty and surprising will likely hit three buttons at some point or other.
About a quarter-century removed from the “The Scene That Celebrates Itself” and the music press that made it infamous, Slowdive reveals what a Slowdive free of that pressure can do. The result isn’t the youthful explosion of their first full-length Just for a Day, nor the polished shot at success of Souvlaki, nor the thrillingly reactionary minimalism of Pygmalion. It’s the work of a band that reformed and recorded by choice, at their own pace, bringing the accrued experience of their entire adult lives to bear on music made outside the crucible for the very first time; no wonder the album, like their debut EP, is self-titled. So forget the weather imagery. Slowdive doesn’t make it look easy. It makes it look hard. Creating music this great almost always is. | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | May 8, 2017 | 8.6 | 5af86db2-78e9-4c05-8c11-8bdbfdf28df6 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | null |
Mark Kozelek’s latest 90-minute dispatch frames his unedited ramblings as a kind of... free jazz? | Mark Kozelek’s latest 90-minute dispatch frames his unedited ramblings as a kind of... free jazz? | Sun Kil Moon: I Also Want to Die in New Orleans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-kil-moon-i-also-want-to-die-in-new-orleans/ | I Also Want to Die in New Orleans | There’s a special kind of panic that sets in when you’re trapped in a one-sided conversation, the powerlessness of realizing that no amount of fidgeting will make the story you never volunteered to hear end any sooner and that, no matter how much your eyes dart across the room, nobody else at the party will come to rescue you. No songwriter has induced that feeling as uncannily over the last half-decade as Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek. Since 2014’s wide-ranging and discursive Benji, he’s doubled down on talk for talk’s sake, sharing ever-longer monologues increasingly devoid of irony, comic coincidence, payoffs, or takeaways, all delivered at the slumberous pace of those first 15 minutes of Marc Maron’s podcast that everybody skips.
Building on the audacious banality of last year’s This Is My Dinner, Kozelek’s latest 90-minute dispatch of unedited thoughts I Also Want To Die in New Orleans goes a step further by framing his ramblings as a kind of free jazz. Recorded with Dirty Three drummer Jim White and Donny McCaslin, the saxophonist who helped drive David Bowie’s Blackstar to transcendence, the record has a limber, late-night session vibe that sets it apart from its predecessors, but anybody coming for the tasteful playing of those accompanists is seriously overestimating Kozelek’s restraint. Hardly a second goes by that isn’t usurped by the drone of his indiscriminate, run-on narration.
Each of these seven songs feels like a Jim’s Journal comic stretched to the length of a Tolstoy novel. The 15-minute “Day in America” opens with news of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, but that grave backdrop gives way to a pedestrian account of a show: Some musicians sit in with Kozelek’s trio, one of them plays a Bill Evans song that Kozelek thinks is brilliant, but he’s furious when he learns it’s a cover, imagining the fallout if he’d unknowingly released it as his own (“Someone would have called me out and said, ‘You ripped off Bill Evans!’”). This goes on for minutes. And then, for no other reason than Bill Evans sounds like Bob Evans, Kozelek details a bad night he had at that chain restaurant when he was 18, which also goes on for minutes. The song ends with a dream sequence.
And amazingly that’s the most eventful song on New Orleans. On the 23-minute “Bay of Kotor” he pets some sickly kittens, and imitates various animal cries and barks. “Cows” considers his relationship with meat: “To give up cow flesh entirely, completely, at this stage in my life, I’m afraid would be very hard for me/For half a century I’ve enjoyed the tasty flavor of cow meat/It tastes so good in my mom’s chop suey.” One of the few songs with a pulse, “Couch Potato” squanders a fluttery, jazzed-out Modest Mouse groove on Kozelek’s ornery political musings and #UnpopularOpinions. Sure, Trump is terrible, he maintains, but Obama separated immigrant children from their parents, too. Never mind that fact checkers beg to differ; fact-checking a song that also includes a dicey aside about Obama’s light skin is wasted energy.
Despite their periodic flirtations with lofty subjects, these songs are deliberately inconsequential, flimsy excuses for Kozelek’s assault of superfluous details, circuitous dialogue, and dead-end asides. The individual parts rarely mean anything, and the whole means even less. Benji’s great trick was its songs only seemed meandering—its winding tales gave way to emotional revelations that were all the more moving because Kozelek sounded like he was processing them in real time. But the songwriting style that seemed so brave on that album feels more than ever like a cowardly cheat on I Also Want To Die in New Orleans, a preemptive attempt by an artist running short on ideas to shield himself from criticism by feigning indifference. After all, you can’t fail if you were never really trying, and from the blurry photo of a cat on its cover to its afterthought of a title, lifted from a poster he saw for last year’s $uicideboy$ album, and the miserable slog of the songs themselves, Kozelek never stops telegraphing how little he cares. | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Caldo Verde | March 8, 2019 | 3.2 | 5afad1db-da2b-4f4a-b58e-9003831aac2a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Certain records are just made for close listening on headphones. Some albums cannot be fully experienced\n\ save a complete ... | Certain records are just made for close listening on headphones. Some albums cannot be fully experienced\n\ save a complete ... | Broken Social Scene: Feel Good Lost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/953-feel-good-lost/ | Feel Good Lost | Certain records are just made for close listening on headphones. Some albums cannot be fully experienced save a complete discontinuation of the outside world. The inner retreat of headphone listening sheds light on a group's true colors; the makeup rubs off, and leaves us to discover all the flaws and inconsistencies in the music's resplendent left/right asymmetry. What on speakers sounds like an extension of a refrigerator's hum may upon closer inspection be revealed as a delicate, pulsating harmony that draws together an otherwise lifeless song. Ambient noises, effects and other tricks are also often lost by stereo speakers' capricious playback tendencies. For such intricate and subtle records, only headphones paint a just portrait, and while they limit themselves to a narrow environment, their payoff can be duly satisfying.
You Forgot It in People, the album that brought Broken Social Scene due prestige last spring, wasn't one of those albums. Though it sounded just as great in the isolation of Prestige Series Grados, the record was a bona fide speaker blaster, full of craggy, overdriven guitar lines and unabashed vocals. It pulled few punches and refused to drown its populism in reverb or overblown production. Part of its appeal was its vulnerability: the diversity of musical styles and songwriting voices, the unashamedly tuneless vocals on songs like "Looks Just Like the Sun". Yet somehow, all its elements came together perfectly to create a work of accidental genius. So it may come as a shock for fans of that record to discover that Broken Social Scene premiered as just another of Canada's many instrumental post-rock bands. Their debut album, Feel Good Lost, features only two separate instances of distorted guitars or impassioned vocals (the raspy strumming on "Love and Mathematics" and the sober murmuring on "Passport Radio", respectively)-- which seems like a great disappointment until you get up close and personal with the record, and realize just how greatly it informed its successor.
Feel Good Lost is the sort of album that does lend itself to intimate listening, and while not nearly as inventive or as well-rounded a statement as You Forgot It in People, it owns its fair share of dazzling moments. The similarity between the two records has more to do with their spirit than with their sound: Feel Good Lost isn't a rock album, but the band affects the same cogitating melancholia that made You Forgot It in People so intimate-- in fact, that record's bittersweet warmth is even more prominent here.
A sense of historical influence permeates the recording, creating a pleasant sense of familiarity. The tangled, chorused guitars of "Guilty Cubicles" evoke Durutti Column at their ethereal best, while a track like "Stomach Song" possesses a blasé cheerfulness that stretches back to Nico-era Velvet Underground. "Stomach Song", in particular, feels affable, featuring a mumbled, repetitive soliloquy, delivered by a breathy female voice over a loop of jumbled talking that at times sounds like an unlikely precursor to The Books' patented crowd-sampling. Some newer influences have also wrestled their way into the mix: "Passport Radio", with its quavering strings and heart-pulse bassdrum, conjures Sigur Rós circa Agaetis Byrjun.
Unfortunately, Broken Social Scene's few attempts to step outside the narrow coordinates of Feel Good Lost's overarching vibe don't always yield successful results-- which is surprising, given how skillfully You Forgot It in People navigated the pop strata. Part of the problem is that the band seems too attached to the things it does well. The record maintains a laser-like focus that runs through all twelve songs. Any and all detours are taken with noticeable wariness, such as "Prison Province", a spare, two-minute porno-esque guitar track that left me slightly bemused, as did the percussion on "Last Place", which wouldn't sound out of place in a Lexus commercial. The song is the album's longest, and at over eight minutes of thin, repetitive drones, it's by far the least engaging track in Broken Social Scene's catalog.
Feel Good Lost is balanced nicely, however, by various embellishments which help break the occasional monotony, and even hint at the more confident band that produced last year's paramount orch-pop opus: A harmonica breathes life into the feeble "Blues for Uncle Gibb"; rustic strings add a fragile touch of broke-down sadness to "Mossbreaker"; diced drum loops drive the otherwise subdued "Love and Mathematics". Feel Good Lost may inhabit a much smaller plot of land than its successor, but the ground on which it rests has been just as thoroughly reared and cultivated. | 2004-02-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-02-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Noise Factory | February 17, 2004 | 7.5 | 5b14946f-ecaa-4bd3-ac25-95d94d0a059e | Pitchfork | null |
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Sleeper's title can be seen as a comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy but it also has a deeper resonance. It's a largely acoustic album that meditates on death and loss, a record that owes a debt to Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch. | Sleeper's title can be seen as a comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy but it also has a deeper resonance. It's a largely acoustic album that meditates on death and loss, a record that owes a debt to Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch. | Ty Segall: Sleeper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18398-ty-segall-sleeper/ | Sleeper | As a recent promotional tour video pointed out, Sleeper's title can be seen as a comment on Ty Segall's own prolificacy. But it also has a deeper resonance. Last December, the singer and guitarist's adopted father died after a long battle with cancer, and shortly after, Segall stopped speaking to his mother. (He doesn't go into detail in interviews, saying only "she did some bad stuff.") Speaking to NPR, he called this period of his life a "weird, intense time," and Sleeper is a document of what came out of him in that moment. "It was kind of a purge, to be honest," he said.
Gone is the brazen, screaming Segall behind Slaughterhouse, Melted, and Twins. Even the relatively sedate Goodbye Bread, with its exploding heads and angry California commercials, featured a more intense Segall than the one who made Sleeper. "When I was making [Sleeper], I couldn't have written a loud, heavy song if somebody had paid me to," he said. Instead, he picked up his acoustic guitar and made something that owes less to Sabbath and more to Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan or early Bert Jansch. The title track opens quietly with a whistle, and slowly, he strums a minor chord progression louder and louder. "Oh sleeper/ My dreamer/ I dream a dream for you," he sings. It's a gentle track that Segall said was initially written for his slumbering girlfriend, but Sleeper's much weightier symbolic connotations of sleeping and dreaming hang heavy over the album.
While the album's tone and pacing seem to reflect its initial inspiration, the lyrics are rarely confessional in the most explicit sense-- any references to Segall's personal life are cloaked in more broadly relatable terms. Occasionally specific details pop out ("He packed his bags this morning/ He bought his ticket today/ Don't you go away/ Not today," he sings on "She Don't Care"), and he gets slightly more blunt with "Crazy", which is sung to a "little one," offering comfort because "He's here/ He's still here/ Though she is crazy." Segall said that "Crazy" was written spontaneously the moment he recorded it-- something he's never done before-- about his mother. "It’s kind of that thing where a person crosses a line and you just snap," he said. "You hit a point where you don’t care how it affects that person because you just have to say it so you can move on." The way he talks about the song, it's easy to imagine a diatribe, but it's a catchy, sweet, two-and-a-half minute song with a lyrical twist. For all its personal significance, "Crazy" is as open-ended as Segall's best songs.
So after all his shrieking, shredding, and psychedelic freakouts last year, Sleeper offers a welcome sonic respite. It's easily his most stripped down effort to date, full of elegantly simple, catchy, well-crafted songs. And although everything's acoustic, aside from one well-placed electric solo near the end of "The Man Man", the album's packed with subtle diversity. While "6th Street" recalls the more psychedelic-leaning folk he made with Tim Presley on Hair, "The West" could've been plucked from the rambling Carter Family songbook. Then there's "Queen Lullabye", with its distant-sounding falsetto, sludgy guitar, droning low-end, and trudging-through-molasses pace.
But even when he's switching things up on Sleeper, the album never feels as scatterbrained as his previous work. Goodbye Bread opened with a sing-songy ballad and went straight into a shout. Twins featured psychedelia and garage pop. Melted had acoustic-driven catchiness and blown-out fuzz. Those albums could pull off a scattershot of styles with well-placed transitions, but Sleeper is something else. Everything here easily lives in the same universe-- 10 tracks of similarly hued songs, all of a piece. It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best. | 2013-08-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 21, 2013 | 8.2 | 5b17edc1-0426-4a22-9b2a-3b788f1a9ed2 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
After elongating his brand of retro-futurism to great song lengths, the Norweigan producer crafts an achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record. | After elongating his brand of retro-futurism to great song lengths, the Norweigan producer crafts an achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record. | Lindstrøm & Christabelle: Real Life Is No Cool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13848-real-life-is-no-cool/ | Real Life Is No Cool | As supportive as Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's fans have been of his random acts of creative fitfulness, one wouldn't blame them for feeling a bit tested by his most recent string of output. Between his brilliant but impractical 2008 long-player Where You Go I Go Too and his 42-minute refit of "Little Drummer Boy", two of the Norwegian producer's recent major releases have accounted for nearly 100 minutes of music across a scant four tracks. In a scene where an elongated 12-minute remix is par for the course, that's still hard going.
Real Life Is No Cool isn't just the achingly stylish and neatly accessible dance record to end all that, it also constitutes a fresh new take on the strand of retro-futurism that Lindstrøm helped create. The main difference is that whereas a lot of his output has been rooted in a genre-- disco, Balearic, new age-- Real Life Is No Cool often feels more like an attack on the very idea. It's almost as if Lindstrøm's response to years of genre exercise has been to atomise all of his influences into mist. What remains is a free-floating collection of sounds that not only still works as pastiche, but also somehow provides the basis for a remarkable dance record.
Of course, it might well be that the reason Lindstrøm finds it easier to play loose with his productions is because he's got a voice like Christabelle's to anchor them. A Norwegian with Mauritian roots, she slides effortlessly into pretty much any groove he provides, moving between slippery spoken word and breathy falsetto with equal ease. Evidently years in the making, Real Life Is No Cool functions partly as a chronicle of the pair's working relationship, spanning as far back as 2003, when she was still recording under the name Solale. While those early collaborations, including the slinky Italo of "Music (In My Mind)" and the fluttering space disco workout "Let's Practise", make repeat appearances here, they barely hold their own alongside most of the newer material.
Of the fresher tracks, the most immediate are probably "So Much Fun", a scattershot slice of end-of-the-evening disco that rivals Scissor Sisters at their friskiest; "Baby Can't Stop", an unequivocally shameless tribute to Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson that deserves airplay in even spite of Aeroplane's original-dwarfing remix; and "Lovesick", an irresistibly slinky head-nodder. Ultimately though, it's the slightly more unstructured, harder to hold tracks that make the most lasting impressions. Album opener "Looking For What" surfs along on a wobbly arpeggio, an occasional guitar chug, diffuse piano chords, and spoken-word samples; the stunning "Keep It Up" manages to transform a distinctly cheesy retro synth chime into a thing of effortless gorgeousness; and "High & Low" starts with a stodgy 1980s sitcom theme vamp before melting into something deliriously woozy. If the man and his long songs have been off your mixtape radar for the last little while, this should see an end to that. | 2010-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Smalltown Supersound | January 20, 2010 | 8.1 | 5b1e499c-080b-47dc-9b1f-3b3108b53f85 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Two years after helping to define a genre with the Life of Leisure EP, Ernest Greene returns with a satisfying full-length expansion of his sound. | Two years after helping to define a genre with the Life of Leisure EP, Ernest Greene returns with a satisfying full-length expansion of his sound. | Washed Out: Within and Without | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15614-within-and-without/ | Within and Without | Despite being the butt of jokes because of its goofy but actually spot-on name, chillwave as an idea and a sound is here to stay. Synthesizers are in; guitar-based rock has taken a backseat to diffuse, rhythmic dance music; and the sound's key influences (broken, blissed-out electronica, hip-hop) have leached into most interesting music happening right now.
So, where does a significant subgenre defined by the less-than-lofty goal of manufacturing good vibes go next? The artists either do the same thing with the same synth presets to diminishing returns (Memory Tapes, Small Black, Teen Daze) or they pull a Toro Y Moi on Underneath the Pine and morph into something different altogether. The former creates music that can seem a little too comfortable, and the latter, while admirable, could come over as a bit alarmist-- a calculated response to the critics.
The first full-length from Washed Out doesn't have an on-repeat banger like "Feel It All Around" on it, and it isn't a sea change. Instead it's a sly, solid release that can fade into the background but has the ability to jump out and take hold of your ears. It sounds great on headphones and even better coming out of speakers in a car or at a party, where it can breathe a little. When Washed Out's Ernest Greene spoke to Pitchfork recently, he noted that he was working on the album in the same place that Goodie Mob were hammering out their reunion album. Quite different from the laptop on mom and dad's back porch that birthed Life of Leisure.
Ben Allen, who helped beef up Animal Collective's sound for Merriweather Post Pavilion, produced the album, and while Within and Without isn't too shiny or expensive, the more professional approach rewards multiple listens. There are delicate, lasting production flourishes like the cracking snares on "Echoes" and the impenetrable web of fashion-show synths on "Before" that give way to an agitated disco-like jerk. Drums are bold and complex, reflecting the almost Pete Rock-aping found on Washed Out's tour-only Untitled EP, and live instruments are used for atmosphere the way samples were before. One of the most chilling, affecting moments of Within and Without happens when cello swings through "Far Away".
The album's also very sensual and not just because of the American Apparel-lite album cover. Its beats slink along like those Public Enemy drums creeping through Madonna's "Justify My Love", and there's a lush, snowy warmth to the production (one of the songs is even called "Soft"). No longer a stand-alone Adult Swim-released single, "You And I", featuring Chairlift's Caroline Polachek, is the soundtrack to a tender, Sunday morning make-out session, and well, just listen to that throbbing bassline. "Sade but a bit more shy," or "Trip-hop intended for making love rather than fucking" kinda describes what's going on here. "A Dedication", the album ender, eschews airy ornate production for fragile piano and Greene's least mumbly, most direct vocal performance. It's a purposeful period at the end of the album; the point where the record stops worrying about dancing and seems intent to curl up and get cozy.
Within and Without is a declaration to snarky ironists that there is nothing to be ashamed of with this sound. "Feel It All Around", Neon Indian's "Should Have Taken Acid With You", and Toro Y Moi's "Blessa" entered this rarefied, awesome space between indie pop catchiness and fragile, narcotic groove, and here's a whole album of tracks on that level. That it comes at a time when others have abandoned the genre or quickly jumped on and then off to raise the stakes and get respectable, is even more impressive. Greene has made an elegant, subtle album in a genre that primarily values the single mp3 and, every once in a while, a 12" or cassette tape. Within and Without is an excellent demonstration of what happens when, even after the buzz-band cycle has faded, you continue to investigate a sound on your own hushed, ambitious terms. | 2011-07-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sub Pop / Weird World | July 11, 2011 | 8.3 | 5b2418a3-2ef3-4763-944a-f54265e4cb3c | Brandon Soderberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-soderberg/ | null |
Blink-182's seventh album wants to be a pop-punk eminence album, evidence humbly submitted that this aging pack of skater brats is still young, selectively dumb, and full of commiserating angst. | Blink-182's seventh album wants to be a pop-punk eminence album, evidence humbly submitted that this aging pack of skater brats is still young, selectively dumb, and full of commiserating angst. | Blink-182: California | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22080-california/ | California | Much like a malcontent teen at a strip mall, killing a weekend's hours while nursing the pulpy dregs of a Jamba Juice, the internet has once again met the challenge of making something from almost nothing. This time, the subject of their dedication is a 16-second track from Blink-182’s seventh album, California called “Built This Pool.” Covers have been uploaded. Annotations have been cribbed. The band themselves knotted it in a narcotizing 10-hour loop that seems to contain all the world’s traumas and solutions. All for a cavernously stupid pop-punk blip in which frontman Mark Hoppus yelps, in entirety, “Woo woo/I wanna see some naked dudes/That’s why I built this pooo-oooo-oool.”
These endeavors as valuable as any, to be clear; the song remains hilarious, for the virtual minutes of my life I’ve dedicated to replaying it. It’s a nice jolt back to the group’s gleeful heyday, when flapping their rude bits up and down So Cal was high art to a nation of TRL viewers, and their infectious three-chord screeds belied real, sly wisdom. (It’s also a fairly unprecedented bout of brevity; the spiritual antecedent is the Take Off Your Pants and Jacket cut “Happy Holidays You Bastard,” which clocks a robust 42 seconds.) If the entire album was stuffed similarly, with sneeze-length quips and short stabs of power chords, California would seem no less anomalous for what it’s trying to be: the pop-punk eminence album, evidence humbly submitted that an aging pack of skater brats hasn’t jumped off the hedonic treadmill just yet and is still young, selectively dumb, and full of commiserating angst.
The album is a much slicker petition, though. It opens with a bald-faced admission of nerves, a level stare that doubles as a keen bit of reverse psychology. “There’s a cynical feeling saying I should give up/You said everything you’ll ever say,” Hoppus sighs on “Cynical,” the reedy edge of his voice unchanged. “There’s a moment of panic when I hear the phone ring/Anxiety’s calling in my head.” The glum pall quickly dissipates into the sort of doubletime thrash that powers most garage punk, but it never entirely leaves the record; the earnest California takes plenty of time to sprawl out, from wound-licking power ballads (“Home Is Such a Lonely Place,” “Hey I’m Sorry”) to high-shine navel-gazings that hew closely to past hits. The solemn “Bored to Death” rides a rubbery guitar intro just one note inverted from “Adam’s Song,” a hit from their 1999 breakout Enema of the State, and boasts a chorus deep in conviction only (“Life is too short to last long”).
As the title suggests, a Red Hot Chili Peppers-level obsession with the Golden State serves an undercurrent; “Los Angeles” won’t score any Schwarzenegger tourism ads soon. An ode to “San Diego,” their hometown, rings equally fatalist as a swift chanty about idyllic, surely impossible return. But there are less skilled diplomats to deliver this: especially in the spry, up-pace moments, Hoppus remains an appealing vocalist, determined and frayed, and Travis Barker’s drums are crisp. New addition Matt Skiba, erstwhile frontman of Alkaline Trio, cops some lead vocal duties with a gruff edge that complements Hoppus, and doesn’t attempt to copy the irreverence of his predecessor Tom DeLonge (who’s now thornily fixated on chasing UFOs). The many blithe punk bands their outfits influenced–Paramore, Fall Out Boy–were birthed from this nexus long before it existed on one stage.
There’s one more quick blast of total absurdity here: “Brohemian Rhapsody,” a whole 30 seconds of driving guitars and drum fills with a tinny, sole quip as lyrics: “There’s something about you/That I can’t quite put my finger in.” These two snippets couldn’t be the first dumb little jams Blink-182 committed to tape, not by a long shot, so it speaks to a canny professionalism over the years that we’re just hearing some now. And while the conceit was funnier earlier, even 10 tracks earlier—when our pants fit better and our eyes were wider—it’s still pretty damn likable. | 2016-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Viking Wizard Eyes | July 6, 2016 | 5.5 | 5b28d39b-5e81-4d03-927d-f97a60cbf29b | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
A collection of stuttering, stately, and studiously weird disco songs associated with producer/writer/performer August Darnell. | A collection of stuttering, stately, and studiously weird disco songs associated with producer/writer/performer August Darnell. | Kid Creole: Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11418-going-places-the-august-darnell-years-1976-1983/ | Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983 | "Like the Seminole, Navajo, Kickapoo/ Like those Indians, I'm an Indian too." These are words you will find rolling around your mind, for reasons all out of sorts, after listening to the maniacally infectious disco of August Darnell. (Prepare, too, to take stock of the Chippewa, Iroquois, Omaha, and Sioux, lest other tribes go underrepresented.) The couplet comes from "I'm an Indian Too" by Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band, one of many acts commanded by Darnell during an era when disco knew no bounds. It certainly didn't on any of the tracks compiled on Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1976-1983, a collection of stuttering, stately, and studiously weird disco songs that have to be heard to be believed. Darnell was involved in Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band before branching out as a writer/producer for other acts (many on the fabled crypto-disco label Ze Records) and then for his own group Kid Creole & the Coconuts. Common to them all are theatrical airs, irrepressible grooves, and fateful moments, however subtle or pronounced, that give rise to reactions classifiable only as WTF?!?!
The new compilation starts with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band's "Sunshower", a spritzy song that has become ubiquitous thanks to samples by Ghostface and M.I.A., among others. From there, Going Places goes places where idiosyncrasy and ambition reign. The title track, by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, struts through a funky mix of rhythm guitar and dryly shaken cymbals before breaking for a vibraphone solo and an eerie few-note guitar refrain that plays like something out of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". In "Is That All There Is?", singer Cristina broods about nightlife boredom with coy high-style jadedness before assenting to "let's keep dancing" (and this in the midst of a musique concrète interlude complete with cuckoo clock and restless crowd sounds).
Some of the songs on Going Places were made for dance-theater projects in the East Village in the 1980s, but one gets the sense that, for Darnell, a blank reel of tape was as conducive to theatricality as any commissioned stage. The parade of vocalists on display-- snappy divas, choruses of kids, uncertain guys who sound like they were just pulled away from sweeping up the studio-- makes for an uncommonly wide range of expression. And the music follows suit. The disco-vocal histrionics in Machine's "There But for the Grace of God Go I", so intense you can practically see the veins rising on the singers' foreheads, sound calm compared to a synth-streaked instrumental breakdown with sweaty funk guitars and blitzing bass runs too controlled to worry over mere concerns of the humanly realm. A similar mood plays out in slow songs like Aural Exciters' "Emile (Night Rate)", which cycles through a carnival of ideas without rising above a simmer.
The most striking aspect of Going Places is how little a sense of novelty figures into songs so outrageously playful and weird. The bizarre parts are never bizarre for no reason, and they're played (often by many, many band members) with too much spirit and skill to rate as stunts. It's hard to imagine dance music half as grand and imaginative being made today. But then, August Darnell would be hard to account for in any era. | 2008-05-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-05-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Strut | May 12, 2008 | 8.6 | 5b29f08d-cf49-4cfd-8c93-f74904ffb325 | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
Always defined by their eccentricities, the Decemberists offer a tangled narrative set to thick stoner-metal sludge and prog-folk arpeggios. | Always defined by their eccentricities, the Decemberists offer a tangled narrative set to thick stoner-metal sludge and prog-folk arpeggios. | The Decemberists: The Hazards of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12842-the-hazards-of-love/ | The Hazards of Love | Nobody got into the Decemberists for the riffs. In other ways, though, the theatrical Portland folk-rockers' noble sojourn into heavy narrative prog-folk was probably always in the stars. Ornately antiquarian diction was their Ziggy Stardust. Ginormous song suites based on world folklore were their deaf, dumb, and blind kid. Yes, they were meant for The Wall.
In an interview with Paste, singing guitarist/songwriter Colin Meloy mentioned that The Hazards of Love was "initially conceived as a musical... but I decided about halfway through my time in France that it wasn't going to work as a stage piece. But it would still work as a rock record, so that's where it ended up." Alas, for all the derring-do of the Decemberists' resolutely un-sold-out (I guess?) fifth album, its failures as a stage piece may explain some of the problems that hamper it as a rock record.
It makes sense that the Decemberists would end up here. A willingness to make their fans put in some work, whether with fancy language or sprawling song suites, has been part of their steez ever since the baroque reveries of 2002 debut Castaways and Cutouts and stagey bookishness of 2003 breakthrough Her Majesty-- both of which still kick pantaloon. After 2004's The Tain EP flashed the first signs of metalhead envy, Picaresque a year later ended the Decemberists' indie years with their most relatable and poppiest album (still my favorite of theirs). Capitol debut The Crane Wife showed no symptoms of what Meloy had termed "major-label sellout-itis".
The Hazards of Love, inspired by UK folkie Anne Briggs' 1966 EP of the same name, has thick stoner-metal sludge and peat-bogged prog-folk arpeggios. Tucker Martine, who mixed The Crane Wife, produces exactly right for the material, focusing on the songs. Multi-instrumentalist Jenny Conlee and bassist Nate Query add several string arrangements. Robyn Hitchcock adds subtle electric guitar textures on an instrumental interlude, and My Morning Jacket's Jim James and the Spinanes' Rebecca Gates are in there somewhere, too. Still, although the album's grandiose narrative about star-crossed lovers William and Margaret-- and the dastardly villains who beset them-- has some nice twists, it's not exactly Andrew Lloyd Webber. Usually here's where I'm supposed to say, "That's OK, you don't have to follow the plot, because the songs stand on their own"-- except, with a few exceptions, they don't, not quite.
It doesn't simplify things that Meloy sings the parts of multiple characters, also including "First Voice" and "The Rake". The blessedly thorough lyric sheet makes advance mp3s like dark infanticide memoir "The Rake's Song" a lot funnier, full of witty wordplay ("I was wedded and it whetted my thirst") and sly foreshadowing ("You think that I would be haunted"-- he will be), but reading isn't the same as listening. Too much work, not enough payoff. (Hmm, imagine that.)
Not that the Decemberists' latest has anywhere near the smugness that haters might wrongly expect-- they sang "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade", calling "all bed wetters", after all. "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid", in which Meloy's William argues against the Queen to set him free to be with his beloved, has blazing classic-rock riffs and a commanding vocal by My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. (The reprise is less essential, unless you're still following the plot.) Worden returns on the "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing", which has blistering dynamic shifts, an organ solo, and plenty of lurching Black Mountain heaviness. Surprisingly, it all sounds like the Decemberists, at least if you've been paying attention over the years.
For the love songs, then, The Hazards of Love puts on some Nashville twang. Pedal steel cries alongside swaying accordion on "Isn't it a Lovely Night?", with a precious post-orgasm (post-Pete & the Pirates?) pun. As the pregnant Margaret, Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark is a welcome pairing for Meloy, smiling with Princess Bride-like serenity through her worries on "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; Meloy's voice is at its vulnerable best on the trembling meadow-makeout ballad "The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)". I can take the undead children chanting on "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)", but not the watery wedding vows on the drunken finale-- what can I say, I really, really didn't like Titanic.
Enough happens musically on The Hazards of Love that I can still see it being fun for fans in a live setting, especially if you know the lyrics. On disc, though, it's largely missing the catchy choruses and verisimilar emotions that previously served as ballast for the Decemberists' gaudy eccentricities. As a turn toward metal, The Tain EP's smaller portion was more satisfying-- although, as mid-career change-ups go, this is still a fair piece more enjoyable than something like MMJ's Evil Urges.
"Doing The Hazards of Love took a lot out of me," Meloy confides in the press bio. "And I'm definitely curious what will come out now that I've got this out of my system." The Decemberists already released three non-album singles last year, compiled as the Always the Bridesmaid EP; "Sleepless", a lovely orchestral lullaby from the recent Dark Was the Night charity compilation, suggests the Decemberists still have plenty more nautical epics to perform. "I've got nothing to hold onto," Meloy sings. A friend of Bobby McGee's once called that feeling freedom, and it only took a four-and-a-half-minute song. | 2009-03-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | March 23, 2009 | 5.7 | 5b2cfbb9-db5a-48b1-8bbe-e7c5683e4754 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Techno artist and White Material label cofounder Young Male branches off from floor fillers on his latest. This is dank, ominous, beat-free music that suggests a certain weary fatalism. | Techno artist and White Material label cofounder Young Male branches off from floor fillers on his latest. This is dank, ominous, beat-free music that suggests a certain weary fatalism. | Young Male: How to Disappear in America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22536-how-to-disappear-in-america/ | How to Disappear in America | In the beginning, New York’s White Material label prized an ethos of function over form, packaging gruff, no-frills techno in plain white sleeves. Their logo depicted a hard-hatted technician strapped to a telephone pole: “Working man’s techno,” read a phrase stamped on the label's first release. (There is an element of fantasy at work here; a few of the label's artists are RISD grads, and at least one works by day as a graphic designer.) None of the crew’s members stripped his records more mercilessly to the bone than co-founder Young Male, aka Quinn Taylor, who came up with the label’s slogan during a stint working in a hand tool factory.
As recently as September, when he released Hot for Destiny and the Street, his second full EP for the label, Young Male was still applying himself primarily to stern, basement-quaking floor-fillers. His peers, meanwhile, had developed distinct musical identities: Galcher Lustwerk became known for his barbiturate house beats and hypnotic baritone; DJ Richard’s debut album, for Dial, put a chilly ambient spin on techno. Both producers’ music is unmistakable for the work of anyone else, but Young Male’s minor-key throb felt ego-free, a kind of ur-techno that was less about authorial genius than collective release: DJ tools meant to keep dancefloors running smoothly.
Now, though, with his debut album, Taylor makes his own pivot toward auteur status. How to Disappear in America sounds unlike anything he’s done before. This is not a dance record. The tracks are short and sketch-like. The tempos are slow, the lighting crepuscular. A few tracks feature no beats at all, and when percussion does appear, it’s a rickety pitter-pat pulse that sounds as cutting-edge as the home organ in your great-aunt’s living room, and as hard-hitting as the tapping fingernails of an ASMR video.
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s influence looms large over the record’s pensive pulses and gravelly pedal tones. How to Disappear in America resembles a soundtrack in other ways, too. Its titles read like film cues (“Franklin’s Theme,” “Into the Night,” “Fade”) and its pursuit of atmosphere is all-consuming. It is resolutely minor-key, and his analog synths have a bitter tinge to them.
Occasionally, a pinprick of light punctuates the murk. “Muzak” makes surprising use of fretless bass and oily tenor saxophone, evoking the glass bricks and neon lights of a decades-old softcore video found in a discarded box of VHS tapes. And while “Carrier” is little more than a gloomy bass pulse buffeted by a cold, unforgiving wind, there’s a hint of the Durutti Column in the silvery guitar line that sprouts from it like a sturdy desert cactus.
Mostly, though, bleakness predominates. “Into the Night” channels the drone of bomber jets into a short, sinister ambient sketch, and “Franklin’s Theme” wraps its hi-hat rhythms with a coppery and noxious monotone. “Reveal (Pacific Coast Highway 1 Version)” is strikingly reminiscent of the Cure’s “Carnage Visors,” the soundtrack to a film the band opened their concerts with on 1981’s Picture tour.
That song, reissued on the expanded edition of Faith, stretched a single riff into a 28-minute dirge, and Young Male’s short, funereal album—itself just 28 minutes long—functions in similar ways. Almost claustrophobic in its cohesion, it sounds like it was made using only a handful of obsolete machines, and the manner in which it worries away at the same few sounds and themes suggests a certain weary fatalism, a sense of running out of options. In Young Male’s America, all roads are dead ends. | 2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | White Material | December 7, 2016 | 7.4 | 5b2ff2af-143e-4db4-bc37-f004df9e4ea5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Australian rapper returns with her first album in five years, sounding not just unrepentant but also tediously uninterested in growing or challenging herself. | The Australian rapper returns with her first album in five years, sounding not just unrepentant but also tediously uninterested in growing or challenging herself. | Iggy Azalea: In My Defense | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iggy-azalea-in-my-defense/ | In My Defense | Iggy Azalea wants you to know she’s not sorry. She mentions this on every track of her new album, braiding it into brags about her money and her body until they snarl together in a petty wreath. It’s an odd package for a record with high stakes: This is her first album in five years, after her planned 2016 release Digital Distortion was shelved, and the first she’s released on her independent label. In those years, she has cemented a reputation built on appropriation and controversy. Name a major artist—Halsey, Snoop Dogg, the cartoon character Peppa Pig—and Iggy has entangled herself in some sort of feud with them. On an album with the unsubtle title In My Defense, she attempts to cast herself as a victim while further distorting and dismissing the cultures she takes from. Less than three minutes into the album, she raps, “Because I talk like this and my ass fat/They be saying Iggy tryna act black.” A few tracks later, she drops the record’s thesis: “I started to say sorry, but fuck that shit.”
Didn’t we cancel Iggy Azalea? Maybe because of the nature of the internet, or because of the privilege that Iggy both willfully ignores and has worn as a shield throughout her career, she’s somewhat positioned for a comeback; media outlets have been hinting at her potential victorious return for years. This album could have been an opportunity to show an ounce of contrition, to own up to her mistakes and demonstrate that she has learned. Iggy is talented: a four-time Grammy nominee with the vocal toolkit and dancefloor command that allowed her to jump on and invigorate hits. (On “Fancy,” she handily eclipsed Charli XCX, a feat that few of Charli’s collaborators have managed.) But talent isn’t an excuse, and on this album, it’s almost irrelevant.
“I just knew I wanted to go to America and be a rapper and have a ponytail and a leopard-skin jacket that went down to my feet, and like, 20 white, fluffy dogs on one leash,” she told Dazed and Confused in 2012. The album is stacked with cartoonish approximations of what she thinks a rap song should sound like: shivers of bass, the occasional “skrrrt,” Mad Libs of designer brands and bodily fluids. Many sound like direct imitations of the rappers she admires. “Sally Walker,” the best song on the album, features sparkling piano chords similar to Cardi B’s “Money” (J. White produced both songs). The exhausting, Juicy J-featuring “Freak of the Week” sounds like a rejected track by Megan Thee Stallion, whose debut album features her own song with the Memphis rapper. She hisses “lil’ bitch” in a way that sounds like Rico Nasty.
It’s possible Iggy sees herself as a pioneer who paved the way for female rappers. Her album starts with “Thanks I Get,” a paltry diatribe about the “little mes” she claims to see. Women have been rapping as well as men for as long as rap has existed, but it’s only now, years after Iggy came on the scene, that they seem to be inching towards getting equal attention. Iggy Azalea is not the only current rapper who fills songs with dreary, monotonous references to sex and money, but many find creative, amusing, and even raw ways to write and spit about both. Instead, Iggy crams her songs with one-liners that sound like branded Instagram captions: “I waste my wine before I ever waste my time”; “Catch flights not feelings.” Even worse are the banal repetitions: “I just wanna nut,” she whispers over a bastardized “Push It” sample, subjecting us to the word “nut” 15 times in under three minutes. Mixed metaphors wilt over predictable beats. I found myself bobbing along automatically to the slumped synths and handclaps, then wanting to hit “next” after 30 seconds of each song.
For an album so concerned about “haters,” the worst we see comes from Iggy herself. “They call me racist/Only thing I like is green and blue faces,” she sneers, managing to corrode and embarrass herself in one line. Rather than penitence, she offers only a garish caricature. Her only defense is to further offend. | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Bad Dreams / Empire | July 25, 2019 | 3.8 | 5b383b10-acea-4bbc-96e3-187f7b4f9083 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The country star’s sixth album is an endlessly pretty back-to-basics record focused on growing and bettering oneself. It’s a balm, even if her sharp songwriting has dulled a bit. | The country star’s sixth album is an endlessly pretty back-to-basics record focused on growing and bettering oneself. It’s a balm, even if her sharp songwriting has dulled a bit. | Kacey Musgraves: Deeper Well | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacey-musgraves-deeper-well/ | Deeper Well | You only have to listen to the last few weeks in pop music to understand that, yes, Saturn has very much returned. There are its icy rings barging into Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine in “Saturn Returns Interlude,” a brief explainer about the astrological notion that after the 29 years or so it takes for Saturn to orbit the sun, major life transitions may ensue. SZA begged its ammonia-yellow light to shine on her in Lana teaser “Saturn.” And now here is Kacey Musgraves, welcoming back the gassy giant to remind her that some people are givers and some are takers and she’s well shot of the latter on “Deeper Well,” the title track of her sixth studio album.
The pro forma language of astrology, tarot, and therapy is all over the charts lately. These are great boons to the famous: ways for them to venture relatability without disclosure, and to make the listener feel centered in the music, too. While you, a civilian, may never know what it’s like to feel dogged by deuxmoi, I’m a Leo and so are you! On the endlessly pretty Deeper Well, Musgraves encounters energy vampires, boundaries, moon bathing, the mycelium network, the power of jade stone, and breaking patterns that no longer serve her; the song “Dinner With Friends” is a torn-out gratitude journal page. The wistful folksy vibe is very much “pottering around your local wellness shop picking up crystals and sniffing the hand-rolled palo santo incense.” Sageing my cynicism momentarily, these things seem to have genuinely helped Musgraves as a person, and all power to her. But as songwriting concerns, they wash out the erstwhile country radical’s incisiveness, her winks, her delightfully subverted cliches, and turn a beloved outsider into a solipsist. Once she’s sweetly bid “goodbye to the people that I feel are real good at wasting my time” on the second song, the world outside is all but gone.
Deeper Well is Musgraves’ back-to-basics record after 2021’s conflicted star-crossed. Written after her divorce from fellow country singer Ruston Kelly, the lyrics were fragile and vulnerable but came in sleek pop packaging with Lemonade-sized ambitions. It didn’t connect in the same way as her 2018 psychedelic opus Golden Hour. You might imagine her next step to be another corrective, whether commercial or creative, but Deeper Well beats a further retreat. “I don’t care for money or fame,” Musgraves sings on an album that exudes disregard in its rainy-day strums and glazed vocal refrains. There are teases of more compelling directions not taken: Those lyrics are from highlight “Heaven Is,” which, like “Jade Green,” has the mournful formality of traditional British folk in its spindles. The influence of Nick Drake and Linda Thompson collides with Musgraves’ Texan roots on the yearning opener “Cardinal,” which unavoidably evokes “California Dreamin’”—but also the impeccable The Trials of Van Occupanther by her fellow Lone Star druids Midlake. It makes the idea of Musgraves striking out on a folk-rock quest over the existential plains sound extremely appealing.
Instead, the understated music on Deeper Well fits its theme: Comfort and care are life’s biggest prizes and the fear of upending that careful balance is what keeps you up at night. (“I think about you often/Worrying that I might drive/The nail into the coffin,” from “Nothing to Be Scared Of,” might be the album’s best lyric.) When there are details, they are delicate: “Giver/Taker,” one of several songs about how all one really needs is love, is sparsely wreathed with banjo and cello and has an intricate beauty. “The Architect,” the lone song with Musgraves’ old core co-writer, Shane McAnally, sticks out for its nesting Russian doll structure, mirroring Musgraves’ worried spiral about whether there’s logic to the universe.
Awareness of death hovers over some of these songs—“Cardinal” remembers a lost friend and wonders if a bird is bringing “a message from the other side” and the self-possessed “Dinner With Friends” loses some of its saccharine quality when Musgraves reveals that she’s imagining what she “would miss from the other side”—yet there’s rarely more than a shadow to the arrangements. From someone who flipped off the country establishment and vaulted beyond it two albums back, it’s perversely captivating to witness her sounding so cautious. The palliative “Sway” is about Musgraves’ desire to “let go” so that “maybe one day/I’ll learn how to sway.” The sunflower-bright wooziness suggests she’s got that licked.
For an album predicated on having cast off the superficial shit, Deeper Well is frustratingly short on what happens when you really wiggle your toes in the dirt. On the title track, Musgraves remembers her curiosity as a small-town Texan kid: Her family had what they needed, “but the world was as flat as a plate/And that’s OK/The things I was taught/Only took me so far/Had to figure the rest out myself,” smartly acknowledging her pride in her roots and her instinct that the picture was bigger than she had been told. As a young woman she developed an expansive and discerning worldview that brought her this far, which gets a cursory nod in “Dinner With Friends” when she memorializes “my home state of Texas/The sky there, the horses and dogs/But none of their laws.” Her inquiring eye, once so sharp on hypocrisy and sanctimony, is now a bit rheumy. The midnight campfire strum of “Heart of the Woods” takes the fungal web that lets plants communicate as a toothless metaphor for how it’s human nature “to look out for each other … when there is danger.” It sounds like a dream because it is one. Similarly, the tastefully twilit (and unusually hooky) “Lonely Millionaire” finds a pop star reminding her listeners that money and diamonds “can’t buy you true happiness.”
Deeper Well is the latest addition to a canon of refusenik pop records from young women burned by the spotlight: Lorde’s Solar Power, Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, Ariana Grande’s post-2018 output, Hayley Williams’ Petals for Armor, Clairo’s Sling, even perhaps Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore. They are curious artifacts. It is entirely positive that we have started to reckon with the toll that business demands and grossly unfair scrutiny take on these archetypal figures. These records are often products and expressions of the therapy necessitated by that toll, embodying the revelations about quietude and self-worth that therapy so often suggests. Yet they still exist in a pop infrastructure and function, as pop unavoidably does in this moment, as celebrity texts. This creates some tension between why they’re made and who they best serve. Deeper Well is sympathetically fame-agnostic and focused on steadying Musgraves’ axis, but its emollient balms also aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of.
I almost feel guilty for saying the poppiest song is the standout: “Anime Eyes” is as gorgeously weird as the best of Golden Hour, a paean to a lover who makes stars and hearts burst from Musgraves’ lashes as if they were besotted cartoon teenagers. It spirals skyward on a rapturous rush of memories that stumbles adorably, backed by Daft Punk-robotic vocal effects. For the length of the middle-eight, you understand exactly how it feels to be transformed by cosmic forces beyond your control. | 2024-03-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Interscope / MCA Nashville | March 14, 2024 | 6.8 | 5b3cc315-9f48-4093-adb1-37e3bf17373b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
For as many people who saw their idealized selves in Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, Lodger was the first time David Bowie really seemed accessible—a character with flaws and frailties, petty thoughts and grocery lists; someone who doesn't just dabble in reality but lives in it. | For as many people who saw their idealized selves in Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, Lodger was the first time David Bowie really seemed accessible—a character with flaws and frailties, petty thoughts and grocery lists; someone who doesn't just dabble in reality but lives in it. | David Bowie: Lodger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21476-lodger/ | Lodger | [Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
The thing to know about David Bowie's 1979 album Lodger is that there really isn't anything special to know: No creation myth, no alter ego, no 10-minute-long song-suites or spooky instrumentals or pretentious backstories about George Orwell and "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock." Actually, Lodger might be the first David Bowie album marketed as nothing more than an album of recorded music by David Bowie. "I would like to do something rivetingly new and, uh, earth shattering," he said in a radio interview a few days before the album's release. "Every Saturday I want to do that!" Then, self-mockery: "Let's do something earth shattering. No, let's put the telly on*.*" A few minutes later, his digression on the metaphorical impacts of science fiction on personal identity is interrupted by a dog. Like, a canine, whimpering aloud while Bowie unburdens himself about inner space. "I know it's a bore, darling," he says to the dog, and everyone, including David Bowie, laughs.
The dog had a point: Seriousness really can be boring after awhile, which might've occurred to Bowie after the cold white peaks of 1977's Low. Sensing that high art might be losing its flavor, he went on a long, generous tour called Isolar II during which he revived the entirety of 1972's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a gesture that in the context of his restlessly radical early-'70s career would've been like staging a Vegas revue. "He's remembering that bone shot in 2001," Bowie says of the dog during the radio interview. "What a waste of a bone!" A showman by birth and narcissist by trade, Bowie could've easily been talking about himself.
Lodger has 10 songs, all of which are three to four minutes long. One is a great Talking Heads impression called "D.J." and another is basically a Brian Eno song with vocals by David Bowie instead of Brian Eno ("Red Sails"). The music is punky and dramatic and a little odd, with detours into reggae and near-Eastern tonalities ("Yassassin") and nebulously exotic "world" sounds ("African Night Flight"), all filtered through the ears of a British guy with plenty of money and the imperial leeway to appropriate whatever he felt like. To this day, no musician has better mastered the hermetic intensity of cocaine, a drug that makes you want to have long conversations with everyone you've ever met without leaving your room.
Prior to Lodger, Bowie's alien status was existential, metaphorical, general—a one-size-fits-all garment for anyone convinced they'd been born in the wrong time or with the wrong body. But for as many people who saw their idealized selves in Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane, Lodger was the first time Bowie really seemed accessible—a character with flaws and frailties, petty thoughts and grocery lists; someone who doesn't just dabble in reality but lives in it. "Look Back in Anger" opens with a wild panorama of guitar before devolving into a story about an angel with a cough; "D.J." is childish and bitchy; "Boys Keep Swinging," which Bowie apparently wrote after listening to the Village People, actually does sound a little like the Village People but less secure in its sexuality. When David Bowie sings the word "depression" on "Fantastic Voyage," it's like listening to Zeus complain about sorting lights and darks.
The title alone reduces his myth to something banal and transactional: No longer the Lonely Starchild gracing us with his unusual point of view, we instead meet Safari Bowie, half-drunk tourist working out his masculinity issues by haggling with street vendors, Bowie the houseguest who can't stop talking about getting "authentic" tacos. The first half of Lodger especially, with its cartoon jungles and mysterious Bedouins and Englishmen too dumb to stay out of trouble but too powerful to ever really be in it, belongs more to the colonial satire of Evelyn Waugh than late-'70s art rock. (Bowie said that "African Night Flight" in particular was inspired by a trip to Kenya where he met a bunch of old German pilots who seemed to spend most of their time getting drunk and the rest doing profitable crime in the bush.) Lodgers aren't heavenly beings; they're people with enough money to rent a room.
All this didn't just humanize Bowie, it made him whole. By the time he'd released Lodger, he was 32, halfway divorced and trying to keep his drug thing in check, rich and famous and still staring down the long rest of his life. "Radical genius" would be nice, but so would making it to 1985 and having people still remember your name. In that sense, Lodger is an anxious, humble album, the sound of an artist ceding the wheel to a younger generation he'd be a fool to pretend he was part of. To let the culture take him out and chauffer him for a little while.
Of course, he still had plenty to offer and spent the next 30 years offering it: The music videos, the generous celebrity, room-unifying songs like "Modern Love" and movies like Labyrinth, which introduced hundreds of thousands of '80s babies to Bowie the mischievous goblin king, prancing around in his tights. Stars might look pretty while they fall but all they leave when they hit earth is a big empty hole. Lodger is the moment when Bowie took a deep breath and started to fill it. | 2016-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | January 22, 2016 | 8.5 | 5b43c53d-239e-4233-96c4-c885c82cfe68 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The South Florida rapper puts on for his city and delivers the best, most dynamic, and altogether hardest album of his career. | The South Florida rapper puts on for his city and delivers the best, most dynamic, and altogether hardest album of his career. | Denzel Curry: ZUU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/denzel-curry-zuu/ | ZUU | Three years ago, Denzel Curry was working out how to represent Carol City, the Miami Gardens neighborhood he grew up in. The music he was making didn’t scream South Florida, the way, say, Kodak Black’s does, but he was a South Florida boy through and through, and he wanted to make that known. He’d rapped about how his city shaped him on songs like “Chief Forever,” but he could never quite channel and embody that love. It wasn’t until now, on his new album, ZUU, that he figured out how to show appreciation for and celebrate one of rap’s most underrated regions.
Of course, Curry’s music has always been deeply indebted to the culture of his hometown. His initial mandate was to simply prove that Miami was more than Scarface, Art Basel, and spring breakers. “Most people come down here expecting that South Beach shit,” he said in 2014. “It’s not just that. We got hoods too.” ZUU dives even deeper. There is a familiarity that feels like watching a secret handshake. It doesn’t shy away from the nastier aspects of learning to love a violent place; on “P.A.T.” he raps, “I grew up in a city where most people have no goals/Just cold-blooded niggas in a place that never snow.”
Deeply referential, ZUU scans Carol City, Dade County, the Greater Miami Area, and the wider South Florida milieu. From the Miami Bass of the ’80s to Port of Miami-esque coke-rap epics and the chants of Trick Daddy and Trina, through Raider Klan phonk and the bass-boosted rioters Curry helped pioneer with Ronny J, the album maps the sounds of Florida and his path through them. These are all touchpoints along a journey of self-discovery placing Curry’s music in the lineage of his great Miami forebears. It samples MC Cool Rock & MC Chaszy Chess, has a Bushy B interlude, references Blackland Radio 66.6., dusts off Ice Billion Berg, and pays homage to Plies. (The only person missing is fellow Carol City High alum Flo Rida.) There’s drug money, and speedboats, and ass shaking, and the U swagger. You can hear and come to appreciate his love for this place and its music. The album is so rich with the subtext of Florida, and local rap history, it feels lived in.
He does this with Australian production duo Finatik N Zac, or FnZ, backing him. With credits on every Denzel Curry project since 2016’s Imperial, they have been as instrumental to his success as Ronny J. Here, they help realize his vision of a Miami rap mood board. They produce or co-produce eight of the 10 songs (excluding the two skits), stitching together something both nostalgic and forward-thinking. Their distinctive and vibrant octave-shifting synth lines help bond disparate templates, including the kingpin excesses of the Rick Ross-assisted “Birdz,” the twerker energy of “Shake 88,” and the trunk-rattling lows of “Carol Mart.” But the binding agent is Curry, who puts himself at the heart of the city.
Inside the swirling, expansive tribute to his hometown, Denzel constructs his origin story. The album is at once personal and communal, splicing throughlines of individual identity and civic pride. “This what you made me, Carol City raised me/Trick said ‘I’m a Thug,’ that’s the hate you gave me,” he raps on the title track, connecting a local psalm to cross-generational hip-hop scripture. There are lessons from parents, memories from a since-demolished Miami Gardens flea market, quiet eulogies for XXXtentacion, who he recently described as his brother, the way Poseidon and Hades were brothers, and his actual brother Treon “Tree” Johnson, who died in 2014. Even more impressive than his mastery of the local musical language is how he puts his own music and story at the center of it all. He is the bridge connecting all these things.
Since 2013’s Nostalgic 64, Curry has been a proven polymath. His raps can be blunt or sharp-edged. He’s as comfortable barring out over Wu-Tang beats as he is covering Rage Against the Machine. ZUU mines all of it to construct his most complete and thrilling music yet. It can be dark, it can be funny, it can irreverent, it can be urgent, but it’s never tonally unbalanced. He runs the full gamut from singsongy shapeshifter (“Wish”) to nuanced, panoramic storyteller (“RICKY”) to aggro black metal terrorist (“P.A.T.”). He has been all of these things before but he’s never put it all together like this. He took up freestyling while recording TA13OO last year and continued to do so in these sessions, and there’s a looseness to his verses that lends itself to the process of recall. Memories come flooding back with immediacy. He performs as if it’s all just coming to him in flashbacks, as if that history is in him. Being “raised off of Trina, Trick, Rick, and Plies” is his pedigree. There are few forces more powerful than the feeling of belonging. In creating his stunning Miami rap opus, Denzel Curry taps into that, demonstrating that he belongs among its most distinguished representatives in the process. | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | June 4, 2019 | 8.3 | 5b47129e-9cf2-4c06-b1ef-0d131b408d50 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Danny Brown’s go-to producer abandons his sampledelic style for an album of original beats and inspired guest vocals that reveal who he really is as a solo artist. | Danny Brown’s go-to producer abandons his sampledelic style for an album of original beats and inspired guest vocals that reveal who he really is as a solo artist. | Paul White: Rejuvenate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-white-rejuvenate/ | Rejuvenate | Electronic musician Jon Hopkins explained in a recent interview that although his compositions are often ambient and airy, his aim is to capture the attention of the preoccupied listener. He loves to hear fans say things like, “I went to do some cooking and put it on, and ended up sitting down and listening to the whole thing.” But not all instrumental musicians so openly covet listeners’ attention. London-based producer Paul White, best known for his work with Danny Brown, seems indifferent to the spotlight. Over the course of more than a dozen releases marked by carnivalesque hip-hop beats and samples sourced from a wide array of traditions and cultures, his own identity has largely faded into the background. Each of White’s beats can sound like the gateway to an entire world, but few of them reveal much about their maker.
In light of that history, White’s new album, Rejuvenate, is unusual. Its cover is a sketched headshot of the artist (which, if you buy the vinyl version, you can color in yourself). And it’s the first record he’s made on which the music isn’t constructed from samples. Instead, it finds White making music that others might deem worth sampling, not by echoing his primary sources but by blending chillwave, R&B, ambient music, soul, and various British dance traditions. The result is a subtly extraordinary record that is likely to boost White’s profile whether he likes it or not.
Until now, White’s sensibility was most apparent on the 2011 cult favorite Rapping With Paul White, a mix of instrumentals and hip-hop tracks featuring collaborators like Brown (for whom he went on to produce the majority of Atrocity Exhibition), Guilty Simpson, and Marv Won. The sampledelic album was modest but arrestingly strange. On “A Weird Day,” Homeboy Sandman recounts his trip to London to record “A Weird Day” with White. The song is so odd and so distinct that, years after encountering the track, hearing the phrase “weird day” can trigger a memory of Sand kicking off his verse: “Peace to my people/Next thing you know I’m in Heathrow.”
At first listen, it might strike you that Rejuvenate could have been called Singing With Paul White. Heavy on R&B, the record features the Zimbabwean poet and singer Shungudzo, the British-Jamaican singer Denai Moore, and White’s sister Sarah Williams White, each lending her voice to a pair of songs. But its key moment is the wordless “Returning,” a peaceful, string-plucking composition that makes use of White’s expertise with loops, the rhythm coiling into place as voices echo in the background, to quietly beguiling effect.
“Returning” is a revelation following the tracks featuring Moore, which are solidly composed but a little soulless. Despite her strong voice, her performance is too listless to build two consecutive songs around. White keeps things interesting by tinkering with the beat throughout, but like many producers, he seems relatively uninterested in evocative lyricism.
Sarah Williams White feels more present on her songs. “Laugh With Me,” which includes a sample of a child and an adult talking about laughter, is a buoyant, beautiful track, reminiscent of the best of the movement once pejoratively known as chillwave. Her hushed vocal makes the song sound as if it’s meant for children, a pleasant and genuinely moving lullaby without any saccharine aftertaste. The joyous “All Around” closes the record with Williams’ voice approximating Whitney Houston coaching Natasha Bedingfield through a breakdown.
But it’s the tracks featuring Shungudzo, which come in the middle of the record, that play most to White’s talents. Shun resembles Santigold when she was still Santogold, livening up “Spare Gold” with her drawling, rhythmic vocal. White’s trilling synths elevate lyrics about the everyday struggle (“I can’t escape this paper chase”). As the song circles in on itself, the beat achieves a supernatural glow.
This turns out to be White’s signature skill: With his incandescent, polyrhythmic beats, he brings a sense of mysticism to the ordinary. His production is full of fresh ideas, but his songs wouldn’t necessarily stop you in your tracks while you were cooking. Like so many other beautiful things, it’s only once you turn your full attention to it that White’s music begins to reveal itself. | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap / Rock | R&S | May 7, 2018 | 7.9 | 5b490568-52d6-41ac-8639-2091eb2e29d8 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The Special Interest synth player’s latest solo project is an emotional tour of the bathhouse: a celebration of defiantly queer spaces in the form of heady, hazy techno and ambient. | The Special Interest synth player’s latest solo project is an emotional tour of the bathhouse: a celebration of defiantly queer spaces in the form of heady, hazy techno and ambient. | Ruth Mascelli: A Night at the Baths | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ruth-mascelli-a-night-at-the-baths/ | A Night at the Baths | Raytheon Technologies wants to wish you a Happy Pride. The defense conglomerate and military contractor is on a mission to “celebrate and uplift [its] LGBTQ+ employees.” So is Axon, a taser and body cam manufacturer. So is Uber—did you know it has transgender and asexual “driver-partners”? Each June, another hawkish corporation debuts a rainbow-hued logo in hopes of capturing that elusive pink dollar, rapidly absorbing a once-radical identity bloc into the economy of girlboss drone pilots and Pete Buttigieg. In a recent interview, Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of the cultural history Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, bemoaned the way the mainstreaming of pride has erased deviance in favor of respectability: “Some forms of sexuality are pervy. And I think that there’s been a kind of erasure of the pervert,” he said. “There’s a kind of essentialism, then, about how you are valid because your sexuality isn’t dirty, and then there isn’t a place for dirtiness and finding playmates in perversion, you know?”
A Night at the Baths, the new album by Special Interest synth player Ruth Mascelli, is, like Gay Bar, a fond evocation of queer spaces that are sordid, deviant, and defiantly anti-mainstream—the bathhouses and club basements that are integral to queer history but rarely historicized in the traditional sense. Described by Mascelli as “an audio diary of adventures had at various bathhouses, dark rooms, and gay clubs,” A Night at the Baths is a heady and hazy record of techno and ambient music that, intentionally or not, acts as a piquant tonic to the ultra-safe, proud-but-poreless pride content often found on themed Spotify playlists. Mascelli once joked that they and Special Interest frontperson Alli Logout wanted to go on a bathhouse tour; until that day comes, A Night at the Baths is presented like an emotional tour of a bathhouse, an immersive suite that attempts to capture the tension and frisson of the sauna.
Mascelli used to make electronic music under the moniker Psychic Hotline, but their eponymous work presents far more than a name change. Where Psychic Hotline’s music was lo-fi, vocal-led minimal wave not unlike Throbbing Gristle, A Night at the Baths is instrumental and cinematic. The muffled thump of opener “Sauna” is preceded by a taut, syncopated synth sting that pans from left to right—an ostentatious welcome to Mascelli’s potent, rakish world. Throughout the album, they use the tools of immersive sound design to great effect: There is wonderful dimension to a song like “One for the Voyeurs,” which utilizes echoing, breathy vocal samples, or “Libidinal Surplus,” a frantic, menacing acid techno track built around a visceral kick that sounds like it was recorded through peaking club speakers. A Night at the Baths walks a fine line between dance music and sound art designed to evoke the feeling of hearing dance music, as Mascelli has tacitly acknowledged: “The sound of a degraded pop song several rooms away getting lost amidst the chorus of heavy breathing was the starting point for this project,” they say in a statement.
But this music, so swept up in trying to convey the power of nightlife spaces, falls short of conjuring that same thrill itself. Split between a raucous A-side consisting of four heaving techno tracks and a B-side containing four pieces of spectral, pulsating ambient music, the album occasionally feels like a museum display—fragments lovingly curated to represent a greater history that never quite comes through. There are some striking moments on the album’s second half: the way a discordant buzzsaw synth cuts through the new age meditation of closer “Missing Men,” for example, is surprising and impactful, a sharp reminder of the risk inherent in so much queer nightlife. In contrast to the meta, almost discursive, approach to club music seen on recent projects like India Jordan’s For You or Doss’ 4 New Hit Songs—records about clubbing that are also perfect for clubbing—A Night at the Baths uses club music as a means to an end. It seeks to capture the specifics of an environment that, as it stands, becomes more existentially threatened by the day. That in itself is reason to be proud.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Disciples | July 29, 2021 | 6.8 | 5b5a0cf5-4009-4c4f-9625-33b113e52398 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
With his intense baritone voice, Devon Welsh travels deep into the feelings of isolation and introspection with grace and beauty. | With his intense baritone voice, Devon Welsh travels deep into the feelings of isolation and introspection with grace and beauty. | Devon Welsh: True Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devon-welsh-true-love/ | True Love | There was a strange high-wire thrill to Majical Cloudz, Devon Welsh’s project with Matthew Otto. Welsh proclaimed the simplest and most naked sentiments in a clear but untrained baritone over synthesizers so warped and wispy they felt like they existed only in your head. Their best songs arranged these few elements in space like a score to a David Lynch film, where loud sounds crashed in without warning and confounded your sense of space and time. Nothing that happened felt strictly real. It either worked spectacularly for you or it didn’t; they weren’t a middle-ground act.
Since parting from his Majical Cloudz partner, Welsh has continued as a solo artist. His voice radiates the same emotional intensity, and he sings with equal commitment. But he also reinforces what a fragile balance the Majical Cloudz project was. On his second solo record, True Love, he occasionally sounds a little denuded, his voice leaving that uncanny space and becoming the voice of just a guy sitting at the end of the bar. The arrangements scan as simple instead of sparse, and with one of these small elements slightly out of place, everything he does starts to feel a bit flat-footed; lines like “I wanna be just like my stepdad, I wanna be as cool as him/But then the only thing I can ever really find is me” on “Uniform” scrape pavement instead of taking off.
But there are also moments here where that unsteady magic kicks back in—“Dreamers” sounds like 2009-era John Maus, painting a sweet portrait of two lovers (“He liked the Beach Boys, she liked the Doors”) and offering a bashful, fist-pump chorus of chanted “yeahs.” It’s exultant but tiny, like the cells of a future teen-movie anthem gathering in a petri dish. “Songbird” marries the finger-picked guitars of Welsh’s last solo record, 2018’s Dream Songs, with the dreamy atmospherics of Majical Cloudz. He stops to admire the way “songbirds sing in the sun,” and his music operates on a similar level—instinctual, beautiful. In place of a chorus, he croons wordlessly at the top of his range. It is a lonely, haunting sound, and it communicates with your bones.
Some songs float in the unsteady middle, dipping into near-banality and then catching a draft upward. “Somebody Loves You” might be the most bathetic song Welsh has ever written, on paper—“Heaven is a place I do hope you find,” he sings, enunciating each word as if talking to a small child—but the near-human cries of the synthesizers defamiliarize his words. “Don’t get carried away/Sometimes there’s nothing to say,” he intones on the title track. He sounds like he might be reading them, puzzled, off a milk carton. “This won’t mean a thing unless we try,” he pleads on “Faces,” allowing the word “try” to occupy six syllables.
Welsh made this album almost entirely alone, a process that seems to suit him. His introspection is the sort that usually precludes human interaction, and Welsh’s narrator always seems to be reentering the world, raw and shaky, after some defining devastation. “I will turn away from the shivering world/Though I am a child of that old and rotten place,” he vows on “Grace.” But there is no spirit of turning away here, only an embrace from someone who seems ready to break and rebuild himself, again and again, for you. | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | You Are Accepted | October 15, 2019 | 7.2 | 5b5d8ae9-2f4c-48a2-bd05-3d2f5fba1e3d | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Bay Area producer’s debut project draws upon Armenian mythology to create an ambient-house-dabke hybrid in five shape-shifting tracks. | The Bay Area producer’s debut project draws upon Armenian mythology to create an ambient-house-dabke hybrid in five shape-shifting tracks. | Lara Sarkissian: DISRUPTION EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lara-sarkissian-disruption-ep/ | DISRUPTION EP | To fully appreciate Lara Sarkissian’s mesmerizing Disruption, you’d have to know a little about Armenian mythology. A filmmaker and electronic musician of Iranian-Armenian descent, Sarkissian works to bring Armenian stories into the fore. Growing up in San Francisco in a community of immigrants, Armenian music was both everywhere (taught at school, sung in church, blasted through speakers at neighborhood gatherings) and nowhere, all but absent from Western pop. In 2015, she and Esra Canoğulları (aka 8ULENTINA) began throwing parties in Oakland in an attempt to fill the cultural void, booking local, queer, and non-white DJs from transnational diasporas and encouraging them to tell their stories. Those shows eventually birthed Club Chai, now one of the biggest underground collectives in the Bay Area.
As DJs, Sarkissian (who spins as FOOZOOL) and 8ULENTINA are known for ultra-eclectic sets that reach back in time, sampling traditional instruments and vintage records (like funk, disco, and psychedelic rock from 1970’s Turkey and Iran), and adapting Middle Eastern sounds for modern dance floors. Recently, the pair have expanded into their own experimental productions. 8ULENTINA’s Eucalyptus is a patchwork of distorted synths, arcade-game loops, and vigorous drum ‘n’ bass. Disruption, Sarkissian’s first release under her own name, is murkier and more melodic, an ambient-house-dabke hybrid in five shape-shifting tracks.
The EP is billed as the soundtrack to a fictional film inspired by stories from Armenian mythology. We don’t know which stories, aside from clues in a couple song titles. It’s also, Sarkissian said, about her own experiences “communicating with passed family members” and the disruptive conversations and visions that ensued.
These concepts both clarify and confuse the work. While they help to contextualize the music’s folk elements and non-Western roots, they’re also a bit of rabbit hole, with references so far-out to some that they feel empty and disorienting. Do we need to know the story of the ancient god to enjoy the song “Greeted by Tir (Տիր)”? Of course not. But if the goal is to build bridges through cultural storytelling, narrower themes and more specifics would be easier to grasp.
Unlike Sarkissian’s DJ sets, which are club-minded and upbeat, Disruption is designed for more intimate spaces, the kind where you can close your eyes and shuffle around without feeling self-conscious. The vibe is intensely spiritual, a blend of fast, frenetic rhythms from classical Persian percussion, samples of the duduk and zurna (woodwind instruments from the Armenian Highlands), and lo-fi electronic atmospheres sparked with dance-floor energy. At times, it borders on delirious. There are ambient moments in “Tir” that feel utterly out-of-body.
But this is not a chill-out tape. Most of the songs on Disruption are rooted in pummeling house and techno breaks that occur intermittently and somewhat unpredictably, skittering alongside flurries of drum whip-cracks, acid swirls, and cascading synth arpeggios. These dizzying combinations are both thrilling and mildly stressful, like sitting shotgun in a getaway car. You’ve just got to trust that she’s got it under control. On “A Ceremony (for Arax),” the project’s most muscular and structured track, she roars past fits of turbulent drums and whistles like they’re elegant scenery.
Other songs, like “Gnum Գնում (Going) (ft. Margenrot),” unfold like an elaborate obstacle course. Snare drums, cymbals, and quivering howls pile on top of each other in polyrhythmic frames until suddenly, you’re acutely aware of all the layers. It feels like zooming in on a city from a distance; the further in you get with the lens, the more alive it looks.
These dramatic shifts in perspective are Disruption’s real pleasure. Rather than linger in one place, Sarkissian weaves between moods and levels, entire regions and eras. It could be a reflection of those living in the diaspora, wedged between two worlds and searching for connections. Or maybe she’s just piecing together her own identity: old world samples, new school edits, shaped into something entirely new. | 2019-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Club Chai | January 12, 2019 | 7.3 | 5b72db1c-52f6-4dac-b9b9-3789e9a747f5 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
On his seventh album, the conscious hip-hop fallback poses a revisionist fantasy about underwater slaves sinking other slave ships—a premise he quickly abandons during these 24 tracks. | On his seventh album, the conscious hip-hop fallback poses a revisionist fantasy about underwater slaves sinking other slave ships—a premise he quickly abandons during these 24 tracks. | Lupe Fiasco: Drogas Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lupe-fiasco-drogas-wave/ | Drogas Wave | Conscious hip-hop exists in a state of perpetual existential irony. Known for its power-to-the-people catalog, Rawkus Records is actually a product of the moneyed elite. The subgenre’s most popular modern figure promotes himself while wearing MAGA gear. Other icons, like the artist formerly known as Mos Def, simply quit. But hip-hop heads in glasses have maintained a fallback in Lupe Fiasco, still dedicated to multi-entendres and high-concept verses.
But Fiasco’s surface-level sophistication doesn’t mask just how low-stakes his career has been since 2011. That year’s Lasers, the ugly result of his hostage situation with Atlantic, effectively ruined his chances of meeting his potential as a mainstream star and bar-for-bar traditionalist, the intersection Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole now control. Though he’s largely remained consistent since that disaster, arguably peaking with 2015’s Tetsuo & Youth, Fiasco has fallen from Late Registration feature to amicable niche. He has become overly ambitious with his smaller audience, too, so that listening to Fiasco can now feel like encountering someone’s unedited passion project. This is especially true of Drogas Wave, a wildly unrealized 24-track, 98-minute concept album with a surreal premise: What if African slaves thrown overboard during their transatlantic passage had managed to survive underwater and dedicate their existence to sinking other slave ships? This is only a slight left turn for someone who made a song about an undead drug dealer, but still.
This is emotionally rich fictitious content. Still, you can’t help but wonder if Fiasco cares to engage with its dramatic weight; this is someone, remember, who praised Ab-Soul’s barely listenable Do What Thou Wilt. by throwing around ideas about morphology and hermeneutics. Fiasco’s love of dense verses, though, often overshadows the empathy that runs through the finest moments of his career. During “WAV Files,” an early Drogas Wave highlight, Fiasco’s voice reflects a genuine mournfulness. It helps him sell his revisionist fantasy, whether incorporating a sympathetic Poseidon into the narrative or stumbling upon a new backronym: “Walking on water/WOW WOW.”
Fiasco doesn’t only construct an alternate historical narrative for Drogas Wave; he explores why we need such myths in the first place. Fiasco realizes that there’s temporary liberation available in reimagining a space where black people are empowered by—not destroyed for—their identities, a concept central to Black Panther’s significance. This isn’t a new concept for him—“Kick, Push” follows a boy wishing for something as small as a place to skateboard—but here it’s his explicit obsession. During “Manilla,” he reaches to use the tired materialism-as-slavery metaphor to set up Wave’s concept. But his powerful mantra “You can survive anything if you can survive blackness” adds gravity to this world.
This is a place, after all, populated by pain, so he offers an alternative. In “Jonylah Forever” and “Alan Forever,” Fiasco imagines a reality where Jonylah Watkins, a Chicago infant killed in a feud over a video-game system, and Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while his family attempted to flee to Greece, survive into adulthood. In Fiasco’s vision, Jonylah grows up to open a free medical clinic. Alan’s story connects through mundane but compelling details: “I love smiling, I got talents/I can do flips,” Fiasco raps, reminding us Alan could have become a regular boy.
There’s promise here, even payoff, but Drogas Wave suffers the same problems as most Fiasco albums. The production—which is filled with aquatic textures, natch—is some of the most likable of his career, but he remains as committed to his ideology as he is to a lack of focus. Despite this being his seventh album, he’s somehow grown more inept at structuring the things. Drogas Wave stops explicitly referring to its fictional concept by the end of its first third, with little sense of plot development. It’s as if underwater slaves were a passing thought Fiasco wanted to add to an album of references to his history as an Atlantic refugee (“Imagine”) and his nephews (“King Nas”).
Drogas Wave makes little effort to hide how superfluous so much of this material is. The clunker “Sharks is my niggas/The dolphins is with us” proves we jumped the shark only seven tracks in. Fiasco spends most of one very long verse just naming slave ships. And “XO” is merely the moody counterfeit of his old “The Instrumental.” Lupe Fiasco’s career is a string of near-misses. What makes Drogas Wave especially frustrating is the way you can squint and see the shape of his possible masterpiece inside. | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1st & 15th | September 29, 2018 | 6.2 | 5b765338-a6c2-42b8-8f90-23c4c14ffb32 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
The final of four box sets exhaustively chronicling the seminal post-punk band Unwound's career features 1998's Challenge for a Civilized Society, which alienated fans at the time with its studio experimentation, and 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, a hauntingly beautiful double album that upended every preconceived notion about the group. | The final of four box sets exhaustively chronicling the seminal post-punk band Unwound's career features 1998's Challenge for a Civilized Society, which alienated fans at the time with its studio experimentation, and 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, a hauntingly beautiful double album that upended every preconceived notion about the group. | Unwound: Empire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20891-empire/ | Empire | By the late '90s, Unwound were asking themselves whether the band was worth fighting for. The trio had invested more time and money into their 1998 album Challenge for a Civilized Society than they had any other, and they’d never been more disappointed by the returns. Trading the unrelenting roar of its predecessors for hit-or-miss studio experimentation, the album alienated longtime fans and halted any career momentum the group had gained from their 1996 near-breakthrough Repetition. "I remember playing Challenge for a couple of friends in Olympia after we finished it, and them just kinda starting at the ground," drummer Sara Lund recounts in the liner notes for Empire, the final of four box sets exhaustively chronicling the band’s career. "It’s my least favorite of our records," says bassist Vern Rumsey.
If Unwound had split up after Challenge—and they came close—the band would have ended on an off note, but their legacy would have been secure. The trio had so perfectly refined their chaotic noise rock over their first five albums that they’d forever be remembered; while they’d never be celebrated as widely as Nirvana or Fugazi, their DNA would live on for generations as young punk bands discovered and learned from them. Instead of disbanding, though, they pushed on a little longer, holding out against mounting personal troubles and growing geographic and emotional separation long enough to muster a magnificent final statement, 2001’s Leaves Turn Inside You, a hauntingly beautiful double album that upended every preconceived notion about the band.
Leaves Turn Inside You, out of print on vinyl for over a decade, is Empire’s main event, the career high this entire box set series has been leading up to. But despite its low standing in the band’s discography, Challenge for a Civilized Society is worth revisiting, too. It’s Unwound’s End Hits, a transitional work from a band chaining themselves to the studio in hopes of forcing inspiration, and occasionally succeeding. Even though they don’t cohere, the songs reveal a range the band’s previous albums had never hinted at. The opening throes of the nine-minute "Side Effects of Being Tired" are scribbled with gnarly free-jazz saxophone. The techno diss "NO TECH!" pillages the wiry rhythms of post-punk acts like Swell Maps and the Pop Group, while the boozy, blustery guitar licks of "Meet the Plastics" imagine what an Unwound Jon Spencer Blues Explosion covers album might have sounded like.
On an album of curiosities, one stands out as a clear success: "Lifetime Achievement Award", a ghostly dirge composed over a found recording of "Happy Birthday" played backward. Hypnotically paced and chillingly sad, it’s the one moment on Challenge where everything comes together: the performance, the songwriting, the phantasmal production, the overall feel; everything about it feels piped in from a different record. Three years later, they’d actually release that record. Leaves Turn Inside You took all the right lessons away from its predecessor’s hits and misses. This time the band wasn’t tossing spaghetti at the wall. They had focus.
Though Challenge’s sales were lackluster, a publishing deal with BMG afforded the band enough money to get started on a project they’d long dismissed as a pipe dream: building their own studio. They assembled it piece by piece in the basement of an old farmhouse, borrowing equipment they couldn’t afford from Calvin Johnson and teaching themselves how to use it. The band had never self-produced an album before, but the challenge invigorated Rumsey and singer/guitarist Justin Trosper, who spent weeks obsessing over technical details, figuring out the best ways to capture interesting sounds and texture. Traditionally the band has worked fast and shrugged off mistakes. Now they were discovering the luxury of time.
Midway through their sessions, the band’s old producer Steve Fisk visited their farmhouse to check their progress. “I thought, ‘God, what a terrible, depressing, sad place to be putting a record together,’” he recalls in Empire’s liner notes. That house casts a long shadow over Leaves. On "Below the Salt", a fractured, 11-minute lament paced like a séance, you can almost hear the foundation settling between notes. The similarly sprawling "Terminus" begins as a statement of defiance before succumbing mid-song to an orchestra of despair, led by a spectral cello that seems to sweep in and out of the studio walls. The whole record exists in a permanent November, condemned to those waning days of fall when all the color has been drained from the skyline, and all that’s left are barren trees and an isolating chill.
Yet for all its melancholy, Leaves is also an album of uncanny splendor. Opener "We Invent You" follows a full two minutes of cautionary drone—the band’s way, perhaps, of weeding out old-guard fans unwilling to take the album on its own terms—with an outpouring of mammoth, multi-tracked psychedelia. Trosper had recently discovered Led Zeppelin III; this was his homage. Friend of the band Janet Weiss, a few years away from letting her own classic-rock flag fly on Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, lent backing vocals to the closest thing Leaves offered to a pop song, "Demons Sing Love Songs", a gorgeous respite from the album’s prevailing unease.
Leaves Turn Inside You didn’t happen in a vacuum. Around the turn of the century, indie acts as varied as Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Wilco, and Modest Mouse were also embracing the studio, pouring considerable time into risky albums that ultimately proved high watermarks. But where those bands carried on with those victories under the belts, Unwound didn’t stick around to bask in their achievement.
There’s a generous way of contextualizing the group’s breakup: They put everything they had into one last, great album and called it a day. But the reality isn’t quite so romantic. Instead, the band resumed their slow process of breaking down. A tense tour behind Leaves had been cut short during its key stretch by September 11, and Rumsey’s worsening alcoholism had made it impossible to carry on like nothing was wrong. They announced their split 10 months after the album’s release, with an unceremonious post on the Kill Rock Stars website. Fourteen years later, Leaves Turn Inside You has lost none of its wonder, but it feels like a broken promise. Though the members of Unwound have bounced around between new bands, nothing they’ve recorded since has approached that album’s creativity or ambition. They teased a world of new directions, but never followed up on them.
In Empire’s liner notes, Trosper comments that in hindsight he realized some of his free-association lyrics on Leaves were about the troubled state of the band. The group hadn’t been on solid footing for a while; the writing had probably been on the wall even before they started recording the album. Perhaps that’s part of why it’s such a powerful work. It’s a last gasp, an album about ghosts by a band that on some level understood they were becoming one. | 2015-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 7, 2015 | 7.8 | 5b77cafc-6c28-4dc3-bd90-be92bacb641b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Over the course of her career, Juliana Barwick has perfected a very particular form of ethereal vocal ambience. For her new album, she recorded in Iceland with Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers, members of múm, and the string quartet Amiina, resulting in her most emotionally complex work yet. | Over the course of her career, Juliana Barwick has perfected a very particular form of ethereal vocal ambience. For her new album, she recorded in Iceland with Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers, members of múm, and the string quartet Amiina, resulting in her most emotionally complex work yet. | Julianna Barwick: Nepenthe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18408-julianna-barwick-nepenthe/ | Nepenthe | Growing up in rural Louisiana and then later on a farm in Missouri, Julianna Barwick was a preacher's daughter at a church whose organ got very little use. "We would always sing a cappella," she explained in an interview a few years ago, "And instead of instruments we would clap or sing in rhythmic rounds." A curious kid and a bit of a loner, Barwick showed a precocious fascination with the human voice. Her hobbies included harmonizing with random sounds, making up songs about whatever she was doing at the moment, and singing long, loud notes in hollowed-out spaces like parking garages and inside the trunk of a giant tree just to see what the echo would sound like. "It sounds kinda psycho, I know," she admitted in our interview, but sometimes "I would sing to myself and get so lost in it that I would cry."
Actually, it doesn’t sound that crazy; it’s very easy to become lost in the music that Barwick now makes as an adult. Over the span of her career, from her imaginative 2006 debut LP Sanguine up through 2011's dazzling breakthrough The Magic Place (the name is a nod to that aforementioned giant tree trunk, where she'd unwittingly discovered reverb), Barwick's gradually refined a process that is at once inventive and incredibly simple. She sings short, reverb-drenched, often wordless vocal fragments into a loop station (though she made the loops on the painstakingly lo-fi Sanguine using just a guitar pedal) and layers them into luminous compositions that feel like the aural equivalent of an airplane ride through a cloud. Toweringly sublime yet invitingly human, her music has an uncanny power to transform whatever space it's played in. It can make a cramped apartment feel like a high-ceilinged cathedral, or-- when she plays in one-- an actual cathedral feel like a gear-cluttered basement show.
Following the warm reception of The Magic Place, Barwick's approach has often been compared to ambient pioneers like Steve Reich and Brian Eno or the conceptual vocal artist Meredith Monk, but something about her music remains approachable and deeply personal—more intuitive than academic. Even as Barwick's songs become as polished and ambitious as those on her third full-length album, Nepenthe, they’ve managed to retain a certain playfulness and an openness to the process of discovery. It deserves mention among the best and most artful ambient music being made today, but Barwick’s work still feels like the realization of a dream left over from childhood, made by someone downright giddy that she has finally figured out a way to sing a round song with herself.
Sanguine, the 2009 EP Florine and The Magic Place all conveyed a sense of serenity found in solitude, which is maybe why her collaborations with other artists have been such a mixed bag. Her records with Ikue Mori (for RVNG’s FRKWYS series) and Helado Negro (as the duo OMBRE) have been solid, but a 2011 remix EP (featuring versions of Magic Place songs reworked by the likes of Diplo, Lunice and Prince Rama) basically just underscored how beside the point it is to remix a Julianna Barwick song. Her music is so pure and reliant on moments of quiet that another artists’ presence often overwhelms. So Nepenthe was a potentially risky move: It marks the first time she’s worked with other artists on one of her solo albums. And we’re not exactly talking anonymous session guys here: she recorded it with Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers (members of múm and the string quartet Amiina also contribute) at Sundlaugin, the band’s famed Icelandic “swimming pool studio.” (As a kid Barwick probably couldn’t have even imagined what sort of natural reverb you can get out of an abandoned swimming pool.)
Thankfully, Nepenthe sounds like a step forward for Barwick, a noticeable expansion in scope that still honors the sensibility that made her early records so unique. Somers’ lush production gives her music a larger and crisper depth of field, making it that much easier to get lost in its many overlapping folds. The structures of some of her tracks have become more complex: The billowing “The Harbinger” finds drama in the movement from crescendos to moments of quiet and back again, while the misty incantation “One Half” feels (true to its title) like a seamless fusion of two separate arcs. (For once, there’s even discernable lyrics in that song, but their purpose is purely phonetic, like words spoken in a strange dream.) But even in its most epic moments, one of Nepenthe’s greatest virtues is restraint. Given free reign in one of the most spectacular studios imaginable, Barwick didn’t go all kid-in-a-candy-store on us here. Nepenthe is a modest evolution-- the work of an artist growing, smartly, to scale rather than adding on needless bells and whistles or pushing prematurely past her limits.
It’s also more emotionally complex than her past work. The Magic Place was a slice of pure, unfiltered bliss, but the songs on Nepenthe ache and yearn. Album opener “Offing” hovers like thick fog over a remote pond, while Amiina’s strings drone and growl ominously throughout “Pyrrhic”-- these songs are still ethereal, but they’re stormier clouds than Barwick’s conjured before. On a few tracks, Róbert Sturla Reynisson from múm plays a guitar that, true to his post-rock pedigree, sounds more like a tiny spaceship or the noises made by a comfortingly unthreatening alien. But it’s Amiina’s presence that’s particularly harmonious with Barwick’s overall aesthetic. They're creative with the sounds they get out of stringed instruments, which allows Barwick to use them in a way that says something more complex than “[insert orchestral grandeur here].” They often feel like an extension of her own voice. “Waving to You”, the muted, palliative finale, fits in so well with Barwick’s vibe that it took me a few listens to realize it’s the only song on the album without vocals.
Barwick claims she went to Iceland with nothing written ahead of time. This is how she’s always worked, from her childhood experiments up to The Magic Place-- tapping into the vibrations of the present, and turning them into something that is somehow both enduring and impermanent. You sense feelings of longing and unease all over Nepenthe, which makes it a less blissful place to spend time than her previous album. But that also makes it a much more cathartic listen, and perhaps a more rewarding one. | 2013-08-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dead Oceans | August 23, 2013 | 8.5 | 5b79796e-865a-4072-9683-0465ef0ff5b4 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The songwriter’s new EP reimagines four tracks from her recent album Punisher with devastating orchestral arrangements that bring her voice into dramatic focus. | The songwriter’s new EP reimagines four tracks from her recent album Punisher with devastating orchestral arrangements that bring her voice into dramatic focus. | Phoebe Bridgers: Copycat Killer EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phoebe-bridgers-copycat-killer-ep/ | Copycat Killer EP | During the hellish week that we waited for the results of the U.S. presidential election, Phoebe Bridgers promised that if Trump lost, she would cover “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. Her pledge felt partly like earnest emotional bargaining and partly like a joke, but when Bridgers, joined by Maggie Rogers, released the cover the following week, it was clear she took the challenge seriously: Bridgers’ “Iris” transformed the alt-rock power anthem into a twangy, hushed plea for belonging. Her cover felt a bit like a teaser for Copycat Killer, a new EP of reworked songs from this summer’s excellent album Punisher. It would have been easy to replicate the plucky folk of her debut, 2017’s Stranger in the Alps, but instead, she and arranger and string player Rob Moose (who has worked with Bon Iver, Taylor Swift, and FKA twigs) reimagine four songs as devastating orchestral arrangements.
Like an auditory bokeh effect, Copycat Killer places Bridgers’ voice in dramatic focus, causing the emotional heft of the songs to balloon. Excavated from layers of watery distortion, every lyric lingers in the air as she sings about losing friends, searching for signs of an afterlife, resisting emotional vampires, and managing her savior complex. The strings elevate the vocal drama, swooping and majestic one moment, percussive and anxious the next. Without Punisher’s twinkling production flourishes and array of friends’ voices, there are no distractions. Listening to Copycat Killer all at once feels like waking up from an evening nap or entering a movie theater in daylight and leaving in the dark. You’re nourished but also disoriented, limbs tingling as they recalibrate to the outside world.
“Kyoto,” originally written as a ballad, is most beautifully transformed. The Punisher version was propelled by a whimsical trumpet section and synth line, mirroring Bridgers’ restless lyrics about travelling in Japan but missing California. On this version, her gossamer vocals bring other aspects of the song to the forefront: the father who forgets his son’s birthday, the flailing attempts to stop loving someone you know will continue to hurt you. On “Savior Complex,” another highlight, the original string section expands effortlessly, cellos filling the song with foreboding. The final words—“All the bad dreams that you hide/Show me yours”—feel more menacing than empathetic.
Bridgers’ songs are so devastating because she plays both hero and villain, creating a Möbius strip of virtues (like selflessness) that twist into flaws (like savior complexes). Rarely is there a feeling of catharsis or righteousness, especially on Copycat Killer, where the paralyzing angst and introspection feels so stark. Yet the EP ends on a quietly hopeful note. After setting a crisis of faith to heart-pounding strings on a new version of “Chinese Satellite,” Bridgers closes with “Punisher,” an ode to her idol, Elliott Smith. Though delivered with the same agonizing intimacy as the rest, at its heart, it’s a song about connection. “What if I told you I feel like I know you/But we never met,” she ventures cautiously, finding reassurance in Smith’s generosity and talent without ever having witnessed it firsthand—the very definition of faith. Meaning doesn’t always come from institutions or scriptures, but from the heroes we pick for ourselves. | 2020-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | November 27, 2020 | 7.2 | 5b81b708-3e2a-429d-807c-4e8f04a4ca49 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
A well-regarded player in the Chicago jazz world, bassist and composer Joshua Abrams has also established a reputation as a composer for film. Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters collects two scores Abrams composed for documentary filmmaker Steve James, best known for his 1994 picture, Hoop Dreams. | A well-regarded player in the Chicago jazz world, bassist and composer Joshua Abrams has also established a reputation as a composer for film. Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters collects two scores Abrams composed for documentary filmmaker Steve James, best known for his 1994 picture, Hoop Dreams. | Joshua Abrams: Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21177-music-for-life-itself-the-interrupters/ | Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters | A well-regarded player in the Chicago jazz world, bassist and composer Joshua Abrams has spent the last several years recording expansive trance music with his band, Natural Information Society. That outfit’s records are driven by improvisation, though not necessarily in the form of individual solos. Instead, Abrams and his collaborators create hypnotic interlocking patterns, rhythms, and melodies that seem to spool forth endlessly without any single voice taking center stage. It is serene and peaceful music that relies on spontaneous invention, but also on restraint.
It’s a sensibility that is carried over to Abrams’ other pursuits. In the past several years, the bassist has also established a reputation as a composer for film. Released digitally by Eremite Records, Music for Life Itself & The Interrupters collects two scores that Abrams composed for documentary filmmaker, Steve James—best known for his 1994 picture, Hoop Dreams—including the two features in the title as well as a two-minute piece written for the short, A Place Called Pluto.
If you’re coming to this music having listened to Abrams’ work in Natural Information Society, one thing will be immediately noticeable: these compositions are a lot shorter. Working in the context of a film, there’s no room to sprawl and most of Abrams’ cues last barely more than a minute. It’s a very different kind of music making, but the results share certain qualities with the composer’s other outlet, mainly in that they often carefully balance ambience and melody.
Released last year, Life Itself is an adaptation of film critic Roger Ebert’s memoir of the same name. Though the film includes interview footage shot during the final months of Ebert’s battle with cancer, the mood is not morose. Abrams’ score is mostly lighthearted, often taking stylistic inspiration from blues and '60s cool jazz. Much of it seems to capture spontaneous interplay. The central thread, "Roger’s Theme", finds a brass band trading riffs and "Professional Enemies" is largely a bass solo. For the film’s somber and reflective moments, Abrams’ arranges music that suggests a sense of peace—drones and light chords embellished with flourishes of trumpet and harp.
This is followed by Abrams’ score for James’ 2011 film, The Interrupters, which tracks a group of anti-violence activists working with communities in Chicago. Commissioned a mere six weeks before the film's Sundance Film Festival premiere, it's the slightly less polished of the pair. However, with its focus on percussion and hip-hop rhythms, it’s probably the more enjoyable of the two to listen to outside of the context of the film. On both, Abrams’ benefits from the presence of great musicians, including drummer Hamid Drake, saxophonist Ari Brown, and guitarist Jeff Parker, who also performs in Tortoise.
Watching the films, Abrams’ music is never intrusive. It enhances a scene, but never forces a mood. And while it’s probably not the first place you’d turn to experience his work, it provides an example of his stylistic reach and musical ability. Natural Information Society’s music thrives amid the extended zone-out, but listening to the music for The Interrupters, it’s surprising how malleable many of those sounds are—that, in miniature, the music can slot so naturally into somebody else’s story. | 2015-11-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Eremite | November 4, 2015 | 7 | 5b83b7d4-5d15-43a9-8c84-223f7974d4cf | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
An hour-long excerpt of an experimental performance at the Tate Modern in 2019, Tissues is rooted in opera but extends the sounds, themes, and harrowing moods of the Berlin-based musician’s electronic work. | An hour-long excerpt of an experimental performance at the Tate Modern in 2019, Tissues is rooted in opera but extends the sounds, themes, and harrowing moods of the Berlin-based musician’s electronic work. | Pan Daijing: Tissues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pan-daijing-tissues/ | Tissues | Pan Daijing’s studio discography leans toward post-industrial and dark ambient—whether it’s the mechanical misanthropy of 2017’s Lack 惊蛰 or the organic sprawl of 2021’s Jade 玉观音—but the underlying skeleton of the Berlin-based musician’s work is keenly operatic. An hour-long excerpt of an experimental play originally performed at the Tate Modern in 2019, Tissues is the fulfillment of that tendency. Though the recording derives from an opera-based performance, it doesn’t feel dissimilar to Pan’s electronic work; its traditional choral arrangements are haunting and cryptic, and its vast expanse is familiar in its agitation. Pan’s music has often used sound as a means of investigating the collision of the biotic and the synthetic, and on Tissues, she turns to the human voice to explore the title’s multiple meanings, both paper and flesh.
Opening with an uneasy cascade of electronic tones, the opera quickly melts into a ritualistic soprano, its dialogue intentionally untranslatable. Tissues is divided into four sections demarcated by shifts in motion and terror, tracing a journey from “A Raving Still” to “A Deafening Hum.” In addition to the double-bladed meaning of “tissues,” Pan pursues the idea of duality more generally in the libretto’s mixture of old and new Chinese, establishing an unsettling tension between the two forms that mirrors the piece’s contrasting vocal styles. The body of the story itself is ouroboric, the libretto loosely inspired by Murong Yan, a wuxia character whose male and female aspects try desperately to kill one another.
The interplay of warring voices informs the thesis of Pan’s project. The abstract structure, at least compared to a traditional opera, piercingly emphasizes the beauty of its arrangements. Across the seamless span of “A Found Lament” and “A Tender Accent,” swooning sighs and orotund mezzo-soprano are backed by an almost melodic drone, and high-pitched voices cry out, “害怕! (Fear!),” to protest the minatory wall of mechanical sound encroaching on them. On “A Raving Still,” a strangulated, robotic voice commands, “Wake me after, wake me after,” before the song is pierced by an inhuman screech that recalls a hawk’s lone journey across a canyon. A delicate battle plays out between Pan’s electronics and the voices that color them. Her own voice, rich and euphonic, adds to the frisson of these tracks—marking a stark contrast to the bite of synth punk in her cries on Amnesia Scanner’s “AS Chaos,” or her spoken word across 2017’s A Satin Sight.
Despite her fascination with opera, Pan has no formal musical schooling. “I’ve never studied a single day of music and now I want to write an opera,” she told an interviewer in 2019. “Where does that come from?” But when performed at the Tate Modern, draped against the brutalist backdrop of the Tanks, Tissues emerges as a vivid, full-bodied narrative. A large ensemble of dancers and opera singers is drenched in shadows of black and red; they contort and perform the play’s ceaseless conflict against the museum’s inorganic architecture. Even removed from the context of the live performance, Tissues remains charged with resonant beauty and keen-eyed focus, despite the pervasive air of disquietude. Its duality never strives to pull itself apart.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Pan | January 22, 2022 | 7.4 | 5b8b049d-0ef6-4131-b4ab-22dffdf27eac | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
null | Paul! Good god, man, it's been a while. Last I heard, you were wasting away in some piss-gutter on Minneapolis' north side, regaling the local liquor slobs with tales of 7th Street glory and Tommy Stinson's bitchin' hair parades. Hey, how about that solo career? Yeah, you blew it right from the start. Christ, dude, "Silver Naked Ladies"? *Suicaine Gratifaction??* What'd, you have an aneurysm? Ahh, no offense, pal. Heard your new records-- fuckin' *shocker*, man! Thought we'd heard the last of you after that career-ender back in '99. But that's all history now, buddy. Get up on that barstool | Paul Westerberg / Grandpaboy: Stereo / Mono | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11863-stereo-mono/ | Stereo / Mono | Paul! Good god, man, it's been a while. Last I heard, you were wasting away in some piss-gutter on Minneapolis' north side, regaling the local liquor slobs with tales of 7th Street glory and Tommy Stinson's bitchin' hair parades. Hey, how about that solo career? Yeah, you blew it right from the start. Christ, dude, "Silver Naked Ladies"? Suicaine Gratifaction?? What'd, you have an aneurysm? Ahh, no offense, pal. Heard your new records-- fuckin' shocker, man! Thought we'd heard the last of you after that career-ender back in '99. But that's all history now, buddy. Get up on that barstool and talk some noise about Pete Jesperson. You still owe me a rum-and-coke for "World Class Fad".
Such is how a conversation between myself and olde Paul Westerberg might've gone had we hooked up for a drink at the Turf Club a couple of months ago for an interview I just dreamt up to make this transition smoother. Yeah, I could be like the rest of you cynical half-breeds and feign disinterest, write this weathered codger off and tell you to save yourself the worry and pick up a Sorry Ma reissue. After all, I've got the practice, having spent the last ten years bored to tears by Westerberg's post-Replacements solo schlock. 14 Songs and Eventually have long since left my memory banks, forgettable like the phrase "adult contemporary singer/songwriter." Yet, after getting the boot from two major labels in the past four years, Westy's back on the minor circuit with a sense of confidence so renewed it produced two full-length records.
But what shocks even more than his sudden resurgence in popularity is the fact that these albums mark the first time since about 1987 that Westerberg's released anything worth more than a 5.0. And while I'm on a roll here, I'll go ahead and be controversial: Stereo and Mono are the best work Paul's done ir like fifteen years. And yeah, I'm just as surprised as the rest of you skeptics.
Stereo's a collection of low-key, country-tinged acoustic ballads, sad love songs, and bluesy rock beaters that were reputedly self-recorded in the basement of Westerberg's house over the course of two years. The amateurish production announces its presence with abruptly ending songs and occasional, unintentional background racket. Westerberg plays all the instruments, occasionally flubs lyrics, and gets defensive in the liner notes: "Unprofessional? Perhaps. Real? Unquestionably." Cocky? Yep. But the man's got a right. This here's the inventor of cock, the guy who shared a town with the already well-established Hüsker Dü and openly mocked them in a song on his band's debut album!
That cockiness fights its way onto both Stereo and Mono, and solely on the basis of the man rediscovering his testicles, these records are worth a listen. But there's more: reverting to his trademark graveled vocals and veering off the path of predictability by dropping some genuinely loud material along the way, Westerberg's conviction is nearly as strong now as it was in his prime. And, spared the studio polish and complex arrangements of the rest of his solo catalog, these songs are simply solid-- proving that when he's inspired, he can still bring home the magic. Unquestionably.
The disc opens with "Baby Learns to Crawl," with its spacious guitar and muted accordion effects fading into "Dirt to Mud," a plaintive, acoustic Dylan-esque paean to regret. The excellent, waltz-timed "Got You Down" even recalls the sparse intimacy of Nebraska-era Springsteen. For an album conceived and recorded with a modicum of slick production toys, it does a great job manipulating atmosphere from song to song. Take the downtempo blues-pop of "No Place for You," which, for its spatial expanse, is remarkably intimate (likewise the lo-fi rock of "Unlisted Track"). Makes one wonder about the acoustics of Westerberg's basement.
Included with the original pressings of Stereo comes Mono (released under that cheeseball moniker Grandpaboy), and seen as a double album, Stereo/Mono is particularly effective. If the Paul Westerberg of Stereo is a seasoned musician putting his sorrows to music in the basement, Grandpaboy is his incorrigible alter-ego, playing spacious, low-fidelity Stones-stampin' rock 'n' rule that evokes his Replacements days without pandering to nostalgia. Westerberg's even joined by a tight backing band on Mono, and claims to have recorded the album in a state of hurried, sweaty-handed irrationality-- something some of you digital perfectionists out there might take a cue from.
As on Stereo, Mono moves fairly seamlessly across genres without disrupting the essential tone of the album: the bar-brawling "High Time" kicks things off somewhere between rootsy Americana and power-pop; "Let's Not Belong Together" is a reverb-heavy, imperfect rockabilly number; "Anything But That" pits Jagger swagger against Westerberg's best 'Mats yowl. And of the two, Mono holds up as the stronger album throughout. But only by a hair.
Both of these records are considerable accomplishments, considering that the last time we heard from this guy it was on the cut-out bin damnation of Suicaine's abysmal "Bookmark." Westerberg's influence was planted ir this fertile indie rock soil back in 1982, and whether it's been bastardized through the generations or not, you can still hear echoes of his rasped tone deep in the mixes of today's greatest counter-cultural masterpieces. Mono and Stereo would be fine records from any musician-- that Westerberg himself is the source makes it all the sweeter. These albums, if nothing else, serve as a reminder of all he's done, and all he's yet to do. Congrats, Paul. Didn't think you had it in you. | 2002-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 23, 2002 | 7.7 | 5b8b93a7-6758-4a74-98e8-7d7cadf0aed1 | Pitchfork | null |
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The strikingly intimate debut from the London-via–South Africa singer showcases an exciting new talent despite its occasionally lead-footed pacing and stilted theatrics. | The strikingly intimate debut from the London-via–South Africa singer showcases an exciting new talent despite its occasionally lead-footed pacing and stilted theatrics. | Nakhane: You Will Not Die (Deluxe Version) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nakhane-you-will-not-die/ | You Will Not Die (Deluxe Version) | Nakhane Touré was only 19 years old when he came out as gay. Living in a small town on the Eastern Cape of South Africa in a community of strict fundamentalist Christians at the time, coming out meant the actor and musician was sent to conversion therapy, an experience that made him question his Christian faith altogether and turn to his own form of prayer for guidance. Eventually, following a controversial appearance in a queer South African film that prompted death threats, Nakhane relocated to London, where his music career has since flourished. It’s a life story loaded with enough affliction and triumph to make You Will Not Die, Nakhane’s deeply personal, grief-stricken shout of a debut album, an instant revelation on its own terms. With several stunning moments centering Nakhane’s crises of faith that give his supple voice room to strut and soar, You Will Not Die is a strikingly intimate album that succeeds despite some occasionally lead-footed pacing and stilted theatrics.
You Will Not Die was released in Europe last year, and it’s now being re-released stateside in deluxe form with five new tracks, featuring the standout song “New Brighton.” The victorious, upbeat track tackles the legacy of colonialist names and monuments conferred on towns in South Africa, with streaks of bright synths, rhythm guitar, and backing vocals by ANOHNI. “Never knew them before, don’t know them now,” Nakhane rallies proudly over the charging backdrop, “What about my mother and her sisters/Where was their name?” The song is a revelatory statement that twists the album’s recurring themes of religiosity and his personal history into bold new shapes.
Early highlight “Interloper” pulls off a similar trick, riding swaggering electric guitar licks and a rolling drum line as Nakhane details the clash between a clandestine tryst and his faith: “Good Lord, I see him now/Tell me what happened to the opium of your word,” he sings seductively, recalling Wild Beasts’ similarly wily and expressive Hayden Thorpe, “Let me put my finger in the cavern of his mouth.” Nakhane’s vocals throughout “Interloper” simmer under the surface until he lets them rise on the chorus, letting out a piercing clarion call halfway through that sets the song ablaze.
Nakhane’s voice is a deep and soulful instrument, and he employs it with both the delicacy of a feather and the weighty drop of a hammer. Yet the funeral march across You Will Not Die’s middle section undercuts Nakhane’s talent. Moody ballad “The Dead” plods into “Star Red” and “Fog,” both downcast and overly theatrical to the point of an Off-Broadway production. A few songs on You Will Not Die also feel perhaps overly indebted to ANOHNI, whether drawing from the solemn dramaturgy of Antony and the Johnsons (“Presbyteria”) or the pummeling electronics of 2016’s HOPELESSNESS (“Clairvoyant”).
Yet Nakhane proves he’s able to craft ballads while bringing his influences into play in a more intriguing way, dialing things down for a cover of New Order’s eternal, springy 1983 single “Age of Consent.” Suspended by sparse electric guitar, piano, and choral backing vocals, the cover is an opportunity for Nakhane’s voice to take center stage in unblemished fashion, climbing up to a falsetto and back down again while rendering the song completely anew. It’s a maneuver that, like “New Brighton,” offers up exceptional promise for Nakhane’s future, wherever it may lead.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this review inaccurately reflected portions of Nakhane’s biography. | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | BMG | February 23, 2019 | 6.8 | 5b909004-13b9-4194-a400-c0e490f5dfcd | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On his new album for Shanghai’s Genome Tapes, London’s Tim Zha applies Auto-Tuned vocals to hybrid pop informed by dancehall and Afrobeats, where bright details dance against a blurry backdrop. | On his new album for Shanghai’s Genome Tapes, London’s Tim Zha applies Auto-Tuned vocals to hybrid pop informed by dancehall and Afrobeats, where bright details dance against a blurry backdrop. | Organ Tapes: Into One Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/organ-tapes-into-one-name/ | Into One Name | “Inner poetry eludes words,” said the 20th-century Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. “One doubts the exactness of words, their ability to express what we feel within us.” That awareness of the limitations of language guides Organ Tapes, a solo project of the London-based vocalist and producer Tim Zha. His new record on the Shanghai label Genome 6.66 Mbp takes its title from a Jiménez poem, and Zha also borrows the poet’s slippery linguistic approach. He slathers his vocals in Auto-Tune, to the point where discrete words often fail to materialize from within a waterfall of sound. “I want people to make their own meanings,” he told Dazed. “I want the song to function as something that approaches being outside language.” His alias is suggestive of emotions captured in a preverbal state, still roiling inside the body. Zha pulls sentiment straight from the gut.
The singer operates within a loose orbit of young London talents, including Mixpak vocalist Palmistry and Bala Club’s resident crooner Uli K, who’ve established a niche crafting delicate pop accented by R&B, trance, and dancehall motifs. With its large Jamaican population, London has long served as an inflection point where Caribbean influences bleed into fusion subgenres like ragga-jungle and 2 tone. This legacy has left contemporary London youth hyper-attuned to regional sounds from around the world—and ruthlessly willing to experiment with them. Under his DJ Corpmane alias, Zha makes off-the-wall edits that connect the dots between unexpected emotional valences in, say, baile funk upstart MC Pedrinho and screamo legends Circle Takes the Square, or Lil Peep and Kamixlo. That might sound like a gimmick, but Zha is totally sincere. He’s a bloodhound on the trail of raw feeling, following his nose wherever it might lead.
That omnivorous approach informs Into One Name. Like generations of bedroom pop musicians before him, Zha strips established forms down to a spare framework. His smudged melodies cast a homespun glow on the dancehall and Afrobeats sounds he loves. “Li Bu Kai,” which features Bala Club affiliate Yayoyanoh, pays homage to the Nigerian star Mr. Eazi’s tender 2016 Afrobeats hit “Skin Tight.” Zha—who grew up between London and Shanghai—sings in Chinese, and Yayoyanoh’s verse cites the original’s lovelorn refrain, “If you give your heart to me.”
Sometimes Zha’s approach doesn’t connect. On “New” and “All Night,” hooks never crystallize out of the spongy atmosphere. The Auto-Tune elides his vocals into background texture, and the outlines of pop songs struggle to emerge from the gloom. Elsewhere, the record leans too heavily on pastiche. “Song” has a catchy hook, but it follows in the jetstream of melody-friendly rappers like Trippie Redd and Future without adding to their formula.
Into One Name succeeds when Zha contrasts blurry sounds with strange, sharp details. On “Something,” Zha floats over a translucent riddim bursting with 8-bit chirps that glisten like dew on a soccer field. He resembles Alkaline by way of Daniel Johnston. “Can I Know,” a duet with the like-minded London singer Malibu, isolates a fun mood with surgical precision—it’s just two voices harmonizing over a breezy kalimba loop, like the hold music you might hear while calling to book the world's coolest cruise.
Best of all is “Seedling,” a breathtaking jam that pops up near the end of the record. Zha sculpts a few sparse details—flute, xylophone, frosty synth—into what sounds like a trance rave captured in a snowglobe. “I’m burning inside, and I’m freezing,” he sings, in thrall to the mind-melting paradox of unrequited love; “I lost it, I feel it, I’m broken, I need it.” The tension builds toward a major percussive climax complete with crunk-inspired “What!” and “Hey!” samples. At the end of a record that scrupulously avoids fixed meaning in favor of fragile moods, it feels good to hear Zha get something real off his chest. | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Genome 6.66 Mbp | January 18, 2018 | 7.3 | 5b91bd5d-48c6-4fc5-9f39-5beef7f24491 | Ezra Marcus | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ezra-marcus/ | |
When Kate Boy debuted with the song "Northern Lights" three years ago, they joined a group of synth-pop oddities enraptured by the Knife. Their long-gestating debut hits the same targets as that song: Kate Boy love pounding synths and a good shout-along chorus, and so every song on One has both, a technique that is exhausting as often as it is potent. | When Kate Boy debuted with the song "Northern Lights" three years ago, they joined a group of synth-pop oddities enraptured by the Knife. Their long-gestating debut hits the same targets as that song: Kate Boy love pounding synths and a good shout-along chorus, and so every song on One has both, a technique that is exhausting as often as it is potent. | Kate Boy: One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21252-one/ | One | When it came out three years ago, Kate Boy's "Northern Lights" joined a new, growing class of Knife-wielding groups. Purity Ring, Chvrches, and Niki and the Dove all made debuts that year that recast the Swedish duo's roiling, synth-heavy formula into new electropop oddities. But the strutting "Northern Lights" stood out for a number of reasons: Those teeming, plasticized synth melodies; that widescreen, euphoric chorus; the promise that "everything we touch turns to gold" that on repeat listens sounded more and more like a threat. In spite of singer Kate Akhurst's voice bearing a borderline-scary similarity to Karin Dreijer Andersson, Kate Boy's music remained irresistible, dressing up Silent Shout's pressurized gloom in vivid, maximalist clothes.
Kate Boy's long-gestating debut, One, continues to hit those same targets, for better and for worse. It includes "Northern Lights" and three other tracks culled from an EP quietly released earlier this year, and none of the album's new offerings stray from those songs' well-established blueprint. Kate Boy loves pounding synths and a good shout-along chorus, and so every song on One has both, a technique that is as exhausting as often as it is potent. On "Lion for Real", Akhurst's cries of "It's adrenaline that you're traveling" are matched in force by the synthetic drums that rally behind her like a militia, an explosion of sound that practically demands you to move. "Burn" is similarly gratifying, in a slower, more consuming way, Akhurst stretching her vowels out in a pained howl that sounds like an alternate universe in which Fever Ray was making Billboard-charting singles. Nothing on One really feels as immediate as "Northern Lights", but Akhurst's ability to grab you by the throat with each chorus and the trio's playful use of texture—the descending wash of glassy synths at the end of "Human Engine", the '80s-indebted guitar line that slinks through "Higher"—make One an easy, undemanding, and ultimately unsurprising listen.
This speaks to Kate Boy's credentials: Australian-born Akhurst has been working as a songwriter since the age of 16 and spent time in L.A. penning songs for Disney star Ashley Tisdale and "Glee" actor Charice in the early 2010s before migrating to Sweden, where she met Markus Dextegen and Oskar Sikow Engström and formed Kate Boy (Engström has since been replaced by Hampus Nordgren). But where the group excels at assembling all the bones of a good pop song, One's lyrical content is broad even by those same standards. Platitudes like "It doesn't have to be this way/ We're different, still the same/ Move your mind to a higher state" are vague and don't manage to express much nuance beyond "we're all human, get it together." "Self Control" reaches a bit further, girding its narrator's insecurities as self-defense and providing an interesting counterpoint to the bright, jagged sounds Kate Boy likes to plays around with. On "Human Engine", they even shoot for a bit of self-awareness: "We like the word 'dynamic'/ We like to use it a lot." Still, those moments are fleeting; sometimes the group even resort to baffling, tech-referencing word salad, as on "In Your Eyes": "Activate emotion waves, oppression down/ Activate the open changes flowing out."
But maybe Kate Boy's sleekly designed songs aren't meant to be ingested with so much scrutiny. They're aiming for the same big, emotional targets as those aforementioned electropop peers here, with enough brooding style to make it distinct. Besides, the group has admitted that they're painting with broad strokes, saying in an interview last month that their main goal is to create "something that we can all feel empowered singing together." There are enough dance-ready, skyward hooks on One to render that mission accomplished. Perhaps next time they'll have something worthwhile to say. | 2015-11-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Fiction / Iamsound | November 11, 2015 | 6.9 | 5b930943-9fbe-423b-b73d-c0615ec00dae | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | null |
Syrian singer Omar Souleyman's first proper studio LP Wenu Wenu, produced by Kieren Hebden, was colorful in its exuberance, a headlong rush into new love. Bahdeni Nami is the immediate aftermath, and it's heavier this time, both lyrically and musically. | Syrian singer Omar Souleyman's first proper studio LP Wenu Wenu, produced by Kieren Hebden, was colorful in its exuberance, a headlong rush into new love. Bahdeni Nami is the immediate aftermath, and it's heavier this time, both lyrically and musically. | Omar Souleyman: Bahdeni Nami | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20830-bahdeni-nami/ | Bahdeni Nami | It's not always easy to tell who the person is behind the persona that is Omar Souleyman—what's really going on behind the aviator shades, the poker face, the dissonance between the high-speed jangling dance music bumping out of speakers and his relatively motionless stage presence. But if Bahdeni Nami is any indication, the man who's become the frontrunner of Syrian techno dabke is, among other things, a human being, who like anyone else is prone to heartbreak.
Souleyman's last release and first "proper" studio album, Wenu Wenu, produced by Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), was colorful in its exuberance, a headlong rush into new love. But if Wenu Wenu was the upswing, Bahdeni Nami is the immediate aftermath, which isn't necessarily pretty and isn't always fun to listen to. It's still dabke—the popular Levantine Arab music traditionally accompanied by circle and line dancing—but it's heavier this time, both lyrically and musically.
Bahdeni Nami was recorded closer to home, in Istanbul instead of Brooklyn where Wenu Wenu was made—though Souleyman is still in exile from his native Syria. Signed to Berlin producer duo Modeselektor's Monkeytown Records, Souleyman has enlisted a slew of producers for this second full-length studio release, including Four Tet, Gilles Peterson, Modeselektor, Legowelt (for an out-of-place haunted house remix), and Black Lips' Cole Alexander (for a purported upcoming remix). Unfortunately, Bahdeni Nami as an album isn't stronger for their handiwork. And it's not that their production styles overshadow Souleyman's sound, but rather that as the album progresses, the music becomes static and, in most instances, redundant.
There's still a lot to be said for the mind-bending keyboard work of long-time collaborator Rizan Sa'id and the saz (long-necked lute) skills of Khaled Youssef, who create the bulk of the sound. The opening track, "Mawal Menzal", finds the singer professing his undying love for a woman who has ostensibly left him. It's a mawwal, a sung passage in Arabic music that traditionally involves a vocalist improvising the melody of a poetic text, usually while an instrumentalist intersperses corresponding lines. That kind of dueting is ubiquitous on Bahdeni Nami, alternating predictably with longer stretches of keyboard/saz solos.
It's a formula that helped propel Souleyman to electro-dabke stardom in the first place. And on the album's title track "Bahdeini Nami", it still works. Produced by Four Tet, it's the most light-footed of the lot, and the most communal. Throughout the song, men throw "Yey!"s and "Hey!"s into the air. Even the stomping bass has a sort of upward lift, buoyed in part by lilting toy-Casio-esque syncopations. By contrast, on the dirge-like "Darb El Hawa", synths drone like distorted bagpipes above a lumbering bass drum and staid handclaps. Souleyman drags his voice like tired feet, intoning in Syrian Arabic, "The road of love tortured me/ For so long, I've been waiting for a letter from my loved one." His words echo and ricochet into the distance as he plays and replays his own grief back to himself. Save for saz, voice, and sometimes claps, everything here is simulated on keys, which is how Souleyman and Sa'id have always worked. But there's something poetic this time about the fact that nearly all the instrumentation is simulated; love is often an illusory thing after all.
That said, on much of the album, repetition crosses into redundancy, especially true on the two Modeselektor-produced tracks, "Tawwalt El Gheba" and "Enssa El Aatab". Both have a four-on-the-floor thump that imitates migraine pain above all else. It's not because of the four-on-the-floor though; it's because the music keeps cycling back on itself without a sense of having moved anywhere or varied much. This monolithic feeling ends up overshadowing some of the more interesting '80s synth music and acid house moments on the album, where the tightly-coiled keyboard solos recall variously a reedy mijwiz (a double-pipe reed instrument), a distorted psych rock guitar, even a Moog. Listening to Bahdeni Nami as a whole can feel borderline-masochistic. But then again, maybe that's the point; longing for or stewing over the memory of someone you've lost is its own kind of hell. | 2015-08-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Monkeytown | August 3, 2015 | 6.2 | 5b971f6c-3948-4e65-9018-d0a8081375ab | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
The Palm Beach rapper shows turn-up promise on his latest, but much of this project feels like it’s coasting on autopilot. | The Palm Beach rapper shows turn-up promise on his latest, but much of this project feels like it’s coasting on autopilot. | Wifisfuneral: Boy Who Cried Wolf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wifisfuneral-boy-who-cried-wolf/ | Boy Who Cried Wolf | On an emerging Florida rap scene that includes controversial figures like Kodak Black and XXXTentacion, the least volatile newcomer is Wifisfuneral, a quick-spitter from Palm Beach making turn-up tunes about surviving depression and drug dependency. The Bronx-born son of a freestyle battle rapper longed for a connection to his absentee father and chose to follow in his footsteps. Wifi has worldwide aspirations, striving to be connected everywhere, and he met his DJ, Scheme, when Scheme’s best friend killed himself. They formed a duo and Wifi ramped up his commitment to recording. This convergence of ambitions and fatalities manifests in the name he bears, and the life he’s lived.
Wifi has had dangerous run-ins with cocaine, Adderall, and Xanax abuse, spending recent years in and out of emergency rooms. He had a near-death experience while making Black Heart Revenge, which is (perhaps coincidentally) his best work. He’s called a recent project, When Hell Falls, a suicide note turned mixtape. The songs are all about death and misanthropy, surviving a hell on earth and subduing the demon within. Now newly sober, attributing the change to “growing up,” Wifisfuneral seemed to be chasing clear-headedness, telling Mass Appeal, “I don’t want to drown.” But his newest mixtape, Boy Who Cried Wolf, is a relapse: present tense rapping about drug benders and small narcotic operations. If When Hell Falls is about caging demons, Boy Who Cried Wolf lets them loose. This is regression through xanax binges, losing oneself in the darkness. When he isn’t on a drug-induced rush, he’s completely empty.
The rapper has claimed a weird set of sonic reference points: MF DOOM, Gucci Mane, Eminem, and Three 6 Mafia, but rarely does the palette lead him to really try anything daring. His most compelling stuff toyed with opposing forces of hypeness and misery, but much of that is lost on Boy Who Cried Wolf. Wifi has dismissed the “SoundCloud rap” tag out of hand, but he isn’t unlike other locals like Lil Pump and Smokepurpp, or tourmate XXX. They are all internet amalgamations of regional signifiers diluted so vigorously that they don’t represent anything anymore. He sounds like Uzi on “Weigh !t Out!” He sounds like Carti on uppers throughout “Wrist Motion.” Sometimes he’s XXX. Any sense of personal identity has been washed away. Songs on Boy Who Cried Wolf don’t really have topics or ideas, which wouldn’t be an issue if there was anything notable happening. For much of the project, Wifisfuneral uses flows as distractions. The hope is that there are enough head rushes to sustain momentum and wind you into a dizzied state.
The pace can be blistering, and he’s a good enough rapper to keep songs going, but eventually lucidity sets in and it’s obvious Wifi doesn’t have much to say. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things he could be rapping about. His struggle to overcome personal demons has produced some thoughtful writing, but there’s little of that here. He doesn’t talk about his complicated relationship with XXXTentacion, one of rap’s most polarizing figures. He hardly mentions those closest to him—his mother, his longtime girlfriend—or the person furthest from him—his father. The biggest moment of his year gets glossed over: At a tour stop in Houston, he was jumped during X’s performance after he leapt into the crowd. Video of the attack and his unconscious body being dragged back to stage caused such a stir online that he responded the next day.
There isn’t any mention of the incident on Boy Who Cried Wolf, but he facetiously responds to the web gadflies pestering him about it. He has a song called “JoeBuddenProbablyThinksICantRap :(,” decidedly showcasing his technicality within. The follow-up, “lil jeff hardy >:-),” opens with a clip of DJ Akademiks, Budden’s sparring partner on the Complex debate series “Everyday Struggle,” ridiculing Wifi’s stage diving technique and comparing the flip to a wrestling move. These moves prove he can be funny, and that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, but they are hollow gestures. If his verses were half as snappy as his gags, his writing would be far less static. The juxtaposition of crazed cadences and stagnant wordplay can be headache-inducing.
There is a single sobering moment, on “DisDaHateSongBby(outro),” that finally addresses the contradictions of his world: “I hate everything that I’m living/I hate everything that I’m saying/I hate the motherfucking fact I never had patience,” before concluding, “I wish I never took these drugs, but it made me.” This is the only thing that feels real and not like wild boy posturing. But one string of contemplative lines can’t negate an entire mixtape of thrasher playacting.
Boy Who Cried Wolf does produce its share of witless bangers, which can be enjoyable when disengaged. His raps aren’t quotable, but it’s possible to become enthralled by the unrelenting motion. “Pop” turns Three 6 Mafia’s “Body Full of Bullet Holes” into a wind sprint. On “Eyez Low,” Wifi crams syllables between the strummed gaps from a pitched-down harp. The Pierre Bourne-produced “1st day out” brings a touch of “Magnolia” flair. The tape’s best song is “Jackie Chan,” where he karate chops xans like the film icon. But closer inspection exposes a rapper on autopilot. These are all short-lived payoffs—the mark of a rapper chasing fleeting highs. | 2017-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo / Interscope | August 8, 2017 | 6 | 5b9847cd-67b0-4b3e-b167-b98202d0d4a2 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Blending fuzzy guitars and 2-step beats, the UK singer’s richly textured DIY pop looks to Britpop and garage, Frank Ocean and Drake. | Blending fuzzy guitars and 2-step beats, the UK singer’s richly textured DIY pop looks to Britpop and garage, Frank Ocean and Drake. | Downtown Kayoto: Learning in Public EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/downtown-kayoto-learning-in-public-ep/ | Learning in Public EP | As Downtown Kayoto, Chiko Chinyadza offers a listening experience akin to an all-you-can-eat buffet with a time limit: You are having it all and you are having it all right now. Fuzzy guitars, sadboi rap, and twinkling 2-step pile high. Some of it is really rather nice, much of it is familiar, and the odd tang is utterly new and remarkable. A good amount will be left on the plate, but the unguarded, have-a-go attitude is all part of the appeal. Previous outings—the Tyler-imitating Pinkboy in 2019, and 2021’s NAVIG8, which embraced guitars and a more forthright pop stance—tried on different looks without fully committing. Influences were proudly advertised, to the point of imitation. Kayoto’s latest EP, Learning in public, is more assured, and sparks with brilliant charm.
It helps that Kayoto, born in Zimbabwe and now based in Hull, is both a nimble rapper and proficient singer. He cycles styles and shifts between registers with ease, channeling a one-man boy band, though it’s his rapping—often delivered in a half-rasp—that’s most urgent and impressive. He can handle choruses from the softer verges of Britpop (“Run from you”) just as convincingly as a double-time verse switch (see “Lite,” which packs more ideas than the average mixtape). Occasionally, he leans a little heavily on his favored touchpoints—Drake, Kendrick, Frank—and slides away from the capacity to surprise. Indeed he’s best, like on slick, bouncy opener “Lite,” when not displaying his influences so proudly. Still, if “In2you” is Drake shortly after discovering archive footage of tastemaking ’90s rave Twice as Nice, or attending a millennial Brit’s wedding where garage-pop totems like “Flowers” and “Sweet Like Chocolate” are belted to the rafters, then it’s also a whole lot of fun—and brightly executed to boot.
More than anything, Kayoto is honest in his approach, and transparent to an almost compulsive degree. On “Run from you” he raps silkily over lounge guitars about flights to California, before admitting, in a barely audible ad-lib, “I’ve never been to the U.S.” We know, because he broadcasts the fact, that this music and the captivating accompanying videos were put together between studying for a medical biochemistry degree and working at a supermarket. He projects ambition, without losing sight of the appeal of what’s real. He embraces Hull’s reputation for, well, not having much of a reputation (an unkind joke describes the place as “one letter from hell”). Kayoto’s done with stacking shelves now, and left the childhood dream of being a doctor back in the lecture halls, but he’s not about to pretend that those things, or his hometown, haven’t shaped him and his quest for pop recognition.
All this transfers via his naked lyrics. “Poison”—where he employs the age-old trick of pairing depressive, sludgy lines with a peppy beat, singing “I felt like poison, the way I spread so slow” over baile funk rim shots—is his take on a breakup song, and potent in its blend of bluntness and subtlety. It’s small-town, post-teen living in all its contradiction and imperfection, and Kayoto’s ability to pinpoint and illustrate these moments—of young love, figuring things out, grasping for a sense of self—with precision, but not pretension, makes him a compelling prospect. | 2023-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Other Projects | July 12, 2023 | 6.9 | 5b9ac77a-a557-46fa-a457-588d64a02e92 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the restless Southern spirit of Lucinda Williams’ fifth album. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the restless Southern spirit of Lucinda Williams’ fifth album. | Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucinda-williams-car-wheels-on-a-gravel-road/ | Car Wheels on a Gravel Road | When nothing but time can still the pain, a Lucinda Williams song will see you through. In her dry Louisiana drawl, she sings plaintively of abusive childhoods and bad marriages; of drunken bar brawls and suicidal poets; of her own heart that shatters and mends and shatters again, like a puzzle, down-and-out. A magnet for the kind of unrequited love that seems to stop the Earth from turning, Williams persists. Then she’s onto the next town.
Williams was born a rolling stone. Her late father, the poet Miller Williams, was a college professor and the family moved often, to Mexico and Chile and a dozen Southern towns. After Williams was expelled from one New Orleans high school in part for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in protest of Vietnam, dad gave her a list of 100 great books to read instead. (Williams’ family of civil rights activists and union workers passed on that spirit of dissent as well.) Miller’s profession brought a young Lucinda into contact with Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and, most influentially, Flannery O’Connor. Williams would never let go of her O’Connor-inspired fantasy of writing a Great Southern Novel. Instead, Williams set hers to music, becoming an itinerant Southern Gothic beat.
At 18, she left home and belonged nowhere. There was no alternative country in 1974, no alternative rock, no Americana, and in at least one Austin bar where Williams hoped to perform, no room for another “chick singer.” Nashville told her she was too rock’n’roll. Los Angeles said she was too country. Galvanized by Bob Dylan, Williams’ songwriting evoked his poetic ambition, Bruce Springsteen’s every-people, Joni Mitchell’s confessionalism. The lonesomeness of jukebox country met the darkness of an outlaw. The whiskey-stained tenacity of the blues was spiked with the honey of AM pop. She released two albums, a 1979 covers collection Ramblin and 1980’s thrilling Happy Woman Blues, but did not catch a break until a punk label, Rough Trade, came along and signed her (making her labelmates with Stiff Little Fingers, on the one hand; Leadbelly, on the other). Lucinda Williams, in 1988, was her third album and first masterpiece. Ten years later, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was her second.
Williams was by then 45 and over two decades into her career at the fringes: touring small clubs, working with small labels, the life of an ’80s indie band more than a country star. She had released only four albums, filled with female characters who wanted it all—sung by a woman who wanted it all, too. The cool girls in Lucinda Williams songs were always packing up, pawning possessions, saving their tips to split town. There was “Maria,” in 1980, who was “wild and restless” and “born to roam.” There was the small-town waitress Sylvia, in 1988’s “The Night’s Too Long,” who resolutely declares “I’m moving away/I’m gonna get what I want.” “One Night Stand” was like a long-lost string-band ancestor of Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run.” These were mini-manifestos for a female life. Williams’ feminism rang with no stronger conviction than when she used the first-person to narrate her own desires: “Give me what I deserve cause it’s my right!” she longed on her eventual hit, “Passionate Kisses.”
If what she wanted was recognition, or fulfillment, or money—with Car Wheels, she got it. But the road there was almost comically difficult. Labels combusted in her wake: Rough Trade, Chameleon, and American all fell apart after she signed. RCA head Bob Buziak brought her to that label and then got fired. Williams and the music industry seemed allergic to one another. Lucinda Williams was an astonishing album—a classic from a renegade songwriter who never grew too hardened to admit “I just wanted to see you so bad”—but you couldn’t blame the greater public for being somewhat oblivious to it, since Rough Trade went bankrupt shortly after its release. Better-known fans kept the songs alive, with covers from the likes of Tom Petty, Patty Loveless, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. In 1997 the Los Angeles Times wrote: “It’s a good thing Williams has gotten a boost from others, because her own luck as a recording artist has been miserable.”
The six-year gap between 1992’s Sweet Old World and Car Wheels is now charged with myth. By one account, Car Wheels took six tedious years, recorded three times in three cities with three different producers. In reality, there were two years in the studio, from 1995 to 1997, and one scrapped attempt. After Williams started the album with her longtime guitarist and co-producer Gurf Morlix, she felt it was “flat, lifeless, not up to par” and chose to re-record with country fixture Steve Earle and his production partner, Ray Kennedy. She liked their warm, scratchy old equipment and how prominently Kennedy had produced the vocals on Earle’s 1996 album, I Feel Alright. When time ran out, Williams finished the album in L.A. with Roy Bittan, a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, adding keyboards, accordions, guitar, and backing vocals. (Though Bittan claimed, “We redid most everything.”) A tornado hit Nashville just as Williams was mastering the finished analog tapes; someone had to race to the studio to save them.
Unlike her hero, Dylan, Williams was mapping directions home. But home, never fixed to one place, was a profound in-between, more like the breeze that pushed her. Car Wheels is a raw, exquisite travelogue of her American South, from Jackson to Vicksburg, from West Memphis to Slidell, from the Louisiana Highway to Lake Pontchartrain. She searched for novelistic detail in back roads and cotton fields and dilapidated shacks. She played furious bluegrass stompers alongside clenching Memphis soul. Williams and an ex-lover drive through Lafayette and Baton Rouge “in a yellow Camino listening to Howlin Wolf.” Loretta, Hank, and ZZ Top are called out by name. “I see the whole thing like a pitch for a little movie,” Williams once said.
But like Flannery O’Connor asserted, “Southern identity is not really connected with mockingbirds and beaten biscuits… an identity is not to be found on the surface.” Worlds exist beneath Car Wheels’ dazzling edges and monumental hooks. As “Concrete and Barbed Wire” evokes its thorny title, Williams wonders about human divides: “This wall is not real/How can it be real?” she sings, nearly cracking a yodel, a possible polemic. (The track was once covered on the compilation Sing Me Home: Songs Against Prison.) And Williams took bold risks: The opener “Right in Time” includes some of her most irreducible, eloquent poetry—“Not a day goes by I don’t think about you/You left your mark on me, it’s permanent, a tattoo”—before becoming a moaned narrative of a woman alone in bed, pleasuring herself. It is unbelievably sensual, a daydream.
The honky-tonk title track is a sung memoir of an uncertain childhood, set in a Macon, Georgia kitchen with Loretta in the air, the smell of eggs and bacon lingering. At the whim of a disgruntled parent, a young Williams watches the world blur from a car window. When she sings of a “little bit of dirt mixed with tears,” she underscores the vulnerability and toughness at the heart of her character—the shy sense of human imperfection that makes her so heroic, unsettled already from a fixed place. There’s an innocence to this phrase, “Car wheels on a gravel road.” Williams’ melodic wording is sensitive to the bumps you feel, bumps that manifest as chaos and grief and troubled men: drunk men, self-destructive men, men in bands, men doing time, ghost men. Her voice cracks and quivers, allowing ugliness when her subject so demands.
Earle was deeply inspired by rap in the mid-’90s, particularly Dr. Dre’s ’92 gangsta rap gamechanger The Chronic. And while there remains no word if Williams shared in that affinity, it’s an illuminating prospect: On Car Wheels, her words are dramatically upfront, suspended, locking into mellow grooves. That’s especially true on “2-Kool 2 B 4-Gotten,” where Williams sings a nonlinear stream of images of rural Mississippi, her most audacious attempt at a surreal, Dylanesque poetry collage. The title of “2 Kool 2 B 4-Gotten” was taken from a phrase scrawled on the wall of a Washington County juke joint—the social gathering spaces of Black Americans in the segregated Jim Crow South—which she found in a 1990 book, Juke Joint, by the photographer Birney Imes.
But Williams sets her scene 50 miles north, in Rosedale, perhaps in homage to bluesman Robert Johnson, who she namechecks in the song and who sang of the same town in his “Traveling Riverside Blues.” Markings from the wall of yet another Juke Joint photo are scattered through Williams’ lyrics: “No dope smoking no beer sold after 12 o’clock,” “No bad language no gambling no fighting,” “Sorry no credit don’t ask,” “Is God the answer YES.” Williams is like a documentarian of these spaces, which incubated the Delta blues and are extinct today. A humble Imes photo of a juke called Turks Place, in Laflore County, also graces the cover of Car Wheels.
Williams sings “2 Kool” with a toughened poise and a dash of nihilism. “You can’t depend on anything really/There’s no promises, there’s no point,” go its opening lines, and while she continues weaving her Southern patchwork—pointing to a serpent handler outside—“2-Kool” ultimately becomes a eulogy for Williams’s ex-boyfriend, Clyde. The jumbled narrative seems to mirror the impossibility of making sense of death; it never quite resolves, feels diffuse, feminine even. When Williams sings of “Leaning against the railing of a Lake Charles bridge,” of how her former lover “asked me baby would you jump in with me,” it recalls another Southern epitaph: Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” Williams wrote the easeful, bittersweet Car Wheels ballad “Lake Charles” for Clyde as well: “Did an angel whisper in your ear?” Williams cries. “And hold you close and take away your fear/In those long last moments?” It is as close to perfect as elegies come.
The soaring, strummed-out build of “Drunken Angel” suggests an opening blue sky. Williams’s most iconic song is another eulogy, this one for her Texan acquaintance, the outlaw underdog Blaze Foley. She wonders why it had to happen, why he had to die in senseless shootout at 39. Williams’ characterization is masterfully vivid: Foley’s outcast glory, his slovenliness. As she describes his “duct tape shoes” and “orphan clothes,” “Drunken Angel” becomes an anthemic honoring of these hidden people—too eccentric, too outside, too much—who cannot bear this world and who this world, in turn, cannot hold.
Car Wheels pivots, by side B, to a fully blistering breakup album. Williams knows what belongs at the soul of these pristine songs about merciless heartache, placing them at a nexus of obsession, rejection, and occasional delusion. “Metal Firecracker” is a flawless vagabond love song: As she is wont to do, Williams turns two people sitting in a car into a film treatment of just eight lines, remembering when she was his “queen,” his “biker,” curling that last word with so much effortless twang you can feel the sun in your eyes. “Once I was in your blood and you were obsessed with me,” Williams pines. “You wanted to paint my picture/You wanted to undress me/You wanted to see me in your future.” Love that is anything less than life-changing infatuation feels fraudulent in Williams’ world.
A gentle and foreboding ballad, “Greenville” is the resilient sound of a betrayed woman trying, with impossible grace, to keep a toxic man out of her life. The quiet of the song is in stark contrast to this aggressor who screams and fights and lies, who “drinks hard liquor and comes on strong,” who compels Williams to imagine “empty bottles and broken glass/Busted down doors and borrowed cash.” “Looking for someone to save you,” Williams sings, conjuring the feeling of being used, “Looking for someone to rave about you.” Strength and tenderness are rarely entwined so consequentially. The angelic harmonies from Emmylou Harris feel like solidarity, like another woman carrying her safely through.
The rootless rhythms of travel are survival mechanisms on Car Wheels. The album’s finger-picked closer “Jackson” is like a drifting Carter Family hymn. The deeper she gets on the road, Williams sings, the less she will miss yet another ex-lover. It’s clear this woman knows the game, the fiction, that time alone repairs a wrecked heart. “Once I get to Lafayette, I’m not gonna mind one bit,” she sings, convincing herself. “Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won’t cry a tear for you.” Car Wheels ends in motion, Williams crisscrossing the country in pursuit of herself, the thing she can count on.
Car Wheels topped the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop critics poll, earned the Grammy Award for Contemporary Folk Album, and entered the Billboard Top 200. In a four star review for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau began: “Sometimes it seems Lucinda Williams is too good for this world.” Still, other critics turned mocking eyes at the supposedly “nutty” and delirious “perfectionism” Williams demanded. These criticisms would never so beleaguer a male artist—or as Emmylou Harris put it, “When a guy takes a long time to make a record, he’s a genius. If a woman does that, it’s a different matter.” A Times profile from 1997 illustrated a scene in which Williams’ male collaborators questioned her creative decisions and she proved them wrong. When, in ‘98, someone asked Williams what she learned from the process of making Car Wheels, she said, with some reluctance, “I need to learn to assert myself more in the studio environment because I’m dealing with all men. I wish I had more women to work with.”
Reading the tales of how Williams worked on Car Wheels with a record exec knocking, I’m reminded, again, of her heroine Flannery O’Connor, who refused to open the door of her Georgia home until she had completed her morning writing, even with visitors waiting. “I live in my head, pretty much,” Williams said in 1998. For all of its journeying, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road emerges as eternal proof that home, inside you, is worth fighting for. | 2018-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mercury | October 28, 2018 | 9.5 | 5b9e6f88-f6c0-4636-a355-5ef899959be9 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The Cluster Ensemble tackles some of Philip Glass's iconic early works, playing them more crisply and clearly than perhaps any other recording in history. | The Cluster Ensemble tackles some of Philip Glass's iconic early works, playing them more crisply and clearly than perhaps any other recording in history. | Cluster Ensemble: Cluster Ensemble: Plays Philip Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22203-cluster-ensemble-plays-philip-glass/ | Cluster Ensemble: Plays Philip Glass | The Philip Glass sound is easily caricatured in the minds of some listeners: a few minor-key notes are rattled off, and then repeated. By proposing to leave it at that, the composer’s critics reveal they haven’t listened to very much of his music. Insistent arpeggios are a common feature of many Glass compositions, but the overall shapes of lush, late-career works like Symphony No. 9 or Songs and Poems for Solo Cello typically bear little similarity to his hypnotic first opera, Einstein on the Beach, or to the earlier hardcore minimalism that helped Glass establish his name.
After working under Ravi Shankar and writing music for a Samuel Beckett play produced in Paris, a 30-year-old Glass arrived back in New York, in 1967. Upon his return, he started to play alongside his onetime Juilliard classmate Steve Reich, who was already far along in developing his own approach to minimalist composition. By the following year, Glass had honed a distinct method of creating music via minimal means: He discovered that a small unit of melody could be spooled into longer lines, if you took those notes through a complicated process of addition and subtraction. The resulting music could prove spellbinding, if that’s the experience you wanted. But it also rewarded obsessively close listening.
This “additive” approach yielded a succession of important works, between 1968 and 1971. These compositions gave Glass’ minimalism a new, more strictly patterned sound, one that would define the rest of his purely minimalist period. Five of these items—“Two Pages,” “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Similar Motion,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” and “Music with Changing Parts”—were also key pieces in the repertoire of the composer-keyboardist’s pioneering own ensemble, which he formed in 1968. And they were some of the first Glass opuses issued on LP. Because Glass and his ensemble were still learning to master this new aesthetic, their iconic early recordings sometimes have a harried vibe, as they learned how to speak their own language.The fact that every rhythmic addition isn’t always faultlessly executed by the group can be charming, though this quality tends to come at the expense of Glass’ compositional ideas. (Glass later said he always thought “Changing Parts” was too “spacey” for his own taste.)
Various modern-classical groups have embraced portions of Glass’ early catalog in recent decades, taking advantage of the fact that the instrumentation is often not specified. But the Cluster Ensemble—a group of talented young players from Slovakia—is the first one to record all the core works from the composer's great-leap-forward period, and to rely on the same instrument that drove the original Glass Ensemble: electric keyboards. (Like the Glass Ensemble, they use woodwinds and brass, too, but it’s clear which instrument dominates.) Cluster’s triple-album survey of this music, issued on Glass’ own label, offers a rare chance to follow the composer’s early-period innovations with consistent precision. And in terms of production, the engineering of Cluster’s keyboard textures is admirably crisp throughout.
This resulting collection offers fresh experiences of several Glass milestones. Two of Cluster’s keyboard players launch “Two Pages,” the earliest work here, with a faster tempo than is heard on the original Glass recording. And they also indulge in more repeats of individual phrase-units. (The Glass Ensemble had LP side-length restrictions to contend with). The resulting transparency is stunning, making Glass’ innovations easier to understand. Amid all the dizzying patterns birthed from the five-note beginning of “Two Pages,” each strike of G lands with an easily identifiable authority. As Keith Potter notes in his valuable book Four Musical Minimalists, that’s part of the score's design.
Thanks to Cluster's rigor, this isolated note thumps harder than it ever has on record. And as you track the prominence of that ringing leap, “Two Pages” can seem like an early example of experimental techno. The ensemble’s clarity also gives the climax a potent sense of emotional release. The traditional line on Glass’s music from this period is that it took on greater and greater suppleness each time out, but Cluster’s version of “Two Pages” makes a strong argument that this early composition was at least on par with the two that followed.
As its title suggests, “Music in Fifths” presents one keyboard part that is shadowed by another at the interval of a perfect-fifth (breaking a cardinal rule of music theory, in a bit of private joke to one of Glass’s old teachers). “Music in Contrary Motion” is dominated by an inverted tonal relationship between another pair of keyboard lines. These two emphatically conceptual pieces receive devoted performances at the hands of Cluster’s pianists, though the comparatively limited nature of the works can’t be disguised. While provocative and energetic, there were only so many pieces for Glass to write in this vein. To find a new one, he’d need some fresh ideas.
“Music in Similar Motion” breaks up this static feel, as it’s where Glass starts to find a place for harmony. The final section offers one of the most sublime harmonic progressions in the early Glass catalog. And then, in an almost perverse move, the composer sets the resulting melody up for destruction. In the space of a few minutes, the music can suggest a stuck-groove, then motorik rock, before briefly offering something danceable again—and finally resolving in a fit of minimalist joy. Cluster’s steady-but-fast playing helps bring out every distinct quality embedded in this climactic rush.
The third CD here is devoted to the magnum opus of this Glass period. “Music with Changing Parts” builds on the harmonic invention of “Similar Motion” by giving instrumentalists the option of contributing sustained pitches drawn from its modes, a choice that adds a contrasting sense of calm, as the rest of the ensemble motors along. In doing this, Glass was opening up his aesthetic to some of the prior innovations of pioneering minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley. Rather than diluting the Glass brand, this expansion of texture helped point the way toward some of his later triumphs, such as Music in Twelve Parts.
During Cluster’s performance, there’s less pitch-bending throughout “Changing” than on Glass’ first recording. As a consequence, this performance seems less wild, more orderly—and thus Earth-bound in a way that counteracts the composer’s onetime diagnosis of this as a “spacey” product. The focused take on “Changing” falls in with Cluster’s general rigor. The composer-performer’s original recordings will always have a place in the catalog, but this impressive survey of his early pieces holds value for multiple groups of listeners. Those who already admire these works will likely find new aspects to treasure. And for those who’ve only regarded the composer through a pop culture filter, this may be the perfect place to begin encountering his steadily changing music on its own terms. | 2016-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Orange Mountain | August 8, 2016 | 8.3 | 5ba41591-7ee4-4159-b68c-356def413917 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Queens-based beatmaker Luis summons early Warp-era IDM, when acts like Autechre, Speedy J, and Polygon Window crossbred hardcore and rave with the introspection of Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd. | Queens-based beatmaker Luis summons early Warp-era IDM, when acts like Autechre, Speedy J, and Polygon Window crossbred hardcore and rave with the introspection of Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd. | Luis: Dreamt Takes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22568-dreamt-takes/ | Dreamt Takes | Brian Piñeyro is part of a bustling New York club music demimonde that includes similarly leftfield-inclined producers such as Anthony Naples, Huerco S., and Patricia. But the Queens-based beatmaker is also verging on a mini-scene all by himself. DJ Wey, DJ Python, DJ Xanax, and now Luis—for a relatively green musician, Piñeyro has run up more than his share of pseudonyms, a tactic that seems part about minimizing awkward questions of identity, and partly about enjoying the freedom that comes from being a little slippery.
Dreamt Takes, his debut 12-inch as Luis, bears traces of what has come before—hazy-eyed synths, brittle hardware drums, a slight wonkiness of rhythm—while adding additional hazy atmospherics, a sort of cotton-wool fuzziness that surrounds and permeates everything. If these tracks have a historical antecedent, it’s that early ’90s branching of the hardcore continuum that spawned Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations, which saw then-green names like Autechre, Speedy J, and Polygon Window crossbreed hardcore and rave with the introspective head music of Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd. Opener “HV’s Sequence” employs the same building blocks as pretty much any given early ’90s hardcore 12”—rattling breakbeats, clipped vocal samples, shuddering bass—but is unlikely to burn up the dance floor, instead aiming for blissful reverie. “Talk Me Down,” meanwhile, slices jungle snares into slim fillets and interlaces them with shimmering 8-bit effects; so pared back are its rhythms that you’re drawn to fill in the gaps yourself, although Piñeyro occasionally pitches in a flurry of drill‘n’bass beats to gesture in the right direction.
Dreamt Takes is a reminder that it wasn’t its much-vaunted “intelligence” that made IDM distinct from the club scenes it span off, but mood and melody. “Shea’s World” suggests that Piñeyro hasn’t yet totally perfected the latter, its cycling of the same motif getting stale around the fifth minute. But the closing “Kirgaly” strikes the right balance between cranky deconstruction and melodic prettiness, a gem of misty-morning acid that’s throwing in neat twists and turns right to close. Whether Dreamt Takes is Piñeyro inching closer to a signature sound or just off another diversion isn’t clear, but for now his elusiveness is endearing. | 2016-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 1080p | October 28, 2016 | 6.8 | 5ba60e8f-aff6-4dcc-963e-dc2af92018c3 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Portland vocalist-composer Natasha Kmeto has been compared to Maya Jane Coles, Grimes, and Jessie Ware, though she has as much in common with James Blake and How to Dress Well. Her proper full-length debut features precision production, straightforward melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and a new sense of urgency. | Portland vocalist-composer Natasha Kmeto has been compared to Maya Jane Coles, Grimes, and Jessie Ware, though she has as much in common with James Blake and How to Dress Well. Her proper full-length debut features precision production, straightforward melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and a new sense of urgency. | Natasha Kmeto: Crisis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18223-natasha-kmeto-crisis/ | Crisis | Portland composer and vocalist Natasha Kmeto is a multitasker. Half her time's spent on careful precision production; the other half, the straightforward melodies and plainspoken lyrics you’d find in more outward-facing dance or R&B. As such, she makes two types of songs: meticulous vocalises that seem hookier than their short length would allow, and more fully-formed songs with melodies and subject matter that wouldn’t be out of place on a 90s R&B crossover-- maybe it was done by Timbaland at his pre-Shock Value loopiest. (For an example, see Kmeto’s tense cover of Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down.”) Kmeto has company in this, especially lately, and she’s often brought up alongside vocalist-producers like Maya Jane Coles, Grimes, and Jessie Ware, sometimes on dubious gender grounds. Arguably, she has equal affinity with James Blake or How to Dress Well, artists who share similar ideas about space and moodiness, or Disclosure, who’ve fielded the same questions about composing for vocals. Crisis, her proper full-length debut, has plenty of both, but also-- unlike her half-flirting with trap on this year’s Dirty Mind Melt EP, or the deconstructed snippets of ideas scattered throughout her last albums-- a new sense of urgency.
For one, Crisis has got something that’s eluded Kmeto thus far: a massive single. You can see the stock parts in “Idiot Proof”, the sequencer octaves and skittery percussion, the piano chasing glassy voice down the scale, the chorus that kicks up about three times the storm of anything else surrounding, but it’s authoritative in a way that’s new for her. There’s another, too. “Last Time” presses against a synth slab long enough to highlight how little motion the track’s got-- an apt analogue to the sorta-on, sorta-off relationship described. The quieter cuts have their charms, too. “Morning Sex” is far more unmoored and resigned than the blunt title suggests; it provides its own soft focus. “Vodka Diet” is like a callback to The Ache’s “Detox Saturday”, another hungover hallucination with synth claps, vague trap rhythms, and half-distorted vocals submerged in the fog. The album closes with a three-track suite that sheds progressively more production frippery (thrilling as it is) to great effect, until closer “Prideless” is almost a cappella over snaps and a simple riff. It’s like an early Ashanti track submerged underwater, and just because that’s right off the alt-R&B pantheon of ideals doesn’t make it any less delicately compelling.
Though “delicate” may not be the best word for Crisis. Kmeto’s said that Crisis is her “straightforward, cathartic” album, and while that’s often interview-speak for “album with broader ambitions than the old stuff,” there’s something to it. Just look at the song titles-- the middle stretch in particular comes off like a drugged-out portion of a Laurie Weeks book-- or what they’re saying. “Idiot Proof” is one big protest-- “it’s been a while, I need peace from all the things I’m supposed to be”; the weighty synths punctuating the words as much as Kmeto’s voice, torchy all of a sudden. It’s a little strange at first that such millennialisms are as poppy a prospect as the crashing rhythm, but it’s 2013 and here we are. If “Last Time” is like something out of a mumblecore sitcom, come-on “Take Out” is the party episode: beginning brash, as if Kmeto’s strutting in front of a mirror, it bursts with extra vocal tracks and laser zaps and synths like confetti. Moments like these are, at times, more effective hooks into the album than the actual hooks, or Kmeto’s 90s vocals, for all their perfectly timed retromania. Anyone can get all Aaliyah over Ableton. Where Kmeto shines as a songwriter/producer isn’t simply mashing together trends and skillsets, but finding that emotional entry point. | 2013-07-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-07-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dropping Gems | July 16, 2013 | 6.8 | 5ba6f663-34cd-4a00-8155-560a9b501a9a | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The debut album from Teenage Time Killers, the brainchild of Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy, features guest spots from Dave Grohl, Jello Biafra, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson, Queens of the Stone Age's Nick Oliveri, Slipknot's Corey Taylor, and others. It's not so much a punk album as it is a pageant. | The debut album from Teenage Time Killers, the brainchild of Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy, features guest spots from Dave Grohl, Jello Biafra, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson, Queens of the Stone Age's Nick Oliveri, Slipknot's Corey Taylor, and others. It's not so much a punk album as it is a pageant. | Teenage Time Killers: Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20835-greatest-hits-vol-1/ | Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 | Congratulations are in order for Teenage Time Killers, the massive, metallic brainchild of Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy: with the arrival of their long-gestating debut LP, the duo may have very well set a Guinness World Record for the biggest supergroup ever (excepting, of course, one-offs like USA for Africa and Artists for Haiti). Three years ago, they set out on a mammoth mission to recruit their friends, contemporaries and tour-mates and forge The One Punk Album To Rule Them All. Of course Dave Grohl signed up; from Them Crooked Vultures to Sound City Players, the Foos frontman's got a veritable addiction to side projects. Jello Biafra, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Queens of the Stone Age's Nick Oliveri, Slipknot's Corey Taylor: the roster might as well be metal's answer to The Masked Marauders, except the Teenage Time Killers are entirely real, and unfortunately, wholly underwhelming.
Over 20 individual vocalists scream, sing, bark (and in Biafra's case, ramble about Sean Hannity) on Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 backed by various guest musicians; Grohl takes on bass duty on over half the tracks, with Sunn O)))/Goatsnake guitarist Greg Anderson plugging in for similarly long stretches. Listening to the humdrum backbeats of "Ignorant People" and "Plank Walk", you'd have difficulty picking these two out of a lineup. This vagueness carries over into the album's instrumentation as a whole, with some exceptions. Bad Religion guitarist Brian Baker brings some timeless So-Cal punk to "Barrio", an album highlight featuring Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba that's practically written for top-down summer drives, and the thrashy, ever-so-sludgy fretwork on "Ignorant People" instantly belies the involvement of Anderson.
And so proceeds Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, not so much a punk album as it is a pageant. One minute, Clifford Dinsmore is staging a tepid, one-man BL'AST! reunion on "Power Outage"; the next, Jello Biafra is stumbling onstage to deliver a minute-and-a-half "Ode to Sean Hannity" (yes, dude, we know Fox is evil). The LP's second half is a doldrum of reheated hardcore ("Big Money", featuring Fear's Lee Ving) and second-rate sludge ("Your Empty Soul", with a grumbled lead from Red Fang vocalist Aaron Beam). When the self-titled closer, a TV theme song of sorts, barrels in to whisk the entire thing away, it feels like a last gasp rather than a final hurrah.
Mullin et al had the chance to make something truly epic—who wouldn't want to hear a heavy-as-fuck response to "We Are the World" from dozens of metal's finest? Instead, the 20-track album plays out like a more dudely version of that "Rock of Love" episode where contestants have 30 minutes to bang out a killer tune for Bret Michaels' amusement. Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling. | 2015-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rise | July 30, 2015 | 4 | 5bab3510-351a-486f-af4e-0c96dad6a2fb | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The New Zealand band’s debut is heavy but nimble, with the tight interplay of an old-fashioned indie rock power trio. | The New Zealand band’s debut is heavy but nimble, with the tight interplay of an old-fashioned indie rock power trio. | Office Dog: Spiel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/office-dog-spiel/ | Spiel | When the New Zealand singer-songwriter Kane Strang got tired of going it alone as a solo artist, he started an old-fashioned indie rock power trio called Office Dog. Backing him up are two friends from different iterations of his touring band: bassist Rassani Tolovaa and drummer Mitchell Innes. Like Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and Built to Spill, this threesome emphasizes the personality of each player as it wrings maximum drama from a minimum of instruments. Tolovaa interjects unexpectedly melodic counterparts, Innes drags the songs in odd directions, and Strang favors low, dissonant guitar notes that often sound like an animal scurrying through underbrush. Rather than abrupt or violent, their quiet-loud dynamics are measured, even eloquent, such that Spiel, their debut, sounds like an album about the joy of playing together.
Recorded in Auckland with producer De Stevens (best known from the Dunedin band Marlin’s Dreaming), Spiel wanders some of the same terrain Strang has mapped in his solo work. Too young to have experienced the initial wave of New Zealand indie pop firsthand, he always sounded a little more self-consciously clever, a little less enamored with earworms than the other Flying Nun bands to which he was constantly compared. (Spiel was released on that label last year before getting an international release via New West this year.) But he’s still interested in the way a grinding, slightly dissonant guitar can kick up some dust and how a monotone delivery can make even slightly melodic passages sound almost ecstatic by contrast.
With Office Dog, however, Strang is more than willing to cede control to his bandmates. Spiel is heavy but nimble, more direct in its arrangements and sentiments, but also moodier, more melancholy; it sounds like shoulders shrugged against a cold wind. While he does craft some intriguingly askew hooks—slicing the word “shade” into multiple syllables, clipping his words into a staccato rhythm on “Tightropes”—Strang pares his songwriting back considerably, deploying just a few words to gesture toward feelings that resist specific labels. Just as the music toggles between quiet and loud, these songs move from alienation to contentment, from unease to “something like an antidote.” That tight interplay between the three musicians sounds so disarmingly poignant because at heart this album is about recognizing and savoring even the smallest moments of joy.
It’s odd, then, to hear Strang close out the album with an apology. “Sorry for the spiel,” he sings as the trio’s dense rumble fades and some tentative guitar licks emerge. “I just wanna feel real.” It’s a meta moment that might have sounded too clever for what precedes it—like a wink at the notion of the indie rock album as a therapy session. But what comes through isn’t self-absorption but something much closer to gratitude. These are songs that catalog small moments and simple pleasures, like a friend’s smile that “feels like heaven to me” or the warmth of “sunshine on your face.” Or maybe it’s just the modest pleasure of bass, drums, and guitar each clicking into place. | 2024-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | New West | February 6, 2024 | 7.5 | 5badfa85-8ab4-4bab-8ac8-61a426c78ff0 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On her debut album, the Newcastle-via-Melbourne songwriter works slowly and methodically, lamenting her past and praying for the future. | On her debut album, the Newcastle-via-Melbourne songwriter works slowly and methodically, lamenting her past and praying for the future. | Punko: Plants Singing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/punko-plants-singing/ | Plants Singing | Punko treats songs like invocations. The Newcastle-via-Melbourne musician, real name Liv Jansz, makes percussive, lo-fi synth music, filled with lamentations for the past and prayers for the future. Across her debut album, Plants Singing, she wishes away not just a toxic relationship, but the memory of it, too: “It’s hard to remember knowing you at all,” she sings on “Undivided,” repeating the first four words as if to pull them into reality. This type of steely, considered repetition appears on nearly every song on Plants Singing, and for good reason: “Songwriting can be very predictive,” Punko said last year. “Often the things you write about come true, so I have found that by writing about future […] versions of myself who are in a better place, I am opening up a door for that person to come to life.”
Plants Singing captures the possibility of Punko’s future as much as it reflects her past. Jansz was a stalwart of the Melbourne scene before relocating to Newcastle, playing in Sui Zhen as well as the lean, rangy rock outfit Real Love and her own band, Hearing. Vestiges of her pedigree course through the album: Its new age-y synth palette makes it feel like a scuffed, unruly cousin of Sui Zhen’s Secretly Susan, while Hearing’s “Plus Minus,” originally released on a 2017 compilation, is revived as the hypnotic closing track, “+-.” The difference between the two recordings is staggering: Where the former is discordant and anxious, jolting around like a dinghy in choppy waters, listening to Punko’s version is like watching someone deliver a prophecy. The shift in focus reveals Punko as a musical project less interested in immediacy than endurance. Where “Plus Minus” was starkly thrilling—Jansz’s plea of “I cannot farewell you, friend” like a winding blow — “+-” takes longer to unravel, its intentions altogether more mysterious.
The songs on Plants Singing tend to loop and build slowly and methodically. They work best if you sink into them, leaving the record on repeat and letting the words slowly ingratiate themselves into your psyche. Listening to this album can feel a little like sitting on a beach, watching as new fragments of ocean detritus wash up with each wave. The hollow cacophony of “Plants Singing” is initially the song’s most striking element until Jansz’s lyrics—“I’m distracted by the future/I’m not looking at you” —float to the surface. Punko and Pillow Pro vocalist Christobel Elliot’s unified chants of “I can feel the warmth” on “Time for Us” seem to take up the entirety of the song’s frame, until you notice the rush of hi-hat coursing underneath.
Plants Singing can feel slow-moving, but it reveals its secrets in time. Jansz is a deft lyricist, and she knows to use her most direct and impactful lines judiciously. “Painted by the Moon” is all atmosphere and scene-setting until one lyric, “I’m not in the mood to fear for my life,” rings loud and clear. “Collect” begins with inscrutability (“It’s like peeling fruit/I can see what’s true and untrue”) before slipping into bracingly clear terms: “Holding me close/Will hurt us both.” “Cash Under Your Bed,” the best song here, takes one standout lyric, picks it apart, and builds an entire song from it. Over a sharp synth line, Punko sings about fleeing her relationship, each line fragmented but impossibly vivid: “You were drunk when I left/I took the cash under your bed/You dipped and I ran.” It feels like the rest of Plants Singing is a reverberation of the event she describes in these words—echoes of what precipitated it and flashes of what could come after. | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dinosaur City | March 21, 2022 | 7 | 5bae9435-0143-4644-a904-6cb0c2ec8fef | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The duo’s latest speeds between fragmented beats and mournful balladry but rarely makes an impression beyond its sound and fury. | The duo’s latest speeds between fragmented beats and mournful balladry but rarely makes an impression beyond its sound and fury. | Xiu Xiu: Girl With Basket of Fruit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xiu-xiu-girl-with-basket-of-fruit/ | Girl With Basket of Fruit | Girl With Basket of Fruit at least sounds incredible. Across nine uniformly taut tracks, Xiu Xiu slash into and race out of growling viola drones and battered hip-hop junkyards, smoldering torch songs and noise confessionals, racing against some apocalyptic countdown clock. “Pumpkin Attack on Mommy and Daddy” puffs its chest and raises its fist like Death Grips entering the octagon; “Amargi ve Moo” reimagines a world where Lou Reed and John Cale never had rock band ambitions. Musically aggressive and texturally provocative, these songs shape a vertiginous whole: As your head spins, you can imagine the minds of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo racing through the possibilities.
But that is, with some exceptions, where the thrill ends. After that early-onset dizziness subsides, Girl With Basket of Fruit loses its power and makes little impact, as if these songs were menacing storm clouds that simply drift into and out of town without leaving a trace. It is heavy but hollow, muscular but oddly meaningless, built with streams of images that, however vivid, are the lyrical equivalent of inert gas inside combustion chambers. During the wonderfully frenetic opener, Stewart shouts about sagging breasts used as body fans and frogs and fleas shoved in assholes, the provocations of an 8-year-old’s wildest short story. During “Scisssssssors,” the tessellated rhythms of Haitian drummers and squiggling samples bounce like popcorn in a skillet, a setting as fascinating as it is tumultuous. But Stewart drowns intriguing fragments about existential erasure and mortal fear in obscure phrases, reciting wisdom from a codex for one.
When Stewart has less cover, though, or when the volume subsides and the production opens to reveal a wider frame, he offers something that lingers. With a falsetto that seems to be fighting tears and swallowing pride, he sings sweetly of a dying loved-one for “Amargi ve Moo.” And the finale, “Normal Love,” ranks as one of the most affecting moments in Xiu Xiu’s vast catalog, a downcast ballad that longs for acceptance as a manifestation of love, for validation more than a Valentine. He tangles esoteric phrases with raw vulnerability, making the struggle personal and real. “I think I have shown you/I don’t need it to be fair/I think I have shown you/I don’t need it to be kind,” he and Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson trade, their voices choked by a desperate sort of soul. “Just let me pretend I have something to lose.” It is a breathtaking revelation, a gut-punch, and an anomaly on Girl With Basket of Fruit.
Xiu Xiu feel like a band readymade for these times. The issues that have been on their lips for decades—blind nationalism, religious servility, reproductive rights, personal freedom, human fairness—now ripple through the pieces of this ripped international landscape. But Stewart and Seo turn inward and insular here, smearing themselves in a camouflage of inside jokes and outlandish images. They blend in with the din, adding to it.
The lone exception comes with “Mary Turner Mary Turner,” a hellscape of bells and bass so blown out it corrodes the beat around it. Stewart forces his way through the traumatic terror of a pregnant Georgia mother, his voice claustrophobic and curdled inside the orchestrated madness. A mob of angry white men ruthlessly lynched, burned, and mutilated her a century ago for protesting her husband’s murder. Ripped from the womb, her unborn child died on the ground. Stewart wrestles with this emblematic American atrocity, his voice splintering as he shoulders its ugly truth. He pulls the scenario out of the past and into the present, daring us to stare into the cracked mirror of history. It is one of too few moments here where the sound and fury push us to reconsider our humanity, not obfuscate it with prurient imagery and associative bluster that seem self-satisfied in their isolation. | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Polyvinyl | February 13, 2019 | 6 | 5bb038d4-41a5-46d4-a1f3-48b53cd72455 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Kompakt's annual Pop Ambient entry features regulars Wolfgang Voigt, Thomas Fehlmann, and Jürgen Paape, plus Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld. | Kompakt's annual Pop Ambient entry features regulars Wolfgang Voigt, Thomas Fehlmann, and Jürgen Paape, plus Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld. | Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2011 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15043-pop-ambient-2011/ | Pop Ambient 2011 | Even though it's rooted in stasis, ambient music is always evolving. The German label Kompakt, an authority in the field, has driven both its evolution and the entrenchment of certain habits in the last decade. Label co-founder Wolfgang Voigt's ambient techno with Gas and other projects inspired a generation of frank imitators, even as his label's Pop Ambient compilations have pushed the limits of what ambient can entail. The term has picked up such varied connotations since Brian Eno coined it that it's become hard to define clearly. As usual, this year's Pop Ambient entry is an opportunity to take the temperature of what ambient means right now.
Pop Ambient 2011 does suggest some common properties of modern ambient music. It assumes an air of immutability-- then, it changes. It features cyclical phrases, layered drones, sculptural textures, and flashes of traditional instrumentation. It avoids crisp delineation of sections, obscuring its internal dynamics to create a sense of traveling without moving. It has more in common with abstract visual art than other music-- it calls attention to its materials and features enigmatic subjects, like the scraped and peeled paint fields of Gerhard Richter, the colored light sculptures of Dan Flavin, and especially the monumental land art of Robert Smithson. Ambient insists that music is already latent in the raw terrain of sound.
But Pop Ambient 2011 provides exceptions to every rule. "Bernsteinzimmer" by ANBB (that's Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld) conveys an abstracted but palpable narrative via harmonic development and whispers that suddenly break into an authoritative voice. Against the notion that ambient music is sonic wallpaper, it shockingly commandeers the foreground. Triola's "Dunkelraum" also taps into the current vogue for submerged voices, but otherwise is merely an inert bed of tone and texture that represents ambient music at its most pro forma.
Mikkel Metal and Bhutan Tiger Rescue take the "pop" part to heart. The former's "The Other Side Of You" places dreamy piano and drums amid a radiant synthetic sunburst. The latter's "Beginner's Waltz" is built around three lustrous tones that sway endlessly, splashed with sleigh bells and ethereal harmonies. Here, ambient music is something superficial; a haze gathering around repetitive tunes. That's not a ringing endorsement, but it's hard to get mad at pretty songs for conceptual reasons, and the Bhutan Tiger Rescue track has an especially memorable mood. At the other extreme, Crato conceives of ambient as something closer to noise or drone-metal: "30.6.1881" is a grayscale dirge midway between Infinite Body and Svarte Greiner, spooky but rote.
But the most fertile influence on this year's comp is classical music. Voigt offers orchestral halos that wax and wane majestically, like an overdubbed Arvo Pärt symphony. Marsen Jules splices Glassian piano minimalism with a coiled, pouncing filter odyssey, and the Orb's Thomas Fehlmann creates a "cover" of Mahler's First. Best of all is label co-founder Jürgen Paape's huge, swooping "Ein Schöner Land". Like Voigt's offering, it has more false endings than a James Brown song, and a dramatic sense of tension and release. Its shapes are stalwart and high-relief. Nothing feels vague or accidental. These are bona fide compositions, relying on traditional building blocks like tonality, counterpoint, and motivic development instead of the haphazard interaction of shimmering tones-- a style that some of Kompakt's artists seem content with, even as the founders who enshrined it keep pushing forward. | 2011-01-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-01-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Kompakt | January 31, 2011 | 6.8 | 5bb08c2d-2d37-4b81-9a51-e5a8852a3f9f | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
After being dropped from their label, the Portland duo flout despair with a wall of nostalgic, over-the-top sound. | After being dropped from their label, the Portland duo flout despair with a wall of nostalgic, over-the-top sound. | Pure Bathing Culture: Night Pass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pure-bathing-culture-night-pass/ | Night Pass | It’s not that Pure Bathing Culture sought out the late ’80s; it’s more like the sounds of those years beckoned them in. In the years since 2015’s Pray for Rain, the Portland duo recorded a full-length cover of the Blue Nile’s 1989 LP Hats. But after being dropped from their label, they crash-landed in the studio with songs for Night Pass already written. They questioned their next steps. They probably pulled tarot cards. Instead of going quietly into the night, they enlisted producer Tucker Martine (R.E.M., My Morning Jacket) and roared back at the void with glossy, grandiose certainty.
Where previous releases dabbled in heady synths or ’60s pop jangle, layering Sarah Versprille’s vocals in folds of reverb, Night Pass’ production is fine-tipped and meticulous. Its snares seem to land a little heavier; its grooves exude a bit more urgency. Underpinning the languid ’80s guitar lines are lyrics that hint at desperation: “Dark nights and blackest dreams, when nothing’s ever as it seems, and you are all alone,” Versprille sings on standout track “All Night.” Pure Bathing Culture juxtapose the highs with the lows, packaging distress as euphoria. The album does its most interesting work on songs like “Moonrise” and “Thin Growing Thing,” where Versprille wails, “Do you want to take it higher?,” as if in homage to Steve Winwood’s 1986 hit “Higher Love.” At its best, Night Pass flaunts the sounds that might have embarrassed you in your dad’s station wagon: the noodly electrified riffs of Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night or the earnest soulfulness of Peter Gabriel’s So.
The album’s imagery relies on nature, the night sky, and mysticism, the lyrical equivalent of a shop stocked with lumpy ceramics and letterpress cards. “Black Starling” drops references to both wands and pentacles, and the rest of the album reads like a gemology guide—within 10 short tracks, there’s mention of peridot, obsidian, selenite, and diamond. “Joyous Lake” opens with zodiac sign pairings. The faddish references shimmer out unexpectedly, like broken glass catching light on the sidewalk, and their niche referentiality limits the songs’ potency.
But those quirks aren’t enough to derail a record with such velocity. The album’s greatest triumph is its brashness, the way it flouts despair with a wall of nostalgic, over-the-top sound. Notions of commitment—to an idea, a person, or music in general—are propelled by baroque swells of vocals and guitar, and Versprille’s earnest voice belting, “Darling devotion, you know it’s all we can do.” | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Infinite Companion | May 4, 2019 | 7.3 | 5bb37f7b-553e-44ad-9bd8-2968e9614aea | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Alternating between ruthless hardcore punk and melodic post-hardcore, the Los Angeles band seek emotional truth that still rips. | Alternating between ruthless hardcore punk and melodic post-hardcore, the Los Angeles band seek emotional truth that still rips. | Militarie Gun: All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/militarie-gun-all-roads-lead-to-the-gun-deluxe/ | All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe) | When the pandemic forced Seattle powerviolence band Regional Justice Center to cancel tour plans, it marked 28-year-old Ian Shelton’s first break from the road since age 17. He found solace in daily songwriting sessions where he worked on untangling his pent-up vulnerabilities, a process that birthed his new project, Militarie Gun. “I had to let my subconscious bring it out of me,” he later explained. After debuting with the 2020 solo EP My Life Is Over, Militarie Gun released a pair of EPs in 2021 that transformed them into a five-piece post-hardcore band. Relentless touring opening for acts like Touché Amoré and Fiddlehead soon landed them a record deal with Loma Vista. On All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe), which repackages last year’s dual EPs along with four new songs, Militarie Gun take stock of their whirlwind origin and showcase why their subtle brand of self-help is so much fun.
Militarie Gun alternate between ruthless hardcore punk and the alt-rock undercurrent of post-hardcore, a logical outcome of the members’ previous bands. Regional Justice Center delivered tireless, aggressive testimony to the need for prison reform: Shelton handled vocals and drums while his incarcerated brother, Max, penned lyrics from behind bars. Militarie Gun guitarist Nick Cogan splits his time in Drug Church, the invigorating post-hardcore band with an unapologetic approach to controversial topics. Rounding out the lineup are guitarist William Acuña, bassist Max Epstein, and drummer Vince Nguyen, who indulge in playful alt-rock licks (“Fell on My Head”), pogo-worthy drumming (“Big Disappointment”), and blistering post-punk attacks (“Disposable Plastic Trash”). No matter how scratchy Shelton’s scream, Militarie Gun always lead with emotive melodies. It’s what allows him to improvise lyrics about spite, relationship missteps, and newfound empathy for his parents, unleashing passionate real-time confessions while the band streamlines his emotion into concentrated, memorable hooks.
The four new songs tacked onto the deluxe release further demonstrate Militarie Gun’s emotional range. “Let Me Be Normal” is a burst of distorted power-pop about embracing adulthood, college-radio bait fit for the 1990s or its Gen-Z revival. The remaining tracks are unexpected collaborations: “Can’t Get None” is a spacious noise-pop number featuring vocalist DeeDee from Mississippi punks MSPAINT; “I Can’t Stand Busy People” and “Pull It Out” are comparatively mellow indie rock jaunts, with acoustic guitar strums and sweet vocal harmonies from Giles Roy and Heather Black of Vancouver band Woolworm. The trip from Militarie Gun’s typically heavy sound to these lighter ventures produces mild whiplash, but the new songs speak to the band’s skill at integrating a worthwhile hook to the vehicle best suited to carry it, like the wistful chord progression that makes “Don’t Pick Up the Phone” a tender affair.
Not even Militarie Gun can escape the lure of their own hooks. During moments without lyrics, Shelton sings along by uttering a husky grunt, an “oof oof” that sounds like a dog warning off a passing stranger. It’s an idiosyncrasy akin to a rapper’s favorite ad-lib, like Cardi B’s “okurrr” or RZA’s “bong bong,” and once you notice it, you start to hear it everywhere. When Shelton lets loose another “oof oof” during “Can’t Get None” or the bridge in “Ain’t No Flowers,” you can imagine his cheeks turning red from trying to hold it in. It’s a primordial feeling that any music fan with a favorite karaoke spot knows firsthand.
As he stared down his 30th birthday, Shelton penned lyrics that occasionally sound like unsolicited advice from a hardcore veteran: “Don’t pick up the phone when you’re on drugs”; “They say be grateful for what they give to you”; “This punk shit needs to pay, man.” These aren’t reprimands, though, but a pact with himself: After logging more than a decade in a scene outwardly defined by fortitude, masculinity, and punk ideologies, Shelton is level-headed enough to recognize it’s not the sturdiest career ladder. “When it ceases being fun, run,” he sings on the title track. Fortunately it’s more paranoia than prophecy: All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe) is both a personal space for Shelton to unpack his self-doubt and an opportunity for the rest of us to revel in melodic post-hardcore done right. | 2022-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | December 8, 2022 | 7.4 | 5bb4501d-322b-490f-9a35-214ecc0875de | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
For Salutations, Conor Oberst rearranged songs from 2016’s Ruminations with a full band and shuffled, expanded tracklist. It’s one of his most demanding albums, and also one of his least ambitious. | For Salutations, Conor Oberst rearranged songs from 2016’s Ruminations with a full band and shuffled, expanded tracklist. It’s one of his most demanding albums, and also one of his least ambitious. | Conor Oberst: Salutations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22994-salutations/ | Salutations | Last year’s Ruminations was like no Conor Oberst album before it, and hopefully, none to come. Performed entirely solo, released with little fanfare and bearing a distressing, cabin-fever ambience, it offered the first and final word on a once-unspeakably rough time in his life. Ruminations was Oberst’s strongest record in years, but no one would want him to make it a second time. Less than six months later, Salutations is an even more curious move. Oberst re-recorded all 10 songs with a full band and a host of guests, added seven new ones and hit shuffle—a decision that drags Salutations down and bring its predecessor along with it.
After a series of lesser-loved guises—inscrutable mystic, folk-rock yeoman—Oberst has found a more interesting and sustainable point of view. A kind way of putting it would be “world-weary raconteur.” Perhaps a more accurate way would be “kind of an asshole.” The prospect of hearing another dude do this for about 70 minutes is a hard sell at a time when Father John Misty, Drake, Mark Kozelek, and Future have released approximately 9 hours of music in the past year that wearily postulates from a position of privilege on their dissatisfaction with sex, drugs, and everyone outside of their immediate circle. The difference here is that Oberst only hops on a pedestal for the purpose of knocking himself down.
In his post-poster boy phase, Oberst is no longer trapped by expectation or myth; he can play his past personas against each other. “Afterthought” and “Overdue” respectively caricature the roles he played on his 2005 diptych of protest song and smack-addled narcolepsy, presenting the narrator as someone for whom extreme politics and heroin are just another fix. On the opener “Too Late to Fixate,” he half-asses his way through transcendental meditation only to find serenity in the luxuries of a hotel feather bed and a mistress to lay upon it: “You know I don’t mind the money/It beats betting on sports/And though it might get expensive/It’s cheaper than divorce.”
These aren’t new topics for Oberst, but he’s never been this flat-out funny, providing a necessarily salty and bitter edge as he reverts back to the tasteful roots rock that has defined his past decade. This approach reflects of Oberst’s status as a Nonesuch recording artist who hangs out with the Felice Brothers and Dawes, but it also shows the dividing line between “crowd pleaser” and “cult builder.” Though Ruminations was the inverse of the fire-breathing agitpop of his band Desaparecidos’ 2015 LP Payola, both serve as proof of the extreme measures necessary to steer Oberst away from the middle of the road—where Salutations spends well over an hour.
The most rewarding records of this length carry a mutual assumption of risk. Listeners will indulge the occasional faceplant as long as the artist is making an attempt to reach new personal heights. Though Salutations is one of Oberst’s most demanding albums, it’s also one of his least ambitious, even before taking these new arrangements into account. The righteous indignation of “You All Loved Him Once” was devastating when it was Oberst alone; recast now as “Oberst and the Felice Brothers against the world,” it’s less believable. “Counting Sheep” dulls its edge in the most literal way imaginable: On Ruminations, Oberst mused on the death of two local youths, hoping it was both slow and painful while censoring out their names. He actually reveals them here, but changes the lyric to “Hope it was quick, hope it was peaceful.”
Even if *Ruminations *is now rendered a collection of demos, it was unquestionably an album—thematically and sonically coherent and perfectly sequenced. Salutations muddles that. On Ruminations, “You All Loved Him Once” was the penultimate track, settling scores. And it led into “Till St. Dymphna Kicks Us Out,” which implored those who stuck around to forget old memories and make new ones. The latter is now stuck right in the middle of Salutations and this diminishes the song’s effect. (Just imagine if Oberst had lost his nerve in 2005 and recorded the caustic electro-pop of Digital Ash as folk songs and slapped them onto I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.) From a songwriting standpoint, Salutations is an undeniable triumph—for people who haven’t heard Ruminations yet. If they exist, I envy them. | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | March 14, 2017 | 6.6 | 5bb4eff2-cfba-424c-b9d6-da4467b12dcc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
For such an on-the-record perfectionist, Jansch sounds humble and approachable during Live at the 12 Bar. On this "authorized bootleg," a fan favorite for years, he lets the imperfections stand. | For such an on-the-record perfectionist, Jansch sounds humble and approachable during Live at the 12 Bar. On this "authorized bootleg," a fan favorite for years, he lets the imperfections stand. | Bert Jansch: Live at the 12 Bar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20716-live-at-the-12-bar/ | Live at the 12 Bar | During Bert Jansch's five-decade career, he released records where nothing seemed out of place. The folk singer, who died in 2011, often wrestled with the torment of young lovers and restless souls in his lyrics, but those worries came in near-perfect packages, in which the blues and intercontinental folk, jazz, and pop moved together with riverine fluidity. When a New Weird America contingent led by Devendra Banhart and Noah Georgeson worked to revive his career with the The Black Swan LP in 2006, it made sense; he and his band, Pentangle, were godheads for pockets of that scene. It was, however, an odd fit, since Jansch, even as the young man who had made Birthday Blues or It Don’t Bother Me 40 years earlier, never seemed one for letting loose and getting wild. There was very little freak in his folk.
Live at the 12 Bar—a 16-song set from 1996 that Earth Recordings has resurrected for the launch of an extensive series of Jansch reissues—is not some unbridled onstage affair. An intimate solo show, Jansch plays without much pause for about an hour, laughing at himself when he doesn’t leave the stage ahead of the encore. The sound of his amplified acoustic guitar is thin and modest, and his voice ranges from furtive murmur to broad-shouldered bellow. He speaks softly to the audience, and he doesn’t indulge in the great between-song yarns endemic to such releases.
You do, though, get a sense of Jansch’s modest personality, wry wit, and self-effacing charm. He momentarily forgets song titles and awkwardly stumbles through a birthday greeting for a gleeful audience after his definitive take on "Blackwaterside". He flubs or altogether drops some notes in the turnarounds of the gorgeous aubade, "Morning Brings Peace of Mind", and he strums hard enough during the protest number "Let Me Sing" to break the reverie his music inspires. For such an on-the-record perfectionist, Jansch sounds humble and approachable during Live at the 12 Bar. On this "authorized bootleg," a fan favorite for years, he lets the imperfections stand. The errors give his precise work a newly human touch, spotlighting the deep folk origins of his tender tunes.
There are nearly a dozen live releases crammed into Jansch’s catalogue. Live at the 12 Bar stands out in part for the sweep of its songs, a range that reflects the roots of his work and how much he was able to grow within its traditions. He moves from the impetuous opener of his 1965 debut, "Strolling Down the Highway", to "Walk Quietly By", the beautiful and bothered beginning of When the Circus Comes to Town, the album he released not long before this show. He saunters and pleas through American R&B ("Come Back Baby") and stands at the threshold of loneliness and love for an endearing turn on the Irish standard, "Curragh of Kildare". He picks gracefully through the transcontinental standard "The Lily of the West", and he seems to smile through the blues of "Trouble in Mind".
Four years after his death, Jansch’s legacy often revolves around his guitar playing. Frequently presented as an other-side-of-the-Atlantic foil to John Fahey, Jansch is the less deliberate of the two. Where it felt like Fahey was often pulling notes from his instrument, Jansch’s skill seemed to be holding their flow back long enough to articulate their shape. But this career-spanning set from a late London club known as an incubator for great songwriters is a welcome reminder of his skills in that regard, too. He plunges into romantic neuroticism for "A Woman Like You" and moves between sensuality and sensitivity for "Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning". In turn, he gets mad, sad, and nostalgic, feelings he communicates as capably with his underrated voice as he does with his fingers and strings. No, Live at the 12 Bar, unlike much of Jansch’s catalogue, isn’t perfect. You hear mistakes, clumsy knocks at the microphone stand, and even his breath as he plays. But mostly, you hear this master traversing a musical map of his life, hard times and all. | 2015-07-31T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-31T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Earth | July 31, 2015 | 7.7 | 5bb6ab79-8d07-47b8-a086-72b89bccf3fc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Long a collectors’ holy grail, this 1975 session is the keyboardist and bandleader’s only known recording: a fierce half-hour that pushes the limits of jazz, funk, and R&B to their breaking point. | Long a collectors’ holy grail, this 1975 session is the keyboardist and bandleader’s only known recording: a fierce half-hour that pushes the limits of jazz, funk, and R&B to their breaking point. | Roland Haynes: Second Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roland-haynes-second-wave/ | Second Wave | Nobody is quite sure who Roland Haynes is. As far as anyone knows, the keyboardist and bandleader played on precisely one record—his own, this one, from 1975—and then disappeared, leaving behind a half hour of ankle-snapping jazz-funk played so fast and with such meticulousness it’s practically comical. What’s more, because Haynes shares duties on Second Wave with one-time Pharoah Sanders sideman Kirk Lightsey, and nobody thought to write down whose keyboard is whose, we can’t even be sure what Haynes is doing on this record, which means he’s a ghost in his own machine, playing with ferocious anonymity from either the extreme left or extreme right margin of producer Gene Russell’s beautifully wide stereo image. When it comes to obscurity, Roland Haynes makes Jandek look like DJ Khaled.
Despite this frankly incredible obfuscation, Second Wave reveals plenty about its creator—most obviously, that he was intent on pushing the willing containers of jazz, funk, and R&B to their absolute breaking point with as many notes as he could cram into them. His quartet flies through these six songs with the virtuosity of a prog group approaching terminal velocity, their playing buoyed by unalloyed joy and the steady pulse of Henry Franklin’s bass. Second Wave is a funk record playing by jazz’s rules—mostly in order to break them—but it possesses a sweetheart streak that puts Haynes’ group in conversation with Brazilian legends Azymuth, who also made their debut in 1975. Like much of the Black Jazz catalog, which languished for decades following the label’s shuttering later that year, Second Wave is possessed of the kinds of breaks and riffs that have made it a holy grail for collectors for decades. Now reissued by Real Gone, Haynes’ only known recorded work should take its rightful place as a minor but crucial piece of one of jazz’s most innovative eras.
Black Jazz began releasing records in Oakland in 1971 and positioned itself as the Bay Area’s answer to Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and Brooklyn’s Collective Black Artists. Label heads Russell and Dick Schory proposed to release work exclusively by Black musicians, and in their embrace of then-ascendant spiritual jazz and ongoing experiments in free jazz, they explicitly rejected orthodoxy. This was politically and spiritually conscious music made by artists who were as influenced by poets and comics like Nikki Giovanni and Dick Gregory as they were by Archie Shepp, McCoy Tyner, and Alice Coltrane.
At first blush, it’s not totally clear how Second Wave fits in this milieu. While the album’s two ballads—the opening “Eglise” and breath-catching “Aicelis”—both capture a bit of reflected starshine from Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano-based astral journeys, the band under Haynes’ direction doesn’t seem to be in pursuit of the transcendental. They’re far too locomotive for spiritual jazz, and much too melodic for free jazz. Like Herbie Hancock, whose embrace of funk and danceable grooves in Head Hunters had turned jazz on its ear two years prior, Haynes’ protest against the status quo leads him into more populist territory, making things difficult for the performers but not their listeners. Indeed, following these four as they navigate the intricacies of Haynes’ arrangements often feels like watching a Formula 1 race: They sprint along at extraordinary speeds on the straightaways, then navigate tight turns with absurd precision, their playing so tightly bound as they enter the corners it feels like a miracle when they emerge without ramming into one another.
Much of the success of Second Wave comes down to the spaciousness of Russell’s production. He situates Haynes and Lightsey as far apart from one another as they can reasonably go, then fills in the space between with Carl Burnett’s drums and Franklin’s bass. With the two keyboardists throwing out fitful constellations of notes from their electric pianos—the left channel frequently running through a wah pedal that makes it sound like Jimi Hendrix, the right comping with the lyrical swagger of Hancock—the rhythm section’s clarity and presence at center stage make them the de facto leads. Franklin takes advantage of the low-end space ceded to him by the keys and elegantly slides in and out of his runs. Burnett, who kept time on Cal Tjader’s stately 1967 album Along Comes Cal, kicks off the title track with a tense, in medias res fill that seems destined for a Flying Lotus mix; rather than resolve it, the quartet burrows into the tension, doubling down and not allowing the song to break into a comfortable stride until nearly four minutes in.
It’s not hard to spot Haynes’ antecedents—Hancock, Les McCann, and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever were all making similar music around this time—but the willingness to sit with the song’s tension long enough to see where it goes speaks to his instincts as a composer. It happens again and again across Second Wave: The quartet breaks down the wiggy funk of “Kirstn’s Place” only to rebuild it as an arch showtune, coaxes the Grateful Dead-ish explorations of “Descent” into sweet soul-jazz, and dresses up a simple blues progression with silky vamps in “Funky Mama Moose.” For all their flashy playing, Haynes’ group are at their best and most entertaining in these small transitional moments, where they’re forced to follow their leader’s instincts and bring them to life. Their strokes paint what is possibly the only portrait of Haynes we’ll ever have.
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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. | 2020-12-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Real Gone | December 30, 2020 | 7.4 | 5bb6ec3d-caa4-4659-b354-d27b81299d6a | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
In composing radiant new-age music inspired by plants, the Los Angeles-based musician encourages a sense of empathy with nonhuman life. | In composing radiant new-age music inspired by plants, the Los Angeles-based musician encourages a sense of empathy with nonhuman life. | Green-House: Music for Living Spaces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/green-house-music-for-living-spaces/ | Music for Living Spaces | A simple, open sense of awe suffuses the music Olive Ardizoni makes as Green-House. Their debut record under that alias, the calming, contemplative Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, came out in early 2020 via the Los Angeles label Leaving, a longtime home for music with a spiritual slant and a reverent embrace of nature. Like Mort Garson’s 1976 cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia, the first Green-House release took plants and their caretakers as its intended audience. Ardizoni similarly followed Stevie Wonder’s mesmerizing 1979 score Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants in mapping the behaviors of flora onto synthesized compositions, trying to imagine what kind of musical patterns plants might like to hear—or, conversely, what kind of rhythms and melodies might induce in people the opportunity to empathize somatically with their still, unspeaking neighbors.
Ardizoni’s second release as Green-House, Music for Living Spaces, sustains their fascination with nonhuman life. Songs like “Royal Fern,” “Nocturnal Bloom,” and “Sunflower Dance” imbue their subjects with a sense of animist agency, using melody as a vehicle for imagining the interiority of an organism without a central nervous system. To Ardizoni, plants and wildlife don’t merely supply the backdrop to human activity; they are deeply entwined with our species, and available to commune with us should we grant them the opportunity. The world rendered in these songs is not the setting of any one protagonist’s arc, nor does it exist merely to support the narrative of humanity as a whole. It’s a tightly woven mesh of interconnected movement in which we as people are lucky enough to find ourselves tangled.
The soft triumphs of Music for Living Spaces make it easy to see reality on this scale. This album furthers the palette and techniques of Six Songs, relying largely on the pearly tones of simple synthesis: pure sine waves; simulated horns and woodwinds that make no bid for realism; the compressed peal of a xylophone dreamed up inside a computer, untethered from mallet or key. Some tones, like the one playing out a countermelody on “Sunflower Dance,” beep like scientific instruments steadfastly recording data. Ardizoni keeps their melodies unhurried, sticking largely to placid tempos. In this world, there’s no anxiety and no rush. The music invites diffuse attention across its entire field; Ardizoni doesn’t designate particular sounds as leads and accompaniment so much as they let dynamic and static melodies mutually support each other, giving each equal weight in an abundant expanse.
One of Ardizoni’s greatest strengths as a composer is their sense of pacing: the patience to let the natural arc of the work emerge over time. Close to the end of the album, they introduce their singing voice into the mix for the first time on a Green-House project, and the music suddenly blooms. Like their synthesizers, their voice suspends melody with a gentle, oblique touch. When they repeat the title of the song “Rain,” their voice is layered and processed such that it finds kin, not contrast, with its electronic environment. It’s like the clouds have opened up and a ray of sun has drawn out the full colors of the scene, warming it through the lingering dew. “I follow the wind/And I fly home,” Ardizoni sings on “Find Home,” their clear voice flowing into a stream of pristine synthesized sound. This world is already their home; all they have to do ease into its path.
The album’s title suggests that this music is intended to be played in rooms where people carry out their daily lives, rooms people keep clean and decorate to maximize their pleasure and productivity. But it also gestures to the idea that on Earth, there is no such thing as an unliving space. Music can play wherever there’s air; wherever there’s air, something is striving, growing, resisting entropy to take on new and astonishing shapes. Green-House’s music invites you to consider yourself not as an isolated subject clawing against an antagonistic world, but as an organism among organisms, a locus of growth and becoming, unweighted by directive beyond the urge to keep living.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Leaving | May 10, 2021 | 7.7 | 5bba31db-6e84-4877-8a94-b5a26d1472f5 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On his sophomore EP, DJ/producer Caleb Halter positions his music between ambient atmospheres and clubby bombast—this time pulling in opposing directions rather than seeking balance. | On his sophomore EP, DJ/producer Caleb Halter positions his music between ambient atmospheres and clubby bombast—this time pulling in opposing directions rather than seeking balance. | Feral: Nexus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22231-nexus/ | Nexus | “100 Fold,” the leadoff track on this sophomore EP from DJ/producer Caleb Halter (a.k.a. Feral) begins with a soothing keyboard fade-in that lasts all of 20 seconds before Halter interrupts it with rolling layers of abrasion. First comes a supremely fat bass note, then a jarring touch of glitch, followed by a pitch-shifted four-note hook that sounds like a digitized blend of human vocals and wood flutes. If you’ve set foot anywhere near a dance floor in the past, oh, 15 years or so, you instinctively expect a tune like this to unfold with a bass drop followed by a forceful groove based on the hook, with some whiplash-inducing glitch thrown in for good measure.
In a club setting, Halter could’ve easily ridden that stereotype into a repetitive trance. But the bass drop and groove never arrive. Instead, Halter teases at both while “100 Fold” froths with atmospheres that threaten to reclaim the spotlight. After a minute and a half, the music simply fades away, but in that space Halter establishes the central dynamic at the core of the five tunes that comprise this EP: From start to finish, he keeps one foot in an ambient headspace and another in the ear-rattling clamor of the club.
On Feral’s first EP, last year’s Relay, as well as on his contributions to comps by Ghostly and Lucky Me, Halter appeared to be searching for a comfortable medium between those two modes. On this new material, he sounds restless and focused on sonic opposition as much as balance. If you like the element of surprise—or if you enjoy hearing boisterous dance-floor gestures through headphones and, in reverse, gauzy ambient nuance at loud volumes—Nexus keeps in perpetual flux, never quite resting in one world or the other.
Nexus also demonstrates Halter’s deliberate attention to timing. After he leaves you pining for a beat at the abrupt conclusion of “100 Fold,” he delivers on the remaining four songs, all of which are either anchored by strong beats (“Hyphen,” “We Feel You”), arrangements that suggest them even without any percussion (“Sum”), or a combination of both (“Wasp”). In all four cases, though, Halter continuously throws curveballs, some more subtle than others. “Wasp” starts off with a digital frost-like coating of atmosphere that appears to be heading straight for ambient territory, which makes the sudden onset of brash 808 pomp feel almost rude. From this point onwards, Halter allows the grooves to establish themselves enough to bob your head or move your body to them. However if you actually try to dance to this music, you’ll be presented with challenges.
In the middle of “Wasp” there’s a section where the groove drops out and the music just hovers, suspended, before it’s clear where things are going to go next. Meanwhile, when he captures the ham-fisted bombast of drum‘n’bass and glitch on “Hyphen,” for example, one gets the sense that some of his choices verge on satire. (“Nexus” is also the name of a software plug-in that Halter describes as dated and cheesy.) It takes attentive listening to notice that Halter often undercuts his gaudier sounds with finer details.
Nexus ends with “We Feel You,” a track whose triumphant overtones and skittering rhythm recall Middle* of Nowhere*-era Orbital. It sounds like the fabricated optimism of a closing credits sequence to a Hollywood blockbuster. But when you compare it to the more overtly uplifting “Ceremony,” the tune that closes Relay, it’s clear that Halter is moving away from emotional directness and into more guileful self-presentation. At times, Nexus appears to overstate what it is, only to leave you questioning whether you've properly read or even misread its intentions. Given Halter’s sense of precision, the push-pull of his music is both intentional and very rewarding. | 2016-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | UNO | August 26, 2016 | 7.4 | 5bbcf499-a9b9-4bee-abac-d2e6ae666dca | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On his most extreme and cohesive solo album yet, the Swedish producer and Fever Ray collaborator steers from the dancefloor while locating a sense of humor within techno. | On his most extreme and cohesive solo album yet, the Swedish producer and Fever Ray collaborator steers from the dancefloor while locating a sense of humor within techno. | Peder Mannerfelt: Daily Routine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peder-mannerfelt-daily-routine/ | Daily Routine | Peder Mannerfelt has had an exceptionally busy decade. In addition to his production work for Fever Ray, Glasser, and Blonde Redhead, he has issued four albums with the duo Roll the Dice and, with the new Daily Routine, four solo albums in four years. The Swedish producer’s own daily routine likely involves quite a bit of time in front of his computer. When he’s there, things get strange.
Though Mannerfelt has put his hand to some rather straight-up techno tracks, the majority of his solo work since 2014’s Lines Describing Circles has proposed an unusual mixture of analog grit and hi-def digital treatments. Halfway between Cabaret Voltaire’s murk and SOPHIE’s glistening artifice, it’s like a high-resolution hologram wreathed in the acrid smoke of an electrical fire. The imaginative dimension of his largely instrumental music plays out in titles like Transmissions From a Drainpipe and Black Holes, or How We Lost Solidarity—equal parts sci-fi escapade and subterranean nightmare. As 2016’s flag-waving Equality Now showed, he can also be refreshingly unambiguous. You might say that he makes dystopian rave with a utopian core. Still, Daily Routine is as extreme as anything Mannerfelt has ever made, its tempos either amphetamine fast or death-gurgle slow.
Several of Daily Routine’s highlights were clearly crafted with peaktime in mind, but much of this album doesn’t come anywhere near the dancefloor. “Hibernation Hyper Nation” is a drifting mixture of ersatz pan flutes and underwater pianos roiled by slow-motion laser bursts and subwoofer tremors; it sounds a little like what you may get if Arca moved to British Columbia and started making new-age house. Even further out, the beatless “Belgian Blues (Black MIDI Mix)” and “Weighing My Brain” are deep dives into the guts of his electronics, all unsteady flutter and viscous dissonance. “How Was Your Day? (Numb)” approaches the pumping cadences of club-centric bass music. Just when it feels like it’s building toward a steady groove, though, the beat drops out. The track slips sideways across a jagged expanse of distorted breaks and doomy pads in one of the rare occasions where you can hear an echo of Fever Ray. Even the 184-BPM juggernaut, “This Machine Shares Memes,” isn’t really a “dance” track; strafed with mournful sirens and piledriving kicks, it feels more like an audio document of a construction-site accident.
But the album’s seething heart lies in its heaviest songs. “Cigarettes (Eurofierceness Mix)” is a skulking rave anthem whose synths hang like lead blankets. “Temporary Psychosis” loops its titular phrase over thundering drum programming and minor-key streaks, embracing its campy excesses without losing any power. Best of all is “Sissel & Bass,” a collaboration with Sissel Wincent, a fellow Swede signed to Mannerfelt’s label. His beat here—kick drum, crash cymbal, a sampled man incessantly saying “bass”—is practically a parody of rave music. But the heaving sub-bass isn’t kidding around, and neither is Wincent. “I have some questions for you all: Are you doing things the way they’ve always been done?” she spits at the outset of a lecture on risk-taking.
It’s a bracing screed against the complacency of nostalgia, particularly when paired with Mannerfelt’s looped whoops and crescendoing gabber kicks—the best sort of meta-music, the kind aimed at expanding one’s mind while losing one’s mind. In the midst of her lesson, she asks, “Can you play it harder. Can you play it faster. Can you play it funnier?” One of those things is not like the others. But that’s the genius of Mannerfelt’s approach: By embracing a sense of humor, he brings life back to techno. At a time when dark, experimentally minded dance music sometimes seems to suffocate in self-seriousness, a little laughter is the best medicine. | 2018-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Peder Mannerfelt Produktion | November 28, 2018 | 7.9 | 5bbd0277-9b0a-4884-ae91-d08bc878f4d2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The cult death metal act returns with a fresh blast of hellish air, full of joyously absurd keyboards, hyper-technical guitars, and apocalyptic sci-fi visions. | The cult death metal act returns with a fresh blast of hellish air, full of joyously absurd keyboards, hyper-technical guitars, and apocalyptic sci-fi visions. | Nocturnus AD: Paradox | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nocturnus-ad-paradox/ | Paradox | Nocturnus’ “Destroying the Manger,” from their 1990 record The Key, is one of the most perplexing songs in death metal. It details an unnamed protagonist traveling back in time to kill a newborn Jesus, thus eliminating Christianity and allowing evil to reign over Earth. Going Terminator on Jesus is exactly the kind of fervent anti-Christian energy on which death metal thrives, and “Manger” is an iconic example of it. But if there were no Jesus to oppose, there would be no death metal. This contradiction epitomizes how absurd “Manger” is, which is also what makes it one of the best death metal songs ever.
Nocturnus were one of the first death metal bands to incorporate sci-fi themes, and they outfitted their bizarre visions with an equally unlikely blend of new age keyboards and hyper-technical guitar, drummer/vocalist Mike Browning whipping the cosmic chariot along with brimstone-as-paradise energy. While Tampa’s death-metal sound has long been the world’s death-metal sound, no band has ever been able to capture The Key’s singular weirdness, which is why it remains a cult record among the faithful. That is until Browning revived Nocturnus as Nocturnus AD, with members of his band After Death. Thus, Paradox is less of a debut than a continuation, and in every respect it proves a worthy successor to one of death metal's lost classics.
Leadoff track “Seizing the Throne” follows The Key’s opener “Lake of Fire” in structure, beginning with drifting keys and wind chimes before quickly descending into a whammy bar-driven frenzy. Save for the fresh 2019 production, you’d think it was ripped from a lost B-side. It’s remarkable how well Browning and his new band replicate The Key’s sound: Demian Heftel and Belial Koblak are faithful to original Nocturnus guitarists Mike Davis and Sean McNenney, who were more technically advanced than a lot of death metal at the time but still moved with chaotic unpredictability. “The Bandar Sign” ends with tight, frantic syncopations like a death-metal Moving Pictures.
Even the keyboards sound like they haven’t been taken out of the vault since The Key’s release. They are not secondary or mere texture — they drive an already-maddened band to their brink. Keyboardist Josh Holdren abuses the pitch shifter in “Bandar Sign,” making the guitars sound more even more out-of-control and hyperspeed. In “Aeon of the Ancient Ones,” he goes from faux-orchestral placidity to doomy, cobweb-ridden synth organ, and in instrumental closer “Number 9,” he conjures a fevered intersection of “The Final Countdown,” “Mr. Crowley,” and Klaus Schulze. The keyboards are permanently set to "ridiculous," and Nocturnus AD wouldn’t be the same without them.
Paradox is both a revival record and a continuation of a whacked-out, singular vision. It’s an ideal revamp: familiar enough for those around the first time, fresh enough to rejuvenate the genre. Appending “AD” to your band’s name is usually a tired old-metal-dude move, a way to skirt copyrights and cash in on your legacy. But it is the only such move here: In every respect, Paradox is a fresh blast of hellish air, breathing new life into once-lost possibilities. | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | May 28, 2019 | 8 | 5bbda1f0-3aef-40b2-a6af-d88179f0fdd1 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
On his soundtrack for the film This Is Bate-Bola, the Chicago cornetist, keyboardist, and composer summons the dread and excitement of the lesser-known Rio festival. | On his soundtrack for the film This Is Bate-Bola, the Chicago cornetist, keyboardist, and composer summons the dread and excitement of the lesser-known Rio festival. | Ben LaMar Gay: Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks (This Is Bate Bola OST) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-lamar-gay-confetti-in-the-sky-like-fireworks-this-is-bate-bola-ost/ | Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks (This Is Bate Bola OST) | Far from the beaches, big floats, bikinis, and festivities that define Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, there is the Bate-Bola. A more raucous affair, wholly ignored by the media and middle and upper classes of Brazil, the Bate-Bola is the celebration of the working class and the poor, living in the city’s favelas. Most descriptions of the festival allude to fever dreams and monsters, which hints at the hallucinatory fun and underlying violence of the affair. Costumes can take a year to make, and each turma–or bate-bola group– boasts its own booming soundsystem. In North America, it might bring to mind the Gathering of the Juggalos invaded by Mardi Gras Indians, but that doesn’t quite encapsulate the madness. “The Bate-Bola costume has an energy unlike any other,” says a voice in Ben Holman and Neirin Jones’ short film, This is Bate-Bola. “When we put it on, we get that cold feeling in our stomach...It’s like something from another world.”
In scoring This is Bate-Bola, Chicago cornetist, keyboardist, composer Ben LaMar Gay had his work cut out for him. Gay lived in Brazil for a number of years, and parts of last year’s lovely and eclectic Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun alit on bossa nova and baile funk. But on Confetti In The Sky Like Fireworks, outside of a few explosive moments, Gay conveys the sound of Brazil via smeared abstraction rather than explicit homage. The soundtrack opens with a backmasked song, as if attempting to plumb a hazy bacchanalian recollection, hinting that what’s to come won’t be sun-warmed and bright, but rather chilly and haunted.
Within the confines of a soundtrack, Gay ranges wildly. Clattering percussion mixes with flickering synth lines and dark drones, and lording above it all is “Nos Reunimos Em Fantasias,” a 14-minute epic that’s by turns ethereal and disquieting, as if David Lynch opted to film in the narrow alleys of a favela rather than along Mulholland Drive. The title loosely translates as “We Meet in Fantasies,” and as such, it toggles the thin line between dream and nightmare. Gay lets the sounds here expand slowly, allowing the open, twilit spaces to fill with dread and uncertainty. As often as Gay earns comparisons to the likes of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and other jazz figures, he’s in a rarefied ambient space here, closer to the likes of William Basinski or Tim Hecker.
The rest of the soundtrack contains mostly short cues and interludes, brief fragments that heighten the charge of on-screen images but feel slight when reduced to audio. “O Rugido” is a muffled rustle that darkens some of the film’s footage, yet it becomes all but inaudible if you’re listening with a car window rolled down. Mercifully, the clanging alarm-clock din of “Casos De Vidro Soam Como Sinos” recedes after two minutes. One of the set’s strongest moments –the buzzing, beat-centric “Kingdom Come/ Strong”– vanishes at the one-minute mark, just before it can burst into full bloom. Closer “A Saída” pulls a hard left, reminding us that Gay is equally adept at baile funk. Full of queasy bass and a with a rowdy MC hollering atop the beat, it shows that Gay can also match that feeling of the Bate-Bola costume, balancing cold sensation with jolts of unexpected energy. | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | March 21, 2019 | 7.2 | 5bc93794-7df4-4cc5-be72-36ce8bace08c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The British singer, rapper, and producer’s second project approaches the challenge of self-discovery through graceful avant-R&B. | The British singer, rapper, and producer’s second project approaches the challenge of self-discovery through graceful avant-R&B. | Wesley Joseph: GLOW | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wesley-joseph-glow/ | GLOW | U.K. polymath Wesley Joseph’s psychedelic, existential ballads play like a score for an Oscar-nominated thriller. Paired with hazy production, his diaristic words of self-reflection and self-deprecation ring out loud. The London-based singer, rapper, and producer has a knack for vivid storytelling on emotional despair and introspection that serves as makeshift therapy sessions. GLOW, his second project, centers the anticipation and fear of unlocking one’s own potential. This intimate collection of avant-R&B songs wallows in growing pains, embracing late-night anxieties of not feeling good enough for anyone, least of all yourself.
Across the record, Joseph airs stream-of-consciousness musings on fear and hopelessness with apparent ease and warmth, sounding like he’s ready to welcome the confidence to overcome. He first established that vision as a founding member of Birmingham musical collective OG Horse, which also included childhood friend and fellow singer Jorja Smith. In 2016, the Walsall-raised artist moved to London to study film. His 2021 debut, ULTRAMARINE, was soulful and upbeat, but relied heavily on cinematic aesthetics that left its themes of loneliness and longing feeling boring. GLOW is far more evolved.
Throughout the project, Joseph’s music evokes a mix of Pip Millett’s gritty neo-soul, Blood Orange’s colorful textural exploration, and SAULT’s funk-inspired melodies. His songs translate deep feelings into futuristic pop and R&B that sounds as sinister as it is grandiose. The project opens with its title track, a five-minute emotional goliath that dissects Joseph’s inner turmoil and desire to be perceived: “How do you see me/When you glow so bright/So bright?” he repeats in a melancholic tone over moody, blue-lit strings. What happens when dark thoughts are so ubiquitous that standing in the light feels like a distant dream?
On “I Just Know Highs,” a Leon Vynehall-produced track that twists Joseph’s eerily Auto-Tuned vocals into a flute instrumental, Joseph examines the personal lows that paradoxically make him feel most alive: “I’m lost out my mind/Well, most of my mind/If I look down I’m dying, or maybe I’m flying,” he croons. On “Cold Summer,” he juxtaposes optimistic bars on moving past self-deprecation against wistful strings that bring the emotional work within reach. GLOW sags at “25,” where Joseph’s personal stocktaking is stunted by a vague and repetitive wish to find “a different side of me.” The song ends abruptly before we find out which side that might be.
It’s the album’s least interesting moment, but the missed opportunity doesn’t overwhelm the breadth of Joseph’s skill to delineate his feelings in a way that evokes comfort and reflection. With GLOW, Joseph underlines the often scary process of uncovering insecurities with a sense of reassurance that suggests your own introspective forays could be just as rewarding. What lies on the other side of fear? GLOW’s warm and encouraging approach to finding the answers makes for a stellar introduction to a multidisciplinary artist dedicated to conquering his own limits. | 2023-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Secretly Canadian / EEVILTWINN | February 21, 2023 | 7.1 | 5bccfd12-85bd-4309-bcda-33d8dcb7b422 | DeAsia Paige | https://pitchfork.com/staff/deasia-paige/ | |
The haunted folk singer's latest album is her most tactile, thanks in part to producer Randall Dunn, best known for his work with metal bands such as Earth, Sunn O))), and Wolves in the Throne Room. | The haunted folk singer's latest album is her most tactile, thanks in part to producer Randall Dunn, best known for his work with metal bands such as Earth, Sunn O))), and Wolves in the Throne Room. | Marissa Nadler: July | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18941-marissa-nadler-july/ | July | The question of whether Marissa Nadler's elegant folk music ought to soundtrack our dreams or haunt our nightmares has been a thread through her uncannily cohesive catalogue. With six albums in 10 years and never a misstep, Nadler has grown her own perceptive language—she's an old-soul lost in time like Sibylle Baier, but her music is blackened and more literary. Her songs have come steeped in misery and macabre, cobwebs and ashes, but Nadler is not a doomy aesthete merely for gloom's sake. She is devoted to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and her music understands folk tradition. While her songs sound isolated and spiritually vintage, as if beamed from the grayscale interior of a Victorian home, her stories have been generous, selfless tales, heavy with metaphor and imagery. Nadler's poetic temperament and steady grace point to a darkness within us all—though her singing always seems to hone on mortality not for the purpose of crushing, existential missives, but in order to protect us.
Each of Nadler's albums has signaled subtle evolution. After channeling a bewitched Hope Sandoval and establishing a gothic heart, her sound became gorgeous and nuanced on 2007's III, broke from the freak-folk tag on 2009's astounding Little Hells, and incorporated sing-song Gillian Welch-inspired country pop on 2011's gleaming Marissa Nadler. Still, she has never let her dark essence slip away—this is a singer whose first record mixed traditional English balladry with an arrangement of Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee" and a song about the death of Virginia Woolf. "I once was young and I once was strong," she sang then, in 2004, at age 23 on "Box of Cedar". Nadler's music has been tinged by country blues and murder balladry, by people who died alone and old loves who creep her memory. But empathy has defined her work. See, for example, Nadler’s tender treatment of the recurring figure Mayflower May, a lonely and reflective old woman, or the 20th-century siamese twin circus performers Daisy and Violet (2011's spellbinding "Daisy, Where Did You Go?" explores what happened to Violet when Daisy died first, an especially harrowing piece of historical subject matter).
Nadler's self-described "dreadfully shy" wallflower persona fits in well with these earlier records, filled with swaths of muted color and third-person characters. July is another side of Marissa Nadler; if she sounded older back on Little Hells, Nadler is younger and bolder now, in confessional mode. Here are intimately personal accounts of misread desire, an empty heart set by winter blues, and years wasted on a lover who could do no right. "I called you when I was drunk all the time," Nadler sings on the quiet, finger-picked "Holiday In", stranded on a mountain in winter, recalling a depleted love. This is the "beer/thank-you" of Nadler's new honest approach. "I'd rather watch crime TV than see you again," she sings. It is a shocking but humanizing charm to hear Nadler reference even basic technologies in song. More so than any of Nadler's records, July is a self-knowing and zenlike advocate of change; "I know better now/ I don't get as high," she sings on the intensely detailed breakup song "Firecrackers," pointing blame at herself as she steadies her own romantic mess of ghosts and lovers.
July is more tactile thanks to new producer Randall Dunn, best known for his work with metal bands such as Earth, Sunn O))), and Wolves in the Throne Room. (Dunn has also worked on folkier projects for Akron/Family and Six Organs of Admittance, but Nadler has ties to the black metal community, having collaborated with Xasthur and Locrian.) The pairing befits Nadler's sound. Like black metal, her songs are atmospheric, austere, and engulfing. At times, Nadler's resonant acoustic strums are coated thick, as if emboldened by the deep ebony outline of a Sharpie marker. Her gothic touchstones return more deliberately melodic, and the audible strength of her voice lends to a more idiosyncratic sound; even the quiet acoustic songs and piano ballad sound like they are set up on-stage. There are textured synths and the occasional electric guitar underneath, and the dramatic orchestral strings that underpin "1923" offer the song a sense of grandeur—"I called you from another century/ To see if the world had been kind and sweet," Nadler sings, offering not just an impressionistic line but a pointed one that sums up an essential idea about her work. It's Nadler's stacked, carefully pronounced harmonies, though, that really make these songs stand so tall.
The forward movement of July can be entrancing and propulsive: "Drive" and "I've Got Your Name" are evocative Americana road songs, the former cast with a cruel road-weary disaffection that she medicates naturally: "Still remember all the words/ To every song you ever heard," Nadler sings, conjuring more direct, intuitive emotions than usual. There are grittier details here, too: "Changed in a rest-stop into my dress/ Made sure not to touch the floor/ I've done that kind of thing before," she sings from the side of the I-95. Nadler always sounds like a journeying soul poet, but here she makes her rootless experience clear, as on the piercing "Holiday In": "You have a girl in every state/ I know I'm in the way."
"Dead City Emily" is July's hypnotic centerpiece, the realization of Nadler and Dunn's work at the stone-cold polar vortex of folk structure and doom metal mood. Nadler's rain-streaked music has an overcast glow here, one that comes with a first snowfall, the realism of dead leaves and paralyzing ice. Nadler has few direct contemporaries—Bill Callahan, Sharon Van Etten, or Alela Diane come to mind—but here, on July's most extreme song, she could sensibly share bills with, say, Iceage or Deafheaven. The song’s fictional conversation is made of inner-strife, trapped in a devil town and a dead-end love, jaded towards the innate beauty of trees or birds—images Nadler has used throughout her songbook. Nadler typically speaks through female figures, and while there is struggle in this exchange, there is also power, like she is teaching another woman or warning her in secret. July's stories are rich with such wisdom. | 2014-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sacred Bones | February 7, 2014 | 8.1 | 5bd7c178-b36e-4b8b-97f5-3b0c330c5b2c | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The Louisville rapper has a keen talent for bridging regional styles. The uninspired beats on his new album fail to light up the map. | The Louisville rapper has a keen talent for bridging regional styles. The uninspired beats on his new album fail to light up the map. | EST Gee: MAD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/est-gee-mad/ | MAD | In the mid 2010s Yo Gotti’s label CMG stood for “Cocaine Muzik Group,” until 50 Cent told him that the name was “too harsh” and would scare people off—which I took to mean potential investors and fans. That inspired Yo Gotti to tweak the name to the vague and non-threatening Collective Music Group. If I were to guess what Yo Gotti’s dream is, it’s for CMG to be to the 2020s what Quality Control was to the 2010s: A dependable hub for mainstream Southern rap that eventually gets sold to a bigger label for hundreds of millions. So while CMG has a solid roster—new star Glorilla, golden boy Moneybagg Yo, Detroit firecracker 42 Dugg, and the steely Louisville rapper EST Gee—it doesn’t go unnoticed that Gotti is shaping artists into the most palatable and innocuous versions of themselves.
Look no further than EST Gee’s MAD. It’s a relatively by-the-book 14-track album that interrupts his coldblooded, stone-faced raps with wannabe Lil Durk melodies and strips away the regionality of his production in favor of generic “trap” made for the playlist grind. Gee’s breakout 2020 mixtapes Ion Feel Nun and I Still Dont Feel Nun worked because his central location in Louisville allowed him to fold stylistic elements from many Midwestern and Southern cities into relentless raps full of melancholic memories, cruel imagery, and twisted humor. There was Memphis in the bounce. Chicago in the menacing mood. Detroit in the jerky rhythms. Atlanta in the gloss. Baton Rouge in the way he carried himself like a walking wound. With MAD, it’s hard to pin down where Gee is on the map—unless he’s explicitly telling you by jacking T.I.’s singsongy “24’s” flow on “The One & Only” or tapping Boosie for a song called “Hotboys.” It’s hard to feel anything when the music sounds like it’s from nowhere.
The beats are the most glaring problem. Did Yo Gotti accidentally send over the Moneybagg Yo scraps folder? Too many tracks coast on vague familiarity. On “Ball Like Me Too,” the 808s are lifeless, the rhythm is slow, and the Shirley Bassey sample is played out. “If I Stop Now” has a piano-driven groove so plodding that even resident Florida sadboy Rod Wave would say it’s a buzzkill. The flute-led beat of “Slam Dunk” does roughly sound like it could have been on Lil Baby’s It’s Only Me—too bad that’s probably the worst Lil Baby album to be inspired by.
Save for the punchy, drum-fueled burst of “Blow Up” and the smooth elegance of “Us,” this is some of the most uninspired production I’ve heard this year so far. It’s a waste of Gee, who is otherwise still a good rapper with an ability to condense complex emotions and conflicts into just a couple lines. “Lethal injection by the needle, I ain’t forcin’ nothin’ on my people/And they ain’t force it on me neither, we both addicts, so we equals,” he raps as he tries to weigh the effect he had on his community on “Undefeated.” His delivery on the album intro is icy and understated as he reflects on how his mother’s death left a hole in the family. Occasionally he pushes his flow to creative extremes, like on “25Min Freestyle” (which is actually just three minutes), slurring his words so hard that it sounds like he’s rapping with his jaw wired shut.
The singing, though—that will hit you like a jump scare. It’s bad. Gee’s melodic aspirations were a mystifying whiff on last year’s I Never Felt Nun and he’s decided to double down. The knockoff Kevin Gates croons of “Lie to Me Some More” and the Durk-like switch-ups between bullish raps and scarred wails on “Stay Focused” feel forced and unnecessary because they don’t add any new emotion. Gee’s rigid delivery already said so much: the pain, the inner strife is there even when he’s just rapping about having too much cash in his jeans. All the melodies do is make the album feel cleaner, less harsh, easier to categorize. Judging by the origins of the CMG name, that’s on purpose. | 2023-03-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | CMG / Warlike / Interscope | March 22, 2023 | 5.5 | 5bd8bf4b-d272-409b-9c2c-5deae2d2664a | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On their latest record, the Scottish post-rock heroes sidestep some pitfalls from recent releases and sound like they're enjoying being themselves again. | On their latest record, the Scottish post-rock heroes sidestep some pitfalls from recent releases and sound like they're enjoying being themselves again. | Mogwai: Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15100-hardcore-will-never-die-but-you-will/ | Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will | Mogwai never seemed like a particularly good bet to age well. They came out of the gate as a band that Meant Something to many people, namely fans of heavy guitar music and rock critics. They established a clear, identifiable, and exciting new sound, but their latest LP-- Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will-- doesn't change the pattern Mogwai have set for themselves on recent, often middling, releases: There are some anthemic guitar blasts, some prettily drifting comedowns, and one or two vocal tracks.
The band has regained none of its prior fierceness, but Hardcore is, importantly, the band's least self-conscious album in ages. There are no attempts to be really heavy, man. There are no stale electronics. The songs that wander out of the band's comfort zone-- most notably the Neu!-indebted "Mexican Grand Prix"-- are the types of genre exercises a veteran rock band of Mogwai's stature should probably undertake. Hardcore feels comfy and lived-in, backhanded compliments only to those who didn't slog through The Hawk Is Howling and Happy Songs For Happy People.
The price for all this hominess is basically any lingering sense of mystery. Mogwai can chime away pleasantly during "Death Rays"-- featuring the band's best guitar lick in years-- but it can't turn "Rano Pano" into "Stanley Kubrick". This is fine, as long as we're willing to admit that we get different things out of Mogwai albums these days. This is a record of savvy rock vets kicking at distortion pedals until something frothy emerges. I'm on board if the results are going to be as page-turning-ly melodic as "How to Be a Werewolf" or as playful as the pitch-shifted "George Square Thatcher Death Party". The mistakes are easy to forgive: "White Noise" is the band's most vanilla opening track ever. The slide-guitar panorama of "Letters to the Metro" will still your blood just as surely as "Like Herod" once boiled it, but it's merely the type of innocuous doodling the band has long padded its albums with.
Mogwai's prior output and general demeanor has made it difficult for them to be a group that fans simply enjoy. The band built its reputation on sonic extremes, and that purview has infected their reputation: deliver a masterpiece-- I don't think they have it in them-- or suffer indifference. On Hardcore Mogwai sound like they're enjoying being Mogwai again. I'm ready to enjoy them being Mogwai again too. | 2011-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Rock Action | February 16, 2011 | 6.6 | 5bd8c86d-7208-488e-b48a-e5d0ca57fd02 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On her second album, the Dutch-Zimbabwean musician feeds off the energy of a move from Amsterdam to Peckham, England, turning the minutiae of daily life into bold, 1980s-inspired synth pop. | On her second album, the Dutch-Zimbabwean musician feeds off the energy of a move from Amsterdam to Peckham, England, turning the minutiae of daily life into bold, 1980s-inspired synth pop. | Rina Mushonga: In a Galaxy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rina-mushonga-in-a-galaxy/ | In a Galaxy | Less isn’t always more. In 2014, the Dutch-Zimbabwean artist Rina Mushonga released The Wild, the Wilderness, a pleasant but mild debut record that didn’t look much further than the coffeehouse for inspiration. But a recent move from Amsterdam to Peckham, a culturally diverse community in London’s South End, has unlatched something grand in Mushonga. Her sophomore album, In a Galaxy, is expansive, integrating sounds gathered from her native country and her newfound home in the UK. Thinking big suits Mushonga, and over the course of this 12-track LP, she dramatizes the banal trappings of daily life with her fortifying melodies, making a case for maximalist, ecstatic pop as a balm for it all.
In a Galaxy is richly embroidered: Warm horns, plucked guitars, and sparkling arpeggios are threaded through the album like jewels adorning an imperial robe. But these luxe soundscapes aren’t excessively opulent—one of In a Galaxy’s virtues is that the colossal scope of its arrangements is tempered by the intimate subject matter. Were Mushonga to chase topics as giant as her melodies, her songs might sag under all the weight. Instead, the telescopic range of the instrumentation is countered by her microscopic observations of daily life, making her music both poignant and tangible. As James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”
Mushonga best achieves the balance between vast sounds and common problems on the oozing slow jam “Good Vacation.” Here she depicts a crumbling relationship with concise language. “Let’s go back there,” Mushonga pleads, her voice simultaneously robust and fragile; “We’ve been to Mazan but we could go again.” Synthesizer slinks around the verses like an eel stalking tropical waters. With a few well-placed words, Mushonga sketches out a couple that forfeits the pleasures of daily life for the promise of a holiday. “We don’t sleep at the right time/We don’t drink and dance at the right time,” Mushonga laments. “’Cause we hold out for a good vacation.” Her words, detailing a romance that has become as routine as the 9–5 grind, land like a punch in the gut.
While Mushonga found inspiration for the album in the street noise of Peckham—traffic, kids returning from school, snatches of conversation—it’s fair to say that her eclectic new sound is due in part to producer Brett Shaw, who’s worked with pop titans like Florence and the Machine and Lady Gaga. But Shaw’s gilded touch doesn’t outshine Mushonga’s personality or press her into a Top 40 mold. In fact, her music borrows more from the 1980s—particularly Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and Phil Collins—than from contemporary music. Songs like “For a Fool” and “AtalantA” are particularly rooted in that era; the former unfolds like the train scene in Risky Business, complete with smears of saxophone and syncopated keys. “AtalantA” has the makings of an arena anthem, creeping in with rubbery bass before bursting into a battle cry buoyed by shrill organ and layers of thunderous percussion.
The title track is a testament to the album’s diversity and overall disregard for the confines of genre. Mushonga glides effortlessly between synth pop and dubstep, interlacing flute samples and vocoder flourishes without gilding the lily. Here, the intricate details embellishing her music do more to enrich the whole than draw attention to themselves, just as individual stars complete a constellation. A similar effect arises from the very short list of players credited on In a Galaxy (Mushonga, Shaw, and few others). Despite its minimal lineup, the record feels like it was forged by a community of collaborators, each contribution representative of a much larger whole. But it could just be that the staggering reach of Mushonga’s music summons multitudes. | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | PIAS | February 15, 2019 | 8 | 5bd8d2a1-8a78-4176-be70-2667f917bdf7 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
This eight-year retrospective comprises robust and fierce re-recordings from the group’s decidedly lo-fi catalog, featuring the best of Ian Svenonius’ sneering rock ‘n’ roll anthems. | This eight-year retrospective comprises robust and fierce re-recordings from the group’s decidedly lo-fi catalog, featuring the best of Ian Svenonius’ sneering rock ‘n’ roll anthems. | Chain and the Gang: Best of Crime Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23283-chain-and-the-gang-the-best-of-crime-rock/ | The Best of Crime Rock | Ian Svenonius’ is at once one of rock’s shrewdest intellectuals and one of its most primal performers. But there’s no dissonance between those two modes—the ideas of the former fuel the physicality of the latter. Since surfacing with D.C. post-hardcore heroes Nation of Ulysses a quarter-century ago, Svenonius has fronted several different bands—from gospel-ye-ye purveyors the Make-Up to the frisky psych-funk crew The Scene Creamers—but they’ve all been rooted in the late-'60s belief in rock ‘n’ roll as an agent of radicalism, and in the potential for a three-minute single to instantly make you question and dismantle everything you’ve ever known.
As such, Svenonius’ sideline writings—be it in books or magazines—aren’t so much extracurricular pursuits as the expository DVD commentary for his music. Though he’s always drawn from the proto-punk garage rock and black-power soul, Svenonius isn’t so much nostalgic for their sound as their revolutionary intent, pining for a bygone era when pop stars could show up on a network talk show and spend the better part of an hour talking about race, feminism, and U.S. immigration policy.
He also remembers an era when greatest-hits albums weren’t just quickie cash-ins for rock bands, but the tool that cemented their legend. Svenonius’ current band, Chain & the Gang, has released five albums since 2009, making it his longest-running, most prolific outfit since the Make-Up. Where the band’s name once served as its cheeky organizing principle—with stripped-down, call-and-response chants in the prison blues tradition—by 2014’s Minimum Rock ‘n’ Roll, the proverbial chain had come to represent a whip, with Svenonius smashing windows and busting bricks on the sneering anti-gentrification anthem “Devitalize.” The song distills the band’s insolent essence into a Molotov cocktail of bruising soul-punk rhythm, shout-it-out-hooks, and lyrics that deftly toe the line between pointed anti-capitalist critique and a sly, knowing sarcasm toward the impractical extremities of their mission. In two minutes, they go from calling for a decline in real-estate values to wishing ill will on fresh fruit and child educational standards.
“Devitalize” is thus the perfect opening salvo for Crime Rock, which, ironically, seeks to revitalize. It comprises more robust and fierce re-recordings of the best songs from the group’s decidedly lo-fi catalog (plus two new tracks—the organ-spun soul of “Logic of the Night” and surf-ready power pop of “Come Over”—the fit right into the post-mod milieu.) It’s an uncharacteristic concession to the marketplace for a band that’s more liable to wage war on it, but then it also illustrates just how prepossessing and powerful this band can be under the right conditions. Chain and the Gang is the most accessible group Svenonius has ever commandeered, and with the Crime Rock revamps, he matches the white-hot intensity of The Make-Up (with bassist Anna Nasty playing the Michelle Mae-like foil), but with that band’s JBs-funk engine stripped out and replaced with revved-up Motown motions.
Where he once used his shriek like a weapon, Svenonius now wields a sense of humor that’s as cutting as it is absurd. The garage-blues strut “Certain Kinds of Trash” functions as a companion piece to his 2014 essay in defense of hoarding, its lyric sheet presenting a laundry list of arcane, discarded consumer products (“typewriter ribbons, TV dinner pans, you just don’t see ’em”). But embedded within his fetishization of refuse is a thinly veiled contempt for planned-obsolescence sales strategies and the iCloud age’s premium on intangibility. For Svenonius, garbage and decay represent a freedom from a culture of constant commodification—when something has no value, it’s truly priceless. “I see progress,” Svenonius sings on the bass-swung song of the same name, “in paint peeling/And I like a leaky ceiling!” He punctuates the line with a high-pitched Princely gasp that finds the eroticism in rot.
Several of the new versions on Crime Rock just amount to tighter, better-quality recordings. In other cases, the changes are quite dramatic: the nihilist to-do list “Why Not?” gets pumped up from a stripped-down busker-blues shuffle into a taut, motorik garage-rocker; the militaristic psych-folk march “Deathbed Confession” becomes the cinematic, piano-pounding curtain-closer its ridiculous conspiracy-theory lyrics demand. But in all instances, Crime Rock greatly improves upon its source material, by amplifying the tension between Svenonius’ hard-knock lyrics (from “Livin’ Rough”: “I’m livin’ in a bathroom stall/With no paper on the roll/I can’t believe it!”) and the Gang’s punchy performances. Chain and the Gang cheekily (or maybe not) describe themselves as the world’s “only anti-liberty rock ‘n’ roll band,” dismissing the genre’s ingrained wild-child mentality as an emblem of unchecked capitalism. But after spending years in a small holding cell, Crime Rock finally transfers them to the maximum-security penitentiary they deserve. | 2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | June 5, 2017 | 7.7 | 5bd98c11-3187-4fd9-b06a-bd5a387d2587 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The once wildly unhinged psych-rock maverick grows into adulthood, though his backing band brings some much-needed weirdness to the proceedings. | The once wildly unhinged psych-rock maverick grows into adulthood, though his backing band brings some much-needed weirdness to the proceedings. | King Khan: Murderburgers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-khan-murderburgers/ | Murderburgers | “I wasn’t born in ‘77!” Arish “King” Khan declares on “Born in 77,” off Murderburgers, but he knows that you know it’s a lie. Khan turned 40 this year: The man who played bass for the Spaceshits, who dressed up like Tina Turner and howled like James Brown, who strode the grounds of the 2008 Pitchfork Fest wearing a centurion helmet and little else—that guy survived long enough to mature into a music veteran and family man. But the Gris Gris, his backing band for this album, maintain the ruse with a manic glam-punk jam, tempo-rushing piano chords, glitter-crust guitar riffs, and a sax solo that sounds like it’s being mobbed by zombies. The song is a gleefully irreverent take on the Berlin punk being played around the time Jimmy Carter was taking office, with Khan playing Iggy to producer Greg Ashley’s Bowie.
When Khan emerged more than a decade ago with the Shrines, there was still something rattling about the way he turned psych-rock and R&B conventions into vehicles for outrageous self-expression. He preached a radicalized version of freedom where each song offered some promise of triumphant escape, whether from poverty (“Welfare Bread”), gender identity (“I Wanna Be a Girl”), American exceptionalism (“Land of the Freak”), or the strictures of polite society (pretty much every other song). Idle No More, released in 2013, was his first real adult album, with a real U.S. label and a sound that buffed away some of the rough edges but maintained that sense of the ridiculous.
That charisma comes through on Murderburgers, his debut solo record and the first on his own Khannibalism Records (an imprint of Ernest Jenning Co.), although it’s more muted and even more mature. Khan once wrote about love through the lens of freakdom, as though the sexual and romantic bonds between people didn’t have to adhere to old rules or puritanical decrees. Murderburgers, on the other hand, is mostly just love songs. “It’s a Lie” plumbs romantic paranoia, but Khan can’t make anything new of it. When he sings, “I’ve see you with your arms dealers/Bombmakers and undertakers,” on “It’s Just Begun,” it’s nothing as timely as a protest song, but just another “love is a battlefield” metaphor. It’s hard to give that idea much weight when there’s a very real nuclear threat looming.
Fortunately, he’s got the reconstituted Gris Gris backing him up, and they prevent his 1960s obsession from curdling into pastiche rock. Onetime members of Khan’s vaguely defined death cult called the Kukamongas (which also included the Black Lips and Mark Sultan), the Oakland group disbanded more than a decade ago, but Khan reassembled them, seemingly by force of will, for sessions at producer Greg Ashley’s Creamery Studio. The Gris Gris add some grit to opener “Discreate Disguise” and some skronk to “Run Doggy Run,” an otherwise blandly vindictive diss track. Especially on the album’s second side, they bring some much-needed weirdness to the proceedings, with the band bashing out a snot-covered rockabilly beat on “Teeth Are Shite” and adding some gloriously sloppy guitar licks to the melancholic beach ballad “Winter Weather.” Perhaps it’s about the fate of weird Oakland in the face of encroaching gentrification (which has already claimed Creamery), or perhaps it’s a roundabout comment on being born in ’77 and alive in 2017: “When the winter weather’s done/Gimme some gimme some summer sun.” | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Khannibalism / Ernest Jenning | October 16, 2017 | 6.4 | 5bda6e9b-f591-4e1f-8942-ec84b16186b3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The cheeky London duo put their own spin on UK bass music, and their latest EP of compu-heaters is one of the most substantial releases of their young but already impressive career. | The cheeky London duo put their own spin on UK bass music, and their latest EP of compu-heaters is one of the most substantial releases of their young but already impressive career. | Two Shell: Icons EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/two-shell-icons-ep/ | Icons EP | Given their playful public image, it might seem like Two Shell crashed into the murky world of UK bass like a glitter bomb in a cement factory. But in reality, the mysterious London duo came in a Trojan horse made of unassuming stuff: brittle textures, stark tone colors, sternly syncopated beats. Their 2019 debut EP for Livity Sound fit neatly with the lean, percussive style of leftfield UK club music. Their anthemic tendencies earned comparisons to Overmono and Bicep, UK duos known for supersizing underground tropes for big-room crowds. And Two Shell’s edits—like “Wedding Practice,” which makes zero attempt to disguise a sizeable chunk lifted from Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You”—put them in a class alongside artists like Four Tet and Jamie xx, who wield canny bootlegs as floor-filling festival wildcards.
But not long after they’d established themselves as promising new talents working within a well-defined lane, a switch was flipped, and the anonymous duo turned out to have much more mischievous inclinations. On Two Shell’s 2020 mix CD, ɪᴍᴘᴀᴄᴛ21, songs by canonical acts like Skee Mask and the Prodigy bumped up against shards of digital-native styles like nightcore and hyperpop. They’ve recently dusted their music with helium-huffing vocals reminiscent of SOPHIE and peppered their sets with cheeky flips of Sugababes and the Corrs. Digging is part of any DJ’s job, but hearing Two Shell drop chirpy remixes of unknown emo randos suggests an affinity with Gen Z’s digital avant-garde that you won’t find among most of their post-dubstep peers.
The audaciousness of Two Shell’s productions is matched by the slipperiness of the duo’s presentation. In their Boiler Room appearance at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound last month, they performed wearing absurd disguises—chain mail and cloth goat horns on one, clown wig and nylon-stocking face mask on the other—and were almost certainly pantomiming to a pre-recorded mix. There are even rumors that the two people behind the decks weren’t Two Shell at all. The deeper you descend through the Two Shell looking glass, the more the whole enterprise begins to take on the air of a grade-A piss take, a no-fucks-given sendup of contemporary DJ culture. Yet on Icons, their most substantial release to date, the music, at least, is no joke.
Compared to the breakneck pace and cotton-candy textures of their recent jungle edit “Home,” Icons’ five tracks at first sound almost staid. There are plenty of sped-up vocals and zippy synths, but the tempos are more measured, the structures more streamlined, the beats more in keeping with the past decade of bass-heavy UK techno. Joy Orbison’s game-changing 2009 single “Hyph Mngo” is their obvious lodestar; you can hear it almost verbatim in the hiccupping vocal loop of the opening “Ghosts” and the fluttering synths of “Pods,” which follows. While it’s hardly an obscure pick—no song did more to mark the end of the dubstep era and the beginning of the amorphous stylistic free-for-all that followed—it’s been a while since anyone zeroed in so doggedly on the song’s ecstatic qualities. Virtually every element of Icons feels engineered to replicate the dizzy rush of nightclubbing at its most exhilarating, when a new sound gets its claws into you for the first time.
Two Shell are master manipulators of tension. “Ghosts” just keeps cresting upward, promising release and then pulling out the rug as its towering pillar of synths collapses in a shuddering heap. “Dust” uses a brisk, stuttering effect to accentuate its pulse-raising intensity. “Pods” is even more white-knuckled, running an indistinct vocal sample through a tinny metallic filter that makes it sound like someone is screaming bloody murder somewhere deep in the bowels of the track.
But as full-on as the music can get, they top it off with a jokey flourish of something like metafiction. “Pods” pauses halfway through to make way for a sing-song computer voice intoning database commands. “Calling digital rockstar,” it warbles, and is swiftly answered by an ersatz electric guitar. The relatively linear and groove-driven “Dust” is repeatedly interrupted by the sing-song voiceover of an android flight controller, recalling similar gambits by Drexciya, Daft Punk, and DJ Koze’s trio International Pony. “Memory” makes the most extensive use of these self-consciously digital textures; its melancholy, Vocaloid-inspired singing could have come from a folder of unused PC Music stems. All of these additions have the effect of undoing any potential self-seriousness; the beats may be heavy, but the mood is as light and frothy as Cool Whip.
The final song, “Mainframe,” breaks with the lithe rhythms and wide-eyed rapture of the preceding four tracks. A mid-tempo breakbeat tune marbled with gnarled streaks of acidic bass, it’s a pretty unambiguous homage to the garish big beat sound of the late ’90s, right down to the turntable scratching effects. Bogged down by its half-time rhythm and sticky midrange, it’s the only song on the EP that never achieves liftoff, but the style, at least, is entirely in character for Two Shell. Armed with concussive beats, sardonic wit, and the fairy dust of a sneakily deployed sample, they’re clearly intent upon reclaiming the lineage of UK dance music at its boldest and brashest, taking their place alongside iconic duos like the Chemical Brothers and the KLF. They’re not there yet, but Icons suggests they have a really good shot at it. | 2022-07-01T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-01T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mainframe Audio | July 1, 2022 | 8.2 | 5bdea1ea-e06d-4edd-892d-49a880e80468 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The French foursome's fifth album scans as a post-success commentary, dropping you into a fast-changing world of K-pop synth melodies, Californian glamor and Scandinavian leather where they appear distinctly uncomfortable. The only reliable constant is the band's winning, shiny, jacked-up formula. | The French foursome's fifth album scans as a post-success commentary, dropping you into a fast-changing world of K-pop synth melodies, Californian glamor and Scandinavian leather where they appear distinctly uncomfortable. The only reliable constant is the band's winning, shiny, jacked-up formula. | Phoenix: Bankrupt! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17913-phoenix-bankrupt/ | Bankrupt! | Phoenix are a total anachronism-- can you name another post-millennial power-pop band of thirtysomethings that made the jump from cult curio to festival headliners 10 years and four albums into their career? But if their trajectory feels old-fashioned, the French foursome are so perfectly emblematic of our present. Sure, you could chalk up the surprise, runaway success of 2009's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as some fortuitously timed, crossover-appealing fusion of big-tent indie anthems and glossy synth sheen; but then, this band has embraced huge hooks and smooth moves since day one. Really, Phoenix started making the big dollars once they stopped making sense: By intensifying the jiterry energy introduced on 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That, with Wolfgang, they perfected an ADD-via-ESL approach to pop that matched the pace of our hyperactive, distracted, smartphone-sucking lives.
And through that process, Thomas Mars’ lyrics became Phoenix’s most frivolous yet essential quality. Once a heart-on-sleeve romantic, the frontman now revels in jabbering out seemingly intelligible, ultimately inscrutable streams of words, starting one sentence only to finish another, as if he writes songs by making random copy-and-paste errors. Phoenix songs are that party conversation you weren't really paying attention to or didn't fully understand, but to which you nod in agreement anyway; you don't so much sing along as tentatively mouth along, like when you're doing karaoke and realize you don't know the words to your favorite song. Part way through the band’s fifth album*, Bankrupt!*, Mars even drops a kooky chorus line that doubles as an advertisement for the band’s addictively tuneful disarray: “It’s a jingle jungle/ Jingle junkie-junkie jumble.”
But on Bankrupt!, that sense of confusion is so pervasive it practically coheres into concept-album formalism. Even with Mars’ whimsical wordplay in full effect, the band’s fifth album scans very much as a post-success commentary, the sound of a band who, just two albums ago, was making dates for protest rallies, but now finds itself hobnobbing with the 1%. Lead single “Entertainment” shares its name with Gang of Four’s debut album and also a similar self-awareness of commodifying their art. In the wake of a deliriously ascendant, laser-beamed chorus that’ll give the band’s lighting guy a perfect excuse to shine the house high beams on some festival crowd, the music cuts out and Mars blithely admits, “I’d rather be alone.”
Mars is too amiable a vocalist to express pure disillusionment, but he’s great at communicating discomfort. Bankrupt! doesn’t so much ruefully reflect upon Phoenix’s whirlwind, globe-trotting lifestyle as drop you right in the middle of it. Its K-pop synth melodies and snapshots of Californian glamor and Scandinavian leather give you that sensation of seeing the world but only as a blur from the backseat of your chaffeured car, as you’re whisked from after-party to after-party for just enough time to make bullshit small talk and exchange contact info with people you have no intention of ever contacting. On the album’s heart-racing standout “S.O.S. in Bel Air”, Mars agitatedly shouts out the title as if summoning some sort of Bat signal escape from high-society banality; on the belt-it-out power ballad “Bourgeois”, he tosses a life-saver to a girl stuck bartending for fat cats on a cruise ship. And tellingly, a song named for d-bag cologne-of-choice “Drakkar Noir” is paired with one titled “Chloroform”, the implication being that they’re both just as toxic: the former equates its titular fragrance with sleazy seduction, the latter is a devastating slow jam that chronicles the inevitable morning-after kick to the curb, with Mars delivering the album’s most lucid and frank line: “I don’t like it if you miss me/ Why would I long for you?”
But if Bankrupt! catalogues a set of circumstances Phoenix never expected to find themselves in, they’ve at least grown accustomed to their surroundings. After all, the album rarely deviates from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’s winning formula; befitting the band’s ascendant status, everything’s just that much more shiny, jacked-up, and frantic. But the more-is-more approach fails them on the now-customary moody mid-album odyssey: Compared to previous downtempo turns like It's Never Been Like That's “North” and Wolfgang's two-part “Love Like a Sunset”, Bankrupt!’s seven-minute title track is less a cool comedown than a colossal brick that threatens to sink the whole record. The typical Phoenix song is already overstuffed with melodic change-ups, quirky instrumental flourishes, and fragementary logic; this concerted effort to go prog proper-- with its awkward hodge-podge of space-age bachelor-pad synth doodle, Vangelisian sci-fi soundscape, and forlorn folk ballad-- can’t help but sound forced and undercooked by contrast.
It's not the only moment on Bankrupt! where you wish Phoenix would stop overthinking and let their songs accrue a more natural momentum. Although “Don’t” begins as another fine addition to the band’s repertoire of snappy, post-Strokes skip-along jaunts, it’s derailed by a plaintive, saggy chorus that makes the song feel a lot longer than it is. Bankrupt! is most effective when blurring the line between celebrating decadence and reeling from it, as on the deceptively exuberant closer “Oblique City”, whose title presumably serves as a stand-in for any random stop on the band’s tour itinerary. It’s a song that seemingly celebrates the freedom of not knowing what city you’re waking up in, capturing the momentary rush you get from all the busy streets and massive neon-lit Coca-Cola ads. But couched within its boisterous bustle is a cry for help ringing out of the executive suite at 3 a.m.: “Am I gonna do this alone?,” Mars sings, a contradictory bookend to his anti-social “Entertainment” salvo, but one that encapsulates Bankrupt!’s conflicted, unsettled essence. The song’s synth-buzzed whirr eventually dissolves into gentle acoustic picking, but you know it’s just a brief moment of calm before Mars must brace himself to face another jingle-jungle morning. | 2013-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Glassnote | April 22, 2013 | 7.5 | 5bdfb438-8c9f-42c3-b33e-c71873931010 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
In songs as slick and futuristic as the screens that surround us, the Danish electro-pop musician uses technology as a frame for deeply human feelings. | In songs as slick and futuristic as the screens that surround us, the Danish electro-pop musician uses technology as a frame for deeply human feelings. | ML Buch: Skinned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ml-buch-skinned/ | Skinned | From its dramatic first synth splash, Mary Louise Buch’s debut album, Skinned, seems as uncanny as an android. Its disorienting first minutes shift between sleek sonic touchstones—sci-fi keyboards, synthesized baroque strings, echoing drum crashes, and a warped, robotic vocal—with mechanical ease. But then we get a true shock: Delicately fingerpicked guitar clears the air for a soft human voice. The song, called “Can You Hear My Heart Leave,” is much like the album that follows: wrapped in technological wonders that never hide the human heart beating at its core. Instead, Buch works the two in seamless conjunction, creating a striking collision of experimental and pop sounds.
Primarily based in Berlin, Buch is more closely associated with her hometown scene in Copenhagen, where women like Astrid Sonne, Gel, and PANXING have crafted a fusion of modern classical, cutting-edge club music, and electro-acoustic experiments that sounds like nothing else in the world. Even in that context, Skinned stands out for its remarkable songwriting, fueled by Buch’s soaring voice, tender lyrics, and a guitar as malleable as clay in her hands.
Technology is a constant on Skinned, but Buch uses it as a means rather than an end. These are songs about love, heartbreak, and the unpredictable space connecting the two—and while technology does populate them, it serves more to frame those human feelings. “I’m a Girl You Can Hold IRL” explores intimacy via webcam with only a tender bassline and an airy vocal, before bursting into a moment of magical realism as she sings, “I’m coming through the screen/Crawling on your table/My mouth against your neck.” It’s a scene straight from The Ring reimagined with synth swells and dreamy romanticism. “Can’t Get Over You With You” inverts that sensation, grappling with breakups in the social-media age and the unsettling voyeurism of clicking an ex’s profile, something she finds unable to resist in the opening lines. Buch may sing a lot about screens, but depending on her approach they become portals, windows, or mirrors.
Nowhere is this more powerful or universal than on “Touching Screens,” a bright pop rush that sounds like Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place On Earth” 3D printed in the plastic mold of James Ferraro. The ecstatic chorus (“Touching screens/More than skin”) is delivered with cymbal crashes, guitar fireworks, and, in a perfect final minute, a stadium-sized rush of kick drum. Whoever she’s connecting with is left playfully ambiguous; instead, Buch focuses entirely on the relationship with the object itself, the addictive rush of “picking it up again” captured in balletic images of “fingers gliding” over glass. Whether the notification will spawn butterflies in the stomach or inflict sinking dread is unimportant—Buch focuses entirely on the brief moment between feeling our pocket buzz and checking our phone and blows it out with a surge of endorphins.
These colossal songs are well served by the adventurous instrumentals Buch creates as connective tissue. “O” shoots emotional flutters of trance synths, bridging the thrill of “Touching Screens” and the somber aftermath of “Can’t Get Over You With You.” On the atmospheric Astrid Sonne collaboration “Stone Bridge,” Sonne transmutes her viola from ashen drones to silvery high notes, an otherworldly addition that expands her own spectacular 2018 debut, Human Lines. The transformations continue right up to closer “MW,” a track littered with false endings and quick mutations, from a seasick guitar riff to a reprise of “Can You Hear My Heart Leave” to a crash of drums that builds to an overwhelming peak in the final seconds. For all its careful structure and tenderness, Skinned ensures you enter and leave it utterly dazed.
Much contemporary music tends to approach the subject of technology with the redundancy of that old Black Mirror joke, “what if phones, but too much.” But it’s so much more complex than that, because people are more complex than that. Technology is how we communicate now; we use it to grieve, and fall in and out love. ML Buch shows a remarkable understanding of our sci-fi present by crafting futuristic songs that, at their emotional core, feel timeless. The question she asks at the start is, “Can you hear my heart?” After Skinned, the answer is loud and clear.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anyines | July 14, 2020 | 7.9 | 5be31f2a-50bb-4983-97d5-577196b358ca | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Seekers Who Are Lovers' Ángel Sánchez Borges returns under the name he uses for instrumental journeys into beat-driven minimalism on this, his first release for the Tijuana-based label Static Discos. | Seekers Who Are Lovers' Ángel Sánchez Borges returns under the name he uses for instrumental journeys into beat-driven minimalism on this, his first release for the Tijuana-based label Static Discos. | Antiguo Autómata Mexicano: Kraut Slut | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10307-kraut-slut/ | Kraut Slut | Late last year Ángel Sánchez Borges released a mini-album of ethereal drone-pop under the name Seekers Who Are Lovers. Seekers could be considered a side project for Borges if he didn't have so many things going on at once; he's also an experimental video artist of some renown, and now returns as Antiguo Autómata Mexicano, the name he uses for instrumental journeys into beat-driven minimalism. In 2005 he released his debut AAM record Microhate on the German label Backgroung; follow-up Kraut Slut is his first release for the Tijuana-based label Static Discos.
Given the titles of the album and the first track here, "Rother, Dinger, You, and Me", you might guess you're in for a concept record. And "Rother" certainly delivers on that score, channeling the spirit and the sound of classic Neu! with almost frightening accuracy, but doing so in an even more compact and completely digital package. It's basically a cover tune, but covering a sound as opposed to a song; Borges programs a simple series of pulses to mimic the interplay between Dinger's stark and insistent drum pulse frames Rother's buzzing, carefully picked guitar. Both the idea and the execution are fantastic.
But Kraut Slut doesn't stay long on the motorik road. "Mitte" sticks with sharp, crackly beats but drapes over them a soft curtain of static and lush chords suggesting a much more amorphous and dreamy headspace. It has the pulse of techno, but in terms of mood "Mitte" is closer to the shadowy and sensual world of his Seekers work. Same goes for "Extirpe" which is mostly slow-drift synthetic drone, with just a few percussive beeps and rips lurking in the shadows, while "Harm and Jazz" kicks up so much digital dust it the foreground, a constantly shifting collage of machine noise and buzzes, you can barely make out the steady bass and drums moving somewhere behind. "Malandro de Culto" and "Ill Stijl" are Borges' excursion into more dancefloor-oriented techno, and the latter especially, with its precise but busy array of bleeps, is a particularly focused beam of forward-moving energy.
So then, album title and opening track aside, what exactly binds these disparate elements into a single project? Borges seems most drawn to micro-leaning computer music as a way to conjure atmosphere; there's a lot of suggestion in Borges' music, hints at various possibilities, and you never get the sense that the technology-- always at the forefront considering the persistent use of glitches and noise-- is the music's subject. On its own, Kraut Slut is an evocative sampling of the potential of computer-based minimalism with a handful of fantastic tracks; considered along with Borges' other recent work, the record makes him seem an even more compelling artist worth following closely. | 2007-06-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2007-06-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Static Discos | June 18, 2007 | 7.4 | 5be386a6-e24d-492b-b5ff-46717af856df | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Nonfiction, the first full length from electronic producer James Hinton (aka the Range), is a meticulous record filled with pretty sounds: soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars. Even at its busiest, it feels tidy and compact, like the gears of a prewar pocketwatch. | Nonfiction, the first full length from electronic producer James Hinton (aka the Range), is a meticulous record filled with pretty sounds: soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars. Even at its busiest, it feels tidy and compact, like the gears of a prewar pocketwatch. | The Range: Nonfiction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18679-the-range-nonfiction/ | Nonfiction | Albums like Nonfiction, the first full-length from producer James Hinton (aka the Range), never get the credit they deserve: They’re too neat, too industrious, too polite—too many of the qualities we look for in coworkers and roommates and not enough of the ones we look for in artists. “I studied some math in school,” Hinton told us in a recent Rising interview. Math! Terrific. A sentence later he brings up his admiration for soft-rocker Bruce Hornsby. At 25, Hinton may have already blown the youth vote.
Nonfiction isn’t an album easily pegged to any scene or narrative currently circulating about electronic music. Its rhythms are rooted in hip-hop, drum & bass, and late-90s R&B, rendered on the scale of someone making music more for home listening than club play. Even at its busiest, the album feels tidy and compact, like the gears of a prewar pocketwatch. (What’s interesting to me about Hinton’s syncopations—the jazzy, double-time blasts of hi-hat and snare drum—is that syncopation is usually used to make a straight beat sound momentarily off-balance, whereas on Nonfiction, the more syncopated the tracks are, the more orderly they feel.)
Nearly every track here is pretty, in the most conventional sense of the word. Soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars—if the sounds on Nonfiction showed up on your doorstep in the dead of night, you’d probably let them in without question. On a lot of the album*,* Hinton’s approach reminds me of Aphex Twin circa Richard D. James tracks like “4” and “Girl/Boy Song”—songs that juxtapose a cute surface with a hard-hitting, even threatening undercurrent. The difference is that James is a perennial misfit who always seemed to be half-joking and Hinton operates with the earnestness of a post-rock band working in miniature.
Nonfiction's highlights-- "Metal Swing," "Jamie" and "FM Myth"-- are built around vocal samples. House and dance music have a long tradition of making the human voice do contortions on tape that they could never do live—a possibility afforded by samplers and digital recording, which enable producers to chop, cut, paste, and loop in ways that would’ve been agonizing in the analog era. On Nonfiction, Hinton allows his vocalists full phrases, sometimes even sentences. Usually, these vocalists are gruff-sounding English dudes who seem to have been wounded by something they aren’t ready to get too specific about. (Hinton says he mostly finds them on YouTube, a site that lets us glimpse into the lives of strangers in a way that feels both intimate and yet impossibly cryptic.) They repeat their laments, sometimes for minutes on end, while the music grows steadily around them. The result feels like a series of time-lapse portraits of people refusing to change despite their changing environment—a nice, melancholy touch on an album that tends to take extroverted music and turn it inward.
Even if you listen to Nonfiction—and even if you like it—it probably won’t inspire you to call anyone up and say, “[Expletive], I just got back from the library, or the office, or picking up [friend’s name] at the airport, and I had this new Range album on at a reasonable volume the whole time, and it totally increased my general sense of well-being!” What it might inspire, though, is a kind of passive, slowly gestating admiration—the kind usually best measured in iTunes plays three or four months down the line, the kind you tend to recognize several hours into a workday in front of your computer, the kind that doesn’t surge like a fire but instead grows patiently, like a vine. | 2013-10-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Donky Pitch | October 31, 2013 | 8.2 | 5be4186b-6e56-4391-abcb-558e7edb1811 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Recorded in a Virginia mountain town named Rural Retreat, the debut from this quartet of fringe-folk veterans beautifully articulates the weirdness and magic of life outside of the city. | Recorded in a Virginia mountain town named Rural Retreat, the debut from this quartet of fringe-folk veterans beautifully articulates the weirdness and magic of life outside of the city. | Doran: Doran | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doran-doran/ | Doran | F-150s and Fox News, Christians and country music, ammunition and American flags: These are defining symbols of modern life in the rural United States, a landscape often assumed to be so stubborn and insular that liberal pundits write it off as a lost cause. That stereotype overlooks not only an incoming tide of militantly progressive country folks but also the sort of longstanding wonder that can emerge from life outside of the city. This is the ever-weird America that fascinated Harry Smith and the Lomax lineage, after all, a place so attuned to the skies and the seasons, and so isolated from trends, that it can produce an esoteric entertainment that feels worlds apart from its city kin. Its so-called “outsider art” transmogrifies life’s joys and impositions into something transcendent.
That practical magic is the lifeblood of Doran, a spectacular new quartet composed of four musicians long situated on the fringes of American folk, all of them singers and multi-instrumentalists with a shared fondness for puppet shows and far-flung folk myths. Doran are a pair of pairs: Channing Showalter and Annie Schermer are known as West of Roan, a group whose sublime and haunted songs speak to time split between North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and Washington’s Cascades. Elizabeth LaPrelle, meanwhile, earned attention with Anna & Elizabeth, a transgressive outfit responsible for one of the most transfixing albums of the past decade. Her husband, Brian Dolphin, is a songwriter and ethnomusicologist steeped in the traditional sounds of the Ukraine and U.S. They channel all this into their self-titled debut.
In the winter of 2019, the two duos rendezvoused in the tiny Virginia mountain town where LaPrelle and Dolphin lived until recently. They entertained themselves in the ways that life in a place named Rural Retreat might suggest—cavorting in fallen leaves, stewing broth for hours, and escaping to an attic to record 13 songs that capture the strange majesty of lives so tied to nature that the occult and the ordinary overlap. Where Bonny Light Horseman subtly reimagined very old songs for now, Doran’s originals deny that the march of time actually exists. Their debut lands like a lost treasure salvaged from the vaults of the Watersons in the ’70s or Devendra Banhart and his Gnomonsong cohort three decades later. Sweet, sad, and often surreal, Doran is content to be out of place, a bounty stolen from the deepest woods.
Doran’s four voices—or, rather, the ineffable ways they intertwine—are Doran’s most immediate and expansive tool. Hymnody and balladry, shape-note songs and madrigals: The quartet’s breadth and skills as singers evoke a rural Roomful of Teeth, retrofitting that ensemble’s sense of the palatial conservatory for a modest cabin. Eerie harmonies cast the enchanting prelude of “Deer People,” an invocation fit for either the fall harvest or the tarot. Individual notes gather and scatter like a small symphony of bells throughout “Old Moon,” the steady melody bejeweled by brilliant vocal flashes. As Showalter sings of silvery nocturnal walks during “Solstice,” the rest of the quartet moves in and out of a round, latching onto syllables or phrases to form a rhythm that resembles a trance. I find myself hoping it will never end, then idly humming to sate that desire.
But Doran does not exist to dazzle. These songs are vivid if elliptical snapshots of love and woe, joy and devastation. They celebrate simple pleasures. Rivers, trails, and winds, for instance, act as little gifts during the measured dulcimer gem “Down the Road.” Set against a plaintive fiddle drone, “Day into Night” is Dolphin’s tender ode to a dying friend, soon to be released from the tedium of doctors and pain. The rest of the band gathers him around in the last chorus, an act of encouragement for the living. And Schermer insists that light cannot function without dark during “The Shadow Walks Behind You,” her spectral thesis on the coexistence of pleasure and despair. “Without them, we are only walking. We cannot really dance,” she says over autoharp strums, coolly imparting a bit of country wisdom.
To that same end, the sounds here set these tunes on edge, with foreboding lurking behind every studied harmony. The sense of eternal mystery written into “Bread and Water” is reinforced by the bowed dulcimer beneath it, steadily howling like the ghost of Tony Conrad. The melody of “And We Are Going” is a fuzzy blanket, but the slackly tuned guitar strings conjure an old barn in winter, wind slipping through the cracks. Bells that clatter at the end enhance that forlorn mood, as though this song lives in the loneliest place in the world.
A few days ago, and not so far from where Doran cut this introduction, I was walking through the woods, listening to these songs as the first hints of winter appeared. My mind was focused on the rippling fiddle of “Bonefolder,” a tune forever suspended between a dance and a dirge, when I looked up and spotted a bobcat only feet away. We stared at one another for a while, waiting for anything to happen. The encounter felt dangerous and thrilling and real, an instant of rural life where the demands of the modern world seemed nonexistent—the exact same sensation, turns out, that Doran delivers for 46 minutes.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Spinster | November 15, 2021 | 7.9 | 5be501b9-a374-4a34-a202-c66788ad0b6a | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Elbow's fourth album doesn't rock the boat so much as steadily alter the waves, with surprisingly good results. | Elbow's fourth album doesn't rock the boat so much as steadily alter the waves, with surprisingly good results. | Elbow: The Seldom Seen Kid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11322-the-seldom-seen-kid/ | The Seldom Seen Kid | Guy Garvey's got a great voice, and good thing, too. As Elbow have morphed from ambitious but sterile art-rockers to something slightly more visceral, his singing-- equal parts Peter Gabriel and Talk Talk's Mark Hollis-- has been one of the few elements linking the Manchester band's varied output. It's also what's helped Elbow stick out a bit from the choirboy pack of Chris Martin, guy from Keane, et al. At the same time it's not a very rock'n'roll voice, which perhaps explains how, despite some degree of hype, Elbow have always fallen just shy of expectations.
Fitting, then, that "Starlings"-- the first track on Elbow's fourth album The Seldom Seen Kid-- is all about expectations, or at least subverting them. The track begins with an intense cacophony before settling into a vaguely Polynesian groove; a sole orchestral stab blasts out as quickly as it disappears once again. It's a full two minutes before Garvey even sings, and by then one would be forgiven for thinking that, modest melody aside, expectation is all the suspensefully static track has to offer. Yet Elbow are album artists, first and foremost, and in that context it's hard to come up with a better way to ease into The Seldom Seen Kid. Indeed, the similarly exotic second track "The Bones of You", with its flamenco underpinnings and Gershwin coda, stands in stark contrast to its predecessor, and it's here that the benefits of Garvey's voice really come into play. Were he to rise to a pained falsetto, "The Bones of You" would invite endless comparisons to other, slightly more conspicuous British art-rock bands. That Garvey sounds so comfortable in his skin even as his band sheds its own from track to track helps thread the self-produced disc, suite-like.
There are no roman numerals to be found in The Seldom Seen Kid's song titles, nor is there particularly dexterous playing to be heard from track to track, but that's not to discount the disc's mildly proggy vibe. The ebb and flow of the disc feels like it's advancing some unknowable plot, always the sign of a well sequenced disc but also the bridge between songs like the lovely "Mirrorball" and the bluesy (in the get-the-Led-out sense) "Grounds for Divorce". There, the song's lyrical and musical reputation are in keeping with the band's exploration of the static as well as blues traditions. It's a tragic drinking song where the protagonist loses himself in "a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." Less fancy-pants lyricists would have just said "bar," but Garvey knows the value of a poetic line or two. In typically ornate Garvey fashion, he's called "An Audience with the Pope" "a Bond theme if Bond was from Bury and a recovering Catholic," but he could have just described it as Tom Waits doing 007.
The song is a rare autopilot moment on a disc that otherwise makes so much effort to skirt cliché. Anyone expecting "Some Riot" to reflect it's title is headed for disappointment-- the song could easily explode, but follows a different, more moving path instead-- and "Weather to Fly" is almost mantra-like in its simplicity. Yet while "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver" begins much the same, it gives way to some subtle twists, turns, and escalations that push the track into dramatically fresh territory. On "The Fix", the twist is that guest Richard Hawley's croon vies with Garvey's voice as guide through the jazzy song, vaguely film score in its menace but pretty cool despite its half-familiarity.
The single "One Day Like This" sounds like just that-- a single-- with its faster gait and sunnier demeanor, buoyed by strings and massed vocals despite a deceptive but welcome surfeit of space in the mix, but per Elbow's own downbeat reputation, the album doesn't end there. That would be too easy. Instead, The Seldom Seen Kid ends with a bonus tribute to the title's inspiration, Manchester songwriter/troubadour/busker Bryan Glancy. Track down and browse the website dedicated to his memory and you'll likely wish you knew him. Listen to this absolutely beautiful tribute and you'll miss him like a best friend. | 2008-04-16T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-16T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen / Fiction | April 16, 2008 | 7.8 | 5be572ad-2ec3-46b5-92be-da671fbda79e | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
On his first solo album that exists not because he’s in the habit of making records but because he has something to say, the UGK cofounder finally sounds confident by himself. | On his first solo album that exists not because he’s in the habit of making records but because he has something to say, the UGK cofounder finally sounds confident by himself. | Bun B: Return of the Trill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bun-b-return-of-the-trill/ | Return of the Trill | In the decade since the death of Bun B’s UGK partner and best friend, Pimp C, hip-hop’s A-list has handled him like a widowed, respected elder. They sat Shiva with him to share his grief, subsequently turning out in droves for his solo projects and to memorialize Pimp C and preach UGK’s greatness. But they never spoke what many must have thought: Creatively, Bun B’s best years were almost certainly behind him. From their dueling temperaments to the way Pimp’s wily sneer complemented Bun’s bassy rumble, the two had been perfectly matched. Nothing could replace that chemistry.
It’s a testament to Bun B’s herculean presence and the enduring appeal of UGK’s woozy country-rap that his solo records have been so solid. Still, by the early ’10s, even he was losing interest. “Trying to do music after Pimp C passed away was not necessarily hard to do, but I didn’t really enjoy it,” he admitted. Bun B’s 2013 album, Trill O.G.: The Epilogue, ended with a song titled “Bye!” He soon reduced his torrent of guest features to a trickle and settled into a new job teaching a hip-hop course at Houston’s Rice University. He seemed ready, if not for retirement, then at least the next stage of his career.
What a difference a sabbatical can make. Return of the Trill is Bun B’s first project in five years and his first solo album that exists not because he’s in the habit of making records, but because he has something worth saying. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey decimated his Texas hometown of Port Arthur, a refinery city struggling even before the storm flooded its businesses. “I tried to make an album that’s representative of the mentality of people in Port Arthur post-Hurricane Harvey, and really after any kind of traumatic experience,” he told The Texas Observer. “No matter what happens, you’ve gotta bounce back.” His verses don’t address the storm directly, but if any rapper is qualified to speak on regrouping after tragedy, it’s Bun B.
Throughout Return, Bun mounts a spirited case for continued relevance while preaching resilience, the importance of acting your age, and, as ever, the satisfaction of a well-maintained car. Perhaps all that time on a college campus rubbed off, too, as he engages with politics more than ever. “They don’t care about the cure/They just wanna sell a treatment,” he raps on On “U A Bitch,” an indictment of the prison-industrial complex and big pharma. “Keep you alive while keepin’ you high/Now that’s some street shit.”
Most surprising of all is “Blood on the Dash,” possibly the most sympathetic depiction of law enforcement ever recorded by a marquee rapper. Bun narrates a traffic stop from the perspective of both a pistol-toting driver who has been pulled over and the officer, characterized not as a trigger-happy racist but an idealist who joined the force out of concern for his community. He’s planning on letting the driver off with a warning until he sees him reach under his seat. Neither wants to use their firearm, but both have reason for mistrust. “What if he’s a killer cop like I’ve seen on the news?” the driver worries as he considers his options, all shitty.
Bun is less beholden to the help of gracious A-listers this time around. Instead, he surrounds himself with artists who fit naturally inside his orbit, mostly fellow Southern-rap veterans too far removed from their 20s to care about trends, emcees like Slim Thug, Killa Kyleon, and 8Ball & MJG. Fellow icons of middle-aged hardness Run the Jewels join for “Myself,” and Bun sounds every bit at home over El-P’s ’80s action-movie synths as Killer Mike.
Credit executive producer Big K.R.I.T. for making Return of the Trill hold together. In K.R.I.T., who directly produced half of these tracks, Bun has found a cheerleader and UGK disciple who’s fully internalized Pimp C’s playbook, from the bubbling bass to the churchy organs. And while K.R.I.T. isn’t the first rap producer to recruit bluesman Gary Clark Jr., he becomes the first to put him alongside soul singer Leon Bridges. An elegant Pimp C eulogy, their “Gone Away” ends Return on a graceful note of remorseful guitar and tender horns. Pimp C’s memory looms over this record, not his absence. Bun B never wanted to be a solo artist, but he’s never sounded more comfortable in the role. | 2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | II Trill Enterprises / Double Dose Entertainment / Empire | September 21, 2018 | 7.8 | 5bec5b6f-8032-40a5-8207-16e1f93adf46 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
This Heat were many things, but popular was never one of them. It's almost funny to see this record ... | This Heat were many things, but popular was never one of them. It's almost funny to see this record ... | This Heat: Deceit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8015-deceit/ | Deceit | This Heat were many things, but popular was never one of them. It's almost funny to see this record getting so much deserved attention recently due to its reissue, because before now, I only knew a few people who had even heard of the thing. It's especially strange to see all the praise in light of Gareth Williams' death on Christmas Eve last year. He wasn't a person who ever really wanted to be famous or even known as a musician, and yet will doubtlessly be better known henceforth than he'd ever been during This Heat's existence.
English drummer/vocalist Charles Hayward (fresh from working with Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera in the avant-prog/fusion outfit Quiet Sun) formed This Heat with Charles Bullen (guitar, clarinet, viola, etc.) and Williams (bass, keyboards, tape manipulation, etc.) around 1975. Hayward had worked with a fairly broad array of jazz and prog bands (and post-This Heat, would continue to do so), though Bullen and Williams were much less traveled, even as they were accomplished musicians. Hayward and Bullen had been playing together as a duo for a few years prior to This Heat, and began playing with Williams only after Hayward completed his duties with Quiet Sun. Williams would actually leave the band before this album, Deceit, was released, and maintain a very busy career as an engineer for John Barry and various symphonic recordings. His interest in recording techniques may have provided the impetus for This Heat to experiment with tape loops and editing, which would play very large roles in their studio output.
This Heat's sound was something like a confrontation of prog, free-jazz and contemporary electronic music (think early Stockhausen, not Kraftwerk). They often get lumped into the post-punk (or even just "punk") camp, for no better reason other than they started at the same time. They certainly sounded as if they were angry about something, and taking a glance at the lyric sheet for this album (and you'd better, as often the vocals seem more musical element than communicative force), they had fairly intense political/social statements to make-- though pinning down their position is often as hard as pinning down their sound. In any case, they were "progressive" in the literal sense of the word, and though they came up with the first wave of punk, they didn't really sound like anyone else of the time (save a few other English radicals like Henry Cow or Art Bears, occasionally).
Deceit was the band's second and final album (not counting posthumous releases, including the excellent BBC session release Made Available). As odd as it sounds on the surface, it's actually the more immediately appealing of their two albums, at least partially because of a greater emphasis on drive and something like song structure (though the music here is quite a ways from typical "songs"). The vocals-- mostly handled by Hayward-- were probably the weakest link for This Heat, though they don't really take away from the music so much as push it into yet a stranger realm.
"Sleep," the first track, is actually an atypically calm song, almost like a fractured lullaby. Layers of what sound like African percussion, and a simple piano line support a very low-key melody, wherein lines like, "Softness is a thing called comfort/ Doesn't cost much to keep in touch/ We never forget you have a choice," make me wonder if there isn't some kind of subversive commentary about consumer ethics and advertising at work. This shortly leads to the rave-up "Paper Hats" with its brawny, pouncing rhythms and subtly acrobatic guitar lines. This is a piece with several sections, none of them having too much to do with each other. Some, like the lengthy outro, sound like archetypical math-rock, with repetitive, complicated rhythmic patterns, while the brief middle section is more viscerally dynamic, or perhaps even "noisy." Lyrically, the band was as eclectic: "Well, what do we expect?/ Paper hats?/ Or maybe even roses?/ The sound of explosions?/ Oh no." I'd like to know what they expected, but I'm not sure what they got instead, and am certainly in the dark about to whom they protested.
"Triumph" is a Dadaist collage of various noises, musical and otherwise. There's a brief accordion intro, leading to what sounds like a kazoo lament accompanied by someone scraping a few pieces of metal and wood together. Then, Hayward mentions something about the angles being reversed, and the garbage symphony makes its grand conclusion-- all in less than three minutes. Perhaps this was a prologue for "S.P.Q.R.," which throws out any ideas of abstract noodling in favor of pure rock expression. The high-speed beat threatens to overpower a droning duo vocal line ("We organize via property as power/ Slavehood and freedom imperial purple/ Pax Romana!"). This track doesn't run through a myriad of stylistic changes; it makes its case via sheer persistence.
Hayward's interest in all manner of world rhythms and percussion manifested itself in tracks like "Shrink Wrap" and "Independence" (words provided by one Thomas Jefferson), where kinetic drum orchestras and ancient rain forest flutes and strings lent the music an otherworldly quality which further removed it from recordings by This Heat's angry peers. "Radio Prague" features more electronic trickery, and what sounds like someone actually tuning in and out of a Czech radio broadcast. There's a steady pitter-patter underneath, and some rather dark drones in the background (along with a haunting cello), and though I'm tempted to say this could have influenced Godspeed You Black Emperor!, it's more likely an isolated vignette. In a way, the entire album seems removed from typical musical happenings-- even the underground. Maybe that's why it's taken so long for This Heat to start receiving their due.
The band got its digs in once more for "A New Kind of Water," expressing the rage that seems to have been implied throughout the record, though rarely shown directly. Phrases like, "We were told to expect more/ And now that we've got more/ We want more, we want more," offer some of the only clear ideas about the feelings behind Deceit, and the music is appropriately insistent (crashing drums, wailing group vocals, very precise, discordant guitar lines). Over the years, there have been bands to play as aggressively, or even as strangely, but very few have been able to rise from their collective influences and histories to create music so singularly distinctive and inspiring. I don't know that Hayward, Bullen and Williams were trying to inspire (and that they debated over whether to release their music at all could be evidence to support that they weren't), but the overall feeling I take away from this album is that of revolution and a very creative form of protest. That's what I call punk. | 2002-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Light in the Attic | February 18, 2002 | 9 | 5befd257-31cb-4816-a0f6-721bbd92caa2 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The fourth LP from this mostly instrumental Chicago trio swings from exceedingly beautiful to punishingly physical in seconds flat. Russian Circles' ever-more-legit metal chops and well-realized compositional ambitions leave Empros feeling bigger and stranger than its predecessor. | The fourth LP from this mostly instrumental Chicago trio swings from exceedingly beautiful to punishingly physical in seconds flat. Russian Circles' ever-more-legit metal chops and well-realized compositional ambitions leave Empros feeling bigger and stranger than its predecessor. | Russian Circles: Empros | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16009-empros/ | Empros | A balancing act on a cosmic scale, Empros-- the fourth LP from mostly instrumental Chicago trio Russian Circles-- marries light to dark, order to chaos. Empros swings from the exceedingly beautiful to the punishingly physical in seconds flat. Every note on Empros is its right place, every surface scraped-up just so; a recent Decibel writeup found bassist Brian Cook claiming he'd never make another record "from the ground up" like the meticulously constructed Empros. Shame, that; as on 2009's swarmed-with-strings Geneva, the expanse charted by the grandiose Empros is very vast indeed.
Building on the strides they made on Geneva's adventurous first half, Russian Circles complicate the drift-and-build of most post-rock, injecting craggy climaxes, letting the low end take the lead. Highlight "Mlàdek" finds a rousing, almost Broken Social Scene-style guitar chug careening headlong into a patch of black metal-inspired ballast; the shift in tone's a bit jarring, but considering the disparity of styles at play, the transition's pretty flawless. Empros' best moments-- the snowdrift strings that blow across the end of "Schiphol" and into "Atackla", the patch cord static and drums that open "Batu," the aforementioned "Mlàdek" assault-- find some little sliver of gorgeousness overwhelmed by some orbit-upsetting rumble from Cook or some out-from-nowhere turnaround from drummer Dave Turncrantz.
Complexity for its own sake muddled the Circles' first few LPs a bit; Empros, like Geneva before it, is less prone to wriggle, more likely to lunge, each move bigger than its last. That increased compositional confidence gives each move they make that much more heft, songs charging eagerly towards their second acts, then dizzyingly doubling back. Still, with most of these tunes hinging around some staggeringly huge mid-song wallop, once you've traveled Empros' strangeways a few times, you'll start to see the landmarks coming from a few miles off.
Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes. And then there's "Praise Be Man", a searching, Spiritualized-nodding folk-gospel featuring a rare vocal turn from Cook. On a record with less scope than Empros, "Praise" would prove the sorest of thumbs, an out-of-character overreach from a band who oughta stick with what they're good at. Arriving at end of all that interstellar overdrive, "Praise" proves an especially lovely comedown, one last burst of light to offset all that darkness. | 2011-11-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-11-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Sargent House | November 11, 2011 | 7.7 | 5bf79583-4dc2-4a56-ba6f-0311e1f9bd46 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
D’Angelo’s debut was a sudden shock to ’90s R&B. The deluxe, expanded version of Brown Sugar reveals the extent to which it was grown folks music made by a 21-year-old genius. | D’Angelo’s debut was a sudden shock to ’90s R&B. The deluxe, expanded version of Brown Sugar reveals the extent to which it was grown folks music made by a 21-year-old genius. | D’Angelo: Brown Sugar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dangelo-brown-sugar/ | Brown Sugar | The allure of D’Angelo began in 1995 on his debut single “Brown Sugar,” where he emerged as a nostalgic figure in modern soul. Armed with a honeyed voice and hip-hop swagger, D’Angelo was equal parts Marvin Gaye and LL Cool J, the consummate musician and the coolest guy in the room. It’s like he’d been here before and knew how to do it right this time. His blend of 1970s R&B and hip-hop felt uniquely vintage and modern. He appealed to wide swaths of listeners and helped usher in a new strain of black music.
Brown Sugar, D’Angelo’s debut, became an important forebear of what’s now called neo-soul. Released before Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (1996) and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm (1997), D’Angelo changed the sound of R&B while paying homage to its pioneers: Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield and the like. The success of Brown Sugar paved the way for artists like Anthony Hamilton, Jill Scott, and Alicia Keys to break into the mainstream and achieve their own levels of fame. “Maxwell told me Brown Sugar’s success got his Urban Hang Suite off of Columbia’s shelf,” writer Nelson George penned in an essay for Brown Sugar’s deluxe edition. And to think, the album was essentially a small-scale event compared to its follow-ups—the groundbreaking Voodoo and the eruption of Black Messiah. No, Brown Sugar was truly bedroom soul: “I wrote … the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond,” D’Angelo recalled in 2014. “And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track [there].”
The son of a Pentecostal minister, D’Angelo grew up playing piano and won three amateur competitions as a teenager at the famed Apollo Theater. He signed a publishing deal with EMI in 1991, and prior to Brown Sugar’s release, the singer co-wrote and co-produced a gospel-infused song that appeared in 1994 film Jason’s Lyric. The song, “U Will Know,” featured a who’s who of prominent R&B singers at the time—Gerald Levert, Keith Sweat, Usher and Tevin Campbell, among many others—and earned D’Angelo his first bit of recognition. That buzz helped lay the framework for the musician’s first ever solo release.
Brown Sugar arrived during the peak of hip-hop’s golden era, when rappers like Nas and The Notorious B.I.G., and groups like Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest were at the height of their powers. D’Angelo instantly fit the mold. With his straight-back cornrow braids and baggy clothes, he looked like a rapper of that period, yet his music countered that which dominated the airwaves. Until Brown Sugar arrived, Top 40 R&B skewed very much toward hip-hop, from the upbeat tick of its beats to the guest rap verses that felt obligatory for almost every single. Songs like Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal,” Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” seemed influenced by Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing-style production, which dominated urban music in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
D’Angelo was different, the perfect amalgamation of modern rap and old soul, and Brown Sugar was a masterclass in this alchemy. It was as if, from the very beginning, he wasn’t trying to go against the grain, he just wanted to keep things low-key. For instance, in the video for “Brown Sugar,” the scene unfolds in a smoky jazz club on what looks to be open mic night. It harkened back to the essence of soul and jazz music, live records cut at the Village Vanguard or Five Spot. The title track and the album felt honest and organic; you could feel the lush instrumentation, the sincerity in the lyrics, the warmth of the keys. This wasn’t R&B purposely intended for younger ears; Brown Sugar was grown folks music, it just so happened that a 21-year-old created it.
All these years later, Brown Sugar is still just as resonant, emitting a strong vintage quality that works in any era. It had everything: “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” a dark tale about death and infidelity, became a gritty street anthem that soundtracked a pivotal scene in 1999 film The Best Man. With its upbeat gospel sway, “When We Get By” was an uplifting tune in the vein of Ray Charles, as a track that meshed the genre’s traditional and contemporary aspects. On “Cruisin’,” the Smokey Robinson classic of the same name, D’Angelo kept the integrity of the original—the fluid guitar riff and wafting strings—yet he quickened the pace just slightly, and added weight to the drum kick. The finished product paid rightful homage to Smokey and might be a little better than the 1979 cut. The two-disc deluxe edition of Brown Sugar includes four remixes of D’Angelo’s “Cruisin’,” one apiece from producers King Tech and Dallas Austin, and two others labeled “Wet Remix” and “God Made Me Funky Remix.” Of the “Cruisin’” renditions, Austin’s is closest to D’Angelo’s portrayal; canned drums give it a distinct ’90s knock, but the strings and vocal arrangements are unchanged. The title track, “Lady” and “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine” also get a few different a capellas, instrumentals, and remixes here.
Listening to Brown Sugar’s deluxe edition is like walking through the mid-90s. The record feels like an artifact in that way, capturing D’Angelo at a nascent stage in his creative development while dusting off rhymes from Kool G. Rap (who originally appeared on King Tech’s remix of “Brown Sugar”), Redman (featured on the Def Squad remix of “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine”) and AZ (himself a featured rapper on DJ Premier’s “Lady” remix). Where Voodoo and Black Messiah felt especially grainy and dark, Brown Sugar feels especially lush and radiant, an outcome of Bob Power’s and Russell Elevado’s masterful engineering work. (Conversely, for Voodoo, Elevado and D’Angelo recorded everything on tape, which gave the record its lo-fi sound). Brown Sugar shifted modern soul, not only putting pressure on himself to exceed expectations moving forward, but it opened a door for a new movement in black music. | 2017-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin / UMe | August 26, 2017 | 9.2 | 5c00a4f2-8718-4220-8f33-9dfa99a74a6f | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
On their debut EP, the Washington, DC post-punk trio Flasher offer seven impressively-honed songs that speak to selfhood and sublimation. | On their debut EP, the Washington, DC post-punk trio Flasher offer seven impressively-honed songs that speak to selfhood and sublimation. | Flasher: Flasher EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22619-flasher-ep/ | Flasher EP | Washington, DC exists in a constant ominous haze. It’s no secret that this environment has given rise to absolutely vital punk through grassroots oppositional music scenes, from Dischord post-hardcore forebears like Rites of Spring and Fugazi to the feminist Positive Force collective that fostered the East coast wing of riot grrrl. Sister Polygon, an eclectic record label run by the members of Priests, is helping to set up infrastructure for the latest wave. Their bands deploy many tactics: the confrontational urgency of Downtown Boys and Priests themselves, the tongue-in-cheek minimalism of Sneaks, the giddy polyphonics of Gauche. They all paint sonic critiques of broken systems and create effective models of resistance.
Flasher, made up of Taylor Mulitz (bassist in Priests), Emma Baker, and Daniel Saperstein, is the latest to emerge. They take a moody post-punk approach, crafting introspective songs that speak to selfhood and sublimation. “What happens when the continuity of self and the worlds you come to depend on shatter?” Flasher told The Media in April upon releasing their debut self-titled cassette, which is now being re-released on vinyl. “We’re trying to explore new forms of resistance, where being yourself ceases to be a matter of reliability and instead leans into emerging, shifting, and unsustainable senses of self.” The trio’s previous project, Young Trynas, addressed some of these themes on their 2013 EP Probably Music, but on Flasher they’re silkier, more stylized, well-honed.
Flasher’s airy melodic vocal hooks, layered over grungy instrumentation, earn comparisons to Goo-era Sonic Youth. The more relentless tracks, meanwhile, like “All Over,” recall the overdriven shoegaze of A Place to Bury Strangers. Call-and-response singing and classically ominous synths round out full, rich songs; each part sits perfectly in the mix. On the standout opener, “Tense,” a languid, taunting lead vocal faces off with another voice, which rattles out a laundry list of concerns: “The backseat/The answer/To society/Something greater/The body/Distant achievements/Further growth/Empty gesture.” Crashing waves of guitar nearly drown it out, but the bite of the words is persistent. “Tense” luxuriates in the tension between desire and responsibility.
From there, the tracks are more high-octane, built around mantras of being and nothingness. “I’ll erase myself/To release myself” vows the chorus of “Erase Myself”; “Is this becoming/Or am I succumbing?” asks “Make Out.” The object of immersion is never named; it could be society, or coupling, or the scene. Instead, the focus is on the lure of being consumed, its dark seduction. Closer “Destroy” can be read as a display of sweetly heartsick longing—the chorus crooning, “Starting to realize/I just want to be your boy”—or as a self-conscious critique of that form of desire. “Go destroy your feelings,” Mulitz sings, “Make a little room for me.”
Across Flasher, dissociative existential questions are countered by the visceral physicality of the songs. This places the trio squarely in the tradition of punk that articulates how politics imprint on the body. “Throw It Away” shakes with every drum kick and guitar screech, recalling the angst of other Polygon projects with the repetition of lines like, “With god as my witness/This world is a sickness” and “Why should I be thankful?” But for all the tension and darkness, there’s a real joy to Flasher—a knowing smile, a dream-pop slippage. It’s a fun listen that sounds like it was equally fun to make, which, after all the soul-searching, is a source of relief. | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sister Polygon | November 21, 2016 | 7.8 | 5c0445c5-88ec-49a9-8bae-122b30980ee7 | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | null |
On the fourth album from their reunited lineup, the alt-rock lifers choose to embrace the slowing of their step. | On the fourth album from their reunited lineup, the alt-rock lifers choose to embrace the slowing of their step. | Pixies: Doggerel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pixies-doggerel/ | Doggerel | Doggerel marks an important milestone for Pixies, the pioneering alternative rockers who swapped their mercurial charms for dogged reliability as they aged: It is the fourth album from the reunited lineup, matching the number of full-lengths the band released at its youthful peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Nothing about Doggerel sounds youthful. The band relies on chops instead of accidents to thrill, favoring production that’s clean, burly, and without a lick of grit—a sound that moves with the weight and deliberateness of middle age. Pixies choose to embrace the slowing of their step, using it to accentuate the way leader Black Francis chose refinement over exploration as he learned to sneak his idiosyncrasies into familiar song forms.
The seeds of Doggerel lie in a genre exercise. Francis had been stockpiling original tunes written in the vein of 1950s country music with the intention of cutting an Americana album with Bobby Bare Jr., a latter-day member of Guided by Voices who once toured with his own Pixies tribute group. Tom Dalgety, the producer and engineer who has been behind the band’s boards since Head Carrier, plucked “Human Crime” from the stash and had Pixies transform it into a bouncy little number that felt looser than Beneath the Eyrie, the 2019 album in which the Kim Deal-less incarnation of the band finally found its footing in the recording studio.
“Human Crime” doesn’t appear on Doggerel, yet it served its purpose: It freed Black Francis from the idea that there was a division between the songs he wrote for himself and those he penned for Pixies. He followed this notion throughout the entire first decade of the Pixies reunion, releasing six albums during a period where Kim Deal held firm to her stance that the band shouldn’t record new material. Once she left, eventually to be replaced on bass and vocals by Paz Lenchantin, Pixies immediately started making records that suggested maybe Deal was right to believe the band should’ve stuck to oldies. Indie Cindy and, to a lesser extent, Head Carrier buckled under the weight of a band attempting to live within the confines of its legacy: They spent their time hitting marks, pretending to be the group they once were.
There may be no surprises on Doggerel but, crucially, there’s no pandering, either. The band sounds at ease, even agreeable, as middle-aged rockers. Black Francis never attempts to strain to replicate his trademark wail; Joey Santiago’s guitar squalls are controlled and colorful. David Lovering lays down a thick backbeat that allows Lenchantin just enough elasticity to suggest a hint of a groove. It’s recognizably Pixies music but it’s broader, bigger, and slicker: It’s the alt-rock Voodoo Lounge, the record the Rolling Stones released some 30 years after their debut.
Like the Stones, Pixies survive because they’re road warriors, playing old favorites for audiences who consider themselves lucky to finally hear “Where Is My Mind?” performed live. Pixies operate at a much smaller scale than the Rolling Stones, of course, and modesty is also crucial to Doggerel. Once purveyors of dadaist rock, Pixies now opt for craft, constructing sturdy songs whose appeal lies in their directness. There’s little hidden here: “There’s a Moon On” gallops forth with nocturnal urgency, and “Who’s More Sorry Now?” has the vaguest hint of melancholy to its titular phrase. Black Francis—who, in a first on a Pixies album, is joined by Joey Santiago as a co-writer on two songs, the shimmering, jangly “Pagan Man” and churning “Dregs of the Wine"—writes simply and cleanly, skills honed over the years where he was leading the workaday combo Frank Black & the Catholics. As much as those first fumbling Pixies reunion records, those journeyman Catholics albums demystified the image of Black Francis the yelping madman as he resolutely settled into the limits of a working band. That same sensibility is evident on Doggerel yet the very presence of the rest of Pixies brings the album color and a bit of verve, elements that give the songs a bit of a lift. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Pixies are now an outfit built for comfort, not speed—a group that’s found its personal sweet spot and is content to linger there. | 2022-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | October 4, 2022 | 6.5 | 5c050377-898f-4a1f-8c86-540e45a37c0e | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
This new archival set documents an all-star tribute to Ornette Coleman held in 2014—at which the saxophonist gave his last public performance—as well as recordings from his 2015 funeral. | This new archival set documents an all-star tribute to Ornette Coleman held in 2014—at which the saxophonist gave his last public performance—as well as recordings from his 2015 funeral. | Ornette Coleman: Celebrate Ornette | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22881-celebrate-ornette/ | Celebrate Ornette | Ornette Coleman was not scheduled to perform at the all-star concert held in his honor, back in the summer of 2014. That celebration, at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, was chiefly organized as a way for fans and associates to pay tribute to the saxophonist’s legacy as an American composer and innovator. The lineup—including talents like Henry Threadgill and Ravi Coltrane—suggested Coleman’s towering influence over multiple generations of jazz players. And the bill also promised elite musicians from other stylistic zones, such as Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith.
There aren’t too many artists capable of drawing Flea and Branford Marsalis into the same orbit. Though it’s easy to understand how Coleman’s boisterous catalog does this. Once you strip away all the baggage associated with “free jazz” (never Coleman’s preferred term), you’re left with the joyful idiosyncrasy of that sound. Many of his melodies and solos channel traditional song styles, while his arrangements and harmonies are frequently unexpected—and inspired. Coleman’s interest in collaboration, whether with Jerry Garcia or the Master Musicians of Jajouka, also sets a high standard for risk-taking that can appeal to artistic seekers working in any genre.
On the night of the 2014 Prospect Park gig, Coleman took his final risk on a public stage. He hadn’t performed for a crowd in several years; his last official recording was 2006’s Pulitzer prize-winning Sound Grammar. In the interim, journalists and fans passed on rumors regarding the genius’ failing health. So when the 84-year-old Coleman emerged from the wings of the Prospect Park bandshell, mid-concert, with his white alto saxophone in hand, it was a modest surprise even to his son and longtime drummer, Denardo.
After walking out carefully and taking a seat near the other saxophonists, Ornette simply listened for a bit. Soon after, he delivered 20 minutes of playing: a stretch that drew on two of his early compositions (“Ramblin’” and “Turnaround”). Within a year, he would be dead.
Heard now, on an archival release from Denardo Coleman’s new Song X imprint, it’s clear that Coleman’s technique in 2014 was more fragile than at any other point in his immortal career. His phrases flow more slowly. Sometimes Coleman reaches for a note with audible difficulty. While his reduced physical capabilities are obvious, the spiritual intensity communicated by his playing is equally apparent—and all the more remarkable for the context. Every elderly body confronts decline. But some veteran spirits can discover new strategies for persisting, recognizable to the last.
There’s a frailty in Coleman’s tone, early on, during “Ramblin’.” Despite the occasional tremor of timbre, there’s no desire to hide from his limitations. And Coleman’s way of following up a long-held, bluesy tone with a sprightly flourish of notes remains forceful, unmistakable. When Denardo’s funk-influenced backing group comes in, a saxophone section also joins. (Their ranks include Threadgill and David Murray.) The extra players help thicken out the sound and lift Ornette up—with the icon eventually contributing some ecstatic, piercing notes that cut through the group texture. After finishing up with his playing for the night, the saxophonist hung around on stage for a portion of the rest of the gig. What he took in was a jammy, consistently potent tribute to his catalog, and his spirit of creativity.
It’s thrilling to hear Threadgill’s alto sound—one conscious of Ornette’s style, but not overly indebted to it—during a performance of “Blues Connotation.” (And Flea holds his own, on bass!) A powerhouse ensemble that includes Branford Marsalis, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and Bruce Hornsby gathers for a fiery take of “Song X.” On “Peace,” Ravi Coltrane’s soprano sax leaps create an excitable feel alongside the spiky blues playing of guitarist James Blood Ulmer. And Geri Allen, the pianist with perhaps the best track record of collaborating with Coleman and his mysterious “harmolodic” theory, turns in imaginative supporting lines throughout a performance of “The Sphinx.”
The less-canonical tributes also work. Guitarist Nels Cline handles the melody of “Sadness” while Thurston Moore lays down a din of expressionistic noise in the background. Laurie Anderson’s group—which includes avant-saxophonist John Zorn and bassist Bill Laswell—creates a lyrical squall that feels fully appropriate (in part, because it often references Coleman’s famous composition “Lonely Woman”). Patti Smith plays a pair of tunes from her then-recent album Banga; the way she switches between vocals and stray blasts of clarinet comes across as a tribute to Coleman’s own multi-instrumental practice.
By the time the concert closes—with a cathartic, all-hands-on-deck rendition of “Lonely Woman”—it seems as though few aspects of the artist’s vast playbook have been ignored. What’s particularly touching is the knowledge that everyone thought to pull this gig together in time for Ornette to experience their love for his work.
Performances from Coleman’s public funeral are also included in this new archival set. The mood of that 2015 concert is necessarily more somber than that of the the Prospect Park show, but the results are similarly intriguing, and no less star-studded. Pharoah Sanders’ brief tenor sax solo carries an affecting tenderness. The last living member of free jazz’s inaugural class drops by to pay his respects, as well: Cecil Taylor’s eight-minute tribute encompasses poetry (to the confusion of some in the audience), stark-but-stately piano motifs, and one swirl of atonal density at its midpoint. It’s a stunner.
As a multimedia package, Celebrate Ornette provides fans a wide range of perspectives on both shows. Its three CDs give a complete account of the Prospect Park blowout and the performances from the Riverside Church funeral. The Prospect Park discs stray from a chronological presentation, in order to create a more ideal flow for home listening. (And yes, Ornette’s own appearances are queued up first.) A pair of DVDs also gives you visual representation of each event—though some performances from Prospect Park are omitted, in favor of some backstage commentary from key participants. The DVD of the Riverside service also includes all eulogies and remembrances, which the audio disc breezes past. This lavish, pricey artifact isn’t an ideal first port of entry to Coleman’s art. But the way the set explores the cumulative impact of his work makes it a deeply rewarding experience for devoted admirers. | 2017-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Song X | February 13, 2017 | 8.1 | 5c055fae-98db-4412-8ad6-d809f7a69a25 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
On their third full-length, the Temper Trap capture some of the crowd-pleasing sound of their debut, unleashing likable enough pop-rock with a bright electronic sheen. | On their third full-length, the Temper Trap capture some of the crowd-pleasing sound of their debut, unleashing likable enough pop-rock with a bright electronic sheen. | The Temper Trap: Thick as Thieves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21965-thick-as-thieves/ | Thick as Thieves | Australia’s the Temper Trap exists in a lineage of perfectly acceptable rock bands. There is a template to these acts. U2 is invariably somewhere in their genetic code, or if not them, Coldplay. (In the Temper Trap’s case, they opened on the Mylo Xyloto tour.) They tend to hit during the summer, not the winter. Every single comes with an electronic sheen and a volume of wordless vocals to rival any Gregorian chant troupe or wilderness masculinity junket. They are charming enough in short enough bursts to be made for the rock milieu of interchangeable syncs, snippets heard over festival noise, and crossovers to adult-contemporary radio. More people genuinely enjoy and connect to them than people—especially music critics—give them credit for. They are easy to love. They’re also, perhaps, easier to forget.
The Temper Trap’s distinguishing assets from this set are a falsetto by Dougy Mandagi that suggests he’s studied, if nowhere near mastered, Freddie Mercury, and has done so in the time since their last self-titled album, as difficult a sophomore work as this sort of band can muster. On Thick as Thieves, unsurprisingly, the group returns to the crowd-pleasing likes of Conditions, adding a couple of pop producers—Pascal Gabriel (Marina and the Diamonds, Goldfrapp) and Damian Taylor (the Killers, Björk) and every pop-rock trick in the arsenal. Everything is an anthem. The “Be My Baby” drums show up by track three; a “Boys of Summer” rip by track eight. “Fall Together” adds a drizzle of electronic pitter-patter, but nothing too obtrusive. A generation ago, bands like this might have affected angst, but 2016 calls for a sound far more bright-sided. Even when “Alive” threatens to sully the vibes with talk of taxes and “staring at a screen” (like everyone who deploys this cliché, Temper Trap doesn’t account for the possibility that those screens might transmit something worthwhile), it does so via soaring chorus of “so good to be alive.” It works as irony; it presumably works even better soaked in by sweaty outdoor crowds, its true intended use.
But just like last time around, the Temper Trap are better than all this invariably sounds. It’s easy to be cynical about a record like this, but the Temper Trap are nothing but not earnest; Thick as Thieves never comes off as anything but the exact record the band wants to make, which just happens to fit squarely into alt-rock trends. At their best, they achieve late-’90s VH1 rock heights, which is not such a bad target to hit; the title track is robust and genuinely wistful, and “So Much Sky,” if you ignore the obligatory stadium chant, is optimistic enough to hush any cynic. At their worst, they’re affected and not in an interesting way. (Mangi’s falsetto works more often than it doesn’t, especially when part of arrangement, but left unadorned, as on “Lost,” the vocal timbre suggests someone you wouldn’t ever want to get lost with, at least not alone.) But these are both extremes, on a record otherwise scrupulous to never sound at all extreme. | 2016-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Glassnote | June 14, 2016 | 5.7 | 5c076aa7-7c4d-4742-96d2-eb358b655dee | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
On his debut mixtape, the British-Gambian rising star breaks away from the UK rap mold and establishes himself as a voice for the marginalized. | On his debut mixtape, the British-Gambian rising star breaks away from the UK rap mold and establishes himself as a voice for the marginalized. | Pa Salieu: Send Them to Coventry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pa-salieu-send-them-to-coventry/ | Send Them to Coventry | To “send someone to Coventry” is to ostracize them, cast them out, and cut them off. The origins of the phrase are unclear: Most date it to the English Civil War of the 1600s; one writer suggests it’s a reference to being “hanged from a covin tree.” Either way, the gist that lingers is of the post-industrial West Midlands city as an unwelcoming, unforgiving place. On his debut mixtape, Pa Salieu draws a more nuanced picture of his hometown—a place of violence, but light and hope also—and takes his stand for a generation of marginalized young people.
Last October, the British-Gambian 23-year-old had 20 shotgun pellets picked from the back of his head after a drive-by shooting put him in hospital. Three months later, defiant, he unleashed “Frontline,” a taut, wiry slice of UK rap that detailed his brushes with violence growing up in the Hillfields suburb of Coventry. The track promptly blew up—and the industry cogs spun into motion. Salieu toured the UK’s rap radio shows, laid down freestyles, and saw his name appear on line-up after festival line-up.
Send Them to Coventry was originally penciled for early summer, just in time for the live dates. What happened next is, by now, a familiar tale: a delayed release, canceled bookings, and months hunkered down in the studio. The pause, Salieu has since said, was a welcome one. He took the time to develop his craft and to consider new ways of blending his love of Gambian folk music (he frequently cites his auntie, who performs as Chuche Njie and is sampled on “B***K”, as an influence) with his regular teenage rotations of Tupac and Vybz Kartel.
Salieu’s Gambian heritage and embrace of the West African inflections in his speech have made for comparisons with J Hus, but the more relevant association would be the way he’s emerged with his own distinct mode of expression. Salieu flows in the space left by scattered drums and is acutely attentive to not only the meaning of his words, but the sound of them, too. On “My Family,” he trades punchlines and plosives with fellow breakout star Backroad Gee; the track pops and fizzes with a menacing, stop-start energy. Seemingly throwaway lines like “Chitty chitty, bang bang, four-door dinger/Ting go ‘clap’ tryna hit them figures,” manage to squeeze cartoonish references, paper-stacking aspirations, and Salieu’s own real-life trauma into a tight handful of rhythmic syllables. It’s in these deft moments, and his broader artistic flourishes, that Salieu releases himself from the UK rap mold that early admirers have squeezed him into.
Combining elements of dancehall, Afrobeats, hip-hop, and grime are now par for the course in the UK’s saturated rap scene, which can make it difficult to innovate. Pa Salieu makes it look easy. On “Over There,” he bends the pitch of his voice to inhabit a cast of characters and skips from trap trills to baile breakdowns without missing a beat. “Betty” packs all the lyrical braggadocio of road rap, but the track’s lean, skittish drum rolls, and Salieu’s playful delivery—dancing between a half-sung flow and full-throated proclamation—round off the sharp edges and transform it into something else entirely. On “More Paper,” he mourns the death of his best friend over gentle rimshots and a synth line that could have been lifted from Clint Mansell’s score for Black Mirror’s “San Junipero.” He channels Youssou N’Dour’s rich harmonies on “Flip, Repeat”; the offbeat stabs of “No Warnin’” and picked guitar on “Block Boy” nod to canonical West African pop.
This is an extraordinarily assured first offering from a young artist capable of surprising at every turn. The result is not so much a foreboding portrait of a forgotten, boom-and-bust city, but an invitation to a place and people unduly ignored—and an introduction to an artist who won’t be. Not so much sent to Coventry, then, as visiting voluntarily.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Warner UK | November 17, 2020 | 8.1 | 5c12eca8-824d-4e23-9cef-bafaa37a75a9 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The Chicago musician celebrates idealism on an album of vivid, jubilant art pop that refuses to be pinned down. | The Chicago musician celebrates idealism on an album of vivid, jubilant art pop that refuses to be pinned down. | Sen Morimoto: Diagnosis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sen-morimoto-diagnosis/ | Diagnosis | When Sen Morimoto tried to swallow the sobering realities of pursuing music as a full-time job, he almost quit songwriting entirely. The Chicago multi-instrumentalist was keenly aware that the industry thrives on exploitation—of trauma, identity, and naivete, to start—to sell records. Loath to conform to capitalist models but aware that concessions must be made, Morimoto found himself overwhelmed and undervalued, navigating a confusing balancing act of caring deeply and learning when not to. On his third album, Diagnosis, he abandons that tightrope walk with one big trust fall—into the arms of his collaborators, his ideals, and, ultimately, a more unguarded version of himself.
Diagnosis sounds both liberated and stressed—but then, Morimoto’s music has never been reducible to a single sound or mood. Born in Kyoto and raised in Massachusetts, he grew up studying jazz before trying out hip-hop and playing in punk bands. In his solo music, he alternates between crooning and rapping while juggling guitar, saxophone, synths, drum programming, and Wurlitzer, among other instruments. Previously, he dreamed up songs with acid jazz, doo-wop harmonies, and lo-fi beats while scrubbing plates as a dishwasher. Now, after quitting that job to focus on music, Morimoto restructures those impulses into breathable grooves with jazz flourishes and slow songs built around romantic rhythm sections.
For a self-proclaimed anti-capitalist like Morimoto, the hardest part of pursuing a music career is accepting the need to play the game. He’s found new ways to rethink his values without sacrificing intent, like starting a podcast to confront “industry bullshit”; after five years of self-releasing on his own label, Sooper Records, he has partnered with City Slang to bring out Diagnosis. He works through his ambivalence on “Diagnosis,” a mutating pop-rap ode to the Catch-22 of participating in a system you’re fighting against. Facing down the businesses and politicians that offer a false choice between money or life, he shouts a warning loud enough to wake someone from a daze: “Don’t let them choose/They won’t think twice.”
And when he tries to go with the flow, the doubt sinks in anyway. “When it was real, how did you know?” Morimoto asks in “Pressure on the Pulse,” imposter syndrome biting at his heels. He rifles through trash cans for an established artist’s checklist to success: Which pen did they use? How do they tie lyrics into a bow? Most importantly, what transforms a person who makes art into an artist? In “Surrender,” he manipulates moods to illustrate the battle of head versus heart. Morimoto spits out each word in the phrase, “Please don’t give up now,” while manic keys spiral out of control. When backup vocalists coo, “It’s killing me,” their voices warm and satiny, a single saxophone note oozes seductively beneath like a siren song.
As on his self-titled album from 2020, Morimoto navigates the growth process best when he rotates his anxieties and paranoia until they lock into place as upbeat songs. Lines that could read as scolding or resigned become downright jovial in the context of “Bad State,” a burst of light guitar and sparse funk rhythms, like an indie Bruno Mars. He sounds cozy lamenting his numbness on the stripped-down “Feel Change,” with its autumnal guitar and angelic vocals; “What You Say” uses tight drumming and Radiohead-esque guitar arpeggios to regulate his compulsive overthinking. Friends and collaborators from Chicago’s local music scene—drummer Ryan Person, bassist Michael Cantella, and vocalists KAINA and NNAMDÏ, among others—offer a sense of security; their presence suggests that while there’s no easy answer to ethically navigating a career, staying grounded in your community is the next best bet for sanity.
Morimoto’s strongest skill is his meticulous production, which makes commonplace instruments like synthesizers or saxophone sound unique to him. Throughout his discography, he’s carved out a distinctly plumy sound—one that pulses softly and hypnotically, like an LED light strip rotating through the color spectrum. When “If the Answer Isn’t Love” swerves through blown-out horns and thick grooves, you immediately recognize it as Morimoto’s work, the same way a fellow overlooked producer, Sufjan Stevens, uses hyper-soft banjo plucks or fluttering piano to make familiar instruments sound like one-of-a-kind models reserved for his inventory. The strength of Morimoto’s production on Diagnosis speaks to the fact that while surrendering control is a worthwhile exercise for self-growth, so is refusing to abandon the gut instincts that got you this far. | 2023-11-28T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-28T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | City Slang / Sooper | November 28, 2023 | 7.4 | 5c148cca-1df6-4192-bb15-d0ba1983fc62 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The art-sleaze of Alex Cameron’s second album transcends its surface-level smarm to become a biting piece of commentary. Thankfully, the songs are as effortlessly catchy as they are eminently creepy. | The art-sleaze of Alex Cameron’s second album transcends its surface-level smarm to become a biting piece of commentary. Thankfully, the songs are as effortlessly catchy as they are eminently creepy. | Alex Cameron: Forced Witness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-cameron-forced-witness/ | Forced Witness | Alex Cameron is a sleazeball. Or rather, “Alex Cameron” is a sleazeball. On his 2016 debut, Jumping the Shark, the Australian raconteur presented himself as a lounge-lizard lecher best described by a line from the song “Real Bad Lookin’”: “I am the dumbest richest guy at the bar.” He was a Neil Hamburger who delivered skeezy synth-pop come-ons, instead of bad one-liners, a one-man Suicide playing for the passed-out drunks under the flickering neon beer-logo signage at Trader Vic’s. The fake wrinkles Cameron applied to his face to get into character effectively put the air quotes around the enterprise.
But on his second album, Forced Witness, Cameron has cleaned up his act—aesthetically, at least. He’s no longer reaching for the makeup kit or hiding behind a masquerade. With the help of his sax-wielding accomplice Roy Molloy, producer Jonathan Rado, and a collaboration with Brandon Flowers, he’s upgraded his sound from chintzy pawn-shop synth presets to a luxurious, widescreen presentation that channels the plushest ’80s pop. And we’re not talking eternally fashionable influences like New Order and Depeche Mode, but the sort of slick MOR schlock you might hear between John Waite’s “Missing You” and John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” on a dentist’s office playlist.
He’s also raising his voice beyond above the first album’s disaffected, dead-cool murmur, investing it with chest-pumping passion, and projecting it to the cheap seats. Where Cameron once played a ham, now he’s practically Meat Loaf—and in its most resplendent, sax-smoothed moments, Forced Witness comes on like Destroyer’s Kaputt if its guiding light was Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell instead of Roxy Music’s Avalon. But all that surface radiance ultimately serves to shine a harsh, unforgiving light on the ugliest of creatures: the modern, macho alpha male—and, by extension, the desperate, delusional dudes who aspire to that ideal.
There are ten songs on Forced Witness, and each of them is sung by a complete asshole. These guys casually refer to women as “pussy” and adopt usernames like “Studmuffin96,” while the instant availability of internet porn has rendered them incapable of sustaining actual IRL romantic relationships. As such, Cameron’s cocaine-dusted musical arrangements inflate these losers with so much false bravado, they’re liable to burst. When your hear his shameless characters engage in dick-swinging contests over the glistening electric-piano chords of “Country Figs” or the bongo-powered disco of “The Chihuahua,” it’s almost like Patrick Bateman’s Phil Collins fetish in American Psycho: shiny, plastic pop that holds a mirror up to its subjects’ empty souls.
Like the internet-porn addictions that afflict many of its inhabitants the cheap thrills of Forced Witness can spiral into discomfiting despair (particularly when one computer-bound Romeo says, “I’m waiting for my lover, she’s almost 17!”). But the album displays a pop prowess that Cameron’s debut only hinted at—these songs are as effortlessly catchy as they are eminently creepy. And Cameron’s songwriting has only turned more acerbic and outrageous. He didn’t need to adopt any costumed persona to deliver these songs; the awful behavior chronicled within speaks for itself. The couch-surfing cad on “Country Figs” blithely declares, “The worst part about being homeless is waking up from a dirty wet dream/ With a lap full of cum and a head full of steam.” And while his dazzling duet with Angel Olsen on “Stranger’s Kiss” assumes the form of a soft-focus, heart-pounding, ’80s-soundtrack ballad, it’s ultimately a love song populated by a guy whose idea of pillow talk is: “I got shat on by an eagle, baby/Now I’m king of the neighbourhood, and it feels like I could/Just peel the gym pants off a single mother.”
But Cameron saves his most damning caricature for the sprightly, synth-jabbed “Marlon Brando,” whose narrator spots the woman of his dreams with another guy—and can barely suppress his desire to kick the shit out of him. “I tell you something sister, I’m feeling mighty fine,” Cameron sings to her, “You tell that little faggot, ‘Call me “faggot” one more time…’” It’s a line that would seem wantonly hateful if it wasn’t coming through the voice of a man who is so cowardly and insecure, he has to deliver his threats through a third party. In the end, he reveals, he just wants someone “to say that my hair looks nice and my face has a Beckham-like quality.”
In moments like that, the line between Cameron and his characters can start to blur—after all, the singer’s face actually has a Beckham-like quality. And more importantly, they illustrate that these people aren’t lacking for self-awareness—like the subject of “True Lies” who’s in a happy, committed relationship, yet admits he’d rather jerk off to “this woman on the internet/Even if she’s some Nigerian guy.” But rather than invest these sad creatures with sympathy and humanity, these confessional turns ultimately render them more monstrous. As Forced Witness forces us to see, the most despicable thing about these bros isn’t that they’re total pigs—it’s that they know it and refuse to do anything about it. | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | September 9, 2017 | 7.8 | 5c19bb50-447a-4449-905a-7fc9ed2f1094 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Matador and Pavement follow their 2xCD expanded reissues of Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain with a deluxe Wowee Zowee package that includes B-sides rounding out the first disc, and a second CD of outtakes, radio shots, live songs, and compilation tracks. | Matador and Pavement follow their 2xCD expanded reissues of Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain with a deluxe Wowee Zowee package that includes B-sides rounding out the first disc, and a second CD of outtakes, radio shots, live songs, and compilation tracks. | Pavement: Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9591-wowee-zowee-sordid-sentinels-edition/ | Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition | Stephen Malkmus writes in the liner notes of the expanded 2xCD reissue of Wowee Zowee that many of his friends like this Pavement record best. In 2006, that's not a crazy notion: Wowee Zowee was Pavement's White Album, a little bit of everything thrown together, and as with the Beatles' double, its adherents prefer the band at its loosest, funniest, and most willing to do whatever pops into their heads.
But I wonder what S.M.'s friends thought when WZ was released in April 1995. Press reviews at the time were mixed, and a lot of Pavement fans were disappointed. After the faintly commercial move of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, with its alt-rock hit single and coherent set of fully realized songs, Wowee Zowee seemed a retreat, a record that took the slacker ethos to heart and didn't bother much with songwriting. It possessed none of the key virtues of their first two full-lengths. Slanted and Enchanted, like the singles that preceded it, was unfocused but filled with mystery, a cloudy shape outlining a great band in the process of becoming. And CR, CR was clear and direct, bursting with melody, the sound of vast potential and supreme confidence fully realized. But Wowee Zowee was scattered, jokey, maybe even trivial; the band had tipped its hand and some were seeing a bluff.
But further listens and passing time improved the sound of Wowee Zowee. The original A, stretching from "We Dance" to "Serpentine Pad", may be the best album side they ever managed. And the strangely effective construction of Malkmus' songs bring to mind a question that wasn't asked the first time around: What if he wasn't screwing around, but instead was bored with where he'd been and looking for a new songwriting language? He found one, at any rate, and it all centered on his guitar. Malkmus never played better than he did here, though he didn't solo much. Instead, he let the guitar serve as the duet partner that Spiral Stairs never was, using breathtakingly melodic lines to serve as a chorus of sorts on "Black Out", "Grounded", "Pueblo", and "Flux=Rad"; all have a guitar part at their center in a place where another songwriter might have put a vocal hook.
The best songs on Wowee Zowee are slower and more meandering than what came before, and only give a passing glance to things like chorus, bridge, or meaning. As far as the latter, Malkmus was obviously picking words mostly by how they sounded, which by and large worked out great. An occasional line pops out and you're not sure if it's great or terrible-- "Pick out some Brazilian nuts for your engagement/ Check the expiration date, man, it's later than you think" from "We Dance" springs to mind, sung in a faux-Brit accent reminiscent of the Frogs-- but you wind up remembering those phrases, and the melodies in which they're wedged.
There are a few throwaways-- don't have much use for "Extradition", "Fight this Generation", and "Western Homes"-- but such goofs were part and parcel with Pavement, at least up to this point. Their final two records would contain only fleshed-out songs and are accordingly less favored by fans. Wowee Zowee was also the first and only time Spiral Stairs had a song ("Kennel District") that, though much more conventional, was every bit as good as anything Malkmus managed.
As with the reissues of their first two records, this edition of Wowee Zowee comes with non-album B-sides rounding out the first disc, and a second CD of outtakes, radio shots, live songs, and compilation tracks. With the main album including an additional half-dozen songs compared to its predecessors, the quality of the B-sides is suspect compared to previous Pavement reissues-- though "Kriss Kraft" and "Mussle Rock (Is a Horse in Transition)" (the second best song Spiral Stairs ever wrote) are easily good enough to fit on the album proper, and the entire Pacific Trim EP borders on great.
Disc 2 is a tougher slog. Some of the compilation tracks are good-- "Sensitive Euro Man" from the I Shot Andy Warhol soundtrack has an easy tunefulness, and "No More Kings" from the Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks compilation reveals Pavement as the primo interpreters of Generation X arcana, making the educational cartoon song sound like something the band wrote, thick with a playful sense of nostalgia. But I can't imagine why anyone would prefer alternative versions of songs like "Kris Kraft", "I Love Perth" (both live in BBC studios), "Heaven Is a Truck", or "Best Friend's Arm" (live in Australia). But these misses are keeping, I suppose, with the spirit of Matador's ambitious reissue project, so we have to take the bad with the good. And when you're talking Pavement in 1995 and 1996, there's no question, you're talking very, very good. | 2006-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | November 6, 2006 | 9.3 | 5c1c8725-07df-48fe-a4a3-9b14a30b3909 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Black Lips are no strangers to A-list producers, having worked with Mark Ronson on Arabia Mountain. Here they team with Patrick Carney of Black Keys for over half the tracks, with decidedly mixed results. | Black Lips are no strangers to A-list producers, having worked with Mark Ronson on Arabia Mountain. Here they team with Patrick Carney of Black Keys for over half the tracks, with decidedly mixed results. | Black Lips: Underneath the Rainbow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19099-the-black-lips-underneath-the-rainbow/ | Underneath the Rainbow | Black Lips defined themselves early on with riveting music that breathed new life into garage rock. So let’s just get this out of the way: 2005’s Let It Bloom is still their best album. That’s not meant as a slight to their later work, but rather an acknowledgement of just how thrilling the early, ragged material could be: the way they screamed just after the intro of “Not a Problem”; their hypnotizing, fluid cover of Jacques Dutronc’s “Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah”; the swooning, filth-caked ballad “Dirty Hands”. Everything on that LP was well-written and performed in a way that was exciting and distinctive. Before they had crowds freaking out to “Bad Kids” and “O Katrina!”, these songs anchored their shows (as captured on their great live album Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo).
Even as they cleaned up their sound, Black Lips’ best records since have kept the same grit, glam, and grime they had at the beginning. Mark Ronson’s production on Arabia Mountain‘s “Family Tree”, for example, had a vintage, musty record store atmosphere to it, with saxophones and arrangements that made them sound like they were auditioning to be Rufus Thomas’ backing band. With Ronson, they proved that their unrefined songs could still hit with an A-list producer. So the fact that they recorded in Nashville with the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney on seven of Underneath the Rainbow’s 12 tracks isn’t something to dismiss out of hand.
But another producer is responsible for the album’s best songs. Four tracks were recorded in New York with Tom Brenneck, who worked with the band on Arabia Mountain and played guitar for Sharon Jones, Amy Winehouse, Cee-Lo Green, and others. “Smiling”, a song about spending the night in jail, is the first in a run of Brenneck-recorded highlights. It was originally intended to be about Gucci Mane, but, thankfully, Jared Swilley had the sense to to base it on his own experience behind bars. He sings about pissing in a cup, not being able to sleep because of the fluorescent lights, and sharing old Newports, and the details, when added to the song’s sunny and catchy melody, lend a grinning, toothless charm, not unlike what they exuded on “Dirty Hands”. Brenneck also oversees “Make You Mine”, the expertly crafted power pop song co-written with Mastodon’s Brent Hinds, and “Funny”, which features what are probably the album’s dumbest lyrics (“come suck some milk from my titties”) and a careeningly tenuous vocal performance from Cole Alexander. Here, the band find their old fire, juvenile as it may be.
The Carney material, by contrast, is hit and miss, to say the least. The twee romp “I Don’t Wanna Go Home”, co-written by soul singer Curtis Harding, and “Dog Years”, which was penned with Bradford Cox, are highlights. But other Carney-helmed tracks are utterly faceless, which, for a band with Black Lips’ reputation, is unacceptable. The vocals in “Dorner Party”, “Justice After All”, and “Waiting” are stiff and generic, aiming for a sort of new wave affectation that doesn’t work. Individuality has been sanded away. Since the the lyrics are uncharacteristically tepid, blame can't be solely attributed to Carney, but it is worth noting that until the Lips’ vocals come in, the stomp of “Dandelion Dust” could easily be mistaken for a Keys track.
The album’s centerpiece “Boys in the Wood”, a slow, Southern-rock-tinged song recorded with Brenneck, was the record’s first single. Heard in isolation, it didn’t work, but it sounds great in the context of Underneath the Rainbow. Coming after a dull patch, it’s a sudden injection of life, with a thoughtful and well-paced arrangement. Unlike the Steve Mackay-style sax on Arabia Mountain’s “Mad Dog”, the Budos Band’s horns on this one recall Allen Toussaint’s arrangements for the Band’s Rock of Ages—Southern rock songs emboldened by soulful brass. Counter to the album as a whole, it’s proof that Black Lips can step outside their comfort zone, craft an ambitious song, and still sound like themselves. | 2014-03-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vice | March 20, 2014 | 6.3 | 5c1e96a2-d94b-4c60-ab63-dc64fa846545 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
This vinyl release compiles the germinal recordings of D.C. punks Priests, originally out on tape via their own Sister Polygon label. It shows the band’s sense of purpose was intact from the start. | This vinyl release compiles the germinal recordings of D.C. punks Priests, originally out on tape via their own Sister Polygon label. It shows the band’s sense of purpose was intact from the start. | Priests: Early Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23235-early-recordings/ | Early Recordings | A mere week after forming, the Washington D.C. band Priests sought physical proof of their existence. The group was a trio then—drummer Daniele Daniele, vocalist Katie Alice Greer, guitarist G.L. Jaguar—and they headed to a basement in Maryland to record their first four songs, which would become 2011’s Tape 1. “I was very eager to have evidence of the band exist for myself, because I didn’t know how long it would last, and I wanted to make music more than anything,” Greer explained. Six years later, now a quartet, Priests have come a long way. Following 2014’s overtly political Bodies and Control and Money and Power EP, they released their debut LP earlier this year and it was a huge achievement, exploring new sounds (R&B, glam pop, classical) as well as personal vulnerability. The road has been rocky, but Priests have survived.
Their sound has expanded, but the newly-released Early Recordings, compiling their first two cassettes, shows that Priests’ sense of purpose was intact from the start. Their proximity to their influences cannot be overlooked. Jaguar grew up embedded in the D.C. scene where he saw influential punk bands like Fugazi, Black Eyes, and Quixotic and attended political actions against the Bush presidency. Greer has played in the legendary Ian Svenonius’ Chain and the Gang, who insert a kitschy playfulness onto a punk philosophy. All of these elements come into play as Priests infuse the hardcore pummel and DIY ethics of their city with new life.
Priests’ first ever song was “Diet Coke,” a shrieking satirization of product placement. Greer sounds like an over-caffeinated cheerleader as she chants the names of products, while Jaguar coins his soon-to-be signature chordless rockabilly riff and Daniele threatens to splinter the floor with her drumming. The venomous guitar in “Cobra” sounds ready to bite your head off, as does Greer’s spiteful sneer. “Talking,” on the other hand, resembles Nothing Feels Natural’s contemplative title track thanks to its pensive beginning. But when Daniele’s sticks count off and Greer’s vocals kick in, the song suddenly evokes a wistful Beat Happening track. “Let’s talk about the nature of a classroom/Let’s talk about rewarding complicity,” Greer wails, weaving together conceptual and visceral collaboration; “The world is not so black and white,” she sings later on “The World.”
In 2012, while Greer was on tour with Chain and the Gang, Daniele and Jaguar befriended Taylor Mulitz, who became the band’s bassist. That same year, the members of Priests formed a label called Sister Polygon to put out their own records and those of their extended network (Snail Mail, Downtown Boys, and Sneaks among them). 2013’s Tape Two was the fourth of these releases. After two years of touring and the addition of Mulitz, Priests’ ideas coalesced. Jaguar made an effort to distance his playing from that of the bands he had grown up seeing—on Tape Two, he avoids traditional chords in exchange for minimal, single notes that sounds angular, twangy, and surfy.
Tape Two opens with the fiery “Leave Me Alone,” a callout track inspired by Bush Tetras’ “Too Many Creeps.” “You wanna know what I think? I think you look like a creep!” Greer barks, the scratch in her voice revealing just the slightest trace of fatigue. The bouncy Daniele-led “Say No” exudes sensuality, punctuated by shouts and groans. In the penultimate track “Twelve,” chants of “talking protesting demonstrating” turns a subdued meditation into a one liner: “But then someone said ‘We can’t have a revolution that responds to any of these things.’” The spoken-word piece “USA (Incantations)” exposes an inherent inequality in the U.S. that goes all the way back to the signing of the Constitution. “Unless you are a rich, land-owning, cisgender, heterosexual white man-man-man through and through, things were always bad for you here,” Greer chirps.
Greer speaks often on the use of pop culture as a weapon, as a means of subversion, and as a pervasive form of communication. The brilliant “Lana” uses the Born to Die singer as a means of examining the perception of female celebrity, beauty, and performativity. “Women who are beautiful by societal standards in a place of power often elicit that kind of backlash,” Greer said, referring to the constant criticism of Del Rey’s relationship with the male gaze. The Daniele-penned and sung “Watch You (Alternate Mix)” further continues to explore gender and objectification. We tend to consider scopophilia, or the pleasure gained from the gaze, in terms of the subject; “Watch You” explores the spectator or performer’s pleasure in looking at the audience. “I’m a pervert, I’ve got the gaze,” Daniele taunts, all exaggerated braggadocio. The song sounds purposefully creepy thanks to slick strings, a greasy riff, and drums that sound metallic.
Although they waited six years to release a full-length, Early Recordings illustrates that even in their earliest days, Priests were pushing themselves and the audience they earned. It was only with Nothing Feels Natural that Priests found emotional harmony in their discord, but on tapes 1 and Two, they were beginning to examine and searingly critique the social and political systems around them. “Time waits for no one,” playwright and intellectual Lillian Hellman is quoted as saying in a Tape Two song named for her. Early Recordings proves that Priests took the sentiment to heart. | 2017-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tough Love | May 4, 2017 | 7.8 | 5c24d394-cda8-4495-a75e-7d20ffbb48e5 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Built to Spill arrest their 2000s slide with the unexpected There Is No Enemy, their best album in years. | Built to Spill arrest their 2000s slide with the unexpected There Is No Enemy, their best album in years. | Built to Spill: There Is No Enemy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13541-there-is-no-enemy/ | There Is No Enemy | In the 1990s, they produced some of the most ambitious and resonant indie rock ever made, but in the 2000s, Built to Spill seemed content with merely existing. Following the high-water marks of Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like a Secret, they went into a sort of low-grade creative hibernation, issuing records every three or four years containing a few flashes of genuine inspiration ("Strange", "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss", "Goin' Against Your Mind") surrounded by increasingly aimless jamming. Doug Martsch, the lead singer, guitarist, and creative force behind the band, was beginning to sound like a guy with nothing particularly important left to tell us-- we could stick around, if we wanted, to hear him play his guitar, but the lack of purpose was disconcerting. "Something is wrong/ Something invisible is gone," Martsch crooned on Ancient Melodies of the Future's "The Host", and with each successive release, it was hard not to revisit their earlier work in attempts to puzzle out anew what that "something" was.
On the unexpectedly terrific There Is No Enemy, it becomes immediately clear what had been missing, and sure enough, it was invisible: While Enemy technically sounds just like every Built to Spill record since Keep It Like a Secret-- the pinwheeling guitar fantasias, the ambling tempos, and the wayward vocal lines are all here-- it is buoyed by a fresh sense of emotional stakes, an urgency that puts wind back in the band's sails. For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch might actually have something he wants to say.
"Saying something," of course, is always a loaded concept with regard to Doug Martsch: He has spent years telling every interviewer who asks that his lyrics contain no personal meaning, that they are chosen more for their meter and suggestiveness than anything else. Ironically, he often seems to be pondering the impossibility of clear communication: "This strange sound you said I said/ You're not listening or I'm not saying it right," he fretted on "Strange". "If there's a word for you, it doesn't mean anything," he insisted on Perfect From Now On's "Velvet Waltz".
All of this misdirection only makes the disarmingly candid, even open-hearted tone of There Is No Enemy more startling. Whether or not the words carry personal weight, Martsch is singing convincingly from the perspective of someone thoroughly humbled by loss. "Like anyone assuming they know what makes us tick, I was just as wrong as I could be," he shrugs on "Tomorrow". His shit-eating grin is almost visible when he sings "Finally decided, and by decide I mean accept/ I won't need all those other chances I won't get" on "Life's a Dream". The loss, of course, remains unspecified-- the only clue we get is "Pat", which eulogizes a lost friend-- but its impact can be felt everywhere on Enemy. "Good Ol' Boredom" celebrates the arrival of its titular emotional state as a sign that life is returning to normal, a place where "not so bad/ Seems so great." On the wounded, fragile ballad "Things Fall Apart", meanwhile, Martsch sings "Stay out of my nightmares, stay out of my dreams/ You're not even welcome in my memories" in a subdued mutter before delivering a simple, devastating clincher: "It doesn't matter if you're good or smart-- goddammit, things fall apart." The inspiration for this sentiment could have come from any number of places-- in the press run-up to this album, Martsch mentioned being influenced by soul music, for example-- but it rings with powerful truth regardless, and produces very real goosebumps.
In this context, even their well-worn and comfortable indie jamming feels revitalized. The core lineup of Martsch, Brett Nelson, and Scott Plouf remains unchanged, and they produce the same sound: a majestic, heavy-footed thud, held aloft by Martsch's transcendent guitar work and weightless tenor. But within this framework, they are pushing harder than ever before: witness the cooing "ooh-la-la" backup harmonies in "Life's a Dream", or the outbreak of horn charts at the song's bridge. Three-quarters of the way into "Things Fall Apart", a mariachi trumpet wanders in, seemingly from a Calexico album. "Pat", meanwhile, is a blistering, two-and-a-half-minute burst of anger that hearkens back to Martsch's days in Treepeople. But even the straightforward Built to Spill songs are some of the best ones we've heard in a long time: "Nowhere Lullabye" and "Life's a Dream" are two of the most gorgeously dreamy ballads Martsch has written since "Else" or "Kicked It in the Sun", and on "Good Ol' Boredom", when Martsch finally fires up his shimmering, multihued guitar, the following extended solo workout feels both thrilling and earned. The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade-- an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable. | 2009-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 5, 2009 | 7.9 | 5c293bae-ec7c-49c8-8793-293ba0847727 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Using a soft instrumental palette of Mellotron and keyboards, Canadian minimalist composer Sarah Davachi welcomes listeners into her fortress of solitude. | Using a soft instrumental palette of Mellotron and keyboards, Canadian minimalist composer Sarah Davachi welcomes listeners into her fortress of solitude. | Sarah Davachi: Antiphonals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-antiphonals/ | Antiphonals | Sarah Davachi builds temples out of tone. Throughout the past decade, the prolific Canadian minimalist composer has used repetition, silence, and duration to create secular drone music imbued with feelings of religious reverence. Antiphonals’ soft instrumental palette of Mellotron, synthesizer, organs, piano, and harpsichord offers a restrained counterpart to Davachi’s previous release, the towering 80-minute Cantus, Descant, recorded on ancient church organs during her international travels. Yet no matter what tools are at her disposal, every project treats music as a space to become comfortably suspended inside. “I just like to be cocooned by sound,” Davachi has said.
After studying piano into her late teenage years, Davachi developed an approach to composition that continues to shape the mournful medieval drones of Antiphonals. Her earliest works created new pieces out of abstracted elements of Frédéric Chopin’s music, isolating what she called “the most lachrymose harmonies or chord progressions.” During her studies at Oakland’s Mills College several years later, Davachi discovered the music of minimalist godfather La Monte Young, whose 90-minute piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer opened her to the possibilities of sound that demands total immersion. Traces of Young’s influence can still be heard in Antiphonals’ most patient passages, such as “Magdalena” or “Border of Mind.” Yet compared to the blaring intensity of The Second Dream’s eight muted trumpets, Davachi’s Mellotron French horn and oboe are positively soothing.
Throughout Antiphonals, Davachi smooths out recognizable elements until they blur into the sonic landscape. Compared to the orchestral ensemble recordings of earlier albums like 2018’s Gave in Rest, these eight songs sound subdued and solitary. However, there are moments when individual instruments receive a moment in the spotlight. “Chorus Scene” uses harpsichord tuned to meantone temperament to suggest time traveling to a 16th century concert hall. The sparse piano of “Abeyant” could initially be mistaken for what Erik Satie described as “furniture music,” but it eventually evaporates from a solid form into a shimmering vapor. “Gradual of Image” begins with beautiful nylon-string guitar sounds from the Mellotron, then introduces a haunting melody reminiscent of “Chant for Your Dragon King” by Syrinx, a fellow Canadian group who conjured musical fantasias with a regal grace.
While every one of Davachi’s albums is constructed from different instrumental building blocks, she considers Antiphonals to be a spiritual sequel to 2018’s Let Night Come on Bells End the Day. Both releases were recorded primarily on Mellotron and electric organ, and both display a meditative approach that contrasts with some of her more majestic compositions. There is nothing like Cantus, Descant’s “Play the Ghost,” a song inspired by Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan”; fans will have to keep waiting to hear the full album in that style she has teased in interviews. For now, Davachi welcomes listeners into her quiet fortress of solitude, where they can cast aside the stresses of a chaotic world and worship at the altar of pure vibration.
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. | 2021-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Late Music | September 15, 2021 | 7.3 | 5c3186ce-c8e1-4dc5-912e-d03d09aea2b6 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
On his latest album, the Canadian psych-pop auteur expresses something deeply solitary in his music, a textured and overgrown world of the mind. | On his latest album, the Canadian psych-pop auteur expresses something deeply solitary in his music, a textured and overgrown world of the mind. | Yves Jarvis: Sundry Rock Song Stock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-jarvis-sundry-rock-song-stock/ | Sundry Rock Song Stock | Across Sundry Rock Song Stock, Yves Jarvis’ voice rarely if ever appears alone. The 23-year-old psych-pop auteur almost always layers his vocal takes, appearing in double, triple, sextuple, nonuple, it’s hard to say. These are not immaculate choir-of-one harmonies in the mold of Brian Wilson, but slurry, unpredictable masses, drifting in and out of verbal intelligibility and strict meter, clinging like kudzu to the trunks and branches of the songs they populate. Despite their multifarious abundance and the breezy amiability of the musical settings, these voices do not give Sundry Rock Song Stock the feeling of a communal affair. Instead, they suggest that Jarvis—who performed every instrument on the album, mixed it, and painted the fractured self-portrait on the cover—is expressing something deeply solitary, an overgrown world of the mind that we are invited to visit for the length of 10 brief songs before moving on.
Sundry Rock Song Stock is presented as Jarvis’ third album, but the truth is a bit more complicated. Born Jean-Sebastian Audet and raised between Montreal and Calgary, he began street busking in his pre-teens, and releasing self-recorded albums under the name Un Blonde a few years later. On 2014’s Tenet, the first Un Blonde album, Audet sometimes channeled the icy post-punk guitar work of Calgary hometown heroes Women; by 2016’s Good Will Come to You, the last one, he’d arrived at a version of the sensibility he continues to explore today. (Judging by the positioning of Sundry Rock Song Stock as the third Yves Jarvis album, Audet now seems to view Good Will Come to You as the project’s debut.) The album applied post-punk’s deconstructive impulse to the warmhearted sounds of 1970s R&B, folk-rock, and gospel; one 30-second song consists of a single lyric—“I’ve been on my grind so long, it’s hard to know just who I am anymore”—delivered via the rich and mournful sound of a Black church choir, while a lo-fi recording of children playing runs in the background. Naturally, Jarvis sang all the parts himself.
Sundry Rock Song Stock packs a remarkable variety of sounds into its 33 minutes, opening with the percolating cymbals and chime-like Rhodes patterns of Miles Davis circa In a Silent Way and closing with a whispery doo-wop devotional, always dissolving into a pool of bioluminescent synth ambiance or erupting into a racket of clattering samples just as you expect it to gear up for the next chorus. Still, the album retains a sense of holism, refining the collagelike quality of Good Will Come to You and its somber follow-up, last year’s The Same but by Different Means, by foregrounding Jarvis’s softly strummed acoustic guitar and committing thoroughly to his singular vocal approach. At times, Sundry Rock Song Stock recalls the hallucinatory hymns of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name or Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs, with the freewheeling ensemble nature of those albums replaced by Jarvis’ painterly top-down vision.
In Jarvis’ vocal arrangements, one version of a particular word or note might slightly outlast another that happens at essentially the same time, creating an uncanny sense of permeability at the borders of the whole. Occasionally, a line emerges with piercing clarity for a few words before plunging back into the tangled vines, as when Jarvis describes himself as “A victim of/the same old stuff/my father was” on “Victim.” His delivery is striking in its languor and offhandedness, a casual reminder of the cold reality that lies just beyond the daydream. “Notch in Your Belt” and “For Props” both seem to address people who align themselves with struggles against oppression for superficial reasons. “Your earned fortune makes you depraved/You can’t empathize or reciprocate/I’m sure your heart’s in the right place/But that’s the way it comes across, like you’re pandering for props,” he sings on the latter, the album’s biggest and brightest song.
Plenty of albums are described as dreamy for the way they drape otherwise conventional songs in pillowy textures and arrangements; Jarvis is the rare songwriter who also follows the logic of dreams within the structures of his compositions. “Epitome,” Sundry Rock Song Stock’s opening track, collapses on itself soon after Jarvis delivers one of the album’s most rousing melodies, never to be repeated. “In Every Mountain,” the following track, builds patiently toward a majestic windswept vista, then falls almost immediately back to the bottom of the hill, and begins the process again, and again, and then it’s over. “Emerald” subjects its own sweetly ascending melody to disorienting reharmonizations as it fades out, like viewing the tune through a kaleidoscope. The effect of these misdirections is often wondrous, but they can also give the sense of the album retreating from its own pleasures.
Jarvis has said that he sees himself as a producer primarily, and cited the influence of prog rock bands like Yes and King Crimson on Sundry Rock Song Stock, for the way their music is “not really songwriting,” but more like “a room that you can walk into and then out of.” If Sundry Rock Song Stock falls just short of being a masterwork, it’s because Jarvis occasionally seems to undermine his own songwriting ability—evident in the quiet compositional heft of “For Props,” “Victim,” and “Semula”—avoiding traditional development in favor of tugging you from one hallucinatory tableau to the next. But such a critique feels practically beside the point for an album so profusely inventive, so alive to the possibilities of sound itself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- / Flemish Eye | September 29, 2020 | 7.6 | 5c37ff0b-c335-4d87-828f-919b7c926002 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
After four years, Broken Social scenester Emily Haines' primary band finally releases a set of new material. | After four years, Broken Social scenester Emily Haines' primary band finally releases a set of new material. | Metric: Fantasies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12921-fantasies/ | Fantasies | It's been close to four years since Emily Haines' Metric released a new album-- their 2007 effort was actually just the long-delayed release of their shelved 2001 debut. In the meantime, Broken Social Scenester Haines, the baby-voiced heart and soul of the band, recorded and released an intimate solo album and its companion EP. Those solemn, torch song-like collections stripped her of Metric's new wave gloss, exposing raw nerves and more seasoned vocals. Guitarist James Shaw toured with BSS, allowing him to stretch his riffs beyond Metric's rudimentary pop chug. (He also expanded his sonic palette by producing the Lovely Feathers' debut.) And Metric's rhythm section became Bang Lime, a dance-y post-punk duo that picked up where Metric left off on Live It Out, leaving behind keyboards to mine rock riffage from candy-coated confections. So when the foursome finally reunited last year, they had grown beyond the charming borders of their pop sound, and their fourth album is all the better for it.
Though Shaw's more nuanced guitars have supplanted synthesizers as the focal instrument, the change in aesthetic still seems credited to Haines. The newfound vulnerability and gravitas she explored on her solo work has found its way onto Fantasies, though instead of dark, death-obsessed sentiments, there is a dreamy quality here that eschews the vague, easy rhymes and lyrical polemics of past Metric records in favor of romance and sex.
Metric are often compared to fellow BSS satellite Stars, but while that band's Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell get soggy on their slower moments, Haines embraces more personal sentiments on ballads "Blindness" and "Collect Call", whose stripped-down, twinkly arrangements keep Metric's glam side intact yet cut the inessential sugar and bombast. Further embracing their moody, minimal instincts on "Twilight Galaxy" created one of Fantasies' standouts.
In the end however, Fantasies' other crowd-pleasers are, unsurprisingly, songs with big hooks, bursting choruses, and slick synths-- "Help I'm Alive" and "Sick Muse". The story here though is the album's simmering, intimate moments-- and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it could get. | 2009-04-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | MMI | April 13, 2009 | 6.4 | 5c3ff1cf-535b-45f5-bdea-df59d663c33f | Pitchfork | null |
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These two brief EPs from ambient-leaning producer Matthew Cooper are a mix of old and new tracks, remixes, and video. | These two brief EPs from ambient-leaning producer Matthew Cooper are a mix of old and new tracks, remixes, and video. | Eluvium: Leaves Eclipse the Light / The Motion Makes Me Last | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15158-leaves-eclipse-the-light-the-motion-makes-me-last/ | Leaves Eclipse the Light / The Motion Makes Me Last | A lot of Eluvium's music is really good, especially the album Copia, where he struck a majestic balance between his ambient and quasi-classical styles-- a mixture he'd been perfecting over nearly a decade's worth of releases. And it's not hard to sympathize with the modern musician's need to monetize everything to get by. But with such a slight amount of material to consider on these two new EPs, which are really closer to what used to be called maxi singles, it's natural to pause and consider what our eight dollars plus shipping (each) is actually paying for.
On Leaves Eclipse the Light, it's one standout track from last year's uneven Similes, one lackluster instrumental on ambient autopilot, one capably bloggable Four Tet remix of "The Motion Makes Me Last" that freshens up the original's drizzly climate, and a watch-once video for the same track where buildings and overpasses scroll by slowly against a big sky. Slim pickings indeed. It is a frankly unimaginative package-- it seems like we're mainly subsidizing the pretty cardstock-with-cutouts slipcover, or just financially supporting Eluvium's ongoing career. That's a perfectly valid, even admirable, reason to buy something! But if you come at this strictly as a consumer, there's not much to recommend it.
The Motion Makes Me Last EP is also slight, but features more engaging music and is worth a listen for anyone. The title track was another Similes highlight where Eluvium's bleary singing was perked up by a memorable melody, and Nick Zammuto's very Books-y remix/cover is the most striking thing on either disc. The vocal part gets even hookier in his clear, precise voice, which he places at the very center of the song, breaking down the instrumentation into little whirring mechanisms around it. The two new tracks in between don't innovate, but they deliver the goods. "Crash Deconstructed" serves up a big juicy piano theme, while "Remnant Signals" does something similar in watercolor strokes. Together, they nicely sum up the two modes covered on Copia.
Still, "remnant" seems like it might be a key word here. It's not like Eluvium is out of tricks: Similes, for better and worse, introduced a much poppier feel to his music, and his new Static Nocturne album amplifies nature sounds into something noisier and more violent than we're accustomed to from him, albeit still rooted in sweeping sentimentality. The leftovers and holdbacks on these tarted-up singles aren't charmless, but it's unclear for whom they're intended besides the most ardent supporters and strict completists. | 2011-03-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-03-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | March 2, 2011 | 5.5 | 5c435adc-bd31-43dc-8ba7-f774133ae256 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On her second studio album, Dawn Richard proves her mettle as a fiercely independent force in a world dominated by name-dropping and endless collaborations. Goldenheart was largely produced by just one guy, Druski, leaving Richard's epic portrayal of love as war to flourish. | On her second studio album, Dawn Richard proves her mettle as a fiercely independent force in a world dominated by name-dropping and endless collaborations. Goldenheart was largely produced by just one guy, Druski, leaving Richard's epic portrayal of love as war to flourish. | Dawn Richard: Goldenheart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17619-goldenheart/ | Goldenheart | "Get ready for war," Dawn Richard repeatedly intones on the intro to Goldenheart. She takes love very seriously: For Richard, love has been religion, scripture, an all-changing force to be lamented and celebrated at the same time. On her long-awaited second album, it's full-blown warfare. Goldenheart is the culmination of a fruitful few years for the former Danity Kane and Dirty Money singer: She helped to make Diddy's Last Train to Paris fascinating, released one of last year's most stunning R&B records with the Armor On EP, and worked with Israeli house producer Guy Gerber. Since leaving Diddy's watchful eye in 2010, Richard has proven a fiercely independent force in a world dominated by name-dropping and endless collaboration. Goldenheart is the jewel in her crown.
Richard is the kind of artist who believes in statements, so naturally, she uses the album format as a vehicle for a 16-song, hour-plus opus about the trials of relationships. Real stuff: doubt, power struggles, insurmountable obstacles, and hopeless, life-saving devotion. Richard's subjects are simultaneously mundane and grandiose, transcending usual pop fluff and turning her deeply personal subjects into epic tales of battle and salvation. If that sounds like a bit much, well, it is. But Richard has the personality to prop it all up. Her voice is a ghostly wail halfway between a howl and modern R&B melancholy, effortlessly melismatic (check the Bollywood flourishes on "Return of a Queen"), and capable of making her complex melodies glisten like an iridescent oil slick. On "Gleaux", her processed voice shines as luminous as the sparkling stars the lyrics describe.
Her shimmering vocals are paired with appropriately futuristic-sounding production from close working partner Andrew "Druski" Scott: tight and impressive, yet rarely showy. She's always foregrounded, occasionally leaning on the drums for emphasis as on "Tug of War", (produced by the Fisticuffs), but more often using them as a canvas for her holographic paintings. And, as with most R&B of the past half-decade, Goldenheart heavily incorporates dance music, though Richard's restrained aesthetic holds these tracks back from becoming overblown bangers; "In Your Eyes" folds in the cyan hues of trance without indulging the genre's excesses, resulting in an unusually smooth house track. Even Richard's inevitable attempt at dubstep strikes gold with "Pretty Wicked Things", a pounding industrial foray that literalizes the corruption and deception described in Dawn's lyrics. Though still landing on the more aggro side of the genre, her flirtation with dubstep is more natural than the pop industry's usual taste for the stuff.
Of course, all that "restraint" has an effect-- Goldenheart feels about twice as long as it really is. A collection of 16 mostly midtempo tracks is going to turn tepid any way you look at it. Once you learn your way around the record's labyrinthine path, it's an addictive world, but one that you're more likely to pick and choose highlights from than sit all the way through. If you can, however, it's a grand journey through personal trials and tribulations. Relationships and emotions are presented with striking sagacity-- the incredible "Tug of War" wraps up the conflicted quest for dominance at the expense of another's power in a strident four minutes. Richard's flair for theatricality is unparalleled, and almost exhausting by the end of the album, with at least three possible elegiac endings: the peaceful "Ode To You" and "Break of Dawn" both hint towards resolution.
In the intro to "Warfaire," a hushed Richard mutters "I fight a battle every day, against discouragement and fear... I must forever be on guard." It's a little hammy, sure, but her earnest personality both endears and empowers her work. And Goldenheart is definitively, completely her work; no guest stars and no flashy producers, mostly her and Druski crafting her vision. It's not perfect, but it's closer than you'd expect from someone who just a few years ago was a member of a C-list girl group. | 2013-01-23T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-01-23T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | January 23, 2013 | 7.3 | 5c46d1a0-4d87-41d7-bef0-c92c1575e11e | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
The third album from the British fuss-rockers features tastefully trimmed string arrangements, chamber woodwinds, and terminal boredom. | The third album from the British fuss-rockers features tastefully trimmed string arrangements, chamber woodwinds, and terminal boredom. | alt-J: RELAXER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23315-relaxer/ | RELAXER | Like many bands who stumble unexpectedly into massive success, alt-J have endured their fair share of withering backlash. Witness this parody video, in which two men munching rice cakes quickly assemble a note-perfect parody of an alt-j song called "Put It In My Butt"—it went viral. alt-J themselves mostly responded to this mockery with humility, good humor, and grace (they made that rice cake video into their Twitter avatar). The trio seems like a reasonably well-adjusted group of guys, truly, and unworthy of focused animus: You may as well rage at the way an immaculately designed suitcase clicks shut.
Bad music, after all, earns its distinction. You have to seize someone by the lapels, dominate their senses, to give them the chance to despise you. It requires, if not bravery, then at least audacity, and alt-J have never been audacious. The biggest offense one could take is the way Joe Newman sings through his nose, like a mean-spirited hobbit mocking the singing voice of another hobbit. But it is instantly easy to hear how 2012’s An Awesome Wave managed its bloodless coup, one distracted pair of earbuds at a time—most of the album is a comforting jumble of clicks, coos, and hums. The music had no center, but its edges were soothing, and if you had a few hours to kill at a laundromat, it synced pleasingly with your silently tumbling socks.
Their beige and mostly tuneless second album maintained this modest course through the choppy seas of festival bookings and departing band members, but on RELAXER, alt-J have, just maybe, grown a little *used *to success. They feel, perhaps, ready to stretch, to dip their toes into new styles and ready to take a few, you know, risks.
And this must be how we find ourselves confronting “Hit Me Like That Snare,” the fourth song on RELAXER and the first proudly, magnetically awful thing they’ve ever done. Committed alt-J fans are probably already used to Joe Newman’s unique touch with sexual imagery—for such an unassuming group, they sing often, and zealously, about fucking, or at least what fucking might be like, as interpreted by a befuddled AI. But because all words turned to consonant-free mush in his mouth, millions of festival-goers were likely and mercifully unaware they were dancing to a chorus of, “In your snatch fits pleasure/Broom-shaped pleasure” (”Fitzpleasure”). He may as well have been warbling roast chicken recipes.
On “Hit Me Like That Snare,” Newman appears to be trying to earnestly to swagger. Each word is ruthlessly audible as he sets the most ludicrous sex scene in rock history:
I’m at the door at a quarter to four
Poppers popping baby might take some more
I’m fucking loose, you’re gorgeous, I don’t care
Come closer, baby, slap me like that snare
‘Moon Shaped Pool’ plays in the velvet cell
Green neon sign reading ‘Welcome to hell’
Leather slings fall like oxygen masks
We’re going down, fuck my life in half.
The idea of an album full of this sort of blazing wreckage is perversely exciting, in the same way that a screaming, relationship-ending fight technically enlivens a bad party. But alas, RELAXER doesn’t have the lunatic conviction to embrace oblivion. The rest settles safely back into the mild, featureless middle distance, a realm of tastefully trimmed string arrangements, chamber woodwinds, and terminal boredom. They’ve cut back the anxious fidgets, clicks, and buzzes that textured their music and relinquish any claim to idiosyncrasy they might have had.
“Last Year” is a sedate meditation on death and grief featuring a placid vocal turn from English singer-songwriter Marika Hackman and an immaculately recorded oboe solo, which the song pauses for respectfully like a row of baby ducks crossing its path. “House of the Rising Sun” dials back the heat of the folk standard to the temperature of rapidly cooling tea. “3WW” begins the album with a soft-lit minute of finger-picked guitar before introducing a sound in the background that sounds suspiciously like someone snoring.
The truth is that alt-J have never had an identity, really, apart from Newman’s mangled lyrics and the fidgety, distracted arrangements of their songs. RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say. | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Canvasback | June 6, 2017 | 4.5 | 5c474c8f-77d0-4f18-8a13-93ea7c283ee6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
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