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The punk electronic music Powell makes is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure. | The punk electronic music Powell makes is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure. | Powell: Sport | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22412-sport/ | Sport | The conventional wisdom says that punk and electronic music aren’t supposed to mix, but the two genres have a long, proud history together. Suicide, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black: All of them put electronics at the center of their practice and made a fearsome racket while doing it. And why not? Electronic instruments are the ultimate DIY tools. As Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, of the electronic post-punk act the Normal, put it, “The thing that pissed me off about punk was you had to learn three chords to be in a punk band. If you had a synthesizer, all you had to do was press one key.”
Oscar Powell makes electronic music that is both techno and punk all at once—and yet, a little like Schrödinger’s cat, it is also neither. It flickers unstably between the two genres, running acid squelch against lumpy drum samples, and drilling bursts of harsh, digital noise into basslines that still wear the stink of a Lower East Side basement, circa 1983. There’s a palpable sense of two worlds colliding. The timbre and heft of many of his sounds testifies to their provenance: The room tone identifies them as products of chilly practice spaces or cheap recording studios, and the guitars have the tinny sort of clang that you only get with old, scratched-up 7 inches. But it all takes place in the airless, deathless netherworld of the computer, with short snippets of fluid, human timekeeping chopped up into infinitely repeating loops, and a riot of voices—talk-show clips, shouts, muffled dialogue, and, at one point, what I’m pretty sure is Mark E. Smith's nasal sneer—scattering like the fragments of a malfunctioning hard disk.
Powell has never made any secret of his influences. Instead of punk’s “kill yr idols” maxim, he taps directly into their energy via song titles like “Wharton Tiers on Drums,” a reference to the no-wave musician and record producer, and “No U Turn,” presumably after the iconic drum ‘n’ bass label. He sampled Suicide’s Alan Vega on “Should’ve Been a Drummer,” and he sampled Big Black on “Insomniac.” He’s clearly immune to the anxiety of influence—perhaps to any kind of anxiety at all. When Big Black’s Steve Albini sent Powell a sternly worded email in response to a request for permission to sample the recording—“I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth,” wrote the cantankerous Chicago producer, “so I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from”—Powell blew it up and pasted it to a billboard above a busy London thoroughfare. The irony, of course, was that had Albini actually listened to Powell’s scabrous, mangled beats, he probably would have liked them.
The artists Powell tends to reference aren’t just any punks; they’re artists who never really fit in anywhere. That’s an instructive way of looking at his own work, caught as it is between two opposing systems, not quite at home in either one. Like his heroes, he values qualities like risk and danger, qualities he has said he finds missing from contemporary electronic music. He shares with his influences a certain provocative, even anarchic spirit, one that colors and informs virtually every aspect of the project, in ways that can seem both incredibly dumb and remarkably thoughtful. A video for “Jonny [ft. Jonny]” features crowdsourced footage of fans bashing open watermelons with their foreheads; yet in lieu of a typical press campaign for the album, he opted to post his email address on a billboard, and then answered each of his correspondents’ queries personally, often giving them links to unreleased songs. That contradiction—the knuckle-dragging, tongue-in-cheek trickster vs. the generous, WYSIWYG plain dealer—is a big part of his appeal.
Powell used to work in advertising, and there is no doubt that he is an exceptionally savvy salesman of his own work. But Sport, his debut album, goes deeper than mere provocation. What we find here is a fully formed aesthetic, far richer, far livelier, and far more fun than the tentative mood-pieces he offered on his earliest singles. A few songs are noticeably more sophisticated than his earlier work: “Frankie [ft. Frankie]” and “Jonny [ft. Jonny]” massage gravelly synthesizers, heavy metal solos, and rollicking rockabilly grooves together with husky vocals from HTRK’s Jonnine Standish in a way that recalls electroclash, of all things—but fucked up and broken down, a zombie farce of turn-of-the-millennium dance-punk fusions.
Throughout, Sport is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure. The music is riddled with glitches, but these aren’t the sleek, hyper-aestheticized clicks and cuts of highbrow minimal techno; they’re the sounds you get when you jiggle the patch cable in its socket, or when the pads on your sampler are gummed up with beer. The steady spray of found vocal samples—a woman griping, “I hate a few things, yeah”; a young man slurring, “Fuckin’ kick-ass!”—gives the impression of a television showroom broadcasting a dozen skate videos at once. The haphazard way it’s all stuck together, with palm-muted guitar licks pasted over stumbling kick drums and dissonant keyboard mashing, often resembles little more than shreds videos, those parody clips where rock performances are overdubbed with hamfisted skronk and sly Foley effects.
Shreds videos are about creating an off-kilter alternate universe, a Bizarro World where pop stars are hapless clowns, and Sport does something similar with dance music, stripping of it of its sophisticated patina and returning some of the rough-and-tumble rush that Powell remembers from his teenaged days, taking drugs and dancing to jungle. By pulling the rug out from underneath our assumptions, he gets us moving again. For all its sardonic sense of humor, the album never feels like it’s laughing at the listener. It just refuses to take itself, or anything, seriously—even, or especially, punk. After all, what could be less punk than sports? | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | October 19, 2016 | 8.1 | 5c4bf8c0-c365-4463-8304-57f56489ff73 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
This live album documents the meeting of two avant-garde legends, but it is not exactly a "super duo." The curious chemistry these two share is subtler and possibly more rewarding than that. | This live album documents the meeting of two avant-garde legends, but it is not exactly a "super duo." The curious chemistry these two share is subtler and possibly more rewarding than that. | John Cage / Sun Ra: John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22038-john-cage-meets-sun-ra-the-complete-concert/ | John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert | John Cage was a quotable artist. On the subject of albums, he once remarked that “records ruin the landscape.” Elsewhere, in a treatise collected in his 1961 book Silence, the composer offered some opinions about jazz. The genre “derives from serious music,” he wrote, “and when serious music derives from it, the situation becomes rather silly.” Given those harsh judgments, it makes sense to venture an opening question about Cage’s one-off appearance alongside swing-and-improv icon Sun Ra. If Cage himself thought jazz unsuited for “serious” contexts and recordings lame, why should this document of their 1986 shared bill be anything other than a curiosity?
John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert has an answer for that wariness—and the album gradually emerges as something greater than a footnote. That’s not because the pairing results in an “avant super duo.” As it happens, the two artists tend to trade off soloing, and only play together audibly at one point during this hour-plus set, recorded at Coney Island. Yet despite the arms-length embrace, the overall concert has a surprisingly seamless quality.
The entire show, released here in full for the first time, shows how Cage’s own performances and improvisations were capable of more supple surprise than his most attention-grabbing pronouncements. The composer of 4’33” talked a lot about his ideas—in particular his insight that there is “no such thing as silence”—but the spare, tender nature of his wordless vocal solos here creates a stronger impact than many theoretical explanations. This newly complete representation of the show also draws strength from the flexibility and invention of Ra’s playing.
Ra focuses on one synth here—the then-new Yamaha DX7. Though the instrument’s timbral range is limited, Ra manages to whip up a wealth of approaches during his portions of the show. “Untitled Keyboard Solo 1” opens with some sci-fi movie tones; eventually, Ra accelerates into sprightly figures, before steering into dense chords and drones. His third untitled solo makes psychedelic use of the DX7’s effects, with chords sounding sampled and spun in real time.
Ra’s solos can be sequenced into a compelling EP on their own. But it’s his ability to meet Cage more than halfway that helps hold the entire gig together. He provides the sparest wisps of accompaniment imaginable during his one collaboration with Cage, on the track “Empty Words and Keyboard.” And on tracks like “We Hold This Myth to Be Potential” and “The Damned Air,” Ra provides poetry recitations to go with his playing. His voice is off-mic—the physical editions of the album helpfully give his texts in full—but the way this recording limitation can focus a listener’s attention works perfectly next to Cage’s contemplative silences and delicate mumblings. Likewise, a short duet with singer and frequent Ra collaborator June Tyson is beset by amplification problems, though the noise-damaged result works, in context.
John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert isn’t an ideal entry point into either artist’s catalog. For Ra, you’d first want to explore early albums such as Jazz in Silhouette and Angels and Demons at Play (as well as gonzo triumphs like Other Planes of There). Cage’s key works have been interpreted by elite classical performers like Joseph Kubera and Third Coast Percussion. But this minor addition to both oeuvres has a quietly mind-blowing feel—particularly since another meeting between Cage and a jazz luminary, Joseph Jarman, was never documented. Instead of ruining the landscape, a recording like this one contributes to it. By contradicting one of Cage's rhetorical excesses, the album gently improves our understanding of the valid connection between divergent careers in American experimental music. | 2016-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Modern Harmonic | June 25, 2016 | 7.5 | 5c4d754b-7a22-469a-b737-e04073792de4 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Chicago rapper takes a step further into the mainstream on his third album, an ultimately hopeful exploration of how trauma manifests. | The Chicago rapper takes a step further into the mainstream on his third album, an ultimately hopeful exploration of how trauma manifests. | Polo G: Hall of Fame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/polo-g-hall-of-fame/ | Hall of Fame | Like Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and many others before him, Polo G’s early success was quite literally a ticket out of town. Not long after recording his major-label debut Die a Legend, the northside Chicago rapper packed up his family and moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to avoid fulfilling the prophecy of his album’s title. And while going to LA to work in music is a common migration, it tends to be as much of a survival tactic as it is a career move for Chicago rappers. Polo G remains a fervent booster of his hometown, but the move has clearly changed his perspective. How could it not?
To that end, his latest LP Hall of Fame is as much Hollywood as it is Chiraq. Polo’s style of melodic drill—sparse compositions comprising soft piano melodies and gentle guitars atop booming basslines—is tailored to convey emotion, an intentional diversion from the bleak murder raps of drill’s first wave. His Auto-Tune croon of a flow blurs the lines between hook and verse, with few wasted moments; almost every song is at or under three minutes. And by this point, Polo has helped shift drill so far into the mainstream that twinkling ballads like “Epidemic” have as much in common with Ed Sheeran as they do Lil Durk.
But wherever you go, the memories of lost loved ones follow, and death continues to loom large in Polo’s music. His career has been defined by an exploration of the depths of his trauma to cope with funeral fatigue and the creeping normalization of people around him dying young. Upon the release of Die a Legend, he lamented to Pitchfork, “After a kid in our school dies at 13, no therapists are there. We just deal with it ourselves.” It’s not a tragedy, but an inevitability. Two years later, Polo has put out the most hopeful—and commercial—record of his career. While his first two LPs coped with death (often with pills), Hall of Fame finds him facing forward: Father to a young son, poised for fame and looking to leave behind the drugs that would numb his pain but take his friend.
Polo is far from the first rapper to show a sensitive side, but his perspective feels particularly empathetic and self-aware. He doesn’t just lament the violence that colored his upbringing—he seems to understand better than most how that trauma manifests, coloring his verses with poignant moments that tell entire stories. “Ain’t no limit in these streets/Can ride a bike, you old enough,” he raps on “Black Hearted.” He still wields considerable talent as a lyricist, dropping brazen one-liners as deftly as he transitions from gun-toting villain (“Aim for the head, that chopper spray/We get ’em gone”) to mixtape-making loverboy (“I got a playlist for your heart, girl, pick a song”)—sometimes in the same verse. But he also seems to be running out of ways to describe familiar scenes, like the image of blood soaking into a white t-shirt on both “Boom” and “RAPSTAR.”
To take a step further into the mainstream, Polo taps an array of producers, and while he has a strong ear, his distinct taste in instrumentals lends itself to homogeneity, with tracks like “Go Part 1” teetering on the edge of generic. “Broken Guitars,” featuring his protégé Scorey, is a notable exception, though its crunchy guitar textures and Polo’s soaring emo vocals might sound more at home on a Lil Peep or Juice WRLD record. That track’s producer, the nascent WIZARDMCE, has likely the largest influence on the sound of Hall of Fame outside of Polo himself. The five tracks he produced are some of the record’s strongest, even if they do get buried in the 20-deep tracklist. By track 20, Polo’s vivid revenge narrative “Bloody Canvas” feels out of place. And though it serves as a thematic bookend with opener “Painting Pictures,” its bleak depiction of cyclical violence is an awkward coda to a record that’s often wistful but mostly optimistic.
It would be easy to read Hall of Fame as the inevitable result of a young artist’s career being shaped by major label A&Rs. The bloated tracklist is stuffed full of stars from hip-hop and pop’s mainstream. And indeed, many of the knocks on the album are rooted in the trends and tactics of the major label machine. But a closer look reveals decisions made with as much of Polo’s intention as Columbia’s. Take “RAPSTAR,” the ukulele-driven hit single that recently topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It’s co-produced by Einer Bankz, a YouTuber who courted viral fame via acoustic ukulele performances with what seems like every rapper on the planet, and who has made videos for Polo’s last two album rollouts. When fans rabidly consumed the impromptu acoustic version of “RAPSTAR,” it was Polo who campaigned hard to make the studio version an official single, blowing up Columbia’s rollout for Hall of Fame in the process.
Though Polo has proven he can carry an LP on his own, the guest stars help infuse Hall of Fame with new energies. Wayne’s light and limber verse on “GANG GANG” is a refreshing return to form, and Roddy Ricch’s appearance on “Fame & Riches” helps pick up the pace after the saccharine serenades of “So Real.” But Nicki Minaj’s contribution to “For the Love of New York” should probably have stayed in the can; from the first bar, she sounds too exhausted to even bother rhyming different words.
On the whole, Hall of Fame is missing the sense of urgency of Polo’s debut. Years and miles away from the streets that shaped him, this was perhaps inevitable. If Die a Legend was an insular, tightly woven portrait of a teenager manifesting his future, Hall of Fame is a cluster bomb aimed squarely at the mainstream, chock full of everything he could think of that might help him graduate to the next tier of stardom. Somewhere among those 20 tracks is a good album, but at this stage in his career, chiseling it down to perfection almost seems beside the point. Consider the “RAPSTAR” video in comparison with early clips of Polo, pre-record deal with short hair and lanky limbs, and it quickly becomes apparent how much he’s grown in just two years. He’ll probably always be looking over his shoulder—after his recent run-in with the police, it’s clear he has good reason to. Yet even as he plays the game, serving up consumable bits for his label to package and sell, the heart remains in the music, buried under gold chains, wounded by the past yet hopeful for the future.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | June 18, 2021 | 7 | 5c525ae9-017c-4184-9c2c-ebff186964fc | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Sam Beam brings Iron & Wine full circle on his sixth album, using the warm acoustic instrumentation of his early work and some of the most moving singing of his career. | Sam Beam brings Iron & Wine full circle on his sixth album, using the warm acoustic instrumentation of his early work and some of the most moving singing of his career. | Iron & Wine: Beast Epic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iron-and-wine-beast-epic/ | Beast Epic | One of the many vivid images in the 2004 Iron & Wine song “The Trapeze Swinger” is of dogs “running circles ’round the well.” These same animals have an affinity for soaking in the rain and running after trains, acting on impulses rather than with the measured decision making you’d expect from humans. But the speaker sees himself in the cyclical motion of the dogs. Later, on the 2010 “Walking Far From Home” B-side “Biting Your Tail,” a similar idea crops up more explicitly: “Know that peace is the shape of a circle/’Round and ’round you go/Biting your tail.”
The sixth Iron & Wine album is titled Beast Epic, referring to narrative verses where the characters are animals with human emotions. The record doesn’t take this concept literally, but Sam Beam—who began recording as Iron & Wine about 15 years ago—has himself noted that stories where animals act like people are good vessels for thinking about life in general. Beast Epic also finds Beam returning to Sub Pop Records. It was that label’s co-founder Jonathan Poneman who took a chance on Beam’s intimate home recordings in 2002—in part on the recommendation of future Band of Horses leader Ben Bridwell—allowing Iron & Wine to help define the direction of Sub Pop and indie rock as a whole for the rest of the 2000s. A move like covering the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” helped broaden a genre where breathy acoustic folk and pulsing radio-ready synth pop could be flip sides of the same coin.
Iron & Wine didn’t remain a stripped-down bedroom project for long; by his third album, 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog, he’d developed a rollicking full-band sound. It wasn’t the same Iron & Wine that listeners had fallen in love with, but the growth was symbiotic to the festivals Beam was starting to play. Moving to Warner Brothers for 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean, Iron & Wine hit number two on the Billboard 200—but that record’s glitchy electronic moments, Motown horn sections, and James Taylor-breeziness all worked to divorce Beam from the humble songwriting he’d become known for.
So when Beast Epic opens with a few seconds of Beam counting off under his breath and gently tapping the rhythm on the body of his acoustic guitar, it’s like wrapping a warm blanket around a cold body. It is the sound of Iron & Wine returning home, ending one chapter and beginning another. Beam knows this: In the record’s forward, he writes, “The ferris wheel keeps spinning and we’re constantly approaching, leaving or returning to something totally unexpected or startlingly familiar.” He finds comfort in retracing his own steps. This doesn’t mean sacrificing production value or abandoning the use of outside players, but everything here takes a backseat to Beam’s melodies. When subtleties appear—the vocal harmonies that underscore the emotional swells of “Bitter Truth,” the despondent violins and dusty pianos echoing from what sounds like another room in “Summer Clouds”—they are in service of songs that could stand comfortably without them. Working as his own producer with a live recording style and few overdubs, Beam has never sounded more in control.
Even the album’s most sweeping production, the slow-building single “Call It Dreaming,” remains focused as Beam adds percussion, cello, and keys to his pristine and determined vocals. When the album closes with the fragile “Our Light Miles,” and Beam attempts to lob a delicate falsetto as a big finish, it cements Beast Epic as some of the best singing of his career. This paves the road for the aged wisdom he imparts in his reflective lyrics, as ideas pirouette with the grace Beam has learned. “Bitter Truth” details a relationship dissolving without rose-tinted lenses, with the speaker able to communicate wordlessly while noting “nothing makes silence like experience.” “Summer Clouds” is woozy and whisky-breathed in its romance and introspection; Beam sounds more melancholy when he notes “by the end we leave somewhere too long to ever wander back/by the end we give someone too much to ever close the hand.” When he asks “where all this love fits in the world,” there’s a fear that maybe there’s not much more to give.
Still, Beam provides solace by offering up many of the familiar touchstones of his songwriting. Jesus pops up repeatedly, and “About a Bruise” is an ode to the South, with a choir proclaiming “This is Alabama.” At this point in Beam’s career, meditations on death, on family, and the imprint of living in the Bible belt are like fingerprints, with the difference being the number of years that have informed it all. It’s that cyclical passing of time that informs the music video for “Thomas County Law,” where a man that once sang about “our endless numbered days” plans his own funeral. Beam looks resolute as he sets up chairs, picks lilies, and digs his own grave. He mouths lyrics that arrive at acceptance with both who he is and what he’s done; he deserves all the peace that comes with traveling full circle. | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | August 24, 2017 | 7.5 | 5c5b4bb5-ae48-4aa4-b806-1df02a25fc72 | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | null |
The Strokes' fifth album is more immediately appealing than their last two records as they sound like they’re genuinely trying here, and having fun. At times it feels like a mixtape the Strokes made for themselves: 11 songs, 11 different genre experiments. | The Strokes' fifth album is more immediately appealing than their last two records as they sound like they’re genuinely trying here, and having fun. At times it feels like a mixtape the Strokes made for themselves: 11 songs, 11 different genre experiments. | The Strokes: Comedown Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17788-the-strokes-comedown-machine/ | Comedown Machine | Comedown Machine accomplishes in 38 minutes what nearly a decade and a half of backlash and schadenfreude could not: make the Strokes look like total nerds. This isn’t so much of a revelation as it the culmination of what’s been happening ever since First Impressions of Earth. They got one classic album and another great one exhausting a sound that evoked decades of New York squalor chic through indestructible songs and contradictory images: garages where Orange amps are parked next to Benzes, a trust-funder’s highrise apartment lousy with beer cans and leather jackets, dive bars frequented by models and rock stars. Everything since has taken cues from styles more associated with parents’ basements, musty vinyl shops, and convention centers: dinky synth-pop, surf rock, prog and the weird science of countless 1980s New Wave bands. This flipping of the script can actually be seen as a canny move, recasting the Strokes as lovable underdogs: where they once defined effortless cool, the deeply uncool Comedown Machine smacks of effort.
That goes a long way towards making Comedown Machine more immediately appealing than their last two records; the Strokes sound like they’re genuinely trying here. The functional cover art of Comedown Machine suggests some kind of mixtape the Strokes made for themselves, 11 songs that turn out like 11 different genre experiments viewed through the unmistakable prism of their inhuman rhythmic precision and pinched EQ’ing. There are a couple of Is This It? throwbacks (“All The Time,” “50/50”) that turn out to be among the least satisfying things here, too flabby to fit into those same jeans from a decade prior. Otherwise, you get elastic funk (“Tap Out”), dubby dream-pop (“80s Comedown Machine”), unidentifiable Latin-tinged Casio presets (“One Way Trigger”) and plenty of soft-rock sheen that creates an ouroboros effect of the Strokes sounding like Phoenix when they were trying to sound like the Strokes.
Credit where it’s due: the guys sound like they’re having fun again. At least that’s the gist you get from the numerous, in-studio “throwaway” moments: the flubbed soloing that introduces the otherwise vise-tight “Tap Out” and the labored laughing that closes out “Slow Animals” only take up a few seconds, but they reinforce the idea that this isn’t Julian Casablancas’ de facto solo project despite it sounding closer to Phrazes For The Young than any Strokes LP*.* But you also sense that the rest of the band getting antsy, issuing challenges to themselves to keep things interesting. Albert Hammond’s solos are charmingly anachronistic, a throwback to when tidy solos were a regular occurrence in three-minute pop songs. But they still can’t shake their tendency to stubbornly hammer at awkward riffs (“Happy Ending”) and clunky chord changes ("Welcome To Japan").
Still, the limitations of Comedown Machine's protracted diversity all come back to Casablancas, a man with wide range as a listener and extremely narrow range as a musician. In both lyrics and tone, he’s best at playing the laconic cad: So when he barks “you’re going too fast” on “All the Time” as a callback to “Reptilia” and the hotseat urgency of Room On Fire, it sounds forced. On the opposite end, the highlight of Comedown Machine is when he asks “What kind of asshole drives a Lotus?” on “Welcome to Japan”; you half expect him to do the “this guy!” routine as a punchline.
That’s the kind of thing Casablancas does better than anyone. Unfortunately, most of Comedown Machine finds him doing anything but that. “Tap Out” features at least two of Casablancas' most elegant melodies, but his wispy coo turns them into mush. When he takes the opposite tack to channel his inner Tom Waits, he doesn’t fare much better; no one was asking what the Strokes would've sounded like in the Victrola era, but "Call It Fate Call It Karma" answers it anyway. If this all smacks of effort, at least they are not taking the easy way out. It’s the 10th anniversary of Room On Fire and in light of what came after, a reissue would surely bring more praise than the initial Is This It? Yes It Is assessment. Or, they could’ve followed the lead of fellow fashion plate/occasional hitmaker Suede and made it a point to sound like their old selves after a long, dry spell.
Still, it’s frustrating for anyone who still puts stock in the idea that the Strokes could and should be one of America’s biggest rock bands. After all, they feel like stars even if the numbers don’t back it up and reigning champs like the Black Keys have about as much charisma and sex appeal as a General Tire. Of course, Black Keys are writing much better songs than the ones on Comedown Machine and if the Strokes seem unfashionable in 2013, that's the true reason. | 2013-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | March 25, 2013 | 6.1 | 5c5bdc0d-97f2-47eb-9b6d-ee5611eca848 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Leonard Cohen's latest live album since he returned to the road in 2008 is a concert film and triple album captured in September 2013 at the Irish venue now known as 3Arena. The songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here, as is Cohen's joyful interaction with the audience and his gift for interpreting his own work. | Leonard Cohen's latest live album since he returned to the road in 2008 is a concert film and triple album captured in September 2013 at the Irish venue now known as 3Arena. The songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here, as is Cohen's joyful interaction with the audience and his gift for interpreting his own work. | Leonard Cohen: Live in Dublin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20051-live-in-dublin/ | Live in Dublin | "Are you humoring me?" asks Leonard Cohen with a warm grin shortly after the first intermission of Live in Dublin, a new concert film and triple album captured in September 2013 at the Irish venue now known as 3Arena. He's partway into "Tower of Song", originally from 1988's I'm Your Man, where he plinks out a rudimentary keyboard solo over canned percussion, in between vocals about Hank Williams a hundred floors above him and being "born with the gift of a golden voice." He adds, "If these are the crumbs of compassion that you offer to the elderly, I am grateful."
If audiences have been humoring Cohen, who was 79 then and is 80 now, for his age, they've been doing it for decades; on "Tower of Song", he also admits to having an "ache in the places where I used to play." In fact, Live in Dublin is only the latest live album since Cohen returned to the road in 2008, having been swindled out of his savings by a manager. He previously released the closely similar CD/DVD collection Live in London, documenting a show from that first year of touring. And there was 2010's Songs From the Road, compiling a somewhat different set of songs from various 2008-2009 performances. Whether Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979, Cohen Live (drawing from 1988 and 1993 tours), or Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, live material from the supposedly not-so-golden-voiced songwriting giant is hardly lacking.
There's still plenty to recommend on *Live in Dublin—*in all earnestness, at that. For one, though Live in London has shipped more than 200,000 copies worldwide, odds are that for many who might like this package it will be their first live Cohen recording. Besides, compared with the already-magnificent London set it adds several songs that wound up on 2012 studio album Old Ideas, making this a closer to exhaustive document of the perhaps no-longer-touring artist's legacy; though you'll probably get more replay value out of the audio component, the quality of the video—billed as Cohen's first to be shot in high-definition—is a noticeable improvement. Mostly, though, anyone curious about Live in Dublin might at least want to stream the audio or rent the video because, whatever similar releases came before, it's one monumental tower of song.
Nothing here changes the foundations of Cohen's narrative, but as with any archetypal legend, it's made for retelling. The Jewish-Buddhist poet from Montreal whose songs are often best known through others' covers reminded crowds on his money-making tours that—despite a perhaps overstated reputation for aloofness (watch him doing standup comedy in 1965's Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen)—he's a gifted and generous interpreter of his own work. His speak-singing style has grown deeper and gruffer, but not unbecomingly so, particularly amid so much use. His songs, as former backup singer Jennifer Warnes once told the author of a 1994 Cohen biography, aim to reach "the place where God and sex and literature meet," but his work since returning has had mostly just the artist's advancing years in common with death's-door albums such as Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind or Johnny Cash's (Cohen-covering) albums with Rick Rubin. He's still more of the darkly humorous standup comedian. Yes, he skips off stage.
For all the talk of literature that attaches itself to Cohen, it's striking when digesting his work at such great length how greatly he prizes the concept of song. His most famous composition, "Hallelujah", in a verse left out of the Shrek-immortalized John Cale (and thus Jeff Buckley) versions but kept in here, envisions standing "before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah"; toward the end of the Dublin encore, he refers to the joy of being "united with you in the spirit of song." Whether on 1967's "Suzanne", where "you touched her perfect body" (but only "with your mind"), or 1974's "Chelsea Hotel #2", where "we are ugly but we have the music," physical reality can be a flawed vessel for this spirit. On "Anthem", a song from 1992's The Future that featured on Trent Reznor's Natural Born Killers soundtrack and precipitates Cohen's first traipse off the Dublin stage, he sings, "Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." Perfection is impossible, he explained around the time of song's release, noting that imperfection is "where the resurrection is."
Cohen's fatalism doesn't prevent him from at least striving toward perfection. Longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson, who sang backup during the recent shows along with English duo the Webb Sisters, in her new photograph book On Tour with Leonard Cohen describes the concerts as a "detailed snapshot" of Cohen's life's work, "meticulously put together" and requiring "a Zen-like focus." The virtuosity of the backing band, which includes an additional six musicians along with the singers, is a further expression of Cohen's graciousness onstage. Despite the self-conscious artifice of "Tower of Song", the rest of the performances are based in rootsier music, whether American folk, rock, jazz, and blues or European traditions (Spanish guitarist Javier Mas also plays lesser-known instruments including the bandurria, the laud, and archilaud). Cohen's willingness to stretch his songs to their limits with instrumental and vocal solos means these concert recordings can't be as lean as 2002's The Essential Leonard Cohen—the Dublin set consists of 30 songs lasting about three hours, and the video portion adds three Old Ideas tunes performed in Canada—but in ringing the bells that still can ring, it's perhaps truer to Cohen's philosophy.
One more aspect setting Live in London apart from studio Cohen was his joyful interaction with the audience, and if anything that has intensified on Dublin. By the encore's opening "So Long, Marianne", he's eliding words in the chorus as if startled by the crowd's jubilant belting of the 1967 song; "You sing so pretty," he says. And much as Cohen is willing to trust his songs to cover artists and to world-class bandmates, he also brings "the spirit of song" by closing the night with someone else's: "Save the Last Dance for Me", most famously recorded by the Drifters in 1960 (none other than Lou Reed worked with Doc Pomus, who cowrote the song with Mort Shuman, and Reed has said the song was written on the day of the wheelchair-bound, polio-stricken Pomus's wedding, to a Broadway actress and dancer). By this point in the recording, my first time experiencing the concert, I was expecting something sublime, and that's what I got, though not in the way I expected: The stage lights shine on the audience members, who do much of the hook-singing work for Cohen. Forget your perfect offering.
Cohen is a genially commanding stage presence, falling on his knees at crucial moments and doffing his cap for his accompanists' solo turns. The Old Ideas songs, sprinkled throughout the set at just the right intervals, are naturally at home, capped with the wry God-speaking-to-a-man-named-Leonard "Going Home". Otherwise, the songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here. There's the apocalyptic The Future title track and the organ-drenched take on 1969's "Bird on the Wire", the smoldering Robinson co-write "In My Secret Life", off of 2001's Ten New Songs, and the same pair's bleak 1988 I'm Your Man collaboration "Everybody Knows" (used by Guns N' Roses as intro music on some Use Your Illusions shows). I'm Your Man's disco-funk "First We Take Manhattan", covered by backup singer Warnes with Stevie Ray Vaughan as part of her influential 1987 tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat, runs right into a powerfully restrained take on that album's title track, originally from 1971's Songs of Love and Hate ("Sincerely, a friend," Cohen signs off this time).
Paradoxically, on the songs at greatest risk of overexposure, it's often the instrumental interludes, not Cohen's poetry, that make my hair stand on end, further justifying the songwriter's faith. This is especially the case for "Hallelujah", bringing to mind another less-covered lyric—one that underscores where Cohen differs from the trickster likes of Dylan: "I've told the truth/ I didn't come to fool you." For the last time, no, the good people of Dublin weren't humoring him. There might not be a single perfect, all-encompassing Cohen recording, but there's this. "You can add up the parts/ But you won't have the sum," he sings on "Anthem", and despite his failed tax-avoidance retirement strategy, I'm inclined to trust the Zen priest in the bolo tie and fedora. | 2014-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / Sony | December 10, 2014 | 8 | 5c6234af-4044-40d9-bc7d-08188dc432e0 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Australian group’s ambitious third album overflows with ideas, samples, guests, and sheer stimuli. In their sparkling music, every sound feels like a treasured memory. | The Australian group’s ambitious third album overflows with ideas, samples, guests, and sheer stimuli. In their sparkling music, every sound feels like a treasured memory. | The Avalanches: We Will Always Love You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-avalanches-we-will-always-love-you/ | We Will Always Love You | Life, death, and the cosmos set the boundaries of the Avalanches’ ambitious third album, We Will Always Love You. The record begins with a farewell voicemail—a final communication, we are led to believe, from a young woman who has passed away—and it ends with the Morse code-like bleeping of the Arecibo Message, an interstellar transmission carrying information on the human species into the infinite beyond. In between those poles, the Australian group continues doing what it has always done: spinning the sounds of disco, soul, easy listening, and other nostalgic staples into luminous, ludic shapes, turning musical collage into a sparkling, four-dimensional fantasyland.
The Avalanches are no longer the same group they were when they made their triumphant debut, 2000’s Since I Left You, folding samples from thousands of songs into a flickering, zoetrope-like illusion that netted comparisons to De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. By 2006, with no follow-up in sight and their works-in-progress folder filled with abandoned drafts, founding member Darren Seltmann had left the band. On their sophomore album, 16 long years after their debut, they squeezed a subway car’s worth of guests onto a record already crowded with samples: among them, Danny Brown, Biz Markie, Toro y Moi, David Berman, and members of Tame Impala, Mercury Rev, and Royal Trux. On the new album, the Avalanches technically remain a duo, though Midnight Juggernauts’ Andy Szekeres has co-writing credits on every song, and the guest list is just as extensive as last time. Yet for all those changes, they sound remarkably like their youthful selves.
Whether sampling or playing their own instruments, they favor rich tone colors and ultra-vivid timbres; the high end is awash in chimes, glockenspiel, and children’s choirs. Glance at the sample credits and you may read names like the Roches and the Carpenters and Vashti Bunyan; close your eyes and what you’ll see behind closed lids are rainbows and Day-Glo, fireflies and flax—all opalescent everything, inside and out. They’re not especially mysterious samplers; often, they make no effort to hide their source material at all. “Interstellar Love” is built around a snippet of Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky,” an inspiration so obvious it scans practically as self-parody. Yet they manage to use it in such a way that it merely colors guest vocalist Leon Bridges’ own melodies, rather than upstaging him. Few contemporary artists are so adept at wringing such potent aura from a recognizable sample, rather than simply crowbarring it into a cheap eureka moment. They’re expert manipulators of the tension between nostalgia and déjà vu, playing recognizable refrains off bits of songs you feel like you know, even if you’ve never heard them before. It is, perhaps, the opposite of a project like the Caretaker, whose soupy ambience is meant to simulate the effects of dementia: In the Avalanches’ music, every sound feels like a treasured memory.
On paper, the list of contributors might be even more eclectic than last time. Blood Orange raps and sings on one song, and MGMT square off against Johnny Marr on another. Tricky turns up a couple of times, muttering so quietly you have to lean in to hear him. Mick Jones, of the Clash and Big Audio Dynamite, duets with a cheerful-sounding Los Angeles singer named Cola Boyy on the boisterous “We Go On,” then pops up in the background of the Jamie xx-produced “Wherever You Go,” playing dubby piano behind Neneh Cherry and the Australian singer CLYPSO. There are rappers (Denzel Curry, Pink Siifu, Sampa the Great) and ranters (Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, shouting, “Love is our song!”); in “Gold Sky,” Kurt Vile stays grounded, delivering low-key existentialist spoken-word, while the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne makes for the heavens (“Oh golden sky/A way up high/It’s where soldiers go/When they have died”). But for the most part, all these characters stay folded into the mix, even when their own personalities shine brightly through.
Occasionally, the group highlights the album’s cosmic, life-after-death themes with a well-placed sample or guest turn. In “Solitary Ceremonies,” a woman recounts communicating with the spirit of Franz Liszt (“He used to do so by guiding my hands over the pianoforte keyboard”) while falsetto harmonies glow in the background. “Wherever You Go” opens with a spoken-word snippet from NASA’s Golden Record, a recording carried aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977: “We step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we’re called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.” The album’s most remarkable invocation of the supernatural is hidden in plain sight: “Star Song.IMG,” a 10-second blast of white noise which, when fed into a spectrograph—a program that turns audio waveforms into visual forms—yields a portrait of the Hollywood actor Barbara Payton, whose addictions led to her death from heart and liver failure at just 39. The album’s second song is also dedicated to her; she hovers over the whole project as a kind of tragic patron saint—a nod, perhaps, to Chater’s own struggle with addiction.
By any metric, it’s a lot—such a surfeit of ideas, participants, and sheer stimuli that it feels at points almost absurd. The lyrics sometimes feel like they could use an edit—Neneh Cherry rhymes “agitated” and “celebrated” with “constipated”—and some of the light-and-love philosophizing occasionally verges on hokeyness. But even though the album’s 71 minutes might be 10 or 15 too many, the short track lengths and seamless segues between songs and interludes tend to keep things moving briskly along. The most affecting moments often happen in bridges and outros and other fleeting, marginal moments when an unexpected chord change triggers a palpable jolt of joy. A few of the best songs could be mistaken for outtakes from their debut; if you could bottle a certain frequency of late-summer sunshine, it would probably resemble “Born to Lose,” which flips a snippet of Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” and a hard-to-spot Leon Bridges sample into the kind of weightless filter-disco perfection that made Since I Left You sound so effortless.
Most importantly, We Will Always Love You overflows with heart, enough that it buoys even the top-heavy moments, and the bittersweet mix of emotions feels remarkably appropriate for the current moment. Pink Siifu nails it when he reworks a melancholy couplet from the Silver Jews’ late David Berman into a line about cosmic perseverance: “I sleep three feet above the street in a pink champagne Corvette/Fly out into space, listen to the music the stars are making/Without a flicker of regret.” It’s a record that takes psychedelia not so much as a means of escape as a pledge of faith: that a stranger, better tomorrow is possible for all of us.
The interstellar message that closes the album, transmitting human DNA and earthly biochemicals in binary code, was originally broadcast from Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory in 1974, beamed out at a frequency of 2380 MHz; following a performance with the SETI-related International Space Orchestra, the Avalanches solicited a copy of the transmission directly from Frank Drake, the nonagenarian astronomer who wrote the missive with assistance from Carl Sagan. Last month, the National Science Foundation announced that after more than a half-century of service, the Arecibo Telescope had become structurally unsound and was to be withdrawn from service. Then, on December 1, cables supporting a 900-ton structure suspended above the telescope snapped, smashing the dish below. Knowing the fate of this once glittering icon of space exploration somehow makes the album’s closing gambit all the more poignant. The telescope may be destroyed, but the message is still out there, sailing past star after star, a message of hope from a crumbling world.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | December 14, 2020 | 8.1 | 5c628de0-2cce-41a7-8754-18e9e5f85f79 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Cash family and friends, plus Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, Robert Glasper and others, make songs out of the late Man in Black's poetry. | Cash family and friends, plus Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, Robert Glasper and others, make songs out of the late Man in Black's poetry. | Various Artists: Johnny Cash: Forever Words | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-johnny-cash-forever-words/ | Johnny Cash: Forever Words | The poems collected two years ago in Johnny Cash: Forever Words were unsung, in every sense of the word. Gathered from handwritten letters, notebooks, journals, and manuscripts that Cash left behind when he died in 2003, the verses had never been set to music, as far as anyone could tell. Yet turning the pages of that 2016 book, it was impossible not to hear them delivered in Cash’s asphalt-dark voice, sung or spoke-sung, accompanied by his low-slung guitar and the railroad-rhythm drumbeat he favored.
Those lost songs have now become real with this 16-song tribute album, on which Cash family and friends (Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter; Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson) as well as artists less closely associated with his legacy (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello) accept the challenge of putting music to his posthumous poetry.
It’s a formidable task: Despite the plainspoken quality of his gruff, gothic delivery, Cash flat-out owned his songs, and the number of good Cash covers in the world is fairly low. (Little Richard, Ray Charles, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen are among the standout exceptions.)
The central question of this album is whether the artists assembled can do for Cash what he famously did for Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” bringing new life to the material beyond the limits of time, self, and place. But they are also charged with the task of supplying song where music never existed—to paraphrase Paul Muldoon, the editor of Cash’s collected poems, to deliver “that missing boom-chicka [that] will allow it to be completely what it most may be.”
Nelson and Kristofferson, Cash’s surviving fellow Highwaymen, lead off the album with “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” with Nelson’s guitar Trigger wandering through a forlorn melody as Kristofferson intones what is billed as the last poem their friend wrote, anticipating his own death: “You tell me that I must perish/Like the flowers that I cherish.” What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work. Musgraves does a misty, harmonizing duet with her husband, Ruston Kelly, working from a letter the singer wrote to wife June Carter Cash, who died four months before him. Elvis Costello’s swoony, string-laden rendition of “I’ll Still Love You” feels like that letter’s postscript, and Carlene Carter’s “June’s Sundown” completes the romantic trio.
Some poems are aptly translated: Dailey & Vincent’s gospel bluegrass sound fits the hymnlike lyrics of “He Bore It All,” including Cash’s prelude verse from the Book of Matthew. (Cash, an ordained minister, recorded an audio version of the Bible in his lifetime, and left behind a study of Job among his papers.) In choosing “The Walking Wounded,” a bitter ballad which Cash wrote in the 1970s, Rosanne Cash gives stark voice to her father’s legacy of singing the music of the forgotten—Native American and rural and working people and those drafted in Vietnam, especially: “We make the steel, we cut the trees...You may not know us, but you’ll see/There are more than you’d believe.” In a video shot around the cottonfields of Cash’s childhood home, she wanders the present-day landscape of Dyess, Arkansas. The song also features her half-brother John Carter Cash, who co-produced the album; it’s only the second time they’ve collaborated.
Most of the songs were recorded in Cash Cabin Studios in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Allison Krauss & Union Station’s bluegrass translation of “The Captain’s Daughter” feels most true to that setting. The central character in “Jellico Coal Man,” by T-Bone Burnett, could be a Cormac McCarthy creation plodding through a Tennessee mining town, in a song that’s at once Biblical, bluesy, and brazenly dirty.
At times, the accumulation of so many voices weighs heavy on this album. There’s little room to breathe in Brad Paisley’s “Gold All Over the Ground.” It makes you yearn for the simplicity of a strong, space-giving voice, like Jamey Johnson’s barrel-chested belt on “Spirit Rider,” or Chris Cornell’s cathartic howl on “You Never Knew My Mind,” where the late grunge singer unleashes the pent-up anguish of a 1967 breakup poem by Cash.
Jazz pianist Robert Glasper delivers one of Forever Words’ most transformative moments with “Goin’, Goin’, Gone,” turning Cash’s drug confessional into a stunning R&B groove built around the refrain “Liquid, capsule, tablet, powder.” (“I was trying to describe the hell of trying to stay alive,” Cash explains in a sampled interview.) It recalls the imagination and generosity of Cash’s own work as a covers artist, suggesting his music and words as an enduring Great American Songbook in their own right, ripe for new interpretations. As he concludes in the last poem he wrote, voiced here by Kristofferson: “The trees that I planted still are young; the songs I sang will still be sung.” | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Legacy | April 14, 2018 | 7 | 5c6721ed-fde6-4f5e-9dad-f65c9d6523ee | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
The breakbeat revivalist returns to well-worn rave tropes, yielding diminishing returns. | The breakbeat revivalist returns to well-worn rave tropes, yielding diminishing returns. | Lone: Abraxas EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lone-abraxas-ep/ | Abraxas EP | Clubland’s recent obsession with breakbeats has thrust the idiosyncratic British producer Lone into an improbably fashionable position, with tracks like “Temples” and “Pulsar” slotting, almost despite themselves, into the trend for gritty drum breaks at a house tempo. But the longtime breakbeat revivalist’s Abraxas EP, inspired by pitched-down drum’n’bass, unwittingly sounds a warning bell for the style’s rapidly diminishing returns.
Lone’s interest in breakbeats solidified on Levitate, in 2016—an age ago in electronic music—and continued through the recent Ambivert Tools 12-inch series. To this rave revivalism he brought a gift for mystical melody and dusty atmosphere that elevated his productions above mere novelty. But as his fellow producers pile into the retro wave, these traits are almost entirely absent on Abraxas, an EP that resembles a paint-by-numbers breakbeat kit.
It’s not so much that there is little going on in the three tracks here—some of the best electronic music is made up of very little—as that there is nothing truly noteworthy: no new sounds or rhythmic inflection to put a spring in the step, no intriguing melodies or production trickery to capture the heart. Instead, Abraxas relies heavily on some of the most well-worn tropes in dance music, from the “Funky Drummer” break to choral pads, all rendered in a prosaic manner that does little to redeem them.
The Lisbon DJ Violet made the point in a recent Guardian article that breakbeats can be recycled in countless configurations, in a way that “recharges meaning as opposed to exhausting it.” But the breakbeats on Abraxas feel tired to the point of lethargy. Lone digs shallow into the store of classic breaks and just kind of leaves them there, unmolested in the mix, when a more adventurous mind might have chopped them to hell and back. Given that radically altered breakbeats were pretty much the whole point of ’90s drum’n’bass, this lackadaisical attitude is puzzling.
Equally dispiriting is Lone’s use of the Roland TB-303—the other most over-used sound in ’90s electronic music—which pops up on the EP doing very little of interest. Dillinja’s “Acid Track” and Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness” both proved long ago that 303 plus breakbeat can be a chemically potent mix. But the three tracks on Abraxas have none of Dillinja’s sheer acidic filth or Wink’s brutally effective danceability. Instead, with the possible exception of “Young Star Cluster,” the 303s on Abraxas wobble around indolently, like hippos in a mud lake.
So what else remains? The title track adds a synth melody that wafts about without ever setting fire to the curtains and the kind of “exotic” instrumental sample misused on ’90s rave records to denote globe-trotting depth. “Young Star Cluster” has a nagging kalimba melody, a halfway decent 303 squelch, and airy melodic flutters. “How Can You Tell” closes the EP with angelic synth washes à la The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld and a catchy sub-bass line. And that is that, pretty much, for a hugely underwhelming package.
As Octo Octa’s recent work shows, there is still mileage to be gotten out of reviving music’s most modish decade. But Abraxas’ lackluster approach makes you wish Lone had dug into the daredevil spirit of the ’90s rather than aping its sonic trappings. Lone has made far better music and will probably continue to do so. But lesser breakbeat revivalists should consider themselves warned by this wet blanket of a record. | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ancient Astronauts | August 7, 2019 | 5.5 | 5c67b7d7-ea69-43a0-8d79-40cd208a2fa9 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
With his Atlantic debut looming on the horizon and a higher profile than he's ever enjoyed, the Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates' newest mixtape is packed with uptempo anthems, chest-pumping bravado, and a 2 Chainz guest spot. The beats here are a little bigger than in the past and have more of a sheen to them. | With his Atlantic debut looming on the horizon and a higher profile than he's ever enjoyed, the Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates' newest mixtape is packed with uptempo anthems, chest-pumping bravado, and a 2 Chainz guest spot. The beats here are a little bigger than in the past and have more of a sheen to them. | Kevin Gates: By Any Means | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19109-kevin-gates-by-any-means/ | By Any Means | After the kind of year Kevin Gates had in 2013—finally signing with a major label when he inked a deal with Atlantic Records, releasing two critically-acclaimed mixtapes, becoming a father for the second time—you might think that he'd be in a better mood. This, however, would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the Baton Rouge rapper. Although his unflinching, often brutal dope-boy tales can find him struggling against his naturally pessimistic impulses, Gates' default mode is one of squinty-eyed suspicion, and the world he inhabits in his music is one where human connection only leads to betrayal and trust is something that gets you killed. But even with his Atlantic debut looming somewhere on the horizon and a higher profile than he's ever enjoyed, Gates sounds unsatisfied and more than a little paranoid on By Any Means, his third release in just over a year.
This isn't to say his latest project—or Gates's music in general—is a bummer. As with his previous two releases, By Any Means is packed with uptempo anthems and chest-pumping bravado, the only difference being that here the beats are both a little bigger and have more of a sheen to them. The album splits the difference between the radio-friendly melodicism of The Luca Brasi Story and the technical experimentation of Stranger Than Fiction, inching closer to the mainstream rap radio that one imagines is Gates' ultimate goal. The production still prioritizes the kind of lower frequencies that could level buildings, and it's not afraid to take the sounds usually found at the fringes of trap beats and make them the focus. Whether it's the cathedral organs of "Arm and Hammer" courtesy of the Runners and the Monarch or the eerie MIDI blues backdrop that Dun Deal provides for bitter kiss-off "Stop Lyin'", Gates tends to select tracks just to the left of the kind of beats other rappers would typically choose from the same producers, and it gives his music the advantage of sounding familiar but fresh at the same time.
That said, Gates could rap over boilerplate trap beats and he'd still manage to put his personal spin on them. Few rappers today as using their voices as well as Gates does; he's got an instinctive grasp on when to slip from his usual melodic cadence into a balled-fist croak that sounds like he took a cheese grater to his vocal chords. He pulls out this trick on "Homicide", a harrowing tale in which he exacts revenge after a botched job leaves his friend murdered and Gates in the hospital.
Gates' ability to say one thing with his lyrics and another with his voice has always been one of his greatest strengths. He can puff his chest out while simultaneously undercutting a boast, and this works especially well on an album that finds him ostensibly closer to his goals but somehow even more paranoid and isolated, caught somewhere between sheer disbelief that he's even made it this far ("Can't Make This Up") and an overwhelming suspicion it's too good to be true, especially for someone who knows himself well enough to know that the man he used to be is always lurking around the corner. "Be cool, you must want to see me incarcerated" he raps on "Keep Fucking With Me", but over the course of By Any Means, you get the feeling that Gates' is as worried about his own self-destructive tendencies as he is any external forces out to get him. With the exception of "Movie", an absolutely heartwarming account of the birth of his children, Gates rarely sounds as if he's enjoying his recent success, even while boasting about driving around in cars he once only saw on the big screen; you can tell he's trying, but relaxing is still foreign to someone like him.
On the flip side of "Movie" is "Posed to Be in Love", in which Gates narrates beating his girlfriend after discovering that she cheated on him while he was in prison. At best, the track can be viewed as an "All of the Lights"-style exploration of male rage and domestic violence; at worst, it comes across like a frightening glimpse into Gates' misogynist attitude towards women, which has reared its head before but never as brazenly as it does here. It's the kind of track that makes it obvious that an Atlantic sign-off wasn't required, as it's the kind of song they'd be terrified that an artist of theirs—one who sells himself as much the lothario as he does the hustler—was recording. Then again, Gates has never been one shy away from exposing the worst parts of his psyche, even if it's as disturbing as it is on "Posed to Be in Love".
There's also a sense that Gates is holding back somewhat. There are only a few guests, the biggest being 2 Chainz, who sounds like he's glancing at his watch while contributing a verse and the chorus to "Bet I'm on It". It's likely that Gates is saving them for the future rather than using up that major label budget now, but he doesn't really need them anyways—he's a fascinating persona all on his own. With By All Means he completes a three-release run that's as solid as any in recent memory, even if the answer to the question of whether he has another gear in him remains unanswered for the time being. | 2014-03-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-03-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Breadwinners Association | March 24, 2014 | 7.5 | 5c750672-bac2-4c9a-bf65-39ab640696f2 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
An ominous blend of drones and field recordings, the two musicians’ debut collaboration plays out like a long-distance conversation about geologic time. | An ominous blend of drones and field recordings, the two musicians’ debut collaboration plays out like a long-distance conversation about geologic time. | Lea Bertucci / Lawrence English: Chthonic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lea-bertucci-lawrence-english-chthonic/ | Chthonic | A sense of unease drives Lea Bertucci and Lawrence English’s Chthonic. Rhythms crash like boulders and high-end shapes shriek like birds. An imaginary dive beneath the earth’s crust that finds inspiration in the mysteries of the underworld, the record strikes a delicate balance between their respective styles, blending English’s blazing static and field recordings with Bertucci’s fluttering strings and wind melodies. Both artists have a tendency to sprawl, but Chthonic showcases a more compressed side of their practices, exploring the intensity of densely woven phrases.
Bertucci and English met in 2019, and Chthonic, which they created remotely, passing ideas back and forth between New York and Australia, is their first collaboration. It’s a fitting match: Both artists use music as a means of grappling with the ways that time and space shape perception, and both frequently look to the natural world and the particularities of site-specific sound for inspiration. Chthonic builds from these shared interests, painting menacing pictures of the unseen forces at work inside the Earth.
While these pieces move in cycles, they never form neat circles. Instead, they twist and turn, becoming steadily deeper and more dissonant. Strings scrape against plodding pulses; tension rolls in waves. A purgatorial air pervades the duo’s sounds, which often give the impression of being pulled by uncontrollable forces on all sides. The cramped feeling is at its most potent on “Dust Storm,” which begins with torrential rainfall before a low-end buzz slices against snippets of drone stuck in an endless loop. In the 12-minute “A Fissisure Exhales,” bright streaks echo across a cavernous expanse and are swallowed up in the darkness as if sucked into a black hole.
Chthonic can be monotonous; the mood is anxious, and there are few moments of surprise or reprise. But some unexpected passages prove powerful. On the closing “Strata,” Bertucci and English forgo the heavy-handed pressure of earlier tracks, opting instead for a soft, airy shimmer. A hint of relief comes into focus, even though a foreboding suggestion of agitation remains. In an album of crushing force, it’s the rare moment where hope shines through. | 2023-08-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | American Dreams | August 15, 2023 | 7 | 5c7654db-132a-494e-8305-18911e2dd1c2 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Fuzz is the proto-metal-worshipping power trio of Ty Segall, Charles Moothart, and Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich. Their second full-length is a double album—a ballsy and potentially dangerous move for a band who operate best when their songs are kept tight. | Fuzz is the proto-metal-worshipping power trio of Ty Segall, Charles Moothart, and Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich. Their second full-length is a double album—a ballsy and potentially dangerous move for a band who operate best when their songs are kept tight. | Fuzz: II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21124-ii/ | II | On an episode of "WTF With Marc Maron", Mikal Cronin spoke about the scene he, Ty Segall, and Charles Moothart came up in during high school. As he explained it, he would throw parties at his parents' house in Laguna Beach, and their small circle of musician friends would write songs and start bands specifically for the events. Different combinations of the same people were getting together and exploring different vibes. "You guys still do that," Maron observed. And he's right. This year alone, Segall has been juggling several projects. His circle of friends and collaborators (Moothart, Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich, Wand's Cory Hanson, Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer, and Cronin) all tend to have multiple irons in the fire.
Those high school bands weren't focused on long-term sustainability; they were momentary sparks of creative energy. To this day, the best moment in the life of any new Segall project is the first spark. The introductory taste of new music from these bands offers the opportunity to parse how aesthetic and personnel differences define the music—to hear what separates it from prior work, what makes it exciting, and what the chances are that the project will outlive the confines of a 7". Segall and Moothart's band Fuzz made a strong first impression with their debut 2012 single "Fuzz's Fourth Dream". It was a showcase for Moothart's guitar solo mastery, the band's stellar hook work, the effortless way they can slink into a groove, and Segall's ace drumming. With 2013's Fuzz, the proto-metal-worshipping power trio became a proven entity—a well-oiled machine with a few strong songs. The lineup now features Ubovich, and if you only take into account his impressive work as Meatbodies' frontman, it seems Fuzz have only become more powerful.
Fuzz's second full-length, II, is a double album—a ballsy and potentially dangerous move for a band who operate best when their songs are kept tight. Their Fuzz track "Loose Sutures", for example, went a bit too loose and lost its momentum about halfway in. More than half of II's songs are over four minutes long, and the longest one of the bunch is the most disappointing of them all. The final 14-minute track, "II", is an obligatory instrumental sequel to Fuzz's instrumental closer "One". Where "One" ramps up the power and velocity of its central hook, "II" never quite figures out exactly where it's going. It changes course several times, and along the way, a question emerges—how much Fuzz is too much?
It's a bum note to end on, but before they reach that final song, Fuzz knock out some undeniable high points in their discography. Ubovich's bass provides the perfect dour counterbalance to Segall's dulcet vocal on "Let It Live". There's a premium on heaviness, and "Pollinate" certainly delivers the thudding, crashing goods. And if Fuzz occasionally felt too spare, II is where they throw everything at the wall. All three men play synthesizers, and in a few well-placed moments, they've got string arrangements courtesy of Laena Geronimo. They often change pace—tempo, emphasis, texture—at the moment a song begins to feel stale.
It also helps that they're the rare band where any of the three members could serve as the frontman. While Segall's voice is undeniably the most impressive, Moothart and Ubovich come across more gritty and grounded—perfect for songs about "teeth twisting in the heatwave." It's also refreshing to hear Fuzz bucking their former formula—their "lead singers take turns" approach goes out the window on "Burning Wreath", which features Segall and Moothart trading lines and briefly harmonizing. It's a small moment, but one that hints at how much this band are capable of when you consider how much talent they have between them.
That's why it's disappointing when, around the album's third side, Fuzz's songs begin to feel anonymous—like they're retreading ground they'd already covered earlier in the album. Segall, Moothart, and Ubovich have done an impressive job of nailing this sound, and somewhere in the stoner rock sprawl, they have enough impressive moments and great songs for a truly strong album that's about half as long. They just don't do quite enough to differentiate their approach or justify the album's 67-minute run-time. There are definitely instances of them changing things up—"Red Flag" is a two-minute punk song on an album that benefits from brief interstitials. Even considering all the high points and raw power, II falters under the weight of the band's ambition. | 2015-11-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | November 4, 2015 | 6.7 | 5c7af38c-5055-4719-909a-f7dd47f873b9 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a spiritually charged masterpiece from 1968, a controlled and chaotic blend of free jazz, meditative soul, and gospel. | 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 a spiritually charged masterpiece from 1968, a controlled and chaotic blend of free jazz, meditative soul, and gospel. | Eddie Gale: Ghetto Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eddie-gale-ghetto-music/ | Ghetto Music | In a 2007 interview with JazzTimes, trumpeter Eddie Gale spoke about the impetus behind his debut album, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music, a record so ambitious that not even Blue Note knew what to do with it. It was 1968, and the venerated jazz label was running on the fumes of the hard bop era with swanky, romantic tunes that didn’t address the despair and unrest unfolding outside: a quagmire in Vietnam, the fight for equal rights in the U.S., the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Gale’s album was something else: it conveyed fire, intensity, and most of all, Blackness. “At that point, I didn’t know of anyone who was playing with two drummers and two bassists,” he said. “It just made sense to have this action going on from my love of African music and my time back in the marching band.” Ghetto Music synthesized these touchpoints, honoring the continent’s polyrhythmic arrangements while offering a warm embrace to African Americans fighting bigotry and classism. It was the sound of joy, sorrow, and awakening, funneled through a masterful 41-minute blend of free jazz, meditative soul, and gospel.
Gale’s journey to Ghetto Music began three years prior when the 24-year-old—who had been reared in the bebop stylings of pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Kenny Dorham—grew fascinated with the burgeoning free jazz movement, a frenetic style that eschewed traditional chord changes for strident improvisation and spiritual connection. By 17, Gale started taking trumpet lessons from Dorham, then started jamming with jazz stalwarts like Max Roach and Art Blakey, all while developing his own style on the horn. This free jazz, dubbed “The New Thing,” confused listeners and critics whose descriptions reeked with elitism. Some fusty jazz critics didn’t want the genre to evolve, and this music—with all its dissonance and ear-piercing shrieks—was far removed from the ’40s and ’50s, where clean-cut performers played smooth melodies in cramped supper clubs.
But “The New Thing” was about bringing jazz to people who couldn’t afford expensive tickets and the two-drink minimum. It was from and for communities that needed healing, and evoked the earliest days of the genre when untrained Southern musicians used their instruments to lament discrimination through atonal screeching and wails. In the ’60s, the most famous performer of this new style was John Coltrane, the renowned saxophonist whose 1966 album, Ascension, was far different than the acclaimed, and more melodic A Love Supreme. His embracing of the subgenre brought wider recognition to fellow saxophonists Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Archie Shepp, all of whom influenced Gale to find a similar path. He was introduced to Sun Ra in the early ’60s by drummer Scoby Stroman, who was working with the experimental pianist. Gale was soon brought into the Arkestra’s vaunted horn section and played alongside Pat Patrick, John Gilmore, and Marshall Allen, where he learned how to experiment on the trumpet while keeping in the pocket of Sun Ra’s cosmic expanse. In the Arkestra, the bandleader stressed the importance of musical discipline, planting the seeds for the controlled chaos of Ghetto Music.
Gale’s big break came in ’62, when he appeared on “Space Aura,” the third track on Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra’s Secrets of the Sun LP. Three years later, Gale scored a bigger placement when he played on Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, the pianist’s first album for Blue Note, now a linchpin record in the annals of free jazz. Then, after a star turn on organist Lee Young’s Of Love and Peace, Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff asked Gale if he wanted to record his own music. He assembled a sextet that included drummers Thomas Holman and Richard Hackett; bassists Judah Samuel and James “Tokio” Reid; and flutist/tenor saxophonist Russell Lyle; along with an 11-person choir called the Noble Gale Singers. They convened at the famed Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on September 20, 1968, and recorded Ghetto Music in one day.
The album title itself was an act of rebellion. When people conjure the term “ghetto,” they think poor, dangerous, and Black, coating it in broad, racist strokes. Doing so ignores the community existing there, the togetherness spurred by the dearth of resources afforded to it. Instead, Ghetto Music was meant to celebrate Gale’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and others like it. “It comes from all of us that lived in that area of the city,” he once said. “That lived this life of music, going to school, learning and growing up. It was all-encompassing.”
Ghetto Music was written as a dramatic presentation accentuated by costumes and acting; between its choral chants and prayerful aura, it was an album that could’ve worked just as well in the Theater District and The East, the famed Black cultural center and venue in Bed-Stuy. Anxious moments were met with equally calm ones, offering a nuanced portrayal of Black life beyond its depiction in the news. Simply put: Black people weren’t taking any more shit from white people; the tenants of nonviolence were giving way to militant-minded retaliation. As the thinking went, brutality would be met in kind; the days of “We Shall Overcome” gave way to James Brown’s “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud” and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey.” Along with that thinking came a new, unflinching pride; the tenor was less about what whites have done wrong and more about looking within for the unification and construction of an isolated Black world.
Where other music jabbed its finger in the chest of the oppressor, Ghetto Music felt like a comforting hug for the oppressed. This is what “The Rain” does when Gale’s sister Joann sings of finding the resilience to move on from distress. “I must leave, so so long,” she coos sweetly, her voice tearful and despondent. “Wipe the tears away from your eyes.” Conversely, “Fulton Street,” a break-neck arrangement with thunderous drum rolls and blistering trumpet wails, is twitchy and nervous, the sense of speeding down the road and beating the yellow signals. The song stops and starts at various intervals, only heightening the intensity; in its silent moments, Gale blasts into his upper register; when followed by cascading drum fills, it’s the sound of a fully pressurized Brooklyn summer day.
Compare that to the mournful “A Understanding,” where Gale plays in a lower register and the choir imparts a slow and solemn tone. It’s as if the weight of injustice has gotten to him and the band, and only the faint recollection of happiness remains. Such thoughts aren’t surprising in this context; riots broke out in the city as a result of King’s assassination in Memphis, along with a student uprising at Columbia University related to the construction of a new gym that residents thought would exacerbate segregation in Harlem. Closer to Gale’s home, a battle over school decentralization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville led to racial tensions over how children were being taught in poorer neighborhoods. Gale funneled these struggles into a singular vision informed by his dismay, though not mired in it. Instead, he used such instances to propel himself and the band forward, blasting into aggressive rhythms rooted in the tenets of Black Nationalism. The instrumental “A Walk with Thee” speaks directly to Gale’s past and present—the marching band student and Sun Ra disciple. Between its military-style ra-ta-tat-tat drums and wistful chanting, it’s a festive jaunt that works equally in open air and at West African nightclubs, the feeling of a crew in lockstep. “The Coming of Gwilu” signals a rebirth, or in this case, the actual birth of Gale’s son, Gwilu. Here, the call-and-response chanting is part of a ritualistic birthing ceremony that, with its 13-minute runtime, comfortably ushers the boy into this world. It lets him know he’s protected from harm.
Gale followed Ghetto Music with Black Rhythm Happening, a 1969 companion album with a nonet and bigger guest features (Coltrane collaborator Elvin Jones played drums and Jimmy Lyons played alto sax) that split the difference between funk and jazz. It refined the edges a bit: While songs like “Mexico Thing,” “Ghetto Summertime” and “Look At Teyonda” (about his daughter of the same name) harbored the raw spirit of Ghetto Music, they landed softer on the ear. Conversely, Gale’s first album encompassed the unrest that threatened his existence, letting it unfold in a billowing haze of combative grooves.
Following the release of Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening, Gale was dropped from Blue Note when co-founders Wolff and Alfred Lion lost control of the label. By the time these albums arrived, jazz had given way to funk as the most popular genre in Black music. Even jazz music’s biggest stars—Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock—had started to blend the genre with psych-rock and funk, which led to an amorphous sound that pushed the sound into bigger venues. Gale’s music was overtly radical; his name didn’t ring as loudly as Pharoah and Ayler in the chronicles of underground free jazz. It seemed the landscape wasn’t ready for a Cecil Taylor-approved, Sun Ra-trained trumpeter who could play straight-ahead and avant-garde in fancy concert halls and on the street. The jazz police couldn’t figure him out, so instead of taking time to dissect Ghetto Music’s dense layers, it was easier to move on to something more palatable. Parts of it were tough to endure if you weren’t of the people, and in an era where jazz was fading from mainstream view, Ghetto Music has mostly gone unappreciated.
Ghetto Music was the genre’s future, and would go on to influence several like-minded bandleaders some 50 years later. You hear traces of Gale in the robust spiritual jazz of Kamasi Washington (who, like Gale, uses multiple drummers and choir) and the jazz-electro-funk hybrid of Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble. And where Gale’s feverish tilt surfaced in Pink Siifu’s 2020 album, NEGRO, Ghetto Music’s inward-looking lament textured Sault’s emotive UNTITLED (Black Is). All these artists employ the same “for us by us” ethos, which, to my ear, closely resembles Gale’s first and best LP as a blueprint for what Black Liberation jazz could sound like. After decades in relative obscurity, Ghetto Music was reissued in 2017 and introduced to a new generation of listeners. “The Rain” and “A Understanding” can be heard in director Shaka King’s Oscar-winning 2021 film, Judas and the Black Messiah, which detailed the plot to kill Black Panther activist Fred Hampton.
In the early ’70s, Gale moved to Palo Alto, California, left the music business, and went into teaching. He continued to perform throughout the years and even appeared on a few noted late ’70s Sun Ra albums (Lanquidity, The Other Side of the Sun, and On Jupiter). Yet nothing else he released had the groundbreaking impact of Ghetto Music—a sweltering and comprehensive masterpiece, a high-water mark for Black love and freedom, a time capsule and summation of 1960s Brooklyn as a beacon of spirit and creativity. All these years later, it still captures the essence of the neighborhood it aimed to serve. “It didn’t sound like anything that came out before or after,” trumpeter Steven Bernstein told The New York Times in the 2020 obituary for Gale, who died that year at the age of 78. “Total outlier. It’s 6/8 vamps with two bass players and two drummers, unison melodies in the horns, and then incredible choirs that are bringing blocks of music.” Indeed, Ghetto Music is still a lightning rod record worthy of deeper study and recognition. With Black life still under siege, this record remains a trek toward inner peace and understanding. | 2022-05-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | May 22, 2022 | 9.4 | 5c82a3c3-4bbf-41fe-9d18-03b7959fce52 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
The appealingly unpredictable debut from the Norwegian duo thrives off the dueling forces of unease and temptation. | The appealingly unpredictable debut from the Norwegian duo thrives off the dueling forces of unease and temptation. | Smerz: Believer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smerz-believer/ | Believer | Smerz’s tightly coiled synth pop is designed to keep you on edge. Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg place their zombified vocals atop ruptured synths and murky breakbeats, creating an air of chilly menace. On Believer, the Norwegian duo’s first full-length for XL, Smerz take this sound to even harsher places; as with 2018’s off-kilter Have fun EP, the music works best when it glowers, throwing you off balance and getting under your skin.
Believer’s title track throbs with a looped, saw-toothed synth and stomping trip-hop beat that’s the hardest the pair have ever made. Mid-album highlight “Rain” (one of several tracks sung in their native Norwegian) moves with similar swagger, propped up by a lopsided beat and ominous strings that sound lifted from Homogenic-era Björk. There’s a creeping insistence to this music, thriving off a dual sense of unease and temptation, and the best songs blur the line between hedonism and anxiety.
Smerz recorded Believer over three years in Copenhagen, drawing on their youth in choirs as well as current academic pursuits in music composition and mathematics. Tensile MIDI harp samples bristle against actual violins and cellos, creating a digital and acoustic orchestra that lends Believer its appealing unpredictability. The minimalist interludes sprinkled throughout are intentionally theatrical (there’s a hearty round of applause on “Grand Piano”), complicating the album’s momentum with patches of eerie stillness. “The favourite” and “Versace Strings” are melancholy and full of echo, so it’s like hearing the trilling keys and Motzfeldt’s operatic voice from within a sprawling theater.
Believer dances along a tense, agitated line and doesn’t settle for long. “Flashing” includes Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg’s most expressive vocal performance, reeling off what sounds like a yearning inner monologue: “I don’t see you get close/About the things that I say that matter most.”. The passionate vocals stand out from the rest of Believer, with its glassine pop-R&B delivery. Smerz’s usual brooding, dead-eyed vacancy, punctuated with mumbled interjections, has a magnetic pull in concentrated blasts, but it can also feel like a slight crutch when songs like “Flashing” and the album’s interludes prove they can go in different, evocative directions at a whim. Believer flourishes in those moments, showing the full breadth of what Smerz can do.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | February 25, 2021 | 7.7 | 5c8dd550-747a-4cd0-8dd7-b82cf9e44421 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
!!! were always a ray of California sunshine piercing the paranoid gloom of their dance-punk milieu. Their ninth album shows how dashingly they’ve ripened into their vintage influences. | !!! were always a ray of California sunshine piercing the paranoid gloom of their dance-punk milieu. Their ninth album shows how dashingly they’ve ripened into their vintage influences. | !!!: Let It Be Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/let-it-be-blue/ | Let It Be Blue | Cut-cut-cut-cut through like the Pana-Pana-Panama Canal-Canal-Canal. One run through those 20 staccato syllables could set them pinging around in your skull for hours, but in the chorus of “Panama Canal,” a single from !!!’s ninth album, Let It Be Blue, Meah Pace repeats them three more times for good measure. Most of the music clears away so that the words stand out in stark relief, rendered even more lethally memorable by a surge of lobster-claw clicks halfway through. This chorus pushes the needle between earworm and malware as far as it’s been in bass music since “Like a G6,” and the M.I.A.-like ululation that follows has the ring of an exultant taunt, as befits someone springing a trunk-rattling new “Lovefool” on an unready world.
Now, the Panama Canal is an artificial waterway of some 50 miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific; it has a complex geopolitical history involving several sovereign nations; and if you imagine “Panama Canal” has anything to do with that, you’re so far up the wrong tree you need a firetruck. Catchy nonsense—merrily pasted up from hedonistic yearnings, political tantrums, and coffee-buzzed wordplay—has been the offhandedly definitive leftfield dance-punk band’s stock in trade since Nic Offer founded it more than 20 years ago. Their disco-pop and global funk songs, now far removed from their origins in rock, may sound like they want to save your life, but their governing register is and ever was the dad joke. They’ve stood by the form since before it was a thing and through all that came after, and this seems entwined with the unfading longevity of their goofball chic, impervious to fashion and time.
So the invocation of one of the world’s great engineering marvels has no deeper significance than you’d expect from a band whose most iconic song’s stroke of genius was that Julio sounds a little like Giuliani, and who called a whole album Myth Takes, a lisping groaner of a pun I literally just got, 15 years late. But Let It Be Blue is an engineering marvel itself. Pieced together from swapped Ableton Live sessions, it somehow comes out feeling live, streamlined, and complete. It’s certainly not the only idealized dancefloor to have been dreamed up in semi-quarantine, but it’s a sharp self-portrait of a band on its own endearing and inimitable wavelength. Not only that, it manages something rare in dance music, discovering an invisible third option between aging with grace and clinging to youth.
The dance-punk revival that seized New York around 2002 arguably started a couple of years earlier, in Sacramento, when !!! released their debut album, though they were drawn to Brooklyn soon enough. They were the Rapture before the Rapture—hardcore kids flushed with the discovery of samplers and dance music—and they shared an early bassist with LCD Soundsystem. They also had an extremely fun side project, Out Hud, that was more deeply indebted to house and electro than the disco-punk main unit, in which they raised fleets of horns and crashing cymbals for their freewheeling live shows. They were a ray of California sunshine piercing the paranoid gloom of their milieu, Day-Glo fashion hippies singing songs for pleasure instead of well-dressed men singing songs for oblivion. Let It Be Blue shows how dashingly they’ve settled into that role and ripened into their vintage influences.
All the strutting basses, pouncing guitars, steel-hooped drums, ravey arpeggios, and playful vocal samples you expect from !!! are withheld on the opening track, “Normal People,” a hopeful-sad acoustic bagatelle that may trigger startling memories of Badly Drawn Boy and seems destined for a Noah Baumbach film. But things swiftly get back to normal on “A Little Bit (More),” if your idea of normal sounds like Claude VonStroke giving C+C Music Factory a deep workout. “Here’s What I Need to Know” is lathered in trance synths, while guest singer Angelia Garcia ties a golden ribbon on the pumping dembow of “Un Puente.” The title track somehow gets from Mr. Oizo to David Bowie by way of the Juan Maclean, and it’s one of the only times that the record succumbs to the overly fiddly temptations of file-swapping projects. There is also dramatic, straightforward Human League synth pop and fantasy disco redolent of Phoenix’s Ti Amo, and that’s just the verses and choruses of “Storm Around the World,” featuring Maria Uzor.
The flashiest song might be “Man on the Moon,” a cover of R.E.M.’s borderline novelty hit in a roller-disco style with the slacker flavor of Beck’s “Loser.” Or, if you’re a real music nerd, maybe it’s “This Is Pop 2,” in which Offer spreads the patchy suede of his voice over dark-hued electro-pop, dabbing it here and there with spot-on British new-wave tics. It’s a fan sequel to XTC’s 1978 cris de coeur about the anxiety of definition, which likewise appeared on an album with a Beatles-baiting title. A litany of contradictory statements about the genre cancel one another out until one truism shines with special significance: “This is pop, and it feels like summer.” But it feels obtuse to try to analyze !!!, who like to romp around in music history but mainly use words to lure us nearer to the bouncing cones, where the bass obliterates conversation, lest we risk what’s right there in search of some deeper meaning. | 2022-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | May 12, 2022 | 7.4 | 5c8f7d83-9ffe-49d2-abd5-57a8d3ee03c7 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
On his first Co La full-length, Ecstatic Sunshine member Matthew Papich makes bright, lightweight loop-based music for imagining you're in a perfect somewhere else. | On his first Co La full-length, Ecstatic Sunshine member Matthew Papich makes bright, lightweight loop-based music for imagining you're in a perfect somewhere else. | Co La: Daydream Repeater | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16080-co-la-weekend-repeater/ | Daydream Repeater | A couple of weeks ago, Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson wrote a column on what he called "the Tumblr-ization of indie." One of his ideas was that an artist like Lana Del Rey is basically a collage-- or in his metaphor, a Tumblr-- of images and sounds she thinks are cool. In a cultural moment when the past is instantly accessible-- not to mention one in which we're used to constant reference and appropriation-- it makes sense that we start conflating "who we are" with "what we're into." Instead of creating, the artist collects. As viewers-- or listeners, or whatever-- we learn to read between the lines and explore juxtapositions. Is it possible, for example, for me to express something about myself that can't be best expressed by saying, "I'm pretty into Hawaiian slack-key guitar music and body horror movies?" Liking things-- something we all do by reflex-- becomes a creative gesture if you do it thoughtfully.
Listening to Daydream Repeater, Ecstatic Sunshine member Matthew Papich's first full-length album as Co La, I revisited an experience I haven't had since college: Walking down the street, seeing someone wearing the t-shirt of a band I like, and thinking, cool. It's comforting to know other people like the same things we do-- in this case, skinhead reggae from the mid-1960s, field recordings from the Cameroonian rainforest, cricket noises, music in major keys. It's an incredibly lightweight album-- thin-sounding, super-repetitive, bright to the point of translucence. (Though Daydream Repeater doesn't sound stylistically like Ecstatic Sunshine, people familiar with them might recognize the directive: feel good all the time, over and over again). Papich is no archeologist, nor do I think he's trying to show off his knowledge of obscure sounds-- most of the time, he doesn't even bother disguising his samples.
Whether you attribute this to laziness or naive grace probably depends on frame of mind. By techno or hip-hop standards, Daydream Repeater would be artless, but my sense is that the music on it is closer to something like Girl Talk for audiences who don't like getting the shit beaten out of them-- music that wants you to say, "Hey, I recognize that," music that makes you feel included rather than excluded.
When interviewed for a "Rising" column a few weeks ago, Papich namechecked Erik Satie, a turn-of-the-century French composer who coined the term musique d'ameublement, or "furniture music"-- basically, the foundation for what we now call "ambient." Clearly Papich wants to be part of that conversation, or he wouldn't have made the reference. Whether he adds much to it or not, I don't know. The irony of Satie's music is that, at the time, it was considered radical and antagonistic. Papich has 100 years of art to validate music as brainless and determinedly relaxing as his own.
I've listened to Daydream Repeater a lot lately, but at moments when I otherwise don't want to be listening to music. To my mind, it sounds less like ambience and more like exotica. Its imaginary world is the yacht deck without seasickness or boredom, jungles without the fist-sized bugs. It's music for imagining you're in a perfect somewhere else. Five songs are named after places: "Egyptian Peaches", "Belgian Pillow", "My Jamaican", "Siamese in Greece", "Burning One in Stockholm."
That's where the Tumblr thing comes in. Daydream Repeater plays more like a mixtape than an album-- a document of where someone's been and what they've liked. Aside from one surprising flip of "Be My Baby", Papich doesn't seem as interested in transforming his source material as much as just presenting it. Here's a reggae song I like, he says, and then plays it with some echo. A couple of minutes later, something else. In the cracks between, some aesthetic takes shape. Some of my colleagues here seem outright frustrated by how little Papich seems to interact with his material. For a record so airy and noncommittal, I feel semi-conflicted about it. He doesn't really seem bent on invention. But I like listening to Daydream Repeater. I'd repost it. | 2011-12-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-12-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | NNA Tapes | December 5, 2011 | 6.2 | 5c962f87-c347-4a51-86e4-9cc8ba8bcaea | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Interspersed with birdsong, new age synth, and poetry recitations, a new EP from the English folk singer returns her songs to the elements that inspired them. | Interspersed with birdsong, new age synth, and poetry recitations, a new EP from the English folk singer returns her songs to the elements that inspired them. | Shirley Collins: Crowlink EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shirley-collins-crowlink-ep/ | Crowlink EP | Shirley Collins’ new EP begins with the octogenarian folk singer reciting a short stanza of a poem, her only accompaniment a flock of birds and the gentle brush of a breeze. “One morning in the month of May, when all the birds were singing,” she says, bending the rhythm of the words slightly upward, as though posing a question to the listener. “I saw a lovely lady stray across the fields at break of day and softly sang a roundelay.” It’s a short, simple musing on the motivation to make art and the passage of time—which is fitting because Collins has been singing a version of this song her entire life. The new track is called “Across the Field,” but Collins has long known it as “Just as the Tide Was a’ Turning.” She learned it from her aunt and recorded it first in 1959, then again in 1967 with her sister Dolly Collins. In 1971 she recorded it once more with the Albion Country Band, a loose collective of English folk musicians including members of Fairport Convention and the Young Tradition.
50 years later, Collins has traded those human collaborators for birds, and their chirping lends the music a peculiar intimacy, as though you’re overhearing her praying in her garden. “The tide flows in, the tide flows out,” she says, “twice returning everyday.” As with many of the best moments in her unruly catalog, the song is lovely because it is so fleeting, so quiet, so undramatic. Even during her heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she was recording albums with famed producer Joe Boyd and releasing them on Harvest Records (then home to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, among others), Collins shunned the spotlight and always insisted she was merely a conduit for the legions of unnamed English folks who collectively wrote the songs she sang.
Crowlink, like the two comeback albums that preceded it, reveals an artist who strikes beautiful and impossible balances: She makes public songs sound private; she makes the past feel very present; she honors history by pushing it forward. Released last year, Heart’s Ease ended with a thunderstorm, a windblown drone of harmonium and hurdy-gurdy, and the serene chirping of birds. It sounded as though the old songs she had been singing had returned to the elements that inspired them, and Crowlink acts as an exclamation point to that idea. The EP picks up in the same place, musically and geographically, using those same elements and extending them further. The sounds reappear throughout these five new tracks, assembled from field recordings made by Matthew Shaw at Crowlink in Sussex, as well as nearby Etchingham and Firie Church.
Collins doesn’t sing on the second track, the meditative instrumental “At Break of Day,” which foregrounds birdsong against the ebb and flow of new age synths. She’s a presence regardless, her imagery resonating throughout the notes as Shaw explores these natural and synthetic textures. Together, “Across the Field” and “At Break of Day” make for an immersive introduction to this EP, which finishes with three traditional songs, sung tenderly and calmly, with a quiet resolve. Collins delivers “My Sailor Boy” as if looking back on a long-ago tragedy—an impression bolstered by the noise like crashing waves around her. Similarly, the closing “The Briar and the Rose” is less about any specific event of loss or betrayal than how those shocks reverberate through time—in this case, a rose and a briar growing from the graves of thwarted lovers. They’re old songs made from scraps of even older ones—including references of “Barbara Allen,” perhaps the closest Collins has to a signature tune—but Collins continues to find new meanings within them and therefore new ways to sing them. So the old hymn “Through All Eternity” becomes akin to a promise to find something that persists beyond the tides: “Throughout all eternity I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on,” she exclaims, speaking not for herself but for the songs themselves.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | July 30, 2021 | 7.4 | 5c96cdbc-ee26-4eae-9e10-7cefaf7edf3f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Grating yet perversely gratifying, this King Krule-adjacent South London band’s debut also contains music of inarguable force or surprising beauty. | Grating yet perversely gratifying, this King Krule-adjacent South London band’s debut also contains music of inarguable force or surprising beauty. | Horsey: Debonair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horsey-debonair/ | Debonair | King Krule’s Archy Marshall prefers to keep it in the family, breaking away from the conclave of musicians who play on his curated, hermetic records only for occasional genre-crossing collaborations with friends like Mount Kimbie, Trash Talk, and Ratking. So why is Marshall’s first new song since 2020’s Man Alive tacked onto the end of the debut album by an unknown South London band called Horsey? It snaps into place in the credits: Horsey features singer-songwriter and keyboardist Theo McCabe, King Krule drummer George Bass, singer-guitarist Jacob Read (who was once immortalized in a King Krule song), and bassist Jack Marshall (who is Archy’s older brother). It’s the first gleaming of what an Extended Kruleverse might sound like, and that’s the only context in which it makes a lick of sense.
Debonair is an exasperating, exhilarating record that suggests—but here the comparisons threaten to spiral out with hypnotic absurdity. You might think of Benny Goodman’s band being cryogenically frozen at the end of the swing era and reanimated during the 15-minute reign of Art Brut, but to simplify, imagine the Fall if Mark E. Smith could sing. I hated this album the first time I heard it, and the second, and the third. By the seventh, it had settled into my gray matter like a glittery, pukey miasma, and I had to admit that while I didn’t always like it, I kind of loved it.
In truth, it was mainly the first single and opener, “Sippy Cup,” that stuck in my craw: Though it’s played with striking dexterity and clarity, the theatrical surf-jazz brings back not entirely fond memories of hyperactive, anything-goes aughties bands with names like Architecture in Helsinki. It also introduces the protean McCabe at his most overbearing, modulating from something akin to Frank Black doing a Louis Armstrong impression into a hail-fellow-well-met showtunes persona. But he does it all with impeccable smoothness and a weird force-of-personality lucidity that’s irritating and unforgettable.
“Sippy Cup” is a lot, and more challenging moments soon follow, like “Arms and Legs,” which welds blues vamps that resemble Modest Mouse at their shoutiest to bouncy little organ choruses redolent of 1970s Beach Boys. One of these choruses goes, “Take me away/Take me to a salad bar/Feed me to an elephant mask/Lock me in a cable car,” and here we can no longer put off addressing McCabe’s lyrics. His surrealism resonates in a genuinely personal key, though it might be compared to that of Tom Waits in the ’80s. It goes awry only in one strange, stray use of the word “bitch” on “1070,” an unappealing Scott Walker-like turn late in the album that seems to say, We haven’t had any classical piano yet, so why not?
Horsey could’ve made a whole album in this ponderous vein, or that of the demented funhouse tune “Clown” (which is like the Frogs doing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins); thankfully they didn’t. Grating yet perversely gratifying, Debonair also contains music of inarguable force or surprising beauty. Its best songs operate on the same moody, underwater wavelength as King Krule’s contribution: On “Underground,” Read works a sweet, sincere melody from the merest rumble to a Four Seasons falsetto with superb control. The two-part “Wharf” is similar, packed with little tempo and genre changes that exemplify one of the best things about Horsey: If you don’t like one part, another will be along presently.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is “Everyone’s Tongue,” a memoir of a shark attack that harks back to Les Savy Fav at peak ferocity. On another plane entirely is “Lagoon,” a yacht-rock delight with an irresistibly lusty vocal performance that’s only occasionally interrupted by hellish screams and train-wreck transitions. It’s a dollop of glorious schmaltz on top of Debonair, a noise-rock opera that should be buried in a time capsule to troll the future, and also to get it away from me, because I can’t stop listening to it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Untitled (Recs) | August 3, 2021 | 7 | 5c9a2bd1-73bd-4f31-ba90-b50c361b4bde | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
A posthumous album captures the legendary drummer and Afrobeat icon at his most copacetic and polished, meeting collaborators at their level even as he urges them to his. | A posthumous album captures the legendary drummer and Afrobeat icon at his most copacetic and polished, meeting collaborators at their level even as he urges them to his. | Tony Allen: There Is No End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-allen-there-is-no-end/ | There Is No End | In a video from a Paris recording session in 2014, Tony Oladipo Allen jams behind a drum set, hands lightly grasping the sticks, his body at ease. His mind was likely laser-focused on the rhythms, and yet nothing about him reads tense or forced. In this moment, the late drummer, composer, and Fela Kuti collaborator personifies Black cool—a term that, to borrow from the Roots drummer Questlove’s description, means Allen radiated “cool heat, intensity held in check by reserves of self-possession.”
During his 60-plus-year career, Allen pioneered a genre fused with multiple signifiers of Black cool—jazz, highlife, soul, funk—while traveling the world as a solo artist and shaping the musical direction of Africa ’70, one of the most captivating bands in Afrobeat. Yet one of his most impactful gifts was his commitment to collaborating with a wide range of musicians. On his final, posthumous album, There Is No End, he’s entirely in his wheelhouse, directing up-and-comers and veterans as they find their place in his steps. It’s an intimidating mission for any artist—melding their own distinctive sound to the amorphous beats of those still sharpening their arsenal. But Allen meets his collaborators where they are and transfers not only his musical knowledge but his ability to embody coolness while deep within a performance.
Allen composed all of the beats on the 14-track album and shares production credits with Berlin-based producer Vincent Taeger and French musician Vincent Taurelle. Like his dynamic work with known and unknown artists on 2006’s Lagos No Shaking, “Deer in Headlights” is a magnetic meeting between the drummer and Detroit rapper Danny Brown. It runs like a whip-smart back-and-forth, with Brown bringing the hard-edged, always-on-offense style of his home city beside Allen’s restrained, unhurried groove. The hook is instantly memorable, and the transition from melody into Allen’s assured playing is a smooth curveball. ZelooperZ, a rapper in Brown’s Bruiser Brigade collective, is another salient presence. On “Coonta Kinte,” he projects anxiety about America’s need to diminish Black life: “Why you want me in the ground, cover my skin in soil/I’m just a Black man in a world full of colors,” he sing-raps, perhaps unintentionally echoing the thoughts of a character in Ghanian American author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s 2018 collection Friday Black. Both narrators portray anti-Blackness as a constant disruption that requires survivors to cultivate dark humor to survive.
Allen was born when Nigeria was still under British rule, and by the time he joined Fela Kuti’s band in 1964, the country had been independent for less than five years. In 1969, Allen was part of the entourage that traveled to the U.S. with Kuti, settling in Los Angeles during the height of the Black Panthers’ advocacy against state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and their push towards Black economic and social sustainability. The experience profoundly impacted both men. Fela returned to Nigeria emboldened and ready to die for his people. Allen, though not the frontman, molded his compositions to reflect the urgency, rage, heat, and fire of a diaspora under attack. The violence is ceaseless, but on this album, Allen and his collaborators make clear that so too are the collective cries for accountability. On “Hurt Your Soul,” the drums take center stage; on one standout section, snares like gunshots underline rapper Nate Bone’s fear of jumpy law enforcement agents who, while armed, are startled by the slightest sign of Black activity.
Aside from showcasing a legend in top form, the album also serves as an arrow toward future stars. British-born artist Lava La Rue’s ethereal yet confident tone and delivery on “One Inna Million” channels the agility of FKA twigs. Tsunami is quietly menacing on “Très Magnifique,” and Sampa the Great is enthralling both as a feature on “Stumbling Down” and as a student of Allen’s work: As an artist from Zambia who’s based in Australia and influenced by genres beyond her native country, including hip-hop and R&B, Sampa has faced a similar challenge of being put in a box.
While the breadth of voices here highlights Allen’s constant search for new creators, it also means the album tapers off in places. Tracks like “Rich Black,” featuring Koreatown Oddity, and “Gang on Holiday,” with Jeremiah Jae, could have been trimmed for a tighter sequence. Even the earlier released single “Cosmosis,” alongside Skepta and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, would have best served as an interlude connecting Okri’s poetry to the album’s overarching themes of self-interrogation and displacement. Its existential musings on the fickleness of world peace feel out of place and unmoored against the record’s more immediate and insular reflections of the present.
One of the most crushing moments of the pandemic has been the interruption of rituals, specifically homegoings. Bidding farewell to those we love while unable to congregate and celebrate the lives they lived means that mourning Tony Allen was a global but lonely act. The crowds that would have turned into listening parties were impossible to amass; amid worldwide despair, it felt almost selfish to mourn him with communal reverence that acknowledged his instrumental mastery and legacy. There Is No End is Allen as his most copacetic, polished self. It doesn’t feel like the finish line, but rather a passing of the baton—to artists who compelled him to evolve, and to fans always willing to be surprised.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | May 10, 2021 | 7.7 | 5c9a8da2-3b1e-46b7-8143-f0c54e3d1037 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
A new anthology of previously unissued performances covers three distinct facets of the jazz pianist’s career: his trio work, orchestral arrangements, and his endlessly inventive solo playing. | A new anthology of previously unissued performances covers three distinct facets of the jazz pianist’s career: his trio work, orchestral arrangements, and his endlessly inventive solo playing. | Bill Evans: Treasures: Solo, Trio and Orchestra Recordings from Denmark (1965-1969) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-evans-treasures-solo-trio-and-orchestra-recordings-from-denmark-1965-1969/ | Treasures: Solo, Trio and Orchestra Recordings from Denmark (1965-1969) | If Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is the most common entry point for a new jazz fan and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is number two, a typical next step would be an album by Bill Evans. The LPs drawn from the Village Vanguard sessions in 1961, when he recorded with his great trio that included Scott LaFaro on bass Paul Motian on drums, are widely considered to be the pianist’s high-water mark, but he was an artist of unusual consistency, not just in quality but also in musical vision. While the ’60s and ’70s were a time of rupture in jazz, with the rise of free improv and fusion, Evans mostly worked within relatively narrow parameters—acoustic post-bop played with trios, some solos, a few duos, an occasional date with a larger band.
When you pair Evans’ endlessly listenable style with a seemingly bottomless well of recorded gigs, you get a reissue cottage industry boosted further by the vinyl revival. Every Record Store Day seems to bring a new Evans release or two. The latest of these, Treasures, is a collection of previously unissued performances—over two hours of music, 2xCD or 3xLP—made for Danish radio and cut between 1965 and 1969. It runs counter to some recent Evans reissues by featuring an array of instrumental configurations, and it’s a strong showcase of how he adapted his playing to reflect the settings.
The first section finds Evans in two different trios he worked with for a short time, and running through tunes he played frequently—standards like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and “Beautiful Love,” along with a couple of standards Evans wrote himself, “Very Early” and the immortal “Waltz for Debby,” which appears three times in this collection. These are relaxed, warm sets with Evans in top form.
The second disc contains later trio recordings, this time featuring bassist Eddie Gomez, eventually the pianist’s longest-tenured collaborator, along with drummers Alex Riel (on the ’66 set) and Marty Morell (from a ’69 session). Evans and Gomez were like two halves of one musical mind, and it’s always fascinating to hear them together, as Gomez moves easily between supporting rhythm, undergirding the harmonic foundation, and playing melodic leads. There are some excellent livelier cuts in the mix this time, like the humming “Autumn Leaves” and the hard-swinging “Emily.”
But while the earlier trio work here is good and the latter is great, the more tantalizing Treasures sessions are those with the Royal Danish Symphony Orchestra and the Danish Radio Big Band, and those that feature Evans alone. The pieces for orchestra were arranged by trumpeter and composer Palle Mikkelborg and recorded in 1969, and included Evans compositions along with this album’s title track, written explicitly for the performance. For me, there’s something slightly vexing about hearing a jazz pianist backed by an orchestra of this size, if only because I struggle to hear the loose interplay to which I’m accustomed. That said, Mikkelborg’s arrangements hold interest, sprinkling modernist dissonance in with the lush cinematic swoon.
In this arrangement, the perfectly melodic “Waltz for Debby” sounds like something out of a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, while “Time Remembered” has a gorgeous, low-lit ambiance. Evans was experimenting with orchestra periodically in the late ’60s—his lesser-known LP Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra came out in ’66, and he had a series of live dates with orchestra in the city that year—and Mikkelborg’s sympathetic backing gives a good sense of how his harmonic approach translates in such a setting.
Bill Evans alone is always full of surprises. He used his solo work to explore extremes of touch and density. On one piece, he might leave chasms of silence and finger each note with almost painful delicacy, and on another, his playing might be very dense, as if he’s compelled to explore every structural possibility simultaneously. His quest for harmonic intrigue even led him to record several albums of him accompanying himself, multi-tracking his improvisations so that two or three pianos were heard simultaneously. I think of his solo material as something apart from his small-group work, unlike, say, Thelonious Monk, whose musical personality is more unified.
The full range of Evans’ approach to solo piano is heard in these sessions cut for radio in 1965. His composition “Re: Person I Knew” is a piece of rare beauty, mysterious and lyrical, and his version here is organic and alive, expanding and contracting as if it were a living, breathing thing. Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” opens with a knotty and angular intro before the eternal melody glides out of the clouds, and Evans sometimes seems like he’s wrestling with the tune, trying to extract every viable idea from its harmonic shape. Evans recorded a classic uptempo version of “My Funny Valentine” with guitarist Jim Hall on the 1962 album Undercurrent, but here he takes it at medium tempo and lingers over the individual notes in a way that makes you hear the lyrics in your head before adding inventive embellishments to the melody in his arrangement’s middle section. A few songs later, he ends his solo set with “Epilogue,” the haunting fragment threaded through his 1958 LP Everybody Digs Bill Evans.
Treasures is kind of like four mini-albums in one: You get a taste of Evans in a pickup trio, another with him and one of his most reliable collaborators, a suite for orchestra, and then an excellent solo set. As with so many previously unheard releases from Evans’ vault over the past decade, both the sound quality and the overall package are excellent, reinforcing the idea that this is important music that demands to be preserved properly. This even though Evans probably didn’t give these sessions much thought once they were over—he was a busy man during these years, always on the way to the next gig. | 2023-04-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Elemental Music | April 27, 2023 | 8.1 | 5c9bde37-e376-428a-82ff-60c90ef06106 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Working with members of the National, Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir goes Americana and discovers a great old voice. | Working with members of the National, Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir goes Americana and discovers a great old voice. | Bob Weir: Blue Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22368-blue-mountain/ | Blue Mountain | It’s been a slow transformation (and a decade of beard-growing) for former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, who hasn’t released a studio album since Ratdog’s Evening Moods in 2000. As co-creator of a jam-friendly musical language with the Dead, the 68-year-old Weir has never entirely been able to escape that musical flavor during his collaborations with numerous lyricists and producers, almost all geared towards live performances in front of dancing audiences.
However, on what is unquestionably his best solo release since 1972’s Ace, Blue Mountain finds Weir in territory that is both new and intimately familiar. Produced by longtime auxiliary National member Josh Kaufman, and working with songwriter Josh Ritter, a gaggle of National members, jammers, and others, Blue Mountain returns Weir to the American west of the Dead’s youth, populated by rivers and trains and cloud-scapes, all flickering at the edge of magic.
Pitched as Weir’s “cowboy album”—and the songs are largely about that—Mountain is both a collection of contemporary Americana and something more. While some of the material would likely sound at home in the Dead’s repertoire, like the good-natured gallop of “Gonesville,” it’s hard to imagine the latter lineups of the band treating the music quite so elegantly as Kaufman and company. Most often, the album lands Weir in thick-aired spaces not dissimilar to Daniel Lanois’ work with Bob Dylan, like the humming spaghetti western chorale of “Ghost Towns” and the misty alt-folk stomp of “Lay My Lilly Down.”
As Weir’s sixth studio full-length outside the Grateful Dead, Blue Mountain functionally serves as a reboot for the guitarist, whose solo sensibility long ago veered far from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s cosmic Americana and into the AOR waters of 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool (made with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen), the pastel fusion of Bobby and the Midnites in the ’80s, and the dense jam-jazz of Ratdog in the ’90s. With an ambient C&W production that often subsumes lead guitar into the reverb swirl (and occasionally swallows Weir), Blue Mountain will likewise probably prove inseparable from the historical period in which it was recorded. But, unlike Weir’s previous albums, Blue Mountain also finally seems like the right album at the right time for Weir. Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.
Filled with deep folk allusions and cowpoke asides about Mormon girls and Red River Valleys, Blue Mountain is very much a Josh Ritter album, too, who guides Weir back to the emotional turf of 1970’s American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. But Ritter's lyrics sometimes teeter between timeless imagery and folksy platitudes, with the chorus of “Only A River” and other moments sounding a bit more like a musical about folk music.
But one of the nicest surprises of Weir's recent tours with his former bandmates—and what really sells Blue Mountain—is the vocal gravitas developed during Weir’s two decades of life and music after the Dead. In many ways, Blue Mountain is merely a vehicle for it, which itself is quietly miraculous. “Bobby Fans Are People Too” asserted a bumper sticker sold on Grateful Dead tour, neatly summarizing the junior Dead guitarist’s spot in the band’s canon. Long acting as an overblown short-short-wearing counterbalance to Jerry Garcia’s stoned (and sometimes somnambulant) cool, on Blue Mountain, Weir finally achieves some of the grace that Garcia possessed so easily from a young age.
Perhaps Blue Mountain’s most striking track is the totally solo “Ki-Yi Bossie,” one of a half-dozen songs in Weir’s 50-year career credited to him alone. A wide-eyed C&W strum set in “a 12-step meeting under harsh fluorescent light,” it’s the only moment of Blue Mountain that takes place in the unaffected present, and not coincidentally, the only place where Weir seems to express something of himself. Never mind the song as an account of sobriety, Weir’s grizzled hippie verse tags (“Well, alright, right on…”) and wry lyrics about searching for meaning and saving whales make it a 21st century Marin County cowboy lullaby. Minus producers or songwriters or bandmates, it’s a place for Weir's steps alone, suggesting a wide open territory still waiting to be explored. | 2016-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia Legacy | October 1, 2016 | 7.5 | 5ca1e557-9c6f-4ba7-9133-3278956c1f29 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
null | Reading the news section on Manu Chao's website, you have to wonder whether you're looking at an artist's updates or some sort of multi-lingual, alternate reality CNN ticker. In between items about tour and festival dates, written in a mix of French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, there are updates on the Saharawi independence movement in Western Sahara, Colombia's FARC rebels, and other causes and interests of the singer. This is only fitting for a musician who makes left-wing politics the lyrical centerpiece of his relentlessly globalist music and happens to be good friends with the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos.
Chao is | Manu Chao: Estacion Proxima: Esperanza / Radio Bemba Sound System | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12036-estacion-proxima-esperanza-radio-bemba-sound-system/ | Estacion Proxima: Esperanza / Radio Bemba Sound System | Reading the news section on Manu Chao's website, you have to wonder whether you're looking at an artist's updates or some sort of multi-lingual, alternate reality CNN ticker. In between items about tour and festival dates, written in a mix of French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, there are updates on the Saharawi independence movement in Western Sahara, Colombia's FARC rebels, and other causes and interests of the singer. This is only fitting for a musician who makes left-wing politics the lyrical centerpiece of his relentlessly globalist music and happens to be good friends with the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos.
Chao is a superstar in Europe and Latin America but hasn't quite connected in the U.S., a country where his politics can seem fringy even to the left. But leaving aside his ideological drive and tendency to sing in up to seven languages on his albums (English among them), his music has a melting-pot logic to it that actually seems quite well-suited to a diverse society like ours. It's easy to look at his history, compare it to where he is now, and conclude that Chao was destined to become a musician without borders-- he was born in France to a Galician father and Basque mother who were living in exile from Franco's Spain, which made him a dual minority in his ancestral homeland and part of an immigrant family in the country of his birth.
Chao spent more than a decade playing in punk-influenced rock bands, including Los Carayos and Mano Negra, the latter of which punched his ticket to notoriety with its strange tours of South America by boat and train. In the late 90s, Mano Negra split up and Chao recruited musicians from Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina into his new band, Radio Bemba Sound System, which he named partly for the word of mouth communication system favored by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara during their revolutionary campaign in Cuba (radio bemba is a Cuban colloquialism akin to rumor mill, bemba meaning lip). He recorded his first solo album, 1998's Clandestino, with this loosely assembled band.
His current label, Nacional, perhaps looking toward the wider exposure Chao gained in the U.S. with last year's La Radiolina, has now reissued Chao's second and third albums, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza and the live album Radio Bemba Sound System. Esperanza, whose title translates to Next Station: Hope, a reference to a stop on the Madrid transit system, has a unique feel, flowing like a blocks-long street party through 17 varied tracks. By the time of the album, Chao had moved mostly away from his punk musical roots in favor of a sound that incorporated elements of Spanish and Latin American folk, reggae, African rhythm, and hip-hop, as well as samples of crowds, radio broadcasts, and individual voices.
The album is not quite the masterpiece it is occasionally framed as (it was huge in parts of Europe, where just after it came out you couldn't escape the image of its cover), but it is a very good, cohesive, and internally consistent record that functions as a continuous suite. Chao's adenoidal voice is not spectacular, but it ably delivers his multi-lingual message of universal justice and equality, and helps him keep his melodies simple and straightforward. Many tracks are brief, textural excursions that serve as connective tissue between more fully developed songs.
The way the Cuban-style horns rise on "Eldorado" is reminiscent of a car driving by with the windows open and the stereo up, "Papito" is a nearly unclassifiable mix of ska, Roma brass, circus music, New Orleans street funeral, and European pop, while closer "Infinita Tristeza" is an urban soundscape, casting somber acoustic guitar and organ into a sea of voices speaking different languages. Reggae beats figure prominently, mixing with surf guitar on "Me Gustas Tu", and subtly buoying the sonar-ish lead guitar on "Homens".
Radio Bemba Sound System captures a 2001 live performance featuring songs from Esperanza, Clandestino, and the albums of Mano Negra. The recording, a blend of two performances, never lets up, packing all or part of 29 songs into an hour, and I think it captures the inclusive spirit of Chao's music even better than his studio work. The cheers at the end of "Bienvenida a Tijuana"-- when the final line offers a ringing endorsement of sex and marijuana-- are amazing, and the transformation of punky Mano Negra songs such as "Peligro", "The Monkey", "Mala Vida", and "Machine Gun" into multi-genred beasts is something to hear. "Machine Gun", for instance, begins as slow reggae, kicks up to a quick ska gear and ends as a blazing punk song.
Chao's 10-piece band is extremely versatile, augmenting a standard rock set-up with horns, accordion, and extra percussion. They leap from reggae to funky merengue to punk to flamenco with flourishes of surf, blues, North African rai, Central African rumba, mariachi, and rock'n'roll while also switching languages, sometimes in mid-song. Esperanza's subdued reggae track "Mr. Bobby" is much funkier live, with a great psychedelic guitar solo and second, dancehall-ish vocal from Bidji. Because it samples two shows, a few songs appear twice but that feels like an appropriate side effect of the collage approach. My biggest complaint is the way the sound obviously cuts back and forth between recordings-- the fades on the crowd noise can be very abrupt and even distracting.
Each reissue appends a bit of bonus video content, which is plenty worth watching, but there are no audio extras. Essentially, this is a chance for Americans who missed out on these records the first time to hear one of the world's most popular musicians. They're definitely worth the investment for anyone who loves popular music that blurs the lines between cultures and sounds. | 2008-07-30T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-07-30T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 30, 2008 | 7.7 | 5ca5db8a-78d8-4cd2-9654-7ab0fea2e67a | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On his first release in six years, the UK producer trades the atmospheric grime of his debut for a more driving techno sound, lush enough for headphones but punchy enough to keep one foot on the dancefloor. | On his first release in six years, the UK producer trades the atmospheric grime of his debut for a more driving techno sound, lush enough for headphones but punchy enough to keep one foot on the dancefloor. | Iglew: Light Armour EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iglew-light-armour-ep/ | Light Armour EP | Despite his history of making low-end-heavy grime, Iglew has never cared much about bass drops. His music is more about building shapes that wobble in mid-air, generating tension but never quite delivering release. Urban Myth, his squarewave-filled debut EP on Mr. Mitch’s Gobstobber label, sounded less like a collection of bangers than an atmospheric distillation of how grime might feel rumbling through the club walls to anyone outside on the street. Now returning after a six-year hiatus, Iglew has ditched the gritty bass stabs in favor of a fluttery, more driving techno sound, once again revealing the adventurous spirit that makes his music stand out.
On first listen, Light Armour sounds like the work of an entirely different artist than the Iglew who put out “Lullaby.” While the old flashes of rubbery bass occasionally appear on tracks like “Caffeine Dreamer” and “Gold,” Iglew seems much more interested in building songs that glide in a heavenly mid-zone—uptempo but never manic, bursting with quirky sounds but never overtly absurd. They’re a perfect fit for his new home on Facta and K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth label, slotting right into the UK producers’ warm, tactile take on techno. Like his labelmates, Iglew’s music on Light Armour is full of bouncing marimbas and Mothersbaugh-esqe synth tones, carrying the torch of labels like 1080p and 100% Silk that spent the ’10s working to keep dance music colorful (in contrast to the apocalyptic club aesthetic of PAN and Houndstooth). Often, Light Armour calls back to first-wave IDM producers like Orlando Voorn and Speedy J, capturing the same gleeful intersection of ambient music, classic techno, and good old-fashioned knob-twiddling that helped bring electronic music from the club to the living room.
That sense of giddy excitement courses through “Caffeine Dream,” Light Armour’s first and strongest track. Over the course of its seven and a half minutes, Iglew sounds like a kid on a trampoline full of bouncy balls, leaping between mechanical skronks, elastic bass, and jazzy chords with reckless abandon. It’s the kind of dance music that’s lush and eccentric enough for headphone listening without losing the breathless punch to help it function on a dancefloor. Though the rest of Light Armour never quite hits that high again, it does give room for Iglew to flesh out his vibrant sense of club impressionism. “Microfunk Lament” adorns its barely there rhythm with bubbly synth melodies straight out of the Wii Sports menu, and the title track hits an airy stride that feels like Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib” put through a tropical-house filter. Though the songs rarely rise above a simmer, Iglew’s production is always immersive, and even the most ambient-leaning track (the moody, minimalist “Hawksworth Woods”) has a cyclical pulse that calls back to the club, albeit from a distance.
For an artist who hasn’t released much, the change from Urban Myth to Light Armour is dramatic, which suggests that even if Iglew might not be sure exactly what kind of music he wants to make, he knows how he wants it to feel. Listening to the EP conjures up vivid imagery: flickering laboratory machinery, icy landscapes, passing clouds. It’s peaceful and playful at once, teasing all the different directions his work could go without ever fully committing to any of them. In that way, Light Armour captures that feeling of discovery and expression at the core of dance music, as each of Iglew’s oddball rhythms find their own ways to sink into the groove and wiggle until we start moving too.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wisdom Teeth | June 8, 2021 | 7.1 | 5ca77979-3cdc-4176-9e40-b6bc70e57256 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The clandestine and engrossing Newark rapper’s latest is a seamless continuation of a long string of reliable records; it is also one of his strongest yet, engrossing despite its brevity. | The clandestine and engrossing Newark rapper’s latest is a seamless continuation of a long string of reliable records; it is also one of his strongest yet, engrossing despite its brevity. | Mach-Hommy: Mach’s Hard Lemonade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-machs-hard-lemonade/ | Mach's Hard Lemonade | About halfway through Mach’s Hard Lemonade, Mach-Hommy thanks his fans, then catches himself: He’d rather refer to them as “investors.” This word is both a reference to the unusual passion the Newark rapper inspires in his followers and of the exorbitant prices he charges for his music and merchandise (the deluxe vinyl version of Lemonade retails for $444.44, the standard version a steal at half the price). But as time goes on and Hommy’s catalog grows, the idea of fans as investors begins to evoke the image of a satisfied shareholder, idly reaping the benefits of betting on this nomadic maybe-genius who seems committed to quarter-over-quarter growth.
Mach-Hommy’s public persona––the quasi-anonymity, the wonderfully prickly interviews, his refusal to allow sites like Genius to sell ads against his transcribed lyrics––and his probing, uncompromised music might suggest a flightier artist. But Hommy has grown prolific, even when you allow for gaps on the release schedule where albums that are unaffordable or unavailable on streaming platforms might otherwise sit. Lemonade is the seamless continuation of a long string of reliable Hommy records; it is also one of his strongest yet, engrossing despite its brevity.
It would seem that there is an opportunity for Hommy to court some crossover fame: Lemonade’s digital release was exclusive to Tidal; he was photographed last fall at a meeting with JAY-Z, who took obvious inspiration from Hommy’s cadences for his verses on Jay Electronica’s A Written Testimony. But the closest Hommy comes to incorporating Jay into his latest work is a line on album opener “SBTM” (“I seen the same shit happen to Shan”) that alludes to a quip on Vol. 3 about rappers biting another Juice Crew member. And so when he raps, on that same song, “I was hidden/Now I’m risen,” you understand that Hommy––and not well-meaning advisers assembled around a conference table––is the one setting the stakes and scope of his myth.
Lemonade is mixed more crisply than some of Hommy’s other records, but the sound design––pleasingly jagged, occasionally muddy––is still the unifying force in his music. Hommy is a collagist, someone who can connect lines from a posthumous Biggie song and Baby Doc Duvalier’s reign in Haiti to MC Shan and the Atlanta rap group D4L (Fabo and the late Shawty Lo are both shouted out in the opening verse of “Smoked Maldon”––before Hommy compares himself to Steve Prefontaine). These scraps of material culled from seemingly disparate worlds suggest an observer so keen that he sees the source code of life hidden to the rest of us; he realized the value in masking up in public long before the plague.
When rapping, Hommy exercises remarkable control: at times his verses will seem to careen across the beat, becoming more and more verbose, all while slowly revealing an underlying, rhythmic logic. (This makes it all the more jarring––and rewarding––when Hommy opens his chest and bellows a verse, as he does on the superb closer, “NJ Ultra.”) But it’s Hommy’s intermittent singing that makes his albums so dynamic: See his chorus on “Marshmallow Test,” where the way he croons “One for you… one, two for me” turns an experiment famously carried out on children into a cool, capitalist taunt.
Lemonade’s high point is “Squeaky Hinge,” a moment of complete synthesis for Hommy’s technical virtuosity and musical instincts, his sly humor and his feel for the violent undercurrents in American cities. “The smell of death” wafts from apartments on gentrifying blocks near where the “hot mama” is “in the bordello with the Jonathan.” There’s a devilish bounce, even, to the way he opens the track: “What’s pocket change?/What’s house money?/What’s stock exchange?/All I know is clout, dummy.” Mach-Hommy is interested in evoking, not explaining, and has neither the patience nor desire to bring you up to speed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mach-Hommy | August 17, 2020 | 8 | 5cabd884-557b-400f-b81c-0bd04bf91a15 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Tricky's newest collection returns to the ethereal, almost fragile intensity that marked his well-loved 1995 debut Maxinquaye, but with the more solemn perspective of a grown man who's felt like he's lost his way. | Tricky's newest collection returns to the ethereal, almost fragile intensity that marked his well-loved 1995 debut Maxinquaye, but with the more solemn perspective of a grown man who's felt like he's lost his way. | Tricky: False Idols | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18064-tricky-false-idols/ | False Idols | I wouldn't blame Tricky if he was sick of hearing about the 1990s. It's the decade where he set up his presence, released his defining works, and then noisily tried to escape. That he spent the last dozen years of his career stumbling into the kind of modern rock/indie pop territory that didn't mesh well with his early aesthetic says something about how definitive (and potentially imprisoning) his fame-making sound was. Whether or not his genre-hopping would've worked out on its own terms-- and for the most part, it hasn't-- it'd have a hard time maintaining the moody, seductive yet stressed pull of his first few albums. But Tricky wasn't wrong to try shaking his trip-hop rep and attempt new things, he just sounded so adrift that it was hard to figure out where he'd find his way back to once he finally refocused. By the time he released Mixed Race in 2010, it became clear that the best-case scenario where Tricky was concerned was to either wait for some new thing to finally click, or hope that he looks back just long enough to be reinvigorated by memories of where he started.
False Idols tries to split the difference, and weirdly enough, it nearly succeeds. Calling it Maxinquaye for the middle-aged seems a bit too glib, but this album really does return to the ethereal, almost fragile intensity that marked his well-loved 1995 debut with the more solemn perspective of a grown man who's felt like he's lost his way. And for a while, everything seems right. The production's appropriately spare, moody, and elegant, streamlined and engineered to sound uniquely his while still throwing alternate jabs and nods to contemporary R&B's underacknowledged debt to his sound. But it's still far from monochromatic; the subdued yet rich minimal house thump of “Bonnie & Clyde” and the dirgy guitar squall of Antlers collaboration/cover/semi-rewrite “Parenthesis” are integrated variations on the stylistic theme, not whiplash detours. That sustained mood benefits greatly from his harmonizing and interjections with singer Francesca Belmonte, filling Martina Topley-Bird's role as the quietly assured yet emotionally driven foil to Tricky's clenched, whispery murmur, like two introverts trapped in close quarters. Going into a Tricky album hoping for that pull between beauty and tension is going to leave you at least somewhat happy with this record.
But the catch-22 of “return to form” albums is that without the dregs that precede them, they need to stand up as something deeper, something without ghosts following it around. And even if False Idols is approaching a more coherent idea of what a Tricky album could sound like in 2013, a lot of the record comes off more like a tentative first step. There's no overthinking here, which is a relief after all the tryhard high-concept ideas-- poppy hip-house, French Touch knockoffs, leering cock-rock-- that didn't really take off on his last couple of records. But with that simplified approach comes simplified songs: Only the gel-submerged minimalist funk of “Tribal Drums” barely scrapes past the three-and-a-half-minute mark, and even the more immediately catchy tracks start to sound like sketches on further investigation. It's most evident in the songwriting: Opener “Somebody's Sins” is simply a cover of Patti Smith's opening verses to her cover of “Gloria”; “Nothing's Changed” features a generous interpolation of Pre-Millennium Tension highlight “Makes Me Wanna Die”, and too many songs lean on simplistic metaphors and imagery that merely hint at deeper things they leave frustratingly concealed: the vague romantic overtones of “Valentine”; disjointed debauchery on “Is That Your Life”, the evasive “Passion of the Christ”.
And yet in the end it does show promise: the songs aren't bad by any stretch, and when the first negative that comes to mind is that the ideas need to be fleshed out a bit, it's a long way from wishing they'd've been discarded in the first place. Even with 15 tracks all averaging around the three-minute mark, there's little time on False Idols devoted to offbeat goofs or weird failed experiments, just a handful of songs that bottom out at “not bad but a bit forgettable.” A front-to-back listen won't dredge up any obvious duds or collar-grabbing highlights, but it might get this album's focused vision planted a bit deeper in your head. Tricky might not have succeeded in bringing his old sound 100% back to life, but as an effort to hit the reset button and rediscover himself, this record's a better-than-expected surprise. | 2013-05-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | K7 | May 31, 2013 | 6.7 | 5cb15cc4-2cb9-4bcf-9277-52a5c773f354 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
This score to the 1973 sci-fi film was sampled by generations of hip-hop luminaries. Reissued for its 50th anniversary, it remains a dazzlingly avant-garde fusion of styles and moods. | This score to the 1973 sci-fi film was sampled by generations of hip-hop luminaries. Reissued for its 50th anniversary, it remains a dazzlingly avant-garde fusion of styles and moods. | Alain Goraguer: La Planète Sauvage (Expanded Original Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alain-goraguer-la-planete-sauvage-expanded-original-soundtrack/ | La Planète Sauvage (Expanded Original Soundtrack) | While René Laloux’s 1973 animated film La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) is celebrated for its enduringly shocking, Dali-esque visuals, Alain Goraguer’s soundtrack is a surrealist triumph in itself. Composed for the French-language story of a planet where humans are hunted and domesticated by gigantic blue aliens, its orchestral fusion of jazz, prog rock and modern classical still feels—as the film’s adverts once trumpeted—“Strange! Frightening! Fascinating!”
Goraguer ought to be better known. Born in 1931, he was a go-to arranger for French pop giants like Serge Gainsbourg, Jean Ferrat, and France Gall, but he often avoided the limelight, using pseudonyms like Milton Lewis or Laura Fontaine. Despite the global stardom his music helped others achieve, his death in February of this year went relatively unpublicized. His score for La Planète Sauvage has similarly left a legacy from the shadows, having been sampled by generations of major hip-hop artists. Appearing the summer of DJ Kool Herc’s block party, it was dusted off in the ’90s by KRS One and Big Pun, in the ’00s by Madlib (as Quasimoto) and J Dilla, and over the past decade by Mac Miller, Little Simz, Flying Lotus and Denzel Curry, and Run the Jewels. A new 50th-anniversary reissue—including 10 unreleased cuts—is a fresh reminder that Goraguer’s score is a true avant-garde gem.
Most of the original score’s 25 short pieces refer to two motifs that first appear in the prowling, noirish opener, “Déshominisation (I)”: a descending melody and a twanging bass riff first heard amid a jazz drum groove, trembling orchestral strings, and flashes of flanged guitar. While iterating on a core motif is a common device in film scores, the extent of Goraguer’s repetition is striking. (A looming deadline may have necessitated his recycling: After the French-Czech co-production dragged on for five years—a period interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—Goraguer was brought on at the very end, and given just weeks to complete his score.) Regardless, each instance is full of new twists: The melody reappears as jaunty pop in “Le bracelet,” terrifying stabs in “La cité des hommes libres,” and an eerily romantic waltz in “Les fusées / Valse des statues.”
While an enormous procession of orchestral and rock instruments (from saxophones to flexatones) adds variety and color, the real joy is in Goraguer’s far-ranging uses of recurring elements. Standouts include the expressive female vocals, which deliver a melancholy solo on “Terr et Tiwa dorment” and eerily seductive sighs on “La Femme.” If this might be expected from an arranger for great chansonnières like Isabelle Aubret, his wildly contrasting electric-guitar arrangements are more surprising: from Derek Bailey-esque probing on “Attaque des robots” to dramatic soloing on “Générique (Fin).”
The album feels curiously unmoored from its time and place. While the opening guitars and bass of “Déshominisation (I)” are transportive to Europe’s 1973 experimental rock scene, rubbing shoulders with Can’s Future Days and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, in moments like the baroque pastiche “Conseil des Draags,” the score hurtles centuries into the past. Goraguer’s orchestral instrumentation suspends everything in a state of temporal ambiguity, while his constant jerking between aesthetics means even acutely contemporary sounds—like the Black Sabbath-esque drums on “Terr et Medor”—feel like brief stops in 1973, rather than grounding us there for good.
This reissue features 10 (frequently excellent) outtakes and alternative cuts. “Flore et faune” is a bracing highlight, featuring a tactile palette of ratchets and waterfall shakers, while the call-and-response groove closing “Le destin de Terr” is one of the melodic motif’s finest interpretations. The alternative versions reveal interesting new dimensions to recordings on the original score, but are generally less dazzling: The staccato, squalling alternative take of “Déshominisation (II)” can’t help but underwhelm after the more grandiose orchestral version.
The greatest triumph of Goraguer’s score is how engaging it is even when heard outside the context of the film. While track titles indicate the scene each piece accompanies, the rapid-fire impression created by their brevity and track-to-track contrast divorces the record from the film’s pacing; the story becomes easy to put out of mind. For those who haven’t seen the film, La Planète Sauvage holds its own as a purely musical experience: a breathless, Technicolour avant-garde record of bewildering sonic and emotional scope. Lurching between far-ranging palettes, tempos, and moods, Goraguer’s score remains an otherworldly adventure. | 2023-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | CAM Sugar | September 26, 2023 | 8 | 5cb1de4f-9e79-4a60-8c6f-cb70e95c8917 | Alastair Shuttleworth | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alastair-shuttleworth/ | |
The industrial music and metal sculptures of Tristan Shone can sound and look scary. But there are songs and even soul lurking beneath the grim façade. | The industrial music and metal sculptures of Tristan Shone can sound and look scary. But there are songs and even soul lurking beneath the grim façade. | Author & Punisher: Beastland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/author-and-publisher-beastland/ | Beastland | If you or I wanted to mess with the pitch of an electronic bass signal, we’d probably plug in the nearest $50 MIDI controller and have at it. But we are not Author & Punisher. When Tristan Shone, who has made music under that justly severe moniker since 2005, wants to mess with such a pitch, he gears two high-torque motors to a pair of throttles, giving them autopilot and force-feedback functions. When he performs, it looks like he’s trying to fly an X-Wing with a bad steering rack into the Death Star.
Though he had already issued a few albums of moody industrial music before 2010, those throttles were the first “drone machines” the San Diego-based robotics engineer with a master’s degree in sculpture designed and fabricated. Shone literalized the idea of sonic sculpture, fusing the ethereal and the physical into an industrial metal vision. This tension characterizes Shone’s cursed soundscapes, too, which rampage between rhythm and randomness, melody and mayhem, infernal depths and screaming heights.
Eight years and a half-dozen releases later, Shone has released his Relapse debut, Beastland. His arsenal has grown to include so many forbidding prosthetics and devices he’s like a Rube Goldberg war machine stamping out arty Godflesh songs in stainless steel, his industrial core sprouting tumors of doom, drone, noise, and, covertly, pop. Metal vocals are recessed inside demonic sub-bass, concussive percussion, and skirling frequencies. Whether simmering or exploding, these eight three-to-six-minute tracks are exercises in perpetual combustion, a burning darkness expending some unnaturally limitless fuel.
Most of Shone’s creations are not instruments, per se. Some merely capture vocals in the most ominous sense of the verb, portending torture to follow—his elephantine drone mask, his fetish-y trachea mic, his Bane-style headgear. Others control electronic sounds. His “Linear Actuator” is visually suggestive of both a railgun and a tank tread, while “Rails” looks like some cruel factory press poised to remove a machine worker’s arm. These devices are not just for show; they meaningfully shape the sounds Shone makes. Instead of being designed for ease, his controllers fight back, offering physical resistance and semi-predictable outcomes, sewing chaos instead of order.
But make no mistake: In part, they very much are for show, concretizing the sonic shocks of his albums, which can’t help but pale beside his live sets. The pronounced vibe of James Wan-style medical horror and medieval torture loudly states the music’s creepy aspirations, as if the nightmare-fuel vocal sample that appears a couple of times, first on “Nihil Strength,” leaves any doubt as to what kind of story this is. Shone valorizes the effort of both creation and consumption, pitched against an increasingly frictionless world. “Pharmacide” opens Beastland with a bass frequency I can't listen to on headphones, at any volume; it feels like a black hole opening in my brain. This is not just a performance of sound, but of struggle between human and machine.
Or, let’s be honest, man and machine. I’m not usually drawn to bellicose, self-consciously transgressive personas and sounds. I like music with a lot of softness, space, and curves. But under all the aggressive metal gestures here, it’s impossible to miss the songful gestures embedded in Beastland. Shone’s cold fury lashes the listener, but it’s laced with warmer emotional undercurrents of nostalgia for the raw, ragged soul of 1990s alt and indie rock. At its most inviting, Beastland sounds like the Melvins, Dinosaur Jr., or fucking Candlebox playing a festival stage over from Sunn O))), mostly getting drowned out.
Tell me you don’t hear it on “Ode to Bedlam” or “The Speaker is Systematically Blown,” a prettiness pooled beneath poisoned tonality, righteous chord progressions trying to pound through the calamity. Or tell me you don’t hear a humanizing hint of self-conscious comedy in the overstated ghoulishness of that “Nihil Strength” sample. No one without a sense of humor would fashion oversize control knobs sheerly to mock brow-knitting DJs, anyway. I’ve got one for him, then: Make something out of nine-inch nails. | 2018-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 6, 2018 | 7.1 | 5cb6875b-3bca-4e16-abcb-0a7a093d5a8a | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Since coming on the scene in 2007, genre-smashing West London producer Nathan Jenkins still hasn't released a proper full-length. Though not a proper debut, the one-sided 12" You Drive Me to Plastic proves as idiosyncratic and danceable as past efforts. | Since coming on the scene in 2007, genre-smashing West London producer Nathan Jenkins still hasn't released a proper full-length. Though not a proper debut, the one-sided 12" You Drive Me to Plastic proves as idiosyncratic and danceable as past efforts. | Bullion: You Drive Me to Plastic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15896-bullion-you-drive-me-to-plastic/ | You Drive Me to Plastic | Being a fan of Bullion can be frustrating. The West London producer-- real name Nathan Jenkins-- first caught a fire in 2007 with Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee, a surprisingly deft, quasi-mash-up record that married snatches of the Beach Boys' classic LP with a variety of J Dilla samples. Roughly four years, an EP, and a handful of singles later, and an honest-to-goodness Bullion full-length still hasn't fallen into our laps. This brings us to You Drive Me to Plastic, which saw release on Young Turks at the tail end of last year as a one-sided 12". The 500 copies went fast, and while it was made available overseas on CD this past April, it's only now available stateside.
While it might be the second closest thing he's ever done to making an album proper, You Drive Me to Plastic is, in fact, not the debut we've been waiting out for. Billed as a "non-LP," the piece's nine tracks blend into one another to create a 20-minute extended mix, highlighting Bullion's genre-smashing groovers that continue to prove just as idiosyncratic and danceable as past efforts. Using shorter, less movement-minded pieces to glue together three big, single-friendly tracks and a more ambitious finale, Plastic most certainly doesn't feel like a debut, but it also doesn't seem like just another keeping-busy-mix-of-the-month either. Whether the whole "non-LP" tag sounds like a bunch of nonsense to you or not, a little more Bullion in any capacity is a good thing.
One of Bullion's greatest assets is being able to work with so many different ideas and styles while being overwhelming, and the way Plastic is structured is perhaps even more of a testament to this ability. Each of those interludes provide a specific purpose, linking the more memorable moments to create an even more fluid experience. And while stuff like "Lol Express" can get by on its own merits, sounding something like M83 crashing into a 1980s cop-show theme, the real pull are the more fully realized songs that will inevitably end up in a "Best Of" folder along with his more pop-oriented assemblages. Everything from wandering saxophones, strange vocal clippings, chic club pulsings, and a variety of geographically varied rhythms coexist together while rarely sounding jumbled or too mazy. It shows that, for a guy who isn't terribly prolific, his attention to pacing and matching incompatible sources with finesse often results in success.
Bullion has often oriented himself using hip-hop-- he's the same guy that could thrown Klaus Nomi and Buffy Sainte-Marie on a track and still have it sound like an Afrika Bambaataa record-- but Plastic finds him exploring the dancefloors of Europe and the Carribbean. "Magic Was Ruler", which again features a Sainte-Marie sample ("God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot"), feels as if you could salsa to it, with a bright guitar line and horns that are evocative of a night out in Havana, while "Pressure to Dance" splits the different between slinky Italo-disco moves and Kraftwerk.
There was always a sort of deranged quality to Bullion's sound as well-- maybe it has something to do with the fact that his music has always had a joyous, almost spritely disposition, but often contained imperfect samples and darker tinkerings that could readily translate as feelings of unease. A good many of these 20 minutes explore even more haunted extremes. "Too Right", which features a pulsing Laurie Anderson vocal sample, is one of the more menacing things he's ever produced. Plastic might not contain your favorite Bullion moments (some of the shorter tracks feel a bit lost), but they're important in the sense that he can feel comfortable exploring certain extremes of his personality without compromising the sound he's been sculpting over the past few years. | 2011-10-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-10-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Turks | October 10, 2011 | 7.1 | 5cb724f7-5adf-4b45-b659-2074f2ac590c | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The D.C. dance-music vet and Future Times honcho drops a freeform set of free-spirited club tracks that show off his keen beatmaking abilities. | The D.C. dance-music vet and Future Times honcho drops a freeform set of free-spirited club tracks that show off his keen beatmaking abilities. | Max D: Many Any | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-d-many-any/ | Many Any | While the Washington, D.C. metroplex is one of the 10 largest urban areas in the U.S.—not to mention the seat of the nation’s capital—the music it produces tends to feel insular and intractable, unaffected by outside forces. D.C. scenes like hardcore punk, go-go, and DMV hip-hop show off a sense of both community and incubation. In the 21st century, Andrew Field-Pickering has been a bit of everything for D.C. music: punk drummer, broken-beat MC, house-music producer, jazz-fusion dabbler. His label Future Times also ranges wildly: In the last year it has dropped festive house, boom-bap R&B, and hip-hop that runs from jumbled to amoebic.
Many Any, his fourth album as Max D (fka Maxmillion Dunbar), was released without much fanfare on fellow D.C. imprint 1432 R and draws on all of the above sounds. Like the traffic circles of his city, Field-Pickering is a hub himself, bringing together friends and neighbors Mike Petillo, of Protect-U and Geo-Rip, and 1432 R’s Dawit Eklund and Sami Yenigun. As an album listen, it feels as casual as a few choice tracks and field recordings that have been dragged from his hard drive into Dropbox. Its 45 minutes breeze past without feeling overthought, with random interludes—a sneeze in an airport terminal, the crackle of melting snow—adding a little breathing room. He’s not trying to create dancefloor weapons so much as explore dancers’ headspace. That approach might seem careless or informal in the hands of most electronic music producers, but Field-Pickering’s craftsmanship comes through no matter the cut.
Previous Max D albums showed off lithe, creamy rhythms, but the machine meter of “I Think Our Souls Are Other People” is stiff as robot yoga. As the seven-minute track unfurls, though, the bass thumps and starchy snares slowly get nudged further and further apart, first by an incessant throb and then by vaporous noises twirling around the space. Then the beat falls away altogether, and a pretty, synthetic swirl balloons until the track has turned itself inside out and become a gentle ambient wash instead. He does something similar to the silky stutter-step of “Fly Around the Room,” taking its early-1990s feel and peppering it with small blips and squiggles until it’s as wriggly as the inside of a tackle box.
Other times he prefers stasis in his productions, letting the loops roll on without much fiddling. The dizzying hits of the DJ tool “Many Any Dolo Brush” nod to the slippery rhythm tracks he releases as Dolo Percussion. “Cuz Its the Way” is a throwback to the breaks of early-’90s hip-hop, all chopped vocal samples, chunky drums, and snipped basslines. The cumulative effect of “Shoutout Seefeel,” similarly constructed out of just a few elements, is mesmerizing. One of the longest tracks in his catalog, “Shoutout Seefeel” stirs video-game squelches, gurgling pads, tricky cymbal figures, and a reverberating guitar that seems to be sounding from the bottom of a swimming pool, every element rippling and floating weightless. When it abruptly cuts off after 11 minutes, it feels somehow too short, much like the 45-minute album itself. Even so, Many Any offers an expansive look at Field-Pickering’s casually subversive approach to house, techno, club tracks, and ’90s R&B. | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 1432 R | March 16, 2019 | 7.6 | 5cbd3e3e-5a16-464f-83c8-4f6f1ac41ed5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Puerto Rican rapper wields impeccable flows and pointed barbs into a forceful statement of queer Caribbean spirit. | The Puerto Rican rapper wields impeccable flows and pointed barbs into a forceful statement of queer Caribbean spirit. | Villano Antillano: La Sustancia X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/villano-antillano-la-sustancia-x/ | La Sustancia X | Queer kids have long identified with superhero narratives: specifically, stories in which regular people discover a latent power within themselves and fulfill their destinies. For Villano Antillano (“Antillean Villain” in English), the story that most resonated with her was the Powerpuff Girls, three kids engineered to be perfect little girls who are accidentally dosed with an unidentified substance called “Chemical X,” which grants them superpowers. Troubled at first by their power, they soon come to embrace it, able to defeat even the most evil boys with just a kiss on the cheek.
On her debut LP La Sustancia X, she leans into the metaphor, wielding her gender transformation as a weapon and reveling in the powers it grants her. Across 32 minutes of controlled chaos, Villano and her primary co-producer Ismael Cancel weave trap, reggaeton, metal, and pop into an electric synthesis of the sounds of el movimiento. There’s a direct line between her barrio barbie aesthetic and Nicki Minaj, but she also clearly draws from the divine feminine energy of Puerto Rican performers like Iris Chacón and Myrta Silva. From the first to last notes of La Sustancia X, she carries a natural swagger, making femme expression gangster and embodying a fresh model of femininity in the process.
Across 11 tracks, Villano makes the case that she’s a villain worth rooting for. On “Cáscara de coco,” she draws on the power of flaunting femininity in the face of “machos,” leveraging a Boricua expression that correlates human grit to the hard exterior of a coconut shell. Her sexuality is as fluid as her style—she’ll steal your girl or your man—and refuses to feel bad about it, because she knows you want a piece of her, too. The record’s drum programming is immaculate; Villano and Cancel brandish percussion from the Caribbean and the strip club with equal aplomb.
There are also moments of levity; she unapologetically embraces the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll of “Hedonismo,” but later tempers it on “Kaleidoscópica” with the admission that the pills are armor to endure a dystopia hostile to your very existence. And album highlight “Mujer”—featuring a combative verse from the Puerto Rican singer iLe—is both an admonition and a flex, calling out the forces conspiring against women while admitting those threats are no match for their own strength. While Bad Bunny has made Spanish-language rap-rock records all the rage, few could hope to link prog and trap as effortlessly as she does on “Puesta,” featuring Cuban singer La Dame Blanche.
It’s hard to imagine a record like La Sustancia X cracking the mainstream even just 10 years ago, a testament to the Puerto Rican queer community’s hard-fought battles to claim space—and the vocal support of the biggest pop star in the world. Her BZRP Session may have opened the door to the pop world, but now that she’s here, her collaborative choices suggest she’s propping it open and bringing her community with her. “Yo no soy un artista, so un movimiento,” she raps on the album’s first track (“I’m not an artist, I’m a movement”). There’s more at stake here than just one woman’s success.
While La Sustancia X is clearly a forceful character statement, you don’t need to know anything about Villano to move to these bops, or even understand Spanish to recognize her flow is impeccable. But her identity does add an air of authenticity to el movimento’s trademark braggadocio; these are war stories from the front lines, the ultimate flex from a self-actualized superhero. | 2023-01-17T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-17T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | La Buena Fortuna Music | January 17, 2023 | 7.9 | 5cc6a4c7-c9f5-402a-9a2d-ca491c537f6e | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On an expansive new album, the Los Angeles rapper filters current events through the distorting fuzz of memes, late-night cable, and barbershop chatter. | On an expansive new album, the Los Angeles rapper filters current events through the distorting fuzz of memes, late-night cable, and barbershop chatter. | The Koreatown Oddity: ISTHISFORREAL? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-koreatown-oddity-isthisforreal/ | ISTHISFORREAL? | For all his painstaking reticence, the moment eventually found the Koreatown Oddity. A veteran of Los Angeles’ scuzzier hip-hop outposts, the multi-hyphenate artist spent the 2010s alternating between abstract rap records and nervy beat tapes, usually appearing in a rubber werewolf mask. Following the 2019 death of collaborator Ras G, KTO shed his psychedelic trappings for Little Dominiques Nosebleed, a gnarled work of autobiography centered on a succession of childhood car accidents. At times wistful, others free-associative, Nosebleed’s whipsawing chronology turned the spotlight on a rapper who’d long avoided it.
The follow-up, ISTHISFORREAL?, is a return to marginalia, one in conversation with the work of art-rap forerunners Quelle Chris, Open Mike Eagle, and R.A.P. Ferreira. Nine years into his recording career, KTO is now lodged comfortably in a scene of cerebral loners in their thirties and forties, loosely based in Brooklyn and L.A. but more firmly rooted online. Like Eagle’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce and Quelle and Jean Grae’s Everything’s Fine, ISTHISFORREAL? approaches current events obliquely, filtering them through the distorting fuzz of memes, late-night cable, and barbershop chatter.
The album’s discourse is dour and claustrophobic. On “History Tension,” the ambient drone of grief and police violence is condensed into a blunt, visceral refrain: “The tension of history’s attacking.” He invokes anxiety as a living, breathing thing, yet ISTHISFORREAL? is animated by questions. Over the syncopated cleves of “An Endless Run,” KTO raps with a rigidness approaching spoken-word: “What is the signal/For niggas to know/What direction shit is gon’ go?” He inverts the inquiry for the melodic “Indifferent.” “Am I indifferent or desensitized?” he sings. “No grass is greener/It all gets fertilized.”
KTO favors a stiff, almost mechanical delivery, but he’s rarely bound by the strictures of language. “Misophonia Love” (misophonia: a condition characterized by sensitivity to repetitive and soft sounds, as breathing, chewing, clicking, etc.) pairs ASMR vocals with new jack swing-style 808 drums as KTO’s narrator fetishizes the act of chewing almonds and rubbing together gym socks. In the first chorus, his precise diction makes the song’s title sound like “Me so funny in love.” On the second, the inflection is delicately shifted: “Me so phony in love.” Even the more lighthearted moments are rich with subtext.
Like a De La Soul project, ISTHISFORREAL? gestures at a running talk-show concept without really committing to the bit. Instead, KTO deploys a breadth of styles to match the record’s expansive themes. “Existential Landlord” wanders into noise-pop territory; “Homeboys in Outerspace” and “Hellloooo???” veer into full-on sci-fi. But the title track functions as a centerpiece, returning to Nosebleed’s tone of diaristic poignancy. After some quirky editorializing (“When y’all think of Karen, it’s a racist white bitch/When I think of Karen, it’s an auntie we miss”), KTO expresses gratitude that, during the month of July 2019, his newborn daughter briefly occupied the same earthly plane as his friend Ras G. The song concludes with a jarring edict: “I wish I could say that it was unusual/To hop on a plane from a prom to a funeral.” In the context of ISTHISFORREAL?, paranoia is nothing more or less than a survival instinct. | 2022-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | July 28, 2022 | 7.1 | 5ccc44d3-36b6-4e5b-a7b1-d9289366bb86 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/62ded88e4e5e79e85598915e/3:2/w_600,h_400,c_limit/The%20Koreatown%20Oddity%20-%20ISTHISFORREAL |
Latest from David Tibet features multiple versions of Charles Wesley's 18th century poem "Idumea", as well as contributions from Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Antony, and Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny. | Latest from David Tibet features multiple versions of Charles Wesley's 18th century poem "Idumea", as well as contributions from Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Antony, and Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny. | Current 93: Black Ships Ate the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9224-black-ships-ate-the-sky/ | Black Ships Ate the Sky | Even the most casual Current 93 fan knows David Tibet's career has tended toward rue and malice: cracked spiels, sunken solemnity, opiate apocalypses. Of course, this has been going on since the early 1980s, but his past few albums have depicted an ever-expanding arena of anxiety and resignation. Tibet's recent output has been one decade-long spiritual crescendo, pitting atheists and junkie academics against blind blues oracles and Rapture-rousing dispensationalists. On 2004's Halo and this year's Sleep Has His House, the loosely organized outfit had maximized all of its most intriguing elements-- musical asceticism, mind-wrecked mysticism, intellectualism-- without lapsing into total self-parody. Black Ships Ate the Sky continues the trend with an extraordinary conceptual breadth (a formal song cycle based on a Methodist hymn) and some of Tibet's best songwriting in a decade.
Structurally, * Ships* is anchored by eight versions of Charles Wesley's "Idumea", a 1763 paean to doom and uncertainty: "A land of deepest shade/ Unpierced by human thought/ The dreary regions of the dead/ Where all things are forgot." Eighteenth-century hymns are not known for their entertainment value, and Tibet hedges his bets by enlisting a cadre of young sycophants (including Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Antony, and Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny). Each performance is unique, and yet the cumulative effect is cyclical: One Armageddon precedes another. Marc Almond's rendition situates an echoing Appalachian falsetto in the place where "flaming skies" break asunder. Bonnie's serrated rasp cuts through banjo drones. Baby Dee bristles with stormless rage and cool regret. The two irrefutable stars are Antony, whose doubled vibrato sounds like a shelf of glassware, and Shirley Collins, who slowly turns her honeyed voice into gravel.
Tibet mentions that the album's conceptual scheme comes from "a dream I had that Black Ships had entered our skies in preparation for the arising of the final Caesar and for the Second Coming of Christ." Regardless of one's disposition toward sin and redemption, that idea is certainly enough to warrant a full album, and Tibet is nearly unrivaled as a ranting doomsayer. He observes that "flying moons scare children," proclaims that he is "the king of the Eucharist," and obliges listeners to "kill Caesar like black ships eat skies." That solid advice is administered with weaving violins and a guitar that howls from the galley. Even in an era of freak-folk minstrelsy, Tibet makes nonsense sound genuinely harrowing. As always, you can accept his imagery as a profound allegory of warfare and disaster, or you could just read it as a sophisticated treatise on lunacy. A sentimental favorite is "The Autistic Imperium Is Nihil Reich", a funerary waltz at which Tibet delivers the eulogy: "I want to make love with the umbrella ladies who inhabit the stealing time." He is backed by dust storms, creaky floorboards, and streaking violas. The songs are incendiary and cosmic: solar flares and vibratory crackles on "The Dissolution of the Boat", steel-plated screams on "Black Ships Seen Last Year of Heaven", the slow contractions of a melodica on Clodagh Simonds' "Idumea". As a further development of the apocalyptic narrative, the album becomes less reliant on acoustic austerity and folk balladry. "Black Ships Were Sinking" drums up lashing typhoons of metal filaments, gibbering cellos, and cybernetic locust. "Black Ships Ate the Sky" is probably Tibet's most savage song since the early 1990s, a disconcerting concentration of hemorrhaging drums and lo-fi thrash. But these brash interludes hardly detract from the general sensation of suspension and cessation. In fact, Tibet's finest achievement is compiling mournful songs into an album with obvious momentum and tension. Like all Current 93 projects, Ships is bloated, but this is more of an inevitability than an accident. Despite patches of plodding esoterica, Black Ships builds elegy and aggression into hell-fire incantations. It's a mesmeric album made for midnight crackpots, acid-addled prophets, and nebbish posers. | 2006-07-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2006-07-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Durtro | July 21, 2006 | 8 | 5ccf4ac3-aca2-4341-9323-0dc09cf78dbd | Alex Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-lindhart/ | null |
Against soft keys and faint wells of synth, the Scottish singer-songwriter’s intense, intimate songs sound like unmediated transpositions of feeling. | Against soft keys and faint wells of synth, the Scottish singer-songwriter’s intense, intimate songs sound like unmediated transpositions of feeling. | Kathryn Joseph: For You Who Are the Wronged | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kathryn-joseph-for-you-who-are-the-wronged/ | For You Who Are the Wronged | Across three albums, Glasgow-based musician Kathryn Joseph has gradually extended a loving hand outwards. Her first, Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled, which won the 2015 Scottish Album of the Year award, was an intensely personal and interior record about loss, made in response to the death of her son Joseph (whose name she subsequently adopted as her stage moniker). In 2018, From When I Wake the Want Is featured the stories of some of Joseph’s loved ones: a young niece who suffered a severe illness, friends who temporarily lost their strength and self-worth to abusive relationships. Joseph’s music is urgent, sparse, and largely unembellished, its intimate, slow-burning intensity rendered without distraction or added drama. Often, her songs sound like unmediated transpositions of feeling.
Like her previous records, for you who are the wronged takes desecration and pain as its subject matter, though it presents a more abstract and generalized view, addressing abuse and trauma as broad topics, rather than individual stories. Now reaching out a hand to anyone who might take it, Joseph uses pain as an entrypoint to human connection. From her place of abjection, she offers peace and loving kindness, encouraging whoever hears her music to find themselves in it and to seek power. To do this, she renders brutal subject matter—the violence of those who use their love to abuse—into a soft, soporific register, not unlike a kind of true crime ASMR.
Her luminous brand of minimalism makes use of a very limited and quaint palette of sounds. She plays each of these songs on a keyboard with the subdued twinkle of a music box, almost entirely in a wiggly 3/4 time signature, drumless rhythms spinning in a ceaseless waltz. Her quavering voice, with its tiny reverb tails, establishes a simultaneous nearness and distance. In its cursive expression and diminutive intensity, it recalls Swedish singer Stina Nordenstam. Paradoxically, Joseph carries the majority of her vocal intensity within the diminishing of each note. On “until the truth of you,” her vibrato sounds like the agitated flapping of a bird’s wings, and in its exigent refrain, she wheezes to be heard.
Every element on the album—the sounds of Joseph’s voice and keys, alongside the faint embellishment of collaborator Lomond Campbell’s modular synths—reverberates as long as its breath can carry. Joseph battles against the negative space, conveying her essential urge to communicate and the inadequacy of her keys to transpose her emotional furor. The contrast is immaculate and occasionally excruciating, endowing the tiniest sounds with monumental impact. On the title track, Joseph is simultaneously at her wildest and most restrained; her whisper becomes a wail, though she reins back into a warble at the slightest hint of catharsis. It sounds like the unbearable tension of wanting to scream yourself out of your own body but only being able to manage a howling hush.
Her lyrics, as nonsensically sensical as a dream, often resemble the echolalia of Gertrude Stein. “Until you found it out/You are survive her,” she sings on the title track, mutilating the syntax and manipulating the words so that they embody the broken subjectivity of the abused. Throughout the album, Joseph’s imagery is visceral, fleshly. Blood splatters as she sings of pouring salt into open wounds, of sucking poison from her perpetrator’s veins and spitting it back into their mouth. In its gentle violence, for you who are the wronged functions like a kind of sweet and delicate surgery. Joseph lovingly lulls you into anesthesia while prodding at your most vital pain, and then delivering you back to yourself: poison extracted, powerful, clean. | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Rock Action | April 28, 2022 | 7.5 | 5cd1dca7-d557-426a-96f3-5d8dbb953864 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Originally released in 1994, the Parisian rapper’s second album brought a particularly French sensibility to hip-hop, countering the hegemony of American artists—and the English language itself. | Originally released in 1994, the Parisian rapper’s second album brought a particularly French sensibility to hip-hop, countering the hegemony of American artists—and the English language itself. | MC Solaar: Prose Combat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mc-solaar-prose-combat/ | Prose Combat | One of the most frequent accusations levied at French music in the early 1990s—before French touch and the Serge Gainsbourg renaissance—was that the country only ever seemed to produce weakling copies of Anglo-American music styles, à la Johnny Hallyday’s preening Gallic Elvis. So it was a formidable shock when MC Solaar heaved into view with his 1991 debut, Qui Sème Le Vent Récolte Le Tempo. Thanks to Solaar’s nonchalant flow and a healthy dose of jazz instrumentation, the album packed a particularly French sensibility into hip-hop, reeking of Left Bank cafés and vintage Citroëns even as Solaar’s lyrics explored the underbelly of Parisian society.
Three years later, Solaar’s second album, Prose Combat—now being re-released as part of a wider campaign around Solaar’s early LPs—took this languid Parisian charm and ratcheted up the commercial appeal. The album’s cool rap finesse would propel Solaar to the kind of international acclaim that had eluded his compatriots, as he signed with cult UK label Talkin’ Loud and appeared on the Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool album alongside the Roots and the Pharcyde. If you wanted to introduce someone to French hip-hop in the mid ’90s, you would inevitably play them Prose Combat’s “Nouveau Western”: Its velvety Gainsbourg sample (from “Bonnie and Clyde”) and trilling saxophone line, crossed with Solaar’s gently authoritative baritone, proved that other countries didn’t have to fall so strictly in line with America’s rap hegemony.
That’s not to say that Prose Combat doesn’t take influences from the U.S.: The album’s jazz-funk-heavy production, boom-bap beats, and elongated scratches (at the hands of producer/DJ Jimmy Jay) clearly owe a huge debt to DJ Premier, while Solaar’s nimble yet relaxed flow, like a man calmly picking him way through a raging torrent of honey, is reminiscent of Guru. (It is no surprise at all that Guru got Solaar involved in his Jazzmatazz project in 1993). But Solaar proved definitively on Prose Combat that the French language, with its throaty (and very un-Anglophone) “r”s, nasal vowels, and constantly evolving slang and even stress patterns, could bring a beautifully melodic trill to hip-hop that differentiated it from American styles.
For listeners who don’t understand French, Solaar’s acrobatic lyrical tone is a delight to be savored musically, his voice dancing around the beat with the quiver of a double bass. (Consider the wonderfully percussive cadence on the line, “De la rime et des mots dans l’art d’arrimer les mots,” from Prose Combat’s “Superstarr.”) For those who paid more attention in French class, Solaar reveals himself as a masterful storyteller, like a Gallic Nas: On “Nouveau Western,” he tells the tale of Harry, a modern cowboy type who heads from Arizona to Paris, where he eventually ends up in jail. Throughout, Solaar revels in exquisite details: the suds on a glass of beer, the zinc of the bar beneath it.
The production, too, is sparkling throughout, a sinuous mixture of well-chosen jazz-funk licks, finely weighted beats, occasional live bass, and agile scratching that tied Prose Combat into wider trends in French music—in particular, the country’s nascent house music scene. Hubert Blanc-Francard (Boom Bass) and Philippe Cerboneschi (the late Philippe Zdar), who would later find fame as Cassius, worked alongside Jimmy Jay on Solaar’s first two albums and with DJ Mehdi on the following two. And it was Zdar who decided to use a Fairchild compressor—a piece of gear more associated with 1960s pop than hip-hop—on Prose Combat, giving the album a smooth but punchy dynamic range that was subtly different from American productions. The opening to Prose Combat’s “Dévotion,” with its filtered bass and echoing percussive strikes, sounds like an obvious antecedent to the European deep house that Motorbass—Zdar and producer Étienne De Crécy—would nail on their dazzling debut album, Pansoul, in 1996.
To focus on the production may be to impose a rather Anglophone take on things: Solaar is a towering talent in his own regard, and a bigger star in France (and Francophone Africa) than Cassius could have ever hoped to be; Prose Combat, meanwhile, is one of the defining moments in French hip-hop, and French pop as a whole. Yet the links to electronic music producers and their unusual studio gear help underline why Solaar’s second album was such a key moment in the march of global hip-hop and its ever more localized scenes: This is a record that looked to U.S. rap and decided it could make changes—an album that took on the Anglo lyrical template and won. Twenty-seven years later, Prose Combat is a “Vive la différence” of musical diversity that positively purrs in its victory.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Polydor | October 5, 2021 | 8 | 5cd38f99-af75-4a06-8156-82e63756e7ec | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Written and recorded around 2007 after Redd Kross were coaxed out of retirement for a handful of festival dates, Researching the Blues proves the L.A. band still has a knack for shifting power pop into fresh shapes. | Written and recorded around 2007 after Redd Kross were coaxed out of retirement for a handful of festival dates, Researching the Blues proves the L.A. band still has a knack for shifting power pop into fresh shapes. | Redd Kross: Researching the Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16908-researching-the-blues/ | Researching the Blues | Released in 1982, Redd Kross' debut record, Born Innocent, was to mall-punk what homo erectus was to modern man. Founded in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, the band, led by teenage brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald, wrote scrappy and bratty three-chord pop songs that betrayed a fascination with B-movie kitsch via references to Charles Manson, The Exorcist actress Linda Blair, and sugar-infused breakfast cereals. According to legend, they even opened for Black Flag at a middle school graduation party.
But eventually, Redd Kross accrued some polish. By the early 90s, the band had evolved into a heavy but hooky power-pop outfit. After a few years spent wandering the globe supporting less-worthy, yet more successful, alternative era bands-- Spin Doctors and Stone Temple Pilots, among them-- Redd Kross decided to hang it up for a while, easing into an indefinite hiatus following the release of their 1997 album, Show World.
And now, they're back. Researching the Blues, the group's latest record, was written and recorded around 2007 after the band was coaxed out of retirement for a handful of festival dates, and is just now seeing release via Merge. The McDonald brothers pick up pretty much where they left off, smudging vintage Cheap Trick riffs with liberal amounts of overdrive and balancing lovelorn lyrics with imagery swiped from the "cult" aisle of your local video store. But in a lot of ways, they're better at it now. Produced by Steve, the younger brother, lately of OG hardcore revivalist outfit Off!, Researching the Blues is a leaner and more focused records than its two predecessors. With the murky production artifacts of the 90s stripped away-- the heavy reverb, the walls of fuzz, the chorus pedal-laden solos-- Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.
Over the last several decades, power-pop has proven to be a suitable vessel for all sorts of far-out content, from the surrealist ranting of Guided By Voices, to the teenage ennui of Shoes, to punk-informed self-examination of the Mice. But from a structural standpoint, you have to play by the rules. There has to be a verse, a chorus, and a jangling guitar hook. On Researching the Blues, Redd Kross prove they still have a knack for shifting those component parts into fresh shapes. In just three and a half minutes, "Stay Away From Downtown" ping-pongs between vocal hooks and sticky guitar leads. "Dracula's Daughter" cakes on the Byrds-style "oohs" and "aahhs" to dreamy effect. With its power chord-driven teaser chorus and miniature slide guitar break, "Winter Blues" is the kind of song Weezer fans would gladly trade all of the band's post-Pinkerton records to get. Sometimes it pays to take a break, even if it lasts a little more than decade. | 2012-08-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-08-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 20, 2012 | 7.1 | 5cd40a13-0618-4fb5-b0b7-e0de86e82bf2 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
Natasha Khan's latest album as Bat For Lashes is a richly theatrical concept album detailing the story of a woman left at the altar after the husband dies in a car crash on the way to the wedding. | Natasha Khan's latest album as Bat For Lashes is a richly theatrical concept album detailing the story of a woman left at the altar after the husband dies in a car crash on the way to the wedding. | Bat for Lashes: The Bride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22067-the-bride/ | The Bride | Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, has an uncanny knack for world-building, an ability to craft a musical and aesthetic environment brimming with rich scenes and fantastical characters. Moving gradually from folk and chamber music to emotional electronic pop over four albums, she’s been able to carve out an uncompromising niche for herself, and while not as musically stunning as her last two records (2009’s Two Suns and 2012’s The Haunted Man, both excellent benchmarks for her brand of self-contained yet grandiose songwriting), The Bride may be Bat for Lashes’ most ambitious project yet, a true concept album, every song tightly woven into a through narrative from start to finish.
The Bride tells the story of a woman left at the altar—not because her fiancé skipped out on the occasion but because he died in a car crash on his way to the wedding. The eponymous Bride then finds herself alone and unmoored on her own honeymoon, grieving the loss of her true love and trying to find the strength to piece together the rest of her life. Written as a soundtrack to an imagined movie, it commits to Bat for Lashes’ previous flirtations with going full storybook while never sounding contrived or heavy-handed. Although The Bride is relatively more stripped down than what we’ve come to expect from Bat for Lashes, Khan has no trouble filling the space with her signature lofty soprano, which does all the dramatic work the storyline needs to feel real.
The album’s opener, the idyllic “I Do,” is a bit of a red herring–its strummed harpsichord and simple melody harks back to Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes’ debut album and first foray into the persona she's meticulously constructed over the rest of her career. It does its job, setting up the scene, but it feels pallid after her previous records, and stirs concerns that Khan’s storyline might be shortchanging her songcraft. Luckily, by the time we get to lead single “Sunday Love” The Bride has hit its stride, the track’s shuffling drum loop and plucked strings transporting listeners directly into the mania of the Bride’s pure heartbreak. From there, what began as a slightly unbalanced collection begins to take shape: the quiet duo of “Never Forgive the Angels” and “Close Encounters” signal both the emotional core of the record and the stage where Khan’s character begins to lose touch with reality. “Some say my lover is a pale green light […] I feel him come to me in the dead of night/And I go to the other side” she sings, and it's a beautiful moment musically and within the context of the record: The Bride realizes, through swelling synths, that death, rather than being an absolute barrier, is more of a shifting veil between herself and her beloved.
The second half of the album is a long, tapered comedown from this peak, with the soft guitars and mellow strings of “In Your Bed” and “Clouds” feeling like the tail end of a crying jag, when you’ve used up all your tears and lay exhausted on the floor. It’s still sad, but a peaceful sadness, one that ends the album on a semi-uplifting note. At its essence, The Bride is a sort of anti-breakup album, a story where the absence of physical love doesn’t mark the dissolution of a romantic relationship, but rather its strengthening through celebration and remembrance. Through the metaphor of her character, Khan weaves a story about the most simple of poetic themes–eternal love–but devoid of all the sappiness and clichés one would normally associate with those ideas. Its few shortcomings aside, The Bride is further proof that Khan, unlike almost all of her contemporaries, understands how to wade into mystical realms and emerge with big, beguiling pop. | 2016-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | July 5, 2016 | 7.6 | 5ce1ac0c-9e4d-4998-82b8-22a8a44c080f | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The London IDM polymath’s fourth album puts artificial intelligence in the composer’s seat, rounding out computer-generated rhythms and melodies with AI-penned lyrics sung by Koosha himself. | The London IDM polymath’s fourth album puts artificial intelligence in the composer’s seat, rounding out computer-generated rhythms and melodies with AI-penned lyrics sung by Koosha himself. | Ash Koosha: Return 0 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ash-koosha-return-0/ | Return 0 | Over the last decade human beings have gotten used to artificial intelligence nuzzling into our everyday lives. Virtual assistants like Siri have normalized the idea of chatting away to our devices, the self-driving car is (almost) a reality, and computers have trounced humans at everything from Go to “Jeopardy!” Computer-created music, however, remains something of a moot point. While computers are present in some form in the vast majority of modern recordings, the idea of a computer actually composing is at odds with a widely held belief in music as a deeply felt form of human expression.
Return 0, the fourth album from the London IDM polymath Ash Koosha, pushes against these notions. Koosha, who has previously dabbled in VR and spatial computing, used generative software to create melodies, arpeggios, and chord sequences that he then arranged into their final form on Return 0. “Humans are best at taste because we have intention in finalizing and presenting something,” he explained in a recent interview. “The computer can create arpeggios and melodies—parts that I don’t necessarily want to spend time on.” This interplay between human and machine is perhaps best seen in the album’s vocal lines, which Koosha sings from melodies and lyrics generated by computer. Or, as he puts it, “I perform the machine’s output as voice.”
Without wanting to sound like the last human apologist in front of our silicon overlords, these human-sung vocals are probably the most satisfactory part of Return 0. Previous attempts at computer-generated music have tended to deliver songs that are catchy without tapping into much human emotion—a predictable result for work born out of analysing vast amounts of data—and the same happens here. “Muzikenono” has a circular vocal melody that unwinds like a great spiritual yawn from the depths of the speakers, while “Wild Heart” immerses a soaring vocal run in the haunting sound of the Kamancheh, an Iranian bowed string instrument. Strong as these melodies are, though, they really flourish thanks to the producer’s effects-laden voice, which injects a touch of humanity that was notably absent on “Yona 1.1 (feat. Yona),” a song on Koosha’s previous album, Aktual, that was sung by a computer.
Musically, the album is more disappointing, for reasons attributable to both humans and computers. While there are moments of instrumental brilliance on Return 0—notably “Redempshun”’s warped neo-classical procession, which brings to mind the unsettling electronics of Wendy Carlos’ A Clockwork Orange soundtrack—at many other points the album flops, as middling computer melodies come up against all-too-lenient human editing. “Reach” seems to go on about twice as long as necessary, the pointillist synth lines soon losing their charm, while “Baptizanax” is shaggy, chaotic, and ill-formed, like a repository for all the instrumental parts Koosha couldn’t fit elsewhere on the record. You wonder, too, if the producer could have done more to tidy up the album’s computer-generated lyrics, whose nonsensical nature contributes to the album’s detached air.
In the end, for all Return 0’s innovative conception, the faults that scupper the album are the same ones that Koosha has faced throughout his recording career, notably a weak editorial voice and a tendency to drift that leaves many songs sounding like noises in search of a genre. Return 0 is an interesting record that breaks new ground without coming across as too self consciously important. Ultimately, though, it ends up a proof of concept that’s more rewarding to read about than listen to. There’s lots to admire here, but frustratingly little to love. | 2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | REALMS | September 24, 2018 | 6 | 5ce3d12e-a4ec-4aac-a157-d65843b98906 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Known for collaborations with chamber-oriented musicians like Sufjan Stevens and the National, Shara Worden is backed by the contemporary ensemble yMusic on her third LP, a record that both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope. | Known for collaborations with chamber-oriented musicians like Sufjan Stevens and the National, Shara Worden is backed by the contemporary ensemble yMusic on her third LP, a record that both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope. | My Brightest Diamond: All Things Will Unwind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15942-all-things-will-unwind/ | All Things Will Unwind | Shara Worden's output as My Brightest Diamond is largely unclassifiable, a designation that's favorable in theory but can also be deeply stunting. For years, Worden has drifted between genres and tones (assimilating bits of the opera, classical, indie rock, folk, and experimental canons), letting her vocals act as the lone narrative thread and defining principle. These songs were hers because she was the only person who could sing them, and that felt like enough. Still, while confining artists to a single sound or style might be a philistine's errand, it also gives listeners something recognizable to cling to; there are no bits of boat floating in the water here, and her third LP, All Things Will Unwind, both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope.
Already well known for her collaborations with chamber-oriented musicians (Sufjan Stevens, the National), Worden is now backed by the contemporary ensemble yMusic, who add plenty of playful bits to her oft-ethereal, shifting folk songs. Strummed opener "We Added It Up" is punctuated by various strings and toots; it unfolds like a Rube Goldberg contraption, all call and response. Worden sings about circumstantial incompatibility-- "If I was love/ Then you were shhh"-- with convincing fervor, before the track transforms into a quasi-reassuring mantra. "Love binds the world," Worden and her backing vocalists chant, but it's still hard to know (with good reason) whether those particular shackles are supposed to be a comfort or a curse. It's a pleasantly hazy refrain; Worden's best moments come when she's at her darkest and most uncertain.
The excellent "Be Brave" opens quietly, with muted drums and Worden's low growls: "I'm feeling scared and I am overwhelmed," she sings. "Be brave, dear one/ Be changed, be undone," she coaxes, and like "We Added It Up", the song proffers a tiny, passing glimpse of insecurity. Although Worden's vocal performances are varied and borderline virtuosic, it's easy to find yourself wishing for her voice to crack or crumple or fail, to be fallible in a way that's just as beautiful. The carefulness of All Things Will Unwind can feel impenetrable sometimes, and while her closest musical analogue is the equally ambitious Joanna Newsom, Worden lacks Newsom's oddball vulnerability-- it's the difference between performance and possession, and while there's certainly room for both, the former comes, always, with the risk of affectation. All Things Will Unwind's theatrical bent can read as goofy, if not wholly inscrutable (the slow-but-punchy "There's a Rat" feels cartoonish, while "High Low Middle" feels showy, staged). Mostly, though, Worden's drive-- to be so many things, to harness and perfect so many disparate sounds-- makes her work feel more distant than it should. | 2011-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Asthmatic Kitty | October 19, 2011 | 6.5 | 5ce6c96b-351a-4eee-af67-e50ae0e99304 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Following the solemn elegance of his last album Brace the Wave, Lou Barlow's new ukulele-heavy EP feels incomplete. | Following the solemn elegance of his last album Brace the Wave, Lou Barlow's new ukulele-heavy EP feels incomplete. | Lou Barlow: Apocalypse Fetish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22558-apocalypse-fetish/ | Apocalypse Fetish | As a founder of indie rock institutions Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and Folk Implosion, Lou Barlow’s career is synonymous with the scratchy production of an iconic lo-fi pioneer. When Barlow started releasing albums under his own name with 2005’s Emoh, he redefined himself as a more traditional singer-songwriter. And with last year’s Brace the Wave, he stepped even more decisively into “maturity” by crafting a solemn post-divorce album filled with complex adult emotions.
Barlow’s hushed singing on Brace the Wave conveyed the panic inherent in facing a major midlife upheaval. But after such a personal album, his new five-song EP Apocalypse Fetish feels like a retreat from a late-career blossom. As its title suggests, the new EP tackles end-of-the-world angst, which might have made for a suitable counterpoint to Brace the Wave’s lyrical themes if Barlow hadn’t chosen to strip the new material down so that it emphasizes his voice and down-tuned ukulele.
Barlow has been playing the ukulele since Dinosaur Jr.’s 1987 album You’re Living All Over Me—long before it became the instrument of choice for cute YouTube covers. But Barlow has never fallen prey to the preciousness that is often ascribed to the instrument. On Brace the Wave, for example, he used a baritone ukulele as a textured guitar, not a prop in a play. This time around, though, the ukulele booms in the middle of the mix, the toylike timbre of its strings offsetting the musical balance like a bull in a china shop.
Of course, we’ve heard skeletal arrangements and jarring mix choices from Barlow plenty of times before. But strangely enough, Apocalypse Fetish stumbles into murky waters, as if Barlow couldn't decide between returning to his lo-fi days or sticking with his current, more discreetly elegant sound. Like Brace the Wave, Apocalypse Fetish is full of additional trimmings that Barlow and returning producer Justin Pizzoferrato tuck behind the backbone of the songs. On the title track, for example, a sudden appearance of acoustic guitar and keyboard in tandem splashes the song with drama and color. Barlow even double-tracks the ukulele at times and his bass remains more felt than heard. Still Pizzoferrato’s naked recording style that served Brace the Wave so well only highlights how incomplete these new arrangements are.
As these songs show, Barlow isn't losing a step as a composer—his craft sounds more effortless as he grows. Unfortunately, Apocalypse Fetish is far too easy to mistake for a bunch of demos. On “Anniversary Song,” the absence of percussion actually strengthens the choogling rhythm of Barlow’s strumming, but it’s still framed as though he were performing it in a coffeehouse. Even if you think that works the first time around, Barlow scoops the percussion again two songs later on “Try 2 B,” a song that betrays the barroom rock‘n’roll stomper it truly is at heart.
Likewise, the ends of some of his verses on “Pour Reward” glow with a tail of reverb, but the song never finds the middle ground between its dry immediacy and its atmospheric gestures. “Don’t trust anyone/When it's us who can't be trusted,” Barlow sings on the title track. “We’re perverse/The safer we are/The more unsafe we feel/That’s the curse.” Having fleshed out personal crisis so thoroughly the last time around, it's anyone's guess as to why Barlow holds back from doing so while tackling a major social crisis on this EP. But by this point, Barlow is well beyond having to force the raw amateurism that once defined him. He’s no amateur anymore, as even Apocalypse Fetish proves in spite of itself. | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | November 7, 2016 | 6.5 | 5ce82044-7f5e-4a36-a32e-0cf93d87ce86 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
There’s never been an electric bassist as deified as Jaco Pastorius, who had the swagger of a stadium rocker and the sophistication of a jazz artist. His 1982 Lincoln Center concert is newly released. | There’s never been an electric bassist as deified as Jaco Pastorius, who had the swagger of a stadium rocker and the sophistication of a jazz artist. His 1982 Lincoln Center concert is newly released. | Jaco Pastorius: Truth, Liberty & Soul - Live in NYC: The Complete 1982 NPR Jazz Alive! Recording | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23126-truth-liberty-soul-live-in-nyc-the-complete-1982-npr-jazz-alive-recording/ | Truth, Liberty & Soul - Live in NYC: The Complete 1982 NPR Jazz Alive! Recording | There have been many guitar gods, but there’s never been an electric bassist as deified as Jaco Pastorius. And with good reason. A member of Weather Report from 1976–1981, Pastorius once commenced a concert in Montreal by jumping off a balcony and then onto the stage; in Toronto, he did a back-flip while playing. He wore his hair in braids, with bandanas, and in a man-bun (before anyone called it that). He referred to himself, echoing someone else of that era, as the “greatest bass player in the world.”
If Pastorius had the swagger of a stadium rocker, it so happened he had the harmonic sophistication of a jazz musician. With his fretless bass, he redefined the sound and role of his instrument. His sad, untimely death, at the age of 35—he suffered from bipolar disorder and was killed in an altercation outside a South Florida nightclub—only added to his mystique.
Pyrotechnics aside, his musical palette fanned out wide, as a composer, arranger, band-leader, and even big-band-leader. All of those roles are on display in this exultant, newly-released live recording from the Resonance label, which documents a June 27, 1982 concert at Avery Fisher Hall (complete with a 100-page book). The performance was part of George Wein’s Kool Jazz Festival and a large portion was broadcast on National Public Radio’s Jazz Alive!, a program produced by Tim Owens and hosted by Dr. Billy Taylor that ran from 1977 to 1983. Owens and Zev Feldman of Resonance uncovered 40 minutes that weren’t played during the NPR show, and have released the entire 130-minute concert in its entirety with the help of Grammy-winning engineer Paul Blakemore, who worked the original performance at Lincoln Center.
By 1981, Pastorius had left Weather Report, who were among the godfathers of the fusion movement. Having established his international reputation, he then formed Word of Mouth, an uncommon sextet made up of Randy Brecker on trumpet, Bob Mintzer on tenor sax, Othello Molineaux on steel pans, Don Alias on congas, and Peter Erskine on drums, all one better than the next. (Though in the book, Erskine—another ex-Weather Reporter—proves to be the most formidable raconteur.) Pastorius would expand Word of Mouth into a big band, and a mighty one. They were 22-strong on this night with some of New York’s top session players and special guest Toots Thielemans on harmonica. Everyone was on fire, with the precision of a regular touring act. In fact, they weren’t; Pastorius used different personnel, depending on the city he was in. According to the book, it was one rehearsal, sound check, and—boom—show time.
If the concert starts off jittery, with the frenetic 13-minute “Invitation”—the band seems almost too hyped-up—the remaining two-hours are a seamless, pitch-perfect display of A-game professionalism married to virtuoso sparkle. Even the sound is crystal clear, in a hall with notoriously poor acoustics, especially for non-orchestral music.
The next tune “Soul Intro” starts with a slow, two-minute Pastorius solo, showing off his elastic technique. The band settles into “The Chicken,” a funk number and one of the most rousing pieces of the night. Besides Mintzer and Brecker, the ensemble is joined by five additional saxophones, five trumpets, three trombones, and a tuba. Plus, there are two French horn players, one of whom, John Clark, is especially majestic in the Pastorius-penned tour de force “Okonkolé y Trompa” (which also included an extended conga solo from Don Alias).
Pastorius directs the band through rigorous new takes on some of his best-known compositions, like “Three Views Of a Secret” and “Liberty City.” He tips his hat to the jazz canon with Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” where Thielemans shines; Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee”; and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” He ends with the 1959 blues hit “Fannie Mae” and actually sings (Pastorius was many things, but he wasn’t a singer) before he mumbles the names of the band members to the adoring crowd.
The setting for the concert may have helped bring out the best in everyone. The 10-night Kool Jazz Festival was a big deal at the time; The New York Times devoted 2,300 words in a preview article. It may not have been Madison Square Garden, but painter LeRoy Neiman did the loud poster art, and many of those shows had the air of a big game, despite the normally staid venues. As grand as Pastorius’ show was, though, it was the beginning of the end for him. Erskine and Mintzer recall noticing his odd behavior on their ensuing gig in Montreal. And later in 1982, a tour of Japan was, in the word of the drummer, “disastrous.” Five years later, Pastorius was dead. At least this midsummer night’s dream of a performance is now available for all to remember and relive. | 2017-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Jazz | Resonance | May 27, 2017 | 8.1 | 5ce99501-0d60-43b2-944b-450f3475e076 | Michael J. Agovino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-j. agovino/ | null |
The Richmond doom-metal quartet strips away the excess, honing in on a grunge and psych-rock core and letting Dorthia Cottrell shine as an extraordinarily compelling singer and bandleader. | The Richmond doom-metal quartet strips away the excess, honing in on a grunge and psych-rock core and letting Dorthia Cottrell shine as an extraordinarily compelling singer and bandleader. | Windhand: Eternal Return | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/windhand-eternal-return/ | Eternal Return | Windhand do not do fancy. During their productive first decade, the Richmond quartet burrowed fully into the doom-metal form, mining its long riffs and splintering rhythms for a steel-clad series of three albums and two excellent splits. Their specialties have forever been their subgenre’s staples—lumbering anthems with hypnotic hooks, pummeling jams with spooky underpinnings, haunting acoustic beauties with defiant melodies. Aside from the crisscrossing harmonies of rugged guitars, flirtations with field-recorded preambles, and one half-hour epic best dismissed as a rite of passage, Windhand have kept their sound streamlined. No electronic abstraction or multi-tracked drum militias, no ostentatious guests or audacious operatic themes: Windhand have never taken the bait of experimentalism or willful eccentricity. At their best, as with 2015’s Grief’s Infernal Flower, they have simply been the powerful platform for the soul blues of Dorthia Cottrell, one of the most persuasive metal singers to emerge this decade.
On the unrepentant Eternal Return, Windhand peel away even more layers and complications, getting closer to a core of grunge and psych rock than their doom orthodoxy has ever allowed. Their fourth album, Eternal Return is Windhand’s first full-length since splitting with cofounding guitarist Asechiah Bogdan. The personnel change appears not in the way these songs sound, per se. The guitars are again omnipresent and enormous, with Garrett Morris doubling his parts, taking lengthy solos over his own riffs, and giving bassist Parker Chandler more melodic space in the mix. The rhythm section remains righteously heavy, dueling with the density overhead. And Cottrell is still the star, as convincing inside the bleary drift of “Grey Garden” as she is above the sermon-sized zeal of “Eyeshine.”
The songs themselves, though, suggest a Windhand more comfortable with itself, unashamed to show the frame beneath that lingering doom bulwark. Both “Red Cloud” and “Halcyon” sound like Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr. slowed by viscosity, the band’s weight pushing back against Cottrell’s voice with a Sisyphean relentlessness. There’s a new openness and sense of exploration here, too, as evident on the spellbinding psych exit of “Halcyon” as on the brief but terrific “Light Into the Dark,” where Windhand pursue the instrumental heights of Earthless. “Pilgrim’s Rest” is the best and most developed ballad of Windhand’s career. Supported by a sympathetic pulse and shrouded by fluorescent electric hum, the song benefits from the full-band treatment, becoming more than the afterthought or interlude between heavyweight bouts its predecessors have been. Backed by her own harmonies, Cottrell ponders the ways innocence can curdle into ugliness, how even our children are destined to submit to or stare down the world’s cruelties. Cottrell’s often been great on Windhand’s quiet songs, but she’s never sounded like such a convincing rock bandleader.
All these threads—the psych, the grunge, the doom, the ballads—converge for the finale, “Feather.” Windhand begin with four minutes of strummed chords and plaintive vocals, framing a feeling of suppressed grievance and conjuring the same potency as Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots while saddled onto MTV’s “Unplugged” stage. It’s not hard to imagine this as a potential hit of that era, either. But the song steps decisively into a span of monolithic doom, all marching drums and arching guitar. Cottrell moves in and out of the fray, the ghost-story narrator temporarily lighting the dark. The song triples in length, making this Windhand’s real moment of excess on Eternal Return and a telling reminder of how elemental and concise they otherwise are. End to end, it is riveting.
Windhand wrote Eternal Return after a close friend died and after Morris became a new father. (Speaking of field-recorded preambles, that’s his son’s prenatal heartbeat at the record’s start.) That cyclical nature and the polarity of our experience shape the line that secretly winds through Cottrell’s lyrics here, whether she is mapping the route between purity and pain on “Pilgrim’s Rest” or setting the price tag of life as death on “First to Die.” And during “Grey Garden,” arguably the masterpiece of the band’s four albums, she pushes past the enormous guitars to capture the razor-edge essence of existence. She’s waiting for a pot of flowers to bloom in the spring before deciding how to handle them: “If they’re going to die, I won’t do anything.” The same tension between ends and beginnings that animates so much of Eternal Return also propels Windhand. They took their most significant lineup shift ever as an invitation to turn not outward, for new influences and sounds, but inward, exploring their own four-part interplay and their doom fundamentals—nothing fancier, then, than another Windhand benchmark. | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 12, 2018 | 7.9 | 5cf51364-211e-4809-a91f-d2d95398f834 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On its fourth album, the Philadelphia band lets it rip behind Sadie Dupuis’ knotty, mischievous songwriting. | On its fourth album, the Philadelphia band lets it rip behind Sadie Dupuis’ knotty, mischievous songwriting. | Speedy Ortiz: Rabbit Rabbit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speedy-ortiz-rabbit-rabbit/ | Rabbit Rabbit | The steady churn of the average Speedy Ortiz album complements singer-songwriter Sadie Dupuis’ vocal approach; she sounds as if she’s thinking through the scrupulously worded one-liners, bits of fridge door poetry, gnomic confessions, and tart toss-offs beneath which guitar riffs yowl with impressive volume. Recorded with her touring band’s rhythm section, Rabbit Rabbit, their first album in five years, doesn’t unfold much differently from its three predecessors, but that’s cool: Speedy Ortiz are good at what they do.
Rabbit Rabbit borrows its name from an incantation that Dupuis, as a child with OCD, changed for reassurance. Dupuis loves words because she loves her subjects; she’s after new ways of seeing the reassuringly strange. In “You S02” Dupuis falls in love with the city where cars cut you off from the right lane (this’ll get ya killed in Florida), a “helltrap,” but the glee with which she repeats “no escape” while her and Andy Molholt’s guitars growl their approval is a tonic (when Randy Newman wrote “I Love L.A.,” he had to ironize his affection). Dupuis gets away with it because unlike influences like Elvis Costello and Veruca Salt she doesn’t demand to be heard. She prefers squeezing her high-and-dry vocals between the instruments, a strategy that forces concentration on the band’s instrumental finesse: Joey Doubek’s hi-hats on “Kitty,” for example. On occasion, those filigrees prove so fetching—say, the wobbly synth line on “Who’s Afraid of the Bath”—that Dupuis can’t sustain equal interest in her obscurantist narrative. Elvis Costello can relate.
Happily, Rabbit Rabbit offers pleasures chewy and crunchy. Eschewing climaxes and long solos allows this Philadelphia quartet to preen in the best sense: Speedy Ortiz project confidence in their clatter, in the eel-like slitheriness of their tempos. If a previous generation’s wordsmith once offered the fabulous line, “I’ve got style/Miles and miles/So much style that it’s wasting,” Dupuis ripostes with “Rather than hocking I was spitting taste,” on “Ranch vs. Ranch.” The final track, “Ghostwriter,” with Moholt and Dupuis in Mick Ronson mode, shows they can rock in a straight line.
When Rabbit Rabbit stumbles, blame clumsily applied instrumental novelties and lyrics that insist on being congratulated for their bat-shit inscrutability. “Plus One” begins smashingly with cowbell and programmed handclaps but forgets they exist. Hobbled by a line like “a cactus, bristling, inflexible through lifetime specials,” “Cry Cry Cry” limps from its opening notes. But the smarts and spritz of Dupuis’ writing, and the way her mates fuss up the arrangements, make Rabbit Rabbit one of those albums whose complications provide as much pleasure as hooks-hooks-hooks. Speedy Ortiz regard their audiences as good friends with whom they can share inside jokes—knee-slappers and groaners alike. That’s rare. | 2023-09-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wax Nine | September 5, 2023 | 7.5 | 5cf54324-4ab7-4a26-ace5-8ce15c476cb5 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Shackleton's 137-minute-long, 2xCD offering proves anything but bloated; instead, the double release is the British producer's strongest yet, immersive and shining with deliriousness, while continuing his nation's weird and wonderful relationship with dub. | Shackleton's 137-minute-long, 2xCD offering proves anything but bloated; instead, the double release is the British producer's strongest yet, immersive and shining with deliriousness, while continuing his nation's weird and wonderful relationship with dub. | Shackleton: Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16793-music-for-the-quiet-hour-the-drawbar-eps/ | Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs | Shackleton is incredibly prolific. He follows last fall's surprising dubstep throwback collaboration with Pinch with a massive offering on his own Woe to the Septic Heart label. Available either as an impressive (and pricey) vinyl box set or as 2xCD compilation, Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs sees Shackleton sink even further into grotesque dub madness. It's the work of an experimental composer more so than a dance producer, as this release (especially the macabre pit that is Music for the Quiet Hour) shares headspace with British masters of spleen like Nurse With Wound and Coil.
The volume of material here, clocking in at an intimidating 137 minutes, isn't problematic: Shackleton neatly separates (relatively) shorter rhythmic pieces (The Drawbar Organ EPs) and epic apocalyptic screeds (Quiet Hour). He's said it can take months to properly layer his complex rhythmic patterns, and his trademark drum programming is on display on The Drawbar Organ. He's still mining drum sounds from Asia and Africa, so his pinging, pointillist attacks contain a harmonic complexity unavailable to gated snares and wump-wump kickdrums. On tracks like "Test Tubes" and "Wish You Better", this creates a crawling, organic sense of motion not unlike watching beetles scurry over one another. And like an insect colony, Drawbar Organ feels governed by maths that we're not privy to but are nonetheless fascinating to behold.
Melodically, Drawbar Organ is Shackleton's strongest work. Throughout he borrows more than dub reggae's ghostly reverb; he also nabs its dark spirituality and the soft, reedy tones of the melodica. Cut-up choirs speckle the record, and electric pianos and (duh) organs also feature heavily. They turn "Katyusha" into a roiling, acid-damaged burner. "Seven Present Tenses" is unholy worship, while "(For the) Love of Weeping" is quick and lucid. Syncopated basslines stalk the tracks like housecats.
Drawbar Organ is a welcome expansion of the gray, minimal Three EPs (Shackleton's last solo full-length release), but it's Music for the Quiet Hour where his delirium shines. Just five tracks-- two of which are seven-minute bookends-- Quiet Hour welcomes back estranged collaborator Vengeance Tenfold, a spoken-word artist who who helps strangle Shackleton's most distended productions to date. (Tenfold is less laughably predictable than Kode9's partner-in-misanthropy, Spaceape, but your enjoyment will correlate strongly with your fondness for garden-variety Revelations-style soothsayin'.) The queasy, unnerving passages are stitched together like an 18th-century surgery victim, surpassing last month's Congos/Sun Araw collaboration as the most avant-garde dub expedition this year. The 21-minute centerpiece, "Music for the Quiet Hour Part 4", patters indecisively before a long vocal passage-- a grandfather dictating a letter to his grandson, Shackleton's most alluring spoken-word choice yet-- ushers the track into extended ambience, finding the midway point between Robert Ashley and Digital Mystikz.
Quiet Hour is the immersion experience that Shackleton has been building toward for years, an album that isn't just "not really dance music"-- like many of his productions-- but one that aligns him with avant-garde composers as well as other, less-mannered freakniks. Shackleton lives in Berlin, now, but he's a UK transplant, one that obviously still shares that country's long-held fascination with dub. Drawbar Organ / Quiet Hour takes that fascination and grinds it in the back molars, spitting out something lumpy, infirm, and wonderfully transformed. | 2012-06-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | June 21, 2012 | 8 | 5cfe86d3-1335-42ca-8d21-6a27b31e6248 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Brooklyn post-punk trio’s debut full-length reveals an instinct for scrappy, empathetic songwriting. | The Brooklyn post-punk trio’s debut full-length reveals an instinct for scrappy, empathetic songwriting. | Patio: Essentials | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patio-essentials/ | Essentials | In 2014, Patio was the fictitious brainchild of Loren DiBlasi, then a music journalist who fancied bass guitar but had yet to pick one up. Linking with guitarist friend Lindsey-Paige McCloy, DiBlasi learned bass by replicating Pavement and Blink-182 licks. College friend Alice Suh, who’d just taken up drum lessons, completed the trio. Mitski accepted an invitation to their first show, and nearly five years later, Patio are a frequent opening act on the Brooklyn DIY scene, sharing bills with the likes of Deeper and Les Savy Fav. Their debut full-length, Essentials, reveals an instinct for scrappy, empathetic songwriting that was just waiting to be borne out.
The sprightly post-punk of Essentials commands attention, not because it’s overzealous or hyperbolic, but because of the vigor Patio bring to their songs. Their attitude recalls predecessors like Dig Me Out-era Sleater-Kinney, but Patio inject the final product with enough modern indie-pop influence to clear them of imitator status. They show off a knack for writing unconventional chord progressions in songs like “Endgame” and “Scum,” where Suh’s drum patterns become an unexpected focal point over zippy guitar melodies.
When DiBlasi’s deadpan alternates with McCloy’s croons, the result is a testament to the band’s sharp wit. Backed by buoyant riffs, the women trade lines on “Boy Scout,” McCloy gliding along the verses until DiBlasi interjects with a bleakly conversational chorus: “I went shopping the other day/This week I can afford to feel better.” Later, “Boy Scout” name-drops one of Patio’s New York City indie-rock peers—“I think I’m gonna go home and listen to Washer instead of spending any more time with you”—a celebration of introversion for those in the know.
With just 10 tracks that run under half an hour, Essentials can feel rushed. Raucous opener “Split,” soaring sing-along “New Reality,” and the feisty but fleeting “Boy Scout” would all benefit from more space to sprawl. At almost six minutes, “Open” is an anomaly: It’s by far the band’s most evocative and moving song to date, evidence of the potential Patio have when they allot more time to their songwriting. Hypnotic and morose, the song splices a heavy therapy session into tender hush and flashes of rugged noise. DiBlasi’s drone is especially haunting here, with some of Patio’s most poignant and enigmatic lyricism: “I only have one body to give, and you took it.” The song reads more like an intimate stream of consciousness than a rehearsed composition. “Sometimes I cry when I listen to classical music/...It’s so sad to think I’ll never create something so beautiful,” DiBlasi admits. Maybe she’s right, but Patio’s unyielding nerve on Essentials is a firm start to their own musical history. | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | April 13, 2019 | 7.3 | 5d08cdff-9823-4d26-a625-8a314088c713 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Regina Spektor’s first album in six years is weighty and ambitious, full of sweeping string arrangements and cosmic ruminations on love and loss. | Regina Spektor’s first album in six years is weighty and ambitious, full of sweeping string arrangements and cosmic ruminations on love and loss. | Regina Spektor: Home, before and after | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/regina-spektor-home-before-and-after/ | Home, before and after | A great Regina Spektor song unfurls like a short story with the boring parts excised. Like “Chemo Limo,” “Samson,” and other iPod-era bangers, “Becoming All Alone” fits the bill. It’s a wry ballad that imagines what it might be like to grab a beer with God, and its lonesome chorus has that Spektorian quality of making sincerity seem like a superpower. Watching Spektor, alone at the piano, debut the song at a benefit concert back in 2014, I remember feeling like I was being let in on a secret. Someone uploaded an amateur recording to YouTube, and fans passed it around like a treasure, wondering when she might record the song.
Now, nearly eight years later, that wish has been granted. “Becoming All Alone” is the opening song on Spektor’s eighth album, Home, before and after. But the track’s quiet vulnerability has been lost. The studio version is ornamented with vast, Technicolor strings and a beefy, “Torn”-adjacent drum loop that has the odd task of imposing a funky backbeat onto a track that isn’t particularly funky at all. There’s a great song hiding there, but the arrangement is so slick it makes “Fidelity” sound like a demo.
I know, I know: Don’t get too attached to the early live version. It’s an unspoken rule of pop fandom. Yet the song’s evolution reflects the guiding impulse on Spektor’s first album since 2016. Working remotely for the first time, Spektor recorded her parts in a converted church in upstate New York, while John Congleton produced the record from California. The songs are among her most memorable since the Begin to Hope/Far era, yet there’s an occasional disconnect between the songwriting and the arrangements, which are pitched towards bombastic, widescreen gestures.
Take “What Might Have Been,” which begins as a whimsical recounting of contrasts (“Sickness and flowers go together/Bombing and shelters go together”) before swelling into a windswept chorus caked in Broadway glitter. It sounds majestic, and certainly expensive, but the production flattens the songwriter’s nervy eccentricities.
Spektor’s childlike whimsy is still intact—“Loveology” culminates with her taking the guise of a schoolteacher, listing made-up words ending in “-ology”—but it’s set against a certain solemnity, a heaviness. The record is full of cosmic ruminations; nearly every tune builds to some grand, italicized proclamation about love or loss or dislocation: “Love is enough of a reason to stay” (“Coin”), “Home is where the light’s on!” (“Through a Door”), and so on. Weightiest of all is “Spacetime Fairytale,” a nine-minute epic that flits between grave orchestral brooding and playful piano interludes. Its ambition is staggering and its subject, the immensity of time, compelling, but it’s undermined by a gather-round-m’child tone, replete with hokey rhymes like “The story must go on/So keep listening, my son.”
Spektor’s best work evokes great fiction not just because of its imaginative sense of character (refreshing at a time when sensitive songwriters are sometimes presumed to deliver uncut dispatches of their own trauma), but also in the mood twists and surprise endings she deploys. “One Man’s Prayer” is an instantly great example. It’s written as a plea from a lonely, incel-type guy—“If I won’t get to meet God/And I won’t get to be a God/Then at least God let me get looked at by a girl”—rendered sympathetic until the last verse, when it suddenly shifts into a dissection of power and misogyny. It’s compelling writing, emblematic of Spektor’s empathy and curiosity, and the song pulls off its glossy soft-rock leanings.
Spektor has always been a jumble of contradictions: a classically trained, Russian-born pianist who toured with the Strokes, won over the Meet Me in the Bathroom crowd, turned a multisyllabic pronunciation of the word “heart” into an unlikely chart hit, and charmed everyone from Chance the Rapper to Bill de Blasio, who fêted her at Gracie Mansion in 2019. Her songs have sometimes been unfairly dismissed as precious or twee, but there has always been that undercurrent of dark humor (who else could pull off a rousing singalong about carbon monoxide poisoning?) coursing through their veins.
Now, two decades removed from her debut, Spektor is modernizing her sound and harking back to her early years all at once. The prominent use of programmed beats—an experiment that pays off on the dizzying, feverish “Up the Mountain,” which evokes Post-era Björk and ancient folktales all at once—reflects the former impulse. Yet her decision to finally record old fan favorites like “Loveology” and “Raindrops,” both of which she debuted at concerts in the early 2000s, reflects that sense of time collapsing, as “Spacetime Fairytale” portends, within her own discography.
Despite those songs’ faraway origins, you won’t mistake Home, before and after for an early Spektor recording. Vocally, this record is more accessible than anything she’s done. There are no throaty gasps, no out-of-nowhere falsetto squeals, no on-off Bronx accent. Her voice has deepened; her range is immense.
In a recent Guardian interview, Spektor reflected on that early-career outpouring of songs that generated “Loveology” and “Raindrops.” “I didn’t have any responsibilities,” Spektor recalled. “I would read a book; I would write a song.”
On those early records, like Soviet Kitsch, there was a bracing sense of raw possibility. Songs could swing from kooky anti-folk to cabaret to punk outbursts on a whim. Home, before and after, by contrast, sounds like the work of a seasoned professional. Every note is meticulous; every orchestral swell magnificently labored over. Back then, Spektor could captivate audiences with nothing but a piano (and maybe a single drumstick slamming against a chair). She still can, of course, when cornball production flourishes aren’t getting in her way. | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | June 24, 2022 | 6.6 | 5d109c41-194d-43e7-ab34-35d36ced8f5b | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The feeling of danger from King Khan's best work never comes into play on this Scion EP. Worse, despite a moving cover of Jay Reatard's "Hammer I Miss You" (in German!), Khan sounds tired. | The feeling of danger from King Khan's best work never comes into play on this Scion EP. Worse, despite a moving cover of Jay Reatard's "Hammer I Miss You" (in German!), Khan sounds tired. | The King Khan Experience: Scion A/V Presents: The King Khan Experience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15980-the-king-khan-experience-scion-av-presents-the-king-khan-experience/ | Scion A/V Presents: The King Khan Experience | Last year, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson asked the King Khan & BBQ Show to join their curated Vivid Live festival in Sydney alongside Tuvan throat singers, Reed's Metal Machine Trio, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. According to Khan, Reed and Anderson wanted the duo to "put back the danger into the devil's music." His antics at the event, which ultimately led to his breakup with Mark Sultan, proved that assessment accurate. His live shows are unpredictable and wild. His music with BBQ, Tandoori Knights, and the Shrines is driven by an energetic, fiery soul that jumps straight out of the 1950s and 1960s-- a time when several of pop music's central characters were handsome, wild-eyed men screaming and pushing that "devil’s music" to America's children. King Khan is the same sort of dangerous and then some: He's usually shirtless (in the very least) and he unleashes Wilson Pickett shrieks, exudes grease and sex, and has a knack for being gratuitously crass.
That's why this Scion EP by "the King Khan Experience" is so disappointing. The palpable feeling of danger from Khan's work never comes into play. Where his material with the Shrines felt like a sharp rock and soul review, the Experience comparatively sags. The Shrines' What Is?! was backed by a tight horn section and some on-point melody-accenting guitars. Meanwhile, the Experience features organ and poorly utilized horns. Many of the reference points seem to come less from the 60s and more from the indulgent, jammy 70s-- the wandering organ and the loose blues guitar solo of "Knock Me Off My Feet" feel sloppy in comparision to past material. What's worse, Khan sounds tired. His vocals frequently drag, and even his "OWW"'s come off less wild than usual.
A few songs hint at the electrifying promise he made with the Shrines, but they ultimately slip up somewhere. The opening guitar and percussion drive of "Come Levitate With Me" sound like they're about to build into a party song, but then the song just slows down with a Herbie Mann-ish flute solo and Khan's monotonous, dragging vocals. "I Got Love" is the song that begs for horns and speed, but neither happen. The only track that truly hits is his tribute to Jay Reatard: "Hammer Ich Vermisse Dich", a German cover of Reatard's "Hammer I Miss You". It’s unclear why the song is in German, but through the language barrier, you can hear Khan's passionate delivery. He's backed on the chorus by what sounds like German schoolgirls, and there's glitchy percussion driving the whole thing. It’s a touching tribute to his friend, if only from the titular message: "I miss you."
Maybe the EP was a place to put out some odds and ends that don't have a clear place with any of his other bands-- it really does sound like a hodgepodge. We get "Are You Serious?", a lo-fi goof on Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" and Are You Experienced. (The song might explain the new band name.) He also offers "Keep It Simple Stupid", a bit of clichéd Eastern psych with a too-long whine. There is "Bob Log Stomp", a track that would fit tidily with BBQ or the Shrines, but it's basically a "somebody pooped in my scotch" joke, and it's not even as funny as "Tastebuds".
Throughout, we get a shadow of Khan as "wild man" as joker as rocker. His best work comes from a place that's unhinged. This material's too toned-down and wandering. In "I Got Love", he sings: "It's a question of soul/ Some people got it and some people don't." This turns out to be a supremely a misplaced lyric on an EP where the man's delivery is so flat. | 2011-11-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-11-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Scion A/V | November 1, 2011 | 5.3 | 5d19ce43-fb22-4f50-a03a-aa91a6747778 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Wild Nothing's achingly beautiful reflection of 80s dream-pop carves a tunnel from Ibiza's beaches to Manchester's rain-soaked fairgrounds. | Wild Nothing's achingly beautiful reflection of 80s dream-pop carves a tunnel from Ibiza's beaches to Manchester's rain-soaked fairgrounds. | Wild Nothing: Gemini | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14280-gemini/ | Gemini | Though some of indie's brightest leading men have come through Virginia's halls of higher education (Steve Malkmus, David Berman, Travis Morrison), your average college rock band in the Old Dominion area probably sounds more like Agents of Good Roots. So if you live in a place like Blacksburg, Va., home of the Virginia Tech campus and not much else, and you want to be in a tropical punk act (Facepaint), an introspective singer-songwriter project (Jack & the Whale), or a band that covers Kate Bush instead of Dave Matthews (Wild Nothing's breakthrough rendition of "Cloudbusting"), you'll probably have to do what Jack Tatum did and start them yourself.
Gemini finds Tatum constructing a striking, solitary monument to just about anyone who moped, sulked, or bedsat their way through the 1980s. His love of dreamy, fuzzy, handcrafted guitar-pop isn't far removed from the Radio Dept. or the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but he displays a more comprehensive and widespread commitment to classic indie pop sounds. Revivalism notwithstanding, his craftsmanship is undeniable and the details are spot-on: Check the reflective bell tone in "Live in Dreams", the Cocteau Twins-like, artificial synth tom in "Drifter", and the Johnny Marr homage in the twinkly guitar fade-in that begins "Our Composition Book".
While Tatum plays hopscotch with his collection of 4AD, Factory, and Slumberland records, Gemini has plenty more to offer than sonic verisimilitude. On album opener "Live in Dreams," he sings, "Our lips won't last forever and that's exactly why/ I'd rather live in dreams and I'd rather die," and the lyric plays out like Gemini in miniature: While Tatum's words can edge on maudlin, his delivery is more romantic than dreary, and there's a sly, understated, and subtly addictive melody that gorgeously frames his sentiments. And melodies like that one, which the album features in spades, are ultimately what make Gemini more than just another indie pop record, and often more than the sum of its parts. Of course, that's not to say that each of them connects instantly. Though a handful of immediate standouts reward first listens, the record's debt-to-influence ratio may initially seem to overshadow the strength of the music. However, repeat spins reveal Tatum's strikingly innate sense of songcraft, as these tracks gradually earworm their way into daily life.
Similar to Bradford Cox's early work as Atlas Sound or the more similarly indebted Nick Harte of Shocking Pinks, Wild Nothing doesn't feel like a facile genre exercise so much as honest personal expression borne of intense musical fanhood. And in a strange way, it becomes something of a deceptively joyous affair, a reminder of why so many songwriters retreat to bedrooms or garages to lose themselves in the music-making process. Gemini is grand when it sulks, and even better when it's in motion-- check the falsetto hooks of "Confirmation" and "Summer Holidays", or the clattering, kinetic "Chinatown". Tatum carves a tunnel from Ibiza's beaches to Manchester's rain-soaked fairgrounds, and in the process, captures a lot of what is exciting about underground music's current classic indie-pop fixation. | 2010-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 3, 2010 | 8.2 | 5d327bb0-5a6c-49d6-bb56-613aaad2e474 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Capturing the sound and spirit of its time, this compilation of demos and home recordings showcases the mellow, genre-blurring taste of ’70s record man Earl McGrath. | Capturing the sound and spirit of its time, this compilation of demos and home recordings showcases the mellow, genre-blurring taste of ’70s record man Earl McGrath. | Various Artists: Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-earls-closet-the-lost-archive-of-earl-mcgrath-1970-1980/ | Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980 | Earl McGrath can’t be called a household name. Even among music aficionados, he’s a bit of an obscure figure. A close friend of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, McGrath ran two subsidiaries of the label: Ertegun gave his pal Clean Records in 1970, then McGrath parlayed a friendship with Mick Jagger into a position at the head of Rolling Stones Records in 1977. McGrath departed Rolling Stones Records in 1980 and left behind the music industry, returning to what he did best—cultivating friendships and facilitating ideas among the elite. Maybe the public at large wouldn’t have recognized McGrath. Still, he along with his wife Camilla Pecci-Blunt—an Italian countess who was a descendent of Pope Leo XIII, the head of the Catholic church at the dawn of the 1900s—were linchpins of high society in New York and Los Angeles, calling everyone from Harrison Ford to Joan Didion lifelong friends.
McGrath died in 2016, nearly a decade after Camilla. After his passing, journalist Joe Hagan received an invitation from his estate to peruse pictures Camilla photographed for possible inclusion in his biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. While he was there, he stumbled upon a cache of reel-to-reel tapes squirreled away in a closet. Within the roughly 200 tapes were unheard documents of McGrath’s time as a record man, a period that spanned the entire 1970s. Among those tapes were some Rolling Stones rarities—outtakes from Emotional Rescue and live recordings of the New Barbarians, the short-lived busman’s holiday from Keith Richards and Ron Wood—along with the master tape to Peter Tosh’s “(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back,” but this wasn’t just a stash of Rolling Stones Records artifacts. There was a wealth of recordings from earlier in the ’70s, notably some of the first work from Daryl Hall and John Oates, as well as tapes from the tail end of the decade, including material from punk poet Jim Carroll.
Hagan spent a year cataloging the closet, whittling down the tapes into Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980, a Light in the Attic compilation produced with the assistance of Pat Thomas. Don’t expect any Rolling Stones-related relics here. Earl’s Closet showcases 22 demos and home recordings McGrath collected over the course of the ’70s. Sometimes these recordings were demos sent directly to McGrath and sometimes he had a hand in their creation, but there’s no one thing tying together the music outside of his own tastes—tastes that reflected the era as much as they shaped it.
Earl’s Closet suggests McGrath gravitated toward country-rock made either by Hollywood cowboys or Texan weirdos while also finding sustenance in mellow folk-rock and distillations of ’60s pop. Other sounds crossed his radar, notably soul and a bit of harder rock’n’roll, but sun-bleached troubadours provide the spine of Earl’s Closet, while Daryl Hall and John Oates serve as its fulcrum. McGrath’s first and greatest discovery, Hall and Oates were swiftly poached by Ertegun for Atlantic, a label that would prove to be a creatively fruitful but commercially frustrating period for the duo. Veterans of Philadelphia’s soul scene—they rejected an offer to become house songwriters for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff at Philadelphia International—they refashioned themselves as folkies and couldn’t resist threading artier elements of rock and pop, as evidenced by “Baby Come Closer” and “Dry in the Sun,” two Hall originals that are surprisingly funky even when they’re rooted in folk.
Such casual blurring of genres suggests the journey charted on Earl’s Closet. The first part of the voyage centers on California, with Delbert McClinton and Terry Allen both writing tales of how they moved from Texas to California (“Two More Bottles of Wine” and “Gonna California,” respectively). McGrath signed McClinton and his partner Glen Clark to Clean, where they’d issue two albums as Delbert & Glen, while Allen never quite managed to break into the big leagues. Allen eventually carved out a niche as a Southern-fried outsider artist—his 1979 double album Lubbock (on everything) is an Americana classic and he’d collaborate with David Byrne on 1986’s Sounds From True Stories—but not everybody went onto such success. Hagan couldn’t identify three of the artists here—the bittersweet winds of “Only Yourself to Lose” is credited to the absurd moniker Kazoo Singers—while many other acts operated on the margins of the mainstream: ’60s veterans struggling to find their way forward in a new decade. Andy Warhol associate Ultra Violet fades into the dawn on the languid “How Do You Do (Children of the Most High),” old folkie Paul Potash takes stock of the hippie hangover on “Holy Commotion,” and there is space for not one but two members of Detroit rebels the Amboy Dukes, a band that also counted Ted Nugent as a member: Dave Gilbert is in Shadow, who deliver the sugary pop rush of “Oh La La,” while Johnny Angel sounds like an endearingly cut-rate Rod Stewart on “Invisible Lady.”
Naturally, there are some sons of Hollywood in Earl’s Closet as well. Michael McCarty, the stepson of the notorious B-movie director Ed Wood, is represented by “Christopher,” a piece of dense, crystallized power-pop reminiscent of early Emitt Rhodes. (Fittingly, McCarty spent some time in the L.A. pop band the Palace Guard after Rhodes departed the group.) Mark Rodney, son of Red Rodney—a jazz trumpeter in Charlie Parker’s quintet between 1949 and 1951—is here with “California,” whose smooth groove is much funkier than the records the singer/songwriter cut with John Batdorf in the early ’70s. Batdorf & Rodney were kindred spirits with artists like Country, the first band McGrath signed to Clean, in that they were heavily influenced by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; “Killer,” the contribution from Country here, distills the essence of CSNY in a way that recalls America’s “A Horse With No Name.”
All these mellow vibes mean that the final stretch of Earl’s Closet—the five songs that comprise Side D in its double-LP incarnation—sounds particularly bracing. David Johansen works out an early, ragged version of “Funky But Chic,” Detroit soul belter Norma Jean Bell tears through “Just Look-ah What You’ll Be Missing” and the Jim Carroll Band is a coiled nerve on “Tension,” a song he’d later turn into “Voices” for the soundtrack for the 1985 James Spader film Tuff Turf. All three tunes capture the late-’70s NYC renaissance, a happening that extended from punk clubs to the dance floor, and they also function as the closing chapter for McGrath's time as a record man. He wasn’t alienated from the new wave—he would remain close with Carroll over the years—but he was a man who got bored easily: The music industry followed a spell in the film business. (He maintained that he was the one who created The Monkees, only to have his agent steal it from him.) He had other adventures to pursue, so he left behind his time as a record man in his closet, waiting to be excavated by future generations who would marvel at how vividly these unheard documents capture the sound and spirit of their time. | 2022-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Light in the Attic | July 16, 2022 | 7.5 | 5d3445d9-c84c-4324-b32a-09c8e59fea4b | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
null | Anyone ever stumble across *Struwwelpeter*, the 19th century German children's book by Heinrich Hoffmann? Mark Twain himself translated it to English, although I doubt it made it to the bedside of too many American kids. This illustrated book is comprised of short lyrics describing the horrific things that happen to naughty children: Cruel Frederick is attacked by his own maltreated dog; Pauline plays with matches and burns to death while her cats watch; Conrad the thumbsucker winds up with his thumbs cut off by the red-legged scissor-man. I don't need to go on. There's something so downright un-American about the | Animal Collective: Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7940-spirit-theyre-gone-spirit-theyve-vanished/ | Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished | Anyone ever stumble across Struwwelpeter, the 19th century German children's book by Heinrich Hoffmann? Mark Twain himself translated it to English, although I doubt it made it to the bedside of too many American kids. This illustrated book is comprised of short lyrics describing the horrific things that happen to naughty children: Cruel Frederick is attacked by his own maltreated dog; Pauline plays with matches and burns to death while her cats watch; Conrad the thumbsucker winds up with his thumbs cut off by the red-legged scissor-man. I don't need to go on. There's something so downright un-American about the whole grisly affair, something alien about the gleeful proximity of children to violence and mutilation. Fortunately, I was a college German student when I encountered Struwwelpeter, and it freaked me out even then. Yet Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, the incredible but bizarre release by Avey Tare and Panda Bear brings the fates of those luckless kraut kinder back to mind.
The marriage of psychedelia and fairy-tale imagery goes back at least to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Dead's Aoxomoxoa: the first flowering of psychedelia was joyously regressive, celebrating juvenilia as the antidote to modern rationality. Yet what was indelibly excised was menace-- what the gnomes and newspaper taxis conceal. Remember the boat ride through the tunnel in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? In the middle of this sucrose wonderland, there's something fucking awful.
Don't choke on the references. Forget them. Avey Tare and Panda Bear's Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is a masterful piece of electro-acoustic fairy-tale music; yet its squealing electronics, and vitrified rhythms suggest something darker. Like a Snickers bar with a razorblade in it.
Spirit They're Gone is Avey Tare's album; he sings, and plays guitars, pianos, and electronics. Panda Bear, meanwhile, mans the crumpled percussion. The album opens with the high-frequency squall and delicate vocals of "Spirit They've Vanished," offering little clue about future directions. However, the second track, "April and the Phantom" is crystallizing: expert acoustic guitars, fierce drumming and Daltrey-esque screams resemble the Who resurrected as the seventh member of the Elephant 6. Tinkling toy pianos, organs and exclamations of digital noise round out the track, while Tare perilously insists, "She ran out of nature," again and again.
The wistful "Penny Dreadfuls" lays simple piano over needled electronics reminiscent of Pita or Christian Fennesz in a kind of lysergic dirge on the end of childhood. "Chocolate Girl" is dubbed-out calliope music, swirling and swirling: a strange meditation seemingly on sexual awakening, awkward but erotic in the midst of an enchanted forest of an album. The interstellar Nintendo drone of "Everyone Whistling" is irresistible space-pop, backed by some incredibly nimble jazz drumming. The twelve-minute "Alvin Row" is an epic closer, emerging from free-noise clatter, insect electronics and demented piano into sunny Beatlesque psych-pop. "Can you hear me, troubadour?" Tare asks before the eruption of furious ivories. Schlock horror organs abound and the cymbals crash like storms. The album collapses into the crackly sample of a child (Alfalfa from the Little Rascals?) saying, "My singing voice is gone... My singing voice is gone... My singing voice is gone..."
Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is not only outstanding, but one of the most original sounding albums out there. This record, as I've said, marries the pleasant and the violent and is not for timid ears: the sparkling pop never strays far from the lacerating noise. The lyrics are largely indecipherable but occasional gems and wonderful turns of phrase emerge from the bright din. Two mysterious fellow travelers (one-half of the four-man Animal collective) seem to have stumbled upon each other and created something truly beautiful. The only question is: which one of them is the walrus? | 2000-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2000-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Animal | August 1, 2000 | 8.9 | 5d4042a1-24e2-4ac2-93cc-33253e246dc3 | Brent S. Sirota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-s. sirota/ | null |
With a delivery as authentically conversational as her songwriting, the Toronto-based musician treats even the broadest themes on a person-to-person scale. | With a delivery as authentically conversational as her songwriting, the Toronto-based musician treats even the broadest themes on a person-to-person scale. | Charlotte Cornfield: The Shape of Your Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-cornfield-the-shape-of-your-name/ | The Shape of Your Name | Across three albums, the Canadian songwriter and musician Charlotte Cornfield has crafted refreshingly levelheaded music. Rather than indulging dramatic flourishes, Cornfield is concerned with the search for comfort and health, and though her lyrics may seem slight, they are deeply felt. As a session drummer and a booker for Toronto’s Burdock Music Hall, her work requires personability, and personability is Cornfield’s defining trait as a songwriter. She also contributes the bulk of instrumentation to her new album The Shape of Your Name, and plays drums on every song but two.
The Shape of Your Name holds its own against some of the better singer-songwriter records of the last few years: Short Movie, but less existential; No Dogs Allowed, but defying the digital world rather than embracing it; Hell-On, but grounded on Earth, without Neko Case’s restlessness. While all these albums engage in varying degrees of introspection, Cornfield focuses less on her relationship with herself than on the patience and reflection required for relationships with others. Treating even the broadest themes of love and loss on a person-to-person scale, she refuses to succumb to saccharine platitudes. Musical details, like the time signature jumps on the deceptively uplifting “Andrew” and the synth pad that opens “Storm Clouds,” will catch the uninvested off guard.
Even when her songs aren’t actually joyful, Cornfield takes palpable pleasure in crafting a witty lyric. “You make me sad/Like an undergrad with a guitar,” she sings on “Andrew”—followed, of course, by a brief electric guitar solo. She can bring the pathos as well: Opener “June” ambles along with couplets like, “Your lips are loose and full of ego/And still I come here just to see you,” feeding into an outro most songwriters would use as a chorus: "I don’t know if it’s you or just the shape of your name on my page/That gets me every time.” Her delivery is as authentically conversational as her songwriting, lending weight to even banal sentiments like “all I really wanted was you.”
Cornfield has made a patient record, trusting her listeners to follow her through slower passages. “Silver Civic” boasts a chorus worthy of a Kacey Musgraves ballad (“When every silver Civic was your car/And I was gonna be a star/And you were gonna be mine”), but doesn’t deploy that chorus until almost halfway through. “Wheels” depicts an emotional reaction to the death of Degrassi High star Neil Hope without a trace of self-consciousness about the specificity of its subject matter. Even the confident, upbeat “Up the Hill” buries guitar squalls and manic drum fills beneath confessional lyrics. Yet that relative immediacy makes it the strongest song on a consistently solid record, not to mention one that actually grooves.
There’s less playfulness on Shape than Cornfield’s previous albums, though humor still pops up unexpectedly, as with the non-sequitur ad-lib that closes “Up the Hill”: “I lay down, and beside my head there was a dead fly,” she announces, as the guitars ring out. More such moments of spontaneity and risk-taking could entice listeners turned off by the abundance of mid-tempo ballads, but this record benefits from not trying to be a masterpiece. Instead, it stays small and approachable, a reward reserved for those paying attention. | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Next Door | April 9, 2019 | 7.2 | 5d40494f-69f1-48d6-94ec-0168887a0e12 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The debut collaboration between the Native American group and guitarist Yonatan Gat offers vivid new context for the sound of the powwow drum. | The debut collaboration between the Native American group and guitarist Yonatan Gat offers vivid new context for the sound of the powwow drum. | Medicine Singers: Medicine Singers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/medicine-singers-medicine-singers/ | Medicine Singers | During the Eastern Medicine Singers’ appearance at South by Southwest in 2017, Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson kept noticing someone watching in the distance. That fan turned out to be Israeli guitarist Yonatan Gat, known for his work in the frenzied garage rock band Monotonix. Gat wanted to know if the Medicine Singers would perform with him during the festival, and the East Algonquin powwow group agreed. That spark initiated a full-length collaboration on Medicine Singers, their debut studio album, which extends their communal spirit to a varied group of collaborators. Among them are trumpeter jaimie branch, DNA’s Ikue Mori, and Swans members Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica, along with Minneapolis indie rock staple Ryan Olson (Gayngs, Poliça) and new age legend Laraaji.
Medicine Singers gives ample space to bursts of rock music, swirling electronics, and touches of jazz: branch’s trumpet in particular is a highlight on two of the album’s lengthier, magisterial tracks, “Sanctuary” and “Sunset.” But the balance is always tilted toward the powwow drum and the voices of the Eastern Medicine Singers. “Sanctuary” gives free rein to their pop influences for half of its six minutes, but the steady presence of the powwow drum grounds the track. Equally important are the vocals, which are delivered in the Massachusett dialect of the Algonquin language, along with Lakota, Ojibwe, and Wapishana, performed by Jamieson and the Eastern Medicine Singers alongside featured vocalists Joe Rainey and Ian Wapichana.
Even when drum kits and electronic percussion sizzle, as they do in “Shapeshifter” and “Sanctuary,” the presence of the powwow drum and the vocalists always makes Medicine Singers feel not like the sound of pop music creeping in but of powwow spreading out. One of the record’s most beguiling juxtapositions arrives in “Sunrise (Rumble),” when a round of singing is interrupted by Gat’s interpolation of Link Wray’s foundational 1958 single “Rumble” (Wray claimed Shawnee ancestry, by his mother). The familiar melody blends seamlessly into the song, suggesting how its shuffling, heartbeat-like rhythm already shared similarities with powwow music and highlighting the debt that rock music owes to Native American music.
The monumental effect of the powwow drum, a consistent motif throughout the record, can create an atmosphere that crests into solemnity. Despite the virtuosic range of the artists, there is a distinct lack of lightness or play, and the narrow band of moods sometimes runs the risk of feeling stolid and distant. Two short tracks, the upbeat “My Brother” and the Rainey-sung “Shootingstar Press,” point to the artists’ capacity to be extend beyond this template, and both feel like they could have run much longer. The strongest moments on the record feel transformative. In “Sunset,” sung by Artie Red Medicine, Gat plays a sinuous guitar solo as the percussion quiets and a noodly synth rises in the mix. Once the drum comes back in with the vocals, the sound feels less like rhythmic accompaniment and more like a storm rolling through, alerting the senses and picking up speed. | 2022-07-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Stone Tapes / Joyful Noise | July 11, 2022 | 7.1 | 5d41f747-9eb7-46d8-87b2-a5b45e04d59b | Matthew Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-richardson/ | |
null | The 1974 photo of Andy Warhol superstar Candy Darling on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' second full length, *I Am a Bird Now*, is the perfect complement to the ghostly hymnals that flit and sigh behind its black and white shadows. A melancholy but arrestingly beautiful image, it depicts Darling on her deathbed; bright flowers float behind her upturned arm like a cluster of soft, pale moons radiating light onto the bleached sea of sheets in which she's drowning.
Besides being a tight aesthetic move, the image also links Antony to the early fabulousness of downtown New York, reminding | Antony and the Johnsons: I Am a Bird Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/467-i-am-a-bird-now/ | I Am a Bird Now | The 1974 photo of Andy Warhol superstar Candy Darling on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' second full length, I Am a Bird Now, is the perfect complement to the ghostly hymnals that flit and sigh behind its black and white shadows. A melancholy but arrestingly beautiful image, it depicts Darling on her deathbed; bright flowers float behind her upturned arm like a cluster of soft, pale moons radiating light onto the bleached sea of sheets in which she's drowning.
Besides being a tight aesthetic move, the image also links Antony to the early fabulousness of downtown New York, reminding the informed viewer not only of Darling's too-early death from leukemia, but the AIDS-related passing of the photographer himself, Peter Hujar in 1987 (the same year Warhol died, following routine gall bladder surgery). Klaus Nomi was already buried by then, and the Downtown scene was getting too close to saying goodbye to Cookie Mueller, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Antony's sometime doppelganger Leigh Bowery (the subject of Boy George's musical Taboo), among others-- all victims of the AIDS virus.
This visual meditation on death and radical history smoothly conjures the family tree upon which pale, angelic Antony perches. The vocalist/pianist moved from California to NYC after seeing the documentary Mondo New York, lured by the 1980s cabaret scene it depicted. Quite fittingly, his first performance came with a musical troupe called Blacklips at the famed Downtown venue, the Pyramid. Jump now to 2003, when Antony opened for Lou Reed and sang the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says" (yes, for Candy Darling) as an encore after most performances. Knowing all of this-- the very important history in that cover-- helps to understand the melancholy, sense of loss, and rapturous joy in these 10 tracks.
But however aesthetically intriguing and complex that history may be, the ultimate draw is Antony's voice, and within the first two seconds of the album, it should be very clear to even the most unaware newbies that Antony has an amazing Nina Simone/Brian Ferry/Jimmy Scott vibrato, a multi-octave siren that would sound painfully lovely no matter what he was saying. Lucky for us, he fills that promise with worthy syllables. The greatness of this downcast crooner is the melding of that otherworldly trill with a dark, powerful aesthetic. Looking past his sad eye make-up and kewpie-doll features are these mesmerizing songs about loving dead boys, plaintive letters from hermaphroditic children, the fear of dark lonesome purgatories, breast amputation, the fluidity of gender. The first words of "Hope There's Someone" and of the album "Hope there's someone who'll take care of me/ When I die" feel more lonesome than just about anything and then there's the rapturous promise of "For Today I Am A Boy"' that "One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman/ One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful girl".
I Am a Bird Now's majesty didn't come easily: Antony's self-titled debut was released five years ago on David Tibet's Durtro label, but only now has he found the perfect mix between style and substance. More stripped down than earlier offerings-- most of the focus is on piano and voice, although violin, viola, cello, sax, and flute are also heard-- there's no missing Antony's thoughtful words.
There are a number of guest vocal spots-- Devendra Banhart (gypsy incantations in the beginning of "Spiralling"), Boy George ("You Are My Sister"), Rufus Wainwright ("What Can I Do?"). All of these powerful singers are overshadowed by Antony's angelic chops, though Boy George ends up turning in a surprisingly moving performance. His duet with Antony explores private memory, brotherhood/sisterhood (regardless of gender), relationships, empowerment ("I was so afraid of the night/ You seem to move to places/ That I feared"), and wish fulfillment. (Really, grab the hankies.)
For his part, longtime Antony fan/champion Lou Reed does a little spoken "I was lying in my bed last night" intro and some chunky guitar chords on the doo-wop horn swagger of standout "Fistful of Love", which works itself up to a frothy Otis Redding devotional to love's bruises and the comfort of a familiar fist: "I accept and I collect the memories of your devotion on my body".
The mingling of friends is a treat but, heart in his hand, Antony can more than ably go it alone-- even though he spends so much of I Am A Bird Now fearing solitude and celebrating those rare perfect connections. Then again, in this carefully laid out record, the final track, "Bird Gurl", leads quite dramatically to full-fledged climax as our hero searches for and finds wings, finally taking a solo flight. Contrast this with the pathos of the opener's fear of falling asleep and that "middle place" between light/life and darkness/death. Of course, when the album begins again, so does the reality of perhaps having nobody to hold an aching dying head. But then, so does Antony's riveting trip towards his airborne epiphany. And on the cover, Candy's flowers remain in bloom. | 2005-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | February 10, 2005 | 8.6 | 5d436fbf-7050-46c5-b67f-cd2b4b400b5b | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
An alternate version of Ghostface’s 2013 album 12 Reasons to Die, produced by Detroit’s Apollo Brown, features beats that suit the rapper’s strengths more closely. | An alternate version of Ghostface’s 2013 album 12 Reasons to Die, produced by Detroit’s Apollo Brown, features beats that suit the rapper’s strengths more closely. | Ghostface Killah / Apollo Brown: The Brown Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghostface-killah-apollo-brown-the-brown-tape/ | The Brown Tape | It was 2013, and the excitement was almost tangible. Though he was an inarguable hall-of-famer, Ghostface Killah hadn’t gotten close to a compelling front-to-back listen in years. Now he was set to collaborate with Adrian Younge, the film editor and producer who blessed the 2009 film Black Dynamite with a Morricone-worthy score. These two soulful nostalgics, Starks and Younge, were making a high-concept album, 12 Reasons to Die, with RZA on board as executive producer. It was the perfect combination, like a joint fever dream birthed by the ghosts of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Gordon Parks Jr. And the first single, “Rise of the Ghostface Killah,” which unfolded a tale of a murderous ghost-slash-superhero taking the life of a mafia capo and disappearing in a swarm of killer bees, seemed to justify the hype.
But when the album arrived, the two artists seemed strangely out of sync. Younge soared, mixing funk, trip-hop and psychedelia, and lacing tracks with gloriously campy touches like the Greek chorus singing about roads of glory and winds of fury on “Revenge Is Sweet.” Ghost remained earthbound, uninspired, continuing the trend that had started with 2010’s Apollo Kids and carried over to too many of his Wu-Massacre and Wu-Block verses.
Part of the problem was that, for all of Younge’s strengths, his beats were designed to amplify a narrative that the rapper didn’t seem all that interested in substantiating. It emerged, eventually, that the two hadn’t worked together directly. Younge had recorded his beats to tape on his own, using an analog setup and live instrumentation to get the snap and crackle just right. Only later did Ghost lay down the vocals at a studio in New York, working off a script provided by the producer.
Younge wasn’t the only one enlisted to work with Ghost’s Twelve Reasons acapellas. As the release date neared, Apollo Brown, a Detroit producer with a fetish for the classic New York sound, was commissioned to create an alternate version, which, five years later, is being reissued by Mello Music Group. The Brown Tape, as it was called, was released as a limited-edition bonus cassette at the time and briefly placed online, where it caught the ear of the traditionalists Brown’s music is meant for. Where Younge tailored the production toward the album’s b-movie mash-up themes—the story of a crime boss betrayed and murdered, only to return as a vengeful phantom—Brown crafted his beats explicitly to cradle Ghost’s rhymes.
His style, a humble package of instrumental loops and well-placed samples over boom-bap blacktop, is a truer companion to latter-day Ghost’s low-stakes bars, illuminating lyrical quirks that were overshadowed on Twelve Reasons. The most compelling details of the album’s story line have to do with Logan, the honeypot who betrays Tony Starks. Under Brown’s care, the two songs setting up the seduction and betrayal flash with unexpected emotion. Cappadonna still out-raps Ghost on “Center of Attraction,” but both rappers’ feelings somehow sound more genuine over Brown’s piano keys. The tender rasp in Ghost’s voice is accentuated; Cappadonna’s frustration with his oblivious friend is palpable.
Brown nods toward ’70s funk on “An Unexpected Call” and “The Sure Shot,” standout beats that also spotlight Ghost’s best vocal performances. Even so, for all his devotion, the producer has what you might call a 9th Wonder problem. He’s an adept sample slinger with a good ear and a respectful attitude, who lacks ideas that would set him apart from his predecessors—in his case, RZA, DJ Premier, and other architects of hip-hop’s second golden age. That makes The Brown Tape less incongruous than its fraternal twin, but also less ambitious, less head-turning.
Beats like Brown’s could sing in the hands of a hungry rapper. But by 2013, Ghost was no longer that man, and with the reissue of the tape, that fact is front and center. Today, he’s pushing 50, has three classic solo albums under his belt and is a crucial part of several other legendary records. His legacy is secure. But even he seems to have tacitly acknowledged his own slipping standards. He’s spent the last few years mostly working with collaborators known for their instrumental music, rather than their rap production, hoping, perhaps, to slide tastefully into the background. The style that he helped birth 25 years ago, once known for its rawness, has become respectable in middle age, and so has he. | 2018-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | January 29, 2018 | 6 | 5d47bf35-486b-41f4-876a-3d1d12be1ff6 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
On his stripped-down second solo album, the Parquet Courts frontman finalizes a messy divorce with his adopted hometown, ruminating on vanished cityscapes and piercing memories. | On his stripped-down second solo album, the Parquet Courts frontman finalizes a messy divorce with his adopted hometown, ruminating on vanished cityscapes and piercing memories. | A. Savage: Several Songs About Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-savage-several-songs-about-fire/ | Several Songs About Fire | New York City courses through Parquet Courts’ discography. The quartet that tapped the streets’ pulse on 2021’s “Walking at a Downtown Pace” has long captured the full spectrum of life in the city, from heady exploration to sheer exhaustion. For a subset of listless transplants of a certain age—those who moved there long after the Meet Me in the Bathroom years—Parquet Courts were their house band. Now their frontman, A. Savage, finds the house in flames.
Savage has said that Several Songs About Fire is an album about escape—“a burning building.” It’s shot through with impending departures and monumental changes. Given that the 37-year-old musician finally decamped to Europe after completing the record, it’s tempting to consider it his “Why I Left New York” essay. (“The cantos of my New York years/Are scribed in ink that disappears,” he purrs in “My My, My Dear.”) By turns ruminative and jocular, he grapples with reminders that nothing is permanent: condo conversions, changing seasons, dead friends. Yet while all this might suggest the brainy fury Savage built his name on, his new album plays less like an anxious lifeboat and more like a meditative breadcrumb trail from an old life to a new one, destination unknown.
Savage’s last solo record, 2017’s Thawing Dawn, offered a ragged and occasionally twangy iteration of Parquet Courts’ ’70s rock fixations. Several Songs About Fire is more restrained; the acoustic songs and electric rave-ups alike are simple and sturdy, anchored by his guitar and vocals and tastefully augmented by saxophones, pianos, and a spare, no-frills rhythm section. The material came together in writing sessions in England with Modern Nature’s Jack Cooper and on tour with Cate Le Bon; Savage then recorded the album in 10 days with John Parish in Bristol. That sense of movement is inscribed in its swinging cadences and propulsive drums; the slightly off-kilter rendering of well-worn rock’n’roll tropes suits an album about looking back at home from far away.
Savage’s New York might be a ghost town, population one: “Hollowed face stranger/Just who might you be?/In the mirror, something’s crying/With the same eyes as me,” he sings in the first song’s opening lines. In track after track, he mulls over memories of neighborhood characters and late-night hijinks, contemplating all the ways that the city can grind you down. The lone exception is “Riding Cobbles,” a lighthearted fantasy of European idyll. Several Songs About Fire plays out like a long, messy divorce from an adopted home.
Musically, though, there’s nothing shaggy about Several Songs About Fire. “My My, My Dear” and “David’s Dead” are sharp and hooky—strangely jaunty, even, in light of their downcast lyrics. Most songs, however, unspool slowly and with intent, as Savage takes time to refine both his melodies and his images. He rarely raises his voice anywhere near the commanding bark he usually favors, which makes it all the more powerful when, in the denouement of “My New Green Coat,” he finally pushes into his strained upper register: “Reasons to stay, I’m uncounting them/Because you are the reason that kept me/And I’m taking what’s left of me.” The song is the closest the album comes to offering resolution in its long arc of loose ends. Several Songs About Fire’s snapshots and fragments coalesce here in the picture of a man striking out on his own, not sure what he’s looking for or what he’ll find, only certain that there’s no use in continuing to sift through the ashes. | 2023-10-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 6, 2023 | 7.4 | 5d4806a3-0c04-4b0c-963d-f323d8a13111 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
Originally released in 1988 on SST, Soundgarden’s full-length debut returns in expanded and remixed form on Sub Pop. | Originally released in 1988 on SST, Soundgarden’s full-length debut returns in expanded and remixed form on Sub Pop. | Soundgarden: Ultramega OK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22986-ultramega-ok/ | Ultramega OK | Soundgarden’s ascent from Seattle’s punk scene to rock’s upper echelon wasn’t preordained, but it was probably inevitable. Their first full-length, 1988’s Ultramega OK, expands upon the promise offered by their two Sub Pop EPs, the careening Screaming Life and the glitchy, funked-up Fopp. The band’s assault is sharper and more focused, their musical ideas borrowing from blues (and blooze), punk, tape-manipulation experiments, and dredged-in-mud riffing. It originally came out on the even-then-it-was-legendary punk label SST, although its 2017 reissue on Sub Pop puts a neat little bow on the band’s long career. Soundgarden’s path led them to arena tours and classic-rock-radio canonization, and Sub Pop has grown from a fanzine into a powerhouse, persisting and thriving through multiple independent-rock gold rushes. Both entities are keenly aware of their legacies—and the fact that they’re worthy of exploration.
“Flower,” a swirling tale of a woman whose hard-partying lifestyle leads her to an early grave, opens Ultramega OK. Years after more straightforward Soundgarden tracks like the glittering “Black Hole Sun” and the hiccuping “Pretty Noose” became rock-radio staples, it’s still one of the band’s best pop offerings, anchored by a chug that blossoms out of gauzy reverb, given depth by sonics that recall a muddied-up copy of Physical Graffiti (guitarist Kim Thayil has said that the humming feedback came from him placing his guitar on the floor near his amp, then blowing on its strings). The arrangement is animated by Chris Cornell’s gritted-teeth vocal performance, which only comes into full-voiced yawp briefly. Its appeal to both sides of MTV’s late-’80s late-night rock aisle—Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes—presaged the eventual cultural dominance of “the Seattle sound” and the alt-rock gold rush that followed.
Ultramega OK’s most instructive lesson, though, is how that craved-for aesthetic stemmed from an ever-shifting ideal. The twisted thrash of “Circle of Power,” led by a gasping vocal from bassist Hiro Yamamoto, gets extra tense because of its momentary pauses for breath; the creeping-death march of “Beyond the Wheel” is sandwiched between the tape-warp interludes “665” and “667” and a masterful vocal by Cornell to give it extra eeriness at the height of PMRC-stoked mania about “occult music”; the sludgy cover of the blues chestnut “Smokestack Lightning,” which pairs Cornell’s wail with the band’s 45-at–33 grind, flips the idea of cocky ’80s rockers taking on the blues face-first into a moss-swarmed bog. (“We learned the Howlin’ Wolf version,” Cornell told Sounds. “We didn’t know it had been covered a lot.” Yamamoto deflated Cornell’s insistence: “I did and I told you not to put it on the record. It’s a bit crass—a bit like getting B.B. King to sit up on stage with you.”) Humor was also key, as it was for so many of the band’s compatriots; crediting the album-ending patch of tape hiss and amp-unplugging to “One Minute of Silence” (an homage to his and Yoko Ono’s “Two Minutes Silence”) is one of the album’s more obvious jokes.
Skin Yard’s Jack Endino, whose list of ’80s production credits could double as an early greatest-hits list for Sub Pop, remixed Ultramega OK for this reissue; Thayil’s liner notes go into diplomatic depth about why the band was ultimately unhappy with the SST-released version of the album. Endino’s tweaks don’t render the album spit-shined, thank God, but they do accentuate certain instrumental details more clearly—the clashing guitars on the loop-de-loop slacker portrait “He Didn’t,” the snap of Matt Cameron’s drums on the paranoiac “Head Injury.” (The most notable difference between the two versions is the absence of then-labelmates Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69,” a sample of which served as a radio-static-swathed transition between the sludge of “Smokestack Lightning” and the anxiety of “Nazi Driver.”)
Endino’s liner notes delve into the details of crafting the new mix—sourcing the effects unit that made “665” and “667” so immediate and freaky, fixing a missing snare hit on “Flower.” Endino also recorded the early-stage versions of a few Ultramega OK tracks that round out this reissue; they add to the story by showing how much more precise the band got in the year or so after they recorded the Screaming Life EP, with the two versions of the single-chord grind “Incessant Mace” showing how that song’s brimming dread was the result of a fair amount of experimentation.
Revisiting Ultramega OK, it’s obvious in retrospect that Soundgarden were going to clamber to an exalted position in rock. They managed to balance their mad-scientist tendencies with an innate savvy about how to craft a rock song—even when they were six minutes long and based around one chord. The album captures the band on the eve of being swept into the major-label system, and it predicts how they would wring rock hits out of unexpected building blocks. | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 20, 2017 | 7.3 | 5d49b5d2-d274-44b3-97a0-a36fba566122 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | null |
Teyana Taylor regains control of her art across a long and complex album, one that deftly recontextualizes classic R&B and better represents the fierce persona she has honed in public. | Teyana Taylor regains control of her art across a long and complex album, one that deftly recontextualizes classic R&B and better represents the fierce persona she has honed in public. | Teyana Taylor: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teyana-taylor-the-album/ | The Album | Among the many injustices Black women must endure in the U.S. is this cruel fact: We are up to four times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers. In New York City, Teyana Taylor’s hometown, the disparity is even more staggering. People like Beyoncé and Serena Williams have shared their own experiences with maternal health, driving some coverage into the news cycle and confirming that not even fame and seven-star healthcare can vanquish medical racism. Though Taylor doesn’t call it out directly, this context skulks around the first minute of The Album, whose intro repurposes leaked audio of the 911 call that chronicled the bathroom-floor delivery of her firstborn daughter Junie in 2015. “I’m holding my daughter in my hands,” mewls husband Iman Shumpert, before scrambling to tie off the umbilical cord.
Junie, now 5, is the next voice to appear, softening the tension of her arrival into the world with a merry “turn it up!” She croons alongside her mother and Rick Ross on “Come Back to Me,” joining a club of celebrity children earning major-label royalty statements. The song is followed by another family affair; “Wake Up Love” features Shumpert, a 2016 NBA champion and part-time rapper, doing a gentle André 3000 impression. Last week, a cherubic video for the single doubled as an announcement that the couple is expecting their second child.
Since becoming a mother and foregrounding her family, Taylor has found new momentum. When her slick, sexy turn as a “protective lioness” in Kanye West’s 2016 video for “Fade” introduced her to new audiences, she seized on the curiosity about her postpartum physique to create a dance-fitness business. (Taylor was careful in interviews to push back against scrutiny of women’s bodies after pregnancy.) She has also opened a nail salon named after Junie, starred in a family reality show alongside Shumpert, and launched The Aunties, a familial production company that has directed videos for Schoolboy Q and Lil Duval.
The Album, Taylor’s third album, better represents the fierce persona she has honed in public. It is something of a corrective to 2018’s K.T.S.E., the project that concluded Kanye’s messy Wyoming spring. Taylor shined over some of her label boss’ most compelling production in years, but the men of G.O.O.D. Music fumbled her rollout and released a version she hadn’t approved herself. It recalled her early music experiences as a teen signed to Pharrell’s Star Trak label, when she was denied the autonomy she craved. This time, recording largely while quarantined at home during the pandemic, Taylor snatches her control back. “When people hear the album, they will understand what my frustration was with K.T.S.E. Trying to put a lot of emotion within seven songs is tough. To have a full album, you get to literally express yourself and every single part of you,” she said in an interview with NPR.
At 23 songs, The Album is several times longer than K.T.S.E and infinitely more complex. Taylor splits it across five sections—in addition to the family-themed first bit, there are mini-chapters that explore desire, strength, drama, and joy. This, Taylor exudes, is the project she has always intended to make. In the absence of Kanye (he only has two credits here, both left over from earlier sessions), she opts for beats from Cardiak, Ayo N Keyz, and NOVA Wav—prolific, but not quite transgressive producers whose contemporary R&B sounds ground Taylor’s tremendous vocal ability. Her speaking voice, deep and raspy, is the source, flowing into a broad range that includes a robust upper register.
The album’s best moments come when she’s at her most playful and inventive: coaxing Quavo into singing on “Let’s Build,” turning Erykah Badu’s “Next Lifetime” into a self-assured kiss-off on “Lowkey,” trading accents with Afropop star Davido on ”Killa.” It sags in the fourth section, where Taylor perhaps overcompensates for the brevity of K.T.S.E. with one too many ballads. Still, for an album that lives mostly in the slow- and mid-tempo, it frisks and frolics. Taylor has a unique talent for drawing discovery and rapture out of sexual tropes, actualizing R&B at its best.
On one song, the DJ Camper-produced “1800-One-Night,” she breathily experiments with foreplay-as-jingle. It has the smoky, neon glare of a late-night TV ad, but the single-minded focus of a long-awaited encounter: “This time I’ll let you do things with me that we wanted to/This time is your time to shine, yeah,” Taylor sings, emphasizing the mutual consent and shared desires that “we” signifies. Instead of drums, a meaty bassline and trapezing synths intertwine below Taylor, forming a trampoline that send her vocals flying.
Taylor remains fascinated with updating classic R&B, summoning an impressive tribe of elders—Badu, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott—for intergenerational power. The Album drips with references to recognizable hits from the ’90s and ’00s: She interpolates, references, or samples the sticky romance of Guy, the cheeky sass of Blaque, and the neo-soul warmth of Musiq Soulchild, among a handful of others. But even for nostalgia bait, The Album is extremely effective, subtly recontextualizing recognizable melodies into the present rather than relying on their familiarity for comfort. The strategy also does cynical double duty, pointing directly to the “’90s-inspired” makeup collection Taylor recently launched with MAC; it’s the sort of product tie-in that a marketing manager could only dream of. But it’s not all business. The abundance of successfully cleared features and references reads like a sly rejoinder to the sample clearance issue that blunted K.T.S.E.’s release; where her former label once failed, she doubled down. The allusion to a musical legacy does the important work of contextualizing Taylor within the genre as a masterful, almost-alternative soul singer, lest anyone else try to do it for her. | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | June 23, 2020 | 7.3 | 5d4e1b4f-ac14-4bb3-8fea-fc6a33c9e48a | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Erie, the lone peak stretching above Phil Elvrum's hometown of Fidalgo Island ... | Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Erie, the lone peak stretching above Phil Elvrum's hometown of Fidalgo Island ... | The Microphones: Mount Eerie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5267-mount-eerie/ | Mount Eerie | Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Erie, the lone peak stretching above Phil Elvrum's hometown of Fidalgo Island, Washington, it was probably easy to imagine it as the highest point in the world, the place where Earth met sky. Mt. Erie is a mere 1,448 ft. at its peak, barely a foothill to Everest, and yet to a child, its summit is stupefying. But in the end, the weight of years pierces the exaggerated perception of youth; there's often a cruel disparity between the remnants of distorted childhood imagery and the onset of adulthood. I don't know what, if anything, a young Elvrum might have imagined in Erie's wilderness, but I'm guessing those memories cast a long shadow.
After his three prior Microphones releases turned out, quite subconsciously, to be about Air, Water, and Fire-- respectively and chronologically-- Mount Eerie is, in Elvrum's words, an album "more consciously about mountains and earth, though it turned out to be more about space." Its nominal peak is naturally at its heart, but only as a caricature plucked from the mind of an over-imaginative young poet, twisted and ominously stretching upward as a bridge to the heavens. Above and below, the album's drama is unveiled as a five-act play in words and music, profound and surreal, made all the more so with its awesome, childlike simplicity. It's a grim myth of revelation, death, and rebirth, but written in crayon, ensuring with its bright colors that all will work out in the end.
Each track serves as a piece in Mount Eerie's continuous, linear story, and many of Elvrum's friends assume roles as the primary cast of characters: Kyle Field (of Little Wings) is Death; Karl Blau represents the birds that pick apart Elvrum's body, and K founder Calvin Johnson gives voice to The Universe itself. Mirah Zeitlyn, Khaela Maricich, Adam Forkner, and Anna Oxygen also make appearances. It's ambitious to say the least, but the contributors are up to the task, executing these whimsically bizarre roles with remarkable sincerity. Music is too often described as "cinematic," but Mount Eerie evokes that exact quality; it's almost possible to envision the sets-- a handcrafted, celestial night sky, a sparse, faux-knoll for Eerie's grassy zenith-- and though crude, they're careful and cared for. The stark sincerity of the performance lends it all a gorgeous, unrefined artistry.
The story begins with "The Sun", where the influence of classical form on this album is immediately apparent; beyond the traditional five-act arc, the music is allegorical. Like Verdi attempting to summon spring with a violin, Elvrum tackles things that are much, much larger than a simple tom, snare, or human voice. "The Sun" opens with the heart-like pulse that concluded The Glow, Pt. 2, gradually and subtly mutating to a more complex rhythm. Soon, a wash of drums fades across the channels, evoking either the rising and setting of our star, or the revolution of Earth. It builds to climax before Elvrum, in touching a capella, relates the story of his birth, whereupon he sights Death on a black ship and flees for the peak of Mt. Eerie. At 17 minutes, the track finally supernovas with a deafening drone and crash of cymbals, before the story advances.
As he scales the mountainside to a delicate acoustic strum, Elvrum "reminisces about a girl gracefully juggling [him as] a planet," and somewhere, distantly, she thinks of him. But as he climbs, day is fading: creepy tympani patterns call forth our timeless fear of night, and a Greek chorus gives voice to these feelings of isolation and worry. It's the voice of the cosmos, staring down at Phil, alone on the mountain peak. The hazy-sweet hum of the night sky is at once reassuring, beautiful, and disturbing, but it all gives way as he glimpses his Death approaching, and resigns himself to his fate: "Soon a big black cloud will come/ Soon a big black cloud will come/ And press you to the ground/ The air will leave your chest/ And you'll fade from where you're found."
The clarity of his apprehension is breathtaking, voiced by those who've shaped the story up to the moment before Death arrives with its primal, percussive bloodlust. Phil dies, and carrion birds leave the peak "empty and windy again." After the cawing, and the hiss of wind has subsided, a second mountain reveals itself, stretching further up into "The Universe"; what once seemed infinite and unknowable to mortal perception-- as abstract as a flat plane of light and darkness-- now deepens into a vast, definite expanse. "But Universe, I see your face/ Looks just like mine/ And we are open wide," Phil sings into space, which echoes his words back to him with a ghostly chorus. A titanic bass drum bellows in the distant reaches, and after his life and death, Phil finds his resting place, at home in the arms of the Universe.
I gave away the ending, but this epic is no mystery; the portents are clear from the beginning, and the listener's job is to take it all in. Excepting the heart-wrenching sight of Death in its title track, Mount Eerie never quite achieves the transcendent, lo-fi glory of The Glow, Pt. 2, but it's no less incredible a spectacle. This is a massive artistic statement from The Microphones, and though it may be cryptic-- even overwhelming at times-- it remains warm and open, thanks to the stunning intimacy that has consistently been the group's hallmark. As the truth and meaning of the universe become manifest, Mount Eerie comforts, illustrating that comprehension isn't as important as acceptance. | 2003-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | K | January 20, 2003 | 8.9 | 5d5408c3-b441-4698-9f26-d47a68bd6c08 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a true R&B classic from 1996, the spacious and grooving debut from Maxwell. | 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 a true R&B classic from 1996, the spacious and grooving debut from Maxwell. | Maxwell: Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxwell-maxwells-urban-hang-suite/ | Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite | In the late summer of 1996, Harlem was a loopy place to live—a mix of everyday strivers, storefront church-folk, street preachers, and bugged-out crackheads, buttressed by sneaker shops, streetwear emporiums (like Dr. Jays), soul-food joints, and no-nonsense African hair-braiding centers. Strolling down Lenox Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, I’d tuned my Walkman radio to DJ Hal Jackson’s legendary Sunday Morning Classics broadcast on WBLS: a slow-burn funk groove with an extended intro, hula-hooping bass, creamy electric keys, and mellifluous vocalizing stopped me dead in my tracks. “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder),” the second single from Maxwell’s debut Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, sounded more like the feel-good black cookout R&B associated with ’70s acts like Frankie Beverly & Maze than the machine-programmed, sample-heavy hip-hop and hip-hop soul dominating airwaves at the time. I can distinctly remember that moment I heard Maxwell’s exquisite, subdued soul for the first time as if it beamed in from another time and place; I was lifted right off the Harlem pavement, ascending into the blue and beyond.
More than two decades after its April 1996 release, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite—one of that decade’s constitutive R&B albums alongside Meshell Ndegeocello’s 1993 Plantation Lullabies, D’Angelo’s 1995 Brown Sugar, and Erykah Badu’s 1997 Baduizm—remains a decidedly urbane New York City record. Born Gerald Maxwell Rivera and mostly raised by his mother in Brooklyn’s gritty East New York neighborhood, Maxwell started out crafting demos on a janky Casio keyboard when he was 17. Over the next few years, he bopped in and out of NYC recording studios, formulating his sound. Maxwell cut his live chops and developed a solid reputation, crooning at nightclub venues like Nell’s in downtown Manhattan. With melodious hooks to spare, Urban Hang Suite captures the sparkling intimacy and free-flowing conviviality that characterized New York’s R&B open mic nights in the 1990s to a greater degree than almost any other album of its time.
Maxwell looked like a model. He sported a outtasight, blow-out afro and retro-bohemian fashion that evoked the Afrocentric Fort Greene coffee bars, elegant brownstones, and sandalwood-smoky poetry lounges of mid-’90s Brooklyn. While gigging, writing, and recording songs, he picked up spare change pulling shifts as a waiter at Manhattan’s Coffee Shop, a popular and chic Brazilian-themed joint in Union Square. It was there Maxwell met guitarist Hod David, who would go on to co-write “Dancewitme” and play on a number of other Urban Hang Suite tracks. Driven by talent and hustle, Maxwell landed a record deal with Columbia Records when he was 21; he remains a quintessentially New York musician.
Though it illuminates the sound of mid-’90s New York R&B lounges, Urban Hang Suite is an even more ambitious project—an 11-song concept album that’s a carnal and spiritual exploration of the mystifying terrain of heterosexual romance. It traces the entire arc of a relationship over the course of 58 minutes, from meeting to macking to break-up to reunion to marriage proposal to consummation. All this relationship drama between a single man and a single woman supposedly takes place in an unusually compressed period of time. For an album that sounds so decompressed, so languorous and so tempo-deliberate (the BPMs never exceed 100), Urban Hang Suite may be, at an even more meta-level, a profound commentary on the politics of place, space and time.
The story arc gets going with the seductive foreplay of “Welcome”, depicting a chance encounter between Maxwell and a woman, followed by the finger-snappin’ come-on “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” and the spiritually blissed-out “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder).” Heat rises as the duo moves to the bedroom: there’s hard-driving funk jam “Dancewitme” and torrid sex storm “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’.” The guitar-led ballad “Whenever Wherever Whatever”—sounding like David Gates of Bread, Sade, and Antônio Carlos Jobim got together and had a baby—suggests a dramatic mood shift.
Disconsolate and sullen break-up joint “Lonely’s the Only Company (I&II)” comes up next. But the warmly optimistic “Reunion” suggests things are looking up, and by the time we get to “Suitelady (The Proposal Jam),” Maxwell has pledged his life eternally to his lady. Two dusky smooth jazzy instrumentals, opener “The Urban Theme” and closer “The Suite Theme,” bookend the album. The dramatic album sequencing turns Urban Hang Suite into soul music as hushed erotic breathing, rhythmic like warm blood coursing through the veins, the sensual choreography of two better halves moving toward a musical vision of holy union.
Urban Hang Suite also marked the debut of Maxwell’s tenor on a recording. His vocalizing—Brooklyn Baptist church-inspired but Quiet Storm smooth—remains a timbral wonder. On falsetto-driven torch tunes like “Lonely’s the Only Company (I&II),” his luscious voice wafts out of the speakers, floating on whispery utterances and feline coos that can cause shudders like the unexpected stroke of a hand down the spine. Maxwell’s secret weapon is a slightly-serrated chest belt, which means he knows how to drive a song home and cut straight to the bone, like on the post-chorus closer of “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’.” Maxwell’s larynx, luxurious and intoxicating like streetcorner incense, remains one of 1990s R&B’s great gifts to pop.
Urban Hang Suite’s starry-eyed romantic story is supposedly based on a real-life experience. Maxwell even dedicates the liner notes to his “musze,” confessing, “I could never have done this without you.” But Maxwell never initially made public any other details about his “musze” (whom he reportedly met while working at Coffee Shop); in fact, he kept matters so under wraps that, at the time of the album’s release, gossip floated the songs were actually about his relationship with a man. “Music is my life,” he’d tell journalist Cheo Coker, “but as a profession, I don't want it to interfere with the daily routine of being a human being. Hopefully, people will respect that.” He might have been right: Maxwell’s insistence on privacy added to the album’s alluring mystique—who needs details when the musical sexiness is so off the charts?
“Chill” conveniently describes Urban Hang Suite’s atmospherics, as well as its central thematic concern. Long before Tinder-era millennials hijacked the word “chill” as a euphemism for “hook up,” the album staked out ground as makeout music that was also very much about the complex interpersonal politics of chilling, aka hooking up. In its tale of a fleeting lustful encounter that turns into a lifetime romantic opportunity, the album infiltrates the same territory as other fling-turned-serious-relationship projects like Richard Linklater’s Sunrise film trilogy (the first of which, Before Sunrise, kicked off in 1995; the entire series, prefiguring his later Boyhood, is itself a meta-commentary on compressed time) and I’d like to imagine that it maybe even carved out ground for works like Andrew Haigh’s 2011 interior and touching film Weekend.
Under the cryptic pseudonym MUSZE, Maxwell produced much of Urban Hang Suite himself and in collaboration with co-producers Peter Mokran and Stuart Matthewman. He wisely recruited Marvin Gaye’s I Want You producer Leon Ware to co-write confectionary “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” and Motown journeyman Wah Wah Watson, Gaye’s Let’s Get It On collaborator, to deliver trademark rhythmic guitar strumming. Because of its relatively restricted budget, Maxwell and crew painstakingly pre-produced, pre-planned, and mapped out large parts of the album at Maxwell’s home set-up and at other NYC recording venues before professionally tracking the material in pricier venues. Spread out over a battery of studios including Electric Lady Studios, RPM, Sorcerer, and Chung King, tracking for Urban Hang Suite began in earnest in 1994 and lasted until March 1995.
During the recording process, live musicians replayed MPC samples, early drum loops, and other demo sounds. In addition to multi-instrumentalist Maxwell and Matthewman, Urban Hang Suite’s other accomplished session players include Scritti Politti and Meshell Ndegeocello collaborator David Gamson, and Groove Collective keyboardist Itaal Shur (who co-wrote “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder”). The album’s precise, slick, and clean sound is a testament to the professionalism and organization with which the recording sessions were reportedly conducted. Given that self-contained polymaths in R&B and hip-hop—including Babyface, R. Kelly, Fugees, D’Angelo, and the Tony Rich Project—were increasingly becoming the norm in late 1996, Maxwell’s Columbia A&R rep Mitchell Cohen granted him a relatively large amount of creative freedom. In turn, Maxwell emerged, even from the onset of his career, as an auteur, seemingly in total control of the direction of his sound and style.
The long-stroke idealization of sex as intimate connection ran counter to romance-challenged, freaky-sex tunes storming the charts around the same time, like R. Kelly’s 1995 “You Remind Me of Something” and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me.” While far too many hip-hop and R&B artists were busy relegating women to the status of video honeys, Maxwell promoted his debut album praising the opposite sex and, according to at least one journalist, telling interviewers he believed God was a woman. What’s more, Maxwell’s cosmological orientation was squarely rooted in R&B, not in hip-hop, which distinguished him from more ruffneck peers like D’Angelo, Ginuwine, and Mark Morrison. Maxwell was selling a bohemian throwback version of gentleman soul at a moment marked by intense commercial pressure for black male R&B artists to keep it real and pledge allegiance to the street.
While D’Angelo constructed 1995’s Brown Sugar out of low-end sonics and throwback jazz, Maxwell had admiration for the Black British artists of the ’80s and early ’90s like Sade and Omar, given that they seemed to exert more artistic control than their American counterparts. In pursuit of Sade’s autonomy as well as her atmospheric jazz-inflected sound, he recruited her collaborator Stuart Matthewman as co-writer and co-producer, as well as other members of Sade’s Sweetback band to play on the album. Mixer Mike Pela, who’d also worked with Sade, helped deliver the album’s spacious mix. More than any other artist of his generation, Maxwell made an explicit connection to Sade’s legacy in the crafting of his musical identity (it would be years before Drake and others did the same).
Maxwell himself was a product of a certain version of transatlantic blackness: he was born to a Haitian mother and a Puerto Rican father who died in a plane crash when he was three. In 1998, Maxwell, seemingly positioning himself as a hybrid of Eddy Grant and Bryan Ferry, referred to his own mellow smooth sound as “Caribbean Ambient Soul.” On Urban Hang Suite, Maxwell’s island roots might show up in the album’s sinewy bass grooves, the long instrumental rhythmic stretches, and the vaguely Latin/calypso horn arrangements. But his Caribbean roots have everything to do with his desire to overcome sandbox limitations: “As a West Indian, Puerto-Rican,” he said in an interview at the time, “I know that a lot of people in my clique are tired of being represented by one or two types of music…There's more to the urban lifestyle than that.”
The album title alone is a deft double entendre: On one hand, it evokes “suite” as in a collection of songs, and on the other, it invents “hang suite” as a hip euphemism for the celebrity hotel suite / metropolitan black bachelor pad. Film scholar Steve Cohan, writing about cinematic representations of the bachelor pad in 1950s pop culture, argues that the post-war bachelor represented a kind of “arrested development” in his inability to settle down, even as he captured an exciting new breed of masculine sophistication and sexual intrigue, a playboy alternative to compulsory married life. Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s 1959 film Pillow Talk, with its depiction of a modern bachelor pad full of nifty consumer-era technologies and gadgets designed to seduce and/or ensnare women, epitomized that dichotomy. In keeping with Hollywood studios’ compulsory hetero-romantic code, every playboy’s bachelor pad had to be transformed into—or left behind for—a heterocentric home for two.
Urban Hang Suite, crafting its own neo-soul version of pillow talk, might be the most salient and self-aware musing on the politics of the black bachelor pad/hook up spot ever. “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’”—the only song from Maxwell’s early demos that made it to the album—follows up on H-Town’s 1993 “Knockin’ Da Boots,” offering up a vision of sex so seismic it threatens to surrender private intimacy for public disturbance. “I’m gonna take you in the room, suga, lock you up in love for days,” Maxwell promises. Even more so than contemporaries like D’Angelo or Eric Benét, Maxwell has spent his career fascinated by domestic spaces like the bachelor pad and celebrity hotel room, by the black indoors, by the interpersonal politics of the boudoir. Urban Hang Suite’s videos confirm the singer’s domestic pre-occupations: Eric Johnson’s “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’” unfolds in the hotel suite/bedroom, and in Sophie Muller’s “Whenever Wherever Whatever,” a solipsistic Maxwell wanders around an apartment room doing mundane chores like brushing his teeth.
The album isn’t merely about bedroom carnality; it aspired to the status of a spiritual, existential “Black Love” album. If you’ve ever thumbed through the pages of Essence, read works by writers Maulana Karenga or Lerone Bennett Jr., or even spent 10 minutes at any corner in the ‘hood selling black-themed books, you know about black love: the idea that intra-racial kinship between members of the opposite sex can offer relief, if not therapeutic recovery, from oppressive racism. Black love emerges as a balm that offers members of the community the chance to become healed and unbroken from systemic trauma.
Besides the torrid black-on-black macking that is “….Til the Cops Come Knockin’,” “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” soars on Afrocentric lyrics like “Honey Dew Sugar Chocolate Dumplin,” going so far as to give praise to an “ebony” sista shimmering with a “cocoa kind of flow.” Even the streetcorner slang “sumthin’ sumthin’” and the album’s titular hijacking of the word “urban” (the music business’ lazy and enduring ’90s shorthand to refer to anything black or street-centric) suggests a vision of blackness tied to notions of slick upscale living. There’s no such thing as a rural hang suite; Maxwell only ever envisioned black love as a nuevo asceticism for contemporary urbane lifestyles.
Here was the soulfully sensitive, new age black man, relishing in the carnal opportunities afforded by the bachelor pad, but ultimately in search of long-term stability and monogamy. “I feel that if romance can be re-introduced in this age,” Maxwell told a reporter in 1996, “it might save a lot of people from running around.” He’d go on to say, in a separate interview: “`Respect, commitment, monogamy...it's my trip.” He wanted to hang with women, not on women.
Given the ubiquity of ghetto-centric hip-hop and R&B in 1996, Columbia wasn’t entirely confident they could successfully market Maxwell’s throwback, boho style to a desirable young black demo, nor were they initially sure that they could effectively cross him over to an international audience. Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite debuted at No. 38 on the Top R&B / Hip-Hop Albums chart, and I can recall my surprise, at the time, that Tower Records slashed the price of the cassette format to $7.99 (most new release cassettes at the time cost more than $10). But strategic price promotion, in tandem with persistent plugging and programming on urban radio, heavy rotation of Maxwell’s videos on BET, VH1 and MTV, and a robust touring schedule (even though he was initially booed on stage while opening for Groove Theory and Fugees) afforded the fledgling album sleeper success.
Just two years after its release, the album had already gone platinum, and it captured a 1996 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album. Though D’Angelo got out of the gate first in 1995, proving to the world that that alternative retro-R&B could catch on with mainstream audiences, the slow-burn success of Urban Hang Suite further confirmed non-single format R&B’s coming of age. It is unlikely to ever garner the critical respect of D’Angelo’s Voodoo (released in 2000 but recorded in the 1990s) if only because it never aspired to the textural engineering and scientific headphone details that have since made Voodoo’s intimate, experimental approach to R&B matter greatly to rock connoisseurs.
For an artist whose debut was so thematically focused on compressed time—the concept of the hook-up that evolves into a lifetime connection—Maxwell has been delivering new albums ever since at a turtle’s pace. He has always been about the soufflé, not the Big Mac—in his world, artistic releases take longer, but when they arrive, they nourish us with long-lasting, good taste. Maybe he’s traded in the bushy afro for a short crop and his boho Brooklyn threads for better-tailored suits, but Maxwell has never chased trends, and he’s never lowered his bar to play dress-up as a disposable factory-produced artist. Cool and classic, Maxwell has remained everywhere and barely there in the culture, simultaneously indispensable and inaccessible.
I got the opportunity to interview Maxwell in 2016; he mentioned that even though he hasn’t yet had children of his own, he half-jokingly claims all the children he’s likely to have helped bring into the world because of the album’s status as transcendent baby-making music. Maybe that’s the best reason to cherish the legacy of Urban Hang Suite: by crooning his way in between our sheets, Maxwell’s musical DNA—his uniquely chilled-out, über-romantic, black love soul sound—has embedded itself into the very fabric of contemporary pop, R&B and beyond. | 2018-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | September 30, 2018 | 9 | 5d5926b9-f546-4462-a41d-1c5125f24003 | Jason King | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-king/ | |
The Atlanta rapper finally steps out of Young Thug’s shadow and showcases his own style and versatility. | The Atlanta rapper finally steps out of Young Thug’s shadow and showcases his own style and versatility. | Lil Keed: Long Live Mexico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-keed-long-live-mexico/ | Long Live Mexico | Every week, Lil Keed logs onto Instagram and spends countless hours giving fans glimpses of him recording and playing unreleased music. Fans with Young Thug avatars flood the comments with fire and snake emojis, then subsequently rip the clip and pass the snippet around social media. Since Keed emerged with his promising but ultimately undercooked 2018 mixtape Keed Talk to ’Em, the public’s relationship with the 21-year-old has been mainly through snippets. It’s a release strategy that helps rappers maintain relevance year-round and for some, like the leaked snippets of Playboi Carti, it is often the only way we experience their music. In recent months, Lil Keed has been essentially creating his debut album Long Live Mexico in real time on Instagram, building on melodies and deliveries indebted, as always, to Young Thug.
Until late last year, Lil Keed was little more than a serviceable, occasionally special, replacement Thug. Understandable, given that Keed grew up idolizing and mimicking Thug in the same Cleveland Avenue apartments in which both were raised. But on Long Live Mexico, Keed uses elements of Thug’s versatile set of flows as a foundation to build off of, specifically the high-pitched, mush-mouthed delivery. One of the album’s best tracks, “Million Dollar Mansion,” finds both rappers side by side over an airy Pi’erre Bourne beat that belongs in a dystopian sci-fi flick. Thug’s flow is squeaky-high and eccentric, while Keed’s is at a similar pitch but more subtle, eliminating Thug‘s quirkiness. Those differences don’t make Keed sound better or worse in comparison to his mentor; instead, he finally emerges as his own entity.
Despite the daunting 20-track length, Lil Keed’s delivery is hardly ever tiring. His ability to easily change pace makes it appear like he’s trading bars with a guest, like on the first verse of “Real Hood Baby” as he raps about the designer brands in his wardrobe. “Just a Dream” adds a whispery touch to his melody, despite his controversial anti-hug stance: “Yeah, I go savage mode, ho, fuck your hugs.” His hypnotic vocals make the album breeze by, though a portion of the credit belongs to his ear for selecting dreamy production. On “Snake,” the PyrexTurnMeUp and CuBeatz guitar instrumental is soothing, while Keed sounds like he recorded his verse after inhaling helium. But the album’s best beat is by JetsonMade, who pairs a mellow flute with his signature distorted bass on “Oh My God.” It’s also one of Keed’s strongest lyrical outings: “She like them Percocet things because of me/Got drugs heal pain for me/Told her drugs heal pain, but don’t OD,” he says, taking an introspective look at his own habits.
The perennial downfall of an hour-long album is the filler, the ones that could be left off. The “Make U Proud” instrumental sounds like a demo version of Omarion’s “Post to Be” and “Proud of Me” is similarly outdated, which makes sense given it’s a leftover 2015 Young Thug leaked snippet that Keed repackaged. But the one miraculous part about “Proud of Me”—and Long Live Mexico—is that now when Keed digs through Thug’s past for inspiration, he manages to sound like a new artist all his own. | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | June 20, 2019 | 7.3 | 5d5fb988-385b-4ac3-bc8b-7183a399daab | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Arrested development and affectation continues to define Regina Spektor's quirky music-making. An all-star roll of producers are on hand, including Jeff Lynne. | Arrested development and affectation continues to define Regina Spektor's quirky music-making. An all-star roll of producers are on hand, including Jeff Lynne. | Regina Spektor: Far | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13184-far/ | Far | Regina Spektor is 29 years old. I point this out because on her newest album, Far, Spektor alternately imitates dolphin noises, talks about making a computer out of macaroni pieces, and fashions a refrain out of repetitions of the non-word "eet." And that's just within the first four songs.
Over the course of three proper studio albums and various other tangential releases, Regina Spektor has demonstrated a solid sense of popcraft and an occasional ability to capture slices of life in charmingly non-conventional ways. More to the point, however, she's displayed an unstinting weakness for intensely self-regarding cuteness and overplayed naïveté. Despite being closer to her 40th birthday than her Sweet 16, Spektor continues to romp wide-eyed through her compositions like Sally Hawkins' perennially cheery Poppy character from the Mike Leigh film Happy-Go-Lucky.
Spektor is buoyed on Far by the assistance of four top-flight producers, including Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Eminem), Jacknife Lee (Bloc Party, Snow Patrol) and, oh yeah, Jeff Freaking Lynne. As you'd expect from such an impressive roll call, the album's sonics are exceptionally clean and tastefully tailored, from Lynne's moving string swells on "Blue Lips" to the eminently radio-friendly hook on the Elizondo-helmed "The Calculation" to the Beatles-y brass touches on "Two Birds" (courtesy, surprisingly enough, not of Lynne but of Lee).
Unfortunately, all this talent behind the boards often feels like a waste because of Spektor's inability to let her songs stand on their own merits without the persistent interjection of vocal curlicues or verbal flights of fancy. Notice how she ladles awful oversinging onto "Blue Lips" and "Human of the Year", or tries to put on some kind of robo-Germanic accent for the refrain to the horribly lumbering "Machine". I have no doubt these little whimsical flourishes go over like gangbusters in concert, but on a fifth or 10th or 20th listen to a studio album, how many people are really not going to cringe at these affectations?
Certainly it's easy to chalk up these eccentricities to Spektor's quirky "personality" (which belongs in scare quotes because god knows being quirky doesn't guarantee you have an interesting personality), but frequently they feel like a defense mechanism as well. After all, cuteness is a terrific tool for allowing anyone to get away with being trite, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why a song like the first single, "Laughing With", seems almost trenchant at first blush, yet upon closer scrutiny unravels into pure meaningless mush, a nattering scold that woefully misreads atheism and agnosticism, ticking off a list of boilerplate crises (war, poverty, a missing child) and reminding us that no one laughs at God in these situations, as though non-believers spend the majority of their tragedy-free time busting on the Almighty.
"Dance Anthem of the 80's" is emblematic of Spektor flashing genuine wit and emotional power yet being unable to get out of her own way. At one point Spektor almost off-handedly intones, "And it's been a long time since before I've been touched/ Now I'm getting touched all the time," and it's an undeniably stirring moment, yet it never has a chance to thrive, not when it's contending with Spektor mawkishly cooing, "you are so sweet," while stretching and trilling the word "sleep" at the end of each refrain to an almost unbelievably obnoxious degree. I like to imagine that somewhere 19-year-old Taylor Swift hears this song and shakes her head, wondering when Regina Spektor is ever going to grow up. | 2009-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | June 23, 2009 | 4.8 | 5d60fc84-a758-4eb3-a93d-f614986fc4f9 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The Godspeed You! Black Emperor co-founder’s second album searches for love in the middle of a hellscape, with surprising shades of Springsteen. | The Godspeed You! Black Emperor co-founder’s second album searches for love in the middle of a hellscape, with surprising shades of Springsteen. | Efrim Manuel Menuck: Pissing Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/efrim-manuel-menuck-pissing-stars/ | Pissing Stars | The music of Efrim Manuel Menuck has rarely, if ever, evoked Bruce Springsteen. Over the last quarter-century, the cofounder of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra has droned or groaned his way through barbed anarchist diatribes, feedback pitted, and screams pitched against the impending apocalypse he painted. There’s been little of the hope or warmth found in even Springsteen’s darkest moments. That’s why “A Lamb in the Land of Payday Loans”—the stunning pop song that starts the second half of Pissing Stars, Menuck’s second-ever solo album—is such a revelation: Despite the aggressive political face of Menuck’s work, he arrives here as a fellow romantic, looking for the complex redemption of love in the middle of a hellscape.
When “Lamb” begins, Menuck, who recorded all of Pissing Stars alone in several spells of self-imposed solitude during the last two years, stretches a scrim of noise against a simple rhythmic loop. Its major-key piano melody pounds through the din, a triumph beckoning from the distance. In first person, Menuck sings about being insignificant in a system of weaponized capitalism, of fighting “the hand of the man [who] holds stolen land.” He draws a slanting but savvy line between our culture of Wal-Marts and our militarized police, then asks for mercy at the hands of that machine. Speaking now for the layperson, he even borrows The Boss’ Nebraska yip.
At last, Menuck makes his getaway plea: “Put the kids in the car... O darlin’, let’s try to run,” he harmonizes with himself. It may be the most poignant moment of Menuck’s career, a line you want to shout back in concert alongside a crowd because you, too, know the feeling. It is his “State Trooper” or “Atlantic City,” his escape anthem for a world gone against him. If Springsteen had turned left at Tunnel of Love and followed through on his Suicide love with a drum machine and an army of effects (or, alternately, had he started the War on Drugs 20 years early), it might sound like this—sincere romanticism beset by the realities of existence, with the sound bent and blown out to match the mess around him.
Pissing Stars reveals Menuck trying to understand exactly what it is we get out of love and relationships, a bothered soul in search of any balm. Decades ago, Menuck read about a brief, unlikely romance between Mary Hart, the South Dakota beauty queen who worked for a quarter-century as the effervescent host of “Entertainment Tonight,” and Mohammed Khashoggi, a socialite best known as the son of the Saudi billionaire implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. That is, the wholesome television host piped nightly into the homes of millions of Americans was in love with the scion of a notorious arms dealer—that moment’s domestic personification of overseas evil. The absurdity and beauty of it all stuck with Menuck for 30 years, providing a loose prompt for one of our collective questions: What is love trying to do for us, anyway?
The first half of Pissing Stars is bleak, even by Menuck’s standards. Its invocation, “Black Flags Ov Thee Holy Sonne,” scans as a nine-minute meditation on Donald J. Trump and global warming, spoken and chanted and shouted inside a mile-wide canyon of jagged noise and crumbling guitars. Then, over a foreboding industrial throb, Menuck delivers a fragile falsetto lament on the strong arm of the state. Against a luminous drone, he cuts clips from an infamous 1975 interview with Manson Family true believer Sandra Good, where she warned of impending assassinations for politicians who didn’t prioritize environmental protections. Here, it is the echo of an empty threat. This is a 23-minute suite of defeat, the music and mood as damaged as anything Menuck has ever made.
But “A Lamb in the Land of Payday Loans,” that shot of Springsteen, suddenly offers an escape route as everything else collapses. Indeed, Pissing Stars’ entire second half documents how, together, we cope with torment, or, as Menuck sings over a gorgeous hum, “how to breathe through pain.” During a mutated piano hymn, he serializes images of quiet despair—a county jail, an overflowing trash can, an ant drowning in a coffee mug—only to realize they are as temporary as his own feelings. “Soon we’ll all be empty,” he sings, his tired whimper lifting momentarily toward a smile. “Soon we’ll all be free.”
Pissing Stars ends with its title track, a corroded lullaby that directs the slow-motion stateliness of Low through a nightmarish gauntlet of noise. It’s an apt juxtaposition for any relationship that prompts, in Menuck’s words, both “misery” and “divinity.” These are lovely but wounded songs, as mixed up as the singer’s own ideas about life and love and how something that’s sometimes so ugly allows for something so good. Menuck pulls you into his abiding confusion, into the surreal place where the bubbly star and the son of an arms dealer help one another get through the night, if only for a little while.
In the seven years since his solo debut, 2011’s Plays “High Gospel,” Menuck has relaunched Godspeed You! Black Emperor for three records and for big tours that have sometimes taken them to arenas. Thee Silver Mt. Zion returned, too. But Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too: a Springsteen-like reminder that the romantic has the heart that the system never will. | 2018-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Constellation | February 8, 2018 | 7.8 | 5d639540-c02c-4f08-849a-d868562ba8fc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Sam Shepherd and his ensemble incorporate the vast, rocky landscape of the California desert into the very fabric of their ambient post-rock. | Sam Shepherd and his ensemble incorporate the vast, rocky landscape of the California desert into the very fabric of their ambient post-rock. | Floating Points: Reflections - Mojave Desert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floating-points-reflections-mojave-desert/ | Reflections - Mojave Desert | At one point in Reflections - Mojave Desert, a short film released in conjunction with Floating Points’ soundtrack, director Anna Diaz Ortuño films Sam Shepherd swinging what looks like a satellite dish in circles in the middle of the arid California landscape. It’s for the recording of the interstitial track “Kites,” wherein Shepherd rotates a parabolic Telinga microphone, generally used for field recordings, to capture the sound of an EMS Synthi as it bounces off a constellation of rock structures. A curious thing happens across the track’s brief three minutes: It’s when the mic is turned away from the source that it sounds most natural, rather than when it faces the clear signal.
It’s precisely the kind of inversion of sound and expectations that Floating Points has mastered in a few short years. In the midst of dubstep’s rapid expansion in the late 2000s, the UK electronic musician first emerged with an emphasis on wiggly boogie, but just as listeners became accustomed to his sound, Shepherd began testing the limits of his own style, peaking with 2015’s cosmic jazz-infused Elaenia. Reflections - Mojave Desert is arguably his most ambitious recording to date, if only because he availed himself of the Mojave Desert itself as his recording studio.
Clocking in at under half an hour, the soundtrack shows Floating Points in a transitional phase, moving from the larger ensembles he took out on the road to support Elaenia to a more streamlined five-piece that fleshes out Shepherd’s vintage keyboards with two guitarists, bassist, and drummer. “Silurian Blue” shows just what an expansive sound the new lineup is capable of. It opens with Shepherd playing a dulcet chiming melody as guitarists Matthew Kirkis and Alex Reeve sidle alongside him with long, sustained tones. Gathering momentum, the piece moves from placid to soaring in two minutes, with Leo Taylor’s drums briefly holding it all together before the sounds drift apart again like dust, as Shepherd's keys settle into a rich, church-like organ tone. It's a far cry from the house and garage with which he made his name: When he swoops back in for the track’s climax, certain heads may find themselves waiting for “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” to burst forth at any moment.
Watching the band move between ambient and anthemic instrumental rock against the otherwise de-peopled backdrop of the Mojave Desert, it’s hard not to have your mind drift to Pink Floyd’s own iconic concert film, 1972’s Live at Pompeii. (Floyd-ting Points, anyone?) And while neither guitarist approaches David Gilmour’s ability to electrify such spacy music with emotional intensity, Floyd never had a drummer to match the speed and fury of Taylor, who seems almost tireless in his incessant, ever-evolving rhythms.
Floating Points has always been especially attentive to the way sound exists in space; many of his most electrifying moments take place along the periphery of silence. Here, the painstaking way he details the psychoacoustic properties of the landscape is remarkable. While “Kites” might at first seem like a mere interlude, playback on headphones situates you in the remarkable headspace of the desert, evoking the kind of calm most modern urban listeners rarely experience. As Shepherd swings the mic, distant echo and miles-off reverb color the distant arpeggios of that synth situated on the rocks. Listen deeper and the smallest of sounds also arise, like the crunching of rocks under Shepherd’s feet as he moves through the space; the very breath of the desert is made audible. The result is transportive and supremely psychedelic.
Only two tracks arise from brief moments of desert ambience to become fully fleshed-out pieces. The soundtrack’s longest track, “Kelso Dunes,” is built up from the arpeggios that “Kites” put into relief, now incorporated into the full band setting. Susumu Mukai’s restrained bass is the first to engage Shepherd’s shimmering theme, giving just enough space for Taylor’s motoric drums to push through. Shepherd’s synthesized swirls widen and the guitars pick up velocity. At seven minutes, Shepherd eases off the pedal and the sound is suddenly infused with crisp desert air. You can almost hear the group draw a breath before lighting out on another flight. The intensity that Floating Points attains at the peak of “Kelso Dunes” is exhilarating: You almost hear the small group achieving liftoff and floating a few feet off the desert ground. | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Luaka Bop / Pluto | June 28, 2017 | 7.3 | 5d68157b-05cf-433f-bb13-802ddb082d24 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On his second album as a bandleader, the jazz trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson finds an exciting meeting ground of exploration and approachability. It’s the work of a composer on the rise. | On his second album as a bandleader, the jazz trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson finds an exciting meeting ground of exploration and approachability. It’s the work of a composer on the rise. | Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense: Moving Still | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22516-moving-still/ | Moving Still | Among other qualities, jazz has often provided a meeting ground for complexity and catchiness. In the 1920s and ’30s, “Harlem Stride” pianists held down chairs in the experimental music vanguard, while also becoming some of America’s first dance-music hitmakers. Ever since, experts have debated the “ideal” mixture of exploration and approachability. But both attributes are understood as crucial in the genre—and it’s always a thrill to encounter an artist who can balance the imperatives.
Trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson’s second album as a bandleader provides plenty of this excitement. Where his debut recording was an accomplished set, it also bore a strong resemblance to the work of saxophonist-composer Steve Coleman. That stylistic debt was come by honestly, as Finlayson has played his mentor’s complex, rhythmically cycling compositions for over a decade. But Moving Still hits in a more distinct way. While Finlayson is already held in high regard for his work with players like Henry Threadgill and Mary Halvorson, this album shows that the trumpeter is every bit as much a composer on the rise.
His counterpoint writing is still dense and active, but the tunes on top flow with greater ease. On the pulsing “Flank and Center,” members of Finlayson’s band have to navigate quick handoffs, passing the melodic line from one instrument to the next in quick succession. This is a common trick in contemporary jazz, meant to show off the dexterity of a group—though the melodic line itself can sometimes feels like an afterthought. No so here. Pianist Matt Mitchell and guitarist Miles Okazaki hit their notes with nervy energy, while Finlayson’s turns on trumpet often result in smooth and attractive completions of a phrase. The trumpeter’s subtlety extends to his own solo, where he flips an expected script: turning his tone even mellower, rather than becoming flashier.
Similar expressions of drive and lyricism are achieved with consistency on other tracks. The introduction to lengthy album opener “All of the Pieces” presents some of Okazaki’s most sublime playing, before the guitarist steers the full band into a swinging mood. Bassist John Hébert shows off a range of strummed and bowed techniques during “Between Moves”—a ruminative piece that turns hot in its final minutes. Mitchell’s piano is required to be both graceful (“Cap vs. Nim”) and clattering (“Space And”). At different points, Craig Weinrib’s percussion reveals his affinity for funk and ballad-style accompaniment. (Considered alongside his appearance on Henry Threadgill’s most recent album, it’s clear Weinrib has had a good 2016.)
Aside from all the fine soloistic moments, the band members excel in mixing these stylistic paints. The guitarist and rhythm section may suggest fusions with rock and soul, even while engaging with long, tricky lines composed by Finlayson. The ensemble’s sound can have the “cooking” feel much admired in hard-bop, even as the harmonic language stretches into modernist realms. The result is an overarching mood of delightful invention. Finlayson finds inspiration in chess, titling songs and even this group after aspects of the game. And though there are flashes of schematic obsessiveness in his work, he can also channel the gracefulness that’s apparent in any well-played contest. It’s not easy to create an original sound that “makes it new” and “keeps it traditional” at once, but at age 34—and after years of work alongside icons like AACM co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams—this trumpeter is there. | 2016-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pi | October 25, 2016 | 8.1 | 5d6d127e-e9f3-4611-820c-642b0c176333 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The UK pop upcomer put her former record label on blast, then scored her first No. 1 hit. Her debut full-length makes an ambitious but uneven bid for independent stardom. | The UK pop upcomer put her former record label on blast, then scored her first No. 1 hit. Her debut full-length makes an ambitious but uneven bid for independent stardom. | RAYE: My 21st Century Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raye-my-21st-century-blues/ | My 21st Century Blues | In the UK, even those who have never heard of RAYE have undoubtedly heard her songs. Signed to Polydor at 17, RAYE (real name Rachel Keen) spent several years writing topline after topline with EDM producers like David Guetta and Joel Corry, achieving six Top 20 hits that have soundtracked the oiled-up abs of many a Love Island pool party scene. Behind the scenes, she lent her songwriting skills to Charli XCX, Little Mix, and even Beyoncé (for “Bigger,” from The Lion King: The Gift). But Keen grew fed up writing songs that didn’t reflect her as a person. Her label refused to fund her full-length debut until she hit their benchmark for success, and she had become obsessed with tracking streaming data and chart positions, trapped in a cycle of one-off collaborations and EP releases. In June 2021, she decided to blow it all up. “I have been on a 4 ALBUM RECORD DEAL since 2014,” she tweeted, “and haven’t been allowed to put out one album.” Shortly afterwards, RAYE and Polydor went their separate ways.
My 21st Century Blues is both Keen’s long-awaited debut and her first project as an independent artist. In places, it’s a defiant riposte to an unequal industry, reintroducing RAYE as a solo star full of rage and candor, as on the strident and soulful lead single “Hard Out Here,” where she warns white male music executives to take their “pink chubby hands” off her. In others, it’s a patchwork of Keen’s influences as a jazz singer reared on Nina Simone and Jill Scott, and trained at the prestigious BRIT School (also attended by Amy Winehouse and Adele). Keen has said that the album is a compilation of songs that she’s waited years to release. That gives it a cut-and-paste collage feeling, and while it showcases the breadth and the peaks of her capabilities, My 21st Century Blues lacks a clear thematic throughline.
The album’s highlight is its biggest hit, the 070 Shake-featuring “Escapism,” which unexpectedly became RAYE’s first UK No. 1 and first Billboard Hot 100 entry in January 2023. It’s a slurred, snaking song about alcoholism and drugs, its protagonist trapped in a seemingly endless tripped-out Uber journey, snarling about the revengeful drunk sex she’s going to have with a stranger tonight. The structural weirdness recalls the twisted R&B stylings of Keen’s earliest EPs, rather than her floor-filling pop; the song’s sped-up version, which went viral on TikTok, only adds to its relentless anxiety. Addiction is taboo for female pop stars to sing about in general—“Look what they done to Amy,” Keen darkly noted in a recent profile—but it feels particularly charged in the hands of an artist best known for penning carefree hits about tequila shots and nightclub dancefloors.
Against these sprawling, innovative pop songs, the old-school sheen of tracks like “Thrill Is Gone” and “Worth It” looks dull. Keen’s powerhouse voice sounds robust paired with soft harmonies, a brass section, and funk guitars, but these retro stylings feel like her comfort zone. She’s far more thrilling when she steps outside it, as on the low-riding, semi-rapped “Flip a Switch” and “Five Star Hotels” (featuring fellow British R&B singer Mahalia). These songs have a seductive, sinister energy, and show how strong a lyricist Keen is when she zeroes in on scene-setting and storytelling. Elsewhere, Keen tackles huge topics with a broad brush: the restless “Environmental Anxiety” tries to cover so much lyrical ground—climate crisis, social media, Boris Johnson—that it occasionally feels glib.
Perhaps the album’s most interesting track is “Black Mascara,” which flips the script on the Ibiza-adjacent sound with which Keen first found success. It’s still a dance track, but with a hallucinogenic fluidity; lyrically, it takes a “selfish man” to task, and refuses to glamorize drinking to numb heartbreak. This feels like a real reclamation for an artist who once felt she was losing herself in writing impersonal, party-loving dance-pop. The problem with fighting back, however, is that you can get stuck in defense mode. Keen has refused to be molded by an industry that wants her to be something that she isn’t; on My 21st Century Blues, she’s still working out exactly what she wants to say instead. | 2023-02-08T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-08T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Human Re Sources / The Orchard | February 8, 2023 | 6.6 | 5d6dba70-0083-43d8-ad24-92876aa2d150 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Assisted by players like Sam Gendel and André 3000, the ambient-jazz bandleader explores the spiritual and psychedelic aspects of human birth. | Assisted by players like Sam Gendel and André 3000, the ambient-jazz bandleader explores the spiritual and psychedelic aspects of human birth. | Carlos Niño & Friends: Placenta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carlos-nino-and-friends-placenta/ | Placenta | As a potentially psychedelic experience that often transcends description, new-age music finds an unexpected analog in human birth. There’s nothing trippier or more ineffable than generating new life, deploying cellular tools to create something more than the sum of its parts. With tracks like “Generous Pelvis” and “Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy,” Carlos Niño & Friends’ Placenta makes explicit the connection between the genre’s fascination with womb-like sounds and the physical odyssey of labor. Assembling a who’s-who of the L.A. ambient-jazz scene—including tourmate André 3000, who plays flute on “Birthworkers Magic, and how we get hear…”—and a heady concoction of bells, chimes, synths, whistles, leaves, plants, and shakers, Niño and his far-out compatriots develop an LP with a life of its own—a gestalt marvel.
Opening track “Love to all Doulas!” sets the tone for this mystical instrumental odyssey, Nate Mercereau’s horns punctuating a drone that builds like something (or someone) crowning. “Some rest for the Midwives…” locks us into the groove, an itinerant shuffle that was recorded live with drummer Jamire Williams and saxophonist Sam Gendel in the historically spiritual SoCal town of Ojai. Later, the sound of breathwork and an accordion expand and contract like two sets of ribs on “Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy.”
Thematic breaks, like the compact and propulsive “In Appreciation of Chico Hamilton’s Vast Influence on the West Coast Sound,” provide a welcome respite from feet-in-the-stirrups embodiment. They also keep the record from becoming too conceptually on the nose, flexing Niño & Friends’ range and dynamism. “This ‘I’ was not” takes French composer Ariel Kalma’s spoken-word meditation on ego and lifts it out of the yoga studio with shimmering cymbals and warbling organ. “Either you is, or not. Not more. Nevertheless, life is—always,” he intones, teasing a Seussian riddle stage-set with celestial sounds. “Bi-Location,” another (undetectably) live recording named after the concept of inhabiting two different places in the same physical body at the same time, showcases Andres Renteria’s nimble hand drumming underneath a layer of hazy synthesizer, a sound like something crawling towards the surface and then panting in the aftermath against Aaron Shaw’s dreamy tenor sax.
Like much of Carlos Niño & Friends’ work, the record straddles the boundary between structure and improvisation, jazzy riffs and spasms that return to the gravitational pull of a central motif. “Surges, Expansions” feels the most in progress and least finished, a little unsure of itself (albeit aptly titled). “Moonlight Watsu in Dub” is the record’s most conventional attempt at a groove, groomed enough to play in the lobby of a chic hotel, and all the less interesting because of it.
But where much of Placenta could have been corny and try-hard, its redemption lies in its earnestness. “The baby’s whole universe: the placenta,” breathes Haize Hawke, a meditation teacher and doula herself, on “Placenta, Nourishment, New Home, The Galaxy,” and a baby’s murmurs a few bars later only underscore the reverence. Maybe life is a miracle; maybe birth, something commonplace, is as far as many of us get from the mundane. Jazz breathes new life into new age’s platitudinous tropes, taking us to weirder and more interesting terrain than memefied truisms. The record’s best songs, like birth, feel hard-won and revelatory—journeys that might take place on a single physical plane, but expand psychically outward, broadening the spectrum of beauty, personhood, and existence. | 2024-06-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | June 17, 2024 | 7.9 | 5d6ed64a-55f1-4e1d-a365-ad14190a1d57 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The UK dance producer delivers an effervescent blend of rattling garage, glitzy disco, and thumping house that invokes the idea of nightlife as an endless fantasy. | The UK dance producer delivers an effervescent blend of rattling garage, glitzy disco, and thumping house that invokes the idea of nightlife as an endless fantasy. | Jam City: Jam City Presents EFM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jam-city-jam-city-presents-efm/ | Jam City Presents EFM | Jam City’s debut album, 2012’s Classical Curves, rewired grime textures and electro-funk chords through sleek, off-kilter sound design and blistering rhythms. The English electronic producer born Jack Latham cited both Philly club and Laurie Anderson—indicators of his omnivorous, high-concept style from the start. In the decade since releasing the album, a keystone of London’s influential Night Slugs label, he’s contributed writing and production to a new class of pop stars (Olivia Rodrigo, Troye Sivan), electronic experimentalists (Kelela), and genre-blurring rappers (Lil Yachty) with equal flexibility. On his latest album, Jam City Presents EFM, Latham returns with an effervescent blend of rattling garage, glitzy disco, and thumping house. The guiding principle behind the album, the best Jam City LP to date, is simple: getting blasted at your favorite club with familiar faces, “looking for fun and hedonism and all that good stuff,” as he put it in a recent interview. (He has said that “EFM” is short for, among other things, “Every Freak Moves” and “Endless Fantasy Music.”)
Latham’s tactile production is key to EFM’s spell. A pan flute darts through opener “Touch Me,” giving the song a bright, playful rush that matches lyrics about an intoxicating lover’s healing touch. Latham sounds similarly buoyant throughout: His hooks are uniformly euphoric, and the guest artists meet his uptempo energy. On the shimmering standout “Wild N Sweet,” Empress Of is a perfect foil for Latham’s bright keys and delirious chorus, her voice warped into light-headed, oscillating ribbons over throbbing bass. Latham’s chosen features complement his smooth sound well. South West London singer Aidan sings on multiple songs, finding an especially supple groove on “Do It” over a slinky guitar melody and an assertive, chopped-up vocal sample lifted from the sexploitation classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Latham strikes an easy balance between straight-ahead club tracks and blissed-out pop exercises, and pleasures that could be fleeting linger into the next song.
Some of EFM’s most memorable tracks unearth a deeper melancholy within Latham’s percussive, chest-rattling textures. “LLTB” submerges a yearning piano melody beneath crashing garage drums; topped with Kelly Zutrau’s gentle vocals, it brings to mind the bleary-eyed haziness that hits at the club in the early hours of the morning. He achieves the same effect on a few of EFM’s harder tracks: The insistent, rubbery beat that powers “Reface” bursts open into a sunshower of airy synth squiggles at its climax, while “Times Square” finds a sweet spot over a bounding Omar S sample and joyful, surging melodies. The back-and-forth between exuberance and spiraling angst—best typified by “Tears at Midnight,” an impressionistic, swaying power ballad—gives the album tension, deftly switching between modes.
The palpable sense of delight that radiates across EFM feels like a distillation of Latham’s sharply honed instincts as a producer. He’s fully in control here, even when he delivers a curveball like “Redd St. Turbulence,” an agitated late-album highlight on which he teams up with hardcore band Show Me the Body’s Julian Cashwan-Pratt. The singer’s mumbled vocals give way to agitated snarls, like a careening update of a Prodigy song, while Latham unleashes rapid-fire, rave-ready drums. Like EFM’s best songs, it’s a jolt of energy that cuts bone deep. | 2023-06-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Earthly | June 7, 2023 | 7.4 | 5d7a3c5c-63c8-45be-9b0a-b9aa03df94f1 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Bringing together players from across Chicago’s improv community, Joshua Abrams’ ensemble folds elements of jazz and North African music into mesmerizing pieces that hint at eternity. | Bringing together players from across Chicago’s improv community, Joshua Abrams’ ensemble folds elements of jazz and North African music into mesmerizing pieces that hint at eternity. | Natural Information Society: Since Time Is Gravity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/natural-information-society-since-time-is-gravity/ | Since Time Is Gravity | When an interviewer asked Joshua Abrams how he tends to start writing a new song, he demurred: “Our process is one of continuance.” The Chicago composer and bandleader’s music, through the conduit of his ever-expanding ensemble Natural Information Society, feels as if it exists in a state of perpetual evolution, just beyond the range of human perception. Performances can take on the air of a ritualistic summoning. When Abrams convenes his band, the first notes glint like light in the crack between our world, with its strict laws of temporal-spatial continuity, and the one in which the music has existed, ceaselessly unspooling, for centuries.
While there is nothing explicitly spiritual about Natural Information Society’s output, the group draws on practices from around the world that facilitate transcendent experiences: Gnawa from North Africa, Hindustani classical, ecstatic jazz. The music of these traditions is frequently longform and often uses improvisation to expand upon a central scale or motif. Abrams threads together these sounds and structures, which have been reaffirmed and renewed by their tradition-bearers across hundreds of years, with the postmodern sensibilities of minimalist composition. The music’s timelessness is twofold: The techniques it employs to suspend time for the listener—mesmerizing repetition, nimble rhythmic interplay, buzzing drones—have unfathomably deep lineages themselves.
Natural Information Society’s latest album, Since Time Is Gravity, is a suite of vivid snapshots of eternity, a concept that should be oxymoronic but which feels completely natural in Abrams’ hands. He brings together players from across Chicago’s multifaceted improv community, including drummer and longtime collaborator Hamid Drake, multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay on cornet, saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, and elder statesman Ari Brown. Brown has played tenor sax alongside Coltrane sidemen McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, as well as AACM pioneers Malachi Thompson, Famoudou Don Moye, and Kahil El’Zabar; his improvisations on bookending pieces “Moontide Chorus,” “Is,” and “Gravity” are informed by that lineage while maintaining a deeply individualistic sensibility, and his modal melodies walk a fine line between mystical ambiguity and conversational familiarity. These players are all steeped in jazz, but they are also students of the global histories that led to its development in the early 20th century.
Abrams’ guimbri provides the rhythmic and tonal center for each composition, including two solo pieces for the instrument, “Wane” and “Wax.” The guimbri is a three-stringed bass lute played by the Gnawa people of Morocco that Abrams first heard on The Trance of Seven Colors, by Maleem Mahmoud Ghania and Pharoah Sanders, key influences on his own work. Compared to Steve Reich, who invoked African styles within a Western classical context while claiming much of the credit, Abrams is more attuned to the traditions that have inspired him—and to the nature of his own borrowing. “I wondered if it was right to take it up,” he once admitted of the guimbri, but Drake, who recorded with Ghania, encouraged him to continue. Using the instrument’s unique tone, a bulbous snap of gut strings against stretched hide and buzzing metallic rings, Abrams traces concentric circles around ostinato figures, forming the frame onto which the tapestry of drums, percussion, horns, and strings is hung.
Since Time Is Gravity features more players than any other NIS album—as many as 10, on some tracks. Rather than compete for space, the musicians patiently riff on interlocking patterns or assemble their parts into lavishly textured drones. “Immemorial” glows with restrained intensity, the group’s Indian influences filtered through the lens of Tony Conrad and Faust’s Outside the Dream Syndicate. Drake’s tabla takes center stage as Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium envelops the winds. Elsewhere, on “Is,” the ensemble swirls and swings around an implied drone, an amorphous mass of sound that bulges and recedes at odd intervals. It’s easy to get lost in the tangled web.
Abrams’ compositions specify certain patterns and modalities, melodies and moods, but much of the music remains undefined until the players assemble. Last year at Retreat at Currency Exchange, a Chicago coffee shop, NIS performed nearly all of Since Time Is Gravity, each piece spreading out according to the parameters set by the soloists, with horns leading several segues—an entirely different approach from the LP. Abrams’ music moves through time gracefully, adjusting to the demands of when and where it is performed, and who’s involved. The awe that his music channels lies in its grasp of mutability, tracking subtle changes in repeating patterns—whether from moment to moment or year to year. | 2023-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Eremite | April 22, 2023 | 7.7 | 5d7d7e44-6abb-43ec-94f8-1bc5b55c0e47 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
The album-length collaboration between Mark Kozelek and Justin Broaderick is an appealing change-up in Kozelek's recent work; Kozelek hasn't necessarily "gone metal" here, but he's definitely using his voice in different ways. | The album-length collaboration between Mark Kozelek and Justin Broaderick is an appealing change-up in Kozelek's recent work; Kozelek hasn't necessarily "gone metal" here, but he's definitely using his voice in different ways. | Jesu / Sun Kil Moon: Jesu/Sun Kil Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21339-jesusun-kil-moon/ | Jesu/Sun Kil Moon | Mark Kozelek opens his newest Sun Kil Moon album, a collaboration with Justin Broadrick working as Jesu, by saying "good morning" before taking us through a number of his days and nights. It's a romantic collection of songs, as well as a tender and sad one, but this time around Kozelek sounds less alone. Even when he has a full band, it can feel like he's playing a guitar by himself in a room, but Jesu/Sun Kil Moon comes off like a true collaboration. Broadrick and Kozelek are in fact longtime friends and admirers of each other’s work: Jesu’s 2009 album Opiate Sun was released on Kozelek’s Caldo Verde imprint; in 2013, Kozelek covered Godflesh’s "Like Rats" and a year later he mentioned Broadrick by name in his song, "The Possum."
Kozelek hasn't necessarily "gone metal" here, but he's definitely using his voice in different ways—he yells, he howls, he screams. The gentle guitar crunch and cymbal crashes seem to wake Kozelek up a bit, shaking him from the more soporific spoken patterns of his last couple of releases. And sometimes Broadrick's backdrop drowns out Kozelek, which offers a nice dynamic shift. His gorgeous arrangements of crunchy guitars, tender synthesizers, and soft drums are dotted by the voices of Will Oldham, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, the members of Low, and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, among others. And while the arrangements could stand alone on their own, there's still plenty of focus on Kozelek's lyrics. The words remain stream-of-consciousness, moving from the profound to the mundane and back, and Kozelek's still in the same emotional mode: He's facing mortality, and the mortality of everyone around him.
On the record, his songs often find him returning to the park outside his home, singing how hearing the children that play there makes him happy, and that he often writes his sad songs to those sounds. The references to these children become a kind of Greek chorus. There's the child he invites up on stage with him on "America's Most Wanted Mark Kozelek and John Dillinger." He tells us he sang while he "held her little hand," told her to stop eating sweets, and then chewed the gum he took from her ("it was sweet"). He sings, too, of kids shot at school and brings up the death of Nick Cave's son more than once ("The news hit me like a bus into a hill," he says, and at another time says it's something he thinks about daily). He also names an almost unbearably sad song about grieving parents after Mike Tyson's daughter, Exodus.
In that almost 10-minute track he reflects again on his cousin Carissa, his father's older brother Lenny who died young ("My dad looks down at the ground and gets quiet whenever I mention his name"), and author Danielle Steel losing her son at 19 to an overdose on heroin ("On his bedroom window still remains the sticker he put there/ The Misfits/ Every time I walk past her home on Washington Street/ I look up and I glance at it.") He talks, too, about watching the Mike Tyson documentary The Undisputed Truth, which inspires the song's chorus ("For all bereaved parents/ I send you my love"): "He spoke about the passing of his daughter Exodus and how he joined the bereaved parents group/ He knew when he arrived at her bed that he was not alone/ Because the parents of the other children embraced him and they cried together in the hospital room." It all adds up to the most painful song I've heard this year.
Other kids grow old and then die, and he sings about them, too. We get "Father's Day," in part about his 81-year-old father (he mentions, with a relief, that both he and his mother are still alive) and "Fragile," a song about Yes’ Chris Squire, who died of leukemia, which reminds Kozelek of a long-ago friend named Christopher, who also died of leukemia and is buried in the same graveyard where he and Kozelek used to drink Bud Light all day.
Kozelek's more recent output has obviously been vulnerable, but he feels especially open here—he’s not just making fun of himself, but also deeply dissecting why he makes fun of himself, and the sadness that’s hidden within a punchline. You almost forget what an asshole he’s been on stage and in interviews until, yes, he brings up those things, too. He turns the meta into the everyday.
The excellent eight-minute opener "Good Morning My Love" is based on someone telling their partner that they need to rekindle their love, and that person not knowing what that word "rekindle" means, but wanting/needing to find out. So much of Jesu/Sun Kil Moon has that kind of unexpected profundity. In an interview with Rainn Wilson that Kozelek did in conjunction with the record, he talked about shifting to his newer Sun Kil Moon mode after running out of metaphors. This is on full display here. (After all, the default chorus of "America's Most Wanted..." is "this is an account of the last few days," and there's truth in that advertising.)
The thing you realize listening to these songs, though, is that intimate details quickly take on the feel of metaphor. There's a profound weight, whether it's a middle-aged Kozelek telling his girlfriend how thankful he is to have her (which he does a few times), remembering listening to Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey with a girl a long time ago, or talking about buying a bottle of water. In those water bottle moments, you wonder if he's thinking about spiritual or physical thirst, and realize that, for all of us, it's always a bit of both. | 2016-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock / Folk/Country | Rough Trade / Caldo Verde | February 19, 2016 | 7.5 | 5d822ebf-705f-4880-b624-31c137a46ac2 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
With DJ Drama in tow, Tyler thrives in the realm of the rap mixtape, which allows him great freedom to explore every facet of his talent as a producer, writer, and vocalist. | With DJ Drama in tow, Tyler thrives in the realm of the rap mixtape, which allows him great freedom to explore every facet of his talent as a producer, writer, and vocalist. | Tyler, the Creator: Call Me If You Get Lost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-the-creator-call-me-if-you-get-lost/ | Call Me If You Get Lost | In the 2000s, mixtapes became the most effective and popular medium for aspiring rappers to build fanbases, seduce critics, and serve as commercial proof-of-concept to major labels. Even established rappers used the format to work out new ideas or to circumvent those labels entirely. As file sharing turned what was once a regional enterprise into a global one, rappers who would have previously given a song here and there to the DJs who issued compilation-style mixtapes began headlining their own. And so instead of cutting a hundred demos that might never be heard, or rapping a capella to starchy executives in boardrooms, many artists who broke during the W. Bush years did so by jacking industry beats and rapping underneath those DJs’ excited yelps, their formative work rewound and doubled back until it settled in your brain just so.
When digital streaming platforms made it easy to profit off of online-only releases, provided the artist or label owns the rights to what’s uploaded, “mixtape” became a nominal term used cynically to signal which rap records were meant to be taken more seriously than others. (Think of how many times you’ve seen advertising for an artist’s “debut album” only to think, “Don’t they have three albums already?”) Call Me If You Get Lost—which is either Tyler, the Creator’s sixth or seventh album, depending on whether or not you count 2009’s Bastard—argues for the mixtape not as a tidy bit of careerist maneuvering, but as an aesthetic tradition. It’s an inspired choice, nostalgic but irreverent, and suited perfectly to his strengths: It grants him the freedom to play with tone, to write personally or use his gravelly voice as texture, to treat the harshest raps and the most delicate hooks as mad experiments gone wrong.
Call Me is hosted by DJ Drama, the animated Philly native whose Gangsta Grillz series includes some of the most essential rap records of the century so far. There are times when the album evokes the grittiest of those tapes—its single reimagines a Gravediggaz song—but it breaks up the heavier cuts with shards of bright pop. (At times Call Me recalls In My Mind: The Prequel, the 2006 Gangsta Grillz tape by Tyler’s hero, Pharrell.) Drama is at his comedic best, goading on verses or underlining Tyler’s monologues about jet-setting (“A young lady just fed me French vanilla ice cream!”). He’s irresistible even when he’s fucking up the album’s title, as he does on the excellent “Hot Wind Blows,” which reunites him with Lil Wayne.
While DJ Drama’s presence is indispensable, it is not the only thing that recalls those old .zip files. Of Call Me’s 16 songs, only five make it to the three-minute mark—and that includes the two marathon affairs, “Wilshire” and “Sweet/I Thought You Wanted to Dance,” which run eight and a half and 10 minutes, respectively. Even within those shorter records are sharp breaks and jagged connections: see the way both “Corso” and “Lemonhead” open with menace before moving to more Technicolor sounds, or the way “Massa” inverts that progression, seeming at first to be brighter only to quickly get dulled out again. When Tyler’s old Odd Future comrade Domo Genesis rappels into “Manifesto,” he does so under cover of a drastic beat switch that throws the song into chaos.
The Gangsta Grillz conceit allows Tyler some latitude to meander—the platonic-ideal mixtape includes freestyles, original songs, radio singles, snippets of unreleased material—but he gives Call Me enough motifs that they eventually fuse into a spine. There are near-constant references to travel (the smartest of these is the beginning of “Massa,” where he cuts off an earnest-seeming monologue about his passport mid-sentence, as if he knows how it sounds) and to Rolls Royces: the way the new models’ doors open; the fact that Tyler now owns a pair; the detailing on their ceilings and the cookie crumbs he litters on their floors; the fact that their signature umbrellas are superfluous in Los Angeles. He returns to both these things the way rappers might circle back to an anchor word or phrase while freestyling. This has an intoxicating effect: Over the course of Call Me, it becomes unclear whether these material flexes are his focus, and the more wrenching personal revelations bleed in and take over, or if it’s the other way around. It’s probably a little of both.
As for the personal: Those bloodlettings come in a couple of different forms. There is “Manifesto,” where he meditates on the impact of his past shock-rap provocations and vents about the way he scans to both Black and white audiences; there is his revelation, on “Massa,” that his mother was living in a shelter when his breakout 2011 single “Yonkers” dropped. But the matter he dedicates the most time to is (what sounds like) a single fractured affair between himself and a friend’s lover. This is rendered in prosaic detail on the sprawling and anxious “Wilshire”: one minute he coolly concludes that the affair is worth ruining a friendship over, the next he finds the idea unthinkable. He is deeply, passionately in love, then nervously analytical. It has already inspired swaths of gossip and speculation as to the identity of the woman (and, consequently, the friend). But you picture Tyler alone in a hotel room somewhere, refreshing his phone, hoping it will inspire a single email.
There are plenty of moments on Call Me If You Get Lost that are playful, sometimes joyous. “Wusyaname,” which makes smart use of YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Ty Dolla $ign, is a sweaty flip of H-Town’s “Back Seat (Wit No Sheets)”; the anecdote about Tyler’s mother is paid off with her own, almost unbelievably colorful monologue. Yet even these have a pall cast over them. In the middle of “Massa,” Tyler raps in a low register and a deliberate flow: “Everyone I ever loved had to be loved in the shadows.” This maps onto the affair from “Wilshire,” and maybe onto his past relationships with men, but it is tragic—the notion that a feeling so pure could be swallowed by the secrecy it requires. At moments like this, Tyler seems uniquely in touch with himself, ready to be naked on record. But later in the same verse, he raps about being so paranoid he has to sleep with a gun—now in a voice so affected it’s unclear whether it’s a cry for help, a joke, or both. These things do not move linearly; the willingness to be sincere does not mean it’s easy to do so. If Tyler feels his true life happens in the shadows and crevices—the gaps between what everyone else is meant to see—it’s only appropriate he revived a mixtape format that pushes once-hidden ideas and asides to the center of the frame.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2021-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | June 28, 2021 | 8.4 | 5d8241e1-ce0f-484d-8e42-874fb2013117 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The music from Elton John’s life sinks into the uncanny valley with a studio band, a substitute singer, and a silver-screen production that misses the finer points of the legendary performer’s career. | The music from Elton John’s life sinks into the uncanny valley with a studio band, a substitute singer, and a silver-screen production that misses the finer points of the legendary performer’s career. | Various Artists: Rocketman (Music From the Motion Picture) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-rocketman-music-from-the-motion-picture/ | Rocketman (Music From the Motion Picture) | Records are the constant in Elton John’s life. Records gave the young Reginald Dwight refuge during an unhappy childhood, records delivered him to stardom, records were his indulgence during the height of his 1970s stardom—Tower Records on the Sunset Strip used to shut down so Elton could ransack the racks in private—and records were his sustenance during his recovery from his myriad addictions, providing him a path into a stable, sustainable life and career in middle age and beyond.
Which is why it’s odd that Rocketman (Music From The Motion Picture), by many respects the record of Elton John’s life—at least his life as it is depicted in Dexter Fletcher’s fantastical film of the rock star’s journey—is such a stilted affair. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Fletcher and producer Matthew Vaughn, who decided the music be sculpted to fit the contours of the silver screen, reworking and re-creating John’s original hits so they matched the emotional tenor of the stylized story being told. To that end, the production team hired the right music supervisor for the job: Giles Martin.
Known now as the man overseeing reissues of the prime jewels in the Beatles’ catalog, Martin cut his teeth bringing the Fab Four to Vegas, creating the mashups that fueled Cirque Du Soleil’s extravaganza Love. Rocketman doesn’t take nearly as many risks as Love—at no point on the soundtrack are digital drum beats grafted upon the melodies—but Martin doesn’t quite treat the original recordings as sacred gospel. Sometimes, Martin slyly opens up a familiar tune so it feels slightly left of center: “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” begins with a blast of guitars before dabbling in both mock-reggae and diluted psychedelia. But more often he favors productions that carefully tease out nostalgic memories without succumbing to rote replications. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” swaps out melancholy majesty for pomp and circumstance and “Take Me To The Pilot” submerges Paul Buckmaster’s gorgeous strings in aggressive R&B rhythms. The alterations aren’t as much reimaginations as they are a play upon our collective subconscious.
By design, Martin’s new arrangements are made for the big screen, so every gesture is oversized and aimed at the cheap seats. This is a subtle but notable difference from John’s original records, evident in thick layers of choirs and strings, but also the studio band, who sound considerably stiffer on the rowdy early rockers (“Rock & Roll Madonna,” “Hercules,” “Honky Cat”) than Elton’s loose original crew. This is a problem that plagues Rocketman: The professional players can hit the marks but not with the same aplomb as the musicians who created the recordings in the first place.
Such stuffiness was perhaps inevitable. During the 1970s, Elton John led a rock’n’roll band—and they were a band, not a collection of session musicians; he kept bassist Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Davey Johnstone with him through the years, with the latter two still playing with Elton to this day—so his original recordings have a certain intangible raw soulfulness underneath Gus Dudgeon’s supple productions. Here, the music is intentionally buttoned up, meant to evoke memories instead of creating them.
To that end, this precision is preferable for the actors who populate the cast of Rocketman, but their vocals are the ultimate undoing of the original soundtrack. Where the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody relied on original Freddie Mercury vocals, Rocketman features Taron Egerton—a veteran of the Matthew Vaughn Kingsman film franchise—as Elton John, with occasional contributions from co-stars Jamie Bell, Kit Connor, and Bryce Dallas Howard. Egerton possesses a vocal timbre that’s reasonably similar to Elton John’s and he’s an adept enough vocalist, but he sings like an actor: He’s intent on playing a part instead of inhabiting a song. While this approach may be well-suited for a film, when his performance is heard as strictly a recording, his thinness as a vocalist becomes apparent. Egerton never digs into the meaning of the lyric—granted, Bernie Taupin’s obtuse words have been known to stump the best singers—preferring to glide by on cozy melodies and exacting replications of phrasing, a choice that undoes the ballads “Your Song” and “Amoreena” and keeps the wilder moments tame.
The gap between Egerton and Elton comes into sharp relief on “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” the triumphant number that closes the film and soundtrack alike. A seemingly effortless evocation of John’s buoyant mid-’70s peak, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” is as autobiographical as Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy—it prefers myth-making to soul-baring—but the revelation is how the duet finds John towering over Egerton. Older but still spry, Elton John commands attention on this newly-written number, a track that works because it’s as much a record as it is a song: the colors pop, the beat bounces, horns punctuate each hook, and the interaction between the singer and actor feels like an intentional act of dominance. And, in that sense, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” illustrates once again that records are Elton John’s salvation, since even this single overshadows the mediocrity of Rocketman (Music From The Motion Picture), proving that even if somebody else is playing Elton John, the role still belongs to Reginald Dwight. | 2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Interscope | June 3, 2019 | 4.2 | 5d86c81a-0f6e-46c2-8b06-61ec82a1c8a3 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
After four albums that were driven by overriding concepts, the mighty Mastodon return with a record that heads in the opposite direction: The Hunter sometimes feels more like a mixtape, with almost every track tackling a different sound and style. | After four albums that were driven by overriding concepts, the mighty Mastodon return with a record that heads in the opposite direction: The Hunter sometimes feels more like a mixtape, with almost every track tackling a different sound and style. | Mastodon: The Hunter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15880-the-hunter/ | The Hunter | Mastodon chose the right time to scale back the concepts. For 2002's Remission, they focused on fire; 2004's Leviathan, water (and Moby Dick); 2006's Blood Mountain, earth (plus a vision quest up the side of the title's mountain); and 2009's Crack the Skye, aether, linking astral travel, wormholes, Rasputin, possession, and the suicide of drummer Brann Dailor's sister Skye. There's no way to follow that, so for their fifth album, The Hunter, they offer 13 stylistically and lyrically varied tracks. The title references the death of guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds' brother, who suffered a heart attack while hunting last December, but there's no overarching thread. Despite the heaviness of that kind of information, the record works best as a catchy guilty-pleasure party album-- there's a song about sex in zero gravity, another about the Swamp Thing, one titled "Bedazzled Finger Nails".
Instead of worrying about a storyline they can barely explain in interviews, Mastodon put the complexities into the songwriting and vocal harmonies. The Hunter is longer than Crack the Skye by a couple of minutes, but it feels briefer. As the band itself noted early on, it comes over like a Mastodon mixtape. The Atlanta sludge veterans have never taken the easy way out, sure, but they've also never cycled between so many styles: We get crusty snarling dotted with spaced-out moments ("Black Tongue" and its "I burned out my eyes/ I cut off my tongue" welcome), funky, psychedelic heavy rock ("Curl of the Burl"), crazy keyboard noodles ("Bedazzled Finger Nails"), meditative, progressive Milky Way excursions ("Stargasm"), hammering tech-psych anthems with crazy-climber riffs ("Octopus Has No Friends"). Outside that, "Blasteroid" could almost pass as Torche. Really, it's like pressing buttons at random on a jukebox.
Mastodon 2011 are largely about restless experimentation. The Hunter is the quartet's first collection with cover art by someone other than Paul Romano. They recorded it with hip-hop and Maroon 5 producer Mike Elizondo, the guy who co-wrote 50 Cent's "In Da Club", and the Game's "Higher". It also features the first track sung entirely by Dailor. They use a Theremin. The sound is certainly chewier and, at times, more pop than usual. Two of the best songs-- the fuzzed sing-along "All the Heavy Lifting" and the slowly unfurling title track-- deliver memorable, vaguely radio-friendly choruses. But there's also the tech-heavy weirdness of "Bedazzled Finger Nails", a pretty, stumbling track that offers mathy psychedelia with a variety of vocal approaches (though I could do without the synth squiggles).
As you might expect from a record this jumbled, there are parts that lag. Here, they sequenced three duds together, the generic classic rock of "Dry Bone Valley", the mid-tempo "The Thickening", with its sexy oohs and ahhs, and Brann Dailor's Syd Barrett-like "The Creature Lives", a song that opens with more than a minute of Moog and laughter. (Note: It's not a great idea to follow one of your throwaway tracks with more than a minute of Moog and laughter.) They come back strong with "Spectrelight", a burnt offering sung by regular guest Neurosis' Scott Kelly, and the pretty finale, "The Sparrow", a track dedicated to the band's accountant's wife, who died of stomach cancer. Lyrically, they simply, rather beautifully, repeat her supposed life motto: "Pursue happiness with diligence."
It feels like The Hunter's motto, too. I do miss the grit, heavy-lifting, and larger excavations of their earlier work-- nothing merits tossing around the word "epic" here-- but what they do, and what they've become, is fascinating. I ended my review of Blood Mountain by jokingly referring to the guys as the new "Monsters of Rock." They went on to play the festival of the same name the next year, but I was more talking about the ascension of a new brand of mainstream heavy metal, one that would sit beside Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and others of their ilk. What I hadn't expected was that, a few years later, it would make more sense to pair them with Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and other guys not afraid to spend an entire set smiling. | 2011-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Reprise | September 30, 2011 | 7.5 | 5d8806dd-e113-488a-b5c0-b2ba002fa851 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
A rapper, singer, producer, visual artist, and activist, the Philly native puts all of his diverse talents to work on a debut album that is equal parts political manifesto and bold artistic statement. | A rapper, singer, producer, visual artist, and activist, the Philly native puts all of his diverse talents to work on a debut album that is equal parts political manifesto and bold artistic statement. | DonChristian: Where There’s Smoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/donchristian-where-theres-smoke/ | Where There’s Smoke | As a musician, DonChristian is a triple threat: He can rap, sing, and produce, with an ear for experimental sounds. Off wax, the Philly native is a Wesleyan-educated visual artist and activist whose murals adorn buildings all over New York, where he is currently based, as well as Chicago and Los Angeles. His debut album, Where There’s Smoke, is the culmination of all of these talents—equal parts political manifesto and bold artistic statement.
From the outset, DonChristian presents a portrait of duality. His “Intro (Overture)” positions expressions of bravado (sexual and otherwise) beside one-off lines aimed at affirming and validating marginalized groups. He raps at a low growl, his delivery deadpan but still kinetic. The approach is well suited to his production style, which tends toward the sort of futuristic minimalism that could soundtrack a sci-fi film and allows ample room for all of his divergent interests. The title track finds DonChristian playing his own feature, seamlessly switching between flowing through the verses and crooning on the hook. It's one of few songs that follow a somewhat conventional structure, on an album that doesn’t put much stock in normalcy.
DonChristian stands out most when he lets himself drift further away from tradition, on highlights like the sprawling “Unfolding” and the glitchy “Reeling.” Both use sound and space in a way that makes the songs seem to grow, evolve, and die. Elsewhere, “Savings” is a sensual come-on delivered by the artist’s late uncle, legendary loverman Teddy Pendergrass, interrupted at the end by an aggressive stretch of rapping—once again, DonChristian plays up the duality. Though the album favors rap, there's magic in his singing. It peaks with “Gravity (Stretch Break),” a tease of an interlude that features some of his strongest vocal work. “Say you don’t dream no more, baby let me dream for you,” he wails against a pulsing orchestra of horns and drums.
Despite his ability to move between edgy flows and sentimental croons, he isn’t always a one-man band. A mainstay of New York’s LGBTQ art community, he’s recruited guests that are a statement unto themselves. The druggy haze of “Been Sleep” is accented by a feature from trans rapper Ms. Boogie, who lifts the song with a steamy, self-affirming verse. Bbymutha, the eternally charismatic rhymer from Tennessee, appears on the spacey “Crash,” infusing the hook with attitude. On “Unfolding,” shapeshifting artist Eartheater chills the track with her icy falsetto.
Another trans rapper, Chae Buttuh, appears on standout “Black Quaker,” a war cry set to dreamlike synths and double-time percussion. A menacing DonChristian aims darts at those who would cross him—including the law. “You can't make me no object, it's kings in these projects/School hallways built up by the same housing convicts,” he chants on the hook. Chae Buttuh reiterates the need for agency with a demand that people mind their own business when it comes to her body and general existence. The album’s most powerful statement, it comes together like a summary of DonChristian’s experiences, from his Quaker schooling and later work on Rikers to his allyship and the middle finger he raises at all oppressive institutions.
When he unveiled the album, DonChristian wrote that he had to lose himself to find himself in it—but that statement is far bleaker than the music. He sounds confident as he carves out a lane that is unique but firmly of the present, when proud weirdos are creating the blueprint. In doing so, Where There’s Smoke reveals an innovator who knows what it means to be progressive without being pretentious. | 2018-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Palms Out Sounds | August 24, 2018 | 6.9 | 5d8b7a5f-743d-4e7c-b613-d79d959e401a | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
The Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm's Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. It's a mesmerizing and beautiful work. | The Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm's Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. It's a mesmerizing and beautiful work. | Nils Frahm: Spaces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18949-nils-frahm-spaces/ | Spaces | Tight restrictions are a fundamental component of the music made by Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm. When he plays piano it sometimes feels like his hands are pulling rigid machine-based structures into a lighter, airier place. Frahm is a musician clearly enamored with benchmark figures from the minimalist tradition (Steve Reich, Philip Glass), artists who cross the jazz and classical worlds (Keith Jarrett), film composers that lean toward the tropes of early music (Michael Nyman), and electronic musicians with the lightest of touches (Thomas Fehlmann). Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. Some even stay just as they were.
This is an absorbing work, full of pensive moments cut together by music that thrives on dovetailing melodies that can be simultaneously mesmerizing and beautiful. "Said and Done" is the most impressive of these, with a hammering piano motif looping for most of its 10-minute duration as Frahm filters it through textures both light and dark. It's giddy at times, the sound of a creator utterly lost to his work. The occasional burst of applause or audience noise is a startling reminder that these aren't studio works, although it's easy to forget that fact, so meticulous are the arrangements. Moments of humor work as a neat buffer throughout, stopping everything from becoming too internalized—the Jarrett-referencing "Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone" is a piece bent around the interruptions suggested in its title.
What's fascinating about Frahm's work here is how he plays with time, working strictly within its limits through tiny repeating motifs, but blowing the overall picture up over such a wide canvas that it's easy to forget how long it's taken to get to where he’s going. The almost 17-minute long medley "For - Peter - Toilet Brushes - More" is an example of that idea. Plates of coiling synth sound indebted to the new age markers set down by Jean Michel Jarre open up the track, before Frahm glides through bursts of rim-shot percussion, arpeggiated synths, and a return to the strident piano of "Said and Done". All the component parts work in miniature, based around fragments of sound and ideas that gradually merge into one despite their wildly different roots. The huge burst of applause at the end is deserved, to say the least.
Something that emerges over time spent with Spaces is a subtly shifting dynamic triggered by the way these tracks are recorded. "Over There, It's Raining" ostensibly plays out as a pretty low-key piece of neo-romantic yearning. But a large part of its feeling is derived from the tape hiss that muffles at its corners, giving the sentiment a lack of crispness, lending a sense of love and hope gone stale. Even the most forward-thinking track here, the stunning crisscrossing circuitry of "Says", is far from what it seems at first glance. In a recent interview, Frahm outlines it as an example of "what can you do with one delay and an old synthesizer, no computers." It's hard to picture that basic working method when lost in its complex tangle of glossy electronics, underpinned by myriad counter-melodies that stretch out to unfathomable depths.
For someone as technically accomplished as Frahm surely is, and with so many unique and divisive ideas in mind, Spaces never succumbs to being a set of exercises set to tape. Part of the beauty is in trying to figure out what he's doing and not quite getting there, but mostly it's easy to forget about the way his music is put together and just lose yourself in it instead. Often the charm is, as the title suggests, in the spaces Frahm so artfully leaves between notes. That's an impressive achievement for any live recording—a place where the sweat and sawdust of real life often impinges a little too heavily on otherworldly material, where a layer of fantasy is often shorn away in a manner that can be crude and disillusioning. On Spaces there's a power that Frahm hasn't always been able to capture in his recorded work. But the overriding feel is one of joy at listening to a performer demonstrating the infinite elasticity of sound. | 2014-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | January 23, 2014 | 7.8 | 5d925e22-4569-44e0-aba8-57089f2177f5 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Working alongside pop songwriter Simon Wilcox, the Strokes guitarist delivers a cheerfully sprawling double album that feels less like a cohesive statement than a clearinghouse of ideas. | Working alongside pop songwriter Simon Wilcox, the Strokes guitarist delivers a cheerfully sprawling double album that feels less like a cohesive statement than a clearinghouse of ideas. | Albert Hammond Jr.: Melodies On Hiatus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/albert-hammond-jr-melodies-on-hiatus/ | Melodies On Hiatus | Melodies on Hiatus is a title that sounds better suited to Julian Casablancas, the Stroke who spends his spare time peddling noise skronk with the Voidz. Is Albert Hammond Jr really trying to tell us that he’s turned his back on hooks? The tongue-in-cheek framing of this tuneful solo album underscores the guitarist’s sense of humor, a quality often obscured by his day job in a band that prizes affectless cool.
There’s not much conventional cool to be found on Melodies on Hiatus. The extended release strategy—the first nine tracks dropped digitally last month—may be a calculated response to an oversaturated market, but it also aids in digesting this amorphous double album, whose leisurely sprawl reflects its long period of creation. Hammond Jr began work on the material not long after releasing Francis Trouble in 2018.
Compulsive writing has been his constant state for years, his productivity hindered only by the fact that lyrics come as slowly as chords come quickly. Hammond Jr admitted to The Guardian, “I don’t always hear the words in a song,” a problem he solved this time by collaborating with Simon Wilcox, a Canadian singer-songwriter who has written for Carly Rae Jepsen, Selena Gomez, and Nick Jonas. The pair engaged in a series of lengthy phone conversations which Wilcox used as inspiration for lyrics. The process yielded 19 songs for a double album that feels less like a coherent statement than a clearinghouse of ideas.
Hammond Jr’s decision to hire Wilcox is evidence that he’s loosening the reins without quite letting them go. Wilcox’s words often mimic the cadences of the Strokes’ early years, filtering the guitarist’s thoughts, dreams, and impressions into the band’s trademark conversational sing-song. When he sings, “Cocktails to the drunken crowd/He wants to talk but it’s too loud/So he just stands and stares at her/Like she’s some exotic bird,” on “I Got You,” it feels like a conscious evocation of the insouciant decadence of the Strokes circa Y2K, yet the times have changed. Today, Hammond Jr comes across as an observer, not a participant. Maybe that's why he buries his vocals in the mix, or perhaps it’s because he’s a music guy and not a words guy: The voice is just another instrument, the melody the engine of a pop song.
Melodies on Hiatus is essentially a pop album, a collection of brightly alluring confections that’s full of gilded arena-rock guitars, retro synth sounds, and high-gloss effects. Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders lays down a sprightly new-wave groove on “Thoughtful Distress”; rapper GoldLink wanders into “100-99” to deliver a verse only tenuously connected to the song around it. But such seemingly superfluous flourishes are the point: What happens in the margins gives Melodies on Hiatus its shape.
Usually, that flair is enough to keep Melodies on Hiatus engaging, as it never sits still. It’s fun to hear Hammond Jr tip his hat to Spoon on the nocturnal “Downtown Fred,”; “Dead Air” is a spiky neon-lit throwback; and “Never Stop” swaggers like an AOR hit pining for a MTV that’s yet to be invented. Some tracks are more compelling than others, but that’s to be expected when an artist writes by throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The melodies on Hammond Jr’s album are in ample supply; it’s the urge to self-edit that’s taken a breather. | 2023-06-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Red Bull | June 26, 2023 | 6.6 | 5d926f49-273c-4773-b477-e0b001a8071c | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Peaches may be the only female pop musician working today who sings about sex while firmly and intentionally diverting the objectifying male gaze. While it may not always be pretty or elegant, it's damn necessary, and Rub does an excellent job of it. | Peaches may be the only female pop musician working today who sings about sex while firmly and intentionally diverting the objectifying male gaze. While it may not always be pretty or elegant, it's damn necessary, and Rub does an excellent job of it. | Peaches: Rub | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20950-rub/ | Rub | Back at the turn of the century, Peaches' big and brash "Fuck the Pain Away" was a tsunami. Electroclash was at its peak, such as it was, and when the sultry, leering opening line of “sucking on my titties like you wanted me” would spit out of a club PA, crowds of all orientations turned their heads. Sometimes a first impression that arresting can be an albatross, and while Peaches has carved out a substantial career for herself in both the music and art world, the straight press largely moved on.With Rub, Peaches' sixth studio album, she extends and builds upon the body of work she's accumulated in the past 15 years.
The overarching themes of Peaches' work—gender identity and expression, queer sex, leftist politics—are now more than ever at the forefront of our culture, which means her lyrics sound less transgressive than they might have even five years ago: "Can't talk right now/ This chick's dick is in my mouth" she deadpans on the album's title track. But Peaches has always been able to use her outré, sometimes downright silly, personality to shed light on real issues, like society's patriarchal disgust at the natural state of a woman's body. In the same song, when she sets up a scene of "circle jerk girls who spray/ we've got a male in the middle and we bukkake", she may be the only female pop musician working today who sings about sex while firmly and intentionally diverting the objectifying male gaze. While it may not always be pretty or elegant, it's damn necessary, and Rub does an excellent job of it.
But is Peaches' music secondary to her politics? Interestingly, the first voice you hear on Rub isn't Peaches', but the distinctive whisper-moan of Kim Gordon. On album opener "Close Up", Gordon purrs for Peaches to get closer to the camera as she raps/speaks about her sexual exploits (the song's video features Gordon coaching Peaches through a shit-smearing wrestling match). The track's catchy, powerful bass drum beat threads throughout Rub, which benefits from a driving dance element, much like a sonic sequel to 2009's electro-heavy I Feel Cream. R**ub is the first album in her career where the music feels as foregrounded as Peaches' persona, which makes sense, as she co-produced it with Vice Cooler.
Rub's centerpiece is "Free Drink Ticket", an altogether strange offering that doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the album. With her voice downpitched to sound more masculine, Peaches delivers an almost stream-of-consciousness diatribe against a pretentious club promoter. It sounds jarringly personal, and lyrically is strikingly different from every other track. It's a misstep that is corrected by "Dumb Fuck", the closest thing Rub has to a straightforward pop song (even though it contains about 35 F-bombs). With it's Robyn-esque disco synths and biting lyrics, "Dumb Fuck" is a call for feminists everywhere to ditch their boyfriends for Roland MC-505s.
"I Mean Something", the album's closer and duet with fellow Canadian/frequent collaborator/ex-roommate Feist, sees Peaches defiantly state Rub's most telling line: "No matter how old, how young, how sick/ I mean something." Is that a hint of desperation? Aggression? Bravado? Perhaps, realistically, a mixture of all three, both an assertion of Peaches' rightful place in the trenches of the culture wars and an artistic plea for attention. | 2015-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | I U She | September 29, 2015 | 7 | 5d93ad14-8cab-4c1c-ab90-bc1f2331bab7 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
After a mixtape staking his claim to the Woah, a viral dance, the Dallas rapper looks to present himself as a bona fide pop artist with an aesthetic universe of his own. | After a mixtape staking his claim to the Woah, a viral dance, the Dallas rapper looks to present himself as a bona fide pop artist with an aesthetic universe of his own. | 10k.Caash: Planet Swajjur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10kcaash-planet-swajjur/ | Planet Swajjur | In a recent profile of his hometown scene, the rapper Mel (of duo The Outfit, TX) describes Dallas as the Bay Area of Texas rap: Both regions are the weirder, more undersung counterparts of their respective states’ dominant hip-hop metropolises. The comparison with California offers a useful paradigm for thinking about the differing sounds of the Lone Star State’s first and third-largest cities. L.A. and Houston rappers have, historically speaking, made music for car speakers: Houston is laid-back and poured up, recorded with your Cadillac in mind. But in the Bay and Dallas, hip-hop is dance music—it’s made for the club. The so-called Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex pumps out more viral dance moves than oil barrels; the DFW is home to the Dougie, popularized by Lil Wil’s “My Dougie” before L.A.’s Cali Swag District taught the whole country how to do it, and the Stanky Legg, as made famous by GS Boyz. Though the area has produced superstars like Erykah Badu and regional legends like Dirty South Rydaz and Big Tuck, its biggest breakthroughs have been relatively short-lived.
Dallas today offers an entire spectrum of styles: the strip-club trippiness of The Outfit, TX; the chart-ready soulfulness of Yella Beezy and Boosie affiliate Mo3; the made-for-the-mosh-pit bars of SPLURGE and Emotional Xan. But on a national scale, it’s still most influential as a source of novelty dances. The latest descendant of the Dougie is the Woah. After a boost from Lil Uzi Vert, the Woah was picked up by the likes of Drake and Travis Scott, but Dallas is making sure to take credit for its latest creation. Though its origins are contested, Def Jam signee 10k.Caash established himself as the authority on all things Woah with last year’s mixtape The Creator.
As its cover art suggests, The Creator was largely educational in nature, staking 10k’s claim as the authentic originator of the Woah. Planet Swajjur (which takes its name from 10k’s intentional mispronunciation of the word “swagger”) attempts to prove that 10k.Caash is more than his most famous creation: not just a viral phenomenon, but a bona fide pop artist with a viable aesthetic universe of his own. Yet memes and other forms of online currency remain his stock in trade. His songs are bite-sized, accompanied on Spotify by looping cell-phone footage—mostly edited on the app Triller—of 10k and friends doing various dance moves. The project’s 10 tracks are designed with virality in mind: not much longer than your average TikTok, with repetitive basslines built for looping. Former Raider Klan affiliate and prolific beatsmith Ronny J lends his producer tag to songs like “Flip Flop” and “Hop Out,” but it’s hardly his most cutting-edge work. 10k’s beats often feel like they’re built from digital Lego bricks: loads of crunchy and compressed bass, colorful synth lines, and a few loops that sound like GarageBand presets.
The Creator showcased co-signs from a menagerie of very online rappers—Rico Nasty, RiFF RAFF, Famous Dex, Lil Yachty, Matt Ox—but 10k.Caash is now using his newfound clout to raise the profiles of other emerging artists. In addition to Dallas comrades GUN40 and DSmooth66, Planet Swajjur features appearances from L.A.’s Sexton, Maryland’s TyFontaine, and upstate New York’s Young Jordan, as well as more established guests like Zoey Dollaz and fellow Texan TikTok star TisaKorean. It’s a lineup that’s as regionally diverse as it is stylistically varied, from Sexton’s half-sung, trilling raps to TyFontaine’s bright and exuberant choruses. But these contributions are so brief as to be rendered largely unmemorable. The only real heavyweight this time around is Chance the Rapper, with a guest verse on “Me And My Friends” that’s the hip-hop equivalent of a Cameo shout-out.
In both sound and presentation, 10k’s most formative influence is Soulja Boy, the original internet rapper. DeAndre Way might still be considered a novelty by some, but there’s no denying the untouchable effect he’s had on the last decade of hip-hop: an early pioneer of FruityLoops and digital production, one of the first to figure out how to use social media to his advantage, and the original otaku rapper before everybody and their mother was name-dropping One Punch Man. Like his stylistic forefather, 10k has the signature trend, but he’s got a bit further to go if he wants to reach Soulja Boy levels of saturation. 10k has proved his musical planet is worth visiting; whether or not he’s more than the sum of his viral dance videos remains to be seen. | 2020-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | February 19, 2020 | 6.2 | 5d972f9f-b4dc-49e0-b9dd-fee1a2d0b252 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Roberto Carlos Lange’s sixth and best album as Helado Negro deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk. It is a sublime, masterful piece of music. | Roberto Carlos Lange’s sixth and best album as Helado Negro deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk. It is a sublime, masterful piece of music. | Helado Negro: This Is How You Smile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/helado-negro-this-is-how-you-smile/ | This Is How You Smile | The Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid first published the short story “Girl” in The New Yorker in 1978. In what is essentially one long run-on sentence, “Girl” takes the form of a stern mother’s list of instructions to her daughter on how to become a skilled, self-possessed woman (“this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all”). The litany is imbued with both intense maternal love and unsparing criticism, an imbalance that reflects a colonialist structure that Kincaid sharply excoriates in writing. “I’ve come to see that I’ve worked through the relationship of the mother and the girl to a relationship between Europe and the place that I’m from,” Kincaid explained to Mississippi Review in 1996. “Which is to say, a relationship between the powerful and the powerless.”
That metaphorical relationship, between a powerful forebear and powerless descendants, colors much of This Is How You Smile, Roberto Carlos Lange’s sixth and best album under his Helado Negro moniker. Following 2016’s Private Energy, an album that wrestled with violence against people of color through electronic-pop meditations on identity and connection, Smile takes Kincaid’s weary passion and wanders through soothing, ambling soundscapes, framed as a stroll with Lange’s older brother down the sun-baked streets of South Florida, where they grew up. The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.
These sublime confessions are fixated on perseverance, of embracing joy and laughter while facing the everyday difficulties of growing up in an immigrant household. “Blush now/They can’t know/Lifelong history shows,” Lange sings over gently chiming vibraphone on the opener “Please Won’t Please,” “That brown won’t go/Brown just glows.” The song picks up the thread of Private Energy’s “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin,” centering Lange’s experience of living as a Latinx person with plain-spoken lyrics of support and encouragement. That tender intention paves the way for the rest of This Is How You Smile’s open-hearted solicitude.
Synths glow like footlights on “País Nublado,” a bilingual exploration of uncertainty and the persistence of spirit: “Laughing longer/Smiling harder/Makes me feel/Feeling stronger,” he lists in a soothing croon. The gray, overcast imagery of a “país nublado” (“cloudy country”) represents a precarious future, addressing a widespread present-day fear and choosing to offer a blanket of relief rather than resignation.
Lange employs stretches of fuzzy cellphone recordings and ambient meditations to temper other encroaching anxieties. “Fantasma Vaga” sinks comfortably into a spectral, twitchy pool of echoed synths. “Modulaciónes en tú sonrisa/Desplazamiento que no puedo imitar (Modulation in your smile/Displacement that I can’t imitate),” Lange sings placidly over watery cassette synthesizers, speaking to several experiences of displacement—deportation and gentrification among them—at once. “Y tú cambias todo,” he repeats at the song’s end, the music clearing around him like a receding fog. Highlight “Running” is of the same cloth, incorporating a hazy, recursive song structure that pivots around Lange’s chanting of the title. He is adept at suggesting an optimistic form of escapism from worry, distinct in its uplift.
This Is How You Smile’s finely drawn intimacy can be attributed to Lange’s familial sense of collaboration. A crew of Latinx artists breathes life into the album’s corners: members of the loungey Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla and Providence punk group Downtown Boys appear on backing vocals, as well as Xenia Rubinos and rising Colombian electronic artist Ela Minus. Longtime collaborator Sufjan Stevens adds to the brief “November 7,” transmuting sampled piano into the sounds of a quavering, peaceful grotto, while Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner threads hypnotic electric guitar through the lithe, bounding “Seen My Aura.” Yet none of This Is How You Smile sounds cluttered or overwrought; each appearance is in service of Lange’s cocooning vision, like a cast of supporting characters fleshing out the broader theme of forging closeness with yourself and others within a politically and socially tumultuous time.
The list of how-tos in Kincaid’s “Girl” invokes a mother’s wisdom, regardless of how flawed or mistaken it may be. Lange, however, seems to be taking on the role of both the parent and the child receiving instruction across This Is How You Smile. The relationship between the powerful and the powerless is revealed here in the gentle and generous refutation of mandates we’ve been told to abide by to succeed in life, whether as Latinx people, as American citizens, or as human beings. He reassures listeners that both power and potential exist as guiding voices within each of us, if we take the time to slow down and listen. | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | March 8, 2019 | 8.5 | 5d9855db-e0b8-4275-a9d6-a0d1cd568fbe | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Against dry, plucked guitar and minimal piano, the Texas songwriter creates moments of intimacy that always seem to suggest more than he’s willing to say outright. | Against dry, plucked guitar and minimal piano, the Texas songwriter creates moments of intimacy that always seem to suggest more than he’s willing to say outright. | Ryan Sambol: Gestalt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryan-sambol-gestalt/ | Gestalt | If you saw Ryan Sambol live, you might at first wonder if he was putting you on. The Texas-raised songwriter is fond of large white cowboy hats. He mutters odd little jokes; he appears either slightly boozed or just a bit too shy for showbiz. But spend some time with his records and you’ll understand that his distinctive observations and skewed wit are essential to his work. A decade ago, Sambol was cutting his teeth in Austin garage rock band the Strange Boys, which he’d formed as a teenager. In the years since their final LP—2011’s Live Music—Sambol has rambled through a solo career, issuing Now Ritual in 2013 as well as albums with Living Grateful and the Interstate Group. Though his live shows are intimate affairs, Sambol’s recorded music has usually involved a full band. On his latest album, Gestalt, he’s all alone, and the solitude serves him well. Over 22 minutes, Sambol crafts quiet, intriguing country-folk songs that are specific and lean.
Gestalt is a small record in the best sense. Sambol’s voice is thin and delicate, his instrumentation stripped back. Dry, plucked guitar and minimal piano suit his wavering voice, which in his Strange Boys days was often compared to a young Bob Dylan. Though spare, Gestalt sounds spontaneous rather than unfinished—hearing it feels like eavesdropping on a neighbor who’s winding down with his six-string after work. It’s one-way intimacy, the kind that comes with peeking in on someone’s most vulnerable moments.
On Gestalt, Sambol sifts through half-formed memories. Their shapes are subtle, but sometimes a faint impression of the past can communicate more than a detailed rendering. On “Just Like Golden Hours,” he recalls a modern meet-cute: “We met in the comments of one of our favorite singer’s songs. We felt we had accomplished something new and young.” Sambol’s voice is more processed than on any other track, warbling as if transmitted through an aquatic dream, and his layered, repetitive guitar work deepens the effect. This is one of Sambol’s key devices—the ability to spin banal scenarios into moments of magical realism. An encounter in the comments section could indicate two loners on a YouTube binge, but Sambol makes it sound like the stuff of a certain romance column.
Sambol doesn’t say a whole lot, but the words he utters tend to linger, inviting interpretation. On “There Are Things to Be Doing,” Sambol mumbles along to his drowsy guitar: “I was holding a plank/On soft carpet in the apartment of a friend/Who finds all our troubles funny.” It’s a simple but loaded image. You get the sense that this friend with plush flooring makes a lot more money than our protagonist—a man who’d rather tense up on a rug than relax across it. It can’t be an accident that at least two kinds of “plank” are made of wood: the kind you can’t comfortably sleep on, and the kind you walk off. In a single snapshot, Sambol hints at the stark yet silent contrast between struggle and a life of leisure. His opening line on “Big Text” is just as crammed with potential meaning: “What a mess I want to make with you.” He almost whispers it. The phrase might refer to sex, an unhealthy relationship, a couples’ pottery class, or a night of eating ribs. It could mean all of those things, or none, but the fact that such a simple expression sparks so much imagery is a testament to Sambol’s skill as a writer.
Sambol’s ability to compress big ideas into compact visuals might stem from his years writing poetry. On loping closer “His Aim,” he marvels at broken flower pots, and how “the soil and shape remain the same” after they’ve shattered. On the plucky cowboy number “Round the House,” he directs his gratitude to a nurturing woman. “I feel strong from the breakfast she made like I may never have to eat again,” he drawls. “Humbled, full, and safe.” These are familiar things we often take for granted: the accidental beauty of a busted pot, the warmth of a home-cooked meal. But his observations forego schmaltz and defamiliarize everyday scenes.
Some of Sambol’s scenery is less familiar, even surreal. Opener “You’re Still Loveable to Someone” is filled with funny little sketches, like a 400-million-year-old stone that screams cryptic advice and an unusual offer of camaraderie: “Let’s raise money for each other sometime/If the need arose it’d be good to know.” It is the album’s strangest yet most beautiful song, built on a sweet string melody and anchored by Sambol’s forlorn sense of humor. Even at its most peculiar, there is an unexpected comfort in this music. As a narrator, Sambol isn’t begging us to tag along. His voice is uneasy and hushed, like he’s worried we might hear him. But if you can sneak into these songs and sit with them, their small moments of intrigue may surprise you.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Perpetual Doom | February 5, 2021 | 7.7 | 5d9b7b97-4518-4e9a-ae86-d2151a5c1f75 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Delving deeper into their lead singer’s Iranian-American roots, the band melds Farsi lyrics with shades of the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las. | Delving deeper into their lead singer’s Iranian-American roots, the band melds Farsi lyrics with shades of the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las. | Habibi: Cardamom Garden EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/habibi-cardamom-garden-ep/ | Cardamom Garden EP | Cardamom has the rare ability to transcend culinary classification, adding a rounded depth to savory curries and roasts while also floating to the forefront of sugary desserts. The Brooklyn-based quintet Habibi’s new EP has a similar malleability: It’s full of music that blends cultures, languages, and genres, with charming and intriguing results. Their 2013 self-titled debut was marked by carefree surf-rock songs about dance parties, blissful romances, and other light-hearted subjects. On Cardamom Garden, their first release in more than four years, they delve deeper into lead singer Rahill Jamalifard’s Iranian-American roots, melding Farsi lyrics and Middle Eastern minor scales with the optimistic Americana of Best Coast and the Beach Boys and the vocal harmonization of the Shangri-Las. With this new amalgamation, they suggest a set of contrasts that is deeply familiar to anyone who grew up immersed in a tug of war between two or more cultures.
The four-track EP is bookended by two songs sung predominantly in Farsi. The first, “Khodaya,” sets a quick, fervent tone, reminiscent of the pace of their debut. Jamalifard spends the whole song repeating the titular phrase, which means “God.” Rather than sounding repetitive, though, the song is propelled forward by a high-pitched guitar and rhythmic tambourine. “Green Fuz”—an accelerated, reworked cover of Randy Alvey and the Green Fuz’s 1969 garage-rock nugget of the same name—is similarly thrilling, opening with a line that translates to “Here we come, we’re coming fast.” Again, the winding guitars and vocal harmonies carry the song more than the abstract lyrical content.
Jamalifard has resisted simple political readings of her music. “I get it, I’m writing songs in Farsi,” she said earlier this year. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m an Iranian nationalist or loyal Muslim.” Fittingly, the band seems more interested in exploring multiple influences than expressing a singular identity on this EP. The major exception is “Gypsy Love,” which is also the only song that doesn’t contain any Farsi. The lyrics concern an alluring, mysterious woman (a common conceit in Habibi’s music), describing an “Eastern love” from her almond-shaped eyes to the “desert heat” she evokes. The choice of English lyrics is effective here: It’s easy to imagine a white man saying these same words about a woman, reducing her to her cultural difference. The song’s reductive lyricism mirrors a Western notion of brown and black people as merely exotic stereotypes devoid of their own desires and interests. When surrounded by songs that establish Habibi’s intimate familiarity with Persian culture, the meaning shifts, suggesting instead that the band is playing off those flattened intricacies.
The EP’s strongest song is lead single “Nedayeh Bahar” (“Song of Spring”), which uses nature imagery and enigmatic wisdom—“Where we go we’ll always be”—to convey a sense of yearning that surpasses the beauty of “tall trees” and “gentle flowers.” Jamalifard’s lilting vocals skip gracefully over bubbly guitars, like a buoy bobbing over waves. It is the only song here that is significantly longer than two minutes, and the added length allows it to properly unfurl.
The rest of Cardamom Garden might have benefited from the same treatment. As it stands, these songs are generally caught between the extremes of expansive, dreamy wistfulness and pulse-quickening excitement. The short track lengths also mean that they don’t have room to differentiate themselves: As lush and pleasing as they are, the instrumentals often bleed into one another. At its best, Cardamom Garden feels like an experiment in ambiguity, shedding rigid definitions of what constitutes American music on the way to the band’s future. | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Modern Sky Entertainment | March 24, 2018 | 6.8 | 5daf7178-b275-4482-a84a-6d1f000046a7 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Jeremy Greenspan and Ryan Smith’s hardware experiment EP is fundamentally a dance album, but the intelligent tracks skew more subtle and heady than their solo work. | Jeremy Greenspan and Ryan Smith’s hardware experiment EP is fundamentally a dance album, but the intelligent tracks skew more subtle and heady than their solo work. | Jeremy Greenspan / Taraval: Greenspan and Taraval EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremy-greenspan-taraval-greenspan-and-taraval-ep/ | Greenspan and Taraval | This past winter, Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys and Ryan Smith (aka Taraval, and also a touring member of Caribou) returned to their shared hometown of Hamilton, Ontario to record a series of hardware experiments that would become this collaborative EP. After toying with an extensive list of synthesizers that includes, but is not limited to, a Yamaha CS50, a Roland Jupiter 6 and JX8P, and an Arp Odyssey, the pair cut the results down into relatively concise pieces whose exploratory tendencies are counterbalanced by compositional precision. Indebted to process and the materials from which it’s built, Greenspan and Taraval skews more subtle and heady than either artist’s solo work.
Though the backbone of this EP is a particular kind of hardware obsessiveness, it’s still fundamentally a dance album. It just requests attentive listening for reasons more formal than conceptual. Their techno is constructed on sturdy ground, but builds itself up in intricate ways. Opener “Earthly Delights” is painted over with hazy swaths of ambient melody, gradually thickening through the addition of barely-perceptible bassy rumbles; the terse “Hold Time for a Day” shifts its focus from acid phrases into anxious interlocking percussion. “Be Last” is the least decorated but most club-ready track here, a mesh of sticky beats driven forward by persistent hi-hats.
Greenspan and Smith cite a group of synth pioneers including Cluster, JD Emmanuel, and John Carpenter, though their own take on this experimental classicism is packaged within clubbier tracks. These influences are blended so that no moment feels like an homage; rather, it’s when the pair lock into a groove that some weirdness comes to the fore. On standout “Follow the Moonlight” which is built around dull-edged rattling, its near-soporific landscape is pierced here and there by irregular laser blips. And “Daff” produces sonic terrain through what feels like a deliberate process of subtraction or withholding, its occasional cushions of synthesizer melody receding to leave a metallic skeleton.
Though it reaches out in directions both historical and futuristic, this EP feels neither vintage nor particularly innovative. However, despite an evident wide-eyed appreciation for their instruments, Greenspan and Smith avoid the trap of maximalism or sinking too deep into the worlds they open up; the artists maintain a well-drawn sense of these tracks’ larger picture, which keeps their experiments wholly digestible. Studied and meticulously designed, it’s intelligent music that does most of the legwork for the listener. | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Geej | July 28, 2017 | 6.9 | 5db2de97-f4d4-4d0a-92e2-afd739711469 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
On his second album, the Québécois pop provocateur scales down the lavish glam rock of his debut for funky experiments with inconsistent results. | On his second album, the Québécois pop provocateur scales down the lavish glam rock of his debut for funky experiments with inconsistent results. | Hubert Lenoir: PICTURA DE IPSE: Musique directe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hubert-lenoir-pictura-de-ipse-musique-directe/ | PICTURA DE IPSE: Musique directe | Hubert Lenoir’s career was kickstarted in the moment when he flashed his butt to reveal a fleur-de-lis tattoo. As a guest performer on La Voix (Quebec’s answer to The Voice), the impish provocateur in eyeshadow and lipstick earned controversy from the program’s conservative viewers. This backlash combined with his charismatic talent rapidly reversed into a meteoric rise in Lenoir’s home province and even rarer success beyond, resulting in a Polaris Prize shortlist nomination, international infamy, and a spot opening for The Strokes at the Barclays Center on New Year’s Eve 2019. Responding to the surreality of the past three years of his life, Lenoir’s sophomore album scales down the lavish glam rock and conceptual lyrics of his debut for a strangely funky new sound with himself in the lead role.
The concept behind PICTURA DE IPSE (Picture of Myself): Musique Directe is compelling. Beginning in the late 1950s, Québécois filmmakers such as Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault developed a style of observational documentaries known as cinéma direct. Inspired by its intimacy, Lenoir used an iPhone to capture conversations and field recordings of sounds from his day-to-day life, weaving these samples throughout the album to create his own form of Musique Directe. As its 20 songs bleed together, the overall effect is like listening to a nearly hour-long audio montage with spoken word fragments illuminating the 25-year-old artist’s inner thoughts. The brief “418 wOo” sets a tone with its frenetic Thundercat-style breakbeat before Lenoir admits that the bullying he experienced in his childhood has since become a source of motivation.
The French Canadian rabble-rouser opens up just as readily in his lyrics. Over a patiently unfolding musical backdrop, “HULA HOOP” shares how his busy schedule stopped him from properly grieving the death of his dog Brownie: “I want to take the time to heal/But it’s already time to go again.” On the laid-back groove of “OCTEMBRE,” a duet with Bonnie Banane, Lenoir describes how kids at school used to mock him as “Hubert Pippi Longstocking.” With a voice pitched up like Quasimoto, “MTL STYLE LIBRE” reveals his bisexual insecurities at their base level: “How many girls do I have to fuck for my friends to admire me? How many dicks do I have to suck to be queer enough?”
“DIMANCHE SOIR,” produced by hip-hop beatmaker High Klassified, continues the humblebrags as Lenoir says he forgot to deposit “$50,000 in cheques,” then states that “even though I’m not straight, I’m still a straight shooter.” His sexuality rises to the forefront on “BOI,” a queer love song with G-funk synths and a squawking falsetto like Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes. Yet “SECRET,” featuring frequent collaborator Kirin J. Callinan on guitar and Mac DeMarco on drums, is the album’s most moving confessional. In its video, Lenoir takes on the character of a skunk trying to connect with a popular boy in his high school. Propelled by chiming 808s, billowing sax, and squelching synths straight out of Orange Juice’s “Rip It Up,” Lenoir admits he’s been struggling in therapy, offering his “condolences to everyone that is like me.”
Some of the album’s more immediate melodies are buried deep in its back half, like the English-language chorus of “GOLDEN DAYS” or the way “SUCRE + SEL” is oddly reminiscent of “Lady Marmalade.” After the previous 19 songs, “f.p.b.” brings the record to a tender conclusion as Lenoir sings while strumming the guitar with the soft touch of a lullaby. In the past, he has openly shared his idolization of Kanye West. The way both artists operate without creative filters is admirable, but they could also benefit from a bit more quality control. PICTURA DE IPSE is a fascinating project, but it suffers from being overstuffed, undercooked, and inconsistent in comparison to the bombastic pop of his debut. Thankfully, Lenoir has no shortage of ideas, and even his half-baked experiments are devilishly fun.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Worse/Terrible | September 20, 2021 | 6.9 | 5db79535-63ee-4a98-a0d8-29147b4cd80c | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The Neptunes of the discopunk underground have finally released their answer to Clones: the DFA's Compilation #1, for the ... | The Neptunes of the discopunk underground have finally released their answer to Clones: the DFA's Compilation #1, for the ... | Various Artists: DFA Records Presents: Compilation #1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2031-dfa-records-presents-compilation-1/ | DFA Records Presents: Compilation #1 | The Neptunes of the discopunk underground have finally released their answer to Clones: the DFA's Compilation #1, for the first time, compiles all the Brooklyn-based production duo's hype-building twelve-inches, from The Juan MacLean's straightforward electro singles "By the Time I Get To Venus" and "You Can't Have It Both Ways", to James Murphy's famously tongue-in-cheek "Losing My Edge" and decidedly less danceable "Give It Up", to The Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers"-- the track that more or less made the DFA the internationally renown playboys they are today-- and the mellow vocal dawn of its B-side, "Silent Morning", to Black Dice's danceperimental rockers "Cone Toaster" and "Endless Happiness".
With the exception of the Black Dice track, all of these songs were released last year, and by now, it's safe to say that most indie music fanatics have heard, owned on vinyl, or downloaded sketchy Ogg-Vorbis wax rips of them. This disc means iPodders can now download cleaner versions for their commutes, but after months and months of "Losing My Edge"-- witty and brilliant though it may be-- most listeners have already moved onto newer DFA releases like the new LCD Soundsystem single, "Yeah", which is currently widely available despite its vinyl-only status. At the moment, Compilation #1 to a large degree functions more as an archival folio for early DFA output; in itself, it's a fantastic comp, but perhaps it came a little too late. In time, the songs themselves will undoubtedly regain much of their initial potency, but for now, one can't help but be at least somewhat bored with the exact same song and dance.
Maybe that's one of the keys their success, though: Despite having released virtually just singles, the DFA have managed to become the most formidable production team on the indie scene. Their sole employment of vinyl-- an ever scarcer medium for a self-selecting crowd of hardcore music lovers-- created one of the most effective buzz mechanisms I can remember. Perhaps their only recent musical supply-vs-demand equals are the robber barons of Jamaican dub soundsystems. Any schmuck who's read Walter Benjamin can tell you that there's a relationship between a piece of art's exclusivity and the vitality of its aura; it's nothing new here, but the DFA is exceptionally textbook.
Moreover, this is a commendable act of self-preservation. Look at what's happened with The Neptunes: their immediately recognizable bump/grind formula made them the most relevant producers in hip-hop; but now, through oversaturation, too many commissions and not enough time to develop new musical ideas, their popularity has begun to wane. The DFA could be to all of rock what The Neptunes are to hip-hop-- there are more than a few tales of major pop stars knocking at their door-- but Goldsworthy and Murphy opt instead to issue mix albums for obscure French clothing outlets and electronic music magazines. For all intents and purposes, their exclusivity maintains their credibility, and refuses any possible allegations that they are a one-trick dancepunk pony. The compilation is indeed called Compilation #1, and implies not only more material in the future as is obvious, but a commitment to growth and diversity in their production as well. To hell with the kids; the DFA ain't losing its edge at all. | 2003-12-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-12-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | DFA | December 9, 2003 | 8 | 5dc8d6e6-73e9-4c99-80d2-55aa32381b63 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
New band from former Ultimate Painting songwriter Jack Cooper blends introspective songwriting with churning experimentation in earnest search of a different plane of existence. | New band from former Ultimate Painting songwriter Jack Cooper blends introspective songwriting with churning experimentation in earnest search of a different plane of existence. | Modern Nature: How to Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/modern-nature-how-to-live/ | How to Live | British songwriter Jack Cooper’s former group Ultimate Painting paid tribute to the southern Colorado countercultural artists’ community Drop City, which formed in 1965 and was abandoned to biker gangs by the early 1970s. When Ultimate Painting imploded last year, and Cooper’s new group Modern Nature debuted with an 11-minute piece of cosmic minimalism, one might’ve expected them to dive further into the swirl. But the band’s full-length debut, How To Live, anchored by Cooper and BEAK>’s Will Young, offers a more grounded escape route, blurring ideas of city and country in search of transcendence.
If Ultimate Painting’s soft-edged psych-pop teased at the sounds of the ’60s, Modern Nature evokes the psychedelic era’s ambitions through open-ended song structures. With a mix of quietly pulsing beats, hushed guitars, and whispered vocals, the songs recast Cooper’s music as coming from someplace above the fray. There are too many pulsing Neu!-influenced drums, wild saxophone solos (by Jeff Tobias of New York jazz-noise outfit Sunwatchers), and organ drones for an algorithm to tag the forward-pushing How to Live as “folk.” But the music shares some of the ache and inscrutability of Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band. Everything—from the swirling cello of “Criminals” to the pulsing motorik throbs of “Footsteps” and “Seance”—is held together by Cooper’s quiet voice and his sweet yearning for a different plane.
The loud/quiet/loud eclecticism might feel forced if it weren’t in service of such a coherent mood, a series of scenes viewed through the same rain-spotted train window. Cooper sounds most at home when his voice seems like it’s about to dissolve into the vining parts and the woody paths behind him. “Turbulence” is the album’s most fragile moment, a lilting melody not unlike John Lennon’s “Julia,” Cooper’s voice rising over a guitar pattern and organ. At their best, Modern Nature offer glimpses into the same enlightened place they accessed on their debut EP, where introspective folk songwriting and churning classical minimalism are one and the same.
On dystopian laments like “Criminals,” How To Live might be heard as a break-up album, though with society as a whole instead of any individual partner. A handwritten liner-note zine accompanying the album underscores how the band’s name does double duty, calling on both the countryside and our current blighted sense of humanity. Modern Nature’s songs might be heard as reminders that true escape isn’t about splitting town, ghosting everybody you know, and throwing your phone in the ocean. How To Live uncovers an internal landscape just as wide open, much easier to get to, and even harder to escape from.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Bella Union | August 26, 2019 | 7.6 | 5dca3193-4023-4f57-97fb-43bd7e8a3c93 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
This Compton chameleon borrows flows from anyone and everyone but gets away with it thanks to his sturdy songwriting. | This Compton chameleon borrows flows from anyone and everyone but gets away with it thanks to his sturdy songwriting. | Roddy Ricch: Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roddy-ricch-please-excuse-me-for-being-antisocial/ | Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial | If every hot rapper of the last five years was tossed into a cauldron and stirred together until they were only mildly recognizable, the end product would probably be Roddy Ricch. The 21-year-old Compton-raised crooner can’t decide if he wants to make moody and raw piano-driven street tales like his breakout single “Die Young,” motivational high school basketball warm-up anthems like “Every Season,” or polished and sunny Young Thug-inspired pop songs like his Mustard-produced “Ballin’.” Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial is not the slogan of an Etsy boutique that prints the phrase on Gildan hoodies and caps with adjustable strapbacks, but the title of his debut. The name has nothing to do with his music; it’s just an attempt to manufacture an identity or maybe inspire a few Instagram captions.
But say this for Roddy: No matter the trend he’s chasing, he usually wrings a solid song from it. Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial begins in the most cliche way possible—with a “Dreams and Nightmares”-style intro. As soon as the first somber piano key hits and Roddy starts wailing and reflecting on his upbringing, we know exactly where the track is headed, but he hits the marks well, including the intense beat switch, the motivational flex bars, the details about how he overcame the obstacles and secured the bag. It works. So does“Big Stepper,” when he, of course, meditates on the past over an acoustic guitar-sampling instrumental. His storytelling is rote, but gets over on the warmth of the melody.
There’s not a flow Roddy Ricch isn’t comfortable borrowing. On “Start Wit Me,” Roddy fills in for Lil Baby as Gunna’s partner in listing fashion brands, a low stakes song that just fills Gunna’s weekly appearance on a major label rap album quota—there’s no way Gunna is keeping track of his features at this point. “High Fashion,” his second collaboration of the year with Mustard, is a Young Thug rip so egregious that it probably could have been generated by an AI, but he sings his heart out, and the beat that puts a bright West Coast spin on ’90s R&B.
The few instances where Roddy breaks free from imitation provide standouts. On “War Baby,” Roddy seamlessly harmonizes with a gospel choir like the chameleon he is. And on “The Box,” over a hard-hitting beat that sounds like a teapot is boiling in the background, he finds a new delivery and pitch nearly every 10 seconds. The track is the best example of Roddy’s versatility, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Most rappers would sell their soul for his ability to shape his melody to latch onto any relevant sound, but everything here feels so safe. Roddy’s too good a songwriter to settle for being so vapid. | 2019-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | December 12, 2019 | 6.9 | 5dccad68-2238-49d5-95d7-c170f90198e5 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A brief EP from the Sonic Youth guitarist features ruminative, unadorned acoustic performances that convey a sense of anxiety and perseverance. | A brief EP from the Sonic Youth guitarist features ruminative, unadorned acoustic performances that convey a sense of anxiety and perseverance. | Lee Ranaldo: In Virus Times EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-ranaldo-in-virus-times-ep/ | In Virus Times EP | Lee Ranaldo has always shared similarities with George Harrison. Both guitarists contributed only a handful of songs per album and became the underdog favorite of a beloved band while people split their votes between the two more visible leads. Of the three Sonic Youth songwriters, Ranaldo was always the most indebted to classic rock, and his solo records thus far have looked backwards to his Beatles and Grateful Dead favorites. His brief new EP, In Virus Times, is a departure from this trend. It is a completely unadorned and ruminative listen whose title tells you all you need to know about the context.
This music was born as the pandemic gripped Ranaldo’s native New York, and it was recorded in his home while many studios were still closed. Ranaldo’s voice has always had a scholarly but friendly quality, and his beat poetry-inspired writing has often been a welcome contrast to the slacker melodies of his bandmates. But unlike much of his solo material, there are no vocals on this EP. Instead, alternating between finger-picked and droned chords on his acoustic guitar, Ranaldo manages to convey the anxiety from the ongoing pandemic and the 2020 presidential elections.
In Virus Times blends inspiration from two vastly different artists. The first is Joni Mitchell, whose unique style was a source of inspiration for Sonic Youth’s open tunings. Ranaldo conjures Mitchell’s method of letting an unanswered chord hang in the air; in fact, it’s the very first sound we hear on the EP. The second major influence is Jim O’Rourke, the producer-turned-official member of Sonic Youth. Ranaldo specifically draws from the sound of O’Rourke’s 1997 album Bad Timing, which combined John Fahey-indebted solo guitar and minimalism with a dash of dissonance. These influences are evident, but the playing throughout is unmistakably Ranaldo’s.
In Virus Times is not composed of individual songs; instead, it is broken into four parts that flow into one another but have their own designated starts and endings. The first track offers a complete journey, ending with a hopeful coda wherein Ranaldo whistles a happy little tune. He uses harmonics extensively for the next two parts, pinging high notes on the second composition and then hammering them on the third as if bittered and angry. The fourth and final part of the EP is by far the darkest, with no respite or resolution. The chords loom uneasily throughout, because that’s how Ranaldo must have felt at the time. In moments like these, In Virus Times is best understood as a snapshot of a miserable year, and one person trying to work through it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Mute | November 16, 2021 | 7 | 5dcde305-e5d1-4731-89b7-197d1187a83f | Marshall Gu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marshall-gu/ | |
On her full-length debut, the provocative producer also raps, smartly using her voice as a tool in her quest to dislodge gender binaries and power hierarchies. | On her full-length debut, the provocative producer also raps, smartly using her voice as a tool in her quest to dislodge gender binaries and power hierarchies. | Angel-Ho: Death Becomes Her | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-ho-death-becomes-her/ | Death Becomes Her | Cape Town producer Angel-Ho uses music, as she once put it, as a “medium to articulate the recurring violence on non-white bodies.” That violence is both the method and symptom of centuries of colonialism, an observation reflected in the philosophy of NON Worldwide, the transcontinental label she co-founded with Richmond’s Chino Amobi and London’s Nkisi. “It was interesting for me to have this dialogue between [these countries], considering our colonial histories,” Angel-Ho told The Fader. “And creating music that’s in resistance.” NON has created a borderless network of African artists and those of the diaspora, all set on countering oppressive colonial forces.
Angel-Ho explored these themes instrumentally on her 2015 debut EP, Ascension, a set of visceral, post-industrial beats. On her debut album, Death Becomes Her, she adds neck-snapping rap to the production, using her voice as a tool in her quest to dislodge gender binaries and power hierarchies. A black trans woman, she is Hyperdub’s first emerging pop star, a shape-shifting artist who is just as comfortable toying with experimental sounds as she is invoking Missy Elliott. On Death Becomes Her, Angel-Ho beautifully transmutes any past anguish into a colorful network of global sonics, a bold statement of trans femininity, and a rallying cry for resistance. At once, Angel-Ho shatters binaries and encompasses dualities.
The apocalyptic drums and crashing samples of “Muse to You” recall the most brutal, jagged beats from electronic envelope-pushers Rabit and Arca, both Angel-Ho collaborators. But these tracks are clearly meant for dancing, their industrial samples fluttering over pulsating grooves. And when Angel-Ho spits searing bars over these beats, as on “Pose,” she moves toward queer rappers Le1f and Mykki Blanco, both responsible for breaking barriers in their respective hip-hop scenes.
Angel-Ho also pulls the past into this challenging moment, referencing and reflecting turn-of-the-millenium R&B. She mirrors the cadence of Aaliyah’s “Try Again” during “Live” and interpolates Lumidee’s international hit “Never Leave You” (which itself incorporates the Diwali Riddim) for “Pose.” All these disparate sources stem from the African diaspora, collectively encompassing a broader experience shared by queer people of color around the world. Flipping meanings of familiar songs with her electrifying delivery, Angel-Ho bends old pop tropes, too. She repurposes the classic hook of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” for “Live,” a pointed decision considering that trans people are persecuted at staggering rates around the globe. Angel-Ho screeches the lyrics with urgency, the contrast with the Gibbs’ cool white falsettos high. Elsewhere, she triumphantly yells “Notorious!,” referencing the Duran Duran song that Biggie famously sampled. It becomes a queenly declaration.
Angel-Ho finds power from putting herself on a pedestal, constantly comparing herself to iconic women. She’s “symphonically Björk” or dancing around like Britney. Marilyn Monroe wishes she were her, she boasts. But underneath the desire to be revered and idolized is the need to be respected. During “Muse to You,” over a pounding house beat, Angel-Ho regally announces, “No longer beaten and abused/You are the girl who paid her dues/You are the muse.” It echoes a sentiment shared by many trans women who can only avoid being targeted for violence when they publicly pass as a cis woman, fueling their aspirations to embody a female fantasy.
This idea is the basis of “Like a Girl,” whose sing-song chorus reiterates the simple sentiment of infinite pop songs before it: “I can be your girl/In this lonely world.” Sung by Angel-Ho, though, it becomes a radical statement in the face of the those who don’t believe that trans womanhood deserves to be regarded as womanhood. If she wants to be “your girl,” she can. | 2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hyperdub | March 4, 2019 | 7.6 | 5dd1699e-6a1d-4f6c-9f98-8b176363db26 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
After expanding his palette on both the superb Woman King EP and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins, Sam Beam finally completes his gradual journey from lo-fi home recordings to a full-band setup. The gorgeous results find Beam and producer Brian Deck deftly venturing into dub, blues, and West African music, among other styles. | After expanding his palette on both the superb Woman King EP and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins, Sam Beam finally completes his gradual journey from lo-fi home recordings to a full-band setup. The gorgeous results find Beam and producer Brian Deck deftly venturing into dub, blues, and West African music, among other styles. | Iron & Wine: The Shepherd's Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10691-the-shepherds-dog/ | The Shepherd's Dog | Sam Beam's first two full-lengths under the name Iron & Wine were bare-bones, hushed affairs full of rich imagery, whispery falsettos, rhythmic finger-picking, and not much else. In the time since, Beam has gradually moved in other directions, expanding his palette on both the excellent Woman King EP-- which featured more percussion and fleshed-out arrangements-- and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins.
Beam has also toured with a group of musicians for some time now, so it makes sense that his new album would complete his gradual journey away from lo-fi home recordings. The album even teases you at its start-- it begins with a snatch of scratchy black-and-white guitar and percussion before jumping to Technicolor when the bass and drums dive in. The rest of opener "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" is surprising as well, at once sleek and full of clattering Americana signifiers like steel guitar, acoustic slide guitar, and tack piano.
Despite these new sounds, the core of Iron & Wine remains Beam's voice, guitar, and songwriting, which is still more suggestive than concrete, and is built mostly around strophic verse/verse/verse forms rather than leaning on choruses. Beam and producer Brian Deck deftly build on that foundation, venturing into dub, blues, and West African music (among other styles), creating a series of interstitial passages that cushion the transitions between songs. Beam also experiments with his voice, layering himself heavily on several songs.
Perhaps the most stunning arrangement is the West African juju casting of "House by the Sea", which builds from an abstract soundscape into a snaky groove led by a frenetic bass and a strangely employed baritone sax. Guitars dance atop the rhythm as Beam harmonizes with his sister Sarah on the chorus-- one of the few on the album. The album's foray into dub and reggae, "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)", could have been a disaster if it hadn't been done so subtly, with an ear toward the musical elements that define reggae rather than the sonic character that defines it-- it's not a pastiche or a genre exercise in the least.
For an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd's Dog is so varied that it takes several listens for everything to fully sink in, but the individual details-- such as the dramatic steel guitar at the end of "Love Song of the Buzzard" or the cascade of banjo in the middle of "Innocent Bones"-- are nearly as rewarding as the overall sound of the album. The sequencing is also well-considered, setting contrasting songs against each other and ending on the stunning and starkly emotional "Flightless Bird, American Mouth". The vocal harmony as it rises into the chorus is shiver-inducing, and the song finally delivers the sense of resolution that much of the album purposely holds back.
The Shepherd's Dog is Iron & Wine's most diverse and progressive album yet, a deft transition to a very different sound that explores new territory while preserving the best aspects of Beam's earlier recordings. It's the kind of record that just keeps pulling you back with its dreamlike flow and attention to detail: The first time I listened to it, I played it straight though again when it ended, and I can't think of a higher compliment than that. | 2007-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | September 25, 2007 | 8.6 | 5dda1ee6-433f-4c78-9b32-9654680f7d17 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The semi-anonymous singer has changed her mind about retirement, but almost nothing else. Her first album since 2013 sets emotional miniatures to widescreen Italo disco and dinner-for-one city pop. | The semi-anonymous singer has changed her mind about retirement, but almost nothing else. Her first album since 2013 sets emotional miniatures to widescreen Italo disco and dinner-for-one city pop. | Sally Shapiro: Sad Cities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sally-shapiro-sad-cities/ | Sad Cities | In the mid-2000s, a trio of Swedish stars caught the world’s attention. There was Robyn, whose ability to synthesize complicated emotions into pop made her an idol. There was the Knife, whose penchant for shredding genre boundaries made them underground heroes. And then there was Sally Shapiro, who confusingly was a woman called Sally Shapiro and also a duo with Johan Agebjörn, and who paired music originating in glamour hedonism with a singer who sounded scared of her own shadow, or more interested in it than any spotlight. Sally Shapiro arrived with a pledge of allegiance: “I’ll Be By Your Side,” a heavy pour of expertly chilled Italo disco that made her a cult favorite.
Shapiro went on to release a trio of fine albums: 2006’s Disco Romance, a stellar distillation of what Robyn might sound like if she actually preferred dancing on her own; 2009’s My Guilty Pleasure, in which both the guilt and the pleasure were slap-bass; and 2013’s Somewhere Else, which found Shapiro and a passel of other producers lost in slight, summery idylls. Attendant remix albums brought Shapiro—whose voice expresses a yearning for intense emotions without the chops to convey them, and in that way makes jewels of its flaws—to other parties, with varying results. And then, without much fanfare, it all came to an end with 2016’s glistening single “If You Ever Want to Change Your Mind.”
Nearly six years later, Shapiro has changed her mind about retirement, but almost nothing else. Sad Cities sounds exactly as you might imagine: emotional miniatures set to widescreen Italo disco, dinner-for-one city pop, hooks that don’t haunt so much as settle in like a cat in your lap. It’s self-assured in its awkward swooning, forthright in its faith in four-on-the-floor. In its own way—in its belief that its own way will triumph—Sad Cities is its own kind of triumph.
Opener “Forget About You” arrives with a sweet prelude, a few minutes of sparkling electric piano tones and sugary strings before the song reveals itself. “I miss you so/I cry when I’m on my own,” she sings. “Please don’t forget/Forget about me, my friend.” This is a bravura way to return. It’s also twee as fuck. Too distant for TikTok, too instant for a dissertation, “Forget About You” bins anything not earnest and girlish. If it’s a bit prim, well, prim is a vibe. “Believe in Me,” the second track confirms. The piano house grandeur of “Million Ways” is equally epic. “It was worth the waiting, all those cold and lonely nights,” Shapiro sighs, poised as ever, over a track that’s a quick KiNK remix away from becoming a summer anthem. As it is, it’s pure satisfaction: “Now you’re compensated,” she says, “with a billion shining lights.”
Throughout, assurance is as common as ambivalence, which makes Sad Cities feel less like a melancholy wallow and more like an adult acceptance of the truth of adolescent emotions. “It’s such a sad city,” she announces in the title track, a pep in her step; if “it’s a paradise for everyone but me,” maybe that’s because she’s actually happy. “Dulcinea” dares to sound hopeful, as heartfelt as prime ABBA with none of the heartbreak. “Life is just the way you think it will be,” she resolves. For Sally Shapiro, at home in her head, thinking is how things happen.
Well-versed in the ecstasy of dance music, Shapiro also knows the value of getting out of your head. “Tell Me How” is a warm pool of ambient house streaked with squiggles like bright-colored bath gel; “Christmas Escape” eschews the spirited jingle of Mariah and the arch glamour of Saint Etienne and instead revels in the seasonal psychedelia of Coil. Closer “Fading Away” is a black-light fever dream, mind-altering enough for a Euphoria feature but wise enough in the ways of Hi-NRG to know that a self can be reborn only after the ego death of a crowded dancefloor. Sad Cities is the same song Sally’s always been singing, entirely self-reverential, a guidebook for sticking to your (disco laser) guns. Its stubborn self-reliance sounds like hard-won confidence. | 2022-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Italians Do It Better | February 22, 2022 | 7.6 | 5ddccb10-91ee-44d9-b6f1-573a3c584be3 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
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 liminal sex-pop of George Michael’s 1987 debut 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 liminal sex-pop of George Michael’s 1987 debut album. | George Michael: Faith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-michael-faith/ | Faith | In 1986, George Michael wandered deep into himself. He realized that, at some point in the five years he had recorded and toured with his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, he had completely lost track of who he was. With Wham!, Michael had achieved his childhood dream of becoming unreasonably famous; he glided across stages, and fans’ eyes waded in his direction. His enormous blonde hair looked like a work of relief sculpture, and his voice pulsed with brightness, like a lightbulb about to burst in its socket. He was one of the world’s biggest pop stars by the time his retro-pop duo fell apart; he was also 23, only just beginning to figure out who he was and what kind of music he wanted to make.
Michael felt isolated, anxious over what to do next—the future seemed elusive and unstable, as precarious as a song’s placement on the pop charts. He was sinking into what he would later characterize as an eight-month long-depression, wondering if he even wanted to return to music. In the spring of ’86, two months before the final Wham! Show at London’s Wembley Stadium, Michael released a solo single called “A Different Corner.” Accompanied by a stark, black-and-white video, it was a sad and strange song that seemed to disappear as it happened, the brief snowflakes of synth and Michael’s tenor evaporating into air. It’s as gorgeous as it is uncertain of itself, quietly stealing back every emotion it offers, leaving behind a crumpled blankness. “The problem was just that I had developed a character for the outside world that wasn’t me,” he said. “So I made the decision to uncreate the person I had created and become more real.”
A little over a year later, he drew a thick, Princely scribble in empty space. It would become the first single for his solo debut, 1987’s Faith, a song called “I Want Your Sex.” A near-total photonegative of “A Different Corner”’s lustless vacuum, built out of the boiling dark of the clubs Michael loved to dance in, “I Want Your Sex” employed a sudden fluency with sexuality to define his post-boy band maturity. He fastidiously programmed every detail of the song—even the mummified sub-rhythms that kick like pistons underneath it, which were produced by an error in a synthesizer pattern from a different track. Michael was so charmed by the accidental thicket of snares and kicks that he built “I Want Your Sex” directly on top of it. “I’ve danced to records like this for years and I buy records like this all the time but I’ve never really had the courage to make one,” he said.
The song was immediately banned by the BBC and strategically suppressed by radio, but it eventually blossomed as a single on MTV once Michael added a safe sex disclaimer to the beginning of the video. The clip focused almost inflexibly on Michael’s face, shadowed by an unfocused haze of stubble, singing in a frayed sub-frequency of his former boyish tenor, all interchanged with shots of body parts: legs walking in a garter belt, water cascading over feet and torsos, Michael writing “EXPLORE MONOGAMY” in lipstick on his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung’s thigh and back.
In interviews about “I Want Your Sex” and its video, Michael always redirected the subject toward monogamy. He didn’t want the song to be misconstrued as an untamed celebration of casual sex in the midst of the AIDS epidemic; at the time, monogamy seemed to Michael not only a thoughtful response to AIDS but dimensionally sexy in and of itself. “I wanted to write a song which sounded dirty but which was applicable to someone that I really cared about,” he told Interview in 1988. “I mean, it is the perfect situation to really love someone to death and to want to rip their clothes off at the same time, isn’t it?” But it’s a song so sunken into its desire for someone that Michael’s cautious exploration of safe sex gets lost among the chorus’ seductive synth wobbles and the liquid blend of lust and angst with which he sings the word “sex.”
Michael himself seemed unable to glimpse “I Want Your Sex” beyond its controversy, already looking to exchange it for a different song, a different impression, a different corner of himself to exhibit to the world. In the video for his next single, Faith’s title track, a jukebox needle skates away from “Sex” and gently lowers onto the surface of a new disc. The chorus of an old Wham! single, “Freedom,” bruises slowly into the silence, played on a Yamaha DX7 synth tuned to its “cathedral organ” setting.
The melody is funereal instead of flourescent, as if Michael were entombing his teen-pop past in the bellows of a vast pipe organ. It’s among the first instances of Michael commenting on his music as he made it, embedding his songs with footnotes and reprised themes that connected with his early career. Michael became fascinated with continuity, with how things could change when they were revisited, sometimes revising his songs whole-cloth (“Freedom ’90”) or lightly modernizing them for a new decade (“I’m Your Man ’96”), making his form of pop music a rich and intertextual network of references and repeating motifs.
Out of the deep mournful glow of the organ, emerges… an acoustic guitar? Strumming the Bo Diddley beat? It sounds almost frail playing against a rhythmic skeleton of snaps, handclaps, and whispers across the snare rim. The camera drifts over Michael’s new image: leather jacket shrugging loosely from his shoulders, his gaze buried somewhere beneath impenetrable sunglasses, pretending to strum a sunburst archtop guitar.
In 1987, popular rock music was trying fill arenas with enormous waves of echo; “Faith”’s chords sounded crisp as the blue jeans pasted to Michael’s ass in the video. He was employing rock as a texture, as a signifier of history and depth, absorbing the guitar rhythms of the ’50s and ’60s just as he embedded the drums of the Motown songs from his youth in tracks like Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” It made Michael’s work as serious as it was playful, taking established songforms and converting them into modern pop.
The rest of Faith embodies this approach, a montage of different colors and tempos from pop’s unabridged past—the fluttering rockabilly of the title track, the deluxe synthetic bath of “Father Figure,” and the hardboiled synth funk of “I Want Your Sex” all occur on the same side of an album, like alternate histories talking to each other through time, all before “One More Try” wafts in like wind through an empty cathedral.
During the sessions for Faith, Michael and engineer Chris Porter occasionally recorded songs measure by measure, with Michael singing fragments of verses against a rudimentary LinnDrum pattern. Some of Michael’s songs didn’t even have physical demos before they were captured in the studio; they’d reel out fitfully from his head as they were recorded. The highlights of the darker, more club-lit corners of the album’s second side, “Hard Day” and “Monkey,” were constructed in this way, built on a program of minimal rhythmic cross-hatchings from Michael’s drum machine, his voice dancing between spotlights of synth bass.
Even through the dense programming, Michael’s voice remains at the center of the record. It always shapeshifts beyond its form, whether whispering through “Father Figure”’s garden of smoke or exchanging enthusiastic choruses with the choir that eventually materializes from it. His voice’s most powerful showcase, the peak of Michael’s career, is in the mournful procession of “One More Try.” The song technically lacks a chorus; in its place is an evolving verse whose vocal melody sounds unhinged from any of its chord changes, swimming upwards through an arctic fog. His voice starts to rapidly escalate through notes; when he sings “I don’t want to learn to/Hold you, touch you…” he hits a note of such trembling uncertainty that it bends like curved glass.
“One More Try” is lyrically tentative, a gospel-pop song that’s faintly baffled by the idea of its own salvation. It sits in the perspective of someone too wounded to open themselves up to another person, trapped in an in-between state. Faith itself seems stranded between identities in its reckless skating through genres, from rock to synth pop to the skipping pulse of clubs. It’s an album that’s divided down the center between faith and funk, an album on which the sex song is actually about monogamy—an album that reveals more of itself the more one pays attention to the drift of its details.
“I feel this is not a pop album,” Michael told SPIN in 1987. He thought Faith was more musically sophisticated, that it resembled the black pop and dance records he was listening to at the time. On “Hand to Mouth,” he displays an evolving social consciousness that seems inherited directly from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, characters and their cyclical struggles spilling through a cityscape of wavering synths. He performed black pop forms so well, with such verisimilitude, that each song migrated flexibly between radio formats—Faith was the first album by a white solo artist to top Billboard’s R&B Chart and four of its six singles floated up the Hot 100, each hitting No. 1, one after the other.
Michael planned a nine-month world tour after the record’s release, with rigorously choreographed shows. While on the road, he contracted laryngitis in Australia and over the course of the next few tour dates, his voice eroded further. A cyst began to form on his vocal cords. He needed throat surgery. He felt as though he were having a nervous breakdown. “I genuinely thought, ‘This is what happens. This is when you lose it’,” he told The Big Issue in 1996. He was growing more uncomfortable with having his picture taken; even on the cover of Faith, he’s folding himself up into the inner shadows of his leather jacket. He later said he had spent nearly a year wearing sunglasses, as if he had succumbed to the image he had invented for the album. “I think I even went to bed in them,” he said. “I just couldn’t make eye contact with strangers.”
Having produced an album more successful than anything he did in Wham!, Michael found himself stranded again, depressed, uncertain of the future. He was burdened again by the inflexibility of his image, trapped in an opaque layer of himself that was not really himself. He was 25 years old, unsure of what he should do next. Three years later, he briefly disappeared from his own music videos, leaving no trace of himself, receded to pure symbols: an exploded jukebox, and a leather jacket on fire. | 2018-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | August 5, 2018 | 8.7 | 5de2d584-b9a5-4af1-84cd-e99711f3187d | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
Coldplay have risen to massive popularity on a potent mixture of nice-guy charm, serviceable songwriting, and edgelessness. With this, their third album, they dig in their heels and deliver more of the same. | Coldplay have risen to massive popularity on a potent mixture of nice-guy charm, serviceable songwriting, and edgelessness. With this, their third album, they dig in their heels and deliver more of the same. | Coldplay: X&Y | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1541-xy/ | X&Y | "Don't Panic", the opening track of Coldplay's first album, drew its title from the famous motto of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels. Two albums later, it seems they chose the wrong Adams catchphrase; most of their recorded output is better exemplified by the Guide's description of Earth: "Mostly harmless." In their seven years together, Coldplay have risen to monumental levels of popularity on a potent mixture of nice-guy charm, serviceable songwriting, and general inoffensiveness. Unfortunately, these aren't the kind of traits that often lead to interesting music. Not that the band hasn't taken the occasional stabs at creativity and innovation; it's just that those attempts have always been carefully measured, or even nervously self-conscious.
Coldplay have never seemed intent on world domination, but as their early singles caught on, journalists came waving raves. Then, with nearly 5 million copies of Parachutes sold worldwide and their popularity on the upswing, the band's sophomore album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, found the band unsure of how to advance. Luckily for them, their decision to virtually recreate Parachutes on a larger budget paid off commercially: The album got them tagged as "the next U2," a ridiculously off-base coronation that ignores the fact that U2 recorded "I Will Follow", "New Year's Day", "Bad", and The Joshua Tree, among others, before they wandered off into the MOR wilderness.
Coldplay, meanwhile, started in the middle of the road and haven't strayed since. Granted, they've produced a handful of good songs-- "Don't Panic", "Shiver", and "The Scientist" are all fine achievements, while "Clocks" remains a great piano part in search of an equally great melody-- but their albums have yet to justify the critical hyperbole, and their third full-length, X&Y;, isn't going to be the one to lock that down. Though dressed to the nines in big guitars and faultless musicianship, X&Y; is unable to lay claim to even a single song equal to any of the high points from their first two albums, and the band's obvious desire to be all things to all people doesn't help: They long to be huge and expansive, in The Unforgettable Fire mode ("A Message"), tear-jerking AOR balladeers ("Fix You"), and hip, Kraftwerk-referencing aesthetes ("Talk"), but at heart, they're really built for easy listening, which makes their rockers feel cursory and their ballads simpering.
X&Y; is sequenced fast-song/slow-song through almost its entire running order, which means those of you uninterested in wading through doe-eyed love songs based on lazy rhyming couplets and trite resolutions have already lost half a disc's worth of music. You'll "go backwards and then/ You'll go forwards again." You'll "get lost and then get found." You'll notice that the first verse of "Swallowed in the Sea" ("You cut me down a tree/ And brought it back to me/ And that's what made me see/ Where I was coming from") is somehow meaningless, yet also cliched. Had Coldplay accompanied these lyrics with remotely interesting or memorable music, this could be somewhat overlooked; sadly, "Swallowed in the Sea" is one of several aggressively banal ballads that sink this album into a sort of neo-Carpenters abyss.
The more uptempo tracks here tend to be light years better than their leaden counterparts, if only because the louder accompaniment manages to drown out more of Chris Martin's lyrics and bring the focus to his pleasant if unspectacular vocals. Guitarist John Buckland does his part to bring life to the proceedings: He's an encyclopedia of Will Sergeant and Johnny Marr-isms, and even if most of his window dressings are little more than a distillation of tricks learned from better bands, he does a nice job of providing the illusion of a grand gesture for songs like "Square One" and "White Shadows". Martin's vocals, meanwhile, rarely command attention, content to melt into the string synthesizer and guitar reverb as if he hopes he's not imposing on you. Listening back to an earlier track like "Shiver" proves he's capable of more.
Lending to the uninspired nature is lead single "Speed of Sound"'s uncanny resemblance to "Clocks". Certainly, it rarely hurts to stick with what works, but this is not just a near-exact replica of its successful predecessor; it's also a less memorable song riding a piano hook that has so deeply infiltrated the pop-culture landscape that I've become numb to it. In fairness, the track's vocal melody outperforms the one from "Clocks" by a hair, but without a strong hook, the song fails in the one category it needs to succeed in: replay value. It's symptomatic of the rest of the album, and indeed, much of the band's catalog to date: Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y; is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable. It may be pointless to hate them, but with this album, they've almost certainly become the easiest band on the planet to be completely indifferent to. | 2005-06-06T02:01:08.000-04:00 | 2005-06-06T02:01:08.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 6, 2005 | 4.9 | 5de309cd-98ba-470d-a34e-db18eddbd43e | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On their debut LP, this young band from Denmark mixes post-punk clang and goth atmosphere, serving it up with a massive dose of addictive energy. | On their debut LP, this young band from Denmark mixes post-punk clang and goth atmosphere, serving it up with a massive dose of addictive energy. | Iceage: New Brigade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15576-new-brigade/ | New Brigade | Here's what we know about Iceage: They are four friends, ages 18 and 19, from Denmark. Their debut LP, New Brigade, has actually been out in their home country since January, with a much smaller, limited run coming to the United States earlier this year. These are the essentials. Over the past few months, as New Brigade has been passed back and forth online with increasing enthusiasm, there has been a remarkable amount of chatter, some of it focused on their age, some of it on their music, some of it on faraway mystique.
Not long ago, a Danish daily deemed them "teenage punks full of anger and anxiety," a line galvanized by bloody post-show photos of smiling audience members published on their blog. Questions like "Are they the saviors of punk music?" have been posed, as though punk music needs saving. They just played their first show in the U.S. this past weekend, in Brooklyn. It sold out. The New York Times and The New Yorker have weighed in. They're set to return to Roskilde this summer. As you may have already realized, there's a swirl of information and interest surrounding this band right now, at the heart of which is their music.
And it turns out that New Brigade is a refreshing and extraordinary debut. These four have located a punk-rock sweet spot: mixing the black atmosphere of goth, the wild-limbed whoosh of hardcore, and the clangor of post-punk. It's a feat made all the more impressive by one very important intangible: energy. While they still have room to grow as songwriters, the energy in every atom of New Brigade's charred, sub-25-minute rush is seductive. From the moment "White Rune" starts to quake until those last tangles of guitar conk out on closer "You're Blessed", there's little escape from this record's grip. Even the foreboding mash and march of "Intro", its wordless, 46-second pulse of a prelude, is enough to make you feel like you need to fling yourself in the direction of someone else.
That said, despite the typically direct, blunt-object nature of "punk," much of New Brigade is also impressionistic. Elias Rønnenfelt's words (sung in English rather than Danish) are largely unintelligible, leaving a lot up to the heart and imagination. Rønnenfelt finds an effective way of sharing just enough room for listeners to fill in the blanks. As if mimicking the motions of his own guitar, he scythes his way through each song, usually to anthemic heights. That you can hear in the gasp of "Collapse" and starry-eyed bounce of "Remember". Even more so in aforementioned climax "You're Blessed", a song that sounds like a more irritable cousin to the poppy, post-hardcore emo that came of age here in the 1990s.
The album's grit has nothing to do with fidelity. While Iceage employ decidedly abrasive no-wave textures, New Brigade was recorded in a proper studio. The result is a recording whose snare hits and basslines announce themselves with real fury. And though a lot of this music might seem from a distance like a dozen ideas thrown together in the space of a single song, what they've done here is deceptively precise and exists on a deeply personal, unfiltered plane. All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you. | 2011-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? | June 29, 2011 | 8.4 | 5de38aab-2f9c-4cc7-8dac-d0ec0392c98f | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
With a new rhythm section and tighter performances, the noisy New York band’s latest EP moves deliberately from chaos to catharsis. | With a new rhythm section and tighter performances, the noisy New York band’s latest EP moves deliberately from chaos to catharsis. | A Place to Bury Strangers: Hologram | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-place-to-bury-strangers-hologram/ | Hologram | A Place to Bury Strangers have proven their longevity, if not exactly their consistency. Since the trio’s self-titled debut punctured eardrums in 2007, Oliver Ackermann and co. have continued to play mopey, loud, intense music that splits the difference between post-punk and shoegaze. Unlike their first album, though, the band’s later outings were often loose and underwritten, clomping on long past their welcome. The founder of Death by Audio, a beloved line of custom guitar pedals plus a shuttered Williamsburg venue, Ackermann may seem more interested in special effects than songwriting. Yet on the brief, satisfying Hologram EP, the Brooklyn-based artist transcends his gearhead tendencies, gracefully navigating fuzz and feedback loops as well as melodies and hooks.
And in spite of its modest 22-minute length, Hologram never feels like an afterthought. The EP has a distinct shape, with the abrasiveness of the first two songs cooling into the tight melodies of the final three. “End of the Night” and “I Might Have” aren’t exactly unprecedented for A Place to Bury Strangers, though the production feels punchier, the songs structured beneath the layers of reverb and multi-tracked percussion. The influences are the same—a low-in-the-mix drum fill sounds like the opening seconds of “Only Shallow,” and a number of moments evoke the languid aggression of the Jesus and Mary Chain. But just when his 1990s shoegazing threatens to get old, Ackermann winkingly acknowledges his predecessors: “Hello 1994,” he drones on “I Might Have,” after wistfully describing a desire to “erase the years.”
In the past, A Place to Bury Strangers’ rotating cast of a rhythm section too often relied on thumping bass guitar eighth notes and busy, clamorous drums, creating an atmosphere of wallowing menace. The band’s new drummer Sandra Fedowitz and her husband, bassist John Fedowitz—the latter a key collaborator from Ackermann’s turn-of-the-millenium project Skywave—reach for uplift instead. Sandra’s terse beat on “Playing the Part” lets Ackermann’s riff shine, while the interplay between John’s swimming bassline and a gated snare enables the splintered sweetness of closer “I Need You.” His band’s timekeeping honed, Ackermann’s hooks can breathe: The EP moves deliberately from chaos to catharsis, with tighter performances than we’ve heard from A Place to Bury Strangers in a long time.
Hologram’s meticulous sound drives home how much finesse goes into making noisy music sound distinctive. When A Place to Bury Strangers first came on the scene, bloggers and critics dubbed them “the loudest band in New York,” a limited form of praise for their varied talents. Listen to their debut today, and you might not be shocked by its volume, though the jagged beauty of the record’s songcraft and production endures. Thoughtfully constructed and paced, Hologram could have a similarly long shelf life. A guitar pedal, after all, is like an airplane—anyone can get on board, but only those with a particular set of skills and technical savvy can make it fly. Because they treat every part of the writing and recording process with care, A Place to Bury Strangers lift us off the ground and into a cracked sky.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dedstrange | July 15, 2021 | 7.3 | 5de566d2-1016-4ee1-b3c4-6bbe331cf405 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
You’ve heard sophisti-Kylie, disco Kylie, and Kraftwerk Kylie. On her 14th album, she tries on a new costume: Ready or not, here comes country Kylie. | You’ve heard sophisti-Kylie, disco Kylie, and Kraftwerk Kylie. On her 14th album, she tries on a new costume: Ready or not, here comes country Kylie. | Kylie Minogue: Golden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kylie-minogue-golden/ | Golden | In her 30-plus years of stardom, we’ve met many Kylie Minogues. First came vintage-pop Kylie (“The Loco-Motion”), followed by sophisti-Kylie (“Shocked”), dance Kylie (“Confide in Me”), indie Kylie (Impossible Princess), disco Kylie (“Spinning Around”), and of course Kraftwerk Kylie (“Can’t Get You Out of My Head”). While she’s never attained the imperial reach of her contemporary Madonna, she’s one of very few modern singers whose skill at reinvention merits mention in the same immortal breath. Nor is she done dreaming up new costumes: Minogue recorded much of her 14th studio album, Golden, in Nashville, with collaborators including phase-one Taylor Swift alumni Nathan Chapman and Liz Rose. There’s even space for a banjo on one of the singles, “Stop Me From Falling.” Ready or not, here comes country Kylie.
The idea for this detour apparently came from Kylie’s long-standing A&R. “I’ll try just about anything, so when he said, ‘Think of a country inspiration element,’ I said, ‘Sure!’” she recalled in a recent interview. There’s a certain record-company strategy-meeting logic behind this plan in the era of pop/disco/country hybrids from Man of the Woods to Golden Hour. For both better and worse, though, Kylie’s excursion into Nashville sounds little like either of those contemporary extremes. Instead, she borrows from the sledgehammer-subtle EDM Americana of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” where fingerpicked guitars meet thundering bass drums and teeth-rotting synths in the year of our lord 2013.
The music on Golden sounds ill-fitting and even cheap at times, like a deathtrap ride that has been painted bright pink to distract the potential customer. The worst offender in this regard is “One Last Kiss,” which uses what sounds like a Casio country preset rhythm for its basic structure, the cheap plastic claps throttling what is otherwise a decent piece of songwriting. The previous song, “Sincerely Yours,” is similarly lightweight, thanks to flimsy strings and a vocal hook which suggests Kylie wanted to go full “Where Are Ü Now” dolphin flute but couldn’t quite find room in the budget.
Elsewhere, Kylie gives the impression she’s trying too hard. The title track opens with a yodelling vocal line that appears to reference Ennio Morricone’s theme song to The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, in a broad, meaningless nod to American culture that ranks right up there with Europeans who get really into the NFL. Minogue’s vocal delivery sometimes seems to ape a Southern U.S. drawl, notably on the verses of “Stop Me From Falling.” The album’s lyrics, meanwhile, reference burning rubber, rodeos, and rocking—hardly home territory for a London-dwelling Australian entertainer.
The real shame is that when Kylie stays true to the dance-pop sound that has adorned many of her greatest hits, she cooks up some moments of genuine brilliance. “Dancing” has a wonderfully funny one-liner chorus (“When I go out, I wanna go out dancing”) that perfectly sums up the way a great pop song can defy mortality. “Raining Glitter,” meanwhile, combines lilting acoustic guitar, deep house beats, a whooping vocal effect, and a fabulously overblown chorus to create an exuberant cousin to the classic Spiritual Life / Ibadan remix of Beth Orton’s “Central Reservation.”
Unfortunately, these high points are never quite enough to get over the strained lonesome cowboy-isms that dominate Golden. It’s not that pop stars have to be “authentic,” whatever that means. But they do need to make us believe in them, if only for three minutes. Kylie Minogue made us believe in the spurned lover of “Tears on My Pillow” and the obsessive flirt in “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” But on Golden, she sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it. Her star will doubtlessly endure this awkward release, but let’s hope country Kylie is short-lived. | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | BMG | April 6, 2018 | 5.4 | 5debf975-cde6-4b33-adc2-8f418ca83d24 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Josh Homme and co. follow their first post-Nick Oliveri album-- the quality Lullabies to Paralyze-- with a more diverse record, one that tries its best to be everything all at once, often within one track. | Josh Homme and co. follow their first post-Nick Oliveri album-- the quality Lullabies to Paralyze-- with a more diverse record, one that tries its best to be everything all at once, often within one track. | Queens of the Stone Age: Era Vulgaris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10327-era-vulgaris/ | Era Vulgaris | It may seem cheap to bring up the departure of Nick Oliveri three years and two albums after he was fired from Queens of the Stone Age, but the more I listen to Era Vulgaris, the more I think his presence is sorely missed. I'm not advocating the guy's return, but the tradeoff between Josh Homme's reserved cool and Olivieri's crazy-go-nuts screaming was one of the group's strengths in their heyday; years later, someone for Homme to play off would still be a welcome addition to the band.
Queens of the Stone Age has been mostly Homme's show ever since, and it's been a mixed bag so far. Lullabies to Paralyze was quality, a chance for QOTSA v2.0 to retrench and carve out their own niche, even if those who were less enamored with the album's glowering charms, saw that niche as a rut-- an example of what Oliveri's loss actually meant to the group. If Era Vulgaris is any indication, the group felt the same way: This album tries its best to be everything all at once (often within one track), and in attempting to cover too much ground, the band loses focus and direction.
It's not so much that the songs themselves are weak, just that many of the choices made in them are. For instance, "Sick, Sick, Sick" would be better off simply sticking with Homme's motor-mouthed singing and riffing; instead, the song bellyflops into a flat chorus where everyone sings like they're scared of their own voices. (Since the Strokes' Julian Casablancas guests on this song, let's blame him. Why not?) Elsewhere, Homme spreads his falsetto all over "Misfit Love", where it'd be more effective in shorter bursts, while the obnoxious bridge on album closer "Run Pig Run" (it pops up twice!) kills any chance it might've had for worthy inclusion on a future edition of Guitar Hero. (Note to Activision: I am totally cool with requisite QOTSA singles "No One Knows" or "3's and 7's" bringing the rock fury and carpal tunnel.)
The most enjoyable moments on Era Vulgaris come when the band treads off the beaten path. One of the album's standout tracks, "Make It Wit Chu", is a straight-forward blues-rock number plucked from the last Desert Sessions disc. And the album's gentler digressions, like the guitar-weeping "Into the Hollow" and the mournful "Suture Up Your Future", reveal Homme has a surprisingly palatable softer side. "Turning on the Screw" and "I'm Designer" aren't exactly groundbreaking departures from the QOTSA's usual fare, but Homme's lyrical bent adds an interesting wrinkle. No one's going to confuse him with Bob Dylan any time this century, but you could put much worse in your mouth than lines like, "My generation's for sale/ Beats a steady job/ How much have you got?" or, "You can't lose it if you never had it/ Disappear man, do some magic." It's at points like these when Era Vulgaris truly comes to life. Unfortunately for listeners, those moments are few and far between, leaving fans to trudge back to older Queens records for the fix they crave. | 2007-06-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | June 11, 2007 | 6.2 | 5dee43f4-13e9-40ca-8116-39a531d4059a | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
On their sixth album, Goldfrapp come as close as they ever have to returning to the sound of 2000's Felt Mountain, the album that originally made them famous. Touching on that record’s folkier side and running with it, Tales of Us is every bit as fragile as the romantic themes it obsesses over. | On their sixth album, Goldfrapp come as close as they ever have to returning to the sound of 2000's Felt Mountain, the album that originally made them famous. Touching on that record’s folkier side and running with it, Tales of Us is every bit as fragile as the romantic themes it obsesses over. | Goldfrapp: Tales of Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18474-goldfrapp-tales-of-us/ | Tales of Us | Goldfrapp have spent the last decade trying on different outfits, never really letting anything stick long enough to see if it was a good look. It’s a strategy that pays off as often as it turns out distracting: they’ve struck gold (the sensual disco of Supernature), they’ve fallen flat (2008’s snoozeworthy Seventh Tree), and they’ve stumbled admirably (the uneven 80s pastiche of Head First). But on Tales of Us, their sixth album, they return to the sound of the album that originally made them famous, 2000’s fantastically witchy Felt Mountain. Touching on that record’s folkier side and running with it, the new record is a delicate affair every bit as fragile as the romantic themes it obsesses over. And while it’s not a full back-to-2000 affair, some of the duo’s unique imagination is replaced with a traditionalism that feels incongruous with the rest of their career.
Tales of Us, two years in gestation, was recorded in the English countryside, and it sounds like it. You can practically hear the fog rolling through the moonlit hills. The album digs deep into an idealized concept of English folk, full of lilting melodies that could have been taken from ancient songs (or just a Renaissance fair) and production so subtle sometimes it feels like there’s nothing beyond acoustic guitar, some strings, and Alison Goldfrapp’s typically haunting vocals. When that formula works, it’s uncommonly haunting-- second single “Annabel” has an icy mist hanging over it, and Goldfrapp proves more than effective in one of the more arresting moments on the album.
Her voice is more affected than it’s ever been on Tales of Us; she’s dead serious all the time. The sexuality of “Strict Machine” and the sly humour of “Rocket” are gone, and instead she intones with a cold and artificial mannerism, like she’s reading off a book of old plays. That mood isn’t lifted by the lyrics. Every song refers to a different character in some imagined universe, but the inherent melodrama is only exacerbated by the dead-serious delivery; it has all the emotional impact of a soap opera.
Of course, Goldfrapp have always been a band you could enjoy as much for aesthetics as lyrical content. And Tales of Us is certainly pretty on its own terms, though the songs are bare bones and aren’t placid enough to achieve the attractive wintry drift of, say, Grouper. It’s not as if the LP doesn’t have its moments: on “Alvar,” subtle electronics turn the chorus into a gorgeous smear of melody, and on first single “Drew,” her anxious vocals are riveting, especially against the unsettling backdrop of quick, fingerpicked guitar and sweeping strings. These are glimpses of the typical Goldfrapp genius, but now they’re mere flashes rather than tangible entities.
Admittedly, with a few exceptions, it’s hard to find fault with many of these tracks. A few of them, like “Simone”, are simply unmemorable, but each one has its redeeming qualities. In fact, almost any of these songs would sound beautiful on their own, or make a perfect reflective interlude on any of the band’s previous albums. But presented as a whole, Tales of Us is a dreary blur of folky pretense-- from a group that’s been through so many phases, one that lacks this much imagination is almost unforgivable. Diehard fans of Goldfrapp will no doubt find something to love here, but for the rest of us, it’s a thin record that doesn’t do much to prop up its skeletal frame. | 2013-09-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | September 12, 2013 | 6.1 | 5e05e2bc-0823-46ef-bc47-3253502dbb7c | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
You know, we music journalists have to contend with a myriad of internal voices while reviewing. There's the simple ... | You know, we music journalists have to contend with a myriad of internal voices while reviewing. There's the simple ... | Doves: Lost Souls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2429-lost-souls/ | Lost Souls | You know, we music journalists have to contend with a myriad of internal voices while reviewing. There's the simple, straightforward, credulous voice of the listener, who takes bands, songs and packages at face value. As a counter check, there's a savvier, hipper voice that considers music a constructed, made-up thing, sold to us by bands and manufacturers through advertising, press buzz and the ever-enticing promise of press photos. And, finally, there's a purely contrarian voice that plays devil's advocate, finding the easy path and countering it at every turn.
This kind of intrapersonal debating occurs with every release, but rages almost uncontrollably in the instance of a talked-up offering. Because in such a case, it becomes so important to keep oneself from being swept up in embarrassing critical groundswell without dismissing a record that might be good just because someone else likes it. Case in point: Doves' * Lost Souls * , an album currently coasting on tons of buzz. Follow us as we take a look at three different approaches to reviewing the record, while revealing the secret tricks of the reviewer's game:
__ * Step One: Snappy, Superficial Introduction * __
__ Straightforward: __ While, in the United States, electronic music is considered a new, arty, futuristic medium, it's been a part of the European palette for years. While Underworld seem spacy and abstract on these shores, they're a legit commercial force for our friends across the sea. What's more, techno's such a known quantity across the Atlantic that it's become strictly pro forma for any self-respecting rock band to incorporate a little 808 thud into their rock and roll mix.
__ Cynical: __ After the "electronica" "boom" rose and fell like Keith Flint's spiky haircut, all the big fancy record companies-- and the attendant faux-raver acts to whom they'd promised the world-- had to find a way to shore up their losses. Thus, the awkward shotgun marriage of rock to drum machines, resulting in efforts ranging from lovely (Radiohead) to dull (Smash Mouth) to bizarre (Rolling Stones produced by the Dust Brothers). All in all, the experiment can be deemed a bust.
__ Contrarian: __ Techno? Techno-rock fusion? Fuck that!
__ * Step Two: Introduce the Band * __
__ Straightforward: __ A good, if somewhat surprising, example of the Euro tech-rock fusion is the debut LP from Doves, * Lost Souls * . Where most of the fusing has gone on in the rock camp as aging amp-powered dinos struggled for relevance, Doves' effort provides a rare example of techno-schooled musicians digging in the crates for inspiration. Having made their first splash as a straight-ahead club act called Sub Sub, this trio of blokes woodshedded for a long time, started playing anachronistic instruments you strummed, plucked and hit, and ended up with a collection of damn-near-normal rock songs. Of course, the tincture of their throbbing house-kid past lurks in the shadows all the same.
__ Cynical: __ The latest group of cred-hungry beat monsters to cross this writer's desk are Doves, a frustratingly non-capitalized or articled threesome from the UK. Their record's got everything written in lowercase, there's a lot of noiry photos of a boxer, and the damn thing is called * Lost Souls * , all of which reeks of art (or, perhaps more aptly, "ahhht"). Scowling in front of a cityscape, clad in flannel, and sporting ridiculous stubblefields on their faces, Doves look like they're running as hard as they can from their bow as Sub Sub. There's a reason the single they released under that moniker never made it stateside, and I'm sure it had everything to do with the description "M People-esque," which appeared in the press kit.
__ Contrarian: __ Hairy, serious-looking songwriter types from England? Fuck that!
__ * Step Three: Flailingly Desperate Attempt to Describe the Record * __
__ Straightforward: __ * Lost Souls * is nothing if not a sprawling, ambitious effort. Padded for U.S. arrival with three bonus tracks, the disc stretches out to more than 72 minutes, and I'll be damned if it isn't a solid, engaging effort throughout. Where the increased running time of a CD is usually more beast than beauty, the breathing room allows Doves to stretch out. Few of these tracks weigh in under the five-minute mark, and most of their durations are given over to jangling acoustic guitars and mid-tempo rhythms that, in places, resemble Mogwai's moments of plaintive contemplation.
Tonally, * Lost Souls * reflects the after-after-midnight hours, as if the boys felt the need to document the hung over and blissed-out aftermath of the dancing-hours frenzy their Sub Sub days offered listeners years ago. That rarest of animals, a singing drummer named Andy Williams, wails discontentedly and virtually wordlessly over swelling and receding musical themes, while atmospheric keyboards and ominous samplework provide texture the barebones acoustic arrangements wouldn't achieve on their own.
__ Cynical: __ The heart of the problem on * Lost Souls * is its overreaching ambition. Naming the first track-- the virtually instrumental "Firesuite"-- after the famous four-song suite from the Beach Boys' * Smile * sessions gives it away instantly. Doves are, in both their tilting and endlessly sculpted sounds, after the same instrumental evocations Brian Wilson made and destroyed at the peak of his compositional powers. In most principle respects, this album is straight, rockist Brit-pop. But the samples and keyboards serve only to dress up fairly conventional songs, as if to conceal their pedestrian nature.
__ Contrarian: __ More Brian Wilson name-checking? Fuck that!
__ * Step Four: Track-by-Track Highlights and Lowlights * __
__ Straightforward: __ * Lost Souls * , despite its reach and ambition, works best in its most conventionally melodic moments. The aptly named "Melody Calls" juxtaposes a typically languid vocal against an uncharacteristically jaunty guitar riff, and the result is a little radio-ready wonder. Similarly, the title cut's deep, throbbing chords work as this melancholy work's catalytic center, distilling the band's mixture of atmosphere and song down to a kind of essence.
Among the more adventurous tracks, "Firesuite" and "Break Me Gently" work best because of their carefully planned development and the skillful use of heavily effected vocals, which flesh out what could have been almost Dave Matthews-sized swaths of dull 'jamming.' But the stately ballad at the end of the album proper, "A House," accentuates the songiness of this effort. These boys are interested in beauty, power, emotion and feeling. Not idle wanking.
__ Cynical: __ Hey! He stole my stuff! Punk.
__ Contrarian: __ Emotion and feeling?! Fuck that!
__ * Step Five: Summation * __
__ Straightforward: __ Despite its excesses, * Lost Souls * offers a novel twist on the electronics-plus-rock-equals-fun-for-trainspotters equation. The tech-rock fusion isn't dead in the water yet.
__ Cynical: __ Okay, fine. Even Brits can do something decent from time to time.
__ Contrarian: __ Fuck England!
Rating
__ Straightforward: __ 7.3
__ Cynical: __ 6.2
__ Contrarian: __ Fuck numbers! | 2001-01-31T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-01-31T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Astralwerks | January 31, 2001 | 6.8 | 5e06952a-f364-445f-a4ee-0e457f4955a3 | Pitchfork | null |
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After serving as one of the key writers in G.O.O.D. Music, CyHi’s thoroughly slick debut album finally arrives, with features from Kanye, Pusha T, Schoolboy Q, Travis Scott, and many more. | After serving as one of the key writers in G.O.O.D. Music, CyHi’s thoroughly slick debut album finally arrives, with features from Kanye, Pusha T, Schoolboy Q, Travis Scott, and many more. | CyHi: No Dope on Sundays | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cyhi-the-prynce-no-dope-on-sundays/ | No Dope on Sundays | When CyHi the Prynce popped up on Kanye West’s “So Appalled” seven years ago, it was the product of some gutsy in-studio self-promotion. Commissioned to write a hook, the gravelly voiced Prynce claims he waited for West to fall asleep before sneak recording a full verse that made its way to the final version. Prynce signed to West’s G.O.O.D. Music label and has since stood out as one of Kanye’s most consistently credited writers.
Despite the steady writing credits and feature appearances, G.O.O.D. Music never provided a bona fide platform for CyHi the solo artist, and so he left the label in 2015 to begin the process of releasing his long-simmering debut album elsewhere. He’s remained in the label’s inner circle as an eager little brother type, always the first to announce and overpromise new Kanye and group developments. On the first track of his debut album, he raps: “Me and ‘Ye feel like Jay and Memphis Bleek to me,” weirdly glossing over (or blissfully unaware) the bleak precedent of the bungled side-kick career he’s referencing. Good for CyHi then that his first album, No Dope on Sundays, has the weight and sheen of a major label rap record. It’s got big name features and a surprisingly well-curated batch of soulful beats. Most importantly, CyHi himself feels like the center of gravity.
No Dope on Sundays begins with a trio of five and six-minute songs that vaguely scaffold the rest of the record as a hustler’s bible pinching CyHi between the church and the streets of Atlanta. Throughout the record he raps about the violence and despair of his home, implicating himself in the drama so that he might sidestep it later. The gospel boom-bap of the long-winded “Amen (Intro)” is a backdrop for CyHi to paint his origin story in borrowed strokes, comparing himself to Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp characters just a bar apart. The occasional but persistent corniness of CyHi’s punchline lyricism could be deployed as a sort of barometer amongst hip-hop fans. What do you think when he raps a line like “My homies was crippin’ so hard, all they eat is seafood”? Or, “The only time you got the goosebumps was at a book drive”?
For all the groan-inducing puns and double entendres (”Moving weight, I’m a fat guy”), CyHi is a thoroughly slick rapper and storyteller, as capable of a tidy snapshot as he is prone to an overwrought windup. “They’ll trade a cigarette and Mountain Dew for a statement,” he growls succinctly, denouncing snitches on “Trick Me.” He has a rasp that can sound warm and husky or icy and snarling, a versatility he stretches throughout No Dope On Sundays. Those early tracks are barrage attacks of lyricism, whereas moments like “Movin’ Around” and “Trick Me” cast CyHi as a more than serviceable hook singer. Still, he hasn’t quite weeded out a certain stiffness in these crossover attempts and gets noticeably upstaged when 2 Chainz swoops into the stuttery banger and steals the show with a looser and more fun verse. Later, on “Looking for Love,” CyHi sounds entirely in his range belting out an Autotune tinged hook or leaning in during his verse to croon, “I can’t wait to put some purses on you, girl.” Kanye West tags along on “Dat Side” for a wonky banger and the album’s obvious centerpiece moneymaker.
For all the bases it covers, No Dope on Sundays benefits from swift pacing. But there are still moments where CyHi gets bogged down doing too much and too little at the same time, coddling a story you’ve heard before or quipping a one-liner you can predict a mile away. After his verse on the title track, Pusha T thanks CyHi for granting him the quiet of an inconspicuous feature. “I was tryna’ make it as conversational as possible, ‘cause it’s just conversation,” the elder emcee says after clocking a gracefully minimal performance. CyHi doesn’t have that conversational approachability to his raps. He sounds like a showman that puffs out his words with a deliberate, almost suspicious confidence. No Dope on Sundays sounds like the routine he’s been waiting years to finally deliver. | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Sony | November 27, 2017 | 6.8 | 5e0e0f3d-cc07-4eba-b92f-681850a7817d | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
To date, Emma Ruth Rundle’s stabs at crafting a musical identity have been tentative ones. Her previous solo material has been guitar-centric and mostly instrumental, but her new solo album is different. She not only sings, but she does so a lot—and when she does, she soars. | To date, Emma Ruth Rundle’s stabs at crafting a musical identity have been tentative ones. Her previous solo material has been guitar-centric and mostly instrumental, but her new solo album is different. She not only sings, but she does so a lot—and when she does, she soars. | Emma Ruth Rundle: Some Heavy Ocean | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19241-emma-ruth-rundle-some-heavy-ocean/ | Some Heavy Ocean | To date, Emma Ruth Rundle’s stabs at crafting a musical identity have been tentative ones. As the frontwoman of the L.A.-based projects the Nocturnes and Marriages, her eerie voice has been all but smothered by male accompanists, prog denseness, cyclonic distortion, or her own hushed delivery. The fact that she’s a stunningly supple and versatile guitarist—her skills are a vital component of the post-rock ensemble Red Sparowes—hasn’t given her that much reason to step up her vocal game. Even her previous solo material has been guitar-centric and mostly instrumental. But Rundle’s new solo album, Some Heavy Ocean, is different. She not only sings, she does so a lot—and when she does, she soars.
That’s not to say the album sounds triumphant. Some Heavy Ocean is a black hole of anti-happiness, a heart-shaped growth of dark matter. Veins of inky folk run through “Shadows of My Name” and “Oh Sarah”, songs that encompass the scope of Rundle’s acoustic prowess: On the former, she attacks her strings as if they’re barbed wire that must be breached with her bare hands; on the latter, she fingerpicks with fluid delicacy. As sharp and vivid as her playing is, though, the clouds are always near. Swathes of strings and overdriven twang cast long shadows, and the intermittent drums rattle like bones in a box. Even the two brief, ethereal interludes, “Some Heavy Ocean” and “Your Card the Sun”, seem more like frozen chunks of time than mere placeholders. Far more than anything she’s done prior, the album is a dynamic, breath-snatching statement of intent that’s part lullaby, part night terror.
The biggest leap found on Some Heavy Ocean is Rundle’s voice. On “Shadows of My Name,” her reverb-shrouded vocals dart in and out of the mix, flashing fragments of language rather than distinct lines; in the chorus, she works herself up into nerve-pinching growl that’s recalls Björk at her most unhinged. Throughout the rest of tracks—particularly the mournful yet urgent “Run Forever”—Rundle’s comes across like a student of both Chelsea Wolfe’s frigid intonation and Marissa Nadler’s gloomy coo. As a singer, Rundle now sounds whole, and better yet, she’s gravitated toward a timeless resonance. The post-metal and shoegaze sounds she’s employed before have been left for something broader. When, on “Haunted Houses”, she warns of a distance that must be kept between her and the unnamed target of her simmering wrath, she evokes Stevie Nicks; having another song titled “Oh Sarah” only reinforces that impression, although that track’s candlelit, folk-rock balladry bears just a vague kinship to Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara”.
Rundle’s lyrics, where they can be fully pieced together, are the weakest element of Some Heavy Ocean. There are only so many mentions of ghosts and graveyards that a record can take before it starts to feel cartoonishly goth, even when those motifs are woven into the music with such conviction and subtle shades of mood. That atmosphere works best when it strips away any hint of pale cliché and plunges under the ice; “Living with the Black Dog” is a droning, distorted, shadow-draped leviathan of a song, one in which Rundle breaks away from spooky folk and edges closer toward Earth’s recent forays into chthonic Americana. Not only does it conclude the album on an ominous, ambitious note, it reconciles every medium she’s worked in so far: melody, noise, softness, severity, and a sense of quiet drama and melancholy. Some Heavy Ocean stands as Rundle’s first fully realized release as a singer-songwriter—and while its monochrome scale is narrow, she makes harrowing grays out of it. | 2014-05-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-05-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | May 20, 2014 | 7.4 | 5e0f3b9c-34d8-4171-96ba-14c7b7d379a6 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Kash Doll’s short, 22-minute album contains a lot of flex, some humility, but feels like a victory lap run before the official race has even started. | Kash Doll’s short, 22-minute album contains a lot of flex, some humility, but feels like a victory lap run before the official race has even started. | Kash Doll: Brat Mail | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kash-doll-brat-mail/ | Brat Mail | Detroit native Kash Doll’s catalog isn’t that large—Keisha vs. Kash Doll and Trapped in the Dollhouse are her two prior releases—but there’s a regality to her that suggests otherwise. Her persona is a spiritual descendant of Trina, whose ribald capitalism sneers at the sight of lowly Washingtons. Whereas the idea of starting-from-the-bottom is an essential part of Cardi B’s appeal, Kash Doll minimizes that come-up narrative for a worldview that’s a bit more audacious. Her raps explain she’s better than you because it’s simply the way of the universe. The opening seconds of her breakout “2 On” remix finds her comfortable and pampered up in her bedroom, throwing out a light-footed set of lines as if to humor us.
But she isn’t ungrateful: Brat Mail, which arrived on her birthday, is an act of humility. The 22-minute project partly works as a thank you note; the audio of her acceptance speech for the fan-voted Issa Wave award from this year’s the BET Social Awards is included here. Because Kash Doll is also a boss, Brat Mail must work as a flex. The a capella intro finds her proceeding as such, throwing together a barrage of punchlines: “Any bitch think I drop dick/Get higher than Mariah, and she like a five octave.” But it’s also a reprise of her BET Cypher verse, so the self-satisfied chuckle she lets out at the end is a bit alienating.
Brat Mail often feels like a victory lap run before the official race has even started. There’s a self-congratulatory vibe that makes the effort needlessly low stakes, ultimately refracting her natural charisma in ways that sound rote. “Check,” the clear single from these nine tracks, suffers most from this myopic focus. The banger potential is squandered for a hook that’s a very barebones laundry list of tropes to keep...well, in check (her looks, this money, these hoes). To compare, Meek Mill’s song of the same name is even more repetitious, but he delivers it with a violence that emanates urgency. Brat Mail attempts to be Boss Shit, but the feeling of that idea isn’t quite imbued in the songs.
Over a series of glittery, percussive beats, Kash Doll’s queenly personality remains assertive in whatever flow she flips through. On “Dividends,” she closes her first verse with hurried spurts to get an extra half a bar to laugh at our misfortune of not being her. But she’s playful to the point where she’ll throw out misfires that we’re supposed to let slide because Brat Mall is a celebration. The “Now it's the dolly, not Parton” line that opens “Check” is the sort of pun that’s probably been toyed with by at least one Doll rapper. “Coogi sweater, bitch I'm Biggie” from “Rich Talk” is predictable and feels hewed in, like she’s run out of ideas in less than 20 minutes.
The album ends with that clip of her accepting that BET award, humbly thanking the network for the shine while reminding the audience of that Cypher performance. As the closer to an ultimately middling effort, it comes across as a coronation that’s just too soon. Brat Mail doesn’t frustrate because it hints at a talent hitting her ceiling. There’s a sense she’d do more if only she could find a reason to—because she’s the boss. | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | March 22, 2018 | 6.1 | 5e1234a9-4e15-4c78-9156-0b5e081dc983 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
The New York singer-songwriter shifts from acoustic folk into potent pop-punk that recalls both Hop Along and Titus Andronicus. | The New York singer-songwriter shifts from acoustic folk into potent pop-punk that recalls both Hop Along and Titus Andronicus. | Mal Blum: Pity Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mal-blum-pity-boy/ | Pity Boy | Saying “no” isn’t particularly fun for anyone—especially for New York singer-songwriter Mal Blum. So, in order to practice, they turned it into a song. On the defiant power-pop single “I Don’t Want To,” they practice the art of brazen rejection with a smile: “I don’t want to/So I won’t...at least not now,” they put it plainly. Much of Pity Boy presents a similar tongue-in-cheek catharsis, as Blum laces endearing humor into sorrowful subjects, resulting in the most personal work of their career.
Blum’s early music, such as 2010’s self-released Every Time You Go Somewhere, was mostly acoustic folk, embellished with violin, harmonica, and even toy piano; they’ve now moved into potent pop-punk. If the electric guitar had evolved into a supporting actor by Blum’s last album, 2016’s You Look a Lot Like Me, then it’s the lead on Pity Boy—complete with mixing by Hop Along guitarist Joe Reinhart. The nimble, vigorous riffs here call to mind Titus Andronicus (who Blum will support on tour this fall), ricocheting like rubber balls around “I Don’t Want To” and “Not My Job” with Blum’s vocals surging in countermelody. Fierce solos slice through “Odds” and “Gotta Go,” offering stark contrast to the toned-down strums of slow burners like “Salt Flats” and “Black Coffee.”
If there are any weak points in Pity Boy, they come when Blum’s voice strains, but their lyrics—the album’s centerpiece—mitigate that weakness. Blum’s words often divulge unsettling self-deprecation: “All that I want is for someone to take advantage of me/Because I don’t know any other way,” “I even hate the way I breathe,” “27 is 11/Just on different meds.” “Not My Job” offers a brief moment of aplomb: “If I have to, I’ll kill off my better self/Because it’s not my job to make you well,” they sing, reiterating the final words as if to assure themself, too.
Blum has been openly queer for as long as they’ve been putting out music, but Pity Boy is the most candid they’ve ever been about their sexuality and identity in their music. Here, they poignantly speak on their transgender experience, spelling it out on album opener “Things Still Left to Say”: “You don’t see me when I’m here/I’m like a ghost of myself already/If I could, I would disappear/But I’m still here,” they sing. “See Me” internalizes those sentiments, acting more as a soliloquy: “I don’t belong/Though it helps to play along/Why can’t they see me when I’m right here?” Both songs refer to Blum being non-binary, but the lyrics remain just equivocal enough to spark empathy in anyone who has felt alienated. While platitudes like “I don’t belong” can feel like “Creep” regurgitations, Blum envelops the phrase in a multi-dimensional earnestness, as the repeated use of “I’m here” delivers a steadfast assertion: despite Blum feeling they don’t quite fit in, they have every right to stick around. “You’re direct/One day, I hope that I can be like that,” goes a line in “I Don’t Want To.” That day is much closer than Blum realizes.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | July 19, 2019 | 7.5 | 5e13e5a5-24c8-463e-bba5-fb4fb7e972c9 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ |
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