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The sophomore album from the brilliant producer turns the tools of footwork into an overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go. | The sophomore album from the brilliant producer turns the tools of footwork into an overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go. | Jlin: Black Origami | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23119-black-origami/ | Black Origami | Jlin’s relationship with genre has always been complicated. For as long as she has been recording, the Gary, Ind. producer has been associated with footwork, the hyperactive post-house music spawned alongside the equally chaotic competitive dance style popular in neighboring Chicago. Superficially, the affiliation makes sense. She counts both footwork godfather RP Boo and its most revered son, the late DJ Rashad, among her mentors and made her earliest appearance on the second installment of Planet Mu’s genre-survey Bangs & Works. But she built these ties at a distance; not from weekend road trips into Chicago but from hand-me-down juke tapes and, later, through Myspace messages and extended phone conversations with her influences.
This is, of course, a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: an artist situating themselves at the center of a culture, particularly such a socially oriented one, from the comfort of their bedroom. And this outsider/insider contradiction has long been a source of power for Jlin, giving her the means to master the tools of this potent style while still operating without any obligation to its conventions. On Dark Energy, her 2015 debut, this meant stripping footwork’s stuttered-triplet-everything model down to its skeleton and draping it in frigid industrial textures; her day job at a steel mill provided critics with a too-perfect shorthand for the project’s brutalist impulses. The follow-up, Black Origami, is more difficult to define, moving further away from footwork’s literal sonic qualities while reclaiming and amplifying the genre’s already imposing physicality.
Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go. The lone ping-pong synth squiggle that opens the album on its title track is misdirection because the 40-some minutes that follow are nearly absent of melody. It’s all perpetually escalating polyrhythmic tension, a time-stopping barrage of drum rolls and disembodied angelic voices. The only moments of calm come in the milliseconds of silence between songs.
Like her juke and footwork predecessors, Jlin tends to favor the stock digital sounds of ’90s drum machines to the warmer analog kits of the ’80s or the mutated grandchildren thereof, which now dominate contemporary urban/electronic music. This only adds to the disorienting effect of the record’s intensity, as there is nothing quite like being pummeled by hyper-vivid clavs and shakers grown in the heart of the uncanny valley. This creates a certain grace to this chaos. It’s not dance music per se, at least not in the way footwork originally was—it’s also not not dance music the way the gulps of 808 move against the many polyrhythms of “Nyakinyua Rise.” The martial undercurrent to the record builds from cross-firing drum lines and drill whistles, battle cries and elephant roars. It's like Jlin is less interested in violence than she is the precise motion and strategy of warfare. (This, too, might be read as a nod back to the battle elements of footwork.)
As listeners of electronic music have become so closely attuned to its many shifting micro-genres, their natural inclination may be to decode and map out these many moving parts. Fans of contemporary club music might try to situate it in the context of not just footwork but the similarly charged movements currently happening in Lisbon or Durban. Those more closely attuned to avant-garde corners of the electronic music world could invoke the data-dense sputtered beat structures of Autechre or Ikue Mori’s experiments in teasing humanity out of canned drum machines. An ear more rooted in traditional music might catch the strands of drum corps and school bands (c.f. the marching snares “Hatshepsut”), tribal seances, and gamelan ensembles.
The wonderful thing about Black Origami is that it’s all of these things and none of them at once. It’s a rhythm-spanning collection of contradictions and colliding worlds—the intensity of social music refracted through an introverted mind, the physical converted into digital and back again, the past told through future music and vice versa—all making the case that rhythm is too infinite, too forceful to be reduced to mere utilitarian functions. It denies listeners the question of, “What do I do with this music?” and forces them to react directly to what it does to them. It’s a pure exercise in sound-as-power, music that has no specific agenda beyond simply making itself felt. | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | May 18, 2017 | 8.8 | 5e1e9f10-08db-44b7-9198-51619e07cd77 | Andrew Nosnitsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-nosnitsky/ | null |
The Brooklyn art rock trio’s choppy harmonies and sweetly free-associative tunes are a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny. | The Brooklyn art rock trio’s choppy harmonies and sweetly free-associative tunes are a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny. | Foyer Red: Zigzag Wombat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foyer-red-zigzag-wombat/ | Zigzag Wombat | Foyer Red make winsome and wide-eyed art rock for people who own a fisherman’s sweater and doodle on restaurant menus as an adult. At an earlier point in indie-rock history, they might’ve opened for Dirty Projectors, or joined I’m From Barcelona. You wouldn’t be wrong to say the Brooklyn trio’s debut EP, Zigzag Wombat, is twee, because it is. But unlike their predecessors, Foyer Red are a little bit irony-poisoned. They make fuck-you crayon rock. At its best, their debut is a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny.
Jagged, disjointed, and pure of heart, the songs on Zigzag Wombat exist somewhere between the Suburban Lawns’ Su Tissue singing, “Oh my genitals! I’m a janitor!” and Rose Melberg talking about getting her heart broken on a Softies record. Opener “Fribbe” is 30 seconds of clarinet solo followed by choppy vocal harmonies, courtesy of vocalists Elana Riordan and Mitch Myers. They sing as if collaborating on a crossword puzzle, bouncing off each other as they complete each other’s fragments. “Swimming Pool” starts out almost reminiscent of yacht rock, with a distorted lo-fi loop that shimmers like the Aegean Sea. Then it breaks down, gets mathy, erupts into a collective scream, sounding brainy yet effortless.
As lyricists, Foyer Red favor free association. They like animals (rabbits, frogs), the world wide web (captcha codes, forgetting your password), and minor injuries (mosquito bites, blisters). The album’s titular wombat puts in an appearance on “Plutterbee,” though here the band’s try-anything approach feels too disjointed to succeed as a song. It works best when they sing about art, like on “Blue Pearl,” where they rhyme “peace of mind” with “zen like Yves Klein,” then namedrop the writer Maggie Nelson. The references are almost subtle enough to miss: The first few times I listened, I simply did not think they were speaking about the author of Bluets or the creator of International Klein Blue, but I was wrong, and I felt both trolled and charmed.
Foyer Red aren’t trolling all the time: Zigzag Wombat standout “Slander” is unmistakably lovely. A strident omnichord solo speeds through the song like a plane cuts through the sky, met by a choir of whistlers and warm-toned bass that does backflips. Like all the best twee-of-center art rock jams, it evokes a sense of yearning. It makes you want to bat your eyelashes, go for broke and kiss your crush, or just look out the window and have comically outsized thoughts about your big bright future. It’s a great frame of mind for this young band. “Shoot for the stars” is the cliché. Foyer Red ask: Idk, what if we tried to be famous?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | November 11, 2021 | 7.2 | 5e229653-9aa6-42fb-aed1-b25d21ead80c | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Toyomu is a Kyoto-based producer who assembled his own version of Kanye West's The Life of Pablo from online sources like Genius and WhoSampled when he couldn't stream it. | Toyomu is a Kyoto-based producer who assembled his own version of Kanye West's The Life of Pablo from online sources like Genius and WhoSampled when he couldn't stream it. | Toyomu: 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ (Imagining “The Life of Pablo”) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21831-iii-imagining-the-life-of-pablo/ | 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ (Imagining “The Life of Pablo”) | Between the piracy, the leaks, the surprise releases, and the streaming service arms race, today’s recording industry is closer to the Wild West than a longstanding global market. For years now, sheriffs at Apple Music and Tidal have struggled to convince customers in the Americas, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere to pay for their damn music already. And yet, across the sea in Japan, folks continue to play by the rules—and what’s more, they’re on track to surpass the United States as the world’s most lucrative music market. Unlike most of the world, Japan didn’t experience the Napster revolution; in fact, the supposedly obsolete CD continues to account for about 85 percent of sales. Moreover, the major streaming services (and their exclusive releases) have yet to become available in the country. In other words, while we’ve been blasting three different incarnations of Kanye West’s latest album The Life of Pablo for two months, over 127 million people have been sitting in the dark; until the album’s broader global re-release earlier this month, 2016’s most-hyped album was little more than a Dark Tidal Fantasy. What was a Kanye stan to do?
The solution couldn’t be more obvious for Toyomu, a Kyoto-based producer and ’Ye diehard: if he couldn’t listen to The Life of Pablo, he’d have to make his own version. "I thought it might be a good idea to make the whole album without listening to it," he told Pigeons and Planes. Ironically, the same digital forces that kept him from hearing the album proved key to his reinterpretation. Thanks to WhoSampled and Genius, the producer was able to assemble a complete listing of every last obscure sample and punchline featured on the record, providing Toyomu with the material for his own "Album of the Life:" 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ, or (Imagining "The Life of Pablo"). The project isn’t so much a recreation as it is an uncanny, absurd outlier among the scores of fanservice-y ’Ye mash-ups populating the internet.
The Life of Pablo—and obviously, Toyomu’s project*—*wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet. West has vowed never to release the project across physical formats, instead relying on streaming to drive its success. (The record recently became the first to top the Billboard charts primarily from streaming.) This has created headaches and opportunities alike: Liberated from the finality of a CD pressing, the album—like its creator, and the internet at large—remains in perpetual flux, its trappings mutable. As Toyomu put it in a Genius interview, it's "an eternity of creativity." Accordingly, the record feels more like a snapshot than like a tacit statement.
If you thought Yeezus was esoteric, just try to make it through*印象III : なんとなく、パブロ—*It makes West’s opus sound like a Rockabye Baby! installment, primarily because it sounds so inhuman. All of the lyrics are fed through Apple's text-to-voice function, giving us a record performed entirely by Microsoft Sam (known to most listeners as the stiff-sounding android that "sings" Radiohead’s "Fitter, Happier.") Obviously, the robot sucks at rapping, stripping the songs all nuance in syllable stress and meter, particularly on the standout cuts. Lead single "有名税" ("Famous)] collapses under the weight of all its lyrical moving parts, transmitting the braggadocio into paranoid-sounding pep talk. "I made that bitch famous/God damn/I made that bitch famous/Talk that talk, man" deadpans simultaneous MC/hypeman Sam, unable to distinguish between West’s rhymes and Swizz Beat’s ab libs. (A similar phenomenon lends hilarity to "ゆらゆらボックス 0" ("Waves"), with Chris Brown’s smooth tenor taking the form of a high-pitched, drunken warble.) Even "Low Lights,"—a song centered around Sandy Rivera's passionate inspirational speech—feels mechanical, her every syllable stuck to a hollow, randomly-pitched keyboard plunk in a manner that channels Wesley Willis.
The technology detracts from the latent menace in West’s raps as well, even as the established samples on "Freestyle 4" and "FML" drive the darkness home. In Toyomu’s world, the agitated, carnal queries on the former track ("What if we fucked right now?/What if we fucked right in the middle of the goddamn dinner table?") may very well have come from a curious eight-year-old. The chuckle-inducing moments are frequent (not to mention steadily grating), but there’s ample darkness lurking in the margins: On "Real Friends" and "Highlights," Toyomu digs up the angst buried within West's gospel-infused opus. Meanwhile, "I Love Kanye" is entirely devoid of its a cappella cheer, replaced by a nightmarish duet delivered atop mournful keyboards: following an eerie, monotone Japanese recitation of the track's lyrics, a choir of English-speaking androids come in to proclaim their love for West.
In terms of creepiness, however, nothing compares to "nikeezy," Toyomu’s take on "FACTS." The less-than-two-minute track transports me back to a traumatizing video from my high school physics class that simulated death by black hole. In this case, it’s Kanye who’s being sucked up by the end of it all, his repeated chants of "Yeezy, yeezy, yeezy" stretching and spinning as the rapper floats along the event horizon. The syllables collide with increasing force and velocity, until the song's "Street Fighter" sample resets the sickening cycle with a Sonic Boom. It’s impossible to listen to the track without cracking up, and yet it haunts me more than any Prurient song—not just because it’s terrifying, but because it illustrates the artist's absurdity more than any interview or album ever could. Kanye’s hubris drives our obsession with his art and persona—as well as his own destruction. The celebrity, the memes, the outbursts, the KTT stans—they’re all window dressing to distract from the void that threatens to consume him, and us.
印象III : なんとなく、パブロ may sound like a bit like an Oneohtrix Point Never album at moments, but it’s unlikely to break out of the fan-content niche any soon. Microsoft Sam’s goofy rhymes get old quick, the half-baked, discombobulated arrangements lack the nuance to compel repeat listens, and save for awesome, video-game influenced reworkings of "Fade" and "Siiiiiiiiilver Surffffeeeeer Intermission" (the latter incorporates music from the notorious, well-soundtracked "Silver Surfer" NES game), most won’t be reaching for Toyomu’s takes over West’s. That said, such surface-level aesthetic arguments distract from the album’s sterling achievements. This strange little record has certainly refigured how we view streaming’s ubiquity in the today's industry—not to mention how we perceive the "global album"—but it’s also opened the doors for transcending such barriers through creative drive and compositional savvy. If we can’t have #Tidalforall, at least we can take the power into our own hands. | 2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | self-released | April 19, 2016 | 6 | 5e23b037-c238-47c0-a914-1e8333b1f475 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Dublin rock quartet’s second album considers the toll of living up to expectations—romantic, platonic, and societal—with a new gravitas that smothers some of the band’s fire. | The Dublin rock quartet’s second album considers the toll of living up to expectations—romantic, platonic, and societal—with a new gravitas that smothers some of the band’s fire. | Pillow Queens: Leave the Light On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pillow-queens-leave-the-light-on/ | Leave the Light On | Pillow Queens make the kind of noise that tends to flourish live, roared back by the faithful: burnished heartland euphoria, defiant lyricism bolstered by ragged harmonies, lashings of pride, and an unabashed love of crescendos. But when the four women self-released their debut in September 2020, four years after forming, gigs were off the agenda. Other bands might have held fast until they stood a better chance of breaking beyond their local scene; in name and theme, In Waiting extolled urgency, and so joint guitarists-bassists-frontwomen Pamela Connolly and Sarah Corcoran, drummer Rachel Lyons, and guitarist Cathy McGuinness leapt. It paid off. Their first album transcended the physical limitations of its moment—perhaps because it reminded listeners of the live energy they were missing, perhaps thanks to the writing.
Pillow Queens’ optimistic anthems-in-the-making about queerness, love, and Catholicism took this DIY band as far as a spot on James Corden’s The Late Late Show, where they sang about forsaking the promised safety of a religious upbringing for a life of adventure: “God, give me glory, or don’t/I’ll take my lot/Just start the show and/Cement your feet and take the jump,” Connolly pleaded through a tense jaw on “Liffey.” (One model for the Pillow Queens template is the boisterous, emo, Tegan half of Tegan and Sara’s classic The Con.) With normality somewhat resumed, the sense of potential in their music was theirs to realize on album two. But Leave the Light On loses a bit of puff from its lungs.
When it endures, the magic that got Pillow Queens here remains irresistible—though it’s most apparent on a song that lays out the cost of receiving that kind of attention. Their debut’s “HowDoILook” found freedom from bodily anxieties in love; on “Hearts & Minds,” being visible on stage and in photoshoots brings them roaring right back. “I’ll take it from myself, I’ll save it for the room,” Connolly sings with the kind of declarative fervor that has made Sam Fender an icon in the UK—although she compares herself unfavorably with such male artists who appear born to the stage: “He looks divine from the side/Throws himself around the light,” she sings. “Helps the healing of the brokenhearted/There’s that face again.” Meanwhile: “Now I’ve got the job,” she sighs, “suck in the gut.” The song vacillates from determination to an impending sense of defeat, then a lonely middle eight becomes a double-time sprint, sharpening, squalling, and rediscovering the carefree joy that gets bands off the starter blocks in the first place. In an era of ambivalent stardom, whether Mitski or Billie, few acts have detailed the balance sheet with as much grace.
Leave the Light On often considers the toll of living up to expectations, in romantic, platonic, and societal terms. Unfortunately, you also sometimes get the sense of it with regards to following up a beloved album, with the band revealing a new inclination toward gravitas that smothers some of their fire. Several songs lose power from excessive run times: “Be By Your Side” would be a fine opener at half the length if it simply ignited the desire that Connolly yearns to unleash (“I wanna feel every thought ’til my body drops dead”) instead of layering on cantering percussion and encore-worthy cresting guitar. “The Wedding Band,” Pillow Queens’ ode to their mutual bond, has another heart-tugging, spotlit vocal turn from Connolly but then it all turns a touch landfill, underselling what should be their us-against-the-world anthem.
That ambiguous album title expresses tenderness, bravery (perhaps when said to a new lover), and caution, and Pillow Queens have said they hope Leave the Light On “encourages duality.” There are real moments of nuance here, especially when Corcoran surveys a departing partner on the doo-woppy, bittersweet “House That Sailed Away” and greets the resurgence of old, evasive patterns with grace: “You’ll search forever/I want that for you,” she sings keenly, recognizing her ex’s immutable character instead of trying to change it.
But other songs get mired in confusion (the sweetly dissonant “My Body Moves,” about idealizing a peaceful aging process; the brooding tempest of “Delivered” wanly contrasted by knotty, oblique lyrics) or reach for serious and impersonal character studies. “Well Kept Wife” is nearly as meek as its subject, a woman buried by motherhood; “No Good Woman” offers well-meaning but soggy bonhomie as it observes a woman crushed by exploitative men and by the drinks she consumes to survive them. While Pillow Queens have said, understandably, that they want to avoid being pigeonholed, Leave the Light On seems to suffer from a case of stage fright. | 2022-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Royal Mountain | April 6, 2022 | 6.4 | 5e260893-486d-4e1f-b0da-2df3c86d1c4d | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Led by young oracle Nate Garrett, the second album from the Arizona heavy metal band carries the torch of their forebears and revives the genre with impressive songwriting and ambition. | Led by young oracle Nate Garrett, the second album from the Arizona heavy metal band carries the torch of their forebears and revives the genre with impressive songwriting and ambition. | Spirit Adrift: Divided by Darkness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spirit-adrift-divided-by-darkness/ | Divided by Darkness | Spirit Adrift is Arizona musician Nate Garrett’s vehicle for metal obsession, burning through thrash, doom, NWOBHM, melodic metal, and anything that’ll throw you out a window if you speak ill of Phil Lynott. He is not here for a nostalgia trip; he’s exploring the power within, approaching a unified theory of metal. Spirit Adrift’s second record, Cursed By Conception, is where he found his voice through forging a shared power in doom and thrash. Now, Divided By Darkness shows he has the vision for the greater pantheon.
Metal shouldn’t be measured like a recipe, but for Spirit Adrift, balance is key. No one element dominates over another: The rhythms are as mean as the solos are joyous as the cleans are beautiful. It’s how a track like “Born Into Fire” splices ripping leads and more Euro-style mournful cleans into something coherent. A thrashy jaunt like “Hear Her” can live right next to the more ambitious “Living Light,” where Garrett gets an assist from Witch Mountain’s Kayla Dixon for some vocal harmonies. Even though these sounds are well-established and defined, Garrett’s songwriting breathes new life into them. Darkness understands metal not as just a mash of distortion sounds, but as a continuous, living tradition that has meaning. He talked about Conception as a return to childhood loves of classic metal, and Darkness turns that pure love into mastery.
Even with Garrett’s expanded palette and a full band behind him, there are still shades of melancholy that have carried over from his early writing. “Tortured By Time” is the most classic doom track here, adding a modern sheen to end-time gloom. “Angel & Abyss,” though, is Darkness’ centerpiece for its reconciliation of Spirit Adrift’s past and future. It’s Metallica’s “Fade to Black” where death isn’t the exit, where it doesn’t end in self-destruction but in lead-centric renewal. Garrett channels young James Hetfield’s hopeless voice for most of the song, and ends with an Ozzy-like maniacal cackle, conquering the despair (or at least living with the madness.) It almost acts as the totality of ’80s metal majesty, a tour of hesher emotions. More than anything else on the album, it captures the me-against-the-world vibe that has informed many a metal classic.
There’s plenty of old school revival bands, yet most of them operate as if metal stopped in 1989. Though it pays much reverence to ’80s classics, Darkness also reaches into the early ’90s, when metal was in the midst of a fundamental transformation: Guns n’ Roses and Metallica proved tougher, un-glam looks was bankable, and Alice in Chains and Pantera previewed the sea change to come in their somewhat slower, markedly darker sounds. It’s an important sliver in metal history to which Darkness pays homage.
Two of Darkness’ biggest touchstones are Metallica’s Black Album and Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears, transitional records, both from 1991, that ultimately ended up massive commercial successes. There are few patterns more satisfying than the detuned stomp of Metallica’s “Sad But True,” and Spirit Adrift milk everything out that crunch on the title track. Garrett clearly worships Metallica, and Hetfield in his prime was an untouchable rhythm guitarist. Some keyboards sound lifted from Tears, particularly in the title track and instrumental closer “The Way of the Return,” and like Ozzy, goopy keys somehow make them sound even tougher. Darkness is old school, though not chained to one institution, more accessible but not commercial, deeper but not more complicated, a lunge forward without compromise. Garrett is a younger oracle to carry on the torch of heavy metal. Sounds like an unchill role, but he’s got the chops. | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | May 14, 2019 | 8.1 | 5e2ae1f5-f0c9-4705-9908-eedbc3a93ecc | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
On the sultry new EP from anonymous R&B singer H.E.R., mystery lends itself to relatability. | On the sultry new EP from anonymous R&B singer H.E.R., mystery lends itself to relatability. | H.E.R.: H.E.R. Vol. 2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/her-vol-2-ep/ | H.E.R. Vol. 2 EP | In the time of oversharing and overbranding, mystery markets itself. For singer-songwriter H.E.R.—the irony, of course, is the letters stand for Having Everything Revealed—obscurity is about more than strategy or privacy. By rendering herself faceless, she’s looking to create a space for her listeners to fill in the blanks and take what they need, as the chilly blues of H.E.R. Vol. 1 thaw into sultry warmth on H.E.R. Vol. 2.
Speaking to the L.A. Times last year, she said her goal was for “women to really feel how honest and vulnerable I am and to understand that they are not alone and that these are all human emotions.” Vol. 2 adds to that palette in its search for both indulgence and clarity. The EP opens into confident seduction rather than the ambivalence of its predecessor. “Every Kind of Way” and “Say It Again” find H.E.R. owning her sexuality, first in affectionate lovemaking—her voice delicate and airy—then in fiery red demands. She achieves all the ambiance of grown-and-sexy throwback R&B and modernizes it with the help of her mainstay producer DJ Camper (Mary J. Blige, Tamar Braxton, Jay-Z).
While the many shades of love and heartbreak exist here, there’s also agency and self-empowerment. The slow-burning “I Won’t” stares down the notion that love has to be reciprocated simply because it’s being offered—a pressure women bear and find reinforced with “good guy” narratives. She offers no explanations because she doesn’t have to, and the bluntness of her lyrics further drives the point. On “Changes,” she balances vulnerability with assertiveness. When she sings, “Everybody got somebody that they mess with on the low/But I just want you to save me,” it’s as if she’s acknowledging her autonomy while simultaneously letting her lover decide. With songs rarely topping the three-and-a-half-minute mark (on either Vol. 1 or Vol. 2), the music of H.E.R. to date encapsulates a complete spectrum of experiences with remarkable concision.
Vol. 2 toys with common insecurities and ultimately resolves to own them. It’s about questions, not assumptions, like on “Still Down,” when she sing-raps, “When I ain’t there and you get the urge/Who you hitting up first? Is it me or it’s her?” The possibility of other women shows up often, but she never gives in to bitterness despite the trials depicted in her lyrics. At her most melancholic, she sounds like a person who still loves love—naive, perhaps, but always willing to give it a chance. Even “Gone Away,” which captures that moment of feeling intangibly separated from a lover, is rooted in nostalgia and acceptance accented by Chris McClenney’s elegant piano. H.E.R. uses her music to process in the open rather than quietly stew, and in doing so she writes in familiar but unspoken languages.
There have been theories that H.E.R. is Gabi Wilson, a singer who saw her first big break at the age of 10, but at the end of the day, does it matter? The preoccupation reveals a need to assign faces to narratives in hopes they match expectations, but this music can stand up on its own. H.E.R.’s private-public musings become all the more universal as her anonymity allows women to picture their own faces on the silhouette. | 2017-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 23, 2017 | 7.8 | 5e375d7b-89cb-420a-855e-45bfab8b01c9 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
Still fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music, the legendary songwriter here blends them into a laidback, spry pop sound. | Still fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music, the legendary songwriter here blends them into a laidback, spry pop sound. | Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15326-so-beautiful-or-so-what/ | So Beautiful or So What | On Graceland, "the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio"; it's a "bomb in the marketplace" on So Beautiful or So What. The shift in strategy is minor, but those rhyming images speak to the 25 years separating these two albums: 1986 could be eons ago, or it could be yesterday. Those were the days of miracles and wonder, as Paul Simon entered his forties with humor and curiosity intact. These days, however, haven't been too kind: Even as his influence has grown, his output has suffered. After opening the millennium with the dull-by-obligation You're the One, he hired Brian Eno for 2006's Surprise, whose true surprise was that one of the most careful and rigid pop songwriters of the last 50 years could be just as rambling and self-indulgent as any other aging Baby Boomer.
To his considerable credit, however, Simon has never succumbed to a record with Rick Rubin or a Great American Songbook album, perhaps because his standards aren't pre-rock pop tunes. While there was a period when his South African and Brazilian excursions in the late 1980s were derided as exploitative, both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints have proved enormously influential to a new generation of indie-pop songwriters from the Shins' James Mercer to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. Simon, who turns 70 this year, is still forging his own path even this deep into his career and remains devoted to and fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music. So Beautiful or So What blends them all into a pop sound that's simultaneously laidback and spry, almost self-consciously alluding to his past triumphs.
Replacing Brian Eno, long-time cohort Phil Ramone co-produces, and the pairing is comfortable, if not complacent. They've corralled a small band to suggest a live-in-the-room intimacy and spontaneity, and "Rewrite" and "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light" crackle with energy. Some of the ambient elements from Surprise remain, but they're couched in the earthy rhythms of the percussion and the spidery guitars. His voice still strong, Simon shows off his own fretwork more prominently, especially on the short, sweet instrumental "Amulet". Only the sampled sermon on "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" sounds out of place; contemporary listeners may be more likely to connect it to Moby's pre-millennial techno-folk than to its true source material, a 1941 sermon by Reverend J.M. Gates.
Even as his band gets smaller, Simon's ideas grow larger. He's addressing enormous spiritual matters, specifically the nature of God. In "Love and Hard Times", He and Jesus show up for a surprise inspection of Earth, and it's a bit too precious until Simon interrupts and turns it into a sweet love song about love songs. God Himself narrates "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light", bemoaning that humanity doesn't get his jokes, and Simon sounds more at home in His head than in those of the various New Yorkers who narrate "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" and "Rewrite".
So Beautiful or So What can be stodgy in its emotions and a bit too devoted to its motifs, but there's something humanizing about the album's shortcomings. It is, thank God, no attempt to get his affairs in order, an approach that turns so many older artists' albums into solemn, end-of-life affairs. Simon's not worrying over redemption on these spiritual inquests; he's much more concerned about what he'll do in heaven once he gets there. Turns out, he'll be listening to his favorite American tunes. In "The Afterlife", "Be-Bop-a-Lula" and "Ooo Poo Pah Doo" form a celestial language, which may be the album's most satisfying revelation.
Those reference points-- Gene Vincent and Jessie Hill, not to mention Ramone, Graceland, and King's assassination on the title track-- all well predate Y2K, which is not unexpected for an artist who spent half of the previous century making music. Simon's too preoccupied with the 20th century to settle into the 21st, but here's the thing: It suits him. After foundering when he tried to sound new and modern, Simon comes across as much more at ease and compelling in this familiar setting. He's like a novelist revisiting the particulars of his youth; like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he wants to take in his times, and like John Updike, Simon cherishes small epiphanies, which resound like bombs in the marketplace. So perhaps the epiphany of So Beautiful or So What is that Paul Simon turns out to be a character in a Paul Simon song: An aging songwriter still struggling to connect, still figuring it all out, and still cranking the Dixie Hummingbirds. | 2011-04-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-04-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hear Music | April 15, 2011 | 6.7 | 5e39ab40-a84a-4bc9-94b2-fff4dd34f135 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On his first album with a proper band, the Swedish singer-songwriter sounds great, even as he says so very little. | On his first album with a proper band, the Swedish singer-songwriter sounds great, even as he says so very little. | The Tallest Man on Earth: Henry St. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-tallest-man-on-earth-henry-st/ | Henry St. | A little more than a dozen years ago, Kristian Matsson—the Swedish singer-songwriter better known as the Tallest Man on Earth—was so captivating it has become his retroactive curse. Onstage alone, with so much room to roam, Matsson was a baying young wolf, shouting his hymns of hopeful despair and existential reckoning above galloping acoustic figures. He was pure magnetism, a tangle of charisma and candor not unlike Bob Dylan or Jonathan Richman. What’s more, his atavistic early albums actually captured that crackle, direct-to-tape studio wonders that suggested he was forever at your command. His career since those youthful days, though, has involved a difficult trick. As Matsson has documented divorce, isolation, and professional tedium in subsequent albums, he’s incorporated horns and strings, drums and electronics into his strident approach. But how do you maintain that singular verve while expanding your musical palette? Or how do you mature without stiffening?
Recorded at the edge of 40, Henry St. is Matsson’s most robust answer to that question yet. At the very least, it sounds terrific. With imaginative production from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn and accompaniment from a sterling cast of (largely) North Carolina ringers, Matsson has never before enjoyed such a sprawl of musical settings. He bounds through a scrim of diaphanous static and assuring piano on “Looking for Love,” his nylon strings dancing like the old days. Drummer TJ Maiani shapes a deep country-soul pocket for Matsson’s heartsick croon during “Goodbye.” And his sublime piano duet with Phil Cook on the title track feels like waking from a bittersweet dream to rub the sleep from your eyes and ponder what you’re doing here, alive and aging while still full of wonder. Emerging from pandemic isolation on his farm in Sweden, Matsson desired the comradeship of collaboration; this crew, in turn, responded with thoughtful circumstances for his idiosyncratic voice.
But across the 42 minutes of Henry St., Matsson rarely responds to them in kind. To put it plainly, the writing is just bad, as though it were some slapdash afterthought to the strong instrumentals already in place. Matsson loves a nature metaphor, but they don’t love him back here. They’re either so hackneyed your eyes glaze over upon hearing them (“You’ll be the rolling cloud/I’ll be the endless sky,” etcetera) or so messy and inchoate you miss the music’s pleasure while trying to work your way through them. “I’ve found rain for my burning pain/I’ve found the dry grass for my burning love,” he sings at one point, interrupting the easy canter of “Goodbye” with what sounds like a cure for … pubic lice? He confronts “the river of time”; he hurls unnamed things “into the fire”; he pursues some “light at the end of the world.” If you find yourself laughing, consider it a service, levity from texts that offer little else. As the music has grown, the writing at its center has withered into a rumple.
In the second half of “Slowly Rivers Turn,” Matsson stumbles into a perspicacious moment of self-diagnosis. It’s another warm country-soul number, with electric guitars cutting a jagged path between Terry Allen and Studio One. In one of the record’s lone bits of evocative imagery, Matsson watches his old self float downstream as he contemplates who he might become. “I don’t want to be the yeller of my longings/I don’t want to be the sailor of my past,” he sings in the grandly swiveling bridge, falsetto cracking with honest concern on that last bit.
But this ham-fisted imitation of himself is exactly what he seems to be on Henry St.—the confused and divorced dude waking up to someone new on opener “Bless You,” the restless mortal seeking the typical comforts of companionship on the subsequent “Looking for Love,” the permanently heartbroken guy considering how he might taste to vultures on closer “Foothills.” He puts a bow around what he doesn’t want to be, then fails to write anything that goes beyond it. “I never found a way around myself,” he mutters at the same song’s end, a self-rebuke that defines Henry St.’s dead-end.
Matsson once suggested new energy and possibility inside a field pronounced dead only slightly less than jazz—the guy with the acoustic guitar, bleating his feelings like they were breaking news. The writing ferried that same urgency, the sense that he was trying to transmit something crucial before we were all out of time. That frisson, at least for now, is gone. Instead, Matsson muddles through a mess of word salad that, charitably, feels cautionary. For so long, Matsson has been, as he sings at one point, “a little dude in the scape of songs.” In the prolonged quest to become something bigger, to expand that scape, he has forsaken the tiny core that once made him so compelling. | 2023-04-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | April 19, 2023 | 6 | 5e3de4d6-c784-4f36-83b8-a9a2beaa3e09 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Electroclash holdover's latest both points to new directions and recalls the strengths displayed on debut LP The Teaches of Peaches. | Electroclash holdover's latest both points to new directions and recalls the strengths displayed on debut LP The Teaches of Peaches. | Peaches: I Feel Cream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13003-i-feel-cream/ | I Feel Cream | Peaches is the sort of artist who is so defined by the fully formed, distinct aesthetic of her debut album that her subsequent releases cannot help but seem like sequels in a film series. As such, her last two records were clear cases of diminishing returns-- Fatherfucker seemed lazy and rushed; Impeach My Bush was better, but inconsistent in its inspiration. Both albums expanded upon the gleefully pervy, button-pushing persona established on The Teaches of Peaches, but broke little ground in their own right, and mostly presented a more extreme and gratingly puerile variation on her brand of sexually confrontational performance art. This was unfortunate, as the raw power of songs like "Fuck the Pain Away" and "Lovertits" came just as much from their bawdiness as their well-crafted tunefulness and expression of complicated, conflicted emotions. As she drifted toward intellectualized vulgarity, she lost touch with the wounded humanity that made The Teaches of Peaches so engaging. I Feel Cream finds Peaches reversing that trend, and reconnecting with the muse that produced her early classics. At the same time, its songs point in new directions for her aesthetic and offer her a future beyond endless retreads on a tired formula.
Though it feels strange to describe an album with such unapologetically filthy lyrics as "mature," the word certainly applies here, and not just in the way Peaches foregrounds and embraces her advancing age in many of the songs. Several tracks delve deep into what Stephen Malkmus might refer to as "real emotional trash," and allow her to reveal a vulnerability that had only been hinted at on previous efforts. "Talk To Me", one of the best songs of Peaches' career to date, has her confronting problems with a partner head-on without pulling any punches, and singing her heart out with the aggrieved intensity of Tina Turner. "Lose You", the atypically ethereal track that follows in the sequence, flips the mood with her voice taking on a demure affect as she frets about driving her lover away over a low key yet bass-heavy groove. Both cuts cast aside the baggage of the Peaches persona and are better for it, and the variation in vocal technique broadens the range of the record considerably.
When Peaches returns to her default position of sexually explicit rapping, her performances are more focused and gracefully composed than in the past, perhaps a direct result of the superior quality beats provided by guest producers Simian Mobile Disco and Digitalism. "Billionaire", the record's most overtly hip-hop oriented track, is a genuine banger with rhymes recalling Beck circa Midnite Vultures, and stands out as another all-time high in the Peaches songbook. The remainder of the selections favor a more European approach to keyboard tones and dance beats, which in turn brings her deeper into a modern club sound beyond her origins in electroclash. Intriguingly, the record's final quarter slips into a woozy, down-tempo minimalism that feels sexy as opposed to sexual, and comes across like an update on the freakishly calm funkiness of Missy Elliott and Timbaland's early-00s collaborations.
Depsite the number of collaborators on board for I Feel Cream-- Gonzalez, Soulwax, and Drums of Death also contribute-- Peaches still produced the lion's share of the album on her own, and her sensibility as a musician has clearly evolved along with her approach to lyrics. Ultimately, even when she veers into previously unexplored aesthetic territory, every track feels just like Peaches, which is rather remarkable given how rigid and predictable she had been in the recent past. Whereas it was beginning to seem that Peaches' shtick was an artistic dead end, there is now plenty of reason to believe that she may have the skills and vision necessary to produce interesting, emotionally affecting work well beyond menopause. | 2009-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | May 6, 2009 | 7.3 | 5e4507d7-d660-4d6a-8ce8-fb9507316ef2 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The gruff Detroit rapper Guilty Simpson relies on monotone real talk that, when paired with the right blend of cinematic soul, resembles *4,5,6-*era Kool G Rap. On his latest album, produced by Katalyst, he sounds unsatisfied despite a robust discography, still pushing for a breakthrough. | The gruff Detroit rapper Guilty Simpson relies on monotone real talk that, when paired with the right blend of cinematic soul, resembles *4,5,6-*era Kool G Rap. On his latest album, produced by Katalyst, he sounds unsatisfied despite a robust discography, still pushing for a breakthrough. | Guilty Simpson: Detroit's Son | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20915-detroits-son/ | Detroit's Son | You can't mention Guilty Simpson without thinking of Detroit. The gruff rapper embodies the city's resilient spirit and, much like fellow lyricists Redman and Black Thought, he shouts out his hometown of "the D" every chance he gets. So while his new album, Detroit's Son, is an ode to the Motor City, it's also a chest-thumping salute to himself and a reminder of what he still hopes to accomplish. Because despite a robust discography, Guilty sounds unsatisfied on his new album, still pushing for a breakthrough.
Detroit's Son follows last year's Simpson Tape EP, produced entirely by California composer Oh No, whose stampeding drum breaks worked well for Guilty's menacing flows. Guilty is more straight-laced than his contemporaries: He relies on monotone real talk that, when paired with the right blend of cinematic soul, resembles 4,5,6 era Kool G Rap without the suit-and-tie crime bravado. His style is distinctly blue-collar, correlating with his hometown's hardworking ethos. At his best, he stands apart as a low-key yeoman with a penchant for street narratives.
Yet for all the work he's done in his career—his debut Ode to the Ghetto, 2010's O.J. Simpson produced by Madlib, 2011's Random Axe project with Black Milk and Sean Price, and 2012's Dice Game with producer Apollo Brown—Guilty is only as good as the beats he receives. His bars tend to recede into the music and there's no 'wow' factor with his approach. Instead, he becomes an accessory; you find yourself more interested in the instrumentals than what he's actually saying. There's no denying Guilty's intense work ethic, but 12 years after his debut on Jaylib song "Strapped", he still doesn't sound fully comfortable as a lyricist.
D**etroit's Son was produced entirely by Katalyst, an Australian member of the Quakers collective, and his patchwork funk sets a frenetic pace. The music resembles Madlib and Paul White in a way: It sorta plods along without much structure, and the kaleidoscopic sound feels influenced by the likes of George Clinton and Sun Ra. For Detroit's Son, Katalyst applies a dark sheen that reflects Guilty's home city's gritty reputation. The layered, slow-moving "The D" stands out, and "Dirty Glove" features an excellent verse from fellow Detroit rapper Phat Kat, and the driving rhythm conveys civic despair.
But like the album's other featured rappers, Kat outshines Guilty, simply because he's more energetic and lyrically nimble. On "Blue Collar", Guilty sounds stilted alongside Elzhi, whose complex wordplay fits more naturally with Katalyst's spacey composition. As it plays, Detroit's Son feels like a collection of songs relying too heavily on well-worn themes ("Blunts in the Air", "Smoking", "Money"). Quick tracks like "Ghetto", "The Music", and "Beautiful Death" seem out of place and disrupt Detroit's sequencing. "Power Outage"—a salacious sex romp—brings the album to an awkward and abrupt ending. The album feels a bit hastily assembled and packaged, a widget in a long line of solid, dependable products. Detroit's Son is another line on Guilty's ever-growing resume, not a highlight. | 2015-08-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | August 14, 2015 | 6 | 5e5d3b0e-b445-4cf3-bc98-4d73295a31e1 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Their entire recorded output is less than an hour long, but it became the blueprint of wired, New York dance rock. Incomparable and otherworldly, Liquid Liquid were just in search of the “big beat.” | Their entire recorded output is less than an hour long, but it became the blueprint of wired, New York dance rock. Incomparable and otherworldly, Liquid Liquid were just in search of the “big beat.” | Liquid Liquid: Liquid Liquid EP/ Successive Reflexes EP/ Optimo EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23052-liquid-liquid-ep-successive-reflexes-ep-optimo-ep/ | Liquid Liquid EP/ Successive Reflexes EP/ Optimo EP | Three EPs. Forty-two minutes of music. The four guys who made it all began as Liquid Idiot, a band looking for a sound in 1979 at Rutgers. Relocated to Manhattan, they became Liquid Liquid, one of several minor inversions that yielded major results. By 1981, bassist Richard McGuire, singer Sal Principato, drummer Scott Hartley, and percussionist Dennis Young were sitting in the gulch between worlds.
The no wave bands of the late ’70s were changing shape, moving toward an end that was still years away. If you went with DNA, New York rock was going to be sharp, small, and fractured. If you went with Sonic Youth, the next thing was guitars, and lots of them, none tuned in a familiar way. New York radio was entering a glory day of dance music fed by sources both commercial and loose, the synthetic update of ’70s funk played by live bands. Secret Weapon’s “Must Be The Music,” D Train’s “You’re The One For Me.” At night, rap was finding its first home at WHBI, in Newark, with “Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack.” DJs at clubs like Danceteria and Mudd Club were playing all of these records.
Meanwhile, Liquid Liquid belonged to the downtown rock scene only by virtue of being a live band. They certainly didn’t play rock’n’roll. Self-taught, they were seeking what McGuire called “the big beat,” short, repetitive songs related to rhythm-based artists like James Brown and the rap emerging from his songbook. But Liquid Liquid was too oblique to be mistaken for anything with a known name like funk. By the end of their career, the band had recorded one of the most important songs to come out of New York in the ‘80s. They never had to decide who they were. New York decided what the band was.
At first, though, it was up to a man named Ed Bahlman. He owned a record store at 99 MacDougal St. out of which he ran a label called 99 Records. In four years, he put out 15 records, the bulk of them essential. Though Bahlman’s taste ended up much more on the “big beat” side of things, his first release was from the other side of downtown: Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1. By 1981, Branca’s band would feature Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, and his first full-length, The Ascension, would be released on 99 Records. This music was after real bigness. The resemblance to detuned symphonic music became explicit when Branca enlarged his ensembles and started naming his pieces “Symphony [X],” going up the ordinal ladder as the records came out.
Branca’s use of massed strings and volume made clear that there was irony in the Liquid Liquid approach. Their bigness wasn’t about amplitude or volume. The 99 bands that favored rhythm—Liquid Liquid, ESG, Y Pants, Bush Tetras—built big records from small pieces. A 99 band sounded more or less like McGuire’s cover for the first Liquid Liquid EP: a human figure suggested as an explosion of curves, not all of them there. Looking back at the turn of the century, the strain of guitar music that ran from Branca into Sonic Youth seemed like the most significant contribution to American independent music. Seventeen years later, history has flipped and it’s now a toss-up. When LCD Soundsystem launched in 2001, one of their direct inspirations was Liquid Liquid. The big storm of guitars had happened, so Murphy went back to the small big beat, filled in the missing pieces, and finished a draft of New York begun twenty years earlier.
If you love the Liquid Liquid EPs, it is tempting to view them as lost scriptures, examples of a magical, lesser-known way to render rhythm. If you lean on them, though, that’s not how it works. Liquid Liquid was deft and basic, as good as untutored music gets. Any wise choice was qualified to replace any learned move. Liquid Liquid songs foreground beat, but at least half of them are a step too soft for the dancefloor. The would share bills with ESG, sisters from the Bronx who managed to reduce James Brown from three elements to two, and Konk, a party band with a horn section that was unabashedly after the dancing.
But if Liquid Liquid showed any undeniable influence, it was DNA, the one band any musician of that era—jazz, noise, DJ culture—will cite. Arto Lindsay sang in English while making it sound like another language. His guitar playing had no truck with known tunings, opting for small noises nothing like the Hoover Dams Branca built. Bassist Tim Wright played elegant and melodic lines, the most songlike aspect of songs that avoided songs. Drummer Ikue Mori played in her own orbit and time. DNA sounded like they had recovered recordings from a country that has yet to be found. In four years, they were gone.
Like Lindsay, Principato sang nominally in English. He mangled his lyrics with echo and pronunciation, leaving behind a few decipherable words: time, out, better, phenomenon. Because of no money, the first Liquid Liquid EP featured two studio tracks and three live tracks recorded at Hurrahs in February of 1981. The low fidelity of the live recording brings out the precision of motif in “Bell Head,” a conversation between an agogô, an alarm bell, and a marimba. The tuned metal and wood are backed by a rudimentary beat, something you’d learn in the second weekend of drum camp. Principato sings one word every two bars: “Here!” “Heart!” (Then, ramping up the excitement: “Would be! Stick man!”) The digital delay keeps the tail of his voice in the game, and you end up being able to hum a song that has no bassline, no guitar part, and no traditional singing. This was about framing. Tying Liquid Liquid to the swollen bursts of no wave fails. They weren’t big beat. They were proper patterns.
Liquid Liquid’s second EP, Successive Reflexes, released later in 1981, was done in a studio and emphasized their refusal to make anything obvious. Of everything they put out, this is their most slippery stuff. This is the haze of dub without any overt reference to reggae. McGuire plays harmonics on his bass as often as he plays notes. Principato drags out his syllables and hints at quiet ecstasy. If you dropped this record onto another continent and stripped out the names, someone might think it was Satie pieces rearranged for percussion.
The big beat becomes itself on their third EP, Optimo, recorded at Radio City Music Hall Studios. (This was not as spacious as the name suggests.) Of the four immaculate songs, one secured Liquid Liquid a permanent place in the pop songbook. “Cavern” is rooted to McGuire toggling between the notes A and C on his bass, playing the kind of hitched, self-fading line that no trained player would ever be able to write. It is as much the sound of being unable to play as it is some kind of clever phrasing. It is beyond clever when paired with the drumming, percussion, and vocals. “Cavern” is always there, already rotating and coming at you from behind the sun and under the earth.
“Cavern” found its way onto late night FM radio. It played on the new “Zulu Beat” show hosted by Afrika Islam on WHBI, popping up between improvised raps and snippets of old Dazz and Mandrill records. It was another effortless and inexplicable New York groove, but no obvious smash until Sugar Hill Records got their hands on it. The Sugar Hill house band replayed the song, and Melle Mel rapped about the dangers of cocaine over it. “White Lines (Don't Do It)” was initially credited to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, but Flash took his name off of it, since the only person involved other than the band was Melle Mel. On future pressings, Mel became Grandmaster Melle Mel. One name was still missing, though: Liquid Liquid.
“Cavern” had already been included on volume nine of Lenny Roberts’ biblical series of bootlegs, Ultimate Breaks & Beats. “White Lines” eclipsed that, going from regional to national hit in a month. People who don’t know Liquid Liquid from a frog will say “White lines!” if you hum the bassline from “Cavern.” In 1995, “White Lines” was the rap song Duran Duran decided to record. God bless them—in the twelve years before their cover, the publishing had not been sorted out. Duran Duran’s version of “White Lines” triggered a legal balancing after millions of copies of “White Lines” had been sold.
The story of what happened between 99 and Sugar Hill is as much rumor as fact. Nobody in the band knows exactly what happened between Sugar Hill’s Sylvia Robinson and Bahlman. McGuire remembers Bahlman being asked by Sugar Hill to “take a ride” and sort out the publishing dispute. Another 99 Records employee, Terry Tolkin, recalls a brick thrown through the front window of the MacDougal street shop, though no band members (or anyone else) is on record as having seen this happen. “White Lines” made the band famous, though it made them no money until a band from England decided they wanted to warn everybody about cocaine all over again.
So come for “Cavern,” a wonder of nested movements and elastic power. Stay for the most understated dance music downtown ever produced. Or the most overstated stencils. Something. Maybe a phenomenon. | 2017-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | null | April 2, 2017 | 9.2 | 5e61b295-052f-4873-a6ac-54df02eede74 | Sasha Frere-Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-frere-jones/ | null |
In Hayden Anhedönia’s moody, gothic soundscapes, the ageless persona of Ethel Cain confronts the religion, sex, and violence lurking within the confines of small-town America. | In Hayden Anhedönia’s moody, gothic soundscapes, the ageless persona of Ethel Cain confronts the religion, sex, and violence lurking within the confines of small-town America. | Ethel Cain: Inbred EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ethel-cain-inbred-ep/ | Inbred EP | In the earliest forms of Gregorian chant, church singers would scale multiple notes in melismatic syllables. The effect is hypnotic; a single word undulates until its original meaning blends with its sound—in some cases, it was thought to induce a trance-like state in its audience. For Hayden Anhedönia, who performs as an invented persona named Ethel Cain, those consecrated refrains were a part of daily life since childhood. Raised in an insular Southern Baptist community along the Florida panhandle, Anhedönia recalls her mother, with whom she sang in church choir, playing hymns and Gregorian chant CDs while she cooked. On Inbred, her third EP as Ethel Cain, Anhedönia leans into her restrictive religious childhood, carrying her voice across the melismas of her youth to reveal its murkiness.
To hear Anhedönia describe it, Ethel Cain is both a specific character and a more mutable representation of a woman throughout American history. She chose the surname because of its Biblical origins; “Ethel,” though, just “smells like mothballs.” In her most concise form, Ethel Cain is a preacher’s wife in the simmering stress of the Eisenhower era—she is a vacant stare and hollowed cheekbones; she’s the decrepit old woman sitting in the first pew, silently judging, embodying what it means to bear witness.
Her vision of gothic piety rings clearest on “God’s Country.” Anhedönia belts multi-note incantations over glassy synths reminiscent of a church organ, her voice echoing as if in an empty cathedral. Swapping verses with witchy emo rapper Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, she evokes the rise and fall of liturgical chant as she sings about drinking blood and prays, “Take care of me, God.” It’s a coming-of-age tale told through Kierkegaardian leaps of faith, effortlessly blending tropes of teenage angst—highways to nowhere, first love—with imagery from her Christian upbringing. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she whispers gently in the song’s plaintive coda. The proverb represents human humility, but the resolve in her voice, gravelly and low, suggests that the balance of power is blurrier. Inbred, in its strongest moments, questions established hierarchies to reveal their contradictory messages of strength and powerlessness.
Elsewhere on the album, we get more secular glimpses of Ethel Cain; on “Crush,” backed by reverberating guitar, she’s an introspective and moody teenager fawning over a boy with a violent streak. It’s not only the guns in his locker—the death drive tracks throughout Inbred: Rapper and producer lil aaron muses about dying in a car crash on “Michelle Pfeiffer”’s Thelma and Louise-esque journey West. “Unpunishable” paints Ethel Cain as a “used and abused” woman of the night, covered in bruises and numb after years of pain. These vignettes of Anhedönia’s invented persona don’t exactly coalesce into a single, coherent image—she claims that a forthcoming, two-hour-plus LP will reveal the full narrative of Ethel Cain. But at least on this EP, her protagonists share a pining for a brighter future, while simultaneously languishing in the confines of small-town, Southern womanhood.
Inbred is the culmination of a half-decade of releases under various pseudonyms; it follows her dreamier pop project White Silas and two 2019 EPs as Ethel Cain, Carpet Bed and Golden Age (after which she signed to Prescription Songs, the publishing house helmed by disgraced producer Dr. Luke). This latest EP adds nuance and depth to both her sound and her character: The bolder guitar hooks she introduced on Golden Age return more defiantly; her light sketches of Christian themes are shaded in with more legible metaphors and visual language.
When she wasn’t listening to stoic plainchants in her childhood home, Anhedönia was surrounded by the searing, overtly masculine sounds of blues rock—Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Cash—blasting from her dad’s truck. On Inbred, she incorporates those influences into guitar solos and howls, which break up the restrained, almost haunted soundscapes of her piano-backed ballads. As guitars whine in the final seconds of “Two-Headed Mother,” the power of her character finally snaps into view. Ethel Cain, the Janus-like matriarch, is defined by duality—victim and predator, follower and leader, a preacher’s wife and a rock god.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Daughters of Cain | April 28, 2021 | 7.6 | 5e68de85-6401-41ff-8d4c-1a2e92dff63d | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
This lovingly compiled 4xCD, 120-track box is a near-perfect combination of quality, necessity, song selection, sequencing, informative liner notes, and packaging. | This lovingly compiled 4xCD, 120-track box is a near-perfect combination of quality, necessity, song selection, sequencing, informative liner notes, and packaging. | Various Artists: One Kiss Can Lead to Another | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1973-one-kiss-can-lead-to-another/ | One Kiss Can Lead to Another | Utilitarian and condescendingly named, compartmentalized in its construction, and mostly voiced by supposedly interchangeable sets of teenagers, girl-group music has long been relegated to a footnote in rock's back pages. A large number of its songs are widely loved, of course, but to many critics and listeners, the peak of girl-group music (roughly 1962-65) is considered an era of frivolity and disposability, a manufactured post-Payola placeholder rightfully eradicated from the airwaves by the British Invasion.
Granted, the girl-group sound was cynically designed to be ephemeral, the work of highly competitive yet mostly faceless songwriters working out of Brill Building cubicles. Little concern was given to artist development, and the singers themselves-- many of whom were black-- were rarely promoted as vigorously as their rock'n'roll progenitors, partially due to labels' fears that television performances would reveal their skin color and thus alienate potential listeners. The music, however, has persevered, even proving itself massively important and influential, despite its marginalization by an industry that mythologizes and profits from the past by lionizing larger-than-life personalities and/or album-oriented artists rather than pop singles.
Rhino does its part to make amends for some of that marginalization with its lovingly compiled 4xCD, 120-track girl-group box One Kiss Can Lead to Another, a near-perfect combination of quality, necessity, song selection, sequencing, informative liner notes, and packaging. Crucially, the compilers were liberal with their definition of girl-group music, incorporating not just doo-wop- and/or gospel-influenced female vocal teams such as the Chiffons, the Shirelles, the Cookies, and the Shangri-La's but also combos and solo artists from a variety of musical styles, including R&B, garage rock, country, proto-psych, and Northern and blue-eyed soul. British singers such as Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, and Dusty Springfield are afforded places here-- as are, ironically, tracks made popular by Brit Invasion artists such as the Beatles, Hollies, Moody Blues, and Herman's Hermits. Familiar artists such as Cher and Dolly Parton appear in atypical guises, but most of the widely recognizable names are working behind the scenes: Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Brian Wilson, Neil Diamond, Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman, and Cat Stevens all feature in the liner notes, alongside Brill Building songwriting staples such as Goffin/King, Mann/Weil, and Barry/Greenwich.
The most notable absence is Phil Spector, whose dense Wall of Sound production style and proclivity for melodramatic lyrics were the benchmarks and templates for much of girl-group music. But then, that's just as well, since anyone willing to purchase this affordable set will also want to own Spector's Back to Mono box, which includes the major hits by artists like the Crystals, the Ronettes, Darlene Love, and others. Of course, the inability to license Spector's tracks made it impossible for the set's creators to compile a definitive genre box; wisely, they instead cast a wide net and included mostly non-hits, unearthing a collection of tracks that will appeal to both girl-group neophytes and acolytes.
Unsurprisingly, the most common subject matter on a set of girl-group songs is boys-- boys who lie and cheat, boys who drive a wedge between girls and their parents or friends, boys who feed off of dependency and low self-esteem, boys who trick girls into thinking it's love when it's lust. As the title implies, one kiss leads to two, two kisses can lead to three, and eventually it can lead to doing more than a good girl should. On One Kiss, it can also lead to rationalizing distress (the uncommon diet advice on the Fabulettes' "Try the Worryin' Way"), long-lasting emotional scars (P.P. Arnold's "The First Cut Is the Deepest"), becoming trapped in cycles of emotional abuse and dependency (Lesley Gore's "What Am I Gonna Do With You?", on which she guesses "I'm just the girl you stay with/ To see what you can get away with"), and heartache (the Flirtations' Northern soul classic "Nothing But a Heartache", among many others). At its most extreme, one kiss can also lead to unwanted pregnancy (the Lovelites' "How Can I Tell My Mom and Dad?") and even murderous jealousy (the Whyte Boots' vicious girlfight in "Nightmare").
Crushes entail risk, like an emotional choose your own adventure, but risks can also pay off, and it's that belief that colors many of the tracks. The heartache of the set's most melodramatic tracks is balanced by happy endings, improbably joyous and exuberant music, and the power of self-actualization and empowerment. It sounds quaint today, but a teenage girl building an identity, making her own choices, and gaining measures of self-respect were still largely new ideas in the 1960s. The protagonists here might make a lot of wrong decisions-- from the Shangri-La's lamenting their bad boy gone good in "Out in the Streets" to Evie Sands offering herself mind, soul, but mostly body on "Take Me For a Little While"-- but simply having the opportunity to voice their thoughts or follow their hearts and minds are things their mothers couldn't sometimes do. This spirit is reflected in songs like the Chiffons' psych-tinged anthem "Nobody Knows What's Going On (In My Mind But Me)", the pent-up struggle between lust and loyalty in Elle Greenwich's "You Don't Know", Twinkle's death ballad "Terry", the What Four's sex-as-a-weapon track "I'm Gonna Destroy That Boy", and Wanda Jackson's sexually charged "Funnel of Love", each of which are revolutionary in their own quiet way.
In the past 40 years the music featured on One Kiss has served as a touchstone for a wide variety of artists, most notably 1970s New Yorkers (the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, New York Dolls, Blondie, Martin Scorsese), 1980s Brits (the Smiths, Jesus & Mary Chain, the Field Mice, the Cocteau Twins), and contemporary indie stars (Saint Etienne, Magnetic Fields, the Avalanches, the Concretes). We've even enjoyed a lengthy post-Spice Girls/Aaliyah resurgence of girl-group music via hip-hop/R&B, dance- and electro-pop, teen pop vets, and UK chart acts such as Girls Aloud and Sugababes.
One of the saddest quirks of rock criticism is that the hopes, dreams, and fears of teen girls are frequently considered frolicsome fluff while the rage and defiance of teen boys is miscast as the articulation of free thinkers. And yet, it's the girls-- in part, because they're more likely to function as mouthpieces for adult songwriters-- who examine universal subjects such as love, romance, self-actualization, self-confidence, and personal politics, while young rock bands often simply reject growing up, fight responsibility, and wear that struggle as a badge of pride. Both approaches can work, of course, but unlike a sneer, a kiss never goes out of style. | 2005-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Rhino | October 27, 2005 | 9.8 | 5e70aea3-8e9d-4045-bb77-3071fbdeddda | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The first collaborative full-length by producers Machinedrum and Jimmy Edgar bounces across genres and eras, but the real magic comes from the guest vocalists. | The first collaborative full-length by producers Machinedrum and Jimmy Edgar bounces across genres and eras, but the real magic comes from the guest vocalists. | J-E-T-S: Zoospa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-e-t-s-zoospa/ | ZOOSPA | At the top of the 2010s, when Machinedrum’s Travis Stewart and Jimmy Edgar were releasing projects on the UK label Hotflush, they started a collaborative duo under the moniker J-E-T-S. It was the latest addition to a long list of individual and collaborative pseudonyms: Edgar previously contributed to X District, Her Bad Habit, and Plus Device, while Stewart has issued material as Syndrone, Tstewart, and Sepalcure. J-E-T-S released an EP in 2012 and another in 2015, each offering a handful of soul-inflected DayGlo house and techno tracks. Now, almost seven years after their inception, they’ve returned with their debut full-length Zoospa, a futuristic patchwork of bass, hip-hop, and R&B.
Zoospa plays as if Stewart and Edgar tossed their favorite bits of American pop in a blender, printed them on a floppy disk, used it for a game of hopscotch, and then scanned it back into Ableton. In a recent interview, the duo highlighted the influence of ’90s gospel and noted their use of a chord voicing called quartal harmony, a technique popular in synthesizer music of the early ’70s. They were also adamant that Zoospa should not sound too “throwback,” creating a new sound pack through Edgar’s “super complex modular system” in a bid to avoid unwelcome familiarity.
As a result, Zoospa’s musical elements feel cohesive, even as they bounce across genres and eras, often within the same song. The instrumental “Hyper Hibernate” evokes Steve Reich as a vaporwave artist, with marimba-esque synths that fall into a serene, orderly pattern, like a digitally rendered Ikebana arrangement. The intense squelches and trap hi-hats of “Team Effort” sound like the type of beat SOPHIE would produce for Charli XCX. Zoospa takes a more outwardly R&B turn on the Dawn Richard-featuring “Potions,” where pumping, respirating synths call to mind Nao’s collaborations with British producer Mura Masa. The frenzied amalgamation of genres is a natural progression for both Stewart and Edgar; the former enlisted versatile R&B vocalists like Richard and Jesse Boykins III for his 2016 Machinedrum record Human Energy, and the latter co-produced “745” on Vince Staples’ 2017 avant-garde dance rap opus Big Fish Theory.
But the real magic comes from the guest vocalists, who both match the bouncy dynamism of Stewart and Edgar’s productions and bring their own refreshingly weird energy. Mykki Blanco is in his element on “Play,” punching out some words with tenacity and morphing the pronunciation of others. “Get down with doggies, bet you got fleasies/Opp bitches lurkin’, they not my species,” he says, teasing sass from the final syllable of each bar. The standout “Real Truth” features rising Australian artist Tkay Maidza, who raps with a breezy candor. “I ain’t scared of a dude with a suit baggy,” she says, lending her own quirky flair to the inverted grammatical structure. Stewart and Edgar digitize her vocals until she sounds robotic, becoming one with the track’s synthetic elements.
Besides Big Fish Theory, Zoospa is also reminiscent of Flume’s latest Hi This Is Flume mixtape, which similarly weaves elaborately arranged instrumentals with appearances from inflammatory MCs slowthai and JPEGMAFIA. On both projects, the vocalists serve as inspiration and instrument, yet another reference point for their respective producers to chop up, mess with, and resituate. J-E-T-S play with elements from the past, but their take on future-pop aligns perfectly with today’s forward-thinking trends. | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | May 29, 2019 | 7.5 | 5e7a305c-83b8-444f-89c8-9ab7eae7b7ed | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Hamilton, Ontario vocalist Jessy Lanza works with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys on a collection of glacial electro-R&B. Pull My Hair Back rings with a level of confidence surprising for a first record. | Hamilton, Ontario vocalist Jessy Lanza works with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys on a collection of glacial electro-R&B. Pull My Hair Back rings with a level of confidence surprising for a first record. | Jessy Lanza: Pull My Hair Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18472-jessy-lanza-pull-my-hair-back/ | Pull My Hair Back | Situated on the southwestern corner of Lake Ontario, the midsize industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, has a grittiness that stands in stark contrast to the diverse cosmopolitanism of its northern neighbor, Toronto. While Hamilton may lack the cultural cachet of Canada's largest city, Steeltown served as a creative incubator for singer Jessy Lanza: she fell into a collaborative role with a local acquaintance, Junior Boys member Jeremy Greenspan, that led to studio sessions and a deal with the UK electronic label Hyperdub. The result of Lanza and Greenspan's work together is Pull My Hair Back, Lanza's debut collection of glacial electro-R&B.
Pull My Hair Back rings with a level of confidence surprising for a first record: Lanza experiments with bold minimalism, and frequently employs her voice to meet melodic and rhythmic ends in nontraditional ways. Hiccupping lead single "Kathy Lee" is ultra-stark, with Lanza's breathy vocal backed by little more than tiny percussive shakes and snaps; on "Fuck Diamond" she becomes a percussive tool herself, her casual readings of "Fuck that" and other wordless bits strung together and made part of a burbling tapestry that's reminiscent of the work of Jamie xx. Lanza's willingness to play a supporting role on her own songs, and to give those songs room to breathe, suggests an admirable level of restraint and a good ear for the larger sonic picture.
With all that restraint and space, Lanza's showier gestures stand out. There are several such moments on standout track "5785021," including a featherlight, fluttering vocal in the chorus and a beautifully textured, rippling synth that unfolds over the song's back half. The remainder of the album has its share of turns in the spotlight, from a wickedly funky synth drop on the stellar "Against the Wall" that's straight out of a 1980s playbook to the thrilling closing section of "Keep Moving", surely the album's peak in terms of sonic density.
While Greenspan's production choices and craftsmanship are integral to the album's success, Lanza is more than just a producer's pawn. One of her strengths as a vocalist is her ability to convey personality in small but definite ways, even if it's just through a word or short phrase. When she coos "You know my address" on "5785021," it glows with heat and intelligence and control, just enough to paper over the oddity of its existence in a song that's ostensibly about calling someone. It may be a stretch to say Lanza is creating characters within these songs, but she's certainly injecting personality.
It's tempting to imagine how these songs would transform if Lanza unleashed the considerable chops that occasionally shine on Pull My Hair Back. While this record's sense of self and attention to detail deserve to be praised, a small shift in Lanza's positioning and prominence could be the change that takes her next project from good to great. | 2013-09-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-09-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Hyperdub | September 12, 2013 | 7.3 | 5e7a8006-59e9-4205-8585-18228476e4fe | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
On his third album, the influential R&B singer/songwriter comes into his own as an album artist, getting over on his impeccable sense of craft. | On his third album, the influential R&B singer/songwriter comes into his own as an album artist, getting over on his impeccable sense of craft. | The-Dream: Love King | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14449-love-king/ | Love King | The-Dream earned his respect as a songwriter who co-wrote larger-than-life pop anthems, penning "Umbrella" for Rihanna and "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" for Beyoncé, as well as less-known but evocative tracks for everyone from Usher ("Trading Places") to Rick Ross ("All I Really Want"). His solo debut, 2007's Love/Hate, broke through with minor hits "Shawty Is Da Shit" and "Falsetto", whose wildly addictive hooks papered over his slight persona. The rest of that record created a constellation of characteristics that laid out his aesthetic-- the lush production courtesy of beatmakers L.O.S. and Tricky Stewart, songs that wash into each other in the mode of a DJ mix to create a miniature suite with precision sequencing.
On Love vs. Money, The-Dream's second LP, he tried to replicate this effect. Although the epic sweep of the second album's final third was The-Dream at a songwriting peak, the front-loaded pop songs-- particularly "Walking on the Moon"'s thin attempt at literal transcendence-- felt like shadows of past achievements. Even so, it was another vital chapter in an unusual career, as The-Dream has balanced the mercenary hit-making obsessions of his peers with the tender loving care of an auteur working out a unified statement.
Love King, the alleged final chapter in his Love Trilogy, is the thrilling conclusion to his three-album arc. If you've been charmed by The-Dream's strengths-- Tin Pan Alley song concepts and an unceasing sense of musical craft-- then you'll be immensely satisfied with the music here. The record argues for The-Dream's identity as an album artist whose tics and stylistic effects have created a self-sustaining world of distinctive R&B, and in a style that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve.
As a debut single, "Love King" felt like a cobbled-together collection of these attributes: the expected "radio killa" ad-libs, self-mythologizing, and hooks with familiar insistence. But it turned out to be a pump fake, because here it makes for a great table-setting opener. Love King builds on Love/Hate and Love vs. Money by indulging in emotional and melodic excess. The-Dream knows where to find the sweet spot, and he has an uncanny knack for how pieces of music fit together. When a song would be best served by space, he gives it plenty. Every piano chord and finger snap and bass hit is in its right place. He sweats every detail but never loses sight of how the album works as a whole.
"Yamaha", the most immediately powerful track on the record, is one example of what he does so well. It pushes The-Dream's earlier Prince nod "Fast Car" even further in the direction of outright imitation, with searing hooks, nakedly lustful appeals, and an arrangement and instrumentation that pay homage to the R&B of the early 1980s. As the song unwinds, you feel like you're sharing the songwriter's love of this music, and marveling at the way that he absorbs it into his own aesthetic. The following "Nikki Part 2", emerging from the twinkling synths of "Yamaha", keeps the run going, the melancholy of the verses ultimately finding transcendent emotional recognition when the song opens on the chorus. And then the urgent drama of "Abyss", a perfect title for a song that feels like an emotional freefall, completes the mid-album triptych, its epic chorus evoking a cold-water plunge of claustrophobic betrayal. These highly charged moments are balanced by more understated tracks. "Turnt Out" is The-Dream at his easiest and most likable, and it's one of the album's few moments of restraint. Meanwhile, "February Love" turns Love vs. Money fan favorite "Fancy" from a grandiose statement to a more intimate memory.
The-Dream's debut had the advantage of appearing in a vacuum, enabling him to balance his traditional songwriting impulses with a unique creative approach. Once it became apparent that the latter direction had garnered him a loyal following, the pressure to give more generously to that audience led to an imbalance on Love vs. Money. With Love King, it no longer feels as if he's splitting the difference between his pop star ambition and a large cult of admirers. By breaking down the detachment that made him such a popular songwriter to follow his personal musical vision, and it's taken him to a place only he could find. | 2010-07-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | July 13, 2010 | 8.6 | 5e8375d3-7677-4d81-b774-ef786e83e946 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
On her alluring and unnerving new album, the Melbourne singer-songwriter adopts a digital alter-ego to explore real-life human strife. | On her alluring and unnerving new album, the Melbourne singer-songwriter adopts a digital alter-ego to explore real-life human strife. | Sui Zhen: Losing, Linda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sui-zhen-losing-linda/ | Losing, Linda | The idea of human consciousness existing outside the body has been the focus of dystopian sci-fi from Blade Runner to Westworld, and it’s embedded in the new album from Melbourne art-pop auteur Becky Freeman—a.k.a. Sui Zhen. But unlike those works, Losing, Linda isn’t consumed by apocalyptic visions of robots taking over. Rather, the record suggests there’s something inherently flawed about attempting to live in a perfect world, and that there are certain problems for which there is no app.
Freeman's sublime sophomore effort, 2015’s Secretly Susan, explored a life lived through avatars. On Losing, Linda, Freeman sings from the perspective of the titular AI Linda. The lyrics examine the possibility of artificially reconstructing a human life through the digital detritus we leave behind on social media—an idea that became all-consuming when Freeman’s mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just as recording commenced. And like the latex-mask replica of her face that she wears on the cover, the results are equally alluring and unnerving—this is a record where pristine facades can never conceal the distressed soul underneath.
Losing, Linda hits the same big pleasure points as Secretly Susan—neon-hued ’80s pop, DIY digital dub, bossa-nova balladry—but the mood hovers between ecstasy and unease. Freeman’s voice loses the post-Grimes avant-R&B smear of Secretly Susan, adopting an eerily calm and crystal-clear diction that sounds very much like an AI learning to convincingly imitate us. The drum-machine stutters of “Natural Progression” suggest a robot coming to life and getting used to its mechanical limbs, before asking itself questions like: “I’m growing hair/Do I need it anymore?”
On the centerpiece “Being a Woman,” Freeman’s concerns move beyond physical characteristics to the gender expectations accompanying them. The song is both celebratory and cautionary, a proud declaration of womanhood on one’s own terms (“Redefine sexuality, that’s how I’ll find my way!”) whose chorus (“Being a woman/You have to hold yourself ... before you hold someone else”) suggests self-determination is much easier wished for than achieved. Freeman recently admitted that she was only able to be open about her sexuality after her mother passed, so when she sings “When I grew up, I thought I had to be/Somebody’s mother, or somebody’s daughter,” she hints at the unshakable familial forces that can constrain even the most empowered, free-thinking souls.
On Losing, Linda, her mother's loss isn’t so much addressed as felt. You can hear it in the ghostly chorus to the space-age bachelor-pad sway of “I Could Be There,” in the eerie Dark Side of the Moon Safari atmosphere of “Another Life,” or in the equally desolate and divine dream-pop of “Mountain Song.” The latter track was inspired a treacherous hike that left Freeman stranded for a night atop a Japanese mountain, though with lines like “Can you let go and just be comfortable with the fear you have for the unknown/What could be out there that’s scarier than your own mind,” she seems to be preparing herself for the even greater challenge that awaits her once she returns to her mother’s bedside. But on “Different Places,” she seems to make peace with the fact that her life will henceforth be haunted by absence: “We’re just in different places,” she sings, before adding, “but I’m with you.”
As Losing, Linda reminds us, the cruel irony about technology is that we crave its synthetic pleasures in those moments when life gets too real. But with the immaculate “Perfect Place”—a sensuous swirl of Neal Tennant sing-speak, Kraftwerk keyboards, and rubbery funk bass—Freeman suggests that utopia can be ours not with the push of a button, but with a boost in motivation and change of scene. “Now look toward the river/A new point of view/Past the industry/A little further still/ And it’s the perfect place—get to know it,” she sings, like an enlightened Waze app. ”Things you can’t put off, do it now, do it now.” By adopting a robotic persona to examine real-life strife, she reinforces the notion that a life is more than just an accumulation of data.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cascine | October 4, 2019 | 8 | 5e83d3e6-a885-4a26-ae63-4fef5f002bb6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Two weeks ago came the surprise announcement of a new album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, their first in 10 years. If they felt like a band of the moment around the turn of the millennium, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, Godspeed feel out of step in a very necessary way. | Two weeks ago came the surprise announcement of a new album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, their first in 10 years. If they felt like a band of the moment around the turn of the millennium, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, Godspeed feel out of step in a very necessary way. | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17283-allelujah-dont-bend-ascend/ | Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! | Around the turn of the millennium, Godspeed You! Black Emperor were the right band at the right time. They arrived with their debut album, F#A#∞, in 1997, when the speed of technology was accelerating, genres were being shuffled, and people were thinking about where music might go. Godspeed, a loose and mysterious collective from Canada (guitarist Efrim Menuck seemed like the leader, but they preferred to be received as a unit) with an anarchist political bent who fused Ennio Morricone, minimalism, found sound, and metal-inflected noise, presented one intriguing possibility.
The group stayed busy during its initial run-- by 2002, when they released Yanqui U.X.O., they had put out three expansive full-lengths and a long EP-- and then they put Godspeed on the shelf and went away for a while. If they'd never gotten back together and had never released another note of music, it wouldn't have mattered. Their legacy was secure. But Godspeed started playing live again in 2010 and, just as it was when they first came on the scene, they filled a hole in music that we either didn't know existed or had forgotten about. Then, two weeks ago, came the surprise announcement of a new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, their first in exactly 10 years. Once again, their timing is impeccable. If Godspeed around the turn of the millennium felt like a band of the moment, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, they feel out of step in a very necessary way.
It's tempting to look at Allelujah! through the lens of politics, especially since Godspeed themselves have so often encouraged this viewpoint. When we last heard from them on record, it was a year after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan was well underway, and the war in Iraq was just around the corner. We were settling into a decade that was, from an American perspective, defined by two wars started by an increasingly unpopular president and an inflating economic bubble that would pop just as he was leaving office. Their music and presentation drew some of its energy from this anxiety. So listening to new music from Godspeed now-- during an election season, when the wars and the aftermath of that economy are still being argued every day by two presidential candidates grappling with the legacy of the early 2000s-- you can't help but allow the political moment to shape how it's heard.
But the focus on the band's politics obscures something important: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are making art, not writing editorials. And the fact that they are making art gives them leeway to do things that wouldn't work in the context of pure rhetoric. It allows them to find magnificence in destruction and build an aesthetic out of decay and loss. So for all their political slogans, pointed titles, and references to global doom, engagement with Godspeed's music can feel exceedingly personal. When listening to their music, I'm not necessarily thinking about the downtrodden transcending their place in the capitalist hierarchy or the end of the world; I'm thinking about the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings. Godspeed's music works so brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that feels at home in a bedroom. So mapping the contours of their grand music onto your own ordinary life can feel both natural and inspiring.
The two lengthy tracks on Allelujah!, "Mladic" and "We Drift Like Worried Fire", have been part of the band's live repertoire since 2003. So the record feels in one sense like Godspeed taking care of unfinished business, presenting existing music from their influential run in a context that showcases its full force and power. Taken together, those tracks serve as a 40-minute summary of everything that made this band great. "Mladic" is all gloom and menace, building from an opening vocal snippet, adding pings of guitar, strings that saw away in a Middle Eastern mode, and dark clouds of feedback. This is the Godspeed that learned so much from the pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal. There's not exactly hope in a track like "Mladic", but there is a kind of darkly shaded catharsis. Godspeed have never sounded quite this heavy, and it's especially impressive in how far it can veer from the themes that hold it together without losing the thread.
"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the flip-side of "Mladic", both literally and figuratively. For all their grim black-and-white roadside imagery and scenes of destruction, it can be easy to overlook just how joyful Godspeed's music can be. Built around a simple guitar motif consisting of just a few notes, "Worried Fire" is one of those accruing pieces that gathers one element after another for 10 minutes until it's so gorgeous you almost can't take it. And at exactly that moment, Godspeed pause and then push the music over the top with an explosion of guitar that snaps everything that came before into focus. "Worried Fire" is music that makes you forget about politics and the machinations of the record business and the bullshit of internet chatter and brings you into singularity with the sheer beauty of their sound, music to make you cry with a smile on your face. When it's playing, the rest of the world goes away for 20 minutes.
"Worried Fire" is also the kind of song that Godspeed's early peers (Mogwai, Dirty Three) as well as the bands that followed (Explosions in the Sky, Mono) write with some regularity, but they never quite hit these heights. Godspeed have always been about more than volume, more than just addition and subtraction. And if Yanqui found them getting a little too close to their descendants, Allelujah! makes clear that Godspeed will always own this sound. Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure. And the two shorter tracks on this album, "Their Helicopters' Sing" and "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable", are evidence of their infallible ear for texture. They're both rich, dense drones, "Helicopter" an especially thick mix of feedback and accordion while "Strung Like Lights" is airier and more unstable, not unlike the locked groove that came at the second side of their debut F#A#∞.
In one of the many inserts that came with the vinyl version of that debut, there's a diagram that takes the form of an architectural blueprint. It's called "Faulty Schematics of Ruined Machine [to Scale]" and it contains a drawing with four axes marked as Fear, Hope, Desire, and Regret and text describing elements of the diagram in cryptic and desperate language. One paragraph highlights a drawing of a tape loop connected between a distant satellite and a broken tape machine, a loop "so long it was rocketed thru atmosphere by wigged-out Soviet Cosmonaut... it will take three lifetimes to hear in its entirety." Godspeed use tape loops, both live and on record, and the key visual element of their shows involves the projection of 16mm film loops by collective member Karl Lemieux. For this band, there's always been something appealing about repeating cycles and rituals-- sounds and images that vanish over the horizon and then come back around again, like the trains that roll by their practice space at Hotel 2 Tango. Planets orbit, people are born and die, and music has a moment and then vanishes before returning again. And so it goes with Allelujah!, an album of music that is both new and old from a band that we thought we might never hear from again, one we should appreciate while we can. | 2012-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Constellation | October 15, 2012 | 9.3 | 5e8688c9-654a-4d08-a069-717a843350e1 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
An acoustic-leaning covers collection in the vein of 1990’s Fakebook, Stuff Like That There finds Yo La Tengo tackling songs by the Cure and Hank Williams along with a number of obscurities, and also finds them re-working some of their own material. | An acoustic-leaning covers collection in the vein of 1990’s Fakebook, Stuff Like That There finds Yo La Tengo tackling songs by the Cure and Hank Williams along with a number of obscurities, and also finds them re-working some of their own material. | Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20970-stuff-like-that-there/ | Stuff Like That There | Yo La Tengo were essentially the first on-demand music-streaming service. Through the eclectic all-request sets they used to perform for WFMU’s annual fundraising drive and, more recently, their annual Hanukkah shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the band has amassed an infinite jukebox of cover songs spanning golden oldies to underground oddities. It’s almost as if Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley started this band so that they could one day be the sort of tastemaking entity that can rescue forgotten songs from dollar-bin obscurity or subject popular ones to a critical reassessment.
But while it’s customary for indie-rock acts to approach bygone pop hits with subversive intent, Yo La Tengo never sound like they’re taking the piss, preferring to acclimatize themselves to the original material’s natural habitat rather than try to radically change the song’s context. And yet, whether they’re covering Sun Ra or Sonny Bono, Yo La Tengo covers sound unmistakably like Yo La Tengo songs, because they serve the exact same function as the band’s best originals: they’re intimate exchanges, the sound of secrets being revealed. And as Yo La Tengo’s latest covers-heavy set attests, that quality becomes all the more amplified when those exchanges are rendered as whispers.
Given Yo La Tengo’s well-established karaoke-machine rep, the arrival of acoustic-oriented covers collection Stuff Like That There isn’t as revelatory as their previous acoustic-oriented covers collection, 1990’s Fakebook, which opened up a new dimension to what had then been a pretty straight-forward, scrappy rock band (a primitive state they revisited on 2009’s all-electric complement, Fuckbook, credited to their garage-punk alter ego, the Condo Fucks.) But Stuff Like That There makes perfect sense in the wake of 2009’s Popular Songs and 2013’s Fade, which displayed a gradual drift away from the band’s feedback-blasted extendo-jams toward succinct, small-scale statements.
Though the album's sources range from '40s country to '60s soul to '90s alt-rock, the execution here is uniform, all brushed-snare rhythms, tasteful twang, and gentle acoustic strums that permeate the air like a late-afternoon drizzle. The readings are low-key and reverential, but the spirit is loose and playful. The Hubley-led versions of Darlena McCrea’s swooning 1964 single “My Heart’s Not In It”, Hank Williams’ tear-in-beer standard “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, and The Parliaments’ psych-soul serenade “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” manage to feel on point and off the cuff at the same time, as if the band were pulling precious seven-inches from their protective sleeves and not giving a fuck if they get scratched.
But Stuff Like That There is not just another excuse for Yo La Tengo to show off their encyclopedic knowledge of pop history. At this stage of their career, it also serves as a poignant reminder of the ’80s and ’90s indie-rock peers who never achieved the same level of success, like Louisville contemporaries/collaborators Antietam (a faithfully reproduced “Naples”), Hoboken hero the Special Pillow (the charming, harmony-rich “Automatic Doom”), and R.E.M.-esque Ohio outfit Great Plains, whose jagged ‘n’ jangly anthem “Before We Stop to Think” is given a beautifully wounded reading by Kaplan. By contrast, the album’s lone concession to popular taste—Hubley’s wistful take on the Cure’s atypically sunny 1992 single “Friday I’m in Love”—feels out of place amid the record-collector finds and personal connections that inform the bulk of the tracklist, coming off instead like a novelty that just isn’t novel enough (not to mention a distant second in the pantheon of Cure covers by A-list American indie-rock power trios).
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Yo La Tengo covers album without the band covering themselves. But while the trio is notorious for radically redressing its droning noise-rock odysseys as lilting lullabies and vice versa (often trading Kaplan’s voice for Hubley’s in the process), the rustic redrafts of Popular Songs’ “All Your Secrets” and Electr-o-Pura deep cut “The Ballad of Red Buckets” don’t differ all that much from their official takes—the amplifier settings may be adjusted a touch downward, but the essential vibe remains. The major exception is a tiptoed pass through I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’s swirling centerpiece “Deeper Into the Movies”, though unlike Yo La’s previous loud-to-quiet transitions (like the ambient “Big Day Coming” that opens Painful, or Camp Yo La Tengo’s skiffled take on “Tom Courtenay”) it feels less like a wholesale rethink than a rough sketch that makes you long for the surging force of the original. Thankfully, Yo La Tengo compensate for the superfluousness of these self-covers with two top-notch new tracks: The excellent “Rickety” continues the motorik momentum of Fade standout “Stupid Things”, with the band sounding like buskers on the shoulder lane of the Autobahn, while Kaplan’s “Awhileaway” is a gorgeous moonlit stroll of a ballad.
Stuff Like That There may not always intrigue on a track-by-track basis, but, taken as a whole, the record stands as a loving portrait of Yo La Tengo’s vast musical and social universe condensed into a small wooden frame. And at a time when the full-album experience is giving way to the almighty playlist, Stuff Like That There handily reasserts Yo La Tengo’s reputation as indie rock’s consummate curators. Your music subscription service of choice may present you with a hundred different mood-based mixes to complement Sunday-morning sloth, but Stuff Like That There is really the only one you need for a day spent lazing away in your little corner of the world. | 2015-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 31, 2015 | 7.1 | 5e8ed426-a3fc-47b7-895e-ff805e7e0643 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On a sequel to 2009’s covers collection Tribute To, the My Morning Jacket singer imbues a set of classics and standards with a distinctly contemporary melancholy. | On a sequel to 2009’s covers collection Tribute To, the My Morning Jacket singer imbues a set of classics and standards with a distinctly contemporary melancholy. | Jim James: Tribute To 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-james-tribute-to-2/ | Tribute To 2 | In his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges imagines a literary critic in thrall to an exact modern facsimile of the Cervantes epic—a book “verbally identical” to the original yet, in the critic’s estimation, “infinitely richer” for the new meanings its duplicated pages have accrued in the 20th century compared to the “mere” 17th. There is a distinctly Pierre Mendardish aspect to Jim James’ take on the cover album. When the My Morning Jacket singer elects to record a compilation of songs mostly from the 1960s and 1970s in 2017, what stands out, aside from his interpretive choices, is primarily the question of differing vantage. How do the sentiments of the Beach Boys or Sonny and Cher sound in the 21st century compared to the 20th? What new riches of meaning might Willie Nelson gain?
Tribute To 2 is not, confusingly, a paean to the number two, but rather a sort of sequel to 2009’s EP of George Harrison covers, Tribute To. This suite of unmistakably Jamesian tracks comprises a range of material derived from diverse styles, periods, and genres, all of it filtered through the man’s quite singular sensibility. One can well imagine in advance what he might do with standards like, say, “Blue Skies” or “Crying in the Chapel”: How that reverb-laden, inimitably alien voice handles familiar melodies is no surprise. The vocals on Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” sound like they were recorded in a grain silo. His howls and warbles on Ray Noble and Al Bowlly’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” sound like dispatches from another world. Tribute To 2 sounds, in short, like Jim James. What proves more intriguing is the matter of perspective.
Differences in the mood and character of the eras in question, then and now, seem very much the crux of James’ interest in this project. His previous solo album, last year’s Eternally Even, found the ordinarily abstract singer/songwriter confronting post-election American turmoil, and much was made of the fact that it represented the most overtly political statement of his long career. As that record’s immediate successor, Tribute To 2 is perhaps most fruitfully read in conversation with it. If Eternally Even was James’ aggrieved effort to engage directly with a world in unrest, Tribute To 2 is an attempt to offer succor. It’s a little glimpse of the past James hopes will soothe and reassure us.
“It’s a really crazy time in the world right now, a lot of negative energy in the air,” James told Billboard recently. “A lot of the songs I feel are dealing with that, reflecting on the sadness of that. But also, a part of me likes to remember that life can also be beautiful.” The album is “dealing with that” more explicitly at times than at others: James imparts Abbey Lincoln’s world-weary ballad “The World Is Falling Down,” with its lamentations that “the news is really very sad,” with an urgent sorrow. And when he finds a plausible affinity with Brian Wilson on “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” the sense of alienation is amplified by how fed up James seems with what he sees all around him. The language here is identical to the the source material. But in James’ hands, in times like these, the covers can’t help but sound different. | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | December 14, 2017 | 6.2 | 5e8f9ca6-65dd-4087-b968-a4dffdbc1ccb | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
This unlikely comeback album strikes a fairly comfortable balance between the spare, spritely Meat Puppets of yore and the more polished and forceful Meat Puppets of the mid-1990s. | This unlikely comeback album strikes a fairly comfortable balance between the spare, spritely Meat Puppets of yore and the more polished and forceful Meat Puppets of the mid-1990s. | Meat Puppets: Rise to Your Knees | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10440-rise-to-your-knees/ | Rise to Your Knees | Along with friends and contemporaries the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets remain one of the most interesting and inspiring anomalies to emerge from the U.S. hardcore scene. The band's crooked path to alternative rock almost-stardom is well-documented, but their stylistic singularity and influence still remain largely underacknowledged. No other records before or since sound exactly like II or Up on the Sun; hazy and laid back but staggeringly tight and impeccably arranged. Guitarist Curt Kirkwood's intricate, handpicked style can be heard today in the multilayered playing of Oxford Collapse's Mike Pace, among many others.
Unfortunately, the Meat Puppets have been best known as of late for the tragic misadventures of erstwhile Kirkwood brother Cris. The fact that this record was made at all is pretty amazing; the fact that it's not half bad even more so. The Meat Puppets have never been a band to stray too far from what they do best; with the exception of the sea change between their eponymous debut and their masterpiece II, the band's stylistic development has been gradual, sometimes to the point of stagnation. Rise to Your Knees strikes a fairly comfortable balance between the spare, spritely Meat Puppets of yore and the more polished and forceful Meat Puppets of the mid-1990s.
The most pleasing moments on Rise to Your Knees often arise from the simple charm of its melodies; the instrumentation here is far from the propulsive intricacy of the Puppets' best work. Generally speaking, the choruses on Rise far outshine the meandering verses, as the band snaps into a more simple and straightforward groove that highlights the trademark Kirkwood drawl. And sure enough, time has proven surprisingly flattering to the brothers' voices, which come through rich and satisfying throughout. By the first chorus of standout track "On the Rise", it's clear that the Puppets' charms have remained intact, even if their new songs come up a bit short.
With the exception of the baffling 311-esque "Enemy Love Song", there are very clunkers to be found here. On songs like the excellent "Disappear", the brothers Kirkwood actually find their way back some of the tight and propulsive guitar and bass interplay that marks the Puppets' best work. For the most part, though, the songs on Rise are hazy and unremarkable. As with most of the Meat Puppets' lesser records, this one is easy to space out to-- all dense harmonies, psychedelic guitars and unwavering drum beats-- but often fails to really capitalize on the band's unique strengths.
As was the case with Dinosaur Jr's recent Beyond, Rise to Your Knees is an interesting reminder that the specific musical thread started by this band hasn't been fully picked up since; though a far cry from their strongest records, Rise finds the Meat Puppets thereofre sounding somewhat fresh. It follows, then, that this doesn't quite come off as a "comeback" album, but rather a middling addition to a prolific and distinctive catalog. As the title suggests, Rise to Your Knees isn't so much a glorious resurgence as a humble but definitive step towards recovery. | 2007-07-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-07-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Anodyne | July 18, 2007 | 6.5 | 5e989454-c5d3-4700-8238-35e02b50b5ed | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Synth-rich and emotionally ambiguous, the producer’s new instrumental LP meditates on nostalgia for the sound of terrestrial radio in the 1980s. | Synth-rich and emotionally ambiguous, the producer’s new instrumental LP meditates on nostalgia for the sound of terrestrial radio in the 1980s. | DJ Shadow: Action Adventure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-shadow-action-adventure/ | Action Adventure | It was an eBay purchase that pulled DJ Shadow out of a pandemic slump: a trove of some 200 tapes’ worth of broadcasts recorded from a Baltimore and Washington, D.C.-area radio station in the 1980s. Novel yet stuck in time, their blend of dance, R&B, and early hip-hop triggered nostalgia without feeling overly familiar. On his latest LP, Action Adventure, Shadow homes in on a related aesthetic, importing an underground hip-hop ethos into the most expensive studio money could buy—in 1983. Whether with an MPC or a DAW, he remains a world-class drum programmer, and the beats here balance vintage luxury with slick modern production value. The synth space lasers and electronic drums on “Time and Space” sound clean and classic; the drums and melody on “Ozone Scraper” are basic but richly textured. The total effect is like a 4K remaster of an old film’s 35mm print, its fine grain beautifully rendered in high resolution.
The art and business of sampling have evolved significantly in the 30-plus years since DJ Shadow started making music. By the time of his first releases in the early ’90s, cratediggers were already starting to chop up and manipulate samples beyond recognition; by the end of the decade they had perfected the art of burying them in the mix, layering dozens of pieces of audio like camouflage. Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece Endtroducing… carries the distinction of being recognized by Guinness as the first album constructed completely from samples. But in 2023, the landscape looks much different; digital tools make identifying samples easier than ever, and publishing unlicensed material can create a legal time bomb.
The samples on Action Adventure, rather than providing a wealth of material from which to create a collage, feel like calculated choices, hyper-specific triggers that help set the tone for the songs. The rambling riff and scream from Dust’s 1971 hard rock jam “Loose Goose” provides the jump-off for the high-octane “Free for All,” a raucous bruiser that could easily pass for a Run the Jewels instrumental. A line from Loudon Wainwright III’s 1986 folk ballad “Expatriot,” about a man leaving home, becomes the centerpiece of “All My,” a blistering ode to crate-digging that would feel right at home at a Chicago footwork party. And he’s still capable of finding salvation in the stacks, pulling an inspired vocal performance from Jan Jerome’s obscure 1990 R&B B-side “Baby, Got Me Goin” to build the stunning new jack swing track “You Played Me,” with a bassline that could give a twentysomething Teddy Riley a run for his money.
In a statement, Shadow explained the album’s lack of features by saying he didn’t want to “write music to give someone else a runway.” But some of the beats—“Craig, Ingles, & Wrightson,” “Witches vs. Warlocks”—feel hollow without a charismatic rapper to float over them. Much of the album’s early runtime builds towards a climax that never comes; the final tracks (“Forever Changed,” “She’s Evolving”) only hint at an opaque sense of resolution. But the drums are captivating enough to save more than one song from sleeping at the wheel, and when Shadow shifts gears on the ambient exercise “Fleeting Youth (An Audible Life),” his mastery of texture and layering gives the track a gravitational pull, even if it’s too short to be immersive.
Operating largely without words, Action Adventure captures broad feelings of nostalgia from a POV enriched by decades of hindsight and experience; it’s a testament to DJ Shadow’s production skill and human touch. But where his last album used pointed commentary to communicate a clear concept, the new album’s instrumental abstraction is more elusive. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that even if he never makes another record as singular as Endtroducing…, artists will be banging down his door until he hangs up the MPC. | 2023-10-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mass Appeal / Liquid Amber | October 30, 2023 | 6.9 | 5e9cd230-fb08-4d2f-93b5-4e3f5411cbd8 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On Awake, Scott Hansen, the San Francisco-based visual artist who records colorful techno as Tycho, expands his sound. It's the first Tycho album recorded as a three-piece band, and his previous albums now sound like mere dreams of the luminous world he was trying to create. | On Awake, Scott Hansen, the San Francisco-based visual artist who records colorful techno as Tycho, expands his sound. It's the first Tycho album recorded as a three-piece band, and his previous albums now sound like mere dreams of the luminous world he was trying to create. | Tycho: Awake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19110-tycho-awake/ | Awake | Awake is the album where Scott Hansen, the San Francisco-based visual artist and musician who records as Tycho, expands into a far-reaching space. He's made gorgeously constructed techno under this name for over a decade, ultimately gaining traction with the sunny Dive in 2011. In the context of Awake—the first Tycho record recorded as a three-piece band—his previous albums now sound like mere dreams of the luminous world he was trying so hard to connect to. Here, Hansen gains a skip in his step and strides right into that place, largely due to a shedding of the muddied beats and wistful synth tones that positioned him a little too close to Boards of Canada's retro-futuristic notions. There's more air here, lending a greater expanse of room to move around in than before, like travelling from a rundown seaside resort to vast scoops of desert plane. It's still recognizable as a Tycho recording, with a familiar sense of melancholy and the embers of sundown burning through it, but with the ambition clearly heightened right from the first few notes.
Not for nothing does the echoey guitar clang that opens a couple of these tracks (notably "Awake" and "See") sound like the Edge's long-familiar tones in U2. It's not exactly stadium-leaning, but if what came before felt more like bedroom creations, then here the Tycho sound is taken into a different area entirely, where everything glistens so brightly it feels like the work of someone who thinks the Beatles' career began and ended with the ultra clean lines of "Here Comes the Sun". Something it shares with Dive is the feeling of journey, where tracks heard in isolation won’t make as much sense as picking up the long thread from beginning to end. "Montana" may reach a greater point of euphoria than the moodier "Dye", but watching how Hansen and his band arrive there is part of the thrill, with disparate moods slowly slotting into one another in a perfectly natural flow.
The sense of build Hansen possesses—knowing when to add and subtract, when to fade and zoom right back into focus—was a central tenet of the Dive sound, and it's a sensibility he retains here, although it doesn't always stop his work from circling perilously close to redundancy. "Apogee" is clearly supposed to be born from a moment of discordance, but it's an all-too brief divergence that makes it feel like the ideas are running dry when he returns to his tastefully constructed loops for the bulk of the track. Fortunately, Hansen keeps things brief, cutting Awake dead around the 35-minute mark after eight tracks. A common problem with bringing live instrumentation into techno is the heavy handedness that can set in—a dilemma the Field's live-band incarnation often grapples with—although that's rarely an issue here. Only on "Spectre" does the subtlety loosen, but even there it offers release from the strong sense of control that can feel suffocating when the Tycho sound is so thoroughly pinned down.
Where all this leads Hansen and his creation is into a great pool of reflective thought, typified by the introspective guitar strum of "Plains". It feels like this is Tycho mining an older strain of music than the more contemporary references of Dive. There are nods to post-rock, but this feels like it's reaching further toward the sources of that genre than the acts themselves, with Tortoise's aping of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells on TNT emerging as a strong reference point. Lessons have been learned from Dive here—this is a much leaner record that feels skillfully edited, with less use for indulgence and circular routes that don't lead anywhere. It could use a break from the pensive train of thought at times, and the tentative branches away from that mode suggest it's under consideration, if still not quite there yet. But the strong feeling of movement Hansen creates, as he quietly creeps through shades of orangey color, comes packed with dualling strains of sorrow and empathy. | 2014-03-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-03-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | March 18, 2014 | 7 | 5e9cfb92-3187-4b23-8bca-6cfa904e5a68 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The synth-pop group aches with boy-band sincerity over sugary arrangements and even a little pedal steel on their anodyne new album. | The synth-pop group aches with boy-band sincerity over sugary arrangements and even a little pedal steel on their anodyne new album. | LANY: mama’s boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lany-mamas-boy/ | mama’s boy | Their obscure band name or moody group photos might convey some mystery, but “LANY” simply means “Los Angeles New York,” and frontman Paul Jason Klein is just a 32-year-old babyface whose heart was very publicly torn out by Dua Lipa. Malibu Nights, the band’s sophomore album, documented the breakup in excruciating detail, solidifying LANY as a group of attractive, sensitive boys who know their way around a synth pad. This is still true on their latest album mama’s boy, which is occasionally monotonous and—in a development only partially related to said monotony—vaguely Jesus-centric.
The inclusion of contemporary Christian music conventions is half surprise and half natural extension of LANY’s asexual, boyband-adjacent appeal. If the neon cowboy on the album cover wasn’t enough to tip you off, there’s a pretty clear attempt on mama’s boy to reroute LANY from a quirky coastal band to a “traditional values”-based southern one. This version of LANY is a bit closer to the truth — the band formed in Nashville, and Klein was born and raised in Oklahoma. On some songs, he slips somewhat amusingly into a southern accent that doesn’t appear in his speaking voice. Nestled between the expected tracks about complicated love and heartache, Klein assures us that although he has a “past more stained than glass,” he still “[talks] to Jesus,” and is just a “cowboy in L.A.”
Along with the hamfistedly titled, gospel choir-featuring “i still talk to jesus,” “you!” is probably the song on this album with the most explicitly contemporary Christian feel, and also acts as a case study on what makes this album so disappointingly dull. It’s just too clean—too uninventive, too insistent on generalized emotion without committing to a particular one. The guitars are crisp but lack passion, the drums are restrained, and Klein sings in anodyne, youth-group-leader metaphors: “You’re the sun to the moon/You’re my ocean painted blue,” and so on.
The love songs, however, are much better, full of sugary synth lines and even a little steel guitar. “bad news” has a level of sex appeal comparable to going apple picking with your high school crush, but it still inspires very specific butterfly feelings. Klein’s voice warms and softens with his fake southern accent, lamenting that he’s not “good for you/baby, I’m bad news,” and boom—suddenly you’re you’re 16, you have pimples, and popular kid Paul Jason Klein just told you that he likes you.
Such is the transformative power of emotional hot boys. As bizarre as LANY’s pivot to country pop is, they still manage to infuse it with enough charm where it doesn’t fall flat. Most exciting are the moments where Klein tweaks the image of the stereotypical southern gentleman he’s imitating. On the album, Klein is nonchalant about going to hell, and in the music video for “you!,” he’s wearing a dress with his dirty blonde hair long, holding hands with his bandmates as they walk into a blue desert night. Admittedly, as Klein is a cis white man, this image isn’t necessarily the most groundbreaking or transgressive, but like his music, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes a little earnest mediocrity is enough.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Polydor | October 6, 2020 | 5.8 | 5e9e2d5c-f6e1-48f3-a8ae-dacb96482df5 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The Brooklyn-based Aye Nako puts a unique spin on the sound of classic pop punk, creating relentlessly catchy riff-based music with strong political undertones. | The Brooklyn-based Aye Nako puts a unique spin on the sound of classic pop punk, creating relentlessly catchy riff-based music with strong political undertones. | Aye Nako: Unleash Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18205-aye-nako-unleash-yourself/ | Unleash Yourself | The Brooklyn-based Aye Nako have built their reputation by purposefully keeping to D.I.Y. circles that specifically promote their own community-oriented, anti-capitalist, LGBTQ-friendly ideology. Bassist Joe McCann, vocalist/guitarist Mars Ganito, guitarist Jade Payne, and drummer Angie Boylan have stressed repeatedly that their politics are essential to their standing as queer, multi-racial, multi-gendered musicians. Yet the pop punk style they've perfected over the past few years has, historically, run contrary to that identity. Especially as the genre was enjoying its peak commercial successes in the early 2000s, pop punk's social conservatism helped market an innocuous breed of suburban, digestible rebellion to as wide an American population as possible.
Aye Nako, a band that is anything but macho, say they've attempted to distance themselves from that world, but their self-released, full-length debut Unleash Yourself maintains those ties. Its riffs and melodies barely diverge from traditional pop punk; the sugar rush arrives with an archetypal, Blink-182-like sweep within the first 10 seconds of opener "Start Talking", and gives way only selectively throughout the record's 35-minute cartwheel. Considering that the grittier, more hardcore-influenced tracks from the band's 2010 demo didn't make the LP cut, it seems that Aye Nako's aesthetic has indulged more deeply into its pop punk tendencies than ever.
Fortunately, Aye Nako's greatest strength is their ability to bend the once-rigid constraints of pop punk style to better reflect their unique experiences. They inject new life into the genre by redefining it as the outsider space it was intended as in the first place, using it to explore subjects like love that's complicated by questions of gender identity and sexuality. Still, that juxtaposition of wisdom and childishness sometimes gets the better of them: "Cut it Off"'s deep-digging lyrics, "Break your own legs/ What this condition may reveal/ Is how you only take a sip when it’s watered down" fit awkwardly and indistinctly among Ganito and Payne's stricter, more decisive chord progressions. But as all four Nakos erupt like Lost Boys into puppyish yowls at the end of the fittingly titled "Howl", you can't help but be thankful for that precarious young-old balance, whether or not it always comes off.
As for whether Unleash Yourself will hit home with the audience Aye Nako hopes to reach, that depends on what its members choose to do with it. The band has said in interviews that that its raison d'etre is to make the music they didn't have as queer teenagers, to provide empowerment for younger generations. Unleash Yourself succeeds on that level. But like many albums whose makers staunchly maintain D.I.Y. values, often to the point of self-exile, Aye Nako's debut runs the risk of flying under the radars of less-plugged-in kids who could benefit from their empowering messages. Whether or not Unleash Yourself finds its way into the hands of those teenagers, though, its universally charming launch pad resurrects a strained and tired world as something new, urgent, and far more substantive. | 2013-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | June 18, 2013 | 7.6 | 5ea035e7-5619-4486-a62f-4976b0a09f95 | Devon Maloney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/devon-maloney/ | null |
The major-label debut from the Atlanta R&B singer offers a layered, mesmerizing portrait of modern romance. | The major-label debut from the Atlanta R&B singer offers a layered, mesmerizing portrait of modern romance. | Mariah the Scientist: Master | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mariah-the-scientist-master/ | Master | Mariah the Scientist’s boyfriend was tripping on drugs at 7 a.m. when she realized she loved him, maybe. On her major-label debut, Master, the Atlanta R&B singer staggers away from something equally as reckless, struggling not to be re-hypnotized by nostalgia. “The idea of love and who I was with—they’ve become my master of some sort,” she explained, “when I should have just been myself.” As she writhes against the vice-grip of a toxic relationship, she paints an image of modern romance that’s impressively refined, vivid, and unblinkingly honest. The album is a powerful presentation of her attempt to reclaim control over herself.
Mariah may only be 21, but Master is imbued with the wearied maturity of someone much older: a veteran of love dragged five miles past hell and back, robbed of everything but her own dignity and defiance. While most of the album renders her misery vibrantly, it falters slightly at the start: In “Note to Self,” Mariah tediously spells out her worst tendency: “S-E-L-F-D-E-S-T-R-U-C-T-I-V-E, I need help,” she sings flatly, as if reciting self-help mantras in her bedroom.
But as the album progresses, it plunges forcefully into the messiness of desire. The shards of her past love assemble, offering glints of clarity. “You left me for a bitch in a city full of palm trees,” she announces on “Note to You,” “I never knew that it would haunt me.” Veering from sneering to sad, indignant to wistful, as if negotiating emotions in real-time, Mariah is unflinching about the after-effects of letting go. In the tortured “Thanks 4 Nothing,” she reveals that she left her boyfriend on her birthday, and yet she stayed up, hurting. “Why you never call me?” she cries out on more than one song.
Like SZA before her, Mariah sings in a colloquial style that hovers somewhere in between plain speech and melody, her gravelly voice foregrounded over sparse instrumentals. With the exception of “Hotel,” a gorgeous vocoder interlude, the strongest tracks are backed only by guitar and light drums. This stark arrangement heightens the urgency of her deeply personal accounts: On “Beetlejuice,” a slick, withering remembrance of her lover’s deception, Mariah recalls how she was lied to, guilted into forgiveness, then seduced to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. It’s a scathing drag of a “sensitive” man who is only sensitive to the needs of himself.
But it also implicates Mariah as a woman who’s been played before: Master grapples with its heroine’s self-delusion and insecurity as much as the misconduct of the person who wronged her. It’s haunted by the persistent reminder that she should have known. This indictment, the constant seesawing between self-reprobation and longing, weaves much-needed complexity into a story of heartbreak that could easily feel one-dimensional. Combined with the unvarnished quality of her voice, the cumulative effect is mesmerizing. | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | August 30, 2019 | 7.3 | 5ebae23a-b8e0-4d6e-915f-54ae925631af | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
The Drive-By Truckers co-founder's new solo album was inspired by the bleakest part of his personal history. The songs here survey lives marked by alcoholism, loneliness, loss of loved ones, and lessons learned the hard way. | The Drive-By Truckers co-founder's new solo album was inspired by the bleakest part of his personal history. The songs here survey lives marked by alcoholism, loneliness, loss of loved ones, and lessons learned the hard way. | Patterson Hood: Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17023-heat-lightning-rumbles-in-the-distance/ | Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance | Even when he's exhausted, Patterson Hood can't relax. Between tours and album cycles for the last two Drive-By Truckers records, 2010's The Big To-Do and 2011's Go-Go Boots, Hood decided to spend his down time writing a novel. Conceived while he was on the road for To-Do, the book was supposed to be a semi-autobiographical novel about a deeply troubled period in his life back in the early 90s. "I was 27, my band broke up, I got divorced and left my hometown to live in Memphis," Hood writes in the promotional materials for Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance. "My car got stolen, our band's truck got stripped and I fell in love. I fell out with my family (who I was very, very close to) and had my heart broken. I seriously pondered killing myself several times but instead wrote literally over 500 songs in a three-year period."
Considering Hood's songwriting prolificacy, it shouldn't come as a surprise that his plans for a book eventually turned into an album. But the songs on Heat Lightning aren't otherwise typical for Hood, as they're drawn more directly from his own life than the character studies and southern noir tales of petty crime and drunken malfeasance that he's known for. Heat Lightning is also more hopeful than much of his work, including his previous solo record, 2009's Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs). The songs might be inspired by the bleakest part of Hood's personal history, but he's looking at it from a safe distance, with the perspective of a family man with a much improved station in life.
The album's titular metaphor is reminiscent of "Tornadoes" from 2004's The Dirty South, one of Hood's most unsettling and evocative songs about a twister literally tearing families apart. But the sense of foreboding that exists in the title track is an echo from a far-off past; it exists in a different reality from where the song's protagonist currently stands with his wife and their "babies at our feet" as "the warm summer wind blows" like a salve. And so it goes for many of the low-key rumblers on Heat Lightning: Hood's songs survey lives (or perhaps just "life") marked by alcoholism, loneliness, loss of loved ones, and lessons learned the hard way. But any sadness or desperation on this record is filtered through the reassuring knowledge that these hard times eventually passed.
Heat Lightning, then, is a life-affirming album disguised as a depressing song cycle, with the gut-level power of Hood's best work cut back significantly. It is very much a "home" record by a man who typically makes "road" records, with the noticeable lack of urgency that suggests. Even though Hood recruits several of his cohorts in Drive-By Truckers as backing musicians, and adds ringers like Kelly Hogan and Centro-matic's Will Johnson, there's no mistaking Heat Lightning for anything other than a solo album, and a relatively low-stakes one at that. Hood has assembled a loose narrative connecting the songs, but many of them still sound like unfinished demos, with their rough edges and occasionally under-developed arrangements. "Leaving Time" is a customary guitar strum and clomping drum beat hastily fastened together, which actually works fairly well considering the song is about shoving off from home for a tour. ("Hush little baby, have no fear/ I'm six more tours 'til the end of the year," Hood sings, like he's said it many times before.) The straight-ahead anti-love song "Better Off Without" is more of a throwaway, though it does feature the album's most memorably chunky guitar riff, while "Better Than the Truth" is a jaunty folk-country number that sounds like a mid-afternoon jam concocted over beers and barbecue.
Even the best songs on Heat Lightning-- the pained late-night soul ballad "After the Damage" and the cinematic "12:01", which has a wonderful line about "zombies" crossing county lines to buy liquor in the wee hours of the night-- don't quite measure up to the high standard that Hood established with the Truckers or even the underrated, often brilliant Oscar. It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here. | 2012-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | September 7, 2012 | 6.5 | 5ebbb970-1090-4370-bd9d-e8dd44875f9f | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
Drawing upon her background as a choreographer, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter explores the mind-body connection in her serene and dramatic synth music. | Drawing upon her background as a choreographer, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter explores the mind-body connection in her serene and dramatic synth music. | Kinlaw: The Tipping Scale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kinlaw-the-tipping-scale/ | The Tipping Scale | A crucial bit of Sarah Kinlaw biography is that she’s a choreographer with an operatically trained voice. She’s become a fixture of the Brooklyn art scene; her best-known project to date is Authority Figure, an interactive dance-performance piece co-created with Monica Mirabile (of experimental dance duo FlucT with Sigrid Lauren), which cemented her as somewhat of a luminary in the milieu. Kinlaw exercised her vocals and songwriting in an art-pop band she had for many years called SOFTSPOT, with Bambara’s Blaze Bateh and Bryan Keller Jr. But when the small experimental tape label Soap Library released her 2017 debut EP as Kinlaw, a trigger for every body—which came with a lemon-jasmine aromatherapy sniffer—it was clear she was much more striking as a solo performer, her sound somewhere between Jenny Hval, FKA twigs, and Cate le Bon.
On Kinlaw’s debut album, The Tipping Scale, she’s incorporated all this experience. As any artist deeply in tune with their body, she’s clearly aware of the ways in which sound has a physical effect, as well as the many sounds our corporeal selves can produce. Kinlaw has a keen ear for texture, which grounds this record. And along with all the humming synths and stuttering beats, she stretches her vocals to great impact.
The way she refers to the creation of this record is almost philosophical: she speaks of vowels and consonants the same way she does melodies and key changes, and calls the making of The Tipping Scale a construction of gestures. She turned the writing of “Permissions” into a “game,” only allowing herself to work on it while she was physically moving: every lyric and melody written “on a bus, in the back of a car, on a plane...while walking or running.” In the song’s excellent video, directed by longtime collaborator and fellow dancer Kathleen Dycaico, she crawls from the wreck of an overturned car and bounds down the middle of the street, as though reclaiming her body, her story, her right to shift and change. This is what The Tipping Scale is about.
If The Tipping Scale is constructed of gestures, shaped and honed from spurts of sound, then it makes sense to think of it as choreography, architecture, and story, all at once. Each song feels like a room on wheels, especially “Haircut” and “Home,” the album’s softest moments, with twinkles, sighs, and echoes giving them a chamber-like quality. “Home is where we put things together,” sings Kinlaw on the latter. The concept of storytelling through the body is key. It is only through memory—intrinsically attached to bodily experience—that one can form a narrative of self. As she intones on “Oleander,” a feathery-crunchy choice cut, “This episode is a new memory collection/A tapestry/The lines weave in and through me/Remembering the time in my house.” She’s on par with Austra, a like-minded operatic synth whiz. It feels like the record’s core, especially when Kinlaw says: “I feel like I’ve got five bodies in mine.” That sense of self is in constant flux, and that’s a beautiful thing.
It’s “Oleander,” “Permissions,” and “Potential Control Freak” that sound most like that somatic, constructed movement Kinlaw describes. On “Potential Control Freak,” Kinlaw sings about time opening wider, obsession, picking at skin, getting “caught in the moment,” with a very misty tone. But the far-away pulsing canter of the beat makes it feel like we are going somewhere, making the motion the point. Because of the force of most of The Tipping Scale, there are a couple of moments (namely “Blindspot” and “There She Is”) that don’t really take us anywhere meaningful. And, though it may be part of Kinlaw’s argument of the nature of the self, evoked through her transportive lyrics and pliable voice, on the whole the album feels like it hasn’t fully reached into its own depths. I’m left craving more variance in structure, more viscera—mostly because I can hear it hiding.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Bayonet | February 24, 2021 | 7.2 | 5ec37a33-cfdf-4b18-a12a-df028ee2f75d | Leah Mandel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/leah-mandel / | |
In her latest transformation, Kristin Welchez leaves behind Dee Dee and the Dum Dum Girls for new alter ego Kristin Kontrol, foregoing DDG's garage-band cool for sleek synth pop. | In her latest transformation, Kristin Welchez leaves behind Dee Dee and the Dum Dum Girls for new alter ego Kristin Kontrol, foregoing DDG's garage-band cool for sleek synth pop. | Kristin Kontrol: X-Communicate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21891-x-communicate/ | X-Communicate | Up until now, Kristin Welchez was most commonly known as Dee Dee Penny, the alter-ego she adopted to front garage band Dum Dum Girls, who formed in 2008 amidst an ongoing revival of '60s-inspired, wall-of-sound rock groups. While embodying Dee Dee, Welchez's cool was effortless, as all cool should be; she could have been born with crimson lipstick and a glossy pair of Ray-Bans sitting perfectly parallel to her incredible black bangs. Now, she has re-reinvented herself as Kristin Kontrol, and her first solo record *X-Communicate *is a total 180 from her work with DDG, eschewing guitar music for the sleekest synthpop imaginable.
Saying that X-Communicate only takes its strongest moments from '80s pop would be pigeonholing, but it's undeniable that shades of that decade permeate the record from start to finish. The chorus to “Skin Shed” could almost be a lost Kylie Minogue classic, even down to Welchez's vocal delivery, and the backing harmonies on tracks like “Drive the Night” are straight out of Go-Go's/Bangles/Bananarama territory. If Kristin Kontrol ever does truly hit the mainstream, it could be with “What Is Love,” a song that makes use of the trickiest and most show-stopping of '80s songwriting staples—the power ballad—to tremendous effect. Every single moment is accounted for and brought to completion, from the simple piano melodies of the song's beginning to the stadium-anthem finish.
Luckily, X-Communicate avoids superficiality and mimicry by also adding liberal doses of '70s rock and '90s indie and alt-rock, like on “Face 2 Face,” a mid-tempo number that would have easily fit into 120 Minutes rotation circa '96. There are even tinges of contemporary pop where necessary (the saxophones on the impeccable “White Street” could conceivably be described as “Jepsen-esque”). Other than Welchez, there are two notable creative forces behind X-Communicate: producers Kurt Feldman (who fronts synth band Ice Choir and used to be a member of both the Depreciation Guild and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Andrew Miller, who was the Dum Dum Girls' final guitarist. The pair's extensive knowledge of pop production is an instrument in itself, and one that, along with Welchez's well-honed songwriting, lifts X-Communicate far beyond mere revivalism.
The album's title track is the culmination of all these elements, a polished four minutes full of bleating keyboards and driving drum machines that conjure a midnight drive through L.A. It does what pop songs do best: Take a moment and blow it up to its largest possible size for all to enjoy. In any genre, it’s a difficult task to make music for an informed audience that is both referential without being derivative, exciting without cloyness. Yes, X-Communicate could be a better record: It could reach further beyond the sound that defines it; it could work harder to analyze and skewer some of the tropes that end up supporting it. However, sticking the landing on a musical pivot this total is an impressive feat, and ultimately, the album’s minor shortcomings become admissible next to its higher moments. The clear ambition of X-Communicate is to leave Welchez’s old persona behind and emerge, fresh and new, as something completely different, and by and large, that objective is achieved. | 2016-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sub Pop | May 30, 2016 | 7.5 | 5ec5e376-098c-4e1b-a569-7f98cbd2ec40 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
While still pointedly political, Neil Young’s latest with Promise of the Real takes a more freewheeling, macro look at the world and becomes more centered than his recent albums. | While still pointedly political, Neil Young’s latest with Promise of the Real takes a more freewheeling, macro look at the world and becomes more centered than his recent albums. | Neil Young / Promise of the Real: The Visitor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-promise-of-the-real-the-visitor/ | The Visitor | At the age of 72, Neil Young has forgone most of his contemporaries’ chosen tenures. For the most part, he still operates exactly how he has since the 1970s, with new work arriving constantly and chaotically in bursts of inspiration, with little logic dictating what gets released and what doesn’t. Over the last decade, reuniting with Crazy Horse has proven as likely to inspire new music as, say, buying a new car, or hanging out for an afternoon in Jack White’s recording booth. Even if his hit-or-miss ratio has tipped, it’s hard to think of an artist who’s stayed truer to their muse for so long. When visualizing the span of his career, Young landed on the image a messy filing cabinet—cluttered and spilling over with information.
The Visitor, Neil Young’s 39th record, is a sprawling and boundless project. Teaming again with Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah and their band Promise of the Real, it harkens back to records like 1989’s Freedom, when Young’s wandering interests stood proudly in defiance of cohesion. As evidenced by its first single—the artfully awkward cut-and-paste stomp “Already Great”—The Visitor often plays like Young’s impassioned response to the first year of the Trump administration. The president’s slogans and catchphrases are lobbed back at him in songs like “Already Great” and “When Bad Got Good,” while “Stand Tall” takes aim at a “boy king” who refutes scientific fact to spew hate.
While its topical lyrics stand out, The Visitor isn’t so easily summarized. This is not simply a collection of protest songs, and even its more pointed tracks tend to zoom out, incorporating political observations as stray thoughts, not thesis statements. In the lapping “Almost Always,” Young addresses a “game show host who has to brag and has to boast ’bout tearin’ down the things that I hold dear.” But the mood passes; by the end of the song, he’s urging us to consider instead the mating pattern of birds. If Young’s recent work has felt like a series of hard-headed dives into his pet obsessions—more interesting for simply existing than for actually listening to—then The Visitor is more all-encompassing, and as a result, more centered.
After backing him on 2015’s The Monsanto Years and its semi-live companion album Earth, the members of Promise of the Real seem palpably relieved to no longer be dealing with songs exclusively about food justice. Despite their tendency to ham up every song (contrast Neil’s recent solo rendition of “Stand Tall” with the album version, where his bandmates resort to chanting along with him after certain words), it’s clear that they have a deep reverence for and understanding of his work. One can imagine these twentysomethings are to thank for deep cuts like “Winterlong” and “Western Hero” appearing on recent setlists.
While Young remains hell-bent on moving forward, Promise of the Real are happy to revisit his past glories. They bring back the opening riff from Harvest Moon’s “Unknown Legend” periodically through “Almost Always.” And in the excellent closing track, “Forever,” they transport the haunted chill of his 1974 classic On the Beach to Neil’s current worldview—one that depicts our planet as a “church without a preacher,” where “the people have to pray for themselves.”
That particular song spans ten weary, heart-worn minutes, gliding by with a gentle pulse. That patience lasts the entire record, flowing at an effortless, even pace despite its varying moods. With the exception of a strange meandering vamp about the circus called “Carnival,” genre pastiches—like the bluesy “Diggin’ a Hole”—are mercifully brief, while more fruitful ideas like “Forever” get the space they deserve. Its freewheeling energy highlights two of Young’s greatest strengths: his continuing restlessness and the wisdom that grounds it. The Visitor might not offer any definitive answers to the questions it raises about our planet or our country, but Young seems okay with that. “I’m not gonna work it out right here and right now,” he admits in “Almost Always,” “But I’ll get back to it.” No matter what he returns with, it’s comforting to know we’ve still got him on the case. | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | December 5, 2017 | 6.7 | 5ecfe25d-4d57-4123-94c6-7dd7c59d039c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
John Roberts' pristine and absorbing third LP finds the avant-garde techno producer speaking the language of dance music without actually making much music to dance to. | John Roberts' pristine and absorbing third LP finds the avant-garde techno producer speaking the language of dance music without actually making much music to dance to. | John Roberts: Plum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22114-plum/ | Plum | In a dance-music scene that regularly churns through phenoms and fads, John Roberts exists as almost a meditative presence. He was once one of those phenoms himself: his 2010 debut, Glass Eights, on the respected and fad-allergic label Dial, was a master class in elegiac deep house. His releases since—including a slept-on follow up, Fences, in 2013—have been sparse. He helped found, and helps run, The Travel Almanac, one of those highfalutin (“the first true post-tourism publication”) but worthwhile periodicals you find at upscale design shops. Last year he opened Brunette Editions, a new label, with the masterful “Orah,” a tricky rhythmic composition that doubled as an exploration of Roberts’ sampler. All of this is to say that Roberts operates with a sense of personal and artistic style that can make it seem like his peers are just out there peddling 12”s.
From this springs Plum, Roberts’ third LP. Like Fences before it, Plum finds Roberts speaking the language of dance music without actually making much music to dance to. You can disassemble these tracks into their constituent synth leads, bass burps, and samples, but the grooves and structures never really come into full view. The sounds pirouette around one another, like polite shoppers trying to dodge one another only to awkwardly mirror movements.
Roberts has evolved from an artist who expertly organized familiar sounds—the staccato piano riffs and boomy kicks of Glass Eights—into an artist whose sounds are uncommon and complex. The origin story of “Orah”—which was stubbornly composed using two MPC 2000 samplers—suggests many of these sounds are borrowed and processed, but Plum never sounds like an album woven out of disparate sources. There is a rich harmonic character to it, but not one you would ever describe as alien or experimental. The whole album just has a pervasive, gentle weirdness to it.
The tracks themselves flap and swing and wig-wag. “Plastic Rash” sounds like someone bought Black Dice a really nice spa package. Tracks like “Dye Tones” and “Glue” are reminiscent of the reinvigorated instrumental grime scene: vague Eastern tonalities, lurching half-time beats. Where those young Londoners sound like they've smoked plenty of plants, Roberts sounds like he's merely pruned them with a bonsai-like intensity. Album opener “Six” is somehow more texture than noise, just a sandy stretch of melody. “Wade,” the most intense moment on an untroubled album, is bright, pulsing synth hurrying through carbonated noise, rushed but not rude.
Roberts wisely keeps these somewhat busy tracks short, but it results in occasional bauble-like frivolity. These pieces are just there, suspended, and then not. To note that Roberts’ other creative endeavor (The Travel Almanac) is also an attractive and considered article without clear utility might unfair, but the thought occurred to me. Sometimes, though, it’s satisfying just to surround yourself with nice things—the unspoken mission statement of those upscale design shops—and Plum is eight nice things whose craftsmanship and ungraspable foreignness function as ends unto themselves. | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brunette Editions | July 13, 2016 | 6.9 | 5ed3763a-d604-451d-9a9b-14ef00e70378 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The bilingual underground New York rapper with the gift of gab has put out many tapes in the last five years, but this might be his goofiest and most affable—it suits him well. | The bilingual underground New York rapper with the gift of gab has put out many tapes in the last five years, but this might be his goofiest and most affable—it suits him well. | CRIMEAPPLE: YDFWC? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crimeapple-ydfwc/ | YDFWC? | After dropping 10 records in half as many years, Crimeapple has managed to stay on his grind in hip-hop’s underground without making it seem like a struggle. And while the central premise of his latest LP YDFWC? (You Don’t Fuck With Crime?) suggests an incredulousness at the idea that one might sleep on him—and spends much of its runtime stating his case—he seems genuinely unbothered, as quick to crack a joke at his own expense as he is to flex his rhyming prowess.
Crimeapple’s prolific run kicked off in earnest with a much-buzzed-about “freestyle” on Statik Selektah’s Shade 45 show, a nearly 10-minute lyrical barrage that dissolved any doubts in the room. His sartorial style—loose-fitting hoodies, bald head, and a loud, red beard—is quick to draw skepticism. But those doubts are quickly put to rest the moment he opens his mouth, his smooth delivery and nimble flow honed at countless rap battles, spitting verses peppered with clever one-liners designed to stop you in your tracks.
Born to Colombian parents and raised in northern New Jersey, Crimeapple finds himself, like many Latinos, between worlds. He made a bilingual rap record in Medellín with DJ Muggs (Medallo) but is still seen as an outsider in the country of his birth. Crime knows he’s a gringo (“I’m not Latino enough for Telemundo,” he raps on “Carrington Event”) but still spits in Spanglish. He remains independent—with a distribution deal through the Orchard—and generally seems unconcerned with breaking into the overground, let alone the mainstream. The man just raps really well, and somehow, that’s enough.
That confidence informs a lighthearted air that keeps YDFWC? record from becoming too self-serious. He sticks with some of his go-to producers (Buck Dudley, Brown13), but he mostly avoids the dark and sinister mood of his screed against greed that was Viridi Panem in favor of a smoothed-out vintage R&B vibe. This is Crime at his goofiest and most affable, somehow managing to puff out his chest (“I let you breathe the same air as me/That’s philanthropy”) even when he’s the butt of his own joke (“Chicks on my vas deferens/But I’m no Zac Efron”).
The prime example of Crime’s self-deprecating braggadocio is “Gambler’s Fallacy,” a light romp chock full of sex flexes that opens with a recitation of a mean tweet: “The least believable narrative in underground hip-hop is that Crimeapple is pulling chicks like that.” Amid boasts about dating a Victoria’s Secret model with an eating disorder and a bisexual woman that “rock flannels” and “got the same haircut as Rachel Maddow,” he admits that he wants a woman who will “run her fingers through my back hair” and still loves him even though he wears sweats covered in cat hair.
YDFWC? is not the best Crimeapple record; that honor likely goes to his paean to the Colombian spirit Aguardiente. But it does find the rapper at his most self-assured, a bilingual wordsmith with the gift of gab that’s not above cracking a joke at his own expense. Five years into the game, Crime remains unsigned and unbothered.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Manteca Music | April 6, 2021 | 7.4 | 5ed5015a-375c-4262-93e2-8c8387e3cbbb | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/606b19507d24e8a30a00738a/1:1/w_3000,h_3000,c_limit/Crimeapple:%20YDWFC |
With appearances from MF Doom, Jay Electronica, Madlib, and DJ Premier, the full-length collaborative debut from the rapper and producer is a nostalgic ode to druggy hedonism and classic boom-bap. | With appearances from MF Doom, Jay Electronica, Madlib, and DJ Premier, the full-length collaborative debut from the rapper and producer is a nostalgic ode to druggy hedonism and classic boom-bap. | Sonnyjim / The Purist: White Girl Wasted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonnyjim-the-purist-white-girl-wasted/ | White Girl Wasted | As debut albums go, White Girl Wasted has a particularly auspicious origin story. Brighton-based producer and Daupe! label owner the Purist (Lawrence Lord) and London-via-Birmingham rapper-producer Sonnyjim (Sonny Sathi) had just spent the second weekend of September 2018 completely off their heads at Croatia’s Outlook Festival. Returning home after four days of debauchery in a 19th-century fort, they hit the studio and came up with a doozy of a beat: an airy lo-fi flute sample gliding gently over smooth blaxploitation funk. Sonnyjim laid a verse and nailed it in one take. They thought it sounded like an MF Doom joint, so they sent it over on a whim. Doom responded with a full verse, so they popped a bottle of champagne and sent it to Jay Electronica. In came another verse. By the time Doom got back in touch to licence the track for an Adult Swim compilation, they figured they were sitting on gold. So they kept the track and got to work channelling their creative chemistry into a full-length album.
Four years later we get the duo’s collaborative debut: a nostalgic ode to druggy hedonism and classic boom-bap, set in a gritty ’80s fantasyland populated by St. Tropez models, New York gangsters, Russian boxers, and a bevy of East Coast rap legends. Sonnyjim raps about cooking, dealing, and consuming drugs with laid-back delivery and single-minded devotion. The debauchery is sometimes sinister, sometimes cartoonish, but it provides the perfect backdrop for him to showcase his eye for quotables and his lethal nonchalance. “I’m Rick James rockin’ Slick Rick chains,” he raps on “Doc Ellis.” Elsewhere, he breezes through clever tongue-twisters about boxing (“The one hit will Kostya Tszyu ya like Zab Judah”) and showboats his way through a bar referencing Anna Kournikova, Casanova, and Gorgonzola.
The real star of the show, however, is the Purist, whose lush, sample-heavy production infuses this drug-hazed world with psychedelic color and energy. The producer, who has collaborated with Action Bronson, Freddie Gibbs, and Danny Brown, spent his early years buying and flipping rare records to producers looking for fresh samples. He brings that same crate-digging approach to White Girl Wasted, pulling samples from a string of ultra-obscure and ungooglable songs spanning genres and continents. The woozy funk beat on lead single “Barz Simpson” conjures a seamy, smoky, post-disco world where Sonnyjim, MF Doom, and Jay Electronica can run wild. Doom’s posthumous verse is deservedly the main draw, his throaty bars packing philosophical insight and street violence into dense little rhymes. But the other two don’t pull any punches, stacking up rhymes and references like it’s the Jenga World Championship.
Other high-profile collaborators add their charms. “Doc Ellis”—which features production by DJ Premier—keeps the nostalgia going with record scratches and shoutouts to “authentic hip-hop” set to thrusting bass notes and an ominous piano line that recalls the work of DJ Shadow. The hallucinatory dazzle of “Does Mushrooms Once” comes via a Madlib beat, itself sourced on a four-day, shrooms-fueled excursion through Madlib’s hard drive.
The clever interstitial samples throughout the record—a snippet of Paris Hilton’s court confession, Leo DiCaprio’s quaaludes sales pitch from The Wolf of Wall Street, a Joey Diaz spoken word piece about hunting for cocaine in a hotel toilet bowl—tie everything together into one contiguous pop-culture drug binge. Even the weakest cut—“999,” featuring Lee Scott and Milkaveli—has some memorable rhymes (“I turn up in a MAGA hat and Kaepernick sweat”) to go with the Purist’s slinky, irascible flute-and-drums beat.
The album’s 20-minute runtime keeps things from flagging, and the occasional lyrical clunker (“Life’s a bitch I ain’t have no rubber but I stuck my dick in”) barely registers. It would have been tempting, especially with the high-profile collabs, to cram in as much material as possible, illustrating the depth and breadth of these prolific UK rap veterans’ work over the past decade. But, like the dealers who populate their music, the Purist and Sonnyjim recognize the value of giving you just enough of the good stuff to leave you wanting more. | 2022-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Daupe! | September 9, 2022 | 6.8 | 5edcac47-bbaf-4789-8dda-8e552614305f | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
200 Years is comprised of Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio. Together they draw on the quieter echoes of their other projects to create a charming new hybrid. | 200 Years is comprised of Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio. Together they draw on the quieter echoes of their other projects to create a charming new hybrid. | 200 Years: 200 Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16018-200-years-200-years/ | 200 Years | Music fans like to engage in speculative match-making, imagining what one distinctive artist might sound like in collaboration with another. In real life, of course, such collaborations have a notoriously checkered history. Yet there are still instances when the artists in question present a match too tantalizing to resist, and 200 Years is one such example. The duo is comprised of Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio, and together they draw on the quieter echoes of their other projects to create a charming new hybrid.
It helps that Chasny is an old hand at just this sort of collaboration, and a bit of a chameleon besides. In addition to his gigantic Six Organs of Admittance catalog, he has been a member of noise rock troupe Comets on Fire and improv units Rangda and Badgerlore, and his endlessly creative guitar work has been a welcome presence everywhere it has turned up. Each has served as a touring musician for the others' main gig, and Chasny and Ambrogio previously collaborated with Mouthus' Brian Sullivan in the noise-drone Basalt Fingers, but there is nothing from that trio that anticipated the hushed, song-based style of 200 Years.
The biggest surprise on 200 Years is Ambrogio and the gentle, almost demure performances that she delivers throughout the album. Though her work with Magik Markers has usually been distinguished by the wide-ranging ferocity of her vocals, there have been glimmers of her quieter side on such studio albums as BOSS and Balf Quarry. Still, it is unexpected to hear her sing so softly at such length, with her voice providing a natural foil for Chasny's predominantly acoustic guitars. At times she recalls the solo work of Barbara Manning or Lois Maffeo, a fact that would be astonishing to anyone only familiar with Ambrogio via one of Magik Markers' feral live recordings.
Consisting almost entirely of voices and guitars, there is an ageless quality to 200 Years. The album is bookended by its two most immediately mesmeric songs, "Wild White" and "More Than Alive", both of which are sturdy, melodic gems that could seemingly translate into any idiom. Here they are given the simplest possible treatment, riding along only on the interplay of Ambrogio's voice and Chasny's expertly filigreed guitar lines, the production so intimate that it feels like eavesdropping on a private conversation.
Elsewhere, as on "Partin Wayz" or "Thread", the duo adds discreet electric guitar effects or a quietly droning harmonium to the mix, always with the lightest of touch. None of these effects will shock those familiar with Chasny's previous work, and in its drowsier patches 200 Years can seem to be merely a Six Organs of Admittance tape with female vocals placed overhead. Which is hardly a bad formula in itself, but it might disappoint those hoping for more in the way of improvisational fireworks. On "Bees" Ambrogio does deliver what sounds like a front porch version of her Magik Marker lyrical cascade, with her words casually spilling out just as quickly as she can enunciate them.
The most impressive aspect of 200 Years, especially considering it as the debut of a new collaboration, is its overall aura of cool confidence. Chasny and Ambrogio are clearly two talented musicians with a wide variety of tools at their disposal, yet to their credit they don't feel the need to try and show every trick at once. Instead they show an innate sense of trust in one another and in this resonant collection of songs, secure in the knowledge that this should be plenty. | 2011-11-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-11-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Drag City | November 9, 2011 | 7.7 | 5edcbc30-bfaf-43fb-8822-a8590d8b970c | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The art-pop musician’s latest EP is a bleary, semiconscious rush that invites you to get lost inside it. | The art-pop musician’s latest EP is a bleary, semiconscious rush that invites you to get lost inside it. | Saya Gray: QWERTY EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saya-gray-qwerty-ep/ | QWERTY EP | According to the credits, Saya Gray recorded the bulk of her new EP, QWERTY, on her floor. It's easy enough to imagine: Gray sprawled in a tangle of machinery, plucking strings and smashing buttons, funneled into a pinpoint focus that opens back up into deep, irreverent play. On her 2022 debut LP, 19 Masters, Gray embraced the gloss of pop while letting many of its rules soften. She played inside a soft-focus field that called to mind Nilüfer Yanya’s PAINLESS or Frank Ocean’s Blonde, scattered pieces occasionally congealing into patterns and then disintegrating again. On this 17-minute follow-up, she zeroes in on disintegration. The broad strokes of verse and chorus, anticipation and pleasure and denouement, seem to bore the hell out of Gray by this point. Rather than tensing and releasing in a recognizable narrative flow, QWERTY’s delights wash over you in currents. Forms crystallize and dissolve without fanfare. QWERTY lets the bottom drop out of an already loose songwriting approach, defecting from convention in favor of a bleary, semiconscious rush.
Across QWERTY, Gray dials up the harsher edges of her bricolage. She sends agile drum and bass breakbeats skittering across dusty piano loops on “;),” while a driving post-punk drumbeat spikes the adrenaline behind her lithe, cascading vocals on “PREYING MANTIS !” Gray’s brother Lucian steps in to play guitar solos throughout the EP, and on certain tracks, like “ok FURIKAKE,” he steps firmly into nu-metal territory, playing the kind of hot, distorted riffs that sound like they spill out of a dinged six-string held in place by a flame-pattern strap. These blunt gestures abrade the light touch of Gray’s vocals in thrilling contrasts that spur the music forward. Instead of drawing momentum from lyrical narrative or recognizable song structures, which are all but absent except in gasps, Gray runs the engine of her music on the friction between unlike elements. Those System of a Down fretboard chugs crash into a gossamer R&B line delivery and launch the whole absurdist machine toward the horizon.
Even at its brisk length, QWERTY contains enough space for you to get lost inside it. And for Gray, lost is one of the most fun places you can be. Even her voice shakes loose from its center. Rather than play narrator or act as a guiding thread through the chaos, Gray takes the opportunity of the whirlwind to try on new selves. The voices that fly through “PREYING MANTIS !” are manipulated to the point where it sounds like Gray might have invited another singer or two onto the record, but it’s all her, trying on different personas atop one of the record’s only graspable grooves. “I can make your dust turn to sparkles,” she promises in what could be a mission statement for this whole thing: scraping up refuse, making it shine.
That's not to say it's all fun. The psychedelic meditation “ANNIE, I SING FOR..” offsets the more whimsical freefalls with some gravity. “This song was like my bargain with grief,” Gray explained, and the weight comes through in glimpses: the spare acoustic guitar flickering over a bruised bass tone, the devastating slices of lyrical clarity. “Beg the bullet to make an exception,” Gray sings in an airy register, and then the song peels away to just the guitar, and her voice returns coarsened and corroded: “Is there another side to suicide now? I think I’m finding out.”
QWERTY skips through moments of bewildered levity and dives into opaque, numbing despair, and Gray never balks at the distance between the two. The further you get from yourself, the more that chasm between extremes narrows into a hairline crack. That seems to be the spot Gray vaults toward: the displacement of herself as singular authority, the obliteration of the ego driving the train. From a high enough vantage, all the proportions that govern the ground go out the window. With QWERTY, Gray climbs a little higher still. | 2023-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | June 8, 2023 | 7 | 5ee12589-8148-4449-a308-011f1daee0fb | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
This 26-song compilation surveys the brief period, between 2007 and 2009, when the Harlem rapper remolded rap in his wavy image. | This 26-song compilation surveys the brief period, between 2007 and 2009, when the Harlem rapper remolded rap in his wavy image. | Max B: Wave Pack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-b-wave-pack/ | Wave Pack | Max B grew up in a Harlem apartment building, a few floors beneath Cam’ron. When he was still a teenager, he was locked up on a robbery charge. He came home eight years later, in 2005, to a Harlem that Cam had refitted with after-market Range Rover paint and furs that looked like Easter decorations. Cam hooked Max up with Jim Jones; Max rapped with Jones and wrote for him; his own music quickly emerged as some of the strangest and most irresistible rap that New York had produced in the new century.
On September 21, 2006, a man was shot and killed during a botched robbery in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Max was alleged to have helped plan the heist and was charged with murder. He sat in jail for months until the summer of 2007, when Max sold his publishing to Jones to pay his bail. Once out, he began writing and recording at a delirious clip. Two summers later, in 2009, he was found guilty on nine of 11 counts. In September of that year, he was sentenced to 75 years in prison.
Wave Pack, a 26-song compilation released by EMG last week, functions mostly as a survey of Max’s work in the period between his release on bail and his 2009 conviction, songs which he had released nearly as soon as they were recorded. (Five of the tracks compiled here are taken from Vigilante Season, the album Amalgam Digital issued in 2011.) The effect is to create an immersive 101-minute block that includes none of Max’s formative work, inasmuch as Max has formative work: more than any of his New York contemporaries, he seemed to have been beamed in fully formed, from a wavier place. Most of the songs here have been smartly remastered, in a way that makes them clearer and more punishing but retains the atonal muddiness that’s central to his aesthetic.
As Guru said, it’s mostly the voice: Max’s vocals are often drowned in distortion and/or doubled until they sound like he’s singing through a breathing machine. Together with the producer Dame Grease, he built a style that imagines lullabies filtered through hell, or at least through a cell block. There are hints in Max’s catalog of the Auto-Tuned pop-rap that dominated radio in the late ’00s (for an example, see Vigilante Season’s “Baby I Need More,” which is not included here) but for most of this 2007-09 period, he was mutating the sounds of early-’00s New York street rappers like 50 Cent into something both grimier and poppier. Listening to Max feels like being on downers in your most expensive clothes. Everything is pained; he sounds as mournful recalling “very nice girls” on “Porno Muzik” as he does lamenting the injustice of his verdict (from “Lord Is Tryin’ To Tell You Something”: “I’m innocent! Wasn’t even there”).
While it skews toward songs from the latter half of his brief period of freedom, Wave Pack still functions as a near-comprehensive primer on Max’s sound. There are the acidic hits from his beloved San Diego sessions (“Try Me,” “Blow Me a Dub”) and playful taunts from his series of Public Domain tapes. And save for one verse from Mak Mustard, Wave Pack smartly eschews features. Max was a prolific collaborator—his mixtapes with French Montana are famous, and even those pale in comparison to his work with the late Stack Bundles—but the best road into his world is exposure therapy, letting the wave wash over you.
Wave Pack opens with two new songs: a shimmering bit of funk called ”Phenomenon” and “Run Homeboy Run,” which under different circumstances might play as a defiant first-day-out dispatch. (It is an unbelievable feat of tonal control to describe a 75-year sentence as a judge throwing you an elbow, and then to rap that line cockily through a jail phone.) Last summer, Max announced that his sentence has been reduced, and that he could be released some time in 2021. He’ll return to a rap industry that has never successfully recreated him, despite the traces of his DNA that can be found in many rappers who have debuted in his absence. But in revisiting Max’s music, you find that it’s harder to draw direct lines of influence than it is to see his work as something mostly alien, ahead of its time but mostly unconcerned with time in the first place. | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | EMG / Phase One Network | March 11, 2020 | 8 | 5ee2d1ac-570f-49e6-9bea-e11f8e07ab3a | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
After a decade-long pause, Jaime Brooks revives her Elite Gymnastics project. The record feels like an elegy for a time when the internet provided refuge for misfit kids seeking out like-minded souls. | After a decade-long pause, Jaime Brooks revives her Elite Gymnastics project. The record feels like an elegy for a time when the internet provided refuge for misfit kids seeking out like-minded souls. | Elite Gymnastics: snow flakes 2022 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elite-gynmastics-snow-flakes-2022/ | snow flakes 2022 | “Things change.” That’s one of the first refrains on snow flakes 2022, the debut album from Jaime Brooks’ experimentally minded pop project Elite Gymnastics, and while it’s delivered with bleary-eyed sincerity, there’s an additional layer of winking meta-commentary. Like a few others on the album, the heartrending breakbeat-pop opener, “(i always cry at) regenerations,” is a reworked version of a much older recording, which Brooks and collaborator Viri Char have given new life and brought into a new context.
Things have changed a lot since the last time Elite Gymnastics was regularly releasing music. Ten years is a long time even if you aren’t grappling with the dissolution of a close creative relationship, as Brooks was after the departure of the group’s original member Josh Clancy; it’s a lot of time to reconfigure your orientation to yourself and the world around you. That snow flakes 2022 begins with “(i always cry at) regenerations” feels purposeful. Elite Gymnastics’ music—even at its most frenetic—was always reflective. Returning to the project, she looks inward again, mulling what it means for time to relentlessly march on.
What Brooks has maintained over the years is the willingness to dig deep and share all of herself over the most colorful pop songs. At turns self-lacerating, hopeful, fragile, and poignantly nostalgic, the songs on snow flakes 2022 are intimate and earnest. Splatter-painting imagistic memories and dizzying inner monologues, songs like “tutti in bagno” reflect on human relationships and the vulnerability required for even the most basic connections. Over vaporous synth arrangements and slow-motion breakbeats, Brooks sings fragmented thoughts that one might utter in thrall to a new crush. At points, the album feels like an inventive update of the genre-blurring freneticism that powered Elite Gymnastics the first time around, deliberately echoing the teetering chaos of the sample-laden early songs. But part of what makes snow flakes 2022 so affecting is the way she peels back the layers: On “here, in heaven,” she and Conrad Tao look back to a series of fuzzy shoegaze-pop tracks and crack them open, foregrounding a gentle piano line and a vocal line about the painful interpersonal dynamics involved in love. It’s simple and direct but packed with real emotion—the sort of economy and incisiveness that the best pop music strives for.
The record’s five-and-a-half-minute centerpiece, “snow flakes,” condenses the spirit of Elite Gymnastics into a devastating meditation on both the value and the pitfalls of nostalgia, looking back on the past but never too fondly. Over shape-shifting dance beats, Brooks sings of listless days lying in a basement, smoking bad weed, and listening to records by fellow artists who inhabit the netherworlds between pop music and grandiose ideas, like Jim O’Rourke, Xiu Xiu, DJ Sprinkles, and more. On Twitter, she said the explicit references to those records were meant to “conjure an image of the file-sharing era,” a time when boundaries between musical forms felt blurry and the music internet was roiling with potential energy. There was a sense that anything could happen—that new, unheard sounds could emerge any day from somebody cloistered in their bedroom in a far-flung corner of the world. Those were the circumstances that produced Elite Gymnastics in the first place, and these new songs and versions are in part a response to the feeling that that era is long gone. Due to the samples woven into much of Brooks’ early work under the Elite Gymnastics moniker, she wrote on Tumblr, it’s likely that she’ll never be able to upload some of those songs to DSPs.
As a result, “snow flakes” and the record as a whole function as an elegy for a time long passed, as well as a fond memory of it, when the internet was a refuge for kids stuck at home, finding their people through listening to weird music on the internet. It’s always easy to look back and dream of better days—which snow flakes 2022 does in places—but the beauty of the record is that its very existence proves that these spaces still exist. On the record’s closing track, “chloe 4-ever,” the Cincinnati-based artist Chloe Hotline sings about the virtues of perseverance and slowly becoming the person you want to be, her voice weighed down by the knowledge that such a process takes a lifetime. And while yes, things change, there will always be an audience for this kind of music for seekers and lonely dreamers, made up of listeners who feel the same way. | 2022-11-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | November 3, 2022 | 7.3 | 5ee4f132-654e-440b-997f-1f008625f8c6 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Indie rock vets follow the disappointing Summer Sun with an expansive, ambitious record exploring every style in their repertoire, and a few new ones, too. | Indie rock vets follow the disappointing Summer Sun with an expansive, ambitious record exploring every style in their repertoire, and a few new ones, too. | Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9397-i-am-not-afraid-of-you-and-i-will-beat-your-ass/ | I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass | Many Yo La Tengo fans suspected the band's best days were behind them after Summer Sun. Even the title was a bummer. In my mind I saw it as Setting Sun, and later thought of Around the Sun, both of which brought to mind autumn twilight, a slow fade into darkness, and the onset of a deadening winter. And while the music wasn't terrible (and had at least an enjoyable ambience), it sounded like it came from a band that was locked into something-- like Yo La Tengo had found a measured style they could tweak until they got bored of the band and called it quits. "If this is truly the next step in Yo La Tengo's move toward some abstract concept like artistic maturity," Eric Carr wrote in his Pitchfork review, "I don't think I want to stick around for the conclusion."
Hearing their newest record, I'm hoping Eric hasn't left the building. From the opening bass growl of "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind", it's a new morning on planet YLT. Right off, Georgia Hubley and James McNew are thriving on a riff and Ira Kaplan has his meanest distortion pedal out of hock kicking up clouds of noise because he can. And I'd forgotten how cool he can sound when singing. Here he's Joe Walsh bragging about a fully stocked medicine cabinet and the processing of his voice is perfect, with flanged midrange to accentuate his knowing calm. But Yo La Tengo wouldn't truly be back if they stayed in one place, and the following "Beanbag Chair" is a complete 180, a cuddly piano-driven ditty with velvety harmonies that wants nothing more than to find its way onto a prospective girlfriend's mixtape.
And that's the story here. Yo La Tengo have always sounded more in love with music than pretty much any indie band going, and they've let their diverse interests settle into a comfortable and productive place conducive to growing good songs. Everything they've done well in the past is found on here somewhere, even a couple of the gossamer mood pieces that previously threatened to smother their career like a damp wool blanket. An album of songs like "I Feel Like Going Home" might be trouble, but here it sounds just fine: There's lovely and subtle processing behind the piano and violin, and Georgia Hubley's voice has become a remarkably supple instrument. It's a real trick when you have her limited range to avoid sounding distant and bored, but completely inhabits her leads. The jaunty "The Weakest Part" hits the same sweet spot. It could be a nice Belle & Sebastian song, with its bouncy piano, easy harmonies, and taut construction.
The production is simple but not minimal. It feels overtly "classic" more than anything, with arrangements and instrumentation deliberately plucked from a wide range of rock and r&b sides from the past half-century. The horns backing James McNew's and Kaplan's falsettos on "Mr. Tough" are ladled from Memphis soul stew, punctuating the playfully phrased dancefloor challenge to a bully. "The Room Got Heavy", with its bongos and Martin Rev organ, is part skuzzy 70s-NYC racket, but Hubley humanizes and prettifies the drone and turns it into something approaching a song. The long instrumental "Daphnia", probably inspired by Yo La Tengo's now substantial movie-scoring side career, is more engaging than it has any right to be. It's just a guitar plucking a couple notes over and over while some crackly sound effects rustle in the background, and a creepy piano line ghosted from a John Carpenter score. And then, the scrappy "Watch out for Me Ronnie", with Kaplan half-yelling through a busted microphone, sounds like a lost Nuggets classic having a drink with the closing theme from "WKRP in Cincinnati".
Yes, "Black Flowers" is underwritten and drab, and "Songs for Mahila" is pretty enough but just sort of floats out the window, but hey, there are 15 songs and 77 minutes of music here, and it's not a perfect record. But rather than sounding overstuffed, I Am Not Afraid of You... sounds like a double album in the 70s sense, a chance for the band to stretch out and try everything in their repertoire even if the end result is a little shaggy. Really, this kind of committed and sincere musical sampler is the most natural place in the world for Yo La Tengo to be, but it wasn't clear if they'd ever find their way back. | 2006-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 11, 2006 | 8.3 | 5ee675a2-9805-4b60-8638-252f7d67206c | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The fourth LP from the tireless, master technician from Long Island stays making the case for Marciano as a vicious, creative, and vastly underrated MC. | The fourth LP from the tireless, master technician from Long Island stays making the case for Marciano as a vicious, creative, and vastly underrated MC. | Roc Marciano: Rosebudd’s Revenge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22984-rosebudds-revenge/ | Rosebudd’s Revenge | In professional terms, Roc Marciano comes from nowhere. This website’s review for his staggering 2010 debut, Marcberg, refers to him as “a rapper associated with Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad,” a descriptor that was barely reductive at the time. Roc Marciano the person—that would be the 39-year-old Rakeem Calief Myer—comes from Ed Koch’s New York, a place that informs his work by way of syntax, slang, and a catalog of grainy samples that sound like they were lifted out of rainwater. It gave him train-rattling drums, too, but lately he’s been stripping those away.
The character that Marci has created on wax, the one with Isaac Hayes shades and Kevin McHale-colored fishscale, has been everywhere: Burkina Faso, Venezuela in his best dress clothes, chubby on a sunny beach, his gun in reach. Rosebudd’s Revenge, the long-awaited proper follow-up to 2012’s Reloaded, carries each piece of his style toward the extreme, which makes this his most confounding, and maybe his most singular work to date.
Impressive as it is on a formal level, Rosebudd’s Revenge also raises interesting questions about the inner workings of Marci’s mind. On “Gunsense,” he raps: “Motherfucker, this is art, you can’t just pick this apart/This not a hobby, this is therapy.” Those lines, defiant as they are, would be unremarkable coming from any number of rappers. But Roc Marciano records seldom feel like confessionals, at least in any recognizable sense; you don’t picture a pimp slumping into his therapist’s couch to talk about how flying in shooters from Jamaica makes him feel.
Marci’s trafficking in something more circuitous than a linear line from trauma to psychic baggage. Unlike his longtime collaborator, Ka—who appears here on the excellent “Marksmen,” and whose own solo work also explores just how lean New York can sound—Marci doesn’t write in monologue. Instead, he tends to stack images on top of one another, building it higher and higher until it can scrub blood off of Nikes or get the mink out of storage. See “Already,” where he raps, “Mahogany woodgrain all in the five-speed/Silk lay on me, pray for me/Eight million stories in the naked city/The humidity—it made the titties oil.” Later on the same song, he says that his jeans fit him like Springsteen, that his shoes cost as much as an MF DOOM verse, and “Fans demand new work, but I’m a man of few words.”
In each and every case, the point of view is slippery enough that you’re never quite sure who the speaker is, how literally a line should be taken, and whether its connection to subsequent lines is superficial, deeply important, or altogether non-existent. You don’t need to answer any of these questions to appreciate Marci’s Technicolor virtuosity, to follow him to murder scenes in Wichita (“Pimp Arrest”) or to Israeli hotel rooms (“Better Know”). But answering them might help to bridge the gap between Rakeem Myer and Roc Marciano—to see which of his too-vivid details are things he aspires to and which he sees as necessary evils.
As a writer, Marci’s gift is his ability to make evil seem impossibly slick; on “Burkina Faso,” he ends an armed robbery by telling his victim, “Keep the Dunks, I’m not a hipster,” then heads home and listens to Michael Bolton in the jacuzzi. Rosebudd’s Revenge isn’t as seamless as Marcberg or Reloaded, suffering from some fidelity issues and perhaps being a bit back-loaded, but it’s endlessly, almost impossibly entertaining. Even as he approaches middle age, Marci remains one of rap’s most brilliant stylists, the kind of artist who can make you wear out your rewind button despite being old enough to remember when you could wear out a rewind button.
Maybe the most aspirational line on the record is: “I’m just having fun with this, I live in comfort.” For all the death threats, all the cartoon luxury that Marci rattles off with a sneer, the underlying truth is that he’s a master technician who’s worked tirelessly, for years on end to hone an unmistakable style as a rapper, producer, and auteur. Maybe the most peaceful thing he can imagine—the beach where he can get chubby, as it were—would be fading back into the ether, content to know that after years of obscurity, he became one of the greatest, most influential rappers of the decade. | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Marci Enterprises | March 11, 2017 | 8 | 5ee835da-4614-45bd-acf2-ab2f6a7478a2 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Gwenno Saunders used to front the girl-group the Pipettes. Y Dydd Olaf, her solo debut, is a record about the importance of preserving cultural identity in order to resist corporate death, and on it she establishes herself as a visionary of synth-pop moods and textures. | Gwenno Saunders used to front the girl-group the Pipettes. Y Dydd Olaf, her solo debut, is a record about the importance of preserving cultural identity in order to resist corporate death, and on it she establishes herself as a visionary of synth-pop moods and textures. | Gwenno: Y Dydd Olaf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20765-y-dydd-olaf/ | Y Dydd Olaf | Back in 2000, Super Furry Animals' Mwng became the first Welsh-language album to get into the UK Top 20. It's still the only one to ever dent the charts' upper reaches. There are almost a million Welsh speakers in the UK, but Welsh-language music struggles for recognition outside of Wales. At worst, it's treated as a novelty, a fate that you can only hope doesn't befall Cardiff-born Gwenno Saunders' debut solo album, reissued this week on Heavenly after its initial appearance on local label Peski last year.
Y Dydd Olaf is named for Welsh author Owain Owain's 1976 sci-fi novel in which world-conquering robots turn humans into clones. Nine of its songs are in Welsh while the closing track is in Cornish, which is supposedly the primary language of around 600 people. Saunders used to front kitsch girl-group the Pipettes, which she recently dismissed as "playing a role that had already been written." Y Dydd Olaf also plays into an entrenched role—the gentle Welsh-language pop revolutionary set out by the likes of SFAs and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci—but it's a natural fit for Saunders, who establishes herself as a visionary of synth-pop moods and textures.
Owain's original story is confined to the title track and "Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki", which isn't Welsh, but the nonsense words that his characters start spouting when cyborg forces corrupt their minds. Owain's protagonist, however, retains his individualism by writing diary entries in Welsh, which stops the robots from getting inside his head. Saunders uses that concept to underpin a record about the importance of preserving cultural identity in order to resist corporate death—which in turn, only a relatively tiny audience will actually be able to understand. English notes accompanying the album translate songs that explore the artist's role in a downtrodden society, and the way that technology gives misogyny yet another platform, which compounds the problem of sexism in minority cultures that still promote traditional gender roles. Saunders confronts Cardiff's unimaginative civic planning and highlights the dependable march of nature, weighing up the clash between old and new worlds.
For those without crib notes or a native ear, the idea of language-as-protector shines through in the intimate soundscape that Saunders creates along with her producer husband (and Peski boss) Rhys Edwards. Her palette is kosmische, recalling the likes of Stereolab and Can, but her soft-edged synths, intermingling with field recordings from Cardiff Bay, makes her evocation of space domestic and comforting, like a transmission from a house party on the moon. She has a tendency to stick to one song structure: her languid take on that gorgeously hushed language sits atop an insistent guitar or synth part that spirals somewhere heavenly in the chorus.
The magic, though, is in the spellbinding tones she weaves throughout. The piano on opener "Chwyldro" (revolution) sounds bent and worn, and guides out Cornish closer "Amser" (time). "Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki" sounds like a forlorn death disco for Owain's doomed population. "Stwff" starts with a bright piano recalling the swirl of a French carousel, or Nino Rota's sweeter film scores, though it comes to feel as disquieting as the drowned lounge band swing that underpins "Calon Peiriant" (the heart of the machine).
On "Stwff", a song about growing up and learning how to fit in, Saunders sings (in Welsh): "I can only apologize for feeling the frustration/ Young and ambitious in a minority culture/ I joined the middle but it didn't really impress me." Her treatise on the importance of staying true to your identity finds extra weight in the fact that she tried to live another way and came back, shaken up by the loss she felt during her pop outing. Y Dydd Olaf is a crucial minority language record, but Saunders' beguiling melodies and execution also make it one of the best British debuts of 2015. | 2015-07-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Heavenly | July 24, 2015 | 8 | 5eed2f8c-69da-4cc8-8099-d9b20a51c320 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Though its many guest vocalists can be distracting, the Houston-born musician’s debut album presents a strong argument for the drummer as a modern bandleader. | Though its many guest vocalists can be distracting, the Houston-born musician’s debut album presents a strong argument for the drummer as a modern bandleader. | Chris Dave and the Drumhedz: Chris Dave and the Drumhedz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-dave-and-the-drumhedz-chris-dave-and-the-drumhedz/ | Chris Dave and the Drumhedz | The final two songs on Chris Dave’s debut album present a vivid argument for the drummer as modern bandleader. After a couple of minutes of the psychedelic “Lady Jane,” the Houston-born musician’s stickwork explodes, scattering percussive shrapnel all over the track before he takes command and slows the song to a stuttering halt. And on the space-jazz-influenced “Trippy Tipsy,” Dave’s rocket-fuel drumming lends momentum to celestial sax riffs. Together, they showcase the man behind the drum kit as the lead musical voice. But it’s telling that those two songs are instrumental affairs, because the 13 tracks that precede them are heavy on guest vocalists, to the point where Dave becomes cast as a backseat presence on what should be his journey.
Make no mistake, Dave’s credentials are fully in check. Drumming since the age of three, he’s subsequently played with D’Angelo and John Legend, while in the recording studio he’s contributed to Grammy-winning albums by the Robert Glasper Experiment (Black Radio) and Adele (21). Dave’s connections and reputation have allowed him to pack his self-titled debut with guests who roll with Kendrick Lamar (Top Dawg Entertainment’s Inglewood connection SiR and the singer Anna Wise), hip-hop turntable icon Jazzy Jeff, renowned underground MCs Phonte Coleman and Elzhi, and even former Timbaland collaborator Tweet. But the relationship between guests and hosts isn’t even. The sheer number of voices, which is around 50 once you factor in musicians, threatens to muffle Dave’s smart and soulful playing.
When the vibe is stripped down, the project works best, but it often feels like slogging through molasses to get there. Track six, “Spread Her Wings,” is exquisite: Bilal and Tweet’s sweet vocals are thoughtfully matched with Dave’s shimmering cymbals. “Who better than me to spend your whole lifetime?” croons Bilal at the song’s apex, before Dave’s drum kit erupts into a kaleidoscope of percussion. Crucially, as the song settles, you realize that it’s the drum work conveying the emotion.
That’s not to say the artists on the oversized roster of guests are clunkers. Anderson .Paak brings superfly swagger to “Black Hole” as he sings suavely about how “the cops gon’ bust me if my money too husky.” Phonte and Elzhi drop smart couplets over the clipped funk of “Destiny N Stereo.” Mint Condition’s Stokley Williams adds sultry slow-jam vocals to “Cosmic Intercourse.” (There is an overarching interstellar theme to the album.) But as each new voice emerges, Dave’s own role seems to minimize. It’s like a hip-hop producer’s solo album that ends up becoming defined by one or two stand-out guest turns—think of the way “Tru Master,” featuring Inspectah Deck and Kurupt, dominates Pete Rock’s Soul Survivor—rather than something that gels into a successful top-to-toe listening experience.
Curiously, the album almost seems to end with “Job Well Done,” which hooks onto Anna Wise and SiR’s back-and-forth over a dreamy groove embellished with lilting acoustic guitar. But as the track ends, the glorious “Lady Jane” and “Trippy Tipsy” emerge, sounding less like poignant codas than a hint of what might have been. Chris Dave’s accomplished chops demand that he should be the star of his debut—but too often he’s lost in the firmament. | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | January 23, 2018 | 6.2 | 5ef222c3-cd75-462a-b802-2b372362d405 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
Eight years after “Ima Read,” the club rapper’s debut album channels the ferocity of that breakout single across a maelstrom of different styles while keeping his central shit-talking identity intact. | Eight years after “Ima Read,” the club rapper’s debut album channels the ferocity of that breakout single across a maelstrom of different styles while keeping his central shit-talking identity intact. | Zebra Katz: Less Is Moor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zebra-katz-less-is-moor/ | LESS IS MOOR | The seed for Less Is Moor, the razor-sharp debut album from rapper Zebra Katz, was planted over a decade ago. The Jamaican-American artist born Ojay Morgan studied liberal arts at Eugene Lang College in New York, where he took drama classes, and, as one of the few black people ever in the room, was consistently typecast for roles. Morgan designed a rebuke in the form of his 2007 senior thesis, “Moor Contradictions,” a brashly playful and incisive commentary on the Moorish characters in Shakespeare works, delivered as a one-man performance through different black identities.
One of them was the sharp-witted Zebra Katz, a character who would create funny, off-the-cuff raps out of any subject the audience tossed out at him. After footage of the character picked up traction online, Morgan kept Katz alive by self-producing low-end-driven backdrops for his deep, hypnotizing flow. By 2012, Morgan had perfected the formula and forged a full-on queer cultural moment with “Ima Read,” a deadly ballroom cut picked up by Diplo’s Mad Decent label that remains the clearest vision of the Zebra Katz persona: club-ready, tongue-in-cheek, and perpetually willing and able to cut you down to size.
After a minimalist mixtape in 2013 and a collaboration and tour with Gorillaz in 2017, Morgan hunkered down in Berlin to reflect on the Zebra Katz character five years after his breakout, and to plot his debut album. The resulting, independently released Less Is Moor is an unflagging statement on the complexities of Katz’ personality, arriving on a maelstrom of industrial, drum’n’bass, and noise production. The club remains Katz’ sanctum, but here he relishes different styles, whether emotively singing over an acoustic guitar on the wistful “Necklace” or slowing his breakneck pace down to match an unnerving metronomic rhythm on the spacious “Lousy.” The restless ethos, winding between high-energy club gems and sawtoothed electronic interludes, seems to rid Morgan of inhibitions, allowing him to experiment with free rein.
Hearing Zebra Katz in his shit-talking element drives Less Is Moor’s most dynamic moments. On standout “In In In,” he traipses through his fashion credentials before adopting a Missy Elliott-style flow to make demands to the dancefloor, while sinister air horns and rolling drums from producer Tony Quattro feed his fire. The eerie, perfectly arrogant “Ish” injects Katz’s venom with humor: “Go off, fuck bitch/You don’t really know ish,” he raps in monotone over swells of distorted bass and anxious sirens. “First thing, own it/I’m the shit, you the piss.” It’s quintessential Zebra Katz: flexing, fanged, ready to throw clubgoers into delirium. Later he recruits London rapper Shygirl for the batshit “Lick It N Split,” where the two trade increasingly demented sex raps over gut-punching drums and carnivalesque synths from Sega Bodega. It sounds like a panic attack, but the giddy sense of humor throughout is like catching a buzz from a pair of extremely stoned friends.
With back-to-back club songs, Less Is Moor can fall into a routine even as it explores the varying extremes of Katz’ persona. He spits over a keening whistle on the repetitive deep cut “Sleepn,” and stays on a similar autopilot for “Been Known” despite its delightfully screwy, bass-heavy backdrop. But the album’s highs far outnumber its lows. Katz reels off a merciless freestyle on “Zad Drums,” a highlight with pummeling subterranean drums and an echoing horror-movie vocal. “I got so fuckin’ high last night I kicked myself out of Berghain,” he growls, like he’s telling a story at an after-the-club house party where anything feels possible.
That unbridled energy carries Less Is Moor and allows Katz to move wherever his curiosities allow, even in the direction of an indie ballad on “Necklace,” the album’s hushed centerpiece. “I keep on wishin’ I was next,” he sings in a gentle rasp, “Suffer through all of your sweet neglect/Took all my lovin’ for innocence.” It’s a bracing moment of respite between stark club tracks, revealing a vulnerability to the image of Zebra Katz that is both earned and unexpected. | 2020-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ZFK | March 23, 2020 | 7.5 | 5ef3d685-7a7f-42af-9a28-1af6e52a346f | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Although the veteran metal quintet sounded newly invigorated on its last two albums, T**he Violent Sleep of Reason is easily the most organic-sounding Meshuggah album in over 20 years. | Although the veteran metal quintet sounded newly invigorated on its last two albums, T**he Violent Sleep of Reason is easily the most organic-sounding Meshuggah album in over 20 years. | Meshuggah: The Violent Sleep of Reason | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22503-the-violent-sleep-of-reason/ | The Violent Sleep of Reason | Meshuggah’s first album in four years begins with a hushed one-two-three-four hi-hat count courtesy of drummer Tomas Haake. Unless you’re listening on headphones, you’re likely to miss it—the first subtle-but-tangible indicator of the human element Meshuggah made a conscious effort to recapture this time out. Although the veteran metal quintet sounded newly invigorated on its last two albums, 2008’s obZen and 2012’s Koloss, The Violent Sleep of Reason is easily the most organic-sounding Meshuggah album in over 20 years.
For the first time since the 1994 EP None, Meshuggah opted to record as a band, tracking all guitars, bass, and drums more or less simultaneously. For proper perspective on the significance of this decision, one has to understand how comically anal-retentive Meshuggah’s writing and recording process had become. For the majority of the band’s catalog, each member has worked separately at computer work stations located in adjacent rooms in the studio. Of course, that approach weighted the focus towards digital editing and composition while band chemistry took a backseat.
Over time, it even became customary for Meshuggah to enter the studio without having rehearsed, and with each member hearing the other members’ songs for the first time. Given the heightened energy of the last two albums, one would expect the shift to a traditional recording approach to pay off on Violent Sleep. Metal bands, alas, inevitably lose vitality as they age. Which means that Meshuggah are unlikely to ever match the unbridled thrashing passion of classic titles like 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve and 1998’s Chaosphere. They manage to come close this time—at least in spots.
On second track “Born in Dissonance,” for example, Meshuggah bring the song’s galloping groove to life so convincingly that it’s virtually impossible to listen without doing something physical—pumping your fist, banging your head, getting behind the wheel of a car. Unfortunately, “Dissonance” is one of only two songs on the whole album that are built out of driving grooves. The rest of Violent Sleep bears more of a resemblance to the stiff, plodding material on Meshuggah’s middle-period albums, 2002’s Nothing and 2005’s Catch Thirtythree.
After an encouraging start, Violent Sleep begins to get mired in tentative rhythms that hover and even grate rather than achieve the kind of acceleration that Meshuggah excel at when they choose to pick up the pace. At times, the bare-bones immediacy of the production even clashes with the downtempo vibe of the songs, some of which could have benefited from more of obZen’s ambience.
Haake, the band's chief lyricist, avoids explicit references to terrorism or religious fanaticism. But one doesn't have to read far between the lines to discern the contempt behind a staunchly atheistic song like “Stifled”—or to locate its context in current events when vocalist Jens Kidman barks about “Your self-avowed murderous God.../Your commands unheard underground/Where your voice will never resonate.../Your sleep no longer impermanent/Decaying matter now sums you up/Like all the lives you’ve taken/Now so are you retreating to dust.”
Haake’s point (and point of view) remains vague throughout the album. But the album title positions humanity at a point of collective spasm, as if “reason” and the forces that oppose it—blind religious fervor, most obviously—continue to lock in a deadly contest that leaves mass casualties in its wake. The Violent Sleep of Reason galvanizes most when Meshuggah rise to the challenge of writing music that matches the urgency and global scope of its subjects. All too often, though, even as they’re captured playing together in a room for the first time in ages, Meshuggah sound a tad more comfortable than agitated. | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | October 22, 2016 | 6.5 | 5efa817c-95f9-430d-b556-035c512d6a00 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Russian electronic musician Kate NV’s sonic portrait of her native Moscow is surreal, otherworldly, and playfully inscrutable. | The Russian electronic musician Kate NV’s sonic portrait of her native Moscow is surreal, otherworldly, and playfully inscrutable. | Kate NV: для FOR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-nv-dlya-for/ | для FOR | The city of Moscow is 871 years old. Its first entry in the annals of history is as a minor outpost on the western edge of what would become Russia. Perhaps all great cities start as backwaters, but Moscow in particular has lived many lives, from “Third Rome” to workers’ paradise to late-capitalist playground. The contemporary version of Moscow—with its opulent cathedrals and enormous underground shopping malls—is a weird and wondrous historical crossroad. The Western imagination, at least the one informed by the wreckage of the Cold War, may not necessarily think of the Russian metropolis as magical or otherworldly. But listening to the Russian electronic musician Kate NV’s sophomore album, для FOR, an eccentric sonic love letter to her hometown, one gets the sense that the ambient rumble of a city can be made to seem, from the right angle, marvellously strange.
With для FOR, Kate NV (aka Kate Shilonosova) said her goal was to provide a score to her local stomping ground. That mission statement might suggest soundscapes or field recordings, but the album’s 10 songs are made of unusual materials—wet, fleshy bleeps; bubbly, liquid noise; a whole palette of supernatural synths—that make для FOR the most surreal album of electronic music I’ve heard this year. The entirety of the record was recorded in Shilonosova’s Moscow apartment, and however she sourced the sounds she used, a certain playful inscrutability informs all of для FOR: These songs don’t provide answers, just questions.
The very first noises of the album, on opener “yxo EAR,” elude conventional description: Viscous synthesizer notes floats alongside what might be arpeggiated whoopee cushions and human hums lacerated into sharp, angular shapes. There is a sense that the music is formed from a bewildering mixture of organic and synthetic parts. But для FOR never feels like a dip into the uncanny valley; its cyborgian aesthetic is surprisingly cuddly and comforting. This is especially clear on songs like “двa TWO,” where woodblock percussion intermingles with contorted human voices that are played like keys on piano. What that sounds like is baffling and beautiful in equal measure: Burps, sighs, exclamations, and unclassifiable vocal utterances are blasted apart and stitched together into a rippling, freewheeling chord progression. There’s an uncommon sense of reverence and lightness to the album, too: On “кто WHO” robotic bird chirps are bathed in gorgeous sunbeams of synth, creating a pleasing blanket of alien sound.
The album’s cornucopia of outré instrumentation is only one part of what makes it feel special: There’s a warm, ambulatory flow that encourages not just relaxation but a curious imagination. Listening to it, I wondered what Shilonosova was seeing and hearing in Moscow as she crafted these unusual compositions: Was she wandering between the city’s noisy and baroque metro stations as she created the bleeps of “жук BUG”; did the chimes, whooshes of air, and chattering voices that populate the album come from a day at Gorky Park?
There is almost a painterly way to how Shilonosova organizes sound. More than that, each track feels like a self-contained world—an intimate and deeply odd cul-de-sac of noise. In 1975, the Portland, Oregon, musician Ernest Hood’s private-press album Neighborhoods attempted to capture the nuances of daily life in a familiar place. для FOR gives a similar peek into the richness of the everyday. Shilonosova’s corner of Moscow is bubbly and fantastical—a place where you want to live and explore every nook and cranny. | 2018-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | June 25, 2018 | 8.1 | 5efb9e17-9f40-4a2d-8e11-55b01d1a0be8 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
On the second album to result from a three-year collaboration between late electronic pioneer Mika Vainio and French composer Franck Vigroux, the most striking moments are also the most elemental. | On the second album to result from a three-year collaboration between late electronic pioneer Mika Vainio and French composer Franck Vigroux, the most striking moments are also the most elemental. | Mika Vainio / Franck Vigroux: Ignis EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mika-vainio-franck-vigroux-ignis-ep/ | Ignis EP | Between 2012 and 2014, French composer Franck Vigroux and the late electronic pioneer Mika Vainio generated a wealth of collaborative material. In live sessions and at Vigroux’s studio in the South of France, Vigroux’s electroacoustic experiments (which sometimes expand into other mediums, including performance) and Vainio’s relentless electronics intersected in a searing place. In 2015, two years before Vainio passed away, they released a collection of these tracks as Peau froide, léger soleil, a blistering album that conjured an atmosphere similar to the dystopian aesthetic Vigroux was concurrently exploring in his solo work.
Ignis is the second, and perhaps not the last, compilation of material from this two-year project. Some of the heaviness of Peau froide has dispersed on this release, but even where the sounds the pair generates have shed some weight, a resolute intensity remains. Its compositions move toward experiments in dynamic and presence that ultimately reconfigure the listener’s relationship to the basic sonic building blocks of that intensity.
The six tracks comprising Ignis are largely without traditional structure, and they vary in the textures and sounds they incorporate such that there’s never quite a unifying palette. In the case of so many other experiments based in live collaboration, a sense of the participants’ curiosity will provide a structureless outing with its internal logic. But the assertiveness with which Vainio and Vigroux navigate leaps in frequency, or from claustrophobic hiss to echoing expanse, indicates that these artists already know their way around this uneven ground—or at least are coolly unsurprised when the floor gives way beneath them.
The album’s opening track, “Brume,” introduces relatively gentle modulating tones that form a sound somewhere on the outskirts of minimal techno. Dread-suffused drones swirl in, trailing long shadows behind them. “Ne te retourne pas” follows a similar path of submersion, beginning with a pairing of high and low frequencies, then slowly filling the chasm between them with a churning mix of crackling and razor-edged prismatic sounds. Though the record goes on to incorporate more conspicuously harsh textures (on “Luxure,” for example, there’s a measured onslaught of violent mechanical noise), the silences that open up are just as essential and intentional here as the pulses of sound they punctuate.
These studies in absence allow detail to come to the fore; many of the most striking moments on Ignis are the most elemental (it’s fitting that the album’s title is the Latin word for “fire”). Delicate—but never precious—microtones feel like nothing more than dry wisps of electricity. A heavily vocoded vocal on “Un peu après le soleil” is a jarring, if illegible, evocation of language amid a field of near-total abstraction. When a melodic string sound enters at the tail end of “Luceat lux,” a faint hint of color threading in among grayscale texture, it feels like a revelation.
Concerned as it is with fundamental components and the spatial presence of sound, Ignis moves with ease between its emotional and sculptural impulses. As is often my experience with Vainio’s solo work, I find it impossible to listen to music that sounds this cold without reading dread, anger, negativity—and perhaps without experiencing fear at the strangeness of it all, something I’m fairly certain neither Vainio nor Vigroux, who produce and sustain these sounds at a deliberate, exploratory pace, felt.
Though they’re hardly the point, those dark sensations aren’t necessarily irrelevant; rather, they’re another set of elemental components among the many at play on Ignis. And over the course of these six tracks, a reshaping of our associations with such pieces occurs. This transformation coalesces in closer “Feux,” an epic that feels deliriously full after the experiments in restraint that precede it. Vainio and Vigroux’s path to maximalism is an uncommon one, a glowing flame aware of the singe left in its wake. | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cosmo Rhythmatic | July 9, 2018 | 7.8 | 5efeb7e0-e9fa-4ec8-a9e2-30e68df7d167 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
Turning toward improvisation and meditative minimalism, the Los Angeles singer and songwriter’s latest album seeks a release from rational thought. It sounds fluid, sonorous, and free. | Turning toward improvisation and meditative minimalism, the Los Angeles singer and songwriter’s latest album seeks a release from rational thought. It sounds fluid, sonorous, and free. | Julia Holter: Something in the Room She Moves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-holter-something-in-the-room-she-moves/ | Something in the Room She Moves | In early 2020, while Julia Holter worked on a relatively swift follow-up to her 2018 opus, Aviary, two complications arose. The first, a pandemic, you know all about; the second, a lockdown pregnancy—well, just imagine. The shift flung this once prolific singer-songwriter into a period of stops and starts. She stopped performing, of course, and mostly stopped writing songs; perhaps most gravely of all, she stopped reading medieval texts. She started preparing for motherhood, then stopped preparing—motherhood was here! When she finally started recording, exhausted, things often went awry: She would stop singing and start yawning, occasionally dozing at the controls. This was no reflection of the music, though it is true that Something in the Room She Moves dispenses with her usual song and dance, distilling its vexed creation into one long, languorous thought. Stop talking, it suggests, and start listening.
In the 13 years since Tragedy, her audacious, Euripidean debut, Holter has made contrasting demands of listeners. On one hand, her oeuvre has swung toward pop and back again. At the same time, she and her ensemble have charted a broader arc from intention to intuition. After the high-concept early entries—drawn from Hippolytus, from Gigi, the process she calls “remixing texts”—improvisation meandered to the core of Holter’s practice, shepherded by collaborators like bassist Devin Hoff and multi-instrumentalist Tashi Wada.
The Holter of Something in the Room She Moves sounds more determined than ever to renounce conscious authorship. The music—bubbly, nebulous, free—seems to have a mind of its own. The concept, if there is one, borrows the key principle of meditative minimalism: Reduce, reduce, and reduce to lift your spirit higher. Opener “Sun Girl” is the model in miniature, a sprightly little odyssey that could beguile a conservatory crowd but just as easily reduce—or indeed lift—a child to awestruck giggles.
As well as her own daughter, Holter dedicates the album to her late nephew, “a beautiful young human who loved to make art, to debate ideas, and was passionate about socialist politics.” On “Talking to the Whisper,” a moment of devastating brilliance, she draws out distraught pleas—“Heaven can’t take my love”; “Love can be shattering”—but the true climax is a cosmic, wordless breakdown summoning the ecstatic grief of Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness. In her recent live score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc, Holter sought a language of unintelligible chants, including “syllables decapitated from their word context,” to reflect lead actor Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s fidelity to the inexplicable. “Talking to the Whisper,” and Something in the Room She Moves at large, employ a similar lyricism that, like Falconetti’s Joan, evades literal explanation in favor of communion with the sublime.
More readily apparent than any possible themes—motherhood, grief, love, early cognition—is Holter’s wish to evoke the “body’s internal sound world.” The music is fluid, sonorous, and unpredictable; in the middle of several songs, it briefly shuts down altogether. Pitch-bending synths, sparing percussion, and vaporous reverb suspend the songs in a sort of amniotic sac. Yet they pulse with such serene familiarity that, from inside, it feels odd to find them odd. We think of visceral music as gutsy and brash, but Holter has less interest in jolting your system than listening to it with a stethoscope: Hear the cellular rush; the mysterious currents; in “Evening Mood,” a genuine ultrasound heartbeat. Only on “Spinning,” the blissfully adrenalized nerve center, does she reach out to the world and absorb its electric energy.
This record’s closest relative in Holter’s catalog is the 2017 live album In the Same Room, which smelted brassy numbers like “Horns Surrounding Me” into a loungey, jazzy ooze. Casting off theatrical fineries, Holter set her melodies to music that offered questions rather than answers. Though crafted and produced with her usual perfectionism, Something in the Room She Moves feels similarly open-ended, as if preserved in its own potential. A song, in this setting, is not a final document but something to be dredged and excavated like an ancient ruin. The broodier style of composition, or decomposition, conspires with her tone of sing-songy dissociation to emphasize the disconnect between sound, meaning, observation, and whatever bewildering reality might lie underneath.
The longing that runs through all of Holter’s music is, in some sense, a desire to be liberated from the rational. Something in the Room She Moves luxuriates in that spirit of uncertainty; the title track, a magisterial highlight, uses the melisma of a Hindu devotional to evoke a sensation of hovering on the cusp of ecstasy. She has a knack for pinpointing pop melodies in the ether, then playing the vowels like slide whistles, rummaging deep in a word like “around” as if for a missing set of keys.
Having zigzagged between order and disorder, from operatic refinement to clamor and hubbub, Holter sounds happier now to present heady musings with childlike mystification. It’s a contented ambiguity reflected in her attempt to channel oxytocin, the love chemical, through continuous-pitch instruments: The Vangelis-style synths, portamento vocals, and fretless bass, from an agile Hoff, conjure the stuff of the in-between. Rather than choose the black or white keys, Something in the Room She Moves lets us flutter between the notes. | 2024-03-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | March 25, 2024 | 8 | 5eff9924-9aab-4178-b9d8-f7d74b004cd3 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
MIKE’s place in the vanguard of New York underground rap has invigorated him. It would be a stretch to call this album happy, but the atmosphere is undeniably warmer and more hopeful. | MIKE’s place in the vanguard of New York underground rap has invigorated him. It would be a stretch to call this album happy, but the atmosphere is undeniably warmer and more hopeful. | MIKE: Disco! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-disco/ | Disco! | MIKE likes to share new music on June 21 of any given year: Of the seven projects the New York rapper has released since his 2017 breakthrough May God Bless Your Hustle, four were released on the first day of summer. It’s unclear exactly what significance the date holds, but it marks MIKE as a creature of habit. He’s spent the past four years excavating his mind, using raps and soupy beats to sift through trauma and grief, particularly the loss of his mother a couple years ago. It’s as if each new drop is a timestamp of his emotional state, another ring on his tree. On his latest album, Disco!, MIKE finds something that’s eluded him for quite some time: acceptance. It would be a stretch to call this album happy, but the atmosphere is undeniably warmer and more hopeful. He’s no longer drowning in his emotions and wishing for a better tomorrow, as he was on 2020’s weight of the world and 2019’s Tears of Joy; he’s swimming toward the light on the horizon.
Getting there is still work. MIKE’s understanding of this delicate tug-of-war stretches deep into his catalog, but Disco! stands out by being his most confident album yet. Though the beats are another batch of layered sample collages, this time fully self-produced under his dj blackpower pseudonym, they soar more often than they seethe. Many of these songs bask in full-bodied arrangements: shimmering organs on “Aww (Zaza),” twinkling guitar strums and horn stabs fit for a family barbecue on “Leaders of Tomorrow (Intro)” and “Crystal Ball.” Some, like the winding “Endgame,” coax MIKE out of his usual mid-tempo flow to glide over piano keys and a muted drum loop. The beat feels determined to run him off the road, but he maintains his pace while balancing thoughts both sunny and bleak: “My obligation to the rhythm till my chest break.”
Some of these songs feel steeped in the same murky ambience as past projects (“alarmed!” is one of the most arresting songs he’s ever made), but MIKE’s rhythmic passion manifests in a firm self-awareness absent from his earlier work. He hasn’t exactly outrun his demons, but his place in the vanguard of New York’s underground rap scene has invigorated him. He’s as open about his hunger for respect (“You flexing just to stick out, I flex because of great genes”) as he is about his resolution to call his sister more often. The raps about his mother that close out opening track “Evil Eye” are delivered with a conviction that powers through the blurry vocal mixing. On “Aww (Zaza),” you can hear his smile as he declares, “Struggling? Hmm, nah, but I’m recovering.” His gains as a lyricist on Disco! represent the difference between conceptualizing a plan and executing it.
Even with the new steps he’s taken, MIKE still has a few emotional gut punches in store. Some happen so quickly that they don’t register until well after they’ve landed. “Sometimes I thought to take the losses as a gift/’Cause only death will show you how to live, right?” he says without breaking a sweat on “Leaders of Tomorrow.” It isn’t quite as pithy a bar as May God Bless Your Hustle’s “Hunger make you eat your words instead,” but it harnesses the blunt energy of MIKE’s earlier work to illustrate his perspective changing in real time. He’s not living in the past anymore.
“Endgame” opens with a vocal sample that neatly ties up the themes of the album: “How does one illuminate a dark, muddy sky? There’s only one thing left to do; you gotta ram at the darkness with your rhyme,” a woman’s voice says. MIKE’s sky has been overcast for a long time. Like frequent collaborator Navy Blue, he knows there are no shortcuts through the labyrinths of familial trauma and deteriorating mental health. But knowing when to punch through the fog instead of letting it settle around you is key to making it out the other side. In this sense, Disco! is a triumph. It’s less a singing-and-dancing, public reclamation of self than it is a silent disco, a reminder that introspection and consistency can break any curse.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10k | June 23, 2021 | 8 | 5f030924-b06c-472a-aef8-6227303ab59c | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On this live album, based from a 2014 concert film, you can hear the Postal Service transform from an idea to a band. | On this live album, based from a 2014 concert film, you can hear the Postal Service transform from an idea to a band. | The Postal Service: Everything Will Change | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-postal-service-everything-will-change/ | Everything Will Change | They might pal around with Huey Lewis now, but the Postal Service were once considered ahead of their time. Their collaboration, in which they sent each other digital files, is routine today but felt futuristic then, even though they relied on snail mail and not the cloud. Songs from their one and only studio album, 2003’s Give Up, were used by countless commercials and indie films striving to seem hip, lending an imprimatur of subcultural currency for a few years when, no kidding, bookish tenderness could seem almost radical. Nine years later, the album officially went platinum.
When Sub Pop reissued Give Up as an expanded, 10th-anniversary edition, the record’s winsome twinkle was undimmed, and the reunited trio—Death Cab for Cutie singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard, Rilo Kiley leader Jenny Lewis, and glitchy electronic producer Jimmy Tamborello— headed out to play in front of the adoring crowds that had swelled during their long absence. A concert film from that tour, 2014’s Everything Will Change, showed that far from being Friendster-age relics, these songs still resonated deeply, and they had more to say.
Everything Will Change, the live album that recently landed on streaming services, is an audio version of that concert film, captured over two nights at Berkeley, California’s outdoor Greek Theatre. The 2014 film, interspersed with lighthearted if mostly unrevealing interview footage, demonstrated that a decade-old band anchored by a guy on a laptop had turned, improbable though it may once have seemed, into a consummate live act. You can’t see Lewis playing electric guitar with her teeth here, and the goofy interludes with Gibbard shooting hoops at Barclays Center are definitely kaputt. But these 17-year-old songs have time-traveled again, coming back to us during an age of silent performance spaces. A belated afterthought of a live album can’t compete with a concert film, any more than a concert film can live up to the real deal, but as a document of transformation, the record more than succeeds.
The Postal Service’s most joyful song, “Such Great Heights,” is in a sense about the impossibility of capturing the moment, and then trying through technology to defy those limits. Gibbard attempts “to leave this all on your machine” and ends up being unsatisfied with the low fidelity; at the same time, computer wizardry allows Gibbard to sing the song’s breathlessly overlapping verses without pausing for air. Live shows, like live albums, also rely on technical sleight-of-hand, but the presumed presence of an audience, gathered in real time, is transformative. When the Postal Service do “Such Great Heights” on Everything Will Change, near end of their main set, Gibbard relies on pre-recorded backing vocal, but the interplay between fans and band—feverish handclaps, round of applause for the stabbing guitar solo—has an almost alchemical effect. “Up until now, it’s just been a number of records sold and this potential to be a real band that we never really achieved,” Gibbard says in the concert film. Everything Will Change documents the Postal Service being made real onstage.
What little evidence remains of their early gigs suggests that the rudiments of the Postal Service’s compelling live show were already in place during their months-long initial run through small venues. Lewis ramps up the drama with her screen-kid star quality —in the film, she refers to herself as Gibbard’s “foil”—while his regular mid-song moves behind the drum kit brings needed dynamism. Fast-forward to the shows presented on Everything Will Change, and both players were seasoned festival warriors. Tamborello, along with working his trusty laptop, also rifles between melodica and Vocoder-style singing; when his unprocessed vocal makes a rare, bashful entrance, on climate-change reverie “Sleeping In,” there are wild cheers. Touring multi-instrumentalist Laura Burhenn, of Omaha indie-folk band the Mynabirds, rounds out the mix with keys, vibraphone, and backing vocals, particularly crucial for the multi-part call-and-response of songs like the weirdly romantic prepper fantasy “We Will Become Silhouettes.” Each well-known song is punched up, reinvigorated, and stretched out for wider spaces.
These accomplished performances give new life to recordings that for so long lived mainly in headphones. Melancholy, uptempo songs like “The District Sleeps Alone” or “Clark Gable”—the latter is the one where Gibbard unforgettably sings that he wants “life in every word/To the extent that it’s absurd”—grow into noise-streaked dance parties, as if fellow sentimental robots Hot Chip crashed a New Order show. A slower, more textured song like “Recycled Air” turns gorgeously lush, Yo La Tengo ba-ba-bas draped in Stereolab electro-frippery. Best of all is the self-aware back-and-forth of “Nothing Better.” Gibbard, as the besotted lover who can’t admit that he’s been dumped, might be positioned as the protagonist here—“Who here has had their heart taken out of their chest and stomped on?” he asks, by way of introduction—but Lewis’s nonchalant delivery as she shreds his oppressive wedding-bell delusions is simply exquisite. Gibbard can’t help but break down, laughing.
A clever setlist helps. The lone cover, a masterful Postal Service-ization of Beat Happening’s “Our Secret”—described by Gibbard here as “the greatest band in the world,” with Lewis on drums—draws a connection to the Pacific Northwest indie-pop legends’ deceptively simple, conversational yet suggestive pop storytelling and the Postal Service’s own. The encore begins with a “‘Heroes’”ed-out take on what true fans know is the original Postal Service song, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” a collaboration between Gibbard and Tamborello’s Dntel project that foreshadowed their band.
Everything Will Change’s title phrase, the final refrain from utopian love song “Brand New Colony,” might’ve lodged itself in fewer heads than other Give Up lines, like “everything looks perfect from far away” or “your heart won’t heal right/If you keep tearing out the sutures.” But it hits hard as an encore-concluding, 8,500-strong audience singalong. Crowd participation can be cheesy, but listening to these en masse, near-a cappella voices, all holding forth about the inevitability of transience, it doesn’t feel that way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | December 19, 2020 | 7.8 | 5f05639d-d457-40cb-a5e4-270cfa4fd146 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
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 third album from the radical rap-rock band, their sharpest revolutionary screed dropped into the dead zone of 1999. | 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 third album from the radical rap-rock band, their sharpest revolutionary screed dropped into the dead zone of 1999. | Rage Against the Machine: The Battle of Los Angeles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rage-against-the-machine-the-battle-of-los-angeles/ | The Battle of Los Angeles | Golden hour took over Los Angeles as Rage Against the Machine marched onto a small stage in a sanctioned protest zone across from the Staples Center, where President Clinton was about to deliver the keynote address at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Thousands of young Angelenos packed into the area to scream along to the quartet’s final live performance before a seven-year hiatus. From the stage, guitarist Tom Morello could see a big screen outside the coliseum showing Hillary and Bill giving their speeches while their guests sipped champagne and dunked shrimp into ramekins of cocktail sauce. In his strident call to action, Zack de la Rocha introduced the concert from the stage: “Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked!”
Not only did the ad-hoc concert fit neatly into Rage’s political animus, but it was also a microcosm for American activism writ large in the 1990s: a multiracial group of pro-revolutionary leftists vs. the white figurehead of elite neoliberalism. The two sides flexed and preened for their respective crowds, separated by a tall barbed-wire fence and a phalanx of riot police armed with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. For concerned parents asking their teenagers exactly whom this band was raging against—Know what enemy? Fuck who I won’t do what who tells me?—on this afternoon in August, the answer was right there, standing at a podium, speaking to his delegates, with silver hair and an Arkansas drawl.
Backstage, Morello gave an interview about why this ostensibly liberal band had shown up to protest the coronation of the ostensibly liberal Democratic nominee, Al Gore. “He’s practically indistinguishable from a President George Bush,” Morello said with unequivocal bravado. “They’re both pro-death penalty, both pro-NAFTA, both pro-big business...I don’t feel represented by either one.” When the band kicked into “Guerilla Radio,” the lead single from their third album, 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, de la Rocha said as much—including a line about the Republican nominee, branding Bush as the offspring of the corrupt former head of the CIA: “More for Gore or the son of a drug lord/None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord!” A film crew’s birds-eye camera view revealed five mosh pits going off simultaneously.
On The Battle of Los Angeles, Rage made clear the aim and origin of their anger, especially for those who didn’t surf to ratm.com in the ’90s to learn the word “praxis” from an animated gif. Here they cast their gaze back through history to reel in half a millennia of theft, enslavement, and slaughter at the hands of the colonial state in the Americas. The gravity of hip-hop and the thick brow of metal met the sincere gaze of radical politics, creating an album that upended the prevailing critical idea of what good rock music should be doing. It was obvious, didactic, heavy-handed, bluntly delivered to the thick of the nation, because you don’t overthrow a racist police state with weepy songs about feeling alienated by technology. What better place than here, what better time than now to empty the missile silos at the so-called New Democrats and crypto-fascist Republicans, to give the opposition contour and dimension, to even embody it themselves, to show the world what an autonomous, dignified life could possibly look like.
“There was this interesting thing that was happening during the Clinton administration,” de la Rocha would later tell the Los Angeles Times. “People were looking inward and not outward, and not addressing what was going on.” The malaise of the ’90s—a tone set by the self-defeatist laconism of Gen X—settled in during eight years of relative peace and economic prosperity under Clinton. While the bull market lined the pockets of the growing professional class, Clinton’s legislative victories broke from traditional liberal values and ballooned inequality in America. His disastrous welfare reform gutted the core tenet of the New Deal; his administration deregulated banking, allowing the most powerful financial institutions to amass unseen amounts of capital until they were “too big to fail” in the crash of 2008; they passed the abhorrent 1994 crime bill, the most sweeping in American history, a steroid injection to the carceral state that put thousands of disproportionately Black men into newly constructed prisons and increased the number of federal death penalty cases from three to 60.
Most egregiously, and perhaps most important to Rage lore, was the North American Free Trade Agreement. The treaty sought to accelerate the economy by opening borders between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. In doing so, it moved profit away from workers and their communities toward business owners and shareholders, all while crippling unions and the American labor force, who could now be replaced by unconscionably cheap labor. For Mexico, free trade was seen as—and has proven to be—economically devastating: Some two million Mexican farmers have lost their land in the age of NAFTA. Indigenous workers, like those in the southernmost state of Chiapas who faced the importation of corporate American agribusiness, predicted correctly that “free trade” would decimate their heritage and livelihood.
And so on January 1st, 1994—the day NAFTA went into effect—hundreds of men, women, and children emerged from the Lacandon jungle and the canyons of Chiapas as a guerilla army and demanded autonomy from the Mexican government. Marking 500 years of genocide against indigenous peoples by colonial rule, the workers wanted control of their Mayan land and their food; they wanted democracy, peace, and justice on their own terms. They called themselves the Zapatistas (the armed faction is known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN) and carried a flag bearing a single red star centered against a black background—the same insignia that peppers Rage iconography and stage shows. The Zapatistas’ bandoliers and rifles (some real, many fake) were a theatrical show of military might, but their real power lay in their philosophy, called Zapatismo, and the writings and speeches of the group’s de facto leader, Subcomandante Marcos.
Quixotic, pseudonymous, and filmed wearing a balaclava smoking a pipe, Marcos spoke in winding allegory and professorial verse about the revolution of the Zapatistas. The Zapatista revolution was not for them, but for the greater world. “Para todos todo, para nosotros nada,” goes the most famous Zapatismo maxim, “For everyone everything, for us nothing.” As Alex Khasnabish, a professor and researcher of radical collectives, explained in one of Rage’s unauthorized biographies, Know Your Enemy, the cornerstone of Zapatismo is this: “Rather than insisting that you support [the Zapatistas], they want you to struggle in your own way, in your own place, with your own commitment to dignity in a revolution that makes sense to you and the people around you.” The grandiloquent ideas of the Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos took on the hue of surrealism and romance, a way of sounding a revolution through the tones and rhythms of language.
At heart, the music of Rage Against the Machine is a direct extension of Zapatismo: paradoxical, militaristic, generous, a conduit for power, not a concentration of it. De la Rocha visited Chiapas four times between 1995 and 1996, working closely with the Zapatistas and strengthening his connection to his Mexican heritage (his Sinaloan grandfather fought in the Mexican Revolution). These trips helped shape the idea of revolutionary bridge-building, of connecting the struggle of one to the many. “I think every revolutionary act is an act of love,” de la Rocha told Rolling Stone in 1999. “Every song that I’ve written, it is because of my desire to use music as a way to empower and re-humanize people who are living in a dehumanizing setting.”
On its surface, it was easy to classify Rage as music for teenagers staging a leafy suburban rebellion against their parents or doing curls in the squat rack. But by The Battle of Los Angeles, Rage had ascended to something far more personal, spiritual, and bohemian. If 1996’s Evil Empire came with a leftist library starter pack, Battle came with a politics of emotion, music that was nimble and serious. In her book Hope in the Dark, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit describes the words of Subcomandante Marcos as “the language of the vast, nameless, current movement that globalization has drawn together, a movement...driven by imaginations as supple as art rather than as stiff as dogma.” It is from this delicate branch of politics that Zack de la Rocha’s words were formed.
In 1999, however, the context in which most people engaged with The Battle of Los Angeles was not through the insurrectionary poetry of Subcomandante Marcos or a readily accessible anti-globalization platform. The album was released in the last gasp of the monoculture, dropped into the scum pond of rock’s commercial nadir. Korn led the nu-metal charge on radio, while Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock were rap-rocking without cause on TRL. There were only a few American anti-war protests against Clinton bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan or the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (in the press throughout the late-’90s, Morello would often parry a journalist’s question about, say, the violence at Woodstock ’99 with an indictment of Clinton’s warmongering, like his “Tomahawk missile [that] destroyed the children’s hospital outside Belgrade”). There were no wars predicated on a lie about weapons of mass destruction, no social media to disseminate revolutionary tweets to the masses, just pockets of left-wing activism fighting against the WTO in Seattle and the IMF in D.C. as Creed’s Human Clay sat atop the charts.
The benefit of Rage reentering the mainstream during this odd musical and socio-political dead zone was that they sounded both nostalgic and of the moment. They had cleared the way for nu-metal and rap-rock with their first two albums, 1992’s groundbreaking self-titled debut and 1996’s angsty and downtrodden Evil Empire, both of which eventually went triple platinum. When they swung back in with The Battle of Los Angeles, it was like a reminder of the prophecy they foretold at the beginning of the decade. Once iconoclastic rap-rock alchemists, Rage now sounded pretty much like what was on the radio. Moreover, they sounded like the same band they always were but more lethal, more agile, able to fully disarm with a verse and a hook. “What I did a lot on [Evil Empire] was, ‘This is what I think. This is my comment,’” de la Rocha told Rolling Stone. “I’ve had to change. I want people to see reflections of themselves in the songs.” His personal accountability fit squarely with the Zapatista ethos of wanting people to create a revolution in their own way, now bolstered with songs that moved quicker, had bigger hooks, and carried more weight than anything Rage had ever written.
It took nearly a year for de la Rocha to complete all the vocals on Battle, during which he gravitated to another plane of rapping. He is exacting and dynamic, the generalissimo’s preacher. On “Calm Like a Bomb,” he loops himself around the band in long ribbons of verse: “I be walkin’ God like a dog/My narrative fearless/My word war returns to burn like Baldwin home from Paris.” Then on the pre-chorus, as the band lurches into their signature mosh-rock cadence, de la Rocha hugs the turn on two wheels to deliver this slinky triplet: “What ya say, what ya say, what ya say, what!” When the chorus hits, it does exactly what he says: “Ignite!” The chameleonic ease with which de la Rocha slides between rap, funk, and rock on “Calm Like a Bomb” is indicative of the band’s full symbiosis of all those genres on Battle; a chemical compound perfected, a longshot theory finally proved.
With Brad Wilk on the drums and Tim Commerford on the bass, Rage cut deep into the groove. The verse of “Sleep Now in the Fire” is the rhythm section at its best: the feel has that crab-creep shuffle with Wilk and Commerford laying down an “Amen break” while Morello makes his guitar sound like a British dial tone. The formula of Rage’s rhythm section can be largely predictable—hushed intro, blues riffs, experimental sound-bed under the verse, more blues riffs, wacky guitar solo, breakdown with blues riffs—but there’s just enough variety and mobility to let de la Rocha be the star. He’ll blow a word out of his mouth in a huff with big pockets of air in his cheeks, or he’ll wrap his throat around a word like a snake, sucking the air out of it. The space he leaves between the names of Columbus’ ships, the trilled “r” on “Maria,” the oddly swung rhythm of a line dripping with sarcasm—“So raise your fist and march around just don’t take what you need”—sometimes there are more ideas in the rhythm of his raps than the raps themselves.
When the band was on tour with Gang Starr, DJ Premier told Spin that he’d try to get a remix of a new Rage song onto rap radio, but that it might not be as easy as it was with Fred Durst. “Zack is trying to penetrate the whole soul… he’s speaking the real, and that takes longer to sink in.” One of the band’s longest-running causes célèbres was the fight for the freedom of Black Panther and radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal—who, it is widely believed, was unfairly convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. “Long as the rope is tight around Mumia’s neck/Let there be no rich white life we bound to respect,” de la Rocha stage-whispers on “Voice of the Voiceless,” a short ode to Mumia’s struggle. While the phrase “Free Mumia” became something of an activist meme in the ’90s, Rage never took his sham trial or his then-impending death sentence for granted (Mumia’s execution case was dropped in 2011 and he is now serving life without parole). In January 1999, Rage threw an infamous benefit concert in New Jersey that raised $80,000 for Mumia and sparked a media war between a right-wing cop union and the band. And in April of the same year, de la Rocha flew to Geneva, Switzerland to speak on Mumia’s behalf at the International Commission of Human Rights.
Each song on Battle comes from an outgrowth of personal political conviction. Rage weren’t fretting from afar and hoping for change like Live Aid; de la Rocha was writing about the abject horror of immigrant sweatshop labor on “Maria” after Morello was arrested demonstrating against sweatshops in Santa Monica in 1997. De la Rocha wrote of the wealth inequality he saw in his hometown of L.A. (“Born as Ghosts”) and a final salvo about the Zapatistas’ struggle on “War Within a Breath,” the last in a series of songs about the Zapatistas stretching back to Evil Empire. Hidden in that track is a brief line that could be the album’s subheadline: “It’s a war from the depth of time.”
Perhaps most striking is “Born of a Broken Man,” a slow dirge cut from the cloth of Black Sabbath about de la Rocha’s father, the artist and muralist Beto de la Rocha. Beto was a member of the landmark Chicano painting collective Los Four; in 1974, he was one of the first Chicano artists to be exhibited at the L.A. County Museum of Art. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1981, Beto fell into a destructive spiral of religious fanaticism. He would fast for weekends, sometimes making a young Zack fast beside him. One night, in a fit of anger and guilt, Beto destroyed over half of his paintings in front of his son. “Born of a broken man, but not a broken man,” Zack screams of complicated pride on the hook.
The anomaly of “Born of a Broken Man,” the only Rage song that ever pulled directly from de la Rocha’s personal life, lends emotional credence to the political screeds around it—“harangue’n’roll” as Rolling Stone once derisively tagged the band. Few bands have been given more purity tests than Rage Against the Machine over the years, but the question inevitably arises with any group that stakes their identity on revolutionary thought and leftist causes: Do you buy it? You know these avowed socialists are signed to Epic, a multinational major label, right? They made millions of dollars from record sales, and Battle debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, just as Evil Empire did in 1996. Are they redistributing their wealth? When de la Rocha left the band in October of 2000, he hinted at his own discomfort, saying that the group’s decision-making process had “undermined our artistic and political ideal.” How do you square the band’s leftist ideology with the defanged arena rock of Audioslave in the ensuing years?
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for buying into Rage Against the Machine is simply their name. All these years later, it has curdled into something sophomoric, trite, somehow too specific and too vague at the same time. If it is an albatross around the band’s neck, it’s created a tautology that has forced them to stay true to themselves: The immutable law of a Rage Against the Machine album is that it must, by nature, rage against the machine. And so inherent in their silly band name lies the uncynical, righteous, and repetitious work of activism and fighting for justice, the search for the will to continue even when it seems like the battle is lost.
“I’m not buying this bullshit line that says the situation in Chiapas or with Mumia or with the garment workers somehow has nothing to do with middle-class white kids at our shows,” de la Rocha told Spin in 2000. “All this alienation has roots; it’s not just TV or boredom or bad parents.” This was the great ambition of The Battle of Los Angeles, and perhaps Rage itself: to draw a line between their millions of Gen X and Millennial fans and the causes they fought for, from conquistadors to Clinton, from the Intifada to the Zapatistas, from Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the end of the Cold War was the “end of history” to the spark of the anti-globalization movement around the world. Battle revealed the extent—chronologically and geographically—to which none of us live with dignity. They showed us this is a war we can’t win but it’s a war we don’t deserve to lose.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing a New York police officer in 1981.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | August 9, 2020 | 8.7 | 5f080695-9ae8-4eca-9403-16e1f6a728ec | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
Holed up in his DIY inventor’s laboratory, VanGaalen delivers his most abrasive, unstable collection in years. Even this notorious Canadian recluse can't stop a little apocalyptic dread from creeping in. | Holed up in his DIY inventor’s laboratory, VanGaalen delivers his most abrasive, unstable collection in years. Even this notorious Canadian recluse can't stop a little apocalyptic dread from creeping in. | Chad VanGaalen: World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chad-vangaalen-worlds-most-stressed-out-gardener/ | World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener | Chad VanGaalen's creative habits seem conveniently pandemic-proof. The Calgary songwriter, animator, and all-purpose eccentric has been hunkered down, making records by himself in his home studio and creative den, Yoko Eno, since long before he had a public health reason to do so. The place is a bit of an inventor’s laboratory where you’re liable to find anything from an ancient Korg monosynth to a homemade instrument known as a “Barnswallow,” and it’s where VanGaalen has been building fragmented noise-pop songs that burrow deep into his colorful subconscious since 2011’s excellent Diaper Island.
But on World's Most Stressed Out Gardener—his eighth studio album, if you count last year’s Bandcamp-only Lost Harmonies, and sixth for Sub Pop—even a homebody like VanGaalen can’t stop a bit of apocalyptic dread from the outside world creeping in. On “Nothing Is Strange,” a gorgeous, rickety ballad on par with Diaper Island’s “Sara” or Soft Airplane’s similarly themed “Rabid Bits of Time,” VanGaalen spins a Beetlejuice-like tale of wondering if he’s already died. “Turn up the radio/I think we’re dead,” he sings, his voice garbled and decaying. Then there’s “Nightwaves,” a clattering rocker in which VanGaalen reckons with the intoxicating hum of endless doom-scrolling: “Everybody’s getting high on the same pain,” he scowls. “I can’t feel a thing.”
Named for the musician’s fondness for growing vegetables in his backyard and gobbling them raw, like a grazing animal, World's Most Stressed Out Gardener is an odd, abrasive record, even by VanGaalen’s standards. It’s also the first to draw significant influence from his side hustle creating instrumental scores for Adult Swim shows. The record opens with “Spider Milk,” a curdled psych-folk fantasy that short-circuits into a screeching rock climax worthy of those VanGaalen-produced Women records, before going medieval with “Flute Peace,” a 46-second overture apparently rescued from VanGaalen’s aborted plans for a minimalist flute album. If that sounds punishing, the album’s other two instrumental offerings—“Earth From a Distance” and “Plant Music”—are thankfully much better: soft-focus mood pieces fit for a 1980s sci-fi movie score.
VanGaalen unleashes a more aggressive alien energy on “Starlight” and “Inner Fire,” dark krautrock workouts in which the singer sounds less like a DIY dude than a wild-eyed cult leader. He also retains his flair for oddball instrumentation: “Starlight” squeezes creepy sounds from what sounds like a babbling autoharp, while “Samurai Sword” features the clanging accompaniment of copper plumbing pipes being played as a xylophone. It’s occasionally scattershot, but the songwriter's refusal to streamline his weirdness is a gift.
The throughline, as ever, is VanGaalen’s knack for crafting emotionally resonant songs out of absurd premises—be it a vision of a magical pear (“Golden Pear”) or a search for a misplaced samurai sword ("Samurai Sword")—as well as his feverishly active subconscious. For years, he’s borrowed from his own dreams for prime material; there was 2004’s “Blood Machine,” about a bunch of people’s hearts plugged into a machine for circulating blood, and 2014’s “Weird Love,” in which he described a dream about plants talking. When Chad VanGaalen runs out of bizarre dreams to write songs about, that’s when he’ll know it’s time to pack it in.
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. | 2021-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 19, 2021 | 7.3 | 5f0a2b8a-0471-450f-8c01-ed7d28fc3796 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The latest from the Canadian band finds them having fun and adding more danceable beats to the equation. It’s a more extroverted record that touches on the artisanal indie genres one has come to expect from this band. | The latest from the Canadian band finds them having fun and adding more danceable beats to the equation. It’s a more extroverted record that touches on the artisanal indie genres one has come to expect from this band. | Stars: No One Is Lost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19924-stars-no-one-is-lost/ | No One Is Lost | Stars would likely be flattered if you called them “pop” and honored if you called them “sophisticated.” You shouldn’t have to choose between the two; as their previous collaborator/remixer Owen Pallett will be more than happy to tell you, a lot of science goes into bubblegum. But since their 2004 breakthrough Set Yourself on Fire, Stars made those terms seem mutually exclusive, as their charms were obscured by haughty thematic concepts (In Our Bedroom After the War), doughy orchestration (The Five Ghosts) or astonishing self-regard (the abominable remix LP Do You Trust Your Friends?). Fortunately, by 2012’s The North, Stars decided to have fun again (or for the first time) and No One Is Lost finds them chasing base thrills with more even more gusto. But in micromanaging every celebratory aspect, it raises the question of whether a party is still a party if Stars run through it.
As opposed to its nostalgic predecessor, No One Is Lost concerns itself with forward momentum, beginning with its serendipitous recording atop the Royal Phoenix, a now-shuttered Montreal gay disco. While the Phoenix was still in business, the bass would make its way up to Stars' studio and they were motivated to “out-throb the throb.” And some of No One Is Lost qualifies as danceable, if not exactly “dance music.” It’s simply a more extroverted look at the artisanal indie genres that one has come to expect from this band—melodramatic, Smiths-derived jangle, sophistipop, blue-eyed Motown—though they strew triplet bass drum across the straight soul-clap of “A Stranger” like they might’ve heard DJ Rashad at some point.
More to the point, the narrators of No One Is Lost abide by a fatalism that’s the closest thing we’ll probably get to actual optimism on a Stars record: something along the lines of, you’ll probably have to spend most of your days in a shit job or a boring relationship, so make the night count. That’s the message of six-minute mission statement “From the Night”, and as far as Canadian indie collectives paying homage to the transformative powers of sundown by fusing arena rock and Gloria Estefan, well...it’s at least in the top two from the past year. But even if Stars can never truly cut loose, they can offer the crowd an honest hands-up chorus and lack the earnestness that made Arcade Fire’s costume parties sound stiff.
But as the album progresses, that becomes a liability. If not earnestness, you wish Stars could demonstrate the same kind of black-and-white, life-or-death stakes in their music as their Montreal neighbors. If you’re gonna espouse a “live fast, die young” philosophy, you have to sound like you believe it too. This is less of a problem when Stars engage in their usual, theatrical songwriting constructs and set pieces. The he-said, she-said between Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan is too comfy to generate much friction at this point, although the possible songwriting-as-lovemaking metaphor of “You Keep Coming Up” ("You gotta give it away/ So you can get it for free") does at least provide wincing awkwardness.
But when No One Is Lost tries to blend in with the youth, Stars sound like professors rather than participants. The schoolyard shouts of “Turn It Up” sound out of character in all aspects, though at least the title refers to the radio and not the 2013 colloquialism. And while “Trap Door” contains the most elegant choral melody, Campbell’s critiques of hedonism’s inherent hollowness come off as smug, sounding like someone who’s writing about the idea of it rather than the experience—“the kids in VIP are all looking for a family/ Their teeth are made of gold but their wallets are empty.” Gold teeth? Does Campbell still think people party like it's 1999?
That's a more egregious example of how Stars' lyrics are pithy, but facile, lacking any kind of edge. The most problematic one comes when Stars deliver what should be the mic-drop, valedictory address during the title track: “Put your hands up because everybody dies.” It reminds you that irony pervades this album from its title on down and that Campbell feels the best way to cope with the pervasive disorientation of being alive is, “To get arseholed and listen to Dionne Warwick,” another arch quote demonstrating how “fuck it” is so carefully curated here. Is No One Is Lost even an album meant to be listened to in the very situations it writes about? While a fine enough record in its own right, it’s more suited to fostering a discussion about the theoretical implications of our collective, impending doom than celebrating it. | 2014-10-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | ATO | October 13, 2014 | 5.8 | 5f0dd2d3-3c41-44a0-a471-4c642013046e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Seattle electro-pop duo Crater populate their debut album with distant couples who hide behind glowing screens, barely speaking, and veiling their limited exchanges in so many layers of irony that they can hardly decode each other when they speak. | The Seattle electro-pop duo Crater populate their debut album with distant couples who hide behind glowing screens, barely speaking, and veiling their limited exchanges in so many layers of irony that they can hardly decode each other when they speak. | Crater: Talk to Me So I Can Fall Asleep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21620-talk-to-me-so-i-can-fall-asleep/ | Talk to Me So I Can Fall Asleep | Most of us have experienced the annoyance of dining with someone who won’t put down their phone, even as we’d rather be on our phones ourselves, but few musicians have captured that feeling of hypocritical frustration as acutely as Crater’s Ceci Gomez and Kessiah Gordon. The Seattle electro-pop duo populate their debut album Talk to Me So I Can Fall Asleep with distant couples who hide behind glowing screens, barely speaking, and veiling their limited exchanges in so many layers of irony that they can hardly decode each other when they speak.
On opener "Crater Head," the duo single out a culprit behind this lonely existence: "I blame the Internet," they sing. At first the line reads like a joke, a dig at the Internet using the quippy language of the Internet, but with each repeated listen it sounds more like a genuine thesis statement. Talk to Me is filled with lyrics like this, little asides that seem cheeky or aloof until suddenly they don't anymore.
Gomez and Gordon cast their stones knowing full well they live in a glass house. The Internet has fostered a generation of jaded, apathetic cynics, and they're just as driftless and disaffected as anybody else. Gomez spends "Habits Die Slow" drawing on a sleeping lover's face because she's bored, then getting stoned and blowing off what few weekend responsibilities she had. Mostly she just sits around, watching her relationship rot but doing nothing to stop it, like her life is a TV show and Netflix keeps auto-playing the next episode without her so much as pressing a button.
Crater’s music has been labeled as industrial, but that term suggests a level of aggression even the group's most beat-heavy tracks never quite muster. For the most part, Talk to Me is too dreamy and congenial, too good-humored, to be industrial. The album's early highlight "Ain't Right" is a straight pop song, so personable and deliriously catchy it could be a Tegan and Sara single, right down to the perky new-wave guitars and merrily self-loathing chorus.
That song delivers such a dopamine rush you spend the rest of the album hoping there might be another just like it. There isn't, but what follows is pretty good in its own right. "Lucky Lucy" rocks a heavy "Safety Dance" keyboard lick, while "Summer Skin" and "Hardly at All" both boil over with feverish trip-hop beats. "Holy Ground" and "Sick Sad World," meanwhile, each rotate around frigid basslines caked in the frost of an early Cure album. The record thrives on these sorts of hot and cold extremes. Some passages swell with emotion; others are dispassionately robotic. Most songs find room for both.
The last record to cycle through electronic, post-punk, dub, and R&B textures with this kind of assured dream logic was Warpaint's self-titled album. Warpaint is nominally a rock band and Crater is nominally an electronic act, but both share a gift for creating intrigue that makes even their patchier songs fascinating to hear unfold. Both acts also cultivate cooler-than-thou personas seemingly for the sake of deflating them, letting their guard down during unexpected moments of vulnerability. One of Talk to Me's most poignant ones comes on the hard-thumping closer "Brew," when Gomez cuts through the bullshit and finally spells out her relationship desires: "Won't you take good care of me and we can dance for each other?" And while we don't learn if her request is answered, the sheer act of making it feels like a step in the right direction: no mind games, no Internet speak—just an open plea for a meaningful connection. There's no guarantee of reciprocity, but it's a start. | 2016-02-24T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2016-02-24T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Help Yourself | February 24, 2016 | 6.5 | 5f105c71-557c-4f88-80bf-df8896c9d846 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The unlikely collaboration between the vaporwave producer and the 311 frontman feels as natural as a wedge of lime and a bottle of Corona—equal parts basic and deeply satisfying. | The unlikely collaboration between the vaporwave producer and the 311 frontman feels as natural as a wedge of lime and a bottle of Corona—equal parts basic and deeply satisfying. | George Clanton / Nick Hexum: George Clanton & Nick Hexum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-clanton-nick-hexum-george-clanton-and-nick-hexum/ | George Clanton & Nick Hexum | George Clanton knows how this looks, and he doesn’t particularly care. The Virginia-born musician has never hidden his love for 311 or the band’s co-frontman, Nick Hexum, despite how much it might confuse his fans, onlookers, and anyone else wondering how someone involved with the evolution of a niche form of electronic music (vaporwave, in Clanton’s case) ended up making a record with the dude who sang “Amber.” “They say, ‘I think it’s so funny that you make fun of 311!,’” he once told an interviewer, before clarifying, “I’m not making fun of 311. I love this stuff.”
That much is obvious. George Clanton & Nick Hexum was custom-built to showcase the things that Hexum has always done well—his gorgeous vocal harmonies, catholic taste, and, perhaps more than anything, his ability to articulate his desire to be your best bud; it could only be the product of someone who has spent meaningful time with 311’s lengthy discography. Freed from the pressures of his band’s legacy and the expectations of their still-significant fanbase, or else just more willing to get really stoned before recording than he usually is, Hexum sounds more comfortable in his skin than he has since he first jumped out of it on 1993’s “Hydroponic.” As a result, this pairing feels as natural as a wedge of lime and a bottle of Corona, equal parts basic and deeply satisfying on a hot day.
While Clanton’s music has long been haunted by the digital saudade that is a hallmark of the genre, his maximalist “vaporwave opera” Slide was built up to an at-times-staggering scale, bringing to mind My Bloody Valentine nearly as often as Macintosh Plus. With Hexum, he dials back the scope of the production without losing any of the emotional charge. At heart, Hexum is a songwriter in the classic mold, the kind of guy to put out a soul-jazz record with the regrettable title My Shadow Pages, and the formality of his writing keeps Clanton’s productions from sprawling. The concision of these songs reflects the “heavy positivity”that he’s worked hard for over the years, and which he’s made into 311’s ideological centerpiece.
But that discipline doesn’t stop these two from playing around. Clanton runs a dragnet through the post-“Loser” stream of mid-’90s alt-rock, gathering together the kinds of choppy breakbeats and disorienting samples that made temporary stars of artists like Primitive Radio Gods, Soul Coughing, Eels, The Verve, Luscious Jackson, Butthole Surfers, and any number of other (unfairly or not) cast-off artists whose combined aesthetic did as much to define the era as any of Seattle’s best. He refashions these discarded ideas into his most accessible—and fun—music to date, turning a questionable pan-pipe chime into a new-age jam for the standout “Crash Pad,” which Hexum happily spangles with a lip-smacking auto-wah guitar line. It’s as if Enigma rewrote “Return to Innocence” for a Zac Efron beach caper.
Though he’s made it clear that his partner did the lion’s share of the work here, Hexum is clearly the star, albeit an unlikely one. While the last few years have seen artists like Korn, Sublime, and the Dave Matthews Band reassessed and accepted as key influences on a younger generation of artists, Hexum and 311 are harder to pin down. The SoCal-via-Omaha quintet have never quite fit into any milieu: They were too happy for the alt-rock boom, too sincere for third-wave ska, and they’re just a little too smart for the reggae-rock kooks—from Dirty Heads to Pepper to Magic!—getting barreled in their wake. Appropriately for a band so closely associated with being on vacation, they come across as perpetual tourists to the casual listener, which makes them difficult to take seriously. Point to their graceful melodies, pop instincts, dubby experiments, and bodacious grooves all you want, you’ll still sound like someone insisting you gotta try the coconut shrimp at Sandals Montego Bay.
It’s worth wondering, then, whether Hexum is an unwitting cog in a complex machine built to exploit the subversive joy of liking something you’re not supposed to; “maybe I represent it a little bit harder because I like to get a rise out of people,” Clanton admits in that same interview. Hexum had never even heard of vaporwave until meeting Clanton backstage a couple of years ago, and part of the pleasure of this album does come from the very specific frisson of hearing a somewhat-forgotten icon of the ’90s sing over beats seemingly made from old 7-Up commercials and X-Games soundtracks.
But Hexum is an eager and present collaborator, and he neatly sidesteps his own novelty by indulging in nostalgia of his own. He sings gamely about a past spent sleeping on the floor of a run-down Hollywood apartment and driving a “rattling Corolla rusted out behind the tires” on “Out of the Blue,” and fizzes about the rush of young love on “Under Your Window” over a giddy little beat that’s part “Steal My Sunshine” and part “Baby Baby.” He’s spent the last 30 years vocally sparring with 311’s S.A. Martinez, and he treats Clanton’s beats the same way, ducking around the gaps in the production and finding the swing where it doesn’t seem like it should exist. Even when Clanton takes him through a series of nightlife scenes in “Driving in My Car,” he shows up ready to roll, skanking through with a guitar line that manages to sound like Lynval Golding, Nile Rodgers, and King Krule as the context shifts.
Precisely because these two sound so at ease as a team, the album fails when they begin to drift back to their innate tendencies. Both penultimate track “Time of Wandering” and closer “Shouldnta Done That” feature Hexum as balladeer, as if he couldn’t quite make it to the end of the album without reverting to statement mode; with its vocal stacks and starswept melody, the former comes off like Fleet Foxes covering The Greatest Showman over a 2 Skinnee J’s beat, while Clanton turns in a half-baked Slide retread for the latter. It’s disappointing to hear them both return to type, particularly given how contagious their joy is when they’re splashing around in the shallows together. Hexum has spoken compellingly about the pains of being pegged as a vapid songwriter on the basis of being positive and upbeat, but when you’re making an album as immediate and easy to digest as this, you’ve got to trust your instincts.
Despite their chemistry, it’s not immediately clear what these two artists have in common. But 311’s particular brand of radio reggae has always been tinted by Hexum’s love of the Smiths and the Cure—on their island, the sun is usually setting. As he and Clanton sing together in “Aurora Summer,” he wants you to know just how he feels this summer, because if he can say it clearly, then maybe, for just a second, he can keep the encroaching darkness at bay a little while longer. This is how he’s always operated in 311, and this unspoken self-awareness is what makes this project vibrate with fragile happiness when it’s at its best.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | 100% Electronica | July 27, 2020 | 7.3 | 5f10d247-63ca-4175-b078-dc85b1423695 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Still displaying more promise than power, White Denim are thankfully able to slowly grow under the dim, fleeting spotlight of the Internet music world. | Still displaying more promise than power, White Denim are thankfully able to slowly grow under the dim, fleeting spotlight of the Internet music world. | White Denim: Fits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13119-fits/ | Fits | My base-level reaction to White Denim-- a trio who have seemingly never met neither a tempo they can't shift out of at a second's notice nor a branch of psychedelia they can't pluck from-- is a sense of jitteriness and slight unease, which could be what they're aiming toward. Yet once I start to gain a real feel for the band, I don't get the sense, as I do with many of their contemporaries, that they're merely reverent pastiche artists. Oh, there's plenty about their latest album Fits that pulls from the past-- the blistering fury of Love's "7 and 7 Is" is an obvious touchstone; the Doors' lusty freak-bliss pops up often. But at the same time, the band's choice of name and its aesthetic penchant for surface-level representation makes me think that, far from flipping through back issues of Creem for inspiration, they situate themselves in a nostalgia-for-the-present feedback loop.
Still, the first thing listeners will notice about White Denim is the way they switch sounds so abruptly: In opener "Radio Milk How Can You Stand It", the first two-thirds of the song is standard White Denim-- bass that sounds like it's reverberating from underground, percussion that chatters like wind-up plastic teeth, James Petralli's squawk mirrored by chippy, dirty guitars. Then after a millisecond pause, drums lock with guitar, a skronky sax appears, and Petralli's register shifts to a bluesy howl. The song, still satisfying and surprising on the 10th listen as on the first, could have been drawn from the catalog of any number of psych-based power trios, but it's executed well and makes for a great opener. More often, however, Fits features hippie paeans like "Mirrored and Reverse", bearing a wispy semi-refrain that suggests the Byrds' Fifth Dimension, without bringing much more to the table than atmosphere.
For all the moments Fits locks in and finds a groove strong enough to hang a hook on, it more often slides right past, on some sort of restless vision quest for something it's bound not to find. First single "I Start to Run" sounds like the Red Hot Chili Peppers circa Mother's Milk (there, I said it), and if they want to grind out propulsive, gonzo funk pastiche that's okay with me. It's when the group hints at something bigger and grander without manifesting something out of their ambitions, like on the album's last two songs, "Regina Holding Hands" and "Syncn", that I stop paying attention and instead start anticipating their next EP. "Regina" dispenses with any timbre resembling "honk" or "slap," substituting strummy acoustic guitar and a bluesy wail. "Syncn" ends the record on an even breezier note, Petralli's vocals holding in a creaky upper register that makes him sound like Devendra Banhart.
Incendiary live shows, sure, but White Denim are a product of the Internet, first and foremost. And their path has taken the sort of weird turns that one might expect for a band seeking to distinguish itself in a virtual market where seemingly everything's already been done. Their first EP was promising, to say the least, and since then they've released two very similar "follow-ups", Exposion and Workout Holiday, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, which folded those songs in with a bunch of others that failed to pack as much of a punch. And so Fits feels like the band's formal first LP-- lots of what makes them unique, and then those somewhat awkward "growth" points. That initial itchiness, in other words, never really goes away. | 2009-07-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-07-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Full Time Hobby | July 2, 2009 | 7 | 5f11b465-33e3-4384-81d0-0312dfffda98 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The Brooklyn duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos follow their whims to make experimental pop that combines the freedom of exploration with poignant introspection. | The Brooklyn duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos follow their whims to make experimental pop that combines the freedom of exploration with poignant introspection. | Water From Your Eyes: Somebody Else’s Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/water-from-your-eyes-somebody-elses-song/ | Somebody Else’s Song | Under the tear-stained moniker Water From Your Eyes, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos make music that, like their name, pushes simple concepts towards inventive and imaginative ends. Like their peers in bands like the Cradle and Lily and Horn Horse, the Brooklyn duo makes eclectic, hard-to-define experimental pop, half digital and half not, that always takes familiar ideas to refreshingly new spaces. After several pleasant releases, their latest record, Somebody Else’s Song, combines the freedom of exploration with poignant introspection.
For all of Water From Your Eyes’ confidence in splicing different genres and feels from acoustic twee to indie-electronica, the emotional undercurrent of Somebody Else’s Song is more uncertain. The songs focus on the push and pull between the comfort of dreams and a hazy reality. This idea arrives promptly on the titular opener, when Brown admits, “I try to sing, I get the words all wrong/’Cause it’s somebody else’s song.” (Both musicians assuredly sing their own words on their respectively lovely solo projects, Brown’s thanks for coming and Amos’ This Is Lorelai.)
But the record is never bogged down by unease thanks to the pair’s impressionistic storytelling, dreamy melodies, and Brown’s bittersweet warble. On “Somebody Else’s Song,” their voice floats in a ray of sunlight over a simple guitar loop and a steadily tapping foot, evoking the wistful sing-speaking of K Records folk-poppers. But this tranquil soul-searching is shattered by “Break,” a 10-minute barrage of dizzying drum machine rhythms and creeping keys. Brown’s unvarnished vocals immediately grow cold, hardening into the stiff monotone of an automaton. Without anything resembling a concrete chorus, the track spirals confidently towards euphoric oblivion. “Break” seemingly shares little with its delicate predecessor. But the connective tissue is a yearning for connection, a theme that endures throughout the record.
Though the gear shifts are never as jarring as the transition into “Break,” across eight tracks, Somebody Else’s Song bends into new shapes as it dives into various sonic rabbit holes. The barebones title track is revisited in the back half of the album and blossoms into “Bad in the Sun,” a vocoder-soaked dose of electro bliss. Seemingly melancholic lyrics now feel full of potential, like a nightmare you can laugh off in the morning. A brief blip of harmonized vocals titled “Look” is transformed by a little bumpy guitar melody into the eerie closer “Look Again.” The song concludes with a painfully corporeal depiction of longing: a face gazing through a window at a chain-link fence in the distance, feeling the sensation of wires pressing into their skin.
The best manifestation of this internal conflict is “Adeline,” an off-kilter admission of all-consuming and possibly misplaced devotion. “Nobody else could make me leave me behind,” Brown sings, a heartbreaking, self-aware confession. While wading through Water From Your Eyes’ whims is a delight in itself, discovering the unexpected loveliness buried within is especially worthwhile.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | January 11, 2020 | 7.6 | 5f11d457-0094-4553-a25d-ee6d575cf806 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Sticky Fingers came at a time when—on record, at least—the Rolling Stones could do no wrong. This album could reasonably be called their peak. They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied, it was here. | Sticky Fingers came at a time when—on record, at least—the Rolling Stones could do no wrong. This album could reasonably be called their peak. They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied, it was here. | The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20483-sticky-fingers/ | Sticky Fingers | The story of the Baby Boomers, and their movement from adolescence to adulthood, has been documented and re-told endlessly. And few bands represent that story, and the move from the relative innocence of the mid-'60s into the hedonism and burnout of the '70s, better than the Rolling Stones. They started out as seemingly polite boys in jackets and ties and they grew and changed in front of the cameras and the microphones. Their music grew darker and more cynical, just like the times. At one of their shows, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, held just as the '60s came to a close, a group of Hell's Angels, possibly enlisted as security, killed a man, and the event, along with the Charles Manson murders four months earlier, have long been held up as the symbolic end of the peace-and-love '60s. Seen in retrospect, the Stones were a Zelig-like band for a while there, somewhere in the mix whenever there was a cultural shift underway.
That post-Altamont moment was the setting for their 1971 album Sticky Fingers, an album reissued many times that was recently released in its most extensive re-packaging yet. From 1968's Beggars Banquet and the following year's Let It Bleed on through this album and 1972's Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones had one of the great four-album runs in pop music history. This was a time when—on record, at least—they could do no wrong, and Sticky Fingers could reasonably be called their peak. Beggars and Let It Bleed might have had higher highs, but both also had their share of tossed-off tracks; Exile's tossed-off tracks, on the other hand, were pretty much the whole point—it's the underground music's fan's favorite, but it never had the broader cultural impact of its predecessor. Sticky Fingers is where the myth met the songwriting; Keith Richards' riffs and melodies were in full flower, Mick Jagger never sang better, their new guitarist, Mick Taylor, was upping the ante musically, and the whole thing was wrapped up in a brilliant packaging concept by Andy Warhol.
"Brown Sugar" launches the record with its quintessential blues-rock riff and lyrics that get more questionable the closer you listen (Jagger has since said it was a bit of a wind-up, "all the nasty subjects in one go"). But words were secondary for the band at this point—Sticky Fingers is about melody, and playing, and style. The Stones were always fascinated with American music, but after the death of Brian Jones in 1969 and their move away from psychedelia, their connection to blues, R&B, and country music grew even more intense. From the loping country-folk of "Wild Horses" and the tongue-in-cheek honky tonk of "Dead Flowers" to a Mississippi Fred McDowell cover ("You Gotta Move") to the swelling Otis Redding-style R&B of "I Got the Blues" to the crunchy boogie of "Bitch" to the Latin-flavored Santana jams of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", Sticky Fingers is a love letter to these forms, the culmination of obsessions these musicians had had since childhood. But where they once sounded like English boys doing their version of the blues, now their songs felt as lived-in as their inspirations.
By this point, the Stones were so convincing playing rootsy American music it made little sense to compare them to their British peers. Musically at least, the Rolling Stones of 1971 had more in common with the Allman Brothers than they did the Who. Along with the barrelhouse piano, pedal steel, and Stax-like horns, Sticky Fingers was also only the second album to feature the guitar work of Mick Taylor, and his clean, fluid, and highly melodic leads bear a strong resemblance to Duane Allman's playing from this period.
But ultimately, this is Mick Jagger's album, the same way Exile is Keith's. Of all the iconic vocalists in '60s and '70s rock, Jagger remains the hardest to imitate, at least without sounding ridiculous. That's partly because he himself never minded sounding ridiculous, and he turned his almost cartoonish swagger into a form of performance art. Jagger's voice never sounded richer or fuller than it does here (Exile mostly buried it, to artful effect), but he's doing strange things with it, mimicking and exaggerating accents, mostly from the American South, with an almost religious fervor.
When the Stones were coming up, the line on British singers is that they sounded American because they grew up listening to those records; on Sticky Fingers, Jagger pushes that kind of mimicry to places that run just short of absurd. His twang on "Dead Flowers" is obviously played for laughs, but "You Gotta Move" is harder to get a bead on, partway between homage and parody and delivered with abandon. "I Got the Blues" is utterly sincere, with Jagger flinging every ounce of his skinny frame into it. Wherever he stands in relation to the material, Jagger is selling it, hard, and by extension selling himself as a new kind of vocalist. "Sister Morphine" and "Moonlight Mile" are the two songs that stray furthest from American music reverence, and they are highlights, showing how well the Stones could convey weariness and a weird kind of blown-out and wasted beauty.
With reissue culture in overdrive, we're seeing which classic bands kept the most in their vaults. The Stones, like Zeppelin, didn't keep much. The 2010 version of Exile on Main St. pretty much cleaned out the vault as far as music from this era, so what we have here are alternate mixes, an inferior but still interesting different take of "Brown Sugar" with Eric Clapton, the one true rarity that has long circulated but never been officially issued. There's also, depending on which version you get, a good deal of vintage live Stones, which is the main thing to get their fans excited. Selections from two 1971 gigs, both recorded well, capture the band in a peak year.
To my ears the Stones' live prowess has never quite translated to recordings. The best live records are about more: more heaviness, more jamming, more crowd noise, more energy. And their music didn't necessarily benefit from increasing any one of those things. Their songs were about a certain amount of balance between all of the elements, which is why their recordings sound so platonically perfect. With their live records, you can focus on the grooves and the riffs and the collective playing, but it's easier to notice moments of sloppiness and mistakes. Still, as far as live Stones on record, the material here is about as good as you will get.
The Stones entered the '70s still young and beautiful, but they'd have their share of problems just like everyone else; they got into disco and then in the '80s they dressed like they were on "Miami Vice" and then finally they fully understood what nostalgia for them was really worth and they discovered the power of corporate synergy. Given the weight of history behind it and its centrality to the story of both the Rolling Stones and rock music as a whole, it can be difficult to put on Sticky Fingers and try and hear it for what it was: the highly anticipated new album from one of the biggest bands in the world, a group that at the time hadn't released a new one in two years (in 1971, that was an eternity). They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here. | 2015-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rolling Stones | June 19, 2015 | 10 | 5f128c70-c842-4391-96d8-7be92ba5cb66 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Okkervil River's first release for the ATO label is a concept album about innocence and youth, showing a kid's first glimpses into the adult world. It's set in the 1980s and comes with a map of Will Sheff’s hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, showing where each song takes place. | Okkervil River's first release for the ATO label is a concept album about innocence and youth, showing a kid's first glimpses into the adult world. It's set in the 1980s and comes with a map of Will Sheff’s hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, showing where each song takes place. | Okkervil River: The Silver Gymnasium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18457-okkervil-river-the-silver-gymnasium/ | The Silver Gymnasium | Physical copies of Okkervil River’s eighth album-- their ATO Records debut-- include a map of frontman Will Sheff’s hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, designed by the band’s long-time visual artist William Schaff. Points on the map correspond to songs on the tracklist to show where each is set. First single, “This Is Our Season", takes places at Plainfield Elementary School before heading west on Chellis Road; “Walking Without Frankie” wanders from Soucy’s Gas Station over to the Lake of the Strangled Crane. It’s a clever visual element, a reminder that packaging can complement an album and help shape our listening experience. Without getting into the debate over physical vs. digital, I will say that holding the paper map in your hands as you listen to these new songs is very different from looking at a .pdf on your computer screen, where it has no texture, no physicality-- and therefore no memory rhyme of the real treasure maps that most children make of their own neighborhoods. That is exactly what Sheff and evoke with this piece of ephemera: the mystery of childhood, the unbridgeable gulf between what was and what we remember.
The Silver Gymnasium is, in other words, a coming-of-age album: 11 songs that plumb the loss of innocence and youth, a young man’s first glimpses into the adult world of conflict, compromise, and confusion. It’s exactly as cohesive and novelistic as Okkervil river’s last decade’s worth of work, which explored the mythology of rock and roll. In 2005 Black Sheep Boy told a phantasmagorical tale of Tim Hardin’s doomed character (from the song of the same title) coming to pained life, while both 2007’s The Stage Names and 2008’s The Stand-Ins delved further into that world’s rock-and-roll grotesquerie, famously wrenching “Sloop John B” out of Brian Wilson’s hands and casting it as a boat-trip to hell. Rather than romanticize the experience of a life spent in tour vans and on club stages, Sheff presented it as a dark picaresque. This was a different way of writing what he knew, and his fictions were drawn from liner notes, band photos, song lyrics, and the tall tales of backstage crews in small markets.
The difference between that string of albums and The Silver Gymnasium is that on this new album Sheff is singing about his own personal mythology, mapping the terrain of his own life, and commemorating (perhaps memorializing) old friends who’ve grown too far apart. Sheff has ostensibly mined this territory before, on early tracks like “Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas” (on the band’s second album Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See) or like “A Favor” (off their 2004 EP Sleep and Wake-Up Songs). But this album represents the deepest he has descended into this material as well as his most sustained examination of his own origins. While not quite as fantastical as previous albums, The Silver Gymnasium avoids the pitfalls of self-absorption and confessionalism; he’s less a participant in these stories than an observer and enabler who understands his own memory is unreliable.
Sheff evokes the milieu briskly, hinting at a 1980s childhood without resorting to cheesy period details. “Tell me about the greatest show, or the greatest movie you know,” he cajoles a friend on “Down Down the Deep River”, “or the greatest song that you taped off the radio. Play it again and again. (It cuts off at the ending, though.)” He’s literary without being pretentious (those parentheses are Sheff’s), his text-block lyrics lending themselves to slippery sentiments and corkscrew melodies. Those lines in particular, much like the Meriden map, are simultaneously personal and universal: every kid in 1988 was waiting for his or her favorite song to come on the radio, and every kid was waiting for just the right moment to press <RECORD>. Yet Sheff manages to make the experience sound new and immediate, not to mention loaded with uncomfortable meaning.
Conceptually, The Silver Gymnasium is sound; lyrically, this is incredibly fertile territory and more than enough to hang an album on. Musically, however, it may be Okkervil River’s weakest to date. On previous albums Sheff sang like a man who had already seen too much in a single lifetime, delivering his lines with a sputtering urgency that lent even the quieter songs a palpable dread. Meanwhile, the band itself sounded like they were trying to stave off his hysteria. They played like a slap to the face. On The Silver Gymnasium, however, they rarely let the cracks and strains show, and the songs suffer considerably. There’s little menace or madness here; instead the music gives the false impression of emotional orderliness.
This is Okkervil River’s first album working with producer John Agnello, who has helmed period-specific albums by Cyndi Lauper and John Mellencamp, among others. He lends these songs a careful sheen when they ought to sound taped off the radio. Synths play a prominent role on The Silver Gymnasium, even more so now than when Jonathan Meiburg was still with the band. Rather than reach back to this particular era in pop music, on “Stay Young” and “Lido Pier Suicide Car” the synths sound generically crisp, reinforcing the sense of polish and calculation. Even the sax and harmonica solos on “Stay Young” are mixed low, as though the band remains noncommittal about featuring those instruments.
It’s hard to miss that this sonic development coincides with the band’s move from Jagjaguwar (their home for more than a decade) to ATO Records (home to the Drive-By Truckers, Alabama Shakes, and the True Blood soundtrack). Ostensibly they’re making a bid for a wider audience, and why shouldn’t they? It would be amazing to hear how Sheff’s mythologies play to larger crowds in roomier venues. Okkervil River don’t have to sound right on the precipice of madness to be interesting, but unfortunately The Silver Gymnasium buffs away their eccentricities and robs the music of its impact. They aim for jittery energy on “Walking Without Frankie”, but it sounds inert. They shoot for triumphal on “On a Balcony”, but there’s no heft to those backing vocals. They reach for tattered majesty on closer “Black Nemo”, but they never hoist the flag quite high enough. Perhaps when performed live these songs will accrue the desperation and dynamism their studio versions lack, but for now The Silver Gymnasium too often makes the act of remembering sound like a consequence-free undertaking, as though certain horrors are too far in the past to do us much harm in the present. Anyone with a memory-- especially Sheff-- knows that’s not the case. | 2013-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | September 3, 2013 | 6.8 | 5f297ffb-5457-4670-bdb6-01733e968c00 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The alternately beautiful and unnerving score to Pablo Larraín’s surreal film about Princess Diana captures the elegance of a royal holiday and the horror of feeling trapped inside of it. | The alternately beautiful and unnerving score to Pablo Larraín’s surreal film about Princess Diana captures the elegance of a royal holiday and the horror of feeling trapped inside of it. | Jonny Greenwood: Spencer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonny-greenwood-spencer/ | Spencer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is a story of fitful disappointment, an unhappy obligation from its beginning that grows only bleaker as the tale unfolds. The protagonist, Diana, Princess of Wales (née Diana Spencer), sees that her future, if it even exists, has already been written for her. Jonny Greenwood’s music for the film, accordingly, is often unsettling, amplifying Diana’s discomfort with being held prisoner at Sandringham House with her unfaithful husband and the British royal family for Christmas traditions. Greenwood’s score, sinister and moody, marries the Baroque stylings that would likely have soundtracked royal gatherings for centuries with free jazz that represents Diana’s defiant presence as the People’s Princess. The music amplifies and elucidates Spencer’s themes, the sound of a free spirit and caged bird who becomes increasingly untethered from reality as she longs to escape. And, on its own, the Spencer soundtrack is also an impressive work of fusion, an album that is ambitious in scope and exquisitely detailed.
Emotionally, Greenwood’s Spencer is alternately melancholy and foreboding. The title theme, played on piano by Greenwood in its sparest form, is closest to the composer’s music for Phantom Thread (namely, the Paul Thomas Anderson film’s title themes and the standout “House of Woodcock”) in that it’s teasingly beautiful but never blooms into its brightest and fullest form, a lovely little melody that’s akin to a deep exhale, weary of its own simplicity and purity and nearly dejected.
Greenwood expands the “Spencer” theme on several songs, including the opening “Arrival,” modified slightly and played even more morosely by a string quartet before the free jazz ensemble, led impressively by trumpeter Byron Wallen, abandons the leitmotif and draws out the more menacing elements of the composition. Pianist Alexander Hawkins and drummer Tom Skinner (a Sons of Kemet fixture and Greenwood’s bandmate in the Smile) stand out, too, their playing growing wilder as they pull the song further away from the theme and the quartet recedes to the background.
The “Spencer” leitmotif, a musical stand-in for Princess Diana, is most traditional on “The Boys” and most foreboding when played on organ, especially the near-cacophonous “Press Call.” It also serves as a grounding force for a record that flirts with chaos, as on the Pendereckian “Calling the Whipper In,” which blends stabs of string with trumpet blasts and unhinged harpsichord. Depending on how you see it, the “Spencer” melody is either the anchor or the albatross of the album, a grounding force and reminder of the elegance at its heart or a stubborn commitment to retreat to what is safe and what is expected when improvisation and discordance are more tantalizing.
Spencer, of course, allows for both interpretations. Diana, in the film’s surrealistic portrayal of a long holiday weekend in December 1991, is forced to confront the hell in which she’s found herself, a decade into her disintegrating marriage to Prince Charles and left with all the accompanying distresses and scrutiny of royalty. However she got there, it’s still a hell, and she wants out. The soundtrack features further moments of tension, such as “Home / Lacrimosa,” burying the listener amid a cascade of organ and orchestra, glistening but overwhelming. “Invention for Harpsichord and Compression,” too, finds Greenwood hurrying his tempo and increasing his volume to make his delicate instrument play with ferocity. There is beauty throughout Greenwood’s Spencer, and it always sounds as if it’s about to collapse.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mercury KX | December 3, 2021 | 7.3 | 5f2eccd2-db97-4bf9-aa54-836f3e803225 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Horse Lords songs are intricate, methodical patterns that seem to pulse and shift the longer you stare. Their tension is rooted in anticipation, the only relief the relinquishing of control. | Horse Lords songs are intricate, methodical patterns that seem to pulse and shift the longer you stare. Their tension is rooted in anticipation, the only relief the relinquishing of control. | Horse Lords: The Common Task | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/horse-lords-the-common-task/ | The Common Task | Baltimore’s Horse Lords wield the familiar rock’n’roll toolkit of guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone, and they’ve cited ’70s Bo Diddley as an influence. But this is not a rock band in the traditional sense. Their lineage can be traced more directly to minimalist avant-garde experimentalists such as the Sonic Arts Union and La Monte Young; like Captain Beefheart, they gleefully corrupt the traditions of American blues and folk. Their music finds challenge and beauty in toying with the expectations that accompany familiar tools.
Often the most pleasurable way to listen to a record like Horse Lords’ fourth LP, The Common Task, is to surrender, to shed those expectations and follow the music where it takes you. If it sounds similar to the way the human brain responds to certain psychedelics, it’s no accident—the band’s perspective was shaped in no small part by formative experiences with psychotropic drugs. The record’s tension is rooted in anticipation, the only relief the relinquishing of control. Album opener “Fanfare for Effective Freedom” tests this hypothesis almost immediately, stacking staccato harmonies so tightly they make a full arrangement sound sparse. This is drone music with a narrative, full of rising action that builds to an explosive climax and ultimate resolution.
But none of the tracks on The Common Task adhere to any real pop song structure; they trace meandering paths that feel logical, even if they can’t quite be called melodic. The players strive for robotic perfection, knowing that, as humans, they are destined to fail. The beauty in a Horse Lords record lies in the results of that failure: intricate, methodical patterns that seem to pulse and shift the longer you stare at them. “After a show recently an audience member told me the music reminded her of weaving,” guitarist Owen Gardner told The Quietus in 2017. “I have never felt better understood.”
Some of the band’s most memorable motifs and compositions started as rough sketches on their mixtapes. “Outer East,” the epic opener of 2014’s Hidden Cities, draws from their first mixtape; the spaceship engine hum that appears across The Common Task was first heard on their most recent tape. As their sound has evolved over the past decade, they’ve gradually moved from live-tracking their records with a full band to multi-track recording, a technique that offers more freedom to assemble jams into cohesive statements. And since 2016’s Interventions—their first multi-tracked project—they’ve stopped segregating their modular synthesis in discrete interludes and begun integrating them into their compositions. Their field recordings have also become more sophisticated; the crunchy, resonant textures on “Integral Accident” are so well-designed that in the right context they might pass as Foley art.
Much has been made of Horse Lords’ predilection for just intonation tuning and microtonal harmonies (those notes that fall in between the keys of a piano), as well as Gardner’s Mauritanian guitar stylings, which reappear on tracks like “Against Gravity” and “People’s Park.” Their true energy, though, is derived from drummer Sam Haberman, who teeters on the precipice, veering back to the beat just before a song tumbles over the edge. The band has clearly studied percussion from across the African continent (Central Africa’s Aka and Banda music, and Tanzania’s Wagogo, in particular), and on “People’s Park,” they follow those rhythms across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, deconstructing and reimagining the reggaetón riddim far from its original context.
“People’s Park,” a reference to Chicago’s revolutionary socialist organization the Young Lords and their community-run space in Lincoln Park, offers a glimpse at Horse Lords’ radical politics. It’s difficult to make political statements in wordless instrumental music; without a visual component, titles must do the heavy lifting. And while it’s nice to know their intent, The Common Task doesn’t scan as a political message. But even apart from its real-world context, the album succeeds as an abstraction. Given even a little bit of time, space, and intention, these compositions are an uncommonly rewarding experience.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | March 14, 2020 | 7.8 | 5f2f9b4e-63f6-42f0-bb62-102522f23fce | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Nearly 10 years into its career, the underrated French band has honed its sleek and increasingly effective bursts of pop to a fine point. | Nearly 10 years into its career, the underrated French band has honed its sleek and increasingly effective bursts of pop to a fine point. | Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13052-wolfgang-amadeus-phoenix/ | Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix | At one point in the schlocky 1975 musical comedy Lisztomania, Roger Daltrey whips out an absurdly large phallus and no less than five women simultaneously straddle it like a cannon. It's as insane as it sounds. In the movie, Daltrey plays Franz Liszt, the 19th century Hungarian pianist and composer known for his flamboyant playing style-- hysterical women fought over his handkerchiefs at concerts more than a century before the Beatles. Whereas Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music represented all things respectable and classicist, Liszt was a Romantic hero full of flash; Amadeus won eight Oscars, Lisztomania boasts lines like, "Your big ambition was to stick your working-class cock up a piece of high-class crumpet." With their fourth album, Phoenix reference both composers and hone in on an elusive target somewhere between Mozart's formal wonders and Listz's dramatic flair. While the album's 10 songs are arranged and executed with virtuoso pop-rock precision, they chronicle nothing but angst, confusion, disappointment, and despair. It's truly universal-- everybody live, love, and die.
Much of the album's internal conflict is laid out in its first couple lines. "So sentimental; not sentimental, no!/ Romantic; not disgusting yet," sings frontman Thomas Mars on opener "Lisztomania", sounding like a madman with two tiny creatures whispering into each ear. Mars keeps this treacherous divide in mind throughout Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, and the rest of the record successfully avoids mush while keeping its beating heart intact. And the issue of thematic directness is especially important to Phoenix-- this is an established indie band writing songs about love that are armed with hooks primed for a mainstream embrace. Just listen to the invincible crescendo of Wolfgang's "Countdown"-- especially that little Coldplay-esque piano twinkle about three and a half minutes in-- and realize that these guys are a few Chris Martin-isms away from staggering ubiquity. They're a bona fide "should be bigger" band.
But, as their songs tighten into increasingly effective bursts of pop, Mars is breaking up his words and meanings into smaller and smaller fragments. His isn't a self-congratulatory, indie-nerd triumph, though, i.e., Mars isn't being cryptic to be an asshole. He's getting better and more sophisticated as his band discards anything-- an outro, a bridge, an extra hi-hat hit-- that could be deemed superfluous. Sure: YouTube tells us this album will make a generation-spanning touchstone like The Breakfast Club that much better. It'll also hit your gut if you listen hard enough. There are layers here-- maybe too many layers for the biggest rooms.
"I feel too young," went the hook on Phoenix's innocent and bittersweet 2000 debut single. Back then, the quartet was following a wave of Gallic cool led by friends Daft Punk and Air. Nearly 10 years on and this casually chic group has grown into something unique-- Wolfgang isn't a tweaked Air record or a tweaked Strokes record as much as it's a Phoenix record. Gone is the sometimes-flimsy blue-eyed soul of their first two LPs, replaced with a glossier take on the uptick guitars and sampled snare snaps of 2006's brilliant It's Never Been Like That. And they're not feeling so young anymore, either. "Do you remember when 21 years was old?" muses Mars on "Countdown". Growing up, looking back, and peeking ahead usually isn't this enjoyable.
Its unflappable sonic sheen gives Wolfgang some winsome 80s nostalgia, but smart modern touches-- a constant near-Auto-Tune vocal effect, Justice-lite keyboard stabs on "1901"-- ensure its of-the-moment-ness. Meanwhile, Mars hints at a time and space where he's everywhere-- or nowhere-- all at once. "Acres/ Visible horizon/ Right where it starts and ends/ When did we start the end?" he wonders aloud at the end of the krautrocking epic "Love Is a Sunset", just after the song has blasted into a stratosphere where a diminishing horizon line is the only clear thing in sight. "Rome" likens a collapsing relationship to a collapsed empire; "2000 years remain in a trash can." And, on "Countdown", Mars' ennui reaches its peak as he sings, "True and everlasting didn't last that long." But he's not sad-sacking along, head down, no umbrella. He's pumped. Excited. With the band going full-bore behind him, he concludes the most ebullient song about existential inevitability in recent memory with an impassioned rallying cry: "We're the lonesome! We're the lonesome!" All together now.
At another point in Lisztomania, Roger Daltrey's entire body is sucked into a devilish princess' underthings. (Seriously.) Before that happens, though, the cigar-chomping heiress quotes Oscar Wilde while explaining her unladylike smoking habit, "It's the perfect form of pleasure, it's exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one ask?" Phoenix seem to understand this line of thinking-- and not just because they look like a group of guys who know their Gauloises. They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled-- and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out. | 2009-05-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Glassnote / Loyauté | May 27, 2009 | 8.5 | 5f37331f-fad5-4860-acd1-0b83dc65e837 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
IDM-influenced sounds from this talented architect of instrumental hip-hop. | IDM-influenced sounds from this talented architect of instrumental hip-hop. | Flying Lotus: 1983 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9740-1983/ | 1983 | I'd been hearing about this hot new producer, Flying Lotus-- instrumental hip-hop guy, crafter of "Adult Swim" bumper music, John Coltrane's godson's internist's third cousin or something-- and it's true; he's good. Knows his way around a sequencer, cobbles crazy sounds into beats that only crazy people could possibly rap over (so, basically just MF Doom), has a moniker that looks ill stenciled on a crate. But damn, is someone running a wildly popular Modern Instrumental Hip-Hop workshop now? Does it have a monopsonistic chokehold on a host of beleaguered factories that produce big, brightly colored slabs of BEAT® at an ever more frantic clip to stay afloat against low fees and high demand? Is Dabrye not only the company's president, but a client?
I like squelchy bass, ray-gun trills, clever drum programming, and wobbly keyboards as much as the next guy who used to be really into Anticon, and I respect the polished craft that keeps 1983 shucking along. But like an overly workshopped novel, the album is stylish, well-turned, and interchangeable with its peers. Seldom bad, seldom memorable, Flying Lotus's IDM-influenced hip-hop is paint-by-numbers. That's not necessarily negative, but I prefer music that's willing to strategically violate the terms of its genre in order to make an impression. This stuff bangs, but with a cerebral bent-- splitting that difference dilutes its impact, and a more discernible human charisma would go a long way toward distinguishing it.
At least the paint is often garish and skillfully applied enough to distract from the faint template beneath it, and the eclectic style keeps outright tedium at bay. The title track's rubbery space-funk gets whipped into an electro-pop froth on a remix by Daedelus, marking the first time that Daedelus's presence has ever made anything less boring. The moist, glassy stabs of "Bad Actors" are nicely offset by the clicky, pitch-bending corkscrews of "Orbit Brazil" and the idyllic sheen of "Untitled #7". The stuttering creeper "Pet Monster Shotglass" jerkily mutates for upwards of six-minutes, demonstrating by example what much of the album wants for-- a sense of compositional completion and deliberate evolution that's missing from more static ideas like "Hello", which humps an ice-blue synth swirl into attractive anonymity.
Those of you looking for a good genre exercise will find plenty to admire on 1983. The boom always baps right on time (which is to say, slightly off-time). The herky is extra jerky, but not to the extent of disrupting a good head-nod. Each obstinate loop eventually starts to hiccup and convulse, which is how you know it's art. The rest of you will turn off this album wondering why you can't remember any details from it, and why you suddenly feel the urge to shop for a minivan. | 2007-01-10T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2007-01-10T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Plug Research | January 10, 2007 | 5.8 | 5f37a970-56b0-4b2f-8cf6-cea3a23f3c2c | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Hiss Golden Messenger’s bittersweet, new LP is full of fluttery soul-grooves, borrowing from various regional folk and blues traditions. It speaks to what it means to be a compassionate citizen today. | Hiss Golden Messenger’s bittersweet, new LP is full of fluttery soul-grooves, borrowing from various regional folk and blues traditions. It speaks to what it means to be a compassionate citizen today. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Hallelujah Anyhow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiss-golden-messenger-hallelujah-anyhow/ | Hallelujah Anyhow | M.C. Taylor has been making music for more than 20 years, first as a member of the hardcore act Ex-Ignota and later as frontman for the California country-rock group the Court & Spark. He formed his latest incarnation, Hiss Golden Messenger, when he moved to North Carolina in the late 2000s, but only in the last five years has that band become a full-time gig for the folklorist and family man. During that relatively short time, he has not changed his approach or his subject matter: He still writes intelligently and insightfully about America as both a place to inhabit and a story to tell, about the trials of faith and the lure of doubt, about family and its incumbent responsibilities.
Taylor has not changed, but the times certainly have. Bridging two extremely different presidential administrations, Hiss Golden Messenger suddenly sounds all the more prescient in 2017 than it did even on the group’s most recent album, last year’s Heart Like a Levee. Taylor’s constant theme has been joy in the face of misery, jubilation during times of tribulation, hope despite the tide. As he sings on “Jenny of the Roses,” the first song off Hallelujah Anyhow, “I’ve never been afraid of darkness, it’s just a different kind of light.” With its burbling tempo and gospel piano, it sounds like a joyful tune, but the lyrics reveal gradations of regret and despair as Taylor celebrates the life of someone long departed. “Jenny of the Roses” is the very definition of bittersweet, as are the songs that follow.
There is something comforting in the contradictions Taylor explores on Hallelujah Anyhow, something that speaks generally to what it means to be a conscientious and compassionate citizen at a time when every day seems to introduce some new travesty. How do you find and express joy when the world is crumbling all around you? That’s been the subject of nearly every Hiss Golden Messenger album, but it’s especially pronounced on Hallelujah Anyhow, a record of fluttery soul-grooves and complicated insights. (The album title is perfect, the album cover not even close.) Taylor has said it’s not a protest album. Instead, it might be called a persist album. It doesn’t speak truth to power, but reassures and invigorates those who feel powerless.
That modest ambition supplies the music with a certain spark. Taylor recorded the album in a matter of days, bringing his road-hardened backing band into the studio to flesh out the songs quickly, as though any hesitation might lessen their urgency. Replacing longtime drummer Matt McCaughan (out on tour with Bon Iver) is Darren Jessee, best known as one-third of Ben Folds Five. He brings a staunch backbeat to these songs, moving “Lost Out in the Darkness” along at an almost martial pace and punching up the AM country groove of “John the Gun.” While there’s nothing quite so experimental as the jagged stomp of “Like a Mirror Loves a Hammer” off last year’s Heart Like a Levee, the arrangements on Hallelujah Anyhow are intricate without being showy, borrowing from various regional folk and blues traditions to imply a sense of movement across the map. Taylor has always made good use of reed instruments going back to 2012’s Poor Moon, and here Michael Lewis’ saxophone tugs at the edges of “John the Gun,” fraying the seams until the song unravels in a long, beautiful coda.
Music—and the joy we might find in our favorite songs or albums—is perhaps the dominant theme on Hallelujah Anyhow, which see Taylor referring but not deferring to his heroes. That wheezing harmonica solo on “Lost Out in the Darkness” sounds like a nod to early Dylan, just as the title of “Gulfport, You’ve Been on My Mind” echoes “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind.” There’s a strange reference on “John the Gun” to the infamous goth act Sisters of Mercy and more than a few toasts to Van Morrison, most obviously on “Domino (Time Will Tell).” That song, which shares its title and its general tempo with a song from Morrison’s 1970 album His Band and the Street Choir, might have been corny if the band didn’t convey such excitement in the tribute.
Not that you need to trace every footnote or easter egg to enjoy this album. Rather, the allusions thrum just beneath the surface of these vivid songs, as if to suggest that specific moments of music can get us through hard times or even just move us a little further down the road. Taylor does not seem to harbor the ambition to join those ranks; he’s too much of a fan himself, down here in the pits with the rest of us. “Give me a fiddle and a flattop guitar, give me the gospel of the jukebox in the Lost Horse Bar,” he begs on “Domino,” sounding weary but not beaten. “We’ll be alright tonight.” | 2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | September 21, 2017 | 7.9 | 5f4eb75b-83a5-4694-be9c-4c413117a4fd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
E returns with another exercise in self-referentiality and self-indulgences. | E returns with another exercise in self-referentiality and self-indulgences. | Eels: Tomorrow Morning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14626-tomorrow-morning/ | Tomorrow Morning | One of the most bookish artists to rise from 90s alt-pop, Mark Everett (aka E or Eels) affects the seriocomic deadpan of Daniel Clowes, but really he's the Rick Moody of indie rock. Both are existential mopes who did their best and career-defining work in the 1990s, but have spent the better part of the last decade chasing self-indulgences, becoming too cerebral and too coldly distant to connect with an audience. Both regularly overthink their art to the point of strangling it of all life. Like Moody's new 700-page doorstop, The Four Fingers of Death, Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.
Tomorrow Morning is perhaps most notable for how it complements its predecessor, the teasing End Times released earlier this year. That album showed E wrestling with his defense mechanisms in a way that promised to show the man behind the initial. He has never flinched from heavy issues; he wrote an album about cancer, after all. But he has always swathed any hint of confession in severe detachment, as if he could never wholly inhabit his songs for fear of the very real pain they might contain. Ostensibly grappling with a break-up with his longtime girlfriend, End Times toyed with expectations of autobiographical revelation, first laying out the situation in the barest lyrics possible and then twisting it into a concept album where a romantic rift brings forth an apocalypse. Musically and thematically, it spiraled out of E's control, but for a few brief moments, he became as human and as sympathetic as he had ever been.
Following just a few months later, Tomorrow Morning is the sequel that shows E recovering from his heartache and becoming a new man-- not a new musician, mind you, but a new man. He's found a new woman, and on "Baby Loves Me" and "Spectacular Girl" she gives him the power and perspective to overlook all the negativity in the world. "Baby loves me," he barks Tourettically, "and she's smarter than you." No one would begrudge him such happiness, but the song is a contrivance of burbling synths, plastic beats, and E's own dead-eyed growl. Later, on the gospel cringer "Looking Up", E declares himself transformed, but the song's so ridiculous it sounds more like a pisstake on the idea of salvation than salvation itself.
Even when he's trying to sound upbeat, E just sounds typically downhearted. That idea could be intriguing, but even if you ignore his tired delivery of lines like "I'm a hummingbird, beautiful and free," this album just sounds bad, clattering with rudimentary beats and chintzy keyboards that make the songs blur into each other. He still comes across as a bedroom auteur, shut away from the world like a DIY hermit, but aside from a bit of vinyl distortion around a few songs, the album sounds too slick to sell E's solitary stance. In that regard, the album just sounds way too long. End Times had the benefit of brevity-- just a few short songs that moved the plot out of the real world and into E's head. Tomorrow Morning, however, meanders aimlessly through 14 songs that sound like 28. How's that for existential crisis? Stuck in a never-ending Eels album. | 2010-09-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-09-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | E Works | September 10, 2010 | 3.6 | 5f4f1e75-2973-49c2-acb7-1a56bba2c2e6 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The always-unpredictable singer-songwriter returns with a haunting and beautiful meditation on war that ranks with her finest records. | The always-unpredictable singer-songwriter returns with a haunting and beautiful meditation on war that ranks with her finest records. | PJ Harvey: Let England Shake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15120-let-england-shake/ | Let England Shake | "The West's asleep," PJ Harvey declares on the first line of her new album, Let England Shake, before spending the next 40 minutes aiming to shame, frighten, and agitate it into action. When Polly Jean Harvey burst into the public consciousness in the early 90s, her gravelly voice, outsized personality, and often disturbing lyrics gave the alt-rock world a crucial shot of excitement. That early work is still among the most raw and real guitar music to emerge from the past few decades, so no surprise, it's a version of PJ Harvey a lot of people still miss. But if you've paid attention to her in the years since, the one thing you can expect is that she won't repeat herself.
On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever. Here, she paints vivid portraits of war, and her sharp focus on the up-close, hand-to-hand devastation of World War I-- depicting "soldiers falling like lumps of meat"-- provides a fitting setting for today's battlegrounds. From the Zombies to the Pogues, artists have often gravitated to the confused, massive loss of life of the Great War. If it doesn't resonate as much in America as it does in Europe-- and it doesn't-- that's more our fortune than our shame.
The Great War remains a rich and resonant subject for art because it briefly caused the world to step back, aghast and afraid to look at what it had done. The collective trauma of World War I did indeed shake England, specifically, out of the end of its imperialistic Victorian stupor. The rest of the world gasped as well: WWI hastened the Russian Revolution, coaxed the U.S. into isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism, and set the tone for a shunned Germany to embrace the Third Reich. Culturally, the result was modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque; geopolitically, it redrew European borders, creating roughly a dozen new nations; diplomatically, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, was meant to prevent war, at least on this scale, from ever happening again.
On "The Words That Maketh Murder", Harvey blackly and comically shakes her head at those post-WWI diplomatic hopes. After spinning tales lamenting what a soldier has seen and done, she and her cohorts-- frequent collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey-- break into the jaunty closing refrain from "Summertime Blues": "What if I take my problems to the United Nations?" It's a hilariously depressing coda; her song's character has experienced the unimaginable and is looking to an international peacekeeping body for help.
Throughout the record, Harvey sings in her higher register, as she often did on the underrated White Chalk, granting her some detachment from her surroundings. Instead of owning the spotlight outright, as she did in the 90s, she floats above and beside it; it's a neat trick that forces listeners to crawl closer to her words, allowing them to slowly come into focus. The textural and tonal qualities of her voice are made malleable, a scalpel wielded with precision rather than a sword. On the whole, she carries distant echoes of her peers and successors-- Joanna Newsom, Björk, Kate Bush-- while remaining clearly and identifiably herself.
Harvey does this musically too, incorporating traces of English folk, early rock, reverbed dream-pop, and disparate familiar melodies (as well as "Summertime Blues," she appropriates Niney the Observer's apocalyptic "Blood and Fire" on the one directly Iraq-related song here, "Written on the Forehead", plus a close approximation of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" that originally played a larger role on the record) as a foundation. With autoharp, zither, saxophone, and other new instruments added to her palette, Harvey crucially crafts sturdy, earwormy melodies. If you didn't listen to the words, the record would scan as beautiful, even docile or tame. Harvey forces you to locate the real world behind a pleasantly hazy foreground.
Even considering all of the horror on display, this is her most straightforward and easy to embrace album in a decade. Along with "The Words That Maketh Murder", the bouncing title track, the radio rock of "The Last Living Rose", and "Written on the Forehead" would all make excellent singles. They'll all get a chance, so to speak: Harvey commissioned war photographer Seamus Murphy to craft videos for each of the record's dozen tracks. (Three of them have already been released: "Let England Shake", "The Words That Maketh Murder", and "The Last Living Rose".) As much of a piece as this record is, its songs also work in their own contexts, and despite using a limited number of players and instruments, Harvey and co. locate a wide range of approaches to their central subject; alongside the singles, those include the rousing folk-rock of "Bitter Branches", the delicate "Hanging in the Wire", and the acoustic "England".
Even a cursory glance at the album-- its title, song titles, lyrics-- marks this as a very English record. Its pastoralism befits Harvey's West Country background and recording setting (as well as the fields in Europe in which most of WWI was fought, and where most of the dead are now laid to rest). But it's less about the experience of one nation with war, so much as one people. That those people are English is Harvey soaking her music in her own surroundings and experiences. Swap out the place names with others, though, and the message remains the same. It's universal and it's necessary-- and it's powerfully and clearly stated. That it's also a joy to hear is perhaps the most confounding juxtaposition of all, turning a record you'll respect into one you'll also love*.* | 2011-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Vagrant / Island Def Jam | February 15, 2011 | 8.8 | 5f51c151-856e-41f8-b8e5-4deff2764163 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Dealer is an artistic triumph for the St. Louis band Foxing. A significant advance from The Albatross, it's even heavier, more compositionally complex, and more personally revealing than its predecessor. | Dealer is an artistic triumph for the St. Louis band Foxing. A significant advance from The Albatross, it's even heavier, more compositionally complex, and more personally revealing than its predecessor. | Foxing: Dealer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21191-dealer/ | Dealer | The Albatross became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Foxing. While the St. Louis band's relentless touring enabled the slow-build success of their debut, the aching opening track on Dealer recounts the effect of Conor Murphy having to repeat ugly truths about himself night after night for the better part of two years: "I am caught up in the guilt/ Making a living off of drowning." Though Dealer is an artistic triumph and a significant advance from The Albatross, it's even heavier, more compositionally complex, and more personally revealing than its predecessor. And that's why, from its very first second, Murphy sounds drained over the prospect of doing it all over again—Dealer is not an easy listen. It sounds like it was very difficult to make, and reliving it is going to be even harder.
It's in Foxing's nature to welcome a challenge. Of all the leading figures in the Fest-centered post-emo world, they made the most demanding, unique and self-assured debut. It certainly earned the genre tag—silvery guitar figures streaked and twinkled like tiny Explosions in the Sky, while Murphy's keening vocals delivered confrontational and caustic lyrics with spasmodic, burst-and-bloom dynamics. To paraphrase the slow-motion self-evisceration of "Rory" (think the Wrens' "This Is Not What You Had Planned" stretched to four minutes), he ripped his heart out while it was still beating and shoved it directly in your face. But Foxing are more interested in a renaissance than a "revival", and they mirror the adaptive and forward-thinking qualities of their scene, creating a new voice for familiar sentiments: There was certainly hints of Cap'n Jazz on Albatross, but also actual jazz, as well as Sufjan Stevens' baroque Americana and touches of avant-garde R&B.
The Albatross darted fitfully and stretched out in all directions, while Dealer pulls all of Foxing's influences inward. Inverting his typical role of making burly post-rock bands sound delicate, producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Caspian) boosts Foxing's fragility—Dealer is constructed like an expensive timepiece where you can see every exacting movement behind a thick, glossy lacquer. Murphy's much-improved vocals negotiate the curvature of "Weave"'s mournful melody and the band's syncopated sway—imagine what the Chicago late-'90s post-rock scene could've accomplished if they hooked up with the guys downstate in Urbana-Champaign. While there were short instrumental interludes on The Albatross, "Winding Cloth" is a full-on string orchestration, offering four minutes to absorb the shellshocked war reportage of "Indica" before segueing into the heavy-hearted poetry of "Redwoods".
Foxing are willing to delay gratification or even deny it entirely if the song requires it, and on Dealer, it often does. When Murphy and bassist/co-songwriter Josh Coll take on universal topics like sex, religion and war, they're framed through discomforting personal experiences: "The Magdalene" is the most dour song about losing one's virginity since "Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades", drawing on strict Catholic upbringings that instilled what Coll described as "the internal fear that spirits are in the room witnessing 'sin' in action": "Mother of God on the rosary/ Is she here with us?/ Does she want what she sees?" The guilt carries on to the present day as Murphy becomes choked by the supposedly no-strings hook-ups in "Night Channels" and "Glass Coughs". Both build up from spare, plaintive introductions to restrained screams and contained, brassy cacophony—Murphy allows you to feel every pang and writhe of guilt, but catharsis is scant.
There's none whatsoever on "Indica", which recounts Coll's time as a soldier in Afghanistan. Few, if any, indie rock bands have access to this kind of firsthand experience, but that alone isn't enough to ensure it avoids "Rooster" or "Support our Troops OH!" overstatement on either end. Aside from a brief clatter of field snares, there's little but a single, clean guitar and Murphy's voice catatonic from both PTSD and self-medication: "Could I give back the sounds of their children's screams?/ Let go of what I've seen?" Dealer isn't a narrative, but both his civilian and Coll's soldier could share the exhaustion of closer "Three on a Match"—"For what we did, my love, I'm sorry...the Lord won't let me in/ I'm survived by the weight of my own sins." The devil and God aren't raging inside of Murphy and Coll anymore—Dealer is the arduous post-war reconstruction. | 2015-11-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | November 6, 2015 | 7.6 | 5f5272ae-690b-4447-8513-2f7d340176b8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place. | The piano-and-percussion quartet performs a series of pieces by the Los Angeles composer that wrestle with the aftermath of 2020’s wildfires; McIntosh’s own field recordings flesh out a sense of place. | Yarn/Wire / Andrew McIntosh: Andrew McIntosh: Little Jimmy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yarn-wire-andrew-mcintosh-little-jimmy/ | Andrew McIntosh: Little Jimmy | Nature is no stranger to notated music. Olivier Messiaen’s transcriptions brought birdsong to the page; John Luther Adams writes music about climate change. In Andrew McIntosh’s compositions, nature appears again, but more as an impression than a direct translation. The textures of mountains, wind, and trees often color the Los Angeles composer’s gossamer phrases, creating a feeling that’s sprawling yet interior, built from contemplative, slow-moving sound. McIntosh’s new album Little Jimmy, recorded by New York piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, builds on this style through three quiet meditations, two of which draw from the California wilderness and McIntosh’s experiences in it.
This album is another entry in McIntosh and Yarn/Wire’s long partnership—in 2014, they presented the similarly pensive Hyenas in the Temple of Pleasure. But unlike the strictly instrumental Hyenas, two of the works on Little Jimmy use field recordings to tell their story, letting in sounds from the outdoors. The album’s title track grows out of recordings taken in April 2020 at the Little Jimmy trail camp, in the Angeles National Forest. That was before much of Little Jimmy burned during the Bobcat Fire, altering its landscape. Sparse and ruminative, McIntosh’s music is an ode to the place and the memory of the calmness he felt there.
McIntosh grew up in Nevada’s desert and currently lives in Los Angeles, regularly making trips into the city’s surrounding wilderness, where he finds inspiration in bristling California pines and the gales of wind that swirl around the mountains. To approximate these sounds, he uses extended techniques and unusual instruments. On “Little Jimmy,” a bowed piano technique, in which the player strokes the piano’s strings using a fishing line instead of striking its keys, creates a hollow, resonant tone much like the wind as it rustles through the trees. At other points in the piece, fluttering, high-pitched melodies ring out like agitated bird chirps.
This music conjures the feeling of gradually soaking in your surroundings, yet it never feels placid. It’s unsettled and constantly in motion while keeping a leisurely pace, which is a welcome difference from works that focus solely on Earth’s serenity. “Little Jimmy at the End of Winter” opens with distant bird calls and wind gusts and unfolds into dissonant piano and rolling vibraphone, balancing stillness with desolation. There’s a sense of lamentation in these eerie moments, a yearning for a time that no longer exists.
While much of Little Jimmy explores a sense of nostalgia and uncertainty, McIntosh does gradually turn to a gentler atmosphere by the end. The music’s final moments feel nearly suspended in motion as wind billows around tapping piano and bowed cymbals, emulating the feeling of wandering around the forest alone, bathing in its tranquility. As a meditation on a place that McIntosh loves, Little Jimmy is a quiet love letter to the ever-evolving reality of life on Earth. | 2022-09-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kairos | September 13, 2022 | 7.6 | 5f55814e-cb3f-4bd2-a114-c3f1e7643052 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Wilco’s 11th album is direct and spacious, centering on the beauty of quiet revelation. | Wilco’s 11th album is direct and spacious, centering on the beauty of quiet revelation. | Wilco: Ode to Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-ode-to-joy/ | Ode to Joy | At the end of his 2018 memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy noted a shift in his approach to songwriting. Where he once imagined singing only to himself, “pretending no one else is listening,” the personal excavation of the book opened him to the idea of speaking to listeners, imparting exactly what he’d “like to say directly to someone.” That desire for clarity informed his very good recent solo albums, last year’s WARM and this year’s WARMER. Where he once telegraphed emotional truths through murky poetry like a Midwestern John Ashbery, now he was addressing mortality, depression, and malaise head-on. The approach has carried over to Wilco’s 11th studio album, Ode to Joy, a spacious record in both lyrics and sound.
Wilco albums have often centered on fears and limitations, but on Ode to Joy, even when Tweedy reflects on the holding patterns that keep us making the same mistakes, there is actual happiness woven into these songs—evidence of the “poetry and magic” Tweedy extols on “Hold Me Anyway.” He’s not sidestepping the fraught tone of the national moment—addressing nationalism, never-ending wars, and the lies we tell ourselves to get by—but he populates the album with surprise flashes of brightness, too. These are love songs about possibilities and the way our vision may be limited by our vantage point. What might a shift in position reveal?
Over the course of the last decade, it could be a little hard to tell whether a Wilco record was cruising or coasting. Throughout their catalog, there’s outliers and left-turns, of course: They pushed against roots-rock complacency by embracing violently experimental pop, veered into kosmische musik and distorted meta-commentary. By contrast, Ode to Joy attempts to strip everything down to the bare essentials with a hushed template similar to 2016’s Schmilco. Wilco’s six-piece lineup, in place since 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, has been capable of fireworks, but the focus here is on space. Glenn Kotche—one of rock’s most creative drummers—lays off the cymbals, focusing on bass drum, snare, toms, and rattling percussion. Even when combatively rocking, like on the buzzy “Everyone Hides” and the shuffling “Love Is Everywhere (Beware),” Kotche makes room for skittering keys by Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone and Tweedy’s mellow croon and strained falsetto.
Likewise, guitarist Nels Cline lays back in the cut. His jolts of noise have provided reliable spectacle since joining the band following 2004’s A Ghost Is Born (on which Tweedy himself hinted at Cline’s distinctive style), but he’s reserved on Ode to Joy, which makes the few moments he does step out—the apocalyptic solo on “We Were Lucky” and the fuzzed-out glam leads of “Hold Me Anyway”—gleam all the more. The rest of the cast—Sansone, Jorgensen, and bassist John Stirratt, the sole remaining founding Wilco member aside from Tweedy—offers up similarly textured performances. Tweedy matches the band’s volume, resisting the catharsis of giant rock moves in favor of subdued intensity. “I have a quiet amplifier/Silence seems to be more true/Every guitar is denied/I’ve tried in my way to love you,” he sings on “Quiet Amplifier.”
In “Before Us,” Tweedy documents hearing a doorbell resonate in the body of his acoustic guitar, leaned up against the wall. That’s the way these songs work—they thrive in negative space. Wilco’s earlier records, Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and A Ghost Is Born, were artfully packed, stuffed with extra noise and elliptical messages, reflections of their creator’s worry he’d be misunderstood. Like Tweedy’s solo albums, Ode to Joy’s beguiling folk songs are direct and generous, quiet sounds coming from a big room. “Everyone hides,” Tweedy sings, his signature falsetto in place. But not always, only some of the time. A new perspective doesn’t always require blowing everything up—sometimes it just requires a curious tilt of the head.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | October 8, 2019 | 7.8 | 5f5796b0-bc02-479c-a2c7-addf0e90c181 | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
After a five-year wait and a series of interim EPs, math-metal freaks The Dillinger Escape Plan finally release their second album-- their first with vocalist Greg Puciato. | After a five-year wait and a series of interim EPs, math-metal freaks The Dillinger Escape Plan finally release their second album-- their first with vocalist Greg Puciato. | The Dillinger Escape Plan: Miss Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2315-miss-machine/ | Miss Machine | The Dillinger Escape Plan is about as close to a household name as a mathcore band is likely to get. Their debut full-length, Calculating Infinity, launched them to a level of prestige previously unknown to purveyors of their brand of speed metal, and its impact on the hardcore and rock communities ensured the somewhat astounding longevity of their name recognition. Musical dexterity has always been the band's primary selling point, but the contributions of their original vocalist, Dmitri Minakakis, often seem underappreciated. Minakakis' passionate, incendiary delivery provided tangible pathos to the band's awe-inspiring but detached musicianship.
The band diverted attention from Minakakis' 2001 departure with an ingenious sleight of hand: While The Dillinger Escape Plan searched for a new lead vocalist, they filled their temporary vacancy with Mike Patton, whose stellar vocal contributions to their previous release, 2002's Irony Is a Dead Scene EP, suggested a bright if purely hypothetical future for the band. But this consummate metal wet dream was ultimately short-lived: Patton promptly left his special guest spot in the DEP roster, and the band fell back on Greg Puciato, whose promising demos won him a permanent spot as leading vocalist.
Common Sense dictated that Puciato's role in the band would be something of a stopgap position; it would seem that a new and relatively unknown vocalist wouldn't exceed the legacies of his predecessors, but also wouldn't significantly hinder the sound the band has honed for so many years. But five years after their last LP, Puciato is still on board. Miss Machine's first few tracks are business as usual for DEP: "Panasonic Youth" and "Sunshine the Werewolf"-- though not as punishing as most of the band's earlier material-- serve as an adequate bridge between their seminal debut and the brooding atmosphere of their work with Patton. Ben Weinman and Brian Benoit's frantically spiraling guitar figures and Chris Pennie's double-bass drum marathons give way to bristling, low-key breakdowns, and the band always manages to retain their brutal hardcore crunch within complex, fluid time signatures. Puciato lacks both Minakakis' immediacy and Patton's oily charm, but he manages to evoke both vocalists on the album's strongest tracks.
However, DEP is still struggling to re-establish a unified and compelling sound, and their newfound penchant for melodic exploration seems out of place amid the album's most inspired thrash moments. "Phone Home" revels in sluggish, overbearing doom metal and spoils the album's bristling momentum, and "Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants" is timid and repetitive, unimaginatively juxtaposing menacingly hushed verses with a phoned-in shrieking chorus. Puciato's Patton-indebted metal crooning comes across as awkward and seems incompatible with the album's aggressive drive. On the perplexing "Unretrofied", the band shamelessly apes second-shelf Faith No More, leaning toward melodic pop and away from the band's trademark sound.
Though Miss Machine displays DEP in top musical form, the band seems to have lost its confidence and direction. The album is alternately pensive and playful, and this fundamental musical split in their approach-- exemplified by Puciato's decided lack of a distinctive voice-- prevents their new material from reaching anything near the heights of their previous work. A few missteps are to be expected after years of internal change, but Miss Machine's confusing musical tangents and general aimlessness show The Dillinger Escape Plan straining to find their footing in the very scene they helped to define. | 2004-10-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-10-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 13, 2004 | 6.8 | 5f69fabe-ef02-402e-afc8-3bccb1ac42bf | David Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-moore/ | null |
Death Certificate is Ice Cube’s most important (if not his best) album, and one of the most essential works in rap history. | Death Certificate is Ice Cube’s most important (if not his best) album, and one of the most essential works in rap history. | Ice Cube: Death Certificate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22561-death-certificate/ | Death Certificate | Ice Cube left N.W.A. in late 1989 over a royalty dispute, a fairly mundane conclusion to his tenure as the intellectual force and chief lyricist for the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Dangerous Group” after only one proper album. Cube’s lyrics for “Fuck the Police” had triggered an F.B.I. response earlier that same year, but Cube was still living at home with his parents when Straight Outta Compton was rocketing toward platinum status. He was 20 years old, and he’d just turned down a $75,000 check because he didn’t trust Eazy-E and Jerry Heller, who ran the group’s label, Ruthless Records. Two years later, with the release of Death Certificate, he’d be the biggest and most controversial rapper in the world.
During the two years between Cube’s split in late 1989 and the release of Death Certificate, his sprawling, imperfect magnum opus in late 1991, rap music grew up in a hurry, experiencing its pop and punk moments simultaneously. Crossover acts like L.L. Cool J, M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Kid ‘N Play, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and Digital Underground took rap to the top of the charts and into the heart of suburban multiplexes, while southern California gangsta rap continued to proliferate in N.W.A.’s wake via Above the Law, Compton’s Most Wanted and Cypress Hill. On the East Coast, Public Enemy’s Black Nationalist oratory and incisive media critiques, which inspired Straight Outta Compton, continued on 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet. The Geto Boys took their nightmarish vision of Houston’s Fifth Ward to the Hot 100 singles chart while Miami’s 2 Live Crew emerged as unlikely First Amendment pioneers, and regional rap scenes took shape around the country.
As rap continued to evolve and mutate during this two-year period, forces both internal and external worked to validate it as a cultural and economic power. By 1991, the quickly industrializing genre had spawned its own house organ, as The Source—the first magazine to cover rap in its fans’ vernacular, and a central node linking the disparate nationwide phenomenon together—was bringing in seven-figure ad revenues after moving to New York City from Boston in 1990. In March 1991, rap was legitimized in a different(and perhaps more significant) way: Billboard unveiled a radical (and long-overdue) change to its chart methodology. Instead of relying on self-reported sales numbers from retailers—which ignored many independent and “urban” outlets—the new SoundScan system used actual bar code data to determine sales. The impact for rap was felt immediately: N.W.A.’s independently-distributed Efil4zaggin debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top 200 chart behind Paula Abdul’s Spellbound, before climbing to the top spot in its second week. Six months later, Death Certificate, on which Priority spent $18,000 in marketing and which enjoyed no Top 40 airplay, outsold Hammer’s fourth album Too Legit to Quit (which Capitol spent a million dollars promoting) in both LPs’ first weeks in stores. Gangsta rap had won.
Death Certificate is not Cube’s best album. May 1990’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted is tighter, and the peaks of 1992’s The Predator, released after the Rodney King verdict-inspired L.A. rebellion, are higher. But Death Certificate is Ice Cube’s most important album, and one of the most essential works in rap history. Released a few months after Cube’s star turn as the dead-eyed Doughboy in the summer 1991 release Boyz in the Hood, and preceded by the irresistible first single “Steady Mobbin,” Death Certificate was anticipated like few rap albums had ever been. It had been six months since the King tape showed the LAPD gang-assaulting a black motorist, and their trial wouldn’t start for another six. A million copies of Death Certificate were shipped, and it was certified platinum two months after it hit stores. In the shadow of the King video, and with tensions higher than ever between south LA’s black citizens and the police, expectations were high for Cube, who at the time co-owned rap’s creative and political mantle with Chuck D. With Death Certificate, Cube met them head on.
In a nod toward the vinyl format that was rapidly obsolescing in 1991, Cube split the album into the “Death Side” (“a mirror image of where we are today”) and the “Life Side” (“a vision of where we need to go”). Other rap albums had toyed with the “concept” idea—De La Soul’s 1989 LP 3 Feet High and Rising was a big influence on Cube for AMW, skits and all. Yet due to its status, Death Certificate established a permanent lane for conceptual works in rap music, which Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. would capitalize on with their own death-fixated concept albums a few years later.
Death Certificate’s sides serve as an organizing mechanism for Cube’s two primary subject areas. The “Death Side” is Cube as crass hood storyteller, relating oft-hilarious tales about the VD clinic, stopping at your mom’s house to take a shit, haranguing a girl’s dad about her most intimate activities, even a trip to St. Louis that wound up in a jail stay. “Look Who’s Burnin’” and “Steady Mobbin’” show Cube’s unparalleled skill at lighthearted, detail-rich, slice-of-South Central-life songs—they predict not only the melancholic “It Was a Good Day,” but 1995 film Friday, Cube’s loving, hilarious ode to a single day in his neighborhood. And yes, some of these songs are stomach-churning—“Givin’ Up the Nappy Dugout” wavers between slut-shaming and sexual assault—but the “Death Side” concept is designed to allow Cube a performative “out.” This isn’t autobiography, it argues, but a reflection of the worst impulses of his community (personal mileage, as always, may vary).
The “Life Side,” conversely, is Cube as op-ed columnist, a racially isolationist embodiment of the album’s cover image of Cube standing next to a corpse tagged as “Uncle Sam,” with all the metaphorical subtlety of a political cartoonist. Interracial dating, moving to the suburbs, selling drugs, gangbanging: all of these are noxious activities that are preventing the black race (okay, black men) from reaching its potential. This side, significantly more controversial than the first, was an outgrowth of Cube’s fortuitous 1990 run-in with Chuck D. in the Def Jam lobby. After splitting with N.W.A. and learning that Ruthless wouldn’t let Dre produce his first solo album, Cube headed east, to track down 3rd Bass’ producer. After running into D., Cube took a feature slot on Public Enemy’s 1990 single “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and an east/west creative partnership was established.
D. and the Bomb Squad would exert a huge influence on Amerikkka’s Most Wanted. “Public Enemy taught me how to put a record together as far as knowing what song should come after what song and the feel of a record,” Cube later recalled. “Chuck D is a master at that. How it’s sequenced as a whole is just as important as each individual record.” AMW was a huge step forward for West Coast rap, with Cube further shaping the “nigga” and “gangsta” archetypes he’d started with N.W.A. while creating something close to a full conceptual work complete with skits, samples from the actual America’s Most Wanted television show, and an overall consistency that the shallow-past-the-singles Straight Outta Compton lacked.
Cube’s other P.E.-inspired transformation was happening at the content level, as he turned N.W.A.’s shock-rap into a new hybrid form: part gangsta nihilism and part post-Black Power militarism, inspired by P.E.’s deep connections with the Nation of Islam and its controversial figurehead Louis Farrakhan. The differences between P.E. and Cube are instructive: if “Fight the Power” pioneered a form of post-Black Power cultural politics informed by a desire for a cultural movement, then AMW proper opener “The Nigga You Love To Hate” (and its sequel, Death Certificate opener ‘The Wrong Nigga to Fuck With”) is driven by Cube’s sui generis self-interest. Where Chuck D. was an outspoken diplomat, Cube was a righteous mercenary in the KRS-One mold, aiming as much at suburban pieties—hey kids, check out “Gangsta’s Fairytale”!—as his perceived enemies.
After eight years under Ronald Reagan’s oppressive social and economic policies, which were particularly devastating to black communities, it made sense for a politicized South Central rapper to shun the idea of community mobilization and carve out a cultural politics of the self. The already privileged succeeded wildly, while historically marginalized populations like those in Compton and South Central L.A. deteriorated. Reagan’s Draconian “war on drugs” devastated inner cities for generations. First Lady Nancy urged kids to “Just Say No,” placing the onus to wipe out the crack epidemic not on the state but the individual. This same bootstraps ideal did away with civil rights organizing in exchange for self-entrepreneurship in a putatively free market, and it was from this landscape that Cube’s new identity was born. Jeff Chang explained it best in Cant Stop, Won’t Stop: “If Nation of Millions had signaled the end of the civil rights era, Death Certificate’s primary impulse was to dance on the grave.”
On Death Certificate, Cube expanded AMW’s lone-gunman individualism into a fierce, convoluted political manifesto. It’s not just about Cube alone anymore, but the future of young black men. “Niggaz are in a state of emergency” are the first seven words on the album. “I want to see my brothers and sisters on a higher economical level and treating themselves with more respect,” Cube told the L.A. Times in 1991. “The American Dream is not for Blacks. Blacks who (still believe in that dream) are kidding themselves…What I try to do is tell the kids the truth…the brutal, harsh truth—pulling no punches—about what's out there in the world.” Cube’s truth-telling was rooted in his recently forged relationship to the Nation of Islam, a movement that had recenty brought back to prominence by the outspoken Farrakhan. The NOI had done much good for Black communities over time by preaching a gospel of self-reliance and racial separatism. Both notions permeate Death Certificate’s politics, and, it should be noted, experienced their renaissance during that same individualistic, increasingly identity-factionalized 1980s.
On the album’s CD tray image, Cube is pictured reading the NOI newspaper The Final Call, while strategically positioned between his recently assembled Lench Mob crew on the left and Nation representatives standing at attention on the right. It’s tough to know how much Cube’s NOI affiliation was rooted in ideological purity or performative opportunism—on “Steady Mobbin’”, he wonders if the better come-up is to “start sellin’ bean pies” or bootleg “You Can’t Touch This” t-shirts—though he’d obviously taken Farrakhan’s recommendation to use his fame to spread the word. In 1991, the devout Muslim and Watts-bred rapper Kam and Nation spokesperson Khalid Abdul Muhammad shaved off Cube’s “toxic” Jheri curl, and both appear on the album.
It’s easy to draw a direct line between NOI teachings (including a discredited, Cube-endorsed book that alleges Jewish people dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade) and Cube’s anti-Semitic remarks on “No Vaseline,” Cube’s response to N.W.A.’s diss-track diptych “Message to B.A.” and “Real Niggaz” (the latter of which was repurposed from the 100 Miles and Runnin’ EP). “No Vaseline” doesn’t fit with the rest of Death Certificate at all—it’s like Cube left the stage and confronted N.W.A. in an alley behind the venue, bringing his mic. Although the violence was symbolic, “No Vaseline” remains a hateful song, Cube using homophobia and anti-Semitism as crude weaponry for his macho language battle. The track led the Simon Wiesenthal Center to call for a nationwide boycott of Death Certificate because Cube recommends dispensing with the “devil” Heller by putting “a bullet in his temple.” Island Records, which distributed the album in Europe, removed “Vaseline” (and “Black Korea”) from copies there. In his review of “Death Certificate,” the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called Cube a “sex bigot” and compared “Vaseline” to Axl Rose’s xenophobic lyrics on “One in a Million.”
The “Vaseline” controversy fed headlines for months, and for Cube’s millions of fans, its real-life soap-opera thrill only fed into the song’s problematic appeal. Like with so much art that is virtuosic and problematic in equal measure, many took perverse joy listening to Cube eradicate precarious communicative boundaries that help maintain civil discourse. Especially for the teenage boys who comprised Cube’s core audience at the time, “No Vaseline” was its own rap Wrestlemania headline bout: a triumphal act of face-saving in an easy-to-replicate cadence over a sample of Brick’s 1976 disco-funk hit “Dazz.” Cube flipped Ren’s “too much cargo” line from “Real Niggaz” and called him out for driving a B-210, and even turned Eazy-E’s subversive attendance at a Presidential dinner into an act of kowtowing to white authority. Even the song’s title (and theme) was intertextual: It was pulled from LL Cool J’s “To Da Break of Dawn” from the previous year, on which he eviscerates three foes: Kool Moe Dee, MC Hammer, and Ice-T. Cube outdid L there: he took out five enemies in one song. Until Jay-Z’s 2001 Nas-dismantling “Takeover,” “No Vaseline” was rap’s peak diss track: a non-stop series of consecutively landed, clever punchlines. N.W.A. would break up before getting a chance to respond.
“No Vaseline”s flawlessly executed “dozens” routine was one thing. The inflammatory 47-second track “Black Korea,” on which Cube rails against—and obliquely threatens—Korean-American shop owners, was another. The community relationship between Korean-American merchants (who had run liquor stores and convenience shops in black parts of Los Angeles for years) was already tense, but it was inflamed by the 1991 shooting of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by South Central liquor store owner Soon Ja Du, captured on surveillance video only two weeks after the King footage was released. On “Korea,” Cube alternately suggests a boycott (for which there was precedent) and arson for non-compliant storeowners, characterized as “Oriental, one-penny countin’ motherfuckers” and “chop-suey ass.”
The broader context of this issue is best characterized by Chang: Korean-American storeowners were overworked and often terrorized by local gang members; in 1986, Chang notes, the Black-Korean Alliance was formed after four Korean merchants were killed in a single month. Black citizens, on the other hand, were tired of local merchants who wouldn’t hire black workers, who didn’t give back to local communities, and who assumed that any black-skinned person entering their stores had criminal intent.
“Black Korea” was not a nuanced song, but Cube wasn’t a politician or a diplomat. He’s “the nigga you love to hate,” and “the wrong nigga to fuck with.” To many critics, however, Death Certificate was merely “the rankest sort of racism and hatemongering,” as Billboard argued in a rare editorial condemning the album. At The Source, editor James Bernard replied to Billboard in a manner befitting his publication’s mindset and audience: the industry magazine was “too dainty and thin-skinned to hear the anger and rage and frustration that many people are forced to deal with every day.” This was the official line from Cube’s camp as well. When Christgau asked for comment, Cube’s publicist Leyla Turkkan framed Death Certificate as “an honest expression of black rage.” Bernard went further (and broader) in a review for Entertainment Weekly: “I’m not arrogant enough to wag my finger at someone for stridency or incorrect language when many of his friends are dead and many of the rest are either in prison or standing on the corner surrounded by burned-out buildings and dying dreams,” he wrote. “These people don’t get to write magazine articles, don’t get elected to political office, and don’t get appointed to the Supreme Court.”
As 2Pac would two years later with Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., Cube exploited the mainstream exposure he was receiving as an opportunity to more powerfully broadcast his narrowly intended address. “The truth is I don't care what the white community thinks about the record,” Cube told the LA Times. “I'm talking directly to my Black brothers and sisters. I speak in a language we talk in the streets. Other people can listen too—they might learn something—but I'm talking to the black kids who need somebody to talk sense—honest sense—to them.” This raises a crucial question that we still deal with today: whites bought Death Certificate—an album aimed toward black communities—in the millions. How was a white kid in the Midwest suburbs supposed to assume a subject position as the addressee of a song like “Us,” a song that examines the failures of young black men to take ownership of their own futures, and not rely on government intervention? The answer: we couldn’t. Instead, we eavesdropped.
Indeed, one of the most profound cultural shifts occasioned by the rise of gangsta rap, and pioneered by Ice Cube on Death Certificate, is the phenomenon of mass-cultural “listening in.” An album that sells millions of copies is designed to function as a communicative channel from one young black man to an audience of other black men. Chang called Death Certificate “the most impassioned attempt to speak to the young guns of South Central since Bunchy Carter had left the Slausons for the Panthers.” On one hand, of course, this perspective permits Cube a tautological “out”—“I’m not talking to you so you’re not my audience”—that is logically disproven by the fact that he’s releasing the album to a mass audience. On the other hand, understanding the intended audience of a work is absolutely crucial to empathizing with its message.
And there were messages: Amid Cube’s fiercest isolationist tendencies, Death Certificate exposes structural failings in a way that no rapper had yet attempted with this degree of clarity. Non-Black listeners may have bought the album for the illicit thrills of “Steady Mobbin’,” “Look Who’s Burnin’” or “No Vaseline,” but those with open ears could learn a lot from “Alive on Arrival.” Dramatically concluding the album’s “Life” side, penultimate track “Arrival” is a grim, detail-rich narrative of a drug-related shooting victim (“looked down, and my sweatshirt’s red at the bottom”) who dies while waiting for treatment at South Central’s MLK Community Hospital after being harassed by the LAPD. Cube’s description of his waiting room horror makes for one of the album’s most richly ironic lines: “One hour done passed/Done watched two episodes of MASH”. Much of the public attention paid to Death Certificate was devoted to Cube’s lashing out at anyone who stands in his way, but on “Arrival,” he talks about “an overworked physician” who didn’t have the time to give his character more than a band-aid and IV. “Why, oh why, can’t I get help?” Cube pleads as the song concludes. “’Cause I’m Black, I gots to go for self.”
Then there’s “A Bird in the Hand,” Cube’s single greatest solo work (with respect to “Who’s the Mack,” “Dead Homiez” and “It Was a Good Day”), and one of the signal moments not only for gangsta rap, but rap history. For just over two minutes, Cube perfectly combines the hardhead, oft-comical street narratives of the Death Side with the fiercely opinionated Life Side tracks. As rhetoric, it’s powerful: the day-to-day life of a young black man in Bush Sr.’s America was pinned in on all sides, with no logical action for economic survival, let alone success, that didn’t involve drug dealing. The trade-offs are expressed with sharp detail—“Always knew that I would clock G’s/But ‘Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order please?”—and pragmatism: “So now you got a pep talk/But sorry, this is our only room to walk.”
This is saying nothing about the track itself, which is magisterial: Cube’s production crew the Boogiemen (DJ Pooh, Bobcat, and Rashad) interrupt the album’s George Clinton fixation to flip Jimmue Haskell’s paranormal string break from the final third of B.B. King’s 1970 slave-trade opus “Chains and Things” over a razor-sliced drum knock from the first seconds of the Five Stairsteps’ “Don’t Change Your Love.” Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 flip of those drums and Cube’s “fresh outta school” opening line in the MC Eiht-featuring “m.A.A.d City”—a work deeply inspired by Cube’s early ’90s albums—made for a spine-tingling moment of cross-generational gangsta-rap continuity.
Lamar himself inducted Cube and the rest of N.W.A. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2016, largely because of the Cube-penned “Fuck the Police” and “Straight Outta Compton.” That’s just one metric of his reputation, however. To many 2016 teenagers—the age group who loves Lamar and would’ve bought Death Certificate in 1991—N.W.A. is classic rap, canonized in a 2015 biopic, Cube’s solo career is most likely boiled down to “It Was a Good Day,” and he’s more widely known as the star of Friday and the Barbershop movies, if not the angry Captain Dickson in 21 Jump Street. The proto-reality “true-crime” moment of the late 80s and early 90s that spawned Cube’s approach toward rap storytelling has itself morphed into a celebreality TV entertainment juggernaut (see: Kanye, Drake, the Game), while smartphone footage of police killing Black citizens has become a macabre reality of daily online life, mortifying millions but spurring little actual change.
Polls show that the country is more racially divided than at any time since the Rodney King verdict, six months after Ice Cube tossed Death Certificate like a Molotov cocktail into the nation’s heated debate about race and rights. In 2016, the death rate for black Americans, according to the CDC, is roughly 50% higher than for whites. Much about American culture—who may speak publicly, who may be defended—has changed for the better since late 1991, rendering much of Death Certificate’s sexism, homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism antiquated. At the same time, however, the rest of the album—a Black artist forcefully arguing for Black unity and freedom in the face of looming, state-sanctioned mortality—remains as sadly as relevant as ever.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the onetime Nation of Islam spokesperson featured on Death Certificate. | 2016-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Priority | November 27, 2016 | 9.5 | 5f6ade3a-37e5-4721-8050-6f0906b5c353 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Pop Smoke’s second posthumous album sounds like it’s solely designed to generate clicks as a new generation of rap fans continues to be exploited for their streams. | Pop Smoke’s second posthumous album sounds like it’s solely designed to generate clicks as a new generation of rap fans continues to be exploited for their streams. | Pop Smoke: Faith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pop-smoke-faith/ | Faith | Pop Smoke’s co-managers Steven Victor and Rico Beats, along with the corner office executives at Republic Records, are hopeful that they can upload Pop Smoke’s second posthumous album, Faith, to streaming platforms so that everyone will mindlessly slip it into their rotations and playlists for the rest of the year. They’ll desperately try to placate skeptical fans: This album will keep Pop’s legacy alive! Hey, the intro includes a spiritual speech from his mother! It all feels like an attempt to manipulate us into believing that an argument against Faith is an argument against the wishes of his fans and family—so that the powers-that-be can sit back and line their pockets with the bucks they leeched from Pop Smoke’s legacy.
It’s not to say that making a profit wasn’t a goal of Pop Smoke’s music or that money-making isn’t one of the inherent purposes of posthumous albums, but it should also seek to preserve the spirit of the artist’s music. Faith is unconcerned with anything outside of financial gain. The album is filled with unfinished records, demos, and reference tracks that were sliced together and completed with features only selected to juice streaming numbers. Whoever devised this Frankenstein creation doesn’t seem to get the appeal of Pop Smoke. Meet the Woo, his debut mixtape, was packed with tracks that felt designed to soundtrack a couple of blocks in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and managed to trickle far outside of those borders because of his smooth yet intense personality, the sharp drill production, and that one of a kind growling, deep voice.
Faith leans into a direction that was experimented with on Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, which is to make music for everywhere. But so often, music made for everywhere sounds like it belongs nowhere. Take the Neptunes-produced “Merci Beaucoup,” featuring one of the strongest Pop verses on the album. “Catch a op and I’m takin’ his jewelry, catch a op and I’m takin’ his jewelry/I said, ‘Don’t get it twisted, just ’cause I smile a lot, that don’t mean I’m with the foolery,’” he raps. Too bad the sweet-sounding beat doesn’t fit the sinister mood of Pop’s raps, it sounds like a mashup you might accidentally play on YouTube. Similarly, the hokey Swizz Beatz instrumental on “8-Ball” makes Pop, one of the most energetic and dynamic rap voices to come out in years, come across dull.
But beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad records on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions. I feel dirty listening to the “So Sick”-sampling “Woo Baby” with Chris Brown, which was so obviously made to fill the radio airwaves with white noise. The Kanye and Pusha-T-assisted “Tell the Vision” has the energy of a college paper struggling to hit the word count. “Look, Tyler got the album of the year… for now/But Pop about to drop/I see the platinum in the clouds,” raps Pusha, and I’m sure the record label didn’t even care what it sounded like; it’s just there, like a handful of the album’s features, to fill space and generate clicks.
The most confusing record is “Demeanor” with Dua Lipa, where a short Pop verse and rough hook are laid over the type of bubbly production that could backdrop an episode of Gossip Girl. It doesn’t work and feels out of line with Pop’s music—he never had to sacrifice his drill sound or intensity to make a hit. But again, the shepherds of this album couldn’t care less about the quality. If this album was actually about Pop Smoke’s legacy, like his managers and label would like us to believe, there would be a larger emphasis on paying tribute to those drill roots. One of the more interesting elements of Meet the Woo Vol. 2 was how Pop expanded and built on the foundation laid by drill. The only signs of that on the project are through the brash “Brush Em” with fine fellow Canarsie rapper Rah Swish and the hectic “30” with Bizzy Banks.
Aside from those brief moments, the only good that comes out of Faith is a reassurance that artists cannot be replaced. Though it’s hard to be optimistic, there’s a long history of shameless, money-hungry posthumous albums; and now, after a tragic couple of years in rap, a new generation of fans is being terrorized and exploited for their streams. Where will we draw the ethical line? How far are we from the days where it’s commonplace for labels to put on hologram live shows and pay some tech company to recreate a voice? Faith is a bleak reflection of the reality that nothing is off-limits if it will help record labels pocket a few more dollars.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | July 21, 2021 | 3.8 | 5f6c8d13-b827-49dc-be03-e52a38cebf79 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Just like it says on the box: The Pearl Jam frontman strums and sings simple love songs. Chan Marshall of Cat Power guests. | Just like it says on the box: The Pearl Jam frontman strums and sings simple love songs. Chan Marshall of Cat Power guests. | Eddie Vedder: Ukulele Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15486-ukulele-songs/ | Ukulele Songs | If you include the soundtrack album he recorded for Into the Wild, Ukulele Songs is only Eddie Vedder's second solo album. Considering the size and devotion of his cult, coupled with Pearl Jam's "No, you really shouldn't have" over-generosity when it comes to releases, it's remarkable he hasn't put out five by now. This makes Ukulele Songs even more of a curiosity: As its title makes clear, the album consists of 16 tracks of Vedder pawing the tiny, four-stringed Hawaiian instrument and warbling love songs. That's it. In a way, it's as clear-cut a proposition as you're going to get these days. You either instantly know you need 35 minutes of this in your life or are already backing slowly away.
The songs themselves date back, in some cases, 10 years or more-- presumably from around the same time Vedder wrote "Soon Forget", the two-minute ukulele ditty from Binaural. The rest of the songs occupy that same headspace. They are casual, sweet, and disarmingly unaffected, and you can practically smell the campus green wafting off them. That Vedder is putting Ukulele Songs out during this Big Blowout Year of Pearl Jam (Documentary! Festival! Reissue! Tour!) makes it seem even less of a solo project and more like a a souvenir for longtime Pearl Jam fans. It works best that way.
Indeed, in small doses, Ukulele Songs is lovely. Vedder has always been affecting when he's lovelorn, and here he's more or less curled up in a ball of bewildered hurt. "As I move myself out of your sight/ I'll be sleeping by myself tonight," he croons on "Sleeping By Myself". The album's best moments-- "Sleeping By Myself", "Without You", "Longing to Belong"-- tap the same quietly wounded melancholy as Paul McCartney's 1971 proto-indie pop masterpiece Ram.
Alas, 34 minutes is a perilously long time for most to to spend alone with just Eddie Vedder, a ukulele, and his feelings for company. Vedder's precious side has never been his best one (see: No Code's "Sometimes"), and Ukulele Songs is so determinedly twee and relentlessly self-effacing that it can feel like watching a grown man attempting to morph into a baby koala before your eyes. By itself, hearing Chan Marshall playing Bernadette Peters to Vedder's Steve Martin for the duet "Tonight You Belong to Me" is winning and funny; in the context of a full ukulele album, it is slightly cloying. Vedder has said he wants this record to inspire people to pick up the instrument and sing with their friends, an old-fashioned sentiment impossible not to be charmed by. Like a lot of Vedder's experiments, the spirit is easier to admire than the final product. The ukulele might be a great campfire instrument, but sometimes what works best at the campfire should stay there. | 2011-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Monkeywrench | June 1, 2011 | 6.4 | 5f752073-28a0-4c15-8b25-3f1f079079c3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
In 1984, a teenaged sibling duo in Birmingham, England recorded their unique, Urdu-language take on synth pop. The first release from the Discostan label celebrates a lost classic of new wave. | In 1984, a teenaged sibling duo in Birmingham, England recorded their unique, Urdu-language take on synth pop. The first release from the Discostan label celebrates a lost classic of new wave. | Nermin Niazi / Feisal Mosleh: Disco Se Aagay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nermin-niazi-feisal-mosleh-disco-se-aagay/ | Disco Se Aagay | Los Angeles artist Arshia Fatima Haq was thumbing through racks of dusty vinyl at New York’s A-1 Records a few years ago when a title caught her eye: Disco Se Aagay, or “Beyond Disco” in Haq’s native Urdu. Peering out from the sleeve was a teenage girl with bouffant ’80s hair, a white dinner jacket, and a Mona Lisa smile. The album was billed as “a step further in the field of disco music”; the musicians were identified in the credits as a brother and sister, Nermin Niazi and Feisal Mosleh, from Birmingham, England. Nermin, the singer and lyricist, was “still a school-girl,” according to the sleeve notes. Feisal, a college student, had composed and produced the music, writing some of the songs at just 17. The copyright was dated 1984; there were synthesizers. Naturally, Haq took the record home.
Since 2011, Haq, who was born in Hyderabad, India, had been developing a project called Discostan: a “diasporic discotheque” and radio show dedicated to the stories and sounds of the South and West Asian and North African (SWANA) region. She wanted to upend official narratives of nationhood, to decolonize popular music and the avant-garde alike. Exploring the idea of “home” from a diasporic perspective, her project was critical but also celebratory, designed to facilitate what she has called the “radical embodiment of marginalized people on the dancefloor.” As Haq listened to Disco Se Aagay, she was “blown away” by hearing a new-wave band singing in her mother tongue, she recently told Bandcamp Daily. She realized that the record spinning on her turntable was a physical manifestation of Discostan. Before long, she and her creative partner, Jeremy Loudenback, tracked down Niazi and Mosleh, now middle aged, to discuss a reissue.
The liner notes of Discostan Records 001 fill in the gaps of Nermin and Feisal’s story. They come from a musical family: Their grandfather had been the director of Radio India before Partition; their mother, Nahid Niazi, was a famous playback singer; their father, Moslehuddin, was a renowned film composer. The kids were born in Pakistan but grew up in Birmingham, England, where the family wound up after civil war erupted in their homeland in 1971. As a young teen, Nermin was enamored of the British synth pop that ruled the airwaves; Feisal liked to tinker on his father’s Casio and Yamaha keyboards. They ended up signing to Oriental Star Agencies, the Birmingham label that would popularize qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the West. The summer that they were 14 and 19, respectively, they went into Birmingham’s Zella Studios to record a batch of songs that fused synth pop, electro-funk, Western classical chord structures, and Hindustani vocal scales.
Disco Se Aagay’s nine songs (and two remixes) are immediately identifiable as products of their era. They’re propelled by spring-loaded drum machines and rubbery basslines, and fleshed out in the vivid tones of the top-of-the-line synths like the Roland Juno-60 and Yamaha DX7: synthetic brass stabs, harpsichord-like glissandi, and bright splashes of glassy color. You can hear echoes of early Depeche Mode in Mosleh’s staccato counterpoints and New Order in his insistent drum programming; many of his rhythms are steeped in the punchy syncopations of Latin freestyle artists like Shannon and Connie. The opulent timbres and chord progressions often recall contemporaries like ABC, the Human League, Howard Jones, and other acts pursuing a particularly baroque take on new wave. Despite the songs’ studio sophistication—speaking to Bandcamp Daily, the two musicians recalled multi-tracking Niazi’s voice, then panning the layers to suggest a whirlpool of sound—the results lack the polish of their big-budget peers’ output. During an instrumental passage in “Nazneen,” the chords and bassline occasionally clash, as though two mismatched snippets of tape had inadvertently been spliced alongside one another. But the slightly muddled sonics—and the duo’s autodidactic instincts—are a big part of the album’s charm. As often as new wave celebrated artifice, this music feels unusually sincere.
What especially distinguishes these songs as something out of the ordinary is Niazi’s singing. She has a slight, breathy voice, but what she lacks in power she makes up for in agility and sheer expressiveness. Whereas white British synth pop tended toward either perky major or brooding minor keys, Niazi’s slippery, melismatic phrases, based on Hindustani scales, make room for more ambiguous emotions. At any moment, a giddy melody might turn downcast. On “Chala Hai Akela,” she sounds almost uncannily like Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser; the song’s acoustic guitar and hissing shakers even anticipate the glistening palette that Cocteau Twins would adopt later in the decade.
It’s clear that Niazi and Mosleh weren’t just imitating the synth pop of the day; their musical backgrounds enabled their own original take on it. In place of Western pop’s verse/chorus structures, Niazi’s lyrics employ intricate repetitions—sometimes line by line, sometimes breaking apart individual words into a dizzying stream of syllables. In “Nainan,” her refrain of “Nainan na na na na/Woh nainan na na na na” translates as something like, “Eyes-eye-eye-eye ey-eye/Those eyes-eye-eye-eye ey-eye.” Even for listeners who don’t understand the lyrics, there’s no mistaking the surfeit of emotion, a feeling so powerful it can barely be expressed. And while Niazi sometimes sings of glowing fireflies, glittering stars, and flowers blooming in her heart, her songwriting also betrays a wisdom beyond her years.
In song after song, Niazi dwells on distance: the ache of faraway lovers, the longing to be reunited, the soul mates who wonder, “What is our destination and when will we actually meet?” In “Sari Sari Raat,” she sings of two lovers too scared to share their feelings: “I didn’t say a word/You also stayed silent/And just like that, we lost the moment/You walked away without hearing me.” Even her brightest melodies sometimes contain dark recriminations: “You’re a liar and you hide/Pretending to be something else,” she sings on “Dekha Jab Se Dekha”; “Don’t come near me/What do you think this is?”
British new wave is typically framed as a story of the democratization of pop music—of floppy-haired kids poking away at second-hand synthesizers in their bedrooms, neophytes inventing a crude new musical language. As the Human League’s Phil Oakey joked, “We laughed at the other bands learning three chords—we used one finger.” Still, despite these democratic pretenses, the history of new wave has hardly been inclusive; the kids in its telling are almost invariably white. Disco Se Aagay challenges that assumed homogeneity. Along with other recent reissues from the Subcontinent and its diaspora, like Charanjit Singh’s prescient 1983 album Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat and Rupa’s Disco Jazz, a crate-diggers’ holy grail that became a YouTube hit, Disco Se Aagay offers an important correction to the historical record. It is a reminder that some of pop culture’s most interesting artifacts emerge far from the floodlights of Top of the Pops (though Niazi and Mosleh did get to perform on the BBC’s Asian Magazine); it is a reminder of the diversity inherent to British culture, despite what the St. George’s flag-waving Brexiteers would like to believe. Above all, it is a reminder—and a joyful one—of the dualities experienced by people like Niazi and Mosleh, who grew up straddling two cultures. As Haq would say, decades later, of her fictional Republic of Discostan, “Sound is the one thing that crosses borders…. Music is the bridge between these places, and a way of creating an imaginary homeland.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Discostan | January 30, 2021 | 7.4 | 5f7d0bc6-6724-4446-bb26-0221c1210b8a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his new album, The Good Fight, rapper/producer Oddisee eschews mainstream attention and creative limitations. It's technically hip-hop, but it goes in all sorts of musical directions. | On his new album, The Good Fight, rapper/producer Oddisee eschews mainstream attention and creative limitations. It's technically hip-hop, but it goes in all sorts of musical directions. | Oddisee: The Good Fight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20397-the-good-fight/ | The Good Fight | Oddisee’s music has taken many forms over the years: On his early compilations—101, Foot in the Door and Mental Liberation—Odd was the scrappy upstart, his distinct D.C. drawl and heavy drums carrying a unique "golden-era" hip-hop tinge. As leader of the Diamond District with rappers yU and Uptown XO, Odd is the mature figurehead: The group’s 2009 debut, In the Ruff, is a widely heralded classic in D.C.’s underground rap circles. In 2011, Oddisee released what’s probably his most lauded project to date, Rock Creek Park, a mostly instrumental album dedicated to his own bike rides through the sprawling D.C. landscape. By 2012’s Odd Renditions, you got a sense that he wanted greater visibility: He spit rhymes on Bon Iver samples and flipped Marvin Gaye into a danceable rap tune.
Though in recent years, Oddisee’s tone has grown more acerbic. On his 2013 mixtape, Tangible Dream, Odd wagged the finger at fake friends and naysayers. He reserves some vitriol for The Good Fight, his sophomore album, though he sounds remarkably comfortable throughout its 12 tracks. He does more singing ("First Choice", "Meant It When I Said It") and flirts with different time signatures ("Counter-Clockwise"). "That’s Love" recalls spacious funk, and on "Fight Delays", he brags a little more than usual: "They tell me I ain’t buzzin’, well, last year I made well over a hunnid stacks." That sort of straight-ahead statement is rare for Oddisee, who’s largely kept silent about his financial gains, though in 2010 he moved to Brooklyn from the D.C. area to further monetize his career.
The Good Fight is technically a hip-hop record, but the vibe here is decidedly eclectic, building upon the kaleidoscopic method he’s employed for 13 years. If Odd’s debut album addressed the uncertainty he felt about his artistic trek, The Good Fight proclaims the success of said path. He references a "working" plan that eschews mainstream attention and the fame that comes with it, choosing instead to be the low-key jetsetter culling inspiration from his global travels. As a result, The Good Fight exudes a sense of artistic freedom not heard on Oddisee’s previous releases. The music feels distinctly international and unhindered, far removed from the straight-ahead boom-bap he used to make. He’s always created on his own terms, but The Good Fight feels like a hearty "fuck you" to prevailing groupthink and the industry’s creative limitations.
Still, it’s clear Odd has grown tired of the false starts. On "Want Something Done", he complains about the phone meetings. He bemoans superficial demands and his own struggles to be heard. "Glorifying music that’s abusive and a threat to us," Odd quips, "and if you got a message in your records, you collecting dust." That’s become a common theme for him, in particular, on 2012’s "That Real", where the rapper contemplated his vision and the widespread anonymity felt by underground rappers. He revisits the notion on Good Fight standout "What They’ll Say", but the message quickly floats by: "I know that my intentions go unnoticed, a part of me wants attention." That’s long been Oddisee’s dilemma: On the surface, you’d think he doesn’t care about making it, yet there’s a part of him that values mainstream acceptance. The Good Fight is a streamlined reminder to ignore the restraints. Great music is great music, no matter where it comes from. | 2015-05-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | May 1, 2015 | 7.3 | 5f81838d-29b7-41a6-8501-42db93a200c3 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
After drawing from IDM, krautrock, and sunshine pop, Dan Snaith's project sets its sights on dark and intricate dance music, with dazzling results. | After drawing from IDM, krautrock, and sunshine pop, Dan Snaith's project sets its sights on dark and intricate dance music, with dazzling results. | Caribou: Swim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14157-swim/ | Swim | In his decade-long career, Caribou's Dan Snaith has fluidly moved between genres like folktronica, shoegaze, krautrock, and 1960s sunshine pop, assimilating their most familiar traits until they're practically in his DNA. His albums have felt warm, loose, and ecstatic (especially 2003's still-career-best Up in Flames), despite Snaith's behind-the-boards meticulousness.
Snaith's latest, Swim, is even heavier on the precise sonic detail, and it's all the more impressive for it. Made with help from kindred spirits including Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan, and Born Ruffians' Luke Lalonde, it was borne out of a desire to create "dance music that sounds like it's made out of water." Swim is darker both in tone and spirit than its predecessor, 2007's day-glo Andorra, swapping expansive drum-circle arrangements and ebullience for chilly rhythms and a bummed-out disposition. Easy entrance points here are scarcer than on any of Snaith's previous full-lengths-- as with 2005's kraut-centric The Milk of Human Kindness, repeat listens are key.
The record kicks off with its most accessible moment, "Odessa". Seasick bass, snatches of flute and guitar, and Snaith's mannered patter combine to give the song a pop-centric lean. But the song's easy appeal makes it easy to miss important details, like the ghosted acid-house bleat and lyrics about a break-up ("Taking the kids/ Driving away/ Turning 'round the life she let him siphon away") that establish Swim's bleary-eyed atmosphere. Lyrically, Snaith seems preoccupied with relationship-related indecision and ennui-- a noticeable departure from Andorra's moony-eyed devotionals. On the LP's other highlight, "Kaili", Snaith muses on a couple ruefully growing old together. Elsewhere, divorce and crumbling relationships permeate "Found Out" (whose female protagonist suffers hopelessness as "she knows she'll be there on her own") and empty-nest song "Hannibal".
Lonely feelings abound, as Snaith employs textures and compositional tricks from minimal techno, house, and disco to convey this distant melancholia. The harshly juxtaposed interplay of beats on "Found Out" make for punch-drunk club music, "Leave House" unfolds with LCD Soundsystem's dance-rock know-how, and the warning horns of "Hannibal" give way to a sequined breakdown deserving of any side-long disco edit. Unlike many artists who attempt to dive headlong into the genre, Snaith demonstrates a deep understanding of dance music-- not just how it works, but why, right down to its most pleasurable idiosyncratic tics.
This historian's grasp, combined with the way Snaith's soft, out-of-phase vocals seem to hover over his productions, inevitably brings to mind Arthur Russell. But while Russell's spirit is indeed felt throughout Swim, Snaith's sonic heart still belongs to hash-laced psych, from the drone and Gong-worthy chimes that run through "Bowls" to the vocal chants that break up "Sun"'s tech-house throb. Proof that, despite his chameleonic tendencies, Dan Snaith retains his singular identity as an artist-- and Swim is a reminder that even at his most challenging, the man's compositional capabilities can dazzle. | 2010-04-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Merge | April 20, 2010 | 8.4 | 5f81c7fe-d0c4-40bb-9c48-4e3646c53ea6 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Held up by two good-to-great songs, the lightweight EP is Coldplay’s first release in years that feels more like a clearing of the throat than a new, distinct statement. | Held up by two good-to-great songs, the lightweight EP is Coldplay’s first release in years that feels more like a clearing of the throat than a new, distinct statement. | Coldplay: Kaleidoscope EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coldplay-kaleidoscope-ep/ | Kaleidoscope | Coldplay are nearing the end of a restless decade, one that found them cycling through a handful of disparate creative approaches without ever losing much of their commercial momentum. The albums they made under Brian Eno’s warped wing (2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends... and, three years later, the underrated Mylo Xyloto) pushed their sound to its breaking point with detours into shoegaze, R&B, and chirping electro-pop. 2014’s morose Ghost Stories—a 40-minute shrug made in the wake of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling”—was an obvious outlier the moment it landed on virtual store shelves. And when Martin got his groove back the very next year with A Head Full of Dreams, he didn’t stop at soliciting production from Norwegian pop mercenaries Stargate or a feature from Beyoncé—he joined hands with the emo-EDM doofuses in the Chainsmokers and tag-teamed the listening public with the insipid “Something Just Like This.” Naturally, it became one of the biggest hits of Coldplay’s career.
Kaleidoscope, the band’s new EP, is their first release in years that feels more like a clearing of the throat than a new, distinct statement. The obvious analogue in the Coldplay discography is the Viva La Vida companion EP Prospekt’s March, but there are some key differences separating the two minor efforts. Prospekt’s March was a clear product of the writing and recording that resulted in Viva La Vida; it was released during the same year, and featured several instances of remixed or revised material that appeared on the parent album first. Kaleidoscope is coming out more than 18 months after A Head Full of Dreams, and it largely lacks that album’s blinding sheen and radiant optimism. It’s more of a grab-bag than a coherent release: one-off collaborations and ill-fitting outtakes share space with songs that unexpectedly revisit the sound and spirit of Coldplay’s creative peak.
There’s a version of “Something Just Like This” on here, though maybe not the one you’d expect. Kaleidoscope avoids the studio version for the “Tokyo Remix,” a live take from the band’s mammoth (and ongoing) tour that’s all but indistinguishable from the original in terms of intensity and instrumentation. Lesser Coldplay material can sometimes find redemption through thousands of voices singing in unison, but “Something Just Like This” is the sound of Martin at his smarmiest. A stadium full of eager fans can’t save it. Big Sean feature “Miracles (Someone Special)” fares better, if only because he and Martin are kindred spirits: charming, good-natured presences incapable of resisting their worst lyrical impulses.
Kaleidoscope’s existence is ultimately justified by the two songs that reach into the band’s past. They reunite with Eno and producer Markus Dravs on “A L I E N S,” an earnest take on the European migrant crisis complicated by a jittery 5/4 rhythm. Martin’s never going to grade out as an above-average writer, but he strings together an opening verse that’s unexpectedly moving in its depiction of a family fleeing for its life. (They rush to take a few pictures on the way out so “history has some to know.”) The result is a song that would’ve fit in nicely alongside the mild experiments that made Viva La Vida so refreshing.
The patient, expansive “All I Can Think About Is You” is even better, built on a premise that’s classic Coldplay: a love-drunk Martin stumbles through a world that’s crumbling around him, unable to shake the object of his affection for more than a second. He feels guilty about it, until all of a sudden he doesn’t: the skies part, the band starts rolling, and we’re treated to a stadium-scraping piano melody that’s as gorgeous as anything this side of “Clocks.” This is what Coldplay can do: a vague, familiar sentiment is rendered transcendent through the power of sheer beauty.
Of course, there are plenty of listeners for whom phrases like “classic Coldplay” mean little. The band occupies a rarefied cultural space at this point in their career: they’re popular enough to play the Super Bowl halftime show and uncool enough that no one seemed excited by the prospect. The defensiveness with which Martin used to field questions about the band’s haters has been replaced with a sort of bemused acceptance: “We’re gonna do our thing,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “If you like it, wonderful, and if you don’t, I really don’t mind. There’s so many other things you can do. You can have a PlayStation!” Kaleidoscope isn’t going to kickstart Coldplay’s critical reappraisal, nor does it deserve to. But it rewards those of us who’ve stuck around with a few songs that capture the band at its best. | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | July 17, 2017 | 5.8 | 5f841f31-4b32-4173-934b-fb32115a8fc7 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
Wussy's sixth LP is bleaker and more difficult than its predecessor, 2014's tentatively anthemic Attica!. The album is full of darkly valiant shoegaze, music that is cozy enough to hibernate under. | Wussy's sixth LP is bleaker and more difficult than its predecessor, 2014's tentatively anthemic Attica!. The album is full of darkly valiant shoegaze, music that is cozy enough to hibernate under. | Wussy: Forever Sounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21651-forever-sounds/ | Forever Sounds | Wussy’s unlikely genesis occurred in 2001, when young singer Lisa Walker was scouted by 42-year-old Chuck Cleaver, the heavily bearded Ass Ponys frontman, who would, in later years, quit his day job as a stonemason to sell antiques. Cleaver and Walker, who also dated, wrote sharply about suburban malaise and domestic grievances, with a knack for unsentimental intimacy redolent of Rilo Kiley and Secaucus-era Wrens. A breakthrough of sorts came in 2012 with Buckeye, a career-spanning compilation blending spry country, poppy postpunk, wintry emo, and shabby folk-pop. A fan base grew in their native Ohio without threatening to break the levees, but 2014’s tentatively anthemic Attica! cast a wider net.
While hardly a volte-face, Forever Sounds, the quintet's sixth LP, is bleaker and more difficult than its predecessor. The album is full of darkly valiant shoegaze, swirly chords met by solos that send the narrator tumbling into the abyss. Despite the vast scale, there remains something resolutely midwestern in the delivery: Where dream-pop vocals tend to glide along with the music, Cleaver’s voice is small yet oratory, as if he has a fascinating story to tell but is startled by the volume of his microphone. Walker taps into a similar feeling–of ennui and passion constantly thwarting each other–but dials down the gravity further. On opener "Dropping Houses," she sounds eerily subdued, ready to disintegrate in the atmosphere.
Forever Sounds, then, is the work of a band less interested in telling stories than smothering themselves in obscurity and noise. "Donny’s Death Scene," with its prominent pedal steel and *Big Lebowski-*referencing story, concerns mundane personal failures being reconciled on an epic scale. Walker’s lyrics ("Donny’s fading in the bright, bowling alley lights," goes the chorus) give Steve Buscemi’s meek character the sendoff John Goodman couldn’t, but like much of the album, the abiding themes are as much a product of the music as the words.
It’s just as well, because the discernible lyrics, particularly Cleaver’s, are knottier than usual, and sometimes overwritten. Usually adept at incisive couplets, Cleaver seems preoccupied with sounding poetic on Forever Sounds, to mixed results: "Who robbed the wishing well?/ Looks like there’s nothing coming true," from "Better Days," is several degrees too precious. And on the psychedelically inclined "Sidewalk Sale," he observes his muse "sucking on a chili dog/ Out in the desert where the heat is hot," which is maybe a little heavy on the exposition, desert-wise.
Thanks to its stately pace and generous decorative effects, the music is cozy enough to hibernate under. The words, while sometimes clumsy, can also be disarmingly poignant: On "Hello, I’m a Ghost," Cleaver laments an ex-lover who’s "undressed 700 more times and I’ve missed every one"; Walker sings, sweetly, "It’s not your failed endeavour/ That lights up your name forever" on "Majestic-12." Where Walker sings more naturally, with easier tones, Cleaver's shy, young-old voice is a reassuring presence beneath the music’s astral blanket. That they both sound overwhelmed by Forever Sounds’ vast scale is in fact the record’s saving grace; as ever, Wussy’s proximity to ordinariness is precisely what makes them lovable.
Correction: The original version of this review incorrectly stated Lisa Walker’s age when Wussy was formed. | 2016-03-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Shake It | March 9, 2016 | 6.9 | 5f854829-bae5-4812-803e-a8563fe4a610 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
With Semper Femina, Laura Marling uses a broad study of femininity to explore complex relationships between women. The album is filled with beautiful observations on the psychology of friendship. | With Semper Femina, Laura Marling uses a broad study of femininity to explore complex relationships between women. The album is filled with beautiful observations on the psychology of friendship. | Laura Marling: Semper Femina | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22949-semper-femina/ | Semper Femina | Laura Marling has used conversations surrounding her sixth album, Semper Femina, to disavow music of “innocent creativity”—the kind that’s “not pointed, not political,” she says. It’s an intuitive concept that sounds relatively novel coming from this folk songwriter. In the late 2000s, Marling emerged from London’s Communion scene, a coterie of authenticity fetishists who wore wounded hearts on tweed-jacket sleeves. Marling was herself embroiled in “innocent creativity,” but she released masterpieces of the form. Her identity evolved from romantic pragmatist to underdog sage to mystic troubadour; her voice became distant and supercilious, baring just enough soul to reassure you one was there. Radical honesty is now common among young songwriters, but Marling can harbor guilt, fear, arrogance, deceit, or triumph in a bottomless deadpan. It’s easy to invest in her evasion.
Semper Femina—Latin for “Always a woman,” and taken from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid—is no revolutionary screed. But the album’s characters, who are all given female pronouns, tiptoe outside Marling’s world of heartbreak and personal redemption. There are signs of a broader project at play. With lyrics about “warning signs” that we’re conditioned to “ignore diligently,” “Next Time” appears to preach a maternal fondness for Mother Earth: “I can no longer close my eyes/While the world around me dies/At the hands/Of folks/Like me,” she trills. While her composure hasn’t wavered since 2010’s I Speak Because I Can, there’s something new in songs like “Next Time” and “Don’t Pass Me By.” Both remind me, in their reserve and understated melancholy, of mid-career Elliott Smith—a chaotic and vulnerable individual anchored by a preternatural understanding of melody, using compassion to navigate horror.
As Semper Femina’s questions deepen, answers rarely materialize. The gorgeous “Always This Way” mourns a friendship cut short in unexplained circumstances. As sorrow triggers a bout of soul-searching, Marling confesses, “Twenty-five years and nothing to show for it/Nothing of any weight.” Over pastoral guitar twirls, the narrator soothes herself with a mantra, though not a satisfying one: “At least I can say/That my debts have been paid.” The conciliation feels a little flimsy. A songwriter as meticulous as Marling doesn’t need to innovate, but she’s most intriguing on songs like “Soothing,” when her cryptic lyrics snowball without scrambling for narrative closure.
“Soothing” is also the record’s only really ambitious composition. Interlocked basslines quarrel under Marling’s magisterial tones. Its image of a “creepy conjurer” whose “hands are in the door” hangs elegantly unresolved. She sings her sendoff—“I banish you with love”—through luscious minor notes that, instead of sugarcoating the rejection, transfigure it. Banishment becomes liberation, a generous act. The philosophy develops on “Wild Fire”: “There no sweeter deed may be,” she sings, “Than to love something enough/To want to help it get free.” As is Marling’s trademark, the line blossoms as both a revelation—the narrator takes pleasure in her wisdom—and a reprimand to a clingy partner, someone unsuited to her passionate independence.
Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women. The full Virgil quote—“A woman is an ever fickle and changeable thing”—could seem patronizing, but Marling quotes it fondly on “Nouel.” She is tirelessly nuanced, and the result is an album filled with beautiful, searching observations on the psychology of friendship and occasionally romance. “I think your mama’s kinda sad/And your papa’s kinda mean,” she sneers on “Wild Fire.” “I can take that all away/You can stop playing it out on me.” Marling proposes here that love is a defense against our parents’ pathologies—yet she acknowledges that the traits we inherit are stubborn, determined to sneak in and mangle beauty. It’s a fitting parallel to how Marling wrestles with, and masters, her ever more malleable folk idiom. | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | More Alarming | March 14, 2017 | 7.7 | 5f8591fc-17f4-48e1-a480-df1abb756eb2 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The second album from the UK duo is future-pop at its best: kaleidoscopic production and incisive lyrics that swirl into marvelous, breathtaking songs. | The second album from the UK duo is future-pop at its best: kaleidoscopic production and incisive lyrics that swirl into marvelous, breathtaking songs. | Let’s Eat Grandma: I’m All Ears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lets-eat-grandma-im-all-ears/ | I’m All Ears | In Let’s Eat Grandma’s vision of utopia, some days you might look like an alien; others, you wake up invisible. In a recent interview, the British duo—Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, both 19 and friends since kindergarten—wrestled with the limits of gender as identity. Life would make more sense, they suggested, if physical appearances warped constantly to represent one’s inner self. Rather than be a body, said Walton, “I wanna be a concept.” If you’ve existed as a teenager, you can probably relate; now imagine releasing an album of self-described “experimental sludge pop” as a pair of 16-year-olds dressed like haunted twin dolls. The response was predictable: adult critics shocked that teenage girls could make music at all, let alone music this trippy.
That resistance to easy interpretation extends all the way to the name itself—which, granted, doesn’t exactly gesture towards virtuosity on first glance. “It’s a punctuation joke,” Hollingworth explained—an Eats, Shoots & Leaves type deal where one misplaced comma turns a dinner invite (“Let’s eat, Grandma!”) into a horror movie. But beyond an inside joke, the shape-shifting name embodies LEG’s creative ethos, slyly expanding on conventional notions of how music made by girls “should” sound. Their second album takes matters a step further. I’m All Ears doesn’t just defy demographic stereotypes—it sounds like nothing else in pop right now.
I, Gemini, the duo’s 2016 debut, felt childlike in the sense that it was quite literally written by children; back then, Walton and Hollingworth’s helium-pitch voices gave the impression of cartoon mice, even as they sang about dead cats and radioactive mushrooms. Mileage may have varied depending on one’s tolerance for freak-folk or dadaist poetry, but clearly this wasn’t amateur hour. Guiding LEG’s voracious instrumental experiments (glockenspiels, recorders, motherfucking KAZOOS) was a sense of total control. If anything, I, Gemini’s everything-at-once psychedelia spoke directly to the feeling of being a young teenager—a kaleidoscope of unknowns, as terrifying as it is cool.
Two years later, I’m All Ears delivers on its predecessor’s promise, and though its songs are coated with newfound gloss, they’re just as much of a trip. That much was clear from the first single, “Hot Pink”—a sighing, snarling pop banger, co-produced by SOPHIE alongside the Horrors’ Faris Badwan, that weaponizes the femininity that’s been leveled against the duo. “I’m just an object of disdain to you,” they sing jointly, their voices sickly sweet. “I’m only 17, I don’t know what you mean.” For a SOPHIE production, it’s relatively subdued, until the chorus shatters into sounds of breaking glass and failing machinery as the duo’s delivery bristles. “HOT PINK! Is it mine, is it?” they yelp, flipping the hue of drug-store lipstick and Barbie convertibles into a battle cry. The coexistence of hard and soft isn’t a study in contrasts but in synthesis, merging the two modes until you can’t tell where hard ends and soft begins.
That song’s final chorus is interrupted by a phone call, the first of many moments on I’m All Ears where technology casts an uncanny glow. Pizzicato strings re-imagine a ringtone on the “Missed Call (1)” interlude, and “It’s Not Just Me”—a gently glitched-out synth-pop number, and the album’s second SOPHIE/Badwan production—includes a profoundly Gen Z farewell: “I don’t wanna say goodbye/I guess I’ll see you when the screen is vibrating.” Translating our virtual lives into compelling art is a challenge that often leaves me cold; how do you convey the humanity of a conversation carried out in text bubbles without sounding corny? But I’m All Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to the experience of a teenager in 2018. In that sense, the album’s pop synthetics aren’t such a drastic departure from LEG’s previous work; they heighten the surreal feeling of paradigm-shifting emotional experiences that transpire on a screen in your hand.
But despite the boldness of the production—uninhibited but never excessive, veering from Goblin-esque prog to pristine dance-pop to sludgy psych, sometimes in the same track—the album’s most mind-bending moments happen in Walton and Hollingworth’s writing. “Falling Into Me,” an ecstatic, street-lit roller-disco epic, opens with some of the most evocative lyrics I’ve heard all year: “I paved the backstreets with the mist of my brain/I crossed the gap between the platform and train.” (Amid all the headiness, three simple words later in the chorus—“You/Me/This”—are just as effective in describing the headrush of new romance.) And over the sullen guitar chords of “Cool & Collected,” LEG articulate the anxiety of feeling like a charmless nerd in front of your crush better than I’ve ever heard: “I still blur in the haze that you cut straight through.”
Rather than get lost in these insecurities, LEG uses them as fuel, embracing uncertainty as a psychedelic experience in its own right. And where “Cool & Collected” wallows, album closer “Donnie Darko” practically levitates. Listless midsummer psych-pop climaxes into strobing, cerebral ’80s disco for the home stretch of the 11-plus minute suite; we are left with Walton and Hollingworth lying on the tile of their bathroom floor, heads spinning, drunk with emotion. I imagine the scene illuminated just like the video for “Hot Pink,” where phone screens and secret rooms beam with an irresistible glow, feminine and sinister and ultimately unresolved—the girls disappear into a bright pink room, and that’s the last we see.
All of this reminds me that before it became known as the official shade of prescribed femininity, hot pink meant provocation. “Shocking pink” was introduced to the fashion world in the 1930s as the signature color of surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who collaborated with Salvador Dalí and, as a child, buried flower seeds in her nose and ears in an attempt to grow a garden on her face. Her designs were as weird as they were womanly, and shocking pink was no exception: “Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving,” she once lovingly described it. You could say the same thing of Let’s Eat Grandma, whose bold, tender music at once captures teenage girlhood and transcends it entirely. I can’t imagine what they’ll do next. | 2018-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Transgressive | July 3, 2018 | 8.6 | 5f96750a-0613-4136-8171-0d1ad5a4c8df | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
On his latest as Egyptrixx, it sounds more than ever like the Toronto electronic musician is trying to burrow inside a migraine, stick contact mics to its contours, and figure out what makes it tick. | On his latest as Egyptrixx, it sounds more than ever like the Toronto electronic musician is trying to burrow inside a migraine, stick contact mics to its contours, and figure out what makes it tick. | Egyptrixx: Pure, Beyond Reproach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22709-pure-beyond-reproach/ | Pure, Beyond Reproach | It must not be easy being one of David Psutka’s reverb units. He pushes them hard, stretching their sustain settings to extreme lengths and running heavy material through them constantly: The clang of struck sheet metal, the crash of broken windows, the dissonant peal of heavy bells. His reverb is so glassy and expansive it feels like the main attraction, not the supplementary effect. Most musicians apply reverb the way a photographer might subtly retouch an image, using it to add a sense of depth to a given sound. But in Psutka’s hands, it comes across more like one of Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures—an eerie, distended facsimile immobilized under a spotlight, a frozen echo deep in the uncanny valley.
Where Psutka’s first two records hewed to the jagged blueprint proposed by his Night Slugs peers, his recent work has been getting more and more abstract, downplaying club music’s beats in favor of an all-encompassing throb. On his latest album as Egyptrixx, his main alias, it sounds more than ever like the Toronto electronic musician is trying to burrow inside a migraine, stick contact mics to its contours, and figure out just what makes it tick. It is a heaving mass of ringing copper and seasick frequencies. Not only is it free of anything you might classify as a melody; even its basslines are reduced to an ominous rumble, and its glancing riffs feel as accidental as wind chimes.
It’s a long way away from the prickly, technoid pulse of tunes like “A/B Til Infinity” or “Bible Eyes,” which variously explored John Carpenter synths and the loping beats of UK funky. But it makes for a logical next step from his last album as Egyptrixx, 2015’s doomy Transfer of Energy (Feelings of Power), and it comes even closer in spirit to a record that he released last year under his Ceramic TL alias, Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border. That album, a mostly ambient exploration of held bell tones and granular delay, had the bitter reek of an electrical fire, and this record replicates those noxious atmospheres and reintroduces beats: thudding kick drums, zippering hi-hats, and the incessant din of battered metal. His scrap-heap percussion often has more in common with Einstürzende Neubauten than it does club music peers like Bok Bok or Jam City.
Despite the heaviness, the bell tones’ broad, spectral sweep infuses the music with a rich, burnished glow, and the presence of vocoders and chiming FM synths only adds to the luminous air. The album opens with the sound of running water, and that sound recurs throughout the record, bubbling up like a hot spring and offering a soothing counterpoint to the omnipresent violence. The mood is jarring and gentle all at once, battering the listener with car-crash frequencies and then offering sweeter sounds as a kind of balm. It’s a disorienting listen: His arrangements are as murky as a flooded catacombs, and the way that arpeggiated bell tones and other motifs recur in nearly identical forms across the album, it can be easy to feel marooned amidst its swirl, and the claustrophobic sameness of his sound design verges on the suffocating.
Presumably this is all part of the point. Taking inspiration from the ocean’s burgeoning quantities of plastic flotsam and jetsam, Psutka describes the album’s aesthetic as “pacific litter clank; chill torrents and artificial triumphalism.” He’s definitely nailed the vibe: The music drifts in a great, heaving mass, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it’s beautiful and monstrous all at once. It really does sound like a ton of plastic shifting its weight around: Dumping a tub of my kid’s Legos on the floor, I was immediately struck by the sonic similarity to Egyptrixx’s palette. There’s simply too much of it, though. What feels bracingly alien for the first five or six tracks turns into a hard slog by the tenth; it would have been far effective to shut things down after “Plastic Pebble [beat],” a climactic mixture of grime synths, trap hi-hats, and the dissonant clang of EVOL-era Sonic Youth. That was a problem on Psutka’s last couple of albums, too; his concepts are stronger than his editing skills. Still, taken in moderate doses, it’s a strangely moving portrait of ecological collapse translated into sound. | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Halocline Trance | January 30, 2017 | 6.7 | 5fa309b4-4cac-450e-a67f-a8c131a4db24 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Norwegian artist presents her most unified mind-body work to date, melody-filled art-pop that deals with the nature of self and the freedom of the unconscious. | The Norwegian artist presents her most unified mind-body work to date, melody-filled art-pop that deals with the nature of self and the freedom of the unconscious. | Jenny Hval: Classic Objects | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jenny-hval-classic-objects/ | Classic Objects | Let’s begin with the song “American Coffee,” a drink about which Jenny Hval has some thoughts. She presents herself nearly naked on the song as she surfs through details about her life. She begins before her own birth, empathizing with her frightened pregnant mother and sharing a memorable cinema experience. It’s a stunning piece of music to hear from Hval. Naturally, the Norwegian interdisciplinary artist who’s defined her music with questions about gender, sex, bodies, and power, bucks the standards of glimmery pop-ballad confessionals, singing airily about her UTI and the bloody urine she observes in a movie theater toilet.
Hval’s work is often informed by her bodily preoccupations: the self-care theses of Apocalypse, girl, the sanguinary sensibility of Blood Bitch. Her frank disposition in discussing the messy and painful realities of physical existence neutralizes their unique discomforts. Hval takes a new angle on Classic Objects, her most unified mind-body work to date. She makes a Möbius strip of having a deep understanding of herself: paradoxically, that finely tuned self-awareness can make deviations from that baseline feel all the more destabilizing, whether that’s pinpointing a urinary tract infection or identifying a sense of alienation from mainstream culture.
In an accompanying statement for Classic Objects, Hval explained that the album came out of wondering “what ‘just me’ could mean.” After releasing Menneskekollektivet under the Lost Girls moniker with Håvard Volden last year, she found her life upended and eerily still with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Feeling plain made me want to write something really straightforward,” she continued. To that end, Classic Objects is direct and personal in a way that Hval’s work has rarely been, even as she evades confessional tropes. The album is soft and loose throughout, never spiking with dissonance. The pops and snaps of hands on drum heads give the songs a distinctly fleshy feel. It’s as if Hval is handling herself with a gentle touch as she interrogates who she is and who she seems to be.
Hval works through her introspection openly, and the desert imagery that appears in and around Classic Objects fits the warping feeling of determining a sense of self: everything seems wide open, but how close are you to where you think you want to be? Building from the free-flowing hymn that opens “American Coffee,” Hval wonders what kind of person she’d be if she hadn’t gotten a fine arts degree. She probes deeper into her personal growth, asking, “Who is she who faces her fears?” The burst of percussion and melody that redirects the song is celebratory and relaxed, with Hval considering the other Hvals she could’ve been and letting them pass without regret.
She plunges further into the divide between seeming and being on “Jupiter” and the album’s title track. On the former, she squares herself against the beige concrete corners of the Prada Marfa art installation in the West Texas desert. “I am an ‘abandoned project,’” she sings. The line recalls Lydia Davis’ singular “Tropical Storm,” with Hval offering a lightly funny reminder of the constant upkeep and occasional chaos of the corporeal form. But it also brings to mind the premise that Joan Jacob Brumberg presented in her 1998 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, which examines the historical arc of pervasive messaging to girls about physical self-improvement. Hval further ponders material differences in “Classic Objects,” wondering whether the items in her hands are art or stuff, and how to kiss passive gold and marble.
Within the confines of her humanity, Hval settles into the contradictory realities of her existence—among them, being a proud feminist and independent artistic woman who decided to marry a man. She recoils at being subjected to the “industrial-happiness complex,” as she puts it. “‘It’s just for contractual reasons,’ I explained,” she sings on “Year of Love,” with black jeans offered as another signifier of efforts to defang the proceedings. The song’s jumpy organ melody feels like a feverish calliope, as if the carousel of “The Circle Game” had somehow gone a little lopsided.
Hval’s perspective gradually expands outward across the record, shifting from small personal details to bigger-picture observations. The heady “Year of Sky” spins from the appeal of finding oneself back to losing it again, where time and place are temporary anchors to an infinite expanse, and Hval ponders the afterlife in “Cemetery of Splendour,” with a plodding, earthy bass tone that cedes to a long tail of a woodsy field recording. She takes inventory of her environment in a voice of breathy wonder—leaves, birds, cigarettes, gum! gum! gum!—illustrating her exterior world with lovely and ugly things alike.
From the harp-dappled lilt of “Freedom,” where she wonders about institutional promises, Hval builds toward the stormy, piano-driven finale of “The Revolution Will Not Be Owned.” She basks in the notion that an interior world is the only space where absolute unbridled freedom exists—even songs are subject to copyrights, as she sings. She frames dreaming as “the plan without the plan,” a carnival of unconsciousness. It’s here that the being and the seeming collapse into nothing, where it’s possible to be free of the world and all its impositions. Absolute freedom, Hval suggests, lies in the willful abandon of opening up to the wild possibilities of the interior. In the great conflicting unknown, pleasant surprises, profound revelations, and life-changing love abound. | 2022-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | 4AD | March 11, 2022 | 8 | 5fa37eca-994a-460c-a436-5ad6d16b5526 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Once again, Adele transforms her heartbreak into a searching, graceful, and incredibly moving album. But the complexity of her emotions and the nuanced production make this her most ambitious work to date. | Once again, Adele transforms her heartbreak into a searching, graceful, and incredibly moving album. But the complexity of her emotions and the nuanced production make this her most ambitious work to date. | Adele: 30 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adele-30/ | 30 | Early in the press cycle for her fourth LP, Adele referred to 30 as her most personal album yet—a high bar for someone whose wrenching second album taught the entire world how to cry and compelled Julia Roberts to publicly threaten Adele’s next boyfriend. You could say Big Feelings, backed up with the full weight of her expressive mezzo-soprano, made the London-born singer-songwriter one of the most universally admired pop stars on the planet. These include (but are not limited to): giving your heart away and having it played to the beat, resigning yourself to someone who reminds you of an ex, fearing that love will elude you forever or that it’s somehow trapped in the past, crystallized in amber. It’s hard to imagine something more personal than the empathy bombs that Adele typically drops, but she did not lie about 30.
Here, she’s telling a more unexpected story about love: What it means to inflict that pain on your family, to rebuild yourself from scratch, and—big exhale—to try to love again. The task necessitated a more nuanced writing style and looser structures to some of the songs, resulting in Adele’s most ambitious album to date. The way the 33-year-old interacts with storied traditions feels more in sync with contemporary pop, R&B, and hip-hop, as though she’s taking cues from newer visionaries like Jazmine Sullivan and Frank Ocean as much as her diva elders. She worked with producer Inflo, of London collective SAULT and Little Simz acclaim, on three songs that bring a real warmth and soulfulness to the record’s final third. And her vocals are more playful: Motown-style background vox are modulated to a chirp on “Cry Your Heart Out” and “Love Is a Game,” in a kind of remix of her usual retro homage.
Adele, like other hermetic superstars, dislikes celebrity but makes no effort to conceal the fact that her life inspired her art. Without much context or arc, the polished songs on 2015’s 25 didn’t land in quite the same way as the overwhelming hits of 21. (Though Adele, like Jennifer Coolidge, did wonderful things to redefine greetings.) On 30, Adele makes her story legible—it’s about “divorce, babe, divorce,” going through your Saturn Return, all the things of Nancy Meyers movies but happening 20 years earlier—and shows that it’s complicated and undeniably her own.
The stage is set by the twinkling Fender Rhodes chords that open “Strangers by Nature,” a collaboration with film composer and producer Ludwig Göransson. Inspired by the songs of Judy Garland and the 1992 Meryl Streep/Goldie Hawn dark comedy Death Becomes Her, Adele mourns her past relationships in a manner so dramatic and forlorn, it’s practically camp—complete with Disney strings and an opening line worthy of a Smiths song (“I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart”). Then comes “Easy on Me,” the grounding piano ballad whose swooping eee’s underscore once again that our most expressive singers can make magic from a single syllable. The song represents the first of many times on 30 that Adele will ask for grace—from herself, the lord, and her young son Angelo.
Adele has said she prompted the end of her marriage to Simon Konecki because she wasn’t happy, and her guilt and hope to be understood by Angelo yields some of the record’s richest material. Inspired by the voice notes on Tyler, the Creator and Skepta’s albums, “My Little Love” includes private recordings of tender bedtime conversations between Adele and Angelo as they adjusted to the divorce. It is an uncomfortable choice to make a quiet storm record telling her son’s story, but it shows a brilliant new shade of melancholy for an artist with an already robust palette. (“Do you feel the way my past aches?” she coos, breaking your heart.) One of five songs on 30 that sprawls past the six-minute mark, “My Little Love” is a staggering journey—tucked at the end is Adele’s version of rock bottom, a raw voice note where she admits that, for the first time in years, she feels really and truly lonely. It is hard to hear her like this: someone who is easily able to tap into a super-human well of emotion plainly admitting that she’s broken, sweat-pantsed, and terrified.
After a strong start taking stock and making amends, Adele dips into a more sultry side with two shorter pop tracks about dating again. The first, a Greg Kurstin collab called “Oh My God,” fits in somewhere between Ed Sheeran and Florence Welch, but the whistle-tone runs that punctuate the chorus, plus those “lord let me’s” towards the end, show how Adele’s vocal tics can do a lot to characterize a song. Unfortunately, little can help “Can I Get It,” an out-of-place appearance from pop pros Max Martin and Shellback that retreads corny ’10s pop trends (cue the whistling). Adele has talked about how the song’s titular chorus is in reference to a relationship, not just hooking up, but it’s also bound to be misunderstood. Which is fine! Lots of big pop songs are. On an album so close to feeling like a holistic statement, this just comes across like the single inserted with pop (and maybe even country) radio in mind.
This middle part of 30 is set back on course by “I Drink Wine,” an Elton John-style barroom singalong with strong gospel undertones and an introspective voice memo at the end. Adele serves take-me-to-church chardonnay realness from the jump, opening the song with a verse about her childhood as a means of perspective on how she got away from herself. She knows the lifelong work of ego-death, even on a divorce record: “I hope I learn to get over myself,” she belts in the chorus, a hint of grit in her low notes. Though the lyrics abound with clichés—“can’t fight fire with fire,” “the road less traveled,” “they say to play hard, you work hard”—it is, on the whole, generous and grounded. If this is what soundtracks the 2032 remake of 27 Dresses, I won’t be mad.
As she moves into the final third of the record, past the Ella-meets-Ariana jazz interlude “All Night Parking,” Adele’s humility extends to her kiss-offs. This only makes them land harder and more deliciously, like being roasted in a few expertly articulated words (“I know it’s hard but it’s not,” goes one). She dresses down a lover for not showing up enough on the slowly unfurling neo-soul of “Woman Like Me,” the best of her tracks with Inflo, and ends up revealing more about her own priorities: “Complacency is the worst trait to have, are you crazy?” starts the chorus. Her voice is low and assured, with a hint of disappointment. The expectations and boundaries that Adele sets for others over the course of 30 feel hard-won.
As much as the prayer-like “Hold On” seems intended as 30’s emotional climax, that honor belongs to “To Be Loved,” with a vocal performance that will go down in Adele lore, right next to 25’s “All I Ask.” She has said she won’t perform it live and only sang it front to back a few times, including a video recording where the power of her voice distorts the audio. The subject matter is too devastating to revisit: the sparse piano ballad, a co-write with Tobias Jesso Jr., is sung to an adult Angelo as an explanation for why her marriage didn’t work. Consider it a kind of companion track to “My Little Love,” a zoom-out, flash-forward moment in the narrative. Adele is at first dignified, then desperate to convey the high stakes of love, and the performance is a marvel of control and phrasing that draws comparisons to the greats like Whitney and Aretha. This is what Adele does best: creates a world of feeling out of little more than her voice and then takes you to the brink. She is wise enough to offer a pillow-soft comedown with closing track “Love Is a Game,” but the damage is done.
In “To Be Loved,” Adele offers the listener a thesis statement for her music: “To be loved and love at the highest count/Means to lose all the things I can’t live without.” Oftentimes she has made us feel the carnage of that risk or captured the yearning side of romance for maximum effect, but 30 shows what happens when you willingly walk off the cliff and live to tell about it. This requires patience, honesty, therapy, constantly taking two steps forward and one step back. Knowing what you want is largely gleaned through finding out what you don’t want. Life is messy and not always built for three-minute pop songs with perfect hooks. Adele was always more complicated than that, and now she has an album that ups the stakes and nuance of her artistry. Not just in telling a story over the course of 12 songs, or by making a record that interacts with more modern musical ideas, or in how she’s using her voice with newfound multitudes, but by being bold enough to share it all so vulnerably, with the entire world listening.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | November 22, 2021 | 8.2 | 5fa86b31-3340-44e1-9fb9-c2e5b4ad8aff | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
The Irish singer and composer’s second album of intimate, experimental folk is at its best when it is quiet and tempered. | The Irish singer and composer’s second album of intimate, experimental folk is at its best when it is quiet and tempered. | Hilary Woods: Birthmarks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hilary-woods-birthmarks/ | Birthmarks | Hillary Woods made this record, her second, while she was pregnant. She recorded it between her home in Galway, Ireland and in the home of her producer—the Norwegian noisenik Lasse Marhaug—who has frequently collaborated with Woods’ labelmate Jenny Hval. Noise-folk of this kind is supposed to be more illusory than your traditional pop album, filling in the gaps between each sound so that it becomes its own Rorschach test. Unfortunately, Birthmarks seldom gives you the incentive to find yourself within the record. The conviction of its creators scarcely connects with the convictions of its perceiver.
Woods’ previous album, Colt, which she self-produced, indicated that she was a musician with a visual artist’s approach—a patch-worker constructing layer upon layer. Her piano was her underpainting, which she built upon with synths, the occasional grain of microsounds, and foreboding drones. With the help of Marhaug, Birthmarks augments these sound-art elements, giving it a heavier noise-to-music ratio than its predecessor.
Birthmarks becomes a minimalist-maximalist mishmash of field recordings, microsounds, maximalist drones without ever coming into focus. The elements are used too liberally and haphazardly, to the point where the album becomes an indecipherable well of sound that’s hard to unscramble. “The Mouth” begins in what sounds like a lonely, long-abandoned bunker, ready to be filled with sound, but it swiftly becomes overembellished with screaming gray noise, whooping saxophone, cinematic strings, horrific, body-convulsing beats (the kind that Zola Jesus used to exhilarating effect on Okovi). While it may have brought Woods “back into her body” while creating it, its overstimulation has the opposite effect.
Birthmarks is at its best when its effects are more tempered. “Lay Bare” reaches for the sublime, as Woods’ voice—somewhere between Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan—abides by the same pitch and cadence as the gorgeous, delirious strings—it just stops short of being overwatered by beauty. By the song’s end, the music is converted back into noise, as a long, unaccompanied drone plays. These smaller moments make visible Woods’ internal and external environments. There could be more of them, as they help to make sense of the album’s more bombastic parts.
The acoustic, musical, often beautiful elements of the album—Woods’ voice, repetitive sliding guitar riffs, occasional piano, frequent strings—could potentially signify and give meaning to its nonmusical elements. The core of Woods’ artistry is found in these quiet moments. “I am afraid it’s growing inside of me,” she sings on “Orange Tree,” “My body knows it can’t make it out.” Her voice becomes submerged; her body supposedly oppressed. If Birthmarks is Woods’ restless attempt at self-birth, her true emergence feels yet to come.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 23, 2020 | 6.4 | 5fa94e19-d0f7-47f8-b7c0-6295a321b79e | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
After four full-lengths and a string of EPs of heaven-scraping pomp, Iceland's Sigur Rós give about half of their new LP over to a much-needed change of direction, offering plenty of moments where they sound more spirited, looser, almost playful. | After four full-lengths and a string of EPs of heaven-scraping pomp, Iceland's Sigur Rós give about half of their new LP over to a much-needed change of direction, offering plenty of moments where they sound more spirited, looser, almost playful. | Sigur Rós: Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11924-me-su-i-eyrum-vi-spilum-endalaust/ | Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust | In the near-decade since their 1999 breakthrough Ágætis Byrjun, Iceland's Sigur Rós have made pathos their playground. For them, "little" is scarcely an option: Instead, they've built a career out of conjuring God-sized renderings of sorrow, fragility, and teary joy, rarely on a scale anything less than epic. They've done this instinctively and automatically, sometimes to the detriment of their compositions, leaving the impression that the songs are secondary vessels for spectacle. In the sense that they're less concerned with intellectual honesty than they are with the overall visceral impact of the thing they're creating, Sigur Rós are the Michael Bays of melodrama.
That, of course, is no bad thing-- especially not for a band that does spectacle so well-- but it does invite a problematic dynamic when it comes to the long haul, one wherein they run the very real risk of piling on ever-more ludicrously for the sake of justifying their existence. That's why, after four full-lengths and a string of EPs that saw them bloat their sensory cavalcade of strings, horns, cavernously reverberated guitars, and sweetly vocals to heaven-scraping levels of pomp, last month's single "Gobbledigook" came as a refreshing and shockingly grounded new direction. Gone were the celestial delays and cloud-parting refrains; in their place, a tangle of acoustic guitars, thumping percussion, and rabid vocals. Not only did it sound like Sigur Rós doing Animal Collective (!), it sounded like a way out.
And certainly, about half of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (translation: "With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly") constitutes a much-needed change of direction for Sigur Rós. Building on the gains made from 2005's transitional Takk, they deliver plenty of moments where they sound more spirited, looser, almost playful. The unifying element in these instances is brevity; from the tumbling, modest solo acoustic ballad "Illgresi" to the celebratory "Við spilum endalaust", some of the band's best songs come when they consciously confine themselves to the pop format. You get the feeling that, on a past album, they might have let "Góðan daginn"'s acoustic guitar arpeggios and chiming bell tones waft around interminably. Similarly, one of the album's highlights is a major key summer song called "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" which manages to squeeze some of the band's hallmarks (parading horns, glockenspiels, and a stunning teardown and subsequent buildup) into a positively economical four minutes. The compression generally serves them well, forcing them to make choices they might not otherwise confront when there's 10 minutes of real estate to occupy.
Með suð was produced by Flood (U2, PJ Harvey, Nine Inch Nails) and recorded, variously, in New York, London, Reykjavik, and Havana, a sure sign of a conscious attempt to shake up their methodology. If there's anything disappointing, it's that Sigur Rós weren't more militant about affecting that change. While the album's greatest triumph is its relative leanness, two songs still threaten the nine-minute mark. The first is the conflicting "Festival", which features singer Jonsi Birgisson doing his quavering choirboy routine over a churchly organ for an interminable four and a half minutes before swelling into an instrumental eruption on par with Sigur Rós' finest ever. It's so arresting and muscular on its own that it hardly needs the first bit to introduce it; that the band chose needlessly to build it into a beast feels a bit like old habits dying hard. Far more unforgivable is the comically overstuffed "Ára bátur", which is a bet-hedging and nerveless exercise that bridges another aimless solo piano movement with a culminating swell so over-the-top that Andrew Lloyd Webber himself would have deemed it a little much. That the album's official bio proudly touts the 90-strong recording (which boasts both the London Sinfonietta and the London Oratory Boys' Choir) as "the largest musical undertaking of the band's career"-- and that it's easily the worst thing on here-- speaks volumes of a different kind.
These safe, pandering choices otherwise mar what could have been a game-changing evolution. Instead, Með suð promisingly announces itself as a sunny, happy, easily digestible record before relapsing into old school, heavy-bloat, high-calorie Sigur Rós. Ultimately, there are too many wonderful moments here to deem it anything less than a beautiful record, but armchair producers might find themselves similarly wishing for less fat. How do you say "less is more" in Hopelandic? I worry we'll never know. | 2008-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | June 24, 2008 | 7.5 | 5fae3a2b-1e4e-4f71-bce1-93974d0690b0 | Tyler Grisham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tyler-grisham/ | null |
An intensely personal document, the Tennessee singer and guitarist’s third album examines the realities of being a Southern Black LGBTQ+ woman in songs both defiant and vulnerable. | An intensely personal document, the Tennessee singer and guitarist’s third album examines the realities of being a Southern Black LGBTQ+ woman in songs both defiant and vulnerable. | Amythyst Kiah: Wary + Strange | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amythyst-kiah-wary-strange/ | Wary + Strange | Tennessee guitarist and singer Amythyst Kiah won’t be constrained by anyone’s expectations. “Don’t wanna hear your soapbox speech,” she declares on “Soapbox,” the opening song of her third album, Wary + Strange. “Don’t wanna hear how you would do it.” Kiah’s independent spirit, vast talent, and musical savvy yield dazzling results on this, her Rounder debut: Wary + Strange is a rock album that doesn’t play by anyone’s rules but her own.
Kiah, a guitarist with a powerful wail, marries country blues with widescreen production and unexpected touches—wheezing bass harmonica at the core of “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” spectral backing vocals hovering above “Sleeping Queen.” She steers the journey with her commanding bellow, which is only made stronger by her courage to express the doubt and longing lurking beneath.
Kiah closed her self-released 2013 debut, Dig, with a stripped-down cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” that showcased the range of her voice and tender playing. It was also a nod to the alt rock that helped inspire her to pick up the guitar as a teenager. She went on to study music at East Tennessee State University, immersing herself in that school’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies program. Eventually, her knowledge of vintage American music and dexterity on the guitar led her to become a member of Our Native Daughters, a string-band supergroup assembled by Rhiannon Giddens in 2018.
When Kiah met music industry lifer Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, Aimee Mann’s Whatever), she had been working on the songs that would make up Wary + Strange for so long she’d recorded them twice. During a session in early 2020, Berg reimagined “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” adding a bass harmonica, as well as flute and Mellotron, to its country-blues framework. That led Kiah to plunge into recording the album once more, this time with Berg on hand as producer.
Kiah’s instincts proved correct, and Wary + Strange is a testament to her following them. The modern protest song “Black Myself” is already part of Kiah’s catalog; it was included on Our Native Daughters’ 2019 debut, Songs of Our Native Daughters, where it garnered a Grammy nomination. That recording was a swaying take on the song that spotlighted the quartet’s vocal harmonies, punctuated by an accordion solo. On Wary and Strange, “Black Myself” announces itself with pinging, shimmering guitar riffs; while both versions have fire, the new one possesses extra swagger. “I’ll stand my ground and smile in your face/’Cause I’m Black myself,” sings Kiah defiantly, her voice soaring.
An intensely personal document, Wary + Strange examines the realities of being a Southern Black LGBTQ+ woman in songs that groove and tremble as they tell their stories. “Wild Turkey” mourns Kiah’s mother, who drowned in the Tennessee River when Kiah was a teenager, while also mourning Kiah’s emotional shutdown in the wake of the loss. It opens with fingerpicked guitar echoing the late-night thoughts that Kiah, now 34, keeps turning over; the music swells into a maelstrom of thundering drums and droning strings as her voice gains power and fire. When Kiah asks, “Oh Lord, will I ever feel right again?,” the song breaks open in a surfeit of complex emotions.
Wary + Strange flies by like a far-reaching conversation. Kiah displays a keen knowledge of how songs can electrify the air, and a talent for channeling murky emotions and regret-warped ruminations into succinct, pointed lyrics. “Ballad of Lost” stretches its heartbreak over five minutes, but the song’s spare arrangement and deliberate pacing convey all the shock of the split second when she glimpsed a lover with another woman. A slide guitar scatters teardrops over the landscape as she digs into her pain on the verses; “I am lost/Maybe I have always been,” she muses on the chorus, the sort of clarifying moment that only anguish can bring.
Wary + Strange ends by revisiting “Soapbox”; this new version possesses a slightly quicker pulse, just enough to kick up its sense of self-assurance. Now that Kiah has proven to listeners the full extent of what she can do, she’s here to remind them again that she doesn’t need anyone’s help. “My professional career has been a progression of me figuring myself out,” Kiah recently told Billboard. Wary + Strange proves just how revelatory that process has been, for Kiah and her listeners alike.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rounder | June 22, 2021 | 7.6 | 5fb13ea7-fd3d-4246-87b1-496efb81cdff | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
On his breakthrough solo album, the Asheville songwriter and guitarist polishes his alt-country vignettes with disarming insight and an immersive, fuzz-stacked sound. | On his breakthrough solo album, the Asheville songwriter and guitarist polishes his alt-country vignettes with disarming insight and an immersive, fuzz-stacked sound. | MJ Lenderman: Boat Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mj-lenderman-boat-songs/ | Boat Songs | When MJ Lenderman sings the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Perfect” on Wednesday’s recent cover record, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’Em Up, he razes and rekindles the song with barely more than a slant in his voice. Billy Corgan tends to sing with electrified gravitas, as though life and death hung on every note. “Perfect” justifies the dramatics. It charts the distance between the glorified image of a relationship and the way two people actually move with each other through time. The grain of living weathers away the gloss. While taking lead on that cover—and in his solo work more broadly—the Asheville guitarist and singer-songwriter zeroes in on the fissures that appear in the weathering. His latest album, Boat Songs, holds up what he finds in the cracks, dusts it off, and lets it sparkle in the dusk light.
Boat Songs marks Lenderman's first solo album recorded in a professional studio after two homespun releases: a 2019 self-titled debut and last year’s Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. The shift to higher fidelity doesn't smooth out what makes his alt-country vignettes click. His loping, lackadaisical melodic phrasing, the way he ropes up guitar lines around tragicomic epigrams, and his repeated turns to bathos are all charged by the new punch of the production. He relays disarming insights into the fray of living with smiling, understated delivery; his songs often feel like a conversation with an old friend that suddenly goes deep, plunging down a level without losing any of its safety or warmth. By cranking up the luster around them, he highlights those minuscule faults where universes take root. Here’s an album where failure fertilizes the starting ground.
Across Boat Songs, Lenderman adopts the Gen X strategy of taking implements of power and exaggerating them to absurdity. His music bears the echoes of those 1990s songwriters who dragged amplification and distortion into the realm of sour comedy, who fuzzed out their guitars to near-static and played them with winking simplicity. In his fuzz-stacked sound, storied indie rock acts like Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill, and Sparklehorse mingle with alt-country fabulists like Songs: Ohia and Drive-By Truckers. He mixes Mark Linkous’ eye for beautiful minutiae with Jason Molina’s knack for mythological gravitas, and offsets them both with a warm, easy style that takes the bite out of the pain that rivets his songs. If throughout the ’70s and ’80s, the electric guitar served as a show of dominance and virtuosity in mainstream rock, that ’90s crop of indie musicians found a way to wield it with a sardonic edge: letting the riffs sag a little, turning them up until they sounded like shit, and drawling over the top. If your goal isn’t just to be the most impressive thing in the room, there’s more space to dig around for what you’d otherwise be drowning out.
Lenderman uses that pointed deflation to claw up moments of bliss and frailty. His grounded, flexible, and lucid songwriting nails repeated turns from the everyday to the sublime. He especially enjoys peering into the cracks of celebrity, that bizarre phenomenon where a person gets pulled apart from other people: gilded, televised, held aloft. “TLC Cage Match” has him pondering human fragility while watching WWE: “It’s hard to see you fall like that,” he sings to pro wrestlers bruising themselves inside the TV. “Dan Marino” sets its lens on the eponymous Dolphins quarterback as he drifts through the grocery store, glancing over Tom Brady’s picture on the same Wheaties boxes where his own face used to be. On “Hangover Game,” Lenderman smiles past the official excuses for Michael Jordan’s 1997 flu game to sympathize with the star, who was—by some accounts—hungover: “He looked so sick/It was all over the news/But it wasn’t a pizza and it wasn’t the flu/Yeah, I love drinking, too.” Even legends have their foibles.
The thing about loving your own frailties is that it deepens your ability to love the rest of it, too. Lenderman renders suffering and joy in the same gentle, unhurried deadpan, dragging all those heightened feelings back down to the ground where they can sprout. Right after he imagines Marino sighing through the cereal aisle, he sees actual dolphins from the back of a friend’s boat. “Jackass is funny like the earth is round,” he sings on “You Are Every Girl to Me.” What if our pleasures were natural facts? What if our failures were, too? Our feelings wouldn’t be rewards or punishments; there’d be no score to keep. Or, as Lenderman sings in the album’s final moments: “No one's counting your mistakes.” No one triumphs over the world, not even if they’re on TV, and no one fails the world, either. All we do is course through it and savor what we can. | 2022-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dear Life | May 7, 2022 | 8.3 | 5fb1d1f2-dc16-48a6-969b-f1f7462fb68b | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On its angriest and heaviest record in years, the rock band restores its bluesy, primitive sound as Joshua Homme confronts his recent turmoil | On its angriest and heaviest record in years, the rock band restores its bluesy, primitive sound as Joshua Homme confronts his recent turmoil | Queens of the Stone Age: In Times New Roman... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/queens-of-the-stone-age-in-times-new-roman/ | In Times New Roman... | Like many of us, Joshua Homme has had a rough few years. Unlike most of us, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s troubles have been splattered across the music press. He’s been embroiled in an acrimonious custody dispute with ex-wife Brody Dalle; has filed restraining orders against Dalle (who has also filed restraining orders against him); has undergone surgery following a cancer diagnosis; and has grieved multiple close friends, including former bandmate Mark Lanegan. “This has been the darkest four years of my life,” Homme recently told Revolver, an admission that humanizes a rock star who has long played with cartoonishly villainous personas on record.
For a period, he couldn’t make music at all. Then music became an outlet for his grief, a treatment plan more therapeutic than all those drugs he name-checked in “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.” The resulting album, In Times New Roman…, is the stoner-rock group’s heaviest, angriest work since 2007’s underrated Era Vulgaris. The seething indictments of “Paper Machete” set the tone early: Homme lashes out at an unnamed tormenter (OK, not so subtle: “I know you’d use anything, anyone, to make yourself look clean/In sickness, no vows mean anything”) over grinding power chords that thrash and blare like a Queens song is supposed to. And yet the song sounds somehow preliminary and underwhelming, like Homme needed to get this stuff off his chest and forgot to write a hook worthy of the vitriol.
Wholly self-produced, and absent any high-profile guests, In Times New Roman… is more hermetic than usual. Serving as the band’s only permanent member, Homme chips away the chrome-plated dance-rock machinations of 2017’s Mark Ronson-produced Villains and tries to restore the band to a bluesy primitivity: You can almost smell the tube amps overheating on “Time & Place.” But often the results are mixed. On “Obscenery,” a lukewarm groove of squelchy guitars serves as a canvas for some of the record’s clunkiest rhymes: “Voyeurism jism may cause blurry visions/Or a spoiled brat for an inner child.”
The most compelling tracks deepen the anger with flashes of humor and wry introspection. Borrowing a Silverchair pun, lead single “Emotion Sickness” alternates fluently between high-octane blasts of acid-damaged guitar and a chorus that luxuriates in the band’s melodic chops. “Baby don’t care for me,” goes the deceptively sun-kissed refrain. Like earlier tracks, the song alludes to Homme’s divorce (“See the sights/Holy Braille”), but there’s a playfulness, a thrilling push-and-pull between melody and attack, that recalls the band’s heights.
The best songs on In Times New Roman… are hiding in the back half, resulting in an unusually lopsided experience. Things perk up with track six, “Carnavoyeur,” an atmospheric lament with a slippery, soulful glint. It’s the first song here that brings a detached, almost zen sentiment to personal tragedy. Homme evokes a kind of letting go, a liberation from torment: “Every living thing will die/From the king of the jungle to butterfly/Only sin is waiting too long,” he croons over a groove that’s more Doors than Desert Sessions. The song bleeds out in a haze of strings, foreshadowing the intriguing post-“Kashmir” orchestral stomp of “Sicily.” It’s a seductive tune, not quite like anything in QOTSA’s catalog, that summons a thirst for romantic degradation.
QOTSA haven’t changed a whole lot since the second Bush term, but after a lengthy stretch of inactivity and personal strife, it’s heartening to hear them still making such an unholy racket. Apocalyptic imagery abounds on “Straight Jacket Fitting,” a thick, hulking workout of a finale; Homme rattles off a litany of evildoers (“the old guard, avant guard, technolojesus!”) and concludes: “The world/She don’t need saving.” In QOTSA’s early-2000s heyday, their slow-burners were explosive enough to sound like the world really was ending. On In Times New Roman…, QOTSA evoke the inexorable grief of feeling your own world collapsing, and in their most potent moments, they convey both the devastation and the long crawl back from hell. | 2023-06-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 16, 2023 | 6.8 | 5fb2b599-9e7d-4e7b-88c3-e7426fc8cf42 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
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\n\n\ One of the great, universal inspirations throughout the history of rock and roll\n\ has been the death ... | **
\n\n\ One of the great, universal inspirations throughout the history of rock and roll\n\ has been the death ... | Alanis Morissette: Under Rug Swept | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5429-under-rug-swept/ | Under Rug Swept | [from April Fool's Edition, 2002]
One of the great, universal inspirations throughout the history of rock and roll has been the death of a relationship.\xA0 In 1972, Carly Simon scored a hit with "You're So Vain," a thinly-veiled sendoff to former beau Warren Beatty.\xA0 John Lennon, while separated from Yoko Ono, wrote some of his most harrowing songs, such as "Jealous Guy."\xA0 And at the core of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was the searing open wound of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks' messy breakup.
Throughout her career, Alanis Morissette has railed in a similar manner at an unnamed lover from her past, a mysterious figure described only as an older man from her days at Nickelodeon.\xA0 But now, on the promotional tour for Under Rug Swept, Morissette has bravely revealed the identity of her bitter muse: Dave Coulier! That's right, when Morissette had one hand in her pocket, the other hand was giving the finger to Uncle Joey on the 80s television hit "Full House."\xA0 It was like ray-eee-ain on your wedding day when her and Dave Coulier broke up. And yes, the person she went down on in a theater was... Dave Coulier. The man don't mess around.
Coulier's ghost continues to float over and around Morissette's music, perhaps while doing his famous Popeye impression and mugging wildly.\xA0 The Canadian confronts this secret relationship in her most direct manner yet on the first single from Under Rug Swept, "Hands Clean."\xA0 By assuming Coulier's voice and singing lecherous lines like, "Just make sure you don't tell on me, especially to the members of your family," and, "I might want to marry you one day if you'd watch that weight and keep your firm body," Morissette must be making Coulier very uncomfortable wherever he is today.
This fierce independence finds its way into every aspect of Under Rug Swept, her first album without the assistance of professionally licensed hitmaker Glen Ballard.\xA0 Morissette was obviously taking notes during their previous two collaborations, however, as these eleven songs retain the Jagged Little Pill formula of safely looped drums, angry guitar, and Alanis' trademark clenched-teeth yodel.\xA0 The immediacy is further amped by the fact that Morissette plays nearly all the instruments on the album, finally putting to rest the rumors that she's nothing more than a producer's puppet.
The most marked effect of breaking away from Ballard's input is the unmitigated and highly concentrated ferocity of her lyrical confessions.\xA0 It's no mistake that Under Rug Swept comes off like a 45-minute glimpse into her daily therapy session.\xA0 Morissette wants to put a little bit of her head inside of yours, riding on a catchy hook-- to give all of us a taste of what it feels like to be dumped by Dave Coulier. Because even though "it's been over a decade/ It smarts like four minutes ago."\xA0 Observe:
"Flinch": "How long can a girl be haunted by you?"
"That Particular Time": "I kept on ignoring the ambivalence you felt/ And in the meantime I lost myself."
"So Unsexy": "I'm 13 again/ And I'm 13 for life."
Obviously, the emotional pain persists, many, many long years after "You Can't Do That on Television."\xA0 All Alanis wants is for the world to dance and sing along with her catharsis.\xA0 Can you really hold it against her? Of course not! So don't think you can write Morissette off as doing nothing more than cataloging her relationship grievances.\xA0 On "21 Things I Want in a Lover," Alanis files an audio personal ad of what she's looking for in a man (note to fellas: be against capital punishment, and inventive in bed!), a move that could come off as self-indulgent, but in a personality as luminescent as Ms. Morissette, is nothing short of entrancing.\xA0 And on the somber "A Man," Morissette boldly composes lyrics from the perspective of... a man! Perhaps the target of one of her many incendiary diatribes: "Born of your bellies I yearn for the cord/ Years I have groveled repentance ignored." Dude, that begs for a Mustaine solo.
If Under Rug Swept has a weak point, it's in the lack of musical variety, with few tracks deviating from electric or acoustic versions of the above-stated formula.\xA0 These exceptions show a knack for appropriating the sonic vocabulary of other artists to fit Morissette's vision, such as the Elton John-inspired piano rocker "That Particular Time" ("This Train Don't Stop There Anymore," anyone?). Her skills at adaptation are most striking on "Narcissus," in which Alanis mines the familiar Liz Phair trademark of minor chords, swear words and attitude, and shows once and for all that, while Phair may have invented the modern angry-female act, Morissette perfected it.
Frankly, it's a small matter, since with lyrical messages this strong and profound, a little bit of stylistic homogeneity can be forgiven.\xA0 Even without the disturbing, sad, confusing, and (okay, I admit) mildly hilarious knowledge that her songs are directed at Uncle Joey, the emotional potency of Under Rug Swept's songs cannot be denied.\xA0 On "So Unsexy," Alanis admits that sometimes she "feels so boring for someone so interesting."\xA0 But with an album this compelling, she really needn't worry. | 2002-03-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-03-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Maverick | March 31, 2002 | 8.4 | 5fb5203c-5435-4b61-b17f-92b3048cd326 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Young Dro is a humbly astonishing rapper. The DJ Burn One-curated Ralph Lauren Reefa is one of the Atlanta MC's strongest tapes in a while, showing him at his lyrical, funny, vivid, local-hero best. | Young Dro is a humbly astonishing rapper. The DJ Burn One-curated Ralph Lauren Reefa is one of the Atlanta MC's strongest tapes in a while, showing him at his lyrical, funny, vivid, local-hero best. | Young Dro: Ralph Lauren Reefa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17307-ralph-lauren-reefa/ | Ralph Lauren Reefa | Young Dro is an unspectacularly spectacular rapper. He's humbly astonishing. How to explain this guy? He's more agile, more playful, and more confident than most; almost everything that comes out of his mouth sounds catchy, even when he's just ranting semi-incomprehensibly in skits about how fresh he is. The "should be famous" line is a tired one, so we'll just observe that he's definitely not famous, at least not nationally like his sometime-benefactor T.I. and his other Atlanta colleagues. He had one hit in 2006, ("Shoulder Lean"), but he is a rapper's rapper, a nerd's favorite who will probably be a local legend in his hometown for the rest of his life. His legacy is secure; his epitaph is written.
The Local Rapper Who Just Can't Get Over is everywhere, in every city-- here in NYC, we have Jadakiss, their grumpy-uncle patron saint, but you can find them in Philly (Young Chris, Peedi Crakk) to Chicago (Bump J) to L.A. (Kurupt, WC). Sometimes, these guys are their own worst enemies, smacking home runs when no one's looking and freezing up when the floodlights hit them. Some of them just seem content to work on a ground level, surrounded by familiar associates and making the music that retains their hometown flavor. That's Young Dro. "Freeze Me" was a classic of Atlanta hip hop in 2010, and did as much to push the style of street rap forward as Rick Ross' "B.M.F." from the same year. But you wouldn't know the song was a classic unless you lived in Atlanta or learned secondhand.
Rap's folk history is usually written by these sorts of guys as much as by the megastars they bump elbows with, and Dro has been playing the mascot role to the hilt for the past six years. He can be counted on to put out slightly overlong mixtapes once or twice a year, each one containing at least five or six breathtaking, pull-it-back-six-times scorchers. Ralph Lauren Reefa, which was made available a few weeks ago, is shorter and several notches more consistent than usual, partly thanks to the involvement of DJ Burn One, an Atlanta rap producer with an unwavering devotion to the heavier, humid end of Atlanta's heritage. The two previously collaborated on Future Legends, Vol. 2; with Burn One curating, Young Dro's occasional reliance on cheap-sounding beats disappears.
Dro can loop rings around any wide-open, Southern beat you give him: If you hand him an instrumental made up of just a few bleeps and an 808 clap, like "Smell That Pack" on RLR, he will make it feel like a piece of Silly Putty in seconds. If you sit him back in a plush piece of after-party VIP-room rap ("On Set"), he will pummel its surface ceaselessly. His writing is packed tight with alliteration, colorful slang, and the occasional paper-cut-size confessional ("Momma get sicker, she need a liver") and his sense of rhythm is mind-boggling. When he flexes effortlessly into double-time, you can feel your hair blow back: It might take you six replays of "Check Me Out"'s first verse to fully hear it once.
When Young Dro gets soulful or quiet, he sounds a little less comfortable: "She Gone" is a slightly awkward remorseful-player song, "Dreamer" a slightly strained achiever's anthem. But when he just lets his mind and mouth fly, he's unstoppable. On "Laid Back", he sets up the line "supermodel bitches flying down from New Zealand" just so he can rack up a series of increasingly dazzling slant rhymes for it: "my boo vegan" and "a pound of new tree, and" are two highlights. It's like watching someone pound you in Words With Friends while simultaneously cooking dinner and moonwalking. It seems unfair, somehow. All said, Ralph Lauren Reefa is one of his strongest tapes in a while, showing him at his lyrical, funny, vivid, local-hero best. | 2012-10-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-10-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 15, 2012 | 7.8 | 5fb5396b-11f9-410e-825d-134e60af4ae8 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Working once again with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, the Black Keys try for a moodier, more atmospheric record. Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones. | Working once again with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, the Black Keys try for a moodier, more atmospheric record. Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones. | The Black Keys: Turn Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19329-the-black-keys-turn-blue/ | Turn Blue | This may be a weird statement to make about one of North America's most popular rock bands, but the Black Keys are survivors. The majority of the duo's colleagues from the early 2000s have since called it quits, but the workmanlike Akron boys Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney kept their heads down, dutifully churning out gutshot blues-pop mimicry that carried just enough of a punch to establish them as, at the least, a reliable stadium-act opening band.
Then: worldwide financial turmoil struck, the buying public went from purchasing few records to no records at all, dance music infiltrated pop's consciousness, and guitars were, prophetically, exchanged for turntables (or, in keeping with recent trends, MPCs). Banjo-players and Dave Grohl formed an unlikely alliance to establish "real music" as 2010s mainstream rock culture's slyly conservative ethos and just like that, the Black Keys emerged as the most popular guys making music that sounds like older music without getting all P.T. Barnum about it.
Brothers from 2010 (the first record made at Muscle Shoals in three decades, natch) was the Keys' most consciously bloated effort and, paradoxically, the one that placed them firmly in their current position of The Only Band Your Friend From High School Listens to These Days; writing their catchiest song to date, "Tighten Up", helped, as did soundtracking every goddamn car commercial and buddy-comedy movie trailer that didn't have breakdancing hamsters in it. Cementing their rep as canny opportunists, Carney and Auerbach returned a year later with El Camino, a sleazy, hook-laden album that switched between the basic thematic food groups of cars-and-women and cars-as-women with the horndog exuberance of a kid doing donuts on an ATV in an abandoned dirt lot.
El Camino was the best ZZ Top album that you can't stream on Spotify and, in an impressive feat for a band so 9-to-5 about their creative process that they once recorded an album in an actual factory, it also turned out to be their most distinctive work and arguably their best. The Black Keys' eighth album and first in three years isn't their worst effort—that distinction still belongs to 2006's Magic Potion, their paste-bland major-label debut—but after the relatively fresh approach on El Camino, it's dismaying how much of the inert, mid-tempo Turn Blue resembles elements of their previous albums: Brothers' stoner-friendly drift, Attack & Release's toy-xylophone psychedelia, Magic Potion's indifferent blare. After a decade-plus of pilfering musical history with all the subtlety of a brick through a windshield—for Christ's sake, last time around they basically plagiarized "Last Dance With Mary Jane"—the Black Keys' cultural cannibalism has finally turned inward.
Turn Blue finds the Black Keys getting deep with themselves in several ways; Auerbach recently told Rolling Stone that the band set out to make a singles-bereft "Headphone[s] record," and he's alluded elsewhere that his messy, allegation-laden divorce proceedings—which, in a this-joke-writes-itself touch, once was believed to include a lock of Bob Dylan's hair—lent the album a "melancholy" vibe. Appropriately, Turn Blue sounds distant and subdued, a murky-sounding collection of '70s stoner-rock facsimiles and swirling gray tones that, for the most part, are indistinguishable.
Lyrically, the Black Keys' casual chauvinism has gone from "Girl, you look so good" to "Woman, you done me wrong," the shift in mindset undeniably affected by Auerbach's personal troubles. "Why you always wanna love the ones who hurt you," he sings over the sluggish bounce of "Year in Review", "Then break down when they go and deserve you." Allusions to rain, running, sickness, and the open road are predictably expressed, and Auerbach admits on the title track's disco-ball lilt: "In the dead of the night/ I start to lose control." The couplet speaks volumes, as the mushy gruel of Turn Blue represents the sound of a band going so deep into their own heads that they lose track of where the exit doors are located.
It's tempting once again to blame the dullness on Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, a sometimes-capable producer whose reputation in recent years has carried the weight of an "Out of Order" sign on a bathroom door. Indeed, Burton's reign of boredom continues here in typical fashion; his love for airlock-hatch atmospherics and stiff string-section motifs are intact, and even without the credits confirming it, you could probably guess that the orchestral touches of "Year in Review" were lifted from the score for an Italian 1970s sex comedy.
If Burton remains an easy scapegoat, this time it's harder to make the charges stick. Turn Blue is the second consecutive Black Keys album where he's credited as a contributing songwriter, and as the veritable third Black Key since Attack & Release, his presence has led to some of the band's most successful, purposefully forceful music. The Black Keys are, in fact, the one band this decade that Burton has collaborated with effectively, so the failures of Turn Blue come across mostly as a byproduct of an imbalance of power. While the suffocating weightlessness of the LP's first third is enough to give anyone who's listened to a Broken Bells record more than once a serious case of PTSD, Carney and Auerbach sound as if they're holding back in response, succumbing to bland choruses and muddy aimlessness despite the fact that their catalog dictates they're capable of much more than this. Throughout Turn Blue, it's difficult to tell how invested these guys actually are in the music they're making, an indifferent attitude that encourages the listener to act in tandem.
The Black Keys have never been known for innovation—we're talking about a band that covered the fucking Beatles on their first album—but Turn Blue's strongest moments happen when they explore new territory. At nearly seven minutes, opener "Weight of Love" is a moody epic that carries melodic hints of the pleasantly stretched-out "Bullet in the Brain", meandering to a searing guitar solo that, for those with heavy investment in searing guitar solos, should more than suffice. Lead single "Fever", meanwhile, is Turn Blue's Festival-Headliner Hit, its subtly catchy hook and farty keyboard sounds resembling what might happen if MGMT-circa-2014 tried to write something approaching "Electric Feel" in terms of weirded-out pop accessibility.
Turn Blue's most surprising moment arrives at the end: "Gotta Get Away", whose title alone suggests that the Black Keys are ready to move on from this uncharacteristically dour fog they're trapped in. Coming off as the strongest classic-rock beer-commercial jam since Kid Rock's cliché-tastic "All Summer Long", the cowboy-boots guitar riff and Auerbach's unchained vocal take pair perfectly to create the album's most energizing blast-in-a-glass cut, to the point where it's hard not to dream of an entire album of songs like this. The song sounds like summer; with the right sync, "Gotta Get Away" could make millionaires out of anyone who sells rubber tires and rope.
"For no one/ It's no fun, no fun/ With a one track mind," Auerbach sings on the tune, after name-checking Kalamazoo and wondering where all the "good women" have gone in typical dirtbag fashion; it's hard not to read his lyrical admission as anything but self-prescriptive. On a record where the Black Keys' try way too hard to be "weird," "Gotta Get Away" is the sole moment where they get out of their own heads and back into that beat-up van. You can't fault them for trying to get deep, but this is one band for which shallowness is a virtue. | 2014-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 13, 2014 | 5.8 | 5fb54559-3916-491a-b516-4ce683cd17ea | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Refining the gonzo pop-collages of his previous work, Ariel Pink crafts an immersive, intimate record, marked by solitude. | Refining the gonzo pop-collages of his previous work, Ariel Pink crafts an immersive, intimate record, marked by solitude. | Ariel Pink: Dedicated to Bobby Jameson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariel-pink-dedicated-to-bobby-jameson/ | Dedicated to Bobby Jameson | Bobby Jameson was a victim of hype. In the early 1960s, as the Beatles took over America, Jameson’s manager took a creative approach to promote the fledgling Los Angeles singer-songwriter. An increasingly ambitious series of ads appeared over several weeks in Billboard magazine. They began with a cryptic tease: a black-and-white silhouette of a man and a guitar, promising the “world’s next phenomenon.” When his face finally appeared, along with the announcement of his new record (“Bobby Jameson Says ‘I’m So Lonely,’” it read), he looked awkward, unprepared, frightened.
The song tanked and the world moved on. Jameson sunk into obscurity and depression. In 2003, he said he avoided returning to L.A. for fear that he’d “traded in [his] suicidal tendencies for homicidal tendencies.” He died 12 years later in San Luis Obispo, where he lived with his mother and chronicled the trajectory of his career on a blog, painstakingly, still trying to make sense of what went wrong.
Ariel Pink, who’s dedicated his new album to Bobby Jameson, has experienced his own dramatic evolution in the public eye. When we first met Ariel Rosenberg in the mid-2000s, he was an enigmatic outsider propped by Animal Collective’s in-house record label. The question circling his music was less “Who is this?” than “What is this?” Like Bobby Jameson—whose releases arrived under various guises to fool the public into thinking he was a new, emerging talent—Pink always distanced himself from his output. The pseudonym, then, worked in tandem with the constant stream of hazy, fogged-over records and the intentionally off-putting interviewee, all keeping the actual artist as far from the conversation as possible. “[T]here’s no such thing as Ariel Pink,” he recently told SPIN, “It’s kinda complicated but kinda not.”
Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is Ariel Pink’s most humble, most insular work in years. After the whirlwind collage of Pom Pom—filled with sound experiments, radio jingles, earnest balladry, and honest-to-god pop anthems—Bobby Jameson is a retreat. Its finest songs are cozier and more immediate: the gothy dream-pop of “Feels Like Heaven,” the hypnotic “Time to Live,” the jittery schmaltz of “I Wanna Be Young.” After spending a career composing music that felt siphoned from a hidden corner of your id, the reference points here are slightly more obvious. “Time to Live” swipes its refrain from the first video ever shown on MTV. “Another Weekend” bears a striking similarity to a classic rock song that compared falling in love to hearing a catchy melody. The closing solo of the title track sounds just like “Light My Fire.” Even the nod to Bobby Jameson in the title feels like a means of grounding the narrative and offering the songs some context and company in Pink’s slimy, mythologized vision of Hollywood.
While it walks a straighter line than Pink’s best albums, Bobby Jameson is equally immersive. He’s retained the higher-fidelity haze of his breakthrough studio albums on 4AD, but the atmosphere feels more like his self-recorded music from the early 2000s: dusty and haphazard, filled with subtle hooks and inside jokes. “I Wanna Be Young” actually dates back to those days. Its original version was distorted by a warping tape machine and falsetto harmonies that occasionally overpowered the cheap backdrop of keys and guitars. The novelty was in how ancient, how archaic the recording felt—the irony of a voice pining for youth as it audibly decayed. On Bobby Jameson, the cleaned-up sound brings us closer to a feeling of urgency, even regret. The older Pink’s gotten, the more his subliminal messages rise to the surface.
More than ever, Pink infuses these songs with bald stabs at wisdom. The shift suggests, if not a turn toward transparency, then at least a narrator with similar concerns to Ariel Rosenberg. In the wistful, mostly acoustic “Do Yourself a Favor,” he discusses the danger of falling into routine over music that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Rivers Cuomo’s demo collections. Many songs deal with the process of aging and cataloging memories: He repeatedly chants “Time to live” and “Time to die,” blurring the line between the two. Even the more upbeat moments seem more nuanced, like “Bubblegum Dreams,” where unnatural, echoing percussion deflates the party with lingering moments of silence. If Pom Pom was a full-stage production featuring all the gonzo characters from Pink’s catalog, Bobby Jameson is marked by solitude: one man, uninterrupted, following his thoughts wherever they wander. It’s a faded, shimmering sound, like FM radio reverberating through a quiet airport.
Bobby Jameson, of course, is no somber affair. He sings “Santa’s in the Closet” like a voice-over for a Halloween store commercial, and in “Dreamdate Narcissist,” he references Netflix, Uber, and chillwave within the first 20 seconds. But taken as a whole, the songs on Bobby Jameson play with a startling intimacy. These are among Pink’s simplest, sharpest compositions, sprawling with an intuitive charm. Its sense of ease harkens back to long ago, when Pink’s records mostly served to expand his strange universe with little outside influence. Maybe that’s what he sees in the record’s titular figure: a cautionary tale whose wasted potential loomed large until the bitter end. “Even now,” Jameson wrote, eight years before his death, “There is a part of me that still believes, ‘My name is Bobby Jameson and I am a star.’ I am also alone.” | 2017-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | September 15, 2017 | 8.2 | 5fbd9a5a-2bfb-4b80-979c-b7747b15d3f2 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Recorded in 1984, this live set offers a glimpse behind the fog of pot smoke and blur of whiskey when one of country music’s greatest-ever bands was performing at its peak. | Recorded in 1984, this live set offers a glimpse behind the fog of pot smoke and blur of whiskey when one of country music’s greatest-ever bands was performing at its peak. | Willie Nelson: Live at Budokan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/willie-nelson-live-at-budokan/ | Live at Budokan | Frank Sinatra opened for Willie Nelson once. In Las Vegas. It was the early 1980s, around the time Ol’ Blue Eyes and the Red-Headed Stranger teamed up to cut a PSA for the Space Foundation. “We don’t share the same tailor,” a spotlessly groomed Sinatra quipped. “But we do share the same feeling about space technology, don’t we?” In truth, neither cared all that much about the cosmos, either; they were both massively popular performers in their own right, breathing the same rarified air, and they had simply been asked to combine their equal star power. It was an unlikely development. Willie had been a cult hero and a popular singer, but now, thanks in part to the hit ballad “Always on My Mind” and the worldwide success of his duet with Julio Iglesias, “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” he was a cultural sensation. It’s not at all surprising that, in keeping with one of the era’s greatest rock-star conventions, he cut a live album at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in 1984. Nor is it surprising how supple Willie’s vocals are, or how impressionistic his guitar playing. What is surprising is how long it’s taken to see the light of day.
Live at Budokan was released in Japan on LaserDisc later that year and was subsequently bootlegged onto video cassette, but it remained largely obscure for decades, and is only now seeing wide release. It’s not the first live album to capture the depth of Willie’s powers as a singer and guitarist, his ability to command a crowd, or the underappreciated versatility of his Family Band; Willie and Family Live, from 1978, is every bit as essential as any of his pristine mid-’70s run. But the clarity of Live at Budokan’s production and the relative sobriety of the setting shows what was happening behind the fog of pot smoke and blur of whiskey when one of country music’s greatest-ever bands was performing at its peak.
Willie has always approached country music with a jazz sensibility. It’s easy to imagine Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan taking “Crazy” or “Night Life” for a spin, and his own vocal phrasing drifts around the beat, accents often dropping a single pregnant moment after you’d expect. On stage in Tokyo, the Family is in communication with one another in a way that owes plenty to both the feisty interplay of bebop and the stately arrangements of Western swing. Throughout the 90-minute set, Paul English’s drumming provides the bedrock for the rest of the band. Jody Payne and Grady Martin swirl up a galaxy of phased-out guitar in “Good Hearted Woman,” while Willie’s pianist sister Bobbie Nelson punches up the gospel filigree of her solo with a bit of heavy barroom playing. They draw unusual depths out of the classic song here, as if they’re freshly aware of the tension between cutting it loose and keeping it clean in the song’s lyrics; when they goose the tempo and change keys, it feels less like they’re moving through a well-established composition and more like they’re collectively choosing to let the good times drown out any protest.
They flutter into the delicate “Mona Lisa,” English’s pitter-patter dressing the Somewhere Over the Rainbow ballad like a millefeuille after the shit-kicking opener of “Whiskey River.” On nearly every song, Mickey Raphael plays harmonica in chortles, stomps, guffaws, anything but a melody, his short wads of rhythm matching the gummy phrases Willie tags on to most of the lines he sings with his guitar.
Willie’s approach to his instrument has been rhapsodized to the point of cliché; it’s likely that there are more people who have heard that Willie plays like Django Reinhardt than there are people who have actually heard Django Reinhardt. Perhaps owing to the effects of what Texas Monthly has noted could have been the first show he’d ever played without marijuana, his playing is crisp without being stilted, fluid without losing definition, and expressive in a way that can feel almost showy. Over a 20-second span in Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” he flashes a Tejana riff, doubles down into some heavy strumming, then glides back into the verse as smooth and pacey as a well-built car on a freeway.
In the mid-set “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” another Kristofferson song, Willie picks up the motif from his “Whiskey River” solo, now treating it with a tenderness of touch that matches the lyric. It feels like a purer expression of the same romantic relationship he’d earlier begged the whiskey to wash away, which in turn makes the rowdiness of “Whiskey River” feel less like liberation and more like bittersweet heartache. Near the end of the night, he places “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” next to “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” two songs that suggest cowboys are incapable of love, despite the fact that he’s spent the last hour or so demonstrating otherwise—or at least showing that a life on the range does offer one the chance to artfully share their introspection.
Willie’s ability to dress up complexity in the guise of old standards, campfire songs, Austrian waltzes, and hard-drinking anthems is just as crucial to his success as his ability to nail the high vibrato in “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time.” In both the material he chooses and the way he presents it, he always comes off as a surprise; he’s the casual guy from around the way who turns out to be a hell of a musician. Like his pal Sinatra, he makes genius accessible, even quotidian. The Willie Nelson of Live at Budokan is an unlikely pop star—already over the age of 50, playing a distinctly regional style of music, with a voice that sounds like a drying saxophone reed—and it wouldn’t be long before he’d become an even more unlikely icon. But here, playing sad songs and waltzes with his Family Band on the other side of the world, he sounds relaxed and at ease, casual with himself and confident in his brilliance. Tokyo isn’t Texas, but in 1984, Willie kicked up stardust everywhere he went. | 2022-12-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Legacy | December 13, 2022 | 8 | 5fbe3537-077f-400d-81f5-8a68250ccce0 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Spanning 35 tracks in nearly two hours, the Stereolab spinoff’s first foray into film soundtracks balances playful electronic mood pieces with drones and nameless dread. | Spanning 35 tracks in nearly two hours, the Stereolab spinoff’s first foray into film soundtracks balances playful electronic mood pieces with drones and nameless dread. | Cavern of Anti-Matter: In Fabric OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cavern-of-anti-matter-in-fabric-ost/ | In Fabric OST | If you consider it negligent that Stereolab have yet to apply their otherworldly ambience to a film soundtrack, then In Fabric should go some way towards salving the wound. Active since 2013, Cavern of Anti-Matter are the trio of Stereolab’s Tim Gane, original Stereolab drummer Joe Dilworth, and synth player Holger Zapf; In Fabric, their first album in two years, is the soundtrack to British director Peter Strickland’s 2018 horror comedy, and it draws deep on their sizeable reserves of drones, charm, and finesse.
Alongside singer Laetitia Sadier, Gane was Stereolab’s songwriting engine, and here, his eye for guileful chord changes is evident on songs like “Winter Rhombic” or “Mannequin Metric,” whose ornate, slightly unpredictable melodic patterns suggest the creepy elegance of a Victorian music box. He also has a real knack for sonic texture, using just the right elements—echoing harpsichord (“Inside Luckmoore”), scratchy drum machine (“Elektro-Agitator 2”), or bachelor-pad organ (“The Retail Idea”)—to pin down an unusual mood, be it nervous classicism, strained funk, or dreamy capitalist fantasy.
The big difference between this and Cavern of Anti-Matter’s previous work is that on In Fabric the band dials down the rapid tonal shifts and rhythmic urgency of 2018’s Hormone Lemonade in favor of teasing out one idea over the course of a song. Many tracks weigh in around the two-minute mark, making them more like melodic miniatures for keyboard and guitar than full-blown songs, while even the longer numbers tend to feature only a handful of ingredients. “Queue Nightfall” is particularly minimal: A droning synth runs the length of the song spreading nameless dread, with other electronic elements periodically dropping in to further test the frazzled nerves.
As an accompaniment to the film’s Lynchian legend of a haunted red dress, the soundtrack’s kitsch and occasionally playful textures work well, delivering the kind of gentlemanly chills that stand apart from the overt gore and guts of much modern horror. As a stand-alone listen, though, In Fabric can be testing: The 35-song soundtrack runs to nearly two hours, and the very elements that make it work as a score—the repeating melodic motifs and moments of lingering disquiet—make it a difficult listening experience. Much like the film’s demonic dress, it feels at times like In Fabric owns you, more than you own it.
Still, scattered throughout are numerous examples of the melodic dexterity, genre agnosticism, and rhythmic poise that made records like Hormone Lemonade and Emperor Tomato Ketchup such shape-shifting delights. “The Dress Perspective” has a melody of such Gallic finesse that it begs for Sadier to break out her trademark bah-bah-ing melodies over its gorgeous chord sequence, while “ZinZan’s Avec Moi” has the life-affirming, slightly wonky rush of the best Stereolab disco moments. “Speaks Machine” is even better, a techno-influenced aural illusion that seems to be permanently pushing its melody up to an unscalable peak, like a Sisyphean synth jam.
With Stereolab reforming in 2019 for live dates, the dream of the groop soundtracking an Italian horror, French New Wave, or Eastern European art-house flick remains at least nominally alive. In Fabric won’t quite banish those grand cinematic visions. But it certainly scratches the band’s optical itch. | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Duophonic UHF Disks | June 5, 2020 | 6.8 | 5fbfdb7f-d878-4e01-8988-a02f5049f5f6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Cavern of Anti-Matter is the new project of Stereolab founder Tim Gane. The songs here cover ground from techno to krautrock to electro and beyond. The unifying element is the loose, jammy feeling to everything: It's easy to imagine these pieces being worked out in the studio in just one or two takes, even with their many moving pieces. Bradford Cox guests on one of two tracks with vocals. | Cavern of Anti-Matter is the new project of Stereolab founder Tim Gane. The songs here cover ground from techno to krautrock to electro and beyond. The unifying element is the loose, jammy feeling to everything: It's easy to imagine these pieces being worked out in the studio in just one or two takes, even with their many moving pieces. Bradford Cox guests on one of two tracks with vocals. | Cavern of Anti-Matter: Void Beats / Invocation Trex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21470-void-beats-invocation-trex/ | Void Beats / Invocation Trex | Stereolab may have hung up their hats in 2009, but their motorik pulse and utopian spirit live on in founder Tim Gane's new project Cavern of Anti-Matter. The project also features original Stereolab drummer Joe Dilworth, who played on Peng!, and Holger Zapf, a synthesizer player whose resumé includes a stint in Jan Jelinek's Ursula Bogner ensemble. They released their debut album, the out-of-print Blood Drums, in 2013, but Void Beats / Invocation Trex feels in some ways like a proper debut, taking the tones and drones of that release and sculpting them into mesmerizing and thrilling pieces.
Stereolab's DNA is recognizable from the very first beat: The record's opening song, "Tardis Cymbals," begins with a ringing E chord that longtime fans may initially mistake for the opening notes of Mars Audiac Quintet's "Nihilist Assault Group" (or, for that matter, "Three-Dee Melodie" or "Transona Five" or "Anamorphose"—Gane clearly loves his E chords). Krautrock rhythms abound: In "Tardis Cymbals" it's a burbly pinging in a surprisingly natural-sounding 7/8 time, while "Melody in High Feedback Tones" slips into a brighter and more aerated groove, its clean-toned guitar strum and quicksilver pulse given extra shape by the faint squelch tugging at its edges. The distorted organs of "Insect Fear" lend it a garage-rock feel that flashes back to the Transient Random-Noise Bursts era, while the swinging "Echolalia" recalls Stereolab's '60s fascinations. And the album's period instruments—including Farfisa and Vox organs, Clavinet, and analog synths like the EMS VCS 3 and Korg MS20—contribute to the recurring sense of sonic déjà vu.
But those callbacks—natural enough, given the personnel—are just a small patch of the ground the trio covers here. "Blowing My Nose Under Close Observation" avails itself of electro's whipcrack syncopations. "Pantechnicon" plays winsome Kraftwerkian melodies against rolling, techno-inspired rhythms. The unifying element is the loose, jammy feeling to everything: It's easy to imagine these pieces, three of which extend beyond nine minutes, being worked out in the studio in just one or two takes, even with their many moving pieces and their counterintuitive dodges and feints.
Only one track doesn't fit the mold: Bradford Cox's raspy, rock'n'roll delivery gives "Liquid Gate" a Sonic Youth feeling. The only other vocal track, "Planetary Folklore," is in keeping with the album's overarching aesthetic: Here, Sonic Boom gravely recites a text inspired by Victor Vasarely's monologues on the plastic arts over a muted reprise of the "Tardis Cymbals" groove. The Hungarian artist sought an industrialized, universal, radically democratic art, whose cell-based constructions were a direct antecedent to Cavern of Anti-Matter's method of composition. It was sometimes unclear when Stereolab's mid-century references were meant as kitsch, but here, Gane & co.'s retro-futurist flashback feels optimistic, as though convinced that the key to fulfilling the promise of a new era were just one perfect rhythm away. | 2016-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Duophonic | February 22, 2016 | 8 | 5fc143c9-80a4-4ebc-9be8-2316959019f1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Listening to the remastered box set of Massive Attacks's debut album 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. | Listening to the remastered box set of Massive Attacks's debut album 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. | Massive Attack: Blue Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17384-blue-lines-remastered-box-set/ | Blue Lines | Listening to Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. Nearly every song offers a sound currently in use in music's taste-making leading edge. Robert "3D" Del Naja's chopped-up vocals on the album-opening "Safe From Harm" sound freakishly like the chorus to Kanye et al's "Mercy" (even if Ye actually lifted it from DJ Screw, who was developing his idiosyncratic style 5,000 miles away from Bristol, England at almost the exact same time Massive were recording Blue Lines). The chunky, palm-muted guitar riff on "One Love" is almost identical to the one on "Ahh Shit" from Jeremih's brilliant Late Nights with Jeremih. The subzero space-reggae beat to "Five Man Army" could easily be a highlight of any number of fashionable rappers' mixtapes.
When Del Najas, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles were recording Blue Lines, the sub-genre called trip-hop hadn't been invented. But at its heart, Blue Lines is a hip-hop record, although one marbled with streaks of soul, dub, dance music, and psychedelic rock. The fact that its primary audience in America was made up largely of ravers and alternative rockers doesn't change that. And their accomplishments stand out even further next to what was happening elsewhere in the hip-hop world at the time. Straight Outta Compton, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Paul's Boutique, and 3 Feet High and Rising were all still just a few of years old in 1991, and so was the idea of beatmaking as an art unto itself. The blocky rhythms and minimal arrangements that defined rap's identity in the 1980s were just starting to be replaced by the deep, organic textures that would define its 90s, and Blue Lines was at the forefront.
When Massive Attack first arrived, hip-hop in the UK was still figuring itself out. For years the scene there, such as it was, focused mainly on reproducing trends that had already fallen out of fashion by the time they made it across the Atlantic. That lack of identity was probably an asset for Massive Attack. They didn't have to compete against their contemporaries to see who could sample which Jimmy Castor Bunch break first, or worry about conforming to any outsider whose preconceptions about hip-hop authenticity might not include prog-rock samples or a lush chill-out anthem like "Unfinished Sympathy". Another asset was Neneh Cherry, whose Raw Like Sushi, which Del Naja and Vowles worked on, provided a genre-bending inspiration for Blue Lines, as well as a bankroll to record it. (Cherry even paid the group a salary and let them turn her kid's bedroom into an impromptu studio.)
In fact, those Raw Like Sushi credits (Vowles' for programming, Del Naja's for co-writing "Manchild") were the only real music-industry bona fides any of the principal contributors to Blue Lines had going into it, aside from vocalists Shara Nelson and roots reggae veteran Horace Andy. But somehow the group realized a remarkable and seamless sonic identity. That's clear from the arresting opener "Safe From Harm", which spins an aggressive drumbeat, Del Naja's rap, Nelson's soulful vocals, and a mist of sustained minor-key synths around an intimidatingly muscular bass loop. From that moment, every major part of the Massive Attack profile is already present, from the collaging of genres to the spacious, nocturnal sonic environment to the heavy dose of paranoia that permeates it all.
They spend the rest of the album exploring variations on these themes. "One Love," with Andy on vocals, has a digital dancehall feel, a creepy-funky electric piano riff, and a scratched sample of a blaring horn section that predates Pharoahe Monch's "Simon Says" by almost a decade. "Daydreaming", with its scratchy breakbeat drums, is more directly hip-hop than most of the rest of the album, but the layers of atmospheric synthesizers and Tricky's felonious near-whisper make it clear that Massive Attack was up to something entirely different from what every other rap producer at the time was doing.
Blue Lines brought producers around to its unique vision. By the time Massive released Protection three years later, the group's renegade approach had been copied enough times to become a full-on movement. They'd go on to produce their masterpiece, Mezzanine, a couple of years after, but by then the project had already started to splinter. Tricky split from the collective after Protection to follow his own solo vision, while the core trio behind it would eventually burn out acrimoniously, with Vowles and then Marshall leaving Del Naja to produce increasingly less rewarding music under the group's name. Meanwhile, trip-hop in general had its edges polished off by genteel musicians who transformed it into soundtracks for fashionable hotel lobbies.
Still, that doesn't change the fact that Blue Lines was a startling record when it came out, and it remains one now. For this reissue it received a new mix and a new mastering job straight from the original tapes. It's available as a CD, in digital form in standard and high fidelity formats, and as a set of two LPs and a DVD of high resolution audio files. There aren't any bonus tracks, and aside from a reproduction promo poster in the vinyl edition there aren't any add-ons either. Frankly they'd just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it. | 2012-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | EMI | November 30, 2012 | 9 | 5fc3d563-97f3-4334-ba17-1a1bd8120e2f | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The rapper’s second full-length is intense and riotous, tapping into the anger at the heart of Black America for an eclectic and captivating record. | The rapper’s second full-length is intense and riotous, tapping into the anger at the heart of Black America for an eclectic and captivating record. | Pink Siifu: Negro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-siifu-negro/ | Negro | In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs wrote about the psychological toll of the moment. “People bear all they can, and if required, bear even more. But if they are black in present-day America they have been asked to shoulder too much. They have had all they can stand. They will be harried no more. Turning from their tormentors, they are filled with rage.”
The words come from Black Rage, a text that remains potent nearly five decades later. “If racist hostility is to subside, and if we are to avoid open conflict on a nationwide scale, information is the most desperately needed commodity of our time. And of the things that need knowing, none is more important than that all blacks are angry.” These are the pillars upon which Alabama-born musician Pink Siifu presents NEGRO. Originally titled To Be Angry, the album siphons the repressed ire of Black America. “U are allowed to be angry,” he wrote in a description on Bandcamp. It is a bracing record that is at once crushing and liberating.
NEGRO is about as bold a move as Pink Siifu could have made. It’s a dramatic sonic departure from his debut solo full-length, 2018’s lo-fi rap breakthrough ensley. The messages or politics won’t come as a shock to anyone who has paid close attention to his discography, but it is definitely gutsy to follow your most popular album with your most confrontational one. Siifu sounds nearly ready to explode. The album grabs from hardcore punk, free jazz, and noise music across songs that are fleeting and fervent; 14 of the 20 are under two minutes. In bursts, he performs in defense of looting, in opposition to police violence, and in support of black solidarity. Where ensley was nuanced and interior, NEGRO is intense and riotous.
In a manifesto on the website negro.life, Siifu outlines the influences of NEGRO, some directly sampled, others a phantom presence in the room: Malcolm X, the proto-punk band Death, the Afrofuturist high priest Sun Ra, along with others like writer and activist Amiri Baraka and yogi MC Gonjasufi. This swirling mass of influence is palpable throughout and divergent songs like “.ON FIRE, PRAY!” and “Nation Tyme.” illustrate the vast scope and eclecticism of the project.
Pink Siifu is a rapper, but there isn’t much “rapping” on NEGRO. (For anyone looking for that sort of thing, he released two projects at the end of 2019: Black Sand with Akai Solo and Bag Talk with Yungmorpheus.) Normally, Siifu raps like he’s trying to tell you something he doesn’t want anyone to overhear, but here, his mission is full guttural howling. On the Na-Kel Smith-assisted “Dirt,” he blurts out the verses as if through a megaphone, and “steal from the ENEMY” is a series of near-indecipherable grunts and squawks. NEGRO is best when Siifu’s fury is at its peak. The rumbling racket of “SMD” feels like hurtling toward a black hole. The heavy distortion of “homicide/genocide/ill die” scrubs away at you like a Brillo pad. The industrial rhythms of “bebe’s kids, APOLLO” feel like wandering into a rave at a Ford assembly plant. These songs attack the senses.
Much of the album’s anger is aimed specifically at the police. “run pig run” and “Chris Dorner” take “copwatching” to the next level with fantasies of bringing the fight to them. “You have to shoot a pig, before they shoot you/Pig shoot, we shoot,” he yells on the former; in the latter, he references someone who did just that—the rampaging black officer who declared “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” on the LAPD before dying in a standoff. As if to preempt anyone who might dismiss these songs as “extreme,” there’s “ameriKKKa, try no pork.,” which opens with news clips from several racially motivated police murders before being washed out by white noise and an echoing news story of police violence warped beyond recognition. For many of us, this endless succession of incidents incites feelings of helplessness; NEGRO taps into our irrepressible desire to see a reckoning.
The rage can be galvanizing, but it’s the expressions of tenderness between that have the most power—they are reminders that this frustration is merely a response to frequent injustice suffered at the hands of an oppressor, and that this is all in service of freeing a persecuted community. “we need mo color. Abundance” is hushed jazz with shimmering guitar in search of a less colorless world. The soulful “myheartHURT” is wedged between the most abrasive run of tracks like a reprieve. “Black Be Tha God, NEGRO. (wisdom.cipher),” which samples Eddie Kendricks’ enduring 1977 anthem “Intimate Friends,” is a dedication to the circle of family, friends, and collaborators from which Siifu draws his strength.
This album couldn’t have been made without that community. The intro is dedicated to the late Los Angeles producer Ras G, who introduced him to Sun Ra. The Los Angeles rapper Zeroh mastered the album. Siifu credits Slauson Malone’s influence for the help with sequencing. Jeremiah Jae extends beyond his typical range as a beatmaker on the record, but still adds some of his signature flourishes. Roper Williams produces some of the album’s fiercest moments. Trumpeter Chris Williams pops in the margins. Producer Ted Kamal, self-proclaimed witch rapper Moor Mother, and theOGM, one half of punk-rap duo Ho99o9, all lend their voices to the maelstrom. Though rage is the most present thing, it is not the most important thing. By the end of the album, it is clear that the point is not the wrath but the bond shared by those expressing it. All blacks are angry. On NEGRO, there is some comfort to be found in experiencing that together. | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 15, 2020 | 7.8 | 5fc601c4-cc28-42ac-a320-97a1ebf0b102 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Controversy emerged in 1981 at a pivotal time not just for Prince, but for America. It's often regarded as a bridge between Dirty Mind and 1999, but it's fascinating record in its own right. | Controversy emerged in 1981 at a pivotal time not just for Prince, but for America. It's often regarded as a bridge between Dirty Mind and 1999, but it's fascinating record in its own right. | Prince: Controversy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21843-controversy/ | Controversy | On October 9, 1981, just five days before the release of his fourth studio album, Controversy, Prince walked onto the stage of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, faced a crowd of roughly 90,000 predominantly white people (what was then his biggest audience ever) and experienced the kind of vitriolic backlash that would become the stuff of rock legend.
Invited by the Rolling Stones to open for them on their Tattoo You American tour, Prince and his band came face-to-face with the kind of hate that he would dedicate his entire career to thoroughly and soundly vanquishing. “We went on when the sun was still up, I think we hit the stage around six or seven at night,” recalled bandmate Matt Fink in Touré’s book I Will Die 4 U. “We get on stage and within two minutes of the first song the audience, which was a hardcore hippie crowd, they took one look at Prince and went what the heck is this? And they started booing, flipping us the bird. […] And they’re throwing whatever they could get their hands on…a crumpled up Coca-Cola can. I saw a fifth of Jack Daniels whiz by Prince’s face….”
The scene brought back chilling memories of another turbulent, racially-charged moment in pop music culture from just two years before, when Chicago shock-jock Steve Dahl corralled tens of thousands of his listeners to pack Comiskey Park and channel their anti-queer, anti-people of color, anti-woman rage into Disco Demolition night during a White Sox evening doubleheader. The L.A. Coliseum crowd wasn’t having it and neither was Prince, who famously stormed off the stage and hopped a jet back to Minnesota, leaving his band to finish “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad” without him. Although Mick Jagger would coax him to return two days later, the ensuing shows were more of the same, and Prince and band dropped off of the tour before his new album hit stores.
Back in those days, he knew what he was up against. Prince knew that the sound and look of what he’d been crafting in the club scene back in Minnesota and further on record across three increasingly daring albums that fused slinky R&B with greasy funk rhythms, glam guitar, Afro new-wave synth, post-punk energy, and thrillingly androgynous vocals were reasons to sound the alarm that another kind of Sly riot was goin’ on. “I’m sure wearing underwear and a trench coat didn’t help matters…” he mused to Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times, “but if you throw trash at anybody, it’s because you weren’t trained right at home.”
Released on October 14, 1981, Controversy became a conveniently radical rejoinder to that incident, one of the most famous moments in early Prince history. If the L.A. Coliseum crowd’s violent repulsion of him brought to the surface the racism, sexism (because, don’t forget, longtime keyboardist Lisa Coleman was touring with him at that point, too), and homophobia coursing through rock culture, Controversy was another one of Prince’s defiant declarations that his revolution was not deterred, that it was still fully under way and on its way in spite of racist rock culture’s resistance to it.
Controversy is often thought of as the bridge between Prince’s pathbreaking Dirty Mind and the epic, new-world-making 1999. But it was released during one of the most consequential social, political, and cultural years of the U.S. 1980s for people living in the margins of America—people of color, women, queer folk, poor folk. And the fact that Prince, louder than most all of his peers, was continuing to call, on this record, for collective social and cultural revolt through and by way of his music makes it one of the most important album releases of 1981.
No one was combining the carnal with collective social resistance and political critique as overtly and as imaginatively and along the axes of race, gender, and sexuality as Prince all throughout his three-decade plus career, and especially on this record. As he had on his previous releases, he assumed the role of the pan-musician on Controversy, having a hand on nearly every instrument but also calling on Coleman for backing vocals (on the album’s title track, and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” and “Jack U Off”). Fellow future members of his band the Revolution, Dr. Fink and Bobby Z. would supply keyboards (as did Coleman) and drums, respectively on the closing track, “Jack U Off.”
A seven-minute dance epic unto itself, “Controversy” is comprised of many moving parts: oft-cited anti-confessional lyrics (“Am I black or white/ Am I straight or gay…”), vocals that swing between the spoken and the sung, an oscillation between concern for the “I,” the “you,” and the “we,” the Princely melding of the high spiritual (including a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer) and the suggestion of the profane (“I wish we all were nude…”), the dream of no boundaries (“I wish there were no black and white/ I wish there were no rules…”). It’s a song about a longing to be emancipated from our most wretched and oppressive inhibitions and biases, and as Prince climbs a register and takes us to the gripping bridge (“Some people want to die/ So they can be free”), we hear the suggestion of other places where we might go with him.
“Sexuality” represents the Utopia Prince has always pursued, a place that was for him often one and the same with heaven. “Let your body be free,” he implores on this throbbing manifesto, willing his listeners towards the queer future elsewhere. Prince makes liberal use of that signature vocal squeal—filthier and more sexually intimate than James Brown’s scream, filled with lust, mischief, orgasmic delight, gasps and exhalations. It is the sound of revelry in the body that gives way to a call to “stand up everybody” while he talks of “revolution” and a “new age revelation” that we “don’t need no race.” All we need is each other on the dancefloor and in the act of profoundly erotic coupling.
On the surface, Prince’s insistence on sexuality as the key to liberation seems about a decade late: post-free-love era, after the official timelines for the feminist and LGBT revolutions and the golden years of funk and disco. As much as critics were swooning over the fearless edge and hybrid genre and gender-bending he’d exhibited with abandon on Dirty Mind, most people considered the content of Prince’s message out of time and place, the cries of an oddball brother from the cold Midwest. But the intensity and urgency of this music put it in the here-and-now. Protest songs had gone out of fashion in the early '80s. In the moment right before the era of Band Aid, Amnesty International, and U.S.A. for Africa, pop protest was largely absent from the airwaves, and even if it had been in fashion, no one other than Prince would have been yoking together lyrics about the body with calls to have children avoid television "until they know how to read" (rather than just how to “cuss, fight and breed”).
What did it mean for Prince to seemingly be yelling into the wilderness about getting in formation? Who, in God’s name, was Prince addressing earlier that year when, during his "Saturday Night Live" debut, he closed out “Partyup” with that song’s blazing refrain, “You’re gonna have to fight your own damn war/ ‘cause we don’t want to fight no more!” before angrily leaping off the stage, storming into the audience and out of camera range?
Particularly in hindsight, there was much worth fighting against in 1981, especially if you were an African-American avant-garde, countercultural pop musician. It was the year Ronald Reagan took office, thus igniting a new repressive regime of economic, social, and cultural policies that would further oppress poor and working class communities and communities of color. It was the year of what was, at the time, thought to be the earliest reported cases of the AIDS virus. It was the year that African American loner Wayne Williams was brought into custody as a suspect in the Atlanta child murder cases, and it was the year of what is sometimes referred to as the last recorded lynching of an African-American by members of the KKK.
Controversy’s two opening tracks open fighting and dancing, demanding that we dance ourselves out of clothes, out of our constrictions as a way to fight the corrosive powers that be. It is the sound of a battle under way, and the doe-eyed beauty on its cover, the one in the diamond-studded purple jacket with white shirt and bolero tie, the one with the “Rude Boy” button that signaled his solidarity with black diasporic ska and punk insurgencies, the one with his back against a wall strewn with Prince daily news headlines, is here on this record ready to play “Dr. Everything Will Be Alright” as well as apocalyptic prophet. The former persona rules over Side One, where we find him fighting the tyranny of alienation (life looked at “through a pocket camera,” as he sees it on track two) with the joy of copulation on the fight-the-power-through-funking track “Sexuality.”
Having remade the universe in his own image, the first side closes in the bedroom with one of Prince’s great sex ballads (of which there are dozens). On “Do Me, Baby,” Prince transitions genres yet again, moving into full soul falsetto to stage a scene of carnal supplication, a slow jam dripping with angst and wanting and sensual desperation. It’s a come-on song that’s all about the desire to be taken, a love song delivered by an impish sprite of a man who’s prone to wearing bikini briefs and constantly on the make. “Do Me, Baby” ends not with two-person consummation but with a staged scenario (characteristic of long form R&B and funk narratives) in which our hero takes matters into his own hands to reach ecstasy while his lover sits and watches. “I’m not gonna stop,” he declares, “until the war is over.”
The second half of Controversy is less cohesive as a narrative about sexual insurgency as protest and social reform, but it nonetheless repeatedly returns to these themes across four tracks that swing between hope and despair, the ecstatic and the horrific, the traumatic and the bawdy. If, on the first side, Prince asks us (almost incredulously), “Don’t you wanna play?,” on Side Two, he pushes the art of sexual play to Holy Revival heights on “Private Joy,” a song that marries soul-meets-rockabilly vocals with a Sunday morning, get happy, arrangement that spins us into the center of the church sanctuary and right out the door into the pagan after-hours club.
Still full of the surprises and still unsatisfied living in one sonic register, the Prince on “Private Joy” moves into a disco bassline breakdown towards the end of the track where that other well known voice—as in the lowdown, get-underneath-your-clothes-and-talk-dirty-to-you commanding Prince voice—emerges to announce that he’s defeated all competing suitors for your love: “Strangled Valentino/Been mine ever since/If anybody asks you/you belong to Prince…” A spiraling guitar solo closes “Private Joy” and burns with annihilating fire into the most pointedly political track on the album, “Ronnie Talk to Russia.”
Hell hath no fury like Prince delivering a no nukes message, even if this track’s literal bluntness lacks the lyrical poetry of Controversy’s sonic inventiveness. A hail of Hendrix “Machine Gun” guitar feedback and drum fills open the track and carry out the frenzy of Prince’s appeal for global diplomacy as a solution to the threat of mass catastrophe. It’s the shortest track on the album, more like a concise, high-voltage nightmare interlude where he chooses not to linger. Just as quickly as it’s started, the track is done, blown to bits and leaving Prince to get back to the hard labor of deep, gritty, gratifying movement on “Let’s Work,” an exquisite, mid-tempo dance track with a sinuously insistent bass line that fuels the electric slide togetherness of the party.
What often catches people off guard about Controversy is its dramatic mood swings, particularly in the final few songs of the record. From the celebratory heat of “Let’s Work,” the record careens towards the dark techno-goth-rock nadir on “Annie Christian,” a parable in which Prince, with overdubs, recites (rather than sings) the dizzying tragedy and persistent anxieties that come with fame in the age of early ‘80s celebrity assassination and assassination attempts. “Annie Christian/Annie Christ,” the obsessive fan figure circa 1980/1981, prowls the streets in the wake of John Lennon’s murder and the Jodie Foster-inspired shooting of Reagan (“She tried to kill Reagan/ Everybody say gun control…”). As the speaker resolves to “live” his “life in taxicabs” until this femme fatale is “crucified,” one hears the kind of haunting paranoia (laced with just a mild bit of sexist mythology) that surfaces several decades later on Kendrick Lamar’s albums during those moments when he does battle with “Lucy” (Lucifer) for his soul.
Prince, to the very end, though, is at heart an optimist and an artist who chooses to fight the demons of the world with his superhero virtuosity as a musician, as a man of deep (and sometimes shifting) faith, and as a champion of and protector of black culture as the bedrock of modern sound and salvation. He was also a humorist, a prankster, and a trickster, itself a supremely African-American expressive tradition used as a means to survival. And so Controversy, a dead serious album, ends with the sounds of high levity and inanity on “Jack U Off,” a bald-faced, high-tempo braggadocio track all awash in synths. To close this album, his highness turns to pornographic farce, fun and games in a song that at once invokes early rock’n’roll guitar and '80s pop. He gives us a blue Little Richard ditty for the Reagan era but minus the family-friendly innuendo and assures us that we’ll find pleasure together in these uncertain times. | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. | April 29, 2016 | 9 | 5fc63208-37b5-4375-9e90-fe62213d3851 | Daphne A. Brooks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daphne-a. brooks/ | null |
In the 1980s, Jason Pierce distilled Dylan's methadone strumming, Roky Erickson's psychedelic circular breathing and LaMonte Young's ... | In the 1980s, Jason Pierce distilled Dylan's methadone strumming, Roky Erickson's psychedelic circular breathing and LaMonte Young's ... | Spiritualized: Amazing Grace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7422-amazing-grace/ | Amazing Grace | In the 1980s, Jason Pierce distilled Dylan's methadone strumming, Roky Erickson's psychedelic circular breathing and LaMonte Young's numbing minimalism, and sold the delirious result to us as Spacemen 3. In the 1990s, he continued his tasteful pilfering as the figurehead of Spiritualized-- on Pure Phase, he defined blissed-out noise-pop; on Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, he lifted murky hedonism from Jim Dickinson and voodoo rites from Dr. John (who even guested on the record), building towers of song on a 50-piece orchestral foundation. At its peak stood a full gospel choir, bellowing heartache and redemption.
This decade hasn't been quite as kind. 2001's Let It Come Down, the ridiculously anticipated follow-up to Ladies and Gentlemen which Pierce spent four years crafting, was at times musically and lyrically powerful, but rarely both at once. And Pierce's decision to double the size of the Spiritualized Philharmonic failed to up the impact of his by-then-familiar post-breakup moaning, religious conviction, and continuing struggles with drug addiction. Now, in 2003, it seems clear-- even to Pierce-- that a change is necessary, and with Amazing Grace, he heads back to that motherly womb of rock 'n' roll: the garage.
Unfortunately, there are problems from the beginning: As Pierce's voice bleats through blaring feedback on the opening track, "This Little Life of Mine", there's an unfillable void in his recklessly delivered lyrics where the song's emotional core should lie. His reconstituted band blazes, led by the bonfire-leads of guitarist Doggen (on loan from Brain Donor), but they also lurch in an almost sluggish manner that, push and pull as they might, never actually gets the lead out.
There are highlights: "She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)" (it owes to the similarly titled Spector-produced Crystals song in name only) is cut from the same patch of denim and black leather as "This Little Life of Mine", but more convincingly evokes the sneering garage aesthetic of The Troggs and early Kinks; "Cheapster", burning through a variation on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", brandishes switchblade-sharp chops; and "Never Goin' Back" proves Spiritualized can nail The Stooges shtick as well as any of the usurping mainstream garage rockers-- but no better. Here, he replicates the bottled, melting scowl of Iggy circa the primordial Funhouse, but his imitation, like the kids he schools, is stripped of the necessary blood/cum combo needed to carry the shot through to the heart.
Of course, rock was never what Pierce did best: it's the strung-out ballads and slow, unfurling of studio sounds that's always carried his wasted messages to beatific, almost narcotic effect-- as such, "Hold On" and "Lord Let It Rain on Me" serve as the linchpins of this record. For its entire opening flourish, the former tames itself into a soft strum as Pierce implores you to "hold on to those you hold dear." It's yet another demonstration of his ability to transcend limp Hallmark maxims through sheer will and conviction: he emotes no irony or bitterness, transforming simple truisms and cliches into heartbreaking revelations, much like Wayne Coyne observing that "the sun don't go down" in "Do You Realize??" And despite that the new has worn off this technique somewhat in the 20+ years Pierce has relied on it, in this moment it proves as effective as ever.
Amazing Grace also manages some mildly interesting jazz flourishes. "Rated X" does about a minute's worth of Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly" before Pierce's weightless astronaut murmuring sends the song into the beckoning orchestral stratosphere, and "The Power and the Glory" features the record's most forward-looking moment, as it builds to a massive, cacophonous swell, aided by a horn section that puts British improv legends Kenny Wheeler and Evan Parker in front of their largest audience yet.
After that intriguing instrumental fury, however, Pierce marches his poor, abused gospel choir back into place with the solemn tom thuds and plaintive guitar strum of "Lord Let It Rain on Me." Pieced together from at least four other Spiritualized songs, Pierce doles out more of his redemptive raindrops while "looking down the barrel of a gun," before finally unleashing another predictably bombastic endorphin downpour. Here, as with tracks like the banal "The Ballad of Richie Lee" and the repetitive, melodramatic closing lullaby "Lay It Down Easy", Pierce finally wears out his welcome, having utterly exhausted the possibilities of what can be accomplished within the limited constraints he's set for himself.
Pierce's ability to convey pain-- much like the recovering addict's ability to feel pleasure-- is all but lost among clusters of burnt-out receptors. Even in its most inspired moments, Amazing Grace lacks the fiery intensity of any of Pierce's previous outings (including Let It Come Down). Now, fervently praying to channel the uplift of true gospel and the Gnostic moments of the Nuggets era, J Spacemen is left, for the first time, sobbing at the pearly gates. | 2003-09-24T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-09-24T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sanctuary | September 24, 2003 | 6.2 | 5fc7d3db-6ba9-4d29-9d28-fa569d5dc5a1 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Bad Bunny’s second album is outstanding. It’s a big party record that pushes boundaries and pays homage to reggaetón’s past and future, all made by a swaggering star with absolutely nothing to prove. | Bad Bunny’s second album is outstanding. It’s a big party record that pushes boundaries and pays homage to reggaetón’s past and future, all made by a swaggering star with absolutely nothing to prove. | Bad Bunny: YHLQMDLG | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-bunny-yhlqmdlg/ | YHLQMDLG | Not many parties start with someone contemplating suicide. Yet that’s how Bad Bunny chose to begin the video for “Si Veo a Tu Mamá,” the opening track of his second album, YHLQMDLG. We see a close-up of a despondent young man, standing on a stool and staring through a noose, ready to hang himself as a party buzzes around him. He’s saved by an empathetic little boy who understands his pain, and introduces him to the cure: Listening to Bad Bunny.
It’s a macabre choice for a dance record, a collection of distinctly Puerto Rican party beats that pays homage to reggaetón’s past and future. And on its surface, the song, built atop a morose, Casiotoned version of the “Girl From Ipanema” bossa nova melody, might seem more suited for the elevator of a Florida nursing home than the club. But it’s also firmly aligned with the somewhat paradoxical ethos of YHLQMDLG (an acronym for Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, or “I do whatever I want”). Bad Bunny might know what it feels like to be sad, but he also knows the path to salvation is believing in himself, and with that, he can do whatever he wants—and pull it off with swagger.
Bad Bunny rose to stardom riding the Latin trap wave, crooning over beats constructed with 808 drums, bleeding synth bass, and narcotized atmospherics. It all borrowed heavily from the sounds of late-’00s Southern hip-hop, adding the idiosyncrasies of the flow en Español and a Caribbean POV. For YHLQMDLG, he reaches back even further to the glory days of reggaetón, sidelining Anglo guest stars for OGs like Daddy Yankee, Yaviah, Ñengo Flow, and Jowell y Randy.
YHLQMDLG plays like a mixtape for a San Juan marquesina—the underground garage parties Bad Bunny referenced on X 100PRE’s “Cuando Perriabas.” He curates a playlist of diverse perreo jams with a singular, unwavering focus: having fun. Where X 100PRE felt like a tightly sequenced statement of identity, YHLQMDLG is both looser and freer, a party record made by a young star with nothing to prove. The highlights are plentiful; early singles “Vete” and “Ignorantes” occupy the suave sadboi lane he’s best known for, but “Yo Perreo Sola” and “Bichiyal” rock raw, stripped-down reggaetón beats evocative of the genre’s “Gasolina” era. And he doesn’t completely abandon the sounds of the trap, either: The Anuel AA collab “Está Cabrón Ser Yo” could just have easily found itself on the Migos’ Culture III.
From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette. Bad Bunny leans heavily on the production duo Subelo NEO, but also taps former Luny Tunes protege Tainy for a handful of songs. And even his dabbles in rock are expertly engineered—the emocore breakdown on “Hablamos Mañana” is so epic one might forget the tinny production that almost ruined X 100PRE’s otherwise catchy pop-punk foray, “Tenemos Que Hablar.” The mood is joyful throughout YHLQMDLG, updating some of early reggaetón’s darker, grittier textures with a bright tropical sheen better suited to Bad Bunny’s personality. The sequencing is a bit scattershot, but rather than distract, it keeps the classic reggaetón riddim sounding fresh across the album’s sprawling 20-song tracklist.
A perfect example is the album’s centerpiece, “Safaera,” a self-contained microcosm of YHLQMDLG’s collage aesthetic. More suite than song, the five-minute reggaetón symphony changes tempos eight times and features a new beat nearly every verse. It seamlessly integrates recognizable hits—Alexis y Fido and Baby Ranks’ “El Tiburón” and Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” among others—without ever sounding stale. To find anything remotely like it you’d have to dig up one of DJ Playero’s mixtapes from The Noise era of reggaetón, which blended dancehall, reggae, and rap en Español into a sound that would ultimately coalesce into the reggaetón we know today. That these shadows of the genre’s history—from a time when it was so underground it was literally criminalized—have such a prominent place on one of the most anticipated pop records of the year is nothing short of remarkable.
His ability to push reggaetón forward while paying homage to its past is commendable, but the way he uses visuals is of equal importance to his evolution into a pop star. On its surface, “La Difícil” is about a hard-to-get video vixen, a girl who knows that everyone wants her and uses it to her advantage. Yet the video itself feels infinitely more empathetic, giving a backstory to the women typically used as one-dimensional scenery in nearly every urbano video—in this case, a single mom who’s doing her best for her daughter. This is no aberration; as Bad Bunny’s budgets have swollen and his creative control solidified, he’s used the medium to flip the script on tropes that have made urbano feel stale, offering visibility to the underrepresented, or placing himself firmly in opposition to misogyny and homophobia. Genesis “Nesi” Rios’ missing performance credit on “Yo Perreo Sola”—a song defined by her hook—proves he still has some work to do. But even if he makes some of the same mistakes as his reggaetón forebears, he’s still doing more than most to bring progressive politics into the Latin mainstream.
And when urbano’s brightest young star wears a skirt and nail polish on the Tonight Show, silently demanding we put respect on a murdered woman’s name, it brings us one step closer to a new standard of inclusion, and encourages marginalized people to live their truth in the face of oppression. Musically, one need look no farther than J Balvin’s post-2016 work for evidence of Bad Bunny’s influence on his peers, and while he looks up to his senior contemporary, he left a significantly larger impression on their collaborative LP Oasis. So even if he follows through on his threat from the album’s closing track “<3” —(“Y en nueve meses vuelvo y saco otro/Pa' retirarme tranquilo como Miguel Cotto” or “And in nine months I’ll return and drop one more/Then I’ll quietly retire like Miguel Cotto”)—not only will he have left behind a career’s worth of hits in just four short years, he’ll have reshaped urbano in his own image.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Rimas | March 5, 2020 | 8.5 | 5fcaa688-92d8-43f2-84f8-f8e3c4d5af94 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On her moody eighth album, the Boston singer-songwriter examines the icy terrain of marital strife through the lens of her habitual gothic folk. | On her moody eighth album, the Boston singer-songwriter examines the icy terrain of marital strife through the lens of her habitual gothic folk. | Marissa Nadler: For My Crimes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marissa-nadler-for-my-crimes/ | For My Crimes | For many years, Marissa Nadler wrote songs in the manner of someone rummaging through a box of antique photos. From the dusty depths of memory, she plucked characters at random—some real, some fictional—and spun them into cobwebbed stories of love, longing, and loss. Over the course of her career, the dramatis personae of Nadler’s songs shifted to the periphery; she actively pursued more approachable subjects, and her own voice grew stronger and more centered in her writing. Though still most comfortable in the sparing, spooky goth-folk cabin she built with her very first album, on For My Crimes, her eighth, Nadler is confessional and direct.
The opener and title track of For My Crimes is a microcosm of Nadler’s evolution. It began as a challenge set forth by her husband to write in the voice of a person on death row. The role-playing enabled Nadler to access her own feelings of guilt, and while the fictitious parameters of the song are outlined in its lyrics (“When they take me down the corridor/And secure my wrists with ties,” Nadler sings in its opening lines), they ultimately feel more introspective than narrative. On a record that is largely an examination of marital strife, Nadler begins with an admission of wrongdoing.
The songs that follow range in scope from atmospheric brooding on “Blue Vapor” to hyper-specific autobiography on “Said Goodbye to That Car.” Throughout, Nadler deftly documents what she describes as the space between love and breakup—the liminal zone plagued by skirmishes and strain and all sorts of relationship hangnails, those small aggravations that stay sore far longer than you expect them to. Nothing matches the opener for macabre, but the tone is certainly moody. “Moonlit skies upon us,” Nadler sings on “You’re Only Harmless When You Sleep,” teeing up a storybook picture of romance, then smashing it to icy bits with what follows: “There’s a freeze over our sheets.” Similarly biting is the setup on “Interlocking,” a somber tune bearing the fingerprints of Nadler’s country influences. On it, she borrows a term that typically litters love songs—describing gazes, hands, and hearts—and flips it to describe feeling tethered to a relationship.
The closest For My Crimes comes to a climax is on “Blue Vapor,” a little less than halfway through. Nadler’s words here describe personal erosion; around her, strings plummet, woodwinds snarl, and thudding percussion (contributed by Hole’s Patty Schemel) adds considerable weight. It’s an instrumental moment whose intensity is never quite matched lyrically, beyond the melodrama of the opener. Nadler exposes fissures, not faults, on this album. She articulates her pain points subtly, as on “I Can’t Listen to Gene Clark Anymore,” where she examines the threat of separation through the corollary, but objectively lesser, threat of bitter memories tarnishing once-shared favorite songs. On “All Out of Catastrophes,” Nadler characterizes a fight via its least hurtful spar: her partner naming another woman in his sleep. The understatedness of it all almost scans as complacence—a shrugging, this is just the way things are attitude—until a faint hope for healing surfaces in the record’s final minutes. The penultimate track, “Flamethrower,” cites the possibility for new growth on scorched earth. On closer “Said Goodbye to That Car,” Nadler’s car crapping out marks the end of an era and implies a fresh start to follow.
Nadler is, in fact, optimistic. She recently indicated that, after For My Crimes, she would be done with her “saddest records” for a while. It’s hard to imagine what an upbeat Marissa Nadler album might sound like, but her willingness to move in a new, brighter direction after finding such success in gothic reverie is admirable and likely for the best. Though her albums to date have each shown growth and subtle variation, 14 years into her career, Nadler still has plenty of terrain left to explore. The trouble with being an artist known for consistency is that, at some point, consistency can begin to look a lot like predictability. | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sacred Bones / Bella Union | October 5, 2018 | 7.2 | 5fcf1e17-af8c-4f57-bfdc-aab6e499808d | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
After pre-dating the rise of artists like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Arp's drone gets a shot of songcraft and traditional instrumentation. | After pre-dating the rise of artists like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, Arp's drone gets a shot of songcraft and traditional instrumentation. | Arp: The Soft Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14606-the-soft-wave/ | The Soft Wave | It's not like you're going to see Kevin Drumm hitting the Billboard Heatseekers charts or anything, but artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds, Sam Goldberg, Etienne Jaumet, and Gavin Russom have certainly done their part to give arpeggiated drone a higher profile in 2010. This is due mostly to the fact that the music being made is fairly melodic and often pretty-- but it's also disorienting and doesn't always provide the easiest listening experience. There's lots of blissed-out stuff out there, but it's couched in enough static and noise to create a distance between mainstream listeners and the art itself.
The Soft Wave, Alexis Georgopoulos' sophomore effort as Arp, serves to close that gap a little. Arp's 2007 debut, In Light, was a few years ahead of its time in embracing a full-on synth-heavy arpeggio assault, and here he pushes things forward as well, with a record that's the polar opposite of In Light's smeared, near-psychedelic sound: light and clean, with plenty of negative space. You don't have to find a "way in" to this music; its construction practically leaves a door open for you, with more than enough room to wander around once you're there.
There's still a fair amount of oscillating drone and trance-inducing patterns here, but their components are more organic than before. While In Light leaned heavily on synthesizers, The Soft Wave noticeably uses more electric guitar and bass, which mixes with the structural void to create an almost three-dimensional texture. Thick-stringed patterns create reverberating foundations throughout, while guitar licks frequently dance lightly in the foreground. The resulting sound is simultaneously fleet-footed and humid, which lends the album a distinctly tropical vibe.
With more conventional instrumentation comes more straightforward "songs." Yes, The Soft Wave does open with "Pastoral Symphony", a nine-minute-plus, two-part odyssey filled with jettisoning synth lines and skyward tones, but there's also "From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea", a stately piece featuring Georgopoulos' warm vocals that recall the more ethereal moments of Brian Eno's "vocal" albums.
There's a catch, though: just as Oneohtrix Point Never opened this year's stunning Returnal with the ear-shattering, Burning Star Core-recalling noise of "Nil Admirari", Georgopoulos closes this record out with the uneasy rustling static of "Silver Clouds". The effect is something of a sonic swarm, akin to black ink leaking over parchment and spreading quickly over its surface. Overwhelming, yes, but beauty needs to be tempered with noise sometimes. | 2010-09-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-09-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | September 9, 2010 | 7.9 | 5fd1f17b-d8fb-40b7-9628-e6d5eaf16289 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
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