alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Alessia Cara’s moving and mature album is a sleek ode to in-between states, whether they are relationships or her career track as a pop star. | Alessia Cara’s moving and mature album is a sleek ode to in-between states, whether they are relationships or her career track as a pop star. | Alessia Cara: In the Meantime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alessia-cara-in-the-meantime/ | In the Meantime | Alessia Cara made a career of chronicling the aches of growing up as an outsider. She sang anthems for the isolated, the anxious, the self-branded antisocial. Sometimes, she wrote with a cutting specificity; her breakout single, “Here,” gave a panoramic view of a party from the vantage point of the loner slumped near the TV, a beanie slung low over her eyes. The song was a massive hit that sent her into the pop machine, and soon after she signed to Def Jam, Cara released a stream of sanitized songs with Big Messages—the cloying “Scars to Your Beautiful” addressed a girl who cuts herself, the earnest “Trust My Lonely” was a cheesy ode to intuition. Her albums alternated between tracks that harnessed her keen eye for detail and songs more suited for Disney soundtracks (Cara eventually was featured on the Moana soundtrack). But her undeniable voice and her keen introspection made Cara a compelling figure in the pop world, even as she struggled to define what type of star she wants to become.
Cara’s latest album, In the Meantime, is a sleek ode to this in-between state. It’s a record with defined parameters: She tends to herself after a breakup, with a constant eye towards whatever love might come next. This is the kind of album best written at the age of 25, and Cara grasps for profundity when she tackles the first apprehensions about aging—“You live and then you die,” she rasps on “Best Days,” “but the hardest pill to swallow is the meantime.” The song unfolds a lot like the half-baked meditations on Lorde’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” from another album about drifting through a quarter-life crisis. The record’s other clear parallel is Adele’s 25, a fellow collection of bracing breakup tracks and a time capsule for fading youth, buoyed by breathtaking vocals.
But where Adele sang about straightforward, straining sadness, Cara revels in clashing emotions. This is an album about feeling everything at once, and Cara cuts through her own chaos with sharp writing. Take the crystalline one-liners underpinning her choruses: “I miss you, don’t call me;” “I’m by myself, you’re somebody else;” “I love you, but you let me down.” She doesn’t let herself off the hook, either; some of Cara’s best writing on the album comes when she names her doubt and delusion. “I fill blanks with my own pride/I tell myself you’re miserable without me” she sings on “Somebody Else.” Her layered vocals bloom into lush harmonies throughout, intensifying the record’s internal feel.
The themes Cara explores here are moving and mature, but she dilutes them when she relies too much on metaphor and conceit. On “Find My Boy,” she auditions a cast of potential love interests—the Brooklyn bro picking up a pizza, the “short and sweet” poet, the dude doing yoga on the beach—and the descriptions drag on over the feather-light beats. In “Drama Queen,” she compares a turbulent relationship against the Hollywood ideals of love, but her quest for “a knight in shining armor” grows weary as the slick percussion ticks on. Cara spends much of the record parsing her tangled reflections on her past relationship, a muddle of blame and want and sting and need. At times, all this conflict jarringly contrasts the sound of the album: crisp, frictionless, pristine pop. She sings about holding in and hiding “explosive emotions” in “Box in the Ocean,” and the song itself tucks them away in bright trumpets and a reggae-inspired feel.
These buoyant tracks build to the closer “Apartment Song,” a sparkling coda that shows Cara luxuriating in alone time. She twirls around her kitchen and peers at the sky, she dances in front of the TV, she changes her number. Cara shines with clarity, exhaling and exalting. Especially for an artist who’s sang so much about the pains of feeling on her own, it’s delightful to hear her find bliss in solitude, holding onto the fleeting joy for as long as she can.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | September 29, 2021 | 7.1 | 5fe30d53-2ca0-4e2f-a87b-5f255d8df42f | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The 17-year-old Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$, the most visible member of the Progressive Era artist collective, is a young man with an old soul, and his debut mixtape showcases a prodigous MC with a vision. | The 17-year-old Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$, the most visible member of the Progressive Era artist collective, is a young man with an old soul, and his debut mixtape showcases a prodigous MC with a vision. | Joey Bada$$: 1999 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16864-1999/ | 1999 | The 17-year-old Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$ doesn't sound like his contemporaries. The handful of young rappers with tread, most notably Chicago's Chief Keef or the recently returned-from-exile prince of Odd Future, Earl Sweatshirt, make music with pomp and bombast, as aggressive as it is catchy. But the kind of music Joey BadA$$ makes hasn't sounded contemporary since the mid-1990s, or around the time he was born.
Today, Joey is the most visible member of a young artist collective called the Progressive Era (Pro Era for short), a crew mostly comprised of students from Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School. These kids take musical inspiration from a time before any of them existed, specifically, the era referred to by hip-hop purists of a certain age as the "Golden Age." That time period, however, was dead if not fully decomposed by 1999, the year of this tape's title. While albums from 1999 like Mos Def's Black on Both Sides and MF Doom's Operation Doomsday offered potent alternatives that year to the power-balling of Jay-Z's Vol. 3: Life and Times… and the literal "Bling Bling" of BG's Chopper City in the Ghetto, rap about "keeping it real" was as rare a find as those upholding the practice. Joey Bada$$, however, is doing his best to further the period's legacy of boom-bap production as an authenticator and advanced-level lyricism as a meal ticket.
The young man clearly has an old soul. 1999 opens with "Summer Knights", an interlude produced by fellow Pro Era member Chuck Strangers, that with its shimmering keys, loop of gentle background singing, and words from Bada$$ decrying the lack of rap "style wit no gimmicks," sounds like the direct spawn of Nas' "Memory Lane". "Waves", whose intro regarding the coveted hairstyle of young black men nationwide is the only reference to the song's title, continues in the same manner, with smooth jazz production and Bada$$ rapping, "Like I told you, I know niggas who trash rapping/ Worried 'bout the tending fashions rather than ascendin' passion." There's no chorus, but he drops a 2Pac soundbite about rap not being ready for a "real person" in the middle of two verses. Wack MCs get a break on "FromDaTomb$", but in the midst of "resurrecting boom bap from the tombs," Bada$$ even refers to marijuana using the antiquated term "buddha." It's not enough to simply appreciate the sound: Bada$$ is wholly invested in the period.
For all his "old New York" posturing, though, he's a prodigious rapper, one who could have guested on a revered proving ground like the now defunct Stretch and Bobbito radio show, only to have his freestyle dubbed continuously from cassette to cassette. "Suspect Niggaz", the obligatory posse cut tacked on to the tape's end sounds like friends trying to impress each other, a lunch-table cipher put to record. Its chorus also happens to come from a song on Nas' It Was Written. Bada$$ himself treats every verse as an opportunity to best whomever you'd been listening to prior (his own group members in the case of "Suspect"), a habit that could have been altogether exhausting for the listener if not for his ability to stay on topic. "Niggas don't want war I'ma Martian wit a army of Spartans/ Sparring with a knife in a missile fight," he raps on "Survival Tactics", the song whose video first flung Bada$$ into the internet hype vortex.
Outside of production from his Pro Era crew, Bada$$ has repurposed beats for 1999 from MF Doom, Lord Finesse, and the late J Dilla. They play seamlessly among the newer productions, something Bada$$ was clearly invested in as Pro Era member Chuck Strangers recently revealed to Jayson Greene. "I don't just sit around making boom-bap beats all day," the producer said. "I make all kinds of beats-- this is the just first thing everyone's heard from me. But Joey had a very specific vision for 1999."
Though Bada$$ released the tape on Datpiff, he's managed to get the video for "Hardknock" into rotation on MTV2. So while it could be that he's keeping his label association under wraps for the sake of building a more organic fanbase, he does already have a well-connected management team in place. Regardless, Joey Bada$$ has succeeded at getting the attention he wants for the music he wants to be making. That in itself is a victory in any era. | 2012-06-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | null | June 26, 2012 | 8 | 5fe3b21a-508e-4b8a-8fd2-f7ed49e3965e | Felipe Delerme | https://pitchfork.com/staff/felipe-delerme/ | null |
Mystery Cove, the fourth Monster Rally full-length, is pure, distilled escapism: 42 straight minutes of somewhere else, no SPF required. It is a Hawaiian shirt with an AUX input. | Mystery Cove, the fourth Monster Rally full-length, is pure, distilled escapism: 42 straight minutes of somewhere else, no SPF required. It is a Hawaiian shirt with an AUX input. | Monster Rally: Mystery Cove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22651-mystery-cove/ | Mystery Cove | Way back in the 10-cent bin, between the 40-odd copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights and those “Sounds of Hawaii” records made exclusively by people who'd never set foot on Hawaii, Monster Rally’s Ted Feighan has found paradise. “Exotica,” we used to call it: “Space-age bachelor pad music,” that sort of thing. Feighan, having lifted dozens of samples from the original, often-warped wax, realigns them into a sparkling, sun-soaked collage, deftly sliding between opulent slack-key guitars, clattering breakbeats, and shimmering tropicalia, like the Avalanches stuck in Honolulu with visa issues, or the Caretaker on daquiri three. Mystery Cove, the fourth Monster Rally full-length, is pure, distilled escapism: 42 straight minutes of somewhere else, no SPF required.
Feighan largely works in miniature—few Monster Rally tracks run too far past the two minute mark—without much apparent use for vocals. While early highlight “In the Valleys” lifts a few lines from hapa-haole classic “Lahainaluna,” the paucity of voices throughout the rest of Mystery Cove gives the disc its air of seclusion, a paradise far removed from the madding crowd. From chopped-not-slopped big band ditties (“Moondog”) to swanky hold music/“Hotline Bling” schmaltz (“Full Sail,” “After Hours”) to lusty, Herb Ritts-lensed sandblasters (“Tourismo”), this is transporting work.
Mystery Cove isn’t a real place, but Feighan’s fondness for certain sounds (lounge, surf, slack-key guitar) sourced from a certain era (1948-1964, give or take) neatly conjures one anyway: beautiful people, endless beaches, fruit-based cocktails. Alas, like any vacation, Mystery Cove too often cuts things short just when they’re getting good. For all his curatorial prowess, Feighan tends to winnow down his Goodwill findings into 10-or-15 second chunks. There’s plenty of variation between the tracks, just not necessarily much within them; occasionally, a breakbeat is introduced, or a clip will run headlong into another, but the general rule seems to be “cut, spin, fade, repeat.” While that certainly keeps things moving, there’s rarely enough time within individual tracks to get acclimated to the scenery when Feighan’s anxiously clicking his way through the slideshow.
As an exercise in vibe-sustainment, Mystery Cove is a knockout. To that end, it’s probably the most cohesive Monster Rally record to date: a Hawaiian shirt with an AUX input. But that cohesion comes comes at the cost of a bit of adventure; whereas 2013’s more baldly experimental Return to Paradise found Feighan drawing slivers of samba and sweeping mid-century soundtrack work into his world party, Mystery Cove rarely makes it too far off the Big Island. Most of us will take our escapism where we can get it nowadays, and Feighan’s only too happy to provide. | 2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Gold Robot | November 30, 2016 | 6.5 | 5fffedcd-3e08-49fa-9577-8e20d9cf2eec | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Unlike almost anything that Tim Kinsella has been involved with, Owls' first LP in nearly 13 years, Two, doesn’t need a preemptive warning about its “challenging” nature. Kinsella's pretty much stopped caring about public perception, which has resulted in some of his most honest and direct music. | Unlike almost anything that Tim Kinsella has been involved with, Owls' first LP in nearly 13 years, Two, doesn’t need a preemptive warning about its “challenging” nature. Kinsella's pretty much stopped caring about public perception, which has resulted in some of his most honest and direct music. | Owls: Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19135-owls-two/ | Two | There's little chance that listeners unfamilar with Tim Kinsella's work would refer to the angular, incomprehensible melodies of Owls’ self-titled 2001 LP as “pop”, and it’s even less likely that his lyrics, which are cryptic, piecemeal, and pointed as a ransom note, would strike them as “emo”. Owls is Kinsella’s most accessible project, though, and it’s proven massively influential for countless self-identifying emo groups. Regardless, the funny thing about Two, the project's first release in nearly 13 years, is that as much as it appeases those who would call it “highly anticipated”, it might actually appeal more to newcomers.
Two does sound like a natural progression for the project—“Four Works of Art…” is almost raga-like in its call-and-response drone, not too dissimilar from Owls' opener “What Whorse You Wrote Id On”—but this is not a case of Owls picking up where they left off. Tim Kinsella actually hits notes (even the high ones) and, yes, the unwieldy song titles of Owls have been ditched as well. Mike Kinsella’s drumming is intuitive and fluid rather than fractured, which allows bassist Sam Zurick to actually groove rather than forcing himself within the gnarled arpeggios of guitarist Victor Villareal. A colleague mentioned Real Estate upon hearing “Ancient Stars Seed…”, and there are parts of Two that qualify as “indie rock”—the amiable amble of “The Lion…”, “I’m Surprised…” righting itself into a genuine chorus. Whereas Owls required the kind of sweep-picking mastery outlined in Guitar World columns, a beginner could play some of these songs on guitar.
Unlike Owls—or almost anything that Tim Kinsella has been involved with—Two doesn’t need a preemptive warning about its “challenging” nature, which might disappoint diehards who relish the challenge. Two lacks the explosive, uncanny chemistry of Owls—nothing matches the unbridled exuberance of “Everyone Is My Friend”, the fragile beauty of “Anyone Can Have A Good Time”, the frisky rhythmic interplay of “I Want the Quiet Moments of a Party Girl”, and there's not a lyric that hits as squarely as “It’s not impossible to think of you thinking of me.” Two sounds comparatively normalized, both due to Owls’ own aesthetic softening and the dozens of bands who have co-opted this sound wholesale. It doesn't clearly demonstrate why people follow Kinsella’s every whim, or why he spent nearly two decades being despised.
Ultimately, Two is a showcase for Kinsella as a frontman rather than a bandleader. He’s always been a tough sell, even from the days of the relatively revered-by-consensus Cap’n Jazz, but if you tried to engage with Joan of Arc album titles like In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust (let alone the contents therein) and immediately determined, “Yeah, this isn’t for me,” no one would blame you. But in the past few years, he’s found rejuvenation in old age similar to Mark Kozelek: simultaneously emboldened and embittered by a life in music and a resultant, unflappable fanbase, they’ve pretty much stopped caring about public perception, which has resulted in some of their most honest and direct music.
Two is filled with dozens of obtuse word jumbles that only make sense to Tim Kinsella and others that only make sense if you live in Chicago, but there's also very private thoughts that cloak their own profundity. Two can variously scan as a sly critique of internet culture, or aging within the indie rock community, or just aging in general as an artist of limited earning potential. On “Why Oh Why…”, Kinsella casually doles a withering dismissal of thinkpiece culture: “It’s cute how you assume your experience of the world is the world.” But as a cult artist, he understands the appeal of that cloistered mindset: “Haven’t you ever been new somewhere?/ Haven’t you been envious of membership’s endlessness?”
Two practically demands listening along with the lyrics sheet; this is high-concept, cerebral stuff that's difficult to wrench any kind of visceral thrill from. Opener “Four Works of Art…” is an ingeniously crafted song both musically and lyrically, but it lays out “A way of understanding this historical period” by letting you consider the commonalities between a car filled with trash, Christopher Kubasik, David Petraeus, and a CCR tape—and yet it all rattles around your head in a way that’s more unsettling than the prodding done by Owls’ progeny. Even though Owls serve as a touchstone in 2014, there's still little that quite sounds like Two. | 2014-03-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-03-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | March 25, 2014 | 7.3 | 600362fb-93d0-4b59-9a5d-820a7e945ee1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Young singer Antonia Cytrynowicz brings uncanny presence to the jazz composer and saxophonist’s pop-conscious mixture of improvisation and studio overdubs. | Young singer Antonia Cytrynowicz brings uncanny presence to the jazz composer and saxophonist’s pop-conscious mixture of improvisation and studio overdubs. | Sam Gendel / Antonia Cytrynowicz: LIVE A LITTLE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-antonia-cytrynowicz-live-a-little/ | LIVE A LITTLE | Sam Gendel is at the vanguard of what might be called the Adult Swim-ification of jazz. Like the late night cable block, which has its own formidable music history, the saxophonist’s compositions are both glitchy and luxurious, written for sporadic, needy attention spans raised on the internet. Almost ambient and always restless, Gendel’s music has roots in hip-hop, forefronting boom-bap beats more often than triplets or free-jazz clatter. His approach coolly rejects candlelit supper clubs and university classrooms; his videos are irreverent, funny, and disjunctive with the genre’s ordinary contexts, featuring the composer cruising in a lowrider or eating a banana. As one fawning YouTube user commented, “This is so avant-garde that it’s circled right around and become a sketch show skit.”
If his music sounds like a gimmick, Gendel’s latest record takes the impression even further. LIVE A LITTLE joins the California native with singer Antonia Cytrynowicz, the younger sister of Gendel’s partner Marcella. Cytrynowicz, who was 11 years old when the songs were recorded, improvises vocals while Gendel extemporizes on various instruments. She brings to the album the question mark of extreme youth. Listeners might ask: Is LIVE A LITTLE a pet project for a talented family? A career boost for a nascent artist who couldn’t possibly have found her voice yet? Gendel, though, has an ear for collaborators who challenge convention, and with feet in both the avant-garde and mainstream, he recognizes when the two sensibilities share utopian common ground—such as their relative willingness to overlook age and accomplishment as artistic prerequisites. He’s hardly the first jazz composer to collaborate with kin and kid: Ornette Coleman asked his son Denardo to join his trio when the precocious drummer was 10.
Unlike a drumset, a voice is transformed by a child’s range and timbre. Audiences have to believe a voice—or find its lack of believability compelling. Strangely, the context for Cytrynowicz’s capable soprano is right in front of us: Contemporary pop prizes producers who use Auto-Tune and other digital effects to make adult voices sound childlike. Listen to LIVE A LITTLE without knowing her age, and you’ll think Gendel has simply found a grown collaborator with a natural sense of melody, a modern musical sensibility, and a near-psychic ability to play off of his sax, keyboard, bass, and guitar lines. Cytrynowicz’s phrasing on “Clouds in Me” makes the album closer an earworm; her performances on “Lightly” and “Treasure That I Treasure” are full of feeling, a quality missing in Gendel’s vocals on his own album-length songwriter project, 2017’s 4444. LIVE A LITTLE’s quietly obvious, pop-conscious production fosters a necessary sense of distance.
Cytrynowicz’s improvisations cover lyrical territory commonly considered the province of those more mature in years. Most of her songs think through the appeal and pitfalls of intimacy: “When you come by me/I wonder if I should like it/Or if I should not like it/There is no telling.” Sometimes, she reflects on love’s physical dimensions: “When you touch me/When I like you/When you love saying/You are ready.” Cytrynowicz’s romantic pondering runs counter to a culture that often denies children an inner life apart from corporate-derived, gendered, and pre-censored imagery.
For Gendel, the album is a step into the previously uncharted terrain of cosmic cabaret. He allows himself a more relaxed relationship with the saxophone than he has before, at least on his own projects; rather than processing his tone into murmuring unrecognizability, Gendel erupts into giddy spurts of bebop on “Leap” and lead single “Wondering, Waiting.” The scope of his career is its own argument against snobbery, yet the odd couple at the core of LIVE A LITTLE seems like a particular rebuke of a society that condescends by categorization—whether prescribing culture to children, or predictable career paths to improvisatory musicians. LIVE A LITTLE flips gimmickry on its head. Charting out an oasis for themselves, Gendel and Cytrynowicz reclaim their creative instincts from a patronizing world. | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Psychic Hotline | May 19, 2022 | 7.3 | 6004c905-d6c8-425f-918e-98884d66e9c2 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Wilco's adventurous, self-produced eighth LP follows 2007's lighter Sky Blue Sky and 2009's self-conscious summary Wilco (The Album). The best thing about this one is the ease with which they've recaptured some of their old unpredictability. | Wilco's adventurous, self-produced eighth LP follows 2007's lighter Sky Blue Sky and 2009's self-conscious summary Wilco (The Album). The best thing about this one is the ease with which they've recaptured some of their old unpredictability. | Wilco: The Whole Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15856-wilco/ | The Whole Love | Maybe the most challenging thing about Wilco's sixth and seventh LPs-- into the formalist, featherweight Sky Blue Sky and retrospective-in-repose of Wilco (The Album)-- is just how unchallenging they were. These records seemed at times curiously unambitious, coming as they did from one of the most forward-thinking American bands of the last decade and change. Wilco made their early reputation on their creative restlessness, their ongoing identity crisis, but since 2004's A Ghost Is Born-- still, by some distance, their most difficult work-- their music's seemed something of a retreat from their early-decade boundary-shoving. Wilco's great strength lies not just in Jeff Tweedy's world-weary inscrutability, but the ways he and the band matched those stark, sometimes startling sentiments to expectation-defying deconstructions of Americana. The best thing about The Whole Love, Wilco's adventurous, elliptical eighth LP, is the ease with which they've recaptured some of that old unpredictability: From Being There through A Ghost Is Born, the band's best work has always perched itself upon the edge of traditionalism and experimentation, and The Whole Love is the first of their albums in years not to shy away from such risks.
As soon as opener "Art of Almost" whirrs to a start, you'll know something has changed. A glitchy motorik groove crashes into swarming strings before giving way to a slippery Tweedy melody; then it's elegant bass ooze and keyboard creep, over which Nels Cline drapes a searing kosmische capper. Fraught and foreboding, the song is easily the most daring thing they've put to tape since A Ghost Is Born, a interstellar spin on Wilco (The Album)'s highlight "Bull Black Nova". It seems at first as much statement as song: The self-produced Whole Love is the first LP the band laid down entirely in their practice loft, and the brash, voluminous "Almost" feels like six musicians bottling themselves off from the world and pushing each other towards their breaking points. Though nothing else on Whole Love quite matches the exploratory zeal of "Almost", The Whole Love's littered with enough alluringly off-balance arrangements and instrumental left-turns-- Cline's screaming guitar interludes on "Born Alone", the gurgling keyboard underneath the otherwise old-timey "Capitol City", countless rhythmic exchanges between drummer Glenn Kotche and bassist John Stirratt-- to lend the record much of its precipice-teetering feel.
When The Whole Love's not defying expectations outright, it's tweaking them gently. "Capitol City" comes across like Hoagy Carmichael for the "Boardwalk Empire" crowd, a moddish organ gives the bouncy "I Might" the spring in its step, and Tweedy's deft verse-ending vocal turnaround on highlight "Born Alone" is as sharp as it is sly. Much of The Whole Love's midsection draws from this lineup's folk-rock foundation-- splitting the difference between Being There's rockier material and the sunlit Sky Blue Sky stuff-- but these songs seems to bend and sway a little differently than they have in the past. The band, unchanged since the Sky Blue Sky days, seems increasingly comfortable as a musical unit; Cline in particular, whose hotshot contributions to Wilco's last two LPs sometimes felt like glorified session work, is both everywhere and nowhere, subtly coloring in the backdrops yet unafraid to step out into the spotlight. Kotche and Stirratt's aforementioned interplay does wonders even on the quiet numbers, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen mirrors Cline's dialed-down everpresence, and Tweedy himself is still underrated as both player and arranger. Dressed-up with detail as The Whole Love can be, they know just when to it pull back.
In pre-release interviews, Tweedy's suggested many of The Whole Love's lyrics were born of phonetic garble later wrestled into verse. That much would seem to be true of lines like "The Magna Carta's on a Slim Jim blood, brother" from "I Might", but when Tweedy sings, "I wish you were here," on "Capitol City"-- and then, seconds later, corrects himself with, "And yet I wish I were there with you"-- his meaning's certainly clear. This back-and-forth between alluring nonsense and open-hearted sentiment isn't new for Tweedy, but here the sharp split leaves The Whole Love feeling a bit muddled. He's a devoted romantic one moment, detached and random the next, with far fewer of the knife-twisting standout lines that characterized the band's earlier work on either end of the spectrum. Tweedy's crushed-charcoal voice is as rich and immediate as ever, and though he brings it on the big numbers like "Monday" descendent "Standing O", he occasionally loses a syllable or two to nonchalance during the quieter moments.
The Whole Love bows out with "One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)", a gently unfurling umpteen-minute heart-stopper loosely centered around a weekend with the Iowan author's paramour. The gorgeous, gripping "Sunday Morning" proves The Whole Love's second major triumph, epic in length but intimate in effect. Unlike "Art of Almost", "Sunday Morning" does nothing to push out the band's boundaries; it is, rather, a very good, very long Wilco song, one that could've appeared on nearly any of their post-A.M. albums. But its length, coupled with its minute-to-minute success rate, leaves it feeling at once impressively ambitious and completely natural, the very midpoint mined by Wilco's three or four agreed-upon masterworks.
It took Jeff Tweedy years to get comfortable with his place in Uncle Tupelo, and a few more to truly settle into Wilco's first act. After a few years of constant sonic flux and personnel shifts, Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (The Album) found the band feeling more resolved than ever, a consistent lineup settling into what seemed increasingly like a signature sound. But Wilco's always seemed their most creatively surefooted atop uneven ground. So the weird, winsome Whole Love is certainly Wilco's least consistent LP in a while, but inconsistency has its own rewards. At its best, The Whole Love finds Wilco casting aside the caution, reveling in their own contradictions. | 2011-09-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | September 26, 2011 | 6.9 | 60058f9e-ed0c-4cf3-a7e2-5bd45167a738 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
On her most accessible album yet, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith draws out the organic qualities of her Buchla 100 modular synth. But The Kid sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s cerebral delights. | On her most accessible album yet, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith draws out the organic qualities of her Buchla 100 modular synth. But The Kid sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s cerebral delights. | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-the-kid/ | The Kid | With each new album, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith folds more of her voice into the effervescent, kaleidoscopic electronic music she’s made since borrowing a neighbor’s Buchla 100 synthesizer as a recent Berklee graduate. The L.A.-based composer, who’s one of the few artists to rely on the rare modular system as her primary instrument, has released at least one LP a year since 2015, but her latest record The Kid stands apart as her most immediate and accessible yet. Though its narrative follows a human lifespan through four developmental stages, from newborn bewilderment to a calm acceptance of death, the album flows seamlessly from its initial burbles to its melancholy finish. There are no chapter markers, and if you’d rather ignore the concept behind the compositions, Smith makes it easy to enjoy the music without mapping it to a story. Then again, it’s a story that doesn’t take a lot of concentration: If you’ve been born, grown up, and encountered death, you already know it by heart.
While some contemporary synthesists (like SOPHIE or Arca) emphasize the artificiality of their medium, Smith prefers to draw out its organic qualities—the way sounds churned from electricity can sound like weather, or rustling leaves, or burrowing animals. On The Kid, she loops humanity into that ecosystem, entangling her vocals in fluttering arpeggios and corkscrewing bass. Though her voice drives most songs on The Kid, she never treats it as separate from the rest of her arsenal. It’s not an embellishment slapped on top of an otherwise complete instrumental; it’s wholly integrated into the complex webbing of each piece. There’s a stunning moment on “A Kid” when the beat falls away and Smith sings through filters at several simultaneous pitches. She sounds like an organ that’s learned to articulate syllables, both singer and instrument at the same time. Distorted, multi-tracked, shifted, and still addictively tuneful, Smith’s voice humanizes the work without breaking the spell she casts while commanding her machines.
That the human body is inextricable from the rest of the world seems to be the point. While writing the album, Smith took inspiration from the work of British philosopher Alan Watts, whose lectures tend to emphasize the interconnectedness of all life. People might be isolated sensorily, but all of us come from, and return to, the earth. Smith seizes upon this concept with joy. Her compositions, some of which incorporate orchestral instruments played by the Stargaze collective, overflow with texture and detail. Compared to her more reserved prior albums, 2015’s Euclid and 2016’s EARS, The Kid at times plays almost like Grimes’ alien electro-pop or Caribou’s house-indebted beats. There’s stomp and bite to tracks like “To Follow & Lead” that Smith has never quite indulged before. Without sacrificing her ear for detail, she’s engineered an album that sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s continued cerebral delights.
Even as The Kid rolls to a stop on an explicitly mournful note, Smith extracts as much joy as possible from the sadness. “To Feel Your Best” confronts the thought that everyone you’ll ever love will die with the same verve as the Flaming Lips on “Do You Realize??” Against the chirps of her synthesizers, Smith sings, “I’m gonna wake up one day and you won’t be there/’Cause I care that’s why I stare… I’m gonna miss miss miss will miss your face.” It’s a sobering thought, to memorize the contours of a loved one’s face because you’re pretty sure you’ll outlive them, but Smith treats it gently. There is beauty in that impulse, as there’s beauty in all the human impulses The Kid excavates—and celebrates—so gracefully. | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Western Vinyl | October 6, 2017 | 8.1 | 6008cd23-5f19-4faa-b843-3af7b21892b0 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The Pittsburgh rock quartet’s newly reissued debut is a relentless, intentionally chaotic document of twentysomething existential dread. | The Pittsburgh rock quartet’s newly reissued debut is a relentless, intentionally chaotic document of twentysomething existential dread. | Feeble Little Horse: Hayday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/feeble-little-horse-hayday/ | Hayday | If “I Wanna Be Your Dog” encapsulated Iggy Pop’s fleeting, acquiescent lust, then singer-bassist Lydia Slocum and guitarist-producer Sebastian Kinsler take the trope of romantic possession to full surrender. On “Dog Song (Wet Jeans),” originally released in April 2021, the future Feeble Little Horse bandmates admit defeat in an imbalanced relationship: “I get sick with every touch/Spill it out, I’ll lick it up/I just let you piss on me/Lifted your leg, I was your tree,” Slocum murmurs over a tinny beat and twisted guitar riffs. It’s messy, unexpected, and hypnotic—an early indicator of the group’s bizarre noise-pop appeal, revisited as a bonus track on Saddle Creek’s new reissue of the Pittsburgh quartet’s debut, Hayday.
Feeble Little Horse first released Hayday in October 2021, just months after the current iteration of the band materialized. After Kinsler, guitarist Ryan Walchonski, and drummer Jake Kelley invited Slocum to add vocals to their gnarled mixes, an album swiftly took shape, galvanized by Slocum’s frustration with a recent breakup. Within 24 hours of their first proper writing session, they’d already outlined nearly half of the record. Devised from the band members’ shared love of Alex G, dream-pop experimentalists Sweet Trip, and loud as hell local guitar bands, Hayday is a relentless, intentionally chaotic document of twentysomething existential dread.
One of the first songs Feeble Little Horse wrote together was the album’s centerpiece, “Chores,” where Slocum bemoans a partner’s domestic shortcomings by way of rousing, discordant riffs. “Don’t you know manners, big boy?” she asks with a jeering lilt, dissing his fashion sense and his habit of looting her leftovers. While “Dog Song” illustrated Slocum’s self-effacing side, moments like “Chores”—delivered deadpan, with a snarky laugh—set her back up on two feet.
The peculiarities of Feeble Little Horse’s music tend to draw focus, but their lyrics are often just as perturbing and wry: On “Kennedy,” they channel the song’s grisly namesake curse as Slocum recounts a picnic ravaged by ants and envisions peeling off her skin layer by layer. Walchonski and Kinsler’s distorted chords lend a sense of unease to “Drama Queen,” where Slocum flirts with the idea of settling a dispute with a brawl: “Take a little hit, it’s alright/We could use a heavy fist fight,” she sings, as if through a villainous grin. Some of her most vivid imagery comes packaged in the deceptively saccharine melody of “Termites,” where she likens heartbreak to watching the world rot. Insects are swarming across her body, she can hardly eat without vomiting, and—worst of all—words of affirmation have lost their meaning: “I suck on old compliments to see if there’s still a taste/‘You could have anyone’—you were lying to my face!”
Despite all Hayday’s oddities, Feeble Little Horse understand their limits. “The goal is always to make these songs as weird as we can without destroying what makes them cool,” Kinsler has said, and the band roots that balance in melodic pop structures and an unflinchingly sardonic perspective. On the sweeping “Tricks,” Slocum evokes the anxiety of navigating a pool party and arrives at a hopeful personal revelation: “You are too cool to take a swim/But I look so dumb I already jumped in,” she coos. It’s not self-criticism—it’s that she finally feels secure enough to take the plunge. | 2022-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek / Unstable | November 16, 2022 | 7.4 | 60128f2a-9e19-4d6f-8ce9-c328ba8039cf | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The Australian multi-instrumentalist pushes his wispy electroacoustic music into warmer, more melodic territory. | The Australian multi-instrumentalist pushes his wispy electroacoustic music into warmer, more melodic territory. | Oren Ambarchi: Simian Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oren-ambarchi-simian-angel/ | Simian Angel | The Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi has made the single LP side his canvas. His wispy electroacoustic pieces tend to work best at 15 to 20 minutes a pop—compact enough to retain their focus, yet roomy enough to reward immersion. Simian Angel demonstrates Ambarchi’s mastery of the form across a pair of aqueous ambient explorations shot through with loosely tangled melodic lines.
Simian Angel has the free-associative drift of his loosest improv pieces and a sublimated sense of groove. It opens tentatively, with a watery, synth-like tone drizzled over Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista’s patient, pitter-pat conga slaps. Two minutes pass like this, then four; in the background, counterpoint synth pads glisten like frost on a field. Whatever instrument Ambarchi is playing—on the sleeve, he is credited simply with “guitars & whatnot”—his melodic figures have a searching quality, like water trickling downhill. Gradually, his tone fattens, and as Baptista trades the congas for gentle shaker rhythms, the spectrum fills with a thrumming, organ-like buzz. It ends as gradually as it began, settling into the root note like an old house cooling after a hot summer’s day.
On the B-side, the title track offers a more vigorous take on the same basic material. It opens with a twangy, percussive pattern played on the berimbau—an acoustic string instrument capable of psychedelic pitch-shifting and tremolo effects—that gives the track a forceful push. That momentum carries “Simian Angel” across its 20-minute runtime, even though Baptista sits out for long stretches. Here, Ambarchi uses his guitar first to conjure those organ-like tones (an effect he achieves by running his instrument through a Leslie speaker, whose tremolo is closely associated with the sound of the Hammond organ) and then a bright, crisp facsimile of acoustic piano. Both tracks are powered by melodic instincts that have rarely played such a dominant role in Ambarchi’s music. Over the years, he’s shown us plenty of sides to his playing—brainy, brawny, barely there—but on Simian Angel, we get a glimpse of something new: something sensitive, probing, and even whimsical.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | July 8, 2019 | 7.5 | 6018ce0d-7a27-4d95-a48c-dc931c1d05cf | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Working from an old, dog-eared indie rock blueprint, this Melbourne trio delight in redrafting the lines. The French Press shines just as bright as their last EP, but the songs cast darker shadows. | Working from an old, dog-eared indie rock blueprint, this Melbourne trio delight in redrafting the lines. The French Press shines just as bright as their last EP, but the songs cast darker shadows. | Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: The French Press | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22918-rolling-blackouts-coastal-fever-the-french-press/ | The French Press | With their debut 2015 EP, Talk Tight, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever proved to be one of those special bands that arrives seemingly out of nowhere with a fully realized aesthetic. No tentative baby steps or half-formed experiments for this lot; Talk Tight exuded confidence and purpose, yielding five propulsive, jangly pop gems that felt instantly familiar. And its appeal was cross-generational. If you were raised on ’80s college rock, you could revel in nostalgic nods to the Feelies, the Clean, the Go-Betweens, and countless other Velvets revisionists. Younger fans could hear the sort of band the Strokes might have turned into had they aged more gracefully, or imagine what Real Estate might sound like after downing a case of Red Bull.
But while working from an old, dog-eared indie rock blueprint, the Melbourne band take great delight in redrafting the lines. With three distinctive singer-guitarists—Tom Russo, Fran Keaney, and Joe White—at the helm, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever don’t operate so much like a traditional rock band as an improv theater troupe riffing on a pre-established theme. The locomotive rhythm may be locked in, but each member is free to ride it wherever they please. A Rolling Blackouts song rarely retraces its steps, often eschewing standard verse/chorus/verse structure for a parade of changing melodic motifs that are passed around the singers like hot potatoes. In the case of Talk Tight highlights like “Clean Slate,” that meant you essentially got three great songs for the price of one.
It’s a trick that (the now abbreviated) Rolling Blackouts C.F. still pull off with great aplomb on follow-up EP The French Press. Its six songs shine just as bright as those on Talk Tight, but they cast longer, darker shadows. You can sense the subtle change in temperament within the first 30 seconds of “French Press,” where the band work a taut motorik build reminiscent of Broken Social Scene’s anxious anthem “Cause = Time.” Taking full advantage of their Forster/McLennan-style dynamic, Russo and Keaney play the roles of brothers—one traveling abroad, the other stuck at a miserable desk job—as they try to converse over a patchy Skype connection. But as the song’s incessant forward motion intensifies, the technological divide comes to symbolize the emotional one at the core of their relationship: “Brother don’t you know,” Russo sings, “that jealousy’s a curse, and what’s worse is the silence/Strange… you’re moving out of range.”
“French Press” sets the tone for a record filled with seemingly innocuous scenes that suddenly turn tense. Even the songs that more readily evoke Talk Tight’s carefree kicks—“Julie’s Place,” “Colours Run”—bound about at a more furious clip, powered by blurry-handed acoustic/electric strums liable to leave blood on the pick-ups. Just as Rolling Blackouts’ music provides an instant sense of comfort through its ’80s indie-pop signifiers, lyrically, they make you feel right at home by dropping you in the middle of intimate scenes populated by first-name-basis characters. But that also means we’re sometimes privy to conversations we’re not supposed to hear. Atop the twitchy twang of “Sick Bug,” White’s yearning reminiscence of an old flame (“I close my eyes to take you back/She touched my leg”) triggers a frantic torrent of “I want you! I want you! I want you! I want you!,” crystallizing that moment when the decorum of romance gets steamrolled by the indignities of desire.
Even as The French Press mellows out, it never really settles. The casual lope of “Dig Up” puts a sunny, soft-focus filter on a portrait of a relationship’s painfully slow demise (“The walls are closing in all around us/I feel the moment’s passing us by”). And the swooning, harmony-rich chorus of “Fountain of Good Fortune” offers a precious taste of honey to chase Russo’s bitter-pill critique of organized religion: “I’ve been washed, I’ve been anointed/I’ve eaten the body of the Lord/It’s from the fountain of good fortune/Brings dirty, cloudy water/That pollutes the mind of anyone around.” Like Talk Tight, The French Press is brimming with vim, vigor, and open-road abandon. But what makes it an even more compelling listen is that, this time, we get a clearer glimpse in the rear-view mirror of the stressors they’re trying to escape. | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 10, 2017 | 8.1 | 602fb1c3-d85c-4c3f-8614-2ffc6aa58b23 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On its first soundtrack in seven years, the Texas band mirrors the subtle landscape and beauty of the national park that the namesake documentary captures. | On its first soundtrack in seven years, the Texas band mirrors the subtle landscape and beauty of the national park that the namesake documentary captures. | Explosions in the Sky: Big Bend (An Original Soundtrack for Public Television) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/explosions-in-the-sky-big-bend-an-original-soundtrack-for-public-television/ | Big Bend (An Original Soundtrack for Public Television) | Sorry, but everything isn’t actually bigger in Texas. Take the mountains: The state’s gnarled ranges, wrought by volcanoes and warped by erosive epochs, are just half the height of the country’s great mountains, minor summits that seem like sentries for the West’s true marvels. They are eccentric and beautiful, though, especially the Chisos, nestled against the contested crook of Texas’ southern border inside Big Bend National Park. Serrated and strange like the mighty Cascades, intricately colored like castoffs of the Colorado Plateau, the Chisos are an amalgamation of American geologic splendor, built on the diminished scale of a child’s model sports car. They don’t wow; they mesmerize.
The Chisos must have made an apt prompt for Big Bend, the first soundtrack from Texas’ maestros of epiphanic atmospherics, Explosions in the Sky, in seven years. Big Bend grew out of the band’s work on the score for a splendid Nature documentary about the park, which premiered earlier this year. “Chisos,” its prelude, begins as a slow country shuffle, twilit guitars framed by a keyboard melody that cannot choose between a smile and a sulk. Likewise, just when the piece begins to shudder in anticipation of the kind of climax that made Explosions famous, the song begins to disintegrate, lazily vanishing into an endless sunset. Like the Texas peaks themselves, the moment—and the best of Big Bend at large—forgoes big drama in favor of something subtly spellbinding.
Big Bend itself is a “vibe park,” a place more striking on the whole than any of its specific highlights—there is no Half Dome, Grand Teton, or Grand Canyon. The harsh Chihuahuan Desert surrounds lush mountain meadows, while the Rio Grande flows just miles from incredibly arid expanses. Webbed together by a staggering array of wildlife, Big Bend is a gestalt of actual nature. Big Bend, the album, threads together 20 instrumental miniatures across an hour. Each frames an animal or an idea from the documentary, like bats that hunt on the ground or reptiles that appear to disappear into the desert. The pieces form their own subtle ecosystem, each informing the other rather than overriding.
There are, of course, moments when Explosions in the Sky do what you would expect—shape a sky-wide crescendo of glowing electric guitars, the rhythm section reinforcing an endlessly romantic frisson. “Sunrise” conjures an imagined Tim Riggins montage, where the Friday Night Lights star wakes up alone and hungover just in time to make a game-saving play. The piano of “Nightfall” first rises like a Nils Frahm fantasy. Marching drums and crisscrossing keyboard-and-guitar drones soon summon a bygone moment when the likes of Explosions, Sigur Rós, and M83 made dewy-eyed music that suggested everything was still possible.
But the bulk of these pieces explore less familiar terrain. “Autumn” unfurls like a brief Tangerine Dream homage, with distended synthesizer tones decorated by a neon guitar filigree. The sequential “Climbing Bear” and “Woodpecker”—two animals whose unexpected squabble over acorns makes the entire documentary worthwhile—convey both mischief and wonder with gentle acoustic guitars and restrained drums. Loping loops of pizzicato violin and pencil-thin guitar give “Swimming” a sense of childlike joy. It is perfect for the documentary’s footage of beavers cavorting in the Rio Grande; without the film, it is perfect for a brief afternoon reverie, a fleetingly rare moment of mental free play.
Explosions in the Sky began their work on Big Bend in the final half of the Trump presidency, as tension about inhumane policies at the Southern border escalated. They are releasing it now, amid another border crisis under yet another administration. The band hints at this troubled story of colonialism during “Human History,” the album’s finale and most clearly distressed six minutes. The music wallows, its circular piano and skittering electronics vying for vanishing air. That’s as close as they come to a statement—understandably, perhaps, given the nature of the Nature commission.
Perhaps now—that is, on an album about a natural wonder that has sometimes prompted humanitarian crises—seems like the moment for Explosions to be more direct, to reenlist the political undercurrents of their earliest work. But Big Bend honors the things we haven’t ruined in spite of our efforts, celebrating a wilderness our borders have yet to break. After nearly a quarter century, Explosions in the Sky have learned to leave us with the implication, not the epiphany itself.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | October 25, 2021 | 7.4 | 6033f1b6-7db0-448f-996d-7754865628d3 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Chicago punk trio disbanded in 2016, but their final album serves up the chaotic blend of post-hardcore, noise rock, and Midwest emo that made them beloved. | The Chicago punk trio disbanded in 2016, but their final album serves up the chaotic blend of post-hardcore, noise rock, and Midwest emo that made them beloved. | Yeesh: Saw You Up There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeesh-saw-you-up-there/ | Saw You Up There | The punk rock trio Yeesh formed at Bennington College in 2010, but they quickly relocated to Chicago and became a favorite in the city’s basement scene. Where other bands recreated the tried-and-true formula of sloppy yells and melodic riffs, Yeesh brought shape-shifting post-hardcore and a studio-quality live sound. They released a boisterous debut in 2015, swiftly signed to Tiny Engines, and dropped their gnarled sophomore album Confirmation Bias in 2016 before calling it quits — though not without the promise of a posthumous full-length.
Two years later, that album has finally arrived. Saw You Up There is a fitting farewell for Yeesh, emphasizing the chaotic blend of post-hardcore, noise rock, and Midwest emo that made them such a beloved local act. Their arrangements are consistently surprising—singer-guitarist Alex Doyle and bassist Greg Obis often swap instrument registers so that the guitar chugs through low chords while the bass tackles the higher range. On “The Crossing,” they play off one another, pausing a wave of noise to break into an impromptu frenzy of math rock. Drummer Peter Reale frequently changes lanes, shifting from a barreling drum pattern to cymbal showers on “Escape Plan” or hitting every sixteenth note on “Shagohad” without crowding the field. On paper, Yeesh may sound like another Dischord-obsessed guitar band, but in execution they channel the personality of satisfyingly aberrant acts Unwound and The Dismemberment Plan. Saw You Up There lets Yeesh flaunt what makes them special: subtly complicated bridges, melodic basslines dipped in grunge, and two-guitar refrains played on one.
It’s tempting to award Obis extra credit for Yeesh’s slick balance of levels and EQ. As he did on the band’s early releases, Obis doubles as a mixer, fine-tuning the album’s hairpin turns. (At his day job, he’s an audio engineer at Chicago Mastering Service, which is co-run by Shellac bassist Bob Weston.) He draws out Yeesh’s slyest moments, like the amplified distance between Doyle’s howls and the microphone on “Concave,” or the warp of a guitar string bend on “Collective Sin.”
Looking back, it’s strange Yeesh never gained crossover word-of-mouth fame the way PUP or Pile have. They embody the perpetual tragedy of DIY scenes in that way: professional-level bands whose sound is far bigger than the 100-cap spaces they’re stuck playing. Saw You Up There is a steadfast parting gift that asks what Yeesh could’ve been in a few years. On emotional closer “Victory Lap,” an ode to the inevitable changing of the guard in music scenes, Doyle is stuck wondering the same thing: “The race is run, but you won’t get off the track/From the top, boys, let’s do this again.” | 2019-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 4, 2019 | 7.3 | 6035dd59-7c3d-41da-b765-259a5c2b8a07 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Evolving from the lo-fi sound of his home recordings, the New York singer-songwriter significantly steps up his studio chops, but his songs’ emotional register often remains frustratingly oblique. | Evolving from the lo-fi sound of his home recordings, the New York singer-songwriter significantly steps up his studio chops, but his songs’ emotional register often remains frustratingly oblique. | Sean Henry: Fink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sean-henry-fink/ | Fink | To call your record Fink is a risky proposition. Is it a wry joke? A self-own? In the case of the debut studio album from the lo-fi artist Sean Henry, the loaded title feels out of step with the record itself, which too often shies away from leaving much of an impression at all.
Given the poignant origins of Fink’s title—his father, now deceased, spray-painted the word in their basement where the two would stare at it and laugh, a foreboding memory turned familial relic—you might expect the album to feel similarly charged, either through detailed storytelling or palpable emotion. After all, on Henry’s 2015 demo tape, It’s All About Me, he spouted 16 songs’ worth of intimate musings on friendship, love, and life as if he had anecdotes to spare. According to Henry, the very word “fink,” which felt shocking and powerful in childhood, has begun to seem strangely relatable as he has entered adulthood. Yet these songs come up short of expanding upon that sentiment, and it’s difficult to tell if that’s because Henry’s lyrics cut off before exploring his stories deeper or because his vocal delivery is equal parts detached and campy, a sneaky way of pointing out emotions instead of feeling them.
Fink is a hit-or-miss collection of songs focused largely on anxiety. Henry’s style has been termed “soft grunge”—heavy guitar pop with a sad undertone, like if Heatmiser covered DSU, that’s fleshed out with a backing band he assembled in New York. His brand of lyricism concentrates on simplistic imagery and hyper-repetitive lines, which works for a song like “Party Fiend,” where his nagging pleas reveal a weary dejection. But the brunt of the album fixates on forced imagery (“Gum in Hair”) and middle-school existentialism (“Virgo,” “Are We Alive?”). Even when handling a subject like depression, on “Hard Down,” Henry reaches for surface-level descriptors (“Hard down/I want no one around/When I’m down, I’m down”). It’s possible he purposefully uses flat language to mirror depression’s crippling effects, but his yappy singing has the effect of both underselling the emotion and slighting the subject matter. The album’s touchstone influences—Elliott Smith, Sparklehorse, (Sandy) Alex G—root their songs in deceptively intricate lyrics to tackle subjects like the cyclical pain of self-sabotage or the heartbreak of addiction. Henry never quite accomplishes that on Fink, despite addressing similarly personal topics.
What Fink lacks in lyrical depth and delivery, Henry compensates for with studio savvy. His knack for affecting chords and catchy melodies, present even in his early material as Boy Crush, blossoms here with pedal-laden electric guitars and a heaviness his lo-fi home recordings didn’t capture. Opener “Imperfection” pairs an unassuming acoustic guitar part with cushy synth, a complement to the droning guitars and percussive bounciness of “Those Imaginary.” “Going Backwards Again,” despite its limited lyrics, gets a jolt of life from reversed guitars in the style of the Beatles’ Revolver, the type of musical detail that moves you the way a profound statement might. The biggest-sounding track on the record, “The Ants,” is a perfect combination of Henry’s skills. Sinister electric guitars build towards a taunting call-and-response bridge where an angry session squashing ants reaches a point of mania, his short phrasing playing up the emotion.
While the production on songs like these elevates what Sean Henry can do instrumentally, it simultaneously widens the gap between that and his lyric-writing skills. His messages feel muffled, as though he had chosen a few journal entry phrases without doing the work to explain their importance, either through more elaborate lyrics or more expressive vocal delivery. That lack of intricacy in Fink is odd, given the wide range of subject matter he covered in It’s All About Me. If nothing else, Fink showcases Henry’s newfound strength writing grittier music, even if his words get lost in the shadows of his guitar. | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | July 16, 2018 | 5.7 | 60371435-9074-4a0d-bc85-82ce0df6f5cf | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a landmark of mainstream ’70s soft-rock, the peak of Linda Ronstadt’s power as a singer nonpareil. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a landmark of mainstream ’70s soft-rock, the peak of Linda Ronstadt’s power as a singer nonpareil. | Linda Ronstadt: Heart Like a Wheel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/linda-ronstadt-heart-like-a-wheel/ | Heart Like a Wheel | As their taxi rode uptown in the Manhattan predawn, the singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker leaned over to Linda Ronstadt and told her about a song. This should not have been a memorable occurrence; among their early-’70s country-rock circle of musicians and writers, songs were one of the only things worth talking about—creating them, selling them, matching them to the right singer.
But something about a lyric struck Ronstadt. Writing in her memoir, Simple Dreams, more than 40 years later, she recalls the memory like it just happened: “Jerry Jeff’s face was barely visible in the gray light… He bent his head low, closed his eyes, and softly sang for me all he could remember of the song.”
By this point, Ronstadt had already recorded a handful of albums with her original mid-’60s folk trio the Stone Poneys and as a solo artist. She’d covered old standards and worked with contemporaries like Michael Nesmith, who had written her biggest hit to date, “Different Drum.” Still barely in her mid-20s, Ronstadt had already recorded dozens of other people’s songs, the vast majority of them by men. Perhaps that’s why the opening verse of Anna McGarrigle’s unrecorded ballad “Heart Like a Wheel” hit her like it did:
Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it you can’t mend it
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
Just a couple basic metaphors, but look how they build. A bent wheel becomes a maritime catastrophe, and a vague “some say” becomes a tragic “my love… my heart.” In four short lines with barely any words longer than one syllable, we see a person try to connect their personal pain to a universal experience, only to acknowledge that real-life heartbreak is more awful than any folksy adage can convey. “I felt like a bomb had exploded in my head,” Ronstadt writes. “It rearranged my entire musical landscape.”
She carried “Heart Like a Wheel” around for years, obtaining a reel-to-reel copy of McGarrigle’s demo and begging various managers and producers to allow her to record it. On an endless series of tours and jam sessions, in the studio recording background vocals for Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man,” in front of The Johnny Cash Show’s cameras, Ronstadt grew into a respected, if commercially undistinguished, representative of the new California sound. But she kept this one spare tune close, envisioning it as a string-laden ballad. Eventually, she begged Capitol to let her leave so she could join Asylum, a more artist-focused label recently founded by another friend, David Geffen. They agreed, but asked for one more album.
Ronstadt entered the Sound Factory in Hollywood to record her final Capitol sessions in the spring of 1974. Since Geffen was now invested in her success, she effectively had two labels working to make her new record a hit. Thanks to constant touring and collaborations with seemingly every rock musician under 30 at the time, she had acquired mesmerizing control of a voice that was growing more powerful and evocative all the time. With Ronstadt’s help, producer Peter Asher assembled an unbelievable cast of studio ringers, including members of the Eagles, who started as Ronstadt’s touring band just a few years earlier; Andrew Gold, her ace guitar player and multi-instrumentalist; and background singers including Cissy Houston, Clydie King, and Emmylou Harris. Most importantly, she finally had the clout and support to record “Heart Like a Wheel,” which Asher layered in strings just as she imagined.
Heart Like a Wheel, as the record was inevitably titled, represented a huge creative leap for Ronstadt in every conceivable way. The title track was the least country- or even contemporary-sounding song she’d ever made, while her cover of the Everly Brothers’ immortal “When Will I Be Loved,” was the hardest she’d ever rocked. She sang Hank Williams with her friend Emmylou, then turned two songs by other friends into career-defining statements: her version of J.D. Souther’s “Faithless Love” drifts on banjo and soft percussion that underline its aching, rueful lyrics, while she completely transforms Lowell George’s druggy-trucker paean “Willin’” into a swaying power ballad.
The latter song is possibly the greatest example of Ronstadt’s artistic talent in those halcyon days. The Little Feat version of “Willin’” sounds like a sloppy celebration, but Ronstadt found the yearning in it, the loneliness of a job built on back roads and amphetamines. For George’s great chorus, “If you give me weed, whites, and wine/And you show me a sign/I’ll be willin’ to be movin’,” she slows each syllable down and enlists Gold and Herb Peterson for stunning three-part harmonies that only became longer and more affecting in concert. “Willin’,” with its romantic visions of “Dallas Alice” and its pro-drug message, was the farthest that straightlaced Ronstadt ever drifted from her actual emotional life. And yet she found its heart, and sang it with as much personal conviction as she sang McGarrigle’s wounded hymn.
Heart Like a Wheel sounds—and looks—like it was made to turn Ronstadt into a superstar. More than anything, it resembles the wildly popular records that Richard Perry was producing at the time for Harry Nilsson, Barbara Streisand, and Ringo Starr: a powerhouse voice backed by top-flight studio musicians and a tracklist that drew from 1950s classics and young songwriters alike. It cannily walks the listener through all aspects of Ronstadt’s vocal talent, from the bluesy opener “You’re No Good” to her plaintive voicing on the ballads and her arena-trained capacity for belting on “When Will I Be Loved.” Even the record design seemed like a fresh start: on the cover, her face is afloat in a sea of black and her name is spelled out in sleek, art deco lettering. Especially compared to the country-gal imagery of her earlier work, this is clearly Ronstadt Mach II.
The reinvention worked. Heart Like a Wheel spent nearly a year on the Billboard album charts including a week at No. 1. “You’re No Good” became a No. 1 single while “When Will I Be Loved” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)” reached the Top 10 as well. The album was nominated for two 1976 Grammys including Record of the Year. Decades later, this kind of popular domination seems almost unbelievable, since the record feels a little slight. It flies by in less than 32 minutes, and despite all the consummate talent involved, no one’s contributions stand out. The songs exist purely to serve that soaring alto, and a number of them would be improved on the road. On Live in Hollywood, recorded in 1980 but only released this spring, Ronstadt sings three Heart Like a Wheel tracks and the difference is striking. The band genuinely jams on “You’re No Good,” even including a bass solo, and the tempos of “Faithless Love” and “Willin’” are slowed just enough for Ronstadt to wring maximum emotion from each line.
Nevertheless, Heart Like a Wheel made Live in Hollywood possible. In the second half of the ’70s, Linda Ronstadt became more than just a pop star. She sold-out arenas and brought mainstream attention to cult songwriters like Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and Time, and was deemed the Queen of Rock. There had never been a female artist like her in American history, and few male rock acts were so fluent in classic songs and new ones alike, so capable and respected as a bandleader, or possessed of such a stunning, technically masterful voice.
No, Ronstadt never played an instrument in concert or on record. She never wrote her own songs, either. She had one power, but it was a superpower. Viewed from one angle, Linda Ronstadt’s career is the story of a woman gradually recognizing the power of her own voice. She had the tone early, but you can hear her control improve in each successive album. Her breaths sound more natural, her vibrato becomes more pronounced. By Heart Like a Wheel, she’d mastered it. In the ensuing years she was equally at home singing Pirates of Penzance on Broadway, making albums with big-band legend Nelson Riddle or the top Mariachi bands in Mexico, and harmonizing with Dolly Parton, Aaron Neville, or Kermit the Frog. She seemed to grasp that her voice was some supernatural gift that she had a responsibility to cultivate and share, and every time she went looking for bigger audiences, she found them eager to listen.
So what made her feel so connected to Anna McGarrigle’s little poem of lost love? As a young woman fighting her way out of a male-dominated music scene, she must have related to the deep ungendered sorrow in the song’s lyrics, but she must also have been looking for a tune that could be fully hers. She needed a lyric that she could feel more deeply than anyone else, and a melody she could bless with her unwavering tone. There was a world of music in her mind, and this one whispered verse turned out to be the key that opened it. | 2019-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 18, 2019 | 8.5 | 603bf907-2bea-45d7-b39e-cab9e6e8995d | John Lingan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-lingan/ | |
On two reissued albums and a sprawling collection of arguably finished songs, this Georgia band did everything you want great indie rock to do. Now, everyone has a chance to hear it. | On two reissued albums and a sprawling collection of arguably finished songs, this Georgia band did everything you want great indie rock to do. Now, everyone has a chance to hear it. | The Glands: I Can See My House From Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-glands-i-can-see-my-house-from-here/ | I Can See My House From Here | Drive 100 miles outside Clarke County, Georgia, and any Glands fans you’re likely to locate are either former Georgia Bulldogs, diehard record dweebs, or some confounding anomaly. But the closer you find yourself to Jittery Joe’s or the Georgia Theatre, institutions of Athens’ iconic indie rock stature, the more likely you are to hear something like this: the Glands’ 2000 self-titled second LP—not Reckoning, Wild Planet, Gyrate, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Black Foliage, or any of the college town’s other landmarks—is the finest thing ever committed to tape in or around The Classic City.
Athens isn’t known for keeping sounds to itself. From R.E.M. to Elephant 6, from the B-52’s to the Drive-by Truckers, no other place of its size has reliably exported so many great bands in the last 40 years. The reason why the Glands were never afforded their proper due is, even for easygoing Athenians, still something of a sticking point. But the new box set I Can See My House From Here—a lovingly compiled, handsomely presented collection of the Glands’ 1996 debut, Double Thriller; an expanded edition of 2000’s the Glands; and Double Coda, a 23-song collection of unreleased material—makes an awfully convincing case that the Glands’ warm, weird, rangy music deserves to be heard far beyond northeast Georgia.
For years, leader and singer Ross Shapiro ran Gyro Wrap, a downtown eatery that doubled as a reliable source of income and hangouts for aspiring musicians; later, he owned the now-shuttered Athens outpost of regional record store chain, Schoolkids. Shapiro was a consummate record nut and a Deadhead of some distinction. (He and eventual Widespread Panic bassist Dave Schools used to see the Dead together in the 1980s.) He was something of a loner, too; sure, everybody knew or knew of Ross, but very few knew Ross. Everybody in Athens seemed to know the Glands; upon the release of their self-titled LP in 2000, as Trucker Patterson Hood remembers in the set’s liner notes, it played from every store’s stereo system and out of every open window, the strains of “Livin’ Was Easy” carrying you down Broad Street and all the way home.
The Glands have their origins in the wee hours, as Shapiro and company—drummer Joe Rowe, bassist Derek Almstead, and just about anyone else still standing—would close down the bars, slip back to Ross’ place or a tiny downtown studio, drink coffee, and jam until they couldn’t see straight. These booze-and-caffeine-assisted sessions seemed, even to those involved, like little more than late-night fun, a way to pass time before passing out. “I just assumed it was going to be some kind of weird, heavy townie music,” producer David Barbe remembers thinking before Shapiro played him a few tracks from what would become Double Thriller, the Glands’ debut. But Shapiro had somehow wrestled those bleary sessions into full-fledged songs—strange, scuffed-up songs, but songs nevertheless, one minor miracle after another.
The self-assured, color-saturated, detour-ridden Double Thriller is a remarkable debut. Shapiro brings just about everything to the table throughout Double Thriller, a Spirograph swirl of regal Kinks-worthy melody, Pixies-style squawk, hushed balladry, and McCartney-inspired bounce. One song rarely sounds like the one before it. Neither does Shapiro, as his laconic Tom Petty drawl and pinched Ray Davies upper register share space with a louche Reed-meets-Bowie whisper and a half-scatted funk mumble.
This music is omnivorous almost to the point of overextension, and there’s always something just a little off in every Glands song, glotted with distortion or buried in the muck. No matter which version of Shapiro’s stepping to the mic, though, or how much he bends off-kilter arrangements around these tunes, what’s most striking about Double Thriller even 20 years later is how well it all hangs together. With hooks this sharp, everything else can get a bit slippery.
Shapiro and company self-released Double Thriller on their own in 1996, with another version (sporting a different tracklist and a ghastly cover) arriving on Bar/None in 1998. The follow-up came together in much the same fashion as Double Thriller, with an uptick in confidence inspired in part by the band’s live debut. But where Double Thriller is a very good record, the Glands is miles beyond it and most everything else. Multivalent, charmingly homespun, and endlessly catchy, the Glands’ self-titled LP is a fractured pop dynamo, one sun-dappled aw-shucks anthem after another, strung together with yarn and masking tape.
All the things you want an indie rock record to do, the Glands does almost as a matter of course. It’s slack without being sloppy, catchy without being cloying, clever without being, well, “clever.” Opener “Livin’ Was Easy”—as close to a mission statement as the nonchalant Glands would ever allow—is built around a chorus so good you can’t believe somebody else didn’t come up with it first. Fragmentary ideas rub up against shoulda-been hits. Fidelities intersect. Good hooks get shoved aside by even better ones.
It’s a record that never seems to wear out its welcome; you can float across its blithely catchy facade, scanning the surface for the chorus, but plenty of secrets lurk in the cracks, too. You may hear “Livin’ Was Easy” 10 times before you spot the harmonica, 100 more before you catch that falsetto sigh just before the third chorus. As Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, a longtime Glands fan and one-time tourmate, puts it, “The combination of clarity and wooziness couldn’t be more apt when discussing the Glands.”
Shapiro never was the easiest lyrical read. Most of these tunes play out as little vignettes, kind of a “14 Short Songs About Athens” compendium—you’ll get a first name, maybe a destination, a beginning or a middle, but rarely an end. When he sings about himself, hints of loneliness and frustration occasionally enter the frame, but the overwhelming feeling is one of bemusement. Shapiro’s just taking it in, all the babies on the grass and couples getting coffee, some he knows and some he doesn’t. He sings his way through these tunes like an old excitable friend bending your ear at the bar, semi-drunkenly relaying gossip, cataloging grievances, goofing on acquaintances, and cracking bad jokes. There’s a reason Athens fell so hard for the Glands: Here’s someone everybody wanted to know but many considered unknowable, letting you in one bent hook at a time.
Double Coda is not actually the third Glands LP, which Shapiro never got around to finishing despite several false starts. After he died from lung cancer in 2016, bandmates Rowe and Almstead and producer Barbe sorted through a trove of unreleased material that dated back to 1998 and whittled it into the 23-song Double Coda. They opted for tunes that felt close to done. What’s immediately striking is the lack of post-production clamor that characterizes its predecessors. The mismatched fidelities and fragmentary push-and-pull that gave those first two LPs their rickety charm are largely gone, replaced by 23 discrete tunes with clear beginnings and ends.
The crush of stripped-down ballads just past the halfway mark and the semi-skeletal arrangements on a few would-be highlights disrupt any notion of continuity. But if you take Double Coda as a collection of Glands songs rather than a proper LP, it’s a gift. Shapiro’s songcraft—surefooted, strange, singularly him—is on full display here, from the sly shuffle of the stoner’s lament “So High” to the Daniel Johnston-worthy tender balladry of “Save a Place For You.” There’s oddball digi-psych (“Electricity,”), a Stonesy ripper (“Feelies”), and piano jazz (“Piano Jazz”). The ambling “Great Waves,” the plaintive “Clover,” and at least half a dozen others feel like first-ballot hall-of-famers. Shapiro might not have meant for us to hear these songs this way, but the sudden arrival of 20 or so great “new” Glands songs is an act of pure benevolence.
“All our friends say goodbye,” Shapiro sings to close out Double Coda, “but you and I remain here.” There’s a lot of coming and going throughout this music, but a lot of staying, too, of taking stock and making the most of what’s right in front of you. College towns like Athens are transient by design, and if you’re not careful, surrounding yourself with all that turnover can do a number on your psyche. Shapiro was drawn to Athens not just as a temporary stopover but as place to make a life. He went to school there, worked there, formed a band there. Fame and fortune may have eluded him, but he still got the better end of the deal: Shapiro and his Glands gave people something to remember even after they, and he, moved on. | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 15, 2018 | 8.5 | 6047eb1b-5744-49e9-8107-60066d83c1a5 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
The widespread dissemination of punk’s DIY ethos coincided with an explosion of affordable studio technology, leading to a largely unheralded revolution in home-recorded pop. | The widespread dissemination of punk’s DIY ethos coincided with an explosion of affordable studio technology, leading to a largely unheralded revolution in home-recorded pop. | Various Artists: Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-uneven-paths-deviant-pop-from-europe-1980-1991/ | Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991 | When punk first emerged in the mid 1970s, it promised revolution in the simplicity of three chords and the revelation that you too could start your own band. But as punk’s energy grew increasingly diffuse by the start of the 1980s, other musicians realized that even without three chords—much less a guitar—making music remained a graspable possibility. With the increasing affordability of drum machines and 4-track recorders, anyone, skilled player or otherwise, might press up a single or three. A new world of self-expression lay within easy reach, even if success remained as elusive as ever.
An array of peculiar pop fusions, fascinating detours, inconsequential blips, and woeful failures comprises the Amsterdam label Music From Memory’s latest compilation, Uneven Paths: Deviant Pop From Europe 1980-1991, which digs across the continent for square pegs and songs that briefly asked “What if this could be pop?” before dropping off the map. Last year’s Brazilian set Outro Tempo, which covered the same era, provided a similar sense of a parallel world. Compiled by MFM main man Jamie Tiller and fellow DJ Raphael Top Secret, Uneven Paths is equally ambitious, though ultimately not quite as evocative as its predecessor’s track-by-track chain of alternate universes.
Across its 21 songs, this vision of ’80s pop embeds strands of mutant DNA from genres like bossa nova, jazz, folk, new wave, spoken word, and world music. Mixing violin, heavy drums, a Peruvian melody, jazz saxophone, and murmured longing, Pete Brandt’s “What You Are” evokes Arthur Russell, a far more famous proponent of deviant pop’s DIY approach. Similarly open-ended approaches lead to oddities such as “Nomad Song,” credited to a German jazz-fusion group called Ströer Duo and the American spoken-word performer Howard Fine. With his dry, vocoded delivery, the song at times verges on turning into “O Superman,” though flutters of harmonica and references to Occam’s razor keep the song decidedly off-kilter.
Chance personal encounters and happy accidents abound. The French poet Lou Blic made the acquaintance of saxophonist Philippe de Lacroix-Herpin through a mutual friend but lost touch after recording one 7”. “Minéralité” pairs Blic’s words with hiccupping downtempo jazz and a looped snippet of tribal chant. Belgian new-wave group Nightfall in Camp met vocalist Marie Mandi right before recording at their flat, inviting her to purr lines about her daily routine for the ethereal “Cada Dia.” And the rattling rhythms of “Happy New Year” came about after a glitch erased all the programmed beats and samples on the German trio Härte 10’s completed album, requiring them to try to recreate it all in a night.
Not every jumble of sounds works out. Some of these paths are, indeed, uneven, and when they fail, they make for some wincing face plants. A faux-tribal beat on Miko & Mubare’s “Komoma Ya-Ya-Ya” might appeal to DJs, but the overly dramatic proclamation that “We must all speak in one tongue” ruptures its rhythmic spell. Frenchman Patrick Forgas’ lecherous growl about “sexy move” might work better were it not repeated incessantly against a backdrop of monkey noises. And some songs just plain fizzle. The French fusion band Nonobstant’s wobbly pop song “Jessica” falls flat, and John Makin’s “No Lie” is just a live track from an English singer tackling Brazilian samba.
But some hybrids are just too enticing to ignore. Violet Eves’ “Listen Over the Ocean” is a simmering Italo ballad that reimagines what shoegaze might have been had it consisted of shimmering vibraphones instead of guitars. A recording of the Greek musician George Vanakos talking about how much he hates disco makes for a woozy, lo-fi outsider disco track in “I Hate Disco… Not the Dance.” British post-punk Brenda Ray melts melodica, dub effects, and doo-wop vocals into a heady confection on “Dancing Thru’ the Night.” And Xavier Jouvelet’s “Oeuf En Clock” posits perhaps the most intriguing “what if” of the set: What would Sade’s quiet-storm sultriness have sounded like had they arisen in France instead of Britain? The unanswered questions raised by Uneven Paths might be the most intriguing of all. | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Music From Memory | April 3, 2018 | 7.2 | 6049520e-4206-44c7-8e77-9c62947e05f1 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Montreal shoegaze band display far more confidence on their second album than on any of their previous releases, breaking out of the murk to offer distinct, tactile sensations in the form of glam rock stomp, slo-mo pop, desert blues, and dirty electroclash. Somehow, it all fits. | The Montreal shoegaze band display far more confidence on their second album than on any of their previous releases, breaking out of the murk to offer distinct, tactile sensations in the form of glam rock stomp, slo-mo pop, desert blues, and dirty electroclash. Somehow, it all fits. | No Joy: Wait to Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17916-no-joy-wait-to-pleasure/ | Wait to Pleasure | It’s fitting that so much talk about shoegaze plays up security-- the sound is womblike, it blankets you, places you in a waking dream and so forth. And it’s as welcoming to musicians as it is to listeners, as volume, reverb and distortion can be used to minimize mistakes while bands that stay within the established boundaries are often rewarded by its intense loyalists. Case in point, No Joy; if you like shoegaze, you liked No Joy’s 2010 debut Ghost Blonde, as it was a solid, satisfying entry into the genre that didn’t take many chances. But it was hard to feel invested in the Montreal group. As anyone who owns more than one Asobi Seksu, Brother Kite or A Place to Bury Stangers record can tell you, bands who successfully learned how to synthesize fuzz and pop fizz from Loveless or Psychocandy keel over fast once the training wheels come off. Last year’s Negaverse EP did at least acknowledge a need for a new direction, even if it ventured further into murk. However, the clarity and concision of Wait to Pleasure throws everything into reverse, and while their second LP puts No Joy in a position to make mistakes, with risk comes reward, and they also show far more growth and confidence than they previously had to this point.
The easiest way to understand the difference between Wait to Pleasure and its predecessor is to think about the tactile difference between heat and humidity. Whereas the latter was sticky, immersive and overwhelming, Wait to Pleasure offers 11 distinct, tactile sensations that are often diametrically opposed yet placed consecutively; opener “E” slowly boils over after five minutes of glam rock stomp, while the slo-mo pop of “Hare Tarot Lies” calmly lazes in unseasonal warmth. The breakneck pace of “Lizard Kids” leaves the scent of burnt rubber on desert highway after the white hot sensuality of “Blue Neck Riviera”’s dirty electroclash. “Ignored Pets” sizzles, “Pleasure” soothes. It’s a cohesion based on interaction rather than similarity, maintaining a flow that displays No Joy’s subtly expansive range and adds a cumulative, positive effect to already strong individual components.
It’s all the more impressive that they’re able to do so while maintaining the raw elements of Ghost Blonde. While adept at diaphanous cooing, Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd*’*s vocals take on far more of a lead role with piercing, major-key hooks. The guitars are still singed by redlining distortion, but within the context of Wait to Pleasure’s sweeter production, they tend to caramelize rather than corrode. And between “Lizard Kids” and “Ignored Pets”, they’ve established a stylistic template that distinguishes a No Joy song from those of their peers-- combining the pummeling, barely contained pace of a punk rhythm section with shoegaze’s distended high end, rushing through a light net of harmonized vocals that are reverbed to the point of being mere phonetics.
It can be tough to make out the intentionally wordless lyrics from the expressive ones, so the incorporation of synthetic elements tends to bring out their humanity. “Lunar Phobia” follows a continuum of bands whose names served as adjectives for their own sound (Lush, Curve), beat-driven without crossing over to dance music, and tricked out with a wealth of intriguing effects and layers: bird call vocal samples placed against wafting harmonies, juddering kick drums swapping with backmasked snares, tremolo guitars and raw feedback. “Blue Neck Riviera” goes even further into rhythmic clangor, the blackened, deadpan vocals and clacking drum machines recasting Ladytron as lo-fi nightcrawlers before it revisits the Negaverse album cover, taking off toward the rainbow horizon in its second half.
While improving on the sheer sound of Ghost Blonde on nearly every level, No Joy are still more suggestive than declarative. Allusive titles such as “Night Slug”, “Blue Neck Riviera”, and “Wrack Attack” come off as evidence of an inherent playfulness as well as a wide range of interests, even if No Joy’s lyrics are too deep in the mix to tell if they actually do refer in any way to the techno label, Florida’s Emerald Coast, or "Saved By the Bell". A certain kind of impersonality might seem like a cost of doing business in this genre, but within the context of Wait to Pleasure, there’s compensation in hearing No Joy express themselves as a band rather than as people. If you like shoegaze, you’ll probably still like No Joy, but *Wait to Pleasure’*s triumph is making it far less of a requirement. | 2013-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | April 24, 2013 | 8 | 604bc376-27c5-43d9-b34d-70f98f0c2f6a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Pavement’s divisive final album, full of clamor and clarity that presaged the end of the underground. | 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 Pavement’s divisive final album, full of clamor and clarity that presaged the end of the underground. | Pavement: Terror Twilight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pavement-terror-twilight/ | Terror Twilight | With the release of their second album, 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement seemed poised to become the next Nirvana—or at least a cooler, funnier, unrulier R.E.M. They conceded to releasing videos that could actually get played on MTV and lollygagged their way through a “Tonight Show” appearance, but their ambivalence to join the raging alt-rock revolution was made plain by album highlight “Range Life.” It used the most uncool sound at the time (throwback ’70s country rock) as a platform to take shots at the biggest bands at the time (Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots). To fans, “Range Life” was a form of quiet, casual protest against the increasingly homogenized world of post-Nirvana alt-rock; to detractors, it was proof of indie rock’s inherently elitist disdain toward the tastes of common people.
In a SPIN interview from April 1994, lead singer Stephen Malkmus revealed that, actually, both sides had it wrong. “‘Range Life’ is supposed to be a person from the ’80s country-rock era, like Lone Justice or Dream Syndicate, not being able to keep up with what’s going on today,” he said. “It’s not a really a diss on [Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots]. It’s more like, ‘I don’t understand this MTV world.’ Like Brian Wilson’s ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.’”
Here was Malkmus, at the very peak of his hype, forging a spiritual kinship with an obscure subgenre of a previous generation that had been deemed unfashionable by the shifting cultural tides. Maybe he knew that it would only be a matter of time before he’d find himself in a similar position.
The next year, Pavement’s infamously difficult Wowee Zowee doubled down on their refusal to conform to the modern-rock marketplace—a possibility that seemingly died for good the moment the alt-bros started hurling mud bombs onstage during one of their Lollapalooza sets that year. But surprisingly enough, the crisp, crystalline follow-up, 1997’s Brighten the Corners, had all the markings of a concerted crossover bid. And where Pavement’s earlier albums spawned a hundred sloppy ’n’ sarcastic indie bands in their misfit-preppie image, by ’97, their influence was impacting the biggest rock acts in Britain.
Blur’s Graham Coxon famously credited Pavement with inspiring his band to ditch Britpop for lo-fi noise on their caustic 1997 self-titled release. Elastica’s Justine Frischmann—then in the process of dismantling her own band’s pop appeal—became Malkmus’ duet partner and London crash-pad host. And though they seemed to exist in a completely different aesthetic universe at the time, Radiohead were professed fans, too. Pavement had gone mainstream, if only by proxy. But the indie culture that they once epitomized and still very much inhabited was rapidly shifting away from their brand of wry, off-kilter fuzz-rock, toward sensitive singer-songwriter expressionism and dramatic post-rock impressionism. The country-rock cosplay fiction of “Range Life” was slowly becoming their reality.
So for a group that always sounded torn between playing ball and throwing the game, Pavement’s fifth album, Terror Twilight, was a suitably conflicted, ambiguous document of a band that wasn’t sure if it was ready to break big or break up. On the one hand, it presents us with a group that still hadn’t completely given up on the idea of expanding their cult—for the first time in their career, Pavement hired a big-time producer to take a more hands-on approach in reining in their stray slack. On the other hand, Pavement hardly resembled a hungry band with their eye on the prize.
From Stockton, California (where Malkmus formed the band with childhood friend Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg) to the University of Virginia (where Malkmus befriended percussionist/band mascot Bob Nastanovich), to New York (where superfan-turned-bassist Mark Ibold and Nastanovich’s old drummer pal Steve West came into the fold), the logistics of Pavement were always a challenge. By the late ’90s, all five members were living in different states spread across the country; the simple act of getting a practice together often required calling a travel agent. At a certain point, Malkmus wondered if all the frequent-flyer miles were worth it.
Following a long Brighten the Corners PR campaign that left him “pretty fried,” Malkmus told Rolling Stone that maybe it was time for the band members to lay down some roots, sparking whispers of a breakup. After settling in Portland, he debuted a clutch of new songs at a couple of local acoustic shows in 1998, an uncharacteristic move that suggested if there were to be another Pavement album, it would be a Pavement album in name only. Nastanovich later admitted as much: "Pavement music at this stage is Stephen Malkmus," he said in a 1999 interview. "He’s the main songwriter, and the other four guys in the band are trying to make his songs as good as possible.”
But for Malkmus, that process wasn’t happening nearly fast enough. As detailed in Rob Jovanovic’s 2004 Pavement bio, Perfect Sound Forever, Malkmus was growing increasingly tired of the band’s long-distance-relationship status and, once they were finally in the same room together, he’d get frustrated with the time it took to bring everyone up to speed. “I think he realized that we were at one pace, and he was at another pace,” West recounted, “He didn’t really want to have the patience to coax us along in music creativity.” With their time together at a premium, the band opted to focus on Malkmus’ readymade batch of songs, at the expense of developing ideas brought forth by Kannberg (who, despite bringing his power-pop A-game to the band’s most recent releases, would get no spotlight turns on the finished album).
After a by-all-accounts dispiriting attempt to get the album off the ground in Portland, the band decided they needed a professional second opinion. Through their UK label head, Laurence Bell of Domino Records, they learned that another high-profile Brit had joined the Pavement fan club: producer Nigel Godrich, fresh off the consoles for Radiohead’s game-changing OK Computer and Beck’s celebrated space-folk detour Mutations. At the recommendation of the latter, Pavement hired Godrich over the phone without so much as a face-to-face meeting. But once the two parties got down to business, it soon became clear that Pavement’s haphazard work ethic didn’t so easily adapt to the producer’s discipline.
Being a big fan of the band—and recognizing they didn’t exactly have a Radiohead-level budget to work with—Godrich offered Pavement the starving-artist’s special, forgoing his usual fee for future royalties and crashing on friends’ floors to keep expenses in check. But Godrich still had technical standards that were far more elevated than what Pavement were used to working with. After scrapping the band’s initial plan to record at Sonic Youth’s rehearsal room studio in Manhattan, Godrich moved operations to a proper 24-track facility nearby and then over to London’s famed RAK Studios for overdubs.
Where the band previously used the studio as a sandbox, often emerging with a whole extra album’s worth of outtakes, Godrich had them focus on 12 songs, which were whipped into shape through a militaristic, blister-inducing regimen of repeated takes. (Only one, an instrumental freakout dubbed “Shagbag,” didn’t make the final cut.) And with the producer naturally conferring with Malkmus on most creative decisions, other band members started to feel disconnected from the process. (As Nastanovich claims in Perfect Sound Forever, over a week into the sessions, “I went to talk to Nigel and it was pretty clear that he didn’t know what my name was.”) In the end, Pavement were no longer the sort of band that left the mistakes in, even if it meant taking certain members’ contributions out: During the overdub sessions, West’s drum tracks on three songs were re-recorded by High Llamas drummer Dominic Murcott (ironic, since West was initially brought on to be the rhythmic anchor after the 1993 departure of wild-card original drummer Gary Young).
On an album-by-album basis, Pavement tended to alternate between clamor and clarity. Terror Twilight, however, wound up pulling them in both directions at once. Depending on your vantage, it is either the band’s most polished, pop-friendly album or their darkest, most volatile one—laid-back in the classic West-coast Pavement style, yet atypically on edge at the same time. But Terror Twilight is the sort of counterintuitive album where the most melodically intricate songs feel so effortless, yet the slapdash irreverence that once came so naturally to Pavement feels more forced.
The superior tracks further refined the eloquent songwriting Malkmus had introduced on the 1996 stop-gap single “Give It a Day,” where his signature, Velvet Underground-schooled drawl starting to give way to a more byzantine, classically British melodicism. “Spit on a Stranger” and “Ann Don’t Cry” also chipped away at the popular caricature of Malkmus as the aloof, inscrutable slacker, foregrounding the romanticism that’s always been lurking beneath the sardonic surface, where phrases that are difficult to understand allow him to access emotions that are difficult to express. (“My heart is not a wide open thing,” he sings knowingly on the latter track, a rare moment of candor where he fesses up to his aversion to candor.) If Malkmus had sung the line “bring on the major leagues” back in 1994, it would’ve been interpreted as a withering comment on moving up the corporate-rock ladder, but on Terror Twilight’s wistful serenade “Major Leagues,” it sounds like he’s bracing for the familial responsibilities that lay ahead in middle age. Godrich’s trademark atmospheric production finds its most natural fit with these more serene songs, casting them in a moonlit, magic-realist glow and letting the guitars sparkle.
When they weren’t supporting Malkmus’ improved pop craftsmanship, the Pavement of the late ’90s were gradually turning into the world’s wooliest jam band. It’s a side of the band that really came to light on the Brighten the Corners tour, where songs like “Type Slowly” would get substantially stretched out and beefed up. They also frequently test-drove a new track called “And Then” that took the Slint-like mid-sections of songs like “Stop Breathin’” and “Transport Is Arranged” and invested them with a more ominous intensity. “And Then” would find a home deep into Terror Twilight’s second side, where it appeared with new lyrics and a new title, “The Hexx.” The Terror Twilight recording dials back the nasty psychedelic fuzz of the ’97-era live versions for more of a trembling chill, with Malkmus dropping creepy couplets (“Epileptic surgeons with their eyes X-ed out/Attend to the torn up kid/Salivate and reckon with all the sick things that you did”) as if entering a two-sentence horror-story challenge.
“The Hexx” made a convincing case that Pavement’s future lay in weightier guitar workouts. However, the band’s other attempts to flex their rock muscle on Terror Twilight felt a bit like they were puffing out their chests. “Platform Blues” might have made more sense stitched into Wowee Zowee’s unwieldy sprawl, but feels too scattered to fill the role of centerpiece track—its spastic rave-ups (powered by guest harmonica-honkin’ from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) come off like bar-band blooze delivered with air quotes. “Billie” disrupts one of Malkmus’ prettiest verses with an ugly sore-thumb of a chorus. And while “Speak, See, Remember” follows the same loose-intro/motorik-rock-out template as Wowee Zowee highlight “Half a Canyon,” it’s executed with half the focus and intensity. Compared to the unabashedly posh, big-ticket indie rock albums being released by their peers in 1999—like the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin and Guided by Voices’ Ric Ocasek-tweaked Do the Collapse—Terror Twilight’s willful oddness meant Pavement remained an island unto themselves.
Despite the break-up murmurs, Terror Twilight was received by critics not as an assumed swan song, but a genuine next-level move. The A.V. Club opined that “the time and effort invested in the new Terror Twilight seems to indicate that the group has no intention of throwing in the towel.” And for a while there, that seemed to be the case. Asked about his lack of songwriting contributions on the album, Kannberg told Rolling Stone there just wasn’t enough studio time to hash out his ideas before optimistically speculating he’d “just have more songs for the next record.” In Lance Bangs’ 2002 Pavement documentary Slow Century, we even see the band workshopping a new song during rehearsals for the Terror Twilight tour.
That song, “Discretion Grove,” would soon see the light of day, but not on a Pavement album. It was the lead single from Malkmus’ self-titled 2001 solo debut, the first in a series of consistently enjoyable if far less-hyped albums with his current band, the Jicks (who he’s now fronted for nearly twice as long as Pavement—I guess there is something to be said for living in the same city as your bandmates). That first Malkmus record surfaced 14 months after Pavement played their final shows together in November 1999 at London’s Brixton Academy, at the end of a six-month promotional campaign where Malkmus reportedly turned more insular and unhappy over the course of the tour. Shortly thereafter, Domino announced the band would be “retiring for the foreseeable future”—a somewhat vague communique that further muddied the waters between those who wanted a proper break-up (Malkmus) and those who were anticipating a hiatus (everyone else). Ever since, it’s been hard to listen to Terror Twilight without sensing the 1000-point-font writing on the wall. After a decade of playfully confounding listeners with his elusive wordplay, Malkmus opened “Ann Don’t Cry” with a line so frank and literal, it essentially became Pavement’s epitaph: “The damage has been done/I am not having fun anymore.”
Even now that he’s several years removed from the difficult circumstances that spawned the album, Malkmus’ estimation of Terror Twilight hasn’t exactly improved. Tellingly, it’s the one Pavement album that never received a deluxe 10th-anniversary reissue, a circumstance that can’t help but feel like an implicit judgment of the record. In a 2015 interview with Pitchfork, Malkmus half-jokingly called it “the accidental child of the Pavement catalog,” and in a 2017 Talkhouse podcast interview that detoured into an extended tangent on the album’s recording process, he quipped, “No one really cares about this album that much.” That’s not entirely true, of course: Kannberg holds a much more positive opinion of the record. And there’s evidence to suggest that Terror Twilight’s overtures toward pop accessibility didn’t fall completely on deaf ears—Grammy-winning bluegrass outfit Nickel Creek’s mandolin-tinged cover of “Spit on a Stranger” helped propel their 2002 album, This Side, into the Billboard Top 20.
But if Terror Twilight was by no means a perfect album, it stands today as a perfectly emblematic one—of the band's demise, yes, but also the demise of the very underground/underdog idealism that Pavement represented. In its aesthetic tug-of-war between hi-fi futurism and contrarian weirdness, Terror Twilight portended an indie-rock landscape on the brink a dramatic sea change—a brand new era where Apple commercial syncs and selfie-sticked festival culture dictate that advertising looks and chops are indeed a must. Also, in their own oblique way, the album’s dark undercurrents and convulsive outbursts seemed to be subliminally preparing us for the more unsettled, chaotic world that awaited us on the other side of the new millennium. So maybe Terror Twilight is not merely the flawed, premature final act of an often brilliant band, but more like a savvy act of planned obsolescence from a group smart enough to sense the times were a-changin’, and honest enough to admit that they just weren’t made for them anymore. | 2019-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 2, 2019 | 7.5 | 604eddf3-74fb-4dad-8581-1938a1758576 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Ishmael Butler, the MC of the futurist hip-hop duo, looks in a new direction for inspiration on his latest project: his own son, emo rapper Lil Tracy. | Ishmael Butler, the MC of the futurist hip-hop duo, looks in a new direction for inspiration on his latest project: his own son, emo rapper Lil Tracy. | Shabazz Palaces: The Don of Diamond Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabazz-palaces-the-don-of-diamond-dreams/ | The Don of Diamond Dreams | Ishmael Butler and Tendai “Baba” Maraire of Shabazz Palaces have always been proud iconoclasts, consistently breaking ground in spaces once thought incompatible with hip-hop. They were among the few rap acts signed to Sub Pop; they were pretty much the only rap artists to ever perform at the avant-garde Big Ears festival in Knoxville. This adventurous spirit continues down the Butler family line with Ishmael’s son Jazz, aka Lil Tracy. It seems that Jazz’s work has had a profound effect on his father’s project; in recent interviews, Butler cites his own son as an influence.
As one of the original members of the GothBoiClique, Tracy is an important figure in the development of “emo rap,” and what’s fascinating about Shabazz’s new album The Don of Diamond Dreams is the degree to which Ish seems to be learning from the new generation. Like polarizing label mates clipping., Shabazz’s brand of “alternative” hip-hop is not so much opposed to the mainstream as it is reflective of it, absorbing tangents of influence from trap, Auto-Tuned R&B, chopped and screwed, and other variants. Their lyrics are often shaped by the hip-hop hegemony too, playing off Rap Caviar tropes and taunting the Top 40 with a tongue-in-cheek braggadociousness, the kind that lets you know that Butler is still the same MC who told us he was cool like that all those years ago.
On The Don of Diamond Dreams, the group absorbs and warps a different sonic palette than usual: listen for the loopy guitar solos on “Wet,” or the swaying riffs on “Bad Bitch Walking” and “Fast Learner.” That spectrum of influence is a new strand in their complex sound, but what surrounds it is very much classic Shabazz: glistening synth crystals on tracks like “Ad Ventures,” Maraire’s distinctive kick drum throughout, and a lyrical ode to the Divine Feminine (not their first) on “Thanking the Girls.”
The Shabazz project began a decade ago with Butler and Maraire searching for a place in the cosmos alongside their Afrofuturist inspirations; their discography has been a process of ascension, elevation, and spiritual expansion, from novice pupils to musical prophets. For years now, Shabazz Palaces have oozed a kind of creative wisdom, the type that can only come with age and years of lived experience, but The Don of Diamond Dreams demonstrates a sign of even deeper wisdom: living an entire life of your own, and realizing that there’s still value in learning and listening from the youth.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sub Pop | April 20, 2020 | 7.6 | 6052e48d-7651-488a-898a-b8993f1e272a | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
On his latest project, the Griselda Records rapper reflects on old battle scars and new riches over luxury beats helmed by Hit-Boy. Though he occasionally steps into cosplay, the result is ambitious. | On his latest project, the Griselda Records rapper reflects on old battle scars and new riches over luxury beats helmed by Hit-Boy. Though he occasionally steps into cosplay, the result is ambitious. | Benny the Butcher: Burden of Proof | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benny-the-butcher-burden-of-proof/ | Burden of Proof | Benny the Butcher’s story, like the rest of his Griselda Records cohorts, is one of endurance. There are 14 years between his debut Tana Talk and 2018’s Tana Talk 3, the Buffalo rapper’s formal introduction on the same label as his cousins Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine. During that time, he sharpened his style and emerged fully formed, rapping about dope needles and broken bottles. Benny’s gruff voice, hard-earned lessons, and punchlines quickly earned him a reputation as a feature killer on the rap circuit. More than just a textbook bruiser, though, he’s the rap game’s answer to Jason Voorhees: unrelenting, focused, stoic to the point of menace.
Benny’s latest project Burden of Proof is as much a reflection on his old life as it is a celebration of his new one. Tours have sold out and Rolex watches gleam on his wrist, but old ghosts and lost friends still haunt him. Benny’s music has never shied away from the grisly nature of drug dealing, but now he’s more closely examining the consequences of early spoils. He remembers nights spent in the hospital due to asthma attacks (“Where Would I Go”) and conversations with his girlfriend over bringing his gun on the road (“New Streets”). Every diamond in his bezel was earned through strife, and Benny reveals more aspects of his journey on Burden than ever before.
Even with the battle scars, Burden never becomes dour or overbearing. Unlike Westside Gunn, who's released three albums in 2020, Burden is Benny's first solo project since 2019’s The Plugs I Met. That's an eternity in Griselda time, and Benny's best raps across the album are more potent as a result of the breather.
In fact, everything about Burden’s construction is maximal, scanning as the Next Big Career Step it clearly aspires to be. The album was produced entirely by California super producer Hit-Boy and was mixed and mastered by Young Guru, rap’s engineer to the stars. Hit-Boy has spent 2020 in rap chameleon mode, crafting entire albums to suit the likes of Nas, Dom Kennedy, and Big Sean. He attempts to do the same for Benny, outfitting Burden with a sound that closes the gap between the lush grandeur of early-2000s Roc-A-Fella and early-2010s Maybach Music Group.
When the duo clicks, it feels monumental. “Famous” straps throbbing drums and cymbals to a wailing vocal sample and pulls the ripcord, placing Benny’s braggadocio (“Three Rollies, two cribs, six figures/And I still don’t feel famous”) on a proper pedestal. Closing track “Legend” bounces hi-hats and shining synths off of Benny’s amped-up mythmaking to create what sounds like superhero theme music. Hit-Boy chops chipmunk soul loops and even offers his spin on the minimalist aesthetic that put Griselda on the map. At its best, the sample work across Burden is stunning.
For all its bells and whistles, there are times where Hit-Boy’s beats sound too clean, even sterile. “Over the Limit” shoots for stadium rap and lands somewhere in an NBA2K commercial featuring the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of mediocre Dom Kennedy features. “Where Would I Go” feels tailored more to Rick Ross’ sensibilities than to Benny’s, especially considering Ross’ hefty 90-second verse on the backend. The beat sounds like it was originally meant for Ross’ Port of Miami 2 but was retrofitted here instead.
It’s hard to blame Benny for wanting to branch out from the gutter-soaked boom-bap that first brought him attention. He has every right to experiment and try on sounds as he sees fit. Hit-Boy attempts to balance this out by heading in the opposite direction so fully that it occasionally overwhelms Benny’s personality. There’s a thin line between making songs that evoke the feeling of Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 2 or Ross’ own Mastermind and songs doing Roc-A-Fella and MMG cosplay.
Still, Benny is in rare lyrical form. “What’s more important: the flower or the soil that grow it?” he raps on “One Way Flight,” mixing stories of drug felonies and life advice to dizzying effect. His energy and wordplay help him rip through the album’s lesser beats like Porky Pig, transcending them entirely. He’s been rechristened as one of Buffalo’s first rap stars and you can hear the confidence in his voice. Burden of Proof is undoubtedly the next step in Benny’s evolution, even if the music doesn’t always match the vision.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda / EMPIRE | October 22, 2020 | 7 | 6058e7df-7816-4e8a-b6f1-d7310978b21c | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
August Alsina is a rapper in an R&B singer's body, more likely to sing about his harrowed past and the things he's done to keep food on the table for his family than some romantic tryst. On This Thing Called Life, he hangs hard onto the idea that salvation can be found through perseverance and belief, whether in a higher power or simply your own ability to get through the day. | August Alsina is a rapper in an R&B singer's body, more likely to sing about his harrowed past and the things he's done to keep food on the table for his family than some romantic tryst. On This Thing Called Life, he hangs hard onto the idea that salvation can be found through perseverance and belief, whether in a higher power or simply your own ability to get through the day. | August Alsina: This Thing Called Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21341-this-thing-called-life/ | This Thing Called Life | Ever since August Alsina emerged in 2012 with his first official mixtape The Product, he's been somewhat of a curio. In essence, he's a rapper in an R&B singer's body, more likely to sing about his harrowed past and the things he's done to keep food on the table for his family than some romantic tryst. Even "Would You Know?," the lone love song on the New Orleans native's latest album, This Thing Called Life, is a conflicted ballad on which Alsina is a ball of nerves, afraid that opening up to the possibility of love would leave him vulnerable. But Alsina applies the tender, ruminative aspects of R&B—and its sense of longing, especially—to his street tales, and his second studio album solidifies his place amongst the upper echelon of modern-day R&B.
Like many of his contemporaries, Alsina shares the same interest as Jeremih and PARTYNEXTDOOR—even Young Thug—in exploring the percussive elements of rapping and the myriad of ways they can be married to melody. On sepia-toned lead single "Hip-Hop," he effortlessly slips back and forth between sweet rhythmic singing and melody-oriented rapping as he describes the environment he grew up in and how he "came up in criminal ways." The chorus of "Dreamer" finds Alsina employing a triplet cadence à la Migos, a clever flip of the rap-song-with-a-sung-chorus template. Alsina's line-blurring between rapping and singing is never quite as experimental as someone like Jeremih or Young Thug, but it feels completely natural.
Alsina's music also gestures towards his gospel roots. A singer in his church's choir as a child, he hangs hard onto the idea that salvation can be found through perseverance and a strong sense of belief, whether in a higher power or simply your own ability to get through the day. Persistence is Alsina's default mode of engaging with the world—when he's boasts about "buying the same thing three times" on "Why I Do It," a horn-laden banger featuring an engaged Lil Wayne, Alsina sounds prouder of the work he put in to get to where he is than the spoils of that work.
This Thing Called Life also corrects one the most egregious flaws of Testimony, Alsina's 2014 debut: its guests actually make thematic sense. There are only four: in addition to Weezy, Anthony Hamilton, Jadakiss, and Chris Brown all make appearances. With the exception of Brown, who doesn't subtract anything from the slick radio-ready earworm "Been Around the World" but adds nothing, the guests feel like kindred spirits rather than label-mandated concessions, artists for whom the experiences of a hard-luck upbringing are never far from the center of the frame.
The album loses a bit of steam toward the end, when another love song or two would actually be a welcome change of pace, but it perks back up in time for closer "The Encore." A joyously triumphant paean to perseverance, the track captures Alsina's wide-eyed and generous approach to songwriting: "Always thought that it would be good, but I never had it this good." It's hard not to root for someone whose music is suffused, at the DNA level, with such appreciation. He's grateful for his good fortunes even as he can't help but be surprised by them. | 2016-01-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Def Jam | January 5, 2016 | 7.4 | 605ad587-3f19-425f-858d-b5a5d1315913 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation ... | The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation ... | Various Artists: Dusk at Cubist Castle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5983-dusk-at-cubist-castle/ | Dusk at Cubist Castle | The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation. Though the implementation of unexpected song structures and ostensibly experimental sounds can make music quite a bit more interesting, it can also render it sterile, flat and emotionless. In many cases, the finest pop songs are those that transcend their form entirely-- songs so instinctually graceful that listening to them feels like a creative act in and of itself. Indeed, the best pop songs are often the most difficult to discuss rationally, those indispensable not for their formal inventiveness but for their ability to tap directly into the intangible realm of human memory and emotion.
In the mid-to-late 90s, Athens, Georgia's Elephant Six collective established themselves as a group of artists with a shared interest in expressing the inexpressible through pop music. The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by singer/songwriters Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, encapsulated both the collective's unabashed love for both classic pop and psychedelic music, and its sincere interest in experimental music and sounds. This, the band's debut album, represents their most fundamental integration of these two impulses-- never does the record's sonic palette seem like an afterthought to the songs, nor do the songs themselves seem like haphazard carriers for carefully chosen sounds. For an album with so much going on, Dusk at Cubist Castle is strikingly holistic, its diverse elements held together by an uncanny awareness of what they can evoke and represent.
The Elephant Six Collective is known largely for their reverence towards classic pop music, and Dusk at Cubist Castle inevitably draws comparisons to The Beatles and Beach Boys. But the influence of these seminal pop groups seems to be evident in the Olivia Tremor Control's approach as much as their aesthetic. One imagines Hart and Doss not simply admiring Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, but utterly internalizing them-- appreciating them not only for specific melodies and sounds, but also for how affecting those melodies and sounds could be. Though the bouncy basslines and rich vocal harmonies of Dusk often bring to mind Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, nothing sounds like the result of shallow imitation, as much as reverence and profound understanding.
Nowhere is this clearer than on Dusk's near-flawless first half. "Jumping Fences", one of the finest songs ever penned by Hart and Doss, conjures an air of introspective melancholy without ever approaching languor. At just under two minutes, "Jumping Fences" barely repeats itself at all, instead subtly building upon a beautiful, catchy melody with layered vocal harmonies, pianos and guitars. "No Growing (Exegesis)" follows a similar path, this time incorporating dramatic horn blasts into a climactic chorus.
The second half of Dusk at Cubist Castle is a decidedly more abstract affair, anchored by the 10-track "Green Typewriters" suite. It's here that the experimental undertones of Dusk at Cubist Castle begin to bleed through more noticeably. The fifth "Green Typewriters" track is a brief, unsettling, rhythmically insistent drone piece that foreshadows the extended ambience of "Green Typewriters" number eight. In part nine, the first discernible vocal melody for about ten minutes simply utters "how much longer can I wait," ushering in a majestic guitar solo that immediately plunges into a swirl of backwards sounds, whooshing cymbals and fuzzed-out chords. After the final installment of "Green Typewriters", Dusk at Cubist Castle returns to a slightly more stripped-down and fragmented variation on its first half, finally closing with the ghost-in-the-four-track noises of "NYC-25", one of their most affecting pop songs.
Aside from granting the album an air of timelessness, Dusk's saturated 4-track production always leaves me with the feeling that there's more to this album than can possibly be heard. And sure enough, eight years after its initial release, Dusk at Cubist Castle still somehow surprises me every time I listen to it. As its title suggests, there's something intensely cinematic about the record, and also something perpetually incomplete-- the images and ideas evoked stay with you much longer than the album itself. It's the masterful translation of these images and ideas that makes Dusk at Cubist Castle such a unique and unforgettable record. | 2004-02-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-02-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Flydaddy | February 3, 2004 | 9.4 | 60612afe-b5e6-4171-9e86-dedd9836df46 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Neil Young’s not-exactly-live album EARTH, a set of songs from across his career about food awareness, feels like the first time in a while that Young has been in on his own joke. | Neil Young’s not-exactly-live album EARTH, a set of songs from across his career about food awareness, feels like the first time in a while that Young has been in on his own joke. | Neil Young: EARTH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21973-earth/ | EARTH | Neil Young has been many things over the last five years: High-quality audio preservationist. Prolific memoirist. Reassessed film director. Leader of a reunited Crazy Horse. Jack White collaborator. Serial archivist. All of which is to say, among these positions, you might not find “acclaimed songwriter.” Quickly forgotten releases like 2014’s Storytone and last year’s The Monsanto Years have not gained half the visibility of the pissed-off hippie hawking Pono, but there is something admirable about the work Young has released this decade. In a sense, it’s been his most unpredictable, all-over-the-place era since the ’80s, back when his own record label sued him for not sounding enough like himself. Unlike the first decade of the millennium, when he penned sequels to his earlier works, both in name and in spirit, the past few years have found him following a stranger muse. It’s telling that his most crowd-pleasing and well-received record in recent memory was a feature-length double album opening with a 30-minute screed against MP3s.
This all leads us to Earth, Young’s latest project and his first non-archival live album since 2000’s Road Rock. This time around, Neil deserves kudos for not throwing “Vol. 1” after the title (or “Neil Young Archival Release #83,” for that matter). But Earth is not really a “live” album at all. For an album recorded while touring a collection of songs about food awareness, there is very little organic or even natural about Earth. This should all be abundantly clear by the time you get to the third number—a jammy rendition of The Monsanto Years’ title track that features egregiously overdubbed animal sounds, choir vocals, and Young’s voice AutoTuned to oblivion right in time for a line about detecting GMOs in your food. Is it a little heavy-handed? Oh god yes. But it also feels like the first time in a while—maybe since the product placement overload in the “This Note's For You” video—that Young has been in on the joke.
Speaking of jokes, let’s talk about those animal sounds. It’s been one of Young’s talking points in promoting the record (“All of the animals and insects and amphibians and birds and everybody," he explained, "We're all represented.”) and he sticks to his word. At a certain point, you just sort of get used to the crows and frogs chiming in during the human applause occasionally (and seemingly arbitrarily) thrown at the end of some tracks. For the most part, the animals are harmless. We never really needed to hear a bunch of roosters crowing to imagine where “My Country Home” takes place, but it still doesn’t feel intrusive. What really gets your attention, then, is when Young uses the animal sounds for rhythmic effect, punctuating the downbeats with cawing crows and mooing cows, as if he borrowed Ross’ keyboard from “Friends.” Simply put, the album would probably be better without them.
As such, Earth could have been—and sometimes comes damn near close to being—a total disaster. Like the sci-fi road fantasy of Trans or the Southern Gothic rock opera of Greendale, or hell, like the Pono, it’s a well-intentioned project that's far too unwieldy to ever successfully come to fruition. Somehow, though, it all kind of comes together. The laughably un-catchy call-and-response structure of new track “Seed Justice” (when I say, “Fighting for the farms and the land in the good old way,” you say, “They’ve been here since time began!”) probably won’t knock “Like a Hurricane” out of your top 10. But the Monsanto material actually sounds pretty good, with “Big Box” coming closer to being the epic barnburner Young might have imagined it to be when he first scribbled it down on a napkin, munching Pirate's Booty and watching CNN.
The new material also stands out because Young almost entirely avoids including any of his most recognizable work, instead favoring cuts from records like 1994’s Sleeps With Angels, 1986’s Landing on Water, and the cultishly-beloved-yet-sadly-underperformed mid-70s Ditch Trilogy album On the Beach. It’s about as far from a Greatest Hits set as one could imagine; for some casual fans, it might even play like an all-new Neil Young album. But while it doesn’t come close to illustrating the breadth and beauty of Young’s work, Earth serves a different, and maybe even more admirable purpose.
The record all hinges on a theme, illustrating how committed to environmental issues Young has been throughout his career, from the disheartened musings of 1978’s “Human Highway” all the way up to last year’s “People Want to Hear About Love.” Recent tracks like the latter may be awkwardly time-stamped with buzzwordy proper nouns, but the general ideas have been in his work all along. When “After the Gold Rush” pops up in the middle of the album, it feels eerily current (and not just because he updates the lyric to reference “Mother nature on the run in the twenty-first century”). As a record, Earth is surprisingly balanced and well-considered.
Of course, credit goes to the thematic consistency of Young’s songwriting, but also to Promise of the Real, his current backing band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Mika. After their mostly timid and non-distinctive performances on Monsanto Years, they now seem to have fallen into a loose, steady groove, allowing Young to sound more relaxed and playful than he has in a while. His voice stretches like an old rubber band over their demonically slow shuffle in “Vampire Blues”—a performance hilariously capped with about 30 seconds of looped audience applause (and the hissing sound of bugs). In songs like these, the chemistry between Neil and the band makes Earth a strangely fun and rewarding listen, even when it borders on preachiness or outright absurdity. It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with. | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | June 17, 2016 | 6.5 | 6065a9d4-c744-4115-ba57-44325a76ed51 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
With each new album it becomes clearer that Animal Collective will not stay still. You can see them on tour ... | With each new album it becomes clearer that Animal Collective will not stay still. You can see them on tour ... | Animal Collective: Feels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/193-feels/ | Feels | With each new album it becomes clearer that Animal Collective will not stay still. You can see them on tour and get a preview of the album to come in their live show, but aside from that, it's difficult to tell which direction their music will go next. If you'd heard Spirit They're Gone or Danse Manatee you could possibly have predicted the more difficult and abstract direction of Here Comes the Indian but you wouldn't have guessed they'd make something like Campfire Songs around the same time; if you'd heard the latter you'd might hazard a guess about Sung Tongs but Feels wouldn't necessarily strike you as the work of the same band.
That said, the newly released Feels is not a total departure from Sung Tongs, and it actually tracks it quite closely in terms of the album's structure. It's apparent from the first few bars of "Did You See the Words" that A.C. begins in "song" mode, setting aside for the moment the soundscaping that defined the earlier records. The first spin is a tad disconcerting because, with its electric guitar and more trad band set-up, Animal Collective sound for the first time like what they've always been to detractors with more outré tastes: an indie rock band. The songs proceed with a logic that has more to do with the early experiments of Mercury Rev than say, Sebadoh, but where Animal Collective previously sounded as if they were working according to an unusual set of rules, the first half of Feels exists in relationship to music history, and not just any music history, but rock.
I hear the ghosts of 1950s artists like Buddy Holly inside more straightforward pop songs "Grass" and "The Purple Bottle". On "Grass", the reverb on Avey Tare's voice adds a hiccup to every syllable and the guitar is processed to sound at times like the rollicking boogie-woogie piano rhythm. Of course, 50 years ago no one would have made a chorus out of loud, clipped screams synchronized to bashed drums (well, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis), and the conversational vocal harmony breakdown of "The Purple Bottle" jumps ahead a decade to a highly psychedelicized Beach Boys. Such moments are why the adolescent unpredictability of Animal Collective is such an asset-- they're able to tap into the narrative of Western pop while making it their own.
Like Animal Collective's previous full length, Feels is sequenced carefully, with jauntier, tuneful numbers leading to an amorphous back half. The two transitional songs in the record's middle, "Bees" and "Banshee Beat", are among the best things Animal Collective has done. "Bees" imagines how a drifting pop song might sound inside the sonic universe of an Alice Coltrane album, with a trebly autoharp that is all strings and no body and sustained clusters of piano that bring to mind an ascension through clouds. "Banshee Beat" is even better. Animal Collective's signature approach to composition-- in which open chords are strummed repeatedly for longer than seems necessary to create a unique sense of tension relieved only by vocal chants and howls-- finds its apotheosis over these eight minutes. "Daffy Duck" is a further exploration of the ideas presented on "Bees", and "Loch Raven" is an uncharacteristically tender electro-acoustic lullaby, vaguely Aphexian in the way it mixes sine wave drones with a simple piano line and a cluster of wordless voices.
The upbeat "Turn Into Something" brings the album back to where it started. Feels is an excellent record, one that, despite a more conventional approach, happens to get better over time. But it's also interesting to contemplate as a chapter in the Animal Collective story. If the childhood pals can stay friends and continue to inspire each other we may have some more great records down the road. At the moment they seem on a pretty heady plateau, but you don't get the idea listening to Feels that they've said nearly all they have to say. | 2005-10-17T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-10-17T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | FatCat | October 17, 2005 | 9 | 6068a6bb-c921-4bce-af4f-048b9a7a0664 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On piano and cello, this cross-generational drone partnership finds common ground in the desire to explore the fundamental malleability of sound. | On piano and cello, this cross-generational drone partnership finds common ground in the desire to explore the fundamental malleability of sound. | MV Carbon / Charlemagne Palestine: Liquiddd Changesss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mv-carbon-charlemagne-palestine-liquiddd-changesss/ | Liquiddd Changesss | For Charlemagne Palestine and MV Carbon, sound is a malleable object, something to mold and sculpt. As Palestine once said, “I have always felt and heard and mixed the sounds in my world as liquids, not as solids. Sonic liquids are material that is endlessly transformable.” On their first collaborative album, Liquiddd Changesss, Carbon’s cello swirls and shifts alongside Palestine’s piano riffs, like liquid becoming ice in the cold or steam in the heat. They draw from their backgrounds in drone and noise to make music that often feels psychedelic and anguished, probing darkness to find radiance. A cross-generational partnership—Palestine began playing in the 1960s, while Carbon came up in the ’90s—the two artists find common ground in their shared desire to play with sound’s physicality.
Drawn from two hours of sessions recorded at Palestine’s Brussels studio in 2015, Liquiddd Changesss undulates between lengthy, cavernous drones and hollow echoes. The opening “Evaporated Whispers” clocks in at 19 minutes, manifesting a state of continual growth. In concert, Palestine is known for quaffing brandy while he plays, and here, his rattling snifters and dramatic strumming—a technique in which he holds the piano’s sustain pedal down as he hammers at the keyboard, forming an array of overtones—crash into Carbon’s gravelly cello. Those thunderous few minutes feel turbulent and fulsome, but they dissolve into muted squeals and nervous tremolos. Elsewhere, gossamer shimmers and quiet whispers become screams. The two musicians never stay in one place for too long—their sound is always on the move, ready to morph at the drop of a hat.
One of those metamorphoses is the movement between rich sound and eerie quietude. The music is often loud and resonant, but their more scattered textures are less cohesive. “Crushed Little Gem” builds from bouncy, echoing plucks and abstract vocal cries, a desolate sound that evokes an arid desert; piano pulses, guttural wails, and harsh cello tones pop out of the fold, creating spiky patterns. The draw of Carbon and Palestine’s music is its densely woven layers and naturalistic motion, but here, their sounds drift aimlessly.
With “Glass From Sand,” however, they achieve more hypnotic effects. Built from tumultuous piano and glowing cello, the track bubbles with energy. The pace and dynamics increase as they play, growing from a suspended drone into agitated trembling. The instrumentation harkens back to the album’s opener, but here it feels more unsettled: Palestine’s piano rumbles with nervousness while Carbon’s restless cello slides and quivers, swirling around a steady electronic glimmer. Even as the tension fades, a sense of darkness remains, a fretful energy that signals deep unease.
Despite its abstracted nature, at its best, Carbon and Palestine’s music uncovers intense emotional depths. Harrowing feelings simmer among the music’s twists and turns, threaded inside each wavering tone. The duo’s music is like a sculpture that’s being crafted in real time, never reaching its final form. Their sound is always evolving, always plunging even further into the unknown. | 2023-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Kill Rock Stars / 5 Rue Christine | January 5, 2023 | 7 | 606a6d0f-af87-401f-8d65-5be84d99d1e3 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Detroit producer and Slum Village associate continues to work at a very high level, with hard-hitting beats and textures ready for both clubs and headphones. Guests include Pharoahe Monch, DJ Premier, and Royce da 5'9". | Detroit producer and Slum Village associate continues to work at a very high level, with hard-hitting beats and textures ready for both clubs and headphones. Guests include Pharoahe Monch, DJ Premier, and Royce da 5'9". | Black Milk: Tronic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12451-tronic/ | Tronic | Blame it on trickle-down economics, but things just ain't the same for superproducers-- not only have guys like Timbaland, Pharrell, and Kanye stuck with the steadier pop/R&B dollar (or priced themselves out of hip-hop), you'd be hard-pressed to find any of the up-and-comers who could truly go multimedia (though it's not for Polow da Don's lack of effort). Which leaves Black Milk on something of a singular plane-- he's just a super producer (and MC) with an album mindset, and Tronic just might be his boldest statement yet, far exceeding the modest nature of its Fat Beats origin.
In fact, Tronic could very well be the best end-to-end production job you've heard all year. It's hard to talk about anything Black Milk does without evoking J. Dilla, but even though there's a blatant nod here to the structure of Midnight Marauders, I'm hearing a real ATLiens vibe in the gorgeous, almost dubby undertow to the lunar sonics*.* The album cover is no ruse, as this is the most electro of Milk's productions, but he combines clubby textures and warm EQing in a way that begs for headphone listening even at its hardest knock. So the "Knight Rider" bassline of "Bounce" is counterbalanced by swirling, psychedelic keys and what initially sounds like an accordion on "Tronic Summer" turns out to be a sweltering vocoder.
Though in no way a concept album, Tronic is meant to be consumed whole and some of the interstitial moments are the most rewarding-- "Losing Out" tumbles into an erratic drum'n'bass beat reminiscent of the Roots' "You Got Me", while the sprightly strings that take up the final 20 seconds of "Hell Yeah" feel like a lost treasure. This is a Black Milk album, so you know the drums are going to hit hard, but a lot of tracks sound like he's imported "Tekken" combos into his MPC. There often isn't a traditional earworm beyond the way Milk interacts with his beats-- "Give the Drummer Sum" features a Quasimoto-like chant on the chorus, but the real hook is how Milk pulls tricks like dropping out the drums on the line "let the organ get a stab at it." He practically lives inside the beats, and "Try" is something of a conversation with a soul sample from an artist who promised to stay away from them (a concession similar to Kanye's intro on "Everything I'm Not").
But if you're wondering why that number up there isn't higher, well, here's the thing-- I'd hate to give Milk more reason to get defensive about his mic skills, since far too much of Tronic is muddled by saber rattling over haters who doubt his flow. First off, exactly which corner of the internet spends its time hating on Black Milk? Moreover, he's more than nice with his, considering that if he learned anything from Dilla, it's how to make electronically based hip-hop jiggle organically. That's some pretty bumpy mixed meter terrain he's able to traverse on songs like "Hold It Down" and "Overdose".
While he's every bit as thoughtful about his penmanship as he is about his production, Milk is nowhere near as adventurous. As was the case with Popular Demand and even the split he did with Fat Ray from earlier this year, you get the odd feeling that Milk put his heart into his work, and yet it feels slightly impersonal, save for the career summary "Long Story Short". Beyond his battle rhyming, he most frequently rails against the current state of hip-hop, but his lines are so vague that they actually fail to indict anyone. Even while the kiss-off of hangers-on "Without U" resembles Slum Village at its most softbatch, the topicality, at least, is welcome.
Tronic usually finds Milk's humility working in his favor, however, since he has no qualms about being a facilitator. Royce Da 5'9" breaks hip-hop's silence on Kwame Kilpatrick and absolutely shreds "Losing Out", and "The Matrix" is pure Soundbombing bait for those stuck in the one-nine-nine-nine: a reinvigorated Primo scratches while Milk trades verses with a typically old-man strength 16 from Sean P and Pharaohe Monch dropping a spectacular dud of a punchline likely causing agita at a message board near you ("Like pants legs around the ankles of hipsters-- I'm tight!")
Unfortunately, it makes me think back to something Wale spoke to on "The Perfect Plan"-- "Instead of singing our praise they do/ Raise the bar to a level unattainable." But it's to Black Milk's credit that so much is expected out of him. Maybe he's got the Detroit Chronic in him-- something with Elzhi (where's he?), Royce, and fuck, who's Eminem getting beats from these days?-- but for now, Tronic is one hell of a holding pattern. | 2008-11-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2008-11-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Fat Beats | November 24, 2008 | 7.9 | 606df776-e0cb-477f-b1b3-07146c04d635 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The third album from London composer Bastien Keb is a soundtrack to a nonexistent film: a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and French New Wave. | The third album from London composer Bastien Keb is a soundtrack to a nonexistent film: a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and French New Wave. | Bastien Keb: The Killing of Eugene Peeps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bastien-keb-the-killing-of-eugene-peeps/ | The Killing of Eugene Peeps | Consider the tradition of the imaginary movie soundtrack. From Brian Eno’s ambient collection Music for Films to the Olivia Tremor Control’s kaleidoscopic opus Dusk at Cubist Castle (not to mention lesser-known specimens, such as Barry Adamson’s remarkably creepy Moss Side Story), songwriters have been crafting soundtracks to movies that exist only in their minds for more than 40 years. Sure, scoring an actual film is more lucrative for a working musician, but scoring a nonexistent one may be the more fulfilling creative endeavor: You don’t have to cater to anyone’s vision but your own, and your work will never be tainted by association with a mediocre film.
The Killing of Eugene Peeps, the third album from the London multi-instrumentalist known as Bastien Keb (born Sebastien Jones), is a fascinating new entry in the imaginary-soundtrack category. Keb is a lifelong cinephile—a former video store clerk who spent long, customerless shifts immersing himself in movies—and a composer who knows a thing or two about scoring, having crafted music for TV commercials and documentaries. But no commercial sounds like The Killing of Eugene Peeps, a gloomy, dreamlike suite that summons the vintage sounds of 1970s giallo films and 1960s French New Wave with remarkable specificity.
Keb’s previous albums, 2015’s Dinking in the Shadows of Zizou and 2017’s 22.02.85, gravitated towards a genre-fluid style of jazzy trip-hop with a skewed aesthetic, and even drew some raves from U.K.-based music press. But Eugene Peeps swaps out the beat-driven sound for creaky analog intimacy. There’s an eclectic array of borrowed or found instrumentation: trumpet, bass, flute—even a singing saw floats into the mix on the standout “Young Ponies.” Like a sprawling narrative arc, the music shifts from rickety jazz (“Israel Ate His Own Mind”) to funk (“Street Clams”) to brooding, meditative passages with relative ease. Recurring motifs percolate throughout, and as if the cinematic theme needs further underscoring, the album cover looks like a poster for the kind of fictitious film-within-a-film that might crop up in a Tarantino screenplay.
The most engrossing cinematic flourish, however, is the recurring narration by Keb’s friend Kenneth Viota, who takes the lead on a series of spoken-word passages adapted from Keb’s own journals. In an interview with Bandcamp Daily, Keb described creating the record while coping with the misery of a night-shift warehouse job: “I was a zombie for a year,” he said, “piecing the album together while I was working.” Viota’s coarse growl, and his darkly funny mutterings of desolation and depression (“They’ll be better times ahead—I hear hell’s nice this time of year,” he deadpans in “The World Creaks”), reflect that mind state and recall the seedier spoken-word tracks from Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits. (Keb’s own voice couldn’t be more different; his layered falsetto on songs like “Rabbit Hole” bears a curious resemblance to Justin Vernon.)
If the resulting record sounds like an obscure ’70s soundtrack culled from a dollar bin, that’s by design. Keb commits to the bit, and his fluency with the vocabulary of film scoring means that he is capable of summoning the expressive eccentricity of Ennio Morricone (“Can’t Sleep”) or the roiling, low brass intensity of Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score (“Bookie”). By contrast, the rap cut “Paprika,” featuring a freewheeling verse by Nottingham rapper Cappo, feels conspicuously out of place—it’s the one moment where the film-score illusion shatters.
At 18 tracks, The Killing of Eugene Peeps is undeniably ambitious and occasionally scattershot, but never tedious. It helps that the music is constantly shifting, mutating between styles and tones—often within the realm of a single song—like an anthology film caught between genres. Take “Theme for an Old Man,” for example: In less than four minutes, the track unfolds from doomy brass squalls that evoke a specter of violence to a warped trip-hop groove befitting a DJ Shadow production. From there, the beat drops out and a miniature symphony of descending strings lingers in the air like cigarette smoke, pointing the way to the mournful timbre of “Can’t Sleep.” You may not know much about the characters or storyline, but with music like this, there’s a film in your head, too.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Gearbox | October 14, 2020 | 7.7 | 607721fe-41c7-4871-9804-682250738c12 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The Mexico City duo of Mabe Fratti and Héctor Tosta break with the hushed beauty of the cellist’s earlier work, exploring sprawling new directions in modern composition, jazz, and art song. | The Mexico City duo of Mabe Fratti and Héctor Tosta break with the hushed beauty of the cellist’s earlier work, exploring sprawling new directions in modern composition, jazz, and art song. | Titanic: Vidrio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/titanic-vidrio/ | Vidrio | When we last heard from Mexico City-based cellist and singer Mabe Fratti, she was exploring sun-baked, sand-blasted textures on 2022’s Se Ve Desde Aquí. It was a shift from the earthy chaos of her earlier albums, where shape-shifting instruments tangled like root systems of ancient, verdant trees. This summer, Fratti announced a new project, a collaboration with her live-show linchpin Héctor Tosta, aka I. la Católica. They called it Titanic, which certainly takes nerve: Would the duo tackle Céline Dion? The much-missed Kirsty MacColl’s breathy folk-rock? Would it be camp? Would it be a disaster? Their debut album is confident in its ambitions. Vidrio cross-pollinates the spatial management Fratti has spent the past few years cultivating with Tosta’s taste for prog sprawl. The album’s title is a word for “glass.” The record is a window overlooking fertile plots of modern composition, jazz, and art song.
“Anónima” digs in with sharp whacks at Fratti’s cello, some crashing drums, ringing piano that collapses the separation between melody and rhythm, and chiming percussion that does the same. Above all else, there’s Fratti’s voice. She intones the title (translation: “anonymous”) as trails of reverb slowly surround her. Her voice doubles, quadruples, too clear and strong to stay unknown for long.
Much of Virdrio’s beauty sprouts from the juxtaposition of Fratti’s voice (and that of her cello, which she also makes sing, as if it had not only a neck but a throat) and the various experimental grounds she and Tosta map out. In “Hotel Elizabeth,” Fratti stumbles into a jazzbo waltz; her voice sometimes leads its partner, Jarrett Gilgore’s beastly saxophone, around the dancefloor, and sometimes they do little dances of their own, Fratti never losing her cool in the face of Gilgore’s reedy tantrums. “Entre mis contradicciones crece una flor” (“In between my contradictions grows a flower”), she sings, and her voice sounds like it’s doing just that.
Fratti and Tosta initially drafted much of the album together on synths and drum machines. But their mutual appreciation for both the praxis and finished products of Talk Talk inspired these final versions, which take long jams and use them as stems for studio arrangements. “Circulo Perfecto” shows off the appeal of the process, with its thoughtful precision serving as an ideal vessel for Fratti’s chatty vocal runs.
“En Paralelo” is decidedly darker, with Fratti sawing and hacking at her strings like she’s Bernard Herrmann and speak-singing like she’s Trish Keenan—and what follows, the diabolical “Te evite,” grows and thickens and worries its way towards the deep dark woods Broadcast lost themselves within. Instead, we arrive in the grand “Palacio,” in which piano chords climb five stairs, again and again, only to reach an agonizing suspension of strings, feedback, horn, and silence, and then tumble back down again. It’s frustrating, fascinating, and kind of funny, too. Fratti shares a sense of drama with brainy singers like Nico, Björk, Kate Bush, and Meredith Monk, but her songs often feel smaller in scale, little blossoms instead of great fields of ground and sky.
The highlight of the album offers growth potential, though. Stretching to some seven and half minutes, “Cielo Falso” is twice the size of most of the album’s songs, and you could imagine, say, Julia Holter swelling it into a full album side. Or you could just play it on repeat, as I have, marveling at the way it cross-breeds Vince Guaraldi and Fleetwood Mac, as its amiable piano and hi-hat gradually bloom.
Gilgore skronks all over closer “Balanza,” his bold tone battling Fratti’s breathier one as she proclaims and laments, “Siento una avalancha/Que cae sobre mi” (“I feel an avalanche/That falls over me”). Vidrio is willing to risk sinking deep into ugliness, yet it manages to sidestep the swamps of self-seriousness. “Está descalibrada la balanza” (“The balance is out of calibration”), she decides, but the song never collapses. What might sound wrong on another record—a long-held note swaying in and out of tune, gasps of air moving in and out of her lungs, Tosta’s occasional fiddly filigree, Gibrán Andrade’s drums sinking in and out of pocket—on Vidrio sounds right as rain. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. | 2023-11-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unheard of Hope | November 2, 2023 | 8.3 | 607a5ef3-cd56-4e85-8232-740bf4e3f742 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1978 ambient masterpiece that helped launch the genre through its technological savvy and its soft heart. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1978 ambient masterpiece that helped launch the genre through its technological savvy and its soft heart. | Brian Eno: Ambient 1: Music for Airports | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-ambient-1-music-for-airports/ | Ambient 1: Music for Airports | By January 1975, Brian Eno worked like an electron. He bounded among projects and people, flitting into sessions only long enough to add what Peter Gabriel insisted upon calling “Enossification” to Genesis’ 1974 opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. A self-proclaimed non-musician, Eno would appear with his early EMS synthesizer in a briefcase, then wind others’ instruments through it or a panoply of tape recorders, augmenting their sounds with the excitement of the ineffable.
Then a free agent just shy of 27, Eno had already become a rock star with Roxy Music. He was the alien razzle-dazzle beauty, sashaying among his electronics and upstaging singer Bryan Ferry until the resulting tension prompted Eno’s exit. Other opportunities abounded, anyway: As he labored over his first two solo albums—obtuse hybrids of high-art idealism and glam-rock strut—he daydreamed about outré ensembles he might start but never did. Luala and the Lizard Girls, for instance, was his plan to pair his catholic sexual enthusiasms with his artistic transgressions. Like many other Eno hypotheticals, it never happened.
Though he couldn’t much play the clarinet, he lent his lack of skills (and budding imprimatur) to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the amateur orchestra of composer Gavin Bryars that mutated the classical repertoire with uncanny allure. He even helped them secure an unlikely record deal. There were his foundational tape-and-guitar improvisations with Robert Fripp, sporadic dalliances with boyhood heroes Nico and John Cale, and his collaborative loyalty to the remaining members of Roxy Music not named Ferry.
Around the middle of January 1975, Eno was leaving a session with Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera, daydreaming about what he’d just played and the sudden uncertainty of his career when he slipped on a drizzly London street. He fell into the path of a speeding black cab. Eno bled from the head and was badly bruised, but he soon returned home from the hospital to convalesce, an electron momentarily at rest.
What followed is now, nearly a half-century later, essentially the origin story of ambient music, as riddled with factual uncertainty as all good fables. On her way to visit Eno, Judy Nylon, his former roommate and confidant, bought a cheap album of antique harp tunes near the train station. As Eno lay in his living room, with the rain tinkling against the windows, Nylon put on the record and adjusted the sound to fit the ailing mood. Eno heard his new direction: He wanted to make music like this, sound that could enliven or enhance a space without overpowering it, like a faint stick of incense in the corner or a dim sconce glowing in the distance. Eno now wanted to render the antithesis of the preening rock’n’roll that had made him famous—no glory, only grace.
But first, he again worked like an electron. He would soon finish Another Green World, another ostensible rock album punctuated by opalescent instrumentals, and establish Obscure Records, a short-lived but crucial fountainhead for contemporary classical music. One of its first four records was his own, Discreet Music, an entrancing but halting attempt to re-create that living room calm with a 30-minute keyboard hypnosis and warped fragments of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. Eno assembled a potpourri of brief pieces for movies and commercials, then expanded it. He courted Talking Heads and Devo as their potential (and eventual) producer. And he repeatedly jetted to Berlin to join David Bowie on what would become the Berlin Trilogy and to Cologne to commune with Motorik idealists Cluster on a series of less commercial but eerie and luminescent works.
That’s when it happened: Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ” Eno, laughing but serious, told Stephen Colbert 34 years later, much as he’d said to Lester Bangs in 1979 and repeated in his own published diary in 1996. “Let’s face facts.”
Within a matter of months, Music for Airports was finished. Eno had struggled for years with the sessions that would become his de facto rock farewell, 1977’s Before and After Science, as he wrangled more than a dozen collaborators in two countries. But rock’s valence electron had finally found his perfect fit, coming to rest in the sound he’d been circling for years. This one—an act of near-complete self-reliance, informed by a decade of attentive listening, thought, and arguable artistic theft—arrived in a flash.
Alternately panned as a soporific joke or praised as a cathedral of escape, Music for Airports soon became Eno’s bestseller. And in the last half-century, of course, it has become so much more. Pragmatically and presciently co-titled Ambient 1, few albums have ever been more synonymous with the genre that followed, with the field of play they named. It is an ur-statement of scope and intent. “The listener, I felt, became the population of a sonic landscape,” he later wrote in the foreword to Mark Prendergast’s The Ambient Century, “and was free to wander round it.”
Systems had forever fascinated Eno. As an adolescent in a rural town near the Suffolk Coast, Eno was drawn to his grandfather’s player piano, which required no skill to activate and which he was soon modifying to render his own new melodies. As a budding teenage artist in Ipswich, he turned painting into performance art by trying to recreate someone else’s work by studying the pigmented drips they’d left on the floor. He loved Steve Reich’s early tape pieces, studied the groundbreaking ideas of David Tudor and John Cage, performed a La Monte Young composition that instructed him to repeat a sound as many times as he found necessary (three hours and counting!), and repeatedly installed a George Brecht piece in which water dripped from one container into another.
Synthesizers, tape recorders, and electronic circuitry at large allowed him to bring those propensities and experiences to bear on the rock music he also loved. He had magpied 30 secondhand tape machines by age 20, and, at 24, became the first person believed to be credited for “tapes” on a rock album, with Roxy Music’s debut. By the mid-’70s, writes David Sheppard in his authoritative biography, On Some Faraway Beach, Eno counted himself an apostle of Lee “Scratch” Perry and dub, particularly smitten by Perry’s 1974 rendezvous with King Tubby. The record’s back cover pictured their mixing consoles in striking chiaroscuro portraits, a secret handshake to anyone who believed in the endless possibilities of the studio.
Eno also found several kindred spirits among the German explorers that shaped the krautrock frontier. Chief among them may have been Conny Plank, a slightly older but no less adventurous engineer who had worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen and then converted a farmhouse outside Cologne into a cozy country studio. By the time he and Eno met there in 1977 for the first of two sessions with the duo Cluster, Plank had helped nurture that atmospheric vanguard through classics with Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia. He celebrated the value of craziness, especially in the studio. “Conny always seemed to enjoy the idea that something we didn’t yet recognize would appear,” Eno later remembered of Plank, who died a decade after their first sessions at the age of 47. “[He] wanted to be surprised, to hear something new.”
And then, thanks to Plank, it was Eno who heard something new. During a return trip to Cologne in early 1978, months after he’d had his airport epiphany, Eno saw the reels of tape that Plank and former Can bassist Holger Czukay had meticulously spliced together from samples of shortwave radio transmissions, disco drums, highlife guitars, and Arabic singing. Eno had been struggling to make yet another rock record as a lead singer, and these patchwork spools presented a way out: Someone else could sing, and the system could do the job for him.
Plank’s partner, the actress Christa Fast, typically fed the musicians, often baking sumptuous cakes. Now, though, Eno gathered her and two studio assistants, Inge Zeininger and Christine Gomez, to sing simple “aahs” alongside him, a little plainsong choir. He and Plank cut bits of tape from the results, spooling loops of slightly different lengths around the legs of the studio’s metal chairs, mixing the voices in real time. They thought it was beautiful, celestial—like flying, maybe? This was the start of the music for airports he’d imagined.
Eno had also been interested in another very different system, even before Roxy Music began at the decade’s dawn. Inspired in part by the casual classics of Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinfonia, he liked to assemble ad hoc ensembles, offer vague instructions (including his famous Oblique Strategies), and listen for resulting bits of intrigue. It was an extrapolation of John Cage’s indeterminacy, applied to rock settings. As Robert Fripp once put it, “He’s my favorite synthesizer player, because instead of using his fingers he uses his ears.”
Back in England, he asked old chum Robert Wyatt to hop on the piano, with audio engineer Rhett Davies on Fender Rhodes and the maverick Fred Frith on guitar. No one could hear anyone else, but, listening back, Eno spotted a synchronous moment when a six-note Wyatt phrase not unlike the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” intersected with Davies’ electric piano just so. He cut the tape, built a loop, excised the guitar, slowed it all to a narcotized pace, and played along, augmenting the phrases where he saw fit. Music for Airports, for all intents and purposes, was finished.
Though it was the last piece to materialize, Eno smartly made that augmented 17-minute loop from the studio jam Music for Airport’s opening gambit, calling it “1/1,” or Track 1 on Side 1. On an album where the pieces are so amorphous they suggest Young’s ideas of music that would go on forever, it is the most recognizably shaped, with Wyatt’s trusty piano pattern recurring like mileposts on some desolate and enchanting highway.
True to Eno’s aviation intent, “1/1” suggests the feeling of being held aloft by a partner, parent, friend, mattress, or anything else that buoys you as you begin to sag. His synthesizer passes—faint at first, gradually growing bolder—reinforce that sensation by cradling Wyatt’s piano phrase, by lifting higher the very thing that is doing the uplifting. Sure, death had been on Eno’s mind at the Cologne airport, but the future feels suddenly limpid during “1/1.” A haze steadily dissipates, and the sky brightens, with something new now lingering on the horizon.
Both “1/2” and “2/1”—twin outgrowths of that vocal experiment with Plank and company in Cologne—maintain that sense of the future with vastly different instrumentation and implications. Though his voice is indeed nestled inside the quartet, Eno is nearly a phantom during “1/2,” letting the spools of tape move in and out of sync to create harmonies so soft and slow they almost feel inhuman, pillowing and billowing and collapsing and returning.
“As the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. They stay the same,” Eno told a rapt San Francisco audience in 1996. “But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety.” This, then, is the sheet of clouds in the sky, the same few substances morphing in endless permutations. They suggest that there is an upper limit, that a ceiling has been reached; you can float in that state of grace for as long as you like but can go no higher. On Music for Airports, “2/1” lasts nine minutes. Eno has teased a 30-minute rendition, and you can spend much longer inside it during this radiant time-stretched take. It is music that seems to begin and end only because physical media has material limits.
Eno’s most overlooked stroke of brilliance here is to take those same vocals to the flipside, “1/2,” and push them further apart, like heavy clouds spreading into wisps. Where Wyatt’s piano on the opener is confident and breezy, Eno’s is tentative but exploratory on “1/2,” as if the “non-musician” is still trying to understand the way the keys function together. It’s easy to imagine the kid plundering his grandfather’s player piano, poking new holes in the rolls just to see how the results might sound. There is a delicate hopefulness to his phrasing, like a prairie dog poking its head up after a violent thunderstorm has passed or like an airplane passenger finally exhaling after moving through a tide of turbulence. The first three movements of Music for Airports are the sounds of continued belief, none more so than the faltering but perseverant 12 minutes of “1/2.”
If the first 40 minutes of Music for Airports are about being lifted and then remaining so, then “2/2,” its finale, is the comedown, the score for sinking toward some final destination. Eno cut these 10 minutes at Plank’s place in Cologne, improvising on an ARP 2600, slowing the tape to half-speed, and feeding it through a litany of delays. It is technically the simplest work here, an instrumental modified in post-production. But it is emotionally the most sophisticated and ambiguous, the reason that listeners sometimes leave the halcyon heights of Music for Airports feeling unsettled or vertiginous.
The motion of all the music is spectacular, akin to watching the moonlight shimmer from the ocean’s surface at night. Water, however, is the last thing anyone wants to contemplate in an airport or airplane, and that image makes for unease as “2/2” lumbers forward like some pipe organ dirge, guiding you finally to an end that does not begin again. These are those facts that Eno wants us to face, that death is always hovering nearby. Maybe it is true that this stunning building in Cologne—that happened to be designed by the father of the kid from Kraftwerk—may be the last splendid thing you ever see. Of all the possibilities Music for Airport’s first three pieces frame, they never preclude that certainty. If the beginning of this album feels like an ellipsis, its end is a period, as clear and absolute as mortality itself.
These days, Eno is a frequent guest at creativity conferences, with Music for Airports brandished as one example of his technological advances in music. But it wasn’t that, really. There were already synthesizers more advanced than the relatively common ARP 2600 by early 1978, and the tape tricks Eno deployed for these tracks were not altogether new. His own innovations in that field with Fripp years earlier already owed debts to Terry Riley’s psychedelic meditations a decade prior.
What’s more, a bevy of artists, from Popol Vuh in Germany to Éliane Radigue in France, had touched on so many of these sounds and circumstances. The delays, reverbs, variable speeds, and philosophical understanding of the studio as perhaps the greatest instrument of all were exclusive neither to Eno and Plank nor white rock’n’roll at large. Music for Airports was the result of Eno’s longtime interests and enthusiasms, suddenly given the right name and context. He had enough sense to recognize it, enough restraint to leave it alone.
But Music for Airports has become a wellspring for a now-sprawling genre and an essential record unto itself, its machines turned into a score played by the likes of Bang on a Can, ragtag rock experts Psychic Temple, and insightful pianist Bruce Brubaker. There’s more than restraint and synthesis at work. Instead, Eno—forever the systems man, more devoted to process than product—stumbled upon a true emotional center here. Perhaps it was because he was working to address his own anxieties through sound, but these four tracks radiate a kind of warmth and care that his sometimes-cold art had rarely embraced—and, for that matter, would often eschew in the future. At its core, Music for Airports moved to meet worry with relief, a response that lasts longer than any cutting edge ever can.
One no longer needs to wrap magnetic tape around leg chairs to make something that sounds like Eno’s 1978 masterpiece. These sounds are now matters of software, of templates, of common course. The generative machines of our AI future will likely understand Music for Airports like the alphabet. But it’s the beating human heart at this record’s center—palpitating at first, steadying as the record spins—that distinguishes it after so many decades. As you lift and fall with it, you remember how it is to feel.
After all, the moment he conceived the concept behind Music for Airports, Eno had a specific enemy in mind: Muzak, or music that didn’t allow anyone to feel much of anything.
Amid the Cold War jitters and political upheaval of the ’60s, the idea of piped-in pleasantry became a very big business, not only priming the sales pump in stores globally but also setting a pleasantly productive mood in workplaces. Founded in the wake of World War I by a high-ranking veteran of a particularly tech-driven Army wing, Muzak even found a home in nuclear submarines. By the time the Vietnam War shuddered to a halt, or as Eno’s head encountered that fast black cab, Muzak generated $400 million per year and soundtracked 43 of the world’s 50 biggest businesses.
Eno bristled at these pillow-soft pop arrangements and schmaltzy jazz standards, in and out of airports. His four tracks were not only intended as an architectural accompaniment but also as a replacement for what he heard as commercial drivel. To those ends, Music for Airports has actually enjoyed very limited success—a 40th-anniversary loop at London City Airport, an eight-day stint at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International soon after the album’s release, and a brief broadcast in Brazil’s São Paulo/Guarulhos that was so loud and distorted Eno demanded it be turned down.
In 1980, he installed Music for Airports in LaGuardia alongside four screens showing rudimentary footage he’d filmed from his apartment window after moving to New York. He called the piece 2 Fifth Avenue; airport employees complained about the racket. Still, for Eno, Music for Airports and such installations were breakthroughs, flinging the doors wide to the generative music and multimedia exploration that continues apace even as he nears 80.
In the years since, Music for Airports has become something of a daydream that has backfired in slow motion. By the end of the ’70s, when the record finally began attracting earnest attention stateside, Eno was already seen as a serious artist. He countered seemingly pretentious dalliances with contemporary classical music, cryptic notecards of vague instructions, and interviews that lasted nine hours with transformative popular albums alongside the likes of Bowie, Talking Heads, and Devo. He was a pop guy with a theoretical underpinning, an intriguing comment always at the ready.
But Music for Airports helped to erode the walls between sound designed to lubricate commerce and music made because it was beautiful, meaningful, personal, or powerful. From the jump, most critics did not distinguish between corporate background Muzak and Eno’s auteurist version of it: “Avant-garde Muzak?” The New York Times review began. “Doktor Eno investigates the possibilities of Muzak,” The Los Angeles Times quipped. “Eno’s version of Muzak for our age,” GQ reasoned. These ingenious and heartfelt symphonies of machines were just another dude’s take on background pablum.
That seems like a crucial development on the path to our modern music economy, where the vast majority of recorded music is valued at $10.99 per month, when it is valued at all. Most everything has become background music, and multiple playlists of “music for…” most every imaginable task—baking, fucking, crying, studying, even birthing another human being—abound. “I should think by now I’ve met about 60 or 70 kids who came out of the womb listening to [Discreet Music], which of course, is any marketing department’s dream,” Eno once quipped about his sound’s functionality. “Get in there right at the beginning, you know?” As he completed Ambient 1, Eno actually designed a cover for Ambient 2: Music for Healing. That record never materialized, Eno perhaps sensing his own future disdain for the coming New Age.
“It must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno wrote in conclusion of Music for Airport’s oft-quoted liner notes, a Holy Writ of ambient. Less than a half-century later, it seems like a permission slip to ignore most everything, no matter how interesting. Music is now a utility, a tool to be used for doing something else. Eno, of course, is not to blame for this sea change, but his fortune and reputation were made in large part through the cultural frameshift he helped ferry into being.
I am a first-rate offender when it comes to Music for Airports, a habitual user for whom the record’s sprawl has become a crutch. I put it on nearly every time I write something of any real length, this piece included. The telltale mind of Apple Music informs me I’ve played it nearly 200 times in the past year.
And yet, when I actually stop to listen, to hear Music for Airports as more than a background balm, these four tracks remain wondrous and transformative, able to rearrange the air in a room. Just a few weeks ago, I visited a favorite aunt whose husband had recently died. He had left behind decades of accumulated records in a basement crowded by a lifetime of hobbies and collections. She needed to know what to do with those thousand or so LPs, each cover inked with his name in blue ballpoint pen.
As I sat on the floor scanning the spines, she flitted about the room, trying not to cry as she busied herself with arcane errands but failing. It was the first time I’d been in that room in 20 years, and it was a fraught scene, weighted by thoughts of a kind man of a million passions who died too young. Wedged between a few Magazine records and a Nick Cave single, I spotted the familiar blocky black capital letters: “AMBIENT #1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS.” I pulled it from its place and asked my aunt if she knew it. She’d never heard of Eno, let alone the record.
Minutes later, Robert Wyatt’s lullaby-like piano chimed from speakers wedged among busy rows of books. And then it repeated, of course, seeming to tug itself and the entire room skyward even the second time around. My aunt stopped her busywork, looked up, and finally let the tears flow. We stood there in silence for a while, like electrons coming to rest, held aloft by this music. In those quiet moments, we did exactly what Eno had hoped Music for Airports would allow people to do, in or out of an airport—to not pretend we too weren’t going to die, and to go on ahead, anyway.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2024-01-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | EG / Polydor / PVC | January 7, 2024 | 10 | 607bc2ee-3dec-49eb-8ecc-5d4009eae1fa | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Josh Homme's band with Jesse "the Devil" Hughes returns with another album of sleazy and entertaining rock'n'roll. But Zipper Down’s tongue-in-cheek humor belies the dark self-awareness of two guys well-versed in the study of human depravity. | Josh Homme's band with Jesse "the Devil" Hughes returns with another album of sleazy and entertaining rock'n'roll. But Zipper Down’s tongue-in-cheek humor belies the dark self-awareness of two guys well-versed in the study of human depravity. | Eagles of Death Metal: Zipper Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21115-zipper-down/ | Zipper Down | It’s been over 15 years since childhood friends Joshua Homme and Jesse "the Devil" Hughes founded their cartoonish, carnal blues-rock project, Eagles of Death Metal. When Homme's not manning the drum kit or the mixing board for Eagles (he’s produced each one of their LPs) he fronts Queens of the Stone Age, one of the biggest hard rock bands on the planet. So it makes sense that listeners would categorize the group as a Queens of the Stone Age side project. But EoDM has never been Homme’s show—this band has always been about Hughes, the strutting, showboating, irredeemably decadent presence at its center, the greasy cog around which the freak show turns.
The arrival of Zipper Down coincides with the documentary The Redemption of the Devil, which details one hell of year in Hughes' life, one in which he becomes ordained as a Protestant minister, prepares to marry former adult film star Tuesday Cross, ventures further to the right on the political spectrum (he's a noted gun fanatic), enters a custody battle for his kid, and, somehow, finds time to cut a new Eagles record. The film attempts to answer a question faced by every aging rocker at some point in their lives: when you’ve had your fill of sex, drugs, and scuzz-rock, who do you turn to for guidance? In Hughes’ case, there are only two logical responses: the guy upstairs, and the guy behind the bar.
On Zipper Down, it's clear that Hughes’ certificate of ordination doesn’t exclude him from the party; as outlined on album closer "The Reverend", his spiritual leanings are all part of his divine mission to get us all to "boogie-woogie". In interviews, he's preached the gospel of pure methamphetamine and public sex acts, while openly accepting the fiery abyss that lies in wait. In other words, he’s prepared to pick up the tab for every bender (and miserable morning after) detailed on *Zipper Down—*but only once the party’s over. Accordingly, most of the songs aren't about angels or demons, but rather girls who like to shake their asses ("Got a Woman" and its "Slight Return" on side B), girls who like to swing their asses ("Silverlake (K.S.O.F.M.)") and two-timing heartbreakers ("I Love You All the Time", "Oh Girl"). Homme supports the songs with one shuffling, snare-heavy beat after the next, peppered by handclaps and the odd cowbell.
But Zipper Down’s tongue-in-cheek humor belies the dark self-awareness of two guys well-versed in the study of human depravity. A closer look at the puffed-up, pivoting highlight "Silverlake", for example, reveals it not as a paean to the fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood, but rather a tale of a wannabe hipster trying to weasel his way into the hotspot-du-jour by having his girl get with the bouncer ("So if you date this guy/ He's gonna let us in!"), only to suffer an existential crisis in the end. Likewise, a forlorn, foggy-headed cover of Duran Duran’s one-night-stand anthem "Save a Prayer" revisits the album’s coital motifs through a confessional lens, solidifying aforementioned themes of atonement and reckoning.
Despite these more reflective moments, Zipper Down mostly sticks to the formula of the duo’s past three albums, frequently recycling structural and instrumental elements from past songs. The haggard guitars and handclap-heavy backbeat of "Got a Woman" recalls Death by Sexy highlight "Chase the Devil", while "The Deuce" shares a bluesy foundation with Peace Love Death Metal's "So Easy". This repetition isn’t to the Eagles’ detriment: theirs has always been a goofy project, one grounded in humor, wit, and sass rather than paradigm shifts. Easy rockers like the sawtoothed, shimmying "Complexity" prove that the tricks aren’t necessary, as long as your hips are moving. | 2015-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe / T-Boy | October 6, 2015 | 7.3 | 607e5ca5-1219-41f2-8f4e-0dca56c4e491 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Though the rapper takes questionable creative risks on his fifth album, he’s still capable of bringing scenes to life with a wide eye and a sharp pen. | Though the rapper takes questionable creative risks on his fifth album, he’s still capable of bringing scenes to life with a wide eye and a sharp pen. | Big K.R.I.T.: Digital Roses Don’t Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-krit-digital-roses-dont-die/ | Digital Roses Don’t Die | It’s no secret that Big K.R.I.T. is something of a rap anachronist. His music—transfixed on the dichotomy between the trunk-rattling anthems and soulful grooves that dominated Southern rap from the mid-’90s to early 2000s—has persisted both for its otherness and overall quality. Songs like 2010’s “Just Touched Down” and 2014’s “Soul Food” served as tributes to 8Ball & MJG and Goodie Mob, respectively—and weren’t in fashion at the time they came out. But K.R.I.T. wasn’t so much wearing his influences on his letterman sleeve as he was creating his own patchwork from the same materials.
The Mississippi rapper’s fifth studio album, Digital Roses Don’t Die, feels like the biggest curveball of his career, even for an artist used to going against the grain. Between his 2017 double album 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time and 2020’s K.R.I.T. Iz Here, K.R.I.T. achieved a delicate balance of brash and introspective cuts, which has since been abandoned. Instead of subwoofer-shredding bass, Roses subscribes to the sleek funk style of bands like Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic—sounds that his Dungeon Family progenitors would spend hours digging through crates to replicate. Roses aims for a similar love-soaked retrofuturism as albums like OutKast’s Stankonia, Mac Miller’s The Divine Feminine, and Silk Sonic’s An Evening with Silk Sonic. And though K.R.I.T.’s risktaking is commendable, the results flounder between earnest ballads and cover band hokeyness.
Roses’s imbalance is a shame because its direction feels like a logical extension for K.R.I.T. His past love songs are as seamless as the fusion of his pet sounds, pulsing with the rush of first love or the gravity of an argument as the narrative demands. Roses is more expansive in scope, encapsulating a four-act love story from first contact to breakup, sectioned off by the four elements: the early passion of fire; the foundation of earth; the familiarity and rhythm of water; and the turbulence of wind, as he explained during a livestreamed album listening event.
K.R.I.T. is still capable of bringing scenes to life with a wide eye and a sharp pen, and certain moments showcase the warm sincerity of his earlier work. “Southside of the Moon” is a playful take on the age-old love story to hip-hop (“I’m from 300, she from 106 & Park/BET Uncut, I used to see her in the dark”), told over producer DJ Camper’s minimal 808s, snaps, bass notes, and hums. That song and “Rhode Clean” evoke vintage K.R.I.T., effortless rap-R&B hybrids that cruise by like gently refurbished muscle cars. On “Generational - Weighed Down,” he fears passing his alcoholism and bad decisions onto his future children and second-guesses the relationship he spends the first half of the album building. “Even if we are faithful,” he coos to his nameless lover, “Sometimes love flames out.”
But moments with genuine heart and drive are too often spoiled by overeager schmaltz. The raps on Roses are fleeting compared to previous projects, and while K.R.I.T. has proven many times that he can carry a tune, the album suffers when he shifts gears completely. “Cum Out to Play” is supposed to be a velvet-sheeted sex jam for the ages—K.R.I.T. has even admitted that he purposefully produced the song at 69 bpm—but it’s little more than Isley Brothers karaoke. Ditto the post-breakup bar crawl of “Wet Lashes & Shot Glasses” and “Show U Right,” which aims for roller-rink jam status—complete with talkboxed vocals on the hook—but lands in generic ’70s-movie-soundtrack territory. This clash of time periods sometimes manifests in unintentionally hilarious ways, like a shoehorned 8Ball & MJG reference on “Show U Right” or K.R.I.T.’s insistence on including rap adlibs over the decidedly mellow hooks of “Boring” and “So Cool.” For the first time in his career, K.R.I.T. is trying too hard, inserting puzzle pieces where they don’t quite fit.
As forced as the album sounds, K.R.I.T.’s commitment shines through the muck. He truly enjoys the music he’s recreating, and on standouts like “So Cool” and “Generational - Weighed Down,” that love is infectious. But the interpolated soul beats that have been his calling card for the last decade and change have more personality than much of the staid bandstand work on display across Roses. The album’s four interludes end with slightly different variations of the titular phrase, each one drifting further from the preserved romance of the original: “Take a picture, but keep it original/’cause who needs filters when digital roses don’t die?” K.R.I.T.’s love for the music that made him was never in question, but it would benefit him to find a new way to show his love for the old school. | 2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | BMG | February 24, 2022 | 6.2 | 6084e94f-cba1-4e2d-9919-1aafb37a7bf4 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
After reckoning with her father’s legacy on recent records, the singer offers a vivid, complex portrait of life and the compromises and love that shape adulthood. | After reckoning with her father’s legacy on recent records, the singer offers a vivid, complex portrait of life and the compromises and love that shape adulthood. | Rosanne Cash: She Remembers Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosanne-cash-she-remembers-everything/ | She Remembers Everything | Country music has a long memory. Decades after Hank Williams’ death, he remains shorthand for the music’s spirit, still cited in songs that have no resemblance to his honky- tonk fare. Williams isn’t the only figure whose myth casts a shadow over country. Johnny Cash pops up as a rebellious totem for mainstream country singers and remains a clear touchstone for alt-country troubadours such as Colter Wall. The eldest daughter of Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash never exactly ran away from her father—she covered his “Big River” on Right or Wrong, the 1980 LP that kicked off a decade of untouchable albums. But she strove to define herself independently, too. Throughout the 1980s, she threaded new wave and roots-rock into records targeted at the mainstream, then left Nashville behind entirely in the 1990s, striking up a creative and romantic relationship with John Leventhal and settling in New York City.
Cash didn’t begin reckoning with parts of her father’s musical legacy until after his 2003 death. Much of that process involved looking into the past. On 2009’s The List, she covered songs her father told her she needed to know by heart, like Harlan Howard’s country classic “Heartaches by the Number” and Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.” On the Grammy-winning The River & the Thread five years later, she untangled her roots in the American South, delving into its myths and music; it was as immediate as anything she had ever made. With the new She Remembers Everything, Cash takes those lessons and applies them to the present, creating an album that addresses the turmoil of the moment by tying it into the past.
Working once again with Leventhal, Cash muddies up the clean lines of The River & the Thread, choosing atmosphere over grit. All the soft echoes and muffled rhythms are hazy, not dreamy. These subdued sonics suit a set of songs concerned with compromises, loss, and enduring love, the very things that shape adulthood. The women who narrate Cash’s songs here feel the weight of their previous decisions and look to their current situations with clarity. But She Remembers Everything isn’t a topical album: Cash casts her eye on the larger picture, how all these dashed dreams and small victories add up to make a life.
There are exceptions: On “8 Gods Of Harlem,” three chords punch through the album’s tasteful fog again and again to draw attention to muted but manifest anger. The song captures a school shooting through a trio of distinct perspectives: one written by Cash, one written by Kris Kristofferson, another by Elvis Costello. Each writer contributes a verse that pulses with their own lyrical rhythms. Cash emphasizes the pain of the mother, setting the scene in the street. Kristofferson breaks the spell with vulgar bluntness, countered by Costello’s florid summary of the aftermath. These varied approaches suggest that such violence is beyond one songwriter’s comprehension.
This is the only place on She Remembers Everything where Cash cedes the spotlight to another singer or deigns to be so direct. She doesn’t avoid collaborations; she co-wrote the title track with singer/songwriter Sam Phillips, penned several with Leventhal, and links with the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy for some harmonies. But these partnerships are part of the music’s fabric, not sparkling accoutrements. She Remembers Everything demands quiet contemplation. The hushed tones of opener “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For” serve as an appropriate keynote for the album, its waves of reverb providing a shimmering counterpoint to Cash’s quiet, compelling presence. Amid these misty guitars and muffled rhythms, Cash wanders through the debris of a relationship, resolving that the love made the struggle worthwhile. This tension, residing within both the music and the mind, is apparent throughout She Remembers Everything.
The difficulty of maintaining relationships with the passing of age is a key theme for these 48 minutes. This isn’t limited to romantic partnerships. The stately “Everyone But Me” finds its narrator coming to terms with the absence of her departed parents. It’s a situation that shares similarities to Cash’s own story—and to that of many people, of course. Neither this, nor the stirring ode to the sustenance of long-term romance, “Not Many Miles To Go,” should be read as autobiography. Like “8 Gods Of Harlem” or any of these songs, these are short stories. She Remembers Everything is a collection of miniatures that collectively paint a vivid, haunting portrait of the blessings and bruises of life. | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Blue Note | November 10, 2018 | 7.6 | 608714a3-9646-4043-a4f1-ba6e54fb4936 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
A new reissue highlights Vini Reilly’s 1998 turn towards pop, a less explored period of the guitarist’s long career as the forward-looking post-punk outfit the Durutti Column. | A new reissue highlights Vini Reilly’s 1998 turn towards pop, a less explored period of the guitarist’s long career as the forward-looking post-punk outfit the Durutti Column. | The Durutti Column: Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-durutti-column-time-was-gigantic-when-we-were-kids/ | Time Was Gigantic... When We Were Kids | The Durutti Column’s 1980 debut album—confusingly titled The Return of the Durutti Column—originally came packaged in a sandpaper sleeve, a detail that couldn’t have been more at odds with the music inside. The sandpaper was a Situationist prank dreamed up in part by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, who signed the group to his label, but there was nothing abrasive about the sound of the record, which set Vini Reilly’s quicksilver guitar melodies against Martin Hannett’s ghostly atmospheres and spare electronic production.
Although it had begun as a full-band effort—contributing two songs on 1978’s A Factory Sample EP, alongside Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire—the Durutti Column was in effect the solo project of Reilly. Twenty-six years old when he released his debut, he had been playing guitar for 15 years and studying nearly as long, and after a brief stint crunching power chords in a Manchester band called Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, he bought a £12 acoustic guitar and unlearned everything that punk had taught him, fashioning an idiosyncratic style out of bits and pieces of jazz, classical, blues, and flamenco.
Led by his own quixotic impulses, Reilly developed a singular style across dozens of albums released over the following decades. The essence of his sound is his tone: at once liquid and crystalline, and touched by quick, nervous vibrato, like a dewdrop quivering on a blade of grass. Combining expressive phrases with unusual voicings and unpredictable chord changes, his playing often has an almost discursive quality, as though he had transcribed the cadences of speech for his six-stringed instrument.
Reilly, who suffered a series of strokes in 2010 that left him unable to play, was never a particularly famous figure, but his 1980s albums frequently landed in the Top 10 of the UK independent charts, and over the years he amassed significant fans: John Frusciante reportedly called him “the greatest guitarist in the world.” It’s hard to overstate Reilly’s influence in the 1980s and ’90s, even as he swam against the current. He opted for a clean signal when distortion was de rigueur, and jazzy harmonies when barre chords were standard; he displayed virtuoso talent in an era when many of his post-punk peers were picking up their instruments for the first time. Year after year, the Durutti Column’s music—patient, reserved, catlike—appears more prescient. Today we would call it dream pop, but back then, there was no name for his sui generis brand of largely instrumental, quasi-ambient avant-pop. “Call it new music, but not radical or unpleasant,” Reilly said, with characteristic wryness.
Even as Reilly’s tone retained its unique character, his music evolved in significant ways over the years. Moving on from his minimalist origins, he folded in harp, strings, and cor anglais before experimenting with drum machines and samplers. Some of the vocal loops on 1989’s Vini Reilly anticipate Moby’s Play, while 1990’s Obey the Time was in conversation with acid house. By 1996’s Fidelity, he was citing the influence of UK rave duo Orbital. With 1998’s Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids—newly remastered and reissued with five additional songs—Reilly made a subtle but unmistakable shift toward pop music, due in large part to the vocal contributions of a singer named Eley Rudge.
This wasn’t the first time Reilly worked with vocals. Though The Return of the Durutti Column was entirely instrumental, he began singing with 1981’s LC, and his warmly mopey murmur became a frequent feature of his albums. (In his memoir 24 Hour Party People, Wilson jokes that he tried to persuade Reilly to stop singing, but “failed miserably.”) Guest vocalists became commonplace on Durutti albums beginning with 1987’s The Guitar and Other Machines, and Rudge turned up on two songs on 1996’s Fidelity. But Time Was Gigantic feels like a showcase for her singing, prominently featuring her on six of 11 songs.
On the opening “Organ Donor,” Rudge seems a perfect foil for Reilly’s playing, which piles up in sparkling layers. She has a dulcet tone, and she pursues a sing-songy melodic line that complements his own harmonic voicings without overpowering them. In its blissful tone and mood, the song feels like a response to the gossamer pop of the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, released eight years prior. But Rudge’s other appearances on the album are a mixed bag. Her tone is frequently so sweet that it comes off as cloying; her melodic choices suggest a less bluesy Edie Brickell or a less breathy Harriet Wheeler, of the Sundays. Where Reilly’s playing is mercurial, she’s one-note; while he slides effortlessly over the fretboard, her vocal tics sound affected. She’s not a bad singer, but she’s conventional in a way that doesn’t suit the subtleties of Reilly’s playing. It doesn’t help that the lyrics gravitate toward rote rhymes and facile sentiments (“Let’s make love again/Just one more time/I’ll be yours/You’ll be mine”). Her singing has the distinct air of a ’90s coffeehouse.
Fortunately, Time Was Gigantic remains a more nuanced and exploratory album than Rudge’s lead vocals might suggest. The instrumental “Pigeon” is cool and dusky, Reilly’s multi-tracked guitar trailing long strings of echo behind. In “Twenty Trees,” Reilly takes the mic, and his voice—although buried in the mix, as usual—is warm and reassuring, intimate in its fragility. It’s an unusual song for the Durutti Column, swollen with string synths and a looping tabla rhythm; the guitar is relegated to a silvery filigree. Tabla also figures prominently on “I B Yours,” its rippling patterns mirrored in Reilly’s quick-fingered runs. And on “For Rachel,” he mixes together a trip-hop beat with contrapuntal guitar lines, one flamenco-inspired and the other vaguely West African, along with choral loops and what might be a vocoder. It may lack the grace of his early work, but it’s gratifying to hear him experimenting like this, seeking out new applications for his familiar guitar tone.
Five previously unreleased bonus tracks mostly break with the album’s mood. “Kiss of Def” is a thundering drum’n’bass remix of album cut “My Last Kiss”; “New Order Tribute” is a synthy, squelchy homage to his erstwhile labelmates that he banged out “for fun” in 90 minutes, according to the liner notes. Perhaps the most intriguing bonus cut is the 94-second “It’s Your Life, Babe”—an almost entirely atmospheric track with an unmistakably Lynchian cast featuring ghostly, operatic singing from Ruth-Ann Boyle, who also appeared on 1994’s Sex & Death. Hearing this sketch, it’s tempting to wonder what Reilly might have done had his fascination with Orbital led him in a more explicitly ambient direction. It’s those hints of possible futures that make Time Was Gigantic worthwhile, if not the ideal starting point. Reilly’s fractal spirals of notes always suggested overgrown gardens of forking paths; his catalog is so rich, his ideas so engrossing, that even the detours and dead ends make for rewarding wandering. | 2023-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | London | July 1, 2023 | 6.9 | 6088e949-c95f-44ac-918c-26ac7734acb9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The buzzing rapper’s debut mixtape is an easygoing 40 minutes of sugary trap and mellow, blissfully hazy vibe-music that runs with the sounds of the moment without advancing them much. | The buzzing rapper’s debut mixtape is an easygoing 40 minutes of sugary trap and mellow, blissfully hazy vibe-music that runs with the sounds of the moment without advancing them much. | Lil Skies: Life of a Dark Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-skies-life-of-a-dark-rose/ | Life of a Dark Rose | This winter, the buzzing 19-year-old rapper Lil Skies broke down the first verse of one of his 2017 SoundCloud hits, “Signs of Jealousy” in a video that plays a bit like a comedy sketch. For six minutes, the chatty rapper talks in circles as he enthusiastically footnotes a verse that isn’t exactly loaded with cryptic subtext. The line, “First place when I finish the race,” he explains, means “basically, like, I’m just coming in first,” for instance. If anything, he reveals that his lyrics may actually have less meaning than they appear to have on the surface. At one point, he admits that he doesn’t know what an Uncle Tom is, so for him, the term just signifies an old, cranky uncle—a hater, basically.
Lil Skies is grinning the whole time, so it’s hard to tell if he fully appreciates the absurdity of the exercise. He’s so charming and such a good sport about it, though, that you want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Consider the video a litmus test for his music: Either you’re drawn in by his considerable charisma, or flabbergasted by the inanity of half of what comes out of his mouth. Like so many zeitgeist-chasing rappers in his age bracket right now, he invites hard opinions.
It’s lucky that Skies has charisma to spare, because he won’t wow anybody with his originality. He adheres to a “look the part, be the part” mentality, styling himself after SoundCloud rap’s preferred uniform of dreadlocks and face tattoos that may as well read RIYL: Lil Uzi Vert. “I got tattoos on my face, I use that shit as motivation/I can never get a job so for my dream I’m dedicated,” he raps on the opening track of his debut mixtape Life of a Dark Rose, an easygoing 40 minutes of sugary trap and mellow, blissfully hazy vibe music that runs with the sounds of the moment without advancing them much.
Skies doesn’t try to outdo his flashier peers. He isn’t as radical as Lil Pump, a far less competent rapper who makes up for his limitations with raw energy, and although he sings about being a rock star, he doesn’t act the part like Lil Yachty. What he does bring to the table, though, is an agreeable demeanor and a pleasant, sticky-sweet singing voice with shades of Swae Lee, which he’s comfortable enough with to forgo the Auto-Tune that makes so much of this music bleed together. Leaving his voice naked is his smartest and most distinguishing aesthetic choice. It lets Dark Rose breathe in a way most mixtapes in this lane don’t.
The whole project goes down easy, although it only periodically makes good on the promise of its flagship single “Red Roses.” That’s the track where Skies’ melodious flow matches with a perfectly woozy beat and everything clicks (it’s also got the tape’s most Teflon hook: “I got all the drugs in the world that you need/We get high to pass the time, but bitch I ain’t no fiend.”) Only a handful of songs come close to capturing that rush, including “Signs of Jealousy,” another track with the plush ambiance of an opium den, and “The Clique,” a daffy number with more than a trace of Playboi Carti in it. A few more of their caliber could have turned the tape into something genuinely notable, but at least its second-tier material is agreeable enough. Even when Skies isn’t saying much—and he’s rarely saying much—he sounds good doing it. | 2018-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | All We Got Ent / Atlantic | January 15, 2018 | 6.4 | 6089d589-c9d1-458a-9ae6-f1508d76f73b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
After a five-year hiatus that's been described as something of a fact-finding mission for their true identity, Alec Ounsworth and co.'s third album casts them as the very thing their detractors claimed them to be so long ago. | After a five-year hiatus that's been described as something of a fact-finding mission for their true identity, Alec Ounsworth and co.'s third album casts them as the very thing their detractors claimed them to be so long ago. | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Hysterical | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15805-hysterical/ | Hysterical | The majority of unsigned bands never have their failure to upend the music industry held against them, but... you already know the deal with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The excitement surrounding their 2005 self-titled debut and its DIY success was certainly warranted, but two years later, blogs were still grasping at straws for the sake of "firsties," bands still wanted to get signed, and CYHSY's wildly uneven follow-up Some Loud Thunder all but acknowledged its impending backlash as a given. It was an alternately awkward and rewarding record, but at the very least, a heartening show of artistic gumption in light of hype-bubble peers such as Sound Team, Birdmonster, and Voxtrot essentially turning tail upon encountering the slightest bit of real scrutiny. And yet, after a five-year, self-imposed hiatus that's been described as something of a fact-finding mission for their true identity, Hysterical freely casts Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as the very thing their detractors inaccurately claimed them to be so long ago: a band whose story is the most interesting thing about them.
Truth is, Hysterical feels self-conscious from the moment you press play. In that inimitable avian squawk of his, Alec Ounsworth crows, "we'll make the same mistakes," and it's hard not to see it as winking irony since they're doing the exact opposite: Unlike their previous two records, Hysterical's opener doesn't boast some sort of abrasive production tactic meant to trigger instant buyer's remorse. In fact, "Same Mistake" actually sounds fantastic and emphasizes the elements of their sneaky anthemic streak-- Ounsworth's broad vocal strokes, a brisk rhythm of splashy, 16th-note hi-hats and insistently strummed guitars, all coated in a wash of synthesized strings that soothes like aftershave. It's instantly likeable, it can also just as easily be tuned out completely, and there are 11 others of its kind here.
As hard as it is to believe that anything featuring a vocalist of Ounsworth's piercing timbre can be considered background music, Hysterical is almost hypnotic in its unerring consistency. You hire John Congleton as a producer, and you're all but guaranteed to sound amazing, but compared to his some of his well-known charges (St. Vincent, Bill Callahan, Shearwater), CYHSY work within a far narrower range of dynamics, tone, tempo, and instrumentation-- they sound like a more high-rent version of themselves, revealing how much ramshackle charm played a part in their debut, and that even the most jarring experiments from Some Loud Thunder were for their own good. If you've got a jones for no-qualifiers-necessary indie rock ca. 2005, you can get a proper fix from the title track, "Idiot", and "Yesterday, Never", where snares snap in double time, chords resolve in the most predictable fashion, and Ounsworth's melodies stride and stutter-step through familiar patterns. Still, it's tough to tell whether they impress on their own merits or whether they obtain some sort of halo effect due to their hard proximity to "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth".
So you're left to grasp for trimming: the horn charts on "Maniac" that shed Hysterical's rhythmic straitjacket and hearken to Ounsworth's New Orleans fetish from Mo Beauty, the humid Mellotron strings and puzzling melody on the lonely "In a Motel", the gnarled guitar that corkscrews it way through the middle of "Into Your Alien Arms". But if you cut Hysterical, what does it bleed? At the very least, you'd think "Ketamine and Ecstasy" or "Misspent Youth" would offer some sort of insight based on titles alone, and judging by a teasing Eurythmics quote or a stray line about "trading sex for drugs," maybe they do. But the words themselves rarely linger for effect, instead getting smeared over by Ounsworth's oily melismatics and distended diction.
Look, even those who fell hard for "In This Home on Ice" or "Is This Love?" wouldn't be too surprised by the way things would turn out by 2011-- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah may have a confrontational edge about them, but outside of straight-up indie rock, they're not the types you'd confuse for firebrands. The disappointment is in how it sounds like their years apart have needlessly chastened them into fast-forwarding through the idiosyncratic streak they showed on Some Loud Thunder instead of embracing it, coming out of the wilderness only to end up smack dab in the middle of the road. | 2011-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 15, 2011 | 5.6 | 608a0d5a-7ce5-4bba-a088-a12df2dc65b7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This Michigan-based noise trio has risen to notoriety over the past few years not just as Sonic Youth's attention-getting opening act of choice, but on the strength of their wildly divisive, abrasive, and in fact, downright excruciating full-lengths. Burned Mind, the group's Sub Pop debut, is among the most visceral, caustic records you're likely to hear all year. What we're saying is, the underground has a new Merzbow. | This Michigan-based noise trio has risen to notoriety over the past few years not just as Sonic Youth's attention-getting opening act of choice, but on the strength of their wildly divisive, abrasive, and in fact, downright excruciating full-lengths. Burned Mind, the group's Sub Pop debut, is among the most visceral, caustic records you're likely to hear all year. What we're saying is, the underground has a new Merzbow. | Wolf Eyes: Burned Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8730-burned-mind/ | Burned Mind | Music should not make you want to die. If a record ever successfully achieved such an effect, my sincere hope is that it would be summarily taken off the market and marked for burial at a nuclear waste site. But while few bands are truly capable of inducing such crisis, an unprepared listener's response to abstract, texture-based noise music, like that of Wolf Eyes, will often run something like this:
"This makes me want to kill myself."
With songs like "Burn Your House Down" and "Let the Smoke Rise", Wolf Eyes have doubtless left many craving a fistful of aspirin and a glass of water, but these Michigan noisters' brazen electro-industrial soundscapes have yet to provoke any suicides. Dauntingly abrasive, yes; spiritually violating, no: Wolf Eyes are hyperbole-inducing provocateurs whose scalding compositions never fail to get a rise out of unsuspecting bystanders. And that's part of what makes them so appealing/appalling.
Which raises the inevitable cynical question: Do Wolf Eyes have any actual fans, or just the ever-fickle appreciators, grazers, and gimmick seekers?
This collection has been likened to an art project, and that's an unjust charge. Burned Mind doesn't belong in a museum (where it may well garner glowing reviews), though it does answer to the trove of obnoxious descriptors typically foisted upon music of its stripe: dense, abstract, challenging, and confrontational. But more often than not, Wolf Eyes are on your side: Enlist them to kick your meek ass, and they're happy to oblige. The mesmeric, chainsaw guitar rips of "Reaper's Gong" are nothing if not galvanizing, while the plodding saw-synth tsunami of "Stabbed in the Face" is downright debilitating.
Songs like this might make some want to harm themselves, but can for others offer a quick syringe of adrenaline, or provoke a meditative look inward at a dark stratum of emotions, chief among them frustration, anger, and an overwhelming sense of imminent peril. In fact, much of Burned Mind sounds as if it were scored for a late-21st century update of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the villain is actually an indefatigable android gone haywire.
The opening 45 seconds of "Dead in a Boat" may suggest a quieter, less volatile beast than was present on previous records like Dead Hills and Slicer, but those notions are quickly dispelled as the silence is broken by a wave of electronic squall. The introduction grows more misleading with the next track, "Stabbed in the Face", which features a looped female scream over a heady milieu of feedback and grating pitch-bends. One of the most uncompromisingly and mesmerically abrasive tracks in recent memory, it's easily Burned Mind's crown jewel, and a serviceable mission statement for a band who explore noise not for gimmickry or shock-value, but because that's the mode in which they express themselves best.
This is by far Wolf Eyes' most visceral release to date. The masochistic appeal of stertorous noise and the comely allure of pop music are one in the same: Burned Mind, like any pop album worth its salt, conjures a deeper realm of images and moods beyond its surface qualities. Beneath the shock value of these overwhelming sonic miasmas are unambiguous aural parables about a world gone awry, and technology is held as the main culprit. Song titles like "Dead in a Boat", "Urine Burn", and "Black Vomit" are just façades (if not entirely inaccurate ones), indicative of the arid landscapes of human squalor and degradation stretching open behind. The rusty swingset shrieks of the interminable title track evoke images of spiritless machinery at work, as the band pummel with an admirable dearth of humanity.
Superficially, there's only so much that can be said about Burned Mind that hasn't already been belabored into irrelevance and bought Wolf Eyes curt dismissals. Of course, their style is, to a degree, old news; there are manifold precedents for this breed of unrelenting stridency, dating back to Lou Reed's infamous Metal Music Machine. Throbbing Gristle took a similar stance against technology and industry in the 1970s, and their influence is certainly echoed here. If Wolf Eyes stand out from the legacy of doomsayers that includes Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, Whitehouse, and more recently Yellow Swans, it's because they're impressively, expertly abrasive. The shear inertia of these songs is sufficient to make most self-styled hardcore kids recoil in terror. Burned Mind, better than any recent album I can think of, betrays music's implied purpose of providing an enjoyable aural experience, while at the same time being psychologically compelling and richly imagistic enough to invite repeat listens. | 2004-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sub Pop | September 30, 2004 | 8 | 608a0f25-e1a1-4c70-849a-e13f195bc35b | Pitchfork | null |
|
The superstar’s eleventh studio album pairs her with famous friends ranging from Stevie Nicks to St. Vincent. | The superstar’s eleventh studio album pairs her with famous friends ranging from Stevie Nicks to St. Vincent. | Sheryl Crow: Threads | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheryl-crow-threads/ | Threads | Sheryl Crow’s first two albums were to ’90s kids what Anita Baker’s Rapture and Paul Simon’s Graceland were to their siblings a decade earlier: minivan mainstays blasted by parents aging out of their misspent youth. Raucous within limits, sardonic without blurring into cruelty, Tuesday Night Music Club (1993) and Sheryl Crow (1996) buried sly experimental touches and an encyclopedia’s worth of classic rock knowledge under a radio-ready sheen thick enough to survive heavy rotation. Sheryl Crow, her first self-produced album, threw together Wurlitzers and Neil Finn, Penny-Owsley pianos and the Attractions’ Pete Thomas—it was all good to Crow, master of ecumenical mom rock.
In other words, Sheryl Crow has always gotten by with a little help from her famous friends; she once billed a live album Sheryl Crow and Friends. On her eleventh studio album Threads, she summons another phalanx of luminaries, the lot of them pledging their troth to the SoCal ideal, the ’60s’ most persistent legacy. Inspired and incongruous juxtapositions abound. Stevie Nicks and Maren Morris? Right on. But Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples? What about Crow and—get this—St. Vincent? Years with little to prove have muffled Crow’s ear for cool new sounds, hence the preponderance of songs with chords and lyrics generic enough to support, well, Maren Morris and Stevie Nicks. Nonetheless, Threads makes an admirable case for the continued survival of “L.A” as synecdoche and pension plan.
The remakes comprise the album’s least compelling section. Thumbs up for choosing relative Boomer obscurities like George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” and Bob Dylan’s “Everything Is Broken.” But “Darkness” is little more than an excuse for an extended jam session with Eric Clapton, Brandi Carlisle, and Sting, and Jason Isbell sounds like an aide escorted him to a mic at knifepoint on “Everything Is Broken.” A bigger problem is that Crow is incapable of projecting unease. Accepting romantic entanglements with a quip—that’s the Sheryl we love, the songwriter who flashes the line “you’re my favorite mistake” like an épée. The wry Keith Richards-sung Stones number “The Worst” and Kris Kristofferson’s ramblin’ anthem “Border Lord” are better fits.
News alerts on Crow’s smartphone inspire the most atypical collaborations. A gesture of noblesse oblige called “The Story of Everything” depicts a world where “troubled souls” walk into churches and “gun everyone down” while Chuck D and Andra Day huff and puff over Gary Clark Jr.’s axmanship and a clattering rhythm track. The not-funk complements the determination to avoid offense. Better is “Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” about a topic she has insight into: moneygrubbers. Apparently St. Vincent in 2019 is Eurythmics’ David Stewart in 1985: superproducer for stars who want a dollop of her coolness and just enough of her discreetly mad studio modernizations. Nevertheless, the track works. St. Vincent and longtime Crow collaborator Jeff Trott trade increasingly scabrous licks over a more convincing Crow rap than Chuck D’s.
Besotted with harmony as an end in itself, Crow wheedles animated performances from Vince Gill (“For the Sake of Love”) and James Taylor (“Flying Blind”). If they need material for their own albums, I hope they keep her contact info. Same goes for Joe Walsh, briefly recapturing the careening essence of the James Gang on the on-the-nose “Still the Good Old Days”—why wasn’t he paired with St. Vincent? Threads’ most poignant moment demonstrates what imagination and thousands of dollars of craft can accomplish. A series of renunciations spun as affirmations, “Don’t” presents Crow at her piano, still chewing on the bite-sized ironies of “My Favorite Mistake.” Lucius’ backup vocals shadow her, seizing the title by turns desperately and threateningly. She’s together and alone, as much a truth for insiders as the rest of us.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | The Valory Music Co. | September 3, 2019 | 6.3 | 60947c8d-54fe-47c8-8702-0396d3b77487 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
On his debut album, the standard-bearer of the sad-rap movement refuses to reveal much in the way of emotion at all, aside from a kind of sullen, conflicted defiance. | On his debut album, the standard-bearer of the sad-rap movement refuses to reveal much in the way of emotion at all, aside from a kind of sullen, conflicted defiance. | Lil Xan: Total Xanarchy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-xan-total-xanarchy/ | Total Xanarchy | In the annals of the Least Hip-Hop Shit Ever Documented, the headline “Lil Xan Flees Angry Tupac Fans… Cop Keeps Him Safe” is up there. If you didn’t know Xan from “Betrayed,” a red-eyed anthem for breaking up with benzos that last year cracked the Hot 100, your introduction to the 21-year-old may well have been from the recent “controversy” following his proclamation of Tupac’s music as boring in a deeply useless bit of video content. Boy, did that make folks mad—Waka Flocka, Michael Rapaport—though for whatever it’s worth, a small piece of context seemed to get lost in the mix. The video called for the rapper to rank subjects specifically in terms of “clout” on a scale from one to nine, a proposition that strikes me as far more idiotic than Xan’s answers themselves. For comparison’s sake: Kush, according to Xan, is a hard nine on the clout scale; face tattoos are an eight (because “they’re cool and all, but too many people are getting them nowadays”); and Xanax bars, in a Shyamalan-esque twist, have a clout level of zero. Tupac is clout level two.
To all of which I say: Who cares? It’s a little too tempting to dunk on Lil Xan and his Xanarchy crew—one member of which you may know for the Anne Frank tattoo covering the right half of his face, affectionately dubbed “Xan Frank”—for reasons that might reveal more about the listener’s false hopes as to what this stuff is supposed to be, and for whom, than what it actually is. And yes, this is a young man named after a prescription tranquilizer who makes sold-out theaters chant “I like lean, I like drugs, I like beans, I got plugs”; yes, he looks like a streetwear-swaddled cherub fallen out of heaven and directly upon hard times. There is certainly that.
But Xan opens his debut album, Total Xanarchy, with a sing-song proclamation—“Xans don’t make me what I am, Xans gon’ mess up all my friends”—and that complicates things. That song, “Who I Am,” is of the “XO Tour Llif3” school of rap that presents incredibly bleak scenes with startling casualness: “The only friend I have is time/The only friend I had just died,” Xan raps later, in the cadence of a nursery rhyme. “Betrayed,” his biggest hit and the reason why this album exists, is the same deal: Over a Bobby Johnson beat somewhere between Noah “40” Shebib and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, a miserable-sounding Xan rejects his namesake. He’s said he recorded the song during the final days of his years-long Xanax addiction, the fallout of a prescription to treat his extreme anxiety. Art-wise, maybe it’s not the kind of thing that outlasts the fall of empires. But when he dispassionately chants “Xans gon’ betray you,” someone needed to hear that—a lot of someones, if the proof is in the play count.
Thanks to “Betrayed,” Lil Xan got billed early on as part of a wave of sad rap, or emo rap, popularized by guys like the late Lil Peep. But most of Total Xanarchy does not feel “sad,” exactly; in fact, save for a suite of melancholy and fairly poignant Bobby Johnson collaborations towards the end, it’s hard to detect any particular emotion at all. Instead, we get a whole lot of Cool SoundCloud Rapper posturing delivered in a comatose flatline that is perhaps thematically appropriate but a bummer all the same: “I fuh dat bih, yea,” he reminds us on “The Man,” in case the nuances of his Twitter handle (@lilxanfuhyobih) did not fully sink in. Flows are borrowed with a heavy hand. Charli XCX shows up to do her depraved femmebot thing on “Moonlight,” a cloud-rap/folktronica crossover that is, if not good, at least interesting, like a Caribou song with clout goggles. “Sauce for the young niggas and all of my white fans,” 2 Chainz raps on “Tick Tock,” clearly aware of the “How do you do, fellow kids?”-ness of all of it.
Which, of course, is probably the point: If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24); on “Saved by the Bell,” a “Citgo” descendent on which Xan manages to pronounce the titular phrase using only two consonants, he raps, “Fuck them teachers, fuck suspensions, fuck detention.” And though many of the songs themselves feel hollow, I find myself struck by the idea of a character who is profoundly conflicted by the identity that made him famous, living in a world in which the thing people want from you is precisely what you hate about yourself. In recent months, Xan’s promoted what he’s calling the anti-Xan movement. At some point, he hopes to be known by his first name, Diego. By then, perhaps Total Xanarchy will be a mile-marker of a moment someone thought they had themselves all figured out. | 2018-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | April 11, 2018 | 4.7 | 6099db0f-1d7d-4bce-872b-9686a7b0b1e4 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Blank Face LP is a collection of catchy, urgent gangsta rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core. | Blank Face LP is a collection of catchy, urgent gangsta rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core. | Schoolboy Q: Blank Face LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22094-blank-face-lp/ | Blank Face LP | “Music-wise right now, I suck.”
In 2014, Schoolboy Q bluntly described his difficulty staying off lean, and what the drug had done to his art and personal life. He told radio personality Angie Martinez that he’d managed to keep it at arm’s length while recording his major label debut, Oxymoron, but that as soon as the album was done, he’d had something of a relapse.
Listening to the album though, you suspected that Q may have been dabbling before the record was mixed. Lean leads to bloat, and while Oxymoron featured plenty of memorable moments, it had too much empty material to fully capitalize on the promise of the rapper’s snarling sophomore album, Habits & Contradictions.Q’s enormous personality had been downsized, his sharp edges smoothed, his straight-talking iconoclasm receding into rote gangsterisms. So while Oxymoron was received positively upon release, enthusiasm soon dwindled for the record and for the rapper once thought by many to be the slyer, less-earnest equal of his TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar.
Two years later, Quincy Matthew Hanley says he’s no longer addicted. He’s lost 30 pounds and with his second album for Interscope, Blank Face, he’s returned to the trajectory that had him looking like the yin to Kendrick’s yang. Q’s unpredictable flow, as likely to morph into a bizarrely appealing sing-song melody as it is to shift to sneering double-time, has returned. With it comes a collection of catchy, urgent gangster rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core.
The new record is loaded with features, a warning sign of scattershot focus on most major label albums. But Q’s voice holds the center of nearly every track on Blank Face. Anderson .Paak, rap’s scene stealer of the year to date, is compelling as ever on the album’s title track, but it’s Quincy who grounds the narrative, his spoken-word verses painting a past on Hoover Street and a future with the daughter he refers to as both a munchkin and a queen. Kanye West and Vince Staples, two of the biggest personalities in hip-hop, trade bars with Q without overshadowing him, and the songs on which they’re featured, “That Part” and “Ride Out,” are standouts that nonetheless fit seamlessly into the course of the record as a whole. (Miguel is the only exception to the rule of polite guests: His smooth hook and Q’s sandpaper verses repel each other on the late-album misfire, “Overtime.”)
We’re accustomed to seeing concept albums from TDE, but Blank Face strays from the polemic, reaching instead for portraiture. Q’s verses are built from concrete details and raw emotion, and his flexibility is such that he’s able to channel two seemingly conflicting emotions into a single verse. His bitterness will be palpable, one moment; in the next, pride shines through. “Guess I’m being a real n---a like I’m ’posed to be,” he raps on “Lord Have Mercy.” “But bein’ real never once bought the groceries.” Then, in the span of a couple bars: “Hope was all that I needed/dreaming myself to work. The working affair was better than bullet holes in my shirt.”
Tracks like “Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane,” which was produced in part by TDE producer and frequent Q collaborator, Tae Beast, signal a return to the collective’s house sound. Blank Face turns away from the ambitious fusion of To Pimp a Butterfly, instead doubling down on a smoked-out atmosphere that points the listener’s focus toward rapping. That puts the onus on Q to hold attention for the duration of the record’s hour-plus running time, and he does so with a wide array of tricks, lacing his bars with tone and tempo shifts, a melodicism reminiscent of a young 50 Cent, and ad-libs worthy of Jadakiss, whose signature growling delivery and descriptions of Tony Soprano–esque nihilism provide a thrill on the back half of the track (the first part of which was released as a single without Jada in April.)
Schoolboy Q’s resemblance to those stars—both of whom flamed out to some degree as the commercial and creative center shifted away from gangster rap—is natural. Unlike Drake, or Future and Young Thug, Q’s music doesn’t represent a definitive break with the past. Instead, he symbolizes something of a road not taken, a gangster rapper with the personality and pop instincts to translate an antiquated genre for younger listeners, something like YG’s work with DJ Mustard. Q’s early hits, “Hands on the Wheel” and “There He Go,” were classic rap songs with pop appeal, and Q continues to ably tread that tightrope on Blank Face, with tracks like the E-40 feature “Dope Dealer” and “Whateva U Want,” which somehow makes a trance beat work.
But it’s Q’s reemergence as a distinctive voice that makes Blank Face so welcome. Quincy isn’t the preaching type, but he’s a careful observer both of his own tendencies and those of the world he occupies. Bluster and braggadocio are traditions in rap, but while Q spews plenty of both, he also has a penchant for telling it like it is. In our current political moment, that makes some of the songs on Blank Face particularly unforgettable. “Black Thoughts” features some of the most moving production from TDE familiar Willie B, as Schoolboy Q raps the blues: “On gangster Crip, my papa was a bitch/Left me where hope just don’t exist.” It’s one of many points on the record where Q casts something like a documentary eye on his own surroundings.
In the early morning on July 7, Q tweeted out four bars from “Neva Change,” the blistering centerpiece of Blank Face: “You see them lights get behind us/They pull me out for my priors/Won’t let me freeze ’fore they fire/You say that footage a liar.” The song was most likely recorded months prior. But hours after Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer while reaching for his license and the aftermath of the encounter was watched by millions, the rapper’s words were more timely than most reporting. | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment / Interscope | July 14, 2016 | 8.3 | 609a146e-08df-4049-9dd3-546e77769a97 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The Brooklyn band’s second record is bigger and darker, amplifying their ’80s new-wave sparkle into ecstatic triumph. | The Brooklyn band’s second record is bigger and darker, amplifying their ’80s new-wave sparkle into ecstatic triumph. | Charly Bliss: Young Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charly-bliss-young-enough/ | Young Enough | Darkness is always bubbling beneath Charly Bliss. On their 2017 debut Guppy, the Brooklyn band—singer and guitarist Eva Hendricks, her brother and drummer Sam, guitarist Spencer Fox, and bassist Dan Shure—offered a bundle of off-kilter confessionals that were at once sneering and vulnerable. Over blasts of power pop, Hendricks celebrated the death of a lover’s beloved pet, gazed at a boyfriend’s new partner like “softcore porn,” and gleefully admitted that her conscience was “fucked.” The effect was buoyant and campy, an unapologetically complex portrait of femininity.
While it retains its predecessor’s spirit and attitude, Charly Bliss’ second record, Young Enough, takes a bit of a chill pill. Guppy buried traces of electro-pop beneath grunge fuzz, and Young Enough amplifies that ’80s new-wave sparkle into ecstatic triumph. It’s nothing new for young bands to trade their scrappy rock origins for a glossy sheen—just look to Hendricks family favorites Blondie. It’s also not uncommon for bands to lose their lyrical sincerity within a newfound over-produced sound. On Young Enough, Charly Bliss walk this thin line gracefully.
Opener “Blown to Bits” builds off a sharp buzz of synth as Hendricks’ voice grows increasingly Auto-Tuned, dropping references to Cole Porter musicals, Rilo Kiley, and reality television. “Capacity” bursts with eclectic flourishes, from cavernous drum fissures to the metallic sheen of a guitar synth pedal, a maximalist approach that Hendricks phrases explicitly: “I’m at capacity, I’m spilling out of me!” The band allows all these textures to steep, and when the bridge finally arrives—“I was raised an East Coast witch like/Doing nothing’s sacrilegious/Triple overtime ambitious/Sentimental, anxious kid”—it feels like an epiphany rather than an outburst.
Charly Bliss’ embrace of synth glitz does little to disguise Young Enough’s heaviness. Hendricks scrutinizes her present through the lens of her past, reclaiming pain and prioritizing her own happiness. “I’m fucking joy and I hemorrhage light,” Hendricks shouts on “Bleach,” her voice tart like she’s sucking on a WarHead. “He can destroy everything that I like!”
The transformation of trauma to catharsis reaches its apex near the album’s end with “Chatroom.” Underneath its bubblegum euphoria, the lyrics tell of an abusive ex, violence, and betrayal. “Wasted my summer slapping my face, well/I wanna see you stripped down, naked,” Hendricks taunts, her steady voice barely masking a trace of vengeful relish. But “Chatroom” fuses pop and pain into joyful release. Its spiritual companion, “Hard to Believe,” takes a similar approach, elevating Hendricks’ emotional conflict with high-velocity riffs. “Hurt Me,” on the other hand, is the band’s most somber song yet, a synth-driven number that pushes Hendricks to the emotional brink as she pleads, “You don’t want to hurt me, baby.” Charly Bliss have never sounded so simultaneously restrained and desperate. Hendricks’ voice hardly wavers as her bandmates underline the confrontation with surges of electricity.
On intense moments like these, the razor-sharp wit Hendricks flashed on Guppy is polished into something more meditative. Though her writing is still deliriously idiosyncratic (“I’ll occupy your nation, fool!” she declares on “Under You”), she seems more comfortable letting vulnerable revelations stand on their own, rather than downplaying them with a manic laugh. As such, her storytelling has become more abstract. “Eyes like a funeral, mouth like a bruise/Veins like a hallway, voice like a wound,” she belts on “Hurt Me,” painting a figure that bleeds like watercolors past the edges.
These stirring lines are made all the more immediate by the euphoric melodies carrying them. The band recorded the breakneck Guppy twice, but on this album, which was made in considerably less time, they sound patient even when they’re chasing a gigantic chorus. Building off a simple guitar note, the record’s slow-burning title track is perhaps the band’s greatest accomplishment yet. The band converges around Fox’s guitar line, slowly assembling something that is—to steal their phrase—“astronomically huge” and joyful. As Hendricks recalls vignettes of warmly lit homes, bloody feet on icy sidewalks, and crushed cigarettes, she acknowledges the masochistic naivete of teenage romance: “We’re young enough/To believe it should hurt this much.” It’s an elemental concept that Charly Bliss set aflame. | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | May 13, 2019 | 8 | 60a32151-172b-42b5-bd63-3a8565c437ad | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Erstwhile hip-hop beatmaker Lee Bannon fully embraces ambient music’s conventions on an album that shifts between placid states and disquiet. | Erstwhile hip-hop beatmaker Lee Bannon fully embraces ambient music’s conventions on an album that shifts between placid states and disquiet. | Dedekind Cut: Tahoe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dedekind-cut-tahoe/ | Tahoe | While producer Lee Bannon made a name for himself with East Coast rappers like Big Shug, Inspectah Deck, and Joey Bada$$ and the Pro Era crew, along the way the artist also known as Fred Warmsley began to drift into abstraction. The tracks he started making as Dedekind Cut put him at an even further remove from his hip-hop heritage, and he mingled with unslottable artists including Rabit, Chino Amobi, Yves Tumor, and noise overlord Dominick Fernow on 2016’s intense $uccessor.
For his debut on the esteemed Kranky label, Tahoe finds the Sacramento native not only returning to the West Coast but also fully pivoting to ambient music. While a noir twang ran through his recent mixtape as Barrio Sur, Tahoe wholly embraces the conventions of the genre. Opening tracks “Equity” and “The Crossing Guard” are so hushed that, if heard as the soundtrack for your morning commute, they dissolve almost completely into the daily noise. Quieter surroundings are required to really hear Bannon in motion.
The slow, murky, 10-minute spiral of “The Crossing Guard” brings to mind the mournful undertow—if not the actual decaying sound—of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, with a gentle bath of white noise rising and receding at the periphery. Those accustomed to Bannon’s approach on previous releases may find themselves waiting in vain for a noise to disrupt the calm, as he plays it relatively straight. The same goes for the title track, an elegant heave of orchestral strings and water sounds that move him closer to the likes of GAS, as well as the melancholic “De-Civilization,” which brings to mind Eduard Artemiev’s soundtrack for Solaris.
Tahoe only starts to perk up and run counter to expectations with “MMXIX,” an epic, nine-minute track that utilizes all manner of ambient tropes and then upends them. Pan pipes, reverberated piano, nimble Windham Hill fingerpicking, celestial choirs, and water sounds all gush forth in the dizzying first minute before Bannon slowly peels back all the layers and returns to a placid state. Keys that hark back to new-age grandfather Steven Halpern shimmer, as does the unmistakable deep buzz of Tuvan throat singing, a sound utilized most famously on the KLF’s Chill Out. Using it here, Bannon injects a sense of disquiet. As the glistening sounds of water, birds, and voices return, Bannon emphasizes their synthetic quality, as if suggesting that the state of calm one seeks in ambient music is ultimately illusory.
The album’s other tentpole is the 12-minute monster “Hollow Earth,” which moves masterfully between stomach-churning dread and contemplative quiet. Monastery chants and nature ambience mingle in the opening moments before Bannon drops a menacing low tone followed by a blast of white noise and droning voices that deepen the sense of anxiety. But even as the piece is at its blackest, Bannon judiciously starts to move towards the light. That mineshaft-deep rumble slowly decays, allowing in a luminous tone that falls like a sunbeam in the forest. The sense of calm that washes over the last few minutes of “Hollow Earth” and droney closer “Virtues” feels like a well-earned rest after an arduous trek. | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kranky | March 3, 2018 | 7.2 | 60a62598-9b4b-487b-87c8-426cb0943054 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Joined by veteran saxophonist Evan Parker, Joshua Abrams’ exploratory jazz ensemble delves into a single piece that stretches to 75 minutes and seems to pass in no time at all. | Joined by veteran saxophonist Evan Parker, Joshua Abrams’ exploratory jazz ensemble delves into a single piece that stretches to 75 minutes and seems to pass in no time at all. | Natural Information Society / Evan Parker: descension (Out of Our Constrictions) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/natural-information-society-evan-parke-descension-out-of-our-constrictions/ | descension (Out of Our Constrictions) | Life on pandemic time tends to feel like an endless blur, and it might now also be the readiest example of what bassist and composer Joshua Abrams calls “mandatory reality.” “If our music’s political, it’s because it offers the possibility of slowing down,” the Natural Information Society leader once said. “We live in the age of attention and availability, and [our music] is offering a certain level of experience, and it operates in slightly different ways.” In the past year, however they may have attempted to fill the days, millions found themselves in the realm of experience described by the title of NIS’ 2019 album: Stuck in the same mandatory crawl of time.
But those who caught a NIS performance in the months leading up to 2020 witnessed the delectable possibility of Abrams and bandmates speeding back up. At live shows that summer and fall, the band took a new tack, playing an expansive 40-plus minute piece that revved up to twice the speed of Mandatory Reality. Even guests sitting in with the band, like drummer Jim White, appeared propelled along like a leaf in a fast-moving river. Stripped down to a lean quartet, guided by Abrams’ thrummed guimbri, a sound that had previously felt as steadfast and measured as a walking meditation now hovered at 142 BPM, more appropriate for clubgoers in Berlin. And—as Abrams sought a throughline between ancient Gnawa trance and 1980s Chicago house—it didn’t feel like too much of a stretch. “It’s the original 808, because it has a percussive skin mixed with a bass tone,” he has said of the guimbri. Though NIS is commonly labeled as jazz, its primary instruments of guimbri and harmonium stretch back centuries before the birth of that art form.
Spread across four sides of vinyl and now approaching 75 minutes, that single extended piece comprises the entirety of descension (Out of Our Constrictions). Recorded live at London’s Café Oto in summer 2019, the quartet of Abrams,
harmonium player Lisa Alvarado, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, and drummer
Mikel Patrick Avery are joined by British free jazz legend Evan Parker on soprano saxophone. Exploring the outer edges of the ecstatic as well as the physically exhausting, the four sides of descension push deeper, higher, and wider, using kinetic movement to interrogate stasis.
After an introductory figure on the guimbri from Abrams, the band quickly gets to it. Avery’s stickwork is astonishing throughout, maintaining that high BPM with clock-like precision. Though tireless as a drum machine, he somehow always slides around a steady 4/4, framing it yet never slotting into it. On previous NIS albums, Alvarado’s harmonium favored the instrument’s droney, slow-evolving aspects; watching her work its bellows now might cause your carpal tunnel to flare up. She chops her lines into 16th notes, making the thing hyperventilate rather than breathe deep.
Breath is a natural metaphor when considering Parker’s long, storied career in European free improvisation—an early album was titled The Topography of the Lungs. His circular breathing on descension is a dream pairing for NIS, his cascading solos as ardent, mesmerizing, and pattern-focused as his bandmates. He weaves around, roots under, then circles above them. Hearing him in conjunction with Stein evokes seemingly contradictory qualities: Is it skronking free jazz or early swing? A high-altitude dogfight or a highly attuned conversation, akin to John Coltrane’s soprano trading solos with Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet at the Village Vanguard a half-century prior?
It feels silly to roadmap, recap, much less discern the four parts of descension. Both journey and landscape, the piece lifts off and soars to maximum cruising altitude, where, even at top speed, it seems to stand completely still—and then, over an hour later, you’re on the other side. Saying it all sounds the same might seem dismissive, but one of the descension’s remarkable aspects is its ability to convince your ears and mind otherwise. It’s as transformative and banal as a transatlantic flight. Grumbling about it feels like bemoaning the number of trees in a forest, that the Sahara is just sand dunes. It’s utterly maddening, and to get lost within it feels like the past calendar year: undifferentiated, infinite, and delirious.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Eremite | April 26, 2021 | 7.5 | 60a773c0-78ee-41fb-a7db-1a9fa8fbf204 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On their first release since 2013, the avant-rock group forego the escapism of their past work in order to provide a score for our present chaos. | On their first release since 2013, the avant-rock group forego the escapism of their past work in order to provide a score for our present chaos. | Magik Markers: Isolated From Exterior Time: 2020 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/magik-markers-isolated-from-exterior-time-2020/ | Isolated From Exterior Time: 2020 | Escapism has long been the guiding philosophy of Magik Markers. The avant-rock destructionists titled their 2013 album Surrender to the Fantasy, a reference to the role of “the unconscious mind” in their music-making. Singer-guitarist Elisa Ambrogio told Interview Magazine that their music is, in part, a conscious rejection of “the reality of your day-to-day existence,” an attempt to find joyfulness and ecstasy amid life’s doldrums. For the better part of two decades, they’ve torn up the tropes of rock and blues history and reassembled them into unrecognizable, otherworldly forms. It’s jarring music, but that’s the point—it’s supposed to shake you free from your normal rhythms and lead the way to another world. On Isolated from Exterior Time: 2020, their first new EP since 2013, they shift this approach; instead of providing an escape to these times, they choose to score this period’s chaos.
Such a disposition feels fitting when much of the world is stuck inside, grappling with the uncertainty of an unprecedented global health crisis and the destabilization caused by its calamitous management by the people in power. It’s only fair that the Magik Markers would attempt to reflect the downcast spirit of the year. A brief piece of writing that accompanies the EP on Bandcamp suggests that the timing of their return is no accident: “[Magik] Markers only appear in times of duress.”
The 25 minutes of music on Isolated from Exterior Time certainly don’t sound like a balm for all the time everyone has spent inside. Like the psychedelic memoir of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recent films, they aim for a kind of transcendence, one where truth is gestured at obliquely through surrealism, static, and violence. The four songs are illusory and upsetting—full of spectral harmonies and needly riffs crawling along ominously and overlapping chaotically. “Machines” picks up more or less where Surrender to the Fantasy left off, presenting the Markers in their more song-like mode, offering a few straightforward riffs and some elusive lyrics about fear. But from there the song doubles over on itself; Ambrogio’s lyrics are barely legible as she sings over herself, the song spiraling out into more chaotic thought processes. It’s likely a familiar energy for anyone who’s been cooped up since March; everything starts out normal, but as you spend more time isolated with your thoughts, things can start to get weird.
The rest of the tracks are only stranger. There’s a ghostly round called “Three Guitars” that haunts and creaks in a way that recalls Charalambides’ distressed Americana. “Arms to the Sky” is an echoey, creeping drone that sits somewhere between Spiritualized’s hopeless ballads and the anhedonia of doom metal. However, the record’s most moving moments are peppered throughout the ten-minute closer “Jet Skis (Alt Mix),” a loping, feedback-laden epic that sounds like it got lost in the desert on its way to meet Manuel Göttsching. Unlike the splatter-painted psych-noise that Magik Markers first become known for, it’s gloomy and monochrome, a trudge through the psychic muck and mire. It’s an apt soundtrack for a year that’s been an overwhelming slog. There’s little hope for escape, but Magik Markers make the case that it’s ok to feel a little lost.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Drag City | July 17, 2020 | 6.9 | 60a871df-56a9-4e3e-91ed-d6a693344d9b | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On his fetching seventh solo album, the witty and digressive songwriting of Stephen Malkmus becomes newly and delightfully grounded in the present day. | On his fetching seventh solo album, the witty and digressive songwriting of Stephen Malkmus becomes newly and delightfully grounded in the present day. | Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Sparkle Hard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stephen-malkmus-and-the-jicks-sparkle-hard/ | Sparkle Hard | Though Pavement’s sound and soul have been inextricably linked to the ’90s, Stephen Malkmus’ solo career feels unmoored to any era. Removed from the zeitgeist and any real commercial expectations, Malkmus has settled into a comfortable routine of indulging whims, exploring rabbit holes, and generally making music just far enough removed from Pavement’s buzzy aloofness that nobody could accuse him of chasing past glories. Give or take a Real Emotional Trash, the approach has flattered him.
So perhaps the most surprising thing about his fetching seventh album, Sparkle Hard, is how of-the-moment it feels. It engages with the present in a way none of his Jicks albums have, time-stamping its songs with lyrics about Facebook and nods to the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements (“Men are scum, I won’t deny,” he sings). On several songs, he even toys around with vocal manipulation and Auto-Tune. He doesn’t go full Frank Ocean or Bon Iver or anything, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the kind of music Malkmus might be making if he were a quarter-century younger.
Malkmus possesses a delightful sense of ease and unpredictability here. “Solid Silk” is caressed by warm strings right out of a ’70s Philly soul record. On the country lark “Refute,” Kim Gordon swings by for a verse that slyly reimagines the circumstances of her very public divorce; her poker face and his smirk play off of each other so flatteringly that it’s amazing she and Malkmus have never worked together before. In general, Malkmus’ words are flowing off his tongue even more seamlessly than usual. “You know you should be blushin’ to a hue of Robitussin,” he hums on “Middle America,” a gorgeous doodle of a song.
The album doesn’t skimp on rippers, either. Malkmus has cut back on the guitar theatrics over his last few records, but when he deploys them, he makes them come alive. Slathered in unruly fuzz, “Shiggy” rides a beaming riff that grows more jubilant by the minute. And then there’s “Bike Lane,” which juxtaposes news of a bike lane with the violent death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police. “They got behind him with their truncheons and choked the life right out of him,” Malkmus sings, accompanied by a chugging krautrock rhythm. It may be the most confrontational song he’s ever written.
The Wowee Zowee standout “Grounded,” with its protest that “boys are dying on these streets,” was also a plea for caring, but it directed its jabs at the detached upper class, with their luxury sedans and crystal ice picks. Here Malkmus is poking at his own bubble, the socially aware middle class that presumably makes up much of his audience these days—the ones that back Black Lives Matter on paper, but tend to get a lot more worked up about issues that affect their daily commute. “Bike Lane” is the rare Malkmus song that demands you to wrestle with it. Is it even in good taste? Malkmus is low on the list of artists anybody wanted to hear tell Freddie Gray’s story, and his voice is far too glib for the subject matter. But at least he’s saying his name, and that’s more than most indie-rock records do.
Sparkle Hard is not ostensibly different than his last couple albums, but its arrival feels better timed—there’s been a hole in the market for indie-rock albums this impervious, compact, and good-natured. Where Malkmus’ solo work has sometimes walked the fine line between too detached or too self-satisfied, the record cartwheels over it with the assurance of an artist who’s correctly assumed that so long as he’s enjoying himself enough, others will too. | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 18, 2018 | 8 | 60a96d64-f3b6-47a7-8f8a-e71d18456412 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The trio’s second album buffs away some of its debut’s grime and distortion for a set of knotty, pummeling rock that sounds vintage but feels current. | The trio’s second album buffs away some of its debut’s grime and distortion for a set of knotty, pummeling rock that sounds vintage but feels current. | Dommengang: Love Jail | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dommengang-love-jail/ | Love Jail | The heavy-rock trio Dommengang hail from a little bit of everywhere. Guitarist Dan “Sig” Wilson has been gigging around the Pacific Northwest psych scene for years now, occasionally sitting in with Castanets and Scout Niblett, among others. With roots in Oregon and Alaska, drummer Adam Bulgasem and bassist Brian Markham settled over in Brooklyn, roughly 3000 miles away from their bandmate. After touring together as the backing band for Portland’s Holy Sons, they recently moved out to Los Angeles together, marking the first time all three of them have ever lived in the same city. Rehearsing and recording must be a lot easier.
From these places these three musicians bring different concerns, different influences, and different ideas. Each of them bashes his instrument like he’s playing lead, but the music retains an arid austerity, like it might have been left in the sun too long. The trio’s 2015 debut as Dommengang, the mostly instrumental Everybody’s Boogie, combined heavy riffs with thrashy punk and spacey psychedelia to create a hyperactive form of guitar rock; their follow-up, which was produced by Tim Green of the Fucking Champs, buffs away some of that grime and distortion. Love Jail, despite its crummy title, sounds cleaner and more focused, its heavy sound rooted in the classic rock of bargain-bin denizens like Free, Rory Gallagher, and Humble Pie.
Perhaps due to their proximity, they’ve become a tighter combo, more inventive in their pummeling and more resourceful in their references. Bulgasem plays all fills behind Markham’s sludgy bass and Wilson’s contorting riffs, especially on instrumental jams like the title track and “Lone Pine.” They still can’t muster up anything as nimble as an actual boogie, even when they title a song “Dave’s Boogie,” but even at their stiffest, Dommengang prize tension and release, which lends even their most meandering jams a sense of purpose. “Stealing Miles” sneaks in a country-rock chorus that may be the album’s strongest hook, but the song nearly runs into a ditch as they navigate one knotty jam after another. “Color Out of Space” sounds like the tweaked desert pop of the Meat Puppets, morphing seamlessly into the compelling aimlessness of the instrumental “Stay Together,” which sounds like that title was a musical command.
In that regard, the band’s scattered origins can be especially compelling. Dommengang understand they’re going nowhere—not, of course, in the professional or musical sense. The roads they travel in these songs have no real destinations. “Lovely Place” opens with a cocksure strut along a desert highway, and gradually the band ratchets up the tempo and the tension. “The country is torn,” Wilson snarls, perhaps understating things. “It’s still a lovely place to be, with the windows rolled down and the sun in my hand.” Then they break into a wide-open jam, careening across the bridge like they’re drag racing Golden Earring.
The resurgence of heavy rock may be linked to a nostalgia for a time when crunchy guitars and the dudes who played them enjoyed a more prominent place in pop culture, but Love Jail goes beyond a mere glance in the rearview mirror. It sounds vintage, but it feels current. Dommengang find some potential for escape in this music, some freedom in that absence of a destination. They can go anywhere, bashing out in all directions until they find solid ground between the darkness of our torn country and the sun in their hand. | 2018-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | January 30, 2018 | 7 | 60ad3a14-5ceb-469a-a57e-3c4e23ccbb7d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On her self-titled sophomore effort, Laetitia Tamko leaps with both feet into new sounds and new horizons. | On her self-titled sophomore effort, Laetitia Tamko leaps with both feet into new sounds and new horizons. | Vagabon: Vagabon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vagabon-vagabon/ | Vagabon | In crafting her self-titled sophomore album, Laetitia Tamko (aka Vagabon) was hyper-cognizant of how the context around her had changed. The unexpected success of her 2017 debut Infinite Worlds meant more resources at her fingertips, but also heightened scrutiny from a public that so often defaults to consuming black women as prophets of oppression and pain. “I was growing really weary of black sadness and seeing how it’s consumed,” the Cameroon-born artist said earlier this year. “I don’t want to romanticize being tortured.” she told Pitchfork.
Inevitably, Tamko was folded into the ongoing conversation about the scarcity of visible black women in indie rock—the only world she has known as a practicing musician, having emerged in New York City alongside artists like Frankie Cosmos. She could have dug her heels deeper into the sound that first won her acclaim, but Vagabon is instead a bracing departure, wielding digital sounds and strings alongside her familiar, delicate guitar in search of wider worlds.
Tamko produced the album herself and played most of it, and you notice immediately that her voice is subtly foregrounded. The beckoning whisper of Infinite Worlds has become rounder and more confident. This new boldness is matched by her production, which toggles between small-room intimacy and cathedral-sized grandeur. Tamko plays with all kinds of new palettes here, showing impressive mastery over them. On “Flood” and “Water Me Down,” she subsumes the bombast of ’80s and ’90s new wave into her quietly insightful writing. The heartbreaking “In A Bind” combines her tiptoeing acoustic guitar with a gospel choir and new age, “Orinoco Flow”-esque synth tones.
Throughout most of Vagabon, Tamko is not shouting to a crowd, but addressing one specific “you,” reassuring them of her love, pleading for them to stay, questioning their permanence, all in service of her own self-determinism. “I belong to no one/You tried hard to be mine/I won’t ask permission from you/We reserve the right to be full when we’re on our own,” she sings on “Every Woman.”
Tamko’s adventurousness is admirable, both lyrically and sonically, but occasionally the intimacy of her writing is overwhelmed by her surroundings. The layered arrangement of “Please Don’t Leave the Table” feels muddled, which obscures the simple, evocative chorus: “Please don’t leave the table I’m still eating.” It’s a rare misstep on an album that otherwise uses restraint to its advantage.
With its opening and closing tracks, Vagabon forms a sort of self-comforting loop. “Full Moon in Gemini (Monako Reprise)” takes the album’s opening track and tones it an octave down, turning the song from bright and hopeful to easy and accepting. The closed circle feels like a protective gesture, an act of will, a way to book-end her growth and frame it on her terms. With that transformation, Vagabon concludes as a work of not only personal self-discovery, but evolution in real time.
Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | October 19, 2019 | 7.6 | 60adae14-0fff-4f30-b4bf-df5ff2d425d0 | Ann-Derrick Gaillot | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ann-derrick-gaillot/ | |
Produced by the legendary Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Nico, Fairport Convention), Vashti Bunyan's lone solo album massively influenced San Francisco's new freak-folk movement, despite being long out of print. Now the Dicristina Stair label finally rescues this 1970 classic from record collector hell. | Produced by the legendary Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Nico, Fairport Convention), Vashti Bunyan's lone solo album massively influenced San Francisco's new freak-folk movement, despite being long out of print. Now the Dicristina Stair label finally rescues this 1970 classic from record collector hell. | Vashti Bunyan: Just Another Diamond Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1135-just-another-diamond-day/ | Just Another Diamond Day | One of the happiest by-products of the ongoing underground freak-folk explosion is the reemergence of British singer Vashti Bunyan. After spending more than three decades completely off the music industry's grid, the past couple years have seen the angel-voiced Bunyan duet with fan Devendra Banhart on Rejoicing in the Hands, gig with Stephen Malkmus, and collaborate with both Piano Magic and Animal Collective. And now, as if in response to those wondering what all the fuss might be about, the Dicristina Stair label has finally given Bunyan's lone solo album, Just Another Diamond Day, its first U.S. CD release.
Produced in 1970 by the legendary Joe Boyd, Just Another Diamond Day has long been considered a holy grail for Brit-folk record collectors, with original copies of the album fetching over $1,000 at auction. It shouldn't take many listens to realize why it's so highly regarded; Just Another Diamond Day is, in its own humble way, nearly a thing of perfection.
The album features contributions from such folk luminaries as The Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson, Fairport Convention's David Swarbrick and Simon Nicol, as well as string arrangements by Robert Kirby, who performed the same duties for Nick Drake. Boyd's production is impeccable, with the sound of each breath and string given an appropriate weight in the mix. This is crucial because of the almost impossible fragility of Bunyan's voice, an instrument as lovely and delicate as a dew-covered spider's web but one which could easily be drowned out by over-instrumentation.
Considering the deftness of its acoustic, percussion-less songs, Just Another Diamond Day seems at times like a sonic sibling to the Boyd-produced Nick Drake albums-- albeit one that chooses fresh air and sunlight over Drake's depressive shadows. Although Bunyan wrote all of the songs herself, the lyrics have an organic, out-of-time poetry that makes them feel more like traditional works. Her songs reference neither the politics of the time nor the psychedelically refracted medievalism so prevalent in the folk-rock of the era-- the simple quatrains of hypnotic songs like "Diamond Day", "Come Wind Come Rain", or "Where I Like to Stand" instead consist of uncomplicated lyrics ("Just another field to plough/ Just a grain of wheat/ Just a sack of seed to sow/ And the children eat") that could've been written virtually any time in the past few centuries.
Some listeners find Bunyan's thematic emphasis on nature to be overly cloying and childlike-- especially on such bucolic tracks as "Lilly Pond" or "Glow Worms". But others find themselves captivated by the sincerity and purity of Bunyan's pastoral vision, particularly in the subtle way she's able to portray human activities corresponding perfectly with the rhythms of the natural world, as though the people she encounters are just another feature of the landscape. ("I'm counting the waves/ The men in the boats they wave/ To their wives and say/ I'm counting the hours in the day.")
And the whimsical wordplay she weaves through songs like "Timothy Grub" or "Jog Along Bess" ("Jog along Bess/ Hop along May/ Squeak along Blue/ It's a walk along day") makes it easy to trace the influence she's exerted on contemporary artists like Banhart or Animal Collective. But even with her reputation re-established and her influence deservedly spreading, it's unlikely that you'll encounter another album as charming or transporting as Just Another Diamond Day any time soon. | 2004-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Philips | October 20, 2004 | 9 | 60afee90-d1ae-4604-96e6-1b2f82965646 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The outstanding album from the Philadelphia electro-psych trio is reclusive, cryptic, late-night paranoia music. Their oblique songs can evoke an entire landscape of feeling in very few words. | The outstanding album from the Philadelphia electro-psych trio is reclusive, cryptic, late-night paranoia music. Their oblique songs can evoke an entire landscape of feeling in very few words. | Spirit of the Beehive: ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spirit-of-the-beehive-entertainment-death/ | ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH | The term “Kmart realism” was first coined in the 1980s to describe a trend in literary fiction defined by sparse sentences, fast food joints, and the hyper-acceleration of capitalism and commercialization in primarily suburban spaces. Kmart realists like Mary Robison, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and, to some extent, Don DeLillo, wrote about the eerie feeling of walking through a shopping mall at night, of relaxing in front of the TV only to be greeted by endless advertisements for personal injury lawyers and small-town waterparks, of sending your brain into oblivion with synthetic drugs. The term could also be applied to Spirit of the Beehive, the project of psychotropic Philly punks Zack Schwartz, Rivka Ravede, and Corey Wichlin, whose excellent fourth album, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, is lit by that same, terrifying, phosphorescent glow.
If you were to try to hold a conversation while listening to ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, you would forget what you were saying as the words spilled out of your mouth. It is an inherently destabilizing album, one that doesn’t adhere to any concrete narrative. Instead, it’s fragmented, sewn together with bits of old commercials, blasts of noise, and guitar breakdowns. Opener “Entertainment” starts off sounding like an auto demolition, then shakes itself up, taking on the quality of a rotted-out yé-yé song. A string section rises out of the dirt; the lyrics are hazy and distorted. “Heading east towards KSMO/16-wheelers passing too close/Dust picks up and swallows us whole,” sings Schwartz, as if just waking up from a nap.
Spirit of the Beehive aren’t peerless, but they just don’t sound quite like anyone else in their home scene. They come from the world of Philadelphia DIY, of punk basements without proper plumbing and houses with big front porches. They hang out with people in bands like Palm and Body Meat. Frank Ocean’s a fan. If anything, their sound is less sympatico with Philly DIY and closer to the kind of music released by London’s Warp. In their talent for fermenting chintzy pop music into something rabid and noisy, they evoke something a bit like electro chanson freaks Jockstrap.
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH isn’t significantly different from anything this band has made before, it’s just better, more refined. It’s no less weird or haunting than, say, 2018’s Hypnic Jerks; if anything it’s even creepier and stranger. A song like the muscular “Wrong Circle” feels like experiencing a bad high all over your body, one where your eyes twitch and the pressure builds in your chest. Singing birds are juxtaposed against hyper-vivid synthesizers, oceanic percussion, and modulated vocals. The music flickers and clicks, like an old TV on a channel-search setting, or flies buzzing beneath a yellowed street light.
Schwartz spent much of his youth in Miami taking acid, playing music in a storage locker, and then heading to his job in a mall, as he’s told Pitchfork. He compared his experiences to the Jonah Hill skater flick Mid90s; ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is similar to Hill’s movie, too. It feels listless, like a summer of drinking Robitussin and skateboarding, or maybe spray painting a pentagram on the side of an old lady’s house. “I Suck the Devil’s Cock” best underscores this feeling of a summer wasted idling inside the mall, dreaming of being anywhere else. At nearly seven minutes, it’s the record’s longest track. There is a burst of noise that sounds almost melodic, as well as multiple lines of guitars. “Scared of needles but not of everything,” sings Schwartz, “Another middle-class dumb American, falling asleep. He don’t appreciate constructive criticism.” Spirit of the Beehive’s surreal lyrics reflect the kind of malaise that’s superabundant in the writing of Kmart realists: visceral, hallucinatory vignettes that evoke an entire landscape of feeling in very few words.
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is an intensely beautiful, intensely difficult record. It is reclusive, cryptic, late-night paranoia music, so unsettling and loud that at times it’s almost too intimate, even in the absence of any real identifying details. The feeling it evokes is like listening to a close friend recounting the details of their night terror: You see the sweat, the enlarged pupils, the general sensation of acute discomfort. “Rapid & Complete Recovery,” however, provides a moment at the eye of the storm. The song is meandering, peaceful. Layers of synthesizers suggest watching the world retreat below you as you ride an elevator to the top of a skyscraper. “Spanning lifetimes compressed in a vacuum/No limitations, you know what comes after,” Ravede and Schwartz harmonize, their voices perfectly calm. What it is that they’re after isn’t clear; Spirit of the Beehive is an unknowable band. At any given point in time, they’re a whole galaxy away.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | April 9, 2021 | 8.3 | 60b9d68f-9ef9-4fc4-86c8-4b959e9843c6 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Wild Nothing completes his big year by collecting the previously available Evertide EP, a Gemini B-side, and two new tracks. | Wild Nothing completes his big year by collecting the previously available Evertide EP, a Gemini B-side, and two new tracks. | Wild Nothing: Golden Haze EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14937-golden-haze-ep/ | Golden Haze EP | Whether digging through the crates at a used CD store, or plumbing the depths of Amazon, one of the great thrills of being a music fan is discovering a certain style that appeals to you, and seeing just how deeply you can immerse yourself in it before coming up for air. Gemini felt like Jack Tatum was sharing that feeling with all of us-- that first experience with a Smiths or Cocteau Twins album when you wonder, "Where has this been all of my life?" That he made his album stand out amidst a formidable number of similar acts was a testament to how well he could extract one recognizable cell from the past and spawn it into something wholly his own, reverential but hardly derivative.
Golden Haze initially appears to be the culmination of Wild Nothing's big year, collecting the previously available Evertide EP, a Gemini B-side, and two new tracks. But as a State of Wild Nothing Report, it shows that Tatum is nowhere near done messing with his favorite musical ingredients. While still enamored with 1980s UK indie, like so much of Gemini, the maneuvering here sneaks up on you. The sunny jungle of "Summer Holiday" is almost completely forgone for something sleeker and darker, more along the lines of Gemini standouts "Chinatown" or "Bored Games".
It's a good look for him, considering Tatum's knack for succinct romantic pleas ("beautiful one, I want to go where you are") and weaving chains of floral guitar notes, both of which propel the gorgeous title track. It's one of Wild Nothing's strongest singles, but it's also where he starts to tweak the arrangements, particularly with drums. The textural mesh of its severely-gated snare and sleigh bells recalls the Cure's "Just Like Heaven", and Tatum's portentous and maudlin vocal range invites further comparisons to Robert Smith.
Oddly enough, the one selection from Golden Haze EP that would've been the most jarring inclusion on Gemini is actually a B-side from "Summer Holiday"-- "Vultures Like Lovers" is pure, ecstatic texture, a heavily processed guitar ping-ponging with delay, and Tatum's tremolo'd vocals building a cyclone from the ground up. It's the sort of experiment that ends up as a B-side for a reason, but its inclusion is evidence of what I find most charming about Wild Nothing: The combination of decades-old influence with the ability to see a modern prolific talent progress almost in real time. | 2010-12-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-12-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | December 10, 2010 | 7.7 | 60bc3f1d-4b4d-4641-a116-3833101568b5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Ultima II Massage finds the Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman moving from the gently corroded Technicolor psych-prog of 2010’s Maniac Meat to a full-on barrage of wobbling, low-end-heavy bizarro pop. Tom Fec’s work as Tobacco is frequently approached as a dichotomy of beauty and ugliness, and at times the "ugly" quotient is often ramped up to match the project's warped, grotty imagery. | Ultima II Massage finds the Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman moving from the gently corroded Technicolor psych-prog of 2010’s Maniac Meat to a full-on barrage of wobbling, low-end-heavy bizarro pop. Tom Fec’s work as Tobacco is frequently approached as a dichotomy of beauty and ugliness, and at times the "ugly" quotient is often ramped up to match the project's warped, grotty imagery. | TOBACCO: Ultima II Massage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19388-tobacco-ultima-ii-massage/ | Ultima II Massage | Ultima II Massage, the latest full-length from Tom Fec's Tobacco project, finds the Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman moving from the gently corroded Technicolor psych-prog of 2010’s Maniac Meat to a full-on barrage of wobbling, low-end-heavy bizarro pop. Fec’s work as Tobacco is frequently approached as a dichotomy of beauty and ugliness; on Ultima's front half*,* the "ugly" quotient has been ramped up to match the project's warped, grotty imagery.
The album's standouts signify an evolved sound. Obscene, rowdy, and fun, “Eruption (Gonna Get My Hair Cut At The End of the Summer)” is aggro-R&B cut with a dose of Minneapolis funk, while album opener “Streaker”, which features Beck collaborator Brian LeBarton, is grindhouse glam rock with heavy artillery. Fec claims in a press release that Ultima II Massage is the “definitive end” to his conceptual aims, and he ends up with a zombified mix of Marc Bolan and Prince doused in the industrial scuzz and slime of Tobacco’s customary sonics and executed with puerile glee.
Lyrically, Ultima II Massage is in line with previous Tobacco efforts. Fec is, in his own way, a sensual songwriter, his lyrics are calculated for visceral impact—so there’s plenty of material about popsicles, ejaculation, and fruit, naturally, along with various skin-crawling ephemera. Obscenity is applied liberally, moreso than on past releases; Fec has said that Tobacco's associated imagery draws inspiration from a pre-pubescent mindset, and here he possesses all the excitement of a kid who’s just discovered the full power of the word “motherfucker” for the first time.
Ultima*’s* less gentle tracks are a welcome evolution in Tobacco's music, but the old, swooning BMSR sound--scarred, melodic music that sounds as if it’s just starting to rot--pops up now and again. Occasionally, Fec finds a sweet spot between the two poles, an approach that's crystallized on the violently saccharine “Lipstick Destroyer”. “Creaming for Beginners”, meanwhile, is a heavily distorted ballad with a blistering, slow-burning melody.
Overall, though, Fec doesn't always achieve that balance, so there's several mid-album cuts here that jog in place despite their inherent prettiness, speaking to the album's uneven momentum as a whole. While Ultima II Massage starts off with material that's heavier and meaner than anything he’s done previously, the lighter sound of the album's back half can't help but come across as a drop in ambition, turning down the volume on what could've been the most dynamic Tobacco record to date. | 2014-05-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-05-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | May 21, 2014 | 6.9 | 60be2c09-7830-40ee-b917-404624588b89 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Conor Oberst doesn't read the reviews. Nope, he's not playing for me, as he clearly states on "Let ... | Conor Oberst doesn't read the reviews. Nope, he's not playing for me, as he clearly states on "Let ... | Bright Eyes: Lifted, or, The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/937-lifted-or-the-story-is-in-the-soil-keep-your-ear-to-the-ground/ | Lifted, or, The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground | Conor Oberst doesn't read the reviews. Nope, he's not playing for me, as he clearly states on "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved)." Fair enough, because it shows. If Oberst was really out to put smiles on the ears of his critics, the sound he's cultivated up through this, his third release, probably wouldn't be quite so constant. By now, expecting Oberst to somehow gravitate away from his tortured tales of youthful angst and the perils of confiding yourself in another seems as hopeless as asking a dolphin to stop using echolocation.
Bright Eyes' jangly acoustic strumming and rise/fall vocal quaver has evolved fairly naturally since his 1998 post-Commander Venus solo debut, Letting Off the Happiness. So, then, would you be shocked to discover that Lifted is just about the least surprising album of all time? It's true. This record will happily provide you with plenty of opportunities to be unsurprised-- vocally, thematically, and in some cases musically. Thankfully, it's all dramatically counterbalanced by some of the most unique arrangements Oberst has dreamt up yet.
The Bright Eyes orchestra lends its services to Lifted, pulling a string section and a few horns out of hock for atmosphere, and even recruiting some drunks for choir detail on "Laura Laurent" (there are some sober folks, too-- not just alkies). When these orchestral elements take center stage, the effect is light-years removed and improved from any previous Bright Eyes offerings, though subdued enough to preserve the essential tone of past works, lest the sound be too disorienting.
The changes on Lifted-- beyond the aforementioned strings and horns-- are immediately recognizable. Somewhere along the way, Oberst has developed a much better ear for melody and left (most of) his shrieking tantrums by the wayside. The tunes are often lighter, even playful at points; a far cry from prior heartsick ballads, some of which did little more than display his temper. Of course, these backroom confessions are as intimate as ever, but the vibrant, slightly more lighthearted arrangements are a knowing wink of one bright eye as Oberst crows, "I could tell you/ The truth like I used to/ And not be afraid of sounding fake/ Now all anyone is listening for are/ The mistakes," on "False Advertising." All the self-consciousness can become draining after a while, but the lion's share of this album consists of songs about his family and friends, and the musings of an artist second-guessing with the prospect of failure (and only 22 years old).
Love it or hate it, the precious, nasal vibrato Oberst affects is the tie that binds all these varied tunes together in the end, and in most cases, it compliments the music admirably. It has its lows, of course, the most notable misstep being the nearly a capella "The Big Picture," which stretches the limit of taste for seven full minutes. Oberst falters often here, giving the illusion of greater emotional heft, although the track only really serves to underscore his vocal limitations. Lifted's other weak moments come with a few rarities heretofore consigned to the limbo of cyberspace. "Method Acting" now comes complete with a backing chorus for the bridge, and "Waste of Paint" sounds to have been reworked a little, but they've been out in the sun too long. Next to the fanged beauty of "Lover I Don't Have to Love," these songs are undeniably faded.
But Lifted hits more than it misses. The slow buildup of strings in the languid waltz of "False Advertising" is exceptional despite containing the album's most embarrassing moment (a contrived 'mistake' in the playing just as Oberst sings "mistake"), though, as with the album as a whole, its accomplishments compensate for its oversights. "Bowl of Oranges" features a delicate, continually shifting piano refrain and bittersweet swells of strings in the background. "So that is how I learned the lesson/ That everyone's alone/ And your eyes must do some raining/ If you're ever going to grow," is backed by major-to-minor shifts to compliment the subtle mix of emotions.
The slow burn of "Don't Know When But a Day Is Gonna Come" hangs like a thundercloud in Western skies as Oberst talks of men with silver guns and dying for his father's sins. The cadence that unrolls and distant piano warbling sound like the first drops of rain that presage an eventual downpour, before the song finally breaks with a flood of strings and guitar. It brings to mind some of the darker moments of The Man in Black himself, Johnny Cash, with all its murmurings of end-times prophecies and sober grit-- and that's just about as high a compliment as I could pay. This track is definitely first among equals with the other great moments of Lifted.
The album wraps with "Let's Not Shit Ourselves," a vaguely country-and-western tune that's all over the place, taking a vague stab at assessing the world's situation and how it relates to Oberst himself. It's wildly pretentious, but the charming-- dare I say, quaintness-- of this record finally makes that an asset, especially on this sweeping closer. He's wracked, maybe by necessity, and he's really starting to turn that to his advantage; the prosaic poetry of his work is genuinely compelling on this album, partly due to pretense, and partly to sincerity. In the end, of course, I'm still somewhat disappointed that Oberst isn't catering to my personal expectations, but as long as he keeps marching toward broader musical horizons, I say more power to him. | 2002-08-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2002-08-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | August 12, 2002 | 7.7 | 60be2c94-5232-4277-98e1-f2e79416edc7 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
*Songs in the Key of Life *was the culmination of a historic period of creativity for Stevie Wonder. Its ambition and scope were unprecedented, and he never approached its caliber or impact again. | *Songs in the Key of Life *was the culmination of a historic period of creativity for Stevie Wonder. Its ambition and scope were unprecedented, and he never approached its caliber or impact again. | Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22174-songs-in-the-key-of-life/ | Songs in the Key of Life | Stevie Wonder’s legacy ranks among the most powerful in pop music, though his story remains elusive. His songwriting and his voice echo through virtually all R&B-related sounds that have followed him, from Michael Jackson to R. Kelly to Kanye West, yet there is no major biography, no documentary, nothing that presents the full sweep of the most dominant and defining artist of the 1970s. And make no mistake—it was an era of superstar acts and chart-busting albums, but no one was as universally loved, respected, and honored as he was.
To be sure, Wonder has done himself no favors in getting his story told. Long ago, the media figured out that his world runs on “Stevie Time,” that schedules and deadlines don’t apply to this towering genius, whether that means showing up for an interview or delivering an album.
“You set a goal in your mind,” he told me in 2005, when the record A Time to Love was released after many years’ delay, “and you say, O.K., this is what these songs need to have, this project needs to have, and you don't really settle for anything less than that.” As good as his word, Wonder has not put out a new album since.
But even Stevie Wonder realized that there was one project of his that demanded to be recognized and appreciated while he was still able, and in 2014 he mounted a tour to present, in full, his 1976 magnum opus *Songs in the Key of Life, *which turns 40 next month. The album—two LPs plus an additional four-song EP—was the culmination of a historic period of creativity, a concentrated burst of music matched only by a handful of artists (mid-’60s Bob Dylan, early ’70s Rolling Stones, ’80s Prince). Its ambition and scope were unprecedented, its power and resonance were timeless—and when it was done, he never approached its caliber or impact again.
In 1971, a decade into an already-legendary career, Wonder celebrated his 21st birthday by allowing his contract with Motown Records to expire, holding out for a new deal which gave him a higher royalty rate and creative control over his work. He responded with two albums in 1972, the breakthrough Music of My Mind and his first true masterwork, Talking Book. His next releases, 1973’s Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale in 1974 (which followed a serious automobile accident that left him in a coma for four days) won back-to-back Album of the Year trophies at the Grammys. Wonder not only reeled off six Top Ten hits in three years and repeatedly pioneered new frontiers in music technology (he introduced the Moog synthesizer and the sampler to the public), he also established himself as a leading voice of social protest with such profound commentaries as “Living for the City” and “You Haven’t Done Nothing.”
And then came the wait. Wonder, expressing frustration with America in the aftermath of Watergate and the never-ending war in Vietnam, had started to talk about quitting the music industry and moving to Ghana to work with handicapped children. He got as far as starting to make plans for a farewell concert. Instead, though, in August of 1975, he signed a new contract with Motown—a seven-year, seven-album, $37 million agreement, the largest deal made with a recording star up to that point. Though there were murmurs about an album release later that year, Wonder first took time off, then kept adding songs to the stockpile he had amassed, then decided there was more mixing and post-production required.
Two years might not seem like a long break between records now, but at the time, it was unheard of, especially from the biggest star in the game. Motown staffers printed up T-shirts that read, “We’re Almost Finished.” And when the twenty-one-song set was finally released on September 28, 1976, the promotional campaign borrowed some pages from the playbook for the previous year’s record-shattering movie Jaws, which had redefined the making and meaning of a true blockbuster.
Motown flew press and everyone who had worked on the album to the Long View Farm studio in Massachusetts for the first playback and a battery of interviews with Wonder, presenting everybody with autographed copies of the album. As it made its way to record stores, Songs in the Key of Life (changed from the working title Let’s See Life the Way It Is) was everywhere you looked. I distinctly remember what a major event the release was, and I was only 10 years old at the time.
Yet this was the very rare case in which there was simply no way to overhype the music. The sound drew effortlessly from funk, pop, jazz, Latin styles. Tracks ranged from the fusion groove of “Contusion” to the delicate voice-and-harp duet “If It’s Magic.”
Though more than 130 musicians are listed in the credits (including such stars as Herbie Hancock, George Benson, and Minnie Riperton), Songs in the Key of Life never strays from the singular, blazing vision of one artist. The sneaky pre-chorus in “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” the transcendent, spiraling rise of “As”—hooks pile on top of hooks, tucked irresistibly and unerringly into breaks, fills, and intros, most obviously on the album’s two biggest hits, the nostalgic, swaggering “I Wish” and the shout-out to Wonder’s jazz forefathers (and mothers) “Sir Duke,” soon to take up permanent residence in the repertoire of every marching band in the country.
The hat tip to Duke Ellington was significant, since in some ways Songs in the Key of Life most recalled that composer’s classic long-form works like “Black, Brown, and Beige” (or Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite or Charles Mingus’ “Pithecanthropus Erectus”) in its attempt to portray the complete sweep of the Black American experience. The album’s opening lines—“Good morn or evening friends/Here’s your friendly announcer/I have serious news to pass on to everybody,” from the almost impossibly gorgeous “Love’s in Need of Love Today”—laid out the stakes for all that would follow.
“Village Ghetto Land” spoke of the pain and indignity of poverty and homelessness. “Black Man” served as a literal history lesson, calling out examples of how all colors and cultures have contributed to global progress. “Ngiculela—Es Una Historia—I Am Singing" soared triumphantly in Zulu, Spanish, and English, with melody easily uniting all languages. Then there were the simple celebrations of love and faith—on “Isn’t She Lovely,” the magic of birth and family—emotions shared by all, but never to be taken for granted in undervalued Black lives.
The year 1976 was, of course, America’s Bicentennial year, and especially at a time of such frustration and distrust surrounding the government and the country’s institutions, U.S. residents were bombarded with stories of our history and heroics. Songs in the Key of Life functioned as a corrective, a counter-narrative, alongside such other radical, groundbreaking statements as Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial Nigger and Alex Haley’s Roots, both of which were released just a few weeks before the album.
Almost everyone understood the magnitude of Wonder’s achievement, but there were some objections, mostly having to do with the length and sprawl of the record. “[I]t has no focus or coherence,” wrote Vince Aletti in a wildly mixed but mostly favorable review in Rolling Stone. “The eclecticism is rich and welcome, but the overall effect is haphazard, turning what might have been a stunning, exotic feast into a hastily organized potluck supper.” But to complain about the excess was to miss the point—any great double-album (The White Album, Exile on Main Street) could easily be edited into something tighter and more consistent, but the all-encompassing aspiration is the whole idea, the desire to contain multitudes and to cover as much ground as possible during a revved-up creative groove. Sometimes, more is more.
Certainly, the public understood. Songs in the Key of Life entered the album charts at No. 1, only the third record to hit that spot straight out of the gate (after Elton John’s two previous releases). It then stayed there for the rest of the year; to understand just how ubiquitous the music of the mid-’70s could be, consider that it knocked Frampton Comes Alive! out of the No. 1 slot, and was finally bested in January of 1977 by Hotel California. Inevitably, Wonder won his third straight Album of the Year award at the Grammys (he missed the ceremony because he was visiting Nigeria at the time).
After Songs in the Key of Life, though, something seemed to deflate in Stevie Wonder’s work. It was as if, at the ripe old age of 26, he was bored by the idea of just writing hit songs. His next album was 1979’s mystifying, experimental, mostly instrumental Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, a double-album soundtrack to a documentary about the feelings of greenery and flowers. Turning his attention to the crusade for a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Wonder rebounded with Hotter Than July in 1980 (featuring the sublime “Master Blaster (Jammin’)),” but since then, it’s mostly been long waits in between underwhelming new records.
It was like there was nowhere left to go after Songs in the Key of Life—and maybe there wasn’t. The album was more than just a masterpiece; it was the culmination of all of the potential that Stevie Wonder showed since his days as an 11-year-old prodigy. Musically, politically, culturally, it was the fulfillment of everything that Motown and the ’60s soul revolution had promised. And within a few months, disco was the focus for new Black music, while in the parks and playgrounds of the Bronx and beyond, hip-hop was taking shape for the next generation.
The sound of Songs in the Key of Life never stopped reverberating. Elton John and Prince said that it was their favorite album. Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston sang its praises. Coolio, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Will Smith sampled its hooks. Mary J. Blige and Luther Vandross covered its songs. Kanye West said in 2005, around the release of Late Registration, “I'm not trying to compete with what's out there now. I'm really trying to compete with Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. It sounds musically blasphemous to say something like that, but why not set that as your bar?” Still, it was a genuine event when Stevie Wonder decided to take Songs in the Key of Life to the stage 38 years after its release, and bring the spotlight back to his greatest musical accomplishment.
It required several dozen musicians on stage to recreate the album’s arrangements, with full horn and string sections (that harp!), but it also imposed a discipline on Wonder’s performance, which too frequently devolve into a mess of medleys and sing-alongs. The shows were magnificent, the words as true as ever, and there was Stevie, still telling us—showing us—that “music is a world within itself/With a language we all understand.” Almost four decades later, you could feel it all over. | 2016-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Motown | August 21, 2016 | 10 | 60c7b248-8e70-4564-8380-05b89981cd49 | Alan Light | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alan-light/ | null |
On his seventh studio album, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter reckons with losses both personal and political in search of a new beginning. | On his seventh studio album, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter reckons with losses both personal and political in search of a new beginning. | Amos Lee: My New Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amos-lee-my-new-moon/ | My New Moon | Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Amos Lee’s seventh studio album, My New Moon, pivots on the possibility of a new beginning. It’s not exactly a novel theme. Yet the title’s invocation of the first lunar phase, in which the moon initiates a new synodic month but remains unseen, feels purposeful and specific: It takes a while for the first sliver of moonlight to illuminate Lee’s black sky.
Before arriving at that moment, the album establishes a profound sense of loss; new beginnings generally follow the end of something old, after all. For Lee, the losses in question are both personal and political. Along with his grandmother’s passing—which informed the soulful jazz-pop of “All You Got Is a Song” and the gospel-leaning “Hang On, Hang On”—he mourns regressive changes taking place in the world around him.
“Crooked” opens with the famous Hamlet line, “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.” It’s a melodramatic introduction to the song’s political themes, heightened by harpsichord and toy piano, whose tingling flourishes hint at the childishness that now reigns in the public sphere. But Lee partially redeems the heavy-handedness of his lyrics with what has always been his greatest asset: his weathered voice, which he uses on My New Moon to plumb dark emotional depths. “There’s a crooked leader on a crooked stage,” he sings, before a note of dismay enters his voice and he adds, “Turns out that I’m crooked too.” Determining how the U.S. got into its current predicament isn’t just about pointing fingers, Lee acknowledges. It requires introspection.
The news cycle also haunts “No More Darkness, No More Light.” Lee has said that he “ripped the whole [song] apart and put it back together” after watching the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors expose politicians’ “thoughts and prayers” for the empty platitudes they were. “The day after Parkland happened, I was just… overcome with what the kids were saying and what our history in the United States is and what I feel like some of our obligations to each other are,” he told Billboard. In contrast with that heavy subject matter, the arrangement is unexpectedly bright. Lee frames the song with a bubbling, jumping rhythm that calls to mind Paul Simon’s Graceland; Malian guitar tones race up and down while a second electric guitar pulses darkly in the background. These juxtapositions temper despair with hope, finding solace in the latter without entirely believing in the redemption it promises.
It isn’t just in his songwriting that Lee is embarking on a new chapter. My New Moon marks his first album with Nashville-based indie-folk label Dualtone Records, after five LPs on Blue Note followed by 2016’s self-produced effort Spirit. The move relocates Lee within the Americana spectrum, rescuing him from stagnation. The words his remarkable voice communicate and the melodies that surround them haven’t always been distinct enough to help him rise above other soul-influenced songwriters, like Ray LaMontagne and Nathaniel Rateliff.
But My New Moon producer Tony Berg (Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers) helps Lee shed some of his earlier jazz-pop influences and burrow into an earthier, more textured sound. Unlike 2013’s Mountains of Sorrow, Rivers of Song, his most Americana-saturated album, the new record has arrangements that do more than just hang as a backdrop for Lee’s voice. Touches like the autoharp on “Louisville” and “Don’t Give a Damn Anymore,” as well as the drum tones on “Little Light” and “All You Got Is a Song,” build soundscapes nuanced enough to contain emotional resonance of their own, allowing for greater interplay between the instrumentation and Lee’s vocals.
When My New Moon finally catches sight of the new beginning its title promises, the album is almost over. The standout penultimate track, “Whiskey on Ice,” written after Lee met a couple who shared a story about losing their young son to cancer, surges with the promise of renewal. “I can see the light/Starting to take shape/I can see the sun seeking out escape/I can see the moon slowly creeping in,” he sings, hushed and hopeful, as a longing falsetto reminiscent of Bon Iver’s layered bellows shifts in and out of the background. This is not quite the dawn of a new day, but a different kind of light is radiating from the darkened sky—an aching luminescence that reveals a narrow, arduous path forward. | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | Dualtone | September 13, 2018 | 7 | 60cd7884-ced1-4d6a-b94c-c1fc11ae03fb | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Robyn, Sia, ANOHNI, Jamila Woods, and more all try their hand at some of Neneh Cherry’s greatest hits revealing just how erratically wonderful the Swedish singer has been across her four-decade career. | Robyn, Sia, ANOHNI, Jamila Woods, and more all try their hand at some of Neneh Cherry’s greatest hits revealing just how erratically wonderful the Swedish singer has been across her four-decade career. | Neneh Cherry: The Versions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neneh-cherry-the-versions/ | The Versions | Neneh Cherry thrives on unpredictability. Her four-decade career included stints as punk provocateur, street soul ambassador, trip-hop icon, and jazz singer, just to name a few. The same mercurial spirit that has made her career so thrillingly disparate has also made Cherry hard to pin down, which makes The Versions, a 10-track compilation of covers (and one remix) of Cherry’s songs by female and non-binary artists, a predictably confounding but mostly successful venture through a vibrant pop catalog.
Certainly, there is a lot to celebrate here. The artists who contribute include family members (TYSON is Cherry’s daughter), fans turned friends (Sia), and a number of musicians who operate in the lineage of Cherry’s borderless pop adventures (notably Robyn and London neo-soul/psychedelic R&B restless spirit Greentea Peng). Between them, they cover many of the musical genres that Cherry has embraced in her itinerant catalog. ANOHNI’s “Woman” reflects Cherry’s skill with a world-burning ballad; Greentea Peng’s amusingly grubby take on “Buddy X” nods to the song’s status as a UK Garage anthem (as remixed by scene figureheads the Dreem Teem in 1999), while Sia’s take on “Manchild” is pure pop, a glimmering reflection of the brief period in the late 1980s when Cherry was touted as the new Madonna.
It is “Manchild,” in fact, that provides this album’s two obvious highlights, with distinctive covers from Sia and Los Angeles singer/cellist Kelsey Lu proving the wonderful malleability of Cherry’s work. Sia’s faithful but not overly sincere cover dusts off the tear-jerking pop sincerity that sent the original single up the global charts, while Lu’s gorgeous string-heavy remake locates the jazz influences at the song’s heart. (Neneh Cherry’s stepfather, celebrated trumpeter Don Cherry, once called the song “kinda jazz” with its “seven chords in the verse.”) Crucially, neither version of the song sounds too in thrall to the original, or a victim of change for change’s sake, nimbly escaping the two obvious pitfalls tribute albums easily fall into.
Cherry’s other big hit—the classic “Buffalo Stance”—comes off far worse, despite the attentions of singers Robyn, Mapei, and Dev Hynes on production. Their remake was inspired by Maria “Decida” Wahlberg and Karl “Kyaal” Lund’s “Nostalgia for What Never Was” remix of “Buffalo Stance”, created for a 2017 exhibition in Stockholm on hip-hop as a cultural force. Interesting as this is, though, The Versions’ take on Cherry’s debut single has none of the original’s outrageous self-confidence, which suggested the arrival of a new pop paradigm, somewhere between UK street soul and U.S. hip-hop. Instead, their remake feels limp and unsure of what to do with itself, a combination of polite guitar lines and apologetic beats that drain “Buffalo Stance” of all its vigor, leaving a taste in the mouth like wilted lettuce.
This failure is symptomatic of The Versions’ other principle shortcoming, which is an over-reliance on good taste that edges out Cherry’s rogue-ish, rebellious spirit and sense of humor. (Let us not forget that “Buffalo Stance” included a thoroughly absurd interlude, in which Cherry asked “Wass he loike?” in a blustering faux-Cockney accent.) It’s hard to ask contributors for irreverence on an album celebrating one of the most fascinating pop talents of recent decades. But the cumulative effect of four very respectful covers in a row from Jamila Woods, TYSON, Sudan Archives, and Seinabo Sey—each perfectly satisfying in their own right—makes you wish for the same Neneh Cherry who once rapped about “Chocolates, bananas, doughnuts, and salami/Ain’t gonna fit coz you're full of baloney” (on “Heart”) to break down the studio door and seed some anarchy.
Full of baloney The Versions isn’t. But its muted—and sometimes rather predictable—approach only occasionally gets close to capturing the erratic wonder of Neneh Cherry in full flight, a truly singular star who operates above and beyond the demands of playlist pop and, it appears, major-label tribute albums. | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | June 14, 2022 | 6.8 | 60cf5d5f-1772-4680-a6ce-6ed28e10b2b6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Larry Heard’s productions remain the gold standard for dance music and Another Side, his sterling 1988 collaboration with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson, is no exception. The LP has been reissued on Heard’s Alleviated label, remastered and spread across three pieces of vinyl. For all the sophistication, smooth jazz chords, and political undertones of the album, it's important to note that it still knocks. | Larry Heard’s productions remain the gold standard for dance music and Another Side, his sterling 1988 collaboration with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson, is no exception. The LP has been reissued on Heard’s Alleviated label, remastered and spread across three pieces of vinyl. For all the sophistication, smooth jazz chords, and political undertones of the album, it's important to note that it still knocks. | Fingers Inc.: Another Side | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21391-fingers-inc-another-side/ | Another Side | "I used to pass the Warehouse after school, on my way to work, late in the evening and I wondered why there were so many people hanging out in the street," Chicago producer Larry Heard told XLR8R back in 1995, admitting he had never once set foot in the birthplace of house music. "I guess I was pretty naive." By the time Frankie Knuckles moved over to the Powerplant in 1985, Heard finally checked him out. And while still not the biggest fan of house music, he shared Knuckles’ tastes, a zealotry for both '70s R&B and Moroder-style Eurodisco. Heard, the drummer for a Yes cover band and multi-instrumentalist, began making his own productions as Mr. Fingers soon after, which brought things full circle; "Mystery of Love" and "Washing Machine" became both the urtext for house music and staples of Frankie’s sets.
Heard’s productions remain the gold standard for dance music. While he’s not as prolific in the 21st century, Heard’s still the person acts like Lana Del Rey and Disclosure tap for cred-boosting remixes. But finding and hearing Heard’s albums has never been easy, even in 1988, when he released two of house music’s finest full-lengths: Ammnesia (credited to Mr. Fingers) and Another Side, his sterling collaboration with vocalists Robert Owens and Ron Wilson as Fingers Inc. Both are beacons of American dance music, and ironically neither album was ever released stateside.
Nearly 30 years later, Another Side finally gets reissued on Heard’s Alleviated label, remastered and spread across three pieces of vinyl (it's also available digitally). Another Side might sound unfamiliar to modern EDM listeners, who might wonder where the incessant wallop and insipid vocals signifying "deep house" in 2016 went. The album opens with the shimmering keys and by-turns gritty and gentle soul vocals of Owens on "Decision," Heard’s programmed drums swinging around but never quite settling into a four-four. The downtempo rhythmic figures, silken pads, and whispers of "Bye Bye" only reinforce the anecdote that in 1992 Sade Adu personally approached Heard about producing her band's album, a collaboration that sadly never came to pass.
But while we may never hear the man in conjunction with Ms. Adu, Heard found a singular vocalist in Robert Owens. Forceful enough to growl over an 808 and smooth enough to slot into adult contemporary, Owens’ formidable talents are still not appreciated today. While his fellow Chicagoans were overt in their influences, be it Jamie Principle’s Prince obsession or Darryl Pandy’s Teddy Pendergrass impression, Owens balances between those two giants of R&B without ever being beholden to either. It’s a voice that conveys emotions rarely found in dance music these days: grace, gratitude, giddiness, forlornness, estrangement, defiance.
All those emotions can be not just heard, but felt on songs like the title track, "I’m Strong," and "Bring Down the Walls." "Be strong," Owens and backing vocalist Ron Wilson advise on "Another Side," hopeful for a better tomorrow, repeating as mantra: "Someway/ Someday/ Somehow/ (Carry on)." Whether you hear "I’m Strong" and "Bring Down the Walls" as a resilient call to arms for gay men, for the impoverished, for inner-city African-Americans, for South Africans under apartheid, or just for all the oppressed people seeking solace on a darkened dancefloor, they still resonate as that rare breed, elegant yet body-jacking songs of protest. Not bad for a song like "Walls," which Owens admitted to writing on toilet paper during his break at the hospital.
For all the sophistication, smooth jazz chords, and political undertones of the album, it's important to note that it still knocks. The programming of tracks like "Distant Planet," "Music Take Me Up," and "I’m Strong" still define dance music and elevate the room at peak hour. You could just as easily retitle the latter half of the album House Music’s Greatest Hits, as it’s filled with seismic tracks like "Mystery of Love," "Feelin’ Sleazy," "Bring Down the Walls," and "Can You Feel It."
While "deep house" now means certain club-friendly clichés to a generation of YouTube commenters and Boiler Room attendees, an album like Another Side has only had its title grow in meanings over the intervening decades. It suggests that at its inception, "house" was not a simple square but instead polygonal. Or as one of Heard’s devotees, Todd Terry, would put it a few years on, "house is a feeling." Another Side showcased Larry Heard’s myriad other sides, be it tropical ambient, grown-ass R&B, deft jazz chops, island rhythms, and even prog-rock’s embrace of early synthesizer technology. But ultimately, the music that Heard and Owens rendered back then was a way to make cheap synths and cast-off drum machines emote and express the tumult of human emotions that could arise after a long night at the Warehouse, or anywhere else. In hindisght, it sounds now like the path not traveled by the masses. | 2016-01-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Alleviated | January 12, 2016 | 8.8 | 60d5f5b9-eed0-4c09-a8e3-0752fec0f965 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Chicago jazz composer stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music from a host of local heroes. | The Chicago jazz composer stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music from a host of local heroes. | Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra: Dimensional Stardust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rob-mazurek-exploding-star-orchestra-dimensional-stardust/ | Dimensional Stardust | It’s been five years since Rob Mazurek’s last album with Exploding Star Orchestra, and in that brief window, the Chicago jazz and avant-garde scene from which the collective first arose has enjoyed more attention than it has in decades. Dimensional Stardust was composed for a Berlin-based version of the group, but Mazurek recorded it with a lineup heavy on local heroes—longtime members Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, and John Herndon are joined by Tomeka Reid, Damon Locks, and Jaimie Branch, among others. As a result, it comes off as a second coronation for this era of the city, following Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings from 2018. But where that album highlighted the individual brilliance of Chicago soloists (alongside those from London, New York, and L.A.), Dimensional Stardust is a tightly orchestrated ensemble piece that—like many of the musicians who play on it—uses the gestures of experimental classical music and avant-garde jazz to move into fresh territory.
While previous Exploding Star Orchestra albums have made space for improvisation and soloing, everything on Dimensional Stardust was composed by Mazurek. He recorded each musician’s parts separately over the span of seven months then stitched the album together with the patience and precision of a luxury car embroiderer; if there are seams, they’re obscured by the intricate curlicues he pulls from his band. Throughout the album, he strings together long phrases of short tones, forcing his instrumentalists to play lines that, on staff paper, must have looked like a tangled pearl necklace pulled out of a drawer. On opener “Sun Core Tet (Parable 99),” he sends a spree of notes up Reid’s cello and through Macie Stewart’s violin, then back down via Mitchell’s flute. It’s a trick he repeats often, and it manages never to diminish the individuality of the players; when Mitchell, guitarist Parker, and vibraphonist Joel Ross trade lines in “A Wrinkle in Time Sets Concentric Circles Reeling,” it doesn’t feel like they’re stating one long sentence together so much as they’re considering an idea from multiple angles.
This sense of interdependence is palpable throughout Dimensional Stardust, and it’s made all the more powerful for its having been manufactured after the fact. Mazurek is a master arranger, and he fits the album’s constituent parts together in a way that defies logic. In one of the album’s most uncanny moments, he sutures a virtuosic run from Mitchell to the three-person percussion team in such a way it’s impossible to tell if Mitchell is playing her flute like a drum kit or if the percussionists are matching her polyrhythms tap-for-tap.
Elsewhere, on “Abstract Dark Energy (Parable 9),” Mazurek places a simple square of piano in the distance, giving us a focal point while an anxious bossa nova beat washes through much of the song. Much of the title track sounds as though it’s played in a long, low-ceilinged room with a thin layer of water on the ground, with the resultant compression feeling less like radio-ready loudness and more like the radiating energy of a universe waiting to be born.
Fully half of the songs on Dimensional Stardust are either titled or subtitled as parables, and it’s not hard to understand Mazurek’s attraction to the form. Parables are small stories that open up to cosmic truths. They suggest that our daily life and relationships reveal something greater about the universe itself, and that our quotidian reality is supported by untold mysteries that are nevertheless possible to understand. With his careful needlework, Mazurek stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music, setting aside distinctions between genres, musicians, and points in time and space without losing sight of how each of these components is necessary to the whole. It rises up to gesture toward the cosmos, then returns us to life on Earth, tracing a single great parabolic arc.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem / Nonesuch | December 1, 2020 | 8 | 60d6e99f-142d-4ba7-a0af-0c60fd96e14c | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Clementine Creevy sifts through the muck on her new album, picking up everything from radio-friendly electro-pop to fuzzed-out garage rock. | Clementine Creevy sifts through the muck on her new album, picking up everything from radio-friendly electro-pop to fuzzed-out garage rock. | Cherry Glazerr: I Don’t Want You Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cherry-glazerr-i-dont-want-you-anymore/ | I Don’t Want You Anymore | On Cherry Glazerr’s first new album in four years, I Don’t Want You Anymore, Clementine Creevy pushes herself to extremes. As a lyricist, she explores devotion and surrender, apathy and dependency. As a musician, and self-producing alongside Yves Rothman, she swerves from radio-friendly electro-pop to fuzzed-out garage rock, her vocals delivered in conspiratorial speak-sing or guttural howls. If it scans as an artist throwing everything at the wall, the triumph is that Creevy sounds like she’s in the process of sorting through it.
Cherry Glazerr’s previous albums, 2014’s Haxel Princess and 2017’s Apocalipstick, were rooted in garage rock and noise-pop, but 2019’s Stuffed & Ready went off like a cynical, adrenalized bomb. In place of those explosive moments, I Don’t Want You Anymore paws at ambiguity. The feelings are raw, and Creevy resists major-chord resolutions. Alongside sparse basslines played by Rothman and Sami Perez, Creevy captures the emotional murkiness of a series of devastating but life-affirming relationships through her chilled minor-key guitar and a playful snarl that recalls PJ Harvey. She has cited Evanescence as an influence—a clear reference point for the album’s moments of unbridled drama. But this isn’t a mall-goth reinvention; in sound and subject matter, Cherry Glazerr resists being pinned to any one aesthetic or sound.
Two songs early in the album show just how much Creevy is willing to expand. “Touched You With My Chaos” is a melancholy anthem with harsh, overdriven guitars, shrieking trumpet, and a maudlin string section in the final minute. Creevy wrote it after watching Gregg Araki’s harrowing 2004 film Mysterious Skin, seeking to mimic its themes of desperation, which she does in a screamy, bratty chorus: “I said that I loved you,” she howls. “I never wanted love.” In the relentless “Soft Like a Flower,” Creevy bares it all over garage rock deep-fried in emo. The song ends in a maniacal laugh that could easily be mistaken for a cry: an actorly gesture that suggests Creevy is fiercely devoted to her role.
The maniacal laugh-cry is also a sign Creevy’s having fun again. It recalls the offbeat ridiculousness of early Cherry Glazerr gems like “Grilled Cheese,” a surprisingly sultry ode to comfort food. I Don’t Want You Anymore falls flat when Creevy opts for bubbly, optimistic indie pop like “Wild Times,” which doesn’t display the distinct artistic personality she has developed over the past decade. But the rest of the album’s back half soars, particularly “Sugar,” a slow-build rocker in which Creevy’s vocals take on an ominous lullaby lilt: “You make me wanna push my luck/Break my heart/I don’t care,” she sings. By the end, Creevy once again erupts in delirious laughter, but this time, there’s no mistaking it for tears—the only logical response is to start laughing along with her. | 2023-10-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | October 5, 2023 | 7.1 | 60da13ab-9be1-4b6b-a2e9-d0936f4c07cc | Sophia June | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophia-june/ | |
At once immersive and disorienting, Seth Horvitz’s second album as Rrose is dance music that erases the dancefloor. | At once immersive and disorienting, Seth Horvitz’s second album as Rrose is dance music that erases the dancefloor. | Rrose: Please Touch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rrose-please-touch/ | Please Touch | In the beginning, Rrose made techno. Unusual techno, perhaps—heady, psychedelic, convoluted—but techno nonetheless. It maintained the genre’s recognizable form, based on four-on-the-floor beats and boom-tick cadences. It drew its minimalist aesthetic from the early-’90s sounds of artists like Robert Hood and Richie Hawtin, and it was in conversation with fellow travelers along the genre’s grayscale fringes—contemporaries like Sandwell District, Donato Dozzy, and Kangding Ray.
Rrose—American-born, London-based artist Seth Horvitz, who borrowed the alias from Marcel Duchamp’s femme alter ego—has simultaneously moonlighted in more avant-garde sounds. They collaborated with modular-synth pioneer and free improviser Bob Ostertag and recorded a 1971 composition by percussionist James Tenney. Rrose’s debut solo album, 2019’s Hymn to Moisture, struck a balance between their opposing influences, alternating between chugging rhythmic workouts and buzzing expanses of pure drone.
On their new album Please Touch, Rrose continues to move between sounds that flicker and sounds that throb, wreathing shuddering electronic pulses in opalescent waveshaping. But the proportions have shifted. Where Hymn to Moisture was neatly split between club tracks and ambient pieces, on Please Touch, the elements have fused, and it’s more difficult to discern one mode from the other. It’s all one glistening, churning morass, a cascading chain of vibrations that transcends electronic music’s conventional templates.
Rhythm and drone are inextricable in the opening “Joy of the Worm,” in which a nervous gamelan thrum taps away over low-end swells. There’s something almost rotor-like about the chopping percussion, suggesting a helicopter hovering motionless over a fetid swamp: The drums are in constant motion, yet the whole thing stays almost still, but for the rolling waves of bass. Other tracks attempt similar blends of motion and stasis. “Pleasure Vessels” is dub techno in the tradition of Basic Channel or the Chain Reaction label, just with all the beats blotted out; bursts of synth pile up over almost inaudibly burbling bass, suggesting overlapping layers of translucent materials, like onion skin or tulle.
There are a few purely beatless tracks, like “Disappeared” and the closing “Turning Blue,” in which microtonal harmonies and extraordinarily patient mixing yield immersive psychoacoustic effects in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros or Éliane Radigue. And on a few cuts, the balance tips back toward proper beats. Yet Rrose’s work is so rhythmically and timbrally complex that it bears little in common with standard contemporary dance music. “Rib Cage” begins with a machine-like hum and gradually spreads a flowing array of pulses and pings across the spectrum, from the deepest sub-bass to the prickliest high end. Superimposing insect chatter on turbine groan, it’s part engine room, part rainforest.
Rrose has described their approach as a process of feeding “seed” sounds through “elaborate webs of interrelated audio processing,” which might help explain why these tracks tend to develop in the way that they do, as if expanding outward from a single point, like an organic fractal. They often feel like attempts to map out chaos theory’s “butterfly effect”—the metaphorical postulation that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet might cause a tsunami on the other—in sound. “The Illuminating Glass” begins as the album’s most stripped-down track, just a half-speed kick drum and answering hi-hat swathed in noxious clouds of synth. But as it unfolds, individual drum hits ripple out in waves, and after a few minutes, every single element of the track is quivering violently. It’s a profoundly disorienting effect; you may find yourself snapping to attention and wondering exactly how you’ve gotten where you are. And in the track’s closing minutes of seesawing whirr, as the beats melt away, you may wonder if you had imagined them entirely.
There are few mile markers in Rrose’s music, few opportunities to get your bearings. Weirder and more mystifying than the majority of what passes for techno these days, Please Touch plays tricks on the mind and body. Like those carnival rides where the ground drops away, leaving you pinned to the wall of the rotating chamber, it’s dance music that erases the dancefloor, even as it makes you acutely aware of the physics of sound—the way the tiniest vibrations propagate into your ear canals and across your skin. | 2023-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Eaux | June 27, 2023 | 7.8 | 60e596d8-19e5-46a0-ae39-c55c1ecd0488 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
With production assistance from John McEntire, the Canadian indie rock kingpins return, tighter and more polished than ever. | With production assistance from John McEntire, the Canadian indie rock kingpins return, tighter and more polished than ever. | Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14200-forgiveness-rock-record/ | Forgiveness Rock Record | Forgiveness is not a sentiment often associated with rock music. Anger, despair, infatuation, sure. But forgiveness is more complicated, and tougher to fit into a four-minute song. Broken Social Scene know all about heartbreak-- they've spent most of the last decade crafting songs about it with almost unparalleled zeal. Their story is filled with scurrilous encounters, backstabbings, and break-ups on par with most 70s arena-rockers, and they've crashed and rebuilt so many times that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who was where at any given moment. But they've also used that flexibility to their advantage: Their epochal 2002 breakout You Forgot It In People was the joyous sound of friends banding together to boost each other up, while 2005's Broken Social Scene was the dizzying sound of friends fizzing out into solo endeavors and outside pursuits.
Now they're back, and they're forgiving. Who, exactly? Each other, loves, bad decisions, humanity at large, worse decisions, the past, the future, culture, corporations, art, you, me, maybe even George W. Bush. (Well, maybe not him.) And while a 59-minute absolution session sounds excessive for even the most devout fans, Broken Social Scene aren't just throwing out hail marys here. Because forgiveness is hard, especially for a group this grand and this intertwined for this long. The album lets bygones go while acknowledging the pain and discipline involved, and does so while keeping with the band's indie-mixtape rep. There's a song that sounds like Pavement, one that sounds like the Sea and Cake (featuring Sea and Cake singer Sam Prekop), another like a Broadway adaptation of Children of Men, a weightless ballad that may double as an ode to masturbation, and a song that's basically five minutes of atmospheric pop perfection. Their ambition is intact.
Forgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too. Working with band hero, Tortoise/Sea and Cake drummer, and post-rock mastermind John McEntire for the first time, Broken Social Scene made sure to have their shit together. Considering the co-producer's experimental bona fides, it's surprising that this is the most song-based album the band has ever made-- every track but one contains vocals, and a couple seem to be filled with more words than the entirety of You Forgot It In People. Unlike their last album's sometimes indulgent cut-and-paste sonic collages, Forgiveness has distinct targets and leaves little room for wayward meanders.
The band's newfound tightness results in a few of the most chart-friendly songs in BSS history, although as usual, each seems to come with a built-in caveat to prevent the potential of radio play: the sweat-soaked "World Sick", with its massive crescendos building to one visceral, heart-pounding release after another, is nearly seven minutes long with extended instrumental intros and outros. "Texico Bitches", despite its misleading breezy accompaniment, is an increasingly topical indictment of big oil that repeats the word "bitches" 12 times. And the vocals on the beautiful, synth-laden "All to All" are serviceably performed by relative newcomer Lisa Lobsinger, where Leslie Feist's stronger, more possessed delivery may have pushed it into another weight class entirely. (Feist does show up on Forgiveness, but only for background vocals.)
As an alt-hippie with obsessions for Dinosaur Jr., Jeff Buckley, and Ennio Morricone, BSS main face Kevin Drew led the burgeoning band to somewhere completely fresh with You Forgot It In People, an album that read like a non-ironic, indie-rock Odelay for the early 2000s. For the most part, Drew and company are referencing the same beloved bands on Forgiveness, with one key addition: Broken Social Scene themselves. There are now marks that listeners expect them to hit, and they're nailed with focus and precision: the peppy, horn-laden track from Apostle of Hustle's Andrew Whiteman ("Art House Director"), the back-of-the-bus acoustic session ("Highway Slipper Jam"), the immense instrumental to end all immense instrumentals ("Meet Me in the Basement"). All of those tracks excellently fill their respective niches, but the fact that there are niches at all adds a bittersweet tinge to a band that once sounded like everything else and nothing else.
Which leads us to the indiscretion summary "Sentimental X's". It checks off another BSS box-- the subtly devastating Emily Haines-sung heart-tugger. "Off and on is what we want," sings Haines, narrating the band's gift-and-curse plight, "A friend of a friend you used to call/ Or a friend of a friend you used/ You used to call." Which is what Broken Social Scene is: a mess of friends using friends, loving friends, calling friends, wanting to call friends, and then not calling friends anymore. The connections are transitory but also indestructible. Ultimately, "Sentimental X's" is a love song; there's lots of forgiveness, but nobody feels sorry. | 2010-05-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | May 3, 2010 | 8.3 | 60f224cd-1e23-460f-ad1f-261ba98745c7 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Lately I feel a little shaky. It rains too much and the coffee's too strong and the sirens are ... | Lately I feel a little shaky. It rains too much and the coffee's too strong and the sirens are ... | Ellen Allien: Berlinette | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/411-berlinette/ | Berlinette | Lately I feel a little shaky. It rains too much and the coffee's too strong and the sirens are too loud, too often. People aren't as pretty as they used to seem, and on top of that they're gradually electing the entire cast of the movie Predator to significant governorships. Minnesota, California: I think I saw Carl Weathers in Central Park yesterday with a stack of leaflets. When late November rolls around and someone asks what I'm thankful for, I might just give up and say Ellen Allien's Berlinette, which has made the past six or seven months a lot nicer.
That's the kind of love she inspires. Another Pitchforker came back from Berlin a few months ago, having seen her DJ at a party for her label, Bpitch Control, and said faux-hawked German boys had been lined up around the deck to bring her drinks. Thom Yorke's been going around talking about how great the label is, the cheat: yes, yet another cadre of ultra-fine German electronics. And earlier this year she released Berlinette, which is "serious," and "pop," and beautiful, and which I've had more success recommending to people than anything in years. It's a record that German techno enthusiasts and Björk fans can agree on; it tweaks and thumps and then pulls gorgeous ghostly pop out of it; it's big and solid and lovely.
How so? The truth is that it's just enchanting, in a way that has to do with something much more than the sonic inventiveness and precision engineering that I'll have to settle for discussing here. It's rare for artists to manage what Allien does-- to take the tweaky cutting edges of techno and IDM and electro and draw from them pop music evocative enough to entrance even people who are usually turned off by electronics and "repetitive beats." It's even rarer for an artist to manage that with anything like Berlinette's sense of mood and personality, which mostly transcends the mechanics of the sound. But Allien manages all of this, in about eleven different ways.
Just try one track: "Trashscapes". Her beats are like tiny hypercomplicated machines, with lots of pistons and articulated limbs; "Trashscapes" kicks in with a stiff, daunting one, one that pounds and then hangs in the air for a second before flipping over and starting again. Then come bursts of gnarled guitar, processed into a grim, extra-terrestrial chug-- the same way Allien's vocals are always processed into what feel like departure announcements from a spaceport on Mercury. At first we can't hear her: just micro-second clips and stutters popping over the mech-beat. Then she's singing and it feels heavy but it hasn't quite gelled into sense: "Wo is where/ What is when/ Why we are here." But when the guitars speed into an evil blur she comes out all steely-eyed with the record's mantra: "The past is a lighttrain to unknown trashscapes."
That's what she does, on the face of it: She blurs the line between "real" sounds and "fake" ones, weaving processed patches of voice and guitar directly into the laptopped complexity of her rhythms; on "Abstract Pictures" it's the clang of a sequencer that rings out clear and natural. On "Push" she indulges in the half-crazy tweakery of some of her labelmates, toying with stompy synth blurts and calling, "Push/ Push/ Kick your ass." When she goes pop it's not by watering down the beats and crooning seductively or anything like that; it's just by gathering her steady tech throb up into gorgeous sweeps of melody. "Sehnsucht", one of the record's other standouts, has a compositional swell that's like the best days of Orbital, another act that always had the same ghostly, personal sheen Allien conjures: the beat here is her second-best machine (see "Wish"), and the vocal is just another micro-processed blip, a half-syllable "Ah." It stutters in and takes its shape, and by the time the song draws up, roaring, there's no lyric that could be more right than the electronically pitched melody of those half-syllables.
But all that's only technical. If it were just that, Berlinette would be an outstanding record, but not so outstanding as this. No, Berlinette has something extra-- the sort of mood and magic that makes you want to bring Allien as many drinks as she'll let you buy her. It's in the hyper-pretty, otherworldly electro-funk of "Secret", in the almost Cure-like cerebral throb of "Open", and even in the embarrassingly bald, maybe even naïve lyric of "Wish", which, like any good moment of vulnerability, makes you like Allien that much more. "Need a planet without cars and wars/ I wish it could be true," she sings-- an almost strange thing to hear on a record full of alien machines.
So that's the thrill: realizing all over again just how evocative and gorgeous the stiff clatter of technology can be. You sit calmly listening, drifting off to somewhere else, and then you notice that the little people dancing inside your head could almost be jacking their limbs off to certain points, or that the sounds of power tools are peeking out between the sounds of androids singing arias. Oh, maybe it's not that amazing: It's just a record, after all, and one of plenty of great ones released this year. But I've spent half the year with it, and it only gets better, and I can't wait to hear how it sounds in a few months, when the Predator itself announces a dark-horse independent bid for the presidency. | 2003-11-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-11-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Bpitch Control | November 10, 2003 | 8.9 | 60f561f0-2fe8-442c-9f17-ba2ae70ca8ca | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Eleanor Friedberger's second solo album, which she co-wrote with alt-folk singer/novelist John Wesley Harding, feels like a travelogue of the mind. Personal Record is jam-packed with clever wordplay and fleeting emotions, but the tight, buoyant pop arrangements keep it from getting bogged down. | Eleanor Friedberger's second solo album, which she co-wrote with alt-folk singer/novelist John Wesley Harding, feels like a travelogue of the mind. Personal Record is jam-packed with clever wordplay and fleeting emotions, but the tight, buoyant pop arrangements keep it from getting bogged down. | Eleanor Friedberger: Personal Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18096-eleanor-friedberger-personal-record/ | Personal Record | As one half of proggy brother-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces, the songs Eleanor Friedberger used to sing sounded like pop music as imagined by Thomas Pynchon, or maybe Carmen Sandiego: tirelessly globe-trotting, breathlessly complex, and just a little cartoony. In a voice that sounds like a perfect cross between Patti Smith, Stephen Malkmus, and a 19th century diction coach, Friedberger spun elaborate, wildly fictional travelogues (usually written by her brother, Matthew); in one Fiery Furnaces song she was a Michigan boat captain defending her cargo of blueberries against South Asian pirates; in another she sang in Innuit, and a few songs later she was also a high school queen bee caught in a labyrinthine plot involving credit card theft. Then something unexpected happened with the release of her first solo album, 2011's terrific Last Summer. She suddenly began to apply that same keen eye for meticulous detail, propulsive narrative, and ironic humor to the one character it seemed she'd never written about before: herself.
Last Summer was a sharply observed account of Friedberger's first decade or so in New York, where she moved in the early 2000s. At times, its confessional, meticulously detailed lyrics read like ripped-out diary pages, and its brilliance was so sneaky that it was the very definition of a grower. It demonstrated an exciting shift in her songwriting that she continues to explore on her excellent new album, Personal Record. Spinning unexpectedly compelling narratives out of party-hopping New York nights ("When I Knew") and solitary shut-in afternoons ("My Own World") alike, the songs on Personal Record feel like travelogues of the mind, entertaining accounts of adventures closer to home. “The last record I did was so specific and detailed,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s nice to have a record where you can catch a glimpse of the artist and their world, but this time I wanted something where people could insert themselves into it.” She co-wrote Personal Record with a new collaborator, alt-folk singer and novelist John Wesley Harding, and adding another skilled writer to the mix seems to have gotten her out of her own head a bit.
Occasionally, she nails the one-size-fits-all timeless pop lyric: the opening track’s vivid admission, “I’d rather be two inches from your face,” the elegantly sighed, “Love is an exquisite kind of pain/ And oh, since I saw you, I’ll never be happy again.” But memory’s a funny thing; it latches onto the sensory details, even when they’re somebody else’s. “When I Knew” so perfectly captures the excitement of a blossoming friendship between music nerds that the line “We both liked weird music, so you played me Soft Machine,” practically invites you to swap out the specifics for your own favorite band; ditto the scene of the infatuated new lovers reading an e-book in the back of a cab, or the girl curiously dressed as a Dexy’s Midnight Runner for Halloween. Contrary to what she might believe, the more detailed and specific Friedberger’s songs are, the easier it is to insert yourself into them.
Personal Record is so jam-packed with clever wordplay and fleeting, sometimes contradictory emotions (“I’ll Never Be Happy Again” is followed by the calisthenic skip of “Stare at the Sun”, a song about being dizzyingly happy) that it occasionally feels as much like a short story collection as it does an album. But the tight, buoyant pop arrangements keep it from getting bogged down. Despite Friedberger’s singular phrasing and voice, there’s something inviting and comfortingly familiar about Personal Record’s approach to pop melody. The great “She’s a Mirror” sounds at once like Hall & Oates covering “Lust for Life” and the Peanuts shuffling to a Harry Nilsson tune-- but its amiable melody and boingy bassline give an easy entry point to a song that's lyrically devious.
Like the title Personal Record itself, Friedberger’s songs use double meaning to great (and sometimes genuinely funny) effect, but they become suddenly poignant in the moments when those defenses fall away. “Other Boys” is one of the most candid, quietly devastating songs she’s ever written: It’s about the kind of casual, open relationship that, secretly, only one of the parties wants to be casual and open. In her ever-confident voice she pantomimes a shrug, but someone who didn’t care about the competition wouldn’t make a list of her guy’s side chicks as poetic and mythologized as the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships: “The long-tail pony with the thick, dark mane/ 14 hands, four thousand names,” “the spider you kissed in the stairwell,” and the subtly cutting, “that sometime star of stage and screen who had a bit part in a film back in her teens.” “There are other boys, too,” she insists, her about-face betrayed by the slightest tinge of melancholy. With each repetition, the line becomes a little harder to believe, and a little more heartbreaking.
Ultimately, though, Friedberger’s self-aware enough to be amused by the irony of confessional songwriting. This becomes explicit on “Singing Time”, Personal Record’s bittersweet finale. Over a muted, aqueous guitar, Friedberger finally lets go of a doomed relationship: “You could turn up late and miss the show, or sit in the middle of the very front row/ He would not know, he would not know.” It’s appropriately downcast until-- in a swell of synth and percussion-- the song suddenly takes flight. “Let’s go, my songs,” she sings, a meta-address that's somehow both playful and self-deprecating. “One day we will know more.” Up until then, the song’s been a tear-jerker, but in this moment it becomes oddly triumphant. It’s hard to think of many other songwriters in indie rock right now who’d be able to pull off that kind of tonal shift-- probably because very few are writing with half the precision, wit, and cool poise that Friedberger displays here. | 2013-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 5, 2013 | 8.1 | 60f92240-51f6-4353-b5b0-906ad198a4a6 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
With a slightly subtler approach, the post-metal band relies on familiar tricks, gesturing at widescreen emotions in an endless sea of sine wave swells. | With a slightly subtler approach, the post-metal band relies on familiar tricks, gesturing at widescreen emotions in an endless sea of sine wave swells. | Holy Fawn: Dimensional Bleed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holy-fawn-dimensional-bleed/ | Dimensional Bleed | Over the past decade of heavy shoegaze music, Holy Fawn have enjoyed a uniquely organic success story. The Arizona four-piece broke out with their 2018 debut, Death Spells, which they self-released online before it garnered re-releases from British punk/metal label Holy Roar and New York indie/emo mainstay Triple Crown. They’ve since found fans in post-hardcore-turned-prog mainstays Thrice, Swedish metal giants Cult of Luna, and perhaps most crucially, blackgaze icons Deafheaven, all of whom have invited Holy Fawn on tour. For modern fans of shoegaze, blackgaze, or post-metal, Holy Fawn have become the ultimate “recommended if you like” band. They’re the people’s champs.
It's easy to see why. Holy Fawn draw on some of the most beloved “epic” music of the past 30 years: the drawn-out crescendos of Explosions in the Sky, the mainstage (not dance tent) electronics of early M83, the textural lushness of Slowdive, the intimate grandeur of Sigur Rós, and of course, the Norway-via-California black metal screeches of Deafheaven. These are all bands that are dead serious in their sweeping melodrama, bands that seem tailor-made for soundtracking (or even creating) profound moments in listeners’ lives, and that’s what Holy Fawn aim for, too. Even before you press play, their new album, Dimensional Bleed, is full of song titles (“Death Is a Relief,” “True Loss,” “Lift Your Head”) that aim to evoke widescreen emotions.
Here’s the thing about those types of emotions, though: In real life, they’re completely unpredictable. You never know how you’re going to feel in the aftermath of a life-changing event, whether it be a breakup, a cross-country move, an unexpected death, or even just a random revelation about mortality while stargazing. Lyrically, Holy Fawn’s three vocalists are too opaque in their nature-infused mortality metaphors (“I am an ugly root/Knotting itself out of life”) to discern what, exactly, is eating away at them. But musically, the emotional cues are more baldly manipulative than the soundtrack of a daytime soap.
Picture this: a swell of warm, glitchy electronics, keening guitars, and intimate, close-mic’d singing. A gradual crescendo, louder guitars, heavy methodical drumming. Several minutes in, the tone shifts from hopeful to mournful, and all of the sudden: screaming. The tempo rarely rises above a dirge, the songs (including interludes) average out to five minutes apiece, and the screaming never, ever starts more than three minutes before the song ends—that would ruin the climax. Being formulaic isn’t always a bad thing—in some cases, it’s part of an artist’s charm—but when nearly all of Holy Fawn’s songs expect you to feel things without much deviation from the form, their albums resemble an endless sea of sine wave swells.
Dimensional Bleed introduces a bit more subtlety than Death Spells, with bookend tracks “Hexsewn” and “Blood Memory” in particular making use of minimalistic sound design that goes far beyond “rock band adds synths” stereotypes. These quieter moments are Holy Fawn’s most unpredictable—check out all of the tasteful tricks and effects deployed on the vocals and drums on gentle mid-album highlight “Amaranthine”—much as they were when the band first started prominently featuring more electronic textures on the back half of 2020’s The Black Moon EP. This sparkling, glitchy side is best married to their more bombastic tendencies on lead single “Death Is a Relief.” Through sudden beat switches, constantly churning Stranger Things synths, and satisfying exclamation marks (that spliced-in, breathy four-beat drum hit is very cool), it actually achieves that pit-of-the-stomach, missing-a-step-on-the-staircase feeling that is so often missing from Holy Fawn’s bold, underlined attempt at emotional resonance.
The black metal goblin rasp that inevitably shows up at the climax of “Death Is a Relief” is effective there and in a few other moments—particularly “Void of Light,” where it’s finally paired with drums that ever so slightly pick up the pace. In general though, Holy Fawn’s use of that very specific type of screaming feels like a patch-emblazoned battle vest thrown on to impress a friend’s older brother. There’s nothing else in their sound that’s metal in the slightest. Black metal in particular, defined by rapid-fire assaults of blastbeats and tremolo guitar picking, relies on an intensity that Holy Fawn’s heavy-lidded reveries, which fall squarely into the category of post-rock, never so much as hint at. In a crowded blackgaze landscape that’s quickly becoming just as stylistically restrictive as the genres it initially sought to leave behind, these hallmarks are still treated with blind reverence, despite the nontraditional settings.
In the press materials for Dimensional Bleed, Holy Fawn hammer home that they are covering “uncharted territory,” “blazing new trails,” and “inhabiting multiple states of sonic existence all at once.” But in 2022, is their combination of styles really all that revolutionary? A decade-plus ago, heavy, metal-inflected shoegaze was a tough sell (and a lot tougher to produce). Despite being critical successes, Deafheaven and Alcest were clowned relentlessly by metal purists, and Nothing spent years being either the only loud band or the only slow band on live bills, depending on whether they played with indie or hardcore acts. Holy Fawn have been welcomed by an existing scene with open arms. Perhaps what’s holding them back is a lack of the hunger and iconoclasm that pushed their forebears into uncomfortable, groundbreaking spaces. | 2022-09-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Triple Crown / Wax Bodega | September 12, 2022 | 6.4 | 60fb96c5-368f-48f2-858f-5796b80bf0c5 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
On the 18-year-old New York rapper’s debut album, a pocketful of catchy melodies and bubbly rhythms don’t make up for a lack of anything interesting to say. | On the 18-year-old New York rapper’s debut album, a pocketful of catchy melodies and bubbly rhythms don’t make up for a lack of anything interesting to say. | Lil Tecca: Virgo World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-tecca-virgo-world/ | Virgo World | On his 2013 song “Lonely,” South Carolina rapper Speaker Knockerz sounds like C-3PO with a splash of AutoTune, backed by pianos soft enough for a lullaby. “I had to make a couple bands by my lonely,” he sings, and his expressionless voice suggests he’s trying to hold back tears over a stack of money, like Jada Pinkett Smith in the final scene of Set It Off. It was a regional hit, and became something bigger than that after his tragic death at 19 the following year. The song trickled its way up the East Coast to New York, and Speaker Knockerz’s handful of mixtapes became a lodestar for a new scene of singing rappers 700 miles from his hometown: artists like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Lil Tjay, Jay Gwuapo, and most obviously, Lil Tecca.
Coming from the Five Towns, a section of Long Island that abuts Queens, the 18-year-old Lil Tecca has made Speaker Knockerz’s impact on his music openly known. But even if he never admitted it, you’d be able to tell. “Ransom,” Tecca’s 2019 breakout moment, feels particularly indebted, as he glides over a bright and bubbly beat with a monotone flow, sounding like the kid who got called on by the teacher after sleeping at the back of the classroom. Tecca channels the style well, but there’s an element of Speaker Knockerz that mere imitation can’t capture: he was a writer, filling songs like his “Rico Story” trilogy with the narrative detail of a Carl Franklin neo-noir. On Lil Tecca's debut album Virgo World, he compensates for his lack of a pen with a pocketful of catchy rhythms and melodies, but they don’t have enough spark to elevate the filler.
This isn’t an attempt to nitpick about rappers who lack substance, but they do have to say some memorable or cool shit eventually. The lifestyle Lil Tecca documents in his songs is mundane, which isn’t necessarily a strike against him; plenty of other rappers have found ways to make the uneventful pop. Babyface Ray packs his songs with colorful specifics that make it feel as if you’re there, and Curren$y can make the most monotonous days sound glamorous. Virgo World’s boasts and observations are too generic to resonate in the same way. “For all that I been through and all that I’m goin through next/I’ma always be myself and we gon’ count up these checks,” he raps twice on “No Answers.”
Tecca’s storytelling faults are most clear on “When You Down.” Next to Lil Durk and Polo G, who are both pouring their hearts out, Tecca sing-raps about faceless haters and friends who have turned their backs on him, a writing crutch he leans on repeatedly. On “Insecurities,” he sings, “Real nigga shit, niggas not how they seem like/Real nigga shit, I’m goin’ up and niggas seem tight.” These impersonal and unspecific lines are made even more lifeless by a Taz Taylor and Nick Mira beat that’s like a watered down version of an instrumental from Popcaan’s Fixtape.
Since Lil Tecca emerged on SoundCloud in 2018, his best songs have been the ones where the melodies, production, and good vibes outweigh the blandness of whatever he’s saying. In keeping with that trend, Virgo World’s strongest cut is “Selection,” a Skrillex and DJ Scheme pop record that captures the fun of that “Sorry,” “Where Are Ü Now,” and “What Do You Mean?” summer of 2015. Tecca also has an affinity for light Afro-Fusion records; “Level Up” and “Closest to Heaven” are a pair of moody, slow-wining dance cuts that I selfishly wish were released in June. But these glimpses of vibrancy don’t come often enough.
Nobody is asking Lil Tecca to be profound, or even to make sense. But at least give us the full picture of what you’re talking about. Who turned their back on you? Who is fake? What are you wearing? What are you drinking? What city are you in? Who or what is making you feel this way? These sorts of details helped Speaker Knockerz mixtapes travel from South Carolina and into Tecca’s Long Island home. So far, it’s hard to imagine Lil Tecca’s music making the same sort of journey.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Galactic / Republic | September 24, 2020 | 6 | 60fc7f98-edeb-4e4b-a11e-136da74e71d9 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The seventh album from Ice-T’s heavy metal band sounds like a TED Talk set to a bracing thrashcore/groove metal soundtrack. | The seventh album from Ice-T’s heavy metal band sounds like a TED Talk set to a bracing thrashcore/groove metal soundtrack. | Body Count: Bloodlust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23038-bloodlust/ | Bloodlust | It takes a special balance to straddle the line between piousness and self-parody, but Tracy Marrow, aka Ice-T, has long pulled it off with gusto. Since the beginning of his 1987 hip-hop debut Rhyme Pays, Marrow has relished his self-appointed role as something like Crenshaw, Los Angeles’ unofficial ambassador to the world. As Marrow once explained to Arsenio Hall in 1989, his m.o. has been to intentionally paint exaggerated scenarios in order to show the world what street hustling life is like while also discouraging black youth from pursuing a life of crime. In 1990, Marrow carried the same approach over into metal group Body Count, which he founded with southpaw guitarist Ernie Cunnigan aka Ernie C.
In an interlude on Body Count’s seventh album, Bloodlust, Marrow explains that he started the band to provide the metal-loving Cunnigan with a musical vehicle while also expressing his own love for three key influences: Black Sabbath, Suicidal Tendencies, and Slayer. If you don't mind Marrow’s didactic style, the impromptu Q&A comes off with some charm, as if Marrow were standing at a lectern expounding on the band’s history. (Hell, if Steve Albini can take questions halfway through Shellac’s shows, why shouldn’t Marrow do the same on his own records?) In fact, much of this album plays like the 2015 TED Talk Marrow gave at the Sing Sing maximum-security prison, only set to a bracing thrashcore/groove metal soundtrack.
On his own, Ice-T has maintained household-name status for his 17-year role as Detective Tutuola on the “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” TV series. But the last time Body Count caused any real ripples in the zeitgeist came in the summers of ’91 and ’92, first as a surprise addition to Ice-T’s rap set on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour, and then as the source of a heated controversy over their song “Cop Killer.” Marrow ultimately agreed to pull “Cop Killer” from later pressings of the band’s 1992 debut. Since then, the band has basically repeated itself, almost becoming a heritage act before its time. These days, Body Count can operate in a comfortable space satisfying the public’s niche appetites for vintage metal and hardcore.
But now, owing to the recent occurrences of police brutality captured on video, Body Count stand poised to hit a nerve once again. Marrow attempts to do so most blatantly on “No Lives Matter.” No surprise, he explains the song’s motives in a monologue before it even begins. It’s not, as the ironic title might suggest, a renunciation of the Black Lives Matter movement, but a reminder that although racism is very much alive, power elites view all poor people with the same inhumane disregard. Similarly, Marrow waxes professorial at the beginning of the title track, where he says: “Since the beginning of time, humans have killed each other because they disagreed... The ability to kill is as innate as our ability to love.”
Needless to say, Marrow likes to spell things out. On Bloodlust, he sounds like he’s narrating a profanity-laced “Sesame Street” segment: Imagine an Ice-T muppet popping out of garbage cans shouting, “They’re shootin’ at cops/They’re pushing the line/Racism is high/The country’s divided, you know the fuck why.../The public is dumb.../Our leaders are evil!” Bloodlust is like that; it doesn’t take long to feel like you’re being patronized. That said, Marrow—who doesn’t rhyme on Body Count albums—is simply following in the footsteps of his most pointedly direct hardcore influences. For proof, just look at the Exploited medley he recorded with Slayer in 1993. But his style hasn’t changed one iota since then. Neither, really, has the rest of the band’s. They keep the music raw enough that it sounds almost-but-not-quite amateurish—again, following in the hardcore/early-thrash tradition—while Marrow’s willingness to indulge in comic absurdity with the lyrics makes Body Count’s preachiness more palatable.
Bloodlust opens with a mock emergency broadcast announcement, in which Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine announces that martial law has been declared by the Department of Homeland Security, that gatherings of two or more people are now illegal, that “all traitors will be shot,” and that “America is now engaged in civil war.” It’s hokey as hell. But what makes Ice-T still valuable in a world where we now have Killer Mike, Dälek, the Coup, and Immortal Technique is his unique ability to deliver a message of upheaval that also feels celebratory. Later in the opening track, there’s a giddy sense of anticipation when Ice yells “I’m feelin’ the tension/Don’t tell me you don’t.../Rich or poor, urban war/This shit just might jump off tonight” over squealing leads. At moments like that, Ice-T and Ernie C capture the energy of a party record while urging us to give serious consideration to some of the most naggingly persistent issues of our time—an accomplishment regardless of how spotty Bloodlust gets. | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rap | Century Media | April 13, 2017 | 5.7 | 61016f4d-c49c-4a85-a6cf-108095d57666 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Though just as charged and confrontational as any of his other projects, the rapper’s latest album is uninhibited and proud of it. | Though just as charged and confrontational as any of his other projects, the rapper’s latest album is uninhibited and proud of it. | JPEGMAFIA: LP! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jpegmafia-lp/ | LP! | The chip on JPEGMAFIA’s shoulder has only grown bigger with time. His music—a blend of rap, noise, and punk filtered through the cultural vacuum of the internet—has always existed in the space between brash and sly, hollowing out the center of that Venn diagram with a jagged shovel. Every project, from 2015’s Communist Slow Jams onward, sways from hazy synths to bludgeoning boom-bap to earnest covers of pre-Y2K ballads on a dime, mixing and matching the styles as fresh perspectives on a well-established formula. His two breakout records—2018’s independent Veteran and his 2019 major-label debut All My Heroes Are Cornballs—mine from different ends of the noise-rap spectrum, but JPEG’s humor and world-weary thoughts on racism and music industry bullshit are the adapters through which he’s able to process any musical energy. His rage is palpable while being offset by a deep passion for craft and left-field pop culture reference.
JPEG’s notoriety has increased exponentially since the late 2010s, netting him guest spots on tours with Vince Staples and his first entry on the Billboard 200 with Cornballs. This rise has also eroded what little patience he had for the rap industry machine, and on his latest project, LP!, his final under EQT and Republic, he’s practically bursting a vein at the idea of freedom: “My time in the music industry is over because I refuse to be disrespected by people who aren’t [behaving] respectably in the first place,” he said in a note on the album’s Bandcamp page. LP! supercharges the ire and catharsis of this moment in his career, playing up the contrast between JPEG’s abrasive cheekiness and his warmest batch of beats to date.
For starters, LP! has been released in two forms: the “Online” version—uploaded to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.—and the “Offline” version available on YouTube and Bandcamp, which boasts a handful of extra songs, extended versions of existing ones, and a slightly tweaked tracklist. Even the project’s title—the most basic descriptor imaginable with an exclamation point at the end—feels like a middle finger or at least a metatextual rib poke.
JPEG’s sense of humor is clearly intact, and his myriad influences continue to pull his work in strange directions. A three-song run near the middle of the album typifies these strengths: The ghostly wails and funky bass behind JPEG’s thundering voice on “REBOUND!” are immediately followed by “💯,” a sea of synths flowing around a warped vocal sample. And then there’s “OG!,” which takes a sampled beatbox and rapping session and adds drums that blast like mortar shots. One moment he’s shouting out Bad Bunny and the late MF DOOM, and the next he’s interpolating Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time.” This fusion of past and present is playful without feeling contrived, the beats’ minimal nature never diluting the raw mashups on display.
LP! has enough laughs and smirks to scan as an overall fun time, but the lyrics further plumb the depths of JPEG’s contempt for people who’ve crossed him. His aggro tendencies have always been at the forefront of his art, but there’s more venom this time, more kiss-offs, threats, and vague stories to fuel his glitchy fire. “Why would I pray for your health?/Baby, I pray for myself,” he screams on “REBOUND!” “TIRED, NERVOUS, & BROKE!” in particular, spews at various targets, including someone “buying a ticket to get beat up at my show.” For all the energy behind his vocals, there’s a dead-eyed focus to the sneak disses peppered throughout LP!. His raps land firmly within the established pockets of beats, but each song is so distinct and JPEG’s writing is so fluid and witty that no two moments within the album’s humid atmosphere sound the same. “DIKEMBE!” and single “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” rank among the best pure performances of his career, and they’re not the only highlights.
As artistically assured as JPEG sounds across LP!, the sequencing between versions of the album occasionally snags the momentum. In the Online version, the fourth song “END CREDITS!” segues seamlessly into “WHAT KIND OF RAPPIN’ IS THIS?” while the Offline version smash cuts from “CREDITS” to the bonus tracks “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” and “GOD DON’T LIKE UGLY.” “HAZARD” and “UGLY!” are good songs on their own, but they would have benefitted from a later placement. JPEG claims the Offline version is the one he stands behind the most, his way to circumvent sample clearance issues and an attempt to pull a Frank Ocean on his former label and keep his true artistic intentions in-house. If that’s the case, the sequence and the few unnecessary tracks derail an otherwise tight experience.
That sense of chaos has always come with the JPEGMAFIA brand. He isn’t just a collage of his influences and experiences—they all flow through him simultaneously. It’s the laughter, anger, and passion of a rap fanatic unafraid to declare his love for Terror Squad, AEW wrestling, and twinkling synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Hatsune Miku song. None of these things are foreign to rap, but none of them play out quite like they do on a JPEGMAFIA song. Though just as charged and confrontational as any of his other albums, LP! is uninhibited and proud of it, shit-talk from the eye of an ever-evolving storm.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | EQT / Republic | October 28, 2021 | 7.3 | 610520f5-f073-40f7-8435-428f0a2c3d4a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Lil Pump’s wingman goes through the motions on an aimless, half-baked new 10-song mixtape with “Nice for What” producer Murda Beatz. | Lil Pump’s wingman goes through the motions on an aimless, half-baked new 10-song mixtape with “Nice for What” producer Murda Beatz. | Smokepurpp / Murda Beatz: Bless Yo Trap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smokepurpp-murda-beatz-bless-yo-trap/ | Bless Yo Trap | Miami rapper Smokepurpp is best known as Lil Pump’s wingman and understudy, the tag-team partner brawling at his side at shows—a strung-out-seeming, assault rifle-wielding wildman in body armor. He’s the 20-year-old madcap with a baby bottle full of lean tattooed on his stomach, a catchphrase-roaring reject fit for casting in a “Jackass” reboot. There isn’t much else that defines him, and his unruliness doesn’t really enhance his impersonal music. When people talk about SoundCloud rap, a term that’s quickly becoming a catch-all for an entire generation of young rap refugees, they’re speaking specifically about rappers like Purpp. If he’s not posing as G.G. Allin or proudly declaring his music “ignorant,” he’s staring dead-eyed into the void and rapping in circles about nothing in particular. On the heels of his 2017 debut, DEADSTAR, he’s released Bless Yo Trap, a 10-song mixtape made in collaboration with buzzing Canadian producer Murda Beatz. The main thing he accomplishes in its 23-minute running time is exposing himself as a wash-out simply going through the motions.
Bless Yo Trap takes its name from a DEADSTAR cut that felt like a ritual for the Trap Gods, an unholy offering to Young Thug and Chief Keef. The tape lacks that energy. Murda and Purpp made almost the entire project in a night, and it sounds just like that—in the spirit of SoundCloud, the reason this exists is simply because it can. Half the songs on Bless Yo Trap feel halfway finished, rapped without purpose and released into the world with a shrug. Four of them clock in under two minutes, continuing rap’s ongoing obsession with ridiculously short songs.
Like his friend Pump, Smokepurpp needs his songs to be over as quickly as possible. He isn’t quite as committed to unrelenting motion, but his verses are just as empty and unproductive. Where Pump can occasionally thrill, Purpp is mostly stupefying. His punchlines don’t have set-ups, and sometimes he bails out on his own ideas midway through stating them. On most songs, he doesn’t seem to even be following a specific train of thought—he’s pretty much just rambling into the mic, as if he’s been asked to present a project on the spot by a teacher who caught him sleeping in class.
Every once in a while he stumbles upon something mildly droll (“Your bitch tryna find the circumference/And I got hoes in abundance,” or “I don’t wanna fuck I tell her suck my watch”) or wanders in a somewhat interesting direction, as on “Pray”: “My Fiji and diamonds the same thing/Scope on that bitch it got good aim/Choppa make a nigga do the rain dance.” But the songs are all circuitous, often taking roundabout ways to say the exact same things about the color of his diamonds, the nature of his shootouts, or which drugs he’s doing in which designer outfits. His verses are the rap equivalent of Mad Libs. In certain situations, Purpp’s aggro raps seem to channel bluntness, chasing an “idgaf” punk aesthetic. But on Bless Yo Trap, his rapping is simply artless and unimaginative.
The X factor on this project should be Murda, who, having produced hits for Drake (“Portland”), 2 Chainz (“It’s a Vibe,” “4 AM”), Migos (“MotorSport”), and Travis Scott (“Butterfly Effect”), broke through even further earlier this week with Drake’s “Nice for What,” the current No. 1 song in the country. Murda is a versatile beat maker with undeniable instincts; without him, this effort would be a lost cause. His talents can be felt in the spooky synth throb on “123” and the metallic strobe of “Do Not Disturb.” But his beats don’t suit Purpp the way Jersey pioneer (and SoundCloud rap architect) Ronny J’s distorted bass abstractions do. The life expectancy of these songs isn’t much longer than the time it’d take to face a blunt.
There’s little on Bless Yo Trap to suggest that Smokepurpp has much room for growth, and there’s even less to suggest he cares about that. He’s unbothered and myopic, as many are at his age, stoked to be handling more money than he knows what to do with, simply for turning stunts into songs. “Everywhere I go I keep that thang on me/In the club I flex on niggas that are older than me,” he raps on “For the Gang,” which seems to be the general idea: He’s young and he’s already richer than the adults around him, and he got that way doing what he’s doing, so why stop? Which, fair. Purpp isn’t completely incompetent—he’s finding his way around melodies and he is capable at mimicry—but the time is coming when he runs out of tricks, when being able to ape the sounds of the moment won’t be enough, when “SoundCloud rap” itself is another long-forgotten tag on blog posts. Bless Yo Trap suggests that time is rapidly approaching. | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | April 21, 2018 | 4.8 | 6109820f-5b12-41a6-bbfd-299d1a34a0bd | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Blondie's third and best full-length-- a whipsmart album from the days when there was chart pop made by and for adults-- is an oddly undiscovered gem with charms that extend far beyond its iconic, oft-compiled singles. | Blondie's third and best full-length-- a whipsmart album from the days when there was chart pop made by and for adults-- is an oddly undiscovered gem with charms that extend far beyond its iconic, oft-compiled singles. | Blondie: Parallel Lines: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12058-parallel-lines-deluxe-edition/ | Parallel Lines: Deluxe Edition | "Blondie is a band," read the group's initial press releases. The intent of this tagline was clear, as was the need for it: "This is an accomplished bunch of musicians, a tight, compact group versed in everything from surf to punk to girl group music to erstwhile new wave," it seemed to say, "but, oh-- I'm sure you couldn't help but focus on blonde frontwoman Debbie Harry." In America, however, people didn't notice the group quite so quickly. Their first two records-- a switchblade of a self-titled debut and its relatively weak follow-up Plastic Letters-- birthed a pair of top 10 hits in the UK but had been, at best, minor successes in the U.S.; the debut didn't chart, while Plastic scraped the top 75. Despite savvy marketing-- the group filmed videos for each of its singles, that now-iconic duochromatic cover photo-- the group's third and easily best album, Parallel Lines, didn't take off until they group released "Heart of Glass", a single that abandoned their CBGB roots for a turn in the Studio 54 spotlight. Though its subtle charms included a bubbling rhythm, lush motorik synths, and Harry's remarkably controlled and assured vocal, "Heart of Glass" started as a goof, a take-off on the upscale nightlife favored outside of Blondie's LES home turf.
The swift move from the fringes to the top of the charts tagged Blondie as a singles group-- no shame, and they did have one of the best runs of singles in pop history-- but it's helped Parallel Lines weirdly qualify as an undiscovered gem, a sparkling record half-full of recognized classics that, nevertheless, is hiding in plain sight. Landing a few years before MTV and the second British Invasion codified and popularized the look and sound of 1980s new wave, Parallel Lines' ringing guitar pop has entered our collective consciousness through compilations (built around "Heart" plus later #1s "Call Me", "Rapture", and "The Tide Is High"), ads, film trailers, and TV shows rather than the album's ubiquity. Time has been kind, however, to the record's top tier-- along with "Heart of Glass", Parallel boasts "Sunday Girl" and the incredible opening four-track run of "Picture This", "Hanging on the Telephone", "One Way or Another", and "Fade Away and Radiate". The songs that fill out the record ("11:59", "Will Anything Happen?", "I'm Gonna Love You Too", "Just Go Away", "Pretty Baby") are weak only by comparison, and could have been singles for many of Blondie's contemporaries, making this one of the most accomplished pop albums of its time.
In a sense, that time has long passed: Blondie-- like contemporaries such as the Cars and the UK's earliest New Pop artists-- specialized in whipsmart chart music created by and for adults, a trick that has all but vanished from the pop landscape. Parallel Lines, however, is practically a blueprint for the stuff: "Picture This" and "One Way or Another" are exuberant new wave, far looser than the stiff, herky-jerky tracks that would go on to characterize that sound in the 80s; "Will Anything Happen?" and the band's cover of the Nerves' "Hanging on the Telephone" are headstrong rock; "11:59" does run-for-the-horizon drama, while "Sunday Girl" conveys a sense of elegance. The record's closest thing to a ballad, the noirish "Fade Away and Radiate", owes a heavy debt to the art-pop of Roxy Music.
Harry herself was a mannered and complex frontwoman, possessed of a range of vocal tricks and affectations. She was as at home roaming around in the open spaces of "Radiate" or "Heart of Glass" as she was pouting and winking through "Picture This" and "Sunday Girl" or working out front of the group's more hard-charging tracks. That versatility and charm extended to her sexuality as well-- she had the sort of gamine, sophisticated look of a French new wave actress but always seemed supremely grounded and approachable, almost tomboyish. (That approachability was wisely played up in the band's choice of key covers throughout its career-- "Hanging on the Telephone", "Denis", and "The Tide Is High" each position Harry as a romantic pursuer with a depth and range of emotions rather than simply as an unattainable fantasy.)
Already into her thirties-- ancient by pop music standards-- when Blondie released its debut album, Harry (and many of her bandmates) had years of industry experience and music fandom; at the turn of the next decade, they would combine pop and art impulses like few bands before or since. The lush, shiny sound of Blondie still greatly informs European pop-- which pulls less from hip-hop and R&B than its American counterpart-- as evidenced by the Continent's best recent pop architects and artists (producers Richard X and Xenomania, plus Robyn, Girls Aloud, and Annie); in America, however, the group is oddly seems tied to the past, a product of its era. Even the release of this record is built on the tentative need to celebrate its 30th anniversary. (An opportunity not fully explored: This latest reissue of the record includes a new album cover, as well as a DVD with four videos of television performances and a quartet of mostly unneeded extras-- the 7" edit of "Heart of Glass", a French version of "Sunday Girl", and a pair of remixes.) In that sense, this isn't a record that needs to be re-purchased-- if you own it already, skip this. Sadly, I get the feeling not many people under a certain age do own the record, however, which justifies the reason for trying to re-introduce it to a new audience-- it's still as sparkling and three-dimensional as ever. | 2008-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 1, 2008 | 9.7 | 61099b5b-a4f5-441e-b087-f66c432e3a22 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The noise of Bill Orcutt’s acoustic guitar days is dialed back on his latest album. It features shimmering solo electric guitar that charts new sounds for one of music’s premiere abstractionists. | The noise of Bill Orcutt’s acoustic guitar days is dialed back on his latest album. It features shimmering solo electric guitar that charts new sounds for one of music’s premiere abstractionists. | Bill Orcutt: Bill Orcutt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-orcutt-bill-orcutt/ | Bill Orcutt | Bill Orcutt’s guitar playing has an apocalyptic energy. Harry Pussy’s blown-apart blues records and the torrent of solo acoustic records he’s made since 2009 are rather far apart compositionally, but they’re united in the frantic way he chews up and spits out his instrument. Low parts rumble like mushroom clouds on the horizon. Piercing trebly plucks buzz like swarming locusts. Erratic rhythms and the off-key ramblings punctuate all the more melodic parts. Orcutt plays with the spirit of a doomsday preacher, spewing surreal, dark imagery from a guitar with only four strings running down the neck of his acoustic.
These moments have always been starkest and most harrowing when he takes on recognizable songs from the continuum of American pop history—a tradition he's tackled at various points over his solo career, most prominently on 2013's A History of Every One. There’s something so twisted and unsettling about hearing only the ghosts of familiar melodies, surrounded by instrumental rubble. It’s like coming back to a familiar cityscape, long after it's been ravaged by disaster.
Orcutt’s new self-titled record is largely a departure from the desolation. It’s his first solo electric guitar album, after nearly a decade-playing his four-stringed contraption. He leans mostly on a clean guitar sound, with just the buzz of the amp as accompaniment. But the amplification does allow him a few new tricks, each of which makes the record seem a little brighter.
Most of these pieces start slow, plucked lightly, but at high volume. Every creaky finger slide is teeth-chattering, like you’re listening from inside of one of his pickup’s magnetic coils. A version of “Ol Man River,” from the 1927 musical Show Boat and to which he’s nodded on another of his cover-heavy records, allows Orcutt to demonstrate a dynamic range that he was only able to wring from his guitar by brute force. Volume and texture become new dimensions to explore. He swings from bluesy ambience to dense thickets of barely-consonant notes, diving back and forth between the two with a slippery energy because of the unpredictable shimmer of his new instrument. He’s always been a great improviser, but you can hear him excitedly charting new sounds and melodic runs. There’s a sense of life to it, if only because of the variation he allows himself.
Consequently, his playing takes on a softer, spacier character. You can see it developing in videos of recent live performances, where the slaps and mutilations of his acoustic guitar days are largely replaced by slow, thoughtful musings. He’s relishing in the sounds themselves rather than charting new constellations with his sputtered notes. He still mostly shirks the melodies of the songs he's covering in favor of spiritual approximations—a combustible version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” is even more tattered and droopy than Jimi Hendrix’s famed rendition. But there's something more deliberately approachable about the melodies he uses here. He meditates in the spaces in between phrasings, allowing the more volatile segments to linger like light trails in your vision.
Even when he spools together dense sections—like on “O Platitudes!”—these are pieces of tensile strength and glimmering beauty, more like arachnoid webbing than the clouds of toxic soot he spit up before. Versions of “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “White Christmas” in particular showcase his fascination with dissonance and deconstruction, pushing familiar songs into abstraction. But by and large, his playing bubbles calmly, which is a good, if unfamiliar look for him. It’s a reminder that after destruction, there can be rebirth—greenery poking through the soot and ash. | 2017-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Palilalia | July 1, 2017 | 7.6 | 611108a2-2195-4b86-b650-074d2af5d805 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
It's hard to imagine a voice more equipped to puff new life into "MTV Unplugged" than Florence Welch's, but the series' stripped-back approach doesn't do her any favors. | It's hard to imagine a voice more equipped to puff new life into "MTV Unplugged" than Florence Welch's, but the series' stripped-back approach doesn't do her any favors. | Florence and the Machine: MTV Unplugged | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16480-florence-the-machine-mtv-unplugged/ | MTV Unplugged | To answer your first question: Yes, they still do these. "MTV Unplugged" was once a showcase for pop culture writ impossibly large-- a place where the entire world could gasp at Gene Simmons' bare face or where Kurt Cobain could introduce over five million record buyers to the Vaselines. But in recent years, the show's institutional power has fizzled, and its most recent installments have featured tepid, obligatorily low-lit performances from are-they-really-that-famous? acts like 30 Seconds to Mars and Young the Giant. Which is why Florence and the Machine's Unplugged instalment feels so promising. One of the more compelling pop acts to spring up in recent years, it's hard to imagine a voice more equipped to puff new life into the series than that of celestially soulful frontwoman Florence Welch. As on mega-hits like "Dog Days Are Over" and "Shake It Out", Welch has displayed a talent for sprawling her demons and heartbreak across canvases bigger than the sky: Every song she's ever sung has been writ large.
And occasionally, that's the problem. While her promising 2009 debut, Lungs, had the skittish, genre-hopping restlessness of an artist still settling into her sound, the 12 tracks on its followup, Ceremonials, came in only one size: gigantic. Even the ballads beat with earth-shaking percussion were gilded with epic, Greek choral background vocals and all other varieties of sonic baubles. Though Welch's voice is undeniably powerful, the songs beneath it all seemed well-composed and deeply felt, but their emotional impact was often blunted by producer Paul Epworth's unrelenting maximalism, ramped up from his work on Welch's debut. Which makes them perfect candidates for the classic scaled-back, stripped-down approach, right? You'd think so.
In quite a few cases, the Unplugged treatment does work wonders. The opening number, "Only if for a Night", is more arresting here than it is kicking off Ceremonials, where its haunting power (the song is about being visited in a dream by the ghost of a loved one: typical Florence stuff) was interrupted by a superfluous, glitchy beat. The Unplugged version gives the song much-needed room to breathe, and with fewer distractions the searing imagery of Welch's lyrics have a chance to float to the surface. "And the grass was so green against my new clothes," she trills, losing herself in the song's second verse, "And I did cartwheels in your honor dancing on tip-toes/ My own secret ceremonials before the service began/ In the graveyard, doing handstands." It's an oddly joyous funeral rite, but it's Welch articulating the feeling she plumbs best-- deriving light from the deepest darkness and feeling more at home in the world of spirits than the corporeal one. Same goes for "Breaking Down". On Ceremonials, that song's edges are padded with stately chamber-pop echoes, as though to protect Welch from bruises as she wrestles her demons to the ground. The sparse arrangement of the Unplugged version allows Welch to find deeper and even more unsettling emotion in the song, transforming the chorus from a pop hook to something like a moaning, seasick dirge.
Some of the greatest "MTV Unplugged" moments have been somewhat unlikely covers (Maxwell doing Kate Bush! Nirvana doing Lead Belly!), and here we get Welch adding to this enduring trope with her take on "Try a Little Tenderness". It's a lovely vocal performance (she hits a note early on that will probably prompt someone to book her for an upcoming Whitney tribute), but it also brings into focus the problem with her Unplugged as a whole: Its emotional range is decidedly limited. Welch's "Try a Little Tenderness" is mournful and utterly devoid of playfulness, and-- though no one's going to fault her for her putting her own signature spin on a classic-- so is every other moment of this performance. Which means that "Tenderness" bleeds right into the song after it, an acoustic arrangement of the power-ballad "No Light, No Light". Her twangy duet with Josh Homme, a cover of the Johnny Cash and June Carter song "Jackson", provides a little deviation, but not much.
Many of these songs might sound good on their own, but listening to them one after the other exposes their repetitions. There's only a certain number of times you can listen to Welch feeling lost in the verse and then found, transcendently, in the bombast of the chorus before it all starts to feel like a package of "Amazing Grace"-themed magnetic poetry, with each new track shuffling the elements around just so. Unlike one of Welch's songs, though, Unplugged is a decrescendo, and the performance runs out of steam by the time she gets to two of her best songs, "Dog Days are Over" and "Shake it Out". The latter, a torch song that has enough oomph not just to move mountains but to pick them up and punt them, peters out into a disappointingly tepid finale.
No one who listens to Unplugged will accuse Welch of being an untalented singer, but they might be left wanting more from the material she lends her voice to. Fans will enjoy hearing Welch's songs opened up in this format, but her Unplugged definitely doesn't rank among the classics of the series. The artists who have been responsible for the best and most enduring Unplugged albums-- Nirvana, Lauryn Hill, and Jay-Z's collaboration with the Roots-- all used the candle-lit stage to explore new directions in their respective sounds. For Welch, it serves the opposite end: It displays the boundlessness of her vocal talent but finds her tethered to a frustratingly limited aesthetic. | 2012-04-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | April 12, 2012 | 5.9 | 611d5d9c-c5e3-4a36-a81d-d2de59e1042f | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Named in honor of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Minneapolis-based musician’s shadowy EP is an imaginative investigation of religious and sexual tensions. | Named in honor of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Minneapolis-based musician’s shadowy EP is an imaginative investigation of religious and sexual tensions. | Dua Saleh: ROSETTA EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-saleh-rosetta-ep/ | ROSETTA EP | Dua Saleh is terrified of being tokenized. The 25-year-old Minneapolis-based artist holds identities that people tend to poke, prod, and fixate on: immigrant, refugee, Black, Muslim, activist, non-binary. They boldly engage with these facets of themself in their music anyway. They’ve sung in Arabic. They’ve released an ode to Black victims of murderous cops, promising the song’s proceeds to a radical hometown organization. Their new EP, Rosetta, is named for Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the oft-forgotten architect of rock’n’roll who straddled Christian and secular spaces, though Saleh finished recording before choosing the name. Only in hindsight did Saleh consider Tharpe’s style and story, particularly her failed romantic relationship with collaborator Marie Knight. But the artist reserves their sharpest criticism for the religious zealots who demonize queer people.
Rosetta doesn’t relay queer life with the sort of warm, danceable tracks that bookended Saleh’s first release, Nūr, whose breakout single “Sugar Mama” described a romantic prospect who seemed to fetishize Saleh, too. Instead, Nūr’s harrowing “Survival” may be Rosetta’s clearest predecessor. On that eerie track, Saleh wrestled with the devil and tried to clear their name. On Rosetta, Saleh embraces sin, addressing it directly. “I know you,” they tell it on “windhymn.”
Hoping to satirize the belief that queer people are destined for fire and brimstone in the afterlife, Rosetta features archetypally nefarious queer characters over haunting soundscapes by the EP’s executive producer, Psymun. Saleh is the victim of a lusty enchantress on “umbrellar,” a sexual aggressor on “smut,” and, most memorably, a Hadean slick-talker named Lucifer LaBelle on “hellbound.” The song twists Rosetta’s hip-hop cadences, pop elements, and rock thrashes into a whirlwind of chaos. It is the project’s thesis, combining musical elements that appear throughout: a creeping, skeletal melody that builds into nightmarish distortion, accompanied by Saleh’s steady flow and the light, long sound of their singing, like they’re casting a spell. As Lucifer LaBelle, a brash queer and trans figure who takes pleasure in seduction, Saleh conjures the underworld without actually condemning anyone to it. “Why you fucking hellbound?” they ask instead.
In interviews, Saleh has not been coy about Rosetta’s aims and subtext, which is important, because their writing is often so abstract it could feel meaningless without explanation. They got their start in poetry, writing dark pieces that worried their teachers. Like challenging, personal poetry, Rosetta’s lyrics are heavy on imagery, but the images are disparate and rapid. On intro “cat scratch,” Saleh summons a bloody cheek, dank air, flowering plants, and a toothless raptor within 30 seconds. Sometimes, Saleh’s accessibility is strategic. “smut” ends in soft Arabic warbling that they’re reluctant to translate to English, preferring to reserve an element of their music for a fanbase that can recognize it.
What Saleh and Psymun do best is communicate by mood. “cat scratch” feels unorganized, but there’s a sharpness to its text. Throughout Rosetta, the team creates intrigue and darkness without camp—but without Saleh saying so, the satirical embodiment of religious spite is often unclear, even on “hellbound.” Saleh’s coded lyrics present their vantage point without compromise or commodification, but listeners may still find their ideas difficult to parse. The hexed feeling of the music strikes a nerve, but the tape’s true villain—institutional hate—remains obscured. Luckily, Dua Saleh is an astute and generous guide. | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AGAINST GIANTS | June 26, 2020 | 6.9 | 612a6373-a630-47f4-8afd-94b177250462 | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
The confrontational Brooklyn-based goth-metal outfit get a decadent box set that celebrates their sensuality and pathos as well as their uglier side. | The confrontational Brooklyn-based goth-metal outfit get a decadent box set that celebrates their sensuality and pathos as well as their uglier side. | Type O Negative: None More Negative | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/type-o-negative-none-more-negative/ | None More Negative | Type O Negative sounded how clove cigarettes smell, how crushed red velvet feels, how black hair dye looks when it stains your bathroom sink. Led by singer and bassist Peter Steele—a towering figure with bone structure to die for, best described as either Evil Thor or Dracula with a gym membership—these Brooklyn-based purveyors of goth metal spent their career exploring the genre’s inherent tension between seriousness and schtick. Originally released on Record Store Day in a limited run and now reissued (on gorgeous green vinyl), None More Negative packages nearly that entire career, featuring all six albums from their years on Roadrunner Records. (Their final effort, Dead Again, was released on another label and isn’t included here.) It’s a suitably massive set for a band best known for its eerie epics.
The best-known of these kick off 1993’s Bloody Kisses: “Christian Woman” explores its subject’s sublimation of sexuality into the crucified body of Christ with all the subtlety of “Ken Russell’s The Devils: The Musical.” It continues with “Black No. 1,” an affectionate send-up of a goth girl’s beauty regimen that launched the band into the public consciousness, via a striking black-and-white video that received heavy Beavis and Butthead rotation. Both songs showcase Steele’s distinctive, vampiric baritone, complete with theatrically rolled R’s and overemphasized consonants (“on her milk-white neck-kkh, the devil’s mark-k”). The man eroticized diction.
Steele shared vocal duties with his gifted guitarist Kenny Hickey, who handled the shouty bits; over time, this allowed Steele to hone his voice into something not just creepy or sexy but actually romantic, even abject. He closes October Rust’s anthemic “Love You to Death” by plaintively asking the object of his affection “Am I good enough for you?”, clearly already believing the answer to be “no.”
World Coming Down goes even further down this guilt-ridden road. It’s effectively a concept album about the death of people close to Steele, who by then was dealing with life-threatening addictions of his own. (He died of an unrelated aortic aneurysm in 2010.) Two songs—the savage, hook-laden “Everyone I Love Is Dead” and the harrowing and bittersweet “Everything Dies”—tackle that pain by wondering if it’s worth going on without those he’s lost. The song’s ferocity emerges from the band’s hulking exterior and Steele’s lyrical vulnerability, which sounds trapped inside it.
The music itself displayed a similar duality, alternating between doom-laden dirges and swirling psychedelia. The latter element manifested not just in the Type O’s choice of covers (Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” Seals & Croft’s “Summer Breeze,” an honest-to-god Beatles medley) or in its nickname (“The Drab Four”), but in lush original compositions. My current favorite: Life Is Killing Me’s “(We Were) Electrocute,” an ode to turning neighborhood heads side-by-side with an old flame. These songs showcase keyboardist and producer Josh Silver’s ability to create colorful soundscapes that belie the band’s strict black, white, and green color palette.
But this is a box set, not a greatest-hits comp or even an a-la-carte reissue of the catalog, and that means putting up with the bad and the ugly along with the good. In particular, it means shelling out for vinyl versions of the band’s first two thrash and hardcore-influenced records, which predate the full flower of Steele’s voice. These feel more like an elaborate prank played on the listener than a new group finding its sea legs: Album two, The Origin of the Feces, is essentially album one, Slow, Deep and Hard, re-recorded with new titles for the same songs and, for some reason, fake crowd noise edited in for a faux-live effect—complete with hecklers. (That Type O chose to exchange insults with an imaginary audience on its “live” album tells you a lot about Type O.)
There’s little of musical value on either album, which are also the main, but by no means the only, outlet for the band’s most dunderheaded Noo Yawk shock-jock-style material about class, race, gender, and sexuality. Even the album covers—a blurry closeup of sexual penetration and a crystal-clear photo of Steele’s anus respectively—all but invite you not to listen. This regrettable strain of their work continues on and off through 2003’s Life Is Killing Me and its infantile heterosexist anthem “I Like Goils,” in which Steele roars “I’m proud not to be P.C.!” like he’s auditioning for a Netflix standup special. New liner notes that emphasize this aspect of the band in 2019 do them no favors either.
But just a few songs after “Goils,” this same band absolutely tears through a straight-faced, straightforward cover of “Angry Inch,” as in Hedwig and…. No joke, no irony: Steele simply adored this story of a glam-rock star who underwent botched gender-reassignment surgery and wanted to spread its gospel to his fans. That’s the Type O I hear in their best love songs and death songs: a band torn between the pleasure of an open heart and the pain of having it ripped out, determined to lend its sensual voice to both sensations.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | September 18, 2019 | 6.6 | 613a8745-2a0f-4989-84ce-d75eb0018a63 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
On his new album, Manchester producer Andy Stott is still dabbling in dark, abrasive textures while also moving towards something airier. | On his new album, Manchester producer Andy Stott is still dabbling in dark, abrasive textures while also moving towards something airier. | Andy Stott: Too Many Voices | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21833-too-many-voices/ | Too Many Voices | When Manchester's Andy Stott dropped the Passed Me By EP in 2011, its sound was such a paradigm shift for the producer that it effectively obliterated all that had come before. A previous full-length and more than a dozen singles were rendered obsolete; this rang out as Stott's "true" sound and self. The bruising and bleak dirges were diametrically opposed to the dub techno of his earlier work, its depth of bass aligned more with Sunn O))) and Demdike Stare. Through albums like Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers, the silty sound palette evoked dour industrial spaces even as Stott let in more and more light, primarily by folding in the voice of his onetime piano teacher Alison Skidmore. Much like one of David Lynch's blondes, she was the one beacon of light in human darkness.
For most of Too Many Voices, it sounds like the end of that cycle, suggesting that the grimy sonic template that defined Stott and earned him fans in noise and experimental circles the past five years ultimately might just be a phase itself rather than a final iteration. If anything, Stott sounds like Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont, pulled between those two worlds, still dabbling in dark, abrasive textures while also moving towards something airier. "Butterflies" best exemplifies that split. On the hand it keeps the sluggish rhythm that underpinned his previous tracks. But rather than sounding weighted by granite it feels untethered, the beat landing like ping pong balls instead of boulders. A melody shrieks through, but the mood is no longer foreboding and the effect more enervating than haunting. And where Skidmore’s vocals once gave tracks such as this a thrilling contrast, against these thinner backdrops, now they are turned into mere wisps.
Elsewhere, the tracks feel unfinished, such as "Selfish," wherein Stott takes a preset that sounds like a monkey wrench on cheap plastic. It’s the album’s trickiest beat, bringing to mind early dancehall, early '00s grime and even a bit of Radiohead’s "Idioteque," but Stott does very little with the beat or with Skidmore's voice, just speeding up and slowing down both elements. " The distorted beat of "On My Mind" and gaseous synths might be the start of something, but Stott seems reluctant to add layers in-between. The inverse applies to the title track, with Skidmore’s voice existing in multiples but with little around them. There’s plenty of low and high end, but none of the gray in-between. It makes for an album that sounds more like backing tracks missing the singer and the song to complete them. If anything, Too Many Voices sounds like it has too few. | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | April 25, 2016 | 7.1 | 613f6108-97de-4dae-80ef-f73d99881335 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Strip away the cringe threats and drip talk and what’s left is a glorified beat tape that indicates that, artistically, Matt Ox has a ways to go to discover his sound. | Strip away the cringe threats and drip talk and what’s left is a glorified beat tape that indicates that, artistically, Matt Ox has a ways to go to discover his sound. | Matt Ox: OX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matt-ox-ox/ | OX | Matt Ox looks like a kid on the cusp of a growth spurt who stars in modern Nickelodeon sitcoms. His well-documented journey to stardom proves that he’s lived a cozy life, so the fact that his music portrays the exact opposite captivates a certain sect of rap fandom. His dark trap music is at odds with his appearance and age, so it’s risque in a way that hipsters refraining from drinking Starbucks is. His new album, OX, relies on the listener being familiar with who he is and what he represents to find the novelty within it. Strip away the cringe threats and drip talk and what’s left is a glorified beat tape that indicates that, artistically, Matt Ox has a ways to go to discover his sound, and, more importantly, what he really has to say.
OX is a luxury car with no engine. The kid’s only 13 years old and sounds like Playboi Carti doing an impression of Seth MacFarlane who’s doing an impression of Playboi Carti. His raps are delivered with a sneering gusto that makes them sound comical at times—a complete change from his viral hit “Overwhelming” and “Michael Myers” before it. While he’s a bit better at crafting stellar hook that mixes his older, traditional rap style with the new sneering one, a majority of the album sounds like he binged Die Lit overnight and tried to recreate it immediately.
For what it’s worth, OX makes a stellar first impression with its glossy collection of atmospheric beats. The core of producers here give Ox trap beats that sound gaudily congested, even if they wouldn’t sound as unique if someone older tackled them instead. But the idea of a clean-cut, non-cursing, pre-pubescent teen rapping through his nose while thunderous bass rumbles in the background make these beats hit harder than they ordinarily would. As the album simmers in a way that takes a few listens to really sink in, once unique beats begin to blend together. Album opener “Trident” sneaks with its tip-toeing bassline. “Ride Around,” a few tracks later, feels largely the same. “Ya Dig” is a tad murkier yet still in the same realm.
TrapMoneyBenny, the producer responsible for the meat and bones of Drake’s “In My Feelings,” brings a frosty chill to the album with “Pull Up.” The album’s magnetic centerpiece was co-produced by Oogie Mane, Ox’s in-house Working on Dying collective producer who was also responsible for Drake’s “I’m Upset.” It’s politely nostalgic with those wind chimes that make early ’90s R&B so elegant. When the smothering 808s come in, the track becomes a soothing synthesis of the two producer’s greatest qualities—Benny’s ear for unique melodies and Oogie’s ability to submerge the listener beneath a wave of bass without drowning them—and Matt Ox carries it with relative ease. The kid’s got style.
The album at-large remains paper thin, though. Matt Ox the idea is entertaining, but the actual quality of the rap being presented is mediocre. It’s Slim Jesus all over again. A luxe palette of gorgeous instrumentals and a rather striking imitation of Playboi Carti undoubtedly sound good, but we don't learn anything about Matt Ox over the course of the album. There’s a certain kind of novelty in what’s being packaged here: a suburban, good-natured kid as a criminal kingpin. Without biting into the absurdity of this idea, the album just isn’t odd enough, or weird enough, to be anything more than a suburban kid putting his own dark spin on contemporary trap. | 2018-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | UMG / Motown | November 8, 2018 | 5.6 | 613fa8ed-eb58-461f-b542-9f4e83b6b152 | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
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 debut album by the positive-thinking Swedish pop group whose fusion of synth-pop and reggae became a preposterous international success. | 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 debut album by the positive-thinking Swedish pop group whose fusion of synth-pop and reggae became a preposterous international success. | Ace of Base: The Sign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ace-of-base-the-sign/ | The Sign | In the early 1990s, four unassuming Swedes created a snappy, newly digitized sound that took hold of the world. Ace of Base locked into a style that radio programmers, record execs, and fans latched onto with equal fervor, devising an unheard-of blend of upbeat synthpop cranked with a reggae-influenced bottom end that ushered in a renaissance of Swedish pop imports that continues to dominate charts to this day. But for siblings Jonas, Jenny, and Malin “Linn” Berggren and friend Ulf Ekberg, all in their early 20s at the time, the quick ascent was a surreal head trip. “I never thought I’d come anywhere in the world,” Jenny, one of Ace of Base’s singers, admitted in 1994, at the height of the band’s multimillion-selling peak. “I figured maybe I would see all of Europe, and that would be it.” Yet with the group’s unstoppable debut album, The Sign—which, at over 26 million units, remains one of the best-selling albums of all time—the band quickly went much farther.
The Berggrens grew up in Gothenburg, an industrial port city on the western coast of Sweden. The siblings studied classical music in school, and as they grew older each found a musical outlet: While sisters Jenny and Linn sang in a church choir, older brother Jonas became an Italo disco obsessive who sported a rattail and bleached hair and performed in local bands that traded in New Romantic synth-pop. By the late ’80s, he entered a Swedish government program for aspiring musicians, which afforded him a rehearsal space and some cheap equipment to experiment with. There he worked on music that combined melodies inspired by ’80s synth-pop legends Depeche Mode and A Flock of Seagulls with thrumming percussion that shared the nervy pulse of Kraftwerk. A poster bearing the latter band’s name hung in his studio like a talisman.
At 20, Ekberg was coming out of a phase as a member of a skinhead gang—he’d performed in a neo-Nazi group called Commit Suiside, a fact that haunted Ace of Base when they first got famous and European reporters picked up on it. He blamed banal reasoning for his past: “I used to indulge in drugs and violence, which culminated in my association with the worst form of rebellion: the skinheads,” he said in a statement released the same year as The Sign in a minimal effort at damage control. “I now regret all of this, but I can hardly change the past.”
Despite his history, Jonas and Ekberg struck up a friendship as they worked on separate music in the same rehearsal space. Jonas, eager to start a band of his own, enlisted his sisters Jenny and Linn to supply cheery vocals, forming the first iteration of a group called Tech Noir after the night club in The Terminator. When the original bassist missed a performance to catch a Rolling Stones show the same night, Ekberg filled in and formally replaced him. As they created new demos together, reggae groups often rehearsed down the hall—the genre was gaining popularity in the country by the early ’90s, as local acts like Dr. Alban reworked the sound with a Eurodance pulse. The coincidental proximity of working reggae musicians exerted an osmotic influence on Jonas and Ekberg, setting off a lightbulb that transformed their music for good. They grafted reggae’s spacious groove and off-beat percussion onto their own chirping synth-pop, creating a sweet spot in the middle.
The new quartet clicked, and as their songs gained traction with Swedish club DJs, they quickly wanted to secure a record deal. “Jonas and Ulf were pushy to get what they want,” Linn, who, like her sister, had no formal experience as a leading vocalist, said in 1997. “But the toll was, we’ll just see what happens.” The newly rechristened Ace of Base released their debut single, “Wheel of Fortune,” in 1992, essentially nailing their formula on the first go: enthusiastic synth melodies, weaving percussive rhythms, and the Berggren sisters’ swooping voices. Yet it also contains a melancholic undercurrent that pulls at the corners of their best songs. That bittersweetness is their irresistible, maudlin draw, one that would become key to Ace of Base’s massive appeal.
“Wheel of Fortune” got some regional radio play, specifically in Denmark. Ace of Base recorded a few more tracks and sent a demo tape to Danish imprint Mega Records, rather than to Swedish labels, which they’d found were only interested in the group’s slower ballads. The gamble paid off once the demos reached Scandi-pop impresario Dag Krister Volle, known as Denniz Pop. Pop was responsible for the sleek choruses and R&B inflections that turned Sweden’s young singers and songwriters like Dr. Alban and Kayo into a hit factory in the early ’90s, a sound that would eventually filter through acts like Robyn and *NSYNC in the decade to come. As fate would have it, Ace of Base’s tape got jammed in the cassette player of Pop’s car, forcing him to listen to it nonstop. One of the demo tracks, the loping “Mr. Ace,” got stuck in his head badly enough that he decided to produce a single.
“Mr. Ace,” which evolved into the near-perfect “All That She Wants,” depicts a woman cycling through lovers, tilting the mood toward heartbreak despite the bright chords. Originally centered on a peppy major-chord horn section, the song changed because Linn, a forceful vocalist who was now tasked with singing lead on the bulk of the band’s tracks, insisted that the melody should shift to a minor chord. Even in its spare original form, it’s a pivotal difference: the song moves with a tugging, introspective swing, anchored by Linn’s aching performance. She ramps up the drama behind the refrain “she lives a lonely life,” each repetition echoing like an afterimage. The song landed at radio in summer 1992 and rocketed to No. 1 in Denmark before quickly expanding across the rest of Europe.
When “All That She Wants” hit No. 1 in the UK, a significant feat for any European artist at the time, Mega’s priority became crafting an album to package it alongside “Wheel of Fortune,” which had similarly reached gold in Denmark. To record The Sign, Ace of Base decamped to their own studio—in a rundown house on the outskirts of Gothenburg shared with an automotive shop—and moved at lightning speed to complete writing and recording in just three weeks. “It was too fast, definitely,” Ekberg admitted in 1998. “Some of the songs we didn’t have time to mix or record again. We had to take the demo versions and just finalize them a little bit.” Many of the resulting songs on The Sign, released first as Happy Nation in November 1992, sound as rushed as its genesis, with repetitive arrangements and awkward lyrics throughout. It came out of an urge for “singalong music on the dance floor,” as Jenny put it. “What I enjoy singing about most is that a lot of bad things are happening, so you have to focus on the good parts,” she said.
Even a total lack of attention to detail can’t suppress The Sign’s exuberant attitude. Optimism floods the entire album, whose lyrics flit between romantic troubles and positive sloganeering with wispy attempts at finding meaning in the contradiction. For every “All That She Wants,” there’s a house-inspired misfire (“Voulez-vous danser”) or plasticky ’80s nostalgia (“Dancer in a Daydream”). In “Münchhausen (Just Chaos),” a mystifying selection that only appeared on the Happy Nation version of the album, they transplant the infamous liar’s tall tales onto a techno-fried, convulsive backdrop. You get the sense someone pointed to a bookcase at random as a source of dire, last-minute inspiration.
Yet the group constantly surprises you, even in their programmatic moments. They thrive during the vocoder-heavy “Waiting for Magic,” one of the album’s most underrated moments, an ode to dancefloor hookups that pinwheels out into a rapid-fire staccato chorus. Like several songs on the album, it borrows from the inscrutability of Italo disco to create a template for future Swedish pop, in which lyrics need not make complete sense so long as they fit a lilting melody (“I am Snow White in a coffin waiting for you/Waiting for magic” is about as deep as their metaphors go). The writing doesn’t hamper the album so much as amplify its uncanny digital luster. The same goes for the original title track, “Happy Nation,” written as an “antifascist song and a hymn to life” following the unearthing of Ekberg’s skinhead past, a choice that colors the entire album in a reactive light. Pivoting to lurching drums and echoing liturgical backing vocals in Latin, the song breaks away into chanted lyrics about brotherhood and uniting mankind; it’s oddly effective and deeply unserious at once.
Happy Nation spread quickly, selling over a million copies across Europe within the year. Ace of Base’s success piqued the interest of American music executive Clive Davis at Arista, who signed the group for a U.S. re-release. He required that they replace some of the original album’s 13 tracks with fresh singles to give the re-release more American appeal and an edge over the flood of imports. At his insistence, they covered Albert Hammond and Diane Warren’s “Don’t Turn Around,” originally a Tina Turner B-side and another of The Sign’s pleading highlights, and filled it out with another song, “Living in Danger,” a lesser retread of “All That She Wants.” Then, in another twist of fate, the album found its new title in a song that almost didn’t end up on the re-release at all. “The Sign,” another Denniz Pop co-production and undeniable pop bauble that combines all the group’s best impulses—bobbing rhythm, eccentric production tics, lovably inane lyrics—was intended for a follow-up album, but on Davis’ order it became their next single. The choice unmistakably ensured the song’s seismic impact after the album was released in the U.S. in winter 1993, rounding out the trio of singles that would take them to No. 1. The charming, greenscreen-heavy video for “The Sign” secured constant rotation on MTV, a vital source of exposure that inspired impostor groups bearing names like Bass of Spades and Box of Laces.
By March 1994, “The Sign” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for an impressive six non-consecutive weeks. Ace of Base’s chokehold over radio was unprecedented—all three of their singles also reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Top 40 airplay chart, making them the first band in history to rack up that achievement with a debut album. With “The Sign” in particular, it’s easy to see why: that funky beat, the strangely processed whistle, and Jenny and Linn’s ascending, occasionally growling dual performances are irresistibly sunny. Even as critics took every opportunity to call the band ABBA clones, often straight to their faces (“If you ask us an ABBA question, it’ll cost you five bucks,” Linn once joked to a reporter), and dinged them for their repetitive sound, Ace of Base’s persistence and distinct blend of genres made them stars outside of their counterparts’ shadow. Much like white artists throughout history who have rewired Black music into a diluted, more commercially palatable form, from Elvis to the Beach Boys, their whitewashing of reggae worked wonders in the mainstream. It helped that their featherlight sound, entirely synthetic and draped in a blanket message of optimism, doubled as counter-programming to the grimmer themes of the grunge and rap music then climbing the charts. It was a contrast they often amplified themselves: “I don’t think the lyrics are the best in the world,” Jonas admitted to Entertainment Weekly, “but they’re not about ‘I shot them down,’ or ‘I’ll kill that or that or that.’”
The instant rush of fame left a lasting mark on the group, especially its women. “I liked the success in Europe, but after that, all my interest was lost there,” Linn said of The Sign’s sudden ubiquity. They traveled on press tours for the better part of two years, leading to swift burnout. Linn, the primary singer and the face of the band, was subject to an intense spotlight. Most terrifying of all, in 1994 a would-be fan broke into the Berggrens’ family home and held Jenny at knifepoint. After three follow-up albums featuring the original lineup—The Bridge, Flowers (released in the U.S. as Cruel Summer), and Da Capo—both Linn and Jenny left the group. The Sign remains Ace of Base’s most essential album, a crystallization of pop music as it transitioned toward synthesizer-based production and pronounced Sweden as a veritable hub of pop songwriting. In the decade to come, aspiring American stars like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys would jet to Scandinavia in search of radio-conquering hits.
Though Ace of Base never reached the same level again, their music has had a longer, more curious afterlife than one could have anticipated. You can hear its influence within titanic turn-of-the-2010s pop albums like Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster and Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream; both singers have also worked with Swedish producer Max Martin, who was running coffee for Denniz Pop around the same time that his mentor was producing Ace of Base. By design, it’s hard to resist their upbeat, stylized reggae-pop. Today, turn on any pop radio station and one of their hits from The Sign will turn up eventually, bopping along like a waving palm tree, as absurdly catchy an example of pop music’s simplest pleasures now as it was then.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2023-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Arista | November 12, 2023 | 8 | 6150a7d1-1afb-4605-8faa-5b982f23a35d | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
This Scandinavian folk singer embodies the (seemingly) breezy effortlessness of early Bob Dylan, infusing his songs with a detachment that, miraculously, is neither cold nor alienating. | This Scandinavian folk singer embodies the (seemingly) breezy effortlessness of early Bob Dylan, infusing his songs with a detachment that, miraculously, is neither cold nor alienating. | The Tallest Man on Earth: Shallow Grave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11359-shallow-graves/ | Shallow Grave | Over the last half-century, the tag "Dylanesque" has been slapped on so many mediocre folksingers clutching battered Moleskines that it's become a meaningless joke, a critical hiccup, a silly, lazy way of invoking an age-old raspy voice/acoustic guitar combo. It's gotten so bad that, in 2008, yammering on about the cliché of dubbing someone "the next Dylan" has become a cliché in itself. Still: It's exceptionally hard to talk about Scandinavian folksinger the Tallest Man on Earth (also known as Kristian Matsson) without mentioning Bob Dylan's early years, mostly because Matsson manages to embody Dylan's effortlessness so well (Dylan was trying really, really hard, sure-- but he sang like he didn't give a shit), infusing his songs with a detachment that, miraculously, is neither cold nor alienating. Like Dylan, Matsson is so natural a songwriter that these tracks feel predetermined, tumbling out of his mouth with an ease and grace that's increasingly uncommon.
Matsson released a self-titled five-song EP in 2007; Shallow Grave is his full-length debut. The production is appropriately scrappy, and it seems relatively safe to assume that the album was recorded live with one microphone-- accordingly, we hear the scratch of fingernails on string (and, on occasion, the chirping of birds in the background), made privy to each tiny exhalation and sigh. Matsson is an adept fingerpicker, and his guitar is easily as central as his voice, which is high, crackling, and rich. Much like Dylan himself, Matsson has mined the American south for inspiration, and his frantic strumming and front-porch poetry recall everyone from the Carter Family to Lead Belly to, most noticeably, country bluesman Mississippi John Hurt.
"The Blizzard's Never Seen the Desert Sands" sees Matsson caw little poems ("And the bells up in the tower they will ring/ And the frightened little choirs they will sing/ They will tremble, all their voices") over plucked banjo; "The Gardener" features a robustly strummed guitar melody and more half-cogent ideas ("I know the runner's gonna tell you/ There ain't no cowboy in my hair/ So now he's buried by the daisies/ So I can stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe"). Matsson's lyrics don't stand up as well on paper as they do in song (some have all the logic of fairy tales), but each of these cuts has a distinct, if muddled, narrative-- sparrows, tranquilizer guns, curtains, unicorns. Road stories, love stories, prayers.
Matsson's melodies are remarkably pliant, and while it's understandable to be skeptical of another skinny dude with a mustache, a guitar, and a worn-out copy of The Anthology of American Folk Music, the more time you invest in Shallow Grave, the more you'll realize how unusually memorable it is. Ultimately, Shallow Grave transcends comparison-- which is saying an awful lot, given the popularity of its prototype-- and Matsson is a natural-born folksinger, earnest, clever, and comforting. | 2008-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Gravitation | May 6, 2008 | 8.3 | 61515fc9-0477-456f-8546-fc68b8e640ae | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The Birmingham duo’s 2001 debut introduced their nightmarish hybrid of black metal, grindcore, and electronic music. On a new reissue, it sounds as extreme and subversive as ever. | The Birmingham duo’s 2001 debut introduced their nightmarish hybrid of black metal, grindcore, and electronic music. On a new reissue, it sounds as extreme and subversive as ever. | Anaal Nathrakh: The Codex Necro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anaal-nathrakh-the-codex-necro/ | The Codex Necro | When you zoom out, the history of extreme metal looks like an arms race. Black Sabbath wrote the urtext, Motörhead made it rowdier, Metallica and Slayer made it faster, Death made it more brutal, Mayhem made it more sinister, and so on. Anaal Nathrakh, the Birmingham duo of vocalist V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (aka Dave Hunt) and multi-instrumentalist Irrumator (Mick Kenney), fit neatly into that arc, but they also sought to blow it up entirely. Their 2001 debut The Codex Necro, which has received a new 20th anniversary reissue, pushed sonic extremes in uncomfortable, provocative ways that had no clear antecedent. Their sound was a nightmarish hybrid of black metal, industrial music, grindcore, digital hardcore, and IDM.
Like punk before it, electronic music developed in uneasy parallel to metal during the ’80s and ’90s. Metal’s obsession with musical virtuosity and its tendency toward walled-off hermeticism meant that, as the electronic scene exploded with creativity, relatively few extreme metal bands embraced it as an influence. Anaal Nathrakh were an exception. Where many drummers take pride in playing with superhuman speed, Anaal Nathrakh reveled in writing parts that no human drummer could conceivably attempt. “There is nothing to say we could never have a drummer, should an appropriately necrotic and unspeakable individual become available,” Hunt told the Chronicles of Chaos zine in 2002, and it sounded like a challenge. (They have since welcomed a handful of drummers to the live lineup, though the drums on their records remain programmed.)
By liberating themselves from the limitations of flesh and blood, Anaal Nathrakh opened the door to a whole galaxy of possibilities. They weren’t the first metal band to utilize electronics—Fear Factory and Ministry were early innovators, and the lone album by Norwegian band Thorns from the same year as The Codex Necro is another powerful collision of black metal and industrial music. But few bands in the genre have so fully embraced the potential of computerized sounds, a sonic element that can push an already horrific song to more distressing places.
In both the maximalism of its ideas and the punishing, blown-out production, The Codex Necro is one of the 21st century’s most extreme-sounding metal albums. The drum machine, as promised, pummels with impossible intensity. Humans have imitated these parts onstage, but their live drums have never sounded this deliberately insane. Kenney’s guitars and synths are caked in distortion and merged in mechanized lockstep, at times becoming indistinguishable from one another. Hunt’s throat-ripping vocals are the epitome of anguish, and they’re run through so much processing that he sounds like a Cronenbergian cyborg, crying out for merciful death.
Anaal Nathrakh’s reputation as a frightening band begins with The Codex Necro. The pushed-to-the-edge ethos of the album manifests in some legitimately unsettling moments: the first time Hunt’s strangled howl enters on album opener “The Supreme Necrotic Audnance,” the barked command of “Die on your knees!” from “Submission Is for the Weak,” the full minute of seasick electronics and Blair Witch-like field recordings that close the album. As far as they’ve strayed on subsequent albums from the sound of The Codex Necro, this aural terror remains the key to their work.
A lot of the thrill of The Codex Necro is witnessing Hunt and Kenney finding ways to make all that blood-curdling horror sound fun. The aforementioned “Submission Is for the Weak” is perversely motivating. For a track whose lyrics put the listener in the shoes of the victim, the music delivers some seriously empowering riffs. The most audacious song is “Paradigm Shift – Annihilation,” which starts in a swirling black metal vortex before moving to the dancefloor, with a breakbeat straight out of ’90s IDM. When you convincingly split the difference between Aphex Twin and Darkthrone, you’re operating in rarified air.
Along with the original album, Anaal Nathrakh have reissued Total Fucking Necro, a collection of chaotic, pre-LP demos. Taken as a whole, the music paints a picture of a band standing on the edge of a cliff, inventing themselves with reckless abandon. They don’t sound like a group who could settle into a long, steady career. But in the two decades since The Codex Necro, they have become precisely that. Hunt and Kenney have abandoned their pseudonyms, released 11 solid-to-very-good albums, and established themselves as a killer live act after an early-career aversion to stepping onstage. But The Codex Necro will forever live in a reality where none of that seems likely. It still feels as subversive, strange, and terrifying as ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Metal Blade | June 8, 2021 | 8 | 61540549-fd36-4812-aa6a-cf256a73ea91 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Emeralds leader gathers highlights from his small-run releases, offering explorations in minimalism, kosmische, and rock. | Emeralds leader gathers highlights from his small-run releases, offering explorations in minimalism, kosmische, and rock. | Mark McGuire: A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15420-a-young-persons-guide-to-mark-mcguire/ | A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire | Last year, guitarist Mark McGuire stepped away from the busy production schedule of cosmic drone-rockers Emeralds to craft Living With Yourself, a fine and overlooked album that drew on autobiographical source material. It may have been the first time most people had considered McGuire in a solo context, but he'd actually been equally busy in that realm as well, issuing tracks on an assortment of limited CD-Rs, cassettes, and compilations. A Young Person's Guide gathers highlights from these small-run releases, offering a nice overview of what McGuire's solo work is all about.
Tracks here generally fall into one of a few different types. There are the spacey meditations where single notes are plucked to create a hypnotic effect that nods to minimalism and kosmische explorations that bring to mind in particular the landmark Inventions for Electric Guitar by Ash Ra Tempel's Manuel Göttsching. On tracks like "Radio Flyer", "Explosion Alarm", and "The Marfa Lights", McGuire uses bits of delay and overlapping patterns of cleanly picked tones to create music that feels weightless and airy and meditative.
Other tracks use harder strumming and looping chords and veer closer to the world of rock proper, and here the focal point is exploring the possibilities of a single chord progression. "Dream Team" has a steady pulse, harmonized leads bathed in distortion, and distant vocals, and the way it builds and gradually shifts creates a mood of uplift and even triumph. "The Path Lined With Colorful Stones" takes an even simpler strummed pattern as its base, which allows McGuire to spin out tendrils of melody on top that feel loose and ragged but without clear direction but that nonetheless manage to resonate. Here, McGuire's music feels partway between the thick, mantra-like approach of Roy Montgomery and the fluid melodicism of the Durutti Column's Vini Reilly. And then there are bright, pastoral instrumentals like "Icy Windows" and "Time Is Flying", which have a loose grounding in folk but take on a more mesmerizing quality through repetition.
Tracks vary in length from interludes that last barely over a minute to the 17-minute "Dream Team". Many of the pieces fall into spaces between these loose categories, but taken together, over the course of two packed CDs, they give a good idea of the range of McGuire's interests. It's not an especially wide range, but it is executed very well. He knows where he wants to go and what it takes to get there.
Is almost two and a half hours of guitar-based, mostly instrumental music overkill? It's really not. The way McGuire's music functions, I don't detect an upper limit for when it might grow tiresome. The longest tracks would also work fine even if they were longer; it's music that strives for endlessness in the best possible way. So this is the kind of record you can just put on at moderate volume when you are doing things and it fills a room nicely with warm, inviting sound. And then, when you're in the mood for more intense engagement, you can add another quarter-turn to the volume knob and take in the full force of McGuire's arrangements. The music shows remarkable flexibility.
Part of it is up to the fact that dynamic range is limited. There's little that is jarring or surprising. This is music that wants to wrap you in an affectionate embrace and serve as a companion, to either some other activity or to a more focused journey into of the further reaches of consciousness. And where the dream-driven music scenes that McGuire sometimes finds himself lumped in with can feel like a bummed-out retro hangover, this music is almost uniformly positive and optimistic, seeming to celebrate the restorative possibilities of elemental chord changes, repetition, and carefully sculpted textures. It's music that wants to find its way into your life and do some good, and I can't think of any good reason to resist it. | 2011-05-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-05-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock / Experimental | Editions Mego | May 12, 2011 | 8.2 | 6156f580-14cf-46fa-961c-044f52319d32 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
There are a few things in this world I'm pretty sure of. One of them is that,\n\ in ... | There are a few things in this world I'm pretty sure of. One of them is that,\n\ in ... | Mogwai: Rock Action | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5365-rock-action/ | Rock Action | There are a few things in this world I'm pretty sure of. One of them is that, in a "Survivor"-like desert island competition between Mogwai and fellow crescendo-rockers Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai would be taking home the grand prize. While Godspeed's Efrim Menuck would spend his time trying desperately to craft cigarettes out of coconut shells, picking bugs out of his beard, and figuring out a way to fabricate cellophane in which to bury the dead, Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite would be busy sabotaging the enemy camp, starting bonfires, and dancing naked under the light of the moon.
Alright, so maybe I'm exaggerating. But it can't be denied that of all the bands making epic, apocalyptic rock music these days, Mogwai seem to be the only ones who can sit back at the end of the day and have a good laugh. Sure, their music can be extremely serious and deeply affecting, but there's an element of adventurousness and willingness to fuck with your expectations that makes Mogwai less dire than their competitors.
This adventurousness is evidenced by the fact that Mogwai managed to craft a brilliant debut-- 1997's Young Team-- that achieved the sainted goal of balancing fragile beauty and overwhelming sonic terror. Young Team allowed Mogwai to perfectly encapsulate the essence of their namesake-- those crazy little critters from the movie Gremlins. I still remember the song of the Mogwai; it's a simple, beautiful melody sung in freakish la-la's, yet signifies imminent destruction and face-rippage. Such was the case with Young Team-- a beautifully orchestrated melodic passage could successfully lull you into submission. You pet it. You kiss it. You feed it after midnight... and boom! Layered feedback, crashing cymbals, vacuum cleaner noises, claws, teeth, and wanton destruction.
Sadly, the follow-up to Young Team, 1999's Come On Die Young, replaced the aural explosions of the debut with gradual burnouts. Songs that could potentially have been made great seemed to go absolutely nowhere, resulting in an album full of wasted promise-- a better soundtrack to an afternoon nap than a terrifyingly beautiful explosion.
So what did the boys in Mogwai do? Did they go home and whine to their mamas? Of course not. Mogwai isn't a band of words, they're a band of action-- in this case, Rock Action. As of late, the music press has been falling all over itself to point out that-- get this-- Rock Action is not actually full of action, nor does it rock. And while, yes, the album is, for the most part, a very deliberate, moderately paced album, it manages much like Young Team to pack a stellar amount of energy into a medium-tempo rock song.
Which is not to say that Rock Action is a carbon copy of Young Team. Far from it, in fact. Perhaps the greatest difference between this record and its predecessors is the expanded range of sounds incorporated. In the past, Mogwai have been largely guitar-driven, relying on plucked melodies coupled with soaring feedback crescendos to create their trademark sound. Here, such diverse elements as banjos, patterned static, and the Welsh (singer Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals) are incorporated, making Rock Action the most sonically dense release of Mogwai's career thus far.
This more complex sound has its ups and its downs. On the positive side, it makes Rock Action a really fun album to pick apart. Dave Fridmann's production is flawless, affording each instrument just the right mix of distinction and ambiguity to create an engaging, yet cohesive whole. Unfortunately, this expanded repertoire comes at a cost. One could say that Rock Action is more focused on sound and less so on melody and structure than the classic Young Team. As a result, the epic "You Don't Know Jesus," the album's standout track, never attains the level of jaw-dropping perfection that Young Team's "Like Herod" or "Mogwai Fear Satan" laid claim to.
Still, Rock Action certainly has its peak moments. Aside from "You Don't Know Jesus," two shorter tracks-- the opening "Dial: Revenge" and "Secret Pint"-- perfectly showcase the strengths of Mogwai's new direction. The former, which features the talents of the aforementioned Gruff, puts vocals to better effect than the band's previous singing excursions, creating a stunningly gorgeous orchestral rock track that seems to extend far beyond its 3\xBD-minute duration. The latter, the album's closer, puts to work sparse piano, huge-sounding drums, and mumbled vocals, giving a beautiful ending to a similarly beautiful record.
Despite the changes the band has been through on the road from Young Team to Rock Action, there are enough unifying elements to conclude that those of you who seriously dug the band's earlier work will find a lot to like about the record. Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it. The fact that Mogwai can laugh at their detractors could either lead to the band pursuing brave new directions in rock, or traveling down a path of smug self-satisfaction and stagnation. Either way, Rock Action suggests that it'll be worth sticking around to find out. | 2001-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2001-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | April 30, 2001 | 8 | 615ecaf3-4565-4455-a032-712830e7e15b | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
A composer or a jokester? On his fourth album, Luke Wyatt's Torn Hawk project begins to emerge as the medium for a musician interested in pushing the limits of both. | A composer or a jokester? On his fourth album, Luke Wyatt's Torn Hawk project begins to emerge as the medium for a musician interested in pushing the limits of both. | Torn Hawk: Union and Return | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21912-union-and-return/ | Union and Return | While Luke Wyatt's Torn Hawk project didn't quite qualify as a member of the chill/vaporwave Class of 2010-11, his music shares much in common with them. He too is infatuated with VHS culture, infomercial soundtracks, primitive video games, bad TV cop shows and the distorting haze of memory. But while someone like James Ferraro or Oneohtrix Point Never would deploy samplers, synths, or computers to playfully deconstruct those memories, Torn Hawk’s weapon remains that other '80s artifact: the electric guitar.
Tape-chewed textures and digital glitches initially defined Wyatt’s first few releases, but there’s a remarkable clarity throughout Union and Return that belies the fact that for all the beauty of his fourth album, his inherent weirdness still squirms beneath the surface. “The Romantic” opens with a flutter of bowed cello, woodwinds, and a wordless female voice before Wyatt’s sparkling guitar and stutter-step drums come to the fore. It's anthemic, right down to the fanfare of brass and wordless choir that arises midway through, suggesting that Wyatt has cast off the trappings of his previous albums to embrace a minimal, classical sound palette. Whiffs of Meredith Monk, Glassworks, and Mark Isham abound. The sound is so clean and meticulous that it’s hard to reconcile with his fuzzier, lo-fi output.
Throughout, Wyatt’s guitar work brings to mind the legendary Manuel Göttsching, whose leads were crystalline and cosmic at once, suggesting New Age and progressive rock without settling into either camp. But the guitar here is a changeling, ringing like a bell and then dovetailing with piano, French horns, or swells of strings. One might think that Torn Hawk has evolved into a new music ensemble, but the melodic turns are so tight and precise that it’s hard to imagine them as the work of humans. Instead, Wyatt's guitar is played against a bevy of virtual instrumentation, multiple synthesizer layers stacked to dizzying heights. The drama of album highlight “With My Back to the Tower” stays just this side of bombast with its stacked brass and voices, while “Feeling is Law” continues that opulence: elegant and light on its feet. But for all of the song's brightness, darker tones seep out at the edges, casting doubt for brief moments before receding again.
It suggests a grandeur that begins to feel a bit like madness, the songs so filled with teeming details and turns that it’s easy to get lost in them. It can bring to mind car chases, the pomp of a Game of Thrones ceremony, and the music of a motivational speaker (something that Torn Hawk toys with in promo photos). Its clean fastidiousness becomes Union and Return’s weirdest attribute, akin to James Ferraro’s sleek pop polymer, Far Side Virtual. But while closer “Die Swimming in the Sea Here” retains the sonic attributes of the rest of the album, Wyatt emphasizes the gorgeous melody of the song, so straight and stirring so as to suggest end credits. How long until he moves beyond warping imaginary soundtracks and actually composing them himself? | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer | May 19, 2016 | 7.3 | 615ed5ba-d4ee-44c2-ad7e-894dca76a61f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The glitch pioneer’s new album takes his music to new levels of density and playfulness. | The glitch pioneer’s new album takes his music to new levels of density and playfulness. | Oval: Scis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oval-scis/ | Scis | Markus Popp’s Oval revival has now outlasted his original mid-’90s run, when classics like 94 Diskont brought “glitch” into the electronic-music lexicon. Back in those days, Popp was hesitant to even identify himself as a musician, but when he returned in 2010, it was with a fresh interest in composition and performance, as well as a new perspective on his tendency to pulling music apart. Scis, his first release since 2016’s Popp, takes his second act to new levels of density and playfulness.
Popp’s recent discography has evolved like one of his famously skipping samples, doubling back and repeating in quick distortions. 2010’s gargantuan comeback O showed off the busiest Oval arrangements to date alongside 50 brief fragments worked into those preceding tracks. He then scrambled the O material (and its accompanying Oh EP) with earlier work for the unique OvalDNA compilation, before heading to Brazil to reinterpret all three releases with singers and jazz musicians as Calidostopia!. “Recycled” rarely sounds like a compliment in music, but Popp’s methods have produced undeniably rich compost.
Scis initially picks up where its relatively club-oriented 2016 predecessor left off, but gradually unspools into something new. Opener “Twirror” builds twisting piano lines and unruly synth bleats into a slightly conventional climax of crashing drums. It’s a trick Popp repeats, but also improves upon, on subsequent tracks. “Fluoresso” and “Impecco” navigate similar ascents more gracefully; they open with Popp’s familiar CD skips, but never rely on them, as new elements keep entering the frame. The result hits a sweet spot where Popp is essentially playing live alongside a “band” of classic Oval loops.
He mostly abandons the vocals that made Popp feel ready for a dancefloor, but they find new forms on tracks like “Pushhh,” as garbled voice loops compete with one another over twinkling percussion and strings. Prepared piano and a pitched-down vocal moan form the backbone of aggressive standout “Mikk.” “Improg” is built around eerily airless vocal snippets and prepared piano that recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of. It’s a great example of Popp’s talent for making ambitious experiments sound both playful and coy.
In the 2010s, plenty of Oval’s ’90s contemporaries reasserted their place in different ways. Aphex Twin’s long, mysterious absence ended when he returned with material not too different from where he left off. Popp’s current course feels more akin to Autechre’s, though their current music couldn’t be more different. Since 2001’s Confield, released the same year Oval’s first iteration ended, Sean Booth and Rob Brown have pushed their own process with a tunnel vision that’s certainly had ups and downs, but led to transcendent contemporary work. Markus Popp isn’t quite there yet, but Scis proves that he’s still following his own path.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Thrill Jockey | February 1, 2020 | 7 | 615f343d-bec8-4f5b-a09a-16460ca33409 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
In 1995, Stephin Merritt released a major-label synth-pop LP as the 6ths. He wrote all the songs but enlisted others to sing them, including Lou Barlow, Dean Wareham, Georgia Hubley, and Mary Timony. | In 1995, Stephin Merritt released a major-label synth-pop LP as the 6ths. He wrote all the songs but enlisted others to sing them, including Lou Barlow, Dean Wareham, Georgia Hubley, and Mary Timony. | The 6ths: Wasps’ Nests | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-6ths-wasps-nests/ | Wasps’ Nests | To the world at large, Stephin Merritt was born in 1999. It was in those waning days of the 20th century that his band the Magnetic Fields released 69 Love Songs, the 3xCD opus that delivered exactly what its title promised, and did so with such diversity and brilliance that it was deemed an instant classic. From that point, the audience for Merritt’s music grew and he was afforded the opportunities that budding songwriters can only dream of. (Interviews with Terry Gross! Volvo ads! A major label deal!) But Merritt’s template had already been in place for about a decade. His work up to that point—lush synthpop recorded for indie labels like Feel Good All Over and Merge—demonstrated his unparalleled ability to write devilishly catchy melodies and lyrics as cloudy and sweet as a Manhattan.
But even before his current deal with Nonesuch Records, Merritt spent some time with a major label. Wooed by A&R man and avowed fan Ken Friedman, the songwriter inked a one-off deal with the Polygram subsidiary London Records. True to his contrarian nature, he didn’t produce a new Magnetic Fields album. Instead, Merritt inaugurated the 6ths, a side project for which he writes all the songs but lets other folks handle the vocals.
The resulting album was Wasps’ Nests, released first in 1995 but now available as a single LP via Captured Tracks. It is a fine, quaintly flawed collection of bubblegummy synthpop that now feels like something of a blip among the more well-known projects he’s done since. But within his creative history, it represents a marker of Merritt’s time within the underground scene, a community that he happily moved past as quickly as he could (“I have no interest in remaining in the indie rock ghetto,” he told the Village Voice in late ’99).
That mainly has to do with the singers conscripted to participate in this first 6ths album (a follow-up called Hyacinths and Thistles came out in 2000). The roster reads like a lineup for a great ’90s music festival: Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow, Chris Knox of Tall Dwarfs, Barbara Manning, Anna Domino, and Yo La Tengo drummer/vocalist Georgia Hubley among them.
The supposition is that everyone involved was brought in on the strength or distinctiveness of their vocals, but by and large, Merritt tamps those qualities down. The record is mixed so that the singing is almost overtaken by the burbling synthesizers, reverb-charged guitar lines, and drum machines. Many of the guests also do their best to match the downcast tone of Merritt’s baritone vocals. Some make it work, like Barlow who brings a nice whispery croon to the ballad “In the City in the Rain.” Galaxie 500 leader Dean Wareham takes on the weathered tone of his idol Lou Reed on the swinging gem “Falling Out of Love (With You).” Others, though, including Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, Knox, and Honeybunch member Jeffrey Underhill, feel like they’re straining to keep from soaring.
It’s the women on Wasps’ Nests that are given the real showcase. Unable to hit Merritt’s low notes, they stay true to their own vocal range and the songs delight as a result. Domino’s turn on “Here in My Heart” is a perfect compliment to the Moroder-meets-folk reel that swirls around her. Helium/Ex Hex head Mary Timony uses her bittersweet tone well to go along with the sad sentiments and chirpy music of “All Dressed Up in Dreams.”
Lyrically, Wasps’ Nests has all the highs and lows of Merritt’s non-conceptual work. The good outweighs the blunders here, but for every fine-tuned verse (“I was happy, which is not like me at all/For an hour I was feeling 10 feet tall”), there are others that stumble. Some are caught up in wordsmithery, or pith, or a tendency to just run through lists in place of sentiment—as with the array of possible lovers he spells out in “When I’m Out of Town” (“The butcher, the baker/The thin undertaker”).
At the time of its release, Wasps’ Nests felt like another victory for a songwriter already on one hell of a winning streak, a feeling only amplified by the release of Get Lost six months later. But listened to now, some two decades later, it’s clear that Merritt was gathering his strength as a songwriter and a producer, which he would soon turn into a full-on torrent of genius. | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | November 18, 2017 | 8.5 | 616aa207-5f86-460b-8f24-dd782c992d53 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
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 cult-classic 1979 debut from the Roche sisters, a playful, poignant, and slyly subversive folk masterpiece. | 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 cult-classic 1979 debut from the Roche sisters, a playful, poignant, and slyly subversive folk masterpiece. | The Roches: *The Roches * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-roches-the-roches/ | The Roches | The Roches went down to Hammond, Louisiana, in 1975. Two of them: Maggie and Terre, who’d just released their first album, not yet joined by Suzzy, who would soon round out the trio. The elder two sisters had been performing for nearly a decade at that point, having first hit the road when both were fresh out of high school in Park Ridge, New Jersey, Maggie as a graduate and Terre as a senior-year dropout. Both had learned to play guitar from a public television program, quickly internalizing the dozen folk tunes the host had to offer. After that, rather than building up any standard repertoire or plugging away at fundamentals, they began focusing exclusively on developing Maggie’s original compositions, which flowed out quickly.
By the time Maggie and Terre met Paul Simon at an NYU songwriting workshop, they had an idiosyncratic sensibility as a duo, honed over years of small-time tours and local gigs at Greenwich Village folk clubs. Maggie’s songs mixed heartfelt sentiment and droll humor, plainspoken storytelling and poetic obfuscation, striking clarity of melody and knotty intricacy of form. Terre was ostensibly the lead vocalist, but in truth they were nearly always singing together, their voices entwined over their acoustic guitars. Simon, one of Maggie’s songwriting heroes, was impressed. He hired them to contribute backing vocals to his album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and got them a deal with Columbia, the same label that released his work.
Seductive Reasoning, released in 1975 and credited to Maggie & Terre Roche, didn’t receive much support from Columbia. The only feedback the label offered was that the sisters should wear hipper clothes. During the recording, as seasoned studio musicians played arrangements for Maggie’s songs from sheet music, “we realized that there was a whole thing that we had no idea about with music,” Terre put it to an interviewer later. They began to wonder whether their lack of musical education had left them unprepared for their fledgling new career. Two weeks after Seductive Reasoning came out, discouraged by meager sales and the label’s mishandling, Maggie and Terre resolved to quit performing entirely. They abandoned New York and its music industry for Hammond, a small college town of about 15,000 people.
“If you go down to Hammond,” all three Roches sing on their self-titled debut as a trio, released four years after that Southern sojourn, “You’ll never come back.” If you know “Hammond Song,” reading that line may be enough to conjure the miraculous sound of their harmonies in your mind. “Hammond Song” displaces the pressure Maggie and Terre felt not to leave New York, mapping it onto a family drama about a woman whose loved ones disapprove of her uprooting her life in pursuit of a man. Sometimes, the sisters inhabit different individual characters; at others, they come together in a shimmering Greek chorus.
Maggie’s lyric offers no answers about whether the woman is right or wrong to depart. The voices of her interlocutors radiate both loving concern and stifling control. You might sense, like them, that she’ll find only heartbreak in Hammond, or you might root for her leap into the unknown. The man, identified only with a dismissive “that fella,” is all but immaterial, just there to get the story moving. The heart of “Hammond Song” is the complex relationship between its protagonist and the women we can only assume are her sisters.
The arrangement illustrates those complexities as powerfully as the words do, with voices interweaving and dispersing, building chords that are first rich and sturdy, then fragile and uncertain. The writing is playful and poignant, often at the same time. “They say we meet again, on down the line,” offers Terre at one point, before a tower of voices upends the cliché: “Where is on down the line? How far away?” After the joke comes another blow to the heart. “Tell me I’m OK,” all three Roches sing together, their voices forming a delicate minor chord before spiraling downward.
While in Hammond, Maggie and Terre worked in restaurants and stayed at “a friend’s kung fu temple,” as their press coverage of the era uniformly put it, with understated puzzlement. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a bohemian martial arts institute in small-town Louisiana, it didn’t last forever. When the temple packed up six months later, the sisters did too, headed back to New York. Suzzy, their ebullient little sister, who had been 14 years old when they started performing, was now a college graduate living in the Village. She convinced her sisters to sing together again, and joined in herself, filling out the midrange between Maggie’s deep contralto and Terre’s crystalline soprano. They started by crafting elaborate vocal arrangements for Christmas carols and singing on the street. Soon, they were back in the folk clubs.
In their new trio formation, the Roches quickly caught on, eliciting a fervor that had previously eluded Maggie and Terre. Onstage, each took on a particular guise: Terre coolly charismatic; Suzzy the wild child, gyrating and pulling funny faces; Maggie the mysterious one, focused intently on the music. Maggie remained the primary songwriter, but the other two began composing as well. Along with their originals, they played a selection of covers ranging from Bob Dylan to George Frideric Handel. One newspaper reporter compared the flurry of positive press coverage to “the Bruce Springsteen hoopla in 1975.”
Mixed in with the rave notices was a sense of uncertainty of just what to do with these sisters singing painfully funny songs about workday commutes and affairs with married men in exquisite three-part harmony. Some writers insisted on reading deeply into their wardrobes—sneakers, thrift-store sweaters, peasant skirts, shorts and tights—construing these regular street clothes as evidence of coy affectation. Others sensed, in the Roches’ gleeful rejection of folk music’s po-faced past and utter indifference to prevailing trends, an affinity with the burgeoning rebellion of punk rock.
One early champion was New York Times pop critic John Rockwell, who introduced the Roches to Robert Fripp when the King Crimson guitarist asked him about bands he should see in New York. Both Fripp and the Roches had recently signed contracts with Warner Brothers, the former as a producer and the latter as an artist. After catching a performance in the Village, Fripp approached the band about working together. Both parties agreed that the goal of the sessions, in contrast to the full-band arrangements of Seductive Reasoning, should be to replicate the Roches’ stripped-down stage performance as closely as possible, with few extra elements accompanying their voices and guitars. With the exception of some well-placed washes of electronics, and an iridescent electric guitar solo on “Hammond Song,” Fripp produced the Roches in much the same way that Andy Warhol produced the Velvet Underground: by letting them be.
This fidelity to the Roches’ live setup included starting the album with “We,” their customary set opener, a disconcertingly jaunty number that introduced the band in deadpan biographical detail: “Guess which two of us made a record/Guess what the other one did instead/The two who made the record/Have been a singing group for 10 years,” and so on. In a perceptive Rolling Stone review, Ariel Swartley described the gambit of “We” as “part confrontation, part playing the klutz.” And it’s true: “We” is a sort of gauntlet, an upfront announcement that the Roches will not be bending to accommodate received notions of artistic seriousness: male notions of such seriousness, if you want to put a fine point on it. It also serves as a dare to any listener who might dismiss them as a cutesy novelty act before “Hammond Song” shows up as the second track and obliterates that possibility. It doesn’t sound remotely like punk, but it’s a punk rock move through and through.
“Hammond” wasn’t the only song on The Roches informed by Maggie and Terre’s Louisiana limbo period. There’s also “Mr. Sellack,” one of Terre’s two writing contributions, sung from the perspective of a waitress begging an old boss to rehire her at a dead-end job she left for a failed attempt at stardom. Listening to its jazzy chord changes and piquant lead guitar, it’s hard to believe that the band was ever worried about their informal musical training. (The Roches, among other things, is a top-notch guitar album, with instrumental lines that at first seem secondary but sparkle and surprise with sustained focus.) If anything, it seems that the sisters’ boldness as teenagers—their impulse to plow straight into their own material rather than spend time figuring out how other people put songs together—yielded something original and rare. Each composition on The Roches is shaped unusually, each transition from one section to the next perfectly strange.
One distinctive quality of their songs is the way a single line can shift the emotional polarity of everything in its orbit. In the case of “Mr. Sellack,” it’s the bridge, revealing the yearning beneath the greasy-spoon banality we’ve heard about so far: “Waiting tables ain’t that bad/Since I’ve seen you last/I’ve waited for some things that you would not believe/To come true.” The music bends and stretches around this admission: nudging toward a key change, picking up a couple of extra measures to accommodate all those syllables. The sisters’ phrasing and melodic lines are so graceful—shooting up to mimic the rising of the waitress’s dreams, then falling down dejected again—that the gesture sounds inevitable, almost easy, despite its irregularity. It’s as if the whole song were constructed outward from this one moment.
Lines like these abound in all three sisters’ songs, casting shadows across narratives that might otherwise seem purely whimsical. “The Troubles,” about a visit to Ireland, contrasts the sisters’ exaggeratedly petty concerns about the trip with the reality of a nation that was embroiled in brutal civil conflict. But you only hear about the second part once, and you might miss it if you’re not paying close attention. Suzzy’s “The Train” spends much of its time chronicling the unattractive excesses of an anonymous neighbor on the commuter rail: taking up two seats, drinking two beers, reading The New York Post. And then: “I want to ask him what’s his name/But I can’t because I’m so afraid.”
The Roches could be comically unsparing in their accounts of banality, another connection those early critics may have heard to the new wave of rock bands who yelped out their disenchantment with contemporary life. This was something other than folk music. There was nothing rustic about it. It was the folk music of kids who’d learned how to play guitar by watching TV. The band’s humor, and fondness for the quotidian, may have puzzled some listeners, but it was always in service of finding a deeper truth. “I think that’s kind of the nature of life, you know?” Terre told an interviewer earlier this year. “It’s not either/or it’s, and. Things are often heartbreaking and hysterically funny at the same time.”
“Damned Old Dog” is surely the saddest and sexiest song ever written with “bow wow” as a lyric. Maggie’s narrator wants to be a dog because it would make heartbreak simpler: Dogs don’t fall in love; they generally seem happy to mate with the nearest available candidate. The sisters enumerate this and various other advantages of canine life before realizing the transformation would be futile. “I don’t want to be a damned old dog,” they sing in descending harmony, sounding a bit like pre-Nashville country crooners. “I just want to lick your chin again.” At another point, their voices more closely resemble their subject’s: “Do I want to be a housebroken dog?” they ask, stretching the word “house” until it becomes the sound of three hounds howling at the moon. That’s not a metaphorical description: They literally start to sing like dogs. Somehow, it plays as much like tragedy as comedy.
If the songs of The Roches have a unifying theme, it is the idea of leaving home. Again and again, the women at their centers take courageous and possibly ill-advised plunges, sometimes landing on their feet and others on their knees, begging to be taken back. Is the message of “Hammond Song” really so ambiguous? Of course she has to go down there. If it turns out to be a mistake, it will be one that she’s made for herself.
It’s easy to see the reflections of the sisters’ own paths through life. Despite the hype around their debut, the Roches were never a huge commercial success: The Roches, their biggest-selling album, peaked at No. 58 on the Billboard albums chart. “We have a career, and that is a gift. I guess I want things to be easy, but that’s not the way it is,” Maggie told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. But you never get the sense that they regretted hitting the road as teenagers, or getting up and trying again after the record industry failed them the first time.
Terre’s song “Runs in the Family,” a devastating ballad, suggests that boldness is part of the Roche temperament, and that it isn’t always easy to live with:
One by one we left home
We went so far out there
Everybody got scared
My uncle did it; my daddy did it
I'm beginning to think that it runs in the family
She keeps saying that—“I’m beginning to think that it runs in the family”—without ever quite saying what it is. It echoes my favorite lyric in “Hammond Song,” another one of those lines that jumps out and rearranges your feelings about everything in the story. The protagonist addresses her sisters: “I ain’t the only one who’s got this disease.” What disease? Later in “Runs in the Family,” a fight between partners leads, with a chilling lack of explanation, to a pregnancy. Who knows what sort of passion erupted in that negative space? The Roches, singing as one, seem sure that the child will be afflicted too: “Oh no, kid/You’re gonna run in the family.”
Maybe the disease is simply the urge to take a stand for yourself, and it’s only pathological because it risks being rejected, or worse, misunderstood. “Pretty and High,” the album’s elliptical closer, concerns a circus performer whose adoring public becomes convinced that she’s hiding something after she rebuffs a powerful man’s advances. They call her a liar, and claim that “if she takes off her dress/The sky will fall down.” It certainly sounds like a parable about the dangers of making art as a woman, for an audience that may turn on you as soon as you confound their expectations about womanhood.
“Call the eccentricity something else—more calculated than real, with an ingenuousness that is less than genuine,” wrote Alexander Austin and Steve Erickson in an L.A. Weekly review of a 1979 Roches performance. Women being so bold, so free, so funny—surely, they are trying to pull one over on us. They must be hiding something under their dresses.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2022-11-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Warner | November 27, 2022 | 9.5 | 616e5fc1-75b7-409b-b6ed-acd555435a12 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
This box set of Bowie’s work in the 1990s—a period when he reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music—houses the lost album Toy and makes a case for a bold, divisive era of experiments. | This box set of Bowie’s work in the 1990s—a period when he reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music—houses the lost album Toy and makes a case for a bold, divisive era of experiments. | David Bowie: Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-david-bowie-5-brilliant-adventure-1992-2001/ | Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) | Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001), the latest edition of David Bowie’s ongoing series of box sets spanning each era of his career, is a defining document for fans of a certain stripe. Consensus prevails for the earlier decades: The 1970s were brilliant, the ’80s initially brilliant, then naff. By contrast, the ’90s continue to be a live issue, dividing fans as to whether Bowie was doing vital new work by engaging with prevailing trends or simply cosigning them in hopes their success would rub off. With each album it collects taking a bold left turn from the sound of its immediate predecessor, Brilliant Adventure makes an inarguable case for the former viewpoint: This Bowie took a lot of risks—and those risks largely paid off.
The centerpiece of the 18xLP box set, and its selling point, is Toy. One of Bowie’s proverbial lost albums, Toy was originally recorded in 2000 with members of his touring band playing fast and loose new versions of some of Bowie’s earliest songs, mostly predating his post-“Space Oddity” stardom. It speaks to both Bowie’s restlessness as an artist and willingness to risk embarrassment in service of that restlessness that he’d revisit his juvenilia at all, much less make a whole record out of the project.
The album was subsequently lost in the scheduling shuffle by Bowie’s then-label EMI/Virgin, before being shelved altogether. Rather than fixate on the cancellation, Bowie moved on to brand-new work, and Toy was relegated to the stuff of fan legend. Songs from the sessions dribbled out as B-sides, digital exclusives, and, in 2011, a full-fledged leak; Brilliant Adventure—and the forthcoming set Toy:Box—is the first time this material has been officially made available as a complete album.
The resultant record is a mixed bag. Bowie and his band gel well: “It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music,” as co-producer Mark Plati puts it. But these seasoned pros often fail the material, losing the ramshackle charm of the originals—turning the Swinging London, proto-reggae sound of “I Dig Everything” into a preening rocker, or smoothing out the rough edges of sexed-up, pill-popping mod tracks like “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” and “Baby Loves That Way.” In many cases, the original versions sound more avant-garde than the remakes, despite Bowie’s intervening decades in the art-rock trenches.
The strongest track from the set is “Shadow Man,” first recorded as a demo from the Ziggy Stardust sessions. In this version, Bowie’s rich croon is accompanied by a string section and Mike Garson’s piano, turning the song into a lovely, lyrical meditation on our secret selves; it benefits from the wisdom Bowie accrued with age. Elsewhere, rapturous backing vocals twin with the string section to give “Silly Boy Blue” a gorgeous outro, while “Toy (Your Turn to Drive),” the only song newly written for the collection, mines beauty and pathos from Garson’s rainfall piano and a blissful, wordless, two-note hook. Even if Toy mostly served as a template for the neoclassicist rock of Bowie’s subsequent albums, 2002’s Heathen and 2003’s Reality, these highlights make it worth your time.
The 1990s albums reissued here, however, tell the story best. After a period in the pop-music wilderness, this is the decade during which Bowie reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music, in pretty much any form it took. (The missing link between this box set and its 1980s equivalent Loving the Alien are the two records he recorded with his unjustly reviled rock band Tin Machine; I’ll just say “Justice for ‘You Belong in Rock n’ Roll’” and leave it at that.) Accusations of trend-hopping dogged Bowie at the time, for reasons that now feel increasingly silly—who wouldn’t want to hear him take a stab at industrial or jungle? This is the kind of genre play that paid dividends with his avant-jazz inflected swan song Blackstar, two decades later.
Bowie’s dalliance with the era’s electronic and dance sounds began with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, a reunion not only with Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers (who felt stymied by Bowie’s refusal to record hits), but also with his glam-era bandmates, guitarist Mick Ronson and pianist Mike Garson, the latter of whom continued to work with Bowie for years. (Sadly, Ronson died soon after recording the set’s somewhat anemic dance-beat cover of Cream’s “I Feel Free,” and the lost potential of their reunion is one of the great “what-if”s of Bowie’s career.)
Even when working with old collaborators, Bowie resists falling into old habits. On Black Tie, he meditates on his newlywed bliss with Iman—the opening instrumental “The Wedding” and its lyrical follow-up “The Wedding Song”—and the state of racial relations in America: a gospel-inflected cover of Morrissey’s Ziggy pastiche “I Know It’s Going to Happen Someday,” or the manic title-track duet with New Jack Swing vocalist Al B. Sure!. A bassline cribbed from Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern,” or perhaps from Grandmaster Melle Mel’s “White Lines,” drives both “Wedding” songs and the soaring cover of the Walker Brothers’ “Nite Flights,” the latter of which is as good a reason as any to dig into this record.
Things start getting interesting with 1993’s The Buddha of Suburbia. The most overlooked album in Bowie’s oeuvre, it began life as a soundtrack to BBC2’s film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Hanif Kureishi. Bowie took this remit and ran with it—ultimately only the title track made it into the film—working with longtime multi-instrumentalist collaborator Erdal Kızılçay on a suite of fascinatingly offbeat songs: the quasi-industrial “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad” with its punning reference to the English gangsters the Krays; the gorgeous ambient piece “The Mysteries”; the achingly romantic “Strangers When We Meet” (re-recorded for Bowie’s subsequent release 1. Outside) with its beautiful “heel head over” wordplay; the driving, bittersweet “Dead Against It.” Its instrumentals and experiments serve as a sonic bridge back to the Bowie of Low and “Heroes” while also pointing the way to the albums to come.
Bowie’s mid-to-late ’90s image as an “alternative music” noisemaker truly blossomed with 1995’s 1. Outside. A reunion with Berlin Trilogy collaborator Brian Eno, it’s also the record he toured alongside The Downward Spiral–era Nine Inch Nails—putting Bowie on the radar of any black-clad ’90s kid—and it shares Trent Reznor’s concurrent knack for melody and chaos. In between spoken-word tracks that spool out a Twin-Peaks-meets-Damien-Hirst murder mystery in the art world, this concept album features melodic wonders like “The Motel” and “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” as well as pulsating bangers like “Hallo Spaceboy”—a live-set fixture for years to come—and the Lost Highway soundtrack highlight “I’m Deranged.” 1. Outside’s concept-album conceit has its detractors, particularly because the proposed second and third installments of a new Eno “trilogy” that would have completed the story never panned out. Besides, the Berlin Trilogy of Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger is a nearly impossible act to follow. But it’s the sound of Bowie at his hungriest, anxious to show the kids how it’s done.
Bowie’s culture-vulture tendencies and his ability to craft enduring portraits of a time and place reach their ’90s apotheosis in 1997’s Earthling. Featuring full-fledged jungle beats in several tracks, it’s also a showcase for Reeves Gabrels, the longest-tenured of Bowie’s showboat lead guitarists, whose squalls and soaring solos gave the album an anarchic energy that matched the return of Bowie’s flame-orange hair and his tattered Alexander McQueen Union Jack coat. Simply put, this is a record of nearly wall-to-wall bangers, from the drum-and-bass highlights “Little Wonder” and “Battle for Britain (The Letter)” to the pounding “Dead Man Walking” (a salute to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, of all things) and “The Last Thing You Should Do.”
Ironically, the record’s claim to pop-culture fame in the States is a version of the track “I’m Afraid of Americans” re-recorded by Nine Inch Nails that isn’t even present on the album proper. Regardless, Earthling is very much the Young Americans or Let’s Dance of its day, a muscular collection of contemporary club sounds remade in Bowie’s image. It deserves a place in the pantheon alongside its predecessors.
Then, rather suddenly, Bowie hit the brakes. He switched off the experiments and turned down the volume on ‘hours…’, his exceedingly gentle—genteel?—1999 effort. Though Gabrels shared a writing credit on every song, it’s easily Bowie’s mildest release of the decade, a break from the recent past marked by a somber, long-haired Bowie cradling his previous spiky-haired incarnation Pietà-style on the front cover. The lead track, “Thursday’s Child,” is a melodic highlight, and the closing “The Dreamers” is a full-throated meditation on aging featuring Bowie at his brassiest, but much of the interim—the drab “What’s Really Happening” and its thoughtless swipe of the vocal line from “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” the ghastly rocker “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” and its titular callback to the vastly superior “Oh! You Pretty Things” and the Bowie-produced Iggy and the Stooges slaughterfest “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”—rank among Bowie’s weakest work.
Brilliant Adventure is rounded out by a pair of sprawling collections. Re:Call 5 is a three-disc compilation of soundtrack contributions, B-sides, single edits, and remixes, heavy on perfunctory radio edits and light on remixes or new tracks of interest, Pet Shop Boys’ distinctive remix of “Hallo Spaceboy” excepted. (Seriously, where are the Ice Cube and Photek versions of “I’m Afraid of Americans”?) The superior BBC Radio Theatre, London, June 27, 2000 is a double-disc career retrospective by the same band that played with Bowie a few days earlier at Glastonbury and who would go on to work with him on Toy; the intimate setting works much better for the session-pro players than did the festival sprawl, tens of thousands of fans notwithstanding.
Could the crowd-pleasing Bowie who took the Glasto stage by storm ever have emerged without first amassing his itinerant ’90s catalog? I’d say the answer is no. For one thing, there’s a whole generation, myself included, who bought their first Bowie records in this period, specifically because of their engagement with the underground electronic-music scenes of the time; no doubt there were quite a few of us in that festival audience. But more importantly, Bowie became more comfortable in his own skin by, once again, trying on the skins of others. It’s how he put his ’80s pop-star period, one he largely lamented, to bed, renewing his confidence and enabling him to perform both new and old material with renewed vigor and swagger. As he always did at his best, the Bowie of Brilliant Adventure followed his bliss, wherever it took him.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 11, 2021 | 7.6 | 616eeea2-1539-4bb3-bad1-9e9a844b9e35 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten displays the expressive voice and songwriting chops of peers such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, and Jana Hunter. | Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten displays the expressive voice and songwriting chops of peers such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, and Jana Hunter. | Sharon Van Etten: Because I Was in Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13226-because-i-was-in-love/ | Because I Was in Love | Fans of acoustic guitar-playing female singer-songwriters are so flooded with options these days that they are in the position to be pretty discriminating. Artists such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, Jana Hunter, and Mariee Sioux have issued a steady stream of quality music, and have collectively set a fairly high standard for newcomers to match. Yet on her debut full-length album, Because I Was in Love, Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten proves that she has the expressive voice and the songwriting chops to ably hold her own in the company of her peers.
As with the aforementioned artists, Van Etten's work retains some echoes of folk tradition but generally operates in a more personal, introspective space. Following a number of hand-designed and self-released recordings, a 2008 tour with Meg Baird brought Van Etten into the orbit of Philadelphia's Espers, whose Greg Weeks recorded Because I Was in Love at Hexham Head studio. With Weeks' veteran assistance, Van Etten keeps the album's arrangements minimal and direct, augmenting her voice and guitar with only the occasional splash of organ, brushed cymbals, or multi-tracked vocal harmonies.
Though the arrangements are spare, the performances on Because I Was in Love are not skeletal-- these are full-bodied songs that sound finished, as though Van Etten had already lived with this material long enough to know intuitively how best to present it. In this regard Van Etten's work can resemble Chan Marshall's earliest Cat Power recordings, especially in the way that Van Etten's confident, nuanced soprano is able to help temper the emotional fragility of her material.
As the title suggests, Because I Was In Love spends most of its time chronicling the bittersweet ache and light-headed confusion that can only arise through the ebbs and flows of romance. Unlike some low-key vocalists who prefer to sing as if nobody were listening, Van Etten instead sings these songs as though she had an audience of one, with nearly every lyric directed straight to some unnamed "you." And, at the risk of conflating the performer with her performance, suffice to say that throughout the album Van Etten really nails it, sounding every bit like someone trying to get her head around a complex and evolving relationship.
On opener "I Wish I Knew" or the sumptuous "Much More Than That", Van Etten writes with such intimacy (her lyrics filled with direct lines like, "I wish I knew what to do with you," or "Please don't take me lightly") that the listener gets an almost disconcerting sense of eavesdropping on a private conversation. Elsewhere, as on "Tornado" or the captivating "Consolation Prize", Van Etten sounds more reflective, keeping a measured distance from her narratives, even if her songs' ultimate conclusions ("The moral of the story is don't lie to me again") recognize the impossibility of pat endings and easy solutions.
Most crucial to the album's success, however, is Van Etten's unerring sense for crafting memorable, seductive melodies. Here again she takes no shortcuts, as she largely forgoes standard verse-chorus repetition in favor of a more organic style, with wonderful songs like "For You" and "Holding Out" gently unwinding like the lines across a hand-drawn road map. Even in a folk scene that can sometimes feel over-crowded, Because I Was in Love positions Sharon Van Etten immediately towards the front of the pack. | 2009-06-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-06-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Language of Stone | June 22, 2009 | 7.7 | 61726d6a-2697-4f0a-948e-f760d7328015 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The latest in the Suede reissue series show a band that remained creative and worthy in the wake of what could have been a fatal loss. | The latest in the Suede reissue series show a band that remained creative and worthy in the wake of what could have been a fatal loss. | Suede: Coming Up [Deluxe Edition] / Head Music [Deluxe Edition] / A New Morning [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15571-coming-up-deluxe-edition-head-music-deluxe-edition-a-new-morning-deluxe-edition/ | Coming Up [Deluxe Edition] / Head Music [Deluxe Edition] / A New Morning [Deluxe Edition] | The story of Suede splits well into two acts: the first version of the band, with guitarist Bernard Butler, and the second version of the band, with Butler gone and replaced by Richard Oakes, as well as keyboardist Neil Codling. The first version of the band released two albums, the crackling, sexually aggressive debut and the grotesque, brilliant, and dark follow-up, Dog Man Star, made as Butler and the rest of the band were pulling apart. The original version of the band fed on the tension between its two songwriters, Butler and vocalist Brett Anderson, and the records it made were harrowing and complex, both musically and lyrically.
When the band reconstituted after its messy split with its guitarist, Anderson was in no mood to make another Dog Man Star. It's a difficult kind of record to follow up-- to come back with something that aimed for the same epic sweep and catharsis of that album would have ensured failure. Instead, when Anderson began to write with his new partners, he sought to change almost everything. The new Suede would be a very different band from its predecessor, even though it had the same singer and rhythm section. The new pieces had a lot to say about that. Oakes and Codling immediately began writing new material for the band, and Anderson found that what they were writing fit well with the new direction he hoped to take the band in.
It wasn't a clean stylistic break, necessarily. Oakes had found his way into the band by sending a demo tape to the Suede fan club; when Anderson overheard drummer Simon Gilbert listening to it, he thought it was an old Butler demo, and the 17-year-old guitarist vaulted to front of the long line of people auditioning to be Suede's newest member. Codling came to the band more conventionally: He was Gilbert's cousin, and the new songs they'd been working on immediately after Oakes joined required keyboards, so he was hired. This new three-way creative partnership was considerably less volatile than the Anderson/Butler pair, and partly as a result, the music lost its dark edge.
Back in the band's early days, Suede were heralded as one of the banner acts of the UK music media's new Britpop obsession-- a fact that chagrined and even disgusted Anderson-- and Dog Man Star had in some respects been Anderson's attempt to show that Suede were something distinct from Britpop. The band's next album, Coming Up, released in 1996, feels somewhat like Suede jumping back on board the movement it helped launch. At the very least, it finds the band returning to its glam-rock roots, and it's about the most day-glo rock record this side of Ziggy Stardust, with an intentionally garish Peter Saville sleeve to match. It vaulted the band back to massive commercial success in the UK, selling over a million and a half copies and spawning five top 10 singles.
Listening today, the album's biggest shortcoming is its lack of low-end. Producer Ed Buller chose to highlight the vocals, guitar, and synths over the band's formidable rhythm section, a decision that unfortunately leaves the album's roughly 50/50 mix of bouncy pop songs and melancholy ballads sounding a little thin. Coming Up is still a very good album, though. Anderson's lyrics are considerably more superficial and humorous than they had been in the past; this would eventually become a problem, but on uptempo, fluorescent rock songs like "Beautiful Ones" and "Trash" it works because these songs are just so damned catchy. And there is a lot of depth in the ballads. "By the Sea", actually written by Anderson during the Butler years, is simply beautiful and heartbreaking, while "Saturday Night" works perfectly as a long exhalation at the end of the album's long and disorienting party.
The album is reissued with all of its contemporary B-sides, minus the Neil Codling demo "Digging a Hole", which is omitted without explanation. This is very important, because there's a whole second album on disc two that's easily as good as Coming Up itself. The epic slash of "Every Monday Morning Comes", the relentless dub stomp of "WSD", the grinding descent into debauchery of "Europe Is Our Playground", the exhilarating pop rush of "Sound of the Streets" and Anderson's baritone-voiced lead on the scuzzy, Dog Man Star-ish rock song "Have You Ever Been This Low?" are all essential to understanding just how versatile this band was at this point in its career, and that's just a sampling of the 19 B-sides included on this set. This is an important theme of this reissue campaign, and one that will become even more important later.
The huge success of Coming Up left Suede in a position to do basically anything they wanted with their next album, but it took three years for the band to put together the follow-up. Codling was at times bed-ridden with chronic fatigue syndrome after the grueling 18-month world tour in support of Coming Up, and Anderson had fallen deeper into drug addiction, especially crack. Bassist Mat Osman, who along with Simon Gilbert has always been a source of stability and reason for the band, recalls Anderson's drug buddies hanging around a lot during the sessions and generally ruining the atmosphere. The UK music press interpreted the long wait between albums as a sign that things were going wrong and that the next LP might be another Dog Man Star. When Head Music finally came out in 1999, anticipation was so high in Britain that Virgin Megastores all over the country changed their name to Head Music for a day on the release date.
The album wasn't another Dog Man Star, but it was considerably darker and thornier than Coming Up. The band worked with producer Steve Osbourne to get a much heavier, more groove-oriented sound, and Codling's synths moved to the center of the sound. Head Music is neon to Coming Up's day-glo, and it's aged well sonically-- it is easily the band's most underappreciated album. Part of the reason for that is Anderson's lyrics, which on certain songs were simply terrible. "Savoir Faire"'s notorious opening couplet, "She live in a house/ She stupid as a mouse," is the worst offender, but the slide toward superficiality that began on Coming Up accelerated here, with Anderson sounding more like a bored observer than participant in the nightlife he sings about.
Most of it sounds splendid, though. "She's in Fashion" is a simply effervescent and weightless pop song; the mysterious orchestral swirl of "Indian Strings" is captivating; "Hi-Fi" has a chunky electro bounce that still sounds modern; and the slinking pop noir of "Asbestos" easily forgives the sometimes clunky lyrics. The band's attempts at stomping, punky rock on "Can't Get Enough" and "Elephant Man" might have been better replaced by breezy fluid B-sides "Leaving" and "Let Go", though, and Anderson's solo acoustic stab at political commentary on "Crack in the Union Jack" is expendable. Perhaps reflecting the band's unsettled state at the time, the period B-sides overall aren't the world-beaters of the past, and they're spread across different producers (here again, a Codling-sung B-side, "Weight of the World", has been left off).
Suede's final album, A New Morning, is almost an afterthought in the context of the band's whole career. In his liner notes, Anderson wonders whether it even should have been made and imagines a much different tracklist from what actually went on the album. The disc of B-sides here is very important, because it's easily better than the proper LP-- it's the reason I'm rating this reissue higher than I did the album on its original release. The band was coming apart as it made the record. Codling had left due to his illness, though he still contributed some songwriting; he was replaced by Alex Lee, the former keyboardist for good-but-forgotten Britpoppers Strangelove. For his part, Anderson had kicked drugs and isolated himself to write songs.
The record that came of all this is Suede's sunniest and most organic, but also its least substantial. On "Lonely Girls", Anderson outright repeats himself-- the song is a list of girls, coupled briefly with something that each of them does, which makes it a virtual re-write of the old B-side "Young Men". His voice was also worn by years of abuse, and he sounded a little ragged singing the otherwise buoyant hooks of "Obsessions" and "Positivity", though it's hard to begrudge him the brighter outlook he displays on those songs. Listening to all the music here, though, it's easy to hear how, by bringing songs such as the stately ballad "Simon", the strangely haunting acoustic singalong "Campfire Song", and the unusual, slightly psychedelic "Instant Sunshine" out of B-side exile, they could have pieced together a better album from these sessions. Still, A New Morning is not a bad record, and it sent the band out on a hopeful note that was strikingly at odds with much of what had preceded it.
The five-piece Anderson/Codling/Gilbert/Oakes/Osman version of Suede has reunited and is touring, and a few years ago Anderson and Butler reconciled and made an album together as the Tears. Anderson has a budding solo career but has left the door open to a possible Suede album sometime in the future. If it never happens, so be it-- the band's legacy is already sealed. These three albums, and Coming Up in particular, show a band that picked itself up remained creative and worthy in the wake of what could have been a fatal loss. These releases give us that whole run in all its messy imperfection. | 2011-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 24, 2011 | 7.9 | 6173df83-04e7-46f8-8aef-99a10ff436b5 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Brooklyn drill stars show they’re the best the scene has to offer on a debut mixtape with some distracting extras. | The Brooklyn drill stars show they’re the best the scene has to offer on a debut mixtape with some distracting extras. | 41: 41 World: Not the Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/41-41-world-not-the-album/ | 41 World: Not the Album | In early 2022, the Brownsville trio 41—rappers Kyle Richh, Jenn Carter, and TaTa, all just a couple years removed from high school—relaunched a Brooklyn drill scene that had been decimated by jail and death. It’s hard to point to one specific breakout moment, but it’s probably their first On the Radar cypher from May 2022, which had a volcanic, anything-could-happen energy not far off from old DJ Clue radio freestyles. No surprise that it’s the most watched episode of the series, beating out viral sessions by the likes of Ice Spice and Drake.
Their profile rose in the fall after they released “Notti Bop,” a low, attention-seeking song and dance mocking the death of Harlem rapper Notti Osama, the 14-year-old younger brother of DD Osama. As if it never happened, they then made a sharp pivot to party anthems, infusing the no-holds barred spirit of drill with the breakneck rhythms of Jersey club. Others in New York had tried to do this, but none leaned as far as 41, and new doors opened up to them: They’ve started to play local shows (a rarity for drill stars, given the intensity of police surveillance), and broken through to gatekeepers like Funk Flex and Angie Martinez at a time when corporatized NYC radio has kept its distance from the subgenre.
Now they’ve got their first project, 41 World: Not the Album. (For some reason, they decided not to just call it 41 World: The Mixtape). It’s a formal introduction to the crew, complete with all the expected extras—solo tracks, singing, a major name remix of their biggest hit—none of which are necessary, because they sound the best when it’s just the three of them going at full speed. Like on “Run That!,” which gives M.O.P.’s buckwild classic “Ante Up” the club treatment with throbbing drums and gun clicks. It’s a real headbanger: Jenn delivers the hook with the intensity of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, TaTa chants “Go get that nigga” like he’s in a football huddle, and KR screams “Brownsville, we got the motion” like he’s about to combust into flames. Another highlight is “Stomp Stomp,” the trio’s drill spin on “Crank That.” Yeah, I know. Get your eyerolls out of the way now. But from KR’s rowdy opening bars (“In the party I’m not havin’ fun/Like, thinkin’ ’bout usin’ my gun”) they breathe new life into what could have easily been nothing but nostalgia bait.
At times, they take the well-traveled route of drill stars trying to shed the “drill” label by breaking out the melodies and just throwing some AutoTune on their voice. I understand why—opportunities for drill rappers are slim—but they have been doing just fine. It wouldn’t be that much of a problem if the singing was any good, though, which it’s not. Like on Jenn Carter’s lovey-dovey solo track “Problems,” the verses are OK, but the sung hook is brutal—it belongs on a bad J.I the Prince of NY album. TaTa’s swings are similarly a tough listen; whatever XXX or Juice WRLD inspiration he’s absorbed on “Too Far Gone” doesn’t cut it. Actually, of the three solo songs, Kyle Richh’s “Goodbye” is the only noteworthy one, a dreamy therapy session that adds some depth without making him seem like an entirely different rapper.
But there’s nothing on 41 World comparable to lead single “Bent,” one of the best New York rap songs of the year. Co-produced by L.A. journeyman Synthetic and MCVertt, one of the architects of the club rap revival in Newark, it has the contagious, house party-ready bounce and homegrown soul missing from so many trend-chasing club and drill fusions. Throughout the nearly three-minute track, 41 are connected at the hip, and the energy never lets up. And, of course, at the end of the tape there’s a remix with Sexyy Red tacked on that I’ll probably never listen to again willingly. It gets in the way of the best thing Brooklyn drill has to offer right now: Kyle Richh, Jenn Carter, and TaTa just hot potatoing the mic around. | 2023-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | RiteOrWrongKVH Entertainment / Republic | November 30, 2023 | 6.5 | 617f8430-a00e-4be1-b010-590a678ac32b | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On their second album as a duo, Madlib and Freddie Gibbs pull themselves deeper into one another’s worlds. | On their second album as a duo, Madlib and Freddie Gibbs pull themselves deeper into one another’s worlds. | Freddie Gibbs / Madlib: Bandana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freddie-gibbs-and-madlib-bandana/ | Bandana | On paper, Freddie Gibbs, a straight-shooting street rapper, and Madlib, an eccentric tinkerer, are as mouth-watering a combo as licorice and pickle juice. But their collaborative 2014 album Piñata succeeded because the two are equally uncompromising: Madlib tailors beats to his eclectic ears alone, while Gibbs insists that he can rap over anything. Kindred spirits, the pair bonded through mutual gumption.
On follow-up Bandana, the bond deepens. Madlib’s beats remain off-kilter, and Gibbs remains gangster, but there’s a looser feel to this record, a spirit of intuition and intimacy. Their overall recording process didn’t change much: Madlib sent beats and Gibbs rapped over them as is—samples, pauses, breaks, and all. This time, though, they made the effort to meet in the studio and review different mixes and edits, to calibrate. The result is a keener sense of each other’s presence. Moving in lockstep, Gibbs and Madlib pull themselves deeper into one another’s worlds, forging a new one in the process.
On Piñata, the duo bridged Gibbs’ street sense and Madlib’s throwback flair by embracing the sounds and attitudes of blaxploitation. Smoky soul drifted out of every crevice, drugs flooded the streets, and middle fingers never came down. The general vibe was defiant, gritty, and nostalgic, fitting the back-to-basics spirit of a proud lyricist linking with an inveterate crate-digger. Bandana is palpably more unhinged, less rooted in a particular time or style or mood.
The through line is black freedom. Across the record Gibbs mentions various black figures and tragedies, from the transatlantic slave trade (“Flat Tummy Tea”) to Baltimore drug kingpin Melvin Williams (“Education”) to basketball star Allen Iverson (“Practice”) to the death by police bombing of mass shooter Micah Johnson (“Soul Right”) to Tupac’s assault on the Hughes Brothers (“Massage Seats”), weaving a grand, ambiguous tapestry. Gibbs has been talking black power in various forms since his early mixtapes, but here he’s less certain about what it looks like, who embodies it, how to secure it. As he takes a fuller view of his life and the fates of his idols, he grows more cautious. “I can’t move the same/I gotta readjust how I maneuver,” he insists on “Gat Damn.”
He’s kept on his toes by Madlib’s strikingly robust production, which is maximal compared to his revered lo-fi sound. “Half Manne Half Cocaine” begins with ticking hi-hats and bass kicks topped by twinkly bells, then spazzes into a torrent of cymbals and sampled shouts—trap by way of EPMD. The scuzzy riff on “Flat Tummy Tea” is stretched, distorted, and splashed with atonal effects that evaporate into a breakbeat. Madlib has always been an unsparing producer, but this is one of the few times he’s allowed himself to be baroque.
Gibbs’ rapping is just as fitful. Jerky yet nimble, he regularly drops in and out of cadence, throttling and braking his flows to accent key images. On “Situations,” he mentions surviving a shooting that claimed his cousin, sprinting through the memory like he’s felt a sudden jolt of pain. “Cousin took two to the brain/Bullets missed me it’s a blessing/I could see the day like it was yesterday I’ll never forget it,” he says, cramming the last line into one bar. On “Gat Damn,” he recalls fasting in an Austrian prison that didn’t provide Muslim-friendly meals. “Say my prayers, Alhamduillah/No bacon, ham, bacon, ham/And cold salami/That’s all they serving,” he sings, evoking the strain of the experience by spacing out his words. Gibbs boasts often of his versatility, but here his movement is dictated by purpose rather than reflex.
A current of self-discovery bubbles beneath all this motion. Madlib emerges as less subdued, more emboldened to challenge his collaborator (and the listener) rather than shroud his ideas in fog. His catalog is full of gems, but not since Georgia Anne Muldrow’s Seeds, and Madvillainy before that, has the Beat Konducta felt like, well, a conductor, actively dictating the path the music takes. You can feel Gibbs’ ideas being guided by the dreamy loops on “Crime Pays” and the humid sway of “Cataracts.”
The album’s few misfires occur when guests misread the room. Continuing his one-man nostalgia show, Anderson .Paak’s bloodless crooning on “Giannis” is pure pastiche. “Power, love, and loyalty,” he reads from a movie poster. Pusha T and Killer Mike’s appearances on “Palmolive” are stiff compared to Gibbs’ constant action. They treat the song’s beautiful main loop like a fossil in a museum, admiring it from afar. Black Thought and Yasiin Bey are the only ones who seem to share Gibbs’ hunger here.
Overcoming the constraints on black freedom was always the underlying mission of Madlib’s beloved jazz and soul artists, as well as Gibbs’ prized black rebels. For Bandana, the pair taps into that heritage and allow themselves to be shaped by its highs and lows, its heroes and villains. Finding themselves within that slipstream of black thought and life, they plot their course on their terms. Bandana is tradition and transgression: one rapper, one producer, no limitations. | 2019-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Keep Cool / RCA / Madlib Invazion / ESGN | June 29, 2019 | 8.1 | 61815300-c0f8-4eb6-8ebd-2e0277402b72 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
One of the most underappreciated bands in American rock’n’roll returns after 14 years, still playing as raw, fast, and loud as ever. | One of the most underappreciated bands in American rock’n’roll returns after 14 years, still playing as raw, fast, and loud as ever. | Zeke: Hellbender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zeke-hellbender/ | Hellbender | Seattle’s Zeke have long operated on what you could call the Motörhead Principle: They only play raw, fast, and loud. Subtlety is something they steamrolled over a long time ago, and far from limiting them, it’s made them one of America’s great underappreciated rock acts. While they tore through the ’90s in a way that paralleled brash punk’n’rollers like the Dwarves and Turbonegro, Zeke have always relied less than those acts on lyrical shock value, putting all their energy instead into sounding as nasty and speedy as possible. Hellbender is their first album in 14 years, and it fits right into their unabashedly rude catalog alongside 1994’s Super Sound Racing and 1998’s Kicked in the Teeth.
Most of Zeke’s songs follow a simple formula: Blind Marky Felchtone, the group’s sole consistent member, scrapes throat and strings as he’s been doing for over two decades, making rock swing into a glass-spiked blur. It’s usually all over in about a minute or so. Sometimes, there will be a Kiss-via-Skynyrd lick thrown in, squealing in fast and exiting even sooner. Taken as a single 20-minute chunk, Hellbender feels like mainlining adrenaline. It doesn’t have a proper introduction or conclusion; songs barrel in and out, and you’re left to process what happened afterwards. Were 20-minute sets to become mandatory, Zeke wouldn’t just be compliant, they would thrive.
Their last full-length album, Til The Living End, was brusque compared to a lot of punk and metal that came out in 2004, yet it featured a couple songs that were slightly more laid-back, like the single “Dolphenwulf.” Hellbender does not have any such detours. With original bassist Kurt Colfelt back in the fold for his first appearance since 1996’s Flat Tracker, it’s a full commitment to their slash-and-burn ’90s tactics, all lightning-fast, bare-bones riffs and sour defiance.
The elemental rock fury of Hellbender often feels like it comes from a time before punk. Motörhead, after all, started off many shows saying “We’re Motörhead, and we play rock’n’roll,” resisting the urge to put themselves squarely in either the punk or metal camps. Zeke play with a similar philosophy, and as far as philosophies go, bashing and bashing again and again works a lot better than misguided ambition. In the same sense, Hellbender recalls the Stooges in their prime, stoking and embracing chaos on the rawest level. This is a joyous album that needs no affirmation other than its own speed.
The cynical way to look at Hellbender is that Zeke are stuck doing the same style after a 14-year break, that they’re not tapped into what’s going on right now. But the truth is, there’s always room to rub the basics down to their most exposed. Zeke are the dive bar that’s survived onslaughts of gentrification, knowing that the charm of lawless riffing and broken bottles never fades. | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Relapse | April 7, 2018 | 7.7 | 61870f3a-1f10-4e2e-963b-90d46d5adf11 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Featuring instrumental renditions of many of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits, this collection of solo piano performances feels disappointingly bare and anonymous. | Featuring instrumental renditions of many of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits, this collection of solo piano performances feels disappointingly bare and anonymous. | Brian Wilson: At My Piano | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-wilson-at-my-piano/ | At My Piano | Brian Wilson has never been averse to revisiting the past. He has written two autobiographies and been the subject of two documentaries, plus a major motion picture. But there’s a twist on the 79-year-old songwriter’s latest album, At My Piano: It consists of nothing but instrumental renditions of the best-known tunes from his songbook. Plenty of Wilson’s peers have had fruitful strolls through their back pages, such as Randy Newman’s ongoing Songbook series, and the opportunity to hear Wilson without studio wizardry is intriguing. While candied vocal harmonies are an integral part of the original Beach Boys records, the compositions hold their own, stripped of vocals and lyrics. The instrumental approach is also a clever way to deemphasize Wilson’s diminished voice: the limited range and raspiness that have become evident in concert and such latter-day records as 2015’s No Pier Pressure.
Conception and execution, however, are two very different things. At My Piano is as simple as its title, containing nothing but Wilson alone at the keyboard, augmented only with the occasional piano overdub. Because so many Wilson projects are proudly ornate, the spare setting initially seems like a dramatic shift, as if the songs have been reduced to their base elements. But soon, it becomes evident that the stripped-down arrangements tend to be a bit too bare, leaving Wilson’s flaws exposed alongside his gifts.
Those compositional strengths are evident, as Wilson sticks to a songbook that’s endured for half a century. Apart from “Love and Mercy,” a 1988 solo track that’s become his unofficial anthem, At My Piano contains material written for and performed by the Beach Boys during the 1960s and early 1970s. Roughly half of the repertoire dates from 1966 and earlier, a period covering both sunny surf-rock hits and the sophisticated symphonic Pet Sounds, with the remainder of the record devoted to material Wilson composed in the aftermath of Smile, the album he abandoned in 1967. At My Piano contains a medley of Smile material, a showcase for how Wilson layers chords and countermelodies, a talent that reaches its pinnacle on “Surf’s Up,” whose loveliness shimmers in this relaxed, gentle setting.
Often, the mellow nature of At My Piano works against it. Wilson shows no desire to improvise or rearrange his warhorses. He plays with a lack of flair that accentuates the melody at the expense of texture or vibe: He literally is sitting at the piano playing familiar tunes. With the earliest songs, this approach amounts to little more than tinkling the melody as his left hand plonks out accompanying chords. There is a modicum of homespun charm, but the simplicity is also a bit stultifying.
More than anything, At My Piano resembles an old-fashioned easy listening record, the kind of music from the mid-20th century that sanded away the rough edges of pop or rock to make the melodies pretty and palatable for older audiences. Wilson grew up on these softer sounds, taking inspiration from the barbershop harmonies of the Four Freshmen, so an exercise like At My Piano isn’t quite unexpected—nor could it be called uncommercial, especially considering how Decca announced Richard Carpenter’s Piano Songbook, a nearly identical effort from the Carpenters songwriter, within a month of Wilson’s collection. What is unexpected is how Wilson sounds almost anonymous here. As he drifts through his greatest hits and personal favorites, he doesn’t invest his playing with much personality, so these smooth sounds are about as memorable as a piano twinkling away in the background of a department store.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Decca | November 30, 2021 | 5 | 61a85956-6ab8-497e-bd16-a1ea7863e7b2 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The New Jersey trio’s latest consists of five formless, comforting drones, recorded with a single microphone placed in the middle of their Hoboken practice space. | The New Jersey trio’s latest consists of five formless, comforting drones, recorded with a single microphone placed in the middle of their Hoboken practice space. | Yo La Tengo: We Have Amnesia Sometimes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-la-tengo-we-have-amnesia-sometimes/ | We Have Amnesia Sometimes | “We didn’t really set out to make a soothing, relaxing album for sleep time.” That’s Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew reflecting on the process behind their 2018 album There’s a Riot Going On. Intentional or not, it was probably the band’s most consistently tranquil LP in 15 years— even its charged-up song sounded like it was generating electricity for fairy lights. The New Jersey trio often cope with life’s harder moments by turning down and turning inward—it’s a huge part of what makes them so meaningful to so many. McNew might have also been a bit frazzled from having to learn a new software interface to engineer the layered, loop-dense album; remembering what the multi-track to “Above the Sound” looked like, he said, was enough to make him dizzy.
He won’t have that problem when he thinks back on We Have Amnesia Sometimes, which was recorded with a single microphone placed in the middle of the band’s Hoboken practice space. As Ira Kaplan explains, in late April, “with the outside world weighing on everybody,” the band figured out how to safely convene and resume “playing formlessly.” This is how many of their songs have begun over the years, but here, they’ve released the raw material. It’s new territory for them: The key difference between these five gentle drones and the band’s abundant film-scoring or ambient-leaning work, technically speaking, is that those pieces almost always had some lead melody or some syncopated rhythm, however subtle. Here, there are hints of the former on the third and fourth tracks, and the fourth does have the latter, but otherwise, nobody steps out in front or distinguishes themselves clearly.
And that is, generally speaking, the beautiful part of this project. What better time to submit to an exercise in committee and unity than now, when we are quite literally as distanced as ever? On We Have Amnesia Sometimes, Kaplan, McNew, and Georgia Hubley blend into each other and seem to form one big animal. On “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” the three wade into a shimmering pond of synths and ponder their reflections. On “Georgia thinks it's probably okay (Tuesday),” a storm of feedback rolls in, and by the end there’s a distant pulse, like a washing machine. “Ira searches for the slide, sort of (Friday)” meditates around what sounds like the same organ from “Sudden Organ,” and the light ticking of some down-strumming that the mic picks up becomes its percussion track.
To complement the album’s release, the band performed two ticketed live-stream sets from their practice space, with proceeds going to the Brennan Center for Justice. For a little over half an hour each, they let themselves be filmed while immersed in the process, zoned in on their instruments, pedals, amps, and most of all each other. At one point early in the first set, Hubley leans over in her chair to adjust something, guitar in hand, and on the way up accidentally taps the underside of the crash cymbal next to her with the guitar head. She cracks a smile at the surprise percussion, but it sort of works, so she waits a moment and does it again. It’s indicative of the incredible level of trust and telepathy in that room, which is plenty audible on We Have Amnesia Sometimes. However, the album doesn’t have enough blemishes, stumbles, or flourishes like this to give it extra excitement and curiosity. The risk level stays relatively comfortable; the payoff never really shoots up.
Now in their 29th year with this lineup, ever since McNew stopped a revolving door of some 16 bassists before him, Yo La Tengo are still coming up with new ways to connect with themselves and with their listeners. They picked an appropriate moment for one of their most intimate ideas yet. There is something undeniably comforting, if low-stakes, about hearing them play around with noise, up-close, in the middle of a quarantine-induced drought of human interaction.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | July 29, 2020 | 6.2 | 61a8d368-9cbe-4159-b691-cbe0ae9f331c | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The Brooklyn synth-pop trio expands its signature sound on its surprisingly idiosyncratic third album. | The Brooklyn synth-pop trio expands its signature sound on its surprisingly idiosyncratic third album. | Nation of Language: Strange Disciple | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nation-of-language-strange-disciple/ | Strange Disciple | Nation of Language made their first two albums in the confines of the pandemic, and their lean and understated synth-pop was hewn from varying degrees of convenience. Keyboardist Aidan Noell, who is married to vocalist Ian Devaney, learned to play MicroKORG and Moog Sub Phatty Analog synths to help realize their vision. At their wedding, Devaney and Noell skipped a traditional gift registry and instead fundraised for their 2020 debut Introduction, Presence. Strange Disciple, their first project freed from the confines of lockdown and in the tour van, is still another achievement in economy, a project that looks to the sound of new wave as a springboard, not a textbook, and lets small touches shine.
With LCD Soundsystem’s Nick Millhiser producing the album, the group incorporates new sounds into their typically minimalist compositions. More live drums and more live guitar mean these songs fill larger spaces. The raw material doesn’t hurt either: Noell’s increasingly intuitive synth lines provide a handy pathway toward a rousing indie-rock sound that harkens back to Devaney’s origins in 2010s punk outfit the Static Jacks. (He first landed on synth-pop after a pivotal encounter with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s 1979 single “Electricity.”) Bassist Alex MacKay’s melodic dexterity also tightens the screws on a signature sound beyond their formative influences.
Still, there’s no listening to Nation of Language without hearing the 1980s: icy lighting, rigid hip movements, starched collars. And yet pure nostalgia doesn’t fuel the project. Nation of Language are as quick to evoke millennial forebears like the Postal Service or Bloc Party as icons like the Smiths and Human League, and Strange Disciple’s songs are mostly happening right now, awash in lust or confusion. The band communicates these messy emotions with small idiosyncrasies that go a long way toward evolving their sound: See the soft synth collapses at the end of “Stumbling Still” and “A New Goodbye,” or the clanging chimes of “Sightseer.”
Across the album, Devaney sings in a downcast timbre that recalls Majical Cloudz’s Devon Welsh squared at festivals instead of DIY venues. He sounds most gripping when he uses it to curl his way around unfussy statements, as in opener “Weak in Your Light.” When he glides into his upper register on the line “I’m in love,” he hits the same sweet spot as in the group’s career-best songs: moments when he soars on one hypnotic syllable, his voice becoming indistinguishable from the synths around it. The best songs on Strange Disciple transform into more than the sum of their parts. When the synths and live instrumentation and hooks all coalesce, as on standout “Spare Me the Decision,” it is clear that Millhiser is the group’s secret weapon. He accompanies them with cascading layers of analog synths that still highlight the staples of their identity: the influences, the chemistry, the songcraft. By now, Nation of Language are well-versed in the ways of “less is more.” On Strange Disciple, they’re also learning what it means to get bigger and better. | 2023-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | PIAS | September 28, 2023 | 7.3 | 61aa229f-d880-42a3-a13c-68c2e1d82e0c | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
On her first major solo release in eight years, Jesy Fortino buries her voice—once her most recognized instrument—in dark, ambient chambers of synths. | On her first major solo release in eight years, Jesy Fortino buries her voice—once her most recognized instrument—in dark, ambient chambers of synths. | Tiny Vipers: Laughter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23169-tiny-vipers-laughter/ | Laughter | Laughter is a mysterious record—both a comeback for Tiny Vipers’ Jesy Fortino and a disappearing act. It marks her first major solo release since 2009’s Life on Earth, but it bears few familiar traits. On first listen, its six sprawling compositions seem to be built entirely of atmosphere: Only one piece prominently features vocals, and few approach anything that could reasonably be considered a melody. But in some ways, the album is a natural progression from its predecessor. While Life on Earth was folk music in theory—featuring little more than Fortino’s acoustic guitar and vocals—its most memorable moments were more elusive: the way her voice breaks during the coda of “Dreamer,” or the bluesy pauses between guitar licks in the ten-minute title track. Fortino’s music has always unfolded with a feeling of spontaneity; her performances felt in-the-moment, her songs like living, growing things.
In the time since Life on Earth, Fortino has slowly shifted her interests. She studied at the University of Washington to become a civil engineer, leaving her little time to focus on music. The work she did release over the last five years has reflected a streamlining of her process. In 2012, she collaborated with Grouper’s Liz Harris to form Mirrorring. Their debut record, Foreign Body, closed the gap between Fortino’s acoustic songs and the electronic work to come. “In the end, I was fighting a war,” she sang during one of its highlights, “I’d say it out loud, but my words were fighting me.” She discarded words entirely on 2015’s Ambience 3, a limited edition release that harkened back to her pre-Hands Across the Void material.
On Laughter, Fortino strips back her music even further, and it feels like a breakthrough. In “K.I.S.S.,” she sings about someone whose naivety gets broken by a cruel, careless universe. Her words, however, are impossible to discern without a lyric sheet. Fortino’s voice—once the core of her work, conveying loss and desperation with the subtlest inflections—is buried under a warped, thunderous synth. As she sings, it sounds almost like an accident, like a scratch vocal that was meant to be removed—a private incantation running parallel to the music. That raw feeling spans the record, depleting it of the lushness usually associated with ambient music. Like Fortino’s more traditional compositions, these songs demand your attention and take you to haunted, uneasy places.
Fortino plays synth with equal parts delicacy and harshness. Her guitar work was always an intimate thing: centered on as few notes as possible, occasionally striking the lower strings to create a drone beneath her fingerpicking. Here, she aims for less soothing textures. In “Living on a Curve,” a simple, low-end motif repeats as retro keyboards soar around it, scraping against each other in a strange kind of harmony. The album’s most propulsive composition is “The Summing of Moments,” a burbling mantra that comes closest to locking into a groove. But just as she begins to find stability, the music fades away, leaving just the low, lonely hum of a synth.
Laughter is built out of these dramatic changes. There’s an unsettling shift around the five-minute mark of “Crossing the River of Yourself,” as a dissonant minor chord swerves into the mix and snuffs out the gentle chimes that preceded it. It’s a moment that feels like nerves setting in, ushering in a darkness that seems inescapable, with no lantern to guide you out. In an interview about Laughter, Fortino discussed the transitional period that inspired the record: a time that found her doubting her abilities and growing unsure of her future. “Laughter came out of this awkward place of losing myself,” she explains. The record reflects that feeling, as she searches for preverbal wisdom with music that feels overwhelming, unpredictable, and immersive. | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ba Da Bing | May 6, 2017 | 7.7 | 61ab1426-2987-4ef2-a723-103fbbf5ac3b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The New York rapper Junglepussy works within a lineage of comedic rappers, from Biz Markie to Ghostface Killah to Cam'ron and Action Bronson, rappers who elevate the muck and mundanity of life with zany non-sequiturs, ad libs, and references. On P**regnant With Success, Junglepussy talks shit and pulls apart the patriarchy as she experiences it. | The New York rapper Junglepussy works within a lineage of comedic rappers, from Biz Markie to Ghostface Killah to Cam'ron and Action Bronson, rappers who elevate the muck and mundanity of life with zany non-sequiturs, ad libs, and references. On P**regnant With Success, Junglepussy talks shit and pulls apart the patriarchy as she experiences it. | Junglepussy: Pregnant With Success | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21293-pregnant-with-success/ | Pregnant With Success | Junglepussy is working within a lineage of comedic rappers, from Biz Markie to Ghostface Killah to Cam'ron and Action Bronson, rappers who elevate the muck and mundanity of life with zany non-sequiturs, ad libs, and references. In terms of sharp-witted artists who led to the increasingly rare seismic belly laughs on the subway this year, she's up there with novelist Paul Beatty, whose 2015 book The Sellout sent up American politics and culture in a way that proves good satire can change your truth. Junglepussy's Pregnant With Success is another reminder of how humor can bring the audience closer and form an emotional connection. It's as bright as Beatty's novel is dark, but they're both charmingly demented, sharp-witted, and necessary social critiques. They remind me how humor can transform literature and music, forms that often aren't as empirically funny as film and television, bringing the audience closer and forming an emotional connection.
She has a rare confidence that's rooted in playfulness: "This pussy don't pop for you," she gloats on "Pop For You", a song with watery snares and a glitchy melody. The hook feels like she's playing a character, a parody of contemporary male rappers, but it's more of a roast that has its roots on the surreal experience of being a woman in 2015. It also riffs on the language of the oppressor, so to speak. Junglepussy spits: "You look up to these dudes to tell you who to screw/ What she'll look like if she your type/ Compliment her if she's light/ If she's black don't get her hype." The joke comes at the end, when she compares a guy who takes her to the zoo versus one who buys her leopard print lingerie: "I got niggas taking me to see live animals and you're pulling up with animal prints?"
It's her perspective as a black woman, a regular woman, from New York City that makes this album transgressive. She raps as much about her voracious appetite as she does about fashion and sex. She references Money and Violence and haute Japanese eatery Nobu over a series of glossy melodies and booming bass courtesy of producer Shy Guy. She swiftly cycles through cadences that approximate the balloon-lunged bellowing of Ludacris and a spiky Da Brat flow. On "Country Boy", a song that feels like a nod to her Trinidadian and Jamaican roots, she channels Lady Saw's squawk and the grim commands of Buju Banton before issuing a whimsical sign-off: "I be dutty winin' down the Yellow Brick Road!" The beat on "Get to Steppin'" is the album's most aggressive: a synthetic Orientalist synth loop fights with battering bass and Junglepussy is in your face, exhorting you to step off whilst bigging herself up ("I was fuckin' with me when you wasn't"). It ends with a hilarious outro, a dorky jingle about online shopping and a rush of true swagger: "When your Fendi boots come in the mail, time to front on everyone in here."
But mostly Junglepussy is pure idiosyncratic id; she is unapologetically crass ("If your face ain't a sitting place, fuck up out my face") and freewheeling. Pregnant With Success*'* appeal lies largely in hearing Junglepussy talk shit like one of the girls, with the aim of pulling apart the patriarchy as she experiences it. She uses humor, the voice curling with every joke, to replicate the situations and street corners of her own life. And when you're listening and laughing out loud on the subway, that's Junglepussy's smart truth-telling finding its way into yours. | 2015-12-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 2, 2015 | 7.5 | 61ab6ec3-d036-4940-acec-a66ec87bcc41 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Much like a recent move by his friend and collaborator Nobunny, Seth Bogart's Hunx and his Punx make a sudden turn for a much more pointedly aggro sound with Street Punk. The versatile record also features Shannon and the Clams' Shannon Shaw. | Much like a recent move by his friend and collaborator Nobunny, Seth Bogart's Hunx and his Punx make a sudden turn for a much more pointedly aggro sound with Street Punk. The versatile record also features Shannon and the Clams' Shannon Shaw. | Hunx and His Punx: Street Punk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18286-hunx-and-his-punx-street-punk/ | Street Punk | To date, one of Seth Bogart's great defining works is the 2010 Hunx and His Punx compilation Gay Singles. With its cover emblazoned with the visage of his greasy crotch sheathed in a zebra-print Speedo, the comp featured songs that were heavily indebted to girl groups. Bogart, aka Hunx, sang about wanting to kiss somebody who just ate Del Taco on the mouth, hangin' on the telephone, and wanting to get inside Rocky's pants. On some of those tracks, Hunx had songwriting assistance from Justin Champlin, the jovial masked madman Nobunny. To say the least, Champlin and Bogart's early works were a natural aesthetic match, and that connection carries over to Bogart's newest Hunx album, Street Punk.
Last year, Nobunny continued his streak of power pop gems with "La La La La Love You", but shortly after that single came out, he made a sudden turn for a much more pointedly aggro sound. And now, it seems that Seth Bogart has made a similar transition. After releasing last year's ballad-lined solo effort Hairdresser Blues and the girl group joy of Too Young to Be in Love, Bogart has reminded us why he calls them His Punx. Street Punk exhibits the same kind of shrugged off sneering, swearing, and intimidation as Nobunny's latest punk onslaught. Take "Everyone's a Pussy (Fuck You Dude)"-- a song that's exactly 30 seconds long-- a hard-hitting cut that has an all-intimidation bass riff on the low end and features exactly six angrily screamed words. That song is proof enough that Hunx and Nobunny are still on similar wavelengths, except now, the two men owe more to G.G. Allin than Phil Spector.
But while the Punx may have shifted into a tougher mentality, these tracks can still be genuinely funny. "Bad Skin" escalates things pretty quickly by threatening to "kill you with a knife". Why? Because they have bad skin. Perhaps the most sly track of the bunch is "You Think You're Tough", where the narrator makes a gradual transition from irrational anger ("I think you're gross") to the moment when they realize their disdain may actually be affection ("Oh no, what have I become? Am I in love?"). And like a lot of Hunx's romantic material, it's got a sweet sentiment, one not unlike Emma (Cher) arguing with Mr. Knightley (Paul Rudd) until she suddenly realizes her true feelings.
"You Think You're Tough" is a standout that also showcases the range of Street Punk, a track sung by Shannon Shaw of another great Oakland garage pop outfit Shannon and the Clams. On Too Young to Be in Love, Shannon sang back-up, and it's an extremely smart call to put her voice up front a few times. On Shannon and the Clams' LPs Dreams in the Rat House and Sleep Talk, Shaw and Cody Blanchard created a bubblegummy garage sound with a whole mess of bite. This album similarly finds strength in two voices, though Street Punk jumps from Bogart's nasal to Shaw's soulful rasp and back again. It's exactly what this album needs. With 12 short and fast punk tracks, it's nice to hear sonic shifts not only in tone and tempo, but also in its variety of voices.
Though closing track "It's Not Easy" goes on for nearly four minutes, the rest of Street Punk is appropriately brief. The whole album is just under 20 minutes long, which works well for this kind of thing. Bogart's lyrics, sense of humor, and ear for melody sound great in a bite-sized format. "Don't Call Me Fabulous", for example, is 25 seconds of enraged screams, and that's exactly the right amount of time for a track that's this loudly angry. Hunx's knack for efficient and fun brevity is a double-edged sword in its way, as the strength of Gay Singles could easily paint him as more of a singles guy than an artist who makes great full albums. Fortunately, Hunx's punk rock versatility has made Street Punk his most through-and-through entertaining full-length to date. | 2013-07-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-07-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | July 24, 2013 | 7.4 | 61bacfb0-ee8b-4104-a62e-2416ab6a342b | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Still arguably struggling to escape the weight of "Young Folks" and Writer's Block, the affable Swedes return to the sound of their breakthrough LP. | Still arguably struggling to escape the weight of "Young Folks" and Writer's Block, the affable Swedes return to the sound of their breakthrough LP. | Peter Bjorn and John: Gimme Some | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15251-gimme-some/ | Gimme Some | Some bands struggle their entire careers to get out from under the shadow of one great single. In the popular imagination, that might be the case for Peter Bjorn and John-- three affable Swedish popsters doomed to be forever remembered for one damnably catchy whistle. But such a reading would be to forget that "Young Folks", with all its whistling and bongos and Victoria Bergsman verses, came surrounded by an album of other outstanding pop songs. "Young Folks" was the tip, but Writer's Block was an iceberg-- a much bigger, more difficult obstacle for follow-ups to navigate around.
Their next proper album, Living Thing (which came following a solo album from singer/guitarist Peter Morén and the instrumental effort Seaside Rock), attempted to skirt such expectations by dramatically shifting the band's sound and mood-- from the cheerful nostalgia and romantic struggles of Writer's Block to a darker, more embittered outlook; from spring thawing guitars and drums to a more intentionally spare and sharply frozen sound.
Gimme Some has been spun as a return to the band's sunnier, more winning sound, but it too often fails to reproduce Writer's Block's unexpected spark. The band seems to acknowledge as much on lead single "Second Chance". Over claps and cowbell, Peter Morén coos in his slightly mushy, softly accented voice, "You can't can't count on the second try/ The second try is such a comedown." It may be an apt sentiment, but the song feels intent on proving the point [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| via its own limpness. By far the most galling thing here, though, is is the cruise-ship conga-line leading "Dig a Little Deeper", with its sing-song "oh-oh!"s and the dull semantic argument of its chorus: "All art has been contemporary."
Elsewhere, the album is merely listless. Opener "Tomorrow Has to Wait" is a sort of PB&J-by-numbers lope better hidden in the back half of an album. "Eyes" has a pleasant, clappy shuffle, and a catchy, Spanish-inflected guitar line, trilling and pinched, that dissolves into a fuzzy solo for the song's final minute. These guys are capable musicians and studio heads, and mechanically speaking, these are fine pop songs-- well crafted, ably produced, everything in its right place-- but they don't particularly move you.
The album's better bits pop up on its second half, after some listeners' interest will have waned. "Breaker Breaker" briefly re-invigorates things with upbeat, ramshackle drums, a churning rhythm guitar, and a quick, rising melody on the chorus. "(Don't Let Them) Cool Off" begins as garage-rock pastiche but opens up into more delicate guitar picking without losing its momentum. "Down Like Me" is a fine, downbeat ballad, Morén's voice up in the mix so that you can just hear every gulp and breath before he launches into his self-pitying refrain. And Gimme Some's best song, far and away, is "Lies", a high-reaching and high-scoring number that more than anything here recalls what made PB&J so endearing in the first place. It's just nothing to whistle home about. | 2011-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | StarTime | March 25, 2011 | 6.2 | 61c1fdba-ddbb-4fc1-a91b-136b4c51b7e7 | Eric Grandy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-grandy/ | null |
FIDLAR's second record continues the hormonal, party vibes of their enjoyable debut, but seems to have bigger things in mind for itself. Most of the record revolves around frontman Zac Carper's road to sobriety, and the many inherent pitfalls and setbacks faced along the way. | FIDLAR's second record continues the hormonal, party vibes of their enjoyable debut, but seems to have bigger things in mind for itself. Most of the record revolves around frontman Zac Carper's road to sobriety, and the many inherent pitfalls and setbacks faced along the way. | FIDLAR: Too | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21063-fidlar-too/ | Too | For a band like FIDLAR, the idea of artistic growth seems kind of oxymoronic, or for anyone familiar with the L.A.-based punk dirtbags, maybe just plain moronic. On the jokily earnest, chillaxed last few strummed seconds of "Punks", the second track from their sophomore LP Too, frontman Zac Carper muses, "Relationships are fucking wack/ They make me want to smoke crack/ And girlfriend or boyfriend can suck my dick/ Masturbate, let's make it quick." It's a perfect encapsulation of FIDLAR's outlook (the band name is an acronym for Fuck It, Dog, Life's A Risk), one that they already cemented on their enjoyably party-hardy self-titled debut, a hormonal love letter to getting fucked up and fucking up. And while a title like Too might lead you to believe that FIDLAR are wisely committed to not fixing what isn't broke— there are more scuzzy guitars and songs about bad medicine, bad habits, and stupid decisions (all of which happen to be song titles)— it seems to have bigger things in mind for itself.
FIDLAR were initially met with the obvious-but-apt comparison to kindred West Coast spirits Wavves, and Too seems to greatly admire Nathan Williams' transition from disaffected skate rat to pop-punk Beach King. It's a crisper, almost radio-friendly effort that's feels slightly jarring in comparison to FIDLAR. Part of this shift can be chalked up to the fact that in the past two years, FIDLAR have made a concerted effort to clean up, as Carper has since kicked everything from heroin to booze after a band intervention. The result is a more levelheaded FIDLAR, an incarnation that likely won't scare away too many fans as it aims to convert new ones. Gone is the feral scrap and the forays into sunburnt surfabilly, replaced by a more MTVU-friendly approach that only feels "grown-up" in the sense that it's graduated from 40s in the high-school parking lot to Smirnoff in the frat house basement.
It's too bad Too doesn't boast more numbers like highlight "West Coast", a song about getting wasted on the road. But FIDLAR aim a little lower, offering dated-sounding blues stompers ("Punks"), Black Lips-lite junkie laments ("Overdose"), interminably bratty nose-thumbing ("Sober"), questionable arena rock ("Bad Habits") and a weird little detour into the British Invasion ("Why Generation", which is hopefully supposed to be taken as tongue-in-cheek). The hooks feel forced this time, a byproduct of their desire for a broader audience that dilute the essence of what made them appealing to begin with.
But it's undeniable that Too comes from a good place. Most of the record revolves around Carper's road to sobriety, and the many inherent pitfalls and setbacks faced along the way. "I figured out when I got sober that life just sucks when you get older," he sings on "Sober", and it's a brief but affecting peek inside the head of a guy on the other side of addiction and staring down his thirties. A song like "Leave Me Alone" carries more weight when you realize it's about Carper's intervention, but too often, the songs break down into digestible little nuggets of stoner wisdom. So while Too is at times brave, that doesn't necessarily make it compelling. | 2015-09-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | September 11, 2015 | 5.8 | 61c3745b-efa9-43a9-b0ff-52c844d82c7a | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Germs’ (GI), a touchstone of California punk. | 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 Germs’ (GI), a touchstone of California punk. | Germs: (GI) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/germs-gi/ | (GI) | Trying to get the straight story of Los Angeles punk band Germs is like trying to piece together the timeline of a debaucherous night out: The specifics are blurry, the headache is blinding, and everybody has a different take on what happened. One lucid fact pierces through the hangover: Germs were a mess of contradictions. Doomed frontman Darby Crash was a well-read savant and a mumbling cretin, crowds adored and abhorred them, and the music they made in four belligerent years reached decades beyond their downfall. By the time their sole studio album (GI) arrived in 1979, Germs had swaggered their way to local infamy, and Crash had crowned himself the genius king of Hollywood’s juvenile delinquents. He died by suicide a little more than a year later at 22. The first LP ever released by Slash Records, (GI) captured Germs in top form. It documents four hardworking iconoclasts who somehow translated their chaotic live sets into a classic record.
Before punk-rock brevity came into vogue, Germs opted for glam flamboyance: After forming in 1977, their working name was Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens. Crash (then known as Bobby Pyn) started the group with friend and classmate Pat Smear. Crash and Smear both attended IPS—an alternative education program within L.A.’s University High School that imparted principles of EST and Scientology. It was there that Crash first dabbled in amateur mind control. “[Darby] had this natural power,” Crash’s friend and schoolmate Paul Roessler recalled in the Germs oral history Lexicon Devil. “It was either that he was so much smarter than anybody else… or he had techniques that he learned from the books he read or from IPS. Or he just had magic.”
It was this “magic” that somehow had Germs on everyone’s lips before their first gig at the Orpheum in ’77. Their live debut, opening for the Weirdos, included very little music. “Germs were absolutely fucking terrible!” recalled Weirdos drummer Nickey Beat. “They came on stage, tuned up for 10 or 15 minutes, and then got through maybe one-third of their first song and stopped and started over again… [Darby] took the mic and stuck it in a jar of peanut butter… The Germs weren’t to be taken seriously after that night… for a while.”
What Germs lacked in serious prospects they made up for in absurdity. They taunted interviewers like bratty siblings, destroyed property, and got their first single, “Forming,” on the radio by calling KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer multiple times a day until he relented. The band’s fuck-it-all approach seemed both carefree and calculated: long before merch bundles and lengthy album rollouts, Germs had T-shirts, a logo, and a loyal mob of fans, known as Circle One, before they ever laid down a record. Circle One members, typically women, identified themselves by wearing the band’s blue circle insignia, or with grisly “Germs Burns,” which were administered by searing the inner wrist with a lit cigarette from tip to filter. Once healed, a tidy, circular scar formed. “I completely control a number of people’s lives,” Crash once said. “Look around for the little girls wearing CRASH-TRASH T-shirts.” By late ’77, Germs were headlining Brendan Mullen’s notorious nightclub the Masque; punks queued out the door to watch Crash smash beer bottles and bleed on stage.
Despite early lineup shuffles—their original drummer was future Go-Go Belinda Carlisle, who came down with mono and enlisted a friend to replace her before the band’s first gig—Germs’ circle wasn’t complete until percussionist Don Bolles joined Crash, guitarist Smear, and bassist Lorna Doom. Similarly, the boy born Jan Paul Beahm did not seal his fate until he rechristened himself Darby Crash. “Whereas Bobby Pyn seemed to me a much more innocent, goofy, carefree character,” Brendan Mullen wrote, “Darby Crash became much more demonic, complex, intense, intoxicated, as he gradually began to exude a much darker persona.”
Prior to (GI) (short for “Germs Incognito”), the group had released only a couple of singles. Pronounced the “world’s most volatile band” by writer Kickboy Face, and the “worst band ever” by themselves, it seemed unlikely that any label would sign them. But Slash Records founder Bob Biggs was up to the task. He presented a contract, enlisted Joan Jett to produce, and fronted the cash for Quad Tech studios. Biggs later described his role in (GI) as more “glorified babysitter” than label maven.
Something about their impending debut rearranged Germs’ molecular structure. Despite their prior shenanigans, Crash, Smear, Doom, and Bolles got their asses in gear. “My fondest memories of the Germs are right after the beginning and up to recording (GI)... which was a thrilling experience for me,” Doom said. The band rehearsed more than ever, putting in four hours a day, multiple times a week. Their work ethic in the studio was undisputed, although the same cannot be said for Jett, who was frequently passed out, according to many accounts (Crash even makes a crack about it in closing track “Shut Down”).
Jett wasn’t the group’s first choice of producer—Crash had his heart set on Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, but he was too expensive. Jett, who insists she only slept on the job one time, was chosen for her talent, proximity, and friendship with the band. Asleep or not, she managed to channel their focus. “Darby took it pretty seriously,” she said. “We didn’t have to do a lot of takes. He was certainly not out of control in the studio. He respected me. Did what I asked him to do… It was controlled nuttiness at that point.”
(GI) was yet another page in Germs’ tome of contradictions. Suddenly, the peanut butter-smeared, tantrum-prone little freaks had (nearly) sobered up and delivered one of the most influential records in punk history. Darby Crash’s progression from blathering imbecile to secret rock’n’roll poet shocked everyone. X’s John Doe was particularly surprised by Crash’s vernacular: “You didn’t know the words because it was all like ‘Warrrrrrrrwarrrwarr,’ when Darby’d sing them live,” he said. “So everyone was just astounded when they got that first Slash record and actually read the lyrics. They were great!”
(GI) is often considered the first-ever hardcore album. Bolles’ drumming style was fast and savage, doubling the BPMs of anything the Sex Pistols or Television had released. Meanwhile, Crash’s vocals were far removed from X’s harmonies and Joey Ramone’s chewed-up bubblegum. Crash didn’t sing: he growled. On (GI) centerpiece “Manimal,” he assumes the pelt of a rabid feline: “I came into this world like a puzzled panther/Waiting to be caged… I was never quite tamed,” he snarls. “Manimal” contains some of Crash’s most succinct and effective writing. It has none of the stilted, two-dollar words that sometimes appeared in Germs’ catalog (even Smear admitted that Crash’s lyrics could be “a bit pretentious”), and the song marries thematic and sonic elements better than most of their tracks. It is also one of many cuts on (GI) to hint at Crash’s impending death. “Evolution is a process/Too slow to save my soul,” he sneers, before letting out a pained roar like a wildcat being dragged off by poachers.
Like many bands, Germs’ ingenuity grew from limitations. When they formed, no one could really play an instrument, save for Smear, who dabbled in guitar throughout high school. As they performed and rehearsed, they realized they could play better and faster. Bolles perfected his machine-gun drumming, Doom fine-tuned her trademark “wall-of-whump” basslines, and Smear developed a guitar style that was shrill, gritty, and metallic—it often sounded like he was scraping his strings with a cheese grater. Their playing on (GI) is a balancing act of personality and restraint, leaving space for Crash to run the show.
Crash was a born prophet, a “premeditated would-be apocalyptic cult leader,” as friend and producer Geza X put it in another oral history, We Got the Neutron Bomb. Darby’s followers were already chauffeuring him around L.A. and footing his endless bar tab long before (GI) arrived. “When you have people for friends and they’re not the kind of people you want, what do you do?” he once asked an interviewer. “You make some better ones.” On (GI), Crash’s frightening magnetism was spelled out in song, and “We Must Bleed” is the most stirring distillation of his power. Crash repeats the titular line with such conviction, he sounds like a deranged preacher distributing the poisoned applesauce to his disciples.
Crash was intrigued by the charisma of cult leaders and dictators, from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to Charles Manson, Hitler, and Mussolini. “Richie Dagger’s Crime” portrayed a more benevolent side of Darby’s coercive nature. The song’s narrator is a holdover from Crash’s glam roots—a swaggering “boy that nobody owns.” Dagger was a dead ringer for Crash, who grew from “a child despised” into a teenage messiah. When he sings, “I can take on your heroes” it’s both a threat and a premonition—and the closest Germs ever came to pop music. “Lexicon Devil,” perhaps (GI)’s most iconic entry, repurposes Crash’s favorite manipulation device, suffered by everyone he knew: “Gimme, gimme this, gimme, gimme thaaaaaaat.” The song was an admission of Crash’s thirst for supremacy, confirming that nothing he did was by accident.
If any of (GI)’s songs were out of step with Germs’ repertoire, it was “Shut Down,” a nine-minute, narcotized jam session. Smear, Doom, and Bolles made minor detours from one circular riff, while Crash improvised lyrics that volleyed between playful and disturbing. One minute, he mocked Belinda Carlisle for being a cheerleader. Measures later, he nodded to the needle: “When I put that in my arm, I know that it done no harm.”
(GI) came out at a time when Led Zeppelin, Supertramp, and the Eagles were topping the Billboard 200. It didn’t get anywhere near the charts, but local critics took note. In his Los Angeles Times column, Richard Meltzer crowned (GI) album of the year, calling it “the most remarkable L.A. studio achievement at least since L.A. Woman.” At last, there was documentation that Germs were a legitimate band who could write and cut a record, and a great record at that. It was their best work—the gold standard they never got the chance to improve upon.
In the following year, Darby Crash rapidly eroded due to substance abuse. Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris’ punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization captured his incoherence, making previous claims of his “genius” seem ridiculous. As Crash’s drug use escalated in his final months, so did his sense of alienation. Germs broke up, Crash made a failed attempt at going solo, and he became increasingly distraught over his closeted sexuality—many of Crash’s friends didn’t learn he was gay until after he died. On December 3, Germs played a reunion show. Everyone agreed it was the band’s best performance ever. Don Bolles was so happy playing the concert, he was convinced Germs would regroup for good. But Crash had other plans. “The only reason I’m doing this is to get money to get enough heroin to kill myself with,” he told Smear before the gig. Crash had threatened suicide so many times that few people took him seriously. Four nights later, Crash and friend Casey Cola procured $400 worth of heroin, drove to Cola’s mother’s house, and shot up. Somehow, Cola survived. When she came to the next day, Crash was lying dead next to her.
In a cruel twist of fate, Darby Crash died a day before John Lennon, and the news of his passing was largely overshadowed by the Beatle’s murder. It took years for Crash to be widely recognized as a gifted writer, but his work took on a new life after his ended. Germs had an immediate impact on their L.A. peers, but their contributions were particularly felt in the following decades, when artists like Hole, L7, Melvins, Henry Rollins, Meat Puppets, and Red Hot Chili Peppers cited the band as a major influence. After a string of odd jobs and musical exploits, Smear joined Nirvana as a second guitarist in 1993. As a touring member for their In Utero trek, Smear played on the band’s famed MTV Unplugged session in 1994. Following Kurt Cobain’s death, Smear became a founding member of Foo Fighters. He still plays with them today.
Bolles continues to perform with a handful of bands, and works as a radio DJ. Doom, who passed away earlier this year, retreated from the music scene after Crash died, remerging briefly in the early 2000s to play a few reunion gigs with Smear, Bolles, and actor Shane West filling in on vocals. West starred as Crash in the 2007 Germs biopic What We Do Is Secret, a heap of schmaltz that is hard to watch, but confirms the ill-fated frontman’s eternal allure. Darby Crash knew that Germs’ music was the first step in establishing his legacy. “Records are only a medium to get something else done,” he once said. “I want to die when I’m done.” (GI) serves as the final testament from one of punk’s most divisive figures—a man who was sadistic and kind, brilliant and obtuse, and destined to eclipse his inner circle. | 2019-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slash | October 27, 2019 | 9 | 61c3f1d8-c1c1-4dff-8184-2c655ef869d6 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
I was teaching the Dwight highschoolers how to drunk-drive when I first heard The Ascension. "When\n\ the vision's ... | I was teaching the Dwight highschoolers how to drunk-drive when I first heard The Ascension. "When\n\ the vision's ... | Glenn Branca: The Ascension | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/909-the-ascension/ | The Ascension | I was teaching the Dwight highschoolers how to drunk-drive when I first heard The Ascension. "When the vision's getting blurry, when you can't handle yer liquor or yer speed," I said, "cover one eye and your head'll stop spinning. It takes that binocular dilemma right out of there so you can see straight. Visionary or not, it's easy to steer straight with only one eye working."
Glenn Branca knows nothing about this: he was never one to limit his vision. Seeing Rock out of one side and Academic out the other, the two only blurred together in his third eye. By 1981, Branca had already played in Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio for four years, and had disbanded his No Wave groups Theoretical Girls and The Static to focus on larger movements for amplified guitar. He had even completed compositions like "Lesson No.1" and "Dissonance", bringing to light the possibilities for multiple guitars beyond the Molly Hatchet formations of the early 70s.
But the group he assembled to play a rare tour of the States around 1980 would cohere in such a way as to make his most recent work to that point, "The Ascension", his most fully realized. Featuring David Rosenbloom from downtown group Chinese Puzzle, as well as future Sonic Youth guitar-beating beat Lee Ranaldo, the piece was scored for four guitars, bass, and drums; his sextet was Times Square neon and the ghost-light luminance of the city at 3 a.m. focused into a laser-like intensity.
It was ferocity never seen nor heard before, not even on that coast-to-coast tour, where the guitars would slash it out on stage nightly, roaring alive like the 6 train, one-eyed through dank tunnels across the country. Trying to capture that essence in the elitist Power Station studio, even Ranaldo-- in his excellent liner notes for this reissue-- admits it was hard to recreate the actual beast. Whatever Weasel Walter was able to glean digital remastering from is unbeknownst to me, but this thing is fucking huge.
You can sure bet Branca knows about driving drunk: he swerves about on these city streets between two musical extremes like a pilled-n-pompadoured Popeye Doyle on his way to the French Connection set. On one hand, he seems to be in the slow lane with all the Sunday drivers moving to Brahms and Buckner on the West Side Highway, making symphonic movements with the blinker on for miles before the turn. Riding on the Neu!-like toms of Stephan Wischerth and a bassline that lunges out like Drive Like Jehu, the four guitars in "Lesson No.2" quickly gain on traffic, buzzing and droning about 88 miles faster than anyone else clogging the lanes. It sounds almost reckless, as he steers and swerves the guitars into the other lanes, right at the oncoming lights of punk-crushed cars, weaving in and out of traffic, and then suddenly cutting down dark Chinatown alleys of urban rot. Your knuckles turn white, clinging to the door handles-- it feels so out of control, but every movement has been precisely laid-out.
"The Spectacular Commodity" is precision defined, the massive guitars gleaming like metal and glass towers in a grand opening movement, its bass menacing the very foundations with a low rumble. The manic speed of the piece increases to white-hot levels of crashing, cacophonous overtone; from these bloodied guitar strings and twisted metal carnage you can discern not just the euphoric guitar bliss of everyone from Sonic Youth to My Bloody Valentine, but also the mighty crescendos of Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Black Dice, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, or whomever, here executed with a plasma-like energy and melodic/harmonic structure still light-years beyond the forenamed.
"Light Field (In Consonance)" is as majestic as its title would suggest: guitars rain down like torrents from thunderclouds, but with a savagery typical of back alley stabbings. When the guitar strikes like sheets of lightning into these ascendant runs at the apex, it's as anthemic and all-powerful as anything I've ever heard from a six-stringed electric, in rock or any experimental context.
I've had the symphony of the streets do a little winking dance in a light drizzle to Monk's solo piano playing before, I've had Ellington make the lights of Broadway glimmer and dance for miles. White Light/White Heat split my skull open with the cold cruelty of the last exit to Brooklyn, while Paul's Boutique foretold the coke-smoking pleasures of the Vice lifestyle ten years before I arrived. Daydream Nation carved out the skyscraper shapes and dungeon scrapes of the sewer below in sound, but none of these quintessential New York records made every single movement of the Gotham populous move as one quivering entity in my head as does Branca's finale, "The Ascension".
Every step pounded out on concrete, every seeping bag of dragged garbage, every rat squeal, every metal-on-metal cry of the arriving train on the third rail, every disfigured bum, and all the echoing voices seem to be notated for these detuned guitars. The nasty city these compositions were birthed in appears no longer to be with us. A ghost city, seemingly isolated to Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrera videos, still haunts us as an ineffable layer over the cleaned city of Disney, as brutal and terrifying as the city has always been. She's never left; it's nice to have her back. | 2003-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Acute | June 19, 2003 | 10 | 61c7b4ab-5ba0-492c-aa6e-441a92a484b6 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The undervalued singer/songwriter/producer offers a bedroom-friendly five-track EP filled with slow-motion songs about lust, desire, and regret. | The undervalued singer/songwriter/producer offers a bedroom-friendly five-track EP filled with slow-motion songs about lust, desire, and regret. | The-Dream: Love You to Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22691-love-you-to-death/ | Love You to Death | For over a decade now, The-Dream has demonstrated a keen emotional intelligence, a willingness to throw his heart on the table, and an uncanny understanding of the female psyche—all while coming through with dozens of brilliantly dummy sing-along choruses made for belting and drunk dancing. As a songwriter/producer/singer, he’s breathed melody into his own songs as well as hits by Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Kanye West, adding humor and grace to their superstar personas. With his finest work—think “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” or “Fancy”—it can feel like he went to the mountaintop, met the god of song, and returned with a message.
But he’s never been able to truly take off as a solo artist; after scoring a few minor hits with his first couple of albums, his own work has been met with an increasing indifference by the masses across the last six years. His latest EP, Love You to Death, won’t do much to change that. It’s just as layered and melodic as ever, but unless a more adventurous quiet storm DJ latches onto it, it won’t make it out of bedrooms. Which is where some of it belongs. Over a squiggly flute on “Madness,” a musically adventurous booty call, he rivals the raunchiest of rappers: “I would die to put my lips on it/I would love to rub my face in it/But you just gotta rub my face in it.”
But blunt literalism isn’t his most powerful gift. He’s such a master of songwriting that he can play with language, lodging not just a phrase in your ear, but even abstract baby talk—think the “ellas” and “ehs” on Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” which he co-wrote. Similarly, Love You to Death opener “Lemon Lean,” the most obviously catchy song here, has no chorus other than some high-pitched cooing, but it’ll run like ticker tape through your head for days.
Along with lust, The-Dream is always drowning in desire or regret, wrenching emotions that live very close to each other in the heart. And suffer he does on Love You to Death. “Daddy told me good pussy could kill ya,” he memorably laments on “Rih-Flex,” a clever ode to Rihanna. “I forgot about them things you did in college/Can you forget about them things I did last night?” he asks on “College Daze,” in a subtle nod to “Be Careful” by Sparkle and one of his clear inspirations, R. Kelly. Like Kellz or Jill Scott, The-Dream taps into the real grit of relationships by using ’round-the-way colloquialisms (“Now I don’t wanna just buy you shit… girl I wonder how lit you get”), yet he also has no problem elevating language and extending metaphors, either, alluding to a relationship teetering on the brink of failure in “Ferris Wheel.”
By his own admission, The-Dream is less blessed as a singer than a songwriter and a producer, but that calling-card falsetto sounds crystalline here, and his note intervals are precise, shimmery, and sweet. The disappointments in this moody, make-up babymaker of an EP, then, have more to do with its tone. None of the songs trot along on his signature bright chords, and the closest he comes to going faster is at the very end (but if you’re using the EP as intended, well, perhaps it’s paced perfectly). While lush as ever, the songs never quite catch the “ghost”—that ineffable, humbling streak of god in songs that reduce you to tears—like “Fancy,” “Rockin’ That Shit,” “Yamaha,” and others did. Still, he has captured greatness more often than nearly any other modern-day triple threat, and that alone should make you scream his name. | 2016-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Radio Killa | December 29, 2016 | 7 | 61ce36b2-3a98-455a-a1a3-a20298b27ba3 | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
Lil Uzi Vert's latest mixtape comes at a moment of fever-pitch buzz for the young rapper, reaffirming his talent for synthesizing trends into a catchy melodic soup. | Lil Uzi Vert's latest mixtape comes at a moment of fever-pitch buzz for the young rapper, reaffirming his talent for synthesizing trends into a catchy melodic soup. | Lil Uzi Vert: The Perfect Luv Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22201-the-perfect-luv-tape/ | The Perfect Luv Tape | Lil Uzi Vert has been pegged as the center of rap’s widening generational gap, his name tied to other dismantlers of rap convention Lil Yachty and Playboi Carti. But he’s mostly a product of the traditional industry machine: He was rapping fast like a ‘little uzi’ when DJ Diamond Kuts started playing him on local radio, which plugged the youngster with DJ Drama and Don Cannon. (He’d later sign with their Generation Now label, an imprint of Atlantic.) Those same radio spins caught the attention of Philly producer Maaly Raw, whose manager grew up with Uzi and linked them. Maaly subsequently became Uzi’s sonic North Star. After that, Uzi was nurtured by the A$AP Mob, particularly the late, great curator A$AP Yams, who was one of the first A&R figures to give the rapper a signal boost. His voice was much leaner then, on a tape interestingly titled The Real Uzi, which seemed to invoke Young Thug. These days he sounds like the offspring of *Bang 2-*era Chief Keef, minus the Xan addiction (See: “7AM”), but then again so do many of his contemporaries: guys like Carti and (to a different extent) Desiigner. What’s separated Uzi from his peers is his ability to distill entire subgenres of rap into a tonal soup, and more importantly, his songcraft, a knack for hooks and an understanding of how Auto-Tune best suits his abilities.
Uzi’s buzz reached a fever pitch on the strength of two love-centric mixtapes: 2015’s Luv Is Rage and April’s Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, neither of which were really interested in saying anything substantial about romantic love, instead opting to rubber-stamp random songs with hearts and cliches. Lil Uzi Vert songs rarely see thoughts through—perhaps because he doesn’t usually write his lyrics down—so he isn’t really built for the “concept mixtape” formula. It’s odd, then, that he’d continue to chase it with The Perfect Luv Tape, another basic love-inspired outing. The entire tape essentially boils down to a single lyric from “Of Course We Ghetto Flowers”: “You a broke boy got bad luck, don't even talk to me/ You know his girlfriend stalk on me.”
The Perfect Luv Tape is a spiritual sequel to Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, which was also fascinated by love as a concept, only this time around the central theme, as the opener “Do What I Want” posits, is that Uzi now has enough clout to cut corners. Unfortunately, that occasionally applies to his songmaking, too. Everything is coming easily for Uzi now, and it’s opened a gateway to boredom. Some songs are carefully and skillfully crafted, but the vocal performances are less dynamic. At every turn there is a girl after him, either for his money or his status, or a girl he’s taken from an unknowing boyfriend with little effort. It all becomes pretty dulling after awhile. He hasn’t grown much as a writer, but he’s becoming a pretty epic rambler, stumbling upon gems just by simply drilling away at concepts. The hooks are effortless and earwormy, even when they don’t have a core idea, and his arrangements continue to surprise: some songs have bridges that split verses; others are entirely bridges and hooks.
Even with these new song constructions, though, Uzi seems content to replicate past successes on The Perfect Luv Tape. There are lots of similar tonal ranges to vs. the World, thanks in large part to a similar cast—producers Maaly Raw and Don Cannon, mostly. But Uzi stretches occasionally: See the astronautical space screeches of Nard & B (“Seven Million”), the piano roll-led bass mash of DP Beatz (“Alfa Romeo AW30 (I Can Drive)”), and even a very (uncharacteristically) tropical thumper from Metro Boomin (“Ronda (Winners)”). He embraces an apparent chemistry with both Future and Zaytoven, first exhibited on the Project E.T.: Esco Terrestrial cut “Too Much Sauce,” for the standouts “Money Mitch” and “Seven Million.” Though it doesn’t have the highs or the hits of vs. the World, it is sequenced more carefully and it foregrounds his central appeal: In the spirit of one of his cosigners, Yams, he synthesizes catchy sounds from rap’s most dynamic corners. It might not make him a visionary, but it could make him a star. | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 4, 2016 | 6.9 | 61dafcfa-2a51-49ea-a080-533d68b9d16c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.