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Though weighted with a complicated backstory, Vincent’s latest album contains some of the most organic and sincere techno to come out this year. | Though weighted with a complicated backstory, Vincent’s latest album contains some of the most organic and sincere techno to come out this year. | Levon Vincent: For Paris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/levon-vincent-for-paris/ | For Paris | The American-born, Berlin-based DJ and producer Levon Vincent is famously acrid and anti-capitalist. He has decried the “incestuous” art of remixes and the evils of fast cash in the music industry. (“You break off a piece of your dignity for cash—unless it's between friends,” he once said in an interview.) His 2015 self-titled debut had a track called “Anti-Corporate Music” and he explicitly said that album was an “action against” the lemmings in the corporate “rat race.” Two years later, the implicit political spirit undergirding his music can partially explain how his follow-up, For Paris, came about.
The backstory of Vincent’s second record is pained and complicated. Shortly after the 2015 attacks at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris, Vincent posted on Facebook imploring people to “arm themselves” with a “knife” or “mace” to stop attacks before they get out of hand. Following an intense backlash, he posted an apology, and as he admits in a statement introducing For Paris, the experience led him to reevaluate his life philosophy. He says he’s read everything from the Book of Psalms to Patti Smith, all in search of an understanding of war and peace. As such, he hopes his music and his message can “ignite a new peace movement.”
His ambition—like the album’s artwork—can come off as a bit mawkish, but the jump from independent, almost socialist techno producer to pacifist hippy is not such a wild shift. The flower-power rhetoric is not just for show, it’s something that’s seeped into Vincent’s technique. Scoff as we may at clunky titles likes “If We Choose War,” this album contains some of the most organic and sincere techno to come out this year.
Take for example the palatial nearly nine-minute “Hope For New Global Peace (in 3 parts),” which is nowhere near techno, but closer to a Terry Riley-inspired composition. (Riley might be the secret godfather to the music here conceptually and sonically—lest we forget the pacifist poetry that introduced A Rainbow in Curved Air.) Three suites, filled with harps, jaunty hand drums, clouds of synths, and any number of beautiful string instruments, it's the best demonstration of Vincent’s gentler, more psychedelic palette. Elsewhere, he deploys his new toolbox to create songs brimming with childish energy—“If We Choose Peace,” built from arpeggios and what sounds like xylophones, comes close to the tie-dyed techno of DJ Koze.
While he has retained some sense of the uncompromising minimalism that has defined his sound in the past—in songs like “Baseball” or “Slander Is Terrible”—his music is no longer so cold and austere. Even in the more conventional techno tracks, he draws out a kind of squishy, bodily sensation that can be hard to find in dance music’s grid. The well-wrought “Late Reflections,” with its fluttering chords and balletic percussion, is tightly produced and naturalistic—you get the sense sometimes that he’s leading a band and not manipulating hardware. There’s also an emotional element to his music now that changes its intention and utility. The melancholic “Only Good Things” has all the moving parts of a classic dance track, with mean synth breakdowns and hard-scrabbled drums, but Vincent deploys these tropes with a softer effect in mind. In the same way someone might put a colored scarf over a harsh light, Vincent mutes the aggression of his tools in order draw out a more sensitive sound. There’s an almost wistful and hushed air to the song, a feeling not many techno producers can replicate.
The heartfelt feeling that Vincent chases throughout For Paris comes into focus on its final track, “Dancing With Machiavelli.” It’s the most human song on the record, with its chaotic drum line and splatter of piano keys. It’s unevenly stitched and almost improvised. This is not a smooth or “well-made” song, but that doesn’t matter because Vincent can touch something more emotive. This album is interested in eliciting a reaction that can be difficult to squeeze from any artform—the 10 songs here can be downtrodden, joyful, and meditative all at once. Vincent reveals the seams of his compositions and leans into the albums quirks, mistakes, and maybe you could call them errors. Both in the events leading up to this album and in the music contained within, Vincent has proven imperfect. That messiness comes to define this album, making for machine music that’s lovingly flawed and human. | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Novel Sound | October 14, 2017 | 7.7 | 61db7114-df3e-44b0-a75b-666eb9d17f08 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
null | In November of 2002, as part of a conference honoring the late novelist Kathy Acker, Diamanda Galás' multi-octave voice bellowed and howled through the midrange speaker's of NYU's Fales Library. Due to a previous engagement in Canada, the vocalist was unable to perform in the flesh, so she sent a multi-track recording in her stead. As preferable as it is to watch her unleash her intense Siren songs onstage, I enjoyed the disembodied presentation and the wraith-like shadow it cast upon the proceedings.
As well as textual linkages, the two artists shared a mutual admiration. In a brief article on her | Diamanda Galás: Defixiones, Will and Testament / La Serpenta Canta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11750-defixiones-will-and-testament-la-serpenta-canta/ | Defixiones, Will and Testament / La Serpenta Canta | In November of 2002, as part of a conference honoring the late novelist Kathy Acker, Diamanda Galás' multi-octave voice bellowed and howled through the midrange speaker's of NYU's Fales Library. Due to a previous engagement in Canada, the vocalist was unable to perform in the flesh, so she sent a multi-track recording in her stead. As preferable as it is to watch her unleash her intense Siren songs onstage, I enjoyed the disembodied presentation and the wraith-like shadow it cast upon the proceedings.
As well as textual linkages, the two artists shared a mutual admiration. In a brief article on her performance at London's Royal Festival Hall, Acker called Galás the Maria Callas of her generation. In my mind, generations are broad and formless; so more specifically, Galás is a graveyard Callas (sans corpsepaint) who channels anonymous victims and sings their eulogies. In keeping with her baroque oeuvre and aesthetic, Defixiones, Will and Testament and La Serpenta Canta, Galás' first full-lengths since 1998's Malediction and Prayer, are densely wound, parabolic double albums. Released concurrently, each documents a very different approach, though both are by far creepy enough to make even the gothest shiver.
Defixiones, Will and Testament is a meditation on the Armenian, Assyrian and Anatolian Greek genocides carried out by Turkey from 1914 to 1923, and the Turkish and American denial of the atrocities. According to a statement about the project at Galás' website, "'Defixiones' refers to the warnings engraved in lead that were placed by relatives of the deceased on the graves of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor. These warnings cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under the threat of extreme harm. 'Will and Testament' refers to the last wishes of the dead who have been taken to their graves under unnatural circumstances." Like 1990's Plague Mass-- a work for people with AIDS, inspired in part by the death of her brother, the playwright Philip Dimitri Galás, who succumbed to the disease in 1986-- once Galas affixes her sound to something concrete, the effects are often near sublime.
As we chalk up important numbers of the dead (on calendars, and outlined out sidewalks) and commemorate days of mass murder, Defixiones issues a creepy formal purity, as Galás discusses ethnic cleansing: choirs rage, skies are torn, Galas speaks in tongues. In "Orders from the Dead", "Our dead watch their daughters butchered, raped, and beaten in the still burning of those flames." In light of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, notions of genocide and violence are currently in the forefront of many minds (and even USA Today). Certain lines like, "A man without a God/ Cannot be burned alive/ He never was alive/ Not as a man, giavour/ But as a dog," coupled with recent imagery of Iraqis on leashes, expands Galás' anger to encompass more than her initial subject. Towards the song's end, she turns her phraseology towards the humanizing first person and achieves the voice of victimhood: "I am the man unburied/ Who cannot sleep/ In forty pieces."
Elsewhere in the cycle, she incorporates and expands traditional compositional forms from Smyrna and Asia Minor and poems and by Armenian poet Siamanto, Syrian poet Adonis, Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, and Rumanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan. Throughout Defixiones' 99 minutes, Galás accrues packs of identities, all looking for remembrance. It's a chilling agglomeration: More about absence than a cult-of-personality, the soul-catching proves an angry and unmanageable lament riddled with grief, often as laden as it is uplifting.
La Serpenta Canta, on the other hand, is surprisingly playful, tackling major standards and classics of American blues, country & western, R&B;, Motown, and soul. Each, of course, becomes hers alone. For instance, when Galás holds a particularly cackling note towards the three-quarter mark of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You", it's the stuff of a real hex, not just an interpretation of another's poetry. This is followed by a restrained take on Chip Moman and Dan Penn's "At the Dark End of the Street", which proves more Tom Waits than the violently cascading Pandora's Box that erupts at the coda of her reprisal of John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell", a song she performs twice here with equally glorious results. Elsewhere, her guttural "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" transforms Hank Williams' tear-in-my-beer ballad into a spiraling downpour that carries with it a banshee wail from the top of Mount Olympus.
But despite these warped old favorites, it's her own "Baby's Insane" that steals the show. Taken from The Sporting Life, her unlikely but surprisingly fruitful 1994 pop-art collaboration with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones becomes the campiest of torch songs in a live setting. Recorded at Joe's Pub in NYC on August 31st, 2001, the cabaret lilts, and she jokes with the audience about the song's macabre subject matter before issuing the central warning: "Baby's insane/ Baby's insane/ Baby's on a trip to the morgue again/ Hide all the knives/ 'Cause baby's insane."
Though La Serpenta Canta consists of lighter fare than the gorgeously pained Defixiones, Will and Testament, there are stylistic linkages (Galás, after all, is Galás). In both, the palette consists of her voice, piano and minimal electronics. Another less stylistic connector is the across-the-board inclusion of the traditional "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean". Equally powerful on both releases, the song's central request ("There's just one last favor I'll ask of you/ See that my grave is kept clean") carries more intense resonances in the context of Defixiones. What's a grave keeper to do, for example, if the site's left unmarked or there's no burial at all?
Yes, Galás' caustic voice is at times overblown, and you won't likely plop these discs into your stereo after a rough day at the office; like a complex modernist tome, their richly idiosyncratic materiality demands patient intelligence. At times, listening to these records is like treading water in the Black Sea: To experience them fully involves unraveling codes, grabbing after spirits, and immersing yourself into sinking shadows. It's an effort, but with more and more classifiably ephemeral and easily digestible sugar blasts erupting in the underground, breaking a sweat now and again with something that feels like it's been shot straight out of hell provides a nice change of pace. | 2004-05-19T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-05-19T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | May 19, 2004 | 8.5 | 61f795b3-becb-4f92-ab07-c499c9ed6e27 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Chicago drill star Lil Durk cedes the floor to his capable crew on a 23-song victory lap that memorializes his own hard-earned fame alongside the memory of his late protégé, King Von. | Chicago drill star Lil Durk cedes the floor to his capable crew on a 23-song victory lap that memorializes his own hard-earned fame alongside the memory of his late protégé, King Von. | Only the Family: Only the Family - Lil Durk Presents: Loyal Bros | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/only-the-family-only-the-family-lil-durk-presents-loyal-bros/ | Only the Family - Lil Durk Presents: Loyal Bros | Lil Durk has spent the past decade on a long, grueling trip to success. The Chicago rapper began his career on Myspace in 2010, fresh out of high school and filled with ambition. By 2013, his melodic, war-torn stories led to a deal with Def Jam. But a series of setbacks threatened to derail his ascent: A short-lived rivalry with fellow drill pioneer Chief Keef, several felony charges, his departure from Def Jam in 2018, and, most notably, the shooting deaths of his cousin OTF Nunu in 2014, friend and former manager OTF Chino Dolla in 2015, and protégé King Von this past November. Durk persevered through it all, moving to Atlanta and steadily releasing new music, culminating in the one-two punch of his feature on Drake’s smash hit “Laugh Now, Cry Later” and the release of his sixth studio album, The Voice, last December.
So if anyone has earned the right to host an album-length victory lap with their peers, it’s Lil Durk. Only the Family - Lil Durk Presents: Loyal Bros, released barely three months after The Voice, uses Durk’s second wind to give his Only the Family collective—comprised of Memo600, Booka600, Lil Mexico, Doodie Lo, Slimelife Shawty, Chief Wuk, THF Zoo, and the late Von—a chance to impress on a national scale. Having survived the vice grip of the industry once, Durk is ready to clear the safest possible path for his squad. “I fell off once and I’m still lit,” he croons confidently on opening song “JUMP.” It’s all the more refreshing, then, to see him take a backseat; he appears on only six of the album’s 23 songs, largely ceding the floor to his crew, who prove to be up to the challenge.
Loyal Bros is hardcore Chicago drill through and through, setting dispatches from the trenches of street life over ominous minor-key melodies and 808s capable of punching holes in your chest. The album’s velocity translates to the group’s interplay, which is fluid and piercing. Though ultimately too long for its own good, Loyal Bros is well-sequenced and fine-tuned, providing breathing room to nearly two dozen different artists without devolving into a clown-car pileup.
On “Do It for Von,” Booka600, Memo600, and THF Zoo pass flawless laterals across one winding verse. The duo tracks play to the group’s strongest relationships (like Durk and Slimelife Shawty on “Dying 2 Hit’em”) and find exciting contrasts in outside guests (Lil Uzi Vert steals the show on “Let It Blow” and Detroit neighbor Tee Grizzley runs off with two different songs). “Kennedy,” a solo showcase for member Lil Mexico, sounds ready to devour space on playlists and radio. Unlike Dreamville’s Revenge of the Dreamers III compilation, which leapfrogged effortlessly between different styles of contemporary rap and R&B, Loyal Bros’ hyper-focus on drill aims to demonstrate the strength of the collective’s bond through its grasp of their hometown style.
The OTF bond feels even more crucial in the face of King Von’s untimely passing. Loyal Bros features one song released in Von’s lifetime (“Me and Doodie Lo”) as well as two posthumous verses, all showcases for his sharp diction and gift for straightforward storytelling. On “Me and Doodie Lo,” Von and Lo trade stories like war veterans over a staccato beat, bringing decaying bodies and their own stoic remorse vividly to life. Of all the OTF members, it’s Von whose verses most closely match the emotional fervor of Durk, and the spirit of their fallen lieutenant rallies the entire collective. “Von died, we kept that game face, he hate when niggas cry,” Booka600 laments on “Game Face.”
Even in the face of tremendous loss, the OTF unit stands tall on Loyal Bros. Durk’s belief in his brethren manifests on a record that not only acts as a coda to his own hard-earned stardom but helps the collective shine as a whole. No one rises to the vacant spot left by Von, probably by design. Loyal Bros is a family affair, one that distances itself from the genre excursions of Durk’s recent solo work to stay rooted in traditions of Chicago drill as old as OTF themselves.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Only the Family / Empire | March 9, 2021 | 7.1 | 61f918c7-dacd-444b-89b2-243c8d424cd0 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Made mostly on an iPhone, the first project from 18-year-old producer Steve Lacy—also a member of the Internet—sparkles with classic Southern California funk and soul. | Made mostly on an iPhone, the first project from 18-year-old producer Steve Lacy—also a member of the Internet—sparkles with classic Southern California funk and soul. | Steve Lacy: Steve Lacy’s Demo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22983-steve-lacys-demo/ | Steve Lacy's Demo | There are only 13 minutes of music on Steve Lacy’s debut project, but that’s enough time for him to make a serious impression. Over the course of six tracks that sparkle with classic Southern California funk and soul, the producer, just barely out of high school, offers up a dazzling number of musical ideas. Steve Lacy’s Demo is all the more remarkable for the fact that most of the record was produced on an iPhone.
Lacy, 18, joined his school’s jazz band in ninth grade, where he met Jameel Bruner, the younger brother of superstar bassist, Thundercat. When Bruner was recruited to play keyboards on the Internet’s third album, Ego Death, he invited Lacy to join the group in the studio. The band must have been impressed: Lacy ended up earning himself individual production credits on six of the album’s 12 tracks and an executive producer credit, becoming a full-on member. The album was a breakthrough success for the Internet, occasioning rave reviews, winning the group a Grammy nomination, and reminding the world again that its young members—Syd, Matt Martians, and now Lacy—had massive potential.
All three have released solo projects in early 2017. Lacy has classified Demo as a “song series” rather than an album or EP, a modesty belied by the fact that he has called the songs “perfect.” He’s not far off—the music here is startlingly mature, full of dimension and depth, as if Lacy were accompanied by a full band rather than doing everything, right down to the mixing, by his lonesome. The opening song, “Looks,” kicks off with drums, adventurous bass, a wobbling synth, and gorgeous falsetto harmonies that lead in to the solitary verse. All those layers are in service of a song that’s, of all things, a rejection of superficiality. “What if I got with you and turned out to be a total dick,” Lacy cautions. “Would you be happy ’bout that?” The song is all too brief—it melts in your mouth before two minutes are up.
Talented musicians often lean on their chops, noodling at their instruments at the expense of tight songcraft. If anything, Lacy has almost the opposite problem: Many of the outstanding musical moments here feel teased rather than fulfilled. The verse that opens “Ryd” could easily become a hook anchoring a full song—instead, it’s merely a bookend, a sliver of something great. But Lacy is so multitalented in his vocal range and his creative percussion (check the drums on “Haterlovin”), in his ability to wring soulfulness out of guitar and bass alike, that it’s hard to isolate one single element at which he most excels.
“Dark Red” is the clear standout, the only song in which each part lingers for the appropriate amount of time. The swirling melodies on the chorus float atop the beat as a melodic counterpoint, an effect Lacy has said was influenced by David Longstreth’s work with Dirty Projectors. And the aching quality of the music, complemented by the Motown harmonies that round out its back half, matches the song’s theme, a plea lobbed at a partner who’s beginning to turn away.
Despite its brevity, Demo is reminiscent of another auspicious debut, one that emerged more than 15 years ago. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had already made their mark as producers with the Neptunes, but their first album in the band NERD, In Search Of…, was stronger and stranger than anything they had come up with before. And as its songs became cult classics, In Search Of... announced Pharrell as someone who could star in front of the camera, not just behind the boards. Steve Lacy’s Demo evokes that record in its charisma and musical ability. Given that it’s not even 15 minutes, the record can’t be said to be anything more than a particularly tasty appetizer. But it’s hard to imagine the listener who wouldn’t yearn for the next course. | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Three Quarter | March 10, 2017 | 7.4 | 61fe45ef-2e80-47d5-8479-51add6feae28 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The East London rapper and producer’s debut has the feel of a mixtape, luxuriating in the tension between her reticent persona and raw lyricism. | The East London rapper and producer’s debut has the feel of a mixtape, luxuriating in the tension between her reticent persona and raw lyricism. | John Glacier: SHILOH: Lost for Words | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-glacier-shiloh-lost-for-words/ | SHILOH: Lost for Words | John Glacier’s confessional dictaphone raps sound like intimate notes to self, intended for one listener only. She writes to untangle her mind. “Got weed for the low times too/What’s low times two? I dunno/Double negative makes a positive, or so they say/So I’m playing with the words again,” she drawls over the stretched-out guitar of “Green Elephants Freestyle,” a highlight from the woozy final third of her debut album. SHILOH: Lost for Words shines in the moments when Glacier lets her vocals float a little outside of the beat, luxuriating in the tension between her reticent persona and raw lyricism. On “Boozy,” she duets with her own muffled practice takes; on “Some Other Thing,” her stream of consciousness solidifies over an echoing drone.
SHILOH is the East London rapper-producer’s most substantial work to date, following a handful of wispy feature verses for fellow rap esoterics Babyfather, Jeshi, and LYAM; it arrives via scene-shaping producer and Frank Ocean collaborator Vegyn’s PLZ Make It Ruins. Vegyn made contact after coming across Glacier’s SoundCloud page; pay a visit yourself and you’ll find a handful of snippets with functional titles like “Sounds from Friday evening” and “A Child was Sad so I made this infront of her to make her laugh.” As the pair exchanged messages, they realized they’d met multiple times before—trading gripes at the back of parties, each grateful for an understanding ear.
In 2019, Vegyn opened up his studio space to Glacier—she favored the night shifts—prompting a loose back-and-forth of ideas. Two years later, their sketches emerge as these 12 mostly brief tracks. SHILOH has the feel of a mixtape: Works in progress nestle alongside more carefully structured songs (the percussive cascades on “If Anything” are nothing if not meticulous); ad libs are replaced with Glacier’s in-the-moment reactions to her own output (a gargled “ergh” of apparent disgust on “Timing” is comical as it is vulnerable). But Glacier’s productions—completed alongside a tight-knit ensemble of Vegyn, Holly, Psychedelic Ensemble, and Tn_490—coat the record with a cool, understated gloss and keep it from unravelling.
Glacier’s music toes a fine line between noodly bedroom art-rap and something more substantive. She comes out on the right side with reassuring consistency. The smartarse wordplay on “Green Elephants Freestyle” is knowing enough to retain its smirking charm; “Trelawny Waters” pairs the infectious lilt and measure of a nonsense poem with a tribute to Queen Nanny and the Windward Maroons, a guerilla army of former slaves who battled British colonizers in 18th-century Jamaica. For listeners of such intimate music, there’s a similarly fine line between voyeurism and the privilege of being offered a window into another person’s inner monologues, be they banal or profound. Even when it’s obscure, SHILOH is wholly inviting.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Electronic | PLZ Make It Ruins | August 2, 2021 | 6.9 | 62029769-11aa-4dfb-a799-b96ea7470f04 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
This reissue of a 1982 dub reggae favorite tells a good story, exemplifies a particular moment in Jamaican music history, and offers a new way to hear how dub reggae works. | This reissue of a 1982 dub reggae favorite tells a good story, exemplifies a particular moment in Jamaican music history, and offers a new way to hear how dub reggae works. | Various Artists: Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21810-junjo-presents-wins-the-world-cup/ | Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup | It’s not often that a reissue reframes the narrative around a record. This edition of the 1982 ….Wins the World Cup tells an interesting story and exemplifies a particular moment in Jamaican music history—all the while providing a bit of an object lesson in dub reggae.
The cheekily titled album’s release coincided with the 1982 FIFA World Cup—complete with Tony McDermott’s tell-tale album art depicting a reggae-fied team beating England 6-to-1. Originally titled Scientist Wins the World Cup, the record features the legendary Roots Radics and the studio stylings of Overton H. "Scientist" Brown, with producer Henry "Junjo" Lawes acting as "referee." The tracks are labelled "Dangerous Match," numbers 1–10, followed by five separate tracks entitled "Extra Time" and the final track aptly named "Golden Goal." Initially reissued in 2002, the new version seriously ups the ante by providing the whole World Cup-winning game, and then the original versions of the songs. There are also some extra counteraction deejay tunes—vocal versions that provide an alternative perspective. This move places the emphasis on Junjo—and the title therefore shifts to Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup. Doesn’t have the ring of the original, but it points to the role played by the producer in advance of the dub treatment.
Dub reggae is its own particular thing. A bass-driven, heavy version of reggae, dub breaks down songs into component parts and then sticks them all back together after playing around with all the pieces. Scientist was one of the masters of the form. Born in 1960, he was a teenager as reggae edged into the era of extreme studio experimentation, exemplified by the creative genius of producers such as Lee "Scratch" Perry and Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock. It was Tubby who apparently dubbed him "Scientist" after hearing the young Brown talking about his ideas for adjusting and altering studio technology (http://www.niceup.com/interviews/scientist). In the case of …Wins the World Cup, Junjo produced and arranged a series of songs with the Roots Radics and a range of vocalists. These recordings were taken from Channel One on Maxfield Avenue to King Tubby’s Waterhouse Studio in another part of town to be experimented with by Scientist.
The record demonstrates that the general sense some folks have about a shift between the roots- and-culture focus of the 1970s and the degenerative digital dancehall 1980s isn’t really the case. The production prowess of Junjo paired with Scientist’s touch created classic late-70s reggae songs like "Collie Weed" by Barrington Levy and Sugar Minnott’s "Oh Mr D.C.", but also slack dancehall king Yellowman’s tunes in the early 80s. …Wins the World Cup is the sweet spot right in the middle.
As for the tunes, this collection provides an insight into the dub process by allowing easy side-by-side comparison between vocal originals and dub versions. Listening to Johnny Osbourne’s well-known "Ice Cream Love" followed by "Extra Time One" draws attention to Scientist’s dropping of the vocal after the first line, echoing in the distance until it is but a trace in the background, just audible under the bass and the added wobble on the guitar. At moments, even the bass drops out, leaving the spare, metallic rhythm, and the reverberation of the drum and that bit of tinny melody. It’s much easier to hear how this provides a near opposite to the "warmer than chocolate fudge" original when you can switch back and forth. Little sounds stick out—it’s difficult to not play the game of what’s missing and what’s been added.
The wobbly bits on "Dangerous Match Three" the dub version of Hugh Mandell’s "Jacqueline" sound like they might be the reason for dubstep being called dubstep. The echo of the drums rings out each measure, being pushed along by the bass, accompanied by the clear jangle of guitar and sparkle of horns. Wayne Jarrett’s vocal on "Ranny and Lou," a song about two of Jamaica’s most well-loved performers, is virtually eliminated in "Dangerous Match Ten," drawing attention to piano and organ. The dub treatment tends to play with listener focus, pulling attention from one instrument to the next, seemingly adding extra creaks and beeps just to confound the listener. Regardless, the weight and depth of these tunes lend them to being played loud and for a long time. | 2016-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Greensleeves | May 5, 2016 | 7.7 | 620ba423-4642-4d0f-9550-3b437e5b327e | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
Using corroded samples and languid tempos, Bogotá artist Nicolás Vallejo casts an eerie and sorrowful light on Colombia’s hidden traumas. | Using corroded samples and languid tempos, Bogotá artist Nicolás Vallejo casts an eerie and sorrowful light on Colombia’s hidden traumas. | Ezmeralda: En Átomos Volando | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ezmeralda-en-atomos-volando/ | En Átomos Volando | Before DJ Screw, there was Gabriel Duéñez. Born in Zacatecas in 1947, he moved to Monterrey as a boy and fell under the sway of the Colombian music that was then becoming popular in the northeastern Mexican city. In the 1960s, Duéñez became famous as a sonidero, or soundsystem DJ, spinning cumbia and vallenato at dances and block parties across the hilly working-class district of Independencia. It was at one of these parties that fate placed its hand upon his turntables: After hours of music in the sweltering heat—subwoofers throbbing, signal bleeding red, motors grinding ceaselessly beneath whirring platters—something went awry, some busted fuse or melted circuit, and the music began to play back at an abnormally slow speed. The guitars and vocal harmonies turned thick and syrupy; the loping beat crumpled into a narcoleptic shuffle. But, as these things so often go—cf. Belgium’s sensual popcorn, D.C.’s woozy moombahton, and of course DJ Screw’s opiated screw music—the “wrong” speed sounded even more entrancing than the correct one. Inspired by the error, Duéñez began recording cassettes of slowed-down cumbia songs, and the style known as cumbia rebajada was born.
It was Colombia that initially exported cumbia to Mexico, and an echo of this Mexican variant returns to Colombian soil in the music of Ezmeralda, aka Nicolás Vallejo, formerly of the “gothic cumbia” outfit La MiniTK de Miedo. On his solo debut album, last year’s Patrimonio Inmaterial de la Nada, the Bogotá musician translated his previous group’s sepulchral inclinations into a foggier and more atmospheric sound, in which accordion, flute, and marimba cast a melancholy glow from deep inside misty thickets of shakers and reverb. En Átomos Volando springs from the same source, but this time the tempos are even slower, the vibes wispier, the samples further corroded. “Rebajada” means reduced, lowered, diluted; here, the sounds of the Afro-Indigenous musical tradition seem to physically dissolve into thick, tropical air.
Where Ezmeralda’s previous album explored the “immaterial legacy of nothingness,” En Átomos Volando is more ethereal yet. The accordions and electric organs of his debut still bore obvious traces of the records he was sampling from, but here there’s scant evidence of his source materials, save for the boomy, high-low pattern of tambora and tambor alegre. Cumbia’s distinctive, foot-dragging pulse remains audible, but strange things happen to it at this languid tempo. Those intricate syncopations drift apart like blocks of sea ice, opening vast distances between drum beats; wreathed in echo, hissing shakers dissipate like raindrops on pavement.
Ezmeralda’s murky, moody sound bears some resemblance to Burial’s forlorn poetics of worn-out vinyl, and also to Dominican producer Kelman Duran’s miasmic reggaetón. But his closest compatriot might be the late Philip Jeck, whose plodding loops of battered thrift-store wax have a similarly mesmerizing effect. “When you slow a record down that much,” said Jeck, who used his turntables’ 16-RPM setting to truly psychedelic ends, “other things start appearing out of the sound.” In an email about his own work, Vallejo noticed something similar: “When you slow down the cumbia, the ghosts start to emerge.”
The ghostly qualities of Ezmeralda’s work aren’t just metaphorical; his music is shot through with a powerful sense of mourning. The opening track, “Niños Flotando en el Cielo,” begins with a sample taken from a 1990 documentary about gamines, the boys who live on the streets of Colombia’s cities—shining shoes, sniffing glue, and surviving however they can. “Glue was really sweet,” says a boy who, in the documentary, looks like he can’t be much more than seven or eight years old. “I felt like I was flying like Superman.” In the background, the unsteady call of an ice-cream truck warbles in the distance as the boy rhapsodizes about watching the stars in the sky above him at night; the looping melody and downy reverb combine to form a vaporous concoction of childlike wonder and crushing melancholy.
The EP’s other four tracks are similarly bittersweet. In “Nochear,” airy synth pads imbue cumbia’s languorous pulse with a weightless feel; “Flores en el Río” is meant to evoke petals drifting on the surface of a slow-moving river. A tangle of hand drums, agonized groans, and soupy drones, “Duelo (Cumbia del Fantasma)” marks the record’s darkest moment; its enervated rhythm evokes a nightmare where you cannot scream or run. The closing “Summer of Sacol” seems at first to lighten the mood, with softly pulsing synths casting a gentle ambient shimmer over unsteady percussion. But “Sacol,” it turns out, is yet another reference to the inhalants that plague Colombia’s impoverished youth. While initial doses may provoke agreeable hallucinations, long-time users of the drug may walk unsteadily and suffer from lethargy and convulsions. The same dichotomy plays out in the music itself: The gentle synths evoke the feeling of flying, while the rhythm mimics twitching, stumbling limbs. The deeper you sink into Ezmeralda’s music, the more such dualities become apparent, with bright tropical colors giving way to fathomless shadows.
One reason that Colombian cumbia initially caught on in Mexico is because it appealed to the country’s internal migrants. Colombian records, with their songs of “peasant longing, with that way of expressing those distances, that desire to feel the land… became the choice of the dispossessed, of the newcomers, of those who were not from here,” the cumbia DJ and producer Toy Selectah told Mexico Daily Post in 2021. That is to say, even at its sunniest, cumbia always harbored a sense of tension in its heart. In Ezmeralda’s En Átomos Volando, a music of displacement returns to its place of origin and, made strange once again, casts an eerie and sorrowful light on Colombia’s own hidden traumas. | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ediciones Eter | April 8, 2022 | 7.6 | 621317a6-e32d-4477-9ff0-563c914b5169 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Kamaiyah’s debut mixtape lightly recalls the rap and R&B of the ’90s, but her approachable and assured presence is all her own. | Kamaiyah’s debut mixtape lightly recalls the rap and R&B of the ’90s, but her approachable and assured presence is all her own. | Kamaiyah: A Good Night in the Ghetto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21712-a-good-night-in-the-ghetto/ | A Good Night in the Ghetto | Kamaiyah’s debut mixtape Good Night in the Ghetto initially comes across carefree and effortless, which might seduce you into thinking it was easy to make. The songs are simple, unfussy, and full of space, with a low-key mood meant less for a raucous house party and more for a casual basement hangout. Kamaiyah’s calling-card song, "How Does It Feel," is here, and it’s as wistful and sunny as it was when it came out last year. But now it’s joined by 15 other tracks that hit on the same energy: It feels good to be young, but it’s even better to be smart enough to appreciate how fleeting that feeling is.
*Good Night in the Ghetto'*s production is the aural equivalent of watching Too $hort and TLC videos half-asleep through one of Hype Williams’ custom ’90s fish-eye lenses—a blur of reference points from across hip-hop's glitziest decade. Kamaiyah is 20, which means her earliest impressions of that decade’s music would have come around the time the industry was locked into a death spiral and rap was vanishing from the charts. Seen through this filter, it’s easy to see how a video like, say, "Ladies’ Night" would seem like the peak of some lost civilization. But while she carries a brick phone around as a prop for her throwback image, she otherwise she treats the whole back-in-the-day thing lightly, a personal quirk rather than a defining mission.
Besides, Bay Area rap has been celebrating the power of silky Anita Baker and Sade keyboard patches for years. These sounds have been recreated so lovingly for so long that they've become a thread snaking through a wide range of music. Kamaiyah is part of a tradition that extends back to early-‘90s hits like Conscious Daughters’ "Something to Ride to (Fonky Expedition)" (she told Pitchfork that Conscious Daughter’s Karryl "Special One" Smith gave her the mixtape title) and continues today: the Trackademicks-produced "Come Back" could easily have been given to fellow East Bay artist J. Stalin, whose music often has the same plush retro-funk feel.
Kamaiyah stands out from her peers, though, with her appealingly natural presence. Her voice sounds as unaffected and assured singing as it does rapping, and she writes big hooks: The chorus to "Swing My Way" is full-bodied enough to picture a shirtless male guest star belting it, but she handles it herself, her small voice giving off its own heat. The little interjection "woopty woopty woo" on "Out the Bottle" is fearsomely catchy, "I hope I don’t yelp this involuntarily in a roomful of strangers" catchy. But it’s a detail, a grace note on an album that never oversells anything. Restraint is a slippery virtue to enthusiastically trumpet, but it usually marks the separation between an artist who can hold down a single and one who can comfortably occupy an album.
This poise is what makes Kamaiyah someone worth spending time with. There's a great song on here in the Too $hort tradition ("Niggas") about loving sex, and severe disinterest in being obligated to have it with one person. But it’s not a sexual tall-tale meant to make Kamaiyah sound superhuman: "Hit the back room come back, my dress undid/ He gon’ zip it back before they notice we be fucking," she sings playfully. On "Freaky Freaks," she falls asleep in her Jeep because she’s too high to drive. This is: a) not something it’s easy to imagine Nicki Minaj rapping about, and b) something an affable-everyman like Devin the Dude has probably done in real life. Approachability is a cornerstone of Kamaiyah’s style.
And then, of course, there’s her good-life ode "How Does It Feel." Despite some stiff competition, it remains her best song, something she implicitly acknowledges by reprising it for the introductory track "I’m On." It sounds even better on Good Night without eclipsing anything around it. The emotions on the tape—joy, yearning—are never better expressed than in the two questions she poses in the chorus: "How does it feel to be rich" and "How does it feel to just live?" The underlying subtext—that these might be two versions of the same question—is present, without insisting on itself. Just like everything else on Good Night, the essential substance is just there, a cocked eyebrow and a meaningful pause from someone who’s confident enough to put it all out there in her own way and allow you a minute to catch up. | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 24, 2016 | 8.2 | 62141da8-0a2f-45ea-9ad2-5c776d2a6b60 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Following their collaboration on last year’s Atrocity Exhibition, the Accelerator 12” finds Danny Brown and producer Paul White coloring even more brazenly outside of hip-hop’s lines. | Following their collaboration on last year’s Atrocity Exhibition, the Accelerator 12” finds Danny Brown and producer Paul White coloring even more brazenly outside of hip-hop’s lines. | Paul White: Accelerator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22899-accelerator/ | Accelerator | Speaking to an audience in Glasgow during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2015, Danny Brown attempted to describe Atrocity Exhibition, his then forthcoming album. “I’m just trying to push myself as far and make rap as progressive as possible,” Brown explained. “So maybe like, I’m on some Trent Reznor shit with this one, you know what I’m saying?” Atrocity Exhibition made good on this, employing lumbering post-punk rhythms, industrial textures, and obscure musique concrète samples in service of Brown’s dystopic vision. Of course, Brown didn’t work alone; the English beatmaker Paul White produced the bulk of the album. The pair have a long history of pushing boundaries together. White has contributed to every Brown album since 2011’s XXX, and with Atrocity Exhibition, it felt like they had finally managed to tear down whatever barriers remained between hip-hop and their wide-ranging influences.
A victory lap of sorts, the Accelerator 12'' feels even more uncompromising. Take the title track, wherein White pummels the listener with disorderly polyrhythms and driving intensity. Included here in the barrage of sounds are a tangle of bongos that clop like hooves at a horse track; a buzzing, prog-rock guitar run; a rolling, rubberband bassline; and a psychedelic, reverb-soaked guitar solo. If that sounds like an emcee’s worst nightmare, you wouldn’t know it from Brown’s nimble rapping. He manages to effortlessly surf the track’s competing drum lines. “Rappers rap about it/But never really live it/I never glorify it/I tell it how it is,” he yelps in his signature squeaky register, neatly summing up his documentarian appeal. Of course, Brown can’t help but see the sonic chaos around him as a metaphor for a mind on drugs, half-singing, “Walking light the ground is so shaky/Losing sight, ’cause things is so hazy.” The song’s video features a man chasing his escaped, anthropomorphic brain through the streets of London, which feels about right.
The B-side, “Lion’s Den,” takes a slightly different tack—while it’s plenty unorthodox, it slows things down to an even keel. The song is built around a loop of a yé-yé singer set atop a plaintive pan flute melody; instead of a hi-hat, the steady boom-bap beat lands on a tambourine hit. Brown knows a thing or two about juxtaposition and here he delivers on the promise he makes in “Accelerator,” weaving a tale of street life and addiction that’s anything but glamorous. Brown details days spent hustling “just to get up out the gutter,” admits to “serving out our momma’s house” and finally concedes, “the pain never ends.” Still, the song’s ultimate message is one of defiance in the face of hopelessness: “We gotta break the cycle, a future for our kids/You see it half empty, I see it half full.”
White’s audaciousness on Accelerator is commendable, though the single suffers a bit for its maximalism. As bold as Atrocity Exhibition was, it also felt refined, with the record’s sharpest edges counterbalanced by moments of restraint. Accelerator throws that moderation out the window, resulting in two songs that feel unnecessarily cluttered; in particular, the vocal loop that runs throughout “Lion’s Den” distracts from Brown’s rapping, holding back what’s very nearly a great song. That said, both of these tracks do seem to be abrasive by design—like White is intentionally pitching curveballs at Brown, just to see if he can hit them. To that end, Accelerator also feels like a dare to any other emcees who think they could tackle these beats. It seems unlikely that very many will try. | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap / Rock | R&S | February 16, 2017 | 6.9 | 621c457a-465d-4d45-ad0e-6ee04ff3f018 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The Cardamom Times EP sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. Project leader Natalie Mering sings with a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition, and her arrangements are at once classic and sneakily innovative. | The Cardamom Times EP sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. Project leader Natalie Mering sings with a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition, and her arrangements are at once classic and sneakily innovative. | Weyes Blood: Cardamom Times EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21116-cardamom-times-ep/ | Cardamom Times EP | Weyes Blood is the project of multi-instrument folk musician Natalie Mering. She recorded the four-song Cardamom Times EP on a reel-to-reel deck in her Rockaway, N.Y., home studio; it sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. The playing is patient and assured, and you can't say enough about her voice, a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition. She has the kind of voice that’s both distinctive and familiar, and it fits perfect with her style: the arrangements are at once classic, sneakily innovative, and entirely her own.
Cardamon Times follows Mering's second album, 2014's The Innocents. It's more pure, and the overall sound is less composed. Instead of a complex studio creation, it comes off like an overheard monologue in the woods. The rural, solitary video for the stunning five-and-a-half-minute closer "In the Beginning", which was shot on Super 8 film in Northern Canada and finds Mering wandering the countryside by herself, captures this feel.
Cardamom sounds a bit like an archival folk collection but it's filled with suprising details. The lengthy "Take You There" opens with a minute of melancholic organ drone; for the rest of the track, she sings over the fluctuating keys without any percussion. Opener "Maybe Love" has pretty, Sundays-like guitar strums and eventually, at songs's end, noise is layered beneath ghostly multi-tracked voices. On "Cardamom", her voice is almost distorted beside crystal clear guitar picking and a piping flute. As you listen more closely, subtle touches distance Mering's music from the purely nostalgic.
Her lyrics feel personal. Cardamom Times mostly focuses on love, lost and found and lost again. "Maybe Love" includes the touching, realistic detail: "I like seeing you notice me/ When I’m feeling better about/ You and me." The old-timey sounding "Cardamom" snaps into the present when she sings: "I like your band, can I hold your hand this time?/ Do you find what I do kind of cool?/ Would we last a minute or two?" Nothing seems permanent here, even when the music is timeless.
"In the Beginning", her best song to date, features a melancholic but catchy melody and an arrangement of guitars and organs and her voice. She sings about a field of stars. She sings about suffering and changing, of bittersweet meetings that happen at the wrong time. She asks "Have you ever walked in on a Queen before?" She admits she's not trying to relate at the moment. And she just keeps going, and it's astonishing. Her music seems so simple at first, but it keeps deepening. | 2015-10-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Kemado / Mexican Summer | October 16, 2015 | 7.7 | 622286ef-7b28-41bd-8e77-33d14d4578ba | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Levon Vincent's self-titled record, which consists of 11 tracks spread across eight sides of vinyl, is a half-lit maze, an exploration of dance music at its most subterranean. But even as the record reinforces his reputation as one of techno's most determined purists, it also suggests that his talents are more varied than perhaps anyone has given him credit for. | Levon Vincent's self-titled record, which consists of 11 tracks spread across eight sides of vinyl, is a half-lit maze, an exploration of dance music at its most subterranean. But even as the record reinforces his reputation as one of techno's most determined purists, it also suggests that his talents are more varied than perhaps anyone has given him credit for. | Levon Vincent: Levon Vincent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20276-levon-vincent/ | Levon Vincent | Levon Vincent's self-titled record, which consists of 11 tracks spread across eight sides of vinyl, is a half-lit maze, an exploration of dance music at its most subterranean. But even as the record reinforces his reputation as one of techno's most determined purists, it also suggests that his talents are more varied than perhaps anyone has given him credit for.
Vincent, a New Yorker now based in Berlin, has been making records since the early 2000s, but only in the past six or seven years has become a key figure in the underground. He's a bit like techno's own Fugazi: He has mentored up-and-coming artists, supporting them out of his own pocket, and he uploads vinyl rips of his own releases to SoulSeek. (In fact, the day before this album was to hit shops, he gave it away via WeTransfer.) His records, mostly self-released on his own Novel Sound label, may sell in modest numbers, perhaps a few thousand copies apiece, but sales are only a small part of the story. On YouTube, some of his tracks and DJ sets have been played hundreds of thousands of times. Those numbers might be surprising, even to his fans, given the monochromatic rigor of his music, its single-mindedness. His productions are radically austere and unusually somber—the color of an overcast sky, or a bruise.
That hasn't changed, exactly. The music on his debut album is moody and, sometimes, a little counterintuitive. It's not necessarily trying to be difficult, but it's intractable out of habit. Drums are scarce, for one thing, at least for a techno record: The four-to-the-floor kick is omnipresent, but for long stretches, the merest hint of washed-out hi-hat is the only percussive element audible. Swathed in murk, these skeletal sounds give the impression of stone rubbings, or a metal frame showing through where paint has been worn away. "Phantom Power" goes even further and does away with the low end entirely; for more than five minutes, it is as though the bass EQ has been turned all the way down, leaving tentative synthesizer figures tumbling weightlessly in midair. Which only accentuates the pile-driving wallops of the following track, "Junkies on Hermann Strasse", a classic Basic Channel-style clanger as physical and pliable as sheet metal. "Junkies" eventually dissolves into a cacophonous delay chain as contorted as Cabaret Voltaire's early tape works, but not everything on the album is so relentless or so ugly. "For Mona, My Beloved Cat, Rest in Peace" is every bit as sentimental as the title promises; this time there is no kick drum, just hi-hats mapping infinity across a glowing swirl of keyboards and mallet instruments, part Philip Glass and part Rainbow Bridge.
There's plenty of "proper" techno to be found here; "Anti-Corporate Music" comes closest to the dubby style of Vincent's singles, with its brushed stainless steel textures and its deeper-than-deep sub-bass. (The title offers a glimpse of the politics implicit in Vincent's DIY project. "This is music for the ugly ducklings of the world," he wrote in a Facebook post announcing the LP. "If you're a member of the rat race…you may of course listen, but know—this is not music for you. This is action against you.") But nothing on Levon Vincent is merely functional, and some of the best cuts jam a crowbar into club-music convention. For its first seven minutes, the side-long "Launch Ramp to tha Sky" unrolls relatively smoothly, just a lively, vibraphone-like lead over swinging cymbals and chilly reverb. Without warning, the beat falls away and is replaced by slack organ riffing, and that, in turn, gives way to a chromatic freakout laced with angel choir. Piling nightly-news themes atop dial-tone fugue, this coda to the coda is as unabashedly prog as a gatefold LP sticky with weed resin; give a medal to the DJ who manages to play the whole side to a dancefloor and get away with it.
Thanks to its pared-down gear list and capricious flow, Levon Vincent feels like the work of someone left alone in the studio, sketching in real time with what's at hand and moving on. And that spontaneity gives it an even greater sense of intimacy. My favorite track, "Black Arm w/ Wolf", is, in many ways, the most melodic, with a stately bassline and contrapuntal melody that could lodge in your head for days. The tune is daubed on in broad strokes, left to drift free of the beat—a sure sign that it was played by hand and not drawn across a grid in the browser window. Throughout it all, Vincent keeps his hand on the knob that controls the cymbals' pitch, and they rise and fall like swallows at dusk. It's freedom rendered four bars at a time—a snapshot of utopia that's made with dancefloors in mind, but not limited to them. | 2015-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Novel Sound | March 3, 2015 | 8.3 | 6224664b-4d0f-48c0-b2cf-5e0d58a56d1a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The German experimental musician teams up with a Japanese organist prone to taping down the keys of his instrument; together, they conjure massive, buzzing slabs of drone. | The German experimental musician teams up with a Japanese organist prone to taping down the keys of his instrument; together, they conjure massive, buzzing slabs of drone. | Jan Jelinek / Asuna: Signals Bulletin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jan-jelinek-asuna-signals-bulletin/ | Signals Bulletin | Among the turn-of-the-century click + cuts crew, Berlin’s Jan Jelinek stood out against his low-key contemporaries. Flickering masterpieces like Loop-finding-jazz-records and Textstar—deeply listenable rather than dial-up noisy—outlasted the subgenre. But in the ensuing decades, Jelinek has gravitated towards more destabilizing terrain: glottal sound art, woozy vibraphone, avant-garde radio plays, and collages incorporating the voice of the future President of the United States.
A live performance by Naoyuki Arashi, the Japanese sound artist and organist also known as Asuna, enticed Jelinek with yet another topsy-turvy sound. Asuna’s method involves methodically taping down keys on his organ, generating dense cluster drones with an economy of movement Jelinek compares to “the calm gestures of an office worker.” Jelinek describes Asuna’s static, barely changing sounds as “a music without breaks.” Signals Bulletin captures their subsequent collaborations over the past three years; it is the densest, most opaque of Jelinek’s recent works.
“Relief,” the 13-minute opener, is at a slight remove from the warm, weird terrariums of sound Jelinek makes with vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. It’s dreamy and incremental, its drones built from hums and the slow swell of Asuna’s taped-down keys. But it’s also uneventful and bulky, tethered in one place rather than properly adrift. Its most visceral moment comes as it approaches the 12-minute mark, turning suddenly spare and dark, wherein unmentionable rustles become menacing. The near-growling noises that draw the piece to a close feel frustratingly incomplete.
Another epic excursion follows, but this one, the 11-minute “Pulsating Primary Structure,” teems with life, suggesting further possibilities the two might achieve in the future. The piece is built from gentle thrums that incrementally increase in pressure until they are relentless in their throb. The way Jelinek and Asuna stack tiny sounds can be deceptive: Tracking their movements is like studying a colony of ants piling up grains of sand and suddenly realizing that the heap is the size of the Taj Mahal.
In comparison, the four-minute “Fountain” feels like a musique-concrète bagatelle. It’s full of whooshes, bloops, R2-D2 whistles, and rubbed-crystal drones, but nothing really sticks together. The slightly longer “How a Spiral Works” features the same slab-like keyboard drones and some oscillations from Jelinek’s setup; the piece in another exercise in increasing the density of sound and then ever so slowly peeling back the layers. As it diminishes, you might catch Terry Riley-like arpeggios, shuffling footsteps, the clicks of a birthday-party noisemaker, and some whistles from the audience as they all shake out of the mix.
Despite the lengthy opening tracks, closer “Blinking of Countless Lines” weighs heaviest, topping 14 minutes. For the first half of it, the metallic drones the two conjure are the album’s most dizzying, about as serene as an alien abduction. By the midway point, Jelinek’s whirlpool loops and oscillations wash over the piece. Although busier on the surface, his contributions match Asuna’s in that their respective elements barely change across the tracks’ durations. But the music feels smothering rather than immersive; relief comes only when the two open up space within the sound. Signals Bulletin, a music without breaks, could use more breathing room. | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Faitiche | April 11, 2019 | 6.7 | 62264589-8f90-4c68-aab4-0bc0c178b7d2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
From knotty wordplay to hip-hop in-jokes only a head would attempt, the North Carolina rapper’s latest mixtape provides much to savor. | From knotty wordplay to hip-hop in-jokes only a head would attempt, the North Carolina rapper’s latest mixtape provides much to savor. | Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon : I’ve Really Never Been Better | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lord-jah-monte-ogbon-ive-really-never-been-better/ | I’ve Really Never Been Better | Listening to a Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon mixtape has the same episodic feeling as reading the latest issue of your favorite comic book. It’s just nice to hear what nuggets of hip-hop history he mines (“I’ma have to teach these new boys to stay on yo’ feet like the New Boyz”), pop culture references he weaves into his twisty wordplay (“Next year see my bitch on the cover of Time like Naomi Campbell, no more Campbells”), and double-take inducing relationship drama he gets himself into: “Don’t ask about my rising moon ma’, I don’t give a damn.” He reps his birthplace—Akron, Ohio—and the city where he was raised—Charlotte, North Carolina—but brings to mind wordplay virtuosos of ’90s and ‘00s New York, from Ghost to Cam to MF DOOM; in an interview, he geeks out over an Mm..Food? lyric that took him until his “30 or 40th” listen to comprehend.
His latest project, I’ve Really Never Been Better, is another solid entry into his fast-growing catalog. The raps are fly, punchlines sharp even when they occasionally border on nonsense; songs are sprinkled with comical tricks that only a hip-hop head would attempt. For example, it’s a cliché right of passage to pen a rosy ode to your first love, one that comes away with some sort of vague lesson (see: Slick Rick’s “Teenage Love”). But Jah-Monte is aware of how played-out that is, and on “Eight Pregnancy Scares” the skeptical voice of “the one that got away” chimes in repeatedly with fact checks. “You wrote this whole song about me being your truest love, stop lying,” the voice says at the end, an audio hand to the face. He’s basically putting on his rap critic hat.
Jah-Monte won’t bullshit you; he doesn’t shy away from describing his flaws in his affairs and flame outs, though he gets a kick out of acting irrationally. On “Receipts & Screenshots,” a fling is ruined after the items in the song’s title are presented against him; he responds by calling his lover a “cop.” A confrontation on the opener leads him to command “If I’m sittin’ in the judgment seat, at least ho rub my feet.” Most of the time, he’s just having fun getting off flagrant boasts: “Don’t @ me unless you look like Tracee Ellis Ross,” he barks on “Nah She Got Little.” Or cracking jokes about the underground rap grind—from being done with Greyhound bus rides to imagining one day sending Beyoncé and Rihanna an invoice for a feature.
What holds back I’ve Really Never Been Better relative to better projects like 2021’s Too Little, Too Late and 2022’s Here, There & Everywhere, is the beats. They’re fairly warm yet anonymous soul and funk loops that feel like lesser versions of a style you can find everywhere in New York and New Jersey right now. To the credit of Jah-Monte—as well as guests like the sharp-tongued Denzel Davon—he often sounds too cool to suffer, like when he spits “New BBC apparel, cupid missed with his arrow/Was nominated like Will Ferrell, not singing Christmas carols,” which is rapped in such a blur that it took me three or four listens to parse. Savoring his rhymes and going back to find the wisecracks that previously went over your head is the point; his mixtapes are a world you want to spend time in. | 2023-07-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Jewelry Rap Productions | July 12, 2023 | 7.1 | 6234c499-094b-4736-99db-cea517f85ff7 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
It was the worst day of my life. I get home from the plant and there's my woman: rolling ... | It was the worst day of my life. I get home from the plant and there's my woman: rolling ... | Okkervil River: Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5960-dont-fall-in-love-with-everyone-you-see/ | Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See | It was the worst day of my life. I get home from the plant and there's my woman: rolling around in my bed with my best pal, Big Whitey. And there's my mutt sitting on the floor, watching them go at it with his stupid dog-grin. I just can't get that image out of my mind. Man, I flew into a crazy rage, stormed out to my 81 Buick and tore dirt right out of that greazy hellhole.
The only thing that helps this pain in my gut is the new album by Okkervil River. I don't know what you'd call their music-- alt-country or indie rock or avant-folk or some such crossbred super-genre. Calms the nerves, though. Sure, it's kind of a downer, but without hitting the gutbucket misery of real country. And Okkervil can also let fly, too: the best song on the album, "Lady Liberty," smokes like a raccoon in a chimney, with horns blasting behind singer Will Sheff as he moans about loving the wrong woman. "I can picture you inside some stranger's house/ Inside some stranger's bed/ You're trying to seem mysterious/ The covers pulled over your head." Ain't nothin' stings like the truth.
Okkervil River sounds like a loose outfit; their self-released 1999 debut, Stars Too Small to Use was raw, shambling stuff, but with this new record they're starting to pull it together. The songwriting is impressively poignant, and the music is as tight and comforting as any old noose: under producer and engineer Brian Beattie's wing, the band has filled out and arranged these songs beautifully with every southern-flavored instrument you could dream up-- mandolin, pedal steel, fiddle, organ, and strings and horns. The record maintains a nice, lush air, but manages to stay somehow raucous simultaneously-- it's ponderous indie rock and country charm frequenting each other's local haunts.
But while these guys may be rising stars, they're still looking for comfort and a little love, if the lyrics are any indication. Damned if "My Bad Days," for one, isn't as stark as they come: Sheff can sound like a man who's been beaten back to a lost little boy. "Dead Dog Song" is a mandolin-propelled tune with great, hokey lyrics ("He'd never been to church, so he doesn't have a soul"). And the guys even bring in Daniel Johnston to duet on "Happy Hearts," just coming straight out and pleading for what we're all after: "Unconditional love, why did you leave me?" Come on, guys, you're killing me.
But one song in particular got my attention: "Westfall," the account of a murderer coming to trial. As alt-country serial killer ballads go, this one has nothing on Jim White's "The Wound That Never Heals"-- but it's a good song about evil and murder, and it almost sounds convincing when these nice boys sing: "They're looking for evil/ Thinking they can trace it/ But evil don't look like anything."
So it's past two in the morning and I'm still driving, when suddenly I see someone by the side of the road-- a woman, hitch-hiking-- and damned if she doesn't look like, well... just like my wife on her best day (twenty years ago). I know it can't be her, but I'm transfixed. She's got her thumb out and though I know it's wrong, I decide to pull over. I swerve to the side of the road and let her walk up to my car. Satan was arm-wrestling for my soul, but this time the Lord won: I hit the gas and skidded away before she got to my door. She didn't look too happy, but hell, she doesn't know how close she came to having something awful happen to her, 'cause I know I'm still in a funny mood. Anyway, there isn't room enough in the trunk for a third body. | 2002-04-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-04-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 1, 2002 | 7.2 | 62370137-81ef-4079-bf56-0a1560040325 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
While Brooklyn's Dawn of Midi shares the instrumental makeup of famous jazz aligments, their new album Dysnomia focuses on rhythm and dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. | While Brooklyn's Dawn of Midi shares the instrumental makeup of famous jazz aligments, their new album Dysnomia focuses on rhythm and dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. | Dawn of Midi: Dysnomia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18308-dawn-of-midi-dysnomia/ | Dysnomia | The three guys in Brooklyn’s Dawn of Midi play a grand piano, an upright contrabass, and a drum kit-- the same instrumentation used in traditional jazz piano trios. But it’s tricky to say where Dawn of Midi's new album Dysnomia fits within the jazz pantheon, if it even fits in there at all. Unlike their minimalist free jazz debut First, Dawn of Midi meticulously scripted and scored Dysnomia. For 46 continuous minutes, the trio inverts free jazz into bound jazz, torturing their instruments by playing as few notes as humanly possible. They write barely-there melodies that chase their own tails. They establish mercurial rhythms that are confusingly simple -- three humans dovetailing instrumental loops into thousands of subtly different permutations. It sounds close to an acoustic Beak> session playing a Steve Reich composition, though even closer to something totally unprecedented.
There’s been plenty of jazz groups that tried to reach out to the rock kids in recent years-- The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau (both trios, incidentally) have shown up on the radar with covers of indie rock songs, though the covers feel more like like a bait and switch operations to get a wayward rockist into their more straight-ahead jazz charts. Unlike those groups, Dawn of Midi aren’t interested in coddling the uninitiated into the world of trading fours and Dmaj11 chords. On Dysnomia, they more interested in, or rather wholly focused on, rhythm. It's a new bridge out of traditional jazz to the rest of the world, and it's built with obsessive precision.
The pilgrimage begins with Aakaash Israni suggesting a tempo with two-note bass line. Then Amino Belyamani counters with one or two notes played with one hand while the other mutes the strings inside the body of the piano, making the piano melodies on Dysnomia sound more often like a thwack on a cymbal stand or some Eastern banjo. The polyrhythms of the bass and piano lap each other until Qasim Naqvi connects all the pulses on on the kit and, for a sustained moment, trio is in sync. And when they coalesce like this it’s so rewarding in that kind of pseudo-spiritual way, like when the tempo of the windshield wipers match up with the music in your car. But they all soon disengage and the three scatter off into new orbits at new speeds and prepare to align again.
This rubric that Dawn of Midi uses-- the lost and found, the tension and release-- has its closest cousins the digital world of Orbital, DJ Shadow, or Aphex Twin. The very real instruments on Dysnomia start to transform into breakbeats, ambient textures, a house hi-hat on “Nix”, all with gradual builds with a few “drops” here and there. With a sleek mix by Rusty Santos, who engineered Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs and mixed Owen Pallett’s Heartland, it also shares more with these avant indie albums that used looped acoustic instruments to create free-form dance music-- the "j-word" has little to do with it.
The ultimate irony of Dysnomia is that by playing with musical restraint, they discover whole new avenues of sound that's focused on rhythm, dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. And while it may be closest in spirit to ambient electronica or American minimalism, it retains the tenor of a human, organic quest for something spiritual and transformative. Who knew a grand piano, a contrabass, and a drum kit could actually get people nodding their heads the same way a DJ could? Dawn of Midi’s first triumph isn’t just a sleeker Can, or a more narcotic Battles, or a catnip for Radiohead fans who enjoy arguing whether or not “Pyramid Song” is in 4/4. It’s not just a piano trio that’s subverting the tenets of jazz, either. It’s a missing link for two camps that have been diametrically opposed for years, speaking different musical languages and mostly failing to communicate. Guess no one ever thought to try to get the kids dancing. | 2013-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Thirsty Ear | August 6, 2013 | 7.9 | 6240319e-3840-4336-a538-b682085e2a45 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
As gentle as cherry blossoms on a spring breeze, the Minnesota musicians’ lush compositions for saxophone, piano, and synthesizer convey a wealth of feeling. | As gentle as cherry blossoms on a spring breeze, the Minnesota musicians’ lush compositions for saxophone, piano, and synthesizer convey a wealth of feeling. | Lynn Avery / Cole Pulice: To Live & Die in Space & Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lynn-avery-cole-pulice-to-live-and-die-in-space-and-time/ | To Live & Die in Space & Time | To Live & Die in Space & Time is Lynn Avery and Cole Pulice’s debut album as a duo, but the Minneapolis musicians have been making music in parallel, and occasionally together, for some time. Recording since 2017 under the alias Iceblink, Avery first developed a cozy, playful style of hypnagogic pop. The tape-warped psychedelia of her early releases hinted at Broadcast and Boards of Canada, and on 2020’s Carpet Cocoon, she folded new age, folk, and jazz into the mix, adding Pulice and fellow Minnesotan Mitch Stahlmann on saxophone and flute. Pulice concentrated their 2020 solo debut, Gloam, on the meditative sounds of tenor saxophone and softly glowing electronics; recording live without overdubs, they traded Avery’s lilting chord changes and lysergic easy listening for drone-based minimalism and airy soundscaping. Avery, Pulice, and Stahlmann also made a trio record together in 2020, stretching woodwinds and synths into gauzy abstractions reminiscent of Visible Cloaks. But on To Live & Die in Space & Time, Avery and Pulice tighten their focus, striking a careful balance between melody and mood.
Like almost everything they have done together, To Live & Die in Space & Time is as gentle as cherry blossoms on a spring breeze. Pulice plays saxophone and wind synthesizer, Avery plays piano and synthesizer, and both are credited with additional electronics, which they tend to daub on in translucent background layers. The music is too lush to be called minimal, at least by the term’s more austerely digital connotations, but they keep their tools simple, their tempos slow, and their playing unfussy. Channeling a mix of whimsy and wide-eyed wonder, they come off a little bit like contemporary heirs of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a Brian Eno-produced group that spun bits of folk, jazz, and classical into a loose ambient weave; another reference point might be the new-age jazz of the British group Dif Juz’s 1985 album Extractions and their Elizabeth Fraser collaboration “Love Insane.”
It’s a short record, just 27 minutes, and it opens with the shortest of the four songs: “Belt of Venus,” setting Pulice’s circular melodies over a muted, lazy spiral of arpeggiated synth. Their playing is so lyrical that it practically takes on the qualities of verse. The initial phrase, searching and higher in pitch, voices a question; a second, half an octave down, offers a contemplative answer. Despite the music’s tranquility, it’s not as simple as it seems: Bursts of delay occasionally resemble hammering woodpeckers, and the background is a perpetually shifting moiré of dynamic colors and textures. Not much longer, “Plantwood (Day)” is similar in form and feel, with Pulice’s saxophone gracefully garlanding a watery, waltz-time arpeggio. This time it’s Avery’s piano that assumes the center of the frame. Patiently, she lays down soft yet blocky chords, then lets them fade, until you’d almost forgotten there was a piano in the room at all. She changes the voicing almost every time, shifting the tonal center almost imperceptibly; like Ryuichi Sakamoto, she conveys a wealth of feeling out of the smallest gestures.
On “Stained Glass Sauna,” they sink deeper into their invented soundworld. Pulice’s synthesized flute lends an unmistakably pastoral air; a gently propulsive synth pattern suggests dub techno played on a deep-sea marimba. The sense of immersion becomes total on “The Sunken Cabin (Night),” a melancholy, 13-minute fantasia that recalls Nala Sinephro’s brooding “Space 8,” and marks the dreamy outer limit of the album’s ambient new-age excursions. Over soft, sustained synthesizer pads, Avery and Pulice engage in a relaxed improvisational exchange. Though the saxophone is typically a lead instrument, given its range and its cutting timbre, it doesn’t dominate here; Pulice leaves ample space for Avery’s piano, and vice versa. Their mutual give and take feels both natural and exploratory. Avery begins by mulling over a single chord but gradually moves outward, as though mapping unknown territory.
To Live & Die in Space & Time often feels like overhearing a conversation between two close friends, and listening to “The Sunken Cabin (Night),” can seem like eavesdropping on their most intimate thoughts. An air of mystery abides, and there are occasional intimations of darkness: Occasionally, Pulice will bend a note on their saxophone, hinting at unspoken pain. New age and ambient alike can sometimes fall prey to the facile or the saccharine, but not here. By tempering sunny idyll with passing shadows, Avery and Pulice achieve a depth of expression that’s hard to quantify but easy to recognize: It simply feels true. | 2022-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Jazz | Moon Glyph | March 10, 2022 | 7.7 | 62412d0b-9b34-40b9-ba86-467c7f2634f1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their fourth album, the visionary English experimenters conjure a sinister and beguiling new world. | On their fourth album, the visionary English experimenters conjure a sinister and beguiling new world. | These New Puritans: Inside the Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/these-new-puritans-inside-the-rose/ | Inside the Rose | What if the Knife had peaked in the heyday of MTV Unplugged? What if James Blake and Scott Walker co-produced an Oliver Sim solo album? What if someone slipped a Nine Inch Nails CD to those singing monks from the ’90s? Such are the undreamed-of questions answered, at various times, by Inside the Rose, the fourth studio album by Essex shape-shifters These New Puritans, whose website summary describes them, with maddening understatement, as “an English experimental music group whose music is not easily categorized.”
Still, attempts have been made. Twin brothers Jack and George Barnett—now the group’s sole members, following a decade of periodic collaboration with Thomas Hein, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, and a 35-piece orchestra—started by exorcising their most evident influences: twitchy UK post-rave acts like Aphex Twin, itchy UK post-punk bands like the Fall, and caressing UK post-rockers like Bark Psychosis. (The latter’s Graham Sutton has been helping produce TNPs records since their second album Hidden, where the guitars of post-punk revival subsided behind subby EDM and new-music bassoons.) This inventory of early influences highlights two enduring qualities of a mercurial group: They live in spaces where conventional genre descriptions fall short, and they’re very, very English.
As These New Puritans evolved into a visionary post-classical pop group, their music became marked by the whisper of war, a bellicose current their first great song made overt. Inside the Rose opener “Infinity Vibraphones” is swept with evil-armada strings and battlefield snares, even as it spills imperceptibly from something adjacent to “Carol of the Bells” into silky vibraphone jazz. On “Into the Fire,” an adrenalized electronic scribble scrambles through a fortress of piano chords pounded by drums. Yet the group render warlike tropes so gently, with such containment and poise, that they seem to dramatize figurative battles of the heart rather than literal ones.
Putting aside musical intricacies, Inside the Rose just sounds amazing, conjuring a lustrous, lucid world shaken by distant explosions. The drones of strings, pianos, and electronics are offset by bright accents of tuned percussion, sustaining an atmosphere of anticipation and wonder. Jack Barnett’s voice is a heavy syrup, flowing without friction through crevices in capacious compositions. On each song, a few spare elements are blown up huge and then riveted down in a way that ought to feel airless, but instead pulses with energy. “Anti-Gravity” makes a trap kit sound like a concert timpani, as a phrase that seems to flicker between “never give up” and “never get up” steps down through an arrangement like winding stairs.
These New Puritans have developed a sound that is at once unusually specific and unusually vague, matching music and lyrics in a mode of soft, insistent questioning that opens and opens without ever disclosing its cloistered center. “Isn’t life a funny thing?/All these words and they say nothing,” Barnett intones as “Beyond Black Suns” shivers toward its operatic conclusion. This kind of diffident eloquence pervades an album that realizes more vividly than ever before the bewitching world These New Puritans discovered after they went off the map: One where sound communicates more than speech, serenity is sinister, and obscurity is less like a solid wall than an abstract door to possibility. | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | March 22, 2019 | 7.8 | 62442a78-635d-4648-bc3e-8a2ef9fea05f | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The Psalm Zero frontman and Zs alum reckons with the rise of fascism—and his internal struggle against its insidious appeal—on a debut solo album of unusually confrontational modern classical music. | The Psalm Zero frontman and Zs alum reckons with the rise of fascism—and his internal struggle against its insidious appeal—on a debut solo album of unusually confrontational modern classical music. | Charlie Looker: Simple Answers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlie-looker-simple-answers/ | Simple Answers | Six years ago, New York-based multi-instrumentalist Charlie Looker began composing his debut solo record, Simple Answers, as a meditation on the rise of fascism in the West. Although its genesis (but not its recording, a process facilitated by a Kickstarter campaign last year) predates the current presidential administration, and critics can easily overstate that regime’s influence on individual works of art, there’s no divorcing the album from where America is at now. “When the wound is fresh and open, bad ideas find their way in,” Looker chants on closing track “Puppet.” “And when our state is broke and trembling, we want answers—simple answers.” But in 2018, our wounds aren’t fresh anymore, the answers are often far from simple, and the distance between what we crave and what we have makes Simple Answers a powerful piece of modern classical music.
Informed in parts by the sounds of Looker’s industrial metal band, Psalm Zero, the album is inspired by the work of French philosopher and writer Julia Kristeva, as well as late comedian Patrice O’Neal. Kristeva speaks of fascism as an internal energy to be sublimated rather than an external force that can be defeated, and Looker sees those ideas mirrored in O’Neal’s standup, which is sampled on the crucial track “Fascist Moments”: “The promise of me being better than you makes my fucking whole life,” the comedian says. “I made a decision to be quote-unquote a good guy. My natural instincts stop.” The sentences are deliberately taken out of context, turning humor into horror. Through O’Neal, Looker is doing more than just passively observing the seductive power “might makes right” politics have over the Proud Boys who co-opted Looker’s beloved Fred Perry polos—he’s acknowledging his own susceptibility to their appeal.
There’s plenty of bombast to mirror such temptation on the album. Many of Looker’s roaring compositions could soundtrack marches if ripped from their context. “What Dawn Is This? (Overture)” is an ominous choral passage that foreshadows the overarching mood of Answers, if not to the mess of sounds that follow the string-heavy prelude. Kelly Moran, a New York pianist who also performed on Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, loops with dexterity throughout “Golden Flesh.” Her performance is blissful yet tense, keeping Looker on his toes.
These sweeping gestures don’t ultimately resonate as celebrations of fascism; they demonstrate the dangers lurking behind its allure. Psalm Zero’s drum machines and electronics disrupt the majestic swagger of Answers, weighing down and gleefully perverting the music, as though Looker is spitting in the face of people who confuse their own flailing mediocrity with “the West is best” heroics. (As he once said, “I hate racism, and I love classical music.”) “Ritual Fire” is the closest the album gets to a Psalm Zero track, throbbing with bass undercurrents, pounding bass drum, and an anxious string climax that soundtracks Looker’s scream: “Gas my lungs to hell, gas my lungs to hell!” It’s a dark reference to his Jewish heritage couched in a deliberate provocation.
Although it rarely sounds this confrontational, the modern classical form allows Looker to achieve a visceral sound without any hulking guitars. “Puppet” opens with staccato horns over bumping drum machine, then homes in on Looker’s tender voice, which has long been the core of his projects. As the piece continues, the repetitive sing-song of his voice, the loosening of the drum-machine beats, and the rising strings all coalesce in a wave of helplessness. This is not an admission of defeat—it’s a realistic acknowledgment that, for all the introspection Answers encourages, the internal and external battles with fascism rage on.
Looker, whose work in Extra Life, Zs, and Seaven Teares has made him a fixture of avant-garde music, introduced himself to a metal audience with Psalm Zero. Although Simple Answers is not a metal record, it’s in conversation with the genre’s foundational themes. Metal celebrates power and dominance through brute, masculine force. This energy is not inherently negative—inspiration to take control of your own life can be a good thing—but it can be toxic in the wrong hands. (There may even be some pointed critique of this strain of metal in the electronics on “Fascist Moments,” which resemble those on Burzum’s ambient piece “Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte.”) Looker contemplates the fascism lying dormant within him and rejects it, defying genre borders by bringing elements from pop and New York’s longstanding experimental traditions to the ostensibly stodgy world of classical. His honesty is a more effective weapon in the war we’re all fighting than moral grandstanding could ever be. | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Last Things | June 26, 2018 | 7.6 | 62492b90-2bdb-439b-b607-b0f77bec0c6c | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
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 hard-fought third album by the D.C. hardcore icons who played faster and better than everyone else. | 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 hard-fought third album by the D.C. hardcore icons who played faster and better than everyone else. | Bad Brains: I Against I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-brains-i-against-i/ | I Against I | The hand-drawn cover of Bad Brains’ 1982 self-titled cassette featured a gigantic lightning bolt blowing the 15,000-pound Statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol building to bits. Mississippi Senator and later President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis oversaw the statue’s 1863 installation, ensuring that it met every design specification except for one: Davis, a slaveholder, removed the statue’s liberty cap—a Roman symbol of an emancipated slave.
With the self-titled cassette and 1983’s Rock for Light album under their belts, the four Black members of Bad Brains had become highly respected outliers playing punk rock in a sea of their white peers. Singer H.R., his brother and the band’s drummer Earl Hudson, guitarist Dr. Know, and bassist Darryl Jenifer toured relentlessly in a van they named “The Slave Ship.” Revered for their skilled musicianship, their ability to play at breakneck speed, and H.R.’s flamboyantly shape-shifting voice and persona, Bad Brains were a force, a phenomenon. If punk was the snotty, irreverent response to the pretentious and bloated rock of the 1970s, Bad Brains were a lightning bolt sent to blow up punk.
In November 1986, after a three-year absence, Bad Brains released I Against I—a gripping, heavy, futuristic rock album that left some fans missing the lightspeed precision and spiritual enlightenment that had become the band’s signatures. Bad Brains’ music had always included elements of reggae and dub, but I Against I was their least punk and least reggae album. In the same year that Janet Jackson injected club culture into Control, Run-D.M.C. desegregated rap and rock on Raising Hell, and Metallica introduced refined thrash metal to the mainstream with Master of Puppets, Bad Brains released an equally groundbreaking album. But while I Against I’s legacy is far-reaching, Bad Brains remain relegated to underground hero status.
Formed as teenagers in the Washington, D.C. area in the late ’70s, Bad Brains drew inspiration from accomplished jazz fusion artists like Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra, but when they discovered bands like Dead Boys and Sex Pistols in a friend’s record collection, they were consumed by the energy of punk. They found similar inspiration at a Bob Marley concert, where they began to embrace Rastafarianism and Africanism. Bad Brains connected with the shared ideals in these seemingly contradictory styles: Freedom, unity, and self-expression.
In the 2012 documentary Bad Brains: A Band in D.C., guitarist Dr. Know described the band’s early vision: “We were going to play faster and more technical[ly] than the Ramones, and be more chaotic than The Damned.” By 1980, after H.R.’s father gave him a copy of the self-improvement manual Think and Grow Rich, Bad Brains had also become obsessed with the concept of P.M.A., or “positive mental attitude.” Their early songs were two-minute-ish blasts of kinetic energy that shared punk rock’s themes of rebellion but preached a more positive message. As the repetitive lyrics of “Attitude” state, “Don’t care what they may say. We got that attitude! Don’t care what they may do. We got that attitude! Hey, we got that P.M.A.!”
Bad Brains’ P.M.A. was evident in H.R.’s warm, melodic sneer, which was the band’s focal point. He could scream and howl intensely, but when H.R. sang, it was with an unusual sweetness that felt fresh and uplifting against the backdrop of the ferocious Bad Brains. During early live shows, H.R. often performed backflips between explosions of lyrics. He might spend more time moshing in the audience than on the stage.
The band quickly gained a local following in D.C., including Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and a pre-Black Flag Henry Rollins, who recalled in the same documentary, “It was the summer of 1979. Word was that there was an all-Black punk rock band in Washington, D.C. Never seen one of those before.” When Bad Brains relocated to New York City later that year, they became an anomaly once again in the burgeoning hardcore scene—four Black men who played faster and better than everyone else at the mostly white CBGB. H.R. never screamed, “Black Power!”; Bad Brains simply embodied it.
Born Paul Hudson in Liverpool, England in 1956, H.R.’s family moved to Jamaica (where he discovered reggae at age 3), Texas, Alabama, and New York before settling in D.C. He demonstrated early athletic prowess as a swimmer and a pole vaulter, skills he later used in his band. But Bad Brains’ fearless, thrashing frontman could also be erratic. H.R. arrived late for shows and occasionally missed them altogether. Onstage he sometimes replaced his storied backflips with long periods of stillness, during which he didn’t sing at all. Rumors swirled of everything from drug use to schizophrenia. It took years of this confusing behavior to discover that H.R. suffered from a rare neurological disorder called SUNCT, and it wasn’t until 2017 that he finally underwent successful brain surgery for the condition.
Both of Bad Brains’ early albums featured a few markedly slow, bass-heavy, sun-drenched songs that serve as moments of respite between all-out sprints. H.R. wanted to move further into reggae but other members resisted, so after the Rock for Light tour, he and Earl left the band. H.R. released the first of many solo albums, It’s About Luv, in 1985.
H.R.’s time away cooled things temporarily, and H.R. and Earl rejoined Bad Brains to play two New York shows in July 1985. The rehearsals became the writing sessions for I Against I. Unlike many of their hardcore peers, Bad Brains weren’t concerned with “selling out”—not only did P.M.A. apply to every aspect of life, but it pushed them to strive for success. Though they’d fielded interest from major record labels since their early days, H.R. was hesitant to sign a long-term contract. In any case, he often managed to foil those conversations—in one meeting, he allegedly threatened the A&R man who’d signed Mötley Crüe for attempting to disparage Rasta. In the absence of a major label deal, Bad Brains’ next album would be released by the independent powerhouse SST and produced by Ron Saint Germain, a big-name rock producer who had worked with Jimi Hendrix and would record the album in three days for the relatively small sum of $5,000.
After a commanding minute of sludge on “Intro,” I Against I’s title track—a song Bad Brains first recorded in 1980—offers the security of the band’s classic speed. But while the album maintains intensity and grit, it never returns to that pace. Instead, the band who’d already reinvented a musical movement by speeding up digs in and slows down. Dr. Know had spent the band’s hiatus listening to increasing amounts of hard rock and metal, and I Against I is Bad Brains’ most guitar-driven album. His influence is most evident on the closing “Return to Heaven,” where an opening guitar rev-up and Sunset Strip chug recalls early Van Halen. The guitar solo—a faux pas in punk rock—was omnipresent in Bad Brains’ music from the outset and I Against I is no exception: More than half of its songs feature guitar solos. “You like something and your peers don’t like it, so what?” Dr. Know would explain in a 2011 interview. “You’ve got to keep an open mind.”
Bad Brains had recovered from a breakup and they’d navigated their frontman’s health issues, but a new, unforeseen roadblock would emerge before I Against I’s completion. During the recording sessions, Saint Germain captured several takes of the band, but in order to protect H.R.’s voice, the producer hadn’t yet recorded his vocals. Just before H.R. was set to sing, he casually informed Saint Germain that he had to leave the rural Massachusetts studio and report to prison the following day to serve out a marijuana conviction.
“We had two hours so I basically said, ‘Give me two takes on each song,’” Saint Germain recalled in A Band in D.C. “I finished the recording with H.R. and then he had to go serve three or four months. And I had the one song which wasn’t finished, ‘Sacred Love.’”
The eight songs H.R. recorded in those two hours are among his most impassioned performances in Bad Brains. His imminent incarceration feels almost physical. “House of Suffering” conveys the urgency with stuttering, rhythmic shifts. H.R.’s rant in the final verse is an album high point: “In this house of suffering, don’t want but just one thing, got to have my origin, in this house of suffering.” Each phrase relies upon H.R.’s delivery, abandoning his cool vibrato in favor of a desperate fit augmented with indiscernible rhythmic scats. With “Let Me Help,” he offers a plea to remain positive in times of spiritual trial. The song’s final lyrics—“Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life”—are among the most potent illustrations of the album’s intended message: Positivity, self-assurance, tremendous respect. The themes deeply embedded in Bad Brains’ music have never been articulated so well and delivered with such heft.
Weeks later, while imprisoned at the Lorton Reformatory in Laurel Hill, Virginia, H.R. got a job sweeping the floors, which allowed him access to a pay phone. He then called the studio and sang the unfinished song, “Sacred Love,” into the receiver. “I could barely hear the music,” H.R. recalled in a 2010 interview. “But it was in my heart to sing that song.” His naturally distorted vocals are his most serene and melodic on the album.
Were it not for H.R.’s empathetic vocals, I Against I’s bombastic drums and percussive, muted guitars might mark it as metal. Upbeat tracks like “She’s Calling You” and “Hired Gun” come off as innocent dance-rock segues until they reveal the sharpness of their teeth. On nearly every track, the band exhibits patience, restraint, and groove. Despite the obstacles that impeded the album’s creation, with I Against I, Bad Brains architected what Jane’s Addiction later achieved with Nothing’s Shocking and what Nirvana eventually got credit for with Nevermind: They blurred the lines between punks, new wavers, and metalheads, conceptualizing a new musical landscape less defined by genre.
By the end of 1987, H.R. and Earl would leave the band again, only to rejoin just in time to record 1989’s Quickness. “The Bad Brains function on vibes,” H.R. said of his propensity to leave and return to his band in a 1989 interview. “So when the vibes are right, then we come together. And when they’re not right then we decide to wait until they are.”
By 1990, H.R. and Earl had left the band for a third time when guitarist Dr. Know and bassist Darryl Jenifer appeared on MTV to promote Quickness. On the alternative show 120 Minutes, stoic host Dave Kendall asked with the tact of an awkward record store clerk: “Do you think, uh, that Black rock music is making headway?” And on the metal show Headbangers Ball, a frizzy-haired Riki Rachtman introduced Bad Brains’ video with a disarmingly defensive tone: “I like this song. It’s definitely... Definitely you guys are unique.” Bad Brains perennially endured questions and judgements about their place as a Black band in a white musical universe. That Bad Brains appeared on either 120 Minutes or Headbangers Ball—both shows featured almost exclusively white artists—was unusual; that they appeared on both was nearly impossible. It was a testament to their ability to defy both racial and musical boundaries.
In the wake of I Against I, the door opened just a little bit more for Black rock bands like Fishbone, who drowned out their ska roots with guitars on 1988’s Truth and Soul, and Living Colour, the first Black alternative rock band to achieve mainstream success and significant MTV airplay with “Cult of Personality” that same year. It’s easy to think that Bad Brains should have been there alongside them, but the band’s demons never allowed them equal footing with their contemporaries or their successors—many of whom also had the backing of major record labels. Instead Bad Brains seemed eternally plagued to pave the road for them.
I Against I was Bad Brains’ most successful album, but it never rivaled those of their most vocal admirers. Beastie Boys and Deftones each took Bad Brains on separate tours in 1995, both rife with altercations between H.R. and fans. Jeff Buckley covered “I Against I” and Sublime covered “House of Suffering.” The sticky riff of “Re-Ignition” is the basis of a Lil Jon Crunk Rock Remix, and although it’s not a cover, the title track of Deftones’ 1997 album Around the Fur is an obvious homage. Bad Brains are a classic “band’s band”—cited as legendary by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters—but without a tune that the average person could hum.
No roster of famous admirers gets at what makes Bad Brains important, because they relied little upon external forces to push their message forward. Instead its members were happy to embody their self-defined P.M.A. I Against I marks a high point in the decades-long career of a band who was sometimes on the verge of stardom, often on the brink of total combustion, and always at the nexus of social and political change.
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(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | SST | July 26, 2020 | 9.3 | 624bc9b3-4f37-4e1d-84e9-af94cd9d632b | Nabil Ayers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nabil-ayers/ | |
Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump captures a CD-length slice of diversity, taking in nearly as many styles as it has tracks to offer a brilliant panorama of the country's popular music in the 1970s, with a bit of bleed into the two adjacent decades. | Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump captures a CD-length slice of diversity, taking in nearly as many styles as it has tracks to offer a brilliant panorama of the country's popular music in the 1970s, with a bit of bleed into the two adjacent decades. | Various Artists: Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump, Original Heavyweight Afrobeat, Highlife & Afro-Funk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12014-nigeria-70-lagos-jump-original-heavyweight-afrobeat-highlife-afro-funk/ | Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump, Original Heavyweight Afrobeat, Highlife & Afro-Funk | Nigeria is a huge and diverse country. Expertly, thrillingly, Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump captures a CD-length slice of that diversity, taking in nearly as many styles as it has tracks to offer a brilliant panorama of the country's popular music in the 1970s, with a bit of bleed into the two adjacent decades. The compilation isn't so much an attempt to provide a cross-section or a road map to the music, though, as it is a simply great pass through the tens of thousands of LPs and 45s that were cut in Nigeria's many cities from about 1968 to 1981. Compiler Duncan Brooker and liner notes scribe Quinton Scott aren't writing a textbook, they're telling bits of a story that we in the West had largely not heard until the recent explosion in releases that chronicle the music of the era.
Both men have an admirable history with the music. Brooker was responsible for the dynamite Afro Rock compilation on his own Kona imprint in 2002, while Scott's Strut label has a solid history itself as the source of the Disco Not Disco compilations, the two Club Africa volumes, Tony Allen, Segun Bucknor, Peter King and Orlando Julius reissues, and the original Nigeria 70 compilation, which was one of the first to cast light on the incredible well of great music waiting to be discovered in Africa's most populous country. Over the course of 16 tracks, you get hard funk, Afrobeat, juju, highlife, reggae, rock, psychedelia, blues, ballads, jazz, and simple, sentimental pop, not to mention fusions of all those things.
Sir Shina Peters & His International Stars open the compilation with a seven minute juju-funk blast called "Yabis" that features a slow but relentless groove built around a constantly repeated guitar phrase and thundering percussion that features a deep, variable-pitch drum. It's naturally heavy music that features a witty lead vocal poking fun at Africans with Western pretensions. If Peters' music is naturally heavy, its polar opposite might be the Peacocks Guitar Band's "Eddie Quansa", a lilting, weightless tribute to a Ghanaian highlife great. The guitars on the song scarcely repeat a phrase, intertwining in a constant melodic dance as the rhythm bounces and the vocals thread through, moving between solo verses and harmonized choruses.
"Eddie Quansa" is just one of a handful of intensely beautiful songs on the disc. Rex Williams' poppy "You Are My Heart" is a bright and disarmingly direct love song, sung in English with great chorus harmonies and an infectious circular guitar riff that sets up an impeccably phrased solo. This song was a deserving hit and is the first of a final trio that take the listener out on a gentle note-- the organ that swells unexpectedly throughout Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestroes' "Dododo (Ekassa No. 1)" raised some serious goosebumps the first time I heard it, and the arrangement deftly crescendos by nicking a common early rock'n'roll chord progression. Ifeanyi Eddie Okwedy & His Maymores Dance Band take us out with "Happy Survival", a dark-toned, even ethereal song that stays grounded through its sharp and loud drums.
In this respect, the compilation is sequenced in much the same way a good DJ would sequence his set, pulling the listener (who, for many of these songs, may also be a dancer). Peter's King's awesome jazz-funk track "African Dialects", which features ghostly vocals, Rhodes piano, and muted horns, sets a chilled-out table for Dynamic Africana's "Igbehin Lalayo Nta", which slowly constructs an elaborate Afrobeat groove and patiently holds back the vocals until the four-minute mark. Likewise, the Immortals' cranking, brief garage rock track "Hot Tears" is a great come down from the 10-minute Afrobeat groove and spoken narrative of Eric "Showboy" Akaeze & His Royal Ericos' "Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham".
If you're like me and will never get enough of vintage African pop music, this is another in a bountiful 2008 harvest of great compilations with a very distinctive feel and approach. It sits perfectly on the shelf next to Sound Way's Nigeria Special compilations and Analog Africa's African Scream Contest, not to mention Strut's own original Nigeria 70 compilation. I only hope the floodgates stay open permanently, because I can always use more discs like this. | 2008-08-04T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-08-04T01:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Numero Group | August 4, 2008 | 8.5 | 6258f46c-96d1-48c1-a586-1c2e2c41ed0e | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Baltimore rapper-producer’s sprawling project seesaws across genres, from emo rap to drum’n’bass to indie rock, with mad-scientist abandon. | The Baltimore rapper-producer’s sprawling project seesaws across genres, from emo rap to drum’n’bass to indie rock, with mad-scientist abandon. | Ghostie: Self Hate Wraith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghostie-self-hate-wraith/ | Self Hate Wraith | There’s no point trying to classify Ghostie’s music. A Venn diagram of the Baltimore rapper-producer’s influences would look like a Rorschach test. It’s best described using signifiers: an infernal sludge, a stuffy studio apartment, a deep-fried meme that reveals more about humanity than any painting in a museum could. This is the work of an artist whose biggest stated inspiration is System of a Down, whose SoundCloud-based group Anti-World is credited with inventing something called Trap Metal and absolutely hates the distinction, whose daily life for the past presidential administration has consisted of nothing but furiously recording and absorbing music of all flavors like an overheating machine, input and output meters peaking well past the red.
This is also the work of a human: a father, a renter, a former alcoholic, a stressed and anxious city-dweller. Nowhere is that humanity more apparent than on his latest album Self Hate Wraith. Thanks to Ghostie’s improved writing and continued refinement of his wide-ranging palette, it’s his strongest release to date.
Ghostie is an outsider. He maintains an enigmatic presence—you’ll only find a few interviews with him online—and his music is noisy and challenging. But part of the thrill of his work comes from not knowing what the track playing through your headphones will sound like in the next 45 seconds. The loud, clipping choruses congeal into towering pop hooks that feel more in the spirit of Panic! At The Disco than anything from rap’s last decade (in “Eshuned,” one of the best moments on Self Hate Wraith, Ghostie indulgently interpolates “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off”). Ghostie is daring and unpredictable in the manner of his friend and collaborator JPEGMAFIA. Every album is overwhelming, every song is a calculated risk.
On Self Hate Wraith, he continues his scorched-earth campaign against rap norms. Drum’n’bass, synth pop, emo rap, and indie rock are among the countless genres he mines across these 24 self-produced songs. For the most part, this is experimentation done right; the genres all feel lived-in, not beamed in, and Ghostie’s production is top-flight. The album opens with a searing three-song run that quickly covers three genres while laying out the thesis. “Why must I try? Why must I work?” Ghostie croons on “Crazy,” a pounding pop rap track that splits the difference between WorkingOnDying and early-2010s Kid Cudi. The change-ups can be blinding, especially for listeners primed for traditional rap, but the longer you spend with them, the more they click into place.
Ghostie has grown into an impressive bluesman, flipping simple phrases into glowing screeds with his powerful, heavily processed vocals. He writes about the realities that millions of Americans face on a daily basis: feeling alone, fearing eviction, love and loss and drinking and dinner tonight. Listen to how he repeats a single line—“No matter how much hurt, sing your song you’ll be all right”—on “Shame,” turning it into a numbing chant you might hear during the graveyard shift on an asteroid mining plant. “Think Bout It All The Time” is another exercise in repetition, this time over four-on-the-floor synthpop: “I think ’bout it all the time, it won’t go away.” Ghostie’s writing has a strong populist streak: You don’t need to know what he’s thinking about to know that you’ve probably thought about it, too.
It’s the moments of catharsis that shine brightest. On the brash centerpiece of the album “Sizzle (I’m In Hell),” Ghostie growls something about oranges and potatoes from Blue’s Clues before delving into some of his most harrowing thoughts: isolation, getting kicked out on the 31st, guzzling whiskey and tequila and Sprite. Then another Blue’s Clues chorus, and then the second verse, a stumbling freestyle. It’s messy and brilliant, weirder and more honest than any of the rap music clogging Spotify’s paid-placement arteries.
The more traditional cuts like “Hard Soft Taco” and “Hatsu” pale in comparison to the experiments. They’re awkwardly sandwiched together in the tracklist, revealing a sequencing issue that turns the album bloated in the second half. But Ghostie records are sprawling by design, and you’re not here for a tightly wound opus. You’re here to put yourself in the hands of Baltimore’s premier mad scientist, and the payoffs are well worth the risks. | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1504190 Records | April 10, 2020 | 7.2 | 6259ce1c-c14c-44ed-aa39-60d60a372d5f | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
The Brooklyn composer injects the ambient wash of her past work with flashes of dancefloor emotionality, striking a balance between reflective contemplation and the ego-melting thrills of a warehouse party. | The Brooklyn composer injects the ambient wash of her past work with flashes of dancefloor emotionality, striking a balance between reflective contemplation and the ego-melting thrills of a warehouse party. | Rachika Nayar: Heaven Come Crashing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rachika-nayar-heaven-come-crashing/ | Heaven Come Crashing | Rachika Nayar doesn’t just spew out a little fog before her live show, she stretches the venue’s fire code to its limit. Before the guitarist walks onstage, the entire performance space is clouded, red exit signs barely visible, until you can barely see your hand in front of your face. The effect on the audience is immediate: Conversations dull to a whisper and friends drift carefully towards each other to reunite before the music starts, tiptoeing across a shadowy maze of bodies as they take on a heightened awareness of their own.
It’s the perfect environment to experience Nayar’s music. Interviewed on the heels of her 2021 debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, she championed the “totally obliterating” power of a rave’s atmosphere, and spoke of her desire to create a similar environment, ones that “simultaneously takes you out of yourself, and submerges you deep within yourself.” Our Hands did this by constructing misty ambient labyrinths out of processed guitar, revealing Nayar’s ability to sculpt the instrument’s earthy twang into unpredictable alien timbres and shift them back to familiar shapes at a moment’s notice. When Nayar debuted tracks from her astonishing second album, Heaven Come Crashing, at the Brooklyn venue Public Records, strobes flashed violently and unexpected floods of drums crashed into the crowd. Egos melted away as the crowd breathed in a wave of ecstatic release.
Heaven Come Crashing injects the ambient wash of Nayar’s past work with flashes of dancefloor emotionality, striking a balance between reflective contemplation and the ego-melting thrills of a warehouse party. On the stunning title track, she traces the arc of her musical transformation in miniature. Slices of granulated guitar gently refract into the frame, and for a few seconds, the song could be a holdover from the swooning sentimentality of Our Hands. But she soldiers on, backed by unearthly guest vocals from fellow guitarist and songwriter Maria BC that swell from airy wisps into a supercharged choir. Suddenly, a trap door unhinges and you’re ripped into a punishingly beautiful beat drop. It’s a scene of catharsis surrounded by a squealing guitar solo and the cascading cymbal crashes of a drum’n’bass beat. “Heaven Come Crashing” lifts you up with shameless melodrama and pure affirmation: It was all worth it.
Nayar deploys these moments of tension and release with the sixth sense of a veteran after-hours DJ, keenly aware that floor-filling emotional highs are earned through careful pacing. “Tetramorph,” the album’s longest and most satisfying song, weaves through a series of false stops and starts that perfectly read the pulse of the crowd. Chattering hi-hats come in at full volume, emerging from pin-drop silence in a quick hit of stimulation. They fizzle out but the effects cling to your body, propping you up as you navigate a maze of buzzing drones that build into a waltzing post-rock climax. The effect is startling, but as Nayar rocks out in the coda, you easily recall every part of the meticulously arranged journey, awe-struck at how seamlessly she blended it all together.
Other tracks use compositional sleight-of-hand to leave you dangling off the edge of a cliff, ending on deliciously maddening chords that make you lean into the speaker, trying to manifest a neat resolution by sheer force of imagination. “The Price of Serenity” rides dueling motifs—a steadily rising clean piano arpeggio and a squelching synthesizer lead—to a crunchy four-on-the-floor stomp, disguising a jarring left turn into oblivion with a pulse-pounding bass drum stutter. In a show of supreme confidence, she resurrects the formula on the next track, “Our Wretched Fate,” crashing from nocturnal ecstasy into sober daylight in half the time. Unexpected power surges back into your feet, only for the house lights to come up.
In this metamorphosis from ambient composer to dancefloor mystic, Nayar meets her mirror image in UK producer Loraine James. Where Nayar has folded her impressionistic collages into body-breaking narrative arcs, James has done the opposite, smoothing out the gritty IDM of 2021’s Reflection to reemerge this year with ambient side-project Whatever the Weather. But although they take new form, traces of the past and beloved compositional tools linger. Just as James can’t help but blow the dust off her drum machine, Nayar uses her guitar for soothing interludes that provide a dynamic counterpoint to Heaven Come Crashing’s barn-burning anthems.
Nayar’s new guitar experiments light the path with flickering details. A rhythm that sounds as if it were tapped out on her thigh, off-the-cuff, gives “Gayatri” a strange kind of propulsion. And the combination of bass synth and the brief glimmer of a corresponding lead line roots the searching motif of “Death & Limerence” in the assurance of a heaven-bound trajectory. It’s a dazzling recalibration, lifting Nayar up and over the darkness of her previous work. The answers aren’t quite pieced together, but the questions grow deeper and more satisfying. | 2022-09-02T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-02T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | September 2, 2022 | 8.4 | 62667651-b4e7-4d8c-a9cd-39c559c8468c | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Lionel Williams’ fourth album brings new melodic clarity to his kaleidoscopic variations on soft-focus psych pop, pushing his songs into the realm of pure, escapist pleasure. | Lionel Williams’ fourth album brings new melodic clarity to his kaleidoscopic variations on soft-focus psych pop, pushing his songs into the realm of pure, escapist pleasure. | Vinyl Williams: Opal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vinyl-williams-opal/ | Opal | Trends are hard to suss out amid the diversity of contemporary indie rock, but it sure feels like there’s a lot of good psychedelic music out there lately. From MGMT’s doomy, atomic pop and the motorik fantasias of Hookworms to the variegated loveliness of Beach House’s 7 and the knotty micro-prog of Melody’s Echo Chamber, 2018 has offered an embarrassment of trippy riches. A fair amount of this music has come from Toro Y Moi mastermind Chaz Bundick’s Carpark imprint Company Records, including mind-bending releases from San Francisco guitar stylist Tanukichan and the post-rock dream maker who records as Astronauts, etc., among others.
The latest noteworthy psych album to emerge from this milieu is former Company signee Vinyl Williams’ Opal. The fourth record from the hazy LA pop project masterminded by Lionel Williams (grandson to legendary film composer John Williams) represents a massive leap forward from what came before it. Since his full-length debut, 2012’s Leminiscate, Williams has followed his messy muse wherever it’s taken him, situating patches of streamlined songwriting next to side-long instrumental indulgences adorned with titles like “Mercurial Vestiges.” Although Opal’s tracklist still betrays a predilection for extravagant language (a personal fave: “Florian Veridiciton”), there’s a new clarity to his work here; songs spin through kaleidoscopic variations on soft-focus pop without losing their melodic grounding, even at their weirdest moments.
The album bears some resemblance to Tame Impala’s 2010 debut, Innerspeaker, and to Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s warped rock. But it has a more obscure forerunner in the music of the now-defunct Colorado hippie collagists Candy Claws, whose first full-length, 2010’s Hidden Lands, is all heavenly, hushed whispers and mossy keyboard reveries. Opal has a similarly dreamy aura, with spun-sugar melodic passages anchored by Williams’ gossamer vocals and a thumping low end—but it adds an intense rhythmic pulse, in percussion flourishes that range from the high-speed cymbal rush of “Sanctuary Spells” to the tricky fills underlying “None With Other.” There’s never been any doubt that Williams is an adept musician, but his newfound skills as a songwriter and arranger push the album into the realm of pure pleasure.
The lyrics on Opal are—literally—a real trip. “Lessons of LSD/Light could illuminate me,” Williams sings on the driving closer “Millennial Ballroom,” hammering home that this is music made for (and likely by) black-light enthusiasts prone to binge-watching Alejandro Jodorowsky films. There’s talk of fictional planets and the astral plane, floating houses, aliens, and other cosmic ephemera. The heavy processing around Williams' vocals makes most of these brain-melting musings unintelligible, but you can hear him loud and clear in the jaunty chorus of “Noumena”: “All of everything outside of our head/Opens the doors where we can fall right in.”
For all of its paeans to psychedelics, however, the hermetic and colorful world of Opal also illustrates that “head music” needn’t always be associated with substances. The best psych pop often functions as a guided meditation for its listeners—a way to escape, for a little while, from the horrors of the world or the drudgery of everyday life. (As Tame Impala’s “Music to Walk Home By” suggests, this stuff thrives on solitude.) With Opal, Williams offers an entryway into his own private sanctuary. Once overstuffed with ideas, the place has become an inviting, well-lit haven for daydreamers who could use a vacation from reality. | 2018-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Requiem Pour Un Twister | July 28, 2018 | 7.6 | 626761ce-c081-4c0b-9443-0db7c5dc1744 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
A gentle, mostly wordless collection of ambient pop, Michelle Zauner’s soundtrack for the indie exploration game is a streamlined glimpse into her versatility as a narrative artist. | A gentle, mostly wordless collection of ambient pop, Michelle Zauner’s soundtrack for the indie exploration game is a streamlined glimpse into her versatility as a narrative artist. | Japanese Breakfast: Sable (Original Video Game Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/japanese-breakfast-sable-original-video-game-soundtrack/ | Sable (Original Video Game Soundtrack) | Michelle Zauner has spent this year in an intensely personal state of mind. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Crying in H-Mart centered on her Korean-American identity and the loss of her mother at a formative age, while her latest album as Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee, discussed complex interpersonal relationships while attempting to move beyond grief. Her latest project is a soundtrack for Shedworks’ indie exploration game Sable, and it provides an opportunity to shift the focus.
The music is situated around the coming-of-age journey of the titular young girl. Creatively, Sable reveals a more purely melodic element of Zauner’s work; her halcyon instrumentation retreats from her usual indie rock influences, bubbling into an electronic backdrop for the burnished visuals of sprawling deserts and glowing alien insects. With hints of the sampled experiments of Japanese Breakfast tracks like “Machinist” and “2042,” the score is a streamlined glimpse into Zauner’s versatility as a narrative artist.
Zauner’s voice greets you as soon as you open the game—“Found a way/Found a sun,” she intones like a lullaby—but for the most part, the gameplay is backed by wordless, delicate ambient pop. The tracks are always gentle on the ear, meshing and fading in the background as you send Sable leaping against the solitude of cel-shaded dunes and Metabolist-inspired ruins. For the most part, the tactile, shoegaze dreaminess that permeated so much of Zauner’s previous releases has dissolved. Songs like “Better the Mask” are primarily voice-and-piano affairs. Her location-based score, split between the swift, smooth in-game cycle of night and day, reflects a colorful subtlety. “The Ewer (Day)” hums in soothing, lambent tones, while “The Ewer (Night)” slows like a heartbeat.
Though the playfulness of Zauner’s work is woven into the fabric of these songs, the majority of Sable doesn’t necessarily invite active listening. Instead, it retreats into the background of the gameplay. There’s a brusqueness to the ambience that recalls Boards of Canada circa In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. “Beetle Detour” chirps like chelicerae; “Abandoned Grounds” reverberates in low, polar tones; “Machinist’s Theme” hums mechanically and matter-of-factly. Not so much an album as the nerve system of a narrative, Sable is best experienced alongside the physical act of in-game exploration.
Above all, the soundtrack’s heart is attuned to Sable’s pilgrimage. Shortly after leaving her home, Sable meets a nomadic guard who asks what this great journey feels like. She can answer with bravado or self-deprecation, or she can admit, prosaically, “The world is big and I feel very small.” “Glider,” the soundtrack’s crown jewel, immortalizes this sensation with soaring harmonies. It’s one of the few songs with sung words, a sweetly grand anthem that swells as Sable departs her now-empty home, gliding out of a canyon into the remote landscape. Hopeful synths rise as Zauner empathizes, “I’m caught between the wind and parts of the unknown,” with her voice textured like granulated sugar. “Every particle in sync,” she sings as if projecting her voice across the planes of the desert. She yearns for freedom while making peace with the unease of that wide world ahead of her.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans / Sony Music Masterworks | September 24, 2021 | 7.5 | 626bf33f-2595-4de9-b635-87aebbf169ba | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
With a mixture of shoegaze and dream pop, the Philadelphia band offers a dramatic soundtrack to dark introspection. | With a mixture of shoegaze and dream pop, the Philadelphia band offers a dramatic soundtrack to dark introspection. | Knifeplay: *Animal Drowning * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knifeplay-animal-drowning/ | Animal Drowning | When TJ Strohmer started Knifeplay in 2015 as a solo bedroom project, it was an outlet for self-discovery and a way to dodge the college-to-soulless-desk-job pipeline. “We’re not being nurtured to discover ourselves in any type of way,” he would later explain of his desire to opt out of the system. Eventually, Strohmer expanded Knifeplay into a five-piece—with bassist Alex Stackhouse, guitarist John Klein, keyboardist Max Black, and drummer John Sciortino—fusing shoegaze and dream pop. On the Philadelphia band’s second album, Animal Drowning, Knifeplay balance dark introspection—untangling experiences of grief, abuse, and self-loathing—with empathy and patience.
On Animal Drowning, Knifeplay explore a sound not too distant from that of Godspeed You! Black Emperor: gloomy guitar drones, thundering percussion, and foreboding orchestral strings that quiver on the periphery. They tapped a number of collaborators to flesh out their vision, adding cello, violin, piano, and additional guitar throughout. And like the Canadian post-rockers, Knifeplay do their best to guide listeners past calamity toward the warm glow of hope. In “Nobody,” a strummed acoustic guitar persists despite the tower of fuzz crashing down; in “Cold Rain,” a full-bodied choir pushes back against guitar feedback, defiant in its stance. During the eight-minute “Untitled,” a handful of passages speak to perseverance amid turmoil, like Strohmer’s even-keeled falsettos during the loudest crescendos or the bright guitar that overtakes the drums during the song’s conclusion. These moments of tension are Knifeplay’s reminder that with enough friction, a match will eventually yield light.
While this textural songwriting style offers Animal Drowning its worn sandpaper feel, Strohmer’s lyrics give the music its weight. With the eternal wisdom of Tony Soprano as his guiding light, Strohmer sardonically tackles his conservative upbringing in rural Maryland on standout single “Promise”: “You’re born into this shit/And you are what you are.” His words float like airy soliloquies, contradicting the blown-out, almost doom-metal guitar behind him. Producer Jeff Ziegler further exaggerates these extremes, filtering them through a gauzy lens similar to the one he brought to A Sunny Day in Glasgow and the War on Drugs.
Each of the album’s 10 tracks explores a difficult moment in Strohmer’s life, however cryptic. He often utilizes repetition as a means of diluting his traumas, uttering phrases again and again until they begin to sound unfamiliar. Elsewhere, he omits backstory entirely in favor of focusing on one specific detail, as though reiterating its unimportance until he believes it himself. On the piano ballad “Ryan Song,” he creates his own shorthand for the oft-quoted aphorism, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”: “Failure held its mirror up and teased you.” Strohmer’s through with letting his old wounds debilitate him, and these songs suggest you do the same.
Animal Drowning intertwines these grand crescendos and lyrics of self-growth into an emotional reckoning that intends to overwhelm. At one moment, someone’s screaming while a saxophone wails in the background. At another, a brisk piano melody is overpowered by distorted guitars that verge on apocalyptic. Listening to the album can feel like cave diving: It’s a series of narrow paths and dark, water-filled rooms that are as gorgeous as they are dangerous. The album’s most claustrophobic songs—“Promise,” “Hearts,” “Cold Rain”—are its most rewarding listens. Knifeplay are pushing the shoegaze revival to embrace the jagged textures of experimental rock, the earnestness of emo, and the delicacy of string compositions without any pretension. If Knifeplay began as an outlet for self-discovery, Animal Drowning renders interiority in vivid, four-dimensional terms. | 2022-11-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Topshelf | November 9, 2022 | 7.3 | 6287eca2-7895-4f15-a3f1-c38634496e43 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Sufjan Stevens reaches his saturation point with this 75-minute, 21-track companion album to last year's acclaimed Illinois. | Sufjan Stevens reaches his saturation point with this 75-minute, 21-track companion album to last year's acclaimed Illinois. | Sufjan Stevens: The Avalanche | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9195-the-avalanche/ | The Avalanche | Unless the liner notes are lying, that really is Sufjan Stevens playing a dizzy, disjointed guitar solo on "Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair". When the man known for his gentle falsetto and baroque music fetish picks up an electric guitar, he stumbles and lurches like he's been hit in the head. Shambling and off-kilter, he coughs up odd phrases instead of weaving in countermelodies.
You'll find plenty of small but head-turning moments like that on The Avalanche. You'll also find a disc full of stuff that sounds a lot like last year's Illinois-- and that's the point. This is the outtakes and B-sides album from last year's magnum opus, and Stevens himself calls them also-rans. In his recent Pitchfork interview, Stevens said he considered just giving these songs away on the web, which wouldn't have been a bad idea; he could have dripped the best cuts to mp3 blogs and anthologies, like he's done for the past few months, to stay on the radar while he finishes his next proper album.
As it is, The Avalanche is not just a B-sides record; it's actually a mirror image, with 21 tracks that loosely follow *Illinois-- * including the suspenseful intro, the fast, pulsing second track, the quizzical segues, the interminable song titles, and the gradual instrumental send-off. The mood is gentler and more acoustic; the title track harkens back to the banjo-led introspection of Seven Swans, and the last ballad, "Pittsfield", has the cozy tunefulness of a chicken soup jingle. But for most of the disc, Stevens brings back the statewide namechecks and the "Illinoisemakers" marching band arrangements.
Call it burnout or backlash if you have to, but it's hard not to compare the two albums and find this one wanting; even the best songs, which are quite good, wouldn't bump anything off of Illinois. ("The Mistress Witch From McClure" comes closest, but "Casimir Pulaski Day" already took its slot.) The Avalanche would have been engaging at half the length, but at 75 minutes, let's just say that if you have a saturation point for Stevens, you're gonna reach it.
Still, The Avalanche isn't "Sufjan's latest album" so much as Sufjan's sketchbook: If you want to study how he operates and catch new facets of his work, you'll be satisfied. We get that shambolic guitar, the spacy analog synth on "For Clyde Tombaugh" (named for the guy who discovered Pluto), and most of all, three new versions of "Chicago" (subtitled "Acoustic Version", "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version", and best of all, the beats-and-jitters arrangement of "Multiple Personality Disorder Version"). By including three alternate arrangements of his biggest song to date (per the Last.fm charts, anyway), Sufjan shakes up his image as a new hero of adult contemporary songwriting.
Stevens considers himself a serious composer and a craftsman who wants his songs to stand on their own with no autobiographical or sentimental crutches; personal stories litter the material, but he doesn't use the backstory to sell the songs. Yet in spite of this, his voice and singer-songwriting tempt us to believe that every time we hear his falsetto crack, we're seeing into his soul. People who emote like Stevens are supposed to be "authentic." Just like on Lifetime, everything has to be a true story, and you only write about a friend who dies of cancer if you've just come back from the funeral. Some have even criticized Illinois, and now The Avalanche, because the whole thing was-- to quote Ryan Irvine at Goodhodgkins.com-- a "cold and calculated research project."
On a gut level, I understand that reaction. But critically, it doesn't make sense. Stevens is less a Nick Drake than a maverick craftsman like John Fahey. He'll never come to our houses and weep on our shoulders-- but he'll write songs about coming to our houses and weeping on our shoulders. And this sensitive yet askew set is a reminder that great music comes from the head more than the heart-- and it leaves plenty of mistakes, strange jokes, near-misses, and useless flashes of brilliance along the way. | 2006-07-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-07-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | July 11, 2006 | 7.2 | 6288ca7b-5846-4f27-8eeb-21ad756f40d4 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Persuasion, a new three-song EP by New York City-based duo Blondes, turns their massive live show inside out and reconstructs it in a studio setting. It serves its primary purpose as dance music, but is also intelligent, experimental, and above all, fun. | Persuasion, a new three-song EP by New York City-based duo Blondes, turns their massive live show inside out and reconstructs it in a studio setting. It serves its primary purpose as dance music, but is also intelligent, experimental, and above all, fun. | Blondes: Persuasion EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20936-persuasion-ep/ | Persuasion EP | With the current mainstream status and Coachellification of American techno, it's sometimes hard to remember the origins of the genre. It was created not by pasty knob-noodlers or bros in culturally-appropriative headgear, but a multiethnic, pansexual community of revelers interested in an almost spiritual loss of self, an out-of-body escapism that could only be achieved through electronics, dancing, and the occasional hit of very potent psychedelics. Good techno, inherently, does not forget that heritage. Persuasion, a new three-song EP by New York City-based duo Blondes, is good techno.
Their newest offering since a one-off collage and 2013's gangly soundscape Swisher, Persuasion sees Blondes turning their massive live show inside out and reconstructing it in a studio setting. It's more visceral and immediate than what they've been releasing in the past few years, condensing their more pensive moments into 25 minutes of purified dance. Title track "Persuasion" starts off with a shuffleboard beat and a synth blip that sounds almost exactly like the default iPhone text message alert tone, until the main synthesizer loop tickles its way in and the rest of the track bubbles over an eight-minute build. It's what Blondes do best: expertly guide their audience to that place beyond the dancefloor, grabbing their cerebrums with sound and forcibly lifting them to the heavens, or at the very least to the top of the DJ booth.
"Son" is centered around a runaway timpani chased by swirling synth stabs, landing only a few thumps short of Afrobeat in the process. A third of the way through, reverberated and outstretched vocals punctuate the mix. It's a daring touch that pays off, imbuing the track with an element both human and distinctly alien. As "Son" slows down and comes to a close, the kettledrum finally loses its steam and a lone hi-hat struggles past the finish line—a witty fake-out, as it happens, as third and final track "Inner Motive" gears up in a swell of muted beats and modulated synths. This is the closest the EP comes to customary Blondes, a pulsating, multi-layered beat accompanied by a multitude of overlapping squiggles. Much like the techno of yore, Persuasion serves its primary purpose as dance music, but is also intelligent, experimental, and above all, fun—all qualifiers that many of Blondes' compatriots could learn a thing or two about. | 2015-08-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | August 11, 2015 | 7.3 | 628e98ed-b804-447a-995a-90e5788c009e | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
On their debut album, the quartet applies noise-rock chops and jazz-versed drumming to a wild set of songs with a gastrointestinal fixation. | On their debut album, the quartet applies noise-rock chops and jazz-versed drumming to a wild set of songs with a gastrointestinal fixation. | Melkbelly: Nothing Valley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/melkbelly-nothing-valley/ | Nothing Valley | When it comes to song building, Melkbelly are, more precisely, song demolishers. They tear the wallpaper off of traditional structures, take sledgehammers to the joists and excavators to the foundations, then giddily sift through the rubble and reassemble the debris into something that in no way resembles a normal structure. Just don’t try telling them that. When Miranda Winters sings about “traditional circles in the woods” on the final track of the adventurous four-piece’s formal debut LP, Nothing Valley, she’s out for blood. Exactly what she has in mind is anyone’s guess, but this moment from “Helloween” offers a telling taste of the fuel in the noisy rockers’ frenetic, overheated motor.
Like steel wool on brushed metal, Nothing Valley reconciles the affability of Winters’ scattershot words with a thunderously heavy, sometimes doom-suggestive atmosphere. “Concrete is raw, concrete is cold/This slouch is weighted, too,” she sings softly on “R.O.R.O.B.,” her voice a feather adrift over the city. Later, the song slams the brakes into a two-minute coda of deep, labored instrumental wheezing—inhaling with a faint but silence-piercing guitar screech, exhaling with concrete-cracking release.
It’s not the first sudden shift on Nothing Valley—not even the first on that particular song. Where many indie-rock bands approach jump cuts in tempo or key like a watercolorist might a flamethrower, Melkbelly chuck wrench after wrench into the album’s traction and still end up with engaging arcs. “Petrified” starts as a solo cover of an imagined Black Sabbath song and finishes with the whole band mimicking a hyperventilating security alarm squealing pulselessly by the end. Despite the crashing pace, dynamics, or melodic trajectory of most tracks, Melkbelly flex an innate sense of balance.
Nothing Valley enters suddenly and in panic. Opener “Off the Lot” jumps in at full-throttle physicality rather than easing in and ramping up: If Winters, guitarist Bart Winters, and bassist Liam Winters conjure an electrical storm, James Wetzel’s breakneck drumming tosses about like wayward hailstones. After, they about-face into “Kid Kreative,” a savory single that literally shouts out breakfast food while sonically spoon-crushing granola into a bowl of honey. As they did on their 2014 EP Pennsylvania, Melkbelly hint at an obsession with food and human digestive functions. Nothing Valley’s gastric and gastronomic imagery gets outright, proudly silly; there’s even a line about drinking ketchup water. It’s not hard to picture the band writing while stomping grapes together, barefoot and plugged in, sparked by squishy sounds and sticky sensations.
Melkbelly’s kinship to peak-grating Sonic Youth goes beyond Nothing Valley’s captioned-frame cover art; experimentation runs through the creative backgrounds of each member. Miranda and Bart’s prior project Coffin Ships featured the duo writing sweeter-flavored pop while gamely indulging risks like Miranda performing on drums and keys simultaneously with one hand each. Meanwhile, the drumming of the jazz-versed Wetzel, whose snare whacks are perfectly maxed out with help from producer Dave Vettraino, applies advanced mathematics to their finger-paint sensibilities. On Nothing Valley—the first release from Wax Nine, a Carpark Records subsidiary launched by Speedy Ortiz bandleader Sadie Dupuis—Melkbelly reach their hands into pink slime and somehow pull out real nourishment, along the way finding square footing for a mutual next step. | 2017-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wax Nine | October 13, 2017 | 7.5 | 628f9ac4-6ddb-4769-8a5f-a369e9468fc9 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
On an album with the musical charms of British art-rock, the Indigenous writer and scholar uses our connections with water to explore the revolutionary power of community. | On an album with the musical charms of British art-rock, the Indigenous writer and scholar uses our connections with water to explore the revolutionary power of community. | Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Theory of Ice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leanne-betasamosake-simpson-theory-of-ice/ | Theory of Ice | Willie Dunn’s 1971 song “I Pity the Country” remains one of North America’s most stirring protest standards. The Indigenous singer and activist canters through a litany of grievances with Canada’s so-called civil society—power-grabbing politicians, money-hungry people, bull-headed police, and all the pollution, subjugation, and suffering that ensue. But Dunn’s philippic is less remarkable for what it lambastes than what it lifts up: the notion that these seemingly mighty folks are the wretched and the woeful, because they’re too busy with themselves to notice there’s an easier way to live. Who wants to be, as Dunn puts it so incisively, “a man who thrives on hate”?
Fifty years later, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her own phosphorescent rendition of “I Pity the Country” the centerpiece of her singular new album, Theory of Ice. Like Dunn, Simpson is of mixed Scottish and Indigenous ancestry—she is a member of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people, native to southern Ontario. The novelist, poet, singer, and scholar has emerged as one of the most ardent voices for an intersectional understanding of North America’s Indigenous populations. Theory of Ice is an inviting manifestation of that work, turning seven of Simpson’s poems about water and our inborn relationship to it into sophisticated folk-pop that twinkles like the Clientele and Talk Talk. Simpson poignantly surveys the damage done and, like Dunn, suggests there’s another way forward.
Theory of Ice hinges on Simpson’s version of “I Pity the Country,” with a wash of echoing guitars and astral harmonies anchored by militant drums that would feel at home behind PJ Harvey or Nick Cave. Dunn’s acoustic rendition was the lament of one man, something you would sit and dutifully absorb. Simpson’s electric surge, however, offers both a communal outcry and a velvet-gloved demand that, if you can hear her, you join her in reimagining your relationship to the people and places that keep you alive. Dunn’s stern words become Simpson’s full cri de coeur.
The rest of Theory of Ice is not so explicit—its revelations are small, its calls for revolution more subtle. Simpson alternates between her plaintive, reserved speaking voice and a gentle singing tone, as if always trying to deliver hard news as softly as possible. She begins, for instance, with a pair of spellbinding songs about what changes when the ice above a river or lake melts with Spring’s arrival. That fundamental shift has profound consequences, she notes, from food supplies to shelter systems. Simpson invokes the Anishinaabe concept of “aabawe,” a term that implies that we adapt alongside the world, loosening up and breaking free like the ice.
At least until we can’t anymore. During the tragic but gorgeous ballad “Failure of Melting,” Simpson looks on as the ice collapses too much and too soon. “The caribou sit measuring emptiness/The fish study giving up,” she sings, her voice striking the same bittersweet tone as Kimya Dawson. Simpson alludes to decades of protests and warnings from Indigenous northerners about the deleterious effects of their southern neighbors’ environmental disregard, how it’s melting their very foundations. Above the lullaby-like guitars of “The Wake,” Simpson mourns the ways we’ve pushed natural cycles of life and death into unsustainable overdrive. “Everything we tried/To grow this year has died,” she sings, suggesting there’s a point when you’ve sown so many problems there is nothing left to reap.
A precise thinker but impressionistic writer, Simpson webs together concrete images and ideas into clouds, their intriguing shapes never entirely fixed. At one point, she namechecks the temperature at which water is most dense—39 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning it sinks—and makes this basic fact feel as enigmatic as lines about how “the sky is falling up.” The elliptical playing and production on Theory of Ice reinforce that feeling of discovery, from Tanner Pare’s circuitous drumming during “Surface Tension” to the refracted neon synthesizers of “Viscosity.” There’s always enough motion here to grab your attention but enough blank space for the songs to seem mysterious and enchanting, like there’s something left to learn.
“I Pity the Country” doesn’t leave you hanging—it offers an alternative of revolution, kindness, and real community. Likewise, remedying our problems, or at least trying, feels as important to Simpson as documenting them. As “Viscosity” throbs, she suggests putting down our phones and resisting the urge to engage in “feeding fish to insecurities.” Instead, she gathers with her friends on the beach, reveling in the air and the opportunity to sit silently in one another’s company. She returns to the fire for closer “Head of the Lake,” a powerful ode to the atavistic necessity of connection in a world mitigated by unimaginable convenience. “The smoke did the things we couldn’t,” she says as if with a reserved smile. “I hold your hand without touching it.” It’s hard to imagine a better sentiment for a time when an unnatural disaster has broken our sense of shared spaces—or for the limited time we have left not to repeat the same mistakes.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | You’ve Changed | March 18, 2021 | 8 | 62942448-af7e-4b70-aea0-bb646b50c32d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based composer draws from jazz, Hindustani classical, and folk to create a heartbreaking, exquisite document of the journey from grief to acceptance. | The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based composer draws from jazz, Hindustani classical, and folk to create a heartbreaking, exquisite document of the journey from grief to acceptance. | Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arooj-aftab-vulture-prince/ | Vulture Prince | Arooj Aftab had a very different record in mind when she started writing Vulture Prince, the follow-up to 2018’s dreamy, ambient Siren Islands. The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based composer envisioned an “edgier” and “more fun” update on the fragile soundscapes of her second record, as she recently told NPR. But while she was still in the middle of writing, Aftab’s world was buffeted by tragedy. At home, she lost her younger brother Maher, to whom the new album is dedicated. Outside, a world already embattled with a rising tide of hate and conflict was now struggling to grapple with a global pandemic.
To cope, Aftab reached for the familiar Urdu ghazals and poetry that populated her genre-defying 2015 debut Bird Under Water. The closest thing South Asia has to the blues, the ghazal is a musical form steeped in loss and longing—a subcontinental language of love both mortal and divine. On Vulture Prince, Aftab fuses the ghazal’s existential yearning with minimal compositions that draw from jazz, Hindustani classical, folk and—on one song—reggae to create a heartbreaking, exquisite document of the journey from grief to acceptance.
Intended as a second chapter to her debut album, Vulture Prince takes the airy minimalism and virtuosity of Bird Under Water and strips it down even further. Five of the seven songs here lack any form of percussion, propelled instead by the soft intensity of Aftab’s voice and the delicate cadence of strings and keys. Gone too is the traditional Pakistani instrumentation, replaced by a filigree of gentle violin, harp, double bass, and synths. At the center of it all is Aftab’s powerful voice, suffused in a sorrow so deep that it seeps into your bones.
As if to make this connection—and divergence—explicit, Aftab opens the album with a new interpretation of “Baghon Main,” a mahiya folk song that she first tackled on Bird Under Water. Her original rendition was cavernous in scale, a vast space washed by layers of accordion swells, drum flares, and plaintive guitar. This version is much more intimate. Harp, violin, and double bass brush lightly against each other as Aftab sings of love unfulfilled, a melancholy captured in its opening imagery of empty swings swinging in a garden breeze.
“Diya Hai,” the last song Aftab ever performed for her brother, plunges further into pathos. Over Badi Assad’s arpeggiated guitar, bolstered by the elegiac strings of the Rootstock Republic, Aftab dives into a poem by Mirza Ghalib, one of the subcontinent’s most revered Urdu and Persian poets. Ghalib’s poetry was often obsessed with suffering and loss, a reflection of not only personal tragedy but the political, social, and religious turbulence of his time. Aftab taps into a similar mystic vein of spiritual existentialism, stretching her syllables as if to make space for the overwhelming intensity of her grief.
Aftab’s voice is often compared with Abida Parveen, the transcendent Pakistani “Queen of Sufi Music.” And while that comparison is justified (Aftab herself cites Parveen as an influence), her singing on this record also bears a close similarity to the Hindustani classical vocal stylings of Sulk Station’s Tanvi Rao. It’s not just that they both eschew the taan—a specific pattern of vocal modulation common in ghazals—in favor of a disconsolate elasticity. They both share a very different vision of musical fusion, one that is also evident in the new-age musings of fellow New Yorker Priya Darshini and the Hindustani-classical-jazz-hip-hop mashup of Lahore band Jaubi. Rather than attempt to bridge Eastern and Western music, with all the ideological and historical baggage baked into the notion, they draw from an organic amalgamation of the diverse influences they can call their own. Educated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Aftab has as much of a claim to the Western traditions of jazz and experimental electronica as to the folk and classical music of her native homeland. She mixes and matches these traditions not with the awkward, respectful hesitancy of an outsider, but with the casual intimacy of an initiate.
This point is reinforced by the surprise reggae turn on “Last Night,” its offbeat rhythms and skank chords setting the stage for Aftab’s rendition of a translated Rumi poem. “Last night my beloved was like the moon/So beautiful” she sings, evoking the long tradition of the moon as a symbol of divinity and transcendence in Islamic and Sufi poetry. Draped in shadowy echo, Aftab’s voice drips with a passion at once sacred and sensual.
The album’s centerpiece is “Mohabbat,” a ghazal originally written by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri. Aftab transforms it into a slow-burn exploration of the pain of separation. Gyan Riley’s fingers pluck and pull at the guitar strings with restrained elegance, in lockstep with Jamey Haddad’s velvet-touched percussion. “Zamāne bhar ke ġham yā ik tirā ġham (this sadness equals all the sadness in the world),” Aftab sings, her voice afloat in grief so expansive that it seems to encompass the world, and whatever realms lie beyond.
Despite Aftab’s devotion to minimalism, this is a deeply layered and multi-faceted album, each sparse note and repeated motif building upon the emotional resonance of the last, creating little knots of musical tension that find release in the subtle shifts of a long-drawn-out syllable. Aftab takes the nostalgic melancholia of the ghazal form—heavy with the memory of generations of subcontinental trauma—and repurposes it to grapple with the psychic wounds of a new generation. Vulture Prince becomes a lament for people she has loved and lost, but also for an imagined future where love—for the self, for the divine, for all of humanity—wins out over the politics of difference and resentment that are tearing apart both her native and adopted homelands. Cloaked in the gloom of dusk, it is an incandescent love letter to the light.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | New Amsterdam | April 27, 2021 | 8.2 | 6294b0fd-7a27-46f0-8aef-486731a6464d | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The Majical Cloudz alum trades electronic pop for guitar, piano, and strings on an unflinchingly candid debut solo album that sets his singular voice free to preen, wander, and soar. | The Majical Cloudz alum trades electronic pop for guitar, piano, and strings on an unflinchingly candid debut solo album that sets his singular voice free to preen, wander, and soar. | Devon Welsh: Dream Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devon-welsh-dream-songs/ | Dream Songs | For a songwriter who’s always been fixated on ephemerality and change, Devon Welsh didn’t seem especially bothered by the demise of his own band. In a nonchalant, almost cheerful statement announcing the breakup of his Montreal electronic duo Majical Cloudz in 2016, the singer voiced no regrets or anxieties, only appreciation and the promise of more music to come. “The band was an opportunity for us to grow into the kinds of people and the kinds of artists we wanted to become,” he wrote. “We both feel it to be the completion of something very positive.”
Perhaps he saw that this particular breakup wasn’t really an ending. Like Morrissey or David Byrne, Welsh has one of those voices that ensure a certain consistency across projects; no matter how different the music is, anything he sings is likely to sound a good deal like Majical Cloudz. And so it is with his proper solo debut, Dream Songs, which he recorded with producer Austin Tufts of Braids, using a palette of mostly traditional instruments like guitars, piano, and strings. On paper that may sound like a rebuke to Majical Cloudz’s impressionist electronic pop, but in practice the effect is the same: a backdrop of lovely, spacious music that grants Welsh’s pliable voice full freedom to preen, wander, and soar.
An air of formality hangs over the whole record, which stages its songs like the lush sets of Golden Age Hollywood films. On “Dreams Have Pushed You Around,” an orchestral track that twinkles under the glow of moonlight, Welsh performs as if clad in a top hat and tails. He’s singing clearer and louder than ever, though the extra attention he calls to his voice doesn’t prevent him from exploring its boundaries. On “Vision,” the vibrations of his tenor summon a cascade of rippling synths. That moment is paralleled in “Chances,” when he hits an outright ugly note—a flat, phlegmy neigh that he just lets ride. Strings swell around it in celebration, as if cheering his bravery.
Welsh’s worldview doesn’t allow room for failure. Dream Songs is a safe space where beautiful outcomes and mere effort are rewarded in equal measure, with reassuring music that underscores lyrics about personal growth and self-actualization. “I’ll build the wings on both our shoulders, and I won’t even mention all of the reasons why I fear to fly,” he vows on “Over the Sky.” He presents his most memorable proposal for becoming a better person in the album’s opening line: “When you see an insect, don’t try to squash it.”
Dream Songs is bound to be more polarizing than anything Majical Cloudz recorded because it leaves less room for interpretation. On any given listen, there are moments when I’m awed by its radiance and others when I’m irritated by the sheer obviousness of it all, though the exact trigger points vary from replay to replay. What’s missing is the sense of mystery and otherness that Majical Cloudz so delicately conjured. Welsh’s former bandmate Matthew Otto created music for the frontman to play against, but the swooning accompaniments on his solo debut put a gilded frame around his already prominent voice. At times, it can feel like too much: Welsh is too front and center, too exposed. But it’s all in the spirit of candor. From the get-go, Dream Songs banks on fearless sincerity, and it never once second guesses that choice. | 2018-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | You Are Accepted | August 28, 2018 | 6.9 | 629a9905-882c-4e71-94ca-461825ba573b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Yo La Tengo have finally reached the upper echelon of society: yuppies! Amidst our flaring economy, the cash-obsessed, egocentric 'elite ... | Yo La Tengo have finally reached the upper echelon of society: yuppies! Amidst our flaring economy, the cash-obsessed, egocentric 'elite ... | Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8870-and-then-nothing-turned-itself-inside-out/ | And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out | Yo La Tengo have finally reached the upper echelon of society: yuppies! Amidst our flaring economy, the cash-obsessed, egocentric 'elite' have more cash to blow than ever before, and you know what that means: they're hip! Especially in major American cities, these wealthy professionals are flocking to upscale outlets such as Borders, Barnes & Noble and other places with lots of fancy faux-oak shelving to purchase their copies of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out.
But if there's anything we've learned about these socially, culturally, economically, and apparently now, musically conscious individuals is that they'll only flock to something for one of three reasons: 1) the hype is overwhelming; 2) it's the biggest, most expensive, highest-quality item of its kind; 3) Eric, the office trendsetter, recommended it. My question is, where does Yo La Tengo fit into this picture? A conspiracy theorist might conclude that some high-ranking Matador executive slipped a few copies of Inside-Out into the offices of large mortgage companies, advertising firms, and stockbrokers. Sadly, it's probably much simpler than that.
For years, Yo La Tengo have cranked out incredibly diverse albums with songs ranging from gentle western twang, to noise-fueled indie anthems, to lengthy, distortion-soaked instrumental epics. But here, Yo La Tengo have eliminated the noise they built their name on. 'Upbeat' is no longer an accurate descriptor for the trio's music. Rather, this is an album filled with songs in the vein of I Can Hear the Heart's "Shadows", Electr-O-Pura's "The Hour Grows Late", and the droning seven-minute version of "Big Day Coming" off Painful. And nothing else.
So it makes sense when you consider the music-buying trends of the upper class. In the early 90s, they were all over Enigma, the Eagles, Billy Joel and Steely Dan. While bland VH-1 genericism still rules over the majority of rich, white folks, they have been catching on of late-- The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Beck's Mutations, and Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs have all become big sellers in their demographic. Of course, this doesn't mean the underground can't enjoy it, too. Oh, sure, we're used to a slightly different Yo La Tengo-- one that once burned through rockers like "From a Motel 6," "False Alarm," and "Sugarcube," and kept it loud even during the quiet tracks.
Among Inside-Out's sea of gentle lullabies, it's easy to long for the stunning diversity this band is known for. However, it's clear they were shooting for something different this time around. The album's cover depicts quiet dusk in a common outer suburb. Electrical wires stretch over a standard one-story home. The backyard is crowded with pine trees. To the far right, a man stands at the end of the driveway, a spot of light beaming down around him from the darkening sky above. It's a traditional image of alien abduction that encapsulates the peaceful ringing of the record's gently picked electric guitars and serene vocals. The cover speaks to the band's intentions behind the music: a dreamlike state, lulling, serene, tranquil.
Despite Inside-Out's tendency to fade to background music during the first couple of listens, the album features few songs in need of omission. Only the album's later material seems less inspired. "Madeline," at times, recalls the melody of the album's only driving, uptempo rock track, "Cherry Chapstick." The rhythmic instrumental "Tired Hippo," while an excellent fit on this record, could have been better served as a b-side. And of course, everyone's biggest gripe, the 17 minute-long closing track, "Night Falls on Hoboken," is pretty lacking when compared with their past epics.
Regardless, the first three-quarters of Inside-Out contains some of Yo La Tengo's best work to date. As a whole, however, it may be one of their less ear-catching records. If recorded by an aspiring young band, Inside-Out would be deemed the next big thing by all music press. However, people are used to Ira Kaplan's masterful electric assaults and the broad range of sounds that generally appear in spades on Yo La Tengo's LPs. Still, this record is among the best I've heard so far this year, and will likely remain that way. | 2000-02-29T01:00:07.000-05:00 | 2000-02-29T01:00:07.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 29, 2000 | 8.1 | 629c6c27-7a69-46de-b7dd-329d094ab32e | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | |
On the sequel to last year’s Eat My Pussy, the Chicago rapper’s songwriting is at times more brazen and at others more introspective. | On the sequel to last year’s Eat My Pussy, the Chicago rapper’s songwriting is at times more brazen and at others more introspective. | Queen Key: Eat My Pussy Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/queen-key-eat-my-pussy-again/ | Eat My Pussy Again | Queen Key is not about subtleties. Last year, when the Chicago rapper born Ke’Asha McClure released her bold and brash mixtape Eat My Pussy, the title alone caught plenty of attention. It was an exhibition of Key’s raw talent, particularly her knack for party-rap hooks and her star-making sense of humor. The premise for its follow-up is simple. “You ate my pussy once. It was good… so eat it again,” Key told a “Vice Live” interviewer, beaming as she explained her latest choice of title. Her new album, Eat My Pussy Again, is a clear progression of Key’s songwriting, at times more brazen and at others more introspective.
Key’s prime asset, and the main way she gets jokes off, is her deadpan delivery. Her idea of a punchline is to casually point out, “I don’t like people/I smack niggas,” in a laidback and assured drawl, as if she’d hit the recording booth after smoking a blunt or two. She may not be a rapid-fire spitter like Megan Thee Stallion or as outrageously raunchy as CupcakKe, but Key’s superpower is to inject the most unbothered energy into the fewest possible words. On “Ratchett,” she raps, “I got cash on flash/If he ask, I don’t have it/Nigga tragic,” releasing the last word with the withering disdain of someone who’s just shared a screenshot of your private texts to the group chat.
Key is at her best when she’s riding a hard beat. Eat My Pussy Again’s standout tracks are modeled off current trends in Texas rap, where songs like 10k.Caash’s “Aloha” or Megan’s “Sex Talk” are constructed of monstrous bass, claps, and not much else. In January, a questionably authorized version of “Ratchett” appeared with the bass cranked all the way up, sounding like a distorted fart from a shitty car speaker. Mistake or not, the crunchy, unprofessional production worked with the song’s hook (“Make these hoes get ratchet”), and the idea of turning a “bass-boosted” edit into a studio version suited Key’s brash humor. The first “Ratchett” was scraped from the internet, presumably to make room for the newly mixed album version, where you can actually hear Key’s ridiculous punchlines (“Got head from a nerd, I knock off that nigga glasses”). But if Eat My Pussy Again has a failing, it’s that it tries to present a polished version of Key, who thrives when she’s uninhibited.
Still, Eat My Pussy Again proves Key isn’t only a party girl. On “I Like Me Better” and “Ms. Understood,” she rattles off anxieties about her rising popularity and distrust of others over jazzy, lyrical beats, more Mick Jenkins than Chief Keef. “My heart telling me that this is all where it begins/So don’t lose myself becoming one those who lose and win,” she cautions. “Misunderstood, but it’s all good,” she chants on the hook, as though convincing herself that she’s going to be OK. While her commitment to keeping it 100 usually manifests as comedy, “I Like Me Better” explores the idea earnestly, revealing that it’s part of her larger goal for self-improvement. “I like me better when I listen/I like me better when I learn,” she raps. When she’s rowdy and audacious, Queen Key is exhilarating. But her jokey swagger and hard persona is almost like a setup for the true pay-off: when Key bares her heart. | 2019-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Machine Entertainment Group | May 10, 2019 | 7 | 62a5daf8-148d-4dd0-b32a-98f6630db1d5 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Pairing experimental sound design with varied rap and R&B features, the Detroit producer’s hyperpop-tinged LP doubles as a tribute to the spirit of SOPHIE, his late friend and collaborator. | Pairing experimental sound design with varied rap and R&B features, the Detroit producer’s hyperpop-tinged LP doubles as a tribute to the spirit of SOPHIE, his late friend and collaborator. | Jimmy Edgar: Cheetah Bend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jimmy-edgar-cheetah-bend/ | Cheetah Bend | Before he was old enough to attend clubs as a punter, Detroit’s Jimmy Edgar was cupping headphones to his ears behind the decks, DJing shoulder to shoulder with hometown heroes like Juan Atkins. In the 17 years since he signed to Warp as a teenager, his style has grown alongside his voracious tastes, encompassing IDM, mutated synth funk, and, most recently, hip-hop. Edgar channels that lifetime of songwriting and sound manipulation into his fourth album, Cheetah Bend. The veteran electronic producer’s take on the genre-clashing freneticism of hyperpop, it doubles as a celebration of SOPHIE, his late friend and collaborator, to whom the album is dedicated and whose influence abounds.
Where Edgar’s last solo album, 2012’s Majenta, mostly dealt in sweaty, hedonistic dance music, Cheetah Bend is a more eclectic mix that leans heavily on collaboration, bringing a new featured artist to nearly every song. This reflects his own shifting circumstances; the onetime Berlin resident moved back to the United States some years ago, setting up shop in Los Angeles and holding additional recording sessions in Atlanta and Detroit. Just like other club mavens who became rap producers, like Brodinski before him, Edgar took himself out of his techno comfort zone to immerse himself in the music scenes that inspired him. He put away his modular rig and hung up the patch cables, locking himself away in the studio for years in an effort to learn how to apply his musical talents to more mainstream genres.
The marriage of Edgar’s unbridled experimental production sensibilities with guest turns from rising rappers and R&B singers is rarely transcendent, but it manages to stay interesting throughout. From Atlanta rap star 24hrs’ verses on the bouncy highlight “NOTICE” to relative unknowns like the mysterious Messer, who lends an exhilarating, euphoric counterweight to the otherwise menacing “READY2DIE,” the features best define this new pop-friendly era of Jimmy Edgar. Not every collaboration is so seamless—on “GET UP,” fellow Detroiter Danny Brown’s self-help mantras teeter awkwardly atop a trundling beat—but for the most part, Edgar understands that the best electronic “producer albums” strike a fine balance with their arrangements so that guest vocalists don’t end up feeling like interlopers. He knows when to pull back to austere minimalism in order to accommodate them, and he knows when to flex his sound-design chops to boost them to the next level.
The guests here who have released music with Edgar in the past seem to have the best idea of the world he’s trying to build with his music. Rochelle Jordan, who previously graced Edgar and Machinedrum’s joint J-E-T-S album ZOOSPA in 2019, lends a sultry breathiness to the low-light synths and slo-mo breaks of “CRANK.” B La B, another Atlanta artist who Edgar released an entire mixtape with last year, delivers Cheetah Bend’s most memorable rap feature on “TURN,” a hurtling bass-bin rattler whose metallic, squiggly percussion evokes SOPHIE’s early singles.
SOPHIE’s presence is intimately felt across these songs, in more ways that one. “METAL,” a collaboration between the two artists, sounds like it’s been lifted directly from the PRODUCT era, perhaps retrofitted from an early version that leaked online several years back. Similar sound-design techniques distinguish “ZIGZAG,” the Millie Go Lightly collaboration “BE WITH YOU,” and the back half of “CHEETAH” This should come as no surprise: The two producers were longtime friends who first bonded in the early 2010s over their shared love of the Elektron Monomachine, the hardware synthesizer/sequencer used to summon the squelching, alien sounds that would become the late artist’s sonic signature. It was SOPHIE who introduced Edgar to Vince Staples, which resulted in one of Big Fish Theory’s best songs (“745”) and opened the door a bit wider for Edgar as a rap producer in his own right.
It’s a testament to the long-standing creative relationship between the two, as well as Edgar’s own unique sensibilities, that his new work is so clearly influenced by SOPHIE yet never feels like he’s biting the Scottish producer’s style. SOPHIE always believed that electronic music—even in its harshest, most challenging forms—could break through to the mainstream and make pop weirder, fresher, and better than ever. Edgar carries that torch forward in his attempt to bridge the gap between the underground rave and the strip joint, the avant-garde and the crowd-pleasers. Cheetah Bend doesn’t always hit the mark, but when it does, it evokes a thrilling future of club music without borders.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | March 3, 2021 | 6.9 | 62b66869-d4d3-4b0a-ba2d-28b7f35fd0a8 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
The Toronto songwriter returns with a brief and lovely alt-folk record, vivid and unmoored from place and time. | The Toronto songwriter returns with a brief and lovely alt-folk record, vivid and unmoored from place and time. | Charlotte Cornfield: Could Have Done Anything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-cornfield-could-have-done-anything/ | Could Have Done Anything | Who is Charlotte Cornfield? The video for “Cut and Dry,” a single from her new album Could Have Done Anything, answers the question with a lifelong collage of home video footage. She begins in a children’s choir, sporting a halo of blonde curls, dimpled cheeks, and a nose so buttony it belongs on a teddy bear’s sweater. We watch her grow up, get glasses, chop those curls. She leaves the choir behind and begins to noodle on an electric guitar. She shows off records by the Beatles, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. By the conclusion, she is eight months pregnant and surrounded on a small stage by a band in all black.
It’s clear that Cornfield knows herself, even as the rest of the world is still coming to know her. Her last album, the spry and witty Highs in the Minuses, garnered enough attention that the Toronto-based artist was able to embark on her first U.S. tour. She recorded Could Have Done Anything with producer Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman, her first time extending the creative process beyond her tight-knit community of friends. Still, even with a broader audience and a new collaborator, her work retains the cozily homemade feel of the earlier music.
Could Have Done Anything is an alt-folk record unmoored from place and time. “You and Me” begins at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson Airport, traverses three states in a Subaru, and winds up in the Rocky Mountains. Summer sunsets in Phoenix share time with a playground laid bare by winter. She goes to see the Magnetic Fields in Montreal; she wonders whether to paint her walls “white or Los Angeles blue.” And it’s never clear whether she loved the subjects of her love songs 10 years or two days ago. Youthful imagery like bike helmets and ice cream cones dance alongside car crashes and epitaphs.
The stories Cornfield tells are slippery, non-linear. When she scores tickets to that sold-out Magnetic Fields show, she sings, slyly, “That gave me points with you/That I went on to use,” and holds her date’s hand as the band gets onstage. But then, the song seems to spiral out: She feels sick and wants to be alone; she’ll never get over the relationship; she asks her partner to leave; she says the guy is evil then regrets it. What really happened? Anything, anywhere, at any time: Cornfield doesn’t need, or want, us to know the specifics.
Sometimes, this spare quality works against the album. Could Have Done Anything is not even a half-hour long—so brief it resists being held. No sooner is the listener in Cornfield’s thrall than the record is over and her spell is broken. Still, Cornfield’s words linger long after the record is over, thanks in part to her lovely and understated vocal delivery: a capacious alto, generously raspy, the influence of Lucinda Williams plain. She’s also clever as all hell, given to musical wordplay. On “Nowhere,” she plays a solitary game of call and response—“Nowhere! Nowhere! Nothing! Nothing!”—to amplify her loneliness. “In From the Rain” underscores her impatience with a fickle lover: “Waiting fooooor you to say something,” she sings, holding the note for aeons. A snare sizzles under the anaphora of opener “Gentle Like the Drugs.” The choice to repeat “I see… I see… I see…” rather than describe the images outright creates distance between Cornfield and her listener. But then, that’s the point. Her visions, already compelling on the page, throw off sparks when she conjures them aloud. | 2023-05-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy / Polyvinyl | May 24, 2023 | 7.4 | 62c0007b-20d1-48f3-9e1a-97fb521311d9 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Caroline Polachek’s best album of her career is a transformative pop experience, a passionate, richly melodic odyssey into the darkest corners of love. | Caroline Polachek’s best album of her career is a transformative pop experience, a passionate, richly melodic odyssey into the darkest corners of love. | Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-polachek-desire-i-want-to-turn-into-you/ | Desire, I Want to Turn Into You | Desire can be volatile, excruciating, wonderful, and cruel—but above all, it keeps us going. We want and want and want until we die, these small hopes urging us across the vast expanse of our lives. Caroline Polachek—pop auteur, emotional philosopher, hopeless romantic—makes a muse of this tangled, pervasive force on her virtuosic new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. She knows too well that falling in love suffuses you with possibility, makes a boring world briefly beautiful. And so, as a nod to desire’s transformational power, her album’s cover displays her on all fours on the grimy subway, lunging forward with a ravenous look in her eyes. On one end of the car is the rat race; on the other end, sand—a mirage of paradise.
Polachek spent much of her career as one half of the indie-pop band Chairlift in the maddening, formative city of New York, and more recently has split her time between Los Angeles and London. In 2020, she decamped to the idylls of the Mediterranean—blaring ’70s and ’80s Italo-pop out of a beat-up station wagon with her boyfriend in Rome and staying at the base of Mount Etna in Sicily, marveling at the “faceless, tectonic, chaotic energy coming up from below.” Inspired by these excursions, the album takes us to breathtaking places, all palm trees and crystalline water, deep red sunsets and smoke-covered volcanoes. On the ecstatic “Welcome to My Island,” Polachek is Calypso greeting a shipwrecked Odysseus, waving us to her oasis. She channels a yearning as deep blue as the ocean and howls like a wolf to the moon.
While Polachek was constantly in transit on her 2019 album Pang—descending with a parachute, passing through a door to another door—Desire is grounded in a more real sense of place. Even on songs with few locational details, you can feel the climate: An elusive woman lives out an escapist fantasy on “Bunny Is a Rider,” not checking her email because she’s “AWOL on a Thursday.” Satellites can’t find her because she’s somewhere in the jungle: Hear the muggy, tropical bassline, the faint bird chirps, the static that resembles the rustle of fronds. “Crude Drawing of an Angel” is staged below the Earth’s surface amid dripping stalactites, with jagged breaths creeping up from behind. Polachek’s voice slices through the dank atmosphere like a blade: “Forsake me/Here on the ground/All or nothing,” she pleads, begging for mercy from a lover whom she knows will disappear.
Perhaps the “crude angel” is painter Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the “angel of history” who, in one famous account, looks with horror upon the cumulative wreckage of civilization, the damage wrought in the name of glory and beauty. Polachek is not just a swooning lover, but an aesthete and philosopher attuned to contemporary extremes, conceptualizing Desire during a period of grand instability. During the pandemic her father died of COVID-related complications, and she saw cruelty all around her as she contended with the cyclical nature of disease, the fragility of the supply chain, and the rancor of social media morality. “I started thinking about how to re-harmonize myself, and my music, with the reality that there is a destructive side to everything,” she said. On the flamenco-inspired “Sunset,” Polachek dramatizes the pressure of new love against the backdrop of a destitute society, a collapsed infrastructure of care: “So many stories we were told about a safety net/But when I look for it, it’s just a hand that’s holding mine.”
The love explored on Desire is not the result of a patient and sustainable partnership, but a violent, all-or-nothing immersion. Implicit in the wish in the album’s title, I Want to Turn Into You, is the prospect of losing one’s own selfhood. Across the album, Polachek indulges in the pleasure of obliteration and surrender: “You are melting everything about me,” she sings with her arms outstretched on “Smoke.” On “Blood and Butter,” her descriptions turn grotesque: She coos breathlessly about diving through her lover’s face and underneath his tattoos, longing to be sustained by nothing “but the sun that’s in our eyes.”
Sometimes Polachek seems so breathless with desire that she can only come up to its surface to gasp up a few intelligible lines at a time. Bristling at our culture’s obsession with literalism in art, she proffers, “I’m a deep believer in what lies behind.” So songs like “Pretty in Possible” dabble in Cocteau Twins-style abstraction, blotted narratives featuring mayflies and bloody noses. Sonically, the song is Frou Frou meets “Tom’s Diner” with its keychain-jangle beat, wordless a capella stretches, and corkscrewed melodies. Polachek and producer Danny L Harle started it as an exercise in pure flow, no explicit choruses or verses. Still, one sweet line wrestles itself from the stream: “I was born to get you home.”
The theme of mania is replicated in the songs’ twisted, irregular structures. “Blood and Butter” casts off its jacket and just to put it on again, staging a fickle transition between day and night and ending on an epic bagpipe climax lifted out of “The Sensual World.” “I Believe” is breakbeat pop fit for a Lizzie McGuire trip to Rome, punctured by glitchy, adrenal breaths that sound like a cyborg subjected to shock therapy. The album’s production veers from trip-hop to new wave, trance to flamenco, demonstrating an innate understanding of the pop archive in pursuit of a new personal style. Each creation seems marvelously its own: Who else would pay tribute to their mercurial father with petulant white-girl rapping and cheesy stadium-rock guitar, or use a 1970s young adult novel about an immortal family as fodder for a shimmering Enya ballad?
The cumulative effect is like staring up at a giant fresco, the detail so exquisite you can’t decide where to rest your eyes first. Flourishes appear in one place, then echo in a new location—wings flapping, whistles beckoning, blades slicing, bells chiming. She opens Desire with her father’s warning to “watch your head, girl” and concludes with the image of a decapitated angel. But what really binds the album is the dynamism of Polachek’s vocals, the culmination of years of bel canto operatic training and the hunger to get it right. There is so much conviction in her delivery that ceding space to anyone else, even guest spots from Grimes and Dido, feels like a disservice: Within the span of one song, Polachek’s voice will smear like paint, swoop like a crane, and bubble like lava.
All of the best attributes of Desire are reflected on its closer “Billions,” a humid tabla-pop song with medieval sound effects and an over-the-top drone squiggle. Polachek brings us into the throes of a shaky love affair, doling out details in succulent little morsels. “Salty flavor/Lies like a sailor/But he loves like a painter,” she sings, evoking the tangy taste of skin, the coarse vernacular of the seaman, the uncalloused touch of the artist. There’s something brilliant in how she drops down an octave between verses, going from the heady bliss of the evening to the sobriety of the morning after, and how she lends ordinary words their own strange mouthfeel—“zay-zay-zay-something to me” and “bill-lee-yaaans!” After running through scenes of seduction and anguish, the song appears to end on happy note: “I never felt so close to you,” Polachek confesses, echoed by the cherubic voices of the Trinity children’s choir. But being close to is still not the same as being subsumed by, having turned into. So we nudge and nudge and nudge, never quite reaching fulfillment, longing until the end. | 2023-02-14T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-14T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Perpetual Novice | February 14, 2023 | 8.7 | 62c2a21b-fae3-4964-bd5c-60d902bda1d9 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Lament the demise of the rock juggernaut. In the 70s, there was Led Zeppelin's offering of a whole lotta ... | Lament the demise of the rock juggernaut. In the 70s, there was Led Zeppelin's offering of a whole lotta ... | The Court & Spark: Bless You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1635-bless-you/ | Bless You | Lament the demise of the rock juggernaut. In the 70s, there was Led Zeppelin's offering of a whole lotta love, a stairway to heaven, and a facile Kashmir eclecticism. In the 80s, there was cock rock, hair bands and countless groupies. One must hand it to University of Chicago's Allan Bloom, who in 1987 put forth an accurate, yet jaded, generalization on the role of popular music: "A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy."
While his statement is gargantuan in presumption, it could be said that the mainstream music of the time often bequeathed an overbalanced self-assuredness in the listener. But as my fourth grade teacher aptly stated: change is inevitable. When Kurt Cobain was thrown the reigns in 1991, the new hero wasn't sexual, clean, or a monster of rock. This demigod had feelings ranging from angst to alienation (okay, not that great a divide, admittedly) and rarely came across as completely sure of himself. And with the death of Cobain came the eulogy of genuine rock bombast.
Above ground lie a vast assortment of commercial-quality pop and trite modern rock radio, all sans ingenuity or sincere emotion. Underground, there are the emo kids, the shoegazers, the art dilettantes, anti-everything punks, and dozens of elitist music cliques. Where is one to belong? Perhaps the question is not where to belong but whether to belong at all.
Thus we have the nature of no depression, and its many bands who are routinely pigeonholed as country. And on initial exposure, such a classification is justified. But at the end of the day, no depression is not your uncle's John Michael Montgomery. Consider the description of San Francisco's the Court and Spark as found in the biography on their website: "The Court & Spark is a slow-fade, a slow-klang, a climb to the top of Portola Road to watch San Francisco on the longest day of the year." I may have never been to San Francisco, but this statement can not be denied.
In fact, the Court & Spark's sophomore collection, Bless You, introduces itself in a slow-klang. A simple bass snare pattern in two slowly ambles its way to the listener, accompanied by unorthodox percussion and a sound resembling the plucking and strumming of piano strings before the full band enters. The track, "To See the Fires," presents a comprehensive view of the Court & Spark's terrain: slide guitar (only sometimes lap-steel), the addition of Wendy Allen to sing harmony full-time, organ, piano, and southern tinged vocals. But don't be fooled. You are not listening to country.
Bless You's musical affect is akin to the feeling evoked by the ruddy sunset depicted on the back cover of the record: approaching peace and grasping utter beauty. The eight gorgeous minutes of the penultimate "Fade Out to Little Arrow" are augmented by very light horns that ring more like distant church bells on a Sunday evening. The upbeat tambourine shuffle of "Rooster Mountain" complements the most infectious yet bittersweet track. Such a feat is achieved by a very slamming snare sound, resembling a large crowd of impeccably synchronized handclaps, and droning horn leading the bridge back to the verse. What makes Bless You so intriguing is the effectiveness of such subtle ornaments.
Wendy Allen proves yet again, with her backing vocals on "National Lights," that sometimes the most subtle of performances can be the best. Here, she echoes the vocals of frontman M.C. Taylor and occasionally adds a light falsetto. The song is seemingly standard fare on the surface, but the Court & Spark have almost mastered their art. The burbling organs of "A.M. Radio" lie underneath the entire track, while it climbs between male and female vocals to cymbal crashes and a driving guitar line. "I have seen the driving rain," reflect Allen and Scott Hirsch. But they don't need to tell us; we can hear it ourselves.
The Court & Spark don't consider themselves country, so neither should we. Perhaps no depression is the best description: the melodies and performances are mostly plaintive while never being altogether downcast. Their last album, 2000's tUMULt-released Ventura Whites, documented a band gathering their bearings; Bless You presents a band that's almost settled into their identity. They have their tools and have realized the power of subtlety, something the gods of rock from yestercentury tended to completely disregard. | 2001-10-21T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2001-10-21T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Absolutely Kosher | October 21, 2001 | 8.4 | 62c2d359-0ae3-4c6a-bd4b-71c2af7009d0 | Christopher F. Schiel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christopher-f. schiel/ | null |
On his Sub Pop debut, Seattle rapper Porter Ray unspools wordy verses that delve into personal tragedy, including his brother’s murder. | On his Sub Pop debut, Seattle rapper Porter Ray unspools wordy verses that delve into personal tragedy, including his brother’s murder. | Porter Ray: Watercolor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23029-watercolor/ | Watercolor | In 2009, Porter Ray Sullivan’s brother, Aaron, was shot and killed during an altercation he had no stake in; when the Seattle MC’s son was born a few years later, he named him after his late sibling. Much of Watercolor, Sullivan’s airy, classicist debut, pivots between these two Aarons—one a symbol of the graveyard’s call, the other of the future’s persistence.
Up until recently, the particulars of Sullivan’s personal life have been asides in the exaggerated, smoke-session retellings of old conquests, as on the jazzy 2015 EP Nightfall. But here, for the first time, he takes the time to evaluate the tragedies that have touched his life—in addition to his brother’s killing, his father died of multiple sclerosis when Sullivan was 16, and the mother of his son recently died in a car crash. His stacks of wordy reflections can be deeply affecting, though they’re also frequently muddled by ineffective execution. More often than not, Watercolor is colorless, a feeble rendering that obfuscates a harrowing coming-of-age tale with undercooked bruiser bars. Sullivan, who bubbled to the top of his city’s talent pool by making the mundane seem luxurious with careful word choices and an eye for detail, doesn’t do his own unimaginable story justice.
To be fair, the album is tasked with doing a lot at once: putting on for an unheralded Seattle rap scene, earning the expectations that come with being an unusual signee for indie rock stalwart Sub Pop, and compressing nearly a decade of grief and introspection into a handful of tracks. Still, Sullivan often has trouble finding the right words, which can be disastrous for a rapper known for piecing sentence fragments together like a puzzle. He talks with his dad in his dreams and remembers blunted backyard bare-knuckle boxing with his brother on songs like “Past Life” and “The Mirror Between Us,” but these stories get bogged down in moment-by-moment narration that lacks his signature ability to magnify and enhance.
When Sullivan locks in, he can be a force, effortlessly threading ideas. A song like “Navi Truck,” which uses cars as totems for cherished failed loves, showcases his best scene-setting. “My Mother’s Words” turns maternal advice into a new rapper checklist: be wary of drugs, envious friends, and poisonous relationships. It’s fitting that the strongest moments come on “East Seattle,” a song that relives his coldest nights on the city’s streets, including the one when his brother was murdered. “Just try and visualize losin’ your brother/Make you wonder how it feel inside/Hearing him suffer make me wonder how it feel to die/Seeing him sleeping in his coffin and he still inside,” he raps, remembering the 911 call he made from Aaron’s phone. It’s the most gut-wrenching moment on the album.
Unfortunately, Watercolor doesn’t piece together enough of these moments. And while the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap. For all its wrenching inspiration, Watercolor paints an incomplete portrait of the city and struggles that made Porter Ray one of its most vocal envoys.
Correction: After publication, a family member informed us that the mother of Sullivan's child had recently died in a car crash. The article has been updated to reflect this. | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sub Pop | March 23, 2017 | 6.6 | 62c2f9af-a664-4433-b0aa-9734e75b4c3f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The electronic outfit’s exquisitely bleak new record, the first since bandmate Charlie Cooper passed away, often feels like the very stuff of music is being torn apart. | The electronic outfit’s exquisitely bleak new record, the first since bandmate Charlie Cooper passed away, often feels like the very stuff of music is being torn apart. | Telefon Tel Aviv: Dreams Are Not Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/telefon-tel-aviv-dreams-are-not-enough/ | Dreams Are Not Enough | There was a time, not long ago, that Joshua Eustis doubted whether he would ever make another Telefon Tel Aviv record. Between 2001 and 2009, Eustis and his duo partner Charlie Cooper recorded three albums, establishing a singular fusion of maze-like circuitry and soulful melancholy that is part Autechre and part Depeche Mode. Then, the same week that their third album Immolate Yourself was released, Cooper disappeared and was found dead in his sleep. Shortly thereafter, Eustis’ father died, and then the film director John Hughes passed, whose son had put out Telefon Tel Aviv’s first album, and who Eustis said “was like a second father to me.” With a sizeable chunk of his world suddenly wiped out, Eustis faced the task of starting over.
Gradually, he did just that. In 2014, Eustis released a solo album of elegant synth pop as Sons of Magdalene.. He produced for Tropic of Cancer and Vatican Shadow. He played in Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan’s group Puscifer and the brooding synth-pop trio the Black Queen; he was a touring member of Nine Inch Nails. And with Belong’s Turk Dietrich, he recorded two albums of deeply experimental dance music as Second Woman. Now, a decade after Immolate Yourself, Eustis returns with Dreams Are Not Enough, his first solo album under the alias.
Telefon Tel Aviv were always downcast, but Dreams Are Not Enough sharpens and strengthens their most morose tendencies into a kind of probing and exquisite bleakness—what Eustis has described as “the rapture of despair.” The suffering is inseparable from the serotonin rush; it is storm-tossed sea and lifeboat all in one.
The album is formally inventive in a way we don’t often expect of music so firmly grounded in gloomy electronic pop. In the course of the record’s trim 50 minutes, it winds between sandblasted ambient and misty-eyed synth pop, industrial techno and chamber choir; there are echoes of Chicago acid and Arvo Pärt alongside apocalyptic sound design reminiscent of Ben Frost. The scale of the thing is enormous, suggesting cliffs cleaving into the sea.
Certain tropes recur throughout: Chief among these is a strange kind of zippering rhythm, speeding and slowing in cycles, like a stick being dragged along a metal grill. Second Woman made extensive use of the technique, but if there it could feel clinical, like an experiment in search of a real-world application, here it has a powerful emotional undertow. In the album’s opening track, it works like a bellows, stoking dull coals into full flame, and it’s put into similar service on nearly every song, wringing something wild and unpredictable out of what might otherwise have been merely politely forlorn. It often feels like the very stuff of the music is being torn apart.
This recurring arrhythmic energy helps bind the album; so do the ambient interludes that stitch together contrasting tracks. The whole album works as a suite, a deep dive into a dream state. Eustis says he has experienced both lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, and the album’s song titles are drawn from one of his nighttime visions. When read down the tracklist, they constitute a brief poem:
I dream of it often:
a younger version of myself,
standing at the bottom of the ocean;
arms aloft,
mouth agape,
eyes glaring,
not seeing,
not breathing,
still as stone in a watery fane.
Fittingly, for such an expression of Romantic yearning, Eustis’ songs dwell mostly upon loss, regret, and the passage of time, though his words are frequently indecipherable, buried beneath layers of distortion. It seems likely that’s on purpose: The lyrics are right there on the sleeve of the record, but they are mostly expressions of the kind of hurt that is as private as it is universal. Eustis dances between revealing and concealing, admission and denial, and that tension animates the record from within: emotional whiplash as the engine of life. In this, the album plays out very much like the sweep of grief itself.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | October 1, 2019 | 8.1 | 62c5726e-9d37-4487-a1ce-1024dd0c99ce | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The queen of the coy R&B ballad returns for her first solo album in nearly a decade, making only a few concessions to contemporary trends. | The queen of the coy R&B ballad returns for her first solo album in nearly a decade, making only a few concessions to contemporary trends. | Toni Braxton: Sex & Cigarettes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/toni-braxton-sex-and-cigarettes/ | Sex & Cigarettes | In the eight years since Toni Braxton released her last solo album, 2010’s Pulse, the orbit of her world has shifted dramatically. With her music career more or less sidelined as a result of a 2008 lupus diagnosis, the onetime queen of grown-and-sexy R&B has watched her genre tilt toward more expressly sinful subject matters. Where she excelled with emotional ballads and coy come-ons—on her 1996 hit “You’re Makin’ Me High,” she refers to her “private parts” instead of something more subtle and alluring—many of the artists who have followed have taken cues instead from the rap-influenced, sexually explicit style of Jodeci and, later, the Weeknd.
That’s not to say that Braxton has been out of the public eye. Since 2011, she’s starred in a hit reality show, “Braxton Family Values,” along with her four sisters, mother, and her two sons (whose father is her ex-husband, Keri Lewis of ’90s R&B group Mint Condition). As Toni has always been the family’s biggest name in the world outside the show, there is an undertone of benevolence implied in her decision to include her sisters on her journey. Braxton’s sister Tamar became the breakout star—she and her now-ex-husband, producer Vincent Herbert, even got a spin-off, “Tamar & Vince”—but themes of sibling rivalry and other familial turmoil, from DUI to divorce, ruled the show.
In the series’ second and third seasons, Braxton and longtime collaborator Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds began working on an album that became their 2014 duets set Love, Marriage, & Divorce. Rooted in soulful sounds and themes of triumphing over pain—the same ones they’ve been cultivating together since recording “Love Shoulda Brought You Home” for the Boomerang soundtrack in 1992—it won them a Grammy for Best R&B Album, and stands as some of the best work of her career. “I feel like I’ve been given a third chance,” Braxton told The Guardian around this time.
Perhaps Love, Marriage, & Divorce was more like one life in a cat’s nine. Braxton’s latest album, Sex & Cigarettes, comes on the heels of an even bigger twist in her life story: Earlier this year, she announced her engagement to Cash Money’s larger-than-life impresario, Birdman. Despite this high-profile relationship, you will not hear too many of-the-moment motifs on the album. (Or any cameos from Birdman’s roster: The only guest here is singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat.) The mildly risque title isn’t in reference to her own pursuits—it’s the name of a sparse piano ballad on which Braxton weeps about the stench of an unfaithful lover who stinks up their shared bed with evidence of his infidelities.
There is palpable anger in her voice on “Sex & Cigarettes,” but beneath it is a deep sea of tranquility, and it’s the latter tone that defines her performances on this album. While there are a few tracks that drift out of ballad territory, like the thick-with-bass “Long As I Live,” Sex & Cigarettes deals mostly in windswept textures—but without the high drama of some of her classic singles, like “Un-Break My Heart” or “Breathe Again.” Her performances are meditative, particularly on standout “FOH,” another piano ballad sung through clenched teeth.
It’s here where Braxton makes her grandest concession to contemporary trends: “FOH,” of course, is an internet abbreviation for “fuck outta here.” This isn’t a game that Braxton has to play, but the song’s fusion of an adult contemporary sound with more modern slang proves that she can hang in 2018 without compromising the qualities that made her famous. She is still innately part of R&B’s fabric, even now that her heyday has passed. “FOH” is not a powerhouse single like “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” but it’s confirmation that no matter which way pop’s tides turn, Braxton has a way to find her own voice and make it work. | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | March 29, 2018 | 6.8 | 62c7abc5-52e8-4611-b593-6f0561e98994 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
By all accounts, Bob Mould is on a roll: the former Hüsker Dü frontman's 2011 autobiography and 2012 LP Silver Age were as much capitulations as they were triumphs. His latest solo LP feels like an extension of Silver Age's impassioned buzz and thrust, less a sequel to its counterpart than an appendix. | By all accounts, Bob Mould is on a roll: the former Hüsker Dü frontman's 2011 autobiography and 2012 LP Silver Age were as much capitulations as they were triumphs. His latest solo LP feels like an extension of Silver Age's impassioned buzz and thrust, less a sequel to its counterpart than an appendix. | Bob Mould: Beauty & Ruin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19404-bob-mould-beauty-ruin/ | Beauty & Ruin | This year has seen the 25th-anniversary reissue of Bob Mould’s solo debut, 1989’s Workbook, a release that helped put his alternatingly brilliant and muddled post-Hüsker Dü career in perspective. On the heels of the Workbook reissue comes Beauty & Ruin, Mould's eleventh solo album and his second with the monstrous rhythm section of bassist Jason Narducy and Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster. By all accounts, Mould is on a roll: His 2011 autobiography, See a Little Light, went past being an illuminating read to the point where it felt like a work of catharsis for its author. Mould spent so much of his adult life clashing with former bandmates, struggling with his homosexuality, and groping toward a musical identity distinct from Hüsker Dü without alienating the large percentage of his fanbase that will always prefer the Mould of days past: distorted, angst-ridden, and swinging sword-sized hooks.
Silver Age from 2012 was as much of a capitulation as a triumph; it gave long-tolerant Mould fans the rush of rock riffs and burst blood vessels that had been largely absent since the breakup of Mould’s '90s-alt-rock powerhouse Sugar, but it also came across as Mould taking the path of least resistance, since his time with Hüsker Dü will always press down on him. So Beauty & Ruin feels like an extension of Silver Age’s impassioned buzz and thrust; less fortunately, it’s more of an appendix than a sequel.
Still, an appendix to the vigorous Silver Age—or even to Mould’s career up to this point—isn’t anything to sneeze at. Accordingly, the trio punches the clock with a vengeance on the punky eruptions “Kid With Crooked Face” and “Hey Mr. Grey”, a pair of tracks that circle back to Hüsker Dü’s SST days. “Kid With Crooked Face”, corrosive and supersonic, could even pass as a long-lost Metal Circus outtake, only tightened and cleaned up considerably. And on “Hey Mr. Grey”, Mould goes so far as to echo Flip Your Wig’s “Hate Paper Doll”, even if it feels more like an unintentional lapse into familiar phrasing and melody than some kind of homage to his past.
That said, there’s no denying that “I Don’t Know Anymore” is cut from the same cloth as Hüsker Dü’s “I Apologize” and Sugar’s “If I Could Change Your Mind", and the similarity goes deeper than the song titles. For all of Mould’s experimentation over the past twenty years—a hit-or-miss penchant for reinvention that encompasses everything from chamber-folk to electronica—Beauty & Ruin sticks to just a handful of well-worn gears. On “I Don’t Know Anymore”, he hews to the sound he once tried so strenuously to outrun: the bittersweet, fuzz-fueled, pop-punk open letter to the object of his angst. This latest iteration of that formula ranks up there with his catchiest, but it also comes across like a numbingly comfortable rehash of Mould’s tuneful discomfort.
Nothing on Beauty & Ruin truly resembles experimentation, as Mould, unburdened of so much baggage of late, seems joyously unconcerned with proving anything to anyone other than the fact that he can still craft hook after hook. “Little Glass Pill” opens with a airy folk intro before plowing straight into a bleary-eyed, Sugar-style rager, while “Forgiveness” feels forced in both its ham-fisted jangle and its stiff attempt to add some small amount of textural dynamic to the album. Thankfully, "Forgiveness" is the only track here that feels disposable, although “Let the Beauty Be” and “Fix It” come close; the back-to-back songs usher out Beauty & Ruin on a sentimentally gooey note that finds Mould content to mouth banalities like “It won’t seem so bad” and “Time to fill your heart with love”.
Mould may have largely emptied himself of the venom that’s filled him for decades, but when needed, he still taps into enough of that old poison to infuse “Low Season” with a churning, Black Sheets of Rain moodiness and “Fire in the City” with some inspired chord changes and wrenching twists of power-pop desperation. On the rousing “The War”, he plies one of the most predictable riffs of his career while singing, “Listen to my voice/ It’s the only weapon I kept from the war.” Of course, that’s not true: after so many years of pummeling at everything and everyone, himself included, he’s found a measure of acceptance—but he’s also kept his brass knuckles on, just in case. | 2014-06-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 2, 2014 | 7.3 | 62d22a8b-feaa-4d7b-b488-3d440b9b7ce7 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Animals as Leaders provide a dense and triumphant brand of instrumental metal that can be dazzling or exhausting, depending on your mood. | Animals as Leaders provide a dense and triumphant brand of instrumental metal that can be dazzling or exhausting, depending on your mood. | Animals as Leaders: The Madness of Many | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22617-the-madness-of-many/ | The Madness of Many | Ever since the cartoonish screaming face of In the Court of the Crimson King, progressive rock has often felt like a mirror to the mind at its most active and untamable, transmitting feelings of anxiety through complex, intricate compositions. The genre has also always been an outlet for some of rock’s most capable musicians to put their skills to good use, though sometimes (especially with the help of sterile modern-day studio production) to the point of impenetrability. After debuting in 2009 as the solo project of Nigerian-American eight-string guitar wizard Tosin Abasi, Animals as Leaders have walked the tightrope between sheer technical virtuosity and actual emotional resonance, occasionally with thrilling results. Each of their previous three records has presented a tighter and more focussed band, as Abasi’s introduced a wide range of styles, from jazz to djent, into his band’s arsenal. The resulting music—a dense and triumphant brand of instrumental metal, with Abasi’s arpeggiated soloing always at the center—rewards close listening. It can be dazzling or exhausting, depending on your mood.
Drummer Matt Garstka has called the band’s latest album, The Madness of Many, “the most natural-sounding Animals as Leaders album yet,” which seems like a bit like a paradox. There are a few moments on the record when you can see what he might have meant, like the intimate guitar solos that close out “Inner Assassins” or the (relatively) straightforward jazz fusion of “Private Visions of the World.” But, as always, the primary appeal of Animals as Leaders is just how unnatural they sound. Like any of their previous albums, Madness of Many includes no chaotic feedback squeals, no casual studio banter, no shouted count-offs to four (or to sixteen-and-three-eights, or what-have-you). The production is as clean and glossy as ever, and the band’s M.O. remains scoring dystopian cyborg fights on a burning planet as shooting stars explode in the background. Of course, they sound great doing it. More than any Animals as Leaders record yet, this one feels like the band settling into their skills, simply playing off each other as opposed to pushing themselves to new heights.
Rather than “natural,” a more apt descriptor for Madness of Many might be Animals as Leaders’ most comfortable sounding album yet. Madness is a spacious and satisfying record: what it lacks in standout moments, it makes up for in coherence. Its ten tracks, all hovering around the five-minute mark, mostly steer clear of the band’s patented everything-at-once assault, favoring a slower burn. Few of these tracks feel like entirely new territory for the band, with Abasi returning to familiar tones and patterns and each song skittering around similar tempos. The moments that do feel new, like the lurching electronic raga of album opener “Arithmophobia,” are a welcome introduction of new texture into the occasionally monotonous mix of guttural guitars and synth.
The album’s most daring section is its finale– the meditative sprawl of “The Brain Dance” and “Apeirophobia.” It’s not surprising to hear that Abasi is as inventive with acoustic guitar tones as he is with electric, but it’s a relief to hear him switch it up by the album’s end. “The Brain Dance” takes influence from both Latin guitar and Appalachian folk, with an ominous backdrop of reverb, while “Apeirophobia” is the album’s sparsest piece, layering guitars into a tranquil choir of strings. Both songs find Abasi stepping back from his frantic pace to take a breath, to maybe even enjoy himself. The title of Animals as Leaders’ previous album, The Joy of Motion, referred to Abasi, a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, noticing how quickly his hands moved as he played guitar. On these two songs, he seems more content to let us bask in the joy of taking a break from all the noise. | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Sumerian | November 17, 2016 | 6.4 | 62d830ad-4153-4edc-b972-1922a50e47f6 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Following last year’s thrilling Compro, the Ilian Tape label’s breakbeat-techno renegade returns with a three-track EP of club cuts that cleverly flip dancefloor expectations. | Following last year’s thrilling Compro, the Ilian Tape label’s breakbeat-techno renegade returns with a three-track EP of club cuts that cleverly flip dancefloor expectations. | Skee Mask: 808BB EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-808bb-ep/ | 808BB EP | Bryan Müller is a drummer, and a damn good one. Percussion—marked by grace, power, and sheer inventiveness—is his calling card. His 2018 album Compro was one of the year's most celebrated techno long-players, and in his scant discography under the name Skee Mask, he’s breathed new life into that well-trodden electronic trope, the breakbeat. In that classic sound, he’s found a sense of wonder that that’s sometimes missing amid the starkness of much modern techno.
A certain whimsy defines his drum loops and percussive arrangements—one that feels both focused and mischievous in its chaotic pace. As Compro made clear, he finds real joy in his drums: In songs like “50 Euro to Break Boost” or the hilarious “Muk FM” he found elation and levity in the tumult of his beats. He also found a way to use drums to tell a story and build a world. Redolent of cyberpunk atmospheres and informed by techno’s most futurist impulses, Compro was interested in dancefloors a galaxy (or at least a century) away. His new EP, a three-track affair called 808BB, feels like a logical continuation of where he left off with Compro.
“Trackheadz” is a good illustration of how devilishly talented Müller is. In a 2016 interview with Resident Advisor, he explained that it’s hard for him to feel inspired by a “functional, single drum loop”; instead, his rhythmic constructions are modeled on the constant variations of live performance. With “Trackheadz” he turns this philosophy upside down. It’s a pounding, near-punishing onslaught of stomping, adrenaline-pumping beats; there’s a sense that the pummeling can’t be contained, that the machinery can’t handle the signal it’s being fed. Müller takes this to its logical end, and the track begins to glitch. The sounds clip and warp and as the song sputters, not once but twice, it knocks the listener off balance. It's striking how he has organized the heroics of his drumming around this riveting analog drama. Outside these digital hiccups, the song is almost perfect, driving dancefloor music. But in eluding club convention, he does something even more interesting: He harnesses the unexpected.
He’s just as good at more straightforward statements. “TH808” is dreamy, ambient techno for those who have daydreams of spacefaring. And “808AB” is a study in fusing moody, pastel-colored IDM with exacting techno precision. Everything is united by the genius of his beats, an elating thump that leaves an imprint on the mind. Even when the headphones come off, the energy of his rhythms will stick with you. | 2019-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | February 25, 2019 | 7.7 | 62dc37b4-141d-4acd-bebd-8d35c8634921 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
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 explore the righteous anger of Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This. | 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 explore the righteous anger of Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This. | Hole: Live Through This | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hole-live-through-this/ | Live Through This | Try to imagine a famous woman who screams for a living today. Not alternative, punk-magazine famous, but American monoculture famous, platinum-selling-album famous, so famous her drug mishaps make headlines in Mexican newspapers, so famous rumors and conspiracies about her celebrity marriage hound her for decades. This woman doesn’t let out sing-screams or tinny emo yelps, but raw, diaphragmatic bellows—or, as David Fricke put it in his Rolling Stone review of Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, a “corrosive, lunatic wail.”
He was wrong on the second point: There’s no lunacy on Hole’s records. But there is anger, female anger, which, to a man’s ear, historically scans as madness. Lead singer Courtney Love often told reporters that she named her band after a line in Euripides’ Medea. “There’s a hole that pierces right through me,” it supposedly goes, though you won’t find it in any common translation of the ancient play. It’s apocryphal, or misremembered, or Love made it up to complicate the name’s obvious double entendre—either way, it makes a great myth. A band foregrounding female rage takes its name from the angriest woman in the Western canon, a woman so angry at her husband’s betrayal she kills their children just so he will feel her pain in his bones.
Like all female revenge fantasies written by men, Medea carries a grain of neurosis about how women might retaliate for their subjugation. It is easier, still, for men to express these anxieties by way of violent fantasy than it is for women to communicate their anger at all. In a 1996 New York magazine cover story on women alternative singers entitled “Feminism Rocks,” Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky who also worked as New York’s deputy editor, paraphrased feminist journalist and author Susan Faludi: “While our culture admires the angry young man, who is perceived as heroic and sexy, it can’t find anything but scorn for the angry young woman, who is seen as emasculating and bitter.” This was true for Love, who watched grunge break through to the mainstream only to find that the freedom and rebellion it promised was reserved for her male counterparts. In grunge, men could be scruffy and rude and defy gender norms—they could be rawer than the men modeled in synth-pop music videos or hair metal concerts a few years prior. Women, for all the space afforded them in the subculture’s spotlight moment, might as well have been Lilith.
Hole’s second album, Live Through This, famously came out four days after Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, was found dead at their home in Seattle. The sudden tragedy threatened to swallow the music, to say nothing of the genre and social movement in which it was encased. Here was a dead rock god, and here was the woman who survived him. Even the album’s title alluded to Love’s endurance through a ground-shaking trauma, though of course she had written the title about surviving her fame, surviving her fraught association with the most beloved man in rock, surviving her pregnancy with their child, surviving the tabloid rumors that would—and still do—swarm her as a result.
“I sometimes feel that no one’s taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there’s a certain female point of view that’s never been given space,” Love told Sidelines in 1991, the same year Hole released their first album, Pretty on the Inside. While there were plenty of rock songs written by men about hounding and abusing women, there were few about being hounded and abused. The rock canon, like all the others, fiercely guarded its male subjectivity, and Love wanted to break through its ranks.
She did so with violent contradictions. Love projected a high femme presence, all red lipstick and messy blonde hair like a bedraggled Marilyn Monroe, while commandeering her post at the microphone with masculine bravado. She wore baby-doll dresses and screamed at the coarse bottom-edge of her range. She was the first to admit the look was a compromise, a Trojan horse for her rage. “When women get angry, they are regarded as shrill or hysterical…. One way around that, for me, is bleaching my hair and looking good,” she told The New York Times in 1992. “It’s bad that I have to do that to get my anger accepted. But then I’m part of an evolutionary process. I’m not the fully evolved end.”
If Pretty on the Inside delivered fury on the backs of abject impressionism, then Live Through This crystallized the same impulse into pop songs you could holler along to. Its lyrics juxtaposed visceral imagery—milk and piss and blood—with catchy, vituperative sloganeering. Hole walked the same high wire Nirvana did on Nevermind and In Utero, between bone-deep rage and syrupy hooks, only Hole’s job was harder: The band had to sell that unstable boundary through a female lens.
They had to sell Love, too, who had already committed a host of cardinal sins in the public eye. She was a woman without a filter married to a pop idol, and she had carried his child without giving up her celebrity or her art, without retreating into the shadows to become an incubator. An infamous 1992 Vanity Fair profile probed the question of Love’s irreconcilable role of expectant mother and rock star. Such a simultaneity does not exist in the popular imagination. She was impossible, she could not be, and according to sources quoted in the story, she was using drugs while pregnant. The story prompted an investigation from the Department of Children and Family Services, and Love’s newborn daughter Frances Bean was temporarily taken from her parents.
“I want my baby/Who took my baby?” Love howls on “I Think That I Would Die,” and this time it’s not a metaphor; listeners could map that anguish onto events they’d seen unfold in real time. No one could accuse Love of lying, which didn’t stop rumors from bubbling up that her husband had written all the songs on Live Through This. Love carved an impossible space for herself in pop culture and was pilloried for it, and when she sang about the fallout, Nirvana fans cast her as a puppet for her husband’s genius just because the songs were good. It’s not like he could have written them, either; when Cobain wrote about rape, he wrote sardonically, and from the point of view of the rapist. The irony in his songs was apparently lost on some of his listeners. In that Vanity Fair profile, Love relayed a chilling anecdote she had heard about a girl who had been raped in Reno, whose rapists had been singing Nirvana’s song “Polly” while assaulting her. “These are the people who listen to him,” she said.
Love wrote about sexual violence with a snarl, too, but a heavier, more knowing one. “Was she asking for it?/Was she asking nice?” she poses on the seething “Asking for It.” “If she was asking for it/Did she ask you twice?” The song, she’s said, was inspired by a stage dive that took a wrong turn. She leapt into the audience to crowd-surf during a show, and found the crowd ready to devour her. “Suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off me, my underwear was being torn off me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like ‘pussy-whore-cunt,’” she said. Whatever covenant binds fan and artist, whatever gives the latter power over the former, didn’t apply to Hole—not in totality, at least; not to the extent that it would keep a singer who was also a woman from being molested by her audience in public.
Live Through This refers to autobiographical traumas, but it is not a confessional record. “The whole cliché of women being cathartic really pisses me off,” Love said in a 1994 Spin cover story. “You know, ‘Oh, this is therapy for me. I’d die if I didn’t write this.’ Eddie Vedder says shit like that. Fuck you.” Her lyrics don’t hit like spleen-venting. They’re analytical, no matter how viscerally she howls them, and their insight transcends their origins. Throughout the record, Love speaks to the atomization of the female form that takes place in the eye of the misogynist. To the ogler, a woman is never whole. She’s shards: lips, hair, tits, ass, whatever can be grabbed without consequence, whatever can be bought and sold. Love would know, having stripped for a living before the band broke big, having made a career of, among other things, being looked at. She sings of “pieces of Jennifer’s body.” On “Doll Parts,” against halting guitar chords, she sings about how she’s “doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.” Her multiplicity is underscored by backing harmonies from Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and guest vocalist Dana Kletter, who chime in with the indelible line: “I want to be the girl with the most cake.”
As much as it concerns trauma and misogyny, Live Through This, like all great rock records, quakes with desire. Love deciphers what it means to be an object of desire, but she also plays a woman who wants ravenously. Her wanting, at the time, was a terror; she inspired so much vitriol in part because she refused to be passive, refused to accommodate a man’s hunger without indulging her own. She would not be a vessel or a muse. Her husband did not cast her in the drama of his life. She wanted him and chased him down, and then she wanted their child, and she believed that her desire mattered, that it had substance. “I went through all the shit and pain and inconvenience of being pregnant for nine whole fucking months because I wanted some of his beautiful genes in there, in that child,” Love told Melody Maker, in a profile that called her “a one-woman spite factory” in its tagline, in February of 1994. “I wanted his babies. I saw something I wanted, and I got it. What’s wrong with that?”
On “I Think That I Would Die,” Love calls after her baby in the melodically barren verse, and then the song inverts itself into the album’s greatest hook. Hole pull this trick often, switching gears between repulsion and attraction at a moment’s notice, bombarding the listener with noise and then sweetly luring them back in. There is violence and there is desire and the line between the two is never clear. The album’s pummeling opener “Violet” baits the ear with a jangling guitar tone cut from the same cloth as R.E.M., and then drummer Patty Schemel churns the song into a fury. “Go on, take everything/Take everything/I want you to,” howls Love, her bitterness oxidized into defiance.
In a second profile of Love, published in 1995, Vanity Fair conducted the first-ever interview with the singer’s mother, the therapist Linda Carroll. “Her fame is not about being beautiful and brilliant, which she is,” Carroll said. “It’s about speaking in the voice of the anguish of the world.” That the anguish of the world would have a female voice was an idea new to the music industry. It’s still new. Love makes a bid for universality on Live Through This in that it’s hard not to get swept up in her energy, but she also acknowledges that female pain is marked, that it is compartmentalized and dismissed because it is felt by women, not people. Though Hole screamed open a space for angry, pained women artists like Alanis Morissette to thrive in the mainstream, that space is still bounded by the dismissal of men who will not deign to empathize with them. I think of the letter Larry Nassar wrote when early this year he pled guilty to assaulting hundreds of women and girls, how it looped in a popular misquote from a 17th-century play: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Doll Parts” ends with a chilling, enigmatic hex: “Someday you will ache like I ache,” Love glowers, and maybe it’s a threat but it could also be an oracle. It could be the promise that no matter how much you hate her, no matter how much spite you send her way, the venom will find its way back to you. That those severed parts will one day congeal into a furious living whole. | 2018-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DGC | June 3, 2018 | 10 | 62de9200-26c5-4e5b-93f0-f27ba5ad5b91 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
This ambitious compilation features wild blends of electronics, jazz fusion, new age drifts, new-fangled digital drum machines, and traditional Brazilian percussion placed into new, curious sounds. | This ambitious compilation features wild blends of electronics, jazz fusion, new age drifts, new-fangled digital drum machines, and traditional Brazilian percussion placed into new, curious sounds. | Various Artists: Outro Tempo: Electronic and Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1978-1992 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22878-various-artists-outro-tempo-electronic-and-contemporary-music-from-brazil-1978-1992/ | Outro Tempo: Electronic and Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1978-1992 | In 1985, Brazil’s repressive junta finally allowed for direct elections for a president for the first time since their military coup of 1964. For artists and musicians of all stripes, the censorship and repression experienced during that military reign came to be known as “vazio cultural” (cultural void). The most well-known example came with the 1968 arrest and subsequent exile of two stars of Tropicália, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. But for the artists who stayed in country, the regime’s censorship became increasingly Kafkaesque to navigate. Some artists resorted to recording without words so as to elude such censorship—see Milton Nascimento’s Milagre Dos Peixes—but it was only as the military’s stranglehold finally loosened that others began to rediscover their voices.
In the liner notes to Outro Tempo—a beguiling and dizzying assemblage of fourteen Brazilian experimental and fusion artists from around the time of that country’s thawing—producer John Gómez remembers happening upon Marco Bosco’s 1983 album Metalmadeira in a British thrift shop and finding a handwritten note within: “Dear Mr. Eno, I would like you to know about our work, we work with tapes and sounds of Nature.” Whether or not Mr. Eno ever happened upon this music, in the instance of taking over thirty years for this work to drift to ears, each track feels like a message in a bottle. As guitarist Nando Carneiro states in the notes, musicians during this time “had to stay caught in a cage.” Emanating from a country increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, these artists put wild blends of electronics, jazz fusion, new age drifts, new-fangled digital drum machines, and traditional Brazilian percussion into a new, curious sound.
A trace of Nascimento’s wordless music echoes through Anno Luz’s “Por Quê,” as pan flutes get stretched into a cloud and a bright, fingerpicked guitar figure moves in and out of an analog synth haze. Carneiro’s “G.R.E.S. Luxo Artesanal” also aims for a similar space, wedding his nimble samba phrases to a programmed rhythm and a synth line that slowly becomes unmoored from the beat. Some four minutes in, he splices the tape and the guitar drifts into “O Camponês,” with Carneiro’s non-verbal accompaniment capping the piece with a poignant coda.
One of the sets more thrilling juxtapositions is between the hand percussion that’s underpinned Brazilian music for centuries and these stiff new electronic components. Most of these devices had to be smuggled into the country through bribed officials. But even culturally, there was hesitation to have such computers make facsimiles of the lithe Brazilian rhythms. It’s the tangy interplay of hand drum patter and percolating electronics that gives Cinema’s “Sem Teto” a soda-pop fizz, suggestive of the similar samba hybrids envisioned a hemisphere away by bands like Antenna.
And as the military regime fell asunder and artists regained their voices, so did the music begin to expand and change. The other dialogue flowing through Outro Tempo is between Brazilian artists as they began to interact not just with one another, but with the indigenous tribes in Amazonia endangered by rampant deforestation going on during that decade. Some composers traveled to the jungle so as to better interact with these ancient sounds. Bené Fonteles’ haunted “O M M” chants that sacred Hindu syllable, strikes chimes, and shakes rattles until it resembles the clatter of the rainforest, while Maria Rita couples her powerful voice with tribal percussion and electric bass on “Cântico Brasileiro No.3.”
The most stunning compositions come from Priscilla Ermel, represented by the two longest cuts on the compilation. During the ’80s, Ermel traveled into the rainforest to immerse herself in study of these vanishing indigenous forms, seeking to fuse it with her own sensibilities as a musician and composer. But rather than just conduct a simple integration of ancient and modern, she also reaches outside of her country for other timbres, suggesting a “world music” more holistic than such a tag implies. Across the nine-minute “Gestos de Equilíbrio,” she interweaves guitar, synth, oboe and clay pot drums, but also makes foreign objects like the banjo, kalimba and Indian stringed-instrument the dilruba all sound right at home on her gently undulating ambient piece. Even more formidable is her 15-minute masterwork, “Corpo do Vento.” Across a thundering battery of bombo and cultrun, Ermel breathes through ocarina, Chilean chirimia and Nepalese flute, giving the epic a ritualistic vibration. She judiciously adds piano and viola caipira and the middle section drifts into new age territory before returning to the drum-driven mesmerism of the final passage.
“They are portals through which stories, people, and cultures can be revealed,” Ermel explains in the album’s liner notes about how she perceives her music. And almost every track here resonates like a secret kept silent for decades. Outro Tempo opens up a portal for us in the present moment back to a time and place where —under the suffocating weight of a totalitarian state—a few brave musicians nevertheless could hear the sounds of a brighter world. | 2017-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Music From Memory | March 4, 2017 | 8.8 | 62e31970-247a-4e7b-8aec-874a1fd00365 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
This collection of new age, which gathers tracks from a series of tapes originally issued in the 1980s, shows how instrumental textures from around the globe met early electronics. | This collection of new age, which gathers tracks from a series of tapes originally issued in the 1980s, shows how instrumental textures from around the globe met early electronics. | Cybe: Tropisch Verlangen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cybe-tropisch-verlangen/ | Tropisch Verlangen | New age music has recently experienced a surge in popularity, seemingly as the last bastion of untapped old music to be explored (or plundered) by record nerds. There are endless spiritual-sounding albums from the 1980s that leveraged then-emerging digital technologies to create inhuman drones or pompous soft synth riffs, the yoga lover’s version of a shredding guitar solo. Flute, digitized or otherwise, was often involved, sometimes for the worse. But occasionally these new age explorers got it right, finding a middle ground between the modern classical of the ’60s and ’70s, and the devotional music drawn from an array of religious practices. But where so many artists relied solely on the synthesizer for their sounds of soft ascension, Cybe, otherwise known as Siebe Baarda, got busy in the kitchen, throwing all the ingredients in the soup.
The record’s lore feels almost too good to be true: In the early-’80s, a dweeby Dutch guy travels to southeast Asia, comes home enamored with the region’s music, blends its dreamy percussion into his own early electronic music, which he then releases on obscure cassettes. Thirty years later, these cassettes are dredged out of obscurity, and they now sound oddly prescient. Tropisch Verlangen, the title of a compilation made of music from those tapes, literally translates as “Tropical Desire.” Is the desire his, for the tropics? Or is it the desire of the tropics, perhaps to be heard? Some of each, probably. But the album’s small-scale experimentation is more love than lust. You can feel his young mind playing around excitedly, and while the results are never huge breakthroughs for music, the earnestness of the compositions is palpable throughout.
The cover of Tropisch Verlangen pictures Baarda in a room with recording equipment: several keyboards, various pieces of wooden percussion, small bells and gongs. Dressed in a red sweater with collar peeking, stone white khakis (legs crossed), and huge glasses, he looks absolutely innocent and sweet. At its best, Tropisch Verlangen exudes this delighted curiosity. “Bali Pulau Bagus” features the trancelike rhythm of Indonesian gamelan accented by Blade Runner-style synths ping-ponging across the track. It’s fun, eager. The poetically-named “The Moon Is Shining Above the Ricefields” begins with the recording of frogs ribbiting, before a wooden xylophone plinks around, and low-key smooth jazz guitar (performed by his sister) takes over. The track is a bit haphazard, but that serves to increase its charm.
In some ways, the album recalls the more modern day music of Gang Gang Dance, a group whose work often sampled or referenced music from Asia and the Middle East. But that band benefited from advanced technologies Cybe didn’t, giving their songs subtlety. The borrowed sounds on Tropisch Verlangen serve as accents rather than as focal points, too unwieldy to be tamed. In some sense, Cybe was drastically ahead of his time, merging proggy electronics with non-Western sounds. Would the music be different if he had a studio to record in? Bandmates? A producer? A MacBook? Perhaps. But it wouldn’t be so fun. | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Stroom | June 28, 2017 | 7.8 | 62ec2859-cd14-4c91-aa24-d80e14e9b51e | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | null |
The anonymous UK act construct a vast, vaporous tribute to the patron saint of love and heartbreak: Céline Dion. | The anonymous UK act construct a vast, vaporous tribute to the patron saint of love and heartbreak: Céline Dion. | Romance: Once Upon a Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/romance-once-upon-a-time/ | Once Upon a Time | You can spend every day consuming songs and films and books about love and you still won’t be ready when its incomparable transformation arrives. The UK-based act Romance know how to bottle such ineffable feelings and channel them via ambience—think of their mood-elevating atmospheres as audible incense or, more pointedly, a reminder of the way love makes the day-to-day feel more magical. Without any disclosure of Romance’s identity (or identities—the number of members is unclear), their music centers on pure emotion. Every track becomes an altar to their namesake, invoking love’s defining qualities and magnetic pull, even its ability to leave you a tragic mess.
With their third album, Once Upon a Time, Romance root their gentle synths in something more concrete: Céline Dion. The Canadian diva is the perfect fount of inspiration for the project: Her monumental yet direct singing makes such emotions feel both attainable and like the stuff of legend—she’s sung of love as life-changing and a source of miracles, but also as something found on someone’s lips. When The New Rolling Stone Album Guide gave Dion’s albums a string of one-star ratings, the accompanying text offered a concession: She was emblematic of a certain kind of pop star, one who believes “bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true.” Her words shoot straight from the heart and into your own.
Self-serious aesthetes may find Dion’s lyrics overly simple, but the title track that opens this album disrupts that perspective. Diaphanous synths set the scene, and then a voice emerges from the mist: “Have you ever been in love?” These words, which come from a 2002 Dion song, are isolated and only occasionally repeated, allowing ample time for rumination. So much sample-based music revels in the mutation of its source material—from Christian Marclay’s turntable experiments to John Oswald’s plunderphonics, DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed remixes to Daniel Lopatin’s eccojams—and any skips or collaging presents the results as entirely new creations. Romance’s music has a different effect: Their work points back to Dion, signaling her power ballads’ strengths, which are often hidden in plain sight. When Romance add another sample—“Have you ever walked on air?”—they’re drawing a line between these two questions to declare love a supernatural force. When they throw in another line—“When you find it, don’t let go”—any romantic losses one has previously endured feels all the more incalculable.
Romance transmit such messy, complex emotions in simple, affecting ways. On “Somewhere in the Silence,” a line from Dion’s “Tell Him” is looped: “Never let him go.” The first word is initially truncated, but the rest of the line—let him go—is bellowed. In the original song, Barbra Streisand tells Dion to fight for love, but here any uplift becomes anxiety. The reversed loops heighten the nervousness; it’s as if Dion were replaying different scenarios in her head, paralyzed by a relationship’s uncertain future. “Just a Moment” is even more evocative: The titular line from 2002’s “A New Day Has Come” arrives like a holy decree, echoing the unbridled joy Dion feels upon finding a lover. But “Just a Moment” takes its title from “I Will Be Stronger,” a track from nearly two decades later about surviving a loss. In Romance’s hands, “a new day has come” is a polysemic phrase: love from another and love of self are both crucial to moving forward.
For all the excitement in dissecting Romance’s samples, Once Upon a Time devotes its second half to more straightforward ambience. “Remember” is all ice-cold synths and wispy vocals, while “Crying Is the Only Thing That Gets Me Through” invokes cinematic drama with sustained strings. “I’ve Been Blown by the Wind” proves the star of this three-track run, with vocals on the precipice of coherency: The mere suggestion of a moving lyric is enough to summon bliss. Once Upon a Time lets you peer into all that love can do, encasing fairy-tale experiences and heart-stirring emotions in amber. Romance help you crave love as much as relive it, knowing full well—with help from Céline Dion—that such feelings can last a lifetime. | 2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Ecstatic | March 7, 2022 | 7.2 | 62f3bbe2-dbab-4104-a32e-e1f1c4efe290 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Though Rokia Traoré’s past albums established her as a fine singer, her new Beautiful Africa feels more accomplished than ever, her voice bending around her words (sung mostly in Bamana) with flourishes of subtle vibrato. | Though Rokia Traoré’s past albums established her as a fine singer, her new Beautiful Africa feels more accomplished than ever, her voice bending around her words (sung mostly in Bamana) with flourishes of subtle vibrato. | Rokia Traoré: Beautiful Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17846-rokia-traore-beautiful-africa/ | Beautiful Africa | The first thing you hear on Rokia Traoré's Beautiful Africa is a drum beat, unadorned. It only lasts a few seconds before the guitars wrap around it like a veil, but it still feels revealing, as though we opened the door on the music just a few seconds before it was ready for us. That thump and tap, in a rhythm a bit like Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” tells us a lot about the album that follows: This is a record that grooves but also invites the listener to come closer, to step into its space, be still and listen. Traoré and producer John Parish have captured this music in all its rhythmic grace with great intimacy, capturing each slide up the bass or thrum of the n’goni with direct clarity.
For music with such rhythmic body, precision in capturing the singular character of each sound is often beside the point. But Traoré’s music benefits immensely from it-- you can hear the way the her guitar twists around the other guitars and Mamah Diabaté’s dusty n’goni, and the sound sets this thicket of repeated, interlocking phrases inside the full-bodied rhythm section. The effect is of music that lives two rhythmic lives in tandem, and each one pushes the other, leaving her voice free to glide loosely over the top. Traoré’s past albums established her as a fine singer, but here, she feels more accomplished than ever, her voice bending around her words (sung mostly in Bamana) with flourishes of subtle vibrato.
Moreover, she’s developed the dynamic range of her singing and writing. “Sikey” and “Lalla” both offer slippery funk, but with two completely different feels, while “N’Téri” travels in time over its nine and a half minutes, from hushed and skeletal n’goni topped by some of Traoré’s most incredible, full-throated singing to a whirling, driving electric song. The final couple of minutes surge on a bed of beatboxing and roiling guitar. It’s an amazing performance, and a good contrast to the more concise and straightforwardly funky songs.
Traoré is from Mali, and her music carries many signatures of her homeland, from the n’goni to the language to the circular guitar figures, but her sound is fundamentally international, swallowing tradition and modernity whole to create a pop sound she can quite easily call her own. Being from her country means contending with the legacies of some of West Africa’s most internationally successful artists; at this point, I’d say Traoré fits comfortably alongside her forbears. | 2013-04-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Global | Nonesuch | April 11, 2013 | 8.1 | 62f87dc6-ac49-4e45-ab92-394833f26fa2 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Throwing open his studio doors, the pianist aims for a loose, mixtape-like vibe, but the stacked guest list yields a scattershot party that only ends up overstaying its own welcome. | Throwing open his studio doors, the pianist aims for a loose, mixtape-like vibe, but the stacked guest list yields a scattershot party that only ends up overstaying its own welcome. | Robert Glasper: Fuck Yo Feelings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-glasper-fuck-yo-feelings/ | Fuck Yo Feelings | In the mini-documentary that accompanies Robert Glasper’s Fuck Yo Feelings, the Grammy-winning pianist and composer explains, “I want this whole thing to be mixtape vibe, so when we put it together it’s like a beat here, might be a song here, then we fuck around talking here.” To achieve this sort of free-form setup, Glasper welcomed a guest list of MCs, singers, and musicians—including Yasiin Bey, Herbie Hancock, YBN Cordae, Denzel Curry, and Audra Day—to pass through a studio in New York City and jam. The goal was to allow the artists to form organic bonds and strike up creative collaborations on the fly. But despite the accomplished cast, there’s little spark about the fruits of those sessions: Fuck Yo Feelings is a 71-minute melange of tepid sonic backdrops that lacks the vital momentum and progression inherent in any effective mixtape.
Fuck Yo Feelings begins with an almighty misstep in the shape of the nearly five-minute “Intro,” hosted by comedian and actor Affion Crockett. The premise has Crockett roasting various band members and riffing on the no-fucks-given album title over a growling bass line. It’s a cringe fest. After encouraging the listener to tell the person nearest to them, “Fuck yo feelings,” Crockett breaks into a rant: “You are welcome to fuck they feelings with my dick, disease-free fucking, yeah, fuck they feelings, nasty porno style with some cream on they god damn back.” The barbs are neither shocking or amusing—and the “Intro” completely jars against the prevailing mellow tone of the next 18 songs that follow.
The core sound of Fuck Yo Feelings brings to mind the dusky, keys-laced mid-tempo beats that the Ummah trio of Q-Tip, J Dilla, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad mined during the 1990s. Only here the loops are replaced by drummer Chris Dave’s clipped snares, bassist Derrick Hodge’s warm low-end patterns, and Glasper’s feathery keys. The players’ chops are undisputed, but the relaxed, easygoing nature of the grooves they slip into sap the MCs’ bars of energy. Sometimes this happens quite literally, like when the usually erudite Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins gets pushed out of “Let Me In” early, departing the track and letting the song amble along for another three minutes of spacey keys and tippy-tappy drums.
When Glasper ushers singers to the forefront, this style of low-key neo-soul production works. During the album’s midsection, the sultry, hushed vocals of Yebba, Audra Day, Baby Rose, and SiR seem to sink into the tracks they sing on. For a moment, there’s a seamless blend between vocal tone and musical backing. But the spell doesn’t last. Instead, the last third of the album becomes a meandering slog that takes in a four-minute shout-out track featuring Glasper’s slurry, pitched-down vocals, plus a series of free-associative musings courtesy of Yasiin Bey that, clocking in at seven minutes, sound like their own self-contained project.
The sprawling structure of Fuck Yo Feelings suffers from the same excess that blighted the hip-hop mixtape market during the 2000s, when shunting 20 or 30 tracks onto a project was erroneously seen as a smart hustle rather than something likely to exhaust a listener. Towards the end of Glasper’s mixtape, he names a track after GZA’s crime-rhyme classic Liquid Swords. This is the same learned MC who also once advocated, “Make it brief, son, half short and twice strong”—advice that would have served Fuck Yo Feelings well. | 2019-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Loma Vista | October 9, 2019 | 5.9 | 62fae570-3413-4a88-8ff2-0a400e0a0cf4 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
Mouse on Mars’ latest is a 43-minute suite broken up by short movements featuring a wide array of guests. The duo’s try-anything spirit remains embedded in every note. | Mouse on Mars’ latest is a 43-minute suite broken up by short movements featuring a wide array of guests. The duo’s try-anything spirit remains embedded in every note. | Mouse on Mars: Dimensional People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mouse-on-mars-dimensional-people/ | Dimensional People | Across the last quarter-century, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have moved from dense noise to sleek electro-pop to carefully arranged post-rock, equally comfortable with wispy ambient tracks and banging dance tunes. While certain threads run through the German duo’s work—playful humor, an off-kilter rhythmic sensibility, an ear for colorful electronic texture—they never codified their quirks and sensibilities into a single identifiable aesthetic. There is no one sound of Mouse on Mars. For devoted fans, that’s a good thing, because you never know exactly what their next album is going to sound like. But their eclecticism has also confined them to a certain cult status. Their latest, Dimensional People, once again sounds unlike anything else they’ve made, the try-anything spirit of Mouse on Mars remains embedded in every note.
This appears at first glance to be a genre of album with a long history: DJ + All-Star Guests. From the Chemical Brothers to Daft Punk to UNKLE, electronic producers have created album-length statements by working with rappers and indie rock artists of various stripes. This sort of record has had a checkered history, yielding some great singles and its share of duds. But while contributions here from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Beirut’s Zach Condon, Spank Rock, the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and more slot it within this shaky tradition, Dimensional People is far more coherent as a single statement than that might suggest. Mouse on Mars integrate their guests into the larger project, rather than giving them space to shine on their own. The contributors become building blocks in service of arrangement, which mostly works to the record’s advantage.
Dimensional People emerged out of a heady multimedia installation involving robots, live musicians, specialized software, and an immersive speaker setup. The essence of the project was its modular nature—by recording the base material in the same key and tempo, the various parts could be shuffled, shifted, and folded together so it would still make sense as a single piece.Those established rules shape the feel of Dimensional People in album format, as well. Instead of individual songs, it’s more of a 43-minute suite broken up by movements.
The opening rattle of a woodblock—that’s a robotic instrument “playing” it—carries through the first four tracks. It’s a twitchy pulse that undergirds the music, as horns and strings and slide guitar move in and out. In some ways, this first section calls back to another period of Mouse on Mars’ history, the post-rock of the mid and late ’90s, where familiar instruments from the rock-band set-up were being used in ways that defied genre categorization. When the vocals enter, they are, appropriately enough, those of Justin Vernon, at whose Wisconsin studio a chunk of the album was recorded. As on much of the last Bon Iver album, 22, A Million, Vernon’s voice is used as a sound rather than a vehicle for transmitting lyrics. His yelps and coos and wails are clipped and layered back upon themselves, and the words are both difficult to make out and beside the point.
Vernon’s contributions to the early passages (he also adds guitar) reflect the album at its best, when guests retain hints of their musical personality but are subsumed within the larger structure. Stemming from that are “Foul Mouth” and “Aviation,” which feature vocals from Amanda Blank and Spank Rock, respectively. These tracks are deeply weird and wonderful, mixing a profanity-laced rap, harmonized vocals that sound like the Beach Boys in a blender, and gorgeous swells of pedal steel guitar. It’s nothing you’ve heard but it’s also intensely musical, an affecting masterpiece of arranged parts.
As the album moves on, the flow becomes oblong and harder to parse. Sam Amidon brings his Appalachian folk obsessions to “Parliament of Aliens Part I,” where his vocals are mixed with a sawing violin and a swell of voices that sound as if they’re being processed through a Buchla synth. Where the old world/new world mashup of the record’s first half comes off like an effortless hybrid, the Amidon track feels like a fragment. But the handful of skippable sections aren’t really an issue on an album that moves along so briskly. In the back half, “Resumé,” featuring septuagenarian R&B eccentric Swamp Dogg, brings to mind Daft Punk’s “Giorgio by Moroder,” as the vocalist offers observations on his past over music that is constantly building and falling apart. By the time the record winds down it reveals itself to be a kind of meditation on American music, with pronounced elements of rock, jazz, folk, blues, rap, and minimalism all tied together with a Van Dyke Parks-like flair. But it arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done. | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | April 18, 2018 | 7.6 | 62fb29c1-9eb6-465c-bc6d-b7cb6242ec5e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Underneath the Pine finds Chaz Bundick largely shedding his synth-pop roots in favor of a vastly expanded instrumental palette. | Underneath the Pine finds Chaz Bundick largely shedding his synth-pop roots in favor of a vastly expanded instrumental palette. | Toro y Moi: Underneath the Pine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15129-underneath-the-pine/ | Underneath the Pine | When Chaz Bundick sang, "I found a job I do it fine/ Not what I want but still I try," on "Blessa", it became Causers of This' most-quoted lyric for obvious reasons. Not only can all of us relate to that sentiment at some point in our lives, but it also drew a direct line between the escapism of home-made electro-pop and the lives of most of the people creating it. Talk about Hipstamatic prints, Ariel Pink, and surfing all you want, but y'know, it's also the economy, stupid. Now, I've never shared a cubicle with Bundick, but that kind of resignation is completely at odds with his work ethic as Toro Y Moi, given the steady stream of remixes and side projects he's released in the time since. Just over a year later, he's already the first of the A-listers from this scene to release a follow-up. But if he was feeling any pressure to validate himself and his peers, Underneath the Pine doesn't show it. The album may be too lyrically opaque to have a line as bloggable as "Blessa"'s, but it's a far richer and more accomplished whole, and it makes a strong case for Bundick as an artist with scope, ambition, and a firm grasp of how to balance the two.
Underneath the Pine begins a little like the last album, with a wobbly, splayed-out chord backing Bundick's cooed vocal salutation. But where "Blessa"'s murky, aquamarine production set the tone for most of Causers, this album's "Intro/Chi Chi" is a textured instrumental that trigger memories of Air's "La Femme D'Argent" and underscores one of Bundick's most overlooked assets: his ability to create an appealingly lush ambiance. That mood plays a central role in Underneath the Pine, as much of the album sheds Bunwick's synth-pop roots in favor of a vastly expanded instrumental palette that includes organ, pianos, chimes, and plenty of live drumming. Bundick's skill as an arranger is especially evident in Pine's midsection: though casually paced and humid as his native South Carolina, it pulls from the French pop and krautrock obsessions of Broadcast and Stereolab, imbuing pastoral, acoustic plucks and synth drones with rhythmic purpose, and making retro chic somehow still sound futuristic.
All of this sonic exploration is in service to Bundick's growth as a songwriter. Big choruses like the one on "How I Know" come unexpectedly during what at first appear to be endless motorik grooves, as plainspoken vocal melodies give way to double-helix harmonies. Even the tracks that keep a lower profile maintain enough ballast to prevent the zone-outs that pockmarked Causers. They also serve to set off the big singles, "New Beat" and "Still Sound". Heard individually, those songs' straight-up funk delivery mostly sounded like twists on a successful formula, but in context on Underneath the Pine, they underscore how Bundick's knack for analog warmth always comes in the name of physicality and groove. You may want to try and peg where the drum sounds come from-- maybe Innervisions, maybe even Midnite Vultures-- but rhythmic interplay this addictive has to be felt, not simply conjured from memory.
Because Toro Y Moi is so closely linked with the likes of Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Memory Tapes, it's tempting to read into the success of Underneath the Pine as some predictor of those bands' collective staying power, or a direction others might take. But Bundick seems to be following nothing but his own internal compass. Late in the album, "Good Hold" comes off like an Eno tribute of detuned piano dissonance, and then morphs into the blissful glide of album closer, "Elise". It's a fitting send-off to Underneath the Pine, suggesting that Toro Y Moi's first great album probably won't be his last, or his best. | 2011-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Carpark | February 25, 2011 | 8.3 | 62fbf73d-2d8f-4c4e-9378-01d646ebc521 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The L.A. producer's second LP dredges up a jaggedly delicate sound that merges gently wafting electronic tones with intricately decaying rhythmic atmosphere. | The L.A. producer's second LP dredges up a jaggedly delicate sound that merges gently wafting electronic tones with intricately decaying rhythmic atmosphere. | Shlohmo: Bad Vibes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15698-bad-vibes/ | Bad Vibes | Establishing a sonic personality without lyrical assistance or some unique personal backstory can be tricky, especially when you're in the middle of a room crowded with your peers. The space in question is the one with a "for fans of Flying Lotus" sign posted over the door, and there hasn't been a ton of vacancy in there lately. Those who've broken out have done so by tweaking the sonic imprint of decaying beats and melting analog chords until they come across as distinctly tactile things, humid and slippery, blown-out and elastic.
Reaching out to clutch the music on Shlohmo's Bad Vibes might cause it to crumble in your grasp-- and then cut the hell out of your fingers. The L.A. producer's sophomore full-length comes after a handful of singles, EPs, remixes, and compilation appearances, as well as last year's disorienting debut, Shlomoshun Deluxe. And in that short yet busy time, Shlohmo has dredged up something strange: an aesthetic that's jaggedly delicate, filled with melodic beauty but jostled by abrasive percussive hitches, undercut with sandpapery patches of ambient fuzz. It's a deft merging of gentle, wafting electronic tones and intricately beat-to-shit rhythmic atmosphere, the sounds of old technology trying to reconcile its former gloss with its fading functionality.
The cynical ears that still can't get past the nostalgic surface of chillwave might have their own bone to pick with the cassette-deck/VHS fidelity of Bad Vibes, which stands out pretty prominently in hissy tracks like "Same Time" and "Parties". But instead of celebrating corroded, neon-pastel magnetic-tape detritus for its own sake, the music on this album leans closer to an appreciation of the actual rhythmic counterpoints, quirks, and resonant qualities of white noise. Alongside the moments that seem to revel in the flutter and crackle of old equipment are stretches that draw similar vibes from the sound of literal rainfall ("Seriously") or birdcall-strewn field recordings ("Big Feelings")-- not to mention the texture you can get from good old-fashioned feedback, like the keyboard squall of "Trapped in a Burning House".
The beats themselves are striking enough, whether they're the distant trickling clicks of "Sink" or the sharp, crisp snap-thump grooves that push along cuts like "Places" or "Same Time". Yet even the moments where the beat feels secondary to the other instrumentation have a pulse to them, run through floaty guitars or humming synthesizers that converse with the ambient hiss in compelling ways. Still, neither the melody nor the ambience overwhelms the other. It's easy to hear the silky, billowy tones through the dying-battery distortion, but hard to picture what they'd sound like without it. | 2011-08-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-08-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Friends of Friends | August 11, 2011 | 7.8 | 63057df0-2185-4da4-a4ee-a41f92979242 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell follows his own dream logic on this 1981 LP, which synthesized his hybrid of jazz and minimalism, ambient and exotica, ancient ethnic music and glitchy electronics. | Trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell follows his own dream logic on this 1981 LP, which synthesized his hybrid of jazz and minimalism, ambient and exotica, ancient ethnic music and glitchy electronics. | Jon Hassell: Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-hassell-dream-theory-in-malaya-fourth-world-volume-two/ | Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two | In the 1930s, the Mormon missionary-turned-novice anthropologist Kilton Stewart happened upon an indigenous tribe in the Central Mountain Range of Southeast Asia’s Malay Peninsula. After his time spent among the Senoi, Stewart was struck by what he deemed the tribe’s close proximity to dream worlds. “The Senoi believes that any human being, with the aid of his fellows, can outface, master, and actually utilize all beings and forces in the dream universe,” Stewart wrote in his 1954 book Pygmies and Dream Giants. The notion of such dream interpretation slowly moved westward; dream discussion groups have proliferated into the present day.
The trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell may have titled his fourth album, Dream Theory in Malaya, after Stewart’s paper. But in the notes that accompany this reissue, he finds himself taken less by Stewart and more by “the cinematic sound of the word ‘Malay’” and “a little romance with an exotically-tuned woman from Kuala Lumpur.” Such transubstantiation lies at the heart of Hassell’s music, wherein jazz fusion and minimalist composition, ambient and exotica, ancient ethnic music and glitchy electronics all jostle for headspace. This 1981 album fully synthesized such a hybrid for Hassell’s decade ahead, when his influence would snake through the work of his closest collaborator Brian Eno as well as the likes of David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, and Tears for Fears. While Eno coined the concept of Another Green World, it was Hassell who imagined the indigenous sounds of this planet, a notion that came to be known as Fourth World music. Now into the 21st century, new producers are still grappling with its possibilities.
To find Hassell’s trumpet here is to be spun into a hall of mirrors, the timbre of his horn stretched, chopped, twisted, and processed beyond recognition. Take the maddening glitches of “Chor Moiré.” Thanks to an early use of digital delay effects, it reimagines Hassell and the horn as a skipping CD—as malfunctioning birdcall, as fingernail on sandpaper—anticipating the sounds of late 1990s clicks’n’cuts and the Mille Plateux roster in just over two minutes. Thanks to the harmonizer effect deployed by Hassell, the trumpet’s timbre on “Dream Theory” can sound like an amplified sigh, like a divine choir, and then like a telephone wire of cawing crows at sundown.
As readily as Hassell warps his instrument into strange new shapes, he also finds accomplices from all corners. Dream Theory receives input not just from Eno (in hindsight, Hassell admits to “under-crediting” him) but also from famed land artist Walter De Maria. There are contributions from a bog of frogs, some exotic birds, and a few seconds from a field recording of Proto-Malay kids splashing in some water and giggling at the sound it makes. All such elements toggle between melody, texture, and rhythm in Hassell’s matrix, almost any one of them liable to shape-shift over the duration of a piece. So when the thundering drums of “Courage” enter, they suggest a furious propulsive movement. But as Hassell smears his trumpet across their polyrhythms, they instead turn atmospheric, hanging in place. The breathy ambience of “Gift of Fire” soon grows dense and dizzying with its loops and layers.
Dream Theory’s compositions act as aural illusions, seemingly static and inert, though they deposit you on another shore by the time you reach the other side of a longer piece like “Malay.” Hassell anticipates the looped angelic vocals of Juliana Barwick with his horn during its opening section, before it fans out to sound like his own impression of a pygmy tribe’s vocal trills, mingling with those aforementioned kids and their splashed rhythms. That water sample continues to slosh around and widen until it becomes an ocean, with Hassell hovering over its surface like an alien craft. While Dream Theory’s roots touch on minimal composition, jazz, raga, and ambient, Hassell ultimately follows his own dream logic, conjuring not just another world but also its own atmosphere. | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Glitterbeat | October 4, 2017 | 8.4 | 6306bdab-ea0e-4cdd-80e0-3a4cc24bfb16 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The French artist’s music absorbs and unsettles, juxtaposing whispers, wisps of atmospheric noise, and digitally rendered instruments that float around the auditory field in uncanny ways. | The French artist’s music absorbs and unsettles, juxtaposing whispers, wisps of atmospheric noise, and digitally rendered instruments that float around the auditory field in uncanny ways. | Félicia Atkinson: Image Langage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/felicia-atkinson-image-language/ | Image Langage | Even the smallest sound is overflowing with information. Birdsong can give clues as to when and where it was recorded; the grain of someone’s voice can reveal their emotional state. The quieter it is, the deeper we listen. French musician and writer Félicia Atkinson harnesses and subverts this process of interpreting our perceptions, creating surreal sound environments that sit right next to the ear but stretch towards a distant horizon. Her music resists the brain’s desire for spatial continuity and shatters its expectations for a unified perspective, juxtaposing whispers, wisps of atmospheric noise, and digitally rendered instruments that float around the auditory field in uncanny ways.
“Music is about mystery and reconciliation,” Atkinson said in a recent interview. “Music can transform things into a kind of a code. If you take language, you can find this in poetry—the idea that sometimes meaning is not enough. You have to step back and look further than meaning to be in the experience.” Atkinson’s work frequently references a complex web of concepts, histories and philosophies, but the most satisfying way to listen is to let go of any preconceptions and engage with it second by second, taking it in as you might a landscape or a particularly vivid dream.
This peculiar immediacy is a defining feature of Atkinson’s Image Langage. The music unfolds slowly, drifting from one point to another, but it never quite settles into a state of tranquility. Despite surface-level similarities to the type of ambient music spoon-fed to acolytes of wellness programs and chill-out playlists, there are frequent wrinkles that resist easy listening: her voice recorded as such close range it encroaches on our sense of personal space; shimmers of tense static; irregular pulses panning back and forth. For each plaintive melody there’s a hidden detail, like a field recording that only reveals itself upon close inspection, or a camouflaged synth tone lurking near the bottom of the mix. Presented with extreme intimacy, the disquieting elements of Image Langage are as absorbing as its pastoral expanse. Unsettling details render the texture of sound tangible.
Much of Atkinson’s music revolves around slow, deliberate passages of spoken text recorded at extremely close range, where the tone of her voice is caught in a state between urgency and detachment. This is still a major element of Image Langage, but she supplements it with an increasingly diverse array of instrumentation. Fluttering organ drones swaddle her voice on the title track, and on opener “La Brume,” a reverb-soaked saxophone straight out of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtracks emerges from a layer of drifting synthesizer. (Like Badalamenti, Atkinson is also fixated on creating the impression of something hidden just beneath the surface of her music.) Rich extended tones form the backbone of most tracks, but they sometimes provide a sense of foreboding, as on “Pieces of Sylvia,” where a single note opens up into the quivering dissonance of a semitone, tenaciously held.
Ambiguity reigns on Image Langage, especially in moments like the opening of “The Lake Is Speaking,” where Atkinson overlays the sounds of birds singing and objects rustling with a flickering digital chime. The line between synthesized elements and field recording becomes blurred, complicating our mental image of the scene. Passages of tension evolve out of the album’s most placid tones, and she often lets transitional moments linger, emphasizing the power of in-betweenness. Sitting with that ambiguity creates a sensation of groundlessness, allowing the listener to question their own habits of making meaning. Like a dense morning fog, this music obscures the expected vistas while offering a stranger, less clearly defined type of beauty. | 2022-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Shelter Press | July 2, 2022 | 7.6 | 6308bdb8-9ac7-4ba7-828c-219bb93d9e6c | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
The third album from the UK singer-songwriter is unerringly compassionate. Her brooding post-punk is an unsettling backdrop for songs about the refugee crisis, Islamophobia, and poisonous politicians. | The third album from the UK singer-songwriter is unerringly compassionate. Her brooding post-punk is an unsettling backdrop for songs about the refugee crisis, Islamophobia, and poisonous politicians. | Nadine Shah: Holiday Destination | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nadine-shah-holiday-destination/ | Holiday Destination | Nadine Shah’s third album surveys the refugee crisis, Syrian families, gentrification, “a fascist in the White House,” Islamophobia, and politicians’ demonization of the north of England. She does a lot of work in ten songs, but it rarely feels like it. On her first two albums, her theatrical voice oozed blood through fairly traditional guitar-band arrangements. But on Holiday Destination, the setting is brittle, brooding post-punk, her singing lowered to a glowering monotone that makes more subtle use of her vocal power. It sustains an unsettling mood rather than a series of bold-type headlines.
As a British Muslim woman with Norwegian and Pakistani heritage, Shah is all too familiar with the exclusionary rhetoric around concepts of ‘home.’ “Where would you have me go? I’m second generation don’t you know,” she levels at racists who tell her to go back to where she came from on the intimidating “Out the Way.” Her jagged saxophone and guitar rattle like old machinery, evoking a knackered suspension unit—her bold North-Eastern accent and the smokestack aesthetic only deepening her connection with her industrial hometown. But as righteous and exhilarating as Shah’s protests are, she knows they’re futile. “How can I compete with an ingrained thought?” she asks on the bittersweet “Evil.”
In an unerringly compassionate record, Shah focuses on the scurrilous leaders and toxic groupthink behind these prejudices rather than those who parrot them. She’s well versed in how elite charlatans deploy their poison. Later in “Evil,” she advises an opportunist hatemonger to “Tell your followers that I’m crazy if it stops them questioning anymore.” The corroded title track underpins a scene of refugees arriving to shores of angry tourists, their indignation stoked by “speakers grinning in their address to the crowd, how capacities are brimming, but empty buildings all around.” Coming from a personal angle, the clipped “2016” finds Shah alienated by her own body, invaded by broodiness and anxiety. “Now my friends are all detoxing,” she rues, a funny jibe at the cult of wellness and its inability to eradicate darker psychological toxins.
The sound of Holiday Destination mirrors that sense of being overtaken by insidious forces. These are long songs that lull listeners into Shah’s bleak world before delivering a jolt—a guitar solo or tempo hairpin—that makes you reconsider your surroundings. Only one track, “Yes Men,” lacks intrigue: a sodden torch song where her voice carries all the weight, though her accent lends distinction. “No way, man, you’re surrounded by yes men,” she sings, sounding dismissive and forlorn. As she finds her world looking less familiar, the music also becomes more surreal. Monstrous backing vocals and playful percussion enliven the uncanny domestic setting of “Ordinary,” and on “Relief,” creepy, Stereolab-indebted cabaret soundtracks the mundane becoming manic.
In the past, Shah has been compared to PJ Harvey, mostly for the bloodlust in her voice. But Holiday Destination has a fair amount in common with Harvey’s last album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project—they’re similar in tone and ambition, though Shah’s personal investment in her themes gives her record an immediacy that was lacking in Harvey’s dispassionate project. Holiday Destination is always deeply felt, and no more so than on its last song, “Jolly Sailor,” named for a pub in her hometown. Wobbling bass and dreamy synths channel the drunken wooziness of Shah’s lyrics, as she watches fathers and sons sing karaoke together, “toast to battles lost,” “speak of holidays of work that pays.” It’s a tender portrait of the kind of working-class community that politicians goad into fearing the other and voting against their best interests, only to be characterized as feckless drains on the economy themselves. Holiday Destination is compellingly bleak, but Shah’s defiance and willingness connect the dots to make it hopeful. | 2017-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 1965 | September 1, 2017 | 7.6 | 63090718-43af-462d-a35d-c86fbda82c94 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The expansive companion album to last year’s A Crow Looked At Me is no less a marvel. Phil Elverum’s latest is part memoir and part magnum opus, sung softly and with wonder. | The expansive companion album to last year’s A Crow Looked At Me is no less a marvel. Phil Elverum’s latest is part memoir and part magnum opus, sung softly and with wonder. | Mount Eerie: Now Only | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-eerie-now-only/ | Now Only | Phil Elverum’s music feels like a conversation. His songs move at a relaxed pace, quiet and hypnotic, sung in a boyish voice amid passages of near-silence, as if to induce private reflection from both artist and listener. But Elverum also makes records that are in conversation with each other: Lyric sheets come with annotations, songs beget sequels, album titles become band names. It’s a literary tendency that’s made his large body of work, from his lo-fi recordings as the Microphones through his later work as Mount Eerie, a deep and rewarding refuge that he’s perpetuated by occasionally breaking the fourth wall. In his self-published diary he released in 2008, he introduced himself, “Hello. I am a self-mythologizer.”
This mythology—which involves his hometown of Anacortes, Washington; the shape of the universe; the wisdom of the natural world; and Elverum’s (and, by extension, everyone’s) place in it all—came to an abrupt end last year. He composed his 13th album, A Crow Looked at Me, in a dark fog after the death of his wife, Geneviève, with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t the first time Elverum’s work had been starkly autobiographical, but it was the first time that it didn’t seem to be in service of a larger poetic vision. “There is nothing to learn,” he sang in a pivotal moment. “Her absence is a scream/Saying nothing.”
Almost exactly one year after that release comes Now Only, an expansive and embattled companion album. The songs on Crow were defined by solitude—thoughts spiraling in the absence of somebody to receive them. By comparison, Now Only is downright crowded with ideas, even if one person remains at the center of everything. Its six tracks are long and knotty, comprising multiple movements and following non-linear narratives. In the title track, Elverum reflects on touring his most vulnerable work, faced with live audiences and other acts on the road. Released back into society, he lets his mind return to the hospital waiting rooms where he sat waiting for his wife and considers the other people who quietly accompanied him there with their own stories of loss. Elsewhere, he looks at Norwegian art, listens to the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, runs into Father John Misty, and watches the news. The world opens up. Sometimes reluctantly and sometimes with new serenity, he finds his footing in it again.
With that shift, images that felt blurred and distant in Crow’s lingering heatwave come into focus. In crucial moments, we learn about Geneviève prior to her cancer diagnosis. “Tintin in Tibet” depicts her as Elverum’s 22-year-old soulmate—the couple living blissfully as vagabonds, playing shows around the country. Opening with a simple declaration—“I sing to you”—and exploring the implications of each of those simple words, his lyrics sink deeper and deeper into his memory, like water through soil. Where Elverum once sought Geneviève in abstract forms, she appears to him as herself here. When Elverum turns to these thoughts, the music finds balance and momentum.
Another comforting reappearance on Now Only is the analog sprawl of earlier Mount Eerie records. While the music on Crow was built from skeletal, often dissonant acoustic guitar progressions, Now Only recalls his previous, more atmospheric work. The ringing drones throughout “Distortion” sound like fallout from his ambient black metal experiments; “Earth” stomps with a grungy drawl that recalls the garage-folk bluster of 2008’s Black Wooden Ceiling Opening. The climactic “Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup” even begins with a direct lyrical callback to an earlier song. “I know no one,” he sings, repeating the title of a 2005 track and assessing how that mantra applies to his life now.
These references beckon to a younger, simpler version of Mount Eerie, but they also become a grounding force for the record. Now Only feels as much like an epilogue to Crow as it does a dark forest road back to the wide-open landscapes of his earlier records—a search for meaning, for permanence and continuity. For a collection of such complex songs, it flows with seamless intricacy, one thought leading into the next, even when they seem at war with each other. At times, it suggests a dismissal of Crow’s magical nihilism for something more earthbound, demanding logic in the face of destruction. “I sing to you,” Elverum concludes one song. In the opening lines of the next, he clarifies, “But I don’t believe in ghosts or anything.”
The tension in Elverum’s songwriting lives in the space between those ideas. His questions are plentiful (“Who am I talking to?” “What am I saying?”), and the ground he covers to answer them is vast. While Crow moved chronologically through a brief but intense period of time, Now Only tells a longer story, stretching back to his childhood. During “Distortion,” one of Elverum’s most ambitious compositions to date, he describes an early encounter with death, reciting a passage from the Bible at a funeral but finding more resonance in the open casket. In “Earth,” he lets a rare, friendly euphemism slip into his writing: “You’re sleeping out in the yard now,” he sings. Then, as a means of self-correction, he describes what is actually happening to her body, bone by bone, in the yard where she’s buried.
Despite that verse—his most harrowing and physical description of decay—Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus. His songs play like they’re being conjured in real time, surging with a driving intensity that feels more like post-rock than folk and puts his work at odds with similarly diaristic epics from peers like Mark Kozelek or Sufjan Stevens. In “Distortion,” Elverum finds a foil in late-in-life Jack Kerouac. Accompanying himself with persistent, low harmonies, he sings about the aging writer “taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology” as an excuse to shirk his responsibilities as a parent and an artist. Elverum allows himself no such escape, even if he’s increasingly aware of the limitations of his project.
“These waves hit less frequently/They thin and then they are gone,” he sings in “Now Only.” Elverum is not describing an end to mourning—a flat, constant thing. Instead, he’s addressing the inevitable side effect of writing these first-hand accounts, stories that can only be repeated so many times before they lead to a different kind of death. The record closes with its bleakest, barest track, “Crow Pt. 2.” After listing a series of symbolic incarnations of Geneviève, Elverum admits in a broken sigh, “I don’t see you anywhere.” The song doesn’t stop there, though—it echoes beyond. Death is real, but it isn’t necessarily the end. | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | March 16, 2018 | 8.5 | 6309ea7e-1f5f-4b46-8f45-e00413f81262 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The galvanizing New York dance-punk trio returns with a long-anticipated third album that sounds like the Rapture without retreading past successes. It's a nifty trick that underscores the band's hard-won identity and it happens to come at a time when house and disco are more fashionable than any period since the early 1980s. | The galvanizing New York dance-punk trio returns with a long-anticipated third album that sounds like the Rapture without retreading past successes. It's a nifty trick that underscores the band's hard-won identity and it happens to come at a time when house and disco are more fashionable than any period since the early 1980s. | The Rapture: In the Grace of Your Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15783-in-the-grace-of-your-love/ | In the Grace of Your Love | Looking back, the Rapture's legacy is as a galvanizing force for the underground, busting indie rock's standstill so mightily that we're now embarrassed to be the guy not dancing. They never seemed like a good bet to break dance music to the mainstream audiences, though, no matter how hard iTunes insists that the closing track on my copy of 2006's Pieces of the People We Love is titled "Best Buy Exclusive." Pan-pop conspiracy theorists might note that the Rapture reached fever-pitch in New York in 2003, or right around the time that Lady Gaga was enrolling at NYU, but if the Rapture hadn't stopped their own momentum, someone would have stopped it for them: likely labelmate/mentor/producer James Murphy, whose LCD Soundsystem offered the same funk-punk grooves but had better jokes (well, had jokes period) and a more explosive live presence, with pathos to boot. The Rapture were too nervy and out-of-sync to ascend the ranks.
None of that changes the fact that the Rapture return, minus a surly Youtube non-sensation, at a time when house and disco are more fashionable than at any time since the early 1980s. See Gaga, see Hercules and Love Affair, see couture Daft Punk Lego dolls, see the fact that Chris Brown knows a French guy. The Rapture, always medium opportunists, aren't interested in taking advantage of this. They've become what they've always threatened to become: an art-rock band with predilections for boogie and dippy lyrics. Grace sounds like the Rapture without retreading past successes, a nifty trick that underscores the band's hard-won identity.
The Rapture are a pretty good art-rock band, too: Grace is fleshier than its predecessors, with horns, needlework guitar, and Jenner's brash voice filling the negative space the band used to gift to the dance floor. They deftly respond to choral background vocals, funky synth slabs, and tasteful guitar fills. A group that was once a combustible ball of energy is now a functioning nervous system with a keen sense of pace and texture. You can hear notes of U2's propulsive anthems ("Sail Away"), Talking Heads' agitated funk ("Can You Find a Way"), and XTC's ballast pop ("Rollercoaster"). You can forgive them for envying Cut Copy's hot-knife-through-butter crowd uniters ("Children").
Grace is the band's mature album, by their own reckoning: Press for the record has almost unanimously focused on the members' stroller-pushing benders, how frontman Luke Jenner spent time playing softball, attending church, and coping with the loss of his mother. Stability and love dominate its themes, the title cutting think-pieces off at the pass by invoking grace directly: This album is about sustained, earned love, as well as the forgiveness inherent in it.
When it clicks, it's triumphant. My two favorite songs are two of the most explicitly groove-oriented, ramped to tempos at which Jenner's alkaline voice can't help but cast hooks. "Miss You" attempts to reconcile with his mother, while "Never Die Again" pleads for a healthy relationship, topics flung far from dance music's typical fare. Of course, if the songs were about Lunchables or macroeconomics, I'd love them just them same; such is the draw when Jenner turns his nasal pipes to siren.
Therein lies the fallacy of the Rapture's maturity: Jenner has always played peek-a-boo with God and serenity (previous albums included songs titled "Love Is All", "Live in the Sunshine", and "Open Up Your Heart", not forgetting that the name of the band is the Rapture). On Grace he does so with more explicit inspiration, but he's a fumbling lyricist, better suited for tunneling into our Nikes than our hearts.
Jenner used to scrap and cluck for our attention more often; he's had better luck wrangling sentiment out of a yelp than a platitude (the best disco singers handle both). His finest moment is on lead single "How Deep Is Your Love?", the galloping, piano-driven tour de force that so many Chicago house revivalists have failed to nail. Here, the rollicking pianos match his devotional pitch, the wilding sax echoing his hallelujahs. Still, Jenner can feel like a man without a country. He doesn't have the pipes for the sustained howling of "Sail Away", "Blue Bird", or the title track (a misplaced, tedious centerpiece). Nor does the sentiment of soul-sided closer "It Takes Time to Be a Man" lend itself to his tonal irreverence and pizzazz. Of all the naughties indie giants thinking hard about domesticity (LCD, Animal Collective, the National), the Rapture's medium is least primed for the message.
This isn't the Rapture's fault, necessarily. "House of Jealous Lovers" is such a totem amid the last decade of indie that it's easy to forget they began as a somewhat (no pun) catholic punk band. In the Grace of Your Love takes two large steps back from "dance punk." Nearly a decade after "Jealous Lovers", they're a patient, skilled rock band unafraid to look uncool. If they sound extra comfy here it's probably because discomfort pervaded their best work so completely. The band's personal choices-- to abandon rock iconography for smaller, more fulfilling family units-- will be Grace's fate as well: a record without broader narratives, meant for those who grew up with the Rapture, or want to. | 2011-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | DFA | September 6, 2011 | 7.2 | 630b824a-b47e-4af3-80c4-c15d890fd6d1 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
It’s possible that nobody needs another 303 workout, but the Italian producer’s latest album proves that a programmer of his caliber can still wring some ecstasy from the machine. | It’s possible that nobody needs another 303 workout, but the Italian producer’s latest album proves that a programmer of his caliber can still wring some ecstasy from the machine. | Donato Dozzy: Filo Loves the Acid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/donato-dozzy-filo-loves-the-acid/ | Filo Loves the Acid | What’s left to do with the 303? Tadao Kikumoto’s 1981 invention for Roland was supposed to simulate a bass guitar, but instead it stimulated musicians’ imaginations and—with acid house—spawned a genre of its own. Beginning with Charanjit Singh’s 1982 classic Synthesizing: 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat and perfected on CTI’s “Dancing Ghosts” from ’84, the magic box went on to burble and gurgle and squelch and screech through warehouse anthems from Armando, Phuture, LFO, and Daft Punk, not to mention radio staples from Shannon and Aaliyah. An acid house revival seems to fade in and out every five years, summoned by various incarnations of analog fetishists, soft-synth and hardware market servicing, nostalgia—and the simple fact that few sounds tickle the body and mind (particularly when drugged) quite like its squiggle slipped into a set.
Few artists right now are plumbing these psychedelic depths with more success than the Italian producer Donato Dozzy. He’s built weird albums by sampling the mouth harp, and from multiplying and processing sounds from the mouth itself. But his real forte is programming, through which he’s somehow able to coax or conjure the most astonishing expanses. His minimalism is mind-altering in the same way Bridget Riley’s paintings are: It’s hypnotic, efficient, and inexplicable.
Maybe nobody needs another 303 workout, but Filo Loves the Acid proves an expert like Dozzy can still wring some ecstasy from the machine. Opener “Filo” (named, like the album, after an old friend of Dozzy’s) starts out humid and stays that way; a foggy melody that recalls the better of Richard D. James’ Analord tracks condenses for a few minutes, then dissipates. Through the clouds, “Vetta” arrives; its title is Italian for summit, and the track resembles a rocky peak, with 303 crags jutting out and over a simple kick drum, maybe a tom-tom or two, and some delays. An old trackmaster’s trick is to use the 303’s gradually shifting tones to simulate ascension—see: Josh Wink’s deathless “Higher State of Consciousness”—and here you’re climbing, too, but the path is winding, and it winds you, and when you get to the top you don’t know where you are anymore. Or even when you are, as Dozzy is also skilled at suspending time within rhythm. Later, in “Vetta (Reprise),” the journey is far rougher: Hurtling at a relentless clip, bassline engorged like a gasping throat, the track evokes the panic of freefall while hi-hats snap like failing safety ropes… until it’s all suddenly over.
Other tracks aren’t as lethal. “Duetto” is a po-faced cha-cha that is also, oddly, a three-way between kick, 303, and a shawl of phased hi-hats that finally unfurls and swirls around fabulously. “Nine O’ Three” is an icy delight, all distant sirens and chunky, barely submerged drums, equal parts palate cleanser and cold shower. “TB Square” has a charming “Sharevari” kind of snap and wiggle. “REP” closes things out with a euphoric raspberry of noise, pounding with full four-to-the-floor-as-two-fingers-up insouciance. And “Back” is easily the most luxurious of the bunch, with multiple garlands of glittery clamor so dazzling they almost prevent the ear from focusing. It could go on forever, and one night at Berghain it probably will.
For all of Filo’s thrills, though, Dozzy keeps things under control—a characteristic highly prized by the album’s stern German label, Tresor, which since 1991 has offered tense, uncompromising articulations of techno and electro from Drexciya, Surgeon, Robert Hood, and Jeff Mills. But it seems even they couldn’t resist a wink, commissioning this for their 303th release. At eight songs and just over 40 minutes, Filo is a fine thank you to friends—human and machine—who’ve stayed true over the years. | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tresor | July 19, 2018 | 7.3 | 63103073-a3e7-4760-b32e-398339129fca | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
So far, Arca is best known as a producer. He's already produced some of FKA twigs' best work, he's co-producing Björk's next album, and he had a hand in four songs on Kanye West's Yeezus. Despite his high profile collaborations, his excellent debut album Xen is doggedly experimental, perhaps the strangest music he's made. | So far, Arca is best known as a producer. He's already produced some of FKA twigs' best work, he's co-producing Björk's next album, and he had a hand in four songs on Kanye West's Yeezus. Despite his high profile collaborations, his excellent debut album Xen is doggedly experimental, perhaps the strangest music he's made. | Arca: Xen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19836-arca-xen/ | Xen | The Venezuelan-born producer Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, has got a handful of releases to his name so far, including 2012's Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, a pair of bewildering EPs that threaded glassy digital synths with sped-up vocals and chopped'n'screwed stutterbeats, all as twisted and contorted as the weird, milky appendages pictured on their sleeves. Beyond that, though, Arca is best known as a next-generation super-producer, or a potential one, anyway. He's already produced some of FKA twigs' best work, he's co-producing Björk's next album, and he had a hand in four songs on Kanye's Yeezus.
Ghersi's proper debut album, Xen, named for his ambiguously gendered alter ego, shows that his brush with the big time has not softened him. Kick drums stutter and stumble; rhythmic patterns fall apart in mid-song. A few of the beat-oriented tracks, like "Fish", have come completely untethered from the rigid grid that usually governs electronic music's timekeeping. Sounding like a hardstyle rework of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" made with a broken MIDI clock, it flaps at the edges like a tarp with a busted tent pole. Aside from a few relatively placid sketches recalling Harold Budd or Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, the palette tends to emphasize hammered metal, broken glass, and melted plastic; plucked tones and bent notes and nails-on-a-chalkboard sheets of dissonance. (The strident synths of "Tongue" sound like they've been inspired by the shower scene in Psycho.) Taken as a whole, it is an album about unstable unities, things that cannot easily hold together, wholes breaking to pieces and being put back together again in new and unfamiliar shapes.
Even the pacing of the album seems to move in fits and starts. From the dramatic opener, "Now You Know", all elastic arpeggios and rocket-launch glissandi, he feints left into the Harold Budd homage "Held Apart", and from there it's on to the schizophrenic "Xen", a song divided between metallic locust-swarm passages and Fairlight fantasias flecked with synthetic birdsong. "Slit Thru", a downcast Dem Bow number, gives way to the languorous and atmospheric "Failed", a meandering synthesizer jam that wouldn't sound out of place on Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo, a mixtape of Japanese ambient pop from the 1980s. From there, the pizzicato string synths of "Family Violence" lead into the reggaeton-leaning "Thievery", the closest thing to a single on the album. And so on, all the way through the anticlimactic (but still exhilarating!) closer, "Promise", with its aimless string plucks and blast-furnace rumble. Xen feels less like a narrative arc than an amalgam of two- and three-minute chunks that might work just as well on shuffle. That's not a criticism. To the contrary: the album's mazelike shape is an indicator of how much lies beneath the surface. You really could get lost in this thing.
It's been a while since it felt like there was anything really, categorically new in popular music, or even semi-popular music. As Simon Reynolds' Retromania argued, the story of the century so far has mostly been one of collaging together the bits and pieces of earlier decades. Gradually, however, it is becoming clear that something is cresting the horizon, and while it's too early to make out the particulars of its shape—this lumbering behemoth with the Teflon gleam and Transformer joints and image-mapping skin—it is getting closer.
This new thing is not a genre, exactly; call it a style, a sensibility, a veneer. It has to do with computers and digital sound and digital imagery. It has to do with representation and malleability, the idea that sound and image can be stretched and twisted and copied ad nauseam. It revels in digital gloss and grit, in bent tones, in smeared and frozen reverb tails. Extreme compression, schizoid pith: rap vocals broken down to monosyllables, a single "Huh" as metonym for everything that's happened between the Sugarhill Gang and now. History reduced to a USB stick.
It's not necessarily sci-fi in its themes—not, say, in the way that Detroit techno celebrated cybernetics and space travel—but there's still something inherently futuristic about its portrayal of technology as something tangible and even sensual, its suggestion that data has texture and heft. It spins code into a second skin. (I realize that that description doesn't sound that far off from The Matrix—a 1999 film that, these days, we're likelier to read as kitsch than as prophecy—but this stuff is different; it's less Keanu than Cronenberg.) You can make out its traces in the work of people like Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, Evian Christ, FKA twigs, Berlin's Janus crew, and even PC Music, and it feels like it's coming to a head on Arca's Xen. The next few years—his next few years—are going to be interesting.
~
Editor’s Note: At the time of this review’s publication, Arca used he/him pronouns. Arca now uses she/her pronouns. | 2014-11-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mute | November 3, 2014 | 8.4 | 6310430c-3b44-4fd5-9e94-11612d838816 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The English punks’ debut is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore. | The English punks’ debut is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore. | Ditz: The Great Regression | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ditz-the-great-regression/ | The Great Regression | Brighton’s Ditz make angry music in a world where there’s a lot to be mad about. Since forming in 2016, the quintet have armed themselves with pummeling drums and serrated guitar riffs against a world that persecutes queerness and normalizes harassment. “Shit jobs, stuck inside, no hope etc.,” the band explained in a recent interview. “People forget that it’s just quite fun to shout really loud.” Their full-length debut, The Great Regression, is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore that smelts and polishes that anger into engrossing melodic rock. Across 10 tracks, Ditz grapple with breakable bodies, the failures of a perception-based society, and the mindless trudge of worklife.
Inspired by everything from PC Music to At the Drive-In, Ditz aren’t afraid of plunging in headfirst and then working backwards to balance their chaotic experiments against pop structure. Opener “Clocks” demonstrates why it’s hard to fit this group into one category: Singer Cal Francis begins with combustive, chord-splitting screams that recall Converge, before switching character to eerie post-punk spoken word. The oscillation between his venomous roar and leaden spoken vocals resonates with the cultural mood: Anger over a raging dumpster fire of problems that cools to a complacent hopelessness.
But The Great Regression isn’t only unnerving because its whirlpool of distortive effects can feel like a tortuous auditory illusion, or because Francis’ vocal screeches sometimes reach poltergeist highs. On “Instinct,” he numbly recalls a habit of eating flowers and feeling the thorns scratch against his throat, not recognizing he swallowed them whole. Reaching a boiling point, he screeches, “I gnaw and I spit out my own flesh/Razor sharp pin pricks of want fill my head and coalesce.”
What makes The Great Regression such an relentlessly exciting listen is how Ditz balance an army of alien textures without compromising the dark irony of Francis’ performances. Some of the album’s most unsettling moments are the subtlest: “I’ll make you smile,” asserts the sinister entity at the center of “The Warden,” a metaphor for an obsession with work output that’s reminiscent of Interpol. “Summer of the Shark” critiques an insidious modern attention economy by comparing sensationalist news coverage of shark attacks in summer 2001 to the subsequent events of 9/11. “Now I know why Elvis shot TVs/Boredom is more evident when sensation is key,” goes one poignant line, flipping a pop-culture legend into an act of vigilante justice against a screen-obsessed society. The Great Regression has fun pointing out the world’s contradictions, subverting its vulgarity, questioning its systems. At its peaks, it feels like an antidote for the ennui of ceaseless catastrophe. | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Alcopop! | March 14, 2022 | 7.3 | 6312a67d-9548-4fcd-8986-8cbf1e93b5f3 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On his second album, the quasi-anonymous DJ in a stylized marshmallow mask proves the perfect figurehead for a commercial EDM scene running on fumes. | On his second album, the quasi-anonymous DJ in a stylized marshmallow mask proves the perfect figurehead for a commercial EDM scene running on fumes. | Marshmello : Joytime II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marshmello-joytime-ii/ | Joytime II | If you need proof that EDM is firmly in its late-capitalist phase, just take a look at what the music-industry marketing gambit’s brightest stars are up to now: Skrillex is producing for the Weeknd, Diplo’s doing hip-hop again, Calvin Harris is dutifully churning out his own Northern Soul-ish take on American R&B, Zedd’s offered a few pleasant twists on the Chainsmokers’ MOR-sleazebag sound, and Martin Garrix is still desperately trying to make another “Animals.” Ultra’s gotten safer, but the culture’s excesses continue to tragically claim lives in the rearview; when Diplo threatened to go “full Pusha T” on Zedd earlier this month, in the wake of “The Story of Adidon,” the resounding lack of public interest in the button-pushing beef highlighted how uninteresting the supposed stars behind EDM’s successes have become.
But even though EDM’s brief pop-cultural dominance has faded, there are still artists making maximalist music that’s perfect for corporate raves and streaming algorithms alike. This would be happening whether or not EDM ever reached its apex of public awareness (after all, Tiësto had a career way before your parents became aware of furry boots), but the difference between today’s mainstream dance music and the genre's pop breakthroughs of decades past is that the rising stars of the moment take their inspiration primarily from modern-day EDM titans—a profit-oriented subgenre of dance music feeding off itself instead of building on dance's already rich history.
Perhaps the most visible artist in EDM’s smaller second wave has been Marshmello—which is ironic, since he performs and makes public appearances with a marshmallow mask on his head, much like the frequently irascible, mouse-head-wearing progressive-house producer Deadmau5 (who has since acknowledged the similarities in approach in his own confrontational way). Similar to Skrillex, Marshmello—whose true identity is alleged to be the 26-year-old Philly resident Chris Comstock—plays fast and loose with his sound, spanning bass-heavy trap and piano-line trance (sometimes in the same song). Not unlike Garrix, Oliver Heldens, and tons more EDM once-hopefuls, he’s got that One Killer Track, 2016’s “Alone,” a towering anthem that he’s yet to replicate in terms of quality (although he’s subsequently had higher-charting songs bolstered by star-wattage guest singers).
Artists trafficking in EDM have typically been averse to the album format, but Marshmello’s two Joytime releases aren’t exactly albums. Think of them more as collections of DJ tools—packages of cuts tailor-made for setlists and remix fodder alike. The first Joytime was released in 2016, and the second one arrived this month alongside a “Fortnite” streaming session with gamer-of-fame Ninja. Marshmello’s not typically averse to digital cult-of-ubiquity gimmicks (have you seen his cooking show?), but his gaming association makes some sense beyond mere trend-riding: From the synth fanfare of “Stars” to the slick sugar-rush grooves of “Imagine,” Joytime II sounds colorful, aggressive, and relentless, like dropping into Dusty Depot right as the comet hits.
Marshmello does show some stylistic evolution on Joytime II—specifically, towards emo. It’s a development that might seem surprising on its face, but less so after considering “Spotlight,” his collaboration with late emo-rap vanguard Lil Peep that came out late last year following Peep’s passing. “Rooftops” centers on Marshmello’s histrionic vocal line, which is easily identifiable to anyone with a passing familiarity in 2000s mall-centric emo, while the relatively downcast “Paralyzed”—which opens with dark synths dripping over his flatly delivered vocal take—seemingly attempts to replicate the aching approach that Peep popularized during his brief ascent.
Unfortunately, both tracks ultimately scan as far too generic to signify any sort of real artistic growth, an issue that extends to Joytime II as a whole. Its most intense and melodically toothsome moments—the stomping fanfare of “Check This Out,” the loopy melodies and buzzsaw rhythms of “Together”—are reminiscent of Glasgow maximalist Rustie and his peers (including Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s TNGHT project, which Marshmello and a host of trap-adjacent producers owe a decent part of their careers to). When Rustie came to prominence with his brilliant 2011 debut, Glass Swords—to say nothing of his epochal contribution to BBC 1’s Essential Mix series the following year—his digital-excess approach felt like something new and sorely needed, coming off of the pared-back bass music that dominated electronic music in the early 2010s. On Joytime II, Marshmello takes what’s come before him does little more than simply add more—a pile of garish and unmemorable synth-slop that’s as charmless as the mask atop his head. | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Marshmello | June 29, 2018 | 4.2 | 6316108a-1552-4a09-8327-8dce6fd4f68d | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
On their new LP, California indie-poppers Rogue Wave hint at breaking open their songwriting model but keep things modest in the end. | On their new LP, California indie-poppers Rogue Wave hint at breaking open their songwriting model but keep things modest in the end. | Rogue Wave: Delusions of Grand Fur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21814-delusions-of-grand-fur/ | Delusions of Grand Fur | After losing his Silicon Valley job in the early-'00s dotcom bust, Zach Schwartz debuted his Rogue Wave project in 2002, during the indie-pop boom. Like his Shins-era peers, Schwartz, who goes by Zach Rogue, was a sensitive songwriter who politely aired grievances with wayward friends, reckless parents, and departed partners in a way that shone a warm light on his personal losses. It was the redemptive aspect that attracted TV music scouts, and the scouts who helped break the band. But after syncs in shows like "The O.C.," the label Sub Pop, who had signed the group after Rogue’s lo-fi solo debut, mysteriously dropped them. A decade later, following increasingly crisp and radio-ready LPs, sixth album Delusions of Grand Fur finds the California band at a crossroads from which every path looks like a cul-de-sac.
Rogue, a self-effacing character, would be the first to concede his modest prospects. He’s recently professed his newfound obsession with hip-hop and electronic music, lamenting that breakout stars like Kendrick Lamar are rare beacons at a time when "[so] many artists rising to the top are garbage." Where 2010’s Permalight felt like a rudimentary synthpop dalliance, Delusions of Grand Fur is a chance for Rogue Wave to bust open the indie-pop model, inspect the components, and rebuild from scratch. That chance goes untaken and, seemingly, unobserved. The record is chronically mild—it neither pulls off nor attempts songwriting acrobatics. Highlights like "Endless Supply" and "Take It Slow" are pastoral and pretty, vast yet cosy, with a vague sense of battles won. But for all the formula tweaks and threads of political intent—"In the vast expanse of governments/ I think you’re gonna burn," Rogue sings, Leonard Cohen-like, on "Look at Me"—Rogue and Pat Spurgeon have redrafted their gentle-and-epic songwriting orthodoxy, when what it needed was a revolution.
A sign of the record’s impasse is its cover, a defaced, hollow-eyed image by the artist Matthew Craven of Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard. That a decorated racist seemed fitting art for an otherwise harmless pop record feels instructive: Rogue has thoughtful intentions—his reading concerns white America’s blindness to its past, particularly given the present GOP agenda—but overlooks the possibility that album sleeves simply aren’t the best place to put Confederate generals in 2016. Like the album’s lyrics, it presents a potent idea in a manner just broad and ambiguous enough to ring hollow.
It’s a shame, because Rogue has a gift for making art of his uncertainties. On 2003’s "Postage Stamp World," he sang, "You can all get in line/ And lick my behind"—a comically sheepish threat that felt somehow revealing. Now, apprehensive of both world-weariness and quixotic optimism, his songwriting is compromised precisely by its faith in compromise. "Hey, in the morning/ Can’t get you off my mind," goes a typically airy lyric from "In the Morning," a nicely crafted anthem about the trials of marriage. But never does the music submit to raw emotion, relay the breathless rush of dreams chased or the complexities that, in a grim political climate, make retreating into the love of one’s family such a terrifying, guilty temptation. As much as the record flirts with reinvention—personal, political, musical—its modest ambition sounds exactly like complacency. | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Easy Sound | April 25, 2016 | 5.7 | 6319061c-1d1a-4ae7-a0a7-e504dd7fe5cc | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Tel Aviv’s Nadav Spiegel is one of the more promising producers to emerge from his city’s revived electronic scene. His new LP draws on post-punk, disco, kosmische, and more, but the lyrics fall flat. | Tel Aviv’s Nadav Spiegel is one of the more promising producers to emerge from his city’s revived electronic scene. His new LP draws on post-punk, disco, kosmische, and more, but the lyrics fall flat. | Autarkic: I Love You, Go Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23201-i-love-you-go-away/ | I Love You, Go Away | Autarkic is the name for Tel Aviv-based producer Nadav Spiegel, a solo electronic act and one of the more promising artists in the city’s revived electronic scene, along with the likes of Red Axes and Moscoman. The latter released Autarkic’s mini-LP Can You Pass the Knife? last year on his Disco Halal label, their first release of original productions after a series of Middle Eastern-tinged disco edits. It showed the young producer straddling house, coldwave, electro, Depeche Mode-style synth-pop, and the like, keeping the proceedings just sullied enough.
Now Spiegel follows that up with his nine-track debut LP. As both its title and cover image of a cigarette stubbed out in a cupcake suggest, Spiegel is conflicted when it comes to love. Conceived as a documentation and remedy for a recent heartbreak, the album reveals Spiegel’s angst, mistrust, spite, and—like any good romantic—willingness to go through the wringer all over again by album’s end.
“New Heimat” features squalls of guitar feedback, churning bass, and distorted hi-hats topped by Spiegel’s strangulated vocals; it resembles a post-punk band rather than a producer behind some gear. Spiegel repeats the refrain “home is where the hatred is” until the words start to fray. But is he speaking of “home” in the domestic or national sense? With such lines as “No more fighting for the state/No more bleeding for some faith,” home sounds like the last place he wants to be.
The track then segues into the bent synths of “Violence.” Closed hi-hats and shaken bells rattle about the slinking disco bass, reminiscent at times of LCD Soundsystem’s “45:33.” It’s here, though, that Spiegel’s lines start to fall flat. “Envy/It’s not good,” he deadpans, and then draws on a couple’s line of argument (“It’s not about you”). But he fails to do much with either thought. The terse and glowering “How to Cheat” again finds the production in fine form, but Spiegel’s lyrics make it feel like a rant, like a friend whose chat about his ex turns from therapeutic to bitter. Petty and overly dramatic, he sings of sodomizing the mind, money, and sex, to where his temper makes the words verge on incoherence.
All of which makes “Gibberish Love Song” the most effective track here, as Spiegel opts for catchy bits of nonsense rather than embittered lines. A siren-like tone widens into a brooding banger. When the words do return, it’s for a mumbling kosmische take on Guided by Voices’ “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” a curious cover to slot in the middle of the LP. It’s a curveball that doesn’t quite land, but it proves Spiegel’s penchant for going leftfield.
“Bongos & Tambourines” smears Spiegel’s voice across a clanging beat of bells and marimba. The analog keys suggest early Cluster, but again the words feel clumsy with Spiegel’s pitchy delivery of “Bankers and robbers got hit by a cowbell/Bankers and robbers got hit by a snare.” Closer “Warmth (How Mean Is Mean?)” bears the album’s keenest melody courtesy of a violin playing a Middle Eastern scale as Spiegel sings of “the weirdest desire,” hinting that he may once again utter “I love you.”
Looped hand percussion and echoing chimes give “Wipe the Shame” a slightly different feel. But it’s this song that makes one wonder if the album is really about a failed relationship or else an ultimately untenable nation-state. Is Spiegel singing of love or something more oppressive when he delivers lines like, “Brutal oppress as self-defense... How can we take that man down”? There’s a kernel of protest to be had here, but it would resonate deeper with stronger lines and more assured delivery. | 2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Disco Halal | May 2, 2017 | 6.6 | 631b21ae-e909-476b-addc-5b5830a46dfc | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Kacey Musgraves' first holiday album summons ‘60s nostalgia, embraces kitschy exotica, and passes the pipe with Willie Nelson. | Kacey Musgraves' first holiday album summons ‘60s nostalgia, embraces kitschy exotica, and passes the pipe with Willie Nelson. | Kacey Musgraves: A Very Kacey Christmas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22705-a-very-kacey-christmas/ | A Very Kacey Christmas | Kacey Musgraves continues to follow her arrow. In 2013, she built her reputation as an antidote to all that was said to be ailing country music: a traditionalist of unobtrusively twangy arrangements and a credible small-town Texas background, who was also slyly progressive in her down-home narratives. She cowrote Miranda Lambert’s deliciously vengeful mini-masterpiece “Mama’s Broken Heart” and released her own major-label debut, Same Trailer Different Park, which beat out Taylor Swift and the genre’s swaggering bros to win the Best Country Album Grammy. In 2015, she released Pageant Material; that record didn’t go big, it went home, eschewing radio-friendly hits to double down gorgeously on the gentle, folksy nuance of its predecessor. It opened at No. 1 but didn’t sell as well overall.
Its follow-up, A Very Kacey Christmas, is yet another left turn from Musgraves. The third album is pretty early in an artist’s catalog for a holiday record, but she throws herself into this one as wholeheartedly as any proper LP. Her great epiphany is the short distance between rhinestones and aluminum trees, how what once was considered tacky and artificial can, with time, come to seem nostalgic and real. Musgraves’ album summons up the mid-’60s era nostalgia of A Charlie Brown Christmas, gliding naturally from her established Western-swing throwback aesthetic to kitschy exotica and vintage pop, with an expertly curated song selection that leans on campy novelties, classy standards, and a stocking’s worth of originals.
Because our Christmas recordings pile up over the years, to be dusted off with the other decorations for a few weeks and then put back in their boxes, they may be one of the few types of albums many people still play in full. The sequencing of A Very Kacey Christmas exploits this advantage. Musgraves doesn’t rush her conceit, opening elegantly but conventionally with cello and pedal steel on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” followed by a sleigh bells- and fiddle-accented “Let It Snow” with fellow Western swingers the Quebe Sisters. She shows her hand next on—of all things!—a polka-like cover of “Christmas Don’t Be Late,” a/k/a “The Chipmunk Song.” Replacing the cartoon characters’ irritating high-pitched voices with Musgraves’ crystalline effortlessness (and ditching the “ALVIN!!!” banter) renders this familiar bit of silliness deeply affecting; when Musgraves sings, “I still want a hula-hoop,” it’s with the poignancy of a adult yearning for all that she didn’t get in Christmases past.
The other non-originals are cut from similarly elvin-green cloth, and they’re thoroughly enjoyable if less revelatory. Musgraves salvages “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” an oft-annoying mid-century gag record, gamely singing about not wanting “rhinoceroses-es.” She delivers an effectively restrained “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with children chiming in with schoolyard backing vocals. Elsewhere, Musgraves lets the band’s instrumental prowess shine in a nimble, mariachi-flavored “Feliz Navidad.” Another song about various cultural ways of saying merry Christmas, the Hawaiian ditty “Mele Kalikimaka,” piles on the pedal steel, with the Quebe Sisters returning on close-knit harmonies. Ending with a woozy “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”—capped by a snatch of “Auld Lang Syne” on piano, around a hearth of ambient chatter—feels obvious but fitting, like watching It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve.
The four originals here vary in their success, “A Willie Nice Christmas,” if you’ll forgive a pun (and you’ll have to) is Musgraves’ weed-heavy holiday reunion with Willie Nelson, whose 1965 song “Are You Sure” she rebooted with him on Pageant Material. It is hardly essential, but notable for merely existing: Musgraves, who once sang, “I’m always higher than my hair,” name-checks “On the Road Again” and hopes “we’ll all stay higher than the star at the top of the tree,” as Nelson genially reminds us not to get so stressed. “Present Without a Bow,” which features Musgraves’ fellow classicist Leon Bridges, reaches for the holiday soulfulness of a song like Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas,” but it doesn’t quite cohere. “Ribbons and Bows,” an upbeat hand-clapper in the Ronettes and Darlene Love mode, feels like a potential single, with “All I Want for Christmas Is You”-style lyrics channeled through Musgraves’ eye for what “the ladies [down] at the hair salon” will say.
The real gift here is “Christmas Makes Me Cry,” a gut-punching acoustic ballad that Musgraves cowrote with Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. While another country star with crossover ability, Dolly Parton, sang about keeping a stiff upper lip in her “Hard Candy Christmas,” Musgraves confides now that Nat King Cole, starry-eyed kids, and “seeing mom and dad get a little grayer” each year never fails to bring tears to her eyes. “Another year gone by/Just one more that I/I couldn't make it home,” she sings. For all her retro leanings, she wisely chooses to sing about contemporary people trying our damndest to be cheerful and loving in a particularly hectic—and, often, sad and heavy—time of year. Getting a little misty-eyed around the holidays? Now that’s a sentiment everyone can appreciate, in any era. | 2016-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Mercury | December 23, 2016 | 6.8 | 631b9462-029c-4a78-99fd-f5a21d00be76 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Recorded in 1971, the lost album by the Meters’ guitarist and co-founder plays like a document of what happened, and also what could have happened—a heart-on-your-sleeve acoustic career from a funk icon whose feelings always seemed to be hidden in his riffs. | Recorded in 1971, the lost album by the Meters’ guitarist and co-founder plays like a document of what happened, and also what could have happened—a heart-on-your-sleeve acoustic career from a funk icon whose feelings always seemed to be hidden in his riffs. | Leo Nocentelli: Another Side | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leo-nocentelli-another-side/ | Another Side | Since it developed in the late 1960s, roots rock has been a confusing genre. Rejecting ornate frills for something folksier, simpler, bluesier—think Let It Be and the Band—the name itself raises the question: Just whose roots are we talking about? The Beatles, after all, honed their Chuck Berry covers in Germany. Mostly Canadians, the Band had a queasy affection for the Confederate South. Rock’s origins were clearly located in Black America—yet the vast majority of the artists associated with the back-to-basics movement were white. For them, “returning to their roots” meant making the music they had innovated sound more like the structure and sound they had cribbed in the first place.
The phrase “roots rock” feels especially irrelevant in New Orleans, the delta of the Mississippi River along where rock‘n’roll, jazz, and the blues all supposedly began. At the dawn of the 1970s, the most forward-thinking musicians in the bayou weren’t simplifying their sound. They were expanding it with traditions from their own communities: The Meters flirted with second line rhythms, while Dr. John dosed his swamp shamanism with Mardi Gras pomp. Rediscovering roots was nonsense—these artists had never parted with them.
It’s still a bit disarming to hear the stripped-down beauty of Another Side, the excellent solo debut by Meters’ guitarist and co-founder Leo Nocentelli, recorded largely in 1971 but issued for the first time this year by Light in the Attic. Nocentelli wrote the album during a brief span when the Meters were split up. He was in his mid-twenties, enamored of folkster James Taylor, and concerned with his career’s future. Perhaps this was why he was trying to be a singer-songwriter—though his band already broadened the vocabulary of funk, scored a bonafide hit with “Cissy Strut,” and composed songs that would later become a treasure trove for hip-hop producers. The Meters, though, were more ubiquitous than they were famous or rich. Their democratic workings meant Nocentelli’s contributions could often be buried, even if he was perhaps the group’s most consistent songwriter as well as their motor, his palm-muted grooves as regular as a train, headed for pop’s future. Nocentelli’s command as a bandleader comes as no surprise. The shock is this: For lack of a better term, Another Side is a roots rock record.
Spanning nine originals and a tender Elton John cover, the music blends mellifluous, roving acoustic guitar and country stomp; only an experimental hip-hop producer could make a viable beat out of most of these songs. The nakedness of Nocentelli’s lyrics is unprecedented in the Meters’ expanded universe—the record includes maybe the most touching love song, “You’ve Become a Habit,” any member of the group ever recorded. And while it may seem out of step with the New Orleans scene, Another Side came from its center, engineered in part by R&B impresario Cosimo Matassa and rife with local heroes filling the role of chameleonic session men: Two members of the Meters, George Porter Jr. and Ziggy Modeliste, play the bass and drums, respectively; Allen Toussaint sits in on the piano; and on several tracks, jazz great James Black plays drums. The album’s 35 minutes are a document of a city, milieu, and sensibility, all the more lucid because they feel as though they came from another place entirely.
As often happens with lost recordings, the story of Another Side’s fifty-year, hazardous path to wider distribution is so winding that the narrative threatens to scrawl over the tunes themselves. After Nocentelli sidelined the project, because the Meters scored a record deal with Warner in 1972, Toussaint held the masters at his own Sea-Saint Studios, and then Hurricane Katrina destroyed the legendary Clematis Street haven and three-quarters of the tapes housed there.
A storied artistic pipeline leads from New Orleans to Los Angeles—Nocentelli himself lived in Southern California for years, and musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Frank Ocean made the westward trek in the hope of finding wider prospects. This, too, is how Another Side survived. In 1995, Toussaint sold Sea-Saint to a label publisher and marketer named Bill Valenziano, and as Sam Sweet reported in the Los Angeles Times, Valenziano moved the surviving masters, numbering in the thousands, to a storage facility near his California home, only to neglect them. “I had checked in my head that 2020 would be the year that I deal with this,” the octogenarian told Sweet in 2019, “And if I can’t find a new owner….do you have time to have a bonfire at the beach?”
Luckily, someone transported a modicum of the archive to another facility, which foreclosed and the contents ended up at a swap meet in the beachy L.A. suburb of Torrance, how crate digger Mike Nishita lugged them home, shocked to discover both classic records from the ’70s and unreleased material thought to be forever lost. A producer for someone Sweet describes as “One of the world’s most successful rappers” offered Nishita $250,000 for the whole haul, wanting to use a bunch of unheard music from hip-hop’s most sampled era to create unique beats. Nishita declined, and now, Another Side sees the light of day. The record feels like a document of what happened, and also what could have happened—a heart-on-your-sleeve acoustic career from a funk icon whose feelings always seemed to be hidden in his riffs.
Another Side has a narrative, too. It traces a loose tale of a young man, reeling from a break-up, riven between his romantic angst and an intense, perhaps doomed desire to make it in the music business. The first song, “Thinking of the Day,” uses warm, close-mic’d vocals while setting up the record’s themes: “Thinking about tomorrow/But tomorrow never comes/I guess I’ll be thinking about tomorrow/Until my day is done.” We have sketches of frustrated dock workers working for the weekend on the Mississippi—the dyed-in-the-wool blues rocker “Riverfront”—and farmers imagining leaving their daily routines for the big city (“Pretty Mittie”). We see a tableau of dreaming as a young Black man in the south, and how aspirations have a ceiling because of both circumstances and choice. “We are sentenced to life/By our own convictions,” Nocentelli tells us in a poem included in the album booklet, an apt description of his often selfless-seeming career with the Meters and beyond: If he ever asked his bandmates for the spotlight, he sure never received it.
Bolstering the lyrical themes are low-key virtuosic performances, the same quality that give the early Meters’ records their power, though these songs are in a completely different vein. Modeliste’s rim shots on “Thinking of the Day” are muted and unassuming; Toussaint’s organ trills fill out the space of “Riverfront”; airy backing vocals elevate “Tell Me Why” into a full-bodied pop song; Nocentelli’s dense picking makes the outro of “Your Song” feel climactic, even without the strings swells of Elton John’s original; James Black gives highlight “Give Me Back My Loving” a shambling force, and Nocentelli’s voice has a warbly personality throughout. On the aforementioned “You’ve Become a Habit,” about a young man who falls in love with a sex worker named Fancy, his guitar playing and singing thread their way like smoke to someplace hallowed and rare. Every part of the song strikes at someone unhappily resigned to one-sided love, the words themselves the unsure whispers of the young and confused rising through the billows.
Gorgeous if era-bound, Another Side comes with a certain sadness, thanks to the content, but also because we know what happened next. Nocentelli had a sterling second act with the Meters, yet his songwriting benefited him in limited ways—like many artists, particularly Black ones, he was cheated out of substantial royalties. Fascinatingly, Another Side starts and ends with lyrics that describe a song as an interpersonal gift. Ultimately, this gift took the form of a fragile physical object, yet like all presents, it suggests something about generosity itself, how the giver is left exposed without an assurance of anything in return. Leo Nocentelli gave us his music, which at one point probably felt like all he had. Now we accept it as an heirloom, a remnant of a vital culture constantly in danger of slipping into the past, and a voice so powerful it must be part of what we remember in the future.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | November 22, 2021 | 8.2 | 631cf356-bc3f-4518-a74f-8e5239d083db | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
This 2xCD comp is split between artists based in North America and the British Isles and features contributions from Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Vashti Bunyan, and Espers, among others. | This 2xCD comp is split between artists based in North America and the British Isles and features contributions from Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Vashti Bunyan, and Espers, among others. | Various Artists: Folk Off! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9309-folk-off/ | Folk Off! | Folk rock compilations have been sprouting like dandelions in recent months, as various labels have tried to get their arms around the ongoing profusion of new and reissued folk-related material. Complicating matters is the fact that the current international folk revival is less a unified movement than a series of smaller, overlapping sub-movements that might include any variety of American Primitive guitarists, free-form avant-folk collectives, ramshackle campfire pop, medieval-tinged electronica, or wayfaring acoustic singer-songwriters. Predictably, the general upshot has been that a large number of wildly disparate acts have frequently been lumped together under the same banner despite sharing little or nothing in common.
The latest collection to attempt to make sense of it all is Folk Off!, a 2xCD set from UK label Sunday Best. Dubious pun notwithstanding, the album's title is intended rather literally. The compilation is cheekily packaged as a competitive folk-off, with North America and the British Isles each getting one full disc to prove their supremacy, ignoring for the moment the enormous musical debts the two regions owe to one another. For the occasion, Sunday Best's curator Rob Da Bank has used a broad and imprecise definition of the term folk, casting a perimeter wide enough to corral such decidedly borderline folkies as Micah P. Hinson, Acid Casuals, and Magnétophone. Unfortunately, the set also chooses to ignore the massive free/drone/psych wing of contemporary folk almost entirely, instead focusing an unflattering degree of attention on sleepy-eyed acoustic pop and tepid bedroom electronica.
Fortified by familiar, previously-released tracks like Sufjan Stevens' "Decatur, Or, a Round of Applause for Your Stepmother" and Animal Collective's "Kids on Holiday", the North American half of Folk Off! is its most uniformly satisfying. If you want to get pedantic about it, however, few of these tracks genuinely owe much of anything to American folk tradition. To domestic ears, Hinson's opening "Yard of Blonde Girls" might skew more closely to standard alt-country, while Baby Dee's luminous "Morning Holds a Star" appears as a mystical sort of space cabaret. Philadelphia's Espers prove the exception to the rule, and their reverent take on the traditional "Rosemary Lane" sounds just as handsome in this mixed company as it did on their 2005 The Weed Tree EP.
The selection criteria gets even more lax and confusing on the album's British Isles side, which ranges from the strictly traditionalist (Deep Elem's "Lost in the Woods') to the not-identifiably-folk-whatsoever (Same Actor's "Nothing Yet"). Of course, such genre distinctions wouldn't matter much if the mix were consistently entertaining. Vashti Bunyan's "Here Before" and Song of Green Pheasants' "Nightfall" provide a pair of dusky highlights, but too many of the remaining soporific tracks combine into a lukewarm, treacly mush. James Yorkston & Reporter's "Woozy With Cider" is a meandering bit of digital spoken-word that brings any momentum to a crashing halt, while the inclusion of Acid Casuals' neo-sock-hop ditty "Bowl Me Over" just seems inexplicable, unless the American Graffiti soundtrack is now considered some kind of folk relic.
In the liner notes, Pete Paphides credits some of the current folk revival to the music's easy portability, a point that seems somewhat ironic since it appears that many of the artists on this collection did all of their recording home alone in their bedrooms. By omitting such significant (and adventurous) folk-inspired voices as Ben Chasny, Richard Youngs, Josephine Foster, Charalambides, Matt Valentine, Vibracathedral Orchestra, etc. Folk Off! is woefully incomplete as a primer on the contemporary folk scene, and thereby fails to adequately illustrate the extraordinary artistic value our shared folkloric traditions might have for tomorrow's more enlightened musicians and listeners. | 2006-08-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-08-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Sunday Best | August 28, 2006 | 5.9 | 632202d9-98d3-493d-860a-01427b9706b5 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The former dubstep balladeer and sometime pop super-producer returns to his electronic roots, working cut-up vocal samples into leftfield dancefloor material. | The former dubstep balladeer and sometime pop super-producer returns to his electronic roots, working cut-up vocal samples into leftfield dancefloor material. | James Blake: Playing Robots Into Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-blake-playing-robots-into-heaven/ | Playing Robots Into Heaven | James Blake’s early EPs had the tension of a pregnant pause, with tracks so spacious that it seemed as if his airy drums and vaporous keys might waft away if you averted your gaze. The alluring post-dubstep balladry of his 2011 self-titled debut didn’t sound like anything else, and industry tastemakers were soon lining up for a helping of his icy, atmospheric magic. As Blake found himself recruited for projects from artists like Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and Vince Staples, his own music began to grow into its once empty corners, losing some of its soft-focus glow and sharpening its edges; a predilection for doleful melodies sometimes overshadowed his adventurous touch behind the boards. His journey from club deconstructionist to pop auteur culminated in 2021’s Friends That Break Your Heart, a brightly colored, features-heavy singer-songwriter collection that careened through genres, light-years from the minimalism of his early work.
Blake’s new album, Playing Robots Into Heaven, isn’t an outright rejection of the path he’s taken, but it is a clear return to his electronic roots. Most of the material began as sketches on modular synth rigs he brought on tour, jamming to pass the hours between gigs. Some of those recordings morphed into tools for his DJ sets, eventually becoming the foundation for these dancefloor-friendly songs. Blake nods to his dubstep roots and weaves in elements of techno, house, and ambient, retaining some of his trademark icy melancholy but increasing the metabolic rate. The results make for an inspired evolution of his sound, with Blake occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror as he moves in a new direction.
One of Blake’s long-standing signatures has been to cut and rearrange bits of his voice to create texture or emotional resonance. He leans further into that bricolage method here, remixing warped vocal samples into yearning club cuts. These snippets often sound like melodic notes to himself, recorded at different times in different rooms and tucked away for later use. Blake sometimes rearranges scraps of lyrics exquisite-corpse style to craft a narrative (“Asking to Break”), or lets them repeat until they blend into a track’s rhythmic churn (“Loading”). On the soaring outro of shadowy 2-step tune “I Want You to Know,” he stacks wordless tones into reverberant layers of harmony that enfold a choppy, pitch-shifted vocal melody. Gnarled vocal loops bubble up from the murky cloud-rap beat of “Night Sky,” then gradually dissolve into drones.
A loose, improvisational feeling underpins even the most meticulous pieces on Robots. “Fire the Editor” and “If You Can Hear Me” take a more conventional structure with discernible verses, but even they bear markings of Blake’s cut-and-paste approach. A jarring, almost Jandek-like noise gate follows Blake’s voice in the first verse of “Editor,” abruptly cutting it off at the end of each phrase. He crafts “Hear Me” from a somber, chopped-up piano figure; you can hear the click of the digital artifacts on each loop’s uneven edge. Blake lets the seams show just a little more than in his more pop-oriented work, and though it’s not always successful—the disparate rhythms of “He’s Been Wonderful” never quite gel—his off-the-cuff approach gives the album a dynamic, unpredictable energy.
The bangers on Robots—and there are quite a few—make good on the promise of enveloping live staples like 2013’s “Voyeur” or the raw, baffling dubstep of exploratory singles like 2011’s “Order.” This is Blake’s most animated record, as if the chill of his previous albums had finally thawed enough for him to move his limbs again. In “Fall Back,” percussion coated in spring reverb and a nervy synth mesh with a Burial-like beat, creating a potent groove. “Loading” is an irresistibly loping garage cut, its insistent drums pushing through layers of choral harmonies, glinting digital tones, and plaintive vocal fragments. The thunderous “Big Hammer” constantly shifts the rhythmic center from one element to the next; it starts as a tense trap pattern, its timekeeping hi-hats skittering at regular intervals, before scattering into a deconstructed dancehall jam, using sampled vocals from the Ragga Twins to hypnotic effect.
“Tell Me,” the strongest track, is one of the best things Blake has put to tape, and a showcase for everything that makes Playing Robots Into Heaven so refreshing. A stuttering synth line is shadowed by a wobbling, off-time echo. The drums pulse and roll in ways reminiscent of techno and house, but don’t quite become either. Weird, clipped vocals and sharpened cymbals are slathered in distortion while luminous pads drape over their edges. Chest-rattling bass threatens to overtake the entire stereo field, but it’s kept at bay by tiny, achingly beautiful moments like a distant shout of “Tell me!” Despite his desperate plea—“Tell me if it’s worth waking up for”—the song never buckles under the weight of despair. Instead, it transcends. Playing Robots Into Heaven feels like a lesson in rejecting inertia, in finding a way forward by examining and dismantling what’s already been done. | 2023-09-08T14:13:08.027-04:00 | 2023-09-08T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | September 8, 2023 | 7.8 | 6322e896-80ab-4394-a452-dd7ce1e2847a | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The sort-of disco duo has got the hooks and the groove but on their third album, they struggle to find their footing. | The sort-of disco duo has got the hooks and the groove but on their third album, they struggle to find their footing. | De Lux: More Disco Songs About Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/de-lux-disco-songs-about-love/ | More Disco Songs About Love | The opening track of Los Angeles-based duo De Lux’s third album is a story about hustling to pay the rent. One of its hooks is a hustle, that almost turns into Van McCoy’s; the guitar lick from Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” also turns up. Anyway, “875 Dollars” is a song about the difficulty of taking on and protecting a legacy from a band who clearly know their history well enough to be nervous about their place in it.
More Disco Songs About Love nods, of course, to Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, and singer Sean Guerin often sounds unnervingly similar to David Byrne. It’s tempting to meet one reference with another. This might be 21st-century indie pop music, but it ain’t no disco. De Lux is disco the way bands like Wild Nothing, Cut Copy, Holy Ghost!, Bear in Heaven, and Phoenix might be disco: that is, sort of. De Lux’s last record, 2015’s Generation, was full of hospitable songs built on the four-four thump, with frames of simple basslines draped with flowing synthesizer. It was inspired by Karen Finley’s shocking and disgracefully unheralded 1987 album The Truth Is Hard to Swallow, though there’s none of Finley’s politicized rhymes, raucous noise, or glorious filth. De Lux’s disco is tasteful; it sounds like good cheekbones and better record collections. It’s the disco of Roxy Music, not Patrice Rushen, but with Bryan Ferry’s debonair weariness swapped out for the wounded machismo of, like, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”
The second track is called “These Are Some of the Things That I Think About,” and one of those things is: “What if I had the chance to rewrite what it means to dance?” Sal P of the legendary Liquid Liquid saw that chance 35 years ago, and merged punk and percussion into tracks like “Cavern,” which did enact this revision. But De Lux are stuck thinking about it, and ultimately the chance slips away. Sal himself appears on the lovely third track, “Smarter Harder Darker,” which reads like a misheard Daft Punk title but glistens in a genial, jazzy kind of way. They bring another post-punk legend, the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, onto “Stratosphere Girl,” and he howls about voodoo.
Are these songs about love? There’s not much romance. “Keyboards Cause We’re Black and White” might be broadly about race, but its uncertain tone leads to confusion about whether they’re just goofing on “Ebony and Ivory.” Other tracks attempt to tackle toxic masculinity: the titular narrator of “Music Snob” is aware of his own boorishness, but that’s not enough to redeem him. “I guess I’m a music snob,” he says, “Even if I say I’m not/My girlfriend doesn’t like me/’Cause I hate to do laundry.” Fair enough, men are pigs, but the bro culture verses become bromides in the chorus about the need for connection, and ideas around why men behave this way are left unoffered. (Karen Finley has some good theories.) A strange moment where Guerin’s mother pops in to speak in French about crepes hints at other, more interesting avenues, but the song soon returns to its sighing refrain of “I’ll show you my taste is like,” which, in 2018, sort of sounds like a threat.
Things get meta with “Writing Music for Money, to Write More Music,” in which Guerin wonders: “Maybe I should get a job/And work for an agency/Because in case I write another song/And it doesn’t mean anything.” Today, the concept of selling out seems as outdated as eight-track players. Everybody’s got to pay the rent. But De Lux contemplates authenticity over an almost direct lift of Electronic’s “Getting Away with It,” a perfect pop song by three of music greatest writers. De Lux don’t stand a chance in comparison. But since they brought it up, they could definitely write some catchy jingles. | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | January 27, 2018 | 6.1 | 6323011a-9abc-479c-b897-287c63613e74 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On her fourth album, Jazmine Sullivan contends with all that can be lost and gained through sex and love. She is in full command of her spectacular voice and totally delivers on an ambitious concept. | On her fourth album, Jazmine Sullivan contends with all that can be lost and gained through sex and love. She is in full command of her spectacular voice and totally delivers on an ambitious concept. | Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jazmine-sullivan-heaux-tales/ | Heaux Tales | Watching Jazmine Sullivan thrill herself with her own ability is like watching Spider-Man gleefully swing from skyrise to skyrise, not an enemy in sight. Just look at Sullivan shimmy on a recent NPR Music Tiny Desk (Home) concert as she sings, “I’m hoping these titties can get me out the city,” her voice tickling its lower depths. Her eyes widen with feigned confusion when she coos the words, “I don’t know where I woke up.” When she belts, “Don’t have too much fun without me,” from Heaux Tales’ outstanding single “Lost One,” she throws her head, arms, and palms back, as if offering herself to something bigger.
Heaux Tales itself looks to something bigger, too, beyond Sullivan as its subject or star. Her fourth album is expansive and inclusive, embodying as many women’s insights into love and sex (read “Heaux” as “ho”) as 32 minutes could reasonably allow. Across eight songs connected by spoken-word interludes from different women, Heaux Tales unfurls a patchwork of origins, outcomes, thrills, and disasters of coital indulgence in her most cohesive work to date. Sullivan strategically activates her regal voice with stories that are sharp, intimate, and addictive.
One of Sullivan’s breaks into popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows.” The scorned lover in the song is one of many personas Sullivan would act out over the course of three albums that pulsed with drama and camp. Her music has jumped from reggae to disco to boom-bap to marching band and more as she explored the lives of women and men in the throes of crime, passion, and addiction. Heaux Tales, by contrast, commits to simpler, more timeless soundscapes, like the snaps and synths of “Bodies” or the standout guitars of “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me.” Over the comparably minimalist production and instrumentation, the album’s narratives of agency are made central.
There is a direct throughline between the archetypal portraits Sullivan has painted in the past and the more dynamic accounts here. On “Mascara,” from her 2015 album Reality Show, Sullivan personified a proud gold digger with an attitude to match. “We all want to be that confident person,” Sullivan said about the song at the time. “And it’s hard to be that way. ’Cause you always feel like somebody’s judging you.” Throughout Heaux Tales, though, the motivations and makings of women who do or wish to earn material things through love and sex are considered with more kindness and clarity. In one of the spoken intermissions, a woman named Precious Daughtry says a childhood of deprivation repels her from men without money. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s searing performance of “The Other Side,” a vivid daydream about moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can provide for her. “I just want to be taken care of/’Cause I’ve worked enough,” she reasons.
The album’s perspectives do contradict themselves at times. On songs like “The Other Side” and the Anderson .Paak-assisted “Pricetags,” sex is a bold means of empowerment, financial or otherwise. Then, on one interlude, Sullivan’s friend of 20 years, Amanda Henderson, dejectedly admits that looking to sex for power leaves her feeling insecure. “Amanda’s Tale” is followed by “Girl Like Me,” in which Sullivan and H.E.R. sing of the hos in Fashion Nova dresses who steal their love interests away from them. Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to one of shame. Sullivan’s songwriting is agile: These conflicting judgements and desires live in women—and both can live in one woman at once.
All over Heaux Tales, Sullivan contends with what can be lost and gained through sex, from a secure sense of self (“Get it together, bitch,” she tells herself on “Bodies.” “You gettin’ sloppy.”) to crazed pleasure (“I spend my last ’cause the D bomb,” she proudly admits on “Put It Down”). The colloquial bursts of specificity in these vignettes are a feat of songwriting, and the restraint a power-vocalist like Sullivan shows in her delivery is as important. Sometimes her voice is choppy and conversational, sometimes it sounds like rapping, and it’s almost always a delight to sing along to. On this album, she’s both Deena Jones and Effie White; she can be an easy-listen or an all-consuming one. From the crinkly opening run on “Put It Down,” her most powerful singing is mixed into the background, as if to render her a little less superhuman.
R&B has long offered women space to voice their sexual appetites, from the foundational dirty blues songs like Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ’Em Dry” in 1935 (“Say I fucked all night and all the night before, baby/And I feel just like I want to fuck some more”) to Adina Howard’s 1995 hit “Freak Like Me.” After six years between projects, Sullivan joins the ranks of today’s R&B and R&B-adjacent stars like Summer Walker and SZA, who have updated the genre with music that complicates desire with messy reality. Old archetypes like The Gold Digger and new ones like The Instagram Baddie begin to crumble away, leaving fuller women in their wake. Sullivan’s friend Amanda Henderson told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she was nervous to include her revelation on Heaux Tales, but has since found relief in the number of fans who have connected to it. Even in the way Sullivan’s Tiny Desk was arranged—with lush instrumental breaks, opportunities for her background singers to take the spotlight, and a guest appearance from H.E.R.—it is clear Heaux Tales is communal.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2021-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | January 13, 2021 | 8.6 | 632876a7-822c-4c03-b373-948d94149d3f | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
A new anthology of the oft-overlooked 1990s indie rockers zeroes in on what they did best: gentle jangle, tumbleweed drift, and hazy harmonies that display profound comfort in quietude. | A new anthology of the oft-overlooked 1990s indie rockers zeroes in on what they did best: gentle jangle, tumbleweed drift, and hazy harmonies that display profound comfort in quietude. | Acetone: 1992-2001 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/acetone-1992-2001/ | 1992-2001 | It was easy to lose sight of a band like Acetone. Even as the 1990s indie-rock universe splintered into myriad distinct niches, Acetone slipped through them all like water flowing through rocks. They were too rootsy to be shoegazers, too woozy to be alt-country, too classic rock for slowcore, too casually Californian to be mere Velvet Underground revivalists. Like many ’90s peers, they bowed before Big Star, but where Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, et al were chasing their own “September Gurls,” Acetone were curled up in the trunk of “Big Black Car,” whose spectral sighs and insular ethos (“Nothing can hurt me/Nothing can touch me”) perfectly encapsulated the L.A. trio’s blissfully hermetic sound. While some bands take years to define their sonic identity, Acetone swiftly stepped off their fuzz pedals and settled into a cool, countrified groove like an old pair of jeans that were far too comfortable to ever take off and wash.
But despite finding a No. 1 fan in Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, sharing labels and tours with the Verve, and eventually signing on with Neil Young’s fledgling Vapor Records imprint, Acetone never found their audience. Then, in July 2001, the band’s bassist, lead vocalist, and lyricist, Richie Lee, killed himself at the age of 34. Like the tumbleweed drift of their songs, it seemed as though Acetone were destined to get swept away by the passage of time—particularly as the ramshackle charm of ’90 underground rock gave way to the fashion-plated dance-punk and festival-sized indie pop of the ’00s. And unlike, say, Nick Drake or Elliott Smith or Mark Linkous, no sizable cult has formed around Lee to grant him posthumous sainthood. Acetone’s four albums and two EPs never made it to Spotify or Apple Music; YouTube yields little in the way of live footage or official videos. On record, Richie Lee always sounded like a ghost; for much of the past decade and a half, it was almost like he never existed.
But if Acetone are not a name that gets dropped with any regularity these days, a survey of the contemporary indie-rock landscape reveals a number of artists striving for a similar zen state. From the slow-dissolve soundscapes of the War on Drugs to the window-gazing ruminations of Kurt Vile to the lysergic twang of Mac DeMarco, there’s a healthy appetite today for patient, clock-stopping music that, if only for a moment, can pull us out of a world where 24/7 news tickers and obsessive-compulsive feed-refreshing set the pace of modern life. As such, the surprise appearance of Light in the Attic’s Acetone compilation couldn’t have been better timed to get Earth to spin just a little slower.
Despite its seemingly utilitarian title, 1992-2001 is no comprehensive career retrospective. A handful of the band’s official singles are nowhere to be found here, and over half of its 16 tracks are previously unreleased, salvaged from a stash of rehearsal-room demos that had been languishing in drummer Steve Hadley’s backyard shed all these years. Rather, the album zeroes in on what the band did best (and what sounds best today), its non-chronological sequence making songs recorded several years apart sound as if they sprung from the same session. (It’s also intended to serve as audio accompaniment to a concurrently released band biography: Hadley, Lee, Lightcap, by writer Sam Sweet.) Listening to this compilation, you’d never know Acetone’s 1993 debut, Cindy, contained its fair share of noisy alt-rock; instead, the album is represented here by the gentle jangle and “Candy Says”-style swoon of “Louise,” the sort of romantic reverie Yo La Tengo were mastering that same year on Painful, and a crucial transitory track that soon led Acetone down a more pastoral path.
From there, Acetone became a much more relaxed and gentle band, crafting the sort of songs where Hadley’s cymbal taps rang louder than Mark Lightcap’s liquefied guitar lines. They would venture into backwoods spirituals, applying their hazy harmonies to a sweet cover of the Fugs’ folk-song spin on William Blake’s “How Sweet I Roamed.” And while 1997’s “Chew” teased at a shift toward upbeat, Meat Puppets-style country rock, “Vibrato” (from the band’s 2001 swan song, York Blvd.) saw them slather their signature slow-burn balladry in dramatic Hammond organ lines and Lightcap’s Eddie Hazel-esque guitar squeals. But even as they made the UV meter flicker to the right, Acetone never upset their unhurried pace. Lee still sang in whispers; he just no longer felt the need to cup his hand over your ear.
For all their tender touch, Acetone’s hushed demeanor could never be mistaken for meekness. Lee’s lyric sheet may have been filled with dejection (from 1997’s “Germs”: “I’ll never be what you want me to be/But there’s so much you’ll never know”), but he always sang as if he was looking you in the eyes. This band always projected a supreme confidence and comfort in their quietude, a quality that’s especially pronounced on this set’s trove of unearthed rarities. The excellent 1998 outtake “Return From the Ice” is a divine dose of slow-motion soul that gracefully skates atop an omnipresent church-organ hum, while “Too Much Time” is Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos floating on a morphine high. By contrast, the meditative instrumentals (“Shore Power,” “Pico”) ultimately amplify Lee’s absence—more than just showcasing the band’s flair for vivid, nocturnal atmosphere, these tracks feel like memorials for a voice that’s no longer with us.
It’s a context that lends an especially crushing weight to the last track here. “Smokey” is a twangy, tear-stained ballad crudely captured live off the floor in 1999, mic hiss and all. You can hear Lee singing the melancholic melody, but his voice is muffled far beyond comprehension, each line appearing as a smoke ring that instantly disappears before your eyes. Hearing it today, the track sounds like a band jamming by séance, summoning the faint apparition of a departed friend yet frustrated by the impossibility of reconnecting with him. But this collection at least provides a Ouija board through which the spirit of Richie Lee can be accessed eternally. | 2017-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | September 22, 2017 | 8 | 632aab2f-4fd5-4d3b-930f-08796adca21f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The second album from producer Nigel Godrich, drummer Joey Waronker, and singer Laura Bettinson is immaculately composed electronica that never really leaves a strong impression. | The second album from producer Nigel Godrich, drummer Joey Waronker, and singer Laura Bettinson is immaculately composed electronica that never really leaves a strong impression. | Ultraísta: Sister | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ultraista-sister/ | Sister | The second album from the experimental rock trio—producer emeritus Nigel Godrich, veteran drummer Joey Waronker, and singer Laura Bettinson—is mostly immaculate electronica. Listening to Ultraísta is like plunging underwater: a swift blast of relief, followed a need to get orientated. The vocals are muffled; the instruments gleam through burbled layers. This is music to swirl and splash around in, but it doesn’t leave you with much to remember when you come up for air.
This may be, at least partly, because Ultraísta feel less like a holistic group with a distinct identity or purpose and more like a few extremely talented musicians messing around. The band came together through a shared love of Afrobeats, electronica, and art, piecing the album together from improvised sessions over the years that Godrich sculpted into songs. Eight years after their self-titled debut, the result is once again lovely-sounding, but a pristine blankness permeates the record. “Water in My Veins” teems with stretched-out synths and immersive lopped vocals and ends with the blare of the outside world—cars honking, the muted purr of engines, footsteps, like the song has scooped you from the street and deposited you back where you are standing. Ultraísta intend to transport you, but the world it creates is too easily punctured by weak lyrics.
There is no narrative or structure to Sister’s writing, and Bettinson’s monotone doesn’t offer any clues as to what each song might be about. Are we meant to feel pensive while listening to her chant, “Be young, be hungry, be wiser” in “Mariella”? “If you wanna go, please don’t stay,” she croons over violins on “Anybody,” another statement tossed out for the sake of texture. “Lift me off the ground, so I can see/The twenty-first century,” she intones on closer “The Moon and Mercury.” The album’s production tends towards controlled distortion—blurred synths, twinkling mashes of drum and piano and violin—and the lyrics could be a foothold in all the intricate chaos. Instead, they just further confuse, or land as bleary platitudes to fill the space.
For a project born out of improvisation, the record mostly stays within the boundaries it creates for itself. Even the most complicated drum patterns never devolve into anything frantic or surprising; the added layered vocals are too faint to become panoramic. These are tightly-wound songs that highlight the band member’s obvious gifts. Sister is never anything less than adroit, but it’s also never anything more.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Partisan | March 19, 2020 | 6.2 | 633424cb-ef3e-4790-ba1e-8d859053843a | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
On his 2011 debut, Toronto-based producer David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, took a widescreen approach to mining the fertile ground of the London dance music label Night Slugs. His second album focuses on a specific realm and comes off like a soundtrack pointing to a space between film noir and dystopian sci-fi. | On his 2011 debut, Toronto-based producer David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, took a widescreen approach to mining the fertile ground of the London dance music label Night Slugs. His second album focuses on a specific realm and comes off like a soundtrack pointing to a space between film noir and dystopian sci-fi. | Egyptrixx: A/B til Infinity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18768-egyptrixx-ab-til-infinity/ | A/B til Infinity | There's much to be said for exploring opposites. With Bible Eyes, his 2011 debut album as Egyptrixx, Toronto-based producer David Psutka took a widescreen approach to his mining of the fertile, boundary-less ground of London dance music label Night Slugs. Bible Eyes ran the gamut from lush to harsh, juxtaposed bass and synth in various contortions, and even toyed with guest vocals. Most importantly, it established his knack for seemingly effortless, deeply evocative arpeggiated melodies.
On A/B til Infinity, he flips the mode to zoom. The album focuses in on a specific realm—one he hinted at but abandoned with Bible Eyes’ opener “Start From The Beginning”—and comes off like a study or a soundtrack. Repeated motifs of rain and sirens, metallic surfaces and a sense of impending doom, point to a space between film noir and dystopian sci-fi. It is an underbelly world he traverses, one caught between the audible fizz of digital distraction and the sharp demand for material possessions. Water drips, signals fail, desires echo.
The album’s evocations are overwhelmingly literary, if somewhat familiar. The subdued grandiosity of “Bad Boy” calls to mind Alan Moore’s iconic graphic novel Watchmen, while its sister “Adult” invokes the dual feeling of intrigue and unease that is central to the work of J.G. Ballard. The synthetic choral voices of “Disorbital” stir a feeling of absence, one that Blade Runner fans might associate with the replicant’s fate to mourn memories it never had.
That’s not to say A/B til Infinity doesn’t have musical bedfellows. Atmosphere-wise, lines can be drawn to Kuedo’s majestic Severant (which also riffed on some of the same themes), while “Adult” feels in conversation with the taut conceptualization of Night Slugs comrade Jam City’s debut Classical Curves. While Psutka’s self-proclaimed love of black metal and his recent experience as one half of experimental post-rock/psychedelic duo Hiawatha aren’t exactly strikingly evident on this second Egyptrixx album, there is a newfound single-minded moodiness that could be credited to the influence of both. There’s no question that A/B til Infinity marks a distinct evolution: it has a stronger, more cohesive identity than Bible Eyes, but where it falls down is when it wallows in that guise. Both “Water” and “My Life is Vivid, My Eyes are Open” feel a little sludgy: their pulse is quicker but the blood runs cold.
Rather, in keeping with the titular theme, the record’s crowning glories are two sides of a flipped coin: the title track’s searing arpeggio that swims closest to the exquisite melodies of Bible Eyes (“Rooks Theme” and “Naples”) and the ambient elevation of final track “A.C.R.R.”. The latter closes the circle on the film noir ambience, shutting out the rain to embark on an internal journey. There is a sense of limbs and lungs stretching, followed by the triumphant punch through to a higher plane. | 2013-11-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Night Slugs | November 25, 2013 | 7.8 | 6343e0b8-902f-473e-83b0-d63759759f70 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | null |
German techno giant Mark Ernestus delves deep into African music, and the result is drum-drunk and gorgeous, both techno-fast and dub-slow. | German techno giant Mark Ernestus delves deep into African music, and the result is drum-drunk and gorgeous, both techno-fast and dub-slow. | Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force: Yermande | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22461-yermande/ | Yermande | “I had a lurking interest in African music for a long time, but that door had never quite opened for me.” So Mark Ernestus said last year in discussing how he went from being a driving force in Berlin techno to delving headfirst into African music. It was a long road: Ernestus founded record shop Hard Wax—ground zero for techno in post-Berlin Wall Germany—and with partner Moritz Von Oswald they released totemic techno as Basic Channel, Maurizio, Phylyps, Round One, and more before evolving into the dub-heavy Rhythm & Sound. And as that project wound down, Ernestus encountered a DJ set featuring the Gambian dance style, MBalax.“I was hooked on the spot,” he said. “It was clear to me that these were not just a few interesting tunes and that there was more where this came from.” Soon after, Ernestus began releasing a series of singles credited to the Senegalese ensemble Jeri-Jeri.
Almost from the beginning, house and techno lifted from African music, making for tribal house and tracks like Caribou’s ferocious dance edit of “Ne Noya.” But Ernestus’s Senegalese projects—first as Jeri-Jeri and now with the slightly more streamlined Ndagga Rhythm Force—feel less like a techno master taking a passing fancy in African music and more of an attempt to grapple with this centuries-old music on its own terms.
Ndagga Rhythm Force won’t soon be mistaken for bigger Senegalese stars like Youssou N’Dour or Baaba Maal, though the rhythmic root of them is similar. Ernestus simply puts the family of sabar drums forward as the main attraction. That the rolling thunder of polyrhythms created by Senegalese drumming (which can be heard from 15 kilometers away) resonated with a techno producer whose entire discography could mesmerize with little more than a kick, the space between each hit, and the columns of air it shoved aside should come as no surprise.
While NRF is a slightly larger ensemble than Jeri-Jeri, it sounds more spare and focused. There are nine players in total on “Simb” but there is so much sonic space for the keyboard chords and guitar to skate about the drums that you might think it’s the work of a trio. Restrained, melancholic, the slow, slinking track brings to mind Miles Davis’ ’70s work, somewhere between the haunting elegy “He Loved Him Madly” and the menacing python-slither of Agharta. At least until Mark Ernestus triggers the bass drum, resulting in a tone so deep and rumbling that it could be a detonation from the asthenosphere, an instance of a beat that plummets a track into profound depths rather than sends it higher.
Between Ernestus’ production and mixing desk wizardry—to say nothing of the mastering job of Rashad Becker—it’s easy to get drum-drunk off of Yermande, to be concussed into submission. The battery of sabar drums are as relentless as a waterfall yet the depth of sound suggests a canyon, creating a sense of space so that hi-hats and talking drums clatter at the fore on “Walo Walo” while cannons discharge far on the horizon. The cumulative effect is both techno-fast and dub-slow. There’s a club pulse to tracks like “Lamb Ji” and “Jigeen,” but rather than just use the goat-skin drums to mimic machines, they instead land just off-grid, pulling and tugging so that no rhythm can be precisely determined. The drums fall like rocks on a mountain road on the former and gleefully accelerate the latter to the breaking point.
Released as a single last year, “Yermande” might be the most thrilling dialogue between German electronic engineering and African drum talk. The guiding beat wallops like a classic break and the hi-hat pattern is feverish, while echo and delay stretch out the anthemic synth chords, guitar and voice of Wolof singer Mbene Diatta Seck. And when the tungune, talmbat, and thiol drums burst through, the track pulls in two directions at once: furious breakbeat and syrupy dub. It’s a speedball of rhythm and sound as only Ernestus could capture it. | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Ndagga | October 18, 2016 | 8 | 6344585a-638c-447b-99e1-0be668cc89ee | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Portland party rapper’s debut album is darker and more introspective than his past work, with features from the Last Artful, Dodgr, Michael Christmas, and Blossom. | The Portland party rapper’s debut album is darker and more introspective than his past work, with features from the Last Artful, Dodgr, Michael Christmas, and Blossom. | Myke Bogan: Pool Party | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/myke-bogan-pool-party/ | Pool Party | Portland, Ore. is a famously rainy city. But what most people outside of the Pacific Northwest don’t realize is that the region has pronounced wet and dry seasons. During the summer months, Portland can feel more like idyllic SoCal, with nothing but sun, clear skies, and dry air for weeks on end. This is the Portland that rapper Myke Bogan has always evoked. Since relocating from South Dakota early this decade, Bogan has dropped four mixtapes’ worth of paeans to summers filled with women, weed, and liquor. Given the title and cover art for his debut LP, you’d be forgiven for expecting more of the same from Bogan this time around. However, Pool Party finds the rapper leaning into his more introspective side, with a darker sound to match. If this is pool-party rap, it’s a kind you might choose to leave on after the last revelers have departed and the evening chill starts to set in.
Pool Party marks Bogan’s first solo release for EYRST, the label co-founded by moody Portland producer Neill Von Tally and former Trail Blazers player (and sometimes rapper) Martell Webster. As EYRST’s house producer, Von Tally has a tendency to leave his fingerprints all over the label’s releases and Pool Party is no exception. Unlike previous Bogan releases, Pool Party’s sound is more submerged than sun-drenched, built for headphones rather than car stereos. While this texture-rich production is great at underscoring the album’s more contemplative moments, the album’s hazier tracks can also feel a little interchangeable at times, like one big greyscale blur. Luckily, Bogan is adept at providing splashes of color. While he’s a typical West Coast emcee in some regards—he tends to lag just behind the beat and often stretches out his words with a melodic drawl—he’s also a bubbly, animated vocalist with no shortage of gruff charm.
“Elevators Above” opens the record with a Tawrence-produced beat and synths that oscillate and shimmer—you can practically smell the scent of chlorine in the air. Bogan uses the opportunity to complicate his party-starter persona straight off the bat, admitting, “Emotions tend to taste of wine/See, I tend to bottle shit.” On “Not The,” Von Tally furnishes the album’s most interesting beat: a shifting instrumental built from a Vaudeviliian sample, snares that hit like blasts of static and the fluttering of what sound like hummingbird wings. Rather than ducking into the track’s many folds, Bogan raps forcefully, strong-arming the off-balance beat into submission.
“Top Gun” proceeds similarly; here, Von Tally’s instrumental evokes a drunken marimba player and rapper/singer the Last Artful, Dodgr coos a honeyed hook, reprising her role as Bogan’s foil from last year’s Rare Treat EP. Boston vet Michael Christmas drops in on the piano-driven “Gravy,” but Bogan steals the show with the line, “And I’m with this Black and Asian chick, eating phở/Prolly finna fuck,” rhyming “phở” and “fuck” so effortlessly, you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard another rapper do it. (His proper pronunciation of “phở,” it’s worth noting, will also score him plenty of points at home.)
Despite a handful of weaker songs lurking in the album’s back half, Pool Party is a largely enjoyable listen, though there’s still plenty of room left for Bogan to grow. He is an expressive and technically-proficient rapper, a fact that’s made even more apparent thanks to the challenging, rhythmically-complex beats he tackles here. Still, Bogan hasn’t yet developed the lyricism to match his mic skills: he’s great at landing one-liners but is less adept at conveying depth, nuance, and narrative in his rhymes. Pool Party provides Bogan with a promising way forward in this regard, one where he cops to the fact that partying provides only a temporary reprieve from life’s worries. Summer doesn’t last forever, a fact that Bogan seems to know all too well. | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | EYRST | August 17, 2017 | 6.7 | 634a8078-e378-4b36-ac67-85850cf6c218 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Stylistic shifts and personal reinvention have become par for the course for this New York singer-songwriter. But on their new album, they turn uncharacteristically self-reflective. | Stylistic shifts and personal reinvention have become par for the course for this New York singer-songwriter. But on their new album, they turn uncharacteristically self-reflective. | Caroline Rose: The Art of Forgetting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-rose-the-art-of-forgetting/ | The Art of Forgetting | Caroline Rose has a penchant for reinvention. They turned from their Americana origins to nervy indie pop on 2018’s LONER, then slipped into hyper-stylized digital pop on 2020’s Superstar. Released just days before COVID-19 sent America into lockdown, that album went largely unnoticed. For Rose, the professional bad luck was compounded by a sudden, painful breakup. The New York singer-songwriter processes those events on the moody, tumultuous The Art of Forgetting.
The move toward emotional exorcism on The Art of Forgetting is nearly as startling as Rose’s previous stylistic pivots. Each of these tonal shifts suggested that Rose preferred to operate at a distance, reluctant to reveal too much of themselves in their art. On LONER, they repeatedly relied on humor—the album cover featured a deadpan Rose cramming a whole pack of cigarettes in their mouth—and they immersed themselves in an entirely different musical persona on Superstar, a concept album about fame.
The Art of Forgetting, wit and artistic self-awareness are not the driving force of the music; they’re accents that color Rose’s descent into their psyche. “Miami,” the lead single—and the source of the album’s title—crystallizes the emotional shift within their art, building to a cathartic release. Rose returns to such vulnerability throughout the album, sometimes pushing their weathered voice to the brink, occasionally murmuring in a whisper that commands attention. These changes aren’t so much reversals as points on a spectrum, capturing the peaks and valleys of a particularly challenging bout of reflection.
As a song called “The Doldrums” suggests, Rose spends much of The Art of Forgetting testing the limits of sadness, boredom, and isolation. With its slow, dramatic crescendo, “Love/Lover/Friend” provides a keynote for the rest of the record, setting the stage for a song like “The Kiss,” which stretches out so long that its yearning feels almost meditative. It’s a trick Rose replicates on the introspective “Where Do I Go From Here?,” which ends the album on an uncertain, questioning note. Rose occasionally departs from mid-tempo melancholy. There’s an appealing slipperiness to the new-wave gauze covering “Everywhere I Go Bring the Rain,” while “Stockholm Syndrome” simmers over a subdued, lounge-y rhythm that neatly contrasts with the insistent “Tell Me What You Want,” which boasts the cleanest, clearest hooks here.
But individual songs, as carefully articulated as they are, tend to get swallowed up by the overarching psychological thrust of The Art of Forgetting: This is a mood piece capturing a specific frame of mind, even a particular era. Rose approached the album as a kind of audio documentary, threading in voicemails from their ailing grandmother. They describe these found sounds as “little grounding moments that capture the time.” Perhaps they do carry great personal import for Rose, yet these scattered voicemails backfire; the jarring bits of audio vérité unravel the songs’ dreamy, dramatic spell.
Those voicemails and other spoken-word fragments reveal a confessional side that Rose hasn’t previously shown. Once reluctant to spill their feelings onto the page, Rose now writes an ode to their therapist in “Jill Says,” a song that demonstrates admirable personal growth yet makes for awkward art. Rose's forthright lyrics aren't as bracing as their painterly music, where emotions are conveyed through shifting textures and circular melodies. For all of the soul-baring on The Art of Forgetting, what lingers are the unanswered questions and ambiguities—the places where Rose is still searching for their truth. | 2023-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | March 28, 2023 | 6.8 | 634bc883-6a58-4aeb-96ef-a02d37c1ea7a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On her intimate and assured new album, the Brooklyn R&B singer eagerly seeks deliverance from bad sex, bad vibes, and the pulsing anxiety of dead-end jobs. | On her intimate and assured new album, the Brooklyn R&B singer eagerly seeks deliverance from bad sex, bad vibes, and the pulsing anxiety of dead-end jobs. | Yaya Bey: Madison Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaya-bey-madison-tapes/ | Madison Tapes | The Brooklyn singer Yaya Bey effortlessly mingles the personal and political. On 2016’s The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’eta Brown, a largely acoustic outing inspired by the work of Audre Lorde, she contrasted protest anthems with first-person accounts of romantic torment. Embracing the tradition of neo-soul songwriters like Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, powerful women who were forthcoming about their own hangups, Bey radiated resolve, not sorrow. In Bey’s estimation, there’s no reason the revolution shouldn’t be led by people who, like the rest of us, have shitty exes.
“I’ve been spendin’ my life on a paycheck,” she sings on “i got a promotion and i still miss you” from her third album, Madison Tapes. “When does my real life start?” Her storyteller’s eye imbues ordinary scenes of home and work with an enthralling freshness. Madison Tapes seeks common ground between neo-soul and the deconstructed R&B of Mereba and Ivy Sole, the soft guitar chords of Bey’s earlier records interspersed with sampled and synthesized instrumentals. On “sorry i unfollowed you” and “april showers,” Bey surveys a relationship gone sour, asking on the latter, “Who hurt you, boo? Bad enough to hurt me, too?” Both tracks have a faint vinyl hiss and looped horn arrangements, devolving into studio chatter as the songs transition into discursive interludes.
Madison Tapes has a spontaneous, meandering energy. There’s a pinging noise lurking on most of the tracks that sounds suspiciously like a smoke detector in need of a battery change. Unseen collaborators come and go, departing with jokes and bromides. Bey maintains a cool composure, singing with a throaty purr that ascends into an airy whisper. On the late highlight “morgan views,” she volleys between somber melody and a conversational delivery, rapping, “It’s a fine time to read between the lines, my dear/It’s a fine time to have a change of mind, my dear.” (Bey’s father, it bears mentioning, is the categorically laidback Hempstead rapper Grand Daddy I.U., whose 1990 Cold Chillin’ debut Smooth Assassin remains something of a lost classic.)
On the Trill’eta Brown tape Bey spoke earnestly of revolution, flitting among characters to inhabit differing perspectives. Madison Tapes is comparably insular, its pursuit a self-derived liberation consistent with the ethos of her neo-soul forebears. That’s not to say it’s any less idealistic—Bey eagerly seeks deliverance from bad sex, bad vibes, and the pulsing anxiety of dead-end jobs. “paterson plank,” the descending chords of which evoke Vinia Mojica and Pete Rock’s 1998 duet “Mind Blowin’,” concludes with a yearning final verse that keeps it from lapsing into mere mood music, Bey singing, “Forever is a long time/To be wasting somebody’s time.” On the inspired “unseen freestyle,” her runaway rap verse mourns lost love as well as peers lost to nine-to-five drudgery.
There’s also solace to be found in the record’s convivial atmosphere, particularly “that’s pressure,” on which Bey and fellow-Brooklynite guest rapper Juu Mcfuckit bemoan an unraveling fling. Mcfuckit raps with eye-rolling insouciance (“She lyin’, she tell me she love me, I say I love you back/Shorty sent me soul-searching, couldn’t use Google Maps”) and a palpably New York attitude. While some of the spoken interludes are considerably more profound than others, they cast Bey’s malaise in a universal context that complements the more overtly political themes of her earlier projects. There are attestations to love, surrender, and abandonment: On “what truly is,” a young woman speaks with startling prescience about the power of photography to both convey and garble stories of human will. Even in heartache, Bey cuts a forceful pose. | 2020-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Elevated | June 12, 2020 | 7.7 | 63516aec-9550-4c75-806f-1eebcb6f856c | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Mastodon seems like a kickass metal name until you realize that the now-extinct American Mastodon was a\n\ hell of ... | Mastodon seems like a kickass metal name until you realize that the now-extinct American Mastodon was a\n\ hell of ... | Mastodon: Remission | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5142-remission/ | Remission | Mastodon seems like a kickass metal name until you realize that the now-extinct American Mastodon was a hell of a lot like a manatee with legs. A member of the Proboscidea family (like its cousin the Wooly Mammoth), the mastodon stood almost ten feet tall and weighed in at roughly five tons-- surely a big beast by any measure. Lacking the killer instinct of its contemporaries, the Sabre-Toothed tiger and the Pterodactyl, the American Mastodon was content to browse, trolling the plains for tasty morsels of shrub. If you look at artist renderings, most paleontologists seem to think the good-natured Mastodon even enjoyed smiling! But as meek and mild as this beast was, its placid demeanor and limited diet-range rated low on Darwin's survival scale, and it thus perished once and for all in 800 A.D.
The implications may be benign, but it remains that the name 'Mastodon' still sounds pretty badass-- certainly more badass than 'Manatee'. And I suppose it imports a metaphor that fits quite nicely for the band Mastodon, an Atlanta, GA-based quartet that has heavy-music lovers everywhere shitting themselves naked. For, like their namesake, this Mastodon represents something utterly imposing, primeval and oppressively heavy.
Mastodon, like pioneering heavy acts Botch, Isis, Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan, prefer to mix their metal with some hardcore, albeit with the strong emphasis on the 'metal' part. The others place a premium on virtuoso musicianship and highly technical song structures, and while that also figures prominently into Mastodon's music, these boys slather it all up in a special sauce that I like to refer to as 'classic sauce.' I'd like to give the credit for this sauce to heavy music über-producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Botch, Blood Brothers), but who really knows the sauce-source? What the hell am I talking about? I explain: I'm talking about the tight-jeans, Dodge Hemi, "Starsky & Hutch" production quality, that's what-- the perfect complement to the prehistoric riffing featured all album long. The recording sounds deliberately rustic and antiqued, like that milk-stained fake money you'd buy at the museum. (Admit it: you loved that shit.)
But production is not what prods Mastodon. What stimulates this band's formidable corpus are four super-proficient veteran musicians, two of whom (guitarist Bill Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor) cut their tusks in Today Is the Day and Lethargy. It's Dailor, though, who takes home the MVP award on Remission; if drummers are action figures, Dailor carries both a rapid-fire uzi (the toms) and an erase-all, double-barreled bazooka (dual-bass drums). I guarantee, he will brutalize you.
Like their metal peers, Mastodon sport some mathematics. But where Meshuggah get deep into calculus and Dillinger Escape Plan prefer trigonometry, these guys enjoy the more accessible stuff-- we're talking pre-algebra here. They drop in just enough to keep the arrangements flavorful, but not so much as to overload the vintage guitar riffs with Dream Theater-like complexity. And then they counterbalance it with some nice, old-fashioned, Sabbath-style metal attitude: guitars crunch, wail, and burn. The complete package sounds timeless, but in that unbelievable way that you've never heard before.
Maybe there exists a parallel world where the mighty mastodon kept on walking. And maybe, just maybe, that mastodon met a sabre-toothed tiger and maybe they had kids (work with me here). And those kids crossed over into our world, became human beings, moved to Atlanta, and formed a band. A great band whose raging, sodden hellfire now beckons you to warm yourself at its side throughout the impending winter months. A band whose crushing, odiferous, sodomizing blade dices like a Popeil cuisinart and runs you through with gruesome exactness until you beg for Remission. This band is Mastadon. Thank God for the miracles of crossbreeding. | 2002-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | September 15, 2002 | 9 | 63522ae9-6624-42e7-9e5e-f5b71705a251 | Brad Haywood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-haywood/ | null |
Vancouver’s the Courtneys capture the shambolic spirt of New Zealand bands like the Clean and write effortlessly catchy songs about heartache and longing. | Vancouver’s the Courtneys capture the shambolic spirt of New Zealand bands like the Clean and write effortlessly catchy songs about heartache and longing. | The Courtneys: II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22934-ii/ | II | The Courtneys are charmingly droll. The Vancouver trio includes but one Courtney, née Courtney Garvin, who rips vivid fuzz-guitar riffs alongside bassist Sydney Koke and singer/drummer Jen Twynn Payne. Their music—a bit gray, slightly lopsided—recalls velvety 1980s kiwi acts such as the Clean and Look Blue Go Purple. Crucially, though, the Courtneys bust out of the ramshackle Dunedin sound with bold, driving arrangements and thrilling pop sense. They have covered U2’s “I Will Follow” live and mention the influence of Teenage Fanclub and Big Star. Accordingly, the Courtneys feel like a punkish band with clearly-outlined emotions and a cheekily arena-rock spirit. On their supremely catchy second album, II, they lock into a real groove. They tactfully pair simplicity and strength. They make sad songs sound like a blast.
Something about the presence of a singer/drummer always communicates a discernible vulnerability. It emphasizes just how badly this person wants a voice—enough to carry both a tune and a beat—and turns a song into an act of conviction. To a degree, this amplifies the reaching emotionality of II. Singing in her endearingly nasal tone across the album, Payne is—to borrow a phrase from That Dog—totally crushed out.
Payne has said II is “75% about crushes,” which feels like a modest appraisal. Though there are more oblique songs about iron deficiency, the movie Lost Boys, a distant Virgo, and alien abduction, the bulk of II is about longing—the harshest emotion. “Can’t get you out of my head/Even through the miles,” Payne sings wistfully on “Silver Velvet.” It feels like driving into a sunset, and the bubblegum sentiment at its heart (“And nothing you say!/And nothing you do!/Can stop me from thinkin’ about you!”) sounds squarely fit to be shouted into hairbrush-microphones everywhere. Through the many disarming hooks of “Minnesota,” she pines, “I never wanted you to go/But you had to.” Likewise, “Country Song” is liminal: “I know I’m going but I don’t know when,” Payne sings.
Among all of these uncertain feelings, the music of II is appealingly concrete. II is a lovesick album, but its songs lift off. There’s a steadiness to its build, a comforting antidote to all of the unsteady urges. Even the seven-minute jam of “Lost Boys” is sharp and measured, never losing itself. The sun-streaked riffs of “Tour” pry open like a window on a long highway drive. It sprawls, capturing the restlessness that comes with transience, grounding a self-help mantra: “What you are and what you want to be/It takes a long time.” On “25,” Payne fruitlessly chases the object of her affection, and she evokes the true emotional horror of a two-sided gemini: “I’m a gemini/And I change my mind/Always change my mind.”
As Payne attempts to cope with heartache, the chorus of “Minnesota” is distilled yearning. “If you go away/I hope that you will know,” she sings, “That I’ll miss you so/Not easy to pretend it’s not hard to let you go.” These are evergreen subjects within an evergreen sound, to be sure, but II proves their cyclical natures—especially given its remarkable energy. The songs are viscerally anguished, but they don’t wallow. There’s an essential, breezy levity to the music; the parts require one another. The whole of II moves forward and on.
The democratic alchemy of the Courtneys makes this music feel humbly triumphant—like they collectively work through the confusion that Payne describes. Speaking with Westender, Garvin shared a story that underscores both their wry humor and this internal logic. She is a 2D animator by day, and once, Nickelodeon asked her to pitch a series. Garvin devised a cartoon based on the Courtneys, but differences with the network kept it in limbo. “If you have a show with three characters, one needs to be the leader and the other two have simplified characteristics,” Garvin said. “I just realized right away that wasn’t going to work for our band. It’s really important that we’re very equal.” They animate an egalitarian spirit on II instead. | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flying Nun | March 25, 2017 | 8 | 635b7468-31e4-4421-9048-6f79dd11376e | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Scottish band curate the latest edition of this venerable comp series, offering a diverse range of selections that includes funk, jazz, soul, hip-hop, lounge, tropicalia, IDM, Afropop, classical, classic rock, and reggae, as well as their own cover of the Brazilian song "Casaco Marron". | Scottish band curate the latest edition of this venerable comp series, offering a diverse range of selections that includes funk, jazz, soul, hip-hop, lounge, tropicalia, IDM, Afropop, classical, classic rock, and reggae, as well as their own cover of the Brazilian song "Casaco Marron". | Belle and Sebastian: LateNightTales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/640-latenighttales/ | LateNightTales | Once a furtive marker of recognition among like-minded obsessives, Belle and Sebastian have increasingly attracted casual listeners. Recent full-length The Life Pursuit completed the break with the band's outsiders-as-insiders origins, becoming their first album to reach the UK top 10. With the latest installment in the LateNightTales compilation series, previously curated by the Flaming Lips and Four Tet, the Scottish group poses an inevitable cred-salvaging question: But have you seen their records?
Oh, sure, they've got it all: funk, jazz, soul, hip-hop, lounge, tropicalia, IDM, Afropop, classical, classic rock, reggae, country reggae, reggae funk (but not reggaeton), and a hazy spoken-word piece by comedian David Shrigley in which an old woman dishes about her husband's "apparatus." It's never clear which specific band member chooses each track. No matter: Stuart Murdoch & Co. throw down the pop archivist's gauntlet impressively, though it often feels they're trying too hard to impress.
Like the recent Rough Trade Counter Culture comp, the disc is too varied for many one-sitting listens, but as a crate-digging exercise it yields a few directions for further exploration. The plaintive vocals of Greek troubadour Demis Roussos on his sparse 1972 ballad "O My Friends You've Been Untrue To Me" should appeal to Antony and the Johnsons fans. California soul singer Mary Love's uptempo mid-1960s also-ran "I'm in Your Hands" has the energetic appeal of the best Motown. Gal Costa's Caetano Velosi-penned 1969 "Lost in the Paradise" is swooning, horn-drenched bossa nova, while Ramsey Lewis's funky jazz entry from the same year, "Uhuru", features Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White on kalimba. Erick and Mondrek Muchena add a taste of Zimbabwe amid the dusty rhythms of "Taireva". To be fair, Tom Middleton already picked the Peddlers' sub-Sinatra crooner "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" for another compilation series, Family's The Trip, but this song remains the only good argument for a new Austin Powers sequel.
Other tracks fall deeper into novelty territory. Elsie Mae and the barrel-voiced Walter Jackson each turn in powerful performances, but their material-- a tepid "Rescue Me" knock-off and an overwrought soul weeper, respectively-- explains their lack of wider fame. It's hard to say what Belle & Sebastian were thinking when they mashed up Johnny Cash's mariachi-laced "Ring of Fire" with the West Kingston skank of the Ethiopians' "Freeman", but Butch Cassidy Sound System's "Cissy Strut" works with the classic Meters tune.
Where the compilation intermittently succeeds is in building a foggy, buzzed late-night atmosphere, true to its title. Rehash's opening "Gratuitous Theft in the Rain" sets the scene with David Axelrod-like loops, bringing to mind Rjd2, whose heartbreaking Deadringer hidden track and single "Here's What's Left" also appears. Madlib's Lootpack offers the slinky "Questions". A dancefloor rendering of the Stylistics' "People Make The World Go Round" by Paperclip People, aka Carl Craig, achieves a futuristic Herbertian sheen that almost transcends its smooth-jazz sax. Contrast that with Novi Singers' Polish-language vocal jazz. The electronic textures of Múm's "Green Grass of Tunnel" and Space Jam's 1998 12-inch "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guidance" prove even more immersive.
No worries, a few tracks also conjure the band's own sound. On "Get Thy Bearings", from 1968's Hurdy Gurdy Man, unlikely indie-yuppie precursor Donovan floats his fey, Murdoch-like vocals atop jazzy instrumentals fit for Astral Weeks, which was released the same year. Big Star's "Watch the Sunrise", from 1972's #1 Record shares the gawky acoustic glow of "Mayfly" or "I Don't Love Anyone". Stereolab melds "Eleanor Rigby" strings and joyously fuzzy guitars on 1993 touchstone "French Disko". Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle" sounds kinda like how haters described The Life Pursuit, except this time it really is flatulent mid-70s astro-blooz, which no amount of so-unhip-it's-hip trend-speculating (BTW sooo unhip) can salvage.
So it goes: Eclecticism and obscurantism provide the tale of the tape in record-collector apparatus-measuring contests. By this standard, Belle & Sebastian's LateNightTales is a prodigious success. The band's lone recording here, a breezy, overlookable cover of "Casaco Marron" by Evinha-- a member of Brazilian a cappella group Trio Esperanca-- seals the victory, pyrrhic as Plutarch. Belle and Sebastian's fan culture may have always encouraged vinyl fetishism, but the misplaced machismo in this nugget-flaunting display seems gauche given the delicate wit of the band's original compositions. Dudes, you're not losing your edge. | 2006-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2006-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Azuli | March 1, 2006 | 6.8 | 63632484-6746-4f7b-bf6e-2b78dc7f7c75 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Fire Records' 4xLP reissue of Half Japanese's ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts demonstrates how the Fair brothers' caveman racket anticipated the work of acts such as Daniel Johnston and Beat Happening; it's a brilliant mix of loud punk blasts, shapeless rants, heartfelt confessions, and minimal experiments. | Fire Records' 4xLP reissue of Half Japanese's ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts demonstrates how the Fair brothers' caveman racket anticipated the work of acts such as Daniel Johnston and Beat Happening; it's a brilliant mix of loud punk blasts, shapeless rants, heartfelt confessions, and minimal experiments. | Half Japanese: ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17841-half-japanese-12-gentlemen-not-beasts/ | ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts | “You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting,” wrote David Fair in his mini-manifesto How to Play Guitar. “If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.” Listen to ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts, the sprawling, primitive, raucous debut of Fair’s band Half Japanese, and you probably won’t be surprised that David and his brother Jad never learned to play guitar in any traditional way. But it would be wrong to assume that they couldn’t learn. Read David again: “If you ignore the chords…” Half Japanese made a choice. They weren’t clueless outsiders or deluded novices. Primitiveness was their calling, not their fate.
It was also their path to freedom. As David says, lack of knowledge can mean infinite options, and he and Jad explore a lot of them on ½ Gentleman / Not Beasts, often touted as the first (and only) triple-LP debut in rock history. That may or may not be true, but it certainly was the least likely. Before it came out, the Fair brothers had made just a few 7-inches and cassettes, recorded at home (where they lived with their parents) and released on their own label, 50 Skidillion Watts. (One of those early tapes was called ½ Gentlemen / ½ Beasts, but the Fairs changed it to Not Beasts for the box since, according to David, “we’re nice guys.”) British label Armageddon’s offer to put out a box set was so unusual that, when interviewed in the Half Japanese documentary The Band That Would Be King, the Fairs’ parents could only compare it to a then-new box set by Frank Sinatra.
Musically, though, giving Half Japanese six album sides to fill with their spilling ideas made a lot of sense. In no less than 50 songs (now 86 on Fire’s 4LP reissue), the Fair brothers injected their caveman racket-- usually crafted solely on cardboard-sounding drums and strangled guitar-- into loud punk blasts, shapeless rants, heartfelt confessions, minimal experiments, audio collages, and twisted covers of their heroes the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, and Buddy Holly. Some songs sound like a suburban parallel to the concurrent, atonal no wave movement in New York (David’s chord-avoiding guitar is often a dead ringer for the dissonant shrieks of DNA’s Arto Lindsay). But Half Japanese replaced no wave’s burned-out nihilism with sleeve-worn, open-wound emotion.
Much of that emotion comes from Jad’s adolesecent voice and love-letter lyrics. On bracingly honest cuts like “Shy Around Girls”, “Dream Date”, and “School of Love”, he brings the sentimentality of a lovelorn teenager to the musical equivalent of primal scream therapy. (It’s telling that, according to later member [Don Fleming](file://localhost/ttp/::en.wikipedia.org:wiki:Don_Fleming_(musician)), David claimed that Half Japanese had two kinds of songs: “Monster songs and love songs.”) With these proto-emo bombs, the Fairs predicted a lot of future lo-fi rock, especially the home-taped ballads of Daniel Johnston and the nursery-rhyme swing of Beat Happening.
But don’t mistake Half Japanese’s naked emotion for naïveté-- Jad and David knew exactly what they were doing. That’s especially clear in ½ Gentlemen’s audio experiments, which can be surprisingly formal. The bass cycling through “Du Du Du / Du Du Du” evokes Steve Reich-style minimalism; the repeated notes and found sounds on “T / T / T / T / T” would fit on a Faust LP; the slashing guitar and wordless babble of “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” suggests Derek Bailey backing Yoko Ono; and “Jad Interview”, one of Fire’s bonus tracks, is a word-jazz-like vocal-collage. These aren’t random noodlings that hit on something by chance. There’s clear thought behind each construction, ironic considering how loose the more traditional “songs” are.
Another sign that Half Japanese were more clever than they looked is ½ Gentlemen’s sly sense of humor. You can hear Jad and David winking through the fake-protest chant “No More Beatle Mania” (“once was enough!” Jad screams), the drooling whine of “I Don’t Want to Have Mono No More”, and the rock-fantasy-camp scenario of “Battle of the Bands”, wherein “backup singers” Mick Jagger and Johnny Rotten are too busy watching David to actually sing. Even funnier are the prankster-ish cover versions, wherein the band rambles through classics as if blindfolded. Jad never alters his singing style throughout “Stooges Medley” (another Fire bonus track), the musical equivalent of Andy Kaufman doing impressions by merely reciting lines without changing his “Foreign Man” voice. If anyone thought Half Japanese was a hoax, David and Jad were clearly happy to feed that rumor. Yet their brazen refusal to conform to the originals captures the Stooges’ spirit more than any faithful cover could.
All this fearless amateurism can make ½ Gentlemen a brutal listen. As their career went on, Half Japanese gradually turned their monster love songs into more listenable tunes that influenced a generation of indie rockers (most famously, Kurt Cobain brought them along on Nirvana’s In Utero tour and was wearing their t-shirt when he died). But ½ Gentlemen, in its near-giddy willingness to push sound past the limits of amps and tape recorders, is more a precursor to noisy rock experiments like the kiddie nightmares of Happy Flowers, the trash-can blues of Pussy Galore, or the early splatter of Boredoms.
Still, even at its most grating, there’s always a loudly-beating heart inside 1/2 Gentlemen. It’s earnest, eager, and takes a wry view of the world that makes it endearing. And it’s so hard to predict what’s going to happen at any given point that the music never feels dated. Because it was based mostly on their own hermetic ideas, the Fair brothers’ primitivism blasts through the years, too hot for any time period to hold onto. Maybe that’s the best thing about ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts: even today, over three decades later, you can picture Jad and David banging it out in their parents’ house, thrilled at what they’re discovering. | 2013-04-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | April 26, 2013 | 9.2 | 63648414-1279-406c-96d4-5411534f199f | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Moving beyond FAKA’s gqom influences, the South African musician pairs experimental club styles with operatic falsetto in a multi-sensory exploration of the nature of the divine. | Moving beyond FAKA’s gqom influences, the South African musician pairs experimental club styles with operatic falsetto in a multi-sensory exploration of the nature of the divine. | Desire Marea: Desire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/desire-marea-desire/ | Desire | Long before music became an industry, its primary purpose was ceremonial. For thousands of years, people have used song and sound to celebrate their communities and to worship their ancestors and deities. While today’s stars often thank God for their blessings and the nightclub remains a church for many, few contemporary albums embody a sense of the sacred like Desire Marea’s debut solo album, Desire. As one half of South African duo FAKA, Marea drew on local dance music sounds like gqom, but on Desire, their exploration of the divine takes them in a many-splendored multitude of stylistic directions, often within the span of a single track: liturgical drone, galloping club beats, existential noise.
The scene is set by the resonant organ of opener “Self Centre,” a pleasing play on “self-centered” that puts the emphasis on the core of one’s being—in other words, the soul. Exultation follows in the form of “Zibuyile Izimmakade,” which means “The Gods Have Returned” in Zulu. A galloping beat, the hoot of an owl, and Desire’s operatic falsetto come together in a wave of ecstatic energy that makes a rockpool of the chest; in Zulu, Marea sings, “The Gods have returned/To tell us to stand proudly in our light.” It’s not the only spirit-catching moment. Taking its name from a Zulu word that means “rejoice” and is used to greet one’s ancestors, “Thokozani” spans from baroque harpsichord flourishes to piano house, imbued with the dynamism of the sonic collages that Total Freedom parented and popularized in the transatlantic club scene of the early 2010s.
Of course, the divine does not exist solely on another plane. The joy of existing within a body, and expressing that freely, is one of the most sacred human experiences. In an interview with writer Lindiwe Mngxitama, Marea said they wrote the album’s lead single, “You Think I’m Horny,” during a time when they were “trying to foster a sense of...tenderness[,] even with casual interactions.” Over a goosebump-inducing marimba line and a stretch of scuffed-up trip-hop, the song prioritizes intimacy over sex: “You think that I’m horny/Baby you arouse me/And I don’t even wanna fuck you/I just wanna be with you.” There’s also a sensual reference to the anime franchise Dragon Ball Z (“You are my senzu bean, healing me/From deep within/I get up again”) and a full minute’s repetition of “squeeze me” in a range of choral tones that reach transcendent heights.
In “Tavern Kween,” healing extends to the dancefloor. Marea sings in Zulu, “Those of us who live in the night/Find home under disco lights.” Featuring a hypnotizing dance-off between saxophone, trumpet, and electric guitar, “Tavern Kween” is a slow-burn disco anthem in the vein of “Blind,” and its triumphant message is unambiguous: “Hit the floor in your full majesty,” urges Marea; “You deserve to claim your joy in the world.”
What makes Desire such a standout debut is that it sounds like an artist at home in the journey of life and in lively dialogue with their craft. A pattern of flux and flexibility runs through the album’s palette, song structures, and emotional tenor. The more somber and reflective moments, like the mindscape-evoking “The Void” and “Studies in Black Trauma,” which features potent, prayer-like bars from Johannesburg rapper Gyre, are not immune to this feeling of movement, thanks to Marea’s invigorating production decisions. The latter starts out akin to a death-metal opera and moves through several sound scenes before morphing into an aural bubble bath. Along with the London composer and sound artist Klein, Marea belongs to a new generation of independent artists approaching voice, musicianship, and performance with all the senses in mind. It’s that embodied vitality that allows Desire to speak so fluently to the mind, body, and soul. | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Izimakade | January 30, 2020 | 8 | 636c6d99-a3e6-43ef-a0f4-483ee256aaf5 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
Flying Lotus' fifth album has the stated theme of the one thing every single human has in common, and just about every conceivable style of music is prone to address: the inevitability and condition of death, and how mysterious it really is. Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, and others contribute. | Flying Lotus' fifth album has the stated theme of the one thing every single human has in common, and just about every conceivable style of music is prone to address: the inevitability and condition of death, and how mysterious it really is. Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, and others contribute. | Flying Lotus: You're Dead! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19875-flying-lotus-youre-dead/ | You're Dead! | Each subsequent full-length album that Flying Lotus has released seems to start with a personal connection that's grown more all-encompassing the further he gets into his career. From his year of birth, he moved on to the city he found his musical identity in, then out to the very structure of the universe, then deeper inside to the inner world of dreams and the subconscious. His fifth album, You're Dead!, has the stated theme of the one thing every single human has in common, and just about every conceivable style of music is prone to address: the inevitability and condition of death, and how mysterious it really is.
Like many people who've grown past 30 years old, Steven Ellison has lost some important people in his life. Specifically, they were artistic inspirations—from collaborators like Austin Peralta to influences like J Dilla to blood relatives like Alice Coltrane—formative catalysts that made his music and his life what it is. Coltrane in particular is frequently brought up as a familial connection to Ellison, but even if she weren't his great-aunt, her meditative way of being in the world and putting forth music as a way of spiritual connection has carried through deeply into Ellison's own art, even when it appears irreverent or cartoon-ridiculous on the surface.
The title of You're Dead! has that exclamation point for a reason, though. While the spirits of his friends, family, and peers weigh heavy throughout this album, the music itself is frequently light and sometimes shamelessly goofy, treating mortality with the irreverence and fascination of anything inescapable and unknowable. There's little that's morbid and even less that's melancholy about it. In the context of coping with The Other Side, it all feels a lot more like a wake than a funeral.
And consider the guests at this particular wake: pianist Herbie Hancock, likely legacy-minded as he continues to branch out and find new musical environments through his seventies; rappers Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, the latter whose insight towards death has the subtle heft of somebody who's cheated it while being well aware of those who didn't; guitarist Brendon Small, whose involvement in the gory cartoon absurdity of "Metalocalypse" prepped him well for an album that sounds equally informed by Slayer and Raymond Scott. Even the album art and promotional visuals, provided by the body-horror guro manga artist Shintaro Kago, revels in the idea of nightmarish evisceration and dismemberment rendered with an almost playful slapstick weirdness.
The theme sticks out as the most consistent element of You're Dead!, since it's far and away the most free-ranging FlyLo album to date. And yet the album doesn't sprawl out of control, maybe because it doesn't really have the time to: the whole record clocks in at just over 38 minutes, all jolts of sound and quick bursts of motifs. The fleeting cross-sections of chopped-to-bits fusion jazz strung together over the first five minutes—the ascendant cosmic drone and black hole collapse of "Theme", the fast-forward bop of Hancock collab "Tesla", and the careening hesher-Sharrock guitar licks of "Cold Dead"—flow from buzz-cluttered headspaces to spacious serenity so unexpectedly yet naturally that the seams never show. (The live-band personnel—including prog/jazz superdrummer Deantoni Parks, Ayler-school saxophonist Kamasi Washington, and ever-present partner/bass wizard Thundercat—do a masterful job in turning concentrated doses of high-speed, complicated chops into giddy bursts of euphoric adrenaline.) Kendrick Lamar's virtuoso obstacle-course run through the d'n'b-tweaking "Never Catch Me" is the closest there is to a centerpiece statement of the album ("Analyze my demise, I say I'm super anxious/ Recognize I deprive this fear and then embrace it"). But the tonal 180 into the buoyant, kind of tipsy/faded Captain Murphy/Snoop Dogg teamup "Dead Man's Tetris"—complete with a riff-echoing gun-cock collage and Street Fighter II K.O. SFX—is less of a jarring shock than a knowing counterpoint.
From there, the album's remaining path through prog, fusion, IDM, and ambient all feels like a necessary comedown, shot through with moments at the precipice of chaos or deliberate ugliness (like the pill-popper nightmare of Captain Murphy croak-wailing through "The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep"), but still resiliently calm in the face of death. Ellison's once-sparse use of others' voices is especially haunting at points—Angel Deradoorian's breathily manipulated into weaving through wispy psychedelic soul like some minimalist version of Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky", or Niki Randa harmonizing at a distant horizon through "Your Potential//The Beyond". A lighter hand, even when it's punching up bass drones or pushing through dense walls of complex instrumental interplay, makes the end-of-humanity choral hymn "Coronus, the Terminator" and the pull between intense rhythm and delicate melody on "Moment of Hesitation" feel infused with just as much wonder and awe as foreboding.
There's the idea expressed through You're Dead!—intentional or otherwise—that making a life's work with the full knowledge of death as the final limiting factor is a strong motivator. Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything? | 2014-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | October 6, 2014 | 8.3 | 637b68cf-154f-4771-b07b-eefcaaad81f0 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Dominic Maker and Kai Campos blaze another new path, but the genre vagabonds get a little lost in their sleek shoegaze post-rock album. | Dominic Maker and Kai Campos blaze another new path, but the genre vagabonds get a little lost in their sleek shoegaze post-rock album. | Mount Kimbie: The Sunset Violent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-kimbie-the-sunset-violent/ | The Sunset Violent | Mount Kimbie are once again seeking transformation. Over the past 15 years, the UK duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos have swerved from post-dubstep to post-punk, techno to R&B, ambient garage to lo-fi pop, releasing DJ mixes and double albums, collaborating with James Blake and Jay-Z and King Krule and Travis Scott. Now they’re back with something slightly different: a gritty, shoegazy, post-rock album called The Sunset Violent. With help from new bandmembers Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, Mount Kimbie dust off their guitars and turn up their distortion, hoping to become Stereolab for a new generation, an electro-rock outfit whose work is as familiar as it is obscure.
The road to Mount Kimbie’s revised sound has been winding. As underground electronic producers in the early 2010s, Maker and Campos’ experimental flair punctuated otherwise minimalist compositions: a time-warped acoustic guitar behind glassy ambient pads, arhythmic drums around synth keys. Their most recent album, 2022’s MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning, branched off into hazy R&B and hip-hop before morphing into muted, dubby club beats. Their defining work remains 2017’s Love What Survives, a new-age post-punk record heavy on overdriven guitars and grainy synths, a style well-suited to Maker and Compos’ habitual muffled abstraction.
Sleeker and safer than its predecessor, The Sunset Violent similarly provides a sturdy backdrop of fuzzy guitar and Korgs for Balency-Béarn and Maker’s melancholic vocals. The newly constituted four-piece sounds like if Sonic Youth or Young Marble Giants were wizards with the DAW, a band whose songs play like richly detailed dreams whose meaning may leave you scratching your head.
The strongest songs sparkle with a morose charm. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck,” Balency-Béarn’s plainspoken singing wafts over murky lounge-pop, giving The Sunset Violent some much-needed friction. “Every day we’re eating out/Another date I’ll kill myself,” she deadpans on “Dumb Guitar.” Her wistful, unadorned voice is the closest thing the album has to an emotional center, especially with Maker playing the guileless sidekick role Oliver Sims perfected in the xx. It’s jarring to hear how much more alive King Krule’s baritone sounds on “Boxing” and “Empty and Silent,” how much defter his pen—a stunning feat for such a famed curmudgeon. Sometimes The Sunset Violent searches high and low for a pulse and just comes up empty.
Maker’s at his most confident on the spectacular “Fishbrain,” a song that blisters with bitterness and regret. The writing is cryptic but sharp, featuring fractured lines about bridges falling and “running out of films” to watch. When Mount Kimbie align their songcraft with a tension, a feeling, a perspective—no matter how prosaic or subliminal—their songs soar. It’s when they languish in repetitive patterns and dry melodies, like on “Got Me” and the opening half of “A Figure in the Surf,” that they’re yanked back to earth.
Having proven themselves as successful genre vagabonds, Maker and Campos’ decision to team up with Balency-Béarn and Pell suggests an attempt to home in on a more distinct, durable identity, one that ground the Mount Kimble sound in a reliable aesthetic. The Sunset Violent pushes them closer to this identity, establishing a clearer vision for what the band can be. But just as the vision begins to crystalize, it burns to black, leaving a pleasant if not entirely indelible outline. | 2024-04-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 8, 2024 | 6.8 | 637c3536-030a-4a26-8246-81fd36c1de24 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
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 2007 debut from the L.A. duo, an enchanting hip-hop classic with an almost mythological history. | 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 2007 debut from the L.A. duo, an enchanting hip-hop classic with an almost mythological history. | Blu & Exile: Below the Heavens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blu-and-exile-below-the-heavens/ | Below the Heavens | By the end of the 2000s, hip-hop had completed its transformation into a dominant cultural force that dictated music, fashion, and language around the world. But the economy that made it and other pop genres so wildly profitable was crumbling. The decade that began with commercial behemoths like Country Grammar, Stankonia, and The Marshall Mathers LP ended with Department of Homeland Security officials seizing the domains of MP3 blogs. By 2007, when CD sales were just over half of what they’d been seven years prior, it was clear that the online hip-hop community had the power to break new artists by bypassing the music industry’s traditional infrastructure. This is a long way of explaining how the debut album by a relatively unknown producer and a completely anonymous MC, pressed onto only 3,500 CDs by a tiny label that would soon go out of business, became one of the signature LPs of its era.
Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens is more than an economic curiosity. Recorded over several years in the early and mid-2000s, it channels the tactile sample chops of underground rap production at that time and the writing styles of several different subgenres from the previous decade. It is conspicuously modeled after hip-hop’s canonical debuts: rooted in autobiography, shot through with a young person’s brash ambition, its moments of vulnerability carefully parceled out and couched in redemption arcs. But it revels in tension—between its author’s parents; between his favorite MCs; between the mundanity of daily life and the divine. It’s the kind of album that made other rappers household names. And it likely would have made Blu one, too, had he shown any interest in becoming one.
Blu was born in 1983 and, as a child, moved with his mother and pastor stepfather all around greater Los Angeles, between Vernon and Inglewood, Long Beach and Azusa, even across the San Bernardino County line into Montclair. Wherever they made a home, there were strict house rules, including a ban on rap records. (A smuggled cassette of LL Cool J’s Bad was confiscated almost immediately.) While his classmates were saving their allowances to buy Doggystyle and The Chronic, young Johnson Barnes was relegated to singing in the church choir, sopping up whatever pop music bled into the sanctuary.
Around 1998, when he was in the 10th grade, Blu moved to San Pedro to live with his biological father. His dad was, well, not a pastor. (“My pop a thug,” he would later rap—“I'm a son of a Blood, with blue gators on.”) 2Pac and Too $hort filled the house. But by this point, Short Dogg was 10 albums deep and the L.A. stars of the ’90s had dimmed. Pac had been murdered in Vegas, Eazy-E had died of AIDS-induced pneumonia, Ice Cube was between halves of a poorly received double album, Snoop was recording for No Limit, and Dre had yet to make Aftermath anything more than a slightly embarrassing vanity label. Suge Knight was at a federal prison in Oregon. The iconography of the Tom Bradley era—lowriders under palm trees, jheri curls under Raiders hats—had already hardened into cliché.
The album that sparked Blu’s interest in rapping came from the opposite coast. DMX’s 1998 debut, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, seemed to beg imitation: It was viciously animated, frothing at the mouth. Blu would later say his earliest raps sounded like “a baby DMX” while his high school rhyming partner patterned himself after Brotha Lynch Hung, the horrorcore pioneer from Sacramento. But this ferocity was soon balanced out by influences that were more cerebral. By 2000, Blu had heard One Day It’ll All Make Sense, the Common album from 1997, and the self-titled debut EP by the Fresno rapper Planet Asia, released the year after. Over the next several years, as Blu continued to refine his style, these competing sensibilities—the swaggering id and the obsessive inward gaze—would tug at him equally.
After high school, Blu got on stage as often as he could, playing his own small shows and hosting others. He wrote constantly, but freestyled just as often, proud of his skills as a battle rapper. He was falling into an important L.A. lineage. In much the same way that the G-funk era’s imagery and local gang politics creeped into Blu’s music through osmosis and personal experience, his battle chops recalled the conscious-bent, open-mic ethos of Project Blowed and its predecessor, the Good Life Cafe. While San Pedro is some 20 miles south of the Blowed’s home in Leimert Park, Blu was meshing his showman’s instincts with that scene’s headier undertones—his raps became confrontational, but in the way that Aceyalone’s were, not MC Eiht’s.
In 2003 Blu met Aloe Blacc, the rapping and singing half of Emanon, his duo with the producer Exile. (The two were hanging with mutual friends and clicked while reciting lyrics from J. Dilla’s Welcome 2 Detroit.) Exile was working on a compilation album, and Blacc dragged him to one of Blu’s shows to scout the younger MC as someone who might contribute a couple of songs. Ex was impressed, gave Blu a pair of beats to write to, and immediately scheduled a session to cut those songs. The pair developed a quick chemistry. One night, Blu brought a Sesame Street record to Exile’s studio to sample. The muppet’s voice got laid over a lighthearted piano loop; Blu rapped, “I look like my mother, but I act like my pops did/Whatever he ain’t teach to me, the block did.” This was the beginning, in earnest, of the sessions for the hypothetical debut album that Blu had been dreaming about—and had quietly kept the name for—since the 10th grade back at San Pedro High: Below the Heavens.
It was not the only record Blu was writing at the time. Despite his pride in being a member of L.A.’s underground—the album title, aside from the obvious religious themes, is a reference to the underground/mainstream divide—Blu was not necessarily set on staying indie forever. In fact, a cousin who engineered for Death Row had put him in touch with Suge Knight, and had that label been on more solid financial footing, Blu might have filled the vacuum created by Pac’s death and Dre’s departure. Instead, he was working on a much smaller scale, cutting a playful, slightly genre-bending album with the Detroit rapper Ta’Raach and another, under the name Johnson&Jonson, with the producer Mainframe. Around this time, Blu began to have conversations with Stones Throw, the local indie giant that had just put out Madvillainy. But reps for that label told Blu they felt they could not service his commercial potential.
The J&J LP is an excellently arrogant knot of battle raps and sneering monologues, but Blu was determined to make Below the Heavens his widescreen debut, in the mold of Illmatic or Ready to Die. So Mainframe secured him and Exile a deal with Sound in Color, the indie label he founded as a teenager. The duo got to work on the album in a variety of studios around L.A. County, most frequently near the Sound in Color house in Long Beach. This is partly due to the convenience of being near a label’s headquarters, but mostly, one presumes, because Blu didn’t have a car. He would take the bus from his day job at a Long Beach pharmacy, toting the raps he had worked on during the slower parts of his shift.
It’s this sort of intrusion—real life into fantasy, bills into the best-laid plans—that gives Below the Heavens its unique texture. The album is, in some ways, built around its seventh song, the Tony Mottola-sampling “Dancing in the Rain.” Its first verse is kind of a working-class farce: It opens at 6 a.m. when Blu tries to call Exile but finds his cell phone has been cut off; carless, Blu is then victim to a slow bus schedule, which angers his boss, and his girlfriend won’t stop nagging him about money. When he finally clocks out, he doesn’t have enough change to take the bus back home, and is caught in a downpour at the stop. And then you arrive at the song’s title: a silver lining, a dance in the rain.
But what Blu does next is subvert the familiar arc he’s been tracing. After a shift spent daydreaming about the studio, he arrives there—burnt out and bitter. “Sometimes I hate taking trips to the lab,” he raps, before bluffing his way through a conversation with an impatient A&R and sheepishly admitting that, while many great artists supposedly used depression to fuel their best work, his simply makes him tired. The temptation, in any sort of dramatic writing, is to focus on acute moments of change; Blu instead writes about the crushing weight of every workday blending into the next, the death-by-a-thousand-cuts that ends so many artists’ careers before they begin.
None of which is to say that Below the Heavens is dour, or self-pitying. It never is—“Dancing in the Rain” ends with a phone call between Blu and a friend that reminds him why he enjoys writing, and that song is preceded by another, “Blu Colla Workers,” where the same types of economic stress are rendered as goofy sitcom problems. Despite describing himself as “mad at the world” on the album’s opening song, Blu spends much of it bouncing between happily placid (the sunbaked “So(ul) Amazin’ (Steel Blazin’)”) and exultant (“Show Me the Good Life”). His broad smile on the cover is not some sort of arch in-joke.
Below the Heavens’ other centerpiece, along with “Dancing in the Rain,” is “In Remembrance of Me,” a lush song meant to turn Blu’s life into myth. It doesn’t take much decoding to see what he and Exile are reaching for here: The first line Ex scratches in the chorus is from Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You.” In the final verse of “Remembrance,” Blu raps that his “mom thought that [he] was too young to make this song,” but this is of course the kind of song that only 22-year-olds write. It’s full of strange little tonal contradictions (he calls the girl he lost his virginity to “my first fuck” just a few bars before saying “I saw the whole world through that girl’s eyes”) and wistful recollections from just a few years prior (“We was full of youth,” he raps, “not yet abused by time”). Blu’s writing would change radically in the years to come, but on Heavens, he’s less concerned with granular details than the feelings that linger in their wake. Later on the album, he recounts not the particulars of an arrest, but the guilt he feels teaching his son about right and wrong with cuff marks fresh on his wrists.
The tonal balance and technical proficiency of Blu’s raps were mirrored by Exile behind the boards. The omnivore son and grandson of musicians, he came to hip-hop through the electro music that pumped through roller rinks and the rap broadcast throughout L.A. on KDAY. Ex had made his first mixtapes with Aloe Blacc in the mid-’90s, when both were still teenagers. By the time he met Blu, he was a dexterous veteran. His beats have, at times, been miscast as exercises in boom-bap revival, but they are better understood as an analog anchor to L.A.’s then-burgeoning beat music scene, which would soon turn toward electronic psychedelia. His scratches ground the LP in the past, while the rare digital touches keep it current: See the coda on “Show Me the Good Life,” a track that—fitting, given his partner’s influences—Exile had originally submitted to Common for inclusion on 2005’s Be.
For his part, Blu’s vocals are well served by his experience battling and his wealth of time on stage. He knows when to sink into a pocket and when to push a verse’s pace; he knows when, as at the end of “Juicen’ Dranks,” to extend a rhyme scheme in a way that elicits gasps from a crowd. He can be jagged or cascade over a beat, as he does while rattling off nuisances early on “Dancing.” He’s expressive without being a ham, charming when he tells a woman in a club that “slaves come with whips and chains/We gotta liberate!” as a way of explaining away his lack of money only a few songs after he used the whips/chains construction in earnest, on “Remembrance.”
His variety of flows also bridges some of the real and imagined fault lines between different schools of rap. His most forceful, muscular deliveries—opener “My World Is…,” “Simply Amazin’”—are actually the songs where he’s most reminiscent of Common, One Day being a more vigorously-rapped album than its reputation would suggest. And then there’s his singing. Maybe the residue of his days in church, Blu’s melodic sense on the hooks for “Blu Colla Workers,” “Dancing in the Rain,” and “The Narrow Path” makes those songs feel like complete records, and Heavens like the product of a lifetime’s worth of musical study.
Most of the lyrics on Below the Heavens are straightforward in terms of their construction and their meaning. But its most moving song, “Cold Hearted” is written elliptically, on the micro and macro level. There is domestic abuse in Blu’s childhood home and there is the death of a friend; there are weapons real and metaphorical. But Blu’s verse cagily circles each event, looping back and forth with seemingly anachronistic details and conspicuously repeating phrases. Five years after the fact, Blu told XXL that “Cold Hearted” was “the most personal record I ever recorded in my life,” an ode to the childhood sadness so deep it gave him his stage name.
By the end of 2006, after years of sessions that yielded around 50 songs, Below the Heavens was finally ready to be released, its meager first run of CDs pressed and sealed. On January 16, 2007, a SWAT team, carrying M-16s and supported by helicopters, raided the studio shared by DJ Drama and Don Cannon, two fixtures on rap’s mixtape circuit, on RICO charges. Like the websites that would be seized by ICE three years later, these mixtapes were in fact useful tools for major labels and their artists; the relationship was one of mutual benefit, not one-sided piracy. In any event, the walls were closing in around traditional brick-and-mortar sales and file-sharing blogs alike. Below the Heavens arrived just in time. Despite Blu’s ambivalence about the internet (“When we first got MySpace I was denying people I didn’t know… The label was like, ‘Yo, man, how are you gonna sell a record?’” he would later recall), the album became an instant sensation online. A single post on the hip-hop blog NahRight, Blu told me last year, made “about as much difference as it did when [Exile and I] went overseas” to tour.
Even though Sound in Color dissolved, Below the Heavens and its internet following made Blu an obvious, inevitable star in the eyes of major labels. He signed with Warner Bros. and got to work on an album. But instead of remaking Below the Heavens or writing its spiritual sequel, Blu tapped producers like Flying Lotus, Samiyam, and the Sa-Ra Creative Partners—linchpins of the beat music scene that was exploding out of Low End Theory, the weekly club night in Lincoln Heights. (In a fitting parallel to Blu’s own scene-bridging, Low End was co-founded by Nocando, the battle rapper and Project Blowed veteran.) The LP Blu recorded, originally titled NoYork!, got deprioritized during a period of corporate upheaval, but was probably too avant-garde for a major at the time anyway. A few weeks before being dropped by Warner, Blu handed out promo CDs of the nearly-finished record; it would eventually be released independently in 2013, in slightly abbreviated form and with a slightly abbreviated name, York.
For most artists, NoYork!/York would be the strangest record in their catalog, a clear outlier. For Blu, it was the most conventional thing he’d release for several years. See 2011’s j e s u s, a record so lo-fi as to give the term new meaning; see HerFavoriteColo(u)r, the self-produced dip into jazz and Blu’s DVD collection from 2009. He recorded a mostly self-produced solo album, referred to alternately as God Is Good and theGODleebarnes(lp), which is actually a natural successor to Below the Heavens—expansive, linear, autobiographical—and uploaded it to MySpace as one long MP3 under heavy distortion. And when a second Blu & Exile record finally appeared, it was with no announcement and little fanfare, as give me my flowers while i can smell them, a digital-only release. Much of this later music is superior to Heavens—richer in detail, less iterative, full of tics in writing and production that are wholly unique to Blu—but to hear fans muse about his debut, or to read much of his press, it’s as if little of it ever existed.
In many ways, Blu’s larger project is one about impermanence. His work can be hard to find; it disappears frequently, and the retail versions of NoYork! and flowers are inferior to their initial leaks. Many of his songs are buried under digital fuzz—a provocative, frequently effective choice, but one that surely shrinks his audience. And much of his most recent output, like his 2018 collaboration with Shafiq Husayn, The Blueprint, is clearly freestyled, unconcerned with persona or narrative structure. Even Below the Heavens, which seemed a conscious exception to this, has been retroactively nudged in a similar direction: its physical editions falling out of print, its files sloppily uploaded to DSPs with song titles that are incomplete or incorrect, some tracks disappearing from those platforms when permissions lapse or are lost in the shuffle. A certain kind of listener would look back at the album as a foundation that was never built on. But it could be more clearly seen as the first step on the journey that everyone and everything takes, back into the ether. | 2022-03-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Sound in Color | March 13, 2022 | 8.7 | 6380c444-332c-40a7-a5a0-bd347d5726f1 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
This is a record with nothing to prove, a vision of ambient music clad in bathrobe and slippers. You come to it to kick back, get lost in texture, and forget about time for a while. | This is a record with nothing to prove, a vision of ambient music clad in bathrobe and slippers. You come to it to kick back, get lost in texture, and forget about time for a while. | Prins Thomas: Principe del Norte | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21435-principe-del-norte/ | Principe del Norte | For an album with a royal pedigree right there in its title, Prins Thomas' Principe del Norte is a record with nothing to prove. The shortest of its nine untitled tracks is nearly eight minutes long, and three run to 13 minutes or more. You don't get the sense the track lengths stem from any sort of desire to grandstand; it just looks like Thomas didn't much feel like editing himself. The whole album runs more than an hour and a half, beats halting and restarting, synths drifting willy-nilly over muted basslines, and arrangements wandering free as clouds. It is a vision of ambient music in bathrobe and slippers, slurping milk straight from the carton at the all-night grocery; it is The Dude of ambient.
Of course, the Dude was pretty cool, and so is Principe del Norte, which comes across as genial, charmingly rumpled, and totally unflappable. These songs appear to have been improvised and recorded across long studio jams, and the main compositional guideline seems to dictate only that the music is limited to what Thomas can play with his own two hands—or his sequencers—at any given moment. Take "C," which begins with patient, parallel synthesizer lines, teases with a pitter-pat beat, falls back into a beatless breakdown—mashed keys, a wrong note or two—and then ramps back up into its full chug. There's yet another false ending at the eight-and-a-half minute mark, before the arpeggios fire up again for a four-minute denouement.Disco's pulse is implicit in the four-to-the-floor beats of the album's heavier cuts ("E," "F," "G") and in faintly funky basslines that crop up here and there, but the album draws most of its inspiration from '70s German electronic artists like Tangerine Dream and Manuel Göttsching.
In his notes to the album, Thomas cites the influence of '90s ambient artists like the KLF, the Orb, and the Black Dog, but for the most part, Principe del Norte scans as a logical extension of Thomas' previous work, just with the drums dialed way down. The lone exception is the final track, "H," which might be one of the heaviest things he's ever recorded; with its thudding bass kicks, cavernous bass kicks, and monotone clatter and grind, it sounds almost like his attempt at Berghain-style techno. ("D," which uses some of the same elements, scans more as Thomas' interpretation of dub techno in the tradition of Chain Reaction.) Unlike proper warehouse techno, though, "H" retains all of Thomas' habitual characteristics—idiosyncratic, loosey-goosey, a little unkempt. Does anyone need 13-plus minutes of it? Perhaps not, but you don't come to Principe del Norte for concision. You come to kick back, get lost in Thomas' textures, and forget about time for a while. It's not music for airports; it's music for beanbag chairs, and that's just fine. | 2016-02-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | February 25, 2016 | 6.8 | 6390bf36-523f-4615-916a-ae6faf36fff2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Three difficult years in the making, Gossamer is an overwhelming album about being overwhelmed, a bold torrent of maximalist musical ideas, repressed anger, and unchecked anxiety. | Three difficult years in the making, Gossamer is an overwhelming album about being overwhelmed, a bold torrent of maximalist musical ideas, repressed anger, and unchecked anxiety. | Passion Pit: Gossamer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16844-gossamer/ | Gossamer | Here's an incomplete list of the subjects dealt with on Passion Pit's second album, Gossamer: immigration, alcoholism, economic disparity, suicide, mental illness, drugs, domestic abuse. So when Michael Angelakos sings, "I'm so self-loathing that it's hard for me to see," that should come across like a tremendous understatement. But two lines later, he cries "no one believes me, no not a single thing." That part cuts deep, since Passion Pit's 2009 debut LP, Manners, was an often dark and troubled record a lot of people chose not to take seriously due to its sugar-smacked synth pop and countless product placements. So it's no wonder that Angelakos' next words are "my brain is racing and I'll feel like I'll explode!" Three difficult years in the making, Gossamer is an overwhelming album about being overwhelmed, a bold and ultimately stunning torrent of maximalist musical ideas, repressed anger, and unchecked anxiety.
Perhaps it's fitting that Gossamer, so focused on failure and human frailty, should begin with a stumble. "Take a Walk" is a fairly by-the-numbers Passion Pit song. Nonetheless, there's a strange imbalance to it. The massed chorus of chipper vocals and the stoic, pavement-pounding verse feel mismatched. And while Angelakos' literal account of the financial troubles facing his family is gut-wrenching and brave, it amounts to a curious fit on an album that's otherwise entirely personal. As a one-off, it would be an intriguing character study. As the leadoff track on Gossamer, it feels misplaced.
Luckily, "I'll Be Alright" doesn't allow much time for the disappointment to register. The joy-buzzer synths and Angelakos' falsetto scan as instant-gratification Passion Pit, but on both a musical and lyrical level, it's a raising of the bar, far more complex than anything the band has done to date. Consider the combination of its surging chorus and the synapse-frying barrage of microscopic jumpcuts, and you might have the weirdest and catchiest band on Warp, and the most dejected if you're really paying attention. The first line of "I'll Be Alright" could be a retroactive assessment on the day-glo Manners, asking "Can you remember ever having any fun?/ Cause when it's all said and done/ I always believed we were/ But now I'm not so sure." The effect is initially disorienting and uncomfortable: Do you escape into the comforts of the music or give into the lurid thrill of confrontation?
Angelakos is no pop subversive. While he's been forthcoming about the autobiographical details that inspired Gossamer, within the auspices of Passion Pit, he seems incapable of dealing with them through anything other than pop's pleasure principle. This was true of the now comparatively restrained Manners, an album of strong melodies that worked in a fairly narrow stylistic range. On Gossamer, Passion Pit recast themselves as polyglots and pacesetters, tackling the currency of pop music head-on as a competitor rather than admiring it with a few well-placed press quotes. Gossamer is rife with dichotomy, one of which is that the hooks highest in fructose are lent to songs dealing with the most uncomfortable topic: money. While "Carried Away" proves Angelakos might not be Ezra Koenig in terms of cleverly deconstructing the interactions between the socially stratified, there's a thematic congruence in the occasionally forced rhyme within a song about saying all the wrong things. Later on, "Love Is Greed" is far more multi-layered than its title and hook ("If we really love ourselves/ How do you love somebody else?") initially indicate. Courtship is reduced to the search of "another person that's just yours for the taking," which is essentially a trenchant distillation of post-recession social science.
Gossamer does have humor in its perspective, but surprisingly little joy. As the penultimate track, you might expect the rafter-reaching chorus of "It's Not My Fault, I'm Happy" to deliver some kind of relief amidst the litany of disappointments and misunderstandings, but this is a record about things not working out as expected. It leads into the disquieting calm of closer "Where We Belong", where the title is explained by a blatant suicide pact ("And then I'm lifted up/ Out of the crimson tub/ The bath begins to drain/ And from the floor he prays away all my pain"). Meanwhile, "Mirrored Sea" siphons M83's rocket fuel and throws everything in reverse, a paralyzing descent into realizing the impossibility of escaping the lingering failures of youth ("Slipups in this town are like a sentence to life/ Like overhead insults or a cheating wife"). The overload of digital shoegaze abates for the message of a dispassionate vocoder: "everyone's alone."
If only it were that easy. Were Gossamer simply played out in Angelakos' head, it would probably turn out insufferably self-obsessed and tuneless like so many other "difficult" second albums. Though it doesn't make Gossamer a happy record, Angelakos writes with a truly affecting ability to make unflinching acknowledgments of his demons' effects on those closest to him. A substantial portion of Gossamer is simultaneous love letters and apologies addressed to his real-life girlfriend, and naturally they're couched within Passion Pit's most complicated arrangements to date. "You never once controlled me/ When all the others told me/ That if I kept on going I'd be dead," he sings before the platinum-plated wallop of a chorus on "Cry Like a Ghost", an admission that takes on a menacing tone as the bridge finds him awake from a blackout ("She says I screamed and that I raised my hand/ I never meant to, I wasn't even there").
Beyond that brief bit of violence, the love songs are desperate and very, very drunk. Were a more composed R&B singer given the liquid slow-jam "Constant Conversations", the sophistication of Angelakos' melodic transitions might overshadow a devastating verse detailing a remorseful alcoholic's account of a tired partner emptying drinks and issuing ultimatums: "If there's a bump in the road, you fix it/ But for me, well I'd just run off the road/ But tonight you've got me cornered/ And I haven't got a place to go." It makes the context of "On My Way" almost unbearably intimate, Angelakos proposing, "we'll consecrate this messy love," in a voice overpowering the delicate music-box arrangement of bells and whirs with promises of a better tomorrow.
And is that ever a mission statement for a record of passionate reactions to a messy life. Angelakos puts so much of himself into Gossamer that it couldn't help but be riddled with all-too-human imperfections: Sometimes you wish he'd pick a cleverer lyric, tone down the falsetto, or at least realize that it might be in his interests to try to be cool for once. Because even though Gossamer could not be more overt in its exploration of profoundly adult and bleak topics, all some people might choose to hear is how most of the melodies could still sell children's cereal.
We expect this sort of masculine reckoning from the likes of Matt Berninger, Britt Daniel, Bill Callahan, Hamilton Leithauser; gaunt, brooding men whose vocal austerity and general presence convey authority and wisdom. "Let's not try and figure out everything at once," Berninger sang on "Fake Empire", and it was a comforting statement from a guy who sounds like he's figured things out.
But Gossamer's music is meant to reflect its sense of encroaching panic, where you really feel like you'll explode if you don't figure out everything at once. Angelakos sings variations on "I'll be all right" and "everything will be OK" throughout, but they're not so much reassurance as commiseration. It's unclear whether you're supposed to cry on his shoulder or vice versa, but it actually makes Gossamer more reassuring. Anyone can manufacture hope through a slogan, but there's an empathy and humanity that simply can't be faked as Angelakos tries to figure out how to stay atop his life. It's hard to think of a more noble goal for a pop album. | 2012-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | July 23, 2012 | 8.4 | 63915266-8534-4e92-91be-0924869b4b17 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The incarcerated Watts rapper’s latest release, a collaboration with Mustard, is exultant and Dionysian. | The incarcerated Watts rapper’s latest release, a collaboration with Mustard, is exultant and Dionysian. | 03 Greedo: Still Summer in the Projects | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/03-greedo-still-summer-in-the-projects/ | Still Summer in the Projects | Just as 03 Greedo was getting a foothold in rap, he was sent away. Sentenced to 20 years for drug and gun possession, the already-prolific Watts rapper grew more so, amassing a cache of music to sustain his relevance during a long bid. Prison, as he saw it, is no excuse for inactivity. “Everything is strategic,” he said in a Noisey documentary. “When they look at me, they have to see an icon.”
Still Summer in the Projects, the second release from this trove, comes on the heels of Greedo’s brisk tape with Nef the Pharaoh, Porter 2 Grape, and offers a bracing contrast to last summer’s heart-rending God Level. Featuring an entire slate of beats from Mustard (née DJ), Still Summer in the Projects is often exultant and Dionysian. The lyrics are full of bedroom pregames, post-club wind downs, strip-club negotiations, and trap-house sex. It is not uncommon for a coke deal to fund an all-nighter on ecstasy.
Mustard and 03 Greedo make the most of each other’s talents; Greedo’s crooning and rapping melt into the plush spaces of Mustard’s sweltering cookout beats. “Grapevine” and “Bet I Walk” have liberating, improvisational flows, but Greedo is taut and controlled on “10 Purple Summers,” reeling off lines like, “I ain’t worried about no frivolous movement,” as if he’s invincible.
Greedo has an almost supernatural way with potent, bluesy melodies. Both gruff and graceful, his singsong raps straddle the line between Chief Keef’s growls and the honeyed coos of Ty Dolla $ign. In a suite of songs across the middle of the album (“Loaded,” “Getting Ready,” “In the Morning”), he sings as sweetly as ever. He performs with a joy that almost makes you forget that he’s a ward of the Texas prison system. And that’s kind of the point.
For most of the project, Greedo dances around his prison sentence, recalling something he discussed in the Noisey documentary: No one going to prison wants to spend their last precious moments free talking about going to prison, much less rapping about it. But on the closer, “Visions,” the crushing reality finally sets in. “Locked inside a cell with no windows/Hope I make it out of this prison/I’ll be coming out with a vengeance” he croons tenderly, promising us that “once I get out, I’ll be richer.” The song closes with a heartbreaking voicemail from prison: “I’ll be back sooner than May,” he says. Even inside a Texas cell, 03 Greedo is an optimist, transmitting visions of a brighter tomorrow. | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo / Interscope | April 24, 2019 | 7.6 | 6391792c-68ad-4f94-8ddf-87efd9ab0702 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Snoop’s new album, the latest in a quietly prolific period as he closes in on 50, reminds us of the simple pleasures of his still-virtuosic voice when set against booming, funk-inflected production. | Snoop’s new album, the latest in a quietly prolific period as he closes in on 50, reminds us of the simple pleasures of his still-virtuosic voice when set against booming, funk-inflected production. | Snoop Dogg: From tha Streets 2 tha Suites | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snoop-dogg-from-tha-streets-2-tha-suites/ | From tha Streets 2 tha Suites | In a skit early on Snoop Dogg’s second album, 1996’s Tha Doggfather, he bridles at someone’s suggestion that his production would grow “delicate” following the acrimonious Dr. Dre/Death Row split. “I don’t give a fuck about no beat,” he says. You, too, might be this defiant if your voice were so irresistibly pliable that you were allowed to cover Slick Rick on your debut album. And yet some of the beats on Doggfather are, in fact, delicate, leaving him unanchored from the heavy low end that was Doggystyle’s signature. It was a mistake that he would rarely make again: For the next 20-plus years, Snoop would identify the producers who could ferry him from era to era, yielding forward-thinking hits at the appropriate intervals to keep him from turning fully into a legacy act, even when it seems he would be perfectly happy becoming one.
From Tha Streets 2 Tha Suites, released last week with little ceremony, comes during a quietly prolific period as Snoop closes in on 50, and reminds of the reliably high floor that some booming, funk-inflected production and Snoop’s still-virtuosic voice provide. Streets pulls about half of its beats from the Bay Area, a fact that Snoop intermittently reflects in his slang and syntax. ProHoeZak produces and handles hook duty on the strip-club bait “Say It Witcha Booty” and on “Roaches In My Ashtray,” where he plays a serviceable faux-Nate Dogg; longtime collaborator Rick Rock is in predictably trunk-rattling form on opener “CEO.” And it’s the veteran duo the Mekanix who furnish the album’s best song, “Gang Signs,” a duet with the Sacramento rapper Mozzy so supremely bassy that its final minute, where Snoop talks idly to his engineer about how to tweak said bass and when to fly the hook back in, is as replayable as the chorus sections of many radio hits.
The more assertive fare is balanced by the lush, half-sung “Sittin’ On Blades” which, placed squarely in the middle, brings a tranquility to the album. But the rest of Streets pales slightly next to that song and “Gang Signs.” “Look Around,” the album’s penultimate song, is the one cut that scans as a genuine retread of a dozen superior ones in Snoop’s catalog. And the mogul talk, which dominates songs like “CEO” and “Get Yo Bread Up,” grows inevitably rote. Despite that the architecture––the beats combined with Snoop’s commitment to switching vocal approaches every eight or 12 bars––is a reliable safeguard against any real derailment. And then, of course, there’s the voice. Take the Eastsidaz reunion, “Fetty In the Bag.” Snoop’s opening verse has a passage of writing that grows almost comically lazy (“Twice as nice, never paying the price/Baking a cake––have a slice”) and yet retains the metronomic, head-nodding quality of his more engaged work, thanks to the gravity of his timbre and cadence. There are times Streets begs for the chip on Neva Left’s shoulder, or for a hint of I Wanna Thank Me’s sociopolitical bent. But, Streets seems to argue, summer is almost here, and to complain would be bad form.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Doggy Style | April 27, 2021 | 6.9 | 63979390-cdca-4732-9161-eb261fccae23 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The D.C. band's 1994 major label debut, long out of print, has been reissued by Dischord and DeSoto, and it has aged exceedingly well. | The D.C. band's 1994 major label debut, long out of print, has been reissued by Dischord and DeSoto, and it has aged exceedingly well. | Jawbox: For Your Own Special Sweetheart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13732-for-your-own-special-sweetheart/ | For Your Own Special Sweetheart | The eight-year career of Jawbox could be written as a cautionary tale: indie band signs to a big label, makes two great records that eventually fall out of print, and breaks up. But listening to Jawbox's freshly reissued 1994 major-label debut, For Your Own Special Sweetheart, it's difficult to conclude they made the wrong decision by recording this album for Atlantic. The obvious reason is cold, hard cash: Sweetheart might sound unassumingly direct, but it takes a lot of time and money to make a record this precise and balanced. The other reason is more nebulous, but no less relevant: You don't jump ship from a dogmatically anti-major label like Dischord to a behemoth like Atlantic without understanding that the next thing you do had better be really, really good. While a more naïve band might have diluted its sound to seek fame and fortune, Jawbox cashed in the chips on their shoulders and made their most uncompromising and ferocious record.
Sweetheart's return to Dischord reintroduces the album as a win-win prospect: a record with a mid-90s alt-rock budget, but none of that era's corny or diminishing relics. Bob Weston's thoughtful remaster retains the dynamic range of the original while breathing new life into its low end; Zach Barocas' kick drum finally feels like a punch in the chest. The essential B-sides from the Savory EP are included as well. Even the cover art has been revised, the dated sepia toned blow-up doll image of the original replaced by a solidly cast marble figure rendered in high-contrast grayscale.
The new cover is apt; FYOSS is downright sculptural in its attention to form and structure. The brilliance of FYOSS lies not in any one melody, guitar line, or drum fill but rather in the interaction between these elements. Every song is a thoughtfully interrelated system, an organic economy of sound, rhythm, and gesture. At times, once-distant guitar parts come together with such effortless strength that you can visualize guitarists J. Robbins and Bill Barbot bending the necks of their instruments in unison. Ted Nicely's impeccable production lends a subtle sheen to the album's pop sensibility but never dulls its harsh edges, revealing a band that is well-versed in both harmony and discord (no pun intended).
At its best, FYOSS compresses the energy of hardcore into something more nuanced and deliberate. "Savory" is a masterfully constructed study in tension and release, as Robbins' simple vocal melody is made infinitely more potent by layers of dissonant guitar chords, sparse bass, and violent, propulsive drumming. Even the song's angelic chorus seems subtly unresolved and menacing, though Robbins' and Barbot's guitars chime rather than stab. The guitar "solo" consists of little more than occasional muted feedback bursts, instead serving to emphasize the monolithic force of the band's rhythm section in the absence of Robbins' vocals. The J.G. Ballard-inspired "Motorist" narrates a car crash as metallic guitars jut out from a spare, skeletal frame. "Cruel Swing" sounds exactly like you'd think, Barocas absolutely pummeling his kit over a walking bass figure that sounds like it's challenging you to a fight. Album closer "Whitney Walks" contorts the limitations of Robbins' vocal range into a uniquely seething, uneasy kind of melancholy that perfectly prefigures the song's explosive finale.
The highlight of this reissue of Sweetheart, however, may very well be Savory B-side "68". For an odd-time-signature rock song, "68" is disarmingly elegant, to the point where you barely even notice that it's chugging along in 7/4. Here, you can understand why the Dismemberment Plan were quick to cite Jawbox as an influence: The improbable chord changes and impossible rhythmic ideas on FYOSS are rendered as seamless and intuitive as possible. Though the playing here is solid throughout, nothing about the record is flashy or unattainable-- restraint and discipline consistently best self-aware complexity.
While FYOSS itself doesn't sound dated, the notion that plainly recorded guitar, bass, drums, and vocals can add up to something extraordinary sometimes does. The onslaught of radio-friendly "alternative" bands that followed Jawbox has left us understandably wary of well-produced, punk-informed rock music with no obvious quirks or departures. But FYOSS has aged well precisely because it did not pander to the aesthetic fads of its time-- mainstream or underground. Instead, Jawbox honed their sound, maximized the resources at their disposal, and made a record that hides behind no extraneous instruments, sounds, or ideologies. | 2009-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dischord / DeSoto | November 24, 2009 | 9.3 | 6397cd32-8df0-49e6-93ef-a34cd0752d2d | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Trading his customary piano for a mostly electronic palette, the Berlin composer conjures an air of stillness and solitude. The results are both meditative and, at three hours long, sprawling. | Trading his customary piano for a mostly electronic palette, the Berlin composer conjures an air of stillness and solitude. The results are both meditative and, at three hours long, sprawling. | Nils Frahm: Music for Animals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nils-frahm-music-for-animals/ | Music for Animals | Nils Frahm’s work lives in the gray area between ambient, neoclassical, and other gossamer styles of experimental music. The Berlin-based composer and producer’s output tends to recall Philip Glass and Aphex Twin in equal measure, but he has released everything from dubby downtempo to theater scores. Though he performs on a battery of synthesizers, keyboards, and electronic gizmos, he’s most closely associated with the piano, both as a performer—last year’s Old Friends, New Friends was just the latest in a long line of solo piano recordings—and as the founder of Piano Day, an international celebration of the instrument. But his new album, Music for Animals, features no piano at all. Centered on a largely electronic palette, Frahm’s first collection of fresh material in four years is more evocative of Warp Records than it is of Erik Satie.
Frahm began recording Music for Animals during the first year of the pandemic, when lockdowns put much of daily life on hold, and he seems to have found inspiration in the solitude. His tempos are uniformly slow, his track lengths long—four songs run more than 20 minutes apiece—and his patterns repetitive; he’s clearly in no hurry to get anywhere. His patience is palpable on “Stepping Stone,” where airy drones are layered with jagged washes of glass harmonica played by his wife, Nina. Her contributions inject a welcome spirit of collaboration into the otherwise introverted endeavor, which sometimes risks playing like it was conceived without an audience in mind.
As is the case with most of Frahm’s music, the pieces here are elegant and eminently tasteful, if occasionally a little too buttoned up. “Sheep in Black and White” demonstrates his penchant for tranquility, stretching out a tentative synth riff that slowly disintegrates over the course of 24 minutes. “World of Squares” offsets lush monophonic synths with cloudy strings in a way that’s reminiscent of a particularly subtle strain of ’90s ambient techno. Music For Animals is meditative and sprawling. But an essence of something cinematically sinister darts beneath its frosty surface, and this dark edge proves to be one of its more alluring aspects.
Still, at more than three hours long, Music for Animals is difficult to digest in its entirety; there’s a fine line between patient and dull. Frahm’s extended track lengths are presumably meant to foster immersion, but after a while, they come to seem indulgent. For all the sumptuousness of his materials, there’s not enough happening to merit stretching them out so long; sitting with Frahm’s hermetic album can feel like watching exquisitely hued paint dry. | 2022-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Leiter / BMG | September 23, 2022 | 6.4 | 639c1311-6d5f-495f-863a-a7d88e54d5c8 | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
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 intersection of pop and trip-hop and love and memory in a stellar record from 1996. | 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 intersection of pop and trip-hop and love and memory in a stellar record from 1996. | Everything But the Girl: Walking Wounded | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-but-the-girl-walking-wounded/ | Walking Wounded | Half a dozen Tracey Thorns slouch around a chrome-walled hotel suite in the video for “Wrong.” They all wear a snakeskin-print shirt-dress, and have the same wilted quiff kissing their brow. Hanging in the background, a handful of Ben Watts watch every move the Thorns make. There he is, her then-lover, crouching on the floor, leaning against a wall, sitting on a kitchen counter. In one shot, two of him lean over Thorn’s shoulders, miming her gentle line, “I wanted to know what he was like,” as she gazes at the floor. Each version of the two bandmates has a see-through quality to them; they are ghosts to one another and to the crowd of extras that dance around them on the chorus: “Wherever you go I will follow you/’Cause I was wrong.”
The people we love are made up equally of flesh, blood, and memories. The myriad ways time and trauma can impact a relationship and fracture one’s sense of self is the territory that Walking Wounded stalks. Released in May 1996, the eighth album from UK duo Everything But the Girl is the sound of picking up the pieces and trying to puzzle them back together—if they’ll fit at all. At the time, the UK charts were dominated by Oasis’s lad rock and the Lighthouse Family’s easy-listening hits: two very different examples of historical rehashes. Trip-hop pioneers Tricky and Massive Attack were critical darlings, but their early experimental releases skewed closer to soul and hip-hop. An opportunity to connect the dots and breath new life into pop had long been brewing.
While “Wrong,” a song about pushing love to its breaking point, elevated its tensions with a house piano riff, the lion’s share of Walking Wounded draws on downtempo, drum ‘n’ bass, and trip-hop. On paper, compressing the wide open space of those then-nascent sounds into a pop format could’ve been a disaster. But words don’t do justice to the emotional multiplicity—hurt but warm, worn but rich—of Thorn’s voice, and how seamlessly she made a home for herself amid Watt’s stark sonic architecture.
Thorn and Watt’s songwriting, which had traced feminist, left-wing, and diaristic lines on their previous seven albums, was mature enough on Walking Wounded to trawl the corners of their psyches in a way that felt in conversation with the music. It was precisely the album’s use of space that allowed them both to stretch out and reflect on what it really means to love someone, and what sustaining that connection requires.
Despite the album’s vulnerability, the dialogue that circled Walking Wounded at the time of its release focused on the indie-pop band’s seemingly sudden embrace of the dance floor. They’d experimented with jazz, bossa nova, soul, and orchestral music before, but this youthful new direction catapulted them to a previously unseen level of stardom. The story of their ascent usually goes like this: New York house legend Todd Terry’s ginormous remix of their song “Missing,” off their 1994 album Amplified Heart, led to the hasty creation of the club-inspired Walking Wounded. While Terry certainly set the stage for “Wrong,” like all come-up stories, it’s heavily abridged.
Thorn and Watt became one another’s muse more or less as soon as they met at university in 1981. They were both signed to the same label: Thorn with post-punk group Marine Girls, a favorite of Kurt Cobain, and Watt as a solo folk artist who collaborated with Robert Wyatt. As they bonded over their shared antipathy towards rock’s hegemony, a romantic and musical partnership grew. Together, they were interested in exploring hybrid sounds, not replicating the status quo. Their label, however, Blanco y Negro—a subsidiary of WEA/Warner Music—wanted pop hits and applied the kind of pressure that would eat away at anyone’s confidence. Six albums in, with the release of 1991’s lukewarm, tour-life-inspired Worldwide, their music had hit a nostalgic tone. But then, in the summer of 1992, Watt was diagnosed with an extremely rare and life-threatening autoimmune disorder called Churg-Strauss Syndrome. He had to have 80% of his intestines removed and spent months in intensive care, including a series of relapses. His recovery was long and slow, and involved a radically restricted diet.
In 1993, as he adjusted to his new life, Watt got increasingly into computers and sequencers, which was the start of his journey to becoming a producer. Midway through the year, Thorn received an invitation to provide guest vocals on what would become Massive Attack’s second album, Protection. When she first heard the music for the title track, she was struck: “I’m not sure whether I have ever heard a piece of music this slow and empty before,” she recalls in her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen. The song she wrote for it drew on her feelings for Watt as he clawed his way back to health.
Earlier that summer, the pair had travelled to Oxfordshire to collaborate with Fairport Convention on a festival performance. Seeing the ’60s British folk group operate outside of the suffocating demands of a major label reminded Thorn and Watt of their own DIY beginnings, and helped them shed their insecurities. “Like in the old days, we were making a record again because we NEEDED to,” wrote Thorn in her memoir.
The album that followed, 1994’s Amplified Heart, addressed the distress of Watt’s brush with death from the perspective of both the patient and the caregiver (while Thorn often did the majority of the lyric writing, on this album it was 50/50). Yet sonically, it turned out closer to Fairport Convention’s yearning folk than Massive Attack’s proto trip-hop. The one song that had more of a clubby edge to it was the cowbell and acoustic guitar-led “Missing.”
While everyone agreed it should be the lead single, it was their American label that really heard the potential in “Missing”: Atlantic commissioned the Todd Terry remix, which they included on a 12" for the US market in the second half of 1994. Conversely, WEA decided it was the end of the road for the band in the UK and, just like that, dropped them.
“Missing” was not an overnight hit. It wasn’t until early 1995, when Thorn was in New York with Massive Attack doing promo, that there was an inkling that Todd Terry’s fairly loyal take on the song might have legs. (“The song was already so powerful,” Terry said later. “I just added a beat and a bassline. I’ve always felt that house music has both a radio and club feel simultaneously.”) Massive Attack’s Daddy G heard it in a club and reported back to Thorn that it sounded like a dance floor hit. Between interview commitments with Massive Attack, she wrote “Single” in her hotel room. It set a tone for Walking Wounded before the album had even swam into focus: one of struggling to be seen as—to see yourself as—an individual in the context of a relationship. Thorn would later sing the lyrics over a muted sax-sounding synth and a languid trip-hop beat: “And how am I without you?/Am I more myself or less myself?/I feel younger, louder/Like I don't always connect.”
In spring 1995, Thorn returned to New York with Watt, where they spent a couple of months working on more ideas for Walking Wounded. During that trip, they learned that Terry’s remix had blown up in Miami and, in fact, across the States, breaking out of the clubs and into the charts. Worldwide, it went on to sell 3 million copies.
In the months before “Missing” mania hit the UK, Watt had dived headfirst into London’s drum ‘n’ bass scene. He heard DJs like Fabio and Doc Scott at atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass pioneer LTJ Bukem’s night Speed, and connected with the freeform flow of the sound that Bukem has compared with jazz. His enthusiasm eventually convinced Thorn to join him at the club night. “It wasn’t a rock gig, and it wasn’t a rave—it felt like something new again,” she wrote in her memoir. “Strange and yet familiar, it felt possible.”
The mental space that these new encounters cracked open can be observed in the clarity with which both Thorn and Watt approached their songwriting on Walking Wounded. On the breezy “Flipside,” which features lyrics by Watt and scratching by Scottish producer Howie B, the moment Watt’s life got turned upside down is directly referenced: “London, summer ’92/I think I’ve changed a lot since then, do you?” In the next verse, Watt writes that he is “blasted land,” comparing himself to a coastline that’s constantly shifting at the mercy of the sea. It’s a poetic reminder that the processing of trauma can shape you as much as the incident itself.
In Thorn’s mouth, the lyrics serve to underline that Watt’s near-death experience left them both reeling, questioning everything they used to know. The flipside to “Flipside” comes in the form of a slo-mo drum ‘n’ bass number called “Big Deal.” Written by Thorn, she uses the titular phrase sarcastically in an attempt to deliver a reality check. With an air of frustration, she seems to sing of Watt’s search for answers in the club: “You say you wanna get cured, you wanna turn off your head/Oh and you say it hurts, and you feel unsure/First you doubt yourself and then you doubt her/Big deal, that's the way we all feel.” Everyone goes through trauma in some form or other, the song suggests, what matters is giving one another the space to work through it.
The strength of Walking Wounded lies in exactly that. Each Everything But the Girl album has its own style and story, but the one on which Thorn and Watt’s individual gifts shine brightest is the one on which they stripped everything back. They shared their knottiest feelings, created dialogue with skeletal new sounds, and made the record in a much more insular way than they ever had previously. Its timely sonics and emotionally wrought themes spoke as much to teenagers, myself included, as it did the band’s adult contemporaries (Bristol drum ‘n’ bass head Roni Size gave it thumbs up). Walking Wounded remains Thorn and Watt’s biggest-selling album with worldwide sales of 1.3 million. It did the kind of well that prompted U2 to ask them to be their tour support, something they ended up turning down because, well, they needed some space. Thorn and Watt’s relationship had been tied to their career from the very beginning, and it was time to listen to the cries for independence that Walking Wounded so clearly contained. Instead of going on tour, they started a family, and set the wheels in motion for their separate careers to come. | 2019-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Virgin | March 3, 2019 | 9 | 63a38b15-9309-44aa-9b1b-10ac84f4e4e5 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
It’s Great to be Alive!, the sprawling, three-plus hour document of Drive-By Truckers’s 2014 three-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, is a carefully curated record that does a great job pretending to be a raw, unfettered representation of a single night. | It’s Great to be Alive!, the sprawling, three-plus hour document of Drive-By Truckers’s 2014 three-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, is a carefully curated record that does a great job pretending to be a raw, unfettered representation of a single night. | Drive-By Truckers: It’s Great To Be Alive! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21083-its-great-to-be-alive/ | It’s Great To Be Alive! | Halfway through the Drive-By Truckers' new live record, Patterson Hood abruptly stops singing four minutes into “Goode’s Field Road”, a dark song with a paint-by-numbers Truckers premise: a junkyard operator makes some bad decisions and ends up committing suicide to avoid being sent to jail. “He was a god-fearing man, he was a family man, he was a hardworking man, trying to raise his family and support everybody the best he could in difficult times and a troubled economy in North Alabama,” Hood says, now preaching in front of the band’s minor-chord sludge. By the time Hood finishes expounding on various histories—social, economic, cultural—of his beloved Lauderdale County, the reason for his very un-rock 'n' roll professorial digression becomes clear: sometimes a story can’t be told in just a song.
There are two or three moments like this at every Drive-By Truckers concert, when Patterson Hood the storyteller interrupts Patterson Hood the songwriter, cramming background information that his songs—novelistic in detail, cinematic in scope—can’t quite contain on their own. That’s because at their heart, the Drive-By Truckers are a storytelling band. It’s easy enough to compare Hood to a prolific novelist and Cooley to a modernist poet, but most of their songs could just easily be labeled: based on a true story. That’s the central tenet of the Hood and Cooley’s indignant premise when they first started the Drive-By Truckers in the post-grunge mid-late 90’s: the idea that a young scrappy band can write heroic songs about their grandparents. Why look further than that?
The stories collected on It’s Great to be Alive!, the sprawling, three-plus hour document of the Drive-By Truckers’ 2014 three-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium,are tall-tales mumbled by friends at the bar, family legends passed on through generations, anecdotes from neighbors romanticized and made grand. As such, a Drive-By Truckers concert can feel like a punk staging of the Southern oral tradition that takes place on front-porches and in rocking chairs. Hood and Cooley act out the role of grizzled elders with countless tales up their sleeve, taking turns swapping their story-songs without any semblance of a setlist. That’s why Truckers shows can also be occasionally exhausting: Sometimes you might just not be in the mood to hear Grandpa Hood launch into that seven minute story about Mary Alice and her chemo treatments again.
This is hardly the first live record the Truckers has released in its near 20-year history. It is, however, the first time the band has tried to faithfully replicate what it feels like to attend a Drive-By Truckers concert. The material, which spans from “Runaway Train”, a song by the pre-Truckers late-80’s incarnation Adam’s House Cat, to a half-dozen selections from last year’s English Oceans, is performed by the slimmer, five-piece lineup the band has used since 2012, after various departures, firings and lineup changes. On stage the band has reworked much of its back-catalogue to fit its current streamlined incarnation, which has grown more sophisticated and elegant in the studio as of late (their last few records contain more piano and banjo than distorted guitar feedback). An unhinged rant like “Sink Hole” is now a precise polemic, whereas the mournful pedal-steel coda to “A Ghost to Most” is now a freewheeling, two-guitar improvisation. The modern-day Truckers are particularly good at such shape-shifting, switching from sloppy to stately from one song to the next.
It’s Great to be Alive! is the sound of a veteran band in complete command of its back-catalog. “Box of Spiders” is reimagined as a country-soul centerpiece, another song that gains multitudes when prefaced with Hood’s four minute story about his relatives. “Sounds Better In The Song” is a revelation in its prickly full-band arrangement, and “The Living Bubba,” Hood’s ode to a stubborn musician slowly dying of AIDS, sounds more moving with each passing year, an anthem of persistence and survival for a road-weary band still chugging on.
A carefully curated setlist can go a long way, and the tracklisting here benefits a great deal from some post-hoc sequencing. Tales of defeat and struggle promptly segue into stories of defiance and hope. Soul ballads bleed into rockabilly raves. A song like “Goode’s Field Road” is followed by “Uncle Frank”. Although Cooley’s “Uncle Frank” takes place more than 50 years before Hood’s “Goode’s Field Road”, the two stories may nearly be identical: North Alabama tragedies filled with depression and heartless bureaucracy that conclude with suicide. The one-two pairing serves as a quiet, powerful comment on Southern change and progress, or lack thereof. Like the best live records, It’s Great to be Alive! is a carefully curated document that does a great job pretending to be a raw, unfettered documentation of a single night.
As its partially sarcastic, partially dead-serious title suggests, It’s Great to be Alive! serves as a pointed testament to the Drive-By Truckers’ longevity and continuing relevance. A little less than half of the songs on the record come from the band’s post-Jason Isbell period, from their 2008 subtle masterwork Brighter Than Creation’s Dark onward. The subtle interpersonal drama in recent songs like “Primer Coat” and “Mercy Buckets” are every bit as urgent as older, anthemic statements like “Tornadoes” and “Women Without Whiskey”. Musicians will forever insist that their more recent work holds up alongside their classic material. It’s Great to be Alive! is proof that the Drive-By Truckers’ discography is the rare case where such wishful thinking actually proves true.
“Tell me another story,” Cooley sings towards the very beginning of their latest live record. “Tell me about the lows and the highs.” The Drive-By Truckers spend the rest of It’s Great to be Alive! proving that they’ve always honored that modest request better than anyone. | 2015-10-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | October 12, 2015 | 8 | 63a569c0-227a-4aec-8523-1e8e22d0d2fb | Jonathan Bernstein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-bernstein/ | null |
One of the most quietly influential rappers of the last ten years maintains cruising altitude. | One of the most quietly influential rappers of the last ten years maintains cruising altitude. | Wiz Khalifa: Fly Times, Vol. 1: The Good Fly Young | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiz-khalifa-fly-times-vol-1-the-good-fly-young/ | Fly Times, Vol. 1: The Good Fly Young | It’s been a long time since it was cool to like Wiz Khalifa. The Pittsburgh rapper’s two most streamed tracks on Spotify are a good indication of his current clout level: the Charlie Puth-featuring “See You Again” from the Furious 7 soundtrack and the Hot Topic-approved posse cut “Sucker for Pain” from Suicide Squad. Being a Wiz fan in 2019, in other words, gets you about as much respect as wearing a Harley Quinn shirt in public or slapping a Paul Walker memorial bumper stacker on your Nissan Skyline.
There’s an alternate universe in which Wiz Khalifa fell off the face of the Earth entirely, like his fellow 2010 XXL Freshman Pill, or became a full-time marijuana farmer like the fizzled-out Internet sensation Jackie Chain, who debuted a year after “Say Yeah” with his own trance-sampling single. But instead, Cameron Jibril Thomaz signed with Warner, dropped a single that sampled Alice DJ’s “Better Off Alone,” ended his relationship with Warner, released an independent mixtape that flipped everything from Camp Rock to the Chrono Trigger score, signed with Atlantic, and became a star off a Super Bowl anthem. Somehow, throughout rap’s tumultuous and transformative last decade, Wiz has persisted.
His appeal was always in his effortlessness—every syllable crisply annunciated, each bar delivered with a little melody. Khalifa claims Pittsburgh, but he’s also an army brat; his voice is accentless, and there’s little in the way of regional flair to his music. His greatest assets are malleability and flexibility, which have allowed him to try out a variety of styles and subgenres, from the relaxed stoner rap of Kush and Orange Juice to the Top 40 trap of “We Dem Boyz.”
This adventurousness has made Wiz Khalifa one of the most quietly influential rappers of the last ten years. His Taylor Gang record label revived the career of Juicy J, introduced us to Ty Dolla $ign, and he was one of the first mainstream acts to work with the likes of SpaceGhostPurrp, Chief Keef, and Thundercat. Many a millennial—this one included—learned to roll a perfect joint by watching the now-canonical “How to Roll a Perfect Joint with Wiz Khalifa.”
But at his laziest, Wiz Khalifa’s inability to commit to a single style can leave his albums unfocused, as on last year’s woeful Rolling Papers 2. Khalifa’s latest tape, Fly Times, Vol. 1: The Good Fly Young, exceeds the expectations set by his less-than-topshelf recent output and his history of incessant trend-hopping. There’s a consistency here that seems to suggest a growing maturity on the part of Khalifa who, at thirty-one, is a bit of an elder in the game.
With the exception of the TM88-assisted “Big Pride (Bag Talk),” almost nothing here feels like a bid for a spot on Rap Caviar. Instead, Fly Times goes for something closer to the chilled-out G-funk of Kush and Orange Juice, but with more of a throwback R&B flavor: whiny keys, MIDI strings, and copious amounts of 808 cowbell. The lyrics aren’t especially profound, but that’s never really been the point of Wiz Khalifa’s music—Fly Times is about the vibe above all else.
There are collaborations with regular members of Khalifa’s stable—Problem, Curren$y, Ty Dolla $ign—but more space is given to emerging artists. Six of the tape’s fourteen tracks showcase vocalist and Taylor Gang signee Young Deji. Two feature THEMXXNLIGHT, a soulful duo of twin brothers who seem like Taylor Gang’s answer to indistinguishable, OVO-approved R&B acts like Majid Jordan and dvsn. Both artists help flesh out the atmosphere, but neither offers anything substantial. The best of the guest hooks is by Houston rapper and Sauce Twinz affiliate Sosamann on “Taylor Life.” Sosamann’s voice is everything Khalifa’s isn’t—textured, drawling, and marked by the unmistakable flavor of his hometown—and he plays foil to Wiz like Curren$y has done for a decade.
If Wiz Khalifa’s career has proved anything, it’s that stoners are like puppies: easy to please and loyal as hell. Luckily for Wiz Khalifa, the critical reception of his music has never mattered that much—so long as it burns easy and makes you feel good, even mid is acceptable. | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | April 27, 2019 | 6.9 | 63a57689-da2b-4f5c-a7e3-2e87e9bd7b3c | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Birds Outside Sang is an unassuming, deeply personal record that manages to shoehorn some big ideas into three-minute pop songs. It’s an album that invites us to appreciate the mundane, to look out at the world and be awed by the majesty and fragility of it all. | The Birds Outside Sang is an unassuming, deeply personal record that manages to shoehorn some big ideas into three-minute pop songs. It’s an album that invites us to appreciate the mundane, to look out at the world and be awed by the majesty and fragility of it all. | Florist: The Birds Outside Sang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21445-the-birds-outside-sang/ | The Birds Outside Sang | Emily Sprague is barely of drinking age but she can come across like an old soul, perhaps because she’s accomplished a great deal in the last few years. At the age of 17, she released a series of folk scribblings under her own name and began writing and recording with bandmates under the name Florist. Shortly after relocating to Brooklyn in 2013, Sprague was the victim of a hit-and-run cycling accident that left her in a neck brace and unable to use her left arm. Arriving two years later, Florist’s debut full-length, The Birds Outside Sang reads like a record of Sprague’s brush with mortality and slow recovery. It’s an album that invites us to appreciate the mundane, to look out at the world and be awed by the majesty and fragility of it all.
Most of its first half chronicles the misery and isolation of convalescence; its often claustrophobic sound evokes a bedroom full of stale air. Many songs are corporeal in their fixations—blood, bones, and body parts make frequent appearances, while the world outside remains fixed behind a pane of glass. "Morning birds sing songs like Mrs. Robinson/ Inside my head I’m a child again/ But there’s a pill for that," Sprague sings on the title track, the interior and exterior blurring into a medicated haze. Sprague is skilled at drawing us into her perspective with just a few words: She tends to state things plainly, in a manner that suits her often stoic delivery. Even the recounting of her accident is detached ("The rain is falling at the perfect speed/ The cars are driving at the perfect speed/ My legs are moving at the perfect speed/ My arm is moving at the perfect speed"). When she adds emphasis, it carries real weight, like the way she draws out the phrase "It’s painful" before following up with "But I don’t feel pain at all" on the haunting "A Hospital + Crucifix Made of Plastic."
Sprague wrote mostly on the keyboard while her arm was healing, and many of these songs consist of skeletal arrangements built around a single organ or synth line. Despite their simplicity, some of the album's more minimal songs are among the most memorable: the spare opener "Dark Light," the slow-burning dirge "The Birds Outside Sang," and the plunky fever dream "Thank You." Warmth creeps into the album's second half, which leans on reverb-soaked guitars and looser arrangements. There’s melancholy here too but also a much-needed goofy playfulness. "Please come quick, I’ve stuck my head in the banister again," Sprague sings on "White Light Doorway," before admitting, "I just wanted to know what it would feel like/ With one part of my body alive."
As the album’s sound thaws, Sprague perspective broadens, taking in the beauty of "tall trees," "cold lakes," and a "stone, skipping slow"; by observing the vitality around her, she learns to appreciate her own. "Thunderstorms, a friendly thing that reminds me I could be dead," Sprague sings at the outset of the record’s denouement, "Only a Prayer Nothing More." By the song’s close, she’s able to sum up the entire album neatly in a couplet: "I thought that I saw the other side/ But it was only sunlight in my eyes."
The Birds Outside Sang doesn’t break much new ground nor does it aim to. It’s an unassuming, deeply personal record that manages to shoehorn some big ideas into three-minute pop songs. In so doing, it recalls some of indie’s turn-of-the-millennium high water marks: Sprague’s reverence for the natural world recalls Phil Elverum’s work under the Microphones moniker, while the album’s shut-in, confessional feel owes a debt to early Bright Eyes. Even so, The Birds Outside Sang quietly announces the arrival of a young songwriter whose voice is very much her own. It should be interesting to watch it develop. | 2016-01-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Double Double Whammy | January 25, 2016 | 7.3 | 63a5aebc-9018-4135-9950-b63702025d73 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The myth-skewing, Oakland-based artist is a chameleonic pop singer on her third album. Whimsical and urgent, these are fairy tales meant to wake us up. | The myth-skewing, Oakland-based artist is a chameleonic pop singer on her third album. Whimsical and urgent, these are fairy tales meant to wake us up. | SPELLLING: The Turning Wheel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spellling-the-turning-wheel/ | The Turning Wheel | Oakland-based artist Chrystia Cabral, who makes music as SPELLLING, has a knack for spinning fairy tales into jagged and reflective truths. In her lyrics, picture-book scenery and happy endings are swapped with existential longing, political criticism, and unsparing self-questioning. She often incorporates pop music itself as another myth to retell slantwise. On 2019’s Mazy Fly, for instance, she cast lines from an upbeat Paul McCartney song into a dark exploration of the Atlantic slave trade: “Hang our hands across the water,” she sang in “Haunted Water,” subverting Macca’s lyrics with a simple but cutting verb choice to address the deadly history that brought Africans to the Americas: “Hang our hands across the sky.”
SPELLLING’s ambitious third album, The Turning Wheel, serves as a culmination of her myth-skewing sensibility, with decidedly more hi-fi production. The record’s title echoes a line from “Rumpelstiltskin,” in which an imp spins straw into gold at a high human price—a first-born child. “So much about the [songwriting] process is about discovering who I am,” Cabral said in a 2018 interview, and the spinning wheel appears in her lyrics as a spiral of sturm und drang that her characters must navigate on their quests toward self-knowledge. “When I’m complete/I think I’ve found my way around/This Mortal Coil,” she sings on the show-stopping “Revolution,” and the words could be her way of name-checking both the Shakespearian symbol of struggle and the foundational indie-pop group—she invites us to listen for these layers of meaning, to draw our own connections.
On her previous albums, 2017’s Pantheon of Me and Mazy Fly, Cabral looped her voice over swampy chords played on two primary synthesizers—the compact microKORG and a vintage Juno-106—both of which contributed to the thin, bedroom-pop atmosphere of the music. On The Turning Wheel, Cabral favors the fuller tones of a piano. With horns, strings, harps, banjo, and bassoon following in her wake, she reintroduces herself as a chameleonic pop singer. The album’s first half is gleeful, soaring. “Emperor With an Egg” starts like a slow jam before speeding into a chorus that might sound at home on a mid-2000s crossover indie track. The velvety drum-machine ambience of the second half evokes her earlier work, but the crisper production is dramatically more dynamic. A weary song about hard work, “Magic Act” brightens when Cabral sings about turning her “brain [into] a garden,” the soundscape so lush that it feels like its own habitat apart from the rest of the album, with flutters of high-hat and gravelly low notes digging in the soil.
For all its high concepts and ornate orchestration, the true star of The Turning Wheel is Cabral’s voice. We hear her in clearer relief than ever before—ranging, distinctive, and unafraid to show her influences. Her breathy, pinched delivery on the phenomenal opener “Little Deer” suggests Kate Bush and even Marilyn Monroe, another player in the American mythology, while her twee intonations at the beginning of the title track point toward the delicate, chamber-pop records of Anohni. Rather than sounding derivative, Cabral tries on these familiar sounds like meticulous costumes. Her own identity is unmistakable—an actor you recognize from role to role.
While The Turning Wheel was originally planned for release in September of last year, its whimsical presentation and urgent, socially conscious lyrics give it a timeless feeling. There is no fantasy in Cabral’s pop packaging; we meet characters who are in “grave danger” because they’re “waving wands with wizards,” viewing a troubled earth from “high in a tower we call America.” We hear of happily-ever-after concepts like “destiny” and “legacy,” but before her characters can even contemplate a happy ending, they first must “crawl into the daylight.” Cabral’s folklore reminds us that life is arduous, long and full of unexpected beauty, if we just open our eyes to it. Fairy tales are not always comforting—some are written in order to wake us up.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | June 28, 2021 | 7.5 | 63abad64-d99a-4adb-9c70-d9b79de66694 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
On her second album, the sophisticated art-rock singer steps toward the center of her own songs, thanks in part to production from Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner. | On her second album, the sophisticated art-rock singer steps toward the center of her own songs, thanks in part to production from Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner. | Madeline Kenney: Perfect Shapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madeline-kenney-perfect-shapes/ | Perfect Shapes | “Cut Me Off,” an early standout from Perfect Shapes, the second album from art-rock songwriter Madeline Kenney, begins with an order: “Wait,” commands a mechanized voice at a crosswalk, counting down the seconds until Kenney can move. But at last, she lashes through the guitar lines that seem to have looped around her legs. “Don’t cut me off,” the North Carolina-via-West Coast singer counters, establishing rules of her own. By song’s end, she’s found her stride and momentum. “I gotta good thing going now,” she sings, backed by bright harmonies. The line is a personal affirmation, a way for Kenney to steel herself against distractions. But it also serves as a blanket statement for Kenney’s progress on Perfect Shapes, a set of 10 patiently simmering and ambitiously structured songs that offer a new image of self-assurance.
Tory Y Moi founder Chaz Bundick produced Kenney’s debut, 2017’s Night Night at the First Landing. Obscured by layers of fuzzy guitar, with her voice low in the mix, she often didn’t sound like the star of her own songs. But Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner produced all but one of the songs on Perfect Shapes, adding bass, guitar, and synthesizer. Kenney’s frayed riffs still form the backbone of these songs, rising to the top of the spiky “I Went Home,” but she surrounds them with more sophisticated melodic cascades. With Kenney’s smooth voice now at the center of these tunes, Wasner adds her touch for tastefully ornate arrangements. Fluttering saxophone parts from Wasner’s Wye Oak compatriot, Andy Stack, dapple “No Weekend” with light, shining through the spaces between Wasner’s relaxed bass and Kenney’s glistening guitar. As its stuttering beat and ascendant harmonies move over foamy synths, “The Flavor of the Fruit Tree” is effervescent.
These careful layers help frame the distance Kenney keeps from her subjects, as she balances the hyper-specific with the hyper-relatable. Kenney’s wide-angle lens makes it easy to apply her observations to one’s own life, even when these songs stem from specific people and circumstances. She opens “No Weekend” with a stanza about not getting to enjoy supposed days off for being so overextended—“I’m sorry, I can’t go out/I don’t know where my time goes/I’m in the hustle to my elbows”—before she captures the unease of being tempted by old habits. During “Cut Me Off,” when she sings “Don’t cut me off/I’m in my own time,” she’s telling, not asking. Especially in the rising gig economy, establishing personal boundaries can feel frightening, but Kenney does so with cool aplomb.
Kenney maintains an unhurried pace across Perfect Shapes, but don’t mistake her deliberate moves for any sort of lacking. “They’re calling me empty/Just because I know my own limits,” she counters during “Overhead,” setting another guideline for life. On Perfect Shapes, Kenney builds a comforting space for her own reflection and growth. It reflects a welcome boost in confidence, Kenney at last stepping onto the pedestal of her own design. | 2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | October 8, 2018 | 7.2 | 63af1d23-460c-4fd4-ab8e-e2e9abacd65a | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The long-awaited sequel to the duo’s classic debut contains bursts of inspired lyricism, but a lack of chemistry and uninspired production make this a disappointing follow-up. | The long-awaited sequel to the duo’s classic debut contains bursts of inspired lyricism, but a lack of chemistry and uninspired production make this a disappointing follow-up. | Black Star: No Fear of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-star-no-fear-of-time/ | No Fear of Time | Black Star have always been preoccupied with the passage of time. Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) and Talib Kweli’s 1998 debut Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star tied references to Black popular culture from across eras—the 1997 drama Eve’s Bayou, DJ Clue mixtapes, Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti’s “Black Man’s Cry,” and Toni Morrison novels—to a then-evolving consciousness within hip-hop in general and the streets of Brooklyn in particular. Across the album, Bey and Kweli balanced fierce intellect with a perceived sense of duty in their quest to protect hip-hop culture from the Diddy-led shiny suit era. There was an expansiveness to their rhymes and interplay, especially on songs like “Astronomy (8th Light)” and “Thieves in The Night,” where both rappers displayed an urgency to combat violence, ignorance, and commercialism with patois and àses. They weren’t the first or the last to take up this mantle, and the progressive fervor in their lyrics was slightly muted when it came to gender, but Bey and Kweli’s youthful vigor cut the distance between a corner cipher and an issue of the defunct Brooklyn newspaper The City Sun.
24 years after releasing this debut, Bey and Kweli are now internationally recognized icons of rap, activism, and entertainment. Bey pursued film and television projects and released four solo albums before threatening retirement in 2016, while Kweli attempted to find his footing between the underground and mainstream, eventually founding his own label. Both men have faced their share of controversy—child support lawsuits for Bey and harassment charges, sexual and otherwise, for Kweli. But through it all, the legacy of Black Star has persisted and, thanks to their long-awaited sophomore album No Fear of Time, lives on for a new generation.
On paper, Black Star’s return is fortuitous. The world is in a state of disrepair: racism still runs rampant and the Republican party is attempting to dismantle decades worth of civil rights legislation. Theoretically, the people need Black Star now more than ever. Bey and Kweli work best when they spin righteous indignation into catharsis and beauty. The ire in Kweli’s voice when he eviscerates Confederates and Nazis on “So be it” and the smirk in Bey’s voice when he calls out Satan on “Yonders” recall the dizzying heights of their debut. It would be unfair to expect the nearly 50-year-old rappers to come with the same energy they had in their 20s, but in its best moments, No Fear flips this assumption inside out, facilitating a thoughtfulness that ripples and flows with the steady rhythm of high tide in the moonlight.
But while there are bursts of inspired music across the album, the duo’s old-school sensibilities cut the other way as well. Much has been made of their decision to forego releasing No Fear on traditional streaming platforms, but lines like Kweli’s “The OGs is in jail, millennials is for sale” ring insincere considering that the album lives exclusively on the podcast network that also happens to host the group’s Midnight Miracle show with Dave Chappelle. For every clear thought, there are several that meander and flop just for their own sake; like the calendar-based rhyme scheme that starts Kweli’s verse on “So be it” and Bey’s verse on “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” which is esoteric to the point of being nonsensical.
The chemistry that made them both stars doesn’t always translate on group songs, either. Bey’s voice used to be a lower but still spirited counterpart to Kweli’s mid-range tenor, but Bey often sounds bored and unfussed here. On “Sweetheart. Sweethard. Sweetodd.,” Bey’s flow drags and his words slur together like he’s falling asleep in front of the mic. “Freequency,” a collaboration with Black Thought, should be an earth-shattering moment for rap heads, but the measured menace of Thought’s bars (“I don’t relate to fools/They focus on the vision, they all going to Hell and swear you going with them”) barrels through Bey and Kweli’s formless ideas with the barest possible effort. It’s a shame considering that other groups like A Tribe Called Quest and Little Brother have used their recent reunion albums to both address the times and tighten their group dynamic. No Fear establishes a general disconnect between its two emcees, who still rap competently but seem to be on different wavelengths.
Madlib provided all the beats for the album’s nine songs, but even the Loop Digga’s contributions are a mixed bag. The energetic shuffle of “So be it,” ornate loop of “Sweetheart. Sweethard. Sweetodd.,” and the jazzy jam session vibe of “Supreme alchemy” tease out some of Bey and Kweli’s best performances across the album. But several beats lack the texture and warmth we’ve come to associate with Madlib—both “o.G.” and “Yonders” feel limp and lifeless. The ghostly wails and harsh drums of “My favorite band,” a solid beat in its own right, have already been used by two different artists in recent years. When Madlib goes out of his way to deliver all-original beats to rappers like Freddie Gibbs and the late MF DOOM, a group of Black Star’s stature having to settle for leftovers on their comeback record is telling.
No Fear ends with several quotes from the late musician and critic Greg Tate, who muses on rap’s innate relationship to time: “One of the things we know about emcees is, man, they just have phenomenal memories.” As Black Star, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli built careers off of decoding the past and raising hope for the future. However, there are few moments across No Fear that feel immediate, timely, or necessary, and their sense of urgency has dulled. For all the hype, fans deserved something better than just good enough. | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 10, 2022 | 6.2 | 63b0051e-2337-48d4-8e6e-5efd3262af89 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
In the first volume of his Digital Shades series, which will collect his ambient works, M83's maximalist composer Anthony Gonzalez attempts to get back to his minimal roots. | In the first volume of his Digital Shades series, which will collect his ambient works, M83's maximalist composer Anthony Gonzalez attempts to get back to his minimal roots. | M83: Digital Shades Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10765-digital-shades-vol-1/ | Digital Shades Vol. 1 | New records by M83 are big events not only in the sense that their unrelenting cinematic grandeur seems built with IMAX in mind, but also in that they're generally met with wide-eyed anticipation. So it's weird that Digital Shades Vol. 1 slipped onto the market with so little fanfare. There is a nice symmetry to it, though: Reduced fanfare is what this record is all about.
Ambient music is one of M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez's formative influences, and you can hear traces of it in his music-- especially on "Unrecorded" or "In Church" from 2003's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. The funny thing is that M83, in general, is the antithesis of ambient music: The latter slips into the background; the former saturates the foreground. But on the first volume of his Digital Shades series, which serves to document his ambient recordings, the maximalist composer attempts to get back to his minimal roots.
Brian Eno, ambient music's definitive figure, is a self-professed influence of Gonzalez's, and his mark is all over this album. It's impossible to hear broad piano figures plinking in a deep field of tone without being reminded of Eno's pacesetting Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a record that even came with its own manifesto: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
By Eno's definition, Digital Shades Vol. 1 is ambient only in the most literal sense: sound fills the air. The interpretative openness Eno stresses is absent from the record, which can be pretty handily interpreted in one way: It's an M83 album without the pummeling percussion. If purely ambient music is like sand slipping through your fingers, felt but ungraspable, Digital Shades is more like a rope sliding through your palm, laced with friction where the music hijacks your attention. "Coloring the Void" opens with an angelic chorale, a retiring guitar figure chiming in the background, and Gonzalez's muffled soft rock vocals-- all of which will be immediately familiar to M83 fans. Beyond the humming tone that wreathes it all, it's just M83 on muscle relaxers.
The compositions build organically, but they lack the mystery of pure ambient music, the sense of not knowing how you got from one place to another, and the womblike feeling of enclosure. The transitions are often too overstated-- and the short songs too fast-moving-- to induce that sort of subconscious hypnosis. On the eight-minute closer "The Highest Journey", scattered pianos gradually gather emphasis amid tense drones, eventually blissing out in a way that's satisfying but utterly predictable. But the album's iffy classification does nothing to dilute its pleasures, and only the most prescriptive ambient music fans will balk-- on balance, the record brims with ambient signifiers. There are field recordings of waves and birdsong, lots of efflorescent long tones, vaguely new-age song titles that suggest a naturalistic mysticism, and the usual sky, snow, and sea imagery.
In the end, the album's aura of inessentiality becomes an asset-- a pleasant contrast to M83's usual momentous impact. The songs are big by ambient standards, but tiny by Gonzalez's. All of M83's work is mood music, but the mood is usually one of passion and intensity, which can occasionally be a bit enervating. For those who crave the M83 sound but feel too nervy for all the pageantry, this is a perfect fit: grand and beautiful, but also retiring and relaxing. It's an X-ray view of the skeleton that tends to disappear under Gonzalez's percussive muscle, and a promising teaser for the next proper M83 album. | 2007-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | October 12, 2007 | 7 | 63b85cd2-cfe8-48ee-a9a2-95e694496683 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | 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 explore the ecstatic songs on Mary Margaret O’Hara’s cult hit Miss America. | 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 explore the ecstatic songs on Mary Margaret O’Hara’s cult hit Miss America. | Mary Margaret O’Hara: Miss America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-margaret-ohara-miss-america/ | Miss America | Miss America stubbornly emerged in 1988, named because Mary Margaret O’Hara thought the record was “so much unlike what those two words together said.” The Canadian singer had been made to feel irrational for pursuing her vision (she knew what people said about her: quirky, eccentric, I’ve heard chickens sing better than that), and the grueling process of getting the album out into the world left her emotionally and physically tired, disinclined “to bother people with my own things.”
Her story is familiar in many ways: a powerful label discovering a young female talent, capturing it, then attempting to quash her idiosyncratic style, repeatedly sending her back to the drawing board in search of a hit. What isn’t familiar is O’Hara, no placid archetype, a one-of-a-kind torch singer whose flame floats free of the match. She is an improviser who stacks words and melody in real time to try to approximate a feeling only to immediately question the results, like a sculptor meticulously pressing clay into the shape of a face then wondering why they had ever thought it might appear human. Navigating an unimaginative record industry was small fry for O’Hara, who was then a 38-year-old singer devoted to conceiving a form of expression that transcended physical bounds and conventional relationships. She went in search of pure, unmediated sensation and dared others to experience it with her. As she sneers on “Year in Song”: “Now hit those gleaming faces hard/Though they’ll try to miss it.”
Plenty did. Miss America remains a cult album 30 years after its release, cited occasionally by Nick Cave, Perfume Genius, Neko Case, Tanya Donelly, and the Dirty Three. It would be too easy and somewhat disingenuous to lay the blame for its disappearance at the feet of a sexist music industry—in Britain, at least, it was greeted with total reverence. (That is how you imagine Morrissey discovered it, inspiring him to ask O’Hara to howl on his 1993 song “November Spawned a Monster.”) Maybe some failure of promotion on Virgin’s part denied Miss America its rightful standing alongside the decade’s other jarring noir masterpieces like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, and Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man.
But its creator also wasn’t committed to attaining those heights, disappearing soon after its release. It remains her only full-length album. O’Hara’s disinterest in pursuing success is in keeping with how she expresses longing on Miss America: desire is open-ended and without objects on songs called “To Cry About” and “My Friends Have”; a strange force that mangles her country-tinged balladry. While achieving transcendence through music wasn’t novel at the dawn of pop, let alone 1988, the way in which O’Hara sang about needing to escape the physical confines of her body to do so is just one of the qualities that gives Miss America its contemporary resonance. There is comfort and power in hearing ideas around the confines of gender and physical limitations being echoed back across a 30-year divide.
As convinced as Virgin was that Miss America was an unsellable anomaly, O’Hara’s debut isn’t totally abstract by any means. There are moments of impossibly tender melody that could soundtrack a big-haired ’80s romantic comedy or even a jazzy supper club rendezvous were it not for her destabilizing presence. The firelight in her ballads flickers just enough to suggest something malevolent lingering beyond the window. Her jaunty moments have a rictus determination, and her spiritual pleas could be frightening. Sometimes she drags behind the beat; sometimes her players struggle to keep up. “I am usually trying to jump out of my own skin,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Not trying, though—it’s natural. You know how you can do something and your brain’s just a little bit behind? The thought of doing it is a little bit behind the action?... I don’t like to watch where I’m going.”
If O’Hara had any direction, it was forward into joy: “Joy is the aim,” she repeats on “Year in Song.” Here, her band is steady—moody, loose, a little corrosive twang—but she is a dervish, beating the phrase like a blacksmith. She sings it with idle sweetness, gasps and chews at it until she is spitting scrambled consonants—“See, the aim, eh, joy?” as if nudging the concept, in cahoots with it—and whimpering to an end. She moves in and out of her fraught incantation, seeming to address anyone watching her in the throes of this process: “Pretty soon too much,” she rasps, or taunts, perhaps aware that there will be people who find her pursuit grotesque. She suspected as much from how she made her band “lose their sense of rhythm for a while.” “Maybe I don’t realize how uncomfortable that makes some people,” she told the Toronto Globe and Mail in 2002.
There’s no concrete narrative threaded through Miss America, though O’Hara returns to what sounds like a relationship with a person who did not share her vast capacity for ecstasy. Beauty and defeat intermingle on “Dear Darling,” a dusky tear-catcher where O’Hara’s natural vibrato rivals the smoky twirl of the pedal steel around her. And “Keeping You in Mind” is a pouty coffee-shop waltz that tries to reckon with this person’s fears—“Don’t you think that I’m worried too?”—before returning to another of O’Hara’s central tenets: Holding on to one good thought, strong in your mind, makes both solitude and physical unions immaterial. “I’m still happy with what I’ve got,” she muses: “Not having you/But keeping you in mind.” She suggests self-knowledge is key to joy on “When You Know Why You’re Happy,” a woozy meditation in which an upright bass note reliably stretches and contracts beneath O’Hara’s exploratory approach. “You move much better than you know/Not just some jerky to and fro,” she sings, stacking her impressions in real time again, “when you know why you’re happy.” Her lovely tribute comes after the precarious jubilation of “Anew Day,” a vampy ode to new beginnings that’s occasionally unsettled by harsh, ragged traces entering her voice.
O’Hara’s euphoric defiance might seem woo-woo if we didn’t hear her pain. Her most famous song is “Body’s in Trouble,” which bridges the gap between Miss America’s more languorous and choppy sides. “You want to kiss, feel, take, hear, ride, stop, start somebody/And a body won’t let you,” she grieves, becoming ragged, dragged along by the guitar’s circadian tide: “Who do you talk to when a body’s in trouble?” she implores. It’s not even her body, it’s simply a body. O’Hara’s sense of dislocation, rendering her incapable of accessing neither the divine nor the quotidian, comes through more strongly on “My Friends Have” where she wails amid irritable, detuned post-punk about her distance from the chattering world: “I want to get what my friends got,” she mumbles, a few seconds off-cue. “Just physical and some small talk.”
The small stakes of her plea amplify its sorry unattainability, though O’Hara refuses to be deterred from her reach for liberation. If “Not Be Alright” is Miss America’s weakest song—scatty guitar chopping around distracting wobble-board bass—it’s where she recommits to her quest for unmediated intensity: “No curtains on the windows/No covers on the beds/She lays them out on the floor/And she rips them up to shreds,” she yelps in a halting fashion that sounds as if she’s trying to approximate backmasking’s slippery sensation, making her desecration of domestic comforts even more unsettling. “It will not just be alright,” she repeats, barking and seething, sounding so wired with torment and resistance that it’s almost frightening. You feel her heels digging in.
O’Hara’s breakdown of language and unsteady presence mean that quite a bit of Miss America can feel disconcerting to listen to. Its instability often recalls exaggerated cinematic portrayals of people experiencing episodes related to poor mental health—and O’Hara knew that some quarters talked about her as if she was crazy. This diagnosis, she told Melody Maker in 1989, was just another example of a restricted imagination: “I think a lot of the people they say are mentally ill, it’s just ways of thinking.” Making one album and vanishing certainly implies fragility and an inability to bear industry pressures, and O’Hara’s relative withdrawal from the public eye affirms notions of her as a recluse. But what if she got everything she needed from that one album? What if what scans as trauma to unfamiliar ears is actually the sound of escape? From its title down, Miss America defies the notion that women should be pliant, steady vessels and forges a beguilingly fractured statement that holds its secrets to this day. | 2018-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | July 8, 2018 | 8.5 | 63ba9972-b764-4720-8201-693f677a5e8c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The comedian, actor, musician, and professional personality recounts a miserable breakup with disarming sincerity and grim humor on a solo debut steeped in rock history. | The comedian, actor, musician, and professional personality recounts a miserable breakup with disarming sincerity and grim humor on a solo debut steeped in rock history. | Chris Crofton: Hello It’s Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-crofton-hello-its-me/ | Hello It’s Me | The first words Chris Crofton sings on his debut solo album are also the words that make up its title: “Hello, it’s me.” If they leave you thinking of Todd Rundgren’s 1972 hit, that’s no accident. Crofton peppers these ten songs with knowing references to rock history: “I cried 97 teardrops today,” he sings on “Numbers Game,” one-upping ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears.” “I know what becomes of the brokenhearted,” he asserts on “Find Me in the Bar,” as if he’s responding to Jimmy Ruffin on the jukebox. Somehow, he never sounds like he’s trying to impress you with the size of his record collection; he presents these lyrics as though they’re all part of a common pop language. Crofton is telling his own sad story through the music that has soundtracked his life—and maybe yours, too.
And what a story he has. A comedian, actor, musician, and professional personality, Crofton is one of those guys who just seems to pop up randomly in any number of mediums. You may have seen him in the 2009 Harmony Korine flick Trash Humpers or on the CMT sitcom “Still the King.” Sometime in the past decade, you may have witnessed him fronting an outrageous quasi-metal act, Nashville’s Alcohol Stuntband, or watched him doing stand-up in Los Angeles, or heard him co-hosting one of several podcasts. Perhaps you’ve read Crofton’s long-running advice column in the Nashville Scene or remember bumping into him in one of the city’s bars when he was still drinking heavily.
Several years sober now, he gets serious on Hello It’s Me—although not in the demonstrative, grave manner of, say, Jim Carrey brooding his way through Dark Crimes. Instead, these songs are low-key and open-ended, offering more questions than answers as they chronicle what sounds like a pretty miserable breakup. When he asks, “Would you, could you love me?” on “Non-Conformist Blues,” Crofton isn’t posing the query merely to his ex but to everybody within earshot.
As dark as the album gets, Crofton can still be funny. These aren’t joke songs (thank god), nor is Hello It’s Me some clever meta-commentary on the breakup album, but there are moments of humor, whether it’s the extremely specific locales he names on “Everywhere You Should Be (Except for in Love)” or the stargazing ufologists he describes on “UFO Hunters.” “They’re searching the sky, I’m staring at my phone,” he sings, right before Jim James’ guitar solo explodes out of the song like an Alien chestburster. Even as he waits for a text that will never arrive, Crofton knows the odds of romantic reconciliation are every bit as astronomical as the chances of a flying saucer landing in his backyard. The chuckle gets stuck in your throat.
Jettisoning the heavy rock that defined the Alcohol Stuntband, Crofton embraces a more straightforward pop sound, paired with a sincerity that can be disarming—especially when he addresses his struggle with alcoholism on “Find Me in the Bar”: “That’s where I feel most at home,” he sings. “It’s where I feel least alone.” But the album’s primary subject is his broken heart. Featuring members of Houndmouth and Bully, it deploys the gentle patter of drums, soft-rock guitar strumming, and weepy strings to express a strain of heartache that is familiar from so many other breakup albums. Fleetwood Mac and Sleater-Kinney aside, these records are almost always one-sided, airing the grievances of only half a couple. As a result, they can be exercises in ugly recrimination.
Crofton doesn’t solve this problem, but he does acknowledge it in an indirect way, mainly by hoarding all the blame himself. “I know it’s all my fault, because whose else would it be?” he sings on “It’s All My Fault.” On some level, he suspects he’s unlovable, and that paranoia lends these songs a deep pathos as well as enough grim humor to undercut any self-seriousness. Hello It’s Me conveys pain with an asterisk: It hurts like hell, but it’s not the end of the world. | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arrowhawk | June 30, 2018 | 7.4 | 63bb497a-0254-4cc4-a416-78787fb8249c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ |
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