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Ten years have taken some shine off of Daft Punk’s gilded final album, but its unforgettable impact still echoes throughout the pop universe. | Ten years have taken some shine off of Daft Punk’s gilded final album, but its unforgettable impact still echoes throughout the pop universe. | Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daft-punk-random-access-memories-10th-anniversary-edition/ | Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) | It was a provocative thought: What if, Daft Punk wondered, we take our retro flirtations and lean all the way in? Is it the moment to fully consummate a Pharrell connection that stretches back over 12 years? In spite of everything that’s made our name, shall we reject modernity and embrace tradition? To each, an affirmation: Bien sûr, pourquoi pas?
Random Access Memories, which swept into homes 10 years ago on the back of the most fulsome rollout imaginable, arrived with “Classic!” practically etched into the lacquer. Yet Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s fourth and no-fooling final album is their only one to see its reputation stall, or even backslide when put under scrutiny—unlike the rest, which all traveled from varying shades of skepticism to being regarded as either significant, genius, or both.
RAM is slow, it’s said, a long 75 minutes; the airlocked grooves are linear and the opening run sags under the weight of treacle. This was an undeniable event record, but does the lore supersede the songs themselves? Where Homework and Discovery teem with eternal youth, RAM’s unyielding devotion to the past can fix it in time.
The next installment in a post-dissolution push to gild their legacy, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) supplies 35 minutes worth of unheard or hard-to-acquire bonus material, as well as a wormhole back to 2013—an era of buzz, naivete, and fortune-cookie wisdom that good times can last not just all night, but forever.
Having conducted extensive interviews about the duo’s universal influence for a forthcoming book, After Daft, I was surprised by how much was left to discover about one of modern pop’s most pored-over records. Among not only their team but also a small auditorium’s worth of affiliates, the same giddy perspective recurs uncoerced: They were all nestled in the belly of a magnificent Trojan Horse bedazzled with Hedi Slimane sequins, knocking at the gates of the big leagues.
The plan for RAM materialized at a point when Daft Punk’s stock seemingly couldn’t go any higher. Midway through Alive 2006-07, the tour that reshaped live electronic music's potential, they hatched a plan to pivot sharply. Bangalter, de Homem-Christo, and their creative director (or, according to those closest to the nerve center, silent third member), Cédric Hervet, were in agreement: Pro Tools, plug-ins—anything their clubworld peers might avail themselves of had to be ditched unless unavoidable.
They amassed a band of engineers who would keep pace with Bangalter’s cultured ear (“the best in the business,” says DJ Falcon, despite lingering hearing damage sustained from a misfiring speaker in 2002), then spent years rotating between premium studios—including one, Henson B, that required an enormous crystal to be spotlit 24/7 because the ghost of Karen Carpenter was said to lay within. The preliminary sessions in 2008 didn’t produce much, save for the eventual arpeggio on “Giorgio by Moroder,” a moment of liftoff so goofily brilliant it shot into the annals of memes with zero astrodynamic drag.
Following a detour to work on 2010’s TRON: Legacy soundtrack, progress steamed forward “like a train without brakes,” according to core mixing engineer Peter Franco. The Avengers of session players were assembled to jam for days on end while Daft Punk captured, miniaturized, and rearranged their physical essence as they once treated 12"s by Billy Joel and Barry Manilow. After splicing one rhythm section from the West Coast with one from the East, a distinctly buttery texture began to form: two parts Stevie, one part Steely.
The duo corralled inspiration differently. Bangalter drastically reduced his liquid intake to enable 15-hour stints without the flow-jarring mundanity of bodily functions. De Homem-Christo—“the wrangler to Thomas’ wild buck,” as Franco puts it—typically offered feedback from a nearby couch, sharpening a song’s contours by requesting lighter snares here or extra syncopation on a two-bar loop there. (He also nearly wiped Julian Casablancas out with a late tackle during an impromptu soccer game; whether this was a motivating tactic remains unclear.)
No expense was spared. An exceedingly rare Sennheiser VSM201 vocoder, the same make employed on Kraftwerk’s Computerwelt and Herbie Hancock’s Sunlight, met decommissioned hi-hats from Off the Wall, which drummer John “JR” Robinson had dug out for a specific, non-dominant crispness. Old pal Todd Edwards, who crashed out of music in the late ’00s, took up temporary residence in Bangalter’s guest house and was restored to factory conditions. Of the launch recordings that NASA handed over, Daft Punk chose humankind’s last successful moon voyage, Apollo 17. They weren’t exactly burying the intergalactic lede. You think Earth’s orbit can’t be breached again? Watch this.
Heaviness hung in the air, too. Unbeknownst to most, de Homem-Christo was churning through a divorce at the time, which might explain the soft agony marbling “The Game of Love.” When it came to adding toplines in 2012, the project’s gravitational pull could warp those who entered its atmosphere. Pharrell and Nile Rodgers both recall experiencing a peculiar memory fog, which makes you wonder if “Lose Yourself to Dance” really was the result of groove-hypnosis. Noah Lennox, unaccustomed to working under the judgmental glare of soundproofed glass, suffered a nervy first-day flub with his idols. In the end, “Doin’ It Right,” an inspired modular hymnal without any clear antecedent in the Daft catalog, was well worth the pounds lost in flop sweat.
Even mastering wasn’t free of drama. Petrified by the fear of damage or a leak, Franco loaded two duffel bags of foil-wrapped tape reels into the trunk of a gleaming BMW 3 Series and embarked upon the four-day trek from L.A. to engineer Bob Ludwig’s bolthole in Maine, sleeping next to the tapes at night just to be sure. He was pulled over twice, once in Arizona and then again in Arkansas, suspected of hauling supposed contraband across state lines. Which, in a way, he was.
Listening back, one of the most commonly held knocks against the record rings true: It takes nearly a half hour to pick up and sustain momentum. RAM shines brightest in pursuit of fun across a back half where the bow tie hangs loose. That Gainsbourgian extra syllable conjured from the word love-uh during “Beyond” is a hoot. The ’70s songwriting guru Paul Williams punches in the performance of a lifetime on the irreducibly sweet “Touch.” “Contact,” constructed around a sample that DJ Falcon and Bangalter first spun on a joint Cassius/Together DJ tour, then further elevated with pinched synth tones and fusion specialist Omar Hakim’s antic fills, rips. “Get Lucky” is “Get Lucky.” You can’t step to it, and there’s no use trying.
A true monocultural event, “Get Lucky” slammed in at No. 2 Stateside, breezed nicely past the one-million mark within 69 days in the UK, and tipped the scales in favor of team Daft Punk’s five-trophy sweep at the 2014 Grammys. The hit was so ubiquitous, recalls Edwards, that attempts to promote anything else got splattered. As the next four singles whistled clear of the Billboard Hot 100, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo simply made peace with the fact that “Get Lucky” was set to run and run (and run).
Before anyone heard a note off the rest of the album, the noise surrounding RAM was intense. Overall, it’s an unrepeatable highlight reel: Teasers on SNL and at Coachella, a premiere in some remote Australian town called Wee Waa, riffin’ on stage at the Music’s Biggest Night to “Le Freak” and “Another Star.” If you had the industry in the palm of your hand, wouldn’t you?
From that performance until 2021, Daft Punk’s career became marked by silence, save for a few banner production jobs and fan dreams of an Alive 2017 tour melting into a puddle of purest copium. Following a grace period to process all the attendant emotions of calling time on their creative unison, plans for this reissue quietly ran in parallel to 2022’s commemoration of Homework’s quarter century, with 2/22—a date in the Daftian calendar thick with import—of this year destined to be the 10th Anniversary’s kickoff.
Paradoxically, the group now appears more active in death than in life. Many might wish there was more trace material worth flexing for this reissue, yet theirs was not a regimen conducive to cranking out B-sides on the fly. Indeed, none of the outtakes lifted from what we know generate more than fleeting intrigue. Take “The Writing of Fragments of Time,” where Edwards’ eagerness and the happenstance of Franco leaving a tape running hot can’t carry the attempt to retcon a Get Back-style eureka moment atop the original.
Of the unlocked extras, the synthetic croon of “Infinity Repeating” doesn’t quite make up the down payment on Casablancas’ pledge in 2014 of it being “super bizarre,” nor does it hit on the same level as the laser-guided lovesickness of “Instant Crush.” It just… is. “Prime,” however, comes correct with a high-noon epic that brings to mind the superabundance of disco pioneer John Morales’ reel-to-reel edits, or 1997’s Daftendirektour, where Daft Punk would break into a galloping cover of Moroder’s “Chase.” It’s a tantalizing glimpse at how an alternative RAM might have panned out with extra rocket fuel.
“The worst thing you could do for an album is release it,” Bangalter confided to TRON: Legacy’s orchestral arranger Joseph Trapanese. For RAM, however, market conditions could hardly have been sweeter. Both social media and the music press were at peak effectiveness as promotional vehicles, entire staff rooms marshaled to lavish attention upon this monument to midtempo.
Handily, an antagonist had also emerged. The dance sphere had become convulsed by a debate pitched between DJ traditionalists and the high-octane, low-subtlety new breed of EDM stars who brazenly pushed Daft Punk’s theatrical live template toward an event horizon. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo surely couldn't have foreseen a wave of cake-throwing as the direct ramification of Alive 2006-07, yet it provided the perfect opening for these upstarts-turned-scene-elders to splash cold water in the face of a rapidly overheating scene.
Well, here’s the rub. RAM’s titanic popularity offered a roadmap to disposability, sparking a wave of cosplayers who gestured toward the album’s burnished chrome and instructed their labels that, if enough money was dumped down the hole, they too could attain a throwback vibe, man. Top 40 radio and festival bills alike became hopelessly bogged down with yawningly sterile business-class bops, a mid-2010s morass of Earth, Wind & Dire.
There’s still plenty to relish, but front to back, the songs on this set are not airtight enough to be impervious to time’s ebb and flow. The framing of RAM as an antidote to screen addiction has calcified into a Boomerist rind; today, the most compelling forms of expression do emanate from a laptop, and a decade’s worth of denuded disco and rich-guy funk simulacra has rendered plush melodies and scratchy licks of the ’70s bloodless. Human After All, which bludgeoned listeners for being supine in the face of a commodified future, strikes a positively relatable note by comparison.
Such is the curse of music as Fabergé egg. Where the visuals for Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” and Discovery counterpart Interstella 5555 conclude with the dream of a child, RAM comes off like the high-spec dream of an adult. Which is fine if that’s your thing—and to be sure, it is a great many people’s thing—yet the most self-evidently perfect recording of the century can’t help but feel as if it’s best admired through a gold vitrine.
Random Access Memories was assembled to preach the credo of analog over digital, faces over interfaces. To electronic fans who were switched on by the generosity and million-volt charge generated between Homework and Alive 2007, the move suggests a different binary: that of abdication over affirmation. During the press junket for Mythologies earlier this year, Bangalter was eager to state that his communion with the machines was over. It’s not as if we couldn’t already tell.
Whether you love RAM the album, or loved the pomp, circumstance, and deserved celebration of Daft Punk that accompanied it, is to a degree immaterial. Several collaborators have said the group was comfortable in the face of possible rejection, which I don’t entirely buy, but if the very attempt of an Apollo-level moonshot was the goal, why fuss over sticking the landing. The residual memory we carry alongside the music is that of Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, ringed by friends, dangling their feet off the edge of pop culture’s Mount Rushmore, game finessed. | 2023-05-15T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-15T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | May 15, 2023 | 7.7 | 63bbdef0-4a41-456d-976e-716b7ab735c4 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
For all of the Decemberists’ instincts as performers, they've never been a band to leave listeners wanting more. The Florasongs EP is culled form leftovers from their last so-so album, but at just five songs and 19 minutes long, it goes down easier than its predecessor. | For all of the Decemberists’ instincts as performers, they've never been a band to leave listeners wanting more. The Florasongs EP is culled form leftovers from their last so-so album, but at just five songs and 19 minutes long, it goes down easier than its predecessor. | The Decemberists: Florasongs EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21137-florasongs-ep/ | Florasongs EP | For all of the Decemberists’ considerable instincts as performers, they've never been a band to leave listeners wanting more. Save for 2011’s uncharacteristically concise The King Is Dead, even their best albums often seemed like too much of a good thing, and most have felt longer than their runtimes—much, much longer in the case of 2009’s proggy endurance test The Hazards of Love, a cautionary tale about the overreach ambitious artists are capable of when left unchecked. Like The King Is Dead before it, this year’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World played like a correction to that record, a continued dialing back of the band’s more audacious tendencies, but it was overstuffed in its own right, and with no musical or conceptual themes binding its 14 songs, it begged for some focus. Terrible World was the first Decemberists album that didn’t have the vision to justify its bloat.
Casual fans won’t be overcome with excitement upon learning the band’s Florasongs EP was culled from leftovers from the Terrible World sessions. Even for Decemberists diehards, an addendum to the band’s most forgettable album probably wasn’t high on the wish list, and the EP reaffirms what Terrible World already made clear: that Colin Meloy brought an abundance of songs to these sessions, but not much in the way of a big picture. Unlike its full-length counterpart, though, Florasongs has brevity working in its favor. These days, the Decemberists sound best in small doses, and at just five songs and 19 minutes long, the EP goes down easier than its predecessor.
If the EP has a unifying thread, it’s the band’s wide-eyed fascination with '80s college rock. Filled with ringing guitars and taut melodies, "Why Would I Now?" moves with the swift efficiency of Elvis Costello’s King of America-era output. A shanty caressed with accordions, "Riverswim" plays like it was traced over the Pogues’ "Dirty Old Town". And though Decemberists have so fully internalized R.E.M.’s playbook by now that they could probably turn around a Lifes Rich Pageant tribute album on two days’ notice, "The Harrowed and the Haunted" is one of their most elegant homages, building to the same lovely, slow reveal as R.E.M.’s dreamiest numbers. Even the Communist Russia setting of "Fits & Starts", the EP’s lone rocker, feels like a throwback to the Reagan era in its own way. "I was watching on the apparat/ Some comely little apparatchik felled," Meloy sings over pounding pianos. As rowdy party songs go, it’s hardly AC/DC, but it’s about as close as he’ll get.
As The King Is Dead proved, there’s still some pleasure in hearing a relatively reigned-in Decemberists. But while the band wears restraint well, Florasongs never overcomes the sense that they’re selling themselves short, penning good-enough songs when they used to shoot for grand, great ones. This is a band that once thrived on risks. The Crane Wife shouldn’t have worked but it did. The Hazards of Love shouldn’t have worked and, by and large, it didn’t, and ever since they've been playing it safe. After five years of bowling with bumpers, maybe it’s time for them to start taking chances once again. | 2015-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | October 8, 2015 | 5.8 | 63be44ff-59da-46f1-83b8-6a29ef91a40d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The fifth installment of the rapper-producer’s long-running series lands closer to the sweet spot between beats and bars glimpsed on his previous effort. | The fifth installment of the rapper-producer’s long-running series lands closer to the sweet spot between beats and bars glimpsed on his previous effort. | Pi’erre Bourne: The Life of Pi’erre 5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pierre-bourne-the-life-of-pierre-5/ | The Life of Pi’erre 5 | As a rapper-producer, Pi’erre Bourne’s musical frame of reference first blossomed under the glow of FL Studio. His uncle inspired him to make his first beats while in elementary school during the rise of Dipset and G-Unit. After a childhood spent traveling between New York and South Carolina, Bourne moved to Atlanta to study sound engineering before taking a job as an engineer for Epic Records. His time in the studio helped refine his songcraft, but it was his direct exposure to the 2010s Atlanta rap boom—artists like 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, and Young Nudy, among others—that truly galvanized him.
At the time, Bourne’s contrasting style was an anomaly within rap: he pitted cavernous 808s against synth lines that wouldn’t sound out of place in a 16-bit-era Sonic the Hedgehog game. Though indebted to producers like Pharrell and Kanye West, songs like Nudy’s “No Stains” and Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia” hijacked genre conventions with chirpy abandon and helped lay the foundation for a new generation of rap psychedelia ruled by song leaks and heavy vibes. Bourne’s beats quickly became the star of the show as his approach became more ubiquitous, but he’s expressed frustration at having his raps looked over as a part of the experience: “I just want everyone to take me seriously for both,” he told The Fader in 2017. The Life of Pi’erre 5—the fifth installment of his long-running series which also doubles as his sophomore major-label album—lands slightly closer to the sweet spot between beats and bars glimpsed on 2019’s The Life of Pi’erre 4. It’s a slight upgrade, less a gear shift than a recalibration.
There’s no denying Bourne’s strengths manifest as a producer first and a rapper second. He’s never been bashful on the mic, but his beats—synths, drums, and sound effects whirring and clicking together like gears in a clock—tend to smother his breathy sing-song. Continuing the refinement seen on TLOP4, the fifth in the series further corrects this power imbalance; his voice meets the production halfway, becoming more than just another detail in an audio mosaic. He cuts through throbbing 808s and minor octave keyboards on mid-album highlight “40 Clip,” where he flexes checks and leaves his jewelry at home to not embarrass anyone. He’s become better at determining whether to skate over his bubbly sonics (“Biology 101”) or submerge himself within them (“HULU”). His voice generally lands a little bolder than before, which gives the raps more impact.
None of this is to say that his subject matter has changed much. Bourne’s raps are wordplay-heavy, funneling boasts about money and fashion, flirtations with lovers, and the occasional autobiographical gem through the tried-and-true art of the metaphor. He isn’t as silly as Big Sean or unfadeable as Roc Marciano, but his jokes and scene-setting are typically colorful enough to infuse each rhyme with enough personality. He invokes rapper Cassidy’s song “Hotel” while describing an anonymous hookup on the chorus of “Biology 101.” On “Couch,” he laments his deteriorating relationship with a brother who let him crash in his living room before talking about untucking his chain at a train stop that used to scare him. Not every line is a winner—“I wear ice on me like hockey dudes” and “I’m a king like Simba, roar,” in particular, fall flat—but they fit the lighthearted nature of Bourne’s music, which takes itself just the right amount of serious.
Pi’erre 5’s guests and production embellishments do the rest of the heavy lifting. Playboi Carti, who’s already set to appear on the album’s upcoming deluxe edition, bounds across the double-time of “Switching Lanes,” while Sharc—an artist signed to Bourne’s SossHouse record label—pulls off abrupt left turns on “Drunk and Nasty.” These two songs also house some of the album’s most surprising production choices. “Lanes” ends with a sped-up ice cream truck jingle merging with the beat; “Nasty” features an abrupt five-second pause after its hook, designed to keep listeners on their toes. Further, on “Butterfly,” Bourne slides between rapping regularly and rapping a half-measure ahead of the beat, creating a beautiful instability. These quirks could only come from a rapper with a professionally tuned production ear; one willing to compare themselves to Kobe Bryant, a basketball player who also made a point of subverting expectations on the fly.
The Life of Pi’erre 5 exists in a world terraformed to Pi’erre Bourne’s sensibilities. His aesthetic reaches far beyond the leak threads and madcap videos that have turned him into a cult icon. Even though his sound has become more commonplace, Bourne’s consistent tinkering brings him closer to fully reconciling both sides of his art. If Pi’erre 5 proves anything, it’s that Pi’erre Bourne the producer and Pi’erre Bourne the rapper are less at odds than ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | SossHouse / Interscope | June 11, 2021 | 7.2 | 63c20fe6-7ea3-4cb6-b6c5-a5d4d9b4f05e | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The latest of many 2008 releases by Hospital Productions mastermind Dominick Fernow tilts away from his (loosely speaking) "song"-based work and back to the realm of harsh and undeniably powerful noise. | The latest of many 2008 releases by Hospital Productions mastermind Dominick Fernow tilts away from his (loosely speaking) "song"-based work and back to the realm of harsh and undeniably powerful noise. | Prurient: Arrowhead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12427-arrowhead/ | Arrowhead | One of a half-dozen full-lengths to be released by New York noise artist Prurient this year, Arrowhead can be considered in either of two contexts depending upon your familiarity with the one-man-band's sizable discography or with noise music at large. If you're interested in Prurient, Arrowhead is a revealing transitional retrospective, intense but with precedent. If you're not, it's a shocking, singular piece of hair-raising noise. Either way, it's yet another essential piece in Prurient's metastasized catalog and one of the year's most obliterative and exhilarating releases.
Originally recorded in 2004, Arrowhead consists of three squelch-and-sustain tracks built by high-pitched microphone feedback, challenged only by spasms of drumming and the mutilated screams of Prurient mastermind Dominick Fernow. He infamously employed a similar approach-- a thin, powerful shriek of feedback that slowly warps and expands until it blooms into a boundless abyss-- on "Roman Shower", the brazen first track from his 2005 Load Records debut, Black Vase. Though exceptions abound, much of Fernow's recent output has been more "song"-oriented, meaning only that the settings have generally been shorter and less of a standstill (see the excellent Pleasure Ground or the second side of Adam Tied to a Stone).
In that historical setting, Arrowhead-- recorded the same year and in the same city as "Roman Shower"-- links many of the facets of Prurient's sound. In the first two tracks, Fernow gradually intensifies sinister, relentless rays until, like "Roman Shower", they become pained, bloody wastelands. The third and shortest track lunges forward, slowly becoming caked in static and sliced by feedback similar to that heard during the first 27 minutes. All the sounds smear, wiping across the speakers like a grimy, gory mess. Imagine Daniel Menche pushing the Fuck Buttons on speed, for four minutes, and you get the point. Together, these tracks-- "Sternum", "Ribcage", and "Lungs"-- show us where Prurient had been in 2004 and where he was delightfully going.
If this release serves as an introduction to Prurient, it'll be a trial by fire, but one well worth the burns. Sure, you'll find noise "bigger" than this, but you'll find little that's so dramatic and masterful. Listen for the control Fernow wields over his electronics as he grapples with the tone, letting it slide into chaos only to bring it back under his hand. There's a violent, lacerating ebb-and-flow to this work that's as nauseating as it is enrapturing.
Both in his Manhattan record store, Hospital Productions, and through his record label of the same name, Fernow peddles the most extreme black metal, a genre that-- at its best-- delivers an idea without apology and with exhaustion. Prurient sounds little like black metal here (with its drowned vocals and saturated, tidal murk, Cocaine Death-- another excellent 2008 release from Fernow-- does; and he's in a black metal band, Ash Pool), but Arrowhead functions in much the same way: Its stylized, specific, and unflinching sound roars with a singular menace, at once terrifying and captivating. These performances sound like the sorts of pieces that happen when every ounce of trouble the performer has gets sweated, bled, and screamed into the cutting room floor. Re-reading that sentence, I'm afraid I've made Prurient's searing power-electronics sound, well, emo. And I suppose, in the end, it is. But for 31 minutes, Arrowhead should keep you too fixated (or, as it were, repulsed) to care. | 2008-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2008-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | November 19, 2008 | 8.8 | 63c7d64e-0728-4124-b6a3-c8e39f6fa6a7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Dutch producer Bas Bron abandons the understated cool of his cult hit “What’s a Girl to Do” for bright ’80s synths and Daft Punk melodrama. | Dutch producer Bas Bron abandons the understated cool of his cult hit “What’s a Girl to Do” for bright ’80s synths and Daft Punk melodrama. | Fatima Yamaha: Spontaneous Order | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fatima-yamaha-spontaneous-order/ | Spontaneous Order | In the 11 years after Fatima Yamaha released the 2004 single “What’s A Girl to Do,” the whimsical electro-house tune became a cult club favorite. With its earworm hook and gradual build, the song became a dancefloor staple, particularly in Glasgow, and it was a rare night out that didn’t feature its signature hook floating over a sweaty crowd. Its sneaky catchiness, plus the anonymity of its creators, propelled the mysterious entity to popularity. No one knew who “Fatima Yamaha” was, and the original pressing of the song featured a girl on the cover. Then Fatima Yamaha played a set at Dekmantel 2015, and was revealed to be Dutch producer Bas Bron. With this, the spell broke.
His 2015 breakthrough album Imaginary Lines offered more of the same synth-based dreamy electro as “What’s A Girl to Do,” but felt more like pastiche than the genuine article. Follow-up Spontaneous Order was five years in the making, and represents an about-face from the detached cool that brought Fatima Yamaha its slow-burning fame. Instead, the album offers an over-the-top confection of Daft Punk-esque synth keyboards, tight funk beats, and heavily filtered vocals.
Spontaneous Order revels in its campiness, and many tracks here feature cheesecake-rich melody lines that take the songs skyward. Opening track “Drops in the Ocean” features life-like water droplet sounds that mark the downbeat, and a synth melody soars over the top before Sofie Winterson’s vocal feature enters, layered thick with effects. It gathers pace before it’s saved from its own silliness by that signature Fatima Yamaha squelchy bass. “Bar-Bodega ‘That’s It!’” opens with a sharp four-on-the-floor beat before zipping into cheerful bouncing chord stabs and an obnoxiously confident synth melody. The slowed-down “We Are Drops” sneaks into power-ballad territory, with its heavy-handed drums the and shamelessly empty lyrical platitudes (“We’re drops, we’re drops/Together alone, we’re drops”) sung in falsetto by Bron before building to an echoing, spacious climax.
Elsewhere on the album, Bron is subtler. The breakbeats and juddering melody of “Monderman” are a far cry from the up-beat funk of the rest of the album; its chords are transposed up and down the scale as the track progresses, generating patterns from randomness. “Master Zhuang” begins with a booming bass and squelching drums before a blipping, jaunty synth melody pulls it into the realm of vintage video game soundtracks. The title Spontaneous Order is a nod to the accumulating and random set of circumstances that first brought Bron recognition as Fatima Yamaha. To replicate the alluring mysteriousness of “What’s A Girl to Do” would only be disappointing; instead, Bron has created an album that’s shameless in its poppy sensibilities and that doesn’t try to be cool.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Magnetron | December 1, 2020 | 6.5 | 63c83c37-3c5a-44ba-b288-1525054e72e6 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
JEFF the Brotherhood's eighth album tries to make up for a lack of direction with pure enthusiasm, like the "responsible" parent letting the high school kids get drunk at their house because they’re gonna anyway. | JEFF the Brotherhood's eighth album tries to make up for a lack of direction with pure enthusiasm, like the "responsible" parent letting the high school kids get drunk at their house because they’re gonna anyway. | JEFF the Brotherhood: Wasted on the Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20320-wasted-on-the-dream/ | Wasted on the Dream | Wasted on the Dream was supposed to be JEFF the Brotherhood's second album on Warner Bros., but about a month ago, the Nashville duo announced they were "SO FUCKING PLEASED" that they had been dropped. Now the title reads as accidentally prophetic: This is likely to be the only album ever to feature members of Jethro Tull and Best Coast and a guy who worked with Poco, and you have to wonder what Warner Bros. were hoping for by allowing a band like JEFF the Brotherhood to conduct their own fantasy draft. But at least their short stint in the big leagues allowed the group a shot to make good on the upward trajectory promised by 2011's We Are the Champions. Instead, Wasted on the Dream just skulks back to a keg that was kicked far too long ago.
No one should have to apologize for party rockin’, of course. But when your basic M.O. is "we’ve got mustaches and a sixer," there’s only three ways your eighth (!) album can go. You grow increasingly debauched until your body gives out or the authorities come calling. You discover the Replacements and start writing wistful, ruminative songs with acoustic guitars. Or you take a third path, cut by recent Hold Steady and Free Energy releases and followed by JEFF the Brotherhood here: scale back in the name of "good, clean fun." It’s an overreaction to any encroachment of "I’m too old for this shit," countering age with enthusiasm in the hopes of perking the ears of listeners who might still get titillated at the mention of beer and weed in a radio rock song. At best, Wasted on the Dream is an eager, "responsible" parent letting the high school kids get drunk at their house because they gotta do it somewhere. At worst, they sorta sound like narcs.
Sample lyrics: "The world has turned into a great big ball of shit." "Marijuana makes me wanna take off all my clothes." There’s one song where Jake Orrall is too drunk to karaoke and many others that refer to "the dream" as some kind of vague vision quest guided by an unnamed hallucinogen. Quoting the lyrics at length disarms deeper criticism once you realize what you’re up against—it’s harmless, mostly, the sort of played-out and time-stamped easy laughs that lead one to believe the flute solo on "Black Cherry Pie" could’ve been inspired by Ron Burgundy, even if Ian Anderson actually plays the damn thing.
Wasted on the Dream argues for the viability for modern classic rock and at the very least, it wants to interact with the kids rather than resort to Kid Rock-style concern trolling about the obsolescence of the geetar. Their generous hooks and effective riffs establish the Orralls as premiere Buzz Bin archivists,"Cosmic Visions" somehow recalling both Weezer and the one time when the Smashing Pumpkins sounded like they were having fun, which is to say it’s a major bite of "Where Boys Fear to Tread". They’re an able stand-in for fellow alt-grunge torchbearer Wavves on the Bethany Cosentino feature "In My Dreams", and their stoner-rock allegiances are confined to "Melting Place", which manages to recall "Black Sabbath", "Iron Man", "Paranoid" and JEFF's single-entendre spirit guide, "Sweet Leaf", the four Black Sabbath songs known by even the most casual fans.
It's all crunchy and cloying and probably better if you're high, but that just makes Wasted on the Dream something like a store-brand version of your favorite cereal; it's close, but not there, usually a matter of texture and feel. Despite doubling their number of guitar strings from three to six and their live personnel to a quartet, Wasted on the Dream is a buzzless, antiseptic recording, with hotshot producer Joe Chiccarelli (The Strokes, Spoon, Jason Mraz, it just gets weirder) spraying Febreze all over the room. Or, there just isn't an established character selling it to you, no way to ascertain a discernible JEFF the Brotherhood-ness through it all. But maybe that's just as well for an act that always felt destined not to be America's preeminent party-rock band, but a pre-party band—surely fun, but a warmup for something bigger and more memorable. | 2015-03-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-03-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Infinity Cat | March 11, 2015 | 5.2 | 63c8d6be-3f3a-43c0-a144-ac1d0cc95960 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Inspired by a panoply of club-music styles like gqom, UK funky, and tribal, the Mexican producer’s music revels in eroding barriers between percussive techniques. | Inspired by a panoply of club-music styles like gqom, UK funky, and tribal, the Mexican producer’s music revels in eroding barriers between percussive techniques. | OMAAR: Drum Temple | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omaar-drum-temple/ | Drum Temple | Centering polyrhythms and syncopation in the traditions of gqom, UK funky, or dembow may be the order of the day for club music, but Mexican producer OMAAR isn’t new to these kinds of sounds. Since 2012, Omar Suárez has cut and pasted elements of grime, tribal, and Latin American styles into the structural elements of techno and house. Drum Temple, his debut full-length for Mexican label NAAFI, further cements him as a faithful proponent of rhythmic fluidity and Afro-diasporic percussion. All seven tracks, along with three remixes from NAAFI members and affiliates Lao, Nick León, and WRACK, revel in eroding barriers between percussive techniques, instead embracing a nomadic sense of rhythm and release.
OMAAR’s reverence for percussion on this album is almost liturgical. His tracks possess a hard-charging density, but there is something ceremonial, meticulous, and sacred about his style. “Drum Dance” is a rapturous reinterpretation of gqom and techno, at once resembling an ancient ritual and an intense strength-training session. The title track follows in its footsteps, adopting a similar palette. “Mystery Man” affixes industrial clanging, echoes of pan flutes, and eldritch vocals to this format, culminating in a sort of midnight drum march.
OMAAR adopts an eclectic approach, but Drum Temple is still threaded together by a cohesive percussive atmosphere. The Mexico City-based artist is less interested in emulating any one style than in articulating his own impressionistic vision of these genres. The second half of “Jungla” buries thumping drumbeats beneath field recordings of bird calls and monkey screeches, suffusing the album with a verdant sensibility. Meanwhile, the drum sequencing on “Ritmo” is reminiscent of UK funky, synthesizing a conga loop, hi-hats, whistles, and a dancefloor command that implores you to “pull up.” It is a jagged journey that lands in a dark dreamworld somewhere between the Selva Lacandona and the East London ends.
While OMAAR’s previous releases on NAAFI leaned more heavily on club-ready references and styles, Drum Temple is far more preoccupied with rhythmic introspection and careful control, even as it maintains an athletic tempo. Drum Temple quietly showcases the rhythmic alliances made possible by experimentation, smashing one genre boundary after another, but still communicating a strong sense of character in the process.
NAAFI is now more than a decade old, and it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say it has become the chief reference point for Latin American experimental music (at times eclipsing other equally deserving collectives and labels, though that is largely the result of European and U.S. media’s myopia when it comes to music from the Global South). OMAAR has released on NAAFI since 2014, so he’s become a key artist for the imprint as it has garnered attention abroad. Over the last few years, though, the label has worked hard to expand its original mercurial vision internationally; it’s put out music from British and Japanese artists like Gaika and WRACK, stretching the geographical boundaries beyond its initial realm of collaborators. Drum Temple is an excellent reminder of the label’s original vision: to complicate the narrative of Latin American club music, continually embrace reinvention, and let a love for innovation and experimentation be its guide.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | NAAFI | April 19, 2021 | 7.7 | 63cab6bb-5b3e-408d-9690-8a91ea2a6c48 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
The Swedish savants team up for their first collaborative project, a sincere commitment to alt-rock and post-punk that brings the genres’ darkness into a new era. | The Swedish savants team up for their first collaborative project, a sincere commitment to alt-rock and post-punk that brings the genres’ darkness into a new era. | Yung Lean / Bladee: Psykos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-lean-bladee-psykos/ | Psykos | A decade ago, before the words “Drain Gang” were ever uttered, Yung Lean and Bladee were the twin flames at the forefront of the Swedish Invasion. Despite the longevity of their creative relationship—and the fact that the collective has always seemed to prioritize their genuine friendships over business transactions—the duo has never actually released a full collaborative project until now. While both artists have flirted with guitar music and rock star aesthetics since their genesis, Psykos sincerely commits to an alt-rock and post-punk palette. More than a step forward, though, it’s also a look back: “Ten years, blood, sweat, and love, still standing tall,” as Lean sings on “Golden God.” Their sound in between genres is a natural byproduct of a life lived in-between, lost in the liminal transience of touring, shuffling from one hotel room and relationship to the next.
With last year’s Sugar World, Lean introduced his schmaltzy Thin White Duke era; here, he transforms into a version of himself closer to Ian Curtis or Robert Smith. It’s a fitting sound for an album that is in many ways about reckoning with the trauma of touring stardom—the titular declaration of “Golden God” inevitably suggests Almost Famous, another story about a precocious kid exposed to the pleasures and perils of rock’n’roll at far too young an age. On the anthemic blog-rock groove “Sold Out,” the pair sing not just about losing their childhoods, but completely destroying them: “I killed my youth/I watched it fall.”
If Psykos is an open-casket funeral for lost innocence, then opening “Coda” is a tender eulogy delivered at the service. So often, the cherubic Bladee has played the ethereal angel, but here he embodies a tempting devil, his crooning voice summoned once Lean says, “I hear God talking/But it’s overshadowed by El Diablo.” From that reflective intro onward, Psykos strips away almost any semblance of the trancey Eurotrash pastiche and lacquered hyper-pop gloss that this collective has become known for. In lieu of the ethereal gnosticism of Drain Gang is a kind of Zen nihilism that finds solace in the comforting stillness of a dark and empty void. When Bladee sings of making “the jump without wings” on “Still,” you can either take it as suicidal ideation, or a leap of faith.
Sometimes the effects-heavy guitar recalls Eno-produced U2 or Parachutes-era Coldplay, but woozier and more dissociative—probably the result of the counterintuitive cocktail of kratom and codeine that Lean claims to have been drinking regularly during recording sessions in Thailand. On the eerie “Still,” titanic cymbals crash into streaks of effects-heavy guitar, while “Things Happen” slips into a more intimate acoustic mode. Most of the overt hip-hop influence is stripped away, but Lean slips into a blunted rap flow on “Ghosts” as Bladee serenades him with circuitous loops, and their penchant for tight hooks lends itself to anthemic singalongs like “Sold Out.”
But it’s as much of an unplugged pivot for producer Palmistry, whose 2022 album TINKERBELL interspersed trance and 2-step with Dean Blunt-ish hypnagogia, alongside collaborator Silent$ky. The whole dissociative feel of Psykos belongs to Palmistry as well, whose struggles with psychosis during the album’s production informed its shape, most literally in the title, which Lean—also a survivor of psychosis—scrawled on the back of a leather jacket. In a recent conversation about the making of Psykos—as much a group therapy session as an interview, which Lean self-effacingly describes as “AA shit”—Lean gently teases his friend about his behavior during these episodes, not just from a place of love, but from a place of firsthand experience with schizophrenia. Lean compares the experience of enduring psychosis and coming out the other side to being a veteran traumatized by combat, fearful that your reality might snap at any moment: “If you’re in a war and your mind is safe, at least you know who the enemy is. If you're in a psychosis, your brain is the enemy. And that should be your best friend, that should be your home.”
In spite of the pain that fueled Psykos, the album is defined by resilience and triumph. After all the lightning strikes and near-death experiences, they owe it to themselves to take their own work seriously. With every release as solo artists and collaborators, there’s a greater intentionality and a heightened sense of focus to everything Lean and Bladee do, as they’ve not only found their voices, but found what they want to say with those voices. To have watched Lean and Bladee maturing over the years is to be reminded that every musician is not just a performer engaged in an ever-evolving creative process, but a human being often just trying to grow up, as the hard armor of life falls away to reveal the frightened child underneath. | 2024-04-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | World Affairs | April 1, 2024 | 8 | 63d418d5-4183-41c3-bb42-4d7d3f3304a5 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Australian beatmaker Flume mixes woozy Dilla-fied production, R&B-inspired bedside intimacy, and guest vocals on his promising debut. | The Australian beatmaker Flume mixes woozy Dilla-fied production, R&B-inspired bedside intimacy, and guest vocals on his promising debut. | Flume: Flume | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17484-flume-flume/ | Flume | In an interview with Dazed Digital last year, Australian beatmaker Flume said, "Music essentially boils down to two main elements, rhythm and melody. I feel tones and textures often get overlooked, so I like to take my time finding the right sounds." The approach is working for the unassuming 21-year-old musician, otherwise known as Harley Streten: In November, his self-titled debut album and its single "Sleepless" beat One Direction for the number one position on Australia's charts. Streten celebrated by posting screenshots of the ensuing Twitter outrage.
He doesn't come off as a firestarter, though, or even all that different from other young electronic producers. He listens to J Dilla and Flying Lotus, started tinkering with production when he was barely a teenager, and still makes music in his parents' basement. While his approach to warped sound owes much to Dilla, Flume's aesthetic can be compared to SBTRKT's integration of R&B's bedside intimacy with distant beats and silky voiced female singers.
Streten explores his sonic palette with varying degrees of success on Flume. It's a little long on instrumental filler ("Space Cadet", "Warm Thoughts", "Ezra"), highlighting the fact that at this point in his career, samples and singers are Streten's most effective asset. Those features mask the fact that most of his songs are structured around samey, distracting background swoops that introduce climactic moments.
On "Sleepless", singer/model Jezzabell Doran is Streten's Jessie Ware, though he gives George Maple more of the spotlight on "Bring You Down". Her featherlight refrain "Hush now, you're standing on a landmine" is the centerpiece around which snares skitter and arpeggios twinkle, her voice soaring as Streten drops a judicious beat into the bridge. On "Insane", Streten distorts Australian singer Moon Holiday's lovely but affectless voice into a melodic foil to his throbbing builds and drops. Sometimes, neither the vocals nor backing can save the show: "On Top" features uninspired rapping from New York MC T.Shirt ("The night's forever young/ It's us that gets old") that falls flat over offbeat thuds and simulated siren wails.
Now and then, Streten strikes an unusually potent streak: On "Left Alone", a chorus persists throughout as if dogging guest Chet Faker's slurred pleas for solitude. Preceding track "Holdin' On" juxtaposes an old-soul male vocal sample and gospel echoes ("Mama, I love you!" "Yes I do!") with muffled keyboard stabs and serious swing for an effect that recalls Jamie xx's Gil Scott-Heron remixes. Sinuous opener "Sintra" chops up vocals like James Blake's "CMYK", a foil for the calming, sweet "Star Eyes", which closes the album with a dream sequence made up of screwed bits of speech. On "What You Need", Streten makes a claim-- "Been waiting to love you/ ... I've got what you need"-- shiver so that it sounds like she's slowly dissolving into tears. With that kind of control over his songs and performers, Flume could easily evolve into a sought-after producer. | 2013-02-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-02-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Transgressive / Mom+Pop / Future Classic | February 22, 2013 | 7.4 | 63d7c9ee-db0b-45c2-867b-fd0a45157f9d | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
Written as her loved ones protested at Standing Rock, during the dissolution of a queer romance, and after the death of a beloved mentor, Katherine Paul’s debut is a work of intersectional mourning. | Written as her loved ones protested at Standing Rock, during the dissolution of a queer romance, and after the death of a beloved mentor, Katherine Paul’s debut is a work of intersectional mourning. | Black Belt Eagle Scout: Mother of My Children | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-belt-eagle-scout-mother-of-my-children/ | Mother of My Children | Mother of My Children, the debut album from Katherine Paul’s Black Belt Eagle Scout project, is a collection of pensive rock songs saturated with an oceanic mood. Recorded in the depths of winter, near the singer-songwriter’s hometown in northwestern Washington, it gets its drama from mists and crashing waves—a lush rhythmic force of unruly drums, distorted guitars—with Paul’s voice surfing above it all. Transparent but weathered, her sound has a beach-glass blurriness befitting an album devoted to many forms of loss and mourning that unfolds in moving, hazy episodes. In each one, she rushes towards the elements of her life that have a salt-water sting to them, approaching every one of them with anthemic conviction.
Paul grew up on Puget Sound, on a small reservation called the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. Steeped in intertwined musical and spiritual heritage, her family started teaching her Coast Salish music, drumming, and jingle dress dance as soon as she was old enough to make memories. From there, her musical education expanded across the 70-mile coastal stretch connecting Seattle with her hometown: As a teenager, she taught herself to play guitar and drums from bootleg Hole and Nirvana VHS tapes.
Paul stitched her first album together from a series of heartbreaks. The title song begins with vocals that seem to echo through a vortex. She repeats “without you” enough times to pluck out the phrase’s unique sadness. Like the other tracks on the record, this one was written as her family and friends protested at Standing Rock, during the dissolution of a relationship with the first woman she loved, and after the passing of her beloved mentor Geneviève Castrée, the illustrator and musician (whose death was also the subject of a pair of albums by Castrée’s widower, Phil Elverum of [Mount Eerie](https://pitchfork.com/artists/2919-mount-eerie/). A work of intersectional mourning—queer, indigenous, feminist—Mother of My Children doesn’t compartmentalize these compounding losses.
Specifically, Paul doesn’t draw sharp distinctions between sorrow that is political and sorrow that is personal. Her first single, “Soft Stud” (a track guaranteed to make queer hearts skip a beat), pulses with one person’s specific lust as she navigates a queer community rife with “open, overcrowded love.” The song deserves an award for how deftly it captures the frustrated, wavering intimacies of open relationships.Its lyrics are direct—“Need you, want you, I know you’re taken”—but there’s a layer of discretion in Paul’s delivery. It wasn’t written to be heard by the subject; it exists for the singer’s own purposes. Her insistent guitar and her noble, self-abnegating retreat as the song progresses only add to its potency.
There are confrontational moments on the album. In “Indians Never Die,” Paul questions an oblivious colonizer with chilling calm: “Do you ever notice what’s around you? When it’s all right under our skin?” She is almost furious on “Just Lie Down,” whose distortion and feedback are the aural equivalent of clenched fists. No matter how it’s expressed, her anger throughout the record comes across as righteous. By the closer, “Sam, a Dream,” Paul is ready to blink away her weariness, finding new momentum in its churning energy and static drums.
Mother of My Children is particularly elegant in the way it demonstrates how grief and love share space when something precious is taken from you, how the distinction between those emotions can blur. Paul embeds her coded wisdom in elemental language, refusing to differentiate between forms of heartbreak. But there’s truth behind her vagueness: You can get hit with more than one tragedy at a time; life doesn’t dole them out in distinct chapters. Paul’s project is to show the enormity of this undifferentiated mountain of loss, and to find a way beyond it. If a river dries up, mourning it doesn’t create a new river. It creates a memory where the river used to be, a monument of loyalty to what was lost. | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | September 17, 2018 | 7.2 | 63e95117-f0ff-4950-b8b4-164b41c9ea23 | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
There's an organic and unforced feel to the latest album by Chicago-based post-rock trio Russian Circles, as if songs were allowed to grow wild rather than carefully cultivated. | There's an organic and unforced feel to the latest album by Chicago-based post-rock trio Russian Circles, as if songs were allowed to grow wild rather than carefully cultivated. | Russian Circles: Guidance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22147-guidance/ | Guidance | For five albums now, the Chicago-based trio Russian Circles have made great use of post-rock most familiar's dynamic tricks—loud and quiet; stop and start, swell and subside. But they’ve never had qualms about splicing elements of everything from metal and noise-rock to krautrock and post-hardcore into their darkly dramatic, instrumental compositions. Their last album, 2013’s Memorial, fleshed things out even further with keyboards, strings, and guest vocals from Chelsea Wolfe. But on the group’s sixth full-length, Guidance, a slightly different ethos is at play: the fine art of letting it flow.
There’s always been a sense of flow to Russian Circles, but on Guidance, it’s far more striking. On the folk-like opener “Asa,” Mike Sullivan’s delicate guitar is underpinned with surges of dusky ambience; from there, the band’s tried-and-true blend of glacial riffing and overcast atmosphere takes hold, with the chunkiness of “Vorel” tracing a direct path back to Through Silver in Blood-era Neurosis. Brian Cook’s bass churns with seismic force—the tone of his instrument remains one of the Russian Circles’ most instantly recognizable and arresting textures—and Dave Turncrantz turns his drums into an intricate apparatus of temporal dissection. Amid all that, though, the grooves reign. “Afrika” creates an pulsing undertow that’s desperate and triumphant at the same time; “Mota” switches up more often. But even when Guidance gets complicated, there’s a more organic and unforced feel to it, as if songs were allowed to grow wild rather than carefully cultivated.
Just as unforced is the emotional gravity of Guidance. In a recent interview with Destroy/Exist, Cook explained how the album was inspired by a handful of photos his husband was given at work one day—photos of public executions being held somewhere in Asia. No explanation was given, and since then, the photos had haunted Cook. Rather than turning Guidance into a album-length threnody—Memorial, after all, kind of fits that bill—there’s an urgency and even a sense of meditative acceptance to songs like “Mota” and “Lisboa.” It’s no accident that those are two of the most openly melodic tracks on the album, with chord progressions that evoke beauty, melancholy, and cautious hope as potently as Jesu. “Lisboa” is also the only song on Guidance that truly, fully commits to the sudden, super-quiet/super-loud dynamic that’s become post-rock standard issue. But here, when the band shifts abruptly from hush to hurricane, it feels like a introspective collapse rather than an explosion.
Unlike a huge portion of heavy and/or post-rock albums, lately or in the past—including records in Russian Circles’ own back catalog—there are no lengthy, eight-minute-plus tracks on Guidance. Nor are there any brief interludes. Aside from delicate, folk-like opener “Asa,” each track occupies a relatively uniform span of time: roughly around the six-minute mark. Conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that such uniformity would make for a flat feeling; instead, Russian Circles use the strictness of that structure to explore numerous ways of wringing contemplation and ecstatic out of its tightly bound, three-person setup. Then again, that’s what Russian Circles—even at their most sprawling—have always done: searched for resonance and depth in the turbulence around us. | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Sargent House | July 27, 2016 | 7.5 | 63e9d63e-14f5-490a-830d-e9ef301645d2 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Fetty Wap and French Montana are very different types of rappers, but on their collaborative mixtape Coke Zoo they find common ground in cocaine rap's tropes—and in their shared penchant for hook-driven songs. | Fetty Wap and French Montana are very different types of rappers, but on their collaborative mixtape Coke Zoo they find common ground in cocaine rap's tropes—and in their shared penchant for hook-driven songs. | French Montana / Fetty Wap: Coke Zoo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21251-coke-zoo/ | Coke Zoo | Fetty Wap and French Montana are at different points in their careers. Both are northerners with cocaine-centric worldviews – French Montana comes from a rap outfit called Coke Boys and Fetty Wap's breakout single is called "Trap Queen" – but they don't share much else in common at the moment. Fetty's self-titled debut recently hit Number One on the Billboard 200 after a string of trap ballads became Top 10 hits, and French is in the process of trying to muster up some much-needed buzz after a commercial flop and a series of mixtapes that failed to stick. They are also two very different types of trappers: French is a materialist with tunnel vision and Fetty is a hopeless romantic penning Pyrex love poems. They go about dealing in different ways, but they traffic the same thing, and on their collaborative mixtape Coke Zoo they find common ground in cocaine rap's tropes—and in their shared penchant for hook-driven songs.
Coke Zoo disproves any notion that Auto-Tune is the great equalizer. When Fetty uses it, his voice soars. When French uses, phrases flat-line. It can be jarring going from Fetty's voice, which is robust and full, to French's, which is flat and without depth. French hitches a ride on the Fetty bandwagon for many of his best contributions, but his approach to writing is far more elementary (On "Freaky": "I'ma hit it like a dog/ Then I'ma pass it to my dog"), and it's Fetty's knack for melody that makes songs like "Power" so appealing.
Many of the ideas and sounds on Coke Zoo feel like Fetty Wap b-sides and leftovers: "Sometimes" is a leaked Fetty Wap song from July ("I Wonder") with a French verse tagged on. "Angel" once again showcases the stunning skill set of the trap balladeer ("And I make all this guap just to show you it's ours") before French Montana sucks out all of the energy with lifeless vocals and a mood-breaking verse. On "Gangsta Way", a repurposed Chris Brown song with a French verse, he takes an otherwise solid record and stifles its momentum. It's weird that French Montana, who is one of the more interesting characters in hip-hop, often writes such simple and boring raps, and on Coke Zoo,standing next to Fetty, he somehow seems even duller.
There are some outliers. Unsurprisingly, French delivers his best performances on the French Montana songs, where he gets to operate in his own space without Fetty creeping over his shoulder. The Lil Durk-featuring "See Me" is French's strongest use of Auto-Tune on the tape over a trudging rhythm, sax, and piano chords. On "Concentration", he takes a minor piano riff (courtesy of the Mekanics and MIXX) and makes one of his signature repetitive, bass-heavy jams. But as the chanting Fetty Wap joint "Damn Chainz" proves, there isn't much French can do better than his trapping Jersey counterpart. Coke Zoo is an interesting experiment that showcases why the stocks of these two rappers seem to be headed in two different directions. | 2015-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 3, 2015 | 6.6 | 63f1ad86-c3c8-4f28-a440-ac5425c4c39d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
A wonderful, dreamy record of techno music that invites you to float freely in the time between late night and early morning. A perfect soundtrack for getting lost. | A wonderful, dreamy record of techno music that invites you to float freely in the time between late night and early morning. A perfect soundtrack for getting lost. | Lawrence: Yoyogi Park | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21695-yoyogi-park/ | Yoyogi Park | Dance music, by definition, is communal—except when it's not. The German electronic musician Lawrence, aka Peter Kersten, makes house music that's as much about getting lost in one's head as being enfolded by the crowd. And while Kersten rarely strays too far from dancefloor-oriented forms, his work has spent the past several years getting steadily dreamier.
Kersten is a key figure in German house and techno, having co-founded Hamburg's Dial label in 2000 and then, in 2006, the deeper-diving Smallville. Early Dial pursued a streamlined take on house music that, combined with the whittled-down sounds of early-'00s digital production, led to its characterization, not always accurately, as a minimalist enterprise. But the label never relinquished its fondness for the skippy rhythms and soulful undercurrent of Chicago house, and it went in hard for a strain of windswept romanticism that was easily apparent in both the label's sleeves and its titles. (From Lawrence's own catalog, just consider bittersweet songs like "Happy Sometimes," "The Night Will Last Forever," and the Smiths-referencing "Fifteen Minutes With You.") Smallville, meanwhile, has represented a distillation of those tendencies, resulting in a hyper-classicist style of house, heavy on all the analog signatures of pioneers like Larry Heard, that's also wistfully misty-eyed. Throughout, Lawrence's recordings—including his albums for Japan's Mule Musiq label, of which Yoyogi Park is the third—have served as a kind of ur-text for the Smallville aesthetic.
His ambient inclinations peaked with 2014's A Day in the Life, a collection of songs that took all his typical hallmarks—the shimmer, the swirl, the open-ended tones—and muted all the drums. The result, delicate and ephemeral, was something like the logical conclusion of his most sensitive tendencies: music for Sunday-morning snuggling, walks in the garden, and gentle comedowns, with the merest memory of the dancefloor traced in the shadow of a pulse. Yoyogi Park starts where A Day in the Life left off. It's suffused in hazy synthesizers, sparkling arpeggios, and melodic lines that twist like green tendrils. But in places Yoyogi Park also marks Lawrence's wholehearted return to the dancefloor. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the three songs that have been reprised—upcycled, really—from the previous album, doubled in length and given a whole new rhythmic underpinning. Where the original version of "Nowhere Is a Place" drifted like a kelp forest, the new one leaps purposefully into motion, driven by tightly wound hi-hats and a walking bassline that's unusually fleet of foot. Flickering chords lend additional color and movement, and the result sounds a little like an updated version of Ricardo Villalobos' great "808 the Bassqueen," but even more full-bodied, if you can believe it. This is not an album for sitting still: "Marble Star" fleshes out its ultra-low lows and ultra-dreamy highs with rugged, rolling breakbeats, and "Blue Mountain" rides white-capped waves of synths and drums that bob like flotsam borne aloft on the tide.
One of Kersten's favorite tricks is to juggle soft and hard textures until you're not sure which is which. "Tensui" starts off with knife-edged hi-hats and tough wooden thumps, but it's soon suffused in drowsy pads and bucolic flutes. It would be easy to imagine the same elements remade for A Day in the Life's beatless reveries; the fact that he manages to marry such diffuse sounds to a rhythm track so overwhelmingly physical—this isn't bass you simply feel; you savor it, with your whole body—only makes the track more remarkable. Nothing on Yoyogi Park is original, exactly; Lawrence has been making music like this for most of his career, and his peers on Dial and Smallville have spun the same material in similar ways. Still, no one else is making this music quite so well. And as far as Lawrence's catalog goes, this is his fullest realization yet of interior and exterior—of thought and movement, of daydream and dance. The line separating Saturday night and Sunday morning is no thicker than a second hand; Yoyogi Park invites you to clear out a space inside that sliver of time, and to luxuriate in it. | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mule Musiq | April 21, 2016 | 7.9 | 63f3248a-bab5-49ff-85c4-4a827d20ab58 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride remain committed to their tactile brand of minimal synth with a set of nostalgic rhapsodies that embrace a newfound warmth. | Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride remain committed to their tactile brand of minimal synth with a set of nostalgic rhapsodies that embrace a newfound warmth. | Xeno & Oaklander: Vi/deo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xeno-and-oaklander-video/ | Vi/deo | Xeno & Oaklander—the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride—came up through Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Nights, an endearingly gloomy fixture of late ’00s New York. In the early days, the pair’s music was of a piece with the sounds popular at Wierd—a posthumously defined category of obscure ’80s synth-pop, largely from continental Europe, known as minimal synth.
Wendelbo and McBride’s early music echoed minimal synth’s dour romantic pathos and stark monochromatic textures. But since Wierd closed its doors in 2013, Xeno & Oaklander gradually embraced color and sensuality. Their seventh album, Vi/deo, gusts in as if carried on a waft of perfume, sweet and overpowering. “Aromas of incense and spices/Will rise again/Feelings of misery/Will fade into the haze,” sings Wendelbo on “Infinite Sadness,” as synth melodies bloom like wildflowers. The track’s title is a sign that Xeno & Oaklander haven’t entirely foregone the pleasures of melancholy, but the frigidity of their early output has been replaced by a welcoming new warmth.
In parallel with her musical work, Wendelbo is a perfumier, and speaks of Vi/deo as an expression of her experiences with synesthesia. Her vocals here have a breathy, translucent quality, as if cast out of vapor. By contrast, the music that backs her is crisp and energetic. McBride is the polar opposite of the synth-pop instrumentalist disinterestedly prodding at his keyboard with one finger. Live, he resembles a technician, sleeves rolled up, grappling the controls of a vast modular synth as if guiding the Starship Enterprise through a particularly perilous meteor storm. You can feel this sense of toil on the record: “Afar” and “Raingarden” build up layers upon layers of melodies that interlace in bright, jerky patterns, often feeling just a whisker from spinning dangerously out of control.
What’s remained constant with Xeno & Oaklander is their firm commitment to tactile analog technologies and nostalgic themes. “Television” and “Movie Star” are thoughtful paeans to popular entertainment that feel descended from Kraftwerk, another group entranced by stardom and the power of mass communication. Elsewhere, tracks like “Technicolor” unfold like subtle melodramas, as if soundtracking the moment when a starlet stares off into the middle distance as a solitary tear trickles down her cheek. But for all this looking back, Vi/deo never sounds retro.
The record’s comparatively brief runtime—eight tracks, dispatched in 33 minutes—combined with its ethereal qualities mean it feels somewhat fleeting. A frequent vocal presence on earlier Xeno & Oaklander records, McBride pops up here only briefly, his dour tones on “Television” offering an appealing jolt of cold reality. Though a few more moments like this would have brought the album’s abundant beauty into sharp relief, Vi/deo mostly passes in a reverie, a set of heady rhapsodies that linger in the senses long after the record comes to a close.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dais | November 9, 2021 | 7.1 | 63f3b1cf-1a57-4599-978d-028e7032d17f | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
The 21-year-old Detroit rapper ZeelooperZ is a member of Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade. On his latest album, he tries to push the boundaries of conventional rapping. | The 21-year-old Detroit rapper ZeelooperZ is a member of Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade. On his latest album, he tries to push the boundaries of conventional rapping. | ZelooperZ: Bothic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21713-bothic/ | Bothic | For an artist struggling to stand out, it can be a smart move to focus on your strangest qualities and amplify them. If a conventional approach is failing, then there's no downside to trying something different and getting weirder. On previous projects, 21-year-old Detroit rapper ZelooperZ showed hints of an outsider waiting to break out, but 2011's Coon N the Room is a teenager's failed concept album, and 2014's Help stood out only for its stilted verses (especially considering mentor and Bruiser Brigade leader Danny Brown appears twice and excels). But on his latest album Bothic, ZelooperZ is now both more refined and eccentric than ever. It's nearly impossible to identify a single conventionally rapped verse on the album, which somehow works to its advantage. For the most part, Bothic lacks straightforward melody and ZelooperZ's delivery borders on grating, yet the result is still occasionally enthralling.
ZelooperZ opens the album with his best Lil B impression on "Summit" over a beat reminiscent of Clams Casino. It's truly an inauspicious start to the project; ZelooperZ is not as observational as Lil B, nor does he give off any semblance of stream-of-consciousness rapping, which makes the track simply sound the work of a bad rapper—someone who tries and fails to rhyme or flow. From there, however, Bothic picks up. "Bothic Bout It" is a banger despite (or perhaps due to) a complete lack of comprehensible lyrics. The consistent repetition of "bothic" (a portmanteau for "bruiser gothic" that ZelooperZ coined) suggests that we don't need much more than heavy bass, rhythm, and a couple of well-chosen words or sounds for a song to communicate intensity. ZelooperZ has a rudimentary flow, but the momentary offbeat bits of flair that show he has a feel for the grace notes outside traditional structure. "Bothic, rockin' Rick Owens in Hot Topic / Popped a pack for 175, blew a bag, then I made some profit" is intentionally askew and is easily one of the most memorable lines on the record, not only for its humor, but also for how ZelooperZ withholds certain sounds, creating small bursts of energy.
At times, it sounds like ZelooperZ is ignoring the production around him, like on "Scale," where he moans over jaunty piano. Still, it works, its haphazard parts colliding together to form a mess, but a compelling one. Ratking's Wiki shows up on "Heart" for the Bothic's only guest appearance; he clearly outshines ZelooperZ lyrically, but while his quick "where I'm from" narrative is welcome, it's somehow not as notable ZelooperZ's frenzied shrieks.
Bothic requires a fair amount of immersion to enjoy. With the exception of "Bothic Bout It," "Heart," and "ISBD," most tracks would probably be skipped immediately if heard out of context. "Ocean," for instance, is a relaxing comedown, but ZelooperZ's delivery of "ocean" as "oshaaah" doesn't work without hearing him go through warped exercises on "Scale" and "Automatic." As a whole, Bothic seems intended to be heard as the work of a next-level auteur, but there are still too many moments that beg the question whether it's successful or just plain strange. ZelooperZ is not a finished product as an artist, but if Bothic is any indication, he's willing to push boundaries and could potentially create a style all his own. | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bruiser Brigade | March 15, 2016 | 6.3 | 63f65d0f-420f-441e-9691-f03449aed651 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Kyle Thomas’ fifth album as King Tuff is more fleshed out and lustrous than before, now preoccupied with death, environmental degradation, and technological dependency. | Kyle Thomas’ fifth album as King Tuff is more fleshed out and lustrous than before, now preoccupied with death, environmental degradation, and technological dependency. | King Tuff: The Other | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-tuff-the-other/ | The Other | Garage rock is the natural musical manifestation of a room where junk is collected and neglected, where the floors are stained with grease spots, and where plugging in always carries the thrill of pissing off your parents as they try to sleep upstairs. It is by nature a closed-off, confining space, impervious to external influence and the passage of time. And there’s only so long you can wallow in its gas-rag stench before you start choking on the fumes.
The garage has been Kyle Thomas’ spiritual home for the past 10 years, where he’s revved up the flame-job Camaro of his dreams and gotten high off the exhaust. Over the course of four albums as King Tuff, he’s smeared ’60s garage rock into ’70s glam and ’80s rock sleaze until it turns into bubblegum, all while cultivating a party-hard persona that’s made him something of an Andrew W.K. posi-vibes guru for the Burger Records set. But over time, the garage has started to feel more like a prison: after touring behind 2014’s Black Moon Spell, Thomas was starting to fear for his health—physically, mentally, and creatively. So, on his first album in four years, he’s flipped up the proverbial sun visor, hit the button on his clip-on garage-door opener, and peeled out for parts unknown.
With Black Moon Spell, Thomas pushed his garage-glam amalgam as far as it could go without sacrificing his essential dirtbagitude and cheeky charm, by applying liberal dollops of lip gloss and mascara to give it a greater shine, but not enough to cover up the greasy stubble. In one sense, The Other is a logical extension of its predecessor’s more lustrous moments, like the jangly acoustic outlier “Eyes of the Muse” and the stargazing ballad “Staircase of Diamonds.” But the execution here is more sophisticated—and the overall tone far more serious. Within its first 10 seconds, The Other has already established itself as such a different beast from what’s come before, you almost wonder why Thomas didn’t just retire the King Tuff name entirely along with his penchant for cartoon cover art.
Nothing announces an artist’s maturation quite like a waft of wind chimes. That sound eases you into The Other’s opening title track, whose dulcet organ tones provide a suitably melancholy backdrop for Thomas’ confessional lyrics about bottoming out and finding the will to carry on. It’s the sort of atmospheric vignette that would be highly effective as a two-minute scene-setter… but it goes on for three times as long as that, subtly layering additional textures yet never quite building up to the big emotional payoff suggested by its epic proportions. Beyond introducing the album’s overarching themes of pain and perseverance, the song also proves emblematic of a record that’s always reaching for the stars, yet sometimes strains too hard to get there.
With The Other, Thomas has arrived at the same point Bowie did with Diamond Dogs, or Alice Cooper with Welcome to My Nightmare, where the campy hijinks old have given way to more worldly apocalyptic concerns. On his previous records, Thomas seemed concerned with little more than chasing girls, getting fucked up, and listening to records; here, he’s preoccupied with death, environmental degradation, and technological dependency. And the record’s ostentatious touches—brass, funk grooves, sci-fi synths—only serve to tease out a more sinister energy. Certainly, the horn-powered voodoo rhythms of “Neverending Sunshine,” “Psycho Star,” and “Raindrop Blue” blast open uncharted territory for Thomas to roam. But they forsake his melodic songwriting gifts in favor of a more plainspoken theatrical exposition, with Thomas devoting so much energy to loading up his narrative verses with mystical metaphors that he has little left for the half-cooked chorus chants. And where his previous records were always delivered with a smirk that could sell you on the goofiest throwaway lyric, Thomas delivers his heavy-handed treatises with all the subtlety of a protest placard— on the stern folk-rock parable “Circuits in the Sand,” he essentially comes up with a smartphone-era answer to Aquarian-age rants like Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs.”
Fitting for an album born of an existential crisis, The Other resonates best when it wades into more personal terrain. On the poignant “Thru the Cracks,” Thomas delivers a cosmic country-rock elegy for a departed friend with a luminous guest-vocal assist from Jenny Lewis, while “Infinite Mile” broaches the album’s grave topical concerns from a more playful perspective, fusing a ’65-Dylan ramble to a swaggering ’70s-Who acoustic groove. And if The Other shows that Thomas’ evolution from slack stoner to conscientious art-rock oracle has not come without growing pains, he makes good on the album’s magisterial promise with the closing “No Man’s Land.”
The song serves as a bookend echo of The Other’s title-track opener, revisiting similar themes of loneliness and disillusionment, but Thomas finds solace in its gorgeous celestial sweep, and braces for the great unknown with a smile on his face. “Someday maybe you’ll find me like a wild Santa Claus,” he sings, “in a tin-foil hat, talking on a disconnected telephone.” King Tuff, the non-stop party machine, may be gone, but he’s been replaced with someone even more off the hook. | 2018-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 16, 2018 | 6.5 | 63f860dc-4602-47da-9d56-23194a04e5d7 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
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 1993 album from the technically dazzling jazz-rap group that changed the national perception of West Coast hip-hop. | 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 1993 album from the technically dazzling jazz-rap group that changed the national perception of West Coast hip-hop. | Freestyle Fellowship: Innercity Griots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freestyle-fellowship-innercity-griots/ | Innercity Griots | A couple decades before Kendrick Lamar galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement with the rallying cry “we gon’ be alright,” a different group of Los Angeles rappers were saying something similar. The year was 1993 and the words rang out on “Everything’s Everything,” a song from Freestyle Fellowship’s Innercity Griots. The album was released on April 28, one day shy of the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. “Unhh! Unhh! It’s alright y’all!” the group chants over a rollicking funk track. Rather than steeling their community against an unsympathetic future, their words felt like a much-needed reassurance, a James Brown chorus line assuaging themselves and no one else: “Everything is gonna be alright!”
Freestyle Fellowship were some of the first technically dazzling rappers to come out of California, paving the way for a number of artists who would soon change the national perception of West Coast hip-hop. When it comes to the history of flows, it can be tempting to jump directly from Rakim to Wu-Tang Clan without making a detour through Los Angeles. But the frenetic interplay between Clan members on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is reminiscent of the Fellowship. Their fast, melodic “chopping” double-time raps were an evolutionary step for lyricism, one that influenced chart-toppers like Busta Rhymes and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Denzel Curry is a fan. You can even hear echoes of the four rappers today in the triplet flows and freewheeling strangeness of Future and Young Thug.
But in 1993, Myka 9, Aceyalone, P.E.A.C.E., and Self Jupiter were just trying to put out their major-label debut. They hailed from Leimert Park, a South Los Angeles neighborhood known as “the creative center of Black Los Angeles,” home to several performing arts centers and a thriving music community. 1991’s To Whom It May Concern... was a staggeringly inventive and restless burst of offbeat conscious hip-hop—the first run was only 300 vinyls and 500 cassettes. After signing with Island Records subsidiary 4th & B’way and parting ways with founding members J. Sumbi and M.D. Himself, the group were primed and ready to make a grand statement.
Produced primarily by the Earthquake Brothers with additional beats by Bambawar, Daddy-O, and Edman, the Fellowship’s new tracks tiptoed between organic and programmed music, largely forgoing sampling for live instrumentation. Innercity Griots was a pioneering example of this hybrid production style, helping to set the stage for later albums by groups like UGK and OutKast. Several songs used jazz tunes like Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay” and Miles Davis’s “Black Comedy” as templates but spiraled off into different directions as the house band, the Underground Railroad, jammed together. Though turntablist DJ Kiilu made sure the production didn’t stray too far from hip-hop, the tracks feature a cornucopia of instruments rarely present on a rap album in 1993: saxophone, trumpet, timpani, flute, trombone, vibraphone, upright bass. Compared to the muddy, traditional beats of their first album, the sound was substantially richer and more detailed.
A Tribe Called Quest breathed new life into their parents’ jazz records. The Roots were a live jazz band that made hip-hop music. But Freestyle Fellowship were the only rap group in the ’90s that seemed to embody the style and spirit of jazz on a molecular level. They shared the effortless cool and tough countenance of the great bebop players from the ’50s without verging into jazz-rap parody. Their innate jazziness felt tangible and hard-earned. Days after the release of Innercity Griots, the Fellowship chose to perform live with jazz legends Horace Tapscott and Don Cherry, as well as proto-rap spoken-word ensemble the Watts Prophets, at Hollywood’s Ivar Theatre instead of sharing the stage with other contemporary rappers.
Rather than sounding like a group of emcees rapping over jazz records, they more closely resembled a free jazz horn quartet taking turns soloing. “My rhymes take the direction of a jazz trumpet or sax solo, like Miles or Trane,” Myka 9 told L.A. Weekly in 2000. “If I was to rhyme in the same meter as those notes... that’s my concept.” Their A&R at 4th & B’way liked the album’s musical direction but wanted them to re-record the vocals. JMD from Earthquake Brothers disagreed: “No, it’s jazz. They’re reacting. Everybody’s reacting to one another.” Writing about rap and the L.A. riots for the Los Angeles Review of Books, critic Jeff Chang noted that many welcomed Innercity Griots as “rap’s equivalent to [Ornette] Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come.” When he was born, Self Jupiter’s parents named him after Ornette. The jazz was in them.
Freestyle Fellowship found emancipation through jazz, but they found their styling within the confines of the Good Life Cafe. Founded in Leimert Park in December 1989, the Good Life was an earthy health-food restaurant with open mic nights every Thursday that became an incubator for groups like the Pharcyde and Jurassic 5. In the early ’90s, these events attracted big-name attendees like Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, Pharrell, and John Singleton. The Good Life served as a predecessor to the Project Blowed scene, and inspiration for influential club nights like Low End Theory and rappers such as Busdriver and Open Mike Eagle (Ava DuVernay, herself a Good Life emcee, directed a documentary about the venue called This Is the Life in 2008.)
The cafe’s commitment to health went beyond just the food they were selling: profanity, xenophobia, and misogyny were strictly prohibited. If you swore, the crowd would boo you. (It famously happened to Fat Joe.) It wasn’t puritanical—it was intended to promote a professional artistic environment. Experimentation was welcomed, and the tough, discerning audience helped separate the wheat from the chaff. If you were wack, the crowd would yell “please pass the mic!” in unison as a form of “constructive criticism.”
Freestyle Fellowship were the most respected group in the Good Life scene, and their music became a prime example of the freedom that can come from imposing limitations. Their whimsically funky single “Inner City Boundaries,” featuring stylistic forebear Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, received a tastefully minimalist black-and-white promo video of the group performing in the studio with a full jazz band, intercut with shots of people holding up cue cards like Bob Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Myka 9 scats and plays an imaginary trumpet as he raps. Compared to the playful Hollywood largesse of other videos from the same year, like Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” and 2Pac’s “I Get Around,” it looks like a Truffaut film.
The Fellowship weren’t all that concerned with following industry trends or being commercially viable. Another video, for “Hot Potato,” featured an alternate version of the song with different lyrics and performances than the one on the album. It was their way of recreating the atmosphere of the Good Life open mic nights, and of saying that rapping was like a beloved schoolyard game to them. But a bunch of guys angrily rhyming about root vegetables didn’t exactly set the charts on fire, and 4th & B’way struggled to market the group and get their songs on the radio. Other jazz-rap acts such as Digable Planets and Arrested Development enjoyed more mainstream success, but Freestyle Fellowship lacked those groups’ familiar samples and clear pop sensibilities.
Instead, the label commissioned ads for the album featuring magazine quotes that focused on how good the group was at rapping. An interview in an April 1993 issue of The Source describes the group as having a reputation for being “rapper’s rappers.” When asked how they fit into the world of hip-hop, P.E.A.C.E. responded, “I see us in the doorway, but nobody’s offered us seats to sit down and lounge in the hip-hop arena yet, so we kinda in the middle.” They earned a 3-and-a-half mic review that praised them as “style junkies.”
In an era when few rappers straddled both sides of hip-hop’s ideological divide, Freestyle Fellowship’s image was somewhat ambiguous. “People may say that we should talk more about what the gangsta rappers talk about,” Myka 9 told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “but we’ll leave that to those rappers. We’d rather broaden our musical horizons than complain.” He saw his group as “liberators, liberating rap from its R&B/funk structures—that 4/4 (time) prison.” For Freestyle Fellowship, process was more important than politics.
Listening to the album, it’s not hard to see which way their moral compass points. “I gotta be righteous, I gotta be me/I gotta be conscious, I gotta be free” could’ve been a slogan for the conscious rap movement that would be in full bloom by the turn of the millennium. “I am a Black man, I’ma survive!” Myka 9 repeats on “Bullies of the Block” with delirious, almost bemused anger, as if he were trying to convince himself that it’s true. But the next lines quickly shifted the sentiment from Martin to Malcolm: “Yesterday I had a fight in a nightclub/But I had my gat and I bust alive!” In the song’s video, an American flag burns.
As much as the press tried to flatten their vibrant personas, Freestyle Fellowship complemented each other perfectly in the music. P.E.A.C.E., who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia, never sticks to a distinct rhyme structure or a particular voice for long, shifting restlessly from track to track and moment to moment. Aceyalone tethers the group to earth with his erudite personality, spinning a world-weary collection of Black fables sprinkled with elements of the Funkadelic, Run-DMC, and Egyptian Lover tracks that inspired him as a youth. On “Everything’s Everything,” Self Jupiter compares his recorded performances to competitive gymnastics. His verses occasionally take on a haunted affect, as if Vincent Price could rap. (Jupiter went to jail for armed robbery not long after the release of Innercity Griots, derailing the group until they resurfaced after his release with 2001’s Temptations and 2002’s Shockadoom.)
But Myka 9, the group’s spiritual leader, is the kind of rapper whose exploits other emcees speak of with wide eyes and hushed tones. Daddy-O once introduced him to Afrika Bambaataa as “the best MC I’ve ever heard in my life.” His mellifluous, twisting flow skitters over beats like stones skipping across a pond. He never repeats himself stylistically but is nonetheless unmistakable on any track he appears on. Unpredictably free-associative, he scats, hums, roars, whimpers, and howls, opening up new galaxies of possibility with every verse. Among other influences—John Coltrane, the Last Poets, Miles Davis—Myka 9 also claims to be inspired by birds, his verses an attempt at replicating their songs with his human voice.
Together, the four emcees luxuriated in their own creativity, rapping for the sake of rapping, a practice of pure technique where what was said wasn’t entirely the point. Even when they occasionally resorted to rap cliché, there was always something off-kilter about their approach that set it apart. The obligatory songs about weed (“Mary”) and women (“Shammy’s”) were way too bugged out for the masses. The vividly foreboding P.E.A.C.E. solo cut “Six Tray” details a twisted drive-by shooting where the aftermath of murder takes on macabre specificity not typically found in gangsta fare from the same time period: “Split second too late, brown hearse/Right door second, left door first.”
On “Bullies of the Block,” Aceyalone raps about “making the kind of music that will outlast you all.” To me, that sounds like the ultimate goal of the griot, the African storyteller referenced in the album’s title. The griot’s purpose is to share wisdom from generation to generation by setting words to music. Over the years, this record has been passed from rapper to rapper and from fan to fan as a rite of passage, a lodestar that unlocks new potential in whoever hears it. The album’s verses are oral histories that have yet to lose any of their potency. In a 1993 interview with Rap Sheet, Myka refers to “the spirit of the die-hard rapper” as the essence of what keeps the Fellowship together. Through the music and legacy of Innercity Griots, that spirit seems destined to live on forever.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Jazz | 4th & Broadway | October 11, 2020 | 9 | 63f8c7f5-bb8d-4195-ac2b-28fd3a0a73f9 | Rollie Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/ | |
With barely more than her voice and a piano, Annie Clark strips her hypersexual, neon-clad 2017 album Masseduction for parts. It is a welcome antidote to a career defined by cult and concept. | With barely more than her voice and a piano, Annie Clark strips her hypersexual, neon-clad 2017 album Masseduction for parts. It is a welcome antidote to a career defined by cult and concept. | St. Vincent: MassEducation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-masseducation/ | MassEducation | The acoustic album is a rite of passage. It marks a period when the tour, the band, and the press has left an artist yearning to be seen in a soft new light: For Nirvana, their MTV Unplugged performance was a middle finger to the hype machine—one of the biggest, loudest rock bands on earth settling in for some quiet covers and deep cuts. Mariah Carey’s 1992 acoustic EP set out to disprove naysayers who claimed her lack of touring equated to lack of talent. For St. Vincent, whose promotional circuit for 2017’s Masseduction featured latex accessories, pop-up art galleries, and interviews given from inside a hot-pink cube, an intimate, no-frills album is a welcome antidote to a career defined by cult and concept.
Masseduction used locomotive synths and schoolyard call-and-responses to project an image of manic sensuality, while Annie Clark took on the public persona of “dominatrix at the mental institution.” It was a vision that deferred and distracted from questions of a more personal nature, perhaps a defense mechanism following her whirlwind year in the spotlight with her relationship with model and actress Cara Delevingne. But behind all the leopard print and leather, the record was a romantic opus filled with simple melodrama: “You and me, we’re not meant for this world,” she sang on “Hang on Me,” as if starring in her own John Hughes movie.
Recorded over two days at Manhattan’s Reservoir Studios studios, MassEducation strips its hypersexual, neon-clad predecessor for parts, exposing its songs as tales of longing and nostalgia. Clark seemed to always know that her record contained two lives: “This needs to be something people can really dance to,” she said of a song on her last album, “until they listen to the words and then they’re crying.” Hiding melancholy behind pop production is nothing new, but on an album so saturated with sadness, these pared-down renderings give Clark a chance to indulge in their underlying sentiments.
Accompanied by longtime friend Thomas Bartlett (a frequent producer for Sufjan Stevens) on the piano, Clark’s voice expands and contracts, varyingly snarky and flat, honeyed and affectionate, husky and sensual. On “Slow Disco,” her voice wells up, rich and velvetine, as she muses, “Am I thinking what everybody’s thinking?” On an earlier club remix of the same track, dubbed “Fast Slow Disco,” the line is more of a wink towards promiscuity. Here, the same lyrics come off as a desperate cry for connection. “Young Lover,” a tragic depiction of drug addiction that once masked itself behind triumphant electric guitars, reveals the frustration and pain in her voice, an almost uncomfortably close portrayal of a disastrous relationship. The record also gives Clark room to be completely vulnerable—on Masseduction’s “Sugarboy,” the closing refrain of “Boys! Girls!” sounds like an industrial machine running out of juice. Here, Clark embodies this exhaustion, as if fatigued by her own sexual intensity.
Bartlett recontextualizes Clark’s delivery throughout the record via his reinventions of the piano. It builds tension and foreboding in the maudlin dance-with-death “Smoking Section,” punctuating the air between Clark’s increasingly morbid verses. On “Savior,” Bartlett plays the inner strings of his instrument like a violin, the staccato notes fighting against Clark’s drawn-out vocals. The high-octave, mile-a-minute progressions on “Sugarboy” lend a strikingly expressive counterpart to her animalistic, baritone interpretation of the song’s chorus. It might not sound as alien as Clark’s glam guitars, but it makes room for the otherworldly range of emotions in her voice. On “Fear the Future,” the wailing of electric guitars is replaced by maximalist, thundering crashes on the piano, turning an apocalyptic screed into a frenetic fear of the unknown.
Of course, there are natural limits to the acoustic format. Without the sleek production posse of Jack Antonoff and Sounwave, prosaic lyricism has nowhere to hide. The already saccharine chorus of “Pills” sounds like the theatrical performance of a junk food jingle here. Similarly, her thinly veiled criticism of image-obsessed Angelinos on “Los Ageless” loses its sexiness and sheen, leaving in its wake a smokey, hollow cabaret crooner. “Hang on Me,” a woozy post-club comedown, takes on a second life as a kind of modern lullaby, one with a bit of added schmaltz but no less flair than the original, a rendition that wouldn’t feel out of place over a tender familial flashback from “This Is Us.”
For Clark, the intimacy of MassEducation is the natural conclusion to nearly a decade of life behind rotating personas: a jealous, pill-popping housewife, a self-described “near-future cult leader,” and most recently, a sexed-up, technicolor seductress. But on the cover of this record, all we see is Annie Clark: blurry, yes, but also literally laid bare. She has discussed the idea of songs having multiple lives, and that people, too, can live more than one existence in parallel, always aware of their diametric opposite. These songs bridge the gap between the two, exposing the overwhelming darkness that unifies her eclectic output along the way. | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | October 16, 2018 | 7.2 | 64016c80-1216-4259-8dc3-c3f5f52f1801 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Alex Paterson and his band of merry pranksters pay tribute to the golden age of ambient house with subtlety, occasional silliness, and a slyly subversive edge. | Alex Paterson and his band of merry pranksters pay tribute to the golden age of ambient house with subtlety, occasional silliness, and a slyly subversive edge. | The Orb: Abolition of the Royal Familia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-orb-abolition-of-the-royal-familia/ | Abolition of the Royal Familia | With Andrew Weatherall gone and the KLF occupied with conceptual art, the Orb are the last act standing from the magical moment in British music when house, reggae, and ambient collided with a mischievous sense of humor. Abolition of the Royal Familia, the Orb’s new studio album, is no match for Chill Out, Screamadelica or other landmarks of the post-acid-house era. But it feels like a guardian of the flame that Weatherall and his peers ignited: melodic, adventurous, and slyly political, a far-out dispatch from one of the most brilliantly infuriating sonic adventurers of the electronic age.
After the rambling of 2018’s No Sounds Are Out of Bounds and the horizontal ambience of 2016’s COW / Chill Out, World!, the opening half of Abolition of the Royal Familia is a return to the pop-house Orb of “Toxygene” or “Perpetual Dawn,” where abstraction and atmosphere cede place to beats and hooks. The opening “Daze (Missing & Messed Up Mix)” and “House of Narcotics (Opium Wars Mix)” are both straight-up vocal house numbers whose mixdowns betray the slightest touch of the Orb’s dub influences. “Hawk Kings (Oseberg Buddhas Buttonhole)” is even more rambunctious, a pumping house gem that incorporates spinal-stretching string rushes and wistful robotic chatter in tribute to Orb fan Stephen Hawking.
House isn’t the only element to come clattering to the fore on Abolition of the Royal Familia: At times, the album feels like the Orb are peeling back the layers to reveal their inspirations. Reggae has long been an influence, usually stretched out and dubbed off into the cosmos, in keeping with the band’s origins in London chill-out rooms. But tracks like “Shape Shifters (In Two Parts) [Coffee & Ghost Train Mix]” and “Say Cheese (Siberian Tiger Cookie Mix)” are notably earthbound, the work of dialed-in humans on actual instruments rather than smoked-out alien adventurers. On songs like these, the Orb don’t feel so far removed from similarly enduring musical travellers the Grateful Dead, albeit a Dead brought up on Scientist LPs and Monty Python specials, rather than Owsley and the blues.
This touch of humor is important. For a band whose best moments—particularly their debut album, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld—are gorgeously otherworldly, this excursion into the human realm can feel a little too close to reality. But the free-spiritedness of Abolition of the Royal Familia, with preposterous samples stacked on top of each other in gleefully arranged collages, separates the Orb from their more po-faced peers while providing a through line to their gag-packed career. “Say Cheese” starts with what appears to be British actor/director Richard Ayoade talking about cheese, while the intro to “Ital Orb (Too Blessed to Be Stressed Mix)” features a news item about the effect of “killer dope” on a baby squirrel. Depending upon your tolerance for musical tomfoolery, you might be charmed, revolted, or bored stiff.
Like good situationists, the Orb mix this absurdism with a political edge. The album is intended in part as a retrospective protest against the British royal family’s historical endorsement of the East India Company’s role in the opium trade, while “Slave Till U Die No Matter What U Buy (L’anse Aux Meadows Mix)” is a glistening ambient remake of Jello Biafra’s blistering spoken-word piece “Message From Our Sponsor.” On paper, this sounds ludicrous: politics meeting cheese on a reggae-influenced ambient-house album that dredges up the last 30 years of electronic music. But the Orb’s particular skill—much like the KLF before them—lies in stirring these ingredients into sweetly melodic stews that go down like honey, their silliness a feature rather than a bug. It’s not so much that no one else could make this ridiculous album, more that no one but the Orb would even think of it. Abolition of the Royal Familia is a testament to their sadly singular talent. | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cooking Vinyl | March 31, 2020 | 6.9 | 6407ae1f-1395-4818-a81b-91bf7cec249a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Produced by Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-yArDs, Thao Nguyen's fourth album, A Man Alive!, is her most rhythmically robust and gleefully discordant release to date. | Produced by Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-yArDs, Thao Nguyen's fourth album, A Man Alive!, is her most rhythmically robust and gleefully discordant release to date. | Thao & the Get Down Stay Down: A Man Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21415-a-man-alive/ | A Man Alive | Over the course of four albums, Thao Nguyen has been on a mission to get down more than stay down. From her winsome 2008 debut onward, twee has given way to twitch, her formative folksiness gradually overpowered by funk. And with that shift, her lyrical focus has turned less contemplative and more communal, with her 2013 album, We the Common, inspired by her advocacy work for imprisoned women in California.
But her fourth album, A Man Alive!, is something of a full-circle move. Built from the bottom end on up, it's Nguyen's most rhythmically robust, gleefully discordant release to date. It also marks a return to the more self-analytical approach of her earliest efforts, yielding her most candid songwriting yet. These two approaches never feel at odds with each other somehow, and instead, A Man Alive! reinforces the symbiotic relationship between personal trauma and ecstatic physical release.
Guiding Nguyen through this process is her friend and occasional collaborator Merrill Garbus (a.k.a. tUnE-yArDs), who's credited as the album's producer. However, her approach is more like a remixer, as she playfully manipulates the band's constituent elements and amplifies their irreverent qualities. At times, it recalls the Clinton-era alt-rock of The Breeders, Luscious Jackson, and Cibo Matto—bands that shot a distinctly female perspective on life and love through cut-and-paste productions and absurdist funk.
Nguyen and Garbus also share an ability to wade into messy, difficult conversations with poise and clarity. If the sound of A Man Alive! is informed by Garbus' unmistakable presence, lyrically, Nguyen is grappling with absence—specifically, that of her father, who abandoned her family at a young age. "Half of all my blood in vain," she shouts amid the hand-clapped beat and acoustic shredding of "Departure," channeling her pain into puns. Later, on "Guts"—a cool-down strut sounds like its slinked off some mid-'70s Rickie Lee Jones record—she boldly declares, "I've got the guts/ I don't need my blood." The implication: It's one thing to mend a broken heart; it's quite another to extract your DNA.
If much of A Man Alive! sees Nguyen powering through her troubles with grace and groove to spare, she bravely lets her guard down on the tremolo-sparkled centerpiece ballad "Millionaire," which hinges on a line that's both defiant and devastating in its simplicity: "Oh daddy, I broke in a million pieces/ That makes you a millionaire." Atop the blissful dub fadeout "Endless Love," Nguyen sings, "I've got an endless love/ no one can starve," before cheerfully adding this shockingly unsentimental rejoinder: "I don't want it/ I don't want it/ Carve it on out of me." The scar tissue on a healing heart inevitably hardens it, but A Man Alive's great virtue is that Nguyen can still sound like she's having the time of her life even as she's recounting the darkest moments from it. | 2016-03-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-03-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Ribbon Music | March 7, 2016 | 8 | 6423c9d0-122e-48ac-a42b-f3e2812ec53b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The solo debut from the Hunx and His Punx frontman finds him reflecting on the past, writing ballads to his old friend Jay Reatard, his departed father, and the Bay City Rollers. | The solo debut from the Hunx and His Punx frontman finds him reflecting on the past, writing ballads to his old friend Jay Reatard, his departed father, and the Bay City Rollers. | Hunx: Hairdresser Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16313-hairdresser-blues/ | Hairdresser Blues | Seth Bogart, better known as Hunx, has been spending the past few years upending the certain heteronormative rock'n'roll clichés, whether through creating a girl-group with himself at the center, or through subverting the machismo of 1950s greaser icons by adding a liberal dose of glammy homoeroticism. Last year's Too Young to Be in Love proved to be a valuable contrast to the heterosexuality of first-wave rock'n'roll, but more importantly, it was an enjoyable garage-pop record. Bogart and his "punkettes" sounded like they had a ball recording it, embracing the kitsch of malt-shop soundtracks. And while the album certainly possessed the air of "sock hop night" at your favorite gay bar, it also had a universal emotional core, with many of the songs detailing the highs and lows of teenage infatuation-- which, in spite of what you're told, doesn't get much more mature when you enter young adulthood.
When it was announced that Bogart would record a solo album, speculation arose. A Hunx record with no punx, no punkettes, and no Shannon Shaw to potentially steal the show. Is Bogart heading into pensive singer/songwriter territory? Would he go from the unbridled fun of Too Young to Be in Love to releasing his own Nebraska? Recorded by Bogart and Too Young producer Ivan Julian (with help from Daniel Pitout of British Columbia punk band Nü Sensae on drums), Hairdresser Blues finds Hunx reflecting on the past in a major way, writing ballads to his old friend Jay Reatard, his departed father, and the Bay City Rollers. With the newfound emotional weight comes punchier production and fuller arrangements, sacrificing the girl-group harmonies of songs like "Lovers Lane" for driving surf-rock numbers and Flying Nun-indebted Farfisa organs.
The songs still traverse into the realm of Nifty Fifties homage by way of pastiche à la Hairspray ("Do You Remember Being a Roller?", right down to the title, is the album's most overt nod), many of them still carry an undercurrent of writhing lust. (Hint: "Private Room" isn't exactly about those spaces in the library hallway with the opaque glass doors.) But whereas Too Young to Be in Love was the excited doodles of a crush's name in a notebook, Hairdresser Blues is the discarding of the love letters that came after.
Most of the album's songs finds Bogart singing about wanting to turn the clock back to past experience, the time-honored method of dealing with bleak periods by thinking about simpler times. "Say Goodbye Before You Leave" is an ode to Reatard, with Bogart singing of the fun he had opening for him on tour and their late-night phone conversations, wishing he could run his fingers through his hair or just hang out one more time. (When he sings, "We can talk about girls," in the second verse, there's a clear hint of compromise in his voice, a plea that they could do whatever he wants to do, as long as he just comes back.)
Closer "When You're Gone" is the classic case of when a departed loved one feels like a phantom limb, when it hasn't quite sunk in that someone is gone for good, and all you do is wait for them to come back. Like Too Young to Be in Love closer "Blow Me Away", the song is about his father, who passed away when Bogart was a teenager. Through heartbreak and death, Hairdresser Blues is very much an album about loss and the different ways it affects us. But the darker recesses of Bogart's memory are tempered with moments of levity, the moments of waiting up for someone who's never coming back sitting alongside dreams of Bogart having a blow dryer between his thighs. | 2012-02-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-02-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | February 24, 2012 | 7.2 | 64263331-48b1-45a5-ba01-61c73340aa60 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Steven Julien specializes in a jubilantly no-frills strain of house and techno, and his debut album is bare-bones—just gnarled acid sequences, bare-knuckle drum programming, and drifting synths. | Steven Julien specializes in a jubilantly no-frills strain of house and techno, and his debut album is bare-bones—just gnarled acid sequences, bare-knuckle drum programming, and drifting synths. | Steven Julien: Fallen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22026-fallen/ | Fallen | Steven Julien is a committed disciple of the jam econo. Since 2009, recording mostly as FunkinEven, the London electronic musician has specialized in a jubilantly no-frills strain of house and techno. His rugged workouts for a stripped-down setup of synthesizer and drum machine are unvarnished, unfussy, and unsentimental. Often recorded in single takes, they have a gestural quality to them, like the arc of a hand slicing through air. And they tend to move in one direction: forward.
A lot of the same qualities hold true for Fallen, his debut album, and his first major release under his own name. It’s not lo-fi, exactly, but it's proudly bare bones, giving no corner to excess. There’s no advanced digital signal processing here, no fantastical sound design, no psychoacoustic sleight-of-hand—just gnarled acid sequences, bare-knuckle drum programming, and drifting synths. In most cases, the technology behind these tunes hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past 30-odd years; nor, for that matter, has their style.
He covers a lot of ground: “Jedi” is smooth, pinging techno in the vein of Jeff Mills or Robert Hood. “XL,” which he made some 15 years ago, as he told The Wire, brandishing an old floppy disc on which he'd saved the song, teases rolling jazz piano over an excitable house rhythm, ragged filters in constant motion. “Kingdom” is a spacious, starry-eyed acid cut similar to Joey Anderson or Levon Vincent; its structure is simple, but the dimensions suggested by its spiraling arpeggios are vast and expansive. “Reficul” is a greasy, mean-mugging drum-machine fugue in the spirit of “Night,” a 2012 collaboration with Kyle Hall under their Funkinevil alias, and “Disciple” is a thrilling explosion of breakbeats and stuttering horn stabs that throws off energy as though exorcising demons.
But Fallen also marks an important shift from Julien’s earlier work. While there are plenty of storming club cuts here, the whole thing is more varied, more nuanced, and more contemplative than any other record in his catalog. “Begins,” an ambient miniature that opens the record with mercurial timbres and complex harmonies, sets up a full-on jazz fusion number in the form of “Chantel,” flush with digital chimes, flute synth, and squirrely bass work reminiscent of Jaco Pastorius or Stanley Clarke. (It comes as no surprise to learn that Julien cites Plastic People’s Co-Op parties as a major influence; jazz fusion and electric soul played a huge part in the development of the broken-beat aesthetic.)
Fallen is clearly a transitional record for Julien. He recently told The Wire, “I don't like half the stuff I’ve released. This is exactly where I’m at in my head at the moment and hopefully forever.” The album dramatizes that transition in its sequencing. Broken into two halves, it follows a loose kind of narrative, with the first half bathed in warm colors and rich harmonies and the tangled second half caked in grit and worry before emerging into the rosy glow of its ambient outro. The dichotomy is clearest in the juxtaposition of two songs at the album's center. “Oshun,” named after a fertility spirit from the Yoruba and Ifá religions, is a shuffling, meditative cut whose earthy, swirling tones evoke a whiff of petrichor; with “Fallen,” we burrow underground to the tune of a brooding, minor-key synth melody. It’s the album’s darkest moment, and also its most unembellished, just a spindly series of notes pacing up and down the scale for three-and-a-half minutes. It digs a bleak pit smack dab in the middle of the album, a black hole of worry against which everything else shines that much brighter.
It’s easy to make moody electronic music, but it’s harder, and riskier, to pull off something as stark as “Fallen.” But Julien is skilled at achieving complex ideas using modest means, and part of the pleasure of Fallen is the mutability of its emotional terrain; pleasure is tinged with doubt, and fretfulness wears a halo of ecstasy. It’s a good record for introverts who love to dance, and dancers who can’t help but brood. In fact, although the title implies a particular trajectory, the album works just as well heard back to front; it may set up a dichotomy between light and dark, but its treatment of the subject turns out to be far more nuanced. On Fallen, FunkinEven’s one-way streets of yore have funneled into a mazelike warren of alleyways that invites and rewards extended exploration. | 2016-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Apron | July 9, 2016 | 7.1 | 64272624-76dd-4232-87a2-345df640c06c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Thin Lizzy’s greatest album, one that embodies the myth and grandeur of classic rock. | 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 Thin Lizzy’s greatest album, one that embodies the myth and grandeur of classic rock. | Thin Lizzy: Jailbreak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thin-lizzy-jailbreak/ | Jailbreak | You don’t have to be a boy to be one of the boys. All you need are good times, good friends, and the kind of self-acceptance that comes with looking around knowingly and nodding in appreciation. When you hang with the boys, there’s a bunch that gets said, but there’s a bunch more that goes without saying—that you’re leaving your worries behind, that this right here, being with the boys, this is the real living, and everything else is what you navigate to get here. It feels good to be with the boys. You lose yourself a little bit, sitting in your camp chair or at some wooden picnic table or in the corner booth of your local bar and grill. You feel a little bit bigger, too.
Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott seemed like he felt this way even when nobody was around. He always believed he was a superstar, and on the song that finally proved it, he swells with the feeling of what’s coming. “The Boys Are Back in Town” is a romantic proclamation, Lynott the grinning town crier with a pack of cigs tucked into his shirt sleeve who sings with the pluck of someone who thinks this time, he might join them. Guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson crack open the song with a thunderous chord and they sign their names to the chorus in battery acid, twin-tagging it with a heroic pride and triumphant humor that makes them sound like John Williams scoring Woody Woodpecker. The danger is totally theatrical, mostly theoretical. The boys want to fight each other for the girls, the girls aren’t all that impressed, and this is all happening where? A place called Dino’s Bar and Grill. It’s pure romance, pure bullshit, exactly the kind of story you tell over a pint, knowing and not caring how stupid it sounds. It’s a perfect rock’n’roll song.
Like many songs of its era, “The Boys Are Back in Town” evangelizes the poseur myth of rock’n’roll: It wants you to believe that the music can whisk you away from who you actually are. On Jailbreak—their most focused, most confident album—Thin Lizzy’s unwavering belief in their power as a band and the simple joy they get from playing together is so strong, it nearly makes the legend feel like it’s worth believing in, no matter if you know how all of these stories pan out. Who wouldn’t want to feel this free, even if the freedom dies the moment the record’s over?
Despite the persistence of “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the reputation of Thin Lizzy in the U.S. is that they don’t have a reputation. While they stayed on the UK charts longer, reaching their highest mark with 1979’s Black Rose: A Rock Legend, they flamed out in 1983; Lynott himself passed away three years later, his body severely ravaged by a heroin addiction. He and Lizzy left behind an uneven but greatly rewarding discography whose fingerprints can be seen in the needling harmonies of everyone from Prince to Iron Maiden to 311 to Ratatat. Nick Lowe not only aped Thin Lizzy in “So It Goes,” he set the song’s first verse at one of their gigs. Henry Rollins claimed they were “streetwise as any punk could hope to be,” which made Lynott, Gorham, and drummer Brian Downey the most authentically punk members of their short-lived supergroup the Greedies with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. They’re probably the only band to have the same song covered by Titus Andronicus, Belle and Sebastian, the Cardigans, and Huey Lewis and the News. And in their home country of Ireland, Lynott is revered as a poet and cherished son. He is beloved in a way that perhaps no other Irish rock star has ever been. They built a statue of him in the middle of Dublin. There are no statues of Bono anywhere.
Lynott and Downey began Thin Lizzy in 1969 as a power trio that also included guitarist Eric Bell, an alum of Van Morrison’s Them. Together they put out three strong but poorly selling records in the early 1970s and had a novelty hit with their version of the traditional Irish song “Whiskey in the Jar.” From the age of 7, Lynott had been raised by his grandmother in Dublin while his mother lived in Manchester, and when Bell and his successor Gary Moore left the band in rapid succession in 1974, he hired Gorham and Robertson partly to appease his fear of abandonment.
This is not speculation. Lynott was explicit about his reasons for bringing on the two guitarists: “The next time one of those cunts walks out there will be another one there,” he told the band’s former manager Brian Tuite, as related to Graeme Thomson in his biography of Lynott, Cowboy Song. In addition to the added security, the twin-guitar attack brought a new sense of purpose to Thin Lizzy’s songwriting. While recording Fighting in 1975, the two guitarists—one a laid- back Californian, the other a hard-drinking Scotsman—would figure out how to braid their disparate styles together. Robertson and an engineer had been playing around with super-short delays in the studio, allowing the guitarist to accompany himself. Gorham overheard and they began experimenting with playing in tandem. While the Allman Brothers had been knitting tight harmonies for years, the stripped-down simplicity of Lynott’s hard rock songs put Gorham and Robertson’s playing in the center of the frame. The metallic glint of the guitars gave the new Thin Lizzy a sparkling chrome finish.
Primed by the experience of Fighting and ready to record again, Lynott honed in on the core of what he was experiencing on stage, where he found himself in command of huge crowds of teenage boys who were ready to rumble at his command. He had always composed songs about dashing loners scheming on the outskirts of society, but he was now making a conscious effort to dress his characters in black leather and chains. “When you reach the age of 14 or 18, you suddenly find strength that you’ve never had before,” he explained to an interviewer. The lifelong devotee of Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix was now in search of something to do with the power he received on stage, something greasier than his idols, something less transcendent and more connected to the crusty highway life Steppenwolf touted in “Born to Be Wild.”
Despite his efforts and the atomic thrust of Gorham and Robertson, Lynott never quite gets there on Jailbreak, to the album’s tremendous benefit. The band is simply too happy, too taken by how much they enjoy what they’re doing—both the music they were making and the way it allowed them to see themselves—for the power and aggression of these songs to come across as truly dangerous or liberating. When the band added Gorham and Robertson and changed their direction, Thomson writes, “[there] was a tenderness, a starry-eyed innocence and adventurism that did not wholly survive.” This is true, but what did survive of that original sweetness makes Jailbreak a hard rock album like no other. In effect, it turned the band into something like professional wrestlers working the circuit—the muscles they flex are real, the fights themselves aren’t, and they can still feel the humming in their bodies for days afterward.
They knew how to use this to their artistic advantage. On its surface, the title track serves as a warning shot, the cry before the battle: “Tonight there’s gonna be trouble,” Lynott promises. It’s tough-guy shit, but it’s impossible to believe. All four of them are strutting, making a show of how easily they can control their power. This swagger—the knowingness of it, how plainly they telegraph their pleasure—is absurd; escaping prison has never sounded less risky. The original Thin Lizzy played with David Bowie and Slade, and Lynott’s experience observing expert showmen up close, as well as the band’s own connection with their audience, let them embrace the absurdity of living one’s life as a rock star. It’s a trait they shared with ZZ Top, and it’s what makes Lynott as irresistible on “Jailbreak” as Billy Gibbons is on “La Grange.” He’s clearly having a ball, savoring the posture of the chorus as he leans deep into the words “Don’t you be around,” practically cooing for the listener in a way that is anything but threatening. He obviously wants you to be around.
American critics ignorant of Lizzy’s back catalog heard Lynott’s alternately yawping and dewy vocals and assumed they were stolen from Bruce Springsteen, who had released Born to Run only months before Jailbreak. In reality, they were simply drawing from the same source. Both singers nicked their style from Van Morrison, who approached both a song’s meter and its melody as something he could drape his voice across and twirl around. You can hear it as Lynott rounds into the second verse of “Romeo and the Lonely Girl,” when he suddenly belts himself off track, his voice nearly breaking as he vamps near the high end of his range. It’s as though what he’s singing means so much to him that the restrictions of a rock song, even a loose Celtic boogie like this one, can’t contain it; he simply has to break the rules to make you understand how he feels. When he’s at his hammiest—rhyming “Romeo” with “out on his own-ee-oh,” say—you still feel close to him.
Lynott pulls this trick over and over again on Jailbreak, and it works every time, especially when he clearly doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Whether he’s reassuring a former lover on the sax-laced power-pop of “Running Back” or throttling the word “Lord” as “Cowboy Song” rises to a canter and he ruminates on “a certain female,” he flat-out refuses to sound lonely or contrite. He sings with relish, soaking in the intensity of the memories while keeping his eyes on whatever’s next. It’s consequence-free music, total fantasy, and he knows you’re OK with that.
Lynott enjoyed a reputation as a poetic lyricist, and his rakishness has an air about it that is popularly associated with poetry, or maybe just with poets: He implies a self-contained sensuality, a somewhat tragic devotion to love, a presumed dedication to deeper things. Put another way: He was a little pretentious. It’s certainly a way of saying that his lyrics were usually decent at best, but that pretension makes him a compelling figure; it gives these songs a charge they would lack in hands that weren’t so silky.
Still, Lynott’s suavity sometimes failed him. The son of an Irish mother and an Afro-Guyanese father, he strongly identified as an Irishman—Jailbreak’s “Emerald” is but one of the many odes to ancient Celtic lore that dot Thin Lizzy’s discography—but in 1976 he seemed unsure of what it meant to be a Black person in a very white rock’n’roll context. “American Black artists all seem to be rolling their eyes and wearing suits,” he told Rolling Stone’s Patrick Snyder before lamenting the apparent dearth of “rebellious ones.” “I’d like them to feel they can play rock and roll if they want to,” he added.
His attempts to write about his Blackness were similarly ambivalent. “Fight or Fall,” which already has the unfortunate luck of being stuck between “The Boys Are Back in Town” and the bucking “Cowboy Song,” oscillates between a need to stand together with Black folks and Lynott’s insistence that he’s “not that way inclined.” It’s the quietest song on Jailbreak, and while the closing shout of “Brothers, we gotta fight for one another!” could be read as pat, it comes across as an authentic attempt by the singer to navigate between his identities as a Black man and an Irishman. “I’m very proud of being a Brother. Don’t get me wrong,” he told NME in 1977. “But I think that there are a lot of people like Stevie Wonder [who are] more apt than me to put it across.” By staying true to that reticence, “Fight or Fall” is probably the closest Lynott gets to exposing himself on this record.
Disclosure, social responsibility, idealism: These are not Jailbreak’s values. But the album does speak clearly about who Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy were, what they desired, and how they felt. Put aside the swashbuckling lyric and the serrated guitars, and “The Boys Are Back in Town” is Jailbreak at its most tender. Downey serves up a soft shuffle in the verses, while Robertson and Gorham fill the song with minor-key chords that turn the action back in on itself, their regret and vulnerability complicating the good cheer of Lynott’s vocal. The lyrics obviously aren’t sincere in their violence, but the boys’ battle royale isn’t quite camp, either; yes, he sings like he knows he’ll be running off soon, but there’s something sad in the sundown way Lynott emphasizes the word “again” when he sings the chorus for the last time. It makes you wonder what life was like when the boys weren’t around.
Lynott was attempting to write an American song—it started life as “Here in Dallas,” then became “G.I. Joe Is Back”—and he was struck by the bar and grills he saw on tour the way an American in Ireland might be struck by the pubs. Though Thomson suggests it may have been influenced by the legitimate scumminess of the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip, the reference to Dino’s Bar and Grill nevertheless makes it sound like this song takes place in a Chili’s. And that one quirk does make it feel American to its core, though not in the way that Lynott intended. Coupled with the guitarists’ trick chords, it softens the song, makes it more palatable. It lets us all in on the joke: that rebellion isn’t really rebellion when it’s this agreeable. It’s not a hard rock song; it’s simply pretending to be one. And in that way, “The Boys Are Back in Town” has become the kind of song that could be played ad nauseam in any suburban bar and grill in the U.S., just another small part of the American experience.
This is the rock’n’roll life for most people who survive it: cashing checks for songs you wrote decades ago, struggling to balance adulthood with the demands of your livelihood. It becomes a job like any other job, defined by decisions you made before you were old enough to be trusted to make them well. Lynott lived long enough to see his star begin to fade as the punks who embraced him gave way to new wavers who didn’t. Thin Lizzy’s influence on metal and hard rock was already apparent, but his days at the center of the culture were over even before the band broke up. For a time, he was reduced to playing pubs and hotels back in Ireland, often to minuscule crowds.
Jailbreak did prove that Lynott was right to think of himself as a superstar, at least for a little while. But the smoke and lightning and leather that got him there eventually overtook him. “He got wrapped up in the suit you’re supposed to wear as a rock star,” former bandmate Midge Ure said. In his finest moment, though, just before he was overtaken by the version of himself that had swelled in the spotlight, he and his boys managed to capture everything that’s beautiful and good about rock’n’roll, and none of its ugly truth.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mercury | January 17, 2021 | 9.1 | 642895f4-578e-4c20-a57d-61d2cc8c3de0 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Since his 1998 breakout hit “Beau Mot Plage,” the German house producer has been associated with tropical idyll. On his first album in 12 years, he takes a more ambivalent look at paradise. | Since his 1998 breakout hit “Beau Mot Plage,” the German house producer has been associated with tropical idyll. On his first album in 12 years, he takes a more ambivalent look at paradise. | Isolée: Resort Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isolee-resort-island/ | Resort Island | Triangle of Sadness, The White Lotus, The Resort: The luxury holiday has taken a cultural battering over the past few years as creators have explored the tensions between escapism and exploitation, opulence and poverty, that are inherent in these posh getaways. Resort Island, the fourth album from German microhouse pioneer Rajko Müller, may be the first house record to explore this idea, which is ironic, given that Isolée’s breakout track, the eternal “Beau Mot Plage,” was a mainstay of the polite dance compilations designed to soundtrack well-groomed decadence in the intimidatingly expensive hotel bars of the early 2000s.
On first impression, Resort Island appears to occupy a similar niche. It is, by some distance, Isolée’s most brushed-up album. There’s something very ordered about the record, particularly the beats, which have the clean lines and attractive symmetry of a well-designed airport. The drums and bass are both perfect—witness the beautifully scuffed open hi-hat sound on “Con o Sin,” which has the percussive scratch of steel wool on glass—and perfectly ignorable, well-designed foundations that barely raise a second thought. You can imagine an overworked concierge sticking Resort Island on to greet the latest batch of pampered guests, in a way that would be implausible for the wibbling electro rock of “Jelly Baby / Fish” (from 2005’s We Are Monster) or the diffuse, nervous funk of “Going Nowhere” (from 2011’s Well Spent Youth).
On one level, this withdrawal into luster is disappointing; the world is not exactly crying out for more hotel-lobby house. Yet the album’s minimal production allows Müller’s exquisite sense of melody, which tends towards the wistfully melancholic, to shine its doleful light. “Let’s Dence” [sic], a beguiling beatless number, is reminiscent of Brian Eno’s classic ambient albums in its gentle, introspective harmonics, which curl up into themselves like puppies snuggling up to their mother, while “Modernation” has a gorgeously understated air of blues to its central theme, reminiscent of the melodic sketches that underpin Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. The result is some of Isolée’s most straightforwardly moving music since “Beau Mot Plage.”
What’s more, it becomes apparent that Müller has not so much abandoned his idiosyncratic ways as hidden them deep within his radiant productions. Resort Island operates according to the subtle push and pull between repetition and variation. Most of the album’s 10 songs are based around what appear to be simple, looped melodic motifs—like the oddly perky riff at the center of “Canada Balsam” or the descending bassline on “Tender Date”—which, on closer examination, don’t quite repeat, as if the idea of reiteration is simply too vulgar for a work as finely tuned as this. Instead, Müller introduces slight variations in tone or timing—a note falling off beat, or a melody suddenly scuffed by electronic effect—that weave a cerebral and hypnotic spell on the unsuspecting listener. Implicit in all this is a sense of degradation. One of Müller’s favorite tricks, employed beautifully on “Clap Gently” and “Coco’s Visa,” is to use detuned synth sounds to create the impression that his melodies are diminishing before our eyes, their notes dragged down by strong underseas currents or melting in the midday sun.
In this decaying opulence lies the tension between elegance and superficiality that underpins Resort Island. There’s considerable beauty to the album’s reverie, but, as for a hotel guest fretting over their looming departure date, the shifting sands of fantasy are not built to last. This may be a slightly charitable interpretation of Müller’s work: Shorn of its title and visuals, Resort Island could potentially be about any kind of impermanence or decline. But this speaks mainly to the limitations of instrumental electronic music, and Resort Island should be applauded for engaging with an emotion as fundamentally elusive as ambivalence. In the end, it’s fitting that Resort Island is a qualified success—not Isolée’s best work, but the closest he has sailed to the zeitgeist since microhouse was the underground darling, back in the EasyJetset 2000s when the budget airline boom was paving the way for decades of techno tourism to come. | 2023-05-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Resort Island | May 19, 2023 | 6.9 | 642c3926-bb08-465d-81eb-07c4799864a0 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Collaborators including Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr and members of Mdou Moctar’s band reinterpret the guitar virtuoso’s songs, reinforcing his growing stature as a singer-songwriter. | Collaborators including Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr and members of Mdou Moctar’s band reinterpret the guitar virtuoso’s songs, reinforcing his growing stature as a singer-songwriter. | Steve Gunn: Nakama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-gunn-nakama/ | Nakama | When he was getting started, 15 years ago, it would have been strange to guess that the dividing line between a good Steve Gunn song and a great one would ever be drawn by his voice rather than his guitar. But that’s arguably where things have stood since he released last year’s Other You, a dreamy California postcard that shares more wavelengths with Gram Parsons than John Fahey. The case gains further credence from the way Gunn’s collaborators treat his voice on Nakama, an EP of five deep reinterpretations that sometimes rival the excellent originals.
Gunn’s fortunes once seemed inseparable from his guitar playing for the simple reason that he hardly ever sang. In his early psychedelic blues and cosmic ragas, he’s too busy working a lot of heavy influences—such as Michael Chapman, La Monte Young, and Bardo Pond, the Philly scene elders he grew up admiring before moving to Brooklyn—into the whorled grain of his own soft-spoken guitar virtuosity. Sometimes electric, often acoustic, it always has an intricate momentum and a sort of scarred lyricism, as if gouged from hard bark with a dull knife.
When he did start singing, it was with something between shyness and wariness. In 2009, on Boerum Palace, his voice appears on a single song, a far-off moan reverberating in a scrubby canyon of guitar. As his singing grew more prominent and expressive, it retained a trace of those modest, hesitant origins. He said as much to Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker in 2016, when his quiet rise from Kurt Vile sideman to headliner was well underway. “I came into songwriting a little bit late; I always thought of it as a selfish endeavor—playing live and having people hear us is such a privilege,” he said. “I don’t want to be like, ‘I’m a guy living in Brooklyn, and I love this girl who works at the bagel shop!’ I mean, who cares.”
As Gunn developed his identity as a singer-songwriter—one who tenders grave observations with almost superstitious caution, cladding them in harmonically interesting yet effortlessly melodic runs—it’s not that his guitar playing stagnated. It’s more like it became as good a tool for its purpose as it could be, and it took its rightful place behind the increasingly distinctive songcraft. The collaborators Gunn chose and worked with closely to rewire Other You songs on Nakama seem to recognize this. Though they employ very different settings, which are responsive to their own idioms and the respective songs’, they all find ways to make Gunn’s voice stand out in sculpted isolation.
The original “Protection” is a bright, brittle electric blues that imperceptibly shades into a kosmiche jam (genres don’t really govern Gunn’s music; they kind of just flow in and out). Mikey Coltun and Ahmoudou Madassane, from the band of the Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar, frame Gunn’s voice with a lean, warm acoustic arrangement, ingeniously recasting the original’s dubby effects with tweaked field recordings of Tende drums and chants in Niger.
On two songs, Gunn worked with the bassist Joshua Abrams, a mainstay of the Chicago jazz and free-improv scenes, and his band Natural Information Society, known for its adventures in expansive minimalism. But Abrams, working with Lisa Alvarado, is also a gifted miniaturist. “Good Wind,” originally a new-age jazz kaleidoscope focused by the voice of Julianna Barwick, is rearranged to emphasize the slippery downward slide of Gunn’s syllables. The effect is like colored oils dripping into water. Though it warbles a little like old Boards of Canada and seems about to resolve into quiet-storm R&B, it’s unique. Similar alchemy changes “On the Way” from a soft, horn-seared country pleaser to something dark and earthen, crawling out of the slowcore heyday of bands like the Black Heart Procession.
Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr is plainly most interested in Gunn’s melting vocal on “Ever Feel That Way,” suspending it in an eerie void and then arranging it with strophes of intense orchestration. She wrings every ounce of drama and pathos from Gunn’s torchy vocal, probing to depths that the serene acoustic arrangement of the original couldn’t reach. Bing & Ruth’s trip-hop take on the weary, winsome “Reflection” comes closest to a standard remix, but it’s still good, if not a revelation or replacement.
Though surely without strategy, Gunn’s evolution has been right on pace with indie rockers’ tastes in rusticated yet cerebral guitar music by white guys. He transitioned quite easily over the hump from the fingerstylin’ late ’00s, when it seemed like James Blackshaw could put out five or six records a year, to the more songwriterly, Oxford American-y ’10s, when all your William Tylers and Hiss Golden Messengers started coming up. But his nearest analogue is probably Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, another restless yet patient explorer who, perhaps unexpectedly, found his voice in the distant frequencies buzzing through his strings. Nakama, which is far more than an afterthought, makes us very glad Gunn did. | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Matador | February 3, 2022 | 7.2 | 642e6018-92d7-4728-b566-b2f2242e12f0 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Ontario musician Daniel Romano's fifth solo full-length finds him relying on classic country flourishes to build simple songs that look to the great beyond. | Ontario musician Daniel Romano's fifth solo full-length finds him relying on classic country flourishes to build simple songs that look to the great beyond. | Daniel Romano: Mosey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21956-mosey/ | Mosey | Canada’s Daniel Romano is neither an outlaw nor a good ol’ boy, a bro nor a balladeer. He's made power pop and indie rock, but since going solo in 2010 he's been making his twist on classic country. He might not be tearing up the Stateside country charts, but his new Mosey still makes for a solid entry in the new-school canon of hybrid country. Rather, Romano’s fifth full-length under his own name finds him relying on classic flourishes to build simple songs that look to the great beyond.
For the duration of its dozen songs, Mosey is married to the aesthetics of a forgotten B-movie about the wild West. Romano’s voice sounds weary, the guitars are all a little fried, and mariachi-style brass seals the deal. Psychedelia seeps in, too, for a hazy fever-dream finish. The resulting LP sounds like a dusty, abandoned postcard, a yellowed “wish you were here!” that curls at the corners.
“Valerie Leon” gets the record off to a scorching start, in which Romano races through a near-breathless yarn about a forbidden love that becomes a different sort of disaster—getting what you want doesn’t always yield the best results, it seems. But the bright chorus enlivens the song and makes it sound like a wry joke of sorts. Romano offers an intense triple stack of loneliness toward the middle of the record: “One Hundred Regrets Avenue” sounds hopeless, thanks in part to Romano’s off-kilter piano lines, while “I’m Alone Now” and “Sorrow (For Leonard and William)” trade in melancholy malaise even as they swing and shuffle.
Mosey isn’t all gloom, though it boasts plenty of excellent bummer songs. “Toulouse” is a cheeky, slinky number that finds Rachel McAdams adding wobbly hound-dog “woo”s and breathy lines in French, and “Hunger Is a Dream You Die In” is beguiling in its measured patter. There, Romano sounds barely patient as he contemplates growth and solitude: “Somethin’ in you’s not the same, when there’s no one to share your pain.” Mosey speaks to restless, if uncertain, ambition: you know you need to go, but you’re not sure where or how to get there. | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | New West | May 31, 2016 | 7.1 | 64318a13-42c1-4fcb-baaf-e3f655429cd8 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
Years into her solo career, Larsson is still just a disembodied voice floating over the beat. On her third album, she tries out some different sounds, but the result comes off like a Who's-Who of 2011 radio. | Years into her solo career, Larsson is still just a disembodied voice floating over the beat. On her third album, she tries out some different sounds, but the result comes off like a Who's-Who of 2011 radio. | Zara Larsson: Poster Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zara-larsson-poster-girl/ | Poster Girl | Zara Larsson makes breezy, digestible electro-pop: all shine, but no substance. She found her niche in the years after EDM crept into pop, crooning over bright, sanitized synths on her 2015 breakout track “Lush Life” and sighing over wobbling bass on Kygo and Clean Bandit tracks, her voice reduced to a murmur. On her third album, Poster Girl, Larsson attempts to incorporate Dua Lipa–style disco, with stabs at the kind of retro gloss that filled Lady Gaga and The Weeknd’s albums last year. But the record sounds more like a sun-splashed artifact from decade-old pop charts, filled with dated references and fizzy hooks, clunky metaphors and boundless optimism. Even when Larsson stays firmly in her comfort zone, she struggles to convey a sense of character or identity. Years into her solo career, she’s still just a disembodied voice floating over the beat.
These are wispy songs, and Larsson’s at her best when she allows them to drift and dissolve. “Need Someone” melts over a knock-off Tame Impala bassline. “Ruin My Life” starts with fluffy strings before receding tastefully into the middle distance. These are pool-party soundtracks, songs to hum while driving around—pleasant at times, but mostly just tolerable. Too much of the album is hindered by grating, overly accessorized production: hand claps and layered, distorted vocals, theatrical spritzes of synths. On “WOW,” Marshmello slings Larsson’s limp vocals over teetering bass, looping her deadening “Make your jaw drop–drop” hook 10 times in a row.
Larsson and her collaborators — a cast that includes Dua Lipa producer Ian Kirpatrick and boy-band whisperer Mike Sabath — have a penchant for clumsy lyrics, slippery vowels, and mangled subject/verb agreement. “Is this a story arc/’Cause if it are/We’d be iconic,” she chirps over bleating, tinny beats on “FFF,” apparently code for “Falling for a Friend.” The song fumbles over a well-tread narrative in pop, a “Will they or won’t they” dynamic with no charm or suspense. The title track is supposedly dedicated to Larsson’s love for weed, with a chorus of “Holy smokes!” and gasps about “sweet organic healing,” but the song crumbles under its own nonsense:“Someone call a lifeboat,” Larsson moans, “Because I’m drowning in your vibe.”
It’s easy to pinpoint Larsson’s influences, a “Who’s Who” of 2011 radio. The sludgy Young Thug duet “Talk About Love” rehashes Lil Wayne’s croaking Auto-Tuned ballad “How to Love.” The half-spoken bridge in “What Happens Here” tries on early Kesha cadences—“Even if I kiss it, touch it, feel it,” she drawls. What’s harder here is identifying Larsson herself; these songs seem like glitzy containers with nothing inside. When she started making music, Larsson told MTV recently, she didn’t focus on formulating lyrics or testing out guitar chords but on crafting the persona of a star. “I would stand in front of my mirror and sing into a fake mic and tell my fake crowd, ‘I can't hear you! Sing it louder’,” she said. “Poster Girl” is so enraptured with this idealized vision of a pop star that it leaves no room to learn about the woman behind the mic.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ten / Epic | March 17, 2021 | 5.4 | 64349cae-1faa-4cca-a096-9663eaff3ebf | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Inspired by The Caretaker’s corroded loops of antique 78s, the Kentucky guitarist creates hypnotic dialogues with the past by mining and responding to his own vast collection. | Inspired by The Caretaker’s corroded loops of antique 78s, the Kentucky guitarist creates hypnotic dialogues with the past by mining and responding to his own vast collection. | Nathan Salsburg: Landwerk/Landwerk No. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-salsburg-landwerk/ | Landwerk/Landwerk No. 2 | For nearly a decade, Nathan Salsburg has managed a remarkably compartmentalized career. A dazzling solo guitarist, he’s released a series of largely instrumental acoustic albums that capture bucolic and bittersweet scenes. As sideman and collaborator, he has added restrained elegance to records by Joan Shelley, The Weather Station, and even Shirley Collins. The longtime host of a global folk show on New York’s erstwhile East Village Radio, Salsburg became the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive; as one of the compiling minds behind many of its recent revelatory releases, he assembles box sets and expounds on the virtues of folk music repatriation. The synthesis of all this work is sometimes audible on his albums, but it is not hard to imagine an old-time music enthusiast admiring the Lomax-centric gig without having heard the remarkable Third—or even knowing it’s the same Salsburg.
But Salsburg’s enthusiasms dovetail in plain view on Landwerk, a compelling pair of hypnotic records he completed during this year where time itself seemed to falter. In 2019, Salsburg began poring over The Caretaker’s self-made universe of borrowed ballroom recordings, sampled and looped and damaged to suggest a mind’s gradual slide into dementia. Inspired, Salsburg began digging through his own 2,800 or so 78s in search of evocative snippets from the past, ghosts he might revive long enough to play along with. Salsburg adds his emotionally nuanced guitar to century-old cultural flotsam, lending and receiving new meaning through the process.
On the first Landwerk volume,Salsburg responds in real time to the samples he has plucked, such as a wobbly Turkish dance band or the orchestra of a Finnish socialist society in New York. During the first piece, he lifts an organist’s sighing introduction to a Jewish High Holidays standard and uses its pillowy static as the textured canvas for the crosstalk of his guitars. His pensive electric lead and playful acoustic slide feel cautiously hopeful, suggesting the end of an arduous journey that never arrives.
Meaning emerges from these exchanges. Salsburg moves gingerly around that immigrant orchestra on the second piece, reinforcing their insistent horns patiently. By the end, though, he tires of waiting for them to change, stepping into the foreground to add new energy through a charged pointillist solo. For the 11-minute finale, Salsburg lets a wartime snippet of a pipe-and-drum band repeat, their cadence marching only toward oblivion. His melancholy guitar wraps around that rhythm like vines, suggesting a solemn war memorial overtaken by time and wisdom.
By comparison, Landwerk No. 2 may feel listless or repetitive at first. Like a searchlight through fog, Salsburg’s silvery electric guitar lines flash through the static-caked samples—a 1928 side from an orchestra of Slovakian coal miners in Pennsylvania, a sliver of a tender 1924 plea from the globetrotting “People’s Diva” Isa Kremer. These four tracks are self-contained pieces with distinct themes and textures; Salsburg’s piano even takes a surprise star turn near the start of “Coincident Constellation,” locked in an exchange with woozy strings.
But as with the best work of Earth or Eliane Radigue, these 36 minutes form a slipstream, entrancing you from the first dusty murmur to the last decaying drone. After half an hour, you may find yourself wondering exactly how you’ve already heard three pieces, and where the demarcations landed. Salsburg seems to disappear inside this music, subsumed by these whispered dialogues between past and present, between creation and discovery. Recorded late during this year’s sweltering and transformative Kentucky summer, these experiments feel like a harbor for Salzburg, a space to sit with worry and hope as long as needed.
More than the guitars, this sense of retreat—of taking care of one’s self—is the key difference between Salsburg’s work here and James Leyland Kirby’s enormous output as The Caretaker. Kirby’s music imagined the experience of others, especially the helpless sensation of the loops in your mind disintegrating into confusion. (Perhaps that’s why The Caretaker has enjoyed new life as a viral challenge on TikTok, our most expedient avenue for distilling life’s complexities into something resembling a commercial.). But Landwerk captures the exact feeling of this shared uncanny moment and the quest to be present even when the days tick by on repeat. These records feel like Salsburg’s own creative coping mechanism. They’re spacious enough to extend an invitation to you, too.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | null | January 2, 2021 | 7.5 | 64381887-dcf0-48a7-90f6-420794155406 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
After replacing their lead singer, the reborn metal duo Cobalt make their best-ever record, as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs. | After replacing their lead singer, the reborn metal duo Cobalt make their best-ever record, as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs. | Cobalt: Slow Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21685-cobalt-slow-forever/ | Slow Forever | When do you last remember a respected band replacing a lead singer and actually getting better? This is the central anomaly of the brilliant and brave Slow Forever, the first album in seven years from the reborn metal duo Cobalt. For a decade, Cobalt made mad, warped dashes through black metal, summoning the spirit and language of hero Ernest Hemingway alongside the imagery and intensity of singer Phil McSorley’s stints in the U.S. Army. But without McSorley, Cobalt has opened its sound, fully embracing the blues, country, hardcore, and hard rock strains that have long been latent in its music. Slow Forever is as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs all anchoring this eighty-minute maelstrom. It is an electrifying, enthralling opus.
Two years ago, it seemed Cobalt would never make another record. Half a decade had passed since the pair’s landmark Gin, when, in March 2014, McSorley announced he was out; a month later, he was back in, set to work on new material with childhood friend and Cobalt co-founder Erik Wunder. But in December of that year, McSorley took a series of brutally misogynistic, homophobic online shots at other bands. Wunder cut him loose. In retrospect, it seems like serendipity, as Lord Mantis, Charlie Fell’s manic sludge band from Chicago, was publicly splitting at the seams, too. Wunder asked Fell—"the only guy that came to mind when I thought about somebody who could replace Phil," he has said—to enlist. They spent the third quarter of 2015 reinventing Cobalt in a Colorado recording studio.
Those fraught beginnings ripple through Slow Forever, where the songs stem from abject depravity, or from a mindset where nothing goes right and hope is only a useless four-letter word. Images of drug abuse, sexual frustration, emotional exhaustion, self-mutilation, wanton violence, and outright dejection flash by one by one, suggesting a Charles Bukowski biopic produced by David Cronenberg. "I am not a man/I am just a dog," Fell shrieks and repeats above clattering drums and bullying guitars within the first six minutes. "Condone the act of self-destruction," he roars much later, with militant drums and a clarion riff buttressing his pronouncement. "A ritual/And bury it, bury it in the veins of lovers." Fell paints a sort of cosmic portrait with these very human flaws and faults. These failures—the "pinnacle of the archetype," as he puts it at one point—are the natural order, the way it will always be. "The past in a pile of ash, forgotten in the cycle," he offers by way of summary.
Even during instrumental interludes and extended introductions, Cobalt seems to be preparing for conflict, for coming face-to face with the demons inside Fell’s words. "Beast Whip," a song about perpetual dissatisfaction, batters its subject with a series of blast beats and D-beats; Fell seems to be screaming at his own thoughts, demanding more from himself. When "Elephant Graveyard" takes up the cycle of addiction, the music illustrates the mania by inciting a circle pit before fading into a long, slow comedown.
Fell is more versatile and nuanced than McSorley, his predecessor. His work here even suggests a range and finesse that his time in Lord Mantis didn’t, firmly establishing him as one of metal’s great new vocalists. During "Cold Breaker," he launches from a hardcore yammer to a doom-metal roar, alternately summoning the Dead Kennedys and Eyehategod as the music shifts around him. When he emits pained, animalistic screams or haunting, ghostly yells, he’s horror-film terrifying. But he’s not averse to fists-up, muscles-clenched chants, either, and those are what make Slow Forever so unexpectedly approachable. For "King Rust," he returns to a credo—"Hoisting myself out of myself," shouted in a staccato clip and enunciated so that it sticks. It feels motivational, inspiring. "Ruiner" hinges on a duet between Fell’s voice and Wunder’s winding riff, the two trading lines like they’re in Thin Lizzy. Of all the things Cobalt or Lord Mantis ever were, "catchy" was never one of them. On Slow Forever, Wunder and Fell, gleefully grim, stumble into that territory.
Cobalt’s albums have always depended upon a sense of ultimate urgency—life or death, do or die, kill or be killed. Because of the circumstances around its creation, Slow Forever felt that way before it was finished; had Wunder bungled Cobalt’s restart without McSorley, he would have looked like the fool who just didn’t know when or how to stop. Slow Forever thrives in that existential anxiety, as though Wunder and Fell realized they had a lot to lose but even more to gain. As surprising as it may seem for an album where death, despair, and destruction linger in every word, Cobalt gambled on resurrection and, against the odds, advanced. | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | March 25, 2016 | 8.4 | 64399e7c-36c1-488a-b887-ecf115c52b53 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On Muchacho, Matthew Houck's sixth full-length as Phosphorescent, he gathers together everything he's attempted to date-- beery, rollicking country-rock, haunted tribal hymnals, regret-soaked bar room heartbreak-- and fashions it into something close to a defining statement. | On Muchacho, Matthew Houck's sixth full-length as Phosphorescent, he gathers together everything he's attempted to date-- beery, rollicking country-rock, haunted tribal hymnals, regret-soaked bar room heartbreak-- and fashions it into something close to a defining statement. | Phosphorescent: Muchacho | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17522-phosphorescent-muchacho/ | Muchacho | When Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck came off the road in support of his last album, 2010's Here's to Taking it Easy, he was mentally and physically exhausted, uncertain he wanted to make another Phosphorescent record. So he dispatched himself to Tulum, a small community in Mexico, where, he said, "I just checked out of my life for a while." As he took long solitary walks in the woods and swam, the pieces of what would become Muchacho began taking shape in his mind.
As with everything Houck does as Phosphorescent, from 2007's urban-rustic classic Pride to his 2009 Willie Nelson tribute record, this little story has an endearingly second-hand ring to it, as if Houck was obediently following the dictates of some dog-eared country-drifter playbook tucked in his back pocket. But this credulousness is also key to his music, which glows with simple reverence and purity. On Muchacho, Houck gathers together everything he's attempted-- beery, rollicking country-rock, haunted tribal hymnals, regret-soaked bar room heartbreak-- and fashions it into something close to a defining statement.
The first layer of Muchacho to savor is the simple gloriousness of its sound. Houck records his music largely alone, bringing in key players for individual parts but crafting the end results meticulously, in isolation. With the assistance of engineer John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Male Bonding), he has produced a bright, rich, warmly three-dimensional record, one that fuses the headed-for-the-big-city bar-rock signifiers of Here's to Taking it Easy with the night-sky awe of his earliest work. In fact, the album feels like a daylight version of Pride, a point hammered home by the contrast between that album's "Be Dark Night" and this one's two book-ending hymnals.
Accordingly, listening to Muchacho often feels like being warmed by afternoon sun as it floods your window. Every sound is lovingly recorded and given a cradle of space: The rounded pop of the drum track on "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)", paired with tumbles of upright piano and softly pattering bongos; the dryly whispering bowed harmonics that open "A Charm/A Blade"; the mournful little mariachi trumpet solo winding through the country waltz of "Down to Go". The first thing we hear on the record, introducing the opening "Sun" hymnal, is a dreamlike, welcoming major-key synth flutter. Those synths reappear on "Song For Zula", mingling with crystalline threads of pedal steel guitar, lifting country's signature instrument further heavenward.
At the center of all these majestic noises sits Houck himself. His voice is an unreliable instrument-- reedy, hiccuping, prone to cutting out entirely mid-note-- but he plies it heartbreakingly, never more than on Muchacho. On "Sun, Arise!" and "A New Anhedonia", he stacks himself into massed, keening layers, like a church full of choirboys. It’s a technique that he’s used before, but he has never sounded as overwhelming as he does here. The persistent catch in his voice, meanwhile gives him an unstable, baby chick fragility, magnifying the pathos of a line like, "See honey I am not some broken thing/ I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee" from "Song For Zula".
One of Muchacho's main thematic concerns is redemption, and it’s one Houck explores with his customary ringing, allegorical language. Sometimes his writing grows so high-flown that it eludes sense: "I was the wounded master, and I was the slave… I was the holy lion, and I was the cage/ I was the bleeding actor, and I was the stage," he sings on "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)". More straightforward is this, from "Muchacho’s Tune": "See I was slow to understand/ This river’s bigger than I am/ It’s running faster than I can, though lord I tried." It’s a simple sentiment, pitched somewhere south of Zen koan and just north of heartland-rock cliche, and it maps out the coordinates of Houck’s world: It’s a place where well-worn sounds are the most beloved, where ideas and poses are settled into like old chairs. On Muchacho, Houck invests this world with new beauty and profundity. | 2013-03-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | March 18, 2013 | 8.8 | 643a612d-6736-4468-9768-f51e94c356f0 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
X-Ray Spex’s debut album is a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. Its songs tackle identity, feminism, and consumer society with fire and joy. | X-Ray Spex’s debut album is a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. Its songs tackle identity, feminism, and consumer society with fire and joy. | X-Ray Spex: Germfree Adolescents | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22316-germfree-adolescents/ | Germfree Adolescents | Who is Poly Styrene? On January 20, 1979, the BBC endeavored to find out. “I chose the name Poly Styrene because it’s a lightweight, disposable product,” Styrene stated, with an absurd serenity, while scrubbing her teeth on national television during a 40-minute special on her London band, X-Ray Spex. “It sounded alright. It was a send-up of being a pop star—plastic, disposable, that’s what pop stars are meant to mean, so therefore I thought I might as well send it up.” Only two months had passed since the release of X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents, a brash, vivid masterpiece of the germinal punk era. An incisive 1977 interview with the fanzine Jolt, penned by one Lucy Toothpaste, was revealing in other ways. “She’s a girl and she’s half-black,” goes Toothpaste’s introduction. “HOW OPPRESSED CAN YOU GET?” (Caps Lucy’s.) “Doesn’t seem to keep her down though,” Lucy added, before quoting a patch of Poly’s more impressionistic lyrics: “‘Yama yama yama yama yama yama.’”
Poly Styrene was born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish secretary and a dispossessed Somalian noble, in 1957. While UK punks were screaming about cutting ties with their pasts, Poly spoke of her fascination with her own history, her uniquely multicultural family tree; plenty of punks played Rock Against Racism gigs, but Poly was one of few active participants of color. After working in fashion in her youth, she ran away from home between the ages of 15 and 17 and spent a year touring Britain’s hippie music festivals, including the Trentishoe Earth Fayre—after the fest, she lived with fellow travelers in the countryside, where they brewed dandelion tea and bathed in streams. This wandering all stoked the ecological consciousness that would fuel her ethos in punk. Armed with her itinerant background, Poly Styrene became one of the most original pop stars in music history—trained in opera, acutely anti-authoritarian, braces cemented across her teeth—and she was indeed the sharpest punk lyricist that Britain ever saw.
She rolled her Rs over supercharged riffs with more tenacity than Johnny Rotten. She yabbered gibberish more wildly than the Ramones. She naturally did punk-reggae better than the Clash or the Slits, and she was upending the notion that “cleanliness is next to godliness” when Kurt Cobain was in elementary school. With guttural, soul-cleansing, full-body wails, Poly sang of our sanitized culture’s lethal obsession with sterile perfection long before pop culture had sniffed “Teen Spirit.” Poly Styrene’s prescient lyrics could serve as epigraphs to scholarly books about identity politics, commodified dissent, or consumer society. They are also fun.
On her 19th birthday—July 3, 1976—Poly saw the Sex Pistols at Hastings Pier and was changed. She swiftly put an ad in Melody Maker seeking “young punx who want to stick it together.” X-Ray Spex—name inspired by ads in True Detective mags, and brilliantly evoking punk’s impulse to dissect life below the surface—was managed and produced by one Falcon Stuart. Sixteen years her senior, he was also Poly’s boyfriend and produced her pre-punk reggae single “Silly Billy,” released on GTO—the UK label that put out Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” One of the “young punx” to reply to that ad was 16-year-old Lora Logic, a Bowie-child who wrote and performed the band’s definitive sax arrangements before getting unceremoniously chucked out (allegedly for claiming too much of its spotlight). “Poly just wanted some men that would blur into the background,” Lora once told me, and she got a formidable lot in guitarist Jak Airport, bassist Paul Dean, drummer BP Hurding, and later sax player Rudi Thompson. They released four singles before EMI put out their only album, Germfree Adolescents, in November ’78.
X-Ray Spex is what I consider capital-P Punk—meaning, of the original movement—more than lowercase-p punk—meaning, by current vernacular, an action. Though raw, strange, and legitimately subversive, the songs of *Germfree Adolescents *have traditional structures. There are persistent verses and choruses and swaggering solos, steady beats and percussive hip-shaking claps; there are overdubs, candy hooks, chiseled little flourishes in the form of “oh-oh”s and (on “Highly Inflammable”) even some galactic synth shimmer. Germfree Adolescents holds up, in some sense, like pop music, albeit pop that is equally scorched and joyful, liberationist, charged with intellect and insurrectionary zeal. It inspires in ways that transcends genre, which explains why an artist like FKA twigs has called Germfree Adolescents her favorite album ever. Its musicality is honed; the musicians here are obviously amazing players. Its chugging faster-harder chords accelerate by the second, like the culture Poly describes. It is steely, shit-kicking, and bright; like an unbreakable machine, its build reflects the industrialization at hand. Germfree Adolescents’ singular sax-punk sound is, to borrow a word from Poly’s lyrics, “bionic.”
Along with her hippie inklings, Poly devoted much of her teenage years to watching fringe theater groups, and so she was visually inclined. This manifested in her striking and unusual sartorial choices—such as a green tin army helmet or a lipstick-red conductor’s jacket—as much as in X-Ray Spex’s music. The riffs were tonally fluorescent, but Poly’s language also made immediate appeals to the imagination. Her images—of “warriors in Woolworths,” of her mocking desire to turn into a “dehydrated” “frozen pea”—become 3D in your head. And Poly is refreshingly funny. “I am a poseur and I don’t care!” she sneers on the galloping “I Am a Poseur”; sarcasm vivifies “I Am a Cliché”’s pogoing titular chant. On the vibrant, almost-slapstick “I Can’t Do Anything”—“I can’t read and I can’t spell/I can’t even get to hell”—Poly cheerfully fights back against a guy called Freddy who tried to “strangle” her with plastic jewelry. Each word is an embodied exclamation point: “I hit him back!/With my pet rat!”
The prevailing theme of Germfree Adolescents is the inescapable horror of daily life in consumer society. Poly’s voice and the music—always peaking, always cranked to 100%—is persistently in-your-face, just like the most garish excesses of capitalism. “There was so much junk then. The idea was to send it all up,” Poly said in England’s Dreaming. “Screaming about it, saying: ‘Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you have created: do you like her?’” The original tracklist opened with revving drums and Poly roaring “AAARRT-I-FIIICCIAL,” a reverbed rallying cry. “I know I’m artificial/But don’t put the blame on me,” she blazes. “I was reared with appliances/In a consumer society.” There is a scene in Who Is Poly Styrene, set among the modern industrial wasteland of the supermarket aisles, where Poly is pushing a shopping cart beneath the glare of fluorescent lights, grabbing at products: Daz laundry detergent, Special K, Anadin painkillers, Comfort fabric conditioner, Sunlight lemon liquid cleaner. The Raincoats’ Ana da Silva once told me she wrote her 1979 song title “Fairytale in the Supermarket” after watching it and realizing that Poly’s songs were like “fairytales, but in a consumerist society.” In 1978, Mick Jones was lost in the supermarket; Poly Styrene stared its offerings dead in the eye.
Anthems like the unsparing “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” and “Plastic Bag” anticipated the anxieties of a world made of hidden cancerous chemical detritus. “Day-Glo” has an ominous gravity, but it’s catchy, sneaking into you like a sweet, hastily-torn packet of Splenda. Poly explores the toxicity of daily life in excruciating, relentless detail: our homes (“nylon curtains” and “perspex window panes”), our infrastructure (“the acrylic road”), our transport (“my Polypropylene car”), our fake food (“a rubber bun”), irradiated air (“the X-rays were penetrating through the latex breeze”). It culminates with an image of fake plastic trees years before Thom Yorke sang of a “cracked polystyrene man” (“synthetic fiber see-thru leaves fell from the rayon trees”). X-Ray Spex songs are like musical Andy Warhol soup cans; they find a spiritual predecessor in Warhol’s pivotal 1964 exhibition The American Supermarket. Look around, both whisper to you: Everything is plastic.
On “Plastic Bag,” Poly coupled her eco-critique with an incendiary indictment of advertising: “My mind is like a plastic bag/That corresponds to all those ads/It sucks up all the rubbish/That is fed through my ear/I eat Kleenex for breakfast/And I use soft hygienic Weetabix/To dry my tears.” Her sly reversal—Kleenex for eating, Weetabix for crying—underscores the interchangeability of these artificial products. Poly knew advertisements were inescapable, were rewiring brains; look out, they are coming for you right about now. But she was also genius enough to speak their mass language: “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” was an unlikely chart hit in the UK, reaching No. 23 in April ’78.
In an age of burgeoning A.I. and rampant outsourcing, the sci-fi poetry of “Genetic Engineering” is even more prophetic, as Poly declares that “genetic engineering could create the perfect race… could exterminate/introducing worker clones/as our subordinated slave.” Her grim propositions have lost none of their daunting edge. Punks were screaming “NO FUTURE,” and fair enough, but Poly went further, deeper; her songs dared to imagine just how bad hellish normalization could be. And here we are.
Words like “disinfectant,” “Listerine,” and “sterilized” have never sounded so oddly seductive as they do on the postmodern love song “Germfree Adolescents,” the era’s greatest punk-reggae ballad. “I know you’re antiseptic/Your deodorant smells nice/I’d like to get to know you/You’re deep frozen like the ice,” Poly beams through this dubby, surreal waltz. In her futuristic tale of boy-meets-girl, purity reigns; “he’s a germfree adolescent” and “cleanliness is her obsession.” “Cleans her teeth 10 times a day,” Poly sings, “Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away/The S.R. way.” Both “deep frozen like the ice” and “the S.R. way” (sodium ricinoleate) reference a promo for Gibbs S.R. toothpaste, the very first television commercial broadcast in England in 1955. As Poly’s voice cracks out with each repeat of “10 times a day,” the desperation—the casual corner-store apocalypse of unpronounceable additives—pierces through the song’s swirling veneer. “Germfree Adolescents” became X-Ray Spex’s most successful single, reaching No. 19 on the charts in November ’78.
Somehow, Poly’s two most radically feminist statements—debut single “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and a later B-side, “Age”—were left off the original Germfree Adolescents tracklist, only added back to the 1991 reissue. All punch and bounce, “Age” takes on ageism, body dysmorphia, and the beauty myth perpetuated by Hollywood in a fell swoop: “Age/She’s so afraid/Age/She’s not the rage.” (Check the mellow, reggae-tinged version of it on Poly’s lovely, misunderstood 1980 solo album Translucence.) The iconic “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was, and is, like dynamite to patriarchy. It is a succession of lightning bolts, dizzied with ideas, as Poly’s profoundly unhinged voice skyrockets into the red to cap each chorus line. “Bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall/I want to be a slave to you all,” Poly seethed. It’s the ultimate punk song, and also intersectional feminist scripture: “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard/But I say oh bondage, up yours!”
In 2005, excerpts from Poly’s “diary of the seventies” appeared on her website. Poly muses on Superwoman, on vegetarianism, on reading about genetic modification in the glossy pages of *Time. *But she also reflects on Lucy Toothpaste probing her regarding “Oh Bondage! Up Yours.” “Is it about women’s liberation?” Lucy asks, and Poly replies vaguely, mentioning bondage trousers she saw at Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique. Then her entry continues forth, tracing the DNA of each line. She alludes to The Sexual Revolution by Wilhelm Reich, to images of “Suffragettes chained to the railings of Buckingham Palace,” to “pictures of ball-and-chained African slaves stored in my psyche.” Poly Styrene would often deny that her songwriting was autobiographical; six months before Germfree Adolescents came out, she told NME, “You have to be detached from everything in order to write. I have to observe… I can’t get too directly involved.” But you can’t escape yourself. The glimpse into Poly’s inner life shows just how innately distinct her perspective was from all around her in UK punk. Transcending time and place, though, in Shotgun Seamstress—the indispensable zine by and for black punks founded by Osa Atoe in 2006—the author repeatedly dubs Poly “Captain of the Brown Underground.”
Poly did not have to try to be this different; she simply was. At the core of Germfree Adolescents is a mantra that could summarize all of popular culture in 2017: “Identity/Is the crisis can’t you see.” Just over a year ago, Wesley Morris in The New York Times Magazine declared 2015 “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” situating our world “in the midst of a great cultural identity migration” where “gender roles are merging” and “races are being shed,” and of course this is felt at the turn of any axis. But a migration has a destination; identity is always fluid. On “Identity,” Poly wisely presents these dilemmas of personhood as perennial question marks: “When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?/Do you see yourself on the T.V. screen?/Do you see yourself in the magazine/When you see yourself does it make you scream?” Eviscerating and empathic in equal measure, “Identity” is a most logical anthem for today.
When X-Ray Spex imploded in mid-’79, they cited creative differences, but there was a darkness churning below the gleeful surfaces, which boiled over before Germfree Adolescents was released. The wages of Poly’s exuberance had a cost; she lived, to some degree, within the extremities of the hyperactive mindset she sang from so intimately. (It was not until 1991 that she was diagnosed as bipolar.) In the mid-2000s, Poly referenced a “traumatic experience of a sexual nature” she’d endured in ’78; she had a breakdown, went to John Lydon’s flat, and shaved her head (if she ever became a sex symbol, she promised early on, she’d shave her head). On tour that summer, she claimed to have seen a UFO fly past her hotel window “like a fireball.” (“I wasn’t mad, but I went into the hospital after that,” she said.) Lydon wrote of Poly in his 2014 memoir: “They used to lock her up occasionally… She’d break out and always make a beeline for my house… She was good fun until the ambulance turned up for her.” Poly soon remembered chanting with Hare Krishnas during her teen hippie years, began reading The Bhagavad Gita, and aligned with the movement. One need only look at the muchness of what Poly writes about to understand the potential sources of her struggle. In England’s Dreaming, Poly said she wanted Germfree Adolescents to be like “a diary of 1977.” It is also a diary of survival in a world closing in on us all in ways that can go hauntingly unseen.
Elsewhere in her journal, Poly meditates on her own ascending fame with three quotes:
“We will be famous just for one day.” —David Bowie
“Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” —Andy Warhol
“I am a cliché.” —Poly Styrene
But clichés do not hold. They dissolve. Poly Styrene is solid; Poly Styrene lasts. With her inclinations towards Eastern spirituality, perhaps she would relish in how the status of Germfree Adolescents now feels sky-like. Poly Styrene is the future, and she is now. | 2017-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | EMI | January 15, 2017 | 10 | 643c4816-48df-4592-a728-f97832aa393a | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1990 R&B blockbuster that bridged the gap between new jack swing and hip-hop soul. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1990 R&B blockbuster that bridged the gap between new jack swing and hip-hop soul. | Bell Biv Devoe: Poison | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bell-biv-devoe-poison/ | Poison | They’d been talking about Bell Biv DeVoe for four minutes straight, and Ralph Tresvant was getting pissed. All six members of R&B group New Edition were back together, sitting on BET’s black leather “Video Soul” sofa for an interview, and these three guys who usually sang backup for Ralph—Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, and Ronnie DeVoe—wouldn’t shut up about their little hip-hop side project.
Tresvant decided to interrupt and set it straight. “Mike keeps stressing BBD—it’s not a BBD moment,” he said. “It’s a New Edition reunion.”
This was 1990, and the trio’s debut single “Poison” was on the verge of breaking into the Top 10. Their album, also called Poison, had just dropped, and it was on its way to selling 4 million copies. By the end of the year, Billboard would declare BBD the biggest new pop group of 1990. It was definitely Bell Biv DeVoe’s moment.
Poison was a conceptually groundbreaking pop album that reinvented the relationship between R&B and hip-hop for the ’90s. BBD even had a neat little mission statement to explain their vision: “Our music is mentally hip-hop, smoothed out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal to it.” They stamped the slogan on their album cover and flashed it on screen during their videos. They talked about it in every interview, including that day on BET. The show’s host wasn’t sure what to make of it: “And like...what does that mean?”
Ricky Bell spoke up: “You have to listen to the music to understand what we’re talking about.”
You’ve heard “Poison” too many times, probably at a wedding or a school dance or some perennially bad episode of “Carpool Karaoke.” But Bell Biv DeVoe is more than just a song, and their debut album represents a critical leap in the evolution of R&B. A collaboration with revered Public Enemy production crew the Bomb Squad, Poison embodied the style and sound of hip-hop in a more convincing way than any R&B album before it. For better or worse, Bell Biv DeVoe set the stage for three decades of singers who want to talk, dress, and act like rappers.
Back when he was only 14, Michael Bivins introduced himself to the world with a little rap on New Edition’s 1982 breakout hit “Candy Girl”: “She walks so fast, she looks so sweet/She makes my heart just skip a beat.” The group made smiling, bubble-gum electro-pop, but Bivins had the cool confidence of a rapper, even if he was stuck singing background vocals most of the time. As New Edition grew from boys to men, embracing a sophisticated sound on their 1988 album Heart Break, Bivins was quietly establishing his hip-hop credibility.
On the 1989 single “N.E. Heartbreak,” Mike foreshadowed the BBD attitude with a more aggressive rap style:
Strolled in the party, walked to the bar
Playing incognito like I ain’t no star
F-F-Fellas looking jealous
And girlies looking horny
Saw a foxy young lady—her man was corny
In the song’s music video, Bivins rolls through the party with Heavy D as his wingman. Months later, Biv appeared in Eric B. & Rakim’s gritty black-and-white video for “In the Ghetto,” walking down a dark alley with the God MC and his crew. “The engine for Bell Biv DeVoe was Michael Bivins. He had a vision for the group,” said Hank Shocklee, leader of the Bomb Squad and the producer who would help shape Poison. “New Edition was all about wearing suits and dressing upscale. Michael brought it back to the street realm. They really brought out the hip-hop element by wearing Timberland boots and sagging pants. This is what gave the group their visual look.”
At the 1989 Soul Train Awards, New Edition took the stage wearing grown-and-sexy tailored suits—except for Bivins, who was rocking a gold chain, green baseball hat, and baggy green leather pants. He had played his role for seven years, but now that Tresvant and Johnny Gill were going solo, the questions had started: What are you gonna do? Bell and DeVoe were in the same position. As the New Edition tour was ending in the summer of 1989, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis suggested they start a trio: Bell, Bivins, and DeVoe.
Louil Silas Jr., the executive VP of black music at MCA Records, did not want Bell Biv DeVoe to make a rap record. “Louil wanted to have them back in suits like they were still in New Edition,” remembered producer Alton “Wokie” Stewart. Wokie and his partner Timmy Gatling were fresh off producing sophisticated R&B singer Christopher Williams when Silas asked them to record with BBD. The sessions produced a pair of safe, sensitive slow jams, “When Will I See You Smile Again?” and “I Do Need You,” that appear at the end of Poison. They feature zero rapping, a saxophone solo, and a seductive quiet storm monologue.
“(Mainstream black music) doesn’t deal with the kids on the street anymore,” Shocklee said at a black radio conference in 1988. “It’s now being made for people who drive Mercedes, not people who ride the buses.” More and more radio stations were advertising their “no rap” programming policy, despite the fact that young people were buying a ton of rap records. Tone Loc’s 1989 hit “Wild Thing” became the top-selling single of the late ’80s, but one in six radio stations refused to play it because “the program directors dislike rap music or found the song sexually suggestive,” according to Billboard.
Public Enemy was the biggest thing in rap, but their music got no love from quiet storm R&B radio. In 1988, frontman Chuck D wrote a cover story for Black Radio Exclusive, a radio trade magazine, in which he criticized the black radio industry for ignoring hip-hop. “Rap gives you the news on all phases of life, good and bad, pretty and ugly: drugs, sex, education, love, money, war, peace… you name it. R&B doesn’t do that anymore,” said Chuck. “R&B teaches you to shuffle your feet, be laid back, don’t be offensive, don’t make no waves because, look at us! We’re fitting in as well as we can!”
“Hip-hop and R&B were in two separate spheres, two separate universes,” said Shocklee, who invited BBD to work with the Bomb Squad, which also included his brother Keith and programming wiz Eric “Vietnam” Sadler. At their first session in late 1989, Ricky, Mike, and Ron were all dressed up, looking like they came straight from a New Edition show. To break the ice, Keith Shocklee brought them up to the “hip-hop spots” in Harlem to shop for new clothes—jeans, sneakers, and t-shirts. When they came back, they were ready to make some rap music.
Based on their strengths, Shocklee assigned them roles: Ricky would be the singer, while Mike and Ronnie would stick to rapping. “For me, it was about crafting a sound [where] the rappers and the singer could co-exist together,” Shocklee remembered in 2015. “The rapping and the singing had to be married together.”
In the ’80s, collaborations between rappers and singers were mostly cookie-cutter—the singer would perform the chorus and verses, and then the rapper would jump in during the break or the intro for a quick verse. The result still still felt like an R&B record, just with a brief rap interlude, as heard on LeVert’s “Just Coolin’” (featuring Heavy D). Some R&B acts had started pulling double duty and adding their own raps, like Bobby Brown on 1989’s “On Our Own,” but it was still very rare for R&B singers to appear on hip-hop songs. BBD’s arrangements broke the rules by pairing rapping and singing together within a single verse, making rap-free radio edits impossible.
The first voice you hear on “Poison” is Kool G Rap, the wildly influential Queens MC who helped create East Coast gangsta rap. G Rap shouts “poison!” at you 38 times throughout the track, a sample from his own 1989 song “Poison.” The voice was like a dog whistle for hip-hop heads that immediately gave BBD a hardcore edge.
The poison in this story is, of course, a woman. On the song’s chorus, Bell warns listeners to “never trust a big butt and a smile,” a line that’s jacked from another hardcore rapper, KRS-One. Mike and Ron both call girls “hoes” in their rap verses—a daring move for two clean-cut boy-band members—while Bell’s doo-wop harmonies keep things civilized. The cool walking bass echoes LL Cool J’s 1987 hit “I’m Bad,” and the iconic rapid-fire snare pattern is a blunt rendition of new jack swing’s signature rhythm.
“Poison” was written and produced by Elliot “Dr. Freeze” Straite, a Brooklyn producer and aspiring artist who shared a manager with BBD. But several musicians have claimed credit for helping to shape the track, including Hank Shocklee. “When it came to me, the record was very mellow and laid back,” Shocklee said. “I had to take it and give it a boost and pump it up. Besides changing kicks and snares, I wanted to make sure it had some power and punch. The drums had to be loud. When you hear the intro to the song, that’s what set the whole song off.”
The Bomb Squad crew only received production credits on three songs, but Shocklee says he actually remixed most of the songs so they would feel more hip-hop and have a cohesive feel. Minus the two out-of-place slow jams at the end of the album, every song on Poison is deeply committed to the mission of hip-hop fusion. The Shocklee-produced “Ain’t Nut’in Changed!” and “Let Me Know Something?!,” are the album’s most overtly hip-hop moments, bringing the golden era’s chopped funk aesthetic to R&B. These aren’t hip-hop-influenced new jack swing beats with typical mega-loud snares and orchestral synth stabs—they’re straight up hip-hop beats with samples flying everywhere and some singing on top.
The highlight of Shocklee’s sessions with the group is “B.B.D. (I Thought It Was Me)?,” which became Bell Biv DeVoe’s second No. 1 R&B single. Shocklee created the record after trying to imagine what Teddy Riley would do with BBD, imitating the hype, breakbeat swing of Riley’s hardest-hitting club bangers for Big Daddy Kane, Wreckx-N-Effect, and Heavy D. The lyrics on Poison are largely pretty light-weight party raps, but BBD were not pop rappers like Milli Vanilli or Technotronic—their music feels of the culture. Biv even came through with some slick nautical wordplay:
Yo, I love being a bachelor
Ricky said, “Yo, that girl’s a good catch for ya”
She and I choose to cruise in my love boat
My waterbed, kept us afloat
When it came to BBD’s controversial hit “Do Me!,” DeVoe swiped his lyrics without permission from an aspiring teen rapper named Busta Rhymes who he’d met the studio with Shocklee. Musically, the song is a pretty typical new jack swing affair, but lyrically, it pushed the envelope of sexuality in R&B. Ron—who was 22 at the time—tells a story about committing statutory rape (“backstage, underage, adolescent...”), while Mike brings some light S&M to the party: “Ooh, that booty/Smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh no!” It’s hard to ignore three horny dudes chanting “do me, bay-bayy” with orgasmic moans as background vocals.
The song was a huge hit, despite disrupting R&B’s polite, euphemistic relationship with sex. The “smack it up” line in particular prevented some radio stations from playing “Do Me!,” but the song still received heavy rotation on MTV and went to No. 3 on the Hot 100. “This time we chose not to bite our tongues,” Bivins told [SPIN] in 1990. “This is us, we’re just speaking words that we hear every day.”
The obscenity trial surrounding 2 Live Crew had reframed hip-hop’s explicit sexuality as a free speech issue. If BBD wanted to be “mentally hip-hop,” they had to find some way to align themselves with hip-hop’s confrontational cool. And as three former teen heartthrobs who had grown up singing love songs, making the leap to sex songs was the most believable way for them court controversy.
The music video for another hit, “She’s Dope!,” where they compare the object of their affection to a “sexy X-rated video queen,” features a scene where Bell pours a bottle of champagne on a woman’s breasts. Selling sex was BBD’s way of asserting their masculinity, and, as is often the case, women were caught in the crossfire. “Poison” might be a transcendent party song, but its low-point is DeVoe’s mean-spirited, hypocritical assessment of a woman who’s slept around:
The low-pro ho, she’ll be cut like an afro
So what cha sayin’, huh?
She’s a winner to you
But I know she’s a loser
How do you know?
Me and the crew used to do her
BBD not only gave R&B singers permission to talk like rappers, they proved that baggy pants, dope beats, and a little casual misogyny could turn you into a huge crossover pop star. At the time, R&B needed to break free from the stale love-song conventions, but we now live in a world where Chris Brown has everyone singing “these hoes ain’t loyal” at the Soul Train Awards. Hip-hop contains multitudes, and Bell Biv DeVoe chose not to co-opt rap’s Afrocentric identity politics, its clever multi-layered lyricism, or its criticism of systemic racism. The fact that they mostly chose to co-opt hip-hop’s misogyny—and the fact that it made them even more famous—shows what entertains us as a culture.
Ralph Tresvant still did not understand BBD’s crossover appeal. “That’s weird to me, man. We’re all from New Edition. White folks eat up Bell Biv DeVoe, but [when] we’re together, they scratch their heads,” he said in the wake of their success. Along with Tone Loc, Young MC, and MC Hammer, BBD helped usher hip-hop into mainstream radio rotation, clearing the way for white-privilege beneficiary Vanilla Ice to score the first No. 1 rap hit in the fall of 1990. And like hair metal’s death at the hands of grunge, hip-hop’s rise rendered many veteran R&B acts irrelevant—especially those who weren’t capable of adopting the sound and style of rap.
Bell Biv DeVoe weren’t the first to inject hip-hop into R&B. But they were the first to suggest that the two genres could be one in the same, predicting the rise of modern genre-fluid hip-hop/R&B superstars like Missy Elliot, Black Eyed Peas, and Drake. BBD’s slogan—mentally hip-hop, smoothed-out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal—sounded crazy in 1990, but today, it sounds like a prophecy. | 2018-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | MCA | July 29, 2018 | 7.4 | 643e7edd-6281-4bea-8d47-3f54d21e1281 | Brendan Frederick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brendan-frederick/ | |
On their first-ever EP, the Swedish dance-pop band again aim for escapism while failing to realize that the format offers a chance for exactly that. | On their first-ever EP, the Swedish dance-pop band again aim for escapism while failing to realize that the format offers a chance for exactly that. | Little Dragon: Lover Chanting EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-dragon-lover-chanting-ep/ | Lover Chanting EP | Little Dragon have long seen their sounds as a way out of reality. “Our aim is to make music for people to escape into,” drummer Erik Bodin told Spin in 2011, when the Swedish four-piece released their third album, Ritual Union. That mission statement summarizes a decade-plus of snappy synth-pop throwbacks, none of which have quite eclipsed the success of the group’s 2010 guest turn on Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. Still, even without any hits of their own, Little Dragon have, across five albums, built a body of work largely catchy and generally upbeat enough to earn a respectable following and soundtrack trips to the shopping mall.
Little Dragon’s first-ever EP, Lover Chanting, arrives just a year after the middling Season High. It returns to their escapist mantra: “Dance for peace and unity in this world of madness!” reads the recommendation that accompanies these three songs. “Embrace the great mystery of everything that your brain can’t grasp and lose track in the most beautiful sense.” The cavalier sentiment is the glossy finish atop minimal substance; these tunes are pleasant enough, but they offer little more reward than fast-acting, fast-fading dopamine hits.
Little Dragon check several of the requisite boxes for movement, at least. The title track and opener is cut from loping disco synths and a bludgeoning backbeat that feel club-friendly and familiar enough from Little Dragon’s past catalog. The hook, a rare vocal performance by Boden, is undeniably infectious, though its refrain of “Do you wanna be my girl/I wanna be your man” is so hilariously shallow that even Yukimi Nagano, Little Dragon’s lead singer and primary lyricist, “got a bit worried about [Bodin’s] lyrical abilities.” But for a song that purportedly prioritizes motion, it never gains momentum; halfway through, its points have already been made, but it harps on nevertheless. (As though by way of acknowledgement, the EP actually ends with an edit of the track that chops off two minutes.)
“In My House” has the same problem. In her best moments, Nagano’s delivery is captivatingly idiosyncratic—her voice nasal and slippery, applying an oddly sensual tone to sterile words. But here, even her best efforts don’t break up the monotony of the song’s dancehall-lite wobble as it stretches toward the six-minute mark. “Timothy,” the EP’s final full track, is its shortest and best, with a whistle riff to rival that one by fellow Swedes Peter Bjorn and John and a star-is-born narrative that offers a ballast its counterparts lack.
Too bad: An EP is often a great place for a band to experiment and test out new ideas between albums, to make mistakes and start again, especially when their trademark sound seems tired. But Little Dragon show none of those desires. For them, the pursuit of escape has created another sort of trap: the comfort of the familiar. | 2018-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | November 19, 2018 | 5.2 | 6449e8f3-7275-44b7-b994-05c138f48fe1 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
The new album from Macklemore—his first without collaborator Ryan Lewis since 2006—is a light listen with a couple of good moments and some innocuous clunkers, plus features from Lil Yachty and Offset. | The new album from Macklemore—his first without collaborator Ryan Lewis since 2006—is a light listen with a couple of good moments and some innocuous clunkers, plus features from Lil Yachty and Offset. | Macklemore: Gemini | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macklemore-gemini/ | Gemini | The cultural context in which Macklemore briefly became one of the most derided musicians on the planet has, in some sense, dissipated. In 2014, the Seattle native, born Ben Haggerty, caught hell when The Heist—his goofy, modest, hit-laden album with Ryan Lewis—was awarded a Grammy over Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city. In response, Macklemore sat down, had himself a think or three, and emerged in early 2016 with a painfully labored sequel. This Unruly Mess I Made succeeded in earnestly engaging with criticism that Macklemore and Lewis had profited from white privilege while utterly failing to show that they deserved the attention they’d received. It was a bad album made in good faith when people still had room to care. But does anyone have the energy to be angry at Haggerty anymore?
On his new album, Gemini, Macklemore feels like he’s shrunk back down to an appropriate size. The record is not wondrous, but it’s a light listen with a couple of good moments and a handful of clunkers. The weaker moments reveal his shortcomings as a rapper without being provocative or ponderous enough to provoke a firebomb, or even a raspberry, in response.
Gemini is Haggerty’s first solo album in 12 years and his first without Lewis since the two met in 2006; the duo announced an amicable split in June. Macklemore has been careful to praise the relationship in interviews, but he’s also suggested that his partner placed significant pressure on him. (“Ryan is so good at [...] bringing out the best in people,” he told Rolling Stone. “It can be daunting a little bit when someone’s constantly like, ‘Nope, rewrite it. Nope, rewrite it, rewrite it.’”) With Lewis gone, Gemini’s sound falls to an old collaborator, the producer Budo, along with Tyler Dopps, the young engineer and producer who helped source samples for This Unruly Mess.
Budo and Dopps have left Macklemore’s sound more-or-less unchanged, if a bit less cloying, with plenty of tinkling piano keys and bland, stadium-sized choruses. The record is faux-inspirational in the front and faux-churchy in the back with some mild, relatable songs stacked up in the middle. Those include “Intentions” and “Good Old Days,” the first about failing to make good on intentions (“I wanna be faithful/But love hooking up with randos”) and the second, which features Kesha, about the good old days.
Relatable, platitudinous songs like these, which mistake honesty for profundity, are Macklemore’s bread and butter. They’ve allowed him to retain a dedicated fan base as his mainstream appeal has waned. Listening to Gemini, it struck me that one of the things that must draw fans to Macklemore is the simple intelligibility of his lyrics. Rap has only gotten more cryptic since the emergence of Young Thug, Lil Uzi, and their Soundcloud imitators. Macklemore, on the other hand, enunciates so clearly that he could be calling bingo at a local retirement home. Fittingly, on “Glorious,” he imagines getting props for his bars all the way from heaven, sent not by a departed rap legend but by his late grandma.
Lines like that one combine Macklemore’s self-seriousness (“I am a terrific rapper”) with his goofier side (“Even my grandmother thinks so”). He has trouble sticking consistently to either approach. On the Lil Yachty-featuring “Marmalade,” there’s a particularly confusing sequence where he talks shit to a hater for being on Tinder, only to pivot: “And if I was single/I’d be right there with ya/But I’m committed, keep my dick in my britches.”
Macklemore is a generous collaborator, extending a hand to plenty of unknowns and gamely imitating the flows of established artists including Yachty and Offset on “Willy Wonka.” (Listening to Offset rattle off the reasons why Willy Wonka is a sensible role model is one of the fleeting pleasures of this record). The romantic “Zara” includes a sweet tribute to 1990s R&B and is elevated by Abir, a Moroccan-born singer with a powerful voice; when asked what she was most excited for fans to learn about her in a recent interview, she responded, “That I exist!”
There are some other standout songs: the block-party special “Levitate” and “Corner Store,” which is enjoyable despite being a thunderingly obvious “Thrift Shop” redux, lacking only the latter’s catchy hook. There’s also plenty to ignore—like “Firebreather,” in which Macklemore dabbles in rawk with the help of fellow Seattleite Reignwolf. The album’s closer “Excavate” is outrageously maudlin with an overwrought falsetto from the Washington singer Saint Claire. But it’s obviously sincere and even touching at times. The hip-hop world has moved on to fresh abominations—to YouTubers who cannot even pretend to be making music in good faith, to viral successes apparently intent on repeating the errors of Macklemore and Iggy Azalea anew. Gemini, meanwhile, is an album full of schlock that no one is asking us to pay attention to, and it signals that Macklemore wants, and deserves, to be left in peace. | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bendo | September 26, 2017 | 5.4 | 644b8544-eb61-4fb2-baab-b9367497da8c | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
On her 1967 debut album, Nico’s unmistakable voice sings the songs of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Jackson Browne. Chelsea Girl helps define her as a mercurial aura and a manifold, complicated artist. | On her 1967 debut album, Nico’s unmistakable voice sings the songs of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Jackson Browne. Chelsea Girl helps define her as a mercurial aura and a manifold, complicated artist. | Nico: Chelsea Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nico-chelsea-girl/ | Chelsea Girl | In the early-to-mid-1960s, visitors to Andy Warhol’s silver-plated Manhattan Factory were often asked to sit for a screen test. Unlike traditional screen tests, which are more like auditions, Warhol’s brief black-and-white 16mm films were silent portraits of an individual in a moment of unguarded stillness. Nico’s 1966 Screen Test finds the singer perfectly content in front of the camera. She fiddles with a few props, stares off into space, and nibbles on her fingernails. It’s almost as if the camera is not there at all, which for Nico, it may as well not have been. She was always under someone’s gaze, a kohl-lined enigma glaring out from behind her bangs.
Nico spent most of her life as a manifold figure reduced to a muse. She was so often limited to her striking physical presence and icy “unapproachable mystique.” As Warhol’s Screen Test shows, Nico possessed that inexplicable magnetism, a wordless ennui. But she was also written off as untouchable and unknowable, which by all accounts she was. “She had no inner life. What inner life she did have was always strictly kept in her,” said Viva, one of Warhol’s Superstars, in the 1995 documentary Nico Icon. “There was really nothing to talk to Nico about because she had no interests.” “[Nico] didn’t hate people,” says her friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock in the same film. “She was just alone, alone. And she was scared to death. Of herself, of everybody.”
Nico’s beloved 1967 solo debut Chelsea Girl is her aura commodified by men who were intoxicated by the idea of Nico. Despite the fact that each song on the album feels extracted from Nico’s soul, she did not write any of the lyrics. Of course, men writing music for women is a constant in the history of pop music. But there’s something about Nico’s qualities—ennui, detachment, mystery, beauty—that make Chelsea Girl a double-edged sword. Consider the lyrics to “Afraid” off Nico’s 1970 record Desertshore: “You are beautiful and you are alone.” Detachment, the ever-present quality of Nico’s voice, only intensified the idea of her as just an image.
Throughout her life, Nico actively encouraged the air of mystery that followed her. She claimed to have been born everywhere, from Berlin to Budapest (definitively, it was Cologne, 1938). She said her estranged father was either a soldier with Hitler’s Wehrmacht armed forces or a Turkish Sufi (it was former, and he was killed by a commanding officer, after being shot by a French sniper). When the British bombardment of Cologne intensified, mother and daughter moved to a small town outside of Berlin. After dropping out of school around the age of 14, Christa Päffgen was discovered by the German fashion designer Heinz Oestergaard and began a fruitful modeling career. Eventually, she would take on the name of photographer Herbert Tobias’ ex-boyfriend: Nico.
Nico began acting in her early 20s, appearing most notably in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita. About a year later, while studying at New York’s Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, she had a brief affair with French actor Alain Delon, which resulted in a son, Ari. By the time Nico met Warhol in 1965, she was already a Superstar of her own creation.
She was hardly a singer, nor did she aspire to be one. Her unwavering Germanic baritone was a result of the opera and wartime propaganda anthems she grew up with and the jazz and blues she witnessed as a young model in Paris. But Nico’s voice only heightened the spectacle Warhol desired. “The group needed something beautiful to counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell,” explained Paul Morrissey, a Factory filmmaker and one of the Velvet Underground’s first managers, “and the combination of a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed.” Warhol had recently been approached to help open a discotheque in Long Island and was looking for a house band. Coincidentally, he had just encountered the Velvets at the Greenwich Village venue Café Bizarre and decided that the quartet were the perfect fit. Enter Nico, who would be the band’s “window-dressing.”
Conflict between the Velvets and Nico erupted immediately, largely because of Nico’s desire to sing every song. At this point, there were no songs fit for Nico’s low, unbroken rumble in the Velvets’ repertoire, so Warhol commissioned a reluctant Lou Reed to write a few ballads for his rising star. The resulting songs—”Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror”—are deep psychological studies rooted in Reed’s complicated relationship to Nico and the cultural spectacle swirling around them. While each of these songs seems directly drawn from Nico’s psyche, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is Nico in a nutshell. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1979 book Seduction, “’I’ll be your mirror’ does not signify ’I’ll be your reflection’ but ’I’ll be your deception.’”
Despite its historical accolades, their 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico was considered a commercial and financial failure, and as a result, the band was not playing many shows. Nico began a solo residency at the St. Marks street club The Dom where she was initially accompanied by a tape deck playing Reed’s pre-recorded guitar solos. Apparently, it was painfully awkward, and soon Nico was joined by the actual Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Tim Buckley, and a young Jackson Browne, who later became her lover. In the final weeks of Nico’s residency, the Velvets presented her with an opportunity to join them on tour. Nico chose to stay in New York, symbolically ending her time with the Velvet Underground. “I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big might have happened for me,” she would say.
But something big was happening for Nico. Her 1967 solo debut Chelsea Girl would be her first step towards claiming herself as an artist and individual. Although the record’s 10 sparse folk-pop songs were written by Nico’s male collaborators—Browne, Reed, Cale, Bob Dylan, Morrison, and Tim Hardin—Chelsea Girl is not a covers record. Rather, these were the unreleased songs she had acquired through her residency at The Dom. Like her songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico, each track is a remarkable communion between writer and singer. “I am the person, the Chelsea Girl,” Nico declared while revisiting the hotel years later. The record takes its name from Warhol’s split-screen 1966 experimental film Chelsea Girls, which documents the mundane activities of scenesters at the legendary Chelsea Hotel. “Chelsea Girl” is a continuation of the film in the form of a ballad about the hotel’s S&M queens, Superstars, and junkies; every character’s verse contains a heartbreaking epitaph like, “Her future died/In someone’s past.”
Chelsea Girl presents a young woman torn between the regrets of her past and the unknown but hopeful future. Browne’s three contributions—“These Days,” “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “Somewhere There’s a Feather”—are introspective meditations on change backed up by Cale’s chirping viola and Browne’s gentle acoustic guitar. “These Days,” the ultimate loner anthem and the most famous song of Nico’s career, has been covered by artists from Drake to Elliott Smith, and is as iconic as Nico herself. It’s no wonder Wes Anderson chose to use it as a theme of sorts for The Royal Tenenbaums’ Margot, a character whose mystery and sadness is as heavy as her mink coat. But upon listening to Browne’s twangy version of “These Days,” it becomes obvious that Nico’s droning, Germanic drawl is what makes the song so affecting.
While Browne focuses on transitions, Cale pushes Nico into more a more esoteric realm. On “Little Sister” (co-written with Reed), Nico’s voice is flat and brooding in direct contrast to the whimsical organ which pipes along beside her. She sings in “perfect mellow ovals” as Goldstein wrote in 1966. “It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning.” “Winter Song” on the other hand, basks in an almost medieval atmosphere which is heightened lyrically by talk of “tyranny,” “royal decay,” and the “worshipping wicked.” The closest thing to a Velvet Underground song on Chelsea Girl is Reed, Nico, and Cale’s hefty eight-minute “It Was a Pleasure Then.” While Cale’s viola groans with distortion and Reed’s guitar drives into darkness, Nico’s voice soars into a wordless soprano at the peak of her range. She draws out the words until they lose definition and simply become expressions.
Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” provides some levity at the end of Chelsea Girl. Though Judy Collins also claimed that Dylan wrote the song for her, technically he wrote it while on vacation in Greece with Nico in 1964. Whereas Collins’ version is an alarmingly cheery love song drowning in organ, Nico’s take indulges in darkness despite the poppy orchestra backing her up. “I’ll Keep It With Mine” brings Nico full-circle from “I’m Not Sayin,” and would be the last time she ever made a song so conventional.
Reactions to Chelsea Girl was at best indifferent and at worst, sexist. One Los Angeles Times writer remarked, “Nico’s a classy girl, but they’d sell more Nico if she were naked...and not hiding behind a string orchestra in a flower print dress.” For her next record, 1968’s wintry The Marble Index, Nico picked up the harmonium and wrote all of the songs after being encouraged by her “soul brother” and part-time lover Jim Morrison to document her dreams. She dyed her blonde hair with henna and trading her white clothing for an all-black ensemble. “I felt that at last I was independent, and that I knew what independence was,” she said.
But while Nico was taking some control of her music, her life was spiraling. There was the time in 1974 that she performed the German national anthem “Das Lied der Deutschen” including the verses that were banned in 1945 due to their Nazi associations. A year later, Nico was dropped from Island because she told a reporter that she “didn’t like negroes.” In an alleged instance in the early ’70s, Nico declared that she “hate[d] black people,” smashed a wine glass on a table, and stabbed the eye of a mixed-race singer who worked with Jimi Hendrix. Concert footage of a middle-age Nico in the early ’80s portray her as a skeletal figure with gaunt cheeks, rotten teeth, and sunken eyes from a disturbing heroin addiction. It’s as if Nico found power in destroying her image.
Nico once admitted that she could not relate to the songs Reed wrote for her. “I can’t identify with that,” she said of “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “to notice only the beautiful and not the ugliness.” Despite its melancholy, Chelsea Girl is still very much caught up in this world of the Screen Test, one focused on ineffable, alluring melancholy. To today’s casual Nico fans, she still exists in this bubble, a blonde monolith in a white pantsuit, a vessel for dreams and desires. But to consider Nico as frozen in her Chelsea Girl years is a disservice to the active efforts she made later in life to move beyond her image. But consider all of Nico, the strange circumstances of the Velvet Underground, the image of Chelsea Girl, and the horrific, inexcusable actions of her later life. It’s a wholeness she craved all along. | 2017-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Verve | November 12, 2017 | 8.9 | 644eaa73-0aa4-471b-8031-923f427745d8 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
His Name Alive's new album is inspired by the Large Hadron Collider, filtering the cosmic implications of the awe-inspiring device through the stonier side of ‘70s rock. | His Name Alive's new album is inspired by the Large Hadron Collider, filtering the cosmic implications of the awe-inspiring device through the stonier side of ‘70s rock. | His Name Is Alive: Patterns of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22628-patterns-of-light/ | Patterns of Light | There is a surprising amount of music inspired by particle accelerators. Techno-classical producer Kate Simko wrote an album about the one at Fermilab, located outside her hometown of Chicago. Jazz pianist Al Blatter once improvised along to a “sonification” program that translates data collected by the Large Hadron Collider into music on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival, where CERN, the multinational research organization that runs the LHC, has held several artist workshops. Sound artist Bill Fontana created a piece that used the LHC itself as an instrument, refracting sound generated by its own data. The LHC and Fermilab have each inspired their own not-particularly-good nerdcore rap anthem, complete with inter-lab beef.
So His Name Is Alive isn’t breaking new conceptual ground by taking the LHC as the inspiration for their new album Patterns of Light, but where they’ve taken that influence is entirely uncharted territory. Previous works in strange little niche have crossed multiple genre lines, but there’s always been a consistent aesthetic: clean-lined, blippy, and serene, like what you’d expect to find in a PBS documentary, or what you might imagine a massively powerful and complex piece of technology might listen to for fun. His Name Is Alive mastermind Warren Defever has gone pretty much the exact opposite way, filtering the idea of the LHC through the stonier side of ’70s rock.
Defever has spent the past 25 years picking a strange course through a field of genres that up until now has touched on goth, folk, R&B, noise, and chamber pop, but even with all that range, Patterns of Light feels like an outlier. Even if you heard 2014’s Tecuciztecatl, where the band merged shoegazey noise with vintage prog, you’ll still probably be caught off guard when the album opens with a track that–apart from the hypnotic multitrack cooing of vocalist-keyboardist Andrea Morici–sounds exactly like Dio-era Black Sabbath. It’s by far the heaviest, shreddiest, most aggressive thing Defever’s ever done, and, as far as I can tell, entirely unlike any other music ever composed for CERN.
The major difference is that past artists seem to have been inspired by the Large Hadron Collider’s earthly manifestation: the sleek lines of its beam-conducting apparatus, its intricate computer arrays, the pixelated action art of its data visualizations. Defever, on the other hand, considers it from a more cosmic perspective, which the LHC offers in abundance. After all, this is a machine that was built in order to rip the veil off the mechanisms of reality, one designed in search of something that’s often been called the “God particle.” It’s so powerful and strange that a lot of people seriously thought that it was going to destroy the universe when it was first powered up. Even after it’s been up and running for years without tearing apart the fabric of reality, people are still terrified of it.
Patterns of Light runs on this occult energy. The lyrics—with their frequent invocations of witches, dragons, and the “light of creation”—often read like spells, where knives and sacrificial murder pop up next to dark matter and the standard model of particle physics. “Silver Arc Curving in the Magnetic Field” describes the LHC collider’s 17-mile-circumference circle like the ritual site of a new techno-pagan cult–just the latest iteration in a 3000-year-old tradition of earthworks inscribed into ancient Celtic land.
It also helps Defever’s direction in genre-hopping make stronger thematic sense here than on other His Name Is Alive albums. Classic metal and prog—which the band expertly executes on cuts like “Black Wings” and “Demonmix”—have long served as vehicles for high-concept, bong-smacked, “whoa, man” philosophizing. The sunshiney psych-pop of “Calling All Believers” bears a strong resemblance to the Canadian band Klaatu’s new age-y 1976 hit “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” while the pastoral folk of “Dragon Down” sounds like it could have been lifted from a private press LP recorded by a Californian hippie cult. A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable. | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | London London | November 21, 2016 | 6.6 | 644f71eb-0851-4f3a-8666-60b6145a5413 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Following her ambient collaboration with Cole Pulice earlier this year, Lynn Avery’s newly reissued 2020 LP is charmingly offbeat and shrouded in snowy intimacy. | Following her ambient collaboration with Cole Pulice earlier this year, Lynn Avery’s newly reissued 2020 LP is charmingly offbeat and shrouded in snowy intimacy. | Iceblink: Carpet Cocoon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inkblot-carpet-cocoon/ | Carpet Cocoon | In Lynn Avery’s hands, the cosmos feels like it could fit in your pocket. The Oakland artist’s homespun style of ambient music delicately balances the tactile with the mystical, weaving freeform jazz and lo-fi collage together into playfully diffuse semblances of songs. Over the last several years, Avery has gradually nurtured her peculiar little sound worlds, regularly working with saxophonist Cole Pulice and flutist Mitch Stahlmann to explore her ideas from different angles. She achieved one of her headiest concoctions yet earlier this year with To Live & Die in Space & Time, where she and Pulice stretched their new-agey jams out into negative space, tapping into a stately and surreal calm suspended in zero gravity. Now, Avery follows that record with a reissue of 2020’s Carpet Cocoon—her wondrous, charmingly offbeat debut album as Iceblink.
Where Avery’s other collaborations with Pulice and Stahlmann often reach way up into the clouds, Carpet Cocoon has its feet planted firmly in the soil. Describing it as a “comfort album” to “retreat to in the winter,” Avery adorns the record in tenderly plucked nylon string guitars, lending even its more uncategorizable tracks a sweet, earthy air. From the moment the album opens with the acoustic “Healer,” Carpet Cocoon shrouds itself in a snowy intimacy, as Pulice’s saxophone lines waltz with Avery’s melancholy fingerpicking in a lonely yet soothing lament. Avery and Pulice continually expand on the song’s winding, folky theme, granting it an almost epic quality, like thumbing through the pages of a hardbound book found buried in your grandmother’s attic.
Carpet Cocoon’s most special moments are those where Avery lets her ambitions loose. “Cellphone in the Bath,” with its chirpy, tick-tocking mallets, recalls the more whimsical experiments of Inoyama Land, but on a bedroom scale (it certainly wouldn’t sound out of place as a video-game merchant background theme). Avery continues to swerve with each track, dipping into a slanted bass groove on the muted “Vocoder Upright” and looping in Stahlmann’s radiant flute accompaniment on the blossoming, Isik Kural-like synth vignette “Microsong.” But her various experiments never disturb the album’s peaceful essence. Even darker tracks like “August Von Koenig,” whose mysterious guitars and ringing bells feel as if they were lifted straight out of an eerie folk tale, fit neatly into Avery’s warm patchwork.
Though Avery has taken her craft to hypnotizing, otherworldly new places in the years since Carpet Cocoon, there’s a certain magic to her debut album that’s distinct. Carpet Cocoon feels as lovingly assembled as an old photo album, each hissy field recording infused with a serenely nostalgic quality, like overexposed Polaroids too fuzzy to make out the clear details. It’s so organic that it almost seems to breathe on its own, revealing tiny new textural details with every new spin. In an ambient scene where soft, easy vibes often rule above all, Avery has proven herself to be incredibly adept at threading the needle between accessibility and adventurousness. Tracing her journey back to its beginning shows just how many different directions her sounds can go. | 2022-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Moon Glyph | September 7, 2022 | 7.4 | 6452ce88-60de-4f7a-8698-92b970f157d8 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters, a brick of an Isley Brothers box set, contains 21 albums from the beloved vocal group, nearly all expanded with single mixes and other assorted rarities. A close listen to the collection underscores how they may have been reliable but they were never static. They were keenly aware of emerging trends, and hearing these albums back-to-back underscores that progression. | The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters, a brick of an Isley Brothers box set, contains 21 albums from the beloved vocal group, nearly all expanded with single mixes and other assorted rarities. A close listen to the collection underscores how they may have been reliable but they were never static. They were keenly aware of emerging trends, and hearing these albums back-to-back underscores that progression. | The Isley Brothers: The Isley Brothers: The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20989-the-isley-brothers-the-rca-victor-and-t-neck-album-masters/ | The Isley Brothers: The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters | The Isley Brothers first appeared on Billboard in 1959, when "Shout (Part 1)" made its way to 47 on the Hot 100. They last cracked the charts in 2006, with "Just Came Here to Chill" petering out at 25 on the R&B charts. Few other artists can match that kind of longevity and, fittingly, the band's biggest hits still resonate. "Shout", "Twist and Shout", "This Old Heart of Mine", "It's Your Thing", "That Lady", and "Fight the Power" all arrived during the glory days of Top 40 in the '60s and '70s, enduring hits still heard on oldies radio, movies, television, and commercials. The Isleys also are a bottomless well for samples in hip-hop. "Fight the Power" provided Public Enemy with the title and some beats for their defining 1989 protest anthem, Ice Cube based "It Was a Good Day" on "Footsteps in the Dark", "Between the Sheets" provided the bed for the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Big Poppa", "That Lady" invigorated Beastie Boys' "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" and can be heard in Kendrick Lamar's recent "i".
Kendrick's sample illustrates how the Isley Brothers remain close to the surface of modern culture, so perhaps the time is ripe for The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters, a brick of a box containing 21 albums, nearly all expanded with single mixes and other assorted rarities (it also represents the first CD release of 1969's Live at Yankee Stadium, the U.S. digital debut of 1981's Inside You and 1982's The Real Deal, and the first-ever release anywhere of Wild in Woodstock, a good live-in-the-studio record cut in 1980). As hefty as this is, it doesn't have all the recordings they ever made, not by a long shot: everything they did for United Artists (where they recorded "Twist and Shout") or Motown (where they struck gold with "This Old Heart of Mine") is absent, as is anything from the 20-plus years they spent hopping between Warner, Island, and DreamWorks, racking up sizeable R&B hits but never seeing crossovers.
In fact, the RCA designation is a bit of a misnomer, as the only record the group recorded there was 1959's Shout!, so this winds up being a deep dive on the Isleys' work for T-Neck, the independent label they launched in 1964. About a decade later, the Isleys signed a distribution deal with an Epic Records run by Clive Davis and that's when their career hit its stride: 3 + 3, their first album on Epic, reached #8 thanks to "That Lady", and two years later The Heat Is On became their first #1 on the back of its single "Fight the Power". The Isleys stayed in the pop Top 10 until 1980's Go All the Way and racked up platinum albums until 1983's Between the Sheets, after which the band's classic lineup splintered and the group left Epic, selling the label the rights to T-Neck as a way to get out of a financial jam.
Despite this prolonged success—and even when they hit a rough patch in the early '80s, they bounced back on the R&B charts within a couple of years—the Isley Brothers never have been considered album artists, not in the way such peers as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, or Curtis Mayfield were. They never had an album place on Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, they never make All-Time Greatest Albums lists; they're seen as a perennial singles act, responsible for some of the greatest 45s of the 20th century but never tying it all together into a grand artistic statement—a sentiment, if true, would make this 23-disc set a slog. It's not. It's absorbing, due to the Isley Brothers' ability to shift with the fashions, their dogged work ethic and embrace of recorded music as commercial product. At their peak, they delivered hot funk and smooth soul every year without fail—sometimes splitting an album in two so there was a fast side and a slow side—and there is something to be said for that regularity: when you laid down your money, you knew the Isleys would deliver the goods.
A close listen to The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters underscores how the Isley Brothers may have been reliable but they were never static. They were keenly aware of emerging trends—shamelessly exclaiming "It's a Disco Night" in 1979 but threading in hot analog synths á la Rick James on 1982's The Real Deal as they slowly drifted into a quiet storm—and listening to these albums back-to-back underscores progression, not complacency. The presence of the outlier of 1959's Shout! emphasizes just how far the group travelled. Here, the group—just a trio of Ronnie, O'Kelly, and Rudolph Isley—slipped exuberant R&B in between blues and Tin Pan Alley standards, the kind of tunes acceptable to the supper club audiences that constituted a pop crossover in the late '50s.
This was standard practice in 1959 because kids didn't buy long-players, adults did, yet this divide between respectable material and rip-roaring rockers like their original "Respectable" gives Shout! a slight musty air. The Isleys traded the standards for the twist while at United Artists in the early '60s, a swap that emphasized their youth but still carried traces of stiffness due to UA and the Isleys chasing dance crazes. Like so many artists, the Isley Brothers learned how to cannily blend their commercial aspirations with pure soul while at Motown, a pivotal moment missing on this big box. Instead, this set has their fledgling mid-'60s singles for their own T-Neck, 45s heard on the compilation In the Beginning. Released in 1971—the date explains why Jimi Hendrix, the trio's guitarist in 1964 and 1965, looms over the band itself on the cover art—In the Beginning crackles with the rumblings of the intense grit of funk, goosed along by Jimi's proto-psychedelic guitar, music that points the way toward T-Neck Isley Brothers more than Motown's This Old Heart of Mine. Ernie Isley picked up the thread Hendrix lay hanging, but before Ernie turned into a guitar hero in his own right came "It's Your Thing," a wild, loose-limbed groove that functioned as the Isleys' repudiation of Motown and embrace of Sly and the Family Stone funk.
With this 1969 hit, along with the It's Our Thing album that accompanied it, the Isley Brothers embraced the now of '60s soul. The album was very much their thing: they threw in everything they had in reviving their indie T-Neck, abandoning the uptown soul without losing sight of a pop audience while also deepening the groove, all giving them their biggest hit to date. Maintaining momentum proved tricky, especially when their socially conscious, Black Power-fueled records (1969's The Brothers: Isley, 1970's Get Into Something) didn't catch a spark, so the group caught the rays of the hippie sunset in the early '70s, scoring a genuine hit with Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With", the cornerstone of a covers-laden '71 LP Givin' It Back, where Ronald, Ernie, and Marvin all posed like Earth-minded singer/songwriters on its burnished cover. Givin' It Back coincided with the rise of album-oriented radio and, as there was now an audience consuming albums as albums, the Isleys began structuring their long-players as immersive experiences. A flirtation with Philly Soul followed in 1972—Brother, Brother, Brother bore a huge hit with "Work to Do", but it's an anomaly on a record where the second side contains just two songs, one of which is a 10-minute workout on Carole King's "It's Too Late"—and then came the 3 + 3 makeover, when the trio doubled the size of their lineup and found funk.
3 + 3 is the breakthrough, the album where the bespangled bell-bottomed soul renegades of the '70s were unveiled—not coincidentally, it's the first released on Epic—but it's a record where the fizzy "That Lady" sits next to a cover of James Taylor and the Isleys find a way to bring soul to Jonathan Edwards' "Sunshine (Go Away Today)" and Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze", two of the most sensitive of the '70s SoCal soft sounds. More than anything, this illustrates how the Isleys' phases overlapped: they found their groove thing but weren't quite ready to leave covers behind, not when those covers were successful and broadened the audience. They needed the security of one other hit—1974's Live It Up, whose title track went to four R&B while a cover of a Todd Rundgren ballad sat on its second side—before they cut their first album of all originals, 1975's The Heat Is On. With its "Fight the Power"—an anthem of defiance that seemed more political than its lyrics actually were; it was a rebellion that jumped demographics—they had their biggest-ever crossover hit and it's one firmly grounded in funk: its attitude and melody hooked in a larger audience.
The Heat Is On proved to be the apex of the Isley Brothers' chart success, at least as far as the crossover pop audience was concerned. Hit albums still followed—1976's Harvest for the World, 1977's Go for Your Guns, and 1978's Showdown all went platinum or better, all accompanied by major R&B hits—but the Isley Brothers were now firmly an R&B act, one who were still stars but stars for a specific demographic. Retroactively, these records do have a crossover appeal, due in no small part to their lasting legacy within the R&B demographic, a legacy echoed through samples that underpinned crossover hip-hop hits of the '90s. After Showdown, however, the last run of Isley records on T-Neck—1979's Winner Takes All, 1980's Go All the Way, 1981's Grand Slam and Inside You, 1982's The Real Deal, 1983's Between the Sheets—are records divided between smooth quiet storm and cloistered disco fallout, records that substitute adventure for calculation. By most measures, these albums aren't as strong as what came before, particularly the hot streak of the mid-'70s, but when listened to in succession, they're not drastic disappointments; they underscore the fleet-footedness of the Isley Brothers, how they followed fashion and wound up reflecting their times.
This eager elasticity is why Eric Weisbard uses the Isley Brothers as his R&B case study in his revelatory book Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Weisbard argues that the Isleys were crowd-pleasing showmen from the start, a group keenly aware that a broader appeal meant steady work, so they were happy to go wherever their audience went, no matter what sound took them there. Through its sheer variety, The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters does provide supporting evidence for this thesis but the wonderful thing about the box is how the Isley Brothers never sound crass or mercenary as they hop from church-inflected R&B to funk to quiet storm. The Isley Brothers never abandoned their identity as they rolled with the changes, finding sly ways to make fads seem like divine inspiration. If they never did manage to deliver an outright classic album—3 + 3 and The Heat Is On come very, very close—this box suggests using this metric as a yardstick for measuring greatness is a fallacy. What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety. | 2015-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | September 11, 2015 | 8.5 | 64547365-7857-47f1-a6ff-8b3465d034e7 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
Swedish producer Armand Jakobsson, aka DJ Seinfeld, is an ostensible figurehead of the recent lo-fi house movement. His new EP tends towards warmth and melody even at its roughest. | Swedish producer Armand Jakobsson, aka DJ Seinfeld, is an ostensible figurehead of the recent lo-fi house movement. His new EP tends towards warmth and melody even at its roughest. | DJ Seinfeld: Ruff Hysteria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23072-ruff-hysteria/ | Ruff Hysteria | Armand Jakobsson is a house producer from Sweden who operates under two aliases: DJ Seinfeld and his twin ego Rimbaudian. For just over a year, he’s been going at a clip, sharing dozens of tracks on SoundCloud and pressing the best of them to vinyl for labels like Lobster Theremin and Endotherm. The musical distance between his two projects is almost negligible, yet it’s as DJ Seinfeld that he’s ended up becoming a figurehead for what has been called, improbably, the “lo-fi house” movement.
DJ Seinfeld and Rimbaudian share a penchant for primitive, distorted drums paired with simple, emotive melodies spelled out in reverb-laden vocal and piano samples. This continues on Seinfeld’s recent four-track Ruff Hysteria EP. It’s a straightforward recipe, and one that’s been servicing dancefloors well for years in the hands of artists like Anthony Naples, Omar S, Legowelt, and their acolytes. But look at the other artists leading the “lo-fi scene” and you’ll notice a shared aesthetic. In the UK, Ross From Friends and DJ Boring both dabble in ’90s nostalgia—the latter’s 2016 single “Winona” samples an old TV interview with the actress—and a mood of playful, ironic detachment. Other artists who’ve been called their peers, like Montreal’s Project Pablo and Australia’s Mall Grab, may share an off-the-cuff, unserious presentation, but otherwise have no more in common than they do with any house producer looking to classic styles and analog machines for inspiration. So “lo-fi” is a sub-genre with no edges; the current “scene” has no home turf or artistic manifesto.
Jakobsson’s bright and breezy formula typically melts a silky vocal from Sade or Janet Jackson over saturated drums for a heart-pounding, peak-time rush. The four-track Ruff Hysteria EP, pitched as “too unsavoury for public consumption,” is grittier stuff; on the sleeve, Jerry Seinfeld’s face melts like candle wax over a rictus grin. But the gory humor doesn’t bear out in the music, which tends towards warmth and melody even at its roughest. “Vaping Lyf” bleeds messily, with squashed hi-hats cutting into a one-note melodic squiggle. Like all of Jakobsson’s tracks, it’s structurally linear and totally functional—although with drums this far into the red, all but the best sound systems could turn it to sludge.
“Ruff Hysteria” and “What Kind of Sandwich Is This?” are bleary-eyed nocturnes that recall the hazy shuffle of Moiré, with beefy bass melodies dominating foggy piano drifts and distant vocal samples. The outlier is “Wombat Bounce,” a wonky tribute to vintage rave—wedges of saucer-eyed synths interrupt the breaks and hi-hats melt like they’ve been left out in the sun. Aside from the bottom-heaviness, this is accessible, DJ-friendly material—hardly the stirrings of a new movement. As it happens, Jakobsson creates his analog-fancying sound inside his computer. Nowadays you can recreate the crunch of aTR- 909 with a cracked DAW and a few decent plugins. It’s totally free, and what could be more lo-fi than that? | 2017-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Natural Sciences | April 14, 2017 | 6.9 | 6458658b-4a88-4122-8fc9-41348ead0a65 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | null |
On their second album, the Houston-based instrumental trio crafts a unique, psychedelic vibe that hangs between continents and eras. | On their second album, the Houston-based instrumental trio crafts a unique, psychedelic vibe that hangs between continents and eras. | Khruangbin: Con Todo El Mundo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khruangbin-con-todo-el-mundo/ | Con Todo El Mundo | Khruangbin craft atmosphere music that never fades into the background, like some endless curl of smoke that keeps pluming upward. Sprinkled with snippets of spoken word, faint vocal melodies, and ranging and impeccably performed guitar solos, the whole of their second record, Con Todo El Mundo is, in effect, a long and pleasant head nod that seems to hang between continents and eras. The group—whose name is a transliteration of the Thai word for “airplane”—elicits the same eclectic enjoyment of any number of artists that came of age around the turn of the century, from the laid-back trip-hop feel of Kruder & Dorfmeister to dub-jammy Thievery Corporation: Ethereal instrumental music that might be described as “world” as shorthand for its range of melody, rhythm, and overall vibe. But the Houston-based instrumental trio makes music that’s a little more dusty, frayed around the edges, and personal.
Though clearly informed by psychedelic rock, the primary influence that fueled their 2015 debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was Thai funk, music that bassist Laura Lee and guitarist Mark Speer found by scouring the Thai music blog, Monrakplengthai. Speer was in a gospel band with hip-hop producer and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, who became the third member, adding the more influences to the blend, and plenty of breakbeats. But Con Todo El Mundo broadens the group’s sound, maintaining the funk but also adding bits and pieces of Caribbean, Indian, and Middle Eastern music. Iran is the obvious touchstone in “Maria También,” whose video directly addresses women’s rights in that country. Throw in a few retro surf riffs and whispered vocal lines and you’ve got an aesthetic that feels at home at any beach or desert in the world.
From the laidback first few seconds of guitar, bass, and organ that begins “Cómo Me Quieres” (“How do you love me?” )—the question answered by the album’s title Con Todo El Mundo (“With all the world”)—it’s clear that this music might be the perfect accompaniment to just about any somewhat passive activity. Cooking? Studying? Walking? Riding the bus? Khruangbin have your back. Need to speed it up a little? Skip to the funky, zouk-styled bounce of “Evan Finds the Third Room.” Relaxing around the house on a Sunday afternoon? Try the loping slowness of “A Hymn.” Every track is profoundly pleasant and, at times, even danceable, in a crunchy kind of way.
Perhaps this is music for the Spotify era; a flowchart of sounds spawned from a range of music connected by the wonders of algorithmic technology. Describing how musical influence can be found anywhere, drummer Johnson describes Shazaming tunes in his local pho restaurant, and the band also offers a curated Spotify playlists for listeners. Each one contains music that influenced the band while recording and allows the playlist to be tailored to the length of an airplane journey and tweaked according to the mood. It may read like a slight to say that Con Todo El Mundo sounds like the result of an algorithm, but it’s an algorithm that reflects the way music is now consumed. Every week listeners “discover” new rhythms catered to an activity or previous selections. But it also allows, maybe, just maybe, for what was once called “world music” to slide into these shuffled, technologically selected playlists. Khruangbin’s takes this new mode of listening and injects its own singular and developing personality into the playlisting of modern music. | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Night Time Stories Ltd. / Dead Oceans | February 1, 2018 | 7.6 | 645d5480-be6c-4d08-85de-b4536f3b1874 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | |
With her forceful contralto and skyscraping pop-rock, the Los Angeles songwriter’s second album is a dramatic chronicle of exiting young adulthood into an uncertain future. | With her forceful contralto and skyscraping pop-rock, the Los Angeles songwriter’s second album is a dramatic chronicle of exiting young adulthood into an uncertain future. | Hana Vu: Romanticism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hana-vu-romanticism/ | Romanticism | Time comes for us all, but Hana Vu is taking it harder than most. “There’s no song in my heart like I thought there was when I was young,” she wallows on the first song of her second album, Romanticism. It’s the kind of lament that a more restrained songwriter might make with melancholic resignation, but Vu doesn’t do quiet emotions: She bellows the line as if she’s been mortally wounded or awoken to find the sun stricken from the sky. She’s not just getting older—the very fabric of her being is slipping through her fingers, and she’s wrecked.
On Romanticism, Vu channels her despondence into such titanic pop and gleaming rock that you don’t feel her pain so much as marvel at the magnificence of its display. She sings with an operatic authority that makes even her most hyperbolic assertions land as indisputable truth. “I scream so loud/Because I don’t exist no more,” she writhes over glammy twinned guitars on the album’s rousing farewell to youth “22,” her unrelenting voice prodding the song to a Bowie-esque climax. The irony that she’s still in her early 20s isn’t lost on her, but she has such command over her voice that she really does seem old beyond her years. Her keening contralto envelops the song as if it’s been conjured from an ocean of epsom salt.
Just imagine how some of the label A&R in her native Los Angeles might have tried to mold her rock instincts for maximum return: play up the soaring guitars, tie her into a “Gen Z can rock, too” narrative, and perhaps encourage her to throw shade at the state of popular music in interviews. Everybody involved would probably make a mint. Vu’s own vision isn’t nearly so prefabricated. It’s much more nuanced and amenable to the times, a complement to the stately gloom of Mitski, the TikTok sadness of Boygenius, and the alt-rock ear candy of Olivia Rodrigo. For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.
Depression’s unliftable curse hangs heavy over the album. On “Hammer,” Vu pleads for a cure to an ailment her doctor can’t diagnose: “There is no answer/But I want one anyway.” Romanticism’s tone lightens on its more resigned B-side, as tense rock gives way to driftier, dreamier material, but Vu’s malaise never clears, despite her attempts to harness the power of positive thinking. Over a tentative dance-pop pulse, “Dreams” imagines an existence where “it doesn’t hurt to be alive,” while “Airplane” sets a lovelorn fantasy to the buoyant pop-rock of the Killers. A closing suite of three more love songs challenges the core assertions of the album’s first half, suggesting the root of Vu’s anguish might be romantic, not just existential.
Vu’s been kicking around the Los Angeles music scene since she was 14, which may explain in part why she carries herself like such an old soul. She also lost a prime chunk of her youth to pandemic, time she can’t get back. On Romanticism, she grieves the past not just out of nostalgia for something that’s been lost, but also trepidation about the future. “Do you remember getting older?/Can you tell me what it’s about?” she sings on “Airplane.” It’s one of the rare moments on the album when she sounds hopeful, as if knowing might take some of the worry away, but of course, nobody can tell her precisely how adulthood will unfold. That’s what makes it so frightening. | 2024-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ghostly International | May 13, 2024 | 7.6 | 645fd0d6-ab75-4351-8dd5-e0ff6abc0069 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Brooklyn's Underachievers practice the kind of esoteric mysticism that once flourished in some far-flung corners of '90s rap, from Leaders of the New School to X-Clan. | Brooklyn's Underachievers practice the kind of esoteric mysticism that once flourished in some far-flung corners of '90s rap, from Leaders of the New School to X-Clan. | The Underachievers: Evermore: The Art of Duality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20998-evermore-the-art-of-duality/ | Evermore: The Art of Duality | "I know my soul was born to do some cool things," testifies AK over the wood flute-and-maracas loop of "Rain Dance (Phase One Intro)". The Underachievers, his duo with Issa Gold, practice the kind of esoteric mysticism that once flourished in some far-flung corners of '90s rap, from the feverish jabberwocky of Leaders of the New School’s T.I.M.E.: The Inner Mind’s Eye to the pan-African zealotry of X-Clan’s To the East, Blackwards, and the backpacker bohemianism of Zion I’s Mind Over Matter, Mystik Journeymen’s The Black Sands Ov Eternia and Abstract Tribe Unique’s Mood Pieces. It’s an ethos that largely dissipated by the end of that decade as rap moved on. But the Underachievers have not only revived it, they’ve stuck with their spiritual bent through four projects, including 2013’s revelatory Indigoism, last year’s uneven but satisfying Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium, and now Evermore: The Art of Duality.
At first, Evermore appears to offer more of the same, as they rap about being miseducated in school, dabbling in street hustles, and feeling alienated from society. "We lost in this world, but it’s hard to relate," says AK on "Chasing Faith". They strive to use their experiences to educate others through hip-hop music, celebrating the use of "natural" herbs such as marijuana and ‘shrooms, but acknowledging that they’ve struggled with harder substances. They underline the importance of their metaphysical lessons by acknowledging in "The Dualist" that "We all sin."
AK and Issa Gold complement each other. Vocally, AK has a more sour tone and a barking delivery that sounds like he’s dispensing real talk. Issa Gold has a mid-range baritone that lightens when he gets excited, as if he can’t wait to finish rapping one line and start the next. Both are strong lyricists, but for much of Evermore, they repeat the same themes again and again. The perils of mental illness are frequently noted; mainstream religious dogma, school indoctrination, and the banality of social media and Western pop culture are repetitively disparaged.
These observations are delivered over serene production. "Shine All Gold" matches an acoustic guitar loop to a bass drum bounce, then closes with an ambient techno beat. The next two tracks, "Chasing Faith" and "Star Signs", pick up that downtempo thread and build backgrounds full of melancholy and yearning. "The Dualist" breaks the holistic spell with the kind of mid-'90s boom-bap classicism on which the Underachievers and other Beast Coast artists built their reputation. The warm electric keyboards and synthesizers of "The Brooklyn Way" make for a particularly glorious peak. "Hands up if you live for love," chants Issa Gold.
For much of Evermore, the Underachievers spin in their spiritual axis, until a series of tracks near the end break the heavenly trance with jarring abruptness. Trap orchestration creeps in on "Take Your Place" as Issa Gold warns, "Don’t fuck with the snakes," and AK adds, "Really pop up on a nigga blocka/ If he think he hotta ‘cause a nigga conscious/ Got to keep a chopper just to cease the nonsense." The duo descends into a hellish inferno until they reach the ninth circle of "Allusions". "Got a bitch in the Bay that loves the ‘shrooms/ She be screamin’ AK when I shove the broom," brags AK. Issa Gold adds, "Smoking fuego with your dame/ Been like a whole 20 minutes, can’t front, nigga still don’t know her name /30 minutes later, had my pinky in her brain/ She like, I thought you was different, all of you rappers just the same/ She ain’t complain."
The latter songs throw everything that precedes it into doubt. Are the Underachievers just rap dudes lusting for weed, bitches, and cash like everyone else? They’re obviously aware of the contradictions, but Evermore: The Art of Duality places these adventures in a present-tense context. Perhaps they’re simply acknowledging their flawed humanity. Just as likely, they don’t yet realize that their perspectives on sex and violence can be as tough to break as the mental prisons that damaged their troubled youth.
The Evermore journey is an engaging one, but it would have slid into a new age torpor if not for the spate of ugliness near the album’s end. The coarse "Generation Z" shenanigans give the earlier "Chasing Faith" added urgency. We now know why the Underachievers strain to ascend their earthly selves. "I done came far, still got a lot further to go," raps Issa Gold on the final track, "Unconscious Monsters (Evermore Outro)". "Trying to leave a mark by giving everything that I know." | 2015-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | RPM MSC | September 25, 2015 | 7.5 | 64632015-6516-4819-ab62-2259f7974cb6 | Mosi Reeves | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mosi-reeves/ | null |
Young rapper Bishop Nehru's teamed up with DOOM for this brief full-length, and such a relationship could have soildified the former's status as a strong young talent. But NehruvianDOOM sounds more like the work of an MC with a little while longer to go, and a producer who's sounded more inspired in the past. | Young rapper Bishop Nehru's teamed up with DOOM for this brief full-length, and such a relationship could have soildified the former's status as a strong young talent. But NehruvianDOOM sounds more like the work of an MC with a little while longer to go, and a producer who's sounded more inspired in the past. | NehruvianDOOM: NehruvianDOOM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19809-nehruviandoom-nehruviandoom/ | NehruvianDOOM | The veteran mentor/young up-and-comer dynamic almost always has a good story behind it, even if it's a simple one. In 2013, when he was still two years away from the legal drinking age that his show's attendees were at, rising NYC phenom Bishop Nehru shared a bill with MF DOOM in London's renowned 100 Club. Nehru had already seized on the opportunity to rhyme over a DOOM beat the previous year on his early release Nehruvia: the Mixtape with his track "Lemon Grass". Even more fittingly, he opened the mix with an interview clip of DOOM venting about the state of the hip-hop industry, one that could've been recorded any time in the last ten years and still more or less held true.
With Nehru operating as an East Coast classicist-minded MC with a '94 revivalist mindset that rivals Joey Bada$$, forging a relationship with DOOM should have solidified his status as a strong young talent. But NehruvianDOOM sounds more like the work of an MC with a little while longer to go and a producer who's sounded more inspired in the past (even in exile). Even at only eight tracks—nine if you count the intro—Nehru's presence starts to tread water, a technically sound voice with solid lyrical structure that isn't quite there yet as far as bringing a unique perspective is concerned.
To be fair, harshing on a teenage rapper still finding his voice is like griping that I Was Made to Love Her is a weaker album than Innervisions. It's easier to shrug at what DOOM brings to the table, actually; his role on this record, touted as the first full-length production job by DOOM since King Geedorah's 2003 album Take Me to Your Leader, is largely relegated to unearthing some of the more underused stuff from his Special Herbs archives. It still bumps, just in a way that a lot of hardcore heads have likely heard before, all blurry soul-jazz and punch-drunk underquantized drums. DOOM's verses, rare as they are, also still show glimmers of the off-the-cuff-sounding, truism-tweaking conversational punchlines that made him so appealing throughout the '00s—but they mostly come across as autopilot or hook-duty versions of his usual self, with the occasional contemporary reference (like a missing Malaysian airplane joke in "Disastrous") held up like a newspaper headline in a proof of life hostage photo.
So Nehru's shortcomings are easier to forgive, even if the best you can say about him at this point is that he's lucky to be one of those rare high-school age artists who doesn't let his own naiveté get the best of him. He maintains a solid balance between conceptual wordplay, philosophical musings, and internal rhymes, but it's not quite well-traveled enough to possess a real authority. Which makes sense, in that he's still figuring shit out; a line like "Am I being idolized, or am I a pair of idle eyes" in "Om" or the frustrated come-up aspirations of "So Alone" touch on a nerve of creative-teenager introspection. Those lines are delivered with more finesse than personality, a flat-voiced series of monologues that have their share of nod-worthy internal rhymes but still need refining into a style that outgrows its influences. The number of recent artists who've done that by the time they hit 18 can be counted on one hand, so it's still worth following Nehru's development just to see where he takes his style. But in the meantime, this generation-crossing collaboration feels like a record lodged in a sort of chronological rut, one where a young artist fronts an old-sounding record that sounds like it could've been released at any point in his lifetime—and helmed by any number of MCs that could've sounded like him. | 2014-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | September 29, 2014 | 5.6 | 646698e7-7b74-4b19-86b7-660df81d28ff | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The second solo album from the Real Estate frontman defaults to carefree songwriting that explores sacred moments of adolescence in the Jersey suburbs. | The second solo album from the Real Estate frontman defaults to carefree songwriting that explores sacred moments of adolescence in the Jersey suburbs. | Martin Courtney: Magic Sign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martin-courtney-magic-sign/ | Magic Sign | Real Estate’s 2020 album The Main Thing never had a chance. As singer and guitarist Martin Courtney tells it, the New Jersey band labored uncharacteristically long over their fifth LP in a bid to make something that couldn’t be dismissed as “another Real Estate record.” A self-consciously big statement from a band that specialized in endearingly small ones, the album was released just days before the pandemic brought the world to a halt. Yet even with better timing it’s hard to imagine it could have met its lofty ambitions of rekindling the critical goodwill once enjoyed by a veteran indie group whose modest guitar-pop sounded out of step with the times, even during their early ‘10s heyday.
Courtney set out to make The Main Thing Real Estate’s best album, but on some level he seems to understand that he wasn’t being true to himself by forcing it. This is, after all, the same songwriter who insisted on Days that it shouldn’t take all summer long “just to write one simple song.” And so for his second solo album Magic Sign, written while separated from his bandmates during the pandemic, Courtney defaulted to the more carefree songwriting that’s always come most naturally to him. After pouring so much into The Main Thing with so little to show for it, “I didn’t really want to think too hard about any part of the process of making this record,” he explained.
Courtney has never needed an excuse to dwell on comforts; he’s already architected one of the most tension-free discographies in modern indie-rock. But on Magic Sign, which he drafted largely at night while his kids slept and his wife worked late shifts at the hospital, the good vibes serve as a kind of defense mechanism. Amid the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic, he retreated to some of his safest, most sacred memories of adolescence—particularly of those transitional years where he found the freedom to roam beyond the New Jersey suburbs.
“In the basement of my mind, I’m on a bike in 1999,” he sings on “Merlin.” On “Shoes,” he similarly reminisces on long days with nothing but time to kill: “In vacant lots with dusty shoes, we found things to do.” The accompaniments are fittingly blissful, chime-forward as always but with just enough variations to set it apart from a Real Estate LP. The reverb is turned down and the vocals are pushed way up; strings and pedal steels further warm several songs, while The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick provides some thrust behind the drum kit, especially on “Sailboat,” a sugary homage to Yo La Tengo’s gentle rippers. It’s all brought to a hi-fi finish by Rob Schnapf, the Elliott Smith producer whose presence highlights the similarities between Courtney’s droopy sighs and Smith’s own wistful tenor.
Despite its overt optimism, there are cracks in the album’s dreamy facade. Courtney’s lyrics are filled with allusions to silent houses and empty lots, all of which give the impression of a world that’s moved on from his memories. Over the Byrds-y twang of opener “Corncob,” he struggles to remember the name of a childhood pal he ran around with. The more he tries to live in the past, the more he’s reminded of age. A more dramatic songwriter might further explore that dissonance, but Courtney never digs all that deep. Even when he’s singing about ghosts in the walls on “Sailboat,” it sounds like another pleasantry.
Courtney’s breezy, honeyed harmonies make the record go down easy, but Magic Sign may be Courtney’s first album that errors on the side of being too carefree. He’s always kept his lyrics simple, but here he falls back on so many underdeveloped “head/bed,” “sound/around” rhyme patterns that his prose often feels like a first draft he never got around to tightening. Maybe he was making a point by keeping his lyrics so plain. There are albums born of a burning need to create and express, and there are albums that exist simply because the artist had the spare time and inclination to make them. Magic Sign never pretends to be anything other than the latter. | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 24, 2022 | 6.8 | 64678dce-d4a2-4dfa-8bd2-621f9df75a35 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
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 breakthrough LP from a pair of proud eccentrics whose arcane preoccupations and clever songwriting made them unlikely stars. | 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 breakthrough LP from a pair of proud eccentrics whose arcane preoccupations and clever songwriting made them unlikely stars. | They Might Be Giants: Flood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/they-might-be-giants-flood/ | Flood | What did it mean to be a rock star in 1990? Whatever the answer might be, They Might Be Giants were decidedly not it. The Brooklyn duo’s style was more turtlenecks than leather, their voices nasal and not especially alluring, their erratic dance moves more like the mechanics of wind-up toys. One of them played the accordion. On their first record, they gave a famous Who lyric a sincere moralistic spin: “I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die.” Yet those same uncool qualities were the exact things that made They Might Be Giants total rock stars. Their ability to grab listeners with sharp, catchy songwriting was never more evident than on 1990’s Flood, where their expansive imagination was matched by major label money. The underdogs always find a way.
John Flansburgh and John Linnell had both come of age in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a cozy Boston suburb close enough to Walden Pond that Thoreau could hear the ringing of the town’s church bells during his afternoon meditations. As high schoolers, the pair worked together on the school newspaper and bonded over a mutual interest in comics books, the Ramones, and experimenting with Flansburgh’s tape machine. In 1981, the two Johns reconnected as young adults after moving into the same Brooklyn apartment—Flansburgh was there to study printmaking at Pratt, and Linnell was playing keys in a band called the Mundanes. The limitlessness of punk had blossomed into the brightness of new wave, and the pair’s quirky preoccupations made them natural bedfellows within a burgeoning New York City scene.
At the time, New York was just emerging from the economic stagnation and crime surge that battered the city in the 1970s; 1981 would turn out to be one of its most violent years. But there was potential in the disintegration. The Johns began working on music together in earnest, with Flansburgh on guitar, Linnell on accordion, and a drum machine. The absence of a formal rhythm section was liberating: While they might not have been able to afford an orchestra, they could program one on a computer. (Besides, lugging an organ to gigs was exhausting, as they found out at their first show: a Sandinista rally in Central Park.)
Over in the East Village, performers as eclectic as feminist artist Karen Finley—known for intense monologues about the politics of the female body over pounding disco beats—and Steve Buscemi’s comedy duo could find an audience. In between day jobs as a graphic designer and a darkroom technician, They Might Be Giants began honing their own act, which often included homemade props—like a massive stick with a microphone attached to one end, which Flansburgh would pound for percussion. But equally intriguing were the Giants’ offstage practices. In the early ’80s, after Flansburgh’s equipment was stolen from his apartment and Linnell broke his wrist while working as a bike messenger, the pair began recording songs to Flansburgh’s answering machine. They shared this material not by seeking out a label, but by placing ads for what they called Dial-a-Song—named after the Christian hotline Dial-a-Prayer—in The Village Voice classifieds section. Long before music was readily available online, the duo leveraged a landline to release new songs daily and play them directly to listeners in and beyond New York.
This underground momentum eventually landed the Giants their first major press notice in the pages of People—yes, the celebrity rag—where their 1985 demo cassette received a glowing review. “These guys should definitely change their name,” quipped writer Michael Small. “It won’t be long before they really are giants.” It was a prescient prediction. Soon after, They Might Be Giants released their self-titled debut, a hyperactive collection that bounced from punk to polka as it folded in references to the off-kilter ephemera that filled the two Johns’ real lives: the 1954 Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz film The Long, Long Trailer, a coworker with Elephant Man disease, Burt Bacharach. But the album’s incisive core saved it from collapsing into novelty. “No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful,” goes the infectious “Don’t Let’s Start.” “Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.”
Around this time, the Giants started working with a young Nickelodeon director named Adam Bernstein. Their video for “Don’t Let’s Start” captures the band’s oddball showmanship: They perform a jerky, synchronized dance routine alongside props like chimney flue hats and cutouts of progressive newspaper editor William Allen White (the two former high school newspaper staffers would adopt his cheery visage as their group’s unofficial mascot). Inexplicably, “Don’t Let’s Start” entered regular rotation on MTV and the band’s album sales skyrocketed. It was a sudden, fantastical leap, but as one TV executive suggested, the Giants’ outsized visual presence made them “the ultimate MTV band.” Their next record, 1988’s Lincoln, pushed them further into the mainstream with the chart-climbing single “Ana Ng,” a love song to a woman who lives halfway around the world. By the time they signed to Elektra in 1989, “we weren’t just weirdos, we were weirdos who’d sold some records,” Flansburgh remarked later. Still, the label was reluctant to let them self-produce their third record, encouraging the band to collaborate with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, known for their work with Elvis Costello & the Attractions. Eventually the parties reached a compromise: Langer and Winstanley would produce the album’s four proposed singles, which ended up consuming two-thirds of the recording budget.
From that disproportionate division of funds to its 19-track length, Flood embraces overflow. The album begins with a 30-second choral theme that asks grandiose questions about the roots of joy (“Why is the world in love again?”) and doom (“Why are the ocean levels rising up?”). The Giants don’t have the answers, but they can offer “a brand new record for 1990…Flood!” In its own earnest weirdness, Flood was a beacon of modernity—an attempt to explore existential quandaries with playfulness.
While a handful of songs used live drums, Flood is indebted to the Casio FZ-1 sampler, which made a huge impression on the Giants when they heard De La Soul deploy it on 1989’s groundbreaking 3 Feet High and Rising. The two Johns used this synthetic genie to record everything from clinking kitchen utensils (“Hot Cha”) to the whiplash of a wet towel (“Minimum Wage”) to a vacuum cleaner (“Hearing Aid,” which also features a guitar solo from no wave icon Arto Lindsay). The sampler was especially heroic in the Giants’ reimagining of the Four Lads’ post-war novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” as a fast-paced romp. The Giants treated “Istanbul” as a tutorial for their new machine, and the song is almost entirely constructed of cobbled-together sounds, including the heavy whistle of blowing on a Coke bottle.
On their first two records, the Giants pulled from a vast stockpile of songs they had written throughout the mid-’80s. But Flood is composed almost entirely of new material that allows ideas to unspool in peculiar, organic ways. On “Whistling in the Dark,” Linnell sinks into his baritone range and spins an absurdist parable about independent thinking. The cartoonishly simple “Particle Man” explores the injustice of natural law through elemental characters and wordplay (“When he’s underwater does he get wet?/Or does the water get him instead?”). Other songs take a more straightforward route: “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” shakes its fist at life’s minor annoyances; “Minimum Wage” conveys its disdain for capitalism in under a minute using only a yodel, a whip crack, and an arrangement that borrows from Sinatra’s version of “Downtown”; the power-chord laden “Your Racist Friend” unambiguously condemns ironic racism (“Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding”).
Nowhere is their imagination more profound than on the album’s whimsical hit, “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” written from the standpoint of a night light. Atop a steady snare and a jangly arrangement heavily inspired by the Lovin’ Spoonful, this luminous narrator pours out a stream-of-consciousness ramble about, among other things, its family tree. “Though I respect that a lot, I’d be fired if that were my job,” it says to its lighthouse ancestor—“after killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts.” Though the bouncy melody is outwardly chipper, there’s something subtly menacing about “Birdhouse,” from the acerbic trumpet solo to its wavering bridge: “I’m your only friend/I’m not your only friend/But I’m a little glowing friend/But really I’m not actually your friend/But I am.” It’s brilliant, it’s breathless, and boy is it bizarre.
Robert Christgau once described They Might Be Giants’ debut as “an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance.” There is indeed something maddening about the band’s ceaseless inventiveness, especially on Flood. What neurons are required to conceive a song about reincarnation told from the perspective of a bag of groceries? How does a rock with a piece of string tied around it become a metaphor for man’s search for meaning? And who the hell thinks to rhyme “infinite” with “Longines Symphonette”? Whimsy was inherent in the band’s name, which makes reference to Don Quixote’s insistence that distant windmills were, in fact, giants. But the pair knew that wit can easily tip into irritation: “Being considered smart alecks is a negativity and we don’t want that,” Linnell told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. So Flood remains humble in spite of its eccentricities. “I can’t understand the appeal of bands that pretend they have the meaning of life on tap,” he once remarked. “We’re the opposite of that confessional school of songwriting; there’s no all-nude revue portion of our show.”
To this point, Flood offers very little insight into its creators beyond their obvious talents. Only one moment toes a biographical line: “John, I’ve been bad/And they’re coming after me,” the pair warble in harmony on “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love.” “Done someone wrong and I fear that it was me.” In spite of this emotional distance, fans eagerly latched on to the band’s strange tales. Was a line like “Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads” a metaphor for conformity, or a sly reference to silicon implants used by sumo wrestlers to meet height requirements? “We’re not really into writing songs with secret meanings or coded messages,” Linnell once clarified. Absurdity is in the eye of the beholder.
Flood was a huge success by the band’s standards, reaching No. 75 on the Billboard 200 and eventually receiving a platinum certification. The songs were blasted across television for all ages: Kids got animated music videos for “Particle Man” and “Istanbul” on the Looney Tunes spin-off Tiny Toon Adventures; teens saw the surrealist “Birdhouse in Your Soul” video on MTV; The Tonight Show treated adults to a zippy live rendition of “Birdhouse.” After years running a shoestring live setup that the Giants themselves parodied as a rhythm section want ad, they finally enlisted a live backing band in support of their next album, 1992’s Apollo 18. The response was immediate: Their shows became “full-out, stage-diving, moshing, party celebrations.” The duo would record all subsequent albums with a full band.
By the mid-’90s alternative music had become big business. After Flood, They Might Be Giants became known as the not-so-elder statesmen of the burgeoning subgenre of geek rock. Though they’ve long resisted the label, their success undeniably opened doors for bands that were not traditionally “cool,” like Ween, Fountains of Wayne, and Weezer; Flood’s surf-rock breakup song “Twisting” could have been a Blue Album B-side. But all bubbles must burst, and the Giants were among the alt-rock bands that found themselves shortchanged in Elektra’s eventual corporate reshuffle. “If something breaks, they don’t see an opportunity to get something going,” Flansburgh said later. “They want to focus on the new record by the Cure.” They Might Be Giants departed Elektra in 1996 and spent the latter half of the decade touring and releasing a handful of compilations and live records. Meanwhile, the band’s cult following kept beating the drum. The Giants were early adopters of the internet, communicating with fans via mailing list and starting a website. In 1998, their coordinated web army rigged People’s annual online reader poll of the world’s most beautiful people, and Linnell landed in the top 10 alongside Madonna and Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio. (He subsequently wrote an op-ed about it for the New York Times.)
In the late 1990s, Flansburgh and Linnell began writing and performing for music and television, winning a Grammy for “Boss of Me,” their theme song for the Fox sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. This work paved the way for They Might Be Giants to enter the lucrative world of children’s music. They’d long penned songs about historical figures like 11th American president James K. Polk and “Belgium’s famous painter” James Ensor; in 2002, they released No!, a record geared specifically towards “the entire family.” Children, it turned out, were the perfect audience for strange songs about a man with superhuman taste buds, or the uncertain origins of balloons, and the Giants have pursued this path while continuing to make more adult-oriented albums.
But whether making music for children or their parents, They Might Be Giants have stayed true to the innovative spirit that shines so brightly on Flood. “I’ve often been told that you only can do/What you know how to do well,” Linnell sings on “Whistling in the Dark.” “And that’s be you/Be what you’re like/Be like yourself.” Flood proved they didn’t know any other way. | 2022-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Elektra | June 5, 2022 | 8.5 | 64681235-de64-4cc4-9439-0f54b1b7948d | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Blending triumphant jams with the mind-bending repetition of minimalism, the instrumental outfit offers a leaderless, collective shout of defiance. | Blending triumphant jams with the mind-bending repetition of minimalism, the instrumental outfit offers a leaderless, collective shout of defiance. | Sunwatchers: Music Is Victory Over Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunwatchers-music-is-victory-over-time/ | Music Is Victory Over Time | As of late 2023, there are at least eight images of the Kool-Aid Man scattered across Sunwatchers’ Bandcamp page. He’s an unlikely mascot for an anti-capitalist experimental rock band, but ever since he appeared on the cover of the group’s 2019 album Illegal Moves in full-on Braveheart regalia standing triumphant over a mutilated corpse of Uncle Sam, his presence within the band’s own cheeky branding has been ubiquitous. Naming their 2020 follow-up Oh Yeah? was a not so subtle nod in his direction. The group’s tongues are shoved firmly into their cheeks, and the blatant IP theft aligns with their anarchist-leaning politics. But the exuberant, barrier-breaking energy of their appropriated brand ambassador is mirrored in the unchecked jubilation at the heart of the band’s music.
Sunwatchers exist in a lineage of musicians and performers creating politically radical work that cherishes the spirit of invention and is charged with hopeful defiance. Like the Bread and Puppet Theater, they construct a homegrown spectacle that is viscerally entertaining; like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, they use jazz as the groundwater that feeds a holistic practice of playfully and provocatively challenging artistic norms. As an instrumental band, Sunwatchers convey all of this through sound alone, countering their triumphant melodies with blasts of saxophone skronk and the time-bending repetition of minimalism. Think of it as solidarity fuel: a jolt of revelry to replenish the spirit of those engaged in the daily struggle of existence and resistance.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Sunwatchers have been notably less prolific than over the previous half-decade. Music Is Victory Over Time is the quartet’s first album in over three years, and their approach has shifted in subtle ways. The valleys are now just as potent as the peaks, and the darkness at the margins is more apparent, if still largely kept at bay. The relatively understated “Foams” plays out like the first moments of the jam section of the Grateful Dead’s “Playing in the Band” expanded into a shimmering ebb and flow of electric guitar arpeggios. Closer “Song for the Gone” punctuates the album with a wistful tribute to lost friends that climaxes in a three-chord refrain—a rare retreat into traditional song form.
The group sounds most dialed in when they focus on a single musical phrase and push it to a breaking point. The opening melody to “World People” feels cribbed from a game show (or perhaps an ’80s Ornette Coleman record with Prime Time) until it begins to contract and expand simultaneously, a short arpeggiated phrase building in intensity until it explodes into a glorious two-chord blowout. The wide-eyed, flowing triplets played by saxophonist Jeff Tobias on “Tumulus” become full-cheeked bleats by the song’s end. It’s in listening to these shifting, evolving pieces that the album’s title begins to come into focus: While being swept up in the music, listening closely to the way it moves from points A to B to Q, the slippery, untamed flow of time seems dictated by the pliable swirl of sounds rather than the unflinching tick of the clock. Music Is Victory Over Time, like so much of the Sunwatchers catalog, creates the mindset in which revolutionary impulses and ideas can flourish—one driven by patience and passion in equal measure. Their music is a leaderless, collective shout of defiance, each element working in tandem to rethink how music moves and how it moves the listener. | 2023-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | December 5, 2023 | 7.2 | 64699f39-37d4-4e32-8570-9d1cd99563c1 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth hopscotch between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. On their eccentric new album, the only constant is stylistic inconsistency. | Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth hopscotch between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. On their eccentric new album, the only constant is stylistic inconsistency. | Loose Tooth: Big Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23178-big-day/ | Big Day | Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth entered into existence as an item on one woman’s bucket list. In the summer of 2013, Larissa Sapko, the group’s eventual bassist, took it upon herself to enlist her friends in a rock group that “sounded like Yo La Tengo,” as she admitted to Nylon. Four years, two releases, and a host of line-up changes later, Loose Tooth have amassed a reputation as one of the rowdiest, most unpredictable bands in the Philly underground, hopscotching between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. That the band’s delirious din now bears little resemblance to Yo La Tengo’s music is a blessing in disguise; overt fan-service only gets you so far in such a glutted scene.
Loose Tooth do right by eccentricity on their sophomore full-length Big Day, a nine-track joyride where the only constant is stylistic inconsistency. In its 24 minute runtime, the band covers a remarkable amount of ground. Peppy buzz-bin choruses explode into thorny breakdowns; red-meat grunge morphs into math rock, recedes into an ambient interlude, then circles back to punk. And that’s just the first four tracks. The album’s B-side proves just as wide-reaching, albeit noticeably sunnier. The bubbly “Dog Year” recalls Pinback, and the midtempo ballad “Day Old Glory” is a collaboration with showstopping vocalist and fellow Philadelphian Abi Reimold. But the storm clouds come rushing back in for “Fish Boy,” the crunchy, seething closer.
Vocalist and guitarist Kian Sorouri soothes his bandmates’ queasy racket somewhat with plainly-sung melodies, delivered in his lazy, nasal tenor, occasionally punctuated by a deadpan joke or a full-throated yelp. Still, the frontman’s lyrics are anything but pedestrian. “Garlic Soup” frames the conflict between self-control and catharsis as a literal stomach-churner: “Remain totally in control of the things you spew/Releasing totally unconsciously/Feel the shame you spew.” The chorus ramps up the gross-out further, zooming in on an image of the speaker going for a dip in “a river made of [their] own waste” and transmogrifying it into a stomping sing-along, all sweeping chords and roiling bass.
Whether intentional or not, every aspect of Big Day—its brisk pacing, its disjointed arrangements, its thematic frisson—hinges on the undertow of its creators’ stream-of-consciousness. That makes for a potentially tenuous listen, considering the fine line between endearing quirkiness and directionless excess. Barring the occasional missteps—like the underwhelming opener “Sleep With the State Concept,” which buckles under the weight of its lumbering parts—Loose Tooth fall into the former camp. For a band with seemingly limitless ideas, they’re notably disciplined, but on Big Day, less proves to be more. | 2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter / Lame-O | April 18, 2017 | 6.6 | 646a1620-4b73-4e18-9dea-f2a1b969f372 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Peppered with Star Trek references, meme humor, and lyrics generated by an AI trained on Beowulf and 4Chan, the English band’s sixth album is its nerdiest yet. | Peppered with Star Trek references, meme humor, and lyrics generated by an AI trained on Beowulf and 4Chan, the English band’s sixth album is its nerdiest yet. | Everything Everything: Raw Data Feel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-everything-raw-data-feel/ | Raw Data Feel | Everything Everything want you to believe that they are clever cultural critics. They costume themselves in Devo-inspired utilitarian fashion, almost always sporting navy blue boiler suits; they deliver emotion with a distanced and cerebral irony. The apocalypse interests them, as do computers, and on their records they’ve positioned themselves as outcast philosophers inquiring into subjects as broad as “the human condition,” “technology,” and “society.” On their latest album, Raw Data Feel, the band’s grandiosely empty, teenager-on-weed musings make a mockery of that haughty stature.
Raw Data Feel is Everything Everything’s nerdiest record yet. With its pew-pew synths, Star Trek references, and long since played-out meme humor (there’s a song called “Shark Week”), the band’s sixth album feels like music for a Minecraft convention. The biggest talking point has been the use of AI software to produce some of its lyrics: Lead vocalist Jonathan Higgs reportedly input posts from 4Chan, verses from Beowulf, and language from LinkedIn’s terms and conditions agreement. But what came out is indistinguishable from Higgs’ usual mix of boilerplate platitudes and garbled literary nonsense, especially since he won’t reveal which lyrics were AI-generated. The AI has no tangible presence, except as a reason to talk about this album at all.
Still an experimental technology, AI has been used in music by the likes of Brian Eno and Holly Herndon; Herndon, a scholar of machine learning, incorporated it into her 2019 album PROTO as a counter-narrative to the prevailing anxiety that AI might someday write humans out of the artistic process. Raw Data Feel offers no such critique or commentary. Instead, AI is a gimmick at best, and at worst a crutch, a way for Higgs to do less of the labor. This, to be fair, does play into the album’s main theme: Higgs’ desire to abandon the human brain and its capacity for holding pain altogether, to convert raw feeling into data by offloading his trauma onto a machine.
“Bad Friday,” the album’s best song, is about exactly this. Accompanied by brazen chanting and gung-ho grooves, Higgs describes a terrible violence inflicted upon him, rendering the incident with murky shards of detail. “How did I get this blood all over me?/I got the pictures here on my phone/I can’t remember,” Higgs sings, incongruously, over a chipper funk-rock groove. The song’s sustained and insistent beat sounds as though it’s chasing Higgs; he breaks out into an invertebrate whimper in the pre-chorus, a minor and melancholy refrain that tonally mirrors the song’s traumatic subject matter, before the band reestablish the absurd contrast between its violent nighttime content and jittery nightclub atmosphere. The trauma that bedrocks the song is quickly glossed over: The sound of a Windows 95 error message bonking after the choruses repeatedly disrupts any abiding sense of humanity.
The album’s production, helmed by guitarist Alex Robertshaw, is at least immaculate. Every sound is treated as delicately as in minimal techno, as though each was made to stand out on it own; the littlest synth line sparks, and the guitars gleam like a galaxy made of candy. Higgs’ vocals are clean and processed, his emotion as raw as a 3D-printed steak. It’s one of the only elements that really nails the band’s man-meets-machine brief.
“Jennifer,” with a wiggly, romantic New Order guitar line, is a particular highlight. In the verses, Higgs presents his protagonist: Jennifer, a suicidal woman and possible victim of domestic violence, who longs for an escape while all the exits appear sealed off. The despondency of the verses is balanced with a hopeful refrain, as Higgs encourages her to keep looking for a way out. With no brainy modular synths or cyborgian conceits involved, it’s one of the few songs that isn’t overwrought, and, incidentally, the only one that confronts trauma with a human heart.
Yet there’s no saving the album’s second half. “Metroland,” a sci-fi-meets-country track, keeps you at a barge pole’s distance with its kitschy schmaltz and nonsense lyrics: “Kevin can you imagine it?/The escalator breathing in a hydra bowl,” Higgs sings. Then there’s “Shark Week,” which contains frankly unforgivable lines like “He’s Obama in the streets but he thinks he’s Osama in the sheets.” You’d hope that these were the work of the AI. Perhaps they’re just an excuse to bring in some sort of interesting gadgets: Higgs told Apple Music that Robertshaw suggested that he write a song using certain chords, “because he had this special synth that did cool stuff with chords that had four notes in them.” Higgs tries to balance the zaniness of the verses with seemingly heartfelt refrains (“Do you think you got everyone under your control? When you haven’t got anyone, anyone at all”), but the sticky-sweet choruses merely curdle amid all that would-be acid wit.
Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies—believing in his ability to impart Earth-shattering truths, despite not really saying much at all. That guy can be endearing; he’s energetic and has an infectious interest in technology’s effects on the human spirit. But when it comes to expressing his ideas, much less his own emotions, he’s got a long way to go—not unlike the neural net Higgs used to write his lyrics. | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Infinity Industries | June 1, 2022 | 4.8 | 64758472-0c88-4248-9fe2-80bc8f2e7fe8 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Connecting disparate styles, eras, and moods, the London DJ’s mix tells a story of black dance music from both sides of the Atlantic, an ongoing dialogue that transcends genres and borders. | Connecting disparate styles, eras, and moods, the London DJ’s mix tells a story of black dance music from both sides of the Atlantic, an ongoing dialogue that transcends genres and borders. | Josey Rebelle: Josey in Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/josey-rebelle-josey-in-space/ | Josey in Space | Dance music is steeped in mythology. The U.S. has Chicago, Detroit, Frankie Knuckles, the Belleville Three, Ron Hardy, Larry Heard, and countless tales of young artists—many of them black, brown, and/or queer—cooking up house, techno, electro, and other genres that would go on to transform dancefloors around the globe. Over in the UK, there’s a similar reverence for the country’s so-called “hardcore continuum,” which has roots in imported Caribbean soundsystem culture and runs through hardcore, jungle, drum’n’bass, garage, grime, dubstep, and a myriad of other low-end-heavy dancefloor sounds.
There are innumerable points of overlap between these two spheres, and the exchange has gone both ways. In 1988, early house music from the U.S. helped inspire UK rave culture and the country’s Second Summer of Love. Twenty-five years later, Chicago producer DJ Rashad reinvigorated the distinctly American sound of footwork by injecting it with UK jungle rhythms. There’s an ongoing dialogue, particularly among black artists, yet U.S. and UK dance music are often portrayed as completely separate worlds, parallel entities rather than two pieces of a larger conversation.
Perhaps Josey Rebelle can help change the narrative. A North London native with Caribbean roots, she started DJing at age 13, became a hardcore and jungle fanatic before she’d even finished high school, and is now arguably best known for her work on seminal radio station Rinse FM, where she’s been on the air since 2011. In many ways, her biography is quintessentially British, but her artistic vision extends well beyond the borders of the UK.
Josey in Space is Rebelle’s first official mix album—and only the second installment of the Beats in Space-curated mix series, following last year’s excellent Powder in Space—and it arrives just months after she was awarded BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix of the Year and subsequently landed on the cover of DJ Mag. DJing is her calling card—Rebelle doesn’t produce—and she’s developed a reputation as an eclectic, highly knowledgeable selector who’s just as comfortable playing moody jazz, blues, and soul as she is dropping blistering acid and thundering drum’n’ bass. Although she reins that in slightly on Josey in Space, the mix is a far cry from the rigid genre exercises that many official mix series tend to offer.
It’s telling that so much of the Josey in Space tracklist is populated by black artists, British and American alike. Midwestern house veterans like Andrés, Hieroglyphic Being, and Reggie Dokes sit alongside experimental producer Loraine James and bass upstart Afrodeutsche. Rebelle may not be an overtly political artist—having grown up in a community whose relationships with police and authority were fraught and full of mistrust, she describes herself as “political by default”—but this mix is very much rooted in notions of blackness, a point that’s underscored by early selection “I Dream So Loud,” in which Bay Area poets Tenesha the Wordsmith and Daniel B. Summerhill riff on social justice and identity while referencing Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and a litany of horrors that have been visited upon black Americans over the years.
From there, Rebelle lets the music do the talking. The bubbling acid of Fotomachine’s “BBoy”—one of a handful of new tracks exclusive to Josey in Space—kicks off an extended excursion through a variety of drum-machine workouts, including a couple of siren-filled hardcore screamers from 1991. Along the way are grotty stormers, wiggly house cuts, and deep house strutters (like Nwachukwu’s remix of Uschi Classen’s “Open Your Eyes,” a clear standout that features the iconic voice of Chicago house legend Robert Owens).
Josey in Space runs nearly 72 minutes, and though the energy level peaks around the 40-minute mark with Rum & Black’s bonkers “Zombies at Dawn,” it’s during the mix’s final half hour that Rebelle flexes the breadth of her repertoire. Seamlessly moving between genres, moods, and eras, she weaves together catwalk-ready sass, dubby broken beat, swirly Afro-Latin rhythms, Balearic bliss, soulful drum’n’bass, and heads-down hip-hop. On paper, that sort of journey sounds like a jarring, confusing mess, but in Rebelle’s hands, it’s a gloriously winding road, a soul-drenched comedown after a wild bit of raving.
As a DJ, Rebelle is a storyteller, and while Josey in Space is certainly good for a dance, it goes significantly deeper than the average mix. It’s a story of black excellence and black struggle, of endless creativity and innovation in the face of systemic and societal aggression and discrimination. That story transcends borders, and is also responsible for revolutionizing dance music in the U.S., UK, and beyond. It’s a different sort of dance music mythology, and with artists like Rebelle at the helm, a better and more accurate one.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Beats in Space | May 15, 2020 | 7.8 | 647994d0-14c4-44f7-863c-528a39e4e40d | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Tracing the Beach Boys’ long road back to the spotlight, this five-disc set showcases a complicated era and a creative peak. | Tracing the Beach Boys’ long road back to the spotlight, this five-disc set showcases a complicated era and a creative peak. | The Beach Boys: Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beach-boys-feel-flows-the-sunflower-and-surfs-up-sessions-1969-1971/ | Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 | As the 1960s came to a close, even the Beach Boys knew it wasn’t cool to be a Beach Boy anymore. Brian Wilson floated the idea of simplifying their name to “The Beach,” arguing, “We’re not ‘boys’ anymore, right? We’re men!” The rest of the band rejected the notion. They brought their past with them whenever they performed on stage, still dressed in the matching surfer uniforms from before the psychedelic epiphany of 1966’s “Good Vibrations.” The hits dried up, and the downturn coincided with Brian Wilson’s breakdown during the 1967 sessions for Smile, his abandoned project intended as the sequel to Pet Sounds. Left rudderless without their leader, the Beach Boys stumbled through the remainder of their contract with Capitol Records, often making good music while slipping further away from the center of public consciousness.
Documenting this complicated era, Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 is a five-disc box set featuring augmented remasters of the band's first two albums for their new label Reprise alongside unreleased songs, alternate versions, live tracks, session highlights, and a cappella tracks. This music traces the group’s long road back to the spotlight. It was not an easy journey. Embroiled in an ugly divorce from Capitol, the Beach Boys searched for a new label home and discovered that most companies were reluctant to sign them due to concerns about Brian’s health. While the labels and press were focused on their primary songwriter, his brothers Carl and Dennis, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston kept themselves busy on the road and in the studio, figuring out how to be a band without Brian. When it came time to record their first album for Reprise, they had a surplus of material ready to go—more than could possibly fit on a single album.
Feel Flows illustrates just how fruitful this period was for the Beach Boys as a collective. Sequenced within the unreleased material are songs that would become highlights on subsequent albums, fascinating variations on familiar songs, and oddities and castaways that highlight in particular the growth of Dennis Wilson as a songwriter and Carl Wilson as a bandleader. Much of this progression was evident on 1970’s Sunflower, an album whose cover pointedly depicted the Beach Boys as “Beach Men” surrounded by children they’d fathered. A highlight in their discography, it also showcases the band’s evolution from AM pop to FM rock. Dennis adds some grit to “Slip on Through” and “Got to Know the Woman,” and the band matches his urgency on “It’s About Time.” Dennis also contributes the gorgeous, shimmering “Forever,” a song that finds a counterpart in “Our Sweet Love,” a collaboration between Brian, Carl, and Jardine, graced by a soaring lead vocal from Carl.
As good as it was, Sunflower flopped. Audiences couldn’t be bothered paying attention to an oldies act, so the Beach Boys decided to revamp their image. Enter Jack Rieley, a radio DJ who frequented the Radiant Radish, a health food store owned by Brian Wilson. Rieley got the Beach Boys to ditch their old-fashioned stage clothes and perform for hip audiences at the 1970 Big Sur Folk Festival and the Fillmore East, prestigious gigs that helped change the band’s public perception. By the time they released Surf’s Up in 1971, the audience was primed to accept that the Beach Boys were making relevant music again; where Sunflower peaked at 151 on Billboard’s Top 200, Surf’s Up went all the way to 29.
It helped that Rieley encouraged the group to write topical material. With assistance from Jardine, Love wrote the pro-ecology “Don't Go Near the Water,” and he reworked Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller’s R&B chestnut “Riot in Cell Black 9” as “Student Demonstration Time,” a protest song against protesters. “Student Demonstration Time” isn't the only indication of a conservative streak: Johnston’s wistful remembrance “Disney Girls (1957)” offers a bit of honeyed nostalgia. These breezes from bygone days forecast how the Beach Boys would struggle to shake their past and move forward. Even if Carl and Dennis were coming into their own—Carl’s dreamy “Feel Flows” stands proudly alongside his older brother’s mind-expanding psychedelia—Brian remained the marketable star, so much so that Reprise required a certain number of his compositions on the tracklist. Brian delivered the exceedingly odd tone poem “A Day in the Life of a Tree” and the exquisite “‘Til I Die,” but it was up to Carl to dredge up “Surf’s Up” from the Smile sessions, editing together old tapes to give it the illusion of being completed.
The excavation of "Surf’s Up" underscores how much music the Beach Boys left behind in the studio—a point which the very heft of Feel Flows proves with ease. The box set includes multiple attempts at songs that would surface later: The rambling rocker “Back Home” would be re-recorded for 15 Big Ones, while Love’s gorgeous “Big Sur,” a sparkling revery for the West Coast which ranks among the best songs he ever wrote, found a home on 1973’s Holland. Compilation producers Mark Linett and Alan Boyd expand the timeline further with live renditions of Surf’s Up material from as late as 1993. Focusing on the era at large, the sequencing muddies distinctions between the albums and the outtakes: The proper albums are expanded with bonus tracks and presented in succession, then followed by session tapes and outtakes. On the vinyl edition, the bonus tracks are tacked onto the ends of LP sides, disrupting the flow of the original albums.
Part of the joy of listening to Sunflower and Surf’s Up is hearing the Beach Boys’ perspectives intertwine, and Feel Flows shows how those records merely skimmed the surface of their dynamic during this vibrant period. Brian looms over the proceedings but he’s not at the center. When he does surface, his goals are often diametrically opposed to the rest of the group: Witness his monster movie shtick on the genuinely strange “My Solution,” or how he forces Love to sing about enemas on the ode to health food, “H.E.L.P.” Where the comparable Pet Sounds and Smile box sets placed Brian directly in the spotlight, here the attention is drawn to Dennis and Carl, with Love, Jardine, and Johnston providing compelling grace notes. With each member given ample room for individual showcases, and each coming up with indelible songs and melodies, Feel Flows offers new insight into a creative peak.
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. | 2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | August 31, 2021 | 8 | 64814cdf-9a96-417c-9d20-4fcb1666ef36 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The distinctive sound of Wild Beasts—the dueling voices of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming, a sleek and supple rhythm section, immaculate production—remains on the new Present Tense, but there's a marked shift in lyrical tone. This is on the surface a more domesticated Wild Beasts, but they've lost none of their skill for sharp observation. | The distinctive sound of Wild Beasts—the dueling voices of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming, a sleek and supple rhythm section, immaculate production—remains on the new Present Tense, but there's a marked shift in lyrical tone. This is on the surface a more domesticated Wild Beasts, but they've lost none of their skill for sharp observation. | Wild Beasts: Present Tense | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18961-wild-beasts-present-tense/ | Present Tense | Hayden Thorpe sneers "Don't confuse with me someone who gives a fuck" on the first track of Present Tense, as if Wild Beasts could ever be the victims of mistaken identity. The inimitable interplay between Thorpe’s keening alto and Tom Fleming’s rich lower registers, the sleek and supple rhythm section, the immaculate production that provides quiet storm R&B’s high-thread count and funk’s pinpoint precision: you can’t really approach this sound without ripping them off outright, so no one even tries. Much has been made about how Wild Beasts have drastically reduced the musical drama since their swashbuckling, chandelier-swinging debut Limbo, Panto. Present Tense doesn’t reverse that trend, but without much left to discard sonically, Wild Beasts make their most radical and daring subtraction: emotional drama.
As unique as they’ve been musically, Wild Beasts' candid carnality has made them far more rare in the boy’s club of rock music than you’d been led to believe. Uncoupling masculinity from cartoon machismo, indie slackerdom, teenage neediness, and brooding distance, Wild Beasts presented modern man as a libidinous creature burdened by expectations and failed by his body, both hunter-aggressor and prey to their own insecurities and embarrassments. Thorpe sang “I know I'm not any kind of heart-throb/ But at the same time, I'm not any sort of slob” on Smother’s “Plaything” and that was about the size of it.
Things are a lot healthier on Present Tense, and Wild Beasts' dueling vocalists own up to past mistakes. Thorpe sums it up on “Past Perfect”: “Man did fuck up/ And then he learnt.” Lurid and obscenely limber, “Mecca” presents sexual compatibility as nothing short of god’s will and eternal truth. The same goes for the “Sweet Spot”, its title signifying “A godly state/ Where the real and the dream may consummate.” You’ve got the gist of it by the time “A Simple Beautiful Truth” comes around, and it’s Wild Beasts’ most locked-in, fluid performance, barely two minutes of gorgeous and curvaceous R&B. These add ballast to the plainspoken and plainly pretty pop songs that define Wild Beasts’ new romantic fulfillment. “Palace” and “Pregnant Pause” come awfully close to treacle outside of context, but balanced by the loinclothed swagger of “Nature Boy” and the apocalyptic retribution that “Daughters” foretells, contentment feels earned rather than seen as entitlement.
Still, Present Tense is incrementally more dense and foreboding than Smother or Two Dancers. This is largely due to the implementation of synthesizers, arranged by Leo Abrahams (amongst other things, co-writer of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s “Strange Overtones”) and Lexxx, whose previous, blunt-force stadium-status charges (Arcade Fire, the Killers, Madonna and Keane amongst them) are about the exact opposite of Wild Beasts. And yet, even with all of this expert musicianship and hired talent, the added sounds are soft and welcoming. The lo-fi, rigid beats of “Wanderlust” and “Daughters” and the Hounds of Love-style Linn rolls that ramp up the chorus of “Mecca” push against Chris Talbot, a drummer who’s never played a standard rock beat and still hasn’t; he’s at his most emotive on Present Tense, as “Nature Boy” skulks with primitive menace, while the sadness of “A Dog’s Life” is conveyed by an inventive trick that makes his kit sound like it’s deflating.
Though dealt with indirectly, class struggle has always pervaded Wild Beasts' lyrics and they’ve always empathized with the outsider for good reason. They came on the scene at a time when the Arctic Monkeys ensured that lad-rock would continue to constitute the UK’s musical ruling class, and so their early, theatrical scene-chewing was seen as the epitome of drama club elitism. And while they’ve relocated from northern farming town Kendal to London and occupy their own sweet spot between the top of the pops and the basement, Wild Beasts still side with the have-nots without condescending. “Nature Boy” plays off a common artistic trope—here’s a wild man that will do things to your woman that your white-collar, Victorian ass can’t even imagine and she’s really into it. That sort of thing is right within Fleming’s wheelhouse, but that dynamic seems a little too simplistic for Wild Beasts. You might miss the money quote courtesy of Jake “The Snake” Roberts (“A little fun for me/ And none for you”), but the title is indeed a Ric Flair reference, and so the and so the caricatured imagery of “Nature Boy” makes the song as a whole a laugh at how complexities of class, masculinity, and sex can often be reduced to the heel/babyface duality of pro wrestling.
A similar skewering occurs on “Wanderlust”, which thankfully doesn’t aspire to be another pat, “Common People”-style rant about the rich kids fetishizing artistic “authenticity.” Instead, Thorpe questions the reductionism that goes on in both sides and the self-obsession that goes into any artistic pursuit. "In the mother tongue/ What's the verb 'to suck?'", Thorpe taunts, a subliminal at some fellow UK band getting a little too obvious in their Americanization. It also makes you wonder if “Nature Boy” might be a metaphor for how Wild Beasts compare to some of their more accommodating and popular peers. So what is “Wanderlust” doing as the opener on a record that focuses so much on domestic satisfaction? Get to the closer “Palace” and Thorpe bookends it by singing, “Baby there’s have alls and there are have nots/ I’m happy with what I got”. Both songs speak on the futility of trying to attain any sort of real happiness trying to be someone else. Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves. | 2014-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | February 26, 2014 | 8.2 | 64831905-4e16-46d5-a499-4514831da2b2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Sometimes I think I'm really missing things. It's not that I'm unobservant or a fuckwit or\n ... | Sometimes I think I'm really missing things. It's not that I'm unobservant or a fuckwit or\n ... | The Delgados: The Great Eastern | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2267-the-great-eastern/ | The Great Eastern | Sometimes I think I'm really missing things. It's not that I'm unobservant or a fuckwit or anything. But sometimes events pass me by as I'm gazing, no doubt, at something far less exciting. For instance, I found out the best place to score drugs in my neighborhood isn't the street corner (as HBO would have you believe) but rather the upscale hair salon. Yes, hidden behind the Paul Mitchell hair care products, there are baggies galore of all your pharmaceutical faves.
When I was growing up, the barber (my town enforced a strict "no hair stylist" policy) might mutter as he was buzz-cutting the little annoying hairs on your neck, "Anything for the weekend, sir?" By this, he did not mean a few twists of whizz or a coupla tabs. Nope, he meant rubbers. In fact, his crazy prophylactics were displayed on a cardboard dispenser. The dispenser had wee hooks on it which held aloft the johnnies. Printed on the cards were a really fast car and some woman in a bikini (0 to last base in 9 seconds or less-- not the image of the unselfish lover that might have been portrayed). You could gauge whether my town's male population was getting horny by how much of the image had been revealed since you last sat in the barber's chair. No one missed a thing back then.
But somehow I missed the Delgados' transition from record label-owning stars-in-their-own-right to record label-owning prog-rock wannabes. The Delgados, as well as providing shelter for the immensely boozed-up talents of Arab Strap, Suckle and Mogwai with their aptly-titled Chemikal Underground Records, released a delicate wisp of Scottish indie-pop entitled Peloton. That album nearly gave itself a double hernia with all the imaginative songs and production sleights it gamely bore.
Now the band follows up the greatest Scottish record since the Nectarine No. 9's A Sea with Three Stars with the ponderously self-conscious, woefully proggy The Great Eastern. Remember how disappointed you were when Belle and Sebastian followed up If You're Feeling Sinister with The Boy with the Arab Strap? Well, here's the reprise.
In flagrant disobedience to the teachings contained in The Urban Buddhist's Handbook, I do not seek out disappointment. It's quite happy seeking me out, truth be told. The Great Eastern is the teeth-gnashing, lip-biting sound of a talented band reveling in studio time and awkward time signature changes. At this point, I'd like to let it be known that I've never divined the so-called appeal of Steely Dan. The Delgados probably love the quirky jazz changes that Fagan and Becker whack off in. Me, if it's got guitars in it, it'd better be in the style of either Iggy & the Stooges' Raw Power or Love's Forever Changes.
To be fair, The Great Eastern doesn't show off in 15/8 compound time, though there are enough jarring transitions from 4/4 to waltzing \xBE. But one has to wonder why the band felt compelled to create some highly-wrought art when the simple directness of Peloton endeared itself limpit-like to my heart. Did the band members marry each other and turn their thoughts to creating immortal representations of their late thirty-something selves? Did they think they could out-wank Sonic Youth? Could be.
Or maybe they bought hook-line-and-sinker the critics' fawning adoration and decided to give back real music with real musical significance. Sadly, this entails empty, platitudinous support of innovations such as speed garage and techstep drum-n-bass. For crying out loud, people, that's the only reason the Pastels exist-- so that NME and Magnet can drone on that real musicians remain unrecognized and tirelessly bemoan that the public adores stringy ginger-bearded geekatrons with PowerBooks running FuckmeElectro Version 7.46.
Which is pretty much the reason why The Great Eastern doesn't execute well. It works too damn hard. The most seductive indie pop fluffers have been the Smiths' The Queen is Dead, Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk, and the Stone Roses' self-titled album. James, Inspiral Carpets, and the Manic Street Preachers have fallen by the wayside, and with good reason.
Unhinged from the huge Abacab-era Phil Collins drum sound, The Great Eastern's opening track, "The Past That Suits You Best," would sound as pretty as a Spring rainfall on a Scottish glen. The band overburdens the simple beauty of "Accused of Stealing" with jarring time changes. On "American Trilogy," however, the band captures the right blend of gently strummed guitars and overblown symphonic strings with tubular bells. The middle section even hints at the fey end of grunge, which is echoed in the line, "No one can depress me more than I can." "Reasons for Silence (Ed's Song)" showcases Emma Pollock's dreamy, pastoral vocals in a song that Nick Drake might have recognized from his Bryter Layter album.
Pollack duets with Alun Woodward on "Thirteen Gliding Principles" as they trade half lines ("Lock the door/ Wash the floors/ Shine the shine") until Metallica-esque heavy riffing and orchestral accompaniment barge their way into the domestic arrangements. Fortunately, that track is followed by the subdued piano figures and mournful cello of "No Danger." Woodward lullabies, "Now I've got to choose/ Who from you is gonna lose and who is going through." The responsibility weighs on him: "We don't know we're strong enough and now we're singing out of tune." After a brief reprise of the opening tranquillity, the band's rock tendencies steam in to rip up the peace. Pity.
I understand that the band didn't want to release Peloton II. Nonetheless, it sounds like the Delgados threw their charming, sweetly laughing baby out with the bathwater and replaced it with all manner of musical flummery. Absurdly, they've gilded (or steel-girdered) a fragile lily. I hope I don't allow any stripped-down version to pass me by. | 2000-05-09T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2000-05-09T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | May 9, 2000 | 5.7 | 64870a41-942f-4640-a09a-5616b6cc505f | Paul Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-cooper/ | null |
The expansive spirit of Mike Hadreas’ terrific new album conjures and reimagines a mode of experimental pop music that is ecstatic, healing, modern, and queer. | The expansive spirit of Mike Hadreas’ terrific new album conjures and reimagines a mode of experimental pop music that is ecstatic, healing, modern, and queer. | Perfume Genius: Ugly Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/perfume-genius-ugly-season/ | Ugly Season | As Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas straddles the line between storyteller and composer. His music suggests narrative threads—an abusive grandfather, a sick body, a hateful world—that he dissolves into impressionistic lyrics and orchestral soundscapes. Hadreas’ restless style keeps him at the vanguard of pop where a twinkle of piano might sound as queer as an intimate disclosure. Shapeshifting becomes its own act of defiance, a shirking of the simplified labels of the straight world.
Yet rather than just mystifying his fans, Hadreas has seemed to age alongside them, first confessing adolescent traumas, then slyly signaling a watershed era of LGBTQ+ rights. By 2020’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, he had matured into a grown-and-sexy crooner, relating intimacy in the present tense and anecdotes of youthful gay struggle from a taller perch that comes with growing older. “Half of my whole life is gone,” he sang at the album’s start, sounding not just resigned, but satisfied: Life’s second act might actually be better than its first.
On his latest, the eerie and gorgeous Ugly Season, the 40-year-old makes a dramatic yet natural shift. Decentering his angelic voice and direct lyrics, Ugly Season favors the experiments that always lurked on the outskirts of his songs. A master of tone-setting opening lines, Hadreas starts the album with a statement of purpose. “No pattern,” he deadpans, under treatments so heavy they smother his words. Ugly Season incorporates chimes, Mellotron, celeste, guitarrón, reggae pulses, and song structures loose enough that they seem to swell operatically, or, in the case of the thrilling “Eye in the Wall,” stretch into an extended disco mix. A pop-star-turned-composer’s record akin to Kid A and Low, Ugly Season nonetheless feels more like an act of generosity than a wrench thrown in expectations. The album’s expansive spirit recalls a long line of artists who rejected the classical establishment in order to show composition’s potential to be ecstatic, healing, modern, and queer—luminaries such as Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and Merce Cunningham.
Appropriately, Hadreas wrote these songs to score his dive into modern dance. In 2019, he co-directed and performed in Kate Wallich’s piece The Sun Still Burns Here, touring his collaborator and longtime beau Alan Wyffels with Wallich’s company the YC. Though the movement-based cues are audible, Perfume Genius’ abstract music has more sinister ambiguities than the Seattle choreographer’s bewitching, sex-positive routines. It creeps and writhes with its own logic, suggesting a grimness that the sparkling surfaces of his last couple of records had seemed to leave behind. He nonetheless celebrates community through his musical collaborators, who leave bold thumbprints on the songs: Wyffels, who sits in on a number of instruments; megaproducer Blake Mills; engineer Joseph Lorge; inveterate session drummer Matt Chamberlain; and Sam Gendel, whose doctored saxophone provides Ugly Season with a bevy of uncharted timbres.
The collision between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production makes for a lush and widescreen experience. Mills’ harmonium on “Herem” bubbles with dread from the song’s swirling brew before programmed drums carry the arrangement to a cathartic finish; clarinet swells offer an immense moment of bliss on “Teeth”; Hadreas’ sighing vocals on “Pop Song” turn to playful coos when chimes and percussion bang into the mix. Compared to previous albums, such rousing peaks are less immediate, on tracks that stretch past the seven-minute mark and leave choruses in the dust. Spend time with this music, though, and its glimmers of hooky beauty leave a profound impression, like watching a peacock preen and flash its magnificent plumage for a moment at a time.
At points, Ugly Season reminds me of Prince’s 1986 album Parade, another score that outgrew its source material, balancing forward-thinking highs with a casual, elusive, disjunctive structure. In place of Prince’s buoyant eroticism, Perfume Genius’ stylistic smorgasbord treats sex like a languid affair, one that befits the record’s other preoccupation: sadness. Formally, the album seems to crumble in its middle. “Scherzo,” an unadorned piano composition by Wyffels, serves as a melancholic comedown after the first suite of songs. This strange bit of sequencing sutures the wound in Ugly Season’s middle, as though Hadreas wants you to see the stitches.
Less narrative than ever, his lyrics shine with a symbolic vocabulary rooted in gay culture. He often compares bodies to plants and fruits: “Stretched out like a reed,” he sings on “Herem,” and on “Pop Song,” he commands us to “harvest the pit/And spit out the rest.” He views sex as a magic ritual on a couple of tracks, and on “Teeth” he harkens back to the same 19th-century context in which a homosexual identity began coalescing in the West. “A fading garland,” he describes: “A skull set on a plate.” For the first time, Perfume Genius sings in still-lifes, and formally, the album reflects this same focus—wordless closer “Cenote” echoes the first track’s opening notes on a simpler setup of solo piano, like a gallery displaying the study of a work alongside its finished canvas.
Ugly Season does have a single narrative gem, among the greatest Hadreas has cut. “Hellbent” reprises the character of Jason, the casual lover of a confused narrator, from the eponymous highlight of Perfume Genius’ last album. “They took my phone,” the speaker intones, perhaps because he just escaped from rehab. Alone on the roadside, bleeding from his arm (because of a boozy fall, we imagine), he clings desperately to the heartbreaking belief that he can charm his hookup into offering him help. “First car to stop/Just took one look and drove,” he spits, and tells us several minutes later, “If I make it to Jason’s and put on a show/Maybe he’ll soften and give me a loan.”
Here, Perfume Genius channels the empathy that drew us to his tunes in the first place, chronicling his character’s chaos by balancing a first-person sneer with the lucidity of distance and maturity. Hadreas, who jump-started his music career after he became sober in his late twenties, has already mastered this sort of songwriting. Yet the effect feels newly urgent on the atmospheric Ugly Season, like a buried, hurtful memory that starts pulsing again through the haze of time. Pop music tends to offer the lozenge of amnesia to just about everyone, allowing even homophobes and gay people to blot out their differences, if only for three minutes at a time. Hadreas refuses to manufacture such pills for his fans. His sprawling post-pop draws our attention to the many ways in which changing ourselves can never resolve our memories of the past, posing an implicit question: Can we truly leave behind the people we’ve been, or have we merely learned to keep our eyes fixed on the promise of self-reinvention? | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Matador | June 16, 2022 | 8.6 | 648eaab0-7bd2-4c7a-8e48-a0a39fb8bd7d | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Hercules and Love Affair's mission has remained consistent throughout: to breathe new life into the sounds and structures of early dance music, particularly the interplay between producer and vocalist that underpinned the genre’s formative years. The project's third album transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience. | Hercules and Love Affair's mission has remained consistent throughout: to breathe new life into the sounds and structures of early dance music, particularly the interplay between producer and vocalist that underpinned the genre’s formative years. The project's third album transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience. | Hercules and Love Affair: The Feast of the Broken Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19396-hercules-and-love-affair-the-feast-of-the-broken-heart/ | The Feast of the Broken Heart | Hercules and Love Affair is an amorphous project with a roster that, aside from the group’s mastermind and artistic director Andy Butler, has turned over completely with each of its three albums so far. But its mission has remained consistent throughout: to breathe new life into the sounds and structures of early dance music, particularly the interplay between producer and vocalist that underpinned the genre’s formative years. On the group’s first two records, 2008’s self-titled debut and 2011’s Blue Songs, they accomplished that goal by exploding the tropes of early house music while simultaneously paying fealty to them, resulting in tracks like the quasi-operatic, Antony-led “Blind” that reincarnated the style into ambitiously strange shapes.
For The Feast of the Broken Heart, Butler and his team (which this time around includes Viennese house-and-techno revivalists Haze Factory and industrial music stalwart Mark Pistel) color inside the lines a little more than before. If the first two Hercules records were tributes to the dawning era of dance music thirty or so years ago, Feast is more of a flat-out homage. The sounds, the structures, and the entire approach more closely resembles the source material—the propulsive, hard-edged descendant of disco that pioneers like Larry Levan were spinning in the '70s and '80s. Having spent years deconstructing old house music, Butler's now become a considerably more faithful and accurate emulator.
There are drawbacks to any artistic undertaking with an explicit retro-revivalist agenda, and Feast suffers accordingly—in particular, there's the subtle but ever-present sensation that, for all the excitement that the music generates, it’s still an echo of someone else’s good time that happened decades ago. Butler and company mitigate much of that feeling by giving their influences a sonic touch-up, dirtying and tweaking out the vintage drum machine and synthesizer sounds they’re working with (check the noisy synth that puts an intriguing wrinkle into the smooth lines of “My Offence”), in the process infusing them with a wily energy that more fastidious retro reproductions can’t manage. Hercules and Love Affair give these tracks more room to breathe than the sometimes claustrophobically compact arrangements on older house records.
To some extent, The Feast of the Broken Heart bounces back against those drawbacks because of the nature of the style Hercules and Love Affair working in. Compared to the other major pop genres, dance music has historically been immune to the effects of nostalgia because it’s spent so much of its existence, at least in America, as a subcultural style with an audience that’s been removed from the mainstream (partly because it’s been so relentlessly forward-looking from the genre's beginnings). The recent arrival of younger rave revivalists and old-school house fanatics, however, has caused the genre as a whole to take a good look at its past and try, in earnest, to replicate it.
Like Hercules’s first two records, Feast transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience. Butler is both a gifted producer and a crafty A&R, and throughout the album he fits an unexpected cast of singers to songs based on criteria much more subtle and significant than their vocal range. The stage performer Rouge Mary imparts disco-diva uplift to the self-realization anthem “5:43 to Freedom”, elevating a hokey line like “Be yourself/ Like there ain’t nobody” into something that could genuinely inspire a dancefloor epiphany. On “My Offence”, singer-songwriter Krystle Warren, whose own work normally leans towards rootsy chamber pop, brings a raspy low range and gleaming high range with the same kind of casual fuck-you attitude that's similarly animated other statement-of-identity house tracks offering spiritual solace to several generations of club-going social misfits.
The album’s emotional and musical peak comes with “I Try to Talk to You”, featuring alt-folk singer and former Czars front man John Grant. It’s about Grant’s experience finding out he’s H.I.V. positive, and knowing that about the song can make it a gutting listen, especially on the choruses where he crooningly pleads, “I don’t understand, help me please.” But instead of backing him up with a dirge, Butler and his crew give him a raucous, thumping floor-filler. To some, combining lyrics about a potentially life-threatening illness with the gaudy synthesized orchestral stabs the track’s festooned with might seem crass, but it’s exactly this refusal to bow to tragedy that kept the original house music scene alive through the ravages of the AIDS crisis. With it, Hercules & Love Affair tap into an essential part of house music’s history that’s far more profound than just the music. | 2014-05-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-05-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Atlantic / Big Beat | May 30, 2014 | 7.6 | 6490bc7a-074e-48dd-8567-2f89ec68c513 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
On her debut album, the Toronto-based singer radiates anxiety and yearning about love, offering an unadulterated document of a fluid creative process and truly weird, impulsive thoughts. | On her debut album, the Toronto-based singer radiates anxiety and yearning about love, offering an unadulterated document of a fluid creative process and truly weird, impulsive thoughts. | Saya Gray: 19 Masters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saya-gray-19-masters/ | 19 Masters | Saya Gray writes her songs in what she describes as a flow state: She “blacks out,” moving from concept to finished song within an hour. The process is bodily and intuitive, resulting in music that pops like bubble wrap. Funny quips peek through guitar work that’s alternately finger-plucked and distorted; slippery synths coat dense wordplay (“Told my temper that tampons tamper with temptation” on “Saving Grace”) that provides more texture than literal meaning. The breadth and chaos of these songs can be overwhelming at times, but the ultimate appeal is the authenticity: There’s a real pleasure in getting such an unadulterated document of someone’s creative process and truly weird, impulsive thoughts.
Her debut album, 19 Masters, radiates anxiety and yearning about love, which Gray spends the entire record running from. She’s consumed by a self-destructive impulse to leave someone before they leave her, she conceives of intimacy as a prelude to abandonment, and she loves people who can’t handle the affection she has to offer. Gray’s self-awareness about her negative romantic impulses is devastating on songs like album highlight “EMPATHY 4 BETHANY” where she sings, “Honestly we’ll get too close, I’ll go ghost, you’ll have my clothes in hopes you remember [me],” made especially poignant by an amber-toned trumpet and piano solo that meanders behind her. You feel the intensity of the love Gray experiences, and the wistfulness that she feels in knowing she will lose it.
Often, the tension in Gray’s relationships and in her own self-appraisal comes from her perception that other people are conforming too much to unnamed societal pressures. On “LEECHES ON MY THESIS!” she’s upset that someone she loved used her to network; on “TOOO LOUD!” someone lets her down because they’re “part of the machine.” “Saya you don’t need to conform, place your knees on the ceiling and the ceiling will turn into the floor,” she reminds herself on the latter. And on “S.H.T.” she criticizes someone for hating “the imitation game” yet “echoing everything the players say.” It’s fitting that an artist who makes such esoteric music is so concerned with preserving her individuality, but the anti-conformity is more a broad sentiment than a fully fleshed idea.
In general, Gray’s technical skill sometimes supersedes her intention. As a musician who has been playing music professionally since she was 13, she’s able to quickly construct complex sounds and intricate wordplay, but it’s not always clear how they coalesce. Listening to this album, I’m reminded of reading Eye Spy books as a kid, partly because of the childlike exploration of these arrangements, and also because I find myself excavating through a mass of gorgeous baubles searching for something specific: a single thread of meaning, a moment of clarity. “SAVING GRACE,” for example, is a lovely collage of eerie synth sounds, Gray’s gauzy falsetto, and heady lyricism: “We looked up at the night, held the sky with our minds.” It’s vivid and captivating, but almost impossible to follow what’s happening in the song, even after many listens.
That approach to songwriting is intentional. Gray said she prefers to use her music to communicate “a straight passage in frequency rather than trying to decipher in words then trying to convey THAT to another human.” She uses her words to convey sounds and impulses rather than narrative arcs. Without many articulated messages or overarching sentiments, the meaning comes in flashes. It can be a disorienting listening experience, one that asks you to find pleasure in cacophony and still-developing ideas.
There’s also so much secondhand joy that comes from the conviction with which she presents her inner world. She treats all of her ideas, whether they are passing thoughts, poetic observations, or crushing feelings, with the utmost respect and care. And in the moments when all the moving pieces of a song come together just right, the results are devastating and illuminating. On “CERVICAL CEDRIC,” Gray sings with resolution, her voice emerging from a whirlwind of bubbling synth and grating guitar. She elevates a straightforward sentiment—“You said you could handle my love”—into a whirlwind of rage and disappointment. There are moments when the emotions feel familiar, but mostly Gray’s thoughts belong to her alone. So you leave this album determined to trust your impulse, and find beauty in your messiest moments. | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | June 15, 2022 | 7.4 | 64934eb4-35e8-41b4-bf8c-5d4518bb9d62 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
The former members of Krill return with a slower pace and a heavy political conscience. The effect is one of careful deliberation in place of what once seemed to come so naturally. | The former members of Krill return with a slower pace and a heavy political conscience. The effect is one of careful deliberation in place of what once seemed to come so naturally. | Knot: Knot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knot-knot/ | Knot | Of the many Brooklyn DIY bands to fizzle out in the last decade, Krill left perhaps the biggest void. The Boston transplants brought a sprawling, wide-eyed mythology to their brand of grungy lo-fi power-pop, writing songs about tigers, twigs, and phantoms that were covert studies in phenomenological perception. Early recordings like “Self-Hate Will Be the Death of Youth Culture” almost anticipated their eventual breakup, with frontman Jonah Furman singing about his commitment to brevity and lightness in the face of punk-rock fatalism. Krill called it quits in 2015, with drummer Ian Becker pursuing a graduate degree in urban planning, guitarist Aaron Ratoff finding work with legal aid and tenants’ rights organizations, and Furman moving to Washington, D.C. as a labor organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign. “When I was 20, I thought that making art was an important part of making a better world,” Furman recently told Fader. “[Now] I think there's more important things to be doing. Also, you get it out of your system.”
Yet the band made the complicated decision to reunite under the name Knot, easing back into indie rock with a relatively unassuming collection of new tracks. Ostensibly picking up where Krill left off, Knot’s self-titled release marks a conscious departure from the racing, anthemic arrangements that defined their earlier material; here, they slow things down, emphasizing their weight. Where the tight guitar and basslines on Krill albums like Lucky Leaves and A Distant Fist Unclenching held close to a central lightness, Knot is defined by incongruence, with a rigid austerity that wouldn’t feel out of place on an early post-punk record. While some of this could be attributed to their changing lineup—Furman swaps his bass for rhythm guitar, Ratoff fills in on both guitar and bass, and newcomer Joe DeManuelle-Hall joins as second guitarist—the general effect is one of careful deliberation in place of what once seemed to come so naturally.
Much of what made Krill great was bound up in their lyrics, and the new album returns to a similar headspace, looking to the natural world to explain their own psyches. “Foam” confronts the feeling of impending doom that can accompany even the smallest glimpse of sky or ocean at a time when rising temperatures threaten to destroy the planet, as Furman’s narrator struggles to speak to the people around him. Butting heads with his dad over their conflicting worldviews, he disputes the claim that people are inherently “evil motherfuckers,” only to end up doubting himself. “I believe in people’s power, but not at this late hour personally,” Furman sings with a bitterness unheard of in his former band.
Furman has long been invested in questions of individual morality, and his latest songs train a clear-eyed gaze on the dark hearts of oppressors everywhere. Songs like “Justice” and “I Live in Fear” address the necessity of locating power within individual actors and institutions, even as it operates at a larger scale. “And if we take our boot off their neck, how much justice will they want?” he sings on the latter track, voicing the class anxieties of a gun-toting vigilante in a moment of crisis. Other songs, though, recognize that power lies with everyone, expressed through even the smallest gestures of solidarity.
It’s easy to dismiss music with political aspirations as didactic, but Knot sidestep this characterization by focusing on the transformative potential of interpersonal struggle. Rather than rehash historical events or whine myopically about Trump, Furman remains committed to exploring the implicitly political aspects of everyday life, like taking care of a pet, or peeling an orange for your partner in the morning. This kind of political gesture is preceded by an orientation to the world that leaves space for compassion, and it’s here that the band returns with newfound depth. In a time of rapid change, sometimes the best you can do is keep moving.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | August 31, 2020 | 6.9 | 6498d1b8-5d95-4248-97cc-20942962fed7 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
On her fourth album, the pop superstar finds a more unifying sound but struggles to come up with lyrics that aren't plain cringe-worthy. | On her fourth album, the pop superstar finds a more unifying sound but struggles to come up with lyrics that aren't plain cringe-worthy. | Katy Perry: Witness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katy-perry-witness/ | Witness | Six years ago, when Teenage Dream tied the chart record set by Michael Jackson’s Bad with five No. 1 hits off one album, Katy Perry became the modern paragon of the singles artist. Armed with Max Martin and Dr. Luke’s calculated approach to ear-wormery, Perry dominated pop radio more than anyone else for the first few years of the decade. Since then, the format wars have shifted towards streaming, and with it, more pop superstars have tried to make the shift to album artist. Prism, Perry’s 2013 album, was a small step in this direction, but it suffered from classic Pop Album Syndrome: trend-hopping around genres and tempos with nary a thought of cohesion. But as cloying as the piano line in “Roar” has become, the big singles saved Prism from flop status. Besides, as Luke himself once said of Perry’s first two albums, “If you can make huge first and second records, if you have a third record that sucks, you can still do a fourth record, no problem.”
So what happens when your fourth record kinda sucks, too?
Katy Perry now finds herself in this position, and the reason is twofold. Her attention to detail pales next to that of album-minded peers like Beyoncé, Drake, and Lorde, and her poorly chosen singles often rely on eye-rolling gimmicks, even for someone who used a large poop emoji as a live prop. Not thoughtful enough to be album pop, not catchy enough to be singles pop: there is no real way to root for Witness—tone-deaf PR campaign included. (Seriously: I got a press release about watching Perry’s “shockingly honest” therapy session, the canned nature of which made her 2012 doc Part of Me resemble Don’t Look Back.)
To her credit, Perry’s sound is more consistent and tasteful here than it has ever been, as she explores the midtempo via atmospheric electronics and bleeding-heart pianos. For as omnipresent as executive producer Max Martin is, the hooks just don’t sink in the way they used to. Or perhaps it's that as soon as you get into a groove, Perry goes and says something truly cringe-worthy to pull you right out. It’s bad enough to put up with her constant hokeyness, her clichés and mangled metaphors, but when she takes an audible breath and tearily declares her decision to… save the email as a draft on the Lorde-jacking power-ballad “Save As Draft,” you will question her ability to separate modern mundanity from actual depth. The world does not need a hoary sequel to “Email My Heart” lest Perry double down and joke about how she’s “setting an out-of-office reply” for love, but instead she shrugs one of the record’s worst, most inscrutable lines: “I don’t fuck with change, but lately I’ve been flipping coins a lot.”
The bar is low when it comes to pop lyrics (Perry, specifically), but with Witness’ premise lying in “real” talk, the talking part seems pretty important. Instead, the album’s turns of phrase make Carly Rae Jepsen look like Yeats, with Perry and co. fumbling even the most obvious opportunities for verbal flourish. Teaming up with Nicki Minaj for a diss track aimed at mutual foe and burgeoning pop pariah Taylor Swift, Perry had built-in narratives on her side—all she had to do was bring the barbs. Instead, she softballs, over Eurodance beats that sounded fresher three years ago, “You're ’bout as cute as an old coupon expired,” like the “Drag Race” queen who talks a big game then bombs the reading challenge. If you’re going to do something as tired as fueling this beef, at least give us the satisfaction of making it deliciously shady.
Occasionally, Perry doesn’t put her foot in her mouth. Witness’ best track (and one of three she co-wrote with Purity Ring’s Megan James and Corin Roddick) “Miss You More,” where her piano balladry perfectly meets the record’s electronic production, swirls and snaps its way to a sweeping crescendo with a few glints of lyrical hope. “I miss you more than I loved you,” goes the chorus, playing with the passage of time like that great “Call Me Maybe” line (“Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad”). “We were a match, but not a fit,” she laments later, with a hint of the depth she so badly wants to project. It is the one time on Witness where Perry is actually subtle. The other time she comes close, on the Hot Chip co-write “Into Me You See,” gets muddled in the wordplay: bad nautical metaphors mixed with earnest usage of the phrase “open sesame,” and a chorus whose elision of “into me you see” into “intimacy” comes out awkwardly enough to warrant a double take. The funny thing about these lyrical clunkers: Her vocal performance on the piano ballad is perhaps one of her loveliest on record to date—understated but stronger than her voice used to sound.
Perry needs strength for what she’s trying to do, too. Her stated goal of making woke pop is, depending on how cynical you are, either admirable or shameless (or both), but either way, it’s not terribly effective. One-third of the 15 tracks have vaguely empowered themes, the best of which—“Power”—approximates feminism by politicizing a personal struggle for control. With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days. We all know it’s near-impossible for pop this focus-tested to drop truth bombs about America’s fractured state, but Perry’s efforts to finally transcend Top 40 confectionary with a cohesive album leaves her in a tough spot. She aimed for pop-game Chipotle, complete with enlightened prose on the cups. She landed at sad fast-food-chain salad. Nevertheless, she persisted: Bon appétit, baby. | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | June 14, 2017 | 4.8 | 649a1cb2-6c5b-40ec-ae14-f2efe5816ed5 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
The Iowa City doom trio’s latest streamlines their approach. It lacks the subtleties that distinguished their previous work. | The Iowa City doom trio’s latest streamlines their approach. It lacks the subtleties that distinguished their previous work. | Aseethe: Hopes of Failure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22938-hopes-of-failure/ | Hopes of Failure | Though Aseethe identify as a doom act, the prominent noise samples on 2011 debut Reverent Burden showed that the Iowa City trio was trying to do more than just sludgeon its audience into submission. Aseethe have since recorded an improv album, a suite of re-worked riffs by avant-doom duo Barn Owl, an EP featuring synth accompaniment, and a rendition of Black Sabbath’s “Rat Salad” stretched and slowed beyond recognition. Across that entire body of work, Aseethe maintained an atmosphere and textures verging on ambient drone.
On Hopes of Failure, Aseethe shed their sound’s flaky outer layers in favor of ultra-dense riffs that creep by like boiling molasses. True, they built Reverent Burden on similarly solid riffing, but this time they offer less in the way of sonic detail. The new album—four tunes ranging from eight-and-a-half to 14 minutes—drones on without the subtleties that distinguished Aseethe in the first place. And because it lacks the space and sweep of their previous work, Hopes of Failure marginalizes the industrial-metal gloom furnished by drummer Eric Diercks’ samples.
The new material doesn’t reward the patience of letting the songs unfold nearly as effectively as this band always has. Diehard doom aficionados will likely appreciate Hopes of Failure as a purposeful trimming of extraneous fat. But it’s puzzling that Aseethe would choose to recast themselves as something of a conventional doom band at this stage, after repeatedly demonstrating that there’s more to what they do.
It would be one thing if the fidelity of the recording could approximate the sensation of standing in front of amplifier cabinets, having your chest rattled by the sheer density of sound. But that’s not the case. It’s not that the recording is necessarily flat, but Hopes of Failure doesn’t say anything we haven’t already heard after decades’ worth of tone-obsessed artists getting better and better at capturing on mic the way speaker cones move air through a room. Compared to 2014’s Burdens II, it’s almost shocking how little Hopes of Failure conveys a sense of the band in a physical setting.
At times, the album does hint at the wrinkles Aseethe have added to doom. “Barren Soil,” for example, begins with a Danny Barr bassline so deep it seems to dip toward subsonic frequencies. That said, every note is audible and you can actually hum along to the melody—no small feat when you’re dealing with timbres that tend to smother pitch. And in a dramatic departure for the band, Barr also sings a clean verse on closing track “Into the Sun.” After Barr and his brother, guitarist and founder Brian Barr, have spent a half hour barking, the shift to relatively melodic vocals enhances the album’s acerbic mood.
But the band opts not to emphasize these features. Stripped of its usual dimension, Aseethe’s music consigns the Barr brothers’ lyrics to the realm of unremarkable negativity. Clearly, Aseethe have made a concerted effort to streamline their approach, but Hopes of Failure only underscores how much better off they are when they stick to their guns. As such, it functions best as a gateway to a more colorful back catalog. | 2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | March 3, 2017 | 6 | 649d224f-22a3-4d9e-a523-dad888eb091c | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On an ambitious new album, the Pennsylvania death metal band moves in nimble, surprising directions while honing its psychedelically brutal sound. | On an ambitious new album, the Pennsylvania death metal band moves in nimble, surprising directions while honing its psychedelically brutal sound. | Outer Heaven: Infinite Psychic Depths | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/outer-heaven-infinite-psychic-depths/ | Infinite Psychic Depths | Death metal is music of eternal descent. The guitars are the muck into which the drums pound, while the vocalist growls amidst it all like a drowning beast. It’s a fitting style to be pioneered in Florida, a state that has a head start on other coastal areas in the U.S. in sinking into the ocean. A lot of classic death metal glories in that queasy sinking feeling, but the Pennsylvania band Outer Heaven take their cues from groups like Gorguts and Demilich who have fun imagining what the music would sound like if it were trying to get out.
On their excellent second album, Infinite Psychic Depths, the riffs and guitar tones are as soupy and viscous as ever. But the quintet pushes against that downward force with an arsenal of arrangement choices—chord changes, tempo switches, technical guitar leads, high-up-on-the-neck melodic bass lines. Alongside reigning death metal champs like Blood Incantation and Tomb Mold (whose guitarist Derrick Vella makes an appearance here), Outer Heaven are experimenting with the subgenre in ways that never takes the music away from its core action verbs: Gurgle. Pound. Churn. “We just like to play heavy music with a little bit of technicality” is how Haines put it in an interview, taking great and amusing pains to avoid invoking the subgenre tag “technical death metal.” It is music of brutal determination and iron will, the sound of the beast struggling to escape the swamp.
Frontman Austin Haines, working with guitarists Jon Kunz and Zak Carter, fashions a sound thick enough to pull under a bison, but the band still manages to move in nimble, surprising directions. On “Starcrusher,” sonorous bits of doom metal riffing and frenetic little melodeath guitar lines surface like swamp bubbles. Halfway through “Unspeakable Aura,” female vocalists break through the din, singing in eerie pentatonic harmony and sending shafts of light into the murk. And a minute into album highlight “Rotting Stone/D.M.T.,” sublimely cheesy harmonized twin guitars soar like F-150s over a county fair.
Infinite Psychic Descent comes positioned as a “prequel” to the band’s also-great 2018 debut, Realms of Eternal Decay. That album, Haines explained, told the story of a virus that led to an outbreak of cannibalism: To further elaborate, he shared what he called his “Stoned Ape Theory,” which speculates on the role that hallucinogens and other mind-altering substances may have played in the evolution of human speech and creativity. This album, Haines said, fills in the backstory to that first album, an idea so invested that the last track of this album, “From Nothingness to Eternity,” fades into the first track of the debut, and when you lay out the gatefolds of the two records together, they make one splash-page-styled piece of art. It’s just about the perfect concept-album fodder: cool to think about, theoretically plausible, entirely superfluous.
How would you know about any of this, outside of reading Haines’ press statement about it? That’s simple: You wouldn’t. Death metal needs about as much backstory as a burp. But even without a single intelligible lyric between them, I can report from field studies that the albums, sequenced together as Haines suggests, melt together nicely in one long, organic, wet roar. You can nearly smell the music’s textures: wet leaves, damp moss, fresh manure. By the time the opening track of Realm of Eternal Decay rolls around, you’ve briefly forgotten other styles of music exist. | 2023-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 26, 2023 | 7.7 | 64a78acd-4997-4fd4-a34e-f6d9a7e4b97c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Chance’s sprawling, 77-minute “debut” is an exuberant and often wonderful celebration of love and family that struggles to bring depth to his newlywed dad-raps. | Chance’s sprawling, 77-minute “debut” is an exuberant and often wonderful celebration of love and family that struggles to bring depth to his newlywed dad-raps. | Chance the Rapper: The Big Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chance-the-rapper-the-big-day/ | The Big Day | In the fall of 2015, about a year before Chance the Rapper became the biggest independent rapper on Earth, he released a song with his band, the Social Experiment, about transitioning into a family man. The song, a rendition of Kanye West’s “Family Business” called “Family Matters,” named after the sitcom about a black middle-class Chicago household, warned that things were changing. “In this part of my life, I’m growing up and I wanna do this the right way … grow out of it, in the best way possible,” he said, as cautiously optimistic as ever. His daughter was born the month before. With fatherhood ahead of him, he plotted a new course and in the years since, he has pivoted from a carefree yet careful boy to a God-fearing man of the house.
Chance’s new album, The Big Day, pegged as his “debut” after three studio mixtapes, is a preordained coming-of-age spectacle. It’s full-fledged, 401k rap, a snapshot of the moment where the future starts approaching so fast it begins to look like now. “They don’t take teenage angst at no banks,” he raps on “We Go High,” invoking Michelle Obama’s famous line about what to do when “they” go low. It’s a flavor of righteousness that pervades the entire 77-minute album.
Though less thematic than his previous albums, the day in question revolves primarily around his wedding to longtime sweetheart Kirsten Corley. “The whole album has been inspired by the day I got married and how I was dancing that day,” he told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “Everything in it is all the different styles of music that make me want to dance and remind me of that day.” In an attempt to take the rap auteur baton from his mentor Kanye, Chance has curated these festivities to be eclectic yet holistic, emblematic of the guy who remixed the theme song to TV’s beloved “Arthur” and sampled the indie darlings Beirut. There’s an expansive list of guests: En Vogue and SWV, CocoRosie and Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, John Legend and gospel singer Kiki Sheard, Randy Newman and Shawn Mendes. For the most part, he wrangles them into a collective indicative of the Chance experience (the rapper co-produced every song on this project). There’s nothing that suggests he’s breaking character.
It’s just that this 22-track sprawl amounts to everything and nothing at the same time. God, marriage, fatherhood, children, adulthood, the future: all heavy things that feel weightless and inflatable in Chance’s hands. In trying to honor all the love and music that moves him, Chance becomes an ill-advised master of ceremonies for an uneven reception. The songs are infectious and exuberant until they become stilted and underwritten. After reclaiming the maligned subgenre of gospel rap on Coloring Book, Chance is trying to one-up himself by bringing perky, newlywed dad-rap back to the zeitgeist. Somewhere on that dancefloor, or perhaps before, he lost his edge.
On the surface, Chance hasn’t really strayed too far from his high-spirited wheelhouse, which presents opportunities for him to find his signature stuff. As the Pi’erre Bourne beat wails and shatters on “Slide Around,” he bounces singsongy nursery rhyme melodies off a more than game Lil Durk and Nicki Minaj, who match his breezy flows and Grammy-speak. There are enough glimpses of genius, like the thoughtful living trust he bestows during “Sun Come Down,” to serve as reminders of why Chance has earned all this fanfare, but not enough to sustain an otherwise middling effort.
His failures here are, if nothing else, in good faith. Bringing his family together in holy matrimony under the banner of God is clearly very important to him. It’s also a means to get his life on the right track. “My daughter mother double-ringed up/Finger look like jean cuffs, or two lean cups/Used to have an obsession with the 27 club/Now I’m turning 27, wanna make it to the 2070 club,” he raps on the Ben Gibbard-assisted “Do You Remember.” But songs like “I Got You (Forever and Always)” and “Found a Good One (Single No More)” never reach any level of introspection beyond the enthusiasm of their titles. Through all the celebration, there isn’t much consideration for what being a husband and dad actually means.
It takes a lot to make the sheer honeymoon joy of a new marriage sound labored or awkward, but Chance is nearly bursting a vein rapping and singing and squawking about how great things are. His wife and child are his muses but they almost never manifest as humans beyond his awestruck fascination with them. The true history of wives is one in service to the legacy of patriarchs. In Chance’s songs, this marriage exists solely as a symbolic vehicle for his maturation. There are moments where he seems to understand this (“For every small increment liberated, our women waited/And all they privacy been invaded,” he raps on “Zanies and Fools”), but he never interrogates it.
One of Chance’s great powers has been balancing a childlike wonder with a world-weary pragmatism. His endearing corniness was a coping mechanism for seeing and knowing too much too soon. Now, as he continues to check off boxes—rich, famous, philanthropic, award-winning, married with kids—it’s as if he’s conquered the game and all that’s left is searing self-congratulation. The charms of his cartoonish performances don’t translate well when he raps about the mundanity of adulthood or his Christian homilies.
Coloring Book made piety seem as sublime as an acid trip with heady, expanding verses. Chance was guided by his faith but never blinded by its light; his rapping not just precise but breathtakingly eloquent. It was personalized but still far-reaching, steadfast but non-denominational. Kanye’s self-proclaimed best prodigy, “pre-currency, post-language, anti-label, yet pro-famous,” had brought the secular world of rap an invocation even more profound than “Jesus Walks.”
In contrast, The Big Day, which is often just as prayerful, feels closed-off. These raps aren’t just duller and more rigid in motion, they’re dogmatic. He loves his girl, he loves his God, he loves his kid, and anyone who doesn’t share that love is a dissenter. He is so tenacious in his worship that it can feel contrived. “They prop up statues and stones, try to make a new God/I don’t need a EGOT, as long as I got you, God,” he raps, demonizing the same awards he champions elsewhere on the album as marks of progress.
The album can become a slog, almost oppressively upbeat, but The Big Day isn’t without wonders. Chance is still one of the most talented rappers working, and there are signs of that latent brilliance across about a dozen songs. There are instances where his assorted taste shines, flipping Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down” into a hip-house jam with Shawn Mendes or getting CalBoy to rap over a chipmunk’d James Taylor sample for “Get a Bag.” The fierce Nicki Minaj verse on “Zanies and Fools” that closes the album is her best in recent memory, and the most memorable among a slew of rap guest spots (DaBaby, Megan Thee Stallion, Gucci Mane, even his kid brother Taylor) that make the quirkier ones all but forgettable. Still, The Big Day rises and falls on Chance's vows. Even on the dancefloor, his hopefulness can feel like a beacon. | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 30, 2019 | 6.9 | 64b87cdf-7dc6-4f78-93fe-b058d144cc1e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Baltimore-based noise-punk quartet uses pedals, loops, and off-kilter rhythms to pummel its teenage heroes into blurry abstraction on its debut album. | The Baltimore-based noise-punk quartet uses pedals, loops, and off-kilter rhythms to pummel its teenage heroes into blurry abstraction on its debut album. | Dope Body: Nupping | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15637-nupping/ | Nupping | Dope Body are one of the only underground bands in existence brave enough to claim Rage Against the Machine as a formative influence. The Baltimore-based noise-punk quartet embraces the signature sounds of the alternative nation, but uses pedals, loops, and off-kilter rhythms to pummel its teenage heroes into blurry abstraction. Borrowing from punk-funk and nu-metal as much as spazz-core and pigfuck, the group plays Dr. Moreau with a decade's worth of MTV buzz clips. It's telling that Dope Body's debut album, Nupping, has a song called "The Shape of Grunge to Come."
Bro-rock and Boredoms mash up better than you might think. Live, Dope Body are a mosh-worthy mess of sweat and blast beats. Frontman Andrew Laumann alternates between punker grunts and animalistic yelps, his shirt rarely staying on his chest for an entire performance, while guitarist Zach Utz makes hairpin turns between stoner chugging and modem noise. Nupping does an admirable job of capturing the band's spastic onstage energy.
Album opener "Enemy Outta Me" wiggles to life with the band playing around an off-time loop, but it quickly makes a left turn into scorching riff-rock. Utz pulls double duty, answering each of his chugging stoner riffs with a bevy of electronic gurgles. When it's time for the big guitar solo, he instead opts for some balloon-on-hair squelches. "Bangers & Yos" pogos around on a rubber-band riff that's just far enough removed from "Bulls on Parade" that Rage's lawyers won't have grounds to sue.
Like Philly sludge-punkers Pissed Jeans, Dope Body have a special gift for draining the air from muscle-head music. Pissed Jeans do this mainly through lyrics, imbuing early 80s hardcore with a narrative of manly anguish. Dope Body pull at the sounds of dude-rock like taffy-- tugging guitars out of key, building up big walls of heavy rhythm only to belch in the face of fist-pumping catharsis. Utz's expansive pedal board and glitchy deconstruction of Tom Morello riffs may hint at arty pretensions, but Dope Body still smell punk. | 2011-07-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | HOSS | July 14, 2011 | 7.8 | 64ba4a81-1568-4f29-b6e6-44d8aa355b53 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The A-list dance-pop duo returns to the club on a new record that’s fresher and more fun than the brothers have sounded in ages. | The A-list dance-pop duo returns to the club on a new record that’s fresher and more fun than the brothers have sounded in ages. | Disclosure: Alchemy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/disclosure-alchemy/ | Alchemy | “The mix should represent where we’re at now,” Disclosure said of their DJ-Kicks mix in 2021. “And where we’re at now is clubby.” Two years since Guy and Howard Lawrence turned in that seamlessly blended selection of opalescent deep house and fleet-footed garage—a set notably free of the kinds of big, belting, attention-grabbing vocals that they built their reputation on—their attitude doesn’t appear to have changed. The brothers have spent the past 13 years zigzagging between insidery dance music and big-tent pop, with mixed results. Alchemy, their first release since the conclusion of their major-label contract, is clearly meant as a reboot, repositioning them as dance artists who happen to make hits, rather than chart aspirants dabbling in club tropes.
Though there are vocals here, the grooves come first: fast-paced, winkingly contemporary takes on house and garage where the kick drums flutter and the filters fizz. They’ve made the shift in focus an explicit selling point: Alchemy is billed as their first album with no features and no samples. That’s a pronouncement presumably meant to get the attention of dance scenesters who may have lost interest in Disclosure around the time they started working with people like Lorde and the Weeknd. It’s a gambit with some intrigue (even if, for many acts, announcing a dance album with no features would be like unveiling a fish with no bicycle). But, beyond the jockeying for scene cred, the main takeaway is that Alchemy is fresher and more fun than Disclosure have sounded in ages.
On 2020’s Ecstasy EP and again on 2021’s Never Enough, Disclosure briefly canted away from the vocal-heavy pop that had become their bread and butter, but Alchemy marks the first time in a long time that they’ve dedicated themselves so thoroughly to pure dance music. Where those EPs jumped between Afropop edits, disco samples, and garage throwbacks, the new LP is held together by a sleekly unified palette. Reflecting the speedy tempos currently in vogue across dance-music subcultures, the grooves trundle away at a rollicking clip; save for two brief, beatless interludes, nothing dips below 135 BPM, and a couple are much faster. The drum programming emphasizes a sense of forward motion driven by skipping syncopations and a slippery sense of swing. The opening “Looking for Love” draws on the rushing cadence of vintage speed garage. “Simply Won’t Do,” which plays a killer bassline off silky vocal chops, sounds like an updated Basement Jaxx with a little bit of French touch thrown in and the pitch fader glued to +8. “Higher Than Ever Before” is like a counterfactual thought experiment: What might a golden-age jungle remix of Tame Impala sound like? And “A Little Bit,” which closes out a strong four-track opening stretch, is an irresistibly syrupy, sentimental trance-house banger that sinks its hooks deeper with every twist of the chord progression.
Disclosure have always had a strong ear for nuance, and it’s the details that really make Alchemy sing. Rather than hitting you over the head with a drop, they might mute the kick drum right when you expect it to hit, making its sudden reappearance that much more delightful. They favor vibrant organ-like patches which, when combined with their richly augmented chords, lend an unusually enveloping cast to the synths. And they flesh out Auto-Tune with thick, vocoder-like processing, pouring harmonies on top of harmonies until they feel like cascading rainbows.
There are occasional missteps. “Go the Distance,” the only song that pushes the vocals to the front of the mix, reverts to a forgettably bluesy hook that tries too hard to be cool and sexy, particularly given lyrics that read more like motivational hashtags: “Fuck resistance/We’ll go the distance,” “When there’s nowhere left to hide/How do you want to die,” etc. (Then again, this is a group that kicked off its debut album with a song built around a big, honking sample of a self-help guru.) They do better when they strip their lyrics back to a single refrain—like the endearingly dopey hook of “Higher Than Ever Before”—or sink them like marshmallows into the Jell-O of their digital processing.
Those moments of gelatinous concord—where synths, drums, and vocals come together in a supersaturated blend—exemplify Alchemy at its best. One song, the reverberant 45-second a cappella “Someday…,” sounds like they’ve been listening to Duval Timothy’s intricate harmonic pivots. And on “Sun Showers,” they channel decades of dance tropes—flickering trance gates, wiggly bassline, finely diced coos and sighs—into one of the most effortlessly propulsive floor-fillers of their career. In moments like these, Alchemy taps into a sense of lightness buoying one particularly inventive strain of dance anthem right now—a bubbly, spirited style plied by artists like Two Shell, Overmono, and Pangaea. It sounds good on Disclosure. For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table. | 2023-07-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Apollo | July 18, 2023 | 7.4 | 64bac0b7-e815-4c99-8925-a4e7ecad6024 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
A sprawling new album from the Buffalo rapper subtly expands his raw and luxurious sound. | A sprawling new album from the Buffalo rapper subtly expands his raw and luxurious sound. | Westside Gunn: And Then You Pray for Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-and-then-you-pray-for-me/ | And Then You Pray for Me | Westside Gunn has spent his career treating rap music like a high-end commodity through keen juxtaposition: Vivid bars about cooking and selling drugs live side by side with scenic tours of his closet and passport, his sharp voice piercing through mesmerizing beats. If he thinks something is fly, then that’s as powerful as anything the greatest fashion houses could produce, a testament to determination, consistency, and will. On his new and purportedly final album, And Then You Pray for Me, Gunn sticks to his ethos but widens his palette, turning to classic trap music for inspiration.
Westside Gunn and his Griselda Records have staked their claim through boom-bap-style production that echoes the ’90s New York sound of RZA and DJ Premier. Through go-to producers Daringer and Conductor Williams, the Buffalo crew landed on a sound that’s murkier, more desolate, and more melodic than typical golden age fare. Some of the best songs on And Then You Pray for Me stick to the formula and showcase Gunn’s captivating vocals and talent for beat selection and guest recruitment. On the smooth “Mamas PrimeTime,” Atlanta’s JID delivers a show-stealing verse with a slick verbosity that’s not often heard on Griselda tracks. The song represents what Gunn does best, concocting a grimy flyness and sounding raw and luxurious all at once.
When Gunn switches to trap production, it’s like a dominant fastball pitcher turning to his off-speed stuff; it might still get the job done, but the intent is perplexing. Two of the trap beats on And Then You Pray for Me are produced by Memphis mainstay Tay Keith, but the majority are produced by the otherwise unknown Miguel the Plug. The Tay Keith songs—“Kostas” and “Steve and Jony”—are invigorating, enveloping, and somewhat alien, all hallmarks of a genre known for world-beating bombast. Miguel the Plug’s beats, on the other hand, have a lot and very little going on simultaneously. The skittering hi-hats, staid bassline, and rudimentary piano melody of “DunnHill,” for example, don’t do much to elevate the instrumental beyond something you might find on YouTube for free. Gunn has a proclivity for muted production, and it sounds as if he is trying to strip the aesthetic to its core, but the results are not as gritty or compelling as usual.
While not as natural a setting, the trap turn allows Gunn to showcase mixtape legends like Jeezy, Rick Ross, DJ Drama, DJ Trap-A-Holics, and DJ Swamp Izzo, all of whom feature on the album and bring their own strains of rap history. Past projects featured Slick Rick, Jadakiss, Fat Joe, Raekwon, and Busta Rhymes, presenting an important but limited view of hip-hop’s heroes. By featuring musicians outside of New York and its traditions, Gunn expands his views of what and who constitute the regal end of rap.
Westside Gunn balances his trap ambitions with the straightforward Griselda cuts, dotting the album with more raucous songs to suggest a symbiosis between the trap and boom-bap genres. The album has a careening momentum, with more familiar tracks like “Jalen Rose,” “The Revenge of Flips Legs,” and “Suicide in Selfridges” scattered to remind us of his strengths. Westside Gunn has said that And Then You Pray for Me is a sequel to Pray for Paris, his pivotal 2020 album that stood apart with a finely concentrated smoothness and confidence. For a rapper who has always followed his own logic, this exploratory collection makes sense as the de facto follow-up. And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art. | 2023-10-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | October 18, 2023 | 6.9 | 64bb8522-13f1-4a52-a0c3-4400ab5a5698 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Defined by small acts of joyful resistance, the Edinburgh group’s fourth album is a celebration of music as shared and spontaneous practice. | Defined by small acts of joyful resistance, the Edinburgh group’s fourth album is a celebration of music as shared and spontaneous practice. | Young Fathers: Heavy Heavy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-fathers-heavy-heavy/ | Heavy Heavy | For the past 10 months, the cavernous Duveen Galleries of London’s Tate Britain—the art gallery named for the sugar magnate who funded it—have featured a Technicolor parade of figures of all shapes and sizes, draped in maps, money, patchwork flags, hoodies, and ornamental masks. Some ride horses, some drag captives. It’s a cacophonous thing, detailed to the point of near infinity, awash with messages but ultimately defined by sheer feeling. It’s beautiful, unsettling, messy, at once engaging and combative: a mix of matte and shiny, rich and rough materials, cardboard, cloth, and wire. It reads like a poem. The work, titled The Procession, is by Edinburgh-born, Guyana-raised, England-returned artist Hew Locke. When Young Fathers producer Graham “G” Hastings visited the exhibition in person, three years deep into the making of his band’s fourth album, he was struck by the way the work seemed to offer “a full stop” to his own group’s effort: a summation of the ideas that he and his Edinburgh bandmates Alloysious Massaquoi and Kayus Bankole had been working on. Their album, Heavy Heavy, shares some of The Procession’s immersive qualities; it invites the listener to join in, to stand up and sing. It might also be the band’s best yet.
Young Fathers have often gestured at meaning but ended up with obfuscation—whether by the nature of their impenetrable yet poetic lyrics or the grab bag of genres and musical conventions they like to rifle through. If 2018’s Cocoa Sugar offered a stiff corrective, zeroing in on tighter, more conventional pop forms, then Heavy Heavy is the lingering afterburn. They carry forward Cocoa Sugar’s lessons (songs should be three minutes long and laden with irresistible hooks) but cast off the stiffness. Here, unburdened, vibes are the only guide. And from the opening woody drag of the bassline on “Rice” to the chug and claps of “Holy Moly,” Heavy Heavy bursts with overwhelming momentum, as if to say, “Keep up, if you can.”
In the midst of sessions for the album, Hastings picked up a National Geographic Through the Lens photobook from a nearby charity shop. He chopped it up and then pinned the cuttings around the group’s Edinburgh studio, conjuring an imaginary audience for the group to sing to and engage in a communal act of music-making. Bankole’s trips to Ghana and Ethiopia during the band’s time off between albums also helped to inform their approach. There, he witnessed singing as a shared, everyday, and often spontaneous practice. Singing can be freeing, and a sense of soulful liberation leads the action throughout Heavy Heavy: in the not-quite-harmonies and ad-libbed improvisations of the ascendant “Geronimo,” the woven call-and-response of “Drum,” the gentle swells of “Ululation.” Early highlight “Tell Somebody” manages to be both dense and delicate at the same time, like cotton candy, or the most inviting cloud.
On these rails, simple meditations like “I need to eat more rice” and “Put it all on the line” become transformative, gospel-like in their affirmation. The album is defined by these small acts of joyful resistance, rather than, as previously, simple rage against the dying of the UK’s ever-dimming light. It’s not a surprise to learn that the trio plumbed the raw, kitchen-sink folk traditions of Roberto De Simone and records by the electric-guitar-and-kick-drum-wielding Rev. Louis Overstreet, whose own bluesy rock’n’roll take on gospel has refused simple definition. Rather than seeking their niche among contemporaries, or finding a reason to be heard, Young Fathers have simply hit the record button and existed (in tight, three-minute bursts). Some old habits are hard to kill: Lyrics often add more texture than meaning, and the scatty opening to “Shoot Me Down” threatens briefly to derail the whole thing—until it evaporates into a wash of vocals that recall TV on the Radio at their most emotive, or Saul Williams at his most soothing.
Heavy Heavy sweeps its listener along, churchlike, and conveys the feeling that resisting the urge will always feel worse than rising up and pushing the air from your lungs. And then, after a brief 10 tracks, it’s all over—as if the procession has marched on, out of earshot. But the invite is still there extended: It’s up to you whether to accept it or not. | 2023-02-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Pop/R&B | Ninja Tune | February 7, 2023 | 7.5 | 64be6ee4-f649-46ac-9ed2-616148aaaee0 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The pop singer’s second album is looser, livelier and more ecstatic than her debut, detailing the headlong rush of falling in love. | The pop singer’s second album is looser, livelier and more ecstatic than her debut, detailing the headlong rush of falling in love. | Shura: forevher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shura-forevher/ | forevher | Shura emerged in 2014 as a pop star with a contradiction at her core. “Touch,” her lo-fi disco debut single, was a sort of “Dancing On My Own” for a new generation: an eminently danceable song about watching somebody else dance, about wanting to touch one another but being unable to because you’re paralysed by your own thoughts. Her 2016 LP Nothing’s Real was full of pop songs about unfulfilled promise and missed connections. With track titles like “2Shy” and “Tongue Tied,” she channelled the feathery soul of Janet Jackson and early Madonna while singing about being so engulfed in her own mind that she came apart from her body (the title track described the near-death pangs of a panic attack). If Nothing’s Real was all thought, the Manchester-born singer-songwriter’s follow-up forevher is all feeling.
Shura (real name Aleksandra Denton) spent the three years between her first and second records falling in love. The relationship that inspired forevher is a long-distance one, played out between New York and London via Skype and iMessage, and so the album tells a very modern story of intimacy (switching off Airplane Mode as soon as you land to see what your lover sent you while you were flying; being preoccupied with thoughts of the latest nude they sent you).
In tandem, her sound has grown into something more corporeal: While her voice on forevher largely comes through the filter of Auto-Tune, the instruments are looser and more live than they were on Nothing’s Real, with string flutters mimicking skipped heartbeats, and basslines settling into deep, well-worn grooves. If Shura used to hover awkwardly on the edges of dancefloors, now, she gives herself over to them. The psychedelic electronic soul of “religion (u can lay your hands on me)” or “skyline be mine”—all co-produced, once again, with her regular collaborator Joel Pott—could sit comfortably alongside Steve Lacy or Connan Mockasin, with digital flourishes bringing a layer of surreal newness to earthy rhythms.
The hooks of this record, at its most sensual, are less pop choruses than they are ecstatic moans. The swaggering sci-fi funk of “side effects” melts into a refrain that feels ancient and instinctive: “What it is, what it is, what it is, it’s so good.” On “religion,” the sparse, direct hook is simply, “Ooh girl, don’t stop, please/ You can lay your hands on me.” The record’s repeated urge, between clipped scratches of funk guitar and distorted saxophone, is simply to keep on going, keep on dancing, keep on feeling.
Of course, Shura still grapples with light insecurities in the album’s slower mid-section, in particular “flyin’” and “princess leia,” both of which deal with anxious thoughts during long-distance travel. It’s a necessary contrast for a record that mostly revels in new-relationship bliss, but—obviously—less fun. Likewise “tommy,” a voice memo and short ditty depicting an old man finding new love, rings more hollow than the richer funk songs that surround it. Shura is at her most convincing, and her most alive, when she’s fully embodying her own experience rather than narrating someone else’s.
The album’s slightly saccharine title is an indication of its general embrace of romantic cliché—on “forever,” she rhymes "forever" with “together” and coos: “You make me feel like sunshine, feel so good.” It might be clichéd, but as with her neo-soul sound, it’s also an enthusiastic, earnest reclamation: You’ve heard people sing “forever together” on a pop song before, but have you heard a woman sing it to another woman? Throughout forevher, Shura places herself lyrically inside religious imagery (she promises to baptise her love like Jesus on “BKLYNLDN” and makes herself into God on “religion”) and inside romantic tropes, as if asking, why not us? On the cover of the record, she places two women inside the familiar image of Rodin’s The Kiss, washed in blue light reminiscent of a Hockney swimming pool.
The pop canon has, for so long, been totally devoid of women expressing uncomplicated desire for other women, but 2019 might be the first year where queer women are spoilt for choice. LA band MUNA are preaching self-love, Marika Hackman is writing rock anthems about women going down on one another, and Charli XCX and Christine and the Queens stop just shy of making out in the video for “Gone.” This record is, first and foremost, about queer women. It is also about anyone who has experienced this kind of love: as blinding as religion, as cheesy as a Hallmark card, as familiar as a pop song.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | August 15, 2019 | 7.8 | 64cff568-fd3d-4f0f-ae5f-f1ae4bd2f352 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Tennessee rapper and TDE associate really finds his voice on his second album, one filled with the tensions caused by a cycle of self-loathing and self-discovery. | The Tennessee rapper and TDE associate really finds his voice on his second album, one filled with the tensions caused by a cycle of self-loathing and self-discovery. | Isaiah Rashad: The Sun’s Tirade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22363-the-suns-tirade/ | The Sun’s Tirade | Chattanooga MC Isaiah Rashad wears his anxieties. They bleed through the rap revelry in verse, as if they could consume him at any moment. Is he about to stunt, or is he about to self-destruct? It makes his songs more like inkblots in a Rorschach test: What you see in them may depend on where you currently are on the spectrum—longing, laboring, or lost. Rashad appeared fully-formed on his debut Cilvia Demo as a young rap star in the making constantly humanizing himself before eyewitnesses with bars like “I done grown up for my child’s sake.” It was clear early on that he wasn’t afraid to publicly grapple with his demons. “Now, I’m praying that I make it to 25/They be calling doctors for my health/And ‘no’ is kinda hard to say to drugs/’Cause I been having problems with myself,” Rashad rapped on “Heavenly Father.” He turned 25 this year, but it was a rocky road getting here.
In the two quiet years since Isaiah Rashad released Cilvia, his inactivity fed his addiction, and vice versa. During a stint on Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron tour in 2014, he got hooked on a potent brew of Xanax and alcohol, a concoction used to numb himself during an ongoing battle with depression. Drug dependency threatened to derail a promising career and almost getting him dropped from Top Dawg Entertainment on a handful of occasions. “I can’t admit, I’ve been depressed/I hit a wall, ouch,” he raps on “Dressed Like Rappers” from his long-awaited follow-up, The Sun’s Tirade. It’s an album that examines the strain of family ties, smalltown spokesmanship, and self-awareness. The Sun’s Tirade is brutally honest and open, a record saddled by substance abuse and melancholia. These are soul-baring cuts lined with pent-up emotions from the tour, which “BDay” hints at in a single lyric: “How do you tell the truth to a crowd of white people?”
Fittingly, though, Rashad really finds his voice on The Sun’s Tirade, an album filled with the tensions caused by a cycle of self-loathing and self-discovery. The tension is usually built up in his cadences with his uncanny sense for when to give and when to pull back. His voice can deflate in an instant or shrink to a mumble or mushroom into singsong. Raps tumble, sputter, and croak, stretching his timbre’s range and depth. On “Tity and Dolla,” he tries on a slippery inflection that’s whiny and exaggerated, which later morphs into something snappier at the octave change. His voice nearly cracks on “Park” as he staggers through verse rapping quick hitters like “I’m tryna be Nicki Minaj/Rich as a bitch in the drop” and “Bitch have you tutored the pastor/I know the root and the master/I know the coupe was a casket.” “Rope // rosegold” showcases flows on opposite ends of the spectrum, the first an impassioned croon, the second something more intoned, canceling out the animated performance. On every line, he works toward lucidity.
The Sun’s Tirade remains heavy with sound and subject. Rashad often reveals his deepest misgivings and uncertainties and scales his woes with liquid courage, intoxicated and numb. But instead of a disorienting album that tries to replicate those druggy highs and lows, the songs are clear-eyed, sobering, and even more detail-oriented than Cilvia Demo with monster guest verses from TDE associates Kendrick Lamar and Jay Rock and complementary ones from other contributors (SZA and Kari Faux, among others). There is even more precision and purpose in the raps here and an even stronger sense of identity. Take a standout like “Free Lunch,” which shows off his impeccable rhythm and timing, wading through a groovy tune tied together by a personal anecdote: The only numbers Rashad remembered as a kid were the last digits of his social security number, which was his access code for the free lunch program. Rashad connects the past and present together in an effort to understand his future.
The sonic template of The Sun’s Tirade is laid bare on “Brenda”: “Mix that Boosie with that boom bap.” There’s a similar palette to Cilvia Demo—as indebted to J Dilla production kits and Common’s Electric Circus as it is to Lil Wayne and Scarface—but this is far more adventurous on the back half. There’s a robotic Mike WiLL Made-It beat (“A Lot”), “Stuck in the Mud” splits itself in two with varying moods and textures, and the double-time “Don’t Matter” is the most uptempo thing he’s ever rapped on. These added dimensions bring variety to an otherwise uniform soundscape. Rashad has a way of making styles his own, shaving influences down until they bear his signature while paying homage along the way. “Silkk Da Shocka,” which carries on Rashad’s legacy of songs named after Southern rappers (there’s also the smooth 2 Chainz salute on “Tity and Dolla”), is a spiritual successor to “West Savannah” in aim and sound, moving in tandem with the Internet’s Syd over a slow-rolling, bluesy riff. The songs create a similar aesthetic blend to Cilvia Demo, processing regional rap staples through a soul filter.
But The Sun’s Tirade isn’t just Cilvia Demo: Redux. It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store. Development and maturation are themes unfolding in both Isaiah Rashad’s lyrics and personal life, and that overlap produced one of the great rehab records in recent memory, a collection of songs that both diagnose and medicate. “Can I sleep for a while? Can I work on myself?” Rashad asks on “Stuck in the Mud.” Wallowing in isolation and self-pity nearly drove one of rap’s most promising talents to implode. The Sun’s Tirade is a moving triumph to facing your demons and coming out on the other side one step closer to whole. | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | September 7, 2016 | 8.1 | 64d44b29-10cc-4aeb-8bb6-d95903fe8818 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
After playing imaginary rock stars for years, Kings of Leon finally found success. And they follow that with a sense of victimhood. | After playing imaginary rock stars for years, Kings of Leon finally found success. And they follow that with a sense of victimhood. | Kings of Leon: Come Around Sundown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14830-come-around-sundown/ | Come Around Sundown | If you had to single out a band as the embodiment of everything supposedly small-stakes and emotionally bankrupt about indie rock culture, who would it be? I imagine you wouldn't pick the almost painfully sincere and Billboard-topping Arcade Fire, but you're not Caleb Followill. Despite Only By the Night's elevating Kings of Leon from self-imagined superstars to actual superstars, Followill has spent the leadup to the release of Come Around Sundown in attack mode, throwing ill subliminals at Richard Reed Parry (the dude with the helmet), preemptively turning down Glee, and calling their breakout hit "Sex on Fire" a "piece of shit," the message being "look at these effin' hipsters, we're the real deal." Aw-shucks posturing aside, KoL have always been savvy about how they position themselves, and this is a classic political move: galvanizing a majority with a sense of victimhood.
But after hearing Come Around Sundown, here's the thing about this "us vs. them" tactic: I don't believe it, in large part because I don't think Kings of Leon do either. Come Around Sundown indeed feels like an awfully political work of art, though it's not necessary falling into the philosophy of red state/blue state. Rather, Kings of Leon themselves come off like jaded and wearied political lifers who've finally realized what it takes to win the game they're playing: That compromise is an end, that saying nothing at all is often saying the right thing.
Those sort of mixed messages permeate Come Around Sundown. The rise of Kings of Leon has coincided directly with their ability to be compared to U2, and just as you suspect they follow fame with a loose, modest comedown album pumped up to stadium status grandeur against its own will. At its core, first single "Radioactive" is a pleasingly aerodynamic piece of radio rock, a two-note bass riff giving an alley-oop to the most emphatic, hollering hook on Sundown. So why the gospel choir on the chorus? Well, that's just what the biggest of the big do, and the staggeringly exploitative video uncomfortably suggests the idea of it as soul-by-osmosis. Duly acknowledging the midnight tokers, "Mary" is full of headslap, "Sweet Leaf"-deep metaphors. Meanwhile, "Birthday" is a barstool rabble-rouser on first glance, but it's little more than an exhibit for what's become the stock characterization of women on Kings of Leon songs, namely, the kind of mythical, hell-raising maneater who still manages to make her submissive victim sound misognystic. Fact is, even if Kings of Leon sound almost nothing like the guys who made Youth & Young Manhood, they still have no trouble recognizing the archetypes that trigger an immense sense of self-satisfaction from people who insist rock achieved perfection in 1974.
At the very least, the powerfully encoded titles of "Pickup Truck", "Beach Side", "Back Down South", and "Mi Amigo" aren't a real indication of what they deliver-- though there's the occasional pedal steel and fiddle sigh, Kings of Leon stop shy of the "we're a country band now" pandering that prolonged the careers of Bon Jovi, Kid Rock, Jewel, and Darius Rucker. But even if they did overemphasize their Tennessee twang, these songs in particular call out Come Around Sundown for lacking the lowest common denominator of all pop: hooks. Even if this still packs amphitheatres, what are the crowds suppose to sing along to? At this point, you should no doubt be used to Followill's bizarre accent, which sounds wholly averse to enunciation, but tonally, he remains one of the most grating singers in rock. Regardless of what incarnation of KoL you're talking about, the vocals should have depth, warmth, or swagger, but Followill lacks grit, instead gilded with a squeaky, mewling edge that is unwisely amplified by featuring him punishingly high in the mix at all times.
A shame, really since KoL do have their charms-- the rhythm section is often agile, inventive, and propulsive when the tempo allows it, and like the similarly positioned Coldplay, there are hints of a wellspring of eccentricity that they haven't been able to fully tap into. But as in political debate, nuance is rarely acknowledged and incremental progress is often mistaken for none at all when it comes to bands at this level. You're either in or you're out, and for some reason people tend to think that being against Kings of Leon is akin to being against drinking whiskey or getting laid. That's not necessarily Kings of Leon's fault, but Come Around Sundown is, and it ends up being no different from a lot of the phony populism in the air these days. | 2010-11-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-11-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | November 5, 2010 | 3.6 | 64d5a870-440a-4db2-9823-42dd50bc9e7f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Solo debut by the one-time frontman of shoegaze heavy hitters Swervedriver gets better the further Franklin gets from the blistering guitar attack of his earlier band. | Solo debut by the one-time frontman of shoegaze heavy hitters Swervedriver gets better the further Franklin gets from the blistering guitar attack of his earlier band. | Adam Franklin: Bolts of Melody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10631-bolts-of-melody/ | Bolts of Melody | Back when Adam Franklin was blowing cool about cars and guns as Swervedriver's head honcho, his drowsy drawl was the perfect complement to the group's blistering effects-pedal attack. His work under the Toshack Highway moniker was certainly less spirited than what he's best known for, but he's always had a sleepy way about him. It's only here on his first official solo album where Franklin actually sounds tired and worn-out, both in a good and bad way. While Bolts of Melody deftly illustrates that his way with a tune hasn't diminished in the slightest, his attempts to split the difference between rocking and reclining leaves the album worse for wear.
Bolts of Melody starts off with a relative bang, and while "Seize the Day" says what it needs to say in just over two minutes, it comes off as a half-hearted nod to his previous days. The same goes for the oddly muted "Shining Somewhere". "Syd's Eyes" is presumably meant to pay homage to Syd Barrett, but it sounds more like a watered-down pastiche of Franklin's swinging 1960s touchstones (the "Space Oddity" homage "Walking in Heaven's Foothills" is much more flattering.) The other nominal "rock" track on Bolts, "Birdsong", sounds like Franklin getting in touch with his inner Eric Clapton. And I'm talking about the arena-rockin' Eric Clapton that epitomized the worst excesses of the 80s. That the track also appears in a stripped-down acoustic version does the album no favors.
Aside from that misstep, the album's less energetic tracks are what save this record. Gentle psychedelic songs like "Sundown" and "Morning Rain" might find Franklin gazing more at his navel than his shoes, but he sounds much more comfortable and confident taking it easy. Only the appropriately titled instrumental "Theme from LSD" tops the latter track's hypnotic groove, though both feature stellar wah-wah pedal work that would make Jimi Hendrix smile. And while the album starts off on the wrong foot, it ends on a strong note. One would think a track called "Ramonesland" would be an upbeat album closer. Instead, it's a dreamy seven-minute tour that encapsulates everything good about this album. There's a line midway through the track about a girl playing the Red House Painters, where Franklin says they sound "fucking depressing." It might be a toss-away zinger at that sort of introspection (which Franklin willfully indulges in throughout this album), but it comes off as knowing irony: The most depressing tracks on Bolts of Melody are those that superficially sound the least depressing. | 2007-09-28T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2007-09-28T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Hi-Speed Soul | September 28, 2007 | 5.8 | 64d76899-35df-4fae-a648-f41a72087335 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
*Collapse *is a strange and beautiful record that refuses categorization, traipsing through the fields of house, free jazz and musique concrète on the way to something inscrutably Other. | *Collapse *is a strange and beautiful record that refuses categorization, traipsing through the fields of house, free jazz and musique concrète on the way to something inscrutably Other. | Seiho: Collapse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21937-collapse/ | Collapse | Field-recorded sounds have been part of popular music almost as long as portable recording devices have existed. Our desire to capture the world as we hear it with the purpose of sharing with others is intrinsic to humankind, as are our desires to tinker and to put forward a best face; in experimental electronic music, we often see all three of these desires play out at once. A great example of this is Collapse, the latest album by Japanese artist Seiho, a genre-fluid record which follows in the footsteps of its forebears in the hopes of creating something new and distinct out of fresh ideas, beat culture and curated found sounds.
Collapse is a strange and beautiful record that refuses categorization, traipsing through the fields of house, free jazz and musique concrète on the way to something inscrutably Other. Despite being ostensibly an “electronic” record, Seiho proudly boasts that “very few samples were used in the making of the LP,” instead utilizing live instrumentation and sounds captured in personal recordings of animals, machines and nature, which he sculpted into many of the beats, rhythms and chirps put on display.
The idea of turning found sounds into electronic music is nothing new, of course. Matthew Herbert and Matmos have been releasing records with beats made from hand-crafted sound recordings for years, with two of the most famous examples coming in 2001 with the former’s Bodily Functions and the latter’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure. Both of those records derived their power in part from their slavish devotion to specific themes (sounds from bodies and medical procedures, respectively). One spin of Collapse, however, and you can tell that Seiho is going for something else, something freer and less constricted by subject matter; rather than focusing on a world bodies or industrial machines, Seiho wants you to hear the wandering world that passes in front of him. And wander it does—over the course of only thirty-three minutes, Collapse darts and dashes from sound to idea to sound like the speed-shifting brain of a manic teenager. Not one track of the ten lingers on a single musical idea for long. Even the track (possibly ironically) titled “Deep House” doesn't have a single deep house or even house-inspired idea coursing through it.
For this reason, it’s easier to see Collapse as a single work with repeating index points rather than a collection of “songs.” There’s jazz-concrète (“The Vase”), actual deep house (“Exhibition,” “Plastic”), and whimsical IDM (“Peach and Pomegranate,” “DO NOT LEAVE WET”); many songs, such as “Edible Chrysanthemum,” touch multiple indexes. In many ways, this record is a kindred spirit to last month’s Brainfeeder release Fool by Dutch artist Jameszoo. But while that record felt messy and basement-made, Collapse is neat and pristine, as if every careening moment has been carefully crafted and controlled so that no matter how wild it gets, it will never fall apart.
There’s no question that Collapse is a fascinating, inspired record. But the obvious challenge in making music this inherently fidgety is that it can be tough for a listener to stay engaged for long stretches of time, let alone the duration. As a result, some of the tracks get boring (“Deep House,” “Rubber”) and others start or end interestingly but can’t sustain the momentum throughout.
“Edible Chrysanthemum” and “DO NOT LEAVE WET” manage to hold on to their ideas just long enough to sink in deeper than the rest. The first begins with pleasant mechanical hums and aviary trills, then picks up a mock-gamelan beat (maybe samples of sticks on glass) before giving way to a mournful near-jazz of horn, piano and percussive clacks. Album closer “DO NOT LEAVE WET” is easily the warmest and poppiest track: Beautiful, rich and full, and featuring a wider range of instrumentation of '80s funk and R&B, it invites jamming in summer mornings en route to the beach, or maybe afternoon mojitos. The song plays almost like your reward for staying put, and underlines that with a bit more focus and clarity, Seiho might evolve into an important voice in the new guard of experimental electronicists. | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Leaving | June 3, 2016 | 7.4 | 64d96977-8fa4-4045-81cc-716de7d34331 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
M.I.A. returns with a politically charged but confusing album that lacks bite and bounce, presenting only glimmers of what once was. | M.I.A. returns with a politically charged but confusing album that lacks bite and bounce, presenting only glimmers of what once was. | M.I.A.: AIM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22396-aim/ | AIM | When revisiting the culture that informed her 2005 debut album Arular, Maya Arulpragasam painted the 2000s with a rose-colored tint. “We had way better fucking music. People were having way better sex. People were eating way better food. It’s like we had progression,” she told Rolling Stone last year. She concluded that in 2015, broadly speaking, art was boring and safe, due to the lack of “fireworks,” the repetition, and the disappearance of the “new.” It was a recalcitrant comment, sure, but also unsurprising coming from M.I.A. What felt unnatural was all this nostalgia. M.I.A. has always been an artist interested in constant reinvention—the past, it seemed to her, was nothing compared to the future. Her music, her art, her years of public confrontation were once prophetic.
But today it’s increasingly clear that many pieces of her creative legacy, from the caustic inhuman sheen of Maya* *to the bullet casings that litter “Paper Planes,” have either been plundered or misinterpreted. The fake patois of Drake’s “One Dance” blaring from car windows all around the world, the ubiquity of greasy synths and rattling gun-shot samples in dance music (see any of the artists in NON or Fade to Mind), and the globalization of American and European pop music all can trace a thread back to M.I.A.’s experiments, both failed and successful. Her evaluation of art in the present was another middle finger pointed at watchful eyes, and now, with the release of her fifth album, *AIM, *it’s become an unintended self-criticism of her own inability to light the fuse.
The lead-up to *AIM *was not without expected provocation. Before the album had a name there was a music video. It was searing and combative, an addictive piece of agitprop that once again aligned M.I.A. as one of our best political artists. The video for “Borders” depicted a dramatization of border crossing that was at once complicated, blunt, and grandly rendered. The song was empathetic about the global refugee crisis, (“We’re solid and we don’t need to kick them/This is North, South, East and Western”) yet it was also a polemic against media saturation and the endless panoply of issues both serious and inane (borders, politics, identities, privilege, being bae, breaking the internet) that made any action impossible. When she summons these topics through the course of the song, she cooly punctures them with a simple question, “What’s up with that?” Overall, it was the type of sobering political gesture that was much needed in the music discourse. Then the controversies started.
She was dropped as the headliner for London’s upcoming Afropunk Festival after clumsily targeting Black Lives Matter and the activist inclinations of musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, asking if questions like “Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?" would function into the dominant conversation in pop music. Then she got mad about MTV overlooking “Borders” for this year’s VMAs, accusing the media corporation of “racism, classism, sexism, elitism” and essentially policing what kind of voices were institutionally sanctioned. And naturally, she threatened to leak *AIM *(which she also threatened to do with her last album), and claimed that Interscope refused to clear samples for a Diplo-produced version of “Bird Song.” After the predictably rocky months of rollout, the 17 songs of *AIM *read as a disappointment, lacking bite and bounce, and presenting only glimmers of what once was.
For what went wrong, look no further than what might’ve been the big pop hit of the album, “Freedun,” a collaboration with smoldering One Direction malcontent Zayn Malik. The song was apparently written over Whatsapp, and it certainly contains all the half-baked charm of a group text thread. “I’m a swagger man/Rolling in my swagger van/From the People’s Republic Of Swaggerstan,” she begins, extremely inauspiciously. It’s the forgivable brick from someone with a history of lyrics that are at the very least provocative or allusive. But this specific brand of poor writing haunts the album. In “Bird Song,” her avian puns are grating: “I believe like R. Kelly, we can fly/But toucan fly together/Staying rich like an ostrich.” Her voice seems flatter, inelastic, and without her early inventiveness.
At the same time, *AIM *isn’t saved by some world-beating or state-of-the-art production. Neither M.I.A. nor or her collaborators (including Skrillex and longtime producer Blaqstarr) come close to the vibrancy of her previous work. Take “Foreign Friend,” with its half-hearted drum beat, sleepy progression, and clunky construction. Its pallid form turns the song’s sharp narrative about cultural assimilation into a trying slog. This has never been a problem with her music before—even when it didn't work, it was wild and freewheeling, intelligently and deftly compacting rhythms from around the world under a single flag.
But these songs are diffuse, thin on hooks, and often recycle through old warhorses of polyrhythmic percussion and splattered sampling. It’s telling that “Visa” samples her debut single “Galang” in its back half. It creates a bizarre effect, like listening to M.I.A. do karaoke over her own music. “Visa” also heavily references—almost eulogizes—her past work (“They call me Arular, trendsetter, making life feel better/Breaking order like a leader now follow”). It’s as if she is well aware of how newness has escaped her, as much she feels it has escaped the world at large. This recursive comment would work better if the album were explicitly framed as a referendum on her career up to this point: the boredom and frustration of the present as an endless reflection of the past. Instead, whatever grand vision *AIM *is hoping for becomes muddled. While the highlights offer glimmers of hope, like “Ali R U OK”—an incisive narrative about capitalism’s degradation of immigrant hustle—*AIM *is in desperate need of a clear identity or throughline.
Diplo once said, “Albums now are a hit song and 11 other songs that are attached to it.” “Borders” will live on as one of many crown jewels in some future retrospective of M.I.A.’s music, but AIM is otherwise her dullest album. For all the accusations that she’s been blithe, unaware, or plain reckless with her messaging, there has never been a more crucial time for pop music that wrestles with globalization, transnational suffering, and the plight of immigrants. While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in *AIM, *M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues that are volatile and antagonistic. But at this point her music is more potent in theory than execution. | 2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Interscope | September 13, 2016 | 5.9 | 64df3c56-4261-4119-8153-eddf33d8f723 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On their fourth album, Parquet Courts enlist Danger Mouse to produce an album of joyfully absurd, danceable rock music. It is straightforward but alien, simple but endlessly referential. | On their fourth album, Parquet Courts enlist Danger Mouse to produce an album of joyfully absurd, danceable rock music. It is straightforward but alien, simple but endlessly referential. | Parquet Courts: Wide Awake! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/parquet-courts-wide-awake/ | Wide Awake! | As familiar as they seem (four white guys, guitars), Parquet Courts don’t have many peers. Their music is both passionate and removed, rock not as a vehicle of emotional release but the simple venting of calories. Over the course of six albums, the band has explored a sound rooted in punk and early-’70s art rock that relies on the past without seeming sentimental about it. Even their romantic material is prickly, hug-proof, more occupied by the anxiety of having feelings than the relief of surrendering to them. They are a rock band refreshingly unconcerned with what it might mean to be a rock band. Like the restless minds whose contours they mirror, a good Parquet Courts song is neither happy nor sad so much as stupidly, consumingly alive.
Their last album, 2016’s Human Performance, sounded like the work of serious young men exploring their seriousness, an outlaw vision of inner journeys and crumbling connections. Three of the band’s members had hit 30, an age at which some are struck by the delusion that they have figured out something essential about the universe. Parts of it sounded like the Velvet Underground, even Bob Dylan. But Wide Awake! marks the moment when the false wisdom subsides and one is left to concede that life is shaping up to last a long-ass time whether you know anything about it or not. One of the band’s singers, Andrew Savage, recently described it as an attempt to make a punk record you could put on at parties, the presumption being that even earnest people need space to act dumb. Parts of it remind me of “Louie Louie”; my favorite song on it is called “Freebird II.”
The album was produced by Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, whose recent clients have included Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, the Black Keys, A$AP Rocky, and a variety of other artists with whom Parquet Courts do not seem in league. Burton compresses the band into a kind of cartoon: blunt, cranked-up, surface-oriented. The album’s punky songs (“Total Football,” “Freebird II,” “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience”) are about 80 percent yelling and feature fake crowd noise; its pretty ones (“Mardi Gras Beads,” “Death Will Bring Change,” both written by co-frontman Austin Brown) seem to have been run through a Japanese photo booth, saturated with sparkles. These are not actual moods, but the idea of moods, outsized and distorted. Savage in particular often sounds like he is drowning in words, or needs the assistance of a fire department.
The shift is natural. Despite their garage-rock overtones, Parquet Courts have always been a band about artifice, about pushing sounds to the point of hyperbole. Not the Velvet Underground, but Roxy Music, Devo, bands that presented their music less as a naturally occurring substance than the product of design, straightforward but alien, simple but endlessly referential. As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place: the G-funk breakdown on “Violence,” the ’70s variety-show groove halfway through “Normalization,” the pub-rock piano on “Tenderness.” The band is moving rapidly toward a magic zone in which their sound is defined as whatever they happen to be playing at the moment, a unity achieved by attitude instead of style.
One gets high on this much past. I can’t listen to the gang choruses of “Before the Water Gets Too High” without thinking about Houston but also New Orleans, about rising water as a symbol not only of environmental catastrophe, but the sustained indifference America shows to its poor. Or Savage screaming about why society can’t afford to close an open casket on “Violence” without thinking not only of Freddie Gray in 2015 but Emmett Till 60 years earlier.
As metaphors, these are perfect: clear, precise, and yet invisible. For all of Savage’s sloganeering (part Soviet propaganda, part Barbara Kruger) there is something almost delicate about these turns, how he puts you in the mind of broader narratives without rubbing your face in them. One of the album’s most boldface lines—“What is an up-and-coming neighborhood and where is it coming from?,” screamed halfway through “Violence”—is as applicable to New York in 2018 as it was about 25 years earlier, when the New York Times declared that gentrification in the city was dead. If Wide Awake! does have a more abstract resonance, it’s somewhere in there: An experience of the past as not only alive but continuous, uncontainable, something we’d have an easier time handling if it ever seemed to stop.
At the heart of the album is a tension between the individual and the group, between the angst of freedom and the lull of dependence. Take “Freebird II,” a song Savage wrote about his mother, who struggles with homelessness and substance abuse. The music is celebratory, extroverted—less the sound of a son mourning than spring pledges hosing each other down with beer. On the song’s last line—“I feel free like you promised I’d be”—Savage is joined by a gang chorus, a dozen people shouting in barroom singalong. The paradox is simple but effective: Sometimes we feel closest to people in the moment we let them go.
By contrast, the album’s dreamiest, most internal-sounding song is “Mardi Gras Beads,” which lingers on the image of someone floating through the crowd, beads around their neck, surrounded by people but lost in a daydream. It makes sense that the band’s foundation is punk: No other style has struggled harder to reconcile the promise of community with the burning need to go it alone.
The tension is resolved, at least momentarily, on the album’s last song, “Tenderness.” As punctuation, it arrives as a sigh—warm, catchy, off its guard, everything the band ordinarily isn’t. “Nothing reminds the mind of power like the cheap odor of plastic/Leaking fumes we crave, consume, the rush it feels fantastic,” Savage sings, his voice hoarse and exhausted. “But like power turns to mold, like a junkie going cold, I need the fix of a little tenderness.” You can almost hear him ripping away from the hug, then turning reluctantly back. | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | May 21, 2018 | 8 | 64e08449-abd4-44e8-a700-e05aca906fc1 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | |
After Ash Ra Tempel dissolved in the mid-’70s, the krautrock band’s leader Manuel Göttsching explored ambiance and minimalism. Improvised at home in an hour, E2-E4 became an electronic music landmark. | After Ash Ra Tempel dissolved in the mid-’70s, the krautrock band’s leader Manuel Göttsching explored ambiance and minimalism. Improvised at home in an hour, E2-E4 became an electronic music landmark. | Manuel Göttsching: E2-E4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22283-e2-e4/ | E2-E4 | Some classic albums have origin stories that threaten to eclipse the music itself. My Bloody Valentine almost bankrupted Creation over Loveless. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was just a cassette demo that he carried around in his pocket before deciding to release it. Brian Wilson’s inability to finish SMiLE caused him a mental breakdown. Add to these E2-E4, the marvelous extended electronic work by Manuel Göttsching, former leader of the key krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel.
After the dissolution of Ash Ra Tempel in the mid-’70s, Göttsching began working solo as Ashra, moving away from his earlier band’s wooly psychedelic rock and toward structures based on ambiance and his interest in Terry Riley-style minimalism. Both the trance-inducing repetition of 1975’s Inventions for Electric Guitar and the softer drones of 1976’s New Age of Earth showed his mastery of these forms, and he would build on them. In December 1981, having just returned from a tour with his friend Klaus Schulze, Göttsching was alone in his home studio and decided to create an improvised piece as an exercise, and also to give himself a tape to listen to on an upcoming trip. Moving between his battery of synthesizers and sequencing devices, he settled on a gentle two-chord vamp on his Prophet 10, to which he added an array of pinging electronic percussion and simple melodic figures. And over the second half of the piece, he laid down an extended guitar solo. Cut live without overdubs in a single hour, E2-E4 became, upon its eventual release in 1984, an electronic music landmark.
E2-E4 has an elusive appeal, one that is mysterious even to its maker. In 1981 and ’82, Göttsching was partway through planning a new solo album—it was quite complicated, with different sections and laborious themes. He wasn’t sure what to do with this new music, which came so easily. By 1981, Göttsching had made many pieces at home on his own for many purposes, but this one was lightning in a bottle. Like the longjumper Bob Beamon—whose one perfect jump at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics set a world record that he never came close to reaching before or since—Göttsching puzzled over his flawless moment. He listened to his creation over and over, trying to figure out why it worked so well, looking for some reason it wasn’t as good as it seemed. But he was at a loss. There were no mistakes, no incomplete ideas. It wasn’t too loud or too soft or too derivative. For one magic hour, the perfectly realized music floats in space, inviting listeners to admire it from the outside and then dance within it.
There are two things to hear in E2-E4: what the music is, and what the ideas within it would become. It’s sublime as a present-moment listening experience, with beautiful textures and a glorious symmetry. E2-E4 is like one long pop song stretched over 60 minutes, which is to say it’s sort of like its own DJ set. It plays with pop structures, but on a much larger canvas—a change that might last for a few bars in a pop single might last, here, for four minutes. At the 23-minute mark, there’s a several-minutes-long section where Göttsching starts flanging the tones and it feels something like dub; it’s kind of like a bridge. At the 3:35 mark, a pinging melody first enters, and that feels like a verse. As with many pop songs, there is an instrumental break, and in this case, it’s a guitar solo that lasts for a full album side. Göttsching vibrates with his riff in harmony, winding out fluid lines in the middle register that function as a rhythmic counterpoint and shifting melody simultaneously.
If three chords form the skeleton of punk, then two chords are the soul of techno, the minimum the music can move and still be changing. Göttsching’s guitar solo is reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, with its clean but expressive tone that mixes a touch of jazz and blues with a more free-floating pointillist psychedelia. And Göttsching’s guitar work highlights one of E2-E4’s most appealing qualities: that the music sits precisely at the point where the human meets the machine. The great bulk of the music is synthesized and sequenced, a Rube Goldberg-like device that winds through pre-programmed sections, but when his guitar enters, we hear the touch of a musician brought up playing classical music on nylon strings. The human hand and the circuits also switch roles, though. If the warm tone of the machines can feel almost human, like an invitation—a friendly and welcoming sound perfect for the communion of the dancefloor—Göttsching’s tightly controlled guitar work sometimes has a mechanical quality, existing in clear relation to the sequencer’s grid.
So that’s the music as it plays. But for those interested in the larger sweep of history, it’s impossible not to listen and hear how ahead of its time this record was. Simply put, E2-E4 sounds a great deal like techno would when it emerged roughly a decade later, and it came from someone with no interest in dance music. As he was contemplating releasing E2-E4, Göttsching visited Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Records, his then-current label, on Branson’s houseboat in order to play him the tape. In a beautifully told story from the liner notes of this reissue, Göttsching says that Branson was rocking his baby in his arms as the tape played, an apt image given the gentle undulations of the chords. “Manuel, you could make a fortune with this music,” Göttsching quotes Branson as saying, and indeed, a fortune would be made from the ideas found on E2-E4. But Göttsching wouldn’t be the one to collect it. Göttsching eventually issued E2-E4 in 1984 on Klaus Schulze’s label, and it didn’t sell well, moving only a few thousand copies. But a handful of those wound up in the right hands.
E2-E4 is also the story of formats. When Göttsching first contemplated releasing it, he realized that its 58-minute length presented difficulties. It was conceived as a single flowing piece, but an hour was generally considered too long even for a single LP, if one wants it to sound good. A skilled disc cutter was able to get a 30+ minute side down in 1984, and thanks to the record’s popularity in clubs, it still feels like a vinyl artifact. Which is one reason this exceptionally well-done reissue is so welcome. Great care was taken in getting the cut right. The 31-minute side, though at a relatively low volume, is clean and clear, even in the inner grooves. One could argue that a seamless digital version of the piece is the “real” version, but if vinyl was good enough for Larry Levan—who, unbeknownst to Göttsching, made the record a regular part of his sets for a time at the Paradise Garage—it’s good enough for me.
The music’s reputation in dance music circles reached a peak when three Italo producers approached him about re-working the tune for a dance music 12” in 1989. That record, released under the name “Sueño Latino,” turned out to be an international hit, and a 1992 remix from Detroit producer Derrick May brought the music full circle. Which gets back to one of E2-E4’s essential qualities: cut in a single hour, it wound its way across the world, morphing and changing with formats and remixes, finding new contexts, a music that is constantly in the process of becoming. | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | MG.ART | September 14, 2016 | 9.2 | 64e1cdad-cfdb-4c90-bfe0-68df8bdaffc2 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
J.G. Biberkopf's Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess is an often fascinating record of music that sits between the club, gallery, and lecture hall. It stumbles most when it sounds like the last. | J.G. Biberkopf's Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess is an often fascinating record of music that sits between the club, gallery, and lecture hall. It stumbles most when it sounds like the last. | J.G. Biberkopf: Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22616-ecologies-ii-ecosystems-of-excess/ | Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess | Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf makes music for turbulent times. A Lithuanian producer with roots in Berlin’s club underground, his music—a liquid, digital audio collage of distressed electronics and manipulated field recordings—suits a world buffeted by technological disruption and tidal waves of capital. It isn’t dance music, exactly—too abstract, too spacious. But Biberkopf works with the club in mind, such spaces being, as he told FACT, “a total, immersive environment, rather than a stage with a predefined fourth wall.” Like, say, Hyperdub boss Kode9 or the Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, Biberkopf straddles the worlds of dance music, art practice and academic theory, in search of something profound or meaningful to say about the times in which we live.
Ecologies II: Ecosystems of Excess is a sequel to his 2015 EP Ecologies, and continues with many of its themes. This is a sort of speculative fiction in sound, dealing with the dawning of the Anthropocene, defined by scholars as the epoch of humankind: one of mass extinction, climate change, deforestation, oceans choked with plastic. Biberkopf is into collapsing boundaries—between the real and the virtual, the organic and synthetic, the gallery and the club. At times, Ecosystems of Excess gestures towards dance music: see the pulsating trance synths that cut through “Transfiguration I: Enlightenment”; or “New World Order,” with its thudding, pressurized beats and flicking halogen hats. Elsewhere, it feels like a 2016 update of music concrete, as pioneered by figures like Bernard Parmegiani or Pierre Schaeffer. Processed electronics intermingle with heavily treated field recordings, tracks stretch out into protracted drones or twitch with sudden jump-cuts, and everything collapses into texture.
The influence of critical theory and contemporary art runs throughout the record. The titles here—“Technocracy,” “Wetware,” “Eruption of the Amorphous”—gesture to sci-fi and cyberpunk, or resemble chapter headings plucked from an ambitious philosophy Ph.D dissertation. The LP, meanwhile comes packaged with an art book by the design studio Maximage, in which surreal landscapes are overlaid with an essay by the writer Deforrest Brown Jr. that blurs the edges between academic theory and avant-garde poetry.
This aesthetic is echoed in the music, which appears to resist clear interpretation. On “Eruption of the Amorphous,” voice software recites hollow platitudes. In the depths of “From Infinity To Here,” you can discern snatches of narrative—the splash of water, the rattle of a subway car, distant sobbing—but try to piece it together and you end up lost. The best moments here are those that set out to fool the ear. “Preacher” samples an African-American minister and makes him sound like a vein-popping MC of the Def Jux school. “Realer Than Real,” meanwhile, employs that common trope of 21st Century club music: the crack of gunshots. In a moment of pleasing absurdity, though, it chooses to blend it with the sound of panicking geese and cocktail jazz piano.
Like recent records by Rabit and the Haxan Cloak, Ecosystems of Excess feels very tactile: you feel it as much as hear it. But its tone of high academic seriousness is something of a stumbling block. An artist like Holly Herndon works with similar conceptual ideas, but makes them feel like a playground, not a lecture. Ecosystems of Excess can be formally daring and grimly thrilling in its bold, dystopian vision. But it can feel rather enervating, inducing a sense of paralysis and alienation. Right now, just a glimpse of the way forward would be very welcome. | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Knives | November 17, 2016 | 6.3 | 64e6bc08-39e6-44e7-8262-2cf7de450fb1 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
ZZ Top’s 1973 breakthrough was a masterful melding of complementary styles, cramming Southern rock and blues boogie through the band’s own idiosyncratic filter. | ZZ Top’s 1973 breakthrough was a masterful melding of complementary styles, cramming Southern rock and blues boogie through the band’s own idiosyncratic filter. | ZZ Top: Tres Hombres | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zz-top-tres-hombres/ | Tres Hombres | “Billy Gibbons’ guitar sound isn’t the way it is because he uses a quarter as a pick or anything as simple as that; it’s because he’s in touch with a different sector of the cosmos that we know nothing about.” So said experimental noise musician Kevin Drumm, in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork. You can also find message boards arguing whether Gibbons actually uses a peso for a pick instead. But when it comes to testimony from the lanky ZZ Top frontman himself, the truth always comes with a side of Texas Tall Tale. This is a band that splashed around in a bayou near Houston’s upscale Tanglewood subdivision on their second album and called it Rio Grande Mud—from the start, they mastered image and mystique. Take the band name itself: the trio of guitarist Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill, and drummer Frank Beard either pays homage to their Southern blues heritage (combining B.B. King and Z.Z. Hill) or else a “green” heritage (combining two brands of rolling papers); the story remains slippery, eons later.
Such elusiveness has served the band well, allowed a late-’60s blues-rock dinosaur to survive and thrive well into the 1970s and then on into the MTV decade, so that their contemporaries went from Jimi Hendrix to Michael Jackson, from Molly Hatchet to Madonna. Or as their longtime roadie David Blayney’s put it in his 1994 book Sharp-Dressed Men— “the band with the midnight shades, the Father Time beards and the pile-driver counterpoint…to many lovers of rock, it’s like they have always been there.”
How does a band that rose to success along with Southern rock and the urban cowboy archetype outlast the trends and become a paradigm of cool for the likes of hardcore punks Steve Albini and Black Flag, Chicagoans Kevin Drumm and Tortoise, a group referenced by avant-guitar weirdoes and wankers alike? How did that self-proclaimed “little ol’ band from Texas” break concert attendance records and come to signify the cosmos? It sure wouldn’t have happened based on ZZ Top’s first two records, which are full of muddy production, slapdash songs (outside of a few highlights), and licks by turns stinging and sloppy, as if summoned from a late ‘60s British blues-rock power-trio hangover. No, the answer can be found on their third album, 1973’s Tres Hombres.
Early ZZ Top shows had them performing to exactly an audience of one (as in 1970, when they played the National Guard Armory in Alvin, Texas, and Gibbons bought the guy there a Coke at intermission to make sure he stuck around the for the second set), but a relentless touring schedule put them before plenty of ears in the early part of the ’70s. They shared bills with Uriah Heep, King Crimson, Brian Auguer’s Oblivion Express, Earth Wind & Fire, and African funk band Osibisa, as well as Cheech & Chong. But, as Blayney recalled, an early gig with the Allman Brothers Band was the real catalyst: “[Duane] Allman’s guitar technique seriously influenced Billy Gibbons…he slowed down a touch, became more precise in his fretting, played fewer but tastier notes.” Quarter, peso, or regular pick in his palm, Gibbons’s right hand grew ascendant.
Had the band simply returned to a cinder block studio in Tyler, Texas, where they cut their first two albums, that sort of tone might have never been clarified. But thanks to bigger shows and higher placement on the marquee, ZZ Top’s notorious manager Bill Ham afforded them the luxury of traveling to Memphis to record in a real studio, the legendary Ardent, where Isaac Hayes cut Hot Buttered Soul, Led Zeppelin mixed III, and Big Star recorded their star-crossed albums. Working with engineer Terry Manning (the start of a relationship between band and engineer that would stretch into the ’90s), ZZ Top finally put the band’s deceptively simple tone down to tape.
Tres Hombres is a top sirloin steak of an album, lean yet beefy, not a trace of gristle to be had on 10 songs that clock in just over 33 minutes. It twines together both the Texas blues and its hard-rocking British variant, with Gibbons taking cues from the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green. But it also stakes out its own ground. The record struck a nerve with metalheads and punks, prog-rockers and hipsters. In its songs, tales of highway succubuses and Greyhounds abound, the supernatural mingling with the folksy, Jesus with good ol’ boy ghosts.
The end result changed the ZZ Top’s fortunes forever, even if the initial critical response was muted. NME found the songs “virtually indistinguishable, the lyrics unmemorable.” Rolling Stone said they were “only one of several competent Southern rocking bands.” Tres Hombres nevertheless went Top 10, hung out on the charts for 81 weeks, and gave them their first gold record, even though the album’s lone single, “La Grange,” broke down just outside the Top 40. ZZ Top would forever sound like a Texas roadhouse blues band, even as they now filled stadiums.
In hindsight, it’s hard to fathom American rock culture without Gibbons’s lecherous "har-har-har," much less the opening one-two of “Waitin’ for the Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago.” The latter pair was foundational for classic rock radio’s Twofer Tuesdays (along with Zep’s “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid” and the Rolling Stones’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “It’s Only Rock’N’Roll”), in which two songs began to be thought of as one. That opening hiccup of snare, bass drum, closed hi-hat, and the three-chord lick of “Waitin’ for the Bus” has the kick of a flank-strapped bull, the crunch of a crushed beer can, and the tang of sauce-slathered beef ribs. Featuring Gibbons’s dual turns on both harmonica and wah-wah guitar, and boasting a boogie rock strut, “Bus” has a blues structure lyrically and thematically, its narrator singing with a paper bag in hand and dreaming of a gleaming Cadillac instead of public transport. Said “Bus” then rear-ends right into “Jesus Just Left Chicago.”
The latter is a slower 12-bar blues with added measures that pits Gibbons’s trembling nasal sneer against the lurch of the rhythm section. His clean, chiming tones on his sunburst 1959 Les Paul (an instrument he called Mistress Pearly Gates) drift across the song like buzzard down. Gibbons even slips in and elongates the country blues lick from Robert Johnson’s "Love in Vain" for good measure. Thanks to a tape-splicing mishap, there’s almost no space between the two songs, and the happy accident means one tune in 4/4 and one in 6/8 serve as conjoined twins. The band has had the “Bus Jesus” pairing on their setlists ever since.
No song better defines the ZZ Top crowd’s aesthetic than “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers,” and it’s also the tune that’s been covered by the most baffling array of acts, ranging from Motörhead to Van Halen to Coheed and Cambria. It all but certifies the band’s shit-kicker credentials, right down to the “can of dinner” boast. And the original album’s inner sleeve verifies that with 13 photos of peculiar small-town characters that seem pulled from the song—there are fields of oil derricks and mariachi bands in roadhouse bars, longhairs and good ol’ boys downing Schlitz.
Speaking of Tres Hombres and its visuals, the LP’s centerpiece is pretty much the pinnacle of the album-gatefold-as-artwork, opening to reveal an aorta-plugging spread of Tex-Mex courtesy of Leo’s Mexican Restaurant on Lower Westheimer in Houston. The going rate at the time for the meal depicted at the center of Tres Hombres was $2.99, and it came out of brainstorming session the band had with longtime artist Bill Narum, responsible for drawing freehand the band’s early album covers. “We talked about how the album was once again a return the brotherhood of the Texas border and threw around some ideas to reflect that,” Gibbons recalled in an interview. Narum stepped out and returned with the meal, which, rather than being shot at Leo’s, was instead set up at photographer Galen Scott’s studio, along with a bottle of the Howard Hughes-brewed Southern Select beer and an antique radio tuned to 1570 on the AM dial, a Mexican clear-channel station that could be picked up in the States. It’s the station the band would immortalize in 1975 with “Heard it on the X.” And the photo almost didn’t happen: when they took a break during the shoot, Scott’s German shepherd hopped up on the table and wolfed down the entire platter.
A peculiar figure named R&B Junior serves as an inspiration for “Master of Sparks.” As Gibbons recollected to the Houston Chronicle: “[R&B Junior’s] family had a spread outside town with a ranch-hand on hire who was a talented welder. We got together to construct a steel caged ball, complete with escape door and a surplus pilot’s seat. We figured that chaining this ball up and rolling off the back of a truck would provide a thrill. At 60 miles an hour, that thing would spark up the night sky like nobody’s business.” A sly shift in perspective at song’s end reveals that the narrator in the song burns to a crisp amid the highway flares, meaning that one of the heaviest songs in the ZZ Top catalog is narrated by a dead man.
That line between reality and fantasy might be stretched thinnest on the band’s most infamous track, “La Grange.” It was named for a small Texas town that boasted a destination called Chicken Ranch, a local institution since the 19th Century. “La Grange” paid tribute to what would later be called “the best little whorehouse in Texas,” though said house was shuttered the same year that Tres Hombres arrived. The song has since ubiquitous across American culture. You can hear its nimble, clacking shuffle (equal parts John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun” and Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips”) on everything from Striptease, Armageddon and Dogtown and Z-Boys to remakes of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and Walking Tall. It was the entrance music for Texas wrestling royalty the Von Erich brothers. In the 40 years since its release, “La Grange” has been in commercials for motorcycle insurance, Wrangler jeans, and NASCAR. But Gibbons is a sly one, hmmming and hawing as he spreads a rumor and then interjects, “But now I might be mistaken.”
Take ZZ Top at beard value and you might miss the wink going on behind the cheap sunglasses. Or mistake them for any other Southern rock band. Jon Tiven’s assessment of the group in 1976 is most revealing in that regard. “On stage they look like nothing other than a bunch of dumb shits from Texas, three boys who just walked off the set of “Bonanza” and are heading out after the show to eat three sirloins apiece,” he quips. But as the story progresses, Tiven’s first impression falters. Gibbons opens up to talk about mandala formulas, meditation, Rastafarian cults (Gibbons was an early fan of the Wailers), and how to “impart a consciousness which will elevate the listener.” Perhaps that Tex-Mex spread from Leo’s really does contain the body and blood of Jesus, and maybe there is a stretch of Texas highway that leads to a different sector of the cosmos. | 2017-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | London | June 25, 2017 | 9 | 64ec9f0a-f44e-45ac-8e4b-59122d56b87b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his second album produced by Steve Gunn, the underground folk icon sings about age and regret with authority and grace. | On his second album produced by Steve Gunn, the underground folk icon sings about age and regret with authority and grace. | Michael Chapman: True North | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-chapman-true-north/ | True North | The British folk guitarist Michael Chapman has spent at least half a century writing and singing about age, regret, and longing. On “An Old Man Remembers,” from his third album, 1970’s Window, he presciently offers, “An old man is lost in his dreams/As he waits for the fruit of his schemes.” Even then, young Chapman sensed the span of time—how quickly the present morphs into past, how laden it becomes with memories. Now, at 78, he’s caught up in number to the old soul he’s often inhabited in song.
True North is Chapman’s second consecutive project with stylistic and spiritual descendent Steve Gunn. Chapman dubbed their first collaboration, 2017’s 50, his “American” album, because he recorded it with the likes of James Elkington and Nathan Bowles. For True North, Chapman sticks closer to home, gathering with Gunn, cellist Sarah Smout, and pedal steel legend BJ Cole at Mwnci Studios in West Wales. The precipitous landscape serves as a fitting platform for subtly psychedelic exploration and deep reflection. In fact, True North situates four new tracks among updates of Chapman’s older, more obscure material. He gives himself over to memory’s full sway, until the project feels a little like thumbing through a souvenir album, Chapman singing about the postcards that help remind him of places held dear.
Chapman catalogs two such spots with the new instrumentals “Eleuthera” and “Caddo Lake.” Named after the Caribbean island where Chapman likes to vacation, “Eleuthera” begins with the exchange of cerulean blues for lingering grays. Chapman’s phrasing is pensive, but Cole’s pedal steel softens the brooding. Sounding at first like a soft flute, Cole wends his instrument so deftly that it practically becomes the deep breaths Chapman takes between his fingerpicked phrases. “Caddo Lake” is another waterscape homage, equal parts meditative and meandering, thanks in part to Smout’s cascading timbre. These are less homages than mementos, as though Chapman can carry them easier in his mind by freeze-framing them in song.
A loquacious player, Chapman’s fingers often fly at the pace of thought. He taught himself to play guitar by listening to the likes of Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery and even trying to replicate the sound of two guitarists on a record at once. He eases back on True North, working from a kind of muscle memory. “I like to think these days I play more atmospheric guitar than technical guitar,” he’s said. True North’s opening track, “It’s Too Late,” feels more than it sounds, its arrangement brimming with anguished sustain. Chapman’s starched voice bemoans the trick time played on him. “I never knew I wanted you until it was too late,” he sings.
At Chapman’s age, the impetus to look back necessitates a looming finality; in response, he oscillates between bouts of melancholy and tranquility. On “Full Bottle, Empty Heart,” he plays his guitar ponderously, spaciously. But his phrasing turns somber as he confesses, “I never minded all the miles/Seems like I was born to roam/But I just wish you’d walk right in, and take this roamer home.” The earthy voice of fellow British folk icon Bridget St. John underscores the heavy reality of the line, “I got nothing more to give.” The sentiment returns on “Youth Is Wasted on the Young,” originally collected for an archive of Chapman’s assorted castoffs. Here, it’s restrained to the point of being sparse, as if the interim threw the credo into relief.
Rather than end on this dark note, Chapman lets loose on the jaunty, acoustic “Bon Ton Roolay,” originally recorded live for 2015’s Journeyman. The song shifts the Cajun phrase “Laissez les bon temps rouler” into a Haltwhistle dialect, as Chapman joked during the earlier live take. Delivered as an enthusiastic solo number, Chapman gives over to the moment—the best way to enjoy time’s ceaseless progression. His laughter comes unexpectedly, presenting a happier message than True North’s other meditations on life and what’s left of it: The journey goes fast, so find jubilation where and when you can. | 2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | February 7, 2019 | 7.4 | 64ecf263-bcbc-4283-af29-474d1ef1aac8 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Five years after the moody Wincing the Night Away and two releases by his Broken Bells project, James Mercer returns to the Shins energized and with his songwriting prowess intact. | Five years after the moody Wincing the Night Away and two releases by his Broken Bells project, James Mercer returns to the Shins energized and with his songwriting prowess intact. | The Shins: Port of Morrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16390-port-of-morrow/ | Port of Morrow | The Sopranos ended. The United States elected an African-American president. The global financial system more or less keeled over. The U.S. stopped sending people into space and "got" Osama Bin Laden, both in the same year. Harry Potter peaced out-- twice. Zach Braff's career shit the bed. Martin Scorcese won an Oscar, finally. Jeff Mangum returned. R.E.M., LCD Soundsystem, the White Stripes-- called it quits, all of 'em. Michael Jackson died, and so did Whitney Houston. Pop music headed out to the club, mainstream hip-hop more or less went bust, people started buying more vinyl (and, to a lesser extent, cassettes), and "indie" culture traded its guitars for turntables (or, at the very least, pirated audio software and synthesizers that didn't take up too much space in the bedroom).
A lot can happen in five years, the amount of time since the Shins released their last album, the eclectic and overlooked Wincing the Night Away. During that stretch, the band's primary songwriter and sole constant member, James Mercer, also went digital. In 2010, he teamed up with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton to form Broken Bells, a collaboration that has led to an album and an EP, both of which were light on things like "songs" and "choruses." The problem with Broken Bells is that it took up so much of Mercer's time and didn't provide a proper outlet for one of big-tent indie pop's strongest songwriters. For a few years, the idea of a new (never mind good) Shins album seemed unlikely. Mercer sounded hopelessly adrift.
A deep breath, then: James Mercer has returned to Earth. Port of Morrow, the Shins' fourth studio album in 11 years, is a triumphant return from a project that once risked being reduced to an indie-went-mainstream tagline. It's the perfect distillation of the Shins' back catalog-- the jangly, wistful airs of Oh, Inverted World, Chutes Too Narrow's genre-resistant playfulness, Wincing the Night Away's expansively detailed production. But in other ways, its colorful, detail-oriented approach sets it apart from anything Mercer's done before.
Mercer invited a cast of characters both new (Janet Weiss, production wiz Greg Kurstin, singer/songwriter Nik Freitas) and old (Modest Mouse's Joe Plummer, Fruit Bats' Eric D. Johnson, on-and-off supporting players Marty Crandall and Dave Hernandez) to realize his ornate pop-rock creations. All contributions are felt-- you don't need liner notes to tell how many people worked on this thing-- but none more so than Kurstin's. His multi-instrumental arrangements and behind-the-boards know-how are what make Port of Morrow one of 2012's best-sounding records thus far. Every element here is tricked out for maximum emotional effect-- experience total power-pop pleasure overload from "Simple Song"'s acrobatic pile of guitars, get the chills from the drifting sea breeze-echo of "September", and wrap yourself in "For a Fool"'s string-laden lushness. Needless to say, these songs would sound great on Natalie Portman's humongous headphones.
Of course, Kurstin wouldn't matter if the raw materials weren't so strong: Mercer (who also co-produced) delivers the goods, mostly by being himself. He's either missed out on the last few years of indie's ever-shifting microtrends or simply doesn't care about "the conversation." And thank fucking god for that. More so than any other Shins album, Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem. There's the sugary new-wave "Bait and Switch", "No Way Down"'s meat-and-potatoes American pop-rock (right down to the "Jack & Diane"-biting guitar hook), the title track's creeping psych-soul bombast. Most surprisingly, there's "Fall of '82", a Steve Miller Band-meets-Chicago lite-rock hybrid-- muted trumpet solo!-- that also works as a "Summer of '69" update. (These are all good things.)
Lyrically, I've always thought of James Mercer as a cousin of A.C. Newman, another songwriter with a gift for spinning gold from the sounds from the past. Newman's never been shy about writing kinda-nonsensical lyrics that simply sound good accompanying a solid melody (think "Sing Me Spanish Techno", or "Submarines of Stockholm"). Although Wincing the Night Away had dark undertones drawn from Mercer's personal life, he's got a similar knack for writing beautiful words that don't need to mean anything in particular. Along with its other strong points, Port of Morrow proves he hasn't lost that talent, especially when rhapsodizing on matters of the heart. "Simple Song" and "Fall of '82" score points for sharp, nostalgic description, but "September" is the real winner, a straightforward stunner of stumbling affection with a shining pearl of a couplet buried within: "Love is the ink in the well/ When her body writes."
Despite all the hullabaloo about band members getting "fired," the fact is that Mercer isn't a member of the Shins-- he is the Shins, and he always has been. In a recent interview, he expressed his frustration over how to represent that specificity: "Bands I really loved were these auteurs who presented themselves as bands-- Neutral Milk Hotel, the Lilys-- and I just felt, 'Why am I not allowed to do that?'" Consider Port of Morrow, then, the results of an auteur's accepting that role while having a load of fun with his friends in order to realize it. Comeback stories don't get much better than that. | 2012-03-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-03-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / Aural Apothecary | March 19, 2012 | 8.4 | 64edcefa-ccae-4f6a-a802-7fada1f21f2e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On his third release as the genre-bending alter ego Diane Coffee, Shaun Fleming explores the trap of online intimacy. | On his third release as the genre-bending alter ego Diane Coffee, Shaun Fleming explores the trap of online intimacy. | Diane Coffee: Internet Arms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diane-coffee-internet-arms/ | Internet Arms | Internet Arms is Shaun Fleming’s third release as the genre-bending alter ego Diane Coffee. The former Foxygen drummer is concerned with digital intimacy—the unbounded sharing that we do under social media’s watchful eye. That’s rich, raw material, and out of it, Fleming is sometimes able to spin a luminous and insightful song. On the title track, he paints the internet as a toxic lover blackmailing you into staying put—“I've got memory of all your history,” he taunts. It’s a far-flung idea—the internet as manipulative partner—made hauntingly realistic by Fleming's insightful characterization.
If only the album were made of more moments like these. But just as often, Fleming veers into pop sloganeering that has nothing to do with his theme. On the pulsing synth-rock opener “Not Ready to Go,” Fleming describes a situation worth walking away from —“Holding onto someone who’s giving you next to nothing”—his voice nearly breaking in the upper heights of his impressive range. It’s a sharp song, and on this and a few others (“Like a Child Does,” “Stuck in Your Saturday Night”), he successfully follows the map drawn by pop pioneer Robyn and used by other smart synth-pop acts like Christine and the Queens. These new inspirations guide Fleming into more promising territory than the glam-rock cos-play of Everybody’s a Good Dog. But they provide no real insight into intimacy, digital or otherwise.
Elsewhere, he falls back impressions of late ‘70s icons. On “Work It” Fleming borrows the *Stop Making Sense-*era yelps of David Byrne to bark commands at the listener: “You better take it, get it while the getting good,” followed by a triplet of phoned-in encouragement, “It’s worth it, you’ve earned it, just work it.” On the next song, “Good Luck,” Fleming cuts into his own encouraging words with “You won't get far if you're only working hard, here in America.” The vaudevillian instrumentation adds a cheery dash of nihilism, as do the flourishes that unexpectedly push the song into rock opera land (Fleming recently played King Herod in the Signature Theater’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar).
Fleming’s flair for the dramatic sometimes pushes into overdrive, replacing incisive writing with tricks. “Simulation,” “Lights Off,” and “Internet Arms” rely too heavily on digital manipulation to make their points, trying to coerce insight and meaning from Pro Tools plug-ins instead of incisive writing. Roboticizing his voice to intone “Ain't no problems in my simulation/A state of vegetation/In my personal isolation/Ain't no worries in my simulation” is affect overkill and doesn’t help answer the question he lays out later on in the lyrics — “Who am I without my simulation?”
Ultimately, Fleming doesn’t venture far enough into what disturbs him about our hyper-connected lives to come out of the other side of it with something interesting to say. Ignoring the wisdom in the old expression “The only way out is through,” a distracted Fleming instead attempts to circumnavigate his anxiety about the internet and observe it from the sidelines. He raises questions he doesn’t bother trying to answer and fails to address the many ways we empower online inauthenticity simply by being online and maintaining social media accounts. Addressing those hypocrisies would’ve made for a richer album. As it is, Fleming substitutes theatrics for insight. | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 24, 2019 | 6.4 | 64faf325-4d65-4ea0-aecb-d52d5d659c13 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
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 stellar rise of Miranda Lambert with her second album, one that laid the groundwork for an artist destined for country superstardom. | 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 stellar rise of Miranda Lambert with her second album, one that laid the groundwork for an artist destined for country superstardom. | Miranda Lambert: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miranda-lambert-crazy-ex-girlfriend/ | Crazy Ex-Girlfriend | Miranda Lambert will not tolerate beach balls at her shows. She has her reasons. The finer points change with each retelling, but here’s the gist: She’s opening for Kenny Chesney somewhere in Pennsylvania—“No beach close to here, not even a grain of sand,” she recalls—when someone in the audience lobs something buoyant and spherical toward the stage. It collides with her mic stand, busts open her lip. From that moment on, Lambert vowed to carry a small pink razor blade on stage at all times. “I’m very sorry for whoever’s ball this is,” she says in one of many videos that makes its way to YouTube in the coming years. “But it’s gonna die now.”
It’s a funny tradition—perfect fodder for radio interviews and inside jokes among fans. It also symbolizes some of the qualities that have made Lambert a proud loner in 21st-century country: how she insists on playing by her own rules, how the easy-going customs that work for, say, Kenny Chesney aren’t gonna fly for her. It also happens to be a good example of the way justice is served in her music. After all, the song she remembers singing in that moment is “More Like Her,” one of the gentler tracks on her 2007 album Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The women who narrate its other songs take to their antagonists with firearms and vengeance; they scour parking lots looking for license plates and descend on unsuspecting creeps like brutal storms. She might sound at peace but there’s a good chance the singer of “More Like Her” was already thinking about buying that razor blade.
Lambert grew up in Lindale, Texas, a small town where her parents worked together as private investigators and eventually worked on Paula Jones’ 1997 sexual harassment case against Bill Clinton. For a few years, Lambert shared the house with women seeking refuge from abusive relationships. She heard their stories and paid close attention to how men weaponized their power, both in the private and public eye. Her memories from childhood involve frank discussions about her parents’ business—“Our dinner conversations were about divorce cases and who was cheatin’ on who,” she would reflect—and picturesque evenings on the porch with her father, perched on his lap with an acoustic guitar, singing country songs.
Lambert started writing and performing at an early age. She sang in the school choir, which didn’t exist until she petitioned to start one. When she was 18, she released a self-titled album with songs pitched between precocious breakup ballads and hometown anthems designed to get the crowd on her side at the local honky-tonks (titles include “Texas Pride” and “Texas As Hell”). She followed the album by auditioning, at the age of 19, for the USA Network’s Nashville Star, a country reboot of American Idol. She was effortlessly charming and became a fan-favorite but Lambert was playing the long game, already thinking from a business angle. “I thought if I could make it through the original song night, then I could get a publishing deal out of it,” she explained to the Dallas Morning News.
She didn’t win—she came in third—but she did make it to the original song night, where she debuted a ballad she wrote with her father called “Greyhound Bound for Nowhere.” Before her performance, she explained that people tend to not take her seriously: “I haven’t been through a lot of tough times in my life,” she concedes, noting that her songs are inspired by the stories she heard in her hometown, the people she came across, the patterns she observed—not necessarily her own experiences. “I’m gonna sing a song that’s about a woman who’s having an affair with a married person,” she says sweetly into the camera with her thick Southern drawl.
“Greyhound Bound for Nowhere” would eventually appear on Kerosene, Lambert’s 2005 major-label debut. Set to a muted Southern rock chord progression, its depictions of misery and broken dreams weren’t exactly what the suits at Epic Nashville had in mind for her. Lambert insisted on writing the album herself; they wanted a hit. They started doing what major labels do, which is supplying material written by powerhouse songwriters with proven records of chart success. Lambert knew her originals were better. “I listened to 20 songs,” she explained to Texas Monthly, “and the label people said, ‘OK, you need to say yes to at least one song, because you’re starting to hurt people’s feelings.’”
She says yes to one song. Otherwise, the album is written entirely by Lambert, although the brilliant title track—still among her signature songs—ends up with a Steve Earle writing credit due to similarities with his outlaw anthem “Feel Alright.” It’s a great record that helped cement a loyal fanbase. But the industry wasn’t totally on board. “I don’t get played a lot on country radio, and I don’t understand why,” she said to Texas Monthly, a few years later, despite the album’s extraordinary sales.
There are a few reasons. Lambert attributed her early success to songs like Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” a barnburner that paved the way for hits by women who didn’t follow the path of Faith Hill’s breathless love songs or Shania Twain’s arena pop crossovers. She was also influenced by the Chicks, who followed their muse past the point where country radio was willing to follow. Lambert’s songs were catchy and immediately identifiable to her audience but they owed more to the spirit of classic country than most burgeoning artists at the time. And country radio remains a tough format for women—let alone ones with mercilessly upbeat anthems about burning men’s houses down. (At the time of Kerosene’s release, the No. 1 country single was “Bless the Broken Road” by Rascal Flatts, a song that would later be covered by a contemporary Christian band who barely had to change a word.)
If Lambert felt deterred, she didn’t show it. The follow-up, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, was even more unsparing and uncompromising than Kerosene, louder and tougher. There are three cover songs, all written by women: Gillian Welch’s “Dry Town,” Patty Griffin’s “Getting Ready,” and Carlene Carter’s “Easy From Now On,” a ballad closely associated with Emmylou Harris. Most of the songs take place in the moments immediately after heartbreak, consumed by a need for revenge—“He wants a fight, well now he’s got one,” she sings, armed at the door with a shotgun—or a rebound. “I made a point of not mixin’ love and pleasure in my life,” she sings in “Guilty in Here,” pledging to stick to that divide.
Here is how Miranda Lambert’s best songs work. The verses arrive as uninterrupted trains of thought, her words flowing in a speak-sing cadence that glides through turbulent emotions and complex rhyme schemes that seem to come second-nature. She has an edge to her voice and a preference for simple, intuitive melodies that help sell ominous lines like, “Well, it’s half-past-ten, another six-pack in/And I can feel the rumble like a cold black wind.” But she also sings despairingly about more vulnerable scenes, about love letters on wet paper, leaving you to imagine the tears falling and the texture in your hand.
All this work below the surface allows her choruses to hit like exclamatory onomatopoeias in a comic book. She has a knack for catchphrases: Is it guilty in here or is it just me? He ain’t seen me crazy yet! Country music is built for hooks like these, but Lambert has a way of pacing herself, furnishing her songs subtly so that she never seems like she’s pandering. As soon as she starts railing against her ex’s current flame using a “stitch/pitch” rhyme scheme, you know where it’s going. But it’s how she gets there, the little twists in her delivery, that keep you entertained. Her songs ramp up so naturally you feel like you’re riding shotgun with her, egging her on until you’re shielding your eyes.
If this kind of writing aligned her with the outlaw country legends she was raised on, the glossy production aimed directly for radio play in the mid-2000s. These songs practically bounce from the speaker, bursting in the air like confetti. It wasn’t always to her taste. “I love raw albums,” she said. “I’d love to record an album in a garage and for it to sound like an old Gary Stewart album, without a bunch of overdubbed this and that. But when you’re in the mainstream, you’ve got to fit in. You’ve got to get your foot in the door first.”
Even as she pushed for radio play, Lambert made sure her songs had depth. In the middle of the album, her accompanists step away for a series of ballads that form the greatest work of her early career. The barroom lament of “Love Letters” showed she could write her own jukebox standards, while “Desperation,” with its gently anxious arrangement and lonesome harmonica part, proved that her stories rang true even when she lowered the stakes. “Complicated words slippin’ off of your tongue and ain’t one of them the truth,” she sings, and it’s one of the most damning accusations on a record that begins with threats of a gunfight.
While she could have spent her career racking up the body count with more songs like “Gunpowder and Lead,” her first top 10 country hit, Lambert refused to be pigeonholed. “I feel like I was getting dangerously close to being shoved in that box of ‘She’s that crazy girl who kills people in her songs,’” she confessed to The Los Angeles Times before the release of her follow-up album, Revolution, a commercial breakthrough and creative reset. In its songs, love is still full of pain and deceit and people are not to be trusted. She covered John Prine at the end of the record because she figured he’d agree with this outlook. Like Prine, she saw the span of life as ugly enough retribution. “I kill them a little more softly this time around,” is how she put it.
The success of Revolution kickstarted a prolific and fruitful decade of music. She made a full-blown country-pop blockbuster (2014’s Platinum) and that raw, live-sounding album she dreamed about (2016’s The Weight of These Wings). She was in and out of the tabloids for high-profile relationships; she has had success and failure with country radio. She started a dog sanctuary and a clothing line. She also founded the supergroup Pistol Annies with her friends Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, a band that remains one of country music’s most reliable side projects.
She found stability, the missing thing that keeps the characters on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in motion, the hunger that makes it sound so empowering and alive, years later. I think about “Desperation” and the last line of each chorus: “I’m still desperate for you.” Like all the songs, it’s an attempt to describe a sudden surge, a feeling at its peak. Desperation fades; anger subsides; heartbreak heals. Lambert sings knowing she’s got something up her sleeve for whatever comes next.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Columbia | August 23, 2020 | 8 | 64fce7c3-6612-47a2-a90d-694b1b1808cb | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Los Angeles "doom folk" singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe may white-out her eyes and show a fondness for gothic and Greek typefaces, but Apokalypsis shows there is more than meets the eye. | Los Angeles "doom folk" singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe may white-out her eyes and show a fondness for gothic and Greek typefaces, but Apokalypsis shows there is more than meets the eye. | Chelsea Wolfe: Apokalypsis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15893-chelsea-wolfe-apokalypsis/ | Apokalypsis | The image that Chelsea Wolfe projects dovetails with the general aesthetic put forth by her label, Pendu NYC. Granted, it'd take the tinniest of ears to conflate Wolfe's music with the witch-house stylings of Mater Suspiria Vision or White Ring. Also, while her music is caustic and challenging in its own way, the semi-industrial loop-heavy aTelecine runs laps around Wolfe in that department. Still, the image of her on the cover of Apokalypsis with whited-out eyes, coupled with her fondness for gothic and Greek typefaces, and choice of cover material (particularly her take on Burzum's "Black Spell of Destruction"), makes her a perfect fit for Pendu's combination of high art/fashion/horror/goth signifiers (particularly of an early-to-mid-1970s, European vintage). The first track on Apokalypsis ("Primal/Carnal") is a near-perfect apotheosis of this entire ideal, as Wolfe-- underneath a layer of static and fuzz that ages the clip by a good 20 years-- growls and gurgles like a woman literally possessed. Once you move past this horrific introduction, though, Apokalypsis turns out to be a kind of book completely different from what its cover promises.
The title of the album refers to the Greek root of the world "apocalypse," the root meaning "lifting of the veil." Folks not enamored with the way Apokalypsis was recorded-- an improvement only when compared to Wolfe's first album, The Grime and the Glow-- might feel like the "lo-fi" vibe on some of these tracks is one veil too many, but that choice helps as much as it hinders. On "Mer", the first proper song on the album, the hazy film lends Wolfe's halting, fragmented thoughts an air of expectant mystery that's bolstered by the song's pensive rhythm. That veneer of mystery is less beneficial on "Demons", a straightforward track that's as close to actually sounding like a Sister-era Sonic Youth outtake as anything made in the 21st century. Wolfe's uncanny mimicry of things musically goth-like doesn't end there. She's able to approximate the general pallor and stuttering sample-based rhythms of Dummy-era Portishead (on "Movie Screen"), makes like a superfan of Zola Jesus' The Spoils (on "The Wasteland"), apes early PJ Harvey (on the fittingly titled "Moses"), and even recalls the icy allure and off-kilter harmonies of the Knife (on "Friedrichshain"). It speaks favorably to Wolfe's abilities that she's able to approximate all these different styles successfully, but these tracks don't say much about who Wolfe actually is.
The aforementioned "Mer" might take its cues from performers like Harvey or other like-minded singer/songwriters, but those potential influences are more fully integrated with Wolfe's actual voice. The same goes for "Tracks (Tall Bodies)", a haunting ballad that features Wolfe imbuing a potentially heavy-handed line-- "We could be two straight lines/ In a crooked world"-- with enough pathos to avoid any possible pitfalls. Apokalypsis' crowning achievement, however, is the album's penultimate track, "Pale on Pale". It's a turgid and powerful, metal-like processional fronted by lilting Gregorian-type chants that eventually turn shrill and cacophonous by the time the seven-minute track reaches its conclusion. Its black-mass ambiance (coupled with its de facto coda, the ambient howl-laden "To the Forest, Towards the Sea") is the closest that Apokalypsis comes to realizing the foreboding, frightening airs that Wolfe's image and presentation promise. It's also, not coincidentally, the closest that Chelsea Wolfe comes to sounding less like something else, and more like herself. | 2011-10-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-10-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Pendu Sound | October 6, 2011 | 7.3 | 64fd92cd-c9eb-431c-ba18-e43a5d3a8d98 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
The sense of control Margaret Chardiet wields over her nasty, fire-breathing music provides a sense of structure that makes this very out-there music easy to grasp for those outside of noise music circles. Her work is marked by a push-and-push-harder tension between pummeling rhythms, swaths of power-electronics static, and her impressive, chilling howl. | The sense of control Margaret Chardiet wields over her nasty, fire-breathing music provides a sense of structure that makes this very out-there music easy to grasp for those outside of noise music circles. Her work is marked by a push-and-push-harder tension between pummeling rhythms, swaths of power-electronics static, and her impressive, chilling howl. | Pharmakon: Bestial Burden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19871-pharmakon-bestial-burden/ | Bestial Burden | Around this time last year, Margaret Chardiet almost died. Days before the noise artist was supposed to go on her first European tour, doctors discovered a cyst so large it almost brought on organ failure. The subsequent surgery and healing process was long and intense. During the weeks of bed rest, a dying man lay next to her in the hospital, crying out for his daughter to join his side. For whatever reason, she never showed up.
In the rearview, Chardiet’s situation sounds like hell, and so does her latest album as Pharmakon, Bestial Burden. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, she described the theme of her second LP for Brooklyn-based label Sacred Bones as “[a] desire to show the body as a lump of flesh and cells that mutate and fail you and betray you—this very banal, unimportant, grotesque aspect of ourselves.” It’s a grim focus on the corporeal, a lens that Chardiet has projected her nightmarish music through before; on last year’s Abandon, the roaring final track was gruesomely titled “Crawling on Bruised Knees”, the cover art a shot of Chardiet’s lower torso covered in maggots. On the cover of Bestial Burden, she literally turns the inside outwards, with grisly-looking butcher’s-shop organs placed accordingly on her upper torso and chicken talons glued to her fingers.
Musically, Bestial Burden is a considerable step forwards for Chardiet, a feat that’s more impressive when considering that the genre she works in doesn’t necessarily call for artistic growth. Before releasing Abandon, Chardiet established her presence with a run of small-press releases similar to many noise musicians past and present, so that record wasn’t so much her debut as it was an introduction to a somewhat wider audience. If the depth-charge blasts of Abandon showcased an exciting emerging voice in experimental music, Bestial Burden elevates Chardiet to an even more accomplished plane. The sense of control that she wields over this nasty, fire-breathing music—a push-and-push-harder tension between pummeling rhythms, swaths of power-electronics static, and her impressive, chilling howl—provides a sense of structure that makes this very out-there music easy to grasp for those outside of noise music circles.
Still, chaos reigns on Bestial Burden, an album that sounds like anything but a safe space to inhabit. Chardiet’s steadier focus on rhythm provides a sound structure nonetheless annihilated by jet-engine roars, bursts of mechanical heat, and ear-bleeding screeches. Paradoxically, the harshest and most alienating moments on Bestial Burden arrive when the record is at its quietest: album opener “Vacuum” practically serves as a portal into the record’s landscape, as Chardiet’s vocal hyperventilation is backed by a undulating fuzzy drone that rubs against the ears like a drill to the teeth. “Primitive Struggle” lays wet, heaving coughs over a heartbeat-like rhythm that eventually grows to an insistent thud, bleeding beautifully into the death-march stomp of “Autoimmune”. By turning the human body’s failures into rhythmic tools at her disposal, Chardiet has created the truest form of body horror.
Fittingly, her voice is the album's most expressive instrument, at times recalling black metal’s pitchless burn. While her vocal approach on Abandon came across as sprawling and freeform in its presentation, Chardiet takes the shape of a menacing furnace on Bestial Burden, giving off blasts of heat and steam that are deeply felt even as they recede into the darkness. In the aforementioned interview, Chardiet groused about the reception her difficult music receives: “When I put that out to someone and the only thing they can say is, ‘Oh look, it’s a girl screaming,’ I want to fucking kill them because I’m literally pouring my heart and soul out, being so vulnerable.” On Bestial Burden, her voice casts jagged, threatening shadows, but on a record that concerns itself with bodily disintegration, Chardiet’s forcefulness is a necessary human constant.
Her most surprising performance arrives on the album’s closing title track, seven minutes of pulsing tones that culminates in tangled noise and mutated vocal strangulation. Before “Bestial Burden”’s satisfyingly destructive conclusion, though, Chardiet expresses herself in a way that stands apart from the rest of the six-track record; her voice sways and swerves with disorienting clarity, sounding almost psychedelic with every half-spoken dispatch. Chardiet has played it straight previously when it comes to her vocals—her cover of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”, featured on Sacred Bones’ 2013 compilation Todo Muere Vol 4, was surprisingly faithful to the original—but the wavy, near-meditative form of “Bestial Burden” is, at least for those who just arrived to the Pharmakon party a year ago, unexplored territory. As a whole, Bestial Burden highlights Chardiet’s ability to re-draw the boundaries of her own artistic approach, ripping out its guts and creating something new out of the decaying remains. | 2014-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 15, 2014 | 8.4 | 64ffb959-559c-42b2-89b1-bf473c1810da | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The team-up between two West Coast rappers suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts. | The team-up between two West Coast rappers suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts. | YG / Mozzy: Kommunity Service | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yg-mozzy-kommunity-service/ | Kommunity Service | There are times on *Kommunity Service—*which pairs the Compton-bred YG with Mozzy, the dizzyingly prolific rapper from Sacramento—that the duo sounds wonderfully intertwined: finishing one another’s thoughts on hooks, sharing space in verses, Mozzy’s voice coiled around YG’s doubled ad-libs. Taut at its start and frustratingly indistinct near its middle, the album suggests an inspired combination, but it pays off only in intermittent bursts.
Kommunity Service runs just 28 minutes, and its songs take the same shape in miniature. With one exception, they’re in full swing within 10 seconds, and none reach the three-and-a-half minute mark. And so, when the album works—as on its far superior front half—it evokes the same feelings as a smart, seedy DJ set (its release is well-timed to nationwide strip club reopenings.) This is never truer than at the very beginning, when a quick four-count gives way to an audacious flip of “Wanksta” and Mozzy interpolating 50 Cent’s flow. And G Herbo’s inclusion on the subsequent song, “Dangerous,” is especially shrewd: The Chicago rapper works so well at faster tempos that his vocal alone seems to propel the record forward.
Despite its brevity and that breathless opening run, the album is poorly paced. The Herbo feature is followed soon after by the slinking “MAD,” which features Young M.A and seems handmade for the New Yorker, down to its slightly lower BPM, and “Vibe With You,” with Ty Dolla $ign vocals silky enough to soften a YG verse that boils down, very literally, to “I fuck with you.” That trio of collaborations, plus the “Wanksta” flip and the irresistibly sinister “Bompton to Oak Park,” comprise the A-side and are diminished severely by what follows: a sullen cut plagued by a regrettable A Boogie hook; Tyga on his bottle service autopilot; and a posse cut where all five rappers operate on shootaround half-speed.
That losing streak is finally snapped by the penultimate track, “Bite Down,” the one here that sounds most like it was pulled from Mozzy’s hard drive. It has all the hallmarks of his best work: melancholy major-key piano, a verse that lurches from the spiritual to the uncomfortably corporeal, mid-period 2Pac without the world domination bent. The song, complete with Mozzy’s charming, slightly atonal hook, is superb despite a YG verse that is merely OK; a mild disappointment considering that some of YG’s best writing comes when it sounds as if he’s trying to slot neatly onto Mozzy albums. In fact, while the production frequently reminds more of Mozzy’s LPs than YG’s Def Jam affairs, there is little of the paranoia that the latter so often mine to chilling effect, and which would seem to be squarely in Mozzy’s wheelhouse.
It is almost never wise to draw too many conclusions from a record’s cover—in this instance a wonderful recreation of one of the posters for Belly, the 1998 movie that stars Nas and DMX. But there are echos: the contemporaries and creative equals with wildly disparate national profiles, whose public personas would suggest music far different from one another’s but who are actually at their best when orbiting the other’s supposed territory. While Kommunity Service only hints at what a true synthesis of those artists could be, at times the implication is enough.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mozzy / 4Hunnid / Empire | May 25, 2021 | 6.6 | 65011a11-b422-48dd-8c8b-8232cfce8d64 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Of all Jakub Alexander's pursuits and side projects, his work as "low level" ambient act Heathered Pearls is designed to give him a break from his personal anxieties. While tension clearly fed into Loyal, it doesn't give much back out, dealing instead in gentle mood shifts that crystallize over the course of the record. | Of all Jakub Alexander's pursuits and side projects, his work as "low level" ambient act Heathered Pearls is designed to give him a break from his personal anxieties. While tension clearly fed into Loyal, it doesn't give much back out, dealing instead in gentle mood shifts that crystallize over the course of the record. | Heathered Pearls: Loyal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17478-loyal/ | Loyal | Jakub Alexander does a lot of different things, which is probably why he's so stressed out. He founded "electronically made music" label Moodgadget, performs A&R for Ghostly International, curates the music selection on graphic artist Scott Hansen's (a.k.a. Tycho) art and lifestyle blog ISO50, and records and performs as a DJ and musician under his own name and several others. As Heathered Pearls, the Polish-born musician recently released his full-length debut Loyal, a low level (his preferred term for "ambient", which he associates with the decidedly less hip-sounding "pure mood") album designed "as a mental break from my personal anxieties." And Loyal is a hypnotic record, siphoning in and out of repeated, textured loops that soothingly chafe against each other like fingers performing a head massage.
It's surprising, then, that Alexander practically mandates hooks in the music of the artists he signs to Moodgadget. When discussing the label's recent compilation Expanse at Low Levels with Percussion Lab, he gave some advice to aspiring electronic artists: "If you got a hook and you can write a song and keep it at two-and-a-half minutes long, and I want to hear it over and over, that's going to make me want to email you back." Like most ambient or low-level music-- Tim Hecker's touchstone Ravedeath, 1972, Laurie Spiegel's machine music, and electronic pioneers like Otto Luening-- Loyal is devoid of those hooks in the traditional sense, the tension and release that evokes the visceral reaction of wanting to hear something again and again.
Listening to "Ringing Temple", the album's echoing, urgently polyrhythmic centerpiece that probably draws the most from Alexander's other work as a DJ alongside slow-motion disco outfit Worst Friends and Matthew Dear, there seemed nothing that could have emerged as a hook over its two-and-a-half minutes. Once I watched a teaser video for the song, however, I got it. I played the 45 seconds of geometrically spiraling incandescence over and over again. The visual, which looked a lot like the type of graphic art that saturates ISO50, activated certain pleasure centers that the song's steady repetition hadn't; the experience changed the way I heard much of the album afterward. In that respect, Loyal is similar to Hansen's work, which traffics similar principles of music as a means to aesthetics.
In his review of Tycho's Dive, Joe Colly said the album's downfall was its lack of tension. The same can be said of Loyal: even though the tension and release of Alexander's emotional struggles is part and parcel of the record, the album as a whole is meant to function as a reprieve from his anxiety. "Beach Shelter", which pulses with a low-range that threatens to engulf the track in an abyss of noise, and "Lower Dome", sparkling with synthesizers that might soundtrack interstitial plotting scenes in an 80s heist film, are vaguely disquieting. Still, they find their antitheses in the sweet relief of droning micro-permutations on the six-minute "Raising Our Ashes", and the similar, appropriately named "Docile Touch". Because these mood swings happen over the course of the album, however, they lack the urgency that characterizes a sought-after hook, which would give the album more presence.
That's not to say Loyal would benefit from instant gratification; rather definition. For the last song on the album, veteran Dutch producer Markus Guentner remixes "Lower Dome" to allow a glimpse into what the record might have sounded like if Alexander brought more of his Worst Friends disco sensibility to the table. (According to Heathered Pearls' page on Ghostly International's site, Alexander "always comes back to disco.") Guentner drops in a softly ticking house beat like something weighing on your mind, steadily increasing it in volume, dropping it out, and bringing it back with variegated beats, all with an acute sense of timing. It's not much, but it sharpens the synthesized drift and gives the song more of a purpose and destination. Plus, it's just more fun. And that might be the best way to alleviate stress. | 2013-01-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-01-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | January 9, 2013 | 6.5 | 6501e6a8-cbb8-4470-865b-212f0381addd | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
The Chicago rock band turns in a casual, charmingly low-key set of kitchen-table blues, slow-dance serenades, and unplugged power pop. | The Chicago rock band turns in a casual, charmingly low-key set of kitchen-table blues, slow-dance serenades, and unplugged power pop. | Twin Peaks: Down in Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21724-down-in-heaven/ | Down in Heaven | Twin Peaks don’t seem like the sort of guys who would fork out $1,599 for tickets to the Desert Trip festival. But, given the chance, they’d surely hop the fence. Make all the “Oldchella” cracks you want—there are still a whole lot of young folk who bow before rock ‘n’ roll’s few remaining golden gods, and in three short years, Twin Peaks have proven themselves quick studies in the ways of tradition. In stark defiance of The Who’s “hope I die before I get old” edict, the relaxed, easy-going groove of Down in Heaven suggests this Chicago garage-rock outfit can’t wait to age.
Already, the band seems decades removed from their 2013 debut, Sunken, recorded when they were still teenagers and sounding very much like it—carefree, cocky, and sloppy. The follow-up, 2014’s Wild Onion, tightened up the songcraft, amped up their attack, and spit-shined the production, suggesting aspirations to follow fellow Chi-town miscreants The Orwells down the path of major-label patronage and late-night talk-show appearances. But with Down in Heaven, Twin Peaks have already initiated the rural retreat that most rock bands take only after succumbing to excess, holing themselves up in a friend’s northern Massachusetts studio-house and turning it into a veritable retirement home for early twenty-somethings. The result is a casual, charmingly low-key set of kitchen-table blues, slow-dance serenades, and unplugged power pop. Here, Twin Peaks aren’t so interested in being the life of party as documenting what happens outside of it: the awkward first kisses, the difficult break-up conversations, the sad walks home alone.
It’s a really good look for them. By toning down their sound, Twin Peaks are better able to amplify the sweet/sour tension between honey-voiced vocalists Cadien Lake James and Jack Dolan, and their more acid-tongued compatriot, Clay Frankel. But even as down ‘n’ out diatribes like “Cold Lips” wallow in cruel sentiment (to wit: “you ought to get yourself a shiny gold medal for being the coldest bitch I know”), Down in Heaven exudes a welcoming, wood-panelled warmth. But Twin Peaks take certain liberties with the past, weaving alternate histories into a sound that’s familiar yet peculiar. Their version of the Stones folds the raw blues of Beggars Banquet into the smooth, falsettoed soul of “Beast of Burden”; their definition of cool is equal parts Lou Reed and Tom Petty. And with the recruitment of keyboardist, Colin Croom, Twin Peaks acquire their own Benmont Tench, swaddling beautifully bruised ballads like “Holding Roses” in soothing Hammond tones or guiding the bouncing-ball rhythm of Dolan’s delightful “Getting Better” with playful piano rolls.
Twin Peaks still flash some swagger between their more sensitive moments, though in these cases, it’s harder to parse their personality from their source material: “Keep It Together” is essentially Big Star’s “Mod Lang” dipped in extra T. Rex glitter, while “Butterfly” loads up on Loaded, copping everything from Lou Reed’s streetwise sneer on “Head Held High” to the “ba ba bas” from “Who Loves the Sun” for good measure. While these songs reinforce a definition of garage-rock steeped in impetuous, middle-fingered attitude, Down in Heaven’s more revelatory slow songs remind us that the genre has always been an outlet for misfit romantics to express feelings they’d be too shy and embarrassed to say in person. In other words, it’s a music for neglected nice guys as much as boisterous bad boys. With Down in Heaven, Twin Peaks come off like a Black Lips that would rather drink apple juice instead of their own piss, and seem evermore willing to embrace the idea that they’re actually better at kiss-off ballads than kicked-out jams. | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | May 13, 2016 | 7.2 | 6505ee67-224f-4dfc-ac43-a71f236024cb | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The 18-year-old UK singer-songwriter Declan McKenna has been called a voice of his generation. His major label debut is scattershot, though it includes a Rostam-helmed standout. | The 18-year-old UK singer-songwriter Declan McKenna has been called a voice of his generation. His major label debut is scattershot, though it includes a Rostam-helmed standout. | Declan McKenna: What Do You Think About the Car? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/declan-mckenna-what-do-you-think-about-the-car/ | What Do You Think About the Car? | There’s been such a fuss about Declan McKenna, it’s tempting to wonder if folks were subconsciously confusing his name with the one on Elvis Costello’s birth certificate, Declan MacManus. In early 2015, when McKenna was barely 16, he was already being courted by numerous music-biz types. Later that year, brandishing a loop pedal and a red bandana, the floppy-haired bard won Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition. That contest’s previous winners aren’t household names, but McKenna was soon hailed as the voice of his generation.
McKenna had been uploading jazz-inflected, appealingly ramshackle guitar-pop for a couple of years, name-checking influences from Jeff Buckley to Bach. The song that vaulted him into the arms of the major labels was “Brazil,” which is most interesting for being written, when McKenna was 15, as a condemnation of FIFA then-president Sepp Blatter. The lyrics themselves weren’t so obvious, but they were evocative. McKenna’s pinched vocals, however, sounded like just about every UK indie bloke hype that has come over post-Libertines. Musically, with a twinkling riff over a shambolic four-chord progression, it was also pretty commonplace. Super catchy, though. Viewers of his 2016 solo performance on “Conan” wondered, wrongly but not unreasonably, if the melody was nicked from a song that they used to know.
“Brazil” is one of the best songs on McKenna’s major-label debut album, What Do You Think About the Car?, and also illustrates its shortcomings. Now 18 years old, McKenna really does sound like a voice of a generation (as Lena Dunham once put it). He’s an eloquent champion of progressive social causes who wore a “Give 17 Year Olds the Vote” T-shirt on “Jools Holland,” spars with TV villain Piers Morgan, and speaks out against sexism aimed at his female band members. He grapples with social issues in his lyrics, too. But those lyrics are often forgettably muddled. All this is generally backed by bland Bowie homages that further blur the lines between McKenna and any number of would-be British indie-vaders, from Jake Bugg, Tom Vek, and Jamie T to the Maccabees, the Kooks, and the Vaccines. There’s promise here, but it’s confused.
His message loses strength, in part, because he doesn’t fully commit to it. McKenna has nonchalantly skewered the generational-voice stuff as mere “sensationalism.” And yet the video for “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home,” written after the Bataclan attacks, begins with the voices of young people, talking about their g-g-generation—which they feel is “lost,” but also deeply concerned about racism, homophobia, sexism, and bullying. The song itself, a standout here, if a bit overblown in its Britpop grandeur and vague in its second-person indignation, could benefit from similar clarity.
James Ford, who produced all but two of the tracks, has plenty of experience with a McKenna-like vocal style in his great work across several Arctic Monkeys albums. But an uneasy conflict between ideological progressivism and sonic orthodoxy feels like it’s embedded in the songs. Opener “Humongous” builds up until it’s, well, humongous, but quirky riff aside, it’s not much more fun than when those Gen Xers in Oasis got similarly bloated. The subject matter is all critically important— “Paracetamol” was inspired by the suicide of transgender teen Leelah Alcorn, “Bethlehem” grapples with religious hypocrisy, and “Isombard” depicts a FOX News-like TV host—but that isn’t necessarily evident without research. One of the standard lines on McKenna seems to be: He doesn’t just sing memorable songs, he’s also intelligent. I completely agree he’s intelligent. I’d like to remember more of his songs.
Unfortunately, but tellingly, the easiest-to-recall moments aren’t musical. They’re spoken-word snippets, where McKenna seems to be sending up his voice-of-the-youth rep by taking it very literally. What Do You Think About the Car? opens with the voices of children—McKenna’s sister asking the title phrase in audio from an old home movie, the four-year-old proto-troubadour chirping back cutely, “I think it’s really good and now I’m going to sing my new album now.” A track later, “Brazil” ends with a young boy’s voice from a popular meme. “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home” has a children’s choir and closes with one of its members laughing about not wanting to come home.
There are aspects of McKenna’s rise that can look weirdly puffed-up. His YouTube channel claimed the “Brazil” lyrics got him investigated by the FBI—a joke, he said when asked. Rumors spread that he’d been chased by an unbelievable 40 record labels—a misconstrued exaggeration, he has said, though the stat persists. Surprisingly, Columbia didn’t pack fidget spinners with the vinyl.
But that McKenna is far worthier of your time than Jake Bugg isn’t in doubt. McKenna happily gushes about musical free thinkers like St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens, and the most hopeful sign he might join their ranks is the finale, “Listen to Your Friends.” Co-written and produced by Rostam, it’s part country-pop lope, part artful cello shading. Calling for youth solidarity against atavistic forces of shallow ignorance, it’s trenchant, convincing, and stunning. McKenna concludes here, “Please trust in me.” Despite a scattershot and often lackluster first outing, he has at least earned that trust. | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | August 1, 2017 | 5.9 | 65070dbc-ea86-4496-9f76-bfcd075d5a81 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
A key template for almost two decades of mainstream rock is reissued with a new mix, extra songs, and a DVD of the group's "MTV Unplugged" show. | A key template for almost two decades of mainstream rock is reissued with a new mix, extra songs, and a DVD of the group's "MTV Unplugged" show. | Pearl Jam: Ten: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12873-ten-deluxe-edition/ | Ten: Deluxe Edition | Ten may be classic rock today, but it's easy to underestimate how radical Pearl Jam sounded back in 1991, even with Nirvana ascendant. After several long years of hair metal dominance, here was a band that could jam stadium-large, texture their sound darkly and densely, and explode the blues-rock template. Here was a frontman with an entirely new stage presence, whose voice strained hard for sincerity and whose songwriting expressed grave self-reckoning without resorting to easy sentiments or self-glorifying choruses. Against the odds-- as well as against the band's wishes, apparently-- their debut became a phenomenon, an alt-rock figurehead as crucial as Nevermind in ushering in and defining the parameters for mainstream rock. Vedder's self-doubts ran as deep as Cobain's, but he expressed them bluntly and directly rather than poetically and obscurely. Oh and also, he's still alive.
Deeply invested in the cathartic possibilities of punk and classic rock, Pearl Jam seemingly made music as a form of self-therapy, an idea that took hold with nearly a decade of alt-rock acts to come. The band is routinely blamed for the self-gratifying Stone Temple Pilots, Creeds, and Nicklebacks that followed Ten, but the band naturally never set out to remake rock music in its own image. Suspicious of the hedonism of the arena rock that preceded them, Pearl Jam were a solemn band, and Ten sounds nothing if not entirely serious about animating Vedder's self-doubts. At times, it's a bit overwrought ("I don't question our existence/ I just question our modern needs"), but the earnestness with which Vedder sang and the band played these songs belies the decade's reputation as a period of pervasive irony. Ultimately, the 1990s wouldn't have been so bad if Pearl Jam's followers hadn't aped their self-seriousness so relentlessly.
Nevertheless, Ten remains impressive and occasionally moving 18 years later, even gentrified with a shiny reissue. The public perception of the album is watered down thanks mainly to the excision of "Alive", "Jeremy", and "Even Flow" as singles. The latter two may be the album's least remarkable tracks: "Jeremy" is the most pat Freudian psychodrama on an album full of them, and "Evenflow" romanticizes homelessness as spiritually transcendent. But "Alive" remains potent not only because Vedder touches on some seriously transgressive shit here (dead fathers, hints at incest, survivor guilt), but mostly because the band rock the hell out of that coda.
Today, Ten lives and dies by its album tracks, and while there are a few clunkers, most are pretty ballsy in their disdain for expectations. Granted, as a new band with few realistic prospects for the kind of success they quickly achieved, Pearl Jam were working with a very different set of expectations than the ones retroactively assigned to them. On songs like "Once", with its insistent breakdowns, and "Black", with strangely dramatic vocalizations, there's a hardscrabble dynamic that the band would be unable to capture on subsequent releases. "Why Go" is ferocious in its outrage, with Vedder delivering his most pained vocals, and Stone Gossard and Mike McCready match him on every song, translating Vedder's howls into messy, edge-of-the-precipice solos and paint-peeling riffs like the one that anchors "Deep".
In addition to the original album as produced by Rick Parashar and mixed by Tim Palmer, the new reissue includes a second disc, titled Ten Redux, that includes a new mix by Brendan O'Brien. A few of these new versions appeared on 2004's best-of Rearviewmirror, and O'Brien, who has worked with Pearl Jam on most of their subsequent albums, brings Vedder's ad libs to the forefront, sharpens some of the guitar riffs, and generally cleans up the murkiness. Sounding like 2005 rather than 1991, Ten Redux misses the point: The album's murkiness was one of its chief attractions, its flawed spontaneity feeding the songs' of-the-moment intensity. Ultimately, these new versions have less to do with Pearl Jam's music than with O'Brien's superfandom.
Ten Redux closes with a paltry six bonus tracks. "2,000 Mile Blues" is atrocious Jimi worship, "Evil Little Goat" is Vedder's best Jim Morrison impersonation, and neither "Breath" (here retitled "Breath and a Scream") nor "State of Love and Trust" sound as vital here as they did on the Singles soundtrack. These tracks are obviously intended not to overlap with 2003's Lost Dogs: Rarities and B-Sides, but flipsides like "Dirty Frank" and "Yellow Ledbetter" were surprisingly popular satellites orbiting Ten, played often on radio stations that didn't typically delve that deep into any artist's catalog and shouted at concerts by fans who weren't that fanatic. Their absence limits the reissue, creating an incomplete portrait of the band in its earliest days.
Ten deserved better than Ten Redux and the paltry bonus tracks. Fortunately, the reissue also includes a DVD of Pearl Jam's 1992 performance on "MTV Unplugged". The fashions are of course dated (nice fuzzy hat, Jeff Ament) and Vedder's stool-bound intensity can be fairly ridiculous, but the DVD is a useful and entertaining document of their intense live sets. Thanks to the tight rhythms of drummer Dave Abbruzzese and bass player Ament, the songs lose little of their momentum in this setting, which handily showcases the guitar interplay between Gossard and McCready. But this is Vedder's show-- a live, public debut for his idiosyncrasies. Taking the stage in a tight jacket and backwards baseball cap, he gradually unleashes himself during the show, first letting his hair down and then eventually losing the jacket. By show's end, he's balancing precariously on his stool and scrawling PRO CHOICE!!! on his arms with a Sharpie. Pearl Jam may have shunned the spotlight, but they were born showmen. | 2009-04-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic / Legacy | April 3, 2009 | 6.7 | 6508663f-6db8-4ae0-8d7d-b06456aa7a82 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Julia Holter's first LP-- an album of distant, breathy voices; grainy sound collages; and heavy atmosphere with nearly no release-- is a record committed to itself as a project, one that calls to mind the arty, austere work of Laurie Anderson, Grouper, and Meredith Monk. | Julia Holter's first LP-- an album of distant, breathy voices; grainy sound collages; and heavy atmosphere with nearly no release-- is a record committed to itself as a project, one that calls to mind the arty, austere work of Laurie Anderson, Grouper, and Meredith Monk. | Julia Holter: Tragedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15932-julia-holter/ | Tragedy | It's almost unfortunate that Tragedy-- an album of distant, breathy voices; grainy sound collages; and heavy atmosphere with nearly no release-- came out now, in late 2011, if for no other reason that it sounds so contemporary. Younger bands making cool underground music have become goth-curious for the first time in probably 20 years, and the tendency to filter all "pop" hooks through the funhouses mirrors of "avant-garde" production techniques is so commonplace that clarity-- a voice spared from way too much reverb, for example-- has become the exception instead of the rule. Tragedy-- Julia Holter's first full-length-- is one of "those records," but it's also more: more sonically detailed, more attentive to its compositions, and more clever and varied about its use of grayscale. Holter isn't just holding a Russian icon painting in the air and cranking the echo. In turn, it's a record with more integrity than a lot of its peers, a record committed to itself as a project but also exemplary as a summary of several trends in contemporary underground music now.
If "integrity" sounds like an old-fashioned argument, well, it is. Holter's work here rhymes not only with artists as disparate as Zola Jesus and Grouper (or even a bad-dream version of Julianna Barwick), but with the quasi-classical, quasi-medieval sounds of 4AD bands circa the mid-1980s or a tradition of adventurous female artists like Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk-- arty music that tends toward a kind of austere, asexual mystery.
Holter uses plenty of synthesizers, but also field recordings and percussion that sounds like rattling chains, a blend of sounds that register as obviously "unnatural" and ones that register as almost tactile. Long passages of the record have no beats or vocals, and some of the more song-oriented tracks-- "Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art" or "So Lillies", for example-- are structured as ambient passages that seem like they're trying to organically slip into their "pop" moments, then slip out of them as the track comes to a close.
The result is that Tragedy is a continuous experience that I've enjoyed best front-to-back instead of in parts-- a strength for when you have time and patience, a weakness when you don't. (And there's no ambiguity, I don't think, that Holter wants it that way: The first track is called "Introduction", the fifth is called "Interlude", and the last is called "Tragedy Finale".) I first heard Holter's music a few years ago, when a friend played me Monika Enterprise's 4 Women No Cry compilation, and her contributions there were more contained and mixtape-able-- it's a mode I think she can work in but chooses not to here.
As a general rule, I try and avoid album concepts, especially when it gives the album weight it doesn't earn elsewhere. Tragedy, for example, is based on a 2,439-year-old Greek play by Euripedes-- just try and make it seem unimportant after that. Holter has made a dreamy, intense album that aligns with a variety of traditions but, like a lot of great contemporary music, synthesizes them in novel or at least artful ways.
What gets me about it most, though, is its atmosphere and consistency: Sounds I can't identify resonate in the background; drones underpin entire songs without ever intruding. Still, I know Holter has made this possible, and that's what makes me trust her-- that's what makes me acknowledge the album's integrity. Results with other listeners may vary, but one of my favorite moments of Tragedy is listening to the murmuring, disjointed voices fade out in the album's last 30 seconds: That's when I realize how unified it is, hanging like a storm cloud that barely opens up. | 2011-10-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Leaving | October 19, 2011 | 8 | 650b95ca-7254-4c3d-90a8-c4478104b8fa | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
A Portuguese singer and a Spanish guitarist (and one-time Rosalía collaborator) pair up to translate fado icon Amália Rodrigues’ songs into subtly experimental contemporary forms. | A Portuguese singer and a Spanish guitarist (and one-time Rosalía collaborator) pair up to translate fado icon Amália Rodrigues’ songs into subtly experimental contemporary forms. | Lina / Raül Refree: Lina_Raül Refree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lina-raul-refree-lina-raul-refree/ | Lina_Raül Refree | There’s something satisfyingly audacious about Lina_Raül Refree, the debut album from Portuguese singer Lina and one-time Rosalía collaborator Raül Refree. Lina’s ambitions for the project were “to do something different with fado,” brave enough given the genre’s cultural status in her homeland. To do so she recruited Refree, a Barcelona guitarist and fado newcomer, to cover songs associated with Amália Rodrigues, a singer so iconic that the Portuguese government declared three days of mourning when she died in October 1999.
Lina was attracted to Refree for his work on Rosalía’s debut album, Los Angeles, where he helped the Catalan singer tease a modern edge out of the traditional flamenco style. Lina felt that they could do something similar with fado, a goal they achieve here, albeit in a very different fashion. Los Angeles largely employed flamenco’s traditional acoustic guitar and vocal palette, experimenting instead with production and form; Lina_Raül Refree keeps the words and melodies of the source material intact but ditches fado’s bright acoustic guitars in favour of piano and analogue synths. In what is an admirably stubborn move, the acoustic guitar only turns up on the album’s final track, “Voz Amália De Nós,” a song originally recorded by António Variações using synths.
The production throughout is minimal to the point of austerity, creating an intimacy that feels like standing with the duo in a darkened room: “Ave Maria Fadista,” for example, uses just echoing piano chords and a hint of distortion. Yet there is still room for the two to give rein to their experimental instincts. “Destino” is haunted by the kind of synthesiser throb that suggests a nervous headache, while “Maldição” combines low organ drone with a faint synth arpeggio, lending the song a distinct air of disintegration. Drama comes in small musical quirks, from the touches of multi-tracked vocal on “Barco Negro” to the cute, two-fingered piano riff that leads “Cuidei que Tinha Morrido.”
Listeners steeped in Amália’s canonical work may balk at this approach but, to an outsider, the duo’s methods feel respectful, the production modestly taking its place behind the songs’ timeless melodies and Lina’s gorgeous vocals. The singer possesses a voice of fiercely intimate power and texture, capable within one brief musical phrase of tempting a bird to the windowsill and blowing the opera doors clean off, as in the show-stopping melodrama of “Quando eu era Pequenina.” The ghostly double tracking of Lina’s voice on “Fado Menor,” meanwhile, is a thing of wonder, two thin layers of sibilant vocal echoing tantalisingly out of phase, like a pair of rippled reflections on an otherwise still lake.
The songs’ melodies are equally potent. The Portuguese idea of saudade—a notion of longing that scholar Aubrey Bell defined, in his 1912 book In Portugal, as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist”—is closely linked to fado, and you can hear a kind of inexhaustible yearning in songs like “Gaivota” or “Quando eu era Pequenina,” piano chords crashing over your hopes like dirt on a coffin lid.
Ever since Rosalía hit big with El Mal Querer, the Spanish music industry has been hoping for an artist to follow in her wake, reinventing traditional music to a global audience. Lina_Raül Refree suggests they may have been looking too close to home. Lina and Rosalía don’t necessarily sound alike; fado and flamenco are worlds apart, after all. But their musical perspectives are similar: respectful but questioning, drawn to emotion and the grand gesture rather than generic convention. Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right. | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Glitterbeat | January 15, 2020 | 7.7 | 650e1d13-cd6d-4db9-819e-1d54170f5516 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Elaborating on music he composed for the British TV series “Kiri,” the Warp Records mainstay vacillates between too-tasteful acoustic arrangements and abrasive provocation. | Elaborating on music he composed for the British TV series “Kiri,” the Warp Records mainstay vacillates between too-tasteful acoustic arrangements and abrasive provocation. | Clark: Kiri Variations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clark-kiri-variations/ | Kiri Variations | Seasoned electronic music producer Chris Clark sounds like a man in need of a change on Kiri Variations. In the run-up to the release of his 10th album he praised acoustic instruments as “an antidote to frictionless digital music” and advocated for an “anti-muso” approach, sounding exhausted with both electronic timbres and conventional musicality.
The album started life as the score to the British TV series “Kiri,” a commission Clark has credited with inspiring new approaches in his productions. This may explain why the Warp Records veteran has swapped out his habitual synthesizers in favor of piano, harpsichord, strings, and voice, topped with a light sprinkling of electronics. Rather than sounding refreshed, though, Kiri Variations comes across as a labored work that can be both interesting and listenable but rarely at the same time.
Weighing in on the side of intrigue is “Kiri’s Glee,” which resembles an aural rendering of a not particularly inspired piece of naive art, its tasteful string plucks interrupted by a recorder line that is deliberately out of tune. This may provide useful color within the television show, which centers on the abduction of nine-year-old Kiri Akindele, but here the effect on the listener is nails-on-the-blackboard annoying, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. “Cannibal Homecoming” walks a similar path, its opening minute marked by a vocal buzzing around, high-pitched and infuriatingly out of key, like a late-night mosquito attack when you’re dozing off to sleep.
The self-explanatory “Simple Homecoming Loop” is quite the opposite: a tasteful mixture of piano, strings, and electronics that circles around harmlessly, adding little to the tradition of piano mood pieces that Erik Satie would have considered revolutionary before shuffling off this mortal coil in 1925. You’ve heard this kind of thing before, many times: the kind of prettified sketch that AI algorithms will be knocking off en masse for Spotify dinner playlists by 2030.
It doesn’t help that the album’s palette is so limited. Even the more experimental songs on Kiri Variations tend to be built upon the same wispily tasteful blocks of acoustic and electronic sounds, with the mid-album duo of “Flask/Abyss” and “Tobi Thwarted” so similar in their airy ambience you could barely fit a licked cigarette paper between them.
Occasionally, Clark does nail the mixture of engaging and effective to create moments of itching disquiet that merit repeat listening. “Forebode Knocker” is genuinely troubling, an unsettling vocal loop infecting the instrumentation around it so that it curdles out of tune before your ears, while “Yarraville Bird Phone” has unexpected melodic leaps that send a delicious shiver up the spine.
But it’s not enough. Kiri Variations feels like an album that has lost its way: a soundtrack (though most of the music never appeared on the show) that shoots for terror but settles for unease; an “anti-muso” work that is far too conventionally musical. Clark compares the album to Roald Dahl’s short stories for its alleged witchy feel. But Dahl was never, ever dull. | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Throttle | July 31, 2019 | 5.8 | 6511a362-4d8c-4f2b-a85f-47dfabb37416 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
In part two of a trilogy of releases focused on “capitalist semiotic pollution,” the UK producer juggles abrasive club-music tropes with field recordings and ominous scraps of advertising. | In part two of a trilogy of releases focused on “capitalist semiotic pollution,” the UK producer juggles abrasive club-music tropes with field recordings and ominous scraps of advertising. | Lee Gamble: Exhaust EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-gamble-exhaust-ep/ | Exhaust EP | There’s a line on Lee Gamble’s Exhaust that really gets under the skin. It pops up on “Naja,” named for a genus of venomous snakes better known as cobras. Against a backdrop of spa-time sounds, an emotionally blank but texturally fried voice says, “You can breathe, forgive yourself, and move on.” It calls to mind online privacy notifications, issued in accordance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, that assume the expectant stance of a playground bully making the lunch-money rounds: “Accept and move on.” In other words: This is just the way things are now.
Exhaust can’t accept, won’t accept. The prevailing tenor of the UK artist’s new album is a deep-seated frustration with the paralyzing effect of late capitalism. It’s something that Gamble snarkily signposts with digitally voiced statements throughout the record’s eight tracks. They include “Look around, look around/We sell perfumes and cosmetics for £1…” on opener “CREAM,” and “I am so excited to help you pick out your next luxury vehicle,” delivered in an ASMR-like whisper at the beginning of “Shards” before the track breaks out into machine-gun snares and the satisfyingly gruff tongue twisters of a ragga MC. “Glue” employs a similar play, setting up a somewhat placid scene—the chatter of what sounds like an outdoor market offset by birdsong—only to raze it with a synth as subtle as a pneumatic drill. Abrasive drums and an alienated rave vocal sample complete the track’s disquieting portrait of metropolitan life.
In the release notes, Gamble references “the semioblitz,” a term coined by the late critic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. A portmanteau of “semiotics” and “blitz,” Fisher used it in a blog post to describe the “capitalist semiotic pollution” that swirled around the London 2012 Olympic Games. The primary function of the semioblitz, explained Fisher, “is to make it seem that capital’s involvement is a precondition for culture as such.” Gamble—who is exploring the impact of the semioblitz across three releases, of which Exhaust is the second—extends its meaning to reflect “the aggressive onslaught of visual and sonic stimuli of contemporary cities and virtual spaces.”
It’s not hard to draw comparisons with James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual, which addressed a similar theme from a different angle. While Ferraro handled the sonics of our newly augmented reality with glee, Gamble uses the musical languages he has been steeped in for decades to critique the pace, temperament, and manipulative objectives of our interlocking online and offline existences. On “Envenom,” he erratically channel-hops through rave, techno, and breaks in a high-speed, contextless tour through dance-music history. In the last 30 seconds, a ringing bell, like the kind found on old-fashioned shop counters, serves as a subconscious reminder of how seamlessly corporations subsume subculture. The consumerist FOMO of “CREAM” (“these prices are only for today”) is not as effective as it could be, however; the vocals are too heavy-handed, and the intro’s siren and broken glass are overplayed tropes.
While there are moments on Exhaust that are pleasurable (the arcade-game grime of “Switches,” for example, or the unpredictable collage of “Saccades”), the album’s overwhelming sense of frustration often makes it a difficult listen. Of course, as Gamble alluded to in conversation with Simon Reynolds, that wasn’t without intention: “‘Brexit was happening, Trump was happening, and I was like, Am I now supposed to make an ambient record for everyone to just zone out?’ he says. ‘In these times, making music about escapism would be a cop out.’”
What I hear above all else when I listen to Exhaust is an exasperation with music as product. The emotion of the liberating anthems that Reynolds is nostalgic for has been co-opted time and time again. What’s more, as Liz Pelly has so incisively detailed in her reporting on both Spotify and Sofar Sounds, venture capitalists have played a big part in softening the edges of our experience of music, turning themselves into the stars in the process. If the most widely available music is also the most easily digestible, then it is no wonder that artists like Gamble are so keen to grapple with music’s purpose beyond entertainment—to be an art form in fierce dialogue with the present.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | November 18, 2019 | 7.7 | 6515a623-aaae-401f-9c8b-fe70781863f5 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
Joe Budden's latest album, produced almost entirely by AraabMUZIK, offers a concentrated dose of his usual fare: complex lyrical raps, bitter contempt for current hip-hop, and a list of grievances. | Joe Budden's latest album, produced almost entirely by AraabMUZIK, offers a concentrated dose of his usual fare: complex lyrical raps, bitter contempt for current hip-hop, and a list of grievances. | Joe Budden: Rage & the Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22547-rage-the-machine/ | Rage & the Machine | Joe Budden has defined himself as an intensely emotional tough guy who has never stopped putting everything out there, but the New Jersey rapper’s best music has frequently cut inward. Throughout his Mood Muzik mixtape-series-turned-brand, Budden has picked at and peeled away his depression, addiction, and the many embarrassments he’s collected as an eager public figure. When he’s down, he opens up.
In many ways Budden is an under-acknowledged trailblazer of hip-hop’s 21st century relationship with the Internet, ahead of his time in living for and through the web as much as alongside it. He nurtured his online fans before it was an obvious play, earning and grooming a cult following of lyric-obsessed hip-hop heads, some of whom prize his legitimate emo leanings, and some who just love bars.
On his new album, Rage & the Machine, Budden’s music is less moody but as densely lyrical as ever. His raps have long leaned on the preferred devices of the competitive lyricism he exemplifies: puns, metaphors, clever topicality. “I used to drive around the tunnel in a Lexus with a snub/Before Power 105 was sneaking breakfast in the club,” he raps on “Uncle Joe,” a track that plays on his preferred trope of bitter contempt for the current state of hip-hop.
The record is produced almost entirely by the Providence beatmaker AraabMUZIK, a 27-year-old whose pyrotechnic pad-smashing earned him viral YouTube fame as an MPC whiz. AraabMUZIK, whose given name is Abraham Orellana, has been generously collaborative and experimental, producing for the Diplomats and many others in a meandering career. Unfortunately, Rage & the Machine skips over Orellana’s most interesting inclinations—forward-looking fusions of electronic, dance, and street hip-hop—in favor of his most traditional ones, an unfortunate fit for Budden’s reductionist New York rap nostalgia.
AraabMUZIK isn’t the type to dwell on a beat, and has established a formula of programming drums that is both finicky and mechanical. On a song like “Flex,” a conspicuous lead single that features Fabolous and Tory Lanez, he piles drum sounds onto each other expertly before haphazardly triggering a sample atop. With a breathless, high-word-count approach to lyricism, Budden benefits from the boxed-in nature of AraabMUZIK percussion, which give him a wall to push against. “Forget” is one of the best bits of matchmaking, a short, verse-only ramble on a boom bap 2.0 beat that lets both artists play to their talents. “I Gotta Ask” is a committed Jay Z homage; instead of an Annie number, !llmind flips a Sondheim stage song into similarly whimsical territory. Budden adopts Jay’s cadence to run down his preferred list of boasts and persistent complaints.
Elsewhere, some songs arrive a little late to the party in borrowed clothes. “I Wanna Know” samples a Manhattans loop which was also the thrust of a standout Madlib beat on Freddie Gibbs’ 2014 breakout album Piñata. Sample recycling might not be the faux pas it once was in hip-hop—Madlib himself wasn’t the first to pull this record—but AraabMUZIK’s simple chop and pitch-up make it feel like a blatant beatjack. On a separate song, a separate infraction: “Time for Work” has a hook sung by Emanny that he must have written while listening to Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ’Em,” because the melody is all but the same. More generally, Budden has struggled with making catchy songs and this album carries a couple clunkers with gawky hooks.
To the rapper’s credit, Rage & the Machine is one of his more accessible records, less emotionally insular than usual, but perhaps a little cold for that reason. It’s not a redesign as much as a measured refinement. There’s a fan service aspect to Budden’s music by now that hinges on his fixed audience. “What you expecting from me?/Why else you checking for me?,” the singer Jazzy wonders on a track called “By Law.” If you’re listening to a Joe Budden album in 2016, you probably already know what you’re in for. | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / Mood Muzik | October 29, 2016 | 6 | 6517bdbe-e797-4529-8b56-a17ce17d7c54 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The longtime Tortoise bassist picks up lead guitar on his solo debut, a wayward instrumental expedition with a poker-faced sense of humor. | The longtime Tortoise bassist picks up lead guitar on his solo debut, a wayward instrumental expedition with a poker-faced sense of humor. | Douglas McCombs: VMAK<KOMBZ<<<DUGLAS<<6NDR7<<< | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/douglas-mccombs-vmakkombzduglas6ndr7/ | VMAK<KOMBZ<<<DUGLAS<<6NDR7<<< | Douglas McCombs has spent much of his career crafting shapes in the shadows of his music, even on projects where he’s been a leader. As the longtime bassist of Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day, as well as the face of his rotating-collaborator vehicle Brokeback and one-third of his new trio Black Duck alongside Charles Rumback and Bill MacKay, the bassist and guitarist specializes in pulling fundamental strings while generally lingering outside the foreground. On his first solo album under his own name, VMAK<KOMBZ<<<DUGLAS<<6NDR7>>> (its busy title was pulled from one of McCombs’ many international visas), he steps into that foreground with a wayward instrumental expedition that sacrifices none of the string-pulling.
VMAK doesn’t fall into any typical solo-debut buckets. It’s no grand, renewed statement of purpose, nor a stripped-down, personally revealing dispatch from the heart. It doesn’t sound painstakingly composed; it’s completely instrumental with a fair share of improvisation; and it features friends who have collaborated plenty with McCombs over the years, including Sam Prekop of The Sea and Cake (for whom McCombs has toured as bassist) and James Elkington. In its spontaneous spirit, if not always its sound, VMAK slots comfortably alongside most of McCombs’ catalog.
Where VMAK stands apart is in how it isolates and magnifies McCombs, who mostly sticks to lead guitar here. He steps into this role like a head chef with the whole kitchen to himself, eager to play around and experiment, but also to refine. VMAK is three tracks long—the first and last account for over 30 of the album’s 34 minutes—but feels more like five or six distinct ideas. He cooks up something sweet, something bitter, something bland but curious. The point isn’t to be instantly, familiarly appetizing, but McCombs makes sure to include a couple of immediately delicious bites in between the less savory, just-trying-stuff ones.
Like any courteous host, McCombs gives fair warning with the very first notes on his electric. He barges into opener “Two to Coolness” with a distorted belch of guitar squall, and away we go. There’s some deliberate humor to his greeting, yet you picture him performing it stone-faced; for McCombs, heedlessness in the creative process can be the spice of life. He blends the noise into some inspired ambling that finds space between a 1980s cop drama and a peaceful solo writing session in an empty garage. As Prekop and Calexico’s John Convertino—on modular sequencer and drums, respectively—join for some staggered, lurching tip-toes over the melodic final few minutes, the track’s tone completes a full about-face. McCombs’ love for distractions and pivots then finds a fresh outlet in the short and sweet, morning-dew acoustic guitar solo of the second track, “Green Crown’s Step,” which strolls with gentle confidence and little predictability to its route.
McCombs likes to manipulate time and pacing like this, in addition to tones and moods, and he takes it furthest on closer “To Whose Falls Shallows.” Here, an extra-long buildup of sparse, dull solo notes over faint drones breaks into an irresistibly warm and panoramic groove, where the album comes to a rest. While McCombs mimics feeling around in the dark for the song’s first two-thirds, Elkington sneaks onto his drum kit and ever so gradually raises the lights until the players arrive at the finale, where McCombs patiently climbs some arpeggios in triplets while Elkington casually keeps him to a beat and adds some just-right percussive accents. As McCombs completes his solo explorations on VMAK, the music carries him back to his long-perfected sweet spot: as a critical cog in a machine of guitar-centered magic, reading the room for just the right moments. | 2022-12-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Thrill Jockey | December 13, 2022 | 6.8 | 651e9832-99ca-4f1d-b4ba-63ff5963d335 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Sigur Rós' new album Kveikur is their first without founding member and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinnson, a record reacting to the impossible standards set by their groundbreaking early work by exposing their gnarled roots and demonic impulses. | Sigur Rós' new album Kveikur is their first without founding member and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinnson, a record reacting to the impossible standards set by their groundbreaking early work by exposing their gnarled roots and demonic impulses. | Sigur Rós: Kveikur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18191-sigur-ros-kveikur/ | Kveikur | Sigur Rós’ relationship with their peers is about as one-sided as it gets: metal bands namedrop them as proof that they can be pretty, pop acts do the same to show an interest beyond verses and choruses. They serve a touchstone for electronic producers interested in apparitional mystery and their music gets placed in movies when directors are looking for a shortcut to beatific beauty. Conversely, with the exception of the Animal Collective-styled “Gobbledigook,” not one Sigur Rós song has suggested a contemporary outside influence. But they'd become trapped by their singularity: By 2008’s gluttonously orchestrated Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, they appeared stuck in an escalating arms race with their past work and on last year’s Valtari, Sigur Rós didn’t feel like a human entity anymore, just a collection of textural signifiers that confirmed their critics’ view of them as credible New Age.
Valtari sounded like a dead end, and it did turn out to be the end of Sigur Rós as we knew them. After the breakup rumors subsided, the band lost keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson and signed with a new label. Returning with unexpected speed and unprecedented vitality, Kveikur is the big payback; a bracing record of pummeling post-rock, eerie hauntology and concentrated pop splendor, Sigur Rós finally acknowledge their impact by beating all of their acolytes at their own game.
That Kveikur translates to “candlewick” and phonetically sounds like “quake” is appropriate, as Sigur Rós’ seventh album is their most explosive and action-packed. Perhaps it’s to compensate for the departure of Sveinsson, or maybe bassist Georg Holm and drummer Orri Páll Dýrason are just tired of getting 0% of the credit over the past decade and a half. Either way, Kveikur is defined by its rhythm section, even as it wisely repositions Jónsi's inimitable vocals as the focus, back where they belong after being used as mostly texture on Valtari.
After the ambient bubble bath of Valtari, the deep drum hits within the first minute of “Brennisteinn” disrupt Sigur Rós’ artistic stasis like a cannonball; the heavy metal churn takes on a metaphorical and symbolic aspect, as if signifying Sigur Rós’ transformation from an inanimate object into a vengeful, destructive Decepticon. From there on out, Sigur Rós are fully committed to stress testing their sound. Whenever the distorted bass lunges on the title track, it sounds like it’s trying to drill oil from the ocean floor. The feedback shrieks throughout “Brennisteinn" feel elegant and sleek rather than abrasive, like fine cutlery on black marble instead of nails on a chalkboard. “Hrafntinna” is a metal song in a literal sense, composed of fractured cymbals, sonorous brass, the whinny of horsehair on steel guitar strings; over its six minutes, there’s a filmic, storytelling quality that shows Jónsi could and should be doing soundtrack work for movies with more heft than We Bought A Zoo.
But Sigur Rós always had the frame for heavy metal muscle-- let’s not forget this is a band who makes 10-minute songs with elfin vocals from a guy who wears a fringed jacket and plays his guitar with a cello bow. For all their ethereal beauty, Agaetis Byrjun and ( ) are heavy records. This isn’t Sigur Rós all of a sudden donning Viking helmets and playing out dry-ice fantasies like Robert Plant in The Song Remains the Same-- Think of it along the lines of Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest or Portishead’s Third without the attendant hype-stoking hiatus, reacting to the impossible standards set by their groundbreaking early work (as well as a reputation for being chillout fare), by exposing their gnarled roots and demonic impulses.
For example, what if the distended howl of Agaetis Byrjun was distilled into the percussive clatter of Takk’s “Gong” and concentrated shoegaze swirl of “Með blóðnasir”? It might produce something like “Ísjaki", where Dýrason's drums continuously push Jónsi’s call and response vocals to new ecstatic spaces between disco pleasure and black metal pain. Combine the electronic-pop momentum of Jónsi’s Go with the imperial marches of Með suð of and the result is the “Rafstraumur", a reminder that Sigur Rós can still go goosebump-for-goosebump with M83 and Coldplay if they so choose.
It’s one thing for a complete sonic overhaul to be necessary, but what stands out about Kveikur is how natural it feels. As opposed to a rebranding, this is Sigur Rós internally reconstituted, where the biggest addition isn’t distorted guitars or huge drums or Jónsi going full tilt. More than sounds, this is an integration of new verbs and actions, as Sigur Rós pummel, rage, wail and assert, asking hard questions of themselves. What if they could harness their power to convey immediate anger instead of patient catharsis, as a soundtrack for lifting weights instead of zoning out? Jónsi’s vocals will always bear an extraterrestrial shimmer, but why can’t he play the avenging archangel rather than a friendly ghost? After 15 years of evoking Iceland's gorgeous, volcanic terrain and woodsprite legends, why not reflect the endless winters, cratered economy and the frightening suicide rate?
Even if it doesn’t have the same cultivated mystery or incapacitating demands of Agaetis Byrjun or ( ), Kveikur is every bit a return to form, tapping into its predecessors’ bottomless emotional wellspring for a Sigur Rós album that can be listened to casually or intensely, a collection that works as effectively as a spiritual experience and pop music, the essence of their overwhelming, widescreen grandeur conveyed with the immediacy of a 50-minute rock record. | 2013-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | June 17, 2013 | 8.1 | 6529150a-d6f4-419b-b0d1-405838525bff | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Like early-'00s bands like Asobi Seksu, Serena-Maneesh, or Mahogany, Pinkshinyultrablast are rooted in shoegaze while maintaining a basis in electronic noise. The effect is like getting showered with a firehose pumping spangly glitter. | Like early-'00s bands like Asobi Seksu, Serena-Maneesh, or Mahogany, Pinkshinyultrablast are rooted in shoegaze while maintaining a basis in electronic noise. The effect is like getting showered with a firehose pumping spangly glitter. | Pinkshinyultrablast: Grandfeathered | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21453-grandfeathered/ | Grandfeathered | With the possible exception of Godsmack, no band name is more indicative of a main influence than Pinkshinyultrablast. It was previously the title of the third LP by Astrobrite, a continuation of the similarly, evocatively named lovesliescrushing, projects that approached shoegaze while maintaining a basis in electronic noise—other "truth in advertising" Astrobrite releases include Whitenoise Superstar and Supercrush. It’s a style far more obtuse than the guitar-pop model that spawned genre titans like My Bloody Valentine and Ride, which also means it’s never as overexposed. In fact, more than a decade after the original Pinkshinyultrablast, this style sounded entirely novel on the Russian band’s striking 2014 debut Everything Else Matters. On Grandfeathered, Pinkshinyultrablast sought to go further toward the margins—noisier, more electronic, more dense, simply more. And yet, they became something much closer to a guitar-pop band in the process, their primary and really only objective to overwhelm.
In a literal sense, Pinkshinyultrablast’s self-described "thunder pop"/"kung-fu-gaze" is sensational and impressive: the effect is entirely based on hitting a few particular pleasure centers. And every time, Pinkshinyultrablast hits them with such force that the name becomes almost stupidly obvious. It’s the equivalent of getting showered with a firehose pumping spangly glitter.
From a certain angle, Pinkshinyultrablast are a pop band, just one that believes that pop music should work on a subliminal level. The bold hip-hop beat and sleek loops that push "Initial" could pass for Chvrches’ laser-light anthems passed through audio and visual lo-res filters to the point of total abstraction. When they present themselves as a rock band, they’re a much heavier one than on Everything Else Matters. The heaving guitar riffs on "Glow Vastly" reimagine the Joy Formidable’s alt-gaze colossus "Whirring" if it only consisted of its final two minutes. "I Catch You Napping" and "Kiddy Pool Dreams" maintain the propulsive rhythms of the previous record while subjecting them to a torrential downpour of distortion, similar to mid-2k bands Asobi Seksu, Serena-Maneesh, or Mahogany who served as shoegaze torchbearers during a lull for the genre. (And if those names mean anything to you, Grandfeathered is required listening.)
While the sound on Grandfeathered is deep, it often feels impenetrable rather than multilayered. Lyubov Soloveva has a genre-appropriate voice that isn’t especially distinctive—high, diaphanous, taking on sing-song cadences to signify a chorus. Their most fitting contemporary peer A Sunny Day in Glasgow are by far the funniest band to ever get tagged as shoegaze, imbuing their music with a unique playfulness, and there are countless options for guitar bands who take things in the opposite direction, but Pinkshinyultrablast never manages to express a personality. The rapturous cooing delivers on the promise on song titles like "Glow Vastly," "Comet Marbles," and "Kiddy Pool Dreams," but not much else. Surely, Grandfeathered is impressive, but the first impression tends to be the only one it makes. | 2016-02-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Club AC30 | February 26, 2016 | 6.5 | 65295531-0efb-4515-9b65-8fcc83a6c854 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Berlin producer is a master of negative space and biomechanical sound, lacing her uneasy compositions with voices that excavate images of unceasing loneliness and longing. | The Berlin producer is a master of negative space and biomechanical sound, lacing her uneasy compositions with voices that excavate images of unceasing loneliness and longing. | Pan Daijing: Jade 玉观音 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pan-daijing-jade/ | Jade 玉观音 | Pan Daijing has a keen ear for the vicissitudes of the human voice—the way it can commune or conflict with its environment, or how it can spark immediate, visceral sympathy and then plunge into revulsion with a choking throttle. Since the release of her 2017 debut LP Lack, the Berlin-based experimental artist has written and staged operatic works for upward of a dozen singers, constellating voice in the service of narrative, finding the edges where difference makes friction. In the studio, she laces her solo work with voices that beckon and spit, hinting at story and then submerging those hints in discomfiting electronic noise. She is a skillful collagist of biomechanical sound. On her second album, Jade 玉观音, Daijing breaches more intimate terrain, using the voice and its antagonists to excavate images of unceasing loneliness and deep, unruly need.
“I take my bath in the ocean/I can’t get out,” Daijing says in the closing moments of “Let 七月.” The couplet reveals the paradox of scale on which her work often plays. Within the span of a few words, she drifts upon the ocean’s inconceivable expanse and, at the same time, is crammed into a bathtub. An open horizon and a tight, windowless room collapse into a single scene. Inside it, Daijing luxuriates and is trapped. “Let 七月” offers something of an oasis from the album’s industrial scrapes and whines. Yet the terror and discombobulation central to Daijing’s work never quite ebbs. Even at their calmest and most curious, the voices she orchestrates don’t soothe. They fester; they salivate; they probe, rooting for more than what the surface offers. If the voices on Lack could feel abstracted, alien, the ones that appear on Jade 玉观音 venture direct address: “Did I ever need you too much?” Daijing asks on “The Goat 二月,” her murmur barely audible against an ominous synthesizer pulse. “If you ever leave, I’ll go with you.”
These spoken-word soliloquies carry the urgency of intolerable secrets, irritants that require indiscriminate purging. Throughout the album, strands of voice drape across instruments that sound just enough like they come out of a body that they take on an uncanny quality. A low, snarling stringed instrument seems to breathe on “Dictee 三月”; analog synthesizers chirp and burble alongside impromptu laughter and a brambly, computerized growl on “Tilt 四月”; a diaphragmatic bass tone stumbles and lurches through “Ran 乱.” Daijing delights in that confusion, the ear’s misrecognition of an instrument as another body, tortured to extremes and calling out.
Jade closes with the gutting “Moema, forever 九月,” a piece with uneasy Sprechgesang at its heart. “I forget her,” Daijing repeats against purring machine drone and intermittent piano strikes. Her voice arcs upward, as if she’s searching for a question mark. “Forget her face, forget her smell, forget her finger.” She is able so precisely to remember the things she forgets, to enumerate them. They pile up like keepsakes in a box. Her voice trudges on, strained to the point of breaking, but it does not break. The whirring environment sputters and stalls. The piano calls, insistent; a synthesizer wordlessly shrieks. Daijing, her voice shallow but steady, goes on forgetting, making a spectacle of the absence until there is no light left, until all that remains is loss.
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. | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | June 9, 2021 | 7.4 | 6529b434-1e94-46be-99e0-9958b92ab054 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
One-time DFA disciple Armani XXXChange, working from a homemade studio in an apartment in Brooklyn, displays a keen ear for smart ways to mash regional and time-lost delicacies. | One-time DFA disciple Armani XXXChange, working from a homemade studio in an apartment in Brooklyn, displays a keen ear for smart ways to mash regional and time-lost delicacies. | Spank Rock: Yoyoyoyoyo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7856-yoyoyoyoyo/ | Yoyoyoyoyo | "It's party music." "No consequences." "Just ass-shaking shit." "Why you hating?" "Stop thinking so hard."
BULLETIN: Reports are circulating that Miami Bass paragon Luther "Uncle Luke" Campbell's filthy and amazing split box set, My Life and Freaky Times, featuring a soundtrack and a 2xCD spoken word audio-biography, has been delayed by retailers citing its content and lascivious packaging inappropriate. In other news, Spank Rock released Yoyoyoyoyo last month.
That's the hierarchy. Yoyoyoyoyo is one of the most precise and brilliantly produced albums of the year. One-time DFA disciple Armani XXXChange, working from a homemade studio in an apartment in Brooklyn, displays a keen ear for smart ways to mash regional and time-lost delicacies (H-Town Screw, B-More Club, Philly Soul, Miami bass, NYC Electro, 1980s dance pop, Samba, First Wave Freestyle, etc.). XXXChange uses dug-out bass, Space Invaders blips, and relentless 808s, among myriad sound effects, to enhance what can feel like sonic revolution. Each song uses a new sound to flex his skills, like the cheek-pop plucking on "What It Look Like" or the sped-up orchestral underbelly on "Coke & Wet". "Bump" has an accelerating cowbell and synth loop as tight and hilarious as anything on LCD Soundsystem's debut. His versatility is a gift, though it sometimes robs Spank Rock of any discernable individuality. Still, an album full of disconnected but adventurous beats is hardly grounds for failure. More troubling is the message.
Much has been made of MC Naeem Juwan's geographical history. Born in Baltimore, a move to Philadelphia reportedly informed his style, as have tutorials from noted Rawkus beatsmith Shawn J. Period. But Juwan's rap POV bears little resemblance to Mos Def or Talib Kweli, nor does it fit bass's garrulous charm or Baltimore Club's chant-heavy style. He's got a helium-laced voice and his patterns are intentionally manic, jumping around, off-beat-or-on, as if his point can't be made fast enough. Sometimes it's dazzling; mostly, it's frustrating. "Rick Rubin" is less about the producer, and more a questioning philosophical treatise ("Is it off-key?/ Is it just too hip?/ Is it out of touch or is it the touch?")-- Spank Rock doing his Rimbaud joint over stutter-clap, revealing one of many knowing winks on the album. He also raps about ass. A lot.
Moving bodies is as worthy a goal now as it was when Little Richard sang, "Good booty, if it don't fit, don't force it". But Spank Rock's unspoken nihilism-- or, more pointedly, chauvinism-- has been getting a pass. You may be thinking, "Rap writer comes down on innocuous, possibly ironic good-time MC for sexism, continues ignoring Interscope artist's crimes." Fair point. Amanda Blank hops on "Bump" for a verse that could out-nasty Lil' Kim on her worst day to balance things, if only for a song. It's just that when a group like Spank Rock achieves a certain status with tastemakers, so much of its ethos remains uncontested and unclear. The quotes above are some of the responses I've heard when attempting to engage in conversation about this album. I still can't tell how serious Juwan is when he says, "Ass-shaking competition champ, ooh that pussy gets damp, pump that-- pump that-- pump that amp." The image is clear. But is it sheer reportage? Fantasy? He's got jokes? No doubt he likes ass. Next to a domineering pro like Uncle Luke, though, Juwan comes off like a stepchild.
There's a fluid, unidentifiable hipster appeal to Spank Rock and Yoyoyoyoyo. Because they lack a true identity, they're as comfortable performing with Bun B or Devin the Dude as Man Man or Animal Collective. Existing in the Hollertronix quadrant-- a fun, strange cultural sphere occupied by the undeniably talented but suspiciously prominent Diplo, among others-- will get you criticized as vacant. There's nothing vacant about the dire sexuality chirped about here, it'd just be more useful if it could be more easily understood. The thrilling and immediate "Coke & Wet" is so raw, smacked by a sharp Moog and guitar-slink, that when Juwan oddly boasts through the chorus "Coke and wet, bitch/Guns, nigga, holla!" it sounds like it could be parody. On the other hand, closer "Screwville, USA" is as nostalgic and dramatic a Houston anthem as I've heard this year. And who knows if these dudes have even been to Texas. | 2006-05-02T02:00:44.000-04:00 | 2006-05-02T02:00:44.000-04:00 | Rap | Big Dada | May 2, 2006 | 6.5 | 653c25a3-f701-47ab-ba0e-04a833a693d1 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
In the spirit of work from Dipset and Bad Boy, Lil Wayne creates a clique record, and-- with Drake and Nicki Minaj on board-- pulls it off. | In the spirit of work from Dipset and Bad Boy, Lil Wayne creates a clique record, and-- with Drake and Nicki Minaj on board-- pulls it off. | Young Money: We Are Young Money | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13810-we-are-young-money/ | We Are Young Money | After recording a staggering amount of verses, hooks, and hallucinogenic hiccups for three-plus years, Lil Wayne topped-out with 2008's Tha Carter III, a success on every level imaginable. And then he basically took 2009 off-- relatively speaking, at least. He still grossed about $42 million in worldwide ticket sales, released two stellar mixtapes (Hottest Nigga Under the Sun and No Ceilings), and was the subject of one of the more fascinating music documentaries in recent memory, The Carter. (I'm just going to pretend to ignore his forever-delayed dalliance into mook-rock, Rebirth, for the time being.)
But without new tracks and features hitting the web every week, it did seem like Wayne was M.I.A. He had spoiled us. And that missing feeling tugged harder when he pled guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon in October, a blunder that could put him in a New York jail for a year starting next month, when he's due to be sentenced. These dire circumstances loom over We Are Young Money, the first album from Wayne's cobbled-together hip-hop clique-- can his pupils come close to filling the creative vacuum left by their frighteningly prodigious mentor? Crazily enough, a couple of them just might be able to pull it off.
Though Puff Daddy and the Family's pioneering 1997 boomtime opus No Way Out still boasts the greatest number of contributing stars-- Biggie, Mase, Lil' Kim, the L.O.X.-- when it comes to the single-ego-fueled-rap-crew-album genre, most of the time, side players have little chance of becoming anything but. Consider the sorry track record of Eminem's D-12, 50 Cent's G-Unit, Ludacris's Disturbing Tha Peace, or Young Jeezy's U.S.D.A. Even Jay-Z's most overt clique record, 2000's The Dynasty: Roc La Familia couldn't bolster main contributors Beanie Sigel and Memphis Bleek to much past staunch regional kudos. Last decade, Cam'ron was one of the more successful kingpins, with the 2003 album Diplomatic Immunity spawning semi-careers for Juelz Santana and Jim Jones before Dipset forgot why they were great and imploded. And while We Are Young Money undoubtedly marks a career high for most of Wayne's crew, there are two contributors who have an excellent chance of jumping out from behind their teacher's shadow.
Drake is already there. After smashing with lover-not-fighter anthem "Best I Ever Had" and sussing out the logical continuation of Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak sound with his So Far Gone mixtape last year, the singer/rapper's forthcoming major label debut LP is the uncontested Most Anticipated Hip-Hop Bow of 2010. And for good reason-- more than competitors like Kid Cudi and Wale, Drake has the sensitivity, wit, and commercial wherewithal to create the breakout album hip-hop fans longed for, and didn't get, in 2009. His encroaching stardom probably hurts We Are Young Money as an album-- he seems to be saving his signature Auto-Hooks for the solo LP-- but his four verses act as apt teasers, highlighted by a melodic and horny masterclass on "Every Girl" and an anchor lap on "Pass the Dutch", where he boasts: "I told you catch up, did you make a mil yet?/ I can't predict how many of 'em I can still get." Could be quite a few.
The other current YM bold face is 25-year-old Queens native Nicki Minaj. A vixen with outlandish curves and a flow that pings between valley girl sex goddess and cartoon thug, Minaj could probably carpet-bomb hip-hop mag covers no matter her skills on the mic. Thankfully, she's much more than a pair of boutique high heels and a dirty mouth-- in fact, with her five WAYM verses, Minaj is the most consistent (and consistently amusing) MC on the entire album. She's as outrageously raunchy as vintage Lil' Kim ("flow tighter than a dick in a butt") and as randomly hilarious as, um, Lil Wayne ("Switch my name, now I'm celebratin' Hanukkah/ Lewinsky, bitches, Young Money Monica/ I been hot since Hedgehog-- Sonic, the"). Like Drake, her 2009 mixtape, Beam Me Up Scotty, was a powerful opening salvo, and-- considering recent collaborations with Usher, Robin Thicke, and Mariah Carey-- Minaj has the potential to become the first new out-and-out female rap star in years.
In between appearances from Drake, Minaj, and Wayne-- who offers lukewarm verses and/or deranged-but-palatable Auto-Tune hooks on most tracks-- a slew of numbskulls, weirdos, and little kids sometimes make things interesting. On the bonehead front are Gudda Gudda, Mack Maine, and onetime Dipset pal Jae Millz, who show up a lot but have comically little to say. (Sample Mack Maine brain fizzle: "We on some other shit/ They on the same shit/ I'm Mack Maine/ I'm Mack Maine, bitch!") There's an awful singer (Atlanta-based Shannell), an awkward emo refugee (Tyga, who's the cousin of Gym Class Heroes leader Travis McCoy), and a couple of screechy voiced teens whose contributions are mercifully kept to a minimum. Along with its top tier talents, what keeps WAYM from slogging along is a stylistic diversity and a selection of beats that sometimes borders on phenomenal.
Unlike most rap crews, YM features artists from all across the continent and not just one regional enclave, so even when the lesser lights take over, at least they don't sound exactly like each other. Meanwhile, upstart producers Chase N. Cashe and Kane Beatz keep things moving sonically, whether it's CNC's baroque, Grizzly Bear-esque (!) beat for "New Shit" or Beatz's bright and haughty instrumental for the hit "Bedrock", which wouldn't sound out of place on a Wes Anderson hip-hop movie score (not to say that should ever exist, necessarily). But reliable Southern stalwart David Banner takes best beat honors with his absolutely-evil subwoofer mulcher "Streets Is Watchin'". It's a shining moment from an album that signals hope for Lil Wayne's collective enterprise even during his imminent state-sanctioned breather. | 2010-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment | January 8, 2010 | 7.4 | 6541f54e-975e-4e3a-a115-04a5fa1f2acf | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Naarm, Australia-based duo draws upon its Black and Indigenous heritage to make visceral instrumental metal infused with unmistakable socio-political intent. | The Naarm, Australia-based duo draws upon its Black and Indigenous heritage to make visceral instrumental metal infused with unmistakable socio-political intent. | Divide and Dissolve: Systemic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/divide-and-dissolve-systemic/ | Systemic | Naarm duo Divide and Dissolve’s Indigenous identities are intrinsic to everything they do. Their name doubles as a call to dismantle hegemonic power structures (or, conversely, an acknowledgment of hegemony’s pernicious effects on Indigenous cultures). They bring up ancestral heritage and colonial violence in their interviews; their albums bear socio-political buzzwords like Gas Lit and Systemic as titles. Lacking all of that context, though, it’d be tough to pin down their grizzled, tectonic metal as inherently political. The instrumental duo is not, say, Sons of Kemet, who address the Black diaspora by playing it, gathering African polyrhythms, Caribbean fusion, and American R&B under their wide umbrella of global-minded jazz. Divide and Dissolve’s music is immediately visceral—you don’t need a syllabus to feel the passion dripping from their sludgy constructions—but learning where they’re coming from adds another dimension to their music.
Since 2017, Divide and Dissolve has comprised guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed and percussionist Sylvie Nehill (who is leaving the project’s live shows after her work on Systemic). Reed is Black and Cherokee, Nehill is Māori, and in a press release, Reed says the album is in “direct opposition” to “the goal of the colonial project” of “separat[ing] Indigenous people from their culture, their life force, their community, and their traditions.” As the word “systemic” suggests, this is a deep-rooted process, its tendrils entwined with every aspect of modern life. One possible reading of the album is that the only thing that’s going to shake those tethers loose is overwhelming, rattle-your-bones heaviness. The majority of Systemic’s 33-minute runtime is dominated by Reed’s lurching, slowly evolving riffs and Nehill’s thundering doom drumming—an elemental sound that harkens toward millennia-long power struggles, perhaps the Titans rising up from Tartarus and overthrowing the Greek gods.
Depending on your vantage point, Systemic can convey a vast spectrum of moods with its relatively narrow sound. Is it a joyous reclamation? A wailing lament? A call to action? I don’t think the specifics matter. Both musically and philosophically, Divide and Dissolve take a position that is blunt at face value but rich in its readings and interpretations.
Systemic is by far the band’s most structured work. All of Reed’s riffs feel of a piece: a gnarled forest of recurring themes that’s easy to miss for the trees. After a striking ambient intro beckons a false sense of security, their opening riff on “Blood Quantum” pulls the album into a thicket, and though you might catch glimpses of similar pathways midway through on songs like “Reproach” and “Indignation,” they all lead to different ends. It’s not a Dopesmoker-style rotation around a central motif, but it’s hypnotic in execution, a stunning mood captured in amber.
As with Gas Lit, Systemic’s maelstrom is tempered with softer sounds (namely Reed’s piano and harmonium and Nehill’s xylophone) as well as a spoken-word guest spot by the poet Minori Sanchiz-Fung on the song “Kingdom of Fear.” This track, a foreboding, humid interlude, distills the album’s central conflicts. “I have agony on my side, I have experts on violence, I have control of the tide,” whispers a personified shadow with clear parallels to real-world powers-the-be. Sanchiz-Fung, voice quivering but powerful in the face of such opposition, rebukes those forces: “Even in the kingdom of fear, the air murmurs with song through the streets. Joy remains wild. It has baffled the cage again. It has cut through the horror.”
Enjoying Divide and Dissolve doesn’t require mental gymnastics. The initial, gut-level response to Systemic’s crust-punk take on doom metal is more than enough to hold it aloft. But in engaging with its themes, then contemplating them on repeat listens, Systemic gains a depth that’s rare for a largely instrumental record. After a while, it seems as potent and unshakeable as the power structures it seeks to dismantle. | 2023-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Invada | June 30, 2023 | 7.8 | 6542f410-e4db-458b-a851-e21485e4e7f3 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
On his third and richest album, the English singer-songwriter probes the mysteries of childhood, family, and memory. | On his third and richest album, the English singer-songwriter probes the mysteries of childhood, family, and memory. | Douglas Dare: Milkteeth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/douglas-dare-milkteeth/ | Milkteeth | English singer-songwriter Douglas Dare recorded his new album Milkteeth in Margate, an eccentric seaside town roughly 200 miles from his native Dorset, where he was raised on a dairy farm. Dare is currently based in London, but Milkteeth bears no trace of city life. Instead, it is filled with pastoral imagery from childhood. With subtle production from Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, Milkteeth stands apart from Dare’s previous, more conventional records. Here, he mines the mysteries of memory, family, and the ghosts of his hometown. Dare doesn’t find a concrete answer to any of them, but he arranges the remnants into gorgeous compositions that borrow from English folksong, baroque pop, and piano balladry.
Milkteeth is Dare’s third studio album, following 2014’s Whelm and 2016’s Aforger, both of which were hindered by their safe, electro-classical production and hemmed-in songwriting. Dare’s talents as a vocalist and composer have never been in question, but there seemed to be an invisible wall holding him back. On Milkteeth, Dare has managed to break free. He makes earthly experiences sound otherworldly, owing in part to Lindsay’s light touches and Dare’s autoharp, his new tool of choice.
On standout track “The Joy in Sarah’s Eyes,” Dare strums said autoharp while speaking to the phantom of a young girl. “Sarah, you were five years old/When the ceiling fell from its walls” he sings, as if guiding her through the halls of their childhood home. His voice crackles over a lattice of tambourine and spectral percussion as he asks, “Do you remember your height on the wall?/You’d be taller now with further to fall.” It’s not clear if Dare is recounting fact or fable, but his sense of loss is weighty as we imagine a crumbled structure marked by the height of a child who never lived to outgrow it.
Dare takes on the role of bard on Milkteeth, celebrating the wonders of childhood on “The Playground.” He likens youth to a luminous fairground, his voice riding a circular piano riff like a kid on a carousel over synthesizer arpeggios and pulses of horn. “Red Arrows” explores similar subject matter in a sparser presentation. Dare sings in the round about running with his mother up Denhay Hill, a grassy mound in Dorset. The song recalls traditional English folk music, updated with tasteful pangs of drone.
Milkteeth may be Dare’s most stripped-back album, but it is also his richest, a loose tapestry of memories both painful and cherished. In “Silly Games,” Dare recalls the loneliness of his rural upbringing. “Mother’s in the kitchen washing plates,” he sings. “Brother, cousin won’t play with me/Uncle, auntie they’re not free.” Dare’s solace, however, lies in an unnamed figure that is plenty willing to join him. The album is full of nebulous renderings like this, where we’re left to interpret Dare’s personal mythology. It makes Milkteeth feel suspended in time, more dream than recollection.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Erased Tapes | February 29, 2020 | 7.6 | 65462f44-ff90-400c-b1f0-1e22ef10d22c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Reams of electronic producers luxuriate in the safety of creating a comfortable atmosphere. But Howl, the third LP from the producer Ryan Lee West*,* is impossible to ignore and hard to forget. | Reams of electronic producers luxuriate in the safety of creating a comfortable atmosphere. But Howl, the third LP from the producer Ryan Lee West*,* is impossible to ignore and hard to forget. | Rival Consoles: Howl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21222-howl/ | Howl | Ryan Lee West felt moved to a brief outburst back in August. The Leicester-born, London-based producer who makes music as Rival Consoles tweeted in protest of the ongoing boom of deep house, asking artists to quit contributing to the genre, currently in vogue. "There's probably enough to last us till 2089," he wrote.
West's ire makes sense, if only because the music he makes as Rival Consoles feels diametrically opposed to the luxuriant, lengthy bath evoked by deep house. West is a musical engineer in the mold of luminaries like Aphex Twin and relative newcomers like Dave Harrington, and the soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening. You're always aware that any given composition is morphing, is in flux. Reams of electronic producers luxuriate in the safety of creating a comfortable atmosphere. But Howl is impossible to ignore, and hard to forget.
That's partly because West so often feels comfortable disrupting his own patterns. "Afterglow" seems as if it's going to build on an early synth loop, but what at first seems like the track's foundation turns out to be its foyer: halfway in, and suddenly we're in an entirely new room, one that's louder, brighter, more expansive. Our understanding of his pieces broadens as they move through time, so that once they're nearly over we apprehend the entire structure as if by a drone camera hovering above.
That vivid view is studded with allusions: the title track makes extraordinary reference to trains and tunnels, and at times the dusky track "Pre" recalls the snaking sounds of a film projector. West has said that he's a fan of "sloppy things and rough things happening in music," but even the little blips and isotopes here feel as if they've been cast in concrete, accidents granted purpose. In contrast to the last two Rival Consoles LPs, Howl was largely forged from hardware (as opposed to digital technology), and the record's analogue origins would be obvious even if you knew nothing about its genesis.
West is a labelmate of Nils Frahm and, this year alone, has toured with Clark and Nosaj Thing. He shares with all three the instincts of a classical composer*.* Howl's closer, "Looming", is a six-and-a-half-minute mini-epic that reflects the depth of emotion that West says he poured into Howl. But the catharsis it induces comes as much from the musician's restraint and sense of composure as anything else. What isn't there is as important as what is.
West's grumbling about deep house might make him seem like a dinosaur. But he doesn't seem bothered by its existence; he's complaining about a surplus, and, like a true progressive, his momentary gripe stands as mere prelude to more concerted action. His music—rocky, spiky, warm, titanic—drives us to re-evaluate whether referring to someone as a dinosaur might not be quite as pejorative as we thought. | 2015-10-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | October 22, 2015 | 7.7 | 6551bbb6-8932-4b94-a8b9-83d45427b085 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Berlin-based electronic musician collages vinyl samples and field recordings into sensually inviting soundscapes infused with a powerful sense of mystery. | The Berlin-based electronic musician collages vinyl samples and field recordings into sensually inviting soundscapes infused with a powerful sense of mystery. | Jake Muir: the hum of your veiled voice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jake-muir-the-hum-of-your-veiled-voice/ | the hum of your veiled voice | Jake Muir’s sonic collages, made from vinyl samples and field recordings, pair pristine detail with a shadowy, secretive pulse. His 2018 album Lady’s Mantle was a foray into surf-pop plunderphonics, incorporating aquatic field recordings taken from expeditions in Iceland and California, but the hum of your veiled voice marks a shift in scenery. On his second release on Manchester’s sferic label, home also to experimental and lo-fi ambient from Space Afrika and Perila, Muir’s soundscapes channel the murmurs, whispers, and distant glimmers of the restless city night. They are an ode, he has said, to “gay bathhouses and spas, club back rooms and decadent boudoirs.”
Warping and layering his source material into fluid new shapes, Muir suggests fleeting glances and furtive encounters. His warm, fuzzy textures are both nostalgic and sensually inviting; they seem to open up a new space in the subconscious. The melting arcs in “fleeting touches” have a narcotic effect; the music falls in upon itself in droning loops and waves. Subtle hints of jazz piano on “reservoir of memory” are barely audible, yet the washed-out melodies seem to grow louder on a second listen. On “red as the print of a kiss” he marries dubbed-out synths with the sounds of nature, lovingly and carefully extended and manipulated.
Muir composed the hypnotic sounds on the hum of your veiled voice after relocating from Los Angeles to Berlin, and the effects of that move are perceptible in his drifting compositions. The fluid character of Muir’s collages emphasizes spatial shifts and transitory states of being; the unidentifiable crackles in “silent sailing” lead past the limits of perception. On Muir’s 2016 debut, Muara, his obsession with environmental found sounds led to a mood similar to the psychedelic forest scenes of GAS’s Pop. But here, his glimmering loops are infused with the decadence of a midnight cityscape. Elusive twinkling textures in “on occasions of this kind” mimic a kaleidoscope of street lights, while distant footsteps signal unidentified waltzes in the restless night. A powerful evocation of an imaginary nonplace, the hum of your veiled voice lies somewhere between the hum of the city and a faint memory, gently slipping beneath the surface of the conscious mind.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | sferic | November 9, 2020 | 7.7 | 65627735-38bc-4e21-bbc4-c27c9bd08ea9 | Esme Bennett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/esme-bennett/ |
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