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The Avalanches return with their first new album in 16 years. | The Avalanches return with their first new album in 16 years. | The Avalanches: Wildflower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22065-wildflower/ | Wildflower | To listen to the Avalanches is to wrestle with time. The sample-rich music made by this group of Australian DJs makes you think about where its pieces come from, what those fragments meant to you then, and what they mean to you embedded into the group's finished songs. There’s nostalgia and loss ingrained in every bar, and you can sense the erratic movement of past, present, and future from the first listen.
Speaking of time, there’s also the fact that the Avalanches waited 16 years to follow up their debut album, 2000’s landmark Since I Left You. To be a fan of the Avalanches, you had to be patient. Some of the delay was to be expected. Their first record was said to have thousands of samples, but you never can tell with a figure like that—let’s just agree that it contained a lot. And working with samples means submitting yourself to a longer timetable. Because while Jarvis Cocker might pick up a guitar and write eight songs in two days, building music from other music means you have to do a lot of listening. Which means sampling artists spend a great deal of time engaged in the same activity as their audience—driving around with the radio on, poised by the turntable, dropping a needle, clicking around on YouTube, walking around with headphones. And there are no shortcuts. Throw in the usual long-delayed-album mix of bad equipment, poor health, perfectionism, and clearance issues, and who knows, maybe we’re lucky to get Wildflower, the first new Avalanches record in 16 years.
It’s a music business truism that every sample-heavy instrumental act will eventually work with guest vocalists. As satisfying as it can be to assemble new music from old pieces, every producer, deep down, eventually wants to make their own primary source. Wildflower’s guest vocalists—including Detroit rapper Danny Brown, Biz Markie, rap duo Camp Lo, Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev, Chaz Bundick of Toro Y Moi, David Berman of Silver Jews, Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux/Black Bananas—are what set it apart from the first record. Since I Left You had huge swaths of constantly shifting sound, flowing as one epic suite, and it was often hard to know where one song ended and another began; almost half the songs on Wildflower are clearly set up to showcase a rapper or singer who have written something close to a proper song, so it’s a series of tentpole tracks joined by gorgeous instrumental interludes of the kind only the Avalanches can assemble.
At its best, Wildflower feels like an extension of Since I Left You, hewing close to its predecessor in terms of style, sound, approach, and texture—you would never mistake this for an album by anyone else. The Avalanches make music that’s open, welcoming, soft, gentle; the track construction is virtuosic, but it never wants to show off, and the beat-jacking never feels competitive. In addition to the found sounds, the album has a lot of new instrumentation, most of it presented to mix seamlessly with the samples. Film composer Jean-Michel Bernard adds orchestrations to a handful of tracks, upping the quotient of Disneyfied wonder. The general approach to production is classic Avalanches: AM Gold pop with its sweet strings bleeds into delicate disco with beats inspired by early hip-hop unpinning the whole, imbuing it with a kind of bookish innocence common to the world of indie pop. If the turntable-scratched choruses are gone, replaced by live people at a microphone, the sonic universe they exist in has, thankfully, changed very little.
On the whole, the indie pop songs are more successful than the tracks featuring rappers. “Colours,” the first Jonathan Donahue feature, sounds like a lost classic of psychedelic pop from a forgotten Elephant 6 offshoot, a lysergic mix of backward beats, warbly guitar, and wide-eyed vocals awed by the overpowering beauty of the world. The Toro Y Moi collaboration “If I Was a Folkstar” takes the same tape-stretched, sun-bleached feel and mixes it the kind of bouncy and playful disco beat Bundick has mastered in his own music. Jennifer Herrema usually speaks to us from behind a cloud of weary cynicism, but on “Stepkids” she sounds downright hopeful and maybe even happy, as she gets wistful over “a pack of smokes and a can of spray paint.” David Berman’s spoken-word turn on “Saturday Night Inside Out” sounds like something you might find on the back half of a weird forgotten singer/songwriter record from the ‘70s, which is perfect, and somewhere behind him are backing vocals from Father John Misty. The Avalanches have a knack for bringing all of these disparate voices into their world.
The tracks with rappers are a bit more mixed, but there are still great moments. Nostalgia works a bit differently in rap, and here and there a particular combination of beats and voice bring back a memory that didn’t necessarily need to be brought back. Most notable among these is lead single “Frankie Sinatra” featuring Danny Brown which, with its strained oompah beat and sing-song rap, reminded many of Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood,” a song few people who lived through that era feel compelled to relive now, to put it mildly. Biz Markie’s comic turn on “Noisy Eater” is also in danger of being too cute by half, but it gets over by sheer commitment to its evocation of childhood, sounding like some bent version of a Nickelodeon jingle. And Camp Lo’s explosive rhymes on “Because I’m Me” are brimming with joy.
The stable of vocalists underscores another way the Avalanches play with time: the guests are mostly members of Generation X, who arguably made their best music during the Bill Clinton era. Which, when combined with the fact that collage music built from dense samples is technique closely identified with the ‘90s, gives the album a weird funhouse-mirror quality. Nostalgia moves in 20-year cycles, which means the ‘90s sampling artists the Avalanches were inspired by were drawing from the ‘70s. So Wildflower’s references are doubled: the original music is sliced and diced and processed and filtered through a sensibility that emerged two decades later, and then that feeling is reflected once again into the present moment, two more decades later. The feeling can either be comforting or unsettling, depending on your angle of approach.
When Since I Left You arrived in 2000 it seemed less like the arrival of a new kind of pop than a bittersweet farewell to a decade that was coming to a close. The album mixed the technique and spirit of the Dust Brothers and transported it from the urban street to an open field far somewhere far from civilization, some place where everyone is dressed colorfully and they’re either on MDMA or they remember their days taking it fondly. The Avalanches are all about feel. And Wildflower, though it misses some of its predecessor’s thematic unity and from-nowhere sense of surprise, has that feel in spades. Their work continues to mine a deceptively narrow emotional world—new love, childhood playfulness, wistful sadness, happy feelings of connection—but renders it better than just about any music ever made.
CORRECTION: Chaz Bundick’s surname was misspelt in an earlier version of this article. | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Modular / Astralwerks / EMI / XL | July 8, 2016 | 8.5 | 657067c4-1ac6-496d-93ef-081579efd7b9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Now is the time of year when people get sick. Know what? I'm sick. But before I bore you ... | Now is the time of year when people get sick. Know what? I'm sick. But before I bore you ... | Nobukazu Takemura: Scope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7920-scope/ | Scope | Now is the time of year when people get sick. Know what? I'm sick. But before I bore you with another paragraph of self-pity, let me say that I'm getting better. The symptoms have been reduced to a full-body sweat, a feverish chill, a swirling nausea, lack of appetite and the occasional dry-heave vomit session.
This afternoon, as I lay on the couch watching a hypnotising episode of "Judge Mills Lane" (the one where the rich lady's dog, Buttercup, was mauled to death by this guy's Rottweilers), I thought, "What better way to cure my pain than by listening to the latest Thrill Jockey release? Ah, there it is!" My discman and headphones were being eaten by my fabulous $30 couch, and were stuffed under my pillow. Lying in the vicinity, Nobukazu Takemura's Scope.
I remember a few of Takemura's remixes-- most notably, his remix of Roni Size's "Brown Paper Bag." They're usually crazed experimentations that leave behind only a fragment of the original song. I can't wait to see what happens when Takemura's given free reign to record whatever he wants.
Drifting in and out of peaceful but fevered sleep, I listened with great ease to the five lengthy tracks. For the first half hour of Scope, I was lulled into an electric dreamland with bizarre mid-'80s special effects. But somewhere, I've heard this stuff before... the 22-minute opener, "On a Balloon," sounds, well, exactly like a track off Oval's Dok. Exactly. And following, the 13-minute-long "Kepler" sounded remarkably like Tortoise's "Ten Day Interval" or Ghost's "Daggma."
Suddenly, at "Taw," Scope's third track, I shot up, stunned. Was this communication between primitive R2D2-type androids? Either that or some wanky moog experiment. After nine minutes of seemingly random robot noise, I find myself fast asleep once again. "Icefall" again cops Oval's trademark skipping CD noise, but uses it to a create a different effect-- this time, the skipping noise is a beautiful ambient coldness and is organized rhythmically. So, like Oval, but with sort of a Windy and Carl feel. Scope closes with the strangely medievil sounds of "Tiddler," the album's shortest track. In as few words as possible: ending music for an old Nintendo game.
It seems like Takemura's primary talent is building upon what's already been created by other artists. His concepts are taken directly from other artists, but what he creates with his concepts is pure talent. Except on "Taw," which is jarring and unwelcome in this record's otherwise harmonious soundscape. Well, I gotta go take some Advil Cold & Sinus. Ugh... | 1999-06-08T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 1999-06-08T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | June 8, 1999 | 7.5 | 6587e0a8-469f-4c2d-ab56-f7636ae09259 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Los Angeles singer and songwriter Dijon Duenas’ solo debut takes a polyglot approach, setting his yearning, falsetto-laden vocals against synthy digital textures and folk-inflected guitars. | Los Angeles singer and songwriter Dijon Duenas’ solo debut takes a polyglot approach, setting his yearning, falsetto-laden vocals against synthy digital textures and folk-inflected guitars. | Dijon: How Do You Feel About Getting Married? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dijon-how-do-you-feel-about-getting-married/ | How Do You Feel About Getting Married? | Baltimore-bred, Los Angeles-based Dijon is the quintessential singer-songwriter for this moment where genre and style have become exempt from classifications and hegemony. His new EP How Do You Feel About Getting Married? was released under the R&B/soul tag, appropriate for his yearning, falsetto-laden vocals and the mood of the synthy, digital textures throughout, but many of these sounds lie in the crosshairs of folk and pop-rock. Dijon cites Joni Mitchell and Feist as influences; his 2019 song “lace,” he’s said, was inspired by Smog’s “Teenage Spaceship.”
When Little Richard died earlier this month, the vital conversation about how rock’n’roll was not invented by white people reopened. Whether it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Beyoncé’s country stylings on Lemonade, or the often reductive classifications of a folk-leaning artist like Moses Sumney, the message remains the same: Guitar music, despite perception, despite who has dominated the charts, does not inherently belong to whiteness. In 2018, Dijon told the FADER that, as a person of color making Americana-influenced music, he was grappling with a kind of cultural dissonance. “[I’m] fascinated [with] really unironically and genuinely appropriating these symbols, ideas, and mythologies that aren’t necessarily associated with minority music,” he explained.
With Dijon’s latest release, any trepidations about his obsession with guitar music are gone. On “rock n roll,” he sings, “She don’t like rock’n’roll/We talked about it… So I told her that I just got a record and I promise it’s a jam/‘Automatic’ and I wanna see you dance.” That would be Prince’s “Automatic,” from 1999, a reference Dijon goes on to pair with name-drops of the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, and, later, Sly Stone and Earth Wind & Fire. Like everything on the six-song collection, “rock n roll” is loud and sparse. Crunchy guitar and big, clubby bass expand and contract as silence peeks in through the synthetic chunkiness.
Genre alloys that sound brand new and genuinely surprising—without being a mess—are always hard to come by. Standout “alley-oop,” the EP’s thunderbolt, pairs tender R&B and digital tinkering with pedal steel and country-ish riffs. Throughout, the sound-jamming is focused, the production glossy. But many of Married’s other hybrids are not so unusual that they sound particularly new. Opener “do you light up?” invokes both early Frank Ocean and Merriweather Post Pavilion without muddying the colors, but it doesn’t amplify them, either.
Polygluttony reigns right now, and Dijon has figured out his place in it. But sometimes his references seem pulled out of a hat, as when he described an earlier song, “Cannonball,” as an attempt to merge Jodeci and Animal Collective. It does sound like AnCo with soul vocals, but there’s more to a Jodeci influence than soul vocals alone—nor does the combination seem entirely necessary in the first place. Essential on their own, Dijon’s inspirations require singular finesse to succeed as a mix. | 2020-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | R&R / Warner | May 21, 2020 | 6.5 | 65913275-c8ae-4290-9528-34d05ded7b46 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5ebeb04ee5423e84f420ed2e/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/How%20Do%20You%20Feel%20About%20Getting%20Married?_Dijon.jpg |
Crack’s latest album is a delicate balance of fresh and familiar from one of the funniest and most thoughtful rappers working today. | Crack’s latest album is a delicate balance of fresh and familiar from one of the funniest and most thoughtful rappers working today. | Chris Crack: Growthfully Developed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-crack-growthfully-developed/ | Growthfully Developed | Chris Crack finds comfort in the chaos of non-sequiturs. The Chicago rapper’s songs can jump from wry life-isms to boasts about his status within his hometown to stories of falling in love in bougie grocery stores with no warning. This description may feel erratic, but Crack’s charisma and voice—which sounds like a frayed nerve ending come to life—have a strong gravitational pull. It’s the equivalent of switching between different TV shows with the same actor; the stories might not be the same, but the leading face is always recognizable. “Celebrate Everything Until Further Notice,” a song near the middle of his latest album Growthfully Developed, features a quick passage that neatly sums up his style and humor: “I got thoughts that just scatter my mind/It’s why my hair nappy.”
Surrendering yourself to the whims of a darting mind can be a double-edged sword, and it’s an issue Crack has grappled with in the past. But Growthfully Developed maintains the delicate balance of fresh and familiar as well as any of the dozen projects he’s released in the last three years. In fact, Crack and his on-hand producers are more prone to experiment, adding flourishes to his cherished mid-tempo soul loops. Producers MelloMatt and Turk Money retrofit “Chicago Don’t Make Industry Plants” with booming 808s that grant the underlying vocal samples the pomp of stadium rap; Sledgren does the same with “Pussy Better When You Eat It First.” Both “Uknowwhereihadderat” and “Ate Ball in My Sock” are so plush they wouldn’t sound out of place on a Jeremih or Summer Walker album. They fit well next to the drumless loops and smoldering boom-bap on display, and Crack corrals these disparate beats with ease.
Crack’s music has always been animated and bursting with color, and his writing on Developed is no exception. He begins “Therapy Don’t Work, Try Drugs” with an anecdote about eating hibachi for three nights in a row that leads to the strip club, life advice, and reminiscing on days when you had to ask for a parent’s permission to play with friends. Other distinct scenes race by while leaving an impression—a game of Loteria played over Friendsgiving dinner at the end of “Illuminati Phone Numbers,” demons faced down in a pair of Asics sneakers on “A Blunt Forced This Trauma.” But he’s just as likely to spend songs walking listeners through his unlikely path to success, as he does in the first few seconds of “Jordan Never Did That Move.” Topics change mid-track, but none of them feel adrift or aimless, which is the ultimate method to Crack’s madness.
For all the jokes and acid hurled at haters, there’s a sense of longing across Developed not present on his other projects. Crack is exhaustingly prolific, and a good share of this album’s chest-beating stems as much from a general sense of underappreciation as it does from feelings toward any particular person. When he croons “I’ve been doing this half my life” on “Nine 2 Fives Make You Fake,” it lands with a sense of both frustration and release, a positive and negative affirmation amplifying each other in real time. The stakes feel higher here than they did on last year’s Fool’s Gold debut Might Delete Later, which inflates the album’s sense of purpose.
Said purpose wouldn’t mean as much if the songs weren’t worth revisiting. Thankfully, Crack remains one of the funniest and most thoughtful rappers working today. The formula he’s been tinkering with for the last four years has produced the breeziest and most eclectic album in his catalog since 2020’s White People Love Algorithms. “You can’t put me in no box. I want to be remembered as the trillest and as the guy who didn’t fold,” he said in a recent interview. It’s hard to predict where he’ll end up next, but chances are, Crack will get a reaction wherever he lands.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly indicated that Cutta and Sledgren produced “Chicago Don’t Make Industry Plants” and “Pussy Better When You Eat It First.” The former track was produced by MelloMatt and Turk Money, while Sledgren produced the latter song. | 2022-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | New Deal Collectives | March 8, 2022 | 7.2 | 65941948-a683-41b9-815c-9d20ddb4b89a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Continuing with the harrowing narrative fervor that defined last year's compelling Fishscale and the old-soul loops that have defined much of his career, Ghost's new album may not uncover many new darts but, even 11 years after his solo debut, there's no denying one of hip-hop's most vibrant voices in its comfort zone. | Continuing with the harrowing narrative fervor that defined last year's compelling Fishscale and the old-soul loops that have defined much of his career, Ghost's new album may not uncover many new darts but, even 11 years after his solo debut, there's no denying one of hip-hop's most vibrant voices in its comfort zone. | Ghostface Killah: The Big Doe Rehab | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10965-the-big-doe-rehab/ | The Big Doe Rehab | Talking about the title of his seventh album, Ghostface recently offered a sleep-inspired explanation: "Dreams-- you can't really remember the dreams-- but I was someplace, I don't even know if it was rehab, but it was mad money in there. When I woke up, the first thing that came to my mind was The Big Doe Rehab." For most people, a dream filled with money would make them think of what they could do with all that cash. Ghost is not like most people. His vision is aptly conflicted; though he's ostensibly in rehab for having too much money, the only cure-- according to the characteristically daffy album art featuring orange medicine bottles filled with Benjamin Franklins-- is more doe. When it comes to the hustle, there is no way out. Continuing with the harrowing narrative fervor that defined last year's compelling Fishscale and the old soul loops that have remained a constant throughout much of his career, Ghost's new album may not uncover many of the verteran MC's still-hidden darts but, even 11 years after his solo debut, there's no denying one of hip-hop's most vibrant voices in its comfort zone.
Of course, his sweet spot is anything but sweet. As usual, the drug-peddling tales here deal in the currency of consequence; in Ghost's world there's no such thing as a simple transaction. Even on the hands-in-the-air anthem "We Celebrate", the boasts are tinged with annoying necessity ("The pool's a pain in the ass/ Fifty grand on Windex, kid/ They keep it clean, the whole bottom is glass") and concession ("If you fat I might take one for the team/ But I gotta get drunk first, know what I mean?"). Elsewhere, the terrors are more substantial. Both "Walk Around" and "Yolanda's House" are entries into the list of Ghostface chase classics (see: "Run"). "Walk Around" starts where most murder-rap songs end-- right after the shots go off. Describing a grizzly corner store scene, the trigger-happy narrator doesn't skimp on the details: "A part of his nose was stuck to my Padres" (trumping Prodigy's similarly gruesome "you've got some stomach on your Nikes" line from earlier this year). Soon, the killer is puking in his friend's car and dismissing claims of insanity ("don't put me in no mental clinics")-- it's a yarn ripe with the tangible vulnerability and irrationality of a first-time offender.
Meanwhile, on "Yolanda's House", the emotive rapper enlists both Method Man and Raekwon to tell his harried tale. "God strike me if you don’t like me," huffs Ghost. "I'm tired and I'm out of breath, the weed got me paranoid." The lines evoke Sam Jackson's famous take on Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction. And while RZA may be the Wu-Tang member who can call Quentin Tarantino a close friend, Ghost's intricate crime stories and flamboyant violence-- not to mention his extreme verbosity-- increasingly sound like deleted scenes from one of the director's post-modern epics. On this track, a miraculously revived Method Man has to pull himself together after Ghost bursts in on him mid-coitus while on the run ("She’s asthmatic and you laughin', son/ I bumped my toe on the nightstand just running trying to grab the gun," Meth bitches, pulling up his underwear). These guys are well aware that getting caught with your pants down can often be as endearing as it is embarrassing.
Just as they provided the sweeping musical backbone to Jay-Z's American Gangster, producing tandem Sean C and LV of Diddy's Hitmen crew work their criminally smooth style on five Rehab tracks. But while Jay used the duo's blaring horns to vault himself to triumph, Ghost embodies the sweat on the '70s session man's brow as he relives the pain and hard work of his nostalgic sound snippets. "I'll Die for You" works around purchasing an expensive Marvin Gaye sample by pinching a symphonic bed of strings that uncannily replicates the lush grooves of What's Going On. On the track, Ghost fancies himself a modern martyr ("I die for the babies who can't eat with bare feet who need they mother"). But this Messiah won't die for just anyone ("First off yo you ain't my peeps/ I know we from the same town and shit/ But we ain't that deep"). Unfortunately, given the current internal Wu-Tang Clan war, those disparaging comments sound like they could be aimed at the RZA.
In his songs, Ghostface is always striving and battling and starting a ruckus so, in a weird way, his press fight with the RZA-- involving alleged unpaid dues and the head Clansman's unorthodox (and fantastic) production on new Wu album 8 Diagrams-- is apropos. Even as both the Wu-Tang and Ghostface release two of the best rap albums of this shallow year within one week of each other, the group's problems overshadow their conquests. Fittingly, at the proper ending of Rehab, Ghost isn't chilling on some getaway island, he's rushing headlong into an untold number of cops waiting to shoot him dead, Butch Cassidy-style. There will never be a happy fade out for Ghostface-- and lucky for us he still can't quite figure out why. On "The Prayer", Rehab's acapella conversation with God, an r&b singer named Ox sums up the rapper's ongoing turmoil as well as anyone could: "He said, 'Son you should know you're born to die'/ I said, 'I do, it's just hard sayin' bye'." | 2007-12-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-12-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | December 6, 2007 | 8 | 65955103-232a-4c5d-acd8-7ccef2921755 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
With a long bench of guests from 2 Chainz to Ne-Yo, the singer’s fourth album is sometimes catchy but astonishingly hollow and derivative. | With a long bench of guests from 2 Chainz to Ne-Yo, the singer’s fourth album is sometimes catchy but astonishingly hollow and derivative. | blackbear: cybersex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blackbear-cybersex/ | cybersex | The singer, songwriter, and producer known as blackbear is devoted to brands; it’s one of many ways in which he’s old-fashioned. The songs on his new album cybersex, released sure enough on Cyber Monday (his 27th birthday) bristle with product mentions. There are spots for Gucci, Timberland and, blackbear’s potential favorite, Wilhelmina Models, whom he brags on “Thursday/Froze Over (“Interlude”)” about sharing carnally with G-Eazy (another example of the artist’s inherent conservatism is his unrepentant, unblinking misogyny.) His interviews, even the ones conducted by phone, come with a monotonous, Patrick Bateman-esque recitation of what he was wearing as he discussed how little he cared about music. You imagine his publicist sending multiple emails to the reporters: “Don’t forget, you said you’d include that he had on a…yep…yep, it’s spelled R-A-F…”
cybersex is blackbear’s fourth full length, but it’s the first that he’s released since signing what he touted as a $10 million deal with Interscope and the project has all the bells and whistles of the industry playing catch-up with a genuinely new sound. His talents are for melody, mimicry, and self-promotion and he has marketed himself as a polished answer to what critics have called SoundCloud rap. cybersex scans as a major label affair, with a bloated 14-song, 51 minute tracklist, shiny Rap&B hooks scattered chaotically like glitter on hotel bedsheets. The record has a dream list of features for someone whose teenage years coincided with the death of blogroll-rap. Appearances, some energized, some dutiful, are made by Cam’ron, Paul Wall, T-Pain, Rick Ross and Ne-Yo, among others.
Ne-Yo and blackbear have known each other for a third of the younger man’s life, since he was releasing music as Mat Musto (he was born Matthew Musto). Their meeting marked the beginning of the near-decade that blackbear has spent termiting his way in and around the industry. His writing assist on the 2012 Justin Bieber hit “Girlfriend” granted him insider cred and his prolificacy, social media presence and nose for fashion trends did the rest. His explosive popularity, seeded by his 2015 record Deadroses and several appearances on Kylie Jenner’s snapchat, culminated this year with the Gucci Mane-featuring hit “Do Re Mi” and a burst of tabloid coverage linking him with the actress Bella Thorne.
As a public figure, blackbear is so objectionable in his self-pity, mean-spiritedness, and obliviousness—after Lil Peep’s death in November he criticized the 21-year-old as a swagger-jacker who glorified drugs—that it’s tempting to dismiss his music on the basis of the lyrics alone, which can’t help but to reveal those qualities. But there are germs of musical talent in evidence on cybersex, particularly on a string of R&B songs that display his melodic abilities. The first of these is “Playboy S**t” but the best is the Ne-Yo feature, “Top Priority,” a sweetly sung, inescapably catchy R&B song that features the mentor in A+ vintage form, as he serenades his old flame, Ms. Independent.
There are fewer rap songs and they are significantly weaker. On several, blackbear and his featured guest (Rick Ross, Cam’ron) seem to expect each other to carry the weight and the results (“Glo_Up,” “Bright Pink Tims”) sound like a dresser being dropped down a flight of stairs. Even on the stronger tracks, blackbear’s lack of originality is near stunning. “Top Priority” shamelessly rehashes the “ho to housewife” trope and the high-point of “Gucci Linen,” outside of the 2 Chainz verse, is a hook which references Nelly Furtado’s 2001 hit “I’m Like a Bird” and Nelly’s 2002 hit “Hot in Herre.”
Then, there are the lyrics and boy, are they awful. “Thursday/Froze Over” begins with a recitation of the most famous men who have had sex with the same women as blackbear, who, along with the aforementioned G-Eazy, apparently include Bieber and Bruno Mars. On “I Hope Your Whole Life Sux,” women are compared to foodstuffs—“Instagram be feeling like the grocery store I pick and choose”—and on “Candayapple,” he boasts of a companion that “She my accessory, you know that ima flaunt her.”
These sentiments are a natural outgrowth of vibes expressed on Drake’s Take Care and in the Weeknd’s entire discography. blackbear appears to have studied both artists closely and, like the two Canadians, his melodic gifts will yield a handful of hits—“Down 4 U,” the T-Pain feature on cybersex, might be a contender. But unlike Drake or Abel Tesfaye, blackbear has little interest in perfecting his music, exploring new sounds, or earning pop stardom; he has repeatedly told interviewers that he plans to quit within the next couple of years. “Music’s a hobby to me,” he said to Noisey. “I have stocks and bitcoins, I consult for things and whatever, I dress girls for Coachella.” His lack of investment helps explain why listening to cybersex feels the way it does. Initially appealing and often catchy, it reveals itself relatively quickly as a shallow record made by an emotional idiot, stocked with brand names and old ideas, signifying nothing. | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Beartrap / Interscope / Alamo | December 4, 2017 | 4.1 | 6595d4d2-11ae-4ee0-bd9a-1cdefcd3f388 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
On the follow-up to her 2017 album For organ and brass, the Swedish composer delves even deeper into microtonal interplay, balancing heady theoretical terrain with a rare emotional resonance. | On the follow-up to her 2017 album For organ and brass, the Swedish composer delves even deeper into microtonal interplay, balancing heady theoretical terrain with a rare emotional resonance. | Ellen Arkbro: CHORDS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ellen-arkbro-chords/ | CHORDS | The title of Ellen Arkbro’s CHORDS couldn’t be much more succinct—or accurate. Her longform compositions, first encountered on 2017’s stunning For organ and brass, consist entirely of rich harmonies rendered in obscure tuning systems, unfurled one at a time. Melody, rhythm, lyrics, and other beloved chestnuts we tend to enjoy in music are unflinchingly cast aside. Listening to Arkbro’s work means listening to chords and nothing else.
If that sounds dull, or strict, or technical, then you haven’t heard these chords. Though in interviews Arkbro enthuses about high-functioning academic subjects like septimal intervals, the ultra-complex computer program SuperCollider, and “microtonal tuba,” her music is infused with a profound emotionality that transcends its heady origins. Passing through the gates of extreme rigor, CHORDS finds private infinity in a handful or stretched-out drones.
The A-side returns to the organ with “CHORDS for organ.” Here the instrument is rendered bare and unaccompanied, and the first impression is one of scale—a mammoth stack of tones that swells, churns, and undulates in place. Notes are added and taken away with a technician’s cool remove. Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley recently described the experience of working with frequency relationships as being akin to becoming a “witness to phenomena,” a comment that finds much purchase here. Arkbro’s cadence has a strikingly chunky quality; she plops each new harmonic shift down with the matter-of-factness of a butcher weighing meat. Yet this absence of romance or theatricality works in the music’s favor, allowing us to hear the depth and power of the organ without feeling manipulated or needled into some calculated epiphany.
These austerity measures are a step or two away from her debut. Comparing the albums, CHORDS is notably more severe, and also more mercurial. For organ and brass at times recalled the muted yearnings of Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning, but CHORDS feels less expressive and more like a force of nature. It may inspire awe, dread, deep calm, or nervous discomfort, but that’s on you. The press release describes the album as built from a “carefully selected combination of tones,” but you get the feeling that the tones selected Arkbro, rather than the other way around. The longer you sit with them, the more they speak.
On the B-side, Arkbro shifts her focus to the guitar, though it sounds particularly alien here. Could this be a function of tuning? Or has Arkbro returned to the world of software, where she worked until recently? We hear each string sounded one at a time, strummed with a dirge-like solemnity, in a languid cascade. The action is really in the decay, where the strings resonate together in beautiful stasis, though it doesn’t sweep you up with the same immediacy as her organ works, which essentially feel like limitless explorations of those same fading harmonies. I’m reminded of Morton Feldman’s search for “sourceless” sounds. “The attack of a sound is not its character,” held the composer. “Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing—leaving us rather than coming towards us.” A piece built entirely out of these floating evaporations could be an experience. Though “CHORDS for guitar” moves in the direction of this mystery, it doesn’t quite arrive. It’s almost majestic, almost hypnotic, and almost feels sublimely empty, but not quite.
This is not a blow to Arkbro’s work, however. Her debut showed a young artist composing with remarkable assuredness and clarity of vision, and CHORDS is a strong, occasionally astonishing next step. Give it a close listen and try to resist being entranced by the subtle, pulsating viscera of the A-side. A single note hangs in the air, oscillating with a sludgy tremolo. A second joins, and suddenly the interaction of the two causes a fluttering. But then there’s something below, a deeper moan, answered by the jackhammer drill of the next combination. Time seems to freeze as you sit there, parsing out this gentle paradox of stillness and movement. When Arkbro reintroduces a long-neglected lower octave—forget it. This could go on forever. | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Subtext | June 18, 2019 | 7.8 | 6596704b-9965-4b67-8793-799d6583719d | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Alabama Shakes escape their "retro-soul" box for good on Sound & Color, a strange, mystical and unexpected record with traces of Curtis Mayfield, Erykah Badu, MC5, and the Strokes. This is stadium soul with one eye peeking toward another galaxy while hands and feet and throats desperately try to suss out life here on Earth. | Alabama Shakes escape their "retro-soul" box for good on Sound & Color, a strange, mystical and unexpected record with traces of Curtis Mayfield, Erykah Badu, MC5, and the Strokes. This is stadium soul with one eye peeking toward another galaxy while hands and feet and throats desperately try to suss out life here on Earth. | Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20420-sound-color/ | Sound & Color | Two years ago, Alabama Shakes performed at the White House as the Obamas sat in the front row, just a few feet away. The Athens, Ala. band were part of a "Memphis Soul" revue celebrating that city’s groundbreaking '60s sounds, which famously featured black and white musicians working together to make lasting hits like "Hold On, I'm Comin'" in the thick of the civil rights era. The visual symbolism of the event was powerful, a historically rich triumph of the unity that soul music has often portended: As the nation’s first black president looked on, multiracial Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard led her band of white instrumentalists—along with Memphis greats Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper—on the classic 1967 blues track "Born Under a Bad Sign". Barack and Michelle nodded their heads in respectful rhythm. Malia seemed mildly amused. Sasha, meanwhile, was bored. Like, remarkably bored. Her flat stare was the type usually reserved for dentist waiting rooms or Target customer service lineups. Her obligatory golf clap at the end of the song was wan to the point of noiselessness.
Howard, for her part, could probably see where the youngest Obama was coming from. During the performance, the singer paced impatiently, seemingly humbled by the pageantry and also perhaps feeling a little constricted by the antiquity of it all. It wasn’t that Howard and her band didn’t know their blues; the working-class quartet came from a small town in the mythic South and cut their teeth on hours-long sets of covers. And when the frontwoman belted, "Hard luck and trouble been my only friend/ I been on my own ever since I was 10," the lines held pointed meaning for Howard since she lost her older sister—and only sibling—to cancer when she was around that age. But for all their preternatural grit, sweat, and passion (along with every other age-old signifier of rock'n'roll authenticity known to man), Alabama Shakes were never quite comfortable with the retro-soul box many placed them into upon their arrival in 2012. To be fair, their debut, Boys & Girls, certainly deserved the tag, its vintage moves elevated mostly by Howard’s gale-force delivery, an instrument that could have blown Otis Redding back. The band’s effortless charm, instant familiarity, and Great Recession recovery anthem "Hold On" made them easy to root for, and the album went onto sell more than 700,000 copies. It felt as if they could be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at any moment.
And yet, the idea taking on the mantle of '60s soul was never part of the plan for Alabama Shakes. In interviews, they casually distanced themselves from the pure revivalists of Daptone Records while repping for theatrical sensationalists like Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and My Chemical Romance; their origin story had Howard noticing bassist Zac Cockrell because he was wearing an At the Drive-In shirt; when the band hit "Saturday Night Live" recently, Howard wore earrings emblazoned with Prince’s face. "We just don’t wanna own the classic R&B title and let people down," guitarist Heath Fogg diplomatically stated around the release of Boys & Girls, "because when we go electronic on the next record it might break some hearts."
Sound & Color is not an electronic record. But it is strange and mystical and unexpected—more Houses of the Holy than "Holy Cow". It’s got past lives and future people, traces of Curtis Mayfield, Erykah Badu, MC5, the Strokes. There’s a song called "Shoegaze" that could find a second home on the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You. Bon Iver collaborator Rob Moose provides eerie string arrangements that slowly encroach on songs like ivy climbing up a fence while the band and co-producer Blake Mills tweak tones and rhythms to make guitars and drums and bass and keyboards sound genuinely exciting—fresh, even—in 2015. This is stadium soul with one eye peeking toward another galaxy while hands and feet and throats desperately try to suss out life here on Earth.
Of course, Howard is at the center of it all. Over the course of the last three years, she’s managed to take complete control over her unbridled voice without losing a smidge of spontaneity. She’s no longer just building toward an ecstatic climax (though there are several of those here), but rather exploring the upper reaches of her register, cajoling instead of hollering, taking on operatic cadences. The singer, who took part in both raucous Baptist services as well as a cappella hymns in the Church of Christ growing up, layers her vocals on almost every track, offering harmonies and ghosts that can’t help but follow her around; on one bipolar love song, what sounds like ghoulish laughter echoes behind Howard as she pours her being into the words "gimme all your love!" Is she reveling in her desires? Sending up her larger-than-life voice? Smiling into the void of unrequited love? Yes, yes, and yes.
As a lyricist, Howard excels at spinning down-home profundity that make her sound her age, 26, and years beyond. Along with her tales of haunted love, cautious optimism, and impassioned pacifism come more impressionistic songs that mean to find connections between epochs and space. She and her band travel through the blues back to a bad sign—or is it a good one?—on "Gemini", a six-and-a-half-minute excursion into zero-gravity funk. Whereas Alabama Shakes once seemed destined to relive the history of others, they invent their own genesis here, as weeds grow near the Tennessee River and eyes reveal dreams that eventually must wake up. And just as the song comes to a close, it keeps going for a little while longer. | 2015-04-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | April 23, 2015 | 8.1 | 659a65f3-b595-4a82-a999-6976e03ea892 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Ill-starred and long overlooked, the Detroit shoegaze band finally gets its due with a new Numero Group compilation. | Ill-starred and long overlooked, the Detroit shoegaze band finally gets its due with a new Numero Group compilation. | Majesty Crush: Butterflies Don’t Go Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/majesty-crush-butterflies-dont-go-away/ | Butterflies Don’t Go Away | In 1994, shortly after most of their musical dreams collapsed, Majesty Crush played a show opening for alt-rockers Belly. After seeing them perform, lead singer Tanya Donelly pulled aside the band’s bassist and told him point blank, “I think everyone in your band needs therapy.”
The bitter comedy in Donelly’s observation wasn’t that Majesty Crush had hit a low point; she had simply noticed the askew intensity that kept them going. An American shoegaze band that merrily sang about wanting to assassinate politicians and be debased like an animal while crafting tunes just as dreamy and gorgeous as their UK peers, Majesty Crush were upfront with their desires to the point of repulsion. Butterflies Don’t Go Away, Numero Group’s new compilation of the band’s only album and few EPs, explores this tension: a melding of the unsavory and sweet, raw lust and desire amplified tenfold by tense basslines and waves of pillowy distortion. It would have been enough to send them far beyond the Midwest and on to bigger things—if only anything, internally and externally, had gone right.
Majesty Crush originated in Detroit at the dawn of 1990. The start of a new decade had brought the end of Spahn Ranch, a sparse, gothic post-punk band featuring Odell Nails III and aspiring music journalist Hobey Echlin. Itching to start a new band, Nails turned to his roommate and high school friend, David Stroughter. The duo turned back to Echlin to be their bassist. Michael Segal, a local record store clerk who had introduced Stroughter and Nails to A.R. Kane’s 69, completed the lineup on guitar. A.R. Kane’s album would become the new band’s Rosetta Stone: evidence for how to make noisy, echo-filled songs about deeply intimate desires, as well as how being Black did not exclude you from making such music.
By 1992 Majesty Crush had begun to self-release singles and rise in the Detroit scene, powered in part by Stroughter’s stark intensity on stage and the band’s unwillingness to be confined by genre. Dali, an Elektra subsidiary, came calling; before 1993 even started, the band was making plans to record its debut. That record, Love 15, is presented here in full and stands as one of the most unheralded shoegaze albums of the ’90s. Opener “Boyfriend” is a sly wink: Its plumbing cymbal crashes and jet-engine guitar squall invoke the overwhelming barrage of other albums of the era before giving way almost immediately, opening up to real song, full of gliding guitar notes and Stroughter’s roughly sultry vocals about how he’s going to take another man’s girlfriend and make him squirm while he does it. Not that the band was afraid to be loud. “Seles” and “Grow” are beyond generous with the feedback, all the better to accent the unfettered debauchery within both. Still, there were few dream-pop bands of the time who could produce something like “Penny for Love”: easily the catchiest song the band ever wrote, with a rhythmic energy as infectious as the singing, even if Stroughter is talking about selling his body so he can buy time with someone else’s.
The band also mined songs from earlier singles to great effect. Reworked tracks like “Cicciolina” began to sound more alive, swapping the timid tempo of the original for a more confident propulsion and psych-y finale to match Stroughter’s obsession with the adult film actress. “No. 1 Fan” achieves its true form here, its oil slick bassline wrapping around the song as sheets of distortion crash in throughout. Stroughter coos about John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession with Jodie Foster with honey in his voice: The uglier the emotion or impulse, the more the band seemed to relish in transforming it into something bewitching.
No matter how seemingly skeevy the thematic territory, there was a pained honesty at the group’s core. So “Feigned Sleep,” a love song filled with the same breathy melancholy and tension of “Fake Plastic Trees,” feels just as sincere and appropriate as the rest of the album. The brooding beat of “Brand” is the backbone to a song about the endless consumption of every comfort in sight (cigars, alcohol, sex); Stroughter may be surrounded by everything he’s ever wanted, but there’s no hiding how hollow inside he sounds singing the pained notes of the chorus. There was depth to the depravity and the band harnessed it to make something immaculate. It all came crashing down when Dali folded a month after the album’s release. Majesty Crush were left holding whatever copies they could scrounge from the office.
The band soldiered on with the Sans Muscles EP a year later, but cracks were glaringly apparent. By this point they were crafting shoegaze so formulaic it bordered on parody (“Space Between Your Moles”) or trying to recreate the terrible funk-rock then creeping into alt-rock radio and coming out sounding like sentient leather jackets (“If JFA Were Still Together”). Still they had one last ember of beauty inside them. “Ghost of Fun” is the longest song the band wrote, stuffed with guitars that twinkle and reverb to the point of overflow, swaying and sagging with a rhythm that weighs heavy on the shoulders. It’s a final tale of dark longing—about an adult knowingly chasing after a teenager—that compresses the band’s entire existence into a little less than seven minutes, hauntedly dreamy at one moment, nightmarishly noisy by its end. It’s a worthy coda, even if Stroughter’s lyrics feel spewed out rather than plucked from his soul.
A short tour with an up-and-coming band called the Verve followed, but by then it was too late. It would be their last EP, and Majesty Crush would sputter out in 1995, having finally lost their grip on the reserve of intensity and chaos that fueled them. Any hope of a proper second chance for the original lineup ended in 2017, when Stroughter was killed by police at age 50.
At a time when so much shoegaze and dream pop has been rediscovered, when CDs long forgotten in the used bin can morph into canon-reshaping classics, Majesty Crush remain unfairly forgotten, another apparent casualty of the major labels’ frenzied search for the ’90s’ next big thing. Maybe it was their explicit rawness that doomed them from the start, their unwillingness to sound or to be just like their peers. Yet to be forever denied something they wanted seems so tragically fitting for this band, one so nakedly upfront about desire. “I’d kill the president,” Stroughter sings over and over on “No. 1 Fan,” proclaiming his willingness to do something unthinkable just to get the attention of his latest obsession. Even that wasn’t enough at the time. But maybe now it will be. | 2024-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Numero Group | April 3, 2024 | 8 | 659fb8b5-4fb7-46b8-9122-7fb7c8966fd0 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | |
Head Wound City, a supergroup drawing from members of the Blood Brothers, the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, convene for an album of abrasive, low-stakes hardcore. | Head Wound City, a supergroup drawing from members of the Blood Brothers, the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, convene for an album of abrasive, low-stakes hardcore. | Head Wound City: A New Wave of Violence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21898-a-new-wave-of-violence/ | A New Wave of Violence | Conservative regimes have always provided a boon for punk rock. The Reagan and Thatcher years famously birthed hardcore as we know it; more recently, George W. Bush’s two terms spurred on a generation of bands that expanded the boundaries of post-hardcore, screamo and grindcore. With right-wing demagoguery making headlines and xenophobia on the rise around the globe, another musical backlash could be just around the corner. That might be the idea behind the reunion of Head Wound City, a supergroup whose lineup includes some of the Bush era's most forward-thinking punk musicians: Jordan Blilie and Cody Votolato of the Blood Brothers, Justin Pearson and Gabe Serbian of the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner. Up until now, the band’s only formal output was a 10-minute EP written and recorded in the span of a week in 2005. Following some reunion shows in 2014, Head Wound City have now produced A New Wave of Violence, their fittingly-titled full-length debut.
More so than in the past, Blilie and Votolato seem to take the lead on A New Wave of Violence--these songs all bear a close resemblance to the Blood Brothers’ work circa Burn Piano Island, Burn. Of course, Johnny Whitney’s high-pitched squeal and glam affectations are dearly missed, but many of that band’s other signature elements are here: Blilie's dark humor and throat-shredding screams, the pummeling rhythms, songs that barrel forward with a punishing intensity. Votolato, as always, manages to make an impressive racket, with guitars that alternately crash down in waves of fuzz, roar like a jet engine and buzz like a cloud of hornets.
As with Piano Island, Ross Robinson returns to the boards, lending his skilled hand to the proceedings--few producers can capture the live energy of hardcore bands with the sort of fidelity that Robinson does. The upgrade is immediately apparent; where the Head Wound City EP’s sound was defined by DIY muddiness, A New Wave of Violence brings each element in the mix into sharp focus, even as the overall effect is one of crushing heaviness. These songs are felt as much as they’re heard, with every riff, scream and drum hit practically leaping out of the speakers.
Opener “Old Age Takes Too Long” provides a representative sample: a steady march of floor toms, chugging, palm-muted guitars that give way to thunderous choruses and an almost Misfits-like sing-along refrain of “Whoaaa-ohhhh.” “Born to Burn” and “Palace of Love and Hate” are scorched earth campaigns that sprint through multiple verses and choruses in under two minutes (only three of the ten songs here extend beyond the three-minute mark). Longer tracks like “I Cast a Shadow for You,”“Avalanche in Heaven” and “Love is Best” recall some of the Blood Brothers’ best-loved songs–multi-part miniature epics like “Cecilia and the Silhouette Saloon” and “Camouflage, Camouflage”—but in keeping with Head Wound City’s proclivity for brevity, are much more tightly scripted.
If you’re looking for a hardcore record that fires on all cylinders, you won’t be disappointed by A New Wave of Violence: here you’ll find a set of skilled players tearing through 25 minutes of music with relentless energy. That said, the latest incarnation of Head Wound City does feel both more straightforward and less ambitious than nearly all of these musicians’ previous projects. You’ll find few of the Locust’s loopy synth lines or breakneck tempos; Zinner seems content to let his guitar follow rather than lead and in the absence of Whitney, it’s hard not to hear Blilie as vaudevillian straight man in search of a foil. That’s only by way of comparison to the band members’ past work, though and Head Wound City is clearly a vehicle for these guys to let their hair down and play some explosive music free of any expectations. Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster. | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vice | May 20, 2016 | 6.9 | 65a39b00-3c43-4528-9df9-8f460e7da59d | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
On her breakthrough project, executive produced by Phonte, the polymath rapper-singer displays her love of classic hip-hop and tries to soothe the sting of survivor’s guilt. | On her breakthrough project, executive produced by Phonte, the polymath rapper-singer displays her love of classic hip-hop and tries to soothe the sting of survivor’s guilt. | Lyric Jones: Closer Than They Appear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lyric-jones-closer-than-they-appear/ | Closer Than They Appear | California-via-Boston rapper Lyric Jones’ latest album Closer Than They Appear begins with a crisis of conscience. After spending the last eight years honing her skills, she devotes the early moments of her biggest album to date to reflecting on the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland and wondering if her career was worth the blood, sweat, and tears. “Survivor’s guilt cause many ain’t beating the odds/Often faced with ‘That could’ve been me’; fuck the facade,” she says on “Face to Face.” Jones uses her art as a balm to soothe the sting of systemic oppression and finds confidence in her ability to rap anyone under the table. On Appear, her sincerity and musical range are her greatest weapons.
In many ways, Jones is a formalist, a craft-first MC and a classically trained musician who’s released music professionally since 2012. Appear feels like a breakthrough, amplifying her rapping and singing voice on a scale several steps beyond her similarly varied 2014 EP Love’s Trail Mix. The album is executive produced by Phonte, a fellow rap/R&B polymath whose experience in groups like Little Brother and The Foreign Exchange undoubtedly helped pinpoint Jones as a kindred spirit. She doesn’t coast on the co-sign. On standout track “Cruisin,” Jones and Little Brother, including Rapper Big Pooh, kick bars while riding their respective state highways—I-405 in California, I-85 in Virginia, and I-95 in North Carolina—and she holds her own over Focus…’s crisp breakbeat: “At times it often takes removing caution tape/To let the right ones cross it safe/And pretty soon I’ll be in awesome shape.” Rap is clearly a healing element for Jones, and her energy reflects the good vibes.
She brings just as much energy to rapping without pretense and simply wearing her love for classic hip-hop on her sleeve. “2020 feels heavy, singing D scales/Lyte as a rock, this audio too detailed,” she spits on the Nottz-produced “Rock On,” shouting out Heavy D, MC Lyte, and Audio Two in two easy-to-digest passes. Her bars are battle-tested and referential, hitting with the snap you’d expect from someone who can rap and play drums at the same time. While there are plenty of showcases sure to make backpackers of all ages smile, Appear has more in store than straightforward bar-fests. Jones regularly jumps between rapping and singing in a light and airy voice contrasting with her mid-register rap tone. The beats shift and morph accordingly, taking on elements of flamenco, disco, and the more adventurous side of modern R&B occupied by artists like Kaytranada.
Whether flirting with Vic Mensa over H0wdy’s roller-rink-ready beat on “Show You How” or weaving through Phil Beaudreau’s guitar strums on “Angelina,” Jones’ transitions are effortless. She credits Phonte with Appear’s mostly stellar sequencing, which brings cohesion to the project’s various sounds. It shines brightest in the album’s first quarter where the first three full songs all flow seamlessly into one another. The effect works so well it draws attention to the more jagged transitions elsewhere. Opening track “Objects In The Mirror” is a pretty but unnecessary introduction, sapping momentum from the thundering drums on “Face to Face.” The short interlude between “Cruisin’” and “Show You How,” where Jones interrupts her own desires to shoot her shot with a new love interest, feels more like a random voice memo than a fully fleshed-out thought.
In an Instagram post celebrating the album’s release, Jones recalls meeting Phonte at Atlanta’s A3C Festival in 2019 after a decade of keeping her dream collaborator on her vision board. “I saw an example of individuality, versatility, and I was so inspired at how Tigallo was RESPECTED in various side music scenes,” she explained. These were all qualities she possessed before meeting her idol, and they’ve been supercharged on Closer Than They Appear. Standing on her largest platform yet, Jones’ dreams are finally within reach.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | self-released | November 4, 2020 | 7.2 | 65a8ebeb-d2c7-4e52-b294-19ff1bbc19a7 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
In 1973, Neil Young played the inaugural show at the Los Angeles club, The Roxy. The reissued recording captures a night that turned his famously bracing album into something warmer and vibrant. | In 1973, Neil Young played the inaugural show at the Los Angeles club, The Roxy. The reissued recording captures a night that turned his famously bracing album into something warmer and vibrant. | Neil Young: Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-roxy-tonights-the-night-live/ | Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live | Walk the city blocks of Los Angeles and imagine its bohemian yesteryear, when strung-out sex parties and impromptu jamborees emanated from the storefronts and bungalows. Neil Young’s foothold in the musician circles of Topanga, Laurel Canyon, and Hollywood are well documented. Further proof of his contribution to the cultural fabric of Los Angeles is that he consecrated some of the city’s most celebrated clubs. A new reissue of live performances from his celebrated diamond in the rough, Tonight’s The Night—released in conjunction with Record Store Day—aims to recapture the intrigue tied up with Young’s tenure in L.A. in the early 1970s.
When the now-famous nightclub The Roxy flung open its doors in West Hollywood in September 1973, Young and his band, the Santa Monica Flyers, were invited to be its inaugural live act. They were fresh out of a makeshift recording studio in Hollywood, where Young, pedal steel player Ben Keith, multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, and the Crazy Horse rhythm of bassist section Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina had been recording live jam sessions. These hours in the studio also served as a musical wake for two friends who’d recently died, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. Young meditates on the loss in its namesake opener: His friend had overdosed on heroin and cocaine, and Young identified too acutely with the tragedy: “Out on the mainline,” as he put it.
Young and the Flyers spent the summer months of 1973 playing through their grief, forming the bones of what would become Young’S 1975 album Tonight’s The Night. They worked from 11 p.m. until sunrise, cruising—or flying, if you will—down Santa Monica Boulevard to sleep off the daylight hours at the Sunset Marquis hotel. When they hit The Roxy with the brand new songs they’d been rehearsing for months, the group was a lockstep machine that propelled, for example, “Tonight’s the Night,” “Albuquerque,” and “Tired Eyes” from insular meditation on death and its trappings to an amped-up catharsis to adoring fans. In the studio, Tonight’s the Night was imposing and dark, it sliced through the speaker like a razor. Live, though, these songs from Young’s famous “Ditch Trilogy” become warmer, more vibrant and alive. It’s a testament to Young’s indelible songwriting that a slight alteration in speed or sound can change the emotional tenor of his songs, and it's what makes this reissue a worthy addition for both avid Young collectors and casual fans.
Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live imbues the songs with the spirit of a specific place in time, at the Sunset Strip’s newest digs, where Young’s soon-to-be label boss David Geffen was a face in the crowd. Young tips his hat to Geffen specifically in a chatty interlude included between “New Mama” and “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” and there are other improvised bridges like polka mainstay “Roll Out the Barrel,” which the audience audibly digs via claps and whoops. That a group of people could be so jubilant about songs they’d never heard before is unfathomable in today’s firehose of festival reunions, but it speaks to the magnitude of Young’s pull in 1973.
The existence of alternative studio versions of Tonight’s the Night have long been the subject of much speculation among Young scholars. While this release won’t scratch that itch, it is still a perfect time capsule back to a wilder L.A., featuring nine songs from the original album played in a different order and in a more joyful spirit. "Walk On," from Young's 1974 album On the Beach, appears too. If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy - Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion. | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | April 17, 2018 | 8.3 | 65adc4dd-7cf4-4d42-aff8-602bf50e24ea | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
Danny Brown’s ear for talent outweighs his larger-than-life persona on a mixtape that finds him ceding center stage to accentuate and support the voices of other rappers in his crew. | Danny Brown’s ear for talent outweighs his larger-than-life persona on a mixtape that finds him ceding center stage to accentuate and support the voices of other rappers in his crew. | Bruiser Brigade: Reign Supreme | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruiser-brigade-reign-supreme/ | Reign Supreme | On August 24th, Danny Brown hopped on Twitch, a video game social network to play “Persona 5” with some virtual pals. After a while, he started playing new music, songs he insisted wouldn’t be released and were not part of the album he’s working on. Brown’s spent the last 10 years building a world so precise and nuanced that the playful tape emitting from his speakers had to be something different—something outside of Brown’s exacting grasp. That record, now circulating on the web, is a compilation from Brown’s Bruiser Brigade, a loose collection of Detroit rappers in their late-20s-to-mid-30s that have been his affiliates since he was an upper-and-downer-addled gangster rapper in the mid-2000s.
Live-streaming an album on a communal, shared social media platform is antithetical to Brown’s style; his is a world of controllable chaos, emanating from, and ending with, him. So, perhaps it makes sense that the only logical place this Bruiser Brigade tape, Reign Supreme, could land would be in a temporary social setting. This is clearly music Brown likes, but not an album he’s comfortable owning entirely. Tossed off, it’s devalued while still whetting the collective appetite of Danny Brown’s biggest bingers. As one of rap’s quickest-evolving emcees, this live-hosted one-off event makes perfect sense. It’s a testing ground for new ideas, old loosies, and whatever else Brown feels like pulling from this experiment. And yet, there’s a feeling that the Bruiser Brigade crew is perhaps overlooked.
So strong is the gravitational pull of Danny Brown’s personality that the other artists in his Bruiser Brigade orbit inevitably get swept up in his stylistic tics. The rapper’s airhorn snarl, miles-long grin, and the long come-up that preceded his evolution into Detroit’s best attraction are all key elements of Brown’s reputation, and they’ve established his extravagant voice as one of the most distinctive in hip-hop. So the Bruiser Brigade compilation Reign Supreme, which spotlights other members of his crew, presents a challenge: How does Danny Brown champion lesser-known talent on a record hosted, presented by, and featuring him?
Thankfully, Brown’s ear for talent outweighs his personal theatrics on Reign Supreme, a cohesive tape in which his voice accentuates Bruiser Brigade’s other voices, rather than consuming them whole. Led in by the siren call of Danny Brown’s laugh, the ZelooperZ solo track “Liar” opens the album with the MC sifting through various dramatic flows before landing on one that works. ZelooperZ dances around the beat’s pocket, moving in and out of hi-hats and woozy synths. The similarities between his and Brown’s vocal styles are palpable, but ZelooperZ stands out thanks to his buoyant, unpredictable flow. If Reign Supreme is a demonstration of what Bruiser Brigade’s quieter soldiers can do, “Liar” is the record’s call to arms.
The crew’s most visible member aside from Brown, ZelooperZ is the only rapper on the project who gets his own solo track. Dopehead, Kash Tha Kushman, and Fat Ray each get opportunities to spit their best bars, but it’s a bit disappointing to see them relegated to secondary roles, considering how effortlessly they charm the listener and paint their hometown.
A collaboration between Dopehead and ZelooperZ, “Everybody Like Me” is a hyped-up number propelled by a hypnotic horn line and thumping drums that seem to be riding an amphetamine high. Despite having been on the scene since 2011, with his debut Plaid Palm Trees, Dopehead sounds the most in touch with rap’s youthful contingent, employing a half-yelled, choppy flow and delivering nihilistic aphorisms like, “Smoking that kushy bitch/Everybody like me lit/Everybody icy bitch.” While he and ZelooperZ have a tangible, effortless synergy that makes the track one of the best moments on the compilation, ZelooperZ’s flow on the track comes so close to imitating Brown’s, you might find yourself double-checking the credits.
These occasional moments of stylistic confusion are unavoidable with a clique so tight. But, for the most part, Reign Supreme defines the role each rapper plays in the Bruiser Brigade universe: Danny is the king, ZelooperZ his right-hand man, Dopehead does SoundCloud recon, Fat Ray is the old-school holdout, and Kash is the unrepentant speed demon, wary of ever letting his foot off the gas for fear that whatever he’s running from will catch up. His crew shrinks his shadow a bit, shaping a world where Danny Brown is simply the marquee name on a bill stacked with memorable talent. | 2018-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 6, 2018 | 7.4 | 65b2921f-a6cd-4433-98f7-85cd513ec6c4 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
Colter Wall is one of country music’s most exciting young voices. His debut album is strange and stirring, rarely ever rising above a gentle rumble. | Colter Wall is one of country music’s most exciting young voices. His debut album is strange and stirring, rarely ever rising above a gentle rumble. | Colter Wall: Colter Wall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colter-wall-colter-wall/ | Colter Wall | During the mid-1990s, a new back-to-basics movement swept through country music. Johnny Cash kicked off his fruitful American Recordings partnership with Rick Rubin; Willie Nelson released the sparse, unadorned Spirit; and—in the city of Swift Current in Saskatchewan, Canada in June 1995—Colter Wall was born. Blessed with a curious, slurring baritone that burbles like smoke from a chimney, Wall writes country songs as stark and traditional as they come, accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar. To call him wiser than his years would be an understatement: veteran songwriters go to great lengths to sound so gruff and world-weary. The 11 tracks on his self-titled debut are strange and stirring enough to make him one of the genre’s most exciting young voices.
Rarely ever rising above a gentle rumble, Wall’s songs zoom in on haunting scenes and resolve in unexpected ways. They gain their intensity from his vivid, fragmented storytelling. The album begins with “Thirteen Silver Dollars,” a spirited ramble that finds our narrator lying in the snowy streets of Saskatchewan before a cop comes to take him away. Wall never explains how he wound up there (“For now we’ll say I had no place to go,” he offers) or what happens next—there’s not even a second verse. Instead, he closes with a rousing repetition of the chorus, proudly naming the few possessions he owns. It’s a fitting introduction to an album built from small details, conjuring larger pictures with what’s left out.
Wall’s aversion to narrative spans the record and makes these songs a lot more hallucinogenic than their earthy arrangements suggest. “Kate McCannon” is told through one of folk music’s oldest tropes: the dual love song/murder ballad. But Wall offers little time for reflection, fading out shortly after the cathartic and inevitable round of gunfire in the song’s final couplet. “I ain’t in the business of making excuses,” Wall sings earlier in the album, and he doesn’t. As often as he references guns and drugs and death, Wall is too plainspoken for his stories to ever feel glamorized or romantic. Like Springsteen on Nebraska, Colter Wall surveys mankind in its most fragile states—betrayed, lonely, desperate, dangerous—as a means of addressing how much we have to lose, how easily it can all fall apart.
“You Look to Yours” offers the album’s most useful (and timely) bit of advice: “Go about your earthly mission,” Wall sings, “Don’t trust no politicians.” Tellingly, the wisdom doesn’t arrive from Wall himself but from a series of women eloquently turning him down in various seedy bars, their kiss-offs echoing in his head as he stumbles home alone. Hummable and warm, it’s one of the album’s most upbeat songs, effortlessly summoning the honky-tonks Wall sings about with a lazy swing. “Motorcycle” is another moment of levity with a cheerful melody that masks the death wish driving its lyrics. The friction in Wall’s delivery highlights the genre’s ability to blend pain and joy past the point of differentiation: a power he seems to harness intuitively.
The album was produced by David Cobb—the go-to guy for breakthrough acts like Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and Chris Stapleton. But Cobb takes a decidedly unmodern approach, letting Wall’s songs speak for themselves. The two songs on the albums that Wall didn’t write (Townes Van Zandt’s “Snake Mountain Blues” and the traditional “Fraulein”) slip seamlessly into the tracklist: an indication of just how gloriously out of touch his writing is. In the slow, ominous “Me and Big Dave,” Wall revels in his outsider mentality while conceding to the dangers of a life spent alone. “This whole world’s full of ghosts,” he concludes, “I believe that most people can’t see.” It’s one of the album’s most powerful lyrics, sold with a fierce and frightening conviction. For 40 minutes, Colter Wall brings you face to face with his ghosts until they’re so familiar you can hardly remember life without them. | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Young Mary's | June 28, 2017 | 8 | 65b74c83-cbdf-41fb-be15-1b892dfe00a1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The English six-piece’s debut is a high-wire act combining jazz fusion, disco rhythms, and high-gloss art rock. | The English six-piece’s debut is a high-wire act combining jazz fusion, disco rhythms, and high-gloss art rock. | ALASKALASKA : The Dots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alaskalaska-the-dots/ | The Dots | The English six-piece ALASKALASKA have spent the last two years in the same South London melting pot as jazz revivalists Sons of Kemet, post punks Shame, and Afropop modernist Rina Mushonga. A wonderful cross-contamination must have occurred, because their debut LP The Dots is evidence that they have soaked up their surroundings: Combining jazz fusion, disco rhythms, and high-gloss art rock, The Dots is an ambitious first album boasting attention to detail and a natural gift for pop melody.
What strikes you initially about the songs are their radiant, body-moving grooves—early single “Meateater” being the most immediate example. A dizzying smash-up of polished synth pop, canned percussion, and blurting saxophone, it’s a track that seems allergic to genre and untethered by era. Bandleader Lucinda Duarte-Holman’s crisp voice cuts through the tangle of keys and woodwinds like an Exacto blade dividing tinsel. Over time, the record’s precise composition and production details start to peek out. Opening suite of songs “The Dots,” “Bees,” and “Moon,” are ripe with sonic curios: Whether it’s a buried baritone harmony, a gooey bass riff that Thundercat would co-sign, or a skronking sax phrase that flaps overhead like a passing seagull, each element feels simultaneously effortless and deliberate.
This might be a result of ALASKALASKA’s dual areas of expertise: Duarte-Holman met multi-instrumentalist Fraser Rieley and guitarist Calum Duncan during a pop music course at Goldsmiths University, while the remaining members are heavily enmeshed in the jazz scene. It would be easy for one camp to overpower the other’s native musical tongue, but what emerges instead is a whole new dialect of their own design.
While The Dots is awash in dimensional, multicolored compositions, ALASKALASKA are able to pare things back when necessary. “Sweat” is a slow-burning sex hymn draped over a frame of plucked strings, whining drones, and what sounds like the faint creaking of bedsprings. Duarte-Holman is hushed here, letting the words slip out of her mouth; “Sweat baby,” she sings. “Salt never tasted so good.” The Dots is packed with quick sketches of daily life like this, each rendering familiar dilemmas—sexism, resentment, PMS—without beating you over the head with the subject matter. Maybe that is the trick to ALASKALASKA’s music: They push everything right to the brink and then pull back at precisely the right moment. | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Marathon Artists | May 8, 2019 | 7.7 | 65bd5f2e-577b-40aa-98dc-1ec572307473 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
With panoramic proportions and gleaming finishes, the band’s sprawling eighth album luxuriates in the rhapsody of sensation itself. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it. | With panoramic proportions and gleaming finishes, the band’s sprawling eighth album luxuriates in the rhapsody of sensation itself. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it. | Beach House: Once Twice Melody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-house-once-twice-melody/ | Once Twice Melody | Beach House’s Once Twice Melody begins “out in the summer sun,” dawning strings and downy acoustic guitars sketching a scene of pastoral bliss, and ends, 17 songs later, reaching “into the darkness,” where “the universe collects us.” It is a fittingly epic span for a pair of Baltimore stargazers who have never been shy about courting infinity. Between those two ephemeral points, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally luxuriate in the interplay of shadow and light, the scent of night-blooming flowers, the rhapsody of sensation itself. The first album that they have produced on their own, it hews to Beach House’s trademark dream-pop reverie—eight albums in, it is clearer than ever that they have no interest in breaking character or changing up the scenery—while billowing outward in every direction. The operative term is more, the operative mode superlative: bigger but also gauzier; more sumptuous, more diaphanous, more dazzling. You don’t listen to Once Twice Melody, you dissolve into it.
From the current vantage point, Beach House’s entire career looks like one long, gradual process of transformation, a slowly winding path leading up to this point. Over the years, they have made subtle tweaks to the languid slowcore template they fashioned on their self-titled 2006 debut. The organ-heavy Depression Cherry wrapped itself in velvety drones that bristled with dissonance; 7 was darker and more muscular, tinged with a syrupy hit of shoegaze. They have never abandoned the attributes that make them inimitably Beach House; compare Once Twice Melody with a record like Devotion or Teen Dream, and it’s clearly the same band, yet profound changes have taken place.
Their evolution brings to mind the Ship of Theseus, a classic philosopher’s paradox. Imagine a vessel that, over the course of many years, has had all of its parts replaced: mast, rigging, sails, hull, all the way down to the very last nail. After a century’s worth of repairs, not a single original piece of the boat remains. It looks identical, but can it truly be said to be the same ship? Beach House, in contrast, have steadily upgraded their materials, replacing oak with titanium and sailcloth with Kevlar. They have swapped clean-toned electric guitar for surging shoegaze fuzz, traded the thrift-store keyboards and rickety home-organ rhythm presets for hi-def synthesizers and powerhouse live drumming, while Legrand’s ambiguously imagistic lyrics have become more grandiose and diffuse. The essence of their sound has remained the same, yet the contours have changed: They have transformed themselves from a weathered wooden boat into a gleaming, streamlined spaceship; from a twentysomething’s dogeared Moleskine into something as vast and ineffable as the metaverse—a rush of pure vibes, ephemeral and enveloping.
With 18 tracks and 84 minutes of running time, Beach House have plenty of room to try out different things, but Once Twice Melody invariably sounds phenomenal. There are feathery acoustic guitars and rosy vocoders, watery analog synths and chord changes that explode like fireworks against the night sky, and all of it has been mixed to emphasize its nuanced contrasts and swollen dimensions. In their soaring choruses and sumptuous arrays of synths, guitars, and percussion, they have taken on the proportions of spectacular, stadium-sized alt pop. (Guest drummer James Barone’s controlled wallop goes a long way toward establishing the record’s blockbuster footprint.) Where once they sounded indebted to bands like Mazzy Star or My Bloody Valentine, here they’re chasing a shiny brass ring bearing the fingerprints of Air, M83, even Tame Impala.
Their supersized instincts often serve them well. Driven by chugging electric guitars and a hint of the Cocteau Twins’ chiming leads, “Superstar” is a feast of texture set to heartstring-tugging chord changes. The stately “New Romance” boasts one of the sugariest hooks of the band’s catalog, with an irresistible (and meme-ready) chorus to match: “Last night I’m messing up/Now I feel like dressing up/ILYSFM.” The spangled “Over and Over” is slow and radiant, a Moroder-influenced power ballad whose celestial choirs boast megachurch wattage.
Along the way, they pull out some surprising references. Extending Legrand’s wistfully looped vocals over a driving 4/4 beat, “Only You Know” approximates the muted ecstasy of the Field’s 2007 melodic techno classic “Over the Ice.” The instrumental breakdown of the closing “Modern Love Stories” recalls the strummy acoustic grandeur of David Bowie’s “Five Years.” “Another Go Around,” lilting and luminous, could be mistaken for an Elliott Smith cover. There’s a rising set of chords in “The Bells” that’s a dead ringer for a passage from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” These echoes may be unconscious but they hardly seem accidental: The lyrics are peppered with phrases that sound like half-remembered bits of hallowed songs—“all the parties”; “a lust for life”; “there’s a light going out tonight”—and in the lullaby-like penultimate song, “Many Nights,” Legrand sings of “many nights/By your side/Listening high/To Suicide.” In part, Once Twice Melody is an album about shaping a life around listening, about the simple pleasures of losing yourself in music.
It is also a record about nameless yearning. The album is shot through with dozens of references to the skies and the stars, to light itself: “A flicker in the sky reflects the dying light”; “Sunshine in her lap/Centuries of light”; “Out of nothing comes the moonglow.” “The stars were there/In our eyes,” Legrand sings in “Superstar.” In “Pink Funeral,” she returns to the theme: “The painted stars they fill our eyes.” And on “Runaway,” someone’s hair is “melting into silver stars.” Though individual songs may be about love or memory or desire, the cumulative effect of all this brilliance feels like a leap into the sublime. As she sings in the closing “Modern Love Stories,” “A dark mouth surrounds us, into the stardust.”
There is no shortage of arresting imagery reflected in the glare of these slow-motion glitter bombs: swans on a starry lake, or headlights running up a wall, or, from the excellent “Sunset,” “spider silk and sweet nonsense,” which sounds almost like a metaphor for Legrand’s own lyrical impulses. But in a few places, she falls back on frustrating cliché. Certain stock phrases feel like placeholders for more interesting lines that never found their way to her notebook. Secondhand images betray their borrowed provenance: “Red sunglasses and a lollipop/See her dressed in the polka dot” sounds like Lolita via Lana Del Rey, a threadbare narrative hand-me-down. And in the otherwise gorgeous, country-kissed “The Bells,” Legrand’s couplets feel like well-worn tropes cut-and-pasted into her rhyme scheme: “Something somebody told me, think the plane is going down/You can’t take it with you, so let me buy you the next round.” It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’ve heard this story before. Legrand’s best lyrics, historically, have been vivid, cryptic, full of mystery, like folktales poorly translated from forgotten dialects. Where they were vague, they were provocatively so. But here, Legrand sometimes seems like she’s chasing moonbeams, hoping they will land on the object or feeling she’s trying to name.
Still, Beach House lyrics aren’t meant to be parsed on the page; they are as much about the sound of Legrand’s voice as the meaning of the words. Like everything else here, she, too, simply sounds incredible. Having abandoned all traces of the husky contralto that defined the group’s earlier records, she is all breath, and the softness of her tone suits the album’s gossamer materials: From the Stereolab-like la la la of the opening “Once Twice Melody,” she’s the embodiment of spider silk and sweet nonsense, a presence as ethereal as her songs.
Occasionally, amid Once Twice Melody’s overflowing cornucopia of feeling, I find myself wishing for something else: something weirder, more erratic, less narrowly focused on that insistent eyes-closed vibe. In their all-encompassing pursuit of mood, Beach House occasionally have trouble moving past the mood board, and they sacrifice risk on the altar of ambition. Shooting for the moon is a time-tested strategy. But what about digging into the muck? That’s what Low—a band whose essence is as unchanging as Beach House’s—have done with their last two albums, and the result was a pair of records that were not just enthralling but also genuinely surprising. For Beach House to turn the rapture up to 11 may be unexpected, but the sounds themselves are, by and large, familiar.
Yet as a slow drip of pure serotonin, Once Twice Melody delivers. It can be tempting to wonder if the album is too long, but the more time I have spent with it, the harder it has been to decide which tracks I might cut. They all—the ballads, the anthems, the lullabies, the synth-pop throwbacks—serve a purpose in fleshing out the enormity of Beach House’s spellbinding universe. The sprawl, the surfeit, is the point. You need plenty of room to summon a mood as widescreen as this. It’s a long way from the summer sun to the dark embrace of the universe, and on Once Twice Melody, Beach House are determined to cover the entire distance.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 17, 2022 | 7.8 | 65c3728b-0cb2-4fbc-843b-b8e9c290d891 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On the third La Sera album, Katy Goodman, former bassist for the now-defunct Vivian Girls, finds the right balance of joy and heartbreak. An album that could be sad based on the lyric sheet is stuffed with delirious fret runs, muscular drum fills, and sunny guitars soaked with reverb. | On the third La Sera album, Katy Goodman, former bassist for the now-defunct Vivian Girls, finds the right balance of joy and heartbreak. An album that could be sad based on the lyric sheet is stuffed with delirious fret runs, muscular drum fills, and sunny guitars soaked with reverb. | La Sera: Hour of the Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19268-la-sera-hour-of-the-dawn/ | Hour of the Dawn | Where Vivian Girls’ rough edges and droning harmonies suggested mystery, Katy Goodman’s La Sera has to this point made no such attempt at obfuscation: Here was the Vivian Girls bassist, here’s what was on her mind when she wasn’t with her bandmates. But Vivian Girls are no more, meaning Goodman’s instincts have run in a less solitary direction for Hour of the Dawn, La Sera’s third album. "I wanted the new La Sera record to sound like Lesley Gore fronting Black Flag," Goodman says in the album’s press material. "I didn't want it to be another record of me sad, alone in my room. I wanted to have fun playing music and writing songs with a band."
How fun it is when album opener “Losing to the Dark” strikes that aggressive pose, the guitars pinballing off the walls as Goodman snarls about a boy who doesn’t seem to need her until he’s too drunk to take care of himself. “What a shame it must be to have to be in love with me,” she sings, both heartbroken and spiteful. Not that she’s suddenly gone mean. Hour of the Dawn is largely made up of romantic songs carried to their open-hearted potential by Goodman’s high, floating voice. She’s in love with people and with memories, from summer’s promise to the town that used to be filled with her friends. An album that could be sad based on the lyric sheet is stuffed with delirious fret runs, muscular drum fills, sunny guitars soaked with reverb. Vivian Girls’ girl group harmonies were usually cloaked behind a curtain of feedback. Here, Goodman stands in front of the band, her voice shining like a lighthouse on the shore.
The Lesley Gore-fronting-Black Flag comparison is apt, since you could imagine the tougher directions the music would lean toward were Goodman’s instincts for melancholy and tenderness not there to soften the impact. The resulting sound is closer to Best Coast with more focus on the jamming. “Kiss This Town Away” leans into surf rock and a country singer’s sense of lament; the nimble picking of the title track builds to a triumphant outro even as she expresses unease about whether a new day will really bring something better. “10 Headed Goat Wizard” is straight-up Beatlesesque pop, like something you’d hear at the end of an episode of “Mad Men” and not even realize it was anachronistic.
The moments where she lets the band get heavier are interesting: “Control” chants like the flip side of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2” while “Storm’s End” groans like its title, which is possibly a “Game of Thrones” reference (which Goodman has talked about in interviews) but probably doesn’t need to be read into beyond that. (Or does it? Okay, it doesn’t.) That’s when Goodman takes steps toward establishing herself beyond what she’s known for, which is personable if not always easy to distinguish from itself. Hour of the Dawn sounds like a summer record, meant to be played when emotions are high and the sun is out. Most importantly, it shows what she’s capable of when the shine has worn off. | 2014-05-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-05-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | May 15, 2014 | 7.1 | 65c5dc8f-00ef-427e-a625-353bf0a04808 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
The jazz and R&B legend's songs have been sampled by everyone from Will Smith to Prince Paul. This compilation shows her immaculate work on its own. | The jazz and R&B legend's songs have been sampled by everyone from Will Smith to Prince Paul. This compilation shows her immaculate work on its own. | Patrice Rushen: Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patrice-rushen-remind-me-the-classic-elektra-recordings-1978-1984/ | Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 | When (and if) Patrice Rushen’s two moderate ’80s hits spring to mind, more than likely your memory super-imposes a different voice atop hers. Her triumphant “Haven’t You Heard” broke into the R&B Top 10 in 1980, but couldn’t crack the Top 40. But when Kirk Franklin lifted it wholesale for “Looking for You” in 2005, it charted across the gospel, R&B, and the Hot 100. Similarly, “Forget Me Nots” made the Top 40 and was nominated for a Grammy in 1982, but that beguiling handclap and bounding bassline also laid the foundation for Will Smith’s “Men in Black” 15 years later (George Michael also sampled it). Rushen’s DNA runs through everything: Diddy, J Dilla, Jermaine Dupri, Prince Paul, Q-Tip, and Knxwledge have sampled her, to name just a few among hundreds. “We’re living in Patrice Rushen’s world,” the New York Times recently declared. “We just might not know it yet.”
Rushen started playing music at the age of 3. By the time she was a teenager, she was signed to the iconic jazz label Prestige, recruiting heavyweights like Joe Henderson and Leon “Ndugu” Chancler for her debut album, Prelusion. The pianist grew up within jazz. But it was 1974, and the charts were instead filled with funk, R&B, fusion, and the pulse of disco. What was she supposed to do? Her music naturally started to absorb it all. When Rushen jumped to the Elektra label in 1978 and started cutting sophisticated urban pop that drew on all of the above, she wasn’t alone—jazz stars like Herbie Hancock, Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, and George Benson had already crossed over. Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 shows us how her production and arranging provided building blocks for decades of future R&B and hip-hop hits.
Rushen faced harsher critical backlash for her crossover than her male colleagues, and was deemed a sellout by the jazz community. Worse still, her label did almost nothing to support her efforts. She grazed the lower rungs of chart success, but never reached the heights she deserved. Her dancefloor songs still sound featherweight and spry. “Forget Me Nots” and “Haven’t You Heard” remain indefatigable, grooves that belong on the Great Wedding Playlist in the Sky alongside Chic, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sister Sledge. Lesser-known numbers like “Look Up!” and “Number One” are sharp enough to inspire new imitators and samplers. Her crack session band is buoyant, and her arrangements made alongside Charles Mims, Jr., are sturdy and supple enough to be twisted in all kinds of new shapes. (My lone gripe is that I wish the ebullient “Call On Me” had made the cut.)
Depending on how Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin’s stinging guitar is sampled, the slinky slow jam “Givin’ It Up Is Givin’ Up” imparts either sensuousness or eeriness, but Rushen’s voice twines with soul singer D.J. Rogers and sends chills regardless. And Rushen’s gurgling electric piano on “Remind Me” shows that despite forgoing her jazz audience for pop, she could still pull head-bobbing clusters from her keys in a manner that brings Herbie Hancock to mind. Her airy vocals might not always stick, but the groove does.
But the ballads keep drawing down the energy. “Settle for My Love” is breathy and wispy, liable to drift past without much notice. “When I Found You” relies on Rushen’s nuanced-but-insubstantial voice. She’s early in her pop career, still figuring out how to write the best lines for the right vocal register: “Let’s Sing a Song of Love” dances just beyond the reach of her backing singers.
By the time of her last Elektra album, 1984’s Now, Rushen had mastered the language of pop, with songs like “Feels So Real” and “To Each His Own” supplying late highlights. And while her own pop career would wind down soon after, her career as a musical director took off. She began working for the Grammys, NAACP Image Awards, and Emmys. Her status as materfamilias of pop was cemented when Rushen served as musical director for Janet Jackson’s early ’90s world tour. Breaking through the constraints of genre at a time when it was an arduous task for a woman, Rushen’s willingness to draw from across the Black American radio dial with sophistication still resonates today. Offering up pathways for Solange, Teyana Taylor, Erykah Badu, Esperanza Spalding and more to explore, Remind Me still sounds like a guidepost for the future.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Strut | July 25, 2019 | 7.8 | 65c9ef7b-4709-4c30-b2bb-acb272c9ecda | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The onetime industrial futurist, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, casts a backward glance at 1960s electronics and British folk, weaving cut-up voices into a curious shape that floats outside time. | The onetime industrial futurist, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, casts a backward glance at 1960s electronics and British folk, weaving cut-up voices into a curious shape that floats outside time. | Chris Carter: Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-carter-chris-carters-chemistry-lessons-volume-one/ | Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One | Living legend Chris Carter has fruitfully spent the last few years looking back, and there’s been much to see. In the 1970s, he invented sonic weapons for Throbbing Gristle, a fabled four who get the credit (and blame) for igniting music’s industrial revolution but in truth were polymath as the Beatles, if less cheery. In the 1980s, Carter released a few stunning proto-electro records; then, with his partner in life and crime, Cosey Fanni Tutti, perfected a churning, sexualized-yet-not-sexy pop built for people who’d like the back rooms of clubs but are too shy to explore them—a kind of disco aural tourism, with earworm choruses. In the 1990s, he and Cosey went rave, then relaxed into some gorgeous ambient patches.
After the millennium came, Throbbing Gristle triumphantly rebooted, then self-destructed. But reissue culture demands repackaging, and Carter responded with a remastered, revelatory series of Throbbing Gristle and Chris and Cosey albums before he and Cosey took it further, crafting an inspired album of self-made remixes that shrugged off the originals’ icy eros—subsequently slipped into by everyone from the Italians Do It Better glam squad to Kelela—for rumbling, greyscale expanses as rough and tough as anything on, say, L.I.E.S.; Cosey also wrote a masterpiece of a memoir, Art Sex Music. And that was that.
Except, of course, Carter was also looking forward, to his first solo album in 17 years. Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One is a master class of miniatures, largely under three minutes apiece, that offer synth pop’s bubble and fizz, the sweet-and-sour textures of prime IDM, and hits of dub and early techno. It’s an entire table of electronic elements, precisely composed. “Tangerines” charms with concision: some soft claps, a honeyed melody, a pad or two, and voilà, an exemplary 120 seconds. “Tones Map” is part smoke machine, part perfumed garden, all intoxicant. As in any lab, not every experiment is successful: “Post Industrial,” for example, tries to summon a foreboding grit yet remains inert. But late highlights like “Rehndim” shimmer with loungey, xylophonic pings that sound like perennially worthy formulas.
Carter cites time-honored influences for the album: 1960s analog experts like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and also the sort of ancient British folk music Shirley Collins breathed life into around the same time. But this isn’t Space Age nostalgia for a future yet to come. Instead, from these pasts, he’s somehow found a way into a mauve new world where they paved the uncanny valley and put up a call center. The album is full of voices—not Cosey’s or his own or even artificial voices, exactly, but some odd in-between. “I fashioned a new workflow,” Carter told me over email, “using my voice, vocal ‘field recordings,’ and vocal sounds from my archive….I treated them through the vocoder and the V-Synth, [and] through some of my more esoteric modular modules. The processed voices were quite often then re-processed multiple times.”
Layered and smeared and cut up into melodies, the vocals chant and enchant, and at times it’s difficult to tell what’s what. On “Cernubicua,” sirens call among deep blue waves of filters. The awed worshippers among the stoned “Pillars of Wah” might not be benevolent; later, on “Time Curious Glows,” they form a kosmische chorus. The incantations of beatific opener “Blissters” melt beguilingly like a hard candy, but they differ from pop’s current fascination with vocal sweeteners like Auto-Tune that seduce with an illusion of smoothness. Carter’s work is slippery, not slick; there’s a banality in the gloss of “Durlin” that’s meant to disorient, and it really does. For a little over an hour, the past and future spin, dissolving in fields full of chatterboxes. It’s a world not unlike the present one. | 2018-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | April 5, 2018 | 8 | 65cde6ec-ab01-488e-ac5e-98f280bc8654 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On their debut LP, the co-ed Ann Arbor quartet Pity Sex offer post-coital pop-punk that's melodic and punchy enough to be attractive, but rumpled and lethargic enough to let you know they're not trying too hard. | On their debut LP, the co-ed Ann Arbor quartet Pity Sex offer post-coital pop-punk that's melodic and punchy enough to be attractive, but rumpled and lethargic enough to let you know they're not trying too hard. | Pity Sex: Feast of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18502-pity-sex-feast-of-love/ | Feast of Love | Well, if you end up liking this record, it’s not going to be easy to tell your friends what you’re “into these days.” But whatever shock value or comic relief you get from Pity Sex’s name, there’s no phrase in the English language that more accurately foreshadows the concerns of this co-ed Ann Arbor quartet-- which is to say, the effect of sex on exceptionally self-pitying people. Their debut LP Feast of Love is post-coital pop-punk, far enough removed from the physical act where any intimacy or legitimate emotional connection has given way to the neediness and self-loathing that drove these poor souls to pursue their couplings in the first place. And of course, they're saddled with the additional depression of realizing that another person isn’t going to fix them; in fact, it always makes it worse. Feast of Love, sure. But the whole affair just makes Pity Sex kinda sick to their stomach.
That much is conveyed on “Wind-Up”, where Brennan Greaves demands space to nurse an incapacitating hangover or the fact that he just cannot fucking deal right now. Hell, maybe he just woke up still drunk, as there’s an illicit giddiness to “Wind-Up”; ripping through their most anthemic riffs and a righteous fuzz solo, Pity Sex are having a blast here, even though Greaves' droopy vocals try to tell a different story. His counterpart Britty Drake isn’t much better off on the subsequent “Keep”, where a surprising melodic (mis)step occurs in the tipsy chorus, possibly because she’s too despondent to reach the next higher note in the scale. The two have about equal billing here, though Feast of Love doesn’t sound like a concept album or a back and forth conversation. When Greaves and Drake trade verses on the acrid “Drown Me Out”, it's a standoff between two friends who might be getting a little sick of telling each other about their failed romances as well as hearing about them. Misery loves company on Feast of Love, but it also wants some damn space.
Which makes a lot of sense-- after all, Feast of Love is a record of limited scope, to put it lightly. It’s also limited to 10 songs and 28 minutes, so it never has the opportunity to get too oppressive. Plus, the music itself could not be more adept at channeling Pity Sex’s particular brand of hangdog horniness-- melodic and punchy enough to be attractive, rumpled and lethargic enough to let you know it's not trying too hard…which in turn makes it more attractive depending on your tastes. The distinctions are incremental on Feast of Love and even after so many listens, I’m still taken aback by how "Fold" makes no concession to being a grand finale, ending the LP with zero fanfare. Within the record's narrow musical arc, “Hollow Body” establishes itself as the “ballad” by ditching the drums and distortion, while the whammy-bar abuse on “Drawstring” sonically embodies the masochism of the lyrics-- "Your name is a a drawstring around my neck/ tighter with every breath." And while happiness appears to be comically unattainable on Feast of Love, at least there’s ownership of one’s misery on “Honey Pot”, where Greaves snarks, "I'll take what I want/ I'll concede to all my faults...I won't feel guilty when you kiss me."
Though not as lyrically sharp as either Waxahatchee or Speedy Ortiz and more affiliated with pop-punk despite its shoegazy alt-rock leanings, Feast of Love is a record that finds Pity Sex as part of an uninentional "moment" for slack, sexualized indie rock. So the initial temptation is to think of it as reactionary-- is it possible that these bands are interested in a reclamation of 90s indie rock ideals at a time when “indie rock” rarely means “guitar rock” and deals with the actual, mundane mechanics of relationships even more rarely? Doubtful. Judging from their unsurprisingly active Twitter feeds, none of the aforementioned appear the least bit interested in being scolds. Nor do I think an album like Feast of Love is a reaction to the countless thinkpieces about how the self-involvement of 20-somethings or the romantic complications caused by technology somehow didn’t exist before 2013. Nah, but it is a nice refutation of both, and though every sound on Feast of Love existed before the end of the first Clinton term, Pity Sex's tales are as timeless as the band’s name-- self-pitying people are still having sex and nothing seems to stop them. | 2013-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | August 28, 2013 | 7 | 65ce499e-a450-4d8d-b4f5-b92d3c063280 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Electronic musician Ryan West's latest release as Rival Consoles has a level of warmth and humanity missing from his earlier records. This is his most expressive and emotional music yet. | Electronic musician Ryan West's latest release as Rival Consoles has a level of warmth and humanity missing from his earlier records. This is his most expressive and emotional music yet. | Rival Consoles: Night Melody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22148-night-melody/ | Night Melody | In a 2014 film made by his label Erased Tapes, electronic artist Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, said that he’s “always more interested in newer sounds, even at the cost of them not being as rich or dynamic as a violin or cello.” However West’s music has grown more distinctive only as as he’s done the opposite. Last year’s excellent Howl found West embracing warm, analog equipment—a major change from his beginnings as a purveyor of somewhat-derivative mid-90s bleep-n-bass in the vein of Hard Normal Daddy-era Squarepusher. His following records got better in increments but sat comfortably in a modernized IDM groove that felt a little played out. With Howl, all of West’s ideas finally seemed to crystallize into a unique vision.
Night Melody, West’s latest, builds and improves on the framework set out with Howl. Opener “Pattern of the North” starts with an analog synth bleating an arpeggiating melody that seems to hang from the sky before repeatedly disappearing. West’s move toward these analog instruments (which he mentions in the video)—including the powerful and historically significant Prophet-5—is felt all over Night Melody, particularly on “Pattern” and follower “Johannesburg”, and they provide his music with a level of warmth and humanity missing from his earlier records. This is his most expressive and emotional music yet.
Howl’s slow, gently unfurling tunes seemed most interested in laying themselves out for you and just being there to take in, but the crackling *Night Melody—*with the exception of the plaintive “Slow Song”—offers a direct, almost lyrical approach that feels like a sort of wordless storytelling. “Lone”’s clinking opening beat and skittering melody is perhaps the album’s closest relative to his previous IDM worship, but it draws from the quieter and more reflective moments of beauty found on records like Autechre’s mid 90s Garbage EP and *LP5—*wistful, ghostly sounds that remain fresh.
One reference point for the album emerges boldly on the record’s final two cuts, the beautiful titular cut “Night Melody” and its quasi-diptych closer “What Sorrow”: The first two ‘00s records of underrated German producer Ulrich Schnauss. On 2003’s excellent A Strangely Isolated Place in particular, Schnauss demonstrated an ear for a strange kind of haunting, emotive electronic-music based storytelling which West strives for here. Each song’s careful uses of decaying melodies, soaring synths, and rushes of volume stir a powerful lonely euphoria, strengthened by a sense of restraint.
Ironically, West folded some of the rhythms and sensibilities of deep house, a genre he openly derided a year ago via Twitter, on Howl, and he continues that interpolation on Night Melody. Whatever his ambivalence about deep house as a genre, the results on both records are winning, particularly on Night Melody’s titular track. The invigorating pulse of four-on-the-floor dance has loosened up his music and given it a freedom it was missing before.
With Howl, West transitioned Rival Consoles from skilled also-ran to forward-thinking electronic musician with his own ideas about sound. Night Melody goes one step further: This an album of songs, not sounds; feelings, not ideas. It’s not easy to tell stories without words, but West has been working long and hard enough to hit that point where his wordless miniatures convey as much as some albums. | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | August 5, 2016 | 8 | 65d93e49-1b60-4eb1-92c8-0265a537ac53 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Roman Flügel has explored hard techno, acid trance, willfully lunkheaded electro-house, and lyrical deep house over his prolific career, but this is the furthest he has strayed from the dancefloor. | Roman Flügel has explored hard techno, acid trance, willfully lunkheaded electro-house, and lyrical deep house over his prolific career, but this is the furthest he has strayed from the dancefloor. | Roman Flügel: All the Right Noises | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22413-all-the-right-noises/ | All the Right Noises | Roman Flügel has released hundreds of tracks over the roughly quarter-century since he began putting out records, and in them he has explored many permutations of four-on-the-floor dance music: hard techno, acid trance, willfully lunkheaded electro-house, lyrical deep house. The Frankfurt native doesn't tend to stay in any one place for too long. On his 2014 album Happiness Is Happening he delved into glinting synth-pop and Krautrock's motorik chug; earlier this year, his Verschiebung EP explored polyrhythmic drum sounds as dry and scratchy as strep throat.
Even within the context of that panoply of styles, All the Right Noises stands out as something we haven't heard from him before. The moods and sounds may be recognizable from his recent work, much of which has tilted toward contemplative states; glinting synthesizer patches transmit a pensive air, and the analog drum machines maintain a kind of stone-faced calm. But this is the furthest that Flügel has strayed from the dancefloor, at least for such an extended stretch.
It isn't strictly an ambient album. “Warm and Dewy” plows ahead at a quick-stepping 130 beats per minute, battered by tablas and brandishing hi-hats that couldn't be sharper if they'd come straight from the J.A. Henckels factory. (This, too, is new territory for Flügel: The drums sound a lot like he's been listening to Shackleton’s classic Skull Disco fare, in fact). But four-on-the-floor beats are an exception rather than the norm, and even when they appear, they make a beeline away from the functionalist dictates of contemporary dance music. Following the gorgeous, clear-eyed ambient opener, “Fantasy,” “The Mighty Suns” drops us into a curious kind of middle ground: It's fast-paced, but it feels half-speed; the pulse nods to dub, yet the bright keys and faintly naïve melodies echo Kraftwerk. It sweeps you up in colliding waves of contrapuntal melodies, a sensation at once both relaxing and slightly unsettling: You're never quite sure in which direction it will move next.
Rhythmically, the album peaks early, just three tracks in, with the polyrhythmic lurch of “Dead Idols.” Triplets snap against 4/4 rhythms, and an off-kilter clunk pulls the groove into a strange, elliptical shape; the first dozen times you hear it, you can practically feel your brain straining to parse the timekeeping. Shackleton's influence is audible here, too, along with the doomy menace of an artist like Demdike Stare, with wraithlike voices ratcheting up the tension as minor-key bleeps sound an ominous alarm. The rest of the album tackles far more soothing sounds: “Nameless Lake” harnesses the chirps and chimes of Amber-period Autechre; the elegant, strutting “Dust” reimagines Jean-Michel Jarre as downbeat acid; and the melancholy “Planet Zorg” is sad-sack ambient house with a hint of shoegaze thrown into the mix, sparking memories of Superpitcher remixing M83.
But the most satisfying material here may be the simplest. “Believers” offers the merest hint of kalimba plucks spun through delay and the occasional piano chord. Very little happens, and captivatingly so. The same goes for the closing song, which at first listen might sound like a new age spa soundtrack, complete with electronic crickets deep in the mix. Listen closely, though, and you can hear Flügel's playful spirit at work in the song's richly expressive piano and restless synthesizer improvisations. He effortlessly squeezes so many ideas into its barely-there, four-minute frame, it's easy to wish he'd settle in and record an entire album of such quietly masterful pastoral mood-setting. | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dial | October 31, 2016 | 7.8 | 65dc8b69-4e9b-45ce-9406-9b795c013323 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The latest One Directioner to go his own way tackles big themes, but the music is filled with that same dead-eyed vocal delivery, lazy drumming, strumming, and writing that all pop stars fear. | The latest One Directioner to go his own way tackles big themes, but the music is filled with that same dead-eyed vocal delivery, lazy drumming, strumming, and writing that all pop stars fear. | Louis Tomlinson: Walls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/louis-tomlinson-walls/ | Walls | The years following One Direction’s dissolution have reshaped Louis Tomlinson. More than just rich-people problems, his life has tumbled into real tragedies and triumphs, like the death of both his mother and 18-year-old sister, as well as the birth of his son. Of course, now he wants to tear down his barriers and emerge fresh, raw, and newly sensitive, like the many references to roadblocks and changing on his debut album Walls suggest. Something isn’t right, though. The heart he so desperately wants to present is missing.
Unfortunately, Walls is just as maddeningly uninteresting as its slate grey, cuffed-light-wash-jeans album cover suggests. The appropriately named album opener “Kill My Mind” is a feeble attempt to create stadium pop-rock, droning on with faux bad-boy guitar while Tomlinson limply delivers, “You’re a nightmare on the dancefloor/And you hate me, and I want more.” “Too Young” is an explicit introduction to the album’s running preoccupation with youth; like many of Walls’ folkier moments, the song is flat coffee-shop music. “Habit” features this same mood but adds in sleepy drumming. “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” subtracts the drumming and adds in wistful vocal layering, reminding us that “life gets hard and it gets messed up.” Brian Eno had Music for Airports; this is Music for Your John Mayer Cover Band.
When I was in high school, I owned a limited edition Harry Styles doll and read tawdry fanfiction about our favorite Frankenstein, Mr. Larry Stylinson. This was how you engaged in the fandom of One Direction, and fans knew that every One Direction member had an archetype. Harry Styles was the heartbreaker, Zayn Malik the mysterious (read: ethnic) one, Niall Horan the cute one, and Liam Payne was unlucky enough to receive the nickname “Daddy Directioner.” Tomlinson was the “sassy” one who couldn’t sing, which didn’t add up to much. Now on his own, Tomlinson is left with exactly what he is: someone who received massive success when flanked by other, more interesting people. Walls is filled with the kind of dead-eyed vocal delivery and lazy drumming, strumming, and writing that all pop stars fear. There is no attempt to scrape at the soul, to dig deep. The result is a depressing Xerox of people like Coldplay and Oasis, who managed to make soft Britpop with a little more charm and ingenuity.
Tomlinson is best on “We Made It,” where his imitation begins to sound more like a sincere attempt at invention. The dreamy acoustic guitar sounds like the backdrop to the silliest, prettiest, slow-motion Instagram video of a sunset on the beach. Reminiscing about how he used to “share a single bed and tell each other what we dream about,” Tomlinson captures the essence of youth with one line. You can’t hear the stars in his eyes, but you know that they’re there. The rest of the album could have used this tenderness and lyrical specificity, but it’s mostly abandoned in favor of the pop conventions that Tomlinson pledges himself to, remembering how he used to sing “something pop-y on the same four chords/used to worry 'bout it but I don't no more.”
It’s difficult to tell whether Tomlinson is even trying to make music different from his time in One Direction. On “Fearless,” he constructs an entire chorus around the question, “Do you still remember feeling young?” like he can’t quite get himself to move on from the golden days. “Perfect Now” is basically a low-quality rewrite of One Direction’s “Little Things,” featuring galaxy-brain observations of an insecure lover like, “You say to me your jeans don’t fit/You don’t feel pretty and it’s hard to miss.” Tomlinson himself calls this song a “kind of” lyrical extension of “What Makes You Beautiful,” One Direction’s legendary breakout single. Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | February 5, 2020 | 4.8 | 65de834e-dde1-4942-9617-a30a4f9e80d4 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The Los Angeles rapper’s final album before his 20-year sentence is anxious, forlorn, and self-assured—the violence simmers just below its cool and breezy surface. | The Los Angeles rapper’s final album before his 20-year sentence is anxious, forlorn, and self-assured—the violence simmers just below its cool and breezy surface. | 03 Greedo: God Level | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/03-greedo-god-level/ | God Level | As of this June, 03 Greedo is a ward of the Potter County Sheriff’s Department. The State of Texas expects that, for the next 20 years, one of Los Angeles’ most celebrated rappers will be a resident of a shared pod at a detention center in Amarillo. For the duration of Greedo’s stay, the lights will come on at 4:30 a.m. every morning, his small cache of personal items must fit in a rectangular plastic box, and, though he has a purple grape cluster tattooed beside his left eye, his outfit will be a particularly carceral tone of orange. In the eyes of the law, this is just punishment for possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. In the estimation of anyone with a sense of proportionality, this is a miscarriage of justice. There are many 03 Greedo albums awaiting release, but God Level was his final testimony before a long sojourn.
In the days before his surrender, Greedo performed with a frantic regularity, proposed to his girlfriend on-stage (she said yes), dined at a Beverly Hills steakhouse with daughter Meilani, and released his latest tome, God Level. Like his other six albums—he’s very adamant that they’re not mixtapes—God Level is a snapshot of his life in a precise, fleeting moment. It’s him, reckoning with incarceration, desperately supping every last ounce of fame, fortune, and sex before the cup, once overflowing, is snatched away. It’s anxious, forlorn, self-assured, lustful, vulnerable and unrepentant.
Greedo’s honesty is revelatory and, in the sense that every rap fan has some yearning for lyrics to have real-life ballast, it’s exciting. But the seeming absence of fictive storytelling can shade his work with horrifying and saddening hues. When Greedo asks his wife if she’ll mail him photos while he’s imprisoned, that isn’t a hypothetical request—basic privations are his new reality (“Bacc to Jail”). He doesn’t sensationalize his adolescent practice of bringing guns and drugs to school—he doesn’t have to (“Street Life”). And, when on “Basehead” he claims, in his nasal, Miles Davis-overblowing-voice, that he bought his first gun from a basehead? Well, that’s probably true, too.
But verisimilitude is only part of what makes folks croon Greedo’s songs. They sing because when confronted by an artist with a touched-by-god intuition for catchy choruses and hooks, it’s hard to remain silent. And, on God Level, Greedo has some of his most polished pop moments to date. “Dibiase” has the languid sway of green-yellow palm fronds; “Conscience” is a filigree of soul-baring lyrics about his deceased best friend, Paul “Lil Money” Reed, backed by a golden instrumental; “100 100 100” is a spring shower of royal purple raindrops. But it’s the aspirational “Floating,” with its honking, mumbled chorus, that’s the climax of God Level. It epitomizes Greedo: unhurried and confident, with violence simmering just below its cool and breezy surface.
Like every Greedo album save the 13-song First Night Out, God Level suffers from mild bloat. With 27 songs clocking in at a generous hour and 40 minutes, the album is too long and, in parts, too unpolished to be fully immersive. While his prolificacy is impressive, in overstuffing his albums he occasionally draws some of the listener's’ attention away from the remarkable to the merely passable.
But of all the tragedies to befall Greedo—and of all the tragedies he may have caused—the possibility that he may never generate a singular, masterful project seems a minor concern. For the past two years, the precariousness of his life has determined the tenor of his career. His first effort as 03 Greedo, Purple Summer, was released less than a month after the Texas arrest which led to his recent incarceration, and subsequent albums were recorded while on the lam from bounty hunters (Purple Summer 03: Purple Hearted Soldier), after death of Lil Money (Money Changes Everything), and on his first night in Los Angeles after being caught by said bounty hunters (the aforementioned First Night Out). The clang of that arrest on a barren stretch of I-40 still resonates, and God Level is just one of its echoes. It isn’t 03 Greedo’s magnum opus. But until he’s free of the deprivations of an unconcerned carceral state, it’s close enough. | 2018-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | July 5, 2018 | 8 | 65e15f7c-1f07-4651-b28e-a2b5867fb736 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
This 36-disc box set presents every surviving tape of Bob Dylan's 1966 world tour, capturing combative audiences and transcendent performances nearly every night. | This 36-disc box set presents every surviving tape of Bob Dylan's 1966 world tour, capturing combative audiences and transcendent performances nearly every night. | Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22643-bob-dylan-the-1966-live-recordings/ | Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings | Put on nearly any of the 36 discs in Bob Dylan’s The 1966 Live Recordings box set and it will probably be perfect. Capturing the songwriter at the crest of his magical ’60s peak and culminating with a series of exhilarating performances in Manchester, Paris, and London, the imposing block of music documents Dylan facing down confrontational audiences while making some of the most ambitious creative leaps of his career. Causing controversy in some quarters by playing electric guitar in front of a rock band and seemingly abandoning his topical political songwriting, the shows depict an ongoing battle between Dylan and self-righteously betrayed folkies. Debuting material from the not-yet-released Blonde on Blonde alongside recent hits and new electrified arrangements of old tunes, Dylan is luminous and fragile-sounding during his opening solo acoustic sets, and equally fierce and possessed during the electric second halves, backed by the quintet that would soon become the Band, who match him in super-charged vitality.
A classic tour from start to finish, the set’s only drawbacks owe more to the format than the music: Various incomplete or missing songs, a few over-saturated vocal tracks, five CDs worth of grotty audience tapes, and the fact that Dylan performs nearly the same set lists in nearly the same order at every stop of the tour, from Long Island to Stockholm. Thoroughly consistent, especially by Dylan’s later live standards, the repeated performances from the 22 represented shows might be seen as feature, not a bug. Listening to oblique narrative epics like “Visions of Johanna” and dense truth attacks like “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” over and over, each becomes like a sculpture viewed from different angles, each liable to reveal something new about the lyrics or melody or interplay between musicians.
The 1966 Live Recordings builds itself around discs 19 and 20, a long-bootlegged show from Manchester officially released in 1998. Containing the notorious back-and-forth in which an audience member calls Dylan “Judas!” and Dylan snarls back, "I don’t be-lieve you, you’re a liar" (and to the musicians “play fuckin’ loud”), the Manchester show also finds the just-exactly-perfect balance of performance, soundman Richard Alderson’s mix, and high drama. Listened to in the context of the gigs on either side of it, one hears Dylan and the Group (as they were capitalized at the time in the British music press) circling around the tempos and inflections of what would become the classic performance of the material.
But each disc—even the barely listenable audience recordings—has its own rewards for the committed Dylanologist, from on- and off-stage histrionics to a range of varied mixes, each with its own personality. Turning 25 on May 24th in Paris (discs 26 and 27), Dylan goes into near meltdown, attempting desperately to get his acoustic instrument in tune. “This never happens to my electric guitar,” he deadpans, a punchline deployed many nights, part prop theater (“This machine confuses fascists”), part a musician's nightmare of gear damaged in transit. Slurring his words, Dylan is deeply inside of both himself and his songs, his Woody Guthrie drawl blurred into the oft-caricatured nasal howl. One takeaway, though, and perhaps the perpetual Dylan hot take, is that the dude actually is an amazing singer, lingering sensuously on every syllable during the quiet acoustic sets and occupying every bit of smarter-than-thou word-play and put-downs when the electric guitars come out.
“It takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace,” Dylan told journalist Robert Shelton that year, and various accounts (including those of liner-notes writer Clinton Heylin) hint at Dylan’s prodigious chemical intake during his extended world tour in 1966. Dylan had been touring in the electric/acoustic format since the previous summer, cramming in studio sessions between an extended fall tour with his new accompanists. The former backing group for Arkansas-born rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, the ex-Hawks played 60 gigs with Dylan in the fall of 1965 and spring of 1966, drummer Levon Helm bailing in late November, before the start of Dylan's first world tour in 1966. Helm and others can be heard on the scant fall ’65 audience tapes released as downloads last year, and Sandy Konikoff can be made out (barely) on the audience-recorded discs from the American leg, stuck rightfully at the end of this set. But it’s the hard-hitting Mickey Jones (later seen in bearded form as neighbor Pete Bilker on ABC’s “Home Improvement”) who galvanizes the band from April of 1966 onward, providing gun-shot snare-cracks to start songs and a dependably rolling thunder. “In my group, the drummer is the lead guitar player,” Dylan would tell a press conference a quarter-century later, and Jones totally wails.
Often dismissed in the British music papers, the Group was anything but typical, owing especially to the double piano/organ attack of Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. Filling the corners of each song with soulful R&B color and sometimes lost in the mix, Manuel can be heard especially on the May 14th show in Liverpool (disc 14), adding on boogie-woogie filigrees to “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” Though Hudson's solos are few and far between, one of the recurring pleasures of the box comes with his conversational fills between vocal lines every night on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” with Dylan taking over for Manuel at piano. Perhaps the keynote for the entire period, Dylan milks the tune for every last insult.
With Jones driving them, Manuel, Hudson, Danko, and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson make room for one another, all while heeding Dylan’s urgent rhythm playing, an electrified bandleader for barely six months by the time of the box set’s chronological opening on February 5th in White Plains. Climaxing all sets but one with “Like A Rolling Stone”—a #4 hit in the UK the previous year, #2 back home—was almost a joke in itself, a reminder that none of this electricity should be any sort of surprise. With most of the violent upheavals of the ’60s still building towards a fever pitch, Dylan had gradually moved away from overt topicality beginning with 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan, adding electric instruments to the mix for 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home. And, every night, “Like A Rolling Stone” makes a thrilling conclusion, Dylan yawping out the vocals, Robertson and pals transforming the sparkle of the 1965 studio rendition into an ethereal punch.
Speaking almost entirely in parables in interviews and press conferences, the Bob Dylan that stood in front of audiences in 1966 had an unearthly air, a beautiful and vibrating young alien. “Bob Dylan got very sick backstage and I’m here to take his place,” he announces in Glasgow (disc 21), but whoever it is that's wearing the Bob Dylan mask positively glows. The folkies were right, of course, in that he and his lyrics had drifted far from topical concerns, replacing them with a personal expression that spoke more to the abstract intellectual autonomy of the counterculture than the ongoing issues of the New Left. But sharpened even beyond that, the acoustic sets possess a stark beauty, like a series of elegant black-and-white portraits.
It would be the last time Dylan regularly performed extended solo acoustic sets, and it is a form he has mastered. Finding a subtlety in his harmonica playing, it ranges from spare melodic statements like the introduction to “Fourth Time Around” to more abstract honkings (such as the concluding solos in “Desolation Row”) perhaps more akin to what soundman Richard Alderson had recorded as house engineer at avant-garde label ESP’-Disk. At times, such as on the terrible February 5th audience tape from the Westchester County Center in New York, Dylan squonks up and down the harp for comedic value, but mostly it’s an instrument as weird and pliable as Dylan’s voice.
The long-haul listening experience of 29.5 hours of music provides able space for contemplation, a manner of observing Dylan’s work in real time, hearing him earn giggles for his then-unreleased “Norwegian Wood” answer song “Fourth Time Around” in Sheffield (disc 17) and endlessly tweak the work-in-progress electric set opener “Tell Me, Momma” at every stop of the tour. Dylan doesn’t settle on a single set of lyrics throughout the 20 surviving performances of this song, which was never recorded in a studio; the official lyrics in his published lyrics book (and on his website) bear only fragmentary resemblance to any version documented on the box set. A lost classic, never performed again after 1966, each version flashes by in a perfect torrent of Dylan-esque babble, as if he were scribbling in a notebook, trying out endless variations.
To Dylan, his sets with this Group seemed to represent the next step in his work. Though only Robbie Robertson featured on Blonde on Blonde, in stores a few weeks after the tour concluded, Dylan would rush-release the Liverpool recording of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as the B-side of the last pre-album single, “I Want You.” In addition to spending post-show time with the Group and his entourage reviewing Alderson’s recordings, Dylan continued to work off-hours on even more new songs, with a half-dozen fragments of hotel songwriting sessions with Robertson included on last year’s The Cutting Edge, almost all abandoned after the tour.
Operating at high speed in every regard, Dylan’s career would take a major turn after a motorcycle accident in Woodstock in July, canceling the next legs of the tour, eschewing live performance until 1969, and staying off the road until 1974. The 1966 Live Recordings, then, are a definitive cap on one of the most productive and astounding periods in any popular artist’s creative history, a story so familiar it’s become an archetype and myth. While the recordings sound pristine as might be hoped, give or take occasional distortion, the accompanying packaging is left a bit wanting. The long liner note essay by longtime Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin is excellent, but the mere quantity of music seems to demand even more material than the set provides, or even just more caring annotation of what is included, like the dates of film stills or even the names of the concerts’ venues. (Heylin’s own recent book Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall is an excellent start.)
The box set offers dramatic resolution, too. During the tour's penultimate gig, at London’s Royal Albert Hall (disc 29), Dylan’s syllable-crunching shout-singing bounces gracefully off the Group’s elastic crunch, a performance every bit as transcendent as Manchester. But on the last night (disc 31), Dylan finally snaps, and after the electric set-opening “Tell Me, Momma,” offers a completely earnest and logical explanation for the music. “I like all my old songs, it's just that things change all the time, everybody knows that,” he says in part. It’s so earnest, in fact, that he finds himself speaking words that one would rarely associate with the future Nobel laureate. “The music is… the music is… I would never venture to say what it is,” Dylan trails off, perhaps even shocking himself in his attempted candor. But on this final night of the tour, mostly, Dylan finally sounds too far gone, his voice weak. He and the Group seem to fray in places, and in doing so reveal the other 21 performances for the high-wire achievements they were and are. “You can take it or leave it, it’s up to you,” Dylan says, and the choice still exists, the answer out there blowin’ somewhere. | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia Legacy | December 15, 2016 | 9.3 | 65ebd41a-e7c4-4852-9765-d6f9a69e69af | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The legendary Athens band goes from being hipster homework to being easily appreciated thanks to a DFA reissue that includes every song from both versions of Gyrate, plus a few singles and extras. | The legendary Athens band goes from being hipster homework to being easily appreciated thanks to a DFA reissue that includes every song from both versions of Gyrate, plus a few singles and extras. | Pylon: Gyrate Plus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10924-gyrate-plus/ | Gyrate Plus | …on which the beloved Gyrate gets its remastered, expanded, completist, contextualized due. Even with liner notes by principals from R.E.M., the B-52's, and Gang of Four, this reissue from the dependable vinyl-miner James Murphy at long last permits the appreciation of Pylon to stop being hipster homework; DFA's generation-later vouch frees the listener, finally, to enjoy the assaultive relationship of Michael Lachowski's often ominous boing-boing-bass and Curtis Crowe's hot-pursuit whackamole drumming. The 10 songs from every copy of this seminal Athens band's debut are here, as well as both of the alternating "11th" tracks. Also included: The "Jamaican" version of "Danger" ("Danger!!") from the Pylon!! EP, the confident first single, and a previously unreleased track whose title is also, less than incidentally, Gyrate's defining preoccupation: "Functionality".
The original three musicians had a self-assignment. Their aim: To get NYC ink and then press kaboom. They weren't yet traditionally proficient with their instruments, and thusly seemed to approach their technological implements with a "How can I use this tool?" ethos, resulting in a kind of primitive precision, each member locking into a groove hardly ever intuitively related to that of another member. Before they found Vanessa Hay (née Vanessa Briscoe), they came close to using a recording about teaching parrots to talk as "vocals." Hay's eventual Situationist bark often reduced musicality to Pavlovian stimulus-responses via a joyless-sounding (but, ironically, joy-producing) series of reports or demands: "Cool" fascistically declares everything cool, baiting dissidents. "Dub" brags angrily of devouring dub at the start of each day, lest any white British acts think themselves superior digesters of the mode. Whereas Joy Division demanded "Dance, dance, dance to the radio"; Pylon grunts the tad-more-individualistic "Dance, dance, dance if you want to," even though the invitation is parsed like a warning with harsh consequences. "Volume" instructs its audience to "forget the picture" and "turn up the volume." "Gravity", obviously about the physics of the nightclub, taunts listeners by telling them that they both "cannot resist the urge" and "cannot dance," framing the insanely danceable track as an incitement to rebel against its mouthpiece. "Read a Book" is some seriously infectious Maoist literacy-advocating combat-rock.
Other tracks seek to provoke proletariat detournement: "Precaution" is about anything but risk minimization. "Human Body" juxtaposes bottom-rung job skills ("I can sweep/ I can mop") against enlightened capabilities ("I can think") while espousing "safety glasses" and "safety shoes" for the sake of a vessel that can "function/ without going to school." "Working Is No Problem" pretends to establish boundaries between the brain and the body, but the knowledge that Hay was a nurse, factory worker, and Kinko's manager makes it even more literally functional: Lyrics such as "Everything's in boxes" and "I'm not a racecar driver" obtain a kind of not-neurotypical discipline. "Stop It" raises the faux-dictatrix stakes, as the listener is instructed first to not rock-n-roll, and then to rock-n-roll on cue. "Driving School" merely catalogs, unromantically, the common nouns of public schools' instructing folks to use the dominant/subsidized means of transportation. The song insists that for certain industries, the government is a willing propagandistic babysitter, and even the stereo is implicated. Yet: all of these cuts are pogo-able, full-on jams, every scraped string ahead of (the mainstream version of) its time*.*
Did Hay adopt such a dry tone in order to defuse gender-based responses to her band's art, to become a sexless object instead of a sex object? (I, for one, am intimidated by the orgyhole-shorthand-versus-radio-signal agenda of her current project, FFFM.) Many a female-led band since (Numbers, Controller.Controller, Love of Diagrams, Glass Candy) has adopted her iced-ham, standoffish tone. Maybe, like her fellow Georgian artist Flannery O'Connor, Hay "refused to do pretty." Meanwhile, her bandmates were busy wondering how minimalist, how non-"human," analog dance music could get without ceasing to be fun. The result: a kind of militaristic disco. No, wait, I meant: android reggae. No, wait, I meant: postpunk without the melodrama. Of course Pylon didn't blow up like their fellow Athens luminaries; they were too fucking Spartan. | 2007-11-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-11-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | dB / Armageddon | November 28, 2007 | 8.8 | 65ebf627-dcf3-4b54-90fb-4d60b2c6bf8c | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
After a debut album that reinterpreted Iberian folk for a contemporary audience, the Catalan duo turns toward the future, adding electronics and collaborating with Holly Herndon and Kronos Quartet. | After a debut album that reinterpreted Iberian folk for a contemporary audience, the Catalan duo turns toward the future, adding electronics and collaborating with Holly Herndon and Kronos Quartet. | Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés: CLAMOR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maria-arnal-i-marcel-bages-clamor/ | Clamor | CLAMOR, the second album from Catalan duo Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés, offers dazzling proof of the old adage that sometimes you need to go back to go forward. The duo’s debut album, 2017’s 45 Cerebros y 1 Corazón, interpreted Iberian folk music from the 1950s and 1960s for a contemporary audience, using electric guitars and modern production techniques in a spirit not a million miles away from Rosalía’s experiments with flamenco on her debut, Los Angeles.
On CLAMOR, Arnal and Bagés take their inquisitive inclinations into bold new territory. While the material on their debut was built up over a period of time, CLAMOR was born from a desire—inspired by romantic separation, post-tour exhaustion, and a looming fascination with apocalypse and rebirth—to wipe the slate clean and make something genuinely new.
Arnal compared the recording of the new album to coming out of the “bubble” that was their debut, opening up to fresh sounds and new imaginative leaps. This meant inviting collaborators such as Holly Herndon and the Kronos Quartet into the fold; it also involved embracing new compositional techniques, bringing the electronic effects that were passing influences on their debut into the heart of their work. Producer David Soler, more of a passive presence on 45 Cerebros, became a key part of the duo’s sound on CLAMOR, as Arnal and Bagés built their new musical world from the ground up.
The result is a panoply of musical colors. “Fiera de mí” judders to the kind of sheet-metal bass rumble found on old dubstep records; “Murmuri” rides a sickening detuned string rush; “Hiperutopia” mixes a clattering industrial beat with stuttering vocal effects. “Milagro,” with its strummed guitar and apparently unprocessed vocal, is about as close as you get to 45 Cerebros’ new traditionalism on CLAMOR, and even that ends up in a whirl of distortion and programmed beats, calling to mind the febrile pop of Björk’s Homogenic.
The connecting thread to 45 Cerebros comes in the combination of Arnal’s gorgeously full-bodied voice and CLAMOR’s heady vocal melodies, which soar and dive like an eagle after its prey. These may be largely new songs—“Cant de la Sibil·la”, which is adapted from a medieval liturgical drama that prophesies the apocalypse, is the exception—but to the untrained ear the darkly dramatic melodies of “Tras de ti” or “Jaque” could be part of the same Iberian tradition celebrated on 45 Cerebros. On “Fiera de mí,” this songwriting form is alloyed to a strident pop sensibility and a well-defined chorus to create an anthem to rival 45 Cerebros’ stand-out track, “Tú Que Vienes a Rondarme.”
Arnal’s exquisite voice is key to the success of CLAMOR. But it is far from alone: the “clamor” of the album’s title is reflected in a rush of voices, both human and non-human. Field recordings bring the sound of birds, goats, and the gentle burble of a river to the mix, while on “Meteorit ferit” (“Wounded Meteorite”), Arnal channels the voice of a meteorite who is feeling vulnerable and doesn’t want to hurt anyone. This experimentation reaches its apotheosis in “Cant de la Sibil·la,” a sensational meeting point of musical tradition and technological thrust, where Holly Herndon’s “AI baby” Spawn meets the combined voices of Arnal and Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena in what could be a hymn to musical perpetuity.
The song’s synthesis—of medieval and 21st century, local and international, human and robot—exemplifies the brilliant complexities at the heart of CLAMOR. The album may take its inspirations from endings, but it finds its strength in what comes next. What comes after the apocalypse? How do you fill the hole of a broken heart? And where do you go after the success of your well-defined debut album? The answer, on CLAMOR, is upwards, outwards, and beyond.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fina Estampa | March 18, 2021 | 7.6 | 65ef1259-e585-473e-a831-a6fd53869a22 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Kylie Minogue’s most relaxed album in years is a compendium of all the sounds she’s best known for: confectionary synth-pop, breezy Euro house, and propulsive EDM. | Kylie Minogue’s most relaxed album in years is a compendium of all the sounds she’s best known for: confectionary synth-pop, breezy Euro house, and propulsive EDM. | Kylie Minogue: Tension | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kylie-minogue-tension/ | Tension | Should executives at Mattel follow through with their plans for a full-blown, thousand-year Barbie movie franchise, they might take a page from another enduring icon and star of the summer: Kylie Minogue. The similarities between the Australian pop diva and the American fashion doll have been remarked upon (and played into) for the better half of Minogue’s four-decade career, but apart from the unfailingly sunny demeanor, flamboyant costume changes, and elemental, almost psychedelic blondeness, Minogue has always foregrounded a humanity that no corporate property—never mind most pop stars—could hope to touch. “Self-knowledge is a truly beautiful thing and Kylie knows herself inside out,” Rufus Wainwright once exclaimed to The Guardian, “she is what she is and there is no attempt to make quasi-intellectual statements to substantiate it.” Minogue’s art is surface—fabulously so. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the singer made pop stardom as compelling a site of projection as Kate Moss was for modeling, collaborating with artists and filmmakers to depict her beauty and blondness through a darkly romantic lens or in campy, theatrical neon. Unlike Janet Jackson or Madonna, who sought to reveal fresh aspects of their psychology with each new release, the fiercely private Minogue has often opted to present herself at face value, even as she’s navigated intense personal upheaval.
To read too deeply into the lyrics of a megahit like “Padam Padam” would be an insult, so consider its charm: The single, which defied industry expectations, became an officially sanctioned Pride anthem, sparked dialogue about ageism on UK radio, and dominated the summer off the back of a million TikToks, is a testament to how invigorating and multifaceted the effect of the singer’s music can still be. It is also, taken for parts, a profoundly weird song: the rare hookup banger that manages to shout out Édith Piaf, keep time with your heartbeat, and elicit Pavlovian screams from gay bars in a mere two syllables. “Padam Padam” embodies a looseness of concept that slightly conflicts with the title of Minogue’s 16th album, Tension. It is the most relaxed of her recent LPs and by far the best, a return to form that privileges the emotional immediacy and kinetic sensation that’s defined the best of her music for years.
Minogue forayed into concept albums with 2018’s countrified Golden and 2020’s DISCO, which yielded a few undeniable gems but failed overall for the simple reason that they didn’t sound quite like Kylie. In the process of accommodating mirrorballs and cowboy hats, the singer sacrificed a degree of spontaneity, resulting in a self-conscious sound at odds with her self-possessed spirit. After drafting and then ditching plans for an ’80s-inspired album, Minogue and her collaborators—producers Biff Stannard, Duck Blackwell, and Jon Green—abandoned overarching themes in favor of a more casual process, recording with a portable mic setup in Airbnbs and hotel rooms whenever inspiration struck. The final product is a compendium of all the sounds Minogue is best known for: confectionary synth-pop, breezy Euro house, and propulsive EDM.
At some points it’s easy to recognize exactly which sounds the singer and producers were gunning for. The interwoven sing-song rap of “Hands” feels like an unambiguous stab at recreating Doja Cat’s “Say So,” while the flirtatious roller-rink strut of “Green Light” seems suspiciously Dua Lipa and Carly Rae Jepsen-adjacent, especially with its prominent, dreamy sax. This would be a problem if it weren’t for how capably Minogue finds a home for herself in the music. To sing something like Kylie is to sound as though you were the most deliriously fun and sexy woman on the planet, and apart from some pinched nasal notes on the otherwise excellent “Hold on to Now,” she’s beguiling and dynamic a presence as ever, even if the instrumentals occasionally register as a bit canned in comparison.
There’s no real unifying concept underlying Tension, except that almost all of it is concerned with the singer’s longtime pet themes: love and sex as all-encompassing, full-body highs. Checkered romantic histories present themselves as obstacles to swiftly overcome and breakups only ever slingshot the singer and her beau passionately back together. Nothing quite has the cinematic drama of her self-titled’s “Confide in Me” or the slinky come-on of Body Language’s “Slow,” but what the new record lacks in variety is redeemed by full-hearted energy. “Hold On to Now” is a Robyn-esque plea for romantic faith, while the rapturously fun “Things We Do for Love” pits her racing heart against a euphoric synth-pop beat. The title track and “Padam Padam” are the record’s camp highs, with the singer vamping through pounding piano house to deliver some truly ridiculous lyrics. Both songs land on the right side of silly-serious and wield sledgehammer-subtle choruses with the feverish commitment required to make a hook like “Call me Kylie-lie-lie/Don’t imitate-tate-tate/Cool like sorbet-et-et” feel ecstatic rather than clunky.
“Vegas High” and “10 Out of 10” are the only tracks that register as flops: the former feels like an unambiguous advertisement for her forthcoming Vegas residency, while the latter is far too bloodless and vanilla to remotely merit its watered-down ballroom chorus. At its best, Kylie’s music possesses an intense physicality; energizing in a way that bypasses the head and appeals directly to the heart and body. This is also true of the best of Tension, and when the romantic urgency of her lyrics and the bracing runner’s high of her music commingle it reminds you that what is most glamorous and definitive about the singer is not only her sustained self-belief but her capacity for making it felt. | 2023-09-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | BMG | September 21, 2023 | 7.3 | 65f4dfd8-18a6-42ee-9fa2-871396597639 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Third album from Broadcast-- now downsized to a duo-- sees them dressing their poptastic efforts with whatever ruckus they can conjure. | Third album from Broadcast-- now downsized to a duo-- sees them dressing their poptastic efforts with whatever ruckus they can conjure. | Broadcast: Tender Buttons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/948-tender-buttons/ | Tender Buttons | If you thought Haha Sound was a sonic mess, you might want to bring a Dust Buster with you for your first go with Tender Buttons. Where The Noise Made By People eagerly embraced listeners with its pastiche of groovy space-age bachelor pad couture and timeless pop songsmithery, Haha Sound was more standoffish at first blush. The tunes were there, but they were covered in a bit of soot. Those able to look past the static were rewarded; the clash between the off-putting sounds and the melodies created something greater.
The same plan of attack is in place for this album. Only two folks were involved in the making of Tender Buttons-- vocalist Trish Keenan and bassist James Cargill. What the group lost in manpower, they more than make up for in racket. Keenan, as always, lends her gorgeous frigid voice to the proceedings, often two times (as on the lilting ballad "Tears in the Typing Pool"). As for the music, Keenan and Cargill bring the melodies, but then dress their poptastic efforts with whatever ruckus they can conjure.
It begins with the keening pings that kick off "I Found The F", and continues throughout. (For what it's worth, a kinder, gentler reprisal of the first track's melody ends the record.) The first single, "America's Boy", disguises its topicality in warbling, ghostly shrieks. "Arc of a Journey" chirps and skitters through its tunefulness for three minutes, then ends with a distorted and distended coda. Meanwhile, "Corporeal" decides to just throw in the raucous bits against the tune's Young Marble Giants-esque facade to see what sticks.
This possibly comes off as a dour appraisal of this album, which I enjoy, and there a good reason for this. As noted earlier, Haha Sound went for the approach, and brought stronger tunes to the mix (cf. "Colour Me In", "The Little Bell"). There's no such stand-out track on this album (and there's certainly no "oh wow" moments like "Papercuts" or "Come On Let's Go", either). What you have with Tender Buttons is a Broadcast album that listeners might need to spend more time with than expected. That said, this is still a Broadcast album, meaning it's one of the better things you'll put in your ear this year. Don't mind me if I reciprocate the album's tough love in equal measure. | 2005-09-18T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-09-18T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | September 18, 2005 | 7.5 | 65fb518b-5090-484a-9eee-e4c3ac4486d4 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
Wild Nothing's second album, Nocturne, distinguishes itself from the crowded pack of dream-pop nostalgists for the same reason 2010's Gemini did-- Jack Tatum is simply one of the best songwriters in this field, and Nocturne's significant upgrade in fidelity makes that point more clearly than ever. | Wild Nothing's second album, Nocturne, distinguishes itself from the crowded pack of dream-pop nostalgists for the same reason 2010's Gemini did-- Jack Tatum is simply one of the best songwriters in this field, and Nocturne's significant upgrade in fidelity makes that point more clearly than ever. | Wild Nothing: Nocturne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16969-nocturne/ | Nocturne | "You want to know me? Well, what's to know?" asks Jack Tatum on the title track of Wild Nothing's Nocturne. The album's subtly addictive nature is such that only after a dozen listens did this anti-revelation strike me as its most revealing lyric. Tatum really does view himself as a facilitator. He drove that point home during our interview last month, debunking any attempts made in the past two years to classify him as a "personality." This seems self-defeating for a guy who works in a style of lovelorn, Anglophilic indie rock that never goes in style because it never really goes out of style, and tends to favor extreme recluses or extroverts for its breakout artists. Fortunately, Nocturne distinguishes itself from the perrennial crowd of dream-pop nostalgists for the same reason Wild Nothing's 2010 debut Gemini did: Tatum is simply one of the best songwriters in this field, and Nocturne's significant upgrade in fidelity makes that point more clearly than ever.
Whether it's better than Gemini or its EP follow-up, Golden Haze, only matters in the event you have room for just one Wild Nothing album in your life, and you probably shouldn't limit yourself. It's hard to imagine anyone who dug Gemini jumping ship here-- Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious. Even while recording with one of Brooklyn's classiest sonic interior decorators in Nicolas Vernhes, Tatum granted himself only basic amenities-- live strings, a human drummer, better microphones.
Nocturne is painted with the same colors as Gemini, but the resolution is much higher. When the songs on Gemini wanted to convey vitality or physicality, they were charmingly ramshackle, stuffed with busy drum machines and insistently strummed guitar. If Nocturne wants for anything, it's the sense of immediacy that marked highlights such as "Chinatown" and "Summer Holiday". This record is more about craftsmanship. Lead singles "Shadow" and "Paradise" feel newly urgent in a holistic way, going places Tatum couldn't access in his Blacksburg dorm room two years ago. "Shadow" allows itself brief asides between verses to let those lustrous strings moan and swoon, "Paradise" interrupts its glistening downer-disco for an indulgent ambient build-up. The full-bodied sound means the softer side of Nocturne gets fleshier too. Gemini relied on reverb to convey texture and depth, and while there's still plenty on "Through the Grass", the rhythmic complexity of the song's delicate, interwoven arrangement plays a bigger role in making it one of the loveliest thing to be done with guitars this year.
Entire labels and local scenes are dedicated to preserving the era Nocturne evokes-- lacquering the malaised vocals, getting the right reverb plates, and hoping that aesthetic identification is more important than writing melodies that stick. Tatum, however, is a songwriter first who just happens to work in this medium. His vocals are put to the forefront to give the listener a clearly marked place to return, and his melodies are smoothly curved, like a small divot at which the rest of the arrangements can dig deeper. The hopscotch verse melody of "Shadow" works in tandem with an insistent, four-note motif doubled on lead guitar and violin. On "Counting Days", a simonized harmony serves as the chorus, but the little guitar countermelody that darts around it is the hook. Tatum understands the semantics of this stuff.
Which makes it strange that his ambitions as a melodic tunesmith aren't matched by his lyrics. Successfully writing like Robert Smith can be just as tricky as doing a decent Morrissey, which becomes clear every time Nocturne crosses an invisible line where a tiny bit of editing would pay off: "Paradise" contains the sensible-sounding, yet bafflingly mixed metaphor "velvet tongue so sweet", while "Only Heather" rhymes first and asks questions later: "I couldn't explain it/ I won't even try/ She is so lovely she makes me feel high."
Or maybe that's the only kind of lyric that really matters on Nocturne. If there's a Heather in your life, that song might be the centerpiece of your next mix. Or you might just listen to it hoping you'll meet a Heather, in which case, Wild Nothing is invested in the concept of wish fulfillment. This is called *dream-*pop for a reason, and there's no logic for what drives adults to lie out on the grass staring at the sun for hours or write songs about girls with fantastical names like "Rheya". Nocturne gives a voice to those feelings, and damn if it isn't lovely to listen to. | 2012-08-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | August 28, 2012 | 8.3 | 660442fb-bd54-4983-a277-caf649053c0b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
An all-star lineup-- Mangum, Oldham, YLT, Callahan, Merritt, Darnielle, Jay Reatard-- pays tribute to the iconic Kiwi singer/songwriter and stroke sufferer. | An all-star lineup-- Mangum, Oldham, YLT, Callahan, Merritt, Darnielle, Jay Reatard-- pays tribute to the iconic Kiwi singer/songwriter and stroke sufferer. | Various Artists: Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13859-stroke-songs-for-chris-knox/ | Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox | For decades Chris Knox has loomed over New Zealand's music scene. While Knox occasionally ventured outside his native land, the charismatic/confrontational Enemy/Toy Love/Tall Dwarfs frontman and solo act spent most of his life home supporting New Zealand's productive arts scene, paving the way for such acts as the Clean, the Chills, and the Verlaines. Along the way Knox amassed more than his share of fans around the world, too, and when news spread that he suffered a stroke last summer, support and sympathy arrived in equal measure to his stature.
Still, that doesn't quite prepare you for the quantity and quality of A-list acts that appear on Merge's Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox, a 2xCD tribute to the man and his music whose proceeds will go toward his recovery (Knox, 57, currently has limited speech and mobility). (Pre-orders are currently being accepted, and the record is out now digitally.) The sheer breadth and diversity of this recorded response almost begs disbelief, considering how quickly it came together, and really shows how far Knox's influence has reached, from several of his Kiwi peers to kindred spirits. The already much missed Jay Reatard starts off the set well-paired with the Toy Love nugget "Pull Down the Shades", "recorded in the bathroom of a hotel in Denmark on a 4-track," and the just plain missing Jeff Mangum, whose cover of the Tall Dwarfs' "Sign the Dotted Line" marks a rare recorded reappearance of the Neutral Milk Hotel mastermind, whose own lo-fi inclinations lined up well with Knox's.
Incredibly, the presence of Mangum is just the tip of the iceberg. The cavalcade of high-profile support continues with Bill Callahan and Will Oldham, whose versions of "Lapse" and a stunning "My Only Friend", respectively, remind that Knox could be as moving as theatrically manic. Stephin Merritt (who enlisted Knox to close the first 6ths album) simultaneously pays homage to Knox's aesthetic while reminding us of his own home recording roots with his (allegedly circa 1983!) version of "Beauty". Yo La Tengo mellow out "Coloured" and Lambchop offer a faithfully piano-led ren [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| dition of "What Goes Up". Elsewhere AC Newman's "Dunno Much About Life But I Know How to Breathe" channels Knox's trademark lust-for-life brio, while John Darnielle personalizes his sympathetic Mountain Goats track "Brave" with a get-well introduction. Longtime Kiwi pop aficionado (and top secret Merge Records co-founder) Mac McCaughan tackles "Nostalgia's No Excuse" as Portastatic, replete with an approximation of Knox's sneer and dollops of fuzzy distortion.
And then, of course, there's the host of New Zealand acts paying their respects to their friend and inspiration. Flying Nun peers and veterans such as the Bats, Verlaines, Hamish, and David Kilgour (of the Clean), the Chills, Peter Gutteridge (providing a hypnotically reinvented "Don't Catch Fire"), and Shayne Carter (of Straightjacket Fits) make appearances, as do relatively fresh faces like the Checks (doing Toy Love's "Rebel"), the Mint Chicks, and Pumice. Even some bona fide Antipodean stars show up, including Don McGlashan (of the Mutton Birds) and Neil Finn (who covers "It's Love" with his wife and two kids). It's a bit of a bummer that MOR singer Boh Runga gets Knox's beloved "Not Given Lightly", especially considering Pearl Jam covered it well on tour in New Zealand last November and could have provided this comp yet another ringer, but her heart is in the right place.
Special mention, of course, must go to Alec Bathgate, Knox's longtime partner in the Tall Dwarfs and the co-writer of many of these tracks, who contributes a sterling version of the solo Knox gem "Glide". There are other treats and surprises in store, too, from Jordan Luck's inspired choice of "Becoming Something Other" (about a father stricken by Parkinson's, highlighting Knox's sometimes twisted but always humanist lyrics) to SJD namesake Sean Donnelly's lovely "The Outer Skin" (a song covered by the Hope Blister way back when) to Lou Barlow's "Song of the Tall Puppy", from 2008's Chris Knox and the Nothing album A Warm Gun, a gentle reminder that the guy still makes records.
Which leads us to the best surprises of them all: new recordings from both the Nothing and Tall Dwarfs. The Nothing song in particular, "Nappin' in Lapland", offers a glimpse of Knox's novel, inspiring way around his predicament: songs with singing, but no words. Leave it to Chris Knox not to ever let a little thing like a debilitating stroke get in the way of making music. | 2010-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Merge | January 29, 2010 | 8.2 | 66048164-5daa-4f33-9a1a-06c13afa1c29 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The Lisbon-based producer’s soft, contemplative pop centers around everyday memories, embracing repetition as a technique to reveal the novel in the ordinary. | The Lisbon-based producer’s soft, contemplative pop centers around everyday memories, embracing repetition as a technique to reveal the novel in the ordinary. | Bullion: We Had a Good Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bullion-we-had-a-good-time/ | We Had a Good Time | Over the last decade, the Lisbon-based Nathan Jenkins, who goes by the name Bullion, has created epic songs in miniature. Before moving to Portugal, he hosted a show on London’s NTS online radio station, presenting songs by sophisti-pop stalwarts like the Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout alongside synth-rock ballads by John Martyn and Robert Wyatt. With 2011’s You Drive Me to Plastic and 2012’s Love Me Oh Please Love Me, he made early, sample-heavy attempts to fuse these influences. On his 2016 album Loop the Loop, which he’s described as being about “making changes rather than going over and over on the same old path,” he perfected his own flavor of contemplative pop. We Had a Good Time, his newest collection of songs, explores repetition’s ability to find the novel in the ordinary.
On We Had a Good Time, Bullion uses guitar, synth pads, and reverb for a mellow set of songs that center around memories of the mundane, finding the sublime in the banal. Opener “O Vermona” is made up of an Emeralds-like drone and Bullion’s lightly doubled vocals: “I’ll never go quiet on you.” He cuts the phrase into fragments and layers the pieces, turning a simple declaration into an arresting hook. When he allows the line to play out again before the song goes silent, it has obtained a peculiar power.
The most daring display of repetition-as-technique is the decision to record two versions of one song: “Hula,” which appears halfway through the EP, and “Hula Hula,” the record’s closer. If you aren’t paying attention, you might imagine you are hearing “Hula” a second time. But the subtle additions to “Hula, Hula”—more echo, a new guitar solo, extra bleeps—become evident on closer listening. Only a cryptic lyrical fragment remains the same: “Are people in pain where you are?” In the ebullient “Hula,” the question seems rhetorical, like a public service announcement attempting to make you more aware of your fellow citizens. In the spectral “Hula Hula,” the query evokes a deeper, more existential line of thought: Is there anything you might have missed?
We Had a Good Time is acutely conscious of the fact that memories fade. The elegiac title track, co-written by Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft), seemingly mourns a past relationship. Though each wash of ambient sound, artificial clap, and synthetic organ is calculated, the cumulative effect is one of real regret. The present will someday be lost; that’s why Bullion is fascinated by the quotidian. We may tire of our everyday surroundings, but if we fail to note them, we dull ourselves to the phenomena of our lives. Bullion’s music is a reminder to look for the momentous in the familiar. | 2020-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Deek | March 7, 2020 | 7.5 | 660a295e-f36a-4484-95ce-d7bb08b697c5 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
On his first album of all new material, the Chicago footwork pioneer pushes at the outline of the genre, playing with convention and keeping listeners thrillingly off balance. | On his first album of all new material, the Chicago footwork pioneer pushes at the outline of the genre, playing with convention and keeping listeners thrillingly off balance. | RP Boo: I’ll Tell You What! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rp-boo-ill-tell-you-what/ | I’ll Tell You What! | RP Boo has got death on his mind. In his introduction to I’ll Tell You What!—astoundingly, the first album of all new material from the legendary footwork producer—Boo says he wants to “die empty,” purging his musical mind in order to have left no idea unexplored when the Grim Reaper comes calling. That sense of urgency drives I’ll Tell You What!, an album that pushes at the edge of what footwork can be—a footwork record that clings to the genre by mysterious means, questioning where the limits lie.
Footwork has long delighted in fluidity, stamping its mark on anything from rock backbeats to sweet soul samples. Boo himself helped create that viscous template: His 1997 track “Baby Come On” is credited as one of the genre’s founding songs. Boo’s previous album, 2015’s Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints, made good use of this, riding roughshod over samples of everyone from Kenny Loggins to “The Munchkins Parade,” from The Wizard of Oz. But whereas that record still bore the hallmarks of classic footwork—drum-machine kicks, metallic snares, and guttural bass to keep the dancers moving—I’ll Tell You What! strips back Boo’s sound dramatically, often leaving just the genre’s ghostly trails as a guide.
At times I’ll Tell You What! feels like a brother to Wiley’s famed “Devil” mixes, when the London producer took the beats out from underneath his early productions to leave a skeletal corruption of grime. I’ll Tell You What! isn’t quite so radical in its reduction—only a few tracks dispense with the kick drum altogether—but many of the songs hand over main rhythmic duty to the bass, whose triple-time rumbling is often the only indication that we are in footwork’s orbit.
“Earth’s Battle Dance” has a lengthy middle section where the drum machines drop out entirely, leaving just a languorous funk break, over which clipped vocal samples and an insistent bass throb make a subliminal suggestion of footwork. Elsewhere, on tracks like “U-Don’t No” and “Cloudy Back Yard,” the style’s familiar percussive palette shows up almost reluctantly, dropping in for a few bars of lazy-yet-precise drum hits with the deadly lurch of the “drunken fist” fighting style.
The radical change in mood exhibited on “Earth’s Battle Dance” is another distinctive feature of I’ll Tell You What!’s sonic sorcery. Songs will frequently slam into dramatic left turns that unsettle and excite, turning the fabric of the track upside down and dissolving the line between fast and slow. “Flight 1235 (ft. Phil & Crossfire)” sounds like a fairly standard footwork outing for its first 90 seconds, all vocal fire and drum-machine strut, only to ratchet down the gears like a sports car on a country road with the introduction of a sunshine-mellow chorus.
Similarly, “U Belong 2 Me” sounds at first like a throwback to the ghetto-house style from which footwork was born, thanks to a bouncing 4/4 rhythm and pitched-up vocal samples. But halfway through, the insistent bass drum drops out and a funereal melody comes in, while Boo welds the song’s two vocal samples together so that the innocuous “Let go of this” and “You belong to me” combine to produce the chilling refrain of “Let go of me.” “Wicked’Bu” is, if anything, an even odder combination of moods, brilliantly combining the dramatic synth drones of Daft Punk’s Tron soundtrack with a sample that stinks of 1960s spy flick.
I’ll Tell You What! is a masterful album of precision and imagination, one where footwork resounds with the potential of a rewritten rule book. It is also astoundingly alive, its energy and originality a reminder that visionary ideas and emptied minds can outlast feeble human mortality. | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 9, 2018 | 7.8 | 660d7586-8cf5-4f8c-80f9-416371370059 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Detroit siblings dial down the intensity of their underworld street sagas, but their latest mixtape is still packed with drama. | The Detroit siblings dial down the intensity of their underworld street sagas, but their latest mixtape is still packed with drama. | Los / WB Nutty: LOS X NUTTY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-wb-nutty-los-x-nutty/ | LOS X NUTTY | Every Los and Nutty mixtape ascribes to the logic of Dick Wolf-produced television procedurals: You pretty much know what you’re getting every time you click play, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The more familiar you are with the Detroit siblings’ stories of dope deals and brotherly love, the more oddly comforting their underworld sagas are. Often, their hustling chronicles are centered around the less glamorous details, the ones they usually blow by in the movies. You know, the backbreaking work necessary to make the drudgery pay off. Sleepless nights on the highway. Opening up shop in a new town and then closing it in search of greener pastures.
The difference between their new project LOS X NUTTY and mixtapes of the past is the intensity. On 2020’s Panagnl4e, Vol. 2, for instance, their hellish tales of wiretaps and pit stops at motels were so vivid, it felt as if they were happening in real time. Meanwhile, LOS X NUTTY is a bit more removed; you can picture the brothers sitting on the couch in their childhood home, exchanging anecdotes and reliving the old days.
The beats are a big element of the trips down memory lane; this time around, many of them are softer and smoother. They are tailor-made for jolts of nostalgia, like the gruff-voiced Los reminiscing about the rush of a high-speed chase on “Won’t Get It,” while the vocal sample gently blooms in the background. An understated funk groove is the foundation of “I Thought 10 Was Enough”; over it, Nutty, the feistier of the two, recounts memories of snapping photos with stacks of money with the wistfulness of a former high school football star looking back at the state championship game. When it’s less evocative, the lighter touch is a drag. Nutty loses some of his punchiness on “Washin My Hands,” so much so that I zoned out by the time featured guest Samuel Shabazz jumped in. “The Reason” is replete with life lessons that aren’t really that special, though they probably would have been more compelling if the dewy-eyed instrumental didn’t sound like it came from the camp of Complex’s 2023 rapper of the year.
But Los and Nutty don’t stray that far from the formula that works for them; a handful of the tracks do end up capturing the grueling spirit of the Panagnl4e trilogy. None reach the heights of those mixtapes, but they’re still reliably dramatic. Take “Extorted,” which has the duo trading nerve-wracking verses over wailing sirens and barking police dogs. The pair pull out some cool tricks to give the tape extra juice; for one, Nutty sounds real inspired by the N.W.A. homage on the intro. And Los doesn’t typically rap on a beat as breezy as “Los 2 Hot,” yet the tongue-in-cheek particulars he includes in his bars only sound right coming from him: “White people even at the truck stops love me.” He also revives Lil Onion—a cartoonishly high-pitched, high-strung character he introduced on his 2021 tape G, Shit Vol. 2. It’s unexpected and a little funny, the kind of idea that cleverly redraws the blueprint they hold so close. | 2024-01-31T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-31T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Daisy Lane / Empire | January 31, 2024 | 7.1 | 660f96b5-99c2-4aa1-b14c-8ab850058991 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
After the fury of the stunning New Amerykah Part One, Badu returns to creating relaxed, personal funk that feels more like a sketchbook than a record. | After the fury of the stunning New Amerykah Part One, Badu returns to creating relaxed, personal funk that feels more like a sketchbook than a record. | Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14095-new-amerykah-part-two-return-of-the-ankh/ | New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh | Erykah Badu's a narcissist, but narcissism is her art. The title of her debut album, Baduizm, turned her name into a religion, a concept. On 2008's New Amerykah: Part One, she sang, "Everything around you see/ The ankhs, the wraps, the plus degrees/ And, yes, even the mysteries-- it's all me." It's not that she ignores the world at large, it's that she invariably draws her observations and opinions back to home base: herself, her family, her experience, her music. She and her boyfriend Jay Electronica took turns tweeting through her third pregnancy. ("I see the head, full of hair" read one Biblically paced message.) She named the baby Mars.
After Baduizm, she kept writing vocal lines and melodies but loosened her song structures to the point that her albums sounded like a series of digressions. The pose she struck on record became increasingly informal. Her final statements became ellipses. The change wasn't a drop in quality, but a shift in style. Mama's Gun and Worldwide Underground (from 2000 and 2003, respectively) are albums that, at best, sound like music that was made with no effort and very little planning. And though there's never any doubt that she's the center of attention, she started singing like she was off to the side. In its own way, Badu's music is ambient music: It drifts, ebbs, and flows. The verses don't have to hang together as long as the mood does.
2008's New Amerykah Part One was an unusually dark, hard album for her. Instead of the precedent for India.Arie, she was the echo of Sly Stone: fucked-up, long-winded, and overflowing. In her own way, Badu is always protesting something-- the way people betray themselves to be accepted by society, the way society forces people to stop being individuals-- but New Amerykah was almost like a historical re-enactment of a "protest album": the government is watching you, America eats its young, etc. The coffeehouse Afrocentrism of Baduizm was wiped out by producers like Madlib and Dilla, whose collage style is as forward-thinking as it is backward-looking.
New Amerykah Two, by comparison, is a return to the kind of music Badu was making in 2003: relaxed, personal funk that scans more like a sketchbook than an album. Considering this album was being promised as soon as Part One came out, I can imagine someone getting pissy at the inclusion of minute-long half-thoughts like "Agitation" and "You Loving Me (Session)", but... so what? They're funny, memorable, and most importantly, they're hers. And her ability to toe the line between sounding effortless and sounding tossed-off is remarkable-- it illustrates the big, variable personality she's always claiming to have. My least favorite song here is actually the one that sounds like she's really trying: the 10-minute, multi-part "Out My Mind, Just in Time".
Most of the lyrics here dwell on relationships, which Badu handles with a confidence and informality that most of square-ass, tax-filing society just hasn't caught up to and probably never will. ("Had two babies, different dudes," she sang on 2008's "Me"-- "and for them both my love is true.") Badu wants a window seat and nobody sitting next to her. Badu is fucking your friends and laughs about it. There's satire, too-- "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)", where she plays a vapid nag who just decided she really, really loves you. There's a song actually called "Fall in Love (Your Funeral)". But despite the breadth of attitudes toward love, there's no angst, which makes it an uplifting experience-- it's like Badu is actually convinced that life goes on.
There's stuff here that is empty excess-- about three minutes of "Love", for example, or the drowsy instrumental "Incense" (basically a collaboration between Madlib and harpist Kirsten Agnesta). But for the most part I appreciate the ease of the album-- it's really the first time I feel like I'm understanding her, actually. Her art is her life, and her life-- like anyone's-- is too messy and varied to contain. Whether or not it's her responsibility to distill and make sense of it all is beside the point. To invoke Badu logic, Part Two just is what it is-- a coherent expression of a big, scattered personality. | 2010-04-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Motown | April 6, 2010 | 8 | 6621d6d0-f2d9-406c-9ea3-8c4f74b4c16a | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The UK duo loosen their collars on their new remix compilation, pushing the songs on 2022’s I Love You Jennifer B to more mischievous, high-energy places. | The UK duo loosen their collars on their new remix compilation, pushing the songs on 2022’s I Love You Jennifer B to more mischievous, high-energy places. | Jockstrap: I<3UQTINVU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jockstrap-i3uqtinvu/ | I<3UQTINVU | Anyone who has set foot in an academic space knows: Sometimes the brightest students are the biggest freaks. Jockstrap’s 2022 album I Love You Jennifer B was a top-of-class debut: a painstaking, high-drama pop collection with a clear command of classical songcraft and ornate glamour. Their new album, I<3UQTINVU (“I Love You Cutie, I Envy You”), compiles reworkings of those songs that the duo’s Taylor Skye created to blow off steam, fist-pumping anthems that loosen the collar on the polished originals. If Jennifer B was closing night of the big production, then I<3UQTINVU is the chaperone-free cast party: puckish, weird, and ultimately, pretty lit.
On Jennifer B, Jockstrap drew as much from chamber folk and UK rave culture as they did the classic pop canon. I<3UQTINVU scrambles the formula further, zigzagging into grime, chiptune, and harder EDM. Skye recruits a few featured players, including standout South Florida artist Ian Starr on “Red Eye,” which reworks Jennifer B’s strummy curtain opener “Neon” into a brief and unhinged banger. Starr’s nightmarish snarl of “I make that boat rock” sets the tone for the big payoff—a gargled primal scream that rips the track open into a glorious conclusion of 808s and autotune.
Not forgotten in the excitement is Skye’s main collaborator, vocalist and composer Georgia Ellery. Jennifer B placed her warble and knotty writing center stage in its horny baroque circus. Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges. On songs like “Good Girl” and “I Feel,” Skye keeps key verses that preserve her songwriting, like an imagined lover’s quote from “Angst” on the latter: “You fucking love/You love to fuck/To fuck it up/Fucking listen to her sing!” And on “I Touch,” Skye leaves Ellery’s “Glasgow '' nearly intact, introducing a drum machine and looped vocals. It soars.
Not every cut here earns its place. “I Noticed You” sounds like Fred Again.. mimicry with its uber-smooth vocals and monotonous house cascade, missing Jockstrap’s signature skew. Despite a fun verse from vocalist Coby Sey, the inscrutable “All Roads Lead to London''—which includes new synths, dog barks, and Rubiks-cube restructuring—just makes you miss the swooning electro-catharsis of the original, “Concrete Over Water.”
Amid the band’s first-thought-best-though experimentation, a glimmer emerges. A bookending companion to I<3UQTINVU’s high-octane opener “Sexy,” “Sexy 2” reworks “50/50” into a warm lullaby, and features the album’s only new material from Ellery. Over slide guitar, banjo, strings, and shakers, she sets another beguiling scene of lust. But there’s no wink here, and none of Jennifer B’s melodramatic acrobatics: The recording is among their most intimate and unvarnished. Somewhere in the glistening runoff of Jennifer B, Skye synthesised one of Jockstrap’s loveliest tracks yet. It’s a testament to the mess on the cutting room floor as the necessary conditions for producing the next great song. | 2023-11-10T07:50:42.246-05:00 | 2023-11-10T07:50:42.246-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Pop/R&B | Rough Trade | November 10, 2023 | 7.5 | 6622bbf3-bef4-4fde-a775-4d3e20c97089 | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
Philly rapper compiles 32 well-written, expertly produced tracks-- released once per day for the month of December-- into the overlooked Month of Madness mixtape*.
* | Philly rapper compiles 32 well-written, expertly produced tracks-- released once per day for the month of December-- into the overlooked Month of Madness mixtape*.
* | Freeway: Month of Madness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12633-month-of-madness/ | Month of Madness | In a genre with a reputation for inconsistency, 32 well-written, expertly produced tracks-- released once per day for the month of December, then compiled as Freeway's Month of Madness-- deserves critical attention. For a distribution gimmick primarily focused on generating internet buzz, even complaining about the length of the compilation misses the point. And if you do find one track that isn't worth your time-- say, the sub-par feature with James Blunt-- then you can always wait until tomorrow, or hit forward on your iPod, and there's a good chance there will be a track you dig. Month of Madness has a lot going for it-- consistency, quality, and the bottomless hard drive space of the iPod age-- but 32 straight bangers can also be an artist's own worst enemy.
Freeway is a great rapper; he's never lazy, writes detailed, interesting verses, and spits them with unique, frantic urgency. He has great taste in beats, using producers that hew closely to the 2000s' Roc-A-Fella soul-sampling blueprint; newcomer Blunt, who produces the bulk of the tracks, and 2008 It Producer Jake One both have great emotive moments. There are even a few outside-the-box tracks for needed diversity, with assists from Erick Sermon and the Alchemist. Don Cannon takes a break from looping classic soul to drop spinning chainsaws on "Bank Rollz". These are welcome changes from the de rigeur soul sampled banger for which Freeway is known, although they're also safe variations within the same narrow template.
And this is how Month of Madness proves that "quality" doesn't always supersede tedium. It's as if Free has decided that he's foreman at a street rap factory, churning out endless iterations of the same basic structure. Contrary to critical consensus, one of the standout tracks on Free At Last was "Take It to the Top", where a 50 Cent hook helped Free transcend this one-note production with a little bit of pop dimension. Not topical dimension-- Freeway has always managed to spit on a variety of subjects with perspective and intelligence-- but some stylistic flexibility. As a performer, Freeway raps one way and does it very, very well. If you already love the "typical Freeway banger," then you have no complaints. But it does suggest Free's not interested in expanding his audience beyond the converted, in building street buzz like Gucci Mane, or bothering Kanye on Billboard.
Freeway has never really seemed bothered by this. And to criticize him for it is typically hypocritical, since I've been a big fan of DJ Premier's ability to churn out endless variations on the same motif for the past decade. But if the best he can get is fifteen minutes of internet buzz, then maybe consistency isn't what we're really looking for after all. This revolutionary method of distribution has provided Freeway with a niche, to build the kind of fanbase he wants by saturating the same channels as inferior blog-hype rappers. He's very good at what he does, but two hours of great music still draws attention to what he doesn't. | 2009-02-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-02-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 6, 2009 | 7.6 | 6623a332-6d08-420d-9e89-6e73c78325a7 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
One of pop’s most inventive composers returns with a braid of political, maternal, and celestial statements. On Native Invader, Amos’ intricately arranged songs are passionate and despairingly poetic. | One of pop’s most inventive composers returns with a braid of political, maternal, and celestial statements. On Native Invader, Amos’ intricately arranged songs are passionate and despairingly poetic. | Tori Amos: Native Invader | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tori-amos-native-invader/ | Native Invader | For much of Tori Amos’ solo career, the piano-thrashing composer and singer has navigated the porous membrane between the personal and the political—the starkly searing depiction of sexual assault “Me and a Gun,” her waking-nightmare flip of Eminem’s murder lullaby “97 Bonnie and Clyde,” the Trail of Tears eulogy “Scarlet’s Walk.” On her heady, fever-dreamy 15th album Native Invader, Amos adds a third element, bringing in the increasingly strip-mined Earth as both imperiled muse and guiding light. The self, the ever-more-chaotic agora, and the physical world triangulate in a way that allows Amos to take all of them on at once, and to create a despairingly poetic, chillingly vital album that channels its depictions of humanity’s horrors through intricately arranged songs.
As this unjust year burrows deeper into our psyches, the space to think, to create, to just exist as oneself becomes ever more precious. Amos knows this; “Embedded in this record are energy forces, hopefully, that create a space—space to step into from the cacophony of the news cycle,” Amos told Lenny about Native Invader. The album is spacious and enveloping even as it warns of horrors down the line. The wraithlike “Wings” uses sparse electronics to cradle Amos’ exacting mezzo-soprano, while the broken-relationship chronicle “Chocolate Song” see-saws between brittle instrumentation on its verses and simmering organ lines on the chorus. The imagery of nature’s most beautiful creations, which encompass shooting stars as well as selfless women (the sighing “Climb” calls out repeatedly to Saint Veronica, who offered her veil to Jesus Christ while he was on his march toward crucifixion), further cements the album’s connections to the celestial and the maternal.
Amos is one of pop’s most inventive composers and lyricists, and her twinned skills allow the political content on Native Invader to float where others may sink. “Up the Creek,” which features Amos' daughter Tash on backing vocals, pivots on a refrain passed down to Amos from her Cherokee grandfather during her childhood in Maryland: “Good lord willin' and the creek don't rise,” the pair sing in spectral harmony. That line reverberates throughout the track as the music gets more clamorous and the lyrics more urgent, with Amos declaring “We may just survive/If the Militia of the Mind/Arm against those climate blind” as strings churn underneath her. The spiraling “Bats” and the coy “Benjamin” are paired at the record’s end, with the titular animals in the former possessing the knowledge of being “betrayed by humankind,” and the latter doubling as a warning about fossil fuel companies’ ever-extending tentacles into the public sphere—particularly their fusillade of propaganda against Juliana vs. United States, in which the country and its rulers were sued by 21 plaintiffs for “deliberately allow[ing] atmospheric CO2 concentrations to escalate to levels unprecedented in human history.” The piano lament “Russia,” included on the album’s deluxe edition, is an anomaly; lyrics like “Is Stalin on your shoulder?” and “Time to face those who take/More and more from our great Mother” make the themes of the album uncomfortably plain, although whether that unease comes from the lyrics’ explicitness or the situation they’re describing is a toss-up.
”Mary’s Eyes,” which closes the album, threads Native Invader’s needle; over drones and bleakly insistent piano, Amos sings of an unknowable mother who is clearly suffering, with “hymns locked in her memory” that can possibly be unlocked by patterns and sequences, and banishing sadness. It’s about Amos’ mother Mary, who lost the ability to speak in the wake of a stroke she had earlier this year. But the pain that suffuses Amos’ passionate vocal performance and the warnings of climate change doom that preceded that track make it feel like it’s doubling as an allegory for the mother Earth, which cannot raise its voice in self-defense even as it’s being hurtled toward a crushing fate. | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Decca | September 13, 2017 | 7.5 | 662d408d-3515-46a0-a7ce-9b76cfe4492f | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
The Reggae legend returns in full force on his latest album, displaying the indomitable spirit he has cultivated throughout his career. | The Reggae legend returns in full force on his latest album, displaying the indomitable spirit he has cultivated throughout his career. | Toots and the Maytals: Got to Be Tough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/toots-and-the-maytals-got-to-be-tough/ | Got to Be Tough | Reggae legend Toots Hibbert’s decades-long streak of sweaty, impressively athletic live shows came to a halt in 2013, after he was struck in the head by a vodka bottle during one of them. Hibbert filed a $21 million lawsuit against the 19-year-old who threw the bottle, but in a letter to a judge he pleaded that the man be sentenced to no jail time. “He is a young man, and I have heard what happens to young men in jail,” Hibbert wrote—a pointed understatement. Hibbert famously did prison time as a young man himself for marijuana possession, and his signature song “54-46 (That's My Number)” burned with the cruelty he experienced there. On some level, Hibbert has spent the rest of his career trying to reconcile the fundamental injustice of that incarceration, the way freedom could be taken away so arbitrarily.
Hibbert’s injury took the wind out of what had been a pretty remarkable late-career run. It sidelined him from the road for three years, and left him with depression, mood swings, and headaches. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. But the injury also set him up for the kind of comeback narrative that must be irresistible for Hibbert, a fighter who still thinks of himself as the boxer he was as a teen. A recent Rolling Stone profile paints a portrait for a legend who continues to work harder than might be ideal for his age, spending seven days a week in the studio. He air-boxes enthusiastically and still spars with a trainer, so it only makes sense that on the cover of Got To Be Tough, his first Toots and the Maytals record in 10 years, he's illustrated in his default pose: throwing a punch.
There's a Rocky analogy for every occasion, and at this point in his career, Hibbert is Balboa circa the 2006 installment of the franchise. In that movie, Rocky was slowed by bad knees and stiffened by arthritis and calcium build-ups in his joints, leaving him with just one move: hitting for blunt force. Even though he was a shadow of his former glory, there was still a certain power in watching a diminished titan work around the limitations of age.
And so it is with a 77-year-old Hibbert, whose once almost supernaturally resilient voice is now showing real signs of wear. He's lost some considerable range since 2010’s Flip and Twist, but he's switched up his attack accordingly, learning into the grit. His voice is hoarse on the soul scorcher “Just Brutal,” but his commitment sells the song”—he doesn't let the frog in his throat stop him from commanding the call-and-response like a one-man Sam and Dave. And although it may be low on the list of songs anybody needed to hear covered again, Hibbert’s reworking of Bob Marley's “Three Little Birds,” featuring Ziggy Marley on vocals and Ringo Starr on percussion, similarly delivers real heat, energizing Marley's standard with an urgent tempo and feverish horns.
Hibbert has always shined during these hard, soul workouts, and it's admirable that he hasn’t let age keep them away from him. Got To Be Tough’s mid-tempo rocksteady numbers, including its title track, don’t make nearly the same impression, but even on the album’s mellowest songs, Hibbert’s commitment is clear. In his Rolling Stone profile, Hibbert resists talking about retirement, but acknowledges his career is winding down. It may not rival his classic albums—and it never deludes itself into thinking it does—but Got To Be Tough captures Hibbert as committed as always, still giving it all he’s got.
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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. | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Rock | Trojan Jamaica / BMG | September 3, 2020 | 6.5 | 6631ebb4-88f5-47b5-8d41-e0d9420e8dfe | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Freezing Opening Thawing's opener may be the most dramatic outlier in Shackleton's entire body of work. While he's known for his darkly paranoid productions, here the tracks are bright and glossy, fully blanched of color, and a sterility hangs in the atmosphere. | Freezing Opening Thawing's opener may be the most dramatic outlier in Shackleton's entire body of work. While he's known for his darkly paranoid productions, here the tracks are bright and glossy, fully blanched of color, and a sterility hangs in the atmosphere. | Shackleton: Freezing Opening Thawing EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18976-shackleton-freezing-thawing-opening-ep/ | Freezing Opening Thawing EP | Sam Shackleton's career began in the shadows and he's pretty much remained there since. He looked for inspiration past Britain's borders, to Berlin and beyond, at a time when dubstep's nucleus remained embedded deep within a South London postcode. Alloying a steely rhythmic exoskeleton to a sound still largely regarded as a ghostly mutation of 2-step, the run of 12"s on his Skull Disco label successfully ushered the first wave of techno-dubstep hybrids into clubs before it folded in 2008.
That sombre tone and gloomy imagery has become a hallmark since, pressed everywhere from a fêted Ricardo Villalobos remix through to more recent work, incorporating uncommon instrumentation and Middle Eastern motifs. The producer crafts detailed headspaces and then erodes their parameters, invoking a level of uncertainty and crumbled-spliff paranoia. His exacting focus on dread makes his extensive, and often brilliant, catalogue somewhat foreboding. It also instils immediate apprehension when approaching this perplexing new EP, his first after a nearly two year absence.
Freezing Opening Thawing's opener may be the most dramatic outlier in Shackleton's entire body of work, although not without some precedent: his sprawling "Mukuba Special" re-work on a 2010 Congotronics compilation is the nearest relative. There, the contrast between growling sub-bass and brittle guitar notes was the sonic manifestation of two worlds meeting. Here, the title track crams a head-spinning mesh of synthetic sounds into the heavily treated topline, hoovering up anything vaguely earthen and leaving behind a complete void of low-end.
The result is startling: marimba and mbira lines dart across one another at high velocity; oscillators spin out of control; the infectious lead is so over-processed that whatever its original components, it finishes up as sequenced distress signals escaping short-circuiting mainframes. Once it finally locks into a convulsing, serpentine rhythm, Shackleton begins layering stranger noises still: Transylvanian hammer horror riffage, clattering hooks, no-wave synth stabs. For someone who has admitted to spending months at a time perfecting a single drum loop, the torrential hail feels cast off at random, triggered in real-time on an ironing-board's worth of cheap circuit-bent instruments. It's the sound of Shackleton cutting loose in delirious, utterly entrancing fashion.
Given the sensory overload, the pair of tracks that follow offer some breathing room and a human touch. Chinking metallurgy and a collapsing bassline warm up "White Flower With Silvery Eye", ushering in a more linear progression before ducking out for a Deliverance-style showdown between two diametrically opposed percussive factions: digitized blip versus palmed drum skin. That odd juxtaposition is magnified on "Silver Keys", which begins with a grim monophonic MIDI dawn chorus and ends closest to a traditional Shackleton piece, closing out proceedings on a dark and ritualistic stomp. As opposed to the scabrous Coil-style feedback splayed across 2012's Music for the Quiet Hour, here the rich didgeridoo drone is somewhat comforting against the eerie melody; unusual but not necessarily unnatural.
Precious little unity binds Freezing Thawing Opening: the tracks are bright and glossy, fully blanched of color, and a sterility hangs in the atmosphere. Any attempt at human connection is paltry, even by Shackleton's standards. But in spite of the EP's innate weirdness every track remains supremely danceable and this could be his most groove-centric release yet. He's bound to continue as the chin-scratcher's choice, but if anything, this EP's about face will only add to Shackleton's peculiar magnetism. | 2014-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Woe to the Septic Heart | February 12, 2014 | 7.5 | 663353d6-c675-4dd8-970d-79ed25aa16f1 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | null |
Sternberg’s debut balances stark themes of suicidal ideation, abject hopelessness, and self-hatred with whimsy and redemptive tenderness. | Sternberg’s debut balances stark themes of suicidal ideation, abject hopelessness, and self-hatred with whimsy and redemptive tenderness. | Joanna Sternberg: Then I Try Some More | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joanna-sternberg-then-i-try-some-more/ | Then I Try Some More | Joanna Sternberg is a New York-based cartoonist and musician, and on their website you can find a comic titled “somethings never change.” Sternberg depicts themselves as a lonely child in the first panel, then an equally lone adult in the following three. Underneath the strip, they write: “this comic is not me looking for compliments or words of comfort and wisdom...it is more to remind people that they are not alone.” If Sternberg’s debut album could have included the same addendum, it might have.
Sternberg comes to music with a strong compositional background—they specialized in jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music, and the pioneering Yiddish singer Fraydele Oysher is their grandmother. They have an intuitive knack for rhythm and meter; while you won’t find any poetry on this album, Sternberg’s concision is underlined by a consistent metrical pattern that gives every one of their words a punch.
Sternberg sings as though they’re one half of a conversation that turns from loving, to argumentative, to sleepy, and back again. “I wish I was scared of poison, pills, and pain,” they sing on the opener ‘This Is Not What I Want To Be,” with all the nuance of a speaking voice. Despite only singing of despair and depression, Sternberg gives every single beat weight in a way that both somehow eases the burden and demands every word be heard.
Just because the lyrics are clearly stated doesn’t mean they’re easy to hear. With themes of suicidal ideation, abject hopelessness, and self-hatred, Sternberg’s debut can be a challenging listen. For those who aren’t dogged by similar feelings, it may be forbidding, but for those who are able to identify with Sternberg, Then I Try Some More has the potential to be life-savingly relatable.
Sternberg balances the despondency with pathos and whimsy—sort of like the way one laughs when admitting that they’re not OK. The sequencing alternates between sad ballads played on piano and ditties on a chicken-scratched guitar. In the middle of the album lies “Pimba,” a story of a fictional penguin of the same name, who Sternberg uses to make their dejection appear cartoonish and endearing. “My name is Pimba, I’m the littlest penguin,” they sing in a near-squeak.
In terms of predecessors, one would be most tempted to draw similarities between Sternberg and Daniel Johnston. Both write and enjoy comics. Both have a laconic pop sensibility. Both have been dogged by severe mental illnesses. Both could be considered a musician’s musician (Johnston arguably got his break from Kurt Cobain, while Sternberg’s already been scooped up by Conor Oberst, who they’ll soon be supporting on tour). But where Johnston’s passion made up for his lack of musical virtuosity, Sternberg is able to balance both skill sets, in a way that still manages to endow their music with pathos rather than preciousness. | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Team Love | July 12, 2019 | 7.5 | 6633d0ea-5113-4098-b8c4-249c02cb6a36 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The duo’s latest album is a calming and tender reflection on appreciating what you have in uncertain times. | The duo’s latest album is a calming and tender reflection on appreciating what you have in uncertain times. | Damon & Naomi: A Sky Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damon-and-naomi-a-sky-record/ | A Sky Record | Damon & Naomi’s A Sky Record could have just as easily been titled A Quarantine Album. Although the duo started working on the music in 2019, in Tokyo with longtime collaborator Michio Kurihara, they finished during the pandemic, and the lyrics bear the unmistakable stamp of those early months of lockdown: the shock of isolation, the days that bled into each other without distinction, the concerned check-ins from friends and family. “Oceans in Between” opens with a vow to those long-distance loved ones. “Every day I think of you,” Naomi Yang sings tenderly. “I send all my strength to you.”
In an essay included in the 48-page book that accompanies the album, Yang writes that her lasting feeling from quarantine was an overwhelming sense of gratitude, particularly for the support of friends and the comfort of daily rituals. And so, despite its many references to uncertain times and passing storms, A Sky Record is chiefly an album about appreciating what you have. “Shape things that you can change/Nothing need stay the same/Cherish the simple joys,” Yang sings on “The Gift.”
Nearly as much as the absence of Dean Wareham, this wide-eyed, sometimes almost new age-y outlook has separated Damon & Naomi’s records from the ones they used to make as two-thirds of Galaxie 500. Despite the group’s brief existence, Galaxie 500’s legacy has endured not only because they were a great band, but also because they were a cool band: Their dream-pop presented itself with the ragged edges of post-punk and the detached chic of the Velvet Underground.
The very trappings that gave Galaxie 500 their mystique, however, were among the first to go on Damon & Naomi’s own records, which have never humored superficial notions of coolness. Theirs is a much softer form of psychedelia, with an earnestness suggestive of dream catchers, coffeehouse open mics, and Peter, Paul and Mary albums. Their music is so open and unguarded that it can almost be uncomfortable if you don’t meet it at its level. In the wrong frame of mind, A Sky Record can play like showing up for a dinner party where you were expecting more guests.
Yet once you avail yourself to its intimacy, A Sky Record is a beautiful album, one of the duo’s most beguiling works. Though it was conceived as an homage to the relaxed krautrock LPs released by the defunct 1970s label Sky Records (hence the title), it stands among Damon & Naomi’s most direct and song-forward releases, which makes it a good entry point for newcomers daunted by their three decades of music together. Better still, A Sky Record is especially generous with Kurihara’s majestic guitar, which is as much of a draw as Damon & Naomi’s calming melodies. On “Between the Wars” and “Season Without Time,” his bleary electric guitar cuts through the canvas like strokes of acrylic on what was previously a watercolor painting.
After so many songs that vividly evoke the year 2020, A Sky Record ends in the present moment on “The Aftertime.” “Has the storm truly passed?,” Yang sings. “Is it morning at last?” This is how Damon & Naomi write now. The sentiments are never cryptic or coded; the duo simply express what’s top of mind. That face-value approach to lyrics is well-suited for a subject as universal as a global pandemic. There’s comfort in hearing somebody sing what we’re all thinking, and comfort has always been what Damon & Naomi do best.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 20/20/20 | August 13, 2021 | 7.2 | 66342bea-dc87-4c2f-b616-90eb581cc8ec | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The California singer-songwriter’s third album pulls sounds from all across the psychedelic neo-soul spectrum as she muses about matters of the heart. | The California singer-songwriter’s third album pulls sounds from all across the psychedelic neo-soul spectrum as she muses about matters of the heart. | Fana Hues: Moth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fana-hues-moth/ | Moth | Fana Hues’ voice can only be described as romantic. Whether she’s singing about new love or loneliness, her timbre often transmits a sumptuous sense of desire. It bounces jauntily through the dubby piano and flirtatious sway of Tyler, the Creator’s “SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE,” but it also swims through rivers of uncertainty and reverb-drenched guitar on 2022’s “dayxday,” always brimming with hope like a spring sunrise. That aura has surrounded her music, starting from her early years singing in her family band and in school productions of The Wiz to her first two solo albums, 2020’s Hues and 2022’s flora + fana. Hues has said she wants to “showcase the full spectrum of emotion” in her work, which unfurls through her hummingbird-delicate vocal runs. Her third studio album Moth—short for Matters of the Heart—shows Hues at her most assured, standing on firmer sentimental ground as a writer, singer, and lover.
In the past, the content of Hues’ love songs often scraped against their brighter presentation. flora + fana’s “breakfast” feels like gossamer—glittering, doo-wop guitar strums succumbing to a wall of lush bass and synths—but in its pure wistfulness, its story of post-relationship sorrow reads more like a hollowed-out Harlequin romance novel. “Must’ve left my heart where my head is…Woke up in the wrong day; forgot breakfast,” she says sweetly, forcing herself through the motions. But Moth largely moves with more clarity and confidence. In the bridge of “Gone Again,” she’s approaching a similar situation from the other side. This time, she’s the one questioning where the relationship stands, content to work through any fallout: “I know you’re here with me, we’re fine/And what we are won’t be defined/Still I need you to say ‘You’re mine baby.’” Uncertainty still lingers, but this time, she’s the one calling the shots.
Like the insect the album is named after, in her metamorphosis, Hues molts fear and doubt—and embraces a lust for life. Take the dancefloor-ready single “Rental,” where she compares a casual fling to the thrill of joyriding in a fancy car: “Let’s forget the safety/Ain’t no destination/Ain’t no course/Don’t it feel better when it ain’t yours?” Or consider “What Speaks,” which ditches metaphor entirely and asks a potential partner what exactly their desires are in and out of the bedroom. Hues isn’t just welcoming the future, she’s relishing in it. Producer Josh Grant—who has credits on nearly every song—offers up waves of hearty digital and acoustic funk that wash these mini-affairs in vibrant technicolor.
Boldness doesn’t just come through in the production or the lyrics, but also in the way Hues manipulates her dulcet voice. There are a handful of times on Moth where she pushes her higher register to its limits, where it matches the layered emotions of her writing. The hook of “Sweet Like” stacks vocals in the middle of a tornado of drums and bass, amplifying her seductive demands for attention. On lead single “Paper Tigers,” competition for a potential love interest boils over into a hook where she belts for her life, channeling Tina Turner and Janelle Monáe. Explosive moments like these are few and far between, but it’s nice to hear as much variety in her delivery as there is in the writing.
That’s not to say Moth ever gets boring or repetitive. Hues already plumbs the depths of her heart compellingly, but her writing gleams even brighter here, like a gemstone catching stray fragments of light. Life still has its ups and downs; relationships bloom and wither; decisions can feel like life-or-death scenarios. But Hues is no longer a victim of circumstance or meet-cutes gone wrong. She’s fully at the helm and willing to accept the unpredictable with grace. “Matters of my heart never looked so strange/Focused on the things that I cannot change/Who am I to judge what my God has made?” she says on the breezy late-album highlight “Til Morning Come.” With Moth, Hues isn’t shying away from life anymore. She’s ready to find love and self-actualization in the messes and successes of her future. | 2024-06-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bright Antenna | June 18, 2024 | 7.5 | 663d806a-a92f-4583-aa06-895d06bede25 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
With tranquil, careful compositions that encourage introspection, the Vermont musician reflects on climate anxiety without succumbing to doom and gloom. | With tranquil, careful compositions that encourage introspection, the Vermont musician reflects on climate anxiety without succumbing to doom and gloom. | Ruth Garbus: Kleinmeister | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ruth-garbus-kleinmeister/ | Kleinmeister | The title of Ruth Garbus’ second record, Kleinmeister, translates to “Little Masters,” a German term for a group of 16th-century artists who produced prints from miniscule, labyrinthine engravings. Viewing their work half a millennium later, one is awed by the patience of such handmade precision. Such is the experience of listening to Garbus’ music, the intricacies of which inspire a similar quiet reverence.
Before she was a musician, Garbus applied her attention to furniture design. After dropping out of art school, the younger sister of Tune-Yards’ Merrill joined the vibrant music scene in Brattleboro, Vermont, first playing in the acid-folk collective Feathers and then in the bratty garage-pop trio Happy Birthday, alongside Kyle Thomas (aka King Tuff) and Chris Weisman. Weisman and his brother Kurt, Garbus’ bandmate in Feathers, encouraged the burgeoning songwriter to pursue her own music. Garbus’ first solo release, 2006’s Ruthie’s Requests, was so minimalist and delicate that it felt like it might dissolve into its own fuzz. Four years later, her full-length debut Rendezvous With Rama pushed this insularity towards darker realms.
After two pop-leaning EPs, Kleinmeister returns to tranquil, careful compositions that encourage introspection. While Garbus, her guitar, and her idiosyncratic melodies remain the foundation of these nine songs, producers Travis Laplante and Ryan Power adorn opening tracks “Strash” and “Pain” with aqueous textures. Garbus’ crystalline mezzo soprano emerges from the ambience like a headlight on a foggy evening. From these hazy beginnings, Kleinmeister focuses on the careful intertwining of Garbus’ chords and voice, which has expanded with recent opera training. But the heights she reaches stand in stark contrast with the album’s lingering sadness.
While Garbus has not explicitly defined Kleinmeister as a record rooted in the climate crisis, she makes frequent references to Earth’s devastation. On the synthy “Strash,” she’s surrounded by a horrifying mix of organic and manufactured detritus: “Plasticated paper and popsicle sticks covered in algae,” “insurmountable heaps, hot and green,” and “visceral viscera wet cardboard steam.” Elsewhere, she sings about “Adirondack littering,” a vision of dead squirrels, pesticides, and needles—pine or hypodermic, it’s unclear—scattered across forest floors. “It doesn’t matter who, we’re all gonna be underground,” Garbus sings on “Pain”; the final word stretches until it disappears, leaving a void of despair.
But despite this somber sense of reality, Garbus never submits to doom and gloom. Rather, she calmly reflects on how to acknowledge the planet’s decay without becoming apathetic, and how to balance grief and fear without succumbing to them. “I’m not willing to say that everything’s bad, but I’m sad,” she intones on “Pain.” “Why can’t I remove all this psychic sludge?/Is it okay to feel not okay?” she wonders later on “Grey Sweatshirt.” The tenor sax-driven closer “Fetty Wah” imagines the titular character deceased at the bottom of the Atlantic, toes nibbled away by fish and skin glossed in “bivalve shine.” Kleinmeister accepts this fate with open arms. | 2019-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | September 3, 2019 | 7.6 | 66425966-3739-485d-a86a-7217487bd197 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Black metal band creates marathons out of marathons that demand complete attention and destroy attention spans. | Black metal band creates marathons out of marathons that demand complete attention and destroy attention spans. | Krallice: Diotima | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15419-diotima/ | Diotima | It must have been during the fifth or sixth listen when I finally realized that the appropriate reaction for Diotima-- the third album in four years from New York black metal supergroup Krallice-- was laughter. That's a surprising response to a record that lyrically keys on the transience of existence, the failures of our best efforts, and the high costs of man's lowly sexual instincts. But my chuckle was the delirious sort, based on my own addled exhaustion. That's how Diotima works: Unapologetically extreme and intense, it's the most relentless album from a hyper-dexterous band that's never been one to take it easy. Though it's not the longest Krallice album (that's Dimensional Bleedthrough, slightly), Diotima forgoes the long-short-long tack of previous Krallice efforts, creating marathons out of marathons that demand complete attention and destroy attention spans.
During "Intraum", from 2008's Dimensional Bleedthrough, Krallice took a break from their four-piece hustle. Guitarists Mick Barr and Colin Marston ricocheted through quick, countering riffs until the sound sublimated into a restless seven-minute drone. It's an off-ramp ahead of the album's appropriately titled 19-minute closer, "Monolith of Possession", a long-form roar whose pummeling is precise and seemingly perpetual. Halfway through, you realize just how much that pause meant. Nearly 10 minutes into "Telluric Rings", Diotima's penultimate track, you can hear Krallice reaching for the same rest-stop trick. It stands to be a well-deserved rest, too, as "Telluric Rings" is the fourth and final consecutive track on Diotima to race past the 12-minute mark. What's more, it's written as a lyrical sequel to the preceding "Litany of Regrets", meaning that, when Lev Weinstein's drums finally snap out here, it ends a mostly seamless 22-minute cavalcade. But don't rest easy: Marston and Barr noodle and slink for about 80 seconds, summoning a dark radiance with sheaths of distortion. Weinstein blasts back in, and the track's last 90 seconds offer a raze as energetic and complete as any in the band's discography. So brutal and mean, the track's closing blur is a perfectly executed nexus between grindcore and black metal, as cathartic as it is crushing.
Diotima's glory is often in its details. It has fewer stops, starts, and redirections than its predecessors. Rather, the big shifts are now often misleadingly subtle and slight, created more by the way the musicians move against and with each other than how the band moves as a unit. In theory, it's not unlike studying a Steve Reich phase piece, where patterns show themselves best when their relationships with one another change. Or, as McMaster explained to Chad Bowar, "Essentially, we wanted to have more unison parts, to amplify the contrast between when we'd all play the same riff and when the guitars and bass would split off into independent lines."
Indeed, this is the first album on which McMaster has written all of his bass parts, and his unexpected risks make this thundering gauntlet worth hearing at high volume, with high-end headphones. During "Inhume", for instance, the quartet is playing in strict unison when McMaster steps out of the pack, adding low, lumbering lines that sandbag the whole section. It’s a smart redirection, a moment worth hearing again and again. It’s technical black metal that thankfully never puts its own technicality above the bold ideas in its songs.
Diotima has broadly accessible glimpses: The central riff in "The Clearing" supplies all the majesty and power of a Sousa march-- memorable enough to hum, triumphant enough for pumped fists. Writing for Pop Matters, Adrien Begrand correctly called the title track "genuinely catchy" as it moves from "a cruising sludge groove... [into] the frenzied blast beats we know so well from these guys." But the album's emphasis on movement within the songs and within the parts makes it ultimately less dynamic and dramatic, at least on initial listens; the obvious bloodlust of Dimensional Bleedthrough comes funneled into a full assault that might be mistaken for monotony, especially compared to the latest by Brooklyn black metal brethren Liturgy. That's too bad, though, as Krallice's levels of composition and performance have never been higher-- so high, in fact, it's laughable. | 2011-05-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-05-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | May 11, 2011 | 7.6 | 664995c0-4b53-415b-85a3-b13ccdaf5c05 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Over the last decade, Warn Defever has recruited an ever-changing assembly line of musicians to flesh out his mad, perverse ... | Over the last decade, Warn Defever has recruited an ever-changing assembly line of musicians to flesh out his mad, perverse ... | His Name Is Alive: Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3881-someday-my-blues-will-cover-the-earth/ | Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth | Over the last decade, Warn Defever has recruited an ever-changing assembly line of musicians to flesh out his mad, perverse fantasies under the His Name Is Alive moniker. All of his albums before 1996's Stars on ESP are out-of-print in the U.S., so it's hard to trace Defever (once Warren) back to his lo-fi goth-folk-ethnic-guitar-pop roots without paying over $20 for an import. What is available, therefore, is His Name Is Alive's evolutionary pattern over the past five years.
Stars on E.S.P. was a dreamy, occasionally psychedelic pop record, toying with everything from stripped acoustic folk-pop to a complete structural replication of "Good Vibrations"-- with a different melody and different lyrics altogether. It was also the last album to extensively feature the charmingly girlish Karin Oliver on lead vocals. 1998's Ft. Lake then subtly throttled fans with a full-on gutsy rock attack, although admittedly, it's nothing as fully straightforward as that; the entire record is peppered with synthesized oddities, not to mention a couple of trip-hop tracks to mix it up. Although Oliver made a few appearances on the record, soul vocalist Lovetta Pippen generally took the melodic reins. Then in '99, Defever had the gall to go off and release a solo record entitled I Want You to Live One Hundred Years, taking lo-fi to a new level by recording most of the old-timey yet original folk material to Edison wax cylinder.
On the latest outing, Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, His Name Is Alive consists solely of Warn Defever and Lovetta Pippen. How do we know? Well, it's simple really; they're the only two people who have photos on resident 4AD graphic artist Vaughan Oliver's gorgeously fitting artwork, not to mention a terribly cheesy pun to cement the notion: "LOVE & WAR." The record opens with Pippen's characteristic croon, but if you weren't told this were His Name Is Alive, it would take a while to guess that this music spilled from Defever's warped mind. Three quarters of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth consist of a time warp back to the mid-90s, when slow-jam R&B; was innocent and carefree, while the rest is a mix between sparse ballads and a couple hints at traditional blues.
Go back and read that again. No, wait, you don't have to. I'll just write it again: Carefree, mid-90s slow-jam R&B...; for which Warn Defever is responsible. Madness! Granted, it's not that much of a surprise that he's off doing something completely different. What is a surprise is that three years after a record of rootsy pop/rock, and only two years after a country-folk throwback, he's decided to take on Pippen for a collaboration and dive into a project of this particular genre. The curious thing is that they often succeed.
It's quite a shame, then, that not every track is up to par. Ironically enough, a song called "Nothing Special" opens the collection by squandering the album's best material in its first four minutes. Defever's sparse acoustic arrangements and drum machine beats, characteristic of most of the album's remainder, work best around a gorgeous melody such as this one. Pippen's subdued, harmonized laments in the priceless chorus come off as earnestly touching: "I've been in the storm so long/ Nothing special anymore/ Angel sings from another world/ That's all I hear anymore."
The only other success of this caliber comes later with "One Year", the previous version of which can be found in wax-cylinder folk-style on Defever's solo album. Truly funky wah-guitar, clavinet and reversed acoustic strumming are used to the track's advantage, making for a joyously indulgent breakdown in the coda. The rest of the R&B; excursions are pleasant enough, but as Pippen sang herself, nothing special. The melodies become a bit samey and, by the ending title track, appear somewhat hackneyed. The only other guilty pleasure of this dominant style is on the slightly over-long, slightly trip-hop "Write My Name in the Groove", in which Pippen sings, in a melody recalling Stars on E.S.P.'s more restrained moments, "If I'm quiet, I can hear your heart/ When I'm up on ya."
The two other notable moments on Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth are a true 12-bar blues homage, enigmatically titled "Karins Blues", and a decelerated, beatless, acoustic version of "Are We Still Married", originally penned for the 1992 HNIA record Home Is in Your Head. The latter is the most beautiful moment on the record, with gently plucked acoustic guitar weaving in and out of haunting piano chords and string accompaniment as Pippen lends true emotion to the record's best lyrics: "I'm kind of getting shot at/ I'm kind of getting hurt.../ This is your last life/ Take me where you want to go."
The ambition and daring that Warn Defever continually displays in his work, with His Name Is Alive and otherwise, is admirable. His willingness to plunge head-first into a foreign style shows his versatility and knowledge for creating authentic soundscapes of any kind, and his enthusiastic collaborative spirit is infectious as well. While I can't fully recommend Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth as an entirely successful release, I can fervently encourage a closer investigation into the rest of his brilliantly eccentric catalog, a look out for his upcoming work, and maybe even a second glance at this record just to see what he's up to now. | 2001-08-31T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-08-31T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | August 31, 2001 | 6.7 | 664b1f09-ffab-433a-871e-716aa1a493e8 | Pitchfork | null |
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On her debut for Berlin’s Ostgut Ton label, the Spanish-born producer trades industrial techno for more unpredictable hybrids drawn from hyperpop, trip-hop, and IDM. | On her debut for Berlin’s Ostgut Ton label, the Spanish-born producer trades industrial techno for more unpredictable hybrids drawn from hyperpop, trip-hop, and IDM. | Jasss: A World of Service | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jasss-a-world-of-service/ | A World of Service | Silvia Jiménez Alvarez, better known as the Spanish-born, Berlin-based electronic musician Jasss, has hidden languages within her music. In a recent interview, Alvarez said of her debut on Ostgut Ton, “Every track, in some way, has to do with having feelings that you are unable to articulate.” Alvarez uses her music as a vehicle to understand miscommunication itself. In the process, the erstwhile techno DJ and producer has rearranged the typical tropes that people may have expected of her.
On Alvarez’ 2017 album Weightless, she delivered an industrial-techno hybrid with a wintry feel, but on A World of Service, she leaps into a whirlwind of contrasting genres. Noughties pop floats playfully into industrial techno; trance synths and trip-hop alternate with trap. Where Weightless was largely instrumental, here Alvarez uses her voice as a powerful tool. Its shifting states mimic the turbulence throughout, as genre experiments play out broader struggles with identity itself. A softer take on hyperpop, “Luis” highlights Alvarez’ heavily Auto-Tuned vocals, revealing a tender side to the record. Emo belter “Wish,” featuring gritty production from Planet Mu affiliate Ziúr, is the polar opposite: Alvarez belts over an angsty ’90s alt-rock riff, while on the similarly chaotic “Carmelo,” she sings in Spanish over drill’n’bass fuzz.
The album’s instrumental tracks are equally unpredictable. The hypnotic opener “Birds You Can Name” is built from glowing synthesizers reminiscent of the Knife’s mid-’00s work; the song’s bright, reassuring melody makes for a jarring contrast with the percussive blasts of “Camelo,” which follows. The atmospheric ballad “Vapor Dentro” flirts with ambient and IDM; of all the songs here, its hissing white noise and lurching beat come closest to her previous productions.
Alvarez’ genre-fluid experiments on A World of Service promise new avenues of exploration not only for herself; they also point to potential new directions for Ostgut Ton, the in-house label of Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, long associated with a particularly dark, intense strain of techno. By reworking established sounds in unexpected ways, Alvarez suggests that creative miscommunication can be liberating.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ostgut Ton | January 12, 2022 | 6.9 | 664cfd95-b02f-4595-94f7-02d104706c35 | Esme Bennett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/esme-bennett/ | |
On his 10th solo studio album, the Brooklyn-based underground rap vet unpacks emotional baggage and asks what—if anything—he’s willing to compromise for the sake of success. | On his 10th solo studio album, the Brooklyn-based underground rap vet unpacks emotional baggage and asks what—if anything—he’s willing to compromise for the sake of success. | Oddisee: To What End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oddisee-to-what-end/ | To What End | As long as he can create how he wants, Oddisee has been content to exist on rap’s fringes. The Brooklyn-via-Washington, D.C. rapper-producer has treated his independent music career like a small business long before that became the norm, with pragmatic, athletically rapped songs and a busy touring schedule. You won’t find him hung up on industry cred: “Being overlooked did wonders for my esteem,” he says on 2015’s “Belong to the World,” one of several songs about the benefits of niche stardom. Even at his youngest and boldest, on albums like 2008’s 101 and 2009’s Mental Liberation, his boasts were tethered to the reality of his humble upbringing and D.C.-area surroundings. He went from merely making hip-hop cool again through pure boom-bap revivalism to boiling down politics, racism, and eventually, the comforts of family life to raps as terse and practical as the amorphous live-band production he’s slowly come to favor.
But the vigor of his early rap days lingers, powering a begrudging desire for respect. On “The Start of Something,” the intro to his 10th solo studio album To What End, Oddisee retraces his steps over a nearly 20-year career and gives himself a pep talk before the next sprint. “How I’m seen and how I’m heard is not the reason why I’m working,” he says, doubling down: “I’m going off, how to make a million without going soft.” For the first time, he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as the listener. To What End goes beyond being raw and honest about life, society, or even hip-hop; it’s too busy dissecting the drive to do so in the first place.
Thematically, the album explores the nature of ambition and how far we’ll go to get what we want—a career, a relationship, peace of mind. As his work’s become more refined, Oddisee has embraced being the rap game Sidney Poitier, an everyman folding his own life experiences into flows that recall the wanderlust of Kendrick Lamar as much as the reverence of Little Brother. His writing was never withholding, but he’s rarely been this personal. Juxtaposed with the clean, peppy beats, his newfound openness makes some of these revelations uncomfortable, even jarring. “People Watching” is the most explicit of the bunch, taking an ax to forced politeness and ending with one of his bluntest confessions: “Became an entertainer as to hide in plain sight…Rhymes are without filter, in real life I keep it hush/I feel I’ve said enough, it’s time to step back on the mic.” But gentler moments cut the deepest. “Many Hats,” which was inspired by his first-ever therapy sessions, doesn’t shy away from talk of work burnout and panic attacks; “Choices” confronts the uphill battle of avoiding your parents’ mistakes. It’s not particularly theatrical, but it’s the closest we’ll get to seeing him on the ropes.
To What End isn’t all about unpacking emotional baggage. Oddisee finds balance in lighter scenes, stealing a moment to write a rap while his kids are asleep on “More to Go” and kicking references to Slick Rick, Insecure, and The Wire in a cipher with guest Toine Jameson on “Bartenders.” To What End boasts the most vocal features on any of his releases since 2013’s Tangible Dream—certainly it’s the only album in recent memory where Freeway’s gruff wisdom shares space with Phonte’s effortless truisms and Bilal’s jazzy moans. That variety also extends to the beats, a series of MIDI arrangements replayed by his band Good Company that nonetheless groove and thump in ways that transcend regular live-band hip-hop.
This method started as a curiosity on 2015’s The Good Fight and solidifies further on To What End. It’s a breezy, confident style that blurs the lines between analog and digital, modern and vintage. Disembodied voices are warped to sound like samples. The bass and synthetic keys on “Ghetto to Meadow” play double-dutch with a fast-paced drumline perfectly suited for Oddisee and Freeway’s brusque reflections on outrunning poverty. “Work to Do” and “Bogarde” dip into Raphael Saadiq-style funk and rattling go-go percussion, respectively, while “How Far,” “Bartenders,” and “People Watching” tweak Oddisee’s love for boom-bap with live embellishments. A handful of the beats skew generic—closing tracks “The Way,” with its sleepy Wreckx-N-Effect sample, and “Race,” in particular, play like car-commercial music—but To What End avoids defaulting to a rapper spitting with a backing band.
To What End doesn’t skirt around the anxiety that comes with being an artist in Oddisee’s position. He’s a sync licensing darling and a veteran of the indie touring scene who, in spite of himself, wouldn’t mind just a little more exposure, a little more clout. While he doesn’t have all the answers, he does stumble across one: How do you reconcile the drive to succeed on your own terms when your ear for music grows increasingly panoramic? You burrow deeper into yourself, hoping to be surprised by the next layer. | 2023-01-26T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-26T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Outer Note Label | January 26, 2023 | 7.4 | 66506127-5326-4198-b4b9-d1f74e27c5ae | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Chicago rapper fills his debut with raps about...making it in rap. It’s rarely endearing or interesting. | The Chicago rapper fills his debut with raps about...making it in rap. It’s rarely endearing or interesting. | Ajani Jones: Dragonfly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ajani-jones-dragonfly/ | Dragonfly | The Bandcamp bio of Chicago rapper Ajani Jones mentions that he dropped out of the University of Iowa to pursue his rap career, and you can feel him yearning to legitimize his choice in every bar of his debut. Unfortunately, that’s the empty core of Dragonfly. He raps about being really committed to rapping. It’s rarely endearing or interesting.
Rapping about making it in rap isn’t inherently boring. Rappers as different as A Tribe Called Quest, The Notorious B.I.G., Big Sean, and Open Mike Eagle have found fun ways to use their odd career paths as vehicles for storytelling, observations, and color. Ajani Jones doesn’t really tap into that lineage. Dragonfly is filled with half-baked struggle raps that don’t even aspire to smugness or myth-making. His narratives are so devoid of color and purpose that they make J. Cole’s leftover-lasagna come-up stories sound like Hannibal crossing the Alps.
Across the record, his lyrics are so vague they border on nonsensical. There are spells where it is utterly unclear what he is talking about, as on “3D,” where he raps, “It’s fame on the guillotine/And the blood is the love of the industry/Whoa.” It sounds like he’s interpreting a museum painting while stoned. On the song ironically titled “Lucid,” he says, “Feel like Wakandan/I’m just gonna tune in with my niggas/Ain’t got no space for no time limits.” I wish I knew what he meant by that.
Jones is clearly a student of the TDE school of introspective chill raps, where rapping relaxes the mind and frees it. The beats on Dragonfly largely have low BPMs and dulled percussion, accented by ribbons of synths that calmly flutter over the beats. Jones is comfortable with this airy template, and songs like “Dutchmasters” and “Quicksilver” play to his strengths. He’s whimsical when he’s at ease, and can stumble upon a decent image when he’s not overthinking. “Quicksilver” has a stretch where Jones begins “I could’ve been anything” and then recalls a drive-by shooting he saw as a kid. It’s a cutting sequence, and it illustrates the life he’s trying to escape through rap. Of course, it doesn’t last. Moments later, he is back to vague musings (“Everybody wanna go some place”). It’s disappointing, but also par for the course. Ajani Jones is a dreamer. Unfortunately, a dream is not a personality. | 2019-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Closed Sessions | August 3, 2019 | 3.9 | 6653ed7f-4a6f-469a-8bef-5d10f8e98ab9 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
San Francisco's Jessica Pratt is a young songwriter with a decidedly old soul and a voice that balances spry sweetness with husky grit. Her songs feel lodged in some liminal realm between past and present, devoid of references that might place them in a historical moment. | San Francisco's Jessica Pratt is a young songwriter with a decidedly old soul and a voice that balances spry sweetness with husky grit. Her songs feel lodged in some liminal realm between past and present, devoid of references that might place them in a historical moment. | Jessica Pratt: Jessica Pratt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17415-jessica-pratt/ | Jessica Pratt | The mid-aughts freak-folk moment found artists and fans blurring the boundaries between past and present and seeking out kindred spirits across time, which made it an abundant season for folk reissues. Linda Perhacs' Parallelograms, Karen Dalton's In My Own Time, and Sibylle Baier's Colour Green, to name just a few, all got their long-delayed, much-deserved days in record store windows. And now, after an unhurried half-decade gestation period, 2012 felt like the year we started to hear the debut records from some of the young artists who scooped those reissues up.
One such record is Missouri native Angel Olsen's excellent debut LP Half Way Home. Her songs are struck through with poetic macabre ("I thought this time last year I'd be dead/ It's quite strange the thoughts that pop into your head") and showcase a tortured, warbling croon that sounds like Vashti Bunyan leading a seance to commune with Roy Orbison. San Francisco's Jessica Pratt calls upon similar influences but makes music that feels like a counterpoint to Olsen's. As with Baier, the simplicity and affectlessness of Pratt's tranquil tunes are precisely what make them so hypnotic. Anyone who appreciated the general idea behind The Milk-Eyed Mender but couldn't quite make peace with Joanna Newsom's divisive vocal quirks (or her love of obtuse, 10-dollar-and-change vocab words) might feel more at home in the plaintive, unadorned warmth of Pratt's debut LP.
Pratt is a young songwriter with a decidedly old soul and a voice that balances spry sweetness with husky grit. "Night Faces" has a weathered, world-weary vibe as she sings of shedding "a million tears trying to dig myself out all these years," while "Half Twain the Jesse" moves with an air of childlike curiosity. The songs themselves also feel lodged in some liminal realm between past and present, devoid of references that might place them in a historical moment. But their sepia tone never feels like a cheap gimmick; words like "brethren," "twain," and "bushel" roll off Pratt's tongue so naturally that you quickly become enveloped in the record's self-contained grammar. The effect is cumulative, lulling the listener into a tranquil, meditative space somewhere outside the interruptions of the modern world.
Pratt and her acoustic guitar are mostly unaccompanied, and there are occasional imperfections-- buzzing strings, the faint crack of her voice-- that add to its atmosphere of unvarnished intimacy. Her chord progressions are neither neat resolutions nor mournful elegies, which is to say that her songs traverse that vast, somewhat under-explored territory between happy and sad (except for "Titles Under Pressure", which revolves around a hook that goes "The next time, I'm stayin' away from this place/ I cannot make more mistakes"; that one's a heartbreaker.) Even when Pratt sings a line like "All the lights in my life are fading" on "Streets of Mine", there's a bright, resilient note or two that belie how dismal it looks on paper.
The last song on the album is a dim, crackling, live-recorded track called "Dreams", on which she's joined by a man whose voice sounds like a cross between Phil Elvrum and Fred Neil. It's subdued enough to keep the vibe enact, but his sudden presence reinforces what a quiet, private and secluded place Pratt's self-titled debut has been. Listeners who prefer their folk flashier or wrapped around memorable, poppy hooks might find Pratt's approach meandering or bland. But those with a more patient ear will find her a worthy and quietly distinct heir of Baier, Bunyan, and Dalton's homespun sound. "There was a time before us," she murmurs on the lovely "Bushel Hyde", sounding like she's perhaps found a way to travel back there herself, picking up some of her forebears' weathered wisdom and weaving it into her own worldview. | 2012-11-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-11-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Birth | November 20, 2012 | 7.5 | 665590fd-321b-4e71-8d8d-63dbd7d61e95 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Following the dense Six Cups of Rebel, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's second album of 2012 offers a no-frills version of what the Norwegian producer does best: endlessly spiraling, cosmic dance music. | Following the dense Six Cups of Rebel, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's second album of 2012 offers a no-frills version of what the Norwegian producer does best: endlessly spiraling, cosmic dance music. | Lindstrøm: Smalhans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17277-smalhans/ | Smalhans | Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is not one for concise statements: The Norwegian space-disco producer once put out an album with a 30-minute lead track and then followed that release with a 45-minute cover of "Little Drummer Boy". But now comes the comparatively modest Smalhans, Lindstrøm's second release in 2012 following this past winter's Six Cups of Rebel. The latter was a wildly experimental record from an artist known for subtle shifts, so Smalhans will inevitably be heard as a back-to-basics effort. Even ignoring that the song titles draw from traditional Norwegian dishes (Lindstrøm told SPIN that "Ęg-gęd-ōsis" consists of "egg and sugar mixed together," which is as basic as you can get), the six tracks are no-frills versions of Lindstrøm doing what he does best: endlessly spiraling, cosmic dance that maintains an earthy humanity.
Occasionally, Lindstrøm's sense of comfort on Smalhans betrays him. The record's lead track and single, "Rà-àkõ-st", features a melody very close to "Further Into the Future", a cut from 2006's It's a Feedelity Affair. But most of the time he sounds like an accomplished master at work. Take "Fāār-i-kāāl", a six-and-a-half minute trip that builds an endless melodic ladder before letting the floor drop out to unveil weightless bliss. This sort of build-and-release-- taking an arpeggiated melody and pushing it as far as it can go, until it's about to burst at the seams-- is a Lindstrøm speciality. Smalhans reaffirms that no one does it better.
The album was mixed by Norwegian kindred spirit Todd Terje, and there are plans to release extend Terje edits of every song on the album as 12" singles. The pairing is timely. Terje's been in this game almost as long as Lindstrøm but 2012 has been very much his year. Following last year's gorgeous "Snooze 4 Love", the absolutely crushed-out-heavenly "Inspector Norse", from this year's solid It's the Arps EP, stands to be one of the best singles of the year in any genre. Lindstrøm teaming with him is a case of game recognizing game. But he shouldn't be worried: Smalhans is a reliably generous gesture from an artist that takes pleasure in indulging himself and his audience. If you found Six Cups to be a troubling detour, here's your chance to breathe easy again. | 2012-11-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-11-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | November 8, 2012 | 7.6 | 6655a7d5-8e3b-424d-bf2c-e092cd5ad502 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
First proper solo album from the Kinks legend finds him flirting with confessional singer-songwriter material and tapping into the sounds of the Southern U.S. | First proper solo album from the Kinks legend finds him flirting with confessional singer-songwriter material and tapping into the sounds of the Southern U.S. | Ray Davies: Other People's Lives | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2640-other-peoples-lives/ | Other People's Lives | The well-respected Englishman of 1960s pop has spent much of his recent years in a place he once called "the land of the ice cream and apple pie, guns and the Wild West." With air travel in disarray after 9/11, Ray Davies took his stranded American tour on the anywhere American road. During some of the recording of Other People's Lives, improbably the ex-Kink's first proper solo album-- his 1985 soundtrack LP Return to Waterloo and VH1-inspiring 1998 one-man-show The Storyteller each included previously released material-- he lived in New Orleans. The resulting record cleverly mires Davies' observational English cynicism in the turbid bayou of organ-flecked rocking-chair rock and the American confessional singer-songwriter convention.
Now age 62, Davies shares the mortality obsession heard in the latter work of similarly graying singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, and the late Johnny Cash. At its best, Other People's Lives hints that Davies' sunset years may not, contra "Waterloo", be paradise, as on scratchy-throated shitstorm wake "After the Fall", scalding breakup/suicide ballad "All She Wrote", and soulful, incongruously lonely hidden track "Thanksgiving Day", also the lead single. As with Morrissey-- the Oscar Wilde to Davies' less flamboyantly uppercrust-crumbling George Bernard Shaw-- Davies' enduring voice and wordplay belie their faceless session backing, here primarily acoustic guitar jangle and past-date swamp-rock smolder. The moaning feedback and bass throb of importunate opener "Things Are Gonna Change" find their analogue on the title track of Moz's 1997 Maladjusted.
Yet at times Davies matures backward, trading the Kinks' tergiversating sophistication for rash generalization. Yup, he's gone native in curmudgeon country. Davies rails against the "continual quest for the fountain youth" in "Run Away From Time", lambastes dedicated followers of fashion in "Stand Up Comic", and complains about that perpetual foe of fogeys and famous dudes alike, the Fourth Estate, on the cliché-mongering title track-- "Can't believe what I just read/ Excuse me, I just vomited." Stoned wailer "The Getaway (Lonesome Train)" alludes to "Sunny Afternoon", Big Easy poverty shockah "The Tourist" namedrops "La Vida Loca", but both staid productions could benefit from brother Dave's sibling-rival guitar crunch.
Other People's Lives is not without its ostensible character songs, which nonetheless suggest the title may be a cunning misnomer. The Village Green music hall of "Next Door Neighbor" purports to tell of Joneses, Smiths, and Browns, but published interviews indicate the song's events-- running off with an Essex blonde, smashing a TV through a window-- happened instead to our humble narrator. Similarly, the evocative "Creatures of Little Faith" adopts a biblical scope for its title and refrain, but depicts petty relationship jealousy with the detail of someone who's stared into its lurid green eyes. Where many singer/songwriters manipulate the first-person specific to convey a false sense of intimacy, Davies uses the third person and generality to distance his songs from their presumed subjects-- and thus imbues them with particularly true-ringing verisimilitude, which by the way tastes just like cherry cola. | 2006-03-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-03-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | V2 | March 14, 2006 | 6.7 | 665647f0-0ee0-4a52-aae1-2146edf531e7 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The fifth album from the singular songwriter is her greatest to date. From the music to her emotions, Mitski has the power to make the complex seem dazzlingly clear. | The fifth album from the singular songwriter is her greatest to date. From the music to her emotions, Mitski has the power to make the complex seem dazzlingly clear. | Mitski: Be the Cowboy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mitski-be-the-cowboy/ | Be the Cowboy | Before picking up a guitar for 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski Miyawaki’s instrument of choice was the piano. She played it on the two records she created as a studio composition major in college, where she was backed by a gigantic student orchestra. Once again behind the keys, her fifth album, Be the Cowboy, displays Mitski’s knowledge of song structure and her ability to bend any idea to her will. These 14 complex compositions warp the pop textbook into something more knotty and internal, creating a unique zone where the 27-year-old thrives: She’s never sounded so large, even in the record’s quietest moments.
In this way, Be the Cowboy radiates assurance. Whereas 2016’s Puberty 2 was drenched in distortion, here, Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland avoid the sound almost entirely. When the fuzzy drone does appear, it is purposeful, like on opener “Geyser,” where it interrupts a haze of organ and strings to announce a violent eruption of desire. Without the guitar and her typically doubled vocals, she allows herself to crack; for the first time, she seems fully content with the vulnerability.
Mitski is a peerless excavator of her own anxieties, infatuations, and ugliness and she examines them all through the lens of fame. She appears on the record’s cover wearing a white floral swim cap and heavy lipstick, a pair of tweezers honing in on a stray eyelash, symbolizing both a desire for control and the acknowledgment that such concerns can ultimately be futile. At the end of the video for the disco-pop banger “Nobody,” the camera pans back to reveal her to be another performer under the studio lights. She’s candid about how making music can be as depleting as it is fulfilling. “I gave too much of my heart tonight/Can you come to where I’m staying and/Make some extra love/That I can save till to tomorrow’s show,” she pleads on the jagged “Remember My Name.”
And with fame comes a fantastic loneliness. Be the Cowboy delves into that harrowing moment in the vanity mirror when you realize what others see does not match your reflection. How can they think you are so big when you are actually so small? The solitude inside “Nobody” feels so comically inescapable that it is almost worth celebrating; she rolls the word around in her mouth, relishing the universe of possibilities within its emptiness. On the jangly and vaguely country “Lonesome Love,” Mitski slyly delivers the record’s heaviest hitting line: “Cause nobody butters me up like you, and/Nobody fucks me like me.” Even if Mitski channels an exaggerated aspect of herself or performing a character—in interviews she has described a woman whose icy exterior hides the vast cosmos of her internal passions—she commits herself to capture the truth of each role.
But these complexities only emphasize the point Mitski returns to on each of her records: love is manifold. Romance is all consuming and breathtaking; intimacy can be a cycle of toxic stillness. Be the Cowboy is a definitive statement on the myth of perfection. She can stretch to the heavens and sink into the ground. She can be everything at once, again and again. “I thought I’d traveled a long way/But I had circled the same old sin,” she gravely bellows on “A Horse Named Cold Air.” To the two elderly subjects of the devastating closer “Two Slow Dancers,” all those complexities can be relieved beneath the glow of a disco ball. In the album’s last breaths, the spotlight slowly fades from Mitski. She might be exhausted, but she is insatiable. | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | August 17, 2018 | 8.8 | 665dcdb9-fe62-4779-8f4b-6e2387708e1f | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
On her giddy rush of a debut, Australia’s Alex Lahey offers a remarkably focused set of sing-along choruses, punk-pop dynamics, and casually witty observations about relationships. | On her giddy rush of a debut, Australia’s Alex Lahey offers a remarkably focused set of sing-along choruses, punk-pop dynamics, and casually witty observations about relationships. | Alex Lahey: I Love You Like a Brother | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-lahey-i-love-you-like-a-brother/ | I Love You Like a Brother | Few sentences in the English language may inspire a rollercoaster of youthful emotion like the title of Alex Lahey’s debut album, I Love You Like a Brother. It isn’t hard to picture some fresh-faced admirer, at first jubilant (“She loves me!”) and then utterly crestfallen (“…like a brother”). But the Melbourne artist’s song of the same name cleverly goes someplace that’s both less predictable and flatly literal: “I Love You Like a Brother” is a Ramones-blitzed bop about growing up enough to become friends with, well, her actual brother. But it’s not only that: With lines like “You don’t like sports and I don’t like dresses/Luckily for us our parents got the message,” it’s also about defying gender norms. Peppy, charming, and—here’s a word that comes up a lot in discussion of Lahey’s music—fun, the song is thankfully not at all like kissing your sister.
These types of dualities, right in front of your face yet delightfully unexpected, are an area where Lahey excels. “You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me,” from last year’s B-Grade University EP, was a stomping quiet-loud account of rejection that was too specific, too self-deprecating, and ultimately too euphoric to reject. So no one did: She won a crucial grant, competed her way to an Australian festival slot, and by earlier this year had signed with U.S. indie Dead Oceans, amid a daunting international touring schedule with bands like Tegan and Sara. I Love You Like a Brother is a remarkably focused set of sing-along choruses, punk-pop dynamics, and casually witty observations about relationships. If it never quite matches the breathlessness of that first impression, it confirms the 24-year-old music-degree dropout belongs on her globe-trotting trajectory.
Lahey is still best at dissecting relationships with at least a whiff of dysfunction about them. The midtempo “Backpack” again takes a familiar topic—a lover who always has one foot out the door—and captures it in an evocative new way: “It’s hard for me to put my arms around you when your backpack’s on,” Lahey sings on the yearning choruses, between verses stuffed with short-story detail. Almost as good, and perhaps more marketable, is recent single “I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself,” a sleek descendant of the Strokes’ “Last Nite” where an unwholesome rock’n’roll lifestyle, with its real-life side effects of drunken behavior and a few extra pounds, may explain “why you don’t love me as much.” Between discovering “you’re just a bit of a dick” on “Awkward Exchange,” casting a skeptical eye toward a lover’s Barbarella poster on “Lotto in Reverse,” or admiring a lovely western town despite a painful breakup there on “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Lahey brightly sugarcoats enough different hues of romantic ennui for a bag of tropical Skittles.
The songs on I Love You Like a Brother usually arrive as a giddy rush, so when relationships are going well, there’s a risk of exuberance overload. “Every Day’s the Weekend” is celebratory down to its clapping and backing shouts, but Lahey keeps it all from going too far, keenly monitoring the uncertainties of new love even as she encourages jumping in: “My hands are cold, but my feet are not,” she exults. The musical palette widens on “I Want U,” with sweeping strings and a surf-tinged guitar hook, recalling 1960s girl groups along with 2000s revivalists like the Pipettes. “Let’s Call It a Day” is a boozy kiss-off that veers from the Drifters shimmy to Paramore stadium anthem—just when it seems like it may be overshadowed by better breakup songs, a barbed line like “I kinda like you but I don’t like you/You like yourself too much” has a million everyday applications.
In early September, a national vote began in Australia on whether to allow same-sex marriage. Perhaps the starkest indication of Lahey’s knack for in-plain-sight subtlety, and a sign of how her music could continue to grow on further albums, is I Love You Like a Brother’s finale, a strummy drum-machine ballad called “There’s No Money.” Amid reflections on millennial economic malaise, she quietly asserts: “We can’t marry even if we want to.” Lahey has acknowledged the line refers to the marriage debate in her home country, but she has a way of weaving such issues into the fabric of an entire vividly-described life. “It’s never really been something I’ve felt I have to address in a song or had to unpack,” she told the NME. “I think everyone’s experience of their sexuality should be that way.” Lahey’s songs thrive on idiosyncrasies, not generalities, so it makes sense that sexuality for her would be one part of a person’s character, not the full portrait. Still, while the singer’s first full-length is consistently likable, it is most lovable at its especially individual turns. | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | October 9, 2017 | 7.6 | 665e30b3-68e4-4246-9466-b7acb5a48939 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The New York trumpeter and bandleader’s second album is darker, denser, and more experimental than its predecessor, but no less resonant. | The New York trumpeter and bandleader’s second album is darker, denser, and more experimental than its predecessor, but no less resonant. | jaimie branch: FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaimie-branch-fly-or-die-ii-bird-dogs-of-paradise/ | FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise | On November 6, 2018, trumpeter Jaimie Branch was onstage in Paris, France, screeching out the blues with her quartet. The music was more somber than the jam-based jazz that marked the New York native’s impressive debut album, 2017’s Fly or Die. At the same time, voters in the United States shuttled to the polls for midterm elections. The music was a plea for them to do the right thing. “The blues we played was far from where it got to on the album,” Branch writes in the liner notes of her second record, Fly or Die II: bird dogs of paradise. “But the sentiment remained: It’s a prayer for amerikkka…” In its finished form, the 11-minute “prayer for amerikkka pt 1 & 2”—positioned near the beginning of Fly or Die II—is the album’s centerpiece; its plodding rhythm and searing real talk sets a forceful tone. “We got a bunch of wide-eyed racists!” Branch declares in the song’s first segment, “and they think they run this shit.”
With thunderous trumpet wails and airy, sometimes deconstructed arrangements, Fly or Die introduced Branch as a powerful bandleader in the New York and Chicago avant-jazz scenes. Released through International Anthem (the same label that’s put out stellar projects from Makaya McCraven, Irreversible Entanglements, Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble, Angel Bat Dawid, and Ben LaMar Gay), Fly or Die arrived seemingly out of nowhere and became one of 2017’s most acclaimed jazz albums. Centered on triumphant, hard-charging backbeats that oscillated between Chicago- and New Orleans-style jazz, it was a far brighter album than this one. While Fly or Die II is darker, denser, and more experimental than its predecessor, it’s no less resonant.
Branch sings on this record—on “prayer for amerikkka pt 1 & 2” and “love song”—marking the first time she’s used her actual voice on her solo music. Don’t expect her to start singing old Nancy Wilson covers; her voice—part raspy alto, part full-throated wail—is best suited for punk rock and takes some getting used to. She’s a gifted trumpet player who doesn’t need vocals to convey strong emotions, and to fans of her previous work, a track like “love song,” which concludes Fly or Die II, can feel weird on first pass. In keeping with the album’s theme, its sarcastic ode to “assholes and clowns” appears aimed at apathetic politicians, though Branch keeps the lyrics open-ended enough to apply to pretty much anyone worthy of such distinction.
Fly or Die II is expressly influenced by the political climate. In the second half of “prayer for amerikkka,” after the beat quickens to a stampeding mix of Spanish jazz, Branch tells the story of a teenaged Central American girl who seeks asylum in the United States. Liner notes detail her journey: She’s separated from her family at the border and deported to El Salvador, where she’s beaten and sexually assaulted. Three years later, she seeks asylum in the U.S. once again, only to be held in a cage in Texas. “She was only 19, they crossed over at dawn,” Branch sings. “Now her mother and brothers are safe in Chicago and she’s all alone.” Coupled with a surging instrumental—courtesy of Branch, cellist Lester St. Louis, double bassist Jason Ajemian, and drummer Chad Taylor—the song lumbers toward you, as if the border agents were coming for you next.
The theme continues on “twenty-three n me, jupiter redux,” a moody, shape-shifting composition that conjures doom and panic through dark synth chords, crashing cymbals, and sporadic trumpet blasts. A pronounced marching beat breaks down into frenetic free jazz, churning up an urgent blend of drum taps and loud horns—the sound of the sky falling. Yet Fly or Die II grows more optimistic as it plays, and by the time “nuevo roquero estéreo” rolls around, the album veers to a festive style of Chicago jazz, where the beat locks into a two-stepping rhythm as Branch’s horn soars above it. The eight-minute “nuevo” is the album’s most pop-focused track, a bright spot peering through the overcast. This isn’t the album you play if things are going well; Fly or Die II leans into the exasperation of life in a country that elevates assholes, clowns, and wide-eyed racists to positions of power.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | October 14, 2019 | 7.8 | 665e8306-b4c5-4cf0-96e1-511ec8c61de5 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
Eleven years since their last album and nine since keyboardist Carey Lander’s death, the beloved Scottish indie-poppers return with an appealing balance of fond memories and fresh energy. | Eleven years since their last album and nine since keyboardist Carey Lander’s death, the beloved Scottish indie-poppers return with an appealing balance of fond memories and fresh energy. | Camera Obscura: Look to the East, Look to the West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camera-obscura-look-to-the-east-look-to-the-west/ | Look to the East, Look to the West | The industrialization of nostalgia has grown so tedious that the comeback of an old favorite can elicit as much malaise as excitement these days. But news of Camera Obscura’s impending return stirred something hot and fluttery even in cycle-hardened indie-rock hearts. Stereogum “literally squealed,” as did I, as did probably anyone who followed the most loveable band in twee from around 2000 to 2015, a run cut short by the untimely death of keyboardist Carey Lander. How else could we express our feelings about music that, even at its saddest, had brought such unique delight—for reasons that, given its unpretentious style, were so hard to put into words?
It took years to fathom someone sitting in for Lander, in which time Campbell also had a child. But reuniting in 2019 at the behest of Belle and Sebastian was a most fitting rebirth: In 2001, Stuart Murdoch had produced Camera Obscura’s debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi. Indie fans were already gaga for one Glaswegian band with shy boy-girl vocals, old-fashioned pop underpinnings, and zesty, testy lyrics, and they were thrilled to get another one right from the source. Underachievers Please Try Harder, from 2003, perfected their style—plainspoken, sardonic, deliciously heartbroken; bookish rather than self-consciously literary; and marked by subtle strains of postwar Americana, which flourished on 2006’s Let’s Get Out of This Country, a clear turning point. John Henderson, who sang a lot on the first two records, left the band, and Campbell took center stage. Over two more albums, her lilting, aching songs carried the band’s relatability over into a color-drenched land of high fidelity, where it flushed with big studio strings and horns, embracing bubblegum rock, orchestral pop, beach music, and, especially, country and western from the altars of Patsy, Tammy, and Dolly.
There were many reasons to be optimistic about Look to the East, Look to the West, the Scottish band’s first album in 11 years. They had gone out in top form on 2013’s Desire Lines, which I slightly underrated then but grew to adore. Key creators of their ferny, silvery sound were still in place—including McKeeve, bassist Gavin Dunbar, and drummer Lee Thomson—and Lander’s former role was ably taken up by Donna Maciocia. But the emotional charge in anticipation of the new album came from the fact that their story had been left unfinished so suddenly and cruelly. This wasn’t a comeback; it was catharsis, and the only question was whether or not time had faded Tracyanne Campbell's gifts: her rumpled-classic songwriting, unerring instinct for melodic embellishment, and the long green meadows of her voice.
The record’s opening moments seem designed to allay those concerns straightaway. On “Liberty Print,” Campbell unleashes a tiered, fountaining run and then starts stringing out her fluted phrases like soft pearls. Wafting on a bed of sparkling doo-wop, they sound instantly familiar and washed in fond associations, but the hissing drum machine is something new, and the band finds a similar balance of good memories and fresh energies on each song. Guitar leads and bass-led grooves are more prominent, and each member seems to have more space to breathe and shine. The worst you could say about any prior Camera Obscura album was that it had highs so blinding they threw a slight shade on other great tunes—the “French Navy” conundrum. But their latest is their most consistent yet, and it stands among their best.
Look to the East, Look to the West, which reunites the band with two-time producer Jari Haapalainen, clears away the orchestral elements to make room for both more electronic textures—drum machines, quirky or period guitar effects—and a deeper country palette of piano, pedal steel, and starry Hammond organ. Sometimes things are as simple as the lead single, “Big Love,” a bounding, winsome slice of California country rock, but “Only a Dream” swaps the band’s usual guitar reverb for a tremolo delay that ripples with concentric rings, recalling the spacey gardens of the similarly named Cranberries song. A pair of stunners called “Sleepwalking” and “Sugar Almond,” the latter written to Lander, make you wonder why Campbell doesn’t do solo piano ballads more often, with such an ideally structured but expressive voice for it.
“Denon” seems to be concocted from the baroque pop of Pet Sounds and the Christine McVie side of Fleetwood Mac, that agile, tripping-along sense of melody. It evinces—alongside “We’re Gonna Make It in a Man’s World,” cowritten with Maciocia—what it’s tempting to call a newfound sense of confidence: “Hey, it’s all right if you find me trite,” Campbell sings. “The lines on my face are clear and in sight.” But really, though it might fly under the radar because of all the charming postures and mooning over sailors, she’s always talked this way. The chorus of the first song on her first record laid it down: “I know where I stand/I don’t need you to hold my hand.” That sense of no-nonsense centeredness amid the painful confusion of life and love has always been Camera Obscura’s heart, and it still beats here.
Campbell is a distinctive lyricist in the way she goes wandering through effective cliches, striking images, slices of life, and funny demotic phrases, and just as casually turns up stand-alone lines that you never forget along the way. My favorite ever is “Now my door has swollen from the rain,” from “Books Written for Girls.” The line that stands out here is in “Baby Huey (Hard Times),” one of the best and most adventurous new looks, a stretchy electro-pop taffy in the vein of the Blow’s classic “True Affection.” Over a gently switching acoustic guitar, Campbell sings, “The chaos of summer has died,” seeming to enfold everything that has been irrevocably lost while awakening to everything still to be found, in the autumn and winter of life, when the proportions of things grow clearer. Look to the East, Look to the West reminds us of better times while making it possible to believe the best is yet to come.
Correction: An earlier version misidentified Kenny McKeeve as the principal singer on the band’s first two records. | 2024-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 4, 2024 | 8 | 666060d9-1e6e-4846-a6cb-0ba2b8efffe0 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Two dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers unite for a sharp, mellow, and only a little greasy slice of hip-hop. | Two dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers unite for a sharp, mellow, and only a little greasy slice of hip-hop. | CRIMEAPPLE / Preservation: El León | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crimeapple-preservation-el-leon/ | El León | In a rap underground filled with larger-than-life neo-noir capos and bruised anti-heroes cut from the cloth of Roc Marciano and Ka, a rapper like CRIMEAPPLE stands out from the pack. The Colombian-born, Hackensack, New Jersey-raised MC isn’t as outrageous as Westside Gunn or Action Bronson, but his references and frequent jumps between rapping in Spanish and English give his bars a more subdued grace. He’s not above the occasional showy display—he once compared his wallet to the chunky figures painted by artist Fernando Botero—but he takes more pride in direct flexes when he’s not focusing on the struggles that led to the riches.
In the opening seconds of “El Léon”—the title track of his collaborative album with producer Preservation—he relishes traveling often enough for custom agents to recognize him. But amid the talk of swapping Jaguars at the dealership and coming from the dirt, the simplest boast hits the hardest: “Lil’ homie, I own shit.” Throughout El Léon, bittersweet anecdotes like these are matched with tawny sample loops that have the worldly poise of a high-end travel show.
For his part, Preservation rises to a different challenge while working with CRIMEAPPLE. Most of the beats the New York-based producer has created since 2015’s Days with Dr. Yen Lo have put a minimalist spin on the gritty New York sound. But as opposed to his 2020 Eastern Medicine, Western Illness and 2022’s billy woods teamup Aethiopes, El Léon keeps things a bit more traditional. Strange, off-kilter samples—from guitar twangs and sour horn fills to merengue rhythms—are folded into more rigid shapes that suit CRIMEAPPLE’s generally less adventurous flows. Songs like “Don’t Mention It” and “Vida Mantequilla” march closer in line with his work on Yasiin Bey’s The Ecstatic or as a member of the rap quartet Sonic Sum. Even the more outrê stuff—the pitter-patter drums and organs on “Paw Prints in the Sand” or the tambourine and deep piano stabs that power lead single “Hunting Methods”—splits the difference between Black Sunday-era Cypress Hill and the hotboxing expansiveness of his most recent work. Preservation sacrifices a bit of his eccentricity to meet CRIMEAPPLE at his more mellow level, but it’s a worthy tradeoff.
CRIMEAPPLE may not be the flashiest rapper, but his technique and perspective keep his bars sharp. He often plays close to the rhythm of the beat but will occasionally speed his tempo up, especially when he switches between languages. This happens several times on the title track, where threats, slang, and stories of “spending purple paper” are smushed into compact bars. His opening quotables can also be as unpredictable as his language-switching. On “Vida Mantequilla,” he whispers “I’ve never had a White Claw in my life,” ethering the alcoholic seltzer before joking about a date who was built like a Nachos BellGrande from Taco Bell. Without an over-the-top voice or personality, the color in his writing pops more, like the side character in a movie who’s later revealed to be the villain. Even at their most boisterous, Pres’ beats keep things lively without overwhelming CRIMEAPPLE’s presence—he sounds comfortable sifting through the blaring horns on “Don’t Mention It” and the shrieking violin streaks on “Melena Dorada.”
Comfort is a crucial part of the appeal of El Léon. Neither CRIMEAPPLE nor Pres push each other to new heights, and CRIMEAPPLE’s talk of spoils and cigarillos with Exxon Valdez-levels of gas are a snug fit. But things get a bit deeper on the closing tracks “Quanto Te Quiero” and “Bulevar.” Here, CRIMEAPPLE pulls the New Era and hoodie back completely, delving into his relationship with his mother and overcoming the “rent-controlled living” of his youth. He’s as tender and thoughtful when thinking about how his mother raised him and his three siblings on a shoestring budget as he is when he’s counting his blessings after a life of bristling at his father’s drug habit. Combined with Preservation’s mournful mood music, it’s a somber note to end the album on. But El Léon is allegedly the first part in a trilogy of albums coming from the duo this year, a hefty cosign from Preservation that CRIMEAPPLE earns. If this is the start, consider these kindred spirits warmed up. | 2024-02-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Manteca Music / Mon Dieu Music / RRC Music Co. | February 9, 2024 | 7.5 | 666179cc-f9ed-47b8-90ae-a8cebbbac744 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Tunde Olaniran, the jarringly multitalented artist from Flint, Mich., sings and raps in about a dozen different voices. This, combined with his equally startling flexibility with genre, makes his debut album Transgressor feel like it was recorded by a dissonant, flourishing collective, rather than a man from Flint, an LGBTQ activist with a day job at Planned Parenthood, whose only vocal training is choir practice to boot. | Tunde Olaniran, the jarringly multitalented artist from Flint, Mich., sings and raps in about a dozen different voices. This, combined with his equally startling flexibility with genre, makes his debut album Transgressor feel like it was recorded by a dissonant, flourishing collective, rather than a man from Flint, an LGBTQ activist with a day job at Planned Parenthood, whose only vocal training is choir practice to boot. | Tunde Olaniran: Transgressor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20941-transgressor/ | Transgressor | Tunde Olaniran, the jarringly multitalented artist from Flint, Mich., is a one-man band minus the instruments. Often described as a rapper, he's just as much a singer, and his skill in both arenas is prodigious. When he sings, he vaults between octaves, sliding from tragicomic fluttery falsetto to a luxuriant R&B tenor to a taut, imperious belt; rapping, he flips from wild Danny Brown shriek, herby Big Sean bounce, and a Father-ish benzo disaffectation. All told, Olaniran's got at least a dozen voices, and he moves between them without any sign of conscious effort—or any seeming consciousness that what he's doing is quite so wild. And this, combined with his equally startling flexibility with genre, makes Olaniran's debut album Transgressor feel like it was recorded by a dissonant, flourishing collective, rather than a man from Flint, an LGBTQ activist with a day job at Planned Parenthood, whose only vocal training is choir practice to boot.
Born to a Nigerian Christian immigrant father and an atheist, Socialist union organizer mother, Olaniran was discovered by the Berlin-based producer Phon.O off a MySpace track in 2008. He toured Europe briefly, stopping in the cities where he'd lived when his father was in the military. Since then, he's been a mainstay of and bridge between the scrappy Flint and Detroit musical scenes—he's hands-on to the point of designing costumes for his backup dancers and choreographing their routines—and his collaborators now are steadfastly local. On 2014's Yung Archetype, his under-hyped idea factory of an EP, Olaniran brought on Detroit R&B singer James Linck; Transgressor features even more Motor City, including the raucous kitsch-punk act Flint Eastwood, the cross-racial hip-hop buddy duo Passalacqua, and Invincible, a female rapper who's Jewish and queer.
His interest in genre and identity is central enough that it inspired both his album and EP titles, and he's built an experimental, leftist, theatrically artistic, streetwise pop debut, as close to Dirty Projectors as it is to Yeezus as it is to some dystopian alley-cat cabaret. His sound is pastiche reaching for synthesis, falling short when it lacks a sense of stakes. Olaniran's assets are so plentiful that he tosses them around almost forgetfully: without a clear aesthetic target, his shape-shifting can feel haphazard or unedited. But, when he is motivated by a clear sense of intention—when the disparate elements in each track stand out at right angles, subvert each other, throw each other into relief—the album glows.
This intention, like everything about Olaniran, takes wildly varying forms. He's a conscious writer, to begin with. His bouncy rap track "Diamonds", with its singsong, arch delivery and a first verse that name-checks Taco Bell, could sound like Das Racist roleplay on a careless first listen; one more time, and it's a painfully astute inhabitation of a story about the slow, mundane, systematic disenfranchisement of the American poor. His activism is out front, too, on "Everyone's Missing", a beautiful and spooky lament in which Olaniran sound like a prophet on the chorus, a radio crooner on the bridge hook, and then five different rappers on a verse that ramps up with the line "It mocks me when I'm wishful/ Grab my guts by the fistful"—"it" here being both hope and death by police—and then tosses off, "MLK was respectable/ Still gunned down in that motel."
But Olaniran's even better when he's elbowing people aesthetically rather than via commentary. There's a lot of new space ready to be claimed in R&B right now, and he's as sonically progressive as he is in verse. His punky, flamboyant, radical edge is immensely satisfying when it's got a tough, pretty melody to play against, and some of the best moments of the album come from TV on the Radio-esque, flag-waving, desperate, deeply-felt rock toplines. On the standout "Let Me Go", his generous hook unfurls down in spirals: "Once upon a time, I was yours, you were mine/ And you had me hook, line and sinker." The track's not about romance, but about Olaniran's father (who happened to give him a name that translates, remarkably, to "The spirit of the father is gone but will return again to bring back the wealth that was granted to your family.") The whole thing's tough and bombastic, as big as Funeral, as punk as hell.
Olaniran leans on melody again to great effect on "Up & Down", another song with an unexpected subject—his fluctuating weight—that distorts his harmony while spare apocalyptic trap drums build in the back. There's 808s aplenty on Transgressor; Olaniran uses a lot of what the kids are into, to occasionally flat effect. There's an exact Hudson Mohawke facsimile in the highly catchy if somewhat "Reading Rainbow"-esque single "Namesake", and at multiple points on the album, the progression is metronome-regular: there goes the trap clap, the skitter, the stomping wobbly synth. But, just as often (on the swinging, grimy "Run to the Gun" and the dance track "KYBM", for example), Olaniran uses these elements flexibly and exactly right.
Transgressor is an exceptional, aggressive, and incendiary album, in which Olaniran's idiosyncrasy feels alternately revelatory and in need of editing. He's in search of his own idiom. But when he's building—and he is building—his songs feel truly architectural: beautiful, strange structures that bomb themselves at regular intervals; rattling drives through some wild country where subversion is introduced as startling and naturally as landscape—each shift a turn around a mountain that suddenly looms. | 2015-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Quite Scientific | August 17, 2015 | 7.2 | 6661abe7-1b03-43e7-bdd9-a4763def3d0b | Jia Tolentino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/ | null |
Acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman's second self-titled album is his most thoughtful release to date, filled with mindful reflection, confident patience, and a sense of ecological awareness. | Acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman's second self-titled album is his most thoughtful release to date, filled with mindful reflection, confident patience, and a sense of ecological awareness. | Daniel Bachman: Daniel Bachman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22395-daniel-bachman/ | Daniel Bachman | Fingerpicked acoustic guitar is a hit-or-miss proposition: When it works, the rolling, repetitive figures it produces can be hypnotic. But it’s easy for even a great player to drift into auto-pilot. The antidote seems pretty simple—pause, stretch, slow, or otherwise disrupt your habits—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Muscle memory is hard to kick.
In all of his work so far, guitarist Daniel Bachman has avoided the traps of robotic fingerpicking. But on Daniel Bachman—his eighth solo album, and second self-titled one—he does so with a new level of sophistication. It’s his most thoughtful release to date, filled with mindful reflection and confident patience. Even during his snappiest songs, Bachman takes time to consider where he is and where he’s going. When his pace starts to rush, he pulls back, ringing out a long chord or even stopping completely to avoid just going with the flow.
The two clearest examples are the tracks that open each side of Daniel Bachman, both called “Brightleaf Blues.” In each, he uses sustained tones rather than flurries of string-picking to build atmosphere. The first half of the album’s opener is a high-pitched drone, followed by gradual strums and plucks that are more about exploration than exposition. Drone is the also backbone of the second “Brightleaf Blues,” humming in the background as Bachman feels his way through open-ended guitar figures. He achieves the same effect without drone in “A Dog Named Pepper,” progressing and retreating at intervals so well-timed they seem elemental, as if his fingers were guided by the moon and the tides.
An album of only halting, measured music would likely make Bachman’s thoughtful playing seem flat, so he wisely includes some tunes made in a more traditional early-blues style. The raga-like “The Flower Tree,” the twangy “Wine and Peanuts,” and the chord-bending “Watermelon Slices on a Blue Bordered Plate” all fit this bill well, creating lively swing while still allowing Bachman room to contemplate and reset.
Most song titles on Daniel Bachman include images from nature, suggesting this album is environmentally aware—not in the eco-activist sense, but in the sense of Bachman taking stock of his surroundings. He’s almost literally stopping to smell the roses, and the result is an album about growth and development, about the virtues of taking your time rather than the crutch of constantly sprinting forward. In the process, it advances Bachman’s oeuvre significantly. | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Three Lobed | November 22, 2016 | 7.3 | 66690f27-abac-4b9e-b144-49c9ac73403f | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Pledging allegiance to fuzz, this power-pop barrage squares off against heartache, disappointment, and sleepless nights—and survives. | Pledging allegiance to fuzz, this power-pop barrage squares off against heartache, disappointment, and sleepless nights—and survives. | Mike Krol: Power Chords | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-krol-power-chords/ | Power Chords | The portrait of Mike Krol that graces the cover of his fourth album, Power Chords, could pass for a stock photo of any musician noodling alone on the guitar in a bedroom. Except Krol is sporting a black eye, a fat lip, and bloodied fingers. After listening to the record, you may be amazed he emerged with just a few bumps and bruises. Power Chords is among the most visceral and violent documents of heartache, disappointment, and sleepless nights in recent rock memory. Krol relives the details of broken relationships with muses both real and figurative, as if trapped in his own nightmarish version of Groundhog Day. Heads bang against walls. Hearts get stabbed. Ambulances are called. And yet, it’s also one of the most exuberant, energizing, and fun albums you’ll hear all year, maximizing both sides of the power-pop equation.
Krol has long fused cotton-candied melodies to pedal-pushing overdrive in a way that harkens back to the late-2000s bubble-punk of Jay Reatard, Smith Westerns, and King Tuff. But on Power Chords, Krol’s unwavering allegiance to fuzz feels less a function of practical necessity and more a requisite aesthetic enhancement for these 11 songs. Omnipresent distortion is the rusty blade that allows him to open up and bleed, to deliver each self-flagellating lyric as if shouting into the last functioning payphone in town.
At 33 minutes, Power Chords is about twice as long as the typical Mike Krol record, but it’s also his tightest and most frenzied work yet. Where past releases wandered into whimsical psychedelic balladry and meditative piano experiments, Power Chords commits to the woofer-blowing promise of its title with evangelical zeal. The record, Krol says, is his raucous reaction to a career-stalling bout of self-doubt and soul searching that followed his 2015 Merge debut, Turkey. It’s an attempt to reconnect with the primal pleasures of making an unholy racket, and “What’s the Rhythm” provides the perfect demonstration of this therapeutic mission. The verses present an unflinching portrait of emotional paralysis, but the killer chorus is instantly invigorating, like an adrenaline shot jabbed into the chest.
Even as Power Chords cruises in the red, Krol is constantly changing course. The careening “Little Drama” sounds like it could’ve been salvaged from Dave Grohl’s early Foo Fighters demos, but just when it seems like Krol is losing control, he shrewdly locks into a tambourine-rattled backbeat. “Nothing to Yell About,” meanwhile, belongs to an alternate universe where the Strokes never made it out of the Lower East Side, burrowed deeper underground, and started dabbling in space-rock freakouts. And with “Arrow in My Heart,” Krol drifts toward bona fide balladry, with a slow-motion T. Rex strut that strips away Marc Bolan’s cosmic jive to deliver brutal truth. “You shot that thing at me/And then you watched me bleed,” he sings to some unnamed adversary, “but then, when I come after you, I’ll let you know that I ain’t through.” Sure, a life in rock’n’roll has left Krol battered. But the resolute look in his eyes seems to say: Is that all you got? | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 24, 2019 | 7.8 | 666970d5-03fa-4f8b-8562-f5d51f29545b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Xaviersobased comes for the stoner party-rap crown on a mixtape that’s improvisatory, totally zooted, and New York through and through. | Xaviersobased comes for the stoner party-rap crown on a mixtape that’s improvisatory, totally zooted, and New York through and through. | Xaviersobased: Keep It Goin Xav | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xaviersobased-keep-it-going-xav/ | Keep It Goin Xav | Once you hear Xaviersobased, you’ll want to argue about Xaviersobased. Indifference is not an option because his music turns casual rap convos into First Take. Possibly it’s because you think his glazed vocals—sometimes pitch-shifted, sometimes layered so thick that they’re mystically fused together—absolutely suck. In some cases it may turn you into the kind of hip-hop conservative you used to make fun of.
Alternatively, maybe, you’ll see the light, and go on and on, like I do, about how it’s a borderline spiritual experience, one that will have you standing around with crowds of teenagers and skaters after midnight, below underpasses, at warehouse shows with unpronounceable names on the bill, or at more standard venues (where maybe you’ll get caught in a riot, or end up posted up next to a furry), just to listen to this babyface Upper West Side 20 year old’s blur of blown-out, totally zooted dance rap.
Two years ago, I was initiated into Xavier’s prolific and overwhelming churn of mixtapes and SoundCloud loosies with the self-produced “Crisp Dubs,” a lagging, rebooting single that spices up a sample from the soundtrack of an online porno gaming series. It’s so boundless that it had me convinced that I had just stumbled into the coolest shit and instantly bonded with anyone who felt the same, which is what underground rap is all about in a way. Hardly anything else in his catalog is quite like “Crisp Dubs” but it set the precedent for a style that pulls from so many different corners of popular and underground rap and online and regional cultures that pretty much nothing feels off limits. He can rap “Slap the shit out of a old nigga if he classist,” or a zillion iterations of “Two bad hoes in the trap tryna’ fuck me.” He can reimagine lost subgenres of New York or make a beat that feels like he hacked into Soulja Boy’s old GarageBand account. All for the purpose of making party rap that is infused with the DNA of party rap that came before it.
Xavier’s first (and surely not last) mixtape of the year, Keep It Goin Xav, is a bottle-popping celebration. Sprinkled with clips from his interview with the tape’s host DJ Rennessy—which are mostly annoying because Rennessy lacks the identifiable charisma of memorable mixtape hosts—it’s essentially a look-at-how-far-I’ve-come project. It’s nowhere near as humorless as that sounds, though, because the music is vibrant, improvisatory, and fun as hell. In a way, it’s of a lineage with so much of the 21st century’s great hangout rap made by those below legal drinking age, from the skater’s anthems to the bedroom-made rapalongs to the Magic City soundtracks.
If you were to single out a specific lodestar or two, it would be Keef and Lil B (“Based” is in his name). He’s well-versed in both. On “KeepItGoin,” he revives an early Keef flow to talk his shit about wearing a Goth Money Records T-shirt and chilling, as the stuttering instrumental goes nutty. The sped-up second half of “FanOut” is so swagged out it could revive the cooking dance on its own. He’s even got the BasedGod tendency for a why did he just say that moment. I’m thinking of when he rattles off, “White bitch yeah she playin’ with my hair” so casually amid all the chaos of “Finna Go Ot.”
The mixtape is less interesting when it slows down to the point that it would clear out a party and send everyone outside for a smoke break. Consider the half-assed “Google,” where he just seems overly stoned, or “Get High,” which is a pretty unimaginative glimpse at getting fucked up. It’s not that way for long. All the clipping and distortion of “This Far” is what it would probably sound like to record next to a jet engine. The clouded Auto-Tune croons of “UToldMeIWasAFuckUpGirl” have a gentle groove and the hypnotic effect of Duwap Kaine melodies. With “On My Own,” he shows that he can reinterpret the present with as much subtlety as the past, putting a dreamy twist on the handclaps and dancefloor commands of Milwaukee low-end.
But for all of the outside influences swirling around on Keep It Goin Xav, it’s New York rap through and through. Where you’re from is part of the story of a rapper—those roots alone can turn a cliché into part of a narrative, even if it’s unintentional. In the amorphous world of internet rap, artists often thread together so many different influences that the music turns muddled and anonymous. Xavier doesn’t have that problem. His music has a tinge of the fly, hustler anthems that might be the city’s greatest export since the cheese slice—it makes sense that he grew up a couple subway stops from Harlem.
For instance: “Special” premiered on New York’s current home for freestyles, On the Radar. You could picture lines like “Fuck the rap game I think they tryna’ ban me” rapped by French on an episode of Cocaine City when he was beefing with Jim Jones. Even “KlkMiHijo,” which producer Cj808 turns into a grand ATL trap build-up fit for a Gucci tape, uses Rennessy’s intro to set the tone. Finally doing his job as the host, he shouts all the girls in Dyckman, before Xavier digs out a slurred melody with a little Max B sauce. Not often is music this off the walls also this grounded. In or out, that’s what makes Xaviersobased worth fighting over. | 2024-01-24T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-24T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 34Ent | January 24, 2024 | 8.2 | 666e8e63-4d59-4b97-8aea-5c6b02e6f591 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Japanese band Number Girl gained a cult following in the '90s for their unhinged, melodic guitar rock, which took cues from Western groups like Hüsker Dü, the Pixies, and the Stooges, among others. Their albums for EMI Music Japan, recently reissued on vinyl, captured the pre-millennial tension of the times, balancing anxiety for tomorrow with a sweet nostalgia for the past. | The Japanese band Number Girl gained a cult following in the '90s for their unhinged, melodic guitar rock, which took cues from Western groups like Hüsker Dü, the Pixies, and the Stooges, among others. Their albums for EMI Music Japan, recently reissued on vinyl, captured the pre-millennial tension of the times, balancing anxiety for tomorrow with a sweet nostalgia for the past. | Number Girl: School Girl Distortional Addict/Sappukei/Num-Heavymetallic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21400-school-girl-distortional-addictsappukeinum-heavymetallic/ | School Girl Distortional Addict/Sappukei/Num-Heavymetallic | As the 1990s crawled to a close, the Japanese music industry—and the nation as a whole—was at a crossroads. The economy held strong and Japan had fostered a "cool" image globally, reflected in the slick Eurodance-inspired songs being exported across the continent and the jet-setting sampledelica of Shibuya-kei, highlighted by genre heavyweights Cornelius and Pizzicato Five who landed on U.S. imprint Matador Records. Yet as 2000 came into view, the mood started to change, as what many now label the "Lost Decade" came of age and music sales peaked in 1999, in decline ever since.
Amidst all this pre-millennial tension, a quartet reared on distortion called Number Girl landed on major label EMI Music Japan and spiked the nation’s rock scene for good. They played fast and abrasive music prone to sudden tempo changes, with guitarist and lead vocalist Shutoku Mukai’s snarled vocals adding extra force and honesty to their feedback-bludgeoned songs. This wasn’t—and still isn’t—the easiest route to goofy TV interviews and massive festival scream-alongs in Japan, but from 1999 until disbanding in 2002, Number Girl left a deep impression on domestic listeners and carved out a cult following abroad. Universal Music Japan is reissuing the group’s three major-label albums this month, a trio of work still looming large over the country’s rock scene and among the best music to come out of the country in recent memory.
Mukai formed Number Girl in 1995, but his initial lineup dissolved quickly. He reached out to other musicians in Fukuoka—a city resting far south from the glitz of Tokyo—and found guitarist Hisako Tabuchi, bassist Kentaro Nakao, and drummer Ahito Inazawa. The four, all in their early twenties, drew inspiration from 1980s American indie, taking cues from Hüsker Dü and Pixies among others, and sometimes nodded to their influence via lyrics or song titles ("Iggy Pop Fan Club"). Number Girl offered glimpses of what they would become across two self-released cassette tapes and their 1997 indie debut School GirlBye Bye: Mukai’s larynx-ripping singing, Tabuchi’s commanding guitar solos, and a lyrical fixation on adolescence. Yet in these early years, they turned to the records their idols made like CliffsNotes, leaning too much on replication rather than finding their own sound.
After moving to Tokyo in 1998, the band snagged more attention for their live shows, leading to EMI scooping them up in 1999. That summer, they broke through with School Girl Distortional Addict, a frantic 36-minute affair pairing pummeling noise with the catchiest melodies Number Girl ever laid down. Despite major label backing,Distortional Addict sounds raw, several songs opening with tape hiss and screamed countdowns, like they were coming straight from the cramped clubs Number Girl normally played. From opener "Touch"'s pound to "Tenkousei"'s guitar blitz, the songs here hit hard, even before Mukai’s voice tumbled in and added extra unpredictability.
Although Number Girl still wore their sonic influences proudly—the second song here is called "Pixie Dü"—they had evolved from kids imitating their favorite CDs into a group confident enough to get their own voice out into the scrum. Distortional Addict zooms in on the teenage experience the band’s members weren’t far removed from, echoed in the album artwork and the video for lead single/album highlight "Toumei Shoujo." The songs could sound angry, but were never self-loathing or cynical. Rather, they captured the confusion of leaving childhood behind and the uncertainty that follows. The characters roaming these songs grapple with the fear of mortality (on the shrapnel-sharp "Sakura No Dance") to the recurring desire to chase one’s dream (a reflection of Number Girl’s own decision to leave the comforts of Fukuoka for Tokyo). Yet Mukai’s songwriting made room for other viewpoints, too. "Nichijou Ni Ikiru Shoujo" starts as a punk-friendly mosher, but eventually everything stops and it turns into a half-speed meditation on what leading an "everyday life" entails.
Distortional Addict also tapped into pre-millennial anxiety, a tension that popped up frequently in other Japanese pop culture in 1999. It was there in the novel Battle Royale (which, like Distortional Addict, focused on teenagers) and in fellow Fukuoka artist (and deep fan of Tabuchi and her attention-demanding playing) Sheena Ringo’s popular debut album released just before Number Girl's. Distortional Addict, though, captured the vibe better than the rest, balancing anxiety about tomorrow with a sweet nostalgia for the past.
That sweetness all but vanished on the following year’s Sappukei, wherein adulthood’s ugly realities pushed youth away. The band had attracted a large fanbase in Japan, but also caught the ear of longtime Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips producer David Fridmann, who stepped on to produce Number Girl’s much-anticipated follow-up (and their final album). The overall sound didn’t change radically, as the songs still mostly power ahead with a few sudden shifts in speed (and a lot of fierce solos courtesy of Tabuchi), but everything sounds grimier. Fitting, given Mukai’s sudden shift to singing about the ugly parts of urban living. Whatever optimism snuck into their previous material was snuffed out here.
Number Girl could still write a battering number, but Sappukei (translation: "Tastelessness") also found Mukai simply screaming more. When done right, it hit hard, like on the push-pull guitar surge of "Zegen Vs Undercover," but elsewhere it just upped the volume without adding impact. Sappukei found Number Girl experimenting a touch more, but ultimately comes off like a transitional piece for a band starting to get restless with their sound, but not ready to throw caution totally away.
They got weird on 2002’s Num-Heavymetallic, a gleefully confrontational set from a band who easily could have by then coasted on a solid fan base. The title track opens with the sound of Mukai screaming frantically from far away before he switches abruptly into the traditional Japanese enka style of singing, while his bandmates show they can sound just as heavy at a narcotized pace. That’s followed up by "Num-Ami-Dabutz," a lurching number constantly buzz-sawed in half by Tabuchi’s guitar. Mukai breaks into a spoken-word that gave his bleak outlook on urban life a hypnotic quality. It’s a high point in the band’s history, and definitely a favorite when trying to figure out the most bizarre song to ever crash the Japanese singles chart.
Nothing else on the album approached the wildness of those two songs, but the rest of Num-Heavymetallic highlighted the outfit’s growing interest in more fragmentary compositions. Some experiments worked better than others—"Frustration in My Blood" is the point where Number Girl could get too aggro—and overall it doesn’t feel coherent. That was the point though—by 2002, all the artists who had captured the uneasy feeling of the new millennium a few years prior were moving on to new territory. Num-Heavymetallic ended up being Number Girl’s last collection, as bassist Nakao opted to step away, and the other three decided to stop the band rather than replace him. They all went on to new, successful projects, highlighted by Mukai and Matsushita’s Zazen Boys outfit, which continued down the wonky road their final album hinted at.
Ultimately, these vinyl reissues exist to capitalize on Japan’s current LP trend, and the only added feature—a Fridmann remastering of all three—feels unnecessary, as the often hissy sound added to these album’s charm. But they mostly feel strange because Number Girl’s music remains so visible, both in a literal sense (these have already been released as special edition CDs multiple times) and in a more abstract way. Few Japanese bands have proven to be as influential as Number Girl, with festival-headliners such as Asian Kung-Fu Generation and rising groups like tricot claiming them as primary influences. But even more important are the countless bands wailing away in small live houses in Fukuoka and in Tokyo’s Koenji neighborhood and in any small countryside town, because of these four, not to mention the non-Japanese listeners seeking something different, who hunted the group’s material down through Soulseek or shady message boards before YouTube became reliable. They came to prominence at a time when many felt anxious about the future, but Number Girl carried the same torch held by their U.S. indie idols and showed a whole new generation of kids in Japan they could make any music that they wanted. | 2016-01-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 20, 2016 | 8.3 | 667034c8-59e7-40b0-98f3-8d75cff82950 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
Formed in the wake of Talulah Gosh, the indie-pop group Heavenly released four studio albums, but this new singles collection shows that their most magical work existed in smaller formats. | Formed in the wake of Talulah Gosh, the indie-pop group Heavenly released four studio albums, but this new singles collection shows that their most magical work existed in smaller formats. | Heavenly: A Bout De Heavenly: The Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heavenly-a-bout-de-heavenly-the-singles/ | A Bout De Heavenly: The Singles | One evening in 1986, Oxford economics student Amelia Fletcher approached a stranger at a concert and asked her if she wanted to be in a band. In this girl’s Pastels badge she recognized kinship, community, and shared taste. At the time, Elizabeth Price, an art student who would later win Britain’s splashy Turner Prize, had no idea how to sing or play an instrument. No matter. The music Fletcher and Price would create as part of a group they named Talulah Gosh did not prioritize formal skill. Combining C86 jangle with girl-group swooning, Talulah Gosh’s songs were gloriously scrappy. As if to emphasize the band’s informality, they never released a proper full-length; two years after forming, with a handful of singles to their name, Talulah Gosh dissolved. After briefly toying with the idea of solo pop stardom, in 1989, Fletcher started a new band called Heavenly.
During their seven years of existence, Heavenly released four studio albums, but a recent singles collection, A Bout De Heavenly, makes the case that some of their most magical work existed in smaller formats. At first, Heavenly might have appeared to be a continuation of Talulah Gosh under a different name. After all, the two bands shared nearly identical lineups: Fletcher, her brother Mathew, Peter Momtchiloff, and Robert Pursey (a few years later they were joined by Cathy Rogers). But as suggested by the project’s early singles, “I Fell in Love Last Night” and “Our Love is Heavenly,” Heavenly would (for the most part) iron the punk wrinkles out of their songs. Built around upbeat melodies, ’60s pop harmonies, and a staunchly optimistic view of love (purely romantic, rarely sexual), these new songs were tighter than any of Talulah Gosh’s offerings. It was only fitting that Heavenly would sign to Sarah Records, the beloved Bristol label known for releasing music made by introspective wallflowers.
Like other Sarah bands, Heavenly’s style—both music and aesthetic—was polarizing. In its earliest days, indie pop was a parallel movement to punk. Both scenes touted the belief that anyone could make music on their own terms, that mistakes were something to be celebrated. But punk was associated with fearlessness, or at least the facade of that confidence. So maybe if you identified with the punk spirit but weren’t angling for anarchy, you became an indie pop kid. Instead of wearing a T-shirt held together with safety pins, you rocked anoraks and cardigans; you were probably a bit dweeby.
Critics reviled indie poppers for their “shambling” songs about crushes and heartache, grade school outfits, and embrace of “girly” qualities like sensitivity or softness. In Heavenly’s case, the criticism easily and often veered towards sexism. In a particularly cruel review of the band’s 1992 album, Le Jardin De Heavenly, Melody Maker writer Simon Price accused Fletcher of spending “her entire adult life pretending she doesn’t menstruate,” painted her bandmates as developmentally challenged, and used a variety of other lazy insults to describe the group as infantile. (A much more interesting criticism of indie pop could have been about the scene’s overwhelming whiteness, a point that was unlikely to be explored by the majority-white music press.)
So while it’s true that Heavenly songs often framed the world through a childlike lense, their choice to do so was likely not rooted in a desire to escape or regress. “I spent from age 13 to age 17 trying to act like I was 25 and trying to prove to boys I knew all about sex and I didn’t and trying to prove I was cool and no one could hurt me when they could,” Fletched explained in a 1995 article about cuddlecore. “At 18, I thought 'fuck it, I don’t care anymore. I’m just gonna be what I feel like being.’”
In retrospect, it seems like Heavenly’s critics were too preoccupied with twee to consider the darkness that lurked in the shadows of Heavenly’s songs. In the early singles featured on A Bout De Heavenly, these glimmers of pain tend to arrive as a result of heartbreak: “I’m Not Scared of You” aches with betrayal, while “Wrap My Arms Around Him” struggles to move past a manipulative relationship. On the other end of the spectrum, 1991’s chipper “Escort Crash on Marston Street” imagines the entire band’s death or injury in a horrific car crash. But as Fletcher cheerily notes, “The kids are happy/With no more boring Heavenly tunes.”
Beginning with Le Jardin De Heavenly, Heavenly’s records were distributed in the U.S. by K, the Olympia, Washington-based label run by Calvin Johnson, whose own band, Beat Happening, faced similar criticisms about amateurism. Through their connection with K and friendships with bands like Bratmobile and Huggy Bear, Heavenly were exposed to the burgeoning riot grrrl movement, whose feminist, DIY spirit struck a chord with Fletcher. Quickly, Heavenly’s songs began to incorporate more nuanced narratives about sexual politics and gender roles. On the fiery “Atta Girl,” Fletcher and Rogers offer overlapping perspectives on smothering, unrealistic relationships. “No, I could never live up to all your dreams/I don’t have to be cute right through,” an exasperated Fletcher shouts early on. Like Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” the bubbly “P.U.N.K. Girl” pays tribute to a complicated female figure whose honesty and insularity can be misinterpreted as off-putting.
But the most poignant of these tracks would turn out to be a B-side called “Hearts and Crosses.” The song follows a young woman named Melanie as she imagines how the companionship and affection of “some cool boy” could “make things right.” Melanie’s excitement is sugar-coated by bouncy keys, zippy bursts of guitar, and Mathew’s delightfully all-over-the-place drumming. But like it so easily can in real life, the narrative turns on a dime and suddenly, Melanie’s fantasy becomes a nightmarish depiction of date rape. “It was all so different from in her dream,” Fletcher murmurs as her pep collapses into a traumatized monotone. “He never smiled, he never whispered/He bit her hard, but never kissed her.” Heavenly follows this anecdote with a chaotically joyful keyboard solo; a casual listener could be forgiven for missing the horror. Arguably, “Hearts and Crosses” is the band’s best song. Inarguably, it’s a powerful example that pop music—even at its most outwardly precious—can be a vehicle for addressing issues like sexual assault.
While the band’s subsequent record, 1994’s The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, continued to explore these ideas, their fourth and final album, 1996’s Operation Heavenly, embraced a goofiness unseen since the Talulah days. With a more straightforward rock sound, “Trophy Girlfriend” and “Space Manatee” nod more towards Britpop than twee, despite references to rocket ships and granny dresses. For a moment, the world seemed like Heavenly’s oyster.
Sadly, Heavenly’s course ended in tragedy. Right before the release of Operation Heavenly, drummer Mathew Fletcher took his own life. Continuing to make new music under the Heavenly moniker felt wrong, so the group eventually reconvened under the name Marine Research, which later evolved into Tender Trap. These days, Fletcher and Pursey continue to make music together as a couple under the name the Catenary Wires. While the sound itself has shifted into more laid-back territory, the communal desire to explore the world through music that inspired Talulah Gosh back in the ’80s remains.
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. | 2021-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Damaged Goods | January 9, 2021 | 8 | 667a60d1-b864-4ebf-9540-ed616646ee6b | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
With her new record as This Is the Kit, singer-songwriter Kate Stables offers a collection of sparse folk that takes on the mysteries of mortality with a wizened sigh. | With her new record as This Is the Kit, singer-songwriter Kate Stables offers a collection of sparse folk that takes on the mysteries of mortality with a wizened sigh. | This Is the Kit: Moonshine Freeze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/this-is-the-kit-moonshine-freeze/ | Moonshine Freeze | A ramshackle energy propels Moonshine Freeze, the latest from Kate Stables’ folk project This Is the Kit. With rootsy arrangements of banjo, horns, and gentle percussion, it retains the intimacy of its well-loved predecessor, 2015’s Bashed Out. But it also offers the Paris-based songwriter’s loosest, wildest music to date, exploring a fruitful middle ground between the morbid and the profound. Through 11 songs that range from slow-burning mood pieces to riotous anthems, she maintains a sing-songy falsetto even as she assesses human nature in its most violent forms. “People want blood,” she repeats in “Easy on the Thieves,” “and blood is what they’ve got.”
The songs on Moonshine Freeze focus on characters awaiting hard consequences, sometimes gaining wisdom from the experience but more often lingering in dissonance. In the deceptively calm “Bullet Proof,” Stables coaches herself in the third-person (“There are things to learn here, Kate”) as her banjo flutters with the persistent trill of birdsong. She seems more interested, however, in pinpointing where things went wrong than explaining how they can get better, opening the album with a fatalistic sigh of relief. The title track is another highlight, with a buzzing, psychedelic groove. Backed by an army of bobbing horns, Stables meditates on impermanence, as her tightly layered vocals begin to drift apart. “This is the natural order of things,” she sings with a devilish chill, “Change sets in.”
Stables has evolved as a storyteller, writing in surprising, cryptic ways. Her words often seem boiled down to just bare essentials. The chorus of “Riddled With Ticks” alternately reassures (“I know what is true”) and threatens (“I will fight you”). In “Solid Grease,” she refines her process to just six words: “Things get said/Things get don’t.” With many of its songs assuming the form of chants or intonations, Moonshine Freeze feels proudly out of step with time. Stables largely eschews traditional song structures for a more intuitive logic, mirroring the in-between states her words invoke. The rousing ghost story of “Hotter Colder” jitters and jolts in sudden bursts, elevating the sparse track into the album’s boldest moment, even making room for a climactic saxophone solo.
Producer John Parish lends Moonshine Freeze the same starkness he’s developed through his work with PJ Harvey. In “Easy on the Thieves,” humdrum backing vocals add an ominous inevitability to Stables’ words, while “Two Pence Piece” rattles with soulful, gothic Americana. After producing Bashed Out, the National’s Aaron Dessner also helps deepen the texture, with guitar playing as natural and melodic as wind chimes. Even in its busiest moments, the album has a soothing effect. Its rough charms begin to feel like an acceptance of a world in disarray, refining its chaos into compact moments of beauty. “Probability wise, one of us has to die,” Stables tells a loved one in “All Written Out in Numbers,” “But by the same reckoning, it will be fine.” Moonshine Freeze explores all the tension between those two realizations, knowing that’s precisely where life happens. | 2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rough Trade | July 26, 2017 | 7.3 | 668809f6-15db-490f-8a82-67b9bcef12fa | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
On his second full-length, the UK producer crafts an instrumental LP that is a powerful mix of warped and disorienting melodies and clattering beats. | On his second full-length, the UK producer crafts an instrumental LP that is a powerful mix of warped and disorienting melodies and clattering beats. | Lone: Emerald Fantasy Tracks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14998-emerald-fantasy-tracks/ | Emerald Fantasy Tracks | In 2009, UK bedroom producer Matt Cutler, who makes music as Lone, put out a record called Ecstasy & Friends that now sounds oddly prescient. Released on Actress' Werk Discs, the record contained a wide range of in-vogue sonic elements: humid Dilla-stepped beats, filmic vocal samples, and the beatific tape-warp wooziness of Boards of Canada. Cutler's creation was a stylistic cousin to Bibio, another BoC acolyte with an ear for Dilla. But it was also rough around the edges and disjointed. Ecstasy was a forward-thinking record, but also one that wasn't fully realized, so it's not too surprising that it didn't really catch on.
Cutler's follow-up, Emerald Fantasy Tracks, doesn't suffer from the same underdeveloped tendencies. Issued on his own Magic Wire Recordings imprint, the record represents a clean break from his past. Were it not for the name on the album cover, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was made by an entirely different artist. The sticky tropical atmosphere and knack for sentimental melodies are still there, but gone are the loping, static-riddled boom-bap beats. Instead, Culter offers jackknifing tempos and clattering 808s that recall 1990s breakbeat techno at its giddiest (think Underground Resistance's "Jupiter Jazz"), all of which adds up to an album that is dense but immediately engaging.
You get the feeling that Cutler has inhaled 15 years' worth of dance music in the year since his last full-length. This is no history lesson, though-- the music has too much of an emotional pull for that, as Cutler puts his ear for BoC's pitch-drunk melodies to good use. He has a weird knack for arranging clusters of sound to make them feel slow, unstable, and psychedelic. So the perceived speed of neck-whipped cuts like "Aquamarine" and the album's prismatic highlight, "Petrcane Beach Track", feel oddly off, even while the BPMs stay firmly in place. It's a trick that he puts to use carefully, and its application is disorienting in the most blissful sense.
It's that care and attention to detail that makes Emerald Fantasy Tracks more of an album and less of a grouping of similar cuts. The pacing is sharp, from the album's percolating, Eastern-influenced midsection to the downtempo, affecting closer "The Birds Don't Fly This High". Tech-y enough for beatheads but with a direct melodic sense that will appeal to even the most casual of electronic music observers, Emerald Fantasy Tracks is just as thrilling and sensual as the album title suggests, transcending nostalgia and instead drawing a drum-programmed path straight to the human heart. | 2011-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Magic Wire Recordings | January 18, 2011 | 8.3 | 66895d4d-ae58-4fbe-86da-f90acbb91cc9 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Nebraska guitarist and songwriter strips his music to its raw, noisy core, revealing how his favorite records might have sounded when they were still being hammered out in rehearsal. | The Nebraska guitarist and songwriter strips his music to its raw, noisy core, revealing how his favorite records might have sounded when they were still being hammered out in rehearsal. | David Nance: Staunch Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-nance-staunch-honey/ | Staunch Honey | For music obsessives, there comes a time when, having burnt yourself out on the classics, you immerse yourself in ephemera. You may turn to scratchy bootlegs of live shows, expensive box sets of alternate takes, or unauthorized collections of outtakes, passed down by fellow travellers. While less polished than the music that brought you to an artist’s work in the first place, these hidden gems offer a different and equally important thrill: They feel like your own.
Nebraska songwriter David Nance has internalized this behavior like few working artists. He has a habit of covering beloved albums in their entirety, but his own music is where he really puts his fandom to the test. He draws unabashedly from classic rock touchstones like the Allman Brothers and Crazy Horse, the Stones and the Stooges, the Dead and the Basement Tapes. But instead of reaching for their crowd-pleasing heights, he strips his music to its raw, noisy core. At their best, his songs reveal how his favorite records might have sounded when they were still being hammered out in rehearsal.
Nance’s latest studio album, Staunch Honey, features the sharpest and most distinctive songwriting of his career, but the sound remains gloriously unrefined. According to a press release, he reworked the material three times before settling on these renditions: recorded at home, directly to tape, with just a few appearances from collaborators like guitarist Jim Schroeder and drummer Kevin Donahue. (Thus it’s billed as a solo album, as opposed to 2018’s Peaced and Slightly Pulverised, released as the David Nance Group.)
The homespun feel of the album gives it a psychedelic, outsider charm, like if Ariel Pink’s early work had been inspired by jam bands and Southern rock instead of ’60s novelty songs and jingles. Like Pink, Nance is a deceptively traditional songwriter, banding together clever hooks and catchy riffs that play with an uncanny familiarity. As a self-producer, he complements this gift: “This Side of the Moon” begins with a whispered refrain rising deep within the mix, like he’s cuing the band, while the first chorus of “July Sunrise” trails off with a wordless coda, as if he’s still workshopping the melody.
Other highlights, like “Gentle Traitor” and “My Love, the Dark and I,” are warbly studio concoctions, sketches of songs that seem in danger of dissipating into tape hiss. Nance drawls through their fuzzy arrangements in a deep, grungy voice, maintaining the mood rather than expressing any specific emotion. It is partially why his lyrics, when you can make them out, seem primed to sing along with even when you have no idea what he’s talking about: “The worst part about seeing you this evening,” he sings in “Save Me Some Tears,” “is horseflies soaking in my ice tea.”
For such a warped, solitary album, Staunch Honey seems designed for open spaces. On a recent live album, recorded for a socially distant iteration of Gonerfest, the music comes alive, played by a band laughing and cracking jokes, extending solos and jamming out, encouraged by a small group of people hearing it all for the first time. “This is making my year,” Nance announces near the end, before admitting, “Not a hard bar to pass.” While the songs on Staunch Honey feel like breakthroughs, it’s living proof that their real journey is just beginning.
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. | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | November 20, 2020 | 7.7 | 668db7a2-2c01-457e-a6be-2dffb965fdc8 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On his so-called R&B album, it’s exceedingly difficult to square the real-life allegations of the Florida rapper with the toxic content of his songs. | On his so-called R&B album, it’s exceedingly difficult to square the real-life allegations of the Florida rapper with the toxic content of his songs. | Kodak Black: Heart Break Kodak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kodak-black-heart-break-kodak/ | Heart Break Kodak | Kodak Black stands accused of sexual assault. It’s an inconvenient truth, but it’s the lens he invites when he releases a so-called R&B album on Valentine’s Day. Over the course of 17 tracks, the Florida rapper grants entry into his troubled affairs with women through a combination of crooned love letters and woeful screeds. But with an open case for sexual assault lingering (he’s currently locked up on unrelated charges), Heart Break Kodak feels like a witless, noxious provocation.
Throughout the mixtape, the streets and unnamed lovers wage a war for Kodak’s heart. Strained relationships and conflicting interests are a theme as universal as music itself, and fans will likely delight in hearing him croon about letting go as he does on sing-song opener “Running Outta Love.” Much of his appeal comes from his diaristic lyrics and his depiction of a broken system’s impact on his life. Investment in this narrative makes it hard to separate what the world has done to him and what he’s done to the world in the wake of his fame. On the melancholic “I Get Lonely,” for example, he positions himself as a victim of the state, deploying lines like, “I don't be tryna be violent, life could be much greater/But they wanna see me in prison, wanna see me on them papers.” Fans of Kodak love him for this. It’s as if the story he has to tell and the skill with which he tells it eclipses any of his real-life transgressions.
Legendary author, filmmaker, and all-around hip-hop historian Nelson George summarized this very issue in an essay on the genre’s delicate relationship between fans, authenticity, and censorship published in his 1998 book Hip Hop America: “They see everything as a plot by white people to destroy black men when, the truth is, some of these brothers have seriously fucked up and deserve both the censure from our community and jail time.” George, coincidentally, was writing about another of South Florida's native sons: Uncle Luke who, in light of the Parkland school shooting, took to Twitter to paint a picture of how black men are treated compared to their white counterparts, using Kodak as an example. Both points are true: Crime does happen, but politicians and law enforcement also salivate at a chance to lock up these men. There continues to be an attack on rappers and black men in general (see: Meek Mill), but it’s equally true that those same folks have also done irreversible harm to others—especially women.
Lovers of hip-hop extend a certain amount of creative license to rappers and the graphic content in their lyrics. Plenty has been afforded to Kodak since his breakout single “No Flockin’.” After all, there is a context and a functional (though misguided) purpose to intra-community gun violence and selling drugs. These actions are often the result of societal failings trickling down into personal ones, and regardless, everything in the verse isn’t and shouldn’t be taken as gospel truth. But sexual assault is a different kind of social ill. Certainly, misogyny and patriarchal violence are built into American culture and Heart Break Kodak is a product of both. But when attitudes become allegations, what some refer to as “calling in” must become calling out.
The piano-laden “Hate Being Alone” is Kodak’s best attempt at courtship here, and it still rings hollow. While he makes it through the song without undermining his own intent—no bitches or hoes, only bae—no amount of charm can make even his “sweetest” moments appealing. It’s hard not to think of his alleged victim, of the woman from his Instagram Live, of him slapping a stripper’s ass unprompted (and getting kicked off stage for it), of his disdain for dark-skinned women. This isn’t someone who has made a convincing case for deserving anyone’s company. The version of love or lust displayed on Heart Break Kodak is one-dimensional and, more often than not, it’s selfish. The expectation that his partner should put up with his laundry list of ongoing trials and tribulations lingers in every corner, and when she chooses otherwise, she has somehow failed him and, as he claims on “Loyal,” made him heartless.
Though he seems apologetic at times—particularly when he’s offering amends to his mother on the sincere “Corrupted”—his relationship to women remains, at best, complicated and, at worst, altogether toxic. As Elizabeth Méndez Berry wrote in her 2005 Vibe essay “Love Hurts”: “When you get paid big money to call every woman a ho, at what point do you start believing you're a pimp?” It’s not that rap should close itself off from the R&B musings of those who have questionable dealings with women. Future’s HNDRXX, Young Thug’s Beautiful Thugger Girls or Chief Keef’s Thot Breaker, all from last year, deserve every bit of the praise they were offered. It may even be important and necessary that rappers embark on this frontier of balancing their tough-guy personas with matters of the heart. But whatever artistic merits Heart Break Kodak may have, they are sullied by these allegations.
It’s been five years since Rocko’s “U.O.E.N.O.”—a single that featured Rick Ross’ infamous “molly all in her champagne” date-rape lyric. The line spurred one of the first times in recent memory that discussions about rap and rape culture converged in the public discourse on such a grand scale. Ultimately, apologies were doled out, but little has changed since then. Artists get a slap on their hand while their transgressions hover over their music, following them but never falling on them. Record labels keep supporting them and media outlets like this one continue to cover them. It says something about whose trauma takes precedence, whose stories are worth telling, and which survivors are worthy of not having their abuser given a platform. How, after all, does one engage the conversation without also indirectly aiding the bottom line? Hate streaming—whether toward him or his critics—still counts.
Which brings us back to Heart Break Kodak. At this stage, there's nothing salvageable about it when the only maybe-acknowledgment of the pending charges is a now-deleted line from last year’s single “Tunnel Vision” where he claims, “I get any girl I want, I ain't gotta rape.” (The line now goes, “I get any girl I want, any girl I want.”) The entire fiasco is a shame, really. For someone who’s self-aware enough to rap something like, “Jumped up out the womb like my daddy the devil/My son jumped up out the womb like his daddy the devil” from a prison phone on “When Vultures Cry,” it seems he would rather let arrogance derail him. Even with this take on an “R&B” album, his fans aren’t going anywhere, and that’s their choice. But ultimately, Kodak won’t be redeemed by his romance any more than he can be saved by apathy. | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | February 22, 2018 | 5 | 6691562e-3fff-4f36-9a1b-b12cca7e5071 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
As they hide out from the cops, root through garbage, peer paranoid through the blinds, and dig their nails into their hands just for something to do, the protagonists on the Mountain Goats newest are linked not by place or time but by a particular spiritual stance. And a horn section. | As they hide out from the cops, root through garbage, peer paranoid through the blinds, and dig their nails into their hands just for something to do, the protagonists on the Mountain Goats newest are linked not by place or time but by a particular spiritual stance. And a horn section. | The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17112-transcendental-youth/ | Transcendental Youth | In the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of Cheryl Strayed's advice columns, the writer Steve Almond uses the term "radical empathy." I underlined it and wrote in the margins of the book "John Darnielle." I cannot think of two words that better sum up the strange powers that the Mountain Goats frontman has spent two decades and a small shelf's worth of LPs tirelessly honing. "Radical" because the space he's carved out in the musical landscape ("I hide down in my corner, because I like my corner," he seethes on the opening cut of his latest album, Transcendental Youth) stands a sizable and defiant distance from what's cool. His songs hinge upon lines ("Every dream's a good dream, even awful dreams are good dreams if you're doing it right") that would run the risk of sounding like the inspirational posters that lined the walls of your 9th grade English teacher's classroom if Darnielle delivered them with anything less than the tenacity of a rabid dog playing tug-of-war for the last bone on earth. And "empathy" because the degree to which he inhabits his characters is so thorough that it's a little disorienting. We are talking about a guy who has written from the perspective of a 4th-century Danish peasant, a gun-clutching Macon County outlaw, an agoraphobic science fiction novelist, and a moon-dwelling cannibal and has still somehow tricked most people into thinking that he is "a confessional songwriter."
Since retiring his boombox and committing to a full-band sound in 2002, Mountain Goats albums have roughly fallen into two categories, what I'll sort-of-inadequately call "tight concept" and "loose concept." The former are bound by narratives or formal conceits-- That Record About The Painfully Slow Dissolution of A Marriage (Tallahassee), That Secular Record About The Bible (The Life of the World to Come), That Record About What Happens When Junkies Living In A House Together Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Real (We Shall All Be Healed). The latter category-- records like Heretic Pride and All Eternals Deck-- is more of a mixed bag: They don't quite have the blunt impact of the tighter concept albums, but the upside is that they give Darnielle's imagination some room, freeing him to whip around from consciousness to troubled consciousness. And Transcendental Youth, the Mountain Goats' latest, is a fine example of that latter category. As they hide out from the cops, root through garbage, peer paranoid through the blinds, and dig their nails into their hands just for something to do, its protagonists are linked not by place or time but by a particular spiritual stance-- crouched and desperate, but waiting patiently for a sliver of light.
For as attuned as Darnielle is to the desperation of the everyman, his music's humanism extends to honoring the pathos of famous people. (A sampling of song titles from All Eternals Deck: "For Charles Bronson" and "Liza Forever Minnelli.") Two of Transcendental Youth's best songs-- both of which rank among the most searing and immediate things he's written since The Sunset Tree-- were inspired by troubled musicians who didn't live to see better days. Darnielle wrote "Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1" after Amy Winehouse died, but he says the song is for "all the other Amy Winehouses in the world who aren't famous, whose deaths go uncelebrated." With its driving, obstinate tempo and pithily life-affirming proclamations ("Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive"), "Amy" is one of the more anthemic songs the Mountain Goats have put to tape, and it has potential to become a staple in the band's fabled and cathartic live shows. It's perhaps the highest compliment one can bestow upon a Mountain Goats song to say that it has lyrics that would feel really good to scream at the top of your lungs in a room full of hundreds of other people who are also screaming at the top of their lungs; by that measure, "Amy"'s chorus of "Just stay aliiiiive" ranks pretty high.
The terrific "Harlem Roulette", on the other hand, whips us back in time to 1968, where Frankie Lymon is in a Harlem studio putting the finishing touches on a song called "Seabreeze". Darnielle has a knack for the fine balance between hyper-specificity and universality, and the power of "Harlem Roulette" comes from the way it whiplashes between external banalities ("Just a pair of tunes to hammer out/ Everybody's off the clock by 10") and hulking, private tragedies (a beat later: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again.") It's also a song about the gulf between appearance and reality: Someone who'd seemingly achieved a great deal and tons of adoration at a young age can still be one of the loneliest people in the world (Stars! They're Just Like Us!), and what seemed like an ordinary studio session became, in retrospect, tragic. Lymon went home from the studio, took his first hit of heroin in years, and, at the age of 25, overdosed.
The debate's been raging since 2002: At this point it's safe to say that there will always be people who think the Mountain Goats' urgent, lo-fi sound was better suited to transmit stories that raw. But Transcendental Youth does have one wrinkle that adds some emotion range-- a horn section, arranged expressively by up-and-coming avant-symphonic artist Matthew E. White (an omnivorous music fan who leapt at the chance to induldge his inner Mingus, Darnielle recruited White after seeing him perform live with Sounds of the South, a show featuring Justin Vernon, Phil Cook, and Megafaun and admiring his 60s-inspired compositions). They're a fitting addition because, like Darnielle's lyrics, the emotions they transmit are complex and many-hued. The brass is bright but defiant on the upbeat "Cry for Judas", as well as the muted, stunning closer "Transcendental Youth". "Sing, sing for ourselves alone," Darnielle commands, and the horns shine like sunsets or sunrises, hellfire or salvation-- you're never quite sure.
Song for song, Transcendental Youth doesn't have the consistency of the Mountain Goats' strongest records, and it lacks both variation and character motivation around the middle. "White Cedar", "Until I Am Whole", and "Night Light" are powerful but strike similar emotional chords and end up feeling like a mid-album lull. There's also a vividness of external detail that feels missing from some of these songs: The narrator of the stirring but vague "White Cedar" "woke up on lockdown," but in a classic Mountain Goats song we'd know exactly what he did to get there. Not every character on Transcendental Youth is as memorable as the stars-- the Alpha Couple, the fallen high school running back or the Denton Death Metal dudes-- of the band's sterling back catalog, not every line as immediate or cathartic to yell as fan favorite "No Children"'s "I hope you die! I hope we both die!" But in the moments when he articulates the trivialities and tragedies of his narrators most convincingly, Darnielle finds equal grains of humanity and empathy in people crouched in the darkest corners and blinded by the brightest spotlights. It's not spirituality, escapism, or even optimism, exactly, that he's espousing-- all you know is it's some kind of light. | 2012-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge / Tomlab / Remote Control / Moorworks | October 2, 2012 | 7.8 | 66947766-6f11-4057-aa5e-d53f2ec5def6 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Teen Suicide return with a sprawling new album that meditates on the anxiety and indifference of love and mortality. | Teen Suicide return with a sprawling new album that meditates on the anxiety and indifference of love and mortality. | Teen Suicide: honeybee table at the butterfly feast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teen-suicide-honeybee-table-at-the-butterfly-feast/ | honeybee table at the butterfly feast | You face your own mortality in little ways every day: blood on your knees after a fall, brakes that engage a moment too late, the feeling when you swim in the deep blue sea and suddenly a wave hits you in the face. Losing your breath can be the kind of event you barely register until it’s almost too late. That’s a simplified version of what happened to musician and producer Sam Ray last fall, when he suffered an asthma attack, stopped breathing, and woke up in the ICU. Jacked up on prescription steroids and worried there might not be another chance, he scrambled to complete the next album from his project Teen Suicide, honeybee table at the butterfly feast. It’s an alternately lovely and grating record, full of experiments that probably should’ve stayed on the cutting room floor.
For over a decade, Ray has been making homespun noise pop albums under various names, including Teen Suicide and American Pleasure Club, as well as an ambient project, Ricky Eat Acid. He mostly deals in introspection, sharing big thoughts about true love by way of emo-tinged vocals, tape hiss, and looping flutters of keys. On honeybee table, he meditates on love as he’s done on past records, always through the lens of mortality. Each track on the album daisy-chains its way back to a central thought: I almost fucking died. “new strategies for telemarketing through precognitive dreams” is a dreamy shoegaze song that concludes with reflections on watching the world end; on “groceries,” a trip to the store becomes a vehicle to explore Ray’s fears of amounting to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe.
It’s a lofty goal to write something profound about capital-D Death in the context of our unglamorous, everyday lives. In the best moments, he seems up for the task. The looped percussion and keys on “get high, breathe underwater (#3)” feel like being underwater, or watching life pass from within a dream. “I don’t wanna die/I don’t wanna live this way,” Ray sings, like a mantra. Occasionally he’ll pepper in a glimpse of the mythological, like a “big black bird” that “flies out of the flames.” He’s anxious but also blasé about his own mortality, a tension that produces some of the most interesting conceptual work on the record. It’s beautiful and messy to hear him ferment the world around him, to contemplate his relationship with being so tenuously alive.
Same goes for “i will always be in love with you (final),” the first song Ray wrote after he was discharged from the hospital. Made of tape hiss and acoustic guitar, it’s a heart-on-your-cardigan-sleeve emo-pop slow jam that should by all accounts be corny but ends up being tender and warm to the touch. Ray’s work has been compared to Phil Elverum’s projects, a connection that’s particularly clear here as he constructs small, intimate songs about mortality, love, and endurance.
honeybee is at its best when Ray sings unsparingly about facing death. But at 16 tracks, the album is overstuffed, and not in a substantive way. It’s just too long, like Ray decided to dump the entire contents of his hard drive. “violence violence,” a very out-of-place grindcore track, is an excruciating listen. “coyote 2015-2021” starts out pretty with its horns and wispy guitars but eventually falls stagnant. It’s one of the biggest problems Ray’s run into over the course of his career: His sprawling compositions capture the excitement of first-thought-best thought creativity but lack the direction that comes with a little curation and revision. Embarking on the journey with him, watching him figure it out in real time, can be both fascinating and frustrating. After all, not every idea is your best—nor, thankfully, is every day your last. | 2022-08-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | August 31, 2022 | 6.7 | 6699d302-257c-44dc-90e9-3bc985aa0fce | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
On the latest release from Phoebe Bridgers’ new label, the California singer-songwriter takes an anxious yet clear-eyed look at the slings and arrows of late adolescence. | On the latest release from Phoebe Bridgers’ new label, the California singer-songwriter takes an anxious yet clear-eyed look at the slings and arrows of late adolescence. | Charlie Hickey: Nervous at Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlie-hickey-nervous-at-night/ | Nervous at Night | At 22, Pasadena songwriter Charlie Hickey sits astride the chain-link fence between youth and adulthood. His debut EP, Count the Stairs—released on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory imprint—positioned him as the next existential soft-rock wunderkind in the Bridgers family tree, not far from regular collaborators Christian Lee Hutson and Harrison Whitford. But Hickey forgoes their gritty melancholy: Nervous at Night, his debut full-length, lingers in the occasionally too-twee space between bedroom and pop as he navigates the travails of growing up.
“No one here has to pay their rent/Well, it’s not like I do,” Hickey quipped on last year’s dancey single “Ten Feet Tall.” On Nervous at Night, he saves the social satire for the soulful, quasi-R&B of “Springbreaker” (“Springbreaker, you said you ended up at the chateau/What does that mean?/As if that could be an accident”) but mostly channels his wit into affection, penning couplets fit for ironist valentines. On “Missing Years,” Hickey loses his fake ID—and metonymically his identity—but when he’s with his love interest, he sings, he’s “not missing.” Producer Marshall Vore, another Bridgers associate, submerges these acoustic confessionals in watery electronics, stacking production to simulate a boombox at the bottom of a pool. Blue and lurid, a sense of murky, digitized isolation oozes from the vocoder and staticky percussion. The artificial 8-track textures scrub away the edge of emo gloom from Hickey’s earlier music, giving “Missing Years” the waltzy sparkle of Jimmy Eat World’s “Hear You Me.”
On tracks that function as paroxysms of guilt, self-loathing, or simple insecurity, Hickey sings with refreshing open-heartedness. His lyrics can read like drunk texts—“Couldn’t bring myself to get that cracked screen fixed/So when you sent me your love, I only got half of it,” he sings on the vulnerable piano ballad “Choir Song (I Feel Dumb)”—but their half-treacle, half-truth yields the unfiltered immediacy and accidental wisdom of AIM away statuses. Rich with references to cultural ephemera—Love Island, Call of Duty, Zipcar—the record’s zeitgeisty Gen Z nostalgia enhances more than just its scene-setting. On opener “Dandelions,” Hickey recalls seeing 12 Rules for Life in a bookstore and mourns the halcyon, dandelion-wishing days before he knew the darkness of the world or Jordan Peterson’s viral tirades. The song’s dissociative synths and omniscient future tense (the “Canadian doctor… would overdose on Klonopin, next year this time”) deftly depict a person trapped between yearning and anticipation.
The title track is the life of the party, showing up late but bringing the booze. With glittery guitars and a pre-chorus that recalls the antsy zeal of Boys Like Girls, Hickey scores an uptempo pop hit with a windows-down breathless refrain. “I don’t drive, I don’t have a car/I’ll still meet you wherever you are,” he sings, and it feels like we’re already off and running. The fantasy falters when Hickey reaches for trite paradoxes—worrying his silence was loud, fearing arriving more than flying—or loses specificity to fill the meter. But he vies to redeem himself by literalizing clichés, as in “Missing Years,” where his crush crashes into his life, totaling their car.
In moments like these, the just-a-kid shtick is a strength. There’s truth to the unspeakability of certain adolescent experiences; sometimes it is impossible to explain a feeling, especially when they’re as enormous as they were when we first felt them. Even when Hickey relies on easy rhymes, the shapes of his emotions reveal themselves in the firework Swiftian bridges, outsized metaphors, and conviction of his vocal performance. The story is a familiar one, but the baroque strings and underdog spirit leave us rooting for the hero, and for Hickey himself. | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddest Factory | May 23, 2022 | 6.9 | 6699f772-40af-4c3c-b318-a0b86243ee9b | Holden Seidlitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/holden-seidlitz/ | |
The Baltimore band’s spectacular fourth record is all groove, riffs, and passion. It is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility. | The Baltimore band’s spectacular fourth record is all groove, riffs, and passion. It is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility. | Turnstile: Glow On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/turnstile-glow-on/ | Glow On | Brendan Yates is the frontman of the biggest thing in hardcore and he understands that makes him an entertainer first. “If it makes you feel alive!/Well, then I’m happy to provide!” he screams on “Blackout,” a single from Turnstile’s spectacular fourth album Glow On and a synopsis of the entire Turnstile experience: there’s chunky power chords, a blindingly bright alt-rock hook, drum machines, and a Latin funk breakdown, and also it’s about wanting just one moment in the spotlight before you die.
The Baltimore quintet’s genre fusion and their belief in its transformative power are equally responsible for frequent comparisons to Rage Against the Machine, 311, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and maybe even Incubus—bands far outside the purview of hardcore. Turnstile are “alternative rock” by the literal, ’90s definition where no style of music is incompatible with punk if it’s played with speed, force and a genuine respect for its originators. Glow On is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility.
The band’s third LP, 2018’s Time & Space, came tantalizingly close. It was easier to just shrug off its few shortcomings and celebrate the fact that a hardcore band could sign to a major label and use their resources to bring in Diplo, Sheer Mag, Will Yip, and a Ms Lauryn Hill backup singer covering the Gap Band for about 30 seconds. But genre-hopping ain’t the instantaneous draw it used to be—Time & Space simply couldn’t introduce the suburbs to Gang of Four or Public Enemy or George Clinton or dub through rock radio and MTV like RHCP, RATM, and 311 did before them. The guest spots and interludes often played out like distractions or diversions, proof of a band with impressive taste and connections still sorting out what it meant to be Turnstile.
Yates has spent a lot of the past three years sorting out that exact thing. Whereas Time & Space was an expression of familiar anxieties about social media and self-actualization, today Turnstile are thinking about the function of art, the pressures of commerce, and the friends they’ve lost along the way, particularly Power Trip’s Riley Gale. But these solemn concerns enrich and deepen Glow On rather than weighing it down. Yates may be shirtless and airborne 90 percent of the time he’s on stage—just acknowledge the heavy heart he brings to lyrics like “Too bright to live/Too bright to die!” and “Still can’t fill the hole you left behind!” as he readies another roundhouse kick.
But first, Glow On shakes off the emotional baggage of the past three years with a pinwheeling synth line that could lead them on any number of paths. Could they further pursue the skate-house fusion from their Share a View remix EP with Australian lo-fi producer Mall Grab? Does it signal a shift towards the power-pop that Yates, Pat McCrory, and Daniel Fang play in Angel Du$t? Or the jangly indie of Yates’ Free the Birds side project? Glow On has Mike Elizondo behind the boards, a guy who co-wrote “In Da Club” and “The Real Slim Shady” and produced the Mastodon and Avenged Sevenfold albums that royally pissed off metal fans—does this suggest similar kingmaking ambitions for Turnstile? The synth squiggle and the song it introduces, “Mystery,” hint at any and all possibilities before settling into a unified theory of Turnstile—it all comes back to the riff and the groove.
As with older songs like “Real Thing,” “Gravity,” or “Fazed Out,” Glow On’s best riffs initially sound sourced straight from the lizard brain—the sort of thing a teen might play when they get their first distortion pedal. That same teen might also remember how the intro to “Waiting Room” made them feel like dunking themselves through a basketball hoop once the beat dropped—and that’s why Franz Lyons’ bass riffs are the only thing you hear before the chorus detonates on “Holiday” and “Mystery.” If “Endless” and “Fly Again” were played any faster, if they changed chords more quickly or tried to get a little trickier with syncopation, it would displace a groove that Turnstile have so sharply honed—the perfect tempo and rhythm to trigger a reflexive nod from even the most antisocial hardcore head. Free the neck and any other form of movement might be possible; there’s a song here called “Dance-Off” and it’s sort of about the meaning of life.
As it turns out, Turnstile weren’t infiltrating the dancefloor on Share a View as a one-off experiment but as intensive R&D for Glow On’s savvy integration of auxiliary percussion and electro post-production flourishes. Layering handclaps and cowbell underneath a standard drum kit alters the DNA of “Dance-Off” into heavy funk that could set off a wedding reception. The bleacher-stomping beat of “Holiday” recalls peak Sleigh Bells while inverting their ratio of metalcore to indie pop. At its most daring, Glow On creates syntheses so novel that they might predict the future: “Underwater Boi” matches the waterlogged tones and vocal manipulations of Spotify’s Feel Good Indie playlist to screwfaced, palm-muted guitars; “Blackout” punches in 808s, tambourines, and a timbale breakdown, modulating from the timbres of Miami bass to Miami Sound Machine to the Miami Dolphins locker room. The release of the Dev Hynes collaboration “Alien Love Call” as a single initially felt like Turnstile seeking a blessing as they ventured into Blood Orange’s realm of woozy, wavy R&B. But the respect and exchange of ideas is mutual—Glow On closer “Lonely Dezires” reacquaints Hynes with the kind of snotty post-hardcore he hasn’t touched since his old band Test Icicles broke up.
“You really gotta see it live to get it,” Lyons croons on his one vocal feature, “No Surprise,” musing on how the human experience can only be realized in the physical realm. It’s deep shit for a 46-second song. But it’s also an unexpectedly meta moment: Turnstile, and really most legendary hardcore bands, have surely heard “you gotta see it live to get it” about themselves. In many cases, it’s true, though it’s a form of advocacy that sometimes feels like a way to avoid granting hardcore artistry a deeper analysis—especially when the genre has produced vital, brutal, ambitious, subversive, and flat-out fun albums while completely online. Besides, show a skeptic the most insane Gulch or Drain set and they still might only fixate on the risk of getting kicked in the skull. While Glow On will absolutely go off in person, Turnstile’s greater feat is getting across the camaraderie, positive energy, and unlimited possibilities of hardcore for people who might only experience it on record, on a Spotify playlist or, Lord willing, a Tony Hawk soundtrack. Windmill kick to “Mystery” in the comfort of your bedroom, punch the steering wheel instead of a stage diver when Yates shouts “BOOM BOOM BOOM” during “T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection)”—seeing Turnstile live is no longer a prerequisite to “get” Glow On. Being alive will suffice.
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. | 2021-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Roadrunner | August 27, 2021 | 8.4 | 6699fdf7-1754-40ec-830d-7ced60d7e63c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Halsey’s spectral fourth album confronts the thrill and terror of getting what you want. It’s their strongest work to date. | Produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Halsey’s spectral fourth album confronts the thrill and terror of getting what you want. It’s their strongest work to date. | Halsey: If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/halsey-if-i-cant-have-love-i-want-power/ | If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power | When Halsey’s first album, 2015’s Badlands, took off, “New Americana” was its designated hit. The track is a self-conscious attempt to define a generation “high on legal marijuana/Raised on Biggie and Nirvana,” a flimsy but easily digestible thesis statement for critics who saw the Tumblr-poet-turned-pop-star as a “millennial built in a lab,” as a New York Times profile put it then. But the album’s true promise came 10 tracks later, on “Gasoline”: “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?” The pull toward self-immolation saturates Halsey’s music, and they’ve spent every album since drawing a big circle around it, in grand metaphors and gaudy costumed concepts. It’s in the way they call themself a hurricane, in the overdetermined tragedy of their Romeo and Juliet-themed album, in the formulaic pop songs they made later—even within the ache of their Auto-Tuned lines on the Chainsmokers hit that threatened to define their career. They turned the examination of their psyche into spectacle: splashy breakup songs with big-name features, an EP structured to take place in a single room.
On the surface, Halsey’s latest album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, fits this tradition of grand gestures. The singer, who uses she/they pronouns, is releasing the record alongside an IMAX film of the same name; there have been no singles, only increasingly gory, fantastical trailers and a theatrical unveiling of the album art at the Met. But the record itself has a tight, internal focus: It’s about walking the line between self-preservation and self-destruction, control and compulsion, the thrill and terror of getting what you want. Instead of sieving these themes through an elaborate architecture, Halsey lets horror—of the body, of the mind, of mortality—radiate outward. The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet.
Largely that’s because they sound so good: clear and cool and lilting. Nine Inch Nails members and film score mainstays Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross produced the record, and the pair seem eager to announce their unlikely place in pop music. On the opening tracks, they create a psychedelic Gothic fairytale—wisps of wind, icy piano, panoramic synth blur, a churning undercurrent listed in the credits as a “menacing beat”—while Halsey sings about loneliness and crowns and Judas (“Jesus needed a three-day weekend/To sort out all his bullshit”), but mostly about a pervasive sense of doom. “Don’t wait for me,” they cry over the chaos, “it’s not a happy ending.” Reznor and Ross spend most of the album experimenting, careening through genres and hinting at a danger that’s never fully realized. They cram songs with texture, reverberating screams and screeching sirens; the busyness can feel like a distraction. The sound is sometimes abrasive, but rarely shocking. The rollicking “honey” oscillates between frenetic drums and guitar, with Dave Grohl behind the kit and a cyborg inflection that leaks in from hyperpop. “I’ve been corrupted,” Halsey sings on “Lilith,” and a spasm of glitch submerges the last note.
If there’s an organizing framework to the album, it’s dissonance. Halsey wrote the album as they fell in love and navigated pregnancy; the writing zigzags between stability and self-sabotage. Every bit of sweetness is anchored in devastation. “Only you have shown me how to love being alive,” they hum on “Darling.” On “Ya’aburnee,” the delicate closing song and the conclusion to all this examination, they can only express commitment in the direst terms: “You will bury me before I bury you.”
With no features, the atmosphere of the album becomes unsettlingly claustrophobic. The effect is intoxicating on “Whispers,” where Halsey actualizes and criticizes their innermost thoughts. The premise might be hokey or campy from a lesser writer, but Halsey is so good at parsing their competing impulses, so brutal in their self-assessment: “This is the glimmer of light that you’re keeping alive when you tell yourself, ‘I bet I could fuck him,’” they murmur. It’s a line that feels ripped from their first album, a further reiteration of what Halsey has been telling us since the beginning; though its sound is varied and its production heady, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power rarely offers a new dimension. But for a pop star who has tried to write sweeping anthems about being young in today’s America, this is the song, and the album, that seems most likely to resonate: scrolling through a screen at night and surveying the wreckage, looking for a way to slow your own sacrifice.
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. | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | August 26, 2021 | 7 | 669c511e-d1f6-436b-a94e-79be8e6fb135 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside their statelier turns. But where those usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, the sound here is uncharacteristically weightless and eerily atmospheric. | Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside their statelier turns. But where those usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, the sound here is uncharacteristically weightless and eerily atmospheric. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Push the Sky Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17618-push-the-sky-away/ | Push the Sky Away | Push the Sky Away is the 15th official album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but it could almost be their first. After 30 years together, the band has effectively come full circle, having completed its evolution from untamed beast to rock dignitary and, via the fearsome alter-ego offshoot Grinderman, back again. Factor in the recent resignation of Mick Harvey (Cave's right hand man since their Boys Next Door days in the late 1970s), and the sudden deep-sixing of Grinderman (as a recording entity, at least), and the Bad Seeds' reliably black essence now more closely resembles a blank canvas.
Push the Sky Away scans as the Bad Seeds' post-Grinderman comedown album, to be filed alongside statelier turns like 1997's The Boatman's Call and 2001's No More Shall We Part. But where the Bad Seeds' mellow records usually find Cave in pensive, piano-man mode, Push the Sky Away presents an uncharacteristically weightless, eerily atmospheric sound; in lieu of crossover ballads like "Into My Arms" and "People Ain't No Good", we have foggy reveries built upon ominously rumbling bass lines, twitchy rhythmic tics, and hushed-voice intimations. It may not erupt with same force as the Bad Seeds' stormiest gestures, but the underlying menace fuelling it remains.
The approach bears the influence of Grinderman as much as the Bad Seeds' decidedly more raucous 2008 release, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. Though Grinderman was often seen as the Bad Seeds' wild child offspring, it was also a vehicle through which Cave and his increasingly prominent foil, Warren Ellis, could experiment with textures and loops (to the point of spawning a remix album). These production intricacies form the bedrock of Push the Sky Away, which is less a showcase for Bad Seeds' powerhouse prowess than a reconstructed fever-dream memory of it, transmuting the familiar into something foreign. There's a sense of the Bad Seeds expanding their sound and unlearning it at the same time. (Drummer Jim Sclavunos wins the Take One for the Team Award here, tempering his usual thunderous thrust for stragetically timed snare-rim taps and brushed-skin driftiness.)
The freer, more exploratory bent extends to Cave's lyric sheet. True to the album's desolate, dead-of-night air, his songs are less narratively focussed, more stream-of-consciousness haze, countering Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!'s gritty urban milieu with impressionistic images of mermaids and the sea that reinforce the sense of a mind floating away. Tellingly, Cave has said his writing for the album was inspired by "Googling curiosities," and his lyrical logic follows the same circuitous path as an extended, after-hours web-surfing session, bouncing between subjects profound and frivolous, indulging life-long obsessions and newfound, fleeting fascinations. Bad Seeds albums used to inspire you to reacquaint yourself with folk tales and the Old Testament; this one will have you brushing up on quantum physics, astronomy, and "Hannah Montana".
That last bit shouldn't come as a surprise: Over the past decade, Cave has shown a greater eagerness to interact with contemporary pop culture, from the Oprah shout-out on Grinderman's "Kitchenette" to the comically perverse Avril Lavigne fixation that formed a subplot in his 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. But where these namedrops have felt like humourous incongruities in Cave's fire-and-brimstone universe, Push the Sky Away straight-facedly acknowledges how modern phenomena like Wikipedia and Miley Cyrus hold as much sway over the populace as the Bible and Robert Johnson once did, while translating brooding ballads into text-speak and slang ("We No Who U R"). And where more recent Bad Seeds standouts like Abattoir Blues' "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" and Lazarus' "We Call Upon the Author" saw Cave writing songs about writing songs, Push the Sky Away goes one meta: The album's most elaborate track, "Jubilee Street", is answered by "Finishing Jubilee Street", a spartan, spoken-word account of a dream Cave had just after he completed work on the former.
For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another: each comes outfitted with an ominous opening salvo ("We No Who U R", "Mermaids"), an icy glare that thaws into an open-hearted address ("Wide Lovely Eyes", "We Real Cool"), and a scenery-chewing set piece ("Water's Edge", "Finishing Jubilee Street") that hearkens back to early Bad Seeds storytelling turns like "The Carny". (Fittingly, original bassist Barry Adamson rejoined the band following the album's recording.) The simmering tension of each side is eventually unleashed through a slow-boiling, show-stopping epic. The aforementioned "Jubilee Street" is built upon a repeated "Hey Joe"-like chord progression that, thanks to Ellis' mesmerizing violin lines, grows more grandiose with each passing cycle, reaching such dizzying heights that you almost forget you're listening to a song about a murdered prostitute. But even that pales in comparison to side two's colossal "Higgs Boson Blues", which begins as a solitary 3 a.m. strum in the vein of Neil Young's "On the Beach" but, over seven writhing minutes, ends up traversing the entirety of modern history, from "the missionary with his small pox and flu" to the birth of the Devil's music to the anticipated death of a certain teen-pop starlet who "floats in a swimming pool."
"Higgs Boson Blues" is named for the elementary particle whose discovery last year was hailed as the most significant breakthrough in contemporary physics, one that essentially provides the missing piece in explaining the structure of our entire universe. But its discovery after 50 years of intense research has also led to something of an existential crisis among physicists, who are now left with no theory to prove, and asking themselves, "What now?" One can imagine Nick Cave asking himself the same question as he entered his fourth decade fronting a deviant rock band that had seemingly mined every last shade of noir. But in this album's quietly defiant title-track denouement, he finds a renewed mission statement: "If you got everything and you don't want no more/ You've got to just keep on pushing, keep on pushing/ Push the sky away." Because when you can't see the sky, you can't see your limits. | 2013-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bad Seed Ltd. | February 15, 2013 | 8 | 669d0784-bd6a-4eef-9380-b59bc8c78e67 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
This prescient reissue delivers a crucial set of Nigerian songs that show the country absorbing and beaming back singular versions of disco, boogie, electro, and early rap. | This prescient reissue delivers a crucial set of Nigerian songs that show the country absorbing and beaming back singular versions of disco, boogie, electro, and early rap. | Various Artists: Doing It in Lagos: Boogie, Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22729-doing-it-in-lagos-boogie-pop-disco-in-1980s-nigeria/ | Doing It in Lagos: Boogie, Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria | When Nigerian soldiers stormed Fela Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic on February 18, 1977, they not only burned the compound to the ground, imprisoned Kuti, and threw his mother out of a window (she would later die from the injuries), but also altered the course of Nigerian music. For most of the decade, Fela’s Afrobeat ruled the country. But in the wake of this raid that placed the genre’s fiercest proponent behind bars, bands started to look away from the heavy percussion and politically conscious themes of Afrobeat and Afrocentric rock. Their ears instead turned more towards what was happening in the U.S.
Waves of reissues from the motherland act as a mirror darkly. Look for the roots of the blues or guitar heroes, and the likes of Ali Farka Touré and King Sunny Adé get introduced to the West. Fervor for muscular funk at the turn of the century led to a Fela renaissance and the awesome Nigeria 70 set. Now, as people obsess over the likes of William Onyeabor, the post-disco sound of boogie, as well as rubbery Reagan era synth-pop, the Soundways label presents Doing It in Lagos: Boogie Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria. It is as prescient a reissue as can be hoped for, delivering a crucial set of songs that show the country absorbing and beaming back singular versions of disco, boogie, electro, and early rap.
The title track comes courtesy of Hotline, who make a falsetto boast of “We are fearless/Don’t get near us” as the bass pops, tasers get triggered, and UFOs wobble all around it. Closer to Cameo and Parliament’s cartoonish cosmic funk than Fela’s Afrobeat, it’s loose-limbed and woozy enough to anticipate the sound of New Amerykah Part One. “Don’t Give Up” has the stop-start punk-funk feel of A Certain Ratio, with popping bass and dub effects that flare up at unexpected intervals. Lexy Mella’s “On the Air” programs the drum machine in such a way that it anticipates the skeletal groove of “Sign O’ the Times.”
A handful of Doing It in Lagos’ tracks—including the incessant, itchy wiggle of “Holiday Action,” the metallophone-laced slink of Terry Mackson’s “Distant Lover,” and the taut yet silken moves of Peter Abdul’s “Don’t You Know”—could be mistaken for sides of such early ’80s dance labels as Tabu, SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles Records), and Salsoul. This is no coincidence, as the liner notes explain, for these imprints were widely popular in the country. So much, in fact, that SOLAR opened a branch office in Lagos and modern soul bands like Shalamar, Skyy, and Rafael Cameron performed before packed crowds in Nigeria.
Some of the tracks emulate that surface slickness and clichés of the era, chanting about getting funky, having disco fever, dancing all night, and shaking your body. But listen closer and that same sense of power that Fela inspired in his countrymen comes across. Odion Iruoje’s “Identify With Your Root” conveys a message about heritage and pan-African pride delivered with a patter lifted from the Sugarhill Gang. He shouts out countries and adds that, no matter where you are in the world, “you’re still an African.”
And then there’s the undeniable ear candy of Oby Onyioha’s “Enjoy Your Life.” Set atop a gurgling, flanged-out boogie bass—with strings and horns added to the mix for good measure—Onyioha’s sweet styling brings to mind the likes of Teena Marie and Chaka Khan. “Have a ball/Baby it’s your life,” she purrs, “It’s no sin to enjoy your life… Get your chance now/Before you find it’s too late.” Onyioha conveys a sense of female empowerment with total joy. It might be the most honeyed iteration of carpe diem to be had on a Nigerian pop song, even if it isn’t delivered with the type of force that Fela wielded. | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Soundway | January 10, 2017 | 8.5 | 66ab1c1a-5e94-43ba-a26d-2b5718c31368 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Drummer Louis Cole’s sidelong blend of hard funk and soft pop—aided by guest spots from Thundercat and Brad Mehldau—remains delightfully sly and off-kilter. | Drummer Louis Cole’s sidelong blend of hard funk and soft pop—aided by guest spots from Thundercat and Brad Mehldau—remains delightfully sly and off-kilter. | Louis Cole: Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/louis-cole-time/ | Time | The mark of a great chord progression is a peculiar mixture of surprise and inevitability. On first listen, you find yourself confused by the way that one chord follows another, refusing to follow the well-trodden path: jumping when they should step and bounding when they should glide. Eventually, once the song has burned itself into your brain—once its course has remapped your own neural pathways—you’ll have trouble imagining a world where these curious patterns didn’t exist. But even then, even after no matter how many plays, that harmonic dodge-and-feint will still produce the tiniest frisson of wrongness. It’s among the sweetest dopamine hits that music is capable of producing.
Louis Cole’s instrument of choice is the drums, but he definitely knows his way around a killer set of changes. Time, his third album, is brimming with strange, counterintuitive progressions—chords that seem to slip sideways, tumbling into one another, jostling and pivoting just when you don’t expect. An unusual mixture of hard funk and soft pop, like Zapp and Burt Bacharach stuck in an elevator together, Cole's is a sly, jubilant sound; it makes good use of the way funk also thrives upon a sense of wrongness, a screw-faced delight at things gone awry.
Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label turns out to be a good home for Cole’s music. A falsetto singer and secret sentimentalist, he doesn’t often sound much like his labelmates, even if he has played with Thundercat, who returns the favor here on “Tunnels in the Air”; Dennis Hamm, Thundercat’s live keyboardist, also turns up, laying down a ripping piano solo on “Trying Not to Die.” But Cole’s gently twisted perspective fits FlyLo’s mischievous M.O. He’s got a squirrelly sense of humor and a barely veiled obsession with death. This is a guy who, seven years ago, in his early days of uploading DIY videos to YouTube, paired a lovely, sentimental instrumental called “Clouds” with stock footage of nuclear bombs going off. At times, he’s come dangerously close to looking like a novelty artist: His biggest viral hit to date is a lo-fi video—both the graphics and his getup could easily be mistaken for a cable-access leftover from the mid-1980s—called “Bank Account” in which he films himself in split screen, playing keys and drums, and singing, in his frictionless coo, “I don’t want to check my bank account.”
On Time, his off-kilter demeanor takes many forms. Album opener “Weird Part of the Night” is a charging squelch-fest sung in celebration of the workaholic night owl. The uptempo “Freaky Times” tackles a tried-and-tested trope, the sex jam loaded with double entendres, while indulging in both the silly (“Fantasies in my pantasies,” goes the refrain) and the bizarre (“Softer than a corpse whisper,” goes one of his come-ons). “When You’re Ugly,” the album’s crisp funky second song, contains the immortal advice: “When you’re ugly/No one wants to talk to you/When you’re ugly, there is something you can do, called/Fuck the world and be real cool.” Some of his gags are strictly musical: “After the Load Is Blown,” a bruised, end-of-the-relationship slow jam, just goes ahead and quotes Lenny Kravitz’s “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over.”
But many of the album’s most powerful moments come when the grin slips. You can hear it in the feather-light touches of “A Little Bit More Time,” a deathbed plea set to a 1960s easy-listening pastiche; you can hear it in “Real Life,” in which Coles’ bruising drum work squares off against a lightning-like solo from jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, all of it soothed by one of the album’s downiest choruses. And you can especially hear it in the record’s many ballads, like “Everytime,” a middle-school slow-dance number par excellence, or “Phone,” a gorgeous love song featuring some of the album’s most delightful chord changes, or the closing “Night,” another mortality-obsessed song in which he imagines remembering, in his last moments alive, a nighttime drive with his lover. For a guy who loves him some rascally grooves, there’s something almost shockingly unguarded about these witching-hour ruminations. Just as he doesn’t fake the funk, he doesn’t fake his feelings, either. As his sidelong chord changes suggest, he’s led primarily by his own weird muse. | 2018-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | August 16, 2018 | 7.6 | 66ac254b-f415-43a1-9c35-cc6d4d065b1e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon combines an interest in Karlheinz Stockhausen-style modernism with a love of metal, noise, and ambient drones. He's collaborated with members of Wolf Eyes and written for chamber groups, and on his latest album, he combines his interests seamlessly into music that throbs with snarling exuberance. | Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon combines an interest in Karlheinz Stockhausen-style modernism with a love of metal, noise, and ambient drones. He's collaborated with members of Wolf Eyes and written for chamber groups, and on his latest album, he combines his interests seamlessly into music that throbs with snarling exuberance. | Mario Diaz de Leon: The Soul Is the Arena | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20811-the-soul-is-the-arena/ | The Soul Is the Arena | If you don't follow classical music, it might surprise you to hear a living composer professing admiration for metal, noise, and ambient drones. But that's how things have been for decades now—going back to the early 1980s, when guitar-centric composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham started fusing underground rock with post-minimalism. Today, it's common for young conservatory talents to name-check alt-derived noise artists alongside modernists like Karlheinz Stockhausen.
In that respect, Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon is on-trend: the promotional material for his latest release of chamber pieces cites both Stockhausen as well the abrasion specialists in Wolf Eyes. (Diaz de Leon comes by the latter reference point honestly, having collaborated with group member Nate Young in a duo that goes by the name Standard Deviance One.) When he's not working in chamber-music mode, Diaz de Leon also sometimes goes by the moniker Oneirogen—a guise which finds him splitting his attention between an electric guitar and a synth setup, ultimately creating a wash of doomy chords and spacey soundscapes. It's a sound that can make sense on a Liturgy bill.
What makes Diaz de Leon stand out from his peers, though, is his ability to distill these influences into a balanced aesthetic. Plenty of people can write a one-off "amplified" piece for chamber musicians, but few artists have built a language as stable and rewarding as Diaz de Leon's. His first solo-composer album, Enter Houses Of, was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and showed him to be adept at weaving opulently distorted electronics with virtuoso acoustic-instrumental parts, written for players drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble. The noise throbbed with snarling exuberance; the woodwinds doled out haunting harmonies.
The Soul Is the Arena is Diaz de Leon's latest chamber-music album since Enter Houses Of, and it's both shorter and more all-encompassing. In three different pieces that collectively stretch just over 40 minutes, he gives listeners two riff-rollercoaster duos and a 20-minute, chamber-band essay of grim, beguiling beauty. The opener, "Luciform", is a duo between Diaz de Leon's electronics and flutist Claire Chase (a recent MacArthur "Genius Grant" awardee). Over the course of its 13-and-a-half minutes, Chase's flute sometimes often carries the melodic line, while the electronics swoop in big, sine-wave-surfing curves behind her. At other points, Chase's breathy sound is just a complement to the rampaging crunch of the composer's programming. The fast switches are what keep the piece interesting.
The second duo piece is the album's title track, and it asks for Joshua Rubin's bass clarinet to go into reed-squawk mode. (Rubin manages this risky, awkward move with impressive grace.) Later on, the instrumentalist and the pre-engineered sounds partner up for a memorably precise and glitchy passage. The work packs a hell of a lot into nine-and-a-half minutes—so much so that you might need a little bit of a breather. Diaz de Leon has you covered on that count with the album-closing "Portals Before Dawn" (on which he plays synths alongside a sextet of instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble). The composer tried a similar strategy to close out Enter Houses Of, but this longer, more gradually surging and receding composition gets more out of the composer's ambient fascinations. Diaz de Leon hasn't put out an uninteresting release yet, but this compact and wide-ranging album is now the best introduction to his refined feel for instrumental extremity. | 2015-07-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-23T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Denovali | July 23, 2015 | 8 | 66b2ada0-d03e-47da-8626-1049ad94d35a | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter’s latest EP refines her stylish, reflective pop but leans on too uniform of a palette. | The Colombian-Canadian singer-songwriter’s latest EP refines her stylish, reflective pop but leans on too uniform of a palette. | Tei Shi: Bad Premonition EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tei-shi-bad-premonition-ep/ | Bad Premonition EP | Tei Shi’s first two albums wore their love for 1980s and ’90s pop and R&B on their sleeves. Moving from sugary, Britney-inflected pop to glistening ballads, the artist born Valerie Teicher synthesized her influences into charming, occasionally experimental pop delivered in a breathy, luminous soprano. Since an acrimonious split from former label Downtown three years ago, Teicher has entered a phase of reinvention. On 2020’s independently released Die 4 Ur Luv EP, she leaned into energetic dance songs that occasionally spun their wheels. On Bad Premonition, she refines her approach. It’s a solid if relatively slight set that displays all-too-fleeting glimpses of her songwriting and vocal strengths.
The new EP’s six songs breeze by, outfitted with straightforward hooks built around Teicher’s fluttering vocals. “Grip” is the best, a sleek statement of self-worth that pulses with a satisfying charge. “Thought this shit was free and you got me cheap,” she sings. “But it gets ugly when you don’t play clean.” As on Die 4 Ur Luv, many lyrics touch on themes of asserting self-worth and could double as jabs at the music industry. During the downtempo “Mona Lisa,” one of Teicher’s loveliest songs to date, chiming keys and curlicuing synths accent a blunt message. “You’re so full of shit and you know it,” she sings in a sweetened falsetto. On the title track, she ratchets up the drama, describing an impending disaster she feels powerless to stop. She yearns to be “at the right place at the right time,” a frustratingly familiar refrain for independent artists that Teicher warps into her own surefooted pop song.
A few misfires stall the energy. Clanging synths and clicking, syncopated drums flatten “Familiar,” an otherwise atmospheric song about searching for an elusive sense of identity. “Bad Premonition” builds on similarly sparse elements—metronomic synth lines, a stomping beat—but becomes too repetitive by the time its delicate bridge finally strips away the clutter. The sameness undercuts Teicher’s strong lyrics and dexterous vocals. The fidgety, bilingual “¿Quién Te Manda?” features bassy, Y2K-style co-production from Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, but it closes with an overlong outro that feels like subtraction by addition.
When Teicher deviates from her usual palette of metallic synth, Bad Premonition soars. The wistful standout “Color” casts breakbeat pop in a flood of sunlight. “Is it safe on the other side?” she asks on the song’s blissed-out chorus. “’Cause I feel like I died/In a ray of, in a ray of light.” Invoking Madonna’s late-’90s touchstone as much as the afterlife, Teicher blossoms the idea of being a small part of a bigger universe into a radiant song that perfectly suits her featherlight voice. Though her stylish, tasteful pop doesn’t always achieve the same highs, “Color” underlines Teicher’s delicately emotive power to induce a head rush of longing in an instant. | 2023-03-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-21T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | The Orchard | March 21, 2023 | 6.6 | 66b6ff26-86ac-49d3-90af-8501eda711a2 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Sleek but not too sleek for slap bass, the Brooklyn quartet’s third album is a dispatch from the gray area between stoicism and comedy. | Sleek but not too sleek for slap bass, the Brooklyn quartet’s third album is a dispatch from the gray area between stoicism and comedy. | Office Culture: Big Time Things | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/office-culture-big-time-things/ | Big Time Things | For a cheekily suave album from a band named Office Culture, Big Time Things is pretty down-to-earth. Where 2019’s A Life of Crime was a collection of vignettes from the graffitied alleys and grimy back rooms of a hard-knock city, the Brooklyn quartet’s latest finds poetry in the benign challenges of normal adulthood. Over sophistipop arrangements peppered with strings and horns, singer-songwriter (and occasional Pitchfork contributor) Winston Cook-Wilson tells stories so acutely ruffled that they take on an ironic liminality. Though the band can sometimes come across a bit disgruntled, the album takes on a flippant, carefree attitude. It would make a charming soundtrack for a rundown lounge with velvet walls and stiff pours.
A weary, sardonic humor underlines Cook-Wilson’s writing on Big Time Things. Past Office Culture albums were more plot-driven, but here the lyrics lean into Seinfeldian normalcy. “Things were bad then/But they’re better now,” Cook-Wilson sings on the wry, anticlimactic chorus of “Things Were Bad.” “Elegance” contrasts nuanced, self-deprecating verses with a chorus themed around altruism and simplicity, an emotional duality that hovers above the record. The most memorable moment comes on the title track: “Stop, I feel nervous/I smell rust…Wondering if it’s you I should trust,” he repeats in a deadpan refrain. “Seems like big time things/Are bothering both of us.” The hook calls to mind an uncomfortable dinner with a romantic partner, quietly knowing something is wrong but playing dumb to avoid conflict. The tonal ambiguity of Cook-Wilson’s delivery allows the song to sound at once dejected and affirming.
Steely Dan is the most obvious touchstone for the cosmopolitan, freewheeling instrumentals on Big Time Things, as well as Kaputt-era Destroyer, late-1960s Scott Walker, and even Haruomi Hosono’s Pacific. On “A Word,” chintzy bass slaps complement shuffling drums and loungey horns. The warm strings on “Little Reminders” flesh out a complex, deconstructed waltz. Opener “Suddenly” gradually morphs from blocky funk into swirling baroque pop. “You were a road I could travel on/Till opportunity knocked at the gate,” Cook-Wilson croons over sinewy violin and cello before the arrangement disintegrates into a wiry guitar solo. It plays like the hypothetical product of a seasoned jazz band operating within the drab surreality that defines Paul Thomas Anderson films like Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.
At times, the group can sound like they’re trolling by writing cuts this smooth. Over the course of the album’s 44 minutes, Cook-Wilson and his collaborators blend compassion and frustration so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell whether they’re about to start laughing or crying. Office Culture is a fixture in a sphere of bookish New York City rock bands like Adeline Hotel and Wilder Maker; their lackadaisical, almost wine-drunk disposition is what sets them apart. Landing in the gray area between stoicism and comedy, Big Time Things offers the clearest snapshot yet of their fascinating dichotomy. | 2022-11-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Northern Spy | November 25, 2022 | 7.6 | 66b87464-fbde-4631-ada1-7375b59869a3 | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
The post-hardcore sludge-punk trio Metz have spent the last five years becoming the most brutalizing band in Toronto. For their debut, they've distilled their set-list standards into 29 minutes of pure but artfully rendered chaos. | The post-hardcore sludge-punk trio Metz have spent the last five years becoming the most brutalizing band in Toronto. For their debut, they've distilled their set-list standards into 29 minutes of pure but artfully rendered chaos. | Metz: Metz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17170-metz/ | Metz | The biggest lie about punk rock is that anyone can do it. Sure, anyone can do crap punk rock, but there is a fine to art to taking a music fueled by destructive impulses and building it to last. Toronto power trio Metz played their first show in late 2007, and since then, they've effectively applied Malcolm Gladwell's theory about the Beatles-- i.e., that it takes a good 10,000 hours of practice to become them-- to a subgenre not exactly known for its studiousness: post-hardcore sludge-punk. That five-year gap between their live and recorded debuts is not a product of laziness, but rather precision; while Metz quickly established themselves as the most brutalizing band in the city, the process of translating that essence into a record that would sound every bit as devastating and disorienting outside the confines of a circle pit was more protracted and deliberate. After a couple of small-run 7"'s, and a series of sessions helmed by producers including Owen Pallett/Dusted associate Leon Taheny, Crystal Castles engineer Alex Bonenfant, and Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck, they've distilled their set-list standards into 29 minutes of pure but artfully rendered chaos.
From Cloud Nothings' In Utero'd pop-punk to Japandroids' Superchunk-gone-Springsteen heroics to the Men's My Bloody Dinosaur overdrive, 2012 has seen no lack of artists revamping 1990s-vintage indie rock with a more anthemic accessibility and better mastering jobs. Metz pull off the same trick, but work with more angular, insoluble materials: namely, the muscular menace of the Jesus Lizard and the relentless, power-drill discord of Drive Like Jehu. Metz songs tend to start with an isolated element-- Hayden Menzies' thundering, hammer-of-the-gods drum salvos, Alex Edkins' solitary guitar screech-- that immediately triggers a ticking time-bomb countdown for the moment when the band erupts in unison. You can see the storm coming from a mile atway, and yet, when Menzies, Edkins, and bassist Chris Slorach launch into the merciless, firestorm battering of "Negative Space" or the wrecking-ball swing of "Knife in the Water", it still startles like a sneak attack.
But while it ably captures the band's ferocity, Metz is less a recreation of the band's live shows than a surveillance-video document of it, one that's been edited and manipulated to maximize dynamic impact. There's a surface graininess that amplifies the corrosive qualities of the band's sound and the strep-throat rawness of Edkins' voice, but also serves to accentuate some of the more surprising elements in the mix-- like the ascendant "ahhhhh" harmonies that provide a two-second respite from the village-pillaging assault of "Headache". The title of that song and others like "Rats", "Nausea", and "Sad Pricks" provide a handy summation of Edkins' bleak lyrical concerns, but that misanthropy never weighs the album down. Instead, like a pre-fame Kurt Cobain, Edkins channels his anxieties into manic release with a certain insolent swagger: In "Wasted", you get a glimpse of what Nirvana would've sounded like had they recorded their follow-up to Bleach for Touch and Go instead of Geffen.
Though unafraid to temper their inherent ugliness with piano taps and tambourine shakes, Metz stop short of embracing traditional pop-song melody. But they do understand pop-song economy, carefully arranging their riffs, rhythms, and screams in two-to-three-minute bursts that still feel immediate and catchy in the absence of proper sing-along hooks. Live, "Wet Blanket"'s psych-damaged fuzz-bass breakdown often gets stretched out, "You Made Me Realise"-style; on record, it emerges as a tightly wound beast, with a white-knuckled finale that craftily blurs the line between the band's natural, primal energy and studio-tweaked trickery. Recent history is rife with home-recording prodigies who get thrust onto the stage before learning how to perform, or promising live acts who rush-release their albums so that they have something to sell at the merch table, or at least a Soundcloud link to pimp. But while evidence suggests great concerts and great records are becoming mutually exclusive ideals for aspiring artists, Metz prove that, with a little patience, you can still have it both ways. | 2012-10-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 10, 2012 | 8.5 | 66c2bf07-7591-4482-ba6e-3fab784987ce | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Scandinavian synthesizer maven pays dusts off dozens of arcane vintage machines in an all-hardware studio recording meant to summon the spirit of bygone circuitry. | The Scandinavian synthesizer maven pays dusts off dozens of arcane vintage machines in an all-hardware studio recording meant to summon the spirit of bygone circuitry. | Lindstrøm: On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lindstrom-on-a-clear-day-i-can-see-you-forever/ | On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever | Robert Moog’s mid-century, tinker-friendly analog synthesizers were originally “hammered out in the pub” and “assembled out of junk,” write Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco in Analogue Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. The dream was to make sounds like nothing else on Earth, which could be then be made by absolutely anyone on Earth.
But by the 1980s, the dream was fading. Moog’s instruments were, in the end, whimsical and unwieldy. Bigger companies made simpler, more powerful machines. The Memorymoog, in 1982, would be the last thing Moog made for decades, and it was a polyphonic powerhouse. But it lacked touch sensitivity, which meant it basically just played loud, and its presets varied wildly; users switching from machine to machine had to pray the strings didn’t sound like brass. In a Hail Mary pass to stay solvent, Moog salesman David Van Koevering, a former evangelical preacher, repackaged a hundred or so unsold models as “Sanctuary Synthesizers,” added a bunch of pious patches, and sold the lot to Christian music makers. Bankruptcy still arrived.
Then a cult arose around these wooden boxes of wires. Devotees turned the Moog, like relics of the houses of Korg, ARP, and Roland, into a status symbol. Original Moogs are now incredibly expensive, both in terms of cost and the time it takes to learn to use and maintain them. They look great among the fiddle-leaf fig trees on your frenemy’s feed. They are fetish objects at last, prized more for what they are than what they can do.
None of this is Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s fault. Over the course of his 16-year-career he’s floated to the front of the third-wave analog revival, lifting the wow and flutter of predecessors like Stereolab and Faze Action and sending them into a Scandinavian disco jam-band dimension. Tracks like “Closing Shot,” “Blinded by the LEDs,” and of course the deathless “I Feel Space” demonstrated a command of form and function. Clearly he’s mastered his machinery: On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever arrives in the wake of his performance at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, commissioned on the occasion of the art space’s 50th anniversary and conscripting untold riches to procure some 30 hard-to-source synthesizers and drum machines.
One of them, a Memorymoog, as it happens, forms the foundation of the new album’s title track. He dusted one off and explored what he could do with it in 10 minutes, then played it back in reverse while improvising on the Fender Rhodes; a little perfuming with a Hammond through a wah-wah and some spring-reverbs, and, well, the sum of the parts is the sum of the track. The genius of, for example, those old Boards of Canada interludes was how they dissipated before their mystery ran out. “On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever” instead hopes for meaning through repetition, exploiting the precariousness of its electrical pulses as they stream through metal effects units. A rumble about eight minutes in scared the devil out of my cats, but soon enough they were snoring again in a puddle of sun.
The second track, “Really Deep Snow,” is anchored by a covetable Roland SH-101 and administered by various ARPs, Korgs, and Wurlitzers. It’s another almost 10-minute improv, whose main chords pay tribute to a psalm Lindstrøm heard in church as a child. Its vibe is certainly more Halloween (2018), though, a reincarnation of unholy terror as the anxiety of influence. John Carpenter was, without a doubt, the patron saint of arpeggiated epics; “Really Deep Snow” is a pious tribute, if one is needed.
Which can’t be said of the third track, titled by a lousy joke that feels, well, profane. How about we not appropriate the sacrament of an African American spiritual promising biblical deliverance from slavery in the service of a hardware pun? How about we not “Swing Low, Sweet LFO,” with its plinky Pianet and sugary Prophet 6 sweeps, less offensive than Moby’s appropriation of spirituals for car commercials but also, unfortunately, very much not as memorable?
Still, as in Christianity, redemption comes in the end. “As If No One Is Here” reincarnates a tone poem by Jean Sibelius, itself based on the Finnish national epic Kalevala, which tells the story of a swan being hunted in the realm of the dead. And that’s exactly what it sounds like: a murky suspension of endangered grace. A Roland TR-77 drips like water off stalactites into pools of Yamaha CS-60 chords, deeper than they first appear. Halfway through, acoustic cello and violin cut through like slits of moonlight and everything stills without settling down. Korg MS20 and ARP Solina Strings summon grimmer harmonies. There are echoes of Eno and Badalamenti, though “As If No One Is Here” feels looser than either would allow; perhaps Lindstrøm is better at mixing inspiration than at improvisation new forms.
Nonetheless, in moments, On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever is proof that there’s reason to have faith in these elite objects, these inventions of the dead that still somehow call out to us. Ignore the yuppie collectors who think that owning something improves their worth, or that hoarding these rarities will somehow save them from the grave. Lindstrøm may have timed these tracks to fit on a vinyl record, another sign of putting material concerns over creative vision, but there’s a good 15 minutes of so of beauty within those grooves that just might make a believer out of you.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | October 11, 2019 | 6.6 | 66d40a9e-7e23-4b0f-8b3b-98d899fe1373 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The supergroup’s cosmic concerto features lush, lilting instrumentals unfurling from Stevens’ tightly-wound pop choruses, though its glut of sound and ideas becomes wearisome. | The supergroup’s cosmic concerto features lush, lilting instrumentals unfurling from Stevens’ tightly-wound pop choruses, though its glut of sound and ideas becomes wearisome. | Sufjan Stevens / Nico Muhly / Bryce Dessner / James McAlister: Planetarium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stevens-muhly-dessner-mcalister-planetarium/ | Planetarium | Planetarium began in 2011 when Muziekgebouw Eindhoven in the Netherlands commissioned a new work from composer Nico Muhly. He, in turn, brought in the National’s Bryce Dessner and Sufjan Stevens, who invited collaborator James McAlister to contribute beats. It was last year that Stevens and McAlister revisited these performances in a studio setting, building them out to this 76-minute, seventeen-track album. What results is an outsized project whose concept is worn loosely. Each track is named for a celestial entity, and most thematically evoke their namesake through mythic associations—“Venus” twists lore out of summer-camp lust (“Crazed nymphomania/Touch me if touching’s no sin”), while “Mars” considers the relationship between war and love (“I’m the producer/I’m the god of war/I reside in every creature”). Whether through Greek and Roman mythology or contemporary practices of astrology, the stories we build out into our incomprehensible cosmos become a way of accessing our analogously sprawling inner lives; starting from this notion, Planetarium’s lyrics ricochet from micro to macro focus—not infrequently at the expense of clarity.
Given that Stevens’ own work can race between styles, the album feels musically familiar to his catalogue, though Muhly’s arrangements lend distinctive muscle to its orchestral underpinnings. Songs are lush, lilting instrumentals unfurling from Stevens’ tightly-wound pop choruses; Dessner’s polished guitar adds a stadium-sized layer that nods more to the rock opera than the sci-fi soundtrack. But some digressions are less effective than others. About four-and-a-half minutes into “Jupiter,” for example, a cinematic interlude of piano, strings, and trombone fades, and Stevens’ voice interjects, processed such that it feels very intentionally like a radio communiqué from a vintage spacecraft: “Father of light, father of death/Give us your wisdom, give us your breath/Summoner says that Jupiter is the loneliest planet.” Stevens is no stranger to this practice of gravely summoning opaque imagery, but the outer-space literalism of his delivery makes this evocation of the isolation inherent in mortality feel light years more distant than usual, which, as far as I can tell, was not the desired effect.
And despite the occasional urgency of the narratives drawn here, Planetarium is sonically luxurious to the point of sometimes sounding bloated (as such big-ticket pop-classical commissions are wont to be). The four musicians’ amalgam of prog rock, Laurie Anderson-indebted angles, and blockbuster soundtracks nods to a now-retro futurism, but renders it in a smooth, expensive-feeling HD, out of step in an unproductive way. When these songs devolve into clattering piles of space-age electronics, or Stevens messes around with vocal processing and repeating phrases until they become droning refrains, it feels like affect without experimentation—a project that’s interested in styling itself after something avant-garde without much of the curiosity that can make such messes somehow inspiring.
Even with a certain kind of over-the-top Bush-years indie aesthetic long-shelved, excess has worked well for Stevens. His music has a wide-eyed, ecstatic quality that energizes the listener, but here it becomes tiresome. Instead, it’s the slowest and least cluttered instrumentals that feel here the most effectively expansive, capturing the scope of the quartet’s chosen themes without collapsing beneath symbolism and meaning-making. “Sun” gently builds up from a series of uncertain notes to feel unflinchingly hopeful, and the crisp instrumentation of the first passage of “Earth” is a skillful marriage of styles. Singles like the album closer “Mercury,” in which Stevens’ untreated vocals soar above a simple, glistening pop structure, are lovely in their own right, but never quite reconcile with the darker textures found in Muhly’s compositions.
Much of the press narrative around this album has centered the idea that these immense cosmic themes have become increasingly relevant in the last five years of global tumult. Perhaps it’s because of the lack of a center to all this big-question reaching, or perhaps it’s because of its absurd detours, but I found much of Planetarium difficult to get close to. By contrast, an album like Stevens’ excellent 2015 Carrie and Lowell, written after these songs were first composed, can approximate the universal through a series of images that feel both violently proximal and achingly vast. It may make more sense to start with what appears deceptively small: to plumb myth from everyday detail, rather than projecting humanity onto myths. | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Electronic / Experimental | 4AD | June 13, 2017 | 6 | 66d6064e-419d-4da5-8a66-c997b2052d18 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
Though a sense of doom lurks at the heart of the venerable band’s eighth album, they remain determined to keep classic guitar-pop alive by slyly twisting and expanding the form. | Though a sense of doom lurks at the heart of the venerable band’s eighth album, they remain determined to keep classic guitar-pop alive by slyly twisting and expanding the form. | The New Pornographers: In the Morse Code of Brake Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-new-pornographers-in-the-morse-code-of-brake-lights/ | In the Morse Code of Brake Lights | Ever since Chuck Berry motorvated over the hill in “Maybellene,” cars have been a shorthand for freedom in rock’n’roll. The New Pornographers flip this axiom on its head on their eighth album, In the Morse Code of Brake Lights, where all sense of liberation is undercut by a suspicion that whoever is behind the wheel may be headed toward danger.
A sense of doom lurks at the heart of Brake Lights, providing connective tissue between its 11 barbed songs and darkening the album’s sunniest moments. As the work of a collective determined to keep classic guitar-pop alive by slyly twisting and expanding the form, Brake Lights has no shortage of colorful melodies, yet the hooks rarely feel bright, certainly not when compared to the incandescent rush of 2017’s Whiteout Conditions.
Such a shift in tone is deliberate, a reflection of changes within the New Pornographers as well as the culture at large. Always the group’s unofficial leader, A.C. Newman now stands as its lone songwriter and producer. Busy with family obligations, bassist John Collins decided not to share production duties with Newman this time around, while the mercurial Dan Bejar opted to sit out, save a lyric or two. Bejar’s absence has the inevitable side effect of straightening out the group’s sound, but the bigger change on Brake Lights lies in the New Pornographers’ retreat from the bombast of 2014’s Brill Bruisers and the percolating Krautrock rhythms and New Wave sheen of Whiteout Conditions. Stripped of such excesses, the band seems harder and tougher than they have in a while, maybe since the days of Twin Cinema.
A lot has changed since 2005, not the least being a global political lurch toward the right. Newman appears to address the turmoil of Trump’s America throughout Brake Lights: The narrator of “Colossus of Rhodes” sorts through the wreckage of a break-in but still believes in salvation; “Higher Beam” laments that “deep in the culture of fear, we all hate living here”; references to dead malls and cold wars are rampant. Despite these charged phrases, it’s difficult to discern any distinct political position in these songs, because Newman resists concrete narratives. Words pile upon each other, slowing down just enough to allow a certain line to linger; it’s as if he’s writing puzzles to counteract the force of his melodies.
Perhaps Newman’s lyrics are elusive, but enough images catch hold to create a lasting impression. In the Morse Code of Brake Lights feels emotionally direct in a way that’s foreign to New Pornographers, the result of Newman stripping the group down to its foundation and then building back up with the assistance of the string quartet Strength of Materials. When the guitar amps are cranked, it sometimes can be difficult to distinguish the sawing strings from analog synthesizers, but that only emphasizes how densely saturated the album is. The songs are propelled by a giant backbeat and sustained by soaring melodies, but they’re surrounded by a cavalcade of echoing harmonies, carnivalesque keyboards and, on occasion, a ripe guitar riff.
At the center of all the tumult is A.C. Newman and Neko Case, the pair who have wound up as the New Pornographers’ joint frontpeople. By now, their complementary styles are familiar—Case channels her passion with melodramatic flair, Newman is her wry, plaintive tonic—but far from tired. Each vocalist wrings out the confusion, desperation, and fear of the album’s darkest moments, adding shape and meaning to songs designed not to expose their secrets so easily. Case, in particular, has a knack for transforming elliptical tunes into urgent drama—in her hands, “Colossus of Rhodes” plays like an anthem—but Newman lends vulnerability to the delicate strains of “You Won’t Need Those Where You’re Going.” Still, what pulls the album into focus is their vocal interplay. Case and Newman trade lines, finish each other’s thoughts, reveal the unspoken meanings of the songs; they’re old friends who find sustenance in each other’s presence. The essential humanity at the heart of this relationship offsets the dread that flows throughout In the Morse Code of Brake Lights, and gently leads the record toward something resembling hope.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Collected Works / Concord | October 2, 2019 | 7.4 | 66d79c8c-68fc-49b8-b184-fcea543c439c | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The PC Music mastermind’s debut solo album is a 49-song extravaganza of sketches, covers, and fully realized pop songs that purports to reveal the inner workings of his creative method. | The PC Music mastermind’s debut solo album is a 49-song extravaganza of sketches, covers, and fully realized pop songs that purports to reveal the inner workings of his creative method. | A. G. Cook: 7G | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-g-cook-7g/ | 7G | The PC Music philosophy boils down to two things. One: Normal people can be pop stars. Two: Avoid the middle ground at all costs. Pop music becomes extreme music in the hands of PC Music’s chief architect, A. G. Cook, whose penchant for artifice has yielded concepts like QT, the fictional pop star with a fictional energy drink to promote. So it comes as a surprise that on his debut solo album, A. G. Cook strips away the glossy packaging. On 7G—a 49-track collection of songs, sketches, cover versions, and studio experiments—he hands us the keys to the studio and invites us to take a look around.
Cook’s skills as a songwriter, producer, and A&R have taken PC Music from the fringes to the main stage in the seven years since the London collective was founded. Their exuberant, abrasive tunes attracted attention for hoovering up all kinds of music usually dismissed as naff, cheesy, or empty-headed—subgenres like hardstyle, nightcore, and ’90s Europop—and polishing them as bright as a Jeff Koons balloon dog. Dismissed by some as ironic or parodic, the whole enterprise has ended up as a foundational influence on the current strand of hyperpop bubbling up at the limits of the mainstream, including neon-brushed characters like Dorian Electra, Rina Sawayama, and 100 gecs, who credit PC Music as one of their biggest influences.
Cook has released music through many aliases (Life Sim, DJ Warlord, numerous PC Music collaborations like QT and Lipgloss Twins) but under his own name, he is best known for his work as an executive producer, notably on Charli XCX’s recent run of mixtapes and albums. 7G takes a magnifying glass to this strand of his career, breaking down his work as a pop songwriter and pointing to his diverse (and sometimes unexpected) influences, from Squarepusher to the Strokes. The 49 tracks on 7G are divided into seven “discs,” although there’s no physical version of the album. (The title feels immaterial too—a wink to our high-speed future, with possible conspiratorial overtones.) Each disc takes a different sound or effect as its theme: drums, guitar, piano, spoken word, extreme vocals, and, most characteristically, supersaw and Nord, a beloved line of Swedish synthesizers. Supersaw, the waveform created by Roland for its JP-8000 synthesizer, is recognizable as the sound of trance, as well as in the fizzing melody lines that cut through PC Music confections like Hannah Diamond’s “Every Night.” And against the lemon-sharp supersaw is the soft-as-cream Nord, used by Cook as dreamy cushioning for his Auto-Tuned collaborators.
As an archival collection, 7G attempts to show Cook’s creative process from various angles—cross-sections of works in progress, from half-baked ideas to fine-tuned pop nuggets—even though the instrument-based taxonomy yields some strange sequences, with scrappy experiments followed by full-tilt anthems. Some tracks are simple sketches: “No Yeah” is a 54-second tone-poem of whispered vocals and “Drum Solo” is just that. Others offer clues to the stages of evolution that Cook’s material passes through on the way to becoming a hit: The breathily arpeggiated “Idyll” incorporates a shape-shifting riff that’s also been used by Cook’s alias Life Sim and on Charli XCX’s “Track 10.”
Some of the best bits are more like volatile lab experiments to be handled with rubber gloves: “Waldhammer,” for instance, captures what happens when you pour a test tube of Beethoven into a bubbling vat of white noise, while the digital mirage of “Note Velocity” sounds like an encounter between Steve Reich and the impossible genre of black MIDI. A cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1968 psych-pop single “Crimson and Clover” pits guitars against supersaws in a Weezer vs. Scooter deathmatch; no one survives.
Scattered throughout are some fully realized compositions, complete with melodies, hooks, and intricate arrangements. “Dust” opens with ear-scraping horror chords before mutating into stompy sparklepop histrionics. “Life Speed” is a 150 BPM lap of Mario Kart, careening through checkpoints and leaving glittering smoke in its wake. “Lil Song,” a collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never, floats along like a lullaby. The 2-step gem “Show Me What” shines the spotlight on L.A.’s Cecile Believe and her glitched-out melisma, while chopped-up vocals from PC Music original Hannah Diamond are splattered across the IDM vistas of “Acid Angel.” Outliers all, these not-quite bangers feel a bit restrained, as if they didn’t qualify for the final sprinkling of magic dust that turns a studio sketch into an all-out pop epic. (It’s likely that Cook is still incubating a full album of the latter; last August he took the mic on “Lifeline,” a jacked-up power ballad that doesn’t feature on 7G.)
Elsewhere, a handful of cover versions transform megawatt rock hits into scruffy garage-band jams, as if Cook & co. had frittered away a few empty studio hours by learning other people’s songs. And what rehearsal session hasn’t been brightened by a successful stab at “Today” or “Beetlebum”? Even a confirmed avant-gardist can appreciate the comfort blanket of an old MTV2 staple. The “guitar” disc contains several echoes of this impulse, via washed-out pop-punk (“Undying”) and an “unplugged” rendition of Cook’s 2016 single “Superstar.”
Other covers fall closer to home, including a faithful version of Charli XCX’s “Official” and a fist-pumping take on Sia’s “Chandelier” featuring Caroline Polachek, whose own experiments with artifice—particularly the way she’s trained her own voice to reproduce the glitchy textures of Auto-Tune—have made her a natural ally to PC Music’s cyborg mission. When Polachek first visited Cook’s London studio in 2017, she was taken aback by his “insane dedication” to following through on extreme ideas; that day, he was mixing a note-for-note cover of Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker.” The scale and intensity of Cook’s ambitions are laid bare on this outsized collection, a glimpse at the whirring cogs beneath hyperpop’s pristine casing.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PC Music | August 13, 2020 | 7.3 | 66d7e6b3-3d8e-4c20-a3e3-0264965757f6 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The Canadian singer-songwriter uses the concept album to recreate the quietly stirring scenes of a dead romance. The Neon Skyline unfolds into a wistful, funny, and heartbreaking world of its own. | The Canadian singer-songwriter uses the concept album to recreate the quietly stirring scenes of a dead romance. The Neon Skyline unfolds into a wistful, funny, and heartbreaking world of its own. | Andy Shauf: The Neon Skyline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andy-shauf-the-neon-skyline/ | The Neon Skyline | Andy Shauf writes songs full of drinking and dancing, deep conversation and inside jokes, close friends and old flames—and he’s having a miserable time. Since his 2009 debut, the soft-spoken singer-songwriter has grown increasingly adept at telling stories from the vantage of the next morning’s hangover: plagued by regret, lingering on moments of unease stitched through an otherwise pleasant evening. Like Phoebe Bridgers, he incorporates bits of dialogue into his lyrics that illustrate not just how his characters speak but also how they really feel about each other. Like Jens Lekman, he accompanies himself with hushed, breezy soft-rock that can betray the intensity of his thoughts. Some of his best choruses are wordless refrains, the sound of singing along without knowing what to say.
Shauf’s new concept album The Neon Skyline takes place over the span of one night, as did his last solo record, 2016’s The Party. The story goes like this: Our narrator heads to a bar where he hears that his ex is back in town. From there, he spirals through the course of their relationship from young love to jealous arguments to dreams of starting over. He eventually runs into her and they go their separate ways. But by this point, late in the album, you’ve learned that reconciliation was never the point. In the climactic “Thirteen Hours,” Shauf drifts through a flashback that doesn’t focus on the fight that brought out their true nature, or the injury that landed one of them in the hospital. Instead, the key lyric is about a simple facial expression that suggested how things could never be the same again.
These are subtle scenes to hinge a narrative on, especially one as simple as this. Deeply earnest but wary of dipping into melodrama, Shauf gravitates toward the quietly stirring realizations you’d find in a Raymond Carver story. There is no irony, little closure, and often no moral at the end. He’s now in his early 30s, more than a decade removed from an early adulthood spent playing Christian pop-punk, and he has updated his songwriting to reflect precisely the kinds of social situations that keep polite, seemingly well-adjusted adults awake at night. The mood—wistfulness giving way to self-deprecation, deep insight cut with awful puns—is both familiar and endearing.
The most affecting songs arrive during the album’s mid-section, when a polite question about a friend’s kid in “Living Room” turns into a hallucinogenic vision quest about death and reincarnation and living out our parents’ mistakes. The ambling folk music—which Shauf plays entirely by himself on piano, guitar, woodwinds, and beyond—dims and intensifies to suggest a change in setting. When he sings about an intimate story transporting him into someone else’s home, you feel like you’re there with him.
For all Shauf’s expertise as a writer and arranger, the quality of his music that stands out is his gentle, fluttering vocal affectation. Upon first listen, I was certain he was Scottish. He’s actually from Regina, Saskatchewan and just so happens to pronounce the name “Charlie” in a way that sounds closer to “shoreline.” He cracks a good joke about this in the jaunty “Try Again,” where his narrator approximates a British accent to a response of bewilderment: “What was that supposed to be?” Like any good storyteller, he knows when to punch things up—you could play a drinking game with the number of times he mentions characters laughing at each other. But he also sounds a good deal lighter than he did on The Party, as the story of The Neon Skyline calls for a voice that can drift from bar to bar, mood to mood. How sad can you be when the bartender knows what you want without asking and the jukebox has your favorite song?
The Neon Skyline doesn’t require deep investment in its narrative to enjoy. Still, the closer you listen, the more rewarding it becomes. Shauf is growing increasingly masterful at casting a spotlight on tiny moments that tend to get overlooked in stories about relationships. In “Try Again,” a loaded misunderstanding provides one of the album’s best scenes: “I miss this,” she says, touching his coat; “I miss you too,” he responds; “I was talking about the coat,” she clarifies. The record ends with a similarly subdued revelation, as the narrator allows himself a brief fantasy about how things could have played out differently between them. The thought is momentarily thrilling, and the music is equally smokey and romantic, until he cuts himself off: “Oh, I’m already bored.” He’s learning that there’s a whole world out there—new people to meet, other stories to tell, more nights to regret.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | January 30, 2020 | 7.9 | 66dac3da-c17f-4c24-a899-2061efd717a0 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Singer Michael Kiwanuka’s new album* *is a sprawling soul opus full of longing and self-assessment. It's a bittersweet offering, growing more melancholy as it plays. | Singer Michael Kiwanuka’s new album* *is a sprawling soul opus full of longing and self-assessment. It's a bittersweet offering, growing more melancholy as it plays. | Michael Kiwanuka: Love & Hate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21886-love-hate/ | Love & Hate | If you love hard enough, you’ll experience some sort of heartbreak. It’s just a thing that happens, and it doesn’t matter how many dates you enjoy or how many roses you buy. Some people will simply leave you in limbo—with lingering pain, unresolved questions and mounds of regret to sort through. It’s this same fog that permeates Michael Kiwanuka’s new album, Love & Hate, a sprawling soul opus full of longing and self-assessment. The singer sounds perplexed through its entirety, and his voice—a throaty wail the likes of Otis Redding—teeters between hope and hopelessness, perseverance and surrender. Should he stick around, or is it time to move on? And just what is he supposed to do now? Kiwanuka wrestles with these and other queries on Love & Hate, even if he never gets the answers he’s looking for.
Even getting to that point has been a challenge. He won the BBC’s Sound of 2012 and was nominated for a UK Mercury Prize. Following the success of his gold-selling debut album, Home Again, Kiwanuka found himself in a weird space creatively, rubbing elbows with Kanye West, although he wasn’t sure if he belonged. At one point, West invited the UK singer/guitarist to sing on his Yeezus sessions in Hawaii and Paris. “I was lost, absolutely lost,” Kiwanuka told the London Evening Standard in May. “I just felt stupid sitting there with my acoustic guitar with all these producers and rappers. He didn’t tell me what he wanted … I wanted him to tell me what to do because I didn’t know how to do it.” Kiwanuka fuels his music with the same self-doubt, crafting nomadic tales of a man in perpetual movement and unrest. On Home Again, which combined Memphis soul and bluesy folk, Kiwanuka was the understated journeyman, thumbing through his desolation to find personal peace.
For Love & Hate, Kiwanuka linked with producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, best known for his work as one-half of Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo Green, and Broken Bells with Shins frontman James Mercer. Here, Burton brings Kiwanuka out of his shell, encouraging him to build songs from scratch in the studio, composing robust tracks that feel equally large and nostalgic. “Cold Little Heart”—the album’s 10-minute opener—is easily the record’s best song, landing somewhere between Pink Floyd’s soul/rock hybrid and Isaac Hayes’ orchestral arrangements. Throughout Love & Hate, Kiwanuka is backed by a full choir, which adds a richness not heard on his previous album. He doesn’t sound so isolated here, and the music itself feels grand and triumphant. On “Black Man in a White World,” Kiwanuka rides a jaunty Afrobeat instrumental to convey his inner racial strife: “I’m in love, but I’m still sad/I found peace, but I’m not glad.” In this instance, Kiwanuka speaks to the hearts of those who want the best out of humanity, even as the world implodes.
Love & Hate is a bittersweet offering, pulling from ’60s and ’70s soul, growing more melancholy as it plays. And while it’s a creative step forward for Kiwanuka, it’s still tough to get a sense of just who he is at times. Names like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield immediately come to mind, and on “The Final Frame,” Kiwanuka’s spacious guitar chords recall Parliament Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel. Kiwanuka takes pieces from these icons, resulting in a nice effort with occasional tedium, somewhat stalling the momentum. It’s clear Kiwanuka is still working through his angst. He'll need time to find inner tranquility. | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor | July 25, 2016 | 6.9 | 66dd35f8-ceda-4026-aa48-f2360ae403d9 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Six years after their elegant high-water mark, Happiness, Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and Adem Ilhan (Adem) reunite with fellow Fridge man Sam Jeffers on a new record of moody acoustic-electronic instrumentals. | Six years after their elegant high-water mark, Happiness, Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) and Adem Ilhan (Adem) reunite with fellow Fridge man Sam Jeffers on a new record of moody acoustic-electronic instrumentals. | Fridge: The Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10349-the-sun/ | The Sun | About a decade removed from its mid-90s heyday, post-rock has largely succumbed to the same musical limitations it originally set out to obliterate. Torch-bearers Tortoise settled into a predictable, off-kilter groove with 2004's It's All Around You and riff-monsters like Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky sound less triumphant and more manipulative with every touchdown-worthy crescendo. In the current climate, a genuine post-rock stunner like Battles' Mirrored is considered more of a one-off shock than a revitalizing statement. So it's an odd time for cult post-rock heroes Kieran Hebden, Adem Ilhan, and Sam Jeffers to resurface as Fridge six years after their elegant high-water mark, Happiness. The return is especially strange considering the respectable indie success Hebden and Ilhan have achieved as Four Tet and Adem since 2001. Possibly by design, they won't have to worry about The Sun taking off and putting their solo careers on hold. Instead of combining to push their moody acoustic-electronic instrumentals into the future (or at least the present), Fridge come across as a nostalgia act on The Sun-- a hodge-podge of rough sketches dressed-up as a comeback.
While their output ranges from wiry guitar excursions to hypnotic krautrock to Eno wallpaper, Fridge excel most at subtle, scuttling foreplay-- their best work sounds like the first minute of every Sigur Rós song aired-out and deconstructed. As such, Happiness stands as their most complete record, teeming with the meticulously precious production Hebden would later expand upon with 2003's Four Tet effort Rounds. Happiness is a benchmark of homed-in humility, revealing its gorgeousness in shimmers of warm acoustics and careful, cut-up percussion. By contrast, The Sun starts with a track more akin to Hebden's recent scattershot work with drummer Steve Reid than anything in Fridge's catalog. It's a jarring and showy Sun Ra-style introduction adorned with plenty of cymbals and feedback-- a "look what we learned!" moment that plays against the group's taut, minimalist strengths and a telling precursor of what's to come.
Hebden's-- and, to a lesser extent, Ilhan's-- impressive solo material also works against them in this context because we know the heights they're capable of on their own; in that light, most of The Sun sounds like a batch of slap-dash demos for other projects. The pretty-enough "Our Place in This" and Broken Social Scene-esque "Lost Time" lull like in-progress Adem songs, while the rumbling "Oram" and the stumbling "Insects" could very well be sub par left-overs from Hebden's last Four Tet album, Everything Ecstatic. The lilting "Comets", with its simplistic piano chords, loping upright bass, and looping drum machine, has the trio using repetition and tunefulness to its advantage-- too bad it's the exception rather than the rule here.
Free-spirited and Bonnaroo-friendly, The Sun is more of an alternate Fridge history (heavy on the rock-leaning jams of their early albums and EPs) than a progressive follow-up to Happiness. While the band has certainly grown musically, it also seems less patient and focused; much of the record feels like a hastily recorded jam session with a few superfluous electro-bobbles floating above the fray. More than anything, it's the sound of three long-time friends trying to stuff a couple new tricks into old memories and coming up with a discombobulated coda. | 2007-06-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-06-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | June 19, 2007 | 5 | 66df6d5e-b46e-4904-bc76-fba35ac9a16a | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
In his improv duo with drummer John Truscinski, guitarist Steve Gunn makes purposefully stark instrumental music that remains as challenging and personal as his singer-songwriter records. | In his improv duo with drummer John Truscinski, guitarist Steve Gunn makes purposefully stark instrumental music that remains as challenging and personal as his singer-songwriter records. | Gunn-Truscinski Duo: Soundkeeper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunn-truscinski-duo-soundkeeper/ | Soundkeeper | When Steve Gunn was in his early twenties and living in Philadelphia, he learned a valuable lesson from solo guitar legend Jack Rose. During his shift at a coffee shop, Rose refused a free drink to a police officer and was fired—an opportunity he took to devote himself fully to his craft. Gunn, an aspiring musician at the time, looked up to Rose as a kind of hero, emblematic of the ways you can navigate the world without compromising your values. “I was always picking his brains,” he told The Guardian of their friendship.
Now deep into his own career, Gunn has found several outlets for his vision. There’s his traditional singer-songwriter fare: the jammy, easygoing solo records under his own name, where he sings about memory and mortality, wandering and keepin’ on. And there’s the instrumental music where he blends these thoughts into a headier philosophy, following more closely in Rose’s lineage. With drummer John Truscinski, he formed an improv duo whose music is purposefully stark but remains deeply challenging and personal.
When Gunn began devoting himself more closely to songwriting in the mid-2010s, he referred to his work in the Gunn-Truscinski Duo as a kind of meditation, a way to summon his most instinctive voice. But just as his singer-songwriter records have grown more accomplished, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo has developed its own evolving sound: a stirring blend of drone and folk music, occasionally softened with a late night hum recalling Yo La Tengo. Their songs often consist of a repetitive, ragged motif from Gunn’s guitar, paired with a lyrical pattern from Truscinski’s kit. It is slow-burn mood music, remarkable for how much it is able to conjure with so few parts.
On Soundkeeper, their fourth and most ambitious album, the duo expands the boundaries of their sound while still holding back as much as they can. After two opening tracks where Gunn’s guitar work feels like scene-setting—chord progressions that resist the very idea of progression—the first riff emerges four tracks in, about 15 minute into the record. And the first thing that resembles an actual solo appears one song later, in “Pyramid Merchandise,” a ten-minute jam recorded live at Brooklyn’s Union Pool. Watching the video of their performance is a fitting complement to the patient sprawl of the record: Gunn tucked away on one side of the stage, pivoting forward, and Truscinski in the back, eyes fixed toward the ceiling.
The live setting suits the duo, whose work has always felt more focused on the spark of creation than the immersive sound design of experimental artists in recording studios. The 16-minute title track, another highlight, was also recorded during a live set, and it serves as the centerpiece of the record: the explosion from which everything builds and fades. In the rest of the songs, Gunn and Truscinski experiment with new textures: Gunn dabbles with piano and 12-string guitar, while Truscinski abandons the drums completely for one song, accompanying Gunn’s slide guitar in “Northwest” with a deep, resonant drone.
My favorite moments on the record arrive at the very end. “Windows” is a quiet, acoustic-based performance: the kind of laid back Americana that Gunn gravitates toward as a vocalist. To complement the music, Truscinski’s drum part follows the cadence of speech over rhythm; it feels spontaneous, intimate in a new way for the duo. A more direct conversation closes the record. Titled “For Eddie Hazel,” the seven-minute track pays tribute to the Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist whose playing spoke to a similar set of values as their own—virtuosic and refined, cosmic but grounded. Gunn’s electric guitar pulses and echoes, while Truscinski locks into a steady trance. It is the sound of two people with a rare gift for converging into one, or conjuring so many more, at their will.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Three Lobed | October 12, 2020 | 7.5 | 66e62fd8-9d4e-44f3-8ee5-4690ccc68626 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The 1974 album from the revolutionary singer and poet braided together his passion for music and literature. Its emotional pitch and fervent political tenor still resonates loudly in America today. | The 1974 album from the revolutionary singer and poet braided together his passion for music and literature. Its emotional pitch and fervent political tenor still resonates loudly in America today. | Gil Scott-Heron / Brian Jackson: Winter in America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-brian-jackson-winter-in-america/ | Winter in America | Gil Scott-Heron’s literary side was nurtured by his grandmother who introduced him to the poems and stories of Langston Hughes when he was a young boy. He was raised by her in Jackson, Tenn., where he read Hughes’ texts in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper the old lady had delivered weekly. Inspired to start writing when he was in fifth grade, Gil filled notebooks with his own poems and prose as he began observing the world around him. “I’d do two-page things and gradually writing became like a rainy day pastime,” he told writer Nat Hentoff in 1971. “What I wrote got longer and longer... When I start to really get into writing, I can’t deal with whatever else is going on.” While Gil also began taking piano lessons, his first aspiration was to be a novelist.
After his grandmother died when Gil was 12, he relocated to New York City with his mother and together dwelled inside a Chelsea housing project. Years later, when it came time to choose a college, he opted for Lincoln University in Pennsylvania simply because it was Hughes’ alma mater. Although getting into the school as English major wasn’t a problem, Gil was also itching to complete his debut novel The Vulture. “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that my life depended on completing The Vulture and having it accepted for publication,” Gil once recalled.
Promising his family that he would return for his degree, Gil took a leave of absence after six weeks into his sophomore year and finished his Manhattan-based murder mystery. Coming at a time when the textual surrealism of Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Henry Dumas dominated the black-lit shelves, Gil's book had a more straightforward narrative that was closer to the black pulp style of Rudolph Fisher or Chester Himes.
It was that direct approach that he would use in his songs; the meanings behind “Whitey on the Moon” and “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” were complex, but the delivery was Everyman simple. When Gil did right by his mother and returned to Lincoln University in 1969, he and fellow student pianist/flutist Brian Jackson began combining poetics with soulful jazz arrangements. As Gil and Jackson laid the foundation for their future music, first with group Black & Blues and then as a duo, Gil’s novel was published by The World Publishing Company in 1970, who also simultaneously released his political poetry collection Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. It was off the strength of that book that Gil Scott-Heron signed a three-record deal at the then-fledgling Flying Dutchman Records.
Gil’s voice had this musical quality that was both gentle and gruff. Having grown up under the spell of gospel, blues, and soul, he cited the voices of Billie Holiday and Otis Redding as influences. When it came to politics, his heroes included Malcolm X (“…he was such a force in the lives of Black people”) and Nina Simone (“She’s been so outspoken. She was black before it was fashionable to be black.”)
In 1970, the year his voice was first heard on his debut spoken-word album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (based on his book of poetry), radical black pop was already bubbling to the top of the American landscape with James Brown promoting “Soul Pride,” Sly Stone’s integrated band waving their red, black, and green flags while singing, “Don’t call me nigga, whitey/Don’t call me whitey, nigga,” and Funkadelic’s feedback frenzy anthem declaring, “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.” Groundbreaking spoken-word artists the Last Poets and the Watts Prophets were also a part of the equation.
It was Gil’s outstanding “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” the album’s first track, that became a declaration of who he was as both a writer, a rising star, and spokesman for his people—a provocative forewarning of black power that many romantically envisioned would one day overturn “the system.” It was a new kind of counter-cultural folk music tried to disentangle the zeitgeist of the times. In a Jet magazine story published in 1979, Gil took offense when a journalist compared his style to Bob Dylan. As a poet himself, he respected Dylan, but as he said, “There is a long history of black artists who have not separated their art form from their lives.” He continued, “They use their art and their talent as an extension of the community, to reflect the mood, the sensitivity, the circumstance of the community.”
Over the course of his next two albums, Pieces of a Man and Free Will, he became that very kind of artist. His group straddled genres, refusing to box themselves into the soul slot, jazz jive, or a smooth singer-songwriter genre. As much as he enjoyed writing novels, Gil felt he could be more political with music than he could with a pen. “The novel doesn’t lend itself to writing in the immediately political way I can in poems and songs,” Gil once said. “However, that book costs $6.95, and how many of my people are going to get hold of that action. So I’m going to keep on writing songs and poems too.”
In between cutting records and doing shows, Gil sold his second novel The Nigger Factory in 1972 to Dial Press and got a fellowship at Baltimore’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University’s famed Writing Seminars where he completed the still unpublished novel, Circle of Stone. After their Flying Dutchman contract was fulfilled, but before becoming the first artist signed by Clive Davis to Arista Records (Barry Manilow was the second), Gil and company had a brief layover at the jazz artist collective label Strata-East Records. It was there that he and Jackson, along with Danny Bowens on bass and Bob Adams on drums, made Winter in America, an album many consider their undisputed masterpiece, a synthesis of his parallel artistic mediums.
In that age of politically charged concept albums, most notably Marvin Gaye’s superb What’s Going On, Gil’s inspired lyrical goal with this new album was to create an audio novel that told the story of a junkie veteran from Vietnam hanging on the corner of Any Ghetto, U.S.A. and studying the world through his stoned perceptive. The album’s original title, Supernatural Corner, was the name of the space the unnamed junkie was supposed to occupy. Thinking in writerly devices, Gil planned to record spoken-word interludes between the songs that revealed that the vet was actually in a mental institution losing his mind.
It was that original title and concept that Gil gave cover artist Eugene Coles, the Baltimore-based artist who’d met Brian when he came down to hang with Gil at Hopkins. In 2015, Coles told Taon magazine, “The day before the masters were dropped off, Gil changed the name of the album...I didn’t think the painting looked like Winter in America. It was a totally different concept.” Despite Coles’ misgivings about the title, his ghetto-psychedelic image of the old man on the corner represents a detached isolation that perfectly illustrated Gil’s new title. Although the sun was shining, it doesn’t mean that chilly despair wasn’t around the corner.
For Gil, the metaphor of “Winter in America” was something he’d been thinking about since he watched the president of the United States assassinated on television when he was 14 years old. “The day that John Kennedy was killed is the day I’ve pinpointed as the day that started the Winter in America,” Gil told Mojo magazine in 2003. “The deaths of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King were all part of that.”
Ten years later, America hadn’t changed so much as it continued to buckle. Richard Nixon (one of Gil’s favorite political villains) stood in the White House, broken men returned from the Vietnam War, drugs flooded the streets, and racism showed its ugly face when it came to schooling, housing, and job security. Black leaders, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, were dead and surrogate saviors came in guise of badass movie Mack’s wah-wah walking through Harlem on the silver screen as they headed somewhere to “stick it to the man.”
However, Gil’s material wasn’t simply about entertaining the masses, he wanted to make a difference. His NYC blues ideology became his specialty and Winter in America—with its heavy Fender Rhodes presence (played by both Jackson and Gil), soulful flute, and intimate resonance in the recording that sometimes sounded like rough demos—was the perfect balance.
While I will admit that Gil’s words didn’t begin to resonate with me until I was in my 20s, as a young writer coming of age in the 1980s, I often played his albums to get a sense of his take on the men and women that dwelled in American’s chocolate cities, especially in my village of Harlem. I was a child then, at the time of album’s release, and “The Bottle,” an intoxicating track about the dangers of alcohol, was a radio and dance floor hit. Its heavy percussion (and Spanish count-off) appealed to black folks and young Latinxs raised to the sound of boogaloo and Fania Records. Years later, when Gil Scott-Heron was dealing with his own publicly documented substance issues with booze and crack that eventually lead to years of incarceration (journalist Alec Wilkinson’s 2010 New Yorker story on Gil was a harrowing account of that side of his life), I thought how haunting the song must be for its creator; it was, what Brian Jackson would later tell journalist Jeff Mao was, “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Perhaps the most depressing dance hit of those almost-disco days, the song is followed by the tender tracks “Song for Bobby Smith” and “Your Daddy Loves You,” a lovely ballad with Gil explaining to his future daughter (at the time he didn’t even have any kids) why the relationship between him and the child’s mother failed. With the mellowness of a lullaby and Jackson’s flute floating like a sonic bumble bee, the song feels beautifully sweet. Although Gil often is lauded for his pointed political side, few give him credit for his sentimental qualities.
“Back Home,” an autobiographical lament about not visiting his people down South, was Gil at his most literary. Reminiscent of Southern poetics of writers Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Dumas, “Back Home” conjures the country-boy memories of “piggyback rides down them dusty highways” and “collard greens and cornbread on my Sunday dinner.” Meanwhile, on the other side of that sunny picture is the darkly comic, moonshine misery of “H2Ogate Blues,” with the band members sounding like the rowdy audience and players in a backwoods juke joint. “Just how blind will America be?” Gil sang. “The world is on the edge of its seat/Defeat on the horizon/Very suprisin’/That we all could see the plot and claimed that we could not.”
More than four decades after its release, Winter in America rings just as loud and remains a monument to Gil’s legacy as a poet. It boldly proclaims how much we really matter through big pictures and intimate snapshots translated into the mediums of jazz, blues, soul, and literature. Still, while it was consciously thought of as novelistic by its creators, throughout his lifetime, Gil never disappointed his literary muses as he kept his eyes on the world even when it was upside down.
A year before his death on May 27, 2011, he released his dark masterpiece I’m New Here, an album that was brutally upfront about his descent, but honest in its self-evaluation of his troubled soul that was as “writerly” as the New York City drug novels of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., or Ray Shell. Even in the worst of times and situations, he was scribbling notes in his mind and waiting patiently for pen and paper to release those memories through poetry. He was scholarly and streetwise and found a way to balance it all in his material.
Gil Scott-Heron was still writing poems and prose until the end of his troubled life and the memoir The Last Holiday, which details he and his friend Stevie Wonder’s efforts to get Martin Luther King a federal holiday, was published posthumously in January 2012. That same year, he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award; the prize was accepted by his children. While the warrior in him captured the seemingly never-ending turbulence of politics and race in our land of plenty, he also displayed a human side that relished a child’s smile, a lover’s caress and the grit of native-son soil. There were countless winters in Gil’s lifetime, but all throughout there was a raging fire burning in his heart. | 2018-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Strata-East | January 14, 2018 | 9.3 | 66fa2954-cd8d-45be-9e4a-7d82f6ec38c6 | Michael A. Gonzales | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-a. gonzales/ | |
Focusing more than ever on dance music with an album the flows like a DJ set, the left-field R&B diva has made her most consistent record in years. | Focusing more than ever on dance music with an album the flows like a DJ set, the left-field R&B diva has made her most consistent record in years. | Kelis: Flesh Tone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14439-flesh-tone/ | Flesh Tone | Kelis is the unluckiest R&B singer of the modern era. She's enjoyed big hits that have crossed over from urban radio to the novelty-hungry pop audience. The problem is just that, though: Songs like "Milkshake" and "Caught Out There" were taken as novelty songs in the U.S. With Kelis classed as a weirdo outsider-- or worse, nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Neptunes-- both 1999's Kaleidoscope and 2003's Tasty sank from memory once America had squeezed her striking singles dry. Kelis hit the scene in that brief window opened by Missy Elliot, when it looked like R&B radio might have room for more than one oddball with an experimentalist's bent. Despite the fact that her producer pals had the zeitgeist in a stranglehold for a few years, this proved not to be case, to say the least.
And so: the nine-track Flesh Tone. A decade ago, this album would have been career suicide. Now, it sounds so of-the-moment, a full-length exploration of the house music influence that's been all over the radio over the last few years, that it's easy to hear it as a pre-planned attempt at nine hits in a row.
If so, she's miscalculated a bit. This isn't one of will.i.am's stadium-storming pop-dance hybrids, despite the fact that the BEP scourge is now one of Kelis' benefactors. Nor is it one of the over-sugared confections Benny Blanco has spun for Britney or Ke$ha (where sugary becomes barf-worthy). No, this is unadulterated house music, of the sort that's gripped continental European hedonists for almost 20 years. Fans of Kelis-as-leftfield-R&B-singer should consider themselves warned.
Flesh Tone can be as harsh as anything the more brutalist French producers turned out last decade and as melodic as last season's Ibiza smashes. It's structured to flow as smoothly as a pop DJ mix, complete with shape-shifting instrumental segues between tunes. Kelis' producers, including such hipster-unfriendly names as David Guetta and Benny Benasi, have fashioned a catalog of super-club staple sounds. (Naysayers might call them clichés, with the obligatory upturned nose.)
Naturally everything gets sweetened a bit, given that Kelis is still working with the radio (rather than the dancefloor) in mind. The electro riff on "Acapella" lurks in the background, under Kelis' low-key ecstasy and Guetta's melodic bells-and-whistles. And "Scream" shifts from beachside house piano to Kelis imitating a haughty electroclash ingenue. All of this subgenre synthesizing is a bit shameless. It's also frequently great, at least if you're already enamored with big, bright, synthetic dance music.
Now you can't entirely chalk up Kelis' career foibles to a mercurial marketplace, or an unadventurous public, or label mismanagement. Sure, she lacks the show-stopping pipes of a Beyoncé. Most R&B singers do. But there's also something oddly mannered and/or affectless about many of her performances, which you can easily see alienating fans of a genre built on emoting. But here she's clearly working in the tradition of the archly mechanical disco diva, where little eruptions of passion color a delivery as metronomic as the beats. Whereas once her voice got lost between the Neptunes massive beats, on Flesh Tone Kelis blends with the rhythm for the first time.
And yet, despite Britney revitalizing her career with an even more robotic sound, despite the fact that you can turn on the TV and see the (even more) affectless La Roux strutting her chilly stuff, "Acapella" bounced right off the U.S. pop charts, which bodes ill for Flesh Tone. Maybe Kelis just can't catch a break. Or maybe Americans still want pop-dance that's more pop than dance. Whatever her bad luck might be down to, Kelis can take some small comfort in having made her best album since Kaleidoscope. Hopefully the full-scale disco makeover won't scare off the future-funk fans who've sustained her career thus far. | 2010-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | July 8, 2010 | 7.2 | 66fa3df2-2842-472a-9c42-3a3bcda15776 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The Orlando emo band You Blew It!’s sophomore LP, Keep Doing What You’re Doing, is a deeply satisfying “airing of grievances” record. The group's poised to fill a role for frustrated listeners who can no longer find loud, angsty rock'n'roll via traditional indie channels. | The Orlando emo band You Blew It!’s sophomore LP, Keep Doing What You’re Doing, is a deeply satisfying “airing of grievances” record. The group's poised to fill a role for frustrated listeners who can no longer find loud, angsty rock'n'roll via traditional indie channels. | You Blew It!: Keep Doing What You're Doing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18891-you-blew-it-keep-doing-what-youre-doing/ | Keep Doing What You're Doing | Good songwriting doesn’t always require the absence of lyrical nonsense. Sometimes all you need is one memorable line that lends meaning to the gibberish that surrounds it. Tanner Jones of You Blew It! excels at this kind of songwriting. Take “Match & Tinder”, the first song from the Orlando emo band’s sophomore LP, Keep Doing What You’re Doing. At one point, Jones sings, “I’ll struggle to put your shoes over mine in my head and use it to piece together my confidence.” Immediately after that sentence, he adds this equally inscrutable grab-bag of nouns and verbs: “I can hardly breathe, so I’m scanning for space that lends asymmetry where I’ll put mind over matter to put this matter out of my mind.” Now, I’ve played “Match & Tinder” many, many times, because it has an addictively chunky riff and pleasurably hyperactive drumming and therefore is an excellent example of sensitive-dude melodic punk rock. But I never notice the aforementioned vocab casseroles when I’m listening. Because “Match & Tinder” (and the entirety of Keep Doing What You’re Doing) really boils down to the last line, which is kind of brilliant: “I’m having trouble trying to find the right way to say I feel less than confident.”
Keep Doing What You’re Doing is an “airing of grievances” record—Jones constantly directs his ire at an unnamed somebody who has somehow disappointed him, whether it’s the person with “habits” in “Regional Dialect” or the cretin who has given Jones “the displeasure of enduring your lack of manners” in “Rock Springs”. But the way he delivers these indignities—in a pained, shaky howl that’s constantly fighting to stay above the din of YBI!’s wondrously ringing guitars—is indicative of a guy who’s projecting his displeasure at himself onto others. Even when Jones is pointing the finger, he always sounds like the most vulnerable guy in the room. You know, typical emo stuff.
Since forming in 2009, You Blew It! have survived various lineup changes by zeroing in on the tenets of their genre like a religion. The group is not shy about proclaiming its influences—its Topshelf Records bio directly references emo O.G.s Cap’n Jazz and 00s torch-bearers Algernon Cadwallader, and says “YBI! cherrypicks from 90s emo and indie.” That’s exactly what YBI! did on its 2012 full-length debut Grow Up, Dude, where the band’s fat hooks were submerged (and occasionally torpedoed) by booming, fumbling production. If you’re 35 and grew up on Nothing Feels Good and LP2, Grow Up, Dude will make you feel 15 again. But it will also make you feel like you’re 15 if you’re actually 15. This is the difference between “retro” and “timeless”: Emo will remain eternally relevant because people of a certain age will always have trouble trying to find the right way to say I feel less than confident.
What sets Keep Doing apart from Dude is that, musically speaking, YBI! have grown in self-assurance by leaps and bounds. With the production assistance of scene stalwart Evan Weiss (who also plays bass on the record), You Blew It! have fashioned Keep Doing into a deeply satisfying, full-bodied, big-tent rock record. There are four credited guitarists in the liner notes, and it sounds like each of them contributed at least one guitar track to every song. “Award of the Year Award” is a perfectly spat gob of romantic petulance—Jones’ one killer line is “You can always consider me a friend, just strictly in the past tense”—set to over-amped power pop. The ballad “’Strong Island” opens with nearly 30 seconds of beautifully strummed power chords that usher in the bass-driven verse like a fanfare. By the closing number “Better to Best”, YBI! is in full-on anthem mode, with a triumphant chorus of "whoa"’s pushing Keep Doing toward the majestic grandiosity of arena rock.
The bugaboo among some of the scenesters that form the core of YBI!’s audience is that the band has been positioned in the music press as a leading proponent of the so-called “emo revival.” Those that have been paying attention all along understandably bristle at the revival talk. So let’s set that bothersome word aside: What’s really happening is an emo reclamation by a segment of the rock audience that bailed on the genre 10 or so years ago.
For a while, the itch for shouty, earnest guitar music was scratched by records like The Monitor and Celebration Rock, collections that were considered MOR indie, but would perhaps be marginalized in 2014, just as countless other punk and emo records from the past decade have been relegated to the corner. Now, a band like You Blew It! are poised to fill the role for frustrated listeners who can’t find loud, angsty rock'n'roll via traditional indie channels anymore. If this is the music that speaks to you, here is where the action now is. So, forget the emo revival—this is about two subsets of rock fans being pushed together by aspirational emo bands reaching beyond their niche on one side and the eclipse of traditional indie by mainstream pop on the other. Keep Doing What You’re Doing marks the precise point where these audiences meet, get drunk, and turn it up. | 2014-01-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-01-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Topshelf | January 16, 2014 | 7.6 | 6705242e-fca2-4111-8605-7e8dc6d3cfd5 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
L.A.-based folkie's debut sees her collaborating with producers of Tom Waits, Modest Mouse, and Band of Horses fame. | L.A.-based folkie's debut sees her collaborating with producers of Tom Waits, Modest Mouse, and Band of Horses fame. | Lissie: Catching a Tiger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14547-catching-a-tiger/ | Catching a Tiger | When Elisabeth Maurus aka Lissie released her debut EP, Why You Runnin', in fall 2009, it seemed a new voice was emerging in indie folk. After years of playing around Los Angeles and performing guest vocalist duties for house artist Morgan Page, Lissie was gaining ground as a recording artist, introducing herself online with acoustic video performances of understated folk songs, including a cover of Hank Williams' "Wedding Bells". Her voice stood out more than the actual songs: at times raspy and at others full and precise, like Grace Slick or Neko Case. After the EP's release, Maurus switched to the electric guitar and gathered a backing band.
Catching a Tiger, her debut LP, is dominated by an odd mix of producer-writers including Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Modest Mouse), Band of Horses bassist Billy Reynolds, and British session guitarist and producer Julian Emery. There are numerous other composers involved in the album, including singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt (for the leaden piano ballad "Oh Mississippi"), but Maurus wrote or co-wrote every track. Her collaborators seem to have led Maurus down the garden path, transforming some promising unreleased tracks into bland songs sapped of atmosphere and personality. The narratives follow suit: The clear singles feature jilted-teenager juvenilia and cheesy tales of rebellion, while the tracks with Lissie's stamp firmly on them feature mature, creative lyrical twists on familiar ideas, deeply rooted in folk.
In other words, the standouts on Tiger were either written entirely by Maurus or co-written with more synergistic contributors like Craig Dodds (Sugababes, Amy Winehouse) and Angelo Petraglia (the so-called fifth member of Kings of Leon). These songs capture a physical environment as well as an emotional one; geography and psychology feel inseparable. "Record Collector", co-written by Dodds, uses unobvious words ("hue" instead of "color"); wry, poetic narration grounded in nature ("Everywhere I went/ There I was/ With a choir of bees/ They were all abuzz/ Oh my, how amusing"); and rhyming that isn't forced or bland. In the process, Lissie whoops and darts all over the scale, showing off considerable vocal range and expressiveness.
But Lissie's conversion to the electric guitar starts to seem calculated once you hear King and Emery's contributions. A couple of them-- "Cuckoo", "Loosen the Knot"-- are fun enough, and the stories feel authentically Lissie's, but they pale in comparison to her own compositions. Wanting to avoid the woman-and-acoustic-guitar cliché is understandable, but the work has veered too far in the other direction, best exemplified on "When I'm Alone". When it debuted as a live performance video earlier this year, it seemed like Lissie's strongest song to date. On the album, it's thin and unmemorable. The guitars, previously bold and howling, are now pushed down into the mix as part of the rhythm section. Lissie's voice is haunting as always, but the band doesn't match this tone, and as a result it no longer sounds like Lissie's song. Hopefully these missteps aren't enough to put people off, because Lissie is still a significant new voice. Let's hope she listens to it more in the future. | 2010-08-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-08-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fat Possum | August 18, 2010 | 5.4 | 67068d9c-db75-4ce7-96cc-490a24b7eb76 | Pitchfork | null |
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This massive box set offers perhaps the definitive and most comprehensive collection of Philip Glass’ work ever assembled. | This massive box set offers perhaps the definitive and most comprehensive collection of Philip Glass’ work ever assembled. | Philip Glass: The Complete Sony Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22527-the-complete-sony-recordings/ | The Complete Sony Recordings | In 1976, composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson executed an ingenious end-run around the cautious classical music establishment of their day. After a short workshop and tour in Europe, the creative partners decided that Einstein on the Beach—a four-hour plus, non-narrative opera—was ready for its American debut. So they rented the Metropolitan Opera house for two nights.
It was more than a sold-out success. It was a decade-defining sensation in New York’s artistic community. The brief run also set Glass and Wilson back nearly $100,000. (Renting the biggest opera house in the country wasn't cheap.) In the immediate aftermath of Einstein’s American premiere, Glass famously went back to driving his cab. But the pinnacle of this composer’s early, hardcore minimalist period—which relied on hypnotically long, not-quite-repeating melodic lines—would lead to a major-label deal before long.
CBS Masterworks reissued Glass’ independent studio recording of most of the music from Einstein in 1979. Glass had shortened some scenes for the first LP issue—on the logic that without Wilson’s stage tableaus, trims were advisable. But everything that made the recording still clicks. The synths have a snarl that’s appropriate, given the opera’s Downtown New York parentage. The big ensemble riffs motor along at thrilling tempos; the “trial” scenes unfold with otherworldly ease. The spoken vocals produce deadpan surrealism. (Check out the delirious syllabic layering in “Knee Play 2.”) And the instrumental performance of the Philip Glass Ensemble—which included wind instruments and a small chorus—is locked in beyond belief.
Forty years on, this first recording of Einstein has never been bettered as an audio-only experience of the opera. A booming live performance from 1984 comes close; a ‘90s re-recording that restored the excised music isn’t anywhere as energetic or as charming. The only rival way to experience this avant-garde triumph involves doing so with Wilson’s dazzling staging added—something that’s now possible, thanks to a home-video version of Einstein’s most recent revival tour. Still, the inaugural Glass recording remains the ideal way to put the melodies and rhythms into your ears.
After reissuing Einstein, CBS Masterworks signed Glass to an exclusive contract as a performer. Over the following decade, Glass delivered nine albums to the label: a haul that included two other stage pieces from his first opera trilogy, an iconic solo piano set, and several long-form works for the composer’s house band. Those protean sessions form the core of The Complete Sony Recordings. (That title reflects the subsequent corporate acquisition of CBS Records; stray Glass recordings for Sony that postdate his CBS years are also included.)
This 24-CD box also offers a few exclusive bells and whistles meant to entice collectors—some of which prove revelatory. But in a classical marketplace clogged with reissue sets, the key selling point of this one is its contextual comprehensiveness. Full librettos, stage-action summaries and various liner notes are provided not just for Einstein, but for every album here. Most importantly, the box’s accompanying book provides key information on two of Glass’ most important dramatic works: the Gandhi opera Satyagraha and the ancient Egyptian tale Akhnaten—a piece that saw Glass writing for a traditional opera company, for the first time.
Though it didn’t immediately take the opera world by storm in 1980, Satyagraha is now acclaimed as as one of Glass’ milestones. The commission allowed Glass to leave his various odd jobs behind and to focus on composing full time. He responded with a magisterial score that dramatized Gandhi’s time in South Africa, and that also reflected the thinker’s broader journey from newspaperman to activist to political philosopher. The second act’s climactic “Protest” has a galvanic force, thanks to Glass’ strange-but-stirring union of string orchestra and synthesizer. In the third act, Satyagraha looks ahead to the subsequent legacy of nonviolent direct action, as extended to Martin Luther King, Jr. Glass’ score closes with an ascending melody that, with its simultaneous suggestion of vulnerability and determination, makes for one of the most soul-stirring moments in contemporary opera.
In an abstract theatrical touch, the entire libretto for Satyagraha is adapted from the Bhagavad-Gita—the Sanskrit text of which creates a spiritual accompaniment for the opera’s stage action. To follow the narrative on a recording, English-speaking audiences need a track-by-track translation of the Sanskrit, as well as summaries of each scene’s onstage particulars. Akhnaten works similarly, through multiple ancient languages. And Einstein’s blizzard of English fragments is also better studied with a printed lyric sheet. Prior budget-CD reissues of all the early Glass operas have ignored this. Consequently, the small hardcover book included with The Complete Sony Recordings feels as though it’s worth its weight in gold.
A lovingly produced reissue set of the opera trilogy alone could have fetched a high price. (After all, those recordings occupy ten of the CDs here.) But this box wisely expands its purview to include everything in the label’s vaults—including shorter, oft-forgotten theatrical works like The Photographer. As a result, this set allows listeners to re-encounter the decade of Glass’ rise to a position of pop-culture prominence.
While Glass was often sensitive to the idea that he was betraying his classical training by become a “crossover” artist, the Sony recordings do shed light on his fascination with the way different audiences might absorb contemporary composition. His first album under the exclusive contract with CBS, 1982’s Glassworks, was a consciously scaled-down look at his aesthetic. Instead of presenting multiple hours of his gradually morphing themes, the suite of six compact pieces plays in just under 40 minutes. The standard mix is perhaps the most well-known and ubiquitous of all his recordings. But since 1982 was also the era of the Walkman, Glass and his sound designer created a version of Glassworks “specially mixed for your personal cassette player.”
The inclusion of the “cassette mix” in this box marks its first digital release. Bursting with low-end thump and a punchy, less-separated stereo sound, this bonus mix of Glassworks blows away the more genteel, familiar version. Here, the album’s first emotional swing—from the pensive “Opening” to the mechanized march of “Floe”—registers even more grandly. Better than any other CD in the Sony box, it comes closest to representing the potent live sound of the Philip Glass Ensemble, when amplified in a large venue. (This mix of Glassworks also prefigures the strategy of contemporary classical imprints like New Amsterdam, which work to produce recordings in ways that will appeal to all sorts of listeners.)
Not every experiment from this period paid off. Songs from the Trilogy was a useful compilation, back when recordings of Glass’ early operas represented a more substantial physical-media investment. Now it’s a curiosity. And Songs from Liquid Days is a strange misfire. Its harmonic progressions and ensemble tempos seem consistently alienated from the pop-song lyrics (written, variously, by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega). And the vocal performances—by the Roches, Linda Ronstadt and the lead from the cast of Satyagraha—often sound equally uncertain of the appropriate texture to pursue. Still, it’s a fascinating look at a composer with a long corporate leash, and a willingness to play around.
More successful are albums for Glass’ ensemble, originally commissioned as scores for dance performances. These include the miniatures found on DancePieces and the opulent, side-length statements on Dance Nos. 1-5. And the composer’s popular reputation hit a new level with the release of Solo Piano—still one of the most fervently beloved entries in his vast catalog. This record gave fans an intimate encounter with Glass’ solo-instrumental style, and also offered premieres of major pieces like “Metamorphosis” and “Wichita Sutra Vortex.” The former is a piece that has been admired and performed by Blood Orange. The latter is a work that many elite classical virtuosos fail to pull off with exuberance of the more technically limited Glass.
In 1993, Glass jumped from CBS/Sony to Nonesuch—a label that he’d been sneaking movie soundtracks to, on the side, for some time. Before long, Glass would establish his own imprint, Orange Mountain Music (which remains the place to find his latter-day chamber music, operas and symphonic statements). But Sony has also stayed in the Glass business, here and there. It recorded Itaipu/The Canyon—one of Glass’ early forays into orchestral writing for its own sake—in 1993. (Glass would quickly outstrip this effort with several later symphonies.) Thanks to the label’s association with Yo-Yo Ma, this box gets to claim Glass’ fine soundtrack to Naqoyqatsi (on which the cellist performs).
Sony also has the rights to Passages, Glass’ 1990 reunion with Ravi Shankar, his onetime mentor. On that album, each composer arranged themes by the other. Not everything there comes off seamlessly, but it’s a blast to hear Shankar’s adaptation of Glassian melody. The box also gathers obscure sets like Organ Works—an interesting series of Glass arrangements, performed by Donald Joyce. There’s also a rarities collection titled Recent Recordings. It’s a fun listen, even if it contains some recordings that aren’t all that recent. (A short Glass Ensemble performance at the 1984 Olympics torch-lighting ceremony? Sure, let’s have it!)
Aside from the obscure “cassette mix” of Glassworks, however, the exclusive material advertised on the packaging doesn’t have much to do with the true value of this box. The real attraction is the half of the set that sits in the excellent-to-iconic zone of Glass’ catalog. A lot of that material has been widely available for years—though often without important contextual material that can aid deeper immersion. This reverent, smartly produced set fixes that problem. In doing so, The Complete Sony Recordings represents a worthy completion of the company’s original investment in a young composer. | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | November 14, 2016 | 8.6 | 67115b9f-9dba-4435-98dc-3689ad12a378 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Oasis’ third album from 1997 was always more circus than substance. The bloated and indulgent remaster only reinforces it as one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music. | Oasis’ third album from 1997 was always more circus than substance. The bloated and indulgent remaster only reinforces it as one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music. | Oasis: Be Here Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22318-be-here-now/ | Be Here Now | The circus around Oasis’ third album, Be Here Now, makes the modern hoopla surrounding Frank Ocean, Kanye West, and Beyoncé look like amateur hour. Never was the hunger for new product greater, and never was the infrastructure designed to supply it in poorer shape. Back in the summer of 1997, the Manchester band’s label, Creation, and management, Ignition, were mobilized for battle, attempting to downplay the hype after months of tabloid chaos and over-saturation. Oasis had actually made another album, which should have been news enough.
Never mind that in September of ’96, Liam Gallagher had bailed on their diabolical MTV Unplugged performance before walking out on an American tour because, he claimed, he needed to buy a house. Two months later, he was arrested on London’s Oxford Street at 7.25 a.m. with his pockets full of cocaine, described by police officers as “an unkempt man, obviously the worse for wear.” The following January, Noel Gallagher left the nation clutching at pearls after declaring drug-taking to be as normal as having a cup of tea. The pair of them could barely leave their houses for the throngs of paparazzi camped outside.
The new record was also encumbered by what may have been the greatest millstone in pop music history: the double success of 1994’s Definitely Maybe and 1995’s What’s the Story (Morning Glory), which had already been minted as era-defining classics. You can see why the powers that be were trying to manage expectations. Journalists issued with a cassette of Be Here Now had to sign an absurd contract stating that they wouldn’t talk about the album while in bed with their partner. Ignition brought lawsuits against nascent fansites that carried any trace of copyrighted material. They called the police on three local radio stations that broke the embargo for lead single “D’You Know What I Mean?”, and pulled a raft of exclusive tracks from the BBC Radio 1 Evening Session after it was deemed that DJ Steve Lamacq hadn’t layered enough jingles over the songs to deter home-tapers. Even label staff were forbidden to enter the office at certain hours, lest they overhear the album, and at one point, Creation got a specialist in to check whether their phones had been tapped by Murdoch rag The Sun. It’s almost as if there were stratospheric amounts of cocaine involved at every level of the operation.
It might sound like damage control, but if anyone was engaged in that, it was the British music press. They had looked foolish after underrating What’s the Story (upon which Oasis played to 250,000 people across two nights at Knebworth), and were aware that Britpop’s luster was starting to tarnish. Every major news program sent a camera crew to regional record shops on the Thursday of release (MTV UK captured a young Pete Doherty in the queue in London), and HMV issued special certificates to first-day buyers. Magazine sales were predicated on their access to to the band, a valuable commodity that could easily disappear at the first sign of dissent, as evidenced by the album’s desperate and ingratiating reviews: “Oasis’ third LP is a veritable rock’n’roll monsoon of an album; a giant jigsaw puzzle, an elemental force, a monster that cannot and will not be contained,” claimed Vox. “Dem a come fe mess up de area seeeeeeeerious,” suggested Charles Shaar Murray in Mojo. Q actually called it “cocaine set to music,” which was about the only factual statement amid the lashings of hyperbole. Of the many cultural changes that Be Here Now triggered, the shift in power from the music press to marketing men may be the most toxic and enduring.
What sounded like a dog’s dinner in 1997 sounds no better on this 2016 remaster, which remains one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music. It’s not necessarily the songs—Noel Gallagher’s way with a hook is diminished, but passable enough to make “do you know what I mean, yeah yeah” feel sticky and semi-poignant. Even “Stand By Me” is genuinely touching. But the mix is gristle to Definitely Maybe’s fillet. There were reportedly up to 50 channels of guitar on each of Be Here Now’s tracks, sometimes coupled with a 36-piece orchestra, the effect evoking something like hell churning around a cement mixer, or agonizing indigestion. Aside from a two-minute reprise of a nine-minute song, the shortest track is 5:13. It boasts more key changes than a single series of “X Factor.” The morse code blips in “D’You Know…” supposedly spell out “bugger all.” A toilet appears to flush at the end of the title track. “In the first week, someone tried to score an ounce of weed, but instead got an ounce of cocaine,” said co-producer Owen Morris. “Which kind of summed it up.” After the two massive shows at Knebworth, there was nowhere left for them to go. The lyrics are jaded about success and filled with a foreboding sense that nothing’s set to last. (And they only add to one of pop’s greatest mysteries: How can two such naturally funny men be so bereft of lyrical talent?)
It’s easy to write off Oasis given what they became, but as the forthcoming documentary Supersonic makes clear, they were irresistibly magnetic in the early days. Their god-given wit and lack of inhibitions had even made traditional rock star excess into a guilty pleasure for fans who knew better than to buy into the cliche of throwing televisions out of windows. Be Here Now was the flipside of that Faustian pact, trading a generation’s communal optimism for empty calls-to-arms. Noel, at least, realized this and was doing down the record months prior to its August release. “It’s rocking but it’s not innovative,” he said in February ’97. “There’s no new ideas going on. It’s just us.” Within a few years, he admitted that he had been “making records to justify spending fucking thousands on drugs.” This reissue contains “NG’s 2016 Rethink” of “D’You Know What I Mean,” though that’s the only reworked track. “Someone (I can’t remember who) had the idea that we revisit, re-edit the entire album for posterity’s sake,” he said in a press release. “We got as far as the first track before we couldn’t be arsed anymore and gave up.”
So why bother reissuing a record so shit that it never even became a cult classic, that its warring creators can’t even be bothered with it? (Other than to flog £100 vinyl box sets, that is.) There are two-and-a-half hours of bonus materials here, few of them essential and most of them familiar: B-sides, demos, and live tracks—including the live debut of “My Big Mouth” at Knebworth, which somehow sounds better than the studio recording despite being recorded in the midst of a mob. Of most interest are the previously unheard and surprisingly fleshed out demos that Noel cut while on holiday in Mustique with Kate Moss and Johnny Depp (who plays slide guitar on grim blues pastiche “Fade In/Out”). In a sense, this turgid collection is the ultimate expression of Be Here Now: as bloated and indulgent as the record itself, the music a secondary concern to the product’s status.
It wasn’t just the end of Oasis’ imperial period, but the record industry’s as well. Ten days after the album came out, Princess Diana was killed in a car accident, shifting the national mood towards mass grief and mawkish sentimentality. Britpop receded to make way for a more humble kind of rock star in the likes of Travis and Coldplay. Although Oasis rightly questioned the absurd wave of national mourning, they also, in some backflip of contrarianism, started dedicating “Live Forever” to Diana at their autumn ’97 gigs. There was a lavish stage setup at these shows, with the band entering and departing through a giant phone box. The echoes of “Doctor Who”’s time-traveling Tardis were unavoidable: Oasis belonged to the past now. | 2016-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Brother | October 8, 2016 | 5.3 | 6711a258-e711-4978-a7eb-e375cf2d0ce8 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
For these alt-rock throwbacks about the causes and effects of bad relationships, it’s the unapologetic singing of Sonia Sturino that’s the secret weapon. | For these alt-rock throwbacks about the causes and effects of bad relationships, it’s the unapologetic singing of Sonia Sturino that’s the secret weapon. | Weakened Friends: Common Blah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weakened-friends-common-blah/ | Common Blah | If you live long enough, you will eventually hear the same stories—or repeat them yourself. What changes is, hopefully, how they’re told. Portland, Maine’s Weakened Friends embrace that axiom as it relates to vintage indie rock on their full-length debut, Common Blah. Singer and guitarist Sonia Sturino, bassist Annie Hoffman, and drummer Cam Jones pick apart the causes and effects of bad relationships over familiar strains of alt-rock and grunge. In only three years, though, Weakened Friends have found their literal voice and emblem of musical interest: Sturino’s multifarious, melodramatic singing. Amid a trend of 1990s revivalism led by singing men, Sturino gives Weakened Friends the welcome feeling of letting loose that, in turn, makes Common Blah seem audacious despite abiding by alt-rock’s usual themes.
Given the glut of ’90s-obsessed acts that Boston breeds, it makes sense that Weakened Friends consider it their second home—a feeling apparently reciprocated by the city, which awarded them a Boston Music Award last year. Whereas local contemporaries like Pile echo Drive Like Jehu or now-defunct weirdos Krill emulated Pixies, Weakened Friends opt for the punchy eccentricity and pop hooks of Veruca Salt. During “Aches,” depth charges of grunge distortion get a bounce in their step from Sturino’s wiry guitar bends. The blown-out volume of “Peel” is balanced and sweetened by Hoffman’s downplayed vocal harmonies. And Jones steers the pulsing “Younger” with a frenzy of pounded cymbals and insistent snares, switching his emphasis in the chorus to highlight the song’s hook. Even when J Mascis appears on “Hate Mail” for a long-winded guitar solo and to draw Weakened Friends closer to the era they’re honoring, he doesn’t steal the thunder. The song’s core melody is too catchy for second place.
For Sturino, each song serves as a reminder of the dark period that prefaced the band’s formation: the overwhelming weight of perceived inadequacies, the perils of losing someone to addiction, or the belief that she had to endure toxic relationships for the sake of steadying her life. She sings about all of it in exaggerated leaps, ending notes with a guttural trill or pushing out words with a squeaky whine. At times, maybe it’s too much, even cloying, as when she seems to mock the breathy affectations of pop stars during “Blue Again.” But her yell soon transforms into a raw scream, a pure emotion. Turns out, this isn’t overcompensation. Sturino’s dramatic delivery comes from a need to feel the vibration of her voice exiting her body. Without that physicality, she says, she can’t enjoy singing in the first place. Her commitment feels bold and defiant, an introvert learning to be comfortable with some measure of external extravagance.
In the same way, the monotone mumbles of Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch are praised for being plaintive, Sturino’s rubbery inflection deserves recognition for its recklessness, the way it takes risks and leaps in communicating these feelings. By comparison, Common Blah’s most mild songs, like “Early” or the title track, tend to underwhelm when Sturino shies away from the style that transforms Weakened Friends’ pleasing throwbacks into dynamic, vital tunes. Hoffman and Jones are in total control of the rhythm section, but they’re not the reason to show up. When Sturino digs into her delivery, Common Blah shifts from an album of familiar alt-rock into a welcome reminder of how ’90s revivalism can actually sound rejuvenated and reaffirming. | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Don Giovanni | October 23, 2018 | 7 | 67127865-0144-4cf1-903a-dcdfae04dd9b | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the stunning 1981 debut from the English post-punk band, an archly subversive album with style just as sharp as its politics. | 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 stunning 1981 debut from the English post-punk band, an archly subversive album with style just as sharp as its politics. | Au Pairs: Playing With a Different Sex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/au-pairs-playing-with-a-different-sex/ | Playing With a Different Sex | The Au Pairs had been warned. And it would have been so easy not to do it. It would have been so easy to stay silent, passive, and do as they were told. But let’s be real. A political punk band isn’t going to stop being political for the sake of some airtime on the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. That would be so very boring. That would be so very stupid. Because, if you have a platform, saying fuck you to Margaret Thatcher and saying fuck you to Northern Ireland for torturing female political prisoners on live television was exactly what you should do.
Thus: the Au Pairs got up there and performed their song “Armagh,” even though they were told they really shouldn’t. There was the heaving snarl of Jane Munro’s bass, the strident slant of Pete Hammond’s drums, and the dueling guitars and vocals of Paul Foad and Lesley Woods. “We don’t torture,” Woods sang, “We’re a civilized nation!” Anything can happen on live television. The Au Pairs knew that. They were never asked back.
They weren’t interested in making things easy. They didn’t often write lyrics that you could get your head around quickly, nor did they construct songs focused on delivering a dopamine hit on first blush, even if that was, perhaps, the ultimate intent. And in their politics, they weren’t interested in any sort of armchair socialism, theoretically dense, pseudo-Marxist whatever bullshit. “We’re not an army on a mission, we do commercial songs,” Pete once said, tongue-in-cheek, to NME in 1980. Chiming in, Woods said: “We’d like to be number one.”
Here is what they did instead: write music that, while not exactly militant, was explicitly political. There is no way to listen to “Armagh” and not taste how much the band detested Margaret Thatcher and her curdled, inherently cynical realpolitik. There is no alternative, Thatcher famously said about capitalism being the only system that works. Wait, seriously? the Au Pairs seemed to say in response. They were cynical about the idea that following the ’60s, everyone was supposed to be so liberated—how could that possibly explain Thatcher? It was not as if we had finally figured out everything about sex. The Au Pairs were blunt about all of this in a way that made people uncomfortable. “All I do in writing lyrics,” said Woods, “is try and provide a new understanding of situations that people take for granted or accept as natural or normal.” This is what made their debut album, Playing With a Different Sex, a revelation.
At the end of the ’70s, Rock Against Racism—a disparate network of anti-fascist, anti-racist bands that formed in opposition to an increase in support for the National Front, a far-right, fascist political movement and an uptick in violence against people of color throughout the country—was at its height. Thatcher and Reagan were about to bring their bootstrap politics to higher offices. The situation was unsustainable. In 1978, in Birmingham, the Au Pairs formed out of their local RAR chapter. Woods had just dropped out of Birmingham University, and like many other young people in an economically ravaged, post-industrial Britain, was living off of the dole. Through RAR she met Paul, who introduced her to his childhood friend, Pete. They started playing together, inspired by the blade-sharp, discordant sound of bands like Gang of Four, the Slits, and the Pop Group. At first, they were a band called End of Chat, which was more leftfield jazz and funk than rock’n’roll. After spending time playing together, with Woods writing the lyrics and the band co-writing everything else, they decided to become a four-piece, symmetrical. Two women, two men. Munro joined, and at some point, End of Chat became the Au Pairs. And the Au Pairs became a post-punk band that sounded like absolutely no one, with Woods’ perfectly pitched alto, a certain sonic symmetry, and lyrics that were abstract but entirely potent.
They became very big on the indie club circuit, very fast. Their first performances took place just four weeks after Munro joined. They went from “merely edgy and oppressive,” as one reporter wrote, to having “a cohesion, an unforced flow of power and sense of resolution and purpose.” They toured with Gang of Four and the Buzzcocks, playing high-profile gigs that landed them a deal with the indie label Human.
Along the way, Woods became a palpable stage presence. She wore high heels, a full face of makeup, and sang with shocking explicitness about sex. It wasn’t exactly well-received. “I don’t know how they call themselves feminists when they dress like tarts,” one showgoer told a reporter for Rock On. “You’re a girl and you sing about boys and girls and that’s okay because it fits into music,” Woods quipped to Melody Maker, paraphrasing one particularly misogynistic review of the band. “You couldn’t sing about Marxist ideology because you’re not intelligent enough.” In the eyes of the band’s critics, what Woods was doing couldn’t be called “feminist” at all. Isn’t it bad for women, one might incorrectly think, to stand up there like a piece of meat? Why couldn’t the Au Pairs be more like the Gang of Four—cut all the salacious stuff and just focus on theoretical Marxism?
When it comes to the sexual revolution, there are rules: Enjoy sex, but enjoy it the right way. Be a feminist, but don’t be femme. Be a lesbian, but don’t secretly covet the gaze of men. Woods was queer, sexually fluid. She wrote about the freedom of loving who you want, and she wasn’t always sex-positive about it. This provocation was the essence of the Au Pairs as a political project: Their deliberate handling of sex forced a conversation many would have preferred to dismiss as anti-intellectual or disgusting. The sexual revolution may have promised to destigmatize the actual enjoyment of sex, but does liberation happen just because men know they’re supposed to make women cum? Does sex actually have to be about cumming? That’s the essence of “Come Again,” a breakneck beatdown that almost scans as surf rock, with its swinging lines of guitars and shuffling drums. “Is your finger aching?!” Woods shouts in one moment as the guitars crash into each other, white-capped and supercharged, “I can feel you hesitating!”
When reporters asked what the Au Pairs’ songs were about, Woods usually said something along the lines of “personal relationships.” Here’s an example: “We’ve never been into party politics,” Woods once said to the Birmingham Evening Mail. “I write about personal relationships and the attitudes people have to each other.” Personal relationships is, perhaps, a mannered way to describe Playing With a Different Sex’s opening track, “We’re So Cool.” Girl meets girl meets boy meets boy’s girlfriend meets boy. Or however you’d like to interpret it. The lyrics are opaque enough that you can draw your own conclusions. “I don’t mind if you want to sleep on your own,” sings Woods, playing it so cool, so chill. Beside her, Munro’s bassline is a jackhammer, plummeting, smashing itself into concrete. The guitars feel like sticking your finger into an electrical outlet. But then, just when you think that fucking whomever you like is some kind of nonstop all-night free-love Dionysian utopia, Woods reminds you that actually, sex is a power exchange. “You must admit,” she sings, “When you think about it, that you’re mine.”
The record came out in May 1981 with a striking cover. Shot by the Magnum photojournalist Eve Arnold, the photograph features two young women in Inner Mongolia training for the militia, running through a field in pink dresses and white scarves. It cemented the record’s ethos: that of chaos and collectivity. Somehow, this translated into a bona fide indie hit. Playing With a Different Sex peaked at No. 33 on the UK album charts and No. 1 on the Brit Independent Charts. “Here, unless I am much mistaken, is the band that will provide the biggest sales for a small independent record label since Joy Division,” wrote a writer for the Guardian after seeing the band play at the 100 Club. Woods’ dreams of being “number one” were realized, sort of. They were critical darlings. Lester Bangs namechecked them, alongside the Slits and the Raincoats, as “the absolute best rock ‘n’ roll anywhere today.” He continued: “The other night I saw God in the form of the Au Pairs.” Greil Marcus called them “the UK’s most interesting and challenging band.” Kurt Cobain loved them too.
Challenging, as Marcus puts it, is a good word for it. For all of the Au Pairs’ commercial ambition, Playing With a Different Sex is an oblique piece of music. It is one of those records that requires you to rewire your brain a little bit. They play with dissonance and repetition, taking one phrase and beating it into the ground until it becomes less of an earworm and more of an absurdist echolalia. The playful “Dear John,” warps images of kingfisher-blue cars and a sex maniac named John, repeating his name through the epistolary song. Robert Christgau, in a rare lukewarm review of the record, referred to the band as a “bored Gang of Four.” I get it. “Headache for Michelle,” for instance, is nearly seven minutes of downtempo dubby post-punk. It seems like it’s going nowhere, with its meandering bassline and occasional flickers of guitar. But spend more time with it, and it becomes almost like a meditation. The little guitar flickers start to feel like needle pricks on your skin.
And then there is “It’s Obvious,” where repetition and dissonance rejiggers itself as something completely ecstatic. It is the Au Pairs’ anthem, an absolutely perfect post-punk song. First it is the drums, a playful sort of military march. Then it is the braggadocio of the guitar and the way the bass feels like a snake wrapping itself around your throat and maybe you like that. Then Woods’ voice comes in. She sing-speaks in maxims: “It’s nice. It’s paradise. You’re equal, but different.” It is an emerald in a dumpster of a punk song, the record’s climax, its final sigh. It is unmistakably sexy, taking the band’s sexual politics and almost allowing them to be purely pleasure-oriented, if only for a moment. Woods isn’t breaking off from being directly political here, but in “It’s Obvious,” more so than any other song on the record, the operative is to actually feel good. To lose yourself. A guitar break in the second act is like a Wile E. Coyote motorcycle smokeout skronk, where the Road Runner wins and there’s a sense of gratitude about having an Acme dumbbell fall on your head. To put it in simpler terms, it makes you want to just say goddamn.
The Au Pairs, like many great punk bands of the era, flamed out as quickly as they took off. They toured too much. Their original project of communication and closeness between four people, as Foad once put it, began to sour. Their follow-up album, Sense and Sensuality, wasn’t quite as good as its predecessor, written in a rush as tensions started to boil. They broke up soon after, and it became clear that, like many cult bands, the Au Pairs would be remembered by their first record, a nanometer in the cosmic cuticle that is the history of the universe. It would always be about Playing With a Different Sex. It was always about saying what you feel about your relationships with other people. It was all about being radically honest. This is the kind of ethos that would later start riot grrrl. This is the kind of ethos that would make Kathleen Hanna scream “girls to the front.”
It was ironic how things ended: a massive communication breakdown, Woods deciding not to share any of the rights or royalties to the songs. When asked about it in an interview with the Guardian in 2021, Woods said: “Women need to control their own music.” And while this is true in principle and in reality, there is perhaps a notable distinction to be made between, say, Scooter Braun controlling your masters and refusing to share songwriting credits with the people you were in a punk band with when you were young. But then again, Woods never claimed to be some kind of saint. She wanted to be number one. And for a perfect, exhilarating moment, she was.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2023-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Human | December 17, 2023 | 9.3 | 67158b36-9609-4f56-b31a-2870f8f73949 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The Baltimore band’s latest is another emotional tour de force that tests the limits of their long-running sound. | The Baltimore band’s latest is another emotional tour de force that tests the limits of their long-running sound. | Future Islands: People Who Aren’t There Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-islands-people-who-arent-there-anymore/ | People Who Aren’t There Anymore | By the time Future Islands scored their first hit, they were already four albums into their career. It’s been nearly a decade to the day since their viral performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on The David Letterman Show, a milestone that was hardly a starting point for the band: “I was actually holding back,” singer and lyricist Samuel T. Herring has said of his rousing stage demeanor during the show. “That’s what was going on in my head—don’t go too far.” The implication there is that some part of him knew he’d have the chance to go further.
“If I said too much, please let me know,” Herring sings on “The Thief,” a sparkling highlight from Future Islands’ new album People Who Aren’t There Anymore. It’s a jarring sentiment to hear from someone who proudly dances like everyone’s watching, who usually has so much to say that he moonlights as a rapper. And though the Baltimore band has hardly drifted from their new wave-filtered synth-pop in the past decade, People makes it clear that things have changed.
The album largely revolves around Herring’s breakup with a long-term, long-distance partner, with whom he used to spend the bulk of his time in her native Sweden. Travel restrictions during the height of the pandemic meant the pair were often apart for months at a time, though it wasn’t until after Herring began writing People that they decided to split for good, meaning these 12 tracks follow Herring’s heartbreak in real time. During the album’s first half, he ponders sending messages in bottles across the ocean, counts the days until he gets to board his next plane to Sweden, and mulls over the agony of having to text his partner “good morning” just before he falls asleep—a seemingly innocuous interaction that only amplifies the physical distance between them.
Herring has sung about grief, heartbreak, and disappointment several albums over now, and though the events that underscore People have surely impacted him—“Regret and fear have an appetite,” he laments on the up-tempo dance number “Give Me the Ghost Back”—it feels at times that he’s running out of ways to evoke his strifes, his passionate yowls lessened by his clichés. His imagery on the punchy album opener “King of Sweden” is hampered by weak rhymes like “I’m always flyin’/So I’m always cryin’” and sentiments of feeling 15 years old again. The funky, bass-thumping “Say Goodbye” harps on the logistical difficulties of connection across time zones, as Herring measures past time by how many cigarettes he’s smoked.
The real difficulty lies in the fact that even if this is the most catastrophic heartbreak that’s ever happened to Herring, the band is content to write essentially some version of the same songs they’ve been writing for the past decade. They are good songs, but it’s almost impossible to draw any deeper meaning from Herring’s writing while it seems like the sequel of a sequel of a sequel. The synths are perpetually new wave, the drums are sturdy and out of the way, the guitars are only there for a little texture. Future Islands still sound the same as they did on Letterman, indicating that the band’s biggest strength still lies in Herring’s ability to command a stage rather than the studio.
And Herring knows he tends to succumb to a fruitless cycle: Album closer “The Garden Wheel” is perhaps People’s best example of his metaphorical writing. He analogizes his fizzling relationship to a garden that’s been excessively tended to: “We worked the earth so much/It turned to dust,” he sings over a mellow, guitar-forward instrumental. But the line can also serve as a symbol of Future Islands’ approach to their art: You can’t always return to the same soil expecting new growth. | 2024-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | February 3, 2024 | 6.6 | 67175ea5-c3c8-4d34-959b-25770ef19df4 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The eighth album from the English songwriter is the best work of her career. Soothing, immersive, and self-produced, it conjures a dreamlike atmosphere with songs that spiral out into the ether. | The eighth album from the English songwriter is the best work of her career. Soothing, immersive, and self-produced, it conjures a dreamlike atmosphere with songs that spiral out into the ether. | Beth Orton: Weather Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beth-orton-weather-alive/ | Weather Alive | While writing Weather Alive, Beth Orton noticed the way the sound of her piano—a used, soot-filled, and possibly haunted instrument she purchased at Camden Market—would fill the house while her kids were at school. “Not to complain,” she recently told The Guardian, “but motherhood is lonely.” Playing for hours, she inhabited these solitary exercises, allowing the songs to become vessels for memories, methods of communicating with distant versions of herself. In “Friday Night,” she recalls formative years spent self-medicating with alcohol and reflects on some friends who never broke the habit. Her parents, who died while she was a teenager, appear in a song called “Lonely.” Near the end of it, she sings the title 12 times in a row in a cracked whisper, until the syllables sound as natural as do-re-mi.
These are fragile, isolating moments, and fittingly, Weather Alive is the first of Orton’s eight records that she self-produced. And while she has stated the experience of listening to it with other people has been “excruciating,” the music creates a completely different effect when opened up to the world: It is immersive, soothing, and communal. Surrounded by an ensemble of musicians who tend to elevate every record they appear on—drummer Tom Skinner, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, bassist Tom Herbert, and saxophonist Alabaster dePlume—Orton lets each song remain true to its origin as a solitary spiral. Only now she invites more people to stand alongside her, following her paths to their own ends.
The spiritual predecessors are other transformative records defined by their atmosphere—Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. On first listen, more than any one song, you will most likely be struck by individual sounds and textures. As a pianist, Orton gravitates toward dark, silvery cobwebs of melody, repeated motifs that drift in and out of the light. “Friday Night,” an early highlight, feels a bit like a folk song—maybe “After the Gold Rush” set to the tempo of a plane picking up speed along a runway at night—but Orton sounds too moved by its rush of memories to stick to the melody. Letting the words echo through its descending chorus, her voice breaks at just the moment you expect it to take flight, drawing attention to how she sounds at her most ragged and lost.
As a singer, Orton has never sounded more attuned to her material, and her melodies have never felt more transportive. When she introduced herself in the ’90s, she developed a reputation for bringing a tender, human touch to the UK’s burgeoning electronic scene. Because she found sanctuary as a teenager in discos and raves, it was only natural for her to bring the same level of intensity when she collaborated with artists like William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers. More than any record she has made since that decade, Weather Alive brings to mind these early collaborations, her gift for blending genres and their associated scenery. In the past, the menacing, downcast aura of “Forever Young” might have been a trip-hop experiment fit for dimly lit lounges and clubs. Now she embraces a seasick, live-sounding approach, characterized by the grain of her singing and the hypnotic pulse of her bandmates’ performance.
Orton’s writing, too, has grown more elusive. She has spoken in interviews about her diagnosis with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition she is reluctant to describe in much detail beyond its resulting seizures and memory problems. The lyrics on Weather Alive, which occur in bursts and fragments, often circle around these types of disembodying experiences. “I have lived as a satellite,” she sings. “I saddled up/I settled up/I don’t sit right.” Other songs seem designed to capture and prolong brief portraits of serenity, a practice that might feel counterintuitive to someone more prone to meditating on darkness. “Almost makes me want to cry,” she sings repeatedly in the title track. “The weather’s so beautiful outside.”
The lyrics set a scene, but the landscapes tend to form gradually with each element of the production: washes of synths and wordless backing vocals, bursts of electric guitars and flickering percussion, slow drone of a saxophone. When she drifts from the narrative in “Weather Alive” to explore meaning beyond words—“Something like, something like, something like,” she sings around the five-minute mark, as if instructing her bandmates to follow her lead—you start to consider each song as an improvisation: a conversation that could drift into tears or laughter, personal revelation or total silence, depending on the mood.
This nebulous approach has always been central to Orton’s music, which defied categorization from the beginning. In a 1999 interview, she seems exhausted and uncomfortable trying to pinpoint her genre: “Maybe I’m sort of folk-soul-blues-jazz…,” she says, letting her voice trail off into a series of comic, unintelligible syllables. When the interviewer starts asking about specific influences, she changes the subject immediately, noting she just saw Madchester group the Happy Mondays play the other night and they were pretty good. They also seemed a bit tired, she added, acknowledging it was near the end of a long tour for them.
It’s the type of observation a fellow musician is uniquely qualified to make, but it’s also one that Orton seems to focus on, with something resembling obsession, more than two decades later. Listening to Weather Alive, you get the sense that each song is inextricable from the time it was made, the emotions surrounding it, the room where it was written, the view outside the window, the initial response from each collaborator. The atmosphere of a particular song, the quality that allows it to fill a space, she suggests, is dependent on each of these factors. The most upbeat song on the record is called “Fractals,” and its lyrics are uncharacteristically elaborate, as Orton wraps her head around the span of a lifetime and our ever-evolving perspective on love and dreams and hope. “In the hand of the unknown,” she sings, “I made an art out of believing in magic.” Weather Alive is a testament to her conviction, an eerily physical experience with the power to make believers of the rest of us. | 2022-09-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 26, 2022 | 8.7 | 671913d5-5bcc-46f0-a13d-2e98b3944709 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On their first album in half a decade, Steve Hartlett and his reunited band of fuzz-rockers turn up both the overdrive and the emotion, fortifying tender songs with muscular squall. | On their first album in half a decade, Steve Hartlett and his reunited band of fuzz-rockers turn up both the overdrive and the emotion, fortifying tender songs with muscular squall. | Ovlov : Tru | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ovlov-tru/ | Tru | Ovlov just weren’t made for these times, though that has more to do with singer/guitarist Steve Hartlett’s humble career ambitions than his 1990s indie-rock comfort-food aesthetic. At a time when once-independent musicians can resemble overworked content creators forced to feed the internet-industrial complex with a constant stream of songs and selfies, Hartlett has adhered to a policy of striking up the band only when it feels right.
Since cropping up on the East Coast DIY circuit in 2009, amassing the sort of fervent cult fanbase that gets tattoos in their honor, Ovlov have had to break up a number of times in order to keep it together. Their most recent disintegration, in March 2015, seemed to suggest a greater degree of finality, however, with Hartlett expressing his uneasiness with demanding a full-time-band commitment from the revolving roster of friends and family members that have helped him realize his creative vision. But after redirecting his energies to his solo project Stove, he returned to Ovlov’s Facebook page in early 2016 to sheepishly announce an intention to reunite the band, “sometimes but not all the time.” Ironically, that commitment to be non-committal has since yielded two years of steady touring, a vinyl compilation of their early EPs, and now, Ovlov’s first proper album in half a decade.
The division between Ovlov and Stove was always blurry—the former may lean on Dinosaur Jr. overdrive while the latter wobbles on a rickety Guided by Voices foundation, but both ultimately forge a symbiotic relationship between Hartlett’s crestfallen melodies and his fuzz-pedal abuse. While Stove began as a wholly solo endeavor, it quickly formalized into a proper band in its own right—one whose bassist, Michael “Boner” Hammond Jr., is part of this current Ovlov line-up. But with Tru, Hartlett soundly reasserts Ovlov’s signature strength: the band’s ability to fortify tender songs with muscular squall in a way that doesn’t obscure their emotional intent, but amplifies it. Harlett’s songs tend to deal in themes of loneliness, estrangement, and the inability to communicate, and the onslaught of noise ultimately serves to make that desire for connection feel all the more cruelly out of reach.
Compared to its 2013 predecessor, am, the new album is less late-’80s Dino Jr., more early-’90s Sebadoh: While Ovlov are still as wonderfully wooly ever, they’re unleashing the noise in more purposeful, sculpted spurts and displaying a greater willingness to let their melodies sparkle through the clouds of distortion. Tuneful, feedback-slathered surges like “Half Way Fine” and “Spright” feel as comfortable as a beaten-up pair of Chuck Taylors, introducing dramatic dynamic shifts and savvy melodic change-ups to keep you on your toes. You may not always be able to make out Hartlett’s lyrics amid the cyclonic fuzz, but the despondence and disillusionment in his voice always cut through loud and clear. And when he can’t quite find the right words, he and fellow guitarist Morgan Luzzi unleash that simmering angst through nonverbal means, like the roiling guitar tsunami that brings the hazy-headed “Baby Alligator” to a cataclysmic close.
While Tru may initially favor a more patient, mid-tempo pace than the band’s previous work, it eventually achieves the same levels of joyride abandon. “Stick” proves that Ovlov need not blow out their amps to deliver the white-knuckled thrills, with the song’s pin-pricked guitar refrain tiptoeing atop a cascading motorik rhythm like a walker on a wire. And on its second side, Tru hits its exhilarating peak with the frantic stomper “Fast G” and the absolutely sublime “Short Morgan,” where Hartlett’s continuous, single-sentence lyrics snake through the light-speed jangle of the verses en route to a seismic, rocket-launching chorus.
Following that adrenaline spike, Ovlov grant themselves a deserved comedown in the form of “Grab It From the Garden,” a grungy, slow-motion ballad that, at nearly seven minutes, is practically twice as long as everything else that precedes it. The extended length is easily accounted for by the climatic, Mascisian sludgefeast that eats up the track’s second half—but in Ovlov’s case, it feels like less a display of guitar heroics than a violent purging of all the complicated emotions that Harlett has been wading through over the course of the record. It ultimately reinforces the idea that, for Harlett, making a new Ovlov record isn’t simply a matter of finding the right players and amassing the sufficient number of songs; it’s about waiting until his internal reservoir of pent-up frustrations and messy feelings is ready to burst. | 2018-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | July 23, 2018 | 7.8 | 67222651-9c1a-42aa-bd85-b2014f90385e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his latest tape, the Rochester rapper softens his most outlandish barbs. He’s still magnetic, but the sluggish beats sometimes interfere with his oddball flows. | On his latest tape, the Rochester rapper softens his most outlandish barbs. He’s still magnetic, but the sluggish beats sometimes interfere with his oddball flows. | RXK Nephew / Harry Fraud: Life After Neph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rxk-nephew-harry-fraud-life-after-neph/ | Life After Neph | RXK Nephew and Harry Fraud shine as a duo once the topic of steak arises. On “Hunnid on the Dresser,” a highlight from their new mixtape Life After Neph, the Rochester rapper only gets one diss off before he’s distracted by a slab of sizzling meat; soon, he segues into a cooking session so intense that his wrist snaps off like Thing in the Addams Family. Life After Neph is full of the rapper’s oddball pop culture references and weirdo energy, but it also reflects his throw-everything-at-the-wall release strategy. (Check his YouTube channel: Chances are he dropped a new song today, and that it doesn’t sound much like yesterday’s). Measured subtlety was an asset on The Onederful Nephew, his June tape with DJ Rude One, but here the beats feel overly polished. Instead of offering ample grooves for Neph to settle into, the production on Life After Neph is too slippery for his signature flows to get traction.
Fraud is a versatile collaborator; he has made a career curling his samples to fit around different creative partners’ styles. At his best, Fraud’s moderate touch accentuates Neph’s booming register, keeping the beat steady under his tumbling verses. Neph sounds 12 feet tall over the eerie chorus of “How I’m Coming”; he is equally in command on the mellower “RX Instructions.” The atmospheric “Hunnid on the Dresser” is prime real estate for Neph to take a more conversational approach to the chaotic one-liners that made “American Tterroristt” a classic (who else threatens Santa with a hammer?) As he’s started to become the boss of his own life, Neph says he’s tempering the volatile Slitherman persona that drove his early output. On Life After Neph, he raps about innocuous subjects like holiday discounts and bowling over sparkly loops, easy jazz flips, and even the interpolated melody of a Tears for Fears hit.
The album’s highlight is the final track, “Top Chef Neph.” Over ’80s-style synths outfitted with 808 claps, a sweating Neph calls on his girl to help him whip up another feast of epic proportions: Tomahawk steak, a shark-filled seafood boil, and a loaded baked potato for good measure. The production kicks up the punchiness of the earlier cut “Dub 4 U”; you can feel Neph catching his stride as he fires away on matters of taste. There’s even a glimpse of his affinity for conspiracy theories: “Shut up, your food was 3D-printed.”
Although it’s fun hearing Neph, a father himself, embrace dad-coded pleasures like prowling Home Depot for a Blackstone grill, the energy level sometimes suffers with a producer as laid-back as Fraud. His sunny sample flips were a trampoline for Kamaiyah and Jay Worthy earlier this year, but richer beats on tracks like “Authority Figure” and “Gotta Eat” can weigh Neph down. Life After Neph benefits from the same focus and short tracklist DJ Rude One brought to The Onederful Nephew, but the latter had an ember at its center that’s missing here.
Still, “Top Chef Neph” ends the project on a sharp, silly high note that reveals how Neph might sustain his artistic momentum, if and when he gets tired of sharing a new song nearly every day. As he settles into new responsibilities—he released his proper debut studio album this year, the first project he recorded completely sober, and has plans for his own label—Neph is still figuring out how to translate his overflowing verve into a more benign package. It’s not a Michelin-star recipe yet, but with Fraud, Neph manages to carve out space for the outlandish barbs and hollered metaphors that bring his most eager disciples back to YouTube each morning. | 2023-12-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Fake Shore Drive / AintNobodyCool / SRFSCHL | December 5, 2023 | 6.8 | 6725624b-e901-47aa-ae96-521d96225c27 | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s fuzzy, rococo synthpop confections have a magic power: They sound like whatever you grew up with, whenever that was. | Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin’s fuzzy, rococo synthpop confections have a magic power: They sound like whatever you grew up with, whenever that was. | Magdalena Bay: Mercurial World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/magdalena-bay-mercurial-world/ | Mercurial World | Magdalena Bay is a band moonlighting as an extremely online brand. The duo’s website is like a defictionalized Hypnospace Outlaw page: a weirder-than-history recreation of GeoCities. Their TikTok is a whirl of ironic promo, unironic promo, and surreal, post-vaporwave memes filmed in a Rose Quartz and Serenity haze. They have a spooky Space Invaders game; they mailed cryptic brochures to fans. None of this extramusical worldbuilding is new, exactly. An incomplete tour: Taylor Swift’s Tumblrverse, Kanye and Future’s video game (actually, maybe don’t revisit that), Gorillaz’s Shockwave wormholes, that time in the mid-1990s when artists kept making interactive CD-ROMs. But Magdalena Bay commit to the bit.
There are two basic reactions one might have to this level of self-styling. One is to burrow and obsess, relishing the lore and surrendering to the feeling that, as one devotee put it, you’re “now in a cult.” The other is suspicion: seeing style and concluding there can’t be substance. This is the old radio-pop backlash, gussied up for the personal-brand era. It’s also not exactly accurate. The duo behind Magdalena Bay, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, spent a few years in a progressive rock group called Tabula Rasa. When they heard Grimes’ Art Angels, they were surprised to discover intricate arrangements and high-concept storylines that weren’t so far from prog. On their old albums, you might hear a particularly spacey interlude or frenetic guitar line and imagine it recostumed in synth pads and glitter. Alt-pop became a gateway to radio pop; among Magdalena Bay’s many TikTok memes is a skit about how they couldn’t possibly give up Charlie Puth. Judging by the Max Martin-ish strut of some of their singles, they’re not not serious.
For all Magdalena Bay’s scattershot onlineness, Mercurial World is surprisingly old-fashioned. The album’s careful sequencing is full of gentle dissolves and impeccably timed key and tempo changes—refreshing in a genre where the typical M.O. is to spam Spotify and call it an EP. And for all Magdalena Bay’s neo-Y2K moodboarding, their album doesn’t particularly sound like 2000; the Mariah-ish ballad “Prophecy” is the closest they come. Instead, Mercurial World sounds like whatever you grew up with, whenever that was. Their stated influences are current: Grimes’ big concepts and new age haze, Charli XCX’s winking-robot shtick, Caroline Polachek’s MIDI choir vox. Their songs frequently sound like the early ’10s: “Follow the Leader” is like a remix of Beyoncé’s “Party” with the saturation cranked up to max, and the fuzzy synth line threading through the chorus of “You Lose!” is more or less the one from MGMT’s “Kids.” Think of “Secrets” like one of those online quizzes that guesses your age: When the intro slinks in, do you hear “Rock With You”? “Say You’ll Be There”? Something newer, maybe Kaytranada?
Mercurial World is also old-fashioned in its flaws. Like many actual Y2K albums, it sags in the middle. Tenenbaum’s called Fiona Apple her songwriting “north star,” and there are glimmers of this influence in her earlier songs, but on Mercurial World she writes in a more conventional style. That’s not automatically bad; “Chaeri” is one of many strobing synthpop tracks with sad hearts, but its regrets over abandoning a depressed friend feel highly specific. Compared to the rococo production and the quasi-storyline, though, the actual lyrics of Mercurial World often seem like unadorned afterthoughts.
Mercurial World just isn’t that kind of album—nor does it have to be. “The End” (actually track 1; accept it and move on) does the “Material Girl” interpolation that’s basically required with this album title. But Magdalena Bay do it with detail, trailing off like Madonna did with an a cappella fade-out and skating chiptune glissandos back and forth over the arrangement, like a trail of Kid Pix sparkles. The album is full of these little tweaks and stamps and glitches, and they seldom feel gimmicky. “Domino” is Mercurial World at its most thrilling: the best hooks of the album paced like a video game rollercoaster, maximalist glitter rush followed by sinuous soprano descant. It’s genuinely evocative. It’s also, in Magdalena Bay TikTok myth, the siren song of the LOLWUT meme. Both things are true at once, and in its own way, isn’t that beautiful?
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. | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luminelle | October 14, 2021 | 8 | 672f09bf-4ad4-46d2-b846-4bf9f7cd7d9c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ |
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