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Dan Snaith’s new LP as Daphni contains unmixed, extended versions of many of the tracks from his recent Fabriclive 93 mix. Some tracks falter in the context of an album, but others flower in new ways. | Dan Snaith’s new LP as Daphni contains unmixed, extended versions of many of the tracks from his recent Fabriclive 93 mix. Some tracks falter in the context of an album, but others flower in new ways. | Daphni: Joli Mai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daphni-joli-mai/ | Joli Mai | Until now, for Dan Snaith, an album of Daphni tracks may have come as a bit of an afterthought. Since his debut Daphni album in 2012, Snaith has continued to focus most of his energy on his main project, Caribou. He once revealed that his dancefloor-oriented Daphni alias is all about immediacy. “I could make a track, play it one weekend, have it pressed up on Monday or Tuesday, and it could be in shops three weeks later,” Snaith said several years ago.
After releasing the remarkable Caribou album Our Love in 2014, Snaith has largely ended his live shows with that group. Instead, armed with an arsenal of exclusive remixes and productions on his thumb drives, Snaith plays extended DJ sets to dancefloors across the world. This year, Daphni DJ sets came into the spotlight when London’s Fabric club tapped Snaith to contribute the 93rd edition of their Fabriclive mix series. Just a few months later, Daphni is back with a new album, Joli Mai, consisting of unmixed, extended versions of many of the tracks from Fabriclive 93. In fact, 11 of the 12 tracks on Joli Mai were first heard in some form on Fabriclive 93. The omitted track, “Vulture,” was featured prominently on Midland’s Fabriclive 94. It’s safe to say Snaith envisioned these tracks exclusively, or at least primarily, for the club.
Snaith is the rare electronic producer who has a totally distinct sound from the jump. You can hear it on the first synth stab, or vibrant arpeggio on a track, where his synths drift and ripple in a fantasia. As Daphni, Snaith’s tight percussion is distinctive, too—his bass drums don’t thwack as much as they thump, creating a rounder-sounding low-end that is physical, but not overly aggressive. There’s an inherent joy on each Daphni track, with rhythms propulsive enough to make you sweat. It all blends together in an alchemy that’s ecstatic but understated—fun, unpretentious, and positive dance music that is neither too flashy nor too dull.
Just as Daphni’s first album, Jiaolong, was comprised of a number of dancefloor tracks and singles lumped together into a single package, Joli Mai is easier to categorize as a compilation of the producer’s recent work than a proper studio album. In contrast, the Fabric mix was intentionally and scrupulously stitched together as a pristine vision of a Daphni DJ set. And listening to the mix, alongside the unmixed versions of the tracks on Joli Mai, it’s clear that Snaith’s meticulous work for Fabric is the context in which these tracks are truly meant to be heard. Still, in the re-contextualizing these tracks for an album format, some falter while others flower in new ways.
Joli Mai is a grab bag in terms of style. Snaith’s hypercolor synths are on full display, along with his tight vocal sampling, which he perfected on Our Love. The beats themselves span disparate eras and scenes. He touches beatdown disco, shuffling house, rave anthems, and straight up psychedelia while maintaining a cohesive eclecticism. Tracks like “Vikram,” only a minute-long vocal snippet on the Fabric mix, is extended to almost six minutes of gorgeously unfurling melodies and superimposed beats. “Vikram” exemplifies a patience in arrangement that Snaith didn’t have the space to explore on his Fabric mix, and hearing the version in full is rewarding in its own right. “Hey Drum,” another vocal one-shot that was scattered throughout Fabriclive 93, is extended for an additional two minutes, giving the meandering track a more definite, self-contained structure than the jerkiness felt in the Fabric mix.
There’s deeper territory for Snaith to explore than heavy drum workouts and flashy, effervescent melodies. You can hear a deep, gentle dub at the very end of “The Truth” that touches a more minimal nerve than anywhere else on the album, and this lithe outro didn’t make the cut for the Fabric mix. Snaith seems more interested in spilling all of his ideas on the floor as colorfully as possible than managing them with focus and discretion. Joli Mai is loaded with effusive energy and expertly executed ideas, but alongside the specifically tailored Fabriclive 93 mix, Daphni’s new album feels extraneous—an unnecessary step for a DJ quickly reaching the height of his powers. | 2017-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Jialong | October 28, 2017 | 6.8 | 6739bbb2-aea6-490a-bc85-afd86ce59573 | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | |
Reconnecting with his heartland rock roots, John Rossiter interrogates his artistic impulses and creates his most magnetic and direct record to date. | Reconnecting with his heartland rock roots, John Rossiter interrogates his artistic impulses and creates his most magnetic and direct record to date. | Young Jesus: The Fool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-jesus-the-fool/ | The Fool | Here’s an incomplete cast of characters that populate The Fool, Young Jesus’ provocative seventh album: a pair of washed-up outlaws, an elderly man entirely reliant on his children, a doctor who gets caught creeping on his patient’s social media, and, on “MOTY,” a menagerie of garden variety misogynists, hypocrites, and insecure momma’s boys fronting as alpha males. Oh, and the person who gets lost in their memories of being abused as a child and comes to, decades later, standing over a dog they’ve just beaten.
Yet, the most unnerving characters are the ones John Rossiter allows us to believe are himself—artists who’ve witnessed the life-saving powers of art firsthand and seen it curdle into condescension, delusions of grandeur, and revulsion towards the people most like him. While Rossiter hasn’t confirmed whether any of The Fool is autobiographical, it’s an unsparing, indelible product of a man who had to question every one of his artistic motivations before making the most vital album of his life.
Rossiter’s interrogative approach—to pop music, to literature, gender norms, to the social contract, to truth itself—serves as the connective tissue throughout Young Jesus’ fascinating discography, which has earned legitimate comparisons to the Hold Steady, Talk Talk, and Albert Ayler. But there’s also the one remnant of Rossiter’s formative era as a hard-drinking Midwestern garage rocker: the impulse to blow everything up on the verge of a conventional success. After 2015’s Grow/Decompose brought Young Jesus’ initial phase as Chicagoland barstool bards to a wider audience, Rossiter moved to Los Angeles and did what transplants do: experimented with spirituality, got into free jazz, and started book clubs. A trilogy of exploratory albums followed, each one tantalizingly close to a masterpiece. But due to burnout—or just the sense that Young Jesus’ incarnation as a post-rock jam band had become its own kind of formula—Rossiter disbanded the group and released the stripped-down Shepherd Head; like all Young Jesus albums, it felt transitional, but this was the first time that Rossiter lacked conviction in his direction.
The Fool does not have that problem. The opening duo of “Brenda & Diane” and “Two Brothers” brings Young Jesus back to their roots—gleaming acoustic strums and brassy synth washes, a gruff guy singing imperiously of the downtrodden trying to protect their dignity, the sort of things that gets called “heartland rock” in 2024; surely someone as studious as Rossiter recognizes the evocative nature of their respective titles. Whereas most of Young Jesus’ work on Saddle Creek trafficked in dialectics, arcane philosophical tracts, and 15-minute jam sessions, The Fool gets right to the point, with Rossiter putting his trust in direct statements—“True love is a little bit like hell,” the goddamn American Dream, concepts dismissed as cliche until time and experience reveals their enduring truth. Towards the end of “Two Brothers,” Rossiter meets a humble gardener who works the Earth to get closer to God, which would’ve been too pat of a literary device had Rossiter not temporarily quit music to study permaculture.
Even as The Fool shapeshifts into meditative jazz-pop, torch song, and frisky folk-rock, there isn’t a second of passive listening to be had; Rossiter and his new cast of collaborators confront and engage the listener as if their undivided attention essential to keeping the unorthodox mix from collapsing on itself. He might not be the most technically proficient singer, but Rossiter’s fearless—no tonal or emotional register is out of his range. To accurately express the decade's worth of thwarted desires packed in the chorus of “Rabbit,” you don’t hit the notes, they need to be smashed to bits. On “Sunrise,” Rossiter plays the role of a singer who believes they communicate directly with God, but not so far gone they lose their sense of humor—“Don’t think I take it light/Yeah I bought some new pants!” In the rare times when Rossiter takes on a more subdued tone, the mix is riddled with found sound, bursts of noise, and curious harmonies that all hit like a sudden burst of cortisol from the shame of pressing an accidental “like” or experiencing the first pangs of a vulnerability hangover.
“Rich” is that very feeling extended to about six minutes. The narrator is the product of ill-gotten gains that have produced lawyers, schizophrenics, bankers, anorexics, active and sober addicts, completed suicides and four others that “tried, but we didn’t get far.” And now, an artist who sees far too many white guys just like him, overcompensating for their privilege and competing for “the purest of all.” Calling out the hypocrisy of indie rock trust funders isn’t brave on its own, but “Rich” calls into question why and if these conversations are even worth having—does generational wealth create generational trauma? Why is it assumed to preclude the ability to make great art? Is the glorification of poverty a subtle form of condescension? “And the worst of it all is that art saved my life,” Rossiter intones during the final verse, where his voice eventually undergoes an Irishman-style de-aging to bring them back to the time they bought their first guitar and deviated from the path of McKinsey internships, law school, feckless philanthropy, and everything else that makes the rich a different kind of miserable than everyone else.
The thorniest question posed by The Fool is why I’d expect, or even want “Rich” or “Dancer” to be explicitly about Rossiter. Even if that would require him owning some embarrassing truths, it would actually work to Young Jesus’ benefit, placing The Fool in a lineage of indie rock lifers making a mid-career transition to full disclosure and achieving new heights of respect and acclaim. But this is yet another impulse that Rossiter has challenged—“Wanted to write about the bad men that I’ve known,” he moans during “Am I the Only One,” before he questions whether this would be just another way to reinforce his own self-image.
Too often, “therapeutic” and “confessional” music is viewed as praiseworthy by default, where the unburdening of one’s own flaws is an end unto itself rather than a means of shedding ego and shame to foster connection. When the recurring character of Eloise sees a ping from her Instagram page, she doesn’t screenshot it to shame her doctor; she thinks of her father and her brother and the loneliness that moves them to scroll through a stranger’s pictures. “MOTY” (i.e., “Man of the Year”) starts cynically, in judgment of Great Men, and ends with Rossiter finding strength in the presence of the good men in his immediate circle.
Perhaps the most daring song Young Jesus wrote during this process could’ve offered a more tidy first-person narrative had it made the final tracklist. “Another album in the books,” Rossiter sings on the B-side to “Brenda & Diane,” acknowledging up front how this one might be received differently than his previous six—“to Mom and Dad: I know it hurts.” It’s called “Hollywood Ending,” a title that bears more weight given Rossiter’s experience writing for television. Instead, we got The Fool, an album that offers its emotional reckoning as a messy and necessary new beginning for Young Jesus. | 2024-05-29T01:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-29T01:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | May 29, 2024 | 7.8 | 673dc9aa-6521-4a7e-ae41-dc207f131acd | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On what is only his second official live album in his 20-year career, the celebrated electronic producer demonstrates his range—and his mastery of tension and release. | On what is only his second official live album in his 20-year career, the celebrated electronic producer demonstrates his range—and his mastery of tension and release. | Four Tet: Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/four-tet-live-at-funkhaus-berlin-10th-may-2018/ | Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 | Is there a producer more generous than Four Tet? While Kieran Hebden kept up a steady flow of records through much of the 2000s (not to mention a number of collaborative releases with the late jazz drummer Steve Reid), since rebooting his own Text Records imprint in 2007, he’s rewarded his fans with an abundance of music. He uploaded some of his earliest productions as a 38-minute deep dive, cobbled together nearly two decades of one-offs into a handy compendium, then made another for his other handle, Percussions. Beyond his own productions, Hebden openly shares his wide-roving tastes, regularly digging into his collection for an NTS Radio residency, not to mention nearing a thousand songs on his Spotify playlist.
So nonchalantly upping the 17-track Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 in late August represents a continuation of his low-key, generous ways, despite the fact that up until that point, his only previous official live album was a Copenhagen set Domino released on CDR back in 2004. That particular show found him pushing his Rounds material to the absolute limit as he unlocked the ways his laptop could become an improvising instrument in its own right—a path he would explore on albums like Everything Ecstatic and alongside Reid. In comparison, Funkhaus doesn’t rework his tracks extensively so much as show how his last four albums’ worth of explorations—from Bollywood to trip-hop, new age to 2-step anthem—can all tidily hang together.
The nearly two-hour show primarily draws from his post-Domino catalog (though he dusts off a classic from Rounds), taking two tracks apiece from Pink and Beautiful Rewind and pulling primarily from last year’s New Energy. Four Tet remains one of the rare electronic producers who thrives on dismantling his music before a sold-out crowd, juggling and rejiggering the components into something new, so it’s not quite as breathtaking to hear him stay well within the confines of the heady “Planet,” which opens the show. Nudging elements of the original in the mix rather than exploding the space around it, he also keeps “Parallel Jalebi” pretty much as is, lingering amid the breathless R&B ululations and skittering rhythms more or less as we recall them.
Some 20 years into his career as a live artist—and more recently as an in-demand DJ—Hebden has mastered tension and release, deftly moving between peaks and comedowns in his show. He also knows when to luxuriate in a beat, as on an expanded take on New Energy highlight “Two Thousand and Seventeen,” the thrumming strings and downtempo beat so laid-back as to become narcotic. While the tempo picks up from there, the set also enters into a bit of a lull: The details that distinguish “Ocoras” and “Lush” on record blur together live, at least until the chopped pirate-radio shouts and tumbling snares of “Kool FM” finally break through, one of the high-energy breakouts of the show.
Hebden speeds up those jungle breaks and shoves them right into the giddy flickers of Rounds crowd favorite “Spirit Fingers,” which dissolves far too soon, at the four-minute mark, into “LA Trance.” It’s on this somewhat inconspicuous New Energy track that Hebden unearths the most promising new terrain: Its ripples are contemplative and expansive, yet it builds up to a pulsing peak. Amid the already extended “Morning Side,” Hebden drops in some haywire energy at the midway point, finding dubby new spots to burrow into. No matter the dizzying detours he takes, he always winds his way back to the sample of Lata Mangeshkar, the legendary Indian playback singer whose haunting voice buttresses the track. It’s a fitting conclusion for the show, overshadowing the dulcet encore “Daughter” and some four minutes of clapping. It’s a bountiful offering for fans, even if the set ultimately offers few true surprises. | 2018-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | September 6, 2018 | 7.2 | 673f2c76-8c08-4ae1-bdab-e38e49db6fae | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The songwriter’s first album of new music in 13 years is wise and economical. At 71, John Prine is a virtuoso at understatement, finding the joy in the mundane, and writing about what it means to be alive. | The songwriter’s first album of new music in 13 years is wise and economical. At 71, John Prine is a virtuoso at understatement, finding the joy in the mundane, and writing about what it means to be alive. | John Prine: The Tree of Forgiveness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-prine-tree-of-forgiveness/ | The Tree of Forgiveness | John Prine wants a cigarette, but he can’t have one. In the last 20 years, he’s had cancer twice. Sometimes he considers standing next to smokers outside restaurants just to get as close to that experience as he can, that smell, that ritual. He’s 71 years old now. He could be retired from songwriting and no one would blame him. But it’s tough to quit two 50-year-old habits, so he’s got a new album out called The Tree of Forgiveness, his first collection of original songs in 13 years.
But gone is the John Prine who, in his 20s, wrote both the saddest song in the world, “Sam Stone,” and the saddest song in the universe, “Hello in There.” That sweeping heartbreak, that pain, has turned more peaceful with age. Bob Dylan once said that Prine’s “stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” That’s probably fair, but on this album, Prine’s writing is more economical. He doesn’t say anything he doesn’t need to, leaving the space in his songs to do it for you. He lets the mood talk.
This album does not contain a line like “Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.” It contains lines about porches and washing machines and shadows on ceilings. But in their own quiet, ramshackle ways, they’re about being alive and what it means to be alive. There’s a hard-won wisdom to all these songs, a wisdom that can only come with age, where pork chops can be one of the most important things in the world, where joy and divinity can be found in the everyday, on a porch, looking at clouds. It takes age to realize that truth, the thing we fight so hard to find, can be mundane.
It’s the air around these songs that’s existential, a sense of loneliness and the enormous weight of time passing. When I finished this album for the first time, I thought of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Not any lines, but a stage direction: They do not move. Prine may be reflecting on the past and the future an awful lot, but this is not one of those albums where an old man ponders death. It can’t be, because Prine has always done that, and he doesn’t do it any more or less than usual. It’s just a new album by John Prine, a humble but respectable one. If there hadn’t been a 13 year absence of new John Prine songs, you couldn’t even call it a return to form, because his form has never left him.
Even with production by David Cobb, who’s worked with younger singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson, Prine doesn’t pull a single stunt. This is essentially an acoustic album with the same chords and melodies Prine always uses, plus occasional spare and tasteful backing from his regular band along with folks like Isbell and Amanda Shires. The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window.
Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement. On “Summer’s End,” a heartbreaker about lost love, he wrings enormous pathos out of a chorus as simple as this:
Come on home
No you don’t have to
Be alone
Just come on home
The best two songs are the ones where he didn’t use a co-writer. The first is “The Lonesome Friends of Science,” a reflection on the end of the world with a quintessentially Prine digression about how Pluto, demoted as a planet, is now an old has-been, hoping he’ll get recognized in a Hollywood sushi bar.
The other is the album’s closer, “When I Get to Heaven.” It’s a farewell hootenanny that sounds like a daydream. When he dies, he wants to do all the stuff we’d all like to do. He’s going to see his mom and his dad and his brother. He’s going to take his wristwatch off. But he really, really wants you to know exactly one thing. When John Prine gets to heaven, he’s going to smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long. | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Oh Boy | April 13, 2018 | 7.6 | 673f3b17-b423-416d-b6a5-af549f208a4a | Kaleb Horton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kaleb-horton/ | |
The debut from the Berlin-based producer explores at the idea of power in the world and within themself, tiptoeing the line between exuberance and terror. | The debut from the Berlin-based producer explores at the idea of power in the world and within themself, tiptoeing the line between exuberance and terror. | Lotic: Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lotic-power/ | Power | Since 2011, Lotic has played in a space of heightened contrasts, embracing the hyperreal potentials of electronic music much like their contemporaries Arca and Sophie. And like those producers, Lotic has moved from a tight focus on the more formal aspects of their music—the serrated edges of a given synthesizer patch or the structure of a mangled club beat—to a broader, more comprehensive look at narrative and affect. Made during a period of instability and homelessness, Power, their debut album, weaves Lotic’s voice into the palette established by 2015’s Heterocetera and Agitations EPs. Those records were certainly evocative, both in their jagged, glitching sounds and in track titles like “Trauma” and “Slay,” but they felt like they were hinting at a thematic core that never fully surfaced. There’s a difference between making music around yourself and making music about yourself. On Power, Lotic gets personal.
The nameless weight that stalked Heterocetera and Agitations lets up somewhat on Power. Lotic’s voice—most often presented as a whisper or a murmur, more a rhythmic tool than a vehicle for melody—cuts through the tension inherent to their production style. Hearing a flurry of hi-hats and the growl of a square-wave synth can be alienating, albeit thrilling, without an explicitly human element to latch onto; by lacing the voice into their work, Lotic offers a hand to the listener, as if saying, “I’m here with you.” Some of the most fascinating moments on Power arise when Lotic’s voice comprises the song’s backbone. A repeated vocal measure begins “Hunted,” and it sets the tempo for the big band beat that later stomps in. The voice is not the accessory, rather it’s the director of the action; the words Lotic says don’t merely glance off the instrumentation, they invite the drum rolls and queasy synth lines to keep pace with their urgency.
“Brown skin, masculine frame/Head’s a target/Acting real feminine/Make ’em vomit,” Lotic whispers, caught in the uncanny space between feeling in control of their presence and being acutely aware that their existence as a black transfeminine person puts them in danger. They collapse the word “masculine” to the space of a single syllable, then elongate “feminine” as if it’s something they’re showing off for a crowd. Around their words, the percussion veers between threatening and celebratory, as the experience of moving through the world as a trans person often is, simultaneously. There is so much joy in manifesting as you really are, and then there is the world.
The album tiptoes that line between exuberance and terror. Strings climb an octave over a lurching, ramshackle drum pattern on “Distribution of Care,” then, at the song’s midpoint, flip directions and began tumbling down toward an uneasy bassline. The drums pick up speed soon after the reversal, as if closing in on a target. Elsewhere, moments of softness and levity emerge: On “Fragility,” tubular bells map a sweet melody against an industrial scrape of percussion, and on “Heart,” Lotic duets with Argentinian artist Moro, singing an unstable melody that vaults sporadically into the head voice, as though both artists were seized by unexpected moments of tenderness. “I’ll give you my heart/If I can trust you,” they each sing alternately. It’s a disarming moment on a dense album, a raw edge left unsmoothed.
Power’s closing track, “Solace,” sees Lotic at their most emotionally exposed. Rather than dance among nervous, complex percussion, their voice floats among thick slabs of bass, gentle chains of synthesizers, and deep, gnashing drums that apply and then relieve pressure as they appear and disappear. “It’s gonna be okay,” Lotic repeats, their syllables long and syrupy, as if they were self-soothing after trauma. Toward the end of the song, their vocals seem to blend with their surroundings—it can be hard to pick out where a wordless backing voice ends and a high note on a keyboard begins. That confusion feels less like a dissolving of the album’s human presence and more like a reconciliation of it, an exposition of the emotional within the technical. On Power, Lotic re-harnesses their production proficiency toward a trickier goal than what they’ve attempted in the past. In the center of their elaborate electronic constructions, they’ve staged their deeply human terrors and triumphs, and traced the way the power structures of the world flow around them. | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tri Angle | July 16, 2018 | 7.8 | 674197a9-7675-42ea-8e59-338b93248417 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Featuring artists like Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and Iron & Wine, this 25-song benefit compilation for the beloved North Carolina venue Cat’s Cradle boasts far more riches than a charity project requires. | Featuring artists like Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and Iron & Wine, this 25-song benefit compilation for the beloved North Carolina venue Cat’s Cradle boasts far more riches than a charity project requires. | Various Artists: Cover Charge: NC Artists Go Under Cover to Benefit Cat’s Cradle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-cover-charge-nc-artists-go-under-cover-to-benefit-cats-cradle/ | Cover Charge: NC Artists Go Under Cover to Benefit Cat’s Cradle | Things change slowly at Cat’s Cradle, the storied North Carolina rock club that turned 50 last year. It took half that time to meander from a basement in Chapel Hill through several nearby locations to its current home in a Carrboro shopping center, half a mile from where it began in 1969. One thing you can say about North Carolinians: We grow deep roots. It’s a testament to the Cradle’s history that some of the area’s biggest bands recorded covers to help the iconic East Coast tour stop outlast the pandemic. The result is Cover Charge, a whopping 25-song set with far more riches than a charity project requires.
Carrboro, the former mill town that started collecting artists when Chapel Hill got expensive, is central in the music scene, but nobody ever talked about the “Carrboro sound.” When the Cradle moved there in 1993, the club was already inextricable from Chapel Hill and indie rock. Hell, it could probably move to Durham (like Merge Records did) or Raleigh—the other cities that make up the loose conurbation we call the Triangle—and still not shake the association.
The Cradle began as a coffeehouse-folk spot, and like most midsize rock clubs, it has grown into more polyglot bookings—shy of techno, anyway, which throbs at one of its former haunts, now Nightlight. But the early ’90s cast a long shadow. In that myth-clouded time, Cradle denizens like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Ben Folds put Chapel Hill on the map for more than UNC basketball. Major-label A&Rs showed up to find the next Nirvana, who of course had played the Cradle, and national magazine writers showed up to construct the new Seattle. Sonic Youth enshrined the club’s name in a song called “Chapel Hill,” and Merge was setting the national indie-label mold. A hodgepodge of weird little bands were being mashed into a canonical sound.
It’s natural that this brief but influential era radiates through Cover Charge. It could only begin with Superchunk, whose members founded Merge and defined the snotty, rambunctious pop-punk most associated with Chapel Hill. They’re also the rare golden-age band that has lasted without hiatus; their effortless cover of The Go-Go’s’ “Can’t Stop the World” shows why. And it’s inspired to conclude with The Veldt, who risked being forgotten beyond the great “Soul in a Jar” until their reformation several years ago met with a critical renaissance, in a climate more open to a Black shoegaze-soul band than those lily-white days were. They imprint their lush but desperate sound on their cover of Madonna’s “Dress You Up.” The leap isn’t as far as it seems—in the ‘90s, even Madonna was checking for Chapel Hill bands.
In between, Cover Charge spans a range of great moments in Triangle music history, the keenest bridging then and now. The name The Mayflies USA probably only means anything to a subset of late-’90s indie fans. By the time they came along, national attention had largely moved on and the internet was about to redraw the landscape of regional scenes. Archers and Polvo had just broken up, and Superchunk had a string section. The Mayflies were the new national buzz-band most likely to carry the torch. Their sleek, soaring sound almost seemed like a repudiation of their squalling predecessors, so it’s interesting to hear the very early-‘90s vibe they bring to The Smiths’ “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out,” like a handshake across the decades.
Though Archers are finally releasing some good new songs 10 years into their reunion, they don’t show up—but Eric Bachmann does, and his duet with one of the Triangle’s best contemporary singer-songwriters, Skylar Gudasz, is an unexpected and delightful choice. In his folksy Crooked Fingers mode, Bachmann reminds us that his Archers croak is a decision, not a limitation, and the duo’s tender version of The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” is the freshest moment here.
This only scratches the surface of Cover Charge, which is stocked with other scenes and eras that have passed through the Cradle. There’s the ‘90s alt-country surge that gave us Tift Merritt, who thankfully is included, and Ryan Adams, who thankfully isn’t. There’s the motley ’80s college rock before the indie-rock boom: the jangle-pop of The dB’s, the jammy Americana of The Connells, and the chicken-fried rockabilly of Southern Culture on the Skids, a retro strain that Flat Duo Jets carried on into the alt-rock ’90s.
This list doesn’t even touch on some of the biggest names here, such as Durham residents The Mountain Goats, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Iron & Wine, or many of the last decade’s vanguard: Mandolin Orange and Mount Moriah, Mipso and The Love Language. It doesn’t touch on soul singer Faith Jones’s brilliant rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” which breaks open the song’s ’60s time capsule to spill into the turbulent modern world beyond the Cradle’s walls, or the Marshall Crenshaw cover by Florence Dore that incited the whole project. It’s just too much, in a wonderful way.
I don’t remember for sure what my first indie-rock show was, but the first one I remember was at the Cradle. I don’t remember The Comas’ set, but I’ll never forget the underwater feeling of the sound and lighting. I became a Comas stan, an indie-rock snob, and a music journalist at the Cradle, all in a short span, and then its tastes broadened with mine to encompass Ghostface and James Blake and onward.
In short, when I die, I want to find myself on the Cradle’s smoker’s patio. It and many venues like it across the country need your help. This comp is no waste of money even if you’ve never set foot in Carrboro, and every venue exists in an ecosystem that feeds bands from one place to the next. It’s imperative to keep them all alive so they can continue to change slowly and change lives for 50 more years.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | self-released | August 10, 2020 | 7.8 | 67473299-7ccd-4b5f-bc73-b3e577aaec1b | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, was an album of slowly unfurled epiphanies. Affirming moments are a little harder to come by on the more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill. If More Than Any Other Day was about the hard-fought, triumphant ascent, Sun Coming Down is the giddy, daredevil “wheeeeee!” down the other side of the peak. | Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, was an album of slowly unfurled epiphanies. Affirming moments are a little harder to come by on the more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill. If More Than Any Other Day was about the hard-fought, triumphant ascent, Sun Coming Down is the giddy, daredevil “wheeeeee!” down the other side of the peak. | Ought: Sun Coming Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20913-sun-coming-down/ | Sun Coming Down | Pop music was built on a whole lotta "yeah." Because saying "yeah" is the most casual, innocuous form of rebellion—there is no easier way of showing you don’t give a fuck than abdicating the responsibility required to enunciate the "s" in "yes." Seeing it through to the end is a show of diligence and commitment. So when Ought singer-guitarist Tim Darcy drops a fulsome "yes" in the middle of "Beautiful Blue Sky"—the spectacular centerpiece track of his band’s sophomore album, Sun Coming Down—he’s sure to savor it. Amid a song whose chorus reads like a laundry list of 21st-century blights ("Warplane/ Condo/ New development") and excruciating water-cooler chit chat ("How’s the family?/ How's your health been?/ Fancy seeing you here!")—Darcy declares, "I’m no longer afraid to die/ Because that is all that I have left/ Yessssss," stretching out that last letter like pizza dough on a woodblock.
It’s an alarming admission, one that reads like the last will and testament of somebody who’s been so numbed by the dispiriting, clockwork demands of modern life that choosing death feels like the only empowering, self-actualizing move at their disposal. But Darcy invests his "yes" with an ecstatic sense of clarity, as if he was John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono for the first time. Though Darcy is a poet whose voluminous verbiage often overwhelms his melodies, it’s no insult to say that simple "yes" is the greatest lyric he’s written—because it so perfectly crystallizes his band’s essence and purpose.
Ought make indie rock that sounds like how urbanity makes you feel: nervous, antsy, sometimes hostile, yet intoxicatingly vibrant. And Darcy, likewise, gesticulates like a dutiful office drone who’s played by the rules his whole life but just can’t take it anymore. Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, was an album of slowly unfurled epiphanies, stoking simmering tension into fiery, exultant release. Those sort of affirming moments are a little harder to come by on the more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill. If More Than Any Other Day was about the hard-fought, triumphant ascent, Sun Coming Down is the giddy, daredevil "wheeeeee!" down the other side of the peak.
A lot has changed for Ought since the release of their first album—not the least of which is their lead singer’s surname. (Darcy was billed as Tim Beeler the last time out.) More significantly, what was once a casual project among university roommates was promoted to workhorse touring act, and Sun Coming Down sounds like the sort of record that was hastily hashed out in between transatlantic jaunts. But that’s not to suggest the album sounds unfinished or is lacking focus—rather, the new album takes full advantage of Ought’s fully revved, road-tested engine and increased horsepower, in a strike-while-the-iron’s-hot move. Gone are the hazy ambient ballads, quirky congeniality, and taut goose-stepped grooves that, on More Than Any Other Day, counterbalanced the band’s wiry freneticism. Here, Ought doubles-down on their oft-cited early-'80s Fall and late-'80s Sonic Youth reference points, handily destroying any inkling you might have had about this band following the likes of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Vampire Weekend into big-tent-indie territory.
Sun Coming Down’s more aggressive attack pushes Darcy out of his usual agitated-everyman mode to deliver more cryptic narratives in a theatrical snarl that, at times, verges on Mark E. Smith karaoke. But while Ought’s influences may be obvious, you’re never really sure where they’re taking them: the fearsome rapid-fire rants, clanging guitar tangle and jackhammered drums of "The Combo" turn oddly celebratory in the wake of the song’s surprisingly cheery chorus ("Jubilation, darling!"); the bee-swarm buzz and frantic accelerations of "Celebration" are undercut by Darcy’s wonderfully fey, Fred Schneider-worthy exhortations ("Okay... let’s do it!"). Other songs are subjected to more abrupt change-ups: "On the Line" alternates between ponderous tone poem and garage-punk rave-up, before settling into a sublime third act that recalls the steady, galloping build-up of Patti Smith’s "Gloria", while "Passionate Turn"—the only time here Ought attempt to channel the nocturnal grace of More Than Any Other Day’s knockout ballad "Habit"—turns from swooning, stumbling serenade into a menacing, militaristic march for its final verse/chorus run.
Even the songs that remain locked into formation undergo subtle yet substantial mutations. The opening sprint of "Men for Miles" sees Darcy rewriting his verse melody with each pass and, as the band lean their full weight into the song’s motorik momentum, his unyieldingly abrasive guitar noise gives way to hypnotic, third eye-prying bliss. And the aforementioned "Beautiful Blue Sky" may initially sound like Ought’s answer to "Marquee Moon", but spiritually speaking, it’s their "Once in a Lifetime", a song that paints a vivid picture of cubicle-bound 9-to-5 conformity before providing you with the sledgehammer to smash it. The transmission may be a little more distorted this time out, but, with Sun Coming Down, Ought’s underlying message is the same as it ever was: you have the power within you to change your lot in life. When you feel like there’s no way out, just say "yes." | 2015-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Constellation | September 15, 2015 | 8 | 6749ada9-44b4-4272-b4d6-e5e81a01ef07 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Terius Nash digs into his songwriting vault for a leisurely stroll through his single favorite subject. | Terius Nash digs into his songwriting vault for a leisurely stroll through his single favorite subject. | The-Dream: SXTP4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dream-sextape-4/ | SXTP4 | The-Dream’s last project, 2019’s Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3, opened with the sound of two people fucking in a rainstorm. The singer had spent years describing sex in a variety of locales—from the beackseats of every luxury vehicle imaginable to a padded room in a psych ward—but this time he decided to cut out the middleman—himself—and just present the raw act without adornment. It set the tone: This wasn’t a record to create a dance challenge to; this was music made for one thing and one thing only. In an era when some of the biggest rappers in the world proudly proclaim celibacy, Terius Nash is a throwback to an older, more explicit era.
What came next was 39 tracks that replaced the cheeky metaphors and innuendos of his past work with straight-up filth. It never justified the king-sized runtime, but the magic of his songwriting still glimmered occasionally. His followup, SXTP4, is nearly a quarter of the length, suggesting a more cohesive affair, trimmed of fat. Instead it’s another leisurely stroll through the studio for Nash as he strings together a satisfying batch of R&B—but only really strives for transcendence once.
But what a moment that is. In many ways, “Hard 4 Me” is one of Nash’s most stripped-down tracks ever, glued together by a smattering of synths that sound like they came straight from an old Casio preset. Its emptiness leaves space for his sultry squeak of a voice, which is divine at carving out melodic pockets in the groove. Here he uses it to beckon a potential lover to come over after work and, true to recent form, he wastes no time with pleasantries: “Come straight here and take your shit off,” he asserts.
It feels like something made in about 15 minutes, but its rough-hewn finish feels like proof of Nash’s ability to sit down at any given instrument and crank out something infectious. The two tracks that precede it, “Notice” and “Spiritual,” play like alternate versions of the same song, with Nash exploring different directions he can take its chords and lyrics; it feels like we’re witnessing a Pro Tools session in real time. Its overflow cements the fact that “Hard 4 Me” is the project’s centerpiece, with the rest of the works sounding fairly low-stakes in comparison.
The opener may be the most egregious example of that, as all clues point to it being a scrapped reference track for Diddy. Not only are the Bad Boy Records’ founder’s signature ad-libs all over it, but the verses also seem to be written from his perspective, with a reference to his former partner Notorious B.I.G.’s passing woven in. On the opposite end, the closer “Coltrane” is a pile-up of piano strums that goes nowhere, bookending the album with two equally perplexing showings.
“Wee Hours,” revealed in the project’s digital liner notes to be cultivated from a Jhené Aiko demo, fairs better. On it, Nash shows off his signature vocal style where he isolates syllables and stretches and scrunches them until they become their own melodies, just like he did with the “ellas” and “ehs” of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” nearly 15 years ago now. Aiko takes the horniness baton and runs with it by boasting how she keeps hair ties and scrunchies on her just in case her hands need to be tied down. The pair make it all sound sweet, handling the hardcore subject matter with softness.
The one other notable moment here is the aptly titled “Fuck My Brains Out,” another song on SXTP4 pulled from the archives—this time in its entirety, as it was first released almost a decade ago in the leadup to his fourth album, 1977—but nonetheless continues Nash’s streak of making admirable Prince pastiche. It’s no “Fast Car,” “Yamaha,” or “Hell Mary” off Vol. 1, 2, 3, all of which were dazzling in how they reworked the Purple One’s trademark sounds into something refreshing and relevant. But its glossy finish, pounding rhythm and emphatic howls demonstrate how Nash is of a dying breed of R&B singer, one that builds roaring muscle-car engines of funk to move arenas with. He hasn’t shown that capacity fully in a while, and here he again just gives us a taste. | 2020-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Radio Killa / HITCO | April 25, 2020 | 7.2 | 674b4711-877a-48d2-b445-3765095488f7 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Panagiotis Melidis, the Greek producer who records as Larry Gus, is no stranger to chaos, as is evidenced by the mishmash of styles on his new album, I Need New Eyes. The collection's made up of immersive grooves and smartly deployed samples and features lyrics lamenting the fear of failure inherent in creative work. | Panagiotis Melidis, the Greek producer who records as Larry Gus, is no stranger to chaos, as is evidenced by the mishmash of styles on his new album, I Need New Eyes. The collection's made up of immersive grooves and smartly deployed samples and features lyrics lamenting the fear of failure inherent in creative work. | Larry Gus: I Need New Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21050-i-need-new-eyes/ | I Need New Eyes | When Panagiotis Melidis, the Greek producer who records as Larry Gus, first began releasing music, his primary mode of expression was parroting other artists to create sample-heavy pastiche. His productions encompassed everything from Afrobeat to hip-hop; after signing to DFA, his first two albums for the label were somewhat unsteady attempts to turn bits and pieces into a cohesive whole, taking cues from prototypical psych pop outfits like El Guincho and Animal Collective. His last album*,* Years Not Living, was a more conceptually confident (if sometimes muddy-sounding) stew of African-influenced grooves, slathered-on samples, and his own heavily layered vocals.
Though he’s pared down the clutter and clamor somewhat since his initial DFA outing, Melidis is still no stranger to chaos, as evidenced by the mishmash of styles on his new album, I Need New Eyes. Like Years Not Living, it’s made up of immersive grooves and smartly deployed samples. But the music borders on the emotionally drippy, with lyrics lamenting the ever-present fear of failure inherent in creative work—a feeling he describes somewhat cheekily in the album’s first track as a "black veil of fail."
As a writer, Melidis is often either obtuse to the point of sounding glib ("children are all foreign shores") or absurdly abstract ("all the tigers breathe with the fires from above"). He smartly offsets his own straightforward singing with vocal samples from other sources, and his strongest songs piggyback off of other influences: "A Set of Replies" sounds like an earnest adaptation of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind", elevated by sweetly reedy details and percussive pinging, while the sugary "The Sun Describes", with its warbling vocals and tropical percussion, is a melancholy reimagining of his early Avalanches rip, "Contours Sway".
In some ways Melidis is the consummate consumption-driven producer, whose wide-ranging tastes fuel an obsessive thirst for sounds and ideas: in interviews, he seems comfortable driving the narrative that his music is a sum of influences, gamely referencing Prince, Raymond Queneau, Marc Maron, Lucio Battisti, and Seinfeld. (The album’s title is itself a veiled reference to Proust.) He’s an artist who’s attracted to ambiguity, and who’s attributed one of his most profound moments of inspiration to listening to Madlib while in the grip of sunstroke.
Anyone seeking out that woozy, half-sick, half-euphoric feeling will find it all over I Need New Eyes. The album’s sweeping final track, "Nazgonya (Paper Spike)", is a satisfying culmination, a swirling, unambiguously warm callback to psychedelic pop. Of all the songs on the album, it’s the most straightforward, and therefore the most successful. The problem is that Melidis’ ear for busy atmospherics and his desire to say something deep don’t quite mesh; this music is like that huge spinning wheel on "The Price Is Right"—efficient, colorful, deadening. | 2015-10-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | October 5, 2015 | 6.4 | 674e2c2e-d71c-4f36-bbf2-92fbeb41c05a | Abby Garnett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-garnett/ | null |
On her sixth studio album, the former TRL star writes and sings with worldly wisdom and plaintive abandon. | On her sixth studio album, the former TRL star writes and sings with worldly wisdom and plaintive abandon. | Vanessa Carlton: Love Is an Art | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vanessa-carlton-love-is-an-art/ | Love Is An Art | Having outlived the breathless infatuations of her early songbook, TRL survivor Vanessa Carlton now seeks transcendence in the interstices: midnight walks down cold city blocks, pregnant pauses, and marginal, hard-won absolution. Demarcated by 2011’s Rabbits on the Run, a foreboding record about turning 30 amidst Manhattan’s waning charms, Carlton’s late period is highlighted by 2015’s Liberman, an arresting work rife with gothic imagery delivered at an omniscient remove. All that remains of her first singles is a theatrical flair and plaintive abandon.
While she’s scaled back on her meticulous string arrangements, she fills her songs with winding asides and interludes, confessionals which build to rapturous climaxes and end with stray bars or abandoned verses. “The Only Way to Love,” the centerpiece of her sixth full-length Love Is an Art, is a declaration which accretes in momentum and instrumental layers. The chorus surges in fits and starts; it has a bedeviling bridge and a hopeful coda. The symbolism is a bit overwritten—as ever, there’s an abundance of wayward soldiers and nautical expeditions—but the way Carlton vacillates between first and second person lends a worldly wisdom to her insights.
Carlton’s lyrics are threaded with affirmative truisms, like teenaged diaries edited by an older, wiser life coach. “This place won’t bite, but it won’t save you either,” she sings on the otherwise intimate “Future Pain,” which swells with warm guitars before culminating in a stirring instrumental breakdown. The mid-album interlude “Patience” offers assurance from an opposite shore: “You will wait for it/You will know when it’s right/Please let go/When you can’t control.” On the more enigmatic songs, Carlton scales up her narrative scope by acting as an observer rather than the protagonist, an impressionistic technique she deployed successfully throughout Liberman.
Between her allusive lyrics and percussion-free ballads, Carlton’s never quite approached easy listening, although Love Is an Art is her most ambient record to date. Since Rabbits on the Run, she’s applied a spacious reverb which burnishes her lilting voice and lends the piano a cascading effect, raising the dramatic stakes of her songs’ quiet moments. The sparse electronica and disembodied vocals of “I Can’t Stay the Same” evoke New Age, and the title track’s forceful piano chords stand in for the dizzying keyboard runs she once favored. On the songs with any drums to speak of—it’s about a 50/50 split—the snare advances at a slow, emphatic march.
As an album artist, Carlton’s been deliberate: there’s the album about fleeing her life for New York, the one about fleeing New York for her life, and the suite of wry set pieces submitted as anonymous demos. These albums were tensely plotted, almost operatic, while Love Is an Art suffers a bit from a lack of stage direction. “Back to Life” and “Salesman” are lively arrangements with luminous melodies, but their placement at the record’s end underscores the more dirge-like pace of its first half. There are a few oblique paeans to motherhood, yet Carlton remains most inspired by the switchbacks of romantic love; the anthropomorphic metaphors of “Companion Star” and “I Know You Don’t Mean It” feel too much like abstractions.
“Bad boys become sad boys, it’s only cute when you’re young,” she proclaims on “Future Pain.” By now Carlton understands the pull of self-pity, and on Love Is an Art melancholy is less an affliction than a depth to be plumbed. Coming from a songwriter who loves blindly and aches desperately, the silver linings count. | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dine Alone | April 1, 2020 | 7 | 67510a59-4a51-45c3-892c-e2031de7a77a | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
After fronting the rock band State Champion, the Louisville artist crafts a solo debut full of vivid songwriting and cosmic-slacker jams. | After fronting the rock band State Champion, the Louisville artist crafts a solo debut full of vivid songwriting and cosmic-slacker jams. | Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: Dancing on the Edge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryan-davis-and-the-roadhouse-band-dancing-on-the-edge/ | Dancing on the Edge | In Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel, 1952’s Player Piano, the author delivered one of his defining ideas through the mouth of his character Ed Finnerty: “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center… Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.” Seventy years on, the Kentucky-based songwriter Ryan Davis traces life’s edges in the same spirit, contemplating the human capacities for open-hearted euphoria and harrowing pain.
Dancing on the Edge is Davis’ first record under his own name, but it’s hardly a debut: He’s fronted the ragged rock band State Champion, led Louisville’s heady Cropped Out festival, and established Sophomore Lounge, an indie label with a fierce DIY spirit. In carrying his own banner forward, Davis steps into more of a singer-songwriter role, calibrating his focus on twangy, witty tunes. With the humor and wisdom of a good-natured barfly, he shares his meditations on mortality and finding purpose in a short, messy stint on Earth.
Davis has a gift for vivid imagery and inventive turns of phrase, which he applies liberally. As evidenced by the extended metaphor he offers in “Junk Drawer Heart,” Davis homes in on the details of life with idiosyncratic precision. He says he’s seen “sunsets through each and every shade of beer,” and in shaking off the black clouds that chase him, he declares, “Constantine didn’t make Saturday night for sitting here acting like this.” Enumerating the rest would spoil the fun of their patient unfurling, but Davis’ inclinations cast him as an affable narrator of rough and rowdy environs. He hits a Kenny Powers-esque high of crass poetry when he observes the inevitability of the dirty truth coming to light: “Blacklight will find the jizz.”
Elsewhere, Davis sings openly about fear and vulnerability. Here, too, he finds moments of levity as he’s confronting his deepest existential concerns. He describes “playing ‘got your nose’ with the face of death” in “Learn 2 Re-Luv,” an accounting of imperfections with an imploring heart. The colorful moments have their poignant complements, as when he circles a more pronounced sense of hopelessness in “Bluebirds in a Fight.” He rests his observations on piano, pedal steel, and cushy bass padding, prioritizing a somber mood that diverges from the record’s prevailing mellow but restless spirit.
The loose arrangements of Davis’ backing Roadhouse Band swing further into cosmic-slacker territory than the more serrated stuff he’s delivered with State Champion. Acoustic guitars set a sanguine tone that Christopher May chases on pedal steel, and synthy flashes add more jolts of color. The harmonic twists match the exploratory spirit of Davis’ metaphors, enhanced by vocal contributions from guests like Joan Shelley, Will Lawrence, and Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin. The songs tend to lope along with the relaxed pleasure of taking the scenic route home. In the unhurried “A Suitable Exit,” he repeats the phrase “Death has loaned us to life,” while a corkscrewing fiddle line helps carry the point.
Davis makes his most ambitious swing with the 10-minute “Flashes of Orange,” where he ruminates on disappointment, scuttled luck, and yearning, sounding tortured by the chasm between dream life and cold reality. At first listen, it’s never clear where Davis is leading, but the song’s radiant warmth, overlapping waves of synth and pedal steel, and a sumptuous chorus of backing vocalists are amiable invitations into his world. Davis’ wistful, whoa-dude delivery of the title in the furthest reaches of the song is the only place where the record tips into pure goofiness, and it passes without derailing the album’s pensive disposition.
In the closing “Bluebirds Revisited,” Davis casts his eye beyond the mortal coil. “I started out a butterfly detective, then I became a teenage alcoholic, now I’m trying to get to heaven, or whatever you’d call it,” he confesses, finding some semblance of peace while “barreling forward while my memories riot behind me.” In his investigation of the human spirit, Davis has learned to embrace worry and wonder as companions for a restless heart. His place at the edge may be perilous, precarious, and occasionally lonely, but it’s got one hell of a view. | 2023-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sophomore Lounge | November 3, 2023 | 7.9 | 675810a6-b740-4ca1-9f92-33ac6a6e21c0 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
As he stares down a one-year jail sentence for attempting to purchase machine guns from a federal agent in a Walgreens parking lot, T.I. makes a record based on the assumption that everything's going to be all right for him-- emotionally and financially. Rihanna and Ludacris are among the guests. | As he stares down a one-year jail sentence for attempting to purchase machine guns from a federal agent in a Walgreens parking lot, T.I. makes a record based on the assumption that everything's going to be all right for him-- emotionally and financially. Rihanna and Ludacris are among the guests. | T.I.: Paper Trail | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12279-paper-trail/ | Paper Trail | Clifford Harris has gotten pretty good at this self-fulfilling prophecy thing. Though 2003's Trap Musik made him a regional royal in Atlanta, 2006's King accurately predicted he'd go nationwide. That record, combined with the positive reception of his film ATL the same year, gave hip-hop the legitimate multimedia crossover star it needed as interest in 50 Cent flagged. But his predictive powers worked against him on last year's T.I. vs T.I.P., a sloppy and rushed collection loosely based on the notion that no matter how firmly the rapper entrenched himself in the pop world, anything from his hustler past-- from his hotheadedness to his felonies to his associations-- could compromise his success. Which is exactly what happened: He's now staring down jail time for attempting to purchase machine guns from a federal agent in a Walgreens parking lot.
T.I. apparently learned his lesson, and on Paper Trail, he's not taking any chances with an extraneous narrative. Although some recent mixtape tracks suggest we might be getting a 25th Hour-like confessional from Harris on his way to a one-year sentence in 2009 (or reality TV), Paper Trail bases itself on the assumption that everything's going to be all right for him, emotionally and financially. Breaking rank from his previous two efforts by writing down his lyrics again, he immediately shows a willingness to do something other than coast from hook to hook-- at least at the outset, on "56 Bars (Intro)" and "I'm Illy". Not that he's morphed into Pharoahe Monch or anything: His wordplay likens his weed to celery and his money-getting ability to the U.S. Treasury, which are pretty lame boasts these days.
The real shift in tone, though, becomes apparent in T.I.'s eagerness to please: Even with "Swagga Like Us", Paper Trail hosts as many obligatory guest R&B hookmen as rappers. The conciliatory lover's rock of "Whatever You Like", with its near-absence of rapping, spotlights a synth pluck as flirty and debauched as a coked-up celebutante as proof that this "Lollipop" thing is a full-blown trend, not just a one-off WTF. And despite T.I. making an uncomfortable number of veiled threats to bloggers, Just Blaze goes all Rivers Cuomo by cratedigging in YouTube; the internet-approved "Numa Numa" song is now a hook via Rihanna at her most robo. (The song bottoms out on listenability even before you get to the surprisingly unctuous moralizing of its second verse.) And if you justifiably figured "Porn Star" would be the album's low point, wait til Tip stoops to using a "life is like a..." device so cornball that even Travis beat him to it.
Paper Trail more often succeeds when the positivity sounds more earned than court-ordered. Beyond the fact that "On Top of the World" squashes a Ludacris/T.I. beef that threatened to get even more stupidly dangerous (though T.I. isn't above going at Shawty Lo on "What Up, What's Haapnin'"), it's a perfect pairing that makes you wonder how many awesome collaborations we missed out on. Luda's verse is infectiously joyous and quotable ("We see Samuel L. Jackson, like, 'What's up motherfucker!'") as T.I. provides the perfect foil with the weariness of someone whose fight will never be over. The same goes for "No Matter What", the most musically striking track, with Danja's churchgoing organ sighs and punched-up drums. While T.I. lords over wannabes that want to "get a beat from Toomp and make a hook like shawty," ending with a line like "I just let go and let God deal with it" may seem deflating, but in the context of a rap persona that owes its success to otherworldly confidence, it's a telling display of how little control he really feels.
For better or worse, "Swagga Like Us" defines Paper Trail. In the style of those can't-miss 90s posse cuts, T.I., Lil' Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay-Z spit over a martial beat that samples M.I.A.'s pop chart infiltrator "Paper Planes". What could go wrong? Unfortunately, one-upmanship gives way to self-assured competence and Khaled-inspired complacence. T.I. effortlessly bests them all, but in this track, you see how the album manages to be a more detailed manuscript of Tip's complexity: An impending incarceration has lit a fire under him, triggering an impulse to challenge himself. But T.I. has spent too much of his life fighting to get where he is, and Paper Trail's desire to play things chill suggests a different sort of trap than we're used to hearing about from him. | 2008-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | October 2, 2008 | 6.2 | 6761478b-bded-448b-b6ef-38047a25ba23 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The revolutionary Philadelphia hardcore band expand the genre’s possibilities on their new EP, which feels cruelly short at only 12 minutes. | The revolutionary Philadelphia hardcore band expand the genre’s possibilities on their new EP, which feels cruelly short at only 12 minutes. | Soul Glo: Songs to Yeet at the Sun EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soul-glo-songs-to-yeet-at-the-sun-ep/ | Songs to Yeet at the Sun EP | On the week Soul Glo released their new EP Songs to Yeet at the Sun, the outcome of the presidential election was largely seen as resting in the hands of Black Philadelphians such as themselves. After spending a half-decade deftly scrutinizing their tokenization in the DIY hardcore scene and the limitations of white allyship, Soul Glo surely saw the irony of this newly obsessive and granular interest.
Songs to Yeet at the Sun arrives after an entire election cycle where the Black vote was delegitimized on one side, taken for granted by the other, and seen as a monolithic body by both. “If that cop had taken a further step than just putting his hand on his gun, and shot us right there, we might never know whose side yr really on,” Pierce Jordan screamed in one of the many instant quotables from 2019’s THE NIGGA IN ME IS ME—an album whose cover commemorated their 2018 arrest in Missouri and the subsequent GoFundMe that exceeded the $15,000 bail requirement, which the band members claimed was three times the amount normally charged. Soul Glo’s music is firmly based in intersectional identity and lived experience, providing an opportunity for many to see themselves represented while challenging any attempt to label or categorize them.
Early in September, Soul Glo dropped Songs to Yeet at the Sun’s feral opener “(Quietly) Do the Right Thing” just weeks before the Breonna Taylor verdict inspired new protests in Philadelphia. Soul Glo’s songwriting is generally more in line with the Coup’s absurdist, anarchic humor than Public Enemy’s stoic militance, but the parenthetical isn’t played for laughs here. Here and elsewhere, Jordan fixates on how to operate ethically in an artistic community where clout serves as the primary currency.
But as widespread protest reignited interest in Spike Lee’s eternally resonant masterpiece over the summer, it also served as a reminder of the fear-mongering that surrounded its original release. Like Spike Lee, Soul Glo are not interested in solutions. Their music feels like the unignorable act of violence that follows after more socially acceptable forms of communication have failed. Songs to Yeet at the Sun is destructive and abrasive hardcore that nonetheless feels utopian. “(Quietly) Do the Right Thing” functions as Soul Glo’s stylistic syllabus, cross-referencing D.C. hardcore, West Coast thrash, and Midwest screamo while Jordan’s feverish, foaming vocals betray their love for Korn. The end of “29” smuggles “Great Balls of Fire” piano riffs into a post-hardcore Molotov, whereas the production on “2K” finds a common space between industrial grind, pornographic sex raps, and morbid horrorcore.
“Don’t get me wrong, but don’t get me fucked up!” Jordan announces at the very top of “(Quietly) Do the Right Thing.” He’s interested in expressing an anger and urgency potent enough to require the lyric sheet posted on their Bandcamp—and even then, the run-on sentence structure, clipped verbiage (“YT,” “yr”), and pile-ups of agitated question marks make them writhe on the screen. A collaboration with the Richmond DJ and trans artist Archangel, “2K” is about the only time where the lyrics are clearly intelligible.
Songs to Yeet at the Sun rushes forward as if written in real time, slices of life that give voice to the marginalized—Black, queer, trans, musicians, “non-essential workers”—and make them feel accessible to anyone who doesn’t immediately identify. It’s essentially a concept piece about what it means to be broke as fuck in 2020. “Microbudget all your 20s, not just the bills,” Jordan shrieks on “29,” a painfully detailed account of having to penny-pinch to afford exorbitantly priced SSRIs. Meanwhile, as marijuana becomes legalized and commercialized across the country, Jordan sees only people like Elon Musk and “each and every Punk Goes Crunk white nigga” standing to benefit. “It’s places you can cop legally, but till they drop my nigga’s charges, it don’t mean shit to me” he shouts on “Mathed Up.”
“Trump’s going to be great for punk rock!” has served as a running joke for the past four years, but it’s not the assumption of great music that prompted laughs. Rather, it’s the belief that Donald Trump somehow represented a clean break in our supposed arc towards moral rectitude rather than a logical endpoint for the American experiment. “Our era is a marketplace of contained demolitions, pleasant distractions under commercial supervision, and affordable suicidal coping mechanisms,” Jordan cries on the closing track—a sentiment true of the Obama era and the promised return to “normal” when none of Soul Glo’s demands for police reform or debt cancellation get addressed. “Joe Biden’s going to be great for punk rock!” will probably be a running joke too, but the moment Pennsylvania ostensibly tipped the election, the one thing I wanted to hear most of all was the next Soul Glo album. By the end of “I’m on Probation,” the possibilities for Soul Glo appear limitless, leaving Songs to Yeet at the Sun to feel cruelly unfinished after its 12 minutes have passed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Secret Voice | November 18, 2020 | 8.1 | 67626230-6dca-44f1-b102-6bc313fae24c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Father John Misty is a consummate entertainer. On Pure Comedy, he questions the value of entertainment, capitalism, and everything else in a grueling odyssey through the psyche of Josh Tillman. | Father John Misty is a consummate entertainer. On Pure Comedy, he questions the value of entertainment, capitalism, and everything else in a grueling odyssey through the psyche of Josh Tillman. | Father John Misty: Pure Comedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23013-pure-comedy/ | Pure Comedy | Father John Misty presents a sprawling double-feature: the skewering of an infantile generation, and the self-skewering of its author. From the mind of an apocalyptically inclined neurotic, who reads Žižek and Freud and believes humanity is condemned to moral chaos, comes Pure Comedy, a grueling, often inspired odyssey that screams to be taken as art. Across its 75 minutes, humility is scarce. In one song, having indexed the species’ flaws, he reprimands God: “Try something less ambitious next time you get bored.” It is intense, fatalistic, exhausting, and grandiose—sometimes devastating, sometimes pretentious. (Regarding love—he’s not really doing that anymore.) So yes, it is a Father John Misty album, and Josh Tillman still excels at tormenting those unlucky souls who enjoy his music.
The record is also Tillman’s first opportunity to confront pop culture from the frontline. After releasing I Love You, Honeybear, whose inquiry into romance and masculine folly won many hearts, he coasted through the last two years as an indie firebrand. He perfected theatrical cynicism, sarcastically covering Taylor Swift, trolling music sites, claiming responsibility for a stolen crystal and using the coverage to denounce health food. He shot a video with Lana Del Rey, who shares something of his postmodern mystique, and wrote for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, who do not.
That behind him, the Pure Comedy circus kicked into gear at a New Jersey music festival last July. Instead of his songs, Tillman performed a rambling soliloquy, triangulating Trump anxiety, the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis, corporate evil, folksy escapism, and the “fucked up entertainment complex.” Along with all those themes, Pure Comedy channels the speech’s righteous delirium, a rhetorical mode Tillman finds irresistible. If his confessions favor ironic distance, his big-picture theses exude something close to rapture. “The Memo,” a highlight here, smashes together cynicism and compassion, with Tillman declaring that it’s “not self-love that kills you,” it's when “those who hate you” are allowed to profit from your vulnerability. Such sermons are typically repelling, but what saves him from insufferable smartassery—for the most part—is his ability to turn yelling at clouds into a grand form of entertainment.
Pure Comedy follows the thread of Honeybear outliers “Holy Shit” and “Bored in the USA.” The latter concealed sincerity beneath melodrama, its mockery of “middle-class problems” complicated by troubling reflections on depression. Those uncomfortable collisions—bourgeois ills explored through otherwise sympathetic characters—emerge throughout Pure Comedy.
Beneath Pure Comedy’s synth-dappled country, blue-eyed soul, and pop fashioned after George Harrison is a battleground filled with religion, pop culture, technology, and neoliberalism. To open “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution,” a wonderful portrait of life after the climate apocalypse, Tillman nonchalantly topples capitalism: “It got too hot,” he sings, “And so we overthrew the system.” Midway in, an orchestral cacophony swirls into an outrageous chorus, which I’m sure Tillman would love to see quoted unabridged:
“Industry and commerce toppled to their knees
The gears of progress halted
The underclass set free
The super-ego shattered with our ideologies
The obscene injunction to enjoy life
Disappears as in a dream
And as we returned to our native state
To our primal scene
The temperature, it started dropping
And the ice floes began to freeze”
The indulgence is pure Tillman. But the passage, in all its mad glory, matches the size of the task, particularly in times of total dysfunction. It’s never been easier to sympathize with Tillman’s pomposity. Only in the song’s conclusion does the façade collapse, as “visionaries” start developing products that will rejoin this new society with capitalist realism. A cop-out, maybe, but who else would have copped in to begin with?
While “Revolution” is its least discreet flirtation with utopianism, Pure Comedy makes plenty of time to call bullshit on visionary capitalism. The title track swirls with religious fanaticism, secular ideology, and pharmaceutical greed into a repudiation of almost everything. In the last chorus—“But the only thing that they request/Is something to numb the pain with/Until there’s nothing human left”—the record hurtles into a chronically pleasurable near-future. “Total Entertainment Forever” is a postcard from the brave new world: Backed by sarcastically ecstatic horns, Tillman celebrates a “permanent party” where our appetite for distraction has eroded the old-fashioned human soul. His characters finish the chores, slide on the Oculus Rift, and jump into bed with the pop star du jour. He heralds the “freedom to have what you want” in a tone that suggests freedom, whatever it may be, does not look like this.
After that opening suite—“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”—the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips. The spiritual anchor is “Leaving LA,” in which fragments of orchestral splendour—all arranged by the brilliant Gavin Bryars—are buried beneath a 13-minute pilgrimage through Father John Misty’s psyche. An unappetizing prospect, perhaps, but he writes captivating scenes; one revisits a traumatic childhood saga soundtracked by Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” in a JCPenney, another a New Year’s sunset that “reminds me, predictably, of the world’s end.”
Five verses into the song, Tillman inserts a mocking female character: He’s just “another white guy in 2017,” she groans, “who takes himself so goddamn seriously.” “Leaving LA” reaches for transcendent honesty, but this lyric feels misjudged. Is this a sincere concern or an attempt to shoot down nonexistent thinkpieces? Father John Misty’s music is certainly exasperating, but it’s not due to his entitlement so much as that irrepressible impulse to outpace the listener’s criticism. The moment somebody says, “I know I’m being annoying” is often when you realize it’s true.
Tillman has, of course, anticipated this critique. His childish desire to be loved or hated on his own terms is dredged up on “A Bigger Paper Bag,” but there’s an added, delicate touch that’s endearing. “It’s easy to assume that you’ve built some rapport/With someone who only likes you for what you like yourself for,” he sings, over a woozy arrangement evoking peak Elliott Smith. “You be my mirror/But always remember/There are only a few angles I tend to prefer.” It’s a rare callback to Honeybear’s psychological burrowing, and I find myself returning to it. His sociological bombast is dwarfed by these quiet revelations.
The scarcity of such interludes doesn’t undermine the Misty manifesto, but it does mean the record’s pontifications, particularly the tired false equivalencies of “Two Wildly Different Perspectives,” can test your patience. David Foster Wallace—whose critiques on irony, entertainment, and self-consciously “hideous men” are all over Pure Comedy—once advocated for bleak fiction in dark times. Wallace said that it should “find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” This redemptive spirit eludes Tillman. Given his off-record provocations—that a pop star’s “wearing next to nothing” strips her music of value, for instance—it’s reasonable to expect him to dream up something for us to really care about (or at least to button up his shirt). He instead settles on soothing defeatism, a litany of conquered crises whose lessons amount to, “That’s just the way it is.” Given the album’s thematic largesse, it’s almost charming. Almost. But you wonder what kind of progressive future he envisions: that which will lift society or merely flatter his own intellect. | 2017-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 7, 2017 | 7.6 | 6767fcd6-6e6e-480d-b950-a8d7d90070cf | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Naming her first LP after the 1982 debut by the Descendents (who she also covers), the one-woman Oakland band offers an amalgam of punk, garage, and 1960s girl group harmonies. | Naming her first LP after the 1982 debut by the Descendents (who she also covers), the one-woman Oakland band offers an amalgam of punk, garage, and 1960s girl group harmonies. | Colleen Green: Milo Goes to Compton | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16449-colleen-green-milo-goes-to-compton/ | Milo Goes to Compton | If you grew up identifying as a rock'n'roll kid, you’ll probably find something comfortingly familiar about West Coast artist Colleen Green. For one, there's the fact that she named her first LP Milo Goes to Compton-- a play on the title of the Descendents' first album, Milo Goes to College-- and has loaded it up with enough historical references to make it clear that there was some overlap between your high school record collection and hers. If you don't notice that album opener "Good Good Things" is also a cover of a song by the same flagship California punk band, for instance, you'll probably recognize track two as a scuzz-laden half-cover of "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones. Perhaps you'll see something of your own ideal likeness in the cartoon rendering of the 27-year-old Boston transplant that appears on the album art-- Wayfarer-style sunglasses, palm trees, sun-- and if not, then you’re probably familiar with other millennial garage rockers who’ve tapped a similar iconography.
Milo Goes to Compton, which she originally self-released on cassette tape last year, builds on the simple-as-hell, one-woman-band arrangements that marked 2011's Cujo EP. While perhaps a bit quirkier and diminutive in stature, her amalgam of punk, garage, and 1960s girl group memories feels like something you might expect from a member of the Art Fag Recordings stable, which has included Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Bleached, and other contemporary proponents of time-tested guitar-pop thrills. Hustling together the album's eight tracks from nothing but a drum machine, multi-tracked vox, and some fuzzed-out power chords, Green enacts the less-is-more principle on a molecular level, as though she were trying to see how many elements she could subtract from the rock band equation while still creating an overall impression of rock'n'roll.
Depending on your relationship to the rock tropes that abound here, this could feel either endearing or lazy. Lyrically, Green's shortened attention span for pretty much anything beyond crushes, marijuana, and complicated love is likely to recall Best Coast, although her delivery is deadpan enough to discount any aspirations toward belting pop diva-dom. More than sublimate heartbreak into collective exaltation, she shades these lyrical themes a bit darker than the punchy power riffs might suggest. The aforementioned Ramones classic, for example, is renamed "I Wanna Be Degraded", with Green introducing a few NSFW scenarios for the sake of illustration. Album single "Worship You", similarly, sees Green warning a romantic prospect that he had better "worship her" if he wants "to be the one I sleep with every night/ to be the one I let tie me up tight." That the song ends with her desiring to "worship" the same person isn't the only thing that makes its sentiment feel less than cut-and-dry. More striking is the fact that she sounds cool as a cucumber, as though the lyrical content of the song were only secondary, a conduit for a catchy, sock-hopping melody.
More often than not, it feels like Green is trying to hide from us, layering on the auto-harmonies so thick that you cannot even tell which vocal track is meant to be the lead. But what carries Milo Goes to Compton is less its dark-sunglasses-inscrutability than Green's economical melodic sense, which leverages minimal gestures for maximal impact-- loaded pauses included. Her cover of "I Will Follow Him", for example, would be a whole lot less fresh-sounding if it didn't contract the 1963, Little Peggy March original into a skeletal, two-note affair, jauntily layered over a mechanical groove. Likewise, part of the pleasure of listening to "Always on My Mind", is simply hearing the sound of her left hand sliding repetitively up and down the guitar neck, sounding ever-so-slightly different-- or imperfect-- with each go-around.
If we're comparing Green to other, better-known female garage rock heroes of the past few years, I’d say that the Vivian Girls sound like the most kindred of spirits. A band whose members are so unattached to their own instruments that they are willing to swap them mid-performance doesn't just reaffirm the DIY notion that anyone can make catchy, thoroughly engaging rock'n'roll regardless of technical skill, it elevates that understanding to a central facet of their art. Green does that on the level of each individal song, and our enjoyment stems partly from sensing just how much fun she seems to be having while building them, note by note. | 2012-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Art Fag | April 2, 2012 | 6.7 | 67680171-6169-47f8-97b2-5eff5932519d | Emilie Friedlander | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emilie-friedlander/ | null |
The Icelandic post-rockers waver between exuberance and heavy-handed melodrama on the first official recording of an 18-year-old operatic work based on a centuries-old medieval poem. | The Icelandic post-rockers waver between exuberance and heavy-handed melodrama on the first official recording of an 18-year-old operatic work based on a centuries-old medieval poem. | Sigur Rós: Odin’s Raven Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sigur-ros-odins-raven-magic/ | Odin’s Raven Magic | The end of the world looms as Odin, Norse deity of war and death, joins his fellow gods for a banquet. His trusty ravens, Huginn and Muninn, traverse barren fields, gathering the world’s wisdom while the gods feast and watch for omens. This portentous meal is the subject of a poem written in the traditional style of Edda, the collection of Icelandic mythology and prose dating back to the 13th century, and of Sigur Rós’s Odin’s Raven Magic. On the eight-part operatic work, the Icelandic band funnels its serene, immersive style into theatrical storytelling, evoking a lively yet uneasy scene with eerie harmony and cinematic scope that wavers between exuberance and heavy-handed melodrama.
Odin’s Raven Magic is something of a myth itself—though Sigur Rós first performed it live 18 years ago, it’s never received a proper recording. Before now, only fragments of the lengthy work hovered around the internet, captured by eager audiences at crowded shows. This uninterrupted rendition was recorded live in 2004 at La Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris; you might forget it’s a live performance until the end, when the music fades away and applause erupts.
Trading their signature bowed guitar for bowed orchestral instruments, Sigur Rós approach the long history of operas that borrow from mythology with a sense of tranquility. This music swims through melancholy and euphoria, full of grand melodies fit for a Game of Thrones feature film. The strongest moments come when there’s motion, like on “Prologus,” which highlights the orchestra’s subtle shifts between dissonance and consonance, and “Spár eða spakmál,” where a swooping choir, booming horn, and urgent percussion build a sense of exhilaration.
Sigur Rós’ performance is skilled, but their commitment to placidity limits the album’s dramatic capability. Such a menacing tale demands tumultuous color, and opera provides the perfect inspiration for over-the-top storytelling. “Stendur æva” could’ve come as a punch in the gut, but instead a lackluster choir and lilting vocals leave it feeling oversaturated. By illustrating mythology with even-keeled sound rather than diving into its turbulence, Sigur Rós glosses over the magnitude of the catastrophe they’re trying to describe.
The star of Odin’s Raven Magic, besides its folklore, is the twinkling marimba that appears throughout. This isn’t a regular marimba: Built by Páll Guðmundsson, it replaces the usual wooden slats with Icelandic stones, swapping an earthy tone for an icy one. The instrument pops in and out with a delicate, pulsating rhythm that provides an exigent backdrop, subtle yet omnipresent, like a ticking doomsday clock. It’s a recurring theme that makes its first appearance on the sing-songy “Dvergmál,” where gradual layering and generous drums create the record’s truest synthesis of post-rock sensibility and minimalist austerity. The marimba anchors the spacious sound, reminding us of the impending peril that lies beneath the serenity.
Sigur Rós’s music has always felt panoramic, and Odin’s Raven Magic is no different; its sweeping melodies harken back to landmark albums like Ágætis byrjun, but this time, the music foregrounds orchestra and choir. When the sprawling sound becomes overwhelming, it’s the hidden details that prove most tantalizing, telling the album’s story beneath the wandering melodies. Sigur Rós may be more commonly associated with relaxation, but when they allow elements like Guðmundsson’s anxious marimba to drive their music, the feeling lingers.
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. | 2020-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Krunk | December 7, 2020 | 6.8 | 676bb007-0152-428f-be6c-2f65bca951a5 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
One of the indisputable masterpieces of shoegaze is given the expanded reissue it deserves, with bonus tracks, a live show, and detail-sharp remastering. | One of the indisputable masterpieces of shoegaze is given the expanded reissue it deserves, with bonus tracks, a live show, and detail-sharp remastering. | Ride: Nowhere [20th Anniversary Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15069-nowhere-20th-anniversary-edition/ | Nowhere [20th Anniversary Edition] | Along with the 20th anniversary reissue of Ride's debut LP, Nowhere, comes a thick booklet of old photos, liner notes, and a Jim DeRogatis-penned look back on the Oxford shoegazers' near-perfect debut. Flip to page 20 and you'll find a gem: a grainy shot of the foursome sitting on a bed, shoulder-to-shoulder, each with their own reading material. Vocalist/guitarist Mark Gardener is at one end, nose-deep in a copy of the cornball self-help novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull. His bandmate, songwriting foil, and eventual nemesis Andy Bell is left of center, peeking out from behind an issue of Bunty, an old British comic written for teenage girls. Bassist Steve Queralt is engrossed in now-defunct UK pop rag Number One, while drummer Loz Colbert seems rapt by the Christopher Isherwood novel perched at his thumbs. With the exception of Gardener's book, a likely reference to Nowhere opener "Seagull", it's all very English. But at the same time, there's magic more universal to unpack from this one image. The four of them look like brothers. They look like ordinary, wise-ass kids you knew or know. They look like a band.
If I asked you about My Bloody Valentine, the other most seminal shoegaze band, chances are you'd think immediately of Kevin Shields and the countless places you've heard his singular guitar vision unfurl. But while Ride are often mentioned in tandem with MBV, their footprint owes more to their songwork than their sonics, and more to the way all four members clashed and combined. They weren't visionaries or titans; they were young writers with a taste for high volumes. And they didn't situate their melodies amongst tides of effects-pedal-induced mayhem, either; they did it the other way around. Howls were there to support hooks, and the psychedelic interplay between Gardener and Bell's two guitars was far more pivotal to their mission than drapes of all-enveloping noise. But that said, Nowhere, their seismic debut full-length, found them playing with elements of the shoegaze sound as much as they ever would. While it's one of the genre's enduring moments, it's Ride's for another reason: This family of songs is their most focused.
The remastering on this edition makes that all the more clear. It starts with a sharpening. Nowhere was never an especially warm listen, and felt a little flat at times if it wasn't played dangerously loud. The new shine seems so necessary once you hear it. Each jangle and contour has been shored up and made more distinct, resulting in a richer listen. The first whinnies of "Seagull" sound even more serrated than before, and the elliptical guitar figure at its core is less muddy. Gardener and Bell's dual vocals on "Polar Bear" are now as streamlined as that song's livelier coda. And those are just two spots where you can hear again what a great all-around fit they were in the beginning. Not a note feels errant or alone, and Queralt and Colbert sound inseparable, capable of pummeling through squall and enhancing fragile passages with ease. Colbert comes on strong enough to dole out compound fractures, especially during "Dreams Burn Down" and "Vapour Trail." The latter remains immense, standing tall as the most gripping four-and-half-minutes of their career. Twenty years later, it's exciting to realize there's a lot more to be relished in between all its chimes.
Such is the case for much of the first disc. When Nowhere first arrived in late 1990, Ride had already released three outstanding EPs (Ride, Play, and Fall) that year alone. The original North American release added three bonus tracks from Fall, which are joined here by three additional tracks from the album sessions: the workman-like trio of "Unfamiliar", "Beneath", and "Sennen". The new edition also includes "Today", a beautiful, acoustic-based torch song that plumes for miles and miles. Count it up and that's 23 songs of fantastic quality, all culled from an opening stretch so fertile, the band would have a much easier time crafting early setlists than they ever would replicating that initial spark.
Though the booklet is nice and the remastering essential, what makes this anniversary package most intriguing is its second disc: a live set from a Los Angeles show at the Roxy in Spring of 1991. Ride didn't come close to making a splash in the States like they did at home, but on this night, if audience noise is any indicator, their reception was electric. Through headphones, it's hard to believe anyone on stage spent a moment gazing at their shoes, as the legend goes. Rifling through just half of their catalog at the time, they sound like wild elephants throwing their weight around. It's a terrific, thunderous recording and you can quickly get a clear sense for why their live show garnered as much excitement as it did then.
At the same time, the nature of what they were trying to accomplish as a band really comes through in full. The more abrasive tones of MBV and Sonic Youth were clearly an influence as they first started to write and record, but it's the from-the-gut pop screech of Dinosaur Jr. that sounds like their closest kin here. Ride's music wasn't necessarily game-changing but the songs are the kind that last. When they close with "Drive Blind", a cut from their self-titled debut EP, they abandon the song's course just two minutes in to catch a massive swell of guitar. It grows and grows and it grows some more, and then, sure enough, the volume dips, and they circle right back to where they started: a melody. They were really good at that. | 2011-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino | February 4, 2011 | 9.5 | 67703148-dea1-40f7-9f40-c7d6f1f493b3 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Thirteen years after their last album together, the electroclash icons return to their roots. | Thirteen years after their last album together, the electroclash icons return to their roots. | Kittin / The Hacker: Third Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kittin-the-hacker-third-album/ | Third Album | For a few months in the early 2000s, no self-respecting arty dance party was complete without the glacial, if faintly amused, Mitteleuropean tones of Miss Kittin, aka French DJ, producer, and vocalist Caroline Hervé. Songs like “Frank Sinatra,” with the Hacker, and “Silver Screen Shower Scene,” with Felix da Housecat, were at the brief populist peak of electroclash, a short-lived genre that brought alien glamour, DIY showmanship, and a sly sense of humor to rattling electro beats before collapsing under the weight of its own vaingloriousness around 2003.
Kittin and the Hacker’s 2001 debut LP, First Album, was perhaps the musical highlight of the electroclash years, a hooky, gothic-black work that could be laugh-out-loud funny. Their follow-up, 2009’s Two, expanded the duo’s horizons to include straight-up pop and trance-y sparkle, yet it never quite hit the same heights, and the duo went their own ways. Thirteen years on, Kittin and the Hacker are back with Third Album, promising a return to what they do best: “our roots, minimal and raw electro.”
Musical progression isn’t on the menu. Twenty-one years may have passed since First Album, but you’d struggle to notice it from Third Album’s musical makeup, which offers not so much an update of the duo’s trademark sound as a subtle finishing buff with a soft chamois cloth. The production is slightly slicker, the drums kick a little bit harder, and the overall feel is a touch more robust. But on the whole, the electro drum march, percolating Italo-disco synths, and ominous chords of First Album are present, correct, and in fine working order, leaving the more luminous elements of Two stuffed to the back of the wardrobe like a tie-dye T-shirt at the end of summer. This classically dark look suits them: Third Album is home to a host of wonderfully witchy musical moments, from the clipped acid lines and eerie chords of “Ostbahnhof” to the unnervingly beautiful synth riff that runs through “Retrovision” like an unhappy memory.
But if the music on Third Album is similar to the debut, the vocals show more adventure. Hervé’s default tone may still be the glazed and disaffected air of First Album, which she slips into like fine pajamas on songs like “Ostbahnhof” and “19.” But she actually sings on “Malade,” and the song’s chorus soars in a way that the disinterested narrator of “Frank Sinatra” would doubtlessly have considered far too much effort. On “Purist,” meanwhile, Hervé’s voice is stripped of blank cynicism and considerably more engaged, her raw and rather imperfect vocal almost punk rock in spirit.
Lyrically, too, Third Album offers departures from the worlds of nightclubs, glitz, and illicit romances. “Malade” is an astute and rather poignant French-language attack on outdated romantic ideals, while “Retrovision” offers a touchingly accepting look at the passing of time (“Now we are raving without standing/In the sunset of our life”) that brings hitherto unseen emotional depths to the Hacker/Kittin project. That these are the two best songs on Third Album is no coincidence.
For all this, Third Album doesn’t quite reach the heights of First Album. There’s nothing as obviously funny as “Frank Sinatra” (with its classic line, “Do you know Frank Sinatra? He’s dead!”) or as irresistibly hooky as “Stock Exchange,” while “Homme à la Mode” and “La Cave” are dirge-y and underwhelming. On “La Cave,” in particular, it sometimes sounds like Hervé is barking phrases at random, an allergy to rhyme and reason she occasionally succumbed to on Two.
Barring a full-blown electroclash revival, Third Album feels curiously out of joint in 2022—neither contemporary, fashionably retro, nor particularly outmoded. Its success is a sign of how little certain strands of electronic music have moved on over the last two decades, as well as a tribute to the eternal appeal of a catchy vocal over a slamming beat. And there, between stagnation and renewal, base metals and gold, we leave Third Album, a flawed but intriguing record for aging ravers, erstwhile romantics, and fading glamour-pusses alike. | 2022-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Nobody’s Bizzness | April 1, 2022 | 6.4 | 677080e2-c8d4-4f1a-aec2-0e9eb21e092d | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
After 46 years, Neil Young unearths a lost but highly consequential album, a collection of humble, stripped-back love songs he began writing at what was arguably the artistic zenith of his career. | After 46 years, Neil Young unearths a lost but highly consequential album, a collection of humble, stripped-back love songs he began writing at what was arguably the artistic zenith of his career. | Neil Young: Homegrown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-homegrown/ | Homegrown | For a certain kind of music lover, there’s nothing more alluring than a “lost” album. Unlike a record that was merely “scrapped” or “never released,” the term suggests something both mysterious and not worth losing—especially when that album is fabled to be particularly emotionally raw, and especially when the artist who created it is beloved precisely for his rawness, but also for his reticence. “Sometimes life hurts,” Neil Young wrote in a blog post announcing that he was finally releasing Homegrown, an album that’s something of a unicorn among the sort of fans who read his Times-Contrarian newspaper. “This is the one that got away.”
There are a couple stories about why Young waited 46 years to release Homegrown, a collection of stripped-back love songs he began writing at what was arguably the artistic zenith of his career. In one, recounted in Jimmy McDonough’s colossal Young biography, Shakey, Young made a spur-of-the-moment decision to release the high-octane Tonight’s the Night instead after he played the two records back to back for some musician friends during a half-remembered night at the Chateau Marmont. In another, the one that Young has been telling of late, he decided that the album—recorded in 1974 during a protracted break-up with the late actress Carrie Snodgress, the mother of his child Zeke—was simply too painful. “It was a little too personal—it scared me,” he told Cameron Crowe in a 1975 interview for Rolling Stone. According to Shakey, he described Homegrown to his father as “great songs I can live without.”
Like the notoriously chaotic, honey slide-fueled On the Beach sessions that preceded it, the tale of Homegrown’s genesis, as chronicled by McDonough, is in some ways a story of rock’n’roll excess. After discovering that his wife had absconded to Hawaii on a five-day boat trip with a man the book calls “Captain Crunch,” a heartbroken Young set off on a mammoth 24-city tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash, who hadn’t released a new studio album together in four years. Nicknamed “the Doom Tour” by David Crosby, it ended up being the highest-grossing tour in history to date, with a cavalcade of indulgences that included hotel pillowcases and plates stamped with the band’s tour logo, limos hired and never used, and a giant celebratory billboard at a final stop in Long Island. (The group later said that tour was not particularly lucrative, because of the expenses.)
As relationships within the group grew strained, McDonough writes, Young chose to travel from stop to stop on his own, in a GMC motorhome he called the Mobile-Obil, often with his son Zeke and their dog Art in tow. Though the RV broke down in the middle of the tour, the decision feels like the perfect entry point to the songs Young would write during this period on and off the road, even as he was playing blown-out, not particularly inspired renditions of CSNY hits on stage: sober, elemental, and full of the contradictory emotions that come with finding one’s self suddenly uprooted from a serious partnership. “I won’t apologize/The light shone from in your eyes/It isn’t gone, it will soon come back again,” he announces on the stunning, loping “Separate Ways,” opening the album on what feels like a note of acceptance: He and his ex-partner still have “their little boy”; they will simply be growing apart. By the next song, “Try,” he’s pleading for a second chance: “Darlin’, the door is open/To my heart, and I’ve been hoping/That you won’t be the one/To struggle with the key.”
Though he recorded Homegrown with a revolving cast of players that included some of music’s biggest stars at the time (an ethereal EmmyLou Harris appears on two tracks, and the Band’s Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson chip in on drums and guitar, respectively), absent are the orchestral swells and jammy dirges that made On the Beach feel like a woozy foray into the nether regions of a high. And though a couple tracks recall the angular, nail-biting strain of amplified rock he’d minted on Tonight’s the Night—particularly “Vacancy,” a crescendo of anger which describes the look in his soon-to-be ex-partner’s eyes, and a song called “We Don’t Smoke It No More”—the dominant mode here is restraint, and a decidedly “homegrown”-sounding palette of acoustic instrumentation and slide guitar. It allows Young’s idiosyncratically simple approach to songwriting to take center stage.
“I came to you when I needed a rest/You took my love and put it to the test,” he sings over a simple plucked guitar solo on “White Line,” which boasts the album’s most painfully delicate melody. Whether the song’s refrain—“That old white line is a friend of mine”—is meant as an allusion to the open road he describes, or a euphemism for drugs, the ambiguity, combined with the bare-bones treatment, only heightens the feeling that we’re getting a glimpse of Young at his most naked and unsparing.
In some ways, Homegrown is hard to reckon with as a cohesive artistic statement. Though seven of its 12 tracks—among them “Separate Ways,” “Try,” and a gentle ballad called “Kansas”—have never been released in any official form, he’s brought nearly all of them out on stage at different points over the decades. Some—like “Love Is a Rose” and the childlike reverie “Little Wing”—have even appeared on other albums over the years, as have alternate recordings of “White Line,” “Star of Bethlehem,” and the title track. There are also a few profoundly weird moments, such as the two-minute spoken-word number called “Florida,” where, over the sound of a finger rubbing the ring of a glass, he tells a surreal story about rescuing a baby in the street after its parents perish in a hang-gliding accent.
Mostly, though, the Young we get here resembles the Young we already know: the one who we first met on his rootsy-yet-metaphysical 1972 breakout album, Harvest, then again later on Comes a Time, in 1978. This is the Young who feels most at home expressing himself with a few simple piano or guitar chords, some lonesome harmonica notes, and the ragged inflections of his nasal, warbling voice—taking what can read like surface-level observations on paper, or even straight-up clichés, and making them feel like illuminations of some distant and unknowable truth.
It’s a reminder of the qualities that make him such an excellent songwriter, and also, in some ways, an icon of 1970s, post-hippie masculinity: A laconic young anti-hero who is content to present us with brief flashes of his interiority as a stand-in for the whole, but who likes to remind us he is most at home on the open road. Perhaps it’s the slender nature of these poignant confessionals, which rarely clock in over three minutes, but when all is said and done, we’re left wanting more.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | June 24, 2020 | 8.8 | 677142b4-3cf8-49a2-ab1c-e45e5ac1810b | Emilie Friedlander | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emilie-friedlander/ | |
A Love Surreal is only Bilal's third studio album in 12 years. Its jazzy, muted, idiosyncratic feel, and a lack of big guest names, makes it seem like the personal project of someone who has embraced the ability to make music away from commercial expectations. | A Love Surreal is only Bilal's third studio album in 12 years. Its jazzy, muted, idiosyncratic feel, and a lack of big guest names, makes it seem like the personal project of someone who has embraced the ability to make music away from commercial expectations. | Bilal: A Love Surreal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17816-bilal-a-love-surreal/ | A Love Surreal | A Love Surreal is only the third studio album Bilal has managed in 12 years, a remarkable fact that testifies to a career marked primarily by speed bumps and absences. These days, he's known more as a guest or hired session gun than a solo artist and A Love Surreal feels very much like the personal project of someone who has embraced the ability to make music away from commercial expectations: jazzy, muted, idiosyncratic, and completely without high-profile guests (unless you count young jazz iconoclast Robert Glasper as such). A Love Surreal breathes some of the same insular oxygen as Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?, another effort by someone who had figured out that he wasn't ever going to be a marquee star, and, with a shrug, closed his studio door to the outside world.
Recorded in live, spontaneous-sounding takes, A Love Surreal is a long, liquid suite, shifting through long instrumental sections during which Bilal is doing nothing but crooning wordlessly, doubling and tripling his voice into freely rippling layers. That doesn't mean it's boring or static. The mix is filled with tiny surprising sounds-- a high, pulsing keyboard whines in your head on "Winning Hand"; dusty, boxy drum programming throughout that recalls the napkin-doodle electronics taking up the back half of Shuggie Otis' Inspiration Information. There are guitars everywhere-- acoustic and sun-dappled on "Lost for Now", electric and bluesy on "Astray", stabbing Steve Cropper leads on "Winning Hand". On "West Side Girl", they clump together like wet tissues while Bilal multitracks his voice into dizzying layers around them: His harmonized vocals stack behind the verses, and the foreground is flooded with breathing, moaning, muttering, exclaiming, and whispering. He seems to gravitate naturally to smaller-scale, more granular moments like these, which make A Love Surreal mandatory headphone listening.
His sense of melody remains compellingly strange, his harmonic ear bent permanently by operatic and jazz training and his reverence towards decades of atmosphere-first psychedelic-soul LPs. A Love Surreal is short on big, arcing-rainbow melodies as a result, but one of its joys is watching Bilal warp his voice into improbable shapes: nasally and needling on "Longing and Waiting", Donny Hathaway-expansive on "Slipping Away"; "7"-era Prince raspy on "West Side Girl" and "Astray". On "Butterfly," the Robert Glasper collaboration, he lets his voice shoot into a startlingly unbounded falsetto, one that feels like it could plausibly keep climbing and climbing. The song has nothing but Glasper's free, shimmering piano and some drowsy guitar effects to mark its edges. It never ceases to be captivating.
There is very little on A Love Surreal to suggest that Bilal has his ear cocked to what is happening to the R&B landscape around him. There are no rap guest spots, despite Bilal's reliable presence on the other side of the "ft." on a decade's worth of indie-rap albums. Calling in favors doesn't seem to interest him. Having outlasted the "next D'Angelo" tag that hung on his earliest work and weathered a decade in the solo artist wilderness, Bilal seems to have found his sweet spot somewhere between "hired session gun" and "weirdo auteur." | 2013-03-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-03-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | eOne | March 6, 2013 | 7.6 | 677596b7-5b75-4c51-8b8f-a9f25b9682bf | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Where Dead & Company emphasize the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic spectacle, Bob Weir’s rootsy trio offers a more intimate reimagining of his former group’s historic countercultural songbook. | Where Dead & Company emphasize the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic spectacle, Bob Weir’s rootsy trio offers a more intimate reimagining of his former group’s historic countercultural songbook. | Bob Weir: Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-bobby-weir-and-wolf-bros-live-in-colorado/ | Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado | “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” is a timeworn Deadheadism that’s been plastered to countless bumpers over the past half century. The phrase is shrouded in the kind of language that can make the world of the Dead feel impenetrable to outsiders, but behind the cliché hides a secret to the longevity of the culture the band birthed. The Grateful Dead live experience exists as a continuum of traditions and disruptions, where new forms and frameworks are birthed in bursts of improvisatory fervor before being codified and incorporated into the band’s extended mythology. There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert because a Grateful Dead concert is a moving target—a porous, multi-celled organism squirming and multiplying as it steadily evolves. This is as true now, nearly 30 years after the death of Jerry Garcia and the subsequent splintering of the band, as it was in 1968, 1977, or 1990.
Garcia’s death obviously threw a wrench into the whole enterprise. Dynastic power struggles ensued, and rather than see the disappearance of the Dead’s center of gravity as a creative opportunity to rally around, the band scattered into shifting factions before reuniting one last time in 2015, in Santa Clara and Chicago. Bob Weir, the band’s rhythm guitarist and Earth-bound foil to Garcia’s more cosmic inclinations, emerged as the fulcrum among the surviving members. These days he splits his time between Dead & Company, the massively lucrative touring act in which he shares the spotlight with John Mayer (the most temperamentally Weir-like Garcia proxy that’s come along), and Wolf Bros, a stripped-down group with bassist-producer Don Was and drummer Jay Lane. With both bands, Weir is dialing in different elements of what a Grateful Dead show can be—on the one hand a grandiose, psychedelic spectacle, and on the other an intimate reimagining of a historic countercultural songbook.
There are moments when Wolf Bros sound like a bar band taking wild stabs at the rootsy side of Grateful Dead’s Janus-faced repertoire (which they speckle with cuts from Weir’s sporadic solo outings), but just as often they emerge as one of the most elegant solutions to the post-Garcia conundrum. There is no lead guitarist in Wolf Bros, and when Weir does expand the group’s lineup, he brings in keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, pedal steel player Greg Leisz, and a rotating cast of horn players, dubbed the Wolfpack, to add color. Weir takes center stage and stays put, often wearing a cowboy hat, perfecting his role as a grizzled road dog. There have been previous stints where Weir assumed center stage, rather than looking for someone to fill the space left by Garcia, but Wolf Bros have lasted long enough to establish its own rugged and spacious approach to the music. It feels like a tacit acknowledgement of the need to move on, implying that if Weir is to fully embody the legacy he helped build, part of that is finding other ways to live inside it.
Weir is not a natural bandleader, but on the new Wolf Bros collection Live in Colorado he does a convincing imitation of one. The album, his first official release since the 2016 studio LP Blue Mountain, collects recordings from his first public performances of the pandemic era, in June 2021. Weir sounds energized and thankful to be playing for an audience after a year and a half off the road. His words often tumble out of his mouth like they’re anxious to miss a deadline, gruff and braying but loaded with raw enthusiasm. At the same time, the band plays at a snail’s pace, which can either feel like a leaden plod or transform a simple tune into a majestic ballad—sometimes within the course of a single song. The album is full of strange incongruities that highlight both Weir’s fallibility and the humanizing charm of a musician with nothing left to prove trying to prove something anyway.
The songs on Live in Colorado are all rooted in American folk traditions, and all but two were played extensively by the Grateful Dead. Opener “New Speedway Boogie” translates best as Weir’s scratchy, knotted chords and boisterous growl move to the foreground, settling into a slow-motion boogie that’s played with a heavy hand and benefits from that vigor and intensity. Likewise, Weir embodies the sleaziness of “West L.A. Fadeaway” better than Garcia ever could, even if his guitar solo maxes out at a few fumbled stabs at a blues lick. The magic of a Bob Weir gig isn’t in the notes that are played onstage, but rather in the camaraderie felt by an audience singing along to lyrics that have shaped their worldviews and given life meaning over the course of many accumulated years. Listening to the crowd holler, “Spent a little time on the mountain,” or “Taught that weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry,” reveals the bigger picture better than dissecting the Lenny Pickett-esque horn arrangements ever could.
Weir picks up an acoustic guitar for a version of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” a cover that reveals as much about where he is now as it does his intimate history with Dylan’s music. Dylan has been a key inspiration for Weir since before he joined the Grateful Dead at 16, and now, at 74, Weir is mirroring Dylan’s refusal to give in or give up, as well as his determination to turn what could be a phoned-in victory lap into something much weirder and more exploratory. “I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains/I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways” goes the first verse of “A Hard Rain,” and that imagery of a weary traveler echoes throughout Live in Colorado. Weir’s “Lost Sailor” has spent too long at sea; on “Only a River” he returns once again to the mythical Shenandoah of his youth; on “Big River” he travels up and down the Mississippi searching for a woman he never finds. But perhaps it’s the closing “Saint of Circumstance” that best embodies Weir’s current trajectory: “Sure don’t know what I’m going for, but I’m going to go for it for sure.”
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Third Man | February 18, 2022 | 6.8 | 6775af4f-0644-4044-9f37-4c8b5e07a3fb | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
A year on from the breakout YouTube single "Gucci Gucci", Kreayshawn returns with her major label debut. It would be difficult to argue that Somethin' Bout Kreay is a waste of Kreayshawn's talent, because talent has been something of a non-factor in her story. | A year on from the breakout YouTube single "Gucci Gucci", Kreayshawn returns with her major label debut. It would be difficult to argue that Somethin' Bout Kreay is a waste of Kreayshawn's talent, because talent has been something of a non-factor in her story. | Kreayshawn: Somethin 'Bout Kreay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16912-somethin-bout-kreay/ | Somethin 'Bout Kreay | Natassia Zolot, the 22-year-old Oakland rapper known as Kreayshawn, rose to popularity in exceedingly modern fashion, but we've known how to describe her career since before she was born. She's a quintessential one-hit wonder for the digital age-- a girl who accidentally recorded a near-perfect pop-rap hit and followed it with a hollow thud of a record. If her breakout YouTube single, "Gucci Gucci", tore a hole in the conventions of pop and hip-hop, Somethin' Bout Kreay is the awkward seam that sticks out once someone has tried to sew it back up with some expensive twine.
Somethin' Bout Kreay would elicit the embarrassment of, say, walking in on a younger sibling dancing awkwardly in front of her bedroom mirror, were its shrill clatter not so forcefully distracting. These are dance songs so strident that no one could ever hope to move to them, pop songs so thin that no one could choose lines worth singing along to, rap verses so fumbly that practically anyone could rewrite them and make them better. Excepting "Gucci Gucci"-- which shoots out of the mess like a geyser of glitter-- each track can be appreciated primarily for the relief it offers from the previous clunker. To put things into perspective, Lil Debbie, Kreayshawn's mannequin twin of a sidekick, is currently making music miles catchier than Somethin' Bout Kreay, while Gucci Mane and Kreayshawn associate V-Nasty's BAYTL, lyrically speaking, might as well be Watch the Throne in comparison. Imagine watching the "Gucci Gucci" video for the first time and knowing that in the near future-- just about a year later-- you'd be nostalgic for how traditional, how authentic, it felt. Time can move in strange, unsettling ways.
While she's always been discussed in a hip-hop context, Kreayshawn doesn't so much rap here as half-sing or speak. She sounds as though she's been called on in class to read aloud, sometimes short of breath, often painfully off-key and off-beat ("beat" here usually meaning a fizzy, atonal thump). The closest she comes to rapping is on the female-revenge anthem "Left Ey3", where her presence is almost offensively performative. "I should key your car/ But I'd rather slap your mom/ Only a bitch could give birth to such a fuckin' dog," she shouts. Later in the song, during a rare moment of 2 Chainz-like hilarity, she raps: "I'm Lorena Bobbitt chillin' in your bed/ I'm Britney Spears off hella drugs/ And I just shaved my head."
Elsewhere she's a deer in the headlights, lost and meandering through half-assed boasts about how much gold she's got, dismissing her haters and forcing out unmemorable lines that make zero sense. "Them white girls keep on mobbin'/ Yeah we do, your chance is over/ But not to be my lover/ All them haters ask me what I'm doing/ I just simply tell them, 'Kreaysonic,'" she says on "K234YSONIXZ", a song that is unlistenable in spite of a beat reminiscent of Salt-n-Pepa's classic "Push It" and a hook pulled from J. J. Fad's "Supersonic". At some point, on tepid New Orleans bounce homage "Twerkin'", we even run into Diplo, a fish out of water, trying to rap: "And we slow it down/ Slappin' on the bass/ Baby drop your booty down/ Til your booty's lower case," he mutters.
It would be difficult to argue that Somethin' Bout Kreay is a waste of Kreayshawn's talent, because talent has been something of a non-factor in her story. If anything, "Gucci Gucci" helped usher in an era of artists for whom "talent" is beside the point, artists who've triumphantly remapped a hierarchy of values so that charm, branding savvy, and novelty rule supreme. Kreayshawn is one of the first of these artists forced to reconcile her own wiles with tradition in the form of a full-length album on a major label. And the final product finds her allure and charisma entirely lost in translation.
Which is a shame, because in spite of all the dismayed chatter that has enveloped her since she arrived, Kreayshawn's charisma is a special force. Take, for instance, this joyful montage of home videos shot during her childhood and uploaded this summer, where she's pictured belting the lyrics to Nas' "Oochie Wally" alongside one of her girlfriends, pointing the camera toward a mirror, showing off her pets and her Playstation. It should feel familiar, hypnotizing even, to anyone (girls in particular) for whom youth included a lot of boredom, Top 40 radio, bulky camcorders, and a dial-up internet connection. A decade later, her antennae are still tuned to the same channels, her sensibilities still perfectly translating the whimsical stoned-kid-in-a-candy-store experiences of sitting on the internet, choosing outfits with your friends, and blasting the music that makes you happiest. That's the joy we couldn't take our eyes away from when we first learned who Kreayshawn was, and a joy that is entirely absent on her album. She may never get an opportunity to relocate it-- Somethin' Bout Kreay could very well be her first and last. | 2012-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | September 21, 2012 | 3 | 678363d1-a7a0-4592-a691-066b430df70e | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Many albums by electronic producer and composer Tim Hecker have had specific focus—on a theme, or a working method, or a mood. But the two pieces collected here—the 2007 live CD Norberg and the 2010 7-inch Apondalifa—are more like simple displays of creative strength. | Many albums by electronic producer and composer Tim Hecker have had specific focus—on a theme, or a working method, or a mood. But the two pieces collected here—the 2007 live CD Norberg and the 2010 7-inch Apondalifa—are more like simple displays of creative strength. | Tim Hecker: Norberg/Apondalifa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21217-norbergapondalifa/ | Norberg/Apondalifa | You can debate exactly when Tim Hecker became a master of his chosen musical form, but there's little doubt that he did at some point—at least as early as 2006's Harmony in Ultraviolet —and hasn't let go since. The variances between his works may seem incremental, but line them all up and the amount of raw material he's turned to gold is remarkable. This kind of mastery means there are no minor releases in his discography, at least in terms of quality. Even the two records collected here—the 2007 live CD Norberg and the 2010 7-inch Apondalifa, both made in limited quantities to coincide with Australian tours—reach levels of interest and intensity below which Hecker seems incapable of falling.
How exactly Norberg/Apondalifa fits in his stellar discography is a trickier question. Most reviews of Hecker's records compare them to their predecessors, with good reason; his oeuvre forms an internal dialogue wherein individual albums reflect, react to, and play off of each other. But even though "Norberg" and "Apondalifa" reflect the headspace Hecker was in when Hecker made, they feel isolated, meant to stand alone. And where many Hecker albums have had specific focus—on a theme, or a working method, or a mood—these two pieces are more like simple displays of creative strength.
Of the pair, "Norberg" is more comprehensive, a seamless 20-minute piece in which Hecker surfs around the sonic map without deviating far from his initial path. At times he flirts with aggressive noise; in other places he gets so beatific it's like he's meditating. But for most of "Norberg", Hecker skates in the tantalizing space between those poles, hinting at both without dropping off into either. When the piece ends in applause from the crowd, it's almost shocking, because—as in much of Hecker's work—you feel like you've spent the last 20 minutes inside of his head.
Perhaps because it's shorter, the 9-minute "Apondalifa" is more single-minded, hewing to one discernible range of mood. But Hecker can blow up even the tiniest dots into widening vistas, a feat he accomplishes here by varying textures rather than his tones. So even as the track feels relentless, it also spreads out into phasing guitar chords, low-end rumbles, and slow waves of drone that circle a solid core. As important as those details are, in a way they're also irrelevant, because Hecker's touch and control are so deft they could transform any coal into diamonds. That's the ultimate value of Norberg/Apondalifa, a sharp reminder that Tim Hecker has had it all figured out for a while now. | 2015-11-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Room40 | November 13, 2015 | 7.6 | 6794dcfe-78af-44dd-8564-773e9fea32f2 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On their third album, Mount Moriah no longer sound like an indie band playing country music; they sound like a country band, full stop. It’s the band’s fullest, peppiest album yet, with punchier tempos, flashier accompaniments, and a little more of a fighting spirit. | On their third album, Mount Moriah no longer sound like an indie band playing country music; they sound like a country band, full stop. It’s the band’s fullest, peppiest album yet, with punchier tempos, flashier accompaniments, and a little more of a fighting spirit. | Mount Moriah: How to Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21525-how-to-dance/ | How to Dance | You could be forgiven for assuming that Heather McEntire was moonlighting on Mount Moriah’s first album. Before her foray into country music, the singer had led the Chapel Hill band Bellafea through two distinct iterations, first as a quiet/loud indie duo then as a snarling punk trio, and Mount Moriah seemed like the latest pit stop for a restless songwriter who hadn’t fully settled on a vision yet. That the band paired her with guitarist Jenks Miller, of the form-breaking metal project Horseback, only furthered the impression that this was a side project. Despite their obvious reverence for traditional American song styles, there was a whiff of dress-up about their act. They sounded less like a country band than an indie band playing country music.
Two albums on, they’ve shed the last of those lingering indie trappings. The trio is now so fluent in roots music that it passes as their native tongue, and McEntire wears the sublime twang in her voice so naturally that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t there on Bellafea’s albums. Equal parts honey and brimstone, that voice was the star attraction on Mount Moriah’s first albums, and it is on their third effort, How to Dance, too. But where the band’s previous records were sometimes overly careful not to crowd her, How to Dance gives her some welcome competition. It’s the band’s fullest, peppiest album yet, building on the wider instrumental palette that 2013’s Miracle Temple introduced with punchier tempos, flashier accompaniments, and a little more of a fighting spirit.
How to Dance is most invigorating when it sweeps the band’s easy-rolling tunes off of the front porch and drops them at the roadhouse. Miller’s guitar packs "Precita" tight with one plucky honk-tonk lick after another, keeping the energy up for Angel Olsen, who shadows McEntire on vocals. His terse, blustery riffs drive "Cardinal Cross," but generally he resists showboating, preferring to play off of his collaborators. On "Fox in the City," his guitar gradually recedes to clear room for a waltzing violin, while on opener "Calvander" his brief, tuneful riffs are complemented by woozy Memphis horns, which McEntire’s voice weaves around with the limber grace of a young Van Morrison.
Freed by the extra instruments, McEntire delivers some of her loosest, most soulful performances, even as her lyrics remain consumed by lofty matters of faith. Early on "Calvander," she drops to her knees and prays "to something for some kind, any kind of light," and whatever or whoever she prayed to must have been listening, because she finds it all over these 10 songs. On "Chiron (God in the Brier)," she discovers God underneath a water tower near Fishdam Road. On "Higher Mind" she meets him at the North Carolina fishing resort Oceanana Pier. She peppers her lyrics with the names of unassuming places where these kinds of revelations could conceivably occur: Grizzly Peak, Baker Beach, Okefenokee, Davis Square, Crooked River, Honey Lake, Newport River, and so on. You could lose an afternoon researching all the landmarks she mentions, getting lost in the surprisingly fascinating minutia of main streets and highway rest areas you’d never heard of before (Oceanana Pier really does look like a lovely vacation spot).
There’s some irony in a band named for one of the bible’s most holy sites setting an album about magnificent religious awakenings almost exclusively in small-town locales of no biblical significance, but the everyday backdrops are in keeping with McEntire’s inclusive view of spirituality. On Mount Moriah’s first albums, McEntire reconciled her identities as a Christian Southerner, despite being far from the textbook representation of either community, so it makes sense that she doesn’t draw all that much distinction between the fabled Jerusalem mountain where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his second son and a beach motel whose annual fishing contest pays out $150 in cash prizes. In How to Dance's worldview, celestial enlightenment can occur to anyone, anywhere. | 2016-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 17, 2016 | 7 | 6797cd28-de76-4025-84c8-c12261e7f3e1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The Swedish psych-rock pioneers’ songs are usually like odysseys, but their first full-length studio album in seven years is more of a pleasure cruise. | The Swedish psych-rock pioneers’ songs are usually like odysseys, but their first full-length studio album in seven years is more of a pleasure cruise. | Dungen: En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dungen-en-ar-for-mycket-och-tusen-aldrig-nog/ | En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog | Over two decades, Swedish psych-rock pioneers Dungen have carved their own niche, spanning ’70s psych rock homage to free jazz freakouts. From 2004’s excellent Ta Det Lugnt to 2016’s witchy Häxan, the band’s M.O. has been consistent: records that feel like epics, gilded with flute solos and fuzz. En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog, their first full-length studio album in seven years, marks a pivot. Here, they exchange dark hallucinations for the sunny gloss of AM radio, trading offbeat textures for more commercial territory.
Like a phantasmagoric acid trip, Dungen makes songs so freewheeling and exploratory that they teeter on the brink of chaos. Every record scratch or woodwind melody suggests a certain feeling, from eeriness to effervescent joy, and asks the listener to embrace it. That level of immersive, microcosmic attention shows up here on tracks like opener “Skövde,” as it did on Häxan’s “Aladdin ach lampan, del 2,” where the flute sometimes sounds like it’s wafting in from another room. The mix balances a swirl of instrumentation and layered harmonies, a driving drum beat building heat until the melody simmers. Attention to detail and production trained for texture make sense—Dungen began recording this album gradually in 2017, and the meticulousness in the intervening years led to tight, propulsive tracks, nary a cymbal fill out of place.
In keeping with tradition, the band is most compelling when their songs are at the tip of some extreme—a slightly spooky piano ballad, or a deranged fusion of keening guitar and skittering beats. The former, “Om Natten,” closes the album with unadorned chords and a haunting metronome. It moves unpredictably between hopefulness and melancholy, one part radio ballad and one part mourning rite. The latter, “Var Har Du Varit?” is a different sort of chimera entirely, though equally charming, like a Chemical Brothers song pulled back in time by some wizard on LSD.
“Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig” is light and sweet, but a little insubstantial too, like a Necco wafer—the sort of step-touch pop song that might’ve been sung by a sibling duo in matching jumpsuits. “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus” is the reverberant, wilder sibling of Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy,” a winsome melody laced with distortion, where the wheels might come off at any second. The organ chords on “Möbler” evoke the Steve Miller Band, all bombast and build. And while these references are beloved for a reason—who doesn’t want to fly like an eagle?—Dungen’s iterations of these sounds can feel weak, especially compared to the depth and audaciousness of their earlier work. The expectation is an odyssey, but you wind up on a pleasure cruise. It doesn’t sate your wanderlust, even if it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
It’s possible that these songs were a conscious attempt to move even closer to Tame Impala and the War On Drugs’ festival-headlining sound, the irony being that Dungen came first (and informed them both). Mostly, En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog offers driving, instantly catchy songs that would sound excellent blaring from beneath a laser show, some ferris wheel spinning in the background. The destination is almost too familiar; before, Dungen often led listeners down a thornier, less trodden path. The preferable voyage will depend on who’s listening. | 2022-10-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | October 10, 2022 | 6.2 | 67998d6c-8414-4c1c-bb1b-470b96e5901c | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
With sparse acoustic arrangements and cryptic lyrics, the songwriter’s fifth solo album feels like a series of intimate dispatches from a personal purgatory. | With sparse acoustic arrangements and cryptic lyrics, the songwriter’s fifth solo album feels like a series of intimate dispatches from a personal purgatory. | Emma Ruth Rundle: Engine of Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emma-ruth-rundle-engine-of-hell/ | Engine of Hell | Emma Ruth Rundle lives on a gloomy planet. Drop a needle on one of her records and imagine her shuffling down an otherwise sunny street beneath her own personal raincloud, shivering in an oversized trench coat. The clouds gather as you listen, and before long, darkness has fallen. Follow her voice through the night into a sprawling cemetery where a new monster lurks behind each tombstone: a black dog here, a medusa there, a nightmarish whisper-scream further down the row.
Engine of Hell’s setting is no less bleak, but now Rundle stands alone among the mausoleums, digging up skeletons buried deep in her psychogeography. Stripped of drums and effects, the album is emphatically intimate. It’s unsettling to hear her peel back the defense mechanisms she’s often placed between herself and the trauma embedded in her source material, but it’s hard to look away.
Rundle’s power has grown with each new solo album. On 2014’s Some Heavy Ocean, she peeked out from the melancholic morass that characterized her contributions to the downcast post-rock of Marriages and Red Sparowes. She reincorporated her beloved reverb and death-march drum lines into 2016’s Marked for Death and 2018’s On Dark Horses, but these churning undercurrents were no match for her vocals. Collaborating with southern Louisiana sludge band Thou on 2020’s May Our Chambers Be Full, Rundle held her own. Her rich, smoky alto simmered in moments of bitter reflection and warped into a sneering falsetto when the pain flowed freely.
If that album’s brilliance was at times dimmed by sonic excess, Engine of Hell is crystallized by its austerity. It was recorded live, its instrumentation entirely acoustic. Rundle accompanies herself, alternating between piano and guitar. Her arrangements are sparse and simple, though her skill on the guitar is evident even when she’s merely strumming a few minor chords. Her relationship with the piano is more complicated: She played the instrument growing up but abandoned it in her 20s when she decided it didn’t fit her music. She’s a competent player, but her attack often feels tentative, and her voicings are uncharacteristically open and airy.
“Body” begins like an anonymous Lite FM ballad, but the melodramatic intro accentuates the grit in Rundle’s vocal delivery. Over childlike chords, she sings about the grandmother who bought her first piano and cared for her as a teenager until the older woman’s death. The consoling mantra of the chorus—“You know my arms are always around you”—echoes in her head as she watches her grandmother’s body being wheeled away. “We’re moving the body now,” she sings, as collaborator Troy Zeigler rasps the album’s only backing vocal, many octaves beneath her. In a different, earlier Rundle song, “moving the body” might have been the prelude to something more gothic and horrible, but here it’s an act of mourning and letting go.
Elsewhere on Engine of Hell, she cuts biblical allegories down to quotidian size. In “Blooms of Oblivion,” where she allows herself a modicum of lushness in the form of Jo Quail’s cello, Judas is a heroin addict waiting in line for methadone. And in “Razor’s Edge,” Lazarus is the traveling companion of a self-destructive twentysomething who’s “spending all my money as the petty cash of youth runs out.” Cryptic realism is Rundle’s strongest mode; the lyrics are less effective when they tend towards simple abstraction. “Citadel,” a baroque song-poem, feels detached without a more lifelike stand-in for the “fortress in my heart” or the “destroyer in my blood.”
If the first seven songs on Engine of Hell offer glimpses into Rundle’s worst moments, then the final track is where she casts her gaze toward eternity. “Taken to task in some engine of Hell/I lacked the toll to cross the river there,” she begins. Discussing the record with Stereogum, Rundle described the titular metaphor as “this mechanism through which you’re forced to rewatch and relive memories over and over again.” The raincloud hung heavy over her past four records; on Engine of Hell, it breaks open. The personal tragedies that come pouring out are scarier than any of the grisly apparitions she used to conjure.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sargent House | November 15, 2021 | 7.2 | 679c90a7-d19b-4bac-b6fc-2f5bb07f0502 | Raphael Helfand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raphael-helfand/ | |
On her fourth album, the Canadian pop star is doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold—and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm. | On her fourth album, the Canadian pop star is doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold—and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm. | Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carly-rae-jepsen-dedicated/ | Dedicated | Carly Rae Jepsen ties up bright, ribbony pop songs with the magnetism of a person who’s a little too modest to be a pop star. She goes for the big feelings, and as a result, inspires near-rapturous devotion. Jepsen’s most ardent fans feel called to defend her, to arm her with a sword, to catalyze the moment that will reveal her magic beyond doubt. With 2015’s E•MO•TION, they nearly had it; I’ll go one further and say that its follow-up, the overflow collection E•MO•TION Side B, is the better listen. Dedicated, Jepsen’s fourth full-length album, returns to her signature combination of self-aware innocence and mature restraint, though its greater purpose is not always quite clear. She’s doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold—and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm.
Dedicated takes a more relaxed approach to Jepsen’s well-established penchant for ’80s pop. By her own description, the album began under the working title of “Music to Clean Your House To,” a characteristically unassuming goal. The windshield-wiper synths that open “Julien” or the casual autopilot of “Automatically in Love” point to Jepsen’s other guiding aesthetic: “chill disco,” a mood that vaunts sparkling melodies over writing that can feel short on intrigue. Each of these upbeat yet tasteful jams is sturdy enough to spur you through another load of laundry, and light on the kind of indulgent flourishes that spawned “Run Away With Me” saxophone memes. The total effect is glossy, but the individual moments shine a little less; few lines here have the breathless potency of, “Late night watching television/But how’d we get in this position?”
Everything in Jepsen’s world always comes back to love, and in the past, the feeling was usually unrequited. That’s changed now; on Dedicated, love is more assured of itself, and for the first time, distinctly sexy. Rarely has her singing sounded so breathy and astonished. “No Drug Like Me” describes the intoxication of new love as a dry-mouthed truth serum; “The Sound” can play like a plea for spoken commitment, or something altogether more carnal. “Like pressure points my love can ease him in my hands,” Jepsen sings on “Everything He Needs,” an unlikely and lightly risqué flip of “He Needs Me,” the Harry Nilsson-written song performed by Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl in the 1980 film Popeye. “Want You in My Room,” a scene-stealing Jack Antonoff production, wields its pitch-shifted hook like a conspiratorial voice disguise. “I’m like a lighthouse/I’m a reminder of where you’re goin’,” Jepsen sings, the kind of clever line that’s often missing here. She’s also used it before, on E•MO•TION’s “All That,” so she must really mean it.
Though an album of coy disco romance is a good thing, at times Dedicated strains in other directions. The pastel EDM-pop bounce of “Now That I Found You” comes closest to the reckless joy of Jepsen’s single “Cut to the Feeling,” a song impossible to improve on. “Happy Not Knowing” takes a more classically CRJ approach to romance with its “please don’t tell me” appeal to a crush, but perhaps the territory is too familiar. “I’ll only go so far/I don’t have the energy/To risk a broken heart/When you’re already killing me,” Jepsen sings, because she’s loved and lost, and she mostly just sounds bummed about it. These should be some of the album’s best songs, but they feel wiped clean of the messy ambiguities that fog up real emotions.
As with E•MO•TION, Jepsen wrote a lot of songs for this album—more than 100—and ultimately a few too many made the cut. Some of the weakest tracks are swallowed up in their expertly interlocked sequences of pre-chorus and chorus; the verses to “Right Words Wrong Time” feel like afterthoughts. The extra distractions hide potential sleeper hits like the funk-lite of “Feels Right” and the balmy, vulnerable “Real Love,” which deserves to be a standout. But by the time the album ends with last November’s single “Party for One,” it’s been displaced, lost in the shuffle of a transitional album with its heart set but its mind not yet quite made up. | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Schoolboy / Interscope | May 17, 2019 | 7.3 | 67a3219d-0b2d-4402-a6a3-176fab1a1de4 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
With Wolf Parade on indefinite hiatus, Dan Boeckner gives his full attention to Handsome Furs, and they craft their best album yet. | With Wolf Parade on indefinite hiatus, Dan Boeckner gives his full attention to Handsome Furs, and they craft their best album yet. | Handsome Furs: Sound Kapital | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15579-sound-kapital/ | Sound Kapital | Up to this point, it's been somewhat difficult to listen to the broke-down electro-pop of Handsome Furs without imagining what Dan Boeckner's more established band, Wolf Parade, might do to elaborate on it. Though the projects sound very different, his songs for both bands rely heavily on his bleary-eyed lyricism and jagged guitar chug. But as Boeckner could tell you, there's an easy way to get people to stop comparing your side project to your main gig: just break up the latter.
But it's not just Wolf Parade's recently announced "indefinite hiatus" that casts Sound Kaptial as Handsome Furs' most passionate, committed album to date. Rather, by taking the emphasis off of Boeckner's guitars and giving greater shine to wife Alexei Perry's neon-bright keyboard lines and woofer-busting beats, Handsome Furs present themselves as a genuine, ready-for-the-floor synth-pop band rather than a frazzled rock act that happens to use synthesizers. With new wave confections like "Memories of the Future" and "What About Us", Sound Kapital effectively conjures an alternate 1980s where Bruce Springsteen didn't just tinker around with synths and drum machines on occasion, but actually tried to make a full-on Depeche Mode record.
However, Sound Kapital isn't so much an 80s throwback in sound as in its spirit of sincerity. A handful of songs on the record were inspired by the Furs' 2010 visit to Burma, where they performed alongside bands who were quite literally underground, forced to perform out of sight of the oppressive local authorities, with minimal access to electricity, let alone recording technology. Given that Boeckner's always been drawn to the struggle of the underdog, the experience of being around people who routinely risked incarceration just to play their music naturally had a profound effect on his songwriting; the opening song is built around a click-tracked chant-- "When I get back home/ I won't be the same no more"-- that effectively serves as a promise to put aside petty, material-world concerns.
And rather than deal in general, impressionistic images of hearts on fire and shining lights, the album's centerpiece song, "Serve the People", pays tribute to the Burmese band Side Effect with street-level scenes of "kids... making noise with their generators on till the cops say, 'move along.'" It's the sort of arm-swaying anthem you could easily imagine the Furs' Montreal mates Arcade Fire turning into a Coachella-rocking showstopper. But the humbly lo-tech take-- all shuffling drum-machine breaks and squelching frequencies-- feels very true to the environment that inspired it, where music is exchanged via pirate radio and the power can be suddenly cut at any moment. The more frenzied companion track "Cheap Music" reframes the same scene, but downplays the overarching themes of valor and perseverance to convey the illicit, punk-rock thrill of hearing "a thousand lonely kids making noise in the basement."
Therein lies Sound Kapital's greatest success: Handsome Furs no longer feel like a stripped-down antidote to Wolf Parade, but more like a band that's able to execute progressively grander, emotionally resonant ideas while staying within their limited means. And nowhere is that more evident than on Sound Kapital's urgent, feedback-swathed closer "No Feelings", which, despite its seven-minute sprawl, counts as Boeckner's most immediately affecting performance since Wolf Parade's "Shine a Light". The song sees Boeckner returning to familiar concerns (emotional ennui, self-doubt) but as it reemerges from a My Bloody Valentine-like miasma for a final sprint to the finish, Boeckner's repeated claims that he's "got no feeling" provide Sound Kapital with a rare moment of irony: Everything about this song-- and this entire album, for that matter-- suggests this heart's still got a lot left to burn. | 2011-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | June 29, 2011 | 8.1 | 67a4550b-328a-4fac-a6d1-e03492dabc18 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Brooklyn band returns with a Europe-only grab-bag collection of new songs, EP highlights, and remixes. | The Brooklyn band returns with a Europe-only grab-bag collection of new songs, EP highlights, and remixes. | Tanlines: Volume On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14931-volume-on/ | Volume On | Even though Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm of Tanlines do plenty to honor the spirit of their name (and yes, that is a MiniDisc on the cover), don't be so quick to lump them in with every other nostalgia junkie cluttering Brooklyn. It's actually fitting that the 2xCD Volume On is a European-only release, since Tanlines' blindingly bright synth-pop has more in common with jetsetters like Tough Alliance, Delorean, and Studio-- acts that are influenced by the sounds of the tropics rather than just the idea of them.
You won't get much of an idea of what Tanlines actually sounds like from Cohen and Emm's backgrounds (Professor Murder and Don Caballero, respectively). But what has been carried forward from earlier projects is a lab-rat work ethic that makes Volume On more than a bunch of obvious signifiers. Sure, the kick drum insistently hits on every beat and the percussion tempts Miami Sound Machine jokes, but the songs here are always playful and never pushy. It's dance music if you want it to be, maintaining a Balearic vibe without being wholly tied to it.
It's hard to say if Tanlines' real strength is production or songwriting, but Volume On has its share of highlights where they do both. "Real Life", the song that has become Tanlines' signature track, is a regular presence here. In addition to its original version, there three remixes of the song on the second disc, including a smeared-lens rendering by Memory Tapes. The song endures even in the dead of winter in large part because it's the best showcase of Emm's odd melodic charm as a vocalist, and "You might think I'm still that way... It was a past-life thing" stands up as a strangely affecting mea culpa.
More prominent here than on this year's Settings EP, Emm's vocals are a strange, sonorous thing that occasionally morph into something Sting-like but also have the go-for-it spirit of the Rapture's Luke Jenner (who appears here on new song "O Seizing The Day O"). By the same token, his voice doesn't work particularly well in isolation. Like on the acoustic version of "Real Life", which is startling any way you slice it. It's a complete sonic anomaly within the confines of Volume On, but Emm's vocal delivery isn't altered one bit and turns out to be entirely at odds with the arrangement.
Volume On isn't officially Tanlines' first album, but it doesn't sound like a hastily cobbled-together bid for year-end lists either. In fact, it holds together almost too well. They work within a pretty narrow range of BPM's and the textural sleekness can have a dazing cumulative effect over the span of Volume On's hour-plus runtime. Nonetheless, the promise is there. Tanlines obviously know how to properly book an island getaway, but it could really be something special if they can learn to diversify the itinerary. | 2010-12-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-12-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Family Edition | December 8, 2010 | 7 | 67a7b019-999d-4967-aa8d-f8bd127b051f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Muncie Girls frontwoman’s solo debut is part self-interrogation and part community offering, serving up tiny bursts of joy and doubt as refuge for anyone navigating a similar path. | The Muncie Girls frontwoman’s solo debut is part self-interrogation and part community offering, serving up tiny bursts of joy and doubt as refuge for anyone navigating a similar path. | Lande Hekt: Going to Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lande-hekt-going-to-hell/ | Going to Hell | Sometimes the hardest person to be honest with is yourself. On “Whiskey,” Bristol-based singer-songwriter Lande Hekt runs through a list of questions that imply something in her life is amiss, each item in the interrogation shouldering more weight than the last. The true meaning of this DIY-punk-goes-alt-pop anthem is scrawled in invisible ink: To Hekt, the song represents the moment she realized she couldn’t keep pretending that she wasn’t gay. As the opener of her solo debut, Going to Hell, “Whiskey” epitomizes the highs and lows of Hekt’s first independent foray. After a decade as the singer and bassist of the punk-rock band Muncie Girls, she’s got hooks to spare. But as she reevaluates her life as a queer woman in solitude, Hekt occasionally stumbles into lyrical pitfalls that oversimplify the very messages these songs aim to prop up.
Written during Hekt’s coming-out period, Going to Hell captures what it’s like when queer pride in the local punk scene takes on newly personal meaning. Jolts of disbelief and self-doubt weave through “December” and “Hannover” as Hekt wrestles with her heart. “What if it’s you that makes me happy for once? What if I tell you that and I get no response?” she sings, her panic bolstered by a slosh of lo-fi pop-rock akin to P.S. Eliot. Realizing you’ve outgrown hetero culture in adulthood can feel surreal, like watching a model in a glossy ad being reverse-Photoshopped at hyperspeed. If Hekt experienced a similar revelation, it’s not directly discussed in these songs. Instead, she recalls the cold shoulders thrown her way—“Your friends from home start acting strange/When you try to be yourself for a change,” goes the title track—a very real, albeit fractional, part of a larger whole.
As welcome as it is to hear Hekt reflect on her burgeoning identity, the most commanding songs on Going to Hell explore personal feelings in service to a community. Atop Japanese Breakfast-style guitar pop on “Undone” or Sharon Van Etten-inspired finger-picking on “Winter Coat,” she sings about indulging self-pity and the restorative power of hiding away for some peace and quiet. It’s how Hekt copes when she gets inside her own head, and these vignettes—the feeling of sun on her skin while driving down the Autobahn, or the way she tries to recall why she started smoking cigarettes and can’t—give Going to Hell an aura of comfort. In these tiny bursts of joy and doubt, Hekt offers refuge for strangers navigating similar paths.
Although Hekt typically writes with clarity and poise, Going to Hell sometimes embraces cliché. Take the album closer “In the Darkness,” a straightforward acoustic ballad with an earnest motivational refrain: “I’m more powerful than you’ll ever know/’Cause I’ve got democracy and I’ll never let it go.” She originally wrote the song for Rebellious Sounds—an archive of feminist activism organized by the British charitable organization Dreadnought South West—after hearing a woman discuss her experience in the Czech Republic during the Velvet Revolution. Hekt’s song aims to transform that story into a broader call for women’s participation in community politics and organizing, but without any clue to the historical inspiration in the lyrics, the recycled platitudes feel flavorless and out of place. Intent alone doesn’t make great music, but it can lend an otherwise hackneyed sentiment the confidence required to resonate authentically. The trick, of course, is in saying what you really mean the first time.
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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. | 2021-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Get Better | January 28, 2021 | 6.5 | 67aad1b0-71bb-41e4-93cb-08adbd1596bf | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The Irish shoegaze band plunges into darkness on its brilliantly textured second album, led by the eerie vocals of Katie Ball. | The Irish shoegaze band plunges into darkness on its brilliantly textured second album, led by the eerie vocals of Katie Ball. | Just Mustard: Heart Under | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/just-mustard-heart-under/ | Heart Under | On their 2018 debut, Wednesday, Just Mustard rode a wave of noise to the front of the shoegaze pack, breaking from the distorted yearning of the genre’s softer acolytes. Their pseudo-electronic blend of whirring guitars and trip-hop backbeats was its own strain of revivalism—the sound of Beat-era Bowery Electric’s industrial lullabies bleeding into traces of A.R. Kane’s prismatic sludge. But even among these giants of existential dread, the Irish quintet sounded uniquely tormented, winding around singer Katie Ball’s siren-call vocals and dialing into the split-second where anxiety collapses into desperation. Coming from a friend, bleak observations such as “I’m in fear of life/Had it on my mind/Said it all the time/’Cause the dead don't mind,” from “Boo,” would be cause for concern. Slathered in reverb and sent hurtling through a dizzying maze of guitar effects, Just Mustard document succumbing to the inertia of a panic attack with a biting urgency.
Ratcheting up the gloom, Heart Under sharpens the somnambulant dream-pop of their debut to pierce through the mirage of a light at the end of the tunnel. From the fog-horn drone of opener “23” to the wailing feedback freakout that closes “Rivers,” it’s clear that Just Mustard haven’t lightened up a bit during the past four years. United behind Ball’s eerie lead vocals, a role she previously split with guitarist David Noonan, the band takes the plunge into an even more entrancing darkness.
Lead single “I Am You” is a delicate high-wire act, an anthem for ego-death set against pounding drums and howling static. Grinding the creeping dread of Slint’s “Good Morning, Captain” down to a lockstep march, six-string noise piles up slowly as Ball’s plea for transformation (“Can you change my head?”) ascends until it becomes a command, parting the sea of feedback. Even during the less arresting cuts, such as “In Shade,” she goes far beyond shoegaze’s “voice-as-instrument” conceit. Building her voice from a sigh into a full-throated cry in the second chorus, she explodes from behind a wall of ice, shouting into the night. Whether she’s watching the world slip past her reflection (“Mirrors”), processing the regret of inaction (“Rivers”), or disappearing into a mournful daydream (“Early”), the thickest slabs of reverb can’t hide her talent.
Noonan and co-guitarist Mete Kalyon favor the types of effects that send legions of gear-obsessed fans running to the front of the stage to catch a glimpse of their pedals; if their ear for groaning melodies holds up, you can expect dozens of tutorial videos dissecting their haunting tones in the not-too-distant future. The blurred rumble of their interplay seamlessly alternates between atmospheric yawns and melodic jabs. Often, they take entire choruses for themselves, trading fours of manipulated feedback on the stomping highlight “Still” and dragging shards of noise across “Mirrors”’s tambourine-led groove-out. These moments of atonal abandon are immersive and bewildering, turning every song into a funhouse mirror.
Playing out like a series of snapshots from a dawnless night, Heart Under dodges catharsis or release, lingering in staggering volumes and frustrated desires. As the record comes to a close on “River,” Ball contemplates how she could have held on tighter to someone who’s slipped into the past forever, stranded on the shore of a distant memory. “Could I have changed a thing?” she muses, only to be met by a screeching tide. There is no moment of transcendence, of towering above the desolation and meeting a stronger version of yourself. It’s an anti-climax that affirms the deeply personal reality of pain. Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black. | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | June 7, 2022 | 7.7 | 67ab9933-52c9-4558-9f0a-2ffe90aefcdd | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
The self-titled G.O.O.D. Music debut from HXLT (F.K.A. rapper Hollywood Holt) aims to revisit a time when Debbie Harry and Grandmaster Flash rubbed elbows at New York’s Danceteria, but ends up feeling like getting invited to a friend's art show—you’re rooting for the guy, but man, some of this stuff is brutal. | The self-titled G.O.O.D. Music debut from HXLT (F.K.A. rapper Hollywood Holt) aims to revisit a time when Debbie Harry and Grandmaster Flash rubbed elbows at New York’s Danceteria, but ends up feeling like getting invited to a friend's art show—you’re rooting for the guy, but man, some of this stuff is brutal. | HXLT: HXLT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21600-hxlt/ | HXLT | No two genres are as similar in spirit as punk rock and rap. Both were created by poor young people as a way to express disdain with the status quo and provide some insight into the minds and hearts of people who usually don’t get a seat at the table. Both encourage a spirit of self-reliance that allows for a kid in Small Town X to create something that can stand confidently next to an icon. Both have been co-opted by the mainstream at large when they proved to be financially beneficial. Both have been sneered at by lames for not requiring much musical "skill" to execute.
Given all this, you'd think more punk and rap collaborations would turn out better. But usually, the people interested in uniting the genres go the laziest, most obvious route imaginable, and for every Death Grips you get someting like the self-titled G.O.O.D. Music debut from Nigel "HXLT" Holt's (F.K.A. rapper Hollywood Holt). The album aims to revisit a time when Debbie Harry and Grandmaster Flash rubbed elbows at New York’s Danceteria—creating a culture in the process— but ultimately ends up feeling like being invited to a friend's art show—you’re rooting for the guy but man, some of this stuff is brutal.
The album's sound is uncomplicated. He could have gone overboard with screeching guitars, but HXLT keeps things spare, closer to post-punk than punk. "Why" is a decent dark wave homage, taking dashes of the sound (choppy rhythm guitar, disinterested vocal stylings) and forcing the synths to get along with a drum machine doing yeoman's work. There’s elements of social awareness, too. On "Guitar," the Mano-produced standout, HXLT laments that he’d like to be famous solely to bring attention to real issues (the chorus: "I wish I could play guitar/ And write all the songs to make me rich/ Use it all to save the kids"). No complaints there.
The lyrics are another story; there are a ton of eyeroll moments here. While no one expects this guy to be Lou Reed, there’s gotta be something out there better than "Rock N Roll"’s "I wanna get into a fight in front of you and knock his lights out/ I wanna ride a motorbike, make you jump on it and we ride out." It’s a damn shame, too, because HXLT is an undeniable live performer, full of charisma: Put him on a stage right now anywhere and he's walking out with five new fans. Somewhere in him he might have a real punk anthem, but none of the songs on the record accurately bottle that energy. Other than "Sick," a song about the frustration of loving someone you honestly can’t stand half the time, the whole thing kind of ambles. Even the Kathleen Hanna-guested "Together" doesn’t gnash its teeth as much as you’d like it to. (Sidebar: Getting Kathleen Hanna on your first album has to be the punk equivalent of getting a Jay Z feature on your debut, right?)
A lot of the narrative surrounding this record has been about Holt finally embracing the influences traditional rap heads considered too weird, or "too white." Clap for him for sticking to his convictions but speaking frankly, a lot of people wouldn’t be giving this the time of day were it not presented via the Kanye West/G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam co-sign. The missed opportunity is the most frustrating part. What could have been a real shift in culture ends up feeling like moving into a new apartment: There’s some potential, but things are still all over the place. | 2016-03-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-03-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap / Rock | G.O.O.D. Music | March 1, 2016 | 4.9 | 67b1f8e5-bb1d-42da-a788-7c53164a2b29 | Ernest Wilkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ernest-wilkins/ | null |
On this new EP, the British electronic duo and Ninja Tune label founders reckon with the disorientation of our media moment. Their approach is unfortunately vague. | On this new EP, the British electronic duo and Ninja Tune label founders reckon with the disorientation of our media moment. Their approach is unfortunately vague. | Coldcut: Only Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22660-coldcut-only-heaven/ | Only Heaven | “Deejays predate the internet, in a way,” Coldcut’s Jonathan More told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “We’re filters who select information from different sources and give it a context for people to grab on to.” That probably made a certain amount of sense then, right on the cusp of the dot-com boom, but compared to everything that happened next—MP3 downloads, P2P networks, YouTube, Spotify—the idea of a DJ as a crucial node in a global information network sounds as antiquated as a tin-can-and-string toy telephone. And so, in its own quaint way, does Coldcut’s debut single, “Say Kids What Time Is It?,” which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in February. A cut-and-paste hip-hop jam inspired by Steinski’s turntable collages, the tune sampled a mess of funk and disco breaks along with snippets of The Jungle Book and the theme to the 1950s television show “Howdy Doody”—a show that, when Coldcut recorded the song, was roughly as distant in time as their debut single is from us today.
Coldcut have always had a McCluhan-esque fascination with the collision of form and content. That was the driving impulse behind those early experiments in turntablism and sampling, which mimicked the distracted zapping encouraged by cable television and remote controls. But as the flow of information has sped up, Coldcut have struggled to articulate a compelling framework for their own productions, even as their label, Ninja Tune, has asserted itself as a leading force in beat-oriented electronic music. Their last album, 2006’s Sound Mirrors, brought together dancehall beats and acid house with spoken word from Saul Williams, snippets of the poet Amiri Baraka’s voice, and tag-team sloganeering from Jon Spencer and Mike Ladd—an eclectic assemblage that couldn’t quite decide where it wanted to go or what it wanted to be.
This new EP, their first release in a decade, looks at first like an attempt to engage with our own critical media moment, in which “message” is smothered by a deluge of disinformation. The record cover strikingly juggles elements of mid-20th-century Polish poster design, the staticky “snow” of a dead television screen, and the scrambled logo of the Daily Mail, a right-wing populist tabloid in the UK; press materials present the record as “an exercise in ‘dissentertainment’.” But nothing in the EP’s five tracks measures up to that rhetoric. Mostly, it serves as a vehicle for the London rapper Roots Manuva and the singer Roses Gabor, although their contributions sound like they were meant for two entirely different records.
On lead track “Only Heaven,” Roots Manuva rattles off stream-of-consciousness assonant rhymes (“Molotov quality/Causing controversy/Oh, it’s so odd to see/Oh, it’s so novelty”) that sound great—he’s such a personable vocalist, he could make the phone book sound catchy—but don’t add up to much. On the chorus, a sighing Roses Gabor offers platitudes: “Only heaven can ever save me/Feels like hell out on these streets/I need you more than you need me.” Like worn Velcro, the two halves fail to stick together, and the backing track, a twinkling approximation of early Portishead, doesn’t make up for what’s missing lyrically; the same goes for the closing “Quality Control,” a woozy dub version of the title cut.
The languid “Dreamboats” is more interesting musically, particularly in a narcotic breakdown that loops Gabor’s voice against clanking chains and ethereal coos. But again, Roots Manuva’s third-eye mindstates and Gabor’s vaguely erotic hook fail to complement each other in any meaningful way. “Creative,” meanwhile, might as well be Coldcut’s homage to Disclosure’s brand of garage-influenced house—which is ironic, given the song’s anti-biter vocal hook, which they’ve sampled from a 1989 single by the South London rapper Black Radical MKII. More charitably, you could compare its swirls of layered synths to Four Tet, but that’s not enough to make it sound particularly vital.
Musically, the most interesting thing here is “Donald’s Wig,” a rolling drum’n’bass tune featuring Gabor solo. Unfortunately, it flies the furthest from the mark they’ve set for themselves with the “dissentertainment” tag. Perhaps the topic seemed like a good idea at the time, when they went into the studio; from afar—across the Atlantic, and, crucially, months before the U.S. presidential election of November 2016—a tongue-in-cheek song about Donald Trump must have appeared a fairly low-stakes affair. It is precisely the kind of absurdist, media-savvy, vaguely political thing that Coldcut have always delighted in. But the song fails to engage with its subject matter in any meaningful way beyond the title, even though the press release explicitly references the then-candidate, now president-elect. The hook—“Don’t give up your race/Days are going to wait”—was presumably meant in the context of the electoral race, but as the specter of white nationalism looms ever larger over Trump’s cabinet and rabid fan base, the line comes to seem unfortunately vague at best.
Post-election and, for the UK, post-Brexit, we’re well aware of all the ways the media has failed us. Rather than providing a superficial media critique, Coldcut would be better off taking a page from their own book and returning to the righteous anger that fueled their 2002 remix with Saul Williams, “Not in My Name.” | 2016-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Ahead of Our Time | December 5, 2016 | 5.2 | 67bdfb8f-9043-4dc0-90d3-42d327d47025 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
This ecstatic third installment of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi's annual live meeting features ear-filling noise-rock that conjures metal, psych, and stoner rock. | This ecstatic third installment of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi's annual live meeting features ear-filling noise-rock that conjures metal, psych, and stoner rock. | Oren Ambarchi | Keiji Haino | Jim O'Rourke: Imikuzushi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16417-imikuzushi/ | Imikuzushi | The first two albums by the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi were a bit mysterious. On 2010's Tima Formosa, the instrumentation was unexpected-- particularly O'Rourke's piano-- and the music often got so cloudy and formless it was hard to tell who was playing what. Things became a little clearer when Ambarchi moved to drums and O'Rourke to bass for 2011's In a flash everything comes together as one there is no need for a subject. Still, Haino's array of noise-making tools made it feel more like a ritual ceremony than a musical performance.
Mystery gets blown out the window on Imikuzushi, the third installment of this group's annual live meeting. From the very first second, our heroes' intentions are clear: They came to bang out ear-filling power-trio noise-rock. And they do that with obliterating abandon on an opener whose rambling title, "still unable to throw off that teaching a heart left abandoned unable to get inside that empty space nerves freezing that unconcealed sadness…", seems logical compared to its sonic insanity. The track's blood is boiled by Haino's inhuman guitar, which starts in overdrive and gets progressively more violent. At his peaks, he sounds like Jimi Hendrix if he actually played his flaming guitar instead of just waving at it.
It's tempting to say those peaks are the album's high points, since the trio doesn't spend all of Imikuzushi in fifth gear. But even during its most mellow stretches, the music crackles with tension, charged by the possibility that chaos could erupt-- and it often does. That edge-of-oblivion feeling naturally comes from Haino's high-wire acts, but it's also due to Ambarchi and O'Rourke's rhythm work, which is both weighty and nimble. The pair alternates between depth-charge beats and clicking, jazzy clips, along the way conjuring metal, psych, and sky-shooting stoner rock.
Unsurprisingly, they also evoke the bluesy blasts of Haino's legendary avant-rock outfit Fushitsusha. But there's something different about this trio's approach to sonic obliteration. Even when everything's clanging and exploding, and Haino's voice is dive-bombing through all the clamor, the band never sounds rushed or at risk of tripping over itself. Perhaps this move to noise-rock actually calmed their nerves and loosened their musical muscles. Whatever the explanation, Imikuzushi feels like the work of artists looking down from a mountain rather than laboring to climb it.
That vision reaches furthest on track three, which has another sprawling title: "invited in practically drawn in by something facing the exit of this hiding place who is it? that went in…" Here, many sonic parts fit together magically, like levers and pulleys in a Rube Goldberg machine. There's O'Rourke's swaying, two-note bassline as things pick up steam; Ambarchi's monstrous fills when Haino's guitar detonates; and Haino's chilling chants over O'Rourke's rumbling fuzz. The excitement feels endless, but knowing how restless these three can be, this might be the last time they work in this ecstatic mode. Luckily, Imikuzushi captures that moment in a way that sounds timeless. | 2012-03-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-03-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Black Truffle | March 22, 2012 | 8.2 | 67bf1e0a-8542-4632-be86-e48ba4a21e40 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Composer Sofie Birch’s lush ambient creations and experimental singer Antonina Nowacka’s indelible vocal melodies meet on a record that ebbs and flows as naturally as breathing. | Composer Sofie Birch’s lush ambient creations and experimental singer Antonina Nowacka’s indelible vocal melodies meet on a record that ebbs and flows as naturally as breathing. | Sofie Birch / Antonina Nowacka: Languoria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sofie-birch-antonina-nowacka-languoria/ | Languoria | On a crisp autumn morning last year, in a 19th-century synagogue in Krakow, Danish electronic musician Sofie Birch and Polish vocalist Antonina Nowacka coaxed a heavenly sound out of the ether. Birch played a compact setup of hardware synthesizers, wires tumbling from the outputs, while Nowacka held herself still behind the mic, her eyes closed as she sang, hands half-clasped and tracing small circles in front of her, as though she were sewing invisible thread. Their gauzy white frocks only accentuated the ritual atmosphere.
For the few dozen people in attendance, it was a magical event; some wept. Langouria, the duo’s recorded debut together, translates the otherworldly power of their Unsound festival performance to the studio.
The album represents a meeting of the minds. As a solo musician, Birch has spent the past few years developing a unique style of lush, welcoming ambient music steeped in new-age tones. Nowacka’s work has ranged from abstract vocalizations alongside stark electronics—imagine Joan La Barbara fronting Wolf Eyes—to solo improvisations in Oaxacan churches and Javan caves, probing the outer limits of natural reverb. If Birch’s music is a brightly colored expanse of coral, or a sashaying field of kelp, Nowacka’s voice is a lone organism carving a languid path through it—perhaps a translucent jellyfish, lithe yet severe in the exactitude of its movements.
Birch pares back her playing to make way for the slim contours of Nowacka’s instrument. Rather than unleashing her usual billowing plumes of synthesizer, she for the most part restrains herself to just a few sounds and the merest melodic shapes, while faint field recordings—birdsong, the rustle of footsteps—root the music in the lived world. “Lilieae” opens the album with liquid pads and plucked sounds with the incidental rhythm of a soft rain on a tin roof. The two-part “Morning Room” makes do with tentative strokes of vibraphone. “Sudany,” one of the album’s most rapturously beautiful tracks, is a misty constellation of chimes, mysterious as the night sky.
In concert, Nowacka stayed silent for long stretches—eyes closed, fingers performing invisible handiwork—as though waiting for some cue that only she could hear. Here, she is similarly sparing in her contributions, and a few short instrumental sketches—like the pulsing flute synths of “Behind the Hill”—help to draw out the abiding feeling of patience. When she sings, though, it’s everything. Her tone is soft, hushed, often no louder than the hiss of breath, yet the scope of it is vast. There are no words, just sighs, coos, and drawn-out vowels—air given shape and tint. Yet her careful, sure-footed melodies, subtly multi-tracked in places, are indelible as any singalong. What’s most remarkable about her delivery is her tight, quick vibrato, which quivers in a steady, rapid-fire stream, like a magnetic field. There’s something eerie about it; in places, I’m reminded of the sopranos on scratchy old 78s, when phonograph records still carried the lingering aura of a spirit medium.
The abiding feeling of Langouria is its sense of ease. Its songs ebb and flow as naturally as breathing. There are no sharp edges, no moments of dissonance; there’s just enough darkness—in the fogged chords of “The Journey” or the wistful chirps of “Me of Ocean”—to balance its ecstatic calm. Much like Nowacka’s a cappella recordings in caves and churches, it feels like a portal to another world. Building upon that intimate, spellbinding morning last fall, Birch and Nowacka give us an enduring snapshot of the most ephemeral kind of beauty. | 2022-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mondoj / Unsound | October 12, 2022 | 7.9 | 67c05140-997f-4155-a8ef-d024e57e1af3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Fusing club music’s dynamism with ambient’s tenderness, West Coast producer Tomu DJ’s sophomore album calls to mind classic electronic full-lengths while offering something fresh in the process. | Fusing club music’s dynamism with ambient’s tenderness, West Coast producer Tomu DJ’s sophomore album calls to mind classic electronic full-lengths while offering something fresh in the process. | Tomu DJ: Half Moon Bay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomu-dj-half-moon-bay/ | Half Moon Bay | For the past few years, Tomu DJ has been dabbling in alchemy. A devotee of DJ Rashad’s pioneering footwork crew Teklife, the Bay Area producer drew attention to herself with a raft of nimble, amusingly titled heaters that winked at solipsistic playgrounds for the chronically online. It quickly became apparent she was equally skilled at writing gossamer synth melodies that suffuse the air like fragrance and betray no hint of screen glare. Could overlap exist between two forms that are, on paper, miles apart? Half Moon Bay, one of 2022’s most affecting electronic records, offers a resounding yes.
The road connecting juke to new age is rarely trodden, and “ambient footwork”—ludicrously paradoxical, given the Chicago dance style’s invocation to get your ass up and werk—scans like the kind of thing a random microgenre generator spits out. Tested blind, you might never guess that the same pair of hands behind the celestial two-chord sigh of “Sunsets,” a Half Moon Bay teaser released this spring, had also bashed out the hyperactive arcade strains of “banana” some two years prior.
Tomu DJ’s attempts to fuse these two approaches didn’t always gel, though last year’s debut full-length, FEMINISTA, was a fine statement of intent. On her sophomore LP, she cracks the code. Featuring input from footworkers DJ Manny and SUCIA!, as well as regular collaborator kimdollars1 and Tomu DJ’s own partner blessingsnore, Half Moon Bay strikes all the right notes, recalling well-loved contemporary records that manage to be hypnotic, curative, and a touch disquieting all in the same breath.
If you’re curious to hear those early experiments, unfortunately you’re too late. Tomu DJ recently scrubbed her socials and deleted swaths of her catalog off Bandcamp and streaming services—an eyebrow-raising move for a relative newcomer. Half Moon Bay, which she says she revised at least four times over the course of several years, is a purposeful hard reset. A near-fatal car accident in 2019 forced her to reckon with the aftershocks on FEMINISTA, and here she plumbs further depths, working through longstanding, deleterious mental-health issues.
Though the protective barrier of piss-taking is gone—songs named after mispronunciations of Dua Lipa have been replaced by ones that are fairly unambiguous in their quest for creative and spiritual rebirth—Half Moon Bay is far from a drudge, and not even particularly dark. Tomu DJ instead opts to confront roiling trauma with a spear of soft euphoria; pain commuted through snappy drums and bright synths, mixed loud and still raw.
Typically, producer-DJs absconding from the dancefloor will strip out the low end entirely, as if to prove they don’t rely on kick drums as a crutch. The separator on Half Moon Bay is how much Tomu DJ retains. The album’s opening two tracks hover around 130-145 bpm, respectively—very pacy indeed for ostensibly mellow music. Even when tempos decelerate, her downtempo has an uptempo gait. Chatty hi-hats, beat switches, and snare rolls float around like club music’s afterimage, injecting unusual insistency into a field that can sometimes struggle to justify its stasis.
Sour, tensile keys and skittering percussion on “Optimistic” evoke the stampede of a crowd fleeing hail, while the cresting dembow rhythm on “Lost Feeling” is like a flashlight scything through the claggy, toxic air that follows a wildfire. “Spring of Life” plays a cute trick, drifting tones massaging your brain for long enough that you start daydreaming about fronds of giant kelp twisting romantically in turquoise waters, before the pulse quickens as a submerged kick punches in. Although the tempo only leaps to 120 bpm—about par for ambient house—the impact, after being lulled into a false sense of serenity, is arresting.
The heartrending crown jewel is “Half Moon.” As the track is ushered in by a faint click, one hand begins to glide over a Prophet-5, the only non-VST instrument employed across the LP, with a weight and hesitancy that suggests this was a scratch demo deemed richer than the overthought final_final_final version. Initially the mix feels off, notes a little too high and sharp, before a run of crystalline trills washes the song clean, and you realize just how closely you’ve been drawn in. In mood if not sound, it brings to mind Huerco S.’ “Promises of Fertility” and DJ Sprinkles’ “House Music Is a Controllable Desire You Can Own,” respective highlights on exceptional albums that tug insistently at resonant sensations falling just out of language’s grasp.
Half Moon Bay hits like being flash-banged by an emotion grenade. At first the album can seem pretty gutting, the sort of abundantly tender music that makes you want to hop a 3 a.m. Greyhound to nowhere, just to develop a deeper kinship with the sense of ravagement and isolation. But the residual effect is purifying. Half Moon Bay is a kind of quiet force, grace wrested from tumult, yet something greater still: Tomu DJ sounds like she’s happy to be here, and that’s half the battle won. | 2022-08-12T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-12T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Franchise | August 12, 2022 | 7.9 | 67c12a0e-3377-4923-ae3a-4a6ffff63412 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
The Chicago-based songwriter sees singing about personal experiences as an act of violence, but her debut LP translates that dark view into 34 minutes of surprisingly serene, perceptive storytelling. | The Chicago-based songwriter sees singing about personal experiences as an act of violence, but her debut LP translates that dark view into 34 minutes of surprisingly serene, perceptive storytelling. | Gia Margaret: There’s Always Glimmer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gia-margaret-theres-always-glimmer/ | There’s Always Glimmer | Gia Margaret makes folk music hand-stitched with subtle electronic embellishments, preserving emotional ordeals like depression and transition within cushioned vocal melodies. In a recent interview, the Chicago-based musician discussed her fear of hurting others with lyrics drawn from life, likening songs to weapons hurled out into the world. But on her debut album, There’s Always Glimmer, Margaret’s violent view of songwriting translates to 34 minutes of serene and perceptive storytelling.
“Groceries” opens the album on a vulnerable note, pairing her confessions with a somber, humming synth that resembles a droning growl. Margaret recounts how she tried writing about her woes but ultimately found comfort in a companion. “You took me in your arms and said, ‘Though it’s not easy to see, there’s always glimmer,” she sings, revealing the album’s title. “You bought the groceries/And you let the light in.” Even in the midst of a terrible year, the song suggests, the mundane experience of having someone else buy you groceries can be enough to sustain hope.
Margaret calls her music “sleep rock,” a term that captures the lullaby atmosphere of the album’s 12 songs. Combining elements of folk, ambient music, and shoegaze, her songs sometimes evoke the hushed melodies of the Postal Service or Nick Drake; images of moonlight spilling in through windows and fresh black coffee pouring into a cup have the detail of an Ansel Adams photograph. Even at times when the setting is vague, every scene is freighted with enough honest sentiment to create a vivid picture.
A classically trained pianist, Margaret awakens the instrument’s rawest and most graceful potential. Second single “Smoke” opens with a breathtaking prelude; her fingers glide across the keys like figure skaters. “For Flora” invents a new kind of lullaby, layering a piano composition over faded voicemails from her mother. High and low notes waltz together as her mom’s voice peeks out from between the keys: “Just wanted to make sure you don’t forget about me.”
Glimmer radiates nostalgia, but not longing. Despite the voyeuristic tone of her reminiscences, Margaret seems to understand that she can’t go back in time. On “Figures,” she sings of haunting shadows that remind her of an old lover: “The lights are on in the buildings downtown/And a figure inside moves like you.” But the illusion passes.
It’s uncertainty about the future that suffuses There’s Always Glimmer. These worries have Margaret walking alone, “searching for signs, like stones sinking into water” amid the trotting beat of “Exist,” a track that shares its drifting atmosphere with an Iron & Wine ballad. On the closer, “West,” she frets about her hyperawareness of the passage of time. Margaret’s ultimately futile battle with time is well fought: Her lullabies are hypnotic enough to delay the transitions she dreads—to stop the ticking clock—for half an hour, at least. | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | August 4, 2018 | 7.4 | 67c2a431-b0c0-4fc0-a982-c66d7b449afe | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter's powerful third album, produced by the National's Aaron Dessner, features guest spots from Beirut's Zach Condon, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, and Dessner's brother Bryce, among others. | The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter's powerful third album, produced by the National's Aaron Dessner, features guest spots from Beirut's Zach Condon, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, and Dessner's brother Bryce, among others. | Sharon Van Etten: Tramp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16233-tramp/ | Tramp | Sharon Van Etten's first proper album, Because I Was in Love, was nudged out into the world in 2009 despite the best efforts of a college boyfriend in Tennessee who had told her she was shit, hid her guitar, and shoved her back home to New Jersey. That album's tracks, and those of the home recordings she also released that year, were sparse, Van Etten's voice sometimes barely above a murmur, as if she were trying to figure out how to make music at the lowest functional volume. Her next record, 2010's Epic, was almost more of an EP-- just seven songs-- but it was a leap forward in sound and spirit. Epic pulled in little bits of kickdrum and pedal steel and electric guitar, and ended with "Love More", on which she proclaimed, over a doubled harmonium and wavering synth, "You chained me like a dog in our room/ …It made me love, it made me love, it made me love more."
Van Etten first recorded "Love More" for WXPN and Weathervane Music's Shaking Through web series, which captured the session on video. It was one of her first in-earnest collaborations with other musicians, and can almost see new synapses firing behind her eyes: this is what music can be, this is what I can be. It's fitting that the same song grabbed the attention of the National's Aaron Dessner, who wound up producing Tramp, her first album for Jagjaguwar. The new tracks come from a year and a half of sessions wedged in whenever Dessner and Van Etten were both off tour. It includes appearances by Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Julianna Barwick, Dessner's brother/bandmate Bryce, and other friends of the sort that apparently tend to "just drop by" when you're a celebrated musician/producer with a studio in your Brooklyn garage. That Van Etten has been given the time and space and resources to feel out her path, unhurried by the tyrannous buzz cycle, is both a total luxury, and totally vital.
It's the default assumption that a female songwriter, performing under her own name, is "confessional," that she's serving up some dark part of her soul for the world's consumption. And maybe one day Van Etten will slip into the voices of strangers just as easily as she inhabits her own. But for now, confession is still very much the thing. "It's self-therapy," Van Etten has said to nearly every interviewer who has asked, and more and more that seems to refer to both the writing and the production of her songs; that she can draw out the words, bring them into a room with other human beings, and together with them lay something beautiful on tape is both transformative and redemptive.
Matters of mistrust, isolation, and uncomfortable togetherness dominate Tramp, rolling through every track like a sick, creeping fog. Maybe Van Etten is still nursing the psychic wounds carved into her by that one Tennessee boyfriend, or maybe it's something else; either way, she sounds, at last, good and angry and ready to put up a fight. First comes the dark jangle of "Warsaw", then the calculated frankness of "Give Out" ("You're the reason why I'll move to the city/ Or why I'll need to leave”). On "Serpents", the album's lead single, she scoffs, "I had a thought you would take me seriously." As guitars strain at their tethers and Walkmen drummer Matt Barrick pounds out marching orders, the plea she issued three years ago on "Much More Than That"-- "please don’t take me lightly"-- quavers, crumples, turns to ash.
After the torching comes the slow, steady burn. "Kevin's" sounds like an Epic latecomer welcomed into Tramp's fold, Van Etten’s voice, falling somewhere between Cass Elliot's range and Cat Power's emotional register, turns darker and resigned, the whole song one long smoky exhale. "Leonard" is a dreamy, abashed waltz; tickled by ukuleles and kicked along by a big bass drum; it reveals the album's lone confession that seems to stem from anything close to guilt. It's an admission that takes three go-rounds of the chorus to make itself fully known, Van Etten shuffling around the hard truth: "I am bad"-- "I am bad at loving"-- "I am bad at loving you."
The album's brightest spot comes with the steady, strummy "We Are Fine", in which Van Etten talks through a panic attack with a friend ("Take my hand and help me not to shake/ Say I'm all right, I'm all right"). Beirut's Zach Condon sings harmonies and a verse of his own, the song written with him in mind, Van Etten says, not just because she first plucked it out on a ukulele, but because they both do battle with the gnarly beast of social anxiety. There's often no clear balm for Van Etten's laments, but "We Are Fine" is both the means and the end, the sickness and the cure in one.
Tramp is maybe best thought of in terms of having a Side A and a Side B; otherwise, the middle section falls into a weird mid-album slough that doesn't quite jibe with Van Etten and Dessner's generally excellent sense of timing and space. Imagine a click, a pause and a careful flip between the fractured, meandering "In Line" and "All I Can", which starts with a mewling organ hum and gradually wills itself into blistering hugeness. That song might have worked, too, as a big closer; the seething "Joke or a Lie" serves better as a feint than a final attack. As it is, the album doesn't end so much as infinitely loop on itself (serpents, indeed), the last track's final scrape threading back into "Warsaw"'s opening thump and clank.
"I want my scars to help and heal," Van Etten sings on "All I Can". That healing comes, in part, from the making of the music-- that act of physically locating the pain in some way that can be accessed and then shelved as life tumbles on. But it comes, too, from being pushed out into the world, to people who now say, "Yes, we are here, and we are listening." | 2012-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 31, 2012 | 7.9 | 67c668ee-bd72-4620-966b-04d3a90457d4 | Rachael Maddux | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachael-maddux/ | null |
Equal parts manifesto and critique, the pair’s third musical collaboration pays homage to the sound and radical spirit of their West Coast home. | Equal parts manifesto and critique, the pair’s third musical collaboration pays homage to the sound and radical spirit of their West Coast home. | Georgia Anne Muldrow / Dudley Perkins: Black Love & War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/georgia-anne-muldrow-dudley-perkins-black-love-and-war/ | Black Love & War | To be black in America is to live a divided existence, straddling a glorious yet fractured past, the unfulfilled promise of the future, and a present that has never truly belonged to us. But the philosophy of Afrofuturism has given countless black artists and thinkers the ability to “time travel,” exploring the intersectionality of race, politics, science, and technology across genres in as yet impossible ways. Coined by writer Mark Dery in a 1993 essay, Afrofuturism empowered black artists not only to reimagine the world in which they lived—one predicated on racism—but to reclaim identity by controlling our narrative. In Afrofuturist tradition, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Dudley Perkins use their third collaboration, Black Love & War (released under the moniker “G&D”), to collide past and future in an alternate universe.
Equal parts manifesto and critique, Black Love & War implores listeners to rage against the machine—namely, an administration that brands a predominantly black city as “rat infested.” From the echoing refrain of retribution that seeks “death to all oppressors” on “187” to the proclamation of love in the face of a dystopian society on “P.A.L,” Muldrow and Perkins root their work in the present by paying homage to the sound and radical spirit of their West Coast home.
As parents themselves, Muldrow and Perkins have no hesitation about serving as mentors for younger generations. Certain tracks feel as though they were created especially for their children: “Hold on tight to your dreams and don’t you ever let them go,” Muldrow counsels on “The Power of Your Brain.” On “Peace Peace,” Perkins delivers a prophetic freestyle, warning his newborn son of rampant police brutality. He exploits the entendre—“peace” and “piece”—from the very first lines: “Welcome to the world son, now run/Police gotta a gun.”
Like their forebears in the ’70s funk group Parliament Funkadelic, Muldrow and Perkins relish the absurd, using sketches like “English Breakfast” to fuse music and theatrical narrative to cast a surreal light on injustice. On “Slave Revolt Soundtrack,” the slave characters murder the plantation owner and return “home,” speaking once again in their native African tongues. Inversely, lead single “Where I’m From” allow Muldrow and Perkins to proclaim their Africanness while living in modern-day America. Taking their cue from the Mothership Connection, they look to the past with reverence, navigating an uncertain future while remaining unapologetically themselves.
The album’s second half shifts from strife to affection, a jump so immense that, on first listen, one might almost overlook the “love” side of Black Love & War. Highlights include “Fruitful” and “Big Mel,” where Muldrow’s sublimely minimalist production allow her powerful words to rise above the mix. Closing with these two songs instills hope that love is real—and more importantly, that in spite of our past struggles, black people are entitled to experience the full gamut of their humanity, right here in the actual present. | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | SomeOthaShip Connect / eOne | August 15, 2019 | 7.5 | 67c6741b-a3bf-4cd5-871b-cd11b26f3c70 | Shannon J. Effinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shannon-j. effinger/ | |
Sam Beam teams with the Southwest's Calexico on a seven-track mini-album that ranks with anything either act has done on its own. | Sam Beam teams with the Southwest's Calexico on a seven-track mini-album that ranks with anything either act has done on its own. | Calexico / Iron & Wine: In the Reins EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4129-in-the-reins-ep/ | In the Reins EP | Why didn’t somebody think of this sooner? It’s not a fair question, but it’s an easy one to ask once you’ve heard the seven-track In the Reins, the first in what, if we’re all very lucky, will be a series of collaborations between Iron & Wine and Calexico.
Iron & Wine’s Beam and Calexico’s Joey Burns sound heavenly harmonizing with each other, especially when guest vocalist Natalie Wyants joins them. Neither is an exceptional vocalist on his own, both occasionally lapsing to a whisper, but those hushed, gently melodic cords singing in unison make magic. Beam is the principle songwriter and vocalist on the album, and he’s written some A material for the record, admirably putting his all into it instead of offering up some throwaway stuff and hoping Calexico can do something with it.
What ultimately ends up happening is Calexico’s sense of cinematic grandeur and eclecticism imbues Beam’s melodies and lyrics with an expansiveness that his humid Floridian folk doesn’t usually have. Shades of jazz and country creep in, and they even tackle straightahead California pop on “History of Lovers”. The only ingredients from Calexico’s usual recipe that are absent are dub and mariachi, but they employ their arsenal so sympathetically to Beam’s vision that an unschooled listener might never guess that this wasn’t a proper, working band.
Calexico are no strangers to backing other singers—Burns and drummer John Convertino began playing together as Howe Gelb’s rhythm section in Giant Sand, and they’ve contributed to dozens of LPs by other artists over the years. The core duo of Calexico brings along most of the collective of Southwestern musicians that enlivens their own albums—Paul Niehaus’s lap steel, in particular, helps to shape the sound of the album. “Prison on Route 41” and “16, Maybe Less” both traffic in hushed country’n’western tones, but are arranged in such a way that vocals give way to instrumental passages so smoothly that the solos don’t feel at all like showcases.
There isn’t a disappointing song on the EP (mini-album might actually be a better word for it), but it’s worth noting a couple of stand-outs. Opener “He Lays in the Reins” is a subtle waltz stuffed with flourishes of acoustic guitar and brushed drums that almost two minutes in introduces the operatic Spanish vocals of Salvador Duran, a complete leftfield move that proves as inspired on subsequent listens as it does jarring on the first listen. But the real highlight is also the biggest shock: “History of Lovers” is what Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours might have sounded like if it had been recorded in Memphis, complete with steel guitar trim and a great horn arrangement to go with some stunning harmonies and an unbelievable vocal melody.
Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it’s clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next for Iron & Wine and Calexico and how this affects their work apart from each other. In the meantime, we can hope that this isn’t a one-time-only engagement. | 2005-09-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-09-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Overcoat | September 13, 2005 | 8.5 | 67cf0c10-2c2a-443b-bca1-41a846f51f22 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Exploring personal subject matter and wider musical terrain, the Bristol band’s fourth album plays like the dark origin story for how Idles became the preeminent life coaches of modern post-punk. | Exploring personal subject matter and wider musical terrain, the Bristol band’s fourth album plays like the dark origin story for how Idles became the preeminent life coaches of modern post-punk. | Idles: Crawler | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/idles-crawler/ | Crawler | Whether you considered Idles’ 2020 album Ultra Mono to be a voice of righteous rage and reason in the age of Trump and Brexit, or just more haughty, hectored hashtag activism for people who smugly share Occupy Democrats memes on Facebook, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Its album cover was perfect. The image of some poor bloke getting smushed by a hot-pink blob was both an accurate depiction of this band’s blunt posi-punk force and a fitting metaphor for lyrics that are often so on-the-nose, they’re liable to crush your face. After all, this is a band whose lead singer doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve—he tattooed it into one.
Ultra Mono’s No. 1 debut on the UK charts thrust Idles to the premium crowdsurfer position atop the overflowing circle pit that is the current British post-post-post-punk scene, but the Bristol band truly belong to a more storied lineage. Idles are to 2020s DIY-core what the Clash were to punk, what U2 were to ‘80s post-punk, and what Pearl Jam were to grunge—the earnest, ambitious idealists whose credentials are constantly being called into question. And in true Strummer/Bono/Vedder fashion, frontman Joe Talbot is liable to stick his neck out further than Idles’ more cryptically cantankerous peers, even at the risk of landing in a guillotine. However, unlike those spiritual forebears, Idles can be burdened by a self-awareness that verges on self-defeating. On Ultra Mono, Talbot devoted a fair amount of lyrical real estate to baiting his haters: “How do you like them clichés,” he snorted on “Mr. Motivator,” after spouting off a series of over-the-top lines about his limitless, system-smashing bravado. Answering accusations of “sloganeering” with yet more sloganeering, however ironic, proved to be less of a defense strategy than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If Ultra Mono felt like the work of someone who’d spent a little too much time reading their own press, Crawler, the band’s fourth album, sounds like they’re genuinely heeding it. The pot shots frequently aimed at Idles in the past—that their politics feel performative; that their hoarse-throated throttle is too, well, ultra-mono—aren’t so easily leveled here. The band’s motorik engine is still in fine working order, but Crawler uses it to explore a wider musical terrain, while Talbot eases off the broad-stroked bromides, forsaking class warfare for psychological drama. In essence, Crawler is like the dark origin story to a crowd-pleasing blockbuster franchise, providing greater context to the transformative events—namely, his battle with addiction and the near-fatal car accident signifying its nadir—that ultimately turned Talbot into modern post-punk’s most voracious life coach.
Idles are no strangers to getting personal, but even their most sensitive and introspective moments have traditionally been delivered with the same bull-in-a-china-shop aggression and lack of subtlety as their protest-placard rockers. Crawler, on the other hand, immediately presents itself as a different beast with “MTT 420 RR,” where Talbot calmly recites the grisly details of the aforementioned vehicular crash as if reliving the moment of impact in slow motion. The air of impending catastrophe is compounded by an eerie, synth-buzzed atmosphere that recalls the Bad Seeds’ recent turn towards ultraviolet ambient soundscapes, with the spare rhythm provided by a jingling sound that suggests someone drunkenly fumbling for their car keys. Of course, when Talbot grimly intones “Are you ready for the storm?,” he’s both bracing for the story’s violent conclusion and teeing up Idles’ inevitable shift back to familiar turbo-punk turf. Even when they come out swinging with “The Wheel,” however, they sound like a changed band: The raised-fist catharsis of old has been replaced by a more ominous, desperate energy that imbues the song’s grim account of intergenerational alcoholism, as bassist Adam Devonshire punctuates each chorus with a droning chord that sounds like the bell tolling on a doomsday clock.
Crawler continues Idles’ unlikely alliance with rap producer Kenny Beats, who contributed drum programming to Ultra Mono but this time assumes a more central role behind the boards with guitarist Mark Bowen. Together, they arrive at a sound that’s more brutally minimalist yet more evocative. Splitting the difference between grimy dub and dubby grime, “Car Crash” returns to the scene of the album’s opener but rewinds the tape to put us in the detuned-radio mind of Talbot as he gets behind the wheel, drunk on his own delusional omnipotence as much as any substance. And while Talbot has famously declared that Idles are “not a fucking punk band,” Crawler finally provides him with some evidence to justify the claim: Where this band once covered a Solomon Burke song and made it sound like the Birthday Party, on “The Beachland Ballroom,” named for the Cleveland concert hall, the band sincerely embraces the role of early ’60s prom-night entertainers, delivering a soulful slow-dance where Talbot channels the self-flagellating romanticism of another Ohio institution, Greg Dulli. But even that sharp left turn seems minor compared to “Progress,” a fever-dreamed industrial folk song seemingly broadcast from Talbot’s darkest hours of addiction, uncomfortably numbed to the point where he no longer senses the difference between bliss and bleakness.
For all these experimental impulses, Crawler ultimately proves to be more a transitional album than a wholesale reinvention, and it’s not entirely clear if Idles have it in them to go full Kid A: The revelatory “Progress” is immediately answered by the 30-second hardcore piledriver “Wizz,” which is less a song than a gag reflex. A good portion of Crawler remains beholden to Idles’ patented hypno-punk propulsion, a formula that can still yield some thrilling, festival-ready rave-ups (“The New Sensation”). However, by the time we reach the vigorous yet hookless “King Snake,” it feels like they’re running on autopilot. So it’s something of a relief to hear the wheels fall off on the closing grunge grunt “The End,” which sounds like Idles tumbling down a never-ending spiral staircase. As ever, Talbot sees the silver lining in a world of shit: “In spite of it all,” he howls, “life is beautiful.” It’s precisely the sort of simplistic, feel-good platitude that Talbot just can’t resist indulging, the post-punk equivalent of a “Live, Laugh, Love” poster. In effect, Talbot is still asking, “How do you like them clichés?” But this time, he’s not so much saying it for his amusement as his rehabilitation: Coming at the end of a record that documents his journey from trauma to triumph, the moment reminds us that clichés are clichés because they’re true.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Partisan | November 17, 2021 | 7 | 67d0eea5-8a14-45e5-b2ea-05ccd0c0e357 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Five decades since co-founding the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the pioneering saxophonist offers innovative fusions of composition and improvisation on a rare album for large ensemble. | Five decades since co-founding the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the pioneering saxophonist offers innovative fusions of composition and improvisation on a rare album for large ensemble. | Roscoe Mitchell: Discussions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roscoe-mitchell-discussions/ | Discussions | During the 1965 founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, members agreed on an ambitious goal for their concert presentations: original compositions, every time out. Nor were those all-original gigs meant to stick to one genre. Jazz-influenced forms could collide with pop rhythms and avant-garde textures from the classical sphere. This concept had staying power. In the decades since, work by the association’s members has made a profound and lasting contribution to American music.
Saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell was an original member of the AACM, and he has never abandoned the organization’s principles. Fifty years after starting the pathbreaking group that came to be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, he is still developing new approaches to writing and improvisation. When responding to a recent wave of invitations to collaborate with European symphonic groups, Mitchell hit on a new idea for generating material. Because he has long considered the art of improvisation to be “composition in real time,” he says it made sense to take some of his favorite spontaneous licks and put them down on paper.
Mitchell selected tracks from two improv albums, released back in 2014, and commissioned notated transcriptions and re-orchestrations from trusted collaborators, including several of his students from Mills College. Four of these new orchestral arrangements of past improvisations show up on Discussions, in takes that involve 19 different instrumentalists (plus conductor Steed Cowart). The arrangers’ various transformations are significant and imaginative, though aspects of the underlying improvisations are usually recognizable.
The doleful opening that Mitchell and pianist Craig Taborn improvised in their earlier duo performance of “I’ll See You Out There” is given to woodwinds and strings on this new orchestral version. The motifs are familiar, but the new range of instrumental color in Christopher Stover’s arrangement gives the music a wider variety of moods to cycle through. A passage of cautious, vulnerable melody can open quickly into a harmony that suggests hope and eagerness. The gradual addition of percussion even guarantees that—in a surprising twist—the orchestral version has a more propulsive middle section than the earlier take, recorded in a free-jazz context.
The remaining four tracks on Discussions are new, collective improvisations. Two are duo cuts, in which Mitchell’s sopranino saxophone weaves wild harmonics and piping high notes around riffs from Wilfrido Terrazas’ flute. The two other improvisations—“Discussions I” and “Discussions II”—reveal the album’s vision of free-orchestra playing. These selections include some of the most exciting moments on the album. They often sound dizzyingly active without feeling cluttered. It seems as though this new orchestra, having learned from the transcriptions of Mitchell’s past improvisations, has acquired an intuitive ability to create new music together. You can hear Mitchell’s own excitement over this development as he contributes ferocious soloing on both performances.
Still, the album doesn’t rise or fall on the strength of Mitchell’s iconic instrumental voice. Throughout, he frequently exercises the option to sit back and supervise, as strings, woodwinds, brass, and multiple percussionists realize new versions of his past improvisations. (There are even some electronics thrown into the bargain, during the lengthy finale “Who Dat,” thanks to frequent Mitchell colleague James Fei.)
Over its 66 minutes, the set manages to succinctly channel several of the concepts that have fascinated this artist for half a century. You can hear his compositional risk-taking and his instrumental prowess, as well as his pedagogical interest in helping other musicians reach new heights. The album feels like a legitimate event in Mitchell’s career, since it is one of the relatively rare releases devoted to his large ensemble music. Coming hot on the heels of this summer’s masterful live album, Discussions manages to throw light on yet another side of this visionary’s output. | 2017-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Wide Hive | September 16, 2017 | 7.8 | 67d49dfb-e941-4f99-96e5-53ed17d73729 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
Much like the UK composer’s score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Monos uses just a smattering of sounds to craft a world of deepening dread. | Much like the UK composer’s score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Monos uses just a smattering of sounds to craft a world of deepening dread. | Mica Levi: Monos (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mica-levi-monos-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Monos (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | By most quantitative measures, Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 film Under the Skin was a bomb. Whereas some Scarlett Johansson vehicles can break a billion dollars at the box office, Under the Skin is nowhere near making back its original budget. Reviews called the abstract body-horror film “torpid and silly” and “without dramatic, emotional or psychological substance”; Glazer hasn’t made another film since. But thanks to the bracing, skin-prickling score from Mica Levi (her debut as a soundtrack composer after years fronting Micachu and the Shapes), Under the Skin and its soundtrack continue to exert an eerie gravitational pull five years on. Indie musicians like Geoff Barrow, Colin Stetson, and the Haxan Cloak’s Bobby Krlic now make similarly visceral and atonal sounds for the screen, and the experimental imprint PAN has even created its own cinematic sublabel.
Levi’s score for Brazilian writer/director Alejandro Landes’ Monos is similar to her work for Under the Skin: It utilizes only a smattering of sounds to craft a world of deepening dread. The story follows a group of teenagers-turned-soldiers in a mountain retreat tending to a political prisoner and a milk cow named Shakira; the film’s quick erasure of the line between innocence and heartlessness brings to mind Apocalypse Now (while a pig’s head on a stick pays clear homage to The Lord of the Flies). But while characters named Wolf, Dog, and Smurf shed their last vestiges of civility and turn feral, Levi’s score keeps a firm grasp throughout, growing unhinged yet never quite losing control. If there’s an onscreen character that best represents Levi, it’s Sofia Buenaventura’s Rambo, who somehow keeps her humanity intact through the tribulations.
For the first part of the film, the child soldiers occupy a mountain fort, and Levi’s cues expertly match the spare setting. Hushed as the mists that enshroud the characters (many shots show them on lookout with the clouds gathering below them), small sounds suggest deeper forces at work. With the distant rumble of tympanum on “Funeral” and “A La Selva,” Levi heightens the tension on screen and hints at the interior struggle as each character slowly, unnoticeably shakes free from the constraints of society.
The soundtrack’s main theme is a four-note whistle, which sounds throughout the film. At some moments, with the kids silhouetted with guns in hand, it brings to mind the iconic whistle theme of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It’s deceptively simple and devastatingly effective, an elemental childlike sound made from just cupping your hands together and blowing. But as it continues to sound, a sense of exhaustion becomes audible, the fourth note raspy like a last gasp. As digital effects burst in and drums rumble closer, the whistle turns forlorn and increasingly isolated. On “Helicóptero,” Levi digitally manipulates and elongates its tone into a flickering, dreamlike drone.
Even a playful cue like “Honguitos,” wherein the kids nosh on some magic mushrooms sprouting from cow dung and have their environment flipped from garrison to playground, the effect is short-lived. A whimsical air rendered on flute floats by, then gets dragged down by a nose-diving synth line. It’s as if a huge EDM drop lay just around the bend. More flickering synth themes swell on “Castigo” and at other intervals in the film, making for a provocative suggestion: In another time or place, rather than carrying machine guns in bloodied hands, these mud-caked kids might simply be going primal on a saucer-eyed weekend at a countryside rave. | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Invada / Lakeshore | September 10, 2019 | 7.8 | 67d6dc3d-4167-4da3-97a7-0d4e51857af7 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
After years of kicking against dance music’s strictures, Daniel Martin McCormick delivers something close to a pure techno album. A product of turmoil, it’s a satisfyingly confident statement. | After years of kicking against dance music’s strictures, Daniel Martin McCormick delivers something close to a pure techno album. A product of turmoil, it’s a satisfyingly confident statement. | Relaxer: Coconut Grove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/relaxer-coconut-grove/ | Coconut Grove | Daniel Martin-McCormick’s past always seems to dominate the conversation about his present. No matter how many new groups he’s formed or new aliases he’s tried on for size, his music continues to be evaluated through the lens of his earliest projects. Since 2002, Martin-McCormick has logged lengthy stints in groups like Black Eyes and Mi Ami and recorded solo as Sex Worker and Ital. (Full disclosure: he’s also an occasional contributor to Pitchfork.) Launched in 2016 with a series of five self-released EPs, Relaxer is the New York producer’s latest undertaking, and his new album, Coconut Grove, potentially represents a final, complete break from his noisy post-hardcore roots.
More than 15 years have passed since Black Eyes called it quits, but the band’s yelpy, chaotic urgency has colored the perception of Martin-McCormick’s entire career. While some of Black Eyes’ crazed energy did carry over into Martin-McCormick’s subsequent projects (e.g. the tortured glam-pop of Sex Worker and the highly rhythmic post-punk skronk of Mi Ami), he’s spent most of this decade focused on house, techno, and other forms of purely electronic music. As Ital, his initial releases were notably lo-fi, full of jittery intensity and not necessarily primed for the dancefloor, yet the project underwent a major evolution as he moved beyond his playful initial efforts. By the time that Hellhole, the final Ital EP, dropped in 2017, his music was emotionally deeper, more richly detailed and, most importantly, much better produced. Nevertheless, it often felt like listeners’ expectations of sonic anarchy and disarray were still looming in the background; for many, Ital would always be a former punk misfit making weirdo lo-fi house and techno.
With Relaxer, Martin-McCormick has effectively hit the reset button. Although he initially launched the alias as an anonymous side project, in 2017 he publicly made the switch and officially retired the Ital name. It was a time of transition, and not just in the musical realm. In 2018, he began work on Coconut Grove, creating the album during periods of what he calls “deliberate solitude” throughout a challenging year. Though he hasn’t been any more specific than that, he has described the LP as “an exorcism, or maybe a rebirth.”
Yet Coconut Grove isn’t a morose record. It’s not even particularly dark, especially in comparison to some of the later Ital releases. Martin-McCormick has said that some of the first electronic music that caught his attention, during the mid 2000s, was minimal dub techno, and although he was attracted to the music’s elegance and stripped-down aesthetic, it also lacked the visceral energy and raw emotional release he craved as a musician who was then in his early 20s. More than a decade later, it seems that Martin-McCormick has returned to that particular pool of inspiration, at least in part. Coconut Grove isn’t a dub techno album—the percussion is far too lively for that—but there is a certain patience to the music that feels new for him.
Coconut Grove shows a new level of refinement in Martin-McCormick’s music. Songs like “Steeplechase” and “Fluorescence” are brightly colored washes of ambient tranquility, floating along with all the urgency of a cumulus cloud. There’s a slight layer of Martin-McCormick’s usual distortion in the mix, but its presence provides a sense of texture as opposed to abruptly crashing the proceedings and spoiling the mood. The similarly serene “Agony” may sport an ominous title, but the track’s gliding synth washes feel more introspective than melancholy.
As good as these ambient excursions are, Coconut Grove spends more of its time on the dancefloor, mostly in a space that could be described as dreamy, melodic techno. There’s a genuine warmth to the record, and although Martin-McCormick still favors battered drum sounds, decaying basslines, and crackling bits of static, the music’s low-end heft sits comfortably alongside its hazy, space-age melodies. “Breaking the Waves” is one of the best examples of this equilibrium, its Balearic synth waves drifting above the song’s breakbeat-ish rhythm and the snarling crunch of its bassline. Album opener “Serpent in the Garden” dials up the melodic acrobatics even further, its bold synths sounding downright buoyant—and veering rather close to trance territory—atop the track’s sturdy techno foundation.
The LP does have its more upfront moments. The booming kicks and complex drum patterns of “Um” bring to mind labels like Livity Sound, while the cracking “Born From Beyond” also lets the percussion lead the way, with the help of a sticky vocal refrain and the sort of hovering bass tones that usually populate the background of a drum’n’bass track. Still, these songs don’t feel like outliers, as they retain the album’s warmth and dreamlike atmosphere.
Stylistically and musically, Coconut Grove might be one of the safest releases of Martin-McCormick’s career; it’s also one of his best. It may be “just” a techno album, but it’s also a confident statement from a veteran producer who seems to have settled into a groove after years of intentionally butting up against genre barriers and his own production limits. There’s value in that sort of work, but there’s also nothing wrong with an artist leaving it behind once they’ve carved out their own space. Perhaps it’s a function of maturity or simply getting better at his craft, but at some point, Martin-McCormick stopped being an ex-punk dabbling in electronic music and became a proper techno producer who happens to come from a D.C. post-hardcore background. His music has become subtler along the way, but it has also gotten a lot more rewarding. | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Avenue 66 | October 23, 2019 | 7.4 | 67da10fa-1880-4a3f-8a01-6f6005f9d59a | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
On *Shattered—*garage rock veterans Reigning Sound’s first album since 2009 and first for Merge—Greg Cartwright has dialed down the fuzz and cranked up the songcraft. | On *Shattered—*garage rock veterans Reigning Sound’s first album since 2009 and first for Merge—Greg Cartwright has dialed down the fuzz and cranked up the songcraft. | Reigning Sound: Shattered | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19503-reigning-sound-shattered/ | Shattered | Greg Cartwright’s Reigning Sound came into existence in 2001, just as garage rock was readying an assault on the mainstream that would make Jack White one of the least likely superstars of the nascent 21st century. White, of course, had already been kicking around the garage-rock scene for years— but nowhere near as long as Cartwright, whose résumé stretches back to the ’80s, although he made his first mark with the Memphis band the Compulsive Gamblers in the early ’90s. His subsequent group, Oblivians, became his best known, and for good reason: Like a chunk of bloody meat chucked into a carburetor, Oblivians was a wonderful mess of primitive R&B and punk. But even under all that gunk, one thing was clear: Cartwright was a man who knew how to craft songs and coax melodies. Reigning Sound became the vessel for broadening ability, to the point where their 2009 album, Love and Curses, owed as much to early Elvis Costello as to the Cramps. On Shattered, Reigning Sound’s first album since 2009 and first for Merge, Cartwright has dialed down the fuzz— and cranked up the songcraft— even more.
There aren’t many new elements to Shattered as compared to earlier Reigning Sound releases, but it marks a decided shift in how those elements are employed. Recorded in Daptone’s studio in Brooklyn rather than on Cartwright’s home turf of Memphis, and with a relatively new roster, the album is loose, flowing, and at times downright funky. Ironically, it sounds more like a vintage, Stax-era production than anything Reigning Sound ever did back home. “Baby, It’s Too Late” smothers itself in earthy organ, ventilated by stinging, Steve Cropper-esque licks. “North Cackalacky Girl” is a mod-R&B rave-up with only a tinge of punk ruggedness. For a band that titled its 2004 album Too Much Guitar, there’s a noticeable subjugation of that instrument; Cartwright’s riffs are cleaner, sharper, and more sparingly applied, and they punch harder thanks to that tasteful dynamic.
The fluidity and lyricism in Cartwright’s playing has always been hinted at in Reigning Sound but never fully explored. The same goes for his voice, a husky, charismatic bellow that’s able to dip into a supple, soulful croon. His full range is stretched into thrilling places, though, on Shattered’s handful of roots-rock tracks, some of which solidly straddle the country-soul divide. “Never Coming Home” and “Once More” sport mournful strings, lonely spaces, and the kind of choked-up twang that can overcome even the tritest of lyrics—one of the few major drawbacks of the album. A shining exception is “Falling Rain”, the record’s dizzying apex. Approaching Dylan-and-the-Band chemistry, Cartwright and his current lineup pull together every thread that’s unspooled throughout the album; meanwhile, their leader’s lyrics take homespun, borderline mundane sentiments about the sadness of loss and call forth an inspired, gut-deep pathos that transcends the ostensibly basic blocks it’s built from.
“Starting New” is one of Shattered’s subtlest songs, but also one of its most telling. Introspective and impressionistic, Cartwright rhapsodizes and pitches woo with all the caressed, tender phrasing of “T.B. Sheets”-era Van Morrison. The funk is subliminal; the country comes from nowhere and everywhere. Like an attempt at unified field theory of American music, the song is a leap forward for Reigning Sound, one of many on Shattered. Cartwright’s contemporary, Jack White, may be probing the outer limits of his own domain with his new album Lazaretto. But in a humbler, warmer, more openhearted way, Reigning Sound have risen above themselves—as well as the garage-rock idiom that spawned them— while spiritually hewing true. | 2014-07-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-07-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Merge | July 14, 2014 | 7.7 | 67db741a-a1ae-4e60-b1d9-b44c23cec02b | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Long-delayed and eventually shelved, Jay Electronica’s near-mythical “lost” album finally sees official release after it was leaked. Even slightly unfinished, it is nearly an all-time classic, the kind of record that celebrates an art form while simultaneously pushing it forward. | Long-delayed and eventually shelved, Jay Electronica’s near-mythical “lost” album finally sees official release after it was leaked. Even slightly unfinished, it is nearly an all-time classic, the kind of record that celebrates an art form while simultaneously pushing it forward. | Jay Electronica: Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-electronica-act-ii-the-patents-of-nobility-the-turn/ | Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn) | In a 2010 interview with Jeff “Chairman” Mao, Jay Electronica admitted that the mystique around him was confounding. “I don’t get why people say that,” he said. “I be on Twitter, I be on Facebook. The people that know me, I’m open with them. I don’t know where the mystique thing is coming from. I’m a pretty open person.” And indeed, 10 years later, he never really went away—his tweets became infrequent, and the album never materialized, but he never went too long without appearing on a guest feature or dropping a loose single, often a highlight from the announced but unreleased Act II: The Patents of Nobility.
In reality, the only thing mysterious about Jay Electronica was why, having been anointed as rap’s second coming in the wake of “Exhibit C,” he would sit on what was by all accounts the next hip-hop classic. Fans and critics alike struggled to understand why someone with his considerable gifts would resist the industry’s beaten path to stardom, why a rapper with a critical mass of accumulated hype would decamp to London and hole up with an heiress, his magnum opus languishing on a hard drive, collecting dust.
Now that Act II is here, the answers to those questions have come into sharper focus. But Jay did not release it willingly. Almost 11 years after its originally announced release date, it leaked online late last week after an unnamed group allegedly raised about $9,000 to purchase it from hackers. He admitted to attempting to block its release, but in the wake of March’s A Written Testimony, the critically acclaimed LP that served as his “official” debut, he seems somewhat at peace with its release to the public, even in its unfinished form. Perhaps he’s matured; perhaps the weight of expectation no longer burdens him, having shed the albatross he’s worn in public for the past 10 years. Whatever the reason, within days of the leak, the samples had been cleared and the album officially released, with Jay expressing gratitude for the immediate response.
The track list arrives almost exactly the same as it was announced in 2012, with the sole exception being the Charlotte Gainsbourg-featuring “Dinner at Tiffany’s,” now spun off from the original “Shiny Suit Theory.” It very much feels like the sequel to his 2007 breakthrough Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), a 15-minute suite that abandoned conventional form and structure, built atop Jon Brion’s score for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Act II opens with “Real Magic,” a sparse production featuring a plaintive piano melody and bass line that offers a glimpse into the structure of his intended trilogy. A magic trick—as Michael Caine so helpfully explains in the 2006 film The Prestige—consists of three parts. The Pledge, in which the illusionist displays something ordinary; the Turn, in which they do something amazing with that ordinary object; and the Prestige, in which they deliver the seemingly impossible. “This is the Turn/they ain’t ready for the Prestige yet” he raps, laying out his intent for what follows.
He largely delivers. Though the album is clearly unfinished, many of its songs sound complete, and it only peters out in the final quarter with rough-hewn demo-quality beats and reference vocals. It’s easy to see why he wouldn’t want songs like “Rough Love” and “Night of the Roundtable” to see the light of day; in their current form, they blunt the impact of the album’s climax somewhat. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a finished version of Act II with no real misses. And it features some of the strongest work of his career, official or otherwise.
“Better in Tune,” originally released as the single “Better in Tune With the Infinite,” is more evidence that his mystique is mostly the manifestation of an image projected onto him by others. A masterstroke of his signature style, laying quotes from Elijah Muhammad and The Wizard of Oz atop a Ryuichi Sakamoto sample, the lyrics in its single verse are at once poignant and revealing, almost directly answering questions surrounding Act II’s delayed release: “It’s frustrating when you just can’t express yourself/And it’s hard to trust enough to undress yourself/To stand exposed and naked, in a world full of hatred/Where the sick thoughts of mankind control all the sacred.” It’s a place familiar to any writer staring down a deadline: with each passing day, you change, the world changes, and the increasing volume of your internal dialogue can be paralyzing. Who is this for? Do others need to hear this? Should they? The longer the paralysis, the further the moment recedes into the rearview, dulling its potential impact.
To that end, it’s a minor miracle that we get to hear this record at all, because the style he’s honed and crafted on Act II feels unique. A Written Testimony remains essential and representative of his lyrical talent, but compared to Act II, it’s relatively conventional. Jay’s use of his source material is reverent and intimate. He will often insert his voice into existing songs as if he were in the room collaborating with the artist when it was recorded, rather than digging in a crate to find a long-lost melody or break. There’s an intense dissonance at play in “Bonnie and Clyde” for anyone already familiar with the original ’60s cut by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot; were it not for his signature applause sample, one might temporarily forget they’re listening to a Jay Electronica record. But three minutes in, and it feels like Serge wrote the song for him with 50 years of foresight—the percussion buried in the mix, the string melody swirling around his voice. Even when he samples Ronald Reagan—on “Real Magic” and “Road to Perdition”—he seems to twist the late actor and American president’s words to suit his own needs, as if they were spoken in service of his art.
The album’s leak and forced release will likely leave fans wondering what could have been. Consuming it in 2020 after having lived with many of the songs for years, we’ve been robbed of the experience of newly hearing them all for the first time, instead forced to revisit familiar puzzle pieces assembled in their new context. There’s a lesson to be learned here about procrastination, self-doubt, and the common writer’s pitfall of getting in one’s own way, of self-examination devolving into self-destruction.
Act II is nearly an all-time classic LP, the kind of record that celebrates an art form while simultaneously pushing it forward. In its current form, with much of the LP’s strongest material floating around for years before its release, and sequencing that builds to a climax that never arrives, it remains a nearly completed draft that was filed away, abandoned to the archives while the world moved on. Yet it remains an artwork that no one else could have created, let alone finished.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Equity | October 13, 2020 | 8.7 | 67df7914-21bf-4bda-88c7-4fd760364e68 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
An extended investigation of the electric guitar solo, the latest record from Ben Chasny’s experimental project is graceful and surprising. | An extended investigation of the electric guitar solo, the latest record from Ben Chasny’s experimental project is graceful and surprising. | Six Organs of Admittance: The Veiled Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/six-organs-of-admittance-the-veiled-sea/ | The Veiled Sea | There was exactly one moment when it was possible to briefly state the kind of music that Ben Chasny makes. It was in 2005, when his uncharacteristic singer-songwriter album School of the Flower caused his seven-year-old experimental project, Six Organs of Admittance, to be linked with the acoustic psych-pop fad known as New Weird America or, somehow even more embarrassingly, freak-folk. But the former term was a particularly odd fit for him. Like the guitarist Jack Rose, Chasny’s acoustic fingerpicking looked beyond folk idioms and toward influences like the Indian raga, which he fused with drone music. This wasn’t stuff you’d sing around a campfire, and even Chasny’s least hermetic tunes felt distinct from the ersatz standards, sea shanties, and court songs that became associated with freak-folk.
Chasny’s high, almost elfin voice is a presence on some of his other albums, too, although it’s as likely to serve purposes of color or rhythm as to be the central focus. Though his music is always marked by certain tensions—between the mystical and the meticulous, the extemporized and the exacting—he has never done the same thing twice. He keeps turning over new facets of his singular preoccupation with the guitar, the fixed point in a questing body of work that spans the crustiest noise and the most winsome folk-pop. As his playing has deepened, he has expanded his practice to incorporate everything from rewired amplifiers to four-track tapes he’d buried in his yard. He’s traveled a long way from the starting point of guitar-explorer exemplars like Sir Richard Bishop, over rhizomatic paths both traditional and abstract, to a place where genre breaks down into stray fence posts on an open range.
Though Chasny’s compositions typically blend the edges of close-miked guitars into vast, low-lying washes of sound, the instrument looms especially large over his latest album, The Veiled Sea—though not, of course, in a way it has before. It’s the rare, and perhaps only, Six Organs of Admittance LP that features no acoustic guitar. It is an eloquent series of essays on the electric guitar solo—as Platonic object, as mythic measure, as harmonic structure and cultural construct. Each of these five tracks (after a brief prelude, “Local Clocks”) sounds like a rock god’s spontaneous outpouring as heard by some superior being, with seconds stretching into minutes, turning impulses into decisions. It’s a creative choice that would probably feel tiresome if Chasny weren’t such a skilled guitarist and tactful composer, and he mostly manages to boil down the macho bloat of his sources to graceful essences without underplaying the pomp.
Deep with occult concepts, Chasny’s music always gives the impression of something you might play with miniatures on a Dungeons & Dragons map. The highlight “Somewhere in the Hexagon of Saturn” evokes the cosmic choogle that Brian Eno and Robert Fripp constellated in the ambient classics No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, which is just what you’d expect from Chasny’s turn to guitar heroism. “All That They Left You,” which heads earthward over a very exciting drop, is what you’d least expect: a big, four-on-the-floor homage to 1980s hair metal wailer Steve Stevens, of “Dirty Diana” and “Top Gun Anthem” fame, topped with a corroded alt-rock hook. “Last Station, Veiled Sea” wrings misshapen melody from a clangorous guitar effect. Only the cover of “J’ai Mal aux Dents,” which sounds like Jon Spencer jamming with Spacemen 3, wears out its welcome. Your mileage may vary, but I find the song’s endless chanting monotonous when Faust does it, which isn’t mitigated by the glossier setting of Chasny’s interpretation.
Though Chasny tends to work best in subtle, quiet folds, these songs are far from his first attempt at speaking up; the music comes nowhere near the splintering fury of Hexadic, part of a trilogy of albums based on the Cagean conceit of composing with a deck of playing cards. Instead, it continues a turn away from obscurity and toward popular forms that has been evident in recent albums such as the indie-guest-riddled Burning the Threshold in 2017 and last year’s brilliant, inviting Companion Rises. It’s a valuable addition to a varied yet cohesive body of work whose growth shows no sign of slowing. This is experimental music that never treats the word “experimental” as a fixed adjective: Chasny always remembers the fluid verb at its root.
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. | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Three Lobed | July 6, 2021 | 7.4 | 67df97bc-26a0-4fe0-afef-83a39d699de3 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Matthew Friedberger's latest is an instrumental effort with Sebadoh (and sometimes Fiery Furnaces) drummer Bob D’Amico. The best moments have Friedberger's antic playfulness and melodic gift. | Matthew Friedberger's latest is an instrumental effort with Sebadoh (and sometimes Fiery Furnaces) drummer Bob D’Amico. The best moments have Friedberger's antic playfulness and melodic gift. | Saqqara Mastabas: Libras | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22032-libras/ | Libras | Matthew Friedberger’s career is ripe for rediscovery. Though he hasn’t been invisible since Fiery Furnaces went on hiatus in 2011, he has kept the lowest possible profile available to an indie star with a penchant for releasing as many as eight albums in a year. Given all the liner notes and promotional prose that can be read as both funny and intentionally confusing, he may sometimes appear unserious about holding your attention. Yet he has not lost his rare talent for melody.
Vinyl-only sets like Napoleonette and Old Regimes—as well as a 2015 Bandcamp release—all feature memorable stretches that can go lick for lick with beloved Furnaces compositions from Bitter Tea or I’m Going Away. (See: saloon piano on “I’ll Ride Right Up On My Mule,” charming rockers like “I Met the Queen of the Night in the Daytime,” the harp hypnosis of “She’s Relieved, Actually,” or else the synth lines in “I Wasn’t Working.”)
He can also flummox his most committed listeners. A double-album collage that used the “Solos” LPs as source material cannibalized some of his most interesting post-Furnaces music in the service of an exhausting, scatterbrained aesthetic. But for anyone interested in pop as well as modernism, it’s worth checking in on Friedberger—and cherishing the moments when the fractured song structures find communion with his core catchiness.
Libras is the first release from Friedberger’s duo with Sebadoh (and sometime Furnaces) drummer Bob D’Amico. It’s all instrumental, though it's not particularly experimental or dense. The opening track, “Walking Through the False Door,” has a brittle, goofball feel playfully at odds with the title’s reference to ancient religious thought. (The duo’s name, Saqqara Mastabas, is also steeped in Egyptology.) But starting with the next number—“Fixed by the Tiny Talons of the Vulture Goddess”—Friedberger and D’Amico loosen up a bit, with the drummer laying free-improv fills over Friedberger’s slowly repeating chord progressions.
Despite the set’s focused reliance on synths and drums, the best tracks conjure a welcome variety of styles. “No Escape for the Serfs on the Surf” begins with grid of programmed beats and acoustic percussion, as bell-like timbres carry the melody; eventually Friedberger’s keyboard playing slides into more ecstatic, rushing figures, while the percussion invokes Indian classical music.
The usual Friedberger hybridism is here in force, though the sequence of ideas tends to be well paced, with no individual concept sticking around for too long. The freneticism occasionally manages to create an unexpectedly chill profile, too—as in the early going of “Uto on the Upswing” (which eventually turns gonzo, before finishing on a placid chord). Motorik funk and a descending, four-note earworm drive “The Failure (Of the Fencing of the Underground Apart from the Apartments’ Part).” And “The Cosmetician’s Knife” sounds like a dance-mix rethink of Friedberger’s “I Wasn’t Working.”
A couple of the shorter numbers sound comparatively insubstantial—more akin to video-game background music than standalone compositions. And nothing quite reaches the heights of Friedberger’s recent, pop-song solo work. But Libras does make for a consistently engaging half-hour of oddball riffs and themes. And it’s also a reminder of what Friedberger is capable of when he clicks with another talented collaborator. | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Joyful Noise | June 24, 2016 | 6.4 | 67dfafe0-7a97-4774-8e25-417c1eee7531 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Fueled by off-the-cuff bars, absurdist maximalism, and elastic flows, the artist’s new mixtape is a welcome blast of rowdy Atlanta rap. | Fueled by off-the-cuff bars, absurdist maximalism, and elastic flows, the artist’s new mixtape is a welcome blast of rowdy Atlanta rap. | Glorygirl2950: Queen of the Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glorygirl2950-queen-of-the-land/ | Queen of the Land | Thanks to Whole Lotta Red’s generational impact, nostalgia for the outliers in Gucci Mane and Young Thug’s catalogs, and the enduring influence of Chief Keef, a new wave of rowdy and absurd Atlanta underground rap has emerged. There are Lazer Dim 700’s blown-out, stream-of-consciousness spectacles, which are dingy in the best way; 2Sdxrt3all’s screamed ad-libs, which sound like the devil on his shoulder come to life; Bear1boss’ overloaded AutoTune melodies; and L5’s psychological interpretation of drill, to name a few. Not all of it is that interesting—for instance, Baby Kia’s new age horrorcore is tryhard edgy—but what all the music has in common is that there is no restraint in sight. The same goes for Queen of the Land, a raw new mixtape by Glorygirl2950.
There are a few facts to know about Glorygirl2950. For one, she really likes Keef—her name is a callback to his imprint Glory Boyz Entertainment. She is 5 foot 5 (she points this out a lot), hates malls (fair), and doesn’t use parking lots (her car is too fast to abide by any speed limits, of course). This isn’t the most personal music; being as wild and cool as possible is the only clear goal. That would be more vapid than it is—somewhat like Ken Carson’s X, which basically had the same mission—if Queen of the Land wasn’t actually wild and cool. This mixtape is full of so much shrill-voiced wailing, gunshot sound effects, unexpected, acrobatic flows, and seemingly improvised vocal warbles and gibberish that it can be overwhelming. In a way, it recalls the foundational yet flawed Thug tape I Came From Nothing 3, where he engineered a style so wacko that you weren’t even sure how seriously to take it.
However, you should take Queen of the Land seriously. Like ICFN3, this is fun yet messy ATL rap. Over a collection of beats that pull from plugg and vintage trap music, Glorygirl constantly stretches melodies to their breaking point and veers off course just because she can. She delivers off-the-cuff bars like “A bitch get popped in her BBL butt” on “Slang for Me,” her flow so slurred it feels as if she’d downed a six-pack before hitting the booth. The background ad-libs sound like the squeaks of a mouse stuck on a trap, but then her delivery accelerates out of nowhere. It’s both extremely erratic and extremely replayable. So is “WNBA,” in which she’s popping and fluttering her lips for the first 25 seconds; fast forward a little and suddenly she’s onto an Adam and Eve diatribe that would make RXK Nephew proud. She makes choices randomly and recklessly, like on “2950,” the ragiest of the tracks, where it sounds like she’s rapping with a wad of gum in her mouth. Or take “Molly X,” where, in a cracked screech, she brags about all the cows she owns. Obviously bullshit, but good bullshit.
Queen of the Land’s pitfalls and strengths are mostly a result of the same issue: There is no toning Glorygirl down. Sometimes that makes for songs that are straight-up abrasive and annoying. Think of the ear-splitting shoutfest “Glory Freestyle,” or consider “Fireball,” where she can hardly get through a line without mimicking the sound of a chirping bird. It gets unbearable fast. A label might have given her the advice to chill out a bit, though that’s the kind of note that may have sanded down the thrills, too. What’s made Atlanta a longtime creative hub for independent, underground rappers is that the city’s environment often pushes artists to go big with their most rash ideas, even if they wind up faceplanting half of the time. One thing’s for sure: Queen of the Land couldn’t have come from anywhere else. | 2024-03-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 13, 2024 | 7.4 | 67e8818a-aa02-4fc7-b209-817b4472ae43 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The power metal band’s second album is full of fallen kings and cosmic deities, intricate world-building and violent action sequences. Every second of the music aspires to be the show-stopping climax. | The power metal band’s second album is full of fallen kings and cosmic deities, intricate world-building and violent action sequences. Every second of the music aspires to be the show-stopping climax. | Eternal Champion: Ravening Iron | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eternal-champion-ravening-iron/ | Ravening Iron | The heavy metal band Eternal Champion are led by singer Jason Tarpey, whose vocals share a bellowing timbre with Ozzy Osbourne in the ’80s, and whose ideas cannot be contained by his music, so he has to flesh them out with fantasy novels with titles like The Godblade. His are stories of fallen kings and cosmic deities, full of intricate world-building and violent action sequences. When you see the band live, he can often be found center stage, raising a huge, glimmering sword toward the heavens.
Ravening Iron is the Texas band’s second album, following 2016’s The Armor of Ire, but they already feel like lifers. Tarpey is also the vocalist of Iron Age, while guitarist Blake Ibanez plays in Power Trip and the other three members—bassist Brad Raub, guitarist John Powers, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Arthur Rizk—are members of the similarly epically scaled Sumerlands. Together, they treat Eternal Champion as a kind of fantasy camp: Their job is not simply to replicate the atmosphere of their favorite ’80s metal but to transport themselves to those landscapes to carve new ground.
The songs on Ravening Iron are the band’s best yet, and their strength largely comes down to their presentation. The production is cleaner and fuller than The Armor of Ire, and the songcraft is tighter and more immediate. “Skullseeker” involves a carefully plotted sex scene between two warriors from opposing armies (“Wait for the painting!,” Tarpey notes), and the song itself is pure adrenaline, a narrative matched by the music. Tarpey has explained that the title is derived from the name of its lead character, carved into his axe, but you get as much from his delivery (“He was… SKULLSEEKAAH”) and the steady, marching drumbeat.
Other highlights, like the frantic title track and the chugging “War at the Edge of the End,” a revamped song from their early demo, find the band increasingly focused on melodies, evident in their dueling lead guitars and penchant for soaring, singalong hooks. When they sprawl, as in the closing “Banners of Arhai,” their ambition is less for proggy, complex arrangements than to make each individual part sound like the show-stopping climax: The song opens with a blistering guitar solo before the lyrics even begin, and they challenge themselves to make that energy span the entire six minutes.
Eternal Champion operate in a long lineage of melodic, conceptual metal bands from Cirith Ungol to current practitioners like Visigoth and Crypt Sermon, but their own fingerprint is becoming increasingly visible. And if Ravening Iron rarely sees them venturing beyond their comfort zone—they continue their tradition of spacey, instrumental interludes with the synthy “The Godblade” and an acoustic coda in “Coward’s Keep”—it still feels like a step forward. “Thousands of swords/No one can take them from me,” Tarpey belts in the title track. It’s pure fantasy as usual, and yet the triumph has never felt so real.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | No Remorse | December 16, 2020 | 7.6 | 67ea49f3-329c-4454-8ed4-696eb243eb5e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The intricate compositions on the band’s fifth album are bound tighter than ever, evoking distant images and emotions that continually shift in and out of focus. | The intricate compositions on the band’s fifth album are bound tighter than ever, evoking distant images and emotions that continually shift in and out of focus. | Grizzly Bear: Painted Ruins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grizzly-bear-painted-ruins/ | Painted Ruins | The most interesting aspect of Grizzly Bear, at least since they gelled into a democratic band instead of Ed Droste’s project more than a decade ago, has always been the playing. That sounds like an obvious thing to say about a group that’s as prog-folk as they are chamber pop, whose lyrics are like a gorgeous looking puzzle with half the pieces missing. Each member—vocalist Droste, drummer Chris Bear, plus Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor on vocals, guitars, and a bevy of other instruments—is an exceptionally skilled musician. Culminating with the dark intricacies of 2012’s Shields, Grizzly Bear’s evolution has seen them move from the looser, moodier side of folk-rock, to records defined by their more latticework approach to vocals and instrumentation—modern “headphone listening” music.
With their first new album in five years, Painted Ruins, Grizzly Bear offer another record with many gorgeous layers to parse. But this band also knows the pitfalls of making music that continually chooses the scenic route: “Given that our albums aren’t necessarily like, you listen to it once and you love it, I always want to give an album at least five listens,” Droste recently told Pitchfork. “Because it unfolds upon you. You keep discovering things.” There’s a touch of sensory overload to the instrumentation, and individual melodies don’t quite get their hooks into your brain. For some, the moving target of Grizzly Bear compositions is part of the fun, an endless string of unexpected decisions. For others, it will make for aggressively tasteful and well-produced music that can fall flat, like a smile you give to a co-worker in passing.
Consider this: Though Painted Ruins is Grizzly Bear’s most synth-heavy and beat-driven album to date (short of the Horn of Plenty remix collection), there’s nothing here that approaches the pluck of “Two Weeks,” one of the catchiest hits of ’00s indie rock. “Mourning Sound” certainly aims for a similar strain of driving pop power and comes as close to it as the album gets, with new wave synths and a steady beat. But for once, perhaps what sticks with you most is the lyrical imagery, with Rossen cooing about city street noise.
Some bands use their sprawling instrumentation to work up to anthemic choruses (think early Fleet Foxes), but that has never really been Grizzly Bear’s approach. Their arrangements are weighty and crumpled, creating songs that aren’t open roads so much as a series of switchbacks. When their opaque lyricism vibrates on the same frequency as their performances, the story of the song tends to come into soft focus. (I couldn’t tell you what Yellow House’s “On a Neck, On a Spit”—one of Grizzly Bear’s great unwieldy runaways—is specifically saying, but I do have a clear picture of the contented isolation it’s trying to convey.) “Neighbors,” one of Painted Ruins’ singles, is an exhilarating drive through the Swiss Alps. As the guitar comes barreling around a tight bend and the beats hit the gas, it creates this sense that someone’s gaining ground behind you. The scene is apt, as Droste sings about appreciating some distance from a partner while being pulled closer to them.
Though part of Grizzly Bear’s charm lies in the odd textures, tunings, and tempo shifts, their best songs don’t get lost in the details or the unconventional structures. At their best, they reel in and reel out martial indie rock on “Cut-out”; they cohere into something grand on “Losing All Sense,” a five-minute cut that teeters between a jaunty doo-wop and a half-time synth-psych reverie. The shape of that song approximates the gear-shifting dissociation Droste sings of, finally sounding a little more alive in his voice (Rossen swoops in nicely, too). It’s only occasionally when songs lose the big picture, like on”Systole,” that you’re wondering why you took the long way in the first place, as the song plods along without destination.
A colleague once referred to Grizzly Bear as “widescreen sound” because it’s difficult not to think of them in cinematic terms. They are purveyors of mood, evokers of their own time and place. It’s like some of these prestige television shows, with their slate-blue filters, expensive set pieces, and crisp dialogue. Such series are supremely well constructed, made by creators of great skill and taste, but there’s something lacking in the heart department, something a bit hollow. Painted Ruins, cursorily an album about battling demons, can feel a little like prestige music. But there’s this moment at the end—a spot where Grizzly Bear records routinely reach their heights—that reminds listeners that tangible realism can be a necessary counterpoint to the quartet’s impressionism. Atop a briny wave of guitar distortion, Droste offers up a closing shot you can still picture hours later when he calmly and clearly repeats a few times, “Since I was a young boy, it was always there/Inside me growing, none of it seems fair/I’ve come to accept it, let it take the stage/And leave me helpless, watching far away.” Suddenly the music is close to you, as Painted Ruins finally zooms in on an emotion, a beautifully composed moment that captures the haze of what came before. | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | August 18, 2017 | 7.3 | 67ed9860-3a83-4b50-be95-f9d2fe600150 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
The Australian punk band refuses to forgive and forget on a nuanced, ambitious punk record. | The Australian punk band refuses to forgive and forget on a nuanced, ambitious punk record. | Punter: Punter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/punter-punter/ | Punter | Nathan Burns’ furious howl is the sound of someone who’s been screaming relentlessly for days in an otherwise empty room. His home city of Melbourne, Australia holds the record for world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown, totaling almost nine months. In a manifesto included with the album, anarchist punk band Punter describe their self-titled debut as an attempt to unpack a chapter of history that’s quickly being swept under the rug of “back to normal.” Punter didn’t care for whatever “normal” was before, and they are furious about how pandemic restrictions excused harsh police tactics against underprivileged citizens and enabled the government to pass out special dispensations and lucrative private contracts to corporations. (Their manifesto is also pointedly pro-vax and social distancing.) Written at home during the thick of it, Punter’s thesis is succinct: They did not forget and will not forgive.
Burns’ screams about his friends losing their wits in isolation while “essential workers build essential suburbs” cement the album as hardcore in both its politics and burly relentlessness. For all their heft and pummel, Punter are remarkably nimble. “Retirement Simulator” careens, with Burns’ power chords and Bella Steel’s basslines bouncing from peak to valley and back. Just as the song begins to feel established, they drop the hook in favor of a complementary earworm. Several times across the album, Steel and drummer Nathan Revell provide backing vocals that add melodic dimension and contrast to Burns’ rougher approach. Meanwhile, Burns is full of surprises. Several times, his scream subtly morphs from a tuneless bark to a wail, and suddenly he’s hitting actual notes. Even on Punter’s most repetitive songs, like “Curfew Eternal,” Burns howls like a wolf and then lets loose with a guitar solo that utterly whips.
Light on its feet and full of sharp turns, Punter is also a record of emotional multitudes. Rage and depression are balanced by humor, especially when Burns sets his sights on the rich, the “little shits,” and of course, the pigs. The album’s introduction is an elevator music rendition of “What the World Needs Now Is Love” overcome by a squall of feedback. The anti-gentrification protest “A Minute’s Silence” takes an ironic survey of the values the band’s late countrymen died to protect at the World War I Battle of Gallipoli: suburban sprawl, Chemist Warehouse pharmacies, and regional chain stores in trendy brick structures. Burns closes “State Breakfast” by grunting not one a cappella “yeugh,” but eight. It’s like he couldn’t decide which loogie was most spitefully hocked and realized they were all perfect.
The standout track of Punter—simultaneously the best illustration of their pandemic manifesto and their musical ambition—is “A Year’s Silence.” Burns is screaming again, disgusted by a lockdown-era stadium crowd, ripping into the capitalist structure that keeps the general public isolated, divided, and coasting on autopilot. After one of his best guitar solos, Burns and his bandmates find an anthemic hardcore melody that brings to mind the more theatrical inclinations of Fucked Up. The band rollicks as Burns sounds equal parts angry and weary: “I don’t wanna stream another funeral again,” he sings. The word “stream” bottles a timestamped feeling of loss made more terrible by insurmountable distance. Many are eager to forget the darkest and most absurd days of 2020; these enraged and commanding punks seem to remember it all. | 2023-03-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Active Dero | March 30, 2023 | 7.6 | 6801aa3d-af6a-4f1f-867b-ef7268c4c490 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
On his album debut, the South Florida rapper (and former XXXTentacion associate) employs a playful approach to celebrate style over substance. | On his album debut, the South Florida rapper (and former XXXTentacion associate) employs a playful approach to celebrate style over substance. | Ski Mask the Slump God: Stokeley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ski-mask-the-slump-god-stokeley/ | Stokeley | Ski Mask the Slump God is “runnin’ around the city in a toga eating noodles”; he’s as sharp as “baby alligator teeth.” Flipping the pages of his debut studio album, Stokeley, is a thrill because at no point can you predict what’s coming next; its energy is the only constant. In unambitious hands, this could be exasperating, but Ski Mask skillfully navigates the constant flux. A vast database of pop-culture references injects sparks into an expansive album that is heavy on flash and light on substance. It works, for the most part.
Ski Mask isn’t as much an artist as he is a vessel channeling the voices of a horde of souls. He croons like a drunken uncle on the porch, screams choruses like he’s shaking off a straitjacket, and raps as dizzyingly quick as Twista—all sometimes on the same track. He came up on Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, and Jamaican music, so this isn’t a surprise. Hailing from Florida, he was the best friend and frequent collaborator of the late XXXTentacion, who also sat on the outskirts of traditional rap. Ski Mask’s debut album was created with XXXTentacion’s approval in mind and builds on the strange mannerisms that Ski displayed on his long-delayed May mixtape Beware the Book of Eli.
Stokeley’s production feels plucked from the farthest corners of the multiverse and, along with Ski Mask’s voice, plays into the constantly morphing atmosphere. Album opener “So High” pairs soothing, clean-toned guitar with a lazy 808 while Ski Mask gently trills as if he should be strumming a harp. “Nuketown” deflects attention from a mid-tempo, bass-heavy beat and allocates it to his jittery cadence. Each song feels like its own world. “Adult Swim” and “Far Gone” share stylistic similarities in their beats, but Ski Mask’s flow is a shape-shifting rap delivery on the former—he slurs his words and finds power in the resulting clumsiness—and a more restrained, melodic singing style on the latter.
One of the most stimulating things about Ski Mask’s approach is the way it injects fresh air into rap tropes like tales of the struggle, threats of violence, and braggadocio. He liberally sprinkles pop-culture references over Stokeley, often as a means of infusing color into a typical punchline. On “Adults Swim,” he compares marijuana to “ogre nut” and the size of his girl’s butt to the “diaper booty” on Cupid. On “Cat Piss,” he’s carrying so much money, he says, that it looks like he’s got Poké Balls in his pocket. A modicum of wit elevates his lyrics over the standard litany of “water jewels” and dripping wrists. But when he takes on serious subjects, he stumbles. He lacks the ability to give deeper emotions the gravitas they deserve. He fully drops the clown mask on “Save Me, Pt. 2,” an update to XXXTentacion’s 2017 track “Save Me.” As he raps about the relationship between drug addiction and mental health Ski Mask’s rapping clumsily gallops when it should walk.
Stokeley throws everything at the wall and, for the most part, it sticks. The album’s power comes from its unpredictably, which never becomes stale. Despite his mercurial instincts, his commitment to goofy punchlines never sways. And there’s a method to his madness; his pop-cultural flourishes are more than just popcorn and string. Stokeley is a manifesto for style over substance. That cuts both ways. His “Kids Next Door” and “Transformers” references are plenty memorable, but his anti-government jabs carry less water. But then, that’s true to character: The rapper’s real-life accessory is a Chucky Doll—not a textbook. | 2018-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | December 15, 2018 | 7.2 | 68023c8b-77d4-4ce3-9a7d-0babb53a49eb | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
Pairing undulating synthesizers with cycling grooves, the Bay Area electronic musician’s first album in 14 years calls back to the ambient techno of the late 1990s. | Pairing undulating synthesizers with cycling grooves, the Bay Area electronic musician’s first album in 14 years calls back to the ambient techno of the late 1990s. | James Devane: Beauty Is Useless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-devane-beauty-is-useless/ | Beauty Is Useless | Both solo and alongside Maxwell August Croy in the duo En, James Devane makes ambient music that is soft as moonlight and hard as a struck bell. The drone has typically been his lodestar, piercing through a luminous fog that feels like the sum of all frequencies vibrating in shimmering agreement. But the San Francisco musician’s new album for Croy’s Umeboshi label is different. His first solo LP in 14 years, Beauty Is Useless retains the pastel hues and creamy swirl of his previous work; his billowing atmospheres could still pass for one of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner’s nebulous seascapes. But this time, he drops a heavy rhythmic anchor in the storm-tossed harbor.
Beauty Is Useless’ nine tracks are all based on a single idea, pairing undulating synthesizers with driving beats. They remain infused by the essence of the drone, but where movement in Devane’s music was previously a matter of micro-particles drifting imperceptibly, these tracks are propelled by muscular kick drums and flickering hi-hats. As rhythmic as they are tonal, chords pulse at regular intervals, like bursts of flame from an industrial furnace.
The division between tone and groove is generally fuzzy. It’s unclear exactly what he’s doing to his source materials, but his processing tricks tend to blur the distinctions between each element in his songs. In the opening “In Your Time,” a slow-motion riff on classic dub techno, the hi-hat pattern manifests as pinpricks of light perforating the shirred fabric of Devane’s chords. “Sudden Oak Death” arrives like a rumor from the opposite end of a drainpipe, its lumpy downbeats shrouded in muck. Only on one track, “Fences In,” do drums, bass, and pads seem obviously to emanate from different devices; for the most part, his textures are vague as grave rubbings.
Beauty Is Useless may inspire a sense of déjà vu. Devane seems intent upon invoking a style of ambient techno that flourished between the late 1990s and the mid 2000s. Taken as a whole, the album feels like a survey of tropes and tendencies that were then in vogue; some of his reference points are remarkably specific. In the slow-motion chug of “In Your Time” and the elliptical loops of “Sudden Oak Death,” there are echoes of Wolfgang Voigt’s M:I:5 alias—a highlight of Profan, Kompakt’s predecessor label—and also the Kompakt-signed Dettinger, both of whom used sampling to generate dizzyingly off-kilter loops. The smeared chords and muffled kicks of “Bygone Trouble” recall Voigt’s more famous alias GAS, while the controlled ecstasy and coiled forward motion of “Somatic Marker” and “Fences In” are reminiscent of yet another Kompakt artist, the Field. “Can’t Be Here,” meanwhile, suggests a tantalizing fusion of Vainqueur, an underrated alchemist from Berlin’s Chain Reaction stable, and Luomo, Vladislav Delay’s deep house alias, pairing the former’s ethereal wash with the latter’s writhing basslines.
It’s refreshing to hear these influences revived in this way. Many of Devane’s touchstones are sounds that have lain dormant for more than a decade; if they haven’t fallen out of fashion, exactly, they have gradually faded into obscurity, and they’re ripe for rediscovery. Like the projects that inspired him, which often were predicated upon chance or error, Devane also seems interested in the aleatory: These tracks feel less like carefully plotted-out compositions than the mechanical output of complex systems. In part, that’s what makes them so hypnotic. What seems on the surface a simple pairing of chord and pulse opens up, upon closer inspection, to reveal a wealth of granular detail. Outwardly static forms give way to perpetually shape-shifting evolutionary processes. In that sense, Devane’s techno plays the same perceptual tricks that his drone music does—every straight line a labyrinth, every dot of solid color a polychrome explosion of possibility. | 2022-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Umeboshi | September 19, 2022 | 7.4 | 6808cca0-0e85-48b6-8d85-1a554108613b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Copenhagen producer’s debut LP reaches beyond the city’s trademark fast tempos to explore woozy slow-motion jams, pensive ambient sketches, and pulse-racing breakbeat trance. | The Copenhagen producer’s debut LP reaches beyond the city’s trademark fast tempos to explore woozy slow-motion jams, pensive ambient sketches, and pulse-racing breakbeat trance. | Kasper Marott: Full Circle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kasper-marott-full-circle/ | Full Circle | Three or four years ago, Copenhagen became known for a particularly speedy strain of dance music. Its breakneck drum programming packed an industrial-strength wallop; its glistening synths channeled ’90s trance. Most people just called it “fast techno,” though that dryly utilitarian term fails to capture the style’s eye-widening psychedelic aura. Kasper Marott is no stranger to quick-stepping tempos, and he has released on Kulør, a Copenhagen label central to the sound’s development. But Marott doesn’t share the air-punching ferocity of some of his peers. His 2018 single “Keflavik” filtered the scene’s pogoing grooves through the rubbery funhouse shtick of vintage Italo disco, scrawling a giddy smile in place of fast techno’s clenched-jaw grin. And on his 2019 Kulør single “Drommen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19),” he switched things up entirely, slowing the tempo and diving into 14 minutes of weird, weightless bliss—rosy as a sunset, humid as a rainforest, squishy as a waterbed.
On Full Circle, his debut album, Marott continues to push against techno orthodoxy from multiple angles. He tackles a wider range of tempos, styles, and moods than ever before: woozy slow-motion jams, pensive ambient sketches, pulse-racing breakbeat trance. The common denominators are ultra-vivid sound design, super-saturated colors, and a subtle sense of humor. There’s nothing jokey about these tracks, but they’re distinguished by a lightness of spirit and a trickster’s instincts. Multiple times in the middle of “Missing Link,” a thundering drum’n’bass tune, the beat drops out. Marrott typically fills those pauses with squiggles of electronic noise, but the final time it happens, he simply cuts to silence for 11 long seconds—what must feel like an eternity to the startled DJ, scrambling to cue up the next track, who thinks the song has come to a premature end.
The standout tracks take the fast-techno ball and run with it. “Mr. Smiley” opens the album with a gentle aurora of softly flickering synths, but once the beat kicks in, there’s no hiding from the song’s peak-time fervor. Both drums and hyperactive bassline place emphasis on the upbeats, lending the groove a nervous, hiccupping energy, which only grows more unhinged across the course of its nine-minute run. But despite the goes-to-11 intensity, “Mr. Smiley” has a hypnotic grace that’s missing from many similarly full-on club tracks. For all its cartoonish force, there’s plenty of subtlety in the mixdown and just as much surprise in the arrangement, which finds a neat dichotomy between the rolling groove below—bassy, unceasing, regular as your heartbeat—and the mind-melting synths that pitch and dive unpredictably through the upper register, gibbering like deranged birds.
Several tracks mine similar territory. “Mini Trance” marries warm Detroit synths to a stiff, stomping beat and fleshes out the space around them with glittery metallic accents; the sun-kissed “Sol,” the album’s highlight, applies the same approach to a rolling breakbeat house foundation, surging forward and then falling back in oceanic waves. Among these uptempo tracks, only “Kun for mig” (“Just for me”) feels wanting; like its companions, it aims at a kind of billowing catharsis, but the beat and bassline fail to achieve liftoff.
Some of the record’s most unexpected moments happen when Marott abandons the high BPMs. “Mere” offers an oddball take on UK garage, with a stumbling rhythm that feels even slower than it is; like “Mr. Smiley,” it makes the most of contrast—in this case, between the crispness of the drums and the gloopiness of the bleeps above. “Hvad er det” (“What is it”) layers ambient textures over the sort of slow-motion groove once common among ’90s acts like Soul II Soul and Ace of Base, then throws a wrench in the works by looping a misshapen breakbeat in an odd time signature. “Top Soap” and “Pling” both use marimba to evoke warm tropical atmospheres—the former over a crisp dembow rhythm, and the latter tapped out in rippling triplet patterns reminiscent of classical minimalism. That many of these songs are just two or three minutes long doesn’t lessen their impact. These shorter, more sketch-like pieces nicely complement Marott’s trance-inducing epics; their low-key nature makes his anthems hit that much harder.
As a genre, fast techno doesn’t seem to have suffered much during the pandemic; scene stalwarts like Ibon, Rune Bagge, Funeral Future, and Repro have continued to push trembling needles into the red. Still, the style remains inextricably bound up with the experience of nightlife, and as the pandemic drags on and clubs remain shuttered, club music’s entire raison d’être becomes increasingly notional. Divorced from the functional requirements of moving bodies, what is dance music for? Full Circle offers a number of possible answers, stimulating the imagination as much as the limbs. This is music for dancing but also music for dreaming—and, crucially, music to stimulate dreams of a time we can dance again.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Axces | January 22, 2021 | 7.3 | 680ac896-ea5b-4555-9b6f-dccfc6b9561e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Nudging their sound forward on their third LP, the married duo of Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes offer a swirl of psych, synth-pop, reggae, and dub that incorporates the voice and presence of their son, Mikko. | Nudging their sound forward on their third LP, the married duo of Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes offer a swirl of psych, synth-pop, reggae, and dub that incorporates the voice and presence of their son, Mikko. | Peaking Lights: Lucifer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16737-lucifer/ | Lucifer | Is Lucifer Peaking Lights' children's album? One song, "Beautiful Son", is apparently about Mikko, the baby born last year to duo Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes. And the child "sings" on another, "Lo Hi", mixing his gurgles with mom's soothing hums and dad's homemade synths. But Mikko's role in Lucifer highlights something that's been there all along. Built with simple loops and easily memorized hooks, Peaking Lights' music has always been kid-friendly. And they've always been smitten with repetition, like a toddler happy to watch an episode of "Yo Gabba Gabba!" over and over. If this Peaking Lights album is for kids, all of them are.
More interesting than whether youngsters will dig Lucifer is what that possibility says about Peaking Lights' Technicolor swirl of psych, synth-pop, reggae, and dub. Their approach taps into something childlike without sounding artificially crude or annoyingly naive. The way they spin together strands of cycling bass, pulsing keyboard, and reverberating voice echoes how kids are fascinated by things adults take for granted. In the process, Dunis and Coyes find energy in relaxation, vitality in letting things take their course. Maybe that's why a song as beatific and sun-staring as "Beautiful Son" seems to have a pumping heart, even though Coyes never injects it with a beat.
Still, this album is called Lucifer, so maybe don't bring it to your friend's baby shower. Coyes claims they picked that title because "it means 'Venus, bearer of light' and is the first sign of the sunrise." But it also hints at some darkness beneath the sunny exterior. The album opens with the rattling "Moonrise" and ends with the hazy "Morning Star", suggesting this journey happens at night. And things get murkier as the album approaches dawn. Later tracks such as the throbbing "Midnight (in the Valley of Shadows)" and the dense "Dream Beat" mimic earlier songs in structure, but conjure a foggier atmosphere, as sounds slowly blur and fuse into thicker layers.
Those denser moments evoke artists on the farther edge of dub-riding sound: High Places, Sun Araw, Gang Gang Dance, Excepter. On the poppier end, I can hear Stereolab, Tom Tom Club, even Blondie in Lucifer's bouncier jams. These comparisons aren't meant to degrade Peaking Lights' individuality, but enhance it, because none of the above straddle simplicity and complexity quite the way this pair does. When they mold melody into mantra on something like the ethereal "Cosmic Tides", they give off both a broad universality and an inimitable personality.
Perhaps that's where Peaking Lights' kid connection severs a bit. Where a child is personality in flux, this duo's musical character came out of the womb fully formed. Lucifer is just their third album, and yet it's unmistakably drenched in their specific brand of patience and calm. If that suggests stasis, well, maybe that's not such a bad thing. For me Lucifer nudges their sound forward, but even if it were just a repeat-- another great loop, so to speak-- Peaking Lights are still a long way from the bottom of their self-made musical well. | 2012-06-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mexican Summer / Weird World | June 19, 2012 | 7.9 | 68156b67-0f34-4210-8c21-c6b58526e29d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Sheffield band follows its record-breaking debut with another assured album that seems to glimpse the possibility of greatness even when it fails to attain it. | Sheffield band follows its record-breaking debut with another assured album that seems to glimpse the possibility of greatness even when it fails to attain it. | Arctic Monkeys: Favourite Worst Nightmare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10150-favourite-worst-nightmare/ | Favourite Worst Nightmare | No longer can Arctic Monkeys be considered underdogs; given the notoriously fickle English music scene, perhaps that means they should be. Last year, the Sheffield quartet’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not became the fastest-selling debut album in UK music history, spawning two No. 1 singles and winning the Mercury Prize. The band's early press clippings, like those for Gnarls Barkley, Lily Allen, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, highlighted their rapid netroots success story as much as their music, which is a traditionalist brew of observational storytelling, post-Libertines meat-and-potatoes guitar rock, and the heady enthusiasm of youth.
Fifteen months later, Arctic Monkeys’ sophomore effort is already receiving a royal welcome at home, though the premature use of words like “comeback” underscores the precariousness of the group’s situation. As for the Arctics, they’ve come back tougher, sharper, and bleaker, even if to non-fans of this brand of no-frills Britrock it probably still sounds pretty much the same. Favourite Worst Nightmare is in some ways better and in other ways worse than its breakthrough 2006 predecessor, but above all it’s the assured statement of a self-conscious young band determined to deserve their acclaim. Eventually, maybe they will.
In interviews, singer and lyricist Alex Turner stays low-key about his abilities. “You never think, like, ‘We’re amazing, aren’t we?’,” the 21-year-old recently told Mojo. Nevertheless, Favourite Worst Nightmare flexes Arctic Monkeys’ considerable songwriting and musical muscle with a confidence that sets the group apart from their UK rock peers; the latest songs seem to glimpse the possibility of greatness even when they fail to attain it. Turner finds new emotional depth on songs like breakup anthem “Do Me a Favour,” which climbs patiently from baggy drums to a searing, guitar-led crescendo. Gradually shifting from the man’s perspective to the woman’s, he concludes, “How to tear apart the ties that bind?/Perhaps ‘fuck off’ might be too kind,” his raggedly bereaved croon adding Damon Albarn to the list of plausible vocal comparisons alongside Morrissey and Noel Gallagher. Similarly, the drum-less and bass-less “Only One Who Knows” is another big step forward for the band, taking a more deliberate, atmospheric view of a dying relationship: “They made it far too easy to believe/That true romance can’t be achieved these days.”
If such heartache is a fresh addition to Turner’s songs, so too, it seems, is the feeling that makes the pain possible. Real affection glimmered through the bickering on the debut’s “Mardy Bum,” but the girls on that album are mostly fake-tanned participants in meat-market mating rituals (“I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” “Still Take You Home”). By contrast, Favourite Worst Nightmare unveils one of Turner’s first proper love songs: The closing “505,” draped with an apparent Ennio Morricone organ sample, poignantly if none too adventurously describes Turner’s longing to get back to a hotel room where his lover awaits. “I’m always just about to go and spoil the surprise/Take my hands off of your eyes too soon,” Turner admits, displaying his usual gift for vivid imagery.
However, some of Favourite Worst Nightmare continues in the unfortunate direction of last year’s Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys EP, which found the band coming unappealingly to grips with fame. Turner’s obsession with poseurs has always been the least likeable thing about his lyrics, but songs like “Fake Tales of San Francisco” at least reflected a nagging desire not just to repel phonies but to crave something true and real; here, with the band’s debut certified as the “fifth greatest British album ever” by the NME, Turner’s unrelenting bitterness makes him sound like one of the petty fakes he despises. It doesn’t help that first single “Brianstorm”—ostensibly about a T-shirt-and tie-wearing industry creep the band met in Japan—shows the Arctics at their least melodic, swapping out the Supergrass “Richard III” riff that opened the debut and replacing it with pummeling, double-speed aggression. “Teddy Picker” heaps scorn on “professional pretenders,” comparing the music industry to the toy crane machines in arcades, and mocking kids who “dream of making it, whatever that means.” Check the mirror, dude, though Turner also squeezes in what sounds like a pointed jab at the music press: “When did your lists replace the twist and turn?” Fair play; the twist and turn here is, indeed, fab.
Favourite Worst Nightmare flirts, too, with the notion of the Arctics as an indie-dance group, enlisting the guidance of Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford (who also produced the recent debut album by Klaxons). The throttling playing of drummer Matt Helders has been a big part of Arctic Monkeys’ appeal since the beginning, so the differences here are subtle: A thick bass groove on the Dr. Suessian “This House Is a Circus” (“berzerkus”?), four-on-the-floor beat on the Wizard of Oz–steeped “nostalgia” critique “Old Yellow Bricks,” or repetitive fuzz-tone guitar jerkiness on fast-paced “If You Were There, Beware.” While Ford coaxes commanding performances from the band, he modifies their trad-rock trajectory only slightly; Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons were never as different as the UK press suggested.
If Favourite Worst Nightmare is notably lacking something, it’s another song like the debut’s standout, “A Certain Romance.” Arctic Monkeys have now traveled the world, and their new material veers from such detail-rich tales of growing up in provincial England, at times focusing instead on subject matter Blur pursued with sharper wit (and only slightly sharper hooks) on The Great Escape. “Fluorescent Adolescent,” the current album’s most obvious hit, shares a festival-ready ska rhythm with the debut’s “Mardy Bum” (which shares it with Sublime’s “Santeria”), but the new song describes something Turner can hardly know much about: a middle-aged woman’s dreary sex life. “You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress,” Turner cleverly sympathizes. Sure, Arctic Monkeys may no longer belong to their old world of kids wearing “knackered Converse,” drinking underage, and getting accosted by bouncers, but they’re still too boldly tuneful not to find yourself rooting for them. | 2007-04-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-04-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 24, 2007 | 7.4 | 6816a151-f1ba-452a-a8f3-6b408e8740bd | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
On their collaboration, singer-songwriter Joan Wasser of Joan as Police Woman and Benjamin Lazar Davis of the chamber pop outfit Cuddle Magic bond over their fascination with big, mainstream pop. | On their collaboration, singer-songwriter Joan Wasser of Joan as Police Woman and Benjamin Lazar Davis of the chamber pop outfit Cuddle Magic bond over their fascination with big, mainstream pop. | Joan as Police Woman / Benjamin Lazar Davis: Let It Be You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22553-let-it-be-you/ | Let It Be You | In their respective careers, singer-songwriter Joan Wasser (AKA Joan as Police Woman) and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis have both flirted with pop accessibility while also keeping their distance. Of the two, Wasser has hewed closer to traditional pop forms, while Davis has taken a more academic approach with the chamber pop outfit Cuddle Magic. But on their first collaboration Let It Be You, Wasser and Davis indulge themselves, revealing a shared sweet tooth for bubblegum bombast that will likely shock each of their fanbases.
Aside from her work with Anohni, Rufus Wainwright, and Lou Reed, Wasser’s solo output repeatedly demonstrates her natural affinity for songcraft. In particular, she’s shown a knack for borrowing from mainstream pop music in a way that preserves its dignity. Her heavily soul-inflected work, arty as it may be, reminds us of a time when pop tunes wound up in jazz clubs without losing anything in translation. Unlike so many of her peers, Wasser never comes off like she's slumming, instead working deftly at the porous border between whatever separates “highbrow” and “popular” art.
Meanwhile, Davis—who has a much more playful, high-energy presence—brings an explosive spark to the material. Where Wasser's bittersweet chords on piano and guitar reflect the full, often messy range of everyday feelings, Davis tends to lean towards more childlike expressions. One would expect these differences to create fertile ground on an album that addresses relationships so much. But the pair undercuts the human element of the music by play-acting at singing big and bold for the people way up in the cheap seats.
On the aptly named “Overloaded,” the chorus scrapes the adult-contempo stratosphere by mimicking the familiar production style of huge-budget R&B-inflected pop music. Here and elsewhere, Davis and Wasser play off of one another, egging each other on to dial up the schmaltz and clearly having fun in the process. They sound positively giddy, but the results almost completely sideline the moodiness that drives the spirit of both Cuddle Magic and Joan As Policewoman.
Case in point: the Let It Be You version of “Overloaded” oozes with outsized melodrama—you’d believe it if someone told you it had been written with Katy Perry in mind. Cuddle Magic’s rendition, on the other hand, hits more subtle notes by enticing you to read between the lines. On Let It Be You, the song becomes somewhat faceless, one of several love songs that wear heartbreak like a neon-colored stage costume. And generic turns of phrase like “It hurts so bad how much I love you/Makes me wanna die when I'm thinkin’ of you” (from “Hurts So Bad”) make it hard to tell whether Wasser and Davis are mocking or celebrating the pop vocabulary they’re employing.
Sonically speaking, Let It Be You is undeniably rich, and there are moments where Wasser and Davis weave around each other like seasoned dance partners. The title track, for example, starts with a bit-crushed melody line and handclap samples that reference the Central African Republic Pygmy rhythms that initially brought the pair together. At first, Wasser faux-rhymes in a flat-pitched, finger-wagging tone like she's doing her best Luscious Jackson impersonation. But when she and Davis harmonize together on the chorus, the song soars to a more sublime place—where most of this album should aim.
Let It Be You shows what it could have been on the final track, the ultra-solemn “Station,” which starts with Wasser singing accompanied only by watery electric guitar for several verses. The funereal vibe is so jarring—and convincingly heartrending—that at first it sounds as if a Joan As Policewoman tune ended up on the wrong record. Perhaps “Station” would have been better served set aside for one of Wasser’s own albums. Here, it feels like a glimpse of foregone possibility on a lower-stakes project, the sound of two pros blowing off steam by proving they can recreate Top 40 spectacle. It might be a good time, but good times aren’t what got Joan Wasser and Benjamin Lazar Davis where they are. | 2016-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Reveal | December 5, 2016 | 6.9 | 6819fdbd-8e15-4a65-b89e-a2b6cf945ec7 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Norway's Jenny Hval makes a breakthrough on Innocence Is Kinky, her second album for Rune Grammofon. In the past, her music has tended toward subdued art-pop; as this title suggests, her new album is more direct, more brazen, more aggressive, and more provocative, both conceptually and musically. | Norway's Jenny Hval makes a breakthrough on Innocence Is Kinky, her second album for Rune Grammofon. In the past, her music has tended toward subdued art-pop; as this title suggests, her new album is more direct, more brazen, more aggressive, and more provocative, both conceptually and musically. | Jenny Hval: Innocence is Kinky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18135-jenny-heval-innocence-is-kinky/ | Innocence is Kinky | On “Mephisto in the Water”, a standout off her second solo album for Rune Grammofon, the Norwegian singer/songwriter/novelist/critic/academic/provocateur Jenny Hval bends her voice into unusual and unexpected shapes. Over a disquieting Möbius strip keyboard line, she performs a wordless fanfare, sing-chants the verses, and splits into a choir of singers on the vocal hook. “Hey, what do you hear?” she asks coyly. On the protracted bridge, her voice warps and mutates and turns the syllables into pure sounds. Hval goes deliberately flat, savoring the pulsating dissonance, until all that is left is a high, tensile note that wavers in either distress or desire. Rather than alienating, it’s actually inviting: a strange and powerful performance. Innocence Is Kinky thrives on such moments, when Hval’s primary instrument sounds like it’s disentangling itself from her body and swooping around the ether of the song.
First under the stage name Rockettothesky and later under her real name, Hval has been a mainstay in the Oslo scene for several years now, but little in her catalog-- which includes a handful of albums as well as two novels, several sound installations, and a master’s thesis on Kate Bush-- signaled the breakthrough she makes on Innocence Is Kinky. In the past her music has tended toward subdued art-pop, full of plaintive beats and hushed vocals; at her best such subtlety was commanding, even if it occasionally threatened to settle for decorous passivity. The new album, as that title suggests, is more direct, more brazen, more aggressive, more provocative, both conceptually and musically. Recording with producer John Parish, Hval explores some enormous, unwieldy concepts that tend to pop up more often in textbooks than on turntables.
Opening with Hval watching internet porn and closing with her discovering a new way to inhabit her body, Innocence Is Kinky examines thorny issues of gender identity and commodified sexuality. She gives her songs titles like “Death of the Author” and “Amphibious, Androgynous”. Mythological figures wander in and out of these songs: Mephisto does his best Ophelia, Oedipus blindly wanders the streets of Oslo, and Pinnochio takes communion. By far the most significant figure among these songs is also the most human: Renée Falconetti, the silent-film star whose close-up in 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most indelible images in the history of cinema. “The camera is a mirror, but mine, not yours,” Hval sings as an organ thrums in the background and a low bass note pulses on the downbeat.
She’s obviously having a blast throwing these figures and narratives against one another, and her irreverence suggests a playfulness that dispels any hint of pretension. Yet, she keeps the focus squarely on her commanding vocals, which means you don’t need to know Carl Theodor Dreyer from Laura Mulvey to appreciate this album. In fact, the most fascinating ideas on Innocence Is Kinky are the musical ones. While rooted in the same art-pop as Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and pre-“Sledgehammer” Peter Gabriel, Hval paints with a broad palette, not only deploying an array of sounds and styles but setting them against each other to create jarring juxtapositions. As “Mephisto in the Water” fades to its close, a few raw guitar chords introduce the stomping psych-pop of “I Called”. “Oslo Oedipus” opens with a Middle Eastern chorale, layered moans swaddled in reverb, before transitioning into a poetry recitation set to a clangorous beat. Based on a sound installation called “A Continuous Echo of Splitting Hymens”, “Give Me That Sound” is composed of belches of frazzled distortion and bent vocals that make for an arresting interlude before Hval launches into “I Got No Strings”, the album’s truest rock song. The seams between the songs speak as loudly as the songs themselves, giving the album the shape of a journey. It’s less a critical essay than a picaresque: a woman leaving the dirty white glare of her computer and wandering around Oslo.
Ultimately, the album’s heady diversity originates in Hval’s malleable voice, which alters style, approach, timber, and tone from one measure to the next. One moment she addresses the listener in a slyly conspiratorial whisper, as if to draw you into her curious world. The next, she lets loose a full-throated wail that shakes that world apart. Not content to merely test the limitations of musical genre, of sound, of her own voice (and, by virtue, her body), Hval knowingly transgresses those limitations as she explores what’s just beyond her range. That bold tack gives Innocence Is Kinky its unique aesthetic, but it is also, oddly enough, what keeps the music so grounded in the physical and the human. | 2013-05-31T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-05-31T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rune Grammofon | May 31, 2013 | 7.8 | 681b2df8-0dc2-4d79-80e3-5f3b09496c37 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
null | In his review of Swedish electro duo the Knife's 2006 meisterverk *Silent Shout*, Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik waxed ecstatic about how Olof Dreijer worked his sister Karin Dreijer Andersson's vocals through sickly FX, making her nursery rhyme delivery sound like it was coming from the bottom of a slimy well. But Dreijer's crude palette of old-school electro/techno sounds managed to exert a feeling of anxiety all on their own, picking under the scab of never-ending 1980s retro-kitsch until pus bubbled up from underneath. Now a little more than a year later, Mute repackages the album with a DVD featuring a spectacle | The Knife: Silent Shout Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10439-silent-shout-deluxe-edition/ | Silent Shout Deluxe Edition | In his review of Swedish electro duo the Knife's 2006 meisterverk Silent Shout, Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik waxed ecstatic about how Olof Dreijer worked his sister Karin Dreijer Andersson's vocals through sickly FX, making her nursery rhyme delivery sound like it was coming from the bottom of a slimy well. But Dreijer's crude palette of old-school electro/techno sounds managed to exert a feeling of anxiety all on their own, picking under the scab of never-ending 1980s retro-kitsch until pus bubbled up from underneath. Now a little more than a year later, Mute repackages the album with a DVD featuring a spectacle of a live performance from Stockholm in 2006, where the visual aesthetic mines a similar vein of nostalgia for the heebie-jeebies that out-of-date technology can induce, plus 11 music videos and an extra CD containing the audio track from said live performance. For those of us who bought the record the first time around, it's basically your chance to buy a new Knife DVD, and if you're a fan, it's pretty much worth owning two copies of the same CD.
The DVD, Silent Shout: An Audio Visual Experience, begins in an inky blankness broken by audience screams, as the emergency alarm bleeps and astringent arpeggios of "Pass This On" are slowly assembled. When the duo are finally revealed-- androgynous in what look like janitor's uniforms and bathed in cerulean light, with Olof jerking at his machinery and Karin pulling nervous mime moves-- they come off like a sinister cross between Devo's unsatisfied twitches and Daft Punk's studied roboticisms. Backed by exploding neon lights and arena-sized video projections, when Karin begins snapping her fingers and awkwardly swaying during "You Make Me Like Charity", she looks like an android go-go dancer or a space alien who has intercepted transmissions of late 80s episodes of "Club MTV". Even the human element of the Knife's performance feels artificial, some approximation of humanity knocked together by machines that's as intensely unnerving as their records.
An Audio Visual Experience isn't so much a concert film as a 50-minute music video that's been extensively edited and tarted up after the fact, with enough quick cuts at jarring angles to feel as epileptic as the video games you can hear in the band's music. Orchestrated by Andreas Nilsson and Ossian Ekman, it's as decadent as cyberpunk Weimar cabaret. Rough-hewn digital imagery blurs into repurposed Super-8 home video, simple geometric paterns flare into life and spin across the screen like a perverted planetarium's laser light show, and throughout there's that pervasive unease. Like Boards of Canada with the queasiness cranked to 10, all those smudgy faces from someone else's home movies, pixilated effects from the days of 8-bit computers, and other visual tropes you half-remember from growing up mingle with the band's sour, often operatic black forest overhaul of synth-pop to radiate discomfort. An Audio Visual Experience isn't wholly successful; parts of it veer uncomfortably toward the feeling that you could be watching old Nine Inch Nails performances with the sepia-tinting replaced by deep blues and purples. But there are enough indelible images-- the Atari snowflakes that begin falling during "Heartbeats" for instance-- to give it more replay value than your average multi-angle concert film.
The 11 music videos (and one short film) included on the DVD have a broader range and a lighter touch than the concert's unrelenting Grand Guignol. Culled from across the band's discography, they flit from the whimsical domestic scene (literally) sketched out in "N.Y. Hotel", to more crude CGI and home movies for "Heartbeats", to a heavily eyeliner-ed take on "You Take My Breath Away" that would almost feel like a parody of 80s revivalism if the band didn't really sell those leather jackets with ostentatious shoulder pads. "Handy Man", with its hyperreal colors and talking hammers, likewise feels like a loving pisstake of the pounding cheese that Euro-pop has been crapping out for decades and that you can still see weekly in U.S. gay clubs, and the dancing skeletons of a second take on "You Take My Breath Away" are so bargain basement that they briefly made me nostalgic for those charmingly crappy "psychedelic" computer animations of early 90s rave videos.
And despite its forward-thinking rep, the Knife is clearly a pretty nostalgic band, too. As two twentysomething Swedes, these 80s and 90s visual signifiers are the broth their brains were boiled in while growing up. The siblings' enduring fascination with the evocative powers of primitive electronics, whether musical or visual, combined with the florid gothic streak that bloomed on Silent Shout, has resulted in a pretty rich stew. While the inclusion of the original album is superfluous and the second disc capturing the music of the live Stockholm performance is pointless, Silent Shout Deluxe Edition is worth picking up for its near pitch-perfect visual rendering of the band's appeal-- creepy but seductive images from the decade's most unexpected purveyors of bad dreams. | 2007-07-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-07-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mute | July 19, 2007 | 8 | 68200635-d7d8-4223-946b-4e159a9606e0 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Now a duo, Kevin Martin and Roger Robinson strip away all the excess and most of the reggae, yielding a desolate snapshot of heartbreak framed in stark, largely beatless drones. | Now a duo, Kevin Martin and Roger Robinson strip away all the excess and most of the reggae, yielding a desolate snapshot of heartbreak framed in stark, largely beatless drones. | King Midas Sound: Solitude | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-midas-sound-solitude/ | Solitude | Kevin Martin’s music has always pursued extremes. Throughout projects like the Bug, Techno Animal, and God, the veteran UK producer has taken up diverse genres—jazz, metal, hip-hop, dub—and set out to push them to new levels of heaviness. That’s why the unveiling of King Midas Sound felt like a surprise. Debuting in 2008, Martin’s new group drew on the influence of reggae and its romantically inclined British offshoot lover’s rock, weaving a misty urban soul not a million miles from Massive Attack. It made you wonder: Was Kevin Martin mellowing in his middle age?
Solitude confirms that this is not the case. King Midas Sound’s fourth album feels like a plunge into the abyss. Without exaggeration, it is one of the bleakest testaments to heartbreak in the annals of recorded sound. Its atmosphere resembles that of a collapsed star—black, isolated, unfathomably dense. These 60 minutes pass like a dark night of the soul, stretched out to eternity.
Yet Solitude is not a heavy album, at least not conventionally so. Here, King Midas Sound—now boiled down to the core duo of Martin and vocalist Roger Robinson—shuck off old genre signifiers, drifting into territory more abstracted and amorphous. There were signs of this on King Midas Sound’s Edition 1, a 2015 collaboration with the Austrian ambient musician Fennesz that sometimes verged on the incorporeal. But Solitude goes further still. Martin’s production here has the quality of dry ice, a pale fog disturbed only by the rudiments of rhythm—the clack of a wood block, or the dull crack of a snare. Absent entirely is the Korean vocalist Kiki Hitomi, previously the third member of the King Midas Sound project, although in context it’s hard to imagine what role a second voice might have played on an album that draws its power from such stark isolation.
Really, Solitude is all about Roger Robinson. An English-Trinidadian poet and playwright, Robinson has for the last few decades been one of the key documenters of the black British experience. His voice has a rich, earthy grain that imbues his words with deep gravity. Here, though, Robinson stands vulnerable and exposed. Solitude traces a narrative of sorts: the collapse of an all-consuming love affair and its apocalyptic aftermath. “You Disappear” sets the scene. There’s a ghostly clamor of strings, descending tones drip like rain on a windowpane, and Robinson muses on the way things once were. Like Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” it is a vision of a life of comfortable domesticity that has withered. “We float through different parts of the house like a chess game,” he intones, gravely. But he and his lover are merely going through the motions: “For all our efforts, the fire would not burn bright.”
A sense of world-weariness hangs over Solitude, but signs of past passion dot the record like scorch marks. On “Zeros,” Robinson recalls the couple’s fiery bond, forged in opposition to the world: “We were unhappy with everything except each other.” On “In the Night,” he tries to fill the void with frantic action; he craves the taste of raw meat, does push-ups in a public toilet, travels to the Scottish Highlands and bellows his former lover’s name into the wilderness. But it is all for nothing, and gradually, isolation takes hold. “Too much time on your own makes the eyes look hollow,” he mutters on “The Lonely.”
On “Who,” he turns sleuth, sifting clues to his new lover’s movements (“I knew she booked a flight to Jamaica… I got a letter about inoculations… I wonder who’s she’s sleeping with now?”). At moments like this, Solitude feels like a challenge—as if he’s daring you to turn away, to treat him as a pariah or a leper. Still, the power of Robinson’s words and the poetry of his phrasing keep you locked in his orbit. Towards the end of the record, Robinson’s voice disappears from view for protracted periods, as if receding into Martin’s impenetrable drone; a sort of sonic analogue to photographer Daisuke Yokota’s striking monochromatic cover art. On “Missing You,” he remains silent—either stoic, or simply absent—and here, Martin’s music strikes a rare note of beauty, sounding a somber elegy.
When making a record like this, many artists would be tempted to toss in some pitch-black humor. But there is not a glimpse of levity here, save perhaps for the record’s release date (giving Solitude as a Valentine’s Day present might be a bold way to kill off a relationship for good). Solitude is the sort of record it’s hard to recommend wholeheartedly. Certainly, some—even those who have found pleasure in its makers’ earlier work—will find it too severe, too unrelenting. But Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before. | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cosmo Rhythmatic | February 15, 2019 | 7.8 | 6824897d-f7f9-4a1d-8b23-ece1adc0009c | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
The Los Angeles band used to make lithe, multifaceted songs that wrapped daring pop melodies in bristling noise; now, they seem content to complain into a murky hybrid of trip-hop and metal. | The Los Angeles band used to make lithe, multifaceted songs that wrapped daring pop melodies in bristling noise; now, they seem content to complain into a murky hybrid of trip-hop and metal. | HEALTH: VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/health-vol-4-slaves-of-fear/ | VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR | Jacob Duzsik sneers the words “Life is good” on HEALTH’s 2015 single “New Coke,” slithering downward on the third word, cracking it into two syllables. His voice, processed through a metallic filter, runs thick with irony. An acerbic synthesizer chord rises like smoke at his proclamation. It’s not the most subtle strategy, a cheery bumper sticker slogan with pleas for guns to go off and bombs to explode, but it lends the song some dimension. In three words, Duzsik undercuts the forced optimism that seeps from every Coke commercial and bank ad, every shallow rendering of a bought life. Consumerism’s plastered smiles make an easy target, but HEALTH’s aim is true all the same.
VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR, the L.A. band’s fourth original studio album, loses the thematic and musical density packed into their first three. Gone are the complex, ferocious rattles of percussion that pitched HEALTH toward the toothier end of late-aughts neo-psychedelia; instead, heavy, slogging drumbeats keep time one sledgehammer wallop at a time. Gone are the crystalline synth trills that seemed to always cluster around Duzsik’s cybernetically androgynous voice. Even the frontman’s usually translucent delivery sounds clouded and dulled, like the record’s pervasive, muddy low end is dragging him down. SLAVES OF FEAR marks the first new HEALTH album since founding member Jupiter Keyes split from the band in late 2015, and his absence wears through every song. HEALTH used to make lithe, multifaceted songs that wrapped daring pop melodies in bristling noise; now, they seem content to complain into a murky hybrid of trip-hop and metal.
Distorted power chords abound throughout SLAVES OF FEAR, but they tend to come in ones and twos, not progressions. “FEEL NOTHING” breaks up its vocal segments with a chugging fart of a guitar riff, the kind you’d hear choked out of a flying V and a practice amp at Guitar Center. The lyrics are no less blunt. “We didn’t choose to be born/Under a dying sun,” sings Duzsik. “Let’s get numb/Till we don’t feel nothing.” I suspect the song got stuck with the name “FEEL NOTHING” because there’s already a nu-metal track called “Numb,” and while this isn’t the place to discuss the relative merits of Linkin Park, their take on the time-honored tradition of freezing away existential pain at least came with four whole chords and a hook.
HEALTH have never directed much attention to their lyrics—even on the more pop-oriented DEATH MAGIC, where the vocals rose higher in the mix, they rang more as textural accent than focal point—but so little happens musically on SLAVES OF FEAR that the ear tends to fall on what Duzsik is actually singing, which is scrambled magnetic teen poetry. “Life is not but rocks and dirt and bitterness now,” he seethes on the stuttering, hollow “LOSS DELUXE.” “Life is but to burn and rot and stink in the ground.” (Pretty sure that’s called death, my guy!) On “THE MESSAGE,” he speaks to the generational ennui of a sweeping “we”: “Bored when we’re young/We can’t wait to grow up/We get old, we give up/Then we pray to grow young.” The life cycle of the perpetually miserable folds in on itself. “Life/A mystery/Euphoria and misery,” Duzsik muses on “STRANGE DAYS (1999),” nodding to the complexity of human existence and then immediately splitting it into two experiential poles.
While HEALTH’s messaging, such as it is, has varied in the past from “New Coke”’s smirking anti-slogans to the ambiguous but arresting declarative “YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER,” now the band seems content to throw up their hands and just die. Certain metal bands take pervasive suffering as lyrical impetus, but when it works, the muscle of the music pushes through even the most totalizing despair. A well-written metal album takes suffering as its starting point and punches through the lid of its coffin, finding joy, catharsis, release by way of sick riffs. SLAVES OF FEAR forgoes riffs and instead just wallows. This shit does not shred.
At least HEALTH had the decency to slap SLAVES OF FEAR right on the cover of the thing so that everyone would know this was the type of band to take slavery as a metaphor for contemporary alienation. “We want to be different/But we don’t want to try too hard,” Duzsik sings on the title track. The “we,” it seems, refers to the slaves, the slaves of fear, and if I try any harder to connect the dual sensation of edginess and laziness with slavery, the all-American institution that killed and brutalized millions of people for hundreds of years, I am going to have to take a long walk into the sun.
Fear pervades the present moment, as does sorrow, angst, and helplessness. HEALTH is not wrong that the past few years have been a big, steamy bucket of suffering. But SLAVES OF FEAR offers only a closed loop: It invites you to suffer because of the existence of suffering, to look upon the despair of the world and despair. There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell. | 2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | February 11, 2019 | 3.4 | 68307872-c592-4473-a5e0-3c7a90bcf214 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
All four members of the Barcelona band Mourn are still in their teens. On their cathartic self-titled debut, which was reportedly recorded live off the floor in two days, rawness is as much an emotional quality as a musical one. | All four members of the Barcelona band Mourn are still in their teens. On their cathartic self-titled debut, which was reportedly recorded live off the floor in two days, rawness is as much an emotional quality as a musical one. | Mourn: Mourn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20122-mourn/ | Mourn | The cover of the debut album from Barcelona-based foursome Mourn bears an uncanny compositional resemblance to that of another debut album by another young, petulant quartet with an M, O, R, and N in their name. The band logo emblazoned in white all-caps, the grimly grayscale urban backdrop, the dark-haired subjects clad in leather jackets—Mourn’s reverence for the Ramones couldn’t be more obvious if they wore their t-shirts in their press photos. (Oh wait.) But despite a shared affinity for 90-second tunes, Mourn are drawn to the Ramones more as a model of aesthetic purity than a sonic template to emulate; though all four members are still in their teens, their scabrous sound feels less like a hyperactive buzzsaw assault than a series of steely knife nicks on the arm. And while, like the bruddahs, Mourn’s songs can be simplistic to the point of absurdity, for them, rawness is as much an emotional quality as a musical one.
Mourn was reportedly recorded live off the floor in two days, a tactic that emphasizes both the band’s feral energy and the isolated, claustrophobic uneasiness that ties these 11 songs together. More so than the surface Ramones similarities, what’s ultimately most striking about that cover shot is the fact that vocalists Carla Pérez Fas and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno are seen in a protective embrace, suggesting that this band is less an innocent adolescent pastime than a necessary sanctuary from a cruel world. That said, Mourn aren’t so eager to fit in with the normals at school, pledging allegiance to artists who died before they were born or who are old enough to be their mom, if not their grandmother; in the few interviews they’ve done so far, they’ve talked about having their music mocked by classmates, and the dispiriting experience of encountering a potential new soulmate in a Nirvana shirt, only to find out the person wearing it thought Nirvana was just the name of a clothing brand.
As such, Mourn is the sound of outcasts congregating in a basement on a Friday night and making a savage racket to forget about the fact they weren’t invited to the big house party that all the popular kids from school are attending. It’s loud, cathartic, and boiling over with disdain for those who’ve done them wrong; when they start naming names on "Jack" and "Marshall", you can practically picture Fas and Bueno hunched around a computer, subjecting those guys’ pictures to unflattering Photoshop makeovers. Their music is anti-social media: Mourn don’t so much write songs as status updates—"you think you’re awesome/ I say you’re boring/ you called me a baby/ I just say ‘fuck you!’"—that most people would be rushing to delete the morning after, but Mourn turn candor into sport, dropping truth bombs and reveling in the emotional fallout. (And as if the album proper didn’t serve up enough unfiltered honesty, this stateside issue of Mourn tacks on a bonus single… called "Boys Are Cunts".)
But for all their impulsive lyricism, Mourn are an impressively patient band, with a keen sense of dramatic dynamics and gritty groove (courtesy of Bueno’s 15-year-old sister Leia and drummer Antonio Postius Echeverría) that belies their primordial teenage garage-band beginnings. (In particular, the opening "Your Brain Is Made of Candy" is a masterstroke of sustained tension that builds from a stark, solitary strum into a raging, stomping beast that abruptly cuts out the second it hits its feverish peak, transforming that titular sentiment from coy come-on to brutal kiss-off.) And for a record that whips by in just 24 minutes, Mourn exhibits a refreshing breadth that makes it feel like a complete album rather than an overstuffed, undercooked EP—while punkish toss-off tracks like "Misery Factory" and "You Don’t Know Me" feel like remnants of a formative phase Mourn have already outgrown, the "Jane Says"-like sway of "Marshall" and the goth-psych eruption "Silver Gold" respectively assert the band’s accessible and experimental potential. More than a simple clash of teen-angst noise and old-soul poise, Mourn’s debut album is a reminder that a big impetus for the former is the frustration of wishing you were old enough to savor the latter. | 2015-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | February 12, 2015 | 7.5 | 68364a71-bd20-402a-a40e-4f4edb5948f3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The irreverent and charismatic Charlotte rapper's Interscope debut is just as wild as his mixtapes. | The irreverent and charismatic Charlotte rapper's Interscope debut is just as wild as his mixtapes. | DaBaby: Baby On Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dababy-baby-on-baby/ | Baby On Baby | There are 13 songs on DaBaby’s Interscope debut, Baby on Baby, and on those 13 songs, he starts rapping at the following timestamps: 0:00, 0:07, 0:08, 0:16, 0:00, 0:00, 0:01, 0:00, 0:00, 0:02, 0:02, 0:06, and 0:11. This is the fundamental appeal of DaBaby’s music—it’s aggressive, energetic, obsessed with forward motion. The Charlotte native can turn a colorful phrase and sell rote ones through sheer charisma. There are no moody beat shifts or lofty gestures: DaBaby is not trying to be played in museums or at brunch.
But what the 27-year-old shirks in on-record gimmickry he more than embraces on the promotional front. He famously popped up on the streets of Austin wearing nothing but a diaper during SXSW 2017. (This was shortly after he’d changed his name from Baby Jesus.) Recently, his music videos have become funnier, weirder, and more viral. There’s “Next Song,” where DaBaby gets pulled over, hotboxing his car and getting head from the passenger, and placates the cop by telling him to check out DaBaby on Apple Music; there’s the breakout hit “Walker Texas Ranger,” where DaBaby swerves up and down a mountain in a Dodge Ram, watching twerking videos on his iPhone from behind the wheel; there’s “Mini Van,” his collaboration with the Memphis rapper Blocboy JB, where they turn the titular vehicle into the headquarters for a very pleasant-seeming crime syndicate. Just yesterday he dropped the clip for “Suge (Yea Yea),” where he impersonates the Death Row CEO (complete with a muscle suit and a comically large cigar) and a crooked mailman.
None of which is to say that DaBaby or his music can be written off as a simple joke. Songs like the Rich Homie Quan-assisted “Celebrate”—or earlier songs like “No Tears”—are undergirded by betrayal and grim stakes. There’s also the matter of the fatal shooting at a Huntersville, North Carolina Walmart last fall, which left a 19-year-old man dead. (DaBaby says he was shopping with his two children and their mother when a man attempted to rob him; he has not been charged with a crime.) DaBaby is funny, sure, but he is also dead serious.
There are brief moments that remind you DaBaby exists in the contemporary rap landscape. The album’s penultimate song, “Backend,” veers closer to the melodic, lightly AutoTuned sing-song that has dominated rap radio for most of the decade than it does to his usual gruff cadence. “Best Friend,” which appears here as a remix featuring Rich the Kid, interpolates the late XXXTentacion’s “Sad!” But for the most part, Baby is clear and precise, even staccato, an athletic rapper who can whip songs into a frenzy through sheer force of will.
Baby on Baby comes in the middle of a prolific period for the rapper: the mixtapes Baby Talk 5 and Blank Blank, released in June and November of last year, respectively, both underscored his regional popularity and national crossover potential. But while DaBaby seems, in interviews and through his ambitious videos, to be committed to the whole fame thing, the music is refreshingly without pretense or artifice, concerned less with the way it will play in boardrooms and more with the way it will play out of trunks. | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | South Coast Music Group / Interscope | March 8, 2019 | 7.7 | 68397216-a710-4112-853a-978b75c97b4c | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
On her fifth solo album, the New York musician both evolves as a singer-songwriter and grows in confidence, addressing heavy emotional themes with candor and grace. | On her fifth solo album, the New York musician both evolves as a singer-songwriter and grows in confidence, addressing heavy emotional themes with candor and grace. | Laura Stevenson: The Big Freeze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-stevenson-the-big-freeze/ | The Big Freeze | Laura Stevenson has been a solo artist for over a decade, but only now, with her fifth album, does she truly sound like one. The New York musician’s career began in the DIY ska-punk band Bomb the Music Industry! before she peeled off to write her own material, often with friends rallying behind her in her backing band, the Cans. But after releasing the indie-pop record Cocksure, in 2015, she got married, bought a house, and adopted a dog. It’s within these domestic comforts that Stevenson found the courage to confront her demons after years of lyrically hinting at them. The result is The Big Freeze, a record where Stevenson makes her voice and guitar the focus, basks in minimal orchestration, and dissects her past in hopes that she can, finally, detach herself from its grasp.
Ironically, Stevenson sounds her most professional and polished when scrambling to make things work. Lacking the money to book a proper studio, she trekked to her childhood home in Long Island to record—a bold decision, given that her relationship with her mother is complicated at best—and later added violin and upright bass in her newly purchased home, days after closing the deal. It was life coming full circle, her prepubescent memories contrasting with adult strides. Though these songs came together after four years of intermittent writing, the arrangements were fleshed out in real time while recording; a jazz-rooted drummer added percussion and a cellist who could play by ear mirrored Stevenson as she sang her the string parts. Through this process, Stevenson used piano, guitar, cello, and French horn to cushion her cascading vocals on songs like opener “Lay Back, Arms Out” and the colossal “Low Slow.” It makes Stevenson’s personable songwriting sound massive by, counterintuitively, scaling the volume back.
If the vocal runs on The Big Freeze highlight Stevenson’s growth as a singer, then the transparency of her lyrics underlines her confidence as a person. While she’s no stranger to mining difficult memories, Stevenson digs deeper than ever before on The Big Freeze, as if unafraid of the potential avalanche it could dislodge. On its surface, the album focuses on the emotional complexity of relationships. It’s her exploration of loneliness and depression, though, that sees Stevenson grow as a singer-songwriter. “You are burdened by only your dangerous mind,” she sings regretfully on “Hum,” sounding more akin to Jason Molina than she did Rilo Kiley on Wheel. On “Big Deep V2,” she belts so clearly that you can practically hear the double-tracked harmonies fill every room in her mother’s house. Even as she steadies herself for the mundanities of her thirties in “Living Room, NY,” she’s content to point out her biggest flaws. Stevenson is a tour guide in her own museum of self-reckoning.
Stevenson tackles her biggest problem—self-harm, mainly through chronic skin-picking—on “Value Inn” and “Dermatillomania” with grace. On the former, each pluck of the electric guitar
hangs in the air like icicles. The latter, as the only upbeat number on the album, feels like an obvious metaphor for how people hide their scars. Maybe it’s because of the fluidity of these song structures, or how saddened Stevenson sounds while singing them, but her vulnerability feels like a physical presence in the songs. After completing them, Stevenson says she expected a sudden healing, as if her struggle with self-harm would evaporate because it was finally acknowledged explicitly instead of discreetly. It didn’t, of course, but for a moment, during the blissed-out instrumental ending of “Dermatillomania,” it’s tempting to believe it did.
A decade after making her solo debut, Stevenson has found her sweet spot as a singer-songwriter. The emotionally barbed storytelling, stripped-down delivery, and orchestral flair weave together symbiotically, a testament to how far Stevenson has come as a musical autodidact. Above all, it’s her voice that makes The Big Freeze such a raw, therapeutic listen. When she repeats the heart-wrenching declaration “I am honest” throughout “Big Deep V2,” it feels like an attempt to make peace with herself after a lifetime of being at war, an offer she can’t quite accept. No wonder being a singer-songwriter is scarier on your own. | 2019-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | April 3, 2019 | 7.4 | 683ae538-9a12-4c77-937d-f543255c005b | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Reminiscent of Fuck Buttons or Black Dice, Philly's David Harms combines heavily repetitive rhythms with noisy, thickly textured loops. | Reminiscent of Fuck Buttons or Black Dice, Philly's David Harms combines heavily repetitive rhythms with noisy, thickly textured loops. | Mincemeat or Tenspeed: Strange Gods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13777-strange-gods/ | Strange Gods | For something so simply designed and constructed, the music of Philadelphia's David Harms-- aka Mincemeat or Tenspeed-- is pretty tricky. Harms uses only effects pedals and a mixer to make rhythms so repetitive they suggest artistic OCD. But within those parameters, he also creates impressively diverse textures. As his mono-beats roll forward, he piles on layers of gritty, tactile sound, the sonic equivalent of a character in the video game Katamari Damacy gathering sticky debris with his growing ball.
In the process, Harms evokes big-beat dance, abstract IDM, harsh noise, psych-rock, even death metal, all while sticking to his simple A/B rhythms. Which is probably why Dan Deacon, another artist with a knack for mixing abstraction and structure, told Pitchfork in 2007 that Harms "is my favorite performer right now. He is the master of his domain. More human than human."
Strange Gods definitely sounds both fleshy and mechanistic, both monotonous and body-moving. It's as if Harms grafted the squall of Prurient or John Wiese onto the pound of Aphex Twin or Mouse on Mars (that is, if they made their beats without synths or drum machines). You could also shorthand Mincemeat or Tenspeeed as a more extreme version of Black Dice or Fuck Buttons, but Harms' purism sets him apart. The first beat he picks is the one he's sticking with, and he doesn't seem to care much if you stick with it, too. Sometimes it even sounds like he wants to outlast you.
That's definitely the case on Strange Gods' longest tracks, such as the relentlessly bouncy "Hulot", the cuttingly metallic "Points and Lines", and the buzzsaw warp of "Throw Hands". Throughout these marathons, the rhythms can get swallowed by the bulging sounds-- distortion, feedback, a high-pitched din akin to a brutal metal guitar solo. But inevitably the beat returns, stronger and more repetitive than ever. Such stubbornness may seem tedious, but there's something indelibly hypnotic about the way Harms slowly changes the sonic envelope around his oscillations. It's like watching time-lapse footage of a city skyline, as the changing light and motion color the buildings but never erase their immovable presence.
Whether or not that sounds like fun, it's hard to imagine being turned off by Strange Gods, since Harms always cuts his noise with a beat that's easy to hang onto. When he lets that beat take over, like during the catchy first half of "Padre Iscand (Colonization)", you can easily picture him performing inside the kind of ecstatic crowd circles that Deacon often attracts. But don't count on it-- my guess is that Harms is less interested in attracting fans than finding a personal nirvana inside his endless repetitions. | 2010-01-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-01-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Zum | January 7, 2010 | 7 | 6846592d-905b-4885-b9da-2b2f26d9e041 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Brazilian pianist brings his dazzling polyrhythms—plus guests like Jeff Parker and Brandee Younger—to an album that fuses jazz, avant-garde composition, and indigenous Amazonian influences. | The Brazilian pianist brings his dazzling polyrhythms—plus guests like Jeff Parker and Brandee Younger—to an album that fuses jazz, avant-garde composition, and indigenous Amazonian influences. | Amaro Freitas: Y’Y | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amaro-freitas-y-y/ | Y’Y | Like the tropicalistas of the 1960s, Amaro Freitas believes in the sophistication of traditional Brazilian music. Hailing from the northeastern city of Recife—a regional neighbor of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso’s Salvador—he combines the rural sounds of his native region with the cosmopolitan flash of Río de Janeiro. Since making his debut in 2016 with Sangue Negro, Freitas has incorporated the rhythms of rumba and baião with hard bop attitude and an elegant formalism closer to Bach than Bahia. Y’Y, his latest, was inspired in part by a trip to Manaus, a city of two million deep in the Amazon. The only real musical connection the album has to Freitas’ previous work is his presence on the keys. Gone is the urbane small-ensemble jazz of 2018’s Rasif and 2021’s more adventurous Sankofa, replaced with humid, spacious music that moves from tranquility to cacophony with remarkable ease.
Freitas’ polyrhythmic playing—simultaneously unpsooling different cadences in each hand—is at once lacy and delicate, thumping and propulsive; “it’s as though my left hand is Africa and my right hand is Europe,” he recently told The New York Times. On Y’Y, he finds new ways to apply that philosophy to his arrangements. On “Uira (Encantada da Água) - Vida e cura,” he plays a prepared piano whose muted strings transform the notes into stipples of percussion, more like a tabla than a conventional keyboard instrument, while the feathery filigree of a second, untreated piano seems to float across the top. A bassline reminiscent of Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz paces around an anxious plucked figure in “Dança dos Martelos,” and as Freitas begins to merge the two patterns, he bangs on the lower octaves, which rattle with prepared shells. Throughout, he applies little trills and plays riffs that feel palindromic, phasing with the left hand while the right hand is still sprinkling pixie dust. Tidiness and precision have always been some of his greatest strengths, and it’s thrilling to hear him complicate his own tendency toward order.
While these experiments move Y’Y farther from jazz and closer to the spirit of both indigenous Amazonian music and the avant-garde classical realm, Freitas engages in lively conversations with a series of guests in the album’s second half, bringing to mind the open world of McCoy Tyner’s Extensions. He simmers Jeff Parker’s stately guitar into a red-eyed, late-night groove in “Mar de Cirandeiras,” while in “Gloriosa,” he brings Brandee Younger’s harp glissandos down to earth with a single note that pings over and over.
The album’s best moments happen when Freitas matches moods with Shabaka Hutchings. The flautist takes the lead on the album’s title track, his popping rhythm grounded by the sound of his breath as he winds around Freitas’ rattling bass notes. Hutchings announced that he was swapping his saxophone for the flute less than a year ago, but the solo he delivers here would be extraordinary from even a seasoned pro—it’s technically stunning and emotionally open-ended, lilting from loneliness into grace. When Freitas finds a few gospel chords and places them at Hutchings’ back near the end of the run, the relieved sense of companionability only amplifies the ache at the song’s center. Later, backed by drummer Hamid Drake on “Encantados,” Freitas and Hutchings generate something like pure kinetic atmosphere, mist that jolts in the wake of someone moving past.
On Y’Y, Freitas’ vision for decolonized Brazilian jazz isn’t a nostalgic or sentimental view of an edenic Amazon before the Portuguese. It’s a look into a future in which the wounds of the colonial era—including the impulse to cut and snip the fabric of Brazilian music to fit North American and European forms—have healed into scars that are faint, but still visible. Like John Coltrane, Freitas has learned how to approach his compositions with the same confident, wildly adventurous spirit he brings to his instrument. In doing so, he’s left behind some of the accessibility of his early records, but in its place, he’s forged something transcendent. | 2024-03-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Psychic Hotline | March 12, 2024 | 8 | 6850bce9-f935-4f6f-8cf1-b74910560436 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
On his debut solo album, the Toronto artist formerly known as Mustafa the Poet confronts grief and dispossession over understated production with folk-music overtones. | On his debut solo album, the Toronto artist formerly known as Mustafa the Poet confronts grief and dispossession over understated production with folk-music overtones. | Mustafa: When Smoke Rises | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mustafa-when-smoke-rises/ | When Smoke Rises | When Smoke Rises is Mustafa Ahmed’s first full-length album as a solo artist, but it’s just the latest volume in his growing library of dispatches from Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood. Ahmed, a founding member of rap collective Halal Gang, used to be known as Mustafa the Poet, having gained recognition for his earnest spoken-word verse at just 12 years old. These days, he is tight with Drake and FKA twigs; he’s narrated a Valentino ad and written songs for Usher and Camila Cabello. But the topics that marked his poetry as a young teen—violence, death, grief—have remained constant in his artistic output, and they stay central on When Smoke Rises, named in honor of Smoke Dawg, a fellow Halal Gang member who was murdered in 2018.
With subject matter like a still-recent death, the journey from poetry to pop music can be treacherous; the medium necessarily requires Ahmed to polish his stories until they’re glossy enough for radio play and A&R meetings. Thankfully, he has a knack for it. When Smoke Rises deftly translates Ahmed’s poetry to melody without blunting the truth of the narratives at its core. The music is delicate: Ahmed’s singing voice is bassy and warm, and soft acoustic instruments adorn the understated production. The nylon-stringed guitars and piano of beatmaker Frank Dukes’ celestial lo-fi lend a sense of eternality. Elsewhere, submarine synths from Jamie xx and fellow folk futurist James Blake evoke the gnawing immediacy of loss. The vacillation between the two moods is a worthy imitation of the seesaw of grief between abstract and all too real.
Where Smoke Dawg’s death is a source of steady hurt, the gentrification of Regent Park is the insult added to the injury. On opener “Stay Alive,” Ahmed sings to a friend, “All of these traps and all of these street signs/None of them will be yours or mine.” The song’s video, which depicts Ahmed and his friends in front of Regent Park housing projects, highlights the nest of surveillance cameras above them, underscoring their lack of ownership over their home. The theme reappears in the Sampha-assisted “Capo,” where Ahmed sings, “This place isn’t ours anymore.” Dispossession is a conspirator with violence; both threaten his friends’ well-being, freedom, and very survival. In response, Ahmed promises to remember: “I’ll be your empire,” he sings, and disseminates his friends’ memories to the airwaves to live a thousand lives.
Many of Ahmed’s most heartfelt verses are directed to his community. On opener “Stay Alive,” he sings to the soldier with a “bottle of lean and a gun in [his] jeans,” assuring him, “I care about you, fam.” For most of When Smoke Rises, Ahmed assumes a standpoint of absolute devotion. On “What About Heaven,” he trembles at the question, “What if you’re not forgiven?,” and on “Separate,” he cries, “I’m too young to feel this pain.” But even when giving voice to these more private, vulnerable feelings, the album’s folk aesthetic gives his words the aura of fable.
Ahmed seems to bristle at his own image as the poet in a crew of rappers: On an Instagram Live last December, he said, “I’ve never in my life claimed to be anti-violent.” He resents the halo that comes with being a young Black man celebrated by polite society—the attention is grating at best, and at worst threatens to uphold the same prejudices that visit misery upon his community. When Smoke Rises does share many of the aesthetic hallmarks of a modern rap album, with samples and Drake-ish voicemail interludes. But the choice to build it around folk music’s tropes is an innovative way of avoiding the “conscious” stereotype, notorious in hip-hop for a moralizing impulse that tends to hollow out its messages. (In an interview with Pitchfork, Ahmed said pointedly, “All the backpack rap culture, I was never a fan of that.”) When Smoke Rises reasserts the sincerity that brought Ahmed stardom: He needs little more than his voice to captivate. | 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Regent Park Songs | May 28, 2021 | 7.3 | 6850f96c-20ce-494e-97ab-c269cd413821 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
On his first album in almost seven years, the Toronto artist uses ambient pop to craft a masterful, dreamlike world where songs luxuriate for 24 minutes and Dan Bejar shows up to sing about Paris. | On his first album in almost seven years, the Toronto artist uses ambient pop to craft a masterful, dreamlike world where songs luxuriate for 24 minutes and Dan Bejar shows up to sing about Paris. | Sandro Perri: In Another Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sandro-perri-in-another-life/ | In Another Life | For nearly 20 years, Sandro Perri has been cultivating his own genreless brand of futurism. Across many aliases, records, and collaborations, he has zagged from spacious electronic music to Tropicália-flecked folk to avant experimentation to slyly expansive post-rock, like a Canadian Arthur Russell or Jim O’Rourke. He studied jazz in college but only lasted a few semesters, and his subsequent work sketches the form of an improvisational spirit eager to twist out of the shackles of musical tradition. To that end, In Another Life is visionary in both content and form: The first half is filled by the 24-minute title track, while the flipside offers three versions of the same basic song, but with different singers, lyrics, and moods. Both sides are slow and pleasingly repetitious, quiet rebukes of the mania of modern life.
This album comes seven years after Perri’s last solo LP, and “In Another Life” makes it sound like he’s spent every waking minute of that time crossed-legged on a mountaintop, contemplating his utopia. As he sings in verse after verse, hewing to a consistent melody and cadence, like a zen blues, this is a place where there is “nothing to have, no reason to fight.” Where children can play after dark without worry; where intelligence and worth aren’t measured by typical tests; where there is “no position, ladder, or pit.” Egos are fully sublimated. This is a place where album reviews and ranked lists are likely frowned upon too; “What use grafting sport to art?” Perri asks, his voice oozing a calm, casual righteousness.
But these are not demands—he would never be so bold. They are more like wishful affirmations, the wise words of a seeker trying to articulate what a virtuous society could look like. Perri’s dream of a perfect world is as seductive as it is impossible, and “In Another Life” proposes a utopia that falls in line with the ones dreamed up by so many other philosophers and artists—except with a lot more looping synthesizer sequences and yawning guitars.
There’s infinity—and tragedy—in this very long song. It doesn’t really rise or fall. Instead, it luxuriates in its own endlessness, like a koi pond encased in mirrors. For nearly half an hour, its lowkey throb acts as a cocoon from the outside world, from human nature, from the horrors of 2018. There are elements that essentially repeat for the entire track, and elements that pop in for a minute to check out the view and then go away, shutting the door softly as they leave. In some ways, “In Another Life” doubles as a stealth life hack—close your eyes and listen and let the world melt. Then you remember the title and snap out of it. This is another life, after all. Not the here and now. In the song’s unwavering rhythm and cadence is an admission of defeat: We’ve imagined idylls before and we will imagine them again in perpetuity—that is, utopias only exist in dreams that never come true.
Side B brings the lofty philosophies down to a more grounded version of paradise: Paris. “Everybody’s Paris” is presented in three incarnations, allowing Perri, André Ethier (one-time frontman for garage rockers the Deadly Snakes), and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar to wander through the streets of their very own French capital. The melodies remain constant throughout each take, and the chords feel familiar, but the instrumentation is tweaked, and each singer is allowed their own unique perspective. It’s like a Mad Libs for sage Canadian art rockers.
Perri’s version continues with the casual enlightenment, as he trembles out abstract aphorisms over an ambient smear of synth, organ, sax, and strings: “When everyone’s a piece in everybody’s chain/There’s right in losing and at least that much in gain.” Ethier’s “Everybody’s Paris” is more twee, nearing the innocence of children’s music, with the singer emphasizing the universality of the song’s title. His weathered voice is like a bear hug from an old friend as he lists quotidian details that connect us: washing dishes, holding hands, smelling flowers. Bongos and flutes are brought in to bolster the levity, and it all recalls the bittersweet musings of Paul Simon. Even if you’ve never heard of André Ethier, you get a decent sense of his pragmatic, humanistic worldview.
The same sort of reveal happens with Dan Bejar, though, as any Destroyer fan would guess, his viewpoint reads more like a dark comedy. Atop fretless bass and Perri’s meandering guitar, Bejar conjures a Paris where every citizen “wants to be a cat,” “haunts a haunted house,” and has a cigarette dangling from their lip just so. His is a city of mystique—it could kill you just as well as it could lead you to life-changing love, maybe on the same day. Bejar ends the song, and album, by descending from his perch at the top of the Eiffel Tower and offering an apology: “Everybody’s Paris, along the river Seine/Swore I would never do this to you again.” The words could be directed to a loved one, or to the listener, or to the entire human race. Because, behind every brand of utopia, there are wrongs, regrets, and the hope that, next time, we can get it right. | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Folk/Country | Constellation | September 18, 2018 | 8.1 | 6858788a-ef2f-4f88-ba64-d44bc68fb67d | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
On the follow-up to last year’s Erotic Probiotic 2, the Baltimore musician continues to twist the sounds of ’80s dream pop and R&B into a strange, heartfelt picture of a world on the brink. | On the follow-up to last year’s Erotic Probiotic 2, the Baltimore musician continues to twist the sounds of ’80s dream pop and R&B into a strange, heartfelt picture of a world on the brink. | Nourished by Time: Catching Chickens EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nourished-by-time-catching-chickens-ep/ | Catching Chickens EP | The rapturous response to Marcus Brown’s debut album as Nourished by Time, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, has come to look more like destiny. After years of odd jobs, false starts, and aborted artistic experiments, the Baltimore native and Berklee College of Music alum spent COVID holed up in his parents’ basement concocting a new sound, blithely unconcerned about what the world might think. Armed with Ableton, electric guitar, and a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer, Brown blended dream pop, ’80s R&B, deep house, electro-funk, hip-hop, and Baltimore club in daring, original ways while expressing socialist ideas and spiritual concerns in an earnest, naked baritone redolent of the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan and Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. It’s difficult to fathom the record as a debut; it has the timeworn air of an album that took years to make—and the fast-and-free ethos of a practiced savant finally willing to let it fly.
Since Erotic Probiotic 2’s release last spring, Brown has landed loads of new fans, critical acclaim, cross-the-pond tour dates, and a freshly inked deal with XL Recordings, though he’s become skeptical of such conventional measures of success. “This is now an extension of my labor,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s another version of working at Whole Foods, just, like, a lot cooler.” Nourished by Time’s latest EP, Catching Chickens, expands upon Erotic Probiotic 2’s sprawling, singular universe while also hinting at new sounds, shapes, and textures he might explore down the road. As ever, incisive political insights and poignant emotions shine through the mutant genre melds, reaffirming the sneakily transgressive nature of Brown’s approach to pop.
At its best, Catching Chickens subverts playful, exuberant moods with biting social commentary. On opener “Hell of a Ride,” Brown laments the ills of late-stage capitalism over ’80s dance euphoria: “Children stuck in the matrix/They know when it’s fiction/Young, breathing in them toxins/Used to have a third place now they got no options.” After the chorus (“the red, the blue, and even the white… never felt like mine”), the song dissolves into hollow guitars and warbling synths, sketching an ambiguous sonic picture of what societal collapse might feel like: terrifying yet cathartic, isolating yet inspiring. Lead single “Hand on Me” bops with stretchy synths and vocal harmonies, detailing a forlorn yet impassioned love—romantic or otherwise—that’s both comforting and psychosis-inducing. These songs reflect Brown’s uncanny ability to couch complex subject matter in delightful DIY pop. He never strains to mesh form with content; instead, the two are always inextricably and effortlessly linked.
Brown also adds a few dimensions to his sound. “Poisoned-Soaked” is a spacy shoegaze anthem sopped with Nourished by Time hallmarks like lo-fi drum machine and retro synth melodies. On bluesy ballad “Romance in Me,” Brown sings with the intimacy of an unobserved shower performance, his voice soaring beyond its natural range. It’s the rare Nourished by Time song that feels openly nostalgic, yet even this throwback soul feels like a welcome innovation for an artist rewriting the world in his own fashion—seeking transcendence, faith, and beauty as the systems around him wilt into smithereens. | 2024-03-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | March 29, 2024 | 7.7 | 6859c96a-f6a9-484e-9de5-08c55301bd0e | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a foundational new age album from 1975, an alluring, slightly fried soundscape channeled directly to its composer from an inter-dimensional entity named Vista. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a foundational new age album from 1975, an alluring, slightly fried soundscape channeled directly to its composer from an inter-dimensional entity named Vista. | Iasos: Inter-Dimensional Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iasos-inter-dimensional-music/ | Inter-Dimensional Music | It’s a typical scene in Marin County, the affluent expanse north of San Francisco where countless hippies settled down after the Summer of Love. Iasos leans on a deck railing as a bountiful Northern California landscape sweeps behind his lanky frame and Bob Ross perm. A trombone and mute rest beside him. Every now and then the man lets out a high-pitched giggle, not unlike Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus: appropriate given that the film spoke of Mozart’s talent as divine, and this man is steadfastly convinced that the music in his head was beamed there by an angelic, inter-dimensional entity named Vista. “I feel honored that I’m working with him,” he titters, elated as a Rolling Stone on his way back from a session with Muddy Waters.
Iasos is being interviewed for a 1979 documentary by students at Marin College, four years after his debut, Inter-Dimensional Music, one of the first albums to pair new age philosophy with the glittering, celestial style of music that would soon come to bear the same name. The term initially referred to a set of unrelated movements that believed in a coming new age of spiritual enlightenment and human development—influenced by various Eastern philosophies, turn-of-the-century spiritual ideas like Theosophy, and 1950s UFO religions—many of which gained traction among the post-hippie milieu that had recently migrated to Marin. If you can sit through the Iasos interview without your eyes glazing over, you’ll hear a lot of these threads converge.
Even his best friends never learned his real name, which was not made public until after his death last year. Those friends recall a happy and jocular man who wasn’t always easy to meet on an earthly plane of conversation. “Let's put it this way,” said one friend decades later. “I cannot imagine anybody less likely to come to a Super Bowl party than Iasos.”
Iasos was born in 1947 in Greece to Jewish parents. His father was the only one on his side of the family to survive the Holocaust. When Iasos was four, his family moved to upstate New York, where he eventually attended Cornell University, playing in a bossa nova group called the Nova Shadow Quartet. Around this time, he started hearing what he called “paradise music” in his head, whose origin he could not trace and which he lacked the means to realize. After consulting with a psychic, he decided the music came from Vista, the Elohim of the Fifth Ray, whom he compared in interviews throughout his life to an “older brother.”
Jettisoning his initial plan to go to grad school and study anthropology, Iasos moved across the country to Berkeley, California, then found a houseboat in Sausalito, on the same harbor that inspired Otis Redding to write “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” He became an active figure in the local scene: his early credits include flute on the debut album by the Grateful Dead-affiliated Rowan Brothers and chimes on the self-titled album by singer-songwriter Pamela Polland. But he remained focused on the sounds he was hearing in his head. Living off cans of beans and borrowing what equipment he needed to document these transmissions from the higher realm, he jury-rigged a crude home studio and recorded what would become Inter-Dimensional Music.
Though Iasos claimed steadfastly that this music came to him from on high, he did reluctantly admit a few earthly influences: Debussy, Ravel, Jimi Hendrix, exotica great Martin Denny. The early-’70s Bay Area where he worked was a hub for music unbound by rhythm, home to the San Francisco Tape Music Center and the Mills College music program that boasted faculty like Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath—music that had trickled down from the academic avant-garde into more accessible, rock-adjacent forms like German kosmische and Brian Eno’s earliest ambient works. Iasos never cited any of these artists as influences, but his music fit naturally within this zeitgeist.
Stephen Hill, a Bay Area DJ who established the Hearts of Space radio show in 1973 to broadcast what he broadly called “contemplative music,” claims the new age genre was one of the first made possible by home recording. Before it became clear in the late ’70s and early ’80s that there was a market for this music, musicians had to record and release it themselves. Most of the genre’s earliest gems are private-press and small-batch oddities. Recorded on a reel-to-reel, Inter-Dimensional Music has an alluring, slightly fried quality. It sounds faded and corroded, very distant from the sources of its sounds, as if it’s traveled a long way to reach us.
This is insubstantial music by design, evocative of flickering phenomena like flames and shooting stars. From the opening comet-whoosh of “Libra Sunrise,” the album makes clear its almost single-minded pursuit of transcendent beauty. Save for “The Bubble Massage,” a proto-ASMR submersion into aqueous sound, there is almost no low end to speak of. It exists in the same register as birdsong, the voices of children, as Iasos’ curious Mozartean laugh. While ambient music often works at a glacial pace, this music leaps through the air, free from gravity.
Iasos loves slide guitar, which allows him to create incredible sweeps and gentle flutters. The flute, instrument of his childhood, dances freely, conjuring images of satyrs wreathed in laurels. (Vista is not the only god Iasos has worked with; he claims to have received a musical scale from Pan.) The piano does not sound real at all—it’s pearly, warped, slightly too lustrous, a memory of a piano. All these elements combine on “Lueena Coast,” the album’s most stunning track, which opens with scattered piano arpeggios and leaps into grand pirouettes of flute. Iasos’ voice can be faintly heard in the background, mouthing syllables through a thick sheet of reverb.
Avian whoops and titters abound in the margins of Inter-Dimensional Music, making explicit Iasos’ debt to Martin Denny’s exotica records of the 1950s, which used birdsong to put American listeners in the mind of some faraway tropical isle. “Lanua Cove,” available only on the original vinyl pressing, centers a conspicuously Denny-like vibraphone; though a distant, aqueous cymbal gives it some interest, it’s easier to think of tiki bars than transcendence while listening.
“Osiris Bull-Man & Elephant Walk,” a cartoonish approximation of “Ancient Egyptian” music, is the track that’s aged the worst. Iasos’ claim that these pseudo-Arabic scales implied a connection with the age of the pharaohs made clear his music was not immune to the infantilizing streak of exoticism that persists in new age, rooted in the idea that non-Western cultures and spiritualities are more in touch with some fundamental truth about the universe. It’s only thanks to the soupy mix and production grit that “Osiris” actually manages to sound a bit ancient, weathered by time and dust; once the ersatz Eastern melodies fade out, it meanders its way into a surprisingly strong psych-rock groove that’s the only audible instance of Iasos’ influence from Hendrix.
Inter-Dimensional Music doesn’t ever really sound like divine music. It sounds like a human’s approximation of divine music using the limited tools at their disposal. That’s what makes it undeniably cheesy at times, and also what makes it work. It’s a strange thing to say about music so outwardly languid, but it also feels urgent, as if this person was doing their damnedest to transcribe the cosmic music in their mind before it flickered out. The influences from the likes of Debussy and Denny, then, could be interpreted as Iasos’ way of filling in the gaps. Even his chintzy imitations of nature, like the water sounds on “The Bubble Massage” or the canned birdsong effects all over the album, have a hyperreal quality that’s spookier and more alluring than a pristine field recording would’ve been.
Iasos initially released Inter-Dimensional Music in a limited-run vinyl pressing, then quickly followed it up in 1976 with a tape version that included the seven-minute “Rainbow Canyon.” The version on streaming is the Japanese CD repress from 2005; this release combines most of the earlier versions in an hour of music but excludes “Lanua Cove,” still not available digitally. There’s no definitive version of Inter-Dimensional Music; the music’s haphazard presentation across different documents feels true to its visionary origin.
Inter-Dimensional Music came out a full half decade before the market for new age music was established. Precedents like Paul Horn’s Inside, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and Irv Teibel’s Environments had sold a lot of copies, but by explicitly presenting his music within a new age philosophical cosmos, Iasos pointed towards the intertwining of beatless, contemplative music and alternative spiritual practice that would hold the key to the music’s eventual commercial breakthrough. Albums like Inter-Dimensional Music and Steven Halpern’s 1975 Spectrum Suite, which featured Iasos and was presented as an aid for chakra-aligned healing, spent years sitting in alternative bookstores and healing shops before it became clear there was a formidable audience for this kind of music. In the 1980s, new age went mainstream: NPR picked up Hearts of Space for national syndication in 1983; the Grammys created an award for the genre in ’87; the new age label Windham Hill raked in tens of millions in sales.
Iasos never cashed in on the new age boom. Either unwilling or unable to make the same leap to Grammy considerations and gold certifications as his friend and collaborator Halpern, he continued to live in Marin, putting out classics like Angelic Music and Elixir but protecting his real name and personal life and performing only intermittently. He earned some infamy from a 1989 study at Plymouth State University, which suggested that “The Angels of Comfort” from Angelic Music, along with selections from Brian Eno and Jonn Serrie, sounded like what patients heard during near-death experiences. And he kept on recording whatever paradise music was still in his head, with results ranging from the stunning (Jeweled Space) to the terrifically strange (Bora Bora 2000, which alternates long synth meditations with synthesized tiki-lounge tracks just south of Zappa’s Jazz From Hell). He spent the last few years of his life in Maui, where he died in January.
Inter-Dimensional Music might have remained a historical footnote if not for the enthusiasm of American experimentalists 30 years later. In the 2000s and 2010s, a crop of underground artists took inspiration from early new age and synthesizer music, and by 2012, Iasos was playing venues in Bushwick to noiseniks like Emeralds’ Mark McGuire. A year later his music appeared on I Am The Center, the Light in the Attic compilation that kicked off the new age revival in earnest. The Celestial Soul Portrait compilation on Numero Group is a solid survey of his work; featuring a sepia slice-of-life photo on the cover rather than the garish temples-and-rainbows imagery Iasos himself loved, it endears itself to listeners like those in the Bushwick crowd: crate-diggers and musical omnivores who may have no investment in new age concepts beyond their appreciation for the music.
New age, once anathema for anyone who considered themselves a savvy music fan, has come thoroughly back around. It’s hard to begrudge people for turning to music with a focus on positivity and healing in a time when the world looks like it’s ending. Speaking from his idyllic deck in Marin, Iasos spoke of a “cosmic push,” an imminent age of human spiritual and artistic growth brought on by beings like Vista. It seems harder than ever to imagine humanity discovering a collective selfless good—something that would allow the reversal of climate change, perhaps, and keep the lush California landscape around him from catching fire. Yet Iasos insisted throughout his life that such a transformative event was right around the corner. The songs on Inter-Dimensional Music sparkle with the promise of this new world, however distant. | 2024-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | June 16, 2024 | 8.3 | 6859cc8d-dd26-4f1c-a482-f669ab0ad821 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Yoni Wolf's prog-rap project is rejuvenated, and Moh Lhean is a bracing, clear-eyed album that still sounds uniquely like WHY?. It's the most strangely beautiful thing Wolf's made in years. | Yoni Wolf's prog-rap project is rejuvenated, and Moh Lhean is a bracing, clear-eyed album that still sounds uniquely like WHY?. It's the most strangely beautiful thing Wolf's made in years. | WHY?: Moh Lhean | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22945-moh-lhean/ | Moh Lhean | The end of WHY? had never been too far from Yoni Wolf’s thoughts. On 2008’s Alopecia, Wolf brought his finest album to a peak by confessing to “coffin rehearsal” and ended it with his neck in a telephone cord noose. He repeated the trick on Mumps, etc.’s closer “As a Card,” and it felt like a grim confirmation of WHY?’s suicide note—Wolf spent most of it airing out his most noxious personal baggage and speaking about his “rap career” like a job from which he was begging to get fired so he wouldn’t have to quit. With nothing left to burn—himself included—Wolf commissioned WHY? fans for inspiration and wrote about their social media pages on Golden Tickets. Four years later, there isn’t a lot of fight left in WHY?—and yet, the project sounds completely rejuvenated for that very reason on Moh Lhean.
The remarkable thing about WHY? is that they neither needed a return to form nor a total reinvention. To the same degree Mumps, etc. turned Wolf’s strengths—excessive candor, a keen ear for melody—into indefensible liabilities, Moh Lhean expands on the quiet inventiveness of Alopecia’s less-heralded companion album Eskimo Snow. Previously, “post-rock” just meant “hip-hop” for WHY?, but they took on the late-’90s Chicago sense of the term on Eskimo Snow, favoring neatly layered guitars, mallet percussion, mixed time signatures, and exquisite production values alongside Wolf’s layering of obtuse metaphors and lurid self-disclosure.
If the genre-agnosticism of WHY? is no longer novel, it’s still stunningly unique. The arrangements are dazzling in their coherence, especially given the diversity of instrumentation and textures whizzing throughout. The most striking aspect of Moh Lhean is how beautiful it is, even more so since this is their first self-produced album since 2003’s Oaklandazulasylum, one of the definitive documents of the Anticon’s confrontational prog-hop. But Moh Lhean is built to withstand any live show where the triggers and synths malfunction. Acoustic guitar plays a surprising leading role in songs that could be covered as a sturdy blues (“This Ole King”), steely folk (“The Water”) and a straight-up power ballad (“George Washington”).
Unlike the pointedly organic Eskimo Snow, Moh Lhean contrasts all of its lush sounds with brash drum programming that mimics the ungainly motion of the human body, shifting in and out of rhythm with intricate math-rock layering or juddering non-quantized beats. Of course, these are the kind of playing fields where Wolf’s unconventional vocals best operate. Though he’s long proven capable of carrying a tune, Wolf’s still no one’s idea of a pretty vocalist. His imperfections—the odd timbral grain of his high notes, his taste for self-deprecation (“I’d be white, weak and blind/the opposite of oxen”)—provide the edge even though Moh Lhean is anything but belligerent.
Wolf underwent a non-specific “health scare” during the past few years and calls Moh Lhean a “breakup album.” No longer psychosexual neuroses personified, Wolf exhibits a kind of post-traumatic calm, using situations as an opportunity to reflect on how to love and be present. Moh Lhean is rife with scenes that raise the possibility of WHY? having been a covert emo band all along—watching shooting stars in the parking lot, writing love letters from the road, sitting in a boat with his brother after a hospital trip. Past albums relied on the shock value of confession for payoff, but Wolf trusts the emotional contours of his delivery to express the state of being in a moment across in concise, affecting phrases like “This one thing,/There is no other,” or, “I’m on fire,” or, “I’ve got to submit to whatever it is in control.”
Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points—two of its ten tracks are interludes no more than a few seconds, the second of which serves as a preface to “George Washington”: “I wrote a song called ‘The Longing Is All’ instead of calling you/I’d hoped that’d solve me.” Such a line would’ve sounded like an admission of defeat on Mumps, etc., which didn’t lack for lyrics that ruminated on the futility of music. But on Moh Lhean, it’s indicative of a promising new outlook. With his health and his band fully recovered, Wolf is starting to realize what matters with the clarity of someone who’s seen a glimpse of the beyond. | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Rock | Joyful Noise | March 7, 2017 | 7.7 | 685bb98d-9f4e-4f26-8137-0ca09c9f68e0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each record from Dull Tools, the imprint run by Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts, seems to challenge complacency and subvert expectations. The Brooklyn post-punk outfit Pill is no exception. Across the EP's five tracks, Pill keep listeners on their toes while navigating their own chaos. | Each record from Dull Tools, the imprint run by Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts, seems to challenge complacency and subvert expectations. The Brooklyn post-punk outfit Pill is no exception. Across the EP's five tracks, Pill keep listeners on their toes while navigating their own chaos. | Pill: Pill EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20366-pill-ep/ | Pill EP | Recordings are often free and readily available in 2015, but that doesn't make it any easier to find the good stuff. A young band's stellar new record might be streaming for free on Bandcamp somewhere, but it's easily lost. Finding vital underground music often requires a resourceful middle person—usually, someone who goes to a lot of shows and owns an inordinate number of zines and tapes. It's to Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts' credit, for example, that bands like Beth Israel, Yuppies, and Eaters found an audience online. Each record on his label Dull Tools seems to challenge complacency and subvert expectations.
True to the label's reputation, the Brooklyn band Pill prove slippery to pin down on their debut EP. Post-punk is implied in Veronica Torres' deadpan vocals and Jon Campolo's echoing guitar clack, but Ben Jaffe's saxophone scrambles the signal. Sometimes, his melodies recall Steve Mackay's foundation work on "Fun House", and elsewhere, he detours into skronking freakouts à la Pharoah Sanders or Colin Stetson. There are circuit-bent electronics and blasts of noise, dour monotone vocals sung in unison and all-out screams. Across the EP's five tracks, which were produced by Andy Chugg of the art punks Pop. 1280, Pill keep listeners on their toes while navigating their own chaos.
While Jaffe's sax is a fascinating wild card, Torres' lyrics are the heart of this music. She targets seemingly innocuous moments in a relationship, peeling back the facade of domestic bliss and exposing ugly truths in shouted blurts. "Personality Flaw" depicts a couple who initially appeared compatible, but now are locked in a war of wills where nobody wants to compromise. "TV Wedding" explores how technology glosses over real-life despair. On "Hotline", Torres playacts the role of a "California blonde" in a one-sided conversation that's clearly predatory in nature. ("Oh, you wanna touch me where?/ Oh no, I'm younger than that!") The narratives are sometimes abstract and symbolic, but Torres' phrasing has a way of cutting through the haze. On "Psychic Nipple", after several lines alluding to entitlement, she delivers the devastating clincher "Privilege is a warm body that loves you."
This is where Pill showcase what they're capable of—they are loose with form, they pack in a lot of ideas, and they successfully deliver an emotionally complex narrative where joy is accompanied by an impossible-to-ignore undercurrent of danger. The band's debut outing is enigmatic—a Dull Tools record through and through—but it's also well crafted, full of stellar performances and unflinching lyrics. Not bad for a band's first recordings. | 2015-03-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-03-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Dull Tools | March 18, 2015 | 7.4 | 685c8a0b-e9b2-4bac-9356-fb1a8d585cac | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Solange Knowles curates the soundtrack to the critically lauded HBO comedy “Insecure.” The 16 songs, mostly by or about women and almost exclusively by black artists, effortlessly mix R&B and rap. | Solange Knowles curates the soundtrack to the critically lauded HBO comedy “Insecure.” The 16 songs, mostly by or about women and almost exclusively by black artists, effortlessly mix R&B and rap. | Various Artists: Insecure (Music From the HBO Original Series) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22722-insecure-music-from-the-hbo-original-series/ | Insecure (Music From the HBO Original Series) | In the pilot episode of “Insecure,” the critically lauded HBO comedy series created by Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore, Rae’s eponymous character Issa is at a crossroads. She’s in a stable but stale relationship, and the occasion of her 29th birthday has her wondering if she’s wasting time on a romance that’s heading nowhere. Issa decides to take her best friend Molly, who’s also feeling unlucky in love after a streak of failed flings, to an open mic night in hopes of setting her up with someone new—but secretly to reconnect with an ex-boyfriend. Before long, egged on by said ex, Issa winds up on the stage rapping about “Broken Pussy,” a term that she coined to explain Molly’s recent poor run of form (“Maybe it’s really rough, maybe it’s had enough.”)
The resulting cheesy freestyle, set to the tune of Kelis’ twinkly 2006 hit “Bossy,” makes the cut as the second song on Insecure (Music From the HBO Original Series). Its placement injects a welcome dose of Issa’s personality (both fictional and real—Rae wrote the song with Wilmore) into the soundtrack, while acting as the skeleton key to understanding the rest of the selection; back on the small screen, “Broken Pussy” costs Molly the attention of a potential love interest and leads to a big fight between the two, but they reconcile easily by the end of the episode. The show “Insecure” excels at tracing the professional and affective tribulations of young black adults in L.A., but it stands apart for its depiction of the unbreakable black female friendship at the heart of the story.
Insecure (Music from the HBO Original Series) celebrates this dynamic with 16 songs: mostly by or about women, almost exclusively by black artists. Arkansas-native Kari Faux kicks things off with “No Small Talk,” an anthem for the self-possessed, recorded previously for her 2014 EP Laugh Now, Die Later. A ringing phone blends in with a hard-hitting drum pattern to buoy Faux’s cool-but-confident delivery, replete with nods to Pimp C and 2 Chainz: “Three cellphones and I still don’t ever text ‘em/Catch me out in public and you know I’m flexin’.” Faux makes another appearance on “Top Down” assisted by Brooklyn MC Leikeli47, whose cadence recalls that of fellow New Yorker Amil. The song, a bouncy electropop composition about riding around in a drop top feeling like a million bucks, was commissioned for the first season finale.
Much of the soundtrack appeared across “Insecure”’s 8 episodes to date, curated by the show’s eminent musical consultant Solange Knowles, who knows a thing or two about elucidating the black female experience on wax to dazzling effect. The feel-good anthems give way to songs that address a range of romantic entanglements. “Girl,” a standout track from the Internet’s 2015 album Ego Death, is expertly reimagined as an electric-guitar-driven ode to the feminine by SoCal ensemble 1500 or Nothin. Guordan Banks switches between the high and low register over a slick bassline on “Keep You in Mind,” a call for moving past the coy stages of flirtation onto something more serious.
Although Faux’s “Top Down” is the only original song on Insecure, the rest were chosen carefully to illuminate the main characters’ tastes and animate the world that they inhabit, situated for the most part in predominantly black South L.A. neighborhoods like Leimert Park and Baldwin Hills. This is achieved by featuring either the work of local artists, like the 1500 or the Internet themselves (“Just Sayin/I Tried”), or songs that evoke a similar sense of place, like the sunny strings of “Palm Trees” by D.C. rapper GoldLink.
Considered independently from the influences of the show, the “Insecure” soundtrack works as a seamless collection of hip-hop, soul and R&B. The list of performers runs the gamut from established artists like D’Angelo (“Sugah Daddy”) and Thundercat (“Heartbreaks + Setbacks”) to emerging talents like TT the Artist (“Lavish”) and Banks, who claimed his first Billboard #1 with “Keep You in Mind” last summer. In recent months, the well-timed placement of a song in a new TV series has taken on renewed importance as a means for new artists to raise their profile. “Insecure” was already renewed for a second season and while the protagonists’ fate is surely the highest priority for fans, a chance to devour the forthcoming score can’t be too far behind. | 2017-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | RCA | January 5, 2017 | 7.4 | 685e1e51-1911-41e9-817f-545ade36e2f7 | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
A diverse array of musicians reinterpret a standout from the Italian synthesizer composer’s 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, but only a handful recreate the metaphysical wonder of her work. | A diverse array of musicians reinterpret a standout from the Italian synthesizer composer’s 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, but only a handful recreate the metaphysical wonder of her work. | Caterina Barbieri: Fantas Variations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caterina-barbieri-fantas-variations/ | Fantas Variations | Caterina Barbieri recently recruited a diverse array of musicians from around the world to reinterpret “Fantas,” a bracing 10-minute composition from her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation. The piece, which opens with wispy synths that give way to glowing orbs of sound that dart about in interlocking shapes, is engrossing in the same way watching an incoming storm can be; it provokes constant anticipation, the complex swirl impossible to take in all at once.
Barbieri’s music reflects a longstanding interest in the tension between the mechanical and the emotional, how one can blur or melt into the other. It’s a quality that many of the contributors here miss, and Fantas Variations loses the metaphysical wonder of her work. The collection is split between musicians arranging the piece for various instruments and electronic musicians attempting to translate the piece for the dancefloor. Though each artist accentuates something unique, there is something lost in nearly every single adaptation.
Several of the most compelling arrangements on Fantas Variations are the ones that stray furthest from the original. Saxophonist Bendik Giske hypnotic version zeroes in on one specific, repetitive pattern and gradually builds on top of it, the clicking sound of the keys audible on top of distant, wordless vocals. Kali Malone’s arrangement for two organs does away with hyperspeed counterpoint, molding the basic chord progression into her characteristically slow-motion slabs of sound.
While these, as well as Evelyn Saylor’s adaptation for four voices, use “Fantas” as a jumping-off point, others, including electric guitarist Walter Zenetti and producer Carlo Maria (who recreates the piece using Roland TR-808 and MC-202 units), offer flattened adaptations that sound imitative in comparison. On the other end of the spectrum are jarring, awkward remixes by the typically brilliant Nyege Nyege affiliate Jay Mitta and LA-based producer Baseck, both of whom dial up the BPM and end up obliterating the piece’s nuance and delicacy.
The album ends with “Fantas Morbida,” an abbreviated, sparse variation for solo piano by Kara-Lis Coverdale. It boils the piece down to its essence, a pensive melodic line that glides over an open, syncopated arpeggio, reminiscent of the gorgeous piano interludes on Aphex Twin’s Drukqs. After nearly an hour of variations on the same theme, hearing that refrain laid bare feels like a rebirth, finally bringing the piece’s emotional impact into focus. The mechanics of the piano are simpler than those of the synthesizer, the human behind the music more immediately apparent. It’s a reminder that even when aided by machines and algorithms, human minds and human emotions give music meaning and power.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | April 2, 2021 | 6.5 | 685f4de7-3ed3-4ce7-af99-090589870376 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
On their fourteenth studio album, thrash legends Kreator give us more of the same jackhammer style they built the band's name on—only without quite as much personality or edge. | On their fourteenth studio album, thrash legends Kreator give us more of the same jackhammer style they built the band's name on—only without quite as much personality or edge. | Kreator: Gods of Violence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22791-gods-of-violence/ | Gods of Violence | Kreator’s 1985 debut Endless Pain arrived two years after Metallica fired thrash metal's first shot with *Kill 'Em All—*something of an eternity in the formative stages of a genre. Kreator immediately stood out, though, with their static-y guitars, frontman/guitarist Mille Petrozza's inimitable bark, and drummer Jürgen “Ventor” Reil’s distinct combination of precision and primal savagery. So it didn’t take long for the German thrash outfit to gain ground on their elite predecessors with landmark albums like 1989’s Extreme Aggression, 1990’s Coma of Souls, and 1992’s Renewal.
Of course, if you measure the energy level of those titles next to their new album Gods of Violence, there’s just no comparison. By the same token, it would be too easy to dismiss the band’s latter-day work as just an excuse to tour. After a run of four experimental, industrial-tinged albums in the ’90s, Kreator re-dedicated themselves to straight thrash on 2001’s Violent Revolution—a move that might have signified a surrender to heritage-act status if the band hadn’t sounded so revitalized at the time.
Some of that vitality was on display as recently as last year’s Violence Unleashed EP, but Gods of Violence suggests that it might be time for another shake-up. The band’s fourteenth full-length, Gods of Violence does contain some noteworthy deviations from form. Album opener “Apocalypticon,” an orchestral piece courtesy of Fleshgod Apocalypse members Francesco Paoli and Francesco Ferrini, bears more than a passing resemblance to both the Star Wars theme and the “Mars” movement of Holst’s iconic suite The Planets.
Bagpipes appear on the Celtic-flavored “Hail to the Hordes,” while the title track intro features a solo from a 12 year-old harpist. And, for better or worse, the bright melody in the chorus section of “Totalitarian Terror” wouldn’t sound out of place in the hands of pop-punk acts like Against Me! or Anti-Flag. Mostly, though, Petrozza and Reil give us more of the same jackhammer style they built the band’s name on—only without quite as much personality or edge. Case in point: the verse riff on “Totalitarian Terror,” which sees Petrozza coming dangerously close to re-treading Slayer when Slayer have been most guilty of re-treading themselves.
At times, Gods of Violence plays like an unresolved tug of war between quintessential Kreator and grandiose symphonic metal—often in the same song. If you like both styles, you can expect to be in hog heaven. But if you prefer one over the other, you're left to skip over certain sections of songs. “Army of Storms,” for example, hearkens back to signature riffs from the back-catalog staples “Betrayer” and “Renewal” in the verse but then abruptly switches to an operatic chorus. In general, when Gods of Violence hews towards outsized melody, it feels watered-down rather than stretched out.
Lyrically, Gods of Violence suffers in a similar way. Perhaps more than any other genre, part of the job requirement of being a heavy metal musician is the ability to come up with song titles and lyrics that look badass scrawled across the pages of high schoolers’ notebooks. If we ranked bands based on that criterion, Kreator would surely land near the top of the list. For the last 30-plus years, Petrozza has penned gem after lyrical gem, amassing a string of fist-waving catchphrases that rival anyone in metal. So it’s no surprise that Petrozza doesn’t disappoint on Gods of Violence.
Petrozza has a way of distilling a song’s chorus down to a punchline he delivers in single syllables, as if he wanted to ensure that even a child or non-English speaker could imagine a bouncing dot in their heads as they follow along. You have to be willing to indulge a little boneheadedness to get behind classic back-catalog nuggets like “Time/to/raise/your/flag/of/hate” and “Un-/der/the/gui-/llo-/tine.” But a trademark Kreator chorus makes it irresistible to sing along. You haven't lived, for example, until you’ve sung the titular chorus of the new song “Satan Is Real” at an inappropriate volume in a setting where you’re bound to raise eyebrows.(Attention ad execs: this is the song you need for your seitan ad!)
That said, despite Petrozza’s gift for communicating directly to the angsty teenager at the core of every metalhead’s soul, his subject matter speaks to a thoughtful way of observing the world. Petrozza also has a knack for using his words to convey the opposite of what they seem to indicate on first (or even second) glance. The new material exemplifies this technique: For Petrozza, Satan is a fictitious concept that becomes “real” because people invest it with belief. “Death Becomes My Light,” meanwhile, doesn’t glamorize death in stereotypically “metal” fashion but instead looks at dying through the lens of a near-death experience. And the title track, with its chorus of “we shall kill,” is actually a life-affirming call to evolve past (and thus “kill”) antiquated modes of thinking that no longer serve humanity’s forward progress.
Petrozza even delves into utopian reverie with “Hail to the Hordes”—basically a heavy metal buddy anthem that offers solace and solidarity as “the failed, the outcasts... carry each other through the darkest moments in life.” But this wouldn’t be a Kreator album if it didn’t go to dark places. Originally conceived as a concept album rooted in Greek mythology, Gods of Violence frames modern warfare as a remnant of an ancient evil that has resided in the psyche for as long as our species has existed. Petrozza’s original idea was to present our predilection for viciousness as something that was “born” into our world after the gods decided to have an orgy.
It’s a rich premise—unfortunately, Petrozza doesn’t flesh it out very much in the actual songs. Gods of Violence could have used more of Petrozza’s warped take. He has renounced the audacious moves the band made during its experimental period, but at least those moves were charged with a sense of creative risk. After several albums’ worth of proving they can still recapture their classic sound, it’s high time Kreator took more risks, come what may. They’ve earned the right. | 2017-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | January 23, 2017 | 6.2 | 68613cee-b65c-425b-b085-85c6d17e67e6 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
This 19-song, 2xCD compilation features uneven remixes of songs from The King of Limbs by artists like Caribou, SBTRKT, Jamie xx, and Four Tet. | This 19-song, 2xCD compilation features uneven remixes of songs from The King of Limbs by artists like Caribou, SBTRKT, Jamie xx, and Four Tet. | Radiohead: TKOL RMX 1234567 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15905-tkol-rmx-1234567/ | TKOL RMX 1234567 | Radiohead has a reputation for studio perfectionism and have been known to tinker with arrangements for years on tour, but they've rarely delivered an album as obsessive as The King of Limbs. Their most single-minded record, TKOL is an itchy and restless foray into making songs out of almost nothing except whizzing bits of rhythm. Even accounting for the brief dip into balladry toward the end, bands don't generally come up with something this uniformly dense and tense by tweaking over multiple sessions. But as longtime students of Can's Holger Czukay, Radiohead also know that fevered and compulsive-sounding records can be the product of painstaking editing, stitching multiple takes into one bristling rush.
Little of the band's careful detail work, or their general sense of passion, makes it onto TKOL RMX 1234567, a listenable but ultimately bloodless collection of remixes of songs from The King of Limbs. Whether intimidated by the thought of reinterpreting a band renowned for experimentation or unsure how to take apart and reassemble the band's tightly-wound recent material, too many of these 19 artists seem content to settle for bland beauty, or simply apply their usual sonic tricks without pushing themselves in the slightest.
The highlights are the tracks that take TKOL's joy in rhythm to new places. Acclaimed UK neo-rave producer Lone turns out a typically brilliant take on "Feral" that somehow keeps the original percussion pattern intact while recasting it as an early-1990s ambient house record, giving us TKOL RMX's most bizarrely enjoyable image: Radiohead gone to Ibiza. Pearson Sound, the alter-ego of dubstep progenitor and Hessle Audio label head Ramadanman, pulls a fantastic bait-and-switch, opening with an extended drone intro that shifts into a punchy mix of early Detroit techno and jagged jungle breaks. These two, along with a small handful of other acts-- Anstam squeezing drama from just a handful of skeletal drum patterns, SBTRKT recasting Thom Yorke as a forlorn garage diva, Caribou returning to his roots as a left-field beatmaker-- are fearless enough to recreate the feeling of TKOL in a new form. And a few do get by on sheer loveliness alone, like Four Tet spinning "Separator" into an old-school IDM lullaby.
But a far greater number of these remixes flatten out the complexity of TKOL's grooves in favor of commonplace arrangements. Instead of Radiohead's pinpoint editing, we get generically "wonky" takes on house and techno filled with stuttering drums and formless synth goo, whether aggressive like Blawan's take on "Bloom" or shoegaze-lite like Nathan Fake doing "Morning Mr Magpie". And some of the most touted names fail to deliver the craft we've come to expect from them: On his "Bloom" rework, Jamie xx ditches his minimalist gloom-funk for gauzy, forgettable ambience. More ethereal or abstract remixes of such anxious music could have been interesting, but few seem up to the task here, instead doling out placid and perfectly pleasant background noise.
For a while, until its complex grooves revealed the songs beneath, I dismissed TKOL as a brave but opaque attempt to remake Radiohead as just individual components in a roiling rhythm machine. In other words, it seemed like the perfect Radiohead album for remixing. Who would better understand that everything-is-rhythm impulse than dance music producers? If anything, wouldn't they take it further, make it wilder, go funkier?
The lack of rhythmic invention here could be forgiven if most of TKOL RMX displayed any kind of invention. Failing to match TKOL's peculiar vibe-- aggressive rhythms made out of dainty bits of digital detritus, robotically repetitive yet humanly off-kilter, parched thickets of drumming graced with fleeting moments of melodic relief -- is one thing. Failing to replace it with anything that similarly rewards listening deeper and harder is quite another. | 2011-10-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | October 10, 2011 | 6 | 68653d62-3551-49dd-bc5b-acf2c9778ef3 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
On their first album in nearly a decade, and following a wave of viral resurgence, the NYC avant-rock vets return with their warmest, most welcoming music yet. | On their first album in nearly a decade, and following a wave of viral resurgence, the NYC avant-rock vets return with their warmest, most welcoming music yet. | Blonde Redhead: Sit Down for Dinner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blonde-redhead-sit-down-for-dinner/ | Sit Down for Dinner | Over the past decade, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing veteran indie-rock acts enjoy a surprising surge in streams thanks to prime movie placements, sudden social-media virality, or inexplicable algorithmic voodoo. But the case of Blonde Redhead might be the strangest (with all due to respect to Galaxie 500). According to their Spotify stats, the New York trio’s most popular song by far—we’re talking a 65-million-stream margin—isn’t really a song at all. “For the Damaged Coda,” the closing track to 2000’s Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, is a wordless elaboration of the piano ballad “For the Damaged,” a haunting, seance-conjured apparition of a song that was pretty ghostly in the first place. But thanks to the Rick and Morty music-supervision department, “For the Damaged Coda” not only became a recurring theme on the Adult Swim series, but also the sort of heavily memed clip that’s spawned YouTube compilations and trap remixes.
There was a certain cruel irony in the fact a song that began as a time-killing lark—recorded by singer Kazu Makino while her twin-brother accomplices Amedeo and Simone Pace were sleeping at the studio—would become the defining work of a group that’s otherwise taken such a methodical approach to their craft. In the stellar seven-album run from 1995’s serrated self-titled debut to 2007’s shimmering shoegaze odyssey 23, Blonde Redhead had successfully pivoted from no-wave noisemakers to arthouse-indie auteurs, all while sustaining a highwire balance of melodic whimsy and needling tension. But that sort of frisson was in short supply on 2010’s Penny Sparkle and 2014’s Barragán, records that resembled mood boards of disparate sounds in search of songs, with little of the dramatic flair that powered the band’s previous transformations. In 2019, Makino released her first solo album, by which point Blonde Redhead had all but ground to a halt. Once the pandemic took hold, you could be forgiven for wondering if the band would still be standing on the other side of it. Arriving nine years on from their last full-length release, Sit Down for Dinner is the life-saving dose of CPR that gets this band’s oxygen flowing and blood pumping again.
While they differed in style and scope, this band’s signature works—Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Misery Is a Butterfly, and 23—were united by a policy of swift and total immersion: Each led with a striking opening track that immediately thrust you into the album’s distinct three-dimensional sound, making it feel like you’ve been dropped into a film already in progress. Sit Down for Dinner honors that tradition with “Snowman,” which sets a deceptively languid tone with gleaming acoustic guitars and Amedeo’s beautifully sighed serenade. But an insistent rhythmic pulse—powered by percussionist Mauro Refosco—punches holes through the sparkling surface, restoring the contrast between fine-china delicacy and dark-cloud distress at the core of this band’s most resonant work.
Sit Down for Dinner is a pandemic album through and through, from its protracted, piecemeal recording process—spanning several seasons, multiple studios, and at least two continents—to its overwhelming sense of restless stasis. With life suddenly on pause, Makino was drawn to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a meditation on her husband John Gregory Dunne’s fatal heart attack at their dining-room table in December 2003. In this light, the phrase Sit Down for Dinner is less an invitation than a threat, and the duality of the sentiment is manifest in Makino’s two-part title-track suite, a hypnotically wistful ballad that upshifts abruptly into an accelerated drum-machine workout. “Sit down for dinner/And the life as you know, it ends/No pity,” Makino sings, quoting Didion in a tone so matter-of-fact it sounds like a merciless taunt. But as she skates atop the song’s icy-electro rhythm, the line becomes more of a seize-the-day manifesto—death can come for you at any moment, so you might as well get your rocks off while you can.
Though it goes a long way to reinstating Blonde Redhead’s singular mystique and impressionistic aura, Sit Down for Dinner is distinguished by an easygoing melodicism that, even in its darkest lyrical depths, makes it the warmest and most welcoming record in the band’s catalog. Where this band’s albums typically reflect the multicultural mosaic and avant-garde pedigree of their New York homebase, the sublime, spectral folk-rock of “Not for Me” bathes itself in a breezy West Coast ocean mist that blurs the line between ’70s gold and ’80s dream-pop. And never before has this band attempted something as unabashedly blissful as “I Thought You Should Know,” a slow-burning gospel-delic hymn that greets you with open arms and leads you down the path that connects the Velvets to Mazzy Star.
But where these contributions from Amedeo favor a more direct, open-hearted approach, Makino’s voice remains an enigmatic and beguiling instrument, investing songs like “Kiss Her Kiss Her” and “Before” with equal doses of wonder and weariness. Tellingly, just as they did 23 years ago on Melody for Certain Damaged Lemons, Blonde Redhead close Sit Down for Dinner with another arresting quasi-instrumental, “Via Savona,” that showcases Makino’s echoing incantations, but this hardly feels like some calculated ploy to piggyback on those “Damaged Coda” clicks. Rather, “Via Savona” is an enveloping ambient symphony that, depending on your vantage, could be a sign of Blonde Redhead’s creative rebirth or a requiem for their possible demise. While in the midst of making this record back in 2020, Makino told an interviewer she expected it would be “probably the last album we make together.” She may have had a change of heart since then, but should that prediction prove correct, Sit Down for Dinner is the coda this band deserves. | 2023-09-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Section1 | September 29, 2023 | 7.5 | 686ab1b2-f1fe-4779-a56b-aab7f522217d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The UK club producer explores the links between spiritual devotion and bodily release, delivering moments of catharsis in chopped breaks and ghostly vocals. | The UK club producer explores the links between spiritual devotion and bodily release, delivering moments of catharsis in chopped breaks and ghostly vocals. | LCY: He Hymns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lcy-he-hymns/ | He Hymns | Around 15 years ago, a user named “airloaf” began uploading video clips of evangelical church services to YouTube. Picture flailing arms and rapturous uplift—swooning exorcisms, devotees collapsing, pastors with cordless mics and wild dance moves. The soundtrack to these extraordinary scenes? Only the ruffest, tuffest jump-up drum’n’bass. Thanks to some improbably tight syncing, the bootleg clips—titled “Baptazia: Super Sunday,” in a nod to the legendary Fantazia raves of the early ’90s—collided worlds in ways that provoked both laughter and awe. They also spoke to a deeper collective belief: of the rave scene as a place of communion, dance as spiritual connection, rudeboy MCs as modern-day preachers in the pulpit.
This blend of ideas is a well-tapped seam in dance music, and with He Hymns, Bristol-born producer LCY becomes the latest to transpose the worlds of hard dance and hardcore religion; they call their latest EP an attempt “to tie songs of worship into club tracks.” But LCY, whose rhythms are among the slipperiest in contemporary club music, fuses the two dimensions with a little more nuance—though no less punch and roll—than those tongue-in-cheek Baptazia vids.
These five tracks deal in themes of bodies and breakbeats, searching and spiritual release. LCY has been arranging flickering breaks and hi-def sound design around complex conceptual frameworks for a while. In 2021, Pulling Teeth introduced a fictional character—a hybrid of canine, human, and robot—and a “dystopian post-human world” called Ériu; 2022’s “Cherubim” was inspired by “parasitic angel-like creatures” in a surveillance state. He Hymns pulls short of sculpting a new universe, instead providing a songbook of sorts for imagined inhabitants.
The price of bodily devotion (“I don’t have much, but I give it to you/My eyes, my touch, I’ll give it to you,” runs the ghostly refrain of “Sora”) rubs up against a yearning for meaning: “Give me something to believe in,” goes “Believe.” These vocals are stripped and whittled, falling over brittle, staccato rhythms like curled metal shavings from a drill bit. But occasionally, things do get bogged down; the choppy “Bad Blood,” made of little more than stuttering vocals and splintered breaks, crumbles into a form that’s uncharacteristically aimless and unmoving.
Given the claustrophobic tenor of these tracks, it sounds like religion, for LCY, means stricture as much as scripture. He Hymns offers a route out, but not without a tussle: “Bad Blood” is spiny and oppressive, an iron maiden molded from sharp percussion and flat kicks; the 27-second title track, which acts as a sort of mid-EP interlude, sounds like being trapped in a nightclub bathroom stall, hurried whispers and muted organ licks leaking through the walls. But when LCY makes room for release—via a sumptuous post-jungle bassline on “Sora,” or on closer “Heartbreaker,” with its gamut of pitched stabs, looping coos, and artillery breaks—it arrives as pure catharsis. “Believe,” the highlight, is light and frothy as whisked egg whites. Ultimately, LCY reserves their reverence for the moody strains of UK club music. Church would certainly be more fun if it sounded like this. | 2023-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | fabric Originals | May 18, 2023 | 7.3 | 6879b3b9-3c3a-4dca-944b-760f93bc7158 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The UK producer's second album combines the open-field psychedelia of Cluster and Popul Vuh with a healthy amount of Boards of Canada's dusty gaze, oscillating between buzzy pastoral beauty and harsh rhythmic duress. | The UK producer's second album combines the open-field psychedelia of Cluster and Popul Vuh with a healthy amount of Boards of Canada's dusty gaze, oscillating between buzzy pastoral beauty and harsh rhythmic duress. | James Holden: The Inheritors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18184-james-holden-the-inheritors/ | The Inheritors | Around the release of his 2006 debut LP, The Idiots Are Winning, UK producer James Holden was asked by production magazine Future Music to list his top 10 pieces of gear. He's a space cadet in the interview, turning idly in a messy room. By my count he names eight items, three of which are stuffed animals, with a fourth being a shelf of children's action figures overlooking his computer. It's a performance by an artist who at the time was still trying to shake his reputation as a barely legal trance wunderkind/Britney Spears remixer: Holden had burst onto the scene in the late 90s with the kind of progressive tracks that fans still upload to YouTube accompanied by pictures of beaches and sunsets.
He probably wouldn't admit it, but Holden learned something from those early trance hits: go big or go home. It's an impulse he's honed even as he's backpedaled from his early recordings: see his skyscraping remix of Nathan Fake's "The Sky Was Pink". Holden's second album, The Inheritors, is a raging bonfire of electro-acoustic composition. His kindling is the open-field psychedelia of groups like Cluster and Popol Vuh, with a healthy amount of Boards of Canada's dusty gaze. Broken into 15 tracks but playing like a long, evolving piece, The Inheritors oscillates between buzzy pastoral beauty and harsh rhythmic duress. It's the sound of an artist uniquely in tune with his instrument, as Holden coaxes all manner of beastly noise out of his mighty modular synthesizer, trying to keep that sound organized and only sometimes succeeding.
Holden takes advantage of that instrument-- essentially a bespoke synthesis engine adapted for each track, aided by software Holden writes himself-- by embracing its imprecision. He recorded his curdling circuitry live, capturing plenty of pots and divots in the process, which gives The Inheritors a savage and craggy feel. If Boards of Canada evoke the beauty and majesty of the rolling countryside, Holden is puts you in direct contact with it, forcing you to engage its uneven terrain and irregular placements. This comes through on tracks like "The Illuminations", on which pretty, circular patterns are interrupted by haphazard distortion and chords are held to the speaker's breaking point.
In most electronic music, the core elements-- drums, bassline, lead-- play well-defined roles and inhabit familiar sonic spaces. The Inheritors doesn't work like that. The rhythms and melodies come from odd places, sometimes switching roles during the course of a song. The title track, for example, is a hurricane of sound, sharp percussive hits fighting back a massive, distorted midrange assault. When Holden does break out traditional drum sounds-- during the climax of lead single "Renata" or "Delabole", for example-- they amplify the intensity, offering the gargled synth patterns something to spring from. The Inheritors comes to a head with "Gone Feral" and the title track, a sequence during which Holden unleashes his circuity and records the carnage. The hissing, buckling oscillations during this stretch wipe clean the careful pacing of tracks like "Inter-City 125" and "Rannoch Dawn". When he dials it down afterwards he has a sense of humor about it: "Some Respite".
It's difficult to describe the sound of The Inheritors without coming off like an analog apologist. But turn a track like "Blackpool Late Eightes"-- the penultimate and longest track, which acts as something of a victory lap-- up on a good system and you can feel its humming warmth, the air it browbeats around the room. You can imagine a shamanic Holden working amidst his machines, alternately reigning them in and provoking them. After dozens of listens, The Inheritors still feels like it could fall off the rails at any moment, that its wires could trip and the whole album devolve into a mess of feedback that will have you racing to unplug your speakers. Holden's ability to wrangle a complex synthesizer isn't unique; his ability to make that skill seem utterly necessary, is. | 2013-07-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Border Community | July 2, 2013 | 8.2 | 687bea25-fa74-4681-857c-3af0df02224e | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The singer/songwriter's third album, Janus, is a change-up. Kivel has generally been known for spare and hushed songs, with only a few instruments creating a ripple of distress in his lovely folk melodies. Many songs here are chaotic and noisy, however, disrupting his reveries with scribbles of atonal clamor. | The singer/songwriter's third album, Janus, is a change-up. Kivel has generally been known for spare and hushed songs, with only a few instruments creating a ripple of distress in his lovely folk melodies. Many songs here are chaotic and noisy, however, disrupting his reveries with scribbles of atonal clamor. | Matt Kivel: Janus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21577-janus/ | Janus | With his first two LPs, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Matt Kivel established a unified mood. Both Double Exposure in 2013 and the next year's Days of Being Wild sounded hushed-yet-tense, with only a few instruments creating a ripple of distress in his lovely folk melodies. Even when he had a full band behind him, they still played quietly. Perhaps coincidentally, both albums featured spare covers: a few doodles of color dotting stark, white canvases. Both the visual and the musical emphasized negative space—blankness and silence—as all-encompassing, even menacing. In that regard, even before you hear it, Kivel’s third album, Janus, is a change-up. The cover is saturated in color, not merely garish but brashly figural in its depiction of a Capricorn sea goat. There is barely any white at all in the image, which ought to brace you for a sound that is similarly fuller, denser, bolder, more dissonant.
Kivel recorded these 10 songs in Glasgow with the Scottish singer/songwriter Alasdair Roberts producing and a small crew of local musicians backing him. Together, they emphasize friction and conflict. His songs are rigidly structured, full of deft guitar work and languid vocals that lull you a bit. Then the band comes in, sounding chaotic and noisy, disrupting his reveries with scribbles of atonal clamor. Kivel has worked with this kind of contrast before, but never quite as blatantly or as pointedly. It’s purposefully off-putting, even when it threatens to become predictable; you wait for the interruption in every song, whether it comes or not. "Violets" opens with him leading a small band and singing one of his strongest hooks, and you don’t even hear the instruments start ripping at the seams of the song until it ends violently. "Prime Meridian," on the other hand, never even lets you get comfortable before the arrangement falls apart, with only the insistent drums and the seasick drawl of a violin to hold it together.
Especially when they sound like they’re deteriorating, these arrangements complement and complicate Kivel’s guarded lyrics, whose fleeting images and cryptic turns of phrase address the lonely confusion of love and lust. When he confesses on the title track, "Even though I’ve known you for a long time/ I feel nothing close to comfort in you," Kivel might be lamenting the lack of intimacy, or is he celebrating a lover who never lets him settle into routine?
Perhaps the hardest to shake is "Jamie’s," which is a very different kind of song for Kivel. It’s ostensibly a story-song, very matter-of-fact in its phrasing and frank in its detail. It features the one protagonist who isn’t Kivel—in this case, a young woman struggling to define her sexual identity and break out of the strict roles she has been assigned by her parents and boyfriend. It’s a heady take on a subject that might be beyond most male singer/songwriter’s interests or abilities, and when Kivel reaches the wordless chorus, he’s interrupted by sharp stabs of distortion that sound like they come out of nowhere. It’s violent, even disturbing, recalling the staccato guitar effects on Radiohead’s "Creep" and verging on melodrama.
Perhaps that’s the entire point of the song. The protagonist, after all, is a teenager trying to attain some mastery over her own world, so it makes sense to underscore those overwhelming emotions as brashly as possible. It’s weirdly invigorating, especially since it shouldn’t really work at all. Janus is full of such gambits and experiments, most of which add a sense of risk to the proceedings. Even when everything falls apart—especially when it does—the sense of musical experimentation and exploration lend the album a burst of harsh, vivid color. | 2016-02-11T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2016-02-11T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Driftless | February 11, 2016 | 7.2 | 687e9ee9-a556-4c8b-9013-82aad212b12b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Like a half-forgotten dream, the English singer-songwriter’s combination of minimalist blues and free-floating jazz feels just out of reach. | Like a half-forgotten dream, the English singer-songwriter’s combination of minimalist blues and free-floating jazz feels just out of reach. | Rozi Plain: What a Boost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rozi-plain-what-a-boost/ | What a Boost | Like slipping into cotton sheets, Rozi Plain’s music invites an immediate calm. Her songs, a combination of minimalist blues and free-floating jazz, are lucent and inquisitive. Plain comes by this effortless tranquility with extensive practice: A native of Winchester, England, she took up guitar at age 13, and as an art student in Bristol, joined Kate Stables’ jammy folk band This Is the Kit. Over the past 11 years, Plain has crafted three solo albums, moving from the intimate, unpolished indie-folk of 2008’s Inside Over Here to the cozy electronic embellishments and pop melodies of 2015’s Friend. Her latest album, What a Boost, is her most expansive and luxurious yet, proving her merit as a force of understatement.
Friend was the first full-length album to be recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre, a cherished space of the London jazz scene until it shuttered last year. Plain recorded the majority of What a Boost there prior to the closure, with the help of collaborators including the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Chris Cohen, folk musician Sam Amidon, Trash Kit’s Rachel Horwood, Joel Wästberg a.k.a. Sir Was, and fellow This Is the Kit member Jamie Whitby Coles. She’s in good company—together, they forge a sound that feels driven by a collective subconscious.
Opener “Inner Circle” is a steadied stroll into Plain’s nebulous thoughts, a path that’s built as it progresses. A lone guitar melody is accompanied by minimal percussion and saxophone; later, there’s fiddle and a creaking guitar that sounds muted by a palm as tuning forks create a tinny haze in the background. Plain's voice is silvered and smooth, radiating the tiniest halo of fuzz as her vocals overlap one another. “Inner circle, in a square/Finds a line all the time,” she sings, describing the geometrical relationship of the shapes. Or perhaps she’s referencing the idiom “squaring a circle,” to attempt the impossible. The lyrics parallel Plain’s hunger for compositional progression and search for complex meanings; even when moving slowly, there’s no hesitation.
Though these songs sound light and clear, Plain’s lyrics are hallucinatory, adding to their perplexing nature. Her words are mirage-like, their meaning almost graspable but still vague, just confusing enough to escape full comprehension. What a Boost makes many mentions of dreams, illusions, and hauntings: “A dream, a dream/A realistic dream,” Plain sings on “Symmetrical.” When she repeats some of the same phrases at beginning and end, they’re off by a line or two, casting the song itself just slightly off-balance. “Strange about the change/Strange about the same,” she continues, substituting a conventional linguistic definition with purposeful phrasing that embodies asymmetry.
On “Conditions,” galactic sounds and twinkling synths splatter against a soft snare drum as Plain repeats questions like a mantra of consent and concern: “Is this the way for love?/Is this okay in love?/Are you okay in love?/Are you okay for love?” Her voice reaches a barely louder volume, marking the song’s climax with a direct address to another in a final sign of affection. This transition from introspection to outward-looking cognisance is a subtle detail, and part of what makes What a Boost such an exquisite treasure.
Dream logic can be asymmetrical, mimicking a sense of rationality but never quite connecting the dots. Knowing that you were asleep doesn’t unravel the subconscious logic, but it helps you accept its peculiarity. Like the moment of realization upon waking from a dream, the sprawling, elaborate compositions that cushion Plain’s lyrical ambiguity are a kind of tether to reality. These 10 tracks meander and crawl; they swell into percussive bursts and shrink into silence. To some degree, they feel inaccessible—unable to announce their purpose or direction. But that’s the beauty of What a Boost: Its mystery isn’t a gimmick, nor a playful riddle to be solved, but an abstraction awaiting interpretation. | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Memphis Industries | April 11, 2019 | 7.2 | 688c00de-bd2c-4664-a1a3-de89461a2d6d | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On her fifth album, the Australian singer-songwriter steps away from the bleak feelings of her early, glitch-scoured work, reflecting this newfound clarity with unadorned arrangements for voice and keys. | On her fifth album, the Australian singer-songwriter steps away from the bleak feelings of her early, glitch-scoured work, reflecting this newfound clarity with unadorned arrangements for voice and keys. | Katie Dey: forever music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-dey-forever-music/ | forever music | Katie Dey sounds a little less alone. The Australian singer-songwriter has fought hard to reach this state since she first released her glitch-scoured debut asdfasdf back in 2015. She began her career making music that captured the hollow, gloomy feeling of spending too much time online—frustrated, keyboard-smashing pop songs about solipsism, disconnect, and feeling deeply misunderstood. Her voice was often pitch-shifted beyond recognition, analog and electronic instrumentation swirled together in a chaotic fog. Even at its most beautiful, Dey’s twisted-up indie pop was tense and overwhelming. On her self-released fifth album, forever music, she steps away from the bleak feelings that clouded her early work, singing about the possibility of love and the sudden appeal of perseverance when you have something or someone worth living for.
Inspired by the flowering of an “internet relationship,” she began to explore these feelings on mydata. She presented her voice more clearly, opening up about the trials and tribulations of a connection mediated by the internet. On forever music she goes even further, stripping down the electronic experimentation in favor of simpler, gentler arrangements of voice, keys, and plodding percussion. She’s said that her voice is deliberately “unfiltered and dry,” which feels like a bold choice for a musician who made her name with digitalist contortions. Yet, this description accurately describes the directness of songs like “unfurl” where Dey sings about trying to be a better person in an evil world. Bare and bold, she reveals more of herself than before, continuing the slow blossoming of her records—each a little more generous and optimistic than the last.
It’s an approach she holds onto even in the heavier moments, like on “real love,” where Dey details memories of “screaming, fighting, constant violence.” And yet, the song soars with a fragile, futuristic beauty, like a Disney ballad produced by A.G. Cook. Eventually, she realizes that “inner peace lies waiting” for her, marking a distinct change in mindset. In the past, she might have just sulked amid the devastation, but now there’s a reason for pressing onward, for looking for the little cracks where the light shines into the darkness.
The record is full of these little moments of clarity. On “fuckboy,” she offers that someone might “find a better way of growing older.” “impossible” is built around the mantra-like insistence on taking “one more step.” And on the lush, lilting title track, Dey sings of learning to “live without killing my heart.” These moments feel true because of the casual directness of her vocal melodies, the result of a songwriter who’s done a lot of soul-searching in tough times. But what makes these songs most striking isn’t the positivity alone, but how hard-won these realizations are.
The unadorned arrangements give Dey the space to conjure some real emotional weight. Her voice carries desperation, weariness, and then, eventually, joy. While she once concealed the special contours of her instrument, the production of forever music lets her evoke both the bad times and the good, lending depth to the darkness and real color to the moments where she realizes she might make it through. While each of Dey’s records has been a little brighter than the last, forever music feels like the first to offer real hope. It’s easy to imagine it comforting lonely searchers, offering them the courage to trudge on, at least for one more step.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | January 31, 2022 | 7.3 | 6891fdb5-f0d0-41ad-9c6c-1258ac31c99b | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Highlighting the bookish indie pop at their core, this Pains EP still sounds classic and timeless, even if it's more Field Mice than Shop Assistants. | Highlighting the bookish indie pop at their core, this Pains EP still sounds classic and timeless, even if it's more Field Mice than Shop Assistants. | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Higher Than the Stars EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13486-higher-than-the-stars-ep/ | Higher Than the Stars EP | In his review of the title track from this album, Tom Breihan did us all a great service by disallowing the use of the term "lo-fi" with regard to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. From the start, folks threw around that phrase when discussing the group mostly because their early material put a light wash of textural guitars on their otherwise melancholy indie pop, but, really, it was a garnish and not the main course. At their core, Pains aren't about scuzz or even shoegaze, they're a classic bookish indie pop band-- twee, you might even say-- and Higher Than the Stars, an EP of four new songs and one excellent remix, drives that point home very clearly.
In addition to helping clear up misconceptions about the group's M.O., Higher Than the Stars also marks a small but important aesthetic shift for Pains. On their self-titled debut from earlier this year, the band worked within a pretty specific strain of indie-pop from the mid-80s and drew heavily from the hazy guitar pop of early My Bloody Valentine and C86 acts like Shop Assistants. But this EP demonstrates a tweaking of that sound that falls more in line with the cleaner approach of late-80s Sarah Records bands, most notably the Field Mice. That may seem like a minor distinction, but it helps to show Pains not as period fetishists, but instead a group of indie-pop aesthetes who seem to be able to operate comfortably within several different subdivisions of the genre.
The song that most exemplifies this altered formula is the EP's title cut, "Higher Than the Stars", which is noteworthy not only for its gloss but the assurance with which it bounces along-- its twinkling synths, crisp guitar strums, and longing vocals all hitting at the right moments. I'd put it right up there with "Come Saturday" and "Young Adult Friction" as one of the best tracks in Pains' catalogue so far. Though perhaps not quite as dazzling, "Falling Over" is equally crisp, and also puts a greater emphasis on rhythm and synths (keyboardist Peggy Wang-East's playing is confident throughout) and works as a sappy ballad about the uncertainty of a potential new love. Frontman Kip Berman's sad-sack tenderness could be irritating here if it didn't sound so great, as he shields himself from hurt, singing, "Don't you, don't you touch me... I'd fall over for you," in his most convincing faux-British accent to date.
The two tracks that stand out as different from the pack here are "103" and the Saint Etienne remix of "Higher Than the Stars", the former a holdover from the time of the self-titled LP's recording and more in line with that style. (It's pleasant enough but probably the slightest of the batch.) The Saint Etienne remix, though, is fantastic, stretching the original's four minutes to nearly seven of the kind of tropical dance-pop the group is famous for. It also makes for an interesting complete circle here, since Saint Etienne associate Ian Catt also produced the Field Mice (whose influence, again, is clear on this EP) in the 80s, and SE covered the Field Mice's "Let's Kiss and Make Up". Saint Etienne's co-sign on the would-be torchbearers for this style is high praise indeed. It also further emphasizes the argument this EP makes, which is that Pains could be the most promising indie pop group around. | 2009-09-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | September 25, 2009 | 8 | 68939b67-c547-43e0-9fd2-943559eb48ab | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The newly minted rap superstar’s obligatory label compilation is more merch bundle than album. | The newly minted rap superstar’s obligatory label compilation is more merch bundle than album. | Travis Scott: JACKBOYS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/travis-scott-jackboys/ | JACKBOYS | In 2018, Travis Scott became a bonafide rap superstar, reaching a plateau where the only way to prove how high you’ve reached is to bring other guys up there, too. And so here comes his obligatory label compilation, a signal boost for his signees designed to be a flex in and of itself. Only problem is: He doesn’t have much of a crew. The only people in Scott’s orbit are the three rappers signed to his Cactus Jack imprint: Don Toliver, Luxury Tax 50, and Sheck Wes (in a joint deal with GOOD Music). As roster compilations go, this seven-track sampler spread what few assets it has too thin and hardly makes for a showcase.
JACKBOYS has been pegged as a “debut album” for the titular crew, but that is clearly an overstatement. There are two Don Toliver songs and one Sheck Wes song. There is one Luxury Tax 50 verse. Travis Scott fills out the tracklist with a 50-second instrumental and a remix to his recent hit single, “Highest in the Room,” with Rosalía and Lil Baby. JACKBOYS is a branding opportunity, pure and simple: From the Harmony Korine cover art to the promotional film shot as if A24 produced a Need For Speed sequel, it all seems like empty influencer bait. This is music as part of a merch bundle, about as necessary as a branded fire extinguisher.
With ASTROWORLD, Travis Scott finally earned the maestro mantle he was so eager to bestow upon himself, but that curator’s touch is missing here. Pop Smoke is in his element over AXL’s drill production on “Gatti,” pushing Travis into the margins. The song sounds like diet “Welcome to the Party,” and drill isn’t the kind of subgenre where you’re looking to cut calories. “Out West” finds Young Thug carrying Travis (for the umpteenth time), and in this case Thug is barely even trying. Don Toliver’s “Had Enough” is his song in name only; with Quavo and Offset on hand, it sounds like another Migos demo for the Carters’ album with its blatant “Summer” sample and blank, reference-track vocal takes. The sole JACKBOYS posse cut, “Gang Gang,” is all over the place, squandering WondaGurl production.
If anyone comes off like they didn’t waste their time making this, it’s Don Toliver, who goes full tilt even working in the periphery of other people’s songs. His breakthrough on ASTROWORLD’s “Can’t Say” outlined his promise; his was such a distinct performance among an all-star cast that it left listeners scrambling to identify him on the creditless tracklist. He doesn’t squander any of that goodwill here, coming off as a budding talent even as the album grows more and more forgettable. (He scored his first TikTok hit with “No Idea” late last year.) Toliver is like the T-1000 model of Travis Scott: he uses Auto-Tune to similar effect, but he works in a higher octave range than Scott and is simply a more lifelike upgrade of his prototype. This is best expressed on “What to Do?”, a duet with Scott in which they both try to put the pieces of a drunken night back together. It’s Toliver who sounds like he’s rallying, his voice less like a piece of software and more an instrument of feeling. His singsong verse is one of the few moments on JACKBOYS that isn’t just product. | 2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cactus Jack | January 6, 2020 | 5.9 | 68954e46-7071-4afc-b2ad-6baf9b076b83 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The sprawling closing chapter of Colin Stetson's New History Warfare trilogy adds a welcome wrinkle in the vocals of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon-- sometimes angelic, sometimes metal brutal-- and sees the Montreal-based saxophonist explore extremes of darkness and light. | The sprawling closing chapter of Colin Stetson's New History Warfare trilogy adds a welcome wrinkle in the vocals of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon-- sometimes angelic, sometimes metal brutal-- and sees the Montreal-based saxophonist explore extremes of darkness and light. | Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17950-colin-stetson-new-history-warfare-vol-3/ | New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light | With a hyper-demanding solo technique, Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson has plowed a unique path through the music landscape in the last five years. His music is heady but always rooted in the body. Stetson uses circular breathing to produce an endless stream of notes in mode of classical minimalism, music that lulls the brain into a sort of reverie. But the unusual production for his solo records, placing microphones close to capture every nuance of sound (the clattering treble of keys, the bassy thump of the pads over the holes, the whoosh of breath, the moan of Stetson’s vocals through the horn), keeps the hypnotic repetition grounded in an intensely physical now. 2011's New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges was his breakthrough, an album that appealed to people who had very little time for experimental music that also managed to sound like nothing else. He’s been characteristically busy in the year since, playing solo shows and also touring as a member of Bon Iver, whose leader Justin Vernon is featured prominently on the third part of this solo trilogy.
Though guest vocals on Stetson’s music add a welcome textural wrinkle, it seems like a challenge to figure out exactly how to integrate them. For one, when clear vocals are present, it tends to ground Stetson’s music in genre when it otherwise seems to float somewhere on its own, free of classification. On Judges, that meant the sound of theatrical classical with the calming cerebral articulation of Laurie Anderson, cut with a studied take on blues from Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond. Vernon’s distinctive presence puts this record in a different light, driven home by the fact that opener “And in Truth” starts with a huge spread of his angelic harmonies. For a moment, you feel like you’ve wandered into the next Bon Iver record, and it's slightly disorienting. But the easily identifiable voice is used on four tracks to different ends, affirming Vernon’s ability to adapt his style to the project at hand.
The most striking bit of shapeshifting comes on “Brute”, where Vernon assumes the Cookie Monster bark of a death metal frontman and turns out to be very good at it. Giving Stetson’s skill at conveying menace and the darkly churning low end of his work on the bigger horns, a metal lean to the music makes perfect sense and maybe even seems inevitable. “Brute” feels like the soundtrack to a child’s nightmare, and the fact that it sits so easily next to the subsequent “Among the Sef”, which feels like a triumphant, tightly appreciated fanfare celebrating everything that is good in the world, is a testament to all that Stetson can render from his instrument.
Indeed, To See More Light shows impressive range. In some respects, Stetson seems to have gravitated toward the extremes while leaving the minimalist tapestries in the background. At some points, like on “High Above a Grey Green Sea”, and “Part of Me Apart From You”, his tone is especially gnarled and biting and feels connected spiritually to the dark forces of heavy metal. But “And in Truth” and the multi-tracked Vernon guest vocal on the cover of the spiritual “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?” are warm and human, more earthy folk than heady art music. The centerpiece that binds it all together is the 15-minute title track, which moans and swoons and moves between sections like a work of romantic classical music. It is perhaps Stetson’s most powerful single track, though it takes some serious focus to absorb in one sitting.
Heard as the closing chapter in Stetson’s trilogy, To See More Light feels essentially like more: it’s more intense, more sprawling, both darker and lighter simultaneously. And in one sense, the record’s marked ambition can make it a harder listen as a whole, as it moves through moods and modes and seems constantly on the verge of burning itself out. But the album’s sequencing and the essential facts of its live, in-the-moment construction keep it flowing like a singular statement, at times just barely. None of which takes away from Stetson’s hugely impressive achievement: We’re here in 2013 and and he’s spinning out pieces in real-time using common instruments and the result is a sound that could come only from one person on earth. | 2013-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Constellation | May 7, 2013 | 8.1 | 68963628-0538-48b1-bf28-0bbe25685833 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On the Rave Cave EP, Andrew Hung (one half of the duo Fuck Buttons) revisits his fascination with cheap, pared-down tools. In this case, that makes replacing the intense polish of the duo’s most recent album Slow Focus with music programmed on a Game Boy. | On the Rave Cave EP, Andrew Hung (one half of the duo Fuck Buttons) revisits his fascination with cheap, pared-down tools. In this case, that makes replacing the intense polish of the duo’s most recent album Slow Focus with music programmed on a Game Boy. | Andrew Hung: Rave Cave EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20405-rave-cave-ep/ | Rave Cave EP | Andrew Hung, one-half of the duo Fuck Buttons, takes a step back on the Rave Cave EP. In place of the intense polish of the duo’s most recent album, Slow Focus, Hung offers a brief look at the way his mind works when faced with a vastly pared-down set of tools—in this case, a Game Boy. (Though as he has said, that choice was simply a convenient solution to the dearth of portable, easy-to-manipulate gear during Fuck Buttons’ last tour.)
Writing music on an obsolete gaming tool probably seems hopelessly antiquarian to some (especially if you grew up with the DS) but the uninhibited, high-strung music Hung wrings from it feels fresh. There’s nothing here of the magnitude of their massive Tarot Sport centerpiece "Olympians", or the protracted leer of Slow Focus. The biggest and brightest moment is the irrepressible glitch-fest "Korea Town", a gorgeous tide of bleeps and bloops, with romantically wafting strings laid on thick on top.
The EP’s other two tracks are harder-edged, built on heavily metronomic beats with just enough swing to stick. They’re also nowhere near as pretty: The propulsive, bull-headed stomp "The Plane" is stippled with sharp, abrasive sound effects, pushing the rough equipment to an aggressive extreme. Hung also shows a punkish sense of humor, adding in an almost comically seasick warble partway through "Fables". All three songs sound like a loose extension of the unconventional methodology that’s driven Hung and Fuck Buttons bandmate Benjamin John Power’s collaborative jamming.
The EP also benefits from a handmade quality, one that you certainly wouldn’t find on a Fuck Buttons album at this point. Hung and Powers have often worked with cheap equipment, from karaoke machines to children's toys, though they've shown an increasing focus on sound quality as the scale of their work has increased. Here, Hung's unvarnished approach serves to highlight themes that repeatedly creep into his work—an underlying affinity for gear-grinding industrial sounds; a focus on process over a specific end result. In that sense, it's a welcome refresher. | 2015-03-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-03-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | March 31, 2015 | 7 | 68978369-4939-4e35-b0fe-3788ce44eade | Abby Garnett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-garnett/ | null |
On his deeply expressive new album, Canadian producer Dylan Khotin-Foote uses humble materials to broaden the outlines of ambient music and make them feel fresh again. | On his deeply expressive new album, Canadian producer Dylan Khotin-Foote uses humble materials to broaden the outlines of ambient music and make them feel fresh again. | Khotin: New Tab | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23088-new-tab/ | New Tab | Dylan Khotin-Foote’s debut album, 2014’s Hello World, remains a highlight of the so-called lo-fi house revival of the past few years, in which the application of a faint patina of wear has put a fresh spin on relatively straightforward club constructions. A little bit like the “antiqued” furniture at Restoration Hardware, the technique can be gimmicky, and a little bit of scuffing goes a long way. But on songs like “Hello World” and “Ghost Story,” Khotin’s scratchy drum machines and pastel-toned synth melodies came out as polished and tactile as the contents of a rock tumbler; his distortion yielded super-saturated sounds that were berry-rich and bursting with tone. The record was right at home on Vancouver’s 1080p label, although the imprint’s prolific release schedule also meant that it was easy for the album to get lost in the shuffle. That’s too bad, because it’s a fair bet that at least a few of the hundreds of thousands of people who have checked out Ross From Friends and DJ Boring on YouTube would be equally thrilled with Khotin’s misty-eyed house miniatures.
On New Tab, the Canadian producer’s instincts still lead him to sounds so bright and optimistic that they scan as almost naïve. This time, though, he largely forgoes house beats in favor of ambient music’s placid swirl. It’s a breezy, uncomplicated record; with its rich colors and simple recurring patterns, it’s reminiscent of a packet full of pearl-finish snapshots of the sky or the ocean, each one a brand-new treatise on the meaning of blue. The album title might indicate vaporwave’s hermetic perspective, but Khotin’s music actually suggests a wide-open embrace of the world outside. It’s laced with rumbling trains, running water, and ribbiting frogs; synthesizers glisten like dewdrops, and delay piles up like streaked contrails.
These are mostly static vistas; they don’t much develop or evolve. But Khotin imbues them with just enough movement to keep them engaging. In “Canada Line,” slow-attack pads come on like a freight train heard through the veil of sleep. In “Wheeler Road,” the edges of his chords break like the surface of a whitecapped lake. A slow, deliberate conga pattern stirs the waters of “Dialogue 6,” while in “Something Is Happening to Me,” a stuck delay pedal creates the illusion of energy waves rippling into infinity. Occasionally, he relies on scraps of found audio to draw his vignettes into focus: In “Dotty,” scavenged answering-machine tapes sneak us into an unknown woman’s living room, to surprisingly bittersweet effect.
The album builds gradually up to its final three songs, at which point Khotin subtly changes up the music’s intensity, adding skeletal beats back into his squishy ambient soundscapes. If much of New Tab recalls Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, the album’s final stretch sounds like a tribute to ’90s IDM acts like Plaid and Arovane. “New Window” pivots back and forth like a lawn sprinkler, its beat rigid against the rainbow spray of its digital synths; “Health Pack” evokes the choppy moves of Gescom’s rose-tinted B-boy fixations. The best of the beat-heavy trio is “Fever Loop,” which plays a slow-motion breakbeat against burbling bubbles and piano-house keys hammered into a fine gold leaf. Like the rest of the album, it is an unassuming piece of work that casts a powerful spell. Using humble materials, Khotin has created a deeply expressive and surprisingly affecting album, one that takes the broad outlines of ambient music and makes them feel fresh again. | 2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pacific Rhythm | May 23, 2017 | 7.8 | 689ce8b5-a8ac-40b5-8254-167213569b52 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The latest compilation from Young Thug’s YSL label is packed with appearances from rap’s biggest stars, though its flamboyant host seems content to take a backseat. | The latest compilation from Young Thug’s YSL label is packed with appearances from rap’s biggest stars, though its flamboyant host seems content to take a backseat. | Young Thug / Gunna / Young Stoner Life: Slime Language 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-gunna-young-stoner-life-slime-language-2/ | Slime Language 2 | In 2016, Young Thug received a dressing-down on national television, at the hands of his then-mentor and label boss, Lyor Cohen. “You just record so many songs and leave them like little orphans out there,” Cohen snapped, during a meeting that was filmed for the CNBC show “Follow the Leader”. Cohen had a point. Thug had been recording at a furious pace, as leak dumps of hundreds of tracks revealed. And yet, the announcement of his debut album failed to stick, much like his short-lived name changes. A steady stream of mixtapes showed an artist who was evolving at a pace that was hard to comprehend and who didn’t always care for details like editing and sequencing. His innovations in songwriting and vocal delivery were pushing rap forward, but it was difficult to imagine Young Thug ever becoming an elder statesman—if anything, he seemed like a shooting star that we were lucky to have witnessed at all.
In hindsight, 2019’s So Much Fun looks like a turning point in Thug’s career. It stands as his most focused and consistent release since the mid-career masterpiece Barter 6. So Much Fun was also the first time we’d seen Thug standing still; it’s hard to point to something on the album that he hadn’t done before. What was new was the way that Thug ceded so many of that album’s big moments to his mentees Gunna and Lil Baby, both of whom have arguably become even better-known than Thug among younger listeners. Slime Language 2 expands on that approach: here Thug comfortably rubs shoulders with superstars, peers, influences, and descendants, serving as the glue that holds these songs together while rarely commanding the spotlight. He feels a bit like Jay Gatsby here: the guests are glamorous and the trappings of the party are opulent, but the host is content to recede into the background.
Still, a party’s a party, and much like with the previous installment, the aspiration here is clearly to provide an hour of breezy songs designed to go off during the summer. Surely a few of these will. "Solid" feels by turns like a Drake song, a Gunna song and a Thug song, each rapper fully commanding the shifting, distant beat. Lil Uzi Vert draws a line in the sand between himself and his elusive host by infusing "Proud of You" with a gracious, wide-eyed sincerity (he also coins the term “Smithstoneian”). In one of his first high-profile appearances since his release from a New York state prison, Rowdy Rebel stomps all over the horn-filled fanfare of "Came and Saw," which feels like a sequel to Thug and Gunna’s hit “Hot.” It's telling that "Superstar" is one of the weirdest songs on here thanks to an appearance from Thug’s direct antecedent, Future: the trap legend reaches for notes out of his range and coos in a singsong cadence over what sounds like kazoos while Thug just coasts comfortably.
So many of Thug’s verses and hooks here feel that way—competent and tuneful, if not quite memorable. Even the thrills feel a bit second-hand: we’ve heard better “mac and cheese” puns from Thug before and it was more convincing the last time he told us he felt something in his chromosome. There are a few noteworthy moments, like the way he enunciates the word “slatty,” as if his mouth is full of crushed ice, or how his verse on “My City Remix” (a remix of YTB Trench’s “My City”), swerves from “Federales looking but they can't find the body” to “Tryna see my kids every day because it's healthy” in the space of just a few bars. But by and large, Thug hangs back and lets his signees and guests shine. Both Gunna and Lil Baby sound like rappers in their prime; Thug’s on-again-off-again fiancée Karlae is beginning to sound like a genuine talent; Thug’s sister Dolly is downright menacing on “Reckless”; and Thug’s latest sibling to take up music, his brother, Unfoonk, sounds poised to become a gravel-throated crooner in the mold of Ty Dolla $ign.
Ultimately, Slime Language 2 is a label compilation and the usual caveats apply: it’s far too long, the back half is padded out with a few throwaways (“GFU,” “Como Te Llama”) and hardly anyone is showing up with their best material. That said, Slime Language 2 succeeds as a survey of how pervasive Thug’s influence has become. Young Thug may not be much of a presence on the album but his sound is all over these songs. It’s in the way that stars like Uzi, Future and Travis Scott approach melody, the kinds of hooks and ad-libs that rappers pin to these twinkling beats, and most clearly, in the way that the YSL signees move. After a full decade spent at rap’s vanguard, Young Thug seems content to step back and admire the landscape he shaped. You can’t say he didn’t earn it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | April 26, 2021 | 6.7 | 689d139c-148e-44bc-88e4-fcbcffc55faa | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Lambchop's Kurt Wagner and neo-country leader Cortney Tidwell pay tribute to her parents' semi-obscure label, Chart Records. | Lambchop's Kurt Wagner and neo-country leader Cortney Tidwell pay tribute to her parents' semi-obscure label, Chart Records. | KORT: Invariable Heartache | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15102-invariable-heartache/ | Invariable Heartache | Chart Records is a bit of obscure Nashville history, notorious to those who dig through the crates at Grimey's but largely unregarded by those outside the city limits. Founded by Gary Walker in 1962 and purchased by local businessman Slim Williamson in 1964, it was the temporary home of established acts like Junior Samples and Red Sovine, but the emphasis was squarely on young talent with crossover potential, including its biggest success story, Lynn Anderson. Most of its roster might not ring a bell these days, mush less a cash register, but Chart was certainly a label of its moment, when country was entertaining the notion of pop.
One Chart artist, a Miss Nashville runner-up named Connie Eaton, married Williamson's son, and they had a daughter named Cortney (now Tidwell), who grew up to become a country singer herself. Nearly half a century after Chart's founding, she is paying tribute to the family business with an album of primarily Chart covers, most of them duets with Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner. Both represent the seedy Nashville underbelly of local artists actually paying heed to local history, and fittingly, the idea for this collaboration originated on stage at the Basement, where the two sang an impromptu Don Williams cover together.
Like the best Nashville duos, their voices are very different yet suit each other well. Wagner's is an eccentric take on a cowboy croon, which makes the weird psych-folk-country anthem "Penetration" more than simply a novelty, while Tidwell's is a robust, breathy version of a traditional starlet, which can sell the delicate quaver of "A Special Day" as well as the epic hurt of weeper "Who's Gonna Love Me Now". Both communicate with equal ease the regret and invariable heartache of these tunes, especially when they're trading verses. They have chemistry, which illuminates the rollicking "Pickin' Wild Mountain Berries" even as it makes solo numbers like "April's Fool" (him) and "Yours Forever" (her) a bit wan by comparison.
The material is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Invariable Heartache. There's a startling wit to these songs, not only in the unexpected title phrase sung in the first line of "Incredibly Lonely" but also in the coy wink of "I Can't Sleep With You", which goes, "I can't sleep with you... I can't sleep with you... on my mind." It's not hard to imagine any of these songs becoming hits in the 1960s, nestling alongside Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" or Eddy Arnold's "Make the World Go Away". Recruiting a skeleton crew from Lambchop as their backing band, Tidwell and Wagner don't try to re-create the classic sound of Chart Records, with all their strings and bells and whistles, nor do they try to update the songs to today's particular pop-country sound. Instead, Invariable Heartache sounds more like one of Lambchop's more countrified records, which is to say the music is both lush and minimal, the sound of so many musicians giving themselves over completely to the song. It's a gateway album to Chart's back catalog, as well as to an adventurous era in Nashville history. | 2011-02-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-02-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | City Slang | February 11, 2011 | 7.6 | 68a688a5-d7d6-40ff-a9e9-9764161bd634 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The legends of ’90s alt-rock have reunited only to bring this puzzling, indecisive husk of an album into the world. | The legends of ’90s alt-rock have reunited only to bring this puzzling, indecisive husk of an album into the world. | The Smashing Pumpkins: Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smashing-pumpkins-shiny-and-oh-so-bright-vol-1-lp-no-past-no-future-no-sun/ | Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. | The Smashing Pumpkins have reunited—mostly. They are playing sold-out reunion dates—mostly. And, to hear frontman Billy Corgan, guitarist James Iha, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin say it, at least they are getting along. Mostly. If you grew up loving the Smashing Pumpkins—say, if you purchased a suitcase full of Corgan’s B-sides in your youth, voluntarily parting with money to listen to something called “Pastichio Medley” —and wish to retain faint, vestigial warm feelings regarding their reunion, then please walk away, briskly, from Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. There is nothing for you here. There is, in fact, almost nothing here at all.
In the annals of ’90s bands that have reunited to thrust a new album into the void where inspiration used to be: Shiny might contain the least imagination, the least personality, the least effort, the least love. There is nothing firm to hold onto in any of the album’s mid-tempo rock songs—“See love, see time/See death, see life/See tears, See bright/See day from night,” Corgan drones on “Travels.” Neither Corgan nor the song surrounding him tries any harder—just, death, love, tears, bright, day, night. Then Corgan repeats “It’s where I belong” a few times to fill the spot where a chorus is meant to go and the song clicks off like a light in an empty kitchen.
This kind of terminal vacancy has spread like blight in Corgan’s songwriting—2014’s Monuments to an Elegy had a similar woolly blankness, a self-erasing anonymity that seemed to proceed from the assumption that if Corgan stood as still as possible, maybe no one would notice him on the radio and kick him off. For someone who basically landed a hangar full of his wildly outsized ambitions in the middle of the pop charts in the mid-’90s, it is depressing to witness. At least Monuments had the oddity “Drums + Fife,” a little fillip featured the titular instruments and something like a statement of purpose: “I will bang this drum til my dying day.” Not as catchy as “The world is a vampire,” and no one was going to roar when he played it live, but it still sounded as if Corgan was telling stories to himself and for our benefit.
On Shiny, by contrast, there is no songwriting to speak of, and during its barren, 31 minutes you cannot hear a single decision being made. The opener “Knights of Malta” evokes Imagine Dragons—booming piano chords, a few vacant “whoa-oh-ohs.” “We’re gonna ride that rainbow,” Corgan sings, crooning to the terrestrial rock radio station of his dreams. Corgan’s big pop songs used to be full of sly subversions—the glittering hints of self-harm in “Today,” the surreal “zipper blues” and poured cement in “1979.” By contrast, lead single “Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts)” feels mercilessly whittled down from a more interesting song—the ticked eighth notes uncannily resemble a group of people counting the seconds before they can walk away from each other.
The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent. Corgan’s lyrics scan as if they have been translated into numerical code and back into words again: “I’ve seen enough/It’s all undone/Tis the secret of the Irishman,” he mumbles on “With Sympathy.” “When doldrums age in platinum/ I’ve a starship you can use,” he offers on “Knights of Malta.” How does a wishing tree run dry?” Corgan asks on “Alienation,” a query about as meaningful as “Are we human or are we dancer?” and six-thousand times less memorable.
The final two songs perk up, slightly, perhaps because they sense the end is near. Corgan reaches for higher notes on the chorus melody of “With Sympathy,” giving a little push to the song’s sagging frame. “Seek and You Shall Destroy” picks up the tempo and brings an actual riff to the proceedings; you can hear Jimmy Chamberlin’s pulse quicken as he is finally allowed to let loose with some of the fluid, propulsive fills that gave classic Pumpkins songs their velocity. But otherwise, Shiny is an album-shaped unit with nothing inside, and the only thing I know for certain is that nobody cares about it, least of all its creators. | 2018-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Napalm / Martha’s Music | November 19, 2018 | 3.4 | 68a839f1-dfae-42ce-a9fc-56633253fc00 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The final album from the mercurial post-punk project offers a wellspring of quotable surrealism, showing the substance and self-definition of the late Pat Fish. | The final album from the mercurial post-punk project offers a wellspring of quotable surrealism, showing the substance and self-definition of the late Pat Fish. | The Jazz Butcher: The Highest in the Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-jazz-butcher-the-highest-in-the-land/ | The Highest in the Land | While he was making his final album as the Jazz Butcher, Pat Fish knew he was going to die. According to people close to him, he’d managed to outrace cancer, but decades of pint-hoisting good times were catching up with him. He passed away last October at age 64. But one remarkable thing about The Highest in the Land is how little morbidity encumbers it. On the contrary, it positively brims with life. Even when Fish stares down death in the dub-rock countdown “Time,” it’s with the same old gleam in his eye and dodge in his step.
“Fishy go to Heaven, get along, get along,” he drawls, rakish and sarcastic, rushing toward “a pit of Council lime.” But most of the other lyrics are acid pronouncements tangled in exuberant wordplay. The verses excoriate lithium mining and privatized jails, but the pre-choruses are stuffed with nearly nonsense lists of shapely words: luminous, leguminous, salubrious, lugubrious. Part giddy fuck-you-I’m-out to an England he’d suffered from Thatcher to Brexit, part psychedelic experience with a rhyming dictionary, “Time” is all Fish. In other words, this cockeyed memento mori is just another great Butch tune on another great Butch record: irascible, inscrutable, delectable, irreducible.
Irreducible, yes, but to start somewhere: What if the punk-folk protester Billy Bragg fell under the nihilistic spell of the Velvet Underground instead of the messianic one of the Clash? Fish—who was born on the same day in 1957 as Bragg, also less than 100 miles from London—was the living answer to this hypothetical question and many others. His was a cold-war leftist politics through a glass darkly, a Philip K. Dick allusion he probably would have liked, as someone who paid homage to Thomas Pynchon and Harlan Ellison and was admired by the occult comics guru Alan Moore. Even his most comical, outrageous songs were drawn with fine lines of wealth and class, and his most polemical moments were obscured by non sequiturs of incomparable chewiness. Most of all, he thrived on bloodletting observations of the human dramedy in all its vapid cupidity and ordinary beauty.
A native of Northampton, in the East Midlands, Fish either formed or became the Jazz Butcher, depending on how you look at it, while studying philosophy at Oxford. It started as a persona for his precocious, playful adventures in home-recording, and it retained that conceptual flavor as it flourished into a band with a revolving moniker (The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, The Jazz Butcher and His Sikkorskis from Hell) and lineup, which was rooted by members like guitarist Max Eider but also berthed Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom and the bassist David J, when he was between Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.
In the ’80s and early ’90s, the Jazz Butcher’s many albums for the British indies Glass and Creation Records (recommended entry points are Sex and Travel or Big Planet Scarey Planet) displayed a variety that’s bewildering even by UK post-punk standards: twee jangle-pop, Dixieland jazz, arch agit-punk, romantic new wave, country blues, surf-rock, Merseybeat, sophisti-pop, lounge music, Mediterranean wedding songs, on and on. Fish loved soul, Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, and above all, John Cale—sturdy, classic ’60s things. The surplus he extrapolated from them indicates a true eccentric original. Yet he makes it all whole by sheer force of songcraft, flaunting an innate gift for drizzling charismatic melodies on spare, resourceful arrangements in any style.
The Jazz Butcher’s recordings thinned away after 1995, and were mostly out of print and forgotten until Fire Records began a series of reissues about seven years ago. It was around then that Fish, Eider, and other trusted bandmates began working on The Highest in the Land, where they sound startlingly fresh after a decade away. Though done up in the usual power-clashing genres, the songs are mainly either ballads that spill into rants (“Never Give Up,” with very different production and the end lopped off, could pass for a minor Coldplay hit) or vice versa. They call to mind a pleasure dome of fetching, unrelated references: the demotic prowess of Jens Lekman, the melodic immediacy of the Lucksmiths, the wry dandyism of XTC, the dialectical swoon of Stars, and of course, the curdled cool of Cale.
Whether the style is antic, enervated country-and-western (“Running on Fumes”) or dreamy electric soul (“Goodnight Sweetheart”), the music is kept clean and spacious so Fish can fit all his wonderful words inside. He is a wellspring of quotable surrealism. Taste an impenetrable couplet like “The black-crested ape of Boo Yang Shang, sing like a theremin, walk like a man.” Feel the cryptic gut-punch of a question like “Tiny cans of Coke for free—is that what you chose over me?” Another song begins, “I got this fish from Genghis Khan,” which has to rival “Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room” in the pantheon of perfectly weird opening lines.
Fish never had qualms about referencing people we couldn’t possibly be expected to know about, and he preserved this intimate, local aesthetic to the end. It starts immediately with “Melanie Hargreaves’ Father’s Jaguar,” a slinky jazz-cat number in which a tale of young love divided by wealth ends in merry anti-capitalist flames. An additional layer of mystery exists for the non-British listener, who easily infers that Formby must be posh and an East Midlands accent must not be, but who might need to look up things like gammons and Children of the Stones. But no amount of googling can pierce “The Highest in the Land,” a portentous desert blues about Genghis Khan and apes and whatever Boo Yang Shang is, although apparently the “Black Raoul” who Fish chants about is known to hardcore fans as his cat. The song is vividly personal to a riddling degree, and it seems significant that it, rather than one of the more outspoken tracks, provided the album’s title.
As densely English as Fish’s music is, he had an anti-isolationist vision of the country, with a sensibility that spanned Europe and profound musical influence from North America. “Sea Madness,” a pastoral folk tune with warm, tired horns, is a tribute to a legendary figure on the local Northampton music scene, an immigrant from Istanbul called Turkish George. “Sebastian’s Medication” seems to have Brexiters in its sights when Fish dresses down the gammons “pining for some ill-defined imaginary nation, antecedents they would struggle to name.”
As soon as this clear statement comes into view, Fish dances away from it, invoking the right’s favorite shibboleth of “political correctness gone mad.” He liked to keep himself just out of frame, unpinned to any didactic point of view. Inasmuch as The Highest in the Land is a winning globalist view from the provinces, it is not concerned with progressive lip service. “Any moment now, somebody’s going to say ‘toxic,’ that’s assured,” Fish sings on “Running on Fumes.” “Yes, ’cause people love to talk that way, but people only ever made me bored.” His misanthropy is comprehensive, unmalicious, and countered by empathy and sentimentality. “I never really identified with the ‘social commentator’ thing, any more than I did with the asinine ‘Monty Python of rock’ label with which some deaf people tried to saddle us back in the ’80,” he said in a 2020 interview. But The Highest in the Land, a just and honest headstone, captures the substance and self-definition of a singular songwriter where words and labels fail. | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tapete | February 10, 2022 | 7.5 | 68ade6da-529d-4c26-b975-12bc4771a46e | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The 23-year-old Atlanta singer’s slow-groove R&B plays out like a telenovela, feeling irresistibly fresh, messy, and human. | The 23-year-old Atlanta singer’s slow-groove R&B plays out like a telenovela, feeling irresistibly fresh, messy, and human. | Summer Walker: Over It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/summer-walker-over-it/ | Over It | Summer Walker’s slow-groove R&B sounds like it was conceived in the parking lot of an Atlanta strip club. Slow and sultry, it shifts from anger to love to frustration in a heartbeat, like she’s both the angel and the devil on your shoulder. The 23-year-old Atlanta singer hardly does interviews, and when she does, it’s like she’s being held against her will, mumbling with an emotionless stare and her hood up. That shyness disappears on records, where her voice is big yet gentle, and the tales pour out.
At her best, Summer Walker’s stories play out like a telenovela. On “Me,” a moody track in the middle of her debut album, Over It, she’s heartbroken and unsure how to react, so she runs through her options: not care, or be petty and send him a single-word text. Instead, she checks her purse, then the trunk of her car, and pulls out a gun. “I would never shoot you, baby/Maybe just wave it around,” she sings in a sweet but defeated tone. It’s relatable melodrama for some, maybe a cautionary tale for others.
But Walker’s detail is just as rich in the moments that come directly before she reaches her breaking point. “Playing Games” addresses the lame dudes that continue to take her passion for granted, only showing affection in private and refusing to acknowledge their relationship on Instagram. The A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie-assisted “Stretch You Out” shows that frustration beginning to bubble over. “You never wanna clean up/And you talk to me like shit/And you handle me too rough/And, at the end of the day you got the nerve to bring up that bitch,” she sings. Like much of Over It, both tracks feature production from her current love interest and executive producer London on da Track (“Drunk Dialing...LODT” is dedicated to him), who energizes her lovestruck ballads for the social media era with his signature ATL bounce.
Occasionally she steers into blander territory, like the well-written but sleepy “Fun Girl,” but a rotating collection of R&B’s most toxic crooners keeps the energy level high. On “Like It,” Walker is infatuated, while Atlanta’s 6LACK only has sex on his mind. She blames herself for her failed relationships on “Just Might,” her duet with PARTYNEXTDOOR (“I just might be a ho”), while the OVO signee plays the cheating boyfriend with every excuse. The pettiness reaches an apex on “I’ll Kill You,” when she vows “I’ll go to hell or jail about you boy” next to Jhené Aiko, like the final scene of a twisted revenge thriller.
Like many of her current R&B peers, Walker is working through her obsession with ’90s R&B. “Body” flips 702’s “Get It Together,” and “Come Thru,” both samples and features Usher. Otherwise, her writing is irresistibly fresh. Whether she has on love goggles or is shaking up her boyfriend by pointing a gun at him—out of love, of course—it’s part of what makes Summer Walker feel like a real person, making the real misguided decisions that happen when you’re over it, or telling yourself that you are. | 2019-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | October 9, 2019 | 7.2 | 68b370a6-3480-4fd0-a418-3de826359524 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The UK DJ and producer taps the depths of his record collection in a gorgeous, moody mix that runs through ambient, jazz, psych pop, and vintage soul. | The UK DJ and producer taps the depths of his record collection in a gorgeous, moody mix that runs through ambient, jazz, psych pop, and vintage soul. | Floating Points: Late Night Tales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floating-points-late-night-tales/ | Late Night Tales | Listeners consistently underwhelmed by streaming algorithms could do worse than to follow Sam Shepherd, better known as Floating Points. From his globetrotting show on NTS Radio and his roving You’re a Melody DJ nights to the hidden gems he lovingly reissues on his label Melodies International, Shepherd is an enthusiastic sharer of the delectable selections he unearths: rare gospel, soul, jazz, droney minimalism, tropicalismo, folk, and plenty of music that eludes easy identification.
So tapping Floating Points to curate the latest edition of Late Night Tales—a series in which selectors show off the hidden depths of their record collections—is a great pairing. Shepherd takes the opportunity to float through an unhurried selection of ruminative, crepuscular music for the wee hours. Unlike his good friend Four Tet’s own eclectic contribution to the series, Floating Points keeps the mood consistent. Few selections move faster than a resting heartbeat, but they nevertheless feel dramatic. Despite staring-at-a-candle zone-outs from Kara-Lis Coverdale and Sarah Davachi, the mix isn’t made for falling to sleep. Instead, each track—the spiderweb fragility of Carlos Walker’s “Via Láctea,” nine minutes of zero-gravity bliss from ECM trio Azimuth—is perfectly suited to inspire sweet reveries.
And since it’s Floating Points, you can either geek out over Discogs’ asking price of some of these selections or find exquisite, arcane sonic details to get lost in. One listen might yield the way something as simple as the ride cymbal can sound across three consecutive selections: It’s an understated timekeeper on the dreamy psych pop of the Rationals’ “Glowin’,” turns urgent amid the otherwise restrained orchestral movements of William S. Fischer’s “Chains,” and becomes stately and swinging in the hands of drummer Max Roach on “Equipoise.” On another pass through the set, you might find yourself lost in reverb: Sweet & Innocent’s “Express Your Love” sounds like it’s transmitting from a distant planet. Listen close to the anti-war soul of Bobby Wright’s self-released 1974 song “Blood of an American,” recently reissued by Melodies International, and you can hear his lips smack as he leans toward the microphone.
That Floating Points’ mix trades primarily in rare grooves is a given. Beyond the gorgeousness of each selection, something even more unusual surfaces in the lyrics. Sweet & Innocent sing of wanting emotional vulnerability in their men, and the Defaulters stress the importance of humility on “Gentle Man”—two traits hard enough to find in the world, much less in pop music. Listen close and darker sentiments arise: The Defaulters fret about having enough food to eat. The Rationals sing, “Don’t commit suicide/You got to keep on glowin’.” And Wright, who lost one of his bandmates to the fighting in Vietnam, sings of soldiers’ blood being “poured out over you,” his hushed voice a harrowing indictment of the war. Moments like these make the case that, as vital as it is to have music to drift off to, it’s equally crucial that the music has something meaningful to say. | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Late Night Tales | March 30, 2019 | 7.5 | 68b7550c-b1af-4120-ad93-56d7a8a836b3 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
After a run of concept albums, Will Sheff's literate indie rock project returns with a collection of unrelated songs united by the dense production. | After a run of concept albums, Will Sheff's literate indie rock project returns with a collection of unrelated songs united by the dense production. | Okkervil River: I Am Very Far | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15410-i-am-very-far/ | I Am Very Far | I Am Very Far is ostensibly Okkervil River's first non-concept album in eight years. After Down the River of Golden Dreams in 2003, the Austin-based group released two sets of linked records: Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix both re-imagined Tim Hardin's title song as a phantasmagorical rock'n'roll cautionary tale, full of goat-headed men and hearts literally made of stone. The Stage Names and The Stand Ins played like two installments of a dark tour diary, deconstructing old rock myths and scrawling out new ones. Together, these four albums revealed frontman Will Sheff as one of indie rock's most ambitious thinkers: a romantic anti-romantic weighing highly literate lyrics against an endlessly bleak worldview.
For all its bluster, however, 2008's The Stand Ins suggested Sheff's large-scale ideas were yielding diminishing returns. It was an impressive run that explored the edges of indie-rock songwriting and distinguished Okkervil River from so many of their peers, but it's refreshing that I Am Very Far is a collection of songs-as-statements rather than a collection-of-songs as statement. These 11 tracks sound more like stand-alone efforts rather than pieces of a larger puzzle, even if they do revisit and expound on many of Sheff's pet themes. The thundering war stomp of "The Valley"-- which opens the album like a pre-ritual incantation-- soundtracks a journey through "the valley of the rock'n'roll dead," which may be Sheff's idea of a summer festival. On "Hanging From a Hit", he's saved from the abyss by an earworm, then listens as his married lover describes her marriage: "I'm too much mine without him," she says of her husband. "I limp from life."
These songs may be less grounded in familiar settings and predicaments than previous efforts, and therefore a bit more oblique, but lines like those quoted above can be hooks in themselves-- as catchy and sharp as choruses, sticking in your mind as you decode their ambiguities. As a result, Sheff's songs never truly sound settled but remain lively and prickly, especially as various images repeat throughout the album, motifs instead of concepts that suture these songs together. There's a throat in every track, either cut and open or bound to be cut: "A slit throat makes a note like a raw winter wind," he sings on "The Valley", adding to its visceral energy. Of course Jagjaguwar is releasing a small chapbook of lyrics as a promo item and part of the deluxe vinyl edition.
More remarkably, however, I Am Very Far manages to put Sheff's lyrics and the band's music on equal footing, creating a monolithic sound whose density resembles the thick block of prose-poem text in the chapbook. Perhaps emboldened by his work on Roky Erickson's last album, Sheff produced this record himself, recording in short, intense sessions around the country rather than taking advantage of an extended studio stay. That tactic worked well for their previous albums, but I Am Very Far benefits form the piecemeal approach, which allows Sheff to give each song a distinctive personality and creates a strong dynamic in the sequencing. "We Need a Myth" shifts from subtle exotica to towering orchestral rock, while "Hanging From a Hit" dissembles it with a quiet dancehall piano, a trumpet solo recorded form out on the boardwalk, and low, lovely gospel harmonies, which are perhaps warmer and more sympathetic for being wordless.
Sheff favors a towering wall of sound on almost every song, in most cases doubling the instruments in the line-up (two drummers, two piano players, etc.) and layering full takes on top of each other. With a density that can be a bit impenetrable and with a heaviness that Okkervil River have only gestured to in the past, I Am Very Far lags in the middle with the staircase-to-nowhere crescendo of "White Shadow Waltz" and the rambling "We Need a Myth". Sheff recovers with the gut-punch combination of the tense "Show Yourself" and "Your Past Life as a Blast", a surprisingly affecting paean to a wandering brother (perhaps a sequel to "A Favor", from 2004's Sleep and Wake-Up Songs EP). I Am Very Far closes with "The Rise", which is constructed around a call-and-response Sheff performs with himself-- a literal doubling borne out of the lyrical themes. The oboe-and-strings orchestration recalls the lush easy listening of the Carpenters, but Okkervil River put it in service to lyrics about forest fires, wounded stags, and the utter loneliness of death. Even so, it comes as a relief that the song doesn't end with a big, fiery finale. Instead, the band lets "The Rise" fray apart on its own, a quiet conclusion to a lyrically and musically feisty album. | 2011-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 9, 2011 | 7.9 | 68b9a117-c1a3-4ef6-8328-5fa400f2e27a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Warm Leatherette, Grace Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus. | Warm Leatherette, Grace Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus. | Grace Jones: Warm Leatherette | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22014-warm-leatherette/ | Warm Leatherette | Few human beings have so fully embodied the notion of a “singular artist” more so than Grace Jones. In the annals of pop music and fashion, there has simply never been anyone else on earth quite like her—strong, severe, and otherworldly in every way, Jones has blazed a trail through popular culture over the past four decades that remains unrivaled in terms of boldfaced originality. Warm Leatherette, Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus. Having spent the ’70s essentially exploding the fashion world as a model for Wilhemina and serving as muse for the likes of Yves St. Laurent and Helmut Newton, Jones’ career as a musician was still something of a novelty. Her first three albums—Portfolio, Fame, and Muse—were fun but somewhat facile, cover-filled reflections of the druggy hedonism of the disco era, which itself was already on the wane. For someone whose very image was seen as somehow deeply transgressive, Jones’ music had not yet caught up. So it was that, while stepping into the 1980s, Jones sought about drastic change and creative rebirth. In doing so, her next body of work would also reflect the blossoming radicalism of pop’s new wave—music that would upend the staid conventions of nightlife, feminist politics, and tired ideas about sexuality.
Released in May of 1980, Warm Leatherette was the first release in what is known as Jones’ Compass Point Trilogy. Recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, the album finds Jones working alongside Island Records’ then president, Chris Blackwell, and producer Alex Sadkin. Her backing band—which she would lovingly describe as “the united nations in the studio’’—included Sly and Robbie as her rhythm section, as well as a crack team of session musicians that involved keyboardist Wally Badarou, guitarists, Mikey “Mao” Chung and Barry “White” Reynolds, and percussionist Uziah “Sticky” Thompson. Dubbed the Compass Point All Stars, this crew of ace musicians would go on to provide chill vibes for everyone from Tom Tom Club to Joe Cocker, but it was the group’s groundbreaking work with Grace Jones—and the dubby, Caribbean aesthetic they immersed her with—that would make for some of the most defining music of her career. Stripped of disco’s goofier affectations, Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs.
Of the three records that Jones recorded at Compass Point, it would ultimately be 1981’s Nightclubbing that would rightly go down as the stone cold classic, but Warm Leatherette, while perhaps not as pioneering, still sets a high mark in terms of both inventiveness and musicality. Of the album’s eight tracks, seven are covers, though the material covered couldn’t ostensibly be more schizophrenic. Songs by the Pretenders (“Private Life”), the Marvelettes (“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”), Tom Petty (who actually contributed an additional verse for Jones to sing on her version of “Breakdown”), and Roxy Music (“Love Is the Drug”) all get reworked here, with mostly excellent results. The album opens with Jones’ take on the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette”—a J.G. Ballard inspired narrative about sex as car crash that, in Jones’ hands, manages the weird feat of being both abjectly funky and oddly frightening. It’s a trope that carries throughout the record, with Jones’ unmistakable sing/speak imbuing every track with an intense gravitas—equal parts self-assurance and menace. Leatherette’s most defining characteristic is the way that the power dynamics in these songs are neatly subverted, particularly in regards to the songs that were previously sung by men. “Love Is the Drug” loses its original blasé chicness to become something entirely more urgent and potently literal, while Jones’ take on “Breakdown” deflates the somewhat creepy male-delivered directive of the original (“Breakdown, go ahead and give it to me”) and replaces it with something altogether more empowered. Hearing Jones purr the lyric, “I'm not afraid of you running away/Honey, I’ve got the feeling you won’t” the line becomes more than a simple observation, it carries the weight of an implied threat.
The album track that most compellingly predicts the genius to come on Nightclubbing is Jones’ take on the Pretenders’ “Private Life.” The original, which served as Chrissie Hynde’s punk-informed take on reggae, is perfect fodder for Jones, who ratchets up the drama in the lyrics and turns the whole thing into fine art. “Yes, your marriage is a tragedy,” she growls, “But it’s not my concern/I’m very superficial/I hate anything official.” The spectral dub provided by the Compass Point All Stars points in the direction of Nightclubbing’s best tracks and the “My Jamaican Guy” swagger of 1985’s Island Life. What sells the song so effectively is not necessarily the power of Jones’ voice, but rather the power of Grace Jones herself. As she would go on to prove in later efforts, it was the monolithic force of her personality—imperious, feral, queer in the truest sense of the word—that would make these songs so compelling. She is, to put it simply, impossible to ignore.
In regards to this particular reissue, the extras provided on the two-disc set are nice but hardly essential. Mostly we just get “long versions,” “single versions,” and the occasional “dub versions” of the existing album tracks, none of which stray too far from the originals— other than that they are much longer. (Still, hearing eight-minute long, tripped out versions of “Private Life” and “Love is the Drug” is hardly a bad thing). One of the reissue’s best treats, however, is the inclusion of Jones’ fantastically demented cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” presented here in three different versions. It might have been deemed too weird to be included on the album at the time, but you’d be hard pressed to find another recorded document that so thoroughly exhibits Grace Jones’ particular form of genius. Originally released as a B-side to “Private Life” in 1980, “Control” is gloriously unhinged. Taking the liberty of changing the lyrics to first person, Jones transforms the song from a document of unraveling into a statement of defiance: “To the voice that told her when and where to act/She said, I’ve lost control.” Ironically, even in a song about losing your shit completely, Grace Jones is always the one in calling the shots. | 2016-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Island / UMG | June 25, 2016 | 8.5 | 68cfb047-8063-4caf-a439-ee1b78677b7a | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Recorded last summer in Brooklyn, this kinetic live album collects new politically-charged songs from the British art-punk O.G.s—a call to arms for all those pushing against the tides of modern life. | Recorded last summer in Brooklyn, this kinetic live album collects new politically-charged songs from the British art-punk O.G.s—a call to arms for all those pushing against the tides of modern life. | Mekons: Existentialism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22349-existentialism/ | Existentialism | Back in 1987, the ROIR label released a tape called New York—one of many rather roughshod titles from the then-cassette-only New York outpost. The quasi-legit collection almost sounded like a bootleg, the kind of thing that would be traded in dubs from fan to fan. New York was the only live Mekons album ever in-print (though it was reissued in 2001 as New York: On the Road 86-87). That changes now with Existentialism.
Similarly, Existentialism also often sounds like a boot, but that’s a deliberate artistic decision. It was reportedly recorded around a single microphone at the Jalopy Theater in Red Hook, Brooklyn. At times, the rhythms overwhelm, yet this isn’t precisely a record that rocks. The Mekons long ago began weaving in elements of American country and British folk, threading it through the nervy art-punk at their core, a maneuver that only gains resonance as the band slides into middle age; it’s defiance that has turned into a credo. Older they may be, but they’re restless, and when Existentialism was recorded in the summer of 2015, the songs were as new to the band as they were to the audience. The Mekons chose to cut the songs not long after composition, a move that only underscores the urgency behind the project.
Despite the haste, there are no stumbles on Existentialism, though there is rawness. The group is too good to let things careen out of control, but they’re smart enough to play upon the suggestion that things could. Certainly, this adds passion to the performance; it’s the sound of a great band creating great noise. The album pushes levels into the red, but sometimes it suggests more sonic detail than could be achieved from one mic. There’s little separation in the harmonies, and plenty of midrange smear, but instruments pop to the forefront.
Beneath the racket, there are ideas—some expanded upon in an accompanying 96-page book and the Mekonception video that documents the whole shebang—but they’re impossible to ignore in the songs themselves. Images of terror, upheaval, and loss float through the words. Turmoil bubbles to the surface on “Fear and Beer,” a pub singalong for the age of Brexit, but “1848 Now!” makes allusions to revolution past, one of several sly nods to history. The best musical tip of the hat is how “The Cell” plays with the melody of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” without ever following its contours.
Politics and tradition are nothing new to the Mekons, but what makes Existentialism resonate is that it’s an album of the moment, for the moment. As an aural document, it’s kinetic and crackling, a live recording that captures the excitement of a concert. As a complete piece, it says something powerful; it’s a call to arms for old punks, unrepentant artists, and assorted freaks, all pushing against the tides of modern life. It’s the Mekons and friends and family gathering together in a small room, shouting songs of protest and singing sad melodies, realizing there’s strength in being together, even if their numbers are dwindling. | 2016-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bloodshot | September 3, 2016 | 7.5 | 68d101fa-f4c6-4dbe-a296-1a199ac471b4 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
With its mix of rustic lullabies and blown-out rockers, the Men’s eighth album is the work of a proudly counter-intuitive band pushing to new extremes. | With its mix of rustic lullabies and blown-out rockers, the Men’s eighth album is the work of a proudly counter-intuitive band pushing to new extremes. | The Men: Mercy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-men-mercy/ | Mercy | The music of the Men is defined by perpetual unrest, impulsive 180s, and an insistence on questioning assumptions. That quality has only become more entrenched in recent years: Where they spent the first half of the 2010s gradually drifting from the left to the right of the dial, 2018’s Drift ricocheted from industrial stompers to psych-folk hymns like some random sampler CD that’s glue-gunned to a pricey imported British music periodical. With each grab-bag of a record, it’s become clearer that the Men’s attraction to aesthetic chaos is motivated by a desire for inner peace, a musical analog to the process of cutting through the noise of modern life. The group’s eighth album in 10 years, Mercy, is arguably the clearest articulation of that mission: If the Men started out as a murderous post-hardcore band with latent classic-rock affinities, they’re now a frazzled country-rock act trying to control their periodic lapses into aggression.
Like Drift, Mercy is an album of wild stylistic shifts, though it’s plotted along a more predictable course. And while this band can still flex its punk muscle when it wants to, the Men are writing better songs in more serene settings these days. With its binary mix of rustic lullabies and blown-out rockers, Mercy feels like a spiritual companion to 2013’s New Moon, the record where the Men’s mellower inclinations first came to the fore. And like that album’s genteel introduction, “Open the Door,” Mercy’s “Cool Water” welcomes you in with a pastoral serenade that functions as a balm. “I’m a pool of sweat, a canyon of regret, this bottle is my only friend,” Nick Chiericozzi sings, and when the song’s chorus mantra takes over three minutes in, it feels like a baptism.
With its air of redemption, “Cool Water” is the rare opening track that would make an equally effective closer—an expression of hard-won salvation that usually follows a period of struggle. But the Men have always been proudly counter-intuitive, so they follow the record’s most comforting song with its most demanding. Though it shares the preceding track’s gospel-inspired imagery, “Wading in Dirty Water” is a 10-minute acid-blues workout that feels excerpted from an even longer piece—when the song fades in, it sounds as though the band have been riding its groove for hours already. Once they’ve proven they can out-choogle a Canned Heat cover band, they push the track into a more spectral space with a blast of discordant guitar.
After erecting these two distinct poles, the Men spend the rest of Mercy bouncing between them. This is the first Men record to feature Chiericozzi singing lead on every song, easing the sense of whiplash between the finger-pickin’ outlaw yarn “Call the Dr.” and the adrenalized rave-up “Breeze” (which outfits the blatant Buzzcocks love of 2012’s “Open Your Heart” with a liberal quote of Golden Earring’s ’70s classic “Radar Love”). And while he’s always seemed like more of a sentimental traditionalist compared to his usual foil, Mark Perro, Chiericozzi pushes the Men to new extremes of simplicity and vulnerability on ballads like “Fallin’ Thru” and the title track, filling the open spaces in their skeletal piano and acoustic arrangements with his resonant rasp.
But though the Men may be circling back to the roots/rager axis they orbited in the mid-2010s, they’re still punching into uncharted territory. Nothing in the band’s eclectic catalog can prepare you for “Children All Over the World,” a synthy fist-pumper that sounds like it should accompany the training montage in a Reagan-era sports flick. (Only a freakish, squealing guitar solo reminds you that this is a band recording for Sacred Bones in 2020 and not Chrysalis Records in 1985.) Yet even this garish anomaly betrays a certain consistency in transgressive spirit: If the Men’s earlier output showed how noisy garage-punk could be molded into accessible anthems, now they’re demonstrating how slick, ’80s-styled corporate rock can be repackaged as an underground DIY oddity.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | February 19, 2020 | 7.2 | 68d5f14b-f4e4-4c1d-b6d3-429566bdc794 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their second project, the group’s hazy R&B sounds pristine and precise, but the care and craft stop short of their lyrics. | On their second project, the group’s hazy R&B sounds pristine and precise, but the care and craft stop short of their lyrics. | Emotional Oranges: The Juice Vol. II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emotional-oranges-the-juice-vol-ii/ | The Juice Vol. II | The theme of pop in 2019 seems to be stripping it all down to shiny exoskeletons. Tones and I’s “Dance Monkey” hums up the global charts. Shaed’s sleek “Trampoline” is the zenith of Spotifycore—Zayn just hopped on the remix. Enter Emotional Oranges, an anonymous group making oozy, drifting R&B. They refused to state how many performers were in the group until their first tour sold out; then, two singers performed in masks, revealing at least the number of primary vocalists. They’re well-connected in the music industry, serving as writers, producers, and A&Rs for other projects, and they seem to have calculated the catchy, lo-fi haze that succeeds on streaming. On their second project, The Juice: Volume II, their smokey bass and throbbing beats sound pristine and precise. But the care and craft stop short of their lyrics. This is an album made to sing along to, with words embarrassing to sing out loud.
As a production exercise, “Your Best Friend Is a Hater” is stunning: sparse guitar, creamy layered vocals. But the lyrics read like petty tweets from 2012. “Your best friend is a hater, and you’re a hater too,” they croon, attempting to wrench out a meaningful statement. “My swagger is my dagger.” Cringey descriptions of sex squelch throughout the compact, eight-track album. “Let me lick and taste it,” they intone on “Don’t Be Lazy,” imploring a woman to “take it” and “go down.” Another brags, “My baby likes to get me off,” a lazy and obvious throwaway layered over immaculate beats. The shyest track, “Heal My Desires,” is also the weakest, as they chant the title over wilting chords. The sex sounds terrible, but that isn’t the problem; it’s the constant bludgeon of dull words over the shimmering sound that makes listening to the album so frustrating.
To their credit, the group surpasses the curse of most streaming bait: spitting out the same shade of song over and over. On The Juice: Volume II, they prove they can handle “Songs About Jane”-era Maroon 5 acoustics just as well as synth-drenched R&B. Each song is dissolving but discernible: a computerized beep-heavy track bleeds into a curling hip hop song. Slow guitars melt into sped-up synths. “Just Like You,” is a bouncy romp about masturbation, while “Sundays,” a response to a friend’s divorce, unfurls like a yawn. There is an emotional center somewhere in this music, rippling out in glinting chords and sighs, but the group struggles to articulate it. The mood is clear; its roots are not.
Just two releases into their trajectory as a band, Emotional Oranges are so certain of becoming famous that they’ve stayed anonymous in order to preserve their “normal lives” out of the public eye. “We’re going to be the biggest band in the world,” they’ve said. They might achieve that title through raw metrics, shooting across streaming services and then manifesting on your “Discover Weekly” once every three months. They’ll slump into ubiquity on playlists you’ll hear in a coffee shop or at the bar. But even if you listen closely, you won’t know who they are. | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Avant Garden | November 8, 2019 | 6.4 | 68d650a4-62f1-4308-8bd6-826a95954cfb | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Five years in the making, the UK band’s debut accomplishes something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously. | Five years in the making, the UK band’s debut accomplishes something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously. | caroline: caroline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-caroline/ | caroline | An earnest belief in a better tomorrow didn’t seem quite as radical when caroline formed in 2017. Like a lot of people that year, guitarist and vocalist Casper Hughes was inspired by a nascent counterinsurgence of activism by people who’d previously participated in politics from the sidelines. As several band members canvassed for Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom’s general election, Hughes channeled his cautious optimism for a more equitable future into the lyrics to “Good morning (red).”
Five years later, it’s the second song on caroline’s self-titled debut and, as with much recent pop culture, runs the risk of being tied to its era, either too specific or too naive to resonate in a time of increasingly immediate terror. While the lyrics of “Good morning (red)” haven’t changed, Hughes’ performance has adjusted to a new context. When he shouts, “Can I be happy in this world? We’ll have to change it, it doesn’t suit us,” it’s more desperate, a demand rather than a question. Words are sparse on caroline, but that indomitable, communal spirit courses throughout, accomplishing something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously.
If caroline’s hopeful tenor puts them at odds with the political climate, it’s done just as much to set them apart from their presumptive peers. Released by Rough Trade and later remixed by black midi producer John “Spud” Murphy, caroline’s 2020 debut single “Dark blue” established a loose affiliation with the UK’s burgeoning post-punk scene while actively contradicting its stylistic tropes. Contrary to the anxious, monological Fall fanfic that collages absurdities and abstractions until they register as “commentary on modern existence” or whatever, “Dark blue” provoked vast, elemental emotions without being overt about which ones, a towering cumulus that hovers for nearly seven minutes and never breaks.
In the two years since, about half of caroline has been released in some form. Similar to Black Country, New Road’s For the first time, it’s as much a compilation as a debut, an imposed deadline for a band accustomed to constant tinkering. The sequencing is vaguely chronological, with the first half reflecting a more accessible, “triumphant emo” version of caroline. “Dark blue” and “Good morning (red)” have been in development since the group’s origins as a duo in 2017: guitars still play legible chords and tangled arpeggios, countable rhythms are dictated by a standard drum set, and languid vocal melodies sound composed rather than improvised. Taken together, “Dark blue” and “Good morning (red)” are like an album within an album, so complementary and complete that they threaten to overshadow everything that follows. The former’s simmering tension gives way to a bleary vulnerability, a hangover slowly transforming to a flicker of hope for the day ahead. One repeats a mantra of “I want it all,” the other aches for serenity. If caroline had tried to sustain this emotional pitch for the entire album, it might have come off as manipulative, too self-consciously cinematic.
But caroline take a molecular-gastronomy approach to both sweeping post-rock and weeping Midwest emo, toying with structure, arrangement, and texture. As it progresses, caroline becomes a daring document of its creators’ process, maintaining just enough convention to draw attention to the way their atypical presentation defies it. Looser compositions like “Engine (eavesdropping)” are the result of endless studio hours obsessing over the imperfections captured within improvisation, contact mics, and room sound. caroline would rather let a track collapse before they resort to a stock post-rock crescendo. Having only recently solidified their eight-person lineup, they’re still exploring the correlation between their strengths and interests. Of the four interlude-length tracks, the most compelling is “desperately,” a solo showcase for cellist and vocalist Jasper Llewellyn, whose earthy and operatic quaver evokes a virtuoso moonlighting as a shepherd; it’s an instrument all the more devastating for its scarcity throughout caroline. Meanwhile, the longest interlude, “zilch,” is two minutes of what sounds like someone trying to cut rusted guitar strings with a dull knife. The choice to include something so willfully challenging feels more like a philosophical point than a purely musical one.
My best guess is that it’s intended to demystify the album itself, or at least to honor the ugly mistakes and tedious workshopping that accompany the creation of even the most miraculous pieces of recorded music. “zilch” segues into a nine-minute finale called “Natural death,” which recalls the most mesmerizingly static compositions of the Microphones (who selected the group as an opener for their UK shows in late 2021). caroline have clearly absorbed lessons from Phil Elverum’s studio explorations: They share a belief in expressing the awesome power and fallibility of nature through analog decay, repetition, and minimalist drone played at concussive volumes. Small gestures matter in music this exploratory and sometimes there’s only so much you can capture within the music itself. Even caroline’s studio version of “Skydiving onto the library roof” might not be the definitive one: In the “Pool #2” rendition, the entire thing moves not on the two-note motif that runs throughout its entirety, but a small nod by Hughes that indicates when it repeats; the rest of the band responds as if in a private language. In this small, unspoken moment, caroline’s ideals as a “collective” extend beyond simply having a lot of band members. Theirs is a higher-minded definition of the term, a group whose fidelity to their own logic and laws approaches the utopian.
Correction: An earlier version of this review stated that John “Spud” Murphy produced “Dark blue”; in fact, he remixed the track for the album.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | February 28, 2022 | 8 | 68dbadfb-0555-4783-bbd5-383a274ab7dc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ |
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